commit dc7c9d8e67397318fd192e87e0cdd6003215b66c
Author: Toni Rodriguez <tonidani@gmail.com>
Date:   Sun Jun 19 11:38:33 2022 +0200

    init

diff --git a/UMA12_ANTONIO_ProjektFakeNews.ipynb b/UMA12_ANTONIO_ProjektFakeNews.ipynb
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+{
+ "cells": [
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "statewide-crown",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "**12. Projekt**\n",
+    "================="
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "explicit-bunch",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "## **1. Cel projektu**"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "encouraging-officer",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "#### Celem projektu jest przewidzenie ze zbioru danych jakie widomości są Fake Newsami, użyte algorytmy:\n",
+    "* TfidfVectorizer\n",
+    "* PassiveAggressiveClassifier\n",
+    "\n",
+    "Opis algorytmów.\n",
+    "\n",
+    "**TF (Term Frequency):** Liczba wystąpień danego słowa w dokumencie to jego częstotliwość występowania. Wyższa wartość oznacza, że dany termin pojawia się częściej niż inne, a zatem dokument jest dobrze dopasowany, jeśli termin ten jest częścią wyszukiwanych słów.\n",
+    "\n",
+    "Wektorator TfidfVectorizer przekształca zbiór dokumentów w macierz cech TF-IDF.\n",
+    "\n",
+    "**Algorytmy pasywno-agresywne** to algorytmy uczące się online. Taki algorytm pozostaje pasywny w przypadku poprawnego wyniku klasyfikacji, a staje się agresywny w przypadku błędnego obliczenia, aktualizując i dostosowując się. W przeciwieństwie do większości innych algorytmów nie jest on zbieżny. Jego zadaniem jest dokonywanie aktualizacji korygujących stratę, powodujących bardzo niewielkie zmiany w normie wektora wag.\n",
+    "\n",
+    "\n",
+    "\n"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "informal-filename",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "#### Dane news.csv wykorzstane do uczenia pochodz"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "beginning-minute",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "## **2. Importowanie potrzebnych bibliotek**"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "code",
+   "execution_count": null,
+   "id": "effective-democracy",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "outputs": [],
+   "source": [
+    "import numpy as np\n",
+    "import pandas as pd\n",
+    "import itertools\n",
+    "from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split\n",
+    "from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer\n",
+    "from sklearn.linear_model import PassiveAggressiveClassifier\n",
+    "from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score, confusion_matrix"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "alternative-knock",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "## **3. Wczytanie danych**"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "code",
+   "execution_count": 56,
+   "id": "worldwide-blake",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "outputs": [
+    {
+     "data": {
+      "text/html": [
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+       "      <td>You Can Smell Hillary’s Fear</td>\n",
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+       "      <td>Bernie supporters on Twitter erupt in anger ag...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>— Kaydee King (@KaydeeKing) November 9, 2016 T...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>FAKE</td>\n",
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+       "      <th>4</th>\n",
+       "      <td>875</td>\n",
+       "      <td>The Battle of New York: Why This Primary Matters</td>\n",
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+       "      <td>REAL</td>\n",
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+       "      <td>Tehran, USA</td>\n",
+       "      <td>\\nI’m not an immigrant, but my grandparents ...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>FAKE</td>\n",
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+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>6</th>\n",
+       "      <td>7341</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Girl Horrified At What She Watches Boyfriend D...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Share This Baylee Luciani (left), Screenshot o...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>FAKE</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>7</th>\n",
+       "      <td>95</td>\n",
+       "      <td>‘Britain’s Schindler’ Dies at 106</td>\n",
+       "      <td>A Czech stockbroker who saved more than 650 Je...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>REAL</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>8</th>\n",
+       "      <td>4869</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Fact check: Trump and Clinton at the 'commande...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump made some ina...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>REAL</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>9</th>\n",
+       "      <td>2909</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Iran reportedly makes new push for uranium con...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Iranian negotiators reportedly have made a las...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>REAL</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>10</th>\n",
+       "      <td>1357</td>\n",
+       "      <td>With all three Clintons in Iowa, a glimpse at ...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — “I had one of the most wo...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>REAL</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>11</th>\n",
+       "      <td>988</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Donald Trump’s Shockingly Weak Delegate Game S...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Donald Trump’s organizational problems have go...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>REAL</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>12</th>\n",
+       "      <td>7041</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Strong Solar Storm, Tech Risks Today | S0 News...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Per...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>FAKE</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>13</th>\n",
+       "      <td>7623</td>\n",
+       "      <td>10 Ways America Is Preparing for World War 3</td>\n",
+       "      <td>October 31, 2016 at 4:52 am \\nPretty factual e...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>FAKE</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>14</th>\n",
+       "      <td>1571</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Trump takes on Cruz, but lightly</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Killing Obama administration rules, dismantlin...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>REAL</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>15</th>\n",
+       "      <td>4739</td>\n",
+       "      <td>How women lead differently</td>\n",
+       "      <td>As more women move into high offices, they oft...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>REAL</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>16</th>\n",
+       "      <td>7737</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Shocking! Michele Obama &amp; Hillary Caught Glamo...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Shocking! Michele Obama &amp; Hillary Caught Glamo...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>FAKE</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>17</th>\n",
+       "      <td>8716</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Hillary Clinton in HUGE Trouble After America ...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>0 \\nHillary Clinton has barely just lost the p...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>FAKE</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>18</th>\n",
+       "      <td>3304</td>\n",
+       "      <td>What's in that Iran bill that Obama doesn't like?</td>\n",
+       "      <td>Washington (CNN) For months, the White House a...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>REAL</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "    <tr>\n",
+       "      <th>19</th>\n",
+       "      <td>3078</td>\n",
+       "      <td>The 1 chart that explains everything you need ...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>While paging through Pew's best data visualiza...</td>\n",
+       "      <td>REAL</td>\n",
+       "    </tr>\n",
+       "  </tbody>\n",
+       "</table>\n",
+       "</div>"
+      ],
+      "text/plain": [
+       "    Unnamed: 0                                              title  \\\n",
+       "0         8476                       You Can Smell Hillary’s Fear   \n",
+       "1        10294  Watch The Exact Moment Paul Ryan Committed Pol...   \n",
+       "2         3608        Kerry to go to Paris in gesture of sympathy   \n",
+       "3        10142  Bernie supporters on Twitter erupt in anger ag...   \n",
+       "4          875   The Battle of New York: Why This Primary Matters   \n",
+       "5         6903                                        Tehran, USA   \n",
+       "6         7341  Girl Horrified At What She Watches Boyfriend D...   \n",
+       "7           95                  ‘Britain’s Schindler’ Dies at 106   \n",
+       "8         4869  Fact check: Trump and Clinton at the 'commande...   \n",
+       "9         2909  Iran reportedly makes new push for uranium con...   \n",
+       "10        1357  With all three Clintons in Iowa, a glimpse at ...   \n",
+       "11         988  Donald Trump’s Shockingly Weak Delegate Game S...   \n",
+       "12        7041  Strong Solar Storm, Tech Risks Today | S0 News...   \n",
+       "13        7623       10 Ways America Is Preparing for World War 3   \n",
+       "14        1571                   Trump takes on Cruz, but lightly   \n",
+       "15        4739                         How women lead differently   \n",
+       "16        7737  Shocking! Michele Obama & Hillary Caught Glamo...   \n",
+       "17        8716  Hillary Clinton in HUGE Trouble After America ...   \n",
+       "18        3304  What's in that Iran bill that Obama doesn't like?   \n",
+       "19        3078  The 1 chart that explains everything you need ...   \n",
+       "\n",
+       "                                                 text label  \n",
+       "0   Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fello...  FAKE  \n",
+       "1   Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleu...  FAKE  \n",
+       "2   U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Mon...  REAL  \n",
+       "3   — Kaydee King (@KaydeeKing) November 9, 2016 T...  FAKE  \n",
+       "4   It's primary day in New York and front-runners...  REAL  \n",
+       "5     \\nI’m not an immigrant, but my grandparents ...  FAKE  \n",
+       "6   Share This Baylee Luciani (left), Screenshot o...  FAKE  \n",
+       "7   A Czech stockbroker who saved more than 650 Je...  REAL  \n",
+       "8   Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump made some ina...  REAL  \n",
+       "9   Iranian negotiators reportedly have made a las...  REAL  \n",
+       "10  CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — “I had one of the most wo...  REAL  \n",
+       "11  Donald Trump’s organizational problems have go...  REAL  \n",
+       "12  Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Per...  FAKE  \n",
+       "13  October 31, 2016 at 4:52 am \\nPretty factual e...  FAKE  \n",
+       "14  Killing Obama administration rules, dismantlin...  REAL  \n",
+       "15  As more women move into high offices, they oft...  REAL  \n",
+       "16  Shocking! Michele Obama & Hillary Caught Glamo...  FAKE  \n",
+       "17  0 \\nHillary Clinton has barely just lost the p...  FAKE  \n",
+       "18  Washington (CNN) For months, the White House a...  REAL  \n",
+       "19  While paging through Pew's best data visualiza...  REAL  "
+      ]
+     },
+     "execution_count": 56,
+     "metadata": {},
+     "output_type": "execute_result"
+    }
+   ],
+   "source": [
+    "df=pd.read_csv('news.csv')\n",
+    "df.shape\n",
+    "df.head(20)"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "code",
+   "execution_count": 57,
+   "id": "major-section",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "outputs": [
+    {
+     "data": {
+      "text/plain": [
+       "0    FAKE\n",
+       "1    FAKE\n",
+       "2    REAL\n",
+       "3    FAKE\n",
+       "4    REAL\n",
+       "Name: label, dtype: object"
+      ]
+     },
+     "execution_count": 57,
+     "metadata": {},
+     "output_type": "execute_result"
+    }
+   ],
+   "source": [
+    "labels=df.label\n",
+    "labels.head()"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "surprised-desperate",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "## **4. Wizualizacja cech na histogramach**"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "code",
+   "execution_count": 52,
+   "id": "literary-correlation",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "outputs": [
+    {
+     "data": {
+      "text/plain": [
+       "array([[<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x7f51d81ab470>]],\n",
+       "      dtype=object)"
+      ]
+     },
+     "execution_count": 52,
+     "metadata": {},
+     "output_type": "execute_result"
+    },
+    {
+     "data": {
+      "image/png": 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\n",
+      "text/plain": [
+       "<Figure size 1440x1440 with 1 Axes>"
+      ]
+     },
+     "metadata": {
+      "needs_background": "light"
+     },
+     "output_type": "display_data"
+    }
+   ],
+   "source": [
+    "df.hist(figsize=(20,20), xrot=-45)"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "hungry-costa",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "## **5. Podział na zbiór testowy i treningowy**"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "code",
+   "execution_count": 53,
+   "id": "optical-wales",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "outputs": [],
+   "source": [
+    "x_train,x_test,y_train,y_test=train_test_split(df['text'], labels, test_size=0.2, random_state=7)"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "continued-system",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "## **6. Trenowanie**"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "oriental-trinity",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "### 6.1. Użycie TFIDF\n",
+    "\n",
+    "Inicjalizuje wektor TfidfVectorizer ze słowami stop z języka angielskiego i maksymalną częstotliwością występowania w dokumentach wynoszącą 0,7 (terminy o wyższej częstotliwości występowania w dokumentach zostaną odrzucone). Stop words to najczęściej występujące słowa w danym języku, które należy odfiltrować przed przetworzeniem danych języka naturalnego. Wektoryzator TfidfVectorizer przekształca zbiór nieprzetworzonych dokumentów w macierz cech TF-IDF.\n",
+    "\n"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "code",
+   "execution_count": 58,
+   "id": "south-liability",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "outputs": [],
+   "source": [
+    "tfidf_vectorizer=TfidfVectorizer(stop_words='english', max_df=0.7)\n",
+    "\n",
+    "tfidf_train=tfidf_vectorizer.fit_transform(x_train) \n",
+    "tfidf_test=tfidf_vectorizer.transform(x_test)"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "linear-chest",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "### 6.2. PassiveAggressiveClassifier"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "code",
+   "execution_count": 55,
+   "id": "flying-gabriel",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "outputs": [
+    {
+     "name": "stdout",
+     "output_type": "stream",
+     "text": [
+      "Dokładność: 92.82%\n"
+     ]
+    },
+    {
+     "name": "stderr",
+     "output_type": "stream",
+     "text": [
+      "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sklearn/linear_model/base.py:283: DeprecationWarning: `np.int` is a deprecated alias for the builtin `int`. To silence this warning, use `int` by itself. Doing this will not modify any behavior and is safe. When replacing `np.int`, you may wish to use e.g. `np.int64` or `np.int32` to specify the precision. If you wish to review your current use, check the release note link for additional information.\n",
+      "Deprecated in NumPy 1.20; for more details and guidance: https://numpy.org/devdocs/release/1.20.0-notes.html#deprecations\n",
+      "  indices = (scores > 0).astype(np.int)\n"
+     ]
+    }
+   ],
+   "source": [
+    "pac=PassiveAggressiveClassifier(max_iter=50)\n",
+    "pac.fit(tfidf_train,y_train)\n",
+    "\n",
+    "#Przewidzenie na zbiorze testowym i kalkulacja dokładnośći\n",
+    "y_pred=pac.predict(tfidf_test)\n",
+    "score=accuracy_score(y_test,y_pred)\n",
+    "print(f'Dokładność: {round(score*100,2)}%')"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "balanced-security",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "## **8. Podsumowanie wyników**"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "military-radar",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "W tym modelu uzyskaliśmy dokładność 92,82%. Na koniec wydrukujmy macierz konfuzji, aby uzyskać wgląd w liczbę fałszywych i prawdziwych wyników negatywnych i pozytywnych."
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "code",
+   "execution_count": 60,
+   "id": "fifty-melbourne",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "outputs": [
+    {
+     "data": {
+      "text/plain": [
+       "array([[590,  48],\n",
+       "       [ 43, 586]])"
+      ]
+     },
+     "execution_count": 60,
+     "metadata": {},
+     "output_type": "execute_result"
+    }
+   ],
+   "source": [
+    "confusion_matrix(y_test,y_pred, labels=['FAKE','REAL'])"
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "collectible-ireland",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": [
+    "W przypadku tego modelu mamy 589 prawdziwych wyników dodatnich, 587 prawdziwych wyników ujemnych, 42 fałszywe wyniki dodatnie i 49 fałszywych wyników ujemnych."
+   ]
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "markdown",
+   "id": "natural-premiere",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "source": []
+  },
+  {
+   "cell_type": "code",
+   "execution_count": null,
+   "id": "crucial-geneva",
+   "metadata": {},
+   "outputs": [],
+   "source": []
+  }
+ ],
+ "metadata": {
+  "kernelspec": {
+   "display_name": "Python 3",
+   "language": "python",
+   "name": "python3"
+  },
+  "language_info": {
+   "codemirror_mode": {
+    "name": "ipython",
+    "version": 3
+   },
+   "file_extension": ".py",
+   "mimetype": "text/x-python",
+   "name": "python",
+   "nbconvert_exporter": "python",
+   "pygments_lexer": "ipython3",
+   "version": "3.7.3"
+  }
+ },
+ "nbformat": 4,
+ "nbformat_minor": 5
+}
diff --git a/news.csv b/news.csv
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3eb6d94
--- /dev/null
+++ b/news.csv
@@ -0,0 +1,166355 @@
+,title,text,label
+8476,You Can Smell Hillary’s Fear,"Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. 
+In the final stretch of the election, Hillary Rodham Clinton has gone to war with the FBI. 
+The word “unprecedented” has been thrown around so often this election that it ought to be retired. But it’s still unprecedented for the nominee of a major political party to go war with the FBI. 
+But that’s exactly what Hillary and her people have done. Coma patients just waking up now and watching an hour of CNN from their hospital beds would assume that FBI Director James Comey is Hillary’s opponent in this election. 
+The FBI is under attack by everyone from Obama to CNN. Hillary’s people have circulated a letter attacking Comey. There are currently more media hit pieces lambasting him than targeting Trump. It wouldn’t be too surprising if the Clintons or their allies were to start running attack ads against the FBI. 
+The FBI’s leadership is being warned that the entire left-wing establishment will form a lynch mob if they continue going after Hillary. And the FBI’s credibility is being attacked by the media and the Democrats to preemptively head off the results of the investigation of the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton. 
+The covert struggle between FBI agents and Obama’s DOJ people has gone explosively public. 
+The New York Times has compared Comey to J. Edgar Hoover. Its bizarre headline, “James Comey Role Recalls Hoover’s FBI, Fairly or Not” practically admits up front that it’s spouting nonsense. The Boston Globe has published a column calling for Comey’s resignation. Not to be outdone, Time has an editorial claiming that the scandal is really an attack on all women. 
+James Carville appeared on MSNBC to remind everyone that he was still alive and insane. He accused Comey of coordinating with House Republicans and the KGB. And you thought the “vast right wing conspiracy” was a stretch. 
+Countless media stories charge Comey with violating procedure. Do you know what’s a procedural violation? Emailing classified information stored on your bathroom server. 
+Senator Harry Reid has sent Comey a letter accusing him of violating the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is a nice idea that has as much relevance in the age of Obama as the Tenth Amendment. But the cable news spectrum quickly filled with media hacks glancing at the Wikipedia article on the Hatch Act under the table while accusing the FBI director of one of the most awkward conspiracies against Hillary ever. 
+If James Comey is really out to hurt Hillary, he picked one hell of a strange way to do it. 
+Not too long ago Democrats were breathing a sigh of relief when he gave Hillary Clinton a pass in a prominent public statement. If he really were out to elect Trump by keeping the email scandal going, why did he trash the investigation? Was he on the payroll of House Republicans and the KGB back then and playing it coy or was it a sudden development where Vladimir Putin and Paul Ryan talked him into taking a look at Anthony Weiner’s computer? 
+Either Comey is the most cunning FBI director that ever lived or he’s just awkwardly trying to navigate a political mess that has trapped him between a DOJ leadership whose political futures are tied to Hillary’s victory and his own bureau whose apolitical agents just want to be allowed to do their jobs. 
+The only truly mysterious thing is why Hillary and her associates decided to go to war with a respected Federal agency. Most Americans like the FBI while Hillary Clinton enjoys a 60% unfavorable rating. 
+And it’s an interesting question. 
+Hillary’s old strategy was to lie and deny that the FBI even had a criminal investigation underway. Instead her associates insisted that it was a security review. The FBI corrected her and she shrugged it off. But the old breezy denial approach has given way to a savage assault on the FBI. 
+Pretending that nothing was wrong was a bad strategy, but it was a better one that picking a fight with the FBI while lunatic Clinton associates try to claim that the FBI is really the KGB. 
+There are two possible explanations. 
+Hillary Clinton might be arrogant enough to lash out at the FBI now that she believes that victory is near. The same kind of hubris that led her to plan her victory fireworks display could lead her to declare a war on the FBI for irritating her during the final miles of her campaign. 
+But the other explanation is that her people panicked. 
+Going to war with the FBI is not the behavior of a smart and focused presidential campaign. It’s an act of desperation. When a presidential candidate decides that her only option is to try and destroy the credibility of the FBI, that’s not hubris, it’s fear of what the FBI might be about to reveal about her. 
+During the original FBI investigation, Hillary Clinton was confident that she could ride it out. And she had good reason for believing that. But that Hillary Clinton is gone. In her place is a paranoid wreck. Within a short space of time the “positive” Clinton campaign promising to unite the country has been replaced by a desperate and flailing operation that has focused all its energy on fighting the FBI. 
+There’s only one reason for such bizarre behavior. 
+The Clinton campaign has decided that an FBI investigation of the latest batch of emails poses a threat to its survival. And so it’s gone all in on fighting the FBI. It’s an unprecedented step born of fear. It’s hard to know whether that fear is justified. But the existence of that fear already tells us a whole lot. 
+Clinton loyalists rigged the old investigation. They knew the outcome ahead of time as well as they knew the debate questions. Now suddenly they are no longer in control. And they are afraid. 
+You can smell the fear. 
+The FBI has wiretaps from the investigation of the Clinton Foundation. It’s finding new emails all the time. And Clintonworld panicked. The spinmeisters of Clintonworld have claimed that the email scandal is just so much smoke without fire. All that’s here is the appearance of impropriety without any of the substance. But this isn’t how you react to smoke. It’s how you respond to a fire. 
+The misguided assault on the FBI tells us that Hillary Clinton and her allies are afraid of a revelation bigger than the fundamental illegality of her email setup. The email setup was a preemptive cover up. The Clinton campaign has panicked badly out of the belief, right or wrong, that whatever crime the illegal setup was meant to cover up is at risk of being exposed. 
+The Clintons have weathered countless scandals over the years. Whatever they are protecting this time around is bigger than the usual corruption, bribery, sexual assaults and abuses of power that have followed them around throughout the years. This is bigger and more damaging than any of the allegations that have already come out. And they don’t want FBI investigators anywhere near it. 
+The campaign against Comey is pure intimidation. It’s also a warning. Any senior FBI people who value their careers are being warned to stay away. The Democrats are closing ranks around their nominee against the FBI. It’s an ugly and unprecedented scene. It may also be their last stand. 
+Hillary Clinton has awkwardly wound her way through numerous scandals in just this election cycle. But she’s never shown fear or desperation before. Now that has changed. Whatever she is afraid of, it lies buried in her emails with Huma Abedin. And it can bring her down like nothing else has.  ",FAKE
+10294,Watch The Exact Moment Paul Ryan Committed Political Suicide At A Trump Rally (VIDEO),"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+There are two fundamental truths in this world: Paul Ryan desperately wants to be president. And Paul Ryan will never be president. Today proved it. 
+In a particularly staggering example of political cowardice, Paul Ryan re-re-re-reversed course and announced that he was back on the Trump Train after all. This was an aboutface from where he was a few weeks ago. He had previously declared he would not be supporting or defending Trump after a tape was made public in which Trump bragged about assaulting women. Suddenly, Ryan was appearing at a pro-Trump rally and boldly declaring that he already sent in his vote to make him President of the United States. It was a surreal moment. The figurehead of the Republican Party dosed himself in gasoline, got up on a stage on a chilly afternoon in Wisconsin, and lit a match. . @SpeakerRyan says he voted for @realDonaldTrump : “Republicans, it is time to come home” https://t.co/VyTT49YvoE pic.twitter.com/wCvSCg4a5I 
+— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) November 5, 2016 
+The Democratic Party couldn’t have asked for a better moment of film. Ryan’s chances of ever becoming president went down to zero in an instant. In the wreckage Trump is to leave behind in his wake, those who cravenly backed his campaign will not recover. If Ryan’s career manages to limp all the way to 2020, then the DNC will have this tape locked and loaded to be used in every ad until Election Day. 
+The ringing endorsement of the man he clearly hates on a personal level speaks volumes about his own spinelessness. Ryan has postured himself as a “principled” conservative, and one uncomfortable with Trump’s unapologetic bigotry and sexism. However, when push came to shove, Paul Ryan – like many of his colleagues – turned into a sniveling appeaser. After all his lofty tak about conviction, his principles were a house of cards and collapsed with the slightest breeze. 
+What’s especially bizarre is how close Ryan came to making it through unscathed. For months the Speaker of the House refused to comment on Trump at all. His strategy seemed to be to keep his head down, pretend Trump didn’t exist, and hope that nobody remembered what happened in 2016. Now, just days away from the election, he screwed it all up. 
+If 2016’s very ugly election has done any good it’s by exposing the utter cowardice of the Republicans who once feigned moral courage. A reality television star spit on them, hijacked their party, insulted their wives, and got every last one of them to kneel before him. What a turn of events. 
+Featured image via Twitter",FAKE
+3608,Kerry to go to Paris in gesture of sympathy,"U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Monday that he will stop in Paris later this week, amid criticism that no top American officials attended Sunday’s unity march against terrorism.
+
+Kerry said he expects to arrive in Paris Thursday evening, as he heads home after a week abroad. He said he will fly to France at the conclusion of a series of meetings scheduled for Thursday in Sofia, Bulgaria. He plans to meet the next day with Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and President Francois Hollande, then return to Washington.
+
+The visit by Kerry, who has family and childhood ties to the country and speaks fluent French, could address some of the criticism that the United States snubbed France in its darkest hour in many years.
+
+The French press on Monday was filled with questions about why neither President Obama nor Kerry attended Sunday’s march, as about 40 leaders of other nations did. Obama was said to have stayed away because his own security needs can be taxing on a country, and Kerry had prior commitments.
+
+Among roughly 40 leaders who did attend was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no stranger to intense security, who marched beside Hollande through the city streets. The highest ranking U.S. officials attending the march were Jane Hartley, the ambassador to France, and Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was in Paris for meetings with law enforcement officials but did not participate in the march.
+
+Kerry spent Sunday at a business summit hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. The United States is eager for India to relax stringent laws that function as barriers to foreign investment and hopes Modi’s government will act to open the huge Indian market for more American businesses.
+
+In a news conference, Kerry brushed aside criticism that the United States had not sent a more senior official to Paris as “quibbling a little bit.” He noted that many staffers of the American Embassy in Paris attended the march, including the ambassador. He said he had wanted to be present at the march himself but could not because of his prior commitments in India.
+
+“But that is why I am going there on the way home, to make it crystal clear how passionately we feel about the events that have taken place there,” he said.
+
+“And I don’t think the people of France have any doubts about America’s understanding of what happened, of our personal sense of loss and our deep commitment to the people of France in this moment of trauma.”",REAL
+10142,Bernie supporters on Twitter erupt in anger against the DNC: 'We tried to warn you!',"— Kaydee King (@KaydeeKing) November 9, 2016 The lesson from tonight's Dem losses: Time for Democrats to start listening to the voters. Stop running the same establishment candidates. 
+— People For Bernie (@People4Bernie) November 9, 2016 If Dems didn't want a tight race they shouldn't have worked against Bernie. 
+— Walker Bragman (@WalkerBragman) November 9, 2016 
+New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who was one of Hillary Clinton’s most outspoken surrogates during the contentious Democratic primary, blamed Clinton’s poor performance on Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has so far received a negligible number of votes nationally, saying Stein was the Ralph Nader of 2016 in preventing a Clinton victory. The account @BerniesTeachers threw Krugman’s analysis back in his face. Your candidate was the issue. Take responsibility. https://t.co/KHyOuUSrFS 
+— Teachers for Bernie (@BerniesTeachers) November 9, 2016 
+Ana Navarro, a Republican who recently endorsed Hillary Clinton, summed up the preposterous nature of the 2016 presidential election in this tweet: GOP nominated the only damn candidate who could lose to Hillary Clinton. Democrats nominated the only damn candidate who could lose to Trump 
+— Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) November 9, 2016 
+Popular left-wing Facebook page The Other 98%, which was pro-Sanders during the primary, responded to Trump’s surge by simply posting a meme of Sanders’ face with the text “All this could’ve been avoided. Thanks for nothing, DNC!” The meme has been shared almost 15,000 times in less than an hour: 
+Posted by The Other 98% on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 
+While Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton just before the Democratic National Convention in July, many of his supporters remained adamant in their refusal to support the DNC-anointed candidate, pointing to WikiLeaks’ revelations that top officials at the DNC had been working behind the scenes to tip the scales in Clinton’s favor by coordinating with media figures to circulate anti-Sanders narratives. 
+Rather than attribute a potential Trump presidency to the GOP nominee’s perceived popularity among voters, the closeness of this election could be credited to Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable ratings. According to RealClearPolitics, anywhere between 51 and 57 percent of voters had a negative opinion of the Democratic nominee. 
+As of 11 PM Eastern, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin remain too close to call. Clinton has 197 electoral votes to Trump’s 187. 
+
+Zach Cartwright is an activist and author from Richmond, Virginia. He enjoys writing about politics, government, and the media. Send him an email at [email protected]",FAKE
+875,The Battle of New York: Why This Primary Matters,"It's primary day in New York and front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are leading in the polls.
+
+Trump is now vowing to win enough delegates to clinch the Republican nomination and prevent a contested convention. But Sens.Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Ohio Gov. John Kasich and aren't giving up just yet.
+
+A big win in New York could tip the scales for both the Republican and Democratic front-runners in this year's race for the White House. Clinton and Trump have each suffered losses in recent contests, shifting the momentum to their rivals.
+
+""We have won eight out of the last nine caucuses and primaries! Cheer!"" Sanders recently told supporters.
+
+While wins in New York for Trump and Clinton are expected, the margins of those victories are also important.
+
+Trump needs to capture more than 50 percent of the vote statewide if he wants to be positioned to win all of the state's 95 GOP delegates. That would put him one step closer to avoiding a contested convention.
+
+""We've got to vote and you know Cruz is way, way down in the polls,"" Trump urged supporters.
+
+Meanwhile, Sanders is hoping for a close race in the Empire State. A loss by 10 points means he'll need to win 80 percent of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination.
+
+Despite a predicted loss in New York, Cruz hasn't lost momentum. He's hoping to sweep up more delegates this weekend while he's talking about how he can win in November.
+
+""Because if I'm the nominee, we win the General Election,"" Cruz promised his supporters. ""We're beating Hillary in the key swing states, we're beating Hillary with Independents, we're beating Hillary with young people.""
+
+For now, Cruz, Kasich, and Sanders have all moved on from New York to other states. Trump and Clinton are the only two staying in their home state to watch the results come in.",REAL
+6903,"Tehran, USA","  
+I’m not an immigrant, but my grandparents are. More than 50 years ago, they arrived in New York City from Iran. I grew up mainly in central New Jersey, an American kid playing little league for the Raritan Red Sox and soccer for the Raritan Rovers. In 1985, I travelled with my family to our ancestral land. I was only eight, but old enough to understand that the Iranians had lost their liberty and freedom. I saw the abject despair of a people who, in a desperate attempt to bring about change, had ushered in nationalist tyrants led by Ayatollah Khomeini. 
+What I witnessed during that year in Iran changed the course of my life. In 1996, at age 19, wanting to help preserve the blessings of liberty and freedom we enjoy in America, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Now, with the rise of Donald Trump and his nationalist alt-right movement, I’ve come to feel that the values I sought to protect are in jeopardy. 
+In Iran, theocratic fundmentalists sowed division and hatred of outsiders — of Westerners, Christians, and other religious minorities. Here in America, the right wing seems to have stolen passages directly from their playbook as it spreads hatred of immigrants, particularly Muslim ones. This form of nationalistic bigotry — Islamophobia — threatens the heart of our nation. When I chose to serve in the military, I did so to protect what I viewed as our sacred foundational values of liberty, equality, and democracy. Now, 20 years later, I’ve joined forces with fellow veterans to again fight for those sacred values, this time right here at home. 
+“Death to America!” 
+As a child, I sat in my class at the international school one sunny morning and heard in the distance the faint sounds of gunfire and rising chants of “Death to America!” That day would define the rest of my life. 
+It was Tehran, the capital of Iran, in 1985. I was attending a unique school for bilingual students who had been born in Western nations. It had become the last refuge in that city with any tolerance for Western teaching, but that also made it a target for military fundamentalists. As the gunfire drew closer, I heard boots pounding the marble tiles outside, marching into our building, and thundering down the corridor toward my classroom. As I heard voices chanting “Death to America!” I remember wondering if I would survive to see my parents again. 
+In a flash of green and black uniforms, those soldiers rushed into our classroom, grabbed us by our shirt collars, and yelled at us to get outside. We were then packed into the school’s courtyard where a soldier pointed his rifle at our group and commanded us to look up. Almost in unison, my classmates and I raised our eyes and saw the flags of our many nations being torn down and dangled from the balcony, then set ablaze and tossed, still burning, into the courtyard. As those flags floated to the ground in flames, the soldiers fired their guns in the air. Shouting, they ordered us — if we ever wanted to see our families again — to swear allegiance to the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini and trample on the remains of the burning symbols of our home countries. I scanned the smoke that was filling the courtyard for my friends and classmates and, horrified, watched them capitulate and begin to chant, “Death to America!” as they stomped on our sacred symbols. 
+I was so angry that, young as I was, I began to plead with them to come to their senses. No one paid the slightest attention to an eight year old and yet, for the first time in my life, I felt something like righteous indignation. I suspect that, born and raised in America, I was already imbued with such a sense of privilege that I just couldn’t fathom the immense danger I was in. Certainly, I was acting in ways no native Iranian would have found reasonable. 
+Across the smoke-filled courtyard, I saw a soldier coming at me and knew he meant to force me to submit. I spotted an American flag still burning, dropped to my knees, and grabbed the charred pieces from underneath a classmate’s feet. As the soldier closed in on me, I ducked and ran, still clutching my charred pieces of flag into a crowd of civilians who had gathered to witness the commotion. The events of that day would come to define all that I have ever stood for — or against. 
+“Camel Jockey,” “Ayatollah,” and “Gandhi” 
+My parents and I soon returned to the United States and I entered third grade. More than anything, I just wanted to be normal, to fit in and be accepted by my peers. Unfortunately, my first name, Nader (which I changed to Nate upon joining the Navy), and my swarthy Middle Eastern appearance, were little help on that score, eliciting regular jibes from my classmates. Even at that young age, they had already mastered a veritable thesaurus of ethnic defamation, including “camel jockey,” “sand-nigger,” “raghead,” “ayatollah,” and ironically, “Gandhi” (which I now take as a compliment). My classmates regularly sought to “other-ize” me in those years, as if I were a lesser American because of my faith and ethnicity. 
+Yet I remember that tingling in my chest when I first donned my Cub Scout uniform — all because of the American flag patch on its shoulder. Something felt so good about wearing it, a feeling I still had when I joined the military. It seems that the flag I tried to rescue in Tehran was stapled to my heart, or that’s how I felt anyway as I wore my country’s uniform. 
+When I took my oath of enlistment in the U.S. Navy, I gave my mom a camera and asked her to take some photos, but she was so overwhelmed with pride and joy that she cried throughout the ceremony and managed to snap only a few images of the carpet. She cried even harder when I was selected to serve as the first Muslim-American member of the U.S. Navy Presidential Ceremonial Honor Guard . On that day, I was proud, too, and all the taunts of those bullies of my childhood seemed finally silenced. 
+Being tormented because of my ethnicity and religion in those early years had another effect on me. It caused me to become unusually sensitive to the nature of other people. Somehow, I grasped that, if it weren’t for a fear of the unknown, there was an inherent goodness and frail humanity lurking in many of the kids who bullied and harassed me. Often, I discovered, those same bullies could be tremendously kind to their families, friends, or even strangers. I realized, then, that if, despite everything, I could lay myself bare and trust them enough to reach out in kindness, I might in turn gain their trust and they might then see me, too, and stop operating from such a place of fear and hate. 
+Through patience, humor, and understanding, I was able to offer myself as the embodiment of my people and somehow defang the “otherness” of so much that Americans found scary. To this day, I have friends from elementary school, middle school, high school, and the military who tell me that I am the only Muslim they have ever known and that, had they not met me, their perspective on Islam would have been wholly subject to the prevailing fear-based narrative that has poisoned this country since September 11, 2001. 
+In 1998, I became special assistant to the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy and then, in 1999, I was recruited to serve at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In August 2000, I transferred to the Naval Reserve. 
+In the wake of 9/11, I began to observe how so many of my fellow Americans were adopting a fundamentalist “us vs. them” attitude towards Muslims and Islam. I suddenly found myself in an America where the scattered insults I had endured as a child took on an overarching and sinister meaning and form, where they became something like an ideology and way of life. 
+By the time I completed my military service in 2006, I had begun to understand that our policies in the Middle East,similarly disturbed, seemed in pursuit of little more than perpetual warfare. That, in turn, was made possible by the creation of a new enemy: Islam — or rather of a portrait, painted by the powers-that-be, of Islam as a terror religion, as a hooded villain lurking out there somewhere in the desert, waiting to destroy us. I knew that attempting to dispel, through the patient approach of my childhood, the kind of Islamophobia that now had the country by the throat was not going to be enough. Post-9/11 attacks on Muslims in the U.S. and elsewhere were not merely childish taunts. 
+For the first time in my life, in a country gripped by fear, I believed I was witnessing a shift, en masse, toward an American fundamentalism and ultra-nationalism that reflected a wanton lack of reason, not to mention fact. As a boy in Iran, I had witnessed the dark destination down which such a path could take a country. Now, it seemed to me, in America’s quest to escape the very demons we had sown by our own misadventures in the Middle East, and forsaking the hallmarks of our founding, we risked becoming everything we sought to defeat. 
+The Boy in the Schoolyard Grown Up 
+On February 10, 2015, three young American students, Yusor Abu-Salha, Razan Abu-Salha, and Deah Shaddy Barakat, were executed at an apartment complex in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The killer was a gun-crazy white man filled with hate and described by his own daughter as “a monster.” Those assassinations struck a special chord of sorrow and loss in me. My mom and I cried and prayed together for those students and their families. 
+The incident in Chapel Hill also awoke in me some version of the righteous indignation I had felt so many years earlier in that smoke-filled courtyard in Iran. I would be damned if I stood by while kids in my country were murdered simply because of their faith. It violated every word of the oath I had taken when I joined the military and desecrated every value I held in my heart as a sacred tenet of our nation. White nationalists and bigots had, by then, thrown down the gauntlet for so much of this, using Islamophobia to trigger targeted assassinations in the United States. This was terrorism, pure and simple, inspired by hate-speakers here at home. 
+At that moment, I reached out to fellow veterans who, I thought, might be willing to help — and it’s true what they say about soul mates being irrevocably drawn to each other. When I contacted Veterans For Peace , an organization dedicated to exposing the costs of war and militarism, I found the leadership well aware of the inherent dangers of Islamophobia and of the need to confront this new enemy. So Executive Director Michael McPhearson formed a committee of vets from around the country to decide how those of us who had donned uniforms to defend this land could best battle the phenomenon — and I, of course, joined it. 
+From that committee emerged Veterans Challenge Islamophobia (VCI). It now has organizers in Arizona, Georgia, New Jersey, and Texas, and that’s just a beginning. Totally nonpartisan, VCI focuses on politicians of any party who engage in hate speech. We’ve met with leaders of American Muslim communities, sat with them through Ramadan, and attended their Iftar dinners to break our fasts together. In the wake of the Orlando shooting , we at VCI also mobilized to fight back against attempts to pit the Muslim community against the LGBTQ+ community. 
+Our group was born of the belief that, as American military veterans, we had a responsibility to call out bigotry, hatred, and the perpetuation of endless warfare. We want the American Muslim community to know that they have allies, and that those allies are indeed veterans as well. We stand with them and for them and, for those of us who are Muslim, among them. 
+Nationalism and xenophobia have no place in American life, and I, for my part, don’t think Donald Trump or anyone like him should be able to peddle Islamophobia in an attempt to undermine our national unity. Without Islamophobia, there no longer exists a “clash of civilizations.” Without Islamophobia, whatever the problems in the world may be, there is no longer an “us vs. them” and it’s possible to begin reimagining a world of something other than perpetual war. 
+As of now, this remains the struggle of my life, for despite my intense love for America, some of my countrymen increasingly see American Muslims as the “other,” the enemy. 
+My Mom taught me as a boy that the only thing that mattered was what was in my heart. Now, with her in mind and as a representative of VCI, when I meet fellow Americans I always remember my childhood experiences with my bullying peers. And I still lay myself bare, as I did then. I give trust to gain trust, but always knowing that these days this isn’t just a matter of niceties. It’s a question of life or death. It’s part of a battle for the soul of our nation. 
+In many ways, I still consider myself that boy in the school courtyard in Tehran trying to rescue charred pieces of that flag from those trampling feet. It’s just that now I’m doing it in my own country. 
+Nate Terani is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and served in military intelligence with the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is currently a member of the leadership team at Common Defense PAC and regional campaign organizer with Veterans Challenge Islamophobia . He is a featured columnist with the Arizona Muslim Voice newspaper. (Reprinted from TomDispatch by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+7341,Girl Horrified At What She Watches Boyfriend Do After He Left FaceTime On,"Share This Baylee Luciani (left), Screenshot of what Baylee caught on FaceTime (right) 
+The closest Baylee Luciani could get to her boyfriend, who’s attending college in Austin, was through video online chat. The couple had regular “dates” this way to bridge the 200-mile distance between them. However, the endearing arrangement quickly came to an end after his FaceTime was left on and caught something that left his girlfriend horrified. 
+Baylee had been discussing regular things with her boyfriend, Yale Gerstein, who was on the other side of the screen on an otherwise average evening. This video chat was not unlike all the others she had with Yale from his apartment near Austin Community College until the 19-year-old girlfriend heard some scratching sounds after FaceTime had been left on. 
+According to KRON , Baylee was mid-conversation with Yale when scratches at the door caught both of their attention and he got up from his bed, where the computer was, to see who was at his door. He barely turned the handle to open in when masked men entered the room and beat Yale’s face in and slammed him down on his bed while shoving a pistol in his cheek. The intruders didn’t seem to know or care that FaceTime was still on and Baylee’s face, seen in the corner, was watching everything, terrified that she was about to see her boyfriend murdered in front of her, as she watched him fight for his life. 
+Admitting that she first thought it was a joke, seconds later, she came to the horrid realization that he was being robbed and called her dad, who was at home with her in Dallas, into the room. “I was scared, because they were saying I’m going to blow your head off, I’m going to kill you,” Baylee explained along with the chilling feeling she got when the intruder finally realized the video chat was running and looked right at her in the camera. “I’m like wow… seriously watching an armed robbery happen to somebody that I care about,” she added. Screengrabs of intruder forcing Yale down on his bed while Baylee and her father watch on FaceTime in horror 
+With a clear view of at least one intruder’s face, Baylee began taking screenshots of the suspect in the act as she and her dad called the police to report what was going on. She got the pictures right in time since, seconds later, the intruder decided to disconnect the computer as he and the suspects took off with thousands of dollars worth of Yale’s music equipment. Although the boyfriend’s life was spared in the traumatizing ordeal for the two of them, he said that the thieves took something from him that can’t be replaced. 
+“I had just finished my first album as a solo artist,” Yale said. “That’s all lost,” since they took the recordings on the equipment, which means nothing to the thieves and everything to the victim. It’s not often that you hear of FaceTime solving crimes or potentially saving lives, which is what happened in this case. Although it was difficult to watch, Baylee, being there through technology, was an instrumental part in protecting Yale, who hopefully learned that he better take advantage of Texas’ great gun laws and arm himself with more than just a computer.",FAKE
+95,‘Britain’s Schindler’ Dies at 106,"A Czech stockbroker who saved more than 650 Jewish children from Nazi Germany has died at the age of 106. Dubbed “Britain’s Schindler,” Nicholas Winton arranged to transport Jewish youngsters from Prague after Germany annexed Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Though the children were originally set to arrive in Britain by plane, the German invasion forced Winton to transport them by train through Germany before they eventually reached England by boat. Winton arranged eight trains, known as the Kindertransports (children’s transports), to evacuate the children, and died on the anniversary of the 1939 departure of the one carrying the largest number of children: 241. Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 for his efforts, despite keeping it secret for nearly 50 years.",REAL
+4869,Fact check: Trump and Clinton at the 'commander-in-chief' forum,"Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump made some inaccurate claims during an NBC “commander-in-chief” forum on military and veterans issues:
+
+• Clinton wrongly claimed Trump supported the war in Iraq after it started, while Trump was wrong, once again, in saying he was against the war before it started.
+
+• Trump said that President Obama set a “certain date” for withdrawing troops from Iraq, when that date was set before Obama was sworn in.
+
+• Trump said that Obama’s visits to China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba were “the first time in the history, the storied history of Air Force One” when “high officials” of a host country did not appear to greet the president. Not true.
+
+• Clinton said that Trump supports privatizing the Veterans Health Administration. That’s false. Trump said he supports allowing veterans to seek care at either public or private hospitals.
+
+• Trump said Clinton made “a terrible mistake on Libya” when she was secretary of State. But, at the time, Trump also supported U.S. action that led to the removal of Moammar Gadhafi from power.
+
+• Trump cherry-picked Clinton’s words when he claimed Clinton said “vets are being treated, essentially, just fine.” Clinton had said the problems in the Department of Veterans Affairs were not as “widespread” as some Republicans claimed, but she went on to acknowledge problems, including the issue of wait times for doctors.
+
+The forum, sponsored by NBC News and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, was held Sept. 7 at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. Today show host Matt Lauer, and members of the military and veterans in the audience, questioned the candidates separately.
+
+Trump said he “was totally against the war in Iraq,” while Clinton claimed that he supported the Iraq War before and after it started. The facts don’t support either candidate’s strong assertions.
+
+Our review of Trump’s statements before and after the Iraq War started found no evidence that Trump opposed the war before it started. In fact, he expressed mild support for invading Iraq when asked about it on the Howard Stern radio show on Sept. 11, 2002 — about six months before the war started.
+
+Stern asked Trump if he supported a war with Iraq, and Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so.”
+
+In the NBC commander in chief forum, Trump cited an Esquire article that appeared in August 2004 to show his opposition to the war. But that article appeared 17 months after the war started.
+
+As for Clinton, who as a senator voted in October 2002 to authorize the war in Iraq, the Democratic nominee claimed that Trump “supported it before it happened, he supported it as it was happening and he is on record as supporting it after it happened.”
+
+But just as there is no evidence that Trump opposed the Iraq War before it started, the Clinton campaign offered no evidence that Trump supported the war “after it happened.”
+
+The Clinton campaign cited Trump’s interview on March 21, 2003, with Neil Cavuto of Fox Business just two days after the war started.
+
+Cavuto asked Trump about the impact of the war on the stock market. Trump said the war “looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint,” and he predicted the market will “go up like a rocket” after the war. But Cavuto does not ask Trump whether the U.S. should have gone to war with Iraq or whether he supports the war, and Trump doesn’t offer an opinion.
+
+As early as July 2003, Trump expressed concern on Hardball with Chris Matthews about money being spent in Iraq rather than in the U.S. Two months later, Trump told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, “I guess maybe if I had to do it, I would have fought terrorism but not necessarily Iraq.”
+
+Clinton invited her audience to read Trump’s comments on the Iraq War. They can read our timeline, “Donald Trump and the Iraq War.”
+
+Trump said President Obama set a “certain date” for withdrawing troops from Iraq, but that date was actually set by President George W. Bush.
+
+NBC’s Matt Lauer asked Trump about his tendency to respond, when pushed for details on his military proposals, that he’s not going to give details because he wants to be “unpredictable.” Trump responded, “Absolutely,” and went on to criticize Obama for revealing the withdrawal date.
+
+As we said then, Republicans and Democrats disagree on whether Obama or Bush is to blame for withdrawing all combat troops from Iraq at the end of 2011. But that date was set when Bush signed the Status of Forces Agreement on Dec. 14, 2008. It said: “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”
+
+In the NBC forum, Trump also called the withdrawal of troops “a terrible decision.” As we’ve explained before, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of State, later wrote that Bush wanted an agreement for a residual force to remain, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki objected.
+
+Once Obama took office in January 2009, he had three years to renegotiate the deal, which his administration tried to do, to leave a residual American troop force. But Maliki still didn’t agree. Negotiations broke down in October 2011 over the issue of whether U.S. troops would be shielded from criminal prosecution by Iraqi authorities. Whether Obama did enough is a matter of opinion: His then defense secretary, Leon Panetta, later wrote that the president didn’t press hard enough for a deal. But some experts say Iraq was more closely aligned at the time with Iran and there wasn’t a deal to be made with Maliki.
+
+So, both presidents had a role in the withdrawal of troops. But Trump wrongly said that Obama was the one who set a “certain date” for withdrawal and let U.S. enemies know about it, when that date was set before Obama was sworn in.
+
+It’s worth noting that Trump said in a March 16, 2007, interview on CNN that the troops should be withdrawn quickly from Iraq.
+
+Trump said that Obama’s visits to China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba were “the first time in the history, the storied history of Air Force One” when “high officials” of a host country did not appear to greet the president.
+
+That’s not true. Other presidents have encountered similar low-key greetings on foreign trips aboard the presidential aircraft.
+
+Trump referred to the fact that Cuba’s president, Raul Castro, did not greet Obama at the airport on his historic visit to Cuba in March, that Saudi Arabia’s King Salman did not meet Air Force One at the start of Obama’s trip to Riyadh in April, and he referred to China’s handling of the president’s arrival in Hangzhou last Saturday for a Group of 20 meeting.
+
+Whether or not those arrivals constituted snubs of a U.S. president as Trump claims is a matter of debate. But Trump is wrong on the facts when he claims it has not happened before. It has.
+
+In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan landed in Beijing and was received by China’s foreign minister rather than the president, whom he met only later. Similarly, on a 1985 trip to West Germany, Reagan was met by the foreign minister and not Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
+
+These and other examples were dug up by our friend Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post‘s “Fact Checker,” who researched a Trump claim in April that Cuba’s and Saudi Arabia’s handling of Obama’s visits were “without precedent.” Kessler said of Trump, “once again he’s wrong, wrong, wrong.”
+
+Kessler also noted that during Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China he was greeted at the airport by the country’s number two man, Premier Zhou Enlai. His boss, Chairman Mao, didn’t even agree to meet with Nixon until after he had arrived at a guest house.
+
+Clinton said that her plan to overhaul the Veterans Health Administration would not include privatization, which she said Trump supports.
+
+But Trump refuted that statement when it was his turn to discuss his plan to help veterans. “I would not do that,” Trump said, referring to Clinton’s claim that he supports privatization.
+
+Trump’s campaign published “The Goals Of Donald J. Trump’s Veterans Plan” on its website last October. It doesn’t call for the VA to be completely privatized.
+
+One of the biggest changes that plan would make to the current VA health care system is allowing veterans to get care at any non-VA medical center that accepts Medicare.
+
+“Under a Trump Administration, all veterans eligible for VA health care can bring their veteran’s ID card to any doctor or care facility that accepts Medicare to get the care they need immediately,” the plan states.
+
+“The power to choose will stop the wait time backlogs and force the VA to improve and compete if the department wants to keep receiving veterans’ healthcare dollars,” the plan says.
+
+Trump’s proposal would seemingly go further than the Non-VA Medical Care Program, which allows eligible veterans to access care outside of the VA under certain circumstances, such as when VA medical centers cannot provide services. The program requires pre-approval for veterans to receive care at a non-VA facility in non-emergency situations.
+
+Trump’s proposal would also go further than the bipartisan Veterans Choice Act of 2014 that President Obama signed into law, creating a temporary program, separate from the Non-VA Medical Care Program, that allows eligible veterans to receive health care at a non-VA facility if they would have to wait more than 30 days for an appointment at a VA medical center, or if they live more than 40 miles from the nearest VA hospital.
+
+Trump stuck to the idea of allowing veterans to choose between public and private hospitals when he released his most recent “Ten Point Plan To Reform The VA” in July.
+
+Point 10 of the plan says: “Mr. Trump will ensure every veteran has the choice to seek care at the VA or at a private service provider of their own choice. Under a Trump Administration, no veteran will die waiting for service.”
+
+Trump reinforced that part of his plan during the NBC News forum as well.
+
+To be clear, Trump supports giving veterans a choice between VA hospitals and private ones. That’s not the same thing as supporting the complete privatization of the system that provides care to veterans.
+
+Trump criticized Clinton for making “a terrible mistake on Libya” when she was secretary of State. But, at the time, Trump also supported U.S. action that led to the removal of Moammar Gadhafi from power.
+
+Trump made his claim in response to a question posed by Lauer on whether Trump will be “prepared on Day One,” if elected president, to tackle “complex national security issues.”
+
+This isn’t the first time Trump has ignored his past support for the U.S. intervention in Libya.
+
+During the 10th GOP debate, Trump said he had “never discussed that subject” when Sen. Ted Cruz called him out on supporting U.S. action in the country. But, as we wrote, Trump said in 2011 that the U.S. should go into Libya “on a humanitarian basis” and “knock [Gadhafi] out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively and save the lives.”
+
+Trump made that comment in a video posted to his YouTube channel in February 2011:
+
+Even though Trump now says Clinton’s support for intervention in Libya was a “terrible mistake,” it doesn’t change the fact that five years ago he supported Gadhafi’s removal.
+
+Trump twisted Clinton’s words when he claimed Clinton said “vets are being treated, essentially, just fine.” Clinton said the problems in the Department of Veterans Affairs were not as “widespread” as some Republican supporters of privatization of the VA claim, but she went on to acknowledge problems in the VA system — including the issue of wait times for doctors — and what she would do to address them.
+
+Trump highlighted the issue of wait times to see a doctor as “one of the big problems” in the VA, and then suggested Clinton doesn’t think the VA has problems.
+
+Lauer interrupted, noting that Clinton “went on after that and laid out a litany of problems within the VA.”
+
+Trump insisted his version was accurate, adding, “I’m telling you … she said she was satisfied with what was going on in the Veterans Administration.”
+
+That’s not accurate. The comments in question from Clinton came during an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Oct. 23, 2015. Maddow asked about talk among some Republicans of abolishing the VA and privatizing it. “The reason they are able to propose something that radical is because the problems at the VA seem so intractable,” Maddow said.
+
+Maddow asked if Clinton had any “new ideas for trying to fix” the VA. Here was Clinton’s response, with the part Trump is referring to in bold.
+
+Clinton accused Republicans of underfunding the VA because they “want it to fail” so they can privatize it.
+
+Clinton added, “But we have to be more creative about trying to fix the problems that are the legitimate concern, so that we can try to stymie the Republican assault.”
+
+Indeed, the Clinton campaign website states that Clinton wants to “fundamentally reform veterans’ health care to ensure access to timely and high quality care.” The campaign says Clinton “was outraged by the recent scandals at the VA, and as president, she will demand accountability and performance from VA leadership.” The site specifically mentions Clinton’s dissatisfaction that “[m]any veterans have to wait an unacceptably long time to see a doctor or to process disability claims and appeals” and promises she will “[b]uild a 21st-century Department of Veterans Affairs to deliver world-class care.”
+
+Trump cherry-picked the part of Clinton’s response that said problems in the VA have “not been as widespread as it has been made out to be,” to make the blanket claim that Clinton is “satisfied with what was going on in the Veterans Administration” and that “vets are being treated, essentially, just fine.” But Trump is leaving out the parts of Clinton’s answer that acknowledged problems in the VA — including the wait time issue Trump highlighted as one of his biggest concerns.",REAL
+2909,Iran reportedly makes new push for uranium concessions in nuclear talks,"Iranian negotiators reportedly have made a last-ditch push for more concessions from the U.S. and five other world powers as talks on the fate of Iran's nuclear program come down to the final days before a crucial deadline.
+
+The New York Times reported late Sunday that Tehran had backed away from a tentative promise to ship a large portion of its uranium stockpile to Russia, where it could not be used as part of any future weapons program. Western officials insisted to the paper that the uranium did not have to be sent overseas, but could be disposed of in other ways.
+
+The new twist in the talks comes just two days before the deadline for both sides to agree on a framework for a permanent deal. The final deadline for a permanent deal would not arrive until the end of June.
+
+However, if Iran insists on keeping its uranium in the country, it would undermine a key argument made in favor of the deal by the Obama administration. The Times reports that if the uranium had gone to Russia, it would have been converted into fuel rods, which are difficult to use in nuclear weapons. It is not clear what would happen to the uranium if it remained in Iran.
+
+The Associated Press reported Sunday that Iran's position had shifted from from demanding that it be allowed to keep nearly 10,000 centrifuges enriching uranium, to agreeing to keep 6,000. Western officials involved in the talks told the Associated Press that Tehran may be ready to accept an even lower number.
+
+The United States and its allies want a deal that extends the time Iran would need to make a nuclear weapon from the present two months to three months to at least a year. However, The Times reported Sunday that a paper published by Olli Heinonen, former head of inspections for the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, estimated that Iran could still develop a nuclear weapon in seven or eight months with around 6,500 centrifuges.
+
+Tehran says it wants to enrich uranium only for energy, science, industry and medicine. But many countries fear Iran could use the technology to make weapons-grade uranium.
+
+Officials told the Associated Press that another main dispute involved the length of an agreement. Iran, they said, wants a total lifting of all caps on its activities after 10 years, while the U.S. and the five other nations at the talks — Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — insist on progressive removal after a decade.
+
+A senior U.S. official characterized the issue as lack of agreement on what happens in years 11 to 15. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with State Department rules on briefing about the closed-door talks.
+
+Limits on Iran's research and development of centrifuges also were unresolved, the Western officials said.
+
+Tehran has created a prototype centrifuge that it says enriches uranium 16 times faster than its present mainstay model. The U.S. and its partners want to constrain research that would increase greatly the speed of making enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb, once limits on Iran's programs are lifted.
+
+One official said Russia opposed the U.S. position that any U.N. penalties lifted in the course of a deal should be reimposed quickly if Tehran reneged on any commitments.
+
+Both Western officials said Iran was resisting attempts to make inspections and other ways of verification as intrusive as possible.
+
+There was tentative agreement on turning a nearly-finished reactor into a model that gives off less plutonium waste than originally envisaged. Plutonium, like enriched uranium, is a path to nuclear weapons.
+
+Iran and the U.S. were discussing letting Iran run centrifuges at an underground bunker that has been used to enrich uranium. The machines would produce isotopes for peaceful applications, the officials said.
+
+With the Tuesday deadline approaching and problems remaining, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry canceled plans Sunday to return to the United States for an event honoring the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, his German counterpart, scratched planned trips to Kazakhstan.
+
+Kerry has been in discussions with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif since Thursday.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from The New York Times.",REAL
+1357,"With all three Clintons in Iowa, a glimpse at the fire that has eluded Hillary Clinton’s campaign","CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — “I had one of the most wonderful rallies of my entire career right here in 1992,” Bill Clinton said by way of opening to the crowd of more than 1,100 on Saturday night.
+
+Two days before the Iowa caucuses, Cedar Rapids tried to deliver that same old feeling to his wife, Hillary Clinton.
+
+In the crowd, one woman held a sign that said “227 years of men. It’s HER turn!"" Some carried signs and books. Others had traveled from as far as Missouri. They had waited hours, even after the fire marshal told them there was no more room inside the high school gymnasium.
+
+The restive crowd chanted slogans and buzzed with anticipation until finally Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton all appeared on stage hand-in-hand, an hour behind schedule. As they roared, Hillary Clinton beamed.
+
+It has been a long slog in Iowa for the Clinton campaign, which has struggled mightily to shake the label that its supporters can’t muster the enthusiasm of its rival’s backers. As the caucuses near, and with the help of a former president, the energy level at her events are notably dialing up.
+
+""He's a charismatic speaker,"" said Cigi Ross, 31. ""In general, I'd say he's a bigger draw for people.""
+
+Monday night will put the campaign's months of their work to the test. Can the campaign’s organization bring out their supporters? Can the candidate energize voters?
+
+Clinton, who seemed to draw on the higher-than-usual energy, stood at the center of it all and delivered a confident closing statement.
+
+“What we need is a plan, and a commitment,” Clinton said at the top of her voice.
+
+“And me, yes, thank you,” Clinton finished.
+
+Eight years later, Clinton is in Iowa once again facing what could be a nail-biting conclusion of a hard-fought campaign. Clinton acknowledges that it isn’t just her campaign that has changed since her devastating loss here in her last run, she too has changed — and improved, she told CNN on Saturday.
+
+""I think I am a different, and perhaps a better, candidate, so I hope that also shows,"" Clinton said in an interview with the network that morning.
+
+Days ago, Iowa seemed to be slipping from her grasp, but campaign aides are feeling more confident now. A slew of positive news, endorsements, and the latest poll from the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg News indicate the bleeding has at least slowed. That poll -- considered the gold standard in Iowa -- gave Clinton a slim lead over her rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
+
+If Democrats are wary of political dynasties, they didn’t show it. Spotting someone in the audience carrying Chelsea Clinton's book, her father remarked: ""Thank you, young woman, for holding up her book.""
+
+Bill Clinton, who has spent days crisscrossing the state on his wife's behalf, has settled easily into this role as booster-in-chief. He lays off the policy, leaving that to his wife. He focuses instead on what he knows ""about the job.""
+
+“There are certain, almost intangible qualities that determine whether a president succeeds or not,” Clinton said, his voice raspy, even and low. ""You need a sticker. A sticker: someone who won’t quit on you.”
+
+""She’s the best at that I’ve ever known,” he added.",REAL
+988,Donald Trump’s Shockingly Weak Delegate Game Somehow Got Even Worse,"Donald Trump’s organizational problems have gone from bad to worse to flat-out embarrassing. Here’s Politico with the play-by-play from this weekend’s Colorado GOP convention, the latest scene of Trump’s delegate-securing failure:
+
+Unlike in most other states, Republicans in Colorado scrapped plans for a more traditional primary or caucus to award its delegates to this summer’s national convention in Cleveland. Instead, the state GOP selected three delegates from each of the state’s seven congressional districts at individual contests in the days leading up to the state convention, and then the remaining 13 delegates at the statewide event this past weekend. It was a rather convoluted process that favored campaigns that understood the rules and that had the ground game necessary to take advantage of them—or, put another way, not the Trump campaign.
+
+At the first two district-level contests, the billionaire’s team showed up without an approved list of delegates to pass out to attendees, leaving supporters unsure of whom to back. And then at last Thursday’s contest, two of the three delegates on the Trump campaign’s list weren’t actually on the official ballot since they failed to pay the necessary registration fees.
+
+This past weekend’s mix-up, though, was an even bigger embarrassment since at least one of the seven misnumbered names on the Trump-sanctioned list lined up with a Cruz-supporting delegate, according to NBC News. (Even without that mix-up, though, Cruz would have likely swept the contest anyway given his well-oiled delegate-selecting machine.) The Trump camp, though, appeared to blame the state GOP for the mistake, pointing to discrepancies between the delegate guides posted on the party's website and the printed materials distributed at the event. “We'll do whatever it takes to protect the legitimacy of our support in Colorado,” Trump aide Alan Cobb told NBC, suggesting the campaign may challenge the results. “Clearly there are some serious issues with the ballot and balloting.”
+
+Trump remains the favorite to arrive at the convention with the most delegates to his name, but he’s far from assured of the majority of delegates he’d need to win the nomination on the first ballot. Given that reality, the GOP front-runner recently retooled his campaign to address his clear weaknesses in the under-the-radar battle to send loyal delegates to the convention. If those efforts don't start paying dividends soon, though, Trump very well may arrive in Cleveland with the most delegates—and leave without the nomination.",REAL
+7041,"Strong Solar Storm, Tech Risks Today | S0 News Oct.26.2016 [VIDEO]","Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
+Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
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+Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
+7623,10 Ways America Is Preparing for World War 3,"October 31, 2016 at 4:52 am 
+Pretty factual except for women in the selective service. American military is still voluntary only and hasn't been a draft since Vietnam war. The comment was made by a 4 star general of the army about drafting women and he said it to shut up liberal yahoos.",FAKE
+1571,"Trump takes on Cruz, but lightly","Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+4739,How women lead differently,"As more women move into high offices, they often bring a style and approach that is distinct from men. But do they make better leaders?
+
+Democratic women of the US Senate stand on stage during the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia (top). There are 20 women in the Senate – 14 Democrats and six Republicans.
+
+Kelly Ayotte and Joni Ernst take the floor, two dynamic young US senators before a town hall of older military veterans. Between them, they represent a raft of firsts: Senator Ayotte is New Hampshire’s first female attorney general and first female Republican senator. Senator Ernst is Iowa’s first woman ever elected to either house of Congress and the first female military veteran to serve in the Senate.
+
+The gender dimension does not go unnoticed. Please welcome “our beautiful senators,” says the veteran who introduces them. Ayotte mentions Ernst’s military service – she’s also a war veteran. But in most ways, the woman thing doesn’t matter. This is just like any other political town hall in campaign season – one senator trying to help another who’s locked in a tight reelection race.
+
+Yet the stakes are high. Republican control of the US Senate could hinge on Ayotte’s ability to fend off her Democratic challenger, Gov. Maggie Hassan. And across the country, women figure prominently in the Democrats’ strategy to retake the Senate, nominating women in six of the 11 competitive races.
+
+Then there’s Hillary Clinton, the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination in the United States.
+
+It’s enough to call 2016 Year of the Woman 2.0, following the original, 1992, when female representation in the Senate jumped from two to six. Today, female senators number 20 out of 100, with potential to reach 24, depending on how the political winds are blowing by Election Day.
+
+Gender diversity among major world powers is also rising, with the ascension of Theresa May to the British prime ministership. If Mrs. Clinton wins in November, three of the world’s top five economies will be headed by women. (German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the other.)
+
+But the numbers and the “firsts” invite a deeper question: Do women really lead differently? From the halls of government to corporate boardrooms, it’s a burning question.
+
+“I think we’re good listeners, and I think that helps,” says Ayotte in an interview. “I don’t want to say my male colleagues aren’t, because plenty of them are. But I think that we listen, and so we’re picking up on where we see the common ground with other people.”
+
+On that point, there is bipartisan agreement.
+
+“There is good research that shows women tend to have different leadership styles,” Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire’s other senator, says in an interview. “We tend to be more inclusive, we’re less autocratic in our decisionmaking. We like consensus, we like to get people around the table, and so I think that has made a difference.”
+
+Of course, there’s also the example of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D) of California, the first woman speaker of the House (2007-11). During her tenure, she was known for her ability to wield power – and in a highly partisan way. More than with previous speakers, major legislation came out of her office, not the committees. She was (and is) a master fundraiser for Democrats writ large, a skill she has used to great effect in keeping her members in line.
+
+And as a Roman Catholic woman, Congresswoman Pelosi demonstrated at a crucial moment the power of networking. In 2010, when House passage of the Affordable Care Act appeared in doubt over the abortion issue, she tapped connections her male colleagues had never heard of – two associations of nuns, whose support for the bill proved pivotal.
+
+The research on women’s leadership style has been extensive – and mixed. One academic study, released in 2013, found that women are more attracted to cooperation than men. The reason is that men tend to have greater confidence in their abilities, while women tend to be more optimistic about their prospective teammates’ abilities, according to the study by Peter Kuhn and Marie-Claire Villeval.
+
+New research, released in August, looked specifically at gender differences in the US House of Representatives and found “little evidence to suggest women are inherently more cooperative or bipartisan.” The only difference came with Republican women, who tend to recruit more cosponsors on legislation, including more from the opposite party. That tendency was most pronounced on so-called women’s issues, such as education and social welfare.
+
+“We interpret these results as evidence that cooperation is mostly driven by a commonality of interest, rather than gender per se,” write the authors, Stefano Gagliarducci and M. Daniele Paserman.
+
+The study examined 20 years of data ending in 2008. Since then, female representation in Congress has ticked up a notch, reaching 20 percent in the Senate and nearly that in the House – the rough threshold for a perceived “critical mass” of representation in which women can show perceptible influence.
+
+Indeed, since 2013, female legislators point to multiple examples of how the women of the Senate, in particular, have been instrumental in breaking through congressional gridlock. The best-known example is the end of the 2013 government shutdown, when women senators from both parties met privately over dinner and fashioned a compromise that would form the nucleus of the final deal.
+
+More recently, the women of the Senate – all 20 of them, dubbed “the sisterhood” – backed landmark legislation aimed at combating sex trafficking, which President Obama signed into law in May 2015.
+
+When asked for other examples, Senator Shaheen cites the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. “It was considered dead,” she says, “and because all the women [senators] got on board and pushed it, we were able to get it through.”
+
+Shaheen also notes the growing number of women who serve in top spots on committees, such as the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) of Alaska as chair and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D) of Washington as the ranking member. “It looks like we may get an energy bill done this year, and I think that speaks to their ability to work together, and to be flexible, and move our colleagues in the House,” Shaheen says.
+
+Behind all this female power are the women senators’ regular dinners, a chance to kick back and talk about whatever – their lives, their work, their male colleagues.
+
+“We go by Mikulski’s rules – that what happens in those dinners stays in those dinners,” says Shaheen, referring to Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D) of Maryland, the longest-serving woman in congressional history, who is about to retire. “But yeah, they’ve proved to be a great opportunity to build relationships.”
+
+As it happens, Shaheen had hosted 12 of her female colleagues the night before at her office. On the menu: lobsters and clam chowder. That much she will reveal. Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine was there, Shaheen says, “and we had a back and forth about whether the lobsters came from Maine or New Hampshire.”
+
+In 2013, after the Senate’s 20 women helped end the government shutdown, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona wondered out loud: “Imagine what they could do if there were 50 of them.”
+
+That may sound logical, but the reality isn’t so simple. While women do bring a distinctive perspective to policy, based on their life experiences, that doesn’t necessarily make them less partisan, experts say. Some of the most polarizing issues are so-called women’s issues, including health care, abortion, and equal pay.
+
+“As long as women’s issues constitute a prominent division between the parties, there will be little bipartisan collaboration among women on these policies,” Michele Swers, a political scientist at Georgetown University, wrote in The Washington Post in 2014.
+
+Ms. Swers also notes that partisan sorting has made the South – a region less hospitable to women candidates – the stronghold of the Republican Party, while the more moderate brand of Republicanism that predominates in parts of the country more willing to elect women has declined.
+
+And because women tend to occupy the “leftward wing” of their respective parties, Democratic women in particular are less inclined to compromise, the Gagliarducci-Paserman study found.
+
+Still, none of this means women shouldn’t be more rigorously recruited for public office, say leaders of both parties.
+
+“What you need is more good people, and the process of excluding women has excluded good people from service,” says former Gov. John Sununu (R) of New Hampshire. “So what you need to do is level the playing field.”
+
+In the business world, boosting female representation on corporate boards – now near 20 percent – has been a long-held goal. Advocates cite benefits to the bottom line. In a famous study, Catalyst Inc., a nonprofit that promotes women leaders in the workplace, found that corporate boards with the highest female representation attained “significantly higher financial performance” than those with the lowest representation.
+
+But whether in the private sector or in government, women as top executives are even rarer than women legislators. Only six of the nation’s 50 governors are women, three Republicans and three Democrats. Among world leaders, fewer than two dozen are female. Among Fortune 500 companies, only 21 chief executive officers – or 4.2 percent – are women.
+
+While legislating is an inherently collaborative process, and therefore seems to play to women’s strength, executive roles hew more toward public expectations of how men should behave, i.e., authoritatively.
+
+“I think the more people see women in executive positions, the more they will see that as a normal course of business, and it’s taken longer for that not just in politics but in the boardroom,” says Shaheen.
+
+But that becomes a Catch-22: Women don’t step up because they don’t see other women in those positions. “Some would call it a confidence gap,” says Liz Shuler, the No. 2 leader at the AFL-CIO. “We need to do more to increase the leadership skills-building opportunities, so that it becomes second nature for women to step up.” (See interview with Ms. Shuler here.)
+
+But do women executives really lead differently from men? Clinton echoes other women leaders on this point: “I just think women in general are better listeners, are more collegial, more open to new ideas and how to make things work in a way that looks for a win-win outcome,” she told Time magazine in January.
+
+Meta-analyses have found that women leaders, on average, are “more likely to be democratic, collaborative, and participative” than their male counterparts, who are more likely to be “autocratic and directive” in their approach, writes Alice H. Eagly at TheConversation.com.
+
+Of course, there are exceptions. Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Golda Meir of Israel were both known for being tough and assertive. Today, Apple CEO Tim Cook is known for his team-oriented style. But for women aspiring to leadership posts, the challenge is to overcome societal expectations for how women are “supposed to” act – i.e., nice and nonconfrontational – while still projecting authority. Clinton has faced this “double bind” in both of her presidential campaigns.
+
+New Hampshire has a strong record of female leadership. The governor, both US senators, and one of the state’s two House members are women. The chief justice of the state Supreme Court is a woman. The chair of the state GOP is a woman.
+
+In 2008, Granite Staters made history by electing the nation’s first majority-female state legislative body, in the state Senate. In 2013, the state made history again by sending an all-female congressional delegation to Washington. That could happen again in January.
+
+What is it about New Hampshire that breeds women leaders? Start with a culture of independent-mindedness, and an enormous “citizens legislature” – 400 in the House, 24 in the Senate – in a state with only 1.3 million people. Members are paid just $100 a year, plus mileage. Sooner or later, the joke goes, everybody ends up serving.
+
+“We have so much local self-governance, women have the opportunity to try things out, to see how they like public service, and then they discover that they like it and that they’re good at it, and one thing leads to the next,” says Governor Hassan in an interview in the State House.
+
+Hassan got her start advocating for her disabled son, which caught the notice of then-Governor Shaheen, who appointed her to a state educational funding commission. That led to regular interactions with state legislators – and an introduction to her next mentor, state Sen. Sylvia Larsen, who encouraged Hassan to run for state Senate. She spent six years there, eventually rising to majority leader, losing reelection, then staging a comeback by winning the governorship.
+
+The common denominator for most women in politics, it seems, is mentors. Ask Ayotte, New Hampshire’s junior senator, about Ruth Griffin, and her eyes light up. “I love Ruth Griffin. She’s my mentor!” Ayotte gushes, referring to the nonagenarian grand dame of the New Hampshire Republican Party. (See interview with Mrs. Griffin here.)
+
+When Griffin served on the state Executive Council – an elected board that serves as a check on the governor – she advocated strongly for Ayotte, insisting the Democratic governor reappoint the Republican Ayotte as attorney general.
+
+Shaheen, now a mentor to others, cites as her inspiration Marilla Ricker, the first woman to run for governor of New Hampshire – before women even had the right to vote. Shaheen also speaks fondly of the late Susan McLane, a Republican state senator “who was always very good to me.” (Ms. McLane’s daughter is Rep. Ann McLane Kuster (D) of New Hampshire.) Shaheen broke two gender barriers in N.H., first with her election as governor (1996), then as a US senator (2008).
+
+Men, too, have championed women politicians here. At a recent Republican women’s chili fest in Stratham, N.H., Mr. Sununu recalls fighting to make Vesta Roy the first woman state Senate president, in 1983. “There’s that classic picture of me standing at the state Senate door, cracked open, peeking in to make sure the 13 votes I had lined up for her stayed with her,” Sununu says.
+
+Whether New Hampshire’s success at electing women to higher office can be duplicated elsewhere remains an open question. Only two other states have two female US senators, and five others have female governors. New Hampshire is no longer the champ at electing women state legislators; that crown belongs to Colorado, with 42 percent. The top 10 states for female representation in state legislatures are mostly Northern, and the bottom 10 mostly Southern, suggesting cultural factors.
+
+Overall, women hold a higher percentage of state legislative seats (24.6 percent) than seats in Congress (19.4 percent, House and Senate combined). At least the female “farm team” has more players than the “major league,” though those numbers still fall far short of matching the overall female population of the country, 50.8 percent.
+
+For many women, reaching parity with men in government – and in business, the judiciary, the labor movement, and other spheres of life – is a deeply held goal. But a quick glance at the graphs charting female representation in state and national legislatures reveals a stark truth: Growth has nearly hit a plateau.
+
+If progress continues at the current rate of change since 1960, women will not achieve equal representation in Congress until 2117, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Women’s representation in state legislatures, which more than quintupled between 1971 and 2015, has also essentially plateaued. What’s going on?
+
+“It’s not that women are running in droves and losing,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “We know that when women run, they win at about the same rate as men do.”
+
+Women also do just as well in fundraising as men, even if they have to work harder to raise the same amount. Part of the problem, Ms. Walsh says, comes in the recruitment process. Much of the recruiting is done by white men, and they recruit who they know – other white men.
+
+That is particularly so among Republicans: Only 17 percent of Republican state lawmakers are women, a rate that hasn’t changed since the early 1990s. In contrast, Democrats doubled their rate of female state representation during the same period from 15 percent to 30 percent.
+
+In Congress (both houses), the disparity is even more stark: Only 9 percent of Republicans are female, versus 33 percent of Democrats. In the Senate alone, only six of the 20 women members are Republican.
+
+Walsh cites several factors behind this gap: Republican women are perceived to be more moderate than their male counterparts, and can have a harder time making it out of the primaries, where turnout is low and skews conservative. The GOP also has no counterpart to Emily’s List – a well-funded political action committee that helps pro-abortion-rights Democratic women get elected. And then there’s the simple fact that more women identify as Democrats, so their recruitment pool is bigger.
+
+In New Hampshire, where both legislative chambers are controlled by the Republicans, Democratic women legislators still outnumber Republican women legislators, 73 to 49. State GOP chair Jennifer Horn says the party – nationally, not just in New Hampshire – needs a message that’s more inclusive.
+
+“I’m being diplomatic – I think there are times when some of the folks in our party are not as sensitive to the fact that men and women see the world differently,” says Ms. Horn. “When we’re talking about jobs and the economy, for example, we need to be cognizant of the fact that women are an economic engine in and of themselves.”
+
+And then there’s the fact that, in both parties, women are less likely than men to run for office without being recruited.
+
+In the Monitor’s conversations with Ernst and Ayotte, both mentioned how they were asked several times to run for the Senate before saying yes – and both brought up family issues. Without using the word “multitasking,” they both show that they have mastered that classic skill of the working mom.
+
+“It’s about getting the message out about empowering women and saying, you can do this,” says Ernst. “It is important that you have a supportive family, even more so for women. I have a teenage daughter right now – we’re looking at colleges – and sometimes it’s hard for a woman to be away. But there are ways of making it work.”
+
+Before running for Senate, Ayotte had been asked a couple of times to run for Congress, but declined – in part, she says, because she was pregnant, but also because she had plans in her work as a prosecutor.
+
+Ayotte then excuses herself. “I’ve got to pick up my daughter before 5:30 or I’m in trouble!”",REAL
+7737,Shocking! Michele Obama & Hillary Caught Glamorizing Date Rape Promoters,"Shocking! Michele Obama & Hillary Caught Glamorizing Date Rape Promoters First lady claims moral high ground while befriending rape-glorifying rappers Infowars.com - October 27, 2016 Comments 
+Alex Jones breaks down the complete hypocrisy of Michele Obama and Hillary Clinton attacking Trump for comments he made over a decade ago while The White House is hosting and promoting rappers who boast about date raping women and selling drugs in their music. 
+Rappers who have been welcomed to the White House by the Obama’s include “Rick Ross,” who promotes drugging and raping woman in his song “U.O.N.E.O.” 
+While attacking Trump as a sexual predator, Michelle and Hillary have further mainstreamed the degradation of women through their support of so-called musicians who attempt to normalize rape. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+8716,Hillary Clinton in HUGE Trouble After America Noticed SICK Thing Hidden in this Picture... * LIBERTY WRITERS NEWS,"0 
+Hillary Clinton has barely just lost the presidential election and here she is already getting herself caught in another one of her tangled web of lies. 
+The day after losing, a picture was posted of her taking her dog out for a walk. The picture was reportedly from a random hiker she ran into and showed that she was getting back to public life, or that’s what she wants you to believe. 
+Now, I want you to do me a favor and take a very close look at this picture, specifically the “hiker” she met. Memorize her face… 
+Got it? Okay, good. 
+Now what I am about to show you is something Hillary Clinton was hoping nobody else would notice. Tell me if the girl in the 2nd picture, taken in the 2000’s, reminds you of anyone: 
+Yeah, it is the EXACT SAME GIRL! 
+Her name is Margot Gerster and her mother just happens to be one of the big fundraisers for Hillary. That’s actually where the older picture was taken. 
+Wow! That doesn’t seem random at all, does it? 
+It looks like this is yet another example of Hillary Clinton trying to mislead the public using her inner circle and pretending like she doesn’t know them. 
+All I gotta say is, give it the Hell up, Hillary! You lost, nobody needs to see your “chance encounters” or other promotional propaganda anymore. This is exactly why Americans ended up hating you! 
+Oh well, I guess you really cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Well, in that case all that’s left to do is share this all across Facebook and the internet and expose yet another one of her Serial Lies! ",FAKE
+3304,What's in that Iran bill that Obama doesn't like?,"Washington (CNN) For months, the White House and Congress have wrangled over a bill that would give lawmakers a greater say in the Iran nuclear deal the administration is hammering out along with other world powers.
+
+And now, less than two weeks after a framework agreement with Tehran was reached, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is planning to take up the measure.
+
+On Tuesday, the committee will consider amendments to Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker's Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act before deciding whether to have the full Senate vote on it.
+
+For many in Congress, it's a very simple premise: Congress should weigh in on the terms of a final nuclear deal with Iran.
+
+But for the White House, and some Democrats in Congress, that's an explosive idea that could derail the talks — and therefore must be stopped.
+
+So what's in the bill?
+
+Supporters of the legislation have emphasized that it would allow Congress to give a thumbs up or down on the deal President Barack Obama is aiming to finalize with Iran by the negotiations' June 30 deadline. Backers think that's only fair since the United States is contemplating a major nuclear pact with a decadeslong enemy.
+
+The bill would give Congress a chance to hold hearings, host briefings and pave the way to a vote on a joint resolution that could express approval or disapproval of the deal. It also requires the Obama administration to quickly report to Congress on details of the deal and regularly assess whether Iran is keeping its commitments. And it spells out what the President needs to do vis-a-vis Congress if Iran is found violating the terms.
+
+But most important, it would keep Obama from waiving any congressional sanctions on Iran during Congress' 60-day review period. And if Congress passes a joint resolution of disapproval, then sanctions could not be lifted even after that time.
+
+Does this hurt the diplomatic effort to reach a final deal?
+
+Iran's primary reason for agreeing to the deal's limits on its nuclear program is to get sanctions relief.
+
+Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani have insisted sanctions must be lifted on Day One of the deal. While the Obama administration has said it would wait several months before lifting sanctions -- to verify that Iran has taken major steps to roll back its program — the President is counting on having some latitude to waive sanctions in order to give Iran an incentive to sign the deal and then keep its commitments.
+
+The Corker bill makes it less likely sanctions would be lifted, and lifted in a timely way, which gives less encouragement to Iran.
+
+Without the bill, could Obama lift all sanctions on Iran?
+
+Not all, but most — at least for a limited time.
+
+Without the Corker-Menendez bill (named after Corker and lead Democratic co-sponsor Sen. Bob Menendez), Iran could see nearly all nuclear-related sanctions at least temporarily lifted. Those enacted through the United Nations and by presidential executive order could be fully removed, and most of those passed by Congress could be waived by Obama until he leaves office, when they would go back into effect unless the next president continues to waive them.
+
+If the Corker-Menendez bill becomes law and a deal is finalized, Obama wouldn't be able to lift the congressional sanctions for at least 60 days.
+
+During that 60-day review phase, the bill says Obama can't ""waive, suspend, reduce, provide relief from, or otherwise limit the application of statutory sanctions.""
+
+How can Obama waive sanctions passed by Congress anyway?
+
+The biggest sanctions package approved by Congress, widely credited with crippling Iran's economy and bringing the country to the negotiating table, was the 2010 Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act.
+
+It included a provision that gives the President leverage to waive sanctions for a limited time if he determines it's in the U.S. national security interest.
+
+He wouldn't be able to permanently sunset the sanctions, though, unless Iran cuts its ties with and stops funding terror organizations around the world, an aspect not being addressed in the current negotiations with Iran and not predicted to happen any time soon.
+
+The administration says sanctions are where Congress could eventually weigh in on the Iran deal -- by repealing them -- but that would only happen if lawmakers deem the deal a good one.
+
+How would Congress weigh in during the 60-day review period?
+
+Congress could pass a joint resolution approving of the deal or disapproving of the deal and forbidding any sanctions relief. Or it could do nothing, allowing Obama to implement the sanctions, and by implication the deal, after the 60 days are up.
+
+A joint resolution disapproving of the deal would need to muster a two-thirds majority, though, to override the veto Obama has promised -- an unlikely, but not entirely unthinkable, scenario.
+
+Are there other reasons that Obama opposes this bill?
+
+First, he's facing a combative, Republican majority in both houses of Congress. Those Republicans have sought to undermine his negotiations with Iran at every turn. Giving those lawmakers a legislative avenue to slam the terms of an eventual deal would, at best, be a political blow to Obama and his administration's efforts to broker an agreement.
+
+There's also the White House's argument that the executive branch has the power to broker international agreements without Congress meddling, while congressional oversight of the Iran deal would set a dangerous precedent. Most international agreements aren't treaties ratified by Congress, and Obama has argued that U.S. allies need to know they can count on those agreements holding up.
+
+Virtually every Senate Republican supports the bill and nine Democrats have signed on as co-sponsors, including independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats. Several more on the left are leaning toward supporting the bill.
+
+That means backers will likely pass the bill with a filibuster-proof majority. It's unclear, though, if they can muster enough Democrats willing to vote to override Obama's veto.
+
+It's not just the numbers, though. Some powerful Democrats are supporting the legislation. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, who will become the chamber's Democratic leader when Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada retires at the end of his term, is a big proponent of the legislation.
+
+Menendez, of New Jersey, who has been working to rally Democrats around legislation on Iran throughout the negotiations, remains the most vocal Democrat on the issue. He was the top-ranked Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee until stepping aside to face corruption charges handed down earlier in the month.
+
+Also, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, one of the earliest Obama backers during the 2008 campaign, has been insistent on the need for Congress to weigh in and has worked behind the scenes to make Corker's bill more palatable to Democrats -- and the White House. But so far that effort hasn't succeeded, as the White House remains opposed.",REAL
+3078,The 1 chart that explains everything you need to know about partisanship in America,"While paging through Pew's best data visualizations of 2014 (it's awesome), I came across what I believe to be one of the best and most revealing charts about the state of American politics. Here it is:
+
+The chart, which comes from Pew's amazing political polarization project, shows how partisans of both parties have grown both increasingly unified amongst themselves and increasingly far apart from their partisan others over just the last 20 years. As recently as 1994, seven in 10 Democrats were more consistently liberal than the median Republican.  As of 2014, it's a whopping 94 percent. Same goes for Republicans; 64 percent of GOPers were more consistently conservative than the median Democrat in 1994 while 92 percent are today. In addition, ""the overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10 percent to 21 percent,"" according to Pew.
+
+To me, this chart is so important -- particularly in a week where a new Congress arrives in Washington -- because it reveals that the polarization of our elected officials isn't some sort of ""only in Washington"" thing.  The increasing partisanship of Congress is a direct reflection of the increasing partisanship of the country. After all, that's who elects these people to Congress, right?
+
+So, when you hear people decry the partisanship of their elected officials in Washington, don't believe it.  We have the Congress we want -- even if we aren't totally honest with ourselves all the time about what that is.  And, we get the results -- not many -- from our elected officials that you have to expect when you have a country as polarized as ours.",REAL
+2517,The slippery slope to Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims,"With little fanfare this fall, the New York developer who had planned to build an Islamic community center north of the World Trade Center announced that he would instead use the site for a 70-story tower of luxury condos.
+
+Those who had rallied in opposition to the building because of its religious affiliation back in 2010 were exultant. “The importance of the defeat of the Ground Zero Mosque cannot be overstated,” Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, wrote on the website Breitbart in September. “The Ground Zero Mosque became a watershed issue in our effort to raise awareness of and ultimately halt and roll back the advance of Islamic law and Islamic supremacism in America.”
+
+It’s all well and good that so many Republicans have condemned Donald Trump’s reprehensible call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) was particularly forceful, calling proper attention to the “many Muslims serving in our armed forces, dying for this country.”
+
+When he was president, George W. Bush honorably put a lid on right-wing Islamophobia. He regularly praised American Muslims and stressed that the United States needed Muslim allies to fight violent extremism. Once Bush was gone, restraint on his side of politics fell away.
+
+Thus, Trump’s embrace of a religious test for entry to our country did not come out of nowhere. On the contrary, it simply brought us to the bottom of a slippery slope created by the ongoing exploitation of anti-Muslim feeling for political purposes.
+
+You don’t have to reach far back in time to see why Trump figured he had the ideological space for his Muslim ban. Last month, it was Jeb Bush who introduced the idea of linking the rights of Syrian refugees to their religion. He said he was comfortable granting admission to “people like orphans and people who are clearly not going to be terrorists. Or Christians.” Asked how he’d determine who was Christian, he explained that “you can prove you’re a Christian.”
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) took a similar view, saying , “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.”
+
+Trump took limits on Muslim access to our country to their logical — if un-American and odious — conclusion. Vice President Biden said that Trump was serving up “a very, very dangerous brew,” but the brew has been steeping for a long time. This is why the “Ground Zero Mosque” episode is so instructive.
+
+The demagoguery began with the labeling of the controversy itself. As PolitiFact pointed out, “the proposed mosque is not at or on Ground Zero. It does not directly abut it or overlook it.” It was “two long blocks” away. And while a mosque was part of the proposed cultural center, the plans also included “a swimming pool, gym and basketball court, a 500-seat auditorium, a restaurant and culinary school, a library and art studios.”
+
+This didn’t stop opponents from going over the top, and Newt Gingrich deserved some kind of award for the most incendiary comment of all. “Nazis,” he said, “don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.”
+
+When President Obama defended the right of developers to build the project, he was — surprise, surprise — accused of being out of touch, and Republicans were happy to make the Muslim center and Obama’s defense of religious rights an issue in the 2010 campaign.
+
+“I think it does speak to the lack of connection between the administration and Washington and folks inside the Beltway and mainstream America,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), who was then chairman of the committee in charge of electing Republicans to the Senate. Voters, he said, felt they were “being lectured to, not listened to.” Sound familiar?
+
+At the time, John Feehery, the veteran Republican strategist, put his finger on why Republicans were so eager to lambaste Obama’s response to the Ground Zero issue. “This will help drive turnout for the GOP base,” he said.
+
+The Republican establishment is now all upset with Trump, but he is simply the revenge of a Republican base that took its leaders’ pandering — on Islam and a host of other issues — seriously.
+
+You can’t be “just a little” intolerant of Muslims, any more than you can be “just a little” prejudiced against Catholics or Jews. Once the door to bigotry is opened, it is very hard to shut.
+
+Read more from E.J. Dionne’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+10348,Episode #160 – SUNDAY WIRE: ‘Hail to the Deplorables’ with special guest Randy J,"November 13, 2016 By 21wire Leave a Comment 
+Episode #160 of SUNDAY WIRE SHOW resumes this November 13, 2016 as host Patrick Henningsen brings a 3 HOURS special broadcast of LIVE power-packed talk radio on ACR… 
+LISTEN LIVE ON THIS PAGE AT THE FOLLOWING SCHEDULED SHOW TIMES: 
+SUNDAYS – 5pm-8pm UK Time | 12pm-3pm ET (US) | 9am-12pm PT (US) 
+This week’s edition of THE SUNDAY WIRE is on the road broadcasting LIVE from the Valley of the Sun. This week host Patrick Henningsen covers this week’s top stories in the US and internationally. In the first hour we’ll conduct a post-mortem on the incredible US Election which has produced President Elect Donald J Trump , and the aftermath – a nation divided punctuated by numerous street protests in part fuelled by Soros and the Democratic Party Machine . Later, we’re joined by our roving everyman , ACR Boiler Room contributor, Randy J , for an on the ground take on Election events from the West Coast, and beyond… 
+SUPPORT 21WIRE – SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV 
+Strap yourselves in and lower the blast shield – this is your brave new world… 
+*NOTE: THIS EPISODE MAY CONTAIN STRONG LANGUAGE AND MATURE THEMES* ",FAKE
+778,Hillary Clinton Makes A Bipartisan Appeal on Staten Island,"Hillary Clinton told a Staten Island crowd today that she was the candidate who could reach across party lines to get things done as president—pointing to her experience representing the borough in the Senate and even giving public thanks to Republican President George W. Bush.
+
+“I have no time for people who are partisan for the sake of being partisan,” Ms. Clinton, a Democrat and former secretary of state, told a crowd that welcomed her enthusiastically in a historic building at Snug Harbor Cultural Center.
+
+Ms. Clinton was the second leading presidential candidate to speak on Staten Island today, after Republican Donald Trump delivered a typical stump speech at a Republican brunch. But Ms. Clinton, perhaps sensing or recalling Staten Island’s ever-present desire for politicians to pay attention to the forgotten borough, delivered a speech that seemed to be especially tailored for the borough, which is more conservative than the rest of New York City. The majority of its voters are registered Democrats, but the borough routinely swings Republican.
+
+“When I ran in 2000, I didn’t carry Staten Island. When I ran in 2006, I did,” Ms. Clinton said today. “I’ve got no problem with people having political disagreements. That’s in America’s DNA, isn’t it?”
+
+Instead, Ms. Clinton decried “deliberate efforts to set Americans against each other.” She harkened back to representing the borough of cops and firefighters on September 11, 20001, when nearly 300 Staten Islanders were killed in the terror attacks. She noted the city’s mayor, the state’s governor, and the president were all Republicans.
+
+“I did not for one minute stop and say to myself: ‘Well, I don’t know, can we work together?'” Ms. Clinton said. “How absurd is that?”
+
+Ms. Clinton said with 3,000 people murdered, people “pulled together” and “politics was totally left behind.” She had criticized President Bush for his handling of a strong economy he “inherited” from her husband, President Bill Clinton, and for other reasons. But she praised him for approving billions of dollars to rebuild lower Manhattan after the terror attacks, even as others in Washington didn’t want to spend it.
+
+“I publicly say, ‘Thank you President George W. Bush,’ for making sure that we got the money that we needed to rebuild our city,” Ms. Clinton said.
+
+She also touted her record working for the borough after the attacks, including sounding the alarm on air quality and pushing for the passage of the Zadroga Act. Ms. Clinton went on to discuss her foreign policy experience, saying anyone who wants to president has to be able to offer specifics on what they would do—an allusion to her Democratic rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—but also has to be able to keep people safe.
+
+“Maybe we take that more seriously here in New York, but we should,” she said. “And we are going to do everything we can to keep America safe.”
+
+She cited her work building a coalition that “brought Iran to the negotiating table,” without mentioning how controversial that final Iran deal was for President Barack Obama.
+
+Ms. Clinton’s rally had little in common with Mr. Trump’s Staten Island event, except one thing: the crowd at both seemed to hate Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Ms. Clinton mentioned his plan to spy on Muslim neighborhoods, which has also been dismissed by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.
+
+At the mention of Mr. Cruz’s name, the crowd offered a chorus of boos.
+
+The crowd had been hyped up for Ms. Clinton before she even arrived, and gave a nice response to several local pols as they urged people to get out the vote on Tuesday.
+
+“Hillary is the only one with the experience,” said Councilwoman Debi Rose, a Democrat who represents the borough’s North Shore. “She knows what it’s like to be in the White House. She knows the realities. She knows that living and running the White House in this country is not a reality show.”
+
+Ms. Clinton, at the end of her speech, offered the kind of promise Staten Island always loves—and the kind it holds politicians to, if the way the Staten Island Advance repeatedly agitated and inquired about a town hall Mayor Bill de Blasio will finally hold here on Wednesday night is any indication.
+
+“I want you to hold me accountable,” Ms. Clinton said. “I will be coming back to Staten Island when I am your president.”",REAL
+3300,New Senate majority leader’s main goal for GOP: Don’t be scary,"Mitch McConnell has an unusual admonition for the new Republican majority as it takes over the Senate this week: Don’t be “scary.”
+
+The incoming Senate majority leader has set a political goal for the next two years of overseeing a functioning, reasonable majority on Capitol Hill that scores some measured conservative wins, particularly against environmental regulations, but probably not big victories such as a full repeal of the health-care law. McConnell’s priority is to set the stage for a potential GOP presidential victory in 2016.
+
+“I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome. I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority,” the Kentucky Republican said in a broad interview just before Christmas in his Capitol office.
+
+It’s a far cry from his defiant declaration in 2010 that his “single most important” goal was to make President Obama a one-term president, an antagonizing oath that Democrats frequently invoke to embarrass the GOP leader — Obama won reelection comfortably in 2012, and McConnell’s party lost seats.
+
+Now in charge at both ends of the Capitol, Republicans aim to avoid the worst excesses of the past four years and make sure the public isn’t fearful of the GOP’s course.
+
+“There would be nothing frightening about adding a Republican president to that governing majority,” McConnell said, explaining how he wants voters to view the party on the eve of the 2016 election. “I think that’s the single best thing we can do, is to not mess up the playing field, if you will, for whoever the nominee ultimately is.”
+
+But McConnell, who will become majority leader Tuesday, is not planning to avoid conflict altogether. He wants to use the annual spending bills to compel Obama to accept conservative policy riders that will divide Democrats, similar to the December spending bill’s inclusion of a provision benefiting Wall Street firms involved in risky derivative trades. That rider brought a liberal outcry but did not end up torpedoing the bill, which had Obama’s support.
+
+McConnell has been coaching his members to understand that, in the initial rounds, they will have to almost unanimously support the budget outline and the spending bills, because few Democrats will support their policy riders.
+
+With 54 Republicans in his caucus, McConnell knows that he’s a long way from getting 67 votes to override an Obama veto and that it won’t even be easy getting six Democrats to regularly support legislation so that he can overcome likely filibusters led by the incoming minority leader, Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). Still, on some issues, such as energy and taxes on the health industry, McConnell thinks there’s enough bipartisan support to get bills onto Obama’s desk.
+
+“They’d like to be relevant. They’d like to be part of the process,” he said of discussions with some rank-and-file Democrats. “Assuming we will have on most issues a largely unified conference — I don’t expect that on everything — it wouldn’t take a whole lot of Democrats to actually pass legislation in the Senate.”
+
+But McConnell said those who are “craving some grand deal as a way to measure the next two years” should lower their expectations. He’s very skeptical of such bargains with Democrats on tough issues such as immigration and entitlement reform. Instead, he believes three issues have potential common ground: international trade deals, an overhaul of the tax code and new revenue streams for infrastructure projects.
+
+“Could the country use a lot more? You bet. But there’s no way you can overcome a reluctant president on something really large,” McConnell said. The best he can do on some of those bigger issues is force Obama to break out his veto pen so there is a clear set of Democratic policy stances Republicans can campaign against in 2016.
+
+Democrats are dubious of McConnell’s pledge to avert edge-of-the-cliff moments. They believe he will run into the same problems that have bedeviled House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) during the past four years — including the inability to corral rabble-rousers such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to support an agenda that conservative critics will probably view as not bold enough in challenging Obama. Appeasing those far-right conservatives will lead to an agenda that Democrats hope to exploit in 2016.
+
+“What Senator McConnell wants people to think and what they will think when they see the results for themselves are two very different things,” said Reid’s spokesman, Adam Jentleson. “Senator McConnell heads a caucus that is obsessed with rigging the game against working people in favor of wealthy special interests. That’s a scary fact indeed, and he won’t be able to hide it.”
+
+While McConnell’s office is adorned with a portrait of Kentucky’s only other Senate majority leader — Alben W. Barkley, whose tenure was often marked by clashes with his own party’s president, Franklin D. Roosevelt — his model more resembles that of George Mitchell, the Democratic majority leader from 1989 through 1994.
+
+Without ever shutting down the government, Mitchell stared down a president of the opposite party, George H.W. Bush, and won several liberal victories in a 1990 budget showdown. Mitchell also delivered a slew of legislation to Bush’s desk that drew a veto, helping frame the debate for the 1992 election on domestic policy.
+
+McConnell has recently studied other two-term presidents on how often they vetoed legislation in their last two years in office. Obama has issued only two minor vetoes over technical matters, largely because the previously Democratic-run Senate prevented anything from reaching his desk that he opposed.
+
+McConnell suggested that a veto strategy would help clarify issues for voters. “I think his bureaucracy across the board has done a lot of damage to the country. . . . I’d at least like for him to have to personally take responsibility for it, even if he in the end decides to veto the bill over some restriction on EPA regulations.”
+
+McConnell is keenly aware of the challenges of reining in some of the impulses that his fellow Republican lawmakers have developed over eight straight years in the minority.
+
+The first test will come on an energy debate, which could begin by the end of this week. McConnell is trying to keep his side from offering amendments not related to energy issues. In recent years, when some rank-and-file Republicans wanted to stop the Senate in its tracks, they would threaten amendments related to how Congress gets its health care.
+
+“I’ve asked my members to restrain themselves,” he said.
+
+Restraint has been hard to come by in this political era, particularly because a small army of conservative groups has made it a mission to push Republicans to the most strident stands, even if it means shutting down the government or risking default on the national debt.
+
+McConnell faced some of those groups firsthand when they supported his 2014 primary challenger, and he faced a grinding general election against a Democrat who was well financed.
+
+It cost nearly $30 million from his campaign war chest and tens of millions of dollars more from outside groups. Winning both races handily, McConnell is delivering a message to Republicans on how to behave heading into 2016.
+
+“Don’t try to reinvent yourself. Be yourself, number one. And don’t be afraid of a primary. We will win all the primaries. We did it in ’14. We will do it in ’16,” McConnell said.
+
+Shortly after Election Day this fall, McConnell sat down with Obama for a rare one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office, a huddle that both sides kept largely secret. In the pre-Christmas interview, McConnell acknowledged that the meeting’s purpose was only to discuss areas where the president and Republicans might find bipartisan agreement — because their disagreements on other issues were too in­trac­table.
+
+That meeting, he said, focused on trade deals, a tax code overhaul and infrastructure funding. “Can we get there on tax reform, trade, infrastructure?” he said.
+
+He eschewed the idea of holding the debt ceiling hostage to gain spending-cut concessions from Obama, a tool Republicans had to use before because they were in the minority.
+
+“We are in the majority. We can pass a budget. We can determine how much we’re going to spend,” he said.
+
+Avoiding those moments could make for a less “scary” Congress, giving the Republicans a better chance in 2016 to hit the trifecta and gain the White House. His own horse is already chosen, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), but don’t expect McConnell to be out on the campaign trail or doing any other favors for his home-state colleague.
+
+“I’m going to be supporting Rand Paul. But he knows that beyond that, I won’t be involved in presidential politics. I’ve got a big job here,” he said.",REAL
+6155,‘Inferno’ and the Overpopulation Myth,"Mises.org November 1, 2016 Inferno is a great thriller, featuring Tom Hanks reprising his role as Professor Robert Langdon. The previous movie adaptations of Dan Brown’s books ( Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code ) were a success, and I expect Inferno will do well in theaters, too. Langdon is a professor of symbology whose puzzle solving skills and knowledge of history come in high demand when a billionaire leaves a trail of clues based on Dante’s Inferno to a biological weapon that would halve the world’s population. The villain, however, has good motives. As a radical Malthusian, he believes that the human race needs halving if it is to survive at all, even if through a plague. Malthus’s name is not mentioned in the movie, but his ideas are certainly there. Inferno provides us an opportunity to unpack this overpopulation fear, and see where it stands today. Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) thought that the potential exponential growth of population was a problem. If the population increases faster than the means of subsistence, then, “The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.” Is overpopulation a problem? The economics of population size tell a different, less scary, story. While it is certainly possible that some areas can become too crowded for some people’s preferences, as long as people are free to buy and sell land for a mutually agreeable price, overcrowding will fix itself. As an introvert who enjoys nature and peace and quiet, I am certainly less willing to rent an apartment in the middle of a busy, crowded city. The prices I’m willing to pay for country living versus city living reflect my preferences. And, to the extent that others share my preferences or even have the opposite preferences, the use and construction of homes and apartments will economize in both locations. Our demands and the profitability of the varied real estate offerings keep local populations in check. But what about on a global scale? The Inferno villain was concerned with world population. He stressed the urgency of the situation, but I don’t see any reason to worry. Google tells me that we could fit the entire world population in Texas and everybody would have a small, 100 square meter plot to themselves. Indeed, there are vast stretches of land across the globe with little to no human inhabitants. Malthus and his ideological followers must have a biased perspective, only looking at the crowded streets of a big city. If it’s not land that’s a problem, what about the “means of subsistence”? Are we at risk of running out of food, medicine, or other resources because of our growing population? No. A larger population not only means more mouths to feed, but also more heads, hands, and feet to do the producing. Also, as populations increase, so does the variety of skills available to make production even more efficient. More people means everybody can specialize in a more specific and more productive comparative advantage and participate in a division of labor. Perhaps this question will drive the point home: Would you rather be stranded on an island with two other people or 20 other people? Malthus wouldn’t be a Malthusian if he could see this data The empirical evidence is compelling, too. In the graph below, we can see the sort of world Malthus saw: one in which most people were barely surviving, especially compared to our current situation. Our 21st-century world tells a different story. Extreme poverty is on the decline even while world population is increasing. Hans Rosling, a Swedish medical doctor and “celebrity statistician,” is famous for his “Don’t Panic” message about population growth. He sees that as populations and economies grow, more have access to birth control and limit the size of their families. In this video , he shows that all countries are heading toward longer lifespans and greater standards of living. Finally, there’s the hockey stick of human prosperity. Estimates of GDP per capita on a global, millennial scale reveal a recent dramatic turn. The inflection point coincides with the industrial revolution. Embracing the productivity of steam-powered capital goods and other technologies sparked a revolution in human well-being across the globe. Since then, new sources of energy have been harnessed and computers entered the scene. Now, computers across the world are connected through the internet and have been made small enough to fit in our pockets. Goods, services, and ideas zip across the globe, while human productivity increases beyond what anybody could have imagined just 50 years ago. 
+I don’t think Malthus himself would be a Malthusian if he could see the world today. 
+Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute. The Best of Jonathan Newman Tags: Jonathan Newman was a 2013 and 2014 Summer Fellow at the Mises Institute and teaches economics at Auburn University.",FAKE
+636,Anti-Trump forces seek last-ditch delegate revolt,"Washington (CNN) The faction of the GOP that is unhappy with Donald Trump as the party's presumptive nominee has one last plan to stop the mogul: staging an all-out delegate revolt at the Republican National Convention.
+
+The far-fetched idea is the latest reflection of a campaign cycle that has been anything but ordinary, and stems from a continuing dissatisfaction among some conservative stalwarts with how Trump is behaving and running his campaign. But two longtime GOP veterans says they wouldn't bet on the effort working.
+
+The effort comes at a rough time for the GOP. As the Democratic Party's heaviest hitters, including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, line up behind Hillary Clinton and against Trump, Republicans have been forced to criticize their own nominee. Recent comments from Trump about a federal judge's Mexican heritage have drawn widespread rebuke and put GOP leaders in a corner as they defend their endorsement of Trump while disavowing his comments.
+
+One of the vocal advocates for a delegate revolt is conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who has also been actively seeking a candidate to mount an independent bid against Trump, thus far to no avail.
+
+Kristol tweeted late Thursday that the idea of a ""conscience convention,"" where delegates are free to vote for whomever they want to, is also appealing.
+
+""I've been focused on independent candidacy, & still am. But struck by sudden level of interest in possible delegate revolt at convention,"" Kristol tweeted. He added: ""A Convention of Conscience in Cleveland would be quite something. Made easier by fact Trump only won minority of total primary votes anyway.""
+
+Bob Vander Plaats, the head of The Family Leader, an influential social conservative group in Iowa, told CNN's Kate Bolduan Friday morning that ""everything does need to be on the table"" at the convention, though he stopped short of calling for a revolt on the convention floor.
+
+""We want a principled conservative and disciplined candidate who is the standard-bearer of this party,"" said Vander Plaats, who backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz during the primaries. He said Trump has time before the convention to ""have the concerns laid to rest.""
+
+""All I'm doing is adapting to the circumstances,"" Kendal Unruh told ABC. ""I certainly believe Trump's demagogic racist comments are hurting him.""
+
+The rules enacted by the previous convention, which govern in 2016 until delegates pass a new set of rules, state that even if a delegate casts a ballot for a candidate other than one they are bound to, the convention secretary will record their bound vote.
+
+In order to change that rule, the 112 delegates (two from each state and territory) on the Rules Committee would have to pass different rules and bring those to the floor of the convention, where a majority of delegates present would have to approve them.
+
+Rules expert and RNC veteran Jim Bopp, an Indiana delegate who serves as special counsel to the RNC Rules Committee, said he has spoken with people who want to ""keep the option open to manipulate the rules in some way to deny Trump the nomination,"" but he said he wouldn't bet on any changes.
+
+""I would put money on no rules changes that would affect the outcome of the nominating process,"" Bopp told CNN. ""I think it's highly likely that no rules changes would be adopted that would affect the nomination.""
+
+Bopp said there's also a counter movement within Rules insiders to pass a rule that would prevent any other rules changes from going into effect until the close of the convention.
+
+Rules Committee and Oregon RNC member Solomon Yue is behind that effort, and has been pushing the RNC this year to adopt rules that give less power to the party and more to the delegates. He tried but failed to get the party to adopt rules that would require bigger majorities to pass business at the convention.
+
+Yue says with roughly 80% of the convention delegates being either Trump or Cruz backers, the anti-Trump forces don't have much strength.
+
+""The common denominator of the delegates is anti-establishment, anti-Washington,"" Yue said. ""And if you think about 'Never Trump' people, they are representing Washington and the establishment.""
+
+Part of the philosophy for a delegate revolt comes from longtime RNC veteran Curly Haugland, from North Dakota, and a book he co-wrote with public policy consultant Sean Parnell. ""Unbound"" uses the history of the RNC to make the case that RNC rules dictate that delegates be allowed to vote their conscience.
+
+""What Curly and I are contending is that because of RNC rules, there is no such thing as binding,"" Parnell told CNN, saying the binding rules that currently are in place are in a part of the rules package that govern pre-convention during the delegate selection process.
+
+But Parnell also acknowledged that any effort to make the interpretation stick would require at the very least a handful of state delegations if not a majority of delegates on the floor.
+
+""It would be messy. Good television though,"" Parnell said. ""I would not call it likely. My hope is that delegates are free to vote however they want to vote, and it's going to be up to the chair whether or not to allow that. But I think unless Donald Trump actually does go shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, I don't think this is going to cost him the nomination.""
+
+Neither the Trump campaign nor Republican National Committee immediately responded to a request for comment on the chatter about a delegate revolt.
+
+There has been intense focus on the Rules Committee for months, going back to when there was a possibility of no Republican candidate getting enough delegates to clinch the nomination outright. With the prospect of a contested convention, the Cruz campaign made a concerted effort to stock the Rules Committee and state delegations with loyalists who would support Rules that would benefit Cruz in a bid to win the nomination on multiple ballots.
+
+But after Cruz lost Indiana soundly and suspended his campaign, the prospect of a contested convention vanished and Trump rolled to the magic number to clinch the nomination.
+
+Meanwhile, the Cruz campaign urged supporters to continue to become delegates and earn leadership spots to influence the platform at the convention.
+
+Though some in the party have never warmed to Trump, the intensity of finding a way to prevent his formal nomination has grown in recent days after Trump's comments about a federal judge inflamed even the leaders of his own party.
+
+Trump questioned the impartiality of the district court judge overseeing a lawsuit related to his venture Trump University, saying the Indiana-born judge's Mexican ancestry could bias him against Trump. The mogul cited his campaign promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico in making the comments.
+
+Though the presumptive nominee has repeatedly stood behind and doubled down on the comments, his stance has drawn outrage from the likes of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who called the remarks ""the textbook definition of a racist comment.""
+
+Still, only a small handful of Republicans have withdrawn or withheld their endorsements of Trump. Vulnerable Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk disavowed Trump this week and said he could not endorse the party's nominee after all, but Ryan, McConnell and others have stood by their endorsements, saying Clinton would be a worse choice.",REAL
+755,Sanders Trounces Clinton in W. Va. -- But Will It Make a Difference?,"Meanwhile, Democrat Bernie Sanders picked up more delegates in the two states than Hillary Clinton.
+
+The Vermont senator's still way behind, but says he's not giving up, calling his win in West Virginia ""tremendous.""
+
+Clinton still holds a commanding delegate lead, but Sanders still has the fight in him.
+
+""We are in this campaign to win the Democratic nomination!"" he declared.
+
+But Sanders' quest appears to be almost impossible, with Clinton 94 percent of the way to winning the nomination.
+
+""I am, if I am so fortunate enough as to be the nominee - I am looking forward to debating Donald Trump come the fall,"" she said.
+
+Still, Clinton faces the FBI investigation of her email scandal.
+
+In addition, her loss in West Virginia, a state she took in 2008, was payback for her statements in March that a lot of coal miners and coal companies would be out of business.
+
+She's also polling badly among whites, men, and young people, with many loyal Sanders supporters vowing to never vote for her.
+
+Meanwhile, on the Republican side, Trump kept rolling, winning West Virginia and Nebraska.
+
+The billionaire told the Associated Press he's looking at five or six people as his running mate, all with deep political experience.
+
+One person that Trump will likely not be considering is Sen. Marco Rubio, who told CNN he disagrees with Trump's ""America first"" foreign policy.
+
+""I have well defined differences with the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party,"" Rubio said. ""And like millions of Republicans, you try to reconcile those two things.""
+
+Trump will be meeting on Capitol Hill Thursday with Republican leaders, a group he has railed against, to try to patch up the public differences they've had.
+
+Unifying the Democrats is going to be an issue for Clinton too, as many Sanders voters have said they wouldn't vote for her.
+
+So, after tough primary battles, both parties are facing the question of how to work together against each in the general election this fall.",REAL
+626,Donald Trump Is Changing His Campaign Slogan to Prove He’s Not Racist,"After a week of nonstop criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike for comments many condemned as racially charged, Donald Trump claims to be altering his campaign to be a little more inclusive. While the presumptive G.O.P. has long promised to “make America great again,” Trump now says he’s adding two words to slogan to illustrate just how non-racist he really is.
+
+“You know, I have the theme ‘make America great again,’ and I've added a couple of things,” Trump announced to supporters at a campaign rally in Richmond, Virginia, on Friday night. “Right now I’m adding make America great again—I’m adding ‘for everyone,’ because it’s really going to be for everyone. It’s not going to be for a group of people, it’s going to be for everyone. It’s true.”
+
+The allegedly amended slogan, which has yet to appear on any official signage or Trump merchandise, comes after the presidential candidate spent the first half of June repeatedly denouncing Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge of Mexican heritage presiding over the Trump University class action lawsuit, as inherently biased against him. (Curiel was born in Indiana.) His comments were widely condemned by the Washington political establishment, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who suggested he may be an idiot, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who called Trump’s statement the “textbook definition of a racist comment.”
+
+Trump, who hasn’t apologized or taken back any of his comments, indicated on Friday that he realized his words have had a negative effect on his campaign and declared he is not a racist.
+
+“I am the least racist person. The least racist person that you’ve ever seen. I mean give me a break,” he said at the rally. “I am the least racist person that you’ve ever looked at, believe me.”",REAL
+691,Pure chaos: Donald Trump’s campaign management offers a glimpse into his governing style (spoiler alert: it’s terrible),"If you want a glimpse into a presidential candidate’s governing style, take a look at his campaign. How does he build an organization? How does he manage personnel? How does he delegate responsibility? Does he value loyalty or honesty in advisers? It’s hardly conclusive, but how a candidate deals with these challenges says a lot about what they’d prioritize as president.
+
+The presumptive Republican nominee has managed his campaign the way he manages his casinos or his realty TV program: haphazardly and with an unearned arrogance. Everything’s about the brand and non-sycophants are cast aside. Getting it right is far less important than being right. Thus, when prompted by advisers to dial down the rhetoric and think more about his long-term viability, Trump has resisted. He’s yet to understand how different a primary and a general election are, and he’s too cocksure to listen to anyone who tries to explain it.
+
+Trump isn’t as stupid as he pretends to be, but his confidence seems to scale with his ignorance, and that’s a dangerous trait in a president, given how consequential each decision can be. As a candidate, a confident idiot can make a lot of noise and fool a lot of voters. But you can’t lead that way. As president, Trump would need the sober advice of serious professionals. Considering how little he understands about the job and the world, this is especially true in his case.
+
+Based on the latest behind-the-scenes reports on Trump’s campaign (as well as his entire history in real estate and television), it’s unlikely he would govern with the humility and self-awareness required. The campaign has undergone several shake-ups in recent months, with key staffers like Corey Lewandowski being demoted to make way for veteran operatives like Paul Manafort. Trump’s approach has remained very much the same, however. Everyone he brings in bends to his will or is replaced by someone who does.
+
+Things have gotten more chaotic in the last week or so, as Rick Wiley was fired as the campaign’s national political director. Wiley was known to assert himself in ways that alienated Trump and his loyalists. The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan and Robert Costa summarized the broader situation over the weekend: “For the last two months, Donald Trump has presided over a political team riddled with turf wars, staff reshuffling and dueling power centers. But tensions are more than typical campaign chaos: They illustrate how Trump likes to run an organization, whether it’s a real estate venture or his presidential bid. Interviews with current and former Trump associates reveal an executive who is fond of promoting rivalries among subordinates, wary of delegating major decisions, scornful of convention and fiercely insistent on a culture of loyalty around him.” These are the management techniques of a brand-hustling magnate, not a president of the United States. Trump’s dictatorial approach works well on the campaign trail, but it’d be a disaster in office. A president has to persuade and compromise. The capacity to admit ignorance is equally important. Trump, by all accounts, has no interest in any of these things. Trump doesn’t know what he needs to know in order to be president, nor does he care that he doesn’t know. If his campaign is any indication, he’ll hire people to ensure his veil of ignorance is never cracked. That kind of megalomania is why Trump is who he is – it’s part of his outsized persona. It’s also the clearest indicator we have of the kind of president he’d be.",REAL
+5743,"Syrian War Report – November 1, 2016: Syrian Military Deploys Advanced T-90 Battle Tanks to Aleppo","Syrian War Report – October 31, 2016: Al-Nusra-led Forces Failed to Break Aleppo Siege ‹ › South Front Analysis & Intelligence is a public analytical project maintained by an independent team of experts from the four corners of the Earth focusing on international relations issues and crises. They focus on analysis and intelligence of the ongoing crises and the biggest stories from around the world: Ukraine, the war in Middle East, Central Asia issues, protest movements in the Balkans, migration crises, and others. In addition, they provide military operations analysis, the military posture of major world powers, and other important data influencing the growth of tensions between countries and nations. We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by governments and mainstream media. Syrian War Report – November 1, 2016: Syrian Military Deploys Advanced T-90 Battle Tanks to Aleppo By South Front on November 1, 2016 …from SouthFront 
+The Syrian military has deployed advanced Russian-made T-90 main battle tanks to western Aleppo, according to the video released on October 31. T-90 MBTs were observed in the Minyan area where they were participating in operations against Jaish al-Fatah, a Jabhat al-Nusra-led coalition of militant groups. Last weekend, elite units of the Syrian Army’s Tiger Forces and the Desert Hawks Brigade were deployed in Aleppo to counter the militants’ offensive operation to capture the al-Assad Military Academy and the nearby areas. Both formations operate T-90 MBTs supplied by Moscow over the last year. The government forces massively use tanks, artillery, warplanes and helicopters to attrit Jaish al-Fatah’s manpower in non-populated urban areas. 
+Experts note that the jihadists have also concentrated a high number of experienced troops, artillery, rocket launchers and military equipment at a restricted front in western Aleppo. To do this, they had been pushed to use almost all their resources from the rear bases in Idlib province. If Jabhat al-Nusra is not able to achieve a decided success in clashes with the government forces soon, this will lead to its total collapse as a powerbroker in the war. The group’s material and technical base will be destroyed and experienced troops and field commanders killed in the clashes. We’ve been already able to observe signs of this tendency since the failed al-Nusra attempt to dig in the Ramouseh Artillery Acandemy in southern Aleppo. 
+The Kurdish YPG and the Ankara-led forces (Turkish-backed militant groups and the Turkish Armed Forces) have been competing in the northeastern countryside of Aleppo city. Both forces recently captured a bunch of villages from ISIS in the direction of Al-Bab. In this case, the ongoing coordination between the Syrian army and the YPG has once again become reality on the ground. The recent Kurdish operations were coordinated and supported by the Russian and Syrian military and military sources say that Moscow increased military supplies to the YPG in the area. Moscow and Domascus believe that the Kurdish buffer zone plays an important role, preventing Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki and other pro-Turkish groups from attacking the Syrian army and its allies in Aleppo city. In mid-October Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki officially announced that the next stage of Turkey’s Operation Euphrates Shield will include an advance on the ‘regime forces’ in Aleppo. 
+Dozens of al-Nusra Front and linked-groups members were killed during their failed attempt to break the Syrian army’s defenses at the abandoned al-Mahjoorah Battalion military camp near the militant-controlled town of Ibtaa in the province of Daraa on October 31. According to pro-government forces over 40 militants were killed. Pro-militant media outlets confirm 26 killed in action terrorists. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by South Front on November 1, 2016, With 727 Reads Filed under World . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+1787,GOP insiders: Carly crushed it,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+7808,Jeffrey Sewell et al. : Metabiology face to face with Artificial Intelligence [VIDEO],"Randy Maugans & Jeffrey Sewell | Metabiology face to face with Artificial Intelligence Published on Sep 20, 2016 We are speaking on a subject that is vital for humanity to comprehend, AI or artificial intelligence, our objective is to further disclose how this is influencing humanity in subtle and not so subtle ways, for without knowledge of its existence or comprehension of its prevalence humanity is easily being led into more sophisticated technological control mechanisms. 
+Jeffrey Sewell has spent many years in deep study of biology, in the process he introduces us to Metabiology, the tenants are simple, ‘As above, so below’ holds true from the nucleus of a cell to the furthest reaches of distant galaxies, life begets life. And it does so in a miraculous pattern that is reflected from the cosmos to the super organism, our Earth and to each of us in our divine vessel, the human body. From his website: http://cytocosmos.com 
+“Metabiology is a study of the invisible systems of life spanning from the subatomic to the celestial. […] By using cell biology as a template, we are able to map elements within the cell to elements of unseen systems. The latter elements are obtained by cross referencing multiple sources of material from the OBE/LBL/NDE experiencer community. These so-called astral systems map quite nicely to systems in the cell, and they tell the same narrative, albeit the complexity and sophistication of cellular earth is many times that of the cell. 
+Much of the understandings derived from such mappings are echoed in the deeper cosmologies and teachings of the ancient world religions. Examples include; Sumerian, Egyptian, Kabbalah, Gnostic, Kashmir Shivaism, and Vedanta. Jungian Psychology has also proven to be useful in mapping out the cellular psyche. 
+This is the science of “as above, so below” in a very literal sense. The invisible is inner visible within the generalized cell itself. We can therefore grasp and ground the unseen systems of life by mapping them to the empirical biology of the cell. The implications of what this science has to offer reach all the way from psychology to cosmology and particle physics. 
+The primary tenet of Metabiology is that we have inherited biology from systems of life that exist both above and before us. Should it be surprising? After all, we are children of the living universe. The Cytocosmos is a multidimensional living fractal, a cellular holarchy that has hitherto been called the universe.” 
+Randy Maugans is the beloved radio show host of ‘Offplanet Radio’ http://radio.offplanetmedia.net/ Who doesn’t pull his punches speaking his truth. His many years in the medium of the the alternative media and on the internet has given him an ample arena to study the affects of the infiltration of AI and its interface with human consciousness. 
+claudia and christine co-founded “Earth Empaths” and this YouTube channel “Not In Our Name.”… The truth no matter where it leads us. 
+http://earthempaths.net 
+“Listen to your inner voice. Don’t listen to the superficial voice that makes you angry. Listen to that deeper voice that is going to guide you from now on, the voice that is laughing. Listen to it! And laugh with it. Laugh! Laugh!”– Don Juan Matus Share:",FAKE
+6484,Why It’s Necessary To Relax Into A Stretch,"In a previous article , I discussed stretching—namely, why stretching is important for the masculine man, and several stretches that you should use in your training to maximize your physical fitness. And while that advice is still valid, I neglected a very important concept in that first article: the techniques that detail how to stretch.
+I am not referring to a specific stretch or some sort of hypothetical “stretching mindset,” but rather a set of techniques that can be utilized for any stretch to increase ones flexibility immediately. But before I can discuss those, I have to discuss the incorrect way of stretching that many people still use.
+How Not To Stretch Many people believe that stretching is a literal act of forcing the muscles and connective tissue to stretch— avoid this at all costs ! First and foremost, as I have discussed previously in these pages, you should never apply any stretching pressure to the connective tissue. They evolved solely to “hold fast” and keep things in one piece, they should never be stretched at all!
+The muscles are the anatomical feature that stretches, as they evolved to do. When stretching, your body should always be positioned in a way where the connective tissues are stable and the muscles are moving.
+Even when you are positioned properly, no part of stretching should involve the athlete forcing his muscles to stretch, as that risks muscular tearing which is a nagging injury that never truly goes away. This is because the human body has naturally evolved what is referred to as the “ anti-stretch reflex ” to prevent muscular tearing-stretching the muscles increases in difficulty the farther and deeper the stretch is, and your body responds to this stress with pain. This is a biological sign telling you that if you go further you’ll be risking muscle tears, and should normally be a heeded warning.
+However, if you want to do advanced stretching (such as that nigh-impossible benchmark of fitness the splits), you will have to find a way to overcome this reflex without hurting yourself. And as luck would have it, there is!
+
+Relax Into Stretching Reflexes can be overcome with gradual and repeated practice—just ask your friendly neighborhood hooker about how she overcame her gag reflex! Similarly, your anti-stretch reflex that keeps your “joints” (actually your muscles) stiff and immobile can be overcome with a few techniques.
+The most basic of these techniques is the one that I have had the best results with (as usual, the simple but difficult answer is usually the correct one), and that is the titular concept of “relaxing into a stretch”—with thanks to Pavel Tsatsouline for naming the concept.
+To use this technique, take an easy form of the stretch you want to do: using the splits as an example, you would do a seated groin stretch. Engage the stretch just to the point where you feel tension in the target muscle, and then…sit and wait.
+
+Yes, paradoxically, relaxation is the key to increasing your physical fitness in this context. You are literally going to sit there and wait for your muscles to stop fighting the stretch—in other words, you’re going to exhaust your reflex until it stops being reflexive.
+This is not something that happens quickly—from my experience, it will take 5-10 minutes per stretch, so it is perfectly acceptable for you to get a book or watch TV while doing this. As a side note, this is literally the only time where it’s acceptable to have a visual distraction during exercise, in my opinion.
+As you might expect, once your muscles have relaxed and the pain has melted away, you can increase the stretch a little bit more, and hold it for another 10 minutes. Repeat this process until your muscles are in pain and you judge that you can’t go any further—this is a personal call that you will have to decide for yourself, as I can’t judge when your muscles are demanding you to stop.
+This technique can be utilized for any stretch, and in many cases will give you the progress that you so desire. However, there are other methods in the “Relax Into Stretch” family of exercises that can be utilized as well, such as meditation—mentally relaxing will lead to muscular relaxation.
+Or you can try “forced relaxation”, where you flex the muscle simultaneously while stretching, forcing the muscle to relax.
+
+Either way you slice it, don’t just brute force your stretching, utilize these techniques for better results.
+Read More: Why Stretching Is Essential For The Body (With 6 Beginner Stretches To Get You Started) 
+",FAKE
+7385,"Brexit Encourages UK to Trade With Non-EU States, Including Russia","Britain and EU After Brexit ( 31 ) 0 13 0 0 Brexit prompts the Unietd Kingdom to facilitate trade relations with non-EU states including Russia, the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce (RBCC) chairman told Sputnik. 
+MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Leaving the European Union and losing access to the single market encourages Britain to develop trade with Russia and other non-EU states, Roger Munnings, the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce (RBCC) chairman, told Sputnik on Wednesday. ""There are at least two years to go before we leave the European Union, but I think the way Britain is looking at it is that it gives us a chance to be completely open to all countries in the world, including Russia. We’ll need to look for other trading partners rather than being confined to the European Union by virtue of the free trade arrangement, so we will be very keen to do trade with Russia,"" Munnings said on the sidelines of the RBCC RussiaTALK Investment Forum in Moscow. 
+He added that although there was sanctions regime in place against Moscow, at the same time the British government encourages trade with Russia. © Photo: PIxabay UK FinMin Upholds Economic Stimuli to Quell Concerns Over ‘Hard Brexit’ On June 23, the United Kingdom voted on referendum to leave the European Union . On October 2, UK Prime Minister Theresa May said that the country would trigger Article 50 of the EU Lisbon Treaty by the end of March 2017 to start the official procedures to cease its EU membership.
+A number of EU leaders have already stated that the United Kingdom will lose its access to the single market unless it keeps freedom of movement rules. May, meanwhile, suggested at the Conservative party conference in early October that the country’s exit from the European Union would be a ""hard"" rather than ""soft"" Brexit, meaning that control over immigration would be prioritized over the access to the European single market. ...",FAKE
+9016,"2016 interview with Socrates: Another day of Life in the Empire! Are we near an endgame, or fools to ever ‘hope for change’? (6 of ?)","Posted on October 27, 2016 by Carl Herman 
+“It is no use trying to escape their (Empire’s) arrogance by submission or good behavior. Robbers of the world, having by universal plunder exhausted the land, their drive is greed. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if poor, they lust for domination. Neither rule of the East nor West can satisfy them. Alone among men, they crave with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To plunder, slaughter, seize with false pretenses, they give the lying name ‘empire.’ And where nothing remains but a desert, they call that ‘peace.’ ” – Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania (analyses here , here ). Tacitus wrote ~ 100 AD, a century into empire. Emperors proclaimed to the public that their government still upheld the highest ideals of their Republic, claiming expanding empire was only and always in “self-defense.” 
+“One Love! Let’s get together and feel all right. Hear the children cryin’ Hear the children cryin’ (One Heart! )” ~ Bob Marley, One Love 
+language warning: Socrates and I speak in the same direct language that caused his execution for “corrupting the young.” 
+Socrates: Carl! 
+Carl: Soc! (bro hug) 
+S: How may I be of service? (genuine smile) 
+C: I just want to talk with an honest person, bro. We last talked 6 months ago . I don’t know if I have anything new to say, but I want to talk with someone who can hear. 
+S: I’ll try. What about? 
+C: We’re finishing a so-called “election” season that’s “jumped the shark” (and here ) with the Left-wing candidate a proven criminal, and Right-wing candidate a depraved Roman Emperor wanna-be . These are Left and Right arms of one illegal rogue state US empire , of course. 
+S: Of course. 
+C: So I keep feeling that we have to be near an endgame, Soc. We have to be, given the open floodgates of evidence about s much criminal activity by the .01% centered in war , looting , and lying . 
+I mean, really, how much longer can this go on?! 
+S: (smiling) Are you asking me, or just pausing for dramatic effect? 
+C: I’m asking if you have any answers. 
+S: (shrugs) I went through a 27-year civil war after almost 50 years of Athenian “leaders” concentrating an empire under their dominion. As we discussed in some detail , Athen’s “love of freedom” and spin that foreign barbarians “hate us for our freedoms” was total inversion of the facts because “freedom” was only meant for us, and not anyone else. Everyone else had to pay tribute or face military invasion. 
+This hypocrisy in my time produced civil war. Those of us voicing the facts were insufficient to prevent it, or stop it once started. (Pauses to look intensely into my eyes) 
+So you tell me: how much longer could your struggle go on? 
+C: Fuck. 
+I really don’t want a civil war. 
+S: Fuck, indeed. If it comes, maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe it won’t last 27 years. 
+C: Fuck. 
+S: But I do have a brighter perspective. I mean, how many of the non-sheeple would care to talk with me if all I ever did is leave them discouraged? (chuckles) Who would converse with Socrates if those who did were asked, ‘Hey, how did your conversation with Socrates go?’ and the responses were all disheartened, ‘Fuck!’ (laughs) 
+C: Alright, go. What’s the higher light? 
+S: You already know it. You tell me. 
+C: Ok, you’re right. Maybe my being on Earth is all about growth, truth, and service, and I have to exercise real-world Faith to the One Life. It’s my job as a guest on this planet to harmonize in service to the Goddess ’ plan for Earth. Those of us who are relative beacons of light are isolated by design, obviously, by the facts of our relative leadership and lack of response from the public. 
+(smile) At least I haven’t been voted by my peers for execution, as you were, Soc, for standing for truth. 
+S: Not yet, anyway. If you had taken other pathways, you would have been assassinated by your oligarchs, such as Martin King , President Kennedy , and others . 
+C: (sigh) I guess I don’t really have anything new to discuss. I just want to win this game. End the empire. Have truth and love. 
+It’s been a long war, bro. 
+S: Indeed it has. Longer than you know. 
+C: So much bullshit . 
+S: Only bullshit. Any truth has been co-opted, controlled, and used to mask the empire. The only reason I’m allowed onto your history pages is pretense that humanity lives on a planet operated from ideals of virtue. 
+It’s the same with religious ideals of love. 
+C: I’m ready to win. 
+S: So was I. 
+C: (sigh) Alright. So another day in the empire. Ok. Fine. Real-world exercise of Faith. The Goddess has more evolution to oversee with love and wisdom before we see a breakthrough. I can embrace that. 
+It’s really stupid to argue with reality. 
+Really stupid. 
+S: (smiling) Apparently, yes. 
+We have to work with what we have, assuredly. There is no other option. 
+C: We discussed in our previous conversations linked for readers below that the US today compares to your empire in Athens, and the case that perhaps, just maybe, the US is on the verge of breakthrough for Truth and Love. 
+S: Perhaps my history can allow perspective on your world of the present, and encourage Americans today to best use their voice and virtue for a brighter path than the civil war we endured. 
+Certainly for all interested, this consideration is worthy of investing time and attention. History is literally all we know, and what drives our understanding of the present. History is what informs our direction for building the future. 
+America’s history is at war between an awakening We the People and a deeply evil .01% committed to undisclosed vicious empire. 
+Your history could devolve into civil war. (chuckles) As would-be Emperor Trump might say: “Sad.” 
+C: (shaking my head, slight smile). Ok, I gotta’ go to work. Another day in the empire. My vote still stands to planetary management for full fucking truth in a breakthrough. I like a potential trend with revealing e-mails, but want a breakthrough that causes arrests of our .01% leaders in elegant endgame. 
+S: Yes, and I’d like to fly, breath underwater swimming like a dolphin, and have daily dinner parties with wine, music and women! 
+C: (mock agreement) Me, too! 
+Ok, our wants aren’t our best guides, necessarily. 
+I do have to go to work. Back to “earning a living.” 
+S: Make the most of it. It’s your given area of self-expression. 
+C: I promise. I’ll lead by example of my best good-faith expression and experience of virtue. 
+Another day. 
+S: Perhaps just another day. Perhaps you can’t imagine what’s coming. 
+C: Human limitations. I’ll work with what I see. 
+S: That’s all I concluded was possible. That’s all I got for wisdom. I didn’t teach anything other than look for yourself what’s right there in front of you to see. Listen to your small voice within for your best call of virtue. 
+Step-by-step, my brother. In all empathy, live your Faith that you’re loved and guided more than you’re able to imagine. 
+(bro hug) 
+We’ll do our best. 
+“Interview” series:",FAKE
+9324,Mike Pence Drapes Shawl Over Immodest Lady Justice Statue - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Trump Raises Concern Over Members Of Urban Communities Voting More Than Zero Times ATKINSON, NH—Warning supporters that the troubling practice could affect the outcome of the election, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump expressed strong concern Friday that members of urban communities were voting more than zero times, sources reported. Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Most Hotly Contested Down-Ballot Measures Of 2016 As Americans head to the polls, they will be presented with a number of issues to vote on besides choosing their representatives. The Onion gives voters an advance look at which measures will be included on the ballots in which states. New Heavy-Duty Voting Machine Allows Americans To Take Out Frustration On It Before Casting Ballot WASHINGTON—Saying the circumstances of this year’s presidential race made the upgrade necessary, election commissions throughout the country were reportedly working to install new heavy-duty voting machines this week that will allow Americans to physically take out their frustrations on the devices before casting their votes. Clinton Staff Readies EMP Launch To Disable All Nation’s Electronic Devices NEW YORK—In an effort to prepare for any new revelations that might emerge about her emails during her tenure as secretary of state, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reportedly told her staff Tuesday to ready the launch of several electromagnetic pulses to disable all of the nation’s electronic devices. End Of Section ",FAKE
+8983,First Ever Hindu Woman Elected into Congress,"First ever Hindu was elected to the US House of Representatives. She will take the oath of office over the Bhagavad Gita. 
+
+During election, Hawaii elected Japan-born Mazie Hirono to be the first ever Asian-American woman elected to the Senate. Hawaii also elected Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as the first ever practicing Hindu to the US House of Representatives. Because of this, Fox News have declare Hawaii a “disaster zone”. 
+
+Gabbard is the daughter of two conservative Hawaii politicians. She first ran, and was elected into office at the age of 21. After her first term, she served on a 12 month tour of duty with Hawaii’s National Guard, and then became the first woman in history of the Accelerated Officer Candidate School at the Alabama Military Academy to be designated a “distinguished honor graduate”. 
+
+She was then deployed to Baghdad as a medical operations specialist in 2004, and she was deployed to Kuwait in 2008. 
+
+History has proven that not everyone is comfortable with a Hindu elect. When Hindu statesman Rajan Zed was asked by the Senate to open with a prayer in 2007, the American Family Association called the prayer “gross idolatry” and urged people to protest. Three protesters interrupted the prayer with shouts from the gallery. 
+
+When she is sworn this January, Gabbard will take her oath of office over the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text for Hinduism or Sanatana Dharma. 
+
+Gabbard hopes to assist the US in fostering a better relationship with India, the world’s largest democracy with a growing economic and nuclear power. She also hopes to work on veteran’s affairs, and environmental issues. 
+
+Other non-Christian people in Congress include Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, who took his oath of office over the Qu-ran. 
+
+Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science. Follow her adventures on Instagram.",FAKE
+8965,Donald Groped Hillary in 2005! Trump and Weiner Sext Each Other!,"Topics: anthony weiner , presidential politics , American Politics , Donald J. Trump , Groping , Clinton's emails Friday, 4 November 2016 
+[ Associated Press, Washington, D.C. ] FBI Director James Comey informed members of Congress this morning that he was expanding his investigation into e-mails, based on materials found on the laptop of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner. 
+The materials include an e-mail from Trump to ""Carlos Danger,"" the on-line pseudonym which Weiner used, in which Trump bragged about groping then-Senator Clinton when she and former President Bill Clinton attended Trump's third wedding, to Melania Trump, at the billionaire's Mar-a-Lago estate in 2005. 
+""There she was, her and Bill, smiling for the cameras, and all the time I had my hand on her ass,"" boasted Trump, according to Comey. 
+Comey went on to state that Weiner's laptop contained ""sext"" messages from Weiner to Trump, containing photos of a bulge in the former Congressman's tidy whiteys, and messages back from Trump to Weiner, containing photos showing Trump's tiny hands gripping a large zucchini. 
+Comey added that he, also, would be a subject of the ever-expanding investigation, because there were several selfies of himself on the laptop, including one in which he is posed sitting naked on a white horse with a garland of laurel on his brow, one of him dressed up to look like J. Edgar Hoover, in a dress, with the caption, ""Infallible ME!"" and a third one of him engaged in self-flagellation with a Cat'o Nine Tails. 
+""I deserved it,"" Comey explained. Make Philip J. Moss's  ",FAKE
+5580,Ex-Assistant FBI Director: Clintons Are a Crime Family,"Ex-Assistant FBI Director: Clintons Are a Crime Family October   
+That's quite an endorsement . And if there's anything top FBI officials now, it's crime families. Certainly this is probably the first serious level of experience that Hillary can claim in any field. 
+“The Clintons, that’s a crime family, basically,” former assistant FBI director James Kallstrom said. “It’s like organized crime. I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool.” 
+“Kallstrom, best known for leading the investigation into the explosion of TWA flight 800 in the late '90s, said that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, was a “pathological liar.” 
+He also blasted Attorney General Loretta Lynch, claiming that she impeded the investigation into Clinton’s private server. 
+“The problem here is this investigation was never a real investigation,” he said. “That’s the problem. They never had a grand jury empanelled, and the reason they never had a grand jury empanelled, I’m sure, is Loretta Lynch would not go along with that.” 
+Kallstrom also said that FBI Director James Comey and the rest of the FBI’s leadership were responsible for holding back the investigation, not the rest of the bureau. 
+“The agents are furious with what’s going on, I know that for a fact,” he said. 
+But according to the media, the FBI investigating Hillary is the real crime.",FAKE
+9757,Hillary Wants Aggressively Interventionist Foreign Policy,"10-27-1 6 The first Bill and Hillary Clinton co-presidency included eight years of Balkan and other wars of aggression. Bush/Cheney exceeded their lawlessness. Obama outdid the worst of both previous administrations - attacking seven countries, destabilizing others, orchestrating coups in Honduras, Paraguay and Brazil, threatening Venezuelan democracy, enforcing puppet rule in Haiti, continuing Plan Colombia aid, responsible for massacres, disappearances and torture of regime opponents, along with instituting increasingly anti-Sino/Russia policies, risking confrontation with both countries. On October 27, the Wall Street Journal said 2016 electoral politics “scrambled traditional positions on foreign policy and international intervention, obliterating many of the usual partisan distinctions and presenting political challenges for whoever wins in November.” Hillary will likely exceed the worst of Obama’s aggressiveness “on the international stage, according to her public statements and (what) top aides” say. She’ll be more hardline on Russia, China and Iran, risking direct confrontation. Earlier she said “I think I’ve been very clear that my position is in favor of what I called smart power that uses all the tools at our disposal, and military power always should be a last resort.” Her views as first lady, US senator and secretary of state show how often she favors it aggressively, her rage for wars insatiable. As president and commander-in-chief, she’ll likely circumvent international and constitutional law like her predecessors, waging war on any nation she chooses. Former acting CIA director Michael Morell, a likely Hillary administration appointee, urges a more muscular US geopolitical role, including new sanctions on Russia and Iran, earlier saying: “Ships leave Iran on a regular basis carrying arms to the Houthis in Yemen. I would have no problem from a policy perspective of having the US Navy boarding their ships and if there are weapons on them to turn those ships around.” This type aggressiveness would risk greater Middle East war than already, maybe involving Russia and China, challenging US interventionism - knowing their nations are next if it’s not stopped. Earlier, Hillary’s top national security advisor Jake Sullivan said “(w)e need to be raising the costs to Iran for its destabilizing behavior, and we need to be raising the confidence of our Sunni partners.” Last year’s nuclear deal failed to change overall US policy toward Iran - wanting pro-Western puppet governance replacing its sovereign independence. Instead of cooperating with Iran in furthering regional peace and stability, a Hillary administration appears planning to challenge it confrontationally - perhaps with another war in mind, a far greater challenge than against other Middle East states, especially with Russia likely to intervene if asked. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled ""Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."" http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. Donate to Rense.com Support Free & Honest Journalism At Rense.com Subscribe To RenseRadio! Enormous Online Archives, MP3s, Streaming Audio Files, Highest Quality Live Programs",FAKE
+1967,Both parties want to craft populist messages for 2016,"Presidential hopefuls in both parties agree on at least one thing: Economic mobility, and the feeling of many Americans that they are being shut out from the nation’s prosperity, will be a defining theme of the 2016 campaign.
+
+Former Florida governor Jeb Bush last week became the latest Republican to signal a readiness to engage Democrats on what historically has been their turf, putting issues of middle-class wage stagnation, poverty and shared prosperity at the forefront of their political messages.
+
+Bush’s framing of the economic and social challenges facing the country nearly mirrors that of likely Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as other possible contenders on the left. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has written a book on the subject, “American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone,” to be published this week, while Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has proposed policies for distressed communities that he sees as “the ticket to the middle class.”
+
+And Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee who was portrayed by Democrats as insensitive to and out of touch with the lives of middle- and working-class Americans, has told friends he considers poverty a topic du jour as he weighs another run in 2016.
+
+“You talk to any pollster, on the Democratic side or the Republican side, they’re in complete agreement on the idea that there has to be an economic populist message,” said Matthew Dowd, a top strategist for former president George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns. “Then it comes down to ‘Are there credible solutions and is there a credible candidate?’ ”
+
+About 45 million Americans live at or below the poverty line, according to last fall’s census estimates, while the median household income in the United States in 2013 was just under $52,000. Adjusted for inflation, the median is 8 percent lower than it was in 2007, the last full year before the recession, and 11 percent below what it was in 2000.
+
+Wage stagnation has been a persistent problem for low- and middle-income workers. “Since the late 1970s, wages for the bottom 70 percent of earners have been essentially stagnant, and between 2009 and 2013, real ­wages fell for the entire bottom 90 percent of the wage distribution,” Lawrence Mishel of the liberal Economic Policy Institute wrote in a paper published this month.
+
+Launching his new political action committee, Right to Rise, Jeb Bush asserted last week in the PAC’s mission statement that President Obama’s tenure has been “pretty good” for those at the top of the income scale but a “lost decade” for everyone else.
+
+“Millions of our fellow citizens across the broad middle class feel as if the American Dream is now out of their reach; that our politics are petty and broken; that opportunities are elusive; and that the playing field is no longer fair or level,” Bush wrote. “Too many of the poor have lost hope that a path to a better life is within their grasp.”
+
+Bush’s focus adds an unexpected element to the coming debate and puts pressure on the entire field, himself included, to come forward with fresh policies that address the nation’s core economic problems.
+
+The shift also highlights a potential vulnerability for Democrats. In his campaigns, Obama twice promised to focus on wealth inequality and middle-class stagnation, but those problems persist even as the economy revs up and unemployment falls.
+
+Clinton could be challenged now from both the right and the left to lay out solutions that go beyond Obama’s — and also to develop a political voice of her own to articulate them. Democrats conceded after last fall’s midterm elections that they had not found a compelling economic message.
+
+Democrats will look to Clinton, should she run, to take the lead in doing that — although they also are looking to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and her harder-edged populist rhetoric.
+
+Clinton tested such a message last year. In a major speech at the New America Foundation in May, she said that Americans are “finding it harder than ever to get their footing in our changing economy. The dream of upward mobility that made this country a model for the world feels further and further out of reach.”
+
+The language of Bush, Rubio and other Republicans appears aimed at avoiding the problem that bedeviled Romney throughout his 2012 campaign. The former Massachusetts governor’s memorable comment about the “47 percent” of the population who he said depend on government and feel like victims haunted him during the final months before the election.
+
+Yuval Levin, editor of the conservative journal National Affairs, said the overall shift in emphasis by Republicans is an effort to move away from Romney’s more abstract message of job growth and to focus more specifically on social mobility and solutions for those at or near the bottom.
+
+“It’s a process of letting the light out from under the bushel,” Levin said. Citing past conservative leadership in reforming welfare, he added: “I think Republican ideas have always held this promise, but conservatives have not always emphasized these elements. . . . A difference in emphasis is not insignificant.”
+
+Democrats, however, argue that revising their rhetoric will not be enough for Republicans — especially if Jeb Bush becomes the GOP nominee — to gloss over former president George W. Bush’s legacy, which Democrats say tightened the middle-class squeeze.
+
+“It’s not like the Republican Party has clean hands on the issue of rising inequality,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and an adviser to Clinton on economic policy. “It’s a weird thing to say, ‘I care about how the rest of the country is doing, not just the top earners,’ when your brother cut taxes for the wealthy and your party’s economic position starts with undoing Dodd-Frank,” the 2010 law that tightened regulation of Wall Street.
+
+Obama hit the road last week to highlight economic successes of his presidency, from the auto industry bailout to more robust overall growth in the last half of 2014. Still, many Democrats acknowledge that there is a large gap between promise and results on issues of middle-class insecurities.
+
+That is where Bush and some other Republicans are taking aim. Two factors have contributed to the opening they see.
+
+One is the continued problem of stagnating wages for the broad middle class and the income gap between rich and non-rich. The other is new evidence that it has become harder for those at the bottom to rise into the middle class, and that the risk of some born into the middle class — particularly minorities — falling out of it is growing.
+
+Democrats long have been seen as the party more trusted to deal with middle-class economic issues. Republicans long have resisted policies that smack of economic redistribution. Could that be changing?
+
+“How do you tell the middle class, ‘We’re your guy?’ ” said Grover Norquist, a conservative anti-tax advocate. “Republicans feel comfortable saying that now because they feel the guys they’re running against are sufficiently discredited.”
+
+William Galston of the Brookings Institution said that the issue of blocked social mobility is one Republicans will feel more comfortable engaging — and on their own terms. “That’s what Jeb Bush is saying: ‘We can accept a definition of a problem . . . but give unabashedly conservative responses to those challenges,’ ” he said.
+
+But Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said Bush’s framing of the issue this way means he has put down a marker that he will be expected to meet.
+
+“I would expect to hear from him over the coming months some of the best and most innovative conservative thinking on opportunity and upward mobility,” he said. “That will be a fair test on how much gas there is in the conservative ideas tank.”
+
+Other Republicans have been working to reorient their party toward blue-collar economics and to put forward fresh economic ideas. Former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, two former presidential candidates who are looking at running in 2016, long have talked about the GOP’s need to recognize the problems of working families.
+
+House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has focused on policies designed to lift people out of poverty. In 2012, as Romney’s running mate, Ryan wanted to campaign in inner cities and give speeches promoting individual empowerment. He was frustrated that Romney’s campaign team directed him to talk about other topics.
+
+Rubio has proposed a fundamental shift in anti-poverty programs. He has suggested devolving power and responsibility from Washington to the states by consolidating federal monies into a “flex fund.” The senator from Florida has called for significant reductions in federal regulations that he says will spur creation of better jobs. On education, he has offered a series of reforms designed to lessen the burden of student loan debt and expand access to apprenticeship programs. Rubio and others also have proposed changes in the earned-income tax credit to extend its reach to more people.
+
+Democrats are skeptical that Republicans can meet the challenge with policy proposals that are much beyond calls for tax cuts to spur economic growth and further efforts to scale back the size of government.
+
+“It sounds to me like a ­traditional Romney Republican ­trickle-down agenda but with a willingness to engage on inequality and mobility,” said Jared Bernstein, a former adviser to Vice President Biden who works at the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities.
+
+Democrats say it’s too early to draw conclusions, but they note that if Bush and other Republicans find new ways to engage middle-class voters with populist themes, the pressures on Clinton will mount significantly.
+
+“Voters are going to [say], ‘Okay, thank you for acknowledging this problem, but what are you going to do about it?’ ” Bernstein said. “I would argue that Democrats are going to have to have more in their toolbox than [raising the] minimum wage and universal pre-K.”",REAL
+431,First Take: Wall Street bids goodbye to June hike,"NEW YORK -- Bye bye June rate hike. That was the billboard-size headline from Wall Street trading desks after the U.S. job-creation machine hit the wall in May. The government said 38,000 jobs were created in May, way, way, way  below the roughly 160,000 new positions Wall Street economists had been expecting.
+
+It was the worst month for job creation since September 2010.
+
+The Janet Yellen-led Federal Reserve had been driving home the message that it was ""appropriate"" to hike interest rates in coming months – and perhaps as early as June – IF the job market and economy continued to perform well and meet their more upbeat forecast.
+
+But the May jobs report was bad. Really bad.
+
+""Horrible,"" is the word used by Steven Ricchiuto, chief economist at MSUSA. ""Very weak,"" chimed in Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at EverBank. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, tweeted out that the lousy jobs number amounted to a  ""bombshell.""
+
+A bombshell, indeed. So weak was the 38,000 May job count, that Wall Street now sees virtually a zero chance of the Fed moving at its June meeting, which breaks up on June 15.
+
+""This is the weakest number of workers added in almost six years,"" Gaffney told USA TODAY via e-mail.
+
+After the dreadful jobs report was released, the odds of a June hike plunged to about 4%, down sharply from 19% before the data were released, according to futures markets tracked by the CME Group.
+
+""Just when they thought it was safe to go back into the water,"" the Fed gets hit with this less-than-stellar data point on jobs, Ricchiuto told clients in a report. ""This now assures that June is off the table, but may not rule out July.""
+
+But professional investors are still not willing to rule out a hike in July – at least not yet as there is a lot of economic data to come between now and July. The chances of a July hike plunged to 34% from close to 60%.
+
+The market reaction was swift. Stocks dipped as investors now have to worry about a possible slowdown in job creation, which is a negative for the economy. ""Risks about the strength of the U.S. economy outweigh the positive impacts of lower interest rates,"" Gaffney said.
+
+Bond yields fell, as investors piled back into U.S. government bonds as the threat of an imminent Fed rate hike fade. The U.S. dollar weakened as the Fed's rate-hike timetable gets pushed back.
+
+Sure the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.7%. But while that number sounds good it is mainly due to ""another big drop in the labor force,"" says Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics.
+
+Yellen is scheduled to speak on Monday, Ashworth adds. Wall Street will be listening – closely.
+
+""Yellen should provide more insight on the Fed's thinking Monday,"" he said via e-mail.",REAL
+5955,Real Disclosure! Secret Alien Base Found In Moon's Tycho Crater,"Real Disclosure! Secret Alien Base Found In Moon's Tycho Crater # Grey 52 
+Real Disclosure is where you find something on the lunar surface that cannot possibly exist unless someone built it. NO WAY it's a natural formation --- SOMETHING constructed that ---- 90° angles are just not possible without alien/man-made interaction. More 'smoking gun' irrefutable proof of intelligence from abroad. Tags",FAKE
+7455,Homeless Woman Protects Trump’s Walk of Fame Star From Violent Leftists,"Homeless Woman Protects Trump’s Walk of Fame Star From Violent Leftists ""I'm gonna stay here and watch this, and make sure nobody touches it."" Chris Menahan | Information Liberation - October 28, 2016 Comments 
+Powerful video shows a homeless woman protecting Donald Trump’s Walk of Fame Star after it was smashed by a criminal leftist. 
+As The Gateway Pundit reports , the woman was seen holding up a sign reading: “20 Million Illegals and Americans Sleep on the Streets in Tents. Vote Trump.” 
+It was repaired on the same day. 
+The day after, this homeless Trump supporter went to protect it. 
+“I’m gonna stay here and watch this, and make sure nobody touches it,” she was heard saying. Homeless Trump supporter guards @realDonaldTrump 's star on Hollywood Blvd. against all SJWs #BasedSentinel #MAGA3X https://t.co/BjGcFO0du5 ? pic.twitter.com/nrMqnbW5UK 
+— PeterDuke MAGA3X🇺🇸 (@peterdukephoto) October 27, 2016 
+Video shared on Periscope shows hordes of disgusting leftists insult and attack the woman for supporting Trump. 
+In this short video posted to YouTube, one angry black man is seen screaming in her face and asking her: “Do you know your federal government is not even party of the f***ing government?” 
+“Do you know that?” he asks. “No, I didn’t think so,” he says. 
+“Hello,” another woman in the crowd shouts in agreement. “Open your eyes,” she says. 
+In case anyone is not aware, the federal government is part of the government. 
+While Hillary Clinton wants to bring in millions of foreigners to take jobs and welfare from the poorest of Americans, Donald Trump wants to help our own and put the needs of Americans first. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+5224,"With 3:20 a.m. tweet storm Saturday, Clinton continues to mock Trump’s Friday ‘meltdown’","WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Not to be outdone by her Republican rival, Hillary Clinton fired off a series of early-morning messages Saturday  on Twitter.
+
+Only the tweets sent over the Democratic presidential nominee’s account dealt with a very different subject matter than those blasted about a former beauty-pageant winner by Donald Trump 24 hours before.
+
+[Trump under fire after sending nasty tweets about ‘disgusting’ ex-Miss Universe]
+
+Clinton instead focused on national service, a subject to which she had devoted a speech in Florida on Friday.
+
+“It's 3:20am. As good a time as any to tweet about national service,” said the first one, coming at the same time that Trump started his storm of disparaging tweets about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.
+
+The next Clinton tweet borrowed a favorite word of Trump.
+
+“There are hundreds of thousands more @AmeriCorps applications than spots. Horrible!” it read. “Let's expand it from 75,000 annual members to 250,000.”
+
+The tweets — several more followed — were the latest bid by Clinton to keep a spotlight on what she described Friday as Trump coming “unhinged.”
+
+In his tweets, the Republican presidential nominee called Machado “disgusting” and a “con” and raised questions about her past, alleging she had been in a sex tape.
+
+[Clinton calls for new National Service Reserve during Florida swing]
+
+The former Miss Universe’s story has dominated media coverage of the election since Clinton brought her up at Monday’s debate, when she criticized Trump for denigrating comments he made in 1996 about Machado’s weight.
+
+Unlike Trump, who often tweets himself, many of those sent out over Clinton’s official campaign account are composed by aides.
+
+On Friday, there were a series mocking Trump’s behavior, and at a rally in Coral Springs, Fla., she accused her rival of having a “meltdown.”
+
+Trump’s twitter account appeared to have been silent in the early-morning hours on Saturday.",REAL
+7793,220 ‘Significant’ Pipeline Spills Already This Year Exposes Troubling Safety Record,"By Dan Zukowski
+Three major U.S. pipeline spills within the last month are just a small part of the 220 significant incidents reported so far this year—and 3,032 since 2006—that provide a stark reminder of the environmental hazards of an aging pipeline infrastructure carrying fossil fuels. The costs of these leaks since 2006 has amounted to $4.7 billion.
+1. Oklahoma: On Oct. 24, the 30-inch S-1 pipeline carrying crude oil from the critical Cushing, Oklahoma hub to refineries and chemical plants on the Gulf Coast began to leak and was shut down overnight. It was the second release connected with the Cushing storage facility in less than a month.
+2. Pennsylvania: On Oct. 21, 55,000 gallons of gasoline gushed from a ruptured Sunoco Logistics pipeline in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, just upstream from the Susquehanna River. Carol Parenzan, Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper , said that witnesses who contacted her office reported that the “smell of petroleum is so thick you can taste it.” The 80-year old pipeline was damaged by a heavy storm that dumped seven inches of rain on the area.
+3. Alabama: Last month, the Colonial Pipeline in Alabama leaked an estimated 336,000 gallons of gasoline and triggered concerns about gas shortages for drivers in the East. That spill was Colonial’s fifth in the state this year and occurred on a 43-year old section of the pipeline.
+Based on data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), an arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation, the number of significant pipeline incidents grew 26.8 percent from 2006 to 2015. A significant incident is defined as one that results in serious injury or fatality, costs more than $50,000, releases more than five barrels of volatile fluids such as gasoline or 50 barrels of other liquids, or results in a fire or explosion. In 2015, there were 326 such incidents—almost one per day.
+Some 55 percent of the U.S. network of 135,000 miles of pipeline is more than 45 years old. Technology designed to detect pipeline leaks is highly unreliable, even though companies like Colonial Pipeline tout their use as a way “to insure safe operations.” But a recent Reuters report found that these technologies are “about as successful as a random member of the public” finding a leak. Of 466 incidents studied by Reuters, only 22 percent, or 105, were detected by advanced detection systems. The others were found in different ways, with the public finding 99 of the leaks.
+In testimony before a House subcommittee earlier this year, Carl Weimer, executive director of the watchdog group Pipeline Safety Trust , said, “Under the current statutes there is no requirement that a pipeline company obtain any permit or permission to operate a pipeline in this country.” Weimer called on Congress to require PHMSA to issue permits for interstate transmission pipelines and ensure that the company follow all rules and regulations.
+“It is important that we not only maintain our aging energy infrastructure, but that we also remain vigilant about new pipelines and energy interests that threaten water quality,” said Parenzan.
+Dan Zukowski — Environmental journalist and nature photographer. Member, Society of Environmental Journalists. Follow me on Twitter @DanZukowski and visit DBZ Photo 
+Source: EcoWatch 
+",FAKE
+2777,Obama makes the right call to tough it out in Afghanistan,"The president now plans to continue a U.S. ground force presence in Afghanistan to help hold off the Taliban until he leaves office. This is an uncommon turnaround for a president who hasn’t changed his mind on foreign policy since drawing his (much-ballyhooed and promptly ignored) “red line” in Syria.
+
+So what does this rare shift have to say about Obama’s foreign policy and America’s future role in Afghanistan? Not much.
+
+Mr. Obama started his presidency hoping to use Afghanistan to demonstrate his willingness to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty in the national security business. He asserted that, unlike “Bush’s War” in Iraq, fighting in the place where the 9/11 attacks were concocted was worth it.
+
+In approving a surge in Afghanistan, the president made much of his role as decider-in-chief. Yet, even as he sent in more troops, he tipped his hand that Afghanistan was not as much an exception to the talk-don’t-fight Obama Doctrine as the tough-guy image he sought to cultivate.
+
+The president gave commanders only half the force and half the time they requested to do the job right. It turned out, the commanders were right.  Mr. Obama, however, had his eye on the next election and wanted to go into the race showing he had put the war on a glide-path to wind down and pull out.
+
+Signaling a limited-time interest in fighting an enemy rarely ends well. The Taliban adopted the logical and predictable strategy of simply waiting out Mr. Obama. Also predictably, the half-measure surge and overly ambitious transfer of responsibility to the Afghan military resulted in unnecessarily heavy casualties for Afghan security forces, a persistent Taliban, and a shaky security situation.
+
+Nevertheless, Afghanistan is far from a total failure. Indeed,  compared to the president’s other foreign policy dalliances—from the Russian “reset” to Libya to Syria to Iraq to Ukraine— it ranks as his best achievement yet.
+
+Which is why Mr. Obama is reportedly backing away from his plan to yank virtually all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the end of next year. Instead, he has agreed to leave the current force of 9,800 troops in place throughout “most” of next year, and keep 5,500 in theater thereafter.
+
+It’s a good call. With the Taliban flexing its muscles anew and the Islamic State making inroads there, completely pulling out makes little sense. Mr. Obama can ill afford another complete foreign policy disaster on his watch.  Further, virtually everyone –the U.S. military, the Afghans, Pakistan, India, our NATO allies— wants the U.S. to stay and see the job through.
+
+In addition, there is zero domestic pressure for the president to make good on his campaign promise. An appearance of Code Pink is about as common as a Yeti sighting. And in the debates thus far, presidential candidates have devoted about as much time to Afghanistan as they have to defunding Public Television.
+
+It makes complete sense for Mr. Obama to tough it out in Afghanistan, but don’t expect the change in plans to make things better for the Afghans or the larger security picture. The U.S. presence is the bare minimum to hold on. More forces with loser rules of engagement would make the country much safer, much faster.
+
+But holding on is probably the best we can hope for with this president.  Here’s hoping the next Commander in Chief’s attitude toward Afghanistan will focus more on solving problems than just wishing they would go away.
+
+James Jay Carafano is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies  The Heritage Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @JJCarafano.",REAL
+587,Senate race rankings: Dems attack as GOP lays swing-state groundwork,The move would make it easier for the Trump administration to demolish the exchanges.,REAL
+9403,‘He didn’t know the boy didn’t want to be raped’ – court throws out Muslim migrant child sex charge and Germans are in shock,"By INDRA WARNES 
+In a truly shocking twist the Suptreme Court decided the grown Iraqi man may not have realised the 10-year-old did not want to be sexually abused by him. 
+Amir A, 20, was visiting the Theresienbad pool in the Austrian capital of Vienna last December as part of a trip to encourage integration. 
+When the youngster went to the showers, Amir A. allegedly followed him, pushed him into a toilet cubicle, and violently sexually assaulted him. 
+Following the attack, the accused rapist returned to the pool and was practising on the diving board when police arrived, after the 10-year-old raised the alarm with the lifeguard. 
+The child suffered severe anal injuries which had to be treated at a local children’s hospital, and is still plagued by serious post-traumatic stress disorder. 
+In a police interview, Amir A. confessed to the crime; telling officers the incident had been “a sexual emergency”, as his wife had remained in Iraq and he “had not had sex in four months”. 
+A court found Amir guilty of serious sexual assault and rape of a minor, and sentenced him to six years in jail. 
+However, in",FAKE
+5931,Pieczenik “Rogue FBI Agents and Wikileaks are Spearheading a Movement to Stop the Clintons from Stealing the White House” – TruthFeed,"Breaking News Pieczenik “Rogue FBI Agents and Wikileaks are Spearheading a Movement to Stop the Clintons from Stealing the White House” Pieczenik “Rogue FBI Agents and Wikileaks are Spearheading a Movement to Stop the Clintons from Stealing the White House” Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 2, 2016 
+The world is teaming up to stop crooked Hillary from taking the White House. 
+From Wikileaks to rogue FBI agents, everyone is doing their part to stop the sinister Clinton Machine. 
+It’s a joint effort from patriots hailing from every corner of the world. 
+Watch the video: Breaking:Twitter Friendly Version A soft coup has been launched by FBI to overthrow the Clinton’s hostile takeover of the White House. pic.twitter.com/MrPUlSO1OE 
+— OakTown ☢MAGA O.G☢ (@hrtablaze) November 2, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+3027,American politics has reached peak polarization,"For a long time in American politics, we've been trapped in a cycle of ever-escalating political polarization. As measured by voting patterns in the US Congress, the two parties have pulled apart to distances we've never seen before. As measured by consistent partisan positioning among voters, the split in the electorate has reached a historic level of divisiveness.
+
+But this is about to end. We've now hit peak polarization. The forces that have fueled the widening gap between the two political parties are now fueling fights within the two political parties, fights that will lead to new coalitions in American politics, eventually realigning the two parties. A new era of American politics is about to emerge.
+
+The tautological reason polarization has increased in American politics is that over the past four decades, conflict in American politics has increasingly operated along a single dimension: Republican versus Democrat. A large number of issues that were once nonpartisan or non-ideological have become partisan issues. Almost every policy has now been swept into the maw of partisan jockeying, leaving almost no space for the cross-partisan cooperation our political system relies on to function.
+
+In order for congressional polarization to persist, both parties have to maintain tight enough discipline over their members and the political agenda to ensure consistent party voting. And in order for public polarization to persist, parties have to maintain tight enough message discipline among their elites to ensure that their voters only hear one main message.
+
+This is breaking down. Republicans are now in open warfare between Trump supporters and #NeverTrumpers. Democrats are far less divided, but internal rifts between their ""establishment"" (Hillary Clinton) and ""insurgent"" (Bernie Sanders) wings are also real and likely lasting.
+
+This conflict is emerging on issues of international trade, on questions of corporate (especially Wall Street) power, and in growing anger over money in politics and corruption generally. In short, parties are increasingly divided on a growing range of issues that pit their less-educated, lower-income voters who feel left behind by the current political-economic system against their better-educated, higher-income voter who don't want to mess too much with the status quo. These conflicts are not going away anytime soon.
+
+This moment is the culmination of four interconnected but ultimately unsustainable trends that have turbocharged polarization over the last two decades:
+
+Close competition fueled partisan nastiness and increased the demand for campaign money. The demand for campaign money made the parties more dependent on wealthy donors, which made them less responsive to their voters. This lack of responsiveness provided plenty of evidence for corruption and the felt sense that politics was broken, which fueled anger. Both parties attempted to channel this anger against the other party to distract from their own failures and contradictions and win elections by rendering the other party toxic. This exacerbated the sense that politics was broken and corrupt.
+
+These trends created contradictions, and now these contradictions have created openings. Ambitious candidates who could get past their parties' campaign finance gatekeepers had a lot of angry and left-behind voters eager for their message. And this is precisely what Sanders and especially Donald Trump have accomplished. Now there is no going back.
+
+These are big claims. So let's flesh this story out a little more, this time with expanded detail.
+
+The story could go all the way back to the decisive election of 1932, when Democrats became the dominant party in American politics for a generation, holding together a big-tent New Deal coalition that included Southern pro-segregationists with Northern urban progressives. But it was an uneasy alliance that could only last as long as civil rights legislation was bottled up. Then in 1964, the Democrats decidedly became the party of civil rights. And as Lyndon Johnson allegedly acknowledged upon signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Democrats ""have lost the South for a generation.""
+
+Democrats had controlled the South ever since Republican-led Reconstruction (since Republicans were the party of Lincoln and of Reconstruction). But as Republicans came to be the party better aligned with the South on issues of race, conservative Republicans replaced conservative Democrats in Southern House and Senate seats, starting in the 1980s. By 1995, when Republicans won the House for the first time in 40 years, this transition was mostly complete. By 2011, it was absolute and total.
+
+As this all happened, the ideological center of the Republican Party moved to the South, fusing social and economic conservatism. Northern liberal Republicans were marginalized and soon endangered. Democrats, meanwhile, lost their Southern, conservative wing, and the ideological center of the Democratic Party moved to the coasts and big cities, fusing social and economic liberalism.
+
+As the parties became less internally diverse, individual members of Congress delegated more power to their party leaders. After all, they all now basically agreed on the issues. And they wanted leaders who could punish disloyal dissenters and control the agenda. So when Newt Gingrich took over the speakership in 1995, he centralized power in the position in a way it had not been centralized since 1910.
+
+In the 1990s, American politics entered a somewhat unusual period of remarkably close two-party competition for control of the House and the Senate.
+
+This, as political scientist Frances Lee explains, has been the catalyst for a very nasty brand of partisan fighting.
+
+This seems exactly right to me, and there's lots of evidence to prove it.
+
+But not only has this close competition fueled partisanship by turning legislating into zero-sum trench warfare, it has also turbocharged the fundraising dimension of political campaigning.
+
+Parties are campaigning harder than ever to win over those swing seats, and this has meant raising ever-expanding sums of money. And in order to raise this money, both parties have had to lean more and more on their wealthiest donors.
+
+But relying on these wealthy donors created a problem for both parties. On many issues, particularly economic issues, wealthy elites hold separate opinions from most voters.
+
+Major Republican donors generally want fiscal austerity, and particularly a rolled-back welfare state. They also tend to be much more pro-immigration and pro–free trade than Republican voters, and not particularly worried about social issues. But schemes like privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare have never been all that popular with actual Republican voters. And as the middle classes' wages have stagnated, especially for those without college degrees, and the share of foreign-born residents in the US has reached levels not seen since the 1920s (it hit 13.9 percent in 2015), the voting constituency for anti-immigration populism has grown considerably.
+
+Democratic donors are somewhat more economically liberal. But they are not about to support Sanders-style socialism. They prefer Clinton's generally pro-market views. They will tolerate some regulation of business, but not that much, particularly when it's the tech and new economy businesses that they run and invest in.
+
+Whereas Democrats once relied on labor unions to get out the vote, by the 1990s unions could no longer provide the support Democrats needed. Democrats instead moved to depend on the ""professional class,"" deprioritizing workers' concerns to focus instead on the social and environmental concerns that went over much better in Hollywood and San Francisco and Manhattan fundraisers.
+
+For a while, both parties could manage these contradictions, being responsive to their donors while pooh-poohing the economic concerns of their less affluent voters on the bland promise that a thriving economy was good for everyone. And for much of the 1990s and 2000s, the economy was doing okay, which generally kept voters from feeling too angry. And to the extent that individual voters weren't benefiting, it was, of course, the other party's fault.
+
+As long as both sides were focused on the evils of the other side, and the economy was not in a major recession, party leaders could get away with ignoring many of their voters, and using the campaign contribution proceeds to make their case through more and more negative political advertising and aggressive media messaging.
+
+This negativity translated into what political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster call ""negative partisanship."" As they explain:
+
+All these interrelated trends have turbocharged polarization over the last two decades. But they relied on both sides being able to control the anger that they were stoking, and on both sides being able to convince their voters that all of the corruption and fecklessness in Washington was because of the other party. This could not go on indefinitely.
+
+In fall 2008 the financial crisis hit, and the government bailed out the big Wall Street banks in a very public way. For many, this served as the decisive proof that things really were rigged: Washington and Wall Street were in a corrupt alliance, a conspiracy of career politicians and crony capitalists and lobbyists who were rolling in the money and laughing about it while everyone else was living paycheck to paycheck. As the economy stumbled through recession and then a jobless recovery, economic insecurity and political resentment increased.
+
+Obama and the Democrats swept the 2008 election on the strength of anti-Bush feeling and the timeless energy of hope and change. For the first time since 1992, Democrats had unified control in Washington; Republicans were now out in the cold.
+
+With their backs against the wall and Democrats as the new Washington establishment, Republicans now turned their anti-government rhetoric up to 11. Obama was Stalin. Obama was Hitler. Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim bent on destroying America. Democrats responded to the charges with signature big-government legislation that taxed the middle class so that poor people could have government-subsidized health care. The Republican base went crazy. All their worst fears were confirmed.
+
+In 2009, the Tea Party emerged, representing what felt like new anti-establishment radicalism but was really just the culmination of decades of Republican anti-government rhetoric now freed from any institutional responsibility for actually governing. In 2010, on the strength of Tea Party anti-Obama energy (and the fact that Democrats had won a bunch of majority Republican House districts in 2006 and 2008), Republicans swept back into control of the House. In the 2014 election, they finally won back the Senate.
+
+But then nothing happened. Obamacare, the devil piñata of every Republican attack, was neither repealed nor replaced. Worse, Republican leaders were negotiating with Obama, Satan himself. They were letting Obama get away with an executive order on immigration. Here was the most corrupt, most crony capitalist administration in history, and what were Republicans in Congress doing? They were rolling over and being just as corrupt!
+
+In June 2015, Donald Trump announced he was running for president and became the immediate frontrunner on the strength of his aggressive anti-immigration stance. Because he had his own money and his own media celebrity, Trump did not need to do the pro-austerity, pro-immigration, pro-free trade dance that other potential frontrunners had done to shake the big donor GOP money tree. He could just run for president, declaring everything was corrupt and he was the only one you could trust because he was the only one who didn't have a super PAC. And he could speak to the working-class Republican voters who had been left behind in this economy, by saying he'd go after China and give them Social Security and Medicare and go after the corrupt hedge fund rip-off artists.
+
+And they loved it. For decades, they had been told, for partisan reasons, to be angry; they had been told, for partisan reasons, that Washington was corrupt, and that all Washington politicians were evil. Now they finally had somebody who could say those things while actually not embodying any telltale signs of the sins. They also had somebody who could finally and authentically call out all the ""corrupt"" things Republican establishment types themselves were doing.
+
+A few months later, in September, Republican Speaker John Boehner announced he would resign from Congress, responding to efforts by the House Freedom Caucus to force him out. This was the first time since 1910 that an insurgent faction in the House had successfully challenged a sitting speaker. The anti-establishment anger that Republicans had courted had now finally turned on its leaders.
+
+On the Democratic side, anti-Clinton progressives were hoping to draft Elizabeth Warren, who had demonstrated her anti-establishment bona fides in December 2014, sinking Obama's appointment of Wall Street banker Antonio Weiss for a top Treasury position (Weiss withdrew his nomination, instead accepting a counselor position to Secretary Jack Lew). Warren had also been a prominent opponent of Obama's major Asian free trade agreement.
+
+But Warren didn't run. Instead, it was self-identified socialist Bernie Sanders who found the opening. Democratic donor gatekeepers had cleared the field for Hillary. This meant Sanders could get attention just for being the only real alternative, attention that he was able to snowball into a following. Sanders won't win the nomination. But he has done far, far better than anybody ever expected, because a sizable number of Democrat voters share his view that politics is a rigged game where the billionaires and the crony capitalists always win. And like Sanders, they are sick and tired of it.
+
+If you briefly scroll back to the top of this article and look at the graph of polarization over time, you'll see a previous peak around 1910 or so. While historical analogies are never perfect, there are some notable similarities between now and around 1910.
+
+For one, 1910 was the last time a sitting speaker of the US House had been effectively challenged from within the party. Second, in 1912 the Republican Party was so divided over its presidential nomination that the party splintered, with about half of Republicans supporting Howard Taft (the incumbent) and about half supporting Teddy Roosevelt (the previous incumbent). Democrat Woodrow Wilson won in a landslide.
+
+Around 1910 was also when the last great anti-establishment movement in America, the progressive movement, emerged in response to growing concentrations of wealth and political power, concentrations that many Americans felt had left them behind. As political scientist Grant McConnell once wrote of ""the progressive legacy,"" it consisted of a ""charges made against virtually all the institutions of American society"" with ""one common theme — corruption. ... Corruption of such prevalence, disorder of such magnitude could only be explained by something more than the assumption of a slow-spreading decay. The theory of conspiracy was ready at hand and in one way or another it was invoked as an explanation."" This resonates with today's anti-establishment mood.
+
+Political scientist Hans Noel has argued that the emergence of the progressive movement ""crosscut the parties and eventually reshaped them."" Noel notes that progressives opposed existing authority structures, both economically (e.g., the ""trusts"") and politically (they disliked political parties and other authority structures).
+
+In 1910, it was progressive Republican George Norris who led the internal House revolt against Speaker Joe Cannon, stripping Cannon of most of his authority and devolving considerable powers back to individual members, who had increasingly chafed under their marginalization. Like John Boehner in 2015, Cannon in 1910 represented the culmination of exactly 20 years of increasingly centralized leadership control in the House speakership. Just as Gingrich had radically centralized control in 1995, Speaker Thomas Reed had radically centralized control in 1890.
+
+Parties depolarized in the 1910s and 1920s because, freed of centralized leadership structures, more legislating happened in committees, where a cross-cutting progressive coalition could more freely operate independently of the two parties. Interestingly, trade policy also became much less polarized in the 1920s, with cross-party coalitions on tariff issues.
+
+Most likely, Trump will be the Republican nominee. Even if the #NeverTrump forces somehow wrest the nomination from him (unlikely, but possible), the anti-establishment forces in the Republican Party are not going away. If not Trump (though my guess is he will stick around for a while longer), somebody in the Tea Party, or possibly even Ted Cruz, will find a way to harness the Trump voters by following the Trump issues playbook. Where there are voters to be had, there are politicians to have them.
+
+Meanwhile, in Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan is already having difficulty building consensus around a budget process. No matter how many speeches he gives about the importance of decorum in politics, it seems increasingly unlikely that he can reconcile the conflicts that Boehner failed to resolve, which means he will have to eventually lean on Democrats to pass a budget and, like Boehner before him, alienate some of his party. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, much less beloved even within his party, will face similar problems.
+
+Most likely, Hillary Clinton will become the 45th US president (she has led in every single head-to-head poll against Trump). And most likely she will use her agenda-setting powers to try to force the Republicans into open civil war by pushing many of the issues that already divide them, especially immigration and trade. Clinton's natural home is in the pro-business center, a position that will be advantageous to her and Democrats in the short term at least. But she has to be cautious. Emboldened by Sanders and by Elizabeth Warren, the progressive wing of the Democrats is growing, and will be unhappy with Clinton's pro-business instincts.
+
+The internal fights will continue in both parties. The competing wings of both parties will feel that they are the true Republicans/Democrats. The growing importance of outside, non-party groups in elections will also force ideological diversity onto the parties. Party leaders might instinctually want to wrest power back from these outside groups, but they'd be wiser to open up their tent to allow for different ideas. After all, the party that does best in American politics is always the one that can build the broadest coalition, which means accepting ideological diversity.
+
+Eventually, congressional leaders will realize (or be forced to realize) that the only leadership style that works is a less centralized, more committee-driven approach. This is the only way ideologically heterogeneous parties can effectively govern. A more decentralized Congress, with more fluid coalitions, will function better, assuming that a more committee-driven process is also accompanied by increases in congressional staffing capacity. Partisan control of Congress will mean less, since there will be more cross-party coalitions.
+
+Many issues, like gun rights or affirmative action, will remain very partisan. But other issues, especially those of corporate/Wall Street power, antitrust, interventionist foreign policy, will likely split the parties. Trump Republicans and Sanders Democrats will find common cause against establishment centrists. Big organized interests, like the Chamber of Commerce and other corporate groups, will align less closely with Republicans, realizing that their future success will require the right mix of Republicans and Democrats to advance their agendas.
+
+And as the parties become more ideological diverse, voters, who are generally more ideologically all over the place than the current party alignment would suggest, will identify less reliably with one or the other, since there will be more for them in both parties. They will again sometimes split their tickets, depending on who is running. Many will feel more passionate about individual issues and will align themselves with supporters of those issues in both parties, especially as individual interest groups become cross-partisan in order to achieve policy outcomes. In that respect, politics will come to look more like it did in the 1950s and 1970s, when liberal Republicans existed alongside conservative Democrats.
+
+This is an optimistic scenario.
+
+But it only works if party leaders tolerate diversity within their party and allow disagreements.
+
+Another scenario is that establishment Republicans banish the Trump faction and Democrats banish the Sanders faction after the 2016 elections, and both parties go back to the predictable and intractable trench warfare battle lines that have become increasingly dug in over the past two decades, using nastier and nastier tactics to subvert internal divisions in service of the larger fight against a common enemy. This may be possible for a little while longer (especially if the economy improves significantly), but it is still probably long-term unsustainable for reasons I've described above. It also may mean that 2020 becomes an even more violent and nasty election.
+
+Another possibility is that the parties realign quickly, with the Trump/Tea Party faction effecting a rapid transformation of the Republican Party into a downscale nationalist populist party, pushing the remaining upper-class moderate Republicans into a more pro-business Democratic Party, which in turn pushes some disaffected Sanders voters into the Republican Party. If this realignment happens too quickly, there is no period of depolarization. But this seems unlikely, given the stickiness of partisan identity and the strong disagreements between the two parties on a whole range of other issues.
+
+Other scenarios are possible as well, especially if there are significant global crises.
+
+But here's the bottom line: Something is different this year in American politics. The logic that has operated for the past two decades or so is breaking down, largely because the factors and trends that propelled it produced unsustainable contradictions. American politics is now entering a new logic, with new trends and forces that will push the lines of political conflict in directions we are only beginning to understand.
+
+This feels like chaos, and it is. But it is also good news, because chaos scrambles the rules. We've hit peak polarization. Politics is slowly coming unstuck. A period of new possibilities awaits.
+
+This post is part of Polyarchy, an independent blog produced by the political reform program at New America, a Washington think tank devoted to developing new ideas and new voices. See more Polyarchy posts here.",REAL
+4377,Anti-Muhammad cartoon contest: Free speech or deliberately provocative? (+video),"Sponsors say that the shootings in Garland, Texas, confirm their view of Islam as violence-prone. But critics say the event was designed to be incendiary and to poison relations at a volatile time.
+
+When Pamela Geller and her controversial organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, announced it would hold a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, their plan to satirize and lampoon the founder of Islam was intended to have both a defiant and provocative free-speech edge.
+
+Sunday’s contest and its $10,000 prize were prompted in part by the Paris Charlie Hebdo massacre in January, Ms. Geller said in March, as well as the riots in Muslim countries sparked by the publication of satirical anti-Muhammad cartoons by a Danish newspaper in 2005. And indeed, as if on cue, two gunmen with apparent ties to Islamic militants overseas tried to storm the heavily secured event in a similar fashion, before being shot dead by a local police officer Sunday night.
+
+The incident comes at a time when tensions between some segments of American society and Muslims appear to be becoming more fraught – with protests against Muslims in Texas and anti-Muslim social-media attacks after the release of the film ""American Sniper."" In that context, Geller's actions raise questions about speech seen by many as motivated to incite anger and hatred.
+
+It is an issue Geller has faced before. Two weeks ago, she won a federal free-speech case against New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which had refused to put up one of her ads: “Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah” – a quote the ad attributes to “Hamas MTV.”
+
+Geller’s organization has often clashed with officials in other cities, including Philadelphia and Washington, over their incendiary ads, some of which compare Islam to Nazism. In 2012, another federal judge ruled that cities could not refuse to post her subway poster that read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”
+
+Many supporters of Geller and her organization view the violence on Sunday as a vindication of their views of Islam as an inherently violence-prone religion. But for others, her relentless campaign to push the boundaries of free speech with intentionally incendiary messages is only poisoning public discourse at a particularly volatile time.
+
+“And coming as it did right when we, the United States of America, are really facing a time when we have to question what it is that holds us together, I can see this potentially aggravating the already-challenging times for dealing with some of these questions about cultural difference, diversity, and what kind of society we want to be,” says Gordon Coonfield, director of graduate studies in communication at Villanova University near Philadelphia.
+
+After analyzing some of the submissions to the American Freedom Defense Initiative’s “Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest,” Professor Coonfield pointed out the similarities of some of the depictions of the prophet Muhammad to posters for “Der Ewige Jude,” or “The Eternal Jew,” a notorious Nazi propaganda “documentary.”
+
+In one of the cartoons, the prophet is depicted as contorted and snarling and as a hook-nosed man in a turban holding a bloody knife. The caption reads, “When it comes to religion ... I’ve got the edge.” The face, Coonfield notes, is nearly identical to the contorted face of “The Eternal Jew” poster.
+
+“That strategy for creating a sense of ‘unity’ by lifting up this internal enemy is as old as human civilization and culture,” he says. “It’s ironic that the kind of thinking that Hitler used, and the Nazis have become famous for using – propaganda to try to create this sense of a collective by creating a strong unquestionably evil Other who is right here in our midst ... so it’s kind of ironic that she’s trying to link some of these things together, when that is in fact her message.”
+
+Despite the fact that images depicting the prophet Muhammad cut deeply to the heart of Muslim identity, Muslim leaders in Texas told their followers not to picket or protest the event on Sunday.
+
+“Her words are not just free speech,” says Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. “They are inciteful; they incite hate against our whole community. I was very dismayed by the shooting in Garland, Texas, but at the same time, Pamela Geller is not the victim in this situation that we’re in right now.”
+
+“She intentionally put that event together in hopes that she’d get the response that she received,” Ms. Sarsour says.
+
+“We prayed, but not one Muslim from the state of Texas went out to protest her,” she added. “Muslim leaders specifically told people, do not go anywhere near her. Let her do whatever she does. We don’t care. And there was no protesting outside – unfortunately, except for these two guys from Arizona, who were already on the radar of the FBI anyway.”
+
+Advocates have tried to counter Geller’s free political expressions with ad campaigns of a different tone. In 2012, a coalition called Rabbis for Human Rights responded to her “support the civilized man” poster with an opposing message that read, “In the choice between love and hate, choose love. Help stop bigotry against our Muslim neighbors.”
+
+And last week, the makers of the satirical film “The Muslims Are Coming!” launched a humorous series of subway and bus ads to counter Geller's. “The Muslims are coming, and they shall strike with hugs so fierce, you’ll end up calling your grandmother and telling her that you love her.”
+
+But in an era in which the Islamic State, the Tsarnaev trial, and the lingering aftermath of 9/11 still inflame fears about Islam, many worry that Sunday’s violence will exacerbate the current tensions.
+
+“Free speech is about being open to listening to the ideas you hate the most, that you disagree with the most, and I feel this group in particular is hiding behind this free speech rhetoric,” Coonfield says. “This can’t become the poster child for Christianity versus Islam or the West versus the Middle East. We have to maintain a space where groups that have very different ways of thinking and viewing the world can still come together to talk about it, without resorting to this kind of craziness.”",REAL
+5937,"3 Effects of Substance Abuse on Individual, Family and Community","Drug and substance abuse has ruined and taken the lives of many. Substance addiction or abuse happens to be a complicated and complex disease which gradually gnaws the addict of their physical,... ",FAKE
+7277,Tree Shaped Vertical Farms That Grow 24 Acres Of Urban Crops,"By Amanda Froelich This tree-like skyscraper is capable of growing 24 acres-worth of crops and will be powered entirely by renewable resources. By 2050, the world’s population is estimated to reach... ",FAKE
+5521,New Comment Features have been Added,"Be the First to Comment! Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Search articles",FAKE
+3627,World's newspapers react to 'Hebdo' attack,"The world watched in shock on Wednesday as French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo became the site of a grisly terror attack. Gunmen opened fire on a second-floor editorial meeting, killing 12 people in total. Among them were eight journalists and two police officers.
+
+Journalists felt their profession under fire, and several newspapers are taking to their front pages to react. Editorial cartoons, somber black covers and powerful photos from the attack are seen on pages around the world.
+
+The Independent covers their paper with a fictional cover of Charlie Hebdo.
+
+Libération in Paris said ""We are all Charlie.""
+
+The Times of London's calls it ""attack on freedom.""",REAL
+9360,Ying and Yang (the Gold and Silver Set-Up),"Ying and Yang (the Gold and Silver Set-Up) Posted on Home » Silver » Silver News » Ying and Yang (the Gold and Silver Set-Up) No, this is not a post about some new Chinese law firm. Instead, it’s just an update on the gold and silver markets which, while refusing to go further down, aren’t making much progress to the upside, either. From Craig Hemke, TFMetalsReport : Today’s message: A few more slightly positive US economic datapoints and these are likely enough to make a December FF rate hike a fait accompli. Again, though…and I can’t stress this enough… we have traced out a pattern that is remarkably similar to last October and November in the run up to the most recent FF rate hike. And what happened beginning the very next day? Well, by now you know the story. The week of the October 2o15 FOMC produced a high trade in the Dec15 contract of $1183. As the Fedlines were digested later that week, it became clear that the Fed was going to raise the FF rate at the December 2015 meeting come hell or high water. And they did. However, take a close look at how gold traded in the days and weeks between the Oct15 FOMC and the December rate hike. Price fell from $1180 to $1050 in about five weeks but note that it bottomed well in advance of the actual “news” of the FF rate hike. This 10+% drop was fueled by a near panic level liquidation of the Specs at the Comex. How bad was it? From the CoT survey of 10/27/15, just one day before that fateful FOMC and Fedlines, the Large Specs in gold were NET long more than 157,000 contracts while the Commercials were NET short nearly 166,000. Just five weeks later, the NET position of the Large Specs was down to only 10,000 contracts with the Commercial position reaching an alltime low of just 2,911 contracts NET short. We even speculated at the time that there were some days, intraweek, where the Gold Commercials were actually and historically NET LONG. Well now compare last autumn to our current situation. Just as back then, a FF rate hike is a near certainty at the FOMC in December. However, as you know, the anticipatory move in gold began a few weeks ago with the beatdown and purposeful break of both the 50-day and 100-day moving averages in late September. Take a look at the current chart and compare it to the one posted above: In 2015, we had the October FOMC and then two stout down weeks. Before price turned, we slogged through 5-6 weeks of consolidation and CoT improvement before the blast higher began. In 2016, we had the September FOMC and then two stout down weeks. Price is attempting to bottom and turn while the CoT improves, but it doesn’t seem ready just yet to begin moving consistently higher. In 2015, the turn in gold began once the actual rate hike took place. The rate hike and forecast for 3 or 4 more in 2016 led to dollar strength, which led to Chinese devaluations, which led to emerging market crises, which led to equity selloffs and the gold price was already 5-10% off its lows by late January before the real fun began with the USDJPY falling 10% in early February. Are we headed down that same path again? It certainly appears so as the first major salvos of Chinese yuan devaluation were fired last week: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-20/dear-janet-china-devalues-most-august-yuan-tumbles-lowest-sept-2010 And, just as in 2015, the CoT is certainly undergoing a makeover, too. From the survey of 9/27/16, the Large Specs in gold were NET long 292,000 contracts while the Commercials were NET short 325,000. As of last Tuesday and just three weeks later, the Large Specs were down to 180,000 NET long for a reduction of 38% and the Commercials were NET short 203,000. To be sure, these are still hefty positions but much more “bullish” than the levels seen through the past summer. And now check the full long-term chart. You can see again the similarities between now and last fall. Also be sure to note, however, that the trend has clearly changed and that price is pointed higher. So while we must still deal with the consolidation for a while longer…the Ying and Yang mentioned in the title of this post…it is clear to me that the trend remains higher and that the now-expected FOMC FF rate hike will be simply another “sell-the-rumor, buy-the-news” type of event for gold and silver. This current period of relative quiet should be used to prepare for the next leg UP, not some sort of new bear market where paper prices are sharply falling. Use your time wisely and continue to prepare/stack accordingly. TF On Sale At SD Bullion… This Week Only… This entry was posted in Gold News , Silver News and tagged Craig Hemke , December Rate Hike , gold update , silver update , TFMetals Report . Bookmark the permalink . Post navigation",FAKE
+909,"Closed primaries, 'warped' democracy?","Political parties choose their presidential nominees. But with more Americans opting out of parties, is the process representative of what America wants? The New York primary – and others ahead – offer insights.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks to supporter Michael Cantalupo while taking a walk in New York's Times Square Tuesday. Mr. Cantalupo said he is unable to vote in the New York primaries
+
+Denise Guardascione, a waitress for nearly three decades at the Shalimar Diner in Queens, thinks the New York primary process was rigged.
+
+She’s a vocal supporter of Republican front-runner Donald Trump, but as a registered Democrat, Ms. Guardascione missed the deadline to switch her registration to become a Republican – which, shocking to her, was more than six months ago.
+
+And now, the independent-minded waitress has become bewildered by what seems to be the complicated, back-room system of electing party delegates both in her own state and across the country.
+
+“It’s antiquated, it belongs in the Smithsonian, next to Archie Bunker’s chair!” says Ms. Guardascione, a Queens native who works six days a week slinging eggs and coffee for this well-known political haunt. “It’s just for the [expletive] bigwigs and muckety mucks, not us, not the people who just want to vote.”
+
+In truth, presidential primaries have never been more open. Since 1972, primaries have gone from being the province of party bosses to vibrant voter-driven contests. But in this year of populist revolt in both parties, “more open” looks to many voters like “still pretty antiquated.”
+
+That is by design. Parties, after all, are not democratic. They can choose their nominees in whichever way they think is best. But at a time when Democrats and Republicans are a shrinking share of the population, closed primaries are shutting more and more of America out.
+
+The irony is that America is no less partisan. Research suggests the growing ranks of independents are just as partisan as the parties. These voters have just abandoned parties because they are ashamed by how the parties act.
+
+The anger over closed primaries, superdelegates, and convention arcana isn’t likely to help. (Nor are allegations of irregularities in the New York primary. On Thursday, the state's Elections Board suspended the top official in charge of Brooklyn after numerous allegations, the most serious of which is that 125,000 Democratic voters were incorrectly purged from the rolls before polls opened.)
+
+The question is, whether the spotlight of this election could force further change ahead, both in states and in the nation.
+
+“New York and other states have long given power to the parties and to the establishment,” says Jeanne Zaino, a political scientist at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y. “But who has higher voting turnout? States that have early voting, states that have mail in ballots and same day registration. We in New York allow none of that. This was not just a closed primary, this was an ultra-closed primary. Whether you’re running for office or voting, you had to be on top of your game to be a part of it.”
+
+The knock against closed primaries in this election season has been that they hurt insurgent candidates like Trump and Bernie Sanders. But the picture isn’t so simple.
+
+Yes, Senator Sanders of Vermont has done much better among independents. But his biggest wins – in Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington state – all came in closed primaries or caucuses.
+
+Trump, meanwhile, has in many cases actually done better among Republicans than independents.
+
+What is clear is that the primary rules disenfranchise those who most dislike the parties. “So why is Sanders doing so well among independents?” asks Dan Hopkins of the FiveThirtyEight data journalism website. “It appears to be driven not by their ideology so much as their dislike of partisan politics.”
+
+In one respect, that makes sense. Why would parties give vote to someone who doesn’t like them?
+
+Yet those people are a growing share of the American electorate. Some 39 percent Americans now identify as independents; 32 percent say they’re Democrats, and 23 percent say they’re Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year.
+
+In 2000, 29 percent were independents, 33 percent were Democrats, and 28 percent were Republicans, Pew found
+
+In Tuesday’s closed primary, “three million people in the state of New York who are independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary,” Sanders said. “That’s wrong.”
+
+It almost certainly hurt Sanders. In Michigan, for example, Hillary Clinton won the Democratic vote by 58 to 40 percent – similar to the 58 to 42 percent margin in New York. But since Michigan was an open primary where independents could vote, Sanders won the state by taking 71 percent of independent voters.
+
+Eight of the 16 remaining primary contests – including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland – are closed contests.
+
+Sanders and his supporters have also complained about the fact that 15 percent of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention – 712 out of 4,763 – are party leaders known as “superdelegates,” who overwhelmingly support Mrs. Clinton.
+
+In short, the deck is stacked against Sanders. And intentionally so.
+
+Sanders isn’t a Democrat; he’s an independent who describes himself as a democratic socialist. It is not illogical that Democratic primaries should favor an actual Democrat.
+
+The same is true, in different ways, for Trump. The GOP front-runner won a solid victory in New York. But he's getting little help from the establishment in navigating the complex delegate rules – rules that he says are rigged. Meanwhile, the well-organized campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz outmaneuvered him in Louisiana and swept Colorado’s state convention contest.
+
+Presidents have always gone through a complex, multilayered processes in which voters, local officials, and party leaders each have their role, scholars say. Party leaders should have no small say in choosing their party’s presidential nominee, the thinking goes.
+
+But even within the parties, there is some restlessness for change. “Closed primaries poison the health of that system and warp its natural balance,” said Charles Schumer (D) of New York, now the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, to The New York Times in 2014.
+
+As America’s political balance increasingly settles outside either of the two parties, 2016 is showing how even a more open system can be warped.
+
+“And if part of that story is about disenfranchisement, it is about these younger voters, people who are new to the process, or who disengaged from it and didn’t register, or registered as independent and couldn’t vote,” says Professor Zaino.
+
+“You’re talking about Sanders supporters who are going to be on the losing end of that.”",REAL
+6646,Police Turn In Badges Rather Than Incite Violence Against Standing Rock Protestors,It should be evident if you’re following news concerning the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota that tension continues to escalate between protestors supporting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and... ,FAKE
+1522,Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton has 'caused tremendous death',"Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has a new attack line against Hillary Clinton: ""She has caused death.""
+
+Trump raised the stakes against Clinton on CBS' ""Face the Nation"" Sunday, insisting that as secretary of State in President Obama's first term, Clinton's decisions led to unnecessary deaths on both sides in the Middle East.
+
+""She has caused tremendous death with incompetent decisions,"" Trump said. ""She caused a lot of the problems that we have right now. You could say she caused the migration.
+
+""The entire world has been upset. The entire world, it's a different place. During Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's term, she's done a horrible job.""
+
+As he has said before, Trump argued that getting rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- a policy of Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush -- has led to the rise of the Islamic State. ""All of this has led to tremendous death and destruction,"" he said. ""And she, for the most part, was in charge of it, along with Obama.""
+
+Trump acknowledged that by calling for a ban on Muslim immigration to the United States, he was giving radical Islam a rallying cry. The terrorist group al-Shabaab is now using  a clip of Trump in calling for Muslims to join jihad or leave the U.S.
+
+""What am I going to do? I have to say what I have to say,"" Trump said. ""And you know what I have to say? There's a problem. We have to find out what is the problem. And we have to solve that problem.""
+
+During the interview, Trump also disagreed with Obama on the need for more gun control -- particularly if the president tries to move the issue by executive action rather than working with a recalcitrant Congress. ""All they want to do is blame the guns. And it's not the gun that pulls the trigger,"" he said. ""So I don't like it. I don't like what he's doing.""
+
+Rather than fiddle with the Second Amendment, Trump said mental health is the problem. ""We should build, like, institutions for people that are sickos,"" he said. ""We have sickos all over the place. And that's the problem.""
+
+Despite his lead in national polls, Trump said he will spend about $2 million per week on advertising in the coming weeks leading to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. ""I think I'm probably wasting the money,"" he said. ""But I'm $35 million under budget.... I almost feel guilty.""",REAL
+7540,Detroit women’s Halloween decorations depict ‘real-life horrors’ … such as shootings police by police,"Print 
+[Ed. – How to take the fun out of Halloween.] 
+As Halloween approaches, hair-raising yard displays can often cause people to stop, gawk and whip out their cellphones. 
+Larethia Haddon is well aware of that, and is using it to shine some light on real-life horrors, rather than typical Halloween themes. 
+In her yard at the corner of Mendota and Santa Maria avenues in Detroit, there are six dummies portraying police shootings, slain children, the Flint water crisis, and other horrors. 
+Last year, a single dummy placed face-down in the grass, realistically depicting a dead body in her yard, shocked passersby and caused fearful calls to the police. 
+This time around, Haddon wants to inspire a broader range of thought, rather than just shock. 
+“We’re trying to do something positive instead of just having a dead body laying in the yard,” she said. “Want to get people to be a little more focused on the issues, what’s going on in the world. We need to stick together more. We need to come together. And if we don’t, this scene in my yard is going to be reality every single day.”",FAKE
+1834,Biden makes another surprise political stop,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+1775,"Hillary Clinton's declining favorability numbers, in context","Buried beneath Wednesday's eye-popping headlines about Hillary Clinton's sinking favorability ratings, you'll find the reason that she's still on course to win the Democratic primary.
+
+First, the headline number: A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that 53 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Clinton, an 8 percentage point increase since July. Her favorable rating has declined by 7 percentage points to 45 percent over the same period of time, and the split among registered voters is even worse for her, at 56 percent unfavorable to 43 percent favorable. A majority of women (51 percent) now view her unfavorably. None of that is good news for Clinton.
+
+She's been on a pretty steady drop from the moment she left the State Department in early 2013. That was a foreseeable outcome of Clinton moving back into domestic partisan politics after four years of representing America's interests abroad. Ellen Tauscher, a former member of Congress and undersecretary of state, warned Clinton that would happen in a private conversation about Clinton's political future in September 2011, when about two-thirds of Americans rated her favorably.
+
+But what's apparent — and of more immediate interest to Clinton — is that she's still better regarded among Democrats than Vice President Joe Biden, who is still weighing whether to run against her. Biden's dead-even 46 percent to 46 percent favorable/unfavorable rating is better than Clinton's, but the edge is based on him having higher numbers with Republicans and independents, the vast majority of whom won't vote in the Democratic primaries.
+
+A full 80 percent of Democrats view Clinton favorably, compared with 70 percent who feel that way about Biden. Her number among African Americans is 79 percent, and it's 68 percent among Hispanics. By comparison, Biden is viewed favorably by just 67 percent of African Americans and 49 percent of Hispanics.
+
+That helps explain why Clinton is blowing her Democratic competition out of the water in national horse-race polls. She was up 35 percentage points in a head-to-head matchup with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in a PPP poll conducted August 28 to 30 and held a 45-22-18 lead over Sanders and Biden in a Quinnipiac survey conducted from August 20 to 25.
+
+She's also doing much better on the favorability scale than either Republican frontrunner Donald Trump or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Trump checked in with a favorable number that has risen to 37 percent, about the same as Bush's 38 percent. Trump had an unfavorable score of 59 percent, while Bush was at 55 percent.
+
+The Clinton ship has taken on water. But, along with other recent surveys, this poll tell us that Clinton is still running away with her party's nomination and remains in better position than any of her Republican or Democratic rivals to advance to the all-important second round of the presidential race. For someone who lost the 2008 primary in part because she looked ahead to the general election, it makes sense to focus on winning the primary first in 2016. On that score, she's still in great shape.",REAL
+8212,Comment on Quid Pro Quo? Wikileaks Email Reveals Clinton Campaign Eyeing Paul Ryan’s Relative for Supreme Court by lenore.lee,"New Wikileaks email dumps have revealed massive corruption surrounding Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta . In one email dated February 29, 2016, an article sent by Hillary advisor Sara Solow to Podesta and Hillary’s foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan indicates that the Clinton campaign is considering House Speaker Paul Ryan’s relative for the Supreme Court . 
+Ketanji Brown is the subject of the article. She is related to Paul Ryan by marriage and is a judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia. 
+The email reads, “She was confirmed by without any Republican opposition in the Senate not once, but *twice*. She was confirmed to her current position in 2013 by unanimous consent – that is, without any stated opposition. She was also previously confirmed unanimously to a seat on the U.S. Sentencing Commission (where she became vice chair).” 
+“Her family is impressive. She is married to a surgeon and has two young daughters. Her father is a retired lawyer and her mother a retired school principal. Her brother was a police officer (in the unit that was the basis for the television show * The Wire *) and is now a law student, and she is related by marriage to Congressman (and Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan.” 
+Earlier this month, he even said he would not campaign for nor support his party’s nominee, Donald Trump . In fact, some supporters of Trump have theorized that Ryan was somehow behind or involved in the leak of the tape in which Trump made sexually crude comments about women. 
+If you claim this is merely circumstantial, then I think there is no hope for you understanding just how corrupt DC has gotten, and this is the very Paul Ryan I warned you about in 2012, which everyone said was “so conservative.” Sadly, many didn’t listen and voted for liberal Mitt Romney and him. Perhaps Paul Ryan’s records and emails should be leaked and maybe we just might see that he’s willing to engage Hillary in a pay-to-play scheme . 
+Courtesy of Freedom Outpost 
+Tim Brown is an author and Editor at FreedomOutpost.com , SonsOfLibertyMedia.com , GunsInTheNews.com and TheWashingtonStandard.com . He is husband to his “more precious than rubies” wife, father of 10 “mighty arrows”, jack of all trades, Christian and lover of liberty. He resides in the U.S. occupied Great State of South Carolina. Tim is also an affiliate for the Joshua Mark 5 AR/AK hybrid semi-automatic rifle . Follow Tim on Twitter . Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+3363,Hillary Clinton: The criminal investigation keeps moving forward,"While the country has been fixated on Donald Trump's tormenting his Republican primary opponents and deeply concerned about the government’s efforts to identify any confederates in the San Bernardino, California, killings, a team of federal prosecutors and FBI agents continues to examine Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state in order to determine whether she committed any crimes and, if so, whether there is sufficient evidence to prove her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
+
+What began as an innocent Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch, a D.C.-based public advocacy group promoting transparency in the executive branch, has now become a full criminal investigation, with Clinton as the likely target.
+
+The basic facts are well-known, but the revealed nuances are important, as well. When the State Department responded to the Judicial Watch FOIA request by telling Judicial Watch that it had no emails from Clinton, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit. When the State Department made the same representation to the court -- as incredible as it seemed at the time -- the judge accepted that representation, and the case was dismissed.
+
+Then The New York Times revealed that Clinton used a private email server instead of the government’s server for all of her work-related and personal emails during her four years as secretary of state. After that, the Judicial Watch FOIA case was reinstated, and then the judge in the case demanded of State that it produce Clinton’s emails.
+
+When Judicial Watch expressed frustration to the judge about the pace at which it was getting emails, the judge ordered Clinton, “under penalty of perjury,” to certify that she had surrendered all her governmental emails to the State Department.
+
+Eventually, Clinton did certify to the court that she did surrender all of her governmental emails to the State Department. She did so by sending paper copies of selected emails, because she had wiped clean her server. She acknowledged that she decided which emails were personal and which were selected as governmental and returned the governmental ones to the State Department. She has denied steadfastly and consistently that she ever sent or received any materials marked ""classified” while secretary of state using her private server.
+
+All of her behavior has triggered the FBI investigation because she may have committed serious federal crimes. For example, it is a crime to steal federal property. What did she steal? By diverting to her own venue the digital metadata that accompany all emails -- metadata that, when attached to the work-related emails of a government employee, belong to the government -- she stole that data. The metadata do not appear on her paper copies -- hence the argument that she stole and destroyed the government-owned metadata.
+
+This is particularly troublesome for her present political ambitions because of a federal statute that disqualifies from public office all who have stolen federal property. (She is probably already barred from public office -- though this was not prominently raised when she entered the U.S. Senate or the Department of State -- because of the china, silverware and furniture that she and her husband took from the White House in January 2001.)
+
+Clinton may also have committed espionage by failing to secure the government secrets entrusted to her. She did that by diverting those secrets to an unprotected, nongovernmental venue -- her own server -- and again by emailing those secrets to other unprotected and nongovernmental venues. The reason she can deny sending or receiving anything marked ""classified” is that protected government secrets are not marked “classified.”
+
+So her statement, though technically true, is highly misleading. The governmental designations of protected secrets are “confidential,” “secret” and “top secret” -- not “classified.” State Department investigators have found 999 emails sent or received by Clinton in at least one of those three categories of protected secrets.
+
+Back when Clinton became secretary of state, on her first day in office, she had an hourlong FBI briefing on the proper and lawfully required care of government secrets. She signed a statement, under penalty of perjury, acknowledging that she knew the law and that it is the content of emails, not any stamped markings, that makes them secret.
+
+Earlier this week, my Fox News colleagues confirmed the certain presence of top-secret materials among the 999 emails. Intelligence from foreign sources or about foreign governments is always top-secret, whether designated as such or not. And she knows that.
+
+As well, she may have committed perjury in the FOIA case. When the House Select Committee on Benghazi, in its investigation of her role in the deaths of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, gathered emails, it found emails she did not surrender to the State Department.
+
+Last week, the State Department released emails that give the FBI more areas to investigate. These emails may show a pattern of official behavior by Clinton designed to benefit the financial interests of her family's foundation, her husband and her son-in-law. Moreover, the FBI knows of a treasure-trove of documents that may demonstrate that the Clinton Foundation skirted the law and illegally raised and spent contributions.
+
+Two months ago, a group of FBI agents sat around a conference table and reviewed the evidence gathered thus far. Each agent was given the opportunity to make or detract from the case for moving forward. At the end of the meeting, it was the consensus of the group to pursue a criminal investigation.
+
+And Clinton is the likely target.
+
+Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.",REAL
+1084,Rubio’s parting shot at Trump,"It was not supposed to end like this for Marco Rubio.
+
+Eleven months ago, he launched his presidential campaign in front of Miami’s Freedom Tower, the Ellis Island for his and other Cuban families. In his rapid rise, young Rubio had been a darling of both the tea party movement and the conservative intelligentsia — the Republicans’ best hope of attracting nonwhite voters.
+
+But then came vulgar Donald Trump. Rubio was savaged on everything from immigration to his height. On Tuesday night, Rubio, his campaign fading, lost his home state of Florida to the bigoted demagogue who makes scapegoats of foreigners and minorities. Bowing to the inevitable, Rubio ended his candidacy.
+
+By the time Rubio’s campaign bus rolled to its final pre-primary stop — an outdoor basketball court here where he played as a boy — only a couple-hundred supporters were on hand, nearly equaled by the number of journalists on death watch.
+
+Before Rubio arrived, a prankster hijacked the microphone and was chased off by campaign aides. When Rubio himself spoke, the sound system failed, so he delivered his valedictory with a bullhorn.
+
+[The GOP establishment has failed. It’s up to voters to deny Trump.]
+
+Rubio’s voice sounded tinny, but his words were rich with nostalgia as he recalled knocking on doors when he ran for city commissioner here. “In between sips of sweet Cuban coffee, I heard the stories of their youth, of the dreams they lost,” he said. “That has carried me every single day throughout this campaign, knowing that my worst days are better than some of the best days that many people in this community have had.”
+
+These are not the best days for Rubio, or for anybody who cares about American democracy. The 44-year-old made mistakes during his campaign: freezing in the New Hampshire debate, failing to take on Trump earlier, then finally attacking Trump by joking about genitalia.
+
+Yet he finished honorably. He spoke reflectively Monday about Trump’s brutal transformation of politics. This message should have been delivered much earlier, but it deserves to be heard even now.
+
+“Leadership is not about going to an angry and frustrated people and saying you should be even angrier and more frustrated, and you should be angry and frustrated at each other,” Rubio told a gym full of Christian college students in West Palm Beach. “That’s called demagoguery. And it’s dangerous.” It leads, he said, to “where we are today, a nation where people literally hate each other because they’re voting for different candidates. . . . And it leaves us incapable of solving problems.”
+
+Trump tore up the norms of decency that remained in American politics, and Rubio expressed puzzlement that it worked. “My whole life I’ve been told being humble is a virtue, and now being humble is a weakness and being vain and self-absorbed is somehow a virtue,” he said. “My whole life I’ve been told no matter how you feel about someone, you respect everyone because we are all children of the same God — and now being respectful to one another is considered political correctness.”
+
+Rubio voiced regret for his own role in the vulgarity, saying he “felt terrible” for joking about Trump’s penis size. Such remorse separates Rubio from Trump, who seems to have no shame as he blurts obscenities, delivers insults and winks at violence. “There are people, I know, who like this stuff because he says what they want to be able to say, [but] presidents can’t say whatever they want to say,” Rubio told the students, mentioning the harm to America’s reputation that Trump has already done. “We’re not a Third World country. We’re the United States of America.”
+
+[Donald Trump just threatened more violence. Only this time, it’s directed at the GOP.]
+
+That’s the welcoming country to which Rubio’s parents immigrated, settling among the shoe-box homes here in Cuban West Miami. “Everywhere I go I tell the story of this community of people, many of whom lost their country in their youth,” Rubio said Monday night in his boyhood park, his kids beside him in the bed of his Dodge pickup.
+
+He spoke, in English, then in Spanish, with the requisite optimism, telling supporters he looked forward to moving his “caja china” — Cuban barbecue — to the White House.
+
+“If there’s no car, we’ll go in a raft!” a supporter said in Spanish.
+
+Another said in English: “Don’t give up, man!”
+
+But Rubio’s speech to his modest band had the ring of a farewell. “I will always be a son of this community. I will always carry with me the hopes and dreams of generations that made possible the dreams of mine,” he said. His candidacy, he said, “was possible because you and I happen to live in the one place on Earth where even the son of a bartender and a maid from West Miami can be president.”
+
+Or at least he can lose to a trash-talking rich guy from Queens.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+4410,Loretta Lynch becomes first African-American woman AG.,"Washington (CNN) Loretta Lynch was sworn in as the new U.S. attorney general on Monday, replacing Eric Holder. Lynch, the country's first African-American woman to serve in the role, had her nomination held up more than five months over politicking in the Senate.
+
+""Ladies and gentlemen, it's about time,"" said Vice President Joe Biden at the swearing in ceremony.
+
+The highly politicized five-month battle to choose Obama's next attorney general came to a close Thursday when the Senate finally voted 56-43 to confirm Lynch
+
+But the delay of her nomination neared record-breaking proportions. Republicans leading the Senate refused to bring her nomination up for a vote until Democrats cut a deal on abortion language in an unrelated bill. That legislation passed Wednesday, setting up Thursday's vote and ending the latest partisan Washington standoff.
+
+Ten Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined Democrats. Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz was the only senator not to vote.
+
+Obama tapped Lynch to replace Attorney General Eric Holder in November and her nomination cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. Still, she waited longer than the seven most recent U.S. attorneys general combined for a vote on the Senate floor, after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisted on first finishing work on an unrelated bill.
+
+Loretta Lynch's father, Lorenzo A. Lynch, was in the Senate gallery watching when the historic vote took place confirming her daughter as the first African American female attorney general.
+
+""The good guys won. That's what has happened in this country all along,"" Lorenzo Lynch told reporters. ""Even during slavery. Levi Coffin was a founder of the Underground Railroad. Even during slavery. A white man fought against slavery. So all over this land good folks have stood in the right lane, in the right path.""
+
+A two-time U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Lynch takes on the high-profile job at time when America faces a series of challenges, from dealing with strained relations and deep distrust in some cities between the police and the communities they serve, to criminal justice reform, to confronting the ongoing threat of terrorism.
+
+Lynch, 55, has earned a reputation as a highly qualified, but low-profile prosecutor who has a good relationship with law enforcement and a history of handling tough cases well.
+
+She is a good listener and a skilled consensus builder, qualities that will help her succeed at Justice, said Tim Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia who served under Lynch on the Attorney General's Advisory Committee, a group that meets regularly to advise the Justice department on policy matters.
+
+""In that [attorney general] job you are at the center of so many of the emerging, significant, pressing issues not only in this country but around the world. There's probably no job in government as diverse and challenging as being attorney general of the United States,"" Heaphy said. He added that building support for initiatives both within and outside the department is an important part of the job.
+
+""She will be good at getting people to work well together. I think that's a strength of hers. I saw that on the committee,"" Heaphy said.
+
+Lynch's portfolio will include addressing voting rights, white-collar crime and policy reviews, as well as public corruption, an area in which she has vast experience.
+
+In a statement, Obama said America will be better off with Lynch leading the Department of Jusice.
+
+""Loretta's confirmation ensures that we are better positioned to keep our communities safe, keep our nation secure, and ensure that every American experiences justice under the law,"" Obama said in a statement shortly after the vote.
+
+Lynch's experience on civil rights case, like helping win the convictions of New York City police officers who sexually assaulted Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, will be important as her office tackles closely watched investigations in recent police conduct cases, including the still unexplained death of a 25-year-old Baltimore man while in police custody.
+
+""She's seen and understands the injustices that have taken place in the past and so therefore she's uniquely also equipped to deal with what's going on and do the kinds of investigations that will restore faith to Americans in their justice system,"" said Rep. Greg Meeks, D-New York.
+
+Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, Lynch grew up 60 miles to the east in Durham, North Carolina. Her father was a fourth-generation Baptist minister; her mother, an English teacher and school librarian. As a child, Lynch rode on her father's shoulders to his church, which served a meeting place for students organizing anti-segregation boycotts in the early 1960s, she told the Judiciary panel at her January confirmation hearing. Lynch eventually graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
+
+Speaking at her nomination announcement in November, Lynch highlighted the fact that the Justice Department is named for an ideal.
+
+""This is actually appropriate, because our work is both aspirational, and grounded in gritty reality,"" she said. ""Today, I stand before you so thrilled, and, frankly, so humbled to have the opportunity to lead this group of wonderful people who work all day and well into the night to make that ideal a manifest reality.""
+
+At a conference meeting with all the nation's U.S. attorneys a few years ago, Heaphy was put in charge of organizing a presentation showing the attorneys as they were 20 years before. Lynch shared a picture of herself with her college cheerleading squad.
+
+""Loretta sent me a picture of her as a Harvard cheerleader in a pyramid,"" he said. ""She was comfortable sharing this with Eric Holder and other department leaders. She laughed at herself.""
+
+""I don't think she's just tough, there's a humanity, there's a human touch that she has that will also serve her well,"" he said. ""Nobody is going to mistake that she's in charge, but her humility and sense of humor will come through.""",REAL
+2669,Why it's funny Republicans are upset with Facebook: Column,"GOP opposes the kind of antitrust regulation that would preserve freedom of expression online.
+
+America’s right wing is in a froth about allegations that Facebook has tweaked its “trending news” feed to reduce the visibility of conservative news sites.
+
+It’s not clear if the allegations, from a Gizmodo report based on anonymous sources, are true and Facebook denies them. But the deeper problem is undeniably real: Facebook is the dominant member of a small number of giant entities — corporate and governmental — that are gaining control over news, freedom of expression and much of our digital lives. The irony is that the conservatives and business-backed Republicans in Congress who howl about Facebook are the same people who have thwarted policies that would encourage the competition we need to challenge that increasingly centralized control.
+
+Almost no one wants to address the fact that Facebook is becoming a monopoly in the antitrust sense of the word. Along with Google, it dominates online advertising; Facebook especially does so on mobile devices, which are the way many people connect to the Internet. If you offer news and information online, you have almost no choice but to play on Facebook’s field because so much of your audience is there. (In some parts of the world, Facebook essentially is the Internet, because mobile devices are pretty much the sole means of online access and in some cases the company has made deals with local telecommunications companies and, or governments.)
+
+Facebook has been buying everything that presents even a whiff of competition: Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. This is smart — no one can dispute that Mark Zuckerberg and the others on his team are brilliant technologists and strategists — but it’s also a red flag. As Zuckerberg famously said several years ago, he wants Facebook to be “like electricity.” Well, electricity is a utility. And we regulate utilities.
+
+Monopolies and cozy oligopolies never turn out well in the long run for anyone but the monopolists or cartel members. They end up controlling markets and do their best to thwart genuine competition. It’s their nature. Which is why capitalism, plainly the best system when it’s working right, needs rules to promote competition.
+
+Yet Republicans, in general, think the government should play little to no role in promoting competition. They consider antitrust inquiry and enforcement to be counterproductive, at best — except, of course, when a powerful constituent (a corporation, usually) is in danger from predatory behavior.
+
+That attitude accounts for the GOP’s cheerleading for corporate dominance of Internet access. Republicans, in general, are fine with the idea that one or two companies (say the leading cable provider and another telecom) should control access in most communities, and utterly opposed to a remedy — what we call network neutrality — to ensure that people at the edges of networks, not dominant Internet service providers, should decide what information they want and at what priority.
+
+I don’t want the government to tell Facebook what it can publish and don’t look forward to much more than posturing from Congress. But I do want the government to start paying extremely close attention to the way the company is becoming a monopoly and to what it means for freedom of expression when a single company has so much power over what people say online. I want government to use antitrust and other pro-competition laws to ensure that Facebook doesn’t abuse its dominance in a business sense. I want government(s) to promote open technology and communications, and fierce competition at every level. Kudos to Zuckerberg for making Facebook so appealing to millions of users; that’s an amazing achievement. But we can’t allow Facebook to leverage that success to block the emergence of alternatives to its service, or use its market power to influence or alter the content of publications and others trying to communicate with Facebook users.
+
+We all need to wake up to the potential threat Facebook poses to freedom of expression. Once you are in its enclosed online space, it is the corporation’s terms of service, not the First Amendment, that determines what you can say. If it decides to downplay speech it doesn’t like, Facebook has the right to do so.
+
+So I’m glad that conservatives are concerned, even if the allegations prove overblown. (Facebook has modified its outright denial to a “we’re looking into it” stance; stay tuned.) I’d be even happier if conservatives realized that government does have a role in promoting genuine competition — and that we’re in uncharted information-freedom territory under the new control freaks of Silicon Valley.
+
+Dan Gillmor teaches digital media literacy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Mediactive. He wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.
+
+In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns, go to the Opinion front page and follow us on Twitter @USATOpinion.",REAL
+3648,FBI checking if Orlando shooter's wife knew attack plan but didn't warn police,"The wife of the gunman who carried out the deadliest mass shooting on American soil could face criminal charges if investigators conclude that she knew of the attack in advance but failed to warn police.
+
+Noor Zahi Salman told that FBI that her husband, Omar Mateen, had said he was going out to see friends, but she feared he was going to attack a gay nightclub, NBC News reported on Wednesday. She tried to talk him out of it but did not contact law enforcement agencies.
+
+Wielding an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle and a handgun, Mateen opened fire at the Pulse club in Orlando, Florida, early on Sunday in a three-hour shooting rampage and hostage siege that ended when a Swat team smashed its way in and killed him. There were 49 people killed and 53 were injured.
+
+Angus King, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, which received a briefing on the attack, told CNN: “It appears she [Salman] had some knowledge of what was going on. She definitely is, I guess you would say, a person of interest right now and appears to be cooperating and can provide us with some important information.”
+
+Peter King, chairman of the House homeland security subcommittee on counterintelligence and terrorism, told MSNBC: “If it’s true that she did know that it was going to happen and she tried to talk him out of it, then it’s possible criminal action (could be taken) against her, and again there might be more involvement by her, so all that has to be investigated.”
+
+The possibility that Mateen, 29, did not act alone but received support from other individuals or groups is now central to the FBI’s inquiry, King added. “If there’s anybody else that he was dealing with, anyone else he was talking with, anyone else who may have known about this, this is all where the investigation is going now.”
+
+Media reports also suggested that Salman was with her husband when he bought ammunition and a holster. She allegedly told the FBI that she once drove him to Pulse, nearly a two-hour drive from their home in Fort Pierce, Florida, because he wanted to scope it out. Mateen is said to have browsed militant Islamist material on the internet for at least two years before the mass shooting.
+
+As detectives tried to piece together Mateen’s last movements on Saturday night, Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer, who opened a family assistance centre in a stadium on Wednesday, said: “What I know concretely is that he was driving around that evening and visited several locations.”
+
+The FBI director, James Comey, has said the agency is trying to determine whether Mateen had recently visited Disney World, one of the Orlando’s celebrated theme parks, to consider it as a potential target.
+
+Disney, which is donating $1m to an official fund for victims of the shooting, installed metal detectors last December but declined to comment on the Mateen case. A spokesperson said: “Unfortunately we’ve all been living in a world of uncertainty, and we have been increasing our security measures across our properties for some time, adding such visible safeguards as magnetometers, additional canine units, and law enforcement officers on site, as well as less visible systems that employ state-of-the-art security technologies.”
+
+Salman will be key to the ongoing investigation as conflicting narratives emerge, including evidence he had been influenced by militant Islamist ideas and reports he might have struggled with his own sexual identity.
+
+A survivor of the massacre, Patience Carter, suggested on Tuesday that Mateen had an overt political motive. Cowering in a bathroom, she heard him demand that Americans “stop bombing his country” and pledge allegiance to Islamic State, she said.
+
+Carter, 20, who is African American, told reporters at Florida Hospital: “He even spoke to us directly in the bathroom. He said, ‘Are there any black people in here?’ I was too afraid to answer but there was an African American male in the stall, where the majority of my body was, who had answered and he said, ‘Yes, there are about six or seven of us,’ and the gunman responded back to him and said: ‘You know, I don’t have a problem with black people. This is about my country. You guys suffered enough.’”
+
+The account chimed with previous FBI statements that Mateen had called the 911 emergency service and made reference to both Isis and the Tsarnaev brothers, who were responsible for the Boston bombings. Investigators have said Mateen was probably self-radicalised and there is no evidence that he received any instruction or aid from outside groups such as Isis.
+
+Mateen also called a local 24-hour cable news channel, News 13, the station revealed on its website on Wednesday. Matthew Gentili, who was the producer on duty at the time, recalled that Mateen said: “I’m the shooter. It’s me. I am the shooter ... I did it for Isis. I did it for the Islamic State.”
+
+Soon after the attack, Mateen’s father indicated that his son had strong anti-gay feelings. He recounted an incident when his son became angry when he saw two men kissing in downtown Miami while out with his wife and young son.
+
+Several media reports quoted men as saying they had seen Mateen at Pulse many times or that he had contacted them via gay dating apps, such as Grindr and Jack’d. But Pulse denied that he had ever been a patron. “Untrue and totally ridiculous,” spokeswoman Sara Brady said in an email to Reuters.
+
+Mateen’s ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, told CNN she did not know if he was gay but added: “Well, when we had gotten married, he confessed to me about his past that was recent at that time and that he very much enjoyed going to clubs and the nightlife and there was a lot of pictures of him.”
+
+“I feel like it’s a side of him or a part of him that he lived but probably didn’t want everybody to know about.”
+
+Asked by the Guardian about rumours his son was gay, Mateen’s father Seddique Mateen said: “It’s not true. Why, if he was gay, would he do this?”
+
+Seddique Mateen declined to comment specifically on the investigation on Wednesday, saying: “The FBI, they always do a professional job and to the maximum extent of my ability I will support them.”
+
+Mateen, investigated twice by the FBI, was on the government’s terrorist watchlist for 10 months before being taken off. G4S, the security company that employed Mateen, only psychologically evaluated him once, at the start of his nine-year employment with the company and not again after the company was made aware he had been interviewed by the FBI.
+
+Thirty-three people remain in hospital, including six in critical condition. On Tuesday, the first of the seriously injured to speak of their trauma was Angel Colon at the Orlando Regional Medical Center. “He’s shooting everyone that’s already dead on the floor, making sure they’re dead,” he said, speaking from a wheelchair. “I look over, and he shoots the girl next to me. And I’m just there laying down and I’m thinking: ‘I’m next, I’m dead.’
+
+
+
+“So I don’t know how, but by the glory of God, he shoots toward my head but it hits my hand, and then he shoots me again and it hits the side of my hip. I had no reaction. I was just prepared to just stay there laying down so he won’t know that I’m alive.”
+
+The attending trauma surgeon on call that night, Dr Chadwick Smith, said: “It was singularly the worst day of my career and the best day of my career. And I think you can say that of pretty much every person standing up here.”
+
+The atrocity continued to reverberate in Washington DC, where Senate Democrats demanded tighter gun controls. Donald Trump, the Republican presumptive nominee, broke ranks with the party by saying he would meet the influential National Rifle Association lobbying group, which has endorsed him, to discuss an idea for restricting gun purchases by people on terrorism watchlists.
+
+Barack Obama, who will visit Orlando on Thursday, launched a blistering assault against Trump over the candidate’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, which the president described as dangerous and contrary to American values.
+
+“Where does this stop? The Orlando killer, one of the San Bernardino killers, the Fort Hood killer, [they] were all US citizens. Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? ... Putting them under surveillance?”",REAL
+6197,Is google and YouTube in the Hillary's purse?,"Is google and YouTube in the Hillary’s purse? page: 1 link After I posted my opening post (OP) on “Hillary Clinton Wants a Strong Russia. Wait, what did she say?” , mysteriously, my YouTube account gets wiped out. The next thing I notice, is that the youtube video that I used in my OP, www.abovetopsecret.com... suddenly won’t work. Has anyone else experienced this bizarre behavior before? Is this what we are to expect if Hillary becomes POTUS? I went to the Youtube site and the video is available. www.youtube.com... I frankly, don't know what to think about this. link a reply to: Violater1 yes, so is almost all the major media, magazines (that are left), most of hollywood, GOP kinda, most of the bush's. Who else? Google is pro clinton like drudge is pro trump without a doubt Just about every news story under google news is pro hillary and negative towards trump. If I recall correctly they even advice her campaign edit on 511031America/ChicagoThu, 27 Oct 2016 21:51:09 -05 p3142 by interupt42 because: (no reason given) Is the dead link the same as the good one in the following reply? Same vid#? No errors? link I'm getting the feeling that the gun control,Hillary as dictator,is not unlike Obamacare,forced on us,this is socialism and being the Corporations own the candidates,they want this we have no choice,they have the UN,plus a bunch of immigrants to join the UN forces to attack the american freedom fighters,you may think I'm crazy but they said I was crazy when I said 9/11 was a controlled demolition,look at the past,put common sense to it,the big ball is rolling,too much money at stake here thats the goal rich get richer,no more middle class,upper middle class,those making like 1 or 2 million a year,will be joining the crowd,unless your a member of the party,Known many an immigrant who lived under communist rule,all storys kind of same,all bad,no sense of identity",FAKE
+596,Handicapping the Hispanic vote for 2016 GOPers,"The last Texas Republican to occupy the Oval Office, George W. Bush, took 49 percent of the state’s Hispanic vote in his 2004 presidential re-election, setting a relatively high bar for the handful of Texas-born or -raised Republicans who might be hoping to follow in his footsteps in 2016.
+
+Republican presidential aspirants with ties to the Lone Star State must figure out how to hold the GOP base and attract conservative Hispanics if they want to be successful in Texas, political observers say.
+
+So how do the party's four most prominent Texas affiliated might-be candidates — former Gov. Rick Perry; Jeb Bush, the son and brother of two former presidents from the state; Texas’ junior U.S. senator, Ted Cruz; and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — stack up in the early going?
+
+For Republicans to avoid a repeat of 2012, when presidential nominee Mitt Romney took only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote nationwide, they need to nominate a conservative candidate who can go into Hispanic communities and truly connect with voters, said Hector De Leon, co-chairman of the Associated Republicans of Texas, which reaches out to Hispanic voters.
+
+“It’s all about paying attention,” De Leon said.
+
+Hispanics made up 10 percent of the national electorate in the 2012 presidential election. But in Texas, they make up almost one-third of eligible voters. And there’s plenty room for improvement when it comes to voter turnout. Only 39 percent of Texas Hispanics eligible to vote cast ballots in 2012.
+
+Political observers say candidates would be right to take a page out of George W. Bush’s playbook on Hispanic outreach. He solidified his winning record with Hispanics with help from Latino-media guru Lionel Sosa, who told The Texas Tribune he has been in talks with Jeb Bush about his possible presidential bid.
+
+Sosa helped George W. Bush’s campaign craft several television ads that painted him as the candidate who understood Hispanic culture. The candidate who can mobilize on-the-fence Hispanic voters who usually do not turn out to vote could win the state.
+
+“I do think the primaries will include a concerted effort by some candidates to speak to that constituency,” said Sylvia Manzano, a senior analyst for the nonpartisan political polling organization Latino Decisions. “In Texas, that’s 10 million people. That’s a number that cannot be ignored.”
+
+Though it's still early in the game, many political observers say Jeb Bush is best positioned at the moment. He grew up in Midland, spent much of his childhood in Houston and is considered friendly to the Hispanic community, both personally and politically.
+
+“Jeb Bush is not going to come in and play mariachi politics,” Manzano said. “He knows better than that.”
+
+But this far out, all is speculation. As the candidates tiptoe toward the starting gate, here's how several political experts handicap the field.
+
+Already holding a political advantage because he is fluent in Spanish, the former Florida governor has experience winning over Hispanics in a state where they make up a large part of the population. During his 1998 re-election campaign, Bush won an impressive 61 percent of Florida's Hispanic electorate. It's worth noting, though, that Florida’s mostly Cuban Hispanic population differs from Texas, where a majority of Hispanics have roots in Mexico.
+
+What the experts say:
+
+For Bush, reaching out to Texas Hispanics would be an extended family affair. Aside from benefiting from the groundwork his family has done in the state, expect to see Bush campaigning with his Mexican-born wife, Columba, and his son, Texas Land CommissionerGeorge P. Bush, at his side. George P. is also fluent in Spanish and helped found Hispanic Republicans of Texas, a political group that recruits and supports Hispanic Republicans running for public office.
+
+Bush’s record on issues that resonate with Texas Hispanics, particularly immigration reform, could prove attractive to this voting group. He has urged Congress to pass immigration reform and has highlighted it as a key issue in helping Republicans win Hispanics. He also gained national attention last year when he said many of those entering the country illegally do so out of an “act of love” for their families.
+
+As the state’s longest-serving governor, Perry has long courted Texas Hispanics. He has steadily improved his standing since winning only 13 percent of the Hispanic vote when he defeated Hispanic businessman Tony Sanchez of Laredo in 2002. By the time he was re-elected in 2010, Perry pulled in 38 percent of Hispanic voters.
+
+What the experts say:
+
+Perry’s efforts to broaden his appeal were buoyed by the passage of the Texas Dream Act during his 14-year tenure. Though the future of the law granting in-state tuition to some undocumented immigrants is unclear, Perry has stood by it both on the national stage and at home. During a 2011 presidential debate, Perry famously told opponents who challenged his support of the law that they had no heart. More recently, as the state’s new GOP leadership works to overturn the law, Perry has been vocal about his continued support for it.
+
+Because he presided over the state’s economic boom in the last decade, Perry has a unique opportunity to appeal to Hispanics on economic issues. If Perry can convince Hispanic voters that they benefited from the so-called Texas Miracle, he may be able to sway some on-the-fence voters his way.
+
+Though he is the only Hispanic in the group — and the first Hispanic senator from Texas — Cruz has largely avoided making heritage part of his political persona beyond recounting his father’s journey to the United States from Cuban as an exile in 1957. Still, he has done well with Texas Hispanics. In 2012, he outperformed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, taking 35 percent of the Hispanic vote, according to a Latino Decisions poll.
+
+What the experts say:
+
+Cruz arguably faces the toughest challenge courting Texas Hispanics given his divisive tone on immigration and health care. He has been vocal in his opposition to President Obama’s executive order on immigration, which will grant millions of undocumented immigrants work permits and reprieve from deportation proceedings. The order is widely popular among Hispanics. On health care, Cruz has been one of the biggest foes of the federal Affordable Care Act. Texas Hispanics — who make up a large portion of the state’s uninsured population —overwhelmingly support the health law.
+
+Though Paul was elected to the Senate from Kentucky, where Hispanics make up only 3 percent of the population, he grew up in Lake Jackson, Texas, where Hispanics are one-fifth of the population. Paul has spent the last few months preaching a message of Hispanic inclusion within the Republican ranks.
+
+What the experts say:
+
+Paul is someone to watch in the upcoming election when it comes to appealing to Texas Hispanics because of his views on growing the GOP’s number of Hispanic supporters. Because he is largely unknown among Texas Hispanics, Paul also has some room to improve his standing. A November 2014 poll by Latino Decisions found that almost a third of Texas Latino voters have no opinion of Paul.",REAL
+6061,Truth Will Out Radio: The Laconia Incident,"Radio Aryan October 28, 2016 
+Sven Longshanks , Dennis Wise and Messerschmitt bring us another episode of Truth Will Out Radio, this week looking at the Laconia incident and the British Freikorps. 
+Messerschmitt deviates somewhat with his Axis War Heroes series in that the main subject is not a person but the so-called “Laconia Incident”. In September 1942 a German U-boat under the Command of Werner Hartenstein torpedoed the British troopship Laconia. As Hartenstein realized that a lot of Italian prisoners of war and even civilians including women and children were among the survivors struggling for their lives he ordered that as many as possible were to be taken on board the U-boat. Even though he radioed his intentions to all surrounding vessels in plain English and had a Red Cross flag draped across the U-boat he and the survivors they were carrying were attacked by an American B-24. What happened to the survivors and what the response of the German Navy was when it learned of this atrocity is elaborated on by Schmitt and the presentation ends with a letter from a relative of one of the casualties, thanking the U-boat commanders for their courageous and honourable behaviour. 
+This presentation shows how the Allies were breaking the rules of war while the Germans were keeping to their treaties. During the Nuremberg trials this incident was brought up in the hopes of convicting Admiral Doenitz for advising the U-boats not to pick up survivors, but it had the inadvertent effect of exposing the British and Americans of waging unrestricted submarine warfare, in itself a possible war crime as it breaks the law of the sea that any shipwrecked mariners must be rescued, no matter who they are. Dennis points out the hypocrisy of the British and Americans in this before reminding us that not all the British behaved like this during the war. Some became members of the Freikorps and fought to defend Europe from the Bolshevik menace alongside the other SS Volunteer Legions. These heroes were called traitors by the British establishment, yet their oath was to protect Europe from Communism, not to fight against Britain. It is a testament to the truthful ideology of National Socialism that prisoners of war could be set free to fight against Communism once they had heard the truth about it from their kinsmen in the League of St George. 
+After giving us a brief history of these brave young British men, Dennis and Sven conclude the podcast by talking about the importance of race and how the Freikorps highlighted this in their propaganda. 
+Presented by Sven Longshanks, Dennis Wise and Messerschmitt 
+Truth Will Out Radio: The Laconia Incident – TWOR 102816",FAKE
+1569,GOP establishment nightmare? Ted Cruz vs. Donald Trump,"Watch the CNN Republican debate Tuesday, December 15 at 6:00 p.m. ET and 8:30 p.m. ET.
+
+The GOP establishment, confronted by a recalcitrant electorate that refuses to leave Donald Trump, is being forced to take a fresh look at Ted Cruz , a man with grassroots strength in key early primary states and few friends in Washington.
+
+Suddenly, the Republican Party's best hope could be a man hell-bent on transforming it: a senator who openly spars with fellow GOP colleagues, and has campaigned by painting its leaders as spineless and feeble.
+
+Headed into Tuesday's CNN Republican presidential debate, Cruz and Trump have turned Iowa into a two-man race, with the Texan leading in two new polls. Cruz is up 31% to Trump's 21% among likely GOP caucus-goers, according to the Bloomberg Politics-Des Moines Register poll released Saturday. A Fox News poll Sunday has Cruz leading Trump 28% to 26%.
+
+A small and growing number of Republicans allied with the establishment -- the force long thought to quickly consolidate against a surging Cruz bid -- are coming to terms with the idea that he may be palatable in an election cycle where Trump has pushed the envelope well beyond what they considered acceptable.
+
+""Oh God, yes,"" said Ed Rogers, a top Republican lobbyist, when asked if he'd prefer Cruz. ""Compared to Trump, he's OK.""
+
+Establishment Republicans had enough of a problem when Trump began his populist-fueled move to the top of national polls, where he has stubbornly remained for five months. But Cruz's steady rise means that even if Trump were taken out by a well-financed negative campaign, they might have to deal with a stronger Cruz, who has more political polish than the more improvisational Trump.
+
+""If you talk to my peers around town, collectively it's an appreciation the guy is smart as hell,"" explained a senior Washington Republican who is backing another candidate. ""He can be a more acceptable alternative to Trump, if it comes to that.""
+
+The irony hasn't escaped them. Said the Republican: ""It's an interesting life -- and everything's relative.""
+
+""The second he starts to look like a winner in Washington,"" Rogers said, ""he's going to have a bunch of new friends.""
+
+It's a dilemma swatted away on Capitol Hill -- perhaps optimistically.
+
+Asked about choosing Trump or Cruz, 2008 nominee Sen. John McCain would only allow that they are ""smart people."" Bush backer Sen. Susan Collins would just offer that they are ""obviously not my choice.""
+
+And there's no guarantee either one can beat Hillary Clinton.
+
+""He's not as outrageous as Trump, but I don't know that he's any more electable than Trump,"" said Charlie Black, a senior adviser to Republican presidential campaigns for over two decades.
+
+Brian Walsh, a longtime Senate campaign aide, said it's an out-of-control Trump -- not an in-control Cruz -- that explains the Texan's growing appeal.
+
+""Trump has gone so far that it has in some ways masked how problematic Cruz would be as the nominee as well,"" he said.
+
+Despite his background as an Ivy League-educated attorney and his time in the Bush administration, Cruz rose to prominence as a tea party darling who became the national face of the 2013 government shutdown. Cruz has spent the two years since working to salvage his relationship with some potential investors in his campaign, but he has reveled in his image as a Washington bad boy, the only senator willing to do on Capitol Hill what he campaigned on back at home.
+
+It's something that has made him enemies in Washington, where he has not convinced a single Senate colleague to back his campaign. Cruz helped push Republicans to shut down the government in a high-stakes fight over Obamacare, a strategy that failed to get results but didn't cause a predicted electoral meltdown.
+
+On the trail, he has shown no willingness to moderate his positions, bragging about his conservative purity and his rabble-rousing reputation in the Capitol.
+
+But even compared to Cruz's burn-it-down rhetoric, Trump's campaign has been more incendiary and worrisome for party elders determined to beat likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The mogul had harsh things to say about Hispanics, prisoners of war, women in the media, the disabled, and most recently, Muslims, who he thinks temporarily should not be allowed to enter the United States.
+
+And most concerning for GOP leaders, Trump has frequently floated leaving the Republican Party altogether to mount an independent bid, which would significantly increase Clinton's chances of winning the White House.
+
+The pair appears to be heading toward a clash that Cruz, at least, long sought to delay. On Friday evening, about 24 hours after audio leaked of Cruz questioning Trump's judgment at a private fundraiser, the real estate mogul launched his first attacks on Cruz.
+
+Cruz had attempted to head that off by alleging that mainstream Republicans were trying to sow discord.
+
+""The Establishment's only hope: Trump & me in a cage match,"" he tweeted Friday morning. ""Sorry to disappoint — @realdonaldtrump is terrific. #DealWithIt""
+
+Cruz has done little to woo the Republicans he used as his bogeyman: He has raised the lion's share of his money far from the New York-to-Washington corridor, raced to the party's right flank on every issue of the day, and campaigned loudly on the polarizing social issues that one well-placed Republican said puts some contributors permanently out of reach.
+
+Cruz, on paper, should not be as repellent to the GOP political class as he is. Nurtured by the George W. Bush network in Texas, he served as solicitor general before winning an upset bid in the 2012 Republican U.S. Senate primary.
+
+To Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, that resume should theoretically make him attractive to the party's elite.
+
+""At a core of Cruz's candidacy is a great phonyism,"" Stevens said of the self-stylized insurgent. ""You can wear all the plaid shirts and shoot off all the automatic weapons you want, but you're an insider.""
+
+And some of his positions, such as on national security, do hew closely to the party's center. As Cruz held court on MSNBC's ""Morning Joe"" last week, ""you could've sworn he was working for George Herbert Walker Bush on his foreign policy,"" a senior Republican said.
+
+But a leading Republican in frequent touch with high-level donors, said even though those contributors may despise Cruz, they are learning to live with him. ""If that's what we need to do to beat Trump,"" the Republican said, ""then that's what you get.""",REAL
+1178,Bernie Sanders lost poor voters in South Carolina by a big margin — a problem for his political revolution,"Hillary Clinton didn't just take the vast majority of the available delegates in South Carolina on Saturday night. She also took away one of Bernie Sanders's strongest arguments — that he's the candidate who has the most working-class support.
+
+In Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders had done better than Clinton among voters in the lowest income brackets. That seemed to bolster his claim that his ""political revolution"" could energize millions of new low-income voters who typically don't turn out to vote.
+
+This argument, however, is much less tenable after tonight. Clinton did best among poor voters in South Carolina, taking 82 percent of those who earn under $30,000 on her way to a 37-point victory, according to exit polling by the New York Times.
+
+Here are the results by income, according to the Times:
+
+Of course, this discrepancy is largely driven by Clinton's huge 87-13 margin of victory over black voters. But that's the point — outside of states like Iowa and New Hampshire, many low-income and working-class voters aren't white. Unless Sanders is able to win working-class voters beyond the whitest electorates in the country, his revolution may be over almost as soon as it started.",REAL
+9545,Should I Get Botox?,"Support Us Should I Get Botox? 
+source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments November 1, 2016 at 6:25 am 
+I think that maybe she can use a very natural makeup as an enhancement for her features to make her skin look softer and fresher. More than those lines her skin looks tired. Exfoliation, hydration, and a natural makeup will do a great difference in her. November 1, 2016 at 6:25 am 
+Botox is a toxin, it's not for ""taking care of your skin"". If you want to actually take care of your skin and reduce the appearance of your wrinkles, you should do a deep chemical peel once a year, derma roll every month, and use prescription Retin-A in between those things. Keeping the skin hydrated and nourished with consistent exfoliation is the key to young skin. So vitamin e oil, steam facials and natural moisturizers on the regular. As far as feminism and skincare/plastic surgery, I think it's less a gender issue than a reach to maintain biological attraction. Youth equals fertility, and – because we're animals – to attract a mate, generally it's about how ""fertile"" you appear. Call it peacocking or whatever you will, it's not anti-feminist to care about how you look.",FAKE
+1506,Jeb Bush Picks Up Endorsement From Lindsey Graham,"Former GOP presidential hopeful Linsdey Graham has announced his endorsement of Jeb Bush for president.
+
+Graham's presidential campaign went nowhere, but as a senator from the early voting state of South Carolina he hopes to still have some clout.
+
+Graham praised Bush's temperament Friday morning, following Thursday night's GOP debate. ""He hasn't tried to get ahead in a contested primary by embracing demagoguery ... he's not running to be commander-in-chief by running people down,"" he said.
+
+That was clearly a reference to Donald Trump. Bush returned the admiration, calling Graham a ""patriot.""
+
+""He loves this country. You just hear it how he spoke from his heart about what's at stake here. What's at stake is our way of life,"" Bush said.
+
+Jeb Bush — still slumping in polls — has been looking for a way to jump-start his campaign, but an endorsement from a former candidate who couldn't break through either probably won't give Bush the upswing he needs.
+
+With the Iowa caucuses fewer than three weeks away, he's polling behind Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Ben Carson both nationally and in Iowa. Bush was unable to stand out from the field once again at Thursday's Republican presidential debate. And Bush's donors are reportedly getting skittish, saying it's only a matter of time before he drops out. Politico reported that several donors said they are now waiting for what one former George W. Bush administration appointee described as a ""family hall pass"" to switch to another campaign after the New Hampshire primary.",REAL
+1641,"2016 Republican race enters a new, volatile phase","The fight for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination appears to be moving into a new, more fluid phase.
+
+No longer is the question merely whether or how Donald Trump can be stopped.
+
+The recent rise in the polls of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson — Trump’s low-key stylistic opposite — has shown that the celebrity billionaire may not be the only one who can tap the appetite of many in the party’s angry base for an outsider.
+
+And after Wednesday’s chaotic and freewheeling debate, there also is a new dynamic on the establishment side of the race.
+
+Former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s once-formidable campaign appears to be nearing a state of collapse, made worse by his flailing on the stage in Colorado.
+
+That has provided an opening to his onetime ally, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is getting a new look from the party establishment — an ironic situation, given Rubio’s roots as an insurgent tea party favorite in 2010.
+
+“Marco Rubio now has probably the best shot to emerge as the mainstream alternative to Trump and Carson,” said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary for President George W. Bush.
+
+More broadly, Fleischer, who is not committed to any of the 2016 candidates, predicted that the GOP is about to enter “a condensed version of where it was four years ago, where the party is volatile and shopping around.”
+
+That could help Ted Cruz, who also made a strong showing in the debate. The firebrand senator from Texas, widely despised by the Washington Republican hierarchy, is looking to nudge out Trump and Carson among voters who are looking for a candidate to supplant the old order.
+
+“I don’t think the party is going to nominate anybody who has not been elected before,” said Stuart Stevens, who was a top strategist for 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney.
+
+Also likely to force some clarity in the coming weeks is the calendar. The first contest, in Iowa, is barely more than three months away.
+
+So the focus for all the leading contenders will have to shift, from raising their profiles nationally to refining the strategies and organization it will take to put specific states in their column.
+
+“The campaign is really in a nuts-and-bolts stage,” said Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. “It’s about getting on the ballot, organizing, and making sure people understand what caucuses are in Iowa and other states and teach them how to participate. It’s about getting people committed and ready.”
+
+Lewandowski said Trump’s campaign is already hiring staff for states that do not hold their primaries until March.
+
+“Our approach is to execute and meet the criteria to get on the ballot in all 50 states, in five territories and in the District of Columbia. That’s a full-time job,” he added. “This campaign is doing all of the things necessary for long-term success.”
+
+At the same time, Trump seemed to be moderating and refining his message as he campaigned outside Reno, Nev., Thursday afternoon.
+
+Where he previously has devoted his rallies to slinging insults at his opponents and boasting about his poll numbers, Trump focused instead on describing the professional and life experience he would bring to the White House.
+
+He also cited issues where he claimed to have led before it was a popular thing to do — including opposing the Iraq war and aggressively combating illegal immigration.
+
+“That’s the kind of thinking we need in the country,” Trump said. “A lot of the people in the audience, maybe in your small way you have that same thinking.”
+
+Bush, campaigning in New Hampshire, insisted that his struggling candidacy should not be counted out. The former Florida governor, who is polling in the single digits almost everywhere, insisted, “We’re doing fine.”
+
+But he appeared to acknowledge that he had not helped his prospects with his showing in the debate.
+
+“Look, there are two types of politicians. There are the talkers and there are the doers,” Bush told the crowd. “I wish I could talk as well as some of the people on the stage, the big personalities on the stage, but I’m a doer.”
+
+Rubio, meanwhile, must capi­tal­ize — quickly — on whatever interest and momentum may be generated by his debate performance. He spent the morning making the rounds of six network and cable television shows and the remainder of the day fundraising in Denver and Chicago. He will be in Iowa on Friday.
+
+On “CBS This Morning,” Rubio declined to criticize Bush personally and said the differences between the two will be fleshed out in terms of policy.
+
+“I’m going to continue to tell people who I am, what I’m for. There are policy differences between us — we’ll discuss those. Americans deserve to hear those. But I’m not going to change my campaign,” he said.
+
+“Jeb is my friend, I have admiration for him. I’m not running against him. I’m running for president.”
+
+Cruz, meanwhile, is building what GOP insiders say is a strong organization. The campaign says that it has 77,000 volunteers on the ground, with 6,000 in the first four voting states.
+
+Fundraising has also been robust — and was reignited by the debate, during which the senator trained his fire on the CNBC moderators and the media. A Cruz aide said more than $1 million had poured in since Wednesday night’s debate.
+
+There will be growing pressure on candidates who are getting no traction to get out of the race. On Thursday, for instance, the New York Times editorial board called upon New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to abandon his bid.
+
+“New Jersey is in trouble, and the governor is off pursuing a presidential run that’s turned out to be nothing more than a vanity project,” the paper wrote. “Mr. Christie’s numbers are in the basement, and he’s nearly out of campaign cash. This is his moment, all right: to go home and use the rest of his term to clean out the barn, as Speaker John Boehner would say.”
+
+Christie, for his part, tweeted, “Can’t read the article because I don’t have a subscription, but I can tell you this — I am not going anywhere.”
+
+Robert Costa in Colorado and Jenna Johnson in Nevada contributed to this report.",REAL
+139,"‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ was built on a lie","The late evening of Aug. 9, 2014, I couldn’t sleep. I was due to substitute-anchor MSNBC’s “UP with Steve Kornacki” and should have been asleep. But after looking at my Twitter feed and reading the rage under #Ferguson, I felt compelled to type a reaction to the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. Tying the shooting to the inane whine of certain politicians about a “war on whites,”  I decried the next morning the death of yet another unarmed black man at the hands of a white police officer.
+
+In those early hours and early days, there was more unknown than known. But this month, the Justice Department released two must-read investigations connected to the killing of Brown that filled in blanks, corrected the record and brought sunlight to dark places by revealing ugly practices that institutionalized racism and hardship. They have also forced me to deal with two uncomfortable truths: Brown never surrendered with his hands up, and Wilson was justified in shooting Brown.
+
+The report on the Ferguson police department detailed abuse and blatant trampling of the constitutional rights of people, mostly African Americans, in Ferguson. Years of mistreatment by the police, the courts and the municipal government, including evidence that all three balanced their books on the backs of the people of Ferguson, were laid bare in 102 damning pages. The overwhelming data from DOJ provided background and much-needed context for why a small St. Louis suburb most had never heard of exploded the moment Brown was killed. His death gave voice to many who suffered in silence.
+
+The unarmed 18-year-old also became a potent symbol of the lack of trust between African Americans and law enforcement. Not just in Ferguson, but in the rest of the country. Lord knows there have been plenty of recent examples. And the militarized response to protesters by local police put an exclamation point on demonstrators’ concerns. But the other DOJ report, the one on the actual shooting of Michael Brown, shows him to be an inappropriate symbol.
+
+Through exhaustive interviews with witnesses, cross-checking their statements with previous statements to authorities and the media, ballistics, DNA evidence and results from three autopsies, the Justice Department was able to present a credible and troubling picture of what happened on Canfield Drive. More credible than the grand jury decision to not indict Wilson. The transcript of his grand jury testimony read like so much hand-holding by the prosecution.
+
+What DOJ found made me ill. Wilson knew about the theft of the cigarillos from the convenience store and had a description of the suspects. Brown fought with the officer and tried to take his gun. And the popular hands-up storyline, which isn’t corroborated by ballistic and DNA evidence and multiple witness statements, was perpetuated by Witness 101. In fact, just about everything said to the media by Witness 101, whom we all know as Dorian Johnson, the friend with Brown that day, was not supported by the evidence and other witness statements.
+
+Page 6: Brown then grabbed the weapon and struggled with Wilson to gain control of it. Wilson fired, striking Brown in the hand. Autopsy results and bullet trajectory, skin from Brown’s palm on the outside of the SUV door as well as Brown’s DNA on the inside of the driver’s door corroborate Wilson’s account that during the struggle, Brown used his right hand to grab and attempt to control Wilson’s gun. According to three autopsies, Brown sustained a close range gunshot wound to the fleshy portion of his right hand at the base of his right thumb. Soot from the muzzle of the gun found embedded in the tissue of this wound coupled with indicia of thermal change from the heat of the muzzle indicate that Brown’s hand was within inches of the muzzle of Wilson’s gun when it was fired. The location of the recovered bullet in the side panel of the driver’s door, just above Wilson’s lap, also corroborates Wilson’s account of the struggle over the gun and when the gun was fired, as do witness accounts that Wilson fired at least one shot from inside the SUV.
+
+Page 8: Although there are several individuals who have stated that Brown held his hands up in an unambiguous sign of surrender prior to Wilson shooting him dead, their accounts do not support a prosecution of Wilson. As detailed throughout this report, some of those accounts are inaccurate because they are inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence; some of those accounts are materially inconsistent with that witness’s own prior statements with no explanation, credible [or] otherwise, as to why those accounts changed over time. Certain other witnesses who originally stated Brown had his hands up in surrender recanted their original accounts, admitting that they did not witness the shooting or parts of it, despite what they initially reported either to federal or local law enforcement or to the media. Prosecutors did not rely on those accounts when making a prosecutive decision. While credible witnesses gave varying accounts of exactly what Brown was doing with his hands as he moved toward Wilson – i.e., balling them, holding them out, or pulling up his pants up – and varying accounts of how he was moving – i.e., “charging,” moving in “slow motion,” or “running” – they all establish that Brown was moving toward Wilson when Wilson shot him. Although some witnesses state that Brown held his hands up at shoulder level with his palms facing outward for a brief moment, these same witnesses describe Brown then dropping his hands and “charging” at Wilson.
+
+The DOJ report notes on page 44 that Johnson “made multiple statements to the media immediately following the incident that spawned the popular narrative that Wilson shot Brown execution-style as he held up his hands in surrender.” In one of those interviews, Johnson told MSNBC that Brown was shot in the back by Wilson. It was then that Johnson said Brown stopped, turned around with his hands up and said, “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!” And, like that, “hands up, don’t shoot” became the mantra of a movement. But it was wrong, built on a lie.
+
+Yet this does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown’s death. Nor does it discredit what has become the larger “Black Lives Matter.” In fact, the false Ferguson narrative stuck because of concern over a distressing pattern of other police killings of unarmed African American men and boys around the time of Brown’s death. Eric Garner was killed on a Staten Island street on July 17. John Crawford III was killed in a Wal-Mart in Beavercreek, Ohio, on Aug. 5, four days before Brown. Levar Jones survived being shot by a South Carolina state trooper on Sept. 4. Tamir Rice, 12 years old, was killed in a Cleveland park on Nov. 23, the day before the Ferguson grand jury opted not to indict Wilson. Sadly, the list has grown longer.
+
+Now that black lives matter to everyone, it is imperative that we continue marching for and giving voice to those killed in racially charged incidents at the hands of police and others. But we must never allow ourselves to march under the banner of a false narrative on behalf of someone who would otherwise offend our sense of right and wrong. And when we discover that we have, we must acknowledge it, admit our error and keep on marching. That’s what I’ve done here.",REAL
+7744,Lavrov and Kerry discuss Syrian settlement,"Lavrov and Kerry discuss Syrian settlement October 28, 2016 TASS 
+Russian Foreign Ministry Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed the Syrian settlement as well as the situation in Yemen and Libya by telephone on Oct. 28. 
+The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the conversation had taken place at the U.S. side’s request. 
+""The foreign policy chiefs continued discussing ways of settling the Syrian conflict, including the normalization of the situation around Aleppo, with account taken of fundamental approaches contained in the previously reached Russian-U.S. agreements. For that, the United States should ultimately separate moderate opposition (in Syria) from terror groups,"" the Russian Foreign Ministry said. 
+""Lavrov and Kerry also discussed assistance to the solution of crises in Yemen and Libya as well as separate issues of bilateral agenda,"" the Russian Foreign Ministry stressed.",FAKE
+8177,BREAKING : DOJ Says They Will “HELP” Review the 650K Emails – TruthFeed,"BREAKING : DOJ Says They Will “HELP” Review the 650K Emails BREAKING : DOJ Says They Will “HELP” Review the 650K Emails Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 31, 2016 
+Oh great, now the biased DOJ is going to “help” the FBI go through the 650K emails because they want to “HURRY THROUGH” it? 
+That’s unsettling and smells of more “rigged favors” from Loretta Lynch. 
+On Friday the FBI announced they were reopening the email investigation into Hillary’s mishandling of classified information. 
+In a statement, the FBI said that they discovered “new emails” pertinent to the earlier investigation on “several devices.” 
+We now know there were 650K emails found on Huma and Anthony’s private computer. 
+How do you feel about the DOJ “helping” sift through the emails? 
+I say, HELL NO! BREAKING: Justice Dept. says it’ll dedicate all needed resources to quickly review emails in Clinton case – AP This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+4134,Bernie Sanders' call for ouster of two convention co-chairs rejected,"Democratic National Committee officials on Saturday turned down Bernie Sanders' formal request for the ouster of “aggressive attack surrogates” for Hillary Clinton from key national convention committees.
+
+The campaign announced earlier that it wanted to remove Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy as a co-chairman of the Platform Committee and former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank as head of the Rules Committee. Frank has sharply criticized Sanders’ positions on breaking up big banks and Malloy has criticized Sanders on guns.
+
+“Governor Malloy and Mr. Frank have both been aggressive attack surrogates for the Clinton campaign,” Sanders campaign counsel Brad Deutsch wrote in a letter to the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee. “Their criticisms of Sen. Sanders have gone beyond dispassionate ideological disagreement and have exposed a deeper professional, political and personal hostility toward the senator and his campaign.""
+
+But committee co-chairs Jim Roosevelt and Lorraine Miller responded that his challenge ""fails to meet the criteria"" for their dismissal. It did not allege any violations in the conduct of their elections to their posts by the DNC executive committee in January, they wrote.
+
+The Sanders campaign’s Friday letter to Democratic National Committee rules officials marks the latest turn in Sanders’ feud with party officials. It comes a week after Sanders said he would make sure Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida isn’t reappointed to her role as head of the DNC if he becomes president and he began fundraising for her primary opponent, Tim Canova.
+
+Most members of the convention standing committees — rules, platform and credentials — are awarded to candidates based on the results of those primaries and caucuses. But under party rules, Wasserman Schultz recommended co-chairs and a slate of 25 at-large appointments per committee for approval by the party’s executive committee.
+
+In a May 6 letter to Wasserman Schultz, Sanders complained she selected only three of his more than 40 recommendations for committee appointments, and he expressed no confidence in Malloy or Frank, writing their appointments suggest the committees are being established “in an overtly partisan way.”
+
+Deutsch argued Friday that Frank and Malloy can’t be relied upon to perform convention duties fairly “while laboring under such deeply held bias.”
+
+“The appointment of two individuals so outspokenly critical of Sen. Sanders, and so closely affiliated with Secretary Clinton's campaign, raises concerns that two of the three Convention Standing Committees are being constituted in an overtly partisan way designed to exclude meaningful input from supporters of Sen. Sanders' candidacy,” Deutsch wrote.
+
+In April, Tad Devine, Sanders’ senior adviser, said Frank is among surrogates for Hillary Clinton who used Sanders’ remarks to a New York Daily News editorial board on April 1 to promote a story line that questions Sanders’ capacity to be president. Devine pointed to Frank’s April 6 statements on MSNBC that Sanders “confused several things” in his responses to questions about his core issue of breaking up big banks. Frank also said Sanders’ responses to the editorial board were not “coherent.”
+
+Frank said in an April interview with USA TODAY that he would step aside from his co-chairmanship if the Democratic nomination is still uncertain in June and if a Rules Committee decision could be the deciding factor. With Clinton's decisive lead in delegates, that appears unlikely.
+
+A Connecticut Democratic Party spokesman told USA TODAY earlier this month that Malloy agrees with Sanders on many issues. On Saturday, Leigh Appleby said Malloy is committed to a platform and process reflective of the party's diverse viewpoints.
+
+""This year's Democratic platform process is making an unprecedented effort to ensure the process is reflective of the entire party and that every Democrat has an opportunity to have their voice heard in a meaningful way,"" Appleby said in a statement. ""And at the end of the day, Democats will put forward a platform that stands in stark contrast to the hateful, divisive, and dangerous policies of Donald Trump.""",REAL
+917,Five Reasons the New York Democratic Primary Felt Competitive,"NEW YORK, N.Y. — If Hillary Clinton is winning the Democratic presidential race, why has it felt like she’s losing? Yes, Mrs. Clinton scored an important victory in New York Tuesday, winning her adopted home state in the primary. But should the outcome ever have been in doubt?As a former senator from New York she […]",REAL
+3854,"To get around Congress, Obama turns to city halls","WASHINGTON — President Obama has quietly racked up a series of legislative victories during the past few months as lawmakers have enthusiastically embraced his calls for a higher minimum wage, paid sick leave and universal pre-kindergarten.
+
+Instead of Capitol Hill, those victories happened in city halls, state houses and county buildings far from Washington.
+
+At least six major cities — Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Tacoma, Wash., and Washington, D.C. — have passed paid sick leave laws in the four months since Obama called for state and local action in this year's State of the Union Address. Since the 2013 address when Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage, 17 states and six major cities have taken action, including Los Angeles last week.
+
+Obama's state-and-local strategy may be unprecedented in its scope and ambition. Though previous administrations have appointed top advisers to listen to concerns of state and local officials, the Obama White House appears to be the first to aggressively use those same channels to encourage them to adopt Obama's policies.
+
+""It is a change in the paradigm, where we used to sit passively by waiting for elected officials to come to us. We think we can have a more substantial impact if we collaborate,"" said Valerie Jarrett, the assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs.
+
+""I think the president has always had the perspective that change always happens from the ground up, and our state and local officials are oftentimes more influenced by the will of the American people than the politics in Washington would seem to indicate,"" Jarrett said in an interview.
+
+Obama has no formal authority over state and local lawmakers, so his persuasion is a form of soft power — the ""phone"" part of what Obama has described as a ""pen-and-phone"" strategy to take action in the absence of congressional cooperation.
+
+He's found fertile ground in Democratic-run cities such as Seattle, where Mayor Ed Murray helped push for a minimum wage and paid leave laws that have gone into effect since April.
+
+""President Obama recognizes that good ideas are being incubated at the local level, and those are ideas that are going to go to scale nationally,"" Murray said. That recognition can go a long way in a city such as Seattle, which often doesn't get the national attention East Coast cities do. ""The president of the United States recognizing us only helps us. We do other things beside e-commerce and coffee,"" Murray said.
+
+There's also resistance. Jon Russell is a councilman in Culpeper, Va., and the director of the American City County Exchange, a year-old initiative of the small-government American Legislative Exchange Council.
+
+Russell said states — not cities, not Congress and not the president — should be the primary regulator of labor conditions. Obama, he said, is ""hop-skipping over the states.""
+
+""With the number of states that have now turned to the opposite political party, he doesn't have the allies there that he used to,"" Russell said. ""To work with the urban areas to push his agenda is not surprising. It's the only allies he really has.""
+
+The strategy has been more effective on some policies than others. Since last September, more than 200 mayors have signed on to the My Brother's Keeper initiative, a commitment to help boys and young men of color. But since Obama called for states to offer free community college in January, only a handful have moved in that direction.
+
+The state-and-local strategy effort has been particularly effective on paid leave policies, which Obama championed in his State of the Union Address this year. ""Forty-three million workers have no paid sick leave — 43 million. Think about that,"" Obama said. ""So I'll be taking new action to help states adopt paid leave laws of their own.""
+
+That pledge came with a $1 million budget from the Department of Labor to help fund feasibility studies for state and local governments, which will begin to be awarded this summer.
+
+Obama dispatched Jarrett and Labor Secretary Tom Perez on a ""Lead on Leave"" tour of cities that have adopted paid leave policies. Jarrett went to Philadelphia and Chicago; Perez has been to Portland, Ore., Pawtucket, R.I., St. Petersburg, Fla., and Seattle.
+
+Tuesday, Perez will be in Minneapolis, which just adopted a paid leave policy for city employees this month.
+
+Perez said it's a mistake to view the state-and-local strategy as separate from a larger effort. ""Our strategy is an all-of-the-above-and-then-some strategy,"" he said.
+
+He said Obama will continue to use executive orders, as he did when he increased the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10 an hour.
+
+""We want Congress to act, and I'm confident that it's a when question, not an if question. But we're also not going to wait around for Congress to act,"" Perez said.
+
+Although focusing on city councils may seem small compared with the sweeping congressional legislation early in Obama's presidency, state minimum wage laws will raise the pay of more than 7 million people by 2017. (That number, which comes from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, includes people making just above minimum wage who were helped indirectly because their wages are increased accordingly.)
+
+""That's nothing to sneeze at. That's progress,"" Jarrett said.
+
+San Francisco passed the first paid sick time law in the nation in 2006, requiring all employers to grant one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked. Three states and 18 cities now have paid sick leave laws on the books, according to A Better Balance, a New York-based legal advocacy group that tracks such laws.
+
+A year ago, advocates had a hard time breaking through the public consciousness on the issue, said the group's co-president, Sherry Leiwant. After a White House Working Families Summit last year, and again after January's State of the Union Address, there's been an ""explosion"" of interest by state and local lawmakers, she said.
+
+""The White House leadership on this issue has been huge. It's had a real impact,"" Leiwant said. ""That influence on mayors or governors, who are Democrats but haven't paid a lot of attention to this issue, or they want to be pro-business Democrats, this gives them a lot of cover.""
+
+A Better Balance still favors a national law that would cover everyone, but while the government is divided at the national level, ""the best strategy is to go to localities and states.""
+
+A city-by-city strategy can be painstaking and legally complicated. Every state grants different home rule powers to cities — and even different powers to different-sized cities in the same state.
+
+Philadelphia was able to pass a paid leave bill applying to private-sector workers, but Pittsburgh's law applies only to some non-union city workers. Pittsburgh City Councilwoman Natalia Rudiak credits Obama for giving her city's effort ""a lot of momentum,"" but she said more cities need to put pressure on the state Legislature to adopt statewide law.
+
+There's also pushback from the opposite direction. Last month, the Pennsylvania Senate voted 37-12 to preempt the Philadelphia law, taking the power to regulate sick leave out of the hands of local governments.
+
+That bill's sponsor, state Sen. John Eichelberger Jr., said it's untenable to have 2,562 municipalities with different labor standards, forcing businesses to comply with a patchwork of rules.
+
+""Philosophically, I have a real problem with President Obama going to a municipality and trying to accomplish an agenda, whether it's liberal or conservative or otherwise,"" he said. ""It's just not the place to adopt these policies.""
+
+Obama has opened an entirely new frontier of presidential power by turning to state and local governments, said Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, who studies the effect of presidential persuasion at the University of North Texas.
+
+""I'm really struck by, one, why hasn't anybody thought of this before? And two, this could be a very effective strategy,"" Eshbaugh-Soha said. ""At a time when executive orders are becoming particularly controversial and you're not able to break through the gridlock of Congress, I think it's ingenious.""
+
+He's skeptical that the effort will put much pressure on members of Congress who don't support Obama's policies.
+
+Jarrett said the effort is starting to snowball. She said some city leaders agreed with paid leave on principle but were reluctant to pass what could be seen as burdensome regulations in a difficult economy. As more cities and states have passed those policies, it's emboldened others.
+
+""Success begets success,"" she said. ""What the evidence has begun to show is it's not a burden but an investment that is starting to pay off.""
+
+Indeed, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter vetoed two paid leave bills in 2011 and 2013. But three weeks after Obama's State of the Union Address this year, Nutter reversed course.
+
+What changed? Nutter said the economy was better, and the bill contained key compromises to accommodate small businesses. Nutter spokesman Mark McDonald said he was unaware of any role Obama had in getting the bill passed.
+
+Bill Greenlee, the councilman who sponsored the measure, said Nutter ""completely turned a corner"" on paid leave when the president put it on his agenda. ""I gotta think that when the president mentions sick leave in his State of the Union, and if you're a Democrat and a supporter of the president's agenda in general, that's gotta have an effect,"" Greenlee said.
+
+Nutter did make a symbolic nod to Obama's influence in signing the paid leave bill: He signed it with a pen Obama gave him — after the president used it to sign an unemployment compensation bill. The only other time Nutter used that pen was on an executive order raising the minimum wage for city contractors to $12 an hour.",REAL
+7049,Celebrity Deathmatch: Darkmoon Sages Make Their Final Predictions on US Election,"Is Trump the lesser of two evils or are both candidates equally unelectable? 
+THE GREAT DEBATE BEGINS: We’ll know who is right tomorrow! 
+SARDONICUS (to Flopot) : I know it makes your blood boil to consider the “lesser of two evils” scenario. But LD has always been a conscientious non-voter and is therefore unlikely to be voting for either Trump or Hillary. Nor am I for that matter, since I am a UK resident and do not get to vote in the American elections. 
+You really must reconcile yourself, Flopot, to the fact that Hillary is held in such visceral loathing that her millions of haters feel they have no option but to vote for her opponent, Donald Trump, even though they are aware of the Donald’s many faults and his Zionist connections. 
+It’s either not voting at all or voting for the lesser of two evils. 
+FLOPOT : You don’t understand the meaning of “lesser of two evils”. It is a con trick; it doesn’t exist. Donald will pursue the same globalist wars and cultural revolutions as any other Zionist puppet. It is a meme that exists to get your consent to continue the same evil. 
+HARBINGER: Hear hear. Exactly Flopot. As I’ve stated umpteen times, Trump is good cop, Hillary is bad. But sadly, Sardonicus does not see the ‘grand plan’ even though the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carroll Quigley do, both very much part of that process. 
+There is not one politician in the west who becomes what they are, without a careful vetting procedure. Classic example is Jeremy Corbin , whom many thought was going to be the saviour of Labour and take it to the Zionists, when he has proven without any shadow of a doubt that he’s a rampant Zionist, even though who goes on pro Palestine marches. 
+Trump is a puppet. Clinton is a puppet. May is a puppet. Merkel is a puppet….. There is not ONE politician in the west who isn’t part of the ‘grand plan’ and it’s why everything works according to plan. 
+SARDONICUS (to Flopot and Harbinger) : Yes, I understand exactly what both you and Harbinger are saying and I can sympathize with your viewpoint. You are saying there is NO LESSER OF TWO EVILS here since both candidates are EQUALLY EVIL. Because both are Zionists and will deliver a program to further Jewish interests. That’s what you’re saying, right? 
+The only difference, as Harbie indicates, is that one of these two candidates is playing the “bad cop” (Hillary) and the other is playing the “good cop” (Trump). So it’s nonsense to vote for the “good cop” as the “lesser of two evils” when both cops are equally evil when the chips are down. 
+This is your argument and I can sympathize with it only if you are correct in your initial assumption that Trump has no redeeming features whatever and is a total charlatan and liar who will break every single promise of his if he gets into the White House. 
+You are entitled to that assumption, but you are NOT entitled to believe that your assumption is universally shared. Kevin MacDonald certainly doesn’t believe that Trump is a thorough scoundrel who will sell all White America down the river as soon as he is elected. Nor do the thousands of White Nationalists and other White Americans who share MacDonald’s perfectly acceptable and intellectually defensible views. 
+These millions of Trump supporters do NOT believe that Trump is an unmitigated scoundrel who will break his promise to build a wall to keep the Mexicans out. Trump has said he has no intention of starting a war with Russia. Hillary has made no such promise. Trump has said he will crack down on illegal immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants from hostile Muslim states. Well, MacDonald and his White Nationalists are giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. 
+I for one refuse to think that Kevin MacDonald and the millions who are hoping for a resurgence of White ethnic interests are deluded and mistaken in their advocacy of Donald Trump. They could be right. Trump could be their man and actually deliver the goods, i.e., improve the lives of millions of White Americans who are now suffering under Jewish hegemony and a multiculturalism that has gone mad. 
+The pessimism both of you share in regard to the irredeemable character of Donald Trump is simply a subjective state of mind. It’s an opinion, not a fact. 
+I may choose to say, “I can’t stand garlic and onions.” This makes me a garlic-and-onion pessimist. My subjective viewpoint that garlic and onions are horrible vegetables does not make it a scientific fact that garlic and onions are horrible vegetables. The garlic and onion eaters of the world are entitled to tell me to get lost if I told everyone to give up eating garlic and onions. 
+So it is with Flopot and Harbinger with their Trump pessimism. They are making a logical mistake in confusing impressions with facts. It is not a FACT that Trump is a scoundrel; at the most it is a subjective opinion. 
+HP : Trump is not a politician who has been a politician who grew up a politician and lived and breathed politics all his adult life. Apart from business/social, of course. 
+He’s an Alpha businessman who just happens to be waaay more intelligent and personally powerful than 99% of the political mediocres who envy and hate him. 
+He came from out of nowhere and like a freight train rolled right over them before they could even cry foul or man an offense against him based on their default slime factor M.O. 
+Hell, he vetted them ! Even as the entire weight of the political, M$M, Hollywood, Academia, foreigners, etc., etc., set upon him like no other in memory near or far. But they couldn’t even put a dent in him, or scare him off, and you know the vile demons tried very hard. 
+He didn’t scare. But he did and does scare them. A lot. 
+Being a uber-quick study, he easily overtook and surpassed the half-bright bureaucrat politicians and within one solitary year he IS The Alpha Politician. 
+Putin (and his 12 time zones full of natural resources) will no doubt enjoy Trump. Putin will respect his intelligence, embrace his personality, utilize his uber-business talents and skills, and very very importantly, hugely importantly.. share their big big patriotism for their nations, their citizens.. 
+In other words: The world gets an early Christmas present this year! 
+UNGENIUS: Well said, HP! I would add only one statement: Trump is not a murderer, but Killery is a murderer of long standing which should make a choice simple between the two. 
+GILBERT HUNTLY: Sardonicus, thanks for your healthy and sane perspective! Well said! 🙂 
+LOBRO: Seconding that. And add HP’s perceptive comment [ above ] to the score for level headed reason. 
+ARIADNATHEO: Sardonicus, Harbinger and Flopot: You are all wrong, as I used to be, I admit. 
+“Jewish hegemony,” “zionism” …. are nothing but red herrings that distract our attention from the real enemy. It’s not “Jews, Jews, Jews,” it’s Goyim, goyim, goyim. I owe it to Amy Martin to have finally understood who are, to cite her “the two more powerful lobbyists in the US” — the Podesta brothers! 
+Also who are the real rulers whose vast web of corruption brought them virtually absolute power: the Clintons! No Jews are involved anywhere. 
+Amy is really good (AND good looking). Why did RT get rid of her? 
+KAREN: Ariadnatheo, great satire! 
+FLOPOT: Satire reveals truth, though. We’re our own worst enemy — gullible goy; the malleable toy. 
+ARIADNATHEO: This is a prediction I trust [ short amusing video ]. 
+If you watch, make sure it is BEFORE lunch. 
+JOHN KIRBY: Sounds like the usual shakedown. 
+THE DOT (having the last word, unedited) : 
+@ darkmooners charlatans 
+you have been supporting the cretin clown d j dumpy from day one just because that you are sick and mentaly diseased racist pigs just like him your lunatic drivel is just like his . guess what Adriana you sick horny hog ,your Donny will not win ,loser I seen a gifted seer and some mysterious unseen someone ,she can look at the future do some kind of time travel ,I was told that ,but my mind couldn’t accept it ,so i asked for a proof ,the future winning lottery numbers.she asked for my soul then i ran away . before that she said that she visited tomorrow and Donny lost the election . now Adriana and the rest of you dark spirited hyenas ,who is crazier you or me or that witch We’ll know tomorrow (Ed) Like this? Share it now. 7 thoughts on “ Celebrity Deathmatch: Darkmoon Sages Make Their Final Predictions on US Election ” Flopot says:",FAKE
+3343,John Kerry: ISIS responsible for genocide,"(CNN) Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday that the United States has determined that ISIS' action against the Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria constitutes genocide .
+
+Children stand next to a burnt vehicle during clashes between Iraqi security forces and ISIS militants in Mosul on Tuesday, June 10.
+
+Children stand next to a burnt vehicle during clashes between Iraqi security forces and ISIS militants in Mosul on Tuesday, June 10.
+
+A Syrian rebel fighter lies on a stretcher at a makeshift hospital in Douma, Syria, on Wednesday, July 9. He was reportedly injured while fighting ISIS militants.
+
+A Syrian rebel fighter lies on a stretcher at a makeshift hospital in Douma, Syria, on Wednesday, July 9. He was reportedly injured while fighting ISIS militants.
+
+Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people flee Mosul on Wednesday, August 6, after the latest wave of ISIS advances.
+
+Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people flee Mosul on Wednesday, August 6, after the latest wave of ISIS advances.
+
+Thousands of Yazidis are escorted to safety by Kurdish Peshmerga forces and a People's Protection Unit in Mosul on Saturday, August 9.
+
+Thousands of Yazidis are escorted to safety by Kurdish Peshmerga forces and a People's Protection Unit in Mosul on Saturday, August 9.
+
+Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and some other Yazidi people are flown to safety Monday, August 11, after a dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar. A CNN crew was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. But only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.
+
+Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and some other Yazidi people are flown to safety Monday, August 11, after a dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar. A CNN crew was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. But only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.
+
+Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS militant positions from their position on the top of Mount Zardak, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 9.
+
+Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS militant positions from their position on the top of Mount Zardak, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 9.
+
+A elderly man is carried after crossing the Syria-Turkey border near Suruc on Saturday, September 20.
+
+A elderly man is carried after crossing the Syria-Turkey border near Suruc on Saturday, September 20.
+
+Syrian Kurds wait near a border crossing in Suruc as they wait to return to their homes in Kobani on Sunday, September 28.
+
+Syrian Kurds wait near a border crossing in Suruc as they wait to return to their homes in Kobani on Sunday, September 28.
+
+A Kurdish Peshmerga soldier who was wounded in a battle with ISIS is wheeled to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Duhuk, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 30.
+
+A Kurdish Peshmerga soldier who was wounded in a battle with ISIS is wheeled to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Duhuk, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 30.
+
+Alleged ISIS militants stand next to an ISIS flag atop a hill in Kobani on Monday, October 6.
+
+Alleged ISIS militants stand next to an ISIS flag atop a hill in Kobani on Monday, October 6.
+
+Kiymet Ergun, a Syrian Kurd, celebrates in Mursitpinar, Turkey, after an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Kobani on Monday, October 13.
+
+Kiymet Ergun, a Syrian Kurd, celebrates in Mursitpinar, Turkey, after an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Kobani on Monday, October 13.
+
+Cundi Minaz, a female Kurdish fighter, is buried in a cemetery in the southeastern Turkish town of Suruc on Tuesday, October 14. Minaz was reportedly killed during clashes with ISIS militants in nearby Kobani.
+
+Cundi Minaz, a female Kurdish fighter, is buried in a cemetery in the southeastern Turkish town of Suruc on Tuesday, October 14. Minaz was reportedly killed during clashes with ISIS militants in nearby Kobani.
+
+Heavy smoke rises in Kobani following an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on October 18.
+
+Heavy smoke rises in Kobani following an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on October 18.
+
+Kurdish fighters walk to positions as they combat ISIS forces in Kobani on Sunday, October 19.
+
+Kurdish fighters walk to positions as they combat ISIS forces in Kobani on Sunday, October 19.
+
+ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday, October 23. The United States and several Arab nations have been bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the militant group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.
+
+ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday, October 23. The United States and several Arab nations have been bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the militant group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.
+
+Iraqi special forces search a house in Jurf al-Sakhar, Iraq, on Thursday, October 30, after retaking the area from ISIS.
+
+Iraqi special forces search a house in Jurf al-Sakhar, Iraq, on Thursday, October 30, after retaking the area from ISIS.
+
+A picture taken from Turkey shows smoke rising after ISIS militants fired mortar shells toward an area controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters near Kobani on Monday, November 3.
+
+A picture taken from Turkey shows smoke rising after ISIS militants fired mortar shells toward an area controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters near Kobani on Monday, November 3.
+
+Fighters from the Free Syrian Army and the Kurdish People's Protection Units join forces to fight ISIS in Kobani on Wednesday, November 19.
+
+Fighters from the Free Syrian Army and the Kurdish People's Protection Units join forces to fight ISIS in Kobani on Wednesday, November 19.
+
+Smoke billows behind an ISIS sign during an Iraqi military operation to regain control of the town of Sadiyah, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on Tuesday, November 25.
+
+Smoke billows behind an ISIS sign during an Iraqi military operation to regain control of the town of Sadiyah, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on Tuesday, November 25.
+
+An elderly Yazidi man arrives in Kirkuk after being released by ISIS on Saturday, January 17. The militant group released about 200 Yazidis who were held captive for five months in Iraq. Almost all of the freed prisoners were in poor health and bore signs of abuse and neglect, Kurdish officials said.
+
+An elderly Yazidi man arrives in Kirkuk after being released by ISIS on Saturday, January 17. The militant group released about 200 Yazidis who were held captive for five months in Iraq. Almost all of the freed prisoners were in poor health and bore signs of abuse and neglect, Kurdish officials said.
+
+ISIS militants are seen through a rifle's scope during clashes with Peshmerga fighters in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday, January 21.
+
+ISIS militants are seen through a rifle's scope during clashes with Peshmerga fighters in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday, January 21.
+
+Junko Ishido, mother of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, reacts during a news conference in Tokyo on Friday, January 23. ISIS would later kill Goto and another Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa.
+
+Junko Ishido, mother of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, reacts during a news conference in Tokyo on Friday, January 23. ISIS would later kill Goto and another Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa.
+
+Collapsed buildings are seen in Kobani on January 27 after Kurdish forces took control of the town from ISIS.
+
+Collapsed buildings are seen in Kobani on January 27 after Kurdish forces took control of the town from ISIS.
+
+Kurdish people celebrate in Suruc, Turkey, near the Turkish-Syrian border, after ISIS militants were expelled from Kobani on Tuesday, January 27.
+
+Kurdish people celebrate in Suruc, Turkey, near the Turkish-Syrian border, after ISIS militants were expelled from Kobani on Tuesday, January 27.
+
+A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani on Friday, January 30, after the city had been liberated from the ISIS militant group. The Syrian city, also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September.
+
+A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani on Friday, January 30, after the city had been liberated from the ISIS militant group. The Syrian city, also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September.
+
+Safi al-Kasasbeh, right, receives condolences from tribal leaders at his home village near Karak, Jordan, on Wednesday, February 4. Al-Kasasbeh's son, Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh, was burned alive in a video that was recently released by ISIS militants. Jordan is one of a handful of Middle Eastern nations taking part in the U.S.-led military coalition against ISIS.
+
+Displaced Assyrian women who fled their homes due to ISIS attacks pray at a church on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, on Sunday, March 1. ISIS militants abducted at least 220 Assyrians in Syria.
+
+Displaced Assyrian women who fled their homes due to ISIS attacks pray at a church on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, on Sunday, March 1. ISIS militants abducted at least 220 Assyrians in Syria.
+
+Iraqi Shiite fighters cover their ears as a rocket is launched during a clash with ISIS militants in the town of Al-Alam, Iraq, on Monday, March 9.
+
+Iraqi Shiite fighters cover their ears as a rocket is launched during a clash with ISIS militants in the town of Al-Alam, Iraq, on Monday, March 9.
+
+The parents of 19-year-old Mohammed Musallam react at the family's home in the East Jerusalem Jewish settlement of Neve Yaakov on Tuesday, March 10. ISIS released a video purportedly showing a young boy executing Musallam, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian descent who ISIS claimed infiltrated the group in Syria to spy for the Jewish state. Musallam's family told CNN that he had no ties with the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, and had, in fact, been recruited by ISIS.
+
+On April 1, Shiite militiamen celebrate the retaking of Tikrit, which had been under ISIS control since June. The push into Tikrit came days after U.S.-led airstrikes targeted ISIS bases around the city.
+
+On April 1, Shiite militiamen celebrate the retaking of Tikrit, which had been under ISIS control since June. The push into Tikrit came days after U.S.-led airstrikes targeted ISIS bases around the city.
+
+People in Tikrit inspect what used to be a palace of former President Saddam Hussein on April 3.
+
+People in Tikrit inspect what used to be a palace of former President Saddam Hussein on April 3.
+
+A Yazidi woman mourns for the death of her husband and children by ISIS after being released south of Kirkuk on April 8. ISIS is known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public executions, crucifixions and other acts.
+
+A Yazidi woman mourns for the death of her husband and children by ISIS after being released south of Kirkuk on April 8. ISIS is known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public executions, crucifixions and other acts.
+
+Kurdish Peshmerga forces help Yazidis as they arrive at a medical center in Altun Kupri, Iraq, on April 8.
+
+Kurdish Peshmerga forces help Yazidis as they arrive at a medical center in Altun Kupri, Iraq, on April 8.
+
+Yazidis embrace after being released by ISIS south of Kirkuk, Iraq, on Wednesday, April 8. ISIS released more than 200 Yazidis , a minority group whose members were killed, captured and displaced when the Islamist terror organization overtook their towns in northern Iraq last summer, officials said.
+
+Thousands of Iraqis cross a bridge over the Euphrates River to Baghdad as they flee Ramadi on Friday, April 17.
+
+Thousands of Iraqis cross a bridge over the Euphrates River to Baghdad as they flee Ramadi on Friday, April 17.
+
+A member of Afghanistan's security forces stands at the site where a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up in front of the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Saturday, April 18. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The explosion killed at least 33 people and injured more than 100 others, a public health spokesman said.
+
+A member of Afghanistan's security forces stands at the site where a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up in front of the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Saturday, April 18. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The explosion killed at least 33 people and injured more than 100 others, a public health spokesman said.
+
+Iraqi soldiers fire their weapons toward ISIS group positions in the Garma district, west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, on Sunday, April 26. Pro-government forces said they had recently made advances on areas held by Islamist jihadists.
+
+Iraqi soldiers fire their weapons toward ISIS group positions in the Garma district, west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, on Sunday, April 26. Pro-government forces said they had recently made advances on areas held by Islamist jihadists.
+
+People search through debris after an explosion at a Shiite mosque in Qatif, Saudi Arabia, on Friday, May 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, according to tweets from ISIS supporters, which included a formal statement from ISIS detailing the operation.
+
+Residents examine a damaged mosque after an Iraqi Air Force bombing in the ISIS-seized city of Falluja, Iraq, on Sunday, May 31. At least six were killed and nine others wounded during the bombing.
+
+Residents examine a damaged mosque after an Iraqi Air Force bombing in the ISIS-seized city of Falluja, Iraq, on Sunday, May 31. At least six were killed and nine others wounded during the bombing.
+
+Syrians wait near the Turkish border during clashes between ISIS and Kurdish armed groups in Kobani, Syria, on Thursday, June 25. The photo was taken in Sanliurfa, Turkey. ISIS militants disguised as Kurdish security forces infiltrated Kobani on Thursday and killed ""many civilians,"" said a spokesman for the Kurds in Kobani.
+
+Syrians wait near the Turkish border during clashes between ISIS and Kurdish armed groups in Kobani, Syria, on Thursday, June 25. The photo was taken in Sanliurfa, Turkey. ISIS militants disguised as Kurdish security forces infiltrated Kobani on Thursday and killed ""many civilians,"" said a spokesman for the Kurds in Kobani.
+
+People in Ashmoun, Egypt, carry the coffin for 1st Lt. Mohammed Ashraf, who was killed when the ISIS militant group attacked Egyptian military checkpoints on Wednesday, July 1. At least 17 soldiers were reportedly killed, and 30 were injured.
+
+Protesters in Istanbul carry anti-ISIS banners and flags to show support for victims of the Suruc suicide blast during a demonstration on Monday, July 20.
+
+Protesters in Istanbul carry anti-ISIS banners and flags to show support for victims of the Suruc suicide blast during a demonstration on Monday, July 20.
+
+Mourners in Gaziantep, Turkey, grieve over a coffin Tuesday, July 21, during a funeral ceremony for the victims of a suspected ISIS suicide bomb attack. That bombing killed at least 31 people in Suruc, a Turkish town that borders Syria. Turkish authorities blamed ISIS for the attack.
+
+Saudi officials and investigators check the inside of the mosque on August 6.
+
+Saudi officials and investigators check the inside of the mosque on August 6.
+
+The governor of the Asir region in Saudi Arabia, Prince Faisal bin Khaled bin Abdulaziz, left, visits a man who was wounded in a suicide bombing attack on a mosque in Abha, Saudi Arabia, on August 6. ISIS claimed responsibility for the explosion, which killed at least 13 people and injured nine others.
+
+Buildings reduced to piles of debris can be seen in the eastern suburbs of Ramadi on August 6.
+
+Buildings reduced to piles of debris can be seen in the eastern suburbs of Ramadi on August 6.
+
+Smoke rises as Iraqi security forces bomb ISIS positions in the eastern suburbs of Ramadi, Iraq, on August 6.
+
+Smoke rises as Iraqi security forces bomb ISIS positions in the eastern suburbs of Ramadi, Iraq, on August 6.
+
+An ISIS fighter poses with spoils purportedly taken after capturing the Syrian town of al-Qaryatayn.
+
+An ISIS fighter poses with spoils purportedly taken after capturing the Syrian town of al-Qaryatayn.
+
+In this image taken from social media, an ISIS fighter holds the group's flag after the militant group overran the Syrian town of al-Qaryatayn on Thursday, August 6, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported. ISIS uses modern tools such as social media to promote reactionary politics and religious fundamentalism. Fighters are destroying holy sites and valuable antiquities even as their leaders propagate a return to the early days of Islam.
+
+Iraqi men look at damage following a bomb explosion that targeted a vegetable market in Baghdad on Thursday, August 13. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
+
+Iraqi men look at damage following a bomb explosion that targeted a vegetable market in Baghdad on Thursday, August 13. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
+
+Smoke rises above a damaged building in Ramadi, Iraq, following a coalition airstrike against ISIS positions on Saturday, August 15.
+
+Smoke rises above a damaged building in Ramadi, Iraq, following a coalition airstrike against ISIS positions on Saturday, August 15.
+
+Shiite fighters, fighting alongside Iraqi government forces, fire a rocket at ISIS militants as they advance toward the center of Baiji, Iraq, on Monday, October 19.
+
+Shiite fighters, fighting alongside Iraqi government forces, fire a rocket at ISIS militants as they advance toward the center of Baiji, Iraq, on Monday, October 19.
+
+Members of the Egyptian military approach the wreckage of a Russian passenger plane Sunday, November 1, in Hassana, Egypt. The plane crashed the day before, killing all 224 people on board. ISIS claimed responsibility for downing the plane, but the group's claim wasn't immediately verified.
+
+Syrian government troops walk inside the Kweiras air base on Wednesday, November 11, after they broke a siege imposed by ISIS militants.
+
+Syrian government troops walk inside the Kweiras air base on Wednesday, November 11, after they broke a siege imposed by ISIS militants.
+
+Smoke rises over the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar on November 12. Kurdish Iraqi fighters, backed by a U.S.-led air campaign, retook the strategic town, which ISIS militants overran last year. ISIS wants to create an Islamic state across Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria.
+
+Emergency personnel and civilians gather at the site of a twin suicide bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, on Thursday, November 12. The bombings killed at least 43 people and wounded more than 200 more. ISIS appeared to claim responsibility in a statement posted on social media.
+
+Wounded people are helped outside the Bataclan concert hall in Paris following a series of coordinated attacks in the city on Friday, November 13. The militant group ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks, which killed at least 130 people and wounded hundreds more.
+
+Investigators check the scene of a mosque attack Friday, November 27, in northern Bangladesh's Bogra district. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack that left at least one person dead and three more wounded.
+
+Yemenis check the scene of a car bomb attack Sunday, December 6, in Aden, Yemen. Aden Gov. Jaafar Saad and six bodyguards died in the attack , for which the terror group ISIS claimed responsibility.
+
+Syrian pro-government forces gather at the site of a deadly triple bombing Sunday, January 31, in the Damascus suburb of Sayeda Zeynab . ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a statement circulating online from supporters of the terrorist group.
+
+Syrians gather at the site of a double car bomb attack in the Al-Zahraa neighborhood of the Homs, Syria, on February 21, 2016. Multiple attacks in Homs and southern Damascus kill at least 122 and injure scores, according to the state-run SANA news agency. ISIS claimed responsibility.
+
+Wounded passengers are treated following a suicide bombing at the Brussels Airport on March 22, 2016. The attacks on the airport and a subway killed 32 people and wounded more than 300. ISIS claims its ""fighters"" launched the attacks in the Belgian capital.
+
+""My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims,"" he said, during a news conference at the State Department.
+
+Kerry said that in 2014, ISIS trapped Yazidis, killed them, enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls, "" selling them at auction, raping them at will and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations,"" executed Christians ""solely for their faith"" and also ""forced Christian women and girls into slavery.""
+
+""Without our intervention, it is clear that those people would have been slaughtered,"" he said.
+
+This is the first time that the United States has declared a genocide since Darfur in 2004.
+
+The House of Representatives on Monday unanimously passed a resolution labeling the ISIS atrocities against Christian groups in Syria and Iraq ""genocide,"" a term the State Department had been reluctant to use about the attacks and mass murders by the terror group.
+
+The move, aimed at ramping up pressure on the Obama administration, appears to have worked.
+
+The measure was non-binding, but both Republicans and Democrats in the House joined together 393-0 to back a ""sense of Congress"" saying the crimes committed against Christians, Yazidis and other ethnic and religious minorities in the region amount to war crimes and, in some cases, genocide.
+
+Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, whose Nebraska district is home to the largest group of resettled Yazidis in the U.S., authored the resolution with California Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo.
+
+During debate on Monday, Fortenberry noted it was a rare instance of an issue that has ""risen above the petty and difficult differences we often work out on the floor of the House of Representatives.""
+
+Under a deadline set by Congress, the State Department had until Thursday to formally to decide whether it would issue a comprehensive genocide designation.
+
+Kerry, though, had previously alluded to the possibility that the actions of ISIS, also know as ISIL, were genocide.
+
+""ISIL's campaign of terror against the innocent, including the Yazidi and Christian minorities, and its grotesque targeted acts of violence, show all the warning signs of genocide,"" Kerry said in August 2014. ""For anyone who needed a wakeup call, this is it.""
+
+Fortenberry praised the State Department for its decision Thursday.
+
+""I commend Secretary Kerry and the State Department for making this important designation. The genocide against Christians, Yazidis and others is not only a grave injustice to theses ancient faith communities -- it is an assault on human dignity and an attack on civilization itself,"" he said. ""The United States has now spoken with clarity and moral authority.""
+
+""That it took so long for the administration to arrive at this conclusion, in the face of unspeakable human suffering, defies explanation,"" Rubio, who until Tuesday was a GOP presidential candidate, said in a statement. ""At long last the United States is no longer silent in the face of this evil, but it would be travesty if we were to mistakenly take solace in this designation, if the designation did not then yield some sort of action.""
+
+""I am very happy to hear that (the U.S.) will recognize the genocide of Yezidi and Christian minorities,"" he told CNN in an email. ""This is an important step to stop the suffering of the persecuted people under the control of the extremist islamic groups, specially ISIS. And this is also important for my community to trust the international community again, because we were left in the hands of Islamic State.""
+
+He called on the State Department to push the U.N. to establish an international criminal court case on genocide against the Yazidis and Christians in Iraq and Syria.
+
+""Furthermore,"" he said, ""it is necessary to give the minorities more support to be sure that (these) crimes will not happen again.""
+
+An international center advocating against hate, terrorism and anti-Semitism was one to join the chorus.
+
+""The Simon Wiesenthal Center applauds Secretary Kerry's acknowledgement that Christians and Yazidis are targets of Genocide,"" the organization said in a statement. ""We reiterate our call that the U.S put these two groups at the front of the line for consideration for immigration to our country and to redouble our efforts to destroy ISIS.""
+
+In Defense of Christians, a group that has heavily lobbied for recognizing what is happening as genocide, put out a statement from its president Toufic Baaklini.
+
+""IDC extends our deepest gratitude to Secretary Kerry and to the Obama administration for carefully reviewing the overwhelming evidence of the genocide against Christians, Yazidis, Shia Muslims and other religious minorities and for proclaiming the irrefutable truth that the crimes they have suffered constitute genocide,"" Baaklini said.
+
+And the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, put out a statement of ""appreciation.""
+
+""For some time, the world has witnessed the deliberate and organized effort by ISIS to eliminate Christians from the Middle East. For the U.S. government to call this savagery by its proper name -- genocide -- is a welcome step in what must now be a more committed effort at bringing peace and security to that beleaguered land,"" Wuerl said. ""These words must now be translated into action.""",REAL
+4348,Mitt Romney's Re-Invention As Anti-Poverty Warrior,"With the shake of an Etch-A-Sketch, Mitt Romney reintroduced himself to the Republican Party on Friday as a man interested in running for president because of his desire to address poverty and income inequality. One only wonders why the former governor of Massachusetts neglected to focus on the growing problems the last time he held the title of GOP standard bearer.
+
+Addressing a gathering of Republican National Committee officials below deck of the decommissioned U.S.S. Midway aircraft carrier in San Diego, California, Romney ticked off three priorities crucial to what he called the ""post-Obama era"": making the world safer with a more muscular foreign policy, providing opportunity to all Americans, and lifting people out of poverty.
+
+""It's a tragedy, a human tragedy, that the middle class in this country by and large doesn't believe that the future will be better than the past,"" he said. ""We haven't seen rising incomes over decades.""
+
+""The rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before under this president,"" he added.
+
+Romney stressed his years as an LDS pastor, a topic he and his campaign rarely broached in 2012, and described working ""with people who are very poor to help them get help.""
+
+The governor isn't the only potential Republican presidential candidate to embrace a more populist tone as wage growth continues to lag in an accelerating economic recovery. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush recently lamented that ""while the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top-earners, they've been a lost decade for the rest of America."" Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has emphasized reconnecting with blue collar Americans. Even die-hard conservatives like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) paid lip service to the matter at the Heritage Foundation policy summit, an annual gathering of conservatives in Washington.
+
+While he may be sincere in his pursuit to eliminate poverty, the notion that Romney would be the best candidate to lead his party in doing so is puzzling at best. The former Massachusetts governor didn't have just one misstep that allowed Democrats and Republican primary opponents to paint him as an obscenely wealthy, out-of-touch plutocrat in the 2012 election -- he had a dozen. Here's just a brief sampling:
+
+""I'm in this race because I care about Americans. I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it,"" he said inelegantly following his victory in the Florida primary. ""I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.""
+
+""Corporations are people, my friend ... of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people,"" he said before the Iowa Ames straw poll.
+
+And his infamous remarks about ""47 percent"" of Americans: ""My job is not to worry about those people -- I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.""
+
+But it's not just the gaffes. Romney embraced the Paul Ryan budget in 2012 -- a sweeping plan that, if enacted, would have instituted draconian cuts to programs affecting the poor. Millions of low-income Americans benefiting from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as other retirement funding, would have been affected under a Romney presidency. Added to his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act and its subsidies for the poor, it's not hard to see how Romney wouldn't be vexed by some of the same problems should he ultimately decide to run for president.",REAL
+3424,King: Fill the Supreme Court vacancy,"""We've got an opening on the court. I think Sandra Day O'Connor made a very practical point. Let's fill the vacancy so the court can fully function and get on with it,"" he told CNN's Chris Cuomo on ""New Day.""
+
+""I don't agree (with Republicans),"" said O'Connor. ""We need somebody in there to do the job and just get on with it.""
+
+King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said he is surprised that some Republicans have decided to reject a nominee before even having a candidate to evaluate.
+
+""I'm surprised people can make that judgment before they even know who the nominee is,"" he said. ""It may be that he picks a nominee that's so eminently qualified that it would be very hard to explain a vote against him, other than politics."" King acknowledged that the Senate doesn't have to support the nominee, but thinks there should be a vote. ""Of course, we have these debates. And of course, politics are involved,"" King said. ""The politics are important. And I'm not saying a Republican senator has to vote for whoever Obama nominates. I would never say that."" But a refusal to hold a process could leave the vacancy for more than a year and that would be ""pretty troublesome,"" King said. The senator, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, also expressed concern about a judge's order that Apple help the FBI break into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters. ""They're asking Apple to create a key that does not currently exist. And I've got a problem with that. This is a very complicated issue,"" he said. Forcing Apple to do this could set ""a serious precedent"" that could lead to other citizens having their privacy invaded, he said. ""Once that key is made, it can end up in the hands of hackers,"" King said. ""There's no end to complications of this."" ""I think we need to slow down and really consider the policy,"" he added.",REAL
+1718,"Ted Cruz is toast: It’s not just that he won’t be president — his days in the Senate are numbered, too","I’m not sure when it started, but at some point the Republican Party ceded the business of governance to the Democrats. Maybe it began with the Tea Party movement or Fox News or the larger conservative media-industrial complex – I honestly don’t know. But it’s clear now that the GOP is no longer a legitimate governing party. A party that allows rank neophytes like Herman Cain and Donald Trump and Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina to run for the highest office in the country has lost its way.
+
+If you look at how the Republican Party operates today, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that governing just isn’t a priority – or internal pressures within the party make it impossible. Instead, the GOP has become what I previously called a self-perpetuating hype machine for conservative political entrepreneurs. Particularly at the national level, Republican candidates and legislators (many of them, at least) show no interest in compromise or serious policymaking, which is what you’d expect from a party of and for purists.
+
+While the new GOP has been bad for the country, it’s been great for political celebrities, people looking to promote their personal brands. Ted Cruz is the most recent and obvious example of this approach to politics. Cruz has been a remarkably ineffective Senator. He has done nothing but bloviate and showboat on the Senate floor. He’s accomplished zero legislatively. His only practical contribution has been to obstruct and draw attention to his martyrdom (read: presidential) campaign.
+
+Ted Cruz will never be elected president. If he manages to win the Republican nomination, he’ll lose in a landslide to a Democrat, whoever that happens to be. And because he’s so eagerly made a spectacle of himself in the Senate, he’s alienated all but the tiniest segment of his own party. Which means he has no political capital in Congress – hardly a concern for someone uninterested in legislating, however.
+
+Cruz’s latest squabble with Rand Paul helps to illustrate Cruz’s intentions. In an interview with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade, Paul basically wrote Cruz’s political obituary:
+
+Ted has chosen to make this really personal and chosen to call people dishonest in leadership and call them names which really goes against the decorum and also against the rules of the senate, and as a consequence he can’t get anything done legislatively. He is pretty much done for and stifled and it’s really because of personal relationships, or lack of personal relationships, and it is a problem. I approach things a little different, I am still just as hardcore in saying what we are doing , I just chose not to call people liars on the Senate floor and it’s just a matter of different perspectives on how best to get to the end result.
+
+Paul is right, of course, but he omits an essential point: Cruz has been ineffective by design. Managing relationships and respecting decorum only matter to people trying to accomplish things in the Senate – that’s not what Cruz is up to. Like the fanatical Tea Party wing of the House, Cruz is there to obstruct and self-promote. In all likelihood, Cruz will retire after a single term in the Senate. Now that he’s boosted his national profile and endeared himself to the insurgent elements of the base, he can pivot to the private sector and make more money as a professional conservative activist – as, for example, Jim DeMint did in 2012. Cruz ought to be seen as the grifter that he is. It was never about policy for him. When he leaves the Senate, he’ll be a hero to the fringe right. He’ll make a fortune on the conservative lecture circuit, telling rapturous audiences about his willingness to challenge the “Washington cartel.” It won’t matter that he accomplished nothing, changed nothing – it’ll be enough that he pretended to while he was there. The same is true of Carson and Trump and Fiorina and even politicians like Huckabee and Jindal: None of them will be president, but their over-the-top activism will ensure them a profitable career after politics. And that, I assume, is the whole point. The Democrats have their share of bad politicians, but you don’t see this kind of faux activism and exploitation in their party.",REAL
+143,Obama’s speech in Selma was an answer to those who question his love for America,"President Obama's supporters sometimes wonder where the inspirational candidate of 2008 has gone. The answer is to the White House. Obama's presidency is about smaller, less inspiring questions than his 2008 campaign.
+
+Obama's presidency is bounded by the limits of the office and the demands of the moment. It is about what America needs to do right now — the next budget, the next bill, next year's taxes, the last war. Candidates can muse. Presidents must govern.
+
+Obama's 2008 campaign was about what kind of country America is; how to read its past to best guide its future. His speech in Selma — which is really worth reading in its entirety — was among the best of his presidency precisely because it had almost nothing to do with his presidency; it was a return to the central topic of his campaign.
+
+Historians who want to understand Obama will find few better summations than the two paragraphs at the core of this speech:
+
+We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing's changed in the past fifty years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or L.A. of the Fifties. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing's changed. Ask your gay friend if it's easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress — our progress — would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better. Of course, a more common mistake is to suggest that racism is banished, that the work that drew men and women to Selma is complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the ""race card"" for their own purposes. We don't need the Ferguson report to know that's not true. We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation's racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. We know the march is not yet over, the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character requires admitting as much.
+
+Those 230 words are a precise distillation of Obama's view of America, and the role politics must play in it.
+
+The first paragraph is Obama's case for hope: America is improving; it has always been improving, and to deny that improvement is to steal from Americans a belief in their country that they have more than earned. ""To deny this progress — our progress — would be to rob us of our own agency,"" he said.
+
+The second paragraph is Obama's case for change: America's sins are not vanquished; its hatreds remain real; its racism still breathes. ""We know the march is not yet over,"" Obama said, ""the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character requires admitting as much.""
+
+Hope and change. These are the two ideas that form the steady core of Obama's politics. But, more than that, they are the two ideas that define, for Obama, what kind of country America is — and what it means to serve it.
+
+Obama's critics question his love for the country he governs. ""I do not believe — and I know this is a horrible thing to say — but I do not believe that the president loves America,"" former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in February. They look at Obama's steady belief that America is not yet good enough, not yet pure enough, not yet perfect enough, and they see a skeptic, not a patriot.
+
+In this speech, Obama's answer to this criticism was direct:
+
+Fellow marchers, so much has changed in fifty years. We've endured war, and fashioned peace. We've seen technological wonders that touch every aspect of our lives, and take for granted convenience our parents might scarcely imagine. But what has not changed is the imperative of citizenship, that willingness of a 26 year-old deacon, or a Unitarian minister, or a young mother of five, to decide they loved this country so much that they'd risk everything to realize its promise. That's what it means to love America. That's what it means to believe in America. That's what it means when we say America is exceptional.
+
+There is an implicit radicalism in what Obama is saying here. To believe America is good enough is to abandon the tradition of criticism and activism that has made America great.
+
+Obama's answer to Giuliani is that Giuliani has mistaken uncritical adoration for the hard work required of true love. Patriotism is active, not passive. Those who love America prove it by working to perfect America. They continue marching.",REAL
+930,Where Does Bernie Sanders Go From Here?,"NEW YORK - Bernie Sanders is at a crossroads.
+
+The Vermont senator took Wednesday off the campaign trail at home alone with his wife, leaving his top aides behind in Washington to cool their heels.
+
+""He wanted an opportunity to think,"" said Sanders senior strategist Tad Devine. ""It's affording him an opportunity to think about where we are in the campaign, what he wants to say in the weeks ahead. He hasn't had a real chance to do that"" in weeks.
+
+The Sanders campaign poured itself into New York, throwing a hail mary pass to try to change the delegate math while they could. They spent $5.6 million (twice what Hillary Clinton did), made 3 million phone calls in the final weekend alone, and organized the biggest rallies of a campaign defined by big rallies.
+
+But in the end Sanders came up short - not just of winning, but of the delegate target allies had aimed to hit, which might set them up for a path through California, the campaign's final hope.
+
+Now, with the nomination even further out of reach, Sanders faces the difficult question about what comes next. Does he set a do-whatever-it-takes course to actually win the Democratic nomination? Or does he return to the message campaign his long-shot White House bid was originally seen as?
+
+There's no question that Sanders will stay in the race either way. ""Bernie made a decision after Nevada that he was going to go through this process and finish it up by letting everybody who wanted to vote, vote,"" Devine said.
+
+Democratic primary voters have shown no sign they're in a rush for the race to settle down, and seem hungry for Sanders' message, if not his presidency.
+
+He'll continue to draw massive crowds from zealous fans, who have almost literally given his campaign a blank check to do as they wish. On Wednesday night, the campaign announced raising $15 million more than Clinton in March, though they also spent much more.
+
+But even some Sanders allies cringed at parts of the candidate's message in New York, where his agenda was sometimes obscured by a focus on Clinton and issues with the election process.
+
+""Going forward, what we're encouraging Senator Sanders to do is to continue to keep the campaign focused on the issues,"" said Neil Sroka, the communications director of Democracy for America, which backs Sanders.
+
+The campaign says they want to return to more substantive issues - but only as long as the Clinton campaign joins them. So far, at least, they believe Clinton forces are keeping up the heat and see it as sign Clinton still views Sanders as a threat.
+
+Privately, some Sanders allies say it's time for the candidate to start to thinking more about how he maximizes his leverage at the Democratic National Convention, and afterwards, and less about beating Clinton at all costs.
+
+One indicator of which kind of campaign Sanders wants to run is how much he and his aides continue to talk about relying on super delegates to hand them the nomination.
+
+The strategy, which calls for wooing the unelected delegates even if Sanders loses more primaries and caucuses, was floated by campaign manager Jeff Weaver with MSNBC's Steve Kornacki late Tuesday night.
+
+MoveOn.org and Democracy for America, both of which have endorsed Sanders, have since 2008 been pressuring super delegates to support whichever candidate gets the most votes.
+
+More than 380,000 people signed petitions from the group agreeing that ""the race for the Democratic Party nomination should be decided by who gets the most votes, and not who has the most support from party insiders.""
+
+Both groups confirmed to MSNBC Wednesday that they still hold that position.
+
+""MoveOn members overwhelmingly endorsed Sanders for president, and we want him to win the most pledged delegates, become the nominee, and become president. But superdelegates shouldn't overrule the will of the Democratic grassroots,"" said MoveOn Washington Director Ben Wikler. ""If the primary and caucus winner is Hillary Clinton, then Clinton should be the nominee.""
+
+Devine said the campaign's main focus is still to win pledged delegates. But if Sanders falls just short of a majority, it's negligible - ""de minims,"" Devine said - and the campaign will pitch super delegates that Sanders is the stronger general election candidate.
+
+Another indication of Sanders' intentions will be where he devotes his precious time in the days leading up to Tuesday's contests.
+
+Five states are voting and Maryland is expected to be Sanders' worst showing.
+
+If he invests heavily there it's a sign his campaign is still focused on winning and scraping together delegates. If he spends time in states like Connecticut and Delaware to try to eek out wins despite limited delegate opportunities, it's a sign he's more focused on moral victories than ones that lead to the nomination.
+
+What Sanders decides to do, and how aggressively he decides to continuing pursuing Clinton, will help determine the shape of the rest of the primary and how quickly Clinton, the odds-on nominee, can unite the party.
+
+Clinton's favorability rating has tumbled during the primary, especially among Sanders voters, presumably at least in part due to his attacks.
+
+But as Democratic leaders worry about the damage, the party seem to be enjoying the contest.
+
+National polling between Clinton and Sanders has tightened to a virtual dead heat, suggesting voters are not ready to settle on Clinton. Exit polls showed two-thirds of New York primary voters found the heated contest in the state to be energizing, not divisive.
+
+""Mr. Sanders's presence has made this an immeasurably more substantive race,"" The New York Times wrote in an editorial Wednesday calling on Sanders to ignore calls to leave the race, which was shared by the Sanders campaign. The enthusiasm of his supporters ""should be a wake-up call to leaders of both parties. They are missing something big about their own members' priorities, and their mood.""
+
+Still, Sanders' entire campaign has been about bringing new people into politics and the Democratic party. At some point, he might risk pushing them back out again.",REAL
+1661,Exclusive: GOP campaigns plot revolt against RNC,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+7801,Revelation Unleashed: Unlocking The Mysteries Of The Bible’s Most Mysterious Book,"  Revelation Unleashed: Unlocking The Mysteries Of The Bible’s Most Mysterious Book On this episode of Rightly Dividing, join us as we drop some pins and create an easy to understand roadmap to the amazing, awesome, and very much knowable book of Revelation!   Join us as we apply Paul’s command found in 2 Timothy 2:15 to ‘rightly divide’ our Bible and put everything in it’s proper perspective and place. 
+“ And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.” Revelation 5:5 (KJV) 
+CLICK HERE TO LISTEN LIVE when the show starts Sunday night at 9:00PM EST! 
+For centuries, the Catholic Church had locked up the Bible and kept it out of reach of the common man. As a result, when the Protestant Reformation ended the Dark Ages and removed the Bible from its Vatican shackles, it was a book that remained quite a mystery to most people. Out of all of its 66 books, the most misunderstood, most debated over and most feared book is, ironically and undoubtedly, the book of Revelation. 
+On this episode of Rightly Dividing , we apply Paul’s command to “rightly divide” to the book of Revelation, and in the process of doing so remove much of the mystery in the process. God didn’t write any part of the Bible to be out of reach of anyone who, by faith, wanted to plumb its depths and unlock its mysteries. Join us as we drop some pins and create an easy to understand roadmap to the amazing, awesome, and very much knowable book of Revelation! 
+CLICK HERE TO LISTEN LIVE when the show starts Sunday night at 9:00PM EST!  ",FAKE
+10232,Silent Counter-Coup by 17 Intel Agencies To Stop Crooked Clintons [Video],"Leave a reply 
+Bill Still – Good evening, I’m still reporting on an ongoing counter-coup being run by patriotic members of 17 U.S. intelligence agencies to stop the Clinton Crime syndicate from proceeding with the rigging of the coming election. 
+According to a 4 minute video, done by Dr. Steve Pieczenik, a Harvard and MIT-educated psychiatrist who has written 26 New York Times Best Sellers, the Clinton coup has been put down by an intelligence community counter-coup, effective at noon today. 
+Dr. Pieczenik has great contacts in the American intelligence community. He put the following video up on his YouTube channel at noon today and says that the channel was down twenty minutes later. 
+Currently, that channel is up, so perhaps our channel will not be harmed. 
+I believe what you are about to see is true because of the nature of the recent WikiLeaks revelations. To me, hackers could not have done this. To me, white hats at NSA had to have been involved. 
+Having spent my adult life working around the community, I knew that folks who were at most of these agencies – exempting DHS and CIA – are American patriots who would not allow this nation to be destroyed by the Clinton Crime Syndicate. 
+[insert] 
+This may well be the reason President Obama yesterday had his press secretary praise the work of Jim Comey, head of the FBI, at the very moment that Hillary Clinton was speaking in Florida deriding Comey. Let us all pray that Comey has actually turned away from being subservient to Obama and the Clintons and has now joined forces with the vast majority of the American military/intelligence community and Obama has decided – for his own preservation – to not fight them. I’m still reporting from Washington; good evening. 
+Bill Still is a former newspaper editor and publisher. He has written for USA Today, The Saturday Evening Post, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, OMNI magazine, and has also produced the syndicated radio program, Health News. He has written 22 books and two documentary videos and is the host of his wildly popular daily YouTube Channel the “Still Report”, the quintessential report on the economy and Washington. Share this:",FAKE
+1360,"Why Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders, 'won' town hall","Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.
+
+Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
+
+Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
+
+Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.
+
+In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
+
+Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.
+
+Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.
+
+U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""
+
+After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""
+
+Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.",REAL
+3635,French police hunt two brothers accused of Charlie Hebdo terror attack,"A third suspect has turned himself in. Prime Minister Valls said several arrests had been made overnight in connection with the deadliest terror attack in France in a generation.
+
+French President Francois Hollande, right, and interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, left, listen to the explanations of high ranking police officer Jacques Meric, center, during a visit at Paris Prefecture control room in Paris, Thursday Jan. 8, 2015. French police hunted Thursday for two heavily armed men, one with a terrorism conviction and a history in jihadi networks, in the methodical killing of 12 people at a satirical newspaper that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. The prime minister announced several overnight arrests and said the possibility of a new attack “is our main concern.”
+
+French authorities are searching for two chief suspects in Wednesday's deadly attack in Paris on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine, which left 12 people dead in France's deadliest terrorist incident in a generation.
+
+Thousands of police and counter-terrorism officers are searching in northern France for the two armed suspects, Said and Chérif Kouachi, who are brothers, remain at large. A third suspect, Hamyd Mourad, turned himself in at a police station in a small town about 145 miles northeast of Paris after learning his name was linked to the attack.
+
+Speaking on RTL radio, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said authorities had made several overnight arrests and that the possibility of a new attack by the two suspects “is our main concern,” The New York Times reports. An unnamed security official put the arrest total at seven.
+
+“We are facing an unprecedented terrorist threat, both internally and externally,” Mr. Valls said, adding that, “there was not zero risk.”
+
+In an incident likely to rattle nerves in Paris, a policewoman was killed in a shootout in southern Paris on Thursday morning. The shooting set off searches in the area as the manhunt for the two brothers expanded, but police didn't immediately link it to the Charlie Hebdo attack, Reuters reports. The policewoman wasn't involved in the manhunt for the suspects and had been called to a routine traffic incident.
+
+Valls said the suspects in the attack on Charlie Hebdo were known to French authorities and had been tracked before. Chérif Kouachi was convicted of abetting terrorism in 2008 for recruiting jihadists to fight in Iraq, the Associated Press reports. Both brothers were also named in connection with a plot to help an Islamic extremist, who bombed a Paris metro station in 1995, escape from jail.
+
+The brothers are Algerian-origin French citizens who lived in Paris, the BBC reports.
+
+Given his track record, the fact that Chérif Kouachi allegedly pulled off such a brazen attack may raise concerns in France and across Europe. It's still unclear whether the brothers had any foreign support or trained abroad. European security agencies fear that militants from Europe who fight in Iraq and Syria could in future stage attacks at home.
+
+The Christian Science Monitor reports that France has Europe’s largest Muslim population and the largest number of citizens who have joined groups such as the self-described Islamic State. Some 1,000 French have traveled to fight in Syria, according to authorities.
+
+Charlie Hebdo, which directs its irrelevant satire at almost everyone, has repeatedly offended Muslims for its caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. The magazine’s editor and two police officers were among those killed on Wednesday.",REAL
+8290,"The Mandela Effect was made by one overlooked 33 year old man, an ascended master (video and proof)","link There is simply no more denying, for millions of people across whatever planet we are actually on now, that the Mandela Effect is the greatest and most important single event in the history of all mankind on every possible level. That's not in question anymore, the only remaining question left is ""Who done it?"". Will the real one responsible for this, please stand up? Now, because this is the biggest display of sheer Power, there are a lot of government agencies whose only job is to make you think that they have power who are sitting down and yelling ""we did it, we are the ones and we did it with our collider!"" And there's others sitting down and yelling ""we did it, with our d computers!"" These collider and d computers are jokes, they can't do anything, you can barely play pacman on them - they are just impressive looking things to you which make you scared of the people who want to control you. That's all they are. You people need to stop being scared of your bullies. Your bully who took you lunch money every day in the 2nd grade - is not the same person who caused a universal-earth-ending-space-time-continuum-Shift. This is real power. Whoever can do this, isn't the same bully who took your lunch money in the 2nd grade. Your government and Nasa and Cern are all a bunch of bullies, who throw water bottles at your head then when you turn around they point to the person next to them and call them a terrorist. That's all they have done throughout the years. But whoever did the Mandela Effect is entirely different from them, whoever did that has True and Real Light. I'll just go ahead and flatly state it for the whole world to hear - I, Pyron, created the Mandela Effect through metaphysical sciences through writing. No computers no colliders, only my mind and heart. It was my true desire to create a new world where those who control you will lose control. I wrote from age 12 to age 32, obsessively for 20 years in a row without break, I've been rejected by everyone the whole time, no one out there has been continuously rejected like I have, so I just kept on continuously going into my own space and writing more and more. Not caring about money or controlling people for selfish gain or any of that, I was just going on a self-journey. And in doing that, I cracked the code for the fabric of the Space Time continuum and opened up the Stargate. And I recorded every last thing that I did, and tell the whole world exactly how I did it and how everything occurred in a 50 page book - that I've put up for free on Youtube. This 50 page book is the liberation and the Revolution for every soul in all of existence, and I offer it for free here www.youtube.com...",FAKE
+6227,CNN: One voter can make a difference by voting repeatedly,"Channel list 
+Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually 
+Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida 
+Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote 
+The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush 
+Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food 
+Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI 
+Obama ​​captures rare Pokémon ​​while visiting Hiroshima 
+Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say ""It's creepy"" 
+Barack Obama: ""If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"" 
+White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party 
+President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism' 
+Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech , stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman' 
+Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber 
+Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend 
+Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line 
+As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards 
+John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom 
+Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right' 
+News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: ""My work here is done"" 
+Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign 
+Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009 
+National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman 
+National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruz’s basement 
+Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response 
+Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican 
+Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check 
+Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing 
+Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first 
+Susan Sarandon: ""I don't vote with my vagina."" Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer 
+Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote 
+New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to ""Live FOR Free or Die"" 
+Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president 
+Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two 
+Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence 
+Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men 
+In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas 
+TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons 
+Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats' 
+Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with ""This is for Paris"" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with ""Return to sender"" 
+University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities 
+Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island 
+Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a ""safe space,"" changing Missouri motto to ""The don't show me state"" 
+Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy 
+State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery 
+NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget 
+College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action 
+ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios 
+Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic 
+'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break 
+ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood 
+Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans 
+Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people 
+Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's ""unfettered capitalism,"" demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need 
+John Kerry accepts Iran's ""Golden Taquiyya"" award, requests jalapenos on the side 
+Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone 
+John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons 
+Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend 
+Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles 
+State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider 
+Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons 
+Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations 
+Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals 
+US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?' 
+NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy 
+China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: ""The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"" 
+Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be' 
+Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1% 
+America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith 
+Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine 
+Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET 
+Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths 
+Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do' 
+Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State 
+President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise 
+Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market 
+Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males 
+NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record 
+People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services 
+Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba 
+White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet' 
+CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate 
+Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson' 
+Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city' 
+Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers' 
+Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first 
+The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office 
+White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders 
+Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time 
+Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy 
+Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents 
+Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences 
+Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity 
+Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow 
+African countries to ban all flights from the United States because ""Obama is incompetent, it scares us"" 
+Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it 
+Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses' 
+BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama 
+Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free 
+Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness 
+President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser 
+Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members 
+White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos 
+Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency 
+Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole 
+Harry Reid: ""Sometimes I say the wong thing"" 
+Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids 
+Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution 
+Obama draws ""blue line"" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon 
+""Hard Choices,"" a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original 
+Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts 
+Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks 
+100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, ""the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"" 
+Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news 
+""Anarchy Now!"" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence 
+Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours 
+Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues 
+""Free Speech Zones"" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes 
+Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed 
+Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account 
+Joe Biden to Russia: ""We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"" 
+In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea 
+Al Sharpton: ""Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"" 
+Mardi Gras in North Korea: "" Throw me some food! "" 
+Obama's foreign policy works: ""War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"" 
+US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: ""We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"" 
+Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help 
+The 1980s: ""Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."" 
+In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook 
+MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine 
+Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants 
+Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America 
+North Korean voters unanimous: ""We are the 100%"" 
+Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout 
+Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss 
+Feminist author slams gay marriage: ""a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"" 
+Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district 
+Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend 
+Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle 
+North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party 
+White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare 
+Kim Jong Un executes own "" crazy uncle "" to keep him from ruining another family Christmas 
+OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea 
+President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy 
+Obama to Iran: ""If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"" 
+Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC 
+Obama: ""I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"" 
+Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week 
+Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message 
+NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: ""Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"" 
+Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough 
+The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: ""I didn't build that"" 
+Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare 
+Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation 
+Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans 
+Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy 
+GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords 
+Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare 
+Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria 
+Sharpton: ""British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"" 
+DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women 
+Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees 
+Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left 
+Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel' 
+FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp 
+Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies 
+GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election' 
+Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!' 
+Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism 
+News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota 
+Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith 
+Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page 
+Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment 
+White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria 
+Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent' 
+Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins 
+Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date 
+IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history 
+After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot 
+Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence' 
+Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program 
+US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration? 
+Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy 
+This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester 
+White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras 
+Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse 
+Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school 
+Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition 
+Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State 
+Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good' 
+Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners' 
+Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested 
+Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead 
+Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending 
+Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances 
+Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons 
+Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago 
+Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections 
+Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country 
+Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps' 
+White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out 
+New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen 
+White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class 
+To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead 
+State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations 
+Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward 
+President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward 
+Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects 
+World ends; S&P soars 
+Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood 
+Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes 
+Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway 
+Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013 
+Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama 
+As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list 
+Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves 
+Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium 
+Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future 
+Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs 
+Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet 
+Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt' 
+Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties 
+Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years 
+Obama attends church service, worships self 
+Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending 
+Historical revisionists: ""Hey, you never know"" 
+Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh 
+Israelis to Egyptian rioters: ""don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"" 
+Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness 
+Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears 
+Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke 
+Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights 
+Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse' 
+Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter:""Too few words"" 
+Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't 
+Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost 
+Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity ""Religion of Peace,"" praises ""moderate Christians,"" promises to send one into space 
+Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck 
+White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus 
+Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed 
+Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book ""The Road to Smurfdom"" 
+Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere 
+Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: ""When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"" 
+Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college 
+Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill! 
+Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!' 
+Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration' 
+Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome 
+People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies 
+Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, ""only 1% allowed to reach Israel"" 
+Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans 
+Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law 
+Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond 
+Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics 
+Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof 
+Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels 
+Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party 
+Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend 
+May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above 
+Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel ""50 Shades of Hay"" 
+Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name 
+Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich 
+Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag 
+Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its ""President for Life"" 
+Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory 
+Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off 
+Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named ""Fat And Furious"" 
+Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed 
+White House: ""Let them eat statistics"" 
+Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama",FAKE
+3255,Give Social Security recipients a CEO-style raise,"(CNN) On Veterans Day we recognize and honor the sacrifices our service members and their families make for our country. We owe our service members the very best, but unless Congress acts, on January 1 more than 9 million veterans who rely on Social Security benefits or pension and compensation benefits will not get their annual cost of living increase.
+
+This freeze in funds, which has happened only two other times since 1975, will be really tough on veterans among the 71 million Americans who depend on Social Security and other benefits to help make ends meet. Two-thirds of seniors depend on Social Security for the majority of their income, and for 15 million Americans, Social Security is all that stands between them and poverty.
+
+While vets and seniors get no raise, CEOs at the top 350 American companies received, on average, a 3.9% pay increase last year. That's a lot of money. The average CEO at one of the top 350 American companies made $16.3 million and got more than half a million in pay raises. So CEOs get huge raises, while seniors, veterans and others who've worked hard don't get an extra dime. Why? It's not an accident. It's not inevitable. It's the result of deliberate policies set by Congress.
+
+Social Security is supposed to be indexed to inflation so that when prices go up, benefits go up, too. But Congress' formula samples the spending patterns of about a quarter of the country, and the formula isn't geared to what older Americans actually spend.
+
+Projections for the costs of core goods and services show inflation is up about 2%, but seniors won't get a cost of living increase -- mostly because of falling gasoline prices, which don't mean as much to millions of seniors who don't commute to work. So seniors, who are already struggling to scrape by to cover rent and exploding prescription drug prices , will be left scrambling.
+
+Sure, companies should make their own decisions about how much to compensate executives, but because of the laws Congress has passed, American taxpayers are forced to subsidize these multimillion-dollar pay packages.
+
+It's time for Congress to make different choices. That's why last week I introduced the Seniors And Veterans Emergency (SAVE) Benefits Act. The SAVE Benefits Act will give seniors on Social Security, veterans, those with disabilities and others a one-time payment in 2016 equivalent to an average increase of 3.9% -- the same as the taxpayer-subsidized raise that CEOs received last year.
+
+We can afford to give seniors and vets a raise. In fact, we can increase pay for seniors and vets without adding a single penny to the deficit simply by closing the bonus loophole for corporate executives. According to the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, closing this loophole will create enough revenue to help millions of Americans and still have enough left over to help extend the life of the Social Security trust fund.
+
+Seniors and vets would get an increase of about $581 next year — a little less than $50 a month. That $581 increase would cover almost three months of groceries for seniors or a year's worth of out-of-pocket costs on critical prescription drugs for the average Medicare beneficiary. That $50 a month is worth a lot to those 71 million Americans. According to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, that little boost could lift more than 1 million Americans out of poverty.
+
+Giving vets and seniors a little help and stitching up these corporate tax write-offs isn't just about economics; it's about our values. For too long, we've listened to a handful of people with money and power who say: Cut taxes for those at the top, cut rules and regulations that keep everyone honest, and let everyone else fight over the scraps. We tried trickle-down economics, and it failed.
+
+But we can make different choices -- choices that reflect our values. We don't have to ignore this problem. We can give a small boost to 71 million Americans who have earned it and who need it.
+
+We can lift over 1 million people out of poverty. We can extend the life of Social Security. And we can do it by shutting down taxpayer giveaways to a handful of wealthy corporations that will do fine without them. For me, this is simple. Our spending should reflect our values, and that means passing the SAVE Benefits Act.",REAL
+3177,"Fireworks erupt between Trump and Bush, Rubio and Cruz at GOP debate","Sparks flew at the toughest and liveliest GOP primary debate yet Saturday night, as Donald Trump and Jeb Bush clashed over the Middle East and George W. Bush’s legacy, trading insults at a rapid clip – and the two Cuban-American senators in the race accused each other of lying on immigration and even questioned each other’s Spanish-speaking skills.
+
+And just when it seemed Trump and Ted Cruz might steer clear of each other, the two leading Republican candidates entered the ring toward the end of the debate when the Texas senator questioned the billionaire businessman’s pro-life credentials.
+
+“You are the single biggest liar. You’re probably worse than Jeb Bush,” Trump said.
+
+Cruz stood his ground, charging that Trump would “appoint liberals” to the Supreme Court if elected.
+
+The issue of judicial appointments was front and center at the CBS News-hosted debate in Greenville, S.C., in the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, with candidates like Cruz saying it underscores the high stakes in this election. Several candidates called for a delay in any high court appointment or confirmation.
+
+But the barbed and often personal exchanges Saturday marked a new phase of the race, as the candidates charge into next week’s critical South Carolina primary. The clashes left Ohio Gov. John Kasich – the affable, second-place finisher in the New Hampshire primary – making an appeal for peace in the GOP field, albeit one unlikely to be heeded.
+
+“I think we’re fixing to lose the election to Hillary Clinton if we don’t stop this,” Kasich said.
+
+Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, too, warned about the coming general election and said, “We cannot be tearing each other down.”
+
+The appeals came shortly after Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio accused each other of being soft on illegal immigration. It’s an argument they’ve had before – Cruz faults Rubio for backing a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included a path to legal status, and Rubio says Cruz was on board with that effort – but this time, it became more heated. And after Cruz accused Rubio of saying on Univision he wouldn’t rescind President Obama’s immigration executive orders on day one, Rubio quipped:
+
+“I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn’t speak Spanish,” Rubio said.
+
+Cruz, then, immediately began debating Rubio in Spanish. Rubio continued, saying Cruz “lies about all sorts of things” and indeed supports legalizing illegal immigrants.
+
+As the Rubio-Cruz battle heated up, so did the long-simmering feud between Trump and Bush.
+
+“This is a man who insults his way to the nomination,” Bush said of Trump.
+
+With Bush attempting a comeback in the race after a fourth-place finish in New Hampshire, Trump faced a feistier debate rival on stage Saturday night than he has before – boosted in part by what seemed to be a sympathetic audience.
+
+The audience often booed Trump when he took on Bush, though Trump once again accused them of representing Bush’s “special interests and lobbyists.”
+
+Their most personal dispute came when Trump accused Bush of promoting a policy that would get the U.S. mired more deeply in the Middle East – and blamed the former Florida governor’s brother for the problems there.
+
+Trump initially took issue with Jeb Bush’s call to confront ISIS while also taking on Syria’s Bashar Assad and sidelining Russia.
+
+“Jeb is so wrong,” Trump said. “You have to knock out ISIS. .... You decide what you have to do after. You can’t fight two wars at one time.”
+
+Bush, though, said Russia is not a U.S. ally, and Assad’s hold on power prevents a resolution in the war. Trump then went on to repeatedly slam the decision under the George W. Bush administration to enter Iraq in the first place, calling it a “big fat mistake” that “destabilized the Middle East.”
+
+“They lied” about WMDs, he said.
+
+“I am sick and tired of him going after my family,” Jeb Bush countered, saying he’s proud of his brother’s efforts to keep the country safe.
+
+Trump then invoked 9/11: “The World Trade Center came down … That’s not keeping us safe.”
+
+Rubio, who has often been at odds with Bush, leapt to his brother’s defense, saying the Bush administration “kept us safe.”
+
+Jeb Bush joked that he was rescinding Trump’s invitation to an upcoming rally with George W. Bush on the campaign trail.
+
+The fireworks flew after the debate started on a somber note, discussing the legacy of Supreme Court Justice Scalia and the impact his death Saturday will have.
+
+Several candidates urged President Obama to refrain from nominating anybody to fill the vacancy, and wait for the next president to make that decision. Trump, though, said he doesn’t expect Obama to wait, and called on Senate Republicans to hold up any nomination.
+
+Kasich urged Obama to put the “country first” and not move forward with a nomination, a plea echoed by Rubio. Obama, though, said minutes before the start of the debate that he indeed plans to nominate a successor.
+
+The GOP candidates, meanwhile, used opening remarks to honor Scalia’s legacy.
+
+Cruz called him a “legal giant” who “changed the arc of American legal history.” He said Scalia’s death also “underscores the stakes of this election.”
+
+“We are one justice away from a Supreme Court that will strike down every restriction on abortion” by states, threaten gun rights and “undermine” religious liberty, Cruz said. He said he would appoint a strict constitutionalist if elected.
+
+Scalia’s death thrusts the issue of judicial appointments into the 2016 race, raising the possibility that the next president immediately will have to fill a high court vacancy. While Obama vowed Saturday to nominate a successor, it’s unclear whether he can get any appointee confirmed in the Republican-led Senate.
+
+While the prospect of a Supreme Court vacancy now looms over the race, the South Carolina primary already was heating up on several fronts in recent days, with the candidates trading accusations on immigration and other issues.
+
+The debate Saturday reflects that tougher tone, in a state notorious for bare-knuckle primary battles. Trump at one point accused Cruz of trying to spread rumors in the state that he’s not running in South Carolina – likening that to his campaign’s actions in Iowa, where representatives spread false rumors that Carson was dropping out.
+
+“Nasty guy, now I know why he doesn’t have one endorsement from any of his colleagues,” Trump said.
+
+Even Kasich struggled to avoid the fray, as Bush criticized him for expanding Medicaid under ObamaCare and said that would create more debt.
+
+“He knows that I’m not for ObamaCare,” Kasich said, before vowing to stay “positive. “
+
+The GOP field is now down to six candidates -- after New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Hewlett Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina dropped out following low finishes Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary.
+
+A big question Saturday night, and going forward, was whether Rubio could regain his momentum – following last weekend’s lackluster performance. A withering attack by Christie on Rubio, which had the Florida senator repeating himself, appeared to hurt him in the New Hampshire primary. Rubio himself blamed his debate performance in part for his fifth-place finish in the state. He finished behind Trump, Kasich, Cruz and Bush. Christie, though, is no longer on stage or in the race.
+
+Most polling in South Carolina still shows Rubio third, with Trump and Cruz in the top two positions, respectively.",REAL
+2832,"Obama, sounding like his critics, admits no 'complete strategy' for Iraq",The online comment fits closely with his campaign platform.,REAL
+4294,How Ted Cruz Became Ted Cruz,"In 2008, in the high-profile Supreme Court gun-rights case called District of Columbia v. Heller, a brief was filed from the eighth floor of the Price Daniel Sr. State Office Building in Austin, Texas, specifically from the corner office of the man who was then the state’s solicitor general, Ted Cruz.
+
+The brief took a strong stance on the divisive question of whether the Second Amendment establishes an individual right to own guns, or just protects state and local militias. The brief argued forcefully for the first view, writing that “the individual right to keep and bear arms” is a “fundamental right” and that “an individual right that can be altogether abrogated is no right at all.” Thirty attorneys general from other states signed on.
+
+Today, with the White House pushing new gun restrictions and Cruz's candidacy riding on next month's Iowa caucuses, it's no surprise that the Texas Republican would embrace gun rights as a defining issue, holding an event at a firing range and even raffling off an engraved 12-gauge shotgun as a campaign promotion.
+
+In 2008, the situation was very different: he was wading into a case that had no immediate connection to Texas at all. But to see the signature of R. Ted Cruz on the brief would not have surprised the nine Supreme Court justices in the least. By that time, Cruz had been solicitor general for five years, and inserting himself into a case of wide prominence and importance regardless of any direct tie to Texas had become part of his playbook. He clearly saw the Heller case as a watershed in gun rights, writing that it would “determine whether the Second Amendment has any modern relevance.” And he was right. The Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision shot down the Washington, D.C., handgun ban and ruled for the first time in the history of this country that the amendment ensures an individual person’s right to have a gun for self-defense. The National Rifle Association recognized Cruz’s role with a resolution.
+
+As Cruz climbs to the top of the Republican presidential field, the five-plus years he served as the solicitor general of Texas remain the most important period in his public résumé. They’re the record he ran on when he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012—and they represent significantly more of his working life than the three years he has served so far in the Senate. They're also a prime source of fodder for liberal and moderate critics, should be become the Republican presidential nominee.
+
+A Politico review of Cruz’s record as solicitor general shows he used the role in a new and far more ideological way than his predecessors, taking a relatively low-profile job that had traditionally been used mostly to defend the state government and turning it into a stage for pushing national conservative causes. Cruz argued eight cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court—far more than his predecessors and successors—using each of them to advance a position endorsed by conservative thinkers. He also was the counsel of record on some 70 friend-of-the-court briefs, or amicus briefs, weighing in on cases across the country, like Heller, in which Texas had no direct stake, but which similarly offered a chance to argue ideological points.
+
+“He really turned the office into a platform,” David Bernstein, a George Mason law professor who recently wrote a book about the Obama administration for which Cruz wrote the foreword, said in an interview.
+
+“He built up the national aura of the office,” said Tom Phillips, who was the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas at the start of Cruz’s run as solicitor general.
+
+Cruz’s zealous work served the ambitions of the conservative movement, but he also personally used it to build a bridge between what he was (an elite constitutional law nerd) to what he is today (an ascendant right-wing politician). Yet while pleasing to conservatives, other aspects of his record are sure to attract critics. He argued against leniency for an unjustly sentenced man whose lawyer had made a technical mistake; he invoked 13th-century “Saxon law” and the practice of cutting off testicles to justify harsher punishments in a rape case; and he referred to a late-term abortion technique as “infanticide.”
+
+Although little examined in the race so far, Cruz’s time as solicitor general built him a powerful allegiance among the conservative donors necessary to launch a national campaign. Heading into Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond, he has more money at his disposal than any candidate besides Jeb Bush. And the way he used that Texas office is part of the reason. Toby Neugebauer, who wrote a $10 million check to the Cruz super PAC called Keep the Promise II, told me the reason he did that—the single reason—is what Cruz did as solicitor general. He said other major donors feel the same way.
+
+“We’re backing someone,” Neugebauer told me, “that had a worldview and went out and executed on it.”
+
+Cruz took the solicitor job as a reboot of sorts after his initial foray into politics had fizzled.
+
+As a debater at Princeton, as a law school student at Harvard, and as a clerk to then-Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz was widely considered brilliant—but he left his first real job as a promising appellate attorney in private practice in Washington to instead toil in 2000 as a domestic policy analyst in George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, then as a legal hand for Bush’s team in the frantic recount in Florida that ultimately won Bush the election.
+
+In return, Cruz “desperately” wanted “a senior post” in the White House, he wrote in his autobiography. On the campaign, though, he had earned a reputation for his outsized ego as much as for his obvious intelligence, and the post-election jobs he got were out-of-the-way roles at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. “I just don’t like the guy,” Bush has said since. The solicitor general role in his home state of Texas, offered to him by Greg Abbott—then the attorney general of Texas, now the governor—was a political lifeline.
+
+From the start, it offered a chance to turn his legal acumen into political potential, because it came with a green light to advance conservative aims in the courts. Abbott’s directive for the solicitor general of Texas, Cruz said in his book, was to “look across the country” and “identify chances to defend conservative principles.”
+
+This is not the traditional definition of a solicitor general’s job, which comes with two main duties. The first: States get sued, attorneys general and their staffs respond, and some of the cases get appealed—and that’s where the solicitor general comes in, representing the state in higher courts, where the cases are the most legalistic and complex. The second: the writing of amicus briefs in cases elsewhere in which a state believes it has an interest even though it’s not a party.
+
+The first part can be seen as defense. The second part is more like offense, selectively advancing the interests of the state. The way Cruz did the job? Even the defense was offense, and the interests being asserted were less those of the state than its conservative leaders.
+
+“Texas is a huge state, and there’s plenty of work for the attorney general’s office to do,” said Jim Ho, an attorney in Dallas who succeeded Cruz as solicitor general and is a friend and supporter. Cruz, though, “was not content to simply do what was asked and go home.”
+
+When it came to cases that allowed him to argue for things like the forceful application of the death penalty and expressions of religion in the public arena and against things like abortion and gun control, Ho told me, Cruz “was on constant watch for opportunities to press a conservative vision of the Constitution.”",REAL
+5316,Newly Approved GM Potatoes Have Potential to Silence Human Genes,"Late last week, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved two new strains of genetically engineered potatoes. The potatoes, created by JR Simplot, have been engineered to resist potato blight,... ",FAKE
+1524,Accord reached after Sanders sues the DNC over suspended access to critical voter list,"The presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont filed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee on Friday, arguing that the party had unfairly suspended the campaign’s access to key voter information. After several tense hours, both sides announced a deal had been reached.
+
+The suit came shortly after campaign manager Jeff Weaver acknowledged at a Washington news conference that Sanders staffers had improperly reviewed information gathered by rival Hillary Clinton earlier in the week. But he accused the DNC of over­reacting to the breach by suspending the Sanders campaign’s ability to access the computer system containing information about Democratic-leaning voters, including data the campaign has gathered about its own supporters.
+
+After midnight, Sanders and the DNC put out statements that both indicated the impasse had been resolved but that put remarkably different spins on the outcome. Sanders’s campaign said the DNC had “capitulated” and that Sanders would soon regain access to the data. The DNC said what happened was “completely unacceptable” and that it would continue to investigate the circumstances even as Sanders regained access to the valuable information.
+
+Without a quick resolution, the messy public brawl threatened to overshadow Saturday’s third Democratic presidential debate and cast doubt on the DNC’s ability to manage the sophisticated data tools necessary for the party to win the White House next year. And it sparked significant suspicions among Sanders supporters that the party was conspiring to give a boost to Clinton.
+
+DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz rejected that allegation Friday, alleging that Sanders staffers had exploited a software error to essentially “steal” data from Clinton’s campaign. Wasserman Schultz said the party would not allow Sanders access to the critical database again until his campaign agreed to an independent audit of what happened.
+
+The suit, filed in federal court in Washington, argued that under a contract between the DNC and the campaign governing the data system’s use, formal notice in writing is required if either side believes the other has violated the deal. In addition, each side is supposed to be allowed 10 days to address any concerns, the suit said.
+
+“The DNC may not suspend the Campaign’s access to critical Voter Data out of haste or desperation to clean up after the DNC’s own mistakes,” the suit says.
+
+The voter data is heavily used to raise money, and the Sanders campaign estimated that it is losing $600,000 a day in “critical fundraising and publicity opportunities” without access to the files.
+
+The incident strained the relationship between the campaign of an upstart Vermont senator who until this year has run as an independent and a national party his supporters have long accused of favoring Clinton.
+
+Weaver accused the party of purposely sabotaging Sanders by refusing to restore access to the voter information.
+
+“By their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign,” Weaver said. “I think if you look at the pattern of conduct . . . it looks like in this case they’re trying to help the Clinton campaign.”
+
+NGP-VAN, the computer vendor that provides Democrats with detailed information about voters, has said that a computer error on Wednesday briefly allowed the campaigns to review information that had been gathered by their rivals.
+
+The company maintains a master voter list for the DNC and rents it to national and state campaigns, which then add their own, proprietary information gathered by field workers and volunteers. Firewalls are supposed to prevent campaigns from viewing data gathered by rival campaigns.
+
+The Sanders campaign has acknowledged that several of its staffers probed the system during the time of the error cited by NGP-VAN. One operative, data director Josh Uretsky, was fired as a result of the incident. Weaver said the actions of several others are being reviewed.
+
+Landing at the airport in Manchester, N.H., ahead of Saturday’s debate, Wasserman Schultz said that Sanders himself was unaware of the breach until she called to discuss it 24 hours after it took place. “He was stunned,” she said. “I know that Sen. Sanders had absolutely nothing to do with this. . . . Unfortunately, he has staff who acted inappropriately, and they need to be held accountable.”
+
+The severity of the data breach itself remained an issue of serious dispute Friday.
+
+Audit data from NGP-VAN and provided to The Washington Post by the Clinton campaign showed that four Sanders staffers conducted 24 separate searches of Clinton data during a 40-minute window Wednesday, targeting early voting states and searching for lists of voters most and least likely to support Clinton. The logs show that in some cases, the staffers saved the search results in new folders created within the system.
+
+“This was a very egregious breach and our data was stolen. This was not an inadvertent glimpse into our data,” Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, told reporters.
+
+On CNN, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon accused the Sanders staffers of acting “like kids in the candy store.”
+
+“They went hog wild, downloading as much data as they could,” he said.
+
+Later Friday, the Clinton camp struck a more conciliatory tone, issuing a statement in which Fallon said that his campaign was hopeful the matter would be resolved Friday night and that the Sanders team would get access to its voter files “right away.”
+
+Uretsky told The Post that he and the others conducted the searches of Clinton data after they discovered the software glitch only in an effort to discover the extent of their own data exposure. “We intentionally did it in a way that was trackable and traceable so that when they did an audit they would be able to see exactly what we did,” he said.
+
+Uretsky said there was no attempt to take Clinton information out of the software system.
+
+Weaver blamed the software vendor for the breach, which allowed all campaigns to access one another’s data for a time, insisting that the Sanders campaign had actually quietly alerted the DNC to problems with another vendor system in October.
+
+In the lawsuit, the campaign argued that a “similar security incident” during the 2008 presidential campaign resulted in “unintentional transmission of confidential information” to Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign against Barack Obama.
+
+Weaver said a tick-tock provided to the Sanders campaign by the computer vendor confirmed that staffers were not attempting to remove significant Clinton data from the system.
+
+“We are running a clean campaign,” he said. “We don’t need dirty tricks.”
+
+Even before this week, Sanders backers had accused the DNC of trying to protect Clinton by limiting the number and prominence of debates — a narrative that plays into his anti-establishment appeal.
+
+“They’ve been sabotaging Bernie’s campaign all along,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, an 185,000-member union that is backing Sanders.
+
+News of the data breach broke just as Sanders was enjoying a fresh burst of momentum after months in which his campaign appeared to have stalled.
+
+On Thursday, Sanders received his biggest union endorsement to date, from the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America. He also was endorsed by Democracy for America, a progressive group that claims 1 million members nationwide. That group, founded by former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who is backing Clinton, said it had surveyed its membership and found 88 percent favored endorsing Sanders.
+
+Sanders, who has raised most of his money from small donors over the Internet, also this week celebrated a fundraising milestone: more than 2 million contributions to his campaign. That figure made him competitive with the effort of President Obama’s 2012 re-election effort during the same stretch.",REAL
+2974,Why the latest Patriot Act reform won’t be enough to rein in the NSA,"Recent debates over US government spying have focused on one specific program: the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' telephone records — and the Patriot Act provision that supplied the program's legal justification. From that perspective, the partial expiration of the Patriot Act a week ago and the subsequent passage of surveillance reform legislation might seem like a decisive victory against mass surveillance.
+
+But the surveillance debate is actually a lot bigger than the phone records program and the Patriot Act. The NSA has other spying programs with other legal foundations. And the USA Freedom Act, which President Obama signed on Tuesday, doesn't do anything to rein them in.
+
+On Friday, I talked to John Napier Tye, a former State Department official who resigned last year over what he regards as unconstitutional surveillance by the US federal government. He sees the USA Freedom Act as ""a small step in the right direction,"" but he's hoping the next step will be a broader debate about other ways the US government spies on innocent Americans.
+
+Most people have heard about the Patriot Act, which was signed just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, and was reformed this week by the USA Freedom Act. But Tye argues the real action is elsewhere.
+
+""You have to keep in mind that most NSA collection on Americans was not under the Patriot Act. It was under other legal authorities. And none of that surveillance is affected by this new law,"" he says. ""When you think about all the collection that the NSA has been doing on Americans, a small percentage — 5 or 10 percent, maybe less — was under the Patriot Act.""
+
+Tye points to two other sources of authority for government spying. One is the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which is the legal basis for a controversial NSA program called PRISM that collects private data from major internet companies like Google and Facebook. The other is Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era directive that has become the basis for a lot of NSA spying.
+
+Tye says that EO 12333 is ""an executive order, it's not a statute. It was never passed by Congress. It was originally issued by President Reagan in 1981 and has been amended several times since then — including by George W. Bush.""
+
+A huge amount of our data is collected: Gmails and Yahoo messages, Facebook messages, Apple iMessages
+
+EO 12333 ""gives a very broad grant of authority to intelligence agencies to do all kinds of things,"" Tye says. ""There's one section in there that allows the NSA to collect data on US persons as part of a lawful foreign intelligence investigation. That provision is being used to collect a huge amount of Americans' communications and data.""
+
+When the government collects information overseas, it isn't bound by most US surveillance laws. The NSA has reserved the right to ""incidentally"" collect Americans' private communications overseas so long as Americans are not the target of a particular surveillance effort. But Tye argues that this is a huge loophole in practice.
+
+""I don't think most Americans understand that almost all of their internet and phone data is either stored on backup servers overseas or transits outside of our borders,"" he says. ""A huge amount of our data is collected under this authority outside the borders of the US — Gmails and Yahoo messages, Facebook messages, Apple iMessages, Twitter, every service you can think of.""
+
+Tye says he has firsthand knowledge of the extent of NSA spying programs. That's because he was an official in the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in 2013 when Edward Snowden's revelations became public.
+
+""My jobs was internet freedom, promoting free and open internet around the world,"" Tye says. ""When the Snowden leaks happened in June of 2013, I was not surprised. I knew that a lot of stuff had been happening. I knew that a lot of surveillance was going on that no one knew about. And it didn't surprise me that this was finally front-page news.""
+
+Congress should take a more active role in overseeing executive branch activity
+
+Tye says that after the Snowden leaks, ""part of my job was to help develop responses to initiatives within the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly by Germany, Brazil, and other countries that were very concerned with online privacy. To be able to properly negotiate those efforts, I was briefed on the scope of US intelligence practices. In two different classified briefings, one in the fall of 2013 and one in the first part of 2014, I learned about activities under 12333.""
+
+Tye believed these programs were unconstitutional and began filing complaints inside the government about them. He met with the intelligence committees in both the House and the Senate and filed complaints with the inspectors general of both the State Department and the National Security Agency. He says none of them were very interested in the issue.
+
+So last summer, Tye quit his job and went public with his concerns in an op-ed for the Washington Post. He says he ran the op-ed through government censors to make sure it didn't disclose any classified information. Tye has spent the last year at the public interest group Avaaz and is now starting his own law firm that will focus on civil rights and human rights issues.
+
+Tye would like President Obama to unilaterally revise Executive Order 12333 to better protect the privacy of Americans. If Obama doesn't, Tye would like Congress to hold hearings on the issue. ""I think that Congress should take a more active role in overseeing executive branch activity under 12333,"" Tye says. ""Congress should hold hearings and find out what protections really exist for Americans and how much our data is being collected.""
+
+He also favors reforms to the FISA Amendments Act, which was passed by Congress in 2008. Whereas some provisions of the Patriot Act were set to expire this year — and have now been renewed until 2019 — the FISA Amendments Act is permanent. The most controversial part of the FISA Amendments Act is Section 702, which allows warrantless surveillance to collect Americans' communications so long as the target is a foreigner located overseas.
+
+""Under Section 702, the NSA is collecting a lot of stuff inside the United States that's nominally targeting foreigners but in fact is scooping up innocent communications from hundreds of millions of Americans,"" Tye says. Even worse, ""the FBI has access to that database and can search it for domestic criminal reasons. So the purpose of the law nominally was to allow the NSA to conduct foreign intelligence investigations. But as it's currently being used, the FBI is using this data for domestic criminal investigations. The protections that we normally want in place for domestic criminal investigations are not necessarily there.""",REAL
+3364,"FBI expands probe of Clinton emails, launches independent classification review","The FBI has expanded its probe of Hillary Clinton's emails, with agents exploring whether multiple statements violate a federal false statements statute, according to intelligence sources familiar with the ongoing case.
+
+Fox News is told agents are looking at U.S. Code 18, Section 1001, which pertains to ""materially false"" statements given either in writing, orally or through a third party. Violations also include pressuring a third party to conspire in a cover-up. Each felony violation is subject to five years in prison.
+
+This phase represents an expansion of the FBI probe, which is also exploring potential violations of an Espionage Act provision relating to ""gross negligence"" in the handling of national defense information.
+
+""The agents involved are under a lot of pressure and are busting a--,"" an intelligence source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told Fox News.
+
+The section of the criminal code being explored is known as ""statements or entries generally,"" and can be applied when an individual makes misleading or false statements causing federal agents to expend additional resources and time. In this case, legal experts as well as a former FBI agent said, Section 1001 could apply if Clinton, her aides or attorney were not forthcoming with FBI agents about her emails, classification and whether only non-government records were destroyed. It is not publicly known who may have been interviewed.
+
+Fox News judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said the same section got Martha Stewart in trouble with the FBI. To be a violation, the statements do not need to be given under oath.
+
+""This is a broad, brush statute that punishes individuals who are not direct and fulsome in their answers,"" former FBI intelligence officer Timothy Gill told Fox News. Gill is not connected to the email investigation, but spent 16 years as part of the bureau's national security branch, and worked the post 9/11 anthrax case where considerable time was spent resolving discrepancies in Bruce Ivins' statements and his unusual work activities at Fort Detrick, Md.
+
+""It is a cover-all. The problem for a defendant is when their statements cause the bureau to expend more time, energy, resources to de-conflict their statements with the evidence,"" he said.
+
+Separately, two U.S. government officials told Fox News that the FBI is doing its own classification review of the Clinton emails, effectively cutting out what has become a grinding process at the State Department. Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy has argued to both Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Congress that the ""Top Secret"" emails on Clinton's server could have been pulled from unclassified sources including news reports.
+
+""You want to go right to the source,"" Gill said. ""Go to the originating, not the collateral, authority. Investigative protocol would demand that.""
+
+On Friday, Clapper spokesman Brian Hale confirmed that no change has been made to the two ""Top Secrets"" emails after a Politico report said the intelligence community was retreating from the finding.
+
+""ODNI has made no such determination and the review is ongoing,"" Hale said. Andrea G. Williams, spokeswoman for the intelligence community inspector general, said she had the same information. Kennedy is seeking an appeal, but no one can explain what statute or executive order would give Clapper that authority.
+
+A U.S. government official who was not authorized to speak on the record said the FBI is identifying suspect emails, and then going directly to the agencies who originated them and therefore own the intelligence -- and who, under the regulations, have final say on the classification.
+
+As Fox News previously reported, at least four classified Clinton emails had their markings changed to a category that shields the content from Congress and the public, in what State Department whistleblowers believed to be an effort to hide the true extent of classified information on the former secretary of state's server.
+
+One State Department lawyer involved in the alleged re-categorization was Kate Duval. Duval once worked in the same law firm as Clinton's current and long-time lawyer David Kendall and at the IRS during the Lois Lerner email controversy. Duval left government service for private practice in mid-September.
+
+Pamela K. Browne is Senior Executive Producer at the FOX News Channel (FNC) and is Director of Long-Form Series and Specials. Her journalism has been recognized with several awards. Browne first joined FOX in 1997 to launch the news magazine “Fox Files” and later, “War Stories.”
+
+Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.",REAL
+4933,Where is Gary Johnson?,"(CNN) Conservatives dissatisfied with Donald Trump have given the Libertarian presidential nominee a chance to take his third party to center stage, but Gary Johnson has not exactly been a fixture on the campaign trail.
+
+Largely eschewing traditional campaign events, the former New Mexico governor has instead opted to appear almost daily on multiple news programs and appeal to his solid core of online support.
+
+That could soon change as the campaign considers more regular appearances in the real world.
+
+Johnson campaign spokesperson Joe Hunter told CNN Monday the campaign is now undergoing a ""natural evolution,"" having recently ramped up its fundraising efforts with the stated intention of buying advertisements in key states and beginning to hold rallies across the country.
+
+Despite enjoying a brief surge in the lead-up to the major party conventions, Johnson has generally hovered in the high single digits in national polls. The latest CNN Poll of Polls showed Johnson at 9% support nationwide.
+
+In a race where the majority of voters say they are dissatisfied with their mainstream offerings for president, where the Republican nominee has secured little support from the nation's largest generation -- millennials -- and where digital media has taken an unprecedented place in the political landscape, here's what Johnson is -- and isn't -- doing to make his long shot candidacy a viable bet.
+
+Hunter called the constant interviews ""a critical"" component of the campaign, and after taking scheduling into account, ""We take every opportunity we get.""
+
+Similar to Trump, Johnson and his running mate, Bill Weld, have relied on ""earned media"" in the form of appearances in the press.
+
+Unlike Trump, the two almost always stay on message.
+
+Since winning the nomination at the Libertarian Party's convention in May, Johnson and Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, have used their appearances to cast themselves as the centrist candidates between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
+
+They point out their experience as Republican governors in traditionally Democratic-leaning states. Johnson often touts his laissez-faire approach to drugs and immigration, while Weld has pointed to his record on LGBT rights and his cordial relationship with both sides of the aisle, including the Clintons. Both champion their conservative credos on matters of spending.
+
+But the live television appearances, including two prime-time town hall events on CNN, have not yet afforded the Libertarian ticket national recognition or a strong showing in the polls.
+
+On the digital side, the Johnson campaign has largely stuck to its roots by embracing the Libertarian community online. Reaching supporters through social media and email, the campaign has kept its base abreast of its progress -- and appealed for funds.
+
+The Johnson campaign said Tuesday its August ""money bomb"" fundraising campaign surpassed its goal of $1.5 million based off ""entirely digital"" appeals for money. The campaign said it raised $840,000 on Monday alone, totaling $2.9 million in donations in the first two weeks of the month.
+
+A number of groups have fallen into place doing some of the heavy lifting that the long shot bid needs doing.
+
+Among the most standout recent entries into the Johnson orbit is a newly minted group called Republicans for Johnson/Weld. The group formed this month to bring the GOP leaders and voters Trump had alienated into the Libertarian fold.
+
+Republican strategist and group spokesperson Liz Mair told CNN Monday the pro-Johnson forces seeking to convert Republicans from a divisive nominee were in uncharted waters.
+
+""I don't think anybody's tried to launch an effort like this,"" Mair said.
+
+Despite the lack of an established path, Johnson has notched a few victories. Rep. Scott Rigell said he will support Johnson in November, and Reps. Reid Ribble and Mike Coffman have said they are considering it.
+
+In separate interviews, Hunter and Mair both said they had heard supportive words from Republican politicians but that many were not ready to come out into the open against their party.
+
+The outside group could be a key factor in the mainstreaming of Johnson. It already holds several well-known Republican staffers. On Monday, it added Joseph Russo III, a former Sarah Palin aide, Mair said.
+
+Given the nature of the group, Mair said a ""number of us have better connections"" to GOP Capitol Hill figures than the Libertarian campaign.
+
+What will Mitt Romney do?
+
+Within the Johnson campaign, Weld has taken the lead on outreach to Republicans. However, his biggest prize still eludes him: 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
+
+Romney served as governor of Massachusetts after Weld and has said if Weld were topping the ticket, he would be supporting them, but he still needed to hear what Johnson had to say. Months have passed since then without a Romney endorsement.
+
+The Libertarian efforts to sway Republicans have also had to push back against the notion they are helping Clinton.
+
+Johnson has said he is pulling about evenly from both sides and been forceful in his condemnation of Trump.
+
+Mair said Trump was doing the work of helping Clinton on his own and that Clinton's win was at this point ""overwhelming likely,"" although Johnson still had a chance in an unpredictable cycle.
+
+""The Republicans screwed up. That's not Gary Johnson's fault,"" she said.
+
+Up in the air
+
+Hunter said many people would not come to their side until the Johnson candidacy had reached a ""critical mass,"" which they hope to achieve by ramping up their campaign efforts and their ad spending.
+
+In addition to television ads, the campaign said it was looking at radio, billboards and continuing its online efforts.
+
+As with the major party candidates, outside spending groups have also taken it upon themselves to launch ads in support of Johnson. A Libertarian spending group called Americans Deserve Better PAC has put together a few spots hailing the former governors as the ""adults"" in the race.
+
+Republicans for Johnson/Weld, meanwhile, said its focus is less on traditional advertising than generating viral content. So far, however, one of the group's most viral moments came not from distributed content, but from an appearance on CNN. Ahead of the second Libertarian town hall, Mair told CNN's Anderson Cooper that Trump's message ""is being a loud-mouthed d---, basically.""
+
+All told, this third party effort has so far expounded more resources on general election advertisements than Trump's campaign, which has yet to join in the air wars.
+
+All of these efforts have so far been dwarfed by Clinton and her allied super PACs, which have spent exponentially more than the three other presidential campaigns.
+
+Johnson has not been able to draw the kind of rock star crowd sizes that Trump or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders attracted earlier this year.
+
+The former New Mexico governor held one rally in Utah on a Saturday earlier this month and another in Reno, Nevada. After rescheduling, he is set to hold another in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this Saturday.
+
+His campaign said it was still working out specifics on other rallies in the near future but that it planned to host public events soon in Florida and New England.
+
+Meanwhile, fundraising efforts have come largely from the digital side, although the campaign said the governors have appealed directly for funds, with a planned event in Miami on Wednesday.
+
+Their most prominent fundraising event so far came in late July at a Hollywood event hosted by Drew Carey, the Libertarian host of ""The Price is Right.""",REAL
+5530,"The Arcturian Group by Marilyn Raffaele October 23, 2016 [VIDEO]", ,FAKE
+7680,Nuclear weapons question,"Report Copyright Violation nuclear weapons question Hello all.. I have been a longtime lurker on this board but this is my first time posting. I have many questions that I'm hoping someone can help me with since you all seem to be very knowledgeable in this area..In terms of nuclear weapons I know we have tested over 1000 and I know the radiation has increased cases of cancer and killed livestock but shouldn't there be more of an impact? I know the theory with nuclear war ending life as we know it derives from the fact that it would cause a nuclear winter there for beginning some sort of ice age on earth.. with all the weapons that have been tested should we not have already brought ourselves to this or does it more have to do with all weapons going off all at once? Another question being I heard that radiation dissipates quickly (with the most dangerous time being the first 48 hours) if so then how would it cause a nuclear winter? I know these are silly questions I am pretty bad with science so I am hoping someone can explain better.Another question.. I am very sure this article has been linked here before but wondering if someone can give me their thoughts and either disprove the article or explain why it's true. [ link to heiwaco.tripod.com ] Personally I find it's safer to believe they work, if a crazy person threatens you saying they have a gun you take it for face value. You don't want to question them about it or dare them to prove it!In terms of world 3... have all biblical prophecies been fulfilled already to believe world war 3 is next on the timeline? I would be lying if I said I'm not scared. When it comes to death. .it sucks sure but I'm not afraid for myself.. I'm afraid for my one year old! I will do ANYTHING to protect her even if it means giving up my life so she can have a beautiful, healthy, long life! I do believe in God and I find myself turning a lot to him these last few days but I can't help but be angry and feel so guilty bringing this beautiful soul into this world.. for what? So she can suffer and die before she even turns 3? I just feel so lost and hurt. If anyone can give me advice or guidance I would appreciate it more than you know. The aspect of the end being at our door isn't too much a problem for me.. it's more the aspect that I don't want this for my child! I want her to live her life! Fall in love! See the world!I don't know.. maybe the time isn't here.. we've been close to a nuclear war once before maybe just maybe we can dodge this again. Page 1",FAKE
+10490,Kevin MacDonald celebrates Trump’s Amazing Victory,"“WE ARE THE FUTURE.” — Kevin MacDonald 
+This is an amazing victory. The stars were aligned. First, the very long shot of Trump being nominated. Then he gets to run against the most corrupt, least charismatic candidate in history (I think Joe Biden would have beaten Trump, and maybe even Bernie Sanders) at a time when Americans naturally want change after 8 years of Obama. 
+Fundamentally, it is a victory of White Americans over the oligarchic, hostile elites what have run this country for decades. Trump accomplished a hostile takeover of the Republican Party and won without the support or with only lukewarm and vacillating support from much of the GOP elite. 
+In May of 2015 I was very despondent about our prospects. It just didn’t seem like we could break through the elite consensus dominating all the high ground—and all the moral high ground—of the U.S., including the media (print, television, and the Hollywood movie industry), the academic world, politics, Wall St., and the CEOs of major corporations. We were systematically shut out and it was obvious that the powers that be were not going to let the Alt Right get a seat at the table. Then Trump announced, it was hard to take it seriously, but his comments on immigration, American nationalism, political correctness and trade certainly struck a chord. My immediate reaction (July 10, 2015), however, was that he had two things going for him that were absolutely unique — he is a celebrity and he is very, very rich (“ How it could happen “). Such a person is in a position to be heard; he can’t be shut out of the media, and he doesn’t need the money of the corrupt donor class. In fact, the media, eager for ratings, gave him countless opportunities to get his message out. Anyone on the Alt Right could have said the exact same things, but we would be speaking into our closets. 
+Even back in July of 2015, it was obvious Trump was not your usual GOP candidate: 
+[Trump] certainly did not fall in my estimation when he attacked two prominent operatives of the Republican Party/Israel Lobby nexus hostile to his candidacy, Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg. Then there’s the Twitter incident : “I promise you that I’m much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz — I mean Jon Stewart @TheDailyShow,” tweeted Trump , adding, “Who, by the way, is totally overrated.” It is, of course, considered “anti-Semitic” to ever call attention to the fact that someone is Jewish because of the absolutely outrageous suggestion that the Jewish identity of someone like Stewart/Leibowitz might influence his opinions. As we all know, Jews are just like everybody else. 
+And it quickly turned out that he understood the anger in White America far better than anyone else and he was willing to say what they wanted to hear — most of all the White working class (72-23!), but also White women(53-43), and his deficit among White educated women was only 51-45 ( CBS exit polls ). Looks like quite a few college-educated women ignored what they heard in their gender studies courses and those mandatory credits in Black Studies. 
+While obviously a lot of work needs to be done, this is a glorious day. 
+The following is an expanded version of my article in Radix Journal’s series on the meaning of Trump. 
+The Alt Right has gravitated to Trump’s candidacy, and for good reason. Much of what the Alt Right wants will be difficult or impossible to bring about even with a president who is entirely on board with the idea that America should start thinking about the interests of its traditional White majority. But win or lose, Trump has already had a huge effect on American politics in a way that benefits the Alt Right, and his victory will be even more so: Trump has made statements on immigration that have been banned from polite society for 50 years — deport illegals, seal the border, end birthright citizenship, place a moratorium on Muslim immigration, and make immigration serve actual labor needs rather than a moral imperative (ideally with guest workers not given citizenship). He has deplored Angela Merkel’s policies in Germany and has made statements indicating he opposes the transformation of Western societies via immigration and multiculturalism (“ Paris isn’t Paris anymore .”) Trump’s victory will encourage and energize the right in Europe. It is Brexit on steroids — a scream by voters to stop the way things are going. To stop the destruction of their traditional ways of life. If nothing else, it is throwing a monkey wrench into the system. Tear it down! We can’t keep going on like this! Voters want an end to meaningless wars, an end to importing people who hate us and will never assimilate to our way of life. Trump has unmasked the neocons. The neocons have dominated the intellectual and foreign policy establishment of the Republican Party since the 1980s. From the beginning of Trump’s candidacy, neocons have been leading the #NeverTrump movement, despite the catastrophic effects of a Hillary Clinton presidency on the GOP. A Clinton presidency would ensure a liberal/left voting majority into the foreseeable future given that she would amnesty millions of illegals and dramatically raise total numbers of immigrants and refugees. Clinton Supreme Court appointments would likely gut the First Amendment by enabling “hate speech” laws and they would gut the Second Amendment as well. No one on the right, from traditional “limited government” conservatives to the Alt Right, would want this, and it’s difficult to believe that the Jewish identities and pro-Israel commitments of the most important neocons are lost on non-Jewish Republicans. The treason of the neocons will be long remembered in GOP circles and will compromise their influence in the future. 
+I notice on Twitter that Bill Kristol says that the #NeverTrumpers should be magnanimous in losing, but I would be shocked if neocons were given any role in the GOP. This is Trump’s party now. It is incredibly heartening that he wants a good relationship with Russia at a time when neocons and NATO have been clamoring for confrontation and aggression. It is incredibly heartening that he supports the legitimate Assad government in Syria. I have no doubt that he will act in concert with Russia to end the rebellion and bring peace and stability to the region. Trump has highlighted the chasm between the overwhelmingly White Republican voting base and the GOP donor class intent on globalist policies of mass immigration, free trade, and a bellicose pro-Israel, anti-Russian foreign policy. The pre-Trump GOP was dominated by a neocon foreign policy establishment and a pro-Chamber of Commerce, pro-big business economic policy. This party did not represent the interests of GOP voters and can’t be resurrected. Even if Trump had lost, his energized supporters would be a new and important force within the GOP. His victory will ensure that the GOP will be a populist party for the foreseeable future. Trump has unmasked the media. The media have always been liberal, but this time around, even much of the usual pro-Republican media has been hostile to Trump, and a survey by the Media Research Center found an astounding 91% of media coverage hostile to his candidacy. Who can forget the hostility from mainstream conservative media like National Review , The Weekly Standard , and other neocon outlets? This feeds into the narrative that there has been a unified establishment from the far left to the neoconservative right that has opposed Trump’s populist policies favoring the middle class and the traditional White majority. 
+The media is a pillar of the establishment, and it is heartening indeed that people ignored the deluge of talk of Trump being a racist, a bigot, and a misogynist. The media is a huge loser in Trump’s victory. 
+As we have commented many times, the media is under very powerful Jewish influence. Trump’s victory is a blow to the entire Jewish power structure. I have written 6 articles on Jewish hostility toward Trump, much of this hostility bordering on the clinically paranoid. Jews understand that they do indeed have a great deal of power in the U.S. and throughout the West and that they have used that power to destroy the traditional homogeneity of these societies and to do all they can to make Whites minorities in societies they have dominated for hundreds and, in the case of Europe, many thousands of years. We are a long way from really putting a dent in that power structure, but Trump’s victory is a great first step. Trump has put the Alt Right on the map. There have been numerous articles and commentary on the Alt Right because of Trump’s candidacy. The Alt Right has been the only identifiable intellectual perspective supporting Trump, although we understand that he is not one of us and would not attempt to do much what we would like to see in our ideal world. We are the only intellectual perspective that takes race seriously and accepts the social science research not only on race but on the disastrous costs of imposed multiculturalism for White majorities and the horrifying future awaiting Whites if indeed they do become hated, despised minorities. Traditional conservative intellectuals simply cannot explain what is happening with their usual intellectual toolkit. They can’t explain the anger and the very legitimate fears of the White majority. They can’t understand the racialization of politics. We understand it and are able to analyze it in very sophisticated ways that are entirely within the scientific mainstream. 
+Much of the media coverage of the Alt Right was motivated by attempting to tar Trump as a “racist,” and after the election, win or lose, the media will likely attempt to put the toothpaste back in the tube by ceasing coverage. However, a Trump victory makes that all but impossible. Our increased visibility has meant a very large surge in support for the Alt Right. Meeting attendance is way up, and readership on Alt Right sites is skyrocketing. The future is bright, and a very large amount of the credit for that has to go to Donald Trump. 
+We are the future.",FAKE
+9413,"The amazing AquTru water filter, version 2.0, is now in stock: I've snagged 500 units for Natural News readers at a deep discount","Erin Brockovich: Millions of Americans' tap water posioned due to EPA standards About the author: Mike Adams (aka the "" Health Ranger "") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs . There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation. Adams is a person of color whose descendents include Africans and American Indians. He self-identifies as being of American Indian heritage , which he credits as inspiring his ""Health Ranger"" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution. Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal , the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books. In his laboratory research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten . Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods . He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder , and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products. In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue , a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories. With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software . Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com , a massive research resource featuring over 10 million scientific studies. Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed ""strange fibers"" found in Chicken McNuggets , fake academic credentials of so-called health ""gurus,"" dangerous ""detox"" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams , the California raw milk raids , the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics. Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents . Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness. In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released over a dozen popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.",FAKE
+4880,What happens if Clinton drops out?,"Whether an October surprise may have come a month early, it’s too soon to say.
+
+But Hillary Clinton’s weekend health scare already has started to stir speculation about whether Democratic officials should be discussing the possibility of a Plan B, in case they need to hastily arrange for a replacement nominee.
+
+Which raises a basic question: How does that work?
+
+Democratic Party bylaws say the DNC has the power to fill “vacancies in the nominations for the office of the president and vice president” when the national convention is not in session.
+
+Under party rules, the DNC chair – currently Donna Brazile – could call a special meeting, and fill the vacancy by a majority vote of those present.
+
+Analysts still see this scenario as exceedingly unlikely. It appears party leaders have no authority to sideline Clinton, meaning the special meeting would kick in only if she were to step aside voluntarily. The nominee and her aides say she's recovering and feeling much better now.
+
+But after Clinton left a 9/11 memorial Sunday stumbling and being helped into an SUV by multiple aides -- an incident the campaign tied to a recent pneumonia diagnosis and other factors -- some Democrats are at least thinking about that process.
+
+Former DNC Chairman Don Fowler told Politico that the party needs to develop a plan immediately for finding a potential successor candidate.
+
+Former Al Jazeera and MSNBC anchor David Shuster tweeted Sunday that the DNC was considering an “emergency meeting” to talk about a Clinton replacement, although his source emphasized her status as nominee was up to her, not the party.
+
+NPR’s Cokie Roberts said Monday that Democrats already are considering another candidate.
+
+“It has them very nervously beginning to whisper about having her step aside and finding another candidate,” Roberts said, adding that “it’s unlikely to be a real thing” and describing the talk as likely “an overreaction.”
+
+Perhaps inadvertently feeding that frenzy, former Ohio Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland introduced Clinton running mate Tim Kaine at an event Monday by describing him as “ready to become the president” if necessary, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
+
+But in the, albeit unlikely, scenario of a replacement scramble, Kaine isn’t necessarily a shoo-in.
+
+Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others could all be possible candidates.
+
+Historian Doug Wead told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto that the votes would tend to go toward whomever the top of the ticket endorses, though it’s not guaranteed.
+
+“Whatever [Clinton] says will likely hold sway, but legally, technically they have their own vote,” he said.
+
+Replacing a member of a major-party ticket would be exceedingly rare, though not unprecedented. This happened in 1972 when Democratic nominee George McGovern’s running mate -- Sen. Thomas Eagleton -- withdrew from the race in July after it was revealed he had undergone electric shock treatment for mental health issues.
+
+Eagleton was replaced in August by Sargent Shriver as the new vice presidential nominee. The McGovern/Shriver ticket went on to lose the race in a landslide to incumbent President Richard Nixon.
+
+Rick Hasen, who runs the Election Law Blog, told FoxNews.com that the situation could become significantly more complicated if it were to play out later in the calendar.
+
+“The more complicated problem would arise if ballots have already been printed, and people would have started voting. There, the Electoral College would come into play, and electors from the party would be expected to vote for the replacement nominee,” Hasen said.
+
+The first absentee ballots were mailed out in Sept. 9 in North Carolina, and many other states will soon follow. By mid-September the deadlines for both parties to certify candidates for the general election will have passed in every state – meaning lawsuits might have to be filed to try and get a replacement on the ballot.
+
+The DNC did not respond to a request for comment from FoxNews.com.
+
+This isn’t the first time this election cycle there has been talk of a candidate dropping out. In August, during a particularly rough patch of poll numbers for Trump, some GOP officials were reportedly considering contingency plans in case the Republican nominee dropped out.
+
+Adam Shaw is a Politics Reporter and occasional Opinion writer for FoxNews.com. He can be reached here or on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.",REAL
+3512,Brothers ID'd as suicide bombers in Belgium,"(CNN) Several bombers are dead. At least one alleged attacker is still on the loose.
+
+And a key question looms as investigators race to piece together details about the attackers behind Tuesday's deadly bombings in Belgium's capital: Were these men acting alone, or were other members of a terror cell supporting them?
+
+Raids, arrests and forensic analysis are some of the tools investigators are using to get to the bottom of who was behind the attacks in Brussels, which killed 31 people and wounded 270 others.
+
+Two of the bombers were brothers. And one of the bombers at the airport appears to be a man authorities named as a suspect in the Paris terror attacks.
+
+But the investigation is far from finished. With at least one suspect on the run, the stakes are high, Belgian counterterrorism official Paul Van Tigchelt said Wednesday.
+
+""There are still a number of people, possibly involved in the attacks still in our country ... who still pose a threat,"" he said.
+
+Here's a look at the latest developments in the investigation, and the questions they raise.
+
+Belgian federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw identified Ibrahim El Bakraoui as one of two suicide bombers at the Brussels airport and his brother, Khalid El Bakraoui, as the man behind a deadly suicide blast about an hour later on a train near the Maelbeek metro station.
+
+This isn't the first time they've come across authorities' radar.
+
+Ibrahim El Bakraoui was deported by Turkey to the Netherlands last year, a senior Turkish official told CNN. The Turkish presidency's office said authorities there captured him in July 2015 and flagged him to Belgian authorities.
+
+Belgian authorities, the Turkish official said, responded soon after saying he had a criminal record but no known ties to terrorism.
+
+""These two deceased suicide bombers had lengthy criminal records,"" he said, ""but (were) not linked to terrorism.""
+
+Ibrahim El Bakraoui had been sentenced in October 2010 by a Brussels criminal court to nine years behind bars for opening fire on police officers with a Kalashnikov during a robbery, according to Belgian public broadcaster RTBF and CNN affiliate RTL.
+
+Interpol had issued a ""red notice"" for Khalid El Bakraoui, the subway bomber, that noted Belgian authorities wanted him in connection with terrorism. But it wasn't clear when that notice was issued or why Belgian authorities now say he had no ties to terrorism.
+
+Question to consider: If they were already on authorities' radar, how did the brothers manage to slip through the cracks and carry out the deadly attacks?
+
+Surveillance images showing three men pushing luggage carts through the airport have played an important role as authorities work to pinpoint the suspects.
+
+Authorities say bomber Ibrahim El Bakraoui is the man in the middle. Najim Laachraoui, an ISIS bomb-maker, is the man on the left in the picture, a Belgian counterterrorism official told CNN's Paul Cruickshank.
+
+Investigators believe both were killed in the airport blast. But authorities are looking for the third man in the photo, walking on the right and wearing light-colored clothing and a hat.
+
+Belgium's interior minister said that man placed a bomb at the airport and left.
+
+While two explosives went off within 37 seconds of each other shortly before 8 a.m., this third bomb -- described as the ""heaviest"" by Van Leeuw -- did not, instead being detonated by authorities later in a controlled explosion.
+
+Questions to consider: Where did the man in light-colored clothing go? Is anyone helping him hide out from authorities, and could he be plotting another attack?
+
+Two people were arrested in Brussels in connection with the attacks -- one in Schaerbeek and the other in Haren, Van Leeuw said.
+
+One was released later that day, according to the prosecutor.
+
+Another person was detained Wednesday, according to Belgian public broadcaster RTBF.
+
+One raid, officials said, came after a tip from a taxi driver led them to the northeast Brussels area of Schaerbeek.
+
+The driver recognized the men shown in surveillance footage and told authorities he'd driven the men to the airport before the attacks. Police raided the area where the driver told them he'd picked up the men.
+
+On Wednesday, they made another significant find: Ibrahim El Bakraoui's will.
+
+Police found the airport bomber's will on a computer in a trash can in Schaerbeek, Van Leeuw said.
+
+The will indicated Bakraoui ""needs to rush"" and ""no longer feels safe.""
+
+Questions to consider: Who are the people who were arrested, and what was their alleged role in the attacks?
+
+The latest connection: Laachraoui, a suspect in the Paris attacks who authorities now say they believe was one of the Brussels airport bombers.
+
+Investigators believe Abdeslam likely planned to be part of an attack orchestrated by the same ISIS cell that carried out Tuesday's attacks, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official told Cruickshank.
+
+The Brussels attackers likely accelerated their plans when police discovered Abdeslam's hideout, investigators believe.
+
+And one of the apartments where he hid before his capture, located in the southern Brussels district of Forest, allegedly has ties to one of the Bakraoui brothers.
+
+Questions to consider: What role, if any, did Abeslam's arrest play in the Brussels attacks? Are there other links between the Paris and Brussels attacks?
+
+Another piece of evidence authorities found during the Brussels raids could help in their investigation: unused explosives.
+
+In the Schaerbeek residence, authorities found 15 kilograms of the explosive TATP and screws among the bomb-making materials there, Van Leeuw said.
+
+""Such bombs have been a signature of jihadist terrorists in the West for more than a decade because the materials are so easy to acquire, unlike military-grade explosives, which are tightly controlled in much of the West,"" CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen said.
+
+TATP-based bombs require technical know-how and bulk purchases of hydrogen peroxide or hair bleach. That helps authorities narrow down potential bomb-making suspects, because making the explosives can sometimes bleach hair. So authorities can identify bomb-makers in part by recognizing unusually bleached hair or asking sellers to report any suspiciously large purchases of hydrogen peroxide.
+
+Questions to consider: Will the bomb-making materials lead investigators to any new suspects or help them dismantle a terror cell?",REAL
+8685,Glorifying Violence,"opednews.com - Advertisement - The news in the Guardian (June 18) that 'The government has been secretly awarding honours to senior figures in the US military and foreign businessmen ' shows the importance we Brits attach to honoring people. Arise Sir George There is also a lot in the news just now about 'glorifying violence ' and I assume it mainly concerns anyone else who glorifies it, because we Brits have been at it for hundreds of years and do it better than most.I heard a story about the youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross a century ago. He was eighteen and when his maxim gun had jammed had bravely relied on a standard high velocity rifle to continue shooting the unfortunate Pathans, or whoever we were ""supporting"" at the time. He was cashiered for insubordination. He could cope with third world guys with spears, but not being told to get his flippin ' 'air cut. You are more likely to do your bravery when you are young and vulnerable and fear of a sergeant outweighs any feelings of fear of, or sympathy towards, your fellow human beings. ""Right lads we are about to walk across no man 's land, and I would like you chaps to consider coming with me. "" will not get results. ""OK, you shower of girl 's blouses, I will personally shoot the last mincer out of this trench. "" is likely to work, as long as the last guy who dared to debate the proposal, has not yet been removed from the barbed wire. Do we make ploughshares or wait until the next generation comes along, all spots and trying not to look like a female article of clothing in front of their mates and start all over?We glorify violence all the time, we promote people who are adept at slaughtering the biggest number in the best way and we give them medals as if their promotion was not enough. We make war movies shamelessly and don 't think this is weird. We sometimes give the movies medals as well. That 's glorifying violence. - Advertisement -",FAKE
+6763,Russia may run out of patience and respond to USA's rudeness,"Russia may run out of patience and respond to USA's rudeness 28.10.2016 AP photo Russian President Putin said at the meeting of the Valdai Club in Sochi that Washington has not been able to distinguish between terrorists and moderate opposition in Syria, despite many promises to do so. As a result, the truce was terminated, and the White House accuses the Kremlin of all mortal sins. ""This is simply a disgrace. We behave with restraint and we do not respond in such a rude way to our partners, but everything has its limits. We may respond,"" Putin warned. Pravda.Ru asked an expert opinion about the possible development of events from specialist on US-Russia relations, Victor Olevich. ""How can Putin respond?"" ""Russia has a whole arsenal of potential responses. At the moment, Russia is keeping a pause in the Syrian Arab Republic. The Russian Federation is not using its full military capability to resolve the Syrian crisis. ""If the United States continues to engage in further provocations against Russia and Russian interests , then, of course, Moscow will take more active measures to counter what remains, in fact, a terrorist threat in Syria."" Print version Font Size ""Putin mentioned during his speech that ""our personal agreements with the US president did not work."" He added that there were forces in Washington that did their best not to let them work. What kind of forces are they?"" ""First of all, this is the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies: the CIA and some others that have, indeed, made every effort to bury the agreements between Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry that they had reached in Geneva. ""As you know, a few days after the agreement on Syria between Moscow and Washington was reached, the US military accidentally bombed one of the most combat-ready Syrian military bases near Deir ez-Zor. The bombing continued for an hour. Up to 80 Syrian military men were killed, and many more were injured. Of course, one could not talk about any agreements afterwards. ""Moreover, when Russia raised the issue at the UN Security Council, US Representative Samantha Power reacted very sharply, and, indeed, in a rude way. A few days later, a humanitarian convoy in Aleppo was attacked, and the United States and their Western allies presented totally unsubstantiated and groundless accusations against Russia again. ""It was clear that Pentagon chief Ashton Carter, a number of American generals and the CIA were not interested in a joint struggle against the terrorist threat in Syria. Jabhat en-Nusra serves as a reserve of the United States that the country uses when necessary to topple Syrian President Assad. ""These non-constructive forces in the United States want to see Hillary Clinton as president to have a more aggressive approach both to Russia and to the settlement of the Syrian crisis."" Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru US gets ready for war with Russia because of Assad",FAKE
+7730,The David Duke Show: Hillary’s Treason and Why Trump & Duke Will Win,"David Duke October 27, 2016 
+Today Dr. Duke and Dr. Slattery talked about Hillary’s clear acts of treason against the United States by providing massive shipments of weapons to Saudi Arabia at a time that she knew they were providing support to ISIS. Dr. Duke, if elected to the Senate, would be in a position to expose Hillary and push for her impeachment should she win (steal) the election. 
+Dr. Slattery discussed post-election scenarios. He noted that if Trump wins in a close election, a small number of Republican electors could be bribed to vote for Hillary, throwing the election to her, or even vote for Pence, throwing the election to the House of Representatives to decide from amongst Trump, Hillary, and Pence. Should Hillary win and Trump supporters feel the election was illegitimate, impeachment would be more likely. 
+This is an extremely educating and enlightening show. Please share it widely.",FAKE
+2546,Don't blame all immigrants for San Francisco shooting,"Raul A. Reyes is an attorney and member of the USA Today board of contributors. Follow him on Twitter @RaulAReyes . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+(CNN) As the nation was preparing for the July Fourth weekend, there was grim news from San Francisco. On Wednesday night, Kate Steinle , 31, was fatally shot, apparently randomly, while walking with her father on a busy pier. A Mexican immigrant, who CNN reported was in the country without documentation, was arrested in her death.
+
+Illegally re-entering the country after being deported, as Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez is said to have done, is a federal felony . He has also been accused of a horrific, violent crime. And according to immigration authorities, he has seven other felony convictions, including four for drug offenses.
+
+But that doesn't make him a symbol of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Nor is he the poster boy for out-of-control illegal immigration across our southern border (illegal immigration from Mexico is at a 40-year low). He does not represent the overwhelming majority of immigrants in this country -- legal or otherwise -- who are productive members of society.
+
+Lopez-Sanchez is simply a dangerous individual who should not have been free and among us.
+
+It is a myth that increased illegal immigration leads to more crime. Research from the Immigration Policy Center shows that crime rates fell in the United States as the size of our immigrant population, including undocumented immigrants, grew from 1990 to 2010.
+
+Most undocumented immigrants come to the United States to work and provide a better life for themselves and their families.
+
+Consider that several mass shootings, from Aurora to Newtown to Charleston, were committed by young white men. Does that mean that all young white men are potential mass murderers? Of course not.
+
+The same news outlets that are now trumpeting Wednesday's murder as proof that undocumented immigrants are criminals often overlook or ignore other stories of undocumented immigrants who are genuine heroes. In 2013, an undocumented immigrant rescued a mother and her child on Staten Island, New York, amidst the storm surge of Superstorm Sandy.
+
+One takeaway from this episode is that deporting as many undocumented immigrants as possible is not the answer to our immigration problems. Lopez-Sanchez had been deported five times, and yet he was still here in the country without authorization.
+
+Back in 2011, the deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement told an immigration subcommittee of Congress that it costs $12,500 to deport a person. Multiply this by five and that is how much taxpayer money was wasted on a criminal who remained at large to randomly take the life of an innocent young woman.
+
+Another lesson here is our country does not need more immigration enforcement; our country needs smarter and better immigration enforcement. Up to now, immigration authorities have wasted time, manpower and money chasing after people working productively in their communities as, say, gardeners and maids, while felons like Lopez-Sanchez slipped through the cracks.
+
+That's why it was good news last week that the Department of Homeland Security announced it is rethinking its deportation priorities to focus on recent arrivals and serious criminals.
+
+This move is a step in the right direction, because it is time to start seriously targeting those immigrants who are a real threat to public safety. The government will be focusing its enforcement efforts on three categories of people: convicted criminals, recent border crossers and terrorism threats.
+
+True, Lopez-Sanchez should not have been in the country, or he should have at least been behind bars. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement erred in not seeking a warrant or court order for his arrest and he was released in accordance with city law in March.
+
+What's more, President Barack Obama's proposed executive action on immigration, currently tied up in a legal battle, might also have made a difference because it would have freed up resources to go after people like Lopez-Sanchez.
+
+Although Steinle's death was a tragedy, it was the alleged action of one man. All undocumented immigrants do not deserve to be vilified by false association.",REAL
+2596,Netanyahu: I Won't Allow Israel to Be 'Submerged' by Refugees,"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said he would not allow Israel to be ""submerged"" by refugees after calls for the Jewish state to take in those fleeing Syria's war.
+
+Speaking at the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu also announced the start of construction of a fence along Israel's border with Jordan, according to his office.
+
+""We will not allow Israel to be submerged by a wave of illegal migrants and terrorist activists,"" Netanyahu said.
+
+""Israel is not indifferent to the human tragedy of Syrian and African refugees... but Israel is a small country — very small — without demographic or geographic depth. That is why we must control our borders.""
+
+Opposition leader Isaac Herzog on Saturday said Israel should take in Syrian refugees, recalling the plight of Jews who sought refuge from past conflicts.
+
+Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas also called for Israel to allow Palestinians from refugee camps in Syria to travel to the Palestinian territories, whose external borders are controlled by the Jewish state.
+
+There is already hostility in Israel toward asylum-seekers from Africa and a concerted government effort to repatriate them.
+
+Rights groups say thousands of African asylum seekers have been coerced into ""voluntary"" departures.
+
+Official figures show 45,000 illegal immigrants are in Israel, almost all from Eritrea and Sudan. Most of those not in detention live in poor areas of southern Tel Aviv, where there have been several protests against them.
+
+The start of construction of the 30-kilometer (19-mile) fence announced by Netanyahu involves extension of a security barrier to part of its eastern border with Jordan in a bid to keep out militants and illegal migrants.
+
+Netanyahu said when it was approved in June that the new fence was a continuation of a 240-kilometer barrier built along the Egyptian border which ""blocked the entry of illegal migrants into Israel and the various terrorist movements"".
+
+In its first stage, the new fence is being built along Israel's eastern border between Eilat and where a new airport will be built in the Timna Valley.
+
+""We will continue the fence up to the Golan Heights,"" Netanyahu said.
+
+That would take it into the Israeli-occupied West Bank along the Jordan Valley, an area which is already under Israeli military control but is claimed by the Palestinians as part of their state.
+
+Israel has insisted on maintaining troops in the area in any final peace agreement, a stance completely rejected by the Palestinians who say it would be a violation of their sovereignty and merely perpetuate the occupation.
+
+Israel also has a fence that runs along the Syrian frontier through the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
+
+Those fences are in addition to a barrier that runs through the West Bank, which Israel began building during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which lasted from 2000-2005.
+
+Israel seized 1,200 square kilometers (460 square miles) of the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War and annexed it 14 years later, in a move never recognized by the international community.",REAL
+7362,APOCALYPSE NOW: Trump Voters Warn Of ‘Revolution’ If Clinton Wins,"APOCALYPSE NOW: Trump Voters Warn Of ‘Revolution’ If Clinton Wins By Andrew Bradford on October 28, 2016 Subscribe 
+There’s nothing wrong with being passionate when it comes to your political beliefs and the candidate you support. In an electorate as deeply divided as we currently see in this country, you expect no less. But ask yourself this question: If your candidate loses, are you ready to take up arms and try to overthrow the government? For some who ardently support GOP nominee Donald Trump, the answer is a resounding yes. 
+Take for example Jared Halbrook, who lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and told the New York Times : “People are going to march on the capitols. They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there. “If push comes to shove, (Clinton) has to go by any means necessary, it will be done.” 
+Roger Pillath said he also sees violence on the horizon if Clinton is elected: “It’s not what I’m going to do, but I’m scared that the country is going to go into a riot. I’ve never seen the country so divided, just black and white — there’s no compromise whatsoever. The Clinton campaign says together we are stronger, but there’s no together. The country has never been so divided. I’m looking at revolution right now.” 
+As Trump continues to talk of the election being “rigged,” his words are having an effect on people like Paul Swick, who had this ominous warning: “If she comes after the guns, it’s going to be a rough, bumpy road. I hope to God I never have to fire a round, but I won’t hesitate to. As a Christian, I want reformation. But sometimes reformation comes through bloodshed.” 
+Retired truck driver Alan Weegens envisions a very dark future for the United States and says he’s ready to do whatever is necessary: “I am not going to take my weapon to go out into the streets to protest an election I did not win. But I think that if certain events came about, a person would need to protect themselves, depending on where they lived, when your neighborhood goes up in flames.” 
+See if you can recall the last time we heard this kind of violent talk which led to actions by far right nuts who were inspired to be “heroes” in their own minds. The year was 1995 and Bill Clinton was President. Timothy McVeigh parked a rental truck loaded with explosives outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 innocent Americans, including children. Words can have consequences. 
+Featured Image Via PBS About Andrew Bradford 
+Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect",FAKE
+7513,"Geo-Engineering Unlikely to Work, Conservation Group Says","Geo-Engineering Unlikely to Work, Conservation Group Says Posted on Nov 3, 2016 
+By Alex Kirby / Climate News Network Biofilm used in research into carbon capture: Doubts persist about geo-engineering. (ENERGY.GOV via Wikimedia Commons) 
+LONDON—The global watchdog responsible for protecting the world ’ s wealth of species, the UN ’ s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), has looked at the hopes for reining in climate change through geo-engineering. Its bleak conclusion, echoing that reached by many independent scientists, is that the chances are “highly uncertain”. “Novel means”, in this context, describes trying to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by removing them from the atmosphere, and altering the amount of heat from the Sun that reaches the Earth. Some scientists and policymakers say geo-engineering, as these strategies are collectively known, is essential if the world is to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement . This is because current attempts to reduce emissions cannot make big enough cuts fast enough to keep global average temperatures from rising more than 2°C above their pre-industrial levels, the Agreement’s basic goal. But the CBD says in a report that geo-engineering, while it could possibly help to prevent the world overheating, might endanger global biodiversity and have other unpredictable effects. Many independent analysts have raised similar concerns.Attempts to increase the amount of carbon in the oceans, in order to remove GHGs, have so far shown disappointing results. One report doubted that geo-engineering could slow sea-level rise . Another said it could not arrest the melting of Arctic ice . A third study found that geo-engineering would make things little better and might even make global warming worse . Transboundary impacts The lead author of the CBD geo-engineering report is a British scientist, Dr Phillip Williamson, of the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council . He is an associate fellow in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia , UK. The CBD originally became involved in climate geo-engineering in 2008, because member governments were concerned that experiments to fertilise the oceans could pose unknown risks to the environment (they were then unregulated when carried out in international waters). The CBD’s concern expanded to include other geo-engineering techniques, especially atmospheric methods which could have uncertain transboundary impacts. Some scientists argue that “geo-engineering” is a hazily-defined term and prefer to speak instead simply of “greenhouse gas removal”. Dr Williamson and his colleagues say assessment of the impacts of geo-engineering on biodiversity “is not straightforward and is subject to many uncertainties”. On greenhouse gas removal they warn that removing a given quantity of a greenhouse gas would not fully compensate for an earlier ‘overshoot’ of emissions. New risks In some cases, they say, the cure may be worse than the disease: “The large-scale deployment of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) seems likely to have significant negative impacts on biodiversity through land use change.” When it comes to attempts to reflect sunlight back out into space or to manage solar radiation, a familiar theme recurs: “There are high levels of uncertainty about the impacts of SRM [solar radiation management] techniques, which could present significant new risks to biodiversity.” Time and again, it seems, a potential advance is liable to be cancelled by an equally likely reverse: if SRM benefits coral reefs by decreasing temperature-induced bleaching (as it may), in certain conditions “it may also increase, indirectly, the impacts of ocean acidification.” There could even be a risk in some circumstances of loss to the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Dr Williamson and his colleagues believe that geo-engineering is essential—if it can be made to work—because of the diminishing chances that anything else will. “I’m sceptical. That’s not to say bio-energy with carbon capture and storage is impossible, but it seems extremely unlikely to be feasible” They write: “It may still be possible that deep and very rapid decarbonisation by all countries might allow climate change to be kept within a 2°C limit by emission reduction alone. However, any such window of opportunity is rapidly closing.” Repeatedly, those two words recur: a suggested technique or development will be “highly uncertain”. Most of the report amounts to a very cautious call for more research, coupled with an implicit acceptance that in the end geo-engineering is unlikely to prove capable of contributing much to climate mitigation. Dr Williamson told the Climate News Network: “I’m sceptical. That’s not to say bio-energy with carbon capture and storage is impossible, but it seems extremely unlikely to be feasible (for all sorts of reasons)” at the scale needed. When the CBD member governments meet in December they are expected to call for more research: a safe option in most circumstances, but far from a ringing endorsement of a technology once seen as very promising. 
+Alex Kirby is a former BBC journalist and environment correspondent. He now works with universities, charities and international agencies to improve their media skills, and with journalists in the developing world keen to specialise in environmental reporting. 
+Advertisement",FAKE
+1475,3 Questions Ahead Of Tonight's Democratic Debate,"Sunday night's Democratic debate comes at a crucial moment. The two front-runners — Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — are closer in the polls than ever, and the Iowa caucus is only two weeks away.
+
+Up until now, Clinton has done well in debates; it's a format that suits her. But Sanders' message is breaking through, and he's gaining in the polls nationally, leads in New Hampshire and is neck and neck with Clinton in Iowa. That means the pressure is on for both candidates Sunday night. The debate, taking place in Charleston, S.C., begins at 9 p.m. EST. The NBC/YouTube/Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate will air on NBC broadcast stations and livestreamed on NBC digital platforms, including its YouTube channel.
+
+Here's what the candidates need to do — and avoid:
+
+Needs: Show why her plans are pragmatic solutions that work for the progressive base, while still respecting Sanders supporters. She's gotten away from her answer in the first debate that she's ""a progressive who likes to get things done."" Then again, it's tough to make that argument to primary voters
+
+Avoid: Lawyerly, unclear answers that play into an inauthentic narrative, especially paired against Sanders, whose authenticity has been key; attacks that could be seen as cheap shots, like on health care
+
+Needs: Convince Democratic voters, who are skeptical he's presidential material, that he can win; show a facility with issues beyond his core message
+
+Avoid: Pulling punches like he's done in past debates
+
+Needs: Somehow appear relevant; as it is, he barely made it onto the debate stage. His poll numbers had to be rounded up to qualify
+
+Avoid: Being dismissed, especially after the question on the investigation into his discounted purchase of furniture from the governor's office when he left.
+
+1. Where does the race stand? Hillary Clinton seemed to have a comfortable lead on Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders last year, but that has slipped considerably and they are in a neck-and-neck race.
+
+Sanders has picked up momentum with his message and his passion — and Democratic voters like him. He continues to lead in New Hampshire, where he's been in the top spot for the better part of the last five months. He's also closing in Iowa, which is perhaps more surprising, but that's a place where passion counts, because of how the caucuses are conducted.
+
+Beyond the first two states, Clinton still has leads with non-white voters, who are critical to Clinton's ""firewall"" in the South. But that firewall might not look as insurmountable if she loses one or both of these first crucial contests.
+
+2. What about the issues — what's dividing these two? Sanders has gained steam because of his clear message on Wall Street and income inequality. He's tried to tie Clinton to big financial institutions, and Clinton has struggled in defending those ties, as Sanders has labeled her the ""status quo.""
+
+Lately, it's been health care and guns. Sanders voted for Obamacare, but he prefers a single-payer system; Clinton wants more modest tweaks. It may have been a bad tactic for Clinton's daughter Chelsea to try and go after Sanders from the left and accuse him of wanting to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. Clinton stood by her daughter. Bigger picture: Clinton has criticized Sanders for how to pay all of the reforms he wants. Sanders has not been completely forthcoming on a financial and tax plan, though he promises to explain later.
+
+Clinton has harped on Sanders' past support for more moderate gun measures, including his support for a 2005 law that protects gun manufacturers from liability if a gun made by one of them is used in a killing. On Saturday, the day before the debate, Sanders came out in favor of a measure to amend the law.
+
+3. So, with these dividing lines, do they go negative in the debate? There's a risk in going negative, but more so for Clinton. Sanders' voters are very loyal. Clinton is losing ground and can't afford to be completely positive. But how to attack Sanders in a way that resonates and seems authentic will be a challenge. Clinton's making the case she's the more electable — and certainly most Democratic voters would do anything to make sure a Republican isn't elected, especially Ted Cruz or Donald Trump.",REAL
+2232,Obama's terror strategy is failing: US must heed lessons of 9/11,"It is increasingly apparent that the U.S. war against Islamic extremism has been put on hold by President Obama and his national security team.
+
+President Obama failed to even mention Al Qaeda during his State of the Union address. In early January, the recent terrorist attacks in Paris against the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket gave us a glimpse of what the future of terrorism looks like, and what the civilized world will have to defend against.
+
+At the same time, the unfolding chaos in Yemen and loss of a U.S. partner in the fight against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) raises serious concerns about the future of a country that four months ago President Obama cited as a successful model for U.S.-led efforts to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
+
+
+
+ 
+
+ ISIL and AQAP are two faces of the same enemy, radical violent Islam, which is on the march around the world.
+
+In 2013, ISIL was confined to Syria and Iraq. As the Syria civil war dragged on, and in the absence of early, forceful intervention on the part of the United States or European nations, the chaotic situation spread to Iraq, where weak security services were no match for an emboldened terrorist army.
+
+In 2014, global support to the Islamic State blossomed as it began to supplant likeminded terrorist groups, and the Islamic State counted affiliates in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia.  ISIL even has begun to make inroads in Yemen, where the United States has been involved in efforts to degrade AQAP's capabilities, but have been unable to eliminate AQAP's ability to conduct attacks on us and our allies.  AQAP remains one of the most pressing security threats America currently faces as the recent attacks in Paris show.
+
+ 
+
+ In the wake of the Paris attacks and plots disrupted elsewhere in Europe, European capitals are rightfully defiant in the face of terror. But without a change in our strategy, the task of defending against the triple threat of home grown extremism, jihadists who have easy access to hotbeds of radicalization in places like Yemen and Syria, and the expansion of the Islamic State, will be nearly impossible.
+
+ 
+
+ The Islamic State continues to recruit extremists in Europe, the Middle East, and as far away as southeast Asia, using targeted, high quality videos, magazines and literature copied in several languages to spread their message around the world.  They trumpet their successes on the battlefield, and try to portray a welcoming environment centered on family and Islam as a means to attract terrorists and their families as subjects of their caliphate.
+
+The United States and all civilized countries need to coordinate our efforts to fight the Islamic State first by cutting them off.  We must counter their message on social media; bolster allies like Iraq and Jordan; and ensure that we prevent suspected terrorists from traveling back and forth between their homelands and places like Syria, Libya, and Yemen.  Perhaps most importantly, we have to help governments eliminate the safe havens that the Islamic State relies on to gather strength.  
+
+ 
+
+ Syria, Yemen, and Libya are all examples of our failure to learn one of the fundamental lessons of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 -- that failed and failing states breed instability and are potential safe havens for terrorists who will eventually turn their attention toward us.
+
+ 
+
+ We also cannot afford to ignore another lesson of 9/11 and curtail intelligence gathering capabilities that have been legally and painstakingly established following those horrific attacks.
+
+The U.S. government should implore American technology companies to cooperate with authorities so that we can better track terrorist activity and monitor terrorist communications as we face the increasing challenge of homegrown terrorists radicalized by little more than what they see on the Internet.
+
+This year, a new Republican majority in both houses of Congress will have to extend current authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and I urge my colleagues to consider a permanent extension of the counterterrorism tools our intelligence community relies on to keep the American people safe.
+
+ 
+
+ The challenge we face as free societies is unlike anything we have seen in recent decades.  As we look at this moment in the long war against terrorism, it is encouraging to see Europeans aggressively moving to defend the continent following a horrific attack.  But one need look no further than the setbacks in Yemen and the stalemate in Syria and Iraq to see the limitations of President Obama's current strategy.  
+
+ 
+
+ Lofty speeches and half measures do not defeat terrorist groups.  They also do not keep Americans safe in the long term.  The threat from Islamic extremism is only growing and without greater leadership from the United States, I fear that it will only be a matter of time before innocent Americans pay the ultimate price if we continue to underestimate our enemies and not develop a strategy that is commensurate to the threat.
+
+Republican Marco Rubio represents Florida in the U.S. Senate. He is a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016.",REAL
+6247,“Bernie needs to be ground to a pulp.” Leaked Email to John Podesta in February,"Koch Brothers Secretly Allied w. George Soros for Hillary Clinton → Jay Kurtz 
+Why would Bernie supporters vote Clinton? Because if she wins, his movement will be finished, and she will see to it that it is. 
+On the other hand, if Trump wins, Hillary is finished, and Bernie will become the driving force in the Democratic Party, and will crush Trump in 2020. 
+I just don’t understand why ANY Bernie supporter would be DUMB ENOUGH to vote for Hillary. gmatch 
+There are many reasons not to vote for Hillary. Bernie is a proven fraud and should go away. If Trump wins – the DNC will have to change or it will not survive. kimyo 
+while we’re talking about podesta emails, what is your interpretation of the following email from podesta re: a 2015 cnbc interview in which sanders stated “When you hustle money like that, you don’t sit in restaurants like this” and “That type of wealth has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world.” 
+podesta: This isn’t in keeping w the agreement. Since we clearly have some leverage, would be good to flag this for him. I could send a signal via Welch–or did you establish a direct line w him? 
+my interpretation: you fell for sanders’ schtick like an egg from a tall chicken. he was never for real. you’ve been reporting on wrestlemania 2016 without comprehending that the whole thing is staged. 
+you never said a single word about the theft of california, brooklyn and beyond. WHY? 
+the word ‘agreement’, that doesn’t raise any red flags for you? Donate",FAKE
+127,Selma 50 years on: John Lewis's recalls the march,"Watch live coverage of ceremonies in Selma commemorating 50 years since ""Bloody Sunday"" starting at 11 a.m. ET Saturday on CNN and CNNgo
+
+(CNN) Fifty years ago this weekend, a 25-year-old John Lewis was beaten so badly by Alabama state troopers that they fractured his skull.
+
+Lewis calls the Edmund Pettus Bridge -- where the troopers and and a group of white men deputized into a posse by the sheriff attacked hundreds of peaceful protesters on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965 -- an ""almost holy place.""
+
+Now a Democratic U.S. congressman, Lewis is returning to Selma -- as he has nearly every year since that historic march -- to remember the fight for voting rights and to push voters across the country to participate in the political process. He also wants people to continue to speak up about the problems of racial injustice and poverty that persist in American society.
+
+""It is important to come back to remember Selma,"" Lewis told CNN in an interview at First Baptist Church. ""The vote is powerful. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democratic society and I don't want people to forget that people paid a price.
+
+""Selma, these churches and these people, gave it everything they had. We wouldn't be where we are today as a nation and as a people (if it) hadn't been for this community.""
+
+Churches -- like Selma's First Baptist and Brown Chapel -- served as important meeting places during the movement, in part because they were run by the black community.
+
+And music was vital as a unifying force.
+
+""Without music, the movement would have been like a bird without wings,"" Lewis said.
+
+He recalled how people would often sing during the marches, sometimes making up songs along the way.
+
+""Music helped create a sense of solidarity, and there were people in some communities, in some towns and cities like Selma, saying if the meetings are being held at the church, it must be all right. That's the house of the Lord. They must be doing something that is right.""
+
+Activists had been working for years in and around Selma trying to help people register to vote. At the time, only 2.1% of blacks in Dallas County were registered, Lewis said. When blacks attempted to register, they were often given impossible tasks, like counting the number of jelly beans in a jar or the number of bubbles on a bar of soap, to complete before being allowed to sign up. Black lawyers, doctors, business people, public school teachers and college professors were told they could not read and write well enough to pass the so-called literacy test.
+
+As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis -- along with many others -- would spill blood to change that, not only as a leader of the Bloody Sunday march but in other confrontations across the South.
+
+Lewis was arrested some 40 times during the 1960s as he challenged the segregationist Jim Crow laws that kept blacks oppressed. He spent 44 days imprisoned in Mississippi during the Freedom Rides in 1961. As a student at Fisk University, he organized sit-ins at lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee, even spending his birthday in jail there in 1961 -- so Lewis was no stranger to run-ins with the law. But the events of Bloody Sunday would prove fateful for the movement.
+
+Television cameras and photographers captured the troopers attacking the marchers with night sticks and whips -- one man in the posse even had a rubber hose wrapped with barbed wire, Lewis wrote in his memoir ""Walking with the Wind.""
+
+The troopers trampled the crowd with their horses and released nauseating tear gas. The pictures horrified citizens across the country. Eight days after the march, President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke before Congress about voting rights. He signed the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6 to ensure that all citizens would be able to vote regardless of their skin color.
+
+Five decades later, Lewis said a great deal of progress has been made in the struggle for equality. But he added that, despite having twice elected a black man to the nation's highest office, the country still has a long way to go to become the so-called ""Beloved Community"" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned ""where we can lay down the burden of race.""
+
+""We have a black president. We've made a lot of progress, but we're not a post-racial society yet,"" he said. ""We still have a distance to go. The scars and stains of racism are still deeply embedded in the American society.""
+
+The need for 'righteous indignation'
+
+Lewis, who has written a trilogy of graphic novels for young adults about his life called ""March,"" said it was important not to sweep the problems that still plague America under the rug and to instead speak up with a sense of ""righteous indignation.""
+
+""You cannot be quiet. You have to speak up. You have to speak out. You have to find a way to get in the way and make some noise,"" he said, referring in particular to the killings of unarmed black men by police last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City.
+
+He urged those demonstrating against police brutality and racial injustice to study and model the nonviolent methods of the civil rights activists of the 1950s and '60s.
+
+The poverty affecting people of all races across the country still gnaws at Lewis, as does a lack of access to a good education. He believes people should be outraged about hunger and violence, and fired up to renew and strengthen the Voting Rights Act after a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutted the key provision requiring certain states with a history of racial discrimination at the polls to ""pre-clear"" any changes to voting laws with the federal government before implementing them.
+
+On Saturday, Lewis and nearly 100 members of Congress from both parties will join President Barack Obama at the bridge in Selma -- a bridge that still bears the name of a Confederate general who was also a Ku Klux Klan leader -- to mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. The bipartisan event comes as efforts to update to the Voting Rights Act have stalled in Congress. Still, Lewis is optimistic both parties can come together to fix it.
+
+""We must do it. It's the right thing to do,"" he said. ""There is a deliberate, systematic effort to take us back. We've made too much progress to go back."" He was referring to efforts in some states to do away with early voting and voting on Sunday or on weekends and to require photo IDs, moves he said make it harder for young people, seniors and minorities to vote.
+
+""I'm afraid that if we fail to fix it, many of our fellow citizens will not be able to become participants in the democratic process,"" he concluded.",REAL
+6025,“We Were Long Overdue A Presidential Assassination Anyway”,"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] “We Were Long Overdue A Presidential Assassination Anyway” November 9, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS Share 0 Add Comment 
+AMERICANS still coming to terms with the surprising outcome of the 2016 US elections have sought solace in the fact that the country was long overdue a presidential assassination anyway. 
+“It’s been what, 50 odd years since the last one?” queried disgruntled Florida native Toby Hartford, “I mean Reagan doesn’t count since he survived it”. 
+Citing the perfect societal conditions for a swell in dissatisfaction and disquiet brought on by divisive rhetoric, isolation and amplified fears to fester, much of the American population was in agreement that ‘yes, an assassination is something that could conceivably happen’. 
+“I wouldn’t not celebrate it, were it to happen, which is really fucking depressing when I think about it. I thought I was a decent human being, and this was a decent country, but fuck it, this is where we’re at now,” shared New Yorker Bernice Stewart. 
+“I’m not saying it’s something I want, I abhor murder, but give it a few months and when Trump hasn’t made America great again by placing US Muslims in internment camps, I’ve every faith in him stirring the sorts of emotions in a mentally unstable individual required to break our 53-year streak,” another voter remarked. 
+Experts in slowly unraveling individuals with access to guns even speculated that the ultimate cause of the assassination may be seemingly insignificant. 
+“Right now, no one is focused enough to remember Trump said he would release his tax returns, but when he delays that disclosure again and again, someone who never really gave a shit about that might start studying a map of tall buildings surrounding his victory parade route in New York. It could be one of those very people Trump mobilised to vote; working class, jobless and perennially ignored by the political establishment that will pull the trigger, ironic really,” isolated loner expert Condie Matthews explained. 
+Secret Service personnel, tasked with bodyguarding and protecting the president, resigned en masse this morning stating they ‘don’t get paid enough for this shit’.",FAKE
+10122,"Flip-flop: Vox warns of serious risk of Election Day violence, and not the good kind either","Flip-flop: Vox warns of serious risk of Election Day violence, and not the good kind either Posted at 9:24   Brett T. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
+Those playing along at home probably noticed that the flood of groping and sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump, whether true or false, receded awfully quickly once the media and the Clinton campaign decided to clear the decks for a new batch of think pieces about Trump’s allegations that the election was rigged. 
+In case the public missed the hint that, by questioning the integrity of America’s electoral process, Trump was sowing the seeds of Election Day violence, a new wave of think pieces emerged to make the threat that much more explicit. They’re not saying there’s gonna be violence; they’re just strongly implying there’s gonna be violence. If there is unrest and violence after election day, I think we now know why. https://t.co/P6WNdG36f5 
+CNN … isn’t that the network that “shorthanded” a girl’s call for rioters to burn down the Milwaukee suburbs until it could be reported as a condemnation of violence? Election officials and parties are preparing for possible violence on Election Day and long battle over legitimacy https://t.co/n21U1MfHYO 
+— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) October 17, 2016 Trump's attack on the foundation of democracy makes violence on Election Day more likely. https://t.co/rGADYMG5Op",FAKE
+4979,Third-party presidential candidates fight for 15% in polls – and a spot in debates,"The former Republican, marijuana-smoking, Everest mountaineering ex-governor of New Mexico and presidential nominee of the Libertarian party has a problem: he’s barred from the presidential debates. To appear on stage with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump this autumn, Gary Johnson needs to boost his national polling numbers to 15% from around 8% now.
+
+Without that national exposure, and the blockbuster ratings the three scheduled Clinton-Trump dust-ups are likely to produce, it’s hard for anyone to see how Johnson, 63, or either of two other minor-party candidates, the Green party’s Jill Stein or even Evan McMullin, a 40-year-old former CIA counterterrorism officer, could ever become more than mere electoral curiosities.
+
+But the emergence of three independent candidates, during a year of record dissatisfaction with the major party candidates, may still make for an unpredictable twist to the story. Polling data suggests libertarians on both sides of the political divide are giving independent candidates a second look, and in Las Vegas on Friday, Johnson and Stein spoke before a gathering of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters to press their cases.
+
+Soft-spoken and wearing Nikes, Johnson presented a platform of social libertarianism, fiscal conservatism and non-interventionism in foreign affairs. He argued at the gathering that in this, “the craziest election of all time”, he had a chance: “I might be the next president of the United States.”
+
+A just-released WSJ-NBC poll gave Johnson 15% in the crucial swing state of Colorado, and Stein 6%. In Las Vegas, he was asked repeatedly if a vote for him or any third-party candidate was somehow wasted.
+
+“A wasted vote is voting for somebody you don’t believe in. That’s a wasted vote,” Johnson said. “Vote for the person you believe in – that’s how you bring about change. I hope after having made my pitch today that you’ll realize, if you want to waste your vote on Clinton or Trump, have at it.”
+
+Stein, who spoke separately at the event, similarly argued that many Americans were looking for an alternative to Trump and Hillary Clinton, whom she dubbed as “the most disliked and untrusted” major-party nominees in US history. 
+
+“Democracy needs a moral compass,” she told a gathering of Asian American and Pacific Island groups. “It’s not just about who you don’t like the most or who you are most afraid of.” 
+
+
+
+Stein, who like Johnson represented her party in 2012, has outlined policy positions that include a “Green New Deal”, focused on renewable energy jobs and aimed at making the United States transition to 100% renewable energy complete by 2030. Stein has also proposed a reduction in the military budget by a third and the creation of a regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture.
+
+
+
+On the Republican side, Evan McMullin, a beneficiary of the grounded “Never Trump” movement, failed to get on the ballot in 26 states before he’d even sent out his first campaign release. McMullin nonetheless tried to give disaffected conservatives an alternative to the Republican nominee who, he says, has tapped into “people’s darkest prejudices and deepest fears”.
+
+McMullin’s best hope – and likely his only one – to make an electoral dent would require Trump’s departure from the race, though the nominee has made no overt sign that he wants to quit. “Like millions of Americans, I had hoped this year would bring us better nominees who, despite party differences, could offer compelling visions of a better future,” McMullin said in his announcement.
+
+“Instead, we have been left with two candidates who are fundamentally unfit for the profound responsibilities they seek.”
+
+But can they begin to make a difference? Only once in recent election cycles have third party candidates had any significant influence, when in 1992, Texan businessman Ross Perot took 18% of the vote, carving into the support for incumbent Republican George HW Bush and helping Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to victory. Some Democrats blamed third-party candidate Ralph Nader for delivering George W Bush the election in 2000, but the third-party candidate won a paltry 2.74% of the vote, and his supporters were split between Republicans and Democrats.
+
+Johnson’s running mate, former Massachusetts governor William Weld, said he’d seen interest and fundraising pick up as Trump’s campaign has floundered. Their campaign recently reported a $1m one-week fundraising haul and has reported that more than 40,000 people have pledged to donate at least $15 to his campaign on 15 August.
+
+But that was in a relatively tight race. With Clinton now leading Trump by double digits in some key battleground states, the impact of any third-party candidate could be limited.
+
+“At the moment it doesn’t look like they can have much impact at all,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic adviser. “But if the race gets closer, they could throw it either way.”
+
+Sheinkopf reasoned that this election has become more about personalities and less about what party leaders want. The long-term impact may be a significant shift in how people view Democrats and Republicans, he said. As it now stands, Stein, Johnson and McMullin could act as a convenient parking spot for voters disgusted with both candidates.
+
+Earlier this month, a federal judge rejected a challenge brought by Johnson and Stein arguing that the bar for inclusion is set artificially high. Yet there are signs the ground could be shifting. Mike McCurry, now co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates and a former press secretary for Bill Clinton, hinted that a third podium might be needed.
+
+“Some of our production people may have said, ‘Just in case, you need to plan out what that might look like,’’ McCurry told Politico. “We won’t know the number of invitations we extend until mid-September.”
+
+Ron Faucheux, president of Clarus Research Group, a nonpartisan polling company, said there was broad support for including even minor candidates. “Polls show that voters think third party candidates should be included,” he said, “and in an election like this, where polls show a majority of voters dislike both main party candidates, there is a good reason to give them the opportunity to at least look at other options.”
+
+But even Johnson and Stein were somewhat wistful about their prospects, casting themselves as agents of change who, at best, could represent the beginning of a break with the current two-party system.
+
+“The biggest message is ‘consider us’ as a very, very viable alternative to this two-party system that has become so polarized that they’re not able to do anything,” Johnson has said.
+
+Stein advanced a similar argument. “We’re having a political reorganization in this election because the Republicans are kind of falling apart,” she said, “and the Democrats have kind of split with a lot of the Bernie Sanders supporters just not happy with the alternative.”
+
+She argued that it was by elections about “the lesser of two evils” that the country inherited many of its problems.
+
+But first, the two have to get on TV.
+
+“There’s no way I’m going to win the presidency if I’m not in the presidential debates,” Johnson said. “I do believe anything is possible given that right now, arguably the two most polarizing figures in American politics today are running for office.”",REAL
+1700,"Bush, Rubio and Kasich eye one another in the shadow of Trump","The Republican presidential contest is not, regardless of what it seems some days, all about Donald Trump. There’s another dynamic unfolding that has almost nothing to do with the businessman-politician currently atop the polls but that will have a major influence on who becomes the party’s nominee.
+
+This other struggle involves the competition among former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. History suggests that whoever emerges triumphant in this three-way rivalry will be in a strong position to claim the nomination, though admittedly the past has been a poor predictor of events so far in this campaign.
+
+Ever since Trump surged to the top of the polls, the other candidates have been trying to assess both his staying power and the cost-benefit analysis of engaging him. Trump and Bush have clashed almost from the start, with growing intensity. More recently, as Rubio has risen, Trump has taken aim at him, and Rubio has responded in kind.
+
+None of the other candidates has a clear strategy for taking down Trump. But they all think he will look like a different candidate — and in their assessments, a less formidable candidate — once the field narrows to three or four finalists after the voting begins. So they are beginning to focus on one another as much as they are worrying about him.
+
+With the first contests still months away, none of the three yet looks like a front-runner. In the average of recent national polls, Rubio and Bush run fourth and fifth behind Trump, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina. Neither Bush nor Rubio breaks double digits. Kasich doesn’t even break 5 percent.
+
+National polls at this stage are less meaningful than state polls. In Iowa, where the first caucus will take place in early February, Trump and Carson lead, with Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) currently third. Bush and Rubio trail the first three, and Kasich is even deeper in the pack. In New Hampshire, Trump also has a big lead, but Kasich is jockeying with Fiorina for second, with Carson and Bush next and Rubio farther back.
+
+[Trump and Bush take on Rubio in New Hampshire]
+
+In recent days, Bush, Rubio and Kasich have shown how much they’re worrying about one another. They’ve been sniping at each other and making other moves that underscore the significance of their competition.
+
+Rubio has long emphasized that the party needs a fresh candidate, not one tied to the past, an implicit criticism of his fellow Floridian who is part of an American political dynasty. Bush, a two-term former governor, has belittled Rubio’s experience, or lack thereof. Kasich, a two-term governor and longtime House member, has claimed that his experience and record are unmatched by any of the other candidates.
+
+Advisers to the three anticipate more attacks ahead. “The Bush campaign is feverishly doing their opposition research on Governor Kasich and Senator Rubio,” said John Weaver, Kasich’s chief strategist. “An empire like that is not going to go quietly into the night. We’re expecting pretty sharp elbows to be thrown. We’re going to handle it head on.”
+
+Past Republican nomination contests often have devolved into competition between a candidate from the center-right or mainstream conservative wing of the party and a candidate from the hard right or populist conservative wing. Most times, the candidate from the mainstream conservative wing becomes the nominee.
+
+This year, the race is more scrambled because of the added factor of the apparent desire by many Republicans for an outsider or non-politician. That has elevated Trump, Carson and Fiorina and has forced the others to adapt. Rubio has been stressing that, despite being in the Senate, he’s really not of Washington.
+
+Instead of establishment vs. tea party, one GOP strategist describes the race this time as a competition between those in the anger, or anti-Washington, lane, vs. those in the aspirational lane. Bush, Rubio and Kasich all fall more into the aspirational lane.
+
+What will make the difference? Based on how the three candidates are running, it’s clear that they see the path ahead in slightly different ways, though each has handicaps he must overcome to win.
+
+Bush has repeatedly pushed back at Trump by arguing that anger and insults cannot win the presidency. He seeks to be the aspirational candidate, conservative enough because of his record in Florida to be acceptable to a conservative party, while offering a positive and inclusive message that reaches beyond the GOP coalition.
+
+But many Republicans see Bush as least able to appeal across the entire party — not much more able to appeal to the hard right than Cruz would be able to attract mainstream conservatives.
+
+Lodged firmly in the establishment wing as the son and brother of former presidents, he faces resistance on the far right and among those yearning for an outsider. His hope is that he can change perceptions of himself, outlast his rivals with superior resources and persuade Republicans that he’s their best hope to win a general election.
+
+Sally Bradshaw, Bush’s senior adviser, said the key remains what it has been from the start of the campaign: to portray Bush as a conservative reformer by stressing what he did in Florida. “People don’t know that yet,” she said. “When that message burns in, his numbers are going to change. That’s his path.”
+
+[What the pundits said then and now about Donald Trump]
+
+Kasich is looking to the traditional model. He is the compassionate conservative of 2016 who hopes to strike first in New Hampshire and build from there. His advisers believe that, eventually, he can reach across the divide in the party to become the nominee.
+
+But the party has not only moved right in the past decade, it also has developed a harder edge than when George W. Bush ran as a compassionate conservative in 2000. Kasich’s support for expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act is just one example of a position that will not sit well with many conservatives.
+
+Rubio’s team sees crosscutting appeal as vital, a race that will favor a candidate who can best unite a fractured party. The senator’s goal is to demonstrate skills as a communicator, to show depth on the issues, to turn his personal story into a positive message for the party, to make as few errors as possible and over time generate enthusiasm across the GOP coalition.
+
+Rubio, too, has vulnerabilities. His past support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, from which he has backed away, remains an obstacle in his path. So too does his personal profile, that of a youthful first-term senator with limited experience trying to become president — a profile not unlike that of President Obama when he first ran eight years ago.
+
+David Axelrod, who was Obama’s chief strategist in both campaigns, often has said that voters look for a replacement rather than a replica in picking a new president. The adviser to one of Rubio’s rivals put it this way: “When was the last time this country elected two presidents with similar attributes?” Rubio will be trying to dissuade his fellow Republicans that he isn’t another Obama.
+
+There are wild cards in the calculations of all three camps. Maybe New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who occupies similar space, will catch fire in New Hampshire and elsewhere, although the resistance to him within the party is significant. Fiorina has demonstrated fearlessness that has jarred even Trump and can appeal across the party. Carson remains a candidate of unknown potential.
+
+Last, there is the Trump factor and what his support represents. For now, he remains the dominant force in the GOP race. But the advisers to Bush, Rubio and Kasich see a turn in the campaign heading into the final months of the year, one that will heighten the competition among them with significant consequences for their party.",REAL
+9398,Comey Must Explain Why He Advised Obama Not to Publicly Accuse Russia of Hacking Democrats,"By Sarah Jones on Tue, Nov 1st, 2016 at 1:26 pm Comey struggled with not wanting to appear biased as the FBI investigated Russian interference with the U.S. presidential election, and so he told the Obama administration not to accuse Russia of the DNC hackings lest they be seen as ""partisan"". Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+Russia did hack the Democrats. So all of that email information that the media has been reporting came from a foreign entity that seeks to alter the outcome of the U.S. election. 
+But FBI Director James Comey struggled with not wanting to appear biased as the FBI investigated Russian interference with the U.S. presidential election, and so he told the Obama administration not to accuse Russia of the DNC hackings lest they be seen as “partisan”. 
+Republican FBI Director James Comey advised the Obama administration not to publicly accuse Russia of hacking the DNC and more “on the grounds that it would make the administration appear unduly partisan too close to the Nov. 8 election,” officials “familiar with the deliberations” told the Washington Post. 
+These sources with knowledge of the internal discussions spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity. 
+There are a few reasons why Comey might want to keep his agency’s investigation of Russian interference under the radar, but given his choice to publicly suggest that his agency might be re-opening its exhaustive investigation of Clinton’s emails, which resulted from a Republican-led, bogus, overreaching and seemingly endless Benghazi investigation that also cleared Clinton, it seems odd that Comey was going to stay silent on the Russia matter. 
+Comey’s decisions is especially odd given the reports that the Russians have been communicating and coordinating with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to the point that he is already “compromised.” 
+Only one of these matters might allow a foreign power control over the United States president. 
+The same sources tell the Post that Comey made the decision to reveal the Clinton emails to Congress because he had already testified in that matter and said the investigation was closed, which suggests that he was concerned with his own reputation. 
+Not sure I’m buying that because if Comey really only cared about his own reputation ahead of not appearing partisan he wouldn’t have said anything at all, but that doesn’t mean that his motives were nefarious. 
+There might well be good reason for this – after all, this is the FBI and they can’t tell us everything, but as of right now Comey has mishandled this `and appears to be trying to influence an election to help Republicans. Just because he is a Republican and just because he has donated to Republicans doesn’t mean he isn’t doing his job properly. 
+But Comey has a lot of explaining to do right now. He is under fire for good reason, as the explanations he’s giving for these decisions don’t make sense and are contradictory.",FAKE
+10427,"Putin Congratulates Trump, Says Russia Is Ready To Restore Relations With The US","1 Reply 
+Tyler Durden – Perhaps the most beneficial outcome resulting from last night’s loss of the Clinton Clan, whose “charitable” donations from generous donors such as Saudi Arabia to the Clinton Foundation just ended, is that with Hillary not in charge, the probability of World War III has been taken off the table. 
+This was confirmed early this morning, When Russian President Vladimir Putin – whose relations with the US and Barack Obama have deteriorated to Cold War levels – congratulated Donald Trump for his election victory on Wednesday, and said he expected relations between the Kremlin and Washington to improve. 
+The Kremlin announced that Putin had sent a telegram to Trump on Wednesday morning expressing “ his hope they can work together toward the end of the crisis in Russian-American relations, as well address the pressing issues of the international agenda and the search for effective responses to global security challenges .” 
+Additionally, speaking at the presentation ceremony of foreign ambassadors’ letters of credentials in Moscow, President Putin said that Russia is ready and looks forward to restoring bilateral relations with the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, commenting on the news of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election. 
+“We heard Trump’s campaign rhetoric while still a candidate for the US presidency, which was focused on restoring the relations between Russia and the United States.” 
+He added that “we understand and are aware that it will be a difficult path in the light of the degradation in which, unfortunately, the relationship between Russia and the US are at the moment.” 
+Speaking about the degraded state of relations between the countries, the Russian president once again stressed that “it is not our fault that Russia-US relations are as you see them.” 
+Other Russian politicians joined in. 
+Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has also expressed hope that Trump’s victory in the presidential election will help pave the way for a more constructive dialogue between Moscow and Washington. 
+“The current US-Russian relations cannot be called friendly. Hopefully, with the new US president a more constructive dialogue will be possible between our countries,” he said. “The Russian Parliament will welcome and support any steps in this direction,” Volodin added on Wednesday. 
+Commenting on Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia will judge the new US administration by its actions and take appropriate steps in response. “We are ready to work with any US leader elected by the US people,” the minister said on Wednesday. 
+“I can’t say that all the previous US leaders were always predictable. This is life, this is politics. I have heard many words but we will judge by actions.” 
+Sergey Zheleznyak, member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in parliament, hailed Trump’s “deserved victory” in a statement on the party’s website. 
+“Despite all the intrigues and provocations that the current U.S. government put in front of Trump, people supported his intention to address the serious problems that have accumulated in America, and to move from confrontation to cooperation with Russia and the world, ” Zheleznyak said. “I hope that between now and [his] entry into office as the new president of the United States there will be no tragic events and the new U.S. administration will have enough political will and wisdom for civilized solutions to existing problems.” 
+Russia’s second biggest party the Communist Party also issued a statement Wednesday morning, expressing hope for more cooperation and calling Trump’s win “astounding” and against the “elite clans” in the United States. The party leader was more lukewarm on the news, noting that U.S. imperialism was unlikely to change. 
+Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the right-wing nationalist leader of the Liberal Democratic Party who has previously been nicknamed the Russian Donald Trump, called Clinton a “mindless old woman” and praised U.S. voters for “coming to their senses” after eight years of President Barack Obama, whom he referred to as “the Afro-American.” SF Source Zerohedge  ",FAKE
+7099,Monsieur Malbrough est Mort | New Eastern Outlook,"Region: Europe A recently published article titled with the words of a popular French song “ Marlbrough s’en va-t-en Guerre ” has attracted much attention around the background of Francois Hollande’s “achievements” Now that Donald Trump has been elected as the next President of the United States, a string of European politicians have started voicing their discontent, including the current French President. He has failed to hide such discontent with the decision Americans have made. However, he described Trump’s victory as a “lesson learnt,” the importance of which “goes far beyond the borders of the United States.” Little did he know, French politicians have interpreted this passage in their own reserved way. On November 10, the lower house of the Assemblée nationale has passed the vote to impeach Hollande, passing the bill with 152 votes out of the total of 199, resulting in the president of the Assemblée Nationale, Claude Bartolone, officially submitting a draft resolution for Hollande’s impeachment. The impeachment procedure has only been introduced in 2014 in accordance with Article 68 of the French Constitution. According to the laws of the Fifth Republic, a president can only be impeached if he blatantly ignored his duties. To start this procedure, one would have to obtain 58 votes in the Assemblée Nationale, where the Republicans are now holding a total of 193 seats. The demand for Hollande to leave was signed by a total 152 deputies, including the Republican Spokesperson in the Assembly, Christian Jacob and the former Prime-Minister Fran ç ois Fillon. The Right are convinced that Hollande should be held liable for disclosing state secrets in his book with the telling title “ A President Shouldn’t Say This “ (U n pr é sident ne devrait pas dire ç a …). They are convinced that a president should know better than putting down all the details of French secret service operations aimed at assassinating terrorist leaders abroad. If the draft is to be found valid, it will be handed over to a special judicial committee of the the lower house of the the Assemblée Nationale. Finally, when everything is said and done, the two houses will form the Republican High Court that will decide the fate of the sitting president. But regardless of how the impeachment procedure turns out in the end, this whole affairs has literally ended Hollande’s political career, since he has no chance to get reelected. Therefore, one could use the words of the above mentioned song : « Monsieur Malbrough est mort » ( Malbrough is now dead ). However, this wasn’t much of a surprise for anyone who has been following French politics, since, according to Le Figaro , Hollande’s approval rating has hit an all time low of 11%. No President in French history enjoyed less support from the population, with even the Socialist party reluctant to back up Hollande’s policies, with only 34% supporting him. However, it seems unlikely that Hollande will be the only European leader that will have to face the consequences of his mindless support of US President Obama’s warmongering policies that have, at the end of the day, inflicted serious damage to EU interests. Jean P é rier is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East , exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” Popular Articles ",FAKE
+4500,Conspiracy theories swirl around the death of Antonin Scalia,"Two days after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly in remote West Texas, a former D.C. homicide commander is raising questions about how the death was handled by local and federal authorities.
+
+“As a former homicide commander, I am stunned that no autopsy was ordered for Justice Scalia,” William O. Ritchie, former head of criminal investigations for D.C. police, wrote in a post on Facebook on Sunday.
+
+[The death of Antonin Scalia: Chaos, confusion and conflicting reports]
+
+Scalia was found dead in his room at a luxury hunting resort in the state’s Big Bend region by the resort’s owner. It took hours for authorities to find a justice of the peace. When they did, Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara pronounced Scalia dead of natural causes without seeing the body — which is permissible under Texas law — and without ordering an autopsy.
+
+On Sunday, the U.S. Marshals Service, which provides security for Supreme Court justices, said that Scalia had declined a security detail while at the ranch, so marshals were not present when he died. When the marshals were notified, deputy marshals from the Western District of Texas went to the scene, the service said in a statement.
+
+Guevara said she declared Scalia dead based on information from law enforcement officials on the scene, who assured her that “there were no signs of foul play.” She also spoke to Scalia’s doctor, who told her that the justice had been to see him Wednesday and Thursday last week for a shoulder injury and that he had ordered an MRI for Scalia, according to WFAA-TV in Dallas. The 79-year-old justice also suffered from several chronic conditions, Guevara said. She said she was awaiting a statement from the physician to complete Scalia’s death certificate.
+
+The manager of the El Paso funeral home that handled Scalia’s body said Scalia’s family insisted on not having an autopsy done. But the decision has spawned a host of conspiracy theories online, as well as skeptical questions from law enforcement experts such as Ritchie.
+
+“You have a Supreme Court Justice who died, not in attendance of a physician,” he wrote. “You have a non-homicide trained US Marshal tell the justice of peace that no foul play was observed. You have a justice of the peace pronounce death while not being on the scene and without any medical training opining that the justice died of a heart attack. What medical proof exists of a myocardial Infarction? Why not a cerebral hemorrhage?”
+
+In an interview with The Washington Post, Guevara has said she rebutted a report by a Dallas TV station that Scalia had died of “myocardial infarction.” She said she meant only that his heart had stopped.
+
+Ritchie also raised questions about the marshals’ actions:
+
+“How can the Marshal say, without a thorough post mortem, that he was not injected with an illegal substance that would simulate a heart attack…” “Did the US Marshal check for petechial hemorrhage in his eyes or under his lips that would have suggested suffocation? Did the US Marshal smell his breath for any unusual odor that might suggest poisoning? My gut tells me there is something fishy going on in Texas.”
+
+A spokesman for the marshals service said Monday that the marshals did not make a formal determination of death. He directed questions to the county judge who made the call.
+
+Scalia’s physician, Brian Monahan, is a U.S. Navy rear admiral and the attending physician for the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court. He declined to comment on Scalia’s health when reached by telephone Monday at his home in Maryland.
+
+“Patient confidentiality forbids me to make any comment on the subject,” he said.
+
+When asked whether he planned to make public the statement he’s preparing for Guevara, Monahan repeated the same statement and hung up on a reporter.
+
+Eva Ruth Moravec in Austin contributed to this report.
+
+This post has been updated.
+
+Why blocking Obama’s pick could backfire on Republicans
+
+Supreme Court nomination process sure to be epic debate",REAL
+8013,"What is one more election thread, ehhh?","a reply to: kruphix Theocracy? Tim Kaine? In September 1980, as violence and civil war erupted throughout Central America, a quiet American left Harvard Law School to volunteer with Jesuit missionaries in northern Honduras. Around him, the United States-backed military dictatorship hunted Marxists and cracked down on the Catholic clergy for preaching empowerment to peasant farmers. But some locals also looked warily on the bearded and mop-haired Midwesterner in their midst. Just a few hours south, the Central Intelligence Agency was using Honduras as a staging ground in its covert war against Latin American communism, with right-wing forces training for operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua. “Some of the people were wondering what’s going on, who is this guy?” Tim Kaine, then a 22-year-old volunteer and now the Democratic nominee for vice president, said in an interview. He understood why. His mentors in the priesthood had also urged him to be wary of friendly American faces. Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story “It was a time of such intrigue and suspicion,” Mr. Kaine said. Far from being a C.I.A. operative, Mr. Kaine was a young Catholic at a crossroads, undergoing a spiritual shift as he awakened to the plight of the deeply poor in Honduras. In its far-flung pueblos, banana plantation company towns and dusty cities, Mr. Kaine embraced an interpretation of the gospel, known as liberation theology, that championed social change to improve the lives of the downtrodden. In Honduras, his recitation of the traditional Catholic mealtime blessing changed to “Lord give bread to those who hunger, and hunger for justice to those who have bread.” Honduran military leaders, American officials and even Pope John Paul II viewed liberation theology suspiciously, as dangerously injecting Marxist beliefs into religious teaching. But the strong social-justice message of liberation theology helped set Mr. Kaine on a left-veering career path in which he fought as a lawyer against housing discrimination, became a liberal mayor, and rose as a Spanish-speaking governor and senator with an enduring focus on Latin America.",FAKE
+2199,McCain: Trump doesn't understand Syria,"""I don't think he understands very well the situation. And he's entitled to his opinion,"" the Arizona Republican said Sunday in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on ""State of the Union.""
+
+McCain was pushing back against Trump's assertion last week that the United States should let ISIS and Syria's army fight -- and let Russia worry about ISIS there. Trump's comment came as Russia launched air strikes in the region.
+
+""Do we want to keep slaughtering people in Syria that are fighting for freedom?"" McCain said. ""Do we want to continue the barrel bombing, which is one of the reasons why 240,000 Syrians have been murdered? Do we want this flood of refugees to continue?""
+
+In the interview, McCain also prodded Republican presidential candidates to ""think about Ronald Reagan and the way he conducted his campaigns.""
+
+""To impugn each other's characters and integrity is very harmful to each other, ourselves, and our chances of winning a general election,"" he said, without naming any specific candidates. ""I think there's a lot of people in the party that are not happy about the tenor of some of the remarks and the allegations about each other,"" McCain said. ""I'm afraid we will pay a price for it at the polls, and I hope we'll change.""",REAL
+4943,Trump manager says 'undercover voters' will deliver win in US election,"The Donald Trump campaign is counting on “undercover voters” to win in November.
+
+Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway outlined her vision of how the Republican nominee could win in November despite consistently trailing in polls, during an interview with Channel 4 in the United Kingdom for the documentary President Trump: Can He Really Win?
+
+Conway insisted that Trump’s support was not reflected in polls because of the perceived social stigma of supporting the Republican nominee. “Donald Trump performs consistently better in online polling where a human being is not talking to another human being about what he or she may do in the elections … it’s become socially desirable, especially if you’re a college educated person in the US, to say that you’re against Donald Trump,” said Conway.
+
+“People who are supporting Donald Trump, who have not voted Republican in the past, who have not voted in quite a while, are so tired of arguing with family and friends and colleagues about their support of Donald Trump that they just decided not to discuss it.”
+
+Conway insisted: “We give people a comfortable way to express that maybe they don’t want to vote this year and why that is.” She described her method as “proprietary”. She said that as a result, she could reach these undercover voters “in many different ways”. She said: “We go to them where they live, literally.”
+
+Conway’s statement echoes what in American politics is known as the Bradley effect, a phenomenon that describes the willingness of some white voters to tell pollsters that they are voting for an African American candidate while preferring the white candidate in the voting booth.
+
+It is named for former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, who was favored in polls in California’s 1982 gubernatorial election over his white Republican opponent, George Deukmejian, before suffering a narrow shock loss on election day. However, while its existence is disputed, anecdotal evidence for the phenomenon is mostly concentrated in the 1980s and 1990s. Conway’s argument is that something fundamentally similar is happening in the US in 2016.
+
+Speaking to Channel 4 earlier this month, Conway buoyed her claims by citing the UK’s experience of the EU referendum vote.
+
+Polling suggested the UK would remain in the European Union, but it became clear on election night that the vote was going the other way.
+
+Conway said: “Voices are silenced in polls that really should be included because people are too reliant on lists, and they’re excluding people who maybe feel so passionately about that issue, Brexit, or so passionately about this candidate, Donald Trump, that they’re going to vote for the first time ever in many, many, many cycles.”
+
+
+
+In the past week, Trump has begun to ditch his previous unscripted style, using teleprompters on stage at every rally. That is despite repeatedly bashing the technology in the past, saying in August 2015: “I say we should outlaw teleprompters … for anybody running for president.”
+
+The shift toward making Trump a more predictable candidate came as Conway took control of the campaign. The top aide outlined the message she thought Trump should continue to emphasize: “The best Donald Trump is the Donald Trump who is talking about national and homeland security, economic growth and prosperity, ethics and why so many Americans dislike and distrust Washington and all its adjuncts, its consultants, its donors, its lobbyists, its politicians, its way of doing business.”
+
+However, despite his adoption of teleprompters, Trump still veered badly off script in a rally in Akron, Ohio, on Monday night. The Republican nominee said: “You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it is safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats.”
+
+He continued to claim that if he were elected, “we’ll get rid of the crime. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”
+
+Just as there may be a cohort of undercover Trump voters waiting to emerge in November, it seems that despite Conway’s best efforts, there is an undercover candidate who won’t let a teleprompter keep his penchant for controversial statements hidden.",REAL
+10092,Re: WikiLeaks: ‘How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did?’ #PodestaEmails20,"WikiLeaks: ‘How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did?’ #PodestaEmails20 Posted at 10:29 am on October 27, 2016 by Greg P. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
+WikiLeaks’ 20th release of John Podesta’s email is out, and this one caught our eye . Apparently team Clinton was discussing how they could answer questions on Bill Clinton’s past, including comparisons of his behavior to accused rapist Bill Cosby: 
+Yeah, John … how do you handle question No. 4? Trending",FAKE
+9121,"REPORT: Megyn Trashes Trump, Newt… Then Murdoch Announces Replacements Are Available","WikiLeaks Destroys Hillary Mouthpiece Donna Brazile… Iron-Clad Proof 
+“I am sick and tired of people like you using that language. That is inflammatory, that is not true,” Gingrich said during the interview. “When you use those words, you take a position, and it is very unfair of you to do that, Megyn.” 
+“I think your defensiveness on this may speak volumes, sir,” Kelly told Gingrich. “If Mr. Trump is a sexual predator, then it is a big story. And what we saw on that tape was Trump saying himself he likes to grab women by their genitals and kiss them against their will. That’s what we saw. And then we saw 10 women come forward after he denied actually doing it.” 
+“You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy,” Gingrich countered. Advertisement - story continues below 
+You can watch the interview here: 
+Now, it seems the chickens from that encounter might be coming home to roost. 
+“Mr. Murdoch said in an interview that she is important to the network and he hopes to get a contract signed ‘very soon,’ but noted, ‘it’s up to her,’” The Wall Street Journal reported. Advertisement - story continues below",FAKE
+8122,Suspect captured in ‘ambush-style’ killings of two Iowa cops,"Suspect captured in ‘ambush-style’ killings of two Iowa cops 11/02/2016 
+USA TODAY 
+Authorities captured a 46-year-old male suspect without incident Wednesday, hours after an early-morning “ambush-style” killing of two police officers in the Des Moines metro area. 
+The suspect in the back-to-back killings was identified as Scott Michael Greene, said Urbandale police spokesman Sgt. Chad Underwood. Before capturing him, police had described Greene, who was last seen driving a blue Ford F-150 with an Iowa license plate, as armed and dangerous. 
+Greene was taken into custody by the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department while walking along a rural road in Redfield, about 35 miles west of where the shootings occurred. 
+According to police, Greene flagged down a passing Department of Natural Resources officer, handed over his ID and told the officer to call police. No shots were fired and there was no struggle, according to police. 
+The suspect was taken by ambulance to a Des Moines hospital with an unknown injury. 
+In a late morning news conference, police identified the slain officers as Urbandale Police Officer Justin Martin and Des Moines police Sgt. Anthony “Tony” Beminio. 
+The attacks began around 1:06 a.m. CT, when police departments from both cities responded to reports of gunfire at the intersection of 70th Street and Aurora Avenue in Urbandale. 
+The first officers arriving on the scene found Martin fatally wounded. About 20 minutes later, some two miles away, Beminio was was shot near the intersection of Merle Hay Road and Sheridan Ave. while responding to reports of the first officer’s shooting. Beminio was transported to Iowa Methodist Medical Center, where he died. Scott Michael Greene (Photo: Des Moines Police) 
+Both officers were gunned down in their patrol cars. 
+“It doesn’t look like there was any interaction between these officers and whoever the coward is that shot them while they sat in their cars,” a visibly emotional Parizek told reporters. 
+“In all appearances it looks … that these officers were ambushed,” he added. Officer from Des Moines and another from Urbandale were shot and killed in their cars, @dmpolice said. #officersdown 
+— Daniel P. Finney (@newsmanone) November 2, 2016 
+Des Moines police, fearing officers were being singled out, paired up its patrol officers so none were on the street alone, Parizek said. 
+“There’s literally a clear and present danger if you’re a police officer,” he said. 
+Police did not offer many details on how investigators identified Greene as a suspect. Underwood said he was identified “through a series of leads and a series of investigative tips.” 
+As of an early-morning news conference, police were still notifying the family members of the slain officers and planned to withhold the officers’ names, years of service and other details until later in the day, Parizek said. 
+Attorney General Loretta Lynch condemned the killings, saying “violence has no place in the United States of America.’’ 
+“Let me be clear, there is no message in murder,’’ the attorney general said, referring to simmering distrust between law enforcement and many communities across the country. “Violence creates nothing; it only destroys.’’ A Des Moines police officer was found fatally shot in a vehicle near the intersection of Merle Hay Road and Sheridan Avenue in Des Moines on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016. (Photo: Brian Powers, The Des Moines Register) 
+It’s the first time Des Moines has seen a police officer shot and killed in the line of duty since two officers were gunned down in separate incidents in 1977. 
+Two Des Moines officers, Susan Farrell and Carlos Puente-Morales, died earlier this year when their vehicle was struck head-on by a wrong-way drunk driver. 
+The killing of the Urbandale officer appeared to be the city’s first for an officer shot in the line of duty, Underwood said at the news conference. 
+Parizek thanked the community for its support when the department lost Farrell and Puente-Morales, as well as with this tragedy. 
+“I don’t even know where to begin on how bad this year is,” he said. But, “this is what we do. We come in day in and day out, we go out there and provide the same level of service regardless of what’s going on in our personal and professional lives.” Officers investigate the scene at Merle Hay and Sheridan ave. where an officer was found shot at about 1:26 A.M. on on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016, in Urbandale. 
+In a statement, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad called the attack on the officers “an attack on the public safety of all Iowans.” 
+“We call on Iowans to support our law enforcement officials in bringing this suspect to justice,” he said. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the police officers who were tragically killed in the line of duty as well as the officers who continue to put themselves in harm’s way.” 
+Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst extended her thoughts and prayers to the families of the officers killed. 
+“Although the investigation is still unfolding, what appears to be an ambush attack of police in the line of duty is an attack on the community at large and all of the men and women who risk their lives every day to protect us,” Ernst said. “This was a senseless act of violence and it cannot be tolerated.” 
+Finney and Haley report for The Des Moines Register. Follow them on Twitter: @newsmanone and @charlyhaley . Stanglin reports for USA TODAY in McLean, Va.",FAKE
+8988,Re: 10 Things That Every American Should Know About Donald Trump’s Plan To Save The U.S. Economy,"Archives Michael On Television 10 Things That Every American Should Know About Donald Trump’s Plan To Save The U.S. Economy By Michael Snyder, on September 15th, 2016 
+Can Donald Trump turn the U.S. economy around? This week Trump unveiled details of his new economic plan, and the mainstream media is having a field day criticizing it . But the truth is that we simply cannot afford to stay on the same path that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have us on right now. Millions of jobs are being shipped out of the country , the middle class is dying , poverty is exploding , millions of children in America don’t have enough food , and our reckless spending has created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the planet . Something must be done or else we will continue to steamroll toward economic oblivion. So is Donald Trump the man for the hour? 
+If you would like to read his full economic plan, you can find it on his official campaign website . His plan starts off by pointing out that this has been the weakest “economic recovery” since the Great Depression… 
+Last week’s GDP report showed that the economy grew a mere 1.2% in the second quarter and 1.2% over the last year. It’s the weakest recovery since the Great Depression – the predictable consequence of massive taxation, regulation, one-side trade deals and onerous energy restrictions. 
+And Trump is exactly right about how weak this economic recovery has been. 
+So how would he fix things? 
+The following are 10 things that every American should know about Donald Trump’s plan to save the U.S. economy… 
+#1 Donald Trump would lower taxes on the middle class 
+The tax savings under Trump’s plan would actually be quite substantial for middle class families. The following numbers come from a recent Charisma article … 
+• A married couple earning $50,000 per year with two children and $8,000 in child care expenses will save 35% from their current tax bill. 
+• A married couple earning $75,000 per year with two children and $10,000 in child care expenses will receive a 30% reduction in their tax bill. 
+• Married couple earning $5 million per year with two children and $12,000 in child care expenses will get only a 3% reduction in their tax bill. 
+#2 Donald Trump would lower taxes on businesses 
+Under his plan, no business in America would be taxed more than 15 percent. Alternatively, Hillary Clinton’s plan would tax some small businesses at a rate of close to 50 percent. So Trump’s plan would undoubtedly be good for businesses, and it would encourage many that have left the country to return. 
+But where would the lost tax revenue be made up? 
+#3 Childcare expenses would be exempt from taxation 
+For working families with children this would be a great blessing. Without a doubt this is an effort to win over more working women, and this is a demographic that Trump has been struggling with. 
+It is definitely an idea that I support, but once again where will the money come from to pay for this? 
+#4 U.S. manufacturers will be allowed to immediately fully expense new plants and equipment 
+This would undoubtedly lead to a boom in capital investment, but it would also reduce tax revenue. As an emergency measure this would be very good for encouraging manufacturers to stay in America , but it would also likely increase the budget deficit. 
+#5 A temporary freeze on new regulations 
+Red tape is one of my big pet peeves, and so I greatly applaud Trump for this proposal. I think that Bob Eschliman put it very well when he wrote the following about Trump’s planned freeze on new regulations… 
+In 2015 alone, federal agencies issued over 3,300 final rules and regulations, up from 2,400 the prior year. Studies show that small manufacturers face more than three times the burden of the average U.S. business, and the hidden tax from ineffective regulations amounts to “nearly $15,000 per U.S. household” annually. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion dollars per year, and Trump will end it. 
+#6 All existing regulations would be reviewed and unnecessary regulations would be eliminated 
+In particular, Trump’s plan would focus on getting rid of regulations that inhibit hiring. The following are some of the specific areas that he identifies on his official campaign website … The Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which forces investment in renewable energy at the expense of coal and natural gas, raising electricity rates; The EPA’s Waters of the United States rule, which gives the EPA the ability to regulate the smallest streams on private land, limiting land use; and The Department of Interior’s moratorium on coal mining permits, which put tens of thousands of coal miners out of work. 
+#7 Donald Trump would fundamentally alter our trade relationships with the rest of the globe 
+Donald Trump is the first major party nominee in decades to recognize that our trade deficit is absolutely killing our economy. I write about this all the time , and it is a hot button issue for me. So I definitely applaud Trump for proposing the following … Appoint trade negotiators whose goal will be to win for America: narrowing our trade deficit, increasing domestic production, and getting a fair deal for our workers. Renegotiate NAFTA. Bring trade relief cases to the world trade organization. Label China a currency manipulator. Apply tariffs and duties to countries that cheat. Direct the Commerce Department to use all legal tools to respond to trade violations. 
+#8 Donald Trump’s plan would be a tremendous boost for the U.S. energy industry 
+Barack Obama promised to kill the coal industry, and that is one of the few promises that he has actually kept. Obama also killed the Keystone Pipeline, and right now the energy industry as a whole is enduring their worst stretch since the last recession. To turn things around, Trump would do the following … Rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule. Save the coal industry and other industries threatened by Hillary Clinton’s extremist agenda. Ask Trans Canada to renew its permit application for the Keystone Pipeline. Make land in the Outer Continental Shelf available to produce oil and natural gas. Cancel the Paris Climate Agreement (limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius) and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs. 
+#9 Trump would repeal Obamacare 
+Trump claims that Obamacare would cost our economy two million jobs over the next ten years. And without a doubt, it has already cost the U.S. economy a lot of jobs . 
+Not only that, but Obamacare has also sent health insurance premiums soaring, and this is putting a tremendous amount of financial pressure on many families. 
+Trump says that he would “replace” Obamacare, but that is a rather vague statement. 
+What exactly would he replace it with? 
+#10 Trump’s plan says nothing about the Federal Reserve 
+This is a great concern, because the Federal Reserve has far more power over the economy than anyone else does. It is at the very heart of our debt-based system, and unless something is done about the Fed our debt bubble will continue to get even larger. 
+Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the value of the U.S. dollar has fallen by more than 96 percent and our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger. For Trump to not even mention the Federal Reserve in his economic plan is a tremendous oversight. 
+We are in the midst of a long-term economic decline, and things have not gotten better during the Obama years. If you can believe it, a study that was just released by Harvard even acknowledges this … 
+America’s economic performance peaked in the late 1990s, and erosion in crucial economic indicators such as the rate of economic growth, productivity growth, job growth, and investment began well before the Great Recession. 
+Workforce participation, the proportion of Americans in the productive workforce, peaked in 1997. With fewer working-age men and women in the workforce, per-capita income for the U.S. is reduced. 
+Median real household income has declined since 1999, with incomes stagnating across virtually all income levels. Despite a welcome jump in 2015, median household income remains below the peak attained in 1999, 17 years ago. Moreover, stagnating income and limited job prospects have disproportionately affected lower-income and lower-skilled Americans, leading inequality to rise. 
+That same study found that the percentage of Americans participating in the labor force peaked back in 1997 and has been steadily declining since that time… 
+If we continue to do the same things, we will continue to get the same results. 
+Donald Trump is promising change, and many of his proposals sound good, but there are also some areas to be concerned about. 
+Ultimately, just tinkering with the tax code and reducing regulations is not going to be enough to turn the U.S. economy around. We need a fundamental overhaul of our economic and financial systems, and Trump’s plan stops well short of that. But without a doubt what he is proposing is vastly superior to Hillary Clinton’s plan, and so he should definitely be applauded for at least moving in the right direction. More Jobs Shipped Out Of The Country: Ford Moves All Small Car Production To Mexico » trump will have an “accident” 
+but,but,but but ,but obammy mammy said “Donald trump will never (ever) become president”,his words ver batem.bawok also said “Donald trump will never replace me in the WH”,ominous ,disturbing words from el president,what exactly did baaaarak mean obamas red line 2.0 
+Obama did say trump will “never” become president,not on his watch,for him that was a” red line’,but let’s face it we all know barry’s track record when it comes to red lines lol JC Teecher 
+It will only happen the way the Obominable One says it will happen, “IF”, the Creator on the Throne, says it will. barry oldwater 
+Hopefully his changes will spur economic growth which will bring in more revenue as more jobs are created, not saying it will, just speculating that this is his plan. SnodtBlossom 
+he won’t be elected anonymous 
+Nobody is elected, they are selected. Elections are just a way to keep dumb-downed masses in check. So keep voting Lazarovic 
+You’re stupid, that’s why you’re anonymous. Coward too. anonymous 
+You must be responding out of shameful ignorance. It’s not your fault you are dumb-downed. It is ironic that you are calling me out for posting anonymously, when you are doing the same. Resorting to name calling though, really? LIZ THE SHIZ 
+just like in Ancient Rome election season is bread and circus , keep the masses entertained so they won’t notice they’re powerless and gullible BS1986 
+She’ll use that in the debate. BS1986 
+he wants to be coronated , all hail Trumpus Maximus ThePeanut995 
+You are in for a rude awakening GSOB 
+We all are, if either one is elected. I’ve done my research. No choice is without risk. Trump is who I’d like to see. It’s time to think outside the box. 
+If he gets in, perhaps in a 2nd term, the Fed Reserve get’s axed. 
+I can’t stop thinking big with Mr. Trump. I can’t stop thinking small with the leftist. GSOB 
+With more than 50% leftist population….it does look like the final nail. Alan Cecil 
+Bwah ha ha ha…another twist on the “trickle-down” theory. It works great…for the top 1%. hillery comin for your guns 
+then there’s hillery’s economic “plan”, massive across the board tax increases,massive increases in the size of gov’t,staggering draw droppin deficits,massive increases in entitlements (handouts),after all she did say she was continuing beewok obambi failed policies Mondobeyondo 
+I have never felt as depressed – about my own future, about the future of my friends, my family and my country- as I do at this very moment. William Lutz 
+Mondo I’m feeling the same way. Everyday the life is being sucked out of our wonderful nation with each passing day. I’ve noticed it ever since the 2008 crisis, but even more so after Obama got reelected. The only thing we have to do now is hope for the best of our personal lives in the next few years. This downfall is inevitable. anonymous 
+You’re not the only one. Jerry C 
+Most of us felt that way almost 8 years ago. rat28 
+Another stupid tickle down economy by the GOP.. We should be taxing the rich . Obama regulation and energy policies protect us from global warming Obama health care help the poor and sick .. repealing Obamacare will hurt all the economy gains we seen the last 8 years.. Bad deal from Donald Trump. libs credit card economics 
+yeah just let the 35 year old “kids” livin in their parents basement worry bout the 12T of red ink,and that’s just in 8 years GSOB 
+Which is impossible to pay off. South Texas 
+The stupid in your comment just burns. I’ve not met one person who is retired who has benefited from the wonders of Obummacare. Their cost went way up for less choice and service. Maybe you could go get a medical degree and offer our services for free and help out with the problem. 
+As for GW, another money sucking joke pushed by scum who live in opulate homes and waste more energy than any working class family. Speaking of which, how big is your home? SnodtBlossom 
+Sleep with Trump in 2016! BS1986 
+You do have your moments. LIZ THE SHIZ 
+oh Snotty, you just want to rub your fingers through his thick blond weave, don’t you SnodtBlossom 
+What I’m saying is.. If you vote for Trump and you’re single and admit to voting for him,.. a lot of women won’t want you. GSOB 
+Let me be blunt – God called women into spiritual leadership roles, as an exception to His design, in order to shame the men into bringing the nation back to God, and into exercising their God given responsibility to lead in the church, the home and in the nation. 
+In no way does the Bible EVER paint women in leadership roles as a positive thing, but it is something God uses to shame the men into action. SnodtBlossom 
+Be SHAMED.. be very SHAMED G SOB LIZ THE SHIZ 
+and you wonder why your single LIZ THE SHIZ 
+but they’ll be the ugly women, not the mindless bleach blond Fox News types Satirist 1976 
+Michael this is one of the best articles you have ever written. You presented Trump’s solutions to issues that plague everyday Americans. Well done. This is not satire. 
+Trump should replace Ocare with the free market and nothing else. William Lutz 
+Replace Obamacare with individual Health Savings Accounts based on investments. Public hospitals with vouchers is also a great idea. South Texas 
+No, the government needs to get out of looting me with a ‘savings account’ and make it free market all the way. GSOB 
+You don’t understand how it works. They don’t tax those dollars you put into a HSA. Orange Jean 
+Except that in most of them… you select a certain $$ amount each year… and if you don’t use it, you lose it. Who do you think ends up with the money then? GSOB 
+Don’t expect a reward for being careless. No system can sustain carelessness South Texas 
+Exactly my point. Why do we have to put up with some over compensated elected person to ‘let’ me do something with my money? 
+I’ve never had a use for an HSA but known people who do. But hey, at least the scum implicitly acknowledge they are cheating us by ‘giving’ us the privilege to use our money pre-tax. 
+If some of us were not working almost 5 months of the year to support government and we had a real private health insurance and health care sector, this would be a non issue. SnodtBlossom 
+Hillary will win Peanut 
+NO SHE WON’T … HE IS NOW NECK AND NECK WITH HER AND WILL EXCEED HER… MORE STUFF ABOUT HER WILL BE COMING OUT! SnodtBlossom 
+How much prior political experience does Trump have? NADA!!! ZIP!!!! ZILCH!!! ZERO!!! He talks the talk, but never walked the walk. But hey.. it’s only THE PRESIDENCY! Maybe next we’ll grab people off the street w/no medical training to do surgery! 
+Neither did Ulysses Grant or Dwight Eisenhower have a prior politcal position, though both had a strong military background. Dwight being ” The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in World War II” and Grant “Commanding General of the United States Army” How much military background does Trump have? NADA!!! ZIP!!!! ZILCH!!! ZERO!!! 
+“no major U.S. company has filed for Chapter 11 more than Trump’s casino empire in the last 30 years.” He has filed four business bankruptcies. Maybe he thinks it’s just as easy to file bankruptcy w/the entire government and walk away. Raymond Chow 
+Political experience means nothing especially when someones political experience means the detriment of the nation. Cobbett 
+”How much prior political experience does Trump have” 
+Oh yes…there’s Iraq, Libya, Syria(she was also instrumental in convincing Bill to bomb Serbia….all resounding success stories…politics just equal BS. turee60 
+How much military experience does Hillary and Obama have zilch none! jonodough 
+you mean like the idiot obama? Mondobeyondo 
+If she doesn’t have a coughing epileptic seizure before the election. LIZ THE SHIZ 
+yup, the fix is in just watch the electoral college , your vote don’t mean squat!!! GSOB 
+Not yet it don’t Raymond Chow 
+Why do people always mention electoral college when they don’t understand what electoral college is? 
+When looking at the map of blue or red those are just projections where Democrats or Republican voted favorably in the past it doesn’t mean electoral college. Electoral college delegates are pick by the winning candidate in the state. All states in the national election are winner take all. So if the candidate wins in majority of the district in the state he wins all the state electoral college. LIZ THE SHIZ 
+just like super delegates, seems fishy budman 
+nebraska is not winner take all. each congressional districts electoral vote depends on the vote within that district. GSOB 
+And the minimum wage will go up. And unemployment will rise, and government will spend even more. Orange Jean 
+… yeah, and little pink pigs will fly away from Smithfield Foods and not get turned into hams! ISA41:10 
+Yep! krinks 
+Hey Genius. A Free Market solution led people to be denied coverage for nearly every malady under the guise of a pre existing condition. A Whistle Blower for/from the Health Insurance Industry admitted as much. The more she came up with creative reasons to deny payment/coverage the higher she was promoted. GSOB 
+The free market is the best thing going! Because it has some level of risk, non hackers despise and envy this good system. What makes it good is that it benefits the majority of the people, not all. No system can. What happens if the majority are non hackers? Non hackers default to handout mode by finding fault with reality and cry, they depend on a leftist government to provide a silver spoon for everyone. The market then is no longer free. krinks 
+Weren’t you paying attention? They take your premiums and then when you need to use it deny payment. GSOB 
+Appeal it then. krinks 
+Appeal? To who? The same person who gets a bigger bonus for telling you no? Are you an idiot? GSOB 
+You sound like a confident young man. Just ignore me. Stick with your leftist ideas. Your choice. Jace Tate 
+the once estudious michael snider is now drowned by drivel. LIZ THE SHIZ 
+well he opened it up to a Trollathon Raymond Chow 
+When people runs out of argument or loses they start calling names which is exactly what you are. Yes, you sue or appeal your case. krinks 
+I explained that a big bonus follows when you tell people NO in the private industry. If you don’t understand this YES you are an IDIOT. Jerry C 
+Then payers should be free to leave and go to a provider who says yes in a fair market. LIZ THE SHIZ 
+meanwhile you die waiting for the appeal Raymond Chow 
+Then sue them or perhaps you didn’t sign up for the coverage. It’s like you got liability for your car insurance but you wanna be cover for medical when you get into an accident. joe 
+That’s how “insurance” works. Simply banking in reverse and how the inventors, IE banksters intended. Raymond Chow 
+Yes, a free market system where you can acquire health insurance across state boundaries. I.e., wish to buy health insurance in Iowa where it’s lower even though I live in California. Cobbett 
+Why are people so obsessed with their health? Why paying endless 10000s on the chance I ”might” get ill…rather spend it on women and booze. Lillian DeVore 
+I think it’s more of an obsession with the pre-existing conditions people’s health. Cobbett 
+I had my appendix whipped out when I was 14(some time ago)…even though I’m a heavy boozer(although not now)…I Feel Fine. Why worry…what will be will be. GeneP54 
+He should, but he said that he wants universal healthcare. turee60 
+I agree our medical the way it was was still the best in the world. People from Canada were coming here for medical cause it was so much better. The government doesn’t need to get into our medical. Years ago like in 1986 I was out of work and had no medical and went to a free clinic in my area and got waited on quickly and it didn’t cost me anything. William Lutz 
+I agree. On one hand, some of Trump’s policies sound alright, but a lot of his proposals are dubious and a few are unrealistic. First of all, building a YUGE wall on the border is going to be very expensive and not very effective. Furthermore: 
+1) He never really mentions how he is going to deal with Planned Parenthood. 2) He obviously has no full intention of abolishing some bureaucratic agencies such as the Fed Reserve, the FDA, the USDA, Department of Energy, etc. 3) Reckless spending and debt is going to continue, and tax revenue will never keep up with the expenses. 4) I am not sure how he is going to replace Obamacare. 5) His idea on how to combat ISIS is not practical. It would mean extorting the Middle East out of their oil and having a costly militarist operation in various countries. It’s a recipe for World War 3. 6) Even though he is anti establismhment at heart, he is running on a major party platform, which is rigged and corrupt. He should’ve refused to participate within the Republican Party and join an alternative political party. Jace Tate 
+Isis took the oil didn’t they William Lutz 
+Yeah they probably took it, but my point is that you don’t easily defeat ISIS by confiscating the oil and having a double version of the Iraq War. By the way, I forgot to mention that DJ Trump never spoke openly about civil liberties or mass surveillance either. Hence, I suspect that he will strengthen the so called “war on terror”, which God forbid he would do. No more George Dubya Bush please. Christopher Privett 
+Obama expanded Bush’s programs of surveillance, and just paid Mexico 75 Million dollars. For a WALL built across their southern border. John Francis 
+You are right, some things don’t add up, but I’ll take him over Hillary any day of the week. I’m still struggling with whether to vote in the presidential at all, having a very hard time with Trump’s torture advocacy and his call for the execution of Edward Snowden. Jessy Scholl 
+Seriously, Donald Trump can’t talk about abolishing federal agencies because he would be killed on the spot. Jace Tate 
+how are lower taxes going to help zero growth? How is income in the middle class going to aid the systems recovery? Once you go off the cliff of a set system in a fixed economy, you don’t think there is any fixing it. I think higher taxes and lower barriers to growth are the answer. However the way the apple is peeled can only be determined post collapse, after the decision makers have decided the direction the country takes. That is why even if you take out the true deplorables ruining everything, the best you can do is elect someone who identifies with the American way of life and our decisions. themacabre 
+How are higher taxes for failed government programs going to help?…we need to cut federal spending not give it more money. That’s like giving a lazy bum watching tv and drinking beer another six pack. ISA41:10 
+” I think higher taxes and lower barriers to growth are the answer. ” 
+How stupid can you be?!?!? Explain to me how taking more money from the private sector (businesses and people) improves growth and the economy? 
+Waiting .. JC Teecher 
+You are proof of how well mind control by the elite liberals is working. It is this mentality that is meant to destroy the God induced US Constitution. 
+When a nation has allowed four scotus to take the whole nation down a rat hole of sin, then the nation either digs back out or it gets drowned in darkness. 
+There is a slim…very slim chance that America can dig out of the rat hole for a few years, but ultimately sin will drown this nation into the abyss. 
+Don’t believe it? It is in the book; the only book that matters. sister soldier 
+Amen and amen again. LIZ THE SHIZ 
+we will wind up with a one world government just like in Star Trek Next Generation , the united federation of planets GSOB 
+Leftist 1. A member of an ideological camp that defines socialism as a form of totalitarian secular feudalism; an advocate for the management of non-Leftist people as farm animals. 
+“When the Leftist tried to convince me that North Korea had the only true and just form of socialism on earth, I gave up on trying to talk rationally with him and just walked away.” Jace Tate 
+if you would all stop patting each other on the back you’d find the diversity among yourselves deplorable in the face of true knowledge. Jace Tate 
+you changed your comment you liberal demagogues. William Lutz 
+But I give Donald credit where it’s due. At least he is better than Hillary and not as conniving and deceiving as she is. However, I refuse to pick the least of two bad apples. GSOB 
+.. vizeet 
+Removing Obamacare and reducing Defense budget will be huge saving for US. And will be good for rest of the world…. William Lutz 
+Trump however, will not reduce military spending and his idea of replacing ACA is only a secret plan. SnodtBlossom 
+Do you think he will help you when you are homeless? GSOB 
+It is not the POTUS job to do that. LIZ THE SHIZ 
+if he has any rooms empty in his crappy hotels he can rent them to the homeless and get refunded through section 8 housing Raymond Chow 
+You can’t even afford to step into his hotel lobby. I don’t think they allow vagrants there. sister soldier 
+Didn’t the current sitting president already reduce the defense budget? My bad…. he reduced our defenses. turee60 
+You can’t reduce the defense budget you need to raise the defense to protect our country from terrorist! Ye Deplorable Uncucker 
+I would hope that after he is elected he will go after the Fed. Shut them down. Paleface 
+and let the treasury print the US$. that way avoiding paying interest to a private bunch of parasites. LIZ THE SHIZ 
+ask JFK what happens when you try to go after the fed, you can’t can you? Priszilla",FAKE
+2115,The next president can have a big impact on climate policy — even without Congress,"Given that Congress has become so utterly dysfunctional in recent years, it's tempting to think the upcoming presidential election will be fairly low-stakes. Does it even matter what Jeb Bush thinks about tax policy or what Hillary Clinton is proposing on paid leave? Hardly anything will pass.
+
+The next president won't need Congress to tackle global warming
+
+But on global warming, it's a rather different story. Whoever gets elected to the White House in 2016 will have an enormous amount of influence over America’s climate policies — and they won't need Congress to act.
+
+For that, you can thank (or blame) President Obama. Over the past six years, the Environmental Protection Agency has acquired unprecedented authority to regulate the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions. Obama has used that power to enact a slew of new pollution rules, including CO2 regulations on coal plants, all with the aim of cutting US greenhouse gas emissions at least 26 percent between 2005 and 2025.
+
+The EPA will likely keep this authority to regulate carbon dioxide for the foreseeable future — unless it gets altered by courts or repealed by Congress. And many of the biggest decisions on how to use it will be left to the next president.
+
+If, say, Hillary Clinton wanted to expand Obama’s carbon rules to oil refineries or cement plants, she could. Conversely, if a Republican president skeptical of climate change wanted to bog down implementation of Obama’s CO2 rules for coal plants, he'd be able to do that, too. (Though, as we'll see, Republicans may not have unlimited power to scuttle Obama's climate policies.)
+
+""Any future administration will have a lot of room to be either more ambitious or less ambitious,"" explains Michael Wara, an expert on energy and environmental law at Stanford. And how the next president uses the EPA could have ripple effects around the world — and even decide the fate of ongoing international climate talks with China, India, and other countries.
+
+So far, the 2016 candidates have been vague about which way they'd steer the EPA. Clinton has said Obama's climate rules should be ""protected at all cost,"" but she's given little sign of whether she might expand them further. Meanwhile, Republicans like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush sound skeptical about tackling global warming, but they haven't said whether they might try to relax or even dismantle Obama's climate policies. So here's a look at what they could do.
+
+First, a recap of how the executive branch acquired so much power over US climate policy. Back in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA must regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants under the existing Clean Air Act — if there's evidence that they endanger public health and welfare.
+
+In 2009, Obama's EPA laid out this evidence, and that ""endangerment finding"" set in motion a series of rules to curtail US greenhouse gas emissions. Since this was being done under the auspices of the Clean Air Act, a law Congress had passed in 1970, no new legislation was required. The EPA could act on its own. The big actions so far:
+
+Add it all up, and the White House claims these rules put the US on pace to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at least 26 percent between 2005 and 2025. But whether that actually happens will depend on the next president.
+
+Okay, now let's assume it's 2017. There's a new president, and Congress is still totally gridlocked on climate change. What happens next?
+
+The next president likely won't be able to dismantle Obama's climate policies entirely — not on his or her own. After all, the Supreme Court has effectively ordered the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases so long as there's evidence that they cause harm, and that evidence is quite solid. Only Congress could undo everything Obama's done, by revising the Clean Air Act.
+
+Still, whoever occupies the White House and EPA will have a lot of say in how to implement Obama's climate rules. That sounds boring, but it's actually a key step. There's tons of leeway to strengthen or weaken these rules. Here are a few ways this could play out:
+
+1) Fuel-economy standards could be tightened (or weakened) in 2017. Remember, the EPA's fuel-economy standards for new cars and light trucks are on pace to rise from their current 35 miles per gallon to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.
+
+Automakers may push to relax the CAFE standards in the midterm review
+
+Yet those numbers aren't set in stone. These CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) rules are scheduled to come up for a midterm review in 2017. At that point, automakers may lobby to allow the standards to rise more slowly — particularly if sales of fuel-efficient vehicles have been sluggish due to low oil prices. Green groups, meanwhile, could push to make the standards stricter, or to have them keep increasing past 2025, to push vehicle emissions down even further.
+
+So the next administration will have to decide. Leave the vehicle standards alone? Make them stricter? Weaker?
+
+The one twist here is that due to a longstanding quirk of the Clean Air Act, California can threaten to create its own stricter standards if it's not happy with what the federal government is doing (and other states can join). Automakers really hate the idea of multiple sets of vehicle standards around the country, so they may prefer not to weaken the federal rules too much and risk having California go it alone.
+
+2) The Clean Power Plan will live or die based on implementation. The EPA will finalize its rules for reducing carbon dioxide from existing power plants in the summer of 2015. It's a core component of Obama's climate policy — power plants are responsible for 31 percent of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. But the next president will have enormous influence over how this plan actually works.
+
+Assuming the rule holds up in court, it could prove difficult for the next president to simply hit the kill switch on the plan and start all over. But he or she will get to decide how to implement it — and that's arguably just as significant. After the rule is finalized, states will have another 14 months to submit plans for cutting emissions, though some will request extensions. That process could drag on until 2017 or 2018.
+
+""There's a lot of latitude in the review process""
+
+At that point, the EPA will review each state's plans for reducing emissions from its power plants and decide whether the plans are acceptable. An administration that really wants to tackle climate change can make sure states are doing as much as is feasible. By contrast, a president who was less concerned about global warming could allow states that wanted to, like Texas, to submit less-aggressive plans.
+
+""There’s a lot of latitude in the review process,"" says Stanford's Michael Wara. ""The history of the Clean Air Act shows this. If you have a president who doesn’t like climate policy, they could basically signal to the states that they’re going to give a lot of compliance flexibility and allow states to make assumptions in their plan that reduce their costs."" This would likely involve seemingly arcane tweaks to models and baselines that would be harder for green groups to challenge in court.
+
+Meanwhile, some states may outright refuse to submit any plans for reducing emissions. (Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-KY, is already urging states to do exactly this.) If that happens, the EPA has the authority to impose its own federal plan on the states. The agency will unveil the details of this federal plan in 2015, though, again, implementation would be left to the next president.
+
+Meanwhile, industry groups are almost certain to challenge aspects of the rule in court. Adele Morris, the policy director for the Climate and Energy Economics Project at the Brookings Institution, points out that an administration hostile to Obama's EPA rule could defend it weakly in court. And if any parts of the rule get struck down, the next administration will get to decide how to redo it.
+
+It all comes down to preference. ""If you have an administration that's friendly to [Obama's] policy, then you'd have continuity in implementation,"" says David Doniger, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate and clear air program. ""But if you had an administration that wasn't as friendly, they could try to drag their feet or change the rules.""
+
+3) The next president will decide whether to regulate other sectors — like refineries. The Clean Air Act doesn't just cover vehicles and power plants. Technically the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide from other sources, as well. Oil refineries. Cement plants. Trucks. Airplanes. The agency is regulating methane leaks from new oil and gas wells, but it hasn't touched existing wells. And so on. These sources all add up.
+
+The Obama administration is leaving most of the decisions about what to do with these sectors to the next president. If Hillary Clinton comes in and wants to expand the EPA's authority here, she can. If Marco Rubio comes in and doesn't, he may have to fend off lawsuits, but he can likely hold off on doing this for a long time.
+
+At this point, we only have a hazy sense for what most US presidential candidates think about global warming. But given how much power they have at their disposal, they should give more detailed answers.
+
+For instance, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta, claims that she'll put climate change and clean energy at the ""top of the agenda."" And Clinton has said the EPA's climate rules should be ""protected at all cost.""
+
+Hillary says the EPA rules should be ""protected"" — but would she expand them?
+
+Fine. So we know she'll veto any attempts by congressional Republicans to repeal the EPA rules altogether. But what else? Would she try to strengthen the fuel-economy rules during the 2017 midterm review? Would she want to expand the EPA's carbon regulations to oil refineries and chemical plants? Would she try to beat Obama's goal of cutting emissions at least 26 percent between 2005 and 2025?
+
+On the other end of the spectrum, there's Marco Rubio, who says, ""I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it."" But what does that mean in practice? Would he weaken the vehicle rules? Abandon the US goal of cutting emissions 26 percent?
+
+Then there's Jeb Bush, who says he's ""concerned"" about climate change and that ""we need to work with the rest of the world to negotiate a way to reduce carbon emissions."" But, again, what does this mean? Would he keep Obama's climate rules in place? Strengthen them? Weaken them?
+
+Some green groups have started to focus on these questions. ""We definitely want to ensure that the next president is actually committed on building progress through the Clean Power Plan,"" Tiernan Sittenfield, senior vice president at the League of Conservation Voters, told me.
+
+For now, many environmentalists have mainly been pressing Clinton on what she thinks of the Keystone XL pipeline. Yet that issue will probably be resolved before Obama leaves office. The EPA rules are far more relevant for the next administration.
+
+It's worth being precise about what the EPA can and can't do here. The executive branch has acquired sweeping authority over the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. The Obama administration estimates that this authority alone could push emissions down 26 to 28 percent between 2005 and 2025.
+
+truly drastic changes to our energy system would likely require Congress
+
+Looked at one way, that's a huge deal — a decisive break from the past, when emissions would go up and up seemingly without end. Looked at another way, it's a pittance.
+
+To help avoid drastic global warming, the United States will probably need to push down emissions 80 percent or more by midcentury. That would require truly staggering changes. It wouldn't be enough for coal and gas plants to get slightly more efficient under EPA rules. We'd have to replace virtually our entire energy system with a new, cleaner one.
+
+That's the sort of thing that only Congress can really do. Only Congress can fund R&D for new technologies or offer subsidies for clean energy. Only Congress can bring about dramatic changes to our grid infrastructure. Only Congress can enact an economy-wide carbon tax. Barring some creative flexibility on regulations, these are things the next president just can't accomplish without cooperation from the House and Senate.
+
+Where the EPA rules could have a more important effect is on the international stage — at least in the near term. Remember, the United States only accounts for about 17 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. There's also China, India, Brazil, Europe, Russia, and so on. That's why international cooperation on climate change is so crucial.
+
+Right now, the world is groping toward a very, very weak international agreement. The US put forward its pledge to cut emissions at least 26 percent between 2005 and 2025. That spurred China to respond by vowing to get its emissions to peak around 2030. Other countries have started to pitch in, too.
+
+Add all these pledges up, and we're still not close to tackling global warming. The Climate Action Tracker estimates that we're on pace for global average temperatures to rise 3.1°C (or 5.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, give or take — a seriously disruptive change.
+
+""What the US has done with China is a big step in changing the dynamics""
+
+Even so, some experts think even these weak promises could lead, iteratively, to stronger action over time. ""You can see how those plans could start to connect together and create a positive negotiating dynamic,"" David Victor, a political scientist at UC San Diego's School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, told me. ""The encouraging precedent here is in trade ... You build credibility and trust over time and then move to bigger issues.""
+
+The next US president can help decide how this agreement continues to evolve in the years to come. The US can keep pushing its own emissions down and try to persuade countries like China and India to respond in kind. Or it could abandon this budding framework entirely.
+
+Abandoning the US climate targets, says Wara, ""would do real damage to whatever credibility the US has left on the international stage. What Obama has done with China is a big step in changing the dynamics in a very positive way. And if the US were to walk away from that, that would be very damaging for future climate negotiations and commitments.""",REAL
+8682,Look at the SHOCKING Number of Kids Born To Illegals in 2014,"You are here: Home / US / Look at the SHOCKING Number of Kids Born To Illegals in 2014 Look at the SHOCKING Number of Kids Born To Illegals in 2014 October 27, 2016 
+According to the Pew Research Center’s latest numbers, in 2014, 275,000 anchor babies were born in the United States — enough to fill Orlando, Florida. 
+The Washington Examiner reported : 
+Moms in the United States illegally gave birth to 275,000 babies in 2014, enough birthright U.S. citizens to fill a city the size of Orlando, Florida, according to an analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics. 
+The data showed that newborns to illegals accounted for 7 percent of all births in 2014, according to the analysis from the Pew Research Center. 
+The report reviews births to unmarried foreign-born and American born women. Those who are foreign born, including illegals, are seeing their birthrate drop, though it is still making up for the decline in births by American women. 
+Pew’s recently-released report read: “In 2014, about 275,000 babies were born to unauthorized-immigrant parents in the U.S., accounting for about 7 percent of all U.S. births, and 32 percent of all U.S. births to foreign-born mothers.” The share of new mothers who are teenagers is higher among the U.S. born (6%) than among the foreign born (2%) https://t.co/d6f9C9ALoR pic.twitter.com/ydJpV2NgXh 
+— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 26, 2016 
+“A third of all births to foreign-born mothers were to unmarried women – down from a peak of 37 percent in 2008. At the same time, the rate has held steady for U.S.-born women and now stands at 42 percent,” the study continued. 
+According to Pew, the birthrate among U.S.-born women has declined, so the rise in the birthrate is solely because of immigrant mothers. The growth in annual U.S. births since 1970 has been driven entirely by immigrant moms https://t.co/bhzGRzgimg pic.twitter.com/dozNVXXVgT 
+— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 26, 2016 
+While the annual number of babies born in the U.S. has fluctuated in recent years – most markedly during the Great Recession when there was a significant drop in births nationwide – the trajectory over the past four decades or so has been upward. In 2014, there were 4 million births in the U.S., compared with 3.74 million in 1970. 
+This growth has been driven entirely by the increasing numbers of babies born to immigrant women. In 2014, immigrant women accounted for about 901,000 U.S. births, which marked a threefold increase from 1970 when immigrant women accounted for about 274,000 births. Meanwhile, the annual number of births to U.S.-born women dropped by 11 percent during that same time period, from 3.46 million in 1970 to 3.10 million in 2014. 
+So, do you think that all these people coming here, in many cases illegally, have assimilated to our culture and/or are planning on doing so? Take a look around and it’s easy to see that the answer is no. 
+If Hillary Clinton is elected, she plans to greatly increase refugee flows and give amnesty to illegal immigrants who broke our laws. In contrast, Donald Trump has pledged to restore law and order, build a wall, enforce immigration laws, and put the safety and interests of American citizens first. 
+Which one sounds better to you at this critical point in our country’s history?",FAKE
+6350,Mother And Daughter Remind MSNBC Reporter That Trump Has Black Supporters,"Sharpton Attacks O’Keefe, So O’Keefe Releases Brutal Expose on Sharpton… BOOM! 
+If you are going to wallow in the liberal media mire, though, MSNBC is by far my favorite — and trust me, a year-and-a-half of observing presidential campaigns has made me quite a connoisseur of the left-slanting morass. 
+MSNBC pretends that conservatives and Trump supporters are from another planet — or, at the very least, another culture, a sort of cargo cult that is to be studied anthropologically but never taken with any seriousness. 
+This interaction with MSNBC reporter Jacob Rascon on Wednesday proved what I’m talking about perfectly. He had found a mother and daughter in line, apparently for early voting. They were also African-American, which made them a cargo cult on top of a cargo cult, by liberal media standards.   
+However, when he asked them about criticism of Trump’s African-American outreach, the mother and daughter blew him out of the water. 
+“Well, I think Trump is reaching out to all citizens, including African-Americans,” Trina, the daughter, told MSNBC. “He’s trying to address a problem. It should not be a problem if you address there is something wrong, and you have a plan that wants to help people.” 
+“That’s what a president should do for us. He should reach out and try to help people and address problems that’s going on in our country.” 
+“Some of the criticisms have been about (Trump’s pitch to minority voters) ‘What do you have to lose?’” Rascon said to Gloria, the mother. “What do you think about that criticism?”  ",FAKE
+4597,Justice Department Staffers Monitor Polls on Election Day,"More than 500 staffers from the Justice Department will be monitoring polling stations across 28 states Tuesday.
+
+Those staffers have been dispatched to 67 jurisdictions and will be watching for civil rights violations, including racial discrimination.
+
+""As always, our personnel will perform these duties impartially with one goal in mind: to see to it that every eligible voter can participate in our elections to the full extent that federal law provides,"" Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Monday.
+
+     
+
+ The announcement comes amid rising concerns about voter intimidation.
+
+""Observation at the polls should not cross the line into intimidation, that's key,"" The Christian Science Monitor quoted Ned Foley, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State University's Moritz School of Law.
+
+On the other hand, there have also been concerns about voter fraud, with some 41 percent of Americans believing the election could be stolen, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll.
+
+Speaking at a restaurant and bar in Anderson Township, Ohio, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin defended recent claims by Donald Trump that the election could be rigged.
+
+""Of course he gets crucified by the press saying he's conspiratorial or something, saying there could be voter fraud,"" she said. ""Well, primaries can be fixed, and debate questions can be fixed, and dead people can vote.""
+
+     
+
+ In 2012, about 780 monitors were dispatched. This year, that number is down by about 35 percent.
+
+     
+
+ Justice Department officials say they hope voters will not detect any difference in the federal presence.
+
+""In most cases, voters on the ground will see very little practical difference between monitors and observers,"" Vanita Gupta, head of the agency's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement Monday.
+
+""We work closely and cooperatively with jurisdictions around the country to ensure that trained personnel are able to keep an eye on the proceedings from an immediate vantage point."" she said.",REAL
+7818,Elizabeth Warren Just Blasted The FBI Director For Going After Hillary Instead Of Wall Street Crooks,"Comments 
+In the wake of a string of completely extraordinary revelations starting this summer by FBI Director James Comey, Senator Warren is now demanding that the FBI release investigatory details about the 14 corporations and 11 individuals which the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) referred for criminal prosecution in 2010; 
+“Your recent actions with regard to the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provide a clear precedent for releasing additional information about the investigation of the parties responsible for the financial crisis. 
+These new standards present a compelling case for public transparency around the fate of the FCIC referrals. If Secretary Clinton’s email server was of sufficient interest to establish a new FBI standard of transparency, then surely the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis should be subject to the same level of transparency. 
+As a consequence of the 2008 crash, trillions of dollars in American housing wealth was destroyed. Millions of Americans were touched personally as they lost their homes, their jobs, or both. Hundreds of pension funds were eviscerated, and millions of retirees saw their financial futures wiped out. Congress created the FCIC to examine what went wrong and to determine Whether any individuals or entities deserved law enforcement scrutiny as a result of their actions in this crisis. The FCIC followed the law and sent such referrals to the DOJ, yet not a single senior Wall Street executive has ever been criminally prosecuted. 
+For the uncounted millions of Americans whose lives were changed forever and for those who are still dealing with the consequences of the crash, I can think of no matter of intense public interest about which the American people deserve the details than the issue of what precisely happened to the criminal referrals that followed the 2008 crash.” 
+Until now, the FBI has never, ever released the investigatory file of anyone or any institution it has targeted. However, if the Democratic nominee herself was a bank, then she would have nothing to fear from the FBI. 
+Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is laser focused on protecting the American people from shady banks and financial scams, but the newly transparent FBI apparently doesn’t share her concern since those investigations don’t involve Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. To date, no executive has been criminally prosecuted for financial crimes by banks, Wall Street firms and lending institutions which caused the Great Bush Recession’s mass unemployment and foreclosure epidemic. 
+Of 25 entities named by the FCIC to be criminally investigated , only one actual person has paid a civil penalty, and another person – none other than Daniel Mudd, former CEO of mortgage giant Fannie Mae, was fined — but had his $100,000 penalty paid by the government sponsored enterprise that employed him. 
+FBI Director James Comey has deployed a massive double standard to protect the criminal financial institutions, handing them a free pass and complete secrecy for collapsing our national economy and wiping out $3 Trillion dollars in home equity, stock equity and savings, while dragging Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton through the mud for Comey’s partisan predilections for transparency when she’s demonstrably done absolutely nothing wrong. 
+The FBI Director himself admitted in July that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against the Democratic nominee, yet he himself cannot resist rehashing and releasing the investigatory details in public over and over. Releasing anything about an investigation, or even delivering an actual indictment, actually violates Department of Justice policy to remain silent in the 60 days before an election. It’s been described by former top Justice Department officials as the “difference between being independent and flying solo.” 
+Elizabeth is right. How long will the FBI wait to deliver transparency to the American people eight years after their jobs, homes and savings were attacked by irresponsible bankers? 
+Once the FBI completes disclosing those investigatory files, then how long will it take for them to deliver indictments and justice to the men and women who caused the Great Recession? 
+Neither can happen soon enough. For now, he needs to stop his partisan witch-hunt against Hillary and start going after the real crook.s",FAKE
+677,Poll: 71 percent of Dems think Clinton should keep running even if indicted,"A strong majority of Democratic voters think Hillary Clinton should keep running for president even if she is charged with a felony in connection with her private email use while secretary of state, according to a new poll.
+
+Clinton was strongly criticized in a State Department inspector general report last week about her email use.
+
+The report found repeated warnings about cybersecurity were ignored and staffers who expressed concerns were told “never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again.”
+
+Yet, this seems not to be a big issue among Democrats. The Rasmussen poll released Tuesday found 71 percent of Democratic voters believe she should keep running even if indicted, a view shared by only 30 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of unaffiliated voters. Overall, 50 percent of those polled said she should keep running.
+
+The FBI investigation into her email practices is still ongoing. Democratic primary rival Bernie Sanders has avoided commenting specifically on that probe, but campaign manager Jeff Weaver on Wednesday questioned whether she could keep going if an indictment comes down.
+
+""That would be difficult to continue running a race,"" Weaver told Fox News on Wednesday, when asked about the poll.
+
+The email scandal could still be problematic for Clinton's general election hopes, with 40 percent of all voters saying they are less likely to vote for Clinton because of it -- though 48 percent of voters said it would have no impact on their vote.
+
+The Democratic primary frontrunner’s argument that she did nothing illegal with her email use is also apparently failing to sway many voters. According to the poll, 65 percent of voters consider it likely that Clinton broke the law with her email use, with 47 percent saying it’s very likely.
+
+The poll of 1,000 likely voters was conducted May 29-30. It had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.",REAL
+6408,Trumped!,"Finally, the political revolt we’ve all been waiting for, David Stockman tells Lew Rockwell. October 28, 2016",FAKE
+3004,Is the Iran deal unraveling? Think again. | Institution,"Are the wheels coming off the Iran deal? Less than a year after Iran, America, and five other world powers inked a comprehensive nuclear accord, a debate over its terms has erupted anew.
+
+In Washington, the braggadocio of a prominent White House aide is fueling Republican accusations that President Obama deliberately deceived the Congress and the country about Iran and the deal. And in Tehran, frustration over the residual impact of American sanctions has prompted increasingly resentful accusations from Iranian leaders that the United States has failed to live up to its end of the bargain. As a result, some are fretting that the deal is “at risk” and are laying blame on the White House doorstep.
+
+Both claims are spurious, and deserve a more forceful rebuttal from the Obama administration. In the end, however, the ruckus over recent comments by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes is largely an inside-the-Beltway drama—one that provides endless entertainment for Washington insiders but has little real significance for deal or American diplomacy.
+
+By contrast, Iran’s dissatisfaction presents a serious diplomatic dilemma for Washington. But it should not be interpreted as evidence that the deal is “unraveling.” Rather, the chorus of complaints from Tehran demonstrates the accord signed in July 2015 is working exactly as it was intended—forestalling Iranian nuclear ambitions while amplifying the incentives for further reintegration into the global economy.
+
+Obama’s handling of this first real test of the nuclear agreement will be crucial for sustaining its credibility. For the sake of the deal, and for any prospect of a durable Thermidor for the revolutionary state, Washington should resist the temptation to assuage Iran’s post-deal growing pains. If Iranians wants wholesale economic rehabilitation, their leadership needs to embrace the kind of policies that would yield that—in other words, meaningful political, economic, and foreign policy reform.
+
+Not surprisingly, Iranian officials are seeking a quicker fix, and they have mounted an intense campaign to wrest supplementary sanctions relief from Washington. Their principal argument is that the theocracy has been stiffed. On an April visit to Washington, Valiollah Seif, the head of Iran’s Central Bank, questioned the benefits of the nuclear agreement, insisting that Tehran has received “almost nothing” of the sanctions relief that was promised as part of the deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Mohammad Javad Zarif, the country’s smooth-spoken foreign minister, has contended that “the United States needs to do way more,” warning that “if one side does not comply with the agreement then the agreement will start to falter.”
+
+And Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, charged recently that “the Americans are engaged in obstruction and deception, adding: “on paper, the Americans say banks can trade with Iran but in practice they act in such an Iranophobic way that no trade can take place with Iran.”
+
+Adding fuel to the fire are changes to U.S. visa policies that are perceived at constraining Iran’s economic rebound, deliberately inflammatory rhetoric from the U.S. Congress, and a recent Supreme Court verdict that paves the way for a $2 billion payout to victims of terrorist attacks attributed to Tehran or its proxies. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has described the decision as “flagrant theft” and evidence of enduring American hostility toward Tehran.
+
+Tehran’s narrative plays equally well to its essential constituencies: the revolution’s power brokers, steeped in official narratives of American treachery; an Iranian citizenry impatient for its long overdue peace dividend; and a European business community anxious to reclaim its piece of the pie after an unwelcome five years of having to forgo a lucrative market.
+
+And it wouldn’t be the first time Tehran got cold feet about its nuclear obligations out of an unfortunate sense of that the payoff was insufficient. In 2005, two years after a deal with Britain, France, and Germany to suspend core aspects of its nuclear program, Iran’s leadership soured on that deal and reneged. Anxiety about a repeat performance is prompting new U.S. efforts to facilitate business in Iran and a mounting debate in the press and on Capitol Hill around additional American sanctions relief.
+
+But Iran’s campaign is grounded in a fundamental falsehood: that Washington has failed to live up to its end of the bargain. In fact, Washington has delivered fully on the sanctions relief pledged under the JCPOA, and officials in the White House, State Department, and even the enforcement office of the Treasury Department have engaged in extraordinary outreach to clarify remaining restrictions and underscore American commitment to the terms of the deal.
+
+Moreover, the rewards of Iran’s nuclear concessions are actually widely evident—in the volume of new trade and investment that is already underway; in the scope and velocity of diplomatic and commercial reengagement with Iran; in the swifter-than-anticipated revival of oil exports. Heads of state from Italy and India, from South Korea to South Africa are beating a path to Tehran, accompanied by contingents of eager investors. Meanwhile, Iranian officials including Seif—chief of the same Central Bank that was formerly barred by sanctions—headline swanky conferences aimed at wooing European business players. The great Iranian gold rush is on.
+
+The catch is that the money is moving more slowly than Iranian officials seem to have anticipated—and the trickle-down effect has been almost nonexistent for the average Iranian. The explanation for this lag is complex and multi-dimensional.
+
+First and foremost, Iran is hard hit by the decline in oil prices, which have fallen by roughly 60 percent since the interim nuclear deal was signed in November 2013. Even in the best of times, the Islamic Republic was never a particularly easy place to do business, and many of its structural economic problems have been exacerbated by a decade of sanctions and the particularly egregious mismanagement of the 2005 to 2013 tenure of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
+
+Iran’s designation since 2008 as a “high-risk and non-cooperative” jurisdiction by Financial Action Task Force, a multilateral body established to combat money laundering and terrorist finance, poses additional hurdles for banks. In addition, a host of other market distortions induce investor caution: corruption, a bloated and opaque banking system, an inflexible labor market, unattractive contract terms for energy investments, the traditional dominance of the public sector.
+
+Tehran’s challenges in luring capital is further complicated by its reputation for provocative domestic and regional behavior. Torching embassies, arresting tourists and dual-national businessmen, testing ballistic missiles—none of this provides a conducive context for Iran’s reintegration into the global economy. As the old adage goes, capital is a coward, and the Islamic Republic is a haunted house.
+
+Iran has seen this all before. Similar factors undercut Tehran’s previous efforts to open up to the global economy. In the early 1990s, after the long war with Iraq, then-President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sought foreign trade and investment as part of his massive reconstruction program. Initial outcomes were encouraging, but falling oil prices, excessive short-term debt, and the perpetuation of an ideological foreign policy drove away investors and undermined his economic reforms.
+
+This time around, American sanctions have cast a long shadow. The nuclear deal left intact an array of restrictions: the primary U.S. embargo on Iran as well as financial measures that preclude access to the U.S. dollar and penalize third countries for doing business with Iranian individuals and entities that are involved with terrorism or other malfeasance. The vestiges of the sanctions regime create truly epic compliance issues for any international investor. And the hangover effect of a decade of stringent (and costly) enforcement has generated a culture of overcompliance in the international financial sector, since institutional due diligence is an integral dimension of the industry’s viability.
+
+None of this should come as a surprise to Tehran; American officials were crystal clear throughout the negotiations and in advocating on behalf of the deal that the deal only removed the nuclear-related sanctions and that U.S. measures imposed as a result of Iran’s support for terrorism, its human rights abuses, or other issues would remain intact. And every sensible analyst looked past the inflated rhetoric of the deal’s opponents, who brayed against the deal as a massive “cash bonanza,” to recognize that the residual sanctions regime would remain a significant factor in Iran’s post-deal economic picture. As I wrote at the time:
+
+So if this was entirely predictable, why is Tehran crying foul now? Unlike in the United States—where the agreement’s shortcomings were oversold (if anything) rather than downplayed—in Iran there was a triumphalism with which the deal was sold domestically. This was mostly because of the peculiarities of Iran’s political system. To avoid the appearance of contravening the “red lines” articulated by Khamenei, the country’s ultimate authority, Iranian negotiators depicted the JCPOA as delivering wholesale sanctions relief. Rouhani described the outcome as a “legal, technical, and political victory” for the country, emphasizing that Tehran achieved “more than what was imagined.”
+
+Iran’s politically motivated embellishments were exacerbated by the hype surrounding the deal, cultivated by entrepreneurs and aspiring middlemen who presented Iran in hyperbolic terms as “the best emerging market for years to come” and “one of the hottest opportunities of the decade.” But while it may offend the Iranian ego, the relative scale of the opportunity in Iran is more modest than other much-heralded economic openings, such as China. It is hardly inconceivable that many banks and other firms have simply chosen to sit this first round out.
+
+Neither Iran’s economic challenges nor the grievances of its leadership are “fraying” the nuclear accord; in fact, they only highlight its underlying logic. While the deal’s scope was finite—it was not a wholesale rapprochement or rehabilitation—many of its supporters argued that its logic would prove self-reinforcing. Iran’s gradual reintegration into the global economy would bolster the case among its leadership for a broader moderation of its domestic and foreign policies precisely in order to boost their benefits.
+
+Tehran’s dissatisfaction with the payout to date suggests this formula is working. A little bit of sanctions relief has whetted the entrepreneurial appetites of the clerical state. Despite official invocations proclaiming a “resistance economy,” the trickle of new trade and investment from Europe and Asia into Iran since the deal was signed has only intensified pressure for more—and for more tangible dissemination of its benefits among the Iranian population. In other words, it is the success of the nuclear deal—rather than its shortcomings—that is driving the complaints that have emanated from Iran.
+
+The United States is not responsible for the hesitancy of international capital and other economic hiccups that Tehran has experienced in the aftermath of the nuclear agreement. The culpability resides, as it always has, with Iran and the risks that its government’s policies pose for international business. If Iranians want to see their nascent opening to the international community expanded—if they want the peace dividend they have been promised, they need to look to their own leadership and its policies. If Iran’s Central Bank governor wants “normal conditions” and “access to the U.S. financial system,” as he demanded during his Washington visit, let him return to Tehran and help instill the kind of reforms that would make those goals possible.
+
+There are sensible steps that Washington can take to ensure that the provisions of the nuclear deal are fully feasible, including limited mechanisms for enabling transactions, such as the repatriation of previously frozen assets, that are specifically permitted under the deal. Such exceptional measures are reasonable—not because they help Tehran, but because they help sustain consensus between Washington and its European partners and help preserve the West’s negotiating leverage with any future targets of American or multilateral financial sanctions.
+
+However, it would be profoundly detrimental for Washington to provide significant unilateral relief to Tehran without reciprocal additional Iranian concessions. And the PR blitz by senior U.S. officials to reassure Iran’s prospective foreign investors has taken on an unseemly tone, especially since existing sanctions prohibit U.S. persons from facilitating transactions with Iran by foreign entities.
+
+These measures may be aimed at building confidence, but they ultimately have the opposite effect—eroding Iran’s incentives to abide by the deal, undermining any rationale for broader changes. Iran remains a risky place to do business, and it is in Washington’s interests—as well as those of Iranians and the broader international community—that Tehran focuses on mitigating those risks rather than seeking to subvert their penalties.
+
+The nuclear deal is working; Iran’s nascent reintegration into the global economy is intensifying internal debates and popular expectations. This is all to the good. But to get more, Tehran will have to give more.",REAL
+8357,Saturn’s Baffling Hexagon — The Raging Storm Four Times the Size of Earth has Changed Its Colors,"NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered a static hexagonal storm four times the size of Earth crowning Saturn’s north pole, including a clearly defined eyewall. Based on its size and movements, scientists have concluded that it’s a vast cloud pattern generated by a gigantic, perpetual hurricane spinning at the center of the planet’s north pole. Scientists estimate that this storm has been raging for decades – maybe even centuries.
+Each side on the northern polar hexagon is approximately 13,800 km long, and the whole structure rotates once every 10 hours and 39 minutes -a day on Saturn. In just four years, Saturn’s hexagon has changed its color from blue to gold when Saturn’s north pole gears up for next year’s summer solstice.Saturn’s hexagon is a six-sided structure that spans roughly 32,000 km (20,000 miles) in diameter, and extends about 100 km (60 miles) down into the planet’s dense atmosphere. Because Saturn does not have land masses or oceans on its surface to complicate weather the way Earth does, its conditions should give scientists a more elementary model to study the physics of circulation patterns and atmosphere, said Kevin Baines, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who has studied the hexagon with Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. The last visible-light images of the entire hexagon were captured by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft nearly 30 years ago, the last time spring began on Saturn. After the sunlight faded, darkness shrouded the north pole for 15 years. Much to the delight and bafflement of Cassini scientists, the location and shape of the hexagon in the latest images match up with what they saw in the Voyager pictures.
+“The longevity of the hexagon makes this something special, given that weather on Earth lasts on the order of weeks,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at the California Institute of Technology. “It’s a mystery on par with the strange weather conditions that give rise to the long-lived Great Red Spot of Jupiter.”
+The hexagon was originally discovered in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. It encircles Saturn at about 77 degrees north latitude and has been estimated to have a diameter wider than two Earths. The jet stream is believed to whip along the hexagon at around 100 meters per second (220 miles per hour).
+Early hexagon images from Voyager and ground-based telescopes suffered from poor viewing perspectives. Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, has a better angle for viewing the north pole. But the long darkness of Saturnian winter hid the hexagon from Cassini’s visible-light cameras for years. Infrared instruments, however, were able to obtain images by using heat patterns. Those images showed the hexagon is nearly stationary and extends deep into the atmosphere. They also discovered a hotspot and cyclone in the same region.
+As observed by NASA’s Voyager and Cassini spacecraft, each point of the hexagon appears to rotate at its center at nearly the same rate that Saturn rotates on its axis. Along the rim of the hexagon, a jet stream of air is blasting eastward at speeds of 321 km/h (200 mph).
+While we’re pretty confident that we know what Saturn’s hexagon is, the big mystery is how it got there in the first place. Once you have a giant whirlpool of air, it’s relatively easy to keep it spinning – but the force you need to get it wound up in the first place is a whole lot more difficult to explain.
+It’s fascinating that the Cassini spacecraft could have observed two completely different colors in the hexagon between November 2012 and September 2016:
+
+The best hypothesis is that this is what it looks like when Saturn changes seasons. With a year that lasts 29 Earth years, Saturn changes seasons only once every seven years, and the increased sunlight over the past three years could explain the golden haze.
+“The color change is thought to be an effect of Saturn’s seasons. In particular, the change from a bluish colour to a more golden hue may be due to the increased production of photochemical hazes in the atmosphere as the north pole approaches summer solstice in May 2017.”
+“Inside the hexagon, there are fewer large haze particles and a concentration of small haze particles, while outside the hexagon, the opposite is true,” Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University, explained back in 2013. “The hexagonal jet stream is acting like a barrier, which results in something like Earth’s Antarctic ozone hole.”
+But since Saturn reached its equinox in August 2009 – the point where the Sun is directly over Saturn’s equator – it’s been gradually exposed to more and more sunlight, which means that for the past three years, aerosols have been produced inside of the hexagon and around the north pole, making the polar atmosphere appear hazy and golden when photographed last month.
+“Other effects, including changes in atmospheric circulation, could also be playing a role,” NASA explained this week. “Scientists think seasonally shifting patterns of solar heating probably influence the winds in the polar regions.”
+NASA scientists have an investigation underway to figure out what’s actually going.
+The Daily Galaxy via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Hampton University 
+Source: The Daily Galaxy 
+",FAKE
+10511,"Cyrus Mistry renames himself Rohit Sharma-Mistry, gets job back","Cyrus Mistry renames himself Rohit Sharma-Mistry, gets job back Posted on Tweet (Image via intoday.in) 
+Deposed chairman of Tata Group, Cyrus Mistry, has hit upon a great idea to get back his job. At a press conference earlier in the day, Mistry announced that he shall no longer be known as Cyrus Mistry, and instead asked everyone to call him Rohit Sharma-Mistry. 
+Fifteen minutes after Sharma-Mistry’s press conference, Ratan Rata called for a press conference and announced the group’s decision to reinstate Cyrus Mistry as the chairman of Tata Group. 
+“Mr. Sharma-Mistry is a rare talent who will be groomed for the future,” said Tata. “The Trustees and other directors of Tata Sons are convinced about Mr. Sharma-Mistry’s ability and firmly believe that when he gets going, he can turn around any business within one quarter.” 
+Later, our correspondent reached out to the jubilant Sharma-Mistry and asked him what gave him this idea. Sharma-Mistry said that the emotional atyachar at Tata Sons was irking him, but then he met an inspired god man from Chennai, Cheeni Mama, who gave him guidance. 
+Mr Sharma-Mistry is now considering building a temple for Cheeni Mama. “After all, our organization is known for its charitable acts, and in TN it is accepted practice to build a temple for actors, so this is very well in line with our organizational ethos,” Sharma-Mistry was quoted as saying. 
+(Submitted by Citizen Satirist Badri Narayanan )",FAKE
+8322,The FBI intervenes in the 2016 election,"License DMCA 
+In an extraordinary and unprecedented action, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has stepped into the 2016 presidential campaign only 11 days before Election Day, sending a letter to Congress announcing new ""investigative steps"" related to Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. 
+The three-paragraph letter by FBI Director James Comey to eight congressional committees on Friday is remarkably vague. It states that ""in connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation"" of Clinton's personal email server, which, Comey notes, he had previously told Congress was ""completed."" 
+He states that he has agreed to ""allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation."" He acknowledges that the FBI ""cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant."" 
+The obvious question that arises is why, given the fact that the FBI has no idea whether these additional emails contain any significant information relative to the Clinton email case, the agency should make them a public issue within days of the election. Media commentators noted that the letter violates a longstanding informal FBI ban on making politically sensitive announcements within 60 days of a US election. 
+Following the report of Comey's letter, the news media, citing unnamed federal law enforcement officials, said the emails in question were found on a laptop computer shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband, former Representative Anthony Weiner. - Advertisement - 
+Weiner is under FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually explicit text messages to an underage girl. Abedin announced her separation from Weiner earlier this year after the latest episode involving Weiner and sexually explicit Internet activity became public. 
+Comey's letter was hailed by Donald Trump and Republican Party spokesmen as tantamount to an official reopening of the FBI investigation and rescinding of the decision announced by Comey in July that no charges would be brought against the Democratic presidential candidate. 
+Clinton spoke to the press briefly Friday evening, demanding that the FBI provide more information about the substance of what it was reviewing, including whether there was any connection to her use of a private email server. She pointed out that more than 15 million people have already voted and that many millions more will be going to the polls over the next week as early voting continues. In response to questions, she indicated that the FBI has not contacted her and that she first learned of the letter through the media. 
+It is at this point impossible to determine with precision the motivation behind Comey's letter and the political forces for which he is speaking. However, his attempt to present the letter as a politically disinterested response to the discovery of new information lacks any credibility. 
+This direct intervention into the election by the top police-intelligence agency can only be an expression of deep crisis and profound tensions within the American ruling class and the state. The election as a whole has been dominated by the growth of social anger and anti-establishment sentiment, yet it has ended in a contest between two right-wing representatives of the richest 1 percent who are despised by huge sections of the electorate. - Advertisement - 
+It has plumbed the depths of political debasement on the part of both candidates -- the fascistic billionaire Trump seeking to channel discontent along the most right-wing, chauvinist and racist channels; the multimillionaire Clinton relying on sex scandals and a McCarthyite attack on Trump as an agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin to bury incriminating revelations of corruption and lying and to swing public opinion behind a policy of military escalation and confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. 
+The entire process has been surrounded by an aura of violence and a breakdown of public confidence in the political system. It has unfolded under conditions of deepening economic crisis, mounting international tensions and worsening crises for US imperialism around the world, i.e., the ongoing debacle of Washington's war for regime change in Syria, the signs of disarray in the anti-Chinese ""pivot to Asia,"" the emergence of open conflicts with imperialist ""allies"" in Europe, particularly Germany. 
+The convergence of these crises is generating bitter conflicts within the American ruling class over policy questions, magnified by fears of a rising tide of social opposition at home. 
+Whether the intention of Comey's letter was to inflict fatal damage to Clinton's candidacy, shore up endangered Republican majorities in the Senate and House, or fire a shot across the bow against an incoming Clinton administration, it makes clear that the next administration will be mired in crisis from the day it takes office.",FAKE
+6212,"Re: If Donald Trump Wins, He Will Be 70 Years, 7 Months And 7 Days Old On His First Full Day In Office","Archives Michael On Television If Donald Trump Wins, He Will Be 70 Years, 7 Months And 7 Days Old On His First Full Day In Office By Michael Snyder, on November 1st, 2016 
+A couple of weeks ago, it looked like Hillary Clinton was all set to cruise to victory , but now the FBI has delivered an election miracle in the nick of time. A few of my readers had criticized me for suggesting that Trump might lose, but I don’t know who is going to win the election, and so all I had to go on was the cold, hard numbers. And a couple of weeks ago the cold, hard numbers were telling me that Hillary Clinton was going to win. Of course it is entirely possible that the national polls might have been seriously wrong, but even the state polls in the most important battleground states consistently had bad news for Trump. So things didn’t look good for Trump at the time, but now that the FBI has renewed their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails the poll numbers have shifted dramatically in Trump’s favor . 
+As I write this article, the national polls have really tightened up. In fact, the latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll puts Trump 1 point ahead of Clinton. Trump has all of the momentum at the moment, but that does not mean that he is going to win. As we have seen already in this race, one day can literally change everything. 
+And as I noted yesterday , more than 23 million Americans have already voted, and most of that voting was done during a period of time when Hillary Clinton was doing very well in the polls. 
+So we shall see what happens. But if Trump does win on November 8th, there is a fact about his birthday which will start to get a lot of attention. 
+Donald Trump was born on June 14th, 1946. If you move ahead 70 years from that date, that brings you to June 14th, 2016. Moving forward another 7 months brings you to January 14th, 2017, and moving forward another 7 days brings you to January 21st, 2017. 
+And if Donald Trump wins the election, January 21st will be his first full day in office. 
+Of course Trump would be inaugurated on January 20th, but he would only be president for part of that day. 
+So that means that Donald Trump would be 70 years, 7 months and 7 days old on his first full day as president of the United States. 
+And this would happen during year 5777 on the Hebrew calendar. 
+These amazing “coincidences” were first pointed out on Facebook by a user named Alyson Kelly. Some may take these numbers as a sign that Donald Trump is supposed to become the next president, but I want to make it exceedingly clear that I do not know what is going to happen, nor am I making any sort of prediction about what is going to happen. 
+I just thought that this information was “interesting” and so I thought that I would share it. 
+Someone that does believe that Trump is going to win is Glenn Beck. He was been virulently anti-Trump throughout this campaign, but now he is convinced that Clinton will be unable to overcome this new email scandal, and he is calling this renewed investigation by the FBI “the greatest gift given to any candidate of all time in the history of America.” 
+Beck also says that if Clinton wins now it will be evidence that “magic exists”, and he is currently projecting that Trump should win the national vote by 5 points … 
+“Let’s just say he was 8 points, that was fair to say, 8 points behind last week,” Beck said, according to a transcript posted on his website . “He should win by 5 points.” 
+Beck later added: “How can the next president face a possible collapsing economy, possible war with Russia, and a current war with ISIS? Oh, and also, be under FBI investigation and indictment? Can’t. Can’t.” 
+The conservative personality called the latest FBI revelation “the greatest gift given to any candidate of all time in the history of America” and added that if Clinton still managed to win, it would be akin to proof “magic exists.” 
+Hopefully Glenn Beck is right, because none of us should want to see Hillary Clinton in the White House. 
+She is the most evil, corrupt and scandal-ridden politician of this generation, and I can’t understand how any American in their right mind could possibly vote for her. 
+And the hits just keep on coming. Wikileaks has just released an email in which John Podesta told Clinton “fixer” Cheryl Mills that they were “going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later” … 
+It was not entirely clear what Podesta meant by that phrase, but it could potentially be smoking gun evidence of obstruction of justice . 
+Back in 2008, Barack Obama was new, intriguing and mysterious. We didn’t know a lot about him, and so one can almost understand how the American people could have been fooled by him. 
+But in 2016, Americans know more about Hillary Clinton than they have ever known about any candidate in modern American history. 
+The Clintons have a history of crimes and scandals that goes all the way back to the 1980s, but about half the country is choosing to ignore all of that history and vote for her anyway. 
+I believe that this election is America’s final exam. Originally there were 17 Republicans and 5 Democrats running for the presidency. When you throw in the major third party candidates, that brings us to a total of approximately 25 people that the American public could have chosen from. 
+If the American people willingly choose the most wicked candidate out of all of them after everything that has been revealed, I don’t think that anyone will be able to say that we don’t deserve the bitter consequences that follow that decision. 
+The time for talking is almost over, and shortly we shall find out which path the American people have chosen. 
+If that choice turns out to be Hillary Clinton after everything that we have seen during this election cycle, I truly believe that we will have reached the point of no return as a nation.",FAKE
+172,Shutdown clash to return in force by December,"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
+6920,Classless Obama Refuses Photo-Op of White House Welcome with Trump,"
+The Obamas refused to be photographed welcoming President-Elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania to the White House Thursday morning, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal .
+“The Obamas canceled a photo-op of the current and future first couples outside the south entrance of the White House. In his first visit to the White House after the 2008 election, Mr. Obama and first lady Michelle Obama posed for the cameras alongside President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush. The decision not to participate in this tradition illustrates how bitter the campaign was, particularly for Mrs. Obama who delivered some of the most emotional arguments against electing Mr. Trump.”
+Fox News reported that there was no pool video of Trump’s arrival due to an unspecified problem. There does not appear to be any photographs published yet of Trump’s arrival to the White House.
+
+President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush and President-elect Barack Obama and Mrs. Michelle Obama pause for photographs Monday, Nov. 10, 2008, after the Obama’s arrival at the South Portico of the White House.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+9468,Comment on Maryland Trump Supporter: They Switched My Vote to Hillary by misterdawg,"  Paul Joseph Watson Yet another report of vote flipping 
+A woman in Hollywood, Maryland is the latest in a number of early voters to claim that her ballot was switched to Hillary Clinton after she had tried to vote for Donald Trump. Maryland Trump Supporter: They Switched My Vote to Hillary – https://t.co/FkNiEUOZHH pic.twitter.com/dalY9KBWtj 
+— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) October 28, 2016 Noting that she had seen reports on the news of votes being flipped, the woman said, “I went in and voted a straight Republican ticket and thank God I went back and checked and they had switched my vote from Trump to (Hillary).” She said that she had to get the vote changed back by alerting election officials, who simply told her to vote for a second time. “I went back the second time and made sure they didn’t change it,” she concluded. As we reported earlier this week, voters in numerous areas of Texas have made a series of complaints that votes are being switched from Trump to Clinton . One election official responded by claiming the problems were caused by voters not understanding how to use the machines properly. “Typically, we’ve found it’s voter error with the equipment,” Frank Phillips, Tarrant County’s election administrator, told WFAA . “Sometimes they vote straight party and then click on other candidates … or do something with the wheel….There is not an issue with the equipment.” However, Trump supporters continue to point to the reports as evidence that vote fraud may be taking place.",FAKE
+6460,Stuff in the News That No One Is Talking About Because of the Election,"Email This Week in the News 
+You wouldn’t know it by watching the news, but there are actually important things going on in the world that have nothing to do with the Presidential election. Today, we’ll talk about some of these non-election-related events on Survival Saturday, like the Dakota access pipeline, Russia, Venezuela, and our dystopian future. 
+For election coverage, go on over to my other website, DaisyLuther.com , which is all Hillary, all the time, right up until the election. (My goal there is to cover the stuff that the MSM is trying to sweep under the rug about their darling.) The Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters Are Being Brutally Attacked by Law Enforcement 
+Have you been aware of the ongoing protests by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe about a pipeline being forcibly built across their watershed via eminent domain? They have been joined by other tribes to form a coalition of water protectors who say that the pipeline is a violation of a treaty established between the Sioux and the federal government. ( Here are the important things to know about the protest . Trust me, you’ll want to read this.) 
+Everyone who was paying attention breathed a sigh of relief when the US Government for once took a stand on behalf of the little guys back in September. 
+“The federal government ordered a halt to work on a $3.8 billion four-state oil pipeline in the Upper Midwest on Friday, handing a temporary victory to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other opponents of the project… 
+…The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it wouldn’t authorize construction near Lake Oahe, a culturally important location to the tribe, until the agency determines if it needs to reconsider its previous approvals under the National Environmental Policy Act.” ( source ) 
+Unfortunately, the government’s willingness to do the right thing was short-lived. Work has resumed on the pipeline and all hell is breaking loose – but not by who you might think. Protestors have been non-violent, but law enforcement has been absolutely brutal. They’ve beaten up on young people, old people, and independent journalists covering the story. Hundreds have been arrested. 
+These people are protecting their water sources and their way of life, and they are being brutalized by our own government. The story you’re getting on the mainstream is that the water protectors are standing there and that the police are standing there and that it is a relatively calm affair. 
+That couldn’t be further from the truth. The AntiMedia (who would get a major journalism award if real journalists got such awards) has provided truthful coverage, and it is ugly. Every single person who is against government overreach should be supporting the water protectors. Right now, this affects some people up in North Dakota. But what about when someone wants to build something across your land? What about when someone wants to seize your home? What about when Agenda 21 comes to your back yard? 
+Here’s what really happened at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests . It’s on film. It’s ugly. You owe it to your fellow human beings to witness this and be outraged. Go here to learn what you can do to help . With all of this “progress,” is humanity at risk of becoming obsolete? 
+Thousands of jobs each year are being turned over to computers as humans demand higher wages and better benefits for unskilled labor. We’ve all ended up on the endless loop of talking to customer service robots on the phone or going to a checkout counter and discovering it is push button and digital. 
+Is this all part of a greater plan to make the bulk of humanity utterly dependent on the whims of a few? 
+I don’t watch a lot of documentaries, but last night my daughter and I watched Obsolete . This film is available for free on Amazon , and it isn’t one of those dry, boring ones that keep you shifting in your seat in order to stay awake. It’s fascinating from the moment you hit play. When it was over, we sat there in silence for at least a minute, aghast that we could see the whole thing happening around us right now. 
+I can’t recommend this highly enough. Everyone should watch it. Let me quote Morpheus (from the Matrix ) for a moment here. “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” 
+This documentary is the red pill. Take it if you want to survive the future that is coming for us all. 
+Watch Obsolete then come back over here and let’s talk about it. I think this will spark a very interesting conversation. How will you prepare for a future in which humanity is largely obsolete? Meanwhile in Venezuela… 
+Things are still awful there, although there hasn’t been as much news coverage. Basically, this is how life is now for Venezuelans, and recovering from this collapse could take decades. 
+Currently, the people of the country are revolting against the unpopular president, Nicholas Maduro. A campaign had begun for a recall election in order to replace Maduro, but authorities halted the process. The electoral council cited fraud when faced with huge numbers of signatures on a petition. Thousands of demonstrators filled the streets. Source: Federico Parra /AFP/Getty Images 
+NPR reports : 
+The demonstrators were protesting “what they call a sharp turn towards authoritarianism. The Maduro government has jailed opposition leaders, stripped Congress of its powers and cracked down on the press.” 
+As for Maduro, he has blatantly threatened to jail anyone who tries to remove him from power, via elections or legal means, ironically citing the Venezuelan constitution : 
+“If they launch a supposed political trial, which is not in our constitution, the state prosecution service must bring legal action in the courts and put in jail anyone who violates the constitution, even if they are members of Congress.” 
+What’s more, in a conversation with the American DEA, Maduro’s nephew says that Venezuela is at war with the US, which is news to most Americans. Efrain Campo was busted doing a quick cocaine deal in order to make money for the Venezuelan First Family. He was caught attempting to smuggle $5 million of Columbian cocaine into the US. The Charlotte Observer reported : 
+Efrain Campo…was recorded saying “we’re at war” with the Americans and laughing about sending opposition leaders to jail, according to the transcript, which was filed in federal district court in New York. 
+“We need the money,” Campo said, according to the transcript. “Why? Because the Americans are hitting us hard with money. Do you understand? The opposition . . . is getting an infusion of a lot of money.” 
+…The defense has sought to paint Campo and his cousin as victims of a U.S. political plot against the Venezuelan government and has asserted that they didn’t have the knowledge or capability to pull off such a complicated transaction. We’re irritating the snot out of Russia… 
+Lately, the Powers That Shouldn’t Be (great phrase borrowed from my friend Mel at Truthstream Media ) have been going out of their way to paint Russia and Vladimir Putin as the biggest threat to America. A bigger threat, even, than Hillary Clinton, and boy, that’s a stretch. I’m pretty sure you can put all of these recent headlines together and get a picture of where this is headed. ( Hint .) There are many more, but I don’t want this post to be a lengthy novel about idiocy.",FAKE
+5202,Blizzard of charges and countercharges melts away as opinions of Trump and Clinton are frozen,"This has turned into the whiplash election, and it’s virtually impossible to keep up with the head-snapping revelations.
+
+Even the most diligent journalist can get vertigo trying to investigate and evaluate each disclosure, which damages Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump and spawns dire predictions that their campaign is toast, only to fade in a news cycle or two.
+
+Some developments that in a “normal” election would badly wound a presidential candidate get meager exposure in the rest of the media because they are overshadowed by other mega-stories. No one has the bandwidth to do it all.
+
+This is more than a mere campaign; its craziness has become the beating heart of American culture, debated in every cubicle and coffee shop and at every level of the increasingly toxic stew of social media.
+
+Just look at the last few weeks:
+
+Democrats and many members of the media have taken up weapons and stormed a place called Comey Island.
+
+The FBI director shook up the race by revealing a probe of emails that wound up on the laptop of a top aide’s estranged husband under investigation for sending illicit messages to an underage girl.
+
+The New York Times reported that Trump avoided hundreds of millions of dollars in income taxes through a loophole scheme so dubious his own lawyers advised him that the IRS could declare it improper.
+
+The Clinton campaign got advance questions before CNN town halls from a top Democratic Party official who was also a paid contributor at the network, which booted her.
+
+The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump has repeatedly “sought credit for charity he had not given — or had claimed other people’s giving as his own.”
+
+Back on Comey Island, the FBI chief was reported to have argued that the administration shouldn’t accuse Russia of using cyberwarfare to interfere with the presidential campaign because—yes--it would look partisan so close to the election.
+
+Hacked emails revealed that the daughter of the Democratic nominee’s husband, himself a former president, complained that his aides were cashing in on the Clinton Foundation and siphoning money from her parents.
+
+The Trump Foundation was ordered to stop fundraising by the New York attorney general, a Democrat and Clinton supporter.
+
+Clinton’s top advisers, reeling after the email scandal broke, complained that said she had terrible instincts and a pathological aversion to apologizing, according to hacked emails.
+
+Back on Comey Island, the FBI looked into whether Trump’s company had a secret email server communicating with a Russian bank but found no direct link.
+
+A Clinton aide complained in a hacked email that “we…speak in such a tortured, nuanced way when we don’t get any advantage from the nuance, and just wind up looking political.”
+
+Back on Comey Island, the FBI opened a preliminary investigation of Trump’s former campaign manager and his ties to Russian interests, which Paul Manafort said he knew nothing about.
+
+Trump boasted a decade ago on a Hollywood entertainment show that as a celebrity he could grab women by the genitals, which he now dismisses as locker-room talk.
+
+Back on Comey Island, FBI agents were investigating financial and ethical issues at the Clinton Foundation but were told to stand down by top law-enforcement officials, according to the Wall Street Journal.
+
+Eleven women accused Trump of sexually propositioning them or unwanted kissing or touching, all of which he denounced as lies.
+
+Trump held a news conference before a debate with Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey, who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct, and Juanita Broaddrick, who has accused him of rape, which he has denied.
+
+Hillary Clinton nearly collapsed while getting into a car and belatedly revealed that she had pneumonia.
+
+And, well, I could go on.
+
+Many of these cases prompted media firestorms, complete with predictions that Trump or Clinton would be seriously or even fatally damaged. But then the stories were overtaken by some new allegation or outrage.
+
+In the case of Comey’s renewed email investigation, polls so far suggest that it hasn’t moved the needle much beyond the tightening that was already taking place in the race.
+
+It may well be that we’ve all become numb in this whiplash campaign. The race is so polarized, and public attitudes toward Trump and Clinton so firmly established, that each new front-page headline or cable obsession changes few minds.
+
+Perhaps the only consensus is a sense of relief that this long, strange trip is finally coming to an end.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+6809,Social Media Is Censoring FBI’s Re-Opened Clinton Email Investigation,"Posted on October 30, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 
+Zero Hedge reports that Twitter, Facebook, Buzzfeed and Snapchat appear to be censoring the biggest bombshell of this election cycle … that the FBI re-opened its investigation of Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election. 
+I can add that I’ve been checking Reddit’s front page – the top 25 stories – every day, and there hasn’t been a single reference to the FBI, Clinton or emails since the FBI made its announcement. 
+As we’ve documented for years , social media is manipulated by the powers-that-be to prevent news that challenges the status quo from going viral.",FAKE
+2802,Obama Inches Closer to Veto-Proof Support for Iran Nuclear Deal,"Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon said he will vote to support the Iran nuclear deal, a pledge that puts President Barack Obama only three votes short of protecting the pact in Congress.
+
+Merkley issued a statement Sunday calling the accord “the best available strategy to block Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.”
+
+Merkley’s support brings to 31 the number of senators publicly favoring the deal, which would ease economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for curbs on the country’s nuclear program.
+
+Barring defections, Obama needs three more votes from 13 Senate Democrats who have yet to declare their position, to sustain a likely veto of legislation aimed at killing the pact.
+
+If Obama can assemble 41 Senate votes by getting most of the remaining Democrats on board, the Senate may not vote on the agreement at all.
+
+The Republican-controlled Congress has until Sept. 17 to pass a resolution disapproving the deal reached in July between six world powers and Iran. Obama has pledged to veto that resolution if it gets to his desk.
+
+While Republicans have been united in opposing the deal, only two Democratic senators -- Charles Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat in the chamber, and Robert Menendez of New Jersey -- have joined them so far.
+
+Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, plans to announce his decision on Tuesday. Among other Democrats yet to disclose a position are Maryland’s Ben Cardin and New Jersey’s Cory Booker.
+
+The only uncertain Senate Republican vote is that of Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who remains undecided and is expected to make her decision after Sept. 7.
+
+Merkley, in a statement on his website, pledged to vote for the deal even while pointing to “significant shortcomings” that he said the U.S. must address with “a massive intelligence program” and monitoring.
+
+Merkley said he was troubled that the deal allows Iran to import conventional arms after five years and ballistic missile technology after eight years, and sets no restrictions on how Iran can use money it reclaims when sanctions are lifted.
+
+But he rejected a proposal from deal opponents to try to renegotiate the accord for better terms.
+
+If the U.S. rejects the deal and Iran resumes its nuclear program, “the United States would be viewed by the international community as undermining a strong framework for peacefully blocking a potential Iranian bomb,” Merkley said.
+
+While the Republican-controlled House has enough votes to pass a resolution rejecting the deal, it’s unclear whether the Senate does. Assuming all 54 Senate Republicans oppose the accord, they would need support from six Democrats to get the 60 votes necessary to advance a resolution.",REAL
+1329,How Clinton plans to stop Sanders' momentum,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+4114,Martin O’Malley Praises Senate Democrats for Holding Up Trade Deal,"MANCHESTER, N.H.—Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on Wednesday praised Senate Democrats for blocking, at least temporarily, a bill that would give President Barack Obama authority to move trade deals through Congress.
+
+Mr. O’Malley, who is expected to jump into the Democratic race for president later this month, renewed his criticism of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Approval of the big trade deal between the U.S. and 11 Pacific nations would be eased by the so-called fast-track legislation.
+
+“I’m glad the Senate slowed it down and I hope Congress will reject it if we can’t see it, read it and be assured this is good for workers and also good for our country,” he told reporters after chatting up the breakfast crowd at Chez Vachon, a restaurant that has long been a regular stop for White House aspirants.",REAL
+6527,Shi’ite Militias Join Iraq’s Mosul Attack,"Militia Fighters to Advance on Areas West of City by Jason Ditz, October 28, 2016 Share This 
+After a week and a half of assuring everyone that their role in the invasion of Mosul would be very limited, and removed from the Sunni population, Iraq’s Shi’ite militias have been announced to have launched an offensive west of Mosul, advancing on Tal Afar . 
+According to officials, the main goal of this offensive is to cut the city of Mosul off from ISIS territory in Syria, preventing the ISIS fighters within the city from fleeing west if the battle begins to turn sour. The offensive is said to start “within a few days or hours.” 
+The involvement of Shi’ite militias in the “liberation” of Sunni Arab cities in Iraq has been controversial because they often end up carrying out extrajudicial executions, looting and torture of locals they suspect of being secretly in league with ISIS. 
+An effort to block flight from Mosul to ISIS territory is Syria would be an obvious step, but the militias’ involvement again risks targeting of civilians, as the population of from Mosul is already overrunning the minimal camps set up for the displaced. 
+Civilians fleeing these cities are usually not welcomed in Iraqi government-held territory, and wind up fleeing into other ISIS-held territory. With little left in Iraq, this likely means fleeing into Syria, and the militias’ presence means the civilians displaced by the attack are likely to be targeted for fleeing “with” ISIS. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+4354,‘Super PAC’ Gets Early Start on Pushing for a 2016 Clinton Campaign,"In the 2008 presidential primary campaign, Mitch Stewart devoted himself to defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton, overcoming the advantages of a well-funded Democratic front-runner through grass-roots organizing, and propelling Barack Obama to victory.
+
+On Tuesday, Mr. Stewart and a dozen or so other political operatives and 170 donors will gather in New York to plot how to help Mrs. Clinton win in 2016. The meeting is the first national finance council strategy meeting of Ready for Hillary, a “super PAC” devoted to building a network to support Mrs. Clinton’s potential presidential ambitions.
+
+“We’re coming up with plans on how to engage emerging constituencies that will be incredibly important if there’s a primary and in a general — whether that’s women, African-Americans, Latinos, L.G.B.T.,” said Mr. Stewart, who went on to run Mr. Obama’s battleground-state strategy in 2012.
+
+The all-day meeting at the Parker Meridien hotel will be closed to the news media, but a preview of the day, with panel discussions like “What America Will Look Like in 2016,” about changing demographics, and “Building the Resources to Win,” about developing a campaign infrastructure, provided an early look into what supporters consider Mrs. Clinton’s strengths and potential pitfalls in 2016.
+
+Mrs. Clinton has never had a problem raising money from deep-pocketed donors, but her 2008 campaign lacked the grass-roots enthusiasm and modest Internet donations that buoyed Mr. Obama. Ready for Hillary hopes to build that kind of support.
+
+A grass-roots super PAC may seem an oxymoron: such groups can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political races as long as they do not coordinate with a candidate. But rather than invest in expensive television ads, Ready for Hillary puts all of its donations into building its email list of supporters.
+
+For every $25,0000 the group raises, it cuts a payment to Rising Tide Interactive, a firm that helps build online lists of supporters. A social media tool on the website will allow supporters to work together to organize to plan rallies and small-dollar fund-raising events. With no candidate and over a year before a potential campaign, Ready for Hillary has roughly a million names on its email list, about half the size of the Hillary for President campaign list at the time Mrs. Clinton suspended her campaign in 2008.
+
+“It’s not our job to be a campaign and it’s not our job to make decisions to tie any potential candidate’s hands,” said Craig T. Smith, an aide in the administration of President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Ready for Hillary. “The goal is to build a list.”
+
+The strategy is an acknowledgment of mistakes made by Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign, but also a recognition that she cannot simply run as the establishment candidate with inside-the-Beltway support without also inspiring young and minority voters who largely favored Mr. Obama in 2008. Mr. Stewart helped Mr. Obama pick up delegates in small but important caucus states and turn states like Arizona, New Mexico and Virginia into battlegrounds by tapping into changing demographics.
+
+A lineup of longtime Clinton backers and aides will attend Tuesday’s meeting, including Susie Tompkins Buell of San Francisco; Ann Lewis, a former adviser to both Clintons; Jennifer M. Granholm, the former governor of Michigan; and Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist. Along with Ms. Sefl, two young Ready for Hillary volunteers, Taj Magruder, 23, of Philadelphia, and Haley Adams, a student at Yale, will open the event, signaling that the Clinton world intends to bring in fresh voices, even if it means edging some loyal aides out.
+
+The event signals a turning point for Ready for Hillary. The group, registered just before Mrs. Clinton left the State Department in February by young staff members who worked in junior roles on her 2008 campaign, was largely viewed as a makeshift organization that sold Hillary Clinton buttons and iPhone cases online.
+
+Some longtime supporters had worried that the group emerged too soon and that if it were not well run, it could hurt Mrs. Clinton’s prospects, even though she is not involved or in contact with its organizers. But veteran aides like Mr. Smith, Ms. Sefl and Harold Ickes, a former deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House, are now signed on as advisers. In recent months, the group has held events in several cities from San Francisco to Houston and has become among the dominant — if not best financed — political action committees on the Democratic side.
+
+The sessions in New York will point to several advantages favoring a Democrat in 2016. “Democrats do have a series of advantages baked into the cake in terms of demographics and the electoral map,” said Geoff Garin, a pollster who succeeded Mark Penn as chief strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
+
+Fresh off working on behalf of Terry McAuliffe in his successful campaign for governor of Virginia, Mr. Garin will talk about reaching the growing numbers of Hispanics and college-educated white women, and the decline in non-college-educated white male voters, one of the most challenging demographics for Mrs. Clinton. But, he added that some very big odds will work against any Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. “Since World War II, the only time the same party won a third term in the White House was 1988,” Mr. Garin said.
+
+Supporters are also well aware of the attacks Mrs. Clinton would face. During a lunch session, David Brock, founder of Media Matters for America, will lead the “Ready for the Right Wing” tutorial on how to combat conservative attacks and misinformation in the media.
+
+The future of Ready for Hillary is unclear. Should Mrs. Clinton run, the group would most likely dissolve, after encouraging those on its email list to transfer their support to the official Clinton campaign. The widespread belief is that several Ready for Hillary staff members would take up positions on the campaign, which has made the group somewhat of a way station for hopeful aides. If Mrs. Clinton does not run, the group would likely throw its support behind whoever becomes the Democratic nominee.
+
+Either way, this type of early unity and strategizing around a single candidate is a good thing and a rarity in Democratic politics, said Ronald Feldman, a Ready for Hillary national finance council co-chairman who supported John Edwards in 2008.
+
+“We’ve never been paying this much attention this early on, but this time it seemed like a necessity,” Mr. Feldman said.",REAL
+3138,Christianity under attack: US must do more to promote religious freedom,"Throughout the Middle East and North Africa today, Christianity is under attack.  Terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are destroying some of the oldest and most sacred Christian communities and relics in the world on the very lands where Christianity was born and first took root. They are committing brutal atrocities against Christian communities in Syria and Iraq, persecuting religious minorities and destroying entire towns and local economies. Christians are fleeing their homes in increasing numbers, creating an exploding refugee crisis that will have grave ramifications on the stability and security of the entire region.
+
+While the world has been rightly outraged by the violence waged by ISIS against people of all sects, ethnicities, and religions, the United States, Europe and other key allies have done little to end ISIS’s systematic efforts to drive-out and eradicate entire religious communities from their historic and sacred homelands. The Obama Administration has repeatedly refused to defend religious freedom abroad and continues to ignore its devastating cost to those religious communities targeted by terrorists because of their religious beliefs.
+
+As a nation founded in the pursuit of religious freedom, America can and must do more to root-out the religious intolerance that is helping to foster much of the political instability and violence we see today. Specifically, we believe the Obama Administration should integrate the protection of religious freedom into its overall response to growing terrorist threats and development efforts around the world. Doing so would help to eliminate the underlying causes of violent extremism, promote increased international economic stability, and foster greater respect for human rights.
+
+Promoting religious freedom would, first and foremost, undermine the efforts of terrorist organizations such as ISIS to capitalize on simmering religious intolerance to build influence and wield power. ISIS has succeeded in tearing apart the social fabric of local communities and exacerbating sectarian and ethnic divisions to recruit supporters from disaffected populations and assert control over wide swaths of otherwise insecure territory. As a result, they have precipitated a breakdown of basic order that has allowed new and unprecedented security threats to the United States and our allies to fester and grow.
+
+The Obama administration can counter this strategy by building alliances with popular local and regional leaders who can expose these radical ideologies’ moral bankruptcy and champion pluralism and tolerance. The Administration should also combat terrorist propaganda about religious minorities and develop programs that promote tolerance and empower minorities to better advocate for their rights and interests. Only by reaffirming the importance of religious freedom and working closely with communities and their governments will we be able to strip away sympathy and support for ISIS and other extremist groups that is bred from deeper political, economic, and social grievances.
+
+Properly designed and implemented, a U.S. foreign policy committed to religious freedom can advance our national security interests, stabilize and consolidate the spread of democracy across the globe, help sustain economic growth, and promote the equality of men and women.
+
+Most importantly, it can help prevent religiously-motivated terrorism and undermine the conditions that have helped spur the rise of groups like ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Shuddhikaran Movement.
+
+Promoting religious freedom would also support the governance structures necessary for economic and political security in developing nations. As recent studies by groups such as the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation have found, higher levels of religious freedom are associated with higher levels of economic productivity and growth. Clearly, sustainable political and economic development is only possible when religious freedom and equal opportunity contributes to a secure environment in which citizens and businesses can operate freely.
+
+Finally, we must remain committed to religious freedom because of the special distinction religious freedom holds as a fundamental human right—a belief that is shared by democratic countries across the globe and protected by numerous international treaties and agreements.
+
+American support for religious liberty sends a potent and unmistakable message to threatened communities around the world: America is your friend. Such support builds enduring good will towards our country among those who could be leading their own nations in the years ahead. And it reminds all observers, whether friendly or hostile, that the U.S. remains committed to a world where justice and human dignity are central to legitimate governance.
+
+Republican John McCain is a Navy veteran. He represents Arizona in the United States Senate.
+
+Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.",REAL
+9447,U.S. Taxpayers Pay AT&T Millions of Dollars a Year For the Privilege of Spying on Them,"at 10:41 am 2 Comments 
+On Monday, The Daily Beast published a hugely important story about AT&T’s in house, for profit surveillance operation called Project Hemisphere. The program has nothing to do with information sharing legally required under a warrant, but rather consists of a business line through which the telecom giant stores customer data longer than peers in order to turn around and sell it to government agencies (no warrant required). This allows law enforcement to use secret and never disclosed evidence to build a cases against citizens via a shady and unaccountable practice known as parallel construction. 
+The article is titled, AT&T Is Spying on Americans for Profit, New Documents Reveal , and is a must read. 
+Here are some key excerpts: 
+In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Times and described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration . The Times described it as a “partnership” between AT&T and the U.S. government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool. 
+However, AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud. 
+Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public. 
+These new revelations come as the company seeks to acquire Time Warner in the face of vocal opposition saying the deal would be bad for consumers . Donald Trump told supporters over the weekend he would kill the acquisition if he’s elected president; Hillary Clinton has urged regulators to scrutinize the deal. 
+The fact that this deal is even being considered shows what a giant joke this county has become. 
+As I noted on Twitter earlier this week: Why don’t we just merge the entire S&P 500 into one company called Oligarchy Inc. and get it over with. 
+— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) October 24, 2016 
+While telecommunications companies are legally obligated to hand over records, AT&T appears to have gone much further to make the enterprise profitable, according to ACLU technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian. 
+AT&T has a unique power to extract information from its metadata because it retains so much of it. The company owns more than three-quarters of U.S. landline switches, and the second largest share of the nation’s wireless infrastructure and cellphone towers, behind Verizon. AT&T retains its cell tower data going back to July 2008, longer than other providers. Verizon holds records for a year and Sprint for 18 months, according to a 2011 retention schedule obtained by The Daily Beast. 
+The disclosure of Hemisphere was not the first time AT&T has been caught working with law enforcement above and beyond what the law requires. 
+A statement of work from 2014 shows how hush-hush AT&T wants to keep Hemisphere. 
+“The Government agency agrees not to use the data as evidence in any judicial or administrative proceedings unless there is no other available and admissible probative evidence,” it says. 
+But those charged with a crime are entitled to know the evidence against them come trial. Adam Schwartz, staff attorney for activist group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that means AT&T leaves investigators no choice but to construct a false investigative narrative to hide how they use Hemisphere if they plan to prosecute anyone. 
+Once AT&T provides a lead through Hemisphere, then investigators use routine police work, like getting a court order for a wiretap or following a suspect around, to provide the same evidence for the purpose of prosecution. This is known as “parallel construction.” 
+Parallel construction is a pernicious side effect of all this spying. It’s a very important topic I covered last year in the post, How the DEA Uses “Parallel Construction” to Hide Unconstitutional Investigations . 
+“This document here is striking,” Schwartz told The Daily Beast. “I’ve seen documents produced by the government regarding Hemisphere, but this is the first time I’ve seen an AT&T document which requires parallel construction in a service to government. It’s very troubling and not the way law enforcement should work in this country.” 
+The federal government reimburses municipalities for the expense of Hemisphere through the same grant program that is blamed for police militarization by paying for military gear like Bearcat vehicles. 
+There’s your government again. Tirelessly working against you from behind the scenes. 
+“At a minimum there is a very serious question whether they should be doing it without a warrant. A benefit to the parallel construction is they never have to face that crucible. Then the judge, the defendant, the general public, the media, and elected officials never know that AT&T and police across America funded by the White House are using the world’s largest metadata database to surveil people,” Schwartz said. 
+Sheriff and police departments pay from $100,000 to upward of $1 million a year or more for Hemisphere access. Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, made its inaugural payment to AT&T of $77,924 in 2007, according to a contract reviewed by The Daily Beast. Four years later, the county’s Hemisphere bill had increased more than tenfold to $940,000. 
+AT&T documents state law enforcement doesn’t need a search warrant to use Hemisphere, just an administrative subpoena, which does not require probable cause . The DEA was granted administrative subpoena power in 1970. 
+Just another reason to end the failed war on drugs and close down the DEA. Recall, unconstitutional surveillance was actually pioneered by the DEA a decade before the 9/11 attacks. See: How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War – The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9/11 . 
+AT&T stores details for every call, text message, Skype chat, or other communication that has passed through its infrastructure, retaining many records dating back to 1987, according to the Times 2013 Hemisphere report. The scope and length of the collection has accumulated trillions of records and is believed to be larger than any phone record database collected by the NSA under the Patriot Act, the Times reported. 
+This summer, I switched my cellphone service away from AT&T and was able to reduce my monthly bill by nearly 50%. You should consider doing the same. 
+In Liberty,",FAKE
+7256,VIDEO: Journalist Shot by Militarized Police at Standing Rock While Conducting an Interview,"jkbj
+I was shot by militarized police WHILE interviewing a man on camera at #StandingRock …and here’s the footage. #NoDAPL https://t.co/FfWiSCbiKf pic.twitter.com/4DRwNPkfZ9 
+— Erin Schrode (@ErinSchrode) November 3, 2016 
+Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Ryan Banister of The Daily Sheeple . ",FAKE
+421,"Buffett: If I Ran Fed, I Would Not Raise Rates Significantly","""I probably wouldn't do much,"" Buffett said when asked what he would do if he ran the Fed. ""Things are working pretty well, and I would be worried that if I raised rates significantly with negative interest rates in Europe, I would be very worried about what that would do to the flow of funds.""
+
+He also noted that the economy ""is improving month by month.""
+
+Buffett spoke at an automotive industry conference in New York, along with the chairman of the Berkshire Hathaway automotive dealer group, Larry Van Tuyl.
+
+Buffett and Van Tuyl said that Berkshire Hathaway Automotive is actively looking to purchase more dealerships to add to the 81 auto dealerships it now owns in 10 states. Van Tuyl said that the company will look to expand in the United States and not internationally, at least for now.
+
+Buffett said that Berkshire Hathaway will price auto dealerships for possible acquisition by using a long-term outlook and not allow short-term swings of the U.S. auto market to affect purchase decisions.
+
+He also said those purchase decisions will not be related to changes in interest rates.
+
+""If (Federal Reserve Chair) Janet Yellen came up and whispered in my ear what she was going to do for the next two years, it wouldn't make any difference what we do. If we got a chance to buy a dealership at a sensible price with the right people, we'd buy it. We'd buy it in five minutes.""
+
+Buffett and Van Tuyl both said that while Tesla Motors Inc. has a model of selling cars directly to consumers, the volume is too low to affect the U.S. auto distribution system.
+
+""Usually when a distribution system becomes that firmly established, there is a reason for it. I just don't see that changing,"" said Buffett.
+
+He said that self-driving cars will ""be a reality"" but that he expects autonomous cars to be less than 10 percent of the auto market by 2030.
+
+Earlier Tuesday, at the same National Automobile Dealers Association-J.D. Power conference in New York, Buffett said a Greek exit could be constructive for the eurozone.",REAL
+7228,Are Tensions With Russia Even Real?,"10-26-16 In September 2015, at the behest of its legitimate government, Russia began aerial operations to combat ISIS and al-Nusra terrorists in Syria. Numerous other likeminded groups are involved, just as cutthroat, just as ruthless, just as extremist, masquerading as “moderate rebels” when none exist - supported by Washington, NATO, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, other Gulf States, Jordan, Israel and Turkey.They’re massacring civilians, killing government soldiers defending them, using chemical and other banned weapons, committing gruesome atrocities.Why does Russia pretend conflict is civil when Syria was invaded by terrorists, imported from scores of countries, serving as US imperial foot soldiers? Why does it pretend “moderate” fighters are involved when none exist? Why does it insist on separating nonexistent “moderates” from terrorist groups it’s combating when all anti-government forces are the same?Why isn’t it targeting all armed groups wanting Assad toppled and Syrian sovereign independence destroyed? It’s the only way to free the country from the scourge its facing - supported by Washington and its rogue allies, NATO and regional ones.Why did it halt its aerial operations to liberate eastern Aleppo, declaring a unilateral ceasefire, a so-called humanitarian pause - a major blunder, accomplishing nothing? Ongoing since October 18, it’s letting US-supported terrorists infesting the city replenish their ranks, regroup and mobilize for heavy attacks, largely harming civilians Moscow says it wants protected.Last Saturday evening, Russia ended its humanitarian pause because US-supported terrorists in eastern Aleppo prevent civilians from leaving, holding thousands hostage as human shields, including the sick and wounded.Yet it ceased aerial attacks, yielding the advantage to dark forces it’s sworn to eliminate. What kind of strategy gives them the upper hand? It gets worse.On October 26, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov issued the following statement:“The Russian Aerospace Forces and the Syrian Air Force have been sticking to a moratorium on air strikes for the past eight days. They are staying out of a 10-km (six-mile) zone around Aleppo.”“Six humanitarian corridors, field kitchens and first aid stations are open for civilians leaving eastern Aleppo 24 hours a day.”“Russia and the Syrian government are ready to resume ‘humanitarian pauses’ in Aleppo if they receive guarantees from international organizations confirming readiness to evacuate the sick and the wounded as well as civilian population from the rebel-held areas.”Fact: Maintaining an airstrike moratorium aids Washington, its rogue allies and terrorists in eastern Aleppo they support.Fact: What good are humanitarian corridors if eastern Aleppo residents are prevented from using them, risking death or serious injury if they try.Fact: International organizations have no control over terrorists in eastern Aleppo - or anywhere else in the country. So what good are their “guarantees” if made?Fact: As long as Russia continues making the same mistakes repeatedly, the struggle to liberate Syria will likely go on interminably without resolution - a forever war, while countless thousands more civilians will die, be seriously injured and endure hardships people in Western societies can’t imagine, victims of US imperial ruthlessness.A handful of eastern Aleppo civilians alone escaped via a humanitarian corridor. According to one now free, their relatives were seized, imprisoned and tortured.The only way to liberate thousands of others is by relentlessly smashing their terrorist captors, eliminating them - not giving them breathing room to mobilize for greater attacks.Washington is delighted with Moscow’s ceasefire and humanitarian pause, serving US imperial interests, State Department spokesman admiral John Kirby saying:“We welcome the stated intention to extend this pause, and we hope that this extension will be more successful than it has been thus far” - meaning the longer it continues, the greater the benefit to US-led dark forces, the worse off trapped Syrians in eastern Aleppo will be, the longer the struggle to liberate Syria will go on.Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at . Logged",FAKE
+2850,Iran agrees to nuclear restrictions in framework deal with world powers,"Iran agreed in principle to accept significant restrictions on its nuclear facilities for at least a decade and submit to international inspections under a framework deal announced Thursday after months of contentious negotiations with the United States and other world powers.
+
+In return, international sanctions that have battered Iran’s economy would be lifted in phases if it meets its commitments, meaning it could take a year or less for relief from the penalties to kick in.
+
+The framework agreement, a milestone in negotiations that began 12 years ago, is not a final deal. But it creates parameters for three more months of negotiations over technical details and some matters that remain unresolved. Any one of those issues could doom a comprehensive agreement. Among them is the pace at which sanctions will be suspended.
+
+“The political understanding with details that we have reached is a solid foundation for the good deal we are seeking,” said Secretary of State John F. Kerry, sounding hoarse after an all-night negotiation session.
+
+The key moments in the long history of U.S.-Iran tensions
+
+The agreement includes almost all the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear facilities, laboratories, mines and mills that the United States had sought in recent months, although it initially aimed for even tougher restrictions.
+
+But Iran would get several benefits that may make the deal more palatable to politicians and the public in Tehran. It would not have to close any of its three nuclear facilities, though it would be left with only one that would enrich uranium — at levels low enough to create fuel for power plants but not high enough to create weapons-grade material.
+
+The limitations would produce a one-year “breakout” period, meaning it would take Iran a full year to build up enough material to build one nuclear warhead, compared with current estimates of two to three months, officials said.
+
+Many sanctions initially would be suspended, rather than lifted permanently as Iran sought, so they could be “snapped back” into place if Iran was discovered to be cheating, the officials said.
+
+Iran’s apparent acceptance of so many conditions sought by the United States could give the Obama administration a tool to fend off critics in Congress who want to impose new sanctions to wring more concessions from the Iranians.
+
+The White House fears such steps could scuttle the talks and prompt Tehran to resume its nuclear program at full tilt. Iran claims its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian uses.
+
+While the negotiations will continue through June, much of the attention will now shift to the White House and its defense of the negotiations, both in classified briefings to Congress and in public arenas.
+
+Obama hailed the agreement as a “historic understanding” and asked whether anyone really thinks that the deal is “a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East.”
+
+Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a persistent critic of the negotiations, told Obama by telephone that a final deal based on the parameters announced Thursday “would threaten the survival of Israel,” according to an Israeli statement.
+
+Kerry’s predecessor at the State Department, Hillary Rodham Clinton, called the framework agreement an “understanding,” saying it was an “important step toward a comprehensive agreement that would prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and strengthen the security of the United States, Israel, and the region.”
+
+The announcement of the agreement was made by weary-looking diplomats from Iran, the European Union, the United States and five other nations. Most had slept only one or two hours after the previous day’s talks, which stretched nearly through the night.
+
+They sounded exuberant even before they arrived at a Lausanne school a few miles from the hotel where the last rounds of talks had been held. Many diplomats had been cautious after the negotiations failed to meet a March 31 deadline. But once the bargaining ended Thursday, there was a flurry of excited tweets.
+
+“Big day,” wrote Kerry, who shouldered most of the direct negotiations with Iran.
+
+Once the agreement was reached, the diplomats walked onto a stage bearing the flags of the nations involved in the talks — Iran, Germany, France, Britain, Russia, China and the United States.
+
+Then Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister and chief negotiator in the talks, and the European foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, made statements.
+
+Mogherini said Iran and the world powers were taking a “decisive step” before she listed the main parameters for an eventual deal in which Iran would be permitted to pursue the civilian use of nuclear technology.
+
+[A step-by-step guide to what the Iran agreement actually means]
+
+Under the agreement, Iran’s heavy-water reactor in Arak would be rebuilt so it could not produce weapons-grade plutonium. No nuclear fuel would be reprocessed, and spent fuel would be exported or diluted.
+
+Iran’s underground plant at Fordow would be converted from a uranium-enrichment site into a nuclear physics and technology center. The site was built secretly deep inside a mountain near Qom and would be difficult to destroy by military attack.
+
+As Mogherini was speaking, the State Department was
+
+e-mailing reporters a “fact sheet” outlining more details that it said Iran had agreed to, though it could not immediately be confirmed that Iran was indeed on board with every item.
+
+In one of the most significant points, the number of Iran’s centrifuges would be cut by two-thirds, to about 6,000, according to the statement. It said they would be first-generation machines, not the more advanced ones that Iran has sought. Keeping the old centrifuges is a key element in establishing the one-year breakout period, a red line for Washington.
+
+The fact sheet said Iran further agreed not to enrich uranium above the level of 3.67 percent for at least 15 years. That level of low-enriched uranium is suitable as fuel for nuclear power plants but not as fissile material for nuclear weapons, which require uranium enriched to about 90 percent purity.
+
+Iran has agreed to reduce its stockpile of about 10,000 kilograms (22,000 pounds) of low-enriched uranium to 300 kilograms (660 pounds) for 15 years, the fact sheet said.
+
+The restrictions would be monitored through inspections conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and some of them would last 25 years under the accord.
+
+Zarif seemed to go out of his way to thank Kerry for investing so much time and effort in the negotiations, which he said had been conducted with “mutual respect.”
+
+The preliminary agreement could foretell the beginning of a new chapter in Iran’s relationship with the world, and particularly the United States.
+
+Though six nations negotiated with Iran, much of the heavy lifting was done in meetings between the United States and Iran. The countries have been hostile toward each other for decades, particularly since the 1979 revolution and the seizure of dozens of American diplomats who were held hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
+
+But the United States and Iran will remain at odds on many issues.
+
+“We have serious differences with the United States,” Zarif said. “We have built mutual distrust in the past. . . . So what I hope is that through courageous implementation of this, some of that trust could be remedied. But that is for us all to wait and see.”
+
+William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
+
+The key moments in the long history of U.S.-Iran tensions
+
+Transcript: Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif on the ‘framework’ for a nuclear deal
+
+Another nation blazed the trail for Iran in developing a nuclear program",REAL
+7628,Comment on This Is What Constipation Does To Your Body by THIS IS WHAT CONSTIPATION DOES TO YOUR BODY | TheHealthology,"  Big pharmaceutical companies don’t want you to know that some of the artificial medication for constipation significantly reduce the effectiveness of the intestines. As a result, some people report that without taking certain medication, they can’t visit the toilet. The good news is, you can solve constipation quite easily. But let’s delve deeply into what constipation can do to the body first. Bad Breath Firstly, constipation can cause bad breath (halitosis). Unfortunately, people who suffer from bad breath don’t always realize that they have a problem. People are unlikely to point out to a person that their breath stinks; therefore, they might miss out on social events and job opportunities due to bad breath. Constipation can cause bad breath because there is a build up of toxic waste and the gasses rise up through the body. Rectal Issues & Infection As stools spend more time in the bowels, water is reabsorbed. As a result, stools get hard and dry. Some constipation suffers report that passing bowels becomes very painful and can take many hours. As a result, the rectum is stretched beyond its limits. This can lead to rectal prolapse, which is a rectum which fails to close. Rectal prolapse sufferers usually wear diapers because stool leaks out of them. Moreover, they are more prone to infection. Increase Toxins The skin is the largest organ in the body and is a reflection of a person’s general health. Constipation typically increases the buildup of toxins in the body. As a result, the skin has to work harder to eliminate toxins. This can cause acne, skin discoloration etc. Therefore, if your skin is bad, don’t buy an expensive beauty product. Take a look at your diet, and whether you suffer from constipation. The skin is a reflection of inner health.   Colon Cancer Constipation can also cause colon cancer. The colon is designed to hold a few pounds of stools. Think of it like a plastic bag. Overload with heavy items and it rips. It’s primary function is to transport stool. However, when an individual is constipated, it has to store stool. This puts a strain on the inner membrane and can cause ruptures and internal infections. Invasive surgery may be required in such instances. Loss Of Healthy Bacteria The intestines contain flora (healthy bacteria) which help with immunity and vitamin production. Constipation reduces the concentration of flora, thereby leaving sufferers more susceptible to infection and illness. Moreover, they help to keep stools soft. Therefore, constipation sufferers can go through a downward spiral whereby their condition worsens over time. As people age, they are more likely to get constipated. Moreover, it is more likely to have a serious effect on their health. This is because the body isn’t as resilient. Notably, constipation can have a big effect on quality of life; especially if it comes with one of the serious conditions above. Fortunately, there is a natural cure. Sufferers no longer have to be on a path to deteriorating health. What You Can Do A majority of constipation medication are filled with chemicals which can harm the body, and make constipation worse. Even a product like Metamucil contains ingredients no person should consume, like aspartame. Change your diet! This is one of the best ways to end constipation. Eat plenty of healthy fruits and vegetables and cut out processed foods as much as you can. Eating rancid fats (cooked meat) also doesn’t help with constipation and your digestive system so limiting that as much as possible is important. There are also some great products on the market that can assist you in ending constipation while you spend time changing your diet over time. Wholey Shit is a great example as it contains only a few natural, high quality ingredients -and it works great! You can get a free sample of Wholey Shit here. These types of remedies are a great way to get started and relief naturally and quickly while you further discover how to adjust your diet and lifestyle to reflect better digestion, eating habits and so forth. 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+8918,Fifteen Quotes Proving False Flag Terrorism & the Existence of a ‘Shadow Government’,"ARJUN WALIA OCTOBER 18, 2016 Tensions between the United States, their allies, and Russia continue to rise. It seems, as always, that we are on the brink of global war. The Western military industrial complex continues to take over the Middle East and arm ISIS and other terrorist groups, as well as establish and solidify their military presence throughout the world. The sheer number of United States military bases around the globe is astonishing. 
+For more, unbiased information on the current state of affairs between the United States and Russia, I recommend visiting theantimedia.org. 
+Mainstream media outlets continue to spread propaganda , and have been doing so for years, claiming that there are terrorists, that they threaten national security, and that we must go after them. At the same time, an inflated sense of patriotism is encouraged in American citizens, so they believe their soldiers are fighting for freedom, despite doing the precise opposite. 
+A great quote by Edward Bernays, who was known as the father of public relations, comes to mind here: 
+The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society . Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ( source ) 
+A number of politicians and academics from around the world have been trying to create awareness on this issue for decades, and although we’ve come a long way, our relatively slow progress demonstrates the stranglehold mainstream media has on the minds of the masses. 
+“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” 
+– Mark Twain ( source ) 
+Below, you’ll find 15 quotes on false flag terrorism and the secret government. False flag terrorism refers to the idea that terrorist attacks are created, perpetuated, and/or funded by Western governments and their allies in order to justify the infiltration of other countries for ulterior motives. Quotes on False Flag Terrorism and the Secret Government 
+1. The Dalia Lama 
+“Of course, war and the large military establishments are the greatest sources of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings. We should think carefully about the reality of war. Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous – an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.” 
+“Modern warfare waged primarily with different forms of fire, but we are so conditioned to see it as thrilling that we talk about this or that marvelous weapon as a remarkable piece of technology without remembering that, if it is actually used, it will burn living people. War also strongly resembles a fire in the way it spreads. If one area gets weak, the commanding officer sends in reinforcements. This is throwing live people onto a fire. But because we have been brainwashed to think this way, we do not consider the suffering of individual soldiers. No soldiers want to be wounded or die. None of his loved ones wants any harm to come to him. If one soldier is killed, or maimed for life, at least another five or ten people – his relatives and friends – suffer as well. We should all be horrified by the extent of this tragedy, but we are too confused.” 
+“But no matter how malevolent or evil are the many murderous dictators who can currently oppress their nations and cause international problems, it is obvious that they cannot harm others or destroy countless human lives if they don’t have a military organisation accepted and condoned by society.” ( source ) 
+2. Dr. Michel Chossudovsky, Canadian economist, the University of Ottawa’s Emeritus Professor of Economics 
+“We are dealing with a criminal undertaking at a global level . . . and there is an ongoing war, it is led by the United States, it may be carried out by a number of proxy countries, which are obeying orders from Washington . . . The global war on terrorism is a US undertaking, which is fake, it’s based on fake premises. It tells us that somehow America and the Western world are going after a fictitious enemy, the Islamic state, when in fact the Islamic state is fully supported and financed by the Western military alliance and America’s allies in the Persian Gulf. . . . They say Muslims are terrorists, but it just so happens that terrorists are Made in America. They’re not the product of Muslim society, and that should be abundantly clear to everyone on this floor. . . . The global war on terrorism is a fabrication, a big lie and a crime against humanity.” 
+“Al Qaeda and the Al Qaeda affiliated organizations, including the Islamic State, are not independent organizations, they are sponsored, and they are sponsored by the United States and its allies. It is documented that prior to 2011, there was a process of recruitment of mujahideen to fight in Syria, and this was coordinated by NATO and the Turkish high command. This report is confirmed by Israeli news sources and unequivocally, we are dealing with a state-sponsorship of terrorism, the recruitment of mercenaries, the training and the financing of terrorism.” ( source )( source ) 
+3. Paul Hellyer 
+“It is ironic that the U.S. would begin a devastating war, allegedly in search of weapons of mass destruction, when the most worrisome developments in this field are occurring in your own backyard. It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy, when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects about which both the Congress and the Commander in Chief have been kept deliberately in the dark.” ( source ) 
+4. John C. Calhoun, The 7th Vice President of the United States 
+“A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many, and various, and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.” ( source ) 
+5. Robin Cook, Former British Foreign Secretary 
+“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, and any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.” ( source ) 
+6. John F. Hylan, Mayor of New York City from 1918-1925 
+“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation . . . The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties . . . [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.” ( source )( source ) 
+7. Senator Daniel K. Inouye, highest ranking Asian-American politician in United States history 
+“There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” ( source ) 
+8. David Steele, the second-highest ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence and a former CIA clandestine services officer 
+“Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.” ( source ) 
+9. Theodore Roosevelt. former President of the United States 
+“Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. 
+From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare, they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. 
+To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” ( source ) 
+10. Benjamin Disraeli, First British MP 
+“The world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” ( Coningsby, Book 4, Chap. 15 , Page 131) 
+11. Senator William Jenner 
+“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means … We have a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state … It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government … This ruthless power-seeking elite is a disease of our century… This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.” ( source ) 
+12. Woodrow Wilson, former President of the United States 
+“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” ( source ) 
+13. Eric H. May, a former U.S. Army military intelligence and public affairs officer 
+“The easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out. As I’ll detail below, this is exactly how government perpetrators in the US and UK handled the 9/11 and 7/7 “terror” attacks, which were in reality government attacks blamed on ‘terrorists.’ ” ( source ) 
+14. Professor Lance deHaven-Smith, Professor Emeritus of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University 
+“SCADs [which refers to State Crimes Against Democracy] involve high-level government officials, often in combination with private interests, that engage in covert activities for political advantages and power.” ( source )( source ) 
+15. President John F. Kennedy 
+“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. . . . 
+For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. 
+Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.” ( source ) Share:",FAKE
+51,"Bernie Sanders’s vast universe of donors, mapped","Something interesting happened for Hillary Clinton in the third quarter of fundraising: Her fundraising centers softened.
+
+During the second quarter, Clinton outraised Bernie Sanders handily, thanks to a lot of big-dollar donors. In the third quarter, the two were about tied. But look at how Clinton's donors were arrayed during the third quarter versus the second.
+
+In the second quarter, Clinton received donations from about 5,300 ZIP codes. In the third quarter, that increased to 6,300.
+
+That second quarter, when Clinton wrung a lot of money out of a lot of people, she pulled in a lot of money from Manhattan's wealthiest ZIP codes. In those ZIPs, roughly 10021 through 10028, Clinton raised $2 million from individuals in the second quarter. In the third quarter, she raised $725,000 -- a $1.3 million drop. (The densest area of circles below is Manhattan; you can also see the outline of Long Island to New York City's east.)
+
+Notice how centralized her donations were in the second quarter compared to Sanders's. He got a lot more contributions from outlying ZIP codes.
+
+This is what you'd expect to see from a candidate who got a lot of donors to max out early. Those areas subsequently have fewer donors to hit up.
+
+But you might also have noticed how much better Sanders is doing in the lucrative New York market. Across the country, Sanders dramatically expanded the number of places from which he generated contributions, more than doubling the number of ZIP codes from which he got money from 3,400 to 8,400.
+
+Sanders also saw an increase in how much he raised, versus the decrease Clinton experienced. We return to this chart that we published earlier this month.
+
+Sanders has a lot more people now to whom he can go back for more money.",REAL
+7711,"Former Ambassador Andrew Young calls for end to water fluoridation, “Civil Rights Issue”","VIDEOS Former Ambassador Andrew Young calls for end to water fluoridation, “Civil Rights Issue” A letter has been sent demanding hearings to investigate why water fluoridation is being continued in the state despite all the reasons to end it By Brandon Turbeville - October 31, 2016 
+Anti-fluoridation activists in Georgia received a major boost of support when former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, Andrew Young, sent a letter to Georgia Governor Nathan Deal and House Speaker David Ralston demanding hearings to investigate why water fluoridation is being continued in the state despite all the reasons to end it. 
+Ambassador Young is asking for a written response. His letter was also sent to the CEO of the American Water Works Association, David LaFrance. 
+“What’s clear to me is that we need a repeal of Georgia’s water fluoridation law, and hearings to look into how fluoridation has continued all these years, long after there were plenty of reasons to end it,” Ambassador Young wrote. 
+“This is a civil rights issue, and the people have the right to have the full story given to them, rather than highly edited, misleading talking points.” 
+Young also addressed the sketchy nature of the pro-fluoridation argument when he wrote, When someone’s story keeps changing, there are quite often motivations behind their changed stance that may not be aligned with the best interests of the public. The story offered by water fluoridation promoters keeps changing…and changing…and changing. There are key groups such as seniors, kidney patients, diabetics, communities of color, thyroid patients and people who drink a lot of water due to their occupation that are especially effected by Fluoridegate. 
+“I am calling for Fluoridegate hearings, here, in Georgia and I am calling for a repeal of Georgia’s fluoridation law, immediately,” Young added. 
+You can read the full text of Young’s letter here . We congratulate Ambassador Young on having the courage to speak out on this issue and we eagerly await the written response to it. Even more important, we are looking for an end to water fluoridation in Georgia.",FAKE
+9295,Trump's New Ad Portraying 'Every Mother's Worst Nightmare' is Nothing Short of Chilling,"Share on Twitter The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
+In a campaign ad for Donald Trump, Laura Wilkerson talks about her horrific experience of her son being doused with gasoline and set on fire by an illegal alien. In the ad called “Laura,” she explains why Hillary Clinton's policies are harmful for America. ",FAKE
+7474,Undercover Video Exposes Obama’s Plan to Make American “Gun Laws” More Like Britain – TruthFeed,"Undercover Video Exposes Obama’s Plan to Make American “Gun Laws” More Like Britain Undercover Video Exposes Obama’s Plan to Make American “Gun Laws” More Like Britain Videos By Amy Moreno October 26, 2016 
+We know that Obama and Hillary want to take away of Second Amendment right. 
+They say we’re just paranoid freaks for thinking that way. 
+But we know, right? 
+This undercover video exposes a close Obama advisor speaking about Obama’s “issue” which is to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence. 
+FYI, HANDGUNS ARE ILLEGAL IN BRITAIN – YOU CAN ONLY OWN “SPORTING RIFLES” AND THAT’S SUBJECT TO LICENSING. 
+Don’t think it can happen here? 
+Elect Hillary and a liberal Supreme Court and watch. This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+186,So That Happened: Did Obama Forget That The GOP Runs Congress?,"So, that happened: This week, the early stages of the 2016 presidential election collided headlong with the phenomenon of vaccine denialism, with two candidates ending up in intensive care for foot-in-mouth disease. We'll talk about who took a hit and who managed to avoid this nonsense.
+
+Are you a regular ""So, That Happened"" listener? Let us know! Tell us what you think of the show, what we're messing up and who we need to hear more from. Send us an electronic communication at sothathappened@huffingtonpost.com.
+
+""It's a world in which we need sanity. And this week, we didn't get it."" -- Jason Linkins
+
+Meanwhile, the Obama budget is out, and from the looks of it, it seems the president wants to swing for the fences on infrastructure, early childhood care and increased federal spending. But did he notice that Congress is controlled by the GOP? We'll discuss what compromises are possible.
+
+""It's as though Democrats control both chambers of Congress. There is not an effort which he's made in previous budgets to meet them halfway, or more than halfway."" -- Sabrina Siddiqui
+
+Finally, this was a big week for Downton Abbey-inspired congressional interior decoration scandals. We'll explain how it came to pass that we could put all those words in that previous sentence.
+
+""Washington elites decorate their environs with track lighting, chrome appliances and granite countertops -- a very modern, spare look with open floor plans, and [Aaron] Schock is going in the other direction."" -- Arthur Delaney
+
+We're very happy to let you know that ""So, That Happened"" is now available on iTunes. We've been working to create an eclectic and informative panel show that's constantly evolving, a show that's as in touch with the top stories of the week as it is with important stories that go underreported. We'll be here on a weekly basis, bringing you the goods.
+
+Never miss an episode: Subscribe to ""So, That Happened"" on iTunes, and if you like what you hear, please leave a review. We also encourage you to check out other HuffPost podcasts: HuffPost Comedy's ""Too Long; Didn't Listen,"" the HuffPost Weird News podcast, HuffPost Politics' ""Drinking and Talking,"" HuffPost Live's ""Fine Print"" and HuffPost Entertainment's podcast.",REAL
+7661,"Syrian War Report – November 2, 2016: ISIS and Al-Nusra Attempt to Cut Off Govt Supply Line to Aleppo","Trump Whistles His Dogs ‹ › South Front Analysis & Intelligence is a public analytical project maintained by an independent team of experts from the four corners of the Earth focusing on international relations issues and crises. They focus on analysis and intelligence of the ongoing crises and the biggest stories from around the world: Ukraine, the war in Middle East, Central Asia issues, protest movements in the Balkans, migration crises, and others. In addition, they provide military operations analysis, the military posture of major world powers, and other important data influencing the growth of tensions between countries and nations. We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by governments and mainstream media. Syrian War Report – November 2, 2016: ISIS and Al-Nusra Attempt to Cut Off Govt Supply Line to Aleppo By South Front on November 2, 2016 …from SouthFront 
+The Syrian Air Force has delivered a high number of air strikes in western Aleppo, targeting militants in in Al-Assad, Rashidin 4, Rashidin 5, the 1070 Apartment Project (1070 AP), Southern Sawmills and along the road to Khan Tuman. 
+Since November 1, the fighting in the area has become stationary. The western part of the al-Assad Neighborhood is contested. The al-Nusra led coalition, Jaish al-Fatah, controls the southwestern part of the 1070 AP. The militants’ attacks on the 3000 Apartment Project have failed. 
+In the 1070 AP, the government forces keep control of 3 groups of buildings. The supply line #1 has been cut off by Jaish al-Fatah. The supply line #2 is vulnerable to fire by militants. The government-controlled sector is separated from Jaish al-Fatah units by an open ground. This is why the militants are not able to take control of these building blocks. 
+Clashes in this non-populated area allow the Syrian military to use its advantage in firepower to whittle the jihadist manpower and military equipment, repelling their frontal attacks. Jaish al-Fatah suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices remain the main threat to the army’s defenses. 
+While Jaish al-Fatah cannot take control of the 1070 AP, the alliance’s attacks on the 3000 Apartment Project will hardly be able to lead to any success. 
+Syrian troops have repelled an ISIS attack on the government only supply line to Aleppo in the sector between Ithriyah and al-Salamiyah. ISIS attacked the Syrian army in the Wadi al-Adhib region but was forced to retreat after a fierce battle. Last weekend, al-Nusra Front, the leading force of Jaish al-Fatah, attacked the supply line in the sector between Ithriyah and Aleppo, but also failed. 
+This clearly shows that despite all controversies, ISIS and the so-called ‘moderate opposition’ are playing in the same game, attempting to prevent liberation of Aleppo by the government forces. 
+Turkey’s engineer units are currently building a military base, with an airfield, in the area of Ziyar, south of the Syrian border town of al-Rai, the As Safir newspaper revealed. The newspaper believes that the Turkish regime is going implement the Iraq-like strategy in Syria and set a series of military installations in order to project the military power in the area. 
+On November 1, Iraqi security forces (ISF) liberated the strategic Kurdish village of Gogjali in the eastern outskirts of Mosul and seized the nearby state-TV building. By doing this, the ISF has entered the ISIS-controlled city for the first time since it was occupied by ISIS in 2014. Related Posts:",FAKE
+7443,Should Christians Celebrate Halloween?,"Whether or not Christians should celebrate Halloween has been a controversial topic for decades. Some view dressing up, eating candy and enjoying the festivities harmless and innocent, while others view it as an offense to their faith. Americans spend nearly $6.9 billion yearly making it the second largest commercial holiday in the country. As commercialized as the celebration has become, many of its roots are completely paganist. Is this a cause for Christians to avoid the entire celebration?
+This is a time of year filled with debate, but not necessarily politics. Many Christians are convinced that Halloween is a satanic holiday while the rest of the world has found their sweet spot complete with costumes and candy. Children and adults have the opportunity to dress in accordance with their imagination, confirming from its haunted history to modern festivities, this holiday is a big deal. With decorations, candy, parties, and costumes, the average American spends up to $75 in the spirit of celebration.
+Halloween is the holiday that links the seasons of fall and winter. Reportedly, it originated with one of the ancient Celtic festivals; an event where people would wear various costumes and light bonfires in hopes of warding off roaming ghosts. However, by the late 1800s, Americans shifted the theory of Halloween into a holiday centered on community and fun events. The focus, for many, has transitioned from witchcraft and ghosts to neighborhood celebratory events. With the evolving of the focal point, should Christians change their stance to celebrate the holiday?
+Despite having at least partial roots from a Christian tradition, the relationship between Halloween and Christians has long been complicated. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther essentially started the Protestant Reformation in Wittenberg, Germany, when he nailed his 95 Theses to a door. Many of the early Christian groups that came to America rejected this holiday as pagan. The Protestant Reformation heavily influenced the Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, and Baptists causing the great majority to frown upon it. However, that did not prevent Halloween from finding its way to American shores.
+In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III dedicated November 1 as a time to honor all saints and martyrs. The holiday became widely recognized as All Saints’ Day. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve, which later became Halloween. The word “hallow” originated from the Old English word for “holy” and “e’en” is an abbreviation of “evening.” As such, Halloween represented the night before All Saints Day.
+Over time, Halloween advanced into a secular, community-based holiday branded by child-friendly activities that include costumes, neighborhood trick-or-treating, and more recently, trunk-or-treating. Along with a variety of pumpkin-flavored foods, Parties for both children and adults have become a very common way to celebrate the holiday. Some Christians still choose to lock themselves indoors with the lights off, but others have found freedom in their faith and are at liberty to decide when and how to participate.
+In multiple countries around the world, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people continue to escort the winter season in with candy-coated gatherings and a wide range of costumes. Halloween is a celebration that allows people of all ages to participate. Nonetheless, the question remains, “Should Christians celebrate?”
+Due to the efforts of community leaders and parents, Halloween has lost most of its illogical and religious undertones and is now more about imagination than spooky interpretation. There is nothing sinful about a Christian dressing up and participating in fun, non-threatening, celebrations. As a result, many Christians find no harm in dressing in costumes, attending parties and festivals as well as allowing their children to participate in school and local activities.
+By Cherese Jackson (Virginia)
+Sources:
+History: Halloween
+Kidsville News: Around the World – October 2015
+Grace to You: Christians and Halloween
+Photo Credits:
+Top Image Courtesy of Billy Wilson – Flickr License
+Inline Image (1) Courtesy of Richard Vignola – Flickr License
+Inline Image (2) Courtesy of The Forum News – Flickr License
+Featured Image Courtesy of John Nakamura – Flickr License christianity , halloween",FAKE
+3700,Sunday in Charleston: Worship at Emanuel AME,"(CNN) The site of a horrific mass killing will become a house of worship again.
+
+Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, will hold a service at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, according to CNN affiliate WCSC.
+
+Nine people were shot to death Wednesday night at the church.
+
+Authorities said Dylann Roof, 21, of Lexington, South Carolina, admits he shot and killed the people he'd sat with for Bible study at the historicall y black church, two law enforcement officials said.
+
+Roof is white and all the victims are black. He told investigators he did it to start a race war, according to one of the officials.
+
+The church premises remained a crime scene, and thus off-limits to church members, until Charleston police released it Saturday.
+
+One of the victims was the church's pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. The Rev. Norvel Goff, presiding elder of Emanuel AME, told CNN he will give the sermon at the service.
+
+Charleston, nicknamed the Holy City because it has so many churches, will remember the shooting victims in other ways.
+
+On Sunday night, a unity chain will be held on the 13,200-foot-long Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge. Organizers hope to attract enough people to hold hands and stretch from Charleston to the town of Mount Pleasant on the other side of the Cooper River.
+
+That message was echoed by Arthur Hurd, the husband of victim Cynthia Hurd. He's in the Merchant Marines and arrived in Charleston on Saturday.
+
+'Hate's not in me'
+
+""This is all surreal but what I can say to that young man is that in time I will forgive you,"" Hurd told CNN affiliate WCIV. ""I won't move past this but I will forgive you. But I hope for the rest of your life, however long or short that may be, you stop and play that tape over and over and over again in your head and see the sheer terror and pain you put purely innocent people through. ...""
+
+""I would love to hate you but hate's not in me. If I hate you I'm no better than you.""
+
+People angry about the killings took to the streets Saturday.
+
+In Charleston, hundreds joined the March for Black Lives.
+
+The group began the march in total silence as they walked to Emanuel AME Church from a nearby park, stopping outside the church to lay flowers at the makeshift memorial.
+
+Once they passed the church, the group filled Charleston's iconic King Street, usually packed with tourists this time of year. Many carried signs of support for the victims of the Charleston shooting and the black community: ""STILL WE RISE,"" ""Hand in Hand,"" ""Do the right thing,"" ""Black Lives Matter,"" signs read.
+
+The march ended with a rally outside the historic Daughters of the Confederacy building.
+
+'Take it down'
+
+""That terrorist did not win. He wanted to invoke terror and fear in our community, but we are not for that,"" an organizer said to the crowd. ""We are standing up together, arm in arm... We will not bow down, but we will stand up.""
+
+Despite the sweltering heat, a large crowd filled the front grounds of the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia calling for the Confederate flag to be removed.
+
+""Take it down, take it down,"" chanted the crowd filled with people of all races and ages holding signs.
+
+One woman's sign said, ""Love breeds love, hate breeds hate"" and another man's sign says, ""Remove my ancestors sign.""
+
+Organizers of the event, the South Carolina Progressive Network, estimates between 1,500 and 1,700 people attended.
+
+The 2,000-word text explains the writer's philosophy of white superiority, saying the Trayvon Martin case ""truly awakened me"" and that ""I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country.""
+
+Motive has become the biggest question as state and federal investigators work on the case -- and statements and photos on the website match what investigators have determined so far.
+
+For instance, CNN Charlotte affiliate WBTV, citing a source, says Roof told investigators in Shelby, North Carolina, where he was arrested, that he researched the church and targeted it because it turned out to be a ""historic African-American church.""
+
+Three photos show Roof posing with a pistol. One closeup shows a gun that can be identified as a.45-caliber Glock -- the model of gun investigators say was used in the church shooting. Those photos were taken in April, after his 21st birthday, when his family said he purchased a .45-caliber gun.
+
+The website, called the Last Rhodesian, is bare bones. Roof's name doesn't appear anywhere on the site but he is shown in many of the photos. An Internet ownership search shows the website was registered to Roof and listed as the administrator.
+
+While the nation rallies behind Charleston, an insight into Roof's state of mind came from Charleston County Sheriff's Office spokesman Maj. Eric Watson.
+
+Roof, he said, ""is in protective custody. He is currently sitting on his bed being monitored by two detention officers. He is on suicide watch.""
+
+Roof may be prosecuted by federal authorities if it's determined he committed a hate crime. The Justice Department said ""it is looking at this crime from all angles, including as a hate crime and as an act of domestic terrorism.""
+
+Funeral plans for Pinckney, who was a state senator, were announced Saturday.
+
+Pinckney's casket will be at the State House rotunda lobby from 1-5 p.m. Wednesday. Public viewings will also be held Thursday at St. John AMC Church in Ridgeland and Emanuel AME Church.
+
+The funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at TD Arena on the College of Charleston campus. The service is open to the public.",REAL
+8210,Only Making Matters Worse in Syria,"Only Making Matters Worse in Syria October 28, 2016 
+Exclusive: Washington’s foreign policy establishment is determined to escalate U.S. military attacks in Syria even though that won’t resolve the conflict and will only get more people killed, a dilemma addressed by Daniel Lazare. 
+By Daniel Lazare 
+Middle East policy has reached an inflexion point, a moment when Official Washington seems to be caught in the middle between escalation and retreat. 
+On one hand, the rhetoric has not been more militant since Hillary Clinton’s famous “we came, we saw, he died” moment in October 2011. With Barack Obama halfway out the door and Clinton all but crowned, Washington’s laptop bombardiers are rejoicing that the half-measures are over and judgment day nearly at hand. Samantha Power, Permanent Representative of the United States to the UN, addresses the Security Council meeting on Syria, Sept. 25, 2016. Power has been an advocate for escalating U.S. military involvement in Syria. (UN Photo) 
+Thus, The New York Times assures us that that the Middle East is “desperate for American leadership” while the Washington Post reports that “the Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the ground work for a more assertive American foreign policy.” 
+Leading think tanks are publishing “a flurry of reports” urging stepped-up intervention, including U.S.-backed “safe zones to protect moderate rebels from Syrian and Russian forces” and even “limited” cruise-missile strikes. But while differing on the details, all agree something must be done. The time to act is now. 
+As Vox puts it: “The hot new policy idea in Washington is the hottest old idea: direct US military intervention in Syria’s civil war.” 
+But reading between the lines, a very different picture emerges, a realization that the U.S. has painted itself into a corner and that there is little it can do after all. Thus, the Times observes that while the Middle East is clamoring for U.S. leadership, it is not clamoring for Bush-style intervention but for some mythical “middle ground” in between him and Obama. 
+While reporting that pro-escalation sentiment is unanimous in Washington’s vast foreign-policy establishment – sometimes known as “ the blob ” – the Washington Post notes that “even pinprick cruise-missile strikes designed to hobble the Syrian air force or punish [President Bashar al-]Assad would risk a direct confrontation with Russian forces” and wonders whether a war-weary public will support any intervention at all. 
+“My concern is that we may be talking to each other and agreeing with each other,” it quotes one expert as saying, “but that these discussions are isolated from where the public may be right now.” 
+Official Washington in a Bubble 
+Thus, even the Establishment worries that it lives in a bubble. Washington wants war, it needs war, and yet it admits in practically the same breath that it can’t have it. So what will it do? A heart-rending propaganda image designed to justify a major U.S. military operation inside Syria against the Syrian military. 
+Then there are the mild liberals over at Vox, the hip and successful Washington website founded by journalistic wunderkind Ezra Klein. Voxers pride themselves on being sharp and practical yet in the end they are sealed off as well. The poster boy for this tendency is Zack Beauchamp, a young writer who stars in a recent Vox video entitled, “ The crisis in Aleppo, explained in 4 minutes .” 
+As Beauchamp lectures away amid fancy graphics and cool background music, the video faithfully toes the Washington line, both the stirring gung-ho part and the downbeat refrain that inevitably follows. Thus, he describes the Syrian civil war as a “story of flip-flops,” with Assad seemingly on the ropes until Iran and Russia put him back on his feet, at which point the Saudis and Qataris put the rebels back on their feet so the game can continue. 
+But the real turning point, he says, occurred in September 2015 when Russia stepped in with airstrikes that allowed the government to besiege the Salafists in eastern Aleppo. 
+“A siege,” Beauchamp then explains, “involves trapping a group of people, civilians and fighters both, inside a certain territory and denying them supplies until they can no longer fight. Assad’s strategy has a vicious logic to it. When you deprive people of food and you bomb them over and over again, they’re likely to give in just to make the fighting stop.” 
+The upshot, he says, is “a humanitarian crisis … roughly 250,000 people trapped in the city … running dangerously low on supplies, access to clean water and medicine.” So what should the U.S. do in response? The video’s tone at this point turns pessimistic and then pitch black: 
+“The United States has the military power to break the siege of Aleppo,” Beauchamp says, “but doing so would be extremely dangerous. For one thing, it would need to coordinate with rebels on the ground, some of whom are extremists. For another, it means that the US would be operating in hostile air space with Russian planes.If the US were to engage with Russian planes, that could theoretically mean direct fire between two nuclear-armed superpowers, a risk that very few people in the United States are willing to take. And three, even if the US did temporarily break the siege, it would have to maintain a commitment to insure that things didn’t get worse. That could mean an open-ended war. And there’s no guarantee that this would make anything better, but, rather, it might just get more people killed over the long run.” 
+So U.S. options are zero: “Every diplomatic solution tried so far has failed, and failed miserably, and there’s simply no economic tool that can be used to end the fighting or ease the suffering of the people inside besieged territories. There’s no good answer. There’s nothing that anyone has that could simply solve the crisis. It’s a disaster and a disaster without any end in sight.” 
+Falsehoods and Obfuscations 
+Beauchamp’s explanation – which is really not an explanation at all, merely an assertion – is studded with falsehoods and obfuscations. By describing Assad’s strategy as uniquely “vicious,” he ignores obvious parallels between the Russian air campaign in Aleppo and U.S. air assaults on Fallujah , Tikrit , and Ramadi , all in central Iraq and all largely destroyed in the course of “liberating” them from ISIS. U.S.-backed Syrian “moderate” rebels smile as they prepare to behead a 12-year-old boy (left), whose severed head is held aloft triumphantly in a later part of the video. [Screenshot from the YouTube video] By referring to the events in Syria as a civil war, he fails to acknowledge the degree to which it is actually a foreign invasion by the U.S., Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf states. By repeatedly referring to the Salafists as “rebels” – which suggests that they are Syrians rising up from within – he ignores the fact that large numbers – 36,500, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – are foreign-born.
+While asserting that 250,000 people are trapped inside east Aleppo, he ignores reports that the real figure is far lower. The Guardian ’s Martin Chulov, for example, estimated in March 2015 that only 40,000 people remained in rebel-held areas while Vice News reported last July that “most of Aleppo’s residents have fled the city. There are just a handful of civilians and rebel fighters holding on in the shattered ruins.” 
+Beauchamp also implies that it is the government that has “trapped” people in east Aleppo when reports in the London Independent and elsewhere indicate that Salafists are firing on anyone trying to take the government up on its offer of safe passage. While acknowledging that “some” fighters are “extremists,” he ignores the fact that the U.S. military has admitted that Al Nusra, the local branch of Al Qaeda, is firmly in charge. 
+When Salafists launched a short-lived offensive in east Aleppo last summer, for instance, The New York Times reported that they named it in honor of Ibrahim al-Yousef, a Muslim Brotherhood member who led a horrendous massacre of Alawite military cadets in 1979. It was indicative of how anti-Alawite sectarianism of the most bloodthirsty sort is the common denominator underlying all anti-government factions. 
+One could go on, but the point is clear. The foreign-policy establishment has not only cut itself off from the public but, with the help of sympathetic media outlets like Vox, has cut itself off from its own intellectual history. Incapable of examining the U.S. role in the Syrian debacle in an honest and straightforward way, it can only blunder about in the dark, staggering backward or forward as circumstances dictate. Now seems to be the moment when it is poised between the two. 
+So how will the United States respond now that Washington is preparing for a transition between Obama-style abstention and Hillary-style neo-conservatism? Here’s is one reporter’s modest attempt at reading the tea leaves: 
+Washington will continue to fume as the catastrophe deepens in both Syria and Iraq. As the drive to push ISIS (also known as ISIL, Islamic State, and Daesh) out of Mosul in northern Iraq degenerates into ethno-sectarian warfare among Turks, Sunni Arabs, Shi‘ites, and Kurds, the drive to take back Raqqa, ISIS’s capital in north-central Syria will similarly falter as fighting breaks out between pro-Turkish forces and Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG. 
+The fall of east Aleppo, which now seems to be a foregone conclusion, will drive the foreign-policy establishment to a fury. Obama may be able to hold the hawks off. But by the time he leaves office, “the blob” will be in an uproar and demanding that something be done. Map of Syria. 
+With that, Zack Beauchamp will star in another Vox video entitled, “U.S. military intervention in Syria, explained in 4 minutes.” In it, he’ll tell how Russian atrocities in Aleppo, plus backhanded Syrian government support for ISIS, leave the U.S. no choice but to launch a swarm of cruise missiles at Syrian military facilities. 
+When Russian soldiers are killed, he’ll try to shift blame to Vladimir Putin for stirring up trouble in the eastern Ukraine or the Baltics. He’ll note that dissent is limited to a few cranky websites and far-left groups, all of which can be safely ignored since they’re not part of the mainstream. Russia will then counter-attack, leading to … no one knows. 
+While anything can go wrong with this scenario, one thing is clear. The mood in Official Washington is the opposite of 2003 when all the “experts” agreed that an invasion of Iraq would be a walk in the park. Now they’re filled with trepidation. But they’re still trying to talk themselves into an escalation and may succeed. If the election goes as expected, the Clinton II presidency will be an interesting one. 
+Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).",FAKE
+5040,"FACT CHECK: Hillary Clinton's Speech To The Democratic Convention, Annotated","Editor's note: This has been updated at 1:25 p.m. ET Friday with additional fact-checking information.
+
+Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for president Thursday night, delivering a speech that lays out her plan to address terrorist threats and create jobs.
+
+NPR's politics team annotated Clinton's speech below. Portions commented on are highlighted, followed by analysis, context and fact check in italics.
+
+Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all so so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all very, very much. Thank you for that amazing welcome. Thank you all for the great convention that we've had.
+
+And Chelsea, thank you.
+
+I'm so proud to be your mother and so proud of the woman you've become.
+
+Thank you for bringing Marc into our family, and Charlotte and Aidan into the world.
+
+And Bill, that conversation we started in the law library 45 years ago, it is still going strong.
+
+You know, that conversation has lasted through good times that filled us with joy, and hard times that tested us.
+
+And I've even gotten a few words in along the way.
+
+On Tuesday night, I was so happy to see that my explainer-in-chief is still on the job.
+
+I'm also grateful to the rest of my family and to the friends of a lifetime.
+
+For all of you whose hard work brought us here tonight, and to those of you who joined this campaign this week. Thank you.
+
+What a remarkable week it's been.
+
+We heard the man from Hope, Bill Clinton.
+
+And the man of Hope, Barack Obama.
+
+America is stronger because of President Obama's leadership, and I'm better because of his friendship.
+
+We heard from our terrific vice president, the one and only Joe Biden. He spoke from his big heart about our party's commitment to working people, as only he can do.
+
+And first lady Michelle Obama reminded us that our children are watching, and the president we elect is going to be their president, too.
+
+And for those of you out there who are just getting to know Tim Kaine — you will soon understand why the people of Virginia keep promoting him: from city council and mayor, to governor, and now senator.
+
+And he will make the whole country proud as our vice president.
+
+And ... I want to thank Bernie Sanders.
+
+Bernie, Bernie, your campaign inspired millions of Americans, particularly the young people who threw their hearts and souls into our primary.
+
+You've put economic and social justice issues front and center, where they belong.
+
+And to all of your supporters here and around the country: I want you to know, I've heard you. Your cause is our cause.
+
+Our country needs your ideas, energy and passion.
+
+That is the only way we can turn our progressive platform into real change for America.
+
+We wrote it together — now let's go out and make it happen together.
+
+My friends, we've come to Philadelphia — the birthplace of our nation — because what happened in this city 240 years ago still has something to teach us today.
+
+We all know the story. But we usually focus on how it turned out — and not enough on how close that story came to never being written at all.
+
+When representatives from 13 unruly colonies met just down the road from here, some wanted to stick with the king. And some wanted to stick it to the king.
+
+The revolution hung in the balance.
+
+Then somehow, they began listening to each other, compromising, finding common purpose.
+
+And by the time they left Philadelphia, they had begun to see themselves as one nation.
+
+That's what made it possible to stand up to a king.
+
+That took courage. They had courage.
+
+Our Founders embraced the enduring truth that we are stronger together.
+
+Now, now America is once again at a moment of reckoning. Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart. Bonds of trust and respect are fraying.
+
+And just as with our founders, there are no guarantees. It truly is up to us. We have to decide whether we all will work together so we can all rise together.
+
+Our country's motto is ""e pluribus unum"": out of many, we are one. Will we stay true to that motto?
+
+Well, we heard Donald Trump's answer last week at his convention. He wants to divide us from the rest of the world, and from each other.
+
+He's betting that the perils of today's world will blind us to its unlimited promise. He's taken the Republican Party a long way from ""Morning in America"" to ""Midnight in America."" He wants us to fear the future and fear each other.
+
+Well, you know, a great Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than 80 years ago, during a much more perilous time: ""The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.""
+
+Now we are clear-eyed about what our country is up against. But we are not afraid. We will rise to the challenge, just as we always have. We will not build a wall. Instead, we will build an economy where everyone who wants a good job can get one.
+
+And we'll build a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants who are already contributing to our economy!
+
+We, we will not ban a religion. We will work with all Americans and our allies to fight and defeat terrorism.
+
+There's a lot of work to do.
+
+Too many people haven't had a pay raise since the crash.
+
+There's too much inequality. Too little social mobility. Too much paralysis in Washington. Too many threats at home and abroad.
+
+But just look for a minute at the strengths we bring as Americans to meet these challenges. We have the most dynamic and diverse people in the world. We have the most tolerant and generous young people we've ever had. We have the most powerful military. The most innovative entrepreneurs. The most enduring values: freedom and equality, justice and opportunity.
+
+We should be so proud that those words are associated with us. I have to tell you, as your secretary of state, I went to 112 countries. When people hear those words, they hear America.
+
+So don't let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We're not.
+
+Don't let anyone tell you we don't have what it takes. We do.
+
+And most of all, don't believe anyone who says, ""I alone can fix it.""
+
+Yes, those were actually Donald Trump's words in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us.
+
+Really? I alone can fix it? Isn't he forgetting?
+
+Troops on the front lines. Police officers and firefighters who run toward danger. Doctors and nurses who care for us. Teachers who change lives. Entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem. Mothers who lost children to violence and are building a movement to keep other kids safe.
+
+He's forgetting every last one of us.
+
+Americans don't say, ""I alone can fix it."" We say, ""We'll fix it together.""
+
+And remember, remember: Our Founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power. Two-hundred-and-forty years later, we still put our faith in each other.
+
+Look at what happened in Dallas after the assassinations of five brave police officers. Police Chief David Brown asked the community to support his force, maybe even join them.
+
+And you know how the community responded? Nearly 500 people applied in just 12 days.
+
+That's how Americans answer when the call for help goes out.
+
+Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called It Takes a Village. And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, ""What the heck do you mean by that?""
+
+This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.
+
+America needs every one of us to lend our energy, our talents, our ambition to making our nation better and stronger. I believe that with all my heart.
+
+That's why ""Stronger Together"" is not just a lesson from our history. It's not just a slogan for our campaign.
+
+It's a guiding principle for the country we've always been and the future we're going to build.
+
+A country where the economy works for everyone, not just those at the top. Where you can get a good job and send your kids to a good school, no matter what zip code you live in.
+
+A country where all our children can dream, and those dreams are within reach. Where families are strong, communities are safe, and yes, where love trumps hate.
+
+That's the country we're fighting for. That's the future we're working toward. And so, my friends, it is with humility, determination and boundless confidence in America's promise that I accept your nomination for president of the United States!
+
+Now, sometimes, sometimes the people at this podium are new to the national stage.
+
+As you know, I'm not one of those people.
+
+I've been your First Lady, served eight years as a senator from the great state of New York.
+
+Then I represented all of you as secretary of state.
+
+But my job titles only tell you what I've done.
+
+They don't tell you why.
+
+The truth is, through all these years of public service, the ""service"" part has always come easier to me than the ""public"" part.
+
+I get it that some people just don't know what to make of me. So let me tell you.
+
+The family I'm from, well, no one had their name on big buildings. My family were builders of a different kind. Builders in the way most American families are.
+
+They used whatever tools they had — whatever God gave them — and whatever life in America provided — and built better lives and better futures for their kids.
+
+My grandfather worked in the same Scranton lace mill for 50 years. Because he believed that if he gave everything he had, his children would have a better life than he did. And he was right.
+
+My dad, Hugh, made it to college. He played football at Penn State and enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor.
+
+When the war was over, he started his own small business, printing fabric for draperies. I remember watching him stand for hours over silk screens.
+
+He wanted to give my brothers and me opportunities he never had. And he did.
+
+My mother, Dorothy, was abandoned by her parents as a young girl. She
+
+ended up on her own at 14, working as a housemaid. She was saved by the kindness of others.
+
+Her first-grade teacher saw she had nothing to eat at lunch and brought extra food to share the entire year. The lesson she passed on to me, years later, stuck with me: No one gets through life alone. We have to look out for each other and lift each other up.
+
+And she made sure I learned the words from our Methodist faith: ""Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.""
+
+So, I went to work for the Children's Defense Fund, going door-to-door in New Bedford, Mass., on behalf of children with disabilities who were denied the chance to go to school.
+
+I remember meeting a young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school — it just didn't seem possible in those days. And I couldn't stop thinking of my mother and what she'd gone through as a child.
+
+It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough. To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws. You need both understanding and action.
+
+So we gathered facts. We built a coalition. And our work helped convince Congress to ensure access to education for all students with disabilities.
+
+It's a big idea, isn't it? Every kid with a disability has the right to go to school.
+
+But how, how do you make an idea like that real? You do it step-by-step, year-by-year, sometimes even door-by-door.
+
+My heart just swelled when I saw Anastasia Somoza representing millions of young people on this stage — because we changed our law to make sure she got an education.
+
+So it's true. I sweat the details of policy — whether we're talking about the exact level of lead in the drinking water in Flint, Mich., the number of mental health facilities in Iowa, or the cost of your prescription drugs.
+
+Because it's not just a detail if it's your kid — if it's your family. It's a big deal. And it should be a big deal to your president, too.
+
+After the four days of this convention, you've seen some of the people who've inspired me. People who let me into their lives, and became a part of mine.
+
+People like Ryan Moore and Lauren Manning. They told their stories Tuesday night.
+
+I first met Ryan as a 7-year-old. He was wearing a full body brace that must have weighed 40 pounds, because I leaned over to lift him up.
+
+Children like Ryan kept me going when our plan for universal health care failed and kept me working with leaders of both parties to help create the Children's Health Insurance Program that covers 8 million kids in our country.
+
+Lauren Manning, who stood here with such grace and power, was gravely injured on 9/11. It was the thought of her, and Debbie St. John who you saw in the movie, and John Dolan and Joe Sweeney, and all the victims and survivors, that kept me working as hard as I could in the Senate on behalf of 9/11 families, and our first responders who got sick from their time at Ground Zero.
+
+I was thinking of Lauren, Debbie and all the others 10 years later in the White House Situation Room when President Obama made the courageous decision that finally brought Osama bin Laden to justice.
+
+And in this campaign, I've met many more people who motivate me to keep fighting for change. And, with your help, I will carry all of your voices and stories with me to the White House.
+
+And you heard, you heard from, from Republicans and Independents who are supporting our campaign. Well, I will be a president for Democrats, Republicans and independents, for the struggling, the striving, the successful, for all those who vote for me and for those who don't. For all Americans together.
+
+Tonight, tonight we've reached a milestone in our nation's march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president.
+
+Standing here, standing here as my mother's daughter, and my daughter's mother, I'm so happy this day has come.
+
+I'm happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between.
+
+I'm happy for boys and men, too — because when any barrier falls in America, it clears the way for everyone. After all, when there are no ceilings, the sky's the limit.
+
+So let's keep going, let's keep going until every one of the 161 million women and girls across America has the opportunity she deserves to have.
+
+But even more important than the history we make tonight, is the history we will write together in the years ahead.
+
+Let's begin with what we're going to do to help working people in our country get ahead and stay ahead.
+
+Now, I don't think President Obama and Vice President Biden get the credit they deserve for saving us from the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes.
+
+Our economy is so much stronger than when they took office. Nearly 15 million new private-sector jobs. Twenty million more Americans with health insurance. And an auto industry that just had its best year ever.
+
+Now that's real progress, but none of us can be satisfied with the status quo. Not by a long shot.
+
+We're still facing deep-seated problems that developed long before the recession and have stayed with us through the recovery.
+
+I've gone around our country talking to working families. And I've heard from many who feel like the economy sure isn't working for them.
+
+Some of you are frustrated — even furious. And you know what? You're right. It's not yet working the way it should.
+
+Americans are willing to work — and work hard. But right now, an awful lot of people feel there is less and less respect for the work they do. And less respect for them, period.
+
+Democrats, we are the party of working people. But we haven't done a good enough job showing we get what you're going through, and we're going to do something to help.
+
+So tonight I want to tell you tonight how we will empower Americans to live better lives.
+
+My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States. From my first day in office to my last, especially in places that for too long have been left out and left behind.
+
+From our inner cities to our small towns, from Indian Country to Coal Country. From communities ravaged by addiction to regions hollowed out by plant closures.
+
+And here's what I believe. I believe America thrives when the middle class thrives. I believe that our economy isn't working the way it should because our democracy isn't working the way it should.
+
+That's why we need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights, not restrict them.
+
+And if necessary, we will pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
+
+I believe American corporations that have gotten so much from our country should be just as patriotic in return. Many of them are. But too many aren't. It's wrong to take tax breaks with one hand and give out pink slips with the other.
+
+And I believe Wall Street can never, ever be allowed to wreck Main Street again.
+
+And I believe in science. I believe climate change is real and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying clean energy jobs.
+
+I believe that when we have millions of hardworking immigrants contributing to our economy, it would be self-defeating and inhumane to try to kick them out.
+
+Comprehensive immigration reform will grow our economy and keep families together — and it's the right thing to do.
+
+So, whatever party you belong to, or if you belong to no party at all, if you share these beliefs, this is your campaign.
+
+If you believe that companies should share profits with their workers, not pad executive bonuses, join us.
+
+If you believe the minimum wage should be a living wage, and no one working full time should have to raise their children in poverty, join us.
+
+If you believe that every man, woman and child in America has the right to affordable health care, join us.
+
+If you believe that we should say ""no"" to unfair trade deals, that we should stand up to China, that we should support our steelworkers and autoworkers and homegrown manufacturers, then join us.
+
+If you believe we should expand Social Security and protect a woman's right to make her own health care decisions, then join us.
+
+And yes, yes, if you believe that your working mother, wife, sister or daughter deserves equal pay, join us.
+
+That's how we're going to sure this economy works for everyone, not just those at the top.
+
+Now, you didn't hear any of this, did you, from Donald Trump at his convention. He spoke for 70-odd minutes — and I do mean odd.
+
+And he offered zero solutions.
+
+But we already know he doesn't believe these things. No wonder he doesn't like talking about his plans. You might have noticed, I love talking about mine.
+
+In my first hundred days, we will work with both parties to pass the biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II. Jobs in manufacturing, clean energy, technology and innovation, small business, and infrastructure.
+
+If we invest in infrastructure now, we'll not only create jobs today, but lay the foundation for the jobs of the future.
+
+And we will also transform the way we prepare our young people for those jobs.
+
+Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt-free for all!
+
+We will also, we will also liberate millions of people who already have student debt.
+
+It's just not right that Donald Trump can ignore his debts, and students and families can't refinance their debts.
+
+And something we don't say often enough: Sure, college is crucial, but a four-year degree should not be the only path to a good job.
+
+We will help more people learn a skill or practice a trade and make a good living doing it.
+
+We will give small businesses like my dad's a boost. Make it easier to get credit. Way too many dreams die in the parking lots of banks.
+
+In America, if you can dream it, you should be able to build it.
+
+And we will help you balance family and work. And you know what, if fighting for affordable child care and paid family leave is playing the ""woman card,"" then deal me in.
+
+Now, here's the other thing, we're not only going to make all these investments, we're going to pay for every single one of them.
+
+And here's how: Wall Street, corporations, and the super-rich are going to start paying their fair share of taxes.
+
+This is not because we resent success, because when more than 90 percent of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, that's where the money is, and we are going to follow the money.
+
+And if companies take tax breaks and then ship jobs overseas, we'll make them pay us back. And we'll put that money to work where it belongs, creating jobs here at home!
+
+Now, now I imagine some of you are sitting at home thinking, well, that all sounds pretty good. But how are you going to get it done? How are you going to break through the gridlock in Washington?
+
+Well, look at my record. I've worked across the aisle to pass laws and treaties and to launch new programs that help millions of people. And if you give me the chance, that's what I'll do as president.
+
+But then I also imagine people are thinking out there, but Trump, he's a businessman. He must know something about the economy.
+
+Well, let's take a closer look.
+
+In Atlantic City, 60 miles from here, you will find contractors and small businesses who lost everything because Donald Trump refused to pay his bills.
+
+Now, remember what the president said last night: ""Don't boo, vote."" People who did the work and needed the money, and didn't get it — not because he couldn't pay them, but because he wouldn't pay them. He just stiffed them.
+
+And you know that sales pitch he's making to be president? Put your faith in him — and you'll win big? That's the same sales pitch he made to all those small businesses. Then Trump walked away, and left working people holding the bag.
+
+He also talks a big game about putting America first. Well, please explain what part of ""America First"" leads him to make Trump ties in China, not Colorado. Trump suits in Mexico, not Michigan. Trump furniture in Turkey, not Ohio. Trump picture frames in India, not Wisconsin.
+
+Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again — well, he could start by actually making things in America again.
+
+Now, the choice we face in this election is just as stark when it comes to our national security.
+
+You know, anyone, anyone reading the news can see the threats and turbulence we face.
+
+From Baghdad to Kabul, to Nice and Paris and Brussels, from San Bernardino to Orlando, we're dealing with determined enemies that must be defeated.
+
+So, it's no wonder that people are anxious and looking for reassurance. Looking for steady leadership, wanting a leader who understands we are stronger when we work with our allies around the world and care for our veterans here at home. Keeping our nation safe and honoring the people who do that work will be my highest priority.
+
+I'm proud that we put a lid on Iran's nuclear program without firing a single shot — now we have to enforce it. And we must keep supporting Israel's security.
+
+I'm proud that we shaped a global climate agreement — now we have to hold every country accountable to their commitments, including ourselves.
+
+And I'm proud to stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia.
+
+I've laid out my strategy for defeating ISIS. We will strike their sanctuaries from the air, and support local forces taking them out on the ground. We will surge our intelligence so that we detect and prevent attacks before they happen.
+
+We will disrupt their efforts online to reach and radicalize young people in our country.
+
+It won't be easy or quick, but make no mistake — we will prevail.
+
+Now Donald Trump, Donald Trump says, and this is a quote, ""I know more about ISIS than the generals do."" No, Donald, you don't.
+
+He thinks, he thinks that he knows more than our military because he claimed our armed forces are ""a disaster.""
+
+Well, I've had the privilege to work closely with our troops and our veterans for many years, including as a senator on the Armed Services Committee, and I know how wrong he is. Our military is a national treasure.
+
+We entrust our commander in chief to make the hardest decisions our nation faces, decisions about war and peace, life and death.
+
+A president should respect the men and women who risk their lives to serve our country — including Captain Khan and the sons of Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, both Marines.
+
+So just ask yourself: Do you really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander in chief?
+
+Donald Trump can't even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign. He loses his cool at the slightest provocation. When he's gotten a tough question from a reporter. When he's challenged in a debate. When he sees a protester at a rally.
+
+Imagine, if you dare, imagine, imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.
+
+I can't put it, I can't put it any better than Jackie Kennedy did after the Cuban Missile Crisis. She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started, not by big men with self-control and restraint, but by little men — the ones moved by fear and pride.
+
+America's strength doesn't come from lashing out. It relies on smarts, judgment, cool resolve, and the precise and strategic application of power. And that's the kind of commander in chief I pledge to be.
+
+And if we're serious about keeping our country safe, we also can't afford to have a president who's in the pocket of the gun lobby.
+
+I'm not here to repeal the Second Amendment. I'm not here to take away your guns. I just don't want you to be shot by someone who shouldn't have a gun in the first place.
+
+We will work tirelessly with responsible gun owners to pass common-sense reforms and keep guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists and all others who would do us harm.
+
+You know, for decades, people have said this issue was too hard to solve and the politics too hot to touch. But I ask you: How can we just stand by and do nothing?
+
+You heard, you saw, family members of people killed by gun violence on this stage.
+
+You heard, you saw, family members of police officers killed in the line of duty because they were outgunned by criminals.
+
+I refuse to believe we can't find common ground here.
+
+We have to heal the divides in our country. Not just on guns. But on race. Immigration. And more.
+
+And that starts with listening, listening to each other. Trying, as best we can, to walk in each other's shoes.
+
+So let's put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism, and are made to feel like their lives are disposable.
+
+Let's put ourselves in the shoes of police officers, kissing their kids and spouses goodbye every day, heading off to do a dangerous and necessary job.
+
+We will reform our criminal justice system from end to end and rebuild trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.
+
+And we will defend, we will defend all our rights — civil rights, human rights and voting rights, women's rights and workers' rights, LGBT rights and the rights of people with disabilities!
+
+And we will stand up against mean and divisive rhetoric wherever it comes from.
+
+You know, for the past year, many people made the mistake of laughing off Donald Trump's comments — excusing him as an entertainer just putting on a show.
+
+They thought he couldn't possibly mean all the horrible things he says — like when he called women ""pigs."" Or said that an American judge couldn't be fair because of his Mexican heritage.
+
+Or when he mocks and mimics a reporter with a disability. Or insults prisoners of war like John McCain — a true hero and patriot who deserves our respect.
+
+Now, at first, at first, I admit, I couldn't believe he meant it either. It was just too hard to fathom — that someone who wants to lead our nation could say those things. Could be like that.
+
+But here's the sad truth: There is no other Donald Trump. This is it.
+
+And in the end, it comes down to what Donald Trump doesn't get: that America is great — because America is good.
+
+So enough with the bigotry and bombast. Donald Trump's not offering real change.
+
+He's offering empty promises. And what are we offering? A bold agenda to improve the lives of people across our country — to keep you safe, to get you good jobs, and to give your kids the opportunities they deserve.
+
+The choice is clear, my friends.
+
+Every generation of Americans has come together to make our country freer, fairer and stronger.
+
+None of us ever have or can do it alone.
+
+I know that at a time when so much seems to be pulling us apart, it can be hard to imagine how we'll ever pull together.
+
+But I'm here to tell you tonight — progress is possible.
+
+I know, I know because I've seen it in the lives of people across America who get knocked down and get right back up.
+
+And I know it, I know it from my own life. More than a few times, I've had to pick myself up and get back in the game.
+
+Like so much else in my life, I got this from my mother too. She never let me back down from any challenge. When I tried to hide from a neighborhood bully, she literally blocked the door. ""Go back out there,"" she said.
+
+And she was right. You have to stand up to bullies.
+
+You have to keep working to make things better, even when the odds are long and the opposition is fierce.
+
+We lost our mother a few years ago, but I miss her every day. And I still hear her voice urging me to keep working, keep fighting for right, no matter what.
+
+That's what we need to do together as a nation.
+
+Though ""we may not live to see the glory,"" as the song from the musical Hamilton goes, ""let us gladly join the fight.""
+
+Let our legacy be about ""planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.""
+
+That's why we're here ... not just in this hall, but on this Earth.
+
+The Founders showed us that. And so have many others since.
+
+They were drawn together by love of country, and the selfless passion to build something better for all who follow.
+
+That is the story of America. And we begin a new chapter tonight.
+
+Yes, the world is watching what we do.
+
+Yes, America's destiny is ours to choose.
+
+So let's be stronger together, my fellow Americans.
+
+Let's look to the future with courage and confidence.
+
+Let's build a better tomorrow for our beloved children and our beloved country.
+
+And when we do, America will be greater than ever.
+
+Thank you, and may God bless you and the United States of America!",REAL
+9756,BUSTED: Clinton Foundation Directly Tied To Plot To Steal Election,"BUSTED: Clinton Foundation Directly Tied To Plot To Steal Election Posted on October 27, 2016 by Prissy Holly in Politics Share This 
+Ever since early voting began, numerous reports are claiming that the electronic voting machines are rigged, as votes for Donald Trump are automatically switched to Hillary Clinton. We’ve all begun to suspect that Hillary is behind the scam, and now, we have further proof that Democrats are the ones tampering with these machines as part of their intricate plan to steal the election. 
+We recently reported how Hillary’s evil billionaire funder George Soros owns the voting machines in 16 key states, which immediately set off warning bells nationwide. Disturbingly, the massive fraud taking place is not just confined to those 16 areas, as another crooked player in Hillary’s election-stealing plot has just been revealed. 
+In a bombshell just unearthed by independent researcher Micro Spooky Leaks , A Canadian company by the name of Dominion Voting provides the voting machines to 600 jurisdictions in 22 states and is directly linked to the Clinton Foundation as one of their massive donors. 
+On their homepage, the company alludes to how they help rig elections, stating “ we strive to change elections for the better!” which is a chilling statement considering they supply 50% of the electronic voting machines on the U.S. voting market. 
+Right after this startling information was revealed, however, it appears as though Democrats immediately began white-washing the information, as the link to the statement on the Wikipedia page that corroborated the bombshell information was mysteriously removed. 
+Hillary has played dirty for years, and it appears as though her antics aren’t stopping now. After murdering many people close to exposing her scandals as a way to prevent them from ruining her presidential bid, the only thing left now is to steal the election through massive voter fraud. 
+The picture at this point is becoming bleak. There’s no doubt that Donald Trump can defeat Hillary, as evidenced by his early lead in many historically blue states, and the recent bombshell that Hillary’s lead across many polls is completely fake. 
+However, fighting back against electronic voting machines that have been calibrated by Hillary operatives to switch votes from Republican to Democrat will be extremely difficult. The only thing we can do at this point is demand a paper ballot when we vote. Dominion Voting machines that will be used in 22 states 
+We are coming down to the wire here. Every day, more information surfaces on Hillary and the Democrats’ crooked scheme to steal the election. Continue to share stories like this and help fight back and spread the information. 
+Knowledge is power, and with the ability to instantly share information with the internet, we can help expose what’s going on by constantly barraging our clueless friends and family members with the truth.",FAKE
+2305,Connecticut Becomes First State To Boycott Indiana Over LGBT Discrimination Law,"WASHINGTON -- Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy (D) will sign an executive order on Monday barring state-funded travel to Indiana because of the state's new law that could allow businesses to turn away gay and lesbian customers for religious reasons.
+
+Malloy's move would make Connecticut the first state to boycott Indiana over its Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Gov. Mike Pence (R) quietly signed into law last week. The law allows businesses in the state to cite religious beliefs as a legal defense. Opponents fear it offers legal protection for businesses to refuse service to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
+
+Two cities, San Francisco and Seattle, have imposed similar bans in response to the law. Businesses have also retaliated. Angie's List is pulling a campus expansion project in Indianapolis, and the CEO of Salesforce, a $4 billion software corporation, announced plans to ""dramatically reduce our investment"" in the state because of the law.
+
+Twenty states have RFRA laws, but Indiana's law is substantially different. While other state RFRAs apply to disputes between a person and a government, Indiana's law goes further and applies to disputes between private citizens. That means, for example, a business owner could use the law to justify discrimination against customers who might otherwise be protected under law.
+
+The Indiana law could result in ""employers, landlords, small business owners, or corporations, taking the law into their own hands and acting in ways that violate generally applicable laws on the grounds that they have a religious justification for doing so,"" reads their letter. ""Members of the public will then be asked to bear the cost of their employer's, their landlord's, their local shopkeeper's, or a police officer's private religious beliefs.""
+
+That's in sharp contrast to states like Connecticut, which has an RFRA but one that pertains only to religious institutions, not private establishments. And unlike some other states, Connecticut also doesn't permit discrimination based on sexual orientation in any private establishment or institution.
+
+Before signing the order, he called the Indiana law ""disturbing and outright discriminatory,"" and said the National Collegiate Athletic Association should relocate its Final Four tournament from Indiana to another state. Those games are set to begin later this week.
+
+""I think that would be a wise choice for them to do if that's possible,"" said Malloy. ""I'll leave it up to them to make those decisions.""
+
+The NCAA president Mark Emmert has said he is ""surprised and disappointed"" by Indiana's law, and that he is waiting for some kind of clarification to the law, or an outright repeal, before deciding whether to keep holding sporting events in the state.
+
+Malloy said his executive order allows for any of the state's current contractual obligations with Indiana to play out, but said he doesn't plan to enter into any new ones.
+
+""Somebody's got to stand up to this kind of bigotry and I'm prepared to do it,"" he said.",REAL
+2228,Scott Walker Confronts Doubts About His Grasp of Foreign Policy,"Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker confronted doubts about his foreign-policy acumen during remarks Saturday to a largely sympathetic audience.
+
+At the end of a 45-minute discussion with wealthy conservatives, the moderator referred to complaints that Mr. Walker was “not prepared to speak about foreign policy” at a recent donor meeting in New York, and asked him what he was doing to bone up on the topic.",REAL
+3008,Iran carries out new ballistic missile test,"Iran successfully test-fired a medium-range ballistic missile capable of striking U.S. forces in the region as well as Israel, the third such test since the nuclear agreement with Western nations took effect in January, multiple defense officials confirmed to Fox News.
+
+The rogue nation conducted the test in defiance of a United Nations resolution that calls on Iran to cease work on its ballistic missile program.
+
+“Iran has to abide by U.N. resolutions with regard to ballistic missiles tests, and if they have violated or not been consistent with those resolutions, that clearly would be a concern for us,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.
+
+Any ballistic missile launch by Iran is tracked by U.S. military spy satellites which pick up the flash during launch. This case was no different, according to officials.
+
+Gen. Ali Abdollahi, deputy chief of the armed forces' headquarters, said the latest missile tested is very accurate, within 8 meters. ""Eight meters means nothing, it means it's without any error,"" he said. He did not elaborate.
+
+In March, Iran test-fired two ballistic missiles -- one emblazoned with the phrase ""Israel must be wiped out"" in Hebrew -- that set off an international outcry.
+
+Since December, Iran has shipped out its low-enriched uranium, disabled its heavy water reactor in Arak, and weeks ago sold more than $8 million worth of heavy water to the U.S. in compliance with the nuclear deal. However, Iran has ignored separate U.N. resolutions barring the Islamic republic from ballistic missile tests. Fox News was first to report a secret Iranian ballistic missile launch in November.
+
+The test-firing was carried out two weeks ago, Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted Abdollahi as saying. Tasnim is close to the country's powerful Revolutionary Guard, which is in charge of Iranian ballistic missiles program.
+
+The agency said the missile has a range of 1,250 miles -- enough to reach much of the Middle East. Iranian military commanders have described them as a strategic asset and a strong deterrent, capable of hitting U.S. bases or Israel in the event of a strike on Iran.
+
+Analysts say Iran is likely seeking to demonstrate it is making progress with its ballistic program, despite scaling back on the nuclear program following the deal that led to the lifting of international sanction on Tehran.
+
+Last month, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the Guard's airspace division, said a new, upgraded version of the Sajjil -- a solid fuel high-speed missile with a range of 1,200 miles that was first tested in 2008 -- would soon be ready.
+
+But it was not immediately clear if the missile Abdollahi referred to was the new Sajjil.
+
+The landmark deal does not include provisions against missile launches and when it came into effect on Jan. 16, the Security Council lifted most U.N. sanctions against Tehran, including a ban it had imposed in 2010 on Iran testing missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
+
+To deal with the restrictions in the nuclear agreement, the council adopted a resolution last July, which only ""calls on"" Iran not to carry out such tests.
+
+Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6851,Assange: Donald Trump Won’t Be Allowed to Win – Clinton & ISIS Funded by Same Interests,"
+In an excerpt of a John Pilger Special interview, Julian Assange says that emails released by Wikileaks show that Hillary Clinton is intentionally misguiding voters about the degree to which US allies are supporting ISIS, and that Donald Trump will not be allowed into the oval office.
+Assange explains that the same financial interests funding ISIS are funding Clinton. He references a 2014 email from John Podesta to Clinton, in which we find the following:
+While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.
+
+“I think this is the most significant email in the whole collection,” said Assange. “All serious analysts know, and even the US government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS and funding ISIS, but the dodge has always been that it is some ‘rogue’ princes using their oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that it is the government of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”
+Pilger asked Assange about the possibility that Trump would steal the election with the help of Russia, as many in the Democratic party claim.
+Assange thinks that this is highly unlikely, but not because he is unpopular. “My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them establishment,” he explained.
+Assange says that Hillary is the establishment pick. “Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.” Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by The Daily Sheeple of www.TheDailySheeple.com . 
+This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.TheDailySheeple.com. ",FAKE
+3872,Why Joe Biden can't get no respect,"On Monday, I made the case that Al Gore should run for president. But there's another obvious contender out there, too: Joe Biden.
+
+Over at Yahoo, Matt Bai makes the case for Biden. ""Biden,"" he writes, ""is a better candidate than most pundits have ever given him credit for. Yeah, he's sloppy and meandering and says some nutty stuff. But that's all part of being genuine and three-dimensional, which may be the most valuable trait in modern politics and not a bad contrast to Clinton's robotic discipline.""
+
+And Biden's certainly got the resume. When President Barack Obama wanted to make sure stimulus money didn't disappear to fraud, he turned to Biden — ""nobody messes with Joe,"" he said — and Biden succeeded. When the White House wanted to avoid the fiscal cliff, it was Biden who closed the deal with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. When Obama flubbed the first debate against Mitt Romney, it was Biden who restored the ticket's mojo by bullying his way past Rep. Paul Ryan. When the Democrats held their 2012 convention, it was Biden's speech that pulled the highest ratings — beating both Bill Clinton and Obama.
+
+Biden's most off-the-reservation moment, meanwhile, is the kind of thing that should help him in 2016. He pushed the Obama administration to embrace gay marriage before it was quite ready. At the time, it looked like a gaffe. Now it looks prescient.
+
+And yet, according to a recent Marist poll, Biden is running 47 points behind Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016 — and only one point ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. A quick scan of RealClearPolitics' round-up of Democratic primary polls shows that's no outlier.
+
+It's not like Biden has been out of the public eye for the last seven years. So why, if he's such a good politician, doesn't he command more support in the Democratic Party?
+
+Here's my guess: there's a cultural gap between Biden and the party he seeks to represent. Biden is an old-school, white, male politician in a party that's increasingly young, multicultural, and female. Biden's gaffes matter because they tend to reinforce the perception among Democrats that he belongs to a different era.
+
+When Biden calls shady lenders ""Shylocks,"" or says Obama is ""the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,"" he ends up coming off as, in New York Magazine words, ""your accidentally racist grandma."" That leaves Biden facing something more toxic than opposition: condescension.
+
+What I wrote of Biden in January 2013 is still true today, I think. ""In the continuing drama that is the Obama presidency, Biden often appears as comic relief. He's the zany neighbor, the adorable uncle. As a result, his presidential ambitions, which burn brightly even today, have mostly been laughed off. Somehow, the sitting vice president of the United States, the former chairman of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, a man who's on a nickname basis with many of the world's most powerful leaders, is seen in many quarters as lacking the gravitas to be president.""
+
+There is much that's weird about this. Hillary Clinton is a powerful candidate, but there's nothing about the last few months that makes her look invulnerable. She's shown real rust in interviews, pissed off liberals, and found herself in an email scandal.
+
+But while Biden isn't much older than Clinton, she's somehow been more adept at signaling cultural affinity with young Democrats than he's been (though she's occasionally struggled too, most notably in her interview with Terry Gross on gay marriage). She also has a connection to female voters he can't touch. Even her memes are better.
+
+I don't know exactly how Biden fixes this or even if he can. Clinton isn't inevitable, and Biden should, by all rights, pose a real threat to her. But, though Biden's always been known as a great speaker, he needs to learn to talk to a different party than the one he grew up in.",REAL
+1884,"Come on, Paul Ryan must be running in 2016, right? Right?","The Washington game now requires that any unindicted politician with a bit of ambition — even 75-year-old Jerry Brown — let it be known that he is thinking about maybe, just possibly running for president.
+
+But here’s the flip side: the media culture now demands to know whether these pols are quietly plotting a White House bid — and treats it as sort of strange if the answer is no.
+
+What do you mean you’re not feverishly plotting a presidential bid three years before the next election? Is there something wrong with you?
+
+I guess we don’t like to take no for an answer.
+
+Take Paul Ryan. A natural leader of the conservative movement. The Republican VP nominee last year. A man who can translate Beltway jargon into Main Street concerns.
+
+The Wisconsin congressman is in the spotlight because he just hammered out a budget agreement with Patty Murray that passed the Senate yesterday with 64 votes—three fewer than supported a cloture vote—after winning bipartisan approval in the House. The modest deal is noteworthy mainly because it temporarily ends the Washington gridlock and threats of shutdown and default. But it also brought sniping from more militant conservatives who see Ryan as selling out to the Democrats.
+
+The dustup triggered a spate of Whither Paul Ryan pieces in the press.  Is he running? Is he not running? It’s 2013 already — we have to know!
+
+“In interviews The Hill conducted with more than two dozen House Republicans from across the ideological spectrum over the last couple of weeks, many of Ryan’s colleagues said they are doubtful he will run for president in 2016. Most believe that concerns for his young family will lead him to lay claim to the job he’s always wanted: chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.”
+
+Ryan wants to be a Hill poohbah and not move into the White House.
+
+“Ryan on Tuesday told The Wall Street Journal that he plans to lead the Ways and Means Committee in the next Congress. Ryan and his wife Janna have three children, and his friends say that his concern about the hardship of an 18-month presidential campaign is a genuine factor in his consideration.”
+
+This is the human factor that journalists rarely pause to consider. Running for president is a meat grinder that chews people up, and Ryan got a taste of that as Mitt Romney’s running mate.
+
+I don’t know whether Ryan  is being coy, or whether, with the highest positive rating among Iowa Republicans, he’ll change his mind and jump into the race. But I do think the press ought to take him at his word until there’s evidence to the contrary.
+
+I guess it wasn’t a big story when John Podesta compared the Republicans to a suicide cult.
+
+But now that Podesta is joining President Obama’s inner circle, Politico is asking: “Can John Podesta Save Him?” (Boy, that’s a tall order.)
+
+In its profile of Podesta, who is stepping down as head of the Center for American Progress, this incendiary quote was slipped into the narrative without comment.
+
+White House officials, said Podesta, “need to focus on executive action given that they are facing a second term against a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of Congress.”
+
+Podesta was comparing John Boehner to Jim Jones, who led his followers to kill themselves? Didn’t that set off any alarm bells?
+
+But the quote caused a stir now that the former Bill Clinton chief of staff is joining the White House, and he tweeted an apology: “In an old interview, my snark got in front of my judgment. I apologize to Speaker Boehner, whom I have always respected.”
+
+Click for more from Media Buzz.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+4239,Why Bernie Sanders needs to start winning big states — big,"Six days ago, Bernie Sanders pulled off one of the great upsets in modern politics — surging from more than 20 points behind in the polls to edge out Hillary Clinton and win Michigan’s Democratic presidential primary.
+
+It was remarkable! It was historic! And it netted him four more delegates than Clinton in the state. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Clinton won with more than 80 percent of the vote — and gained 28 more delegates than Sanders.
+
+On the best night of the Sanders campaign to date, he fell 24 more delegates behind Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination.
+
+That increasingly challenging math is what Sanders must confront Tuesday as voters in several large states — including Florida, Illinois and Ohio — go to the polls.
+
+[Clinton leads Sanders by more than 2 to 1 in Florida, Post-Univision poll finds]
+
+As of today, Clinton has 1,231 delegates to Sanders’s 576 — a lead of 655. That means that Clinton has 51.7 percent of the 2,383 delegates she needs to become the Democratic Party’s nominee.
+
+Subtract superdelegates — Clinton is dominating even among this group of elected officials and party luminaries — and she has 766 delegates to Sanders’s 551, a margin of 215. (Worth noting: That is a wider lead than the margin by which Clinton ever trailed then-Sen. Barack Obama in the long slog of the 2008 primary race.)
+
+That lead may not seem momentous. After all, almost 3,000 delegates are yet to be allocated in the primaries and caucuses to come. The problem for Sanders is that Democrats allocate their delegates proportionally in every state — meaning that between now and when the process ends June 7, there is no state where Clinton will be shut out.
+
+Winning, then, is not enough for Sanders. He has to win by a lot to make up any real ground.
+
+Clinton has already done that. Take, for example, Alabama. She won there March 1 by 59 points and gained 38 more delegates than Sanders. Or Georgia on that same day, beating Sanders by 43 points and netting 55 delegates. Or the aforementioned Mississippi, where Clinton’s 66-point win translated to a net gain of 28 delegates.
+
+[Southern states help Clinton extend her lead over Sanders]
+
+Sanders’s one big win came in New Hampshire’s primary. But his 22-point margin translated to a net delegate gain of zero because six superdelegates pledged to Clinton, bringing her delegate gain up to match his. Similarly, in the Colorado caucuses, Sanders won by 19 points but the superdelegate math meant the candidates each took 38 delegates.
+
+Look at the next set of big contests, to be held Tuesday. Four states have more than 100 delegates to give out: Florida (246), Illinois (182), Ohio (160) and North Carolina (121).
+
+Polling released Sunday morning suggests that Sanders has a big hill to climb. Clinton leads the senator 61 percent to 34 percent in Florida and has an edge of 58 percent to 38 percent in Ohio, according to NBC- Marist surveys. The race in Illinois, according to NBC-Marist, is closer, with Clinton at 51 percent and Sanders at 45 percent.
+
+But wait, you say. Polling in Michigan had Sanders down 20 points and he won there. So this polling could be wrong, too.
+
+Sure. It could. The problem for Sanders is this: Let’s say each of the NBC-Marist surveys is off by 20 points in Clinton’s favor. (Note that this is a thought experiment. I very much doubt a credible pollster such as this one would be off by even close to that amount.) That would mean Sanders loses Florida by single digits, essentially ties Clinton in Ohio and wins Illinois by 15 points. The delegate allocation from that trio of results? It would almost certainly favor Clinton.
+
+Sanders is in a position where winning states is not close to enough if he wants to be the party’s nominee. He needs to start winning big states by big margins. As in winning Illinois or Florida by 30 or 40 points.
+
+That seems very unlikely either Tuesday or beyond. If past votes are any guide, it will be a tough road for Sanders. There have been seven election nights in the race so far; Clinton has netted delegates in six of them, while the two candidates fought to a draw in the seventh (New Hampshire).
+
+None of this means that Sanders can’t — and won’t — keep running. Winning states matters in terms of perception and keeps the wolves from his door. But winning states and emboldening your supporters aren’t the same as taking concrete steps to reduce or eliminate Clinton’s delegate lead.
+
+That looks to be a near-impossible task for Sanders unless the numbers in the states to come start changing quickly.",REAL
+3282,Leaked: What’s in Obama’s trade deal,"A recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal would give U.S. pharmaceutical firms unprecedented protections against competition from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law.
+
+POLITICO has obtained a draft copy of TPP’s intellectual property chapter as it stood on May 11, at the start of the latest negotiating round in Guam. While U.S. trade officials would not confirm the authenticity of the document, they downplayed its importance, emphasizing that the terms of the deal are likely to change significantly as the talks enter their final stages. Those terms are still secret, but the public will get to see them once the twelve TPP nations reach a final agreement and President Obama seeks congressional approval.
+
+Still, the draft chapter will provide ammunition for critics who have warned that TPP’s protections for pharmaceutical companies could dump trillions of dollars of additional health care costs on patients, businesses and governments around the Pacific Rim. The highly technical 90-page document, cluttered with objections from other TPP nations, shows that U.S. negotiators have fought aggressively and, at least until Guam, successfully on behalf of Big Pharma.
+
+The draft text includes provisions that could make it extremely tough for generics to challenge brand-name pharmaceuticals abroad. Those provisions could also help block copycats from selling cheaper versions of the expensive cutting-edge drugs known as “biologics” inside the U.S., restricting treatment for American patients while jacking up Medicare and Medicaid costs for American taxpayers.
+
+“There’s very little distance between what Pharma wants and what the U.S. is demanding,” said Rohit Malpini, director of policy for Doctors Without Borders.
+
+Throughout the TPP talks, the Obama administration has pledged to balance the goals of fostering innovation in the drug industry, which means allowing higher profits, and promoting wider access to valuable medicines, which means keeping prices down. U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman has pointed out that pharmaceutical companies often have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to get a new drug to market, which they would have little incentive to do without strong protections for the patented product. But Froman has also recognized the value of allowing much cheaper generic drugs to enter the market after those brand-name patents expire. In the U.S., generics now comprise more than five-sixths of all prescription drugs, but only about one-quarter of drug costs.
+
+Advocates for the global poor, senior citizens, labor unions and consumers as well as the generics industry have accused the administration of abandoning that balance, pushing a pharmaceutical-company agenda at the expense of patients and taxpayers. One critic, hoping to illustrate the point and rally opposition to TPP in Congress, gave POLITICO the draft chapter, which was labeled “This Document Contains TPP CONFIDENTIAL Information” on every page.
+
+U.S. officials said the key point to remember about trade deals is that no provision is ever final until the entire deal is final—and that major compromises tend to happen at the very end of the negotiations. They expect the real horse-trading to begin now that Obama has signed “fast-track” legislation requiring Congress to pass or reject TPP without amendments.
+
+“The negotiations on intellectual property are complex and continually evolving,” said Trevor Kincaid, a spokesman for Froman. “On pharmaceutical products, we are working closely with stakeholders, Congress, and partner countries to develop an approach that aims to make affordable life-saving medicine more widely available while creating incentives for the development of new treatments and cures. Striking this important balance is at the heart of our work.”
+
+The draft chapter covers software, music and other intellectual property issues as well, but its most controversial language involves the rights of drug companies. The text reveals disputes between the U.S. (often with support from Japan) and its TPP partners over a variety of issues—what patents can cover, when and how long they can be extended, how long pharmaceutical companies can keep their clinical data private, and much more. On every issue, the U.S. sided with drug companies in favor of stricter intellectual property protections.
+
+Some of the most contentious provisions involve “patent linkage,” which would prevent regulators in TPP nations from approving generic drugs whenever there are any unresolved patent issues. The TPP draft would make this linkage mandatory, which could help drug companies fend off generics just by claiming an infringement. The Obama administration often describes TPP as the most progressive free-trade deal in history, citing its compliance with the tough labor and environment protections enshrined in the so-called “May 10 Agreement” of 2007, which set a framework for several trade deals at the time. But mandatory linkage seems to be a departure from the May 10 pharmaceutical provisions.
+
+In an April 15 letter to Froman, Heather Bresch, the CEO of the generic drug company Mylan, warned that mandatory patent linkage would be “a recipe for indefinite evergreening of pharmaceutical monopolies,” leading to the automatic rejection of generic applications. The U.S. already has mandatory linkage, but most other TPP countries do not, and Bresch argued that U.S. law includes a number of safeguards and incentives for generic companies that have not made it into TPP.
+
+“With all due respect, the USTR has…cherry-picked the single provision designed to block generic entry to the market,” Bresch wrote.
+
+Generics are thriving in the U.S. despite linkage, saving Americans an estimated $239 billion on drugs in 2013. But the U.S. is the world’s largest market, and advocates fear that generic manufacturers may not take on the risk and expense of litigation in smaller markets if TPP tilts the playing field against them. One generics manufacturer, Hospira, reportedly testified at a TPP forum in Melbourne, Australia, that it would not launch generics outside the U.S. in markets with linkage.
+
+The opponents are also worried about the treaty’s effect on the U.S. market, because its draft language would extend mandatory patent linkage to biologics, the next big thing in the pharmaceutical world. Biologics can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for patients with illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis B and cancer, and the first knockoffs have not yet reached pharmacies. The critics say that extending linkage to biologics—which can have hundreds of patents—would help insulate them from competition forever.
+
+“It would be a dramatic departure from U.S. law, and it would put a real crimp in the ability of less expensive drugs to get to market,” said K.J. Hertz, a lobbyist for AARP. “People are going to look at this very closely in Congress.”
+
+Drug companies are already pushing for TPP to guarantee them 12 years of exclusivity for their data regarding biologics, although the draft text suggests the other TPP nations have not agreed. Jay Taylor, vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said it’s crucial for TPP to protect the intellectual property that emerges from years of expensive research, so that drug companies can continue to develop new medicines for patients around the world.
+
+“These innovations could be severely hindered if IP protections are scaled back,” Taylor said. “This is especially important in the area of biologic medicines, which could hold the key to unlocking treatments for diseases that have thwarted researchers for years.”
+
+U.S. officials would not discuss the status of the TPP talks. But they suggested the May 10 Agreement did include a milder form of linkage, although it didn’t prevent regulators from approving generics mired in patent disputes.  They also believe a 2009 U.S. law included a form of linkage for biologics, although again, that law's dispute resolution process for patent issues was not as prescriptive as the TPP draft. And they cautioned that any pre-Guam draft would not reflect recent negotiations over “transition periods” that would delay the stricter patent standards in developing countries like Vietnam.
+
+In any case, Kincaid said U.S. negotiators are determined to strike a balance between innovation and access in the final product.
+
+“While this is our touchstone, the negotiations are still very much in process, and the details of a final outcome cannot yet be forecasted,” he said.
+
+But Malpani of Doctors Without Borders said U.S. negotiators have basically functioned as drug lobbyists. The TPP countries have 40 percent of global economic output, and the deal is widely seen as establishing new benchmarks for some of the most complex areas of global business. Malpani fears it could set a precedent that crushes the generic drug industry under a mountain of regulation and litigation.
+
+“We consider this the worst-ever agreement in terms of access to medicine,” he said. “It would create higher drug prices around the world—and in the U.S., too.
+
+",REAL
+9239,"Michael Moore admits no women ever melted the ice caps, bombs American history","  Posted at 11:03   
+Michael Moore was super excited to learn that Republicans were driving traffic to his film , “Trumpland,” by passing around on social media a four-minute clip, even though he claims it was doctored. That’s not cool — if anyone’s going to doctor the footage in a Michael Moore movie, its going to be Michael Moore. 
+Obviously Moore’s not a Donald Trump fan, and like many other liberals this weekend, he’s not an Anthony Weiner fan. Setting aside Judicial Watch’s lawsuit against the State Department, Hillary Clinton almost looked to be in the clear a few months back, but now her email shenanigans have returned to the front pages, all because of Weiner’s compulsion to send vulgar selfies online. Unbelievable that once again Hillary has to suffer the abuse of men & their dickish behavior. Bubba, Weiner, Trump, Newt, Comey. Sick of it. 
+— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) October 29, 2016 
+What did Bill Clinton do that was so wrong? Hillary long ago established that he was the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy. And Weiner? Sure, be angry at him for the way he’s treated his wife and the women he’s sexted, but there would be no sensitive emails on his laptop if Hillary and company had simply used the secure government email accounts provided to them. 
+Moore was just getting started on his misandrist rant, and when he’s on a roll, it’s best to step away until he’s finished it. The day can't come soon enough when women will take charge. Public policy will not be decided by dick pix, Tic Tacs, grab-assers or the GOP. 
+— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) October 29, 2016 No women ever invented an atomic bomb, built a smoke stack, initiated a Holocaust, melted the polar ice caps or organized a school shooting. 
+— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) October 29, 2016 @MMFlint wowwww? Women can't do ANYTHING…… 
+— Nitro Rad (@NitroRad) October 29, 2016 
+What about all those soccer moms tooling around in minivans and SUVs? The ones manufactured in Michigan, by union workers, in factories with smokestacks? And don’t be so quick to count out women   atomic bomb, either. @MMFlint You might to do a little reading on that atom bomb thingie. You could not be more wrong. 
+— Terry O' (@IrishTea1) October 29, 2016 @MMFlint lots of women were on the Manhattan Project. You just demeaned them and belittled their efforts to support a warmonger… 
+— Charlie Reed (@CharlieReed2004) October 29, 2016 RT @MMFlint "" No women ever invented an atomic bomb"" 
+Leona Woods among others worked on the Manhattan Project. https://t.co/fay4GNLAzy",FAKE
+4532,Someone Isn't Telling The Truth About Freddie Gray's Death,"By now, everybody knows the injuries that contributed to Freddie Gray's death. Baltimore authorities and representatives for Gray’s family agree that the 25-year-old sustained fatal trauma to his neck and spine at some point while in police custody following his arrest on April 12. Although a full autopsy hasn't yet been released, the family has said that Gray’s spine was nearly severed, and that his doctors had attempted to repair three fractured neck vertebrae and a crushed voice box. Last week, The Baltimore Sun spoke to medical experts who said that Gray's injuries were, in the paper's words, comparable to those seen in “victims of high-speed crashes.”
+
+While this may end up being a significant detail of the investigation, much is still unclear about the circumstances of Gray's death, including how Gray's head might have hit the wall of the van hard enough to kill him. Over the past few weeks, Baltimore police have provided few answers about how Gray went from seemingly healthy enough to flee police on the morning of April 12 to dead on April 19 after a week in a coma. On Wednesday, April 29, hours after stating that they would not give the public their forthcoming internal report on Gray's death, police leaked a different document to The Washington Post. It was the first new piece of information from police in nearly a week. But instead of clarity, it offered more confusion.
+
+In its reporting of the incident, The Baltimore Sun found witnesses who refuted Miller's account to the court. In an April 25 article, Sun reporter Kevin Rector wrote: “Kevin Moore, a 28-year-old friend of Gray's from Gilmor Homes, said he rushed outside when he heard Gray was being arrested and saw him ‘screaming for his life’ with his face planted on the ground. One officer had his knee on Gray's neck, Moore said, and another was bending his legs backward. ‘They had him folded up like he was a crab or a piece of origami,’ Moore said. ‘He was all bent up.’"" Others claimed to have seen officers beating Gray with batons.
+
+At one point during the arrest, according to the police commissioner, an officer pulled out a stun gun. Moore claimed to have seen this as well. According to the Sun, police investigators failed to obtain footage from a convenience store surveillance camera that may have captured the incident more clearly. Instead, the officers found that the moment in question had been taped over by the time they got there. This was a common theme throughout the investigation, as officers reportedly failed to obtain footage from other cameras that may have recorded key moments in Gray's subsequent ride to the police station.
+
+A third perspective on Gray's arrest was added to the mix on Wednesday, when CNN interviewed an anonymous relative of one of the arresting officers. The woman said the officer believes Gray ""was injured outside the paddy wagon,"" though she expressed personal concern that ""six officers are going to be punished behind something that maybe one or two or even three officers may have done to Freddie Gray.""
+
+This is the critical question, and there is still no clear answer. Witness video shows Gray screaming at the time he was loaded into the vehicle. According to the official police timeline, the van made its first stop four minutes later so that officers could shackle an ""irate"" Gray. He was removed from the van and was placed in leg irons.
+
+Police and witnesses then agree that Gray was returned to the van in both hand and leg restraints. Officers have admitted they didn't buckle Gray's seat belt, a violation of police department policy that has led to suggestions that Gray may have been the victim of a ""rough ride"" -- an illegal but not uncommon technique in which officers drive vans in such a way as to cause injury to detained passengers.
+
+At 8:59 a.m., about 15 minutes after Gray was first put in the van, the vehicle stopped for a third time after the driver asked an officer to perform a check on Gray. This had previously been explained as the second stop, and exactly what happened there was reportedly a key part of the investigation. Batts has said that responding officers had to ""pick [Gray] up off the floor and place him on the seat,"" and that Gray requested a medic at this time. He was ignored again.
+
+The fourth and final stop was made minutes later to pick up another prisoner. At this point, it's unclear what state Gray was in. Davis has suggested that Gray was again found on the floor, but responsive enough to make another request for a medic. If this request was indeed made, it was evidently denied. Other reports suggest that Gray may have already lost consciousness when this second person was picked up.
+
+Details of Allen's account conflict with earlier reports on Gray's time in the van, including reports from police officials themselves. According to the Post, Allen told investigators that Gray was “banging against the walls” and ""intentionally trying to injure himself.” But Allen later told WBAL: ""When I got in the van, I didn't hear nothing. It was a smooth ride. We went straight to the police station. All I heard was a little banging for about four seconds. I just heard little banging, just little banging.""",REAL
+4130,Prison employee pleaded not guilty to aiding escape of two murderers,"The female prison employee at the center of an investigation into the escape of two killers pleaded not guilty Friday night to helping them flee the maximum security facility.
+
+Prison tailor shop instructor Joyce Mitchell, 51, was arraigned on a felony charge of promoting prison contraband and misdemeanor count of criminal facilitation, authorities said.
+
+Mitchell is accused of aiding in the escape of inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt from the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York last week.
+
+She entered the court room with her hands cuffed in front of her, clad jeans and a lime green top looking terrified. She did not speak. She was ordered held in jail on $100,000 cash bail or $200,000 bond on felony county and is due back in court Monday morning.
+
+District Attorney Andrew Wylie said earlier Friday the contraband did not include the power tools used by the men as they cut holes in their cell walls and a steam pipe to escape through a manhole last weekend.
+
+Wylie didn't elaborate on the charges Friday as more than 800 officers continued to search for the escapees, concentrating in a rural area around the prison in the Adirondacks near the Canadian border. Earlier residents reported seeing  tow men jumping a stone wall outside Dannemora.
+
+Maj. Charles Guess of the New York State gave a stern warning to the convicts at an evening press conference,
+
+""We're coming for you and will not stop until you are caught,"" he said.
+
+He added that Mitchell's arrest represented ""one large piece of the puzzle in our quest"" to find the men.
+
+Asked about any clues to the escapees' whereabouts, Guess said there was no ""conclusive evidence"" that either had left the area. None of the reports of possible sightings has been confirmed, he added.
+
+""It's day six,"" he said, ""and if they have not escaped the area, you've got to assume they're cold, wet, tired and hungry.""
+
+As to whether they split up, Guess said, ""there's no reason to believe they're not together but we're planning for both eventualities.""
+
+Earlier, Wylie said Mitchell, a supervisor in the prison's tailoring shop, brought ""contraband"" into the prison but he declined to elaborate on what, specifically, she gave the men.
+
+The Albany Times-Union reported late Thursday that Mitchell told New York State Police she gave Matt, 48, and Sweat, 34, access to a cell phone and smuggled tools into the prison.
+
+A police source close to the investigation confirmed to Fox News Friday that Mitchell planned to provide a getaway car for the two convicted murderers but had a change of heart at the last minute. Mitchell instead checked herself into a hospital some 40 miles away from the prison, complaining of panic attacks, according to law enforcement.
+
+Mitchell joined the prison staff in March of 2008 and earned $57,697 a year. She was suspended without pay, effective Friday.
+
+Police, meanwhile, said Friday that two men believed to be the inmates were spotted jumping over a stone wall in the woods in Saranac, a few miles from the prison, the Buffalo News reported. According to the newspaper, a law enforcement officer said he believes he saw the two at 7:30 a.m. Friday and authorities converged on the area.
+
+Colleen Cringle, who lives on Cringle road in Saranac, told the newspaper police were using her home as a staging area to search for the killers.
+
+New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has vowed that state law would come down hard on any prison system employee who crosses the line with inmates.
+
+""If you do it, you will be convicted, and then you'll be on the other side of the prison that you've been policing, and that is not a pleasant place to be,"" Cuomo said. The governor also said investigators are ""talking to several people who may have facilitated the escape.""
+
+The Times-Union also reported that Mitchell had been investigated in recent months by the state corrections department's inspector general after a fellow prison worker complained that she had gotten too close to Sweat and Matt. That investigation did not result in any discipline.
+
+Prison employees and correction officers are prohibited from having relationships with inmates or performing favors for them.
+
+Matt was serving 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnap, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of Matt's 76-year-old former boss, whose body was found in pieces in a river.
+
+Matt and an accomplice stuffed William Rickerson in a car trunk in his pajamas and drove around with him for 27 hours because he wouldn't tell them the location of large sums of money he was believed to have.
+
+According to testimony, Matt bent back the elderly man's fingers until they broke and later snapped Rickerson's neck with his bare hands.
+
+After the killing, Matt fled to Mexico, where he killed a man outside a bar.
+
+Sweat was doing life without parole for his part in the 2002 killing of sheriff's Deputy Kevin Tarsia, who was shot 15 times and run over after discovering Sweat and two accomplices transferring stolen guns between vehicles.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from The Albany Times-Union",REAL
+6815,Culchie Tries To Explain Rules Of 25 One More Time,"0 Add Comment 
+RATHER than relax and play Texas Hold ‘Em with his friends as they had a few cans after a recent night out, hardcore culchie Noel Kennelan desperatley attempted to explain the impenetrable rules of the card game ’25’, which he claims is ‘way better than poker, hi’. 
+25, also known as ‘that culchie game’, involves the dealing of 5 cards to each player and the reveal of a trump card, followed by at least 10 minutes of explaining how the 2 of spades can beat the 9 of diamonds if spades were lead with, and diamonds aren’t trump. 
+Kennelan, 28, made great efforts to explain to the 6 other men around the table of his Dublin flat the baffling rules of ‘stealing’ and ‘reneging’, but in the end had to concede that the game was too complex and the players were too drunk to fully wrap their heads around it. 
+“After the nightclub, back to the house, few cans, the cards come out,” said Kennelan, dealing himself a solemn hand of Patience. 
+“The lads all play poker, but 25 is where it’s at. Way more skill, you can win a hand with nothing if you play it right. But the lads just couldn’t get to grips with the fingers”. 
+Kennelan later went online to see if there were any culchies in the area who were looking to play 25, and is considering setting up a club or something where they can go and drink Smithwicks and play cards and complain about Dublin.",FAKE
+599,Election Day: No Legal Pot In Ohio; Democrats Lose In The South,"Election Day: No Legal Pot In Ohio; Democrats Lose In The South
+
+Tuesday is ""off year"" Election Day in parts of the country. Legalizing marijuana is on the ballot in Ohio, Houston voters will decide on an equal rights ordinance and San Francisco weighs short-term rentals in what's being called the ""Airbnb Initiative.""
+
+Elsewhere, eyes are on governor races in Kentucky and Louisiana, and whether Democrats can make any progress in the South.
+
+Here's a look at some of the races:
+
+Houston voters will decide whether to keep an equal rights ordinance that was approved by the City Council last year. The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — criteria not covered by national anti-discrimination laws. The ordinance is hotly debated, particularly after some opposition ads were released. The ads claim that the ordinance would allow men who identify as women to assault women and young girls in bathrooms.
+
+Hillary Clinton tweeted her support for the ordinance on Oct. 29, writing: ""No one should face discrimination for who they are or who they love — I support efforts for Equality in Houston & beyond. #HERO #YesOnProp1 -H"".
+
+A White House spokesman said that President Obama and Vice President Biden were ""confident that the citizens of Houston will vote in favor of fairness and equality.""
+
+Update from Houston Public Media: Houston's voters strongly rejected the anti-discrimination measure, with about three-fifths of voters opposed.
+
+Republican Matt Bevin and Democrat Jack Conway are running to replace retiring Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat. Although Republicans have aggressively been spending money in the hope of retaining the governor's mansion, Conway has outspent Bevin 4 to 1. This race has been characterized by both candidates accusing each other of lying about their records.
+
+Update from WFPL in Louisville: Conway conceded the race — the returns late Tuesday night showed Bevin winning with about 53 percent of the vote — and Republicans generally performed well in the state.
+
+Louisiana has a gubernatorial election this year but it doesn't work the way you might expect. Louisiana's election system relies on what's called a ""jungle primary."" In a jungle primary, all candidates regardless of party appear on one ballot. If no one wins 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates face each other in a runoff election.
+
+John Bel Edwards, a Democrat and state legislative leader, earned roughly 40 percent of the vote. He now will face Sen. David Vitter, a Republican, in the runoff election on Nov. 21. Vitter has had a tough race so far. His critics have continuously cited his involvement in a 2007 prostitution scandal, in which Vitter's telephone number was found in the records of the so-called D.C. Madam, Deborah Palfrey. Palfrey was accused of running a prostitution ring that made more than $2 million over 13 years.
+
+The ""Clean Elections Initiative"" would increase public funding for candidates to up to $3 million in order to make them more competitive against privately-funded candidates, according to Reuters. The existing law makes up to $2 million available to candidates for state office. The ballot measure would also increase disclosure requirements and increase the penalties for campaign finance violations.
+
+Update from the Portland Press Herald: The measure passed, with 55 percent of the vote as of late Tuesday:
+
+Republican Gov. Phil Bryant is up for reelection and faces opposition from an unlikely candidate — truck driver and political unknown Robert Gray. According to The Associated Press, Gray didn't even tell his closest relatives that he had signed up to campaign for governor. Bryant has spent roughly $2.7 million this year and reportedly has $1.4 million in the bank. Gray has spent about $3,000 on his campaign in the past three months.
+
+Update from Mississippi Public Broadcasting: Gray will presumably be back on the road after losing, 67 percent to 32 percent.
+
+Ohio voters vote on two ballot measures with constitutional amendments that could dramatically change marijuana laws in their state. Issue 3, as one of these two measures is called, would enable landowners or operators of 10 predetermined sites the right to grow commercial marijuana. That's in contradiction to the second measure, Issue 2, which would prohibit monopolies from being enshrined in the state constitution. If both measures pass, there's sure to be lots of confusion.
+
+Update from WCPN in Cleveland: Voters rejected legal and medical marijuana, with two-thirds voting against Issue 3; Issue 2, the measure rejecting the proposed marijuana oligopoly, was passing 54 percent to 46 percent.
+
+San Franciscans heading to the polls Tuesday will get to vote on Proposition F, colloquially known as the ""Airbnb Initiative."" The initiative is a ballot measure that would strengthen regulation on the short-term rental of houses and apartments. While Airbnb is likely the biggest company in that niche market, the Los Angeles Times points out that there are other vacation rental companies that would be affected. Right now, residents can rent out their apartment or home for 90 days in a year. Proposition F would limit that rental period to 75 days. The measure is viewed as an attempt to discourage people from taking units off the housing market and using them as short-term apartment rentals. San Francisco has an acute housing shortage.
+
+Update from KQED in San Francisco: Voters rejected the measure, Proposition F, 55 percent to 45 percent.
+
+Seattle voters will decide on a campaign finance measure that's being touted as a national model for campaign finance reform. Ballot initiative I-122, if passed, would create a public financing model in the city. Every resident would receive a $100 voucher to give to the candidate of their choosing. The measure would also limit election campaign contributions from entities receiving city contracts of $250,000 or more, or from people spending more than $5,000 on lobbying.
+
+Update from KUOW in Seattle: Voters overwhelmingly passed the measure, 60 percent to 40 percent.
+
+All 140 seats of Virginia's General Assembly are up for election today. Republicans currently control the state Senate, 21 seats to 19. Expecting low turnout, both parties have been trying to drive their message home to voters. Republicans are expected to retain their majority in the GA. Democrats hope to take control of the state Senate.
+
+Update from the Richmond Times-Dispatch: Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, and their strong control of the General Assembly.",REAL
+4577,President Trump: A colossal failure for democracy and our terrifying new reality,"It’s impossible to overstate how colossal a fuckup this is. At every level, across both parties, the media, pollsters — all the democratic institutions that are supposed to prevent something like this from happening or at least warn us about it. Donald Trump, a Republican candidate who ran an openly racist campaign, who is as proud a misogynist as you’ll find anywhere, who is manifestly ignorant of public policy, who is brusquely authoritarian, who has little respect or understanding of democratic norms and who embodies every moral failing that’s supposed to disqualify a candidate from higher office, has apparently been elected as the next president of the United States.
+
+The markets are collapsing, the globe is reeling, and nobody can quite explain what the hell happened. But here’s what this failure will mean: The climate, which is warming precipitously, is now guaranteed to continue along that trajectory toward global catastrophe. The millions of people who gained health coverage over the last half of a decade are now at acute risk of being thrown off their insurance plan and left to the unfeeling mercies of insurance underwriters.
+
+Income inequality, already at dangerously high levels, will only grow worse as tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor are pushed through the Republican Congress. Unprecedented GOP obstructionism on Supreme Court nominees has been rewarded in the worst possible way. And the foreign policy of the United States will be run by a bona fide ignoramus.
+
+The man elected to the most powerful office in the land has no idea what to do with it and no concept of its limitations. He attracts the worst people to him, sycophants and power-hungry strivers who will be placed in positions of authority and who will obey the boss’ diktat above anything else. Every democratic norm he gleefully shredded along the way is gone for good. Every thumb in the eye of transparency will now be official policy.
+
+But right now those things are not what I think about when I contemplate life under President Donald Trump. This will sound trite, but primarily I think about my two boys, a 2-year-old and a 4-month-old. I don’t have to explain this to them because neither would understand. But if I were to tell my 2-year-old what is happening, I’d do it in Spanish because both he and his brother have deep Mexican roots that my wife and I want them to embrace and be proud of. It destroys me to know that they, that we live in a country that seems to have chosen as its leader a person who made frenzied racial attacks on my family’s heritage the launch pad for his successful presidential run. I think about the African-Americans, Muslims, Jews, and Latinos in this country who now face life in a country presided over by a candidate who embodies white nationalism and memorably couldn’t bring himself to disavow a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Children of undocumented immigrants who are U.S. citizens by birth have been told by their new president that they’ll be deported. Refugees from Syria who were relocated here to escape war and violence will have another target on their backs. These are the people who will feel the consequences of this failure most acutely. I have one more thing to add: I am sorry. In my capacity as a media figure, I too often treated Trump as a joke, a bumbling incompetent, someone who obviously could not be treated seriously as a legitimate candidate for the presidency. Now I can only think that I was too hidebound by conventional wisdom, too comfortably out of touch to see what was in front of me. I succumbed to the sideshow element of this awful race more times than I can be comfortable with. I own this failure, too.",REAL
+7154,Who had to go :-),"Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
+7757,Raqqa/Mosul: Politicians Fiddle As Middle East Burns,"Written by Daniel McAdams   While Americans were obsessing about tomorrow's election, the Obama Administration launched a serious military escalation in Syria. US Special Forces on the ground and jet fighters in the air are deployed in an operation to take Raqqa from ISIS control. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dunford announced over the weekend that the US and Turkey agreed on a long-term plan for ""seizing, holding and governing"" the Syrian city. Is this the beginning of a US-recognized rival Syrian government, as Benghazi was in Libya? We discuss in today's Liberty Report: Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.",FAKE
+1934,Chris Christie losing home-state donors as Jeb Bush makes inroads,"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is rapidly losing support among some of his most prominent home-state donors and power brokers, who are either hesitant to back him or shifting allegiance to former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
+
+Bush’s aggressive moves to lock up the Republican Party’s premier fundraisers threaten to undercut the Garden State governor before his expected campaign can get off the ground, while raising questions about how robust of a network of support Christie will be able to muster.
+
+Bush has stopped short of directly confronting Christie by holding a fundraiser on his home turf. But behind the scenes, he has been quietly wooing, via e-mail, a cadre of high-profile Christie backers, including a group that attended a private dinner with Bush at New York’s Union League Club in January.
+
+“I’ve known and admired Jeb for many years and I’m obviously intrigued by his candidacy, or I wouldn’t have had dinner or communicated with him in recent weeks,” said New Jersey State Sen. Joseph M. Kyrillos Jr. (R), who chaired Christie’s 2009 gubernatorial campaign and attended the New York dinner. “Time will tell how things evolve.”
+
+New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, a onetime Christie booster, signaled his support for Bush on Wednesday when he showed up at a fundraiser in Chicago for Bush’s political committees.
+
+Former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean Sr., a longtime mentor of Christie who is no longer close to him, said in an interview Thursday that he hasn’t decided whom to back — while offering praise for Bush.
+
+“When [Bush] said he has strong views on issues and won’t change them to win an early primary, it showed me he has real convictions,” Kean said. “The Republican Party in the past has had problems with people who changed their views in order to win a primary, only to have to scramble back in a general election. Voters don’t find that kind of behavior credible.”
+
+Several Bush donors in New Jersey are also in the initial stages of planning an event in the state in March or April, according to several people with knowledge of the discussions. Bush may not attend, but his backers want to demonstrate his New Jersey support.
+
+Several top Christie backers said Thursday that he still has a strong organization of financial heavyweights both in New Jersey and across the country, and they disputed the notion that he is being undercut by Bush.
+
+“We’re doing fine,” said Kenneth G. Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, who has pledged to devote substantial resources to advance Christie’s bid. “Everybody I’ve called and asked has said yes.”
+
+Christie allies do not expect that he will be able to come close to matching Bush’s current fundraising spree, which is expected to bring in tens of millions. His team has sought to project a sense of calm as it makes daily calls to donors, arguing that much of the movement toward Bush is coming from loyalists who received appointments in the administrations of his father and brother.
+
+Ray Washburne, the Dallas real estate developer leading the national fundraising push for Christie’s political committee, said there is plenty of room for both of them.
+
+“Jeb has grabbed a good bit of the donor base, no question,” he said. “But there is still a huge amount of the donor base available to get.”
+
+A Christie aide provided a list of two dozen New Jersey major contributors committed to Christie’s new political committee, including investor Finn Wentworth, trucking magnate Jerry Langer and Christie’s brother, Todd.
+
+New Jersey real estate executive Jon Hanson, who served as finance chairman for Christie’s gubernatorial campaigns, said his in-state donor network is “stepping up and contributing.”
+
+“I can see he’s out there doing a good job,” Hanson said of Bush. “But I don’t think that’s going to hinder our ability to raise money for Governor Christie’s PAC.”
+
+Last week, Christie held a fundraiser at the Greenwich, Conn., home of former GOP gubernatorial candidate Thomas C. Foley. In the coming weeks, he is planning to headline finance events in California and Texas.
+
+So far, Christie has been raising money solely for his Leadership Matters for America PAC, which can accept up to $5,000 from individual donors. An affiliated super PAC, which can raise unlimited personal and corporate money, is expected to be launched soon.
+
+Once it is, Langone said he plans to put in significant amounts of money. “Absolutely,” he said. “I’m waiting for it to start.”
+
+But the investor also noted that he would be squarely behind Bush if Christie’s Florida rival emerges victorious out of the GOP primaries.
+
+“If Jeb Bush is the Republican nominee, I will do everything I can to help him get elected,” he said. “Jeb Bush is a good man. My preference is Christie for one reason: As I look at what this country desperately needs, I think he comes closest to giving us everything we need and want.”
+
+The reticence Christie has encountered among prominent party financiers is a sharp contrast with the more than $100 million that the Republican Governors Association brought in under his recent chairmanship. While Christie aides have credited the fundraising haul to his efforts, some RGA donors have privately said their giving was driven more by their interest in supporting various governors up for reelection.
+
+Christie’s difficulty in locking down home-state support comes after his remarks about child vaccinations on a recent trip to London drew a wave of scathing criticism and alarmed some of his supporters. The governor had to make a series of calls to assure contributors that he supports vaccination for diseases such as measles.
+
+Spencer Zwick, Mitt Romney’s finance chairman in 2012, said the attitude of former Christie backers at home is telling.
+
+“Kyrillos is a very good bellwether for what’s happening in New Jersey,” Zwick said of the state senator. “If Christie decides to run, he’s going to need the support from the people closest to him to sustain him until he can get national Republican support.”
+
+Zwick, who has not committed to a 2016 candidate, added, “Personally, I have had my own reservations about what Governor Christie did at a key moment in the last presidential election and let it be known to him and others,” a reference to extensive public praise by Christie of President Obama for the federal response to Hurricane Sandy in the late stages of the campaign. “But I do not believe he had bad intentions and I have moved on.”
+
+Another former Christie ally, New Jersey attorney Lawrence E. Bathgate II, hosted the Jan. 8 dinner in New York to introduce Bush to some of Christie’s top supporters.
+
+Bathgate had been in Christie’s camp for years, but their relationship publicly soured after Christie’s administration pursued a plan to build protective dunes on the state’s coastline where Bathgate has an oceanfront home.
+
+In an interview, though, Bathgate said his reservations about Christie began when he embraced Obama during his visit to the hurricane-battered state. He also expressed concern about more recent events, including the ongoing inquiry into the closing of traffic lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge.
+
+“I know he wanted to work with President Obama on Sandy, but that doesn’t mean you have to put your arm around him and hug him,” said Bathgate, a former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. “That took the election and Mitt Romney off the front page. Then you see him a couple years later flying around on Jerry Jones’s jet, jumping up and down like he is a seventh grader. He’s going to have to answer for all of that, and for Bridgegate.”",REAL
+9557,Washington Home Depot store receives order for five-thousand gallons of gold exterior paint,"Wednesday 9 November 2016 by Pete Redfern Washington Home Depot store receives order for five-thousand gallons of gold exterior paint 
+The Washington DC branch of the famous chain of home improvement superstores received an unusual and baffling phone call late last night. 
+Store manager Chuck Williams told reporters, “We received a telephone call just before closing last night from a very excited gentleman, placing an order for over $120,000 worth of gold concrete paint.” 
+He continued “It was quite a hurried conversation, and I couldn’t catch everything he said, but I did hear the caller say something cryptic about turning a white house gold. 
+“I honestly have no idea what he could have meant, perhaps it was a riddle. And weirdly he kept referring to himself in the third person. 
+“At first we thought it might have been a hoax or someone out of their head on mind-altering substances, but we have checked our account and the money is already there, so we will start fulfilling the order immediately.” 
+When pressed by reporters, Mr Williams was reluctant to give further details for fear of breaching customer confidentiality, but he did confirm that the order was for a residence on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C 20500. 
+He added, “I don’t know who this caller who referred to himself as ‘The Big Cheese’ could be, but he sure loves gold.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+5297,Western Lynch Mob on Russia Ties Itself up in Absurd Anots      : Information," Western Lynch Mob on Russia Ties Itself up in Absurd Knots By Finian Cunningham
+October 31, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" RT "" - The Western lynch mob-like campaign to ‘get Russia’ goes on, with the gathering this week of the United Nations Human Rights Council. By trying to suspend Russia from the council, the flagrant intent is to discredit and further demonize. The 47-member UNHRC, based in Geneva, is the United Nations’ premier inter-governmental forum on human rights. Members are selected on a rotational basis. On Friday, 14 seats on the council are up for renewal.
+This week 80 mainly Western non-governmental organizations associated with human rights reportedly urged the UNHRC to drop Russia’s membership, citing allegations of war crimes committed during military operations to capture the Syrian city of Aleppo.
+Over 80 NGOs call for Russia to be dropped from UN rights council over Syria https://t.co/uKTfWXWOLn
+— RT (@RT_com) 24 октября 2016 г. Among the anti-Russia lobby were US-based and George Soros-funded Human Rights Watch. Notably, billionaire financier Soros is an open advocate for regime change in Russia.
+The campaign to undermine Russia at the UNHRC was preceded last week when Britain – also a member of the council – convened a summit in Geneva. The council issued a resolution which pointedly condemned bombing of civilians in Syria, and implicitly laid the blame on Russia and allied Syrian state forces.
+Russia’s permanent representative in Geneva Alexey Borodavkin rebuked the UNHRC for a one-sided, politicized statement, which he said sought to solely impugn Russia and Syria. He noted the rank hypocrisy of the United States, Britain and France, along with Gulf Arab states, which lobbied for the resolution.
+Radar data proves Belgian F-16s attacked village near Aleppo, killing 6 - Russian military https://t.co/Aj8mgT39ri pic.twitter.com/XHU4ljZb4H
+— RT (@RT_com) 20 октября 2016 г. These states have been arming and funding terrorist groups in Syria since the eruption of the war in March 2011. They are also sending their air forces on illegal bombing raids across the country – in the name of “fighting terrorism” – which has resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties and the destruction of social infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, public buildings and residential homes.
+In recent months, warplanes dispatched by the US, France and Belgium (the latter two current members of the UNHRC) have carried out air strikes on Syria causing dozens of civilian casualties.
+So, of course, Western-orchestrated claims against Russia over alleged human rights violations in Syria are patently hypocritical and belie their own criminality.
+The contrived effort to delist Russia from the UNHRC has the same hallmark as other Western media campaigns to discredit Moscow, such as the banning of Russian athletes from the Rio Olympics on dubious drug-abuse charges, or the pseudo-probe into the downing of the Malaysian airliner in 2014 over Ukraine, or overblown claims that Russian aggression is threatening the security of Europe. We can also include baseless accusations made by shadowy US intelligence agencies that Russia is hacking into computer systems to somehow disrupt the American presidential elections next month.
+Saudi Arabia poised to be reelected to UN Human Rights Council https://t.co/sqWeSwjg48 #UNHR #SaudiArabia #humanrights
+— RT (@RT_com) 27 октября 2016 г. The UNHRC debacle is one strand in a bundle of psychological operations aimed at isolating, demonizing and delegitimizing Russia.
+Perhaps the knock out absurdity in the latest rush by the Western lynch mob is the relation of Britain and Saudi Arabia, both of which are current members of the UNHRC seeking renewal of their seats.
+That Saudi Arabia – widely seen as the most repressive regime on Earth – is even a member of the prestigious Geneva council is due to Britain engaging in underhand vote rigging to help its oil-rich ally gain a seat, according to documents released last year by WikiLeaks.
+A Saudi-led military coalition continues to slaughter thousands of Yemeni civilians by bombing schools, hospitals, mosques, marketplaces, funeral halls, factories and residential homes. Human rights groups like HRW and UN agencies are well aware of this Saudi campaign of mass murder in Yemen. It is also well documented that US, British, French and German weaponry worth billions of dollars is assisting the Saudi regime in its war crimes. That makes these Western states fully complicit.
+Moscow summons Belgian ambassador, presents data on F-16s bombing of Syrian civilians https://t.co/WzwvworaZd pic.twitter.com/cHlKvzaeUD
+— RT (@RT_com) 21 октября 2016 г. Germany, for example, which is also a current member of the UNHRC, has seen its arms exports to Saudi Arabia jump by 250 percent over the past two years, according to a report last week.
+Britain, the ringleader of the media campaign to denigrate Russia in Geneva, has sold over $4 billion worth of armaments to Saudi Arabia since the oil kingdom launched its aggression on its southern neighbor in March 2015. Even while Saudi Arabia is committing the most egregious crimes against humanity, the British government continues to send Royal Air Force pilots to help train Saudi counterparts, brazenly denying that there is any breach of international law.
+There is little or no protest from the 80 NGO rights groups about these applicant states to the next cohort of the UNHRC.
+The hypocrisy and double standards of serial human rights violators make their condemnations against Russia null and void.
+Importantly too, is to not merely rebut the accusers as hypocrites, but to also elucidate the anti-Russia claims as fabrications.
+The information that Western governments, rights groups and media base their claims of Russia bombing civilians is garnered from entirely dubious and partisan sources. Endless reports on Syria and the battle for the northern city of Aleppo broadcast by multibillion dollar Western news organizations are based, incongruously, either on claims issued by the British-located so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, or by “activist” groups within terrorist-held east Aleppo, which are funded by Western governments, such as the purported “rescue workers” of the White Helmets and the Aleppo Media Center.
+BREAKING: UN Human Rights Council votes to open probe into #Aleppo ‘war crimes’ https://t.co/xrdojTxO3v pic.twitter.com/2gKhTiMovH
+— RT (@RT_com) 21 октября 2016 г. In other words, Western governments, media, rights groups, and, sadly, UN agencies are promulgating an anti-Russia narrative that is recycled terrorist propaganda.Good proof of this is seen on the TV station called “Free Syria” broadcast across the Middle East and North Africa on Saudi-owned satellite platform ArabSat.
+Free Syria is a crude propaganda channel funded by the Saudi monarchy. It features jingoistic images of Saudi King Salman, along with Saudi troops, warplanes and tanks.
+Free Syria also features links to the militant group Ahrar al-Sham, which is implicated in countless terrorist crimes along with Nusra and ISIS. Bearded militants are routinely shown firing mortars while shouting Islamist slogans.
+Another regular contributor to the images and “reports” on this Saudi-funded, terrorist-supporting channel are the White Helmets and the Aleppo Media Center. Thus, on this publicly available “Free Syria” channel what we see in stark reality is how state sponsor, terrorist networks and propaganda machine come together in a self-incriminating amalgam.
+What is even more damning is that the same “ information” is disseminated – albeit in a more polished form – through Western news outlets, such as CNN, BBC, France 24 and a gamut of supposedly respectable newspapers, like the New York Times and British Guardian.
+It’s an astounding feat how reality can be so inverted. Russia’s military is legally justified in assisting the allied sovereign government of Syria to defeat a covert war to topple the state. That war is a criminal enterprise fueled by Washington, London and Paris through the deployment of myriad terrorist proxies.
+And to add insult to injury, these terrorist-sponsoring rogue states then turn around and accuse Russia at a UN Human Rights Council based on propaganda sourced from their terrorist proxies.
+The utter insanity of it all. But maybe the Western lynch mob will eventually get hoisted on their own coiling ropes of deception.",FAKE
+5075,Can Sanders rally supporters around Clinton after DNC email leak?,"Bernie Sanders has thrown his support behind Hilary Clinton, but it remains to be seen whether his base will follow his lead.
+
+Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, (I) of Vermont, march during a protest in downtown on Sunday, in Philadelphia. The Democratic National Convention starts Monday in Philadelphia.
+
+Amid lingering angst over the primary process, Bernie Sanders has a chance to encourage his supporters to embrace party unity.
+
+Sanders is set to meet privately with supporters Monday before the start of the Democratic National Convention. Sanders backers have expressed frustration over the nominating procedures, the party platform and party leadership, with some suggesting they may protest or take action on the floor. But the Vermont Senator has struck a positive message in recent interviews, expressing his support for Hillary Clinton.
+
+""I'm proud that, in the Democratic platform that was passed a few weeks ago, we are making some real progress,"" Sanders said on CNN Sunday. He added: ""My focus right now is defeating (Donald) Trump, electing Clinton, electing progressive candidates around this country and focusing on the issues that matter the most to working families.""
+
+Efforts to promote party togetherness were not helped by the publication last week of thousands of hacked emails, some of which suggested the DNC was favoring Clinton during the primary season. For many Sanders fans, the messages proved that their concerns about party officials preferring Clinton were correct. While party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is stepping down soon, she will still have a convention role, which could draw jeers from Sanders delegates.
+
+""Democrats had great fun chortling over last week’s less-than-smooth Republican convention – the 'Never Trump' revolt, the plagiarism, the booing, the high-profile GOP no-shows,"" The Christian Science Monitor's Linda Feldmann reports. ""Now, it appears that Donald Trump and the Republicans may have the last laugh, as thousands of pro-Sanders demonstrators descend upon Philadelphia to protest the Democratic establishment – including Clinton’s perceived deficits as a progressive.""
+
+At a meeting of the DNC credentials committee Sunday, comments praising Wasserman Schultz were met with laughter by some Sanders supporters. At a committee meeting the previous day, Sanders backers shouted ""shame, shame, shame"" as amendments to abolish or limit superdelegates in future nominating competitions were voted down.
+
+Some Sanders delegates feel the Clinton campaign is not taking their policy concerns seriously. At a news conference Sunday, Sanders delegate Norman Solomon, 65, of Point Reyes Station, California, said many of Sanders' liberal supporters were disappointed in Clinton's vice presidential pick of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. He said most viewed Kaine as not progressive enough and that there had been discussion about a variety of protest actions at the convention, including walking out.
+
+""We've got to challenge the corporate power in the Democratic Party represented by Hillary Clinton today,"" Solomon said.
+
+Still, Sanders delegate Courtney Rowe, 34, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said ""we are not here to disrupt for the purpose of disruption."" She said she was not currently planning on any action and wanted to hear from Sanders.
+
+Sanders, who endorsed Clinton two weeks ago after a long-fought primary, has sought to find common ground around the party platform and rules. He successfully won major platform concessions, including a $15 federal minimum wage, abolishing the death penalty and breaking up large Wall Street banks. And at the DNC rules committee the two sides agreed on a ""unity commission"" that will review changes to the nominating process, including limiting the role of superdelegates.
+
+After the unity commission agreement, Sanders supporters seeking to pass amendments to abolish or curtail superdelegates opted against pursuing convention floor fights on the issue.
+
+Sanders has made clear that he would like to see a full roll call vote at the convention, so that his delegates can show their support.",REAL
+2076,'Historic' climate deal in sight as nations parse final text,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+8142,We Live In A Time Where Each Individual Has Immense Power,By Vin Armani You know the state is in trouble when they’re afraid of one man with an Internet connection. The case of Julian Assange... ,FAKE
+4714,"Trump slams 'corrupt' media, as more women make sexual assault claims","Two more women accused Republican nominee Donald Trump of sexual assault Friday, with a relative of one of them saying that the allegation was ""an attempt to regain the spotlight.""
+
+
+
+Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Trump's NBC reality show ""The Apprentice,"" said the real estate mogul kissed her and groped her after meeting at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2007 to discuss a potential job. Zervos, accompanied at a Los Angeles press conference by attorney Gloria Allred, said she was later offered a lower-paying job at a Trump golf course.
+
+“You do not have the right to treat women as sexual objects just because you are a star,” Zervos said at the press conference, addressing Trump.
+
+Late Friday, the Trump campaign released a statement purporting to be from statement in which a cousin of Zervos said he was ""shocked and bewildered"" by her account.
+
+John Barry of Mission Viejo, Calif., said in the statement that Zervos spoke glowingly of Trump until the real estate mogul rebuffed an invitation to visit her restaurant during the primary campaign.
+
+""I think Summer wishes she could still be on reality TV, and in an effort to get that back she’s saying all of these negative things about Mr. Trump,"" Barry said. ""That’s not how she talked about him before.""
+
+Trump himself issued a statement saying that he ""never met [Zervos] at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago. That is not who I am as a person, and it is not how I’ve conducted my life."" He added that Zervos had emailed Trump's office this past April 14 to ask if he could visit her restaurant in California.
+
+Allred, who frequently represents women bringing sexual harassment and assault claims, said “many more women” have contacted her regarding the Republican nominee after a video emerged of Trump making lewd comments about women in 2005 – comments Trump apologized for, but dismissed as “locker room talk.”
+
+Allred said Zervos is not filing a suit at this time.
+
+Earlier Friday, The Washington Post reported on a woman’s claim that Trump put his hand up her skirt and groped her at a Manhattan nightspot in the early '90s.
+
+According to the Post, Kristin Anderson claimed that while she was at the Manhattan nightspot in the early 1990s, Trump slid his fingers under her miniskirt and fondled her.
+
+Campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks called Anderson's claim a ""total fabrication."" She said in a statement, ""It is illogical and nonsensical to think Donald Trump was alone in a nightclub in Manhattan.""
+
+The new allegations capped a tumultuous week on the campaign trail for Trump, who has faced a daily drip-drip of allegations even as he has tried to focus on Bill Clinton's female accusers -- and the massive leak of Clinton campaign emails by WikiLeaks.
+
+As Zervos was making her accusations Friday, Trump was at a rally in Greensboro, N.C., rejecting all the allegations against him as “total fiction.”
+
+“I have no idea who these women are,” Trump said. “The stories are total fiction. They’re 100 percent made up.”
+
+He continued to expand on his argument that the claims are part of a conspiracy involving the Clinton campaign and what he calls “the corrupt media” – in particular the New York Times, which kick-started the reports of sexual misconduct earlier this week. Trump previously threatened to sue the Times over allegations they published from two women who claim Trump groped them.
+
+On Friday, Trump went after the Times again, suggesting the reporters were acting at the behest of billionaire Carlos Slim, the largest shareholder in the Times.
+
+“Now, Carlos Slim, as you know, comes from Mexico. He’s given many millions of dollars to the Clintons and their initiatives,” Trump said. “Reporters at The New York Times, they’re not journalists. They’re corporate lobbyists for Carlos Slim and for Hillary Clinton.”
+
+Trump then claimed the controversy was “a total setup” consisting of “lies spread by the media” as a way to undermine his campaign. He went so far as to mock his accusers, making fun of one who told the Times he groped her on an airplane in the early 1980s.
+
+“The only way they can figure they can slow it down is to come up with people that are willing to say ‘Oh I was with Donald Trump in 1980,’” he said, putting on a voice mocking his accusers. “'I was sitting with him on an airplane and he went after me on the plane.’ Yeah, I'm gonna go after you…”
+
+“Believe me,” he added. “She would not be my first choice, I can tell you.”
+
+One of the accusers who came forward earlier this week, Mindy McGillivray of Palm Springs, Fla., told the Palm Beach Post Friday that she was planning to leave the United States because she feared for her family’s safety. She told the paper cars had been driving around her house.
+
+As Trump ratched up his attacks Friday on the media and his accusers, Democrats have been seizing on the accounts as proof that Trump is unfit for office. On Thursday, first lady Michelle Obama launched a scathing attack on the billionaire and the comments he made on the 2005 tape.
+
+""We have a candidate for president of the United States who over the course of his lifetime, over the course of this campaign, has said things about women that are shocking, so demeaning,"" she said. ""I simply will not repeat anything here today. Last week, we actually saw this candidate bragging about sexually assaulting women. I can't believe I'm saying that, a candidate for president of the United States bragged about sexually assaulting women.""
+
+On Friday, President Obama followed up, saying Trump was determined to “drag this election as low as he can possibly go” and warned that “democracy is on the ballot” in November.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6176,Only Demented Imbeciles Want A Killary Reign Of Terror,"in: Government Corruption , Special Interests , US News The cross section of Hillary Clinton voters is a mixture of walking dead zombies, power hungry influence peddlers, money cartel thieves and establishment diehards willing to start a global confrontation to postpone an inevitable economic collapse. As for the first category; welfare recipients, government bootlickers and mentally deranged utopians survive in a subsistence existence or in a fantasy illusion. The corruption purveyors simply want to maintain their elitist system of institutional inequality. As for the tribe of international finance, their objective always remains the same. Pick the next stooge who can be controlled. Finally, for globalist who are frantic to continue their New World Order of worldwide oppression, the elevation of Hillary Clinton to the position of the mad hatter to achieve the mutual assured destruction that these Illuminati’s masters of the universe require to purge the “Little People” from the planet. Any opposition to this band of desperate and deranged desperados is portrayed as racist, xenophobic and defiant of the “Politically Correct” secular humanism culture. Here is the fundamental point of the conflict. The abandonment of the cannons of natural and common law has produced a didactic ineptness that thrusts humanity into a technocratic prison of a meaningless existence. Dante’s Inferno of basic extinction is the ultimate society that a capitulation to the rigged electoral fraud seeks to achieve. The bloody record of Killary Clinton earns her an especially prominent place in hell. Take your choice. She may descend into Level 7 , for “The violent, the assasins, the tyrants, and the war-mongers lament their pitiless mischiefs in the river, while centaurs armed with bows and arrows shoot those who try to escape their punishment” or Level 8- the Malebolge where “The magicians, diviners, fortune tellers, and panderers are all here, as are the thieves”. Of course this allegory of punishment falls on deaf ears for the Clintonistas . For them this blameless role model for social justice warriors can do no wrong. All the evidence and proof in the world is ignored or dismissed when your patron saint of the occult wears pants suits. The reason HRC is better known as Killary has a lot to do with the body count that follows her around. THE CLINTON BODY-COUNT and the ‘CLINTON DEATH LIST’: 33 SPINE-TINGLING CASES lists several of her enemies that dared defy the queen of mean. Now are these suspicious circumstances of such deaths just another right-wing conspiracy to bring down the Arkancide crime syndicate? To an objective investigator, engaging into an in-depth probe might just get one added to this long list. But why would a Clinton supporter care, she is the epitome of the liberated woman and placing her on the throne of feminism is far overdue. Accepting, if not savoring a little reign of terror is a small price to pay as long as the body count does not include your own person. During the French Revolution the sanguinary women, known as Tricoteuse, who sat and knitted while attending public guillotine executions have more in common with Robespierre than Marie Antoinette. These devotee libbers identified with the symbol of equality, while their crowned head of elitism disdainfully admonish the peasants: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”. Queen Marie Antoinette may not have really said, “Let them eat cake” but the regnant of the House of Clinton demonstrates throughout her entire life revealed her true sentiments; despise and contempt for the “Little People”. The knitting culture of the zombies cult of progressive authoritarianism is at the center of the public psychosis that follows the dictates of Hillary Clinton. Their identity is so caught up in the myth of collectivism that the very spirit of individual liberty is a necessary causality to join the Clinton demon worship. Look to the fictional character of Madame Defarge penned in A Tale of Two Cities for a synopsis of all that is wrong with Killary and her followers. Charles Dickens presents this viewpoint of the quintessential monster. “Her problem, it seems, is that Madame Defarge just doesn’t know where to draw the line. As far as she’s concerned, “justice” for the fate of her family isn’t just that the Marquis gets murdered. Justice should, she thinks, include the “extermination” of all of the Marquis’s family. Given her druthers, Charles, Lucie, and even little Lucie would fall under the sharp blade of La Guillotine. As Madame Defarge exclaims to her husband, “Tell the Wind and the Fire where to stop; not me!” (3.12.36). “It was nothing to her that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself.” (3.14.33) So it comes as no surprise that when “The meeting between Lucie and Madame Defarge makes this absolutely clear: Lucie falls on her knees, begging for mercy on behalf of her child. Madame Defarge stares at her coldly. She doesn’t even stop knitting.” This example of the dark side of human nature is particularly relevant and applicable when analyzing the gender iniquity of the wicked witch. For femininity enablement to champion such abuse from a coldhearted degenerate is the biggest disappointment of this election cycle. Society should never condone or provide consent for anyone, male or female; who is such a habitual sociopath. The influence hucksters do not pretend to be altruistic . They would support Lucifer if they thought they would gain the riches of this world. As for the money changers, they are already archfiends in the Synagogue of Satan. Lastly, the globalist’s warmongers covet the mass eradication of billions to satisfy their lust for world transcendence. These three factions are the true irredeemables. The masses of the walking dead need to politically repent and seek civic redemption. This objective is not possible by voting for Hillary Clinton. If you do nothing else before the November 8, 2016 election watch the video, A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 . No matter your ideological propensities, we all share a mutual objective. Prevent a nuclear war that will destroy all civilized life on the planet. After watching this presentation, every rational person must come to deal with the prospects of putting a psycho in command of the launch codes. Folks; Donald Trump is not the mad man. The schizoid is a systemic and immoral lunatic, who is ready to drop the beheading blade on all of America. Her similarity with Madame Defarge bleeds over to her decadent boosters, who are willing to sacrifice their family, friends and community for the joy of destroying our planet. For all the dissatisfied and frustrated citizens, who understand the colossal stakes of national survival intervene with any fellow acquaintance that has been indoctrinated to the propaganda of Hillaryland . Confront the zombies attitude and appeal to their individual self-interest. Put forth the prospect of not voting for Clinton, even if Trump would not be an option. Citizens will not be the only people voting. Non eligible people are being ushered into a ballot booth with predisposed programming to put Killary into the oval office. The establishment is revealing their real tyranny for any person, who is still alive and has the ability to assess the actual nature of this election. The power structure in ready to collapse and the global elites are prepared to start a world war to keep and protect their feudal system of coercion. Those who might survive will be the special and the anointed. The masses will be served up on the plate of expediency and necessity. Hillary Clinton has always been part of the gang of criminals, protected by the intelligence community, insider politicians and the legal system of corrupt lawyers and judges. Voting for her is a clear validation of pure mental illness. The fact that the discredited FBI is endeavoring to regain their credibility by reopening the criminal investigation into Killary Clinton’s attempt to hide her family’s pay to play scheme to sell out our country is dramatic. This development should provide ample reason to put any notion of voting for the diva of sleaze on hold. Thanks to the Wikileaks release of the illicit emails from the Clinton cabal, only a fool can vote for her. Come to grips with the prospects of knowingly elevating this lifelong criminal to become the commander-and-chief. Genuine national security cannot be scarified to allow a distrustful and compromised agent of foreign interests to become President. Killary is dead meat. She could never gain the confidence of the nation and her continued nihilistic conduct and her kleptocrat criminal violations cannot be tolerated or ignored any longer. If you really want to save the planet, you cannot cast your ballot for this known traitor.",FAKE
+9402,This anti-Trump advert on the side of a bus is really visually clever and you have to see it in motion,"Next Swipe left/right This anti-Trump advert on the side of a bus is really visually clever and you have to see it in motion @Madsalbers over on Twitter writes, “Epic Bus Ad from the political party SF in Denmark is mocking @realDonaldTrump and encouraging Americans abroad to…” Epic Bus Ad from the political party SF in Denmark is mocking @realDonaldTrump and encouraging Americans abroad to vote. #Election2016 pic.twitter.com/MfyeOYtDuQ 
+— Mads Albers (@MadsAlbers) October 26, 2016 
+Well done Denmark! Rolling your eyes like that…",FAKE
+6948,Americans Are So Disconnected From Reality That “Insouciant” Has Become An Euphemism,"Does The Russian Government Have A Reality Disconnect? — Paul Craig Roberts (10/25/2016) Dear friends and readers, 
+PCR's new book, THE NEOCONSERVATIVE THREAT TO WORLD ORDER, is now available: In Print and Digital Format by Clarity Press Quarterly Call to Donations 
+To remind, this is our quarterly request for donations. If you want the information and analysis that this site provides to continue, you must support the site. As the alternative is the presstitutes or Ministry of Propaganda, it is a good decision to support this site . Quarterly Call to Donations Dear friends, It is time for my quarterly request for donations. As we agreed, my columns and this site will continue as long as your support is forthcoming. If you wish to fully escape The Matrix and see reality as it really is, you are brave and I am honored to have you as readers and supporters. If reality is too much for you, then I should cease putting myself at risk. PCR http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/inbound/we87dn9 Thank you for your donations 
+Many thanks to those who donated. I appreciate the commitment that readers have to this website. I match your commitment with my own. PCR Latest Book PCR's new book, HOW AMERICA WAS LOST, is now available: In Print by Clarity Press and In Ebook Format by Atwell Publishing Americans Are So Disconnected From Reality That “Insouciant” Has Become An Euphemism Print This Article 
+Americans Are So Disconnected From Reality That “Insouciant” Has Become An Euphemism 
+While the idiot presstitutes and their brainwashed victims hyper-ventilate about Trump’s lewd talk about women, one consequence of the ignored nuclear arms race restarted by the neoconservatives, who have been in charge of US foreign policy in the 21st century, is the Russian Satan 2, which is reported to be capable of destroying the entirety of a land mass the size of Texas or France with one hit. 
+The neoconservative foreign policy that has produced this result is obviously a total failure and endangers all life on earth. Hillary Clinton is a representative of this disastrous foreign policy. If Americans and Europeans cannot put into office people who can get along with Russia, there is no future for anyone. Trump is the only one who says he sees no point in conflict with Russia. This is what is important, not lewd talk about women. 
+Hillary’s lewd talk about Putin –“the new Hitler”–will get us all killed. 
+http://newatlas.com/rs28-sarmat-satan-2-russian-icbm/46127/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=013c2812c9-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-013c2812c9-92498229 Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order . Newsletter Notifications Signup Form",FAKE
+4911,The 5 unspoken rules for covering Hillary Clinton,"The reporter's job is to ""comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable"" — a credo that, humorously, was originally written as a smear of the self-righteous nature of journalists. And so the justification for going after a public figure increases in proportion to his or her stature. The bigger the figure, the looser the restraints.
+
+After a quarter of a century on the national stage, there's no more comfortable political figure to afflict than Hillary Clinton. And she's in for a lot of affliction over the next year and half.
+
+That's generally a good way for reporters to go about their business. After all, the more power a person wants in our republic, the more voters should know about her or him. But it's also an essential frame for thinking about the long-toxic relationship between the Clintons and the media, why the coverage of Hillary Clinton differs from coverage of other candidates for the presidency, and whether that difference encourages distortions that will ultimately affect the presidential race.
+
+The Clinton rules are driven by reporters' and editors' desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family's political empire. At least in that way, Republicans and the media have a common interest.
+
+I understand these dynamics well, having co-written a book that demonstrated how Bill and Hillary Clinton used Hillary's time at State to build the family political operation and set up for their fourth presidential campaign. That is to say, I've done a lot of research about the Clintons' relationship with the media, and experienced it firsthand. As an author, I felt that I owed it to myself and the reader to report, investigate, and write with the same mix of curiosity, skepticism, rigor, and compassion that I would use with any other subject. I wanted to sell books, of course. But the easier way to do that — proven over time — is to write as though the Clintons are the purest form of evil. The same holds for daily reporting. Want to drive traffic to a website? Write something nasty about a Clinton, particularly Hillary.
+
+As a reporter, I get sucked into playing by the Clinton rules. This is what I've seen in my colleagues, and in myself.
+
+One of my former colleagues, a hard-nosed reporter who has put countless political pelts on his wall, once told me that everyone in public life has something to hide. Who goes down in the flames of scandal? The politicians we decide to go after.
+
+That may not be 100 percent true, but it's true enough. The act of choosing, time and again, to go after the same person has the effect of tainting that person, even when an investigation or reporting turns up nothing nefarious — and it's time not spent digging into his or her adversaries. The original source of alleged malfeasance could come from the other party, within a politician's party, or from the reporter's own observations and industrious digging. But two things are crystal clear: If there's no investigation, there's no scandal. And if there's no scandal, there's no scalp.
+
+The Clintons have been under investigation for about 25 years now. There's little doubt they've produced more information for investigators, lawyers, and journalists about their finances, their business and philanthropic dealings, and their decision-making processes in government than any officials in American history. They've watched countless friends frog-marched into congressional hearings and, in some cases, to jail. They know there's a good chance that any expressed thought will become part of the public record and twisted for political gain.
+
+The most absurd allegations against Hillary Clinton have been bookends on her public career so far: that she had something to do with the suicide of Clinton White House aide Vince Foster, and that she bears responsibility for the terrorist attack that killed US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.
+
+But in between, there was Travelgate, Filegate, and Whitewater. Some were less legitimate than others. When Clinton surprisingly claimed that she and her husband were ""dead broke"" when they left the White House, it was because they had spent all of their money to defend themselves against an eight-year barrage of investigations.
+
+It's understandable, then, why the Clintons have a bunker mentality when it comes to transparency. But their paranoia leads them to be secretive, and their secrecy leads Republicans and the press to suspect wrongdoing. That spurs further investigation, which only makes the Clintons more secretive. The paranoia and persistent investigation feed each other in an endless cycle of probe and parry. Along the way, the political class and the public are forced to choose imperfect sides: the power couple that always seems to be hiding something, or a Washington investigation complex that is overly partisan and underwhelming in its ability to prove gross misconduct.
+
+This is, for Republicans, a reasonable strategy. They know that if they keep investigating her, it will do two things: keep the media writing about scandals that might knock her out, and turn off voters who don't want a return to the bloodsport politics of the 1990s. They leak partial stories to reporters hungry for that one great scoop that will give them the biggest political scalp of them all. But they also err in jumping the gun in accusing her of wrongdoing, which allows Clinton to defend herself by pointing at the folly of her adversaries.
+
+In touring the country to promote our book in 2014, my co-author and I were repeatedly lobbied to assert that Clinton is a lesbian. One gentleman pushed the issue during a Q&A at a Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — one of the few places you might expect that kind of thing to get a rest.
+
+The National Enquirer published a story in April alleging that Clinton wiped her personal email server clean because it contained references to her lesbian lovers.
+
+Meanwhile, the conservative media are also convinced Clinton is preparing to wage a war on Christianity if she wins the presidency. But one thing revealed in her State Department emails is that Clinton shared daily religious reflections with her friends.
+
+It's not just the out-of-the-box allegations that keep the media machine spun up. A year before Chelsea Clinton got married, Clinton staffers were kept busy by mainstream journalists who were absolutely sure she had already gone through with secret nuptials.
+
+And, on a more serious note, remember Benghazi flu? Many political opponents and members of the media were unable to accept the idea that Clinton was forced to cancel planned Senate testimony on Benghazi because she'd suffered a concussion. Now, three years later, it seems ridiculous to think that Clinton was making an excuse — she's since testified on both sides of the Hill — or that she suffered, as Karl Rove suggested, brain damage. And if she was making up the concussion to avoid testifying, how did she suffer brain damage from a fake fall?
+
+The conservative media echo chamber, which bounces innuendo from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News and back again, ensures that the most damning story lines — true or not — stay alive. The Benghazi attacks are a perfect example. Terrorists killed four Americans. The conservative echo chamber seems convinced Hillary Clinton is at fault. The reasonable argument to make is that we shouldn't have been in Libya in the first place and the murders were a down-the-chain result of bad policy. But the right wing wants to prove that they happened because of Clinton's actions — or inaction — on security matters.
+
+They've talked about security requests denied for Libya (never mind that the stronger contingent would have been in Tripoli, not Benghazi, and that there's no evidence Clinton herself was aware of the requests), a stand-down order that prevented reinforcements from arriving in Benghazi (never mind that they wouldn't have gotten there until after the fighting was done, and that even a House Republican committee found that there was no such order) and, most of absurd of all, that Clinton knew the attack was coming. This is how Limbaugh put it in May.
+
+The freedom of the conservative media to make wild allegations often acts as a bulldozer forcing reporters to check into the charges and, in doing so, repeat them. By the time they've been debunked, they're part of the American public's collective consciousness. Or, as it's been said, a lie gets around the world before the truth gets out of bed.
+
+One outgrowth of Clinton's terrible relationship with reporters is that journalists often assume she is acting in bad faith. There's good reason for that. Though she's added some new pros to her press staff for this campaign, her operation's stance toward the media was always a reflection of the way Bill Clinton's White House handled journalists.
+
+Back in the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton relied on a series of Machiavellian spin doctors to keep the press at bay. With the Clinton White House, the modus operandi was to stonewall as long as possible, lie if necessary — or just out of habit — and turn questions around on the questioners. After all, Bill Clinton once wagged his finger at a press conference and told reporters, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman ... Ms. Lewinsky."" He'd lied in a deposition, too.
+
+So the press has plenty of precedent for believing that when the Clintons aren't forthcoming — and sometimes, even when they are — they're covering something up. And the Clintons, given the history of some-smoke-no-fire investigations launched against them, have plenty of precedent for being mistrustful of the press. The result is a brutally dysfunctional relationship on both sides. The Clintons believe the press acts in bad faith, and the press believes the Clintons' attitudes toward the press are evidence that the Clintons are hiding something.
+
+That attitude carried over to Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, and to some degree her tenure as Secretary of State. The standard response to a reporter's question is not an answer. It is to ignore the question or to engage in a Socratic debate by asking a question in return. It's clear Clinton doesn't like the media one bit, as Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman reported last year.
+
+At a July Fourth parade this past weekend, Clinton aides used rope to create an impromptu moving barrier for reporters, keeping them away from the candidate and voters. She treated them like cattle, and they responded by putting the video on television for the last three days.
+
+The mistrust among journalists is a problem for Clinton. And as the media is an amplifier for the public, it's also little wonder that so many voters are inclined to believe she's often acting in bad faith. Most Americans say she's not honest and trustworthy.
+
+This view, shared by many reporters and most of the public, makes it much easier to treat Clinton's actions as though they are uniquely sinister. Case in point: She made a ton of money giving paid speeches to people with business before the government. So did Jeb Bush, of course. But until Bush recently released an accounting of some of those speeches, the media had little interest in his dealings. Kudos to Ken Vogel of Politico, who did some digging on that for a story published Thursday.
+
+The imbalance in assumptions about Clinton's motivations is another way in which the Clinton code has a distorting effect on the public perception of her. And it, too, is self-perpetuating: It leads Clinton to assume the press is biased against her, which leads her to treat the press poorly, which leads more reporters to assume she's trying to hide something from them.
+
+When Clinton keynoted an annual fundraiser for David Axelrod's epilepsy charity in June 2013, several major news outlets sent reporters to cover the speech. That was more than three years before the 2016 election. Every word, every gesture, every facial expression is scrutinized.
+
+Video of Clinton ordering a burrito bowl at a Chipotle became the first viral image of her campaign. Reporters gave fodder to late-night comedians earlier this year when they made a mad dash to catch up as her campaign van rolled by.
+
+This coverage of every last detail, of course, isn't a one-way street. It wasn't until a reporter was tipped off to the Chipotle visit that anyone knew about it. She craves the attention even more than she detests it.
+
+But that, too, has a distorting effect. As with the royal family in London, normally private moments become part of a public narrative: her husband's affair, her daughter's wedding, the birth of her granddaughter.
+
+All the attention has the effect of making Clinton seem, to the casual observer, hungrier for press than even the average politician. And there's no doubt that part of the love/hate relationship is an intense desire to attract and manipulate coverage. But Clinton understands that sometimes it's better not to be in the spotlight.
+
+The best example of that was when she declined requests to appear on Sunday political talk shows right after the Benghazi attacks. Susan Rice, then the ambassador to the UN and now Obama's national security adviser, leaped at the chance to stand in for Clinton. Those appearances ended up costing Rice the nomination to succeed Clinton as secretary of state when many senators concluded she had lied about the origin and nature of the attacks.
+
+The press has such fascination with the Clintons that the coverage would be there whether Hillary Clinton wanted it or not.
+
+For someone who lost a big lead in the 2008 presidential primary and is ceding ground to Bernie Sanders right now, Clinton is given a lot of credit for her political acumen. Her detractors see in every move, including the birth of her granddaughter, a grandly conceived and executed political calculation.
+
+And Clinton plays into that by using the positives in her life for political gain.
+
+That doesn't make her different from other candidates for the presidency — it makes her just like them. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie talked about his grandmothers, his mom, his wife, and his kids when he launched his bid for the presidency last week. Was that calculated to send messages about Christie to the public? Of course!
+
+The best example, though, was the tear — the one that rolled down Clinton's cheek as she campaigned in New Hampshire after having come in third in the Iowa caucuses in 2008.
+
+The New York Times's Maureen Dowd pilloried her for what Dowd saw as a window into the dark part of Clinton's soul.
+
+How far political journalism has come from castigating Ed Muskie for crying to accusing Clinton of calculating that tears would help her win. She's not that good at politics.
+
+I take a dim view of the idea that journalists successfully anoint political winners. The media might have been in the bag for Barack Obama, but he didn't win because he got positive coverage. He won because he had better strategy, a better message, and better skills at delivering that message — in the 2008 primary and in the two general elections he won.
+
+That said, the media can definitely weigh down — and even destroy — a candidate. The emphasis on a candidate's flaws — real or perceived — comes at the cost of the candidate's ability to focus his or her message and at the cost of negative attention to the other candidates. This is a problem for Clinton, and it seems unlikely to go away.
+
+Hillary Clinton is comfortable enough to be a target for a lot of journalistic affliction and powerful enough that no one needs to comfort her from that affliction. But these double standards are an important factor to keep in mind when judging her against her rivals for the presidency. Whether they're fair or not, the Clinton rules distort the public's perception of Hillary Clinton.
+
+Correction: This story has been corrected to remove an erroneous reference to the source of the original report on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The Drudge Report first broke news that Newsweek had decided to hold a story about the affair.",REAL
+9991,"Hillary Melts Down Over Weiner In Public, PICS Prove Campaign Is Imploding","Hillary Melts Down Over Weiner In Public, PICS Prove Campaign Is Imploding Posted on October 30, 2016 by Rebecca Diserio in Politics Share This 
+Hillary Clinton’s campaign is imploding, and it’s so bad that she was caught having a mini meltdown after her press conference as she tried to explain this new email investigation by the FBI, thanks to Anthony Weiner’s laptop. As Hillary lost it, her campaign was caught red-handed, doing dirty tricks to pictures, and you’ll love just how desperate they have become as they see this election sinking like the Titanic. 
+Rumors are flying after Hillary Clinton responded to the latest bomb dropped on her campaign, that thousands of government emails are on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Everyone knows Hillary should have been indicted before, and she had a meltdown of sorts when Kristen Welker of Fox News asked, “Are you worried this could sink your campaign, Secretary Clinton?” 
+While Hillary was walking away from the short press conference after the Weiner email story broke, she stopped and threw her head back and let out a creepy maniacal laugh . Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin found it really weird, saying it was like Hillary had lost it. She described Hillary “stopping and throwing her head back and laughing, it was really odd.” ""Are you worried this could sink your campaign, Secretary Clinton,"" a reporter shouts as HRC walks out. Clinton only lets out a big laugh. 
+— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) October 28, 2016 
+However, Hillary Clinton was not really laughing. That was a public meltdown, and she is pissed off that an idiot like Anthony Weiner just cost her this election. It’s so bad that the Clinton campaign was caught photoshopping the crowd at a recent Ohio rally, where Bill Clinton spoke. Bill Clinton rally Oct. 29th, red arrow shows a man (left) who was duplicated in photoshopped pic put out by Clinton campaign, indicated with red circles (right) 
+Then, if all of that isn’t bad enough, the Chicago Tribune, one of the most liberal papers in the country, had this headline yesterday: “ Democrats Should Ask Hillary To Step Down ,” which was written by John Kass who was speaking from Hillary’s real home state of Illinois. 
+“FBI director James Comey ‘s announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious .” [via Chicago Tribune ] 
+If we are agreeing with the Chicago Tribune, you know what happened on Friday with James Comey and the FBI is so devastating that this election is over for Hillary. However, that doesn’t mean we can let up and sigh with relief just yet. 
+However, we can be extremely optimistic that, after eight years and two elections that caused utter destruction for our country, we have an extremely good chance that Americans will reject Hillary and her criminal cabal. America was saved by Anthony Weiner, and it doesn’t get any stranger than that.",FAKE
+10555,Clinton Vs. Trump: Latest Electoral Prediction [Greg Laden's Blog] | Science and Technology,"(Before It's News)
+It is fun to look at polls, and using such data, decide which candidate will win which state, and ultimately, which candidate will win the electoral college. A lot of people and organizations do that, and for this reason, I don’t. I do not have access to polls that no one else sees. Were I to use polling data to directly predict outcomes per state, I’d use a method like that used by FiveThirtyEight, and probably come up with similar results. How boring. It would be a waste of my time to try to replicate the excellent work done by Nate Silver and his team.
+Back during the Democratic Primaries, I decided that I wanted to get a handle on which candidate was likely to win, fairly early on. The polling based estimates were inadequate because most states simply didn’t have polling data that early in the process. So, I invented an alternative method, which made certain estimates of how voters with different ethnic identities would vote. That method accurately predicted several primary outcomes, outperforming the poll based methods such as those used by FiveThirtyEight.
+After a while, enough primaries had been carried out that I could switch methods slightly. Using the same exact model, but primed with the results of prior primaries (that year) rather than my estimates of voter behavior, I used the ethnic distribution data for each state to predict the outcome of upcoming primary contests.
+Once again, my method was very accurate, and once again, it out performed the polling based methods.
+So, recently, I’ve tried to apply a similar method to estimating the electoral outcome for this year’s presidential race. But, it is impossible to use the same exact method because the entire thing happens all on one day. I can’t use the election results from a handful of states to estimate the likely future outcomes in other states.
+I recognize that polling data is very limited on a national level. Things happen during an election season that probably change people’s likely voting behavior, especially among independents. Solid states are rarely polled, and small states, swing or not, are rarely polled. Many polls are of low quality. Right now, for instance, fewer than half of the states have polls that were a) taken fully after the final POTUS debate and b) have an A- or better rating from FiveThirtyEight. If I allow the use of B and occasional C ratings for recent polls, and allow a few polls to include periods of time prior to the last POTUS debate, but only in states that are very strongly in favor of one candidate or the other (and thus likely to not move anyway), I can find 32 states that have sort of usable polling data. Interestingly, states with some of the more controversial changes happening, like Utah and Iowa, are not adequately polled.
+In order to apply a model like the one I used in the Primaries to the current election, I used the 32 states for which there was somewhat acceptable recent polling data to inform the model (to calculate the regression coefficients) in order to then, separately, predict the likely voting behavior (Trump vs. Clinton) in all of the states.
+Before I show you the map, however, I need to discuss something else.
+About a week ago the press, especially the somewhat more left leaning press, and various commenters, seeing much reaction to a series of events beginning with the NYT release of Trump’s tax return and ending with the final POTUS debate, events which sandwiched the sexual assault tapes and accusations, collectively decided that a huge gap between Clinton and Trump was rapidly opening up and the race would end with a double digit spread, an electoral rout, and a big party.
+Soon after, I pointed out that this may not be correct. That polling data seemed to show, rather, that there was an expansion of the difference between the two candidates followed by a re-closing of the gap, with Clinton still leading but by about as much as before this temporary shift. To this I added a concern. If too many people assumed that the race was over and in the double digit range, perhaps there could be a GOTV backlash effect, or a funding effect, that would shift things to within shooting distance for Trump.
+I was not alone in thinking this, and I was probably right. The GOP sunk, via pacs, 25 million dollars into Senate races in response to the Democrats shifting from the national race to the Senate, which was followed by the Democrats shifting back to the national race in certain states, presumably recognizing that the polls were artificially spread. Indeed, some who criticized (arguing mainly from incredulity and good wishes) my admonition noted, correctly, that some of that narrowing was because a bunch of right-leaning polls had come out all at once. This is true, but it ignores that a bunch of left-leaning polls had made the formation of the Great Gap of GOP Defeat look a lot bigger than it ever really was.
+I say all this as part one of my preparation for what I’m going to tell you below, which is not the news you want to hear. Part two is some logic I’d like to bludgeon you with.
+Consider these points:
+1) True Trump supporters could give a rat’s ass about sexual assault, poor debate performance, or tax forms. Donald Trump was correct when he said, weeks ago, now forgotten, that he could gun someone down on the streets of Manhattan and he would not lose support form his base. These people did not abandon him when he was heard to talk about sexual assault. If anything, they were energized by it. And, I’m talking about something just shy of 40% of the voters. We live in a barely civilized asshole country.
+2) Please tell me exactly which Hillary Clinton supporters, who were going to vote for Clinton over Trump all along, are NOW going to pick Clinton (if polled or on voting day) that change from not being Clinton supporters to being Clinton supporters? In other words (this is a somewhat subtle point) which people who hated Trump became True Haters of Trump after the sexual assault thing? Almost none. They were already there.
+3) The third category of people, the undecideds (who are only lying about being undecided, in most cases) and the so-called “reasonable Republicans” (of which there are very, very few), who could conceivably shift from Trump to Clinton are going to divide their voting activities between Johnson, a write in (as they are being advised by Republican leaders in some cases) or simply staying home.
+In other words, over the last few weeks, no source has emerged that hands Secretary Clinton more electoral votes than she probably had about a month ago, and Trump is not going to have any, or at least not many, electoral votes go away.
+Those observations (part one) and that logic (part two) cause me to be utterly unsurprised to find out that an analysis of the electoral map I did on October 16th and one I did today do not show Clinton pulling farther ahead. In fact, the two analyses have Clinton being less far ahead than Trump now than ten days ago. The difference is in Ohio (shifting from Clinton to Trump) which is almost certainly going to happen, and North Carolina (which shifted from Clinton to Trump in this analysis) which seems much less likely to happen, and Arizona shifting from Clinton (that was probably wishful thinking) to Trump.
+The point here is this, plain and simple. An analysis using a technique that has worked very well for me in the past shows that the difference between that moment of Maximal Clintonosity and today is plus or minus a couple of state. In other words, not different. Maybe a little worse. Really, about the same.
+Here’s the current map:
+Obviously, I will be watching for more data over the next few days. I assume there will be a spate of polls as we approach November 8th (the day Democrats vote. Republicans vote on the 28th of November). If so, then there will be convergence between my method of calibration and my method of calculation, and the model will consume itself by the tail and become very accurate at the same time.
+But between now and then, perhaps that very small number of polls that are both recent and high quality will grow a bit more and I can do this again and resolve those closer states.
+By the way, the “swing states” according to my model, the states where things are close, are Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia of those now in the Trump column. Those are indeed swing states. Numerically, the close states that are in the Clinton column are Virginia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania.",FAKE
+8549,Jubilee Year of Mercy ends on November 20. Following Judgment?,"Jubilee Year of Mercy ends on November 20. Following Judgment? page: 1 Jesus to St Faustina: You will prepare the world for My final coming. (Diary 429) Speak to the world about My mercy ... It is a sign for the end times. After it will come the Day of Justice. While there is still time, let them have recourse to the fountain of My mercy. (Diary 848) Tell souls about this great mercy of Mine, because the awful day, the day of My justice, is near. (Diary 965). I am prolonging the time of mercy for the sake of sinners. But woe to them if they do not recognize this time of My visitation. (Diary 1160) Before the Day of Justice, I am sending the Day of Mercy. (Diary 1588) He who refuses to pass through the door of My mercy must pass through the door of My justice. (Diary 1146). The Jubilee Year of Mercy proclaimed by pope Francis, ends on November 20th the feast of Christ the King the end of the liturgical year. Every jubilee year is destined to end of course, that's why it is a year and not a decade.But...isn't it too much prophecy gathered in that last year? First of all, the Catholics expect earnestly the 100th anniversary of Fatima. The 100th year started on October 13 and would end on October 13, 2017. As pope Benedict said during his pontificate on his trip to Fatima, the 100th year will see the Fatima secrets fulfilled. Then, we had all kinds of predictions recently. Let only remember the once at the time Jewish rabbis predictions of the year 5776, encoded in Bible codes according to some of them, that also appeared to be the 49th jubilee year since the retaking of Jerusalem. ""Nothing happened, again"" would say many. Much happened in terms that might be the last quiet year before the events. Then we have the enigmatic wishes on the last Christmas of both pope and queen as if that would be our last Christmas? The wordings were vague enough to draw firm conclusion, anyway they were said and stirred public interest. There are more predictions, such as of major Solar kill shot, that even president Obama signed orders in case it happens. The French foreign minister said of 500 days before climate chaos, days that expired last Fall. How much more mercy is envisioned by God, in what time frames? If the sequence given in Garabandal of Great Warning- Miracle - Chastisement is to be accomplished before the 100th anniversary of Fatima, it seems God's mercy towards the entire world would end in less than a year time. The only possible date for the Miracle in 2017 would fall on April 13, Holy Thursday. Let make a distinction, mercy to individuals who accepted God's loving call, NEVER ENDS! But God is a just judge at the same time. The Chastisement is predicted by too many prophecies and cannot be disregarded as nonsense. Moreover,t he world today is in a worse shape than during the end of the Cold War. I don't know what exactly will follow, there are variety of scenarios each of them having its own justification and logic to exist. May be a combination of them will happen in reality. What is exactly Great Warning, is it only what is said to be by numerous seers, far not only those in Garabandal? For me it should include ET-angelic component. Time will tell. Time that runs out, according to Anguera and other apparitions of Virgin Mary. That doesn't mean it has all to happen on December 1st. Every next week draws us closer to the two doors, one of which is the Door of Mercy and the other the Door of Justice. Your take on recent catholic prophecy? Or may be protestant or orthodox one? edit on 27-10-2016 by 2012newstart because: (no reason given) edit on 27-10-2016 by 2012newstart because: (no reason given)",FAKE
+2834,Iraq launches operation against ISIS in Anbar province,"The Iraqi government -- supported by Shiite militias from Iran -- launched a large-scale military operation to take out Islamic State militants from Iraq’s western Anbar province Monday.
+
+The operation is under way to recapture Fallujah and Ramadi, a senior defense official at the Pentagon confirmed to Fox News Monday. The efforts are supported by Shiite militias, known as Popular Mobilization Units, from Iran and its proxy Hezbollah.
+
+Photos of Iran’s Quds force Commander Qasem Soleimani visiting Shia militia units inside Iraq have appeared on social media since ISIS took over large portions of Iraq a year ago.
+
+The defense official was unaware of any U.S. air support boosting the operation. It has been longstanding Pentagon policy to support only units aligned with the government of Iraq, but the line can be blurred as the chain of command for units operating in Iraq is not always known.
+
+The spokesman for the Joint Operations Command, Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, said in a televised statement that the operation started at dawn Monday and that government forces are backed by Shiite and Sunni pro-government fighters.
+
+The operation met fierce resistance from insurgents, who deployed five suicide car bombs and fired rockets to repel their advance on the city of Fallujah, about 30 miles west of Baghdad, military sources in Anbar told Reuters.
+
+There were also reports of fighting around the provincial capital Ramadi, captured by Islamic State two months ago.
+
+There were also reports of fighting around Ramadi-- captured by Islamic State two months ago. Iraqi forces pushed towards the provincial capital from the west and the south, police sources in the province said. Islamic State supporters said those advances were repelled by the militants.
+
+When Shia militia units launched an operation to retake another Sunni stronghold, Tikrit, in March, they did so without support from the U.S.-led coalition initially.  U.S. warplanes only supported the operation when the Shia militia units backed by Iran departed the area.
+
+According to the latest coalition airstrike report, there were two airstrikes in Fallujah over the weekend.
+
+This is not the first time the Iraqi government has announced an operation to retake Anbar -- where several key towns, including the provincial capital Ramadi, remain under ISIS control. In May, authorities announced an operation to retake Ramadi, but there has not been any major progress on the ground since then.
+
+The forces arrayed against ISIS are varied, according to retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters.
+
+“This is a real mish-mosh,” said Peters, a Fox News contributor. “You have Shia militias -- not all of whom get along, by the way, Iraqi troops, police and some Sunni tribesmen. Iran is deeply involved in helping them plan and supervising the operation, but it is compartmentalized. It won’t be Sunni tribesmen and Shia militias standing shoulder-to-shoulder. So coordination is going to be a nightmare.”
+
+Peters said retaking Fallujah, a much smaller city than Ramadi and closer to Baghdad, will be easier. Going into Ramadi, where ISIS has been dug in for two months and likely booby-trapped buildings, will be a dangerous and painstaking process, he said. And there is one more tactic to worry about, according to Peters.
+
+“ISIS is very smart,” he said. “When they are attacked in one area, they strike in another area. It would not be surprising to see an asymmetric response -- perhaps a new attack on Tikrit or the oil fields in the north.”
+
+Hadi al-Ameri, commander of the largest Shi'ite force, the Badr Organization, told Iraqi television Sunday he expected the main attack on Fallujah to happen after the Eid holiday which starts later this week.
+
+Residents in Fallujah and Ramadi reported heavy bombardment of both cities early on Monday.
+
+In a brief statement, Iraq's Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, vowed to ""take revenge from Daesh criminals on the battlefield... and their cowardly crimes against unarmed civilians will only increase our determination to chase them and to expel them from the land of Iraq.""
+
+The Islamic State group, also known by the Arabic acronym Daesh, seized large parts of Anbar in early 2014 and captured Ramadi in May. Iraqi forces, which had been making steady progress against the extremists in recent months with the help of the air campaign, scored a major victory in recapturing Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit last month.
+
+During the past few weeks, the troops have been moving to cut the militants' supply routes and to surround and isolate Ramadi and Fallujah.
+
+Rasool didn't provide any further details on the ongoing operations. By noon, the country's state TV reported government forces recapturing villages and areas around Fallujah.
+
+Meanwhile Monday, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for Sunday's series of bombings in Shiite areas of the capital, Baghdad, that killed at least 29 people and wounded 81 others, according to the ISIS-affiliated Aamaq news agency.
+
+Iraq is going through its worst crisis since the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Islamic State group controls large swaths of the country's north and west after capturing Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul and the majority of Anbar province.
+
+Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6035,UKIP MEPs Steven Woolfe & Mike Hookem reported to French police over Strasbourg scuffle,"UKIP MEPs Steven Woolfe & Mike Hookem reported to French police over... UKIP MEPs Steven Woolfe & Mike Hookem reported to French police over Strasbourg scuffle By 0 61 
+MEPs Steven Woolfe and Mike Hookem have been reported to French police over an altercation at the EU’s Strasbourg parliament, which saw Woolfe hospitalized and plunged crisis-hit UKIP into further turmoil. 
+European Parliament President Martin Schulz said he had referred the “regrettable” incident to the French authorities “given the seriousness of the reported facts and their possible criminal implications.” 
+Schulz says he had been recommended to do so by the European Parliament’s advisory committee on conduct, according to the Press Association. Following recommendation of EP Advisory Committee on Code of Conduct, I referred incident involving MEPs Hookem and Woolfe to FR authorities 
+— EP President (@EP_President) October 26, 2016 Based on the result of the investigations, I will then take a decision about sanctions to be imposed according to EP rules 
+— EP President (@EP_President) October 26, 2016 
+“The committee concluded that the versions of the facts given by the two members involved diverged substantially and the facts seem to have happened in the absence of direct witnesses,” he told the parliament. 
+Read more 
+“It also stressed that given the seriousness of the reported facts and their possible criminal implications, further evidence is needed to clarify this matter. 
+“As a result I have decided to follow the recommendation of the advisory committee and I have referred this matter to the competent French authorities. 
+“Based on the result of the investigations, I will then take a decision about a sanction to be imposed.” Hookem off the hook 
+An internal investigation by UKIP published on Wednesday afternoon ruled Hookem should not be held responsible for the altercation. 
+“ In the absence of eye witnesses, the true facts of what took place in the ante room itself are impossible to determine and neither man has made an official complaint to the party over the incident. ” 
+Despite the ruling, party investigators went into a detailed hypothesis as to what took place in the ante room between Hookem and Woolfe. The only thing it determines with any certainty is that “ the door was open prior to Mr Woofle’s fall. ” 
+The investigation concludes Hookem was not close enough to the ante room door to open it himself, and so it is “ reasonable to assume that Mr Woolf opened the door whilst attempting to exit the ante room backwards. ” 
+“ The investigation does find it unlikely that Hookem was in a position to be able to push Woolfe through the door, given where he was standing in the ante room immediately afterwards, but in the absence of an eye witness, it cannot make a definite determination .” 
+While the report lets Hookem off the hook, it actually finds a series of quotes given by Woolfe to the Daily Mail earlier this month to have brought the party into “ disrepute .” 
+“ Had Mr Woolfe continued his membership of the party, a disciplinary panel would have been convened to investigate these quotes ,” the report concludes. Crying Woolfe 
+Woolfe quit UKIP last week, abandoning his leadership bid, and branded the party “ungovernable” without Nigel Farage as leader and the EU referendum to unite supporters. 
+He will now sit as an independent in the European Parliament. 
+Woolfe stands by the claim he “received a blow” from Hookem during an altercation at a private meeting of UKIP MEPs, where they were discussing Woolfe’s rumored plan to defect to the Conservatives. 
+Woolfe says the incident caused him to suffer two seizures, partial paralysis and the loss of feeling in his face and body. He says he issued a police complaint. 
+Hookem denies hitting Woolfe. 
+The fallout from the incident has continued with claims Woolfe has been warned about “inappropriate behavior” by senior party figures. 
+Hookem has also claimed Woolfe signed for £276 (US$300) in daily allowances at the European Parliament three times while recovering from his injuries earlier this month. 
+Woolfe had been seen as a frontrunner in the race to replace Diane James, whose term as UKIP leader lasted just 18 days. 
+Among the other contenders are Suzanne Evans, Paul Nuttall and Raheem Kassam. 
+Also running is John Rees-Evans, who apologized this week over a 2014 claim that a “ homosexual donkey ” tried to rape his horse. He described the comments as “ playful banter .” 
+The new UKIP leader will be announced on November 28. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+2281,Justices Kennedy and Scalia and their divide on gay rights,"Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia were born in the same year, chosen by the same president, live on the same Northern Virginia street and, in serving together on the Supreme Court longer than any other current pair of justices, have many times voted the same conservative way.
+
+But one issue — how the Constitution protects gay citizens — divides and defines the two like no other. This week’s historic hearing on same-sex marriage is both the logical extension and ultimate showdown in a decades-long argument that so far Kennedy has always won.
+
+[Here’s what the fallout of a ruling could be in the various states]
+
+Each of Kennedy’s bold and lyrical rulings on behalf of gays — “times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,” he wrote in Lawrence v. Texas — has been just as reliably followed by a meticulous and fiery denunciation from Scalia.
+
+“The court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed,” Scalia answered in the Lawrence case.
+
+Kennedy has written all of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions on gay rights: protecting the civil rights of homosexuals in Romer v. Evans (1996), abolishing anti-gay sodomy laws in Lawrence (2003) and ruling in United States v. Windsor two years ago that the federal government must recognize same-sex marriages.
+
+Each was a steppingstone to the Supreme Court’s consideration on Tuesday of whether the Constitution forbids states from prohibiting gay couples to marry.
+
+If the pattern continues and the court renders a landmark ruling favoring gay marriage, it will likely once again be Kennedy whose words memorialize that decision and Scalia who will articulate the dissent.
+
+It is not a conflict everyone would have predicted for two of Ronald Reagan’s choices for the court. Scalia ascended to the bench in 1986, and Kennedy followed 17 months later. The two, born on opposite coasts in 1936, are consistent comrades on issues important to corporate America and in dismantling campaign finance laws they see restricting political speech.
+
+After Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sided with liberals to declare the Affordable Care Act constitutional, Scalia and Kennedy united with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in a jointly written, 65-page dissent mocking the majority opinion and saying the entire act should be found invalid.
+
+Kennedy is often the deciding vote when the ideologically divided court splits 5 to 4, but in two-thirds of those cases he sides with the conservatives.
+
+But if they often arrive at the same conclusion — one obstacle for same-sex marriage proponents in the current case is Kennedy’s allegiance to states’ rights — Kennedy and Scalia could not be more different in how they view a judge’s role.
+
+“Their different approach to gay rights reflects their more fundamental disagreement about how to think about the liberties protected by the Constitution,” said Paul M. Smith, a Washington lawyer who was on the winning side in the Lawrence case.
+
+Scalia believes the only freedoms that should be viewed as protected by the Constitution “are those that have been protected under American law throughout our history, defined at the most specific level,” Smith said. Otherwise, the people decide.
+
+Kennedy, Smith said, “believes that each generation has the right to conceive of newer and broader forms of liberty that merit constitutional protection. He sees history as a guide but not a straitjacket.”
+
+Their battle is compelling, said Allison Orr Larsen, a William and Mary law professor, because it “brings to the forefront the theoretical question in constitutional law: How should courts respond to change when interpreting the Constitution?”
+
+Michael Dorf, a professor at Cornell Law School and a former Kennedy clerk, said his former boss’s decisions on gay rights were not constructed to lead ultimately to a decision on same-sex marriage. But they provided a foundation for how to view new constitutional rights “if that’s where the country moves.”
+
+Scalia, on the other hand, champions the cause of originalism, and Edward Whelan, a former Scalia clerk and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said his former boss learned quickly that “Kennedy’s judicial approach was not anything close to what Scalia’s is.”
+
+“A basic tenet of originalism is that it’s not the role of judges to impose their own moral philosophies,” Whelan said. “Scalia understands the Constitution to leave the vast bulk of policy issues to the democratic processes and rejects the notion that it’s his role to read his own views into the Constitution.”
+
+It’s worth remembering the differences among President Reagan’s choices for the Supreme Court.
+
+He fulfilled his campaign pledge to name a woman to the bench with Sandra Day O’Connor, the pragmatic Arizona politician and judge who quickly became the court’s center.
+
+Scalia’s selection was celebrated by conservatives eager to see a new method of constitutional interpretation forcefully advocated on the court.
+
+Kennedy was a compromise, Reagan’s third choice for the seat he once hoped would be filled by conservative Robert Bork, whose nomination was defeated in the Senate. “This was the Bork seat,” said Smith. “Things could have been much different.”
+
+Kennedy’s views, Dorf said, were those of a “moderate California Republican.”
+
+Although he never ruled for gay rights as a lower court judge, Kennedy expressed concern about the policy even as he upheld the military’s right to dismiss gay servicemen. And Frank J. Colucci, a political science professor at Purdue University who has written a book about Kennedy’s jurisprudence, recalled that Kennedy in a speech criticized the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that upheld a Georgia statute criminalizing sodomy.
+
+“He came about as close as you can as a lower court judge to saying it was wrongly decided,” Colucci said.
+
+Once on the court, Kennedy was able to say just that.
+
+In the first gay rights case, Romer, Kennedy wrote for the majority in striking down a Colorado constitutional amendment. After some cities in the state began passing laws protecting gays from discrimination in housing, employment and other areas, voters through a referendum approved the amendment precluding such government protections.
+
+Colorado’s amendment, Kennedy wrote, “classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.”
+
+That began something of a call-and-response on the issue: Kennedy delivering the majority’s opinion, Scalia replying with a scalding dissent, read from the bench for emphasis.
+
+“This court has no business imposing upon all Americans the resolution favored by the elite class from which the members of this institution are selected, pronouncing that ‘animosity’ toward homosexuality is evil,” Scalia wrote in Romer. “I vigorously dissent.”
+
+In Lawrence, Kennedy got the chance to reverse the court’s decision on sodomy, and did: “Bowers was not correct when it was decided and it is not correct today.” Private, homosexual conduct between consenting adults, he wrote, “involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.”
+
+O’Connor wrote a concurring opinion to say the ruling did not touch on the matter of whether gays would be able to marry.
+
+Scalia wrote that homosexuals should be free to promote their cause through democratic means, but “many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home.”
+
+“They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive,” he wrote. “The court views it as ‘discrimination.’ ”
+
+Two years ago, in Windsor, Kennedy wrote that the federal government’s refusal to offer the same government benefits available to heterosexual couples to legally married gay couples tells “all the world that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy” and “humiliates” their children.
+
+Again, Scalia blasted the decision, saying the majority was merely being coy in saying the decision did not address whether states are required to give licenses for same-sex marriage.
+
+“By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition,” he wrote.
+
+Most federal courts have taken Scalia literally.
+
+“The court agrees with Justice Scalia’s interpretation of Windsor,” wrote U.S. District Judge Robert J. Shelby of Salt Lake City.
+
+Shelby’s decision to strike a marriage ban in Utah was the first such ruling following Windsor and began the path that continues to Tuesday’s oral arguments, and will end with the court’s decision in June.
+
+40 years later: “I’ve got the license and the faggot letter”
+
+The right finds a voice on same-sex marriage
+
+Gay rights, religious rights and a compromise in an unlikely place: Utah",REAL
+9134,Justice Clarence Thomas Describes Washington DC As “Broken”,"WATCH: CNN Hack Humiliates Self, Tells Viewers U.S. Reps Are Term-Limited Already (They’re Not) 
+That breakdown in communication in Washington is exactly what has fueled the rise of Trump . People are sick and tired of nothing getting done, at least nothing good, so they want a new leader who can actually accomplish great things. 
+“I think that we have decided that rather than confront the disagreement and differences of opinion, we’ll just simply annihilate the person who disagrees with us,” Thomas said. 
+Unfortunately he is exactly right. Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of preferring to demonize their opponents rather than engaging in meaningful discussion.   
+This sort of polarization doesn’t help America. All it does is increase the frustration the American people have with Congress when they see nothing happening for years. 
+Trump has a history of making compromises and hammering out complex deals in the business world. Unlike Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump has a history of making things work. 
+If Trump can bring about some real change in Washington, he can finally turn this country around. 
+Share this on Facebook and Twitter and let us know if you think electing Trump will be enough to fix what is broken in our capitol.  ",FAKE
+6407,"The Week In Pictures – Week Of October 31, 2016 - The Onion - America's Finest News Source","New Report Finds Voters Have No Idea How Outraged They Supposed To Be About Anything Anymore WASHINGTON—Saying that at this point, they were just taking their best guesses at how they should react to each new scandal that emerged about the presidential nominees, voters across the country admitted Monday they had no clue how outraged they are supposed to be about anything anymore. Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign BROOKLYN, NY—In response to the FBI’s announcement that its investigation of him had produced new evidence that could pertain to its probe of the Democratic presidential nominee, Anthony Weiner reportedly sent an apology sext early Monday morning to the entire Hillary Clinton campaign. ",FAKE
+1938,Jeb Bush's Foreign Policy Plan: More Military Spending Will 'Encourage Peace',"WASHINGTON -- Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will lay out a vision of American foreign policy on Wednesday aimed at pushing his nascent 2016 presidential campaign out of the shadow of his father and brother, two former presidents who waged overseas wars.
+
+""I love my father and my brother … But I am my own man –- and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experiences,"" Bush will say in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, according to excerpts provided to reporters late Tuesday night.
+
+In his first major foreign policy address, the likely 2016 Republican front-runner will make the case for increased military spending so America can ""project power and enforce peaceful stability in far-off areas of the globe."" He will also criticize President Barack Obama's foreign policy, calling it ""inconsistent and indecisive.""
+
+""Having a military that is equal to any threat ... makes it less likely that we will need to put our men and women in uniform in harm’s way,"" Bush plans to tell attendees, adding that he believes ""fundamentally, that weakness invites war… and strength encourages peace.""
+
+The idea that a bigger U.S. military would act as a bigger deterrent to potential foes is one that reached its apex during the Cold War, but has been repeatedly challenged in the 21st century by the rise of global terrorism and sectarian conflicts.
+
+The Obama administration is currently working to devise responses to a number of unconventional threats to global security. Chief among them are the rise of the so-called Islamic State in the Middle East, and the Russian-backed separatists waging guerrilla war in Ukraine.
+
+From his speech, it appears that Bush would have America play a greater role than it already does in these conflicts. ""America does not have the luxury of withdrawing from the world –- our security, our prosperity and our values demand that we remain engaged and involved in often distant places,"" Bush will say. ""We have no reason to apologize for our leadership and our interest in serving the cause of global security, global peace and human freedom.""
+
+This vision of America's role in the world directly contradicts the view held by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, another 2016 potential candidate, that the U.S. should avoid involvement in foreign conflicts unless they pose a direct threat to American lives.
+
+But even as Bush stressed that he would devise his own way forward, plenty of his foreign policies invite comparisons, not contradictions, with those of his neoconservative brother, George W.Bush, and his realist father, George H.W. Bush. 
+
+ One reason for this could be that Jeb Bush has consulted many of the same advisers his father and brother relied on to help them craft foreign policy while each was in office. The advisers represent a spectrum of conservative viewpoints, from the pragmatic James Baker, former secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration, to the fiercely ideological Paul Wolfowitz, who served as deputy secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration.
+
+Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush have held similar foreign policy ideas since at least 1997, when they were both signatories to a set of principles devised by the conservative Project for the New American Century, which were described by the group as a ""Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."" Other signatories include former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.",REAL
+1255,"John Kasich: He’s Conservative, but at Least He’s Sane","I worked for Kasich on Capitol Hill. Yes, he’s very conservative. But there are a few surprises in there, and he’s in Bizarro World.
+
+With his surprising second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary, Ohio Gov. John Kasich has vaulted out of the pack of also-rans to become the latest hope of two distinct groups of people: Republican operatives fearing what Donald Trump’s berserker candidacy might do to their party, and ordinary citizens simply hoping to have a sane presidential candidate to vote for.
+
+Until this past week, Kasich has not attracted much attention, mainly because the current dynamic of media coverage encourages histrionics and preening. But by appearing halfway normal, as he did at last Saturday’s debate in South Carolina, and not engaging in theatrics about carpetbombing, waterboarding, or ripping up treaties, he has become the default choice of those who would worry if Kasich’s opponents ever got their hands on the nuclear switch.
+
+He has the advantage (and disadvantage) of a long record. I had a chance to see him in action as I worked for him for 17 years on budget and armed services issues—although I’ve had no connection to him in over a decade, or to his campaign, and am now a political independent.
+
+In the 1980s, at the dawn of his congressional career, many members of his own party considered Kasich a conservative bomb thrower—he would offer his own budget, something back-benchers weren’t supposed to do in those days. He has not changed ideologically or temperamentally—his 2011 effort to roll back labor protection for state employees was too extreme and Ohio voters overwhelmingly defeated it—but while Kasich has remained a staunch conservative, much of his party has lurched so far right it has entered Bizarro World.
+
+This fact accounts for Kasich’s reputation as a RINO (Republican in name only) and why it may be more difficult for him to win his own party’s nomination than the general election. His apostasy in having Ohio accept Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act is unforgivable to Republicans who consider health insurance for the poor to be an instrument of Satan. Likewise, in 1994 he voted for an assault weapons ban, pure heresy for the burgeoning Ted Nugent wing of his party. Kasich’s practice of occasionally dissing wealthy GOP donors who are accustomed to blind deference is considered a minus among the party’s bigwigs.
+
+Those deeds might help, though, in a general election. So might his national security experience: 18 years on the House Armed Services Committee counts for far more involvement in that field than all his opponents combined. Refreshingly, as a congressman he avoided the kneejerk military interventionism that is now mandatory for GOP candidates. He opposed authorizing the Marines’ mission in Lebanon in 1983; the bombing of the Marine barracks in October of that year and President Reagan’s decision to quickly withdraw vindicated Kasich’s stand.
+
+Similarly, he opposed President Clinton’s bombing of Serbia, which in his view amounted to a drive-by shooting with cruise missiles in a conflict in which no discernible U.S. interests were involved. He was also able to work across the aisle with Democrats to put a stake through the heart of the B-2 bomber, a Cold War anachronism, which at $2.2 billion a copy had become an unaffordable luxury.
+
+As Budget Committee chairman, Kasich was also present at the creation of the first balanced budget since the Eisenhower era. While other factors, such as an avalanche of revenues from the dot.com bubble, set the stage for the achievement, he had a formidable job just to keep his own colleagues on task. The defense hawks were always itching to bust the budget caps with more Pentagon spending. And then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to suffer from ADD, occasionally threatened to derail the difficult march to a balanced budget with novel and unvetted policy visions.
+
+The general election downside? Just as there are legitimate questions about Hillary Clinton’s receiving $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three speeches, Kasich as a nominee would surely face scrutiny over his eight years as a managing director at Lehman Brothers. The investment bank’s collapse in September 2008, the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history, nearly pitched the global economy into the abyss. Lawsuits to settle the dismantling of Lehman are still reverberating through the financial world. Ohio voters gave him a pass, but national inspection of his record would be more thorough—certainly if Clinton’s campaign had anything to do with it.
+
+Stories occasionally surface about Kasich’s anger management problem. As a former employee, I can corroborate those allegations, as well as his tendency to preachy self-righteousness that is a constant temptation of professional politicians. These are, perhaps, pardonable sins both in view of the tasteless vaudeville act being played out by several of his GOP competitors, and his own positive accomplishments.",REAL
+4618,2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Clinton Proposing Rigging Palestine Election,"On September 5, 2006, Eli Chomsky was an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press, and Hillary Clinton was running for a shoo-in re-election as a U.S. senator. Her trip making the rounds of editorial boards brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press.
+
+The tape was never released and has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room. According to Chomsky, his old-school audiocassette is the only existent copy and no one has heard it since 2006, until today when he played it for the Observer.
+
+The tape is 45 minutes and contains much that is no longer relevant, such as analysis of the re-election battle that Sen. Joe Lieberman was then facing in Connecticut. But a seemingly throwaway remark about elections in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority has taken on new relevance amid persistent accusations in the presidential campaign by Clinton’s Republican opponent Donald Trump that the current election is “rigged.”
+
+Speaking to the Jewish Press about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats).
+
+“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”
+
+Chomsky recalls being taken aback that “anyone could support the idea—offered by a national political leader, no less—that the U.S. should be in the business of fixing foreign elections.”
+
+Some eyebrows were also raised when then-Senator Clinton appeared to make a questionable moral equivalency.
+
+Regarding capturing combatants in war—the June capture of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit by Hamas militants who came across the Gaza border via an underground tunnel was very much front of mind—Clinton can be heard on the tape saying, “And then, when, you know, Hamas, you know, sent the terrorists, you know, through the tunnel into Israel that killed and captured, you know, kidnapped the young Israeli soldier, you know, there’s a sense of like, one-upsmanship, and in these cultures of, you know, well, if they captured a soldier, we’ve got to capture a soldier.”
+
+Equating Hamas, which to this day remains on the State Department’s official list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, with the armed forces of a close American ally was not what many expected to hear in the Jewish Press editorial offices, which were then at Third Avenue and Third Street in Brooklyn. (The paper’s office has since moved to the Boro Park section of Brooklyn.) The use of the phrase “these cultures” is also a bit of a head-scratcher.
+
+According to Chomsky, Clinton was “gracious, personable and pleasant throughout” the interview, taking about an hour to speak to, in addition to himself, managing editor Jerry Greenwald, assistant to the publisher Naomi Klass Mauer, counsel Dennis Rapps and senior editor Jason Maoz.
+
+Another part of the tape highlights something that was relatively uncontroversial at the time but has taken on new meaning in light of the current campaign—speaking to leaders with whom our country is not on the best terms. Clinton has presented a very tough front in discussing Russia, for example, accusing Trump of unseemly ardor for strongman Vladimir Putin and mocking his oft-stated prediction that as president he’d “get along” with Putin.
+
+Chomsky is heard on the tape asking Clinton what now seems like a prescient question about Syria, given the disaster unfolding there and its looming threat to drag the U.S., Iran and Russia into confrontation.
+
+“Do you think it’s worth talking to Syria—both from the U.S. point [of view] and Israel’s point [of view]?”
+
+Clinton replied, “You know, I’m pretty much of the mind that I don’t see what it hurts to talk to people. As long as you’re not stupid and giving things away. I mean, we talked to the Soviet Union for 40 years. They invaded Hungary, they invaded Czechoslovakia, they persecuted the Jews, they invaded Afghanistan, they destabilized governments, they put missiles 90 miles from our shores, we never stopped talking to them,” an answer that reflects her mastery of the facts but also reflects a willingness to talk to Russia that sounds more like Trump 2016 than Clinton 2016.
+
+Shortly after, she said, “But if you say, ‘they’re evil, we’re good, [and] we’re never dealing with them,’ I think you give up a lot of the tools that you need to have in order to defeat them…So I would like to talk to you [the enemy] because I want to know more about you. Because if I want to defeat you, I’ve got to know something more about you. I need different tools to use in my campaign against you. That’s my take on it.”
+
+A final bit of interest to the current campaign involves an articulation of phrases that Trump has accused Clinton of being reluctant to use. Discussing the need for a response to terrorism, Clinton said, “I think you can make the case that whether you call it ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamo-fascism,’ whatever the label is we’re going to give to this phenomenon, it’s a threat. It’s a global threat. To Europe, to Israel, to the United States…Therefore we need a global response. It’s a global threat and it needs a global response. That can be the, sort of, statement of principle…So I think sometimes having the global vision is a help as long as you realize that underneath that global vision there’s a lot of variety and differentiation that has to go on.”
+
+It’s not clear what she means by a global vision with variety and differentiation, but what’s quite clear is that the then-senator, just five years after her state was the epicenter of the September 11 attacks, was comfortable deploying the phrase “Islamic terrorism” and the even more strident “Islamo-fascism,” at least when meeting with the editorial board of a Jewish newspaper.
+
+In an interview before the Observer heard the tape, Chomsky told the Observer that Clinton made some “odd and controversial comments” on the tape. The irony of a decade-old recording emerging to feature a candidate making comments that are suddenly relevant to voters today was not lost on Chomsky, who wrote the original story at the time. Oddly enough, that story, headlined “Hillary Clinton on Israel, Iraq and Terror,” is no longer available on jewishpress.com and even a short summary published on the Free Republic site offers a broken link that can no longer surface the story.
+
+“I went to my bosses at the time,” Chomsky told the Observer. “The Jewish Press had this mindset that they would not want to say anything offensive about anybody—even a direct quote from anyone—in a position of influence because they might need them down the road. My bosses didn’t think it was newsworthy at the time. I was convinced that it was and I held onto it all these years.”
+
+Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, publisher of Observer Media.",REAL
+3602,Authorities search for clues after raid thwarts potential 'Belgian Charlie Hebdo' attack,"Belgian authorities were searching for clues early Friday after police killed two in raids aimed at jihadists returning from Syria who were planning to launch a ""Belgian Charlie Hebdo"" attack, officials said.
+
+Police were searching in Verviers, where the raid took place, and the greater Brussels area as part of a weeklong investigation that started well before the terrorism spree last week that led to 17 deaths in the Paris area. The Belgian operations had no apparent link to the terrorist acts committed in France.
+
+And, unlike the Paris terrorists, who attacked the office of a satirical newspaper and a kosher grocery store, the suspects in Belgium were reportedly aiming at hard targets: police installations.
+
+""They were on the verge of committing important terror attacks,"" federal magistrate Eric Van der Sypt said at a news conference in Brussels.
+
+Across Europe, anxiety has grown as the manhunt continues for potential accomplices of the three Paris terrorists, all of whom were shot dead by French police. Authorities in Belgium signaled they were ready for more trouble by raising the national terror alert level from 2 to 3, the second-highest level.
+
+Prime Minister Charles Michel said the increase in the threat level was ""a choice for prudence.""
+
+""There is no concrete or specific knowledge of new elements of threat,"" he said.
+
+The suspects in Verviers opened fire on police when they closed in on them near the city's train station, the magistrate told reporters. There was an intense firefight for several minutes. Video posted online showed a dark view of a building amid blasts, gunshots and sirens, and a fire with smoke billowing up. Two terror suspects were killed in the shootout, and another was arrested.
+
+No police were wounded or killed in the clash, which occurred at the height of rush hour in a crowded neighborhood of this former industrial town of 56,000 about 80 miles southeast of the capital, Brussels.
+
+Belgian news site L'Avenir, as well as Le Soir and France24, reported late Thursday that the government prosecutor's office said a dozen operations were launched against suspects across Belgium, in Verviers, Brussels and Hal-Vilvoorde. Some of those targeted are known to have returned recently from Syria.
+
+The Belgian news site reported that, based on phone intercepts in the homes and cars of the three individuals involved in a shootout in Verviers, authorities believed the three were in the process of carrying out imminent attacks inside Belgium.
+
+The French daily Le Soir is reporting that the investigations were launched against the Verviers suspects at least two weeks ago after they returned from Syria where they were thought to be involved in the fighting there.
+
+The raids earlier Thursday included one on an apartment above a bakery in the eastern city of Verviers, authorities said. Authorities said the terror cell had ties to ISIS and was planning a major attack.
+
+Earlier Thursday, Belgian authorities said they were looking into possible links between a man they arrested in the southern city of Charleroi for illegal trade in weapons and Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four people in a Paris kosher market last week.
+
+The man arrested in Belgium ""claims that he wanted to buy a car from the wife of Coulibaly,"" Van der Sypt said. ""At this moment this is the only link between what happened in Paris.""
+
+Van der Sypt said that ""of course, naturally"" we are continuing the investigation.
+
+At first, the man came to police himself claiming there had been contact with Coulibaly's common-law wife regarding the car, but he was arrested following a search of his premises when indications of illegal weapons trading were found.
+
+A Belgian connection figured in a 2010 French criminal investigation into a foiled terrorist plot in which Coulibaly was one of the convicted co-conspirators. The plotters included a Brussels-area contact who was supposed to furnish both weapons and ammunition, according to French judicial documents obtained by The Associated Press.
+
+Several other countries are also involved in the hunt for possible accomplices to Coulibaly and the other gunmen in the French attacks, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi.
+
+In Spain, authorities said Coulibaly drove his common-law wife from France to Madrid on Dec. 31 and was with her until she took a Jan. 2 flight to Istanbul.
+
+Spain's National Court said in a statement it was investigating what Coulibaly did in the country's capital with his wife, Hayat Boumeddiene, and a third person who wasn't identified but is suspected of helping Boumeddiene get from Turkey to Syria.
+
+France is on edge since last week's attacks, which began at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The paper, repeatedly threatened for its caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, buried several of its slain staff members Thursday even as it reprinted another weekly issue with Muhammad on its cover.
+
+Also, defense officials said France was under an unprecedented cyber assault with 19,000 cyberattacks launched after the country's bloodiest terrorist attacks in decades, frustrating authorities as they try to thwart repeat violence.
+
+Around 120,000 security forces are deployed to prevent future attacks.
+
+Calling it an unprecedented surge, Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, head of cyberdefense for the French military, said about 19,000 French websites had faced cyberattacks in recent days, some carried out by well-known Islamic hacker groups.
+
+The attacks, mostly relatively minor denial-of-service attacks, hit sites as varied as military regiments to pizza shops but none appeared to have caused serious damage, he said. Military authorities launched round-the-clock surveillance to protect the government sites still coming under attack.
+
+The Kouachi brothers claimed allegiance to Al Qaeda in Yemen, and Coulibaly to the Islamic State group.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6841,8 classic football banners of our time,"Next Swipe left/right 8 classic football banners of our time Proof that sometimes the most entertaining part of a football match is the banners made by fans – here are 8 from over the years that have brightened up the beautiful game.
+1. Aston Villa v Fulham, 2006",FAKE
+8756,Tweetwave,"This time it's true no pantsTweetwave More Of Anthony Weiner's Greatest Hits Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 13 guests Display posts from previous: Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. ~ Ayn Rand 
+Rubiks & Rubik’s Cube ® used by special individual permission of Seven Town Ltd. Write down this number and report to your Kommissar at the nearest railroad station. Don't forget warm clothes and a shovel! Channel list 
+Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually 
+Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida 
+Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote 
+The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush 
+Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food 
+Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI 
+Obama ​​captures rare Pokémon ​​while visiting Hiroshima 
+Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say ""It's creepy"" 
+Barack Obama: ""If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"" 
+White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party 
+President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism' 
+Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech , stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman' 
+Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber 
+Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend 
+Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line 
+As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards 
+John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom 
+Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right' 
+News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: ""My work here is done"" 
+Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign 
+Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009 
+National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman 
+National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruz’s basement 
+Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response 
+Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican 
+Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check 
+Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing 
+Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first 
+Susan Sarandon: ""I don't vote with my vagina."" Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer 
+Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote 
+New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to ""Live FOR Free or Die"" 
+Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president 
+Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two 
+Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence 
+Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men 
+In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas 
+TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons 
+Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats' 
+Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with ""This is for Paris"" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with ""Return to sender"" 
+University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities 
+Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island 
+Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a ""safe space,"" changing Missouri motto to ""The don't show me state"" 
+Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy 
+State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery 
+NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget 
+College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action 
+ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios 
+Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic 
+'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break 
+ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood 
+Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans 
+Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people 
+Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's ""unfettered capitalism,"" demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need 
+John Kerry accepts Iran's ""Golden Taquiyya"" award, requests jalapenos on the side 
+Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone 
+John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons 
+Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend 
+Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles 
+State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider 
+Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons 
+Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations 
+Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals 
+US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?' 
+NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy 
+China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: ""The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"" 
+Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be' 
+Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1% 
+America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith 
+Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine 
+Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET 
+Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths 
+Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do' 
+Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State 
+President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise 
+Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market 
+Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males 
+NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record 
+People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services 
+Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba 
+White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet' 
+CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate 
+Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson' 
+Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city' 
+Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers' 
+Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first 
+The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office 
+White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders 
+Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time 
+Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy 
+Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents 
+Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences 
+Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity 
+Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow 
+African countries to ban all flights from the United States because ""Obama is incompetent, it scares us"" 
+Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it 
+Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses' 
+BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama 
+Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free 
+Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness 
+President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser 
+Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members 
+White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos 
+Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency 
+Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole 
+Harry Reid: ""Sometimes I say the wong thing"" 
+Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids 
+Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution 
+Obama draws ""blue line"" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon 
+""Hard Choices,"" a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original 
+Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts 
+Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks 
+100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, ""the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"" 
+Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news 
+""Anarchy Now!"" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence 
+Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours 
+Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues 
+""Free Speech Zones"" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes 
+Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed 
+Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account 
+Joe Biden to Russia: ""We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"" 
+In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea 
+Al Sharpton: ""Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"" 
+Mardi Gras in North Korea: "" Throw me some food! "" 
+Obama's foreign policy works: ""War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"" 
+US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: ""We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"" 
+Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help 
+The 1980s: ""Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."" 
+In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook 
+MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine 
+Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants 
+Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America 
+North Korean voters unanimous: ""We are the 100%"" 
+Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout 
+Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss 
+Feminist author slams gay marriage: ""a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"" 
+Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district 
+Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend 
+Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle 
+North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party 
+White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare 
+Kim Jong Un executes own "" crazy uncle "" to keep him from ruining another family Christmas 
+OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea 
+President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy 
+Obama to Iran: ""If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"" 
+Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC 
+Obama: ""I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"" 
+Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week 
+Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message 
+NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: ""Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"" 
+Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough 
+The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: ""I didn't build that"" 
+Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare 
+Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation 
+Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans 
+Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy 
+GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords 
+Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare 
+Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria 
+Sharpton: ""British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"" 
+DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women 
+Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees 
+Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left 
+Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel' 
+FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp 
+Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies 
+GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election' 
+Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!' 
+Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism 
+News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota 
+Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith 
+Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page 
+Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment 
+White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria 
+Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent' 
+Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins 
+Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date 
+IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history 
+After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot 
+Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence' 
+Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program 
+US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration? 
+Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy 
+This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester 
+White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras 
+Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse 
+Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school 
+Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition 
+Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State 
+Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good' 
+Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners' 
+Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested 
+Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead 
+Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending 
+Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances 
+Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons 
+Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago 
+Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections 
+Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country 
+Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps' 
+White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out 
+New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen 
+White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class 
+To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead 
+State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations 
+Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward 
+President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward 
+Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects 
+World ends; S&P soars 
+Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood 
+Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes 
+Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway 
+Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013 
+Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama 
+As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list 
+Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves 
+Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium 
+Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future 
+Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs 
+Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet 
+Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt' 
+Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties 
+Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years 
+Obama attends church service, worships self 
+Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending 
+Historical revisionists: ""Hey, you never know"" 
+Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh 
+Israelis to Egyptian rioters: ""don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"" 
+Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness 
+Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears 
+Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke 
+Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights 
+Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse' 
+Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: ""Too few words"" 
+Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't 
+Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost 
+Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity ""Religion of Peace,"" praises ""moderate Christians,"" promises to send one into space 
+Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck 
+White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus 
+Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed 
+Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book ""The Road to Smurfdom"" 
+Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere 
+Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: ""When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"" 
+Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college 
+Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill! 
+Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!' 
+Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration' 
+Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome 
+People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies 
+Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, ""only 1% allowed to reach Israel"" 
+Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans 
+Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law 
+Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond 
+Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics 
+Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof 
+Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels 
+Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party 
+Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend 
+May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above 
+Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel ""50 Shades of Hay"" 
+Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name 
+Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich 
+Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag 
+Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its ""President for Life"" 
+Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory 
+Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off 
+Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named ""Fat And Furious"" 
+Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed 
+White House: ""Let them eat statistics"" 
+Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama",FAKE
+5918,Trump’s Gettysburg Address against the New World Order,"Tweet Home » Headlines » Finance News » Trump’s Gettysburg Address against the New World Order 
+The Trump movement is an existential threat to the established order that consistently adopts the agenda and practices from the demonic cabal of the NWO globalists. 
+
+Submitted by James Hall : 
+If not now, WHEN? Only the most dedicated Totalitarian Collectivist would want to keep the NWO in power. Those who are so dim-witted to believe that the governance elites are legitimate rulers, exercising moral authority are so ignorant and illiterate that they deserve the fate of sheep taken to the slaughter. The Sheeple designation is apt for a society mired in a distorted reality of serfdom. 
+The New World Order moved from a century’s old scheme to enslave humanity into a consolidated “ international community ”, when the central banksters organized the Bank for International Settlements, with the adoption of the Bretton Woods system of monetary management, the reorganization of nation states with the end of World War II, the creation of the globalist United Nations and the establishment of the centralized bureaucracy of the European Union. 
+The Trump movement is an existential threat to the established order that consistently adopts the agenda and practices from the demonic cabal of the NWO globalists. 
+It is because of this opposition to the transnational ruling despots that the vicious, deceitful and unending assault on Trump and his followers has been unleashed, since real meaningful change cannot be allowed that would reverse the systematic destruction of Western Civilization. 
+READ the Entire pledge of action that was presented as the 21 st century Gettysburg Address or watch the video . 
+DONALD J. TRUMP CONTRACT WITH THE AMERICAN VOTER 
+What follows is my 100-day action plan to Make America Great Again. It is a contract between myself and the American voter – and begins with restoring honesty, accountability and change to Washington. Therefore, on the first day of my term of office, my administration will immediately pursue the following six measures to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, DC: FIRST, propose a Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress; SECOND, a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health); THIRD, a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated; FOURTH, a 5 year-ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service; FIFTH, a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government; SIXTH, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections. 
+On the same day, I will begin taking the following 7 actions to protect American workers: 
+ FIRST, I will announce my intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205 
+ SECOND, I will announce our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership 
+ THIRD, I will direct my Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator 
+ FOURTH, I will direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately 
+ FIFTH, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal. 
+ SIXTH, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward 
+ SEVENTH, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure 
+Additionally, on the first day, I will take the following five actions to restore security and the constitutional rule of law: 
+ FIRST, cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama 
+ SECOND, begin the process of selecting a replacement for Justice Scalia from one of the 20 judges on my list, who will uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States 
+ THIRD, cancel all federal funding to Sanctuary Cities 
+ FOURTH, begin removing the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back 
+ FIFTH, suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered extreme vetting. 
+Next, I will work with Congress to introduce the following broader legislative measures and fight for their passage within the first 100 days of my Administration: Middle Class Tax Relief And Simplification Act. An economic plan designed to grow the economy 4% per year and create at least 25 million new jobs through massive tax reduction and simplification, in combination with trade reform, regulatory relief, and lifting the restrictions on American energy. The largest tax reductions are for the middle class. A middle-class family with 2 children will get a 35% tax cut. The current number of brackets will be reduced from 7 to 3, and tax forms will likewise be greatly simplified. The business rate will be lowered from 35 to 15 percent, and the trillions of dollars of American corporate money overseas can now be brought back at a 10 percent rate. End The Offshoring Act Establishes tariffs to discourage companies from laying off their workers in order to relocate in other countries and ship their products back to the U.S. tax-free. American Energy & Infrastructure Act. Leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over 10 years. It is revenue neutral. School Choice And Education Opportunity Act. Redirects education dollars to gives parents the right to send their kid to the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of their choice. Ends common core, brings education supervision to local communities. It expands vocational and technical education, and make 2 and 4-year college more affordable. Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act. Fully repeals Obamacare and replaces it with Health Savings Accounts, the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines, and lets states manage Medicaid funds. Reforms will also include cutting the red tape at the FDA: there are over 4,000 drugs awaiting approval, and we especially want to speed the approval of life-saving medications. Affordable Childcare and Eldercare Act. Allows Americans to deduct childcare and elder care from their taxes, incentivizes employers to provide on-side childcare services, and creates tax-free Dependent Care Savings Accounts for both young and elderly dependents, with matching contributions for low-income families. End Illegal Immigration Act Fully-funds the construction of a wall on our southern border with the full understanding that the country Mexico will be reimbursing the United States for the full cost of such wall; establishes a 2-year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence for illegally re-entering the U.S. after a previous deportation, and a 5-year mandatory minimum for illegally re-entering for those with felony convictions, multiple misdemeanor convictions or two or more prior deportations; also reforms visa rules to enhance penalties for overstaying and to ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first. Restoring Community Safety Act. Reduces surging crime, drugs and violence by creating a Task Force On Violent Crime and increasing funding for programs that train and assist local police; increases resources for federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to dismantle criminal gangs and put violent offenders behind bars. Restoring National Security Act. Rebuilds our military by eliminating the defense sequester and expanding military investment; provides Veterans with the ability to receive public VA treatment or attend the private doctor of their choice; protects our vital infrastructure from cyber-attack; establishes new screening procedures for immigration to ensure those who are admitted to our country support our people and our values Clean up Corruption in Washington Act. Enacts new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics. On November 8th, Americans will be voting for this 100-day plan to restore prosperity to our economy, security to our communities, and honesty to our government. 
+This is my pledge to you. And if we follow these steps, we will once more have a government of, by and for the people. 
+Publishing the entire list of all these positive measures, which challenge the elitist consortium of a criminal syndicate that impose a neo-feudal enslavement of humanity, documents the essence of the Trump vow of revolutionary nonviolent combat against the forces of satanic evil. 
+The ironic symbolism of presenting this restoration of national greatness at the site of the historic betrayal of the original American Revolution, one must not forget that Abraham Lincoln embarked upon the initial destruction of the legitimate States’ Right essence that created the country. 
+This apocalyptic step, set into motion the underpinnings of a global empire of which, America was never intended to pursue. Let’s hope that Donald Trump can rectify some of the damage done to the individual rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Gettysburg was not a victory for a union of free men, but was the launching of a lustful hegemony for an Imperium international order. 
+Only this contract with American citizens can offer any hope of reestablishing a legitimate administration of a limited national government.",FAKE
+384,Debate Goals for the Democratic Candidates,Five candidates will be on stage Tuesday at the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 race in Las Vegas. Here’s what each needs to do to come away in a better position at the end of the evening:,REAL
+4492,'Spinning up as we speak': Email shows Pentagon was ready to roll as Benghazi attack occurred,"As the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was unfolding, a high-ranking Pentagon official urgently messaged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top deputies to offer military help, according to an email obtained by Judicial Watch.
+
+The revelation appears to contradict testimony Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave lawmakers in 2013, when he said there was no time to get forces to the scene in Libya, where four Americans were killed, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.
+
+“I just tried you on the phone but you were all in with S [apparent reference to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton],” reads the email, from Panetta’s chief of staff Jeremy Bash. “After consulting with General Dempsey, General Ham and the Joint Staff, we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.”
+
+The email was sent out at 7:19 p.m. ET on Sept. 11, 2012, in the early stages of the eight-hour siege that also claimed the lives of Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith and two former Navy SEALs, Ty Woods and Glen Doherty, private CIA contractors who raced to the aid of embattled State Department workers.
+
+Although the email came after the first wave of the attack at the consulate, it occurred before a mortar strike on the CIA annex killed Woods and Doherty.
+
+“This leaves no doubt military assets were offered and ready to go, and awaiting State Department signoff, which did not come,” Judicial Watch, a nonprofit government watchdog said in a statement.
+
+Parts of the email from Bash were redacted before release, including details on what military forces were available.
+
+In defending the Obama administration’s lack of a military response to the attack, Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee nearly two years ago that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”
+
+The first assault occurred at the consulate at 3:40 p.m. ET. The second attack on the CIA annex a little over a mile away began three hours later. Bash’s email was sent approximately 40 minutes after that attack began.
+
+Bash’s email, which bore the subject line “Libya,” was sent to Clinton’s then-deputy chief of staff Jacob Sullivan, Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman and Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Thomas Nides.
+
+The attack came in three waves at two locations. It began when a handful of attackers scaled the wall of the diplomatic post at dusk and opened a gate, allowing dozens of armed men inside who then set the building on fire. Stevens and Smith died after breathing in smoke while hiding in a safe room, and later died.
+
+Hours later, a nearby CIA annex was attacked twice. Woods and Doherty died there while defending the annex from the rooftop. A team of six security officials summoned from Tripoli and a Libyan military unit helped evacuate the remaining U.S. personnel who were taken to an airport and flown out of Benghazi.
+
+The Obama administration later falsely claimed that the attack was triggered by an Internet video that insulted Islam.
+
+Lawmakers investigating the events surrounding Benghazi already had acquired the e-mail, along with tens of thousands of others related to the probe, according to Matt Wolking, spokesman for the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
+
+“The Select Committee has obtained and reviewed tens of thousands of documents in the course of its thorough, fact-centered investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attacks, and this information will be detailed in the final report the Committee hopes to release within the next few months,"" Wolking told FoxNews.com. ""While the Committee does not rush to release or comment on every document it uncovers, I can confirm that we obtained the unredacted version of this email last year, in addition to Jake Sullivan’s response.""",REAL
+2432,A Case Study On Why The Obamacare Lawsuit Is Based On Mythical History,"The Bentley administration, the Alabama legislature and the governor’s Alabama Health Insurance Exchange Study Commission weighed many of the same issues their counterparts in other states did. How would they finance the exchange's operations? Should a state agency or some other entity manage a new marketplace? How heavily should insurance companies be regulated? Would it better for Alabama to exert at least a little control over Obamacare, or to just let the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services do the work?
+
+If that was the case four years ago, no one told Alabama state Sen. Jim McClendon (R), a native English speaker who co-chaired Bentley’s commission while a member of the state House of Representatives, which unanimously passed a bill in April 2012 to establish an Alabama health insurance exchange.
+
+ 
+
+ “No. No. No. That was never, never brought up,” McClendon said in an interview with The Huffington Post last month. “I was unaware of that stipulation in the Affordable Care Act, and I would almost have to guess that anybody involved in this process was not aware of it. I was a little surprised when it came up eventually. Nope. I was the chairman of the commission and I was totally unaware of that.”
+
+“Never. It was never discussed,” said Carey, who also worked with Delaware and Tennessee on their exchanges at the time, when he was a subcontractor working for LMI, a Tysons, Virginia-based government contractor. “It was never a consideration that they weren’t going to get subsidies if they deferred to the feds. I mean, I was there at every commission meeting and I was presenting, ‘Here are your options, here’s what I think it might cost you,’ and we did those type of calculations.""
+
+I don’t remember that coming up. I really don’t. I really don’t ever remember that ever being brought up as an issue... I don’t ever remember anybody saying, ‘Well, if we do this and let the feds do it, this is the trade-off down the road'... I’m almost positive somebody would’ve brought it up... During the time, we didn’t know that. After the commission, that’s when all that stuff started coming out. We were like, ‘Oh, wait a minute.’ That could’ve really changed, obviously, the advice to the governor, because I don’t think he would’ve even said we’re not going to do it if it was clear at that point in time, all the way back four, five years ago, that if you don’t do this, here’s the side effect. Because that’s a huge trade-off.
+
+Wren was the author of the health insurance exchange bill the state House passed in April 2012, and he championed a state-run marketplace until Bentley’s final decision in December of that year to forgo a state exchange. Wren told HuffPost he still believes Alabama should have its own exchange.
+
+ 
+
+ Wren claimed in an interview that he was aware, early on, of a provision in the law that would restrict subsidies to those who purchased coverage on state exchanges. But in a subsequent email, his account shifted. Wren first said that issue came to his attention in 2009, before Obamacare had even passed. In a subsequent email, he wrote that he had misspoken during the interview, and said he'd actually learned of this phrase in 2011.
+
+ 
+
+ “I believed at the time that for many reasons, including the possible favorable premium treatment to individuals purchasing from a state exchange, that Alabama should consider this over a federal,” he wrote.
+
+
+
+ Greg Wren, then a member of the Alabama House of Representatives, in 2011.
+
+ 
+
+ There is little evidence to back Wren's claim that he was aware of the now-controversial provision in Obamacare during his state’s debate over whether to establish an exchange. The former legislator could not offer an explanation for why his version of events differs from those of McClendon and the others interviewed for this article, or why it isn’t reflected in official documents or media accounts from the time.
+
+ 
+
+ “At this point I can only say is [sic] I remembered back as best I could,” he wrote in an email.
+
+Wren also acknowledged that he has no documentation from 2010 through 2012 to support his assertions that he understood the phrase “established by the state” could mean that subsidies wouldn’t be available in federal exchanges. The Alabama legislature does not transcribe floor or committee proceedings, so no official record exists of the debate on Wren’s bill.
+
+ 
+
+ Wren was often quoted in the local and national press speaking about the advantages of state-run health insurance exchanges in 2011 and 2012, but HuffPost couldn’t find any articles that cited him saying the subsidies wouldn’t be available in federal exchanges.",REAL
+5307,Trump Proudly Declares: Most Of The People I’ve Insulted Deserved It,"Trump Proudly Declares: Most Of The People I’ve Insulted Deserved It By Andrew Bradford on October 27, 2016 Subscribe 
+Arrogance is defined as “an insulting way of thinking or behaving that comes from believing that you are better, smarter, or more important than other people.” In other words, Donald Trump perfectly exemplifies arrogance, and he just proved that fact yet again. 
+Appearing on Good Morning America Thursday morning, the GOP nominee readily defended the insulting posts he’s made on Twitter: “It’s ok, most of them deserved it.” 
+Trump then declared : “I believe in fighting back when people are against me, when they tell lies, you know, I have the power of this instrument and frankly sometimes I’ll use that. And I agree sometimes it will revert back or sometimes maybe it doesn’t come out — you have to be careful with it.” 
+When exactly has Trump been careful with what he posts on social media? Try never. 
+Melania Trump, who was also interviewed, said that if she becomes First Lady, one of her primary areas of focus would be social media: “What’s going on is very hurtful to children, to some adults as well.” 
+Does that mean she’ll take away Donald’s cell phone and duct tape his hands to his sides so he can’t tweet out hateful and hurtful shit the way he normally does? Yeah, good luck with that, Melania! 
+Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a two-page spread listing all of the insults and unkind postings Trump has made on Twitter since he announced he would be running for President in 2015. If you want to see a completely unhinged, uninformed, and unfiltered mind at work, just take a look at the Times article and recall what Hillary Clinton said regarding the Donald: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” 
+Donald Trump cannot be trusted with a smart phone, let alone the reins of power for the most important nation in the world. 
+Featured Image Via YouTube Screengrab About Andrew Bradford 
+Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect",FAKE
+8484,Dems sue GOP over Trump's 'rigged' complaints,"Dems sue GOP over Trump's 'rigged' complaints Claim argument designed to suppress vote in minority communities Published: 33 mins ago 
+(CNN) The Democratic National Committee is suing the Republican National Committee for aiding GOP nominee Donald Trump as he argues that the presidential election is “rigged,” claiming that Trump’s argument is designed to suppress the vote in minority communities. 
+The suit, filed Wednesday in US District Court in New Jersey, argues that the RNC has not sufficiently rebuked Trump for the line of attack, which he has used as a rallying cry and is assumed to be a way to explain away a potential loss on Election Day. 
+What (more) we’ve learned about Clinton’s circle, Neera Tanden from email hack",FAKE
+9948,US Airstrikes on Iraqi Army Slowing Advance on Mosul,"By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 29, 2016 Several Iraqi Soldiers killed by US Airstrike Near Mosul With a blocking force in place preventing ISIS from moving into Syria, reported by Iranian press, the US is doing everything possible to slow down the Iraqi Army and prevent successful operations. There have long been suspicions that the Kurds, who let thousands of ISIS oil trucks through their region each week, have been working with ISIS all along. It was the Kurds, not the real Kurds, but Barzani’s Saudi run dictatorship in Erbil, that invited Turkey into Iraq. Deputy Chief of the Nineveh Provincial Council Noureddin Qablan announced that the US-led coalition warplanes have launched airstrikes on army base in Nineveh province, killing several soldiers. “The US fighter jets hit one of the military bases of Iraqi Army’s 16th Division in a region North of Mosul, and the attack left at least four Iraqi soldiers dead,” Qablan said. According to FNA, He said that the US army has confirmed the attack, calling it a “mistake”. Qablan said that it is not the first time the US warplanes hit the Iraqi army and volunteer forces (Hashd al-Shaabi) military positions, adding, “The US-led coalition has each time said that air raids were not deliberate.” It is reported that another peshmerga convoy accidentally hit by an USA-led coalition airstrike near Mosul today. That’s was 3 “Mistakan Raid” in 24 hours. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 29, 2016, With Reads Filed under World . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+2916,Iran letter blowback startles GOP,The Manhattan billionaire made the announcement on Twitter and said he will hold a formal press conference to discuss it further on Dec. 15.,REAL
+6058,"Clinton Camp Desperate, Russia Trains for WWIII","Clinton Camp Desperate, Russia Trains for WWIII US media not letting the public know how tense Russia situation really is Infowars Nightly News   
+Russia is training millions domestically for WWIII, the Clinton campaign has gone to drastic measures to appear as if they are still alive, the spy state is taking another step forward and the possible answer to National Anthem protests is revealed.   Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . The Most Offensive Halloween EVER! - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force",FAKE
+4713,Donald Trump's GOP civil war,"Panama City, Florida (CNN) Donald Trump is tearing the Grand Old Party apart.
+
+The tension that has simmered in the Republican Party for years -- shutting down the government and nearly bringing the nation to default -- escalated into an outright civil war Tuesday. The conflict not only threatens the party's ability to make any realistic attempt at reclaiming the White House next month, but also previews the conflicts and divides that could consume the GOP for years to come if Trump loses.
+
+On one side is Trump, who spent much of Tuesday lashing out on social media at his GOP foes, such as Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. John McCain, and lamenting the lack of party unity. He's backed by conservative lawmakers including Iowa Rep. Steve King and the throngs of loyal supporters who attend his rallies, including the one here in Panama City, Florida, Tuesday, where he renewed his call for a government investigation into his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
+
+Some are even raising the potential of denying Ryan the speakership after the election.
+
+On the other side is Ryan, who is devoting the full resources of his stature to maintaining a congressional majority. That dominance of Capitol Hill is suddenly threatened -- and not just in the Senate, where there are many competitive races, but also in the House, where the GOP majority was considered untouchable until recently.
+
+The infighting -- sparked by the release Friday of a 2005 video depicting Trump describing women in vulgar and sexually aggressive terms -- isn't likely to ease in the 27 days before Election Day. Trump made clear Tuesday that if he loses in November, he won't go down quietly -- or alone.
+
+He began the day with a series of shots -- taken over Twitter -- at Ryan, saying it's hard to do well when the speaker isn't supportive. He followed up about an hour later calling Ryan a ""weak and ineffective leader.""
+
+And nearly two hours after that, Trump posed his most explosive tweet of the day.
+
+'Shackles have been taken off me'
+
+Trump continued his attacks on Ryan Wednesday during a rally in central Florida, where he said he's at a disadvantage when ""you have leadership not putting their weight behind the people.""
+
+He also complained about getting no credit from party leaders for his Sunday night debate performance.
+
+""Wouldn't you think Paul Ryan would call and say good job?"" he said. ""It got just about the largest audience for a second night debate in the history of the country. You'd think they'd say great going, Don, let's beat this crook. No, he doesn't.""
+
+Trump's turn on his own party may seem counterproductive -- it hardly allows him to improve his chances of catching Clinton. But it does allow him the satisfaction of vengeance against party leaders he believes have never treated him fairly since his stunning outsider campaign captured the nomination earlier this year.
+
+And by blaming Republican leaders for their failure to wholeheartedly endorse his campaign, Trump also opens up the possibility of a face-saving excuse if he crashes to defeat in November.
+
+But the cost to the Republican Party of Trump's burn-it-down-around-him strategy is already high, could become more extreme and potentially leave the GOP badly damaged long after he has left the political scene.
+
+To begin with, the estrangement between Trump and the party leaders is blowing open a gaping split between the party's grass roots and its establishment leaders that Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and others worked so hard to bridge over the summer.
+
+It is a divide that will be hard to overcome if Trump loses the election. Forging unity could be impossible if hordes of Trump voters blame party leaders for the defeat of a man who electrified the grass roots supporters in a way no other Republican has managed in decades.
+
+King, the Iowa Republican congressman, warned Tuesday that a purge of party elites might be necessary, saying ""the establishment wing of the party could simply be amputated out in this effort that's going on right now.""
+
+""They've gone so far out on this limb,"" King said on the Laura Ingraham radio show.
+
+The meltdown in the GOP is the culmination of forces that have been building for years. Intense antipathy towards congressional leaders over their failure to more forcefully oppose President Barack Obama gave rise to the Tea Party and sent waves of anti-establishment lawmakers to Washington in successive elections.
+
+Trump's adoption of a factually-challenged style of campaigning would have been impossible without the power of conservative media that has been building for decades and is now fused with the GOP presidential ticket through the role of Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart News, who serves as the CEO of the Trump campaign.
+
+Trump's turn against his own party could also reverberate in down-ballot races. Republicans have long known that their hold on the Senate was tenuous -- whoever ran at the top of their ticket -- but Trump's slumping poll numbers now threaten to drag down vulnerable incumbents too.
+
+At the very least, a Trump implosion that cuts deeply into Ryan's majority could complicate the Speaker's already tough task of corralling his volatile majority coalition. If an anti-Trump landslide sweeps away House GOP members in more moderate districts, it could hand more relative power to the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus and give him the same kinds of fits that it imposed on John Boehner, his predecessor.
+
+The dilemma is especially difficult for Republican senators running for re-election. Some are rejecting Trump because of revulsion at his remarks among more moderate voters. But at the same time, they risk alienating Trump supporters in states's where the former reality star racked up high margins in the primary race.
+
+New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte fits into this category and her desperate effort to walk the fine line between condemning and embracing Trump during this election has become a symbol of the wider GOP conundrum. Ayotte finally said she could not vote for Trump after the video emerged on Friday.
+
+But another star of the GOP, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, said Tuesday he's not yet ready to back away from Trump. Rubio looks certain to need Trump voters to maintain his narrow lead in his re-election race. But at the same time, if more explosive video emerges about Trump, Rubio, who has presidential ambitions in his future, risks being tarnished by association with the Republican nominee.
+
+Another lawmaker in a tough re-election race who is hedging his bets is North Carolina GOP Sen. Richard Burr, who said that while Trump's comments were ""indefensible,"" he still plans to support him.
+
+For her part, the turmoil consuming the GOP would seem to provide a substantial boost to Clinton's White House bid. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday found the Democratic nominee enjoying a 9-point lead among likely voters in a four-way race.
+
+But her aides caution against excessive optimism. There's concern inside the campaign that an increasingly negative race -- which could only become darker in the days ahead -- could turn off voters and make them less likely to show up at the polls. In that instance, a lower turnout could create an advantage for Trump.
+
+""This seems to be their strategy, disgust everyone with our democratic dialogue so that they won't come out to the polls,"" John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman, told reporters Tuesday. ""I think it is very unbecoming a presidential candidate.""
+
+Clinton said as much herself during an interview with a Florida radio station Tuesday.
+
+""Despite all of the terrible things (Trump) has said and done, he is still trying to win this election,"" she said. ""And we cannot be complacent, we cannot rest.""",REAL
+8767,Comment on Tainted Measles Vaccine Kills More Than 50 Children In Syria by Tragic Deaths Used To Promote Vaccine Fear – On The Fence About Vaccines,"Photos Credits: Social Media The so called “ opposition health authorities ” said in a statement posted online in Arabic: 
+“Primary investigations point to a limited security breach by vandals likely connected to the regime, which has been attempting to target the medical sector in Free Syria in order to spread chaos.” The statement also added: “The Syrian interim government’s health ministry has instructed a halt to the second round of the measles vaccination campaign, which began Monday September 15th … following several fatalities and injuries among children in vaccination centers in the Idlib countryside.” Adnan Hazouri, the health minister in the Syrian opposition who held a conference (in the Arabic Language) said that he will resign if an investigation upheld allegations of negligence, as blood samples have been sent to Turkey for analysis. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights , which is based in London, also confirmed: 
+“At least five children have died and 50 others are suffering from poisoning or allergic reactions after measles vaccinations in Jirjanaz, in the Idlib province.” The following video shows affected children in Saraqeb hospital in Idlib, Syria: Monther Khalil, the head of the Idlib medical department said this during an interview with Radio Hawa Smart -an opposition related station established on Gaziantep, Turkey: 
+“The department assures all parents who have had their children vaccinated that the vaccine is completely fine and there is no risk to children who have already been injected. 
+We have already vaccinated 60,000 children against measles and there has been no previous problem. The same crews also previously carried out a polio campaign, where they vaccinated 252,000 children across seven rounds, and there were no abnormal complications.” More than 190,000 Syrians have been killed during the foreign-backed war since 2011, which has also created more than 3 million refugees outside Syria. Sources:",FAKE
+4217,Laura Bush hints she'd rather see Hillary as president,"“I want our next president – whoever he or she might be – to be somebody who is interested in women in Afghanistan and who will continue US policies… that we continue to do what we're committed to do as a country,” she said, as she appeared on stage alongside her twin daughters Jenna and Barbara.
+
+“That's who I want - or the kind of people that will do that and will pay attention to our history, and know what's what's happened before and know specifically how we can continue to do the good things that we do around the world.”
+
+•  Donald Trump endorsed by Rudy Giuliani in boost ahead of New York primary
+
+Many in the packed auditorium took her words as a coded criticism of Mr Trump, whose foreign policy plans have been condemned as isolationist and weak on detail.
+
+His closest rival Ted Cruz has also made clear that the US has no role in Afghanistan other than fighting terrorism.
+
+In contrast, Mrs Clinton was among those who offered a cover endorsement for Mrs Bush's Afghan book. “For over a decade, Laura Bush has been an ally and advocate for the women of Afghanistan and, in particular, has worked to ensure that the voices of Afghan women are heard,” she wrote.
+
+The two women share a special bond as former first ladies and are of a similar age: both know the struggles of working their way up in a male-dominated world.",REAL
+1770,"Scott Walker, Rick Perry show limits of super PACs","On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+9394,If Catcalls Were Politically Correct…,"By wmw_admin on September 16, 2008 
+The ‘dots’ you are not supposed to connect… Affidavit of Richard Tomlinson By wmw_admin on February 14, 2008 
+“I firmly believe that there exist documents held by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) that would yield important new evidence into the cause and circumstances leading to the death of the Princess of Wales.” They Live By wmw_admin on August 19, 2012 
+Considered by some as prophetic, many will find eerie echoes of present day concerns in John Carpenters 24-year-old ‘They Live’. View the cult classic here The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part I By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
+Bill Ryan talks to a former City of London insider who participated in a meeting where the elite’s plans for depopulation were discussed. The meeting, which took place in 2005, also discussed a planned financial collapse Who Really Murdered Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman? By wmw_admin on February 28, 2015 
+Revelations that a US soldier was the killer would have jeopardised public support for the “War on Terror”. Hence a frame-up was required. A Joe Vialls classic recovered. Back to the Future!!! Part 1 By wmw_admin on May 21, 2007 
+Geological evidence points to an cataclysmic event that almost defies comprehension. The problem is that it may just happen again … and soon too. The Oklahoma City Bombing: 30 Unanswered Questions By wmw_admin on July 11, 2003 
+Timothy McVeigh may have been tried and executed, but there are still too many unanswered questions about the Oklahoma City Bombing",FAKE
+8428,Why Hillary Won't Unleash WWIII    : Information," Why Hillary Won't Unleash WWIII By Pepe Escobar October 31, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" RT "" - She is fully supported by virtually the whole US establishment; a bipartisan, neocon/neoliberalcon, regime change/”humanitarian” imperialist axis.
+On the opposite side, for all his personal pathology problems and incoherent twitter-mouth ramblings, Donald Trump seemed to be on the money when he said that if elected, Hillary would use Syria to unleash WWIII.
+To check out if that holds, let’s start with an essential backup.
+The ‘Queen of War’, at the final US presidential debate in Las Vegas: "" A no-fly zone [in Syria] can save lives and hasten the end of the conflict. ""
+The ‘Queen of War’, in one of her 2013 speeches to Goldman Sachs, published by WikiLeaks: a no-fly zone would "" kill a lot of Syrians .”
+The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: a no-fly zone in Syria “ would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia. ""
+No-fly zone would ‘require war with #Syria and #Russia ’ – top US general https://t.co/veSy8uETak pic.twitter.com/zXyCmWjdXj
+— RT America (@RT_America) September 22, 2016 Predictably, the Clinton (cash) machine has been relentless promoting Hillary’s no-fly zone. Whenever cornered, the machine switches the narrative to Russian hacking of the DNC. Edward Snowden, who knows a thing or two about cyberwarfare, stresses there is no solid proof Russian intel hacked the Democratic/Clinton machine. And if they actually did it, the NSA would know. The fact the NSA is mum reveals this is no more than information war.
+Pass the missile launchers, please Trump seems to have been more on the money when he insisted how Hillary will be outsmarted – as she already was in the past – when dealing with President Putin, who she has demonized as Hitler.
+I have shown how Hillary will be prevented from launching WWIII because her no-fly zone is already implemented in Syria by Russia. And the Pentagon – reflecting Dunford’s comments - knows it, no matter how emphatically soon-to-be-unemployed Pentagon head Ash Carter threatens “ consequences .”
+The Pentagon ranks Russia and China as the number one and two “existential threats” to US national security, in that order. And the US government reserves for itself the privilege of a nuclear “first-strike” – which Hillary supports (but not Trump); this is part of the 2002 Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.
+The relentless hysteria now crystallized as Cold War 2.0 has led scores of analysts to game the actual – terrifying - possibility of a US-Russia hot war. As much as the Cold War MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine may now lie in the dust – exactly because Washington refuses to back down from “first-strike” – only armchair Dr. Strangeloves get their kicks with the possibility of fighting a nuclear power. Dunford does not seem to be one of them.
+What Hillary Clinton will certainly do is to double down on proxy wars, Vietnam/Afghanistan-style. So expect a President Clinton to authorize full weaponization of those Beltway-loved “moderate” Al-Qaeda-in-Syria rebels with plenty of shoulder-held missile launchers. This could easily get out of control – with lethal, yet not nuclear, consequences.
+That’s exactly the point made by Mikhail Rostovsky in Moscow daily Moskovsky Komsomolets; if Hillary ratchets up tensions, “ things could get out of hand .”
+Also expect not so proxy ratcheting up of tension in the South China Sea; after all it was Hillary who claimed ‘mothership’ of the pivot to Asia; and it was Hillary who steered intra-South East Asian maritime disputes into the boiling cauldron of wider US-China competition.
+And if that was not hard boiled enough, US frustration will be at an all-time high after Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s own pivot to China.
+Say hello to my new Sarmat A case can be made that official Moscow is carefully getting ready to work with a Clinton – as in Obama III – presidency, with Hillary, a devil they know well when she was Secretary of State, to be dealt with as a pragmatist, unwilling and unable to plunge US-Russia relations into total incandescence.
+A Clinton presidency for its part should know better than overestimate Russia’s financial “ weakness. ”
+The national debt of Russia is only 17.7 percent of GDP; for the US it is a whopping 104.17 percent of GDP, or $19.2 trillion. Russia in 2015 had a trade surplus of $150 billion, while the US had a trade deficit of $531.5 billion. The current account surplus of Russia was 5.1 percent of GDP, or 65.8 billion, while the US ran a current account deficit of 484.1 billion, or 2.7 percent of GDP.
+Besides, Russia has all the natural resources it needs; unlike the US government, which believes it needs an empire of bases overseas and ten aircraft carrier task forces to secure the resources it lacks.
+Moreover, as much as the Pentagon may continue to be infested by neocon cells, sound generals are also able to identify key Russian signals – such as the unveiling of the RS-28 Sarmat nuclear missile, which NATO calls Satan 2. The Sarmat delivers monster warheads of 40 megatons; boasts a top speed of seven kilometers per second; and is able to outfox any anti-missile shield system anywhere.
+First images of new thermonuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile to replace 'Satan' unveilled in Russia https://t.co/mmX2EHALQu
+— RT (@RT_com) October 25, 2016
+Hot war? Hillary Clinton may have pulled a Julius Caesar over Gaddafi. But she’s realist enough to not pull a (nuclear) Hitler over Moscow. Or is she?",FAKE
+3427,Is It Time To Reconsider Lifetime Appointments To The Supreme Court?,"Is It Time To Reconsider Lifetime Appointments To The Supreme Court?
+
+The unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the looming face-off between the White House and the Senate over his replacement have revived proposals that would limit the tenure of U.S. Supreme Court justices.
+
+Legal scholars from both political parties renewed a call Tuesday to reconsider how much time justices spend on the high court. Many of them cited, with disapproval, a bruising and protracted clash building between President Obama and the GOP-controlled Senate over when and how to fill Scalia's vacancy.
+
+""The point of life tenure is to keep justices insulated from politics,"" said George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr. ""That didn't quite pan out.""
+
+For years now, lawyers have been floating proposals that future high-court justices spend no more than 18 years at a time on the Supreme Court bench. The plan would space out appointments, so presidents would make appointments every two years, supporters said. That would bring regular turnover and fresh thinking to the court — and align with the longer life spans of Americans since the nation's founding, they argue.
+
+""It just sounds undemocratic,"" said Gabe Roth, executive director of an advocacy group called Fix the Court, about the lifetime court appointments. ""There's definitely concern about the justices being out of touch. There have been a number of cases with modern technology, whether it be smartphones or bulk data collection or different types of ways of getting TV over the airwaves or over the Internet.""
+
+Thomas Merrill, a law professor at Columbia University and a former deputy U.S. solicitor general (1987-1990), said he's been ""a little bit skeptical"" of the idea of term limits for Supreme Court justices. But, Merrill said, his thinking has evolved.
+
+""My current cautious endorsement of this is based on the perception that the whole issue of appointments to the Supreme Court has become incredibly contentious, partisan, political, almost to the point where the political system freezes up, as we're witnessing right now with the Scalia death,"" Merrill said. ""It would be a good thing not to have the type of Armageddon it looks like we're about to have.""
+
+Term-limit supporters point to a 2015 poll by Reuters/Ipsos, after high-profile rulings on Obama's health care legislation and same-sex marriage, that suggested two-thirds of respondents would support a 10-year limit on tenure on the Supreme Court.
+
+But actually changing the system could be remarkably difficult for a political system that's already near paralysis. Some lawyers said the change could be made by lawmakers, but others have concluded it would require amending the Constitution. To do that, the House and Senate would need to vote their support, and then three-quarters of the states would have to approve. Another path would be for two-thirds of the states to call for a Constitutional Convention.
+
+""Not likely, but possible,"" Kerr of George Washington University said. ""We'll see how this year goes. It may become unbearable with the president and the Senate duking it out every day.""",REAL
+658,"Clinton has delegates to win Dem nomination, AP reports; Sanders questions tally","Hillary Clinton has earned enough delegates to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, according to an Associated Press count released Monday night – an assessment swiftly challenged by primary rival Bernie Sanders and his campaign.
+
+The AP released its updated tally, showing the former secretary of state winning enough delegates to become the first woman to top a major party’s presidential ticket, on the eve of the last major day of primary voting.
+
+The AP said Clinton reached the 2,383 delegates needed to become the presumptive Democratic nominee with a weekend victory in Puerto Rico and late burst of support from superdelegates. Those are party officials and officeholders, many of them eager to wrap up the primary, free to support whichever candidate they want.
+
+""We really need to bring a close to this primary process and get on to defeating Donald Trump,"" said Nancy Worley, a superdelegate who chairs Alabama's Democratic Party and provided one of the last endorsements to put Clinton over the top.
+
+""It's time to stand behind our presumptive candidate,"" said Michael Brown, one of two superdelegates from the District of Columbia who came forward in the past week to back Clinton before the city's June 14 primary. ""We shouldn't be acting like we are undecided when the people of America have spoken.""
+
+
+
+Clinton touted the news at a Long Beach, Calif., campaign event, saying the campaign is now on the “brink of a historic … unprecedented moment.” But even she stressed that six states are yet to vote on Tuesday and urged supporters to cast their ballots for her in those contests.
+
+The six states to vote Tuesday include New Jersey, North Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, California, and South Dakota.
+
+Campaign manager Robby Mook said in a statement: “This is an important milestone, but there are six states that are voting Tuesday, with millions of people heading to the polls, and Hillary Clinton is working to earn every vote. We look forward to Tuesday night, when Hillary Clinton will clinch not only a win in the popular vote, but also the majority of pledged delegates.""
+
+The Sanders campaign rejected the declaration that Clinton had clinched the party nod, citing its longstanding position that the superdelegates should not count until they actually vote at the convention – as they are free to switch sides before then.
+
+""There is nothing to concede,"" Sanders told KTVU late Monday at a rally in San Francisco. ""Secretary Clinton will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to win the Democratic nomination. She will be dependent on superdelegates. They vote on July 25th so right now our goal right at this moment [is to] do everything we can to win the primary tomorrow.""
+
+Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs accused the media of “a rush to judgement"" and ""ignoring the Democratic National Committee’s clear statement that it is wrong to count the votes of superdelegates before they actually vote at the convention this summer.""
+
+""Our job from now until the convention is to convince those superdelegates that Bernie is by far the strongest candidate against Donald Trump,"" Briggs said.
+
+On Monday, Sanders' supporters expressed disappointment that the calls were made before California's primary and urged the senator to continue on despite the pronouncements. ""We're going to keep fighting until the last vote is counted,"" said Kristen Elliott, a Sanders' supporter from San Francisco who attended the rally.
+
+Said another attendee, Patrick Bryant of San Francisco: ""It's what bookies do. They call fights before they're over.""
+
+House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi endorsed Clinton during an interview on “Good Morning America” before her home state’s primary.
+
+""I'm a voter in California and I have voted for Hillary Clinton for president of the United States and proud to endorse her for that position,"" Pelosi said, though adding ""it's not over until it's over.""
+
+Clinton has won 1,812 pledged delegates in primaries and caucuses. She also has the support of 571 superdelegates, according to an Associated Press count. The AP surveyed all 714 superdelegates repeatedly in the past seven months, and only 95 remain publicly uncommitted.
+
+All the superdelegates counted in Clinton's tally have unequivocally told the AP they will back her at the convention and not change their vote. Since the start of the AP's survey in late 2015, no superdelegates have switched from supporting Clinton to backing Sanders.
+
+Clinton’s presumptive victory Monday came nearly eight years to the day after she conceded her first White House campaign to Barack Obama. Back then, she famously noted her inability to ""shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling.""
+
+Campaigning this time as the loyal successor to Obama, Clinton fended off a surprisingly strong challenge from Vermont Sen. Sanders. He mobilized millions with a fervently liberal message and his insurgent candidacy revealed a deep level of national frustration with politics-as-usual, even among Democrats who have controlled the White House since 2009.
+
+Clinton outpaced Sanders in winning new superdelegate endorsements even after his string of primary and caucus wins in May. Following the results in Puerto Rico, it is no longer possible for Sanders to reach the 2,383 needed to win the nomination based on the remaining available pledged delegates and uncommitted superdelegates, according to the AP.
+
+Clinton leads Sanders by more than 3 million cast votes, by 291 pledged delegates and by 523 superdelegates. She also won 29 caucuses and primaries compared to his 21 victories.
+
+Echoing the sentiments of California Gov. Jerry Brown, who overcame a decades-long rivalry with the Clinton family to endorse her last week, many superdelegates expressed a desire to close ranks around a nominee who could defeat Trump in November.
+
+Beyond winning over millions of Sanders supporters who vow to remain loyal to the self-described democratic socialist, Clinton faces challenges as she turns toward November, including criticism of her decision to use a private email server run from her New York home while serving as secretary of state. Her deep unpopularity among Republicans has pushed many leery of Trump to nevertheless embrace his campaign.
+
+""This to me is about saving the country and preventing a third progressive, liberal term, which is what a Clinton presidency would do,"" House Speaker Paul Ryan told the AP last week after he finally endorsed Trump, weeks after the New Yorker clinched the GOP nomination.
+
+Yet Clinton showed no signs of limping into the general election as she approached the milestone, leaving Sanders behind and focusing on lacerating Trump. She said electing the billionaire businessman, who has spent months hitting her and her husband with bitingly personal attacks, would be a ""historic mistake.""
+
+""He is not just unprepared. He is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility,"" Clinton said last week in a speech that was striking in its forcefulness, previewing a brutal five-month general election campaign to come.
+
+Even without the nomination, Sanders can claim ideological victory. His liberal positions pushed the issue of income inequality into the spotlight and drove Clinton to the left on issues such as trade, Wall Street and campaign finance reform.
+
+But she prevailed, in part, by claiming much of the coalition that boosted Obama. She won overwhelming support from women and minorities, catapulting her to decisive victories in diverse, delegate-rich states such as New York and Texas.
+
+When Clinton launched her campaign last April, she did so largely unopposed, having scared off more formidable challengers by locking down much of the party's organizational and fundraising infrastructure. Vice President Joe Biden, seen as her most threatening rival, opted not to run in October.
+
+Of the four opponents who did take her on, Sanders was the only one who emerged to provide a serious challenge. He caught fire among young voters and independents, his campaign gaining momentum from a narrow loss in Iowa in February and a commanding victory in New Hampshire. His ability to raise vast sums of money online gave him the resources to continue into the spring.
+
+But Clinton vowed not to repeat the failings of her 2008 campaign and focused early on winning delegates, hiring help from Obama's old team before launching her campaign. They pushed superdelegates into making early commitments and held campaign appearances in areas where they could win the most pledged delegates.
+
+Her victory in Nevada in late February diminished concerns from allies about her campaign operation. Decisive wins in Southern states on Super Tuesday and a sweep of March 15 contests gave her a significant delegate lead, which became insurmountable by the end of April after big victories in New York and in the Northeast.
+
+She now moves on to face Trump, whose ascent to the top of the Republican Party few expected. The brash real estate mogul and reality TV star has long since turned his attention from primary foes to Clinton, debuting a nickname — ""Crooked Hillary"" — and arguing she belongs in jail for her email setup.
+
+After a long primary campaign, Clinton said this past weekend in California she was ready to accept his challenge.
+
+""We're judged by our words and our deeds, not our race, not our ethnicity, not our religion,"" she said Saturday in Oxnard. ""So it is time to judge Donald Trump by his words and his deeds. And I believe that his words and his deeds disqualify him from being president of the United States.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+10357,Hillary IMPLODES: Trump 'Took Everything...Paid Nothing To Support Us!',Hillary Clinton can’t believe she’s losing.  ,FAKE
+4865,"Trump says Obama born in US, ‘period’ – after new ‘birther’ dust-up","Donald Trump tried to tamp down a newly revived campaign dust-up Friday over his views on President Obama’s birthplace, declaring the president was born in the United States – “period” – after declining to make that statement earlier this week.
+
+The Republican presidential nominee also tried to blame Hillary Clinton for starting the controversy back in 2008, which her team denies. He cast his remarks as a bid to put the issue to rest once and for all, at a time when his poll numbers are rising.
+
+“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” Trump said in Washington, D.C. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”
+
+He spoke at his new Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a visit that began with lengthy remarks from military supporters and veterans. He briefly addressed the “birther” issue at the end.
+
+The statement comes after Trump’s response on the matter in an interview Wednesday revived the issue. In the interview with The Washington Post, Trump was asked whether he believed Obama was born in the U.S. ""I'll answer that question at the right time,"" Trump told the paper. ""I just don't want to answer it yet.""
+
+Trump’s campaign spokesman, trying to calm the waters, said overnight the Republican candidate now believes Obama was born in the U.S. Campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Trump ""did a great service to the country"" by bringing closure to the debate.
+
+""In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate,"" Miller said.
+
+But the Clinton campaign seized on Trump’s reluctance to address the issue in his Post interview.
+
+Speaking shortly before Trump across town at the Black Women's Agenda Symposium, Clinton said Friday the Republican nominee was “feeding into” the “bigotry and bias that lurks in our country” – and should apologize.
+
+“Barack Obama was born in America,” she said. “Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology.”
+
+Her campaign called his Friday comments ""disgraceful.""
+
+The dust-up comes as Trump gains on Clinton in national and battleground state polls, even surpassing her in some states.
+
+A new Fox News poll shows Clinton topping Trump by just one point among likely voters in the four-way ballot nationally.
+
+In the head-to-head matchup, Trump’s up by one point.
+
+Both candidates were fundraising Friday after events in Washington. Clinton has endured a rough week on the campaign trail, after criticizing some Trump supporters last Friday as ""deplorables"" and then having to take time off from the campaign due to a bout of pnemonia.
+
+She used the birther issue to try and go back on offense.
+
+While Obama was born in Hawaii, Trump several years ago was a key figure in stoking the so-called ""birther"" controversy. Critics saw it as an attempt to delegitimize the nation’s first black president.
+
+Trump has said repeatedly during the campaign that he no longer talks about the ""birther"" issue.
+
+The Trump campaign’s statement late Thursday claimed that Clinton launched the “birther” movement during her unsuccessful primary run against Obama in 2008.
+
+""Hillary Clinton's campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President,"" the statement said. ""This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer.""
+
+Clinton has long denied the claim, and fact-checkers previously have found no public evidence that she or her campaign directly pushed the issue. Rather, Trump’s comments appear to refer to reports that Clinton supporters circulated an email during the bitter 2008 primary race questioning Obama’s citizenship.
+
+Yet former McClatchy D.C. bureau chief James Asher said on Twitter Friday that Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal in fact “told me in person” that Obama was born in Kenya.
+
+Obama had released a standard short form of his birth certificate before the 2008 presidential election. Anyone who wants a copy of the more detailed, long-form document must submit a waiver request, and have that request approved by Hawaii's health department.
+
+In 2011, amid persistent questions from Trump about his birthplace, Obama submitted a waiver request. He dispatched his personal lawyer to Hawaii to pick up copies and carry the documents back to Washington on a plane.
+
+The form said Obama was born at 7:24 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu. It is signed by the delivery doctor, Obama's mother and the local registrar.
+
+At the White House on Friday, Obama declined to comment at length on the issue, saying he’s got other business to attend to – and is confident about where he was born.
+
+Fox News’ Nicholas Kalman and Tamara Gitt and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4031,"MH370: If debris is part of missing plane, what's next?","(CNN) If confirmed to be from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, could a small portion of plane wing discovered on an Indian Ocean island be the clue investigators need to unlock one of aviation's biggest mysteries?
+
+On the surface, the discovery on a Reunion Island beach is just what investigators have been waiting for -- the first physical piece of evidence since the flight vanished en route to Beijing in March 2014 with 239 people aboard.
+
+According to a source close to the investigation, Boeing investigators are confident the debris comes from a 777 aircraft -- although no one is yet saying the part came from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
+
+""It's only a very small part of the aircraft, but it could be a very important piece of evidence,"" Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said Friday
+
+Because Reunion Island is a French territory, the debris has been flown to France, where aviation safety bureau the BEA has taken responsibility for its testing and analysis.
+
+The flaperon arrived in Toulouse over the weekend, but the fact that so many different countries and groups are involved in the search for the missing flight has complicated and delayed the situation somewhat.
+
+Aviation experts are not expected to begin examining the part until Wednesday, and it is unclear how long their analysis will take.
+
+Teams from each of the nations taking part in the search are expected to attend. Malaysia Airlines is sending investigators to France and a second team to Reunion, an airline official said.
+
+Mary Schiavo, a CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation, said those involved would be careful to make sure all tests were carried out scientifically, and completely by the book.
+
+She said that while ""everyone knows that it most likely is from MH370,"" investigators do not want to jump to conclusions.
+
+""They're going to do a lot of analysis on the part, everything from X-rays to sonograms,"" Schiavo said. ""Then when they finally cut it open (looking for serial numbers and part numbers), it has to be filmed, all the parties to the investigation -- there are seven nations in this investigation -- they all need to be present.""
+
+David Gallo, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, agreed: ""That's the way the BEA -- the French version of the NTSB -- works; they will be very careful about what they say and don't say.
+
+""It's going to be scientific. It's a piece of evidence in a criminal investigation at this point, so they're going to take it apart bit by bit.""
+
+Planes are stamped with serial numbers to allow parts to be identified and matched to a specific model and aircraft.
+
+A source close to the investigation said Boeing investigators feel confident the piece comes from a 777, based on photos that have been analyzed, and a stenciled number that corresponds to a 777 component.
+
+Another source told CNN's Rene Marsh that Boeing engineers have seen a part number in photos. A parts supplier confirmed 10-60754-1133 is a part number on a seal associated with 777s.
+
+Images of the debris also appear to match schematic drawings for the right-wing flaperon from a Boeing 777. A flaperon helps the pilot control the aircraft.
+
+""If the part numbers that are stamped on the pieces of the plane still survive, it literally could be a phone call to Boeing or the parts indices to see if it belongs to a 777. And if it belongs to a 777, it is MH370,"" said Schiavo.
+
+Of the five accidents involving Boeing 777s, MH370 is the only one in which debris hasn't been recovered, Schiavo said.
+
+If the identifying numbers are missing, more tests will need to be conducted on the part to determine its origin.
+
+A French laboratory that the BEA could use has the capacity to ""identify very quickly"" which plane the debris belongs to, and what happened to it, a source close to the French investigation said.
+
+Australian investigators, heavily involved for some time in the search, said they are looking at the barnacles attached to the discovered part that could allow marine biologists to tell how long it has been floating.
+
+Truss said that he understood ""the photographs that are available are of such detail that it may be possible to make an identification without further physical examination.""
+
+What does the condition of the debris indicate?
+
+Through the French laboratory near Toulouse, ""engineers would be able to identify quickly whether the plane exploded in the air or whether it broke when hitting the water,"" the source close to the French investigation said.
+
+Images of the component appear to show a small amount of damage to the front of the flaperon and a ragged horizontal tear across the back.
+
+One group of independent observers has said that the damage to the flaperon should give authorities a good indication that the piece came off while the plane was still in the air.
+
+The rear damage could have been caused if the airliner had its flaperon down as it went into the ocean, some members of the group, led by American Mobile Satellite Corp. co-founder Mike Exner, wrote in a preliminary assessment.
+
+But the lack of damage to the front makes it more likely the plane was in a high-speed, steep, spiral descent and the part fluttered until it broke off, the group said.
+
+If the flaperon were still on the wing when the plane hit water, the front would have been damaged by hitting the part of the wing to which it was attached, the group says.
+
+However, Tom Ballantyne of Orient Aviation magazine said the condition of debris could indicate if the plane met a catastrophic end. Charring, for example, could indicate an explosion, he said.
+
+Sciavo said investigators would be on the look out for tell-tale signs of what caused the crash: ""It's possible to find positive evidence of a criminal act, or, of course they could find the absence of that.
+
+""If they find characteristic pitting in the wing structure, in the metal or the composite, that indicates there was some sort of explosive device, or if they find residue, which is not likely (after) this long in he ocean,"" she said.
+
+""But they'll probably not be able to tell why the plane went down -- only that it did, and the manner in which it did.""
+
+To learn more, the flight data recorders -- or so-called black boxes -- will be crucial.
+
+If it is from MH370, will the main search area move?
+
+Truss told a press conference Friday that the discovery of the debris in Reunion was ""consistent with some of the modeling we've done.""
+
+""We remain confident that we're searching in the right place,"" he said.
+
+He said authorities would ""continue to concentrate our efforts on seeking to locate the aircraft in the identified area.""
+
+The current search is focused deep in the ocean off Western Australia, along an arc considered by investigators to be the most likely area the plane went down if it turned back toward Malaysia, as indicated by data, and stayed in the air before running out of fuel.
+
+The southern end of the search area was the main focus, Truss said, but during the winter months weather conditions at that latitude were poor.
+
+Once that search was completed, he said, searchers would focus efforts on a second identified area of interest.
+
+If it's part of the plane, is it more likely the main section will be found?
+
+Truss said that if the flaperon is proven to be from MH370, its discovery did not ""provide a great deal of help in specifically identifying where the aircraft is.""
+
+If confirmed, however, the find is likely to give investigators further belief that other pieces of the plane have been carried by currents to the same region.
+
+Will debris lead to a rethinking of past theories?
+
+Thomas said, if anything, the location of the potential debris confirms modeling from the University of Western Australia that showed material from the plane could wash up around Reunion between 12 to 24 months after the plane's disappearance.
+
+Despite the modeling, no one had been searching in that area, he said, because of the vast nature of the Indian Ocean and the multitude of factors that meant finding anything would be matter of luck and time.
+
+""It was a matter of waiting for something to wash up,"" he said.
+
+However, Truss said, a positive identification with MH370 would rule out the some of the more left-field theories that the aircraft was ""secretly parked in some hidden place"" on land.",REAL
+10257,GOOGLE PLANNED MASSIVE AI INTEGRATED SOCIAL NETWORK SPY TOOL FOR HILLARY CAMPAIGN IN 2014,"GOOGLE PLANNED MASSIVE AI INTEGRATED SOCIAL NETWORK SPY TOOL FOR HILLARY CAMPAIGN IN 2014   Source: Higgins News Network 
+A newly released Podesta email reveals that Google CEO Eric Schmidt contacted the Hillary campaign in 2014 to begin their partnership in sponsoring Clinton’s campaign run for President in 2016. 
+The revelations come from a memo in the email sent to Cherry Mills which was then forwarded Robby Mook, John Podesta, and David Plouffe. 
+Schmidt’s memo outlines an overall campaign strategy for Hillary, Schmidt’s vision for a massive cloud-based AI integrate software program and also reveals that Google colluded with the Obama administration in the 2012 election. 
+The memo goes on to layout plans to construct a massive cloud-based database, along with programs that leveraged machine learning (aka Artificial Intelligence) that would be used to first to track users online to create a partial digital voter ids. 
+Those partial digital ids contain a collection of attributes about the users online behavior which Schmidt explains will all eventually be tied to a real voter id file by leveraging machine learning. 
+Schmidt details the procurement of a development team and the use of outline money to create software that will be connected to users smart phones on 2016 that would allow volunteers the ability to access any and all voter data. 
+Schmidt also outlines ideas for the using the integrated tool to monitor social media and news stories to help promote positive articles and target the source of “rumors” and negative articles. 
+Given Google’s massive collection of personal user data combined with previous revelations that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg and Facebook COO were colluding with Hillary raises series concerns above user privacy, media manipulation and host of other problems. 
+That combined with the fact that just about every other Silicon Valley company and executive is behind the Hillary Campaign makes this a chilling memo that should be getting much more attention than it is. 
+Presented in full: 
+Secondary verification by google.com DKIM key 
+Fwd: 2016 thoughts 
+Date: Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 1:56 PMSubject: 2016 thoughts 
+Cheryl, I have put together my thoughts on the campaign ideas and I havescheduled some meetings in the next few weeks for veterans of the campaign to tell me how to make these ideas better. This is simply a draft but dolet me know if this is a helpful process for you all. Thanks !! Eric 
+
+Notes for a 2016 Democratic CampaignEric Schmidt 
+Here are some comments and observations based on what we saw in the 2012campaign. If we get started soon, we will be in a very strong position toexecute well for 2016. 
+1. Size, Structure and Timing 
+Lets assume a total budget of about $1.5Billion, with more than 5000 paidemployees and million(s) of volunteers. The entire startup ceasesoperation four days after November 8, 2016 . The structure includes aChairman or Chairwoman who is the external face of the campaign and aPresident who is the executive in charge of objectives, measurements,systems and building and managing the organization. 
+Every day matters as our end date does not change. An official campaignright after midterm elections and a preparatory team assembled now is best. 
+2. Location 
+The campaign headquarters will have about a thousand people, mostly youngand hardworking and enthusiastic. Its important to have a very largehiring pool (such as Chicago or NYC) from which to choose enthusiastic,smart and low paid permanent employees. DC is a poor choice as its full ofdistractions and interruptions. Moving the location from DC elsewhereguarantees visitors have taken the time to travel and to help. 
+The key is a large population of talented people who are dying to work foryou. Any outer borough of NYC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston are all goodexamples of a large, blue state city to base in. 
+Employees will relocate to participate in the campaign, and will find lowcost temporary housing or live with campaign supporters on a donated basis.This worked well in Chicago and can work elsewhere. 
+The computers will be in the cloud and most likely on Amazon Web services(AWS) . All the campaign needs are portable computers, tablets and smartphones along with credit card reader s. 
+3. The pieces of a Campaign 
+a) The Field 
+Its important to have strong field leadership, with autonomy andempowerment. Operations talent needs to build the offices, set up thesystems, hire the people, and administer what is about 5000 people.Initial modeling will show heavy hiring in the key battleground states.There is plenty of time to set these functions up and build the humansystems. T he field is about organizing people, voter contact, and get outthe vote programs. 
+For organizing tools, build a simple way to link people and activities as aworkflow and let the field manage the system, all cloud based. Build asimple organizing tool with a functioning back-end. Avoid deep integrationas the benefits are not worth it. Build on the cloud. Organizing isreally about sharing and linking people, and this tool would measure andtrack all of it. 
+There are many other crucial early investments needed in the field:determining the precise list of battleground states, doing early polling toconfirm initial biases, and maintaining and extending voter protectionprograms at the state level. 
+b) The Voter 
+Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates allthat is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify,meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easilyspeak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get thevoter videos and other answers to areas they care about (“the benefits ofACA to you” etc.) 
+The scenario includes a volunteer on a walk list, encountering a potentialvoter, updating the records real time and deepening contact with the voterand the information we have to offer. 
+c) Digital 
+A large group of campaign employees will use digital marketing methods toconnect to voters, to offer information, to use social networks to spreadgood news, and to raise money. Partners like Blue State Digital will domuch of the fund raising. A key point is to convert BSD and other partnersto pure cloud service offerings to handle the expected crush and load. 
+d) Media (paid), (earned) and (social), and polling 
+New tools should be developed to measure reach and impact of paid, earnedand social media. The impact of press coverage should be measurable inreach and impact, and TV effectiveness measured by attention and othersurveys. 
+Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors , andmodel how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us aboutthe origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme .Connect polling into this in some way. 
+Find a way to do polling online and not on phones. 
+e) Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resourceoptimization tools 
+For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote.Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributesof the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn outand why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches workwell. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the mostimportant factors for turnout, and preference. 
+It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcomingdatabases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurementpurposes. 
+The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set ofvendors. 
+f) Core engineering, voter database and contact with voters online 
+The database of voters (NGP Van) is a fine starting point for voter recordsand i s maintained by the vendor (and needs to be converted to the cloud ).The code developed for 2012 (Narwahl etc. ) is unlikely to be used, andreplaced by a model where the vendor data is kept in the Van database andintermediate databases are arranged with additional information for a voter. 
+Quite a bit of software is to be developed to match digital identities withthe actual voter file with high confidence . The key unit of the campaignis a “voter”, and each and every record is viewable and updatable byvolunteers in search of more accurate information . 
+In the case w here we can’t identify the specific human , we can still have a partial digital voter id , for a person or “probable-person” with attributesthat we can identify and use to targe t. As they respond we can eventuallymatch to a registered voter in the main file. This digital key iseventually matched to a real person . 
+The Rules 
+Its important that all the player in the campaign work at cost and there beno special interests in the financing structure . This means that allvendors work at cost and there is a separate auditing function to ensure noone is profiting unfairly from the campaign. All investments and conflictsof interest would have to be publicly disclosed. The rules of the auditshould include caps on individual salaries and no investor profits from thecampaign function. (For example, this rule would apply to me.) 
+The KEY things 
+a) early b uild of an integrated development team and recognition that thisis an entire system that has to be managed as suchb) decisions to exclusively use cloud solutions for scalability, and choiceof vendors and any software from 2012 that will be reused.c) the role of the smart phone in the hands of a volunteer. The smartphone manages the process, updates the database, informs the citizen, andallows fundraising and recruitment of volunteers (on android and iphone).d) early and continued focus of qualifying fundraising dollars to build thefield, and build all the tools. Outside money will be plentiful andperfect for TV use. A smart media mix tool tells all we need to know aboutmedia placement, TV versus other media and digital media .  ",FAKE
+2586,Israel stole classified US information and used it to help congressional Republicans,"The Wall Street Journal's Adam Entous dropped a huge story Tuesday morning: Israel acquired classified US information while spying on the Iranian nuclear negotiations, and leaked the stolen information about the emerging deal to American lawmakers in an attempt to sabotage the Obama administration's outreach to Tehran.
+
+This is yet another disaster for US-Israel relations. But that's not because Israel acquired classified US information, which honestly isn't that surprising. What's really outrageous is that Israel used the information in a deliberate attempt to manipulate American politics.
+
+No one should be shocked that Israel was spying on the talks. A certain degree of espionage is pretty par for the course in world politics, even among allies. Indeed, as Entous' story repeatedly makes clear, American officials expected Israel to snoop on them. In fact, according to Entous, the US found out about the Israeli spying because it was already spying on Israel:
+
+But there is a real scandal here, and that's Israel using stolen intelligence as part of a deliberate campaign of messing around with American partisan politics. That's why the White House is angry: ""It is one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy,"" a senior US official told Entous.
+
+If Entous' reporting is correct, the Israeli government used the leaked information to help Republicans build support for new sanctions among Democrats, which would be necessary to overcome Obama's veto. Israel was using stolen information to help Mitch McConnell and John Boehner foment a Democratic rebellion against the president.
+
+This is the same reason Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress about Iran infuriated so many Democrats this month. The problem wasn't that Netanyahu was invited to Congress; it's that the speech was coordinated with Republicans behind the president's back in a deliberate attempt to undermine his Iran policy.
+
+
+
+The spying/briefing allegations suggest the speech was part of a much broader campaign to help Republicans pass new sanctions, a particularly dangerous move by Netanyahu at a time when Israel is at risk of becoming a partisan issue in America.
+
+Allies really aren't supposed to do this sort of thing. Playing partisan domestic politics — and doing it with classified information, no less — positions Israel as the Republican Party's ally, not America's. The fact that Republican interests line up with Israel's in this case doesn't justify crossing these lines.
+
+None of this is to say the Netanyahu government has to just sit down and accept an American Iran policy it opposes. It's perfectly within bounds for Netanyahu to publicly oppose the ongoing negotiations in which international powers are seeking to limit Iran's nuclear capabilities in exchange for relief on its crippling economic sanctions. It's fine for Netanyahu to lobby the French, who have an important role in the negotiations, to push for more stringent limits on Iran's nuclear program. That's all normal international politics.",REAL
+4045,"""America has a simple ideology"": how one of Russia's top US experts explains America","The United States comes up constantly when you talk to Russians about their country's place in the world. But the conversations tend to go a lot differently than many Americans might expect.
+
+In the US, the common view is that Russians feel aggrieved by the loss of the Soviet Union and all the respect that came with being a global superpower. Russia's acts of aggression in Europe, in this telling, are all about challenging the American-led order as a way to prove Russia's might and importance. This aggression is wildly popular among Russians, many Americans believe, because it makes them feel patriotic and powerful to bully the West, and particularly the US, which they blame for Russia's problems.
+
+""Russia took off its ideological blinders in 1991, but America still seems to have them on""
+
+There is certainly truth to this, but it's just a piece of the truth. Rather, when you speak to influential people across institutions and the political spectrum in Russia, as Amanda Taub and I did during a recent reporting trip there, the story you hear over and over is one of Russia's fundamental weakness. And you hear a preoccupation with the United States that goes far beyond what even many Americans, who are famously narcissistic about our country, would expect.
+
+In this telling, Moscow capitulated at the end of the Cold War, and even tried to make itself a friend to the far more powerful United States. But an irrationally aggressive America has instead sought repeatedly to weaken, control, or even destroy Russia. Their country, in this view, is insecure against an overwhelmingly powerful West. Its actions that we see as aggressive are actually defensive. And Moscow is kept safe only by careful vigilance and by the nuclear arsenal that you hear Russians cite over and over.
+
+This is the version of history you hear in Russia from detached foreign policy pragmatists, from pro-Putin ideologues and anti-Putin ideologues, even from members of the pro-Western political opposition who support what they believe be to a Western agenda of weakening Russia.
+
+There's a quote that speaks perfectly to this Russian worldview — and how Americans misunderstand it — in the most recent issue of Russia in Global Affairs, a Russian foreign policy journal that is widely considered to reflect the views of Russia's foreign policy establishment. The quote is from a Q&A with Vladimir Lukin, a prominent Russian diplomat and liberal politician who previously served as ambassador to the US:
+
+Interviewer: In his 1994 book ""Diplomacy,"" Henry Kissinger writes that ""integrating Russia into the international system is a key task"" for the United States. But as he was saying this, the Americans were actually pushing Moscow away with their policy. Why? Vladimir Lukin: It is in the genes. America has a simple ideology – that there is only one truth in the world, that truth is held by God, and God created the United States to be an embodiment of that truth. So the Americans strive to bring this truth to the rest of the world and to make it happy. Only after that will everything be well. This ideology has a strong influence on their policy. A wise traditionalist and a geopolitical expert, Kissinger had good reason to call such politicians ""Trotskyites"" for advocating a world revolution, albeit in their own way, but always in the front and in shining armor. This is a tempting ideology and has been professed by different countries at different times, not only the United States.
+
+Lukin is hardly seen as an anti-American hard-liner in Russia — rather, he's considered to be an objective expert on the United States and a highly professional diplomat. He is a founding member of the liberal opposition party Yabloko. That he would get the United States so obviously wrong — what Americans would call defending democracy and human rights, he sees as a far more radical and explicitly religious agenda of ""advocating a world revolution"" — is troubling. But his view is a common one, and that tells you a great deal.
+
+The interviewer's response is similarly telling: ""So Russia took off its ideological blinders in 1991, but America still seems to have them on. The Soviet Union is gone, but the policy against it is not.""
+
+This narrative of an inherently aggressive America is one we heard over and over in Moscow, not just from people who support Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aggressive, anti-American policies but even from those who oppose them. In this view, American politics and policies are bent on, and in many ways driven by, a hatred of Russia and desire to destroy or at least control it. Russia has had no choice but to meet American aggression with defensive actions such as putting nuclear-capable missiles in Europe or arming eastern Ukrainian militias at threat of genocidal extermination by American-backed fascists, if only to deter the US from further actions that could lead to all-out war.
+
+It's not hard to poke holes in this Russian worldview. As Stephen Sestanovich, a longtime senior State Department official who helped engineer the Clinton administration's Russia policies, wrote in a recent article for the American Interest, even the ""pragmatic"" Russian case for annexing Crimea in March 2014 makes little strategic sense:
+
+Yet this was the worldview we heard even from professionals and politicians in Russia who oppose anti-Western policies. One foreign policy expert who wished for rapprochement with the West sighed to us that it would be impossible because Hillary Clinton, whom he said was widely viewed as irrationally anti-Russian, would soon take office. At another meeting, a political opposition leader remarked offhand that he hoped the US would be successful in its efforts to engineer regime change in Moscow.
+
+As Sestanovich writes in his essay, ""The idea that the United States aims at a 'color revolution' in Moscow is the single most frequently repeated theme of official Russian rhetoric."" This is more than paranoia or government propaganda; it is the accepted worldview: that Russia is under constant threat from a hostile and irrational United States.
+
+Lukin, at another point in his Q&A, lamented that the US had rejected Moscow's gestures at cooperation in the 1990s and instead sought to surround Russia with a hostile NATO alliance, thus forcing Russia into a defensive crouch and creating today's tensions. ""It was the biggest mistake the West made,"" he said, ""and gradually led to the current situation.""
+
+These fears about America are likely to worsen in Russia if Hillary Clinton becomes president; many people told us she is seen by many Russians, especially Russian policymakers, as unbendingly hostile to Moscow and bent on the Putin government's destruction.
+
+""Hillary is the worst option of any president,"" Fyodor Lukyanov, an influential Russian foreign policy expert who edits a leading foreign affairs journal and heads a foreign policy think tank, told us.
+
+""Many people here believe that [she and her team] will try to come back to the line of the 1990s to encourage Russia into an internal transformation,"" Lukyanov added. ""Not by force, of course, but to encourage some kind of social development that will upend the current system and will promote a new one.""
+
+WATCH: What most people miss about the war in the Ukraine",REAL
+4632,Poll shows Trump made up 13 points in under 2 weeks — now he likes polls again,"While Trump’s edge is just 1 point — which is well within the margin of error — the Republican candidate has made up 13 points in under two weeks.
+
+Trump — who used to read off every poll he led during rallies but had begun to call them inaccurate after he started to decline — has decided he likes them again, or at least he likes this one.
+
+But not everyone wants to capitalize on the poll. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich called the new poll an “absurdity.”
+
+At this point in 2012, Mitt Romney led President Obama by 1 point.
+
+The daily tracking poll was conducted Oct. 27-30, 2016, and included 1,128 likely voters. The margin of error is 3 points.",REAL
+71,"Chaos on House floor as Dems, Republicans clash over LGBT proposal","The chaotic scene -- accompanied by loud chants of ""shame, shame, shame"" -- included one Democrat facing off with the second-highest-ranking House Republican, accusations of foul play and a series of insults being traded openly on the House floor.
+
+The clash began over a yearly spending bill to fund military construction projects and the Veterans Administration. Because the bill covers spending on federal contracts, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-New York, attached what he said was a one-sentence proposal to uphold President Barack Obama's executive order protecting LGBT workers from being fired. The amendment had enough votes to pass but the vote was held open, and several Republicans changed their position just before the vote was officially closed.
+
+""They literally snatched discrimination out of the jaws of equality. We won this vote,"" a visibly irate Maloney told reporters.
+
+Maloney accused House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of ""twisting arms."" Maloney and other Democrats told CNN that once the vote board showed the measure had 217 votes -- enough to pass with just eight seconds left in the vote -- McCarthy personally approached House GOP members to switch their ""yes"" votes to ""no"" as the presiding officer kept the vote open for several minutes past the standard five-minute period.
+
+A senior House Republican leadership aide told CNN that it wasn't just McCarthy -- all the top GOP leaders were working to defeat Maloney's amendment because they were concerned that if passed, it would jeopardize the spending bill. When Maloney walked over to McCarthy to appeal to him to allow the measure to pass, saying plenty of Republicans backed it, he said McCarthy told him ""get on my own side of the aisle."" He answered back to the majority leader, ""What side am I supposed to stand on to support equality?"" One Republican who witnessed the exchange said Maloney walked over to the GOP side of the chamber and was ""taunting Republican members"" and had his arms up in the air as he was trying to talk to them about letting his proposal pass. Roughly a dozen Republicans approached Maloney as the vote was extended and told him they disagreed with their own leadership's tactics to work to defeat the measure. California Democratic Rep. Mark Takano, who was standing with Maloney, told reporters that Illinois GOP Rep. Bob Dold told the New York Democrat ""this is bulls***."" As the scene unfolded, reporters outside the chamber could hear jeers as the gavel came down with a new 212-213 vote tally, defeating the measure. No. 2 House Democrat Steny Hoyer began shouting and calling out Republicans for not following the traditional practice of coming to the well of the House floor to change their votes, saying they instead remained in their seats to avoid being identified. Afterward, Democrats produced a list of seven House Republicans, including the head of the GOP's campaign arm, Oregon Republican Rep. Greg Walden, who initially backed Maloney's proposal before switching their votes. The other Republicans, according to a floor vote printout by Democratic staff, were Rep. Jeff Denham, R-California, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, Rep. Bruce Poliquin, R-Maine, Rep. David Valadao, R-California, Rep. Mimi Walters, R-California, and Rep. David Young, R-Iowa. Hoyer's staff also tweeted out the list of names, calling their votes ""shameful."" CNN has reached out to all seven House Republicans who changed their vote Thursday morning. So far, only Poliquin has responded about why he decided to vote no for the measure after originally registering support for it, defending his vote in a written statement to CNN. ""I am outraged that political opponents or members of the press would claim or insinuate that I cast a vote due to pressure or party politics,"" Poliquin wrote. ""No one controls my vote. I work hard only for the people of Maine's 2nd Congressional District."" Poliquin added, ""I abhor discrimination in any form and at any place."" ""They are bigots, they are haters,"" a seething Democratic Rep. Steve Israel said about House Republicans. He then immediately worked to tie House Republicans to Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, saying Trump ""is very proud of House Republicans today."" House Speaker Paul Ryan, who as the speaker doesn't typically vote, was holding his weekly news conference and missed the fracas. When asked about what happened, he told reporters he didn't have any details about who may have changed their votes, but made it clear he opposed the Democrats' proposal. ""The states should do this. The federal government shouldn't stick its nose in this business,"" Ryan said. Maloney vowed, ""These things are going to be remembered"" and told reporters he planned to try to push similar measures on other legislation. ""The people who stood in the schoolhouse door are going to have this hung around their necks for the rest of their careers, and I hope they can live with themselves,"" Maloney said. ""I hope they can look their kids in the eye and sleep OK tonight because what they did is as disgusting as one of the famous episodes in American history where we've seen people stand on the wrong side of the march toward Selma, or stand in the schoolhouse door when someone was trying to get an equal education.""",REAL
+7577,"New Study Links Fluoride Consumption To Hypothyroidism, Weight Gain, And Worse",Fluoridation of public water supplies as well as the abundance of fluoride in food and dental products have become more controversial in recent years as more and more people realize that the... ,FAKE
+1108,"Clinton, Sanders accuse Trump of inciting violence","(CNN) Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both accused Donald Trump of inciting violence, with the former secretary of state calling him ""bigoted"" and alleging he had perpetrated ""political arson,"" while the Vermont senator labeled him a ""pathological liar"" at a town hall on Sunday night.
+
+""It is clear that Donald Trump is running a very cynical campaign pitting groups of Americans against one another. He is trafficking in hate and fear,"" Clinton said during the event at Ohio State University hosted by CNN and TV One. ""He actually incites violence in the way he urges his audience on, talking about punching people, offering to pay legal bills.""
+
+Clinton charged that Trump was guilty of a case of ""political arson"" by throwing fuel on political divisions in the country.
+
+""He has been incredibly bigoted towards so many groups,"" she continued. ""You don't make America great by tearing down everything that made America great.""
+
+Clinton followed Sanders at the town hall moderated by CNN's Jake Tapper and TV One's Roland Martin. Sanders and Clinton are making closing arguments to voters in their increasingly contentious Democratic nominating marathon, two days before five states vote in crucial primaries that could set the tone for the rest of the contest.
+
+On Sunday night, Clinton's comments followed Sanders' own sharp criticism of Trump.
+
+""I hesitate to say this because I really don't like to disparage public officials, but Donald Trump is a pathological liar,"" Sanders said.
+
+Sanders also blasted Trump for saying that he might pay the legal fees of a man charged with punching a protester at one of his rallies, adding that doing so was tantamount to ""inciting violence.""
+
+""I would hope Mr. Trump tones it down big time and tells his supporters that violence is not acceptable in the American political process,"" Sanders said.
+
+In one of the most dramatic moments of the night, Clinton was asked by audience member Ricky Jackson -- who spent 39 years in jail for a murder he did not commit, including a period on death row -- to justify her support for the death penalty in some cases.
+
+She replied that the states had proven themselves incapable of carrying out fair trials and said she would ""breathe a sigh of relief"" if the Supreme Court and the states began to eliminate capital punishment.
+
+But she argued that there was a case for a ""very limited use"" of the death penalty in cases of ""horrific"" terrorist crimes in federal cases like the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 during her husband's administration.
+
+Speaking directly to Jackson, however, she told him, ""I just can't even imagine what you went through and how terrible those days and nights must have been for all those years. All of us are so regretful that you or any person had to go through what you did.""
+
+Jackson, who is an undecided voter, was then asked by Martin if he was satisfied with Clinton's response. He replied, ""Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you, senator.""
+
+The town hall took place in the wake of Sanders' surprise victory in the Michigan primary last week, which raised his hopes of competing with Clinton across Midwestern Rust Belt states.
+
+They faced questions from Buckeye State voters as they vie for the support of blue collar and minority voters who underpin the Democratic coalition.
+
+It also came at the end of a weekend filled with violence and disruption of Trump rallies, in which the real estate mogul pointed the finger at Sanders for the unruliness.
+
+But Sanders said Sunday night, ""Our campaign does not believe and never will encourage anybody to disrupt anything.""
+
+He added that people have the right to protest even though he said other candidates' rallies shouldn't be disrupted.
+
+""Trump has to get on the TV and tell his supporters that violence in the political process in America is not acceptable, end of discussion,"" he said.
+
+At the same time, Sanders dismissed the idea that he was responsible for the actions of all his supporters.
+
+""Millions of people voted for me. If I have to take responsibility for everybody who voted for me, it would be a very difficult life,"" Sanders said
+
+The town hall was also an opportunity for the two Democratic candidates to highlight their differences even if they didn't meet face to face.
+
+One questioner, Amit Majmudar, a radiologist born to Indian immigrant parents and Ohio's poet laureate, told each one that he had one mission at the ballot box, to keep Trump out of office and asked what each would do to defeat Trump.
+
+Clinton argued that she was the best candidate to take on Trump because she was ""the only candidate who has gotten more votes than Trump"" in the 2016 contests held so far.
+
+She added that she was building a broad-based campaign to convince people that this was the highest-stakes election they had ever been involved in, explicitly because Trump was likely to be the Republican nominee.
+
+And she said that the fact that Republicans had been ""after me"" for 25 years meant there wasn't anything the GOP had not already dug up about her.
+
+""I am not new to the national arena and I think whoever goes up against Donald Trump better be ready,"" she said.
+
+Clinton also said that there would be many arguments that Democrats could make against Trump but that she didn't want to ""spill the beans right now.""
+
+""I am having foreign leaders ask if they can endorse me to stop Donald Trump,"" Clinton said, though she declined to name any other than Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who she said had done so publicly.
+
+Sanders, for his part, pivoted to his Democratic opponent on the issue of trade, which is emerging as a key theme on both sides of the aisle in the 2016 presidential race.
+
+He lashed out at ""corporately written trade agreements,"" which he said were designed to shut down U.S factories and pay people ""pennies an hour"" in China and Mexico.
+
+""One of the very strong differences between Secretary Clinton and myself -- she has supported almost all of those trade agreements, I have vigorously opposed (them),"" he charged.
+
+At one point while talking about trade though, Sanders slipped in another backhanded slap at Trump. Defending his position on trade, Sanders said that he did not want to cut off the United States from global trade flows.
+
+""Nobody is talking about building a wall around the United States,"" Sanders said, before trailing off when people in the audience started chuckling. ""Oh, I beg your pardon, there is one guy who is talking about building a wall. Let me rephrase it: no rational person is talking about building a wall.""
+
+During Clinton's appearance, she sought to match her rival's rhetoric on trade after she was asked by a laid-off steel worker how she would deal with alleged dumping of steel in the U.S. market by foreign nations.
+
+""I believe that the dumping is illegal and we have to summon up the political and the legal arguments to take it on,"" Clinton said, specifically accusing China of the practice. Other nations, including Italy, South Korea and India have in recent months been accused of dumping corrosion-resistant steel in the U.S. market.
+
+The town hall segment with each candidate concluded with a few more personal questions.
+
+Clinton was asked to elaborate on her recent comment that she's not a natural politician like her husband Bill Clinton or President Barack Obama.
+
+Clinton turned the question into a way of stressing her particular skills while admitting her liabilities, saying she had worked hard to become a better politician but wanted to be more than just good at campaigning.
+
+""I don't want to be hired to be a constant candidate, I want to be hired to be the president because I think that I, in this moment in our country's history, bring the combination of skills and understanding and experience that can be really put to work immediately to do all parts of the job,"" she said.
+
+She also said that the campaign skills of her husband and Obama are ""poetry,"" relating that ""I get carried away and I have seen them a million times."" She added that such stump skills were not her forte.
+
+Sanders, asked which ideological opponents he got along with the best, mentioned Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, even though he's someone who Democrats have pilloried as a climate-change denier.
+
+Though Sanders has been scoring some points on trade, Clinton has so far built a more diverse constituency resting especially on African-American voters and Hispanics and appears to have the edge going into Tuesday's primaries in Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina.
+
+Still, Sanders has high hopes of good results in the Midwest in particular and has been driving his message that the economy is stacked against working Americans and underpinned by a corrupt political system.
+
+Tuesday's primaries are hugely significant because they make up the third-highest allocation of delegates available on a single day in the Democratic presidential race.
+
+A new poll by The Wall Street Journal and NBC published on Sunday shows Clinton leading Sanders for the three biggest prizes available on Tuesday. She is up 61% to 34% on Sanders in Florida, leads him by 58% to 38% in Ohio and by six points in Illinois.
+
+Sanders will be hoping that last Tuesday's results are an omen for this week after he went into the Michigan primary trailing badly in polls but still managed to best Clinton.
+
+The former secretary of state, however, is looking to further bolster her lead in delegates over Sanders on Tuesday.
+
+According to CNN estimates, Clinton has 1,244 delegates (including 772 pledged delegates and 472 superdelegates). Sanders has 574 delegates (including 551 pledged delegates and 23 superdelegates). Superdelegates are party officials and lawmakers who can vote at the convention and have already made their intentions clear.
+
+CORRECTION: This story has been updated with the correct number of superdelegates for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.",REAL
+9485,Memo to the Next Administration: Defense Spending Must Be For Actual Defense,"Written by Ron Paul Sunday November 13, 2016 In a disturbing indication of how difficult it would be to bring military spending in line with actual threats overseas, House Armed Services Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry (R – TX) told President Obama last week that his war funding request of $11.6 billion for the rest of the year was far too low. That figure for the last two months of 2016 is larger than Spain’s budget for the entire year! And this is just a “war-fighting” supplemental, not actual “defense” spending! More US troops are being sent to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere and the supplemental request is a way to pay for them without falling afoul of the “sequestration” limits.The question is whether this increase in US military activity and spending overseas actually keeps us safer, or whether it simply keeps the deep state and the military-industrial complex alive and well-funded.Unfortunately many Americans confuse defense spending with military spending. The two terms are used almost interchangeably. But there is a huge difference. I have always said that I wouldn’t cut anything from the defense budget. We need a robust defense of the United States and it would be foolish to believe that we have no enemies or potential enemies.The military budget is something very different from the defense budget. The military budget is the money spent each year not to defend the United States, but to enrich the military-industrial complex, benefit special interests, regime-change countries overseas, maintain a global US military empire, and provide defense to favored allies. The military budget for the United States is larger than the combined military spending budget of the next seven or so countries down the line.To get the military budget in line with our real defense needs would require a focus on our actual interests and a dramatic decrease in spending. The spending follows the policy, and the policy right now reflects the neocon and media propaganda that we must run the rest of the world or there will be total chaos. This is sometimes called “American exceptionalism,” but it is far from a “pro-American” approach.Do we really need to continue spending hundreds of billions of dollars manipulating elections overseas? Destabilizing governments that do not do as Washington tells them? Rewarding those who follow Washington’s orders with massive aid and weapons sales? Do we need to continue the endless war in Afghanistan even as we discover that Saudi Arabia had far more to do with 9/11 than the Taliban we have been fighting for a decade and a half? Do we really need 800 US military bases in more than 70 countries overseas? Do we need to continue to serve as the military protection force for our wealthy NATO partners even though they are more than capable of defending themselves? Do we need our CIA to continue to provoke revolutions like in Ukraine or armed insurgencies like in Syria?If the answer to these questions is “yes,” then I am afraid we should prepare for economic collapse in very short order. Then, with our economy in ruins, we will face the wrath of those countries overseas which have been in the crosshairs of our interventionist foreign policy. If the answer is no, then we must work to convince our countrymen to reject the idea of Empire and embrace the United States as a constitutional republic that no longer goes abroad seeking monsters to slay. The choice is ours. Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.",FAKE
+4701,"In New Responses, Hillary Clinton Insists Email Setup A Matter Of 'Convenience'","In New Responses, Hillary Clinton Insists Email Setup A Matter Of 'Convenience'
+
+Hillary Clinton said she decided to employ a private email server ""for the purpose of convenience"" in early 2009 and doesn't remember ""specific consultations"" about using that account to conduct State Department business, the Democratic presidential nominee told lawyers in material related to a Freedom of Information Act case released Thursday.
+
+In written responses to 25 questions from the conservative group Judicial Watch, Clinton largely hewed to her prior statements about the email controversy, often saying she did not recall details about the arrangement. Clinton signed the court filing ""under penalty of perjury"" on October 10, one day after her debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump.
+
+Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have tangled with Judicial Watch for more than 20 years.
+
+Some of that friction showed in her answers over 20-odd pages, littered with objections. At times, the candidate accused the conservative nonprofit of misstating her earlier remarks.
+
+On occasion, she declined to answer questions about the vulnerability of her emails to hacking on the ground that it exceeded the boundaries of what a judge ordered earlier this year. And she cited attorney-client privilege in refusing to answer a question about her 11-hour testimony to a congressional panel in October 2015 that 90 to 95 percent of her emails ""were in the State's system.""
+
+The Justice Department closed an investigation into Clinton's email practices with no charges against her or any of her aides. FBI Director James Comey found she had been ""extremely careless"" but concluded ""no reasonable prosecutor"" would have sought criminal charges. But that decision remains deeply unpopular among Republicans in Congress and with Trump, who is vying with Clinton to become president.
+
+In the course of the investigation, the FBI recovered thousands of Clinton's emails during her tenure at the State Department. Many of those messages will be released in batches over the next month.
+
+Clinton has said using one email account was a ""mistake"" she will not repeat. But it is also one she is unlikely to shake for the time being, if conservative watchdogs get their way.
+
+""We're pleased that we now have a little bit more information about Hillary Clinton's email practices,"" Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. ""Our lawyers will be reviewing the responses closely. Mrs. Clinton's refusal to answer many of the questions in a clear and straightforward manner further reflects disdain for the rule of law.""",REAL
+4929,Trump mulls alternative options for making Mexico finance 'the wall',"While Donald Trump doubled down this week on his vow to make Mexico pay for his proposed southern border wall, his campaign is reported to be weighing options that don’t necessarily involve the seemingly far-fetched scenario of the Mexican government handing America a great, big check.
+
+LifeZette first reported that the Republican presidential nominee and his top advisers are looking at using assets seized from drug cartels and other traffickers. This reportedly could involve establishing a “joint border security fund” -- holding seized assets from crackdowns on both sides of the border – for border construction and maintenance.
+
+Trump, asked Thursday by Fox News about the report, did not deny the option is on the table.
+
+“There are many ways that they can pay for the wall,” Trump said, calling it a “negotiation.”
+
+But he again insisted, “The United States will not be paying for the wall. Mexico will be paying for the wall.”
+
+Breitbart News, whose chairman Stephen Bannon left to be Trump’s campaign CEO, also reported that cartel resources would be seized to fund the wall if Trump wins.
+
+Trump supporter, and former presidential primary rival, Ben Carson floated another option Thursday night.
+
+Speaking with Fox News, Carson said money saved from enforcing the border could be used – though he did not elaborate on what level of savings the federal government could expect, particularly when Trump is proposing spending more money on border security resources.
+
+“Recognize that a lot of money is going to be saved by enforcing our borders, by not, you know, giving various types of benefits to people who are here illegally,” Carson said. “That money is money that we otherwise would not have had and that can be applied to the wall and various other things. That’s I believe the spirit in which that comment is made. I don't think Mexico is going to write a check out and say here, pay for the wall.”
+
+Trump has not addressed such details on the stump.
+
+He declared in his immigration policy speech Wednesday night that, “Mexico will pay for the wall … they don’t know it yet, but they’re going to pay.”
+
+That came after Trump met with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in Mexico City, and both men left the meeting battling over the payment issue. Trump said they didn’t discuss “payment,” while Pena Nieto said he made clear Mexico will not put up the money.
+
+According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump added the line about payment into his Phoenix speech, in response to Pena Nieto’s claims.
+
+If a Trump administration did pursue using cartel assets to fund a wall, it would take billions. Trump has estimated the wall could be built for as little as $8 billion, though other analyses have put the cost much higher.
+
+Estimates of Mexican cartel revenue vary drastically. The U.S. government estimated a decade ago that Mexican traffickers make nearly $14 billion on drug sales to the U.S.",REAL
+6698,The circus of liars - America's three rings of evil clowns,"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 18:19 UTC © Jen Psaki President Obama holds news conference at the White House. As an American, someone raised to believe truth and justice will prevail, I am appalled at the foreign and domestic policies of my country's government. The level and scope of the deceit with which the Obama administration has laid out onto the world stage is embarrassing. For the first time in my 61 years I realize why some figures in our history were ashamed of being known as American. Our leaders have shamed us, done irreparable damage to our heritage and our legacy as a people, and still most of my countrymen sit idle. America today reminds me of a traveling circus, three rings of evil clowns entertaining a peanut gallery of onlookers. Or are we participant clowns? For over the better part of Barack Obama's presidency we've witnessed the most respected nation transformed, step-by-step, into one of the most dreaded empires the world has ever known. 300 million people, all their ancestors, and their future generations will pay the overwhelming cost of Obama's mistakes and malfeasance in office. While I do not personally believe this man is evil, I am sure the people behind him are. The lies, the impact, the unbelievable devastation these people have unwrapped, it spells the end of a perfect dream for humanity. I wonder as I type this, how many people reading it will realize how true my words are. John Kirby, the spokesperson for the US Department of State is a prototype for all that is wrong with our nation. He is a mirror reflection of Secretary of State John Kerry, who is in turn a further reflection of Barack Obama and the people who stand behind. They lie, cheat, steal, kill, maim, or at best coerce in order to achieve goals their constituency (the people) have no inkling of. All of us knew politicians have always been liars and crooked, but the degree to which we can be betrayed is unheard of today. This press conference on the alleged bombing of Aleppo hospitals by Russia, it is damning, damnable evidence of what I am saying. This is, of course, if one watches intently and then reasons. Compare what Kirby says, with what you have seen or read from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Measure the tone and content of this unique message. Bear with me, and I'll help you convict these warmongers of their crimes. The Circus of Liars I must point out that Barack Obama has had more State Department spokespersons than any president in history. First there was Sean McCormack, from 2005 to 2009, a leftover from the Bush administration. After McCormack's tour of administration liar in chief, he joined Boeing in 2009 and serves as the as vice president of Communications in Government Operations. McCormack left the Obama administration to more or less help Hillary Clinton and the ""click"" extend the growth of companies like Boeing. This Washington Post piece (amazingly) condemns both Hillary Clinton and McCormack for their apparent collusion to morph policy into business with, guess who? Why Mother Russia, of course. Philip J. ""P.J."" Crowley made his ""deal with the devil"" from 2009 to 2011. The 2011-2012 recipient of the General Omar N. Bradley Chair in Strategic Leadership (? The Military ties to State) is a War College bred and reared pentagon puppet. The fact most recent State Department liars are former military begs the question; ""Why is our foreign policy institution lined with CIA, spooks, War College graduates and command grade military officers?"" Crowley is an interesting example of how our foreign service is infested with war hawks and military industrial minions. To Crowley's credit, his candidness in the wake of the mistreatment of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and his subsequent resignation redeemed this old soldier by comparison to his colleagues. He is emblematic of a system that uses good soldiers in order to mislead the people, and to misdirect our policies toward the wrong goals. Crowley is pretty much off the radar now, but somehow still semi-loyal to the Obama-Clinton team. His tweets on Twitter hum the Democratic Party line. He's now a Fellow at The George Washington University Institute for Public Diplomacy, which means he's been let out to pasture. Next we come to Victoria Jane Nuland, the pin-up girl of soulless and reprehensible US bureaucrats. From my perspective, as someone who has covered the Ukraine civil war extensively, Nuland in Kiev reminds me of the worst parts of the rise of Nazi Germany. I cannot possibly be bombastic enough in characterizing this Hillary Clinton spawn. It is not my nature to be unkind, or less than a gentleman, but this woman is no lady. Her hacked conversation, with fellow psychopath, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, lives in infamy amidst volumes of horrid US intentions. ""Fuck the EU"", along with the clear regime change the Obama White House was behind, should have spelled resignation for this demonic Washington witch. She, and her colleague Pyatt, are complicit in the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children in the Donbass. Nuland, who most agree will be Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State should she reach office, is the most deadly psychopath the American people could possibly put in charge of our foreign service. For the Russians who still have to deal with her, I am sure 20 minutes looking at her is unbearable. This is America fiddling, while our reputation abroad burns. She is the queen of regime change, she and her husband children of the ideology America needs to forcefully alter world governments. This is the ""WOW"" persona, the caricature of disastrous Washington policy. Don't take my word, research Nuland starting here , and see where it leads. Jen Psaki lied so well, and stuck up her nose to the dissenting press so expertly, she graduated the US State Department right up to the White House. Those of us who winced at her nonchalant misrepresentation of facts, also understand she is part of the click that now inhabits the halls of power in Washington. Psaki is part of a country club that runs it all. If the Democrats win in November's presidential election, people like Psaki will become monsters, an empowered American politburo kin to the worst fascists in history. Psaki is the official cheerleader now, of a White House campaign to create a legacy for the worst president in American history. Catch her Twitter feed her, and figure out why in the world Barack Obama would want to be a Wired Magazine editor for a day. Despite her pallid and docile appearance, make no mistake, this Obama minion is as deadly as Nuland, maybe even more so. I recall Psaki launched a social media attack on Russia that was nearly universally ridiculed as ""hash tag diplimacy."" Her ""hot mic"" comment on her own points on Egypt at a press conference as being ""ridiculous"", they remind me of Obama being caught promising then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev he'd ""fix"" the ABM missiles issue if he won in 2012. What makes this spokesperson so dangerous is her forward enthusiasm, and her seeming happy-go-lucky satisfaction with being part of the biggest lie ever perpetrated. Lying is transfigured into truth, a job well worth doing. Good God. Finally we come to John Kirby, Naval War College trained mouthpiece for Emperor Caligula (look him up and compare to our presidents) and whichever Nero we elect next. A Public Affairs Officer (PAO) at the command level in the US Navy, he's what many former military people would refer to as a first class boot licker. I'm a squid myself, so I am familiar with the type. Kirby would climb a tree to tell a lie, if ordered to do so, and show righteousness in doing so. Kirby, Kerry, the whole Obama administration is utterly absurd. This recent press conference reveals just how out of bounds US policy is. Furthermore, Kirby's contention the Syrian war cannot end without airpower being grounded is likewise idiotic. The State Department's stance on Russia's hammering of jihadists only makes sense, if the overthrow of Assad and his legitimate government is a goal. John Kirby: Syrian War Won't End Without Grounding Aircraft - this is the headline that calls our attention to the fact Assad is about to wreck Washington's plan. Regime change has become such a common term now, that media consumers are immune to what it really means. Since the first Bush took office, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more governments have been turned upside down than at any time since World War II. And the ""Kirbys"" of the world are accomplices to massive world chaos. Kirby's ""Russians in body bags"" threat has pushed the Kremlin's panic button now. We have descended into crisis policy, an all or nothing lunacy that can only end in war. Three Rings of Evil Clowns These people are all deplorable. But compared to the linchpins of war they speak for, each is insignificant by comparison. This message for instance, the New York Times headline ""U.S. Officials Say Russia Probably Attacked U.N. Humanitarian Convoy"", it did not originate with them. Our new ""probably"" dogma is a function of a failing freedom, the complete takeover of a free press by western oligarchs that make Russian mafia types seem impotent. Watching this evil circus reminds me of a twisted horror movie, a guttural glimpse at wicked clowns betraying the children they are supposed to love and entertain. The Soros and Rockefeller types, those Rotschilds and the Goldman Sachs sharks, Silicon Valley fakers and Wall Street urchins the Clintons take money off of, the whole mess in our nation's capital stinks to high heavens. Just how my countrymen stomach it leaves me breathless and clueless at times. America is taking part in a wider broadcast of the movie The Turman Show these days. Raised up to believe in freedom of the press and the merits of democracy, my countrymen have been conditioned to rely on their media, their leaders, and the seeming implausibility that one group can take over the world. Well, a group has taken over half of it, and with the proper time and funding, this can be proven. Since me or some other researcher has no such investigative grant, the case against these evil clowns goes untried. The Nation, Slate, Global Research, RT, and myriad independent media attempt to dissent. But trillions of dollars flow back and forth fueling the paranoiac message - Russia is the enemy again! The first ring of circus clowns wield more power than Xerxes, the Bilderbergs probably even believe their own cause - perpetuating the elite order is, after all, a noble genetic cause. In the second ring business types and the oh-so aggressive and ambitious, they will literally do anything to succeed. The Clintons, Bushs, and Obamas out there are the master puppets. Their mission is pretty clear, pay the devil his due and cash in. It's really as simple as all that. Today's Washington is a bit like Chicago during Capone's time. Once the ""Man"" has you, he's got you but good. La Cosa Nostra hasn't got anything on the numbers games along the Potomac. The little crime bosses, grown up from their internships and grant designations, they pepper every institution in America. As they graduate, God knows what goals the Kirbys of the world set out to achieve. In the wider center ring, it's easy to see the Clinton Foundation workers really do drink Bill and Hillary's Kool Aid. Mind washed into believing in the ultimate bullshit, naïve middle intellectuals become squirming opportunists, oblivious to the fact they sold out. The ""Man"" has got them, and early on. Meanwhile, the whole mess is cloaked in the guise of democracy, and hidden underneath people's fear they'll be called conspiracy theorists. George Orwell's 1984 seems to have been written to exclude the possibility complete control could be achieved. But isn't that how complete control is ultimately achieved? Above the center ring, high up on the flying trapeze liberty defies death. The people are doing a high wire act without a net. We are the third ring of clowns, only we are hesitant to see our role as sellouts too. America is life under the big top, with our favorite pop stars handing out peanuts. I don't know how you feel about it, but I feel utterly betrayed.",FAKE
+667,"Donald Trump said ‘university’ was all about education. Actually, its goal was: ‘Sell, sell, sell!’","When Donald Trump introduced his new university from the lobby of his famous tower, he declared that it would be unlike any of his other ventures.
+
+Trump University would be a noble endeavor, he said, with an emphasis on education over profits. It was a way for him to give back, to share his expertise with the masses, to build a “legacy as an educator.”
+
+He wouldn’t even keep all the money — if he happened to make a profit, he would turn the funds over to charity.
+
+“If I had a choice of making lots of money or imparting lots of knowledge, I think I’d be as happy to impart knowledge as to make money,” Trump said at the inaugural news conference in the spring of 2005.
+
+The launch of Trump University coincided with two auspicious developments for the real estate mogul: Through his then-year-old hit TV show “The Apprentice,” the billionaire was developing an image as America’s savviest boss, while the nation’s booming real estate market was giving hope to many who dreamed of striking it rich.
+
+Ads touted Trump University as “the next best thing to being Trump’s apprentice.” Trump, who every week on TV singled out someone to be fired, pledged in a promotional video to “hand-pick” instructors. “Priceless information” would help attendees build wealth in the same real estate game that made Trump rich.
+
+In the end, few if any of these statements would prove to be true.
+
+Trump University was not a university. It was not even a school. Rather, it was a series of seminars held in hotel ballrooms across the country that promised attendees they could get rich quick but were mostly devoted to enriching the people who ran them.
+
+Participants were enticed with local newspaper ads featuring images of Trump, then encouraged to write checks or charge tens of thousands of dollars on credit cards for multi-day learning sessions. Participants were considered “buyers,” as one internal document put it. According to the company’s former president, Trump did not personally pick the instructors. Many attendees were trained by people with little or no real estate expertise, customers and former employees have alleged in lawsuits against the company.
+
+“I was told to do one thing,” said James Harris, a Trump University instructor whose sessions have been repeatedly cited in the litigation, in an interview with The Washington Post. “And that one thing was: . . . to show up to teach, train and motivate people to purchase the Trump University products and services and make sure everybody bought. That is it.”
+
+A Trump spokesman said Harris’s comments “have no merit” and accused Harris of “looking for media attention to further his own agenda.”
+
+All told, Trump University received about $40 million in revenue from more than 5,000 participants before it halted operations in 2010 amid lawsuits in New York and California alleging widespread fraud. The New York attorney general estimated Trump netted more than $5 million during the five years it was active. He has since acknowledged that he gave none of the profits to charity.
+
+This account is based on a review of hundreds of pages of internal company records that have become public as a result of the lawsuits, as well as new interviews with former Trump University employees and customers.
+
+Many of the company’s internal records, including several “playbooks” that advised employees on strategies for pressuring customers, were unsealed in court over the past week in response to a request by The Post.
+
+Trump and his lawyers have vigorously disputed the allegations, predicting that they will win in court and reopen the business. They point to positive customer-satisfaction surveys that have been submitted in the lawsuits and suggest they have been unfairly targeted by trial lawyers and a politically motivated attorney general in New York.
+
+“We continue to believe that people got substantial value and that people were overwhelmingly satisfied,” said Trump’s general counsel, Alan Garten. “We are not going to be stopping what we are doing. We are going to continue to zealously defend this case because, at the end of the day, we know we are not being tried by The Washington Post or by CNN — but in a courtroom by a jury.”
+
+Garten acknowledged that Trump never gave away the profits to charity. He said it was always Trump’s intention but that the lawyers leading the class-action suits against the company “got a hold of this and . . . whatever profits existed sort of evaporated.” The unfulfilled promise was first reported last year by Time magazine.
+
+In his defense, Trump has often cited the many positive reviews by former customers. A number of them submitted sworn statements in court explaining their positive experiences at Trump University.
+
+Kissy and Mark Gordon, who own a residential development company in Virginia and jointly signed up for the most expensive program in 2008, said in an interview that they still use techniques they learned from the course today.
+
+“Did we have an expectation that Trump was going to teach us? No,” Kissy Gordon said. “We have a building background and the economy changed, and we were looking for something in the same field to do something with it. So we were there to learn.”
+
+Gregory Leishman, another former customer, recalled speaking to his assigned Trump University mentor on the phone weekly and touring potential properties for purchase with him in New Haven, Conn. “They gave me information I didn’t have otherwise,” he said. “You can probably get all that information from reading books. But Trump University was a crash course. You pay more, you get more.”
+
+Nonetheless, the company has emerged as one of the most potent lines of attack against Trump’s campaign for president.
+
+In the Republican primary, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) cited it as a “fake university” and sought to use it to help build a case that Trump was a “con artist.”
+
+In recent days, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and her campaign have picked up on that theme.
+
+“Trump U is devastating because its a metaphor for his whole campaign: promising hardworking Americans a way to get ahead, but all based on lies,” tweeted press secretary Brian Fallon.
+
+Trump also last week invited a torrent of criticism, including from legal scholars on the left and right, for accusing the judge presiding over the California suits, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, of being biased because he is of Mexican descent. Trump has said that Curiel is “Mexican,” although the 62-year-old was born in Indiana, and that because Trump wants to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border the judge cannot properly do his job.
+
+The focus on Trump University also reignited a controversy in Texas over the decision there by the state attorney general not to file a fraud case against the business. Newly disclosed documents reported by Texas media show that investigators had probed the company for seven months and recommended a lawsuit. The inquiry was shut down when Trump University closed up shop in the state.
+
+Trump later gave $35,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of then-Attorney General Greg Abbott. A spokesman for Abbott, now the Republican governor of Texas, has said it’s “absurd” to suggest a connection between the case and the donation that came several years later and that Trump University was “forced out of Texas and consumers were protected.”
+
+Garten also dismissed any connection between the Texas decision and Trump’s donation, saying investigators reviewed “a few complaints . . . and decided not to proceed.”
+
+The Trump University sales pitch began at free seminars, such as one hosted at a Holiday Inn just outside of Washington in 2009.
+
+[In downturn, aspiring moguls turn to Trump U. for wisdom]
+
+A placard outside the ballroom read, “Trump, think BIG.” Inside, aspiring real estate investors heard the theme song from “The Apprentice,” the O’Jays classic, “For the Love of Money.”
+
+Then, a Trump University instructor took the microphone. “All right, you guys ready to be the next Trump real estate millionaire? Yes or No!?” he yelled, according to a Post account at the time.
+
+The purpose of these free 90-minute introductions was not to turn attendees into millionaires, but rather to “set the hook” for future sales, according to employee playbooks.
+
+The playbooks directed leaders of the free seminars to conclude introductory events by getting “in the sales mindset,” “ready to sell, sell, sell!”
+
+Three-day courses typically cost $1,495, the records show. But people who paid to attend them were then urged to sign up for even pricier “elite” programs.
+
+A “workshop enrollment form” distributed to participants laid out the options in categories, starting with the “Trump Gold Elite” program. At $34,995, it was the most expensive option — providing three days of personal, in-the-field mentorship as well as special programs on real estate investment, “wealth preservation” and “creative financing.”
+
+The “Trump Silver Elite” package, priced at $19,495, offered real estate and finance training. The “Trump Bronze Elite,” priced at $9,995, offered similar, but fewer, courses.
+
+Employees distributed “profile” surveys on the first day of the seminars, in which participants would outline their financial goals, as well as current assets and liabilities. Attendees were told that the information would help them figure out how much they had to invest in real estate, according to customer complaints.
+
+But in the evenings, after seminars had concluded for the first day, staff members were instructed to use the information to rank each participant according to assets they had available to spend on more Trump University programs.
+
+“If they can afford the gold elite,” the playbook advised, “don’t allow them to think about doing anything besides the gold elite.”
+
+A 43-page “sales playbook” offered guidance on using psychological tools to convince students that they needed to sign up for the classes to fulfill their own goals — overcoming their worries that they might not need or be able to afford the classes.
+
+“Customers don’t have needs — they have problems,” the book advised. “Problems are like health. The more a problem hurts now, the more the need for a solution now. And the more it hurts, the more they’ll be prepared to pay for a speedy solution.”
+
+In a section devoted to “negotiating student resistance,” sales people were offered sample responses to common objections from potential students. If a potential customer said he was concerned about going into debt to pay for the classes, staff were advised to needle them: “I see, do you like living paycheck to paycheck?”
+
+If doubts persisted, staffers were advised to invoke the big boss himself.
+
+“Mr. Trump won’t listen to excuses and neither will we,” the instructors were told to say.
+
+Former students have said they were instructed to call their credit card companies on the spot and raise their borrowing limit to pay for the program.
+
+Harris, the former instructor, recalled one of his typical pitches to urge customers to find money for programs: “Do you have any equity on your home? Do you have a 401(k) or IRA?”
+
+Harris, 47, said he was one of Trump University’s biggest sellers. Garten, Trump’s lawyer, said Harris was one of the most highly rated instructors.
+
+Instructors had to sell hard to turn participants at free seminars into paying customers.
+
+For the four years Trump University operated, more than 80,300 people attended the free introductory sessions. Those previews were offered 2,000 times in nearly 700 locations around the country.
+
+But only around 6,000 people paid between $995 and $1,995 to attend three-day seminars, director of operations Mark Covais said in a 2012 affidavit. According to Covais, 572 people paid the full $34,995 for the top-level Trump University mentorship.
+
+The entire program was built around Trump — his picture, his quotes and the promise of obtaining access to his special formula for prosperity.
+
+One ad for the free Trump University seminars that appeared in a Corpus Christi, Tex., newspaper in 2009 promised attendees that they would “Learn from the Master,” below a picture of Trump.
+
+“I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor,” read a quote on the ad, attributed to Trump.
+
+The California class-action lawsuit contains 49 separate instances of Trump University attendees being told their instructor or future mentor was personally chosen by Trump in 2009 alone.
+
+“Donald Trump personally picked me,” one instructor told a group at a free seminar in May 2009, according to a transcript of the session filed as part of the New York case. “He could have picked anybody in this world but he picked me and the reason he picked me is because I’ve been very, very successful helping average people make a lot of money.”
+
+Harris, the former instructor, told an introductory meeting of potential customers in 2009 that Trump’s personal generosity was a core element of the program.
+
+“He did not have to start this university,” Harris told the group, according to a transcript in the New York case. “He does not need the money. . . . He does not get a dime of it. Does everyone understand this? Please say ‘yes.’ He does not need the money.”
+
+In one presentation cited in the New York lawsuit, Harris described Trump as instrumental to his own efforts to turn his life around just after high school.
+
+“I lived on the streets of New York, mostly down in the subways for the first nine months, and I did a lot of things to make some money,” he told a group attending a 2008 event. “And then I met a gentleman and he took me in, and I lived with him for a year and he taught me how to do real estate. He is still my mentor today. So the reason I am here is because Donald Trump picked me.”
+
+In an interview, Harris said he met Trump once in the early 1990s, backstage at an event at the Taj Mahal casino. “Here is the truth,” he said. “When I was at Trump University, I had not one interaction with him ever. Not one.”
+
+In reality, the instructors were not close to Trump, and many were not experts in real estate, according to several ex-staffers who have testified in the lawsuits.
+
+“The Trump University instructors and mentors were a joke,” said Jason Nicholas, who worked for the company for seven months in 2007 and submitted a statement in the lawsuit. “In my opinion, it was just selling false hopes and lies.”
+
+Michael Sexton, who was president of Trump University, acknowledged in sworn testimony in the New York case that none of the event instructors were hand-picked by Trump. Trump told lawyers in California that he would not dispute Sexton’s statement — nor could he remember a series of instructors, including Harris, by name or face.
+
+Trump also did not review course curriculum, Sexton said.
+
+“He would never do that,” Sexton said. “Mr. Trump is not going to go through a 300-page, you know, binder of content.”
+
+Only when it came to marketing material was Trump deeply involved, reviewing every piece of advertisement, Sexton testified.
+
+“Mr. Trump understandably is protective of his brand and very protective of his image and how he’s portrayed,” Sexton said. “And he wanted to see how his brand and image were portrayed in Trump University marketing materials. And he had very good and substantive input as well.”
+
+Garten, the Trump attorney, said Trump was engaged as any CEO would be in the operations. Outside experts designed the curriculum, Garten said, but Trump was “intimately involved” in the process. While Trump may not have selected every instructor, Garten said he was “very much involved in the process and the discussion of what type of instructor was desired.”
+
+At the courses, students were supposed to learn Trump’s secrets of real estate success.
+
+But in sworn testimony in New York, Sexton could recall only one Trump practice that was incorporated into the courses: Invest in foreclosed properties.
+
+The lesson underscored how Trump University, which was formed to teach aspiring business people to profit from the fast-expanding housing market, tailored itself after the 2008 economic crash to offer guidance on profiting from the aftermath.
+
+One ad placed in the San Antonio Express-News in October 2009 promised that seminars would allow participants to “learn from Donald Trump’s handpicked experts how you can profit from the largest real estate liquidation in history.”
+
+At a seminar called “Fast Track to Foreclosure,” students were instructed to find OPM, “other people’s money,” to buy homes out of foreclosure at depressed prices, dress them up with new paint and attractive landscaping — then flip them for profit.
+
+Attendees were advised to use credit cards to invest in real estate, and they were told how to persuade credit card companies to raise their credit limits. If a credit card company representative asked for their income, they were advised to add $75,000 in anticipated earnings from their real estate venture before providing a figure for their expected earnings for the year.
+
+Some customers have also alleged they were told there would be a personal appearance at the session by Trump. Instead, they received the opportunity to get their photograph taken with a life-size cardboard cutout of the mogul.
+
+John Brown, a customer who provided a sworn statement in the New York case, described how he “came to realize that I was not adequately trained, which caused me to feel that Trump University had taken advantage of me.”
+
+Brown said he paid $1,495 for a three-day seminar in 2009 and then used multiple credit cards to charge a $24,995 Trump mentorship program. Three years later, he said he had made no real estate investments using Trump knowledge — but was still paying off $20,000 from the courses.
+
+“Because of the Trump name,” he said, “I felt these classes would be the best.”",REAL
+8516,Trump Has Forever Changed American Politics,"Trump Has Forever Changed American Politics > November 7, 2016, 9:46 pm A+ | a- Warning   
+“If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump. 
+Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics. 
+Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation’s ruling class from which it may not soon recover. 
+Bush I and II, Mitt Romney , the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee. 
+Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars into which they plunged the country. 
+Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate. 
+Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now. 
+How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected? 
+How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees? 
+Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs . 
+The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility. 
+Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank. 
+But it is the national establishment that has suffered most. 
+The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak. 
+Consider the litany of horrors it has charged Trump with. 
+He said John McCain was no hero, that some Mexican illegals are “ rapists .” He mocked a handicapped reporter. He called some women “pigs.” He wants a temporary ban to Muslim immigration. He fought with a Gold Star mother and father. He once engaged in “ fat-shaming ” a Miss Universe, calling her “Miss Piggy, ” and telling her to stay out of Burger King. He allegedly made crude advances on a dozen women and starred in the “Access Hollywood” tape with Billy Bush. 
+While such “gaffes” are normally fatal for candidates, Trump’s followers stood by him through them all. 
+Why? asks an alarmed establishment. Why, in spite of all this, did Trump’s support endure? Why did the American people not react as they once would have? Why do these accusations not have the bite they once did? 
+Answer. We are another country now, an us-or-them country. 
+Middle America believes the establishment is not looking out for the nation but for retention of its power. And in attacking Trump it is not upholding some objective moral standard but seeking to destroy a leader who represents a grave threat to that power. 
+Trump’s followers see an American Spring as crucial, and they are not going to let past boorish behavior cause them to abandon the last best chance to preserve the country they grew up in. 
+These are the Middle American Radicals, the MARs of whom my late friend Sam Francis wrote. 
+They recoil from the future the elites have mapped out for them and, realizing the stakes, will overlook the faults and failings of a candidate who holds out the real promise of avoiding that future. 
+They believe Trump alone will secure the borders and rid us of a trade regime that has led to the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. They believe Trump is the best hope for keeping us out of the wars the Beltway think tanks are already planning for the sons of the “deplorables” to fight. 
+Moreover, they see the establishment as the quintessence of hypocrisy. Trump is instructed to stop using such toxic phrases as “America First” and “Make America Great Again” by elites who think 55 million abortions since Roe is a milestone of moral progress. 
+And what do they have in common with a woman who thinks partial-birth abortion, which her predecessor in the Senate, Pat Moynihan, called “ infanticide ,” is among the cherished “reproductive rights” of women? 
+While a Trump victory would create the possibility of a coalition of conservatives, populists, patriots and nationalists governing America, should he lose, America’s future appears disunited and grim. 
+But, would the followers of Donald Trump, whom Hillary Clinton has called “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots,” to the cheers of her media retainers, unite behind her should she win? 
+No. Win or lose, as Sen. Edward Kennedy said at the Democratic Convention of 1980, “The work goes on, the cause endures.”",FAKE
+3382,Kerry Adviser Marie Harf in Twitter Fight Over Iran Nukes,"With Western and Iranian negotiators racing toward a June 30 deadline to hammer out the final details of a nuclear deal, the mood is tense. Just take a look at Twitter, where Secretary of State John Kerry’s senior communications adviser Marie Harf is feuding with a reporter.",REAL
+10048,"The role of the US and Nato in EU relations with China, by Manlio Dinucci","The role of the US and Nato in EU relations with China by Manlio Dinucci Participating in an international conference, the Italian geographer Manlio Dinucci ties together the various strands of his analysis of the weapons that the US has at its disposal to dominate the entire world. Yet the importance of this article goes beyond that. For it is on account of this domination, this unipolar global order, that Syria, Russia and China, challenge today the use of force.
+Voltaire Network | Rome (Italy) | 28 October 2016 français Español I will get straight to the heart of the issue. I do not think it possible to speak of relations between the European Union (the EU) and China independently of the influence the United States wields over the EU directly and [indirectly], through Nato.
+Today 22 of the 28 (27 once Great Britain has left the EU), EU member states with more than 90% of the EU population, are members of Nato, recognized as the “foundation for collective defence”. And Nato is under US command: the US Supreme Allied Command in Europe is always appointed by the US President and all the other key commands are in the US’s hands. Accordingly, the EU’s foreign and military policy is fundamentally subordinated to the US strategy to which the major European powers have aligned themselves.
+Such a strategy, clearly announced in official documents, is sketched out at that moment in history when, following the dissolution of the URSS, the world situation changes. In 1991, the White House declares in the National Security Strategy of the United States :
+“The United States remains the only State with the force, capability and influence in every dimension – political, economic and military – that is effectively global. Nothing can substitute for US leadership”.
+In 1992, in the Defense Planning Guidance , the Pentagon emphasizes:
+“Our primary objective is to prevent any hostile power dominating a region whose resources would be sufficient to generate a global power. These regions include Western Europe, Eastern Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and South-West Asia”.
+In 2001, in the report Quadrennial Defense Review – published a week before the US/Nato war in Afghanistan, an area of primary geostrategic importance in relation to Russia and China - the Pentagon announces:
+“It is possible that a military rival may emerge in Asia with a formidable resource base. US armed forces must maintain their capabilities to impose the US’s will on any adversary, so as to change the regime of an enemy state or to occupy a foreign territory so that US strategic objectives can be realized”.
+On the basis of this strategy, US-led Nato, has launched an offensive on the Eastern front: after demolishing by war the Federation of Yugoslavia, from 1999 to date, it has subsumed all the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, three of the former Yugoslavia, three of the former URSS and very soon will incorporate others (starting from Georgia and Ukraine – the latter a de facto Nato member), moving bases and forces, nuclear included, ever closer to the Russian borders.
+At the same time, on the Southern front, closely connected to the Eastern front, the war waged by the US-led Nato has demolished the Libyan State and has tried to do the same thing with the Syrian State.
+USA and Nato have tried to make the Ukraine crisis explode and, accusing Russia of “destabilizing European security”, have dragged Europe into a new Cold War, intended particularly by Washington (at the cost of European economies damaged by sanctions and counter-sanctions) to fracture EU–Russian political and economic relations damaged by US interests. This same strategy also includes an increasing deployment of US military forces in the Asia/Pacific region for anti-Chinese reasons. The U.S. Navy has announced that in 2020 it will concentrate 60% of its naval and air forces in this region.
+The US strategy is focused on the South China Sea and Admiral Harris, head of the US Command for the Pacific, emphasizes the importance of this: through this sea passes maritime trade with an annual value of more than 5,000 billion dollars, including 25% from global export of oil and 50% of natural gas. The US wants to control these routes in the name of which Admiral Harris defines “the freedom of navigation fundamental for our way of life here in the US”, accusing China, in his very words of “aggressive actions in the South China Sea, similar to Russian action in the Crimea”. For this, the US Navy “is patrolling” the South China Sea. Riding on the back of the US, the biggest European powers arrive: last July, France has requested the European Union to “coordinate the naval surveillance of the South China Sea to ensure a regular and visible presence in these waters over which China has illegally asserted title”. And while the US established in South Korea anti-missile systems which are also capable of launching nuclear missiles, similar to those installed against Russia in Romania and very shortly in Poland, as well as on board the war ships in the Mediterranean, on 6 October, the Nato Secretary General Stoltenberg receives South Korea’s Minister for Foreign Affairs at Brussels, to “strengthen Nato’s partnership with Seoul”.
+These and other facts demonstrate that the same strategy is implemented in Europe and Asia. It is the extreme attempt of the United States and other Western Powers to maintain their economic, political and military supremacy in a world, radically transformed, where new states and social subjects are emerging. The Shanghai Organization for Co-operation, born out of a strategic Chinese-Russian agreement, provides resources and working capacities, making it the biggest integrated economic area in the world. The Shanghai and BRICS organizations are capable, with their financial organizations, of largely displacing the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that, for more than 70 years, have allowed the USA and major western powers to dominate the global economy through loans that fetter the economic sovereignty of indebted countries and other financial instruments. The new organizations can, at the same time, achieve a de-dollarization of their trade agreements, depriving the US of its capacity to off-load its debt on the other countries, by printing dollar notes used as the dominant international currency.
+To maintain its supremacy, increasingly wavering, the US relies not only on the strength of its weapons, but also weapons more efficient than “weapons” in the strict sense of the word.
+The first weapon: the so-called “Free Trade Agreements” such as the “Transatlantic Partnership on Trade and Investment” (TTIP) between the USA and the EU and the “Transpacific Partnership” (TPP), both of which have economic, geopolitical and geostrategic objectives. This is why, Hillary Clinton defines the EU-US partnership “the biggest strategic aim of our transatlantic alliance”, proposing an “Economic Nato” that integrates that the political with the military. The plan is clear: to form a political, economic and military US-EU block, increasingly under US command which acts as a countervailing force to the following:
+• the Eurasiatic area, now on the rise and based on cooperation between China and Russia;
+• the Brics; and
+• Iran and any other country that manages to escape Western domination.
+The TTIP negotiations are struggling to make headway due to a conflict of interests and vast opposition in Europe. But that obstacle is now circumvented through the “Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement” (CETA) between Canada and the EU: a TTIP in disguise, given that Canada is already party to NAFTA which also binds the USA. The EU will probably sign off CETA when the Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau visits Brussels this 27 October.
+The second weapon: penetrating the target countries from within. Leverage is drawn from the weak points that each country has to varying extents: corruption, a greed for money, political ascent, secessionary movements fed by local power groups, religious fanaticism, the vulnerability of the great masses for political demagogy. Playing as well, in certain cases, on a justified popular dissatisfaction with the actions of their own government. The instruments used to penetrate? The so-called “non-governmental organizations”. These are, in actual fact, the long hand of the Department of State and the CIA. These NGOs, endowed with deep pools of financial resources, have organized the Eastern European “colour revolutions” and replicated the same operation with the so-called “Umbrella Revolution” in Hong Kong, aiming at developing similar movements in other parts of China where the national minorities live. The same organizations operate in Latin America, with the primary objective of subverting Brazil’s democratic institutions, thereby threatening Brics from within. Instruments to achieve the strategy are terrorist groups, such as those armed and infiltrated in Libya and Syria to sow seeds of chaos, contributing to destruction of whole States attacked at the same time from outside.
+The third arm: “Psyops” (Psychological operations), launched through the global media chains, defined as follows by the Pentagon: “Planned Operations to influence, through specific information, the emotions and mindset, and thus the conduct of public opinion, organizations and foreign governments, so as to induce or strengthen conduct favourable to pre-established objectives”.
+Such operations, prepare public opinion for warlike escalation and create the impression that Russia is responsible for tensions in Europe just as China is for the tensions in Asia, as well as accusing them at the same time of “violating human rights”.
+1965: Manlio Dinucci, and his wife, Carla, before the ancestral home of Mao Tse Toung. A final consideration: during the sixties, my wife and I worked in Peking, contributing, inter alia, to the publication of the first Chinese journal in the Italian language. I experienced a life-changing learning experience when China – liberated from the colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal conditions for at least 15 years – was completely isolated. Neither the West nor the United Nations recognized it as a sovereign state. This period imprinted on my mind, the ability of the Chinese people (at the time totalling 600 million), to resist, their consciousness and commitment under the guide of the Communist party to constructing a society with a brand new economic and cultural foundation. I think that this capacity is today still needed so that today’s China, that is developing its enormous potential, can resist new plans for imperial domination and contribute to the decisive struggle for the future of humanity: a world free of wars; where peace, inextricably linked to social justice, prevails.
+Manlio Dinucci Translation
+Anoosha Boralessa",FAKE
+5199,The Daily 202: Many African Americans unenthusiastically ‘settle’ for Hillary Clinton,"RALEIGH, N.C.—Ayana McAllister went to Hillary Clinton’s rally two weekends ago at St. Augustine’s University, the historically-black school where she’s a freshman. She watched the Democratic nominee speak alongside the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland. But on the eve of the election, the 18-year-old is still not 100 percent sold.
+
+“I don’t know,” said McAllister, a native of Largo, Md. “I feel like I’ve got to settle for Hillary. I feel like I’m going to vote because I know I need to, not because I want to. I feel like neither of them should be president, but I feel like Hillary will be better. Really, it’s like two children arguing back and forth.”
+
+This was a common refrain during interviews at yesterday’s football game here between St. Augustine and crosstown rival Shaw University, another historically-black institution.
+
+-- Early voting numbers and polling suggest that African American turnout is down nationally this year compared to 2012 and 2008. Though there are some signs that the gap has been closing in recent days, alarm bells have clearly gone off inside the Clinton high command.
+
+-- Many students at the schools here in Raleigh regret that they never got to vote for Barack Obama. They are collectively disappointed that their first time forces them to choose between Clinton and Donald Trump, but they plan to vote nonetheless. In fact, teachers have told them that in lieu of class they will march to the polls on Tuesday.
+
+“I am not a fan of either one, but of the two I will probably be voting for Hillary,” said Anoviua Rush, a freshman from Durham. “She’s just a liar. And Hillary is not even good at backing up her lies. Everyone makes mistakes, but when you try to cover them up it’s a problem.”
+
+As a marching band performed behind her, under a cloudless sky on a perfect fall day, Rush explained that the prospect of electing the first woman president does not motivate her, but Clinton’s support for equal pay legislation does. “She’s more understanding of minorities and what we go through,” said Rush. “I’m not going to say he’s ‘racist,’ but he’s said some messed up stuff about minorities. … Donald’s main focus seems to be helping the wealthy and, I’ll say it, possibly Caucasians.”
+
+-- “A lot of people are very discouraged. Very, very discouraged,” said Felishia McPherson, 47, who was wearing a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt. “Really, it’s like you’re choosing between a liar and a clown. But who doesn’t lie? We all lie. … I’m a mental health counselor. I know that, psychologically, in order to want to be president, you’ve got to be a little narcissistic to start with. … Trump was never an option for me. I don’t love Hillary, but I don’t have to. She’s not coming to my house. She’s going to the White House.”
+
+McPherson already voted early for Clinton. She brought her seven-year-old niece Malia, named after the president’s daughter, to Obama’s rally in Fayetteville on Friday. “I don’t know if I actually believe in the political system, as far as does my one vote count? But I’m not going to take a chance of it not counting,” she explained afterward. “If the system really does work, then I’m going to participate. If it doesn’t, then I still did the best I could by my ancestors. … I do believe, with Obama’s encouragement, even though we may not believe in the system, we know we need to do it.”
+
+-- Several elderly African Americans expressed deep concern that millennials, including their grandchildren, do not sufficiently appreciate the importance of voting. Irene Hill-Thomas, 79, is a retired special education teacher who now spends most of her time volunteering at church and a food pantry in Sampson County. “If you’ve been around long enough, your eyes are open,” she said. “You appreciate it because you fought for it. The younger generation hasn’t been there. They don’t know. The younger generation doesn’t understand there was a time when we had to sit at the back of the bus and had no say so. … I remember the white and the colored fountains. They don’t.”
+
+-- North Carolina was the closest state Obama won in 2008 and the closest state he lost in 2012. African Americans accounted for 23 percent of the electorate both times, and Obama won almost all of them.
+
+Reflecting the importance of the 15 electoral votes up for grabs in North Carolina, and the strategic significance of the Research Triangle specifically, both candidates will return to Raleigh on Monday. Trump will give an afternoon speech at the state fairgrounds, and Clinton will hold the final rally of her campaign here -- at midnight.
+
+-- Another very important explanation for why African American turnout is down in North Carolina: Republicans have worked to limit early voting locations and hours. The executive director of the state Republican Party persuaded GOP county officials to limit early voting in troubling emails that have been unearthed by public records requests. He pushed to limit the number of hours sites were open, especially evenings and Sundays, when many African Americans typically cast ballots (after church services).
+
+In the Democratic-leaning county that includes Greensboro – the state’s third largest – there were 16 early voting sites in 2012 during the first week that polls were open. This year there was just one. So while 61,000 people voted during the first week four years ago, only 8,000 did this year. (After that first week, 25 voting sites were opened and turnout records were broken.)
+
+-- I shadowed a field staffer from the AFL-CIO affiliate group Working America as she canvassed in a predominantly black section of Raleigh yesterday afternoon. Walking across lawns in a hilly neighborhood just off Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Andrea Vogler urged folks to go vote.
+
+During a period of just one hour, though, half a dozen African Americans separately complained that they tried to vote early but the lines were too long. So they came home. They all said they hope to still go on Tuesday, but what if the lines are long then too? Will they stick around?
+
+A woman in a nurse’s uniform said she went by the early voting site three times over the past week, but the lines were too long each time.
+
+A younger man named Victor came to his door in red-checkered pajamas. He had gone earlier in the day too but said he was too tired to stand around. He works a night shift, so he said he’s going to try voting on his drive home from work at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday – which he hopes will be before a crowd forms.
+
+“I’ve heard that on a couple of different days now,” Vogler, 32, lamented as she walked to the next house. “On the one hand, it is good people are trying to vote. On the other, I hope it doesn’t deter anyone from actually voting.”
+
+A woman named Barbara, pulling out of her driveway in a Chevy Trailblazer with her infant son in the backseat, is one of the people who gave up when she saw the lines.
+
+Damien, her husband, was who Vogler had come to talk with. Barbara warned her that he was sleeping. But every vote counts, so the canvasser went to knock on the door anyway. He was nonplussed. “I worked all damn night, 12 hours,” he said, his eyes bloodshot. “I just want to go back to my bed.” She tried to hand him a piece of paper with bullet points on why he should vote for Clinton. He grimaced and refused to take it.
+
+Working America has about 700 field staffers farmed out across nine states. They have had 573,400 conversations with voters since launching this summer, including 45,500 in North Carolina. In the Raleigh area alone, the labor group had seven vans with five to seven people in each hitting doors on Saturday. The group largely targets African American and Latino voters, though some swing white Republicans are in their universe.
+
+An older man sitting in his green Chevy Lumina, picking his teeth with a toothpick outside a row of ground-level studio apartments, told Vogler that he planned to vote later in the afternoon. She informed him that early voting had ended for the day, and that Saturday was the final opportunity until Tuesday. “Damn,” he replied.
+
+“North Carolina is the most important state,” Vogler stressed over and over again. “You’ve got to get out to vote!”
+
+-- In an interview late last night, I asked Democratic Senate candidate Deborah Ross – who is in a neck-and-neck race with Sen. Richard Burr that may decide which party controls the majority – about all these people who said they did not vote early because of the lines. “It’s by design,” she complained. But she argued that this will also galvanize many African Americans on Tuesday. “I don’t think anything is going to keep people from voting this year,” she said.
+
+Ross, a former state representative who sponsored 2007 legislation allowing for same-day voter registration (which was pivotal to Obama carrying the state a year later), noted that, for every person who returned home when they saw the crowded early voting sites, many more waited around. “There were people who stood for hours in line,” she said.
+
+The weather forecast for Tuesday looks good, and she believes this might make the difference in her “razor thin” race. “I think we’re going to see long lines on Election Day,” Ross predicted, with a southern twang. “We’re going to turn people out.”
+
+A Clinton campaign official, speaking anonymously, said they were worried during the first week of early voting, but the fact that hundreds of additional sites wound up opening for the second week made the situation much better and led to a huge increase in turnout. But allies say Clinton may need to perform especially well on Election Day to offset votes that were lost over the past two weeks.
+
+Surrogates have also streamed into the state to drive African Americans to the polls. Civil rights icon John Lewis headlined a march in Charlotte on Thursday. Cory Booker came Friday night. Other efforts are underway too. The national president of the Sierra Club was outside the St. Augustine’s football game handing out biscuits from Bojangles’ and urging young people to support Clinton in order to advance environmental issues.
+
+-- The president himself has now spoken at five rallies for Clinton in North Carolina. Addressing a crowd of 2,500 that was probably 95 percent black in Fayetteville on Friday, he made a very explicit pitch. “Right now, Donald Trump is calling on his supporters to monitor ‘certain areas’ on Election Day,” Obama said. “I don’t know what ‘certain areas’ he’s talking about, but you do.”
+
+He finished his speech with the story of a 100-year-old woman who was purged from the North Carolina voter rolls after a Republican challenged her registration status on flimsy grounds. Grace Bell Hardison was mentioned in an NAACP lawsuit that prompted a federal judge to issue an injunction on Friday. North Carolina election officials are now scrambling to restore the rights of thousands of voters – most black and Democratic -- who had been cut from the rolls under a so-called “individual challenge law.”
+
+“So, young people, I want you to understand this,” Obama said. “It wasn’t that long ago when folks had to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar (or) the number of bubbles on a bar of soap. It wasn’t that long ago folks were beaten trying to register voters in Mississippi. … If you’ve been marching for criminal justice reform, that’s great. But you still need to vote! … If you vote, we’ll win North Carolina. And if we win North Carolina, Hillary Clinton will be president.”
+
+WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
+
+-- Trump was rushed offstage during a campaign rally in Reno last night after a man reportedly yelled “gun,” but the GOP nominee emerged back onstage after a brief period to finish his speech. Secret Service officials said agents apprehended the man but found no weapon. The man, who identified himself as Austyn Crites, 33, was reportedly released after the event, telling reporters that he was attacked for holding a “Republicans against Trump” sign. “When I pulled out the sign, people around me were trying to grab the sign,” Crites said. “And so all that was occurring was booing, of course. That’s what you would expect.” He said that the crowd tackled him, and began “kicking me and grabbing me in the crotch and just, just beating the crap out of me.” (Jose A. DelReal, Anne Gearan and Ed O'Keefe have more.)
+
+-- Donald Trump Jr. and top campaign social media aide Dan Scavino immediately retweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had just survived an attack on his life: “Hillary ran away from the rain today. Trump is back onstage minutes after assassination attempt,” the tweet read.
+
+-- Meanwhile, a man wearing a mask and carrying a gun was arrested near the White House following a struggle with authorities. Immediate details surrounding the incident are unclear, but the Secret Service says he's being charged with carrying a firearm without a license, carrying unregistered ammunition, resisting arrest and committing a crime while wearing a mask. (Martin Weil)
+
+-- A press bus following Tim Kaine in Tampa was hit “at high speed"" on Sunday evening, according to several people onboard. One reporter said the bus was hit by what appeared to be a police car. But there were no reports of injuries and the bus continued. Kaine was several cars ahead of the press bus, according to reporters in his motorcade.
+
+-- Our WaPo/ABC News tracking poll finds Clinton leading Trump nationally by five points -- 48 percent to 43 percent -- widening last week’s tight race as she shows clear advantages on several personal attributes:
+
+-- The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll finds Clinton up a similar four points (44-40). Clinton’s lead is less than half of the 11-point advantage she held in their mid-October survey, taken before the FBI email announcement. A wide swath of Trump’s support also comes from within his own party, as Republican voters rally around the nominee in the final stretch of the campaign.
+
+-- A Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll shows Trump with a seven point lead in IOWA, up three points from last month.
+
+-- A Columbus Dispatch poll shows Clinton eking out a single point lead over Trump in OHIO (48-47). Pollster Darrel Rowland says Clinton will “almost certainly” carry Ohio should enough young and minority voters show up to the polls. The same poll has Rob Portman crushing Ted Strickland by 21 points (58-37).LeBron James will appear alongside Clinton in Cleveland today on the final day of early in-person voting in OHIO.
+
+-- The CBS News battleground tracker has Trump up 46-45 in OHIO and a 45-45 tie in FLORIDA.
+
+THE FINAL SCHEDULES FOR BOTH CANDIDATES:
+
+-- What's with the 11th-hour fluidity? Karen Tumulty and Dan Balz note that four states have dominated the Clinton campaign’s calculation throughout the fall: Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. “Obama won those four in 2008 and all of them but North Carolina in 2012. Until recently, it appeared that Trump needed to sweep all four to overcome Clinton’s electoral-map advantage. But as the race has tightened, Ohio seems to have moved into the Republican column, and other states outside those four have potentially come into play. The GOP nominee is looking to states including Michigan (and) New Hampshire … to make up a potential deficit, should he not win Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. ... In Trump’s case, it is an effort to grab what he considers emerging opportunities in the sprint for the finish line; in Clinton’s, as insurance against surprises Tuesday in territory she has considered hers.” (The Post’s politics team lists the 15 states that will decide the election on Tuesday, breaking down the state of the race in each one.)
+
+-- Why is Michigan getting so much late attention? Hillary campaigned in Detroit on Friday, and she’s coming back to Grand Rapids tomorrow while Barack Obama flies to Ann Arbor. Bill is stumping in Lansing at 1 p.m. today. Remember that HRC unexpectedly lost the state’s primary to Bernie Sanders in March, despite every poll putting her significantly ahead. Trump and Pence are also both going there. Fourteen percent of the electorate is African American.
+
+-- The Clinton campaign is trying to downplay its late efforts in Michigan. “Look, if we hold onto Nevada (and) hold onto Michigan, then Hillary Clinton is going to be the next President of the United States,” John Podesta said on Meet the Press this morning. “Most people vote on election day in Michigan, so our schedule has been oriented to being in the early vote states, in the earlier period of time.” Stephen Neuman, a senior adviser to the Democratic coordinated campaign in Michigan, noted that the campaign already has 35 offices. A Washington Post average of recent polls in the state has Clinton leading Trump in Michigan just 43 percent to 41 percent. Mook acknowledged that polls have has tightened in Michigan, but added: “I feel very confident about how we’re going to do.” (John Wagner and Anne Gearan)
+
+-- Trump seems to have given up on Wisconsin. Aides told me last week that he’d probably go back multiple times, including to the Milwaukee suburbs. He’s not even going to come back once to the Badger State. But now he’s going to Minnesota (where he has absolutely not a snowball’s chance). The campaign said it has done polling there, but Maggie Haberman of the Times tweeted that this is a lie.
+
+-- The latest indignity for the Speaker --> ""Trump cancels Wisconsin rally just as Paul Ryan says he would campaign with him,"" by Jessie Opoien in the Madison Capital Times: “For the second time in as many months, the possibility of a joint Paul Ryan-Donald Trump campaign appearance was floated and quickly yanked away. The Republican nominee earlier this week scheduled a Sunday afternoon rally in West Allis, just outside Milwaukee. It was to be Trump's sixth Wisconsin event since he lost the state's primary election. ‘We don't know if it's scheduled firm or not yet, but I intend to do it if he's here,’ Ryan told reporters Saturday when asked if he would attend the Trump rally. … ‘If our nominee comes, we'll campaign with him.’ … Seconds later, a spokesman for Trump's Wisconsin campaign alerted reporters that the event had been canceled.” (Ryan stumped alongside Mike Pence yesterday.)
+
+-- But perplexingly Trump and Pence have not given up on VIRGINIA, adding several stops and deploying key surrogates. “Trump’s decision to appear in a populous, purple Washington exurb cuts against his broader strategy of running up the vote in heavily red, rural areas,” Laura Vozzella writes. “Much of his last-minute appeals have been in tiny burgs like Selma, N.C., population 6,000. His foray into Northern Virginia appears to be a bid to hold down Clinton’s margins in a region that, excluding the exurbs, leans heavily Democratic.”
+
+-- Bigger picture: Trump’s schedule belies the biggest challenge facing him right now. It’s not clear where and how he would win. “Of all of [Trump’s must-win] states, the only one where Mr. Trump has really been close in the polls is Nevada,” writes The Upshot’s Nate Cohn. “But Nevada is also the state where we know the most about the results because of early voting, and it hasn't brought good news for Mr. Trump. … Perhaps Mr. Trump will mount a huge comeback in Nevada on Election Day. Or maybe Democrats are much weaker among registered Democrats or unaffiliated voters than most analysts believe. But if Mrs. Clinton does indeed have a big advantage in Nevada, then his chances start looking very bleak: He's at a disadvantage in the polls of all of the other states that could put him over the top. What's more, it's not really clear where he has his best chance — something reflected in Mr. Trump's unfocused pre-election push.”
+
+-- A deep dive on the national mood: Fifteen of our reporters traveled the country talking to voters and report on ""deep anxiety – and some lingering traces of optimism"": “Only eight years after millions of Americans poured into the streets in spontaneous, joyful celebration of the election of the nation’s first black president, optimism seems to have been sucked out of the country’s marrow, replaced by a heavy anxiety, a sense that things aren’t right and can’t easily be fixed.""
+
+-- Early voting trends in FLORIDA appear to (narrowly) favor Clinton: “The Democrats’ lead of 7,280 ballots cast pales in comparison to their advantage of about 104,000 early and absentee votes four years ago, however the state’s voter rolls have shifted significantly and neither Republicans nor Democrats can lay claim to having a clear advantage,” Politico’s Marc Caputo writes.
+
+“I think it's trending well for HRC, but it's definitely a toss up state,” says Democratic consultant Steve Schale, who helped lead Obama's efforts in the Sunshine State in 2008 and 2012. (Read his latest memo on the early vote.)
+
+-- Jon Ralston, the dean of the NEVADA press corps, predicts a deep blue wave in the notoriously-hard-to-poll Silver State: “Trump may have been here this weekend, believing in the polls that show him ahead or competitive here. But like Bruce Willis in ‘The Sixth Sense’ (spoiler alert), he does not realize he is dead. The Democratic early voting effort, which was much more difficult with a nominee so many Democrats don’t like or trust, has been impressive — a valedictory statement from The Reid Machine. Yes, 2016 is not 2012. Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama. Plenty of votes will be cast Tuesday. But: About two-thirds of the votes already have been banked. If the past is prologue … The only real question, I think, is how deep the blue wave goes.”
+
+-- The Supreme Court moved to allow an ARIZONA “ballot collection” law barring organizers from picking up ballots and delivering them to election stations. The move is an eleventh-hour blow to Democrats, who argue that the ruling could disenfranchise thousands of minority voters. (CNN)
+
+-- Chris Christie canceled four NEW HAMPSHIRE stops on behalf of Trump yesterday, following the convictions of two former top aides for their role in the 2013 Bridgegate scandal. The New Jersey governor is doing an interview today with Charlie Rose to try cleaning up the mess. Imagine is Christie was the Republican nominee, and those convictions got handed down the Friday before the election? (WMUR)
+
+-- Faithless elector alert: A WASHINGTON state Democratic elector said he is refusing to vote for Clinton even if she wins the popular vote, facing the potential of a $1,000 fine. He told the AP he “doesn’t care.” This could matter if the election is really close.
+
+-- Some are still Bernie or Bust: Sanders went to Iowa State University in Ames yesterday to lead a rally for Clinton. One of the warm-up speakers was Kaleb Vanfosson, the president of the Young Democratic Socialists group at the school. He was supposed to give a speech about the need for unity, but instead he took the stage and started talking about how ""terrible"" Hillary is. ""She is so trapped in the world of the elite,"" the sophomore in political science said. ""She has completely lost grip of what it's like to be an average person."" He added that there was no point in voting for the ""lesser of two evils."" It took about a minute of this before a Clinton staffer escorted him off the stage. Here’s the story from the student paper. And here’s the video:
+
+-- Tim Kaine made headlines after suggesting that some inside the FBI are “actively working” to support Trump’s campaign. From Ed O’Keefe: In a Miami interview, Kaine called the FBI a “leaky sieve” and accused Jim Comey of breaking protocol by announcing his email investigation so close to an election. He also dismissed Trump ally Rudy Giuliani’s decision to back off claims that he, Giuliani, had been given advance notice of the FBI's plans to possibly reopen the Clinton investigation. “I don’t think Giuliani’s walk-back is credible,” the Virginia senator said, referring to Giuliani’s preemptive announcement that the FBI had a “big announcement” to come. “I think the FBI sadly has become like a leaky sieve,” he added.
+
+-- New York Times, “If Clinton Moves to Oval Office, Aides’ Baggage May Be Heavy,” by Matt Flegenheimer and Mark Landler: “In the final sprint of her campaign, troubled by an F.B.I. inquiry and narrowing polls, [Clinton] has held tightly to a handful of advisers who have spent their careers protecting her interests, defending her reputation, and at times sullying it — and their own. And if she wins on Tuesday, the most telling test of Mrs. Clinton’s transition back to power will arrive quickly: After a campaign season often defined by voters’ weariness with and distrust of her, which old hands will — or should — follow her into the Oval Office? Almost no top adviser has been left untouched by the two central firestorms of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy: the inquiry into her use of a private email server … and the WikiLeaks hack of [campaign chairman John Podesta]. The unvarnished view of infighting in the stolen documents is unlikely to bother Mrs. Clinton much, friends say. The political wisdom of importing excess baggage to the executive branch is another matter.""
+
+-- Boston Globe A1, “9 moments that molded the campaign,” by Matt Viser and Annie Linskey: “When planning the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, Clinton campaign officials didn’t initially include Michelle Obama as a featured speaker, according to a Democratic strategist familiar with the plans. … For Clinton’s campaign, it made sense to put her on the rostrum on the tumultuous opening day — when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were both to speak. ‘We thought it would be hard for Sanders’ people to boo Michelle Obama,’ said the person, who isn’t authorized to talk about the first lady’s deliberations.” Another revelation: The Trump campaign was warned months in advance to be ready for Clinton’s attack over Alicia Machado but did nothing.
+
+-- New Yorker, “Meet Maya Harris, Hillary Clinton’s Progressive Link,” by Emily Greenhouse: “To speak with those who have worked with Harris is to be bulldozed with superlatives. Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union, who worked with Harris recently on the Democratic Party platform, told me that ‘she lives her life on a moral crusade on all of those justice issues … She carries her peeps, our peeps, with her in everything she does.’ Beyond policy, Harris seems to offer, in her very person, solutions to some of Clinton’s image problems.""
+
+-- The owners of the National Enquirer reportedly paid to shield Trump from allegations of a former Playboy model who claims they had an affair, paying $150,000 for rights to her story before declining to publish it. From the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Palazzolo, Michael Rothfeld and Lukas I. Alpert: “The tabloid-newspaper publisher reached an agreement in early August with Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playmate of the Year. American Media Inc., which owns the Enquirer, hasn’t published anything about what she has told friends was a consensual romantic relationship she had with Mr. Trump in 2006. At the time, Mr. Trump was married to his current wife, Melania. Quashing stories that way is known in the tabloid world as ‘catch and kill.’ In a written statement, the company said it wasn’t buying Ms. McDougal’s story for $150,000, but rather two years’ worth of her fitness columns and magazine covers as well as exclusive life rights to any relationship she has had with a then-married man.” Trump and American Media Owner CEO David Pecker are longtime friends.
+
+-- Melania stumped alongside her husband in North Carolina, calling him a ""compassionate, giving ... loving"" man, she said, who ""cares so deeply about this country.""
+
+-- “In America’s democratic showcase, the world sees a model of what not to do,” by Griff Witte: “In the seaside cafes of Beirut, the whole thing looks ‘like a bad joke.’ To persecuted journalists in Burundi, it amounts to ‘a total loss of dignity.’ The government-scripted press of Beijing diagnoses ‘an empire moving downhill.’ And the spin doctors of the Kremlin see cause for pure and unambiguous delight. The U.S. presidential election — America’s quadrennial chance to showcase for the world how democracy works in the most powerful nation on Earth — has become instead an object lesson in everything that ails a country long seen as a beacon of freedom and hope. People in small and distant countries who count on the U.S. to stand up for democratic values have been astonished to see essential components … trammeled. Long-standing allies have been left to wonder … whether the U.S. can be relied on when it counts. And even though the campaign still has days to go — with the outcome very much in doubt — the damage to American moral standing may already be done.”
+
+Quote du jour: “America always spoke to Arab countries as if they had so much to learn,” said a 27-year-old Beirut café worker, who says he has been closely watching the election ever since he read about Trump’s sexual assault boasts. “And now we see their own democracy involves choosing between a woman from a dynasty and a man who says the system is manipulated. If that’s democracy, then we don’t want it.”
+
+-- The New York Times’ Farah Stockman and Nick Corasaniti explore how this loss of luster could affect the American brand: “In interviews, Americans who travel overseas and foreign observers say that tourists who once felt themselves the envy of the world now feel the sting of embarrassment. Businesses that once marketed their jeans and fleece jackets internationally as tiny pieces of the American dream are being advised to revamp their ad campaigns."" An Australian public relations consultant noted that state lawmakers in Sydney recently adopted a resolution – by unanimous consent – describing Trump as ""a revolting slug” unfit for office.
+
+-- The idea that Tuesday will end our partisan rancor is a “naïve fantasy,"" writes Frank Bruni:“There’s no end here, just a punctuation mark, a measly comma between the rancor that has built until this point and the fury to come. And there’s no way to un-see what all of us have seen over these last 18 months, to bottle up what has been un-bottled. Election Day will redeem and settle nothing, not this time around. Whether balloons fall on [Clinton] or [Trump], there will be bolder divisions in America than there were at the start of it all and even less faith in the country’s most important institutions … Even putting Trump’s angry troops aside, it feels as if we’re coming out of this election with four parties: the Paul Ryan Republicans, the Freedom Caucus, the establishment Democrats and the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders brigade … Meet the new paralysis, same as the old paralysis. Potentially, worse. From elections past, I don’t recognize this terrain. How can I assume that it’s navigable?”
+
+-- “If [Trump] loses, the party faces a daunting reconstruction challenge,” says conservative columnist Peter Wehner, who served in the Bush and Reagan administrations: “Policies that promote economic growth, social mobility and greater opportunity are important. But in some respects the party’s stance [here] is a secondary priority. Republicans need to wrestle with more fundamental questions first: Will their party choose as its leaders people who respect democratic institutions and traditions, or not; who conceive of America as a welcoming society or as one that is racially and religiously closed … who abhor ignorance or embrace it? In a post-Trump world, Republicans need to ask themselves if their party will be characterized by its aspirations or its resentments. Can it make its own inner peace with living in an increasingly diverse and nonwhite America? Does it conceive of its role as tamping down or inflaming ugly passions? Does it believe in a just social order or not? The next few months will tell us a lot about whether Mr. Trump and Trumpism were an anomaly or are now the new norm of the party that Lincoln helped create.""
+
+-- “When historians write about this bizarre, ugly and dispiriting campaign … the epic dark saga will unfold this way: A man, filled with fear and insecurity, created a hatemongering character and followed it out the window. And a woman, filled with fear and insecurity, hunkered down and repeated bad patterns rather than reimagining herself in an open, bold way,” Maureen Dowd writes. “Before he jumped into the presidential race, Trump was seen as bombastic, vulgar, a bit of a buffoon and a cave man, but [also] ‘a cheeky brio.’ He was not regarded as a bigot or demagogue. He was seen as a playboy, not a predator … But he created another character for the Republican primaries, playing to the feral instincts of angry voters, encouraging violence at his rallies, hatred toward journalists and disrespect for democracy itself. ‘He’s so used to playing a role in different areas of his life,’ said [TV personality] Donny Deutsch … ‘He saw the crowd’s adulation and it drove him. He started to get the biggest cheers for saying the most offensive things.’”
+
+-- The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin dubbed this election “Clinton investigation mania, part two”: “Bill Clinton’s Presidency was defined, for the most part, by criminal and congressional investigations,” he writes. “The subjects of those probes sound like entries in a nineteen-nineties time capsule: Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate … It may be that Republicans spent so much time in pursuit of Bill Clinton’s scalp because things were mostly going well otherwise. The economy boomed, and the nation was at peace. So Congress took a vacation from its responsibilities to investigate a decade-old Arkansas land deal in which the Clintons lost money. But real dangers abound in the unstable world of today. The economy is only tenuously prosperous. And a warming planet, notwithstanding the lack of interest among debate moderators, threatens apocalyptic change. A politics based on pursuit and accusation, rather than on reason and compromise, will address none of these problems. And the prospect of four years of governance that resemble the last days of this campaign is one that would drive anyone to drink.”
+
+-- “Averting the worst starts with electing Hillary Clinton,” says the New York Times’ Editorial Board. “For many voters that will mean defying Republican efforts to jam the electoral machinery through lies, legal obstructions and the threat of violence. We hope the voters hold out, however intimidating the process and long the lines. For Americans who may feel unmoved or unwilling to vote for Mrs. Clinton, here is a question from the future: In 2016 we were closer than ever to electing an ignorant and reckless tyrant — what did you do to stop him? There’s no sense complaining anymore. The hurricane is three days from landfall. The urgent thing now is to avert the worst, minimize the damage, save the foundations, clear the mess.”
+
+-- ""The Wall Street Journal hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928, and if we didn’t endorse Ronald Reagan we aren’t about to revive the practice for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump,"" the Journal’s board declares. “A broken Washington needs to be shaken up and refocused on the public good, and who better to do it than an outsider beholden to neither political party? If only that reform possibility didn’t arrive as a flawed personality who has few convictions and knows little about the world.”
+
+-- South Korean prosecutors arrested two former aides of President Park Geun-hye on Sunday, widening an investigation into the bizarre “shadow president” scandal that has stoked outrage across the country. On Saturday, tens of thousands of people gathered in the capital to demand she step down. (AP)
+
+-- A Kurdish-led, U.S. backed force in Syria launched an offensive to retake control of Raqqa, seeking to drive out Islamic State militants from their northeastern stronghold. The operation with the U.S.-supported military effort to seize the Mosul from ISIS militants, Hugh Naylor writes. And the impending assault represents an “intensified international effort” to increase pressure on the extremist group as it loses control of territory in the countries.
+
+-- As Chicago battles its highest rate of homicides in nearly 20 years, police are solving fewer cases than they have in decades. Officers today clear just 26 percent of cases – a drastic reduction from years such as 1991, where levels averaged 80 percent. (Kimbriell Kelly, Wesley Lowery and Steven Rich)
+
+-- A South Carolina real estate agent accused of kidnapping a woman and keeping her chained up by the neck “like a dog” inside a storage container may be responsible for the deaths of at least seven people, authorities said. Police said they discovered at least one body on the man’s property, and he confessed to a string of other homicides. The gruesome revelations come as a stark contrast to the man’s professional image – appearing to be a successful realtor who ran his own firm upstate. (Amy B Wang)
+
+-- Two men in D.C. were arrested for allegedly spray painting the Trump Hotel and the FBI building on Saturday. Police said the incidences occurred during the Million Mask March demonstration. Both men were charged with defacing government property and resisting arrest. (Joe Heim)
+
+-- Great profile --> “Founding Fervor,” by Kevin Sullivan:  “More than 250 people, mostly conservative Christians, clap and whoop as [KrisAnne] Hall takes the stage in the ballroom of a suburban Minnesota hotel … Hall, a radio host, former Florida prosecutor and Army veteran, tells the crowd that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that tracks extremism, has included her on its list of 998 anti-government groups in the U.S. She just loves that. Hall, 47, started firing up rage at the federal government six years ago, driving around the southeast in her old Saturn car … [Now] in this era of [Trump], her message fits the moment, and her popularity has exploded. She is a chief circuit rider for liberty, spending more than 260 days a year preaching against federal government overreach.  She says those who disagree with her reading of history are either ignorant of the founders’ intentions or ‘federal supremacists’ who ignore the Constitution. ‘The problem with her approach is that it ignores 240 years of history,’ said Georgetown professor David Cole.”
+
+-- “Big government is the new West Coast craze,” by Jim Tankersley: “Voters up and down the West Coast are quietly poised to extend a massive economic experiment this Election Day, probing the limits of how much states can soak the big guys to help the little guys. Their efforts — in three of the hottest state economies in the country — defy decades of conservative arguments about cutting taxes to spur economic growth. The new West Coast Model is higher taxes on the rich, higher spending by the state and wide-scale efforts to lift the working poor. … It is on the ballot in three states: Californians are set to essentially make permanent an income tax surcharge on millionaires in order to fund education. Washington voters appear likely to raise their minimum wage statewide to $13.25 an hour … In Oregon, it will be a down-to-the-wire battle to see if voters will bolster their state budget by taxing large corporations. Advocates are already planning how to export them to the rest of the country.”
+
+-- “Islamic State tunnels below Mosul are a hidden and deadly danger,” by William Booth and Aaso Ameen Shwan “’They’re everywhere,’ said the Iraqi intelligence officer, sweeping his arm from this ancient Christian village toward the horizon. The Iraqi captain was searching for tunnels dug by Islamic State fighters. The officer stomped on the ground. ‘Here. We found one, then three, now six. Right here.’ … Villages recaptured from ISIS over the past three weeks … have been honeycombed with tunnels, many of them booby-trapped. In the past three days, commanders say Iraqi forces have faced the hardest fighting of the offensive as they entered Mosul, made worse by extensive tunnels that are allowing ISIS fighters to appear seemingly out of nowhere, attack, then retreat to the hidden bunkers. An Iraqi armored commander who drove his Abrams tank into eastern Mosul recalled seeing dozens of fighters scrambling on the street in front of his guns. ‘Then they disappeared,’ he said. Into the ground. ‘It’s like we are fighting two wars in two cities,’ said Col. Falah Al-Obaidi of the Iraqi counterterror forces. ‘There’s the war on the streets and there is a whole city underground where they are hiding.’""
+
+-- “Senate majority may hinge on NEVADA candidates unable to break through noise,” by Paul Kane: “The battle for the Senate might well come down to a contest in which neither candidate has broken through the much-louder noise of other political fights. For months, U.S. Rep. Joseph J. Heck and former state attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto have slugged it out in the most expensive Senate race in this state’s history, locked in a tight contest that gives Republicans a chance to steal a Democratic crown jewel: the seat of Senate Minority Leader [Harry Reid]. A Heck victory would make the tenuous path for Republicans to hold the Senate majority easier to navigate. Democrats need four seats to capture the majority if [Clinton] … wins the White House. Yet despite those high stakes, the Senate race here has often felt like an undercard boxing match on the Las Vegas Strip as everyone awaits the main event between the presidential candidates, Clinton and [Trump], who have campaigned and spent heavily in this key swing state.”
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+-- The Capital Weather Gang forecasts another gorgeous fall day ahead: “Our spectacular weekend weather continues today. You’ll want to get out and enjoy every minute you can, before the sun sets in the District at 5:02 p.m.! Morning temperatures rise through the 50s and, by afternoon, it doesn’t feel much like November, as highs climb to around 65-70.”
+
+Here's the final ""Saturday Night Live"" cold open before the election, with Cecily Strong as Erin Burnett:
+
+It's been a long election season, but there were some great moments; here are a few of our favorites:
+
+Clinton quickly ended her rally in Florida when it began pouring rain:
+
+The Clinton campaign released an 8-minute ""mini documentary"" about her campaign:
+
+In Denver, Trump said he ""doesn't need"" celebrity supporters like Beyoncé and Jay Z:
+
+In light of Trump, Bill Maher said maybe he was too tough on George W. Bush and Mitt Romney:
+
+NH1 asked Elizabeth Warren what she thought about a possible 2018 race with Red Sox legend Curt Schilling:",REAL
+1809,"100,000 people have come to recent Bernie Sanders rallies. How does he do it?","The overflow crowds showing up to hear Bernie Sanders these days are a testament not only to his current popularity and the campaign’s social-media savvy but also to the promotional abilities of an alchemy of like-minded interests: progressive activists, labor unions and even Sarah Silverman.
+
+The comedian took to Twitter to let her nearly 6.7 million followers know she would be at a rally for the Democratic presidential hopeful here Monday. That event drew an estimated 27,500 people — about five times as large as any crowd that has turned out for Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.
+
+“Bernie always seems to be on the right side of history,” Silverman told the boisterous audience at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, noting that the 73-year-old was a civil rights activist in the 1960s, supported gay rights in the 1980s and strongly opposed the Iraq war before most other Americans.
+
+[To his old socialist allies, Sanders has sold out]
+
+All told, Sanders has attracted more than 100,000 people to his rallies in recent weeks, riding a wave of Facebook shares, retweets and old-fashioned word-of-mouth to become by far the biggest draw on the campaign trail.
+
+Such turnout is no guarantee that Sanders will perform well in the crucial early-nominating states — fellow Vermonter Howard Dean preached to similarly large and frenzied audiences in mostly liberal enclaves in 2003, only to collapse as the Iowa caucuses approached.
+
+But it is drawing energy and attention away from Clinton — whose aides peg her largest crowd to date at 5,500 — and exposing a lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy among some facets of the Democratic Party. And it is creating a network of small-scale donors and volunteers that could provide Sanders with the resources he will need to compete with the former secretary of state and first lady in the weeks and months ahead.
+
+Roughly 28,000 people showed up for a recent Sanders rally in Portland, Ore. The self-described democratic socialist drew 15,000 in Seattle; 11,000 in Phoenix; 10,000 in Madison, Wis.; 8,000 in Dallas; and 4,500 in New Orleans.
+
+[The Sanders predicament: Where do you fit all those people?]
+
+This weekend, Sanders will host a couple of town hall meetings in Iowa and attend events with other candidates. His campaign has not yet said where his next large-scale rally will be.
+
+In Los Angeles, Sanders’s campaign estimated that 27,500 people were jammed inside and outside the 16,000-seat arena — a figure impossible to independently verify. Nearly every seat appeared to be taken, and the arena floor was packed. Outside, thousands more watched the rally on large screens.
+
+The throngs were greeted by Dante Harris, the leader of a flight attendants union local that had helped promote the rally.
+
+“Did all of you make the trip out here on a Monday night because everything is going well for you and your family?” he asked.
+
+Harris nodded and shouted back. “Workers’ lives matter! . . . Black lives matter! . . . The truth matters!” Struggling to be heard over the ensuing ovation, he said, “We can build a movement with Bernie!”
+
+The audience was noticeably more diverse than those at recent Sanders rallies in Portland, Seattle and other majority-white cities. Los Angeles is majority-minority, with about 44 percent of its population Latino.
+
+[Sanders needs to court black voters. Now he is.]
+
+There were young hipsters and graying hippies. Some wore black T-shirts with red hammers and sickles; others wore black T-shirts that read “Black Lives Matter.” They sang along as the loudspeakers blasted songs by Willie Nelson, Tracy Chapman and Neil Young. One man carried a handmade sign that said “Bernie: Our Only Hope for Change.”
+
+About a week before each Sanders rally, his campaign sets up a Web page announcing the location and blasts out an e-mail to supporters in that geographic area, asking them to RSVP. There are no paid advertisements.
+
+The events are promoted on Facebook, with the campaign enlisting progressive groups and other “friends and allies” to help spread the word, said national field director Phil Fiermonte. From there, things tend to take on a life of their own.
+
+Like Harris, climate-change activist Joe Galliani got a speaking slot in Los Angeles because his union had spread the word about the rally. He earned some of the loudest cheers as he denounced construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and touted the benefits of solar roofs.
+
+Then there was Maria Barrera, the 31-year-old leader of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, who tearfully noted that Congress has not enacted comprehensive immigration reforms since the 1980s. “For the last 25 years, families have been separated,” Barrera said.
+
+[Activists drove Sanders from a stage, 15,000 people awaited him at the next]
+
+The turnout and enthusiasm have been similar at Sanders events across the country.
+
+For the Portland rally, a local group lobbying for a $15-per-hour minimum wage in the city — a cause Sanders supports nationally — drove a sizable contingent of people to the event. In addition, the Oregon Democratic Party sent an e-mail to people in its database letting them know about the event (with the disclaimer that the party is not taking sides in the presidential primary).
+
+Local Democrats who attended the rally said it appeared to draw lots of newcomers to party politics.
+
+“I hardly ever go to these events without running into friends, and I didn’t see many people I knew,” said Sue Hagmeier, the communications officer for the Democratic Party in Multnomah County, which includes Portland.
+
+Hagmeier said she probably received 15 to 20 digital notifications in advance of the event, counting forwarded e-mails and Facebook posts. Sanders supporters also posted fliers on telephone poles and promoted the event by “chalking the sidewalks,” a tradition in a city known for big political rallies. (In 2008, an estimated 75,000 people came to see then-Sen. Barack Obama on the banks of the Willamette River as he closed in on the Democratic presidential nomination.)
+
+Sanders is striving to harness the energy to help him in states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, where his crowds have been much smaller but still relatively robust. Volunteers hand out donation envelopes to rally attendees and carefully take down their contact information so they can be solicited for money later.
+
+In Los Angeles, anyone who gave on the spot received a Sanders campaign T-shirt. Speakers asked the crowd to text “Bernie” to a five-digit number. In reply, they would receive text messages seeking money and volunteer time.
+
+When Sanders came onstage, the cheers were deafening. His voice hoarse, the senator told the crowd, “This campaign is not a billionaire-funded campaign — it is a people-funded campaign.”
+
+“There is no president who will fight harder to end institutional racism,” he said. “Or for a higher minimum wage. Or for paid parental leave. Or for at least two weeks of paid vacation. . . . Whenever we stand together, when we do not allow them to divide us up by the color of our skin or our sexual orientation, by whether a man or a woman is born in America or born somewhere else, whenever we stand together, there is nothing, nothing, nothing we cannot accomplish.”
+
+Mike Jelf, 69, said he spent the day before the rally leafleting for the campaign in nearby Torrance. He brought his Saint Bernard, Munro, to the arena, wearing a shirt that said “Saints for Sanders.”
+
+“I want to see a country that’s returned to the people, rather than a plutocratic oligarchy,” Jelf said. “I would like to have a planet that’s habitable for future generations.”
+
+Jean-Luc St. Pierre, 19, said he flew from Maryland to attend the rally. He started a “Baltimore for Bernie” Facebook group targeting people in the home town of former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, another Democratic presidential candidate.
+
+Gloria Rios, from Eagle Rock, Calif., said she joined Sanders’s e-mail list a month ago. “I feel very strongly about him,” she said, adding that she has concerns about Clinton.
+
+What are those concerns? She paused. For a really long time.
+
+“There’s — too much conflict around her,” Rios said. “I’m the kind of person who feels that what you say and do has to match up.”
+
+Sanders, she added, “resonates more closely to me.”
+
+After the rally, the Sanders campaign tweeted a photo showing some of the thousands who had watched from outside the arena.
+
+“Apologies to the large crowds who couldn’t fit indoors at tonight’s rally,” the tweet said. “We’re gonna have to get bigger venues!”",REAL
+5724,Trump The President: What Does That Mean For The World? - CounterCurrents.org,"in World — by Mirza Yawar Baig — November 10, 2016 
+Whew! Finally, the charade is over. Donald Trump is now the President of the United States of America. What does that mean? It means that Simpsons prediction came true: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2146815/the-simpsons-correctly-predicted-a-donald-trump-presidency-16-years-ago-in-episode-set-in-the-near-future/ 
+So now you know who to refer to for accurate predictions about the future. Goodbye Tarot cards, et al. In 1995 I recall reading a survey which concluded that America was not likely to be ready for a woman president for the next twenty years. Twenty-one years later, it looks like that prediction was true. Given that women in America to this day are paid 80% of what men are paid, it is not surprising that Americans find it tough to visualize a woman in the White House in any place other than the President’s bed. 
+So, what does Trump mean for America, for American Muslims, for Muslims worldwide, for non-whites in America and globally? I am asking this rhetorical question as I see all kinds of doomsday predictions flying around. I apologize for taking a different view. I see the Trump presidency as an opportunity for those who believe in the opposite of everything that Donald Trump promoted in his campaign to put their actions where their mouths are and show that they are as willing to stand up for what they believe in as he was. 
+What does Trump mean for America? I hope he will be the best thing that happened to America ever. I hope that he can truly make ‘America Great Again’. I say that because though I am not American (should I say, ‘Thank God?’), I am one who believes that a truly ‘Great America’, can make this world great. The world truly needs to change. We need someone to lead the way to make the world compassionate, caring, fighting against injustice, corruption and poverty; disease and ignorance. Which nation is better suited to lead that fight? America has the resources, the intelligence, the education and the leadership ability which I hope it chooses to exercise. Trump won on the anti-establishment platform. I support that fully. The establishment has shown that what it can do is to fail spectacularly. The economy crashed and Obama rewarded those who crashed it. People were and are homeless when there are empty homes on foreclosed loans enough for every American to have two homes, not only one. Yet they are on the streets. I hope Trump can put Americans back in their own homes. 
+Bush father and son, started never ending wars. Obama continued them adding his own flavor to it of drone strikes – using technology to create bug splats (the arrogance is incredible) – thereby escalating the global threat level that comes from driving people to desperation. Obama’s dabbling (what else to call it?) in Middle Eastern politics resulted in continuing the misery for people of Afghanistan and Iraq and new misery for people of Syria and by inference for the rest of the world. And to top it all ISIS came into being because of all of the above. The credit can be shared by all of them. So, Trump standing against the establishment means that he is against all of this. I sincerely hope so. 
+All the jingoism that he rode on will get tempered when it comes to facing reality. It is easy to talk about kicking out the Mexicans and so on. But the day he does that, reality will dawn on him and his cohorts like it did on those who voted Pro-Brexit; that the rich need the poor to survive while the poor don’t need the rich. When nice white Americans get to pay $3 per potato, they will realize the value of cheap labor. Meanwhile some contractor will get the contract to build the Wall, which he will do from the Mexican side, no doubt as otherwise his margin will not make it worthwhile. So also, the wonderful idea to outlaw the H-1 visa. I don’t think it will take very long for Trump and his gang to realize that there is a reason there are blond jokes. And that Indians are not blond. Go figure that. 
+The good news is that Trump made public what was private – racism, misogyny in a country that never stops ‘trumpeting’ about women’s equality, support for genocide, wars and weapons sales, the evils of unbridled capitalism, locker-room conversations which indicate attitudes – have all come out of the closet and locker-room. Now it is up to those who like to say that they believe in the opposite of all these things, to get off their backsides and bring about change. They can no longer live the lives of pretense and lies that they had become used to, saying, ‘It is not happening here.’ Trump proved that it is happening and has trumpeted it from the top of Trump tower. Sorry for so much bad punning in one breath. But there you go. 
+As for Muslims and Trump, believe me Trump is far better than what Muslims have seen in the past. He is far better than what we have today. Take Sisi, the Oily royals who are personal friends of every weapons dealer, the Paki leadership and I can think of several more and Trump begins to look like a choir boy. What will he do that is not already happening? Frankly I don’t know and don’t care to speculate because the prime movers behind Muslim affairs and how they are, are Muslims themselves. Our leadership or more correctly its spectacular failure. Ordinary citizens pay the price, but what’s new about that? The fact remains that until we sort that out and do something about taking charge of our destiny, we must remain satisfied with others writing the script we are compelled to live by. Play endings depend on the script, not on the players. 
+India is a classic example where a so-called minority of 200 million is kicked around like a football and used at will by every mercenary politician for his own ends. But Indian Muslims seem to be satisfied with that, so who is anyone else to complain. If you disagree and tell me that they are not satisfied, then I must ask you what it is that prevents them from doing what is glaringly obvious; get their act together, change their leaders and write their own script. 200 million is not a minority. It is a nation. But only if it chooses to be. Same story for Muslims globally. No point in blaming Trump or looking up to him to find solutions. It is our problem and we must solve it, so let us start doing that. 
+Two other points: what about wars, global warming and such issues? Well, when you have a nation that lives on perpetual warfare and is supported in that by all the other major industrial nations who either manufacture and sell weapons or buy them, how can you pin it all on Trump? If weapons are made and sold, there will be wars. Wars will happen if they continue to make profits for those who run them. That people die is incidental. Those at the top who laugh all the way to the bank, don’t. Those that do, don’t count. They are ‘collateral’, who are necessary to prove the efficacy of the weapons that were used to vaporize them. If it wasn’t for the bugs who splatted, how would you assess the drones or their operators? The fact that the bugs were innocent or that they had families and so on; well, bugs are bugs. And that’s all that there is to it. 
+Global warming? America decided on that when it chose Bush instead of Al Gore. For a minute I thought that was because they got confused because his name is Al Gore like Al Ghurair. But then I realized that it was because he had a terminal problem; he had a brain. See his famous movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and you will see what I mean. https://www.algore.com/library/an-inconvenient-truth-dvd If you do nothing else, buy this and see it. At least you will know why you died. Since you chose that, especially Americans, I believe it is only fair that you understand what you did. With Trump, that came out in the open, so get used to summer all year long. You won’t need to go to the French Riviera for a tan. You can get it at home. That is not inconvenient. 
+Add to this the effect ofunending wars, refugee movement, changing cultures, security nightmares coming true, widening gap between the rich and the poor, global poverty and hunger, preventable disease which is not prevented because there’s no profit in it – when I think about all this and Trump’s election, Nero comes to mind. Renewing our link with tradition. Let us dance to the tune. What’s the use of fiddling otherwise? 
+Final question that everyone is asking, ‘How safe is it to have someone like Trump with his finger on the nuclear button?’ 
+My answer is, ‘The one who actually pressed that button was as different from Trump as could be. Yet he did it.’ Let me leave you to figure out the rest. 
+Meanwhile it is midnight where I live, far away from Trump and America and time to go to bed. Truly it is said that there is solace in sleep. So, good night, world. Sleep well. As long as you stay asleep you can escape responsibility. 
+Mirza Yawar Baig is based in Hyderabad, India and is the founder and President of Yawar Baig & Associates; an international leadership consulting organization. He can be reached at yawar@yawarbaig.com Share this:",FAKE
+2812,"'You've been fleeced': Congress grills Kerry, Obama officials on Iran nuke deal","Secretary of State John Kerry found himself on the defensive Thursday at a Senate hearing where he was hard-pressed to find support for the Iran nuclear deal from either side of the aisle -- and sharply sparred with Republicans who accused him of being ""fleeced"" and ""bamboozled.""
+
+The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing was the first on the controversial deal to lift economic and other sanctions in exchange for concessions of the Islamic state's nuclear program. With Congress taking up the deal and expected to vote on it sometime in September, the hearing underscored the deep resistance the Obama administration faces from both parties.
+
+""From my perspective, Mr. Secretary, I'm sorry ... I believe you've been fleeced,"" Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., told Kerry, claiming the agreement paves the path for Iran to eventually develop a nuclear bomb.
+
+Critics repeatedly suggested the Obama administration's negotiating team gave in to pressure from the Iranians on key points. They question whether sanctions indeed can be reinstated once they're lifted; whether Iran might be able to stall international inspectors; and whether Iran might be closer to a weapon once the deal expires.
+
+Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, said: ""You guys have been bamboozled.""
+
+Kerry, though, vigorously defended the agreement, calling it ""fantasy, plain and simple,"" to think the United States failed to hold out for a better deal at the bargaining table.
+
+""Let me underscore, the alternative to the deal we've reached isn't what I've seen some ads on TV suggesting disingenuously,"" he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ""It isn't a quote better deal, some sort of unicorn arrangement involving Iran's complete capitulation.""
+
+Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz also said the deal is not ""built on trust.""
+
+Some lawmakers tried to play referee when the hearing got heated. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said the remarks from Corker and Risch were ""disrespectful and insulting.""
+
+""If you were bamboozled, the world has been bamboozled -- that's ridiculous,"" Boxer told Kerry.
+
+Kerry still had to contend with skeptical Democrats, notably Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who questioned whether the language in the deal is tough enough and like Corker said the deal aids Iran in building an ""industrial-scale"" nuclear program.
+
+Kerry earlier warned that Iran will not come back to the negotiating table to pursue a new deal, voicing frustration that: ""We've got 535 secretaries of state.""
+
+The hearing comes as lawmakers raise new concerns about alleged secret ""side deals"" struck with Tehran over its nuclear program.
+
+Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., first brought attention to them Tuesday, saying they learned from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that there were two ""side deals"" between Iran and the IAEA.
+
+According to the lawmakers, one agreement covers inspection of the Parchin military complex, and the other concerns potential military aspects of Iran's nuclear program. On the former, they said, Iran would be able to strike a separate arrangement with the IAEA concerning inspections at Parchin.
+
+House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell joined Cotton and Pompeo in sending a letter to President Obama on Wednesday requesting that the agreements be made available to Congress so that they can be reviewed.
+
+""We request you transmit these two side agreements to Congress immediately so we may perform our duty to assess the many important questions related to the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action],"" the letter says.
+
+National Security Adviser Susan Rice, while defending the overall nuclear agreement, appeared to acknowledge the existence of the side deals on Wednesday. She said the matter of the Iran nuclear program's ""possible military dimensions"" (PMD) has long been an issue between Iran and the IAEA. She said they ""negotiated and concluded an agreement to deal with this issue of PMD, which was one of the major sticking points in our dealings.""
+
+She added: ""These documents are not public, but nonetheless, we have been briefed on those documents, we know their contents, we're satisfied with them and we will share the contents of those briefings in full in a classified session with the Congress. So there's nothing in that regard that we know that they won't know.""
+
+Pompeo also asked Kerry about the secret deals in a briefing Wednesday and said afterwards that Kerry ""confirmed that there were in fact side deals and himself had not seen the agreement.""
+
+""I was incredibly surprised to learn there were components of the deal that Congress was not going to be privy to,"" Pompeo said, adding that he had expected that American negotiators would have demanded to see the side deals being cut.
+
+Kerry said after Thursday's hearing, though, ""there are no side deals.""
+
+The letter to Obama expressed concern that Congress was being kept in the dark.
+
+""Most troubling, Iran and the IAEA reached agreement to resolve issues related to research at Parchin, but Congress will not have the ability to review this agreement, nor will we know the results of the IAEA's assessment until December 15,"" the letter says.
+
+It goes on to request access to the side deals so that Congress can effectively review the deal as a whole:
+
+""Failure to produce these two side agreements leaves Congress blind on critical information regarding Iran's potential path to being a nuclear power and will have detrimental consequences for the ability of members to assess the JCPOA,"" the letter says.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4666,"What 20,000 pages of hacked WikiLeaks emails teach us about Hillary Clinton","Hillary Clinton told a joke. Speaking to a roomful of Goldman Sachs bankers in June 2013, Clinton said that Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein could leave the Wall Street firm that’s made him a billionaire to start a soup kitchen:
+
+This exchange was written down by Clinton’s aides as they gathered information on what parts of her paid Wall Street speeches could prove damaging should they leak to the press. Her team filed it under the heading, ""AWKWARD.""
+
+This ""AWKWARD"" quote and hundreds of other previously hidden nuggets about Clinton have spilled out into public view recently. Over the last two weeks, Julian Assange’s whistleblower platform WikiLeaks has published about 20,000 pages of emails illegally stolen from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair.
+
+The strangest thing about the ensuing uproar is that none of the Podesta emails has so far actually broken any fresh scandals about the woman on track to be the next president. Instead, they’ve mostly revealed an underbelly of ugliness to the multiple Clinton controversies that we’ve already known about: the questionable relationship between the Clinton Foundation and its donors, Clinton’s ease with powerful interests on Wall Street, her ties to wealthy campaign contributors.
+
+The Goldman soup kitchen joke is a perfect example. If there’s one thing to really get mad about here, it’s something we’ve known for years — that Clinton took millions from big Wall Street banks right before running for president. Seeing her and Wall Street titans share a laugh about helping the hungry might turn your stomach, but the most important question — was it wrong for Clinton to take big checks from Goldman right before running? — is in no way new. (Clinton’s campaign refused to comment on individual emails, instead blaming the Russians for hacking the emails and providing them to WikiLeaks.)
+
+This is, from what we’ve seen so far, the real story of WikiLeaks’ Podesta emails. Yes, they have not found any major ""bombshells."" No, they’re not going to sink Clinton’s campaign. But by filling in the storylines that have long dogged her campaign with new and vivid detail, we are getting our clearest picture yet of how the sausage — or, if you prefer, the creamy risotto — gets made in Clinton-world.
+
+It can be an ugly sight.
+
+I’ve now read hundreds of the Podesta emails, as well as upward of 60 stories from across left-wing, mainstream, and conservative media outlets about what they entail.
+
+I should stress that what I’ve found is far from all bad. Dozens of these emails show Clinton’s team genuinely striving to discover the correct position on an issue. Many of them show real, determined efforts to find the right solution to some public policy crisis. In general, especially compared to the vicious infighting that characterized her 2008 presidential run, you come away from the Podesta emails thinking that Clinton has assembled an admiringly loyal group of aides that believes in the candidate and the mission of the campaign. There’s some backbiting, but you could imagine far, far worse.
+
+Then there’s the other stuff — the emails Podesta presumably wish never leaked. To help make sense of what we’ve learned, I’ve broken out the interesting new bits into what I think can be more-or-less characterized as four distinct categories:
+
+Vox reached out to the Clinton campaign for comment, and spokesperson Glen Caplin replied that they are ""still not authenticating any individual emails."" The campaign also referred foundation-related questions to the foundation itself, and referenced several times that the leaks were tied to a ""Russian attempt to influence our election."" As it has to other reporters, the Clinton campaign did not dispute the accuracy of any of the individual emails.
+
+We should be clear that these Podesta email leaks have nothing to do with the multiple other ""Clinton email"" scandals percolating over the past few years. So they aren’t, as some news outlets have incorrectly reported, related to the FBI investigation into Clinton’s private server or allegations that she went around transparency laws.
+
+Instead, since these emails emerge from the private account of Clinton’s campaign chair, they tend to tell us far more about candidate Clinton than they do about Secretary of State Clinton.
+
+There is, however, one exception to that general rule: the Clinton Foundation.
+
+Since the campaign began, the Clinton Foundation has been at the center of an intense debate. The most extreme critics, like Donald Trump, have alleged that Clinton used the state department to transactionally reward the charity’s donors (there’s no evidence for that). Meanwhile, the campaign and foundation have fallen back on one consistent defense — that there’s been no proof of a quid pro quo between donor and foundation.
+
+The Clinton Foundation really did do inarguably life-saving work. But good government experts have argued that the Clintons accepted private donations in a way that they should have known would have created dangerous conflicts of interest. This more nuanced attack faults the Clinton Foundation for dangerously blurring the distinction between private and public.
+
+The Podesta leaks back up that story.
+
+One way it does so is by uncovering a private audit conducted by a widely-respected New York City law firm. The review concluded that the Clinton Foundation’s board had failed to oversee potential conflicts of interest, and that some donors expected ""quid pro quo benefits."" ""Interviewees reported conflicts of those raising funds or donors, some of whom may have an expectation of quid pro quo benefits in return for gift,"" the audit found.
+
+It’s not clear they received them. but either way the audit is a striking confirmation that even the attorneys hired by Clinton recognized the danger in the relationship between donor and foundation.
+
+Then there’s another disclosure emerging from the Podesta emails: that Qatari officials sought to present Bill Clinton with a $1 million gift on his birthday on during his wife’s tenure as secretary of state. As the New York Times noted, this revelation suggests that foreign governments were able to gain an audience with Bill Clinton in exchange for a check. (The Times couldn’t confirm if the $1 million check was ever cashed.)
+
+The last revelation in the leaks about the foundation may also be the most unusual: Chelsea Clinton apparently was running around raising the alarm bell over possible conflicts of interest, suggesting the Clintons themselves were aware of the potential problems. (Politico’s Kenneth Vogel has a detailed blow-by-blow of Chelsea’s concerns over the overlapping roles of a consulting firm named Teneo.)
+
+Nothing here represents a major revelation. If you weren’t bothered by the Clinton Foundation before, this probably isn’t going to trouble you. But if you were, having an audit and Chelsea Clinton share your fears will fuel the sense that something suspicious was afoot here.
+
+Over the course of the election, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders leveled a similar critique of Clinton: that she’s too wedded to the ""political establishment.""
+
+For Sanders, that usually meant that Clinton didn’t have the independence to challenge powerful actors on Wall Street and in Washington, DC. Trump has used similar rhetoric, going after ""Crooked"" Clinton for her big dollar campaign contributors.
+
+Whatever you think of the merits of those attacks, it’s clear that the majority of the American people think it’s correct, at least in broad strokes. Seven in 10 voters consider Clinton part of the establishment. Just 30 percent trust her to take on special interests.
+
+It’s an impression that the Podesta emails only deepen — even if they don’t provide ground-breaking new controversies around it.
+
+Again, none of this is revelatory. Nobody who has closely followed Clinton will be shocked to find her campaign was attuned to the wishes of donors. Her affinity for Israel is well known. Critics of her approach to campaign finance are mad about the decision to take money from big donors — not the internal discussion over whether or not to do so.
+
+But watching how all of this unfolded — seeing for yourself how Clinton spoke gently to Wall Street — won’t make the disclosures any easier for her detractors to swallow. It’s a confirmation of what we already know, but that doesn’t make it any less astonishing, at least for Clinton’s critics.
+
+Clinton’s close ties to Wall Street and big donors are certainly part of the story revealed by the Podesta leaks. But only one part.
+
+Indeed, dozens of interesting tidbits have also emerged that allow us to see inside the Clinton campaign’s infrastructure. They have showed that, at some times, the Clinton campaign openly discussed the ""political"" implications of her deciding to get behind one policy or another. They also show the Clinton campaign at other times responding to more high-minded policy concerns.
+
+In one leak, for instance, Clinton’s team discussed at length whether they should endorse the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, which would restrict commercial banks’ ability to engage in some investment activity.
+
+Clinton aide Mandy Grunwald worries that reversing course and backing the law would lead to ""phoniness charges,"" while not doing so could lead Sen. Elizabeth Warren to endorse Bernie Sanders. (""Jake"" in the following exchange is Jake Sullivan, a top Clinton adviser):
+
+Then there’s a lengthy exchange in Clinton-world about a carbon tax proposal. As Vox’s Brad Plumer explains, the emails show how fears of embracing an unpopular idea dominated the internal discussion. Robby Mook, a top Clinton aide, said that embracing the carbon tax would prove ""lethal"" in the general election:
+
+But other revelations have pointed to how the Clinton campaign got behind positions it found genuinely worthwhile. In one exchange highlighted by the Washington Post, the Clinton team talked about forming the ""signature pillars of a future progressive agenda"" like a ""significant middle-class tax cut.""
+
+The exchange about the carbon tax did involve frank political talk. But as Plumer also noted, Podesta elsewhere makes genuine efforts to convince his colleagues about the menace posed by climate change and the need for genuinely huge solutions to address it:
+
+There are other examples. A debate over the ""Cadillac Tax,"" which taxes the most expensive health insurance plans, showed twin impulses fighting against each other. As Vox has written, the tax is widely seen as an essential way to raise revenue for Obamacare. But it’s also hated by unions, whose votes and endorsements Clinton wanted to cultivate during the primary.
+
+The emails reveal Clinton’s policy advisers arguing for a ""fix it"" strategy, while the ""political team"" pushed harder for her to call for a full repeal. (They ultimately came down fully on the political side):
+
+None of Clinton’s critics will be surprised to find her team debating political ramifications of certain policies — it’s certainly widely understood that this is how almost all politicians make their decisions.
+
+But a fair appraisal of the emails doesn't reduce Team Clinton to opportunism. Even behind closed doors, they appear motivated by a genuine embrace of progressive beliefs and causes. At least much of the time, that is. But not always.
+
+Let's be honest: Everyone who has worked in a big enough office has said or written something about a co-worker he or she wouldn't say to that co-worker’s face.
+
+Clinton-world is no exception. But most offices don’t have to deal with essentially all of their internal communications being dumped unceremoniously on the web. Team Clinton’s internal gossip and snipings have been neatly organized into a searchable database that the whole world can use.
+
+These are, understandably, the best catnip for reporters. Like the other revelations, they also don’t tend to reveal anything genuinely earth-shattering. But by laying bare the bitter grievances we (generally) already knew about, these emails are fueling added frustration and old grudges. For instance, the emails include:
+
+This kind of stuff, of course, has the least to do with public policy or the positions of the campaign.
+
+But this category of emails is perhaps most interesting to people who work for Clinton. In a terrific article in Politico, Annie Karni and Glenn Thrush detailed the psychological impacts it’s having on the Clinton campaign:
+
+As Karni and Thrush note, this should be a heady time for Clinton-world. She’s cruising to victory in the polls. Donald Trump has sunk in the polls, and Clinton has trounced him in three consecutive presidential debates.
+
+In general, the critics most upset about the Podesta emails are the ones who have confirmed what Clinton’s inner-circle thought about them. Ironically, that dynamic now appears to apply to Clinton’s own team as well.
+
+Two clear conclusions jump out when trying to determine what these emails tell us about a future Clinton presidency.
+
+One is that Clinton appears genuinely responsive to pressure from outside groups. Her team has clear goals, but they’re also closely attuned to polls and to winning over the organizations (union backers, environmentalist groups, Black Lives Matter activists) whose support they think they need. In private conversations, Clinton tells the audiences in front of her more or less what they want to hear.
+
+But while this appreciation for her listeners may reflect political savvy, it also suggests a flexibility that may worry those on her left. What happens if President Clinton gets polling suggesting a majority of voters support slashing entitlements? What if the country clamors for a war in Iran? What if she can win over Republican voters by tacking to the center?
+
+And second, more than anything, the Podesta emails show how Clinton is the transactional politician many have long suspected. That’s a dispiriting conclusion for some who may wish she was a pure progressive. But it also helps clarify the battle lines for what looks like the coming Clinton administration — persuade her team they need you, and you might have a shot at getting them on your side.",REAL
+7892,Comment on Breaking: CDC Blocks Testimony of Their Senior Scientist Who Blew The Whistle on Severe Medical Malpractice by CDC Accused of Blocking Testimony from Senior Scientist — New York Malpractice & Injury Lawyer Blog,"  Have you heard of Dr. William Thompson? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. His story was completely ignored by mainstream media outlets, the same way that they recently ignored the fact that the Pentagon paid a PR firm half a billon dollars to make fake terrorist/news videos.   Dr. William Thompson is a longtime senior CDC scientist. He has published some of the most commonly cited pro-vaccine studies — studies which purport to show absolutely no link between the MMR vaccine and autism, for example. Two studies he and his co-author published in 2004 and 2007 (CDC studies) were the most commonly cited studies used by the scientific community to debunk the controversy surrounding the MMR vaccine/autism link. ( Thompson, et al. 2007, Price, et al. 2010 , Destefano, et al. 2004 ) The study concluded that “the evidence is now convincing that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine does not cause autism or any particular subtypes of autism spectrum disorder.” ( source ) A decade later, Dr. Thompson came out publicly admitting that that it was “the lowest point ” in his career when he “went along with that paper.” He went on to say that he and the other authors “didn’t report significant findings” and that he is “completely ashamed” of what he did, that he was “complicit and went along with this,” and regrets that he has “been a part of the problem.” ( source )( source )( source ) A study with revised information and no data omission was published by Dr. Brian Hooker (a contact of Dr. Thompson) in the peer reviewed journal Translational Neurodegeneration, and it found a 340% increased risk of autism in African American boys receiving the Measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine on time. The study has since been retracted during the same time of this controversy.   You can read the full study HERE , although, unsurprisingly, it has since been retracted. Thompson’s attorneys, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Bryan Smith of Morgan & Morgan, also released a statement from Dr. Thompson, which mentioned Hooker: “ I have had many discussions with Dr. Brian Hooker over the last 10 months regarding studies the CDC has carried out regarding vaccines and neurodevelopmental outcomes including autism spectrum disorders. I share his belief that CDC decision-making and analyses should be transparent.” ( source ) Even pro-vaccine politicians were contacted, as these documents were sent to Congress. One of them reads as followed, as illustrated by congressman Bill Posey : “The [CDC] co-authors scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the [MMR vaccine] study. The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room and reviewed and went through all the hard copy documents that we had thought we should discard and put them in a huge garbage can.” CDC Blocking Testimony Disconcertingly, Thomas Frieden (see picture above), the Director of the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), has blocked Dr. Thompson’s attempt to testify on scientific fraud and the destruction of evidence by senior CDC officials. Attorneys Smith and Kennedy have been seeking to have Thompson testify on medical malpractice, specifically with regard to fraud in a series of studies that found no link between vaccines and autism, which are cited earlier in the article. Mr. Kennedy writes that, according to Thompson, “for the past decade his superiors have pressured him and his fellow scientists to lie and manipulate data about the safety of the mercury-based preservative thimerosal to conceal its causative link to a suite of brain injuries, including autism.” Ecowatch , Dr. Frieden said that “Dr. William Thompson’s deposition testimony would not substantially promote the objectives of CDC or HHS [Health and Human Services].” Despite the fact that Thompson revealed a casual link between vaccines and autism, or autistic features, Frieden stated that “Dr William Thompson’s deposition testimony would not substantially promote the objectives of CDC or HHD.” The case seeking the testimony of Dr. Thompson is from the family of 16-year-old Yates Hazlehurst. A lawsuit is currently underway implying that Yates is autistic as a result of vaccine administration that occurred in 2001. Related CE Article With More Information 
+The Top 6 Reasons Why More Parents Are Choosing To Not Vaccinate Their Children Some Quotes That Really Make You Think “The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.” – ( source )( source ) Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine” Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal ( source ) “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet ( source )",FAKE
+9935,FOX News Just Admitted It Made Up Story About Hillary Being “Indicted” For Foundation,"Comments 
+The alt-right and other Trump supporters were flush with excitement yesterday as their online echo chamber resounded with stories that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted on the basis of the newly discovered emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer. Today, of course, we learned that this was nothing but a bold-faced lied. While many of the more obscure right -wing blogs named nothing but imaginary sources to support their outrageous claims , the most legitimate source of the false story was none other than Fox News. 
+On November 2 Fox News’ Bret Baier claimed that, according to two anonymous sources within the FBI, the agency’s investigation of Clinton would “continue to likely an indictment.” The very next day reality forced him to walk back those claims, which he called “inartful,” acknowledging that “that’s not the process.” 
+Nonetheless, Baier did not entirely disavow his ruse of an imminent Clinton indictment, maintaining that “there is confidence in the evidence.” Given that Clinton’s indictment has been impending for months in the right-wing universe one would think that these shameless schemers would have wised up to the fact that it’s not going to happen – and for good reason . Instead, every time there is the slightest mention of Clinton’s emails, no matter how vague and clearly inconsequential , the alt-right rumor mill kicks into overdrive on its vicious crusade to smear the potential first female president in any way possible. 
+In reality, there is absolutely nothing so far to suggest that there is anything incriminating in the most recent batch of Clinton emails, and it has become increasingly clear that FBI Director James Comey’s announcement of the renewed investigation was nothing but a cynical and hypocritical political ploy. In part the announcement was designed to fuel a new Republican storyline that Clinton is unfit for the presidency because she is under federal investigation. The demagogues making these claims conveniently ignore the fact that Trump is under investigation in no fewer than 75 cases , including the rape of a 13 year-old girl. 
+Another disconcerting storyline in yesterday’s firestorm of right-wing rumors is the political interference of Trump supporters in the FBI. If Baier’s so-called anonymous sources really were FBI agents, it would represent yet another recent example of meddling in the presidential election by Trump supporters at the supposedly impartial agency. In any case, the endless lies and distortions of the right-wing pseudo-media, from Fox News down to the lowliest blog, are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people.",FAKE
+6810,Repudiating the Media,"Q. If Trump wins can it be considered a repudiation of the national news mediocrity? A. I certainly hope so! 
+The performance of the major news outlets this election cycle has been something to behold. It’s been the worst, most shallow undertaking I can remember. And I remember the treatment Goldwater got. 
+I wrote here on Lew’s blog last week about the hysterical reaction Gloria Borger and others had to Trump’s unwillingness to promise to respect the election results in advance. 
+They acted like panicked teenage girls in a horror movie. 
+Pat Buchanan explains the media’s panic. “The establishment is terrified that it has lost the country,” he says. “The country no longer believes in its leadership.” 
+About time! 
+Now with the Comey development it won’t be long before Dems start talking about a rigged system. 
+Another moment of equal media idiocracy: When the Clintonistas blamed Russia for spilling DNC emails that showed its secret collaboration with Hillary and against Bernie Sanders. 
+Trump said “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing!” 
+The line wasn’t well-delivered. But it was still funny. 
+Even so, the joke was lost on the usual suspects. I watched CNN’s Jake Tapper’s visage grow dark as he expressed grave concern that Trump was inviting the Russians to interfere in our election. 
+The whole thing brings to mind an old vaudeville comedy routine with, let’s say, Joe and Moe: Joe: I’m offended by the media’s alarmist reaction to Trump’s email joke. Moe: Are you offended as a Trump supporter? Joe: No, I’m offended as a person with a sense of humor! 11:09 am on October 29, 2016",FAKE
+5847,Buchanan Smashes CNN Shill,"October 27, 2016 
+I don't think it's possible that there is a man on DS that hates Smerconish more than I do. I wanted so bad to prove that he's a jew but couldn't find proof. The syphilitic, slimy, whining quintessence of his soul, however, is jewish through and through...",FAKE
+7815,The Impossible Is Happening: Cubs Win World Series and Yes… Hillary Clinton is Now Likely to be Indicted,"I’m running on about an hour and a half of sleep and my nails are damn near chewed to the bone. This because, as a diehard Cubs fan, I was up until nearly 1:00 AM working to come to grips with what I had just witnessed. Once I finally went to bed I found myself tossing and turning so at 3:30 I said screw it… I’m heading to the office.
+My beloved Cubbies had just won the World Series, defeating the Cleveland Indians in what is likely to go down as one of the most EPIC game 7 battles in the history of professional baseball. The Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908, making this Championship something we Cubs fans could only dream about until it actually happened last night.
+As prediction hub FiveThirtyEight put it just a few days ago… the chances were slim. How slim? Slimmer than the odds of Trump winning next Tuesday.
+
+An impossible scenario just become very possible. And fortunately for America, another seemingly impossible scenario is now suddenly started to look very possible.
+A Hillary Clinton indictment is now likely .
+This coming via FBI sources telling Fox News host Bret Baier that the FBI is moving towards what is “likely an indictment.”
+Baier’s report includes the following key points .
+1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year.
+2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time.
+3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.
+4. Sources within the FBI have told him that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department.
+5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information had been taken from it.
+That’s a pretty strong case for indictment. Of course, the corrupted DOJ can still do everything in its power to block justice, but it now appears the FBI is throwing DOJ demands out the window.
+Gonna be an interesting few days ahead, folks. For those of us who are Cubs fans and news junkies sleep is not on the agenda.
+",FAKE
+10183,America After Election 2016: the Gullible and the Shattered - David Kerans,"Originally appeared at Strategic Culture Foundation 
+Both inside the US and around the world, political observers have been waiting a long time for an election that would promise relief from the most noxious features of the American system. Alas, while it is high time that the US lead the way in reversing these trends, the outcome of the 18 month struggle to elect a new administration looks likely to scuttle all hopes for serious leadership and reform. 
+I'm looking forward to a market crash to awaken the electorate out of our rut, honestly. Because if a Loony Tunes candidate {meaning Donald Trump – DK} doesn't give Democrats the courage to put up a push-left candidate {Bernie Sanders, or some facsimile – DK}, then catastrophe is the only correction we have left. – commenter «Snapshotist» 
+Both inside the US and around the world, political observers have been waiting a long time for an election that would promise relief from the most noxious features of the American system, such as neoliberal economic austerity policies that hamstring governments' ability to maintain basic services and safety nets, military aggression and destabilization of regimes across a wide swathe of the globe, wholesale violation of privacy via NSA surveillance, trade agreements designed to maximize the power of international corporations over national governments, facilitation of fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure in the face of dire climate change consequences, a financial system sucking wealth away from the population and accelerating wealth inequality, and more. 
+Alas, while it is high time that the US lead the way in reversing these trends, the outcome of the 18 month struggle to elect a new presidential administration looks likely to scuttle all hopes for serious leadership and reform on any of these critical issues. It follows, therefore, that in the near term (if not longer), progress will not be possible unless new forms of politics arise to deliver pressure from below on Washington, DC. But how much hope can we have for that? When will see this again? Crowds lining up hours in advance for a Bernie Sanders rally, New York, April 13th, 2016 
+A Trump Contribution? 
+By all indications, Clinton will win the election on November 8th, and virtually every political commentator will rejoice at the apparent demise of the Donald Trump phenomenon. As strange as it may seem, however, some of the passion of the Trump movement could provide fuel to the fire of reformist politics in the US. To be sure, Trump's campaign has gone far towards legitimizing and normalizing bigotry and ignorance, and this residue will persist. But Trump has also galvanized powerful resentment against an insular, self-serving political class. This sentiment dovetails with a major thrust of Bernie Sanders's advocacy of social democratic policies and empowerment of the population to reverse the accumulation of all power in the hands of wealthy campaign donors and corporations. 
+Further, let us not forget, Trump has consistently promoted the idea of shelving antagonism towards Russia in favor of cooperation, together with reducing the role of the US military around the world. The point is not whether Trump genuinely means what he says (although one of his advisors who spoke with us insists that he does). The point is that Trump brought these positions out into the light, which has allowed increasing numbers of Americans to question the nation's reflexive reliance on military might, expansion, and aggression as a pillar of its foreign policy. If the left is truly serious about unseating Washington's neoliberal status quo, it should make every effort to harness some of the frustration that coalesced into the Trump movement towards broadly shared goals – getting the money out of politics being the most obvious. 
+The Gullible Left 
+For the moment, of course, the huge majority of the left is consumed with the impending election, and with the perceived imperative of defeating Trump by supporting Clinton as the «lesser evil» candidate. At first glance this seems eminently reasonable. But the certitude that has swept the country regarding the preferability of Clinton over Trump ought to give us pause. For those paying close attention, it is not necessarily clear which candidate is the lesser evil. The flaws marring each candidate are so grotesque, and the variables confronting the next administration are so uncertain, that one can easily support a case in either direction. A small segment of the left will reject both Brahmins and cast affirmative votes for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, of course. But the readiness of much of the left – the gullible left – to ignore Clinton's corruption, crimes, and cynicism is preemptively sapping the strength of the resistance that will be needed to push Madame President to pursue even half-baked progressive reforms on any issue. 
+Meanwhile, as the gullible left and center coalesce meekly around Clinton, the real election is taking place behind the scenes: Clinton and her inner circle are lining up the key personnel who will largely determine the course of policy in her administration. Thanks to Wikileaks' publication of Clinton's current campaign chairman, John Podesta, we know very well that this process is far advanced by now. As David Dayen put it recently in « The New Republic »: 
+If the 2008 Podesta emails are any indication, the next four years of public policy are being hashed out right now, behind closed doors.... Who gets these cabinet-level and West Wing advisory jobs matters as much as policy papers or legislative initiatives. It will inform executive branch priorities and responses to crises. It will dictate the level of enforcement of existing laws. It will establish the point of view of an administration and the advice Hillary Clinton will receive. Its importance cannot be stressed enough, and the process has already begun. This is a fight over who dominates the Democratic Party’s policy thinking in the short and long term. 
+Dayen adds that «...if liberals want to have an impact on that process, waiting until after the election will be too late». Well, one wonders why Dayen is so optimistic. Another Wikileaks release revealed that Clinton had more or less decided on Tim Kaine as her running mate all the way back in mid-2015 (!). Surely many of the top positions have long since been scripted, and for those still in play, can anyone – even David Dayen -- imagine public pressure making a difference in the selection? 
+In short, the world should prepare itself for a Hillary Clinton administration that is full of Washington establishment clones and is diligently protected from criticism by a like-minded media establishment. Moreover, and more important, we can already see the Clinton administration maneuvering to avoid the gridlock that minimized President Obama's effectiveness by pushing key foreign and domestic policies further to the right, into the arms of the Republican Party. It is not difficult to locate telling indications on this score... «Sorry, I can't vote for Mrs. Strangelove» – commenter «natureboy» , renouncing Clinton for her hawkishness 
+The implications of Clinton's ascendancy on US foreign policy are already coming into view, and they are more than a little disturbing. An article from Washington Post White House correspondent Greg Jaffe on October 20th delivered news just as bad as we expected: 
+The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork for a more assertive American foreign policy via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House.... the bipartisan nature of the recent recommendations, coming at a time when the country has never been more polarized, reflects a remarkable consensus among the foreign policy elite. This consensus is driven by a broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East… Taken together, the studies and reports call for more-aggressive American action to constrain Iran, rein in the chaos in the Middle East and check Russia in Europe. 
+Clinton is preparing a foreign policy more aggressive than Obama's, in other words. And – take note – she'll enjoy bipartisan support for it. «The entire concept is a form of corporate blackmail» -- David Dayen , characterizing Clinton's preparation of a tax repatriation policy that will permanently lower the tax obligations of large corporations. 
+As far as domestic policy is concerned, meanwhile, all recent revelations point to a posture even more friendly to large corporate interests than that which has obtained under Obama. For example, an important investigation from David Dayen just a few days ago exposed the Clinton circle's coordination with top Democrats and Republicans in preparing an enormous and permanent reduction on taxation of profits corporations earn abroad. As journalist Matt Taibbi once described a similar proposal: «Let's give a big tax break to the biggest tax cheats». 
+Yes, we can expect a few corporate-written trade deals to follow the tax reduction on profits earned overseas. And Wall Street will not be left out. Clinton has many options to assist her finance sector sponsors, including an important plan David Sirota and Avi Asher-Shapiro revealed last week. It would deliver hundreds of billions of dollars worth of individuals' retirement accounts into the hands of asset managers employing aggressive alternative investment strategies, and net the managers billions a year in fees. Campaign contributions do indeed bring corporations colossal returns in the US. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount 
+If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire",FAKE
+6768,Anderson Cooper Absolutely OWNS Kellyanne Conway After FBI Clears Hillary…Again (VIDEO),"  
+In case you missed it, on Sunday, FBI Director Comey once again cleared Hillary Clinton of any wrong-doing with regard to her emails — this, after just a couple of weeks ago saying to congress, that emails found in connection to the Anthony Weiner investigation could have something to do with Hillary’s case. By speculating about these mysterious emails, that we now know had absolutely NOTHING to do with Hillary Clinton, Comey may have been in direct violation of the Hatch Act . Let’s hope Director Comey will have to endure his own investigation very soon! 
+Speaking of speculation, on a special edition of CNN’s AC360 Sunday night, Anderson Cooper brought up that very thing to Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway. 
+“Is it responsible for someone who might be president of the United States to be, in your words, ‘speculating’ about an active investigation when he has no actual facts?” 
+Kellyanne tried to change the attention back to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server, but Anderson wasn’t having it and asks again. 
+“Right, you are not answering the question, though. Is it irresponsible for a man who might be president of the United States to speculate about something about which he has no facts?” 
+Watch their heated exchange below: 
+Featured image via video screenshot Share this Article!",FAKE
+10203,‘Schlonged!’ NYT: FBI reopened Hillary probe thanks to … ANTHONY WEINER?,"— Brad Thor (@BradThor) October 28, 2016 Men ruin everything with their dicks https://t.co/vFLzBWDEpO 
+This FBI-investigation-into-Hillary-plot just got a whole lot thicker, so to speak: NYT alert: new emails were discovered while investigating into ANTHONY WEINER SEXTING SCANDAL. 
+— Andrew Clark 🎃 (@AndrewHClark) October 28, 2016 
+Wait, what? New emails tied to the FBI's Clinton inquiry were discovered during the investigation into Anthony Weiner's sexting https://t.co/FMHEkn03B0 
+Dude: Federal law enforcement officials said Friday that the new emails uncovered in the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton ’s use of a private email server were discovered after the F.B.I. seized electronic devices belonging to Huma Abedin, an aide to Mrs. Clinton, and her husband, Anthony Weiner. … In a letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, and that they “appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. was taking steps to “determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” He said he did not know how long it would take to review the emails, or whether the new information was significant. Clinton picks up @nytimes 
+— David Rutz (@DavidRutz) October 28, 2016 
+What more can you say about this? 
+— Kemberlee Kaye (@KemberleeKaye) October 28, 2016 Oh my god https://t.co/Qa8JRQuO8f",FAKE
+4808,What do Americans really think of election coverage?,"More Americans think that the media are too easy on candidates than in 2012 or 2008, according to a Pew Research Center poll. But they're also more likely to say that 'their' candidates are treated too harshly.
+
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (l.), is interviewed by co-hosts Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie on the NBC 'Today' television program, in New York, on April 21, 2016.
+
+Both presidential campaigns have been outspoken in saying that they think the media are too hard on them. But do Americans agree?
+
+More Americans think the media are letting presidential candidates off easy than in previous years, according to a poll released by the Pew Research Center on Thursday. In the case of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, 27 percent of Americans think the media is too easy on him, compared to 20 percent who reported feeling that way about coverage of the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and 15 percent for John McCain in 2008. Some 33 percent of Americans think coverage of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is too easy, compared to 28 percent and 31 percent for President Obama in 2012 and 2008, respectively, according to the survey.
+
+Positive attitudes toward the media have reportedly been declining since the 1970s. Less than one-third of people now say that they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media. Scholars say this is part of a larger trend in poor attitudes toward institutions generally, compounded by a rise in the number of media outlets and the polarization of these outlets.
+
+When people ""go into their newsfeed or turn on the TV and they're getting information from a wide array of sources, and some of them are less than reputable ... it contributes to the sense"" that all media is untrustworthy, David Jones, a professor of political science at James Madison University, told The Christian Science Monitor’s Gretel Kauffman earlier this month.
+
+A question about Americans’ attitude toward “the media” could refer to information expressing all kinds of opinions, in forums as large as a TV network or national newspaper or as small as a Twitter feed.
+
+This polarity and range of sources could help explain why rising numbers of Americans also think that “the media” is being unnecessarily harsh – on their chosen candidates, that is. Pew reported that three-in-ten Democrats and independents who lean Democratic are likely to see coverage of Mrs. Clinton as too tough. Nearly half of Republican surveyed – 46 percent – believe that coverage of Mr. Trump has been too tough.
+
+Finding the middle ground certainly isn’t easy. And nowhere is this clearer than in the high-stakes world of interviews and presidential debates. The Associated Press highlighted the demands placed on moderators with these guidelines offered during the 2012 election cycle:
+
+Craft sharp questions to get the candidates to talk, while being meticulously fair not to challenge one more than another. Keep an eye on the clock so one candidate doesn't get to hog the time. Don't be bullied; be firm in forcing the candidates to move on. But be flexible enough to keep a productive discussion flowing. Know the difference. Keep the focus off yourself. And do it all on live television before some 60 million people.
+
+Matt Lauer’s performance at NBC’s Commander-in-Chief forum earlier this month was widely panned, with critics saying that he focused too heavily on Clinton’s email server and failed to fact-check some of Trump’s statements. Candy Crowley, whose moderation of a 2012 debate Rush Limbaugh described as “an act of journalistic terror,” later told the Associated Press that she knew from the beginning that “somebody is always going to be unhappy no matter what you do.”
+
+For some, the media’s election coverage – and Americans’ trust in the media on the basis of this coverage – is critical to American democracy.
+
+""Citizens need information, they need to get it from the media. The First Amendment was set up to create a media that served as a surrogate role for the public, and if the public is not engaged and they move on and they're not consuming news ... it's really a disservice and it hurts our democracy a lot,"" Jeff McCall, a professor of communication at DePauw University, told Fox News's Bill O'Reilly following a 2014 Gallup poll.",REAL
+9953,Exclusive: Siege of Islamabad,"By Brig Asif H. Raja on October 31, 2016 
+Asif Haroon Raja 
+Editor’s note: Both BG Raja and Imran Khan are VT followers and personal friends of the Senior Editor. This is a vital untold story. IK isn’t returning emails and it would be nice to hear his side. Our bureau chief in Islamabad, Raja Mujtaba, has been gone for two years now, a huge loss for VT. 
+
+Imran Khan (IK) and his partner Sheikh Rashid pursuing politics of agitation since mid-2014 are once again on a rampage and are determined to lock down Islamabad (Isbd) and seize power by force. Their tantrums have shot up the political temperature to a boiling point and has intensified uncertainty and insecurity. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Chief Minister Pervez Khattak along with PTI workers is exultantly moving in a convoy from Peshawar to reach Bani Gala and participate in the already declared November 2, D-Day for the final showdown with the government (govt) at D-chowk. He has puerilely given an ethnic color to his march by playing the Pashtun card. He and his convey has been greeted by the Punjab Police with tear gas shells at Attock Bridge and Hazro interchange. The PML-Q, PAT and PSP have pledged support to IK but from a distance. The PPP is gearing up to add fuel to fire. Maulana Fazlur Rahman led JUI-F has stood up in support of the beleaguered PML-N and has warned PTI that its march to Isbd will be contested. ANP, NP, QWP and MQM (P) sympathies are also with the ruling party. 
+The fires of agitation lit by the PTI has spread to other cities as well. Containerization has taken the life of one army officer and one child and is causing great inconvenience to the dwellers of twin cities. Media is playing its usual negative role to keep the pot sizzling. One-seater Sheikh Rashid is being glorified and so is the bellicosity of IK, while govt’s defensive acts are demeaned. Anchors and analysts are busy upping the ante and none seem to be interested in defusing the volatile situation. Hate campaign against NS and his family by the social media has touched new heights of slander. Political wrangling and filibustering is further damaging the image of Pakistan in the world and the cause of Kashmir. 
+The master planners sitting in London, Washington, Tel Aviv and New Delhi are keeping their fingers crossed and are excitedly watching the gathering storm and hoping that the govt machinery in Isbd will be paralyzed and will force Nawaz Sharif (NS) to resign, or the Army to intervene and take over. India is incessantly throwing logs into the fire by heating up the LoC, while RAW-NDS are continuing with their covert operations in selected zones. Their major interest is to disrupt work on CPEC. 
+Followers of IK are bubbling with enthusiasm and have gone hyper. Some were caught carrying weapons, ammunition, tear gas shells and bullet proof jackets. Most are carrying batons and young girls are equally aggressive. PTI’s armed Tiger Force has been tasked to battle with the Police/FC if stopped. They are already seeing their charismatic leader wearing the crown and with Aladdin lamp in his hand removing all the chronic ailments of Pakistan in a flash. They are convinced that once he seizes power, milk and honey will start flowing in the rivers of Pakistan and miseries of the downtrodden will be alleviated. One reason of their euphoria is the apparent estrangement of the Army leadership over the security leak scandal. Their joys knew no bounds when Information Minister Pervez Rashid was sacked. It was seen as the beginning of the demise of NS Empire. It has further energized the PTI workers and they seem fully charged up to execute the orders of their Captain to lock down the capital city on November 2. IK has taken it as a last ditch battle. For him it is a do or die battle. He is once again expectantly looking towards Gen Raheel Sharif to raise his finger. 
+Undoubtedly the security leak has suddenly become a bigger challenge for the govt than the IK threat. A high powered committee comprising of members from ISI, MI and IB will carry out in-depth investigation to trace out the culprits responsible for feeding the story and that too in twisted form to the Dawn newspaper, who were behind it, what was the motive, apportion blame and prescribe punishment. It is to be seen where the trail ends. Absence of the author of the controversial story Cyril Almeida will make things difficult for the investigators. 
+Unlike its defensive stance to the 2014 sit-in, which had lingered on for 126 days without any outcome, this time the govt is in a defiant mood and is flexing its muscles to go to any length to defeat the sinister plans of the invaders. Containers have been placed on all entry points of Isbd and along Peshawar-Isbd road and along Bani Gala road. Large contingents of the police and paramilitary troops have been deployed while the army has been alerted to be prepared to defend Isbd under Article 245. At the moment, the entire leadership of PTI have got stranded in IK residence at Bani Gala. NS has addressed two public meetings in KP and his tone and tenor gave no sign of nervousness. Rather he was quite confident to win next elections in 2018 on the strength of his achievements and dismal performance of PTI in KP and PPP in Sindh. The govt side is of the view that there is no reason for IK to agitate when the Supreme Court has accepted his petition and NS has been summoned on account of Panama scandal. They say, PTI youth wing violated the curfew imposed under Section 144 CrPC and also defied Isbd High Court restraining order not to create mayhem. 
+Pervez Rashid was in bad books of IK and his colleagues due to his counter jibes whenever IK lambasted NS. But he was not the most sought target. His unceremonious exit or an in-house change doesn’t fulfil the ambition of IK to become the PM. He desires that NS should be booted out or he quits voluntarily irrespective of the fact that his name does not appear in the list of account holders in Off Shore Company. He has no idea what is in store for him if NS is forced to throw in his towel. In all likelihood, the ruckus in the aftermath of NS departure will drown IK’s ambitions. It cannot be denied that NS is still the most popular leader and he has many feathers in his cap. His 3 rd time premature boot out will make him a political martyr and will not be taken lightly by his fans in Punjab. Baluchistan govt and JUI-F would also not welcome his ouster particularly when he had presented him and his family for accountability and the matter was with the courts. 
+The situation will become ripe for chaos which outside powers have all along been trying to foment. The Army may have to grudgingly step in to restore semblance of order. In the wake of tense geo-political environment, terrorism, acute polarization, feudal mindset, partisanship, parochialism and secular-Islamic divide, it will not be possible for the Army to restore order and hold elections within three months as prescribed in the constitution. Supposedly, if elections do take place within 3 months, PML-N will surely win the race and perhaps PTI may lose KP as well. 
+Elections without reforms will otherwise be an exercise in futility. The Army will perforce have to stretch its rule to 3-5 years if not more to be able to take Operation Zarb-e-Azb, Rangers operation in Karachi, FC operation in Baluchistan and ongoing combing operation to their logical ends; to implement the National Action Plan in letter and spirit, and to complete the vital project of CPEC. Additionally it will have to carry out following reforms for a better morrow and for enabling environment for true democracy to flourish: 1. Electoral, political, police, bureaucracy, judicial, education, media reforms. 2. Breaking the nexus between crime, politics, terrorism and corruption. 3. Effective accountability system. 4. Cleansing the Aegean Stables. 
+All this will be possible only when there is strict martial law and politicians of all hues are kept at bay. Will this arrangement be acceptable to IK? If he is prepared to wait for 5 years, why not hold on for 1 ½ years and contest the 2018 elections and win the coveted crown!! Moreover, what is the guarantee that the Army will be able to put everything right since it was not able to do so in the past? Things may become messier. Memory of our people is very short lived. Soon they will forget the ills of NS and his good deeds will be recalled with fondness and the Army will be put on the mat with a vengeance as had happened during the four military rules. True to their tradition, anti-Pakistan foreign powers will be behind the anti-Army campaign. Political destabilization suit the conspirators since it makes it easier for them to exert pressure and dictate terms. It is indeed most unfortunate that our politicians are fighting for power among each other, while the media and so-called educated lot are supporting their favorite political leaders and feel no qualm in passing lecherous and insulting remarks against their opponents. Preferably, all our guns should be collectively firing at our enemies who are bent upon breaking up Pakistan. 
+The writer is a retired Brig, war veteran, defence analyst, columnist, author of 5 books, Vice Chairman Thinkers Forum Pakistan, DG Measac Research Centre, Member Executive Council PESS. asifharoonraja@gmail.com Related Posts:",FAKE
+9625,The Fix Is In: NBC Affiliate Accidentally Posts Election Results A Week Early: Hillary Wins Presidency 42% to Trump’s 40%,"NBC affiliate WRCB TV in Chattanooga, Tennessee has inadvertently posted election night results. The results page appears to be similar to what mainstream news networks display on election night, including Presidential and Congressional results, the popular vote count, electoral votes, and percentage of precincts reporting.
+The page, a screen shot of which has been sourced from internet archive site The Wayback Machine , is posted below and shows totals for the upcoming Presidential race. It announces Hillary Clinton as the winner.
+As Jim Stone notes, the page was pulled directly from the WorldNow.com content management platform utilized by major networks like NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox and appears to be a non-public staging area for news and election results.
+The original page has since been reset.
+( Click here for full size image ) 
+
+Though the results information appears on an FTP server at WorldNow.com, media companies like NBC’s WRCB TV utilize the platform, also know as “Frankly,” to power their news content. This can be verified directly a the WRCB web site by scrolling to the very bottom of the page footer which notes that it is, “Powered By Frankly.”
+In addition to national results, Jim Stone has identified another page at the WorldNow.com FTP server that appears to show the State-By-State Presidential election results. This page is also accessible in archive format at WayBack Machine with a line by line breakdown available at Stone’s website.
+Of interest is that the State-By-State results indicate a Hillary Clinton win in states like Texas (42% to 40%), Florida (44% to 40%) and Pennsylvania (44% to 40%) which have all been identified as states Clinton must steal to win the election .
+
+Do these latest election “results” confirm that the fix is in and the vote is rigged?
+If so, then we are no longer looking at an election where our votes will count, but rather, a selection where the winner is determined by those who count the votes.
+Related: 
+Will Barack Obama Delay Or Suspend The Election If Hillary Is Forced Out 
+“Executive Orders for Sale”: Leaked Email Shows Hillary Auctioning Off ‘Laws’ To The Highest Bidder 
+Watch This Incredible Video And Decide For Yourself: Did Hillary Clinton Cheat At The Last Debate By Using An Embedded Tablet Device In Her Podium? 
+Are you ready for the disaster that will follow this election? ",FAKE
+4411,Lynch schools the wingnuts: How the right tried — and failed — to wound Obama’s AG nominee,"By all accounts Loretta Lynch, president Obama’s choice to replace Eric Holder as attorney general, was very impressive in the first day of hearings. In fact, she was so impressive that even the right-wing bloggers at Powerline called her the Ernie Banks of nominees, which, judging from their eulogy for the real Ernie Banks, is very good indeed. But then they also said the committee was throwing softballs, so the metaphors got a little confusing.  It was a very good day for Loretta Lynch, much to their chagrin. She was appropriately confident, dignified and boring and thus made for a dull affair that was unlikely to derail her nomination.
+
+The second day of hearings, in which both Republicans and Democrats on the committee invited both people to testify, was a little bit more lively. We knew it would be when the committee announced their guests. The Democrats offered a group of former colleagues and law professors. The Republicans offered a couple of conservative law professors to denounce President Obama’s usurpation of democracy — and some far-right-wing activists to complain about being victimized.
+
+The first person to testify was someone who had never met or had any knowledge of Loretta Lynch. This was former reporter and current right-wing icon Sharyl Attkisson who told a harrowing story of harassment, including her questionable allegation that the government bugged her computer, obviously shocking the likes of Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch to the depth of their souls. It’s one thing for the government to relentlessly pursue reporters like James Risen who report serious and important stories. They wholeheartedly support the Justice Department in such cases. Attkisson, however, resigned from CBS News because she felt the entire network was biased in favor of the Obama administration and refused to allow her to pursue the scandals she just knew were there. (These were scandals like Benghazi and Fast and Furious — scandals that have been investigated approximately 756 times under every committee in the Congress and have turned up zilch.) Somehow they’ve managed to morph this professional dispute into a story of Attkisson being victimized by the authoritarian police state.
+
+It would have been interesting to hear testimony about the government’s pursuit of leaks and reporters over the past few years, which really is a scandal and which should form the basis of questioning for the new attorney general. But since both parties are generally in favor of this practice, that wasn’t to be. Instead the Republicans called one of their celebrity martyrs to testify about how hard it is for a conservative to live in this world.
+
+The next activist they called to testify about Loretta Lynch was a man who admittedly has absolutely no knowledge of her but had something to say about how Eric Holder was very mean to police officers around the country. He is an African-American sheriff from Wisconsin named David Clarke who up to this point is best known for his appearances on “Fox and Friends” in which he says things like, “the NAACP is nothing more than a propaganda entity for the left” and that the behavior of black people is the reason they are getting shot so often. He suggested that the federal government is waging a war on police and should butt out of local business.
+
+The final activist of the day was a citizen who has been working her heart out trying to protect our electoral system from the scourge of nonexistent voter fraud. That would be a woman named Catherine Englebrecht, who runs a far-right-wing group called True the Vote, which sends out groups of “observers” to African-American and Hispanic polling places to make sure they’re not stealing the votes of decent Americans. Upon Eric Holder’s resignation, her group put out a press release stating that Holder had carried out a “radical, racialist assault on voting rights.” She was there to complain about the Department of Justice failing to immediately interview her over the alleged IRS scandal and to excoriate them over the “nightmare of citizen targeting.” She then testified that Loretta Lynch was wrong in saying that laws had been passed throughout the South to prevent some people from voting. Sen. Jeff Sessions pointed out that an Alabama Tea Party leader had been victimized by the IRS and nobody at the IRS cares. Sen. Orrin Hatch expressed his deepest sympathy for what she’s been through and assured her that they were going to get to bottom of it. Her voice cracked with emotion as she said, “Thank you, sir.” This was the first committee hearing of the new Senate Judiciary Committee under GOP rule, a hearing to determine the fitness of a presidential nominee to the most powerful law enforcement office in the land, and they called a group of partisan crackpots and grass-roots loons to relitigate moldy pseudo-scandals and complain about nonexistent government persecution. And it’s not as if they couldn’t have found some real scandals to talk about. The Obama Justice Department is hardly perfect. But they are married to their Foxified version of reality and simply can’t see the forest for the trees. The whole spectacle was a nostalgic trip back in time to the days of Clinton madness when the judiciary committees were able to leverage any public hearing into a scandal fest. The press seems less inclined to go along these days, a fact that Sharyl Attkisson would surely attribute to its political bias. But the truth is that these “scandals” are just sad echoes of the scandal-mongering of the 1990s. The energy is gone, the issues seem pale and lifeless. Not that there was ever any “there” there, but they are now just going through the motions. But I hope Democrats don’t get too complacent. President Obama has never been able to get their scandal mojo rising. But there’s every reason to suspect that this is just an off-season workout for what they see as a return to the big leagues. If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency you can be sure there will be a return to the fiery investigations whenever the Republicans hold either house of Congress. And if history serves, the press will likely be eager to join the team. But this sad little show reveals just how much they are in need of some spring training. Loretta Lynch may be a genial public servant in the mold of Ernie Banks, but when it comes to scandal management, Clinton is Babe Ruth. They are going to need to up their game significantly.",REAL
+1754,"Yes, Ted Cruz could win","Conventional wisdom holds that Sen. Ted Cruz doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the GOP nomination, but I wouldn’t bet the ranch against him yet.
+
+His announcement at Liberty University was impressive, and he was passionate and precise in a 40-minute speech without notes or TelePrompter.
+
+A brilliant man of clear, conservative convictions, he is not muddled by the politics of calculation, which gives him an advantage in a big, wide-open field.
+
+To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.
+
+Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist.",REAL
+6872,"‘Can’t build a wall, hands too small!’ – NYC anti-Trump protest (Streamed live)","18 mins ago 3 Views 0 Comments 0 Likes It's fair to say, Europe's been shocked by Trump's   Europe's   Trump's   RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air      ",FAKE
+854,Trump advisors try to pivot not fishtail,"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+ 
+
+ Buzz Cuts:
+
+ • Trump advisors try to pivot not fishtail
+
+ • Indiana shaping up as do or die for Cruz
+
+ • What happened to working man’s liberalism?
+
+ • Pro-Clinton PAC spends $1 million to fight online trolling
+
+ • 10-point score
+
+TRUMP ADVISORS TRY TO PIVOT NOT FISHTAIL
+
+ HOLLYWOOD, FLA. – It’s a fine line between a general election shift and the dreaded ‘Etch A Sketch.’
+
+Donald Trump’s supporters give him broad latitude on issues and even his promise of an attitudinal change. For example, his suggestion that the Republicans should become a pro-choice party likely wrinkled few brows among his core supporters.
+
+The idea that Trump would change his attitude and approach along with his opinions wouldn’t trouble many who have faith in him as a man and a leader. For those who believe the Trump is the only person who can make America great again, putting on a new guise for the general election would be nothing troubling.
+
+Remember, these are people who believe him when he describes himself as the new Reagan and the person more presidential than anybody since Lincoln.
+
+But can Trump create a habitat that is healthy for both his backers and the kinds of folks that his newly expanded campaign are schmoozing here in Hollywood without further antagonizing the substantial chunk of his party that ranges from resentful to outright outraged about Trump’s surprising success in overtaking the GOP?
+
+Trump had a very good day here Thursday. Aside from turning back a Rules Committee vote that might’ve helped Sen. Ted Cruz win a floor fight at the convention, delegates and other members of the establishment were very impressed by Trump’s campaign’s effort to start sucking up to them.
+
+Promises of Trump’s flexibility when served alongside seafood platters and open bars from his new K Street handlers went a long way toward convincing the GOP elite that Trump is ready to play ball.
+
+Little could be more comforting to them than the pledge from Trump’s campaign boss that the wildness of the frontrunner to this point has been a put on.
+
+Consultants and party elders are not uncomfortable with the idea of tricking rubes or profit and or patriotism. And for those facing general election oblivion, anything that sounds like avoiding a savage showdown in Cleveland and not losing the general election by 40 states sounds good.
+
+But even if Trump and his new handlers can keep the GOP elite and his existing populist base happy, the current maneuvers do pose a risk.
+
+The most important thing for the Republican frontrunner right now is for his detractors and enemies on the conservative side of the party to just give up.
+
+There are enough Republicans who loathe Trump to still stop him. But they have to go vote and they have to be willing to blow up their conventions to do it.
+
+When Trump’s new Sherpa suggests that it has all been a fake so far, that gives new cause for alarm to the conservatives who already deeply mistrust Trump and see him as more of a Democrat than Republican.
+
+All Trump needs in order to win is for the resistance to just lay down for a couple of weeks. When they wake up it will all be over.
+
+But if Trump starts fishtailing in his turn towards conventionality it will reinvigorate the #NeverTrump movement.  
+
+ 
+
+ It’s great to suck up to the party, even belatedly, but doing in such a transparent manner could be hazardous to Trump’s nomination. 
+
+ 
+
+ [GOP delegate count: Trump 845; Cruz 559; Kasich 147 (1,237 needed to win)]
+
+Fox News Sunday: Trump’s new man - Mr. Sunday sits down with the Trump campaign’s new boss, Paul Manafort, to discuss the latest campaign news on the heels of the RNC’s spring meeting. “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace” airs at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. ET on the Fox News Channel. Check local listings for broadcast times in your area.
+
+ 
+
+ Indiana shaping up as do or die for Cruz - RCP: “Due to a dearth of public polling in Indiana, however, it’s not clear how large Cruz’s advantage might be, if he indeed has one. One recent private poll not affiliated with any of the presidential campaigns showed Cruz leading in two congressional districts, Kasich in one, and Trump dominating in two more. Three other congressional districts, meanwhile, showed Cruz and Kasich essentially tied…Although there are just 57 delegates at stake in Indiana, the contest is one of the few remaining wild cards on the primary map. If Cruz or Kasich do not win, the Republican race could quickly spiral out of their control. If Trump does not win Indiana, however, his delegate math becomes exceedingly difficult to win the nomination before Cleveland.”
+
+ 
+
+ Unpacking Trump’s health proposal - Health care policy expert, James Capretta, points out the flaws in Trump’s health care plan proposal: “Trump has said he wants to get rid of the entirety of the [Affordable Care Act], including subsidies for health insurance and its expansion of Medicaid. What does he propose instead to boost enrollment in health insurance by lower-income households? Essentially nothing.”
+
+ 
+
+ [Watch Fox: On Sunday, Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer host a town hall in Philadelphia with voters ahead of the crucial Pennsylvania primary. Tune in at 8 p.m. ET]
+
+ 
+
+ WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…
+
+ The passing of legendary pop star Prince on Thursday rocked the music industry in a way not seen since the passing of Michael Jackson. But the music revolutionary also had another passion in his life, one that Charlie Murphy was surprised by: Prince’s love of basketball. Time: “Back in October, Prince unexpectedly showed up to Target Center in Minneapolis to watch the fifth and deciding game the WNBA Finals, between the Lynx and the Indiana Fever. The Lynx won, 69-52, to clinch the series. The pop icon…approached a Lynx staffer with an incredible offer. The players, plus a guest, were invited to his Paisley Park compound for a private concert…He played ‘Purple Rain,’ ‘When Doves Cry,’ ‘1999,’ and some new stuff. He played different instruments throughout the evening — guitar, keyboards, drums. He played until 4 am; a few Lynx players and coaches danced on stage.”
+
+ 
+
+ Got a TIP from the RIGHT or the LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+ 
+
+ POLL CHECK
+
+ Real Clear Politics Averages
+
+ National GOP nomination: Trump 40.4 percent; Cruz 30.6 percent; Kasich 21.8 percent
+
+ National Dem nomination: Clinton 47.7 percent; Sanders 46.3 percent
+
+ General Election: Clinton vs. Trump: Clinton +9.3 points
+
+ Generic Congressional Vote: Democrats +1
+
+WHAT HAPPENED TO WORKING MAN’S LIBERALISM?
+
+ Vox’s Emmet Rensin takes a deep dive into a concept he dubs “smug style” liberalism in America and how the political concept changed from an ideology of the working class to that of the elite. How did this happen and what has the smug style done to American liberalism? This lengthy piece goes into the origins and results of the shift in American political thought:
+
+ 
+
+ “The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography. Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party…In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent…The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing…It is the smug style’s first premise: a politics defined by a command of the Correct Facts and signaled by an allegiance to the Correct Culture…So long as liberals cannot find common cause with the larger section of the American working class, they will search for reasons to justify that failure. They will resent them. They will find, over and over, how easy it is to justify abandoning them further.  They will choose the smug style.”
+
+ 
+
+ Pro-Clinton PAC spends $1 million to fight online trolling - Daily Beast: “Citing ‘lessons learned from online engagement with ‘Bernie Bros,’ a pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC is pledging to spend $1 million to ‘push back against’ users on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram. Correct the Record’s ‘Barrier Breakers’ project boasts in a press release that it has already ‘addressed more than 5,000 people that have personally attacked Hillary Clinton on Twitter.’ The PAC released this on Thursday.”
+
+Democrats shift from protecting to adjusting Obamacare - National Journal: “In in­ter­views, Sen­ate Demo­crats poin­ted to items like sort­ing out the ‘Ca­dillac tax,’ build­ing on de­liv­ery-sys­tem re­forms, mak­ing sure states are af­forded flex­ib­il­ity in the law, and more. The Demo­crat­ic pres­id­en­tial front-run­ner, Hil­lary Clin­ton, has based her own health plat­form on pro­tect­ing and build­ing on the Af­ford­able Care Act. Her pro­pos­als in­clude adding a new tax cred­it to help with ex­cess­ive out-of-pock­et med­ic­al costs, cap­ping monthly pre­scrip­tion-drug costs, and al­low­ing three free sick vis­its per year, to name a few.”
+
+#mediabuzz - Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer talk with host Howard Kurtz ahead of their Sunday town hall with voters in Philadelphia. Watch Sunday at 11 a.m. ET, with a second airing at 5 p.m.
+
+ 
+
+ [Dem delegate count: Clinton 1893; Sanders 1180 (2,383 needed to win)]
+
+ 
+
+ 10-POINT SCORE
+
+ BBC: “Tom Lo, 17, has told Newsbeat that he was about 10 minutes into the test when [a deer] ran across a road right in front of his car. ‘I was picking up speed because it was a 60mph zone and all of a sudden I see a deer in front of me…So I hit my brake but unfortunately the deer was killed,’ he says. It happened on a road near Colchester [England]. ‘I pulled over after the incident and my driving instructor had a look at the car and checked the deer…‘He said there was nothing we could do and that it wasn’t my fault, so I was told to continue my test.’ Amazingly, Tom passed the driving test with two minor faults.”
+
+ 
+
+ AND NOW A WORD FROM CHARLES…
+
+ “I mean do we really have an epidemic of transgenders being evil in bathrooms across the country? I haven’t heard of a single case…This is a very small problem at the edges of the other problem having to do with gender identity that’s become national precisely because Republicans of North Carolina decided it was a problem.” – Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier”
+
+Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Sally Persons contributed to this report. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+3137,"Christians drop, 'nones' soar in new religion portrait","WASHINGTON — The United States is a significantly less Christian country than it was seven years ago.
+
+That's the top finding — one that will ricochet through American faith, culture and politics — in the Pew Research Center's newest report, ""America's Changing Religious Landscape,"" released Tuesday.
+
+This trend ""is big, it's broad and it's everywhere,"" said Alan Cooperman, Pew's director of religion research.
+
+Christianity still dominates American religious identity (70%), but the survey shows dramatic shifts as more people move out the doors of denominations, shedding spiritual connections along the way.
+
+Atheists and agnostics have nearly doubled their share of the religious marketplace, and overall indifference to religion of any sort is rising as well. Only the historically black Protestant churches have held a steady grip through the years of change.
+
+Remember the familiar map of American religion? The South: A bastion of white evangelicals. The Northeast: Cradle of Catholics. The Midwest: Nest of Mainline Protestants. The West: Incubator of ""nones"" — people who claim no religious brand label.
+
+Well, scratch all that in the new topography.
+
+The shrinking numbers of Christians and their loss of market share is the most significant change since 2007 (when Pew did its first U.S. Religious Landscape survey) and the new, equally massive survey of 35,000 U.S. adults.
+
+The percentage of people who describe themselves as Christians fell about 8 points — from 78.4% to 70.6%. This includes people in virtually all demographic groups, whether they are ""nearing retirement or just entering adulthood, married or single, living in the West or the Bible Belt,"" according to the survey report.
+
+Massachusetts is down on Catholics by 10 percentage points. South Carolina is down the same degree on evangelicals. Mainline Protestants, already sliding for 40 years or more, declined all over the Midwest by 3 to 4 percentage points.The Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church, the country's two largest Protestant denominations, are each down roughly the same 1.4 to 1.5 percentage points.Every tradition took a hit in in the West as the number of people who claim no religious brand continues to climb.
+
+Christian faiths are troubled by generational change — each successive group is less connected than their parents — and by ""switching"" at all ages, the report shows. While nearly 86% of Americans say they grew up as Christians, nearly one in five (19%) say they aren't so anymore.
+
+""Overall, there are more than four former Christians for every convert to Christianity,"" said Cooperman.
+
+Although evangelicals are part of the decline, their slide has been less steep. They benefit from more people joining evangelical traditions, but they're hurt by generational change and by America's increased diversity.
+
+According to the survey, white ""born-again or evangelical"" Protestants — closely watched for their political clout within the GOP — now account for 19% of American adults, down slightly from 21% in 2007.
+
+Politicians should take note, said Mike Hout, a sociologist and demographer at New York University who is also a co-director of the General Social Survey.
+
+""Traditionally, we thought religion was the mover and politics were the consequence,"" he said. Today, it's the opposite.
+
+Many of today's formerly faithful left conservative evangelical or Catholic denominations because ""they saw them align with a conservative political agenda and they don't want to be identified with that,"" Hout said.
+
+Catholics dropped both in market share and in real numbers. Despite their high retention rate for people reared in the faith, they have a low conversion rate. Today, Cooperman said, 13% of U.S. adults are former Catholics, up from 10% in 2007.
+
+Generational shifts are also hurting Catholic numbers. Greg Smith, Pew's associate director of research, said ""just 16% of the 18-to-24-year-olds today are Catholic, and that is not enough to offset the numbers lost to the aging and switching.""
+
+Where are they going? To religious nowhere.
+
+The ""nones"" — Americans who are unaffiliated with brand-name religion — are the new major force in American faith. And they are more secular in outlook — and ""more comfortable admitting it"" than ever before, said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.
+
+Their growth spans the generations, as well as racial and ethnic groups, said Green, a senior fellow in religion and American politics for the Pew Research Center.
+
+""Nones,"" at 22.8% of the U.S. (up from 16% just eight years ago) run second only to evangelicals (25.4%) and ahead of Catholics (20.8%) in religious market share.
+
+The ""nones"" numbers are now big enough to show noteworthy diversity:
+
+Atheists rose from 1.6% to 3.1%, and agnostics from 2.4% to 4%. Combined, there are more ""nones"" than Evangelical Lutherans, United Methodists and Episcopalians all together.
+
+""It's because we're right,"" crowed David Silverman, president of American Atheists. He hadn't yet seen the Pew findings, but commented based on other surveys he said showed nones rising numbers. Indeed, it's the public attention given to ""nones"" in the last decade, combined with the wide-open access to anti-religious discussion on the Internet, that drives the change, Silverman said.
+
+""More people know the facts, and more people realize they are not alone,"" Silverman said. And with these shifts, the stigma of coming out as an atheist is lessening.
+
+""It's now impossible for an atheist to think he is alone in this world. They are automatically empowered,"" said Silverman.
+
+The bulk of the ""nones"" (15.8%, up from 12.1% in 2007) don't even commit to any view on God. Instead, they say they believe ""nothing in particular.""
+
+But among the ""nothings,"" there's a distinct split between ""spiritual"" and totally indifferent ""nones.""
+
+Thirty percent of all ""nones"" still showed ""a sort of religious pulse"" by saying that religion is still at least somewhat important to them, said Cooperman.
+
+However, the bulk of this group (39%) are not agnostic, atheist or vaguely spiritual — they're just not interested. Religion is not even somewhat important to them.
+
+That same level of disinterest cuts into their social and political clout, said Hout.
+
+The nothing-in-particular folks ""don't vote, don't marry and don't have kids,"" at the same rate as other Americans, said Hout. ""They are allergic to large, organized institutions — mass media, religions, big corporations, and political parties.""
+
+""None"" is the winning category for religious switchers across society, particularly among gay and lesbians — 41% of gay or lesbian Americans say they have no religion. Cooperman said. ""This suggests the degree of alienation and discomfort and sense of being unwelcome that they may have felt in traditional religious groups.""
+
+Intermarriage is rising with each generation. Among Americans who have gotten married since 2010, nearly four-in-ten (39%) report that they are in religiously mixed marriages, compared with 19% among those who got married before 1960, according to the report.
+
+There's an identity gender gap. Most Christians are women (55%) and most ""nones"" are men (57%). However, women's unbelief numbers are growing: nearly one in five (19%) now say they have no religious identity.Diversity makes a difference. Racial and ethnic minorities now make up 41% of Catholics (up from 35% in 2007), 24% of evangelicals (up from 19%) and 14% of mainline Protestants (up from 9%). ""The share of Americans who identify with non-Christian faiths also has inched up, rising 1.2 percentage points, from 4.7% in 2007 to 5.9% in 2014. Growth has been especially great among Muslims and Hindus,"" the report said.
+
+The latest survey was conducted among a nationally representative sample of 35,071 adults interviewed by telephone, on both cellphones and landlines, from June 4-Sept. 30, 2014. The margin of error on overall findings is plus or minus 0.6 percentage points.",REAL
+8643,Comment on Brother of Clinton’s Campaign Chair is an Active Foreign Agent on the Saudi Arabian Payroll by marlene,"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Claire Bernish 
+Tony Podesta — brother of the now-disgraced Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta , whose files Wikileaks has been publishing — is not only a powerful Democratic Party lobbyist, but a registered foreign agent receiving a hefty monthly paycheck from the nefarious government of Saudi Arabia. 
+No — as tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist as it might sound — that scenario is the absolute truth. 
+In 1988, John and Tony Podesta formed the Podesta Group and have used their bigwig party-insider status to lobby and influence government policies — while, at various times, simultaneously holding positions of power — which has created a number of glaring conflicts of interest. 
+According to the March 2016 filing made in accordance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, Tony Podesta is an active foreign agent of the Saudi government with the “ Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court ,” and acts as an officer of the Saudi Arabia account. 
+At this point, the web of pay-for-play between the Washington, political heavyweights, and foreign governments comes lurching into the spotlight. 
+For starters, the Podesta brothers’ lobbying firm receives $140,000 every month from the Saudi government, which, in no uncertain terms — and despite a status as privileged U.S. ally — wages a bloody campaign of censorship, murder, suppression, human rights abuse, and worse against its civilian population, while bombing hospitals, schools, and aid convoys in neighboring nations. 
+John Podesta previously served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, founded the think tank Center for American Progress (which oh-so-coincidentally touts the need to reframe Saudi Arabia’s hopelessly tarnished image), counseled President Obama, and now chairs Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
+Tony Podesta acts as a foreign agent for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — lobbying to influence government policy in favor of the Kingdom — while also contributing to and bundling for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
+Think about that for a moment. 
+One brother uses the influence of money to both affect United States foreign policy and infuse the Clinton campaign with cash — while the other wields the influence of power as a political insider for the same entities. 
+As the Washington Post reported months ago in July, Tony Podesta’s lobbying efforts “raised $268,000 for the campaign and $31,000 for the victory fund.” 
+“The Saudis hired the Podesta Group in 2015 because it was getting hammered in the press over civilian casualties from its airstrikes in Yemen and its crackdown on political dissidents at home, including sentencing blogger Raif Badawi to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for ‘insulting Islam,’” Alternet reported . “Since then, Tony Podesta’s fingerprints have been all over Saudi Arabia’s advocacy efforts in Washington DC. When Saudi Arabia executed the prominent nonviolent Shia dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, causing protests throughout the Shia world and inflaming sectarian divisions, The New York Times noted that the Podesta Group provided the newspaper with a Saudi commentator who defended the execution.” 
+Notably, the Saudis’ reputation has only worsened as further atrocities pile up — concerning not only a record number of barbaric beheadings this year, but suspiciously reckless and errant U.S.-backed coalition bombings of civilian sites in several regions of active conflict. 
+Additionally, Tony Podesta’s status as a registered foreign agent for Saudi Arabia is at least obliquely discussed in an email from April 15, 2015 — ironically revealed by Wikileaks’ publishing of his brothers personal communiques — in which former Clinton Foundation chief development officer and now campaign national finance director Dennis Cheng wrote to a small group of insiders: 
+“Hi all – we do need to make a decision on this ASAP as our friends who happen to be registered with FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] are already donating and raising. 
+“I do want to push back a bit (it’s my job!): I feel like we are leaving a good amount of money on the table (both for primary and general, and then DNC and state parties)… and how do we explain to people that we’ll take money from a corporate lobbyist but not them; that the Foundation takes $ from foreign govts but we now won’t. Either way, we need to make a decision soon.” 
+To which general counsel to the Clinton campaign, attorney Marc Elias, replied [all errors original and emphasis added], 
+“Responding to all on this. I was not on the call this morning, but I lean away from a bright line rule here. It seems odd to say that someone who represents Alberta, Canada can’t give, but a lobbyist for Phillip Morris can. Just as we vet lobbyists case by case, I would do the same with FARA. While this may lead to a large number of FARA registrants being denied, it would not be a flat our ban. A total ban feels arbitrary and will engender the same eye-rolling and ill will that it did for Obama.” 
+As the exchange continues, how to precisely handle the campaign’s image with potentially controversial donors — while, at all costs, maintaining the flow of cash — becomes even more apparent. As strategist and campaign manager Robby Mook responds, 
+“Where do we draw the line though?” 
+Elias suggests a particularly intricate solution: 
+“If we do it case by case, then it will be subjective. We would look at who the donor is and what foreign entity they are registered for. In judging whether to take the money, we would consider the relationship between that country and the United States, its relationship to the State Department during Hillary’s time as Secretary, and its relationship, if any, to the Foundation. In judging the individual, we would look at their history of support for political candidates generally and Hillary’s past campaigns specifically. 
+“Put simply, we would use the same criteria we use for lobbyists, except with a somewhat more stringent screen. 
+“As a legal matter, I am not saying we have to do this – we can decide to simply ban foreign registrants entirely. I’m just offering this up as a middle ground.” 
+Mook eventually decides plainly, 
+“Marc made a convincing case to me this am that these sorts of restrictions don’t really get you anything…that Obama actually got judged MORE harshly as a result. He convinced me. So…in a complete U-turn, I’m ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks. Are you guys ok with that?” 
+All of this political wrangling appears to have had the desired effect — despite increasing calls for the United States to either rein in or sever completely its support for the bloody Saudi regime — the U.S. approved a stunning $1.29 billion sale of smart bombs to the Kingdom in November 2015. 
+Tony Podesta’s specific contract with the government-run Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court, which will earn $1.68 million by year’s end, does, indeed, suggest the infusion of a pro-Saudi message into the U.S. media propaganda machine. 
+“Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington,” Sunlight Foundation spokesman Josh Stewart told the Washington Post . “That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying.” 
+That broader audience — the American public — has indeed been manipulated courtesy of at least the thoroughly-corrupt Clinton campaign if not surreptitiously by the Saudis, as well. 
+As The Free Thought Project has repeatedly reported , the evidence of collusion among the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the mainstream presstitutes is indisputable — including no less than 65 so-called journalists listed by name in various leaks as darlings of the campaign. 
+Although this level of corruption and collusion would be considered intolerable in nearly any other nation on the planet. And yet, at the center of this shit storm of contention is an official nominee for the White House — who will not be held responsible for any number of questionable and criminal acts. 
+The system isn’t rigged — it’s performing exactly as intended — and always will as long as the vote validates its existence. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+2010,Inside the Deliberations of a Hillary Clinton Campaign Launch,"Washington (CNN) This time eight years ago, when she first ran for president, Hillary Clinton was already officially a candidate.
+
+""I'm in it to win it,"" she said in a YouTube video posted on January 21, 2007.
+
+But even though a second Hillary Clinton for president campaign is all but certain, she and those close to her are debating when she should jump in the race, potentially delaying her entry by months.
+
+There is no waiting for Republicans, who are engaged in a furious behind-the-scenes scramble for advisers and donors. Mitt Romney, Republicans' nominee in 2012, announced Friday he would bow out after just three weeks on the presidential speculation treadmill. Three Republican senators, two current governors and one former governor have all made active moves toward campaigns.
+
+There could be ten or more Republican candidates by this summer. That might be when Hillary Clinton gets around to officially moving toward a campaign, if she heeds some confidantes, who are privately arguing for an announcement in July to coincide with the start of the third fundraising quarter. Delaying until the summer is an idea that is said to be gaining momentum against those who want to stick to the plan for an April start date.
+
+The possibility of the delay is very real but still unsettled.
+
+""I would say it's 40 percent,"" in the direction of those arguing for a delay, said one Democrat who supports a spring debut for Clinton's presidential campaign. Another Democrat who saw merits in both time lines put the odds of a delay at 50 percent.
+
+Democrats on both sides of the debate spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity so they could make their case without upsetting Clinton or those close to her for talking openly about internal deliberations.
+
+Some Clinton loyalists worry that as the increasingly crowded Republican race heats up, the attacks on her could begin to stick without an apparatus in place to answer them.
+
+The liberal superPAC American Bridge has been countering Republican attacks on Clinton's behalf but many Democrats think it's no substitute for a campaign messaging operation.
+
+""They're doing terrific research,"" said one, ""but they don't know what her specific policy agenda is going to be. She should get in and start putting together a substantive policy agenda so the attacks that are going to begin to come from every single Republican who is jumping in to the race can be answered.""
+
+The Democratic National Committee is beginning to take on a larger role in an effort to protect Clinton and the party brand but many Democrats are concerned even that won't be enough.
+
+Other supporters want Clinton to lay low as the Republican field heats up, convinced Clinton will avoid some fire if she's undeclared and GOP candidates will take aim at each other instead.
+
+""Never interrupt your opponent when it's destroying itself. That event in Iowa - nobody hated that more than [RNC chairman] Reince Priebus,"" said one Democrat, referring to the recent Iowa Freedom Summit, the first GOP cattle call for prospective candidates of many Republican presidential hopefuls (though noticeably neither Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney nor Rand Paul) attended. ""Let's get Sarah Palin out there, let's get Donald Trump out there - the whole clown car.""
+
+Some Democrats believe it's also in Clinton's best interest to wait until President Obama, whose approval ratings have begun to rebound, becomes more popular, since a campaign by his former secretary of state will undoubtedly be seen as an extension of his presidency. It's a view shared by many at the White House who eye the entry of Clinton into the 2016 contest as the beginning of Obama's lame duck phase.
+
+But if Clinton waits, she could run the risk of looking like she's taking the Democratic nomination for granted.
+
+""The American people don't like to see a candidate assume that something is theirs for the taking,"" warned one Clinton supporter.
+
+""If [Hillary Clinton] is trying to avoid a coronation it really is a terrible way to go about it. It sends a message that we don't have to campaign in the primaries."" said a Democratic operative in Iowa, who warned it leaves an opening. ""It really does require another candidate to fill that void""
+
+And so far, no one has.
+
+Vice President Joe Biden, former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, former Virginia Senator Jim Webb and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have all made the trek to Iowa in the last year, but none are being particularly agressive in recruiting staff or taking on Clinton.
+
+""O'Malley hired one staff member the other day and that's all anyone is talking about,"" said the Iowa operative of the unusually quiet political scene in the early state. ""It's kinda weird.""
+
+In 2008, Clinton's air of inevitability was off putting to many voters. Clinton and her advisers have been looking to avoid it this time around.
+
+But without an insurgent, Obama-like candidate waiting in the wings (Clinton insiders are now pretty much convinced that populist darling and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren won't run, despite initial concerns she could mount a serious challenge from the left), many loyalists argue Clinton is safe to wait.
+
+""If she's out there working hard, making her case, speaking to voters, that's what's going to matter,"" said a Washington-based Clinton backer who thinks a delayed campaign launch could benefit her.
+
+It won't benefit her campaign coffers, however.
+
+""Money will not flow until she's actually running,"" said one Democrat who cited powerful donor support for a Clinton run but acknowledged, ""People don't give that kind of money on speculation.""
+
+The numerous Clinton loyalists interviewed for this piece admit there are arguments for both timelines. But perhaps the most important factor in deciding when to jump in the race is Hillary Clinton's personal inclination to put off campaigning.
+
+The last time she ran for president, she entered the race in January 2006, almost two years before the election. The Democratic primary contest turned into a bruising slog that she is not eager to repeat.
+
+""You can't dance in that spotlight for two years,"" a Clinton loyalist said. ""She's not Rand Paul, she's the most famous woman on earth and every move is scrutinized.""",REAL
+9265,American Express disowns Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters because of pro-Palestinian views,"American Express disowns Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters because of pro-Palestinian views 11/03/2016 
+MONDOWEISS When it comes to aiding Israeli Apartheid, American Express is just another brick in The Wall, according to a new report. Roger Waters, lead singer behind Pink Floyd, lost a multimillion dollar American Express sponsorship for his 2017 US+Them tour after expressing solidarity this month with Palestinian students trying to end Israel’s apartheid system of military occupation using the same protest tactic that helped dismantle South African Apartheid (and, earlier, America’s Jim Crow): Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS. “I’m going to send out all of my most heartfelt love and support to all those young people on the campuses of the universities of California who are standing up for their brothers and sisters in Palestine and supporting the BDS movement,” Rogers said, according to CBS News , “in the hope that we may encourage the government of Israel to end the occupation.” American Express decided it would be a good idea to leak the cancellation of the contract to the New York Post , where Page Six’s Emily Smith has the exclusive story . “Roger is putting on a huge show. The company was asked to sponsor his tour for $4 million, but pulled out because it did not want to be part of his anti-Israel rhetoric,” an American Express spokesman told the paper. “We never committed to sponsoring Roger Waters’ upcoming tour. When we were approached with the options, we passed on making a bid.” American Express had helped sponsor Waters’ Oldchella Desert Trip festival (Coachella for the senior set featuring Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and the Rolling Stones) where he made the comments expressing support for human rights. But without anybody even asking them, American Express decided it had to go out of its way to bash Waters for “putting on a huge show.” Noteworthy about American Express’s decision is that it comes even as Waters included more mainstream political views, like featuring in the performance a line of children wearing shirts that said “Derriba el muro,” (Tear down the wall). He also showed Trump in a Klan outfit, and the show featured a floating pig balloon that calls the Republican candidate an “Ignorant, lying, racist, sexist pig,” CBS reported. Waters more mainstream kinds of leftist protest didn’t make up for his audacious display of solidarity with his fellow human beings living and dying under a ceaseless occupation. American Express has also sponsored Beyonce’s performances, where she has used art to make reference to police oppression of communities of color . But AmEx lost its nerve when Waters brought up Palestinian rights. According to the New York Post , Waters has known that there are consequences for standing up against the occupation, and that keeps others silent. “I have been accused of being a Nazi and an anti-Semite for the past 10 years. My industry has been particularly recalcitrant in even raising a voice [against Israel] . . . I’ve talked to a lot of them, and they are scared s – – tless. If they say something in public, they will no longer have a career. They will be destroyed,” he said, according to the Post. But Waters is already famous, and 75, so the stakes aren’t the same as for young artists. Update (11/1/16) This article originally quoted the New York Post as saying that Citi had assumed sponsorship of the tour after American Express dropped out, but after publication a representative of Citi contacted us with this clarification: In your article “ American Express disowns Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters because of pro-Palestinian views ”, it mentions that “Citibank grabbed the opportunity to sponsor one of the biggest and best acts of the 20th century.” However, Citi is not a sponsor of Roger Waters’ upcoming tour. Two weeks ago, Citi offered a limited time pre-sale of tickets for cardmembers for select shows, as we do for thousands of concerts by different artists every year. The pre-sale has ended and we have no plans to work with this artist in the future. 
+– See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/american-express-palestinian/#sthash.cGAw7DW9.dpuf",FAKE
+1109,Clinton condemns Trump over Chicago violence,"Clinton said at a campaign event outside St. Louis that the ""ugly, divisive rhetoric we are hearing from Donald Trump and the encouragement of violence and aggression is wrong, and it's dangerous.""
+
+""If you play with matches, you're going to start a fire you can't control,"" Clinton said about Trump at a caucus kick-off event at a local YMCA. ""That's not leadership. That's political arson. The test of leadership and citizenship is the opposite. If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. And if you see a bully, stand up to him.""
+
+Clinton acknowledged the ""anger"" that is motivating people on the left and the right of the political divide but said the way to bridge the gap ""is to stand together against the forces of division and discrimination that are trying to divide America between us and them.""
+
+Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, has made knocking Trump a regular part of her stump speech, blasting the businessman for comments he has made against Mexicans, women and Muslims. She regularly touts herself as the first candidate to call out his rhetoric.
+
+But at the outset of the Republican race, many inside Clinton's campaign saw Trump as an interesting sideshow, not someone who could credibly capture the Republican nomination. That has changed. Clinton's top aides now view Trump as the favorite to win the Republican nomination, and Clinton has started to go after the brash billionaire with more directness. ""You don't get the chance to make America great by getting rid of everything that made America great,"" Clinton said, parroting Trump's campaign slogan. ""No, our values, our diversity, our openness, these are strengths, not weaknesses.""",REAL
+3592,"In France, a growing debate over why some speech is protected and some isn’t","They tease terrorists. The prophet Muhammad cries. A devout Muslim woman shows some leg, and more. They take on Pope Francis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. There are nuns, priests, rabbis and imams. They laugh at death itself.
+
+The latest edition of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical newspaper attacked last week by Islamist extremists for lampooning the prophet Muhammad, became a symbol of freedom of expression as soon as it hit newsstands Wednesday — selling out millions of copies before dawn. Yet, in a country that mobilized Sunday by the millions in support of the paper’s right to mock, France also found itself facing a mounting debate over the limits of free speech within its borders.
+
+French authorities on Wednesday detained and charged a notorious comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, with “glorifying terrorism” for an ambiguous Facebook post Sunday that, to some, appeared to show support for the gunman who killed four people in a kosher market Friday.
+
+Since last week’s attacks, at least 54 people have faced similar charges — including several underage pranksters and drunken louts who were mouthing off. Authorities have used a beefed up anti-terrorism law passed last year to expedite their cases and issue harsher jail sentences — with one offender arrested Saturday already receiving a four-year sentence. The Justice Ministry has also issued fresh orders for prosecutors to crack down on “anti-Semitic and racist acts or speech.”
+
+Laurent Léger, an investigative journalist for Charlie Hebdo who survived the attack, said there was no comparing the newspaper to Dieudonné — a French showman of Cameroonian descent who popularized a Nazi-like salute and who jokes about the Holocaust.
+
+“Dieudonné does not know the Charlie spirit,” Léger said. “Charlie never glorified terrorism. Dieudonné is a bit too quick when he claims that his freedom of speech is being hampered. His attitude is just making things worse by continuing the confusion that is destroying this country.”
+
+Yet others disagreed, saying France was in danger of trouncing the very right it is aiming to protect: freedom of expression.
+
+“We can definitely talk about hypocrisy here,” said Adrienne Charmet, campaign coordinator for La Quadrature du Net, a Paris-based Internet rights group. “In the past days, we have seen a lot of people condemned for putting out words, no matter how condemnable those words, and receiving sentences that seem quite exaggerated.”
+
+“French opinion is split in two,” she added. “Some see it as the worst possible response to last week’s attack, because many of those who have said these things were drunk, or teenagers, who did not know the weight of their words. But there is another segment of the population that does agree, because they feel these people are making themselves accomplices to terror. Either way, this crackdown on freedom of speech is a betrayal of last Sunday’s march.”
+
+Charlie Hebdo was undoubtedly the hottest property in town Wednesday, with lines snaking for blocks as Parisians clamored for copies that sold out within minutes. An initial print run of 3 million copies was expanded to 5 million when kiosks across the country ran out.
+
+Surviving staff members, who worked day and night after the Jan. 7 attack to ensure the issue came out on time, produced the paper. With their offices still roped off as a crime scene, the staff worked out of a conference room at the left-wing daily Libération. The offices there are being guarded around the clock by an extraordinary number of police officers and private security guards.
+
+There was plenty inside the paper to stir controversy. The 16-page edition brims with the sort of irreverent, off-color humor that made Charlie famous — and infamous. No one is spared ridicule.
+
+In one cartoon, two hooded terrorists are pictured in heaven, with one asking the other, “Where are the virgins?”
+
+“They’re with the Charlie staff, loser,” his accomplice replies.
+
+Another pictures a harried and exhausted cartoonist hunched over his desk, with a caption that reads, “Cartooning at Charlie Hebdo, it’s 25 years of work.” The next panel shows hooded gunmen mowing people down with a Kalashnikov, accompanied by the words, “For a terrorist, it’s 25 seconds of work.”
+
+As ever with Charlie Hebdo, the goal is to provoke, to stir debate and to make people laugh — while also reminding anyone who might think otherwise that reading Charlie can be distinctly discomfiting.
+
+The paper’s lead editorial offers a vigorous defense of secular values, saying that staffers laughed when they heard that the bells of the Cathedral of Notre Dame would ring in their honor.
+
+“The millions of anonymous people, all the institutions, all the world leaders, all the politicians, all the intellectuals and media figures, all the religious dignitaries who proclaimed this week that ‘I am Charlie’ need to also know that that means, ‘I am secularism,’ ” the editorial says.
+
+Delphine Ravion-Casalta, 39, spent an hour and a half visiting three newsstands Wednesday morning before she found her Charlie. She sipped coffee at a cafe, her copy proudly spread out before her, eagerly taking in every word.
+
+“In France, we’re still fighting for our freedom,” she said. “We had revolution for our freedom. A lot of revolutions. And great men like Voltaire and Rousseau. The fight for those ideas continues.”
+
+The rush for copies of Charlie Hebdo came as French authorities detained and charged Dieudonné, 48. After the unity march that brought 1.5 million people onto the streets of Paris on Sunday, the comedian wrote: “After this historic, no legendary, march, a magic moment equal to the Big Bang which created the Universe, or in a smaller way comparable to the crowning of the [ancient king] Vercingétorix, I am going home. Let me say that this evening, as far as I am concerned, I feel I am Charlie Coulibaly.”
+
+Charlie Coulibaly is a reference to both Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four people in a Paris kosher market on Friday. The comedian, in a second Facebook post Monday, sought to clarify his remark, saying his purpose was “to make people laugh, and to laugh at death, since death makes fun of us all, as Charlie very well knows.” He concluded by saying, “They consider me to be Amedy Coulibaly when I am no different from a Charlie.”
+
+Valls, speaking in the National Assembly, sought to draw a distinction between the creative caricatures of Charlie Hebdo and the comedian’s hate-based humor, while insisting that France was not compromising freedom of speech.
+
+“There is a fundamental difference between the freedom to be impertinent, and anti-Semitism, racism, glorification of terrorist acts and Holocaust denial, all of which are offenses, all of which are crimes, that justice should punish with the most severity,” he said.",REAL
+5468,President-Elect Donald Trump's First Televised Interview Since He Won the Election     : Information," President-Elect Donald Trump's First Televised Interview Video CBS 60 Minutes Trump Talks Wall, Deportations, Roe v. Wade, and Clinton’s Future in 60 Minutes Interview. November 14, 2016 Audio
+Lesley Stahl: Well, congratulations, Mr. Trump.
+Donald Trump: Thank you.
+Lesley Stahl: You’re president-elect.
+Donald Trump: Thank you.
+Lesley Stahl: How surprised were you?
+Donald Trump: Well, I really felt we were doing well. I was on a string of about 21 straight days of speeches, sometimes many a day and the last two days I really-- I really had a pretty wild time. I did six speeches and then I did seven and--
+Lesley Stahl: But everyone thought you were going to lose.
+Donald Trump: I know, I did my final speech in Michigan at 1:00 in the morning and we had 31,000 people, many people outside of the arena. And I felt-- when I left, I said, “How are we gonna lose?” We set it up a day before. And we had all of these people. And it was literally at 1:00 in the morning and I said, “This doesn’t look like second place.” So we were really happy, I mean, it was-- these are great people.
+Lesley Stahl: On election night, I heard you went completely silent. Was it a sort of realization of the enormity of this thing for you?
+ Donald Trump: I think so, it’s enormous. I’ve done a lotta big things, I’ve never done anything like this. It is so big, it is so-- it’s so enormous, it’s so amazing.
+ Lesley Stahl: It kind of just took your breath away? Couldn’t talk?
+Donald Trump: A li-- a little bit, a little bit. And I think-- I realized that this is a whole different life for me now.
+Lesley Stahl: Hillary called you. Tell us about that phone call.
+Donald Trump: So Hillary called and it was a lovely call and it was a tough call for her, I mean, I can imagine. Tougher for her than it would have been for me. And for me, it would have been very, very difficult. She couldn’t have been nicer. She just said, “Congratulations, Donald, well done.” And I said, “I want to thank you very much, you were a great competitor.” She is very strong and very smart.
+Lesley Stahl: What about Bill Clinton? Did you talk to him?
+Donald Trump: He did, he called the next day.
+Lesley Stahl: Really? What did he say?
+Donald Trump: He actually called last night.
+Lesley Stahl: What did he say?
+Donald Trump: And he-- he couldn’t have been more gracious. He said it was an amazing run. One of the most amazing he’s ever seen.
+Lesley Stahl: He said that.
+Donald Trump: He was very, very-- really, very nice.
+Lesley Stahl: It was a pretty nasty campaign. Do you regret any of the things you said about her?
+Donald Trump: Well, it was a double-side nasty.
+Donald Trump: I mean they were tough and I was tough and-- do I regret? I mean, I’m sitting here with you now and we’re gonna do a great job for the country. We’re going to make America great again, I mean, that’s what-- it-- it began with that and that’s where we are right now. There are so many--
+Lesley Stahl: So no-- no regrets about--
+Donald Trump: I can’t regret. No-- I wish it were softer, I wish it were nicer, I wish maybe even it was more on policy, or whatever you want to say. But-- but I will say that-- it really-- it really is something that I’m very proud of I mean it was a tremendous campaign.
+Lesley Stahl: Can we talk about yesterday with President Obama?
+Donald Trump: Sure.
+Lesley Stahl: 90 minutes. You were scheduled for what? 15?
+Donald Trump: 15 max.
+[Barack Obama: We talked about foreign policy, we talked about domestic policy.]
+Donald Trump: This was just going to be a quick little chat and it lasted close to an hour and a half. And it could have gone on for four hours. I mean it was-- just-- in fact, it was almost hard breaking it up because we had so many things to say. And he told me-- the good things and the bad things, there are things that are tough right now--
+Lesley Stahl: Like what?
+Donald Trump: Well
+Lesley Stahl: Give us some meat.
+Donald Trump: Well, look I don’t want to divulge, but we talked about the Middle East, that’s tough. It’s a tough situation. I wanted to get his full view and I got his, you know I got a good part of his view.
+Lesley Stahl: Uh-huh.
+Donald Trump: And I like having that because I’m going to be inheriting that in a short period of time. I found him to be terrific. I found him to be-- very smart and very nice. Great sense of humor, as much as you can have a sense of humor talking about tough subjects, but we were talking about some pretty tough subjects.
+Donald Trump:–and we were talking about some victories, also, some things that-- that he feels very good about. But--
+Lesley Stahl: Like--
+Donald Trump: Well, what I really wanted to focus on was-- the Middle East, North Korea, Obamacare is tough. You know, healthcare is a tough situation.
+Lesley Stahl: Oh, I bet he asked you not to undo it.
+Donald Trump: Well, he didn’t ask me, no, he told me-- you know, the merits and the difficulties. And we understand that.
+Lesley Stahl: You looked pretty sober sitting there in the Oval Office, did something wash over you or--
+Donald Trump: No, I think I’m a sober person. I think the press tries to make you into something a little bit different. In my case, a little bit of a wild man. I’m not. I’m actually not. I’m a very sober person. But it was respect for the office, it was respect for the president. Again, I never met him before, but we had-- we had a very good chemistry going. And-- and I really found—it might not be that I agree with him, but I really found the conversation unbelievably interesting.
+[Barack Obama: I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President-elect, that we now are gonna want to do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed then the country succeeds.]
+Lesley Stahl: Was it at all awkward, at all, given what you’ve said about each other? You said he was not born in this country, he said things about you, he said you’re-- unqualified--
+Donald Trump: You know what, it was a very-- it was a very interesting thing because-- I mean, few people have asked me from my family, what was that first period of time like?
+Lesley Stahl: Yeah.
+Donald Trump: We never discussed what was said about each other. I said terrible things about him, he said terrible things about me. We never ever discussed what we said about each other—
+Lesley Stahl: There was no awkwardness?
+Donald Trump: I’ll be honest, from my standpoint zero, zero. And that’s strange. I’m actually surprised to tell you that. It’s-- you know, a little bit strange.
+[Donald Trump: Thank you, sir.]
+Lesley Stahl: Do you think that-- that your election is a repudiation of his presidency?
+Donald Trump: No, I think it’s a moment in time where politicians for a long period of time have let people down. They’ve let ‘em down on the job front. They’ve even let ‘em down in terms of the war front. You know, we’ve been fighting this war for 15 years--
+Lesley Stahl: This was the message of your campaign.
+Donald Trump: We’ve spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, $6 trillion, we could have rebuilt our country twice. And you look at our roads and our bridges and our tunnels and all of the-- and our airports are, like, obsolete. And I think it was just a repudiation of what’s been taking place over a longer period of time than that.
+Lesley Stahl: You know, you surprised everyone by winning the primaries, beating 17 other Republicans or 16, whatever-- people are really surprised that you won this election. Are people going to be surprised about how you conduct yourself as president?
+Donald Trump: You know, I’ll conduct myself-- in a very good manner, but depends on what the situation is, sometimes you have to be rougher. When I look at-- when I look at the world and you look at how various places are taking advantage of our country, and I say it, and I say it very proudly, it’s going to be America first. It’s not going to be what we’re doing—we, we’ve lost-- we’re losing this country. We’re losing this country. That’s why I won the election. And by the way, won it easily, I mean I won easily. That was big, big.
+ Lesley Stahl: Are you going to sometimes have that same rhetoric that you had on the stump? Or are you going to reign it in?
+ Donald Trump: Well, sometimes you need a certain rhetoric to get people motivated. I don’t want to be just a little nice monotone character and in many cases I will be.
+Lesley Stahl: Can you be?
+Donald Trump: Sure I can. I can be easily, that’s easier. Honestly to do that, it’s easier.
+Lesley Stahl: So let’s go through very quickly some of the promises you made and tell us if you’re going to do what you said or you’re going to change it in any way. Are you really going to build a wall?
+ Donald Trump: Yes.
+Lesley Stahl: They’re talking about a fence in the Republican Congress, would you accept a fence?
+Donald Trump: For certain areas I would, but certain areas, a wall is more appropriate. I’m very good at this, it’s called construction.
+Lesley Stahl: So part wall, part fence?
+Donald Trump: Yeah, it could be – it could be some fencing.
+Lesley Stahl: What about the pledge to deport millions and millions of undocumented immigrants?
+Donald Trump: What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally. After the border is secured and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that you’re talking about who are terrific people, they’re terrific people but we are gonna make a determination at that-- But before we make that determination-- Lesley, it’s very important, we want to secure our border.
+[Paul Ryan: We had a fantastic, productive meeting.]
+Lesley Stahl: So you were with Paul Ryan, you met with the Republican leadership, what was the-- one thing that you all agreed you want to get done right away?
+Donald Trump: Well, I would say there was more than one thing, there were three things, it was healthcare, there was immigration and there was a major tax bill lowering taxes in this country. We’re going to substantially simplify and lower the taxes--
+Lesley Stahl: And you’ve got both Houses?
+Donald Trump: And I have both Houses and we have the presidency, so we can do things--
+Lesley Stahl: You can do things lickety-split.
+Donald Trump: It’s been a long time since it’s happened.
+Donald Trump: And they gave me a lot of credit. Don’t forget, I was abused four or five weeks ago, they said I was going to-- instead of having all three, we would lose all three. So that was good. But those are the three things that we really discussed.
+Lesley Stahl: You said that lobbyists owned politicians because they give them money.
+Donald Trump: Yeah.
+Lesley Stahl: You admitted you used to do it yourself. You have a transition team—
+Donald Trump: And when you say lobbyists, lobbyists and special interests.
+ Lesley Stahl: And you want to get rid of all of that?
+ Donald Trump: I don’t like it, no.
+ Lesley Stahl: You don’t like it, but your own transition team, it’s filled with lobbyists.
+ Donald Trump: That’s the only people you have down there.
+ Lesley Stahl: You have lobbyists from Verizon, you have lobbyists from the oil gas industry, you have food lobby.
+Donald Trump: Sure. Everybody’s a lobbyist down there--
+ Lesley Stahl: Well, wait
+ Donald Trump: That’s what they are. They’re lobbyists or special interests—
+Lesley Stahl: On your own transition team.
+ Donald Trump:–we are trying to clean up Washington. Look--
+ Lesley Stahl: How can you claim--
+ Donald Trump: Everything, everything down there-- there are no people-- there are all people that work -- that’s the problem with the system, the system. Right now, we’re going to clean it up. We’re having restrictions on foreign money coming in, we’re going to put on term limits, which a lot of people aren’t happy about, but we’re putting on term limits. We’re doing a lot of things to clean up the system. But everybody that works for government, they then leave government and they become a lobbyist, essentially. I mean, the whole place is one big lobbyist.
+Lesley Stahl: But you’re, but you’re basically saying you have to rely on them, even though you want to get rid of them?
+Donald Trump: I’m saying that they know the system right now, but we’re going to phase that out. You have to phase it out.
+ Lesley Stahl: Let’s talk about your cabinet.
+ Donald Trump: OK.
+ Lesley Stahl: Have you made any decisions?
+ Donald Trump: Yes.
+Lesley Stahl: Tell us.
+Donald Trump: Well, I can’t tell you that, but I have made--
+Lesley Stahl: Oh, come on—
+Donald Trump: You know the amazing thing to show you the incredible nature of our country. First of all, every major leader and probably less than major le- has called me, I’ve spoken to many of them and I’ll call the rest of them, but and I said, “Boy, this really shows you how powerful our country is.” France and U.K. and I mean everybody, all over Asia—and very, just to congratulate. But it really shows the power of our country.
+Lesley Stahl: One of the things you’re going to obviously get an opportunity to do, is name someone to the Supreme Court. And I assume you’ll do that quickly?
+Donald Trump: Yes. Very important.
+Lesley Stahl: During the campaign, you said that you would appoint justices who were against abortion rights. Will you appoint-- are you looking to appoint a justice who wants to overturn Roe v. Wade?
+Donald Trump: So look, here’s what’s going to happen-- I’m going to-- I’m pro-life. The judges will be pro-life. They’ll be very—
+Lesley Stahl: But what about overturning this law--
+Donald Trump: Well, there are a couple of things. They’ll be pro-life, they’ll be-- in terms of the whole gun situation, we know the Second Amendment and everybody’s talking about the Second Amendment and they’re trying to dice it up and change it, they’re going to be very pro-Second Amendment. But having to do with abortion if it ever were overturned, it would go back to the states. So it would go back to the states and--
+ Lesley Stahl: Yeah, but then some women won’t be able to get an abortion?
+ Donald Trump: No, it’ll go back to the states.
+Lesley Stahl: By state—no some --
+ Donald Trump: Yeah.
+ Donald Trump: Yeah, well, they’ll perhaps have to go, they’ll have to go to another state.
+ Lesley Stahl: And that’s OK?
+Donald Trump: Well, we’ll see what happens. It’s got a long way to go, just so you understand. That has a long, long way to go.
+ Lesley Stahl: Are you in any way intimidated, scared about this enormous burden, the gravity of what you’re taking on?
+ Donald Trump: No.
+ Lesley Stahl: Not at all?
+ Donald Trump: I respect it. But I’m not scared by it.
+Lesley Stahl: Now you’re not scared, but there are people, Americans, who are scared and some of them are demonstrating right now, demonstrating against you, against your rhetoric--
+Donald Trump: That’s only because they don’t know me. I really believe that’s only because--
+Lesley Stahl: Well, they listened to you in the campaign and that’s--
+Donald Trump: I just don’t think they know me.
+ Lesley Stahl: Well, what do you think they’re demonstrating against?
+Donald Trump: Well, I think in some cases, you have professional protesters. And we had it-- if you look at WikiLeaks, we had--
+ Lesley Stahl: You think those people down there are—
+ Donald Trump: Well Lesley—
+ Lesley Stahl: are professional?
+ Donald Trump: Oh, I think some of them will be professional, yeah--
+Lesley Stahl: OK, but what about – they’re in every city.
+Lesley Stahl: When they demonstrate against you and there are signs out there, I mean, don’t you say to yourself, I guess you don’t, you know, do I have to worry about this? Do I have to go out and assuage them? Do I have to tell them not to be afraid? They’re afraid.
+ Donald Trump: I would tell them don’t be afraid, absolutely.
+Lesley Stahl: But that’s not what you’re saying, I said it-
+ Donald Trump: Oh, I think, no, no, I think-- I am saying it, I’ve been saying it.
+ Lesley Stahl: OK.
+Donald Trump: Don’t be afraid. We are going to bring our country back. But certainly, don’t be afraid. You know, we just had an election and sort of like you have to be given a little time. I mean, people are protesting. If Hillary had won and if my people went out and protested, everybody would say, “Oh, that’s a terrible thing.” And it would have been a much different attitude. There is a different attitude. You know, there is a double standard here.
+It has been five full days since the election and anti-Trump demonstrations, driven in part by Hillary Clinton’s edge in the popular vote, have been significant.
+When we interviewed him on Friday afternoon Mr. Trump said he had not heard about some of the acts of violence that are popping up in his name or against his supporters.
+Nor he said had he heard about reports of racial slurs and personal threats against African Americans, Latinos and gays by some of his supporters.
+Donald Trump: I am very surprised to hear that-- I hate to hear that, I mean I hate to hear that--
+Lesley Stahl: But you do hear it?
+Donald Trump: I don’t hear it—I saw, I saw one or two instances
+Lesley Stahl: On social media?
+Donald Trump: But I think it’s a very small amount. Again, I think it’s--
+Lesley Stahl: Do you want to say anything to those people?
+Donald Trump: I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, ‘cause I’m gonna bring this country together.
+ Lesley Stahl: They’re harassing Latinos, Muslims--
+Donald Trump: I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, “Stop it.” If it-- if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: Stop it.
+During the campaign Mr. Trump said he would appoint a special prosecutor to look into Hillary Clinton’s email issue.
+So we asked him if he plans to carry that out.
+That part of the interview and a discussion with the next first lady, Melania Trump, when we come back.
+On Friday, Donald Trump announced that he was changing the head of his transition team. Governor Chris Christie was replaced by Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Mr. Trump also added his three older children to the transition team.
+Between now and Inauguration Day, the team must fill the new administration with 4,000 political appointees. That’s 4,000 new hires in just nine weeks.
+When we talked to Donald Trump on Friday, the enormity and gravity of his new role was just sinking in. He was subdued. We wondered if as president he planned to temper his rhetoric, lower the flame.
+Lesley Stahl: I want to ask you about the tweet that you put out, I think it was last night or the night before, about these demonstrators.
+Donald Trump: Yeah.
+Lesley Stahl: You said that they were professionals—and you said it was unfair.
+Donald Trump: I said some of them. Some of them are --
+Lesley Stahl: But are you going to be tweeting and whatever you’re upset about just put out there when you’re president?
+Donald Trump: So it’s a modern form of communication, between Face-- you know, Facebook and Twitter and I guess Instagram, I have 28 million people. 28 million people--
+Lesley Stahl: So you are going to keep it up?
+Donald Trump: It’s a great form of communication. Now, do I say I’ll give it up entirely and throw out, that’s a tremendous form-- I pick up-- I’m picking up now, I think I picked up yesterday 100,000 people. I’m not saying I love it, but it does get the word out. When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story or when somebody other than you and another network, or whatever, ‘cause of course, CBS would never do a thing like that right? I have a method of fighting back. That’s very tough--
+Lesley Stahl: But you’re going to do that as president?
+Donald Trump: I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all, I’m going to do very restrained. I find it tremendous. It’s a modern form of communication. There should be nothing you should be ashamed of. It’s-- it’s where it’s at. I-- I do believe this, I really believe that, um-- the fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera, I think it helped me win all of these races where they’re spending much more money than I spent. You know, I spent my money. A lot of my money. And I won. I think that social media has more power than the money they spent, and I think maybe to a certain extent, I proved that.
+Lesley Stahl: Are you going to ask for a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton over her emails? And are you, as you had said to her face, going to try and put her in jail?
+Donald Trump: Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to think about it. Um, I feel that I want to focus on jobs, I want to focus on healthcare, I want to focus on the border and immigration and doing a really great immigration bill. We want to have a great immigration bill. And I want to focus on all of these other things that we’ve been talking about.
+Lesley Stahl: You-- you know, you--
+Donald Trump: And get the country straightened away.
+Lesley Stahl: You called her “crooked Hillary,” said you wanted to get in jail, your people in your audiences kept saying, “Lock em’ up.”
+Donald Trump: Yeah. She did--
+Lesley Stahl: Do you—
+Donald Trump: She did some bad things, I mean she did some bad things--
+Lesley Stahl: I know, but a special prosecutor? You think you might
+Donald Trump: I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want to hurt them. They’re, they’re good people. I don’t want to hurt them. And I will give you a very, very good and definitive answer the next time we do 60 Minutes together.
+With that
+[Donald Trump: You look great, honey.]
+We were joined by the next first lady, Melania Trump. She’ll be only the second foreign-born first lady. She’s from Slovenia. John Quincy Adams’ wife Louisa was the first.
+Lesley Stahl: You know, I asked your husband if he was at all intimidated and scared about what lies ahead. The enormity. You’re about to be first lady. Are you a little nervous about it? Little tense? A little--
+Melania Trump: Well, there is a lot of responsibilities. And it’s-- a lot of work needs to be done. And-- it’s-- your-- stuff on your shoulders. And-- we will take care of it-- day by day. I will stay true to myself. I’m very strong and um-- tough and confident. And I will listen myself and I will do what is right and what feels to my heart.
+Lesley Stahl: What kind of a first lady do you think she’s going to be?
+Donald Trump: She will be terrific. She is very strong and very confident, but she’s very warm. And I think she’ll have a platform where she’ll really be able to do a lot of good. And that’s what she wants to do.
+Lesley Stahl: You know, first ladies usually have a cause. And you’ve already said you’re interested in speaking out against bullying on social media.
+Melania Trump: I think it’s very important because a lot of children and teenagers are getting hurt. And we need to teach them how to talk to each other, how to treat each other and to, to be able to connect with each other on the right way.
+It’s an ironic choice since her own husband sent out a stream of pretty nasty tweets during the campaign.
+Lesley Stahl: What about your husband’s tweeting?
+Melania Trump: Well, sometimes he-- it got him in trouble. But it helped a lot as well. He had unbelievable following.
+Lesley Stahl: So you never say to him, “Come on”?
+Melania Trump: I did.
+Donald Trump: She does--
+Melania Trump: I--
+Melania Trump: You know, of course, I did many times, from the beginning of the campaign. But
+Lesley Stahl: Does he listen to you?
+Melania Trump: Sometimes he listens, sometimes he doesn’t--
+Donald Trump: I’m not a big tweeter. I mean, I don’t do too many, but they hit home. And they have to get a point across.
+Lesley Stahl: If he does something that you think crossed a line, will you tell him?
+Melania Trump: Yes, I tell him all the time.
+Lesley Stahl: All the time?
+Melania Trump: All the time.
+Lesley Stahl: And does--
+Melania Trump: And--
+Lesley Stahl: --he listen? Does he--
+Melania Trump: I think he hears me. But he will do what he wants to do on the end. He’s an adult. He knows the consequences. And I give him my opinion. And he could do whatever he likes with it.
+Lesley Stahl: Did you ask Melania sort of, for permission, in a way, to run for president? Did you get her approval?
+Donald Trump: Well, I actually sat down with Melania and my whole family and we talked about it. Don, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany. Barron to a lesser extent, but Barron too. Um, because in a way he’s affected every bit as much. Maybe more.
+Lesley Stahl: Maybe more.
+Donald Trump: And so we all had a dinner and I said, “I would like to do this. I think I can do a great job.” And I wanted to get, number one, a consensus and number two, ideally, their permission. And they all agreed.
+Lesley Stahl: Your son Barron, what is he, 10?
+Melania Trump: 10.
+Lesley Stahl: 10. He was on camera the whole time you were giving your acceptance speech. Does he get it? Does he know?
+Melania Trump: He knows. He knows--
+Lesley Stahl: He knows?
+Melania Trump: --what’s going on. And, he’s very proud of his dad.
+Lesley Stahl: Now-- you met with Michelle Obama yesterday. Was there any awkwardness, given--
+Melania Trump: No.
+Lesley Stahl: --what everybody was saying about everybody in the campaign?
+Melania Trump: No. I didn’t feel it.
+Lesley Stahl: Not at all?
+Melania Trump: No.
+Lesley Stahl: Tell us about the meeting.
+Melania Trump: Yes, she was a gracious host. We had a great time and we talk about raising children in the White House. She was very warm and very nice.
+Lesley Stahl: You know, she raised the two kids in the White House. But she had her mother living there. That’s an enormous help. Your parents are here, right?
+Melania Trump: They’re here.
+Lesley Stahl: Will they go to Washington with you?
+Melania Trump: They might. We will see. We will discuss that.
+Lesley Stahl: Are you prepared, both of you, for the lack of privacy and the intense scrutiny? And you know, first ladies are really criticized if one little hair’s out of place. Are you both prepared for this?
+Melania Trump: We are used to it.
+Donald Trump: I will say, it is on a different scale now, ‘cause I’ve had a lot. But I’ve never had anything like this.
+Lesley Stahl: You won’t be able to walk down the street--
+Melania Trump: I didn’t do that for two years already, so you know, it will just continue. It’s another level, but it will continue.
+At that point, the discussion turned back to some of the thornier issues Mr. Trump faces.
+Lesley Stahl: FBI director James Comey. Are you going to ask for his resignation?
+Donald Trump: I think that I would rather not comment on that yet. I don’t-- I haven’t made up my mind. I respect him a lot. I respect the FBI a lot. I think --
+Lesley Stahl: Even though they leak so much?
+Donald Trump: Well, there’s been a lotta leaking, there’s no question about that. But I would certainly like to talk to him. And see him. This is a tough time for him. And I would like to talk to him before I’d answer a question like that.
+Lesley Stahl: Sounds like you’re not sure.
+Donald Trump: Well, sure, I’m not sure. I’d wanna see, you know, he may have had very good reasons for doing what he did.
+Lesley Stahl: Are you gonna release your tax returns?
+Donald Trump: At the appropriate time, I will release them. But right now I’m under routine audit. Nobody cares. The only one who cares is, you know, you and a few people that asked that question. Obviously, the public didn’t care because I won the election very easily. So they don’t care. I never thought they did care.
+Lesley Stahl: Now, for months, you were running around saying that the system is rigged, the whole thing was rigged. You tweeted once that the Electoral College is a disaster for democracy.
+Donald Trump: I do.
+Lesley Stahl: So do you still think it’s rigged?
+Donald Trump: Well, I think the electoral ca-- look, I won with the Electoral College.
+Lesley Stahl: Exactly.But do you think--
+Donald Trump: You know, it’s--
+Lesley Stahl: --it’s rigged?
+Donald Trump: Yeah, some of the election locations are. Some of the system is. I hated--
+Lesley Stahl: Even though you won you’re saying that--
+Donald Trump: I hated-- well, you know, I’m not going to change my mind just because I won. But I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win. There’s a reason for doing this because it brings all the states into play. Electoral College and there’s something very good about that. But this is a different system. But I respect it. I do respect the system.
+Lesley Stahl: What about vacations? You’re not going to take any vacations? You’ve said that.
+Donald Trump: We have so much work. There’s so much work to be done. And I want to get it done for the people. I want to get it done. We’re lowering taxes, we’re taking care of health care. I mean, there’s just so much to be done. So I don’t think we’ll be very big on vacations, no.
+Lesley Stahl: Are you gonna take the salary, the president’s salary?
+Donald Trump: Well, I’ve never commented on this, but the answer is no. I think I have to by law take $1, so I’ll take $1 a year. But it’s a -- I don’t even know what it is.
+Donald Trump: Do you know what the salary is?
+Lesley Stahl: $400,000 you’re giving up.
+Donald Trump: No, I’m not gonna take the salary. I’m not taking it.
+In a moment, the Trump children join us and we will ask the president-elect where he stands on gay marriage, Obamacare, and ISIS.
+On Tuesday, Donald Trump reached deep into America’s ranks of the discouraged and neglected, a largely white constituency. They feel their America hasn’t been great for a long time. And they accepted a promise to make it great again.
+But Mr. Trump’s appeal wasn’t just to the disaffected. A map on election night was a sea of red, as he won support across the traditionally Republican South, but also deep into what used to be the blue wall of the Midwest.
+Hillary Clinton came up short among her own supporters in large cities and affluent suburbs, among minorities and especially women. Just 51 percent of college-educated white women voted to make her the first female president. Her base didn’t come with the enthusiasm and the turnout she needed to fend off Donald Trump’s new and energized coalition.
+On Friday Mr. Trump’s four older children – Tiffany, Donald, Jr., Eric And Ivanka -- joined us to talk about their father’s surprising victory.
+Lesley Stahl: Set the scene. It’s election night. Your father-- no one’s expecting him to win and it begins to dawn on you. Tell us about being in that room.
+Eric Trump: You start to see the states falling. You start seeing Florida come in and he was declared the winner. And then you saw Ohio, you saw North Carolina. You saw Pennsylvania. You saw Wisconsin. I mean, you saw all these great states – they’re all falling. And I think it was when we got Pennsylvania that we knew. And it was amazing. We were high fiving and we were all hugging as a family. And I actually think our father was the calmest of all of us even though he was really obviously the center of attention. So--
+Lesley Stahl: He went quiet is what I heard.
+Eric Trump: --it’s-- it’s--
+Lesley Stahl: --is what I heard.
+Eric Trump: --it’s a moment I’ll never forget, I can tell you that. I mean, the team was around and everybody’s cheering. And it was just-- it was-- it was a beautiful night.
+Ivanka Trump: It is hard to put into words the experience or the emotion when your father becomes president of the United States of America. We had enormous pride, joy. It’s incredibly exciting. And we’re very grateful for the opportunity. And we take that opportunity very seriously.
+Lesley Stahl: Tiffany?
+Tiffany Trump: I mean I don’t think we can really prepare for our father becoming president. But we were all there together with everyone that’s worked so hard. And my dad has worked so hard. And it’s just – it’s really awe-inspiring.
+At some point that night and into the next day, calls from well-wishers started pouring in – including, Mr. Trump told us, from both ex-presidents Bush. Neither of whom supported him in the campaign.
+Lesley Stahl: What did the b=Bushes say when they called you?
+Donald Trump: Well, it was very interesting. I got a call from Father Bush, who is a wonderful man. And he just said, “Congratulations. It was an amazing campaign.” And then I got a call from George and he said-- “Congratulations. It was great.” And, you know, look, it’s-- it’s a tough situation. I went to war with Jeb. And Jeb’s a nice guy, but it was a nasty campaign. It was a nasty campaign. And, I mean, I’m disappointed in one thing. He signed a pledge and I don’t know how you sign a pledge and then you don’t honor it. It was a rough primary. It’s a rough primary. Although I think the general was probably just as tough. Probably as a combination, it was the roughest ever.
+Lesley Stahl: Ivanka, you said that your father’s changed in the campaign. How has he changed?
+Ivanka Trump: I think it’s impossible to go through this journey and not change for the better. You meet-- and in my father’s case, literally millions of Americans, and they speak to you with a candor about their struggles, their challenges. They share with you their most intimate stories. So you connect with people in a different way. And you grow.
+Lesley Stahl: Do you think your father’s changed?
+Eric Trump: I think as a family, we’ve changed, to tell you the truth. I mean, how big this platform is, is incredible. And I have to say, one of the most rewarding things of my life, and I can speak on behalf of really all of us, it’s fighting by our father’s side every single day as you’ve gone through a grueling, grueling process like this.
+Lesley Stahl: Don, did you discover something about your father that you didn’t know before?
+Donald Trump, Jr.: You know-- we-- we know him pretty well. And we’ve got to, you know, be by his side for many years, both as a father and in business. So, you know-- the tenacity that he’s always shown-- was just there. But it was just so much more. When I was watching him working 20-hour days, doing seven major speeches to tens of thousands of people and just saying, “Well, it wasn’t triage. Which state are we gonna do today,” it’s, “We’re just gonna do ‘em all. We’re gonna speak to all of these people.” And I think people saw that energy. They fed off that energy. That energy was so much of the movement-- that he was able to create. And, you know-- it-- it only furthered what I already knew.
+Lesley Stahl: I want to ask you all about something that’s going on right now around the country. A lot of people are afraid. They’re really afraid. African Americans think there’s a target on their back. Muslims are terrified.
+Donald Trump: I think it’s horrible if that’s happening. I think it’s built up by the press because, frankly, they’ll take every single little incident that they can find in this country, which could’ve been there before. If I weren’t even around doing this, and they’ll make into an event because that’s the way the press is.
+Lesley Stahl: Do any of you want to say anything about this fear that’s out there?
+Donald Trump, Jr.: I-- I think the fears, you know, while they may be there, some fabricated, some not-- are totally unfounded.
+Lesley Stahl: One of the groups that’s expressing fear are the LGBTQ group. You--
+Donald Trump: And yet I mentioned them at the Republican National Convention. And--
+Lesley Stahl: You did.
+Donald Trump: Everybody said, “That was so great.” I have been, you know, I’ve been-a supporter.
+Lesley Stahl: Well, I guess the issue for them is marriage equality. Do you support marriage equality?
+Donald Trump: It-- it’s irrelevant because it was already settled. It’s law. It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean it’s done.
+Lesley Stahl: So even if you appoint a judge that--
+Donald Trump: It’s done. It-- you have-- these cases have gone to the Supreme Court. They’ve been settled. And, I’m fine with that.
+Lesley Stahl: One of the issues that has come up in the campaign is your father’s temperament. And he has himself has said, “If someone insults me or says something unkind about me, I’m gonna strike back.” And now people are saying, “Well, maybe he should kinda soften that, control that a little.” What-- how do you think he’s going to comport himself as president?
+Eric Trump: I think very presidential. At the same time, my father, if he needs to be a fighter, he can be a fighter. And I think this country, quite frankly, needs a fighter. And I think that’s what this country elected.
+Donald Trump: They spent $1 billion against me on the word “Temperament.” It was given by Madison Avenue. And they thought that, by temperament, they could maybe, you know, win the election. Obviously, it didn’t work because we’re here and they’re not. And I think my strongest asset is my temperament because I have a temperament where we win and we’re going to start winning again. We’re going to win on trade, we’re going to win at the borders, we’re going to knock out ISIS.
+Lesley Stahl: You have said that you’re gonna destroy ISIS. Now, how are you going to?
+Donald Trump: I don’t tell you that. I don’t tell you that.
+Lesley Stahl: Yeah, but what can --
+Donald Trump: I’m not like the people going in right now and fighting Mosul and they announced it four months before they went into Mosul and everybody now is -- it’s a tough fight because, number one, the people from the --leaders of ISIS have left. What do you-- why do I have to tell you that?
+Lesley Stahl: Troops on the ground?
+Donald Trump: I’m not gonna say anything. I don’t want to tell them anything. I don’t want to tell anybody anything.
+Lesley Stahl: Yeah, but what about—the American people.
+Donald Trump: I wanna do the job. We have some great generals. We have great generals.
+Lesley Stahl: You said you knew more than the generals about ISIS
+Donald Trump: Well, I’ll be honest with you, I probably do because look at the job they’ve done. OK, look at the job they’ve done. They haven’t done the job. Now, maybe it’s leadership, maybe it’s something else. Who knows? All I can tell you is we’re going to get rid of ISIS.
+Lesley Stahl: Let me ask you about Obamacare, which you say you’re going to repeal and replace. When you replace it, are you going to make sure that people with pre-conditions are still covered?
+Donald Trump: Yes. Because it happens to be one of the strongest assets.
+Lesley Stahl: You’re going to keep that?
+Donald Trump: Also, with the children living with their parents for an extended period, we’re gonna--
+Lesley Stahl: You’re gonna keep that--
+Donald Trump: Very much try and keep that. Adds cost, but it’s very much something we’re going to try and keep.
+Lesley Stahl: And there’s going to be a period if you repeal it and before you replace it, when millions of people could lose -– no?
+Donald Trump: No, we’re going to do it simultaneously. It’ll be just fine. We’re not going to have, like, a two-day period and we’re not going to have a two-year period where there’s nothing. It will be repealed and replaced. And we’ll know. And it’ll be great health care for much less money. So it’ll be better health care, much better, for less money. Not a bad combination.
+Lesley Stahl: Roles during the administration. Any of you want a job in your father’s administration? Eric Trump: So we have an amazing company. You know, one of, I think, the fortunate things for my father and our father is that he was able to step out of the company to run for commander-in-chief. And I think he’s going to rely on us more than ever. And--
+Lesley Stahl: So you’ll stay up here?
+Eric Trump: So we’ll-- we’ll-- we’ll be in New York and we’ll take care of the business. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it. And we’re going to make him very proud.
+Lesley Stahl: People think that you’re going to be part of the administration, Ivanka.
+Ivanka Trump: I’m-- no. I’m going to be a daughter. But I’ve-- I’ve said throughout the campaign that I am very passionate about certain issues. And that I want to fight for them.
+Lesley Stahl: But you won’t be inside--
+Ivanka Trump: Wage equality, childcare. These are things that are very important for me. I’m very passionate about education. Really promoting more opportunities for women. So you know, there’re a lot of things that I feel deeply, strongly about. But not in a formal administrative capacity.
+Lesley Stahl: Let me ask whether any of you think that the campaign has hurt the Trump brand.
+Ivanka Trump: I don’t think it matters. This is so much more important. And more serious. And-- so th-- I-- I-- you know, that’s the focus.
+Donald Trump: I think what Ivanka trying to say, “Who cares? Who cares?” This is big league stuff. This is-- this is our country. Our country is going bad. We’re going to save our country. I don’t care about hotel occupancy. It’s peanuts compared to what we’re doing. Health care, making people better. It’s unfair what’s happened to the people of our country and we’re going to change it. As simple as that.
+Š 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.",FAKE
+9044,North Carolina Hillary Supporter Brags on Facebook About Voting Multiple Times,"Email 
+
+Hillary supporter Robert Dougherty from Jacksonville, North Carolina bragged on Facebook today about how he committed voter fraud. 
+Robert boasted on how he voted for some of his Facebook friends using their identities, and tells them not to worry about voting, because he’s already done it for them. 
+And he’s bragging about it on Facebook. 
+Robert boasts about how they give you a sticker every time you vote. 
+He says he will continue to vote all next week! 
+“Isn’t North Carolina nice they give you a sticker every time you vote… No ID required.” 
+“There isn’t a need for you to wait in line anymore. Took care of it for you. Gave you a straight Democratic ticket.” 
+“Amazing how many addresses you get from Google. Going again until Saturday and all next week.” 
+Robert either thinks voter fraud is a big joke or he’s one stupid Hillary-supporting criminal. 
+What do you think, will Voter Fraud play a key role in the election?",FAKE
+6203,Russia reacts to UN aid chief's Aleppo 'kill zone' remarks,"Russia Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the UN (Photos by AFP) 
+Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin has accused the United Nations aid chief of arrogance and bias after he told the UN Security Council that Russian and Syrian airstrikes have turned Aleppo into a ""kill zone."" 
+During a Wednesday Security Council meeting, Churkin accused Stephen O'Brien of making ""arrogant” and ""outrageous"" remarks and failing to recognize that Russia and Syria have been observing a humanitarian pause, which has been in place for the last eight days. 
+“The moratorium on flights has been in place for eight days. Give us at least one proof or leave those narratives for a romance you would probably write later,"" he said. 
+""If we needed to be preached to, we would go to a church,"" the Russian envoy added. UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien speaks during a press conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh on October 5, 2016. 
+On Tuesday, Russia announced plans to extend the week-long suspension of airstrikes targeting foreign-backed Takfiri terrorists in Aleppo. 
+Lieutenant General Sergei Rudskoi of the Russian military's General Staff said that Russian and Syrian jets had stayed 10 kilometers away from Aleppo since October 18, and that humanitarian corridors out of Aleppo remained open. 
+Rudskoi further expressed Moscow’s readiness to organize more ceasefires on the ground in Aleppo to allow wounded civilians to be evacuated. Smoke rises from buildings hit by militant shelling in a government-held neighborhood of the Syrian city of Aleppo on October 20, 2016. 
+Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, has been divided between government forces in the west and the militants in the east since 2012. In an attempt to free the trapped civilian population and to end the militants’ reign of terror in the east, the Syrian army, backed by Russian fighter jets, began a major offensive on September 22. 
+Since March 2011, Syria has been hit by deadly militancy it blames on some Western states and their regional allies. Loading ...",FAKE
+6316,Representative Government or Thugocracy?,"Print 
+I feel strongly that the Supreme Court needs to stand on the side of the American people, not on the side of the powerful corporations and the wealthy. For me, that means that we need a Supreme Court that will stand up on behalf of women’s rights, on behalf of the rights of the LGBT community, that will stand up and say no to Citizens United, a decision that has undermined the election system in our country because of the way it permits dark, unaccountable money to come into our electoral system. ” 
+– Hillary Clinton 
+The first salvo from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (or rather, her answer to the first question posed by Fox News’ Chris Wallace to her and Donald Trump at the third presidential debate) was as chilling as it was an exemplar of hypocrisy. 
+Those on the left are quite fond of leveling the accusation against conservatives of employing “dog whistle politics,” rhetoric that allegedly contains hidden or esoteric derogatory messaging which targets a specific subgroup within the opposition. Ms. Clinton’s response to Wallace’s question (where they wanted to see the Supreme Court take the country, and their views on how the Constitution ought to be interpreted) however, was representative of this tactic. 
+While women’s rights and those of the LGBT community may seem to be a curious focus for the high court (since objectively, women wouldn’t appear to be particularly oppressed given that one has been nominated to run for president, and the LGBT community accounts for less than 5 percent of the American population), Clinton’s answer revealed the focus she believes the court should have once she becomes empress. 
+“Women’s rights” is of course “dog whistle” for unfettered abortion, even late-term abortion, which is essentially infanticide via dismemberment. “LGBT rights” is “dog whistle” for disenfranchising the majority of Americans who hold traditional values, primarily Christians. Leveraging a vocal minority of homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender individuals whom the left has whipped into a froth against Christians is the methodology that was employed to negate the political power of Christians in Europe and Canada. A direct assault via legislation in this area would not work in the U.S. (at least not at present); however, judicial rulings could effectively bring about the same result. 
+Let us leave aside for a moment the fact that judicial activism is unethical and skirts the Constitution and that Clinton’s overall objectives are manifestly evil. Hillary Clinton’s stated priorities for the Supreme Court are a clear indicator of her desire to use the court as a bludgeon against the Constitution and individual liberties, rather than allowing it to perform its designated function. The hypocrisy attendant to Clinton citing the rights of women and homosexuals when she is beholden via financial contributions to nations that institutionally persecute and murder members of these groups remains plain for all to see, despite being conveniently ignored by the press. 
+Clinton’s reference to “powerful corporations and the wealthy” and the malign influence of that sinister conservative organization, Citizens United, was of course another exercise in blatant hypocrisy. Clinton is quite wealthy, and corrupt or otherwise compromised powerful corporations have been instrumental in bringing about the designs of American socialists. Even if Citizens United were a vehicle for “dark, unaccountable money,” the scope of its influence would pale next to the subversive designs of the Muslim Brotherhood , with which Bill and Hillary Clinton have been partnered for decades, or the myriad tentacles of organizations funded by George Soros , the former Nazi collaborator dedicated to advancing oligarchical collectivism in America, someone with whom the Clintons also have a long association. 
+One need not attempt to decipher the thinly veiled intent behind Clinton’s debate rhetoric to discern what a Hillary Clinton presidency might look like. Her actions to date – and particularly those in the pursuit of seeking that office – should suffice quite nicely. Despite the craven complicity of the establishment press (mainstream media), there is ample evidence for even the most indolent news consumer to reach the conclusion that she and the Democratic leviathan supporting her, and which facilitated Barack Obama’s rise to power, are fundamentally malignant. 
+In recent days, we’ve become aware of all manner of unethical conspiracies and outright criminality that’s been brought to bear in getting Clinton elected, from Democratic officials tampering with the outcome of the illegal email server investigation, to the oversampling of key demographics in polling in order to enhance the public perception of Clinton’s popularity, to the recent revelation of criminally prosecutable actions on the part of the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the White House. 
+The bottom line here is that Hillary Clinton represents a class of people who transcend even the loathed archetypal modern politician in their rapaciousness and amorality. What all Americans – not just voters, and not just Republicans – need to realize is that leaders at the highest levels in the Republican Party are every bit as culpable as the gutter operatives of the Democratic Party who pay miscreants to dress up as ducks, instigate fistfights at opposition rallies and, yes, even vote for their candidates. 
+The burning question is this: In the end, are we to be governed by the will of the people, or are we going to continue pretending that we have a representative government, when we are in effect being ruled by abject thugs operating behind a faux veneer of government?",FAKE
+3147,Gay rights and religious liberty: Can Americans have both?,"From an Indiana pizzeria to a Washington State florist, America is grappling with a clash between gay rights and religious liberty. But there are paths forward.
+
+Why climate scientists are taking fact-checking into their own hands
+
+Arkansas state Rep. Warwick Sabin (D) cheers with others protesting the state's religious freedom law at the state Capitol in Little Rock last month.
+
+The recent backlash against “religious accommodation” laws in Indiana and Arkansas is evidence of an increasingly bitter confrontation that is dividing the country and threatens to diminish the scope of religious liberty in America.
+
+That is the conclusion of a number of scholars and experts who are urging the United States Supreme Court to consider this confrontation when it hears oral argument on April 28 in a potential landmark case involving same-sex marriage.
+
+On one side are gay couples who are seeking the full benefits of equal treatment and dignity in a society that has long forced them into second-class status, or substantially worse.
+
+On the other side are religious conservatives, who say they are being coerced to support and/or participate in activities that offend their religious beliefs.
+
+Gay rights activists, sensing an approaching victory at the Supreme Court, are growing more aggressive in challenging the conservatives. Many argue that any accommodation of religious beliefs in the context of gay rights would amount to a “license to discriminate.”
+
+Conservatives counter that the issue is freedom of conscience. Religious accommodations traditionally have been provided to avoid the prospect of coercion against one’s faith, they say.
+
+Indiana and Arkansas were just the latest flashpoints in what could become a major turning point. For the first time in US history, a sizeable social and political force seems intent on sharply restraining or eliminating religious accommodations, according to scholars who study religious freedom.
+
+Now with the Supreme Court poised to take up same-sex marriage, some advocates are hoping the high court will offer much-needed guidance to a nation torn between conflicting values.
+
+Some states, like Indiana, have tried to address the religious accommodation side of the equation, while others, like Utah, have taken a more comprehensive approach – addressing religion accommodations and antidiscrimination laws together.
+
+The stakes involve more than just whether same-sex couples will be able to obtain a cake, or photographs, or flowers for their wedding. Ultimately at stake is a quintessential requirement of life in America: tolerance – on each side for the other.
+
+Douglas Laycock, a leading scholar of religious liberty, has staked out a middle ground position in the looming confrontation between gay rights and religious rights. He calls his approach “liberty and justice for all.”
+
+“Same-sex civil marriage is a great advance for human liberty. But failure to attend to the religious-liberty implications will create a whole new set of problems for the liberties of those religious organizations and believers who cannot conscientiously recognize or facilitate such marriages,” writes Mr. Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, in a friend-of-the-court brief.
+
+He is urging the high court to recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. And he believes states should pass laws barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.
+
+But he also favors robust religious freedom restoration laws at the state level, and he is urging the justices to make clear in their opinion that religious conservatives retain broad freedom to live their lives in accord with their highest sense of morality and faith.
+
+“The gain for human liberty will be greatly undermined if same-sex couples now force religious dissenters to violate conscience in the same way that those dissenters, when they had the power to do so, forced same-sex couples to hide in the closet,” Laycock said.
+
+“That is what will happen, unless this Court clearly directs the lower courts to protect religious liberty as well as same-sex civil marriage,” he told the justices.
+
+In a speech last fall, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah warned that religious liberty was under attack – and losing ground. “What was once a broad consensus here in the United States that religious freedom deserves special protection has recently crumbled,” he said.
+
+The senator said that gay rights organizations and other advocacy groups were increasingly opposed to religious exemptions that a few years ago would have passed without dissent.
+
+“From my perspective, it appears that now these groups believe they are ‘winning’ the argument and therefore have no need for religious accommodations,” he said. “Whereas in the past they were willing to respect religious freedom, now that they believe they have the upper hand they are ready to disregard religious liberty altogether.”
+
+Last June, the Supreme Court pushed back against this trend in a 5-to-4 decision upholding a religious accommodation for the owners of Hobby Lobby.
+
+Within weeks of that ruling, 56 senators voted to overturn the decision and eliminate the accommodation. The tally, only four votes short of the 60 needed to advance the bill, included every Senate Democrat and three Republicans.
+
+The uproar sparked by Indiana’s passage of its own Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in late March illustrates the potential high stakes for religious conservatives.
+
+Indiana lawmakers and Republican Gov. Mike Pence encountered a swift and unrelenting backlash by a well-organized gay rights campaign supported by major business leaders, Democratic governors, and others threatening to unleash an economic boycott against an entire state.
+
+Those threats prompted Republican leaders in Indiana and Arkansas to quickly retreat and water down their religious freedom laws.
+
+It also directed a national spotlight on the intersection of gay rights and religious rights.
+
+It did so in part by focusing on an eight-table pizza shop in Walkerton, Ind.
+
+Memories Pizza owner Kevin O’Connor and his daughter, Crystal, said they would serve any gay or lesbian customers in the shop. But they added that they would refuse to cater a same-sex wedding because such a ceremony would offend their religious beliefs about marriage.
+
+The store closed for eight days after receiving threats and hate mail. At the same time, supporters on a fundraising website contributed more than $840,000 to the shop.
+
+The action against Memories Pizza erupted not from an actual request for service from a gay couple. It resulted from a hypothetical question from a local television news reporter.
+
+Other well-known cases involve a Colorado bakery’s refusal to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex marriage ceremony, a New Mexico photographer’s refusal to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony, and a Washington florist’s decision not to design floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding.
+
+In each case, the Christian business owner said the refusal was based on a sincerely-held religious belief about the sanctity of marriage. And in each case, the courts ruled that the Christian owners violated laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.
+
+“In the last year or so, with the rise of the push for gay rights, it is beyond wanting there to be an appreciation and respect for gay rights. Now a segment of our population is seeking to have that right trump religious freedom,” said Jeffrey Mateer, a lawyer with Liberty Institute in Plano, Texas.
+
+“We are seeing people of faith being attacked, discriminated against, and losing their jobs because they are speaking out on the marriage issue,” Mr. Mateer said.
+
+Among other cases cited by conservatives:
+
+It isn’t just a matter of filing lawsuits or challenging the award of government benefits to certain businesses. The broader campaign often portrays religious conservatives as bigots. The strategy appears aimed at discrediting any claim to the American tradition of solicitude to religious adherents involving sincere matters of faith.
+
+“That’s one way of looking at it,” says Yale Law School Professor William Eskridge. “Here’s another way. What counts as a religious reason is highly dynamic.”
+
+In the 1960s, opponents of the Civil Rights Act used the Bible to try to justify continued discrimination against African-Americans, notes Professor Eskridge, a leading scholar of gay rights. It didn’t work. The tactic was swept aside as the tide of public opinion embraced the principle of equality for African-Americans.
+
+Eskridge suggests it is only a matter of time before gay rights become normalized across the country, and religious and moral arguments are swept aside and discarded.
+
+“One of the lessons of history unfortunately is that very often the line between bigotry and religious doctrine or religious faith is not a clear-cut line, particularly when public opinion is swiftly changing,” Eskridge said.
+
+The professor predicted that as the nation’s rapid embrace of gay rights continues, public norms and the law will also change. So will religious practice and belief, he said.
+
+“We’ve already seen it. And we are going to continue to see it,” he said. “Some religions are literally changing their doctrine.”
+
+So where does that leave the state of interplay between gay rights activists and religious conservatives?
+
+The legal landscape is a patchwork. Even if the US Supreme Court rules in late June that all 50 states must issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, only 22 states currently have laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.
+
+That means that gay men and lesbians are vulnerable to discrimination in 28 states.
+
+Among those 28 states: Indiana and Arkansas.
+
+Some observers view the recent ugly flare-up in the culture war in both states as a missed opportunity.
+
+Had officials in Indiana and Arkansas sought to pass their new religious freedom restoration laws in concert with new legal protections for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, the energy invested in threatened boycotts and waging heated protests would have been expended instead on celebrations of leadership and progress, these analysts say.
+
+Robin Fretwell Wilson knows how to get this done. She was an adviser to the effort do it in one of the most conservative states in America.
+
+“At a time of great change, people have to know what the rules are,” says Ms. Fretwell, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. The idea is to get the relevant parties around a table and negotiate a set of rules acceptable to all.
+
+It employs a common sense approach: If you are sensitive to our concerns, we’ll be sensitive to yours.
+
+The result was the Utah Compromise. It passed the Republican-controlled state legislature and was signed into law last month with the blessing of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
+
+When it takes effect on May 11, it will mark the first time in state history that gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people have specific legal protections prohibiting discrimination in housing and employment because of sexual orientation or gender identity.
+
+“Utah gets it right on every single score,” Wilson says. “They did something good and decent for the LGBT community, but they did not make it come at the expense of religious believers. I think that’s huge.”
+
+The workplace protections apply to all businesses with 15 or more workers, including state agencies, local governments, and school districts. It does not apply to religious organizations, religious schools, and wholly-owned subsidiaries of religious organizations. It also exempts the Boy Scouts.
+
+The compromise has its critics. Some say it does not go far enough.
+
+For example, the Utah Compromise does not address the thorny issue of public accommodations – whether a small business such as a bakery, wedding planner, or florist must participate in same-sex wedding ceremonies if they have religious objections.
+
+But within the compromise are the seeds of a solution to that problem, as well, Wilson says.
+
+The agreement establishes a right for any qualified person in Utah to get married at a county clerk’s office. But under the agreement, no official in any clerk’s office can be fired or otherwise forced to officiate a same-sex wedding if they have a religious objection.
+
+Instead, every clerk’s office in Utah – including in rural counties – must have a process that provides a willing celebrant to any same-sex couple seeking to marry at the clerk’s office.
+
+There is a term for this kind of approach. It is called religious accommodation.
+
+Wilson says she is developing a similar model that may offer a compromise for religious business owners who are worried about getting sued over their religious objections to participating in a same-sex wedding.
+
+In the medical field, there are recognized abortion conscience clauses that exempt certain medical professionals from involvement in that procedure because of their religious beliefs. In effect, someone else takes their place through a prearranged process.
+
+“When that happens, no one says you are being mean to the lady who wants an abortion,” Wilson said. “We don’t even think about it that way.”
+
+The same prearranged process could be set up at a Christian-owned bakery or flower shop. In essence, those parts of the business serving same-sex marriages would be handled by workers (in-house or by contract) who do not have a religious objection to such ceremonies.
+
+“The idea that you show up in the moment and get refused by a religious person is really, really hard to choke down. I don’t think the gay rights people are going to be able to bargain to that,” Wilson says. “And the idea that you suddenly let gay rights run roughshod over every religious person in the community is also hard to choke down.”
+
+She adds: “So if we can find a model where everybody gets served and religious people don’t have to leave those jobs, I think we’d do a really good thing.”
+
+Wilson’s approach holds great promise, particularly in conservative red states looking for solutions or to avoid economic boycotts. But not everyone is ready and willing to negotiate a cease-fire in the culture war.
+
+That’s where the concept of a RFRA may become essential as an increasing number of cases move into the courts.
+
+Much of the controversy last month in Indiana and Arkansas was premised on misinformation and misconceptions on both sides of the debate, according to legal experts.
+
+Some conservatives were under the false impression that a RFRA would offer guaranteed protection against lawsuits by same-sex couples. And some gay rights activists argued, incorrectly, that the Indiana RFRA would be a “license to discriminate.”
+
+Uncritical press reports parroted this line, over and over.
+
+The debate kicked up gobs of dust and fury, but shed almost no light on the real purpose of passing a state RFRA, analysts say.
+
+“I don’t think it is right to view RFRAs in light of gay rights specifically, because RFRA has always protected religious minority groups,” says Eric Rassbach, a lawyer at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington.
+
+He says RFRAs have helped protect a Santeria priest seeking an exemption from a local ordinance outlawing goat sacrifices; it is being invoked to help native Americans who need an exemption from federal law to possess eagle feathers. The law has been used to uphold the right of a Sikh accountant to pass through security at a federal building in possession of her religious “kirpan,” a small dull dagger that is as symbolic to Sikhs as the cross is to Christians.
+
+In January, the US Supreme Court applied a RFRA-like statute and ruled that the Arkansas prison system must allow a Muslim inmate to grow a short beard in compliance with his religious faith. That ruling was 9 to 0.
+
+“If people want to go around stopping RFRAs or neutering RFRAs, the people who are going to be hurt will be the religious minorities – the Sikhs, the native Americans, the Muslims, the Orthodox Jews,” Mr. Rassbach said.
+
+“I think that is a real problem for our society because we are not getting less religiously diverse, we are becoming more heterogeneous,” he said.
+
+The purpose of passing a religious freedom restoration law is not to grant a right to engage in anti-gay discrimination, Rassbach and other analysts say. The law isn’t designed to work that way, and it hasn’t worked that way in practice.
+
+No religious exemption sought under RFRA has ever been granted in any case involving alleged sexual orientation discrimination.
+
+That doesn’t mean there won’t be an accommodation granted in the future. But these results suggest RFRA is no “license to discriminate.”
+
+The real license to discriminate in Indiana was the state’s lack of a statute prohibiting discrimination because of sexual orientation. That is a license to discriminate, legal experts say.
+
+In contrast, the purpose of a RFRA is different. The law is designed to allow a neutral judge to weigh the competing interests when a law that is applied broadly imposes a significant burden on sincerely-held religious beliefs.
+
+When that happens, there must be proof that the provision advances a compelling government interest and that it is tailored to do that in a way least restrictive of religious faith.
+
+This approach was not dreamed up in some backroom legislative chamber in Indiana. It is a legal standard that was recognized as a constitutional guarantee for the entire country and was enforced by the US Supreme Court from 1963 to 1990.
+
+Despite this broad, constitutional protection of religious conscience, religious adherents didn’t always prevail. In 1983, Bob Jones University argued for a religious exemption from a federal regulation prohibiting tax-exempt organizations from discriminating on the basis of race. The university had a rule barring interracial dating.
+
+The high court held that the government had a fundamental – and overriding – interest in ending any vestige of racial discrimination in education.
+
+Though the decision did not diminish the importance of religious accommodations in general, it put religious adherents on notice: fighting discrimination is a compelling government interest that can outweigh a claim for religious accommodation.
+
+Then, in 1990, the high court abruptly changed course. The justices were presented with a case involving two drug counselors who were fired for their sacramental use of peyote as members of the Native American Church. They were also denied unemployment benefits. The two sued the state of Oregon, seeking a religious accommodation that would allow them to collect the benefits.
+
+A divided Supreme Court ruled that the free exercise clause of the Constitution did not authorize a religious exemption from laws of general applicability.
+
+This was a major constitutional shift that made it more difficult for religious adherents – particularly those in minority religions – to seek accommodations from general laws that imposed significant burdens on their faith.
+
+Congress responded in 1993 by passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. (It passed the House by voice vote, and the Senate 97 to 3.) The statute reestablished the same national legal standard of religious accommodation that had been enforced by the high court from 1963 to 1990.
+
+Then in 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal RFRA only applied to federal law, not at the state or local level.
+
+In response to that decision, states began enacting their own religious freedom restoration acts. Currently, 22 states – including Indiana and Arkansas – have enacted RFRAs.
+
+In addition, 11 other states have interpreted their state constitutions as providing guarantees of religious liberty consistent with the standard enforced by the US Supreme Court from 1963 to 1990.
+
+Thus, 33 of the 50 states have in some fashion embraced the broad concept of offering religious accommodations.
+
+How the approaching legal battles will play out is uncertain.
+
+Some cases will be preempted by automatic exemptions from discrimination laws that have long been granted to religious organizations and affiliated groups.
+
+But the stage is now set for litigation over public accommodations related to same-sex marriages. Ironically, most of those cases will be litigated not in conservative “red” states, but in liberal “blue” states that have already accepted gay marriage. That’s because there are no antidiscrimination statutes in most red states that would allow a same-sex couple to file a lawsuit.
+
+“It is that middle area of the small business, individual proprietorship, the mom and pop enterprise; that’s the area where this is going to bite,” Eskridge says. “That is in play and it is highly dynamic.”
+
+The professor sees the legal landscape shifting against accommodation claims.  “Accommodations that would have been given in courts 10 years ago are not going to be given in courts 10 years from now, or even today in some cases.”
+
+In courts across the country the critical question is going to be whether it is possible to strike a balance between discrimination and religious accommodation.
+
+What is at stake is more fundamental than cakes, and photographs, and flowers. It is whether at some point politicians and judges begin to look for ways to defuse disputes so that both sides can start moving forward together toward tolerance and acceptance.
+
+The alternative is more Indiana-style protests and boycotts.
+
+“What was so devastating for the religious community was to be seen as saying we have to have our religious freedom so that we can knock down your gay rights. When they say stuff like that – which is just ugly – they lose,” Wilson says.
+
+“But on the other side, if the gay rights guys say I have to run you out of business in order for me to win, that is just as ugly, and they will lose,” she says.",REAL
+4318,"As Rand Paul stalls, Ted Cruz seeks to pick up support among libertarians","Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) came to a convention of libertarian-leaning Republicans and talked about shrinking government, slashing regulations, fighting against the bulk collection of phone data and his great affinity for a rival in the presidential race.
+
+Paul, Kentucky’s junior U.S. senator and scion of one of the country’s most famous libertarian families, was expected to lock down the support of libertarian voters in the presidential campaign. But as Paul’s poll numbers have sagged nationally — and in such libertarian-minded places as New Hampshire — Cruz is trying to pick off what is sometimes called the liberty vote.
+
+Cruz essentially crashed what was supposed to be Paul’s big libertarian party here, the biennial meeting of the Republican Liberty Caucus. Cruz stood in a hotel here on a dreary Friday morning, surrounded by supporters and curious attendees who held signs and jostled for photos.
+
+“I was elected with tremendous support from the liberty movement,” Cruz said of his 2012 Senate campaign, noting that Rand Paul and his father, former representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.), both endorsed him in that race.
+
+The Texas Republican’s presidential campaign has been making the case that as Paul’s campaign has floundered, Cruz is viable — flush with cash and able to go the distance.
+
+On the trail, Cruz has invoked the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections and railed against the Federal Reserve. Last month, the campaign rolled out a video showing eight supporters of Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign who are backing Cruz for 2016.
+
+“The liberty movement has been integral to our campaign since Day One,” Cruz said.
+
+Cruz breaks down the Republican electorate into four brackets of support: tea party conservatives; evangelical Christians; establishment Republicans; and libertarians. He sees his base in the tea party and evangelical wings, but he also is trying to siphon off libertarian voters with a message of limited government.
+
+Cruz tailored his speech here in New Hampshire to those voters. He took a less hawkish tone when discussing foreign policy, saying that the United States “shouldn’t engage in nation-building” and calling for armed Kurdish ground troops to fight the Islamic State.
+
+“There’s no reason for us to get in the middle of the Syrian civil war,” he said.
+
+Cruz praised the liberty movement as an “amazing thing” and vowed that the size of government will be “materially smaller” if he is elected president. He promoted a bill he co-sponsored to end the bulk collection of phone metadata — an issue that Rand Paul championed this year with a nearly 11-hour Senate floor speech.
+
+“This is the battleground between Cruz and Paul,” said Dave Nalle, a former chairman of the Liberty Caucus. He said Paul appeals to privacy-minded libertarians while Cruz appeals to those who want a strict adherence to the Constitution.
+
+“I was impressed” with Cruz, said Louis Colavecchio Sr. of Wakefield, R.I., who also said he has not decided whom he will support in the primary.
+
+The scramble for supporters seems to have somewhat strained the cordial relationship between the onetime Senate allies. Last month, Paul said Cruz was “pretty much done for” in the Senate after Cruz tried to disrupt the passage of a government funding bill because it would give money to Planned Parenthood.
+
+“Ted has chosen to make this really personal and chosen to call people dishonest in leadership . . . which really goes against the decorum and also against the rules of the Senate, and as a consequence he can’t get anything done legislatively,” Paul said on Fox News Radio. On Friday, Cruz called Paul “a friend” and “good man.”
+
+Paul gave an animated speech here and appeared to be in his comfort zone, saying he wants a government that leaves him alone. He reminded his audience of his marathon Senate speech to defend that principle. He called for reform of the criminal-justice system, and he knocked other candidates for saying they would not hold talks with rival nations. Paul also rapped Congress, labeling a just-passed bill that temporarily funds the government “a bunch of crap” and the body itself “impotent and inconsequential.”
+
+“I’m embarrassed that I’m even a part of it,” said Paul, sporting a bright-blue belt with the University of Kentucky’s logo on it.
+
+Paul played down the threat from Cruz.
+
+“Both here and Iowa, we know where our support is and where my dad’s support was, and we feel comfortable that the overwhelming majority of it is with us,” Paul said.
+
+Some libertarians here were uncomfortable with Cruz making religion such a large part of his campaign.
+
+“I don’t think he’s going to have as much sway on Rand Paul’s electability as people think he will, because he’s a religious zealot. It’s too much,” said Austin Sekel, 22, who is supporting Paul. Cruz “needs to stop grandstanding on the Senate floor,” he said.
+
+Sekel and others said they do not think Paul’s sagging poll numbers will change anything. Sekel thinks Paul has a base of support that has not yet become engaged in the campaign.
+
+Bob Pyle, a pastor from Harrisburg, Pa., said Paul has a “solid, loyal following that is not given to the sounds of throwing red meat.” Between those people and Ron Paul supporters, Pyle said the Kentucky Republican’s fortunes will only increase.
+
+Other people here are not completely enamored of either candidate. Some libertarians have said that Paul has run his race too far from his father’s pure libertarian principles. They include John Cisar, 36, of Burlington, Vt.
+
+“I think there’s a big schism among libertarians that he’s fallen short of expectations,” Cisar said of Paul. Cisar said that he is not a Cruz fan and that he thinks Paul is the more acceptable of the two in the 2016 race.
+
+“He’s the lesser of the evils,” Cisar said of Paul. “And that doesn’t make me feel really good inside to vote for him.”",REAL
+1905,“A dream come true for Hillary Clinton”: Wall Street Journal editorial board rips Ted Cruz,"In a Tuesday editorial, the paper’s opinion editors cast significant doubt on the Texas Republican’s ability to assemble a winning coalition, arguing that Cruz’s assumption that he can win by turning out more white conservative voters is fundamentally flawed and warning that the Tea Party firebrand’s hardline stance on immigration makes him “a dream come true for Hillary Clinton,” the likely Democratic nominee in 2016.
+
+Blaming Cruz for “plunging” the GOP’s favorability by leading the 2013 government shutdown — part of a botched attempt to derail health care reform — the Journal depicts Cruz as a polarizing figure all too willing to reflexively oppose anything the Obama administration proposes. The editors castigate Cruz as an “opportunist” for seeking to pare back government surveillance and for opposing the administration’s abortive effort to authorize air strikes in Syria in 2013 — stances that Cruz took despite a generally hawkish worldview.
+
+As for Cruz’s claim that Republicans like 2012 nominee Mitt Romney have lost because they failed to galvanize the right-wing base, the Journal allows that “Romney in particular failed to motivate enough conservatives.” However, the editors posit, Cruz “is probably wrong to think that conservatives alone, especially white conservatives, can elect the next President,” adding that the party’s 2016 nominee “must broaden the GOP’s electoral appeal.” Part of that, the editorial suggests, entails a softer line on immigration; continued opposition to reform will only prove a boon to Democratic efforts to keep Latino voters solidly in the blue column.
+
+This being the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the piece is not without pot-shots at Democrats. Indeed, the editorial is framed around the notion that Cruz is the Republican version of Barack Obama. There are areas of overlap: Both began their presidential bids as 40-something first-term senators, both graduated from Harvard Law School, both are perceived as dynamic speakers, and both boast appeal among key segments of their parties’ respective constituencies. Although the similarities largely end there, the Journal insists otherwise. Much as Cruz is notorious for his scorched-earth Tea Party tactics, the Journal would have us believe that Obama harbors “contempt” for Republicans and for the very idea of “work[ing] across the aisle.”
+
+In the latter half of his second term, Obama may have come to the belated realization that Republicans had no interest in cooperating with him, but the president reached this conclusion only after the failure of his assiduous efforts to woo GOP support. His 2008 campaign rested on the notion that he, not Hillary Clinton, would bridge Washington’s partisan divide, and he spent much of his first term negotiating against himself in the vain hope that his proposals would garner Republican backing. There was the largely fruitless effort to secure GOP support for the 2009 stimulus package, for instance, and the months-long, ill-fated bid to get then-Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) to vote for health care reform. Obama’s Kumbayaism was doomed literally from the start; just as Obama took office, top congressional Republicans decided in a closed-door meeting that the next four years would be ones of knee-jerk opposition to the president’s policies. Six years later, Cruz is telling Republicans that the obstructionists who run his party aren’t intransigent enough. That view may be held by a large segment of the Tea Party, but even some of the nation’s most conservative voices find it laughable — and politically perilous.",REAL
+4051,Obama Presses Putin to Strike Ukraine Peace Deal,"President Barack Obama called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to discuss escalating violence in eastern Ukraine, urging him to embrace a negotiated solution.
+
+Expressing unease at ""Russia's ongoing support"" for separatists in Ukraine, Obama warned that the failure of upcoming peace talks would lead to more pain for Russia.
+
+During the call Obama ""underscored the importance of President Putin seizing the opportunity presented by the ongoing discussions between Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine to reach a peaceful resolution,"" the White House said.
+
+""If Russia continues its aggressive actions in Ukraine, including by sending troops, weapons, and financing to support the separatists, the costs for Russia will rise.""
+
+Obama has dangled the prospect of further sanctions against Russia and U.S. arms being sent to the Ukrainian government if talks fail.
+
+A four-nation peace summit is planned for Wednesday in Minsk.
+
+The United States has voiced skepticism about Putin's sincerity in negotiating.
+
+A previous agreement, signed in the Belarusian capital Minsk in September, has been largely ignored by Russia.
+
+The White House on Tuesday said that the previous Minsk agreement must be the basis for any new deal.
+
+Key points of that deal include withdrawing ""all troops and weapons"" from eastern Ukraine, allowing ""effective international monitoring of the international border"" and freeing hostages, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
+
+""While we're supportive of continuing diplomatic conversations, what's most important is for both sides to come to the table ready to not just make commitments, but live up to them,"" said Earnest.
+
+Obama also spoke to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, offering condolences for the loss of Ukrainian life.
+
+A devastating rocket strike on Kiev's military headquarters in the east killed at least 37 people on Tuesday.
+
+""The president underlined the commitment of the United States to work with our international partners to provide the financial support Ukraine needs as it continues to undertake essential reforms,"" the White House said.",REAL
+3852,"Trumka: Disappointment with Obama, a warning for Hillary","WASHINGTON — The nation's most powerful labor leader, vowing to defeat President Obama's key trade legislation in the House next month, warned Hillary Clinton of serious political consequences if she fails to take a stand against the Pacific trade pact that the president is campaigning for as a major part of his legacy.
+
+Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, predicted that no more than 20 House Democrats would vote for Trade Promotion Authority, the ""fast-track"" bill that on Friday passed the Senate.
+
+""Thirteen Democrats left their base,"" he said of the Senate vote in an interview with Capital Download. ""They decided to pass something that was going to cost jobs and lower wages, and they're going to have to answer to their constituencies for that."" He added: ""They'll be held accountable; there's no question about that.""
+
+Organized labor has been waging a fierce battle against the legislation, which would require Congress to approve or reject without amendments the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal among the United States and 12 other Pacific Rim nations. Many labor unions have frozen campaign donations as they lobby against it.
+
+The battle between two customary allies — a Democratic president and the country's biggest labor federation — underscores the complicated politics of Obama's attempts to pass legislation through a Republican-controlled Congress during the final two years of his tenure. It also exposes challenges ahead for Clinton, who praised the emerging Pacific pact as ""the gold standard"" in her memoirs as secretary of State but has avoided declaring her view of it since becoming a presidential candidate.
+
+""Unfortunately, it falls far short of being the gold standard,"" Trumka told USA TODAY's video newsmaker series in an interview at AFL-CIO headquarters, just across Lafayette Square from the White House. ""It's not silver. I'm not sure it's copper or some other form of metal, but it's not gold, because it's going to cost us jobs and it's going to lower wages in this country.""
+
+Trumka said he didn't know where Clinton now stood on the issue.
+
+""She's going to have to answer that,"" he said. ""I think she won't be able to go through a campaign without answering that and people will take it seriously and it will affect whether they vote for her or don't vote for her.""
+
+If Clinton backs the trade pact and the fast-track authority, there will be costs, he cautioned. ""It will be tougher to mobilize working people. It'll be tougher to get them to come out excited and work to do door-knocking and leafleting and phone-banking and all the things that are going to be necessary if she is the candidate and we endorse her to get elected. It will make it far more difficult.""
+
+It even is ""conceivable"" that the AFL-CIO wouldn't endorse a presidential candidate, he said, ""if both candidates weren't interested in raising wages and creating jobs.""
+
+Asked whether Obama's presidency had been good for working Americans, Trumka paused.
+
+""The president's been seriously handicapped in his ability to deliver things for the American public, because you've got a determined opposition in the Republican Party that will actually hurt the country to deny him a victory,"" he began. But he added, ""I wish he would have fought for some of the things that are needed as hard as he's fighting for fast track and TPP.""
+
+In the Senate vote, Trumka said he was surprised to have lost the support of Democratic senators Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, Chris Coons of Delaware and Patty Murray of Washington state. When the interviewer commented that it's hard to defeat a president, he replied: ""We'll see.""",REAL
+6850,Pro-Palestinian Propaganda Lowering Standards of Truth in America,"Pro-Palestinian Propaganda Lowering Standards of Truth in America Manipulation by doctored narratives in every sphere. October 28, 2016 
+Reprinted from IsraelNationalNews.com . 
+Commendably, organized American Jewry is finally focused on the campaign to boycott, de-legitimize, and sanction Israel. However, focusing primarily on Israel, and not also on America and Europe, is short-sighted. 
+The BDS campaign has not devastated Israel economically. Israel is thriving both economically and in terms of regional alliances—but fifty years of a well-funded propaganda campaign has all but destroyed Israel's good name and has rendered her and Jews everywhere vulnerable to diplomatic, academic, and mob attacks. 
+It has also lowered the standards for truth among Americans. This is a very important point. 
+An Islamic-style of Jew hatred has merged with Western, politically correct anti-racism to breed an unnatural passion for ""Palestinians,"" (Fakestinians), which has infiltrated every corner, every crevice of our lives and world. It has infected Americans and Europeans on both sides of the aisle and of every class, race, and ethnicity. 
+This is utterly astounding, amazing really; something like this does not happen overnight. 
+The BDS campaign is rooted in the Arab League, PLO, and Soviet propaganda campaign that began in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, the UN proposed its infamous Zionism=Racism resolution. 
+In 1967, the day after Israel won yet another war of self-defense, Israel--not the Arab aggressors--was seen as the alleged ""occupier."" 
+By the late 1970’s, Edward Said's treacherous, lying work had begun to have its way with Western academics, (and with Western-style academics in Israel), European governments, and international organizations. 
+I only realized how successful his campaign was in 1980, when Israel was demonized at a UN conference on Women in Copenhagen. The Soviets, the Iranians, the Arab League, the PLO-- roamed the hallways chanting ""Death to Israel;"" European feminists called upon ""Palestinian"" refugees but refused to hear Jewish-Israeli refugees from Arab and Muslim countries. By 2001, the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban was an even more out-of-control Hate Fest and riot against Israel. 
+As we approach 2017, UN Resolutions against Israel are as commonplace as they are grotesque. UNESCO’s recent decision to De-Judaize Jerusalem, the Western Wall, and the First and Second Temples is a grim and maddening continuation of this trend. At the same time, pro-Israel professors and students in America are increasingly being harassed, even fired. 
+Such Lies have infiltrated my private social world. For example: At a recent holiday dinner, our guests agreed that we live in criminal and anarchic times and that no great power has stopped global barbarism, no entity is willing to bring the world back from the brink. 
+A like-minded gathering, yes? Not exactly. One man, a genial, well-heeled, well-educated Jewish-American suddenly began hectoring us about the ""Palestinians."" ""What if they did not hate the Jews and destroyed all their textbooks that demonize Jews and Israelis? What if they were peaceful? Wouldn't we have to admit that Palestinians have always existed and therefore deserve a state of their own? You can't deny that the Palestinian people have always lived there, can you?"" Oh my. Where to start? The company included two author-scholars who, between them, have published 15 books and thousands of articles, many of them dealing with the history and nature of Islam, tribal gender and religious apartheid, Israel, and anti-Semitism, etc. Among us was a third author, who had also served four tours of duty in the IDF. I held my breath and prayed that we would not go to war at the table. This man was punching way above his pay grade and I could not understand why. 
+The two author-scholars presented facts, cited statistics. I pulled down book after book from my shelves. We got nowhere. ""Look,"" he said. ""I have some really good Muslim friends, they're Americans, totally Westernized, they are Palestinians. They strongly feel that this is their identity. Why deny them the identity of their choice?"" And then I understood that the pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist propaganda behind the relentless BDS campaign is successful precisely because so many Americans of all ages, are without knowledge; without respect for knowledge; do not know this; and frankly, don't care. 
+""Fair is fair,"" he said. In other words: What's good for the Jews has to be good for everyone else. If not, the Jews don't deserve whatever it is either. 
+Here's a man who's not an anti-Semite or an anti-Zionist; not an active member of any organization--yet who needs to believe the canard that non-Jewish ""Palestinians"" have always existed; or that they existed by the nineteenth century or no later than 1948, the year that another stateless people--the Jews--chose a national sovereign identity. 
+He would not listen to reason. It was quite astounding. How is this possible? 
+His mind-set is part of our ruling American zeitgeist. If Rachel Dolezal can say she's ""black"" even when she's ""white"" and direct a chapter of the NAACP; if a man can say that he's really a woman, trapped in a man's body; if all truth(s) are ""relative;"" if everything is ""subjective;"" if objectivity is no longer important; if doctored narratives have supplanted fact-based histories; if revisionism is preferred to truth--then, yes, anyone can say that they deserve their own nation state because they ""feel"" or ""believe"" that they do. 
+I am grateful to my combative guest for reminding me that ignorance is often arrogant and as such, is a great enemy; that educated people have been especially vulnerable to False Ideas; that, psychologically speaking, we must approach them as if they've been brainwashed by a cult. 
+Facts alone will not work. We must consider all known techniques for de-programming. 
+This is one of our greatest challenges.",FAKE
+205,Wingnuts have a death-grip on Congress: Why Paul Ryan can’t control the House GOP,"Remember last fall, when pundits and politicians were trying to talk themselves into Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House because he would lay down the law with the hard-right wing of the Republican caucus? When he was the man who could bring some much-needed order to the ranks? Who could maybe end this habit of careening from crisis to crisis that Congress has fallen into because the two parties are unable to agree on anything, down to whether toilet paper should be rolled over or under in Capitol Hill bathrooms, let alone a budget to fund the basic functions of government?
+
+As the kids like to say, LOL:
+
+“The release of President Obama’s eighth and final budget on Tuesday has forced into the open the seething tensions that never really went away after a spending agreement was reached last year, in part to ease Mr. Ryan’s transition into the speaker’s suite. That deal set spending until the end of October of this year, at levels that the president adhered to and Senate Republicans hope to make stick. But a core group of House Republicans who gave Mr. Ryan a pass back then now say they want to toss those numbers out like so much flotsam and pass their own budget with far tighter spending restrictions.”
+
+That “core group of House Republicans” is the House Freedom Caucus, the band of 40 or so feral meerkats who did much of the heavy lifting in driving John Boehner into retirement. But they aren’t the only Republicans who look like infants here. Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) and Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), the chairs of the House and Senate Budget Committees, last week announced they will not even let the director of the Office of Management and Budget present the proposed budget to the Congress. This practice is a common courtesy extended to presidential administrations for the last 40 years or so.
+
+No one would expect any Congress to rubber-stamp a president’s budget proposal, of course. Not even if the same party controlled both chambers and the White House. But what’s notable here is this quote from one member of the Freedom Caucus:
+
+Right, except you’re not passing a Republican budget any more than President Obama expects you to pass a Democratic budget. The president’s proposal is the opening to a negotiation, to be hashed out between two parties. Is anyone available who can explain the job of legislating to these legislators?
+
+But like so many other legislative norms that the Republicans in Congress have tossed out the window during the Obama era, the practice of two co-equal branches of government openly and fairly debating genuine issues that will affect the American people has been given the heave-ho. Yet I’d bet cash money some of these legislators like Mulvaney and Price are also just astonished that bullying idiot Donald Trump is stomping their party’s candidates for the Republican nomination.
+
+Paul Ryan knows how this is supposed to work. He was, after all, the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee for the four years the Democrats controlled the House from 2007 to 2011. Then, when the GOP regained the majority in the chamber, he chaired the committee for another four years, until 2015. If anyone in the House knows how the budget sausage gets made, knows all the little compromises over appropriations levels and priorities that go into funding the government, it’s Ryan. But as part of his deal to earn his Republican colleagues’ votes for Speaker, Ryan devolved a fair amount of power for setting legislative agendas back to the committee chairmen. This took away one of the tools that past Speakers like Boehner could use as leverage to get bills they favored taken up by individual committees. With that gone, a weak Speaker is practically a helpless bystander to this sort of spectacle. Sure, maybe he can still yank the chairmanship away from Price, but that will just raise howls of protest from the other chairs who thought they had freedom to run things as they see fit. And though Price isn’t a member of the Freedom Caucus, you can bet that group approves of what he’s doing. If Ryan punishes him, he gets an even louder revolt on his right flank, in the middle of an election year. But beyond all this inside-baseball stuff is a point that many pundits have hammered on over and over during the primary campaign. Which is that this partisan infection of the House is not going away after the 2016 election, or even after 2018 and likely not until sometime after the next census in 2020, if it happens at all. So even if Democrats still hold the White House next year, either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton will spend much of his or her time negotiating and fighting these budget fights just to keep the government’s lights on, let alone pushing through major changes to healthcare or financial industry regulations. Plus, there’s a good chance he or she will be saddled with Paul Ryan as Speaker, and he’s about as solid as helium. By the end of 2017, we may all be longing for the halcyon days when John Boehner ran things.",REAL
+6327,Lifting weights could ward off dementia and make you smarter,"Lifting weights could ward off dementia and make you smarter 
+  by: Vicki Batts Tags: weight lifting , dementia , brain health (NaturalNews) There are many reasons to partake in strength training; weight-baring exercises are known for their health benefits. But, could lifting weights also boost your brain? Recent research indicates that may just be the case.To begin the study, researchers asked a group of people aged 55 to 86 to engage in a mix of weight lifting and brain training exercises. All of the people who partook in the study had been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, which is a precursor to Alzheimer's disease , and is an early sign of dementia.While this particular study did not examine whether the benefits of exercise could be extended to the general population, the results were quite impressive. Published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society , the study found that weight-baring exercises could indeed provide some brain benefits. The researchers found a casual relationship between an increase in muscle strength and an increase in brain function. On that basis, the team recommended that more people begin a strength training regime so that the world's aging population can hopefully be a little healthier. It is currently projected that about 135 million people will have dementia by the year 2050.The same team behind this most recent research also published a paper in 2014 that revealed that weight training provided cognitive benefits to just about every area of the brain – something cognitive training failed to do.While discussing their most recent data, one of the study's researchers, Dr. Yorgi Mavros of Sydney University, commented, ""What we found in this follow-up study is that the improvement in cognition function was related to their muscle strength gains. The stronger people became, the greater the benefit for their brain.""For the strength training, study participants were asked to lift weights that were equivalent to about 80 percent of their maximum capacity, twice a week for six months – similar to the way in which many athletes train. And, as the participants got stronger, the amount of weight they lifted went up as well, in order to maintain the desired 80 percent of their maximum effort.Brain scans revealed that certain regions of the brain actually increased in size for those who took part in the exercise regime. Dr. Mavros says that the benefits were profound enough to warrant recommending weight training for everyone.""The more we can get people doing resistance training like weight lifting , the more likely we are to have a healthier ageing population,"" he told the Independent . Dr. Mavros also added that the best way to ensure that you get the most benefit from exercise is by maintaining a regular routine. Exercising frequently, and with some intensity, is key to getting the most out of what you're doing.This new research is not the first to suggest that exercise can provide benefits to brain health . The body of research linking physical exercise to better cognitive function has only continued to grow over the last several years. Science has indicated that in addition to better mental health, exercise can also promote both better memory and concentration.Dr. James Pickett, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society, also had a few things to say about this new study. He noted, ""New research is beginning to unravel how physical exercise may have benefits for the brain as people get older. This study suggests that people with minor memory and thinking problems, known as mild cognitive impairment, may benefit from weight training to improve their brain health.""Pickett also noted that while it is not yet clear if exercise can reverse dementia, they do know that it is one of the most important factors in its prevention. Along with being active, he says that not smoking and eating a healthy, balanced diet are all essential to reducing the risk. Sources:",FAKE
+6442,People excited about Christmas adverts told about rest of human culture,"People excited about Christmas adverts told about rest of human culture 08-11-16 PEOPLE who cannot wait for big shops’ new Christmas TV adverts have been told about books, films and art. Amid growing anticipation about whether the John Lewis advert will feature a lovelorn reindeer or a sad robin, people who love cloying corporate sentimentality have been informed about humanity’s other cultural output. Professor Henry Brubaker of the Institute for Studies said: “For many centuries before high street shops started creating 30-second seasonal narratives to sell jumpers, mankind has been telling stories. “These stories were written down in books, which are stored in libraries or on bookshelves. Some of them are pretty good. “Museums are another good starting point for learning about the things humanity has created that do not involve an animated creature breathing on a window and then drawing a heart in the steam. “Fuck it, even Netflix has some good stuff on it.” Mother-of-two Nikki Hollis said: “I actually tried to get the book version of the last John Lewis advert but apparently it doesn’t exist. “I hope the new one is about an otter who falls in love with Rita Ora and they have little half-human festive otter pups. Then they all go up in a balloon.” 
+Save",FAKE
+3326,State Department warns of possible terror attack in South Africa,"WASHINGTON – The State Department on Saturday warned American citizens in South Africa of the imminent threat of terrorist attacks.
+
+The warning, issued by the U.S. Diplomatic Mission to South Africa, states that the government has received information that terrorist groups are planning to carry out ""near-term attacks against places where U.S. citizens congregate in South Africa, such as upscale shopping areas and malls in Johannesburg and Cape Town.""
+
+The warning refers to the public call by the Islamic State, or ISIL, to conduct terrorist strikes during the coming month of Ramadan.
+
+The State Department has issued similar warnings to U.S. citizens living or traveling in Europe, saying credible information exists about ISIL militants planning attacks there.
+
+On Friday, the Pentagon announced that it had conducted several strikes – some of them kept secret until now – against Islamic extremists outside of Iraq and Syria as the military widens its attacks on militants. In 2016 alone, U.S. attacks in Yemen have killed more than 100 militants, according to U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East.
+
+The most recent airstrike against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula occurred on May 19 in central Yemen and killed four al-Qaeda operatives. It was the ninth attack in Yemen this year, including several the military had announced since March. Central Command also confirmed three previously unannounced attacks in Yemen. Strikes on Feb. 3, Feb. 29 and March 30 killed 11 al-Qaeda fighters
+
+The military didn't disclose those attacks immediately in order to confuse militants and act swiftly on intelligence gathered at the sites, Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder, a Central Command spokesman, told reporters on Friday.
+
+“Sometimes the chatter that comes after a strike allows us to collect more intelligence on adversaries to conduct future strikes,” Ryder said.
+
+Meantime, in Iraq and Syria, the U.S.-led coalition continued to attack ISIL, hitting 25 targets, the military command in Baghdad announced Saturday. Those attacks came as Syrian troops advanced on Raqqa, the self-proclaimed capital of ISIL, and the suicide bombers struck in Iraq, killing 15 people in and around Baghdad.",REAL
+2968,Who Lost Iraq?,"For a brief, happy—and misguided—moment, most Americans stopped thinking about Iraq. After withdrawing the last U.S. troops in 2011, President Barack Obama declared the country “sovereign, stable and self-reliant.” No such luck. Iraq plunged back into chaos as the Islamic State stormed the region last year, and the fall of Ramadi in May revived questions about how, and whether, the country can be salvaged.
+
+As Americans try to understand what $2 trillion and nearly 4,500 American lives really accomplished, partisans are battling over how much blame falls on Obama, who left Iraq, and on President George W. Bush, who took us there. “If you fought in Iraq, it worked,” 2016 presidential candidate Lindsey Graham recently said. “It’s not your fault it’s going to hell. It’s Obama’s fault.” Naturally, Democrats see it differently: “This represents the failed policies that took us down this path 10 years ago,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has said.
+
+Who’s right? Could Iraq have remained stable if Obama had left behind a small troop contingent? Did Bush’s “surge” really stabilize the country? In June, Politico Magazine assembled a dozen experts—including veterans of both administrations from the State Department, White House, Pentagon and the CIA—and asked a simple question: Who lost Iraq? —Michael Crowley
+
+Michael Crowley: Ambassador Khalilzad, you were in Iraq from 2005 to 2007. Describe the trajectory Iraq was on when you left, and the Iraq that Obama inherited when he was inaugurated in January 2009.
+
+Zalmay Khalilzad: It was a very difficult period. Especially in the aftermath of the al-Askari Mosque bombing in 2006, the sectarian violence became front and center—a very large number of fatalities and causalities, both Shia and Sunni—and the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq. We began a more concerted effort training Iraqi troops, which resulted in significant growth in their size and capabilities. The new Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki showed more willingness to use force against the Shia militias in Basra and Baghdad’s Sadr City. Additionally, the excesses committed by Al Qaeda in Iraq against the Sunni community was beginning to turn some Sunnis against them. With increased outreach to the Sunnis, we began to have significant numbers of them work with us.
+
+There were still some issues unresolved—there was no oil law for the distribution of resources, there still was no reform of de-Baathification. These were self-inflicted wounds, if you like—mistakes we made, in my judgment, at the very beginning. But I think the Iraqis were heading in the right direction. You had a government that acquired greater national legitimacy. There was a greater Sunni participation in government compared to an earlier period. The level of violence, by the end of the Bush administration, was significantly down compared to 2006, early 2007.
+
+We’re still talking about Iraq, but relatively speaking, I would say it was on a positive trajectory with some big issues still unresolved.
+
+MC: Kim, tell us more about the security situation when President Obama arrived.
+
+Kim Kagan: The security situation in Iraq was dramatically improved by operations conducted by surge troops—violence in Baghdad and in Iraq fell dramatically over the course of 2007. And in 2008, U.S. forces partnered with the Iraqi security forces, pushed AQI out of Baghdad, out of Diyala and all the way to Mosul, where the Al Qaeda elements were greatly reduced over time by follow-on operations and special forces operations. The Shia militias, which posed a threat to the sovereignty of the Iraqi government, had been greatly diminished by the operations that Prime Minister Maliki and U.S. forces undertook in 2008 and were no longer militarily viable within Iraq.
+
+The two main threats to Iraqi state security had been significantly diminished by 2008 and over the course of 2009. Our U.S. forces were handing over security to Iraqi security forces, such that U.S. forces came out of the major cities of Iraq, and handed responsibility for those cities back to the Iraqi security forces. One of the principles behind the way that the U.S. had constructed its surge operations was that the U.S. had special tie-in capabilities that the Iraqi security forces did not have, because they were still growing, still developing skills. So clearing cities was something the U.S. did with Iraqi security forces’ support.
+
+As those cities became more peaceful, as the population returned, as AQI left, the Iraqi security forces could handle the security environment in the urban centers. But AQI was not destroyed. It had not lost the will to fight. It was potentially reduced from an organization that had high-end terrorist capabilities that could threaten the state, to an insurgency, a group that had very limited capacity to act as a terrorist organization, but still had some will to fight, and still had some organization, some command and control left over, primarily in the Mosul area.
+
+MC: John, what did the threat to the U.S. or western interests in the region emanating from Iraq look like at the time Obama took office?
+
+John McLaughlin: If you go all the way back to 2008, the Arab Spring or Awakening was still years away. In 2008, Al Qaeda central was on the run but not defeated. We were still very much on guard against attacks on the United States; we were just two years after detecting the attempt by Al Qaeda-related people to put together an operation over the Atlantic out of London—the planes plot. So Al Qaeda in that period is still very dangerous but not particularly noteworthy insofar as its capability in Iraq was seen.
+
+MC:  Ambassador Hill, you get to Iraq at the start of Obama’s first term. What does that Iraq look like—is it on a trajectory to a place where it can stand on its own?
+
+Chris Hill: There was perhaps more optimism than the facts might have justified. For example, there was a view that somehow Maliki had gotten in the saddle, that he understood the need for outreach to the various groups and was prepared to continue the payments to the so-called Sons of Iraq. There was an overall kind of optimistic mood, but I must say, in talking to the Sunni leaders who were part of his cabinet, you certainly didn’t get the sense there was any reason to be optimistic. You certainly got the impression when you talked to people that it wasn’t going well. Going out to Anbar, for example, and talking to Sunni sheiks out there, they were all prepared to work together in a kind of all-in Sunni party, but you certainly didn’t get the impression they were cutting Baghdad any slack or cutting Maliki any slack.",REAL
+3107,Pope Francis implores Congress to accept immigrants as their own,"Pope Francis, making history’s first papal address to the U.S. Congress, on Thursday implored America’s leaders to accept those born in other countries as their own children, urging lawmakers to set aside political differences and embrace people who “travel north in search of a better life.”
+
+The pope wrapped traditional Catholic teachings into a celebration of American icons including Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., drawing lessons from their work to gently but firmly push Congress to move beyond the partisan paralysis that has blocked progress on immigration reform, climate change and other issues.
+
+“Each son or daughter of a given country has a mission, a personal and social responsibility,” the 78-year-old pontiff said in heavily accented English. “Your own responsibility as members of Congress is to enable this country, by your legislative activity, to grow as a nation.”
+
+President Obama watched the speech on television, according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “Pope Francis made the appropriate observation for the United States to live up to the high standards that we set for ourselves,” Earnest said.
+
+[LIVE UPDATES: The latest on Pope Francis in America]
+
+The Capitol Hill call to action kicked off a second full day of gleeful crowds and emotional visits to Catholic institutions. The faithful gathered at the Apostolic Nunciature, or Vatican embassy, to greet the pope when he emerged. More lined the streets as his motorcade traveled to the Capitol, where thousands waited on the Mall to watch his speech on giant screens.
+
+After his address to Congress, the pope went directly from the grandeur of Capitol Hill to the spare St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in a neighborhood that has flipped over the past decade from marginalized to magnet. He prayed with people who variously wore suits and torn T-shirts, and he blessed the meals of more than 300 homeless people.
+
+Upon arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the pope traveled by helicopter and motorcade to a very different St. Patrick’s, the soaring cathedral on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, for an evening service.
+
+There, the pontiff began his homily by expressing “my sentiments of closeness” with Muslims after the tragic stampede that killed more than 700 pilgrims near Mecca on Thursday, the first day of Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest Muslim holidays. “I unite myself with all prayers to Almighty God, the merciful,” he said.
+
+He spoke directly to nuns and women in the church, saying, “What would the church be without you?” He also referenced the clergy sex scandal for the second time on this visit, lamenting “the shame” caused by “brothers who harmed and scandalized the church in the most vulnerable of her members.”
+
+The pontiff will carry his message to world leaders Friday when he speaks at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.
+
+In his speech to Congress, Francis crafted an address saturated in American references, with special praise for the nation’s role as “a land which has inspired so many people to dream.”
+
+He was pointed at times, urging the abolition of the death penalty and the end of arms trading, and warning of the dangers of religious extremism worldwide. And he was oblique at points, never directly mentioning abortion or the United States’ rapid embrace of same-sex marriage, saying only that the family is being threatened and that “fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family.”
+
+He saved his most specific prescription for combating climate change, a cause on which he said the United States has a special obligation to lead.
+
+“I call for a courageous and responsible effort to redirect our steps, and to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity,” the pope said. “I am convinced that we can make a difference — I’m sure. And I have no doubt that the United States — and this Congress — have an important role to play. Now is the time for courageous actions and strategies.”
+
+The pope, who helped broker a diplomatic opening with Cuba, offered himself and his example as a pastoral link between opposing points of view. “It is my duty to build bridges and to help all men and women, in any way possible, to do the same,” he said. “A good political leader is one who, with the interests of all in mind, seizes the moment in a spirit of openness and pragmatism.”
+
+Although members of Congress largely avoided the ostentatious displays of partisan cheering that have come to characterize the president’s annual State of the Union addresses, an ideological divide was apparent at times. In response to Francis’s passage about climate change, Democrats mostly stood and cheered, while some Republicans stayed seated and applauded mildly, if at all.
+
+But the response to the pope’s passionate words about embracing immigrants seemed to strike a bipartisan chord. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a presidential candidate and son of Cuban immigrants, wiped away tears as the pope called himself “the son of immigrants.”
+
+[Pope Francis: ‘I always was interested in politics’]
+
+Pope Francis tempered his call for action with a statement of support for the role that business plays in society, calling it “a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving the world.”
+
+“The creation and distribution of wealth,” he said, is a vital element in the fight against poverty and climate change.
+
+Those looking for signs of this pope’s political direction could find evidence in the speech’s repeated references to a pantheon of liberal heroes, from Dorothy Day, who dedicated her life to a battle against poverty and war, to Thomas Merton, whose “Letters to a White Liberal,” written in 1963, urged Christians to follow their faith and join the fight for civil rights for black Americans.
+
+The pope praised King for his focus on “liberty in plurality and non-exclusion,” Day for “social justice,” and Merton for “dialogue and openness to God.”
+
+[6 reasons the pope’s speech could be awkward for some lawmakers]
+
+Francis implored Congress to “reject a mind-set of hostility” and embrace the immigrants who come “to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom.”
+
+The pope, noting that many in Congress are also children of people who made the risky journey to America, said the nation must follow the golden rule and “treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be treated.”
+
+“We must not be taken aback by their numbers,” he said, “but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation.”
+
+Francis’s emphasis on immigrants is a matter of self-interest for a U.S. church that is rapidly becoming majority Latino. Parishes across the white Northeast are shuttered while many in the West and South are bursting with ­Spanish-language Masses.
+
+That focus also dovetails with the major theme of his American trip so far, a series of reminders that his papacy is very much about renewing the church’s focus on the poor and the powerless. The pope this year opened a 30-­bedroom homeless shelter just steps from the Vatican. He had showers set up for homeless people in St. Peter’s Square, and he invited about 150 homeless people to a private viewing of the Sistine Chapel.
+
+In New York, he will get a direct look at inner-city Catholic education when he visits a school in East Harlem and meets with immigrants and refugees. In Philadelphia, where he will end his U.S. visit, the pope will visit a prison to meet with inmates. In Washington, his visit at St. Patrick’s immediately — and pointedly — followed his hour in the majestic House chamber. The plain sanctuary of the 220-year-old downtown church was filled with people who need basic life services. But as Francis noted, “In prayer, there is no first or second class.”
+
+“I need your prayers, your support,” the pontiff said, standing at a simple wooden podium before a reverentially silent flock. “Would you like to pray together?”
+
+The hush broke like the uncorking of a bottle: “Yes!”
+
+Americans are largely supportive of the pope’s engagement on economic, social and environmental issues. But American Catholics, who make up about one-fifth of the U.S. electorate, remain deeply divided over their church’s directives.
+
+[Poll: Americans love this pope. His church? Not as much]
+
+One Catholic congressman, Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), skipped the pope’s appearance to protest Francis’s advocacy for strong action against global climate change and what Gosar sees as the pope’s failure to speak out “with moral authority against violent Islam.”
+
+The many lawmakers who were inside the chamber on Thursday emerged with bipartisan agreement that the pope’s central message was simple: Just get along.
+
+On the Capitol lawn, many of those who watched the pope’s congressional address on giant video screens came away convinced that Congress should — but probably won’t — take his message to heart.
+
+“I was not expecting him to address the bipartisan divide,” said Emily Warn, 62, a writer from Seattle. “It’s as if he was trying to heal Congress.”
+
+In a country where the old-line Catholic population is diminishing because many families are having fewer children — though a wave of Hispanic immigrants is partly making up for that decline in numbers — the pope spoke to young Catholics, especially those who are “disoriented and aimless, trapped in a hopeless maze of violence, abuse and despair.”
+
+They will have children, he said, only if the nation provides them with a greater sense of “possibilities for the future.”
+
+After the address, Francis walked through the Capitol’s second floor to Statuary Hall and paused at the statue of Junípero Serra, the California missionary whom he had canonized on Wednesday.
+
+The pontiff then joined Vice President Biden, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other congressional leaders on the speaker’s balcony overlooking the West Front of the Capitol, greeting an enthusiastic crowd that numbered in the thousands. He said a few words of thanks in Spanish and then, to great cheers, switched to English: “Thank you very much, and God bless America!”
+
+Sarah Pulliam Bailey, DeNeen L. Brown, Pamela Constable, Jessica Contrera, Ed O’Keefe, Michael E. Ruane and Kelsey Snell contributed to this report.",REAL
+1284,"Poll: Trump gains in Iowa, still dominates in New Hampshire","With just over a week until the first 2016 election contest, Donald Trump takes the lead in Iowa -- and maintains his big advantage in New Hampshire.
+
+That’s according to the latest round of Fox News state polls on the Republican presidential nomination contest.
+
+CLICK HERE TO READ THE IOWA POLL RESULTS
+
+CLICK HERE TO READ THE NEW HAMPSHIRE POLL RESULTS
+
+Trump bests Ted Cruz in Iowa and now receives 34 percent support among Republican caucus-goers.  Trump was at 23 percent in the Fox News Poll two weeks ago (January 4-7).
+
+Cruz is second with 23 percent -- down a touch from 27 percent.  Marco Rubio comes in third with 12 percent, down from 15 percent.  No others garner double-digit support.
+
+Among caucus-goers who identify as “very” conservative, Cruz was up by 18 points over Trump earlier this month.  Now they each receive about a third among this group (Cruz 34 percent vs. Trump 33 percent).
+
+There’s been a similar shift among white evangelical Christians.  Cruz’s 14-point advantage is now down to a 2-point edge.
+
+A lot has happened in the intervening two weeks.  Fox Business Network hosted a Republican debate where Trump questioned Cruz’s eligibility to be president, and Cruz attacked Trump’s liberal “New York values.”  On Tuesday, Gov. Terry Branstad urged his fellow Iowans to vote against Cruz because of his opposition to ethanol -- and former Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin endorsed Trump.
+
+Republican pollster Daron Shaw says, “We tend to over-interpret every little thing in a presidential race, but here we actually have solid evidence Trump didn't just win last week in Iowa -- he won it by enough to put some distance between himself and Cruz.”  Shaw conducts the Fox News Poll with Democratic pollster Chris Anderson.
+
+But a lot can change before Iowans caucus February 1.
+
+A third of Republican caucus-goers say they may change their mind (33 percent).  Even one in four Trump supporters says they may ultimately go with another candidate (25 percent).
+
+Cruz tops the list when GOP caucus-goers are asked their second-choice candidate.  When first and second-choice preferences are combined, it’s extremely tight between Trump (48 percent) and Cruz (45 percent).
+
+That’s because 20 percent of Iowa Republican caucus-goers are so negative on Trump they say they would “refuse” to vote for him over the Democrat in November, while fewer say the same of Cruz (11 percent).  Another 14 percent say they would stay home if the nominee is Jeb Bush.
+
+Here’s how the rest of the field stands:  Ben Carson is at 7 percent, Rand Paul is at 6 percent, Bush and Chris Christie each get 4 percent, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich and Rick Santorum tie at 2 percent, and Carly Fiorina gets 1 percent.
+
+More than a third who say they will attend a Republican caucus this year have never gone before (38 percent).  Many of these first-time attendees, 43 percent, are supporting Trump, while 19 percent favor Cruz and 14 percent Rubio.  The poll can’t predict how many from this group will actually show up.
+
+Among just those Republicans who have caucused before, it’s a 3-point race:  Trump 28 percent vs. Cruz 25 percent.  Another 10 percent go for Rubio.
+
+True conservative values is the top characteristic GOP caucus-goers want in their party’s nominee (27 percent), closely followed by telling it like it is (24 percent) and being a strong leader (23 percent).  Those traits outrank nominating someone who can win in November (9 percent) or has the right experience (7 percent).
+
+Unlike Iowa, there has been little movement in the New Hampshire Republican race. Trump continues to garner more than twice the support of his nearest competitors.
+
+The Fox News poll shows Trump at 31 percent (down 2 points), Cruz at 14 percent (up 2 points) and Rubio at 13 percent (down 2 points).
+
+Kasich is at 9 percent, Bush and Christie each receive 7 percent, Carson and Paul tie at 5 percent, while Fiorina gets 3 percent, and Huckabee 1 percent.
+
+Despite dominating the NH race, Trump also tops the list as the nominee who would make Republicans stay home in November:  26 percent say they would refuse to vote for Trump against the Democrat.  Fifteen percent say the same of Bush, 14 percent feel that way about Cruz, and 12 percent about Rubio.
+
+Over half of likely Republican primary voters in the Granite State say they are certain to vote for their candidate, while 36 percent could still shift their support.
+
+Granite Staters also want slightly different traits in their nominee than their Iowa counterparts.  NH GOP primary voters want a strong leader (27 percent) and someone who tells it like it is (21 percent) more than a nominee who has true conservative values (15 percent), is electable (13 percent), or has the right experience (12 percent).
+
+The Fox News Poll is conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R).  These polls were conducted January 18-21, 2016, by telephone (landline and cellphone) with live interviewers.
+
+The New Hampshire poll was among a sample of 801 registered voters selected from a statewide voter file.  Results based on the sample of 401 Republican primary voters have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.
+
+In Iowa, the poll was among a sample of 801 registered voters selected from a statewide voter file.  Results based on the sample of 378 Republican caucus-goers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.",REAL
+2989,Rand Paul Goes on Senate Floor to Protest NSA Spying Measure,"Congress faces a June 1 deadline for the law's expiration, and Paul's speech underscored the deep divisions over the National Security Agency's (NSA's) bulk collection of Americans' phone records, which was revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.
+
+""There comes a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer,"" the Kentucky senator said at 1:18 p.m. EDT when he took to the Senate floor. ""That time is now, and I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts, go unchallenged.""
+
+He finished at 11:49 p.m., having not sat for more than 10 hours.
+
+The House overwhelmingly passed a bill to end the bulk collection and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, has said the Senate will act on the issue before beginning a Memorial Day recess scheduled for week's end.
+
+But McConnell, along with presidential hopefuls Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, and Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, favors extending the law. Final congressional approval of the bill before the deadline is no certainty.
+
+Paul plunged into a lengthy speech declaring the Patriot Act unconstitutional and opposing renewal of the program. With a hefty binder at his desk, he spelled out his objections, occasionally allowing Republican and Democratic senators to pose questions and getting support from a handful of House members seated at the back of the chamber.
+
+""I don't think we're any safer looking at every American's records,"" Paul said.
+
+Paul's campaign sent out a fundraising appeal while his longstanding opposition to bulk collection, a pillar of his campaign, stirred social media.
+
+Throughout the night, several Democratic senators and a few Republicans gave his voice occasional breaks by speaking several minutes to ostensibly ask him questions. Paul kept control by yielding for questions without ""yielding the floor,"" and by not sitting.
+
+The surveillance issue has divided Republicans and Democrats, cutting across party lines and pitting civil libertarians concerned about privacy against more hawkish lawmakers fearful about losing tools to combat terrorism.
+
+As Paul made his case, a Justice Department memo circulated on Capitol Hill warning lawmakers that the NSA will have to begin winding down its bulk collection of Americans' phone records by the end of the week if Congress fails to reauthorize the Patriot Act.
+
+""After May 22, 2015, the National Security Agency will need to begin taking steps to wind down the bulk telephone metadata program in anticipation of a possible sunset in order to ensure that it does not engage in any unauthorized collection or use of the metadata,"" the department said.
+
+If Congress fails to act, several key provisions of the law would expire, including the bulk collection; a provision allowing so-called roving wiretaps, which the FBI uses for criminals who frequently switch cellphones; and a third that makes it easier to obtain a warrant to target a ""lone wolf"" terror suspect who has no provable links to a terrorist organization.
+
+Last week, the House backed the USA Freedom Act, which would replace bulk collection with a system to search the data held by telephone companies on a case-by-case basis. The vote was 338-88, and House Republican and Democratic leaders have insisted the Senate act on their bill.
+
+But McConnell and several other top Republicans prefer to simply reauthorize the post-Sept. 11 law. McConnell has agreed to allow a vote on the House bill, but has indicated there may not be enough votes to pass it in the Senate.
+
+The Justice Department also said that if Congress allows the law to expire and then passes legislation to reauthorize it when lawmakers return to Washington the week of June 1, it would ""be effective in making the authorities operative again, but may expose the government to some litigation risk in the event of legal challenge.""
+
+The White House backs the House bill and has pressed for the Senate to approve the legislation and send it to President Barack Obama for his signature.
+
+The House bill is the result of outrage among Republicans and Democrats after Snowden's revelations about the NSA program.
+
+Although Paul called his action a filibuster, it technically fell short of Senate rules since the bill the Senate was considering was trade, not the Patriot Act.",REAL
+6801,China Airport Security Robot Gives Electroshocks,"China Airport Security Robot Gives Electroshocks 11/02/2016 
+ACTIVIST POST 
+While debate surrounds the threat of autonomous “killer robots,” the mechanized replacement of humans continues across the workforce. 
+The industrial robotics industry is logging record sales worldwide, and there appears to be no sign of a slowdown. As you can see in the graphic below, 2015 sales surged 12% over a previous record year to reach almost 1/4 million units. 
+There are many factors driving this growth, which you can read about here; but one point worth noting is that the two leading countries are the US and China, with China leading the way. 
+The nature of robotics is also changing, as new developments in artificial intelligence are giving robots an increasing range of potential uses. One key area, of course, is security. Robot security guards have already begun appearing at prisons , care facilities , and schools, in various locations around the world. 
+One U.S. robot company, Gamma 2 Robotics, has designed several models for mass production. Their latest – RAMSEE – can be seen in the video below. A true mass roll-out of this fully autonomous security guard could significantly impact the 1.5 million humans that are currently employed in some form of security patrol. 
+RAMSEE advertises the following capabilities: Is a physical presence that autonomously patrols without supervision Provides real-time data: intruders, motion, heat, fire, smoke, gases & more Is a human-machine interface that creates a powerful force multiplier 
+Significantly, Gamma 2 Robotics has partnered with Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure: “the global leader in public safety and security solutions.” 
+However, RAMSEE is missing one thing: weapons. For that, we have to travel to China, where they seem to have embraced police robots full throttle. 
+In late 2015, I covered an announcement from China’s Xinhua news agency where they announced the development and deployment of 3 weaponized “anti-terrorism” robots that would be far more active than a mere patrol: 
+“The toy-sized robots can coordinate with each other on the battlefield,” said the report, following their unveiling at the 2015 World Robot Conference in Beijing. 
+The first model is known as a “reconnaissance” robot, which scouts for poisonous gases, dangerous chemicals and explosives before transmitting its findings back to base.If this initial investigation detects a simple bomb is the source of danger, the second robot model – a small explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) machine – would be sent in to diffuse it. 
+But with other, more complicated threats, an attacker robot would start its mission, armed with “minor-caliber weapons, recoilless rifles and grenade launchers”. 
+“With a sighting telescope, a trigger and a safe installed, the attacker can hit its target from a long distance,” Xinhua said. 
+The local police force in Beijing was reported to be among the buyers for the three robots , which are priced at 1.5 million yuan (£156,000) for the set by manufacturers HIT Robot Group, who are based in the northern city of Harbin. 
+“Apart from anti-terror operations, they can also be applied in fire fighting, public security, forestry and agriculture,” the company’s sales manager Chen Deqiang said, according to Xinhua. 
+If we have learned anything about anti-terrorism efforts, authorities consider front-line deployment to be areas of public travel. We were given the TSA based on such notions, and have since witnessed its intrusive role in airports, and soon-to-be at other public transportation if authorities have their way. 
+China has gone to the next level with a robot TSA of sorts called AnBot that is equipped with what is essentially a taser-like device that is being fittingly compared to a cattle-prod. 
+Image Credit 
+It was first introduced at a tech show earlier in the year, and was speculated to have been designed for protest suppression. For now, its first job is to patrol China’s Shenzhen airport. 
+Most alarming, however, is that it is tied to one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. 
+The back end of this “intelligent security robot” is l inked to China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer , where it has access to cloud services . AnBot conducts patrols, recognizes threats and has multiple cameras that use facial recognition. 
+These cloud services give the robots petascale processing power , well beyond onboard processing capabilities in the robot. The supercomputer connection is there “to enhance the intelligent learning capabilities and human-machine interface of these devices,” said the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review, in a report released Tuesday that examines China’s autonomous systems development efforts . [emphasis added] 
+( Source ) 
+This link to “cloud services” is a new trend in robot artificial intelligence that also has been referred to as the Wikipedia for Robots – essentially an Internet Cloud Brain. Through robot-to-robot information sharing they can speed up their learning process … autonomously. Examples have included robots that can learn to cook, and robots that can learn the tasks involved in care-giving. However, when applied to policing, things become much more ethically troubling. 
+People were outraged in the U.S., for example, when a robot in Dallas was used to deliver a pound of C-4 explosive to a U.S. citizen whom the police deemed a sufficient threat worthy of immediate execution. At least, in that case, a human made the decision. But it is being viewed as a tip-toe along the path to the widespread use of “killer robots” much as we have seen with the use of drones. Discussion was once limited to overseas – egregious enough – but there has been a growing voice of those who are urging weaponized domestic police drones. 
+As John Vibes wrote , it might be inevitable: 
+The Taser corporation is planning on building a drone that is equipped with a stun gun, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal. 
+Not only will the drones be equipped with tasers, but there is also talk of them being autonomous, meaning that an actual human won’t necessarily be needed to fly the drone. 
+This is actually already being done in India , the first country to have approved the use of drones attached with “non-lethal” weapons. And, just this week, British tabloid, The Sun , had a feature entitled “Vladimir Putin’s Russia is preparing an army of robots and drones to take on its enemies, Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin admits.” Given the available facts, this title no longer seems so deliberately sensational. 
+Clearly we are entering a potentially dangerous convergence of expanding robotic artificial intelligence along with the political will to continue allowing robots more and more autonomy as they carry out the traditional duties of the military and police. Some experts argue that the precision of robotics will curb many of the abuses we have seen from our military and police. But is that the trend we are actually seeing? Or will automated systems of violent control inevitably lead to even greater industrial-level suppression and killing? 
+Nicholas West writes for ActivistPost.com . This article may be republished in part or in full with author attribution and source link .",FAKE
+3866,Obama Details His Disappointment With Netanyahu In First Post-Election Comments,"The president's comments cap a geopolitical backlash sparked by Netanyahu's statement on Monday that a Palestinian state would not be established on his watch. The Israeli prime minister has since insisted that he remains open to a two-state solution under very specific, restrictive conditions. But the damage appears to have been done, with the White House offering only the most perfunctory of diplo-speak to obscure its frustrations.
+
+""We indicated that that kind of rhetoric was contrary to what is the best of Israel's traditions. That although Israel was founded based on the historic Jewish homeland and the need to have a Jewish homeland, Israeli democracy has been premised on everybody in the country being treated equally and fairly,"" said Obama. ""And I think that that is what's best about Israeli democracy. If that is lost, then I think that not only does it give ammunition to folks who don't believe in a Jewish state, but it also I think starts to erode the meaning of democracy in the country.""
+
+In his first public comments on Tuesday's elections in Israel, Obama's deepest discomfort was saved for Netanyahu's Election Day warning about Arab Israeli voters going to the polls ""in droves.""
+
+Though he pledged to keep working with the Israeli government on military and intelligence operations, Obama declined to say whether the United States would continue to block Palestinian efforts to secure statehood through the United Nations. In a phone conversation the two had on Thursday, he said he indicated to Netanyahu that ""it is going to be hard to find a path where people are seriously believing that negotiations are possible.""
+
+""We take him at his word when he said that it wouldn't happen during his prime ministership, and so that's why we've got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don't see a chaotic situation in the region,"" the president said in an interview with The Huffington Post on Friday.
+
+WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is operating under the assumption that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not support the creation of a Palestinian state, despite the Israeli leader's post-election efforts to recast himself as amenable to a two-state solution.
+
+Besides the pressing international matters, Obama also discussed challenges on the domestic front. In forceful terms, he chastised Senate Republicans for holding up his attorney general nominee , Loretta Lynch, and encouraged Democrats to buck demands that they first pass a human trafficking bill with a controversial anti-abortion provision.
+
+""Our goal,"" he added, ""is to get this done in a matter of weeks, not months.""
+
+Negotiators took a hiatus for the observation of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. The president on Friday encouraged everybody involved to use that time to grow more ""comfortable with the current positions that are being taken.""
+
+Standing in the way of that final deal, according to recent reports, are lingering disputes over limits on new types of centrifuges that Iran wants to develop and the pace of international sanctions relief to be given to the country after a deal is struck.
+
+""Frankly,"" he said, ""they have not yet made the kind of concessions that are I think going to be needed for a final deal to get done. But they have moved, and so there's the possibility.""
+
+While he expressed worry about the strain that Netanyahu had placed on Israel's democratic fabric, Obama did not see the Israeli prime minister's electoral victory as having a tangible impact on current negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. With just days to go before those talks between Iran, the U.S. and five other countries are scheduled to wrap, Obama offered a markedly sober assessment about the prospects for a deal.
+
+An even bigger fight between the parties could be on the political horizon. The president flatly said that he would not sign an appropriations bill to fund the government if it did not alleviate the spending cuts brought about by sequestration. With spending cuts set to return in October 2015, his declaration ups the ante for lawmakers and portends another government shutdown showdown.
+
+""I’ve been very clear. We are not going to have a situation where, for example, our education spending goes back to its lowest level since the year 2000,"" said Obama. ""We can’t do that to our kids, and I’m not going to sign it.""
+
+Even without Congress' input, there are initiatives that Obama can pursue during his closing year-and-a-half in office. During the roughly 25-minute interview in the White House Cabinet Room, he said that two major ones will be coming.
+
+""Relatively soon,"" Obama said, he will be raising the annual salary threshold at which companies are required to pay overtime to employees who work more than 40 hours a week. The president didn't tip his hand as to how much he would lift the current level of $23,600.
+
+In addition, Obama said he would be exercising his pardon and clemency powers ""more aggressively for people who meet the criteria."" There has been ongoing criticism that he has utilized those powers less than many of his predecessors.
+
+One place where Obama will not go in the closing months of his second term is back to the negotiating table over a ""grand bargain"" on long-term deficit or debt reduction. Despite Republican criticism that a crisis still looms, he insisted that the times allow for a different approach
+
+""The truth is, is that circumstances changed,"" said Obama, when asked why he no longer highlights issues like entitlement reform. ""At that time, we were seeing significantly higher deficits, and the economy was just beginning to grow. We now know that we’ve got strong growth.""
+
+His unwillingness to re-open those talks he had in 2010 and 2011 isn't indicative of some ideological drift, he added. Asked if he'd become a more progressive president over time -- as recent comments from his former top adviser Dan Pfeiffer indicated -- the president answered, emphatically, ""No.""
+
+""What we have done,"" Obama said, ""is consistently looked for additional opportunities to get stuff done. ... By hook or by crook, we're going to make sure that when I leave this office, that the country is more prosperous, more people have opportunity, kids have a better education, we're more competitive, climate change is being taken more seriously than it was, and we are actually trying to do something about it. Those are going to be the measures by which I look back and say whether I've been successful as president.""",REAL
+9196,"Re: WikiLeaks: Neera Tanden has ANOTHER ringing endorsement for Hillary! (No, not really)","WikiLeaks: Neera Tanden has ANOTHER ringing endorsement for Hillary! (No, not really) Posted at 3:21 pm on October 29, 2016 by Doug P. 
+As emails released by WikiLeaks have revealed, Hillary Clinton adviser and Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden has demonstrated brutal honesty when it comes to the Clintons’ dealings, and a new email released today is no different: Neera Tanden knows (and she spells like Trump!): ""Sometimes HRC/WJC have the worst judgement"" https://t.co/hRSAhG2eua pic.twitter.com/cTs0oGSb4m",FAKE
+4796,Reality Check: First Clinton v Trump presidential debate,"The first televised presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was a bonanza for fact checkers. Here are some of the candidates' statements and how they compare with the facts.
+
+Claim: Donald Trump repeated his insistence that he was against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, claiming Clinton's assertions to the contrary were ""mainstream media nonsense put out by her"".
+
+Reality Check verdict: Trump did not publicly speak out against the war before it started. On 11 September 2002, radio host Howard Stern asked Trump if he supported a potential invasion of Iraq. He replied: ""Yeah, I guess so"". During the debate, he tried to explain that away by saying the comment had been made ""lightly"". He said he had been arguing in private, to Fox News's Sean Hannity, that war would destabilise the Middle East, but we have no evidence to support that so far. He did start to express doubts after the invasion.
+
+Claim: Clinton attacked Trump over his boasts about his business acumen. ""You know, Donald was very fortunate in his life and that's all to his benefit,"" Clinton said. ""He started his business with $14m, borrowed from his father.""
+
+Reality Check verdict: Trump says he received a $1m loan from his real estate mogul father. He also got loan guarantees and money from his future inheritance and inherited a share of his father's property holdings.
+
+Claim: Trump alleged that Clinton called the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal the ""gold standard"" of trade agreements. Clinton denied this but added: ""I did say I hoped it would be a good deal.""
+
+Reality Check verdict: We give this one to Trump. Clinton did more than express hope that the deal would turn out well and in a 2012 trip to Australia said it would be the ""gold standard"": ""This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field.""
+
+Claim: Clinton said: ""People have looked at both of our plans, have concluded that mine would create 10 million jobs and yours would lose us 3.5 million jobs.""
+
+Reality Check verdict: Clinton has made this claim before. It is based on an optimistic reading of a report by Moody's Analytics, which says that most of the 10 million new jobs would be created anyway by an expanding economy. If all of Clinton's economic policies became law - which the report says is unlikely - they would account for 3.2 million of the 10 million jobs. The same company analysed Trump's plans and suggested they would tip the US into recession and lead to 3.5 million job losses - something strongly disputed by the Trump campaign.
+
+But the two reports cover different time frames. The author Mark Zandi told CNN Money a more accurate comparison to the 10 million jobs created under Clinton would be 400,000 jobs lost under Trump, not 3.4 million.
+
+Claim: Trump has frequently tried to blame the rise of Islamic State militants on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This is his latest attempt.
+
+Reality Check verdict: Possibly the strangest claim of the night. Clinton is 68 years old. The so-called Islamic State can trace its roots back to 1999, although it did not start referring to itself as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) until 2013. Read more here.
+
+Claim: Clinton accused Trump of calling calling climate change a hoax invented by the Chinese. He insisted ""I did not say that"".
+
+Reality Check verdict: This claim relates to a 2012 tweet which Trump later said was a joke. He said: ""The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.""
+
+Claim: Clinton said race determines how people are treated in the criminal justice system.
+
+Reality Check verdict: This is a tough one to prove as there are no figures on the percentage of crimes that result in arrest. What we do know is that black people are locked up five times more frequently than white people. African-American people make up about 13% of the United States population. White people make up 64%. But black people make up 40% of the prison population, and white people 39%. It does not mean that black people, who tend to live more in urban, heavily policed areas, are five times as likely to commit crime however.
+
+Clinton also claimed that African American men are more likely to be killed by guns than other demographics, something that is largely borne out by the statistics.
+
+Claim: Murders in New York city are up.
+
+Reality Check verdict: As so often with crime statistics it depends how you slice it. The murder rate in New York city is close to record lows but did increase slightly between 2014 and 2015, according to FBI figures. But the very latest figures from the New York Police Department show murder rates are down 4% on 2015.
+
+Murder rates across the US as a whole went up 10.8% in 2015, the biggest single-year percentage jump since 1971, with a big spike in a handful of cities including Chicago, Washington DC and Baltimore.
+
+Trump also claimed that ""stop and frisk"" tactics ""worked very well in New York"" and brought crime rates down. This is hotly disputed by researchers and commentators . Violent crime rates have continued to decline in New York, as part of a long term trend, even though the number of ""stop and frisk"" searches has gone down dramatically in recent years. Research by Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University found indiscriminate searches had little effect on crime, although his research also found crime was reduced when police stopped and frisked civilians after observing someone acting violently, selling drugs or ""casing a joint"".
+
+Claim: Trump says he can't release his tax returns because he is in the middle of a tax audit. He also says publishing them would not reveal much.
+
+Clinton suggests he will never publish them as they might reveal he is not as rich as he says he is, does not pay Federal tax and does not give as much to charity as claimed.
+
+Reality Check verdict: Being audited by the Internal Revenue Service does not prohibit the release of tax returns. They would reveal Trump's annual income, how much he pays in tax and how much he gives to charity. Trump claims he has given $102m to charity in the past five years, but a Washington Post investigation could not find any cash donated by Trump's businesses after 2008. Trump's actual wealth has been assessed by Forbes at $4.5bn, compared with the $10bn he claims.
+
+Interestingly, Trump has never provided evidence that he is actually under audit by the tax authorities. According to Associated Press, a letter released by his tax lawyers never used the word, merely describing his tax returns as under continuous review.",REAL
+9676,Doomsday Election,"Here's   
+This is what it must feel like to be on Death Row, to be waiting for the moment when the iron door clangs open for the last time and four burly guards escort you arm-in-arm to the room where your life will be extinguished. That same sense of dread hangs over the presidential election of 2016. 
+No one is happy about the election and no one anticipates better days ahead. America’s ‘glory days” appear to be in the rearview mirror while the steady downward slide seems to be gaining pace. This year’s presidential campaign has brought all the anger, anxiety and frustration bubbling to the surface. Nerves are raw, people are on edge, and the trepidation is so thick you could cut it with a knife. All the recent surveys tell the same story: Americans are sick of the mudslinging, sick of the scandals, sick of the recriminations, sick of the two party duopoly, and sick of the two candidates, the two most distrusted and reviled candidates in the country’s 230 year history. This is from the New York Times: 
+“An overwhelming majority of voters are disgusted by the state of American politics, and many harbor doubts that either major-party nominee can unite the country after a historically ugly presidential campaign, according to the final pre-election New York Times/CBS News Poll… 
+With more than eight in 10 voters saying the campaign has left them repulsed rather than excited, the rising toxicity threatens the ultimate victor. Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, are seen as dishonest and viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters… 
+After weeks of Mr. Trump’s accusations that the election is “rigged,” a little more than six in 10 of his supporters say they will accept the results as legitimate if he loses. More than a quarter of Mr. Trump’s supporters say they will probably not accept the outcome if Mrs. Clinton is declared the winner, and nearly 40 percent of them say they have little or no confidence that Americans’ votes will be counted properly.” ( Voters Express Disgust Over U.S. Politics in New Times /CBS Poll, New York Times) 
+The growing sense of desperation in America today is palpable and it goes far beyond this one, isolated election cycle. The steady erosion of confidence in the nation’s main institutions is evident in Congress’s public approval ratings which seem to be stuck in single-digit territory. The public probably feels equal contempt for the Loretta Lynch Justice Department which is loaded with Clinton toadies that have done their best to quash any investigation into the illicit pay-to-play machinations at the Clinton Foundation. And, let’s not forget the media which has lost whatever shred of credibility it managed to salvage after its myriad of war-promoting lies about WMD, mobile weapons labs, aluminum tubes and Assad’s imaginary chemical weapons attacks, attacks that were invented from whole cloth at one of Washington’s many neocon think tanks where these fake ideas are typically hatched. The Forth Estate’s latest gambit is an idiotic attempt to prove that Vladimir Putin is trying to hack our thoroughly-corrupted Third World voting system to achieve some nebulous political gain. What a joke. 
+No, Hillary, Putin is not gaming the system like you did in the primaries with Bernie Sanders, nor did he put a gun to your head and force you to delete the 33,000 missing emails from your private server. That was your handiwork Ms. Clinton, although you have a done a masterful job in deflecting attention from yourself and passing the buck for your own sleazy, criminal activities onto Moscow. 
+But, back to the media. This from Gallup: 
+“Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year. 
+Gallup began asking this question in 1972, and on a yearly basis since 1997. Over the history of the entire trend, Americans’ trust and confidence hit its highest point in 1976, at 72%, in the wake of widely lauded examples of investigative journalism regarding Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. After staying in the low to mid-50s through the late 1990s and into the early years of the new century, Americans’ trust in the media has fallen slowly and steadily. It has consistently been below a majority level since 2007… 
+Bottom Line:…the slide in media trust has been happening for the past decade. Before 2004, it was common for a majority of Americans to profess at least some trust in the mass media, but since then, less than half of Americans feel that way. Now, only about a third of the U.S. has any trust in the Fourth Estate, a stunning development for an institution designed to inform the public.” ( Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low , Gallup) 
+“Designed to inform the public”??? 
+You gotta be kidding? Droopy confidence in the media is a triumph for ordinary working people who have begun to see through the charade of “unbiased coverage” and realize that the corporate owners of the press manipulate the news to shape perceptions and maintain their stranglehold on power. That’s what’s really going on, and that’s why a growing number of people have swarmed to Donald Trump’s campaign. They see Trump’s lack of political correctness as a sign that he is not owned by the Washington oligarchy of racketeers who invent teleprompter candidates like Obama and Clinton who are never certain what they actually believe until they see it printed in bold letters on the screen in front of them. ORDER IT NOW 
+To large extent, Trump owes his shocking rise to the top of the GOP ticket to the fact that he shoots from the hip and that the media hates him. What was once a liability, has become an asset as trust for the despised media has plunged to depths never seen before. 
+But that doesn’t explain what’s really driving this election and why are the American people so overcome by desperation? 
+It’s all about economic insecurity. It’s all about the fact that standards of living are slipping, that an entire generation is bogged down with student debt, that all the good-paying jobs have been shipped to other countries, that family incomes are shriveling, that a good portion of the population feel threatened by immigration, that health care costs have skyrocketed, that retirement plans have been postponed, and that the great bulk of the nation’s wealth has been transferred to the 1 percent plutocrats and Wall Street landsharks who dictate policy through their Congressional lackeys and their allies at the Federal Reserve. That’s what the election is really all about. 
+People are waking up to the fact that the American dream is dead, that the US is no longer the land of opportunity, and that the lives of their children are going to be worse than their own, far worse. This is why everyone is so upset, so frustrated, so hopeless. They are looking for a political ally who will address their needs, and instead they get bromides on transgender bathrooms or “glass ceilings” or any of the other soothing slogans the Democrats use to pacify the masses and to keep them in the flock. Only now it’s not working as well. Now a sizable portion of the blue collar vote has shifted into Trump’s camp mainly because they see through the phony Democrat rhetoric and all the job-eviscerating free trade deals they’ve pushed for years. Trump has skillfully tapped into the collective psyche of millions of working people who feel the Democratic Party tossed them under the track-hoe 30 years ago and never looked back. And, he’s right, too. The Dems have sold out their supporters, and it’s only going to get worse under Clinton, or should we say, Madame TPP. Here’s how Nile Bowie summed it up in a recent article at CounterPunch: 
+“Economic disempowerment and political disenfranchisement have accelerated under President Obama, to the detriment of the American middle class. White, blue-collar Americans have witnessed the offshoring of their jobs and the erosion of their status in society, and Trump has masterfully stroked their resentment and discontent by playing on their fears of Muslims, immigrants and minorities… 
+Trump’s real problem with the Washington establishment is that he isn’t part of it. His campaign represents an insurgent faction of the oligarchical class that aims to displace and replace the standing political elites. Bipartisan opposition to Trump is grounded in the belief that he would be an unreliable proxy and a liability, someone too narrow and unpredictable to manage the common affairs of the ruling class and the US deep state. 
+Moreover, the US establishment is not interested in being led by such a contentious figure, who would draw protest and public opposition in a way that more conventional establishment candidates largely do not. For example, Trump’s rhetoric on immigration seems to engender more public outrage than the immigration policy under Obama, who has deported more people than any other president in history.” ( Election 2016: A Political System In Crisis , Nile Bowie, CounterPunch) 
+The big money guys don’t like Trump, and they make no bones about it. But Trump isn’t going away and neither are his followers, a vast number of whom will not respect the results of the election if Hillary wins. That’s a big problem for elites who like to manage the population through the popular election sham. Now all that’s at risk. 
+And it’s not like Trump hasn’t bent over backwards to ingratiate himself with the deep-state powerbrokers either. He has. His first olive branch to the elites was the selection of Mike Pence as his running mate. Pence is a died-in-the-wool establishment Republican neocon who can be trusted to pursue the same extremist agenda the GOP has followed since the Gingrich revolution. But there was another big move that Trump made that escaped the notice of the media and which really underscores his willingness to “play by to the rules.” Here’s the story from Zero Hedge: 
+“Six months ago, Steven Mnuchin became finance chair for the Trump campaign. Having successfully helped to raise 10s of millions of dollars for the campaign, the former Goldman Sachs partner and Soros Fund management employee is now positioned for something much larger as Donald Trump reportedly told his aides today that he wants Mnuchin to serve as his Treasury Secretary. 
+Ironically, Trump has often criticized Clinton (and his former competitor Ted Cruz) for their links to the big banks: “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton,” Trump said in one debate. But as we noted previously, he had no qualms, however, in hiring one of the most prominent Goldman alums to raise money for him. …for Trump, a self-professed “anti-establishment” candidate, who has repeatedly stated he is not “for sale to special interest groups”, his sudden call for the seemingly most “Wall Street” of Wall-Streeters to become Treasury Secretary may come as a big surprise to some and will leave many of his supporters demanding an explanation.” ( Trump Wants Former Goldman Partner And Soros Employee To Serve As Treasury Secretary , Zero Hedge) Another head of Treasury from G-Sax? 
+That figures. 
+Trump is great with the rabble-rousing “take back your country” tirades and all the gibberish about the “rigged” system. But he also knows how to cave in when it suits his interests. He knows he’s not going to be president without Wall Street’s nod, so he’s enlisted a trusted insider to take care of business at Treasury. It’s a signal to the bigwigs that they don’t have to worry about the Donald going off the reservation. (wink, wink) So much for Trump’s independence, eh? 
+And what can we say about Hillary Clinton that hasn’t been said a million times before? 
+Clinton, who still holds a slim lead in most of the polls, is clearly the establishment candidate in a year when hatred for the corrupt Washington oligarchy, has reached levels not seen in the last hundred years. The fact that Hillary can run for the nation’s highest office while being investigated by the FBI, while being savaged by the daily releases of new, incriminating emails (from WikiLeaks), and while promoting a hawkish, neocon-driven foreign policy that portends a direct military confrontation with Russia, speaks to the fact that traditional liberal Democrats are either still hoodwinked by the Democratic Party’s manipulation of identity politics or simply terrified of the alternative, Donald Trump. 
+And that’s why everyone is so utterly dejected and depressed about the election, because instead of voting for a candidate they really want or admire, most people are simply voting for the candidate that either disgusts or scares the hell out of them the least. What kind of choice is that? 
+In less than 48 hours, the most agonizingly-wretched campaign of all times will be over, the ballots will be counted, and the new president will be named. The only thing that is certain is that, whoever wins, we lose. 
+MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition . He can be reached at . (Reprinted from Counterpunch by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+961,John Kasich’s Advice for Women to Prevent Sexual Assault: Avoid Parties “Where There’s a Lot of Alcohol”,"Ohio governor John Kasich, who is still running for president, effectively reminded the public of his continued presence in the Republican presidential race on Friday by making a rather regressive comment about how women could avoid being sexually assaulted.
+
+“Don’t go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol,” Kasich suggested during an appearance at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, New York, when a female student asked how he would tackle sexual violence at colleges and universities. Kasich, a millennial in an older man’s body, provided several policy answers—increase access to rape kits and confidential reporting, for instance—and then provided that “one bit of advice.”
+
+Recognizing within minutes that he might have stepped in it, the Kasich Twitter feed went hastily into damage control mode:
+
+This isn’t the first time that Kasich has made awkward comments about women this week. On Tuesday, he was baffled during a town hall when a young woman asked him about social security, responding, “Did someone tell you to ask that question?” (Her response: “No, I think for myself.”)
+
+Not surprisingly, Kasich has a history of making regularly cringeworthy comments about women. His greatest hits include telling a female questioner at a town hall “I don’t have any tickets for Taylor Swift,” and bragging about how women “left their kitchens” to vote for him in Ohio. In February, he signed a bill defunding Planned Parenthood, and in 2013, he signed a gag rule into law that cut funding for rape crisis centers that provided information about abortion services.
+
+Women may not all love John Kasich, but John Kasich loves them. “Are you available?” he asked one woman who stood up to ask a question at a campaign event earlier this month. “You look great tonight.” Right on schedule, governor.",REAL
+273,The system set Boehner up for failure,"On Friday, Speaker John Boehner announced that he will resign from the speakership and the US House at the end of October. Here, the Mischiefs of Faction writers offer their quick reactions.
+
+I think Boehner's resignation is more notable for when it occurred than for that it occurred. He had been speaker or minority leader for almost a decade, and clearly no longer relished his job. I think that the next speaker will face the same obstacles that confronted Boehner, particularly a ""no compromise"" faction of conservatives. They cannot be satisfied with policy substance, since they mostly care about tactical extremism. They have also made it clear that they have little interest in the sort of ""pork barrel"" politics that members traditionally have seen as a means to reelection.
+
+I don't think this situation will change until there is a Republican in the White House, since the Tea Partiers object to the slightest accommodation of President Obama or any Democratic successor. There's also a whole industry now devoted to feeding conservatives' belief that their leadership has sold them out. This includes talk radio, bloggers, and groups such as Heritage Action. Perhaps a leader with a warmer relationship with movement conservatives might be a more effective speaker. I'm skeptical that much will change soon.
+
+John Boehner has finally decided to take his ball and go home. Of course, I understand why he is resigning: The House GOP is ungovernable right now. Thus, while it is an understandable decision, it is not a ""selfless"" one, as several members have described it. No, this is Boehner's coup de grace, executed with deftness. Now free to rely on Democratic votes when necessary, he will be able to keep the government open. In the same way, he might be able to pass other legislation in the next month. More importantly, he presents his fractured caucus with a parting ""gift"" of their own making: selecting their next leader. Beyond the obvious question of who will be the next speaker (probably Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California), really interesting questions raised by Boehner's decision include how the process will work out: Will other Republicans step forward and challenge McCarthy for the job? Will the GOP caucus ultimately come together behind a single candidate? If not, what will the Democrats do? As unexpected and exciting as today's surprise announcement is, this is probably going to get much more interesting before all is said and done.
+
+John Boehner's resignation as speaker of the House is a good illustration of how American political parties are strong and how they are not. US political parties are not strong in the top-down sense. Neither presidents nor congressional leaders have a lot of control over backbenchers in their parties. The main reason is that these leaders don't control party nominations. While parties have become ""stronger"" since the 1970s, they have become stronger from the bottom up, not the top down.
+
+Presidents don't have much better ability to force legislators to do what they want now (when party line votes are the norm) than they did in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s (when party line votes were rarer). What changed? The power to shape legislative behavior comes from the bottom up. Not just from ordinary voters (although those are influential), but also from organized interest groups and wealthy donors in the legislator's district and in their party's national constituency. These factions are what really influence legislators and create party unity, not their party leaders in Washington.
+
+So why is there so much party unity now, when there wasn't in the 1970s? Now the parties are sorted ideologically. All the legislators who come from conservative districts and are backed by conservative interests groups are Republicans, while all those from liberal districts and backed by liberal interest groups are Democrats. So, unlike the 1970s, a party leader now presides over an ideologically unified caucus that usually votes together. Yet that doesn't mean that he or she has much more direct power over them than leaders did in the decades after World War II.
+
+Speakers' jobs were actually more secure in the post–World War II era when they led ideologically diverse parties and party control rarely changed hands. The last speaker of the House to retire by choice because of age was Tip O'Neill, who left in 1986. All subsequent speakers have left because of internal party revolts, personal scandals, or electoral disappointments. It is a challenging job, because while US political parties are strong, the power largely does not rest in the congressional leadership. Politicians are loyal to their parties' voters and organized factions, not to their legislative leaders in DC.
+
+The longstanding tension within congressional parties is that legislators need to cooperate with their parties to accomplish their shared goals, but to do so they must overcome the inherent diversity of American parties.
+
+Since 2010, the House GOP has provided a brilliant demonstration of this tension. The rules of the House, and the Republican conference, provided Boehner with a great deal of power. But his ""majority"" included a sizable number of legislators who would not or could not cooperate with their party. They had campaigned against the party status quo. They promised not to vote for compromises. They promised outcomes they could not realistically achieve with a majority in one chamber (e.g. repealing Obamacare). They feared a primary challenge from the right more than losing to a Democrat.
+
+It is likely that the next speaker will suffer from the same challenge because the challenge is systemic. The best chance to end the cycle, however, would be for the House GOP to select someone who is trusted by the Tea Party faction both inside and outside of Congress, so that when s/he says, ""That's a stupid strategy that will fail, resulting in a drop in the polls and a humiliating acceptance of the Democrats' demands,"" they will actually trust the speaker.
+
+The nationalization of congressional politics has changed what it means to try to lead a congressional party. What we like to call leadership — for speakers, for presidents, whatever — often amounts to reading the interests and preferences of different actors and figuring out how to bring them into a coalition to support policy that includes a little something for everyone. Pet projects and distribution of resources (that is, what we used to know as ""pork"") can help this process along. But if legislators' preferences are driven by national issues like defunding Planned Parenthood and opposing the president, then the job of coalition building becomes that much more challenging. Boehner may not have been the most talented legislative leader, but his problems, as Greg indicates, are also structural and systemic. And to the extent that they reflect the infusion of national — and often symbolic — issues into congressional elections, they may run deeper than the Tea Party-establishment split.
+
+This post is part of Mischiefs of Faction, an independent political science blog featuring reflections on the party system. See more Mischiefs of Faction posts here.",REAL
+3398,Gay marriage victory at Supreme Court triggering backlash,"Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this story misidentified the Alabama official leading efforts against same-sex marriage in the state. It is the state's chief justice.
+
+WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage last June, the man who won the leading case warned that opponents would find new ways to push back.
+
+“We will have to continue the fight,” Jim Obergefell said then — and he was right.
+
+For nearly a year, seesaw battles over religious exemptions and transgender rights have replaced what had been the gay rights movement's steady progress in winning protections against discrimination in states and cities. Legislative and legal skirmishes have been triggered by an intransigent Alabama chief justice and a defiant Kentucky county clerk, a Colorado baker and a Washington State florist, and most recently a conservative backlash that has traveled east from Texas to Mississippi to North Carolina.
+
+""We never thought this had to do with just marriage,"" says Kristen Waggoner, senior vice president of legal advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents many gay rights opponents in court. ""This is about more than marriage.”
+
+It's also about more than bathrooms, although a North Carolina law that denies transgender people the right to use public restrooms corresponding to their gender identity has dominated the LGBT rights debate for the past two months:
+
+Across the country, the gay rights movement has been met with local opposition — sometimes where it was least expected, such as Houston, which had three times elected a lesbian mayor. That has forced the movement back on the defensive less than a year after its greatest success: the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that extended same-sex marriage nationwide.
+
+“To some, this is the next front in the war,"" says David Stacy, government affairs director at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights organization. “Some of the intensity on the other side, some of the emotional intensity, comes from that.”
+
+Both sides in the battle say it's about individual rights — LGBT rights to live free from discrimination, and religious or moral rights to live free from government interference. It extends to education, employment and housing — and it may not be long before a lawsuit is headed back to the Supreme Court.
+
+“I think this moment is going to be short-lived, but a lot of damage can be done in this moment,"" says Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “It will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether Title VII (of the Civil Rights Act) and Title IX (of the Education Amendments Act) fully protect transgender people, and for that matter gay people.""
+
+Justice Anthony Kennedy's historic ruling on same-sex marriage included a single paragraph warning of the war to come.
+
+""The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered,"" Kennedy conceded. ""The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons.""
+
+Those battles had begun long before the Supreme Court's decision. In states where same-sex marriage already was legal, merchants who refused to participate in gay and lesbian weddings based on religious objections were the targets of lawsuits. Most of them lost the early rounds and have appealed.
+
+The first major sign of resistance after the high court's ruling came out of left field. Voters in Houston, where Mayor Annise Parker in 2010 became one of the first openly gay mayors of a major U.S. city, rejected a City Council-passed ordinance to protect residents based on characteristics that included sexual orientation and gender identity. The simple slogan: ""No Men in Women's Bathrooms.""
+
+""They identified an opening and exploited it,"" says James Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's LGBT efforts.
+
+Then this year, state legislatures in South Dakota, Georgia, Mississippi and North Carolina passed laws pushing back against LGBT rights. The bills were vetoed by Republican governors Dennis Daugaard in South Dakota and Nathan Deal in Georgia but signed by Mississippi's Phil Bryant and North Carolina's Pat McCrory.
+
+Mississippi's law protects those who deny services based on religious objections to gay marriage or transgender people. North Carolina's prevents the state and its municipalities from establishing civil rights protections based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
+
+""You're seeing an explosion of religious liberty legislation in the wake of Obergefell,"" says Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, a conservative law firm and think tank involved in the effort. He calls it ""just the tip of the iceberg of what we will see as Obergefell begins to settle on the rest of the country.”
+
+The fight reached the floor of the House of Representatives this month over an amendment intended to ban federal contractors from firing workers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. The measure was blocked, then passed, then blocked again.
+
+Beset by such conflicts, gay rights advocates have made little progress in the past year on their major post-gay marriage agenda: passing state laws protecting the LGBT community against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations.
+
+Utah was the 22nd state to pass such a law in March 2015. Since then, gay rights activists have met a wall of opposition in the remaining 28 states, mostly led by Republican governors and legislatures.
+
+“People are using Obergefell now to say 'I can get married on a Sunday, but then I can go into work and get fired on the next day,” says Travis Weber, director of the center for religious liberty at the conservative Family Research Council.
+
+ Even so, he says, ""There’s a need to protect religious dissenters.”
+
+The two sets of legal skirmishes — over religious exemptions and transgender rights — ""have made it difficult for us to move forward,"" Esseks says. He calls them ""responses to the reality of the freedom to marry nationwide.""
+
+There have been some victories for LGBT rights. Last month, a federal appeals court in Richmond ruled in favor of a transgender boy's right to sue a Virginia school district over its bathroom policy. A handful of states, led by New York, have banned the use of controversial conversion therapy on minors.
+
+“It’s not as though we’re not making any legislative progress. We are,"" Minter says. Even the prospect of passing non-discrimination laws in 'red' states, he says, ""is actually much less daunting after Obergefell than it was before.”
+
+But energized by their loss at the Supreme Court last June, religious objectors are fighting back amidst a presidential election that has divided the country along geographical, ideological and cultural lines.
+
+""What’s at stake right now is so much bigger than whether someone has to shower with someone of the opposite sex,” Waggoner says. ""I think Obergefell opened that door more broadly than it had been before. It not only jeopardizes religious freedom, but it jeopardizes all of our religious liberties.”",REAL
+10194,Who rode it best? Jesse Jackson mounts up to fight pipeline; Leonardo DiCaprio to the rescue?,"Who rode it best? Jesse Jackson mounts up to fight pipeline; Leonardo DiCaprio to the rescue? Posted at 6:41 pm on October 26, 2016 by Brett T. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
+Vladimir Putin might have popularized the shirtless-on-horseback calendar pose that was echoed recently by Alex Jones , but Jesse Jackson deserves credit for at least one thing: he chose to keep his shirt on Wednesday when he rode up to the front lines of a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. 
+— Marisa Villarreal (@marisa_villarr) October 26, 2016 Proud to stand with the Sioux Indians today in North Dakota. #StandingWithStandingRock pic.twitter.com/0dPbDk6RJD 
+— Rev Jesse Jackson Sr (@RevJJackson) October 26, 2016 Jesse Jackson on the frontline with that native bling #NoDAPL pic.twitter.com/QevCYFugN3 
+— Ruth Hopkins (@RuthHHopkins) October 26, 2016 
+Seen standing with Jackson (literally; check over his shoulder above) was “Avengers” actor Mark Ruffalo, who offered his own exclusive scoop of sorts by confirming that climate crusader Leonardo DiCaprio would be stopping by Thursday, assuming his green-friendly private jet that runs on unicorn tears isn’t delayed. This is happening! #noDapl ! Rev. Jesse Jackson calls @POTUS from #StandingRock ! Mark Ruffalo confirms Leonardo DiCaprio comes tomorrow pic.twitter.com/6b2Gd8FFpd 
+— Asani Isapoet (@Asani) October 26, 2016 
+President Obama seems to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the pipeline. The Seattle Times reports that the administration asked Energy Transfer Partners for a second time Tuesday to voluntarily cease construction, to no avail. And Hillary? No one’s even sure yet where she really stands on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but a few of Ruffalo’s fans aren’t happy that he’s now with her, sort of. Please please please. This is is worth getting out and voting for. A vote for HRC is a vote for @BernieSanders and @SenWarren ! https://t.co/9YElwJ48AJ 
+— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) October 16, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @BernieSanders @SenWarren It most certainly is not. That's propaganda Clinton stans like to push. I vote for who I believe in. 
+— Stan Dallas 😍 (@FanInTheMoon) October 16, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @BernieSanders @SenWarren I don't recall Sanders being pro TPP, pro fracking and circling China with missiles. Lay off the weed 
+— Tony Gagliardi (@hornetgags) October 16, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @BernieSanders @SenWarren @1lolamarina Sorry Mark, never was a turn the other cheek kind of guy. She wronged us. Never Democrat 
+— John Jenkins (@Oteachjohn) October 18, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @BernieSanders @SenWarren NO. A vote for HRC is a for #ElectionFraud , corporate rule, corruption & endless war. #NeverHillary 
+— Basement Barista (@SouthBoulder) October 16, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @dailykos So vote for Hillary who is a pro-fracking warhawk? Time to get the @GreenPartyUS 5% for a true progressive voice. 
+— Eric Magnuson (@emmagnuson) October 17, 2016 . @MarkRuffalo Jill Stein's PROGRESSIVE policies are more like Bernie than HRC's. Why should Hillary get my vote? #JillNotHill 🌍💚☮️ 
+— #DNC fraud lawsuit (@Ontheotherhand) October 16, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @BernieSanders @SenWarren A vote for HRC is NOT a vote for Bernie Sanders. Go Green. Vote Stein, not a corrupt warmonger. 
+— Justin Kelly (@JKelly_80) October 16, 2016 
+* * *",FAKE
+263,McCarthy drops out of speaker race as House asks: Who wants this job? (+video),"The speakership is one of the toughest jobs in Washington, especially when it includes trying to contain a Republican civil war.
+
+Two Sunday attacks add to recent rise in fatal shootings of US police
+
+House majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R) of California speaks during a new conference on Capitol Hill in Washington Thursday after dropping out of the race to replace House Speaker John Boehner.
+
+Shortly after Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy stunned Washington with another development in the race for speaker of the House – the front-runner announced Thursday that he was dropping out – names of new candidates began circulating.
+
+Inevitably, the chatter quickly reached Rep. Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin – former vice presidential candidate, chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and budget hawk who many members believe is the person most capable of uniting the deeply divided and turbulent House Republican conference.
+
+But Chairman Ryan promptly put down this second attempt to draft him. As his Texan GOP colleague, Rep. Blake Farenthold tweeted:
+
+Can you blame him? The speakership is one of the toughest jobs in Washington – especially this speakership, which is tasked with trying to end or contain a Republican civil war in the chamber.
+
+“It’s going to take a lot of gumption and a lot of finesse and talent to bridge the gap. So yeah, it’s a difficult chore that very few people are willing to take on,” Rep. Harold Rogers (R) of Kentucky told a scrum of reporters Thursday afternoon.
+
+Just hours earlier, majority leader McCarthy, an affable Californian known for his listening skills and outreach, capitulated in the face of revolt from the hard-line House Freedom Caucus. Its 40 or so members were set to vote against him in secret balloting.
+
+His unscripted comments about the political nature of the Benghazi special committee, which is calling Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to testify later this month, also played a role in his decision, he said. McCarthy was attacked from all sides for that comment, from Democrats, Republicans, and the media, when he was tagged as a future speaker who can’t speak.
+
+McCarthy was likely to survive the hard-liner defection Thursday, and win the majority support from his GOP conference needed to nominate him for the speakership. But it was not at all clear that he could win the 218 votes needed to elect the speaker on the House floor later this month.
+
+Standing before cameras in the brightly lit marbled lobby of the Longworth House Office Building, his wife beside him, the leader capitulated. “We need a new face.… If we're going to be strong, we gotta be 100 percent united,"" he said.
+
+“There’s too much anger,” McCarthy told Congressman Rogers, after taking himself out of the running at the closed-door balloting session, according to  Roll Call. The Washington Post reported members crying at the news.
+
+“Who knows what’ll happen. People are crying, they don’t have any idea how this will unfold, at all,” Rep. Peter King (R) of New York, told the Post.
+
+What most people see of the speakership is what shows up on television. But the job carries awesome responsibility: second in line to the presidency, manager of the Capitol complex, presiding officer of the House. And that’s the easy part.
+
+Then there’s the role of chief messenger of your party, shaping the agenda, and trying to keep your members in line every day to cross the 218-vote threshold – the number of votes it takes to pass a bill in the 435-member body. And don’t forget incessant fundraising, which takes up most weekends. Oh, and negotiating with the White House and Senate.
+
+Then add the “hell no” caucus of 40 to 50 right-wingers to this mix.
+
+The hard-liners drove Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio to announce his early retirement for Oct. 30. In light of the decision of his No. 2 to withdraw, Speaker Boehner says he will stay on “until the House votes to elect a new speaker.” McCarthy says he is willing to stay on as leader. No date has been set for another leadership election.
+
+Some Republicans want Boehner to finish out his term as a congressman and speaker.
+
+“It’s a very difficult job and having someone like John Boehner there who has a lot of experience and has the courage to do what’s right … is a good thing,” says Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R) of Florida.
+
+Congressman Curbelo, who describes the speakership as “more difficult than being the president,” says he doesn’t see any candidate from either party able to get 218 votes.
+
+That hasn’t stopped new names from being floated, even while the other two candidates – Rep. Daniel Webster of Florida, backed by the Freedom Caucus, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee – kept their hats in the ring.
+
+Right-wingers were pleased to see McCarthy drop out. They see him as ""Boehner 2.0."" In a statement, the Freedom Caucus said it respects his decision to ""put the conference ahead of himself"" and said the next speaker ""needs to yield back power to the membership.""
+
+The Republican caucus is going through a period of transition, says John Feehery, former spokesman to Dennis Hastert (R) of Illinois, the longest serving Republican speaker. McCarthy represented a new generation of leaders in the House, where nearly half of the members have served four years or less.
+
+“They’re going to have to chart their own course and they’re going to have to figure out how the House works together, and they’re going to make mistakes,"" he says.
+
+That’s one way to learn.",REAL
+1242,"Democrats, Republicans in tight races as Iowans prepare to caucus","As Iowans prepare to cast the first votes in the presidential nominating process Monday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders hoped to defy the polls and pull off upset victories in Monday night's caucuses.
+
+After months of campaigning and more than $150 million spent on advertising, the race for supremacy in Iowa is close in both parties.
+
+Among Republicans, the latest polls show real estate billionaire Donald Trump holding a slim edge over Cruz. Cruz, who became the first major candidate from either party to enter the presidential race 315 days ago, has pinned his hopes to a sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation. Cruz has also modeled his campaign after past Iowa winners, visiting all of the state's 99 counties and courting influential evangelical and conservative leaders.
+
+""If you had told me 10 months ago that the day before the Iowa caucuses we'd be in a statistcal tie for first place I would have been thrilled and exhilarated,"" Cruz told Fox News late Sunday.
+
+The Republican caucus is also the first test of whether Trump can turn the legion of fans drawn to his plainspoken populism into voters. The scope of the billionaire's organization in Iowa is a mystery, though Trump himself has intensified his campaign schedule during the final sprint, including a pair of rallies Monday.
+
+ 
+
+ ""I don't have to win it,"" Trump said on CBS' “Face the Nation"" Sunday. ""I'm doing really well with the evangelicals in Iowa. But I'm also doing tremendously well all over the country with the evangelicals. … I think we have a good chance of winning Iowa.""
+
+By contrast, Cruz told Fox News, ""We're not finding Trump's troops on the ground. ‎They don't have an organization that is perceptible.""
+
+Cruz has also spent the closing days of the Iowa campaign focused on Marco Rubio, trying to ensure the Florida senator doesn't inch into second place. Rubio is viewed by many Republicans as a more mainstream alternative to Trump and Cruz, though he'll need to stay competitive in Iowa in order to maintain his viability.
+
+
+
+On the Democratic side, Sanders has rallied to close a 40-point polling deficit against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reviving memories of her disappointing showing in Iowa eight years ago.
+
+""Stick with me,"" Clinton said as she rallied supporters Sunday in Council Bluffs. ""Stick with a plan. Stick with experience.""
+
+Sanders, whose crowds have been large and generally younger than Clinton's, urged voters to help him ""make history"". In a show of financial strength, Sanders' campaign announced Sunday it had raised $20 million in January alone. While Sanders has a large team in Iowa, his operation got off to a later start, particularly compared with Clinton, who has had staff on the ground in the state for nearly a year.
+
+""I think we have a shot to win it, if people come out,"" Sanders told ABC's ""This Week."" The self-described democratic socialist's message that the U.S. economy is “rigged” against the middle class has appeared to resonate with an electorate that has grown frustrated with Washington and given rise to insurgent candidates like Sanders and Trump.
+
+ 
+
+ The campaigns were anxiously keeping an eye on the weather, but a snowfall forecast to start Monday night appeared more likely to hinder the hopefuls in their rush out of Iowa than any potential voters. Republican John Kasich already had decamped to New Hampshire Sunday, with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush scheduled to follow Monday afternoon, hours before the caucuses start.
+
+The trio of governors has had a light footprint in Iowa, banking instead on strong showings in New Hampshire's Feb. 9 primary to jumpstart their White House bids. Yet some Republican leaders worry that if Trump or Cruz pull off a big victory in Iowa, it would be difficult to slow their momentum.
+
+
+
+Unlike in primaries, where voters can cast their ballots throughout the day, the caucuses begin across Iowa at 7 p.m. CST.
+
+Democrats will gather at 1,100 locations and Republicans at nearly 900 spots.
+
+
+
+Turnout was expected to be high. The Iowa Republican Party expected GOP turnout to top the previous record of 120,000 people in 2012. Democrats also expect a strong turnout, though not nearly as large as the record-setting 240,000 people who caucused in the 2008 contest between Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.
+
+
+
+Iowa has decidedly mixed results in picking the parties' eventual nominees. The past two Republican caucus winners -- former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum -- faded as the race stretched on. But Obama's unexpected 2008 victory was instrumental in his path to the nomination, easing the anxieties of those who worried the young black senator would struggle to win white voters.
+
+
+
+While both parties caucus on the same night, they do so with different rules.
+
+
+
+Republicans vote by private ballot. The state's 30 Republican delegates are awarded proportionally based on the statewide vote.
+
+
+
+Democrats take a more interactive approach, with voters forming groups and publicly declaring their support for a candidate. If the number of people in any group is fewer than 15 percent of the total, they can either choose not to participate or can join another viable candidate's group.
+
+
+
+Those numbers are awarded proportionately, based on statewide and congressional district voting, as Iowa Democrats determine their 44 delegates to the national convention.
+
+ 
+
+ Fox News Channel's Carl Cameron and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2840,Iran: Why the best outcome now is to keep negotiating without reaching a deal,"
+
+ Another deadline lapsed Thursday in the seemingly endless negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons programs.  From Vienna Secretary of State John Kerry warned ""if the tough decisions don’t get made, we are absolutely prepared to call an end to this process.”  That would be a mistake.  We should instead keep negotiating without reaching a deal — it’s the best outcome available now.
+
+Iran’s inability to say yes to several very good deals it has been offered suggests the negotiations may be a satisfactory end in itself for the government of Iran.  They have already achieved some sanctions relief.  They get the stature of being Secretary of State Kerry’s full-time job.  Their regional enemies are publicly feuding with Washington and questioning our commitment to their security.  It’s not a bad outcome for Ayatollah Khameni, especially if he fears the domestic political repercussions of reintegrating with the world.
+
+The agreement being haggled over in Vienna by Iran, Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany, and the United States will not eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons program.  What is under discussion is how much nuclear infrastructure to let Iran keep, how extensive will be our inspections of what remains, and how much to give them for the privilege.
+
+Inspections are the key to any agreement focused on reducing the threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons programs.  Technically, the agreement is seeking to increase “break out time”: how long it would take Iran using the known equipment and nuclear materials to construct a nuclear bomb.  These negotiations are seeking to increase Iran’s break out time from it’s currently estimated 2-3 months to a year.
+
+It is important to emphasize that we don't honestly know how long it would take Iran to make a nuclear weapon.  Not for lack of effort by our intelligence services, but most of what we do know about Iranian nuclear weapons programs was revealed to us, and there remains much we do not know about past and current Iranian programs.  We should be deeply skeptical that we know the extent of Iran’s nuclear weapons work or have accounted for all its facilities.
+
+The Congress has long been a force for good on Iran policy, erecting sanctions for which the Obama administration now takes credit.
+
+Senators Corker and Cardin have ensured that if there is an agreement in Vienna, the Congress will now have 60 days to review the president’s handiwork, which is something the administration had desperately tried to avoid.
+
+Secretary Kerry published his understanding of the framework for agreement concluded in April; any further concessions will be carefully scrutinized. Many of the arguments made by the White House so far in defense of the agreement will not hold up under careful questioning.
+
+Any agreement reached will ease sanctions on Iran, and Russia will surely never agree to reinstate them, no matter how outrageous Iranian cheating on the deal.  So sanctions will be unrecoverable.  Since much of the Iranian economy is organized to benefit the Revolutionary Guards and citizen militia, they will be the primary beneficiaries of the $100 billion in revenue resulting from lifting just the nuclear weapons related sanctions.
+
+An Iran deal would solve a political problem for President Obama: he committed to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon yet so very clearly does not want to have to use military force against Iran. A nuclear deal solves his problem as a political matter, but has already created security problems as regional allies hedge against his intentions.
+
+A continuing negotiation not harried by deadlines might vitiate some of the insecurity.  It prevents us lifting sanctions that will be impossible to put back once removed.  It provides exposure we did not have to Iranian leaders and perhaps intelligence on their nuclear infrastructure.  It keeps us aligned with the three European Union states whose sanctions have been an essential constraint on the Iranian government.  It makes more difficult Russian and Chinese support to Iran.  And it leaves us free to conduct espionage of the kind that has prevented Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold so far as we know.
+
+Iran doesn’t appear to have made the fundamental choice to give up its nuclear weapons programs.  Until it does, continuing negotiations is a better outcome than an agreement.
+
+Kori Schake is a Hoover Institution Research Fellow at Stanford University and a contributor to Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government blog.",REAL
+8772,NAZI Flying Saucers & A Permanent Base in Antarctica,". NAZI Flying Saucers & A Permanent Base in Antarctica A highly guarded secret is the probablity that German Nazis, as early as the 1930s, have built a sec... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/nazi-flying-saucers-permanent-base-in.html A highly guarded secret is the probablity that German Nazis, as early as the 1930s, have built a secret base at the South Pole. While this idea undoubtedly will strike most people as absurd, there is tantalizing evidence to suggest that something along this line might have some truth to it.Long-standing banking and business connections allowed high-ranking German leaders in 1944 to forge a formidable Nazi-controlled organization for postwar activities.Author Jim Keith wrote:""...in researching the shape of totalitarian control during this century, I saw that the plans of the Nazis manifestly did not die with the German loss of World War II. ""The ideology and many of the principal players survived and flourished after the war, and have had a profound impact on postwar history, and on events taking place today.""Orvis A. Schmidt, the U.S. Treasury Department’s director of Foreign Funds Control, in 1945 offered this description of a Nazi flight-capital program:The network of trade, industrial, and cartel organizations has been streamlined and intermeshed, not only organizationally but also by what has been officially described as ‘Personnel Union’.Legal authority to operate this organizational machinery has been vested in the concerns that have majority capacity in the key industries such as those producing iron and steel, coal and basic chemicals. These concerns have been deliberately welded together by exchanges of stock to the point where a handful of men can make policy and other decisions that affect us all.Could one of those ""decisions"" have been the creation of a Nazi base connected to the development of UFOs? While this notion may superficially appear to be sheer nonsense, the public record offers compelling — if incomplete — evidence to support this idea.One theory is that Martin Bormann and other top Nazis escaped to South America and on to a secret base in Antarctica — renamed Neuschwabenland by the Germans — where they built UFOs so sophisticated that their secret Nazi empire has exerted significant control over world events and governments to this day. Read: Hitler Escaped to Argentina & Died Old: Pictures of Him After the War, FBI Documents, DNA Analysis of Skull & Pictures of His House Reportedly, German Navy Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz stated in 1943:""The German submarine fleet is proud of having built for the Führer in another part of the world a Shangri-La on land, an impregnable fortress.""And it has been reported that U.S. Admiral Richard Byrd , upon his return from an expedition to Antarctica in 1947, stated it was,""necessary for the USA to take defensive actions against enemy air fighters which come from the polar regions"" and that America could be ""attacked by fighters that are able to fly from one pole to the other with incredible speed.""Advancing the idea that the Nazis continually shipped men and material to the South Pole throughout the war years, author R. A. Harbinson wrote:""Regarding the possibility of the Germans building self-sufficient underground research factories in the Antarctic, it has only to be pointed out that the underground research centers of Nazi Germany were gigantic feats of construction, containing wind tunnels, machine shops, assembly plants, launching pads, supply dumps and accommodation for all who worked there, including adjoining camps for slaves — and yet very few people knew that they existed.""But, while tales of a secret Nazi base in Antarctica may appear plausible to some, the idea that a warm water location at the South Pole has remained undiscovered and no one has escaped or deserted the place in more than 50 years stretched belief to the breaking point in years past.But with the new revelations of 60-70 degree temperature water, magnetic anomalies suggesting the possibility of a hidden city or base and the obvious back out taking place concerning current events at the pole, the idea of a secret base is no longer so far fetched.Rumors began to circulate that whilst Germany had been defeated, a selection of military personnel and scientists had fled the fatherland as allied troops swept across mainland Europe, and had established themselves at a secret base on the Antarctic continent, from where they continued to develop their advanced aircraft technology.Furthermore, it is interesting to note that at the end of the war, the allies determined that there were 250,000 Germans unaccounted for — even taking into account casualties and deaths. Huge Discovery: Nazi Maps and Documents to Agartha Confirm the Hollow Earth Accounts Could Neu Schwabenland have been a permanently manned German base at that time? The brackish water of the warm (30 degrees) lakes virtually confirmed that all had an outlet to the sea and would thus have been a haven for U-boats. The two ice-free mountain ranges in Neu Schwabenland presented no worse an underground tunneling project for Organization Todt than anything they had encountered and overcome in Norway.The Germans were the world's experts at building and inhabiting underground metropolis.At the end of the war the United States gave anything concerning Ohrdruf a top secret classification for 100 years upwards. The fact that there had been substantial underground workings there, and Ohrdruf was the location of the last Redoubt, was concealed absolutely. Fortunately for researchers, in 1962 the DDR had taken sworn depositions from all local residents during an investigation into wartime Ohrdruf, and upon the reunification of the two Germanys in 1989, these documents became available to all and sundry at Arnstadt municipal archive.From the Arnstadt documents it is clear that the Charite Anlage unit operated in a three-story underground bunker with floors 70 by 20 meters.When working, the device emitted some kind of energy field which shut down all electrical equipment and non-diesel engines within a range of about eight miles.For this reason, even though Ohrdruf was crawling with SS, it was never photographed from the air nor bombed. Declassified USAF documents dated early 1945 admit the existence of an unknown energy field over Frankfurt/Main ""and other locations"" which ""fantastic though it may appear"" were able to ""interfere with our aircraft engines at 30,000 feet.""Ohrdruf rebuilt below Neu Schwabenland during the last two years of the war would not have been difficult, and since Charite Anlage had the highest priority of anything in the Third Reich, it seems likely that it must have been.Such a base would have been impregnable, for the suggestion is that the force-field worked in various ways favorable to the occupants. Scary Secrets of the Third Reich's Base in Antarctica A remarkable event occurred in 1999, but only specialists paid adequate attention to it.A research expedition discovered a virus in Antarctica; at that, neither people nor animals had immunity to the virus. After all, Antarctica is far away, for this very reason the virus cannot be dangerous for the rest of the planet, especially since the dangerous discovery was deep in the permafrost.However, scientists say that against the background of a global warming threatening the Earth, the unknown virus can cause an awful catastrophe on the planet.Expert Tom Starmerue from the University of New York also shares the pessimistic forecasts of his colleagues.""We don't know what the mankind will face in the South Pole in the nearest time due to the global warming. It is not ruled out that an unbelievable catastrophe may break out. ""Viruses protected with a protein cover survive even in the permafrost; as soon as the temperature gets warmer they will immediately start reproducing.""American scientists treated the Antarctica discovery very seriously and even organized a special expedition that currently tests the ice for unknown viruses in order to develop an antidote in good time.What is the source of the virus in Antarctica where only penguins can survive in the ice? There is no answer to the question, specialists are at a loss. However, several theories concerning the problem have been put forward.A majority of scientists are inclined to believe that prehistoric forms of life probably survived in the permafrost. But some specialists blame bonzes of the Third Reich for delivery of a secretly developed bacteriological weapon to Antarctica. And this theory arose not in a vacuum. It is known that already in 1938 Nazis suddenly became interested in Antarctica, they organized two expeditions to the area in 1938-1939.At first, planes of the Third Reich took detailed pictures of unexplored territories and then they dropped several thousands of metal pennons with swastika there. The whole of the explored territory was called Neuschwabenland and was considered a part of the Third Reich.After the expedition, Captain Ritscher reported to Field-Marshal Göring:""The planes dropped the pennons 25 kilometers apart; we covered the area of about 8.600 thousand square meters. 350 thousand square meters of them were photographed.""In 1943, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz dropped a remarkable phrase:""Germany's submarine fleet is proud that it created an unassailable fortress for the Führer on the other end of the world.""It highly likely means that Nazis were building a secret base in Antarctica within 1938-1943.Submarines were mostly used for transportation of necessary freight to the place.As specialists for the Third Reich wrote, at the end of WWII the submarines were relieved of their torpedo arms in the port of Kiel and then were loaded with containers with different goods. The submarines also received passengers whose faces were hidden behind surgical bands.Wilhelm Bernhard was commander of one of the submarines, U-530; the submarine left the port of Kiel on April 13, 1945. When it reached the shores of Antarctica, 16 members from the crew built an ice cave and put boxes into the cave; it was allegedly said that the boxes contained relics of the Third Reich, including Hitler's documents and personal stuff. The operation was code named Valkyrie-2.When the operation was over on July 10, 1945, the submarine U-530 entered the Argentinean port of Mar-del-Plata and surrendered to the authorities.It is also supposed that another submarine from the formation, U-977, under the command of Heinz Schäffer delivered the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun to Neuschwabenland. It followed the route of the U-530 submarine and called at Antarctica. The submarine arrived in Mar-del-Plata on August 17, 1945.But the version of Wilhelm Bernhard and Heinz Schäffer saying that the submarines delivered relics to the Antarctica shores (both captains told it at the interrogations held by the American and British intelligence services) seems rather dubious. It is unlikely that the serious operation was designed only for the sake of delivery of the Third Reich documents and relics.Later, special services seized a confidential letter of Captain Schäffer to his friend, Captain Wilhelm Bernhard who obviously planned to publish his memoirs.The letter was dated with June 1, 1983.It runs as follows: ""Dear Willy,I was thinking if it is reasonable to publish your manuscript concerning the U-530. The three submarines that took part in that operation (U-977, U-530 and U-465) are currently at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Isn't it better to leave them there? My old friend, think about it! Think please how then my book will look when you publish your memoirs (after, WWII Heinz Schäffer wrote a book named ""U-977"").We all made an oath to keep the secret; we did nothing wrong, we just obeyed the orders and fought for our loved Germany and its survival. Please think again: isn't it better to picture everything as a fable? What results do you plan to achieve with your revelations? Think about it, please."" Even 40 years after the events, Heinz insisted that Bernhard mustn't say the truth. Is it possible that the submarines delivered something more dangerous to the continent, not Hitler's documents?Could it be the bacteriological weapon traces of which were discovered in Antarctica as unknown viruses in the permafrost last year? NEUBERLIN If you had been a Wehrmacht soldier at the bombed-out railroad station in Poltava, a city in the Ukraine, during the summer of 1942, you may have seen a very strange-looking military unit on the march, heading for a waiting passenger train.The unit consisted of women, all of them blond and blue-eyed, between the ages of 17 and 24, tall and slender, their sensational figures encased in striking sky-blue uniforms.Each woman wore an Italian-style garrison cap, an A-line skirt with the hem below the knee, and a form-fitting jacket with the insignia of the SS. You might have thought the SS had recruited a platoon of high-class call girls, but the truth was far stranger than that. You would have been looking at Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's latest brainstorm - the Antarktische Siedlungnsfrauen [Antarctic Settlement Women or ASF].The story actually begins in 1938, when the German seaplane carrier Schwabenland sailed across the South Atlantic, bound for Queen Maud's Land in Antarctica.According to Russian ufologist Konstantin Ivanenko,""The Schwabenland sailed to Antarctica, commanded by Albert Richter, a veteran of cold-weather operations.""The Richter expedition's scientists used their large Dornier seaplanes to explore the polar wastes, emulating Admiral Richard E. Byrd's efforts a decade earlier.""The German scientists discovered ice-free lakes (heated by underground volcanic features) and were able to land on them. It is widely believed that the Schwabenland's expedition was aimed at scouting out a secret base of operations.""A German base was established in the Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains, just inland from the Princess Astrid Coast. The area was renamed Neuschwabenland (New Swabia) and ""the base was known only as Station 211.From the movie Schindler's List, people have gotten the idea that killing Jews was the Nazis' main concern. But in actual fact, Hitler and the SS were just as ruthless with the rest of the population in their eastern European empire, thinking nothing of shuffling large numbers of people around in their quest for a more perfect Aryan race.This shuffle was accomplished by a little-known office of the SS called the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (German for Race and Settlement Bureau) or RuSHA. In the Ukraine alone, RuSHA drafted 500,000 women for forced labor in the munitions factories of Nazi Germany.It was RuSHA which selected women for Himmler's unit of Antarktische Siedlungsfrauen (Antarctic Settlement Women) About half of the ""recruits"" were Volksdeutsch-ethnic Germans whose ancestors had settled in the Ukraine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The others were native Ukrainians whom RuSHA had ""upgraded"" to full Aryans.This process was called Eindeutschung (Germanization).According to Ivanenko,""There is increased popularity for the idea of a 'German-Slavonic Antarctic Reich.' It is said that 10,000 of the 'racially most pure' Ukrainians, out of half a million deported in 1942 by Martin Bormann, were transported to the German Antarctic bases during World War II, in the proportion of four Ukrainian women to one German man.""If true, this would mean that Himmler transferred 2,500 Waffen-SS soldiers, who had proven themselves in combat on the Russian front, to Station 211 - now Neuschwabenland - in Antarctica. This may be the source of the myth of the ""Last SS Battalion.""An ASF training camp was set up in Estonia, on a peninsula near Ristna on Hiiumaa Island in the Baltic Sea. It was a combination finishing school and boot camp, where the ladies took lessons in charm and housekeeping along with their courses in polar survival. Himmler kept the camp's existence a closely-guarded secret. For ""unhappy campers,"" the only escape consisted of a one-way train ticket to Auschwitz.(There is one known instance of an ASF ""deserter."" In 1943, Auschwitz guard Irma Griese, 22, the off-and-on girl friend of Dr. Josef Mengele , took to wearing a sky-blue ASF uniform, which she had scavenged from a pile of inmate clothing. Griese was hanged in 1946 for war crimes. The uniform's original owner must have had serious second thoughts about a permanent move to Antarctica).The failure of Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz's U-boat offensive by May 1943 freed up dozens of ""milk cow"" U- boats. These were large submarines, almost as big as tramp steamers, which Dönitz had used to supply his U- boat ""wolf packs"" in remote seas of the world. Himmler now put them to work carting supplies and personnel to Antarctica.Himmler's rationale for sending thousands of settlers to Antarctica can only be understood within the context of his mystic beliefs. As a result of his youthful reading of New Age books, his association with the occultist Dr. Friedrich Wichtl, and his membership in the Artamen, Himmler became a believer in the Hindu concept of world-ages or yugas. He believed that the current age, or Kali Yuga, would end in a global cataclysm, thereby giving birth to a new world-age called the Satya Yuga.By sending a Nazi colony to Antarctica, Himmler was ensuring that a remnant of the ""pure Aryan race"" would survive the coming cataclysm with its society and culture intact. They would then take possession of Antarctica when the cataclysm melted the south polar ice cap.According to believers, the Neuschwabenland colony survived not only the end of World War II, but a full on battle with the 3,500 Marines and aircraft of Operation High Jump .In 2003 Ivanenko wrote:""The total population of Nazis in Antarctica now exceeds two million and that many of them have undergone plastic surgery in order to move about with greater ease through South America and conduct all manner of business transactions.""He called the Antarctic Reich,""one of the most militarily powerful states in the world because it can destroy the USA several times over with its submarine-based nuclear missiles, remaining itself invulnerable to U.S. nuclear strikes because of the two-mile-thick ice shield.""Further, he claims that the city of Neu Berlin, the colony's capital, sprawls through ""narrow sub-glacial tunnels"" under an unnamed mountain range, heated by ""volcanic vents.""The ufologist also makes the claim that Neu Berlin adjoins:""the prehistoric ruins of Kadath, which may have been built by settlers from the lost continent of Atlantis well over 100,000 years ago.""Still other fringe researchers claim that the actual ruins of Atlantis have been found — and possibly reoccupied — under the Antarctic ice. Some say that Atlantis is located near one of the 70 or so warm water lakes that have been discovered miles beneath the Polar Ice Sheet, such as Lake Vostok near the Russian base at the Pole of Inaccessibility.Another of the oft made claims about Neuberlin is that the city has an Alien Quarter, where Pleiadians , Zeta Reticulans , Reptoids , Men In Black , Aldebarani and other visitors from the stars dwell. As we have seen, the Nazis were working on some very advanced aircraft, some of which may have been capable of leaving the earth's atmosphere.Some researchers are convinced that the Nazis did indeed make it to the moon , and even Mars . Could they have made contact with space aliens once they left the earth? Or, could their rockets, foo-fighters and disk aircraft have attracted aliens to visit them?A claim floats around in modern U.F.O. lore that an extraterrestrial craft with anti-gravity propulsion crashed in the Schwarzwald in the summer 1936, and was recovered by the Nazis who back-engineered it, thus explaining their flying saucer program. You can read more about Nazi UFOs here . This parallels stories of a similarly recovered crashed ""saucer"" near Roswell , New Mexico in 1947, the American back-engineering of which supposedly led to the discovery of the transistor (patented by Bell Laboratories the following year), fiber-optics and other exotic technologies.Ivanenko reported that talk about the Antarctic Reich is ""becoming more and more popular"" in Russia, Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus and other countries in eastern Europe.He writes:""In the May 10, 2003 issue of the (newspaper) 'Frankfurter Allgemeine', Polish journalist A. Stagjuk criticized Poland's decision to send troops to Iraq"" to assist with the Allied occupation.""At the end, he said, 'The next Polish government will sign a treaty with Antarctica and declare war on the USA.'""Ivanenko added that Stagjuk's words were broadcast on the shortwave radio station Deutsche Welle the same week.""Some analysts compared this sentence to famous code phrases which started wars in the Twentieth Century, such as 'Over all of Spain, the sky is cloudless' in 1936, and 'Climb Mount Niitaka' in 1941.""(""Climb Mount Niitaka"" was the signal Admiral Yamamoto sent to Kido Butai, the Imperial Japanese Navy's fleet, to begin the attack on Pearl Harbor.)It is strange to think of a large population living under the ice of Antarctica, totally divorced from the ""mainstream"" world.Then again, there are Jivaro indigenous people living on Lago de Yanayacu (lake), less than 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Iquitos, Peru, who have never heard of Courtney Love.So, is there a city under the ice inhabited by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original SS settlers?Or is it just an urban legend stemming from the chaotic conditions that prevailed in Europe during World War II?Some day we may know for certain. Excerpt of Jim Marrs ' article from ""Alien Agenda"" Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
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+6862,BREAKING: Man Brags on Facebook of Voting 3 Times… Then Reveals How He Did It,"REPORT: Megyn Trashes Trump, Newt… Then Murdoch Announces Replacements Are Available 
+“Amazing how many addresses you get from Google. Going again until Saturday and all next week. BAAHAA BAAHAA.” 
+He then tagged someone else — it’s unclear if that was just to alert them to the post or to let them know that he voted for them. 
+After his posts where he laughed and boasted about committing voter fraud, Dougherty apologized on Facebook: “I apologize for the insensitive post. Lesson learned about my stupidity.” 
+It’s difficult to say whether Dougherty apologized because he didn’t do it and had made a stupid joke or if he was simply trying to avoid being prosecuted. 
+Although we can’t tell for sure right now what’s true here, Dougherty’s comments at the very least are a reminder of how important voter ID laws are. 
+If everyone were required to present identification to vote, Dougherty wouldn’t have made his “joke” about how easy it was to commit voter fraud — and if he actually tried to do what he boasted about on Facebook, voter ID laws would stop such a thing. 
+For all we know, Dougherty may not even be a Clinton supporter; he could have been trying to make a point about voter fraud and the dirty tricks committed by Democrats. Doubtful, but who knows? 
+No matter what his party affiliation or whether or not he actually did what he boasted about, he intentionally or not made the case for strong voter ID laws. 
+Share this post on Facebook and Twitter so people can see how this man showed the importance of voter ID laws. What do you think about Dougherty's Facebook posts? Scroll down to comment below! Advertisement Popular Right Now",FAKE
+6871,Furious parents slam ‘damaging’ BBC sex change show aimed at six-year-olds,"By wmw_admin on October 31, 2016 Sanchez Manning — Daily Mail Oct 29, 2016 
+The BBC has been accused of acting recklessly after targeting children as young as six with a programme about a schoolboy who takes sex-change drugs. 
+Parents are angry that the show, available on the CBBC website, features a transgender storyline inappropriate for their children. 
+And concerned campaigners said it could ‘sow the seeds of confusion’ in young minds. The programme, Just A Girl, depicts an 11-year-old’s struggle to get hormones that stunt puberty, making it easier to have sex-change surgery in the future. 
+One mother, writing on the Mumsnet website, said her daughter had become worried after seeing the video. She said her girl, who likes wearing boys’ clothes and playing football, had ‘asked me, anxiously, if that means she was a boy’. 
+Tory MP Peter Bone said: ‘It beggars belief that the BBC is making this programme freely available to children as young as six. I entirely share the anger of parents who just want to let children be children. 
+‘It is completely inappropriate for such material to be on the CBBC website and I shall be writing to BBC bosses to demand they take it down as soon as possible.’ 
+Former Culture Secretary Maria Miller voiced her concerns over the BBC tackling the subject in ‘an age-appropriate way’, saying such issues should be raised ‘where children can have support from parents’. 
+And Tory MP Julian Brazier said: ‘This programme is very disappointing and inappropriate. Children are very impressionable and this is going to confuse and worry them.’ 
+Family campaigner Norman Wells said: ‘It is irresponsible of the BBC to introduce impressionable children as young as six to the idea that they can choose to be something other than their biological sex.’ 
+Just A Girl is the fictional video diary of a child who calls herself ‘Amy’ and dresses as a girl. It is hosted on the CBBC website, aimed at children aged between six and 12. 
+In the half-hour programme, Amy – played by an actress – reveals she was born a boy called Ben but has already started using puberty-halting drugs. 
+Such hypothalamic blockers provoked a furore two years ago when The Mail on Sunday revealed an NHS clinic was willing to give them to children as young as nine. 
+Critics cited research claiming that most teenagers confused about their gender never go through with surgery, with many realising they are gay. The BBC row comes amid growing controversy over gender issues, fuelled by a number of high-profile cases. In one, a Christian couple were threatened with having their 14-year-old daughter taken away because they oppose her plans to become a boy. 
+In another, a seven-year-old boy was ordered to be removed from his mother’s care as ‘she was raising him as female’, causing him ‘a great deal of emotional harm’. 
+In Just A Girl, Amy says: ‘When I was born, Mum said Dad was so pleased that he had a boy to take to the football. But Mum knew I was different. She realised early on that I was born in the wrong body.’ 
+She adds: ‘My Mum supported me when I did a PowerPoint presentation to my class about transitioning and that I wasn’t going to come to school in boys’ clothes any more, but girls’ clothes. I wasn’t Ben, I was Amy.’ 
+Later Amy is shown telling a friend, Josh – a boy who wants to be recognised as a girl – that she is on hormone blockers, saying it took ‘ages’ to get them after ‘loads of tests and talks at the clinic’. ‘Once they realised I was trans for real, [I] got them,’ she says. In another entry, Amy tells viewers she has developed a crush on a boy called Liam, but confides: ‘Liam thinks I’m just a girl, but I’m not. I’m trans. And what’s he going to say if he finds out? Stop being my friend? Why? I’m still me, aren’t I?’ 
+Child psychotherapist Dr Dilys Daws said the programme could confuse children. She said that, while it was natural for youngsters to wonder what it would be like to be the opposite sex, the BBC was irresponsible to feature the ‘extreme’ step of gender change for six-year-olds because they were too young to grapple with such issues. 
+The programme generated hundreds of comments on Mumsnet. 
+One mother, who said her seven-year-old had watched the show, asked: ‘Am I being unreasonable to think this is an inappropriate topic for a young age group?’ 
+Another replied: ‘Don’t think this is remotely suitable for a seven-year-old. To start suggesting that children can be transgender when they’re far too young to actually have a gender is reckless and damaging. A small boy who is told that he can become a girl may take this as meaning that sex changes are possible, that sometime in the future he’ll wake up with a girl’s body.’ 
+Another user added: ‘I don’t think hormone therapy should be normalised any more than 12-year-olds drinking or doing recreational drugs should be normalised.’ 
+Other critics slammed the BBC. Mr Wells, director of the Family Education Trust, said: ‘The more we promote the idea that a boy can be born into a girl’s body and a girl can be born into a boy’s body, and that drugs and surgery can put things right, the more children will become utterly confused. Respecting and preserving a child’s birth sex should be seen as a child protection issue.’ 
+But some parents on Mumsnet were more positive. One wrote: ‘I don’t believe there is “too young” for stuff like this. The earlier you teach your children that everyone is different and that nobody is “normal” the better.’ 
+Dr Polly Carmichael, a clinical psychologist specialising in transgender children, said: ‘Raising awareness of these issues is the best way to challenge stigma and discrimination associated with identity issues. Programmes like Just A Girl can contribute to a healthy and informed public discussion.’ 
+The BBC said: ‘Just A Girl is about a fictional transgender character trying to make sense of the world, deal with bullying and work out how to keep her friends, which are universal themes that many children relate to, and which has had a positive response from our audience. 
+‘CBBC aims to reflect true life, providing content that mirrors the lives of as many UK children as possible.’",FAKE
+7391,Trump Family Say Trump Brand Has NOT Been Damaged,"Fans Thrilled as NFL Team Stands for Anthem… Then Players Unleash Sick Surprise 
+“I think the brand is hotter than it’s ever been, but it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care,” Trump stated in a taped interview that aired Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the brand. I care about the country.” 
+His words were echoed by his son Eric, who also felt confident about the survivability of the family’s brand in the face of relentless attacks. 
+“I think we have the hottest brand in the world right now, and I think buildings like this are a testament to what we do every day,” Eric Trump said, referring to the hotel that had just opened ahead of schedule and under budget.   
+There has been some damage attempted against the family business via negative press and spiteful boycotts, such as the mean-spirited campaign to ruin Ivanka Trump’s clothing and accessories line by tying it to the leaked 2005 tape of Trump making vulgar comments about certain women. 
+However, Donald Trump Jr. insisted that in spite of the negative press the brand was doing just fine and was even expanding, proving it was far more than just a real estate development group tied to the New York City and tri-state area. 
+“The brand is much more than New York City. This is a global brand,” Trump Jr. said. “I mean, when you look at the people he’s touching on a daily basis, the presidency, fixing America is so much bigger than any of that regardless.” 
+Granted, it is entirely possible that the Trump brand will suffer long-term from the unceasing onslaught of negative coverage, though it is also just as likely that the brand could even grow in popularity, depending upon how the 2016 election ultimately plays out.  ",FAKE
+1570,Rand Paul is flatlining,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+2463,Nurse Chris Christie Quarantined For Ebola Goes After Governor On Vaccines,"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) came out as a vaccine choicer Tuesday, saying it should be up to parents to decide whether to inoculate their children against deadly diseases that could infect the rest of the population.
+
+His stance was looser than the one he took last year against Kaci Hickox, the nurse Christie forcibly quarantined over Ebola fears when she returned to the United States after helping patients in West Africa. There was never any evidence that Hickox had symptoms of Ebola, a far less contagious disease than the measles, which is currently spreading across the country due to parents who refuse to vaccinate their children.
+
+On Monday night, Hickox went on ""All In with Chris Hayes"" on MSNBC and blasted Christie for his vaccination comments.
+
+""I think this is a good example of Gov. Christie making some very ill-informed statements. We heard it a lot during the Ebola discussion, and now it seems to have happened again,"" said Hickox.
+
+""We know that vaccines are safe, and we know that vaccines save lives,"" she said. ""I have worked in a measles outbreak in northern Nigeria before. We were seeing about 2,000 children a week with measles. It is a scary disease. I know that these families of these 100 people who have the disease now could tell you a little bit about what the disease looks like and how much misery it causes. After the vaccine was implemented in 1963, there was a large reduction in cases, about 98 percent. And I believe it was 1989 to '91, there was a resurgence. ... The stakes are high. We have to protect our most vulnerable populations.""
+
+Christie made his controversial vaccination comments to reporters during his three-day trip to London, as he weighs whether to jump in the 2016 presidential field. Christie said he and his wife had vaccinated their children but understood ""that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.""
+
+Christie spokesman Kevin Roberts later clarified the governor's comments, saying, ""To be clear: The Governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated. At the same time different states require different degrees of vaccination, which is why he was calling for balance in which ones government should mandate.""",REAL
+4469,Can Paul Ryan and Donald Trump coexist within the Republican Party?,"House Speaker Paul D. Ryan attempted to lift the horizons of his party with a speech last week in which he called for a competition of ideas rather than insults, and constructive political debate rather than the politics of demonization.
+
+Ryan’s speech was aimed at pulling the Republican Party away from Donald Trump’s embrace — though he never actually mentioned Trump by name. Events quickly showed what he is up against. The speaker was quickly drowned out by a snarling argument between Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas over their wives that almost eclipsed the terrorist attacks in Brussels in the U.S. media.
+
+By week’s end, the Republican race had gone into the gutter over tabloid charges of infidelity, which the senator vehemently denied and for which he blamed the New York billionaire, who called it unfounded. A race that seemed already at the bottom managed to find another low.
+
+Ryan’s speech was a relatively high-minded moment in the middle of this mud fight of a Republican nominating contest. His effort to rescue the party from a coming crisis is laudable, but the root causes of the condition go far beyond Trump.
+
+The front-runner for the nomination of the Republican Party is as much a reflection of the condition as a cause, a reality that Ryan (R-Wis.) touched on only lightly in calling for a more positive and uplifting approach to politics by all sides. Which means stopping Trump alone won’t necessarily solve all of the party’s problems.
+
+Four years ago, scholars Thomas Mann, then with the Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, then and now with the American Enterprise Institute, published a book examining the breakdown in American politics. It was titled “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.”
+
+The authors took aim at the gridlocked and dysfunctional politics of Washington and the broader issue of political polarization that has become endemic in recent years. They were unsparing but not even-handed in their critique. They were ahead of others in describing the underlying causes of polarization as asymmetrical, with the Republican Party — in particular its most hard-line faction — as deserving of far more of the blame for the breakdown in governing.
+
+Mann and Ornstein are back again with a second and updated paperback edition, called “It’s Even Worse Than It Was.” The paperback arrives in the middle of the most raucous presidential campaign in memory, one that has exposed even more the fissures, fractures and divisions within the Republican Party coalition.
+
+What played out primarily in the party’s congressional wing has come to consume the presidential nominating contest. In their own ways, Trump and Cruz have brought to the surface the economic and cultural anger among many of those in the party’s base as well as the distrust of the party leadership — the same motivating forces behind the Freedom Caucus rebels in the House Republican conference.
+
+The current campaign only adds fuel to the Mann-Ornstein thesis of a Republican Party at war with itself in ways that have helped cripple the governing process. Trump and Cruz reflect the yearning within the Republican base for anti-establishment outsiders to topple the insiders in Washington.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the third remaining candidate for the nomination, is a dissenting voice, calling for cooperation and compromise. At this point, he is not just a dissenting voice; he is a minority voice in the presidential competition, unless he can start winning more primaries.
+
+Trump and Ryan represent bookends in a political debate that has considerable consequences for the Republican Party and for the country. Trump’s position as front-runner not only highlights the degree to which the party is being taken over by anti-establishment forces but also foreshadows the possibility of a significant defeat in November if, as the GOP nominee, Trump is unable to reverse his standing among women, Hispanics, African Americans and other voting groups.
+
+Ryan represents something far different, politics grounded in ideas and policies and an attitude of goodwill toward the opposition that he inherited from his mentor, Jack Kemp, the former House member from Buffalo who prodded his party to be more open and inclusive.
+
+Yet Ryan’s speech left unanswered key questions about his capacity to change the behavior of his party’s conference in the House and in particular the degree to which he is willing to find a governing coalition apart from the hard-liners in the Freedom Caucus.
+
+As the country’s highest-ranking Republican elected official, Ryan symbolizes the establishment’s backlash to Trump’s candidacy, a backlash that has so far failed to stop the New York businessman’s march to the nomination. The resistance might yet succeed. Whether it does or doesn’t, it raises the question of whether this presidential campaign ultimately will produce a true course change for the party or merely end up intensifying the forces that have brought it to this moment.
+
+I put that question to Ornstein in an email exchange Friday: “This really is, I believe, an existential crisis for the Republican Party,” he wrote. “Will it be a Ryan-style conservative, problem-solving party, or will it be either a Trump-style, authoritarian, nativist and protectionist party, or a Cruz-style radical anti-government party content with blowing things up as they now stand? Or, just as possible, will the party break apart, with no clue as to what will replace it or how the pieces will fit into the broader political system?”
+
+The prospects for a crackup are real, given what Trump’s candidacy has revealed about the party’s fractured coalition. Trump’s views on issues, outlined on the campaign trail and in a recent interview with The Washington Post editorial board, represent a fundamental break with many of the conservative ideas that have been at the party’s core for years.
+
+Trump’s constituency finds his support for protecting rather than transforming Social Security and Medicare appealing. His words of praise for the work of Planned Parenthood, apart from performing abortions, are anathema to many religious conservatives. His views on trade run counter to the free-trade philosophy of the GOP elites. His comments about reevaluating the U.S. role in NATO shocked many in the Republican foreign-policy establishment.
+
+That’s the threat Ryan and others in the party see as they watch the nominating contest move into the next rounds of primaries. But it isn’t clear that what the speaker advocated in his speech would be enough to put the Republican Party in a better place, even absent Trump. House Republicans are still an unruly group and, with some exceptions, the GOP still prefers to try to do business with itself.
+
+The Republican Party remains a party of protest. It continues to struggle to demonstrate that, on the national level, it can be a true governing party.",REAL
+2507,"Cruz copying me on border wall, Trump says","During the campaign, Trump had threatened to impose a large tariff to keep the jobs in the United States.",REAL
+9283,John Oliver: America’s Increasingly Segregated Schools Are ‘Very Rarely Equal in Any Way’ (Video),"John Oliver: America’s Increasingly Segregated Schools Are ‘Very Rarely Equal in Any Way’ (Video) Posted on Nov 1, 2016 
+Public schools are more segregated than they have been for over 40 years, but the “Last Week Tonight” host argues this isn’t a case of “re-segregation.” It turns out places like New York “never really bothered integrating in the first place.”",FAKE
+8646,The Rise of Mandatory Vaccinations Means the End of Medical Freedom,"The Rise of Mandatory Vaccinations Means the End of Medical Freedom   Source: The Antimedia 
+Mandatory vaccinations are about to open up a new frontier for government control. Through the war on drugs, bureaucrats arbitrarily dictate what people can and can’t put into their bodies, but that violation pales in comparison to forcibly medicating millions against their will. Voluntary and informed consent are essential in securing individual rights, and without it, self-ownership will never be respected. 
+The liberal stronghold of California is trailblazing the encroaching new practice and recently passed laws mandating that children and adults must have certain immunizations before being able to attend schools or work in certain professions. The longstanding religious and philosophical exemptions that protect freedom of choice have been systematically crushed by the state. 
+California’s Senate Bill 277 went into effect on July 1st, 2016, and marked the most rigid requirements ever instituted for vaccinations. The law forces students to endure a total of 40 doses to complete the 10 federally recommended vaccines while allowing more to be added at any time. Any family that doesn’t go along will have their child barred from attending licensed day care facilities, in-home daycares, public or private schools, and even after school programs. 
+Over the years, California has developed a reputation for pushing vaccines on their youth. Assembly Bill 499 was passed in 2011 and lowered the age of consent for STD prevention vaccines to just 12 years old. Included in the assortment of shots being administered was the infamous Gardasil , which just a few years later was at the center of a lawsuit that yielded the victims a $6 million settlement from the U.S. government, which paid out funds from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program . 
+The Vaccinate All Children Act of 2015 is an attempt to implement this new standard nationwide, and although it has stalled in the House, it will likely be reintroduced the next time the country is gripped by the fear of a pandemic. 
+The debate surrounding vaccinations is commonly framed as a moral struggle between the benefits to the collective and the selfish preferences of the individual. But since the outbreak scares of Zika , measles , and ebola , the rhetoric has taken a turn toward authoritarianism. 
+It’s commonly stated by the CDC and most mainstream doctors that the unvaccinated are putting the health of everyone else at risk, but the truth isn’t so black and white . The herd immunity theory has been consistently used to validate the expansion of vaccine programs, but it still doesn’t justify the removal of choice from the individual. 
+The classic exchange of freedom for perceived safety is a no brainer for the millions of Americans who are willing to use government to strap their neighbors down and forcibly inject them for the greater good. Anyone who expresses concern about possible side effects is immediately branded as conspiratorial or anti-science. Yet controversial claims that certain vaccine variants cause neurological disorders like autism have led some people to swear off inoculations altogether. This all-or-nothing dynamic has completely polarized the issue and prevents any reasonable discussion from taking place. Either you accept all of the CDC’s recommended 69 doses of 16 vaccines between birth and age 18, or you want to bring back measles, polio, and probably the black plague. 
+On the other extreme side of the debate, if you fail to acknowledge all vaccines as dangerous, you’re an ignorant sheep. Through the internet, disinformation has become widespread and created a movement of people that have written off all the benefits accomplished through immunizations. These individuals are unable or unwilling to separate the science from the shady institutions that develop and distribute new vaccines. Even if thimerosal and mercury based preservatives cause adverse reactions in some patients, it doesn’t detract from the advantages vaccine technology provides. In this debate, like most others in the US, both sides are swept up in emotion and ignorance. 
+Regardless, the public’s trust in vaccinations has been eroded by the reputations of those companies producing them. Pharmaceutical giants like Merck and Pfizer make billions from the distribution of these shots, and the potential profits after a mandate are enough to corrupt the morals of almost anyone. In one example, former CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding left her post at the government agency in 2009 to work in Merck’s vaccine division. An investigative report published by the British Medical Journal last year found the CDC downplays its ties to the pharmaceutical industry. 
+Further, by buying the support of politicians like Hillary Clinton — who received more donations from pharmaceutical companies and their employees than any other candidate this year — these huge companies are able to expand their influence in directing government policy . 
+Maintaining control over what we put into our own bodies is a fundamental right, but for now, standing up to these government decrees only means ostracism from the education system and criticism from peers. In the future, however, the punishments for disobedience will likely only grow stricter. 
+An Orange County doctor named Bob Sears is already in the crosshairs of California’s medical board after excusing a two-year-old from future vaccinations. The mother expressed concern that her daughter had an adverse reaction to a previous shot, describing the child as becoming limp “like a ragdoll” for 24 hours after the last dose. Dr. Sears’ alternative treatment recommendations break from the rules dictated by S.B. 277, and now his reputation, as well as his career, are in jeopardy. This new authority to strip doctors of their medical licenses for simply going against the state-imposed standards opens the door for the persecution of medical professionals who resist any government regulation. 
+A vaccination is an invasive medical procedure that can have different effects on each and every individual. The Nuremberg Code’s first principle is voluntary consent, but it seems the lessons of history have been completely forgotten by today’s leaders. The transition of these shots from “recommended” to “required” is well underway, and those who think the ends justify the means are willing to forcibly make sure everyone else complies. 
+The new benchmark set by California symbolizes a precedent that could be mimicked across the nation. Without having the discretion to choose which medications are injected into your body — or your child’s — how can anyone convince themselves they are free? This overreach and collusion can often be dismissed as a trivial issue, but the fact that voluntary consent is under attack speaks volumes to the extent that state power has metastasized.",FAKE
+6784,Scientists Fascinated By Lake Under The Sea: Those Who Enter Never Come Out [Watch],"This underwater lake is actually helping scientists deal with a much bigger mystery. Credit: EVNautilus 
+It may seem impossible, but scientists have discovered what can only be deemed as a lake under the sea. Dubbed the “Jacuzzi of Despair,” the brine-filled pool is deadly for the majority of creatures that dare enter it but is proving to be highly informational for those that are studying it. 
+Located in the Gulf of Mexico, the lake rises about 12 feet off of the ocean floor and is four to five times saltier than the surrounding ocean. It’s also twice as warm, rich with methane, which is what makes it bubble like a jacuzzi, and is dense with hydrogen sulfide. This makes it incompatible with the sea water and a completely separate entity. 
+Dr. Erik Cordes, associate professor of biology at Temple University in Philadelphia who discovered the pool with several colleagues, told Seeker, 
+“It was one of the most amazing things in the deep sea. You go down into the bottom of the ocean and you are looking at a lake or a river flowing. It feels like you are not on this world.” 
+Since the conditions of the pool are so foreign to humans and most of the creatures living under the sea, it’s allowing scientists to get a glimpse of what life might be like in extreme circumstances. What started as an interesting lake in the middle of the ocean has now become the heart of experimentation for one of the most mysterious subjects known to man: space. Dr. Cordes said, 
+“There’s a lot of people looking at these extreme habitats on Earth as models for what we might discover when we go to other planets.The technology development in the deep sea is definitely going to be applied to the worlds beyond our own.” 
+What makes the pool even more unique is that it has a lively ecosystem that has evolved throughout the centuries to include more species. While larger animals, such as deep-sea crabs, die as soon as they enter the pool, other creatures have adapted to the atmosphere of the water and even thrive on it. Giant mussels formed symbiotic bacteria in their gills to feed off of the hydrogen sulfide and methane gas from the pool and specially adapted shrimp and tube worms were able to survive the harsh conditions. Any other animals that entered were immediately killed, pickled by the salt, and preserved forever. 
+Watch the video below to see the beautiful lake for yourself and the creatures who did and did not survive the conditions. 
+Do you like our independent & investigative news? Then please check these two settings on Facebook to guarantee you don't miss our posts:",FAKE
+1610,Jeb Bush loses TV ad edge to Marco Rubio,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+9508,"Russia, India Discuss FGFA Advanced Fighter, Su-30MKI Upgrade","Get short URL 0 16 0 0 Indian and Russian defense delegations discussed joint defense projects and defense issues of mutual interest, in particular, the Sukhoi/HAL Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) and the upgrade of the Sukhoi Su-30MKI fighter, the sources at the Indian Defense Ministry sources told Sputnik. 
+NEW DELHI (Sputnik) — On Wednesday, the India-Russia intergovernmental commission on military and technical cooperation held a meeting in New Delhi, bringing together the delegations headed by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Indian counterpart Manohar Parrikar. © AP Photo/ Aijaz Rahi India Seeks Foreign Defense Firm to Build Domestic Single-Engine Fighters 
+""We discussed… the FGFA project and [upgrade] of SU-31 MKI which is presently India's priority,"" the sources said on Wednesday. 
+The Russian-Indian FGFA has stealth capabilities and is based on the Russian T-50 prototype jet. The FGFA project came about following the signing of a Russian-Indian cooperation agreement on October 18, 2007. Su-30MKI (Flanker-H) multirole fighter",FAKE
+4107,"Our real police/race problem: Diverse forces, white resentment, and America’s persistent divides","Yet the problems do remain “black and white” for reasons of economic exploitation and isolation that run deeper than race itself and that are gathering force, despite rising numbers of white/Asian and white/Hispanic marriages and of multiracial children, even in the families of police officers themselves. Unless we can face the reasons why more “diversity” in police ranks is a far-from-sufficient condition of justice, American society will remain more racist than many others, and thereby hangs my tale.
+
+Shortly before Christmas 1996 in the lower-middle-class Queens neighborhood of East Elmhurst, robbers killed Officer Davis as he tried to protect Ira Epstein, the white owner of a check-cashing store where Davis was moonlighting as a security guard to earn extra money to buy holiday gifts for his 6-year-old daughter, Arielle.
+
+Because Davis was off-duty at the time, it’s unclear if his assailants knew that he was a police officer. But because he was one and was murdered for doing what police officers do, his Episcopal funeral Mass in Garden City, Long Island, was a familiar “tableau of pomp and grief,” as the New York Times put it, with thousands of saluting, white-gloved, white-ethnic officers and a flyover by police helicopters.
+
+“Arielle, your daddy, who loved you, who adored you…will always be a hero of New York City,” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani told Davis’ daughter from the church pulpit. He asked the congregation to give Arielle something she would remember, and all present responded with a long, wrenching ovation. Noting that Ira Epstein’s widow had called Davis a role model for the city’s youth, Giuliani said, “She was right,” adding that, “When [Davis] died Saturday morning he was doing what he was trained to do – he was trying to protect another man.”
+
+Many funerals of New York City police officers killed in action have been tableaus not only of pomp and grief but of the chasm that yawns between an “occupying army” of mostly white-ethnic officers and an “underclass” of inner-city, black and Hispanic men. I spent enough time there in the late 1970s to have wished that the sea of blue around Davis’ funeral — and now those of officers Ramos and Liu — would signify something better than a chasm.
+
+But does it? Or have the examples set by Davis, Liu and Ramos on police forces given the rest of us excuses to rationalize the continuing, calculated, heavily policed and seemingly bottomless isolation of millions of black and Hispanic men and women? Are economic isolation and social stigmatization still driving some of the isolated — and those who police them — so crazy that it’s a wonder there aren’t even more police killers like those who killed Davis, Liu and Ramos?
+
+Ramos and Wu’s killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, was a perversely politicized, vengeance-crazed black man. Even the slaying in Ferguson of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, by white officer Darren Wilson has a symbolic but no less telling opposite (Wilson’s nightmare) in another Ferguson – Colin Ferguson, a perversely politicized, vengeance-crazed black man who, shortly before Christmas, 1993, boarded a suburban Long Island commuter train and shot 23 white passengers, killing six.
+
+Although he killed no cops, many New York officers live on Long Island, whose suburban towns their parents or grandparents chose over New York City’s tenements and row homes in the 1960s while seeking greener pastures in the booming, postwar economy and insulation from racially changing inner-city neighborhoods and rising black crime. As Newsday’s Jimmy Breslin put it a day after Ferguson’s train massacre: “Last night, Brooklyn followed them home.”
+
+Are these officers and prosecutors to blame for provoking their killers’ isolation and rage? Or are they really doing only what our democracy seemingly wants and expects them to do: keep the lid on blacks and Hispanics who are cheated and sidelined, as the rest of us look the other way and disclaim responsibility – an evasion that seems easier to some whenever a Brinsley or a Colin Ferguson explodes?
+
+In a strange irony, Charles Davis probably reinforced white innocence because he was a generous cop, popular with other officers and with residents of the Queens neighborhood where he supervised youth basketball games and a club for kids who might want to join the NYPD. His large presence, sharp eye and caring strengthened the community policing that had helped to cut New York City’s murder rate in half in less than five years, to below 1,000 for the first time in three decades. (By 2013, that number would plummet to just over 300, and this year it may be even lower, notwithstanding predictable predictions of doom 11 months ago by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association that Mayor Bill De Blasio’s curbing of excessive NYPD “stop and frisk” practices would unleash mayhem.)
+
+But if Davis’ blue uniform and the blue sea at his funeral signified something better than black-versus-white, that equation took a perverse turn as Queens District Attorney Richard Brown orchestrated the indictment of 19-year-old George Bell, a stock boy at Old Navy who lived with his mother and had no criminal background, and two other black men, as Davis’ killers. A recent Nation magazine review of the case by Hannah Riley, a former researcher at the Innocence Project and a student of criminology at the University of Cambridge, raises serious doubts that the men convicted and still in prison for killing Davis were really his murderers.
+
+D.A. Brown’s zeal in convicting them may have been fortified by the fact that Davis’ wife had been an assistant district attorney, albeit in another jurisdiction. But all prosecutors who face high-profile, highly charged cases have other, more-powerful incentives to “resolve” them irresponsibly. New Yorkers would be reminded of that in 2002, when the four black men and one Hispanic man who’d been convicted and imprisoned in 1989 amid public outrage over the infamous assault and rape of the Central Park Jogger were released after years of unjustified incarceration after the real assailant confessed.
+
+Such things happen partly because D.A.s win reelection by pandering to angry, frightened voters’ hunger for revenge and because police officers are literally the prosecutors’ comrades in arms and their witnesses before grand juries and in open trials. (The over-zealous assistant prosecutors and detectives complicit in both the Central Park jogger and Davis cases were women, by the way.) But Hannah Riley has found a would-be whistle-blower in retired NYPD detective Pete Fiorillo, who had been pleased at first to see Giuliani touting the work of other detectives in the case and who’d had, as he put it, “no intention of looking at it for the purpose of taking it apart.”
+
+“But the more he learned,” Riley explains, “the more his doubts grew until he became convinced that the investigation and trial were irredeemably flawed. ‘This case represents a total breakdown of the criminal justice system from the bottom to the top: the police that investigated this case; the DA that prosecuted the case; the judge that tried all three cases,’ said Fiorillo. ‘They just didn’t have the courage to do the right thing.’”
+
+Giuliani, himself an infamously zealous former prosecutor, told the public after Davis’ murder that, “If you shoot and kill a New York City police officer, the Police Department is going to catch you, they’re going to find you, usually in a short period of time, and then at a minimum you’re going to spend the rest of your life in jail. And in this particular situation, it’s quite possible you’ll get executed.”
+
+The word “execution” had a dark double-entendre here, giving the “blue over black” equation another perverse twist: Prosecutorial railroading involves not only beguiling or coercing helpless and apparently hopeless young black and Hispanic men into confessions and eventual convictions, and not just complicity by grand juries whose secrecy sanitizes such orchestrations. It also involves finding excuses for officers who are spared indictment time and again — even after summarily executing unarmed and even unresisting black and Hispanic men and, in some cases, women.
+
+Like most New Yorkers watching the Central Park and Davis cases, I was inclined to trust prosecutors and to assume the justice of the convictions. When reporters on the Davis murder were told that the 19-year-old Bell had been heard humming the song, “Have Yourself a Very Merry Christmas” during a break in the questioning at the 109th Precinct and that remorse seemed never to enter his mind, I assumed that he was yet another half-crazed casualty of inner-city isolation, the kind of casualty I’d encountered more than once.
+
+In the late 1970s I ran a weekly newspaper serving poor neighborhoods just across Brooklyn’s Broadway and Flushing Avenue from Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Officers Ramos and Liu were killed; I made more than a few visits to the Tompkins Houses along Myrtle Avenue, outside of which the murders occurred, and to Woodhull Hospital, where they were brought with Brinsley, who committed suicide nearby. Just to the northeast lay Bushwick, a once-tidy, German and Italian white-ethnic neighborhood that had become mostly Hispanic and black in the 1960s in ways and for reasons I knew intimately and that I portray in my book “The Closest of Strangers,” two of whose chapters chronicle North Brooklyn’s ravaging by absentee landlords’ “block-busting” welfare-subsidy scams, rampant arson for profit and for revenge, and massive looting during a huge 1977 power blackout.
+
+On two occasions I navigated the devastation all night with officers of Bushwick’s 83rd Precinct, accompanying them into scenes of domestic violence where terrified toddlers sucking on teething rings crawled across shattered plates and splattered dinners to hide behind sofas as their mothers told us why they’d called 911 out of desperation and sometimes for revenge. Sometimes the man was still there, and officers had to take him outside. Out on the street in the noisy, sulfurous darkness, a black-Hispanic youth sauntered up to the patrol car’s open window and taunted one of my hosts by asking, “You Officer Torsney? Gonna shoot me?” — referring to Robert Torsney, who on Thanksgiving Day in 1976, for no apparent reason, had fired a bullet into the head of Randolph Evans, 15, a ninth grader at Franklin K. Lane High School, outside the Cypress Hills housing project, near where Officer Rafael Ramos was buried last Saturday. As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert noted years later, “Torsney would later claim he had been afflicted with a rare form of epilepsy that, remarkably, had never been noticed before the killing and was never seen after it. The ‘epilepsy’ defense worked. Officer Torsney was acquitted of any wrongdoing.” Herbert’s column, “The Sickness in the NYPD,” is worth reading, if only for the experience of rubbing your eyes in disbelief. Another of its offerings: “One April morning in 1973 a veteran police officer named Thomas Shea pulled his service revolver and blew away a young black boy on a street in Jamaica, Queens. He shot the kid in the back. There was no chance of survival. Afterward, no one could figure out why the officer had done it. There was no reason for the shooting, no threat to Officer Shea of any kind. The boy’s name was Clifford Glover and he was 10 years old. Officer Shea was charged with murder but of course he was acquitted.” For every young man whom killers in uniform execute as unambiguously as they did Randy Evans, Clifford Glover, Eric Garner and many others without being indicted for it, still more essentially hapless, helpless people are packed off into the vast archipelago of incarceration that employs thousands of “corrections” officers. Either way, for the rest of us, it’s out of sight, out of mind, as were the hundreds of homeless people and derelicts about whom few New Yorkers asked when they disappeared from Manhattan’s streets during Giuliani’s mayoralty. If at the bottom of it all is the calculated isolation and impoverishment of blacks and Hispanics that I chronicled while climbing stairwells in Brooklyn’s Bushwick-Hylan and Borinquen Plaza housing projects to distribute our paper, next to that bottom are the cops we assign to keep the lid on it. Is it a wonder that they sometimes say that they feel like “garbage collectors” and that, when the “garbage” call them something worse, some of them explode? In the 1960s, insouciant, pseudo-insurgent, middle-class white youths called cops “pigs.” A police union took out an ad saying, “Next time you really need help, try calling a pig.” But, with a very few, spectacular exceptions like the Brinks armored car robbery, the worst thing that white kids did to cops in those days was call them names. Is it really surprising that some cops and corrections officers feel as trapped in neighborhoods like Bushwick as the people they’re charged with containing? Is it surprising that some of the young white men who are drawn to such work grew up marinating what I described here three weeks ago as ressentiment, the social pathology of a society that has begun to countenance torture abroad and the militarization of police at home against a decadent, demoralized populace that has come to include themselves? Or that, at the funeral of Rafael Ramos, stunted citizens like these would turn their backs on the chief executive of the democracy that employs them, and that they would thereby dishonor the fallen officer and flout civilian leadership of the police and the military as if they would prefer a police state? The surprise is that so many police officers are still as good as Davis and as the relatives of Salon’s own Joan Walsh, as she recounted here vividly this week and in her book “What’s the Matter With White People?” I, too, can testify that there are many officers, of all colors and backgrounds, as generous and effective as Charles Davis. In the mid-1990s, Peter Mancuso, a former NYPD sergeant, Marine combat veteran, and longtime police reformer, introduced me to other impressive colleagues while I was a columnist for the New York Daily News, a paper many cops read while sitting in their patrol cars. The officers I met were better, more proactive citizen-leaders than moralists who simply cluck their tongues at them. On the other hand, whenever I wrote columns like this one praising their reform efforts, I got some unexpected visits from the New York Fire Department, whose firefighters banged loudly on my door at 3 a.m. because someone had called in a false alarm a day or two after the column ran. Soon after the chokehold killing of Eric Garner, but before the assassinations of Liu and Ramos, another retired police officer sent me this video, distributed by anonymous officers who seem to be preparing for race war, that depicts black men maiming and murdering cops in realistic street scenes. Some of the scenes look staged, but if Brinsley’s real deed had been filmed it would have fit perfectly into this alarmist, racist montage. The officer who shared it with me calls it “almost a counter-training device. Its message is, ‘Never mind what we are about to tell you the law says; here is what you are up against at any moment.’ After seeing it, I can better understand that young Housing Division Officer opening stairwell doors with his gun in his hand [and, trigger-happy, shot and killed an unarmed, innocent 28-year-old black man two floors below him]. I’m wondering if he saw the video or something like it.’” (Before calling 911 to aid the man he’d shot, the housing officer called his union.) Officers’ testimony in cases like this and Eric Garner’s and Randy Evans’ and Clifford Glover’s and the rest is almost transparently scripted by the union. Another irony. Even as the rogue video and the real deeds of Brinsley and Colin Ferguson alarm us, and even as some officers’ turning their backs on the mayor at a funeral and a police graduation ceremony disgust us, many black leaders have been ascending a far-better learning curve from the demagoguery of the 1980s and ‘90s to more sophisticated, humane strategizing. Where now are the Louis Farrakhans, the Vernon Masons and Alton Maddoxes (lawyers of Tawana Brawley infamy) and the Johnnie Cochrans, whose verbal threats and courtroom tactics sent chills down whites’ spines? Al Sharpton, whom I knew well in those years and described here in November, has climbed that learning curve: He said that the Ferguson, Missouri, protest movement “was not about Darren Wilson’s job. It was about Michael Brown’s justice…. We are not anti-police. If our children are wrong, arrest them. Don’t empty your gun and act like you had no other way.” Sharpton also led Eric Garner’s family in protesting Brinsley’s deed and mourning the deaths of officers Ramos and Liu. Sharpton is a flawed leader, but efforts by Fox News’ flunkies to blame him and recent protesters for bad relations with police prove only that black leadership’s learning curve has been offset by some white male degeneration along the lines I sketched here. The glorious funerals given officers Davis, Liu and Ramos don’t dispel these white men’s growing bewilderment, fear and anger, less of it generated by black men than by economic and cultural riptides that would still dispossess and disorient many of them even if the U.S. were white from coast to coast. To overcome racism, we’ll have to reach past “black and white” story lines and find strategies that free the oppressed by freeing the oppressor. Police are trapped in the swamp I navigated in Brooklyn because all of us are trapped in a political economy that’s no longer legitimate or sustainable. Unless we confront what Joan Walsh is telling us has happened to the white working  and middle classes, and what AlterNet editor Don Hazen, economist James Galbraith and historian Eli Zaretsky are trying to tell us about the real roots of America’s white male problem, “black and white” explanations will fall short, on both sides of an enduring race line that leads us nowhere.",REAL
+3474,The Supreme Court cannot hide on Obamacare,"The Supreme Court, it would seem, did not want you to see what it was up to on Wednesday.
+
+The robed nine were hearing oral arguments in King v. Burwell , a legal effort by conservatives to dismantle Obamacare and probably the most politically charged case to appear before the high court since Bush v. Gore. But, as always, there was no video of the proceedings and, curiously, the court chose not to release same-day audio of the argument, as it did in Bush v. Gore and has done in other high-profile cases since then.
+
+I went to the argument, as I have for the last decade, to attempt to paint for readers a verbal picture of the atmospherics in the room, such as Samuel Alito’s eye rolls, Sonia Sotomayor’s hectoring and Clarence Thomas’s states of repose. But this time, court staff placed me in the back corner, three feet from the door; blocking my view of the justices were two red-velvet curtains, a marble pillar, another marble pillar, and a closed brass gate carved with images of acorns, oak leaves, dolphins, helmets and plumes, animal heads and the Ten Commandments.
+
+Ultimately, though, there will be no hiding what happened in that chamber Wednesday morning. Ninety minutes of lopsided argument in favor of the Obama administration’s defense cast significant doubt on what had been a plausible challenge to Obamacare’s legality. The conservative majority could still knock down the law, of course, but given the ambiguity exposed Wednesday, it would now be a breathtaking surprise for the justices to cause such massive upheaval — taking health-care immediately from 8 million and causing a death spiral for the rest of Obamacare — based on such a slender legal reed.
+
+The four liberal justices furiously picked apart the arguments of Michael Carvin, who had also argued, unsuccessfully, in a 2012 challenge to the health-care law. Alito and Antonin Scalia were not as aggressive as usual in their questioning of the Obama administration’s lawyer, and Chief Justice John Roberts was almost as silent as Thomas. Anthony Kennedy, perpetual swing vote, had some serious doubts about the argument against Obamacare.
+
+Kennedy said that while “perhaps you will prevail in the plain words of the statute, there’s a serious constitutional problem if we adopt your argument,” along with a violation of federalism, because states would be coerced to embrace Obamacare exchanges or enter an insurance “death spiral,” he said.
+
+“Sometimes we think of things the government doesn’t,” Kennedy informed him.
+
+At issue: whether the language in the Affordable Care Act calling for each state to establish a health-care exchange means that people are not eligible for subsidies in states where the federal government created the exchanges because the state refused to do so. Take away those subsidies, and Obamacare collapses.
+
+One part of the law favors the critics’ interpretation, but other parts of the law, and the broader context of the law, contradict such an interpretation. Given this Talmudic dispute over the text, it’s almost inconceivable that the justices, supposed practitioners of judicial modesty, would consider that justification sufficient to tear apart the nation’s social fabric.
+
+Opponents of the law went through great contortions to bring this case. They’re arguing against tax credits — and thus in favor of tax increases. They had trouble finding people who had sufficient injury to have standing in the case — and in Wednesday’s arguments it became apparent that only one of the four plaintiffs clearly qualified. More difficulty came when Carvin argued that states would still get the benefit of exchanges even without subsidies. Justice Elena Kagan pointed out that he argued the opposite in his last appearance.
+
+Whichever legal argument the law’s opponents were relying on at the moment, it was secondary to the political argument against Obamacare. Scalia, in his attempt to justify the social upheaval that would come if the court jettisoned the law, asked the government’s top lawyer, Donald Verrilli: “You really think Congress is just going to sit there while all of these disastrous consequences ensue? . . . Congress adjusts, enacts a statute that takes care of the problem. It happens all the time.”
+
+There was laughter in the courtroom.
+
+After the argument, hundreds of activists, whipped up by some members of that very Congress, waved signs and traded taunts as if they were rival fans at a basketball game.
+
+“Stand up! Fight back! Health care under attack!” chanted one side.
+
+“Liberty! Follow the law!” the other side shouted back.
+
+In the unlikely event the Roberts court uses an ambiguous textual dispute to overturn the most significant social legislation of the era, there will be no place to hide from the national conflagration that follows.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+8197,BREAKING : TED CRUZ CALLS FOR SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE HILLARY – TruthFeed,"BREAKING : TED CRUZ CALLS FOR SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE HILLARY BREAKING : TED CRUZ CALLS FOR SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE HILLARY Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 3, 2016 
+The Trump train is peaking at the perfect time. 
+Donald Trump is leading in most polls, and gaining in key BLUE states, like Michigan, where he is within one point of Crooked Hillary. 
+Clinton is plagued by endless scandals, lies, and two criminal investigations. 
+The reopening of her email investigation after FBI officials discovered 650K emails on her top aide’s computer, and the FBI investigation into the scam Clinton Foundation. 
+Today, Trump supporter Ted Cruz tweeted out a call for a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton scandals. RT if you agree there needs to be a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute the corruption of Hillary Clinton! 
+— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 3, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+1181,"Poll: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders both top Trump","Washington (CNN) Both of the remaining Democratic candidates for president easily top Republican front-runner Donald Trump in hypothetical general election match-ups, according to a new CNN/ORC Poll .
+
+But Hillary Clinton , who is well ahead in the Democratic race for the presidency, would likely face a stronger challenge should Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or Texas Sen. Ted Cruz capture the Republican nomination for president.
+
+Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates.""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey.""
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23.""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant.""
+
+Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House.""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement.
+
+In the scenario that appears most likely to emerge from the primary contests, Clinton tops Trump 52% to 44% among registered voters. That result has tilted in Clinton's favor since the last CNN/ORC Poll on the match-up in January.
+
+But when the former secretary of state faces off with either of the other two top Republicans, things are much tighter and roughly the same as they were in January. Clinton trails against Rubio, with 50% choosing the Florida senator compared to 47% for Clinton, identical to the results in January. Against Cruz, Clinton holds 48% to his 49%, a slight tightening from a 3-point race in January to a 1-point match-up now.
+
+Sanders -- who enjoys the most positive favorable rating of any presidential candidate in the field, according to the poll -- tops all three Republicans by wide margins: 57% to 40% against Cruz, 55% to 43% against Trump, and 53% to 45% against Rubio. Sanders fares better than Clinton in each match-up among men, younger voters and independents.
+
+The race for the presidency hits its primary season peak as 78% of voters, including almost the same share among Democrats, Republicans and independents, who say that the nation is more deeply divided on major issues facing the country than it has been in the past.
+
+The survey asked voters to choose which of all the remaining top candidates, regardless of party, they trust most to handle seven top issues. Trump tops the list on the economy, terrorism and immigration, while Clinton is the top choice when it comes to health care, race relations and foreign policy. Voters are about evenly split between Trump and Clinton on gun policy.
+
+Adding up all the candidates from each party, Republicans have the edge on the economy, terrorism, immigration and gun policy, while more voters choose one of the Democrats' candidates on race relations and health care, with about an even split between the two parties on foreign policy.
+
+Voters' choices broken out by party provide an interesting window into areas where Trump might hold cross-party appeal. Though the share of leaned Republicans choosing Clinton on any of the tested issues tops out at 8% on health care, Trump is the most trusted for 15% of leaned Democrats on terrorism, 14% on the economy and 13% on immigration.
+
+As noted above, Sanders holds the most positive favorability rating of any of the top candidates for president: 60% of registered voters view him positively, 33% negatively. He is the only candidate seen favorably by a majority of voters, and one of four who are seen more positively than negatively.
+
+The two front-runners, Clinton and Trump, are seen unfavorably by majorities of voters. Almost 6-in-10 have a negative view of Trump, 59% with 38% favorable, and 53% have a negative view of Clinton, 44% see her positively.
+
+Cruz also has a net negative rating, while impressions of Carson, Rubio and Kasich tilt positive.
+
+The economy remains far and away the country's top concern as the election campaign rolls on, with 47% calling it most important as they decide how to vote for president, followed by 19% citing health care, 14% terrorism, 10% foreign policy and 8% illegal immigration.
+
+Should Michael Bloomberg, the independent former mayor of New York City, throw his hat into the ring as an independent candidate, his candidacy would do more harm to Clinton's bid to beat Trump than it would to Sanders' effort.
+
+All told though, few say they would consider backing Bloomberg if he did run. Interest is strongest among political independents, and just 49% of them say they would definitely or probably consider voting Bloomberg for president.
+
+The CNN/ORC Poll was conducted by telephone February 24-27 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults. Results among the sample of 920 registered voters have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.",REAL
+624,Donald Trump revokes Washington Post press access (+video),"U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers a campaign speech about national security in Manchester, New Hampshire, U.S. June 13, 2016.
+
+Donald Trump says his presidential campaign is revoking The Washington Post’s press credentials, and the Post isn’t the first major news outlet to be barred from Trump’s rallies and events. Trump previously banned Politico, BuzzFeed News, The Huffington Post, and others from his campaign events, according to The New York Times.
+
+Trump called The Washington Post “phony and dishonest” in a Facebook post where he explained that he decided to pull the press credentials due to the paper’s “incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting” of his campaign.
+
+Trump took issue with a headline the Post wrote Monday that read, “Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting."" The headline was changed Monday afternoon to read, “""Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting.""
+
+The Post story covered Trump’s statements during a Fox News interview on Monday. When asked to explain why he called for Obama to resign after the shooting, he answered, in part, ""He doesn't get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it's one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.""
+
+Washington Post spokeswoman Kristine Coratti Kelly told the Associated Press in an email that the Post changed the headline shortly after posting the story ""to more properly reflect what Trump said.""
+
+""We did so on our own; the Trump campaign never contacted us about it,” Kelly said.
+
+Washington Post editor Martin Baron said in a statement Tuesday that the decision to revoke the paper’s press credentials ""is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press."" Baron defended the Post’s coverage of Trump’s campaign so far and vowed to continue with honest, honorable and accurate reporting.
+
+Trump has said that if he were to become president, news organizations that have criticized him “ will have problems.” He threatened to sue The Washington Post in January over an article about the bankruptcy of his Atlantic City casino. This would be a very difficult suit to win, thanks to the First Amendment's historically strong protection of journalists, but Trump has said as president he hopes to weaken the libel law that protects journalists covering public figures.
+
+Under American libel law, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly endorsed under the First Amendment, it is difficult for public figures to sue reporters who criticize them because they must demonstrate that factually inaccurate statements were made with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth.
+
+Legal experts doubt Trump as president could change libel law through executive order; the change would likely require a constitutional amendment.
+
+Nonetheless, denying reporters access to his campaign events is within Trump’s current power.
+
+Chris Cillizza wrote for The Washington Post on Tuesday that politicians and journalists inevitably have a tense relationship, “The job of journalists – at The Post and everywhere else – is to give voters the fullest and most accurate picture of the two people who want to represent all of us as president. That is a task that is, inherently, at conflict – at least at times – with the story the candidates want to tell about themselves. That tension is natural and often leads to uncomfortable relationships between the candidates and the media who cover them.”
+
+This report contains material from the Associated Press.",REAL
+5575,The Real Reason Obamacare is Coming Unglued,"The Real Reason Obamacare is Coming Unglued by IWB · October 27, 2016 Tweet 
+The days of $20 doctor house calls and affordable hospitals stays for the uninsured are long gone. Chalk it up to government involvement in healthcare. Now we learn that “Obamacare” premiums will sharply rise in 2017. Prepare for what’s next.",FAKE
+2042,How Jeb Bush can avoid being the Jon Huntsman of 2016,"It seems increasingly likely that Jeb Bush will run for president. (Even his son is talking up the prospects.) What remains to be seen is whether Jeb Bush can actually win.
+
+A lot of GOP establishment types are excited about a Bush candidacy. But don't expect the grassroots to eagerly embrace a former Florida governor who has made a habit of moderately breaking from conservative orthodoxy on big issues like immigration, or who recently (mildly) singled out Fox News for criticism. As the editor of the Washington Free Beacon said:
+
+It's not hard to understand the Huntsman comparison. The former Utah governor — among the most conservative in the country during his tenure — was tarred as a base-betraying moderate before his campaign even officially began. To say he flamed out would be inaccurate in that he never lit up in the first place. Huntsman's much-hyped campaign was basically over as soon as it began.
+
+Jeb already has the baggage of his brother to contend with. The last thing he needs is to invite are comparisons to the ill-fated Huntsman campaign. So how can he avoid this fate? Here are four pieces of unsolicited advice.
+
+1. Toughen up. There are basically two ways that voters judge candidates. One is on the issues and the candidate's record on them. The other is based on temperament — our rather subjective sense of who this person is. For conservative voters who might be uneasy about Bush, his stance on some issues is problematic. Support for things like Common Core and immigration reform aren't exactly red meat for the GOP base. But Bush can balance this by being tough.
+
+Huntsman was seen as ideologically moderate and temperamentally weak. That's a horrible combination. Ted Cruz is seen as ideologically stern and temperamentally tough, a better combination as far as the base is concerned, but probably one that catches up to him with the general electorate. Who has a good combination? Chris Christie's tough persona covers a multitude of sins on the issues — and indeed allows him to be a bit more ideologically moderate. Another example is John McCain. Moderate on some issues (including immigration reform), his tough-guy image helped provide balance — enough to win the 2008 nomination, at least.
+
+Base voters on both sides of the aisle tend to conflate toughness with ideological purity. I'm probably more conservative than Ann Coulter, who backed Chris Christie for president in 2012 and defended RomneyCare. But I'm willing to bet everyone would suspect that Coulter, who is never afraid to take the knives out, is way more conservative than me. Style sometimes trumps substance.
+
+Most candidates have a natural proclivity to be hard or soft. Mike Huckabee might be the best modern politician at playing nice and tough — but even here, the latter often comes across as inauthentic, and, ironically, as mean.
+
+The problem for Jeb is that he seems to be temperamentally moderate as well as ideologically moderate. He needs to overcome this by getting tough. This is the most important thing he can do.
+
+2. Don't flip-flop. Being tough sometimes mean sticking to your guns and standing up to the base (see Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment). Now, you might think that the smart move for Jeb would instead be to pander to the base and change his positions. This is almost always a terrible idea, and only compounds a candidate's image problem. The conservative base now not only distrusts you ideologically, but also sees you as a wimp — which is essentially the same as some caricature of an effete liberal. Yes, there may be ways to massage these things, to stress some issues and downplay others. But the answer for Jeb isn't to shed his moderate positions — that will only compound his problems. He cannot change his positions, no matter how tempting it may be. Doing so will make him look weak. And remember what we said about being tough?
+
+3. Don't try to change the GOP base. This one probably seems obvious, but Jeb Bush isn't some backbencher running to ""get a message out"" or pull the other candidates toward him on certain issues (as Elizabeth Warren might if she challenged Hillary Clinton). If he runs, it should be to win. That means his purpose isn't to lecture the base or shame the base or change the base — it's to win the election. If he wants to win an argument instead of an election, he should stay home and write blog posts. Like me.
+
+People can tell if you don't like or respect them. This is true of almost every profession. In Jerry Maguire, the title character's sports agent mentor tells him, ""Unless you love everybody, you can't sell anybody."" The same is true in the writing world: E.B. White said, ''No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence."" If Jeb harbors any resentment toward the Republican base, he either needs to sit this one out (because it will show), or overcome it by flipping a psychological switch and reminding himself constantly that these are good people and that he loves them.
+
+4. Don't lamely suck up to the GOP base, either. I realize this might seem contradictory. But it's not. And while Jeb cannot and should not be in the business of overtly pandering — doing so would make him look inauthentic and weak — he absolutely must reach out to conservative opinion leaders. He must be accessible. And this will be a problem for him, because he is a bit cloistered. And because of the star-power associated with being a Bush, he can already seem intimidating, and likely already has a team of handlers charged with isolating him from the masses (Rudy Giuliani suffered from this, as well).
+
+How to overcome this? The best model I've witnessed was McCain, who in 2008 was incredibly accessible to conservative writers. In that regard, he probably over-performed. Jeb should read this.
+
+Jeb Bush doesn't have to be Jon Huntsman. In fact, he might well be the next president of the United States. But to win, he'll have to toughen up, stay true to himself, and walk a tricky path between alienating and bowing before the GOP base. It won't be easy — but he can do it.",REAL
+8114,Revived Clinton Email Scandal Killed By A Slew Of New Facts In Record Time,"The revived Hillary Clinton email investigation story that gave Republicans some brief hope has been killed by a slew of new facts. 
+Devastating point number one to Republicans. The emails aren’t about Clinton withholding, receiving, or sending emails: Pete Williams has sources saying not about Clinton world w/holding emails. Not about Podesta emails. Not emails from Clinton. 
+— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) October 28, 2016 
+NBC’s Pete Williams also has details that are already taking the air out of Republican sails: NBC’s Pete Williams: Sr. officials say—During separate investigation “a device” led to add'l emails–not from Clinton https://t.co/QmmNoxXhOx 
+— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 28, 2016 
+For those who can’t watch the video above: Important reporting from @PeteWilliamsNBC on the FBI/Clinton news (h/t @mmurraypolitics ). pic.twitter.com/RyxmTPXMtW 
+— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) October 28, 2016 
+This might be a record for the fastest death of a Republican scandal. Trump and Republicans made a number of assumptions that turned out not to be true. It looks like the FBI is only trying to be careful in their review. Since the emails have nothing to do with Hillary Clinton, the State Department, emails sent or received by Clinton or the Clinton Foundation, Republicans were wrong on all fronts. 
+Facts won’t stop Republicans from trying to make something out of nothing, but the Comey letter is not the campaign changer that Trump and the Republicans were hoping for. The weakness of this story means that should play well in the conservative media echo chamber, but by Monday, it will be forgotten by the rest of the country.",FAKE
+10246,Iraq’s Skies Darken as Islamic State Torches Oil,"Iraq’s Skies Darken as Islamic State Torches Oil Posted on Oct 28, 2016 
+By Kieran Cooke / Climate News Network Photo: Kuwait, 1991. Today, the Islamic State copies Saddam Hussein, threatening Iraq’s environment with oil blazes. (Lt. Steve Gozzo USN via Wikimedia Commons) 
+LONDON—Even at the height of the day, the skies in many parts of northern Iraq are dark as ISIS torches oil wells and oil-filled defensive trenches in its retreat. Artillery fire and bombing raids by US aircraft and others battling Isis are also causing conflagrations at oil installations. Aid teams near the town of Qayyarah, about 80 kilometres south of the Isis stronghold of Mosul, talk of escaping civilians being covered in oil residues . “Everywhere is covered in a fine dusting of black soot and grime”, one aid worker from the Save the Children charity told the BBC. “And the children we met were covered in it—their hands were black, their feet were black and their hair was matted…they were coming out in rashes, developing problems with their lungs.” Deliberate pollution There are fears that as ISIS comes under ever greater pressure it will unleash “scorched earth” tactics, setting alight ever more oil wells and deliberately polluting the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, two of the region’s main rivers, which supply water and power to millions. Setting oil fields alight could also have wider climate-related consequences. During Saddam Hussein’s invasion and subsequent retreat from Kuwait in 1990/91, the Iraqis set alight nearly 800 Kuwaiti oil wells: at one stage—in March 1991 – it was calculated that up to six million barrels of oil were being burned each day . The result was daytime darkness and long plumes of black smoke across a wide area of the Gulf. Though the long-term impact of Kuwait’s oil fires on the climate is still being assessed, the release of vast amounts of climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is considered to have added to the problems of warming, on both a regional and a global scale. The Gulf region is one of the fastest-warming in the world, with many areas forecast to be uninhabitable in the not too distant future because of higher temperatures and chronic water shortages. Long-term damage Pollution from the Kuwait oil fires and ruptured oil pipelines are also believed to have caused serious long-term damage to the waters of the Gulf. There are fears that, with pressure on the group mounting, similar developments could unfold in northern Iraq as Isis torches oil installations 25 years later. In recent years Iraq has been trying to ramp up its oil production in order to raise more revenues—partly to fund the war against Isis. But much of the development of Iraq’s fossil fuel resources has been badly planned and mismanaged . The World Bank says that, globally, approximately 140 billion cubic metres of natural gas produced together with oil are burned or flared off each year— adding 350 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere . “From exploding fuel barrels to exposure to carcinogenic chemicals and inhalational toxins, these makeshift oil refineries will have a long-lasting health impact. ...” Iraq is now one of the world’s leading gas-flaring countries: a lack of pipelines and infrastructure means that its gas is mostly burned off. Meanwhile the country has been forced to import large amounts of gas from neighbouring Iran in order to meet its energy needs. Across northern Iraq and eastern Syria—the country’s main oil-producing region—Isis controls large numbers of oil wells and derives considerable income from selling fossil fuels on the black market . A lack of maintenance and expertise means that many of these installations are a hazard to the environment. Badly-run oil facilities also cause considerable human suffering. A recent report by Pax , a Netherlands-based church grouping, says that more than 5,700 makeshift oil refineries are operating in the ISIS-controlled Deir ez-Zor area of Syria. Thousands of civilians, many of them children, are forced to work at these crude, basically-run facilities. “From exploding fuel barrels to exposure to carcinogenic chemicals and inhalational toxins, these makeshift oil refineries will have a long-lasting health impact on communities and their environment”, says the report. 
+Kieran Cooke, a founding editor of Climate News Network, is a former foreign correspondent for the BBC and Financial Times. He now focuses on environmental issues. 
+Advertisement",FAKE
+9029,New Yorkers fight to overturn ballot selfie ban,"New Yorkers fight to overturn ballot selfie ban New Yorkers fight to overturn ballot selfie ban By 0 119 
+New York voters are suing the state, arguing it is unconstitutional to ban them from showing their completed ballots to others via social media. The ballot selfie ban is becoming a hot topic this election, affecting even celebrities like Justin Timberlake. 
+The three New Yorkers – Eve Silber, Rebecca White, and Michael Emperor – filed the federal lawsuit in on Wednesday, seeking a judge to declare the election law banning “ballot selfies” unconstitutional, according to the attorney representing the group. 
+“Taking a photograph of a filled out ballot is a powerful political statement that demonstrates the importance of voting. Without the photograph, the message loses its power,” says the lawsuit, filed by lawyer Leo Glickman in Manhattan Federal Court, according to the New York Daily News. 
+Under the current state law, showing a marked ballot to another voter is considered a misdemeanor which can result in prison time and a hefty $1,000 fine, according to court papers. 
+Glickman is seeking a court injunction to stop officials from enforcing the law before the November 8 election. 
+Similar laws against “ballot selfies” have been struck down in Michigan, Indiana and New Hamsphire as a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of the freedom of speech. 
+Selfies are being allowed at the polls in Connecticut, but officials will be watching for whether the practice becomes disruptive for voters. 
+In New Jersey, Assemblyman Raj Mukherji is pushing for a bill that would protect voters’ right to take selfies at the ballot box, CBS radio reported. 
+Singer-actor Justin Timberlake got into some trouble this week after posting a photo of himself voting in Tennessee on his Instagram page. The picture prompted a reminder of the law from state officials that such photography is against the law. 
+Timberlake addressed the controversy during an appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ Wednesday, telling host Jimmy Fallon he thought he was inspiring people with the picture and “had no idea” it was illegal. 
+Taking photos inside a voting booth is illegal in Tennessee under a 2015 state law, as it is in 17 other states, according to a review of laws banning ballot selfies conducted by the Associated Press. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+1680,Poll finds Ben Carson knocks Donald Trump from top spot nationally,"For the first time in months, a national poll shows Donald Trump is not leading the Republican 2016 primary race, and instead has Ben Carson in first place.
+
+Carson won the support of 26% of Republican primary voters, compared to 22% who are backing Trump, according to CBS News/New York Times . Though within the poll's margin of error, it marks the first time since the billionaire businessman's dominant rise over the summer where he has been bumped from the top spot nationally.
+
+The new numbers also represent a reversal from the last CBS /New York Times poll, taken more than a month ago, which saw Trump leading Carson 27%-23%.
+
+Carson and Trump have been running consistently neck-and-neck since the start of September -- with other candidates struggling to keep pace.
+
+The switch in the lead comes as Carson has taken a clear lead in the Iowa race, beating Trump in some polls by double-digits. Trump told MSNBC's ""Morning Joe"" Tuesday morning ""I don't get it.""
+
+CBS/New York Times pollsters found Carson outpacing Trump among women and evangelicals and running even with him among men. Trump performed better with moderate Republicans and voters without college degrees. No other candidate cracked double-digit support in the latest poll. Marco Rubio won 8% support, Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina tied for fourth place with 7 percent and Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and John Kasich each got 4%. The poll does carry an important caveat, however: 70% of respondents said they had not settled on a choice yet. Trump's supporters, however, are more locked in with their support. The most recent CBS/New York Times poll surveyed 575 Republican primary voters and carries a 6-percentage-point margin of error. RELATED: Donald Trump on poll slump: 'I don't get it'",REAL
+2874,“I’m glad that he won”: The surprising Palestinian reaction to Netanyahu’s win,"But Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection was regarded with apathy by many Palestinians in the West Bank, and some even welcomed the news – albeit as the best of several bad options.
+
+“Under Netanyahu things will deteriorate. But if it can’t get any better, it might as well get worse,” Ahmad, who declined to give his full name, told Salon. His customers, browsing for phone accessories in central Ramallah, agreed. When you’re in the West Bank it doesn’t much matter who’s in the Knesset: settlement expansion, military crackdowns and wars have taken place on the watch of both the left and right, and there’s been realistic progress toward statehood under neither.
+
+“The experience of the Palestinians is clear. Since the assassination of Rabin, nothing in Israeli politics has brought something good,” Huneida Ghanem, the general director of the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR), told Salon. “Time and time again, election after election after election has just brought something worse. Palestinians see this and in their head, they understand that nothing is going to change, that it will just get worse and worse.”
+
+This year, Ghanem said, some did hope that Herzog and Livni had the potential to change things – a wish that only makes Netanyahu’s win even more disappointing. But she also believes that any trust in the pair’s center-left Zionist Union, which until the election’s final hours was billed as a likely winner, is misplaced. The sense is echoed across the West Bank, where most dismiss the Israeli opposition with a laugh, refusing to refer to it as “left wing” in any meaningful sense.
+
+“Netanyahu, Herzog, Lieberman: if anyone from those Zionist parties become prime minister it won’t make any difference. They all have the same strategy to fulfill their ideology,” Bassam Shweiki told Salon. A literature enthusiast and activist, Shweiki speaks English with a London twang despite the fact he’s lived most of his life in Hebron. A West Bank city carved up by Israeli settlement enclaves and military closures,  the city barely featured in election campaigns aside from a pro-settlement visit by right-winger Avigdor Lieberman.
+
+“The Zionist ideology says Israel is the homeland for the Jewish people that God promised, so there’s no place for any other nations in the promised land,” Shweiki continued. “The strategy is to hold the peace process without announcing its death, while continuing to establish settlements, demolishing homes, confiscating Palestinian lands and so on, while deceiving the world by saying that there are negotiations.”
+
+Shweiki’s view that expansion is inevitable in Zionism is shared by most in the West Bank, and it’s the reason many are even pleased at Netanyahu’s win. Unlike other leaders, they believe, he won’t obscure that fact, and with policies of occupation laid bare, pressure on Israel for a just solution can only increase.
+
+“Personally I’m glad that he won. This proves to the world that it is Israel and its people that do not want peace,” Amer Khader, a postgraduate nutritionist from Ramallah, told Salon. “His speech was clearly stating that if he wins the Palestinian State will not see the light, that Jerusalem is forever the capital of the state of Israel, and for the continuation of the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
+
+“What’s the worst that can happen? More houses to be taken when more than 2,000 have been demolished in East Jerusalem? Another war on Gaza? It’s already destroyed. More settlements? Let it be. It is just more isolation of Israel through its racist discriminatory apartheid policies.”
+
+The bleak irony in Khader’s view comes from long experience. Even for those Palestinians who are able to vote – those citizens of Israel who make up some 20 percent of its population – the achievements of this election have transpired partly from the country’s right wing shooting itself in the foot. Last year, Israeli lawmakers raised the electoral threshold, a move supported in part by right-wingers who hoped it would push small Arab parties out of representation altogether. Instead, several Palestinian and left-wing parties banded together to create the Joint List, a broad coalition that won 14 seats and made Arab Israelis the third biggest power in the Knesset. Even as they bemoaned the Knesset’s rightward tilt, its leaders celebrated a new era of Palestinian political involvement on election night. “I came here to see resistance and to be proud of my community, to get the best for us and to further our aims of two states,” 18-year-old Razi Misherqui, wearing a party T-shirt and draped in a Palestinian flag, told Salon as the results came in. “I think Arab unity is really important and  we can use this to show that we can make change and challenge what’s going on.” In Ramallah, Ghanem called the Joint List victory the “surprise story” of the election, and it was the only reason that many Palestinians bothered to watch the political news at all. But that doesn’t mean it’s a game-changer. Many Arab Israelis, believing any political activity in the Knesset is doomed to fail, still boycott the elections and even the Joint List’s most ardent supporters are measured in their optimism. Even as he pledged to challenge the consensus of the election, leading Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi bemoaned a “disappointing” result in which the “extreme right-wing got the upper hand.” And in the West Bank, where Palestinians haven’t been able to vote for their own representation in nearly a decade, hope for any changes the joint list might make is guarded. With peace negotiations bearing only bitter fruit, an occupation with no clear end and a political mood characterized by frustration and extremism, the only sure thing about the path to a solution is that it will be tough. “Nothing is going to come from the Israeli state if the Israelis don’t feel they don’t pay any price for the Israeli occupation,” Ghanem told Salon. “The last 10 years they’ve been building up this right-wing narrative, this plan for Eretz Israel in the political scene. Things that were once unacceptable to talk about are now part of the hegemonic discourse in Israel. And I’m not talking about buses on Shabbat, I’m talking about fascist, discriminatory policies – the settlement enterprise, the occupation. “People feel very failed by the international community,” she added. “As they’ve grown older they put so much hope into the peace process. Over the years they’ve tried violence, and that didn’t work; the intifada, and that didn’t work; peaceful resistance, and none of it worked. And then the international community came to them saying if you do this, if you do this, you can have a state. But they’ve done that, and it’s led nowhere.” Still, there’s a strong feeling in the West Bank that change from the outside looks more likely than from within the Israeli state. Real international pressure and action, Ghanem said, with a strong stress on the word “real,” is the best hope for statehood. If that’s the case, Khader said, than a Netanyahu win might be a blessing in disguise. “Netanyahu is the worst for the economy of Israel and its international relations. And the only way Israel will get weaker is through screwing their own relations, which is happening,” he told Salon. “Let it be. It won’t get any better till it is screwed.”",REAL
+6448,George W. Bush’s Ethics Lawyer Files Complaint Against FBI Director James Comey,"Richard W. Painter wrote in a New York Times an op-ed: The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election. 
+Such acts could also be prohibited under the Hatch Act, which bars the use of an official position to influence an election. That is why the F.B.I. presumably would keep those aspects of an investigation confidential until after the election. The usual penalty for a violation is termination of federal employment. 
+And that is why, on Saturday, I filed a complaint against the F.B.I. with the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations, and with the Office of Government Ethics. I have spent much of my career working on government ethics and lawyers’ ethics, including two and a half years as the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, and I never thought that the F.B.I. could be dragged into a political circus surrounding one of its investigations. Until this week. 
+This is the second complaint to be filed against FBI Director Comey. The Democratic Coalition Against Trump has also filed a complaint against Comey for interfering in a presidential election as a federal employee. 
+Suspicion around Comey’s actions has grown as the FBI Director is not expected to make any additional statements on this matter before the presidential election. Director Comey appears to have set himself for problems after the election as Senate Democrats are making it known that they are open to holding hearings to investigate the FBI investigation if they win back the Senate majority. 
+Unless Trump wins and Republicans take control of Congress, Director Comey is going to have to answer for his decisions. 
+As the complaints pile up, it looks like Congressional testimony may be the least of James Comey’s future problems.",FAKE
+8294,Netflix Ceo: TV’s Future includes Hallucination Pills,"Netflix Ceo: TV’s Future includes Hallucination Pills 10/27/2016 
+INDEPENDENT 
+The future of TV might everyone taking hallucinogenic drugs, according to the head of Netflix. 
+The threats to the streaming TV company might not be Amazon or other streaming services, but instead “pharmacological” ways of entertaining people, Reed Hastings has said. 
+And just as films and TV shows are a supposedly improved version of other entertainments, those same things might eventually become defunct, he said. In the same way that the cinema and TV screen made “the opera and the novel” much smaller, something else might be on the way to do the same thing, the Netflix boss said at a Wall Street Journal event. 
+Those challenges could come from anywhere, he said. They might not be another form of screen: “Is it VR, is it gaming, is it pharmacological?” Mr Hastings asked the event. 
+He went on to say that it might be possible that in the coming years someone will develop a drug that will make people get the same experiences that at the moment come from streaming services like Netflix. Apparently making reference to The Matrix, he said that we might be able to take one pill to escape into a hallucination and then another to come back. 
+“In twenty or fifty years, taking a personalized blue pill you just hallucinate in an entertaining way and then a white pill brings you back to normality is perfectly viable,” Mr Hastings said. “And if the source of human entertainment in thirty or forty years is pharmacological we’ll be in real trouble.” 
+His references to The Matrix – and to being in “trouble” – recall arguments that have recently been made by tech billionaires including Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Both have suggested that it might be possible that we are part of a simulated universe – something that they said might be part of a virtual reality world, but could just as easily be the result of a drug-induced hallucination. 
+Mr Hastings didn’t indicate whether or not Netflix would look to make such drugs itself, or how it would fend off any companies that did. But it does sound a little like something out Black Mirror, which Netflix is showing the new season of at the moment.",FAKE
+5244,Ernst to Trump: Stop with the name-calling,"""If I have an opportunity I would tell him to just focus, focus on policy,"" Ernst told CNN.
+
+Ernst was speaking at the ""Roast & Ride"" event in Des Moines, Iowa, that she hosted. Trump later addressed the audience; he did not address Ernst's remarks.
+
+""Hillary Clinton has given us so much to talk about really in the email scandal and her policies overseas. Really, she has a record of failure. Let's talk about that record of failure. We can focus on issues, not name-calling,"" Ernst said.
+
+""I don't like it when campaigns go that direction. I'd say to both of them, back down. And let's really talk about the policies and the issues. That's my advice to them,"" Ernst was quoted in The Post. Ernst's comments come after Trump was criticized for calling Clinton a ""bigot"" at a campaign rally, and repeatedly refused to back down from the claims. ""That is not acceptable to be doing the name-calling back and forth,"" Ernst said. ""We need to focus on the issues. He has given voice to millions of American and there's something there. Americans feel that their voice is not being heard and he has really given her a platform, let's focus on the failures of Hillary Clinton,"" Ernst told CNN.",REAL
+7338,Comment on Elections 2012-16 by BeamMeUpScotty,"#CRUX NCA REF 1122930JG AIFL IPR TO USA FEC INSPECTOR GENERAL LA MCFARLAND DL 1 PAGE 25 OCTOBER 2016 2344 QUESTIONS TO BE PUT TO USA FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION INSPECTOR GENERAL MS LYNNE A MCFARLAND DL Following the public disclosure of vote rigging in the U.K. at the General Election in 2015 by Applied I F Limited on the sleazeexpo.wordpress.com Blog and repeated on the wirralinittogether.wordpress.com Blog, we respectfully ask the questions below to the Inspector General of the USA Federal Election Commission Ms Lynne A McFarland The answers to these questions such as these below, which should not be considered exhaustive, might help to dispel Mr Trump’s legitimate concerns regarding potential Vote Rigging, and which have been expressed so clearly and publicly as what potentially might be expected at the Count on 8 November 2016 at the forthcoming USA Presidential Election? 1. Does The USA Have A Freedom Of Information Act Like The United Kingdom? 2. Does The Federal Election Commission Come Under The Freedom Of Information Act Of The USA? 3. Will The Federal Election Commission List Laws To Be Used At The 2016 Presidential Elections? 4. Does The USA Federal Election Commission, When Regulating USA Voting, Use A Voting Count Model In The Identical Way As The United Kingdom Electoral Commission Uses to Regulate UK Voting In England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? 5. Is A Voting Count Model Defined Within The Election Laws Current in the USA? 6. Where Is The Voting Count Model Which Is To Be Used In The Presidential Voting Election Process On 8 November 2016 In The USA To Be Found Within USA Election Law Statutes? 7. What Is The Voting Count Model Used In The Presidential Voting Election Process In The USA? 8. Is The Voting Count Model Used In The Presidential Voting Election Process In The USA Based Upon Acts Of United Kingdom Parliament Such As The Ballot Act 1872, And Representation Of The People Act 1983? 9. Perhaps Such Questions Could Be Continued? Applied I F Limited",FAKE
+5926,After Debate Duke Says USA becoming Banana Republic,"After Debate Duke Says USA becoming Banana Republic November 3, 2016 at 9:27 am After Debate Duke Says USA becoming Banana Republic 
+This is what the viewing audience thought about who won the debate!",FAKE
+5914,"NOW FIVE FBI FIELD OFFICES ARE PROBING CLINTON CHARITY, ADDING FUEL TO THE FIRE","Home › POLITICS › NOW FIVE FBI FIELD OFFICES ARE PROBING CLINTON CHARITY, ADDING FUEL TO THE FIRE NOW FIVE FBI FIELD OFFICES ARE PROBING CLINTON CHARITY, ADDING FUEL TO THE FIRE 4 SHARES 
+[10/31/16] FBI field offices in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Little Rock, Ark., are investigating the Clinton Foundation concerning allegations of pay-to-play financial and political corruption, according to a Wall Street Journal report Sunday. 
+Mirroring information provided by a former senior law enforcement official that “multiple FBI investigations are underway involving potential corruption charges against the Clinton Foundation,” the Journal confirms what The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reported in August . 
+FBI field offices in three cities, specifically, New York, Little Rock and Washington, D.C., were coordinating with the U.S. Attorneys working in those cities. FBI agents in Miami are also joining the probe, TheDCNF has since learned. 
+The Clinton Foundation has numerous programs operating in Haiti, the Caribbean, Latin America and South America. 
+“Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation” and described the unusual field office initiative as “at times a sprawling cross-country effort,” the Wall Street Journal reports. 
+Several polls released Saturday and Sunday show a rapid deterioration of presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s lead in the wake of Friday’s disclosure by FBI Director James Comey that he is reopening the email server investigation. Comey said in August that he did not believe the FBI’s investigation of Clinton and her use of private servers and private email addresses to conduct official diplomatic business would be productive. 
+Comey’s announcement Friday was related to a separate investigation of child pornography allegations against former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat who is married to Clinton’s closest confidant, Huma Abedin. Weiner and Abedin separated earlier this year following a third disclosure of his sexting with an underage girl. Post navigation",FAKE
+3888,White House: GOP Has Failed to Put ‘Points on the Board’,"Republicans have controlled Congress for a little more than two months now, but a top White House official says GOP lawmakers so far have failed to put any “points on the board” and that the president is driving the debate in Washington.
+
+As House and Senate Republicans prepare to lay out their budget priorities this week, senior White House adviser Brian Deese offered a blunt assessment of the political landscape, saying that the majority party in Congress has simply been reacting to President Barack Obama’s proposals rather than advancing its own.",REAL
+763,The Daily 202: The presidency is Hillary Clinton’s to lose. Here are 12 ways she could lose it.,"The elites in Washington almost uniformly believe Hillary Clinton will be elected president in November. The conventional wisdom underlying coverage of 2016 is that Donald Trump will go down in flames and probably take the Republican Senate with him.
+
+The presumptive GOP nominee has a well-documented history of misogyny, xenophobia and demagoguery. He has alienated women, Hispanics, Muslims, African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans. He has mocked the disabled, prisoners of war and Seventh-day Adventists. The speaker of the House and both living former Republican presidents are withholding endorsements.
+
+It should be a slam dunk for HRC, right?
+
+But, but, but: Six months is an eternity in politics, and a year ago no one in the chattering class –— including me –— believed Trump had any real shot at becoming the Republican standard-bearer. With Clinton struggling to sew up the Democratic nomination against a socialist septuagenarian –— she’s expected to lose tomorrow’s Kentucky primary –— we cannot foreclose the possibility that she will botch the fall campaign against the billionaire businessman.
+
+The presidency is hers to lose, but here are a dozen ways Clinton can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:
+
+Remember the Michigan primary? Every poll showed Clinton up double digits, but she lost to Bernie Sanders. One reason is that supporters and field staffers believed she had it in the bag.
+
+The campaign has been using last week’s Quinnipiac polls showing tight races in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania to shake a greater sense of urgency into donors and activists.
+
+Clinton is at her worst when she thinks she’s at her best. She tends to rise to the occasion only when her back is against the wall. Remember 2008? Or recall last summer, when Sanders looked like nothing more than a nuisance and polls showed her ahead by more than 50 points, how she joked about wiping her server clean with a cloth and how her handlers literally used ropes to corral journalists at a parade. Over time, she found herself neck-and-neck with Sanders, who is a weak candidate by most traditional measures. Under heavy pressure in the days before Iowa, when it looked like she could lose the caucuses, she temporarily became a much better campaigner –— then backslid after her wins in Nevada and South Carolina.
+
+When Hillary goes off her carefully scripted message, she has a tendency to gaffe. One reason she is expected to lose Kentucky tomorrow is her declaration at a town hall this spring that, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
+
+Don’t forget about her other gaffes, like when she invoked 9/11 to defend her coziness with Wall Street, when she called Republicans the enemy or when she said she and her husband were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001.
+
+And there was the time Clinton incensed the gay community by praising the Reagans for starting “a national conversation” about HIV/AIDS, prompting a quick retraction.
+
+Clinton cannot just make this election a referendum on Trumpism. She must outline a compelling vision for where she wants to take the country to fully activate the coalition that powered Barack Obama.
+
+“I am not a natural politician, in case you haven't noticed, like my husband or President Obama,"" Clinton said at The Post’s debate in March.
+
+The presumptive Democratic nominee campaigns in prose, not poetry. And she does not always try to be uplifting in her speeches.
+
+It’s part of the explanation for why so many millennials, including young women, have spurned her for Bernie. While Sanders promises tuition-free college, she talks about extending an obscure tax credit. As my colleague David Fahrenthold explained in a story about Clinton’s wonkiness last week, this credit can be worth up to $2,500: “But only if students find their Form 1098-T, then fill out the relevant portions of Form 8863, then enter the amount from lines 8 and 19 of Form 8863 in lines 68 and 50 of their Form 1040.” That is not going to send a thrill up Chris Matthews’s leg….
+
+My colleagues Dan Balz and Anne Gearan spoke with more than a dozen Clinton allies about her biggest weaknesses for a piece on today’s front page. “I bring it down to one thing and one thing only, and that is likability,” said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster who has conducted a series of focus groups for the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Hart said this is “about the lowest bar” for a candidate, and yet Clinton has lower likability numbers today than she did when the campaign began.
+
+Balz and Gearan report that Clinton advisers are working to soften her stiff public image by highlighting her compassion and playing up her problem-solving abilities. “I mean, we can’t give her an injection to make her an energetic candidate,” one longtime Clinton family supporter and donor said on background. (Read the full piece here.)
+
+5. Moving too far to the right
+
+The Sanders campaign has circulated stories about Clinton forces reaching out to top Jeb Bush donors to convince them that “that she represents their values better” than Trump.
+
+Clinton, who used to brag about being a Goldwater Girl in 1964, will be very tempted to appeal aggressively to moderate Republicans who are turned off by Trump. On paper, the Democrat will actually be more of a hawk and more willing to use military force than the Republican. The Donald is all over the place on policy, but Clinton is presently to his right on trade and campaign finance.
+
+She needs Sanders supporters to unite behind her. If it looks like she’s shifting rightward to win votes, she will look inauthentic and many Bernie people will stay on the sidelines.
+
+6. Moving too far to the left
+
+Clinton has treated Sanders with kid gloves recently. She wants him and his people to fall in line after the July convention in Philadelphia, and she calculates that antagonizing him is not worth sewing up the nomination earlier.
+
+The Vermont senator has made clear he wants significant concessions, including very liberal policy planks in the party platform. The Clinton people will be inclined to give on a lot because the platform is not binding. Just last week, for instance, she embraced several reforms to the Federal Reserve that are sought by the progressive wing of the party.
+
+But, if Hillary continues to lurch leftward to satisfy the Bernie people, it will be harder to win those in the middle and woo disaffected Republicans.
+
+You might think it’s unfair to say Clinton cannot go too far left or too far right. But everyone running for president has this problem. It is a difficult needle to thread, yet the Clintons have proven deft at triangulation. Now, Hillary needs to be Goldilocks.
+
+There’s no perfect pick, and candidates who look great on paper might turn out to fall flat –— or have skeletons in their closet.
+
+Citing four people close to the campaign, USA Today reports this morning that “Clinton is considering a running mate who could make a direct appeal to supporters of Sanders, bridging a generational and political divide” and that “Clinton’s chief requirements include a candidate’s resume and a fighter capable of hand-to-hand combat with Trump. The campaign’s vetting also prioritizes demographics over someone from a key swing state as she seeks to unify the Democratic voting base.”
+
+There are parts of every would-be number two’s record that will upset at least some portion of the Democratic Party. Take this story that just posted on Politico: “Targeted by progressive activists hoping to kill his chances of being picked as Clinton’s running mate, Julián Castro is set this week to announce changes to what’s become a hot-button Housing and Urban Development program for selling bad mortgages on its books.”
+
+8. Allowing herself to get defined as an insider
+
+Clinton lost to Obama in 2008 by underestimating the electorate’s hunger for change. Once again, Hillary risks coming to represent the status quo in the eyes of voters who want a renegade.
+
+“Right now, about 6 in 10 Americans have an unfavorable view of Trump.… But the country is faring even worse. … 64.9 percent think we are heading down the wrong track,” The Post’s Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt noted last week in a column warning Democrats not to celebrate Trump. “So what if even voters who respect Clinton’s competence reject her as the embodiment of business as usual? And what if even voters who do not like Trump’s bigotry or bluster care more that he will, in their view, shake things up? … I do have faith in the American voter, I really do. But when two-thirds of the country is unhappy, a rational outcome can’t be taken for granted.”
+
+In trying to stay above the fray, Clinton could find herself defined by Trump. Remember the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? John Kerry didn’t push back forcefully enough early on, and he paid a price.
+
+Last week, Trump called Clinton an “enabler” of her husband’s behavior. While objectively offensive, the Democratic front-runner steadfastly refused to respond. “I’m going to let him run his campaign however he chooses,” she told reporters. “I have nothing to say about him.”
+
+Trump gives a whole new meaning to term “bully pulpit.” And there is very conventional logic in not responding to every insult and attack: it leads to more repetition of the original charge and keeps it in the news.
+
+Hillary dislikes the media. Her impulse is to keep the press away, to only give the appearance of access and to focus her attention on friendly outlets that will engage in puffery.
+
+Trump, to his credit, talks to basically everyone. It gets him in trouble, like when he told Chris Matthews that women who get abortions should be punished. But the tradeoff is that he has often gotten to set the terms of the debate. If he repeats something enough times, however preposterous, some may come to believe it.
+
+“I have a lot of experience dealing with men who sometimes get off the reservation in the way they behave and how they speak,” Hillary recently said on CNN. A few days later, she clarified on MSNBC that she was not referring to her husband –— but Rick Lazio and Vladimir Putin.
+
+The former president has caused fewer headaches for his wife’s campaign than he did in 2008, when he called Obama’s bid “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” said the other side was playing the “race card,” and downplayed a loss in South Carolina by noting Jesse Jackson Jr. had won there too.
+
+That does not mean he has not ruined news cycles for his wife in 2016 –— or has the ability to.
+
+Remember his outburst on the eve of the New Hampshire primary when he accused Sanders of being dishonest and his supporters of being sexist?
+
+Or when he got into an on-stage argument with Black Lives Matter protesters in Philadelphia last month, defending his crime bill and his wife’s 1996 comment about bringing “super-predators … to heel”? The next day, he said: “I almost want to apologize.” But then didn’t.
+
+The campaign must manage WJC appropriately. It’s hard to control any spouse; a former president – especially “The Big Dog” – is even harder.
+
+Trump will try to make Hillary own all the unpopular elements of the Clinton era. Expect to hear a lot about Marc Rich’s pardon and the Lincoln Bedroom.
+
+Hillary will take credit for the popular elements of her husband’s tenure and take umbrage when Trump tries to pin the unpopular parts on her, as she already has with the crime bill and Wall Street deregulation.
+
+Clinton is not widely seen as trustworthy. Her refusal to release the transcripts of her speeches at Goldman Sachs will continue to dog her. Asked during a debate why she received $675,000 for three short appearances, she replied: “Well, I don't know. That’s what they offered.”
+
+But Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns –— along with his evolving answers and lame excuses –— neutralizes this potential problem for the Clinton campaign.
+
+It is unlikely, but the FBI investigation into Clinton’s possible mishandling of classified information hangs like a cloud over her campaign.
+
+“Investigators have found scant evidence tying Clinton to criminal wrongdoing, although they are still working on the case and charges have not been ruled out,” my colleague Ellen Nakashima reported last week. “They have also been interviewing former aides to Clinton, including Cheryl Mills, who served as chief of staff while Clinton was secretary of state. Prosecutors and FBI agents hope to be able to interview Clinton as they try to wrap up the investigation.”
+
+Among other potential problems identified by supporters in Balz and Gearan’s story today: “Clinton’s unpopularity with white men, questions about whether her family philanthropic foundation helped donors and friends, and lingering clouds from her tenure at the State Department, including … the Benghazi attacks in which four Americans were killed and her support for military intervention in Libya.”
+
+-- Don’t forget, history is not on Hillary’s side. Since World War II, only once has a party controlled the White House for three consecutive terms. (George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan by beating Mike Dukakis in 1988.)
+
+-- Bottom line: Clinton is more likely than not to be president at this time next year, but the election will probably be closer than you think and Trump could actually win if she doesn’t play her cards right.
+
+-- President Obama delivered an aggressive refutation of Trumpism during his commencement address at Rutgers University, calling on graduates to reject politicians who “hark back to better days.” From Greg Jaffe: “He mocked Trump’s call to ‘Make America Great Again,’ saying that there was never a better time to be alive on the planet and in America. College graduation rates were up, he said. Crime rates had dropped, and more women were in the workplace than ever before in the country’s history … [He also] slammed Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the country’s southern border, saying the world is becoming ever more interconnected and ‘building walls won’t change that.’ At one point, clearly referring to Trump and other congressional Republicans who have decried efforts to combat global warming, Obama warned that, 'In politics and in life ignorance is not a virtue. ... That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you are talking about.’”
+
+-- “Obama is expected to begin campaigning for Clinton in earnest as early as June, when she is expected to lock up the nomination,” Balz and Gearan report.
+
+-- Trump and Vice President Biden both went to the University of Pennsylvania's commencement ceremony yesterday. David Weigel was there: “For Trump, the ceremony was all about Tiffany Trump, his daughter with ex-wife Marla Maples, who also attended the commencement. Biden was there for his granddaughter Naomi Biden, the first of the family's third generation to graduate from college. … When some unexpected rain fell, Trump disappeared beneath an umbrella, while Biden kept shaking hands.”
+
+MORE ON THE REPUBLICAN RACE:
+
+-- A band of exasperated Republicans is actively plotting to draft an independent presidential candidate to keep Trump from the White House BUT those involved concede that such an effort at this late stage is probably futile. Philip Rucker and Robert Costa: “These GOP figures are commissioning private polling, lining up major funding sources and courting potential contenders … The effort has been sporadic all spring but has intensified significantly in the 10 days since Trump effectively locked up the Republican nomination. ... But these Republicans — including [Mitt Romney,] commentators William Kristol and Erick Erickson and strategists Mike Murphy, Stuart Stevens and Rick Wilson — are so repulsed by the prospect of Trump as commander in chief that they are desperate to take action. ... and they think they have only a couple of weeks to launch a credible bid.""
+
+Their top recruits are Sen. Ben Sasse [who denies interest] and former presidential candidate John Kasich [who today will give his first TV interview since dropping out]. Earlier prospects included former Sen. Tom Coburn, Condoleezza Rice, and even reality-television star and businessman Mark Cuban."" Many dismissed the idea as political fantasy: “Again and again, though, these anti-Trump Republicans have heard the same tepid response. ... 'I don’t see it happening,' Cuban wrote in an email.""
+
+A potential third-party candidate faces enormous risk. No one wants to be the next Ralph Nader. ""The career of the individual would come to an end, and he would have a difficult spot in history for being responsible for putting Clinton in the White House,"" said Patrick J. Buchanan. There are also formidable logistical hurdles, with deadlines to get on state ballots fast approaching.
+
+Spoiler alert: Some anti-Trump Republicans are downsizing their ambitions to a more focused, state-specific effort. Mike Murphy, who ran the Jeb Bush super PAC, is pushing one such proposal. ""Murphy envisions an independent candidate on what he termed ‘an honorable mission’ in Colorado, New Hampshire and Ohio — three battleground states with relatively lax ballot-access rules. 'Running an anti-Trump protest candidate in a handful of swing states really appeals to me,' Murphy said. 'You could deny Trump the presidency and perhaps help important Senate and other down-ballot races­ by giving another choice to Republican voters who abhor Hillary Clinton and can’t cross the moral line to vote for Trump.'""
+
+-- Reince Priebus said drafting a third-party candidate to run against Trump would be a “suicide mission” that could wreck the party for “generations.” ""They can try to hijack another party and get on the ballot, but, look, it's a suicide mission for our country because what it means is that you're throwing down not just eight years of the White House but potentially 100 years on the Supreme Court and wrecking this country for many generations,"" the RNC chairman said on ""Fox News Sunday."" ""I think it's very dangerous, and there's other ways to get assurances on the things that they're worried about."" Priebus praised the approach taken by Paul Ryan, adding that he would be surprised if Ryan did not endorse Trump soon: ""I'd be surprised if we didn't get there, not too much longer in the distant future.""
+
+-- Meanwhile, Republican activists chose unity over resistance this weekend, with party leaders pressuring the rank-and-file to fall in line behind the presumptive nominee – and even punishing those who refused. Politico’s Kyle Cheney: In all, nearly 400 delegates were selected Saturday – about one in every six that will fill Cleveland’s convention center in July.
+
+-- Trump warned of another 9/11-like attack if refugees continue to be admitted into the U.S: ""Our country has enough difficulty right now without letting the Syrians pour in,"" Trump said in an interview on the National Border Patrol Council podcast. He also suggested ISIS is “paying for refugees’ cell phone plans”: ""Who pays their monthly charges, right? They have cell phones with the flags, the ISIS flags on them.""
+
+-- Trump and Clinton are statistically tied in Georgia, according to a general election poll conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: He leads her 45 to 41 percent, within the poll’s 4.26 margin of error, while 13 percent said they were undecided or did not support either candidate.
+
+-- A family grieving the death of an Alabama-born woman has a request for friends and relatives: Don't vote for Trump. From the AP: “Relatives of 34-year-old Katherine Michelle Hinds published an obituary Friday in the Opelika-Auburn News that includes the line: ‘In lieu of flowers, do not vote for Donald Trump.’ Hinds' mother, Susan Pool, says her daughter … feared for the future of her three young children if he's elected.”
+
+-- John Boehner will spend late July and all of August on a cross-country bus trip raising money and campaigning for House Republicans, per Politico’s Jake Sherman: “The trip — on Boehner’s bus, dubbed ‘Freedom One’ — will begin after the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and end Labor Day weekend.”
+
+-- Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) defended his use of a derogatory term toward Japanese in a cable-news appearance, saying that he was trying to critique the “uninformed” views that Trump espouses. From Paul Kane: “King, who supports Trump nominally but is refusing to campaign for him, said that his use of the word ‘Japs’ was meant to criticize the presidential candidate’s policy positions as out of line with the ‘nuance’ required to be the leader of the free world and more in line with a working-class man at the end of a bar espousing his worldview.”
+
+-- “Is Ben Carson the worst or the best surrogate of all time? Yes.” By Ben Terris: “Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon turned presidential candidate turned unfiltered pitchman for Trump, now part of his vice presidential search committee, sat in the back of a town car with his wife, Candy. He had just explained that he wanted no role in a Trump administration when news arrived of a new poll naming him as the best-liked of a list of potential running mates. “The most favorably regarded contenders after himself, he was told, were John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin and Chris Christie. ‘Those are all people on our list,’ he said. That the Trump campaign might want its potential VP picks held close to the vest didn’t seem to occur to Carson. He’s not the type to keep his candid thoughts to himself.”
+
+Carson says he has no plan to pull a Dick Cheney and suggest himself. Carson understands he’s a lightning rod for controversy, and Trump doesn’t need help sparking fires. “He’s not interested,” said business manager Armstrong Williams. And then: “But miracles can happen … we’ve seen stranger things, right?” Yes, yes we have. Not the least of which has been watching Carson say things that would get any other surrogate benched, only to be elevated within the campaign.”
+
+MORE ON THE DEMOCRATIC RACE:
+
+-- CONVENTION CHAOS: Tensions ran high at the Democratic state convention in Nevada, a foreboding signs for Clinton as she prepares for the national convention in Philadelphia. With Sanders partisans pushing to include delegates who had been ruled ineligible, party leaders adjourned the convention for the day. ""But Sanders supporters refused to concede, remaining in the [Paris] casino's ballroom after the event had ended. Eventually, casino security and law enforcement officials entered to force the Democrats out of the space, even turning off the lights to get them to depart,"" Philip Bump reports.
+
+Why the Sanders supporters were angry: The rules were seen as less favorable to the Vermont senator by his backers, as was the process for picking 12 up-for-grabs delegates to Philadelphia. Sanders supporters were outraged over the exclusion of 56 delegates – enough to swing the majority – who were denied mostly because they weren't registered as Democrats by the May 1 deadline. (Eight Clinton delegates reportedly suffered a similar fate, Las Vegas Sun notes.)
+
+Here are some live tweets from the dean of the Nevada press corps:
+
+-- On the trail in Kentucky, Clinton got more specific about what Bill Clinton’s White House role could be. From Abby Phillip: ""I'm going to put [him] in charge of revitalizing the economy because you know, he knows how to do it,"" she told supporters. ""And especially in places like coal country and inner cities and other parts of our country that have been really left out."" Clinton, who has long made it clear she looks to her husband’s presidency as a model for how to manage the economy, often notes the job creation and increases in median household income during his administration. ""When my husband was president, incomes rose for everybody,"" she said in Louisville.
+
+-- Many young Black Lives Matter protestors are not voting, according to exit polling analysis from 25 primaries. From Vanessa Williams and Scott Clement: African Americans account for a larger share of Democratic primary voters than they did in 2008, but that is because of OLDER black voters. Comparing exit polls in 25 states from 2008 and 2016, “black voters older than 45 grew from 12 percent of the electorate on average in 2008 to 16 percent this year. In those same states, black voters younger than 45 made up 11 percent of voters in 2008 vs. 10 percent this year.”
+
+President Obama, in his commencement address last weekend at Howard University, praised young black activists for bringing new energy to the movement for racial justice and equality, but he said: “You have to have a strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes.” Obama’s comments echoed continuing concerns that some young black activists involved in the current wave of political action do not share the belief in the critical importance of the right to vote:
+
+Younger Americans are the least likely to turn out in elections: The share of eligible voters ages 18 to 29 who cast ballots fell from a record high of 48 percent in 2008 to 41 percent in the 2012 presidential election, according to the U.S. Elections Project.
+
+Interviews with activists inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement revealed a nuanced view of electoral politics: “None advocated a total boycott of elections … At the same time, many were not enthusiastic about the value of voting, particularly in this year’s presidential election cycle. These activists argued that neither candidate had adequately addressed the issues affecting black communities. ‘Voting is definitely one way … but there are other ways of reimagining and restructuring the world, and that lies in organizing our communities,’ said Ashley Williams, a 23-year-old activist.”
+
+-- The RNC chairman defended Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns: ""People don't look at Trump as to whether he releases his taxes,"" Priebus said on ABC. ""People look at Trump and say, 'Is this person going to cause an earthquake in Washington, D.C., and make something happen?' That is it. I don't think the traditional playbook applies … We've been down this road for a year … He's rewritten the playbook."" (Elise Viebeck)
+
+-- Newt Gingrich again said he’s open to being Trump’s running-mate: ""I don't think it's an automatic yes,"" Gingrich said on ""Fox News Sunday."" But “I’d be hard-pressed not to say yes."" The former Speaker suggested his decision would be based largely on what duties Trump would expect from a running-mate, as well as how “seriously” he takes the role.
+
+-- Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) demurred when asked if he would serve as Clinton's running-mate. “I love the job I’m doing,” Brown told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I will put real effort into electing Hillary … but as I said, I love this job, and I'm just not going to give you a different answer.""
+
+-- Trump senior adviser Paul Manafort denied that Trump ever posed as his own publicist to speak with reporters, saying he believes a 25-year-old audio recording that is clearly Trump is not actually Trump. ""I couldn't tell who it is. If Donald Trump says it's not him, I believe it's not him,"" Manafort said on CNN’s ""State of the Union."" Manafort also touted the “crossover support” that his boss has attracted in traditionally Democratic states, arguing that they will “expand the map” and can win in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
+
+Trump and Manafort's denials directly contradict testimony that The Donald gave under oath in a 1990 lawsuit.
+
+On Friday afternoon, Washington Post reporters who were 44 minutes into a phone interview with Trump about his finances asked him a question about Miller: “Did you ever employ someone named John Miller as a spokesperson?” The phone went silent, then dead. When the reporters called back and reached Trump’s secretary, she said, “I heard you got disconnected. He can’t take the call now. I don’t know what happened.” (Read the original story.)
+
+Via Zignal Labs, here is a word cloud of all Trump mentions on Friday:
+
+-- “China killed thousands of Maine jobs. Now it’s eating up the state’s lobsters,” by Ylan Q. Mui: “Little Cranberry, an island of 70 inhabitants, and China, a nation of 1.4 billion people, increasingly find themselves connected by the shifting currents of the world economy. The rise of China’s middle class has coincided with a boom in Maine’s lobster population, resulting in a voracious new market for the crustaceans’ succulent, sweet meat. Exports of lobsters to China, nonexistent a decade ago, totaled $20 million last year. … The lobster’s tale is a testament to the complexities of the global marketplace — and a reminder that the line between economic winners and losers is not always clear. China has played the villain (in 2016), blamed for … the disappearance of blue-collar jobs, including in Maine, where the closure of lumber and pulp factories have left thousands of workers unemployed. Yet the reality is more nuanced. Even as foreign competition has devastated parts of the U.S. economy, China ranks among the biggest international customers for a vast array of other industries, from ginseng to airplanes to pork. Maine lobsters are just a tiny sliver of the $116 billion in annual exports to China, a figure that has nearly tripled in the past decade.”
+
+-- “Al-Qaeda affiliates are threatening West Africa’s most peaceful cities,” by Kevin Sieff in Dakar: “In a city where nightclubs and mosques coexist peacefully, Islamist violence long felt like a foreign problem—something residents watched on news clips from the Middle East or other parts of—Africa. But Senegal and its neighbors are facing a new threat from extremists moving far from their traditional strongholds in northwest Africa. Since November, militant groups have killed dozens of people in assaults on hotels, cafes and a beachside resort in West Africa, passing through porous borders with impunity. The attacks have occurred in countries that had been rebounding from political turbulence, such as Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. Now fears of such bloodshed are growing in this pro-Western democracy, which serves as a regional hub for international organizations. ... Senegal, a former French colony that has never suffered a major terrorist incident, is now taking unprecedented security measures.""
+
+-- “Filipino children of U.S. sailors and soldiers have mixed feelings on American return,” by Emily Rauhala: “There’s a taunt that hangs over this former U.S. naval base, looming over kids who look a little different, shadowing single moms: ‘Left by the ship.’ The term is used to shame the offspring of U.S. servicemen and local women ... Nearly 25 years ago, Philippine lawmakers expelled the U.S. warships that had docked here for almost a century, vowing to ‘unchain’ the country from its colonial past …” But for decades, tens of thousands of children of U.S. military men have been fighting not to be forgotten. “Now China’s claims to most of the South China Sea have put the Philippines back at the heart of U.S. strategy in Asia. A new defense pact allows the U.S. military to build facilities at five Philippine bases, and a growing number of ships will be stopping by Subic Bay. Their return is renewing questions about what the U.S. owes Filipino Amerasians — and stoking worries that there will be more neglected children when the ships leave harbor once again.”
+
+-- “Disagreements slow Pentagon’s plan to allow transgender service members,” by Dan Lamothe: “Months before Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said the Pentagon would take steps toward allowing transgender people to serve openly in the military, Army Staff Sgt. Patricia King last year became what she believes is the first openly transgender member of the infantry. While official Pentagon policy still forbids openly transgender personnel, her commanders have been supportive, she said. King even purchased a female dress Army service uniform, anticipating that she would be able to wear it soon. But four months after a deadline set Carter set for a working group to finish evaluating the change, transgender service members are still waiting. Officials say disagreements remain in the Defense Department about how to move forward, suggesting that the Pentagon isn’t close to wrapping up the review, let alone instituting any changes.”
+
+This mural of Trump and Vladimir Putin in Vilnius, Lithuania, is going viral:
+
+Trump sought to preempt conversations on Sunday shows about his treatment of women with these tweets:
+
+Read the full story for yourself here. One of the two reporters pushed back hard on Twitter, noting that they interviewed more than 50 women:
+
+One of the nuggets from the piece:
+
+Trump also turned up his Instagramming about the women in his life:
+
+Lots of jokes about Trump posing as his own publicist:
+
+Cruz aide Josh Perry showed off his bumper sticker. These were being handed out at the Republican convention in Texas:
+
+When Trump does call-in interviews with cable shows, it's worth remembering how close he lives to the studios:
+
+Jeb Bush stopped by a gathering of new U.S. citizens:
+
+It's graduation season and Ben Sasse is in the thick of it:
+
+-- National Review, “In Koch World ‘Realignment,’ Less National Politics,” by Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson: “In February, a team of political operatives arrived in Kansas hoping to turn the tide of the presidential campaign. They’d set aside $150 million to be spread across campaigns. Yet they had not been authorized to spend a dime on the White House race. Marc Short wanted to change that. He led a faction inside the Koch network that had become convinced of the need to neutralize Trump before his momentum made him unstoppable. Short had come to Wichita to present Charles Koch a detailed, eight-figure blueprint for derailing Trump on Super Tuesday when 11 states would vote, hoping to get the green light to hammer him with ads in states where he was most vulnerable. But there was an unwelcome surprise awaiting the delegation: A number of top executives from the Koch enterprise had been invited. They represented the so-called ‘corporate side’ of Koch World, which had long warred with the ‘political side’ of the empire. The meeting confirmed what some Koch insiders had begun to suspect: That the brothers’ political decision-making was increasingly being influenced by their business and public-relations interests.”
+
+-- L.A. Times, “Roz Wyman, L.A.'s secret weapon in luring Dodgers west, is still cheering,” by Chris Erskine: “If Los Angeles has a grande dame of sports, it is Roz Wyman … At 85, she still sits in her Dodgers season seat near the umpires tunnel, cheering on players young enough to be her great-grandsons. Wyman was about their age when she helped bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles almost 60 years ago … The Dodgers' patron saint had just finished at USC when in 1953 she became the youngest person, and only the second woman, elected to the L.A. City Council, on a campaign platform that included, of all things, acquiring a major league team. At the time, baseball's far-western foul pole was St. Louis. The Brooklyn Dodgers were stacked and poised to win their first World Series, in 1955 …. [But] odds never mattered much to Wyman.  ‘It all reflects Roz's courage, brilliance and tenacity,’ says former Dodgers owner Peter O'Malley … These days, L.A. could use a few more movers and shakers like the Wizard of Roz.”
+
+-- NBC News, “The Americans: 15 Who Left the United States to Join ISIS,” by Richard Engel, Ben Plesser, Tracy Connor and Jon Schuppe: “American law enforcement officials estimate that roughly 250 Americans have tried to join IS. Most of them never left the U.S … But a few dozen of those American recruits have made the trip to ISIS's heartland in Syria and Iraq. In March, NBC was given a thumb drive by a purported ISIS defector, containing names and biographical snippets of thousands of fighters who entered Syria, including at least 15 Americans who left the U.S. to join ISIS overseas.”
+
+On the campaign trail: Here's the rundown:
+
+At the White House: President Obama hosts a Medal of Valor ceremony and meets with Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. BuzzFeed News' legal editor interviews Obama live on Facebook about the Supreme Court at 2:50 p.m. Vice President Biden has no public events scheduled.
+
+On Capitol Hill: The Senate and House meet at 2 p.m., with House votes on nine suspension bills planned for 6:30 p.m.
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+Behold -- the sun has returned to D.C.:
+
+-- No rain on the radar for today! But maybe some frost. The Capital Weather Gang forecasts: “If you live in some of our colder areas well west of town, don’t be shocked to awaken to some frost. So grab the fleece and the ice scraper when you head out. But the May sun should help temperatures recover fairly quickly, as they should be near 60 midday. Then, afternoon highs reach the mid-60s to near 70.”
+
+SNL spoofed Trump posing as his own publicist. Watch it here at Hulu. (Bonus: the cast did another sketch on Trump during Weekend Update.)
+
+Here's what late-night comedians said about the Trump-Ryan meeting last week:
+
+Will Ferrell, Aziz Ansari and others attended the Nordic state dinner at the White House:
+
+Watch the toasts from the evening:
+
+Alan Grayson was defensive on MSNBC when asked his ethics allegations and blow-up with Harry Reid:
+
+Obama and Macklemore talked about addiction in the president's weekly address:
+
+BuzzFeed asks: who said it, Trump or a Democrat?
+
+Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg reflected on the loss of her husband a year ago:",REAL
+739,"Do Democrats Want What Bernie Wants, Or Just What Bernie Has?","Do Democrats Want What Bernie Wants, Or Just What Bernie Has?
+
+For some weeks now, as Bernie Sanders has extended his remarkable and improbable run as a presidential candidate, people have been asking: ""What does Bernie want?""
+
+That question is a distant echo of ""What does Jesse want?"" a relic of the 1988 runner-up candidacy of Jesse Jackson, another ""outsider"" challenger with a dedicated hardcore following. But more about Jackson in a moment.
+
+This week, the question took a different form. After a rowdy convention in Nevada prompted death threats against that state party chair, the question suddenly became: ""Are the Democrats coming apart?""
+
+Uniting for the fall has always been an issue for both parties. But this year, it was supposed to be the Republicans, with their 17 candidates and their frustrated #NeverTrump rearguard action, who broke up over their differences.
+
+Now, it's working out quite differently. So we hear again that old nostrum: ""Democrats want to fall in love, Republicans want to fall in line."" A remarkable number of Republicans have accepted, if not embraced, Donald Trump as their nominee. But a large contingent of Democrats continue to feel the Bern, or at least remain very much out of love with Hillary Clinton.
+
+Which brings us to this past weekend, which proved that sometimes what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.
+
+The ""Nevada fracas"" has created a media meme and a conversational focus for the conflict roiling the Democratic Party. That is because it encapsulates the grievances felt on both sides.
+
+Sanders supporters see that some of their number were not seated in Las Vegas and see evidence that the system is rigged against them. Clinton supporters hear the epithets hurled at women on that stage, including the state party chair and Sen. Barbara Boxer, and perceive evidence of something else.
+
+Others will adjudicate what happened in Las Vegas, where both candidates' camps seem to think they were entitled to a majority of delegates. (Although Clinton won the initial round of caucuses back in February, Sanders had the upper hand in an intermediate round at the county level on April 2.)
+
+One camp wanted an open process; the other wanted respect for the rules. A voice vote was gaveled to a conclusion despite an uncertain outcome, which is bound to cause trouble. But in the end, the party chair herself has come to seem the principal victim — ""more sinned against than sinning"" — because of extreme phone and online harassment.
+
+Nevada's convention seems to have been an egregious case, an outlier. In other states where actual delegates are chosen in several phases, regular order has been followed without a similar outburst.
+
+But exceptions to the rule often make news. And in this case, cable TV and social media have endlessly repeated the raucous video shot at the convention and the toxic harassment that followed. As Nevada became a national story, Sanders was pressured to respond.
+
+The candidate has condemned violence generically, but has not apologized for his backers. Instead, Sanders and his retinue have denied responsibility for what happened and doubled down on their long-simmering resentments against Democratic Party officials.
+
+They say the entire process has been rigged against them, even parts that have been in place for decades. And the implicit message has been: Treat us fairly or expect there to be consequences. When this message is combined with Sanders' vow this week to ""carry our fight to the convention,"" it darkens the portents for the national convention in Philadelphia.
+
+So what does Bernie want?
+
+Let's start with the obvious: He wants to be nominated and elected. That's understood. Every candidate has a perfect right to continue fighting until the last ballot is cast, as Sanders vows to do.
+
+But even if he wins California, and several other states on June 7, Sanders would need vertiginous victory margins to win enough delegates to close the pledged delegate gap with Clinton. (The Democrats divide delegates proportionally according to the popular vote, which is just about as democratic a method as you can imagine.)
+
+So Sanders' one path is to persuade superdelegates to prefer him over Clinton, even though they currently prefer Clinton by more than 10-1. (The only superdelegate to flip so far deserted Sanders for the front-runner.)
+
+Sanders and his spokespersons say superdelegates should now ignore the overall vote and the pledged delegate totals and look at how much better Sanders does against Trump in hypothetical November matchups.
+
+The only problem is that hypothetical tests six months before the election are notoriously unreliable. Just ask President Perot.
+
+Moreover, many of the poll respondents who create this November differential right now are Sanders supporters who say they will shift to Trump in November. The likelihood of their actually doing so is problematic, given past experience with disgruntled backers of other candidates who fell short. (The most recent example would be the Clinton backers in 2008 who swore they would not vote for the man who beat her, Barack Obama, but wound up doing so in the fall.)
+
+So the ""path to the nomination"" for Sanders is not just uphill, it is essentially vertical.
+
+So what else might Sanders want?
+
+No one seems to think Sanders wants to be vice president or have any other role in a Clinton administration. He would return to the Senate, where he would be in a wholly new weight class of political influence.
+
+But he clearly wants to make a difference, to alter how the Democrats go forward in the fall campaign and beyond.
+
+And that is what the Clinton camp must manage. It is entirely possible that the Democratic convention in Philadelphia this July will vote to change party rules, shrinking the number of superdelegates or requiring them to follow the voting results in their states.
+
+It is also possible, if less likely, that the party would agree to allow more independents a role in its nominating process (although this would still depend on the will of the various states).
+
+Sanders supporters will also strive to make the party platform more progressive, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and expanding Medicare to cover people of all ages and perhaps calling for free tuition at public colleges. (The platform already calls for much of Sanders' program regarding the campaign finance system and other issues.)
+
+This might fall far short of the ""political revolution"" Sanders says his campaign is about. But it could still matter. And it could still point the party toward a far more progressive future.
+
+That is one way in which the 1988 precedent is relevant. Jesse Jackson arrived in Atlanta with about 30 percent of the delegates (not nearly as many as Sanders will have this summer). At the time, it was easily the best showing for an African-American presidential candidate. And although Jackson was not going to be nominated (Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis had a first-ballot majority), his message of racial and economic inclusion was popular and powerful within the party's base.
+
+The Dukakis forces recognized this and turned the proceedings over to Jackson on the second night of the convention. Thousands of Jackson supporters jammed the arena while delegates, alternates and journalists waited outside — unable to enter. Jackson gave an hourlong oration on the theme of common ground, a siege gun speaking for unity.
+
+Jackson did his part in the fall, helping Dukakis carry nearly 90 percent of the black vote and 70 percent of the then-minuscule Hispanic vote. Unfortunately for Dukakis, minority voters cast only about one ballot in seven in 1988.
+
+But by 2012, the share of the vote cast by people of color had nearly doubled. That stunning growth has turned a dozen states that were red in 1988 to blue in 2012 (California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, New Mexico, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware and Vermont).
+
+The same demographic trends have made Florida, Ohio and Colorado toss-ups in presidential elections. All had been solidly Republican in 1988.
+
+Sanders' hard base is not among minorities, of course, but among younger voters. His success has been built on winning three-fourths or even more of the voters under age 30. That is a group Clinton will need in the fall just as much as Dukakis needed Jackson's base in 1988.
+
+Sanders may not want a Jackson-style prime-time convention session all his own. He might be willing to settle for platform and rules revisions that would validate his campaign. But if he wants a Bernie night in Philadelphia when he can bring his political revolution to life — even for a few hours — it might be a small price to pay for peace.",REAL
+9961,Podesta wiki leaks...We prefer Muslims over Christians....,"Podesta wiki leaks...We prefer Muslims over Christians.... Will the MSM report thIsUser ID: 73227186 Re: Podesta wiki leaks...We prefer Muslims over Christians.... Page 1 10/22/16 5 10/22/16 8 Mail with questions or comments about this site. ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.005s (7 queries)",FAKE
+1338,Critics Pounce on Madeleine Albright’s Exhortation to Women to Back Clinton,"CONCORD, N.H. – Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered a warning to young women who aren’t inclined to elect the first female president. “Just remember,” Ms. Albright told the crowd at a get-out-the-vote rally for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” The familiar phrase was […]",REAL
+5258,Clinton doubles down on disputed claim FBI found her email remarks 'truthful',"Hillary Clinton has doubled down on her assertion that the FBI declared her public remarks on her email scandal “consistent and truthful,” despite independent fact-checkers concluding otherwise.
+
+“And as the FBI said, everything that I’ve said publicly has been consistent and truthful with what I’ve told [the FBI],” Clinton said Wednesday in an interview with Brandon Rittiman of KUSA News.
+
+Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler swiftly chided the Democratic presidential candidate for repeating the ""roundly debunked"" claim.
+
+Clinton first cited the FBI in her defense last Sunday when “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace noted Director James Comey had contradicted her claim she never sent classified material from her home server.
+
+“That's not what I heard Director Comey say … Director Comey said that my answers were truthful and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails,” she said.
+
+Several fact-checkers, however, called her out on that claim.
+
+The Washington Post's Kessler awarded her “four Pinnochios,” and noted, “Comey has repeatedly not taken a stand on her public statements.”
+
+PolitiFact gave her a “Pants on Fire” rating for a lack of truthfulness and FactCheck.org declared her claims “false.”
+
+Comey did tell Congress: “We have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.” But he did not say the same about her public statements.
+
+During testimony before a House committee, Comey said it was “not true” that nothing Clinton sent or received was marked classified. To the contrary, he said, “there was classified material emailed.
+
+Donald Trump also doubled down Thursday on his claim he saw video of Iranians taking $400 million in cash off an airplane on the same day American hostages were released. His campaign earlier said he meant that he saw television coverage of the hostages, not the cash, leaving an airplane.
+
+Afterward, Trump once again clarified, this time via Twitter.",REAL
+4053,How the Clintons’ Haiti development plans succeed — and disappoint,"Deep in the Haitian countryside, peanut farmer Wismith Moricette epitomizes the success of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s charitable work: Through an innovative program backed by the Clintons, the 23-year-old has doubled the yield from his one-acre plot. Along with all those peanuts, Moricette said, have come visions of a brighter future for his wife and young son.
+
+Fifty miles away on Haiti’s north coast, Anelle Germinal exemplifies another reality of the Clintons’ work here: disappointment. The 33-year-old mother of four has been standing in the baking sun every day for months waiting for work in the struggling Caracol Industrial Park, which the Clintons have touted as a model that would change the economy of this impoverished country.
+
+“They said we would have work,” Germinal said, “but I have nothing.”
+
+Moricette and Germinal are two faces of the Clintons’ increasingly complicated relationship with Haiti, where their high-profile development efforts after a devastating earthquake in 2010 have produced both success and disillusionment.
+
+As Hillary Clinton moves toward a second run for the White House, her family’s global charitable work, mostly through the Clinton Foundation, has come under intense scrutiny. The foundation has accepted large donations from corporations and foreign countries, raising concerns that the Clintons are creating conflicts of interest by blurring the lines between their political, business and charitable interests.
+
+The Washington Post reported last month that the foundation’s donors include seven foreign governments that contributed millions during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. Among those donations was a $500,000 contribution from the Algerian government for earthquake relief in Haiti that the foundation has acknowledged violated the terms of an ethics agreement with the Obama administration.
+
+The Clintons’ defenders have dismissed concerns about the donations as political sniping, saying the test of the foundation is not where it gets its money but how it spends it. They said their work has created economic opportunity, improved lives for women and girls, raised health standards and fought the effects of climate change across the developing world.
+
+The work has been especially visible in Haiti, where the Clintons first traveled as young newlyweds in 1975 and where many people credit them with drawing the world’s attention immediately after the earthquake, which killed more than 200,000 people.
+
+With former president Clinton assigned by the United Nations to head up the emergency recovery effort and Hillary Clinton guiding official U.S. assistance as secretary of state, the couple helped a relief effort that has included some of the world’s richest people, biggest celebrities and most successful businesses. The Clintons also helped mobilize an effort in which international donors pledged $10.4 billion, including $3.9 billion from the United States.
+
+Greg Milne, director of the Clinton Foundation’s Haiti Program, said projects include efforts that have helped more than 2,000 small farmers, an artisan-goods company that employs more than 300 people, a fish-farming operation, a cholera treatment center and improvements to schools in some of Haiti’s poorest slums.
+
+Clinton supporters also point out that their successes have come amid Haiti’s chaotic political situation — parliament is not functioning and President Michel Martelly, dogged by scandal, is ruling with virtually no checks on his power — which is marked by endemic corruption, weak institutions, poverty, poor public education, terrible roads and other factors that have historically made it extremely difficult for development efforts to succeed.
+
+The country has long had a fraught relationship with foreigners who come to invest and provide aid. Haitians often regard them with gratitude for desperately needed resources and, at the same time, with suspicion that their motives are more to make a profit in Haiti than to help it.
+
+Nevertheless, the Clintons are facing a growing backlash that too little has been accomplished in the past five years and that some of the most high-profile projects they have backed — including a just-opened Marriott, another luxury hotel and the industrial park — have helped foreign investors and Haiti’s wealthy elites more than its poor.
+
+“Bill Clinton is a good guy and well-intentioned, but the people here don’t think so — they think he’s here making money,” said Leslie Voltaire, a former government official who worked with Clinton on post-earthquake reconstruction. “There is a lot of resentment about Clinton here. People have not seen results. . . . They say that Clinton used Haiti.”
+
+In January, Haitian expatriates picketed the Clinton Foundation’s New York headquarters, demanding to know why more progress has not been made with the billions in international aid pledged after the quake.
+
+Said Raymond Joseph, a former Haitian ambassador to the United States: “People are asking, ‘What has Bill Clinton done for us?’ ”
+
+The Clintons’ long influence in Haiti is hard to overstate.
+
+As president in 1994, Bill Clinton deployed about 20,000 U.S. troops to Haiti to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been ousted in a coup in 1991. Clinton’s trade policies as president, which he later called a “mistake,” were devastating to Haiti’s rice production and made it harder for the country to feed itself.
+
+In 2009, Clinton was named U.N. special envoy for Haiti, and he has visited the country 37 times since then.
+
+After the earthquake, Clinton united with former president George W. Bush to create the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which distributed $54.4 million in the two years after the earthquake. Separately, the Clinton Foundation has spent more than $30 million in Haiti and led efforts through the Clinton Global Initiative to persuade private companies to spend vastly more.
+
+“What I think most people don’t know, even if they’ve been on the ground there, is these people are immensely talented,” Bill Clinton said in a 2010 interview with NPR. “They have suffered from 200 years of outside and inside abuses and neglect and misgovernment. And a lot of the people who’ve gone there even to help them in the best of faith have done so in a way that would never have allowed them to support themselves and to lift themselves up. And now there is a true consensus for and determination for a sustainable, comprehensive, long-term, modern society in Haiti. And they can do it.”
+
+But as the initial emergency response has evolved into efforts to ensure Haiti’s long-term development, Haitians increasingly complain that the Clintons’ most ambitious plans are disconnected from the realities of most people in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
+
+For instance, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund invested more than $2 million in the Royal Oasis ­hotel, where a sleek suite with hardwood floors costs more than $200 a night and the shops sell $150 designer purses and $120 men’s dress shirts.
+
+One recent afternoon, the hotel appeared largely empty, and with tourism hardly booming five years after the quake, locals fear it may be failing. A spokeswoman for Occidental Hotels, the chain that runs the hotel, said that ­occupancy is up this year and that the project will “mature in the long run.”
+
+Bill Clinton also introduced Marriott officials to Denis O’Brien, an Irish telecom billionaire who has contributed millions to the Clinton Foundation. The result is a $45 million Marriott hotel that opened this month in central Port-au-Prince. O’Brien said no Clinton money was invested in the project.
+
+The ultra-modern hotel is adjacent to the headquarters of Digicel, a communications giant owned by O’Brien. When The Post visited recently, many, if not most, guests seemed to be foreign businessmen connected to Digicel.
+
+Clinton defenders argue that hotels that cater to well-heeled foreign guests can still buy local products and provide local jobs, and those guests are often involved in business investments or aid projects that benefit the neediest Haitians.
+
+O’Brien said his hotel employs 200 Haitians, is filled with locally purchased art and serves food from Haiti. O’Brien leads the Haiti Action Network, a collection of private businesses that have committed through the Clinton Global Initiative to spend $500 million on projects in Haiti. He and his company just built 150 schools and rebuilt Port-au-Prince’s historic Iron Market.
+
+“I don’t know any modern leader that has spent more time helping a country and being so effective,” O’Brien said of Bill Clinton. “He works like a demon in the developing world. Nobody is doing that. Is Tony Blair doing that?”
+
+Other Clinton-backed projects have not delivered on lofty promises: A 2011 housing expo that cost more than $2 million, including $500,000 from the Clinton Foundation, was supposed to be a model for thousands of new units but instead has resulted in little more than a few dozen abandoned model homes occupied by squatters.
+
+Controversy surrounding the Clintons only deepened with the recent revelation, contained in an upcoming book by Peter Schweizer, that Tony Rodham — Hillary Clinton’s younger brother — serves on the advisory board of a U.S.-based company that in 2012 won one of Haiti’s first two gold-mining permits in 50 years. After objection from the Haitian Senate, the permits have been placed on hold.
+
+“Neither Bill Clinton nor the brother of Hillary Clinton are individuals who share the interests of the Haitian people,” said Samuel Nesner, an anti-mining activist who thinks mining poses great environmental risks and will mainly benefit foreign investors. “They are part of the elite class who are operating to exploit the Haitian people.”
+
+Clinton Foundation officials said Bill Clinton had been unaware of Rodham’s involvement in the mine project. A spokesman for Hillary Clinton said she does not know the chief executive of the mine.
+
+“I strongly believe the Clintons came to Haiti in good faith and they wanted to have an impact,” said Jean-Max Bellerive, who was Haiti’s prime minister at the time of the earthquake and served as co-chairman with Bill Clinton on the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. (Bellerive is also on the mining company’s advisory board.)
+
+But, Bellerive said, the former president was hampered by a “weak” staff of American aides who were “more interested in supporting Clinton than helping Haiti.” Echoing a common sentiment in Haiti, Bellerive also said Clinton should have listened more carefully to the opinions and needs of ordinary Haitians: “How do you want a guy coming from Davos or Dubai to get the real feeling for what’s happening downstairs?”
+
+Milne, of the Clinton Foundation, said the criticism is wrong and unsurprising.
+
+“President Clinton is one of the most dedicated and highest-profile advocates for Haiti, and he is still engaged while others have moved on,” he said. “So it’s not surprising that, for some, he is an easy target for natural frustration that the change we all want isn’t happening faster.”
+
+Milne said the country has experienced strong economic growth in recent years, with more Haitians employed and more children in school.
+
+“Is Haiti building back better?” Milne said, using a phrase that the Clintons frequently quote. “In many ways, yes, though challenges remain.”
+
+Paul Farmer, a doctor whose Partners in Health has helped provide medical care in rural Haiti since the 1980s and whose health network has received more than $1.8 million from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund for a medical residency program, also praised the Clintons’ work. He said he forged partnerships at CGI meetings with private businesses and other charities for a variety of projects he said would not have taken place without the Clinton connection.
+
+He said that by any objective measure, Haiti has been improving, in part because of the Clintons’ efforts.
+
+“Is the whole country built back better? I doubt it,” Farmer said. “Water insecurity and food insecurity are very pressing problems. But if you look at the health statistics for Haiti . . . infant mortality, child mortality — they’re all improving.”
+
+Still, even some who have benefited from Clinton-backed programs have grown disillusioned.
+
+“I read that Bill Clinton is the most popular politician in America, but he couldn’t get elected mayor in Haiti today,” said Jacky Lumarque, rector of Quisqueya University, a private school that was damaged in the earthquake and received $914,000 from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund to create an entrepreneurship center.
+
+Lumarque said the program has helped hundreds of Haitians turn their informal street businesses into formal entities that keep records, pay taxes and have potential for growth.
+
+He said it has been a huge success — but stands apart from the usual strategy of foreign groups, including the Clintons, who tend to favor projects imposed by well-meaning foreigners that are more “about Haiti” than “for Haiti.”
+
+The entrepreneurship center, Lumarque said, “is an example of what Clinton can do, in spite of himself.”
+
+When Bill Clinton came here late last month to help inaugurate the new Marriott, he made a side trip by helicopter to Haiti’s central plateau to have a look at a Clinton-backed program that is revolutionizing the peanut-farming industry.
+
+The Acceso Peanut Enterprise Corp. was started with a $1.25 million grant from the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, which is headed by Bill Clinton and Canadian mining executive and philanthropist Frank Giustra, as well as the charitable foundation of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.
+
+Acceso buys feed, fertilizer and fungicide at bulk rates, then sells them to farmers for far less than normal prices. Acceso also hires tractors for farmers who otherwise would be using an ox and plow.
+
+Robert Johnson, an American who runs the program, said the improvements are vastly increasing yields, quality and farmers’ profits.
+
+He said Acceso worked with about 1,000 farmers last year and bought about 120 metric tons of peanuts. This year, it expects to triple the number of farmers and buy almost five times as much peanut tonnage.
+
+At least half of Acceso’s sales have gone to two large Haitian factories that produce a peanut-based paste that is given to malnourished children. Most of the rest goes to local peanut-butter producers, he said. The program’s success, Johnson said, comes from its market-driven approach: It’s not a charity, it’s a business with a charitable purpose.
+
+“We’re building something that is going to be sustainable,” he said. “We talk to the farmers. We’re not going to just bring in something that someone thought up in ­Davos.”
+
+The program is branching out into lime-growing, and Clinton visited a site last month where thousands of seedlings are being cultivated by dozens of workers.
+
+Benel Auguste, 32, is one of the small landowners who rented his plot, about a third of an acre, to Acceso to plant limes. “It’s a good idea; it’s going to work,” he said. “We know limes and we need them. We can do this.”
+
+The Clintons also were enthusiastic backers of the Caracol Industrial Park, which was built on 600 acres of farmland just east of ­the port city Cap-Haitien.
+
+They agreed with economists, particularly Oxford University development specialist Paul Collier, who concluded that Haiti is an ideal place to create mass jobs in garment factories because of its proximity to the United States, favorable trade agreements and cheap labor.
+
+The Clintons helped Haitian officials identify Sae-A Trading Co., which operates factories across the developing world and sews garments for giants such as Target, Gap and Wal-Mart, as a potential major investor.
+
+As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, along with top aide ­Cheryl Mills, lobbied for the project with South Korean officials and hosted Sae-A executives in Washington to press the plan.
+
+Bill Clinton attended the Sae-A contract-signing ceremony in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 11, 2011 — a day before the first anniversary of the earthquake. He later laid the first stone of the park’s construction. And then in October 2012, the Clintons, Martelly and other officials attended the ribbon-cutting.
+
+Speaking to a group of investors at the ceremony, officials and celebrities that included actors Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, as well as business moguls Donna Karan and Richard Branson, Hillary Clinton said it represented “a new day for Haiti and a new model for how the international community practices development.”
+
+“Haiti is truly open for business, and we want your help,” she said. “We see this partnership between governments like our own and the private sector as absolutely essential in promoting and supporting long-term prosperity in Haiti. We know very well that long-term prosperity cannot come from just the provision of aid. There must be trade and investment like we have seen here today.”
+
+Today, Sae-A employs about 4,500 people. Company spokesman Lon Garwood said the operation has been steadily growing and will open a new facility next month. Henri-Claude Müller-Poitevien, a Haitian government official who works in the apparel industry, said the Caracol project is on schedule and continues to expand.
+
+A power plant was built, but plans for a new port at the industrial park to carry finished goods to the United States have been shelved. Residents of the plant’s housing project say their land floods when it rains, and few said they think the plant will ever create the number of jobs originally promised.
+
+“I believe that the momentum to attract people there in a massive way is past,” said Bellerive, the former prime minister. “You can do interesting things with Caracol, but you have to reinvent the concept. Today, it has failed.”
+
+Each morning, crowds line up outside the park’s big front gate, which is guarded by four men in crisp khaki uniforms carrying shotguns. They wait in a sliver of shade next to a cinder-block wall, many holding résumés in envelopes. Most said they have been coming every day for months, waiting for jobs that pay about $5 a day.
+
+From his envelope, Jean Mito Palvetus, 27, pulled out a diploma attesting that he had completed 200 hours of training with the U.S. Agency for International Development on an industrial sewing machine.
+
+“I have three kids and a wife, and I can’t support them,” he said, sweating in the hot morning sun. “I have a diploma, but I still can’t get a job here. I still have nothing.”
+
+Tom Hamburger in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+2678,Of Course Facebook Is Biased. Its Real Problem Is That It Won’t Admit It.,"Facebook must have thought the online news game was pretty easy. Two years ago, it plucked a small team of about a dozen bright, hungry twentysomethings fresh out of journalism school or entry-level reporting jobs. It stuck them in a basement, paid them contractor wages, and put them to work selecting and briefly summarizing the day’s top news stories and linking to the news sites that covered them. It called them curators, not reporters. Their work appeared in the “Trending” section of the Facebook home page and mobile app, where it helped to define the day’s news for millions of Facebook users.
+
+On Tuesday, Facebook became the subject of a Senate inquiry over claims of anti-conservative bias in its Trending section. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter asking a series of pointed questions about how Facebook chooses stories for the section, how it trains its curators, who’s responsible for their decisions, and what steps it’s taking to investigate the bias claims. He also asks for detailed records of stories that the company decided not to include in the Trending section despite their popularity among Facebook users.
+
+The inquiry followed a report by Gizmodo’s Michael Nunez on Monday, in which anonymous former Facebook “curators” described the subjective process by which they assembled the Trending section. Facebook had publicly portrayed the section—which you can find near the top right of Facebook.com or under the search tab on the Facebook app—as an algorithmically driven reflection of the most popular stories its users are reading at any given time. But the ex-curators said they often filtered out stories that were deemed questionable and added others they deemed worthy. One, a self-identified conservative, complained that this led to subtle yet pervasive liberal bias, since most of the curators were politically liberal themselves. Popular stories from conservative sites such as Breitbart, for instance, were allegedly omitted unless more mainstream publications such as the New York Times also picked them up.
+
+None of this should come as a surprise to any thoughtful person who has worked as a journalist. Humans are biased. Objectivity is a myth, or at best an ideal that can be loosely approached through the very careful practice of trained professionals. The news simply is not neutral. Neither is “curation,” for that matter, in either the journalistic or artistic application of the term.
+
+There are ways to grapple with this problem honestly—to attempt to identify and correct for one’s biases, to scrupulously disclose them, to employ an ideologically diverse staff, perhaps even to reject objectivity as an ideal and embrace subjectivity. But you can’t begin to address the subjective nature of news without first acknowledging it. And Facebook has gone out of its way to avoid doing that, for reasons that are central to its identity as a technology company.
+
+For that matter, you don’t get that big by admitting that you’re a media company. As the New York Times’ John Herrman and Mike Isaac point out, 65 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew view the news media as a “negative influence on the country.” For technology companies, that number is just 17 percent. It’s very much in Facebook’s interest to remain a social network in the public’s eyes, even in the face of mounting evidence that it’s something much bigger than that. And it’s in Facebook’s interest to shift responsibility for controversial decisions from humans, whom we know to be biased, to algorithms, which we tend to lionize.
+
+Human values shape the Trending section, too. The algorithm that surfaces the stories might skirt questions of bias by simply ranking them in order of popularity, thus delegating responsibility for story selection from Facebook’s employees to its users. Even that—the notion that what’s popular is worth highlighting—represents a human value judgment, albeit one that’s not particularly vulnerable to accusations of political bias. (That’s why Twitter isn’t in the same hot water over its own simpler trending topics module.)
+
+The problem with an algorithm that simply harnesses the wisdom of the crowd is that the crowd isn’t always wise. The most popular stories at any given time might well be misleading, or sensationalist, or even full of lies. That’s why Facebook felt the need to hire humans to oversee it. This is in keeping with the company’s broader push for what it calls quality content, another term that entails value judgments without copping to them.
+
+But Facebook instead opted to hire cheap contractors and went on to claim that their role is simply to “confirm that the topics are in fact trending news in the real world and not, for example, similar-sounding topics or misnomers.” That’s a dubious claim, even if you think the allegations of liberal bias are trumped up. If the curators’ job was really just about cleaning up the data, Facebook seems to have forgotten to tell that to the curators themselves, who described their mandate very differently to Gizmodo. They said they were encouraged to prioritize stories from certain outlets deemed reputable; to avoid news about, among other topics, Facebook itself; and to replace the word Twitter in headlines with something more vague, like social media. That may not be political bias, but it’s bias all the same. They also described choosing stories for the Trending section that may not have been surfaced by the algorithm but that seemed to them to be important or worthwhile, like stories about conflict in Syria or the Black Lives Matter movement.
+
+The problem will not be solved by firing bad apples or instituting tougher guidelines. The only way for Facebook to extricate itself from this mess is to admit that journalism isn’t as simple as it thought. It’s to stop treating “curators” like drones and stop treating news like a data set to be optimized. It’s to build a real human curation team with a real editor in charge and an ethos and a mission and an understanding of the responsibilities involved in shaping how the news is framed to 1.6 billion people. Surely a company that pays its interns $11,000 a month in salary and benefits can afford it.",REAL
+3495,Tax Calculator: The federal debt,"The federal government must make regular interest payments on the money it has borrowed to finance past deficits – that is, on the national debt held by the public.
+
+The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the federal government’s net interest payments on that debt will total $229 billion in the 2015 fiscal year. Working Americans end up having to foot that very large bill to varying degrees based on each individual taxpayer’s adjusted gross income.
+
+Click here to see your share of the federal debt.
+
+And the CBO expects that this challenge will accelerate over the next decade. Current interest rates are low by historical standards and higher interest rates means higher interest payments. It’s projected that net interest costs will more than triple over the next decade, reaching $808 billion in 2025.
+
+These numbers pose a real threat. The CBO has issued warnings about the serious negative consequences that such high and rising debt and interest payments on the debt could have on both the economy and the federal budget.
+
+“The large amount of debt might restrict policymakers’ ability to use tax and spending policies to respond to unexpected future challenges, such as economic downturns or financial crises,” the CBO said in a recent report.
+
+In the same report, they also cautioned that continued growth in the debt could lead investors to doubt the government’s willingness or ability to pay its obligations, which would require the government to pay much higher interest rates on its borrowing going forward.",REAL
+4930,Trump and advisers remain split on how far to move toward the middle,"Ten days after he appointed new campaign leadership, Donald Trump and many of his closest aides and allies remain divided on whether to adopt more mainstream stances or stick with the hard-line conservative positions at the core of his candidacy, according to people involved in the discussions.
+
+Trump has been flooded with conflicting advice about where to land, with the tensions vividly illustrated this week as the GOP nominee publicly wrestled with himself on the details of his signature issue: immigration.
+
+A particular flash point has been whether to forcibly deport an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants from the country, a move Trump long advocated but is now reconsidering.
+
+“He has been listening to a wide range of opinions on that,” said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has been at Trump’s side nearly constantly over the past week. “As you might imagine, there are different opinions on this, even in his campaign. In a very thoughtful way, he’s trying to figure what the right position is.”
+
+“By the way,” Giuliani added, “that’s what everybody criticized him for in the past: that he’s not able to do that. He actually is able to do that.”
+
+The conversations in recent days have featured voices from a range of Republican views, all jockeying to tilt the businessman’s politics in their direction, according to those involved. Trump tends to echo the words of the last person with whom he spoke, making direct access to him even more valuable, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal campaign discussions.
+
+Those pushing Trump to soften his stances and tone — and who have gained immense influence in recent days — include Giuliani, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, a longtime ally who has no formal role with the campaign but talks to the candidate frequently and attended a strategy session last weekend. At recent private fundraisers, many Republican donors have also urged Trump to adopt a different pitch and rethink his priorities.
+
+[Trump ‘softening’ on immigration? Many supporters don’t seem to mind]
+
+Meanwhile, Trump continues to discuss immigration policy with Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), who is seen as the populist force behind much of his candidacy. While he has defended and encouraged Trump’s deliberations, Sessions is considered a balancing force against more centrist appeals. So is new campaign chief executive Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, the hard-charging conservative website.
+
+Trump was joined on the trail this week by Giuliani and Sessions, along with Stephen Miller, a former aide to Sessions who has become a well-trusted confidant. His New York-based children continue to play an outsize role.
+
+But any suggestion of change has alarmed some conservatives and ardent backers. Firebrand commentator Ann Coulter declared this week that it was “a mistake” for Trump to consider abandoning his support for mass deportations and said his tone “sounds very consultant to me.”
+
+The back-and-forth over immigration comes amid broader efforts by Trump to reach out to voters beyond the disaffected whites who compose his base, including events such as a roundtable Friday with Hispanic business leaders in Las Vegas. Trump also lashed out this week at his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, for accusing him of appealing to racist elements, repeatedly labeling her a “bigot” because he says her policies don’t help minorities.
+
+Last year, Trump cast illegal immigrants as being mostly violent criminals, and he rolled out an immigration plan that embraced ideas that had long dwelled at the fringes of the GOP: no longer granting citizenship to children born in the United States to illegal immigrants, constructing a massive wall along the border with Mexico and perhaps restricting some legal forms of immigration. In interviews, Trump added that he would form a “deportation force” to remove the millions of immigrants living in the country illegally.
+
+But Saturday, Trump asked a panel of Hispanic advisers for alternate ideas and made clear that he was willing to change on the issue. The next day, newly installed campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who has advised GOP candidates for years on how to win over swing voters, said in a CNN interview that Trump’s position on creating a deportation force was “to be determined.”
+
+Over the next few days, Trump took a variety of positions that created a frenzy of confusion over where exactly he stands. On Tuesday, Trump said he was open to “softening” the rules for the millions of immigrants who came to the country illegally but are living peaceful and prosperous lives, only to say Thursday that his position is “hardening.”
+
+At an immigration-focused town hall in Texas on Tuesday, which was later broadcast on Fox News, Trump repeatedly polled his audience on what he should do, allowing his internal conflicts to play out publicly.
+
+“Can we go through a process? Or do you think they have to get out?” he asked the audience. “Tell me. I mean, I don’t know, you tell me.”
+
+Trump provided the crowd a sympathetic portrait of a theoretical illegal immigrant who has been in the country more than a decade, building a life with children and a stable job. He repeatedly asked if that sort of person should be allowed to stay or be kicked out of the country, getting results that were often difficult to measure. At one point, Trump asked who in the crowd wanted all illegal immigrants thrown out, even the law-abiding ones, and a man stood up and bellowed: “I do!”
+
+Fox News’s Sean Hannity then asked Trump: “You heard from the audience. What does your gut tell you you want to do?”
+
+“Well, look, this is like a poll, this is like a poll,” Trump said. “And I love the guy that stood up and said — where is that guy? I love this guy. That’s my guy. I mean, I get it. I get it. And I understand what you’re saying. But this is sort of like a poll. And this is what I’m getting all over the country.”
+
+Trump’s often contradictory comments on deportations came during interviews with Fox News or CNN, not during his campaign rallies. For two weeks, Trump has been reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter, a machine he had long cursed. As the week progressed, his control slipped and he went off-script more often — saying at a rally in Ohio on Monday that some urban areas are more dangerous than war zones and making a joke in Tampa on Wednesday about Clinton being medicated.
+
+This week the campaign twice started to plan an event where Trump could give an immigration speech — an opportunity for him to settle on a position and document it — only to cancel without a clear explanation.
+
+[Inside Donald Trump’s new strategy to counter the view of many that he is racist]
+
+Trump’s comment about being open to “softening” laws to help illegal immigrants came Tuesday, the same day Coulter released her new book, “In Trump We Trust,” in which she writes that anything Trump does could be forgiven, “except change his immigration policies.” During an MSNBC interview that night, Coulter was obviously frustrated and threatened to cancel her book tour if the candidate clearly changed his position.
+
+“I think this is a mistake. I’ve thought he’s made other mistakes, and I’ve given him constructive criticism when I think he makes a mistake,” she said. “I think this is a mistake.”
+
+MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked: “Does he take your criticism?”
+
+“Um,” Coulter responded. “I haven’t had a lot, but yeah. No, he does listen to people. And I’m not advising him or anything, but I did write this magnificent book.”
+
+By Wednesday, Coulter seemed confident again in Trump’s candidacy as she attended a book party in Washington and told Bloomberg News’s Joshua Green: “My worship for him is like the people of North Korea worship their Dear Leader — blind loyalty. Once he gave that Mexican rapist speech, I’ll walk across glass for him. That’s basically it. . . . I’ll criticize him, and I have, but it’s all minor stylistic stuff. We all want to shoot him at various times.”
+
+Thursday, Trump took a different tone in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper and said that he foresees “a lot of people being deported,” although he admitted such deportations could not all happen at once. Trump also doubled down on the notion that a majority of illegal immigrants are violent criminals who will be the first to go.
+
+“And there are probably millions of them, but certainly hundreds of thousands,” he said. “Big numbers. They’re out. They’re out.”
+
+At one point, Cooper asked Trump, “So if you haven’t committed a crime and you’ve been here for 15 years, and you have a family here, you have a job here, will you be deported?”
+
+“We’re going to see what happens once we strengthen up our border,” Trump replied, describing that strength in detail. “And then we’re going to see what happens. But there is a very good chance the answer could be yes. We’re going to see what happens.”",REAL
+4904,Clinton in the final stretch: winning over anti-Trump contingent may be best play,"Hillary Clinton’s summer ends abruptly on Monday. For several weeks, the presidential frontrunner has toured the homes of America’s rich and famous, hosted by Justin Timberlake, welcomed by Magic Johnson and serenaded by Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi and Paul McCartney.
+
+
+
+It all helped swell Democratic coffers by a record $143m in August, crucial ammunition for the 64 days of TV advertising left between now and the general election. It also allowed an exhausted campaign to recharge its batteries following months on the road and July’s convention in Philadelphia.
+
+But on Labor Day, Clinton swaps the beaches of Cape Cod and Long Island for the rust-belt towns of Ohio and Iowa, scenes of her bruising primary race against Bernie Sanders and home to a stubbornly loyal pockets of blue-collar support for Donald Trump.
+
+She won’t be alone. Monday’s events in Cleveland and the Quad Cities, industrial towns bordering Iowa and Illinois, will debut a new campaign plane, large enough to carry the traveling reporters who were hitherto consigned to tagging along behind.
+
+Journalists have complained for months about a lack of access to Clinton, who has not held a conference for 276 days. Her campaign has accused the media of fixating on that daily tally and ignoring the interviews she gives to select cable anchors or local news stations.
+
+“This 257 days nonsense is ludicrous. When has it been the norm that a presidential candidate regularly does press conferences?” spokesman Nick Merrill askedreporters on Thursday. He then promised one “soon”.
+
+The new aircraft is nothing if not symbolic: it launches the start of an intense period of travel and scrutiny during the debates and rallies before election day on 8 November.
+
+The plane also provides room for key Clinton aides to escape their headquarters in Brooklyn and gain important time with the boss. Her loyal gatekeeper Huma Abedin will likely stand guard, returning to the plane after a period of absence that aides insist has nothing to do with the very public break-up of her marriage to former congressman Anthony Weiner.
+
+Campaign manager Robby Mook and chairman John Podesta have their own challenge: working out where to direct the plane. Some campaign destinations are obvious, such as the swing states of Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, Iowa and North Carolina. Some in rust-belt states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan are getting more attention this time thanks to Trump’s appeal to the white working class. Colorado and Virginia look well out of his reach.
+
+The bigger question is whether to take the battle into enemy territory. Trump has proved so unpopular among some Republican voters, minorities and women, that deep red territory is perhaps in play. States such as Arizona, Utah and Georgia, which haven’t voted Democrat in decades, could be vulnerable in the winner-take-all electoral college system – and Clinton has superior fundraising and a vastly more organised network of campaign offices.
+
+Her campaign is at least testing the waters. On Friday, Clinton began airing TV ads in Arizona, where Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by nearly 10 points. Clinton’s husband is the only Democrat to have won the state in a presidential election since 1952.
+
+Her campaign is also spending money in Nebraska, one of two states that splits electoral college votes and therefore offers Clinton a chance to peel off electors from the relatively liberal city of Omaha. Even Utah, where Trump has riled conservative Mormons, has seen the Clinton campaign open a field office.
+
+Whether these moves amount to a radical new strategy or clever feints to trick Trump is not clear. Some inside Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters are reportedly cheering that moves into Republican heartlands appear to have Trump spending time and money in places he ought to take for granted – for instance, by staging a major immigration speech in Arizona.
+
+Yet the confidence could easily become complacency too. Clinton’s healthy lead following the party’s convention has eroded in recent weeks, slipping down to the low single digits in some key states. Not only are the headline polls too close for comfort, but Americans still stubbornly dislike Clinton and Trump by enormous margins. A record number of Americans now say they dislike Clinton, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll that showed 41% of Americans have a favorable impression of her, while 56% have an unfavorable one.
+
+Though she enjoys a powerful coalition of support in Washington, particularly from the Obama administration, political surrogates cannot necessarily translate her shower their popularity on friends.
+
+“This ain’t over man. This is not over,” Joe Biden warned at a rally for Clinton in Cleveland on Thursday, where one supporter confessed he was actually planning to vote Trump but came along because he just liked the vice-president.
+
+The scepticism of many independent voters may also help explain the decision by Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri to shield the candidate from the rough-and-tumble of open press conferences, where generally risks are high and rewards low.
+
+Clinton’s campaign has expressed frustration with the questions of trustworthiness, particularly over her private emails system that appear to reinforce a reputation of favoritism and privilege built up by the Clintons. Aides also complain that she does not get the recognition she deserves for developing many more new policy ideas than most candidates.
+
+“People criticise me for having so many plans,” Clinton told a lukewarm audience of military veterans in Cincinnati on Wednesday. “People say, Oh there she goes with another plan about mental health, or whatever,” she added. “But I have this old fashioned idea that if you are going to ask to be president if you have to have a plan.”
+
+
+
+Yet the campaign is under no illusion about the nature of this year’s fight. If hunkering down away from the press while outspending Trump – she has raised more money than the GDP of small Pacific nations – is what it takes to beat him, then so be it.
+
+“This is not a normal election,” Clinton said at the American Legion convention in Cincinnati. “This election shouldn’t be about ideology, it’s not just about differences over policy. It’s about who has the experience and temperament to serve as president and commander and chief.”
+
+“The stakes this fall are as high as any election in our lifetimes.”
+
+Huma Abedin, Clinton’s right-hand woman and gatekeeper. Robby Mook, the campaign manager in charge of her election machine. John Podesta, family friend, campaign chairman and former chief of staff to Bill Clinton. Jennifer Palmieri, former Obama communications director now fielding flak for Clinton. Neera Tanden, key figure in transition team preparing the clan for power.
+
+The campaign slogan “stronger together” captures Clinton’s broad belief in a more socially inclusive America, but the underlying policies range widely from a jobs program and infrastructure spending, to making college more affordable and tackling climate change. On trade and social security, she has moved to the left, rhetorically, at least.
+
+
+
+Clinton’s experience as secretary of state, senator and activist first lady make her one of the most qualified candidates to run for office. Supporters also point to her resilience in the face of setbacks, long track record of social activism and historic achievement as the first woman nominee of a major party.
+
+The biggest handicap according to opinion polls is a perceived lack of trust among voters, something exacerbated by years of attacks on Clinton family “scandals” and an ongoing controversy over her private email server. Voters sometimes also talk about finding her inauthentic and lacking warmth.
+
+African Americans, women, Latinos, college-educated men – in short, a vast swath of the increasingly diverse US electorate. Geographically, the strongest support for Democrats is heavily concentrated on the coasts however.",REAL
+6391,Australian taxpayers charged over $88 million for donation to corrupt Clinton Foundation,"Australian taxpayers charged over $88 million for donation to corrupt Clinton Foundation October 31, 2016 Google + They both love to play the gender card, turning their immense privilege into victim status and ­dividing the electorate by sex.
+Thus, Gillard nobbled Tony ­Abbott with her fabled misogyny speech and Clinton’s machine manages to drown out every Wikileaks embarrassment with a new Donald Trump bimbo eruption. 
+The other thing the two ladies have in common is the Clinton Foundation , which Wikileaks emails now show is an influence-peddling political slush fund. 
+And guess which country was one of its biggest donors? Australia. Yep, we’re up there with Saudi Arabia and Qatar. 
+The Australian taxpayer shovelled at least $88 million into the Clinton Foundation and associated entities from 2006 to 2014, reaching a peak of $10.3 million in 2012-13, Gillard’s last year in office. Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard both involved in the influence-peddling political slush fund that is the Clinton Foundation. 
+On the Clinton Foundation website, AusAID and the Commonwealth of Australia score separate entries in the $10 million-plus group of donors, one rung up from American teacher unions. 
+In 2009-10 Kevin Rudd handed over another $10 million to the foundation for climate research, part of $300 million he squandered on a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute. 
+Gillard also donated $300 million of our money to the Clinton-affiliated Global Partnership for Education. 
+Lo and behold, she became chairman in 2014 and has been ­actively promoting Clinton as president ever since — in a campaign video last December slamming Trump, in opeds trumpeting the next woman president and in appearances with Clinton spruiking girls’ education. 
+The Abbott government topped up the left-wing organisation’s coffers with another $140 million in 2014, bringing total Australian largesse to $460 million, according to a press release from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. 
+And yet, apart from the beautiful friendship with Gillard, what did Australia get from the Clintons for all that cash? 
+A whole lot of trouble is what. 
+The latest treasure trove of Wikileaks emails released last week shows that Australian green groups have been secretly funded to destroy our coal industry by environmental activists connected to the Clinton campaign. Apart from the friendship between Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard, what does Australia get from the Clinton Foundation for donating all that cash? A whole lot of trouble is what. 
+The email account of Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta reveals extraordinary details of the sabotage of the $16 billion Adani coalmine in Queensland, which has damaged Australia’s national interest and denied cheap electricity to millions of poor Indians. 
+Last August John Hepburn, former Greenpeace activist and founder of Australian anti-coal group the Sunrise Project, sent a crowing email to his American paymasters, the Sandler Foundation, which is also a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. (Founder Herb Sandler and mate George Soros funded another Clinton-aligned progressive group, the Centre for American Progress, previously chaired by Podesta.) 
+“The Adani Carmichael mine and the whole Galilee Basin fossil fuel industrial complex is in its death throes,” Hepburn wrote in the email forwarded to Podesta. 
+“I am going to buy a few bottles of bubbly for a celebration with the (Environmental ­Defenders Office) legal team, our colleagues at GetUp, Greenpeace, 350.org, ECF, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Mackay Conservation Group, Market Forces and the brilliant and tireless Sunrise team.” 
+In another email forwarded to Podesta, Hepburn panics about an Abbott government inquiry into environmental charities and discusses hiding Sunrise’s sources of funding to safeguard its charitable tax status. 
+Hepburn boasts about the latest legal blow to Adani, when the Federal Court overturned its approval and the Commonwealth Bank quit the project. 
+In it he now wants to “escalate the campaign ­towards the other 3 big Australian banks”. 
+And he mocks miners who “try to claim that there is some kind of foreign-funded and tightly orchestrated conspiracy to systematically ­destroy the Australian coal industry. (I seriously don’t know where they get these wacky ideas from!)” 
+As if it’s not bad enough that foreign-funded activists are meddling with our largest export earner, Podesta’s emails also detail their insidious influence on indigenous land owners who blocked the Adani mine using powerful native title rights. 
+This alliance of green groups with native title owners is a frightening development detailed in a new book by historian Keith Windschuttle, The Break-up of Australia: The Real Agenda behind Aboriginal Recognition. 
+He reveals the imminent expansion of native title claims, either ­approved or quietly being processed, stretch across a whopping 60 per cent of the Australian continent, an area twice the size of Western Europe. 
+Already 6000sq km of the Kidman cattle empire in the Kimberley has been given, via native title, to green activists to be converted from productive cattle country to a wildlife conservation area. 
+“In return, the Yulumbu people get a paltry $50,000 a year royalty,” Windschuttle writes. 
+“As a flora and fauna sanctuary it is economically defunct for the foreseeable future.” 
+At worst, writes Windschuttle, the upcoming referendum for indigenous constitutional recognition, proposed by Gillard in 2012, could pave the way for a separate Aboriginal state on native title land, funded by taxation, royalties and lease payments — passive welfare in another guise. 
+At the very least, the ­alliance between foreign-­funded green groups and ­indigenous owners gives ­environmentalists the opportunity to take whole swathes of Australia out of the productive economy and shut down industries they don’t like, from coal mines in Queensland to cattle farms in Western Australia. 
+Thanks for nothing, Hillary and Julia. ",FAKE
+3146,Vatican Ends Scrutiny Of U.S. Nuns,"Updated at 10:04 a.m. ET
+
+The Vatican has announced an end to an overhaul of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — an abrupt conclusion to a five-year doctrinal overhaul of the main umbrella group for nuns in the U.S. that began in 2012.
+
+The Vatican said Thursday that it has accepted a report on the overhaul of the LCWR ""marking the conclusion of the Doctrinal Assessment"" of the umbrella group.
+
+NPR's Sylvia Poggioli tells our Newscast unit the unexpected announcement is seen as a sign of Pope Francis' focus on a more merciful church.
+
+LCWR leaders met with Pope Francis later Thursday, during their annual visit to Rome. David Gibson of Religion News Service described the meeting as ""another indicator of the thaw in relations."" He added:
+
+The Rev. James Martin, SJ., editor at large of the Jesuit magazine America, said in a Facebook post that the LCWR agreed to implement some changes, ""mainly regarding speakers and liturgies at its annual conventions. But overall, the operations of the LCWR remains intact.""
+
+Joshua J. McElwee, writing in the National Catholic Reporter, said the ""news seems to bring to an end what had been an especially contentious period between the women religious and the Vatican.""
+
+At issue was an investigation of the LCWR that began in 2012 under Cardinal William Levada, the previous head of the Vatican's theological watchdog. As NPR's Scott Neuman reported at the time, ""the Vatican issued a report declaring that the umbrella group representing most American nuns had strayed from church doctrine and adopted 'radical feminist' views. Rome ordered Seattle's archbishop to begin monitoring all operations of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious."" The investigation called for a five-year doctrinal overhaul of the group.
+
+Sister Simone Campbell, head of the Catholic social justice lobby Network, told NPR at the time that the investigation came ""like a sock in the stomach.""
+
+A separate Vatican investigation into U.S. nuns ended last December with the Vatican expressing what NPR's Sylvia Poggioli called ""appreciation for the dedicated work of nuns in education, health and among the poor.""",REAL
+4489,How Clinton’s email scandal took root,"Hillary Clinton’s email problems began in her first days as secretary of state. She insisted on using her personal BlackBerry for all her email communications, but she wasn’t allowed to take the device into her seventh-floor suite of offices, a secure space known as Mahogany Row.
+
+For Clinton, this was frustrating. As a political heavyweight and chief of the nation’s diplomatic corps, she needed to manage a torrent of email to stay connected to colleagues, friends and supporters. She hated having to put her BlackBerry into a lockbox before going into her own office.
+
+Her aides and senior officials pushed to find a way to enable her to use the device in the secure area. But their efforts unsettled the diplomatic security bureau, which was worried that foreign intelligence services could hack her BlackBerry and transform it into a listening device.
+
+On Feb. 17, 2009, less than a month into Clinton’s tenure, the issue came to a head. Department security, intelligence and technology specialists, along with five officials from the National Security Agency, gathered in a Mahogany Row conference room. They explained the risks to Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, while also seeking “mitigation options” that would accommodate Clinton’s wishes.
+
+“The issue here is one of personal comfort,” one of the participants in that meeting, Donald Reid, the department’s senior coordinator for security infrastructure, wrote afterward in an email that described Clinton’s inner circle of advisers as “dedicated [BlackBerry] addicts.”
+
+Clinton used her BlackBerry as the group continued looking for a solution. But unknown to diplomatic security and technology officials at the department, there was another looming communications vulnerability: Clinton’s Black­Berry was digitally tethered to a private email server in the basement of her family home, some 260 miles to the north in Chappaqua, N.Y., documents and interviews show.
+
+Those officials took no steps to protect the server against intruders and spies, because they apparently were not told about it.
+
+The vulnerability of Clinton’s basement server is one of the key unanswered questions at the heart of a scandal that has dogged her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
+
+Since Clinton’s private email account was brought to light a year ago in a New York Times report — followed by an Associated Press report revealing the existence of the server — the matter has been a source of nonstop national news. Private groups have filed lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act. Investigations were begun by congressional committees and inspector general’s offices in the State Department and the U.S. Intelligence Community, which referred the case to the FBI in July for “counterintelligence purposes” after determining that the server carried classified material.
+
+The FBI is now trying to determine whether a crime was committed in the handling of that classified material. It is also examining whether the server was hacked.
+
+Dozens of FBI personnel have been deployed to run down leads, according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey. The FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election.
+
+The Washington Post reviewed hundreds of documents and interviewed more than a dozen knowledgeable government officials to understand the decisions and the implications of Clinton’s actions. The resulting scandal revolves around questions about classified information, the preservation of government records and the security of her email communication.
+
+From the earliest days, Clinton aides and senior officials focused intently on accommodating the secretary’s desire to use her private email account, documents and interviews show.
+
+Throughout, they paid insufficient attention to laws and regulations governing the handling of classified material and the preservation of government records, interviews and documents show. They also neglected repeated warnings about the security of the BlackBerry while Clinton and her closest aides took obvious security risks in using the basement server.
+
+Senior officials who helped Clinton with her BlackBerry claim they did not know details of the basement server, the State Department said, even though they received emails from her private account. One email written by a senior official mentioned the server.
+
+The scandal has pitted those who say Clinton was innocently trying to find the easiest way to communicate against those who say she placed herself above the law in a quest for control of her records. She and her campaign have been accused of confusing matters with contradictory and evolving statements that minimized the consequences of her actions.
+
+Clinton, 68, declined to be interviewed. She has said repeatedly that her use of the private server was benign and that there is no evidence of any intrusion.
+
+In a news conference last March, she said: “I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.”
+
+During a Democratic debate on March 9, she acknowledged using poor judgment but maintained she was permitted to use her own server: “It wasn’t the best choice. I made a mistake. It was not prohibited. It was not in any way dis­allowed.”
+
+The unfolding story of Clinton’s basement server has outraged advocates of government transparency and mystified political supporters and adversaries alike. Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., who is presiding over one of the FOIA lawsuits, has expressed puzzlement over the affair. He noted that Clinton put the State Department in the position of having to ask her to return thousands of government records — her work email.
+
+“Am I missing something?” Sullivan asked during a Feb. 23 hearing. “How in the world could this happen?”
+
+Hillary Clinton began preparing to use the private basement server after President Obama picked her to be his secretary of state in November 2008. The system was already in place. It had been set up for former president Bill Clinton, who used it for personal and Clinton Foundation business.
+
+On Jan. 13, 2009, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton registered a private email domain for Hillary Clinton, clintonemail.com, that would allow her to send and receive email through the server.
+
+Eight days later, she was sworn in as secretary of state. Among the multitude of challenges she faced was how to integrate email into her State Department routines. Because Clinton did not use desktop computers, she relied on her personal BlackBerry, which she had started using three years earlier.
+
+For years, employees across the government had used official and private email accounts.
+
+The new president was making broad promises about government transparency that had a bearing on Clinton’s communication choices. In memos to his agency chiefs, Obama said his administration would promote accountability through the disclosure of a wide array of information, one part of a “profound national commitment to ensuring an open government.” That included work emails.
+
+One year earlier, during her own presidential campaign, Clinton had said that if elected, “we will adopt a presumption of openness and Freedom of Information Act requests and urge agencies to release information quickly.”
+
+But in those first few days, Clinton’s senior advisers were already taking steps that would help her circumvent those high-flown words, according to a chain of internal State Department emails released to Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit organization suing the government over Clinton’s emails.
+
+Leading that effort was Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff. She was joined by Clinton adviser Huma Abedin, Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy and Lewis Lukens, a senior career official who served as Clinton’s logistics chief. Their focus was on accommodating Clinton.
+
+Mills wondered whether the department could get her an encrypted device like the one from the NSA that Obama used.
+
+“If so, how can we get her one?” Mills wrote the group on Saturday evening, Jan. 24.
+
+Lukens responded that same evening, saying he could help set up “a stand alone PC in the Secretary’s office, connected to the internet (but not through our system) to enable her to check her emails from her desk.”
+
+Abedin and Mills declined to comment for this article, according to Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. Lukens also declined to comment, according to the State Department.
+
+As undersecretary for management, Kennedy occupies a central role in Clinton’s email saga. The department acknowledged that Kennedy, as part of his normal duties, helped Clinton with her BlackBerry. But in a statement, the department said: “Under Secretary Kennedy maintains that he was unaware of the email server. Completely separate from that issue, Under Secretary Kennedy was aware that at the beginning of her tenure, Secretary Clinton’s staff was interested in setting up a computer at the Department so she could email her family during the work day.
+
+“As we have previously made clear — no such computer was ever set up. Furthermore, Under Secretary Kennedy had very little insight into Secretary Clinton’s email practices including how ­frequently or infrequently then-Secretary Clinton used email.”
+
+As it happened, Clinton would never have a government BlackBerry, personal computer or email account. A request for a secure device from the NSA was rebuffed at the outset: “The current state of the art is not too user friendly, has no infrastructure at State, and is very expensive,” Reid, the security official, wrote in an email on Feb. 13, adding that “each time we asked the question ‘What was the solution for POTUS?’ we were politely told to shut up and color.”
+
+Clinton would continue to use her BlackBerry for virtually all of her government communication, but not on Mahogany Row.
+
+Her first known BlackBerry communication through the basement server came on Jan. 28, 2009, when Clinton exchanged notes with Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, then chief of the U.S. Central Command, according to a State Department spokeswoman. It has not been released.
+
+Few knew the details behind the new clintonemail.com address. But news about her choice to use her own BlackBerry spread quickly among the department’s diplomatic security and “intelligence countermeasures” specialists.
+
+Their fears focused on the seventh floor, which a decade earlier had been the target of Russian spies who managed to plant a listening device inside a decorative chair-rail molding not far from Mahogany Row. In more recent years, in a series of widely publicized cyberattacks, hackers breached computers at the department along with those at other federal agencies and several major corporations.
+
+The State Department security officials were distressed about the possibility that Clinton’s BlackBerry could be compromised and used for eavesdropping, documents and interviews show.
+
+After the meeting on Feb. 17 with Mills, security officials in the department crafted a memo about the risks. And among themselves, they expressed concern that other department employees would follow the “bad example” and seek to use insecure BlackBerrys themselves, emails show.
+
+As they worked on the memo, they were aware of a speech delivered by Joel F. Brenner, then chief of counterintelligence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, on Feb. 24 at a hotel in Vienna, Va., a State Department document shows. Brenner urged his audience to consider what could have happened to them during a visit to the recent Beijing Olympics.
+
+“Your phone or BlackBerry could have been tagged, tracked, monitored and exploited between your disembarking the airplane and reaching the taxi stand at the airport,” Brenner said. “And when you emailed back home, some or all of the malware may have migrated to your home server. This is not hypothetical.”
+
+At the time, Clinton had just returned from an official trip that took her to China and elsewhere in Asia. She was embarking on another foray to the Middle East and Europe. She took her BlackBerry with her.
+
+In early March, Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell delivered a memo with the subject line “Use of Blackberries in Mahogany Row.”
+
+“Our review reaffirms our belief that the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the use of Blackberries in the Mahogany Row [redacted] considerably outweigh the convenience their use can add,” the memo said.
+
+He emphasized: “Any unclassified Blackberry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving e-mails, and exploiting calendars.”
+
+Nine days later, Clinton told Boswell that she had read his memo and “gets it,” according to an email sent by a senior diplomatic security official. “Her attention was drawn to the sentence that indicates (Diplomatic Security) have intelligence concerning this vulnerability during her recent trip to Asia,” the email said.
+
+But Clinton kept using her private BlackBerry — and the basement server.
+
+The server was nothing remarkable, the kind of system often used by small businesses, according to people familiar with its configuration at the end of her tenure. It consisted of two off-the-shelf server computers. Both were equipped with antivirus software. They were linked by cable to a local Internet service provider. A firewall was used as protection against hackers.
+
+Few could have known it, but the email system operated in those first two months without the standard encryption generally used on the Internet to protect communication, according to an independent analysis that Venafi Inc., a cybersecurity firm that specializes in the encryption process, took upon itself to publish on its website after the scandal broke.
+
+Not until March 29, 2009 — two months after Clinton began using it — did the server receive a “digital certificate” that protected communication over the Internet through encryption, according to Venafi’s analysis.
+
+It is unknown whether the system had some other way to encrypt the email traffic at the time. Without encryption — a process that scrambles communication for anyone without the correct key — email, attachments and passwords are transmitted in plain text.
+
+“That means that anyone could have accessed it. Anyone,” Kevin Bocek, vice president of threat intelligence at Venafi, told The Post.
+
+The system had other features that made it vulnerable to talented hackers, including a software program that enabled users to log on directly from the World Wide Web.
+
+Four computer-security specialists interviewed by The Post said that such a system could be made reasonably secure but that it would need constant monitoring by people trained to look for irregularities in the server’s logs.
+
+“For data of this sensitivity . . . we would need at a minimum a small team to do monitoring and hardening,” said Jason Fossen, a computer-security specialist at the SANS Institute, which provides cybersecurity training around the world.
+
+The man Clinton has said maintained and monitored her server was Bryan Pagliano, who had worked as the technology chief for her political action committee and her presidential campaign. It is not clear whether he had any help. Pagliano had also provided computer services to the Clinton family. In 2008, he received more than $5,000 for that work, according to financial disclosure statements he filed with the government.
+
+In May 2009, with Kennedy’s help, Pagliano landed a job as a political employee in the State Department’s IT division, documents and interviews show. It was an unusual arrangement.
+
+At the same time, Pagliano apparently agreed to maintain the basement server. Officials in the IT division have told investigators they could not recall previously hiring a political appointee. Three of Pagliano’s supervisors also told investigators they had no idea that Clinton used the basement server or that Pagliano was moonlighting on it.
+
+Through an attorney, Pagliano declined a request from The Post for an interview. He also refused a request from the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees to discuss his role. On Sept. 1, 2015, his attorney told the committees that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights if any attempt was made to compel his testimony. He was later given immunity by the Justice Department in exchange for his cooperation, according to articles in the New York Times and The Post.
+
+In a statement, Clinton’s campaign said the server was protected but declined to provide technical details. Clinton officials have said that server logs given to authorities show no signs of hacking.
+
+“The security and integrity of her family’s electronic communications was taken seriously from the onset when it was first set up for President Clinton’s team,” the statement said. “Suffice it to say, robust protections were put in place and additional upgrades and techniques employed over time as they became available, including consulting and employing third party experts.”
+
+The statement added that “there is no evidence there was ever a breach.”
+
+The number of emails moving through the basement system increased quickly as Hillary Clinton dove into the endless details of her globetrotting job. There were 62,320 in all, an average of 296 a week, nearly 1,300 a month, according to numbers Clinton later reported to the State Department. About half of them were work-related.
+
+Her most frequent correspondent was Mills, her chief of staff, who sent thousands of notes. Next came Abedin, the deputy chief of staff, and Jacob Sullivan, also a deputy chief of staff, according to a tally by The Post.
+
+Clinton used hdr22@clintonemail.com as her address, making it immediately apparent that the emails were not coming from or going to a government address.
+
+Most of her emails were routine, including those sent to friends. Some involved the coordination of efforts to bring aid to Haiti by the State Department and her husband’s New York-based Clinton Foundation — notes that mixed government and family business, the emails show.
+
+Others involved classified matters. State Department and Intelligence Community officials have determined that 2,093 email chains contained classified information. Most of the classified emails have been labeled as “confidential,” the lowest level of classification. Clinton herself authored 104 emails that contained classified material, a Post analysis later found.
+
+Before the server received a digital certificate marking the use of standard encryption, Clinton and her aides exchanged notes touching on North Korea, Mexico, Afghanistan, military advisers, CIA operations and a briefing for Obama.
+
+Clinton adviser Philippe Reines wrote a note to her about Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. Reines started his note by reminding Clinton that Reines’s “close friend Jeremy Bash is now [CIA Director Leon E.] Panetta’s Chief of Staff.” The rest of the note was redacted before release, under grounds that it was national-security-sensitive.
+
+On Sunday, March 29, 2009, just hours before standard encryption on the server began, Sullivan emailed Clinton a draft of a confidential report she was to make to Obama. “Attached is a draft of your Mexico trip report to POTUS,” Sullivan wrote.
+
+In the high-pressure world of diplomacy, the sharing of such material had been a discreet but common practice for many years. Officials who manage problems around the clock require a never-ending flow of incisive information to make timely decisions.
+
+Not all classified material is equally sensitive. Much of it involves discussions about foreign countries or leaders, not intelligence sources and methods. Working with classified materials can be cumbersome and, in the case of low-level classification, annoying.
+
+On Feb. 10, 2010, in an exchange with Sullivan, Clinton vented her frustration one day when she wanted to read a statement regarding José Miguel Insulza, then secretary general of the Organization of American States. Sullivan wrote that he could not send it to her immediately because the department had put it on the classified network.
+
+“It’s a public statement! Just email it,” Clinton shot back, just moments later.
+
+“Trust me, I share your exasperation,” Sullivan wrote. “But until ops converts it to the unclassified email system, there is no physical way for me to email it. I can’t even access it.”
+
+Early on June 17, 2011, Clinton grew impatient as she waited for “talking points” about a sensitive matter that had to be delivered via a secure line.
+
+“They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it,” Sullivan wrote his boss.
+
+Clinton told him to take a shortcut.
+
+“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” she said.
+
+Clinton spokesman Fallon said she was not trying to circumvent the classification system.
+
+“What she was asking was that any information that could be transmitted on the unclassified system be transmitted,” he said. “It is wrong to suggest that she was requesting otherwise. The State Department looked into this and confirmed that no classified material was sent through a non-secure fax or email.”
+
+Security remained a constant concern. On June 28, 2011, in response to reports that Gmail accounts of government workers had been targeted by “online adversaries,” a note went out over Clinton’s name urging department employees to “avoid conducting official Department business from your personal email accounts.”
+
+But she herself ignored the warning and continued using her BlackBerry and the basement server.
+
+In December 2012, near the end of Clinton’s tenure, a nonprofit group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a FOIA request seeking records about her email. CREW received a response in May 2013: “no records responsive to your request were located.”
+
+Other requests for Clinton records met the same fate — until the State Department received a demand from the newly formed House Select Committee on Benghazi in July 2014. The committee wanted Clinton’s email, among other things, to see what she and others knew about the deadly attack in Libya and the response by the U.S. government.
+
+Officials in the department’s congressional affairs office found some Clinton email and saw that she had relied on the private domain, not the department’s system.
+
+Secretary of State John F. Kerry resolved to round up the Clinton emails and deliver them to Congress as quickly as possible. Department officials reached out to Clinton informally in the summer of 2014. On Oct. 28, 2014, the department contacted Clinton and the offices of three other former secretaries — Madeleine K. Albright, Condoleezza Rice and Colin L. Powell — asking if they had any email or other federal records in their possession.
+
+Albright and Rice said they did not use email while at State. Powell, secretary of state from 2001 to 2005, had a private email account through America Online but did not retain copies of his emails. The inspector general for the State Department found that Powell’s personal email account had received two emails from staff that contained “national security information classified at the Secret or Confidential levels.”
+
+Clinton lawyer David Kendall later told the State Department that her “use of personal email was consistent with the practices of other Secretaries of State,” citing Powell in particular, according to a letter he wrote in August.
+
+But Powell’s circumstances also differed from Clinton’s in notable ways. Powell had a phone line installed in his office solely to link to his private account, which he generally used for personal or non-classified communication. At the time, he was pushing the department to embrace the Internet era and wanted to set an example.
+
+“I performed a little test whenever I visited an embassy: I’d dive into the first open office I could find (sometimes it was the ambassador’s office). If the computer was on, I’d try to get into my private email account,” Powell wrote in “It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership.” “If I could, they passed.”
+
+Powell conducted virtually all of his classified communications on paper or over a State Department computer installed on his desk that was reserved for classified information, according to interviews. Clinton never had such a desktop or a classified email account, according to the State Department.
+
+On Dec. 5, 2014, Clinton lawyers delivered 12 file boxes filled with printed paper containing more than 30,000 emails. Clinton withheld almost 32,000 emails deemed to be of a personal nature.
+
+The department began releasing the emails last May, starting with some 296 emails requested by the Benghazi committee. In reviewing those emails, intelligence officials realized that some contained classified material.
+
+Clinton and her campaign have offered various responses to questions about the classifications. At first, she flat-out denied that her server ever held any. “There is no classified material,” she said at a March 10, 2015, news conference.
+
+Her campaign later released a statement saying she could not have known whether material was classified, because it was not labeled as such. “No information in Clinton’s emails was marked classified at the time she sent or received them,” the statement said.
+
+Clinton has also suggested that many of the emails were classified as a formality only because they were being prepared for release under a FOIA request. Her campaign has said that much of the classified material — in emails sent by more than 300 individuals — came from newspaper accounts and other public sources.
+
+“What you are talking about is retroactive classification,” she said during a recent debate. “And I think what we have got here is a case of overclassification.” Her statement appears to conflict with a report to Congress last year by inspectors general from the State Department and the group of spy agencies known as the Intelligence Community. They made their report after the discovery that four emails, from a sample of 40 that went through her server, contained classified information.
+
+“These emails were not retro­actively classified by the State Department,” the report said. “Rather these emails contained classified information when they were generated and, according to IC classification officials, that information remains classified today. This classified information should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system.”
+
+One of those four emails has since been declassified and released publicly by the State Department. The department has questioned the classification of another of those emails.
+
+Twenty-two emails discovered later were deemed so highly classified that they were withheld in their entirety from public release. “They are on their face sensitive and obviously classified,” Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Post. “This information should have been maintained in the most secure, classified, top-secret servers.”
+
+Fallon pointed out that none of those emails originated with Clinton, something that he said Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the Senate Select Intelligence Committee vice chairman, has noted. “We strongly disagree with the decision to withhold these emails in full,” he said.
+
+Under Title 18, Section 1924, of federal law, it is a misdemeanor punishable by fines and imprisonment for a federal employee to knowingly remove classified information “without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location.”
+
+Previous cases brought under the law have required proof of an intent to mishandle classified information, a high hurdle in the Clinton case. The basement server also put Clinton at risk of violating laws and regulations aimed at protecting and preserving government records.
+
+In a statement, Clinton’s campaign said she had received “guidance regarding the need to preserve federal records” and followed those rules. “It was her practice to email government employees on their ‘.gov’ email address. That way, work emails would be immediately captured and preserved in government ­record-keeping systems,” the statement said.
+
+Fallon said that “over 90 percent” of the more than 30,000 work-related emails “were to or from government email accounts.”
+
+Specialists interviewed by The Post said her practices fell short of what laws and regulations mandated. Some of those obligations were spelled out a few months before Clinton took office in National Archives and Records Administration Bulletin 2008-05, which said every email system was supposed to “permit easy and timely retrieval” of the records.
+
+The secretary of state’s work emails are supposed to be preserved permanently. In addition, rules also mandated that permanent records are to be sent to the department’s Records Service Center “at the end of the Secretary’s tenure or sooner if necessary” for safekeeping.
+
+Under Title 18, Section 2071, it is a Class E felony to take federal records without authorization, something that is sometimes referred to as the “alienation” of records. The law is rarely enforced, but a conviction can carry a fine or imprisonment.
+
+Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year he believed that Clinton’s server ran afoul of the rules. In a memo to the committee, Baron wrote that “the setting up of and maintaining a private email network as the sole means to conduct official business by email, coupled with the failure to timely return email records into government custody, amounts to actions plainly inconsistent with the federal recordkeeping laws.”
+
+On May 19, 2015, in response to a FOIA lawsuit from the media organization Vice News, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered all the email to be released in stages, with re­dactions.
+
+One notable email was sent in August 2011. Stephen Mull, then serving as the department’s executive secretary, emailed Abedin, Mills and Kennedy about getting a government-issued BlackBerry linked to a government server for Clinton.
+
+“We are working to provide the Secretary per her request a Department issued Blackberry to replace personal unit, which is malfunctioning (possibly because of her personal email server is down.) We will prepare two version for her to use — one with an operating State Department email account (which would mask her identity, but which would also be subject to FOIA requests).”
+
+“Steve — let’s discuss the state blackberry. doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
+
+Fallon said the email showed that the secretary’s staff “opposed the idea of her identity being masked.”
+
+Last month, in a hearing about a Judicial Watch lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Sullivan cited that email as part of the reason he ordered the State Department produce records related to its initial failures in the FOIA searches for Clinton’s records.
+
+Speaking in open court, Sullivan said legitimate questions have been raised about whether Clinton’s staff was trying to help her to sidestep FOIA.
+
+“We’re talking about a Cabinet-level official who was accommodated by the government for reasons unknown to the public. And I think that’s a fair statement: For reasons heretofore unknown to the public. And all the public can do is speculate,” he said, adding: “This is all about the public’s right to know.”
+
+Alice Crites contributed to this report. 
+
+ 
+
+CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Clinton used two different email addresses, sometimes interchangeably, as secretary of state. She used only hdr22@clintonemail.com as secretary of state.  Also, an earlier version of this article reported that 147 FBI agents had been detailed to the investigation, according to a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey. Two U.S. law enforcement officials have since told The Washington Post that figure is too high. The FBI will not provide an exact figure, but the officials say the number of FBI personnel involved is fewer than 50.
+
+ 
+
+",REAL
+9521,Jews ‘blamed for Holocaust’ at House of Lords event,"Jews ‘blamed for Holocaust’ at House of Lords event Jews ‘blamed for Holocaust’ at House of Lords event By 0 60 
+Israel has condemned a “shameful” event hosted by the British House of Lords in which Jews were blamed for the Holocaust and Israel was compared to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). 
+The session marked the launch of the Balfour Apology Campaign ahead of the Balfour Declaration centenary. The 1917 declaration pledged British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. 
+A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy said the gathering “gave voice to racist tropes against Jews and Israelis alike.” 
+According to the Times, an audience member was applauded after suggesting Hitler only decided to kill Jews after being provoked by anti-German protests led by a rabbi, Stephen Wise, in New York. 
+“[He] made the boycott on Germany, the economic boycott… which antagonized Hitler, over the edge, to then want to systematically kill Jews wherever he could find them.” 
+Read more 
+The speaker also said Rabbi Wise told the New York Times in 1905 there were “6 million bleeding and suffering reasons to justify Zionism.” This quote is often used by Holocaust deniers to suggest the figure of 6 million Jews later killed by the Nazis was a myth. 
+The audience member – reportedly a member of the anti-Zionist strictly Orthodox Neturei Karta sect – also compared Israel to IS. 
+“Just as the so-called Jewish state in Palestine doesn’t come from Judaism. This Islamic State in Syria is nothing with Islam. It is a perversion of Islam just as Zionism is a perversion of Judaism.” 
+Another audience member said, to applause: “If anybody is anti-Semitic, it’s Israelis themselves.” 
+David Collier, a blogger who attended the session, says he “witnessed a Jew-hating festival at the heart of the British estate.” 
+The event run by Baroness Tonge, a former Liberal Democrat MP who sits as an independent, and the Palestinian Return Centre. 
+Tonge reportedly made no attempt to challenge the comments. 
+She has run into trouble for her own anti-Israeli outbursts and resigned as the Lib Dem whip after claiming the state of Israel was “not going to be there forever.” 
+The House of Lords event was also run by the Palestinian Return Centre. 
+Campaigners are calling on Britain to apologize for the Balfour Declaration and show remorse for its “past colonial crimes” in Palestine. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+4454,The Disappearing Middle: Electorate Way Less Moderate Than Past Primaries,"The Disappearing Middle: Electorate Way Less Moderate Than Past Primaries
+
+One of the biggest stories of the election cycle is turnout (as we've reported a few times now): Republican turnout has spiked far beyond 2012 levels, and Democratic turnout has fallen off after the party's mammoth 2008.
+
+The tone and the turnout are vastly different between Republicans and Democrats this year, but oddly enough, both sides have something crucial in common: their voters are far less moderate than they were in their last primaries.
+
+Let's start with the Republican numbers. The below chart shows the ideological difference between the Republican electorate this year and in 2012. Each dot represents one state — so, for example, 33 percent of Vermont Republican primary voters in 2016 said they considered themselves moderate or liberal, compared to 53 percent in 2012. That puts Vermont at negative-20 for ""somewhat conservative"" — the most extreme result we found among the 15 GOP states for which there was sufficient exit-poll data.
+
+It's true exit polls can have a margin of error, but there's no mistaking a pattern here. In no state did the share of ""moderate"" and ""liberal"" GOP primary voters grow from 2012 to 2016. (The exit polls lumped moderate and liberal together in 2012, so they're not separated out here.)
+
+Altogether, an NPR analysis finds that the share of ""somewhat conservative"" voters on the GOP side climbed by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016 over 2012's primaries. (That is, among the states with exit polling data for both years). The share who were moderate or liberal, meanwhile, fell by around 9 percentage points, and the share who were ""very conservative"" held relatively steady.
+
+Something similar is at work on the Democratic side, as well:
+
+The share of moderate and conservative Democratic voters was down — sometimes dramatically so — in most states that have voted thus far. Meanwhile, the share of people who are somewhat or very liberal is way up.
+
+This year, around 60 percent of Democratic primary voters said they considered themselves ""somewhat"" or ""very liberal,"" up from around 45 percent in 2008 (once again, among states with sufficient exit polling data for both years).
+
+So interestingly, though voters on both sides are less moderate than in the last contests, Democrats this year have more decidedly moved toward the ""very liberal"" end of the spectrum. Republican voters, meanwhile, are way more ""somewhat conservative"" than in 2012, but don't appear to be more ""very conservative.""
+
+One thing to keep in mind: Republican turnout across the board is higher this year. That means there are still a few more moderate and liberal Republican primary and caucus voters this cycle than there were in the 2012 primaries — it's just that the number of somewhat conservative Republicans shot up way more.
+
+Likewise, Democratic turnout is down almost entirely across the board. Interestingly, even with the sharp drop off in turnout, multiplying the exit poll data by the turnout numbers suggests that the raw number of ""very liberal"" Democratic voters is, in fact, up slightly from 2008. However, the number of moderate and conservative voters dropped off steeply. And even though the share of ""somewhat liberal"" voters is up, the raw number is also down.
+
+But anyway: all of this could mean that a bunch of moderate and conservative Democrats who voted in 2008 stayed home this year, while a lot of those somewhat and very liberal Democrats from 2008 came out again. Likewise, it could mean that the Republican wave of turnout is driven largely by a bunch of ""somewhat conservative"" voters who weren't there in 2012.
+
+And looking at the results so far, there are simple explanations to why this might be happening. The very-liberal Bernie Sanders is probably driving some of the turnout among very-liberal voters. It's likewise possible that the somewhat-conservative Trump is behind the bump in somewhat conservative voters in Republican primaries (while Ted Cruz does better among very conservative voters, and John Kasich gets more votes among moderates).
+
+But then, it might not just be candidate-driven: it's possible that lots of people have simply become more conservative or liberal than they were four or eight years ago. This is also to some degree plausible, as there is evidence that Americans are getting more polarized.
+
+In other words, there's a chicken-egg question here, with no clear answer — chances are, they're both right. To the degree that voters are more polarized, they're gravitating toward more extreme candidates. And Sanders and Trump also both happen to be very good at energizing people to turn out and vote for them.",REAL
+4708,"Hannity: WikiLeaks Has Proven That ""Everything The Conspiracy Theorists Said"" Was True","Radio host Sean Hannity said on his show Wednesday that the latest revelations about Hillary Clinton's campaign from WikiLeaks prove that ""everything that conspiracy theorists have said over the years"" is true. 
+
+ 
+
+ His examples: 
+
+ 
+
+ -- ""Hillary knew that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding ISIS."" 
+
+ 
+
+ -- ""Hillary Clinton’s dream of a hemispheric common market; open trade and open borders."" 
+
+ 
+
+ -- ""Left wing activists plot[ting] a Catholic Spring and [infiltrating] the Catholic Church."" 
+
+ 
+
+ -- The media ""conspiring to release [debate] quesitons to Hillary Clinton ahead of time.""
+
+ 
+
+ -- Clinton aides ""advancing progressive ideology to foment revolution.""
+
+ 
+
+ ""They’re propagandizing you, they’re posing as objective journalists and they are not,"" he said about CNN, the New York Times, CNBC and the Boston Globe. ""This is a mass media assault on your mind."" 
+
+ 
+
+ ""This is like, you know, Communism in the Soviet Union propaganda,"" he said. ""It’s really sad but it's also true and it's also reality and it's also the world you live in.""
+
+ 
+
+",REAL
+9340,Russia successfully tests its first-ever hypersonic weapon,"Print version Font Size The hypersonic aircraft , known as ""article 4202"" or ""15U71"" was successfully tested on October 25 for the first time. All avionics and electronic systems, as well as the control system of the vehicle are entirely of Russian production.The weapon is capable of speeding up to 15 Max, or 7 km/sec. The vehicle was designed to be installed at prospective intercontinental ballistic missiles, instead of conventional warheads. The ""4202"" vehicle starts working at an altitude of about 100 km and flies to the target at the speed of 5-7 km/s. Before entering dense layers of the atmosphere, directly above the target, the hypersonic aircraft performs a complex maneuver that makes it difficult to interception by missile defense systems of the enemy . Noteworthy, the project of hypersonic warheads called ""Albatross"" appeared in the USSR in the mid-1980s, as a response to USA's attempts to create a missile defense system within the concept of ""star wars."" However, due to the technical difficulties, the project was shut down. In the mid-1990s, the Scientific and Production Association (NPO) resumed the development of the new weapon under the number ""4202.""According to sources at Roscosmos state corporation, the successful tests of the new hypersonic aircraft were made possible with the help of the intensive import substitution program. For instance, Russian engineers had to get rid of the control system, previously manufactured by Ukrainian company Hartron. The successfully implemented program provided an opportunity to resume the tests. As a result, all the avionics and electronic systems, as well as the control system now completely consist of Russian components.The Russian Army is to receive new hypersonic weapons by 2020 . The development of high-speed anti-aircraft missiles has made it possible to intercept and destroy any modern aircraft or missile at any altitude. The way out is to create the aircraft capable of flying faster than interceptor missiles.For this particular reason, major powers of the world, such as the USA, Russia and China, rushed to develop hypersonic flight vehicles of different types and purposes. China, for example, tested the hypersonic WU-14 glider on 9 January 2015. The Chinese aircraft is launched into outer space with the help of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then, the vehicle develops the speed of 10M, that is, more than 12,300 km/h, and dives onto the target. State-of-the-art air defense systems are unable to detect and intercept a target flying at this speed. China has thus become the third country in the world, after Russia and the United States, which has the technology of hypersonic vehicles for both nuclear and conventional weapons. In fact, the Chinese have created a warhead with control surfaces that can maneuver in flight thus becoming practically invulnerable. However, this vehicle does not have its own engine, so the Chinese creation has become another weapon for ""the poorest."" Russia currently works on different types of hypersonic scramjet missiles, which can be launched from land, ships or aircraft.Pravda.Ru requested an expert opinion from chief editor of ""Arms Export"" magazine, Andrey Frolov.""How competitive is Russia in the development of hypersonic aircraft?"" ""Russia is at the forefront. This is not the first test, I think that in the near future these systems will be passed into service at the army. The Americans do not have such weapons yet, the Chinese are in the development process.""""Are there any other details available?"" ""This is a secret subject. We know that such weapons have been created - and this is a lot to know already."" Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru Five types of Russian weapons which USA are afraid of",FAKE
+8145,The Hulk Actor Mark Ruffalo Has Joined Standing Rock to Protest DAPL,". The Hulk Actor Mark Ruffalo Has Joined Standing Rock to Protest DAPL Mark Ruffalo has graced our screens for years. Starring in movies such as Shutter Island, Zodiac and... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/the-hulk-actor-mark-ruffalo-has-joined.html Mark Ruffalo has graced our screens for years. Starring in movies such as Shutter Island, Zodiac and The Avengers as The Hulk, the Hollywood star is no stranger to fame and publicity. Ruffalo is also renown for using his celebrity status to highlight the more important causes and issues that we as a race, confront. The self-confessed climate change advocate has recently made headlines again, while joining in with the DAPL protestors. The DAPL protestors have been covered extensively here, at Anon, as the North Dakota oil pipeline continues in its construction.This week, Ruffalo was seen standing in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe facing off against police kitted up in riot gear. The underground pipeline has been a strong point of contention over the last months. Developer Energy Access Partners has claimed they have the proper permits to pursue the pipeline development in what they claim is private land. However, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and many of their supporters say the pipeline, planned to span some 1,134 miles through North Dakota to Illinois, is running through sacred Native American land. A photo posted by Mark Ruffalo (@markruffalo) on Oct 26, 2016 at 3:06pm PDT Ruffalo and Native renewables founder Wahleah Jones went to Cannon Ball, ND, to present the Sioux tribal elders with gifts of solar collection arrays in mobile trailers, to provide the protestors with clean energy. It is with this gift, Ruffalo hopes to help the Native American tribes remain firm at their protest encampment and further their cause – particularly to protect their sources of clean water, something the oil pipeline very much threatens. (The pipeline is listed to run directly under the Missouri River.)“We know from experience that pipelines leak, explode, pollute and poison land and water. But it doesn’t have to be that way,” Ruffalo said, who has been campaigning the anti-fracking movement since 2008.“This pipeline is a black snake that traverses four states and 200 waterways with fracked Bakken oil.” As per The Free Thought Project , the solar trailers will assist the Sioux tribe and other Native American tribes standing in the protest with medical facilities amongst other necessities, with an endless source of renewable energy. An irony not lost on the actor. Mark Ruffalo is another example of an individual not just simply staying in the by lines, donating money, but rather, he is using his celebrity status and time to display yet another injustice against the citizens of the world. He understands the lack of media attention this protest is receiving – and the lack of support. A photo posted by Mark Ruffalo (@markruffalo) on Oct 27, 2016 at 7:04pm PDT A video posted by Mark Ruffalo (@markruffalo) on Oct 27, 2016 at 8:44am PDT “There’s people being really hurt there; it’s very scary,” said Ruffalo on CNN. “The National Guard has been called in. This is not an emergency. This is not a national emergency. These are peaceful protesters.“Every single person you see there was trained in peaceful resistance. They spend basically the entire day doing prayers, chanting. I’ve never been around so peaceful a stand.”“This particular issue has brought together five hundred tribes from all over the nation,” the actor said. “Never in the history of our nation have all of the Native American tribes come together under one issue. They see this as a very special historic moment for them.“We can’t forget our humanity in the face of these kinds of things.” Reference: Anonhq  ",FAKE
+1461,AP FACT CHECK: The Republican debaters and the facts,"Ben Carson pitched a tax plan with numbers that didn't add up. Donald Trump boasted that he's paying his own way in the campaign, but he isn't. Chris Christie accused the government of stealing Social Security money that it has actually borrowed -- and has been paying back with interest.
+
+Even the price of hamburger got a bad rap in the latest Republican presidential debate, thanks to Ted Cruz.
+
+A look at some of the claims Wednesday night and how they compare with the facts:
+
+CRUZ: ""If you look at a single mom buying groceries, she sees hamburger prices have gone up nearly 40 percent. She sees her cost of electricity going up. She sees her health insurance going up. And loose money is one of the major problems.""
+
+THE FACTS: Americans may be facing many economic challenges, but rising inflation isn't one of them. And ""loose money,"" a way of describing the Federal Reserve's low interest rate policies, isn't to blame for expensive hamburgers.
+
+Beef prices rose 21 percent in January of this year compared with a year earlier. That reflected a Midwest drought that had caused some cattle ranchers to cull their herds. Beef prices have since settled down and were up just 1 percent in September from a year earlier.
+
+Electricity costs have actually fallen 0.4 percent during that period. Those are national averages, so some local areas will have different figures. Overall, inflation has remained below even the Fed's 2 percent target for the past three years. In fact, the government's primary inflation measure, the Consumer Price Index, has actually been unchanged in the past 12 months.
+
+CARSON: His proposed flat-rate tax, which would have everyone pay an income tax rate of about 15 percent, ""works out very well"" in budget terms because it would spark enough economic growth to offset the lower rate.
+
+THE FACTS: Carson says his proposed tax would not increase the budget deficit because he would tax the entire economic output of the U.S. -- the gross domestic product -- plus corporate income and capital gains.
+
+Carson has not laid out a detailed plan, so it is difficult to measure how it would affect revenues or the economy. But based on what he said, he's double-counting because corporate revenues are part of the GDP.
+
+A tax rate of 15 percent would be a huge tax cut for the wealthy. The top income tax rate for individuals is now 39.6 percent. The corporate tax rate for corporations is 35 percent.
+
+To help offset the rate cuts, Carson said he would ""get rid of all the deductions and all the loopholes."" That's a bold proposal, considering how popular many tax breaks are, including deductions for interest on home mortgages and charitable contributions, as well as exemptions for health insurance and retirement savings.
+
+CHRISTIE: FBI Director James Comey said police officers are holding back ""because of a lack of support from politicians like the president of the United States.""
+
+THE FACTS: That's not what Comey said.
+
+In a speech last week about an alarming rise in crime, Comey said some officers feel under siege because of the spread of viral videos taken by young people with cell phones. Comey said he'd heard about one police official who told his force ""their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video.""
+
+But Comey never mentioned Obama or blamed politicians for failing to support police. And Comey made clear he didn't have data to back up his gut impression.
+
+Christie also said when Obama was asked to speak about the issue, he declined to support police. In fact, Obama gave a firm defense of police Tuesday, telling a police chiefs convention that ""this country is safer because of your efforts.""
+
+TRUMP: ""I'm putting up 100 percent of my own money.""
+
+THE FACTS: No, he's not.
+
+Of $3.9 million raised for his campaign in the latest fundraising quarter, only $100,000 came from his own pocket. That was one major revelation from the latest batch of presidential fundraising reports, filed Oct. 15 with the Federal Election Commission.
+
+That's a drastic shift from his springtime fundraising report, when he loaned his campaign nearly all of the $1.9 million it had.
+
+BUSH: ""Marco, when you signed up for this, this was a six-year term, and you should be showing up for work.""
+
+RUBIO: ""Barack Obama missed 60 or 70 percent of his votes"" when running for president while he was in the Senate.
+
+THE FACTS: Bush correctly cited Rubio's spotty attendance record in the Senate since running for president, but ignored the fact that this is common when someone in public office runs a White House campaign --and previous candidates were absent far more often. Bush himself is free to run for president as he pleases, because he doesn't have a day job from which to be absent.
+
+For his part, Rubio didn't offer a fair comparison when comparing his Senate voting rate with Obama's.
+
+From Oct. 27, 2014, to Oct. 26, 2015, Rubio was absent for 26 percent of Senate votes, a worse attendance record than other senators running for president, according to an analysis by GovTrack.us, which tracks congressional voting records.
+
+But in a comparable period in the 2008 race -- from Oct. 23, 2006, to Oct. 22, 2007 -- Obama was absent for 29 percent of votes, a bit more than Rubio's absences, but not as much more as Rubio charged. Republican John McCain was absent for 51 percent of Senate votes in that period.
+
+Both Obama and McCain went on to miss an even bigger share of Senate votes as the election progressed -- an expected development bound to be seen again in 2016.
+
+CHRISTIE: The federal government has ""stolen"" the Social Security taxes paid by workers and spent it on other things. ""It isn't their money any more. ... It got stolen from them. It's not theirs anymore. The government stole it and spent it a long time ago.""
+
+THE FACTS: The money is not stolen, it's borrowed.
+
+Over the past 30 years, Social Security has collected about $2.7 trillion more in payroll taxes than it has paid in benefits. By law, the Treasury Department has invested the surplus in U.S. Treasury bonds.
+
+Over that same time period, the federal government has run budget deficits in all but a few years. To finance the deficits, the government has borrowed money, from other government agencies as well as public debt markets.
+
+The money from Social Security has been spent, but Social Security holds Treasury bonds worth $2.7 trillion, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Saying the money has been stolen assumes that the federal government will not honor the bonds.
+
+Social Security has been paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes since 2010. The program has been able to pay full benefits because the federal government has honored the bonds.
+
+TRUMP: Asked about his criticism of Rubio for his support for increasing the number of high-skilled foreign workers given visas to work in the U.S. -- calling Rubio Facebook CEO ""Mark Zuckerburg's personal senator"" -- Trump denied ever making the comment. ""I never said that. I never said that,"" he said.
+
+THE FACTS: He did say it, on his own website. Trump's immigration policy calls for a different approach -- raising the prevailing wage for the jobs that attract high-skilled foreign workers, in hopes that they'll be filled by more Americans.
+
+Trump's policy statement said doing that ""will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg's personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.""
+
+SEN. RAND PAUL: The new budget agreement ""will explode the deficit, it will allow President Obama to borrow unlimited amounts of money.""
+
+THE FACTS: The agreement allows $80 billion more spending over the next two years, which is only a small addition to the $3.67 trillion the government spends every year. The government's annual budget deficit has declined to $439 billion, about 2.5 percent of GDP, below the average for the past 40 years.
+
+Overall, whatever its faults, most economists have responded to this week's budget deal between Congress and the White House with a sigh of relief. The agreement, approved by the House earlier Wednesday, sets funding levels and extends the government's borrowing limit for two more years, thereby taking the threat of a government shutdown and debt default off the table.
+
+A 2013 budget fight led to a 16-day partial government shutdown that was widely blamed by most economists for sharp drops in consumer and business confidence that dragged on the economy.
+
+GEORGE PATAKI: ""Hillary Clinton put a server, an unsecure server, in her home as secretary of state. We have no doubt that that was hacked, and that state secrets are out there to the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese and others.""
+
+THE FACTS: The former New York governor, speaking in the undercard debate, exaggerated what's actually known about what happened to the emails of Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for her party's presidential nomination. While Clinton's email server was poorly configured and therefore more susceptible to hacking, there is no evidence of intrusion.
+
+The FBI is studying the server, which was subjected to a phishing attack by Russian-linked hackers while she was secretary of state. It's not known whether she clicked on any attachments, which would have exposed her account. Her account was also apparently the subject of cyberattacks originating in China, South Korea and Germany after she left office in early 2013. Determining whether a hack was sponsored by a nation, rather than just originating from that country, is notoriously difficult.",REAL
+440,Why the drop in income inequality?,"Even as it rises in many countries, income inequality has fallen worldwide, a result of pro-poor trends in places from Africa to China. A better focus on growth, innovation, and greater opportunities can help countries close the income gap.
+
+For many in the US and elsewhere, it has become easy to see red or feel blue about income inequality. The Panama Papers revelations about hidden riches feeds this global glum. So does a focus in the US presidential race on charges of a “rigged” economy. Indeed, within many countries, inequality has risen. But not everywhere.
+
+Worldwide, in fact, inequality is actually going down.
+
+Humanity, it seems, is not leaving its poorest behind.
+
+This conclusion comes from the work of an eminent expert on inequality, Branko Milanovic. He spent decades studying data at the World Bank and now works at City University in New York. In a new book, “Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization,” he makes a case that the rapid growth of poorer countries since 1988 has brought the first decline in inequality since the Industrial Revolution.
+
+Mr. Milanovic is pessimistic about the US reducing its inequality soon. But he finds many pro-equality trends will continue to grow the world’s new middle class. One trend is what he calls “pro-poor” innovation, such as the ability of African farmers to use cellphones to check on farm prices. Another is the use of online courses to educate poor people in skills sought by global companies.
+
+China and other Asian countries have led the way in forging development policies that have helped close the global income gap. The best inequality-buster is economic growth, Milanovic says, but other efforts are needed, such as equality in opportunities. In Brazil, for example, inequality has gone down because of better education.
+
+Milanovic’s findings are reinforced by new research from Tomáš Hellebrandt and Paolo Mauro of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. They find global inequality fell between 2003 and 2013. And they project the number of people in poverty will fall from 12.3 percent of the total population to 3.6 percent by 2035.
+
+“The ability to participate in and benefit from economic growth has immediate and tangible impacts on the lives of the bulk of the world’s population,” the two economists conclude.
+
+The very rich or the very corrupt may still hide their wealth in tax havens. Politicians in developed countries may decry rising inequality. But global trends and new data tell an alternative story about the progress already made to lift the poor.",REAL
+7844,Walmart Goes Against The Grain Of Obama’s America With New Thanksgiving Ad,"0 comments 
+Families united in prayer on Thanksgiving Day. Prayer alone is not what comes to mind when you think of Obama’s America where we are told to leave God at home and out of our pledge. 
+There has never been a more crucial time to look to God, as our nation is being divided and torn apart by the selfish greed of a corrupt society with leaders that lead from behind, and hide their dark secrets right in plain sight…because, they can. 
+Now Walmart has brought us a Thanksgiving commercial that is a huge reminder of what is good, and what is right. A reminder of what a good foundation is made up of. Being grateful, family, and prayer. 
+Most of all…coming together. 
+The 30-second ad, which at World Series rates cost Walmart $500,000 — features the diversity of Americas families and the camaraderie of its service members as they gather, pray and enjoy the bonds of family. A commercial showing everyone praying before eating??? 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 great job Walmart!! #Walmart 
+— Deplorable Jack (@DeplorableJackL) November 3, 2016 
+Then their final thoughts… 
+“America, let’s come together and take a moment to reflect on what we’re truly thankful for this holiday season. Friends, family and the chance to spend time with the ones we love. Walmart would like to give thanks to all of our Veterans and Active Duty Service Members at home and oversees this holiday season.” 
+Walmart has invited a spirit of thanksgiving with just a few seconds of video. Can you imagine if “everyday Americans” brought just a few seconds of thanksgiving into their lives daily? 
+What a difference it would make. It could change the very state we’re in right now. Where everything is about oneself and selfish desires. A generation of self-absorbed selfie taking kids who think they can’t do hard things. 
+For them…it would make a HUGE difference. Related Items",FAKE
+3851,Senate Makes History By Confirming Loretta Lynch As U.S. Attorney General,"WASHINGTON -- Loretta Lynch was confirmed as U.S. attorney general on Thursday after months of GOP delays, making history by becoming the first African-American woman to hold the post.
+
+Lynch was confirmed in the Senate 56 to 43. All Democrats voted for her, along with 10 Republicans: Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Ron Johnson (Wis.), Mark Kirk (Ill.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.).
+
+Sen Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of Lynch's loudest critics, was the only senator to miss the vote. Hours earlier, he railed against Lynch for being ""unfit"" for the job.
+
+""Today, the Senate finally confirmed Loretta Lynch to be America’s next Attorney General – and America will be better off for it,"" President Barack Obama said in a statement. ""Loretta's confirmation ensures that we are better positioned to keep our communities safe, keep our nation secure, and ensure that every American experiences justice under the law.""
+
+Republicans who opposed Lynch, who until now was the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, conceded they didn't doubt she was qualified for the job. Instead, they voted against her because of their anger over Obama's recent executive action on immigration, which would provide deportation relief for up to 1.8 million undocumented immigrants. The matter is currently tied up in a lawsuit. Lynch will defend the policy in her new role.
+
+""We are deeply concerned in this country about the president's executive amnesty. The unlawfulness of it, the breadth of it, the arrogance of it to the point that it's a direct assault on congressional power,"" said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). ""We do not have to confirm someone to the highest law enforcement position in America if that someone has publicly committed to denigrating Congress.""
+
+Obama took the executive action in November after Congress failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform. He's hardly the first president to use his executive authority on immigration matters. Every U.S. president since 1956 has used executive authority to grant various types of temporary immigration relief.
+
+Ahead of Thursday's vote, Democrats chided Republicans for throwing up so many roadblocks to Lynch's confirmation. She had been waiting for a vote for more than five months, longer than any of her recent predecessors.
+
+Lynch is ""an historic nominee,"" said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. By voting against her, he said, Republicans are ""making history for the wrong reason.""
+
+""What my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are saying is, it doesn't matter if you're qualified ... We have a new test: You must disagree with the president who nominates you,"" McCaskill added. ""It is beyond depressing. It's disgusting.""",REAL
+334,Manhunt for escaped killers expands to Vermont,"(CNN) A pair of convicted killers who escaped from an upstate New York prison may have headed across the border to Vermont, fearing the pressure of an intense manhunt in the neighboring state, authorities said Wednesday.
+
+New York State Police Superintendent Joseph D'Amico said authorities are looking ""behind every tree, under every rock and inside every structure"" for fugitives Richard Matt, 48, and David Sweat, 34. The pair made a brazen escape over the weekend from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora. The search -- now in its fifth day -- involves more than 400 law enforcement officers. The state is offering a $100,000 reward.
+
+In a news conference outside the maximum-security prison about 20 miles south of the Canadian border , Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin said the search area had expanded to his state based on information the inmates believed ""New York was going to be hot and Vermont ... cooler in terms of law enforcement.""
+
+Vermont state police vessels and additional troopers will conduct patrols on Lake Champlain, which cuts across the states. In addition, searches will include campsites and public campgrounds.
+
+""We have information that would suggest that Vermont was discussed as a possible location,"" New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at the same news conference. ""If they are headed toward Vermont ...Vermont is engaged and Vermont is mobilized and we are working hand in glove, and we will be coordinating several times a day to make sure every lead we have, every piece of information is shared.""
+
+Under an agreement with Vermont, New York state troopers will be allowed across state lines if needed, officials said.
+
+But D'Amico said authorities had no hard information the men had left New York state.
+
+Law enforcement personnel were going door-to-door in both homes and seasonal residences and conducting checkpoints in hamlets and towns surrounding Dannemora. Cuomo said the inmates may have gotten a head start of several hours before the manhunt began.
+
+""These men are nothing to be trifled with,"" Cuomo said.
+
+For the first time since the escape, law enforcement officials acknowledged publicly that a woman who worked with the convicts in the tailoring shop at the prison may have played a role in the elaborate breakout.
+
+D'Amico, without elaborating, said Mitchell had befriended the men and ""may have had some sort of role in assisting them.""
+
+She has not been arrested or charged in connection with their escape, nor has anyone else. The source added that Mitchell is cooperating with police, having provided information as needed.
+
+Her cell phone was used to call several people connected to Matt, according to another source with knowledge of the investigation. It's not clear who made these calls, when they were made or if Mitchell knew about them.
+
+Mitchell went to the hospital this weekend because of panic attacks, according to one of the sources. By then, authorities had discovered during a 5:30 a.m. Saturday bed check that Matt and Sweat had escaped.
+
+Mitchell has worked at Clinton for seven years as an industrial training supervisor, according to Jennifer Freeman, a spokeswoman for the New York State Comptroller. Her salary was $57,697 a year.
+
+Mitchell's son Tobey Mitchell told NBC News his mother was in a hospital Saturday evening because ""she was having severe chest pains and she was concerned about that."" He added that his mom, who works at the prison with her husband, ""worries a lot about everything"" but strongly challenged suggestions she had done anything wrong.
+
+""She is not the kind of person that's going to risk her life or other people's lives to let these guys escape from prison,"" he said.
+
+His wife, Paige Mitchell, told CNN on Wednesday that ""95% of what is being said"" about her mother-in-law is not true.
+
+""They don't have the facts to prove this,"" she said. ""This is just slander and rumor.""
+
+Paige Mitchell said she believed Matt may have persuaded her mother-in-law to contact people for him who knew about art.
+
+""He was interested in art,"" Paige Mitchell said of Matt. ""Her heart was in the right place.""
+
+Paige Mitchell denied that her mother-in-law was to be the getaway driver or helped provide the power tools used in the escape. Saturday's hospital visit stemmed from the fact that Joyce Mitchell is a ""very nervous person,"" she said.
+
+Rural area is rough and 'can be deadly'
+
+If the escapees did indeed have a designated driver, imagine their horror when they popped out of a manhole sometime late Friday or early Saturday and found no accomplice waiting.
+
+""That must have been just a complete panic on their part ... 'Now what? Where are we going to walk to -- this small, rural area?' "" said CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director. ""It's going to be hard to hide day or night for very long, and they wouldn't have been prepared to deal with the elements.""
+
+They'd have to find food, water and money, while also trying to get their hands on weapons or a vehicle.
+
+""That would put every family in that rural (area) in extreme danger,"" Fuentes said. ""If they're feeling like cornered animals out there, they are going to do something drastic to try to ensure their physical survival and their continued freedom out of that prison.""
+
+Without any help like a getaway driver, someone who escapes from Clinton can easily get lost, said Jeff Hall, who teaches at the City University of New York and did his dissertation on northern New York prisons.
+
+""The environment is formidable,"" said Hall, who grew up near the Dannemora prison, where his father worked. ""It's rough terrain and, if you're not familiar with it, it can be deadly.""
+
+Warning: Tell police if you spot anything unusual
+
+The first came in Dannemora after midnight Friday, about five hours before authorities discovered the men had escaped.
+
+Another focus is about 40 miles southeast in Willsboro, a town of about 2,000 people along Lake Champlain.
+
+That's where a resident spotted two men overnight Monday walking in a torrential rainstorm on a rural road, Willsboro Town Supervisor Shaun Gillilland said. As the witness' car approached them, they took off.
+
+Both reports could be false leads, as often happens in manhunts. Former U.S. Marshal Service regional commander Lenny DePaul said he thinks it's important that people be on the lookout.
+
+Still, authorities are clearly focusing on the rural swath of New York near Vermont and the Canadian province of Quebec.
+
+Matt and Sweat's escape was so extraordinarily complex that experts say the two must have had help.
+
+Using power tools, they cut through a cell wall that included a steel plate, maneuvered across a catwalk, shimmied down six stories to a tunnel of pipes, followed that tunnel, broke through a double-brick wall, cut into a 24-inch steam pipe, climbed through the steam pipe, cut another hole so they could get out of the pipe and finally surfaced through a manhole.
+
+Aside from the mystery of how they got the necessary power tools, many wonder how they could have used them without detection.
+
+The hole in the cell's steel wall suggests they used a cutoff wheel, ironworker Ernesto ""Ernie"" Peñuelas said. But using that tool would have produced a loud sound and detectable odor.
+
+Their time on the lam is also remarkable. Most escapees in New York are captured within 24 hours, according to data compiled by the state. Of 29 inmates who fled between 2002 and 2013, only one was free for more than two days.
+
+Escaping from detention happens thousands of times each year, federal statistics show. But most are from minimum security facilities, where prisoners just walk away. In 2013, there were 2,011 cases of prisoners who escaped or were absent without permission.
+
+Sweat was serving a life sentence without parole for fatally shooting and then running over Broome County Sheriff's Deputy Kevin Tarsia in 2002.
+
+Matt was convicted for kidnapping a businessman for 27 hours and -- when he didn't comply with his pleas for money -- killing him.
+
+""Torture is probably an understatement,"" Lee Bates, who drove a car carrying one of Matt's victims, told CNN's Anderson Cooper of the 1997 killing. He said Matt shoved a knife sharpener in his victim's ear, broke his neck and then dismembered the body.
+
+Despite his violent past, Matt is capable of getting others to help him, Bates said.",REAL
+7928,The Path To Total Dictatorship: America’s “Shadow Government” And Its Silent Coup,"By John W. Whitehead
+“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people . Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state…. 
+The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government…. This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable. ”— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech 
+Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law.
+Say hello to America’s shadow government.
+A corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country, this shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.
+No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government— also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group” —may well have played a part in who will win the White House this year.
+To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.
+The first shadow government, referred to as COG or Continuity of Government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.” COG is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law.
+Yet it is the second shadow government —also referred to as the Deep State—that poses the greater threat to freedom right now. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government is the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our government.
+The Deep State, which “ operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power ,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.
+So who or what is the Deep State?
+It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal law enforcement agencies in order to establish themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice.
+It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.” It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “ a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies ”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees.
+It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.
+These are the key players that drive the shadow government.
+This is the hidden face of the American police state that will continue long past Election Day.
+Just consider some of the key programs and policies advanced by the shadow government that will continue no matter who occupies the Oval Office.
+Domestic surveillance No matter who wins the presidential popularity contest, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8 billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. Thus, on any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. Local police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
+Global spying The NSA’s massive surveillance network, what the Washington Post refers to as a $500 billion “ espionage empire ,” will continue to span the globe and target every single person on the planet who uses a phone or a computer. The NSA’s Echelon program intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. In addition to carrying out domestic surveillance on peaceful political groups such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and several religious groups, Echelon has also been a keystone in the government’s attempts at political and corporate espionage .
+Roving TSA searches The American taxpayer will continue to get ripped off by government agencies in the dubious name of national security. One of the greatest culprits when it comes to swindling taxpayers has been the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with its questionable deployment of and complete mismanagement of millions of dollars’ worth of airport full-body X-ray scanners, punitive patdowns by TSA agents and thefts of travelers’ valuables. Considered essential to national security, TSA programs will continue in airports and at transportation hubs around the country.
+USA Patriot Act, NDAA America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, will continue to chip away at our freedoms, unravel our Constitution and transform our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws completely circumvent the rule of law and the rights of American citizens. In so doing, they re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the U.S. Constitution, is the map by which we navigate life in the United States. These laws will continue to be enforced no matter who gets elected.
+Militarized police state Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local law enforcement agencies without charge, police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones.
+Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, will continue to keep the masses corralled, controlled, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.
+SWAT team raids With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by local police for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties will continue to rise. Nationwide, SWAT teams will continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession.
+Domestic drones The domestic use of drones will continue unabated. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000 drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020, all part of an industry that could be worth as much as $30 billion per year. These machines, which will be equipped with weapons, will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat sensors and radar. An Inspector General report revealed that the Dept. of Justice has already spent nearly $4 million on drones domestically, largely for use by the FBI , with grants for another $1.26 million so police departments and nonprofits can acquire their own drones.
+School-to-prison pipeline The paradigm of abject compliance to the state will continue to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. School districts will continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court.
+Overcriminalization The government bureaucracy will continue to churn out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, rendering the rest of us petty criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to this overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal. Consequently, small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community will continue to have their farms raided.
+Privatized Prisons States will continue to outsource prisons to private corporations, resulting in a cash cow whereby mega-corporations imprison Americans in private prisons in order to make a profit. In exchange for corporations buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years.
+Endless wars America’s expanding military empire will continue to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.
+Are you getting the message yet?
+The next president, much like the current president and his predecessors, will be little more than a figurehead, a puppet to entertain and distract the populace from what’s really going on.
+As Lofgren reveals, this state within a state, “concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue ,” is a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”
+The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley.
+This is fascism in its most covert form, hiding behind public agencies and private companies to carry out its dirty deeds.
+It is a marriage between government bureaucrats and corporate fat cats.
+As Lofgren concludes:
+[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change … If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda.
+In other words, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , as long as government officials—elected and unelected alike—are allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution, the courts and the citizenry, the threat to our freedoms remains undiminished.
+So the next time you find yourselves despondent over the 2016 presidential candidates, remember that it’s just a puppet show intended to distract you from the silent coup being carried out by America’s shadow government.
+Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com . Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org . 
+The original source of this article is The Rutherford Institute Copyright © John W. Whitehead , The Rutherford Institute , 2016 ",FAKE
+9168,To the Youth a Day After the Election: Another World Is Possible,"By Tai Amri Spann-Wilson / 400yearsinbabylon.blogspot.com 
+Dear Youth, 
+On this day after the election, many are asking themselves how this could have happened. Regardless of who anyone close to you voted for, and regardless of how you yourself might vote, in a democratic country, the questions still remain: How could so few be allowed to vote? Why do so few who are eligible vote? How can we call ourselves a country when there seems to be so much hatred between those with differing ideologies? Do we care at all for people who are not like us? These questions can be maddening, but I beg you, don’t give up hope. I promise you that just the thought of you gives so many of us so much hope. Especially me. And also, please don’t fall into the temptation to hate those who may hate you. These times we are living in are reminding me, oddly enough, of the Empire Strikes Back. Luke, reacting to the violence of the world tries to combat it with more violence and ends up getting his hand cut off. It’s only after he goes and studies the intricacies of justice that he is able to confront Darth Vader and the Emperor in triumph. If I were to pick a Grandmaster Jedi of our world, it would be Dr. Howard Thurman, the “pastor” of Martin Luther King. Dr. Thurman wrote of hate, “The logic of the development of hatred is death to the spirit and disintegration of ethical and moral value.” While hatred is a natural emotion, acting from it and allowing it to take root will never accomplish the goals we want them to. I call you StillSpeaking Youth to combat what I have seen older generations do to younger generations throughout my lifetime and into history. Each generation seems to think that their generation was the one that knew how best to fight. I’m afraid that the older I get the more I might start saying to younger folkx, “At least MY generation had the Occupy Movement.” or “At least my generation was involved in the Black Lives Matter Movement.” But the truth of the matter is that every generation gets their chance to shine and be a part of creating what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called, The Beloved Community. We hear a lot about Dr. King’s Dream, but what we hear are the little specifics, white children and Black children holding hands and blah, blah, blah. We often miss the big picture. The big picture was that Dr. King believed, as I do, that there is a world possible right here that is far different than the world we live in today. In that world: there is no hatred over religious and political differences; everyone is loved and cherished for who they are, no matter the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, their gender expression; and people aren’t treated differently because of how much money they make or what job they work. That Dream is possible, but only when we all put our hands into making this Beloved Community come true. I love each and every one of you so much, even when you get on my nerves I want to protect you from every harmful oppression. But the best way I know how to do that, is to try and help you be survivors in a world of hate. I always want to show you the survival tools I learned, and also the tools I’ve learned to help create a Beloved Community. Because I know, that just as I will someday be among the eldest generation of this world and that I hope to eventually be an ancestor that you call upon in your struggles, you will someday have to step up to the responsibilities of creating the Beloved Community in your own world just as me and my generation have. You don’t have to do it like us, in fact I really hope you don’t, we’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I want you to be those Love Warriors, I need you to be those Love Warriors, and I vow to be the Elder that you need. Just keep holding on and know this, the ancestors, including Dr. Thurman and Dr. King, are ALWAYS there when you call. You know I love you, Tai Amri (Baby Pastor and Jedi Master) Spann-Wilson 4.0 ·",FAKE
+6455,Physical Gold Demand and Fear,"Physical Gold Demand and Fear Posted on Home » Silver » Silver News » Physical Gold Demand and Fear 
+These two factors are clearly in play today as the metals move higher in a surge we’ve been expecting since late last week. However, these gains might just as quickly be reversed so there are a few indicators you’d better be watching… 
+
+From Craig Hemke, TFMetals : As mentioned in the title of this post, both physical demand and fear seem to be driving price today. How can we measure physical demand? Sometimes it shows up as a lack of overnight “London Monkey” trading. As prices were firming last week, we noticed this phenomena occurring again: http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/blog/7941/some-possible-encouragement And now look at the action overnight (earlier today) in London: Don’t ask me to quantify this because I can’t. This is pure conjecture based upon learned experience. As I’ve followed this stuff daily for nearly seven years now, I’ve noticed a clear correlation between London demand and the London Monkey daily price smash. And this clearly correlates with price trend. So, when The London Monkeys stand down…as they have more than half the time the past two weeks…this tells me that demand for physical is strong on London and, consequently, you can expect price to rise in New York, too. Also affecting things today is fear. This is the fear that Donald Trump is going to be the next president of The United States…I guess. Why this is such a “fear”, I don’t know. Perhaps, instead, a better word is “uncertainty”. The gold price is anticipating the uncertainty that a Trump victory would bring. Either way, when you get a 14-point turnaround in a major national poll just one week before the election, the effect is rather startling. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/01/post-abc-tracking-poll-clinton-falls-behind-trump-in-enthusiasm-but-has-edge-in-early-voting/ And it’s not just the metals. We’ve been tracking the impending breakout and surge in Bitcoin, too, and it’s up 3% today and back through $700. Since the previous breakouts on this weekly chart added 40% or so to the Bitcoin price, I’d say your next target is likely near $1000. Turning to the metals…Just yesterday, we discussed the likelihood of a surge higher. Prices had found support at/near the respective 200-day MAs and, with copper surging higher, we thought that a move like we’re seeing today was coming. And while this is all very nice, well and good, we really haven’t accomplished anything significant until prices move back above the 50-day moving averages. Yes, silver never closed below its 200-day and gold is now more than 1% back above its own 200-day…BUT…if you want to reverse the recent downtrend and get the hot, momo-chasing Spec HFT algo money to come charging back into the synthetic paper gold derivative, then you need this move to extend up, to and through the 50-day. For the sake of clarity, the charts below show nothing but the location of the 50-day MA for both the Dec16 gold and Dec16 silver. THESE ARE THE KEY LEVELS TO WATCH. A move through and close above these levels should excite the algos and drive price even higher. So, watch them both very closely and be sure to note the sharp down angle of both, too. This makes the pressure to jump to and through even greater. Two other key indicators we’re going to be sure to keep watching are copper and the HUI. Copper is up another 1% as I type. This is the 7th consecutive up day and I have a last of $2.222. The HUI is also higher but not as much as you might hope/expect. I’ve got it at 218 and up about 5.5 points. What should you be watching? Let’s get copper to continue higher and move up and out of this pennant AND let’s get the HUI back above 220. Both of these would help spur the metals even higher, too. There’s a lot more going on but I think I’ll stop here so that we can get this posted for everyone. TF",FAKE
+3767,Protester charged with shooting officers in Ferguson,"A 20-year-old protester has been charged with shooting two police officers in Ferguson, Mo., last week, authorities said Sunday.
+
+County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch said Jeffrey Williams was charged with two counts of assault in the first degree, one count of firing a weapon from a vehicle and three counts of armed criminal action.
+
+McCulloch said Williams admitted firing the shots but said he was shooting at someone else.
+
+""We're not sure we buy that part of it,"" McCulloch said, adding that the handgun used in the shooting has been recovered.
+
+He said Williams was involved in the demonstration that was wrapping up when the incident took place. Williams, he said, was being held in lieu of $300,000 cash bail.
+
+McCulloch said information provided by the public was key to the arrest. He encouraged anyone who knows anything about the shooting to contact police, saying the investigation was continuing.
+
+Williams has had several minor run-ins with police and one felony arrest in St. Louis, court records show.
+
+He spent two days in jail last March for failing to appear for court hearings for traffic infractions, including driving without a valid license and operating a motor vehicle without maintaining proper insurance. He also spent two days in jail in January 2014 for speeding.
+
+Police arrested Williams in June 2013 for receiving stolen property, a felony, and credit card fraud. He was sentenced in March 2014 to two years probation.
+
+Bishop Derrick Robinson of the Kingdom Destiny Fellowship International, who has been an organizer of Ferguson protests, later told CNN he spoke with Williams -- and that Williams said he was not involved in protests. He said Williams told him the shooting occurred after he had been robbed by an unknown assailant.
+
+The officers were shot during a protest just after midnight Thursday. One was shot in the face, the other in the shoulder. They were released from the hospital later Thursday.
+
+Ferguson has been the scene of sometimes violent protests since the shooting death of unarmed black man Michael Brown, 18, by a white police officer in August. The shooting and subsequent investigation brought national attention and a Justice Department probe to the St. Louis suburb.
+
+The Justice Department investigation found systemic racism in the police department, prompting the resignation of the city manager, a local judge and the city's police chief.
+
+Attorney General Eric Holder issued a statement lauding the investigative cooperation between federal authorities and St. Louis County officials.
+
+""This arrest sends a clear message that acts of violence against our law enforcement personnel will never be tolerated,"" Holder said in the statement. ""In the days ahead, we will continue to partner with the authorities in St. Louis County to secure justice for all those affected by this heinous and cowardly crime. And we will continue to stand vigilant in support of public safety officers and the communities they serve.""
+
+The officers wounded Thursday were from St. Louis County and Webster Groves. After the shootings, the highway patrol and county police took control of security duties from the Ferguson department.
+
+Hours after the shooting, Holder and Obama condemned the attack.
+
+""They're criminals. They need to be arrested,"" Obama said. ""And then what we need to do is make sure that like-minded, good-spirited people on both sides -- law-enforcement who have a terrifically tough job and people who understand they don't want to be stopped and harassed because of their race -- that we're able to work together to try and come up with some good answers.""",REAL
+6135,Comment on U.S. war with Iran has already begun by جنگ ارزی آمریکا علیه ایران / مورد مطالعاتی سال 1390 - کدآمایی,"Posted on January 23, 2012 by Dr. Eowyn | 10 Comments While we were transfixed and distracted by the Newt vs. Mitt drama in South Carolina, Obama has quietly begun war with Iran — without informing the American people (or Congress?). 
+This is the startling assertion made by James Rickards in an interview on January 13 with King World News. 
+Rickards is a Senior Managing Director of Tangent Capital in New York, whose advisory clients include government directorates around the world. He is the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis (Penguin/Portfolio, 2011). Rickards is also the man who had negotiated the release of American hostages from Iran in 1981, and continues to be involved in US national security issues and the Department of Defense. 
+This is what Rickards told King World News about the situation in Iran: “The fact that we, meaning the United States, are on a path to a war with Iran is very clear at this point. It does seem the countdown has begun and it’s coming to a head sooner rather than later. Things are moving very quickly. General Martin Dempsey, who is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has arrived in Israel and Israel is integrating itself with the U.S. European Command or EUCOM. So, at this point, the integration of the Israeli and the US operational capability, including NATO based in Europe, is very far along. There are an enormous number of US troops in Israel. I don’t know if people realize that, but they are operating the THAAD system (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). They oversee weapons that will shoot down incoming Iranian missiles. There are joint exercises going on between the US and Israel. At the same time Iran is conducting war games. There are a lot of moving pieces on the chessboard at this point. This is not just war gaming or thinking about what might happen, the pieces have actually begun to move on the chessboard. For Israel this is really existential. The US would really like to see a world where Iran did not have nuclear weapons, but for Israel it is not a preference. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, Iran has said they will burn Israel to the ground. So, this is not just a strategic rebalancing, this is life or death for the Israelis….. All of the information I have is that the US is going to do it (attack Iran). So the tension between Israel and the United States is being resolved in favor of letting the US actually launch the attack. Part of the reason for this is the retaliation vector. If the US attacks and Israel keeps out, then Iran has no justification for attacking Israel. They (Iran) will attack US targets in the Middle-East, but we’re ready for that, we’re prepared for that. We will suppress the missiles and their air force is a joke, we’ll take that out in the first day. But they do have a serious missile capability. We’ll need anti-missile warfare and we will need to strike those bases. We will need to do a lot of other damage to Iran, cyber warfare, take down the power grid, take down the command and control structure. Do whatever we can to stop them from attacking our assets in the Middle-East. This war will be fought with air power, sea power, cyberwarfare, financial warfare, sabotage, special operation, assassination, things like that. This is already going on. As an example, yesterday a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist had an unlucky encounter with a magnet bomb. So this war is already being fought. The other day the United States sanctioned the Central Bank of Iran. By the way, we’ve been sanctioning them for years, but we’ve been dialing it up little by little. It’s like the frog that’s boiled in a pot of water and doesn’t know until it’s too late that the water is getting hot. President Obama sanctioned the central bank about a week ago. The Iranian currency, the rial, dropped 30% in a single day. Hyperinflation has broken out in Iran. This is financial warfare. My point to the listeners is this is not theoretical, this is not a war game, not an exercise, it’s happening now and the clock is ticking.” USS Abraham Lincoln 
+Rickards’ startling claim is verified by the UK’s Telegraph this morning . 
+In defiance of Iran’s threat to close the critical Strait of Hormuz, the United States, Britain, and France have deployed six warships to the Strait, led by the USS Abraham Lincoln. The 100,000 ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier entered the Persian Gulf yesterday. 
+That we are at war with Iran is also confirmed by a defense expert in the Australian government, a member of a military-strategic e-mail list I’m on. This is what he wrote about Rickards’ claim: “Got back from leave today and had our first major brief. The interesting thing to come out of it was that everyone in the 4 Eyes community regard ourselves at being in warlike mode, even though there is no ‘declared’ war. We are at war. It’s just that the general public can’t see it. We are certainly of the view that we have been at a cyber war for the last 12 years.” 
+God help us.",FAKE
+5215,It’s not the ‘locker-room’ talk. It’s the ‘lock her up’ talk.,"The second presidential debate — bloody, muddy and raucous — was just enough to save Donald Trump’s campaign from extinction, but not enough to restore his chances of winning, barring an act of God (a medical calamity) or of Putin (a cosmically incriminating WikiLeak).
+
+That Trump crashed because of a sex-talk tape is odd. It should have been a surprise to no one. His views on women have been on open display for years. And he’d offered a dazzling array of other reasons for disqualification: habitual mendacity, pathological narcissism, profound ignorance and an astonishing dearth of basic human empathy.
+
+To which list Trump added in the second debate, and it had nothing to do with sex. It was his threat, if elected, to put Hillary Clinton in jail.
+
+After appointing a special prosecutor, of course. The niceties must be observed. First, a fair trial, then a proper hanging. The day after the debate at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump responded to chants of “lock her up” with “Lock her up is right.” Two days later, he told a rally in Lakeland, Fla., “She has to go to jail.”
+
+[Fareed Zakaria: The GOP is history. What about the country? ]
+
+Such incendiary talk is an affront to elementary democratic decency and a breach of the boundaries of American political discourse. In democracies, the electoral process is a subtle and elaborate substitute for combat, the age-old way of settling struggles for power. But that sublimation only works if there is mutual agreement to accept both the legitimacy of the result (which Trump keeps undermining with charges that the very process is “rigged”) and the boundaries of the contest.
+
+The prize for the winner is temporary accession to limited political power, not the satisfaction of vendettas. Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chávez and a cavalcade of two-bit caudillos lock up their opponents. American leaders don’t.
+
+One doesn’t even talk like this. It takes decades, centuries, to develop ingrained norms of political restraint and self-control. But they can be undone in short order by a demagogue feeding a vengeful populism.
+
+This is not to say that the investigation into the Clinton emails was not itself compromised by politics. FBI Director James B. Comey’s recommendation not to pursue charges was both troubling and puzzling. And Barack Obama very improperly tilted the scales by interjecting, while the investigation was still underway, that Clinton’s emails had not endangered national security.
+
+But the answer is not to start a new process whose outcome is preordained. Conservatives have relentlessly, and correctly, criticized this administration for abusing its power and suborning the civil administration (e.g., the IRS). Is the Republican response to do the same?
+
+Wasn’t presidential overreach one of the major charges against Obama by the anti-establishment GOP candidates? Wasn’t the animating spirit of the entire tea party movement the restoration of constitutional limits and restraints?
+
+In America, we don’t persecute political opponents. Which is why we retroactively honor Gerald Ford for his pardon of Richard Nixon, for which, at the time, Ford was widely reviled. It ultimately cost him the presidency. Nixon might well have been convicted. But Ford understood that jailing a president for actions carried out in the context of his official duties would threaten the very civil nature of democratic governance.
+
+[Michael Gerson: Donald Trump is right: The GOP is utterly pathetic]
+
+What makes Trump’s promise to lock her up all the more alarming is that it’s not an isolated incident. This is not the first time he’s insinuated using the powers of the presidency against political enemies. He has threatened Amazon’s Jeffrey P. Bezos, owner of The Post, for using the newspaper “as a tool for political power against me and other people. . . . We can’t let him get away with it.”
+
+Trump has gone after others with equal subtlety. “I hear,” he tweeted, “the Rickets [sic] family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me. They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!” And after National Review editor Rich Lowry made a particularly cutting remark about him on Fox News, Trump tweeted, “He should not be allowed on TV and the FCC should fine him!”
+
+Trump also promises to “open up” libel laws to permit easier prosecution of those who attack him unfairly. Has he ever conceded any attack on him to be fair?
+
+This election is not just about placing the nuclear codes in Trump’s hands. It’s also about handing him the instruments of civilian coercion, such as the IRS, the FBI, the FCC, the SEC. Think of what he could do to enforce the “fairness” he demands. Imagine giving over the vast power of the modern state to a man who says in advance that he will punish his critics and jail his opponent.
+
+Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+5207,"GOP braces for Trump loss, roiled by refusal to accept election results","A wave of apprehension and anguish swept the Republican Party on Thursday, with many GOP leaders alarmed by Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election and concluding that it is probably too late to salvage his flailing presidential campaign.
+
+As the Republican nominee reeled from a turbulent performance in the final debate here in Las Vegas, his party’s embattled senators and House members scrambled to protect their seats and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities against what Republicans privately acknowledge could be a landslide victory for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
+
+With less than three weeks until the election, the Republican Party is in a state of historic turmoil, encapsulated by Trump’s extraordinary debate declaration that he would leave the nation in “suspense” about whether he would recognize the results from an election he has claimed will be “rigged” or even “stolen.”
+
+The immediate responses from GOP officials were divergent and vague, with no clear strategy on how to handle Trump’s threat. The candidate was defiant and would not back away from his position, telling a roaring crowd Thursday in Ohio that he would accept the results “if I win” — and reserving his right to legally challenge the results should he fall short.
+
+For seasoned Republicans who have watched Trump warily as a general-election candidate, the aftermath of Wednesday’s debate brought a feeling of finality.
+
+“The campaign is over,” said Steve Schmidt, a Trump critic and former senior strategist on George W. Bush’s and John McCain’s presidential campaigns.
+
+Calling a refusal to accept the election results “disqualifying,” Schmidt added: “The question is, how close will Clinton get to 400 electoral votes? She’ll be north of 350, and she’s trending towards 400 — and the trend line is taking place in very red states like Georgia, Texas and Arizona.”
+
+[At third debate, Trump won't commit to accepting election results if he loses]
+
+Clinton and Trump appeared together and traded jabs in delivering mostly lighthearted roasts Thursday night at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner, a white-tie gala benefiting Catholic charities. The candidates used searing humor to taunt each other, reflecting the personal animus on display in the debates. Trump’s routine was at times unsettling, drawing some rare boos from the audience. Held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, the dinner is a traditional event on the calendar for presidential nominees.
+
+Meanwhile, top Democrats fanned out to battleground states on Thursday to hammer Trump for what they described as an unprecedented attack on the country’s political system and to attempt to yoke Trump to Republican candidates down the ballot.
+
+Campaigning in Miami, President Obama said Trump’s doubts about the election outcome are “not a joking matter. That is dangerous.”
+
+The president eviscerated Republicans who have stood by Trump, singling out Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who called Trump “a dangerous con artist” and condemned his more controversial comments during the GOP primaries but now plans to vote for him.
+
+“Marco just seems to care about hanging on to his job,” Obama said, calling the senator’s positioning “the height of cynicism.”
+
+And in Arizona, where polls show an unexpectedly tight presidential race, first lady Michelle Obama said Trump “is threatening the very idea of America itself” by suggesting he would not honor the election results.
+
+“You do not keep American democracy ‘in suspense,’ ” Obama said in Phoenix.
+
+[Rubio, once a shoo-in, fights the anti-Trump tide in Florida]
+
+Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Clinton’s vice-presidential running mate, held a rally at a downtown Charlotte brewery, where he said Trump’s claims of a “rigged” election reminded him of the Third World politicking he had seen as a young missionary in Honduras.
+
+“The bigger we can win by, the harder it is for him to whine and have anyone believe him,” Kaine said, trying to galvanize supporters on the first day of early voting in North Carolina.
+
+On the debate stage, Trump amplified what he had been saying for weeks at his rallies: that the election is “rigged.” Questioned directly as to whether he would accept the results should Clinton prevail, Trump said, “I’ll keep you in suspense.”
+
+Clinton called Trump’s answer “horrifying,” both in the debate and to reporters overnight on her flight home to New York.
+
+Trump’s advisers and surrogates struggled to explain the candidate’s position. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said it was too early to determine whether voting irregularities could make the difference between winning and losing. She and other Trump backers drew a parallel to then-Vice President Al Gore’s concession call to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, which he later withdrew as he awaited a recount in Florida.
+
+“I’m going to keep reminding everybody about the 2000 election when Al Gore said he would accept the results of the election and then did not,” Conway said. “He retracted his concession.”
+
+Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, contended that Trump and the party would stand by the results unless the margin is small enough to warrant a recount or legal challenges. Priebus said Trump is merely preserving flexibility in the event of a contested result.
+
+“All he’s saying is, ‘Look, I’m not going to forgo my right to a recount in a close election,’ ” Priebus said. “We accept the results as long as we’re not talking about a few votes where it actually matters. I know him. I know where his head’s at. . . . I promise you, that’s all this is.”
+
+Other Trump surrogates took a different interpretation. Keith Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general, accused the media of “splitting hairs” and insisted that Trump was “not threatening democratic norms,” while former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani argued that any Republican would be “stupid” to accept the integrity of results before they are known.
+
+“Suppose she wins Pennsylvania by 50 votes,” Giuliani said. He speculated, without evidence, that Democrats would “steal a lot more than 50 votes in Philadelphia. I guarantee you of that. And I’ll tell you how they will do it — they’ll bus people in who will vote dead people’s names four, five, six times . . . or have people in Philadelphia paid to vote three, four and five times.”
+
+Democrats expressed dismay that the Republican nominee and his backers were advancing the idea of widespread voter fraud.
+
+“He is just trying to find an excuse for the fact that he’s going to lose, and perhaps the fact that he’s going to lose to the first woman president stings a little sharper than it might otherwise,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s communications director.
+
+Prominent Republican senators in tough reelection bids distanced themselves from Trump’s posture. “Donald Trump needs to accept the outcome,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) said in a statement.
+
+McCain (Ariz.), who lost to Obama eight years ago, said in a statement: “I didn’t like the outcome of the 2008 election. But I had a duty to concede. A concession isn’t just an act of graciousness. It is an act of respect for the will of the American people.”
+
+As of Thursday afternoon, neither House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had offered any comment, underscoring the party’s unease with its own nominee and the political dangers of tangling with him.
+
+Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a lawyer at Jones Day who has been national counsel for several Republican presidential campaigns, said Trump’s stance puts the party in “quite a difficult position.”
+
+“There will be Republican candidates who are winning by narrow margins and losing by narrow margins,” Ginsberg said. “The party as a whole has a collective interest in having the results upheld.”
+
+Republican pollster Whit ­Ayres said that at the Las Vegas debate, Trump “blew his last chance to turn it around.” But, he said, “I am not convinced that the rest of the party will have as bad a night [on Election Day] as Donald Trump is going to have, because the Trump brand is so distinct from the Republican brand.”
+
+Escalating the Republican angst was Trump’s rally Thursday in Delaware, Ohio, where he advanced conspiracies swirling around far-right websites about Clinton. He referred to reports that Democratic operatives with no direct connection to the Clinton campaign hired people to violently disrupt Trump events.
+
+“This criminal behavior that violates centuries of tradition of peaceful democratic elections, a campaign like Clinton’s that will incite violence is truly a campaign that will do anything to win,” Trump said, going on to call Clinton “a candidate who is truly capable of anything, including voter fraud.”
+
+Trump also mentioned an email, which surfaced on WikiLeaks through an illegal hack that U.S. authorities blame on the Russian government, in which interim Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile seemed to suggest to the Clinton team that she had knowledge of a question that would come up in a primary forum earlier this year. While Brazile has denied that CNN provided any questions in advance, Trump called her actions “cheating at the highest level.”
+
+Even as his party loses faith, Trump proclaimed that he was poised for victory.
+
+“Bottom line, we’re going to win,” he told the boisterous Ohio crowd. “We’re going to win. We’re going to win so big. We’re going to win so big.”
+
+Jenna Johnson in Delaware, Ohio; David Weigel in Charlotte; Krissah Thompson in Phoenix; and Juliet Eilperin, Jose A. DelReal and Karoun Demirjian in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+10021,If You Have One Of These Old VHS Tapes It May Be Worth Over $1000,"posted by Eddie Got VHS tapes collecting dust on a shelf somewhere? Maybe you already reclaimed the space and they’re sitting in an attic long-forgotten. Hopefully you didn’t throw them out, though, as it turns out there might be quite the market for some old tapes. Modern directorial practice for movie releases and re-releases tends to include adding or editing the film from the theatrical version. While some people don’t mind or even enjoy these changes, for others, the original cut is worth a hefty price tag. This translates to listings on eBay for certain tapes at astronomical prices, like one particular Beauty and the Beast tape going for $9,999. The original Beauty and the Beast did not include the song “Human Again”; it was cut for space reasons, then re-added to the 2002 special edition. However, Disney tapes in particular might be valuable to collectors for other reasons. Reddit user Reddit_Executive speculates that, because of the specific branding on original releases, these movies could go for quite a bit: “On the spines of some VHS (and BetaMax) tapes is a black diamond with Walt’s signature on it. This was Disney’s first attempt to market their videos to homes. Because of this, certain Disney collectors are convinced that these VHS tapes are worth something.” While it’s possible some tapes are indeed worth quite a bit, many of the movies listed are actually selling for much less. Still, if your plan for your old VHS tapes begins and ends with “trash them,” there’s no harm in doing your research on what they might be worth. 
+Source:",FAKE
+5035,Obama: Trump is ‘unfit to serve as president’,"President Obama on Tuesday escalated his criticism of Donald Trump, calling him “unfit to serve as president,” as the Republican presidential nominee faced censure from members of both parties for disparaging the parents of a fallen army captain.
+
+“The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn’t appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, means that he is woefully unprepared to do this job,” Obama said at the White House, during a news conference with the prime minister of Singapore.
+
+Obama also challenged Republican leaders to go beyond distancing themselves from Trump, saying their objections “ring hollow” as long as they still pledge to vote for him.
+
+“There has to come a point at which you say enough,” the president said.
+
+Reflecting on the novelty of his own remarks, Obama said his warning stands apart from his criticism of his own Republican presidential rivals, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, with whom he disagreed on “certain policy issues” but whose qualifications and “basic decency” he didn’t dispute.
+
+“And had they won, I would have been disappointed, but I would have said to all Americans . . . this is our president, and I know they’re going to abide by certain norms and rules and common sense,” Obama said. “But that’s not the situation here.”
+
+The president’s remarks pinpointed Republican divisions. He also made clear that Democrats have disagreements of their own, by underscoring his commitment to the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Democratic candidate he hopes will succeed him, Hillary Clinton, opposes the deal, which is awaiting ratification in Congress.
+
+“Right now I’m president, and I’m for it,” Obama said.
+
+Obama’s was the latest in a volley of complaints this week against Trump, whose campaign responded in a statement denouncing the president as a “failed leader” who has wreaked havoc around the world.
+
+Bipartisan and among the most sustained of the election cycle, the criticism of Trump has mainly been a response to his denigration of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, immigrants from Pakistan who appeared last week at the Democratic National Convention to denounce him for his harsh rhetoric about Muslims. They said their son, who was killed in Iraq, would have been barred from entering the country under Trump’s proposed ban.
+
+But the broadsides have also focused on the nominee’s comments about foreign relations, including his apparent ignorance of Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014 and his appeal to Russian actors to expose Clinton’s emails.
+
+In response, Trump has laughed off concerns about his overtures to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, saying warmer relations would help the United States pursue its international objectives, such as defeating Islamic State militants.
+
+At a campaign event Tuesday in Ashburn, Va., Trump attacked Clinton for having a poor relationship with Putin, saying: “This is a nuclear country we’re talking about. Russia. Strong nuclear country.”
+
+“Their stuff is newer . . . they have a lot more,” he said. “She wants to play the tough one. She’s not tough.”
+
+[In clash with Khans, Trump went too far, some strategists say]
+
+Meanwhile, a Kremlin spokesman told NBC News this week that Putin has never had any contact with Trump, which is in line with a recent statement by Trump that he has not spoken to Putin — and yet in direct conflict with the real estate mogul’s prior declarations, including in 2014 at the National Press Club, when Trump said he had been in Moscow and had spoken, “indirectly and directly,” with the Russian president.
+
+In his hour-long remarks on Tuesday, delivered at a local high school, Trump repeated his grave warnings about immigration — across the southern border from Mexico as well as from countries beset by Islamic radicalism. Because “we don’t know if they’re ISIS,” Trump said of migrants from the Middle East, the result would be “the all-time great Trojan horse.”
+
+He didn’t mention the Khans, who have proven themselves dogged in their campaign against Trump, or new evidence that the candidate’s approach is driving a wedge in the Republican Party. Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) on Tuesday became the first sitting Republican member of Congress to say publicly that he plans to vote for Clinton, declaring in an interview with Syracuse.com that Trump is a “national embarrassment.”
+
+The three-term congressman, who represents a swath of upstate New York near Syracuse but is not running for reelection this year, has bucked his party in the past on issues ranging from gay marriage to climate change. He declared his support for Clinton in an opinion piece published Tuesday on the news website and elaborated in an interview that Trump’s prolonged feud with the parents of a Muslim American Army captain killed in Iraq was the final straw.
+
+“I saw that and felt incensed,” Hanna said in the interview. “I was stunned by the callousness of his comments.”
+
+He added: “I think Trump is a national embarrassment. Is he really the guy you want to have the nuclear codes?”
+
+Hanna had already said he would not vote for Trump — a stance shared by a handful of his Republican colleagues. But his pronouncement that he would therefore support Clinton, a woman reviled by much of his party, dealt yet another blow to Trump as his poll numbers dip in the wake of the conventions and as his campaign struggles under mounting criticism over his response to the Khans, whose son Humayun was killed in 2004, at age 27, by a car bomber in Iraq.
+
+Trump said Khizr Khan had “no right” to assail him and suggested that Ghazala Khan was barred by her Muslim faith from speaking alongside her husband.
+
+The quarrel continued into this week, as Trump tweeted that Khan had “viciously attacked” him and had shifted focus from the real concern, “RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM.” The GOP nominee faced strong criticism from a bipartisan group of decorated combat veterans, members of Congress and family members of slain soldiers. A particularly lengthy and impassioned rebuke came from McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
+
+“While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us,” McCain said.
+
+[Broad array of military luminaries condemn Trump over attacks on Khans]
+
+On Tuesday, Trump addressed the matter only implicitly, faulting the media for not giving enough attention to Patricia Smith, a Trump supporter who is the mother of a victim of the Benghazi attacks, while giving “other people unbelievable amounts of air.” In fact, multiple networks, including CNN and MSNBC, carried Smith’s speech at the Republican National Convention live, while Fox News — whose host, Brian Kilmeade, criticized other networks for not covering Smith — did not.
+
+Trump also said his critics would never desert him because they fear a Supreme Court stacked with Clinton appointees. He recounted his own comments from a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, in which he said he told his audience that “even if people don’t like me, they have to vote for me.”
+
+“I said, even if you can’t stand Donald Trump, you think Donald Trump is the worst, you’re going to vote for me. You know why? Justices of the Supreme Court,” he said. “If they pick judges, we’re going to end up with another Venezuela, except just a bigger version.”
+
+With a bit of stagecraft, Trump also appeared to try to fend off questions about his military acumen — and his own draft deferments during the Vietnam War — by beckoning onto the stage a lieutenant colonel. The man had given him his Purple Heart medal before the rally as a vote of “confidence,” Trump said.
+
+“I always wanted to get the Purple Heart,” Trump said. “This was much easier.”",REAL
+3103,Pope Francis met Kim Davis: why it matters in fight over religious freedom (+video),"The decision by Pope Francis to give his personal blessing – and a rosary – to Rowan County clerk Kim Davis thrust the pontiff into one of America’s most volatile cultural battles.
+
+In his meeting with controversial county clerk Kim Davis last Thursday, Pope Francis reportedly told Ms. Davis to “stand strong” as she stands up for her religious beliefs in rural Kentucky.
+
+The meeting between the pontiff and a woman who went to jail for five days for defying a Supreme Court order to allow same-sex couples to marry came before Francis made comments about “conscientious objection” as a human right, even for government officials.
+
+In some ways, the meeting fit with the pope’s focus on the “spirit of encounter” as well as his unorthodox meetings with people he calls on the “peripheries.” And it also came days after he met with nuns fighting an Obamacare mandate on contraceptives, another front in the American cultural wars.
+
+But the 15-minute tête-à-tête at the Vatican Embassy in Washington also jarred a number of narratives from the pope’s historic visit, suggesting to some critics that the pontiff condoned Davis’ actions – which critics say amount to imposing her personal religious beliefs, in violation of the Constitution, on same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses.
+
+The decision by the pope to give his personal blessing – and a rosary – to Davis thrust the pontiff into one of America’s most volatile cultural battles.
+
+In other ways, however, Francis focused Rome’s gaze on the changing dynamics of religious freedom in the progressive era, offering a moment of pause for many Americans to consider growing questions about how the United States handles religious objections to same-sex unions.
+
+“I think both sides have either tried to vilify or champion Kim Davis in one way or another, but what they’re forgetting is that the central issue here is of religious freedom in the US, and how we treat it. What does it mean, and what are its boundaries?” says Joe Valenzano, an expert on religious rhetoric at the University of Dayton in Ohio. “The fact is, both sides have made just a colossal mess out of this to further their own perspective, rather than focusing on what could be a productive conversation for society.”
+
+The Vatican confirmed the meeting, but gave no further commentary, potentially suggesting that it didn’t want to get into the political details of the struggle over same-sex marriage in Rowan County, Ky. For some Vatican observers, it wasn’t surprising that the pope, a religious figure, met with someone who has become a lightning rod for her religious beliefs.
+
+The pope “took somebody on the front of the newspapers for faith-related concerns and met with her,” says Professor Valenzano. “[The pope told Davis that] you don’t lose faith because you lose a battle. That’s not the pope weighing in on the culture wars or endorsing Kim Davis’s position. That’s the pope endorsing the idea that religion is important to people.”
+
+Yet for all the pope’s focus on moral values, the meeting with Davis and the nuns could have a political impact, writes John Allen Jr., on Crux, a Catholic news site. For one, he writes, the meeting “means that Francis has significantly strengthened the hand of the US bishops and other voices in American debates defending religious freedom.”
+
+The meeting also could give more direct encouragement to other US officials who have declined to offer marriage licenses to same-sex couples. A number of clerks and other government officials have followed Davis’s lead, refusing to abide by the Supreme Court’s June ruling declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right.
+
+The problem with that strategy, however, is that Davis, for one, represents what Doug Laycock calls a poor example of a religious martyr. He points out that Davis didn’t just want an opt-out from signing marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Instead, after her release from jail, she changed the Rowan County license form to take the name of the county off the form – a change the plaintiffs argue violates the judge’s order.
+
+“Kim Davis gives religious liberty a bad name, and endangers it for everybody,” says Professor Laycock, a religious liberty expert at the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville. “She does not have to issue marriage licenses. But the county is not entitled to exemption, because the county does not have a religion. That’s the fundamental distinction.”
+
+Those nuances may have been lost on the pope, Mr. Laycock suggests.
+
+“If you come here from Rome, if you’re not closely following this, you don’t have any sort of deep understanding of US law,” he says.
+
+The pontiff made waves in the US during his visit for his attempt to expand the Catholic church’s influence beyond the culture wars. He weighed in on climate change and the death penalty, bolstering his bona fides among US liberals. But he also buckled down on church doctrine on abortion and threats to the sanctity of marriage, to the applause of conservatives.
+
+“I can’t have in mind all the cases that can exist about conscientious objection,” the pope said on the papal plane last week, “but yes, I can say that conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right. It is a right.”
+
+“And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right,” he said, adding, in what may have been a reference to Davis, “It is a human right, and if a government official is a human person, he has that right.”
+
+For American political operatives, the pope’s message may ultimately be frustrating for its nuance. And that may be just fine with the pontiff. As Elizabeth Buerlin writes in the New Republic, “Pope Francis maintains a conservative position on the morality of marriage, and he is concerned for Christians who find their practice constrained by law. But he has also emphasized openness toward LGBT Catholics, famously asking, when queried about gay Catholics, ‘Who am I to judge?’ ”
+
+In that way, she writes, Francis has, at least until now, shied away from directly engaging “the psychodrama of the American culture wars.”
+
+But by meeting with Davis privately, the pope, at the very least, showed a willingness to take a stand on religious liberty, even if it tarnished his message in the eyes of some Americans.
+
+“The news that Pope Francis met privately ... with Kim Davis throws a wet blanket on the good will that the pontiff had garnered during his US visit,” Francis DeBernardo, executive director of gay and lesbian Catholic advocacy group New Ways Ministry, told Reuters in an e-mail.
+
+At the same time, some Americans said the visit may have helped humanize a polarizing figure in the struggle between deeply-felt religious beliefs and the equally deep desire by many gay Americans to marry.
+
+“Any time you get people talking and meeting and listening, even if they don't agree, as long as there is a dialogue, I think we are better as a nation,” Judy Fitzpatrick, a Catholic who describes herself as moderate Republican, told a new Ipsos/Reuters poll, after hearing about Francis meeting Davis.",REAL
+6775,Study: Phytochemical Found In Broccoli And Cauliflower Attacks Prostate Cancer Cells,"in: Natural Medicine We all know that it’s important to eat our vegetables. At least, that’s what most of us have heard since we were kids. What our mother’s told us as when we were young, our doctors tell us as we get older. Sometimes though, it helps to have a more specific reason than high cholesterol, or even a motherly “because I said so.” Especially for people who aren’t big fans of eating organic greens. According to a study conducted at Oregon State University’s Linus Pauling Micronutrient Research Institute confirms that sulforaphane, a phytochemical found in broccoli and related cruciferous vegetables, such as cauliflower and cabbage , have a natural ability to target and attack prostate cancer cells without harming neighboring cells [ 1 ] . Unconnected studies suggest it may have similar promise for breast cancer. The active chemicals found in everyday foods – such as broccoli – are often much more potent than people would imagine. If fact, determining how to safely adapt these chemical ingredients for medical use is one of the biggest hurdles researchers face. Even edible plants that are considered “rich” in a given nutritional substance, contain relatively low amounts of it by volume. The vast majority of these compounds may also become toxic to humans if taken in large enough concentrations. While a number of previous investigations have proven that sulforaphane is able to attack both benign and malignant cancer cells, the Oregon State study is one of the first to prove that it is effective without disrupting otherwise healthy tissue. This gives researchers a tremendous tool for developing new, low-risk treatment options, and is likely to encourage additional research into the healing potential of other seemingly mundane edible plants. Realistically, it could be some time before these findings are applied to any sort of drug development or cancer treatment in a traditional hospital setting. Meanwhile though, the researchers behind the study recommend that we all eat more organic cruciferous vegetables. Besides broccoli, a number of readily available cruciferous vegetables contain naturally large amounts of sulforaphane. Some good examples of foods high in this important phytochemical include mild and spicy radishes, turnips, watercress, cabbage, arugula, kale, chard, and most other leafy greens. Unrelated studies also suggest a variety of other cancer-fighting compounds may be present in other herbs and garden vegetables. Celery and parsley , for instance, are especially rich in apigenin – a substance that has shown remarkable promise for fighting breast cancer. Trace amounts of apigenin are also found in oranges, apples, and some tree nuts. The problem is, it’s very difficult for the body to effectively extract it from any of these foods on its own. References: Oregon State University. Study confirms safety, cancer-targeting ability of nutrient in broccoli . News & Research Communications. 2011 June 9. Submit your review",FAKE
+8263,David Duke wins Louisiana Senate Debate in Landslide despite BLM Riots,"
+The liberal media is going bat$hit crazy over David Duke participating in Louisiana senate debate. BLM holds massive riot, attack police officers and damage their cars.
+David Duke is a former Imperial grand dragon, wizard, sorcerer, magician cyclops of the knights of KKK and whatever you want to call him but what the bat$hit media is always conveniently forgetting to mention about him is that he is also a former Republican State Representative from 1989 to 1992 who reformed the party.
+According to an online poll hosted by FOX 8 , the channel which hosted the debate, David Duke won the debate in a landslide. 92% of the respondents voted for David Duke but could this poll be accurate? Certainly NOT! David Duke has a lot of national support among his wizard circles while no one heard of the other 5 candidates outside of Louisiana. So his supporters rushed in to vote, but does he have any real authentic support in Louisiana? Yes, he has at least 5% state-wide support since he participated in the debate because you need at least 5 points in Louisiana state polls in order to qualify for the debates.
+
+David Duke is associated with the devil across America so people naturally avoid admitting to support him in public polls so it is only logical to assume that his actual numbers may be more than double. This is a phenomenon now known as “the shy voter”. Donald Trump suffers with the same phenomenon. When you see his polls out there. Those are only the known voters. There are many more voters who avoid publicly admitting that they support Donald Trump out of fear of repercussions from tolerant lefties.
+If you have no idea who David Duke is, MSNBC of all TV stations out there did a quite fair description of him. He is a cutting edge politician whose ideas were stolen by establishment politicians, even top Democrats such as Bill Clinton, then claimed it were their ideas. Chris Hayes described David Duke as “The Duke Effect”, admitting that his ideas and policies were stolen by other politicians, such as: repealing affirmative action programs, stricter public housing guidelines, eliminating minority set-asides, welfare.
+Philip Bump who was the guest at “All In With Chris Hayes” said that Duke’s fight from 1991 over welfare which evolved into a centrist position for Bill Clinton.
+Chris Hayes said “He’s leading the edge over of the kind of political discourse that takes the country in a certain direction, not single-handedly.”
+
+The former KKK wizard/magician/dragon/knight/snake/sorcerer, alright let’s be fair to him… the former Representative was definitely the most dominant figure in the debate and he stood his ground after Ted Cruz slandered him saying that he scammed his supporters.
+John Neely Kennedy who is a former Democrat and who looks like and even sounds like he’s Ted Cruz’s lost twin brother, accused David Duke of being a convicted felon who went to prison for: “lying to his supporters, he swindled them out of their money and took that money and used it for his gambling addiction”.
+Duke wanted to respond and the moderator granted him 15 seconds which is definitely not enough for ANY of the candidates to rebuke an attack but, after just 12 seconds the moderator interrupted Duke and jumped in to help Ted Cruz! Sorry, John Neely Kennedy!
+The moderator interrupted Duke and supported John Neely Cruz’s accusations. After that, a full scandal broke out during the debate. The moderator saw that he was not going to back down so he finally decided to let him answer. Duke waved some papers in the air and said that he was audited and he actually overpaid his taxes by $6000 and that he was targeted because of his extreme political views.
+We measured his second response time which he earned after being interrupted in the first place and it was a 40 seconds answer. Definitely over the allocated 15 seconds but the moderator preferred to create a scandal worth of 1 minute and 22 seconds instead of letting him answer the first time. Definitely some bias there, BUT after this incident/fight/scandal, the moderator was very fair and unbiased.
+His supporters think that the moderator was also biased because of asking Duke about Trump’s pus*y tape and why he condemn “The CNN Jews”. Well the question was definitely legitimate since David Duke does spend a lot of time focusing on “The Jews” which is the reason he never gained any serious traction. Not because that “The Jews” don’t have any power, on the contrary, they do own CNN actually, from top to bottom, but because the average American doesn’t know and doesn’t care about that. The average American cares about paying lower taxes, having a strong military and a strong border and David Duke should focus more on those things if he really cares about what white people want/need and if he wants to achieve more in his political career.
+Aside for the 1 minute scandal there was also a funny moment during the debate, when they were talking about Social Security which is seen in the video below, at exactly minute 40 when Democrat candidate Foster Campbell is seen writing down something on some paper, not paying any attention to the debate. 10 seconds later, David Duke is seen waking him up. Foster is then seen looking around disoriented, clearly not paying any attention. The question had to be asked again.
+There was also a Democrat woman candidate on stage which was virtually like a Hillary Clinton clone: “vote for me because I’m a woman not for the snake next to me, David Duke.” Just like Hillary Clinton she works for Goldman Sachs and is funded by them with lots of cash.
+Aside from everything else David Duke was a spectacular watch and if people can be opened minded about him he would win in a landslide actually because he was the strongest Trump supporter on the scene!
+Trump needs a team of people who strongly support him, such as Jeff Sessions, strong loyalist people. He will need his team in order to drain the swamp and clean the system, otherwise he will just run into barriers and be unable to deliver any of his promises. Duke always came out in Trump’s defense when other fled like flees. He even defended Trump with his pus*y tape. Not once has he refuted or denied Donald Trump. It appears that Duke would make a perfect Trump loyalist.
+Donald Trump strongly disavowed David Duke but even being disavowed by the Republican leader, David pursued his own quest to win the senate and vehemently outlined his strong support for the nominee.
+Trump has Jews in his family, his daughter Ivanka is Jewish, his son Erick is also Jewish by marriage and he has Jewish members in his staff allover such as Michael Cohen and he’s a strong supporter of Israel and a good friend of Netanyahu. Now Trump doesn’t have to agree with Duke’s beliefs about Jews and frankly it doesn’t matter. It’s not like David would have any power to do anything as a Senator. In the senate, the power is collective, through voting thus he’s powerless on his own with his own ideas. However if he’s such a strong Trump supporter, then whenever Trump will ask for some law to be passed through Congress and Senate, Duke will deliver by voting in its favor. This is exactly the kind of people Trump needs in order to drain the swamp, obedient loyalists. Otherwise Trump will not be able to destroy the corrupt Washington octopus. Besides David stressed during the debate that he is not against all Jews, he’s just against powerful billionaires who control the narrative such as the people working at CNN or major Hillary Clinton puppet master George Soros.
+David Duke is definitely the best choice for Louisiana but if you still can’t vote for him because of his past, then hopefully John Fleming would win since he was also a good supporter of Donald Trump. According to this article , “toxic Trump” is only supported for real by David Duke and John Fleming:
+Each is on record supporting Trump’s candidacy. But except for Fleming, Maness and Duke (who seem eager to embrace Trump) , don’t ask them why. Because Trump is so toxic , these “leaders” must be grateful Louisiana is not a battleground state. They would surely hate to face a decision about whether to campaign with Trump if he showed up for rallies.
+Rob Maness didn’t participate in the debate because he is irrelevant, he’s below 5 percent and would thus be a waste of votes. It’s only between Fleming and Duke now. You wouldn’t want to vote for another scumbag RINO who thinks Trump is “toxic” and who would “hate to campaign with Trump”, now would you? Louisiana is a true red state, the choice is clear! Show the middle finger to establishment and vote for the candidate you thought supports Trump the most. Whatever you do don’t vote for a Democrat, or that “leading” Charles Boustany. He’s an Arab from Lebanon!!! And despite being married, he had been the client of 3 prostitutes who were later murdered . The choice is clear, its either David Duke or John Fleming!
+
+BLM (Black Lives Matter) thugs who are at least JUST AS BAD AS the KKK, or even worse for killing cops and holding violent rallies allover the country, held a violent protest outside the Dillard University where the debate took place, to oppose David Duke’s right to run as a Senator. The thugs attacked cops and police cars resulting in at least 6 arrests . David Duke needed a police escort in order to exist the building safely.
+So here’s the debate:
+
+",FAKE
+1376,Paris Tragedy Could Shake Up 2016 Race,"The terrorist attacks in Paris could shake up the 2016 presidential race, reminding voters of the high stakes and potentially boosting candidates who put their governing experience front and center.
+
+During much of the campaign, voters have swooned over candidates who trumpet their nonpolitical résumés. Celebrity businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson have led the Republican field, running far ahead of...",REAL
+6494,Hillary Clinton Is Now Radioactive – SoT #122,"Financial Markets Clinton Foundation , Hillary emails , Huma Abedin , Jim Comey , Weiner laptop admin 
+Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall (King James Bible). Throughout recorded history, hubris has been the Achilles’ Heel of political despots. Hillary Clinton and her political crime machine has been operating above the law for decades, stretching back at least to when Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas. “Hillary Clinton is a toilet scrubber for Goldman Sachs” – John Titus on the Shadow of Truth 
+During her 2016 Presidential Campaign, it became routine for her get in front the public and lie with convincing ease. In Greek tragedy, “hubris” was an anti-hero’s excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to the character’s unforeseen demise. 
+When Hillary was deposed by the FBI about the 33,000 emails on her private server that were wiped clean forever using BleachBit, she assumed her tracks were irrevocably covered up. But it wasn’t just 33,000 emails that were incinerated, reams of evidence including laptops, server back-ups and Blackberries either “disappeared” or were wiped clean. 
+Out of the blue, as if sent to earth from a Higher Power, the FBI in its child pornography investigation of Anthony Weiner stumbled on to a laptop with 650,000 emails that appeared to have been downloaded from Hillary Clinton’s private server. It is highly probable that among this treasure trough of emails will be copies of the 33,000 emails that Hillary arrogantly assumed were wiped from the Universe. Hubris gets ’em every time. 
+But it gets better than that. 650,000 is a decade’s worth of emails. It’s also possible that Weiner’s laptop will finally shed the light of Truth on Benghazi. “Jim Comey did not re-open this investigation of to go over old ground. Worse infractions were discovered.” – John Titus 
+In addition to exposing Hillary to all sorts of felonies, her statement to the FBI under oath undermined by this unforeseen “Black Swan” event that has engulfed her campaign. 
+The Shadow of Truth is pleased to present John Titus of Best Evidence productions adds his unique insight into this event. The two-part podcast covers analysis that has not been presented in either the mainstream or alternative media: Share this:",FAKE
+1510,2016's first GOP debate: Six things to look for in Charleston,"Programming Alert:Tune in to the FOX Business Network's GOP Debate on Thursday, January 14, beginning at 6 P.M. ET
+
+The good people of Charleston, South Carolina, divide themselves into two groups – SOBS (folks living south of Broad Street) and SNOBS (those on the northern side).
+
+Worse things have been said of the current crop of presidential hopefuls, nearly all of whom invade the Holy City the next few days – Thursday’s GOP debate, sponsored by the Fox Business Network; Sunday’s Democratic debate, carried by NBC.
+
+If you’re counting at home, this marks the sixth time the GOP field has gathered on one stage, the second time that the Fox Business Network (FBN) has done the honors and, with only seven candidates in the main event (watch live at 9 pm ET), it could be the first time an evening with the Republicans might not descend into pouting, posturing and crosstalk.
+
+How best to anticipate this debate?
+
+The debate’s venue, the North Charleston Coliseum and Performing Arts Center, is less than 10 miles from the Emanuel AME church, the scene of last June’s mass shooting. Gun control won’t go undiscussed, what with President Obama bringing it up in Tuesday’s State of the Union Address and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley revisiting the incident in her Republican response.
+
+It’s a short walk from Emanuel AME to the Cooper River and a bustling container-ship and car-carrier operation that’s converted Charleston from a Navy town to a thriving hub of maritime commerce (BMW and Volvo use the seaport to ship autos made elsewhere in the right-to-work state). There’s no better tie-in for a few questions about the global economy.
+
+Those ships dock upriver from Fort Sumter and were the site of a louder anti-Washington protest than anything the Tea Party’s imagined. Will Donald Trump tell America it’s time to party like it’s 1861?
+
+What else to expect from the Republicans?
+
+In the Low Country spirit of sippin’ bourbon and whiskey concoctions, six things:
+
+1.   Rebel Yell. Before we get into what divides the Republican field, here’s what unites it – multiple opportunities to yell President Obama post-State of the Union. Expect strong words on the President’s omission of the situation on Farsi island, his post-San Bernardino emphasis on guns and not domestic terrorism, his invoking the word “Muslim” only in conjunction with hate crimes, plus his insistence that America’s global influence isn’t in decline.
+
+2. Canadian Club. The knock against Ted Cruz is that most folks who’ve worked with him don’t like him. Let’s see if that carries over onto the debate stage should Trump resume the questions about Cruz’s Canadian birth. Will any other candidate intervene, or will they let Cruz and Trump slug it out? Then there’s also the matter of the Goldman Sachs undisclosed million dollar loan… As for Cruz, does he laugh off these lines of attack, or continue to return fire as he’s just begun to do in New Hampshire?
+
+3. Southern Comfort. To the adage about South Carolina’s quirkiness (“too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum,” said the anti-secessionist James L. Petrigu), there’s this reality: it’s the most conservative of the four stops on the February primary circuit. How many of the seven contenders will cater to the local electorate, versus those who play to the more moderate Yankees up in New Hampshire? For the latter, keep an eye on Chris Christie, John Kasich and this guy . . .
+
+4. Johnny Walker. That’s “Johnny”, as in John Ellis “Jeb” Bush, and “Walker” as in Walker’s Point, the family’s summer compound where the family assembles to celebrate wins and lick wounds. Historically, South Carolina has been invaluable to Bush presidential causes – both father and brother used it as a “firewall” in their respective winning candidacies. But that’s not so with Jeb. The Palmetto State doesn’t fit into a strategy that’s finish strong in New Hampshire or bust.
+
+5. Wild Turkey. Not to suggest that Trump is poultry, but as usual he’s the wild card in the two hours he has to bond with the six other Republicans who trail him in national surveys. Do we assume Trump is the aggressor, in attacking Cruz? Or does he go easy on Cruz and go back to his favorite pincushion: the Clintons?
+
+6. Old Fashioned. Not a brand of booze, but a cocktail (bourbon, splash of soda, bitters, sugar, orange wheel, cherry). The “old fashioned” candidate in this debate? It might be the decidedly youthful Marco Rubio, who suddenly seems less the futuristic GenXer and more a traditional Republican (convening a constitutional convention, berating Hillary Clinton for wanting higher taxes and bigger government). The last guy to popularize this cocktail: “Mad Men’s” Don Draper, who knew a thing or two about marketing and salesmanship.
+
+That show lasted eight years on television – the same goal as everyone mixing it up in North Charleston.
+
+Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
+356,Black Hawk crashes off Florida; human remains found,"(CNN) Thick fog forced authorities to suspend the air search Wednesday for seven Marines and four Army aircrew, feared dead after their Black Hawk helicopter crashed into waters off the Florida Panhandle.
+
+The helicopter was first reported missing at about 8:30 p.m. (9:30 p.m. ET) Tuesday. Hours later, searchers found debris around Okaloosa Island near Eglin Air Force Base, base spokesman Andy Bourland said.
+
+This debris washed up on both the north and south sides of Santa Rosa Sound, which connects mainland northern Florida and a barrier island.
+
+The air search is expected to resume midday Thursday, the spokesman said. A spokeswoman for the Coast Guard said that boats will continue scouring the waters throughout the night Wednesday, weather permitting.
+
+Human remains have washed ashore in the area near Eglin.
+
+Base spokeswoman Jasmine Porterfield didn't specify what was found, noting the search-and-rescue mission remained underway. Still, there was little hope for a miracle, with Gen. Martin Dempsey -- chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- expressing his condolences.
+
+He said the crash was ""a reminder to us that those who serve put themselves at risk, both in training and in combat.""
+
+""We will work with the services to ensure that ... their family members will be well cared for.""
+
+The Air Force, Coast Guard and civilian agencies participated in the intensive search focused on where they believe the aircraft went down, in waters east of the town of Navarre and the Navarre Bridge and near Eglin testing range site A-17.
+
+Porterfield said approximately 100 people were involved in canvassing the ground and the waters, looking for debris: ""It's a huge effort underway.""
+
+""We're working closely with all the parties involved to locate our Marines and the Army crew that were onboard,"" added Capt. Barry Morris, a spokesman for the U.S. Marines Corps Special Operations Command . ""And, really, just our thoughts (and) prayers are with the Marines, the soldiers and the families of those involved in the mishap.""
+
+No one is saying what caused the accident, with Eglin spokeswoman Sara Vidoni indicating only that there's no indication of anything suspicious.
+
+There was heavy fog in the area when the aircraft went missing, though the Eglin spokeswoman said it's too early to tell whether that had anything to do with the crash.
+
+""There is training in all conditions -- that's part of the military mission,"" Vidoni said. ""They were out there doing what the military does.""
+
+According to Morris, the service members -- all men -- were involved in a seven-day training exercise of amphibious operations. It involved small boats and inserting and extracting Marines from the water via helicopter. Morris would not say in which phase of the training the Marines were on Tuesday night.
+
+The UH-60 helicopter wasn't alone when it went down. A second Black Hawk -- assigned to 1-244th Assault Helicopter Battalion based in Hammond, Louisiana -- safely returned to the base, some 40 miles east of Pensacola.
+
+The aircraft were both assigned to the Louisiana Army National Guard out of Hammond and taking part in what the U.S. military called a ""routine training mission involving the Marine Special Operations Regiment"" out of Camp Lejeune.
+
+""Whatever the trouble was with the one aircraft, it did not involve the second helicopter that was participating in the exercise,"" Bourland said.
+
+Seven Marines based out of Camp Lejeune
+
+The Army aircrew members belonged to the Army National Guard unit out of Louisiana, part of a unit that Gov. Bobby Jindal said ""have fought courageously overseas in defense of our nation and here at home.""
+
+By 11:15 a.m., relatives of all four of those guardsmen had been notified, though their names won't be released publicly until the Coast Guard recovers their bodies or calls off the search, said Col. Pete Schneider, a Louisiana National Guard spokesman.
+
+""They have protected what matters most during times of crisis,"" Jindal said. ""These soldiers represent the best of Louisiana, and we are praying for them and their families.""
+
+The pilots were instructor pilots, Maj. Gen. Glenn Curtis told reporters. He said the whole crew had several thousand combined hours of operation flying the Black Hawk.
+
+This week's crash involved a UH-60 Black Hawk, a twin-engine helicopter introduced into Army service in 1979 in place of the iconic UH-1 Huey. Other branches have modified the Black Hawk for their own uses, including the Navy's SH-60 (the Sea Hawk), the Air Force's MH-60 (the Pave Hawk) and the Coast Guard's HH-60 (the Jayhawk).
+
+The Army's UH-60 helicopter, which has a maximum speed of 173 mph, has an airframe ""designed to progressively crush on impact to protect the crew and passengers,"" according to the service.
+
+As Morris, the Marine spokesman, pointed out, those who get on such aircraft or take part in other military exercises aren't always out of danger just because they're off the battlefield.
+
+""We have a requirement to conduct realistic military training,"" he said. ""And unfortunately this mishap happened.""",REAL
+8521,VIDEO: Creepy Clown Gets Pistol-Whipped!,"
+A prankster in Stockton, California is not laughing after an attempt to scare people in a creepy clown costume ended with a man pulling out his pistol and striking him on the side of his head.
+Sadiq Mohammad, 20, decided that clowning around in Stockton attempting to scare unsuspecting people was a good idea. He is a professional prankster who runs an entertainment website called Hoodclips, which gets almost 7 million views daily.
+“The numbers don’t lie, people love comedy. That’s why I have a lot of followers,” Mohammad said.
+
+Mohammad decided to hide behind some bushes and jump out to scare a man who was walking by, he began to cry out, “It’s a prank,” but the man said the prank was not funny, and he approached him with his pistol drawn.
+He was struck down to the ground, and he and his cameraman immediately ran away. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Ryan Banister of The Daily Sheeple . ",FAKE
+5722,THE VISION THING ‘16    : Information," The Vision Thing
+By Paul Edwards
+That this election is an abysmal disgrace is nationally acknowledged; that it is absolutely unique is not, although it’s undeniable. Never before has virtually the entire mainstream media avidly, emphatically endorsed one Presidential candidate while furiously, contemptuously vilifying the other. Never has a sitting President joined in general denunciation of a candidate. With ten days to go it’s affirmed by most key sources that Donald Trump can’t win and Hillary Clinton will. Many pundits predict a landslide for her. Assume it. What then? The most hated President-elect ever will not be loved by the Congress she will confront. Even with a majority in the Senate--just possible--and in the House--not--prospects for a legislative agenda, should she have one, are non-existent. What Obama’s phony charm failed to achieve, Hillary’s lack of it will scarcely obtain. This presages four more years of stasis and nullity, of social and economic rot, financial chicanery, and national decay. As regards the composition of the Supreme Court--the panicky Liberal pitch for being “with her”--unless she nominates hidebound conservatives, which is probable, not a single selection will be confirmed during her term. So... paralysis in Congress, reaction in the Court; two limbs of government neutralized, gives us rule by a disliked, distrusted figurehead with the full power of Wall Street and the Imperial War-loving Establishment behind her. What then will be accomplished? First, the interests of The Empire will be promoted at least as robustly as in Obama’s eight years of sycophancy. Including his Rube Goldbergian Obamacare, still foundering and gouging, nothing of any benefit to Americans was achieved under this charlatan who perfected the skill of describing an airplane crash as a triumph of gravity. So what will she do in office? Well, start with what she won’t do. She won’t make any effort to restrain The Big Casino, the Gold Sacks Mafia. They made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. She won’t attempt any closing of the inequality gap. That would entail clipping her base--”Our Crowd” of the Hamptons, Palm Beach and Beverly Hills. She won’t meddle with Sick Care--”fool me once...”--or, corporate tax enforcement. Her Big Donors don’t want to pay them and why should they, right? She can just let Labor die of its own raging leukemia. College grads have to stay in their parents’ basements and service their college debt via Macdonalds because Arbeit Macht Frei. No need to do anything about Global Warming so long as you denounce it boldly at international meetings. Best leave the environment in the hands of those who can turn idle nature into money. Besides, the solution to pollution is dilution and clearcuts grow back in a millenium or so. On the minor agenda, she knows there are still small poor countries who require our R2P and cluster bombs. Others have resources that, with the odd military coup or assassination, should come on line nicely. Africa, say, has low-hanging fruit, and the Latin American mess needs our firm hand to prevent Lefty dictators diverting perfectly good profits to their own societies. Turning to the major crises, Exceptionalism requires that they be made far bigger. Our Defense Industries can’t be expected to muck along forever on paltry brushfire wars: Iraq, Afghanistan--though in fairness they’ve profuced steady income streams--and Libya, no bonanza, and Syria, which Putin’s diabolical meddling prevented blossoming as we hoped. Still, there’s no earthly reason we can’t achieve a profitable Third World War simply by refusing to take the bait of Satanic Putin’s wimpy peace offers and calling them what they really are: a mortal threat to our Capitalist System. So much for her first Hundred Days. Beyond the panicked cheerleading of the Imperial Elite--those that the late, great George Carlin referred to as “your owners”--and their failing organs of crowd manipulation, and beyond the day Clinton takes office if their hopes are consummated, America faces a cataclysmic crisis of governance; one of the order of magnitude of the secession of The South under Lincoln. Clinton and Trump are the physical, mental and emotional symptoms of that crisis. Our dead system must, and will, have catharsis. Which of them precipitates it may not greatly matter. Or it may mean everything. As Brutus said at Philippi: “Oh, that a man might know the end of this days business ere it come; but it sufficeth that the day will end and then the end is known.”
+Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net",FAKE
+2683,"Drudge, Koch, Soros, Bezos: These 4 non-politicians will determine the next president","They’re approximately 20 percent accurate. While this list would have held water prior to the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, The Hill places undue value on social media.
+
+“Twitter, Snapchat and other social media tools are also playing a role in the race,” the story argues for Zuckerberg’s influence, “but they do not have the reach of Facebook.”
+
+If “likes, posts, comments and shares” were a valid metric, Bernie Sanders would be king of the world right now.
+
+Citizens United invalidated any sort of grassroots political buzz (e.g. Sanders). Even the master of media manipulation, Donald Trump, won’t be able to translate his Twitter-momentum into a general election win against establishment collage Hillary Clinton, unless he can unite the GOP behind him.
+
+The ability of nonprofits to accept unlimited individual donations to push a political agenda is far more important than whether or not the “money-losing” Huffington Post covers Trump under its “entertainment” or “politics” section.
+
+So-called dark money, in conjunction with a wide-reaching “mouthpiece,” paves the road to the Oval Office — and even a brilliant John Oliver expose can’t change that.
+
+Special interest groups — like the NRA — can scrounge up a good chunk of change for the candidate most likely to maintain the status quo, but Super PACs are the best source of dark money.
+
+PACs have the added benefit of keeping their donors anonymous, which is a nice feature for people who don’t want their tennis partners to know they bet on the wrong horse or, worse yet, backed Trump.
+
+As the face of the Koch Brothers — the infamous proprietors of libertarian-leaning Freedom Partners Action Fund — Charles Koch deals with the client-facing aspects of Koch PR.
+
+In an interview with ABC on Sunday, Charles Koch explained his and his brother David’s decision to withhold their much-coveted endorsement of the remaining candidates. In so doing, Charles condemned what he called a “two-tiered system” (i.e. a regressive tax) and suggested Hillary Clinton might make a better president than Cruz or Trump.
+
+Koch’s Hillary support isn’t necessarily as out-of-left-field as it may seem, considering the brothers’ recent embrace of criminal justice reform.
+
+Last spring, Politico Magazine reported that “Koch had decided to help pull together a new coalition of left-right advocacy groups in Washington, including the Hillary Clinton-aligned Center for American Progress” with an aim towards eradicating prison overcrowding.
+
+Among the major donors to the Center for American Progress is billionaire George Soros, who’s given $7 million to the Hillary Clinton-endorsing Priorities USA Action Super PAC during the 2016 cycle.
+
+Soros was the top individual donor during the 2008 cycle as well, giving $5 million to four 527 organizations. In 2012, however, he gave just $1 million to Obama reelection PAC, Priorities USA. Soros has invested a relatively significant amount of personal money into this cycle, and is likely to up the ante when the general election rolls around. There’s a limit to how far PAC money can keep a candidate afloat (e.g. Jeb! Bush and Li’l Marco Rubio). For lack of a less conspiratorial word, every special interest needs a mouthpiece. Not a known political financier, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos took a less direct route to political influence in purchasing the Washington Post in 2013. And though WaPo is a humongous organization, editorial leanings in the media tend to have a top-down effect. Despite his nearly $55 billion net worth, Bezos has donated relatively small amounts to Democrats ($28,000) and Republicans ($4,000). Some, however, claim he’s similar to other tech entrepreneurs who support a libertarian, small-government platform. The Post hasn’t formally endorsed Clinton, but its Editorial Board unmistakably condemned her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, in a January article titled “Bernie Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign.” In the months since the Editorial Board’s unendorsement, the Post has been accused of repeatedly parroting Clinton’s agenda. As the namesake of prominent news aggregation site, Drudge Report, Matt Drudge wields his right-wing influence through the careful curation of what appears on the site’s homepage. In their book, “The Way to Win,” Mark Halperin and John F. Harris call Drudge “the single most influential purveyor of information about American politics” for his role in John Kerry’s loss in 2004. Drudge Report reader polls, conducted after each televised debate this primary cycle, consistently declared Trump the winner. And a when asked who they’re supporting for the presidency, participating Drudge readers voted overwhelmingly in favor of Trump (60% to second place Ted Cruz’s 19%). And though these polls are decidedly unscientific, they did capture the intensity of Trump’s support — the real story of the GOP campaign — and people are starting to give Drudge more and more credit as the Trump train chugs towards Cleveland. In a radio interview earlier this month, Cruz complained that Drudge Report “has basically become the attack site for the Donald Trump campaign.” “By all appearances, Roger Stone now decides what’s on Drudge, and most days they have a six-month-old article that is some attack on me,” Cruz added. “Whatever the Trump campaign is pushing that day will be the banner headline on Drudge.”",REAL
+8340,The Other Way of Knowing,"By Lilian Na’ia Alessa / culturalsurvival.org 
+Western science and Indigenous worldviews are often seen as incompatible, with the Indigenous view usually being far less valued by society at large. But an inside look at Indigenous ways of knowing shows that they offer unique and dependable insights, in precisely the areas where Western science is often weakest. 
+I grew up in a family where Bible study was mandatory. Yet, despite the firm Christian branches that shaded my home, there were traditional roots that anchored daily life. My grandmother spoke no English and went about her tasks singing. She sang to things I couldn’t see, to stones and water. She spoke to the breezes that came off the sea. This was not odd to me. No question of sanity or need of counseling entered my mind. It was simply the mechanics of living, of praise to God, to the Creator. She wove fibers into amazing patterns, placing them in water while singing. When she finished singing, the coarse strands would be soaked and pliable and she would sing again until the pattern was done. Her songs, I came to realize, were timers for different tasks. She had no watch, knew no math, indeed had been denied the opportunity to get the education that became the currency of the world in her adulthood and old age. Instead, she had acquired a sophisticated methodology to transform the resources that yielded to her hand, and her hand only. There were no power tools, no mechanical devices to ease her work. There was only an elegance of skill that no machine could replicate. As a child, she was magic to me, and at her deathbed the shock of her mortality severed my faith in these songs. I turned to the precision of Western learning, so that such a fate would never befall me. So I would know the world, and in that knowledge, somehow control it. 
+My desire to shun those things that had no firm margins grew as I came to learn the beauty and remarkable perfection of the universe through the eyes of those scholars who, like the elders of my youth, had discovered these things before. As I sat in uncomfortable chairs in lecture halls, a number in a sea of students, and despaired at the pain of examinations in those same chairs, a profound awe of the very molecules that composed my body and everything surrounding me settled. When I realized that the ability to pursue this learning fell squarely on my ability to navigate a system of hard edges, I panicked. I had been raised in a home swirling with soft fluidity of being. 
+And now, my learning rejected these things. 
+But numbers sing, too. Their words are clear and distinct, and their combinations were refrains of certainty. The slow draining of the deep convictions of my upbringing and generations of women who had sustained children with their hands became a steady flow. Here lay the solution: I could understand all things by measuring them, and in knowing those words I felt I could rewrite the song. 
+The profound awe I felt as a student failed me when I took a job as a faculty researcher at a university. I came to realize that Western science hummed the words much of the time. I could see it coming: there were too many failures, too many times when it was apparent that politics, egos, and cliques were the white noise that drowned out the song. Like the death of my grandmother, it was a sound blow. 
+Western science as a way of knowing has precision and discipline, and unlike most other ways of knowing, it can be faithfully replicated (most of the time) and understood by practitioners around the world, regardless of their language. But I was led to believe that it could explain more than it really could. Its limitations could be found not only in the over-simplification of the world but also in the murky stupidity of politics, greed, and hubris. And so, in my 30s, I found my faith in Western science fall away like a rock cast off a mountain for the second time in my life. In my rush to compose, rather than hear, the song, I was missing the synergy of the wisdoms of two worlds: one called “traditional” and the other called “Western.” 
+The phrases “traditional ecological knowledge,”“traditional local knowledge,” and “folk knowledge” are often associated with “fuzzy knowledge,” the kind that comes from funneling information through a human instrument, whereas “Western science” suggests an absolute objectivity, immune from human bias. In order to discern between the two, one must understand how different cultures, including the “knowledge seekers” of both, come to exist, survive, and thrive in their worlds. The bottom line is that both address knowing the world using different, yet ultimately similar, approaches. Western science excels at unraveling the unseen—our medical technology a testament to this precision—while traditional knowledge reveals the dynamics of larger systems, particularly animals, plants, and habitats, and the wisdom of our place among them. 
+In general, Western science and traditional knowledge are usually perceived as two separate, distinct, and somewhat incompatible entities. Why is this? In part, it is simply stubbornness and fear on both sides. In practice they are very similar, and in results they are highly complementary, because one works well at small scales and the other at large scales. But in their origins they differ. Western science is relatively new and evolved from the philosophies of Aristotle and Bacon that sought to standardize information so that it could be used by groups of people who did not necessarily live in the same region. People who moved from one region to another relied on this information to aid the growth of their crops, the health of their livestock, and the survival of their young, not to mention the development of weaponry, defenses, and trade. Aristotle stated that humans were separate from the rest of the “natural” world (this including animals, plants, and the places they lived). This was a pivotal time in history: medicine was advancing and people were making connections between cleanliness and protecting food sources from competing interests, such as rats, which also spread disease. 
+Government   were providing security for more and more people, most of whom had descended from tribes that survived by hunting and gathering and competing for these resources with neighboring tribes through conflict and, less often, fragile treaties of cooperation. With this shift from conflict to more and more centralized organization came more time to observe the components of the world not directly related to survival. While not new speculations, a class of “observer” started documenting the way humans behaved with each other and other curious habits of the species. This class of observer was more often than not composed of members of religious sects, such as the clergy, and likely evolved from the strong shamanic heritage of their ancestral traditions. As these observations amassed and humans were ideologically “cleansed” of their socially offensive ties to the animal world, human nature sought to explain the observations. Tied into this desire was an increasing belief that the surrounding world was less and less a living, interacting system and more and more a source of resources, composed of “parts,” each of which could be isolated, understood, and manipulated, usually for the benefit of humans. At this point, any oral histories that linked societies to their environments were rapidly being relegated to the outlying villages and remnants of nomadic peoples. In other words, the “uneducated.” So the “observers” or “scholars” had isolated themselves from their environments and were increasingly reliant on a hierarchy of workers to support their existence and lifestyles, distancing them from the lands and waters that sustained them. Could this be the point where Western science and traditional knowledge diverged as two distinct socially constructed approaches to “knowing?” That remains to be studied, but perhaps one can link this early form of systematic observation and explanation to the relatively recent process called the “scientific method” which is often invoked to settle information-dependent conflicts. 
+It is my opinion that an important distinction must be made between scales of knowledge with respect to the scientific method and traditional knowledge. Tech­nologies such as microscopes and antibodies have given us insights into the unseen worlds of micro-scale processes that we would otherwise never have acquired. As you increase the level of space (for example a cell in the body) and time, you increase the level of complexity, or how many things interact with each other at any given time. By the time you arrive at ecosystems, the interactions of organisms and their habits, you have accumulated an enormous amount of complexity. It becomes increasingly difficult to resolve what is causing which effect. As a consequence, the scientific method and the Western approach to “understanding” is more tenuous, and it is at this intersection of time and space that traditional knowledge is most apparent as another approach. By necessity, Western science must simplify things to develop testable hypotheses about how they work, which is both precise and useful at smaller scales. In the process, however, it eliminates details, many of which are considered “descriptive” and either not important to understanding or too confounding. A hallmark of traditional knowledge is that details are exquisitely noted and communicated in such a way that the user can detect small changes and respond accordingly. 
+This approach to traditional knowledge has existed as long as we have as a species. The act of residing, surviving, and thriving in a place means that the resident must “know” her environment in such a way as to repeatedly have a high likelihood of regularly acquiring necessary resources, whether they are physical or not, on a regular basis. The consequence of failure is not the ridicule of one’s peers or the failure to get a research grant; it is sickness, suffering, and death. One could say that the stakes in traditional knowledge are much higher, and hence so is the precision. Traditional knowledge requires something that, with few exceptions, Western science has failed to accomplish: long periods of observation in the same place and the transmission of these observations to others in that place so that they can use them practically and often, from a young age. 
+Some Western schools of thought romanticize traditional knowledge and perceive that somehow possessing it brings ultimate harmony of the user with his world. No mistakes will be made because there exists a magical link where all things are known. This is part of the devalidation of traditional knowledge because it fails to acknowledge that it, like the scientific method, is a process where information is accepted or rejected based on receiving knowledge continuously, both directly from the system and from one’s colleagues, friends, family, and mentors, usually to benefit the community and future generations. 
+It should not be surprising that somebody suggests that the approach of traditional knowledge is not limited to humans. We have only recently become aware that elephants have very calculated ways of using and moving through their environments. They will find their food, raise their young, interact, and bury their dead in ways that are distinct to their clans, locations, and preferences and they will transmit this information from one generation to the next using a complex subsonic language. My grandmother told me similar stories about ravens, that we were really not that different, and that if we searched our memories really hard, we could actually see someone we knew in those brilliant, wise, winter eyes. 
+Lilian “Na’ia” Alessa is of Salish ancestry. She received a doctorate in cell biology from the University of British Columbia and now works in the area of adaptive resource management in Alaska, using tools from both traditional and Western ways of knowing. This article is adapted from Alessa’s chapter, “What is Truth? Where Science and Traditional Knowledge Converge,” in The Alaska Native Reader, edited by Maria Sháa Tláa Williams and published in 2009 by Duke University Press. For more information, go to the Duke University Press website at www.dukeupress.edu [1] . 0.0 ·",FAKE
+4020,Obama and Putin outline competing visions on Syria,"President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin laid out sharply competing visions Monday about how to tackle the ongoing conflicts in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, with each blaming the other for the region’s turmoil even as they signaled a willingness to address it together.
+
+In speeches to the U.N. General Assembly less than two hours apart, each leader said he embraced a foreign policy approach that respects international norms that are essential to global stability. Later in the day, the two met privately to hash out their differences and to see whether there was room for cooperation. The closed-door session lasted more than an hour and a half, ending just before Obama was scheduled to host a reception for delegates.
+
+After the session, Putin left for Moscow. In brief remarks to Russian reporters, he described relations between the two countries as “regretfully at a rather low level” due to U.S. resistance but said that “we now have an understanding that our work needs to be strengthened, at least on the bilateral basis. We are now thinking together on the creation of appropriate mechanisms.”
+
+A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting, said that while it gave Obama “clarity on their objectives,” the two sides continued to disagree on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s role in the conflict and his future.
+
+Russia’s “objectives are to go after ISIL and to support the government,” the official said, using an acronym for the Islamic State. Administration officials have expressed concern that new Russian deployments in Syria would bolster Assad’s fight against his opponents rather than degrade the militants.
+
+In his speech, Obama took direct aim at Russia’s military buildup in Syria as well as its support for Ukrainian separatists, saying, “We are told that such retrenchment is required to beat back disorder, that it’s the only way to stamp out terrorism, or prevent foreign meddling.
+
+“But I stand before you today believing in my core that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion. We cannot look backward. . . . And if we cannot work together more effectively, we will all suffer the consequences.”
+
+[For Obama, a week that showed the world as he wants it, and how it really is]
+
+Putin, for his part, charged that attempts by Western nations to impose democracy — including in Iraq and Libya — were responsible for upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa. While people in those regions clearly wanted and deserved change, “the export of revolutions, this time so-called democratic ones,” he said, had resulted in “violence and social disaster” instead of a “triumph for democracy.”
+
+Then Putin had a question. “I cannot help asking those who have forced this situation, do you realize now what you have done?” he said in remarks that never mentioned but were clearly directed at the United States. “Policies based on self-conceit and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity have never been abandoned.”
+
+Beyond the barbs, the two raised the prospect of cooperating more closely on fighting Islamist terrorists and brokering a political solution in Syria, where war has raged for 4 years. Obama and Putin — who opened their first extended, formal meeting in two years with a stiff handshake before the cameras — remain divided over Assad, whom Obama wants ousted and Putin continues to back.
+
+“The United States is prepared to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran, to resolve the conflict,” Obama said in his 42-minute speech. “But we must recognize that there cannot be, after so much bloodshed, so much carnage, a return to the prewar status quo. . . . And so Assad and his allies cannot simply pacify the broad majority of a population who have been brutalized by chemical weapons and indiscriminate bombing.”
+
+Putin, by contrast, insisted that “no one but Assad’s forces­ and militias are truly fighting the Islamic State.” He said it would be an “enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed ­forces.”
+
+Russia has directly challenged U.S. military and diplomatic dominance in the region and the U.S.-led coalition air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Over the past month, Putin has expanded Russia’s long-running provision of weapons to Assad with deployments of tanks and aircraft. Over the weekend, Russia and Iraq announced that they would establish a rival anti-militant coalition in Baghdad to include Iran and Syria.
+
+In his speech before U.N. delegates, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani echoed Putin’s comments, saying that while the United States was responsible for the current tumult in the Middle East, his government was willing to help bring “democracy” to Syria.
+
+Russia maintains that Western intervention in Syria is a violation of international law.
+
+Putin proposed creating a “broad international coalition” that he compared to the “anti-Hilter coalition” during World War II.
+
+Russia, the current chair of the U.N. Security Council, has called for a meeting next month to discuss how to better combat extremism. Moscow has also proposed a meeting among itself, the United States and the governments of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt on coordination over Syria.
+
+The Obama administration has not yet responded to the latter proposal, and it remains unclear whether Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Sunni Arab state opposed to Assad, and Iran, the Syrian leader’s other main backer, would agree to cooperate on any Syrian initiative.
+
+Leading European members of the U.S.-led coalition, which has been conducting air attacks against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria over the past year, have indicated that they believe the idea — and some cooperation with Russia — is worth exploring.
+
+French President François Hollande, who last week authorized his country’s first air attacks in Syria, said Monday that “today, the moderate opposition is weak, Bashar al-Assad is weak, and ISIL is strong.”
+
+“We can’t stick to our original enemies,” he said in a morning session with reporters. “We have to gather everybody together.”
+
+“If Saudi Arabia and Iran can find agreement on the future of Syria, then there can be an ­answer,” Hollande said.
+
+In comments last week, British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared to be softening their position toward Assad, at least temporarily. “We have to speak with many actors; this includes Assad, but others as well,” Merkel said. “Not only with the United States of America, Russia, but with important regional partners, Iran, and Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia.”
+
+European views have been influenced not only by the stagnation in the Syrian conflict and the Islamic State’s expansion in Iraq, but also by the hundreds of thousands of refugees — many of them from Syria — who have been pouring into their countries.
+
+U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon praised those European countries that have provided asylum but urged them to do more. “After the Second World War, it was Europeans seeking the world’s assistance,” Ban said.
+
+Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was the first world leader to address the General Assembly on Monday, drew applause when she noted that her country has already provided shelter to many Syrian refugees. Brazil loosened restrictions two years ago and has issued more than 7,000 visas to Syrian refugees at this point — more than any other country in Latin America.
+
+“We have our arms open to welcome refugees,” she said. “We are a multi­ethnic nation.”
+
+Obama and Putin also offered differing accounts of what had transpired in Ukraine, where Russia has annexed Crimea and backed separatists in the country’s southeast.
+
+Although Putin devoted the bulk of his speech to Syria and terrorism, he repeated Russia’s charge that the overthrow of Ukraine’s government early last year was “orchestrated from outside.” He said Russia would adhere to the Minsk agreements, once they gave adequate representation to the legitimate demands of eastern Ukraine separatists that Moscow has backed.
+
+Obama, however, said the West would continue to impose economic sanctions on Russia unless it reversed course. “We cannot stand by when the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a nation is flagrantly violated.”
+
+While relations with Russia rank highest on Obama’s priority list during this visit, his agenda includes other major bilateral meetings and working sessions. The president met privately Monday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, pressing him to adopt a more stringent target for cutting India’s carbon emissions in the coming decades, and he convened a summit on bolstering U.N. peacekeeping forces.On Tuesday, the president will sit down with Cuban President Raúl Castro and Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
+
+Indian officials say they will announce their post-2020 climate target later this week. While they have indicated that they will embrace an ambitious goal for expanding renewable energy sources, they have balked at the idea of committing to cutting their overall carbon output in the near future.
+
+Obama has privately pressed Modi to do more as part of the run-up to U.N. climate talks in December, dispatching a senior adviser, Brian Deese, to New Delhi this month to discuss the matter. After their meeting Monday, the president said, “And what I indicated to the prime minister is that I really think that India’s leadership in this upcoming conference will set the tone not just for today but for decades to come.”
+
+Modi, meanwhile, reiterated his country’s commitment to install 175 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2022. “The president and I share an uncompromising commitment on climate change without affecting our ability to meet the development aspirations of humanity,” he said.",REAL
+7006,Comment on Police Officer’s Wife Caught Faking a Robbery In a Scheme To Frame Black Lives Matter by The Cat's Vagina (Nasty Woman),"Home / Blue Privilege / Police Officer’s Wife Caught Faking a Robbery In a Scheme To Frame Black Lives Matter Police Officer’s Wife Caught Faking a Robbery In a Scheme To Frame Black Lives Matter The Free Thought Project October 30, 2016 1 Comment ( RT ) A Boston police officer’s wife has been charged with faking a robbery which she attempted to frame the Black Lives Matter Movement for. 
+Maria Daly reported a burglary at her home in Millbury on October 17 and claimed her jewelry and some money had been stolen. She told police her home had been graffitied with the letters, “BLM.” 
+“Something wasn’t quite right,” Millbury Police Chief Donald Desorcy said . “I think that was pretty obvious and as a result of that investigation, the officers did their due diligence and followed through with the investigation that we had.” This is white supremacist Maria Daly, the wife of Boston cop Daniel Daly.She staged a fake robbery of her home, and tried to blame #BLM pic.twitter.com/vrdqg1cM6r 
+— Tariq Nasheed (@tariqnasheed) October 29, 2016 
+CBS Boston reports Daly took to social media soon after the fabricated robbery, saying, “We woke up to not only our house being robbed while we were sleeping, but to see this hatred for no reason.” 
+“If you would of [sic] asked me yesterday about this blue lives and black lives matter issue my response would of [sic] been very possitive [sic],” the now private Facebook account continues. “Today on the other hand I have so much anger and hate that I don’t like myself. This is what we have to deal with these days and it makes me sick that this is what was on the side of my house.” 
+Despite Daly’s best efforts, the police were able to tell no robbery took place. @crystalhaynes The poor lady just needs some help.. 
+— Mark Scanlon (@markscanlon50) October 28, 2016 
+“Basically we came to the conclusion that it was all fabricated,” said Desorcy. “There was no intruder, there was no burglary.” 
+Police concluded Daly fabricated the robbery due to financial difficulty. Daly confessed and returned the items she claimed were missing, which amounted to $10,000 in jewelry. 
+Desorcy told reporters, “We weren’t going to sweep this under the rug,” and that he felt sorry for the family. 
+Daly’s husband Dan is not suspected of being involved in his wife’s crime. Share Google + The Cat’s Vagina (Nasty Woman) 
+So, is she going to be brought up on the same charges that any one of us would be for staging a crime and lying to police, or will she avail herself of Blue (Dick Holster) Privilege? Social",FAKE
+3226,Is the GOP losing Walmart?,"(CNN) As goes Walmart , so goes the nation?
+
+Everyone from Apple CEO Tim Cook to the head of the NCAA slammed religious freedom laws being considered in several states this week, warning that they would open the door to discrimination against gay and lesbian customers.
+
+But it was the opposition from Walmart, the ubiquitous retailer that dots the American landscape, that perhaps resonated most deeply , providing the latest evidence of growing support for gay rights in the heartland.
+
+Walmart's staunch criticism of a religious freedom law in its home state of Arkansas came after the company said in February it would boost pay for about 500,000 workers well above the federal minimum wage. Taken together, the company is emerging as a bellwether for shifting public opinion on hot-button political issues that divide conservatives and liberals.
+
+And some prominent Republicans are urging the party to take notice.
+
+Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who famously called on the GOP to ""be the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club,"" told CNN that Walmart's actions ""foreshadow where the Republican Party will need to move.""
+
+""The Republican Party will have to better stand for"" ideas on helping the middle class, said Pawlenty, the head of the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington lobbying group for the finance industry. The party's leaders must be ""willing to put forward ideas that will help modest income workers, such as a reasonable increase in the minimum wage, and prohibit discrimination in things such as jobs, housing, public accommodation against gays and lesbians.""
+
+Walmart, which employs more than 50,000 people in Arkansas, emerged victorious on Wednesday. Hours after the company's CEO, Doug McMillon, called on Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson to veto the bill, the governor held a news conference and announced he would not sign the legislation unless its language was fixed.
+
+Walmart's opposition to the religious freedom law once again puts the company at odds with many in the Republican Party, which the company's political action committee has tended to support.
+
+It has been a gradual transformation for Walmart.
+
+""It's easy for someone like a Chick-fil-A to take a really polarizing position,"" said Dwight Hill, a partner at the retail consulting firm McMillanDoolittle. ""But in the world of the largest retailer in the world, that's very different.""
+
+Hill added: Same-sex marriage, ""while divisive, it's becoming more common place here within the U.S., and the businesses by definition have to follow the trend of their customer.""
+
+The backlash over the religious freedom measures in Indiana and Arkansas this week is shining a bright light on the broader business community's overwhelming support for workplace policies that promote gay equality.
+
+After Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, signed his state's religious freedom bill into law, CEOs of companies big and small across the country threatened to pull out of the Hoosier state.
+
+The resistance came from business leaders of all political persuasions, including Bill Oesterle, CEO of the business-rating website Angie's List and a one-time campaign manager for former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Oesterle announced that his company would put plans on hold to expand its footprint in Indianapolis in light of the state's passage of the religious freedom act.
+
+NASCAR, scheduled to hold a race in Indianapolis this summer, also spoke out against the Indiana law.
+
+""What we're seeing over the past week is a tremendous amount of support from the business community who are standing up and are sending that equality is good for business and discrimination is bad for business,"" said Jason Rahlan, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign.
+
+National Republicans are being forced to walk the fine line of protecting religious liberties and supporting nondiscrimination.
+
+""By the end of the week, Indiana will be in the right place,"" Bush said, a reference to Pence's promise this week to fix his state's law in light of the widespread backlash.
+
+Others in the GOP field are digging in. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the only officially declared Republican presidential candidate, said Wednesday that he had no interest in second-guessing Pence and lashed out at the business community for opposing the law.
+
+Meanwhile, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who previously served on Walmart's board of directors, called on Hutchinson to veto the Arkansas bill, saying it would ""permit unfair discrimination"" against the LGBT community.
+
+Jay Chesshir, CEO of the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce in Arkansas, welcomed Hutchinson's pledge on Wednesday to seek changes to his state's bill. He said businesses are not afraid to wade into a politically controversial debate to ensure inclusive workplace policies.
+
+""When it comes to culture and quality of life, businesses are extremely interested in engaging in debate simply because it impacts its more precious resource -- and that's its people,"" Chesshir said. ""Therefore, when issues arise that have negative or positive impact on those things, then the business community will again speak and speak loudly.""",REAL
+6287,Supreme Court Decides to Weigh in On Transgender Rights,"By Adalia Woodbury on Sun, Oct 30th, 2016 at 11:31 pm On Friday, the Supreme Court decided to weigh in on transgender rights in the case of Gloucester County School Board vs. G.G. This gives the right wing another chance to take civil rights away from people they don’t like. Plain and simple. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+On Friday, the Supreme Court decided to weigh in on transgender rights in the case of Gloucester County School Board vs. G.G . This gives the right wing another chance to take civil rights away from people they don’t like. Plain and simple. 
+At issue is whether a transgender student who identifies as a boy has a right to use the bathroom that corresponds with the gender he identifies with. 
+Last summer, the court granted the school board’s request to put a lower court ruling in the student’s favor on hold until the board filed its petition for review by the Supreme Court. Justice Breyer joined the conservative justices in that ruling as a courtesy. 
+The Virginia school board established a policy mirroring “bathroom police” laws in red states like North Carolina that required students to use rest rooms and locker rooms to correspond with the gender they were assigned at birth. 
+In this case, the district court ruled against G.G. by relying on a 1975 regulation allowing schools to provide “separate toilet, locker room and shower facilities based on sex” provided those facilities are comparable to those provided to the opposite sex. 
+In January 2015, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued a letter opining that if schools separate students in restroom and locker rooms based on their sex a “school must treat transgender students” in a manner consistent “with their gender identity.” 
+Because of that letter, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed the lower court ruling in favor of G.G. It relied on a 1997 Supreme Court decision that courts generally should defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulation. 
+In reality, the right wing hopes to achieve two political objectives with this case. First, this is about denying basic rights and dignity to people who are transgender, which is consistent with their ideological opposition to rights for women, POC and members of the LGBT community. Second, the right wing is hoping to weaken Federal Agencies by attacking their ability to interpret their own regulations.",FAKE
+7119,If Hillary Clinton Is Charged With Obstruction Of Justice She Could Go To Prison For 20 Years,"Archives Michael On Television If Hillary Clinton Is Charged With Obstruction Of Justice She Could Go To Prison For 20 Years By Michael Snyder, on October 30th, 2016 
+In the world of politics, the cover-up is often worse than the original crime. It was his role in the Watergate cover-up that took down Richard Nixon, and now Hillary Clinton’s cover-up of her email scandal could send her to prison for a very, very long time. When news broke that the FBI has renewed its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, it sent shockwaves throughout the political world . But this time around, we aren’t just talking about an investigation into the mishandling of classified documents. I haven’t heard anyone talking about this, but if the FBI discovers that Hillary Clinton altered, destroyed or concealed any emails that should have been turned over to the FBI during the original investigation, she could be charged with obstruction of justice. That would immediately end her political career, and if she was found guilty it could send her to prison for the rest of her life. 
+I have not seen a single news report mention the phrase “obstruction of justice” yet, but I am convinced that there is a very good chance that this is where this scandal is heading. The following is the relevant part of the federal statute that deals with obstruction of justice … 
+Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsified, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under Title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. 
+If Hillary Clinton is sent to prison for 20 years, that would essentially be for the rest of her life. 
+I have a feeling that the FBI is going to find a great deal of evidence of obstruction of justice in Huma Abedin’s emails. But unfortunately there is not likely to be a resolution to this matter before November 8th, because according to the Wall Street Journal there are approximately 650,000 emails to search through… 
+As federal agents prepare to scour roughly 650,000 emails to see how many relate to a prior probe of Hillary Clinton ’s email use, the surprise disclosure that investigators were pursuing the potential new evidence lays bare building tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee. 
+Metadata found on the laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, suggests there may be thousands of emails sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe. 
+Of those 650,000 emails, an inside source told Fox News that “ at least 10,000 ” would be of interest to the investigation. 
+At this point, FBI officials have not even begun searching through the emails, because a search warrant has not been secured yet. The following comes from CNN … 
+Government lawyers haven’t yet approached Abedin’s lawyers to seek an agreement to conduct the search. Sources earlier told CNN that those discussions had begun, but the law enforcement officials now say they have not. 
+Either way, government lawyers plan to seek a search warrant from a judge to conduct the search of the computer, the law enforcement officials said. 
+But the FBI is reportedly already searching a laptop that was co-owned by Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, and no warrant was necessary for that search because Weiner is cooperating with the FBI. 
+Many have been wondering why FBI Director James Comey would choose to make such a bold move just over a week until election day. Surely he had to know that this would have a dramatic impact on the election, and it is unlikely that he would have done so unless someone had already found something really big. In addition, Comey was reportedly eager to find an opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of his peers at the FBI. The following is an excerpt from a Daily Mail article that was written by Ed Klein, the author of a recently released New York Times bestseller about the Clintons entitled “ Guilty As Sin “… 
+‘The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary,’ said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week. 
+‘Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,’ said the source. ‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.’ 
+According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice. 
+He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom. 
+So what happens next? 
+In the most likely scenario, the FBI will not have time to complete the investigation and decide whether or not to charge Hillary Clinton before the election. This means that we would go into November 8th with this scandal hanging over the Clinton campaign, and that would seem to be very good news for Donald Trump. 
+However, it is possible that once the FBI starts searching through these emails that they could come to the conclusion very rapidly that charges against Clinton are warranted, and if that happens we could still see some sort of announcement before election day. 
+In the unlikely event that does happen, we could actually see Hillary Clinton forced out of the race before November 8th. 
+Once again, this appears to be very unlikely at this point, but it is still possible. 
+If Clinton was forced to step aside, the Democrats would need to come up with a new nominee, and that process would take time. In an article later today on The Most Important News I will reveal who I believe that nominee would be. 
+In such a scenario, the Democrats would desperately need time to get their act together, and so we could actually see Barack Obama attempt to delay or suspend the election . The legality of such a move is highly questionable, but Barack Obama has not allowed a little thing like the U.S. Constitution to stop him in the past. 
+This week is going to be exceedingly interesting – that is for sure. 
+The craziest election in modern American history just keeps getting crazier, and I have a feeling that even more twists and turns are ahead. 
+It sure seems ironic that Anthony Weiner is playing such a central role this late in the story, and I can’t wait to see what is in store for the season finale. October 30th, 2016 | Tags: 2016 Election , 2016 Election Delayed , 2016 Election Suspended , Anthony Weiner , Barack Obama , Clinton , Donald Trump , Election Delay , Election Delayed , Election Suspended , Hillary , Hillary Clinton , Hillary Clinton Email Scandal , Hillary Clinton FBI Email Investigation , Hillary Clinton Going To Jail , Hillary Clinton Going To Prison , Hillary Clinton Lock Her Up , Hillary Clinton's Crimes , Huma Abedin , North Carolina , Obama , Obstruction Of Justice , Trump | Category: Commentary aldownunder 
+If Hillary Clinton Is Charged With Obstruction Of Justice She Could Go To Prison For 20 Years 
+Lets hope so biglipnagger 
+There is no way the machine will let her go to prison. Just not gonna happen. K 
+Here is my prediction, one of three. 1.The FBI still decides not to fiile charges. 2. The Attorney General refuses the charges, if the FBI files them. 3. Obama pardons her, if all else fails. A corrupt Government, will never let one of their own, go to jail. Wish I still believed there was justice, in this Country. MeMadMax 
+Most likely kaine will be thrown on top of the woodpile. 
+But there is nothing that says we MUST have a democrat participating in the elections and we still have three other candidates. 
+In fact, if the democrats want to survive, it would behoov them to throw hillary under the bus, even disenfranchise her from the dem party instead of trying to push one of the most toxic candidates in history. 
+But dems havent shown one iota of reason since they got “their man” in the white house. In fact, that man took the dem party and twisted it into a monster. 
+All it will take is one of the higher ups to say enough is enough. If there are any higher up dems left that are not under the control of demon in the whitehouse… carlcasino 
+The Demon is NOT in the white house ! He is just the Soro’s sock puppet. Rob 
+I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope….. carlcasino 
+I’m giving odd’s that the Clinton Crime Cartel will skate –Again ? Any takers at 10:1",FAKE
+3375,"'Top secret' emails on Clinton server discussed drone program, may reference classified info","The two emails on Hillary Rodham Clinton's private server that an auditor deemed ""top secret"" include a discussion of a news article detailing a U.S. drone operation and a separate conversation that could point back to highly classified material in an improper manner or merely reflect information collected independently, U.S. officials who have reviewed the correspondence told The Associated Press.
+
+The sourcing of the information could have significant political implications as the 2016 presidential campaign heats up. Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, agreed this week to turn over to the FBI the private server she used as secretary of state, and Republicans in Congress have seized on the involvement of federal law enforcement as a sign that she was either negligent with the nation's secrets or worse.
+
+On Monday, the inspector general for the 17 spy agencies that make up what is known as the intelligence community told Congress that two of 40 emails in a random sample of the 30,000 emails Clinton gave the State Department for review contained information deemed ""Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information,"" one of the government's highest levels of classification.
+
+The two emails were marked classified after consultations with the CIA, which is where the material originated, officials said.
+
+The officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity work in intelligence and other agencies. They wouldn't detail the contents of the emails because of ongoing questions about classification level. Clinton did not transmit the sensitive information herself, they said, and nothing in the emails she received makes clear reference to communications intercepts, confidential intelligence methods or any other form of sensitive sourcing.
+
+The drone exchange, the officials said, begins with a copy of a news article that discusses the CIA drone program that targets terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere. While a secret program, it is well-known and often reported on. The copy makes reference to classified information, and a Clinton adviser follows up by dancing around a top secret in a way that could possibly be inferred as confirmation, they said. Several officials, however, described this claim as tenuous.
+
+But a second email reviewed by Charles McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general, appears more suspect. Nothing in the message is ""lifted"" from classified documents, the officials said, though they differed on where the information in it was sourced. Some said it improperly points back to highly classified material, while others countered that it was a classic case of what the government calls ""parallel reporting"" -- different people knowing the same thing through different means.
+
+The emails came to light Tuesday after Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, reported that McCullough found four ""highly classified"" emails on the unusual homebrew server that Clinton used while she was secretary of State. Two were sent back to the State Department for review, but Grassley said the other two were, in fact, classified at the closely guarded ""Top Secret/SCI level.""
+
+In a four-page fact sheet that accompanied a letter to Clinton supporters, Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri stressed that Clinton was permitted to use her own email account as a government employee and that the same process concerning classification reviews would still be taking place had she used the standard ""state.gov"" email account used by most department employees. The State Department, meanwhile, stressed that it wasn't clear if the material at issue ought to be considered classified at all.
+
+Still, the developments suggested that the security of Clinton's email setup and how she guarded the nation's secrets will remain relevant campaign topics. Even if the emails highlighted by the intelligence community prove innocuous, she will still face questions about whether she set up the private server with the aim of avoiding scrutiny, whether emails she deleted because she said they were personal were actually work-related, and whether she appropriately shielded such emails from possible foreign spies and hackers.
+
+Clinton says she exchanged about 60,000 emails in her four years as secretary of state. She turned over all but what she said were personal emails late last year. The department has been making those public as they are reviewed and scrubbed of any sensitive data.
+
+The State Department advised employees not to use personal email accounts for work, but it wasn't prohibited. But Clinton's senior advisers at the State Department would have been briefed upon basic protocol for handling classified information and retaining government records. In Clinton's time, most officials saved their emails onto a separate file or printed them out when leaving office. Only recently has the department begun automatically archiving the records of dozens of senior officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry.
+
+In the emails, Clinton's advisers appear cognizant of secrecy protections.
+
+In a series of August 2009 emails, Clinton aide Huma Abedin told Clinton that the U.S. point-man for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, and another official wanted ""to do a secure"" conversation to discuss Afghan elections. Clinton said she could talk after she received a fax of a classified Holbrooke memo, also on a secure line. Later, Abedin wrote: ""He can talk now. We can send secure fax now. And then connect call.""
+
+But other times, the line was blurred. Among Clinton's exchanges now censored as classified by the State Department was a brief exchange in October 2009 with Jeffrey Feltman, then the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East. Both Clinton and Feltman's emails about an ""Egyptian proposal"" for a reconciliation ceremony with Hamas are marked B-1.4, classified for national security reasons, and completely blacked out from the email release.
+
+A longer email the same day from Clinton to former Sen. George Mitchell, then Mideast peace envoy, is also censored. Mitchell responds tersely and carefully that ""the Egyptian document has been received and is being translated. We'll review it tonight and tomorrow morning, will consult with the Pals (Palestinians) through our Consul General, and then I'll talk with Gen. S again. We'll keep you advised.""",REAL
+3106,Miracles Man: Metaxas Vs. Closed Minds And A Closed Universe,"Last Christmas, Christian apologist, Eric Metaxas published an article in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal about a ‘miracle’, or perhaps I should say 'the miracle’ -- the origin of the universe. That article, Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God went on to become, if not quite a miracle, at least a sort of wonder. It was shared via email and social media more than any other opinion article in the history of the Wall Street Journal. That’s really saying something, since the Journal is known to have one of the most popular op/ed pages in the world. Former editor Robert Bartley quipped that his was the only opinion page in journalism that actually sold papers.
+
+Metaxas certainly tapped into something. As of this writing this morning, that article has over 470,000 Facebook shares and well over 9,000 comments. The wonder is not the article itself, but the phenomenon that in an age of angry pop atheism and sloppy ‘God-is-dead’ scientific journalism, intelligent, well-educated people, the kind of people who read the Wall Street Journal, still have minds which are open to the idea that the universe is not closed; that there is something (or Someone) beyond it who can intervene into it, Who started it whirling into existence in the first place.
+
+I sat down across a Skype line with Metaxas recently to discuss the paperback release of his book, Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life. The first third of the book deals with philosophical issues: Are miracles possible? What are they exactly? And why are philosophical objections to them not quite as final or decisive as they purport to be?
+
+The rest of the book is actual miracle stories, stories from history and stories from Metaxas’ circle of acquaintances. The latter are more persuasive than one might expect. We’ve all seen the toupee’d theurgist circuses of Christian television, hawking Jordan river water and magic oils to the gullible. But the people Metaxas describes in this book are a little harder to write off: Educated, well-read, accomplished leaders. The charming little story of Gregory Alan Thornbury and his wife and the miracle of the car keys packs a little extra power when you realize that Dr. Thornbury is a highly accomplished philosopher. I’m not saying that it’s right that secular elites in this country should write-off the testimony of people from trailer parks, I hate that contempt. But I am saying that if class and IQ are your excuses to not listen to people’s miracle stories, then Miracles takes away at least that excuse.
+
+One of the most important features in the book is that miracles are not just intervention, they are information. I found myself wanting more along this line than the book offered. The koine Greek word for miracle is teras, and the word for sign is semeion, which is etymologically related to ‘sign’. Miracles are a form of communication. Modern materialists and those believers who live in reaction to materialism seem to think that the message of miracles is that God exists (or gods exist) and that this world is not the only world. The problem with that is that the miracles of the New Testament appeared in a world in which materialism was very rare, almost unknown outside upper class Romans. Jesus’ disputes with the religious leaders were not about whether God existed, they were about who God approved of and who He did not. In information science terms, miracles have 'entropy’ departures from the expected deterministic route, conferring signal or, as my friend George Gilder would say it, ‘surprise’.
+
+Below you can find a partial transcript of the interview (which has been edited for clarity), and if you want the whole thing you can listen here.
+
+JERRY BOWYER:  Eric Metaxas is our guest.  He's the author of Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life, which has just been published in the paperback edition.
+
+Eric, thanks for joining us today.
+
+ERIC METAXAS:  Well, it is my pleasure.  Thanks for having me.
+
+METAXAS:  Well, that's not so easy to answer.  I would say that there are two answers; they're equally true, because it depends on what your definition is.  And I kind of go with both in the book.  One definition is anything that is an injection into the material world, into the universe of time and space, from outside of that world.  So anytime anything happens in this world, and you say this isn't possible to explain naturalistically, that can be a miracle.
+
+The parting of the Red Sea was not a coincidence.  Jesus walking on water was not a hallucination.  If those things actually happened, you can say those are miracles.
+
+But also -- well, let me put it this way.  I say that those kinds of miracles are God's way of speaking to us, trying to get our attention.  And so that's a particular kind of miracle.  So most of us, when we say something is a miracle, that's what we're talking about.  We're not just talking about something amazing; we're talking about something amazing that actually involves God.
+
+But alternatively, when we're talking about, let's say the creation of the universe, the Big Bang, when you look at the details of it -- and the first part of my book deals with faith and science -- the scientific details of it, the more we know from science, the scientific details of it are so staggering that you can't help but think this had to have been something that God did.
+
+So on one level, everything, all of creation, partakes in the miraculous; if you believe that God is involved on any level, every electron spinning around every nucleus of every atom is somehow miraculous.
+
+But basically, when we're talking about miracles, we're not talking about that.  We're typically talking about, you know, I prayed for Uncle Jimmy and suddenly he could walk again.  You know, that's the kind of a miracle typically we're talking about.  And most of the miracles in the book are those kinds of miracles.  And the thirty miracle stories at the end of the book are definitely those kinds of miracles.
+
+BOWYER:  So your definition of miracle does not include, say, the act of creation.  That might be a wonder, because it's not an intervention into an existing set of physical laws; it's the origin of that existing set of physical laws.
+
+METAXAS:  That is extremely heavy.  I wasn't prepared for that.  I would have gotten the coffee before the interview.  That is a brilliant, wonderful observation and clarification.  And I'm not used to this, Jerry, so thank you for doing that.
+
+I would actually say that the act of creation is a miracle, but it is -- as I meant to clarify earlier, it's a different kind of miracle, because there was no one there to observe it happening.  Although, in retrospect, through science, we can see what happened, and we can be staggered retroactively, or retrospectively, we can be staggered.  The more you look at the origins of the universe, the more you look at what was necessary for the universe to come into being, the more you say this simply could not have happened, that makes no logical sense.  Occam's razor says it's much easier to say God did it, than to say, you know, a thousand things had to line up perfectly, and, oh by the way, coincidentally, they did.  That makes infinitely less sense; it's infinitely less plausible.
+
+BOWYER:  All right.  So just a quick aside for nonphilosophical listeners and readers, Occam's razor refers to the principle that all other things being equal, the simpler the explanation which explains all the observations, the more likely that explanation is to be true.
+
+METAXAS:  Yeah.  When you're talking about science, sometimes people are so put off by the idea that God created the universe that they come up with these baroque, really hilarious alternative explanations.  Like, they say oh, there's an infinity of universes; by the way, we can't see them and we have no evidence for them, but there has to be.  And of all of those infinite universes, one of them got everything perfectly right.  And guess what, we just happen to be living here right now… It's just swell.  Now, to me, when people say that, I think that's actually less scientific than saying a creator created the universe.
+
+BOWYER:  Because by definition, there is no possible observation of multiverses.  They were completely hermetically sealed off from us.
+
+METAXAS:  Right.  And this is what people -- people who advocate for so-called multiverse theory, themselves, say that there's no evidence for them.  So it's a really tremendous speculation that makes believing in the God of the Bible look infinitely scientific in comparison.",REAL
+6804,Obamacare Premiums Spike an Average of 25%!,"Print 
+Some worrisome news is breaking across the nation where most Americans are now preparing to deal with a major spike in their already astronomical healthcare costs. The AP is reporting that healthcare premiums are about to rise an average of 25% across the country, even as many American families are already struggling to pay their current premiums. 
+Premiums will go up sharply next year under President Barack Obama’s health care law, and many consumers will be down to just one insurer, the administration confirmed Monday. That’s sure to stoke another “Obamacare” controversy days before a presidential election. 
+Before taxpayer-provided subsidies, premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services. Some states will see much bigger jumps, others less. 
+Moreover, about 1 in 5 consumers will only have plans from a single insurer to pick from, after major national carriers such as UnitedHealth Group, Humana and Aetna scaled back their roles. 
+“Consumers will be faced this year with not only big premium increases but also with a declining number of insurers participating, and that will lead to a tumultuous open enrollment period,” said Larry Levitt, who tracks the health care law for the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. 
+Fox News took the time on Monday to hammer House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for her lies that Obamacare would make it easier for most Americans to get healthcare and that it would keep prices more “affordable.” 
+Pelosi’s definition of affordable seems to be the exact opposite of what it actually means, because instead of slowing our rising healthcare costs, prices have actually been climbing higher, faster ! 
+Administration officials are stressing that subsidies provided under the law, which are designed to rise alongside premiums, will insulate most customers from sticker shock. They add that consumers who are willing to switch to cheaper plans will still be able to find bargains. 
+“Headline rates are generally rising faster than in previous years,” acknowledged HHS spokesman Kevin Griffis. But he added that for most consumers, “headline rates are not what they pay.” 
+Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) wants to hear the Obama administration and their Democrat allies apologize for the disastrous plan, because thus far it seems to have hurt the average American far more than its helped. “We’ve reached this point because ObamaCare is built on the lie that Washington’s bureaucrats are smart enough to plan health care for millions of Americans. At every turn — whether it’s CO-OPs collapsing, premiums skyrocketing, or big insurers bailing — the American people have paid the price. More spin won’t solve this — it’s time for the White House to admit that this law isn’t working.” 
+The people of Arizona woke up to even scarier news on Wednesday when they learned that their premiums would be rising by 116% this year! 
+However, in Arizona, unsubsidized premiums for a hypothetical 27-year-old buying a benchmark “second-lowest cost silver plan” will jump by 116 percent, from $196 to $422, according to the administration report… 
+Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called the Affordable Care Act a “failure.” 
+“Arizona families are demanding affordability, accessibility and choice when it comes to their health care – not the expensive, restrictive and poor quality care that has been forced upon them by Obamacare,” McCain said in a statement. “Until President Obama and Congressional Democrats wake up to the law’s failure, and until we repeal and replace it with solutions that encourage competition and put patients back in charge, the Washington-knows-best approach will continue to unfairly burden the Arizona families it was supposed to help.” 
+Meanwhile, it seems that Hillary Clinton hasn’t gotten the memo about how bad Obamacare has been or about how much it’s hurt our economy, because she’s still out there running victory laps for the abysmal failure. ""You know, before it was called Obamacare, it was called Hillarycare."" #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/TfalVkgAgO 
+— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 12, 2016 
+Somebody should probably tell her that the majority of Americans hate Obamacare and would prefer seeing it repealed. 
+In a summer that saw many insurers drop out of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges, Americans’ support for the healthcare law continues to be slightly more negative than positive. Now, 44% of Americans support the law, also known as Obamacare, and 51% disapprove of it — similar to what Gallup measured last November. 
+51% disapprove of Obamacare (or Hillarycare if you prefer), even worse about 1/3 of Americans say the law has actually HURT them, and long term most Americans think the law will end up either hurting their families or not making any difference at all. 
+Hopefully, the Trump campaign is paying attention and will begin hammering away on Obamacare. This is a winning issue for Republicans, and it could be the issue that helps us win in November. 
+Article reposted with permission from Constitution.com shares",FAKE
+5352,Collective Consciousness – The Individual is Gone,"Waking Times 
+“In the middle of all the brain-research going on, from one end of the planet to the other, there is the assumption that the individual doesn’t really exist. He’s a fiction. There is only the motion of particles in the brain. Therefore, nothing is inviolate, nothing is protected. Make the brain do A, make it do B; it doesn’t matter. What matters is harmonizing these tiny particles, in order to build a collective consensus, in order to force a science of behavior.” ~The Underground, Jon Rappoport 
+Individual power. Your power. 
+It stands as the essence of what the founding documents of the American Republic are all about, once you scratch below the surface a millimeter or so. 
+Therefore, it stands to reason that colleges and universities would be teaching courses in INDIVIDUAL POWER. 
+As soon as I write that, though, we all fall down laughing, because we understand the absurdity of such a proposition. Can you imagine Harvard endowing a chair in Individual Power? 
+Students would tear down the building in which such courses were taught. They’ve been carefully instructed that the individual is the greatest living threat to the planet. 
+If you can’t see that as mind control, visit your local optometrist and get a prescription for glasses. 
+So we have this astonishing situation: the very basis of freedom has no reflection in the educational system. 
+You can say “individual” within certain limited contexts. You can say “power,” if you’re talking about nuclear plants, or if you’re accusing someone of a crime, but if you put “individual” and “power” together and attribute a positive quality to the combination, you’re way, way outside the consensus. You’re crazy. You’re committing some kind of treason. 
+In order to spot the deepest versions of educational brainwashing, YOU HAVE TO HAVE SOME STANDARD AGAINST WHICH YOU CAN COMPARE WHAT IS COMING DOWN THE PIPELINE INTO THE MINDS OF STUDENTS. 
+If you lack that standard, you miss most of the action. 
+If you lack that standard, you have already been worked over by the system. 
+And in this case, the standard is INDIVIDUAL POWER. 
+Clean it off, hose off the dirt, polish it, look at it, think about it, remember it. 
+Then you’ll see some Grade-A prime mind control. Everywhere. Because schools either don’t mention it, or they discredit it. 
+Back in the days when I was writing on assignment for newspapers and magazines, I pitched a story about individual power to an editor. I wanted to trace its history as an idea over the past ten years. 
+He looked at me for a few seconds. He looked at me as if I’d just dropped some cow flop on his desk. He knew I wasn’t kidding and I had something I could write and turn in to him, but that made it worse. He began to squirm in his chair. 
+He laughed nervously. 
+He said, “This isn’t what we do.” 
+For him, I was suddenly radioactive. 
+I had a similar experience with a high-school history teacher in California. We were having lunch in a cafe in Santa Monica, and I said, “You should teach a course in individual power. The positive aspects. No group stuff. Just the individual.” 
+He frowned a deep intellectual frown, as if I’d just opened my jacket and exposed a few sticks of dynamite strapped to my chest. As if he was thinking about which agency of the government to report me to. 
+Now, for the schizoid part. The movies. Television. Video games. Comics. Graphic novels. They are filled to the brim, they are overflowing with individual heroes who have considerable power. These entertainment businesses bank billions of dollars, because people want to immerse themselves in that universe where the individual is supreme. They want it badly. 
+But when it comes to “real” life, power stops at the front door and no one answers the bell. 
+Suddenly, the hero, the person with power is anathema. He’s left holding the bag. So he adjusts. He waits. He wonders. He settles for less, far less. He stifles his hopes. He shrinks. He forgets. He develops “problems” and tries to solve them within an impossibly narrow context. He redefines success and victory down to meet limited expectations. He strives for the normal and the average. For his efforts, he receives tidbits, like a dog looking up at his master. 
+If that isn’t mind control, nothing is. 
+Once we enter a world where the individual no longer has credibility, a world where “greatest good for the greatest number” is the overriding principle, and where that principle is defined by the elite few, the term “mind control” will have a positive connotation. It will be accepted as the obvious strategy for achieving “peace in our time.” 
+At a job interview, a candidate will say, “Yes, I received my PhD in Mind Control at Yale, and then I did three years of post-doc work in Cooperative Learning Studies at MIT. My PhD thesis? It was titled, ‘Coordination Strategies in the Classroom for Eliminating the Concept of the Individual.’” 
+From Wikipedia, “Cooperative Learning”: 
+“Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively can capitalize on one another’s resources and skills…Furthermore, the teacher’s role changes from giving information to facilitating students’ learning. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds.” 
+That is a towering assemblage of bullshit. 
+“Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds.” You could use that quote on the back cover of Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World . Everyone does not succeed—because the individual never finds out what he can do on his own. That avenue is cut off. He only knows what he can achieve in combination with others. He only knows what he can understand when he borrows from others. He may never glimpse what he truly wants to do in life. 
+This is a tragic situation, but the tragedy is concealed, because the memory of shifting from individual independence to group dependence is gone. There is no such memory. A child is brought up without independence. Therefore, how can he recall losing it? 
+He only knows the group and the team and the participation and the praise. He only knows the organizing of his life within a synthetically produced context. 
+He is taught that this is good and necessary. 
+So, one day, when a bolt comes out of the blue and he recognizes he is himself, what will he use to grasp that revelation and build on it? 
+Yes, there are productive groups and teams, and one is always working with others, to some degree. But the core and the starting point is one’s self. That is where the insight and the magic begin. That is where the great decisions and commitments are made. That is where the world is born, every day. 
+I see no end of writing about this magic, because civilization has been turned upside down by treacherous people who have been fabricating a counter-tradition that will sink the ship. About the Author 
+Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED , EXIT FROM THE MATRIX , and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX , Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29 th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine . 
+(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix , click here .) 
+This article ( Collective Consciousness – The Individual is Gone ) was originally created and published by Jon Rappaport’s Blog and is re-posted here with permission. 
+~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
+2339,Obama on gun control: His emotional evolution,"But on one issue -- guns -- President Barack Obama lets the public mask slip, revealing the ire boiling within.
+
+Before the cameras, moved by the massacres of innocents that have punctuated his presidency, Obama has wept, his voice has cracked, he's visibly shaken with frustration, he's lashed out at lawmakers he sees as cowards and even led a congregation in ""Amazing Grace.""
+
+On Tuesday, as he faced a room filled with parents and relatives of victims of gun violence, he stopped speaking, grew silent and wiped away the tears that began to fall when he recalled the first graders killed in a Connecticut elementary school three years ago.
+
+""Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad,"" Obama said in the East Room of the White House.
+
+At times, the President has questioned the nation he leads, asking why no other advanced country seems so blighted with regular killing sprees and wondering aloud why Americans will not choose to stop the bloodshed.
+
+Evolving through a cycle of sadness, poleaxing grief, frustration and outright fury, Obama has even offered hints of self-recrimination at his own earlier failure to touch the perfidious politics of gun control himself.
+
+But so far, all the emoting, anger and frustration have added up to little. Despite an expansive flexing of his executive powers, Obama, hampered by a Republican Congress and wary Democrats, has failed to significantly tighten gun control laws.
+
+""We are not inherently more prone to violence. But we are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency. It doesn't happen in other advanced countries. It's not even close,"" Obama said. ""Somehow we become numb to it and we start to feel that this is normal. And instead of thinking about how to solve the problem, this has become one of our most polarized, partisan debates, despite the fact that there's a general consensus in America about what needs to be done.""
+
+He added, ""We do have to feel a sense of urgency about it. In Dr. King's words, we need to feel the fierce urgency of now -- because people are dying.""
+
+He will also press for public support on the issue at a live town hall meeting hosted by CNN on Thursday night -- making gun violence a priority of his final year in office, days before his valedictory State of the Union address.
+
+Obama insisted Tuesday that he merely wants to enact a few common-sense gun safety measures. But the gun lobby is mobilizing and Republicans, led by 2016 front-runner Donald Trump, insist Obama is out to make it impossible for people to buy guns.
+
+From the campaign trail to Tucson to Aurora
+
+Obama's often demoralizing and politically radioactive experience with the politics of gun control started when he first set eyes on the White House and have confounded him ever since.
+
+He got off on the wrong foot with Second Amendment advocates with an offhand remark during his 2008 campaign, when he said people in Midwest communities hit hard by economic blight ""cling to guns or religion.""
+
+That seemed to many critics as disdainful of lawful firearms owners themselves, a slip his foes have used again and again to warn the president is coming to get their guns.
+
+Obama also appeared to underestimate the potency of the gun lobby and National Rifle Association back then as well.
+
+""What we have to do is get beyond the politics of this issue,"" Obama he said at a 2008 Democratic debate in Philadelphia.
+
+But when he took office, gun control seemed far from his mind. With a financial crisis raging, and other priorities like health care reform demanding political capital, Obama was absent on the issue while Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.
+
+And to be fair, there were few Democrats -- especially those in red states -- who would have welcomed tough votes on gun control.
+
+At a memorial service, a saddened Obama comforted relatives and cracked hearts when he hoped the youngest victim, nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, was jumping ""in rain puddles in Heaven.""
+
+But he used the tragedy, not to make the kind of outspoken call for gun control that would become familiar in later years but to call on Americans to cleanse their poisoned politics.
+
+""Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let's use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully,"" he said.
+
+In the months to come, Obama would be called upon to react to more shootings, including one at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in which six people died and a massacre at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in which 12 were killed.
+
+But the emotional strain was clearly beginning to take a toll as he wondered after Aurora how he would feel if his daughters had been caught at the scene.
+
+For Obama, the dam broke on what he later named as the worst day of his presidency in December 2012.
+
+A few days later, at a heart-searing memorial service, loud sobs rang out in a school auditorium as Obama slowly read the roll of those killed, while crossing a threshold -- no longer reluctant to start talking politics as he mourned the dead.
+
+""We, as a nation, are left with some hard questions .... can we truly say, as a nation, that we're meeting our obligations?"" Obama said, offering to put whatever power his office held to prevent more tragedies.
+
+And Obama kept to his word -- for several months.
+
+The process did not only leave Obama looking like he'd let the relatives of the Newtown dead down, it appeared to further sour him on Washington itself, a town he no longer saw as moveable by the forces of hope and change.
+
+""This was a pretty shameful day for Washington,"" Obama said, in a stunningly frank appearance in the White House Rose Garden after the lost Senate vote in April 2013.
+
+""It came down to politics -- the worry that that vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections,"" said Obama. ""They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti-Second Amendment.""
+
+Obama did enact 23 executive actions that the White House says have been successful, though officials admit that true reform is only possible through Congress.
+
+But gun control once again slipped down the president's agenda -- after the White House apparently concluded the politics of the issue were impossible.
+
+It took another year shattered by tragedies in 2015 from a bloodbath in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, to a massacre at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon, to draw Obama back into the fray.
+
+In one of the seminal moments of his presidency, Obama broke into ""Amazing Grace"" at a memorial service for a preacher and eight others killed in South Carolina by a gunman who wanted to incite a race war.
+
+After another weary appearance at the White House podium after the Oregon shooting, Obama made clear his heart was sick at the whole futile business of going before the cameras to bemoan another massacre.
+
+""Somehow this has become routine,"" Obama told reporters.
+
+He made no apologies for politicizing the issue and warned ""this is not something I can do myself"" before going the extra step of worrying about his nation's soul.
+
+""I would ask the American people to think about how they can get our government to change these laws,"" he said.
+
+But the killings went on. After a radicalized Muslim couple staged a mass killing in San Bernardino, California, Obama faced a buzzsaw of Republican opposition when he spoke of the need to stop potential terrorists getting hold of guns. GOP presidential candidates said he should be focused on the threat from radical Islam not making it more difficult for law abiding Americans to defend themselves.
+
+Now, Obama is back to try again, but even the President admits the measures are limited in scope.
+
+""We maybe can't save everybody, but we could save some. Just as we don't prevent all traffic accidents, but we ... try to reduce traffic accidents,"" Obama said Tuesday. ""As Ronald Reagan once said, if mandatory background checks could save more lives, it would be well worth making it the law of the land.""
+
+And with prospects bleak for any significant action in Congress, Obama's latest effort may be more about making peace with the relatives of the dead and his own conscience as the result of a realistic assessment that change is possible now.",REAL
+7771,What Scientists Found Inside This 800-Year-Old Pot... Is Changing History!,"Share on Facebook In 2008, on a dig in the First Nation’s Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, archaeologists made a small but stunning discovery: a tiny clay pot. Though it might not have seemed very impressive at first glimpse, this little piece of pottery was determined to be about 800 years old. And inside that pot? Something that changes how we're looking at extinction, preservation, and food storage, as well as how humans have influenced the planet in their time on it. It's amazing to think that a little clay pot buried in the ground 800 years ago would still be relevant today, but it's true! It's actually brought an extinct species of squash that was presumed to be lost forever. Thank our Indigenous Ancestors! Even they knew what preservation meant. They knew the importance of the future, Is it not amazing that they are affecting our walks of life even to this day? Here it is! The pot was unearthed on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, where it had laid buried for the past 800 years. Inside, archaeologists found a stash of seeds. The seeds were probably buried in the pot as a method of storing food supplies. They were determined to be an old, now-extinct species of squash. Now, seven years after making this stunning discovery, students in Winnipeg decided to plant the 800-year-old seeds… to everyone's amazement, something grew! The squash was named Gete-Okosomin. It means “cool old squash” in the Menominee language. (Respect to the science people for respecting the indigenous people who's land this was found on, we see your good nature!) Now, they're working to cultivate the squash so that it doesn't go extinct… again. It may be just a humble squash, but it's also a symbol of first nations' community and history, as well as a fascinating look into how amazing plants can be. It just goes to show you that plants can be pretty incredible… and that sometimes, history has a funny way of coming back around. The Wheel of Life really stands out in this instance of history. Our Indigenous roots are strong and very much tied to the land. I was taught once that the people of Turtle Island were keepers of the land, not owners. I feel like this Squash is proof of that teaching. Check out the original story & the role of White Earth Land Recovery Project (where seed keepers tend to these seeds) or Winona LaDuke (who named the squash)! Related:",FAKE
+2422,The Clock Is Ticking And Republicans Still Have No Serious Obamacare Alternative,"Republicans keep saying they’ll be ready to act if the Supreme Court upholds the big legal challenge to Obamacare, thereby wiping out financial assistance for millions of people in two-thirds of the states.
+
+ 
+
+ With the clock ticking down to a ruling, it’s gotten awfully hard to take the GOP’s vows seriously.
+
+Most experts expect the court to rule on King v. Burwell, as the case is known, on or around June 29, which is the last official day of its term. A victory for the plaintiffs would cut off tax credits that residents in Florida, Texas and 32 other states now use to pay for health insurance they obtain through Healthcare.gov, the federally operated marketplace.
+
+The ranks of the uninsured would swell by more than 8 million, according to an estimate by the Urban Institute. The loss of so many customers would likely force insurance companies to raise premiums and withdraw altogether from some markets, affecting even those customers buying directly from insurers rather than through Obamacare's marketplaces.
+
+Under Supreme Court rules, an order would typically take effect within 25 days of its announcement from the bench. In theory, the court could issue a stay delaying its impact. In practice, legal experts consider such a move both unlikely and of questionable significance, given the tight deadlines that insurers and state regulators face for setting next year's premiums.
+
+Infographic by Alissa Scheller for The Huffington Post.
+
+ 
+
+ Leaders of the Republican Party have cheered on the lawsuit, in some cases filing formal friend-of-the-court briefs in support of it. They have also promised -- in op-eds, speeches and interviews -- to craft a “transitional” plan, or some kind of “off-ramp,” if the lawsuit is successful. The goals of such plans, Republican leaders have said, would be to minimize disruption for the people who now depend upon Affordable Care Act tax credits for their insurance, while crafting a long-term replacement scheme that would serve the public better than President Barack Obama’s health care law has. 
+
+ 
+
+ Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was among those who made that promise back in early February, shortly after he took over as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “We have to have a contingency plan,” Ryan said. “We think we need to have an option, a plan, for these states that might find themselves in this difficult position.”
+
+ 
+
+ Ryan’s committee, arguably the most powerful in the House, has direct jurisdiction over health care financing. So how many hearings has it held about these contingency plans?
+
+ 
+
+ Zero.
+
+Over in the Senate, Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has introduced actual legislation and it has nearly 30 co-sponsors, including Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is the majority leader. But the bill is at best a first draft at legislation and, so far, neither the Finance Committee (which has the most power over health legislation) nor the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (which also has some jurisdiction) has sought testimony or scheduled a hearing -- about either the Johnson bill specifically or, more generally, what to do if the Supreme Court stops the tax credits in those 34 states. 
+
+ 
+
+ No, in the six months since the Supreme Court announced it would hear King v. Burwell, Republicans in Congress have held exactly one formal hearing that focused on the subject. It took place last week, before the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee. But the Small Business Committee is among the least powerful in Congress and it has virtually no jurisdiction over health care financing issues. That may explain why it attracted very little interest -- even from committee members, only a handful of whom bothered to show up.
+
+ 
+
+ A generous takeaway from that hearing -- and lack of others -- is that Republicans are thinking about and working on health care plans much more intensely behind the scenes. Brendan Buck, Ryan’s spokesman, pointed out to The Huffington Post that Republican leaders have convened a working group to craft a post-King contingency plan -- with Ryan among its leaders. That group is now meeting three times a week, Buck said: “They’re informal, but it’s an active group.” 
+
+ 
+
+ In addition, several high-profile conservative intellectuals have been talking and writing actively about how Republicans ought to react if the court takes their side -- and what kind of health care plan Republicans should be proposing as an alternative to the Affordable Care Act, regardless of how the justices rule. Avik Roy, the Manhattan Institute scholar and Forbes columnist now working with former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s political action committee, has been outspoken on the need for an alternative. Philip Klein, longtime writer on health care and now managing editor of the Washington Examiner, has written a whole book on the subject.
+
+ 
+
+ But there's a reason that congressional Democrats spent literally years holding hearings on health care reform and then, in 2009, focusing intensely on legislation for several months. The hearings were sometimes acrimonious and, for reform advocates, the media coverage that testimony and questions generated was a source of never-ending grief. At the same time, these hearings, before the committees that actually had jurisdiction on the issues, were necessary to craft a solution that could accomplish the reform’s main goals and then rally enough support to make it through Congress.
+
+The kinds of plans Republicans seem to have in mind would require making equally difficult trade-offs and uniting even more fractious groups. Johnson’s bill, for example, would limit enrollment in plans only to those who already have them, and it would eliminate the individual mandate -- the requirement that people get coverage or pay a fine -- in all of the states. That would force insurers to raise premiums or maybe exit markets altogether.
+
+Other Republicans have discussed altering the Affordable Care Act's regulation on premiums, so that insurers could charge less to younger people. But reducing premiums for the young means raising them for the old, which might be hard for Republicans to pull off given that older voters are now their political base.
+
+Johnson's bill has gone to the Congressional Budget Office for a formal estimate on its impact, a Johnson spokesperson confirmed. That's meaningful -- and more than can be said of most proposals that Republicans have floated on op-ed pages recently. But if Republicans were serious about crafting a proposal that's capable of avoiding disruption and passing Congress, they would have started hashing out these arguments months ago.
+
+Of course, the absence of a public effort to match the public rhetoric matters only if Republicans are actually serious about passing a plan. They may not be. Their real goals may be purely cosmetic -- to insulate the party from a political backlash should millions of people suddenly lose health insurance and, more immediately, to ease the anxiety of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, either of whom might hesitate to issue a ruling with such potentially devastating consequences to so many people.
+
+ 
+
+ The lack of hearings obviously doesn’t prove that Republican leaders have such ulterior, cynical motives. But it makes that theory a lot more plausible.",REAL
+1597,Trump treads on tradition in New Hampshire,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+4261,GOP presidential candidates hammer on 'top secret' Clinton emails in final days before Iowa Caucus,"The Republican presidential candidates are seizing on the “top secret” Hillary Clinton emails in the final weekend before the Iowa Caucus, trying to slow their top Democratic rival by arguing her mishandling of the messages makes her unfit to be president.
+
+
+
+“Hillary Clinton is a major national security risk. Not presidential material!” GOP frontrunner Donald Trump tweeted after the State Department said Friday that it will withhold 22 emails from Clinton's correspondence as secretary of state because they are classified “top secret.”
+
+Trump and the 10 other Republican candidates are barnstorming across Iowa this weekend ahead of the Iowa Caucus on Monday, the first-in-the-nation balloting in the 2016 presidential race.
+
+Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, revealed last spring that she used a private server and email accounts for official business when she was the country’s top diplomat.
+
+The State Department has in compliance with a federal court order released thousands of page of Clinton emails, with classified information redacted. However the agency said Friday that the 22 top-secret messages, in seven email chains, will not be released.
+
+The intelligence community has deemed some of Clinton’s emails “too damaging"" to national security to release under any circumstances, a U.S. government official close to the ongoing review told Fox News.
+
+“The new e-mail release is a disaster for Hillary Clinton,” Trump also tweeted. “At a minimum, how can someone with such bad judgement be our next president?”
+
+Clinton has repeatedly said she never sent classified information through her private accounts. Her campaign on Friday questioned the secrecy of the messages and called for the State Department to release them.
+
+The FBI is investigating the matter, which has raised questions about how federal agencies have different rules for classifying information and whether some of the emails were marked classified after the fact.
+
+Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s top primary challenger, has declined to talk about the emails.
+
+There is a “legal process in place, which should proceed and not be politicized,"" he said Friday.
+
+During the first Democratic debate last year, Sanders famously dismissed the issue by saying, ""the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!""
+
+He trails Clinton by rough 5 percentage points in Iowa but leads her by roughly 15 points in New Hampshire, which votes Feb. 9, according to the RealClearPolitics poll averaging.
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, running third in most GOP polls behind Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, told an audience in Clinton, Iowa, that such sensitive emails being on Clinton’s server is “not acceptable.”
+
+Cruz suggests that Clinton’s use of the private server and emails now appears “far more serious” than previously thought and that the most recent revelations put her candidacy into more peril.
+
+Cruz, who has 15 events in Iowa before the caucus, is also raising questions about whether the Justice Department, run by the Obama administration, would indeed indict Clinton, if the investigation leads to that decision.
+
+“There is an acceptance that the enforcement of criminal justice is decided not by the laws of this country, but by some political hack in the West Wing of the White House.That is not how our Constitution is meant to operate,” Cruz said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show.
+
+“If she is indicted, it is difficult to see how she could successfully run for president. I would put nothing past the gall and audacity of the Clintons to try. But even the Democratic Party, I would find it hard to believe that they would be eager to nominate someone who is under indictment and could well face felony incarceration.”
+
+Fox News' Catherine Herridge and Pamela K. Browne and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2640,"Cleveland, Justice Department Reach Policing Deal","Cleveland has reached a settlement with the Department of Justice over a pattern of excessive force and civil rights violations by its police department, and it could be announced as soon as Tuesday, a senior federal law enforcement official said.
+
+The official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the settlement before the formal announcement, spoke Monday on the condition of anonymity.
+
+News of the settlement came days after a white police officer was acquitted of manslaughter for firing the final 15 rounds of a 137-shot police barrage through the windshield of a car carrying two unarmed black suspects in 2012.
+
+The suspects' backfiring vehicle had been mistaken for a gunshot, leading to a high-speed chase involving 62 police cruisers. Once the suspects were cornered, 13 officers fired at the car.
+
+The case prompted an 18-month Department of Justice investigation into the practices of the police. In a scathing report released in December, the department required the city to devise a plan to reform the police force.
+
+The specifics of the settlement were unavailable. Messages left for a Department of Justice spokeswoman and the Cleveland Police Department seeking comment weren't returned.
+
+The Department of Justice's report spared no one in the police chain of command. The worst examples of excessive force involved patrol officers who endangered lives by shooting at suspects and cars, hit people over the head with guns and used stun guns on handcuffed suspects.
+
+Supervisors and police higher-ups received some of the report's most searing criticism. The report said officers were poorly trained and some didn't know how to implement use-of-force policies. It also said officers were ill-equipped.
+
+Mobile computers that are supposed to be in patrol cars often don't work, and, even when they do, officers don't have access to essential databases, the report said.
+
+Police Chief Calvin Williams said in December that while it wasn't easy to have to share the federal government findings with his 1,500-member department he was committed to change.
+
+""The people of this city need to know we will work to make the police department better,"" Williams said.
+
+The investigation marked the second time in recent years the Department of Justice has taken the Cleveland police to task over the use of force. But unlike in 2004, when the department left it up to local police to clean up their act, federal authorities this time have been negotiating a consent decree designed to serve as a blueprint for lasting change among police. Several other police departments in the country now operate under federal consent decrees that involve independent oversight.
+
+The Department of Justice in the last five years has launched broad investigations into the practices of more than 20 police forces, including in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, and in Baltimore, where another black man, Freddie Gray, suffered a spinal cord injury in police custody and later died. The Brown and Gray cases spawned protests that sometimes turned violent.
+
+Saturday's bench verdict on the manslaughter charge against Cleveland patrolman Michael Brelo led to a day of mostly peaceful protests but also more than 70 arrests.
+
+Two other high-profile police-involved deaths still hang over Cleveland, a predominantly black and largely poor city: a 12-year-old boy holding a pellet gun fatally shot by a rookie patrolman and a mentally ill woman in distress who died after officers took her to the ground and handcuffed her.",REAL
+10454,Physicists Say Consciousness Should Be Considered A State of Matter: The “Non Physical” Is Real,"advertisement - learn more It’s been more than one hundred years since Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics, said that he regards “consciousness as fundamental,” that he regards “matter as a derivative from consciousness,” and that “everything we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” He is basically saying that the immaterial ‘substance’ of consciousness is directly intertwined with what we perceive to be our physical material world in some sort of way, shape or form, that consciousness is required for matter to be, that it becomes after consciousness….and he’s not the only physicist to believe that. “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”– Eugene Wigner, theoretical physicist and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 Scientists have been urging the mainstream scientific community, which today is littered with scientific fraud and industry influence as well as invention secrecy , to open up to a broader view regarding the true nature of our reality. “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade that in all of the previous centuries of its existence.”– Nikola Tesla advertisement - learn more Not long ago, a group of internationally recognized scientists came together to stress this fact and how it’s overlooked by the mainstream scientific community. It’s ‘post-material” science, an area of study dealing with the ‘non-physical realm, and it’s challenging the modern scientific worldview of materialism that’s dominated mainstream science. The idea that matter is not the reality is finally starting to gain some merrit. The summary of this report presented at the International Summit On Post-Materialist Science can be found HERE . “The modern scientific worldview is predominantly predicated on assumptions that are closely associated with classical physics. Materialism—the idea that matter is the only reality—is one of these assumptions. A related assumption is reductionism, the notion that complex things can be understood by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things such as tiny material particles.”– Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science MIT’s Max Tegmark,a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is one of the latest to attempt explaining why he believes consciousness is a state of matter. He believes that consciousness arises out of a certain set of mathematical conditions, and that there are varying degrees of consciousness – just as certain conditions are required to create varying states of vapor, water, and ice. As PBS emphasized, “understanding how consciousness functions as a separate state of matter could help us come to a more thorough understanding of why we perceive the world the way we do.” ( source ) Tegmark describes this as “perceptronium,” which he defines as the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware and this substance should not only be able to store information, but do it in a way that form a unified, indivisible, whole. “The problem is why we perceive the universe as the semi-classical, three dimensional world that is so familiar. When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, we do we perceive this solution?”– Tegmark ( source ) This new way of thinking about consciousness has been spreading throughout the physics community at an exponential rate within the past few years. Considering consciousness as an actual state of matter would be huge, considering the fact that modern day definitions of matter require a substance to have mass, which consciousness does not have. What it does have, however, is some sort of effect on our physical material world, and the extent of this effect and how far it goes is the next step for science. 
+The quantum double slit experiment is a very popular experiment used to examine how consciousness and our physical material world are intertwined. It is a great example that documents how factors associated with consciousness and our physical material world are connected in some way. 
+One potential revelation of this experience is that “the observer creates the reality.” A paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Physics Essays by Dean Radin, PhD, explains how this experiment has been used multiple times to explore the role of consciousness in shaping the nature of physical reality. 
+The study found that factors associated with consciousness “ significantly” correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double slit interference pattern. ( source ) “Observation not only disturbs what has to be measured, they produce it. We compel the electron to assume a definite position. We ourselves produce the results of the measurement.” (source) For a physicist to brush off the fact that understanding consciousness is necessary for the advancement and understanding of the nature of our reality is not as common as it used to be but, despite the empirical success of quantum theory, even the suggesting that it could be true as a description of our reality is greeted with harsh cynicism, incomprehension and even anger. 
+R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University wrote in a 2005 publication for the journal Nature: 
+According to [pioneering physicist] Sir James Jeans: “the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” . . . The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy. 
+(“The Mental Universe”; Nature 436:29,2005) (source) Thanks for reading.",FAKE
+4477,"A GOP Weekend, Courtesy Of The Koch Network And Citizens United","A GOP Weekend, Courtesy Of The Koch Network And Citizens United
+
+Republican presidential hopefuls are turning out this weekend for two big events, but just one of them, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, plans to be at both.
+
+Cruz is among seven possible contenders who spoke Saturday at the Iowa Freedom Summit, co-sponsored by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, and the group Citizens United. Sunday night, Cruz is scheduled to join two possible primary rivals, Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., at a semi-annual conference of the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce.
+
+Freedom Partners is a central part of the powerful conservative network assembled by billionaires David and Charles Koch.
+
+Cruz, Rubio and Paul are to appear Sunday in a ""national policy forum"" moderated by ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl. The discussion is to be live-streamed to news organizations, although not to the general public. The conference runs through the weekend, providing well-heeled donors in the Koch network a chance to get acquainted with likely candidates.
+
+The live-streaming marks a break with barring reporters from covering the conferences. But in recent years, the conferences have been beset by leaked documents and surreptitious audio recordings. Last June, someone recorded Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, then running for re-election, saying the day the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law was signed was ""the worst day of my life."" Another audio clip, in which Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst praised the Koch network, was used in an attack ad in her Senate bid, which she won.
+
+There are indications that the Koch network may engage in the GOP presidential primary — a step it's previously avoided taking. As a measure of the network's clout, the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising, estimates that in the 2014 midterm elections, four Koch groups ran more than 12,000 TV ads, at a cost exceeding $25 million. The groups were the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the superPAC Freedom Partners Action Fund and the social welfare groups Americans for Prosperity and Concerned Veterans for America.",REAL
+5184,"Juan Williams: My bets on Trump, Clinton vice presidential picks","Editor's note: The following column originally appeared in The Hill newspaper and on The Hill.com. For more, click here.
+
+I’m not one to gossip but…
+
+There is a flood of early talk in political circles about who will get the vice presidential nods from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
+
+The strategy for picking a running mate this year is wildly different from anything seen before.
+
+The textbook on picking a VP calls for a heavy focus on adding swing-state support for the top of the ticket. The book also advises finding a running mate seen by voters as plausibly able to take over as president.
+
+Well, throw out the textbook.
+
+No one believes that any running mate is going to tip this year’s electoral map. And no strong, silent type fits the bill at a moment when voters want to shake up the system.
+
+When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) paid a visit to Clinton just days after she claimed the nomination, speculation kicked into overdrive.
+
+And phone lines got hot when former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) were overheard in a TV green room telling each other that the other one is the best choice to run with Trump.
+
+The dynamics that frame the selection of a VP this year were evident in a Washington Post/ABC poll released last week. It found that nearly 70 percent of Americans have an unfavorable of view of Trump, a 10-point increase since he entered the race last summer. According to the same poll, Clinton also reached a new personal high in her unfavorable rating at 55 percent.
+
+Clinton’s trouble is dwarfed by Trump’s trouble. He is viewed negatively by 94 percent of blacks, 89 percent of Latinos and 77 percent of women.
+
+Picking a dazzling candidate as his running mate is one move that has the potential to change the way the world sees him.
+
+The last attempt to dazzle and distract with a vice-presidential pick was in 2008. GOP nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) got off to a good start with his surprise pick of little-known Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. She is beautiful, high energy and, that year, she had the potential to attract women disappointed that the Democrats had selected a black man over a woman as their nominee.
+
+But the sparkle wore off quickly when Palin began to look uninformed and inept. Questions were raised about McCain’s judgment. Palin’s family life also became a staple of the gossip columns.
+
+Palin’s selection looked especially bad in contrast with Democrat Barack Obama’s pick of Sen.Joe Biden (D-Del.). Biden was experienced and known to be a good guy, while his selection took the edge off the risk of putting a first-term senator in the Oval Office.
+
+This time, Trump and Clinton need running mates combining the qualities of Palin and Biden.
+
+The Trump campaign went nuts last month when Ben Carson said that Trump’s shortlist included Palin. Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla) and Ted Cruz (Texas), and two governors, Chris Christie of New Jersey and John Kasich of Ohio, were purportedly also on the list.
+
+Palin’s downside is obvious; a desperate-looking Christie won’t do either. And Trump can’t afford to extend an offer to Rubio, Cruz or Kasich because he can’t risk being turned down.
+
+That problem is getting worse by the minute as Trump lags farther and farther behind Clinton in the polls. Any dazzling vice-presidential pick has to think about his or her own political future. What will happen to them if Trump suffers a Barry Goldwater-style blowout loss in November?
+
+Gingrich remains a serious contender to be Trump’s number two. He is a well-known personality and an ace with a TV soundbite who is also accustomed to dealing with controversy over his personal life.
+
+But Gingrich sharply criticized Trump for his attacks on New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez and Federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel.
+
+Trump then did an impromptu poll on possible running mates. He asked the audience at a rally in Tampa to pick from Gingrich, Sessions or former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice got the biggest applause from the crowd.
+
+Rice is a dazzler but the odds that she is willing to sign on are low to non-existent.
+
+Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Clinton needs a star to bring young, energetic supporters of her primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, back into the fold.
+
+That means Clinton can’t bring on a centrist pick. Moderate Democrats with close ties to corporate America like Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia or Mark Warner of Virginia, or former Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, would anger the liberal base of the party.
+
+She is left to choose among Warren and other left-of-center Democrats such as Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Tim Kaine (Va.).
+
+Warren, however, has powerful detractors. Critics say she lacks foreign policy experience and note that she has never run a city, state, cabinet agency or business.
+
+“I think she will not pick somebody that she feels in her heart isn’t ready to be President or Commander-in-Chief,” former Pennsylvania Governor and DNC Chairman Ed Rendell recently told a Philadelphia radio station. “I think Elizabeth Warren is a wonderful, bright, passionate person, but with no experience in foreign affairs and not in any way, shape or form ready to be commander-in-chief.”
+
+Clinton could find dazzle by naming the first Latino vice-presidential candidate. But no one doubts she will win Latino voters energized by Trump's insults regardless. If she still wants that option, then Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro is the leading candidate. Labor Secretary Tom Perez and California Congressman Xavier Becerra have come on strong in the last few weeks.
+
+When all the talk ends, Trump has few options. His best bet to dazzle is Gingrich. Clinton has a wider range, led by Kaine, Castro and Warren.
+
+Juan Williams is a co-host of FNC's ""The Five,"" where he is one of seven rotating Fox personalities.
+
+",REAL
+4648,How Trump And Clinton Are Framing Their Closing Arguments,"How Trump And Clinton Are Framing Their Closing Arguments
+
+With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have each framed a closing argument to voters. Each is also focusing on battleground states in ways that reveal different paths to victory — earning 270 electoral votes on election night. (You can read more about the state of play here.)
+
+Here, we lay out what voters will see from each candidate in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.
+
+Trump has ridden a wave of anti-Washington sentiment all year, and in the final weeks of his campaign he's trying to crystallize that message.
+
+Trump recently rolled out a reform package he's referring to as ""draining the swamp."" Trump wants to pass a constitutional amendment setting term limits for lawmakers. He's also calling for a hiring freeze on non-military federal employees, lobbying restrictions, and a sharp reduction in federal regulations.
+
+Trump is now citing these proposals at every rally, along with a long laundry list of other priorities for the first hundred days of a Trump administration. Those include:
+
+The Trump campaign has been running this ad in heavy rotation to draw a contrast between the Republican and Democratic nominees, to show how he will ""Make America Great Again.""
+
+There's a problem Trump continues to create for himself: These policy proposals are often lost in the headlines created when Trump dwells on grievances against his perceived enemies in the media, government and other ""elite"" power structures.
+
+Take Trump's recent speech in Gettysburg, Pa., which was billed as the roll-out of his agenda for the first 100 days of a Trump administration. Trump began the speech by promising to bring legal action against women who have accused him of sexual assault and harassment. This new threat — and not the repackaged proposals he had spoken about before — became the day's news.
+
+Trump spent several minutes at a Monday rally in St. Augustine, Fla., railing against the media. ""They're almost as crooked as Hillary,"" he said. ""They may even be more crooked than Hillary, because without the media, she would be nothing.""
+
+In Trump's telling, the FBI is in league with the Obama administration in its decision not to bring charges against Hillary Clinton for her private email server. And the press is in league with Clinton's campaign.
+
+Trump has said polls showing him trailing Clinton are ""phony"" and that fact-checkers are ""crooked as hell"" — which fits his brand as the ""anti-everything,"" as NPR's Mara Liasson has framed Trump's approach. This resonates powerfully with the GOP nominee's core supporters, but it's unclear how strong that appeal is beyond Trump's base.
+
+On the stump these days, Clinton continues to highlight her policy agenda, often circling back to issues she's been discussing on the campaign trail for months, such as college affordability and equal pay for women. She's also keen to talk about climate change and job investments.
+
+Clinton is a policy wonk, and she's leaning into that in these final weeks. At the same time, she's increasingly willing to nod to the historic nature of her candidacy. She explicitly tied her policy goals to her gender this way on Monday:
+
+""I do have a lot of plans, I do. And I get criticized for having so many plans,"" Clinton said. ""Maybe it's a bit of a women's thing because we make lists. We do, we make lists, and we try to write down what we're supposed to do and then cross them off as we go through the day and the week. And so, I want you to think about our plans as our lists — our lists as a country.""
+
+Clinton often ties all of her ideas back to one central theme — that the decisions the next president makes will affect the kind of country America's children inherit. She's trying to drill home the idea that her campaign is focused on ""kids and families.""
+
+""This is about more than winning an election; it's about the kind of country we want for our kids and grandkids,"" Clinton told voters at a rally in Manchester, N.H., on Monday.
+
+In two new ads the campaign released this week, those closing arguments are reinforced as voters are encouraged to think about the future they want for their children.
+
+Clinton is trying to convince voters that Donald Trump is mounting an ""an unprecedented attack on our democracy.""
+
+Since the final debate in Las Vegas last week, she's hitting Trump on his reservations about saying he'll respect the results of the election.
+
+""That is a direct threat to our democracy,"" Clinton told a crowd of a few thousand on the campus of Saint Anselm College in Manchester on Monday. ""I'm not going to try to call it anything else, because that's what it is. All this talk about the election being rigged, trying to stir up people who are supporting him at his rallies, that is a direct threat to our democracy.""
+
+To quote the late Tim Russert, Donald Trump's election strategy can be boiled down to ""Florida, Florida, Florida."" Tuesday marked the third straight day Trump spent in the state. There's a good reason for that: Trump has no plausible path to the White House if he doesn't carry Florida's 29 electoral votes.
+
+""Florida is must-win, and I think we're winning it,"" Trump told Fox News on Tuesday morning.
+
+In addition to campaigning all over the state, Trump has focused a substantial amount of advertising dollars on Florida.
+
+But Florida isn't enough. Trump has to basically sweep the battleground states in order to win. Other states where Trump is buying television ads — and making repeated visits — include North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
+
+Trump will hit two of those states — Ohio and North Carolina — later this week.
+
+In yet another indication of how Trump has blended a presidential campaign with personal business, he's taking time off the campaign trail Wednesday morning to attend a grand opening ceremony at his new Washington, D.C., hotel.
+
+While Trump does that, running mate Mike Pence is campaigning in deeply conservative Utah. That's something the GOP ticket needs to do this year, due to a collapse in support from Utah Republican leaders and serious apathy toward Trump from Mormon voters. Those two interrelated factors have opened the door for independent conservative candidate Evan McMullin to run neck and neck with Trump in Utah.
+
+Trump is also defending a number of other traditionally red states, including Arizona, Georgia and Texas, where Clinton is challenging his lead.
+
+This week, Clinton is focused on swing states where large numbers of people have already begun voting. That includes places like Florida (where she's campaigning Tuesday and Wednesday) and North Carolina (which she'll visit Thursday with first lady Michelle Obama). The campaign estimates some 60 percent of Floridians will cast their ballots by Election Day.
+
+""Florida, Nevada, Iowa, North Carolina — these are all states where we expect a majority of people will have voted before Election Day,"" said Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri.
+
+Democrats have a staffing advantage that could help with turnout in some of these early voting states — for the presidential race and for the competitive Senate races many are seeing.
+
+The multipronged offense is focused on states Trump needs more than Clinton to reach 270 electoral votes. Florida tops the list. On Thursday, Clinton will campaign in North Carolina, a state that went for the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, and on Friday she'll be in Iowa, a state where most of the polls have shown Trump with an edge — though polling has been relatively scarce there in recent weeks.
+
+Clinton's campaign has not ruled out the idea of campaigning in traditionally Republican states, such as Arizona, where she seems to be in a statistical tie with Trump.
+
+She has plenty of backup, too. Michelle Obama and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren have gotten lots of attention for their rebukes of Trump on the campaign trail. And President Obama is expected to campaign heavily in the next two weeks. That means Clinton's campaign can simply cover a lot more ground ahead of Nov. 8.",REAL
+3144,Scott Walker and questioning Obama’s faith,"When Scott Walker pronounced himself agnostic about President Obama’s patriotism and Christian faith, it must have seemed like a clever formulation. “I’ve never asked him, so I don’t know,” he said. And about Obama’s Christianity: “I’ve never asked him that.”
+
+Walker quickly found his pitch unequal to the presidential big leagues. His argument can’t be generalized into a rule. I have never met Billy Graham, for example, but I’m pretty sure what he believes. As political attacks go, this one is particularly heavy-handed — the equivalent of saying: As far as I know, my opponent is not a swindler and a degenerate. A politician who tried this form of passive aggression before also got criticized for it. During the 2008 Democratic primary fight, Hillary Clinton said that Obama was not a Muslim “as far as I know” — sounding more like one of the wackier speakers at a CPAC convention.
+
+For Walker, this is more of a paper cut than a chest wound. But for the Republican Party, which some Americans associate with religious exclusivity, it can’t be good for a front-runner to sound religiously exclusive.
+
+Walker’s Baptist upbringing — he is the son of a pastor — does put a particular emphasis on the personal acceptance of Christ. It was another Baptist governor, Jimmy Carter, who elevated the idea of being “born again” into the realm of presidential politics. For evangelicals in general, there is no such thing as a birthright Christian. Faith requires a conscious and highly consequential decision — a choice that some do not make.
+
+But here Obama has been as forthright as anyone could be. “I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian,” he said in a 2008 Christianity Today interview. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful. I didn’t ‘fall out in church’ as they say, but there was a very strong awakening in me of the importance of these issues in my life. I didn’t want to walk alone on this journey. Accepting Jesus Christ in my life has been a powerful guide for my conduct and my values and my ideals.”
+
+Questioning this affirmation involves a serious charge — an accusation of the worst sort of cynicism. And it is simply not the role of a Christian layman to publicly dispute the self-identification of other Christians, especially in a political context. It is a practice that can lead down ugly alleys of sectarianism.
+
+Some, of course, will find the whole idea that human beings can make profoundly consequential religious choices to be foreign. And they may find proselytization — the necessary correlate of religious choice — to be offensive. But here a little patience might be in order. In many cases, adult converts have come through low points of addiction, humiliation or crisis. They believe they have found, past the limits of their own strength, something extraordinary and undeserved, which they can only describe as grace.
+
+You may find such converts to be deluded or annoying, but there is little doubt that they have had a profound experience that defies adequate metaphor. They feel they have been washed by water or refined by fire. They have heard a voice in the night or a melody above the noise. Things previously thought important — status or wealth — appear vanishingly insignificant. They can say, with G.K. Chesterton:
+
+And all these things are less than dust to me
+
+Because my name is Lazarus and I live.
+
+In such cases, people amazed by grace are wont to talk about it. But this motivation is the opposite of self-righteous judgment. It is gratitude. I have known people who, after a single moment of transforming trust, have spent the rest of their lives in astonished and vocal thankfulness.
+
+But this type of faith, by definition, is unlikely to publicly judge the faith of others. It is founded on recognition of personal limits and failure. In the New Testament, grace often moves in stealthy and unexpected ways — lavished on lepers, Samaritans and tax collectors. Perhaps the modern equivalents would be people with HIV/AIDS, illegal immigrants and . . . tax collectors.
+
+In any case, Christians should not look to the powerful for definitions of orthodoxy — or be proud of an unmerited gift.
+
+Read more from Michael Gerson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook .",REAL
+1784,What Is Hillary’s Greatest Accomplishment?,"“If you want to stump a Democrat, ask them to name an accomplishment of Hillary Clinton,” Carly Fiorina quipped at Wednesday’s Republican debate. The line got hearty applause—but it also cut to the core of one of the defining lines of attacks against the former first lady and Democratic presidential frontrunner. After nearly forty years in public life, what exactly has she accomplished?
+
+It’s a question that even, at times, has tripped up Clinton herself: During her 2014 book tour, when ABC’s Diane Sawyer asked her about her “marquee achievement,” Clinton changed the subject and she fumbled over a similar question during a women’s forum in Manhattan last year. “I see my role as secretary—in fact leadership in general in a democracy—as a relay race. You run the best race you can run, you hand off the baton. Some of what hasn’t been finished may go on to be finished,” she told Thomas Friedman. “I’m very proud of the [economic] stabilization and the really solid leadership that the administration provided that I think now leads us to be able to deal with problems like Ukraine because we’re not so worried about a massive collapse in Europe.”
+
+The question Fiorina posed has also tripped up members of the Obama administration. When State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki was asked last year to “identify one tangible achievement” accomplished through one of Hillary Clinton’s key projects as Secretary of State—the first-ever audit of the department—Psaki punted, “I am certain that those who were here at the time, who worked hard on that effort, could point out one.”
+
+Hillary’s supporters have been stumped too. When Bloomberg Politics’ Mark Halperin asked a focus group of Iowans this summer about Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments, one Democratic supporter said, “I honestly can’t say I followed along [with] everything that was going on.”
+
+So is Fiorina right? Are Democrats really unable to defend Clinton’s record on the merits? To find out, Politico Magazine on Thursday asked the nation’s top Democratic leaders and thinkers to name Hillary Clinton’s biggest accomplishment.
+
+What is the most impressive item on Clinton’s record? Which legislative or policy triumph from her many years in office will be most important on the campaign trail? Not surprisingly, those surveyed all came up with an answer to defend their party’s likely presidential nominee. Whether these count as “marquee,” “significant,” or “tangible”? You be the judge.
+
+‘It’s kind of hard to pick one accomplishment’
+
+By Bill Burton, former senior strategist for Priorities USA Action, a super PAC in support of President Barack Obama.
+
+It’s kind of hard to pick one accomplishment for Hillary Clinton. Personally, I’m sure she’d say her daughter and grandchild are her greatest accomplishments. Professionally, how about these three?
+
+1. Her China speech on women.
+
+2. Her role in killing Osama bin Laden.
+
+3. Management of the State Department during which time we saw a 50 percent increase in exports to China, aggressive work on climate (particularly at Copenhagen), and the effort to create and implement the toughest sanctions ever on Iran—helping to lead us to the agreement currently on the table.
+
+‘The sanction on Iran that brought them to the table’
+
+Howard Dean is the former governor of Vermont and the former chair of the Democratic National Committee.
+
+Hillary Clinton was the principal author of the sanction on Iran that brought them to the table. We cannot afford any Know Nothings like Carly in the White House.
+
+‘Nearly every foreign policy victory of President Obama’s second term has Secretary Clinton’s fingerprints on it’
+
+American foreign policy was stronger when Hillary Clinton left the State Department than when she arrived. She took the reins from a Bush administration that had left America’s reputation deeply damaged and planted the seeds for the foreign policy successes we see today. From the agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, to the landmark normalization of relations with Cuba, nearly every foreign policy victory of President Obama’s second term has Secretary Clinton’s fingerprints on it.
+
+Her accomplishments extend to health care, as well. As First Lady, she helped create and guide through Congress Children’s Health Insurance Program, a key program that brought health care coverage to millions of children. As a Senator, she worked across the aisle to provide full military health benefits to reservists and National Guard members.
+
+Secretary Clinton was also an outspoken champion for women around the world. She set records for travel while leading the State Department and used every trip to empower the women of the 112 countries she visited. She made gender equality a priority of U.S. foreign policy. And she created the ambassador at large for global women’s issues, a post charged with integrating gender throughout the State Department.
+
+‘The SCHIP program … which expanded health coverage to millions of lower-income children’
+
+After universal health care failed in 1994, the Clinton Administration was reluctant to go anywhere near healthcare again—Democrats lost the Senate and the House in 1994, and losing the house was for the first time in 40 years. Then-First Lady Hilary Clinton ended up being the White House ally and inside player who worked with Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch to create the SCHIP program in Clinton's second term, which expanded health coverage to millions of lower-income children. She has other accomplishments but this one made a huge difference, and came at a time when politically the Administration was cutting deals with Newt Gingrich on the budget and not necessarily all that enthusiastic about revisiting health care.
+
+This obviously isn't her only accomplishment but it is meaningful because she took a political battering after the failure in 1994 but came back to fight again, and was able to work on a bipartisan basis during a very polarized time to get this done. Seems relevant!
+
+‘Clinton is one of the most accomplished people ever to run’
+
+By Chuck Schumer, U.S. Senator for New York, Democratic party.
+
+Hillary Clinton is one of the most accomplished people ever to run for the Presidency. I’m lucky enough to have seen those accomplishments up close from her time as Senator from New York and as Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton was instrumental in helping secure $21 billion in federal aid to help New York rebuild after 9/11. She fought tooth and nail to protect the first responders who rushed into danger when the towers collapsed and was pivotal in the passage of legislation that helped those first responders who got sick get the care and treatment they deserved. She worked night and day to protect and create jobs in New York, whether that was at the Niagara Falls Air Force base or the Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Buffalo. She also led the charge on the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Equity Act, which is now the law of the land.
+
+As Secretary of State, Secretary Clinton was not only inspirational figure for billions of women around the globe, she also did much to restore the shattered credibility of the United States, which had lost so much influence following the failed foreign policies of the previous administration. She negotiated the cease-fire in Gaza that stopped the Hamas from firing rocket after rocket into Israel. She helped secure the START treaty’s ratification, and has advanced women’s rights in countries around the globe. That’s just a snapshot of what Hillary Clinton has accomplished over a lifetime of public service to New York and the country. If you really want to stump a Democrat, you should ask them which of Hillary’s accomplishments is your favorite—there are too many to choose from
+
+‘Rebuilding America’s leadership and prestige overseas after the Bush years’
+
+Bill Richardson is a former secretary of energy and governor of New Mexico.
+
+As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was key in rebuilding America’s leadership and prestige overseas after the Bush years. She restored our alliances with the EU and key Asian allies as well as key relationships in Africa and Latin America.
+
+By Chris Dodd, former U.S. Senator for Connecticut, Democratic party.
+
+Having worked with her in the Senate and on the HELP Committee, the first thing that came to mind was her authorship of the Pediatric Research Equity Act. This law requires drug companies to study their products in children. The Act is responsible for changing the drug labeling of hundreds of drugs with important information about safety and dosing of drugs for children. It has improved the health of millions of children who take medications to treat diseases ranging from HIV to epilepsy to asthma. Millions of kids are in better shape and alive because of the law Senator Clinton authored.
+
+By Paul Begala, political analyst for CNN and counselor to President Bill Clinton.
+
+Easy: Iran sanctions. Sec. Clinton accomplished the nearly impossible mission of getting China, Russia, the European Union and the civilized world on board with crippling sanctions against Iran. This is what brought Iran to the negotiating table.
+
+Ms. Fiorina may not see that as an accomplishment, since while she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard the firm sold hundreds of millions of dollars of computer products the the terrorist regime in Tehran, evading US sanctions.",REAL
+9814,"Iranians Spend $2.1b on Beauty Products Annually, 3 Times more than Their European Counterparts","11 Shares
+1 9 0 1
+Iranians spend 4.5% of their annual earnings on beauty products, three times more than their European counterparts, as per official statistics. The Germans spend 1.5% and the French and British 1.7% of their income every year on cosmetics.
+According to data from the Iranian Association of Cosmetics, Toiletries and Perfumery Importers, Iran accounts for $2.1 billion of the Middle East’s $7.2 billion beauty products market–second in the region after Saudi Arabia, the Persian daily Shahrvand reported.
+It is said that there are 15 million consumers for cosmetic products in Iran. Dividing the annual turnover by this number shows that each consumer spends $140 on cosmetics per year. Germany’s online statistics portal (Statista) states that the per capita cosmetic spending in Europe is €90 ($99) on average. The index is $173.5 in Germany, $176 in France, $177 in Britain, $169 in Italy and $150 in Spain.
+If the raw figures alone are taken, Iranians spend less than Europeans on make-up products. But the results change as other parameters such as the price of products and household average earnings are taken into account as well.
+As confirmed by the Iranian Association of Cosmetics, Toiletries and Perfumery Importers, 70% of the cosmetics in the market are smuggled into the country and often sold at a lower price than they would be if they were legally imported, not to mention the health risks contraband products are likely to pose. Europeans on the other hand pay the real price of the products which includes tax and are thus more expensive.
+MORE... Pakistani warships berth in Iran’s port as part of amicable relations, joint drills President Rouhani’s “open-door” economic policy: Recipe for indebtedness, deindustrialization and dependence Iranian Nowruz: A new day has come! Moreover, the spending has to be measured as compared to the average earnings. Based on Gallup Incorporation’s opinion polls, Iranians’ median per capita income has been estimated as $3,100 while that of the Germans, French and British $14,000, $12,500 and $12,300 respectively. The Spanish and Italians earn $6,800 and $7,200.
+This means that Iranians spend 4.5% of their income on beauty products while the figure is 1.5% for Germans, 1.7% for the French and British, 3% for Italians and 2.5% for the Spanish.
+These calculations show that people in Iran spend three times as much on cosmetics as German, French and British consumers.
+ Cosmetic Surgery
+Additionally, Iran’s Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons’ Association has announced that 80,000 cosmetic surgeries are performed each year constituting 0.3% of the operations in the world. This is a rather large percentage given that only 1.08% of the world population lives in Iran. Besides, the figure is said to be approximate due to the absence of an official registration system and the fact that other types of beauty surgeries such as body contouring and facial rejuvenation, among many others, are not included.
+Data from the Central Bank and the Statistics Center of Iran suggest that cultural pursuits constitute a small portion of Iranian household expenditure. The reports indicate that each family spent only 2% of their income on recreation and cultural activities in 2015, less than half their expenses on cosmetic products.
+Iran’s share of the world book market is 0.1% which is one-third the country’s share of the cosmetics market. The $2.1 billion incurred on beauty products is said to equal Japan’s cinema turnover and exceeds that of Bollywood and the UK’s film industry.
+Culture, cinema and books don’t comprise high-income businesses in Iran while cosmetic surgeons and beauty product dealers make fortunes on their business.",FAKE
+800,"Sanders, Trump easily win West Virginia primary; Trump picks up Nebraska too","Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont easily won the Democratic primary in West Virginia on Tuesday, the first of a string of potentially strong showings this month that may drag out, but not block, front-runner Hillary Clinton’s march toward the Democratic nomination.
+
+Additionally, Donald Trump won Republican primaries in West Virginia and Nebraska — virtually foregone conclusions given that he was the only Republican remaining in the race.
+
+“It is a great honor to have won both West Virginia and Nebraska, especially by such massive margins,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night. “My time spent in both states was a wonderful and enlightening experience for me.”
+
+Heading into Tuesday, Clinton held a formidable lead in delegates, and because delegates will be awarded proportionally, Sanders’s West Virginia victory was not expected to make much of a dent in that lead. However, his enduring popularity, large rallies and insistence on staying in the race until the Democratic convention in July have highlighted some of Clinton’s weaknesses and prevented her from fully turning her attention to a general-election contest against Trump.
+
+“West Virginia is a working-class state, and like many other states in this country, including Oregon, working people are hurting,” Sanders said at a rally in Salem, Ore., Tuesday night. “And what the people of West Virginia said tonight, and I believe the people of Oregon will say next week, is that we need an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”
+
+Sanders’s advantage over Clinton in West Virginia was clear in preliminary exit polling. According to data published by CNN, roughly 1 in 3 Democratic voters identified as an independent, a group that Sanders won by nearly 40 points. Just over 1 in 4 wanted the next president to continue President Obama’s policies, less than half the share who said this across previous primaries this year. Clinton has promised repeatedly to continue to build on many of Obama’s policies and has consistently performed best among voters who support his agenda.
+
+Sanders also benefited from support among Democratic primary voters who said they would favor Trump over Clinton or Sanders in a general election. Roughly 1 in 3 primary voters said they would back Trump in the general election over Clinton, and Sanders won two-thirds of their votes.
+
+Clinton was weighed down by her own troubles. Three in 10 Democratic primary voters said they or a family member were employed in the coal industry, and Sanders won those voters by more than 20 percentage points. Ahead of the primary, Clinton was forced to reckon with comments she made earlier in the campaign about putting the coal industry “out of business.”
+
+Sanders used the West Virginia victory as a rationale to stay in the race “until the last vote is cast.” Less than 15 minutes after the polls closed, Sanders sent out an email to supporters declaring victory and asking for money to help him in the next two contests in Kentucky and Oregon.
+
+Recent polls show Sanders likely to perform well in a string of primaries this month in Oregon, Kentucky and Washington — states with smaller minority populations where Clinton may face similar challenges as in the West Virginia electorate.
+
+Nevertheless, Clinton may have found a purpose to these contests in addition to trying to improve her performance against Sanders: to connect with the working-class white voters who may be crucial in a general-election match-up against Trump.
+
+In the run-up to West Virginia’s primary, Clinton toured the state, holding small, intimate meetings with voters — including some detractors who challenged her on the comments she made about coal miners.
+
+Clinton proposed tax changes that would assist families with the cost of child care — a contrast with Trump’s lack of a specific policy agenda.
+
+Among other details, Clinton said she would limit child-care costs to no more than 10 percent of a family’s income.
+
+“It just doesn’t make sense,” Clinton said at a stop in Lexington, Ky., of the cost of high-quality care for young children and the struggles of working parents to pay for it. “It’s the most important job that any of us can do, and we’re making it really hard and really expensive.”
+
+Bill Clinton was expected to tour Kentucky on Thursday.
+
+The Clinton camp also sought to hold Trump to a tax platform that they called “risky, reckless and regressive,” anticipating that Trump may attempt to walk back some of those policies, including tax cuts for the wealthy.
+
+“Donald Trump has put forward a tax plan that paces him squarely on the side of the super wealthy and corporations at the expense of the middle class and working families,” said Jake Sullivan, a senior Clinton policy adviser, in a call with reporters Monday.
+
+Trump became the presumptive nominee after Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich dropped out following his victory in the Indiana primary last week. He has maintained a lighter schedule than usual since effectively securing the nomination. He visited West Virginia last week — only to ask Republican primary voters not to bother voting for him Tuesday.
+
+“Save your vote for the general election, okay? Forget this one. The primary is gone,” Trump told a massive crowd in Charleston last week. He later made a swing through Oregon and Washington — continuing to target upcoming primary states while also, like Clinton, reaching out to white voters who are expected to play a big role in November.
+
+Trump has also stepped up his attacks on Clinton. He has given her the nickname “Crooked Hillary” and has sharpened his attacks on her judgment, for instance on foreign policy, international trade deals and her vote for the Iraq War. He has also characterized her as an “enabler” of her husband’s indiscretions.
+
+Once a Clinton stronghold, West Virginia’s political preference has shifted dramatically since she won by a landslide against Obama in the 2008 presidential primary.
+
+Win or lose in the remaining contests, she is likely to maintain a significant lead over Sanders in both the votes and delegates necessary to clinch the Democratic nomination.
+
+Sanders, in vowing to fight on, is eyeing the Democratic primary in California, where a huge delegate prize potentially awaits the winner on June 7. Sanders campaigned in Sacramento to a crowd of thousands on Monday. He rallied in Oregon Tuesday, and he was scheduled to campaign later in the week in South Dakota, which also votes in June.
+
+“The political establishment is getting nervous,” Sanders said Monday. “They should be getting very nervous because real change is coming.”
+
+Sanders made a pair of trips to West Virginia during the two weeks leading up the primary, where he emphasized jobs lost to trade deals and the persistent poverty in the state.
+
+During his most recent trip, Sanders devoted a speech last week to the latter subject, staged at a food bank in McDowell County, where nearly half the children live in poverty. Sanders also touted a $41 billion plan to transition ailing coal workers into new industries.
+
+In the lead-up to the West Virginia primary, Sanders also aired television ads in the state, something Clinton did not do.
+
+Heading into Tuesday’s contest, Clinton held a formidable lead of 290 pledged delegates over Sanders, according to a tally by the Associated Press. Once superdelegates are factored in, Clinton’s lead stands at 774 delegates.
+
+Clinton won the Democratic primary in Nebraska on Tuesday, but it was an “advisory” primary that followed caucuses in March at which Sanders won the majority of the delegates.
+
+The more delegates Sanders accumulates between now and the Democratic convention in July, the more leverage aides say he will have in shaping the party’s platform. If he is not the nominee, Sanders has said, he would like to push Clinton to adopt his position on issues including universal health care and raising the minimum wage.
+
+Sanders has continued to insist that he has a narrow path to the nomination that involves catching — or at least coming close to — Clinton in pledged delegates, which are allocated based on performances in primaries and caucuses. Sanders needs to win nearly two-thirds of the remaining pledged delegates to do that.
+
+Gearan reported from Louisville and Lexington, Ky. Scott Clement, Jose A. DelReal and Emily Guskin contributed to this report.",REAL
+1518,"Clinton, Sanders to Face Off in 1st Democrat Debate","LAS VEGAS – The Democratic presidential candidates are holding their first debate Tuesday night in Las Vegas.
+
+It marks the first time frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her main challenger so far – socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. – will appear on the same stage in this campaign, along with the other three candidates.
+
+This campaign was expected to be a cakewalk for the former first lady, but it hasn't turned out that way.
+
+One big reason seems to be the story that just won't away: how she used a private email server to conduct government business. It's fed a perception that she can play by a different set of rules.
+
+Even so, Clinton still has a decent lead nationally over the socialist senator from Vermont, but Sanders is coming on strong. He's beating her comfortably in the key state of New Hampshire and is close in Iowa, too.
+
+Plus, Sanders is the one drawing tens of thousands of people to his events. Democratic voters seem to be listening intently to his populist messages.
+
+With the threat from Sanders a reality, Clinton is now trying to reposition herself a little more leftward. Just recently she came out against President Barack Obama's big Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement.
+
+That's a reversal because while serving as secretary of state, she was for it. This new position puts her more in line with the liberal base of her party.
+
+""As of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it,"" Clinton said. ""I don't believe it's going to meet the high bar I have set.""
+
+So, tonight the drama will center on how much Sen. Sanders and the other Democrats confront Clinton directly on the debate stage.
+
+Expect former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley to be an instigator. He's trying to get traction and has taken some shots at Clinton over the last few months.
+
+As for Clinton herself, she's trying to avoid a repeat of 2008 when she went in as the heavy favorite, then ran into a buzz saw called Barack Obama.
+
+This time around the buzz is growing for Bernie Sanders.",REAL
+6429,#InNorthDakota ~~ PALESTINIANS STAND WITH THE SIOUX,"#InNorthDakota ~~ PALESTINIANS STAND WITH THE SIOUX 
+October 26, 2016 
+
+Palestinians know too well the threat to their own water supply …. 
+As Native communities face an ongoing genocide and continue to resist the imperialist settler-colonial regime of the United States, Palestinians are too experiencing a genocide and ethnocide within our homelands from the settler-colonial state of Israel.” 
+Image by Carlos Latuff “Water is life for all of us”: Palestinian activists join Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to protest DAPL Palestinians join Standing Rock Sioux to protest Dakota Access Pipeline 
+Nadya Raja Tannous “Perhaps only in North Dakota, where oil tycoons wine and dine elected officials, and where the governor, Jack Dalrymple, serves as an adviser to the Trump campaign, would state and county governments act as the armed enforcement for corporate interests. In recent weeks, the state has militarized my reservation, with road blocks and license-plate checks, low-flying aircraft and racial profiling of Indians. The local sheriff and the pipeline company have both called our protest “unlawful,” and Gov. Dalrymple has declared a state of emergency. It’s a familiar story in Indian Country. This is the third time that the Sioux Nation’s lands and resources have been taken without regard for tribal interests. The Sioux peoples signed treaties in 1851 and 1868. The government broke them before the ink was dry. When the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River in 1958, it took our riverfront forests, fruit orchards and most fertile farmland to create Lake Oahe. Now the Corps is taking our clean water and sacred places by approving this river crossing.” – Dave Archambault II , Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, opinion piece in the NY Times The Bakken formation in the northern United States and southern Canada is listed by US energy companies as one of the most promising options for national oil extraction, only surpassed in size by the oil fields in Alaska . The fields in North Dakota have been increasingly targeted for Bakken shale oil resources over the past years and they are quite familiar with public controversy: many of us remember the proposal of the infamous Keystone XL pipeline from 2008-2015, which was held in starkly low public opinion and struck down twice by the Obama administration . The proposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is not so different from its failed counterpart. It is mapped out for the same length of 1,172 miles as the Keystone XL and is targeting the same Bakken shale reserves for carry across the upper Midwest . The proposed $3.8 billion dollar DAPL would transport 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day across four states and cross the Missouri River itself. Parent company, Energy Transfer Partners is selling the pipeline as an economic booster, job creator , and sure investment for the future of the American people. Yet, who exactly are they referring to and who did they consult? In the hills outside of Bismarck, North Dakota is the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, sitting along the banks of the Cannonball River, a tributary to the Missouri River. The pipeline construction sites can now be seen from the reservation, but many people here saw the pipeline coming before it even arrived. Just as Energy Transfer Partners and TransCanada failed to consult Native Tribes who live along the planned pipeline route and whose sacred lands, ancestral lands, and main water sources will be compromised by construction, there has not been a single tribal consultation around the proposed DAPL. On April 1st , Sacred Stone Spirit Camp was erected on the bank of the Cannonball as a residence for water protectors, many whom came from within and off the reservation to stand against pipeline construction, call for water preservation, and call for recognition of the Federal treat ies held with the Great Sioux Nation. What started out as a few hundred people quickly increased into the thousands, stemming the creation of the Oceti Sakowin and Red Warrior Camps on the other side of the Cannonball. Protectors, support, and solidarity with Standing Rock are arriving from all edges of the world, many of them representing Indigenous Nations . My own caravan set out from California the 2nd week of September, preceding the Palestinian Youth Movement-USA Caravan that arrived soon after. As a contingent of Indigenous peoples in diaspora and recent settlers on Turtle Island , we attest that those standing at Standing Rock are standing for our present and future as well. We must in turn stand for each other against the present, future, and historical supremacies of erasure, the active legacy of settler-colonialism, and the viciousness of greed. The pipeline company seems to remain unconcerned by the risk of polluting the reservation’s main water source, the highly probable degradation of land and sacred sights, and their trespass against a series of federal laws , and they are becoming increasingly reactionary to the flow of protectors in and out of the protector camps and surrounding areas. Just a few weeks ago, on September 28th, alarming images and video were released of armed police and military-style vehicles cornering protectors holding a prayer ceremony at a North Dakota construction site. The video portrayed the intensity on the ground and just how vulnerable the protector camps are without the gaze of the public eye: “They are moving in” “They won’t let us leave. They have locked us in on both sides” “They’ve got their weapons drawn” “They’ve got snipers on top of the hill” “They’re blocking me on Facebook” “They are arresting everyone now. Everyone is running” “Share this far and wide” – Transcript of LiveStream video via Unicorn Riot The militarized forces blocked the only exit from the site to the public road before arresting 21 protectors . Other attendees posted photos of a crop dusting plane releasing a gas or chemical over the crowd. There has been little clarity thereafter of the makeup of the compound or the purpose of the spray. The participation and planning of direct actions against DAPL construction, however, are continuing, with over 100 cars caravanning out to 5 construction sites the week of October 3rd and successfully halting construction for the day. Local authorities, private security hires, and the National Guard are seemingly disturbed by the presence of protectors as well, and are going out of their way to restrict access in and out of the protector camp area and intimidate newcomers. Indeed my own caravan coming from California was discouraged from approaching the reservation on the main road running from Bismarck, ND due to the checkpoints erected by North Dakota authorities. Our longwinded encounter with the highway patrol on our way to North Dakota — who insisted on not only checking all of our IDs followed by standing on the side of the highway outside of the car for an hour but also “passed our information down the line to the authorities higher-up” including suspicions of illegal activity — seemed to be motivated to dissuade an influx of supporters into the area. Stories of license plate checks, racial profiling of Native and ethnic drivers and/or car passengers, as well as arrests at roadblocks, circulated through the camps. Democracy Now , The New York Times , Huffington Post , and many independent news sources also reported these same tactics. Why did I go in the first place? Because somewhere in the awkward power dynamic of being a US citizen, a non-native inhabitant of Turtle Island , and a Palestinian in the Diaspora, I saw the struggle for livelihood and culture, the struggle against settler-colonialism, the struggle to protect the sacred and maintain your own legitimacy, and the ever ominous force of erasure and historical amnesia. What I later saw at Standing Rock both embodied this and became bigger than it; as a Mohawk Elder said to me, “Without water, we [humans] are infertile dust”. At a council fire in Oceti Sakowin during my stay, 280 Indigenous Nations were thanked for their support and representation at the camps. Movement leaders at Sacred Stone Spirit Camp have repeatedly stated that the gatherings of different Indigenous Nations near Cannonball, ND is the largest in the past 150 years on the North American continent . The council fire sits at the mouth of the main entrance of Oceti Sakowin Camp, outlined by rows of flags representing many of the Indigenous Nations who have come to stand with Standing Rock. At the end of one of the rows is the Palestinian flag. Seeing it filled me equally with joy and sadness because it confirmed two things that I had pondered throughout the long drive from California to North Dakota: the first thought is that the power of collective resistance against greed and settler-colonialism is a mighty force. That thought was embodied by my joy to see a representation of will by the presently unseen Palestinian siblings who had come to take a stand against destructive powers. The second thought was embodied by sadness for, if the struggle for protection of water, culture, land, heritage, and livelihood is truly mirrored in Standing Rock and Palestine, then the struggle ahead is both vast and uncompromising. I spoke with many inspiring protectors from the Maori in New Zealand, indigenous representatives from Ecuador, Canadian representatives from the Blackfoot Nation who were longtime activists in the “Idle No More” mobilizations, and Dakota/Lakota/Nakota from Standing Rock and the neighboring reservations among so many others. From a variety of perspectives and personal stories, the same foundational message was repeated back to me: this stand isn’t just about standing for Native rights, it is about protecting the water, protecting our earth and securing the livelihood of our next generations. Water is life for all of us. Myself and fellow members of the Palestinian Youth Movement–United States Branch had reflected on the latter thought when we authored our statement of solidarity “with the Standing Rock Sioux, the Great Sioux Nation and our other native sisters, brothers and siblings in the fight against the DAPL”, circulated on September 7th. Segments read: “We condemn all forms of state violence against our First Nation siblings and denote that the undermining of their sovereignty and livelihood is a part of the continuing dialectic of settler-colonialism transnationally. Since the arrival of settlers on Turtle Island, First Nations have resisted genocide and displacement. From seizure of land to reservations, from boarding schools to massacres, the state has done everything in its power to erase and eradicate First Nation peoples. Yet, they are still with us today and they continue to resist. Protecting their land, people, and future generations from the DAPL is a testament to their strength and resilience. …. As Native communities face an ongoing genocide and continue to resist the imperialist settler-colonial regime of the United States, Palestinians are too experiencing a genocide and ethnocide within our homelands from the settler-colonial state of Israel.” The comparisons are uncanny. I had spent most of the hours on the road to North Dakota contemplating the connections between the obstacles and oppressions facing those in Standing Rock and the obstacles and oppressions facing we Palestinians under occupation and apartheid. However, upon arriving at Standing Rock, I no longer just thought about the similarities, I felt them in my bones. When protectors at Standing Rock asked me about what Palestinians experience in our own fight against settler-colonialism , oppression, and greed, I answered sometimes through the language of statistics. Yet, more often, I told them narratives of genocide, exile, delegimitzation, broken promises, and resounding resilience. Sitting around a fire, burning sage and cedar wood, Darlene Meguinis of the Blackfoot Nation in Canada reflected on the beginnings of the Idle No More movement, in which she is still an active organizer. She told me: “Everything must start with prayer and ceremony, especially organizing.” She reminded me that the founders of Idle No More , elders Nina Waste, Jessica Gordon, Sheelah Mcleen, and Sylvia McAdams, had rooted the movement in ceremony. The result of doing so, Meguinis maintained, was to center the focus of the collective actions for change. Native youth in the #NoDAPL Youth Council at Standing Rock reiterated similar ideas about DAPL actions. Two youth leaders recounted to me, “we are striving for the results that we want to see but are being directed by our ancestors. We are here, acting now, for our children.” Intention and prayer surrounded much of the daily camp life and easily dispersed the tensions outside, even as the DAPL Company and National Guard helicopters flew low over the camps each morning, afternoon and night (something that pointedly reminded me of life in Palestine). Some mornings along the bend of the Cannonball River, which delineates Oceti Sakowin/Red Warrior Camp from Sacred Stone Spirit Camp, Native artists reflected the beauty around them in paintings and art installations. One of the organizers was Albuquerque artist Monty Singer, whose picture is shown below. The time set out to create art and music, to gather around fires and drum circles, to participate in prayer and ceremony with each other uplifted the vibrant energy of the camps and the people within them. We cheered, prayed and supported the direct actions as best we could every day; donations from across the U.S. and internationally flooded into the main entrance in the afternoons and community kitchens and donation booths ran 24/7 to maintain the swelling of protector numbers. Hundreds of people ebbed and flowed into the camps every single day. The sheer power required to uphold the movement is sobering: in light of the failed injunction by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the US Army Corps of Engineers at the lower court level, a Federal Appeals court officially halted construction of the pipeline, underlining the same temporary hold parameters as the decree proposed on September 9th by the Department of Justice (DOJ ). That hold applies solely within 20 miles on either side of Lake Oahe near the Missouri River. Other locations on the planned pipeline route are still open for construction and, though direct actions at sites of DAPL construction have not wavered, they are increasingly receiving less and less media attention with increasingly severe charges being applied to protectors. For example, the 5 protectors who strapped themselves to bulldozers at an active DAPL construction site 100 miles down Hwy 94 from the reservation during my stay at Oceti Sakowin Camp were slapped with felony charges for “criminal trespassing”, the same charges outlined against Amy Goodman in her arrest warrant as a result of her coverage of the DAPL in early September (although her charges at the time constituted a misdemeanor and were thankfully dropped October 17th after a court hearing ). Some of those arrested were even extradited back to their home states to face their charges from North Dakota in addition to preexisting protest charges in other states. My last night in Standing Rock, I spoke with a woman by the name of “Terry”, a resident of Bismarck, ND. I asked her why I had met so few non-natives from the local area at Standing Rock. Her response was direct and had very little to do with the sheriff’s implemented checkpoints and roadblocks: “It is because of the media propaganda. For example, during the dog attacks, Bismarck news covered a worker’s injury at the site and the hospitalization of a guard. No one gave popular air time or writing space to cover the effects of the dog attacks on protectors.” She mentioned that an article in the conservative paper, Town Hall , soon after the attacks read: “ So dogs were unleashed on these protestors. Good ”. She and a few others from Bismarck came to the camps because they saw past the media pressure. “We understand that the fight for clean water and recognition of Native sovereignty affects everyone in the surrounding area”, she told me, which would become increasingly apparent if oil leakage wells up in the Bakken region. In Geneva, on September 20th, Dave Archambault II, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, urged the UN Human Rights Council to stand with the tribe in opposing the DAPL project and advocate for the recognition of their sovereign rights, including the protection of water and sacred places . Protectors are remaining vigilant on and off site, many walking to pay respects to the graves of the Dakota/Lakota/Nakota ancestors that have been disturbed by construction. Martina Looking Horse, a longtime writer from Cheyenne River Reservation, has been camping at Standing Rock for over a month. She told me that she and her family plan to stay until the pipeline is defeated but stressed that the conditions at camp are not easy to live under. The torrential rainstorms, the swings of hot and cold, and the impending North Dakota winter discourage many from staying longer than a few weeks. Yet, Looking Horse affirmed her belief that she and many others will carry on, with or without the support of mainstream media. The hope, she reaffirmed, is that the national and international people of conscience will continue to support in all the ways that they can, hold the US government accountable to their promises, and not forget that the protectors are still there taking a stand. The day that I left, the PYM-United States Branch’s official caravan came into Oceti Sakowin, bringing supplies, people power, and small gifts for the tribal council as visitors to the land. They also read our statement at the tribal council fire and met many people, as I had, who stated how glad they were to see Palestinians supporting the front lines against movement suppression. The solidarity with Palestine for all of us who participated in caravans from PYM was overwhelming. What was supposed to be a few-day trip was extended into a week. Inspired by the stories, the people, the call to our moral responsibility to protect each other and the water that keeps us alive, we hope to return back to Standing Rock and bring supplies for winter. Friends of Sabeel North America also sent forward a statement of solidarity , in part remarking: “we know that settler colonialism depends on the exploitation of land and natural resources to the detriment of indigenous communities…Today, we see you, the Sioux nation and members of the other 280 Native American tribes who have joined you to protect the water of the Missouri River and stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, taking a stand for all life, the embodiment of resilience. As the Israeli occupation continues, Palestinian land is stolen, ancient olive trees are uprooted, and blood is shed, your struggle inspires our work and we redouble our efforts to witness and nonviolently resist. We stand in full support of indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.” The light of hope in Standing Rock is not fizzling out. Upon returning to the Bay Area, I came across many art builds and donation efforts, and have been seeing many more events publicized by friends and family in New York State, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona. Thanks to Caleb Duarte and the wonderful youth from Fremont High School in Oakland (recently arrived unaccompanied youth from Chimeltenango, Guatemala) who made this solidarity banner: Art build in Oakland, CA : Recent unaccompanied minors from Guatemala write “Water is Life” in Maya. (Photo: Nadya Tannous) * Dignidad Rebelde woodblock print at the Oakland Art Build for Standing Rock. (Photo: Nadya Tannous) I remember thinking as I left Standing Rock to return to California: peoples suppressed by power and greed have strength when they rise together. There is a poignant uniting force through something as important as the world that sustains us. The river was quiet when I left, with lots of green and tall grass on its banks. The river flats lay muddy and fertile, the slow current reflecting the sky day and night, the water turning pink and orange by sunset. A water protector strapped to heavy machinery down the Hwy 94 shouted out , before being removed to jail, “This pipeline is a pipeline to the past. We need to be building sustainable infrastructure for the future, not destructive unsustainable industries that hurt land, that hurt water, that hurt people. Everything is wrong about this pipeline… We’re here standing in solidarity with millions of people from around the world that are against this pipeline.” (via Unicorn Riot) The collective call for justice is ringing loud and clear. Mni Wiconi –Water is life. Please support Standing Rock. Donate here to Sacred Stone Spirit Camp. Donate here to the Sacred Stone Camp Legal Defense Fund. Donate here to the next PYM caravan to Standing Rock. Source and more photos HERE Share:",FAKE
+3938,"Human remains suggest explosion brought down EgyptAir plane, forensics official says","Human remains recovered from the crash site of EgyptAir Flight 804 showed burn marks and were ""very tiny,"" suggesting an explosion brought down the plane, a senior Egyptian forensics official told the Associated Press Tuesday.
+
+Meanwhile, a U.S. official briefed on the latest intelligence told Fox News, ""All signs continue to point to terrorism.""
+
+The official who spoke to the AP claimed he personally examined the remains of some of the plane's 66 passengers and crew at a Cairo morgue. He said all 80 pieces brought to Cairo so far are small and that ""there isn't even a whole body part, like an arm or a head.""
+
+He added that at least one part of an arm had signs of burns -- an indication it might have ""belonged to a passenger sitting next to the explosion.""
+
+The U.S. official speaking to Fox News said American satellites could have missed a potential explosion over the eastern Mediterranean. ""Contrary to popular belief, we cannot see every part of the earth all the time.""
+
+The official said most U.S. satellites would be trained to positons on land and known areas of interest and not focused over an empty part of the sea, particularly the eastern Mediterranean.
+
+The official would not rule out an explosion took place. To date, no terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the EgyptAir disaster.
+
+The Airbus A320 crashed early Thursday morning near the end of a fight from Paris to Cairo.
+
+An independent Cairo newspaper, al-Watan, quoted an unnamed forensics official Tuesday as saying the plane blew up in midair, but that it was unclear whether the blast was caused by the an explosive device or something else. The official also said the remains retrieved so far are ""no larger than the size of a hand.""
+
+But Egypt’s head of forensics denied the statements Tuesday, Reuters reported, citing state news agency MENA.
+
+""Everything published about this matter is completely false, and mere assumptions that did not come from the Forensics Authority,"" MENA quoted Hesham Abdelhamid as saying.
+
+Analysts who spoke to Fox News also said the body parts could have been broken up in a similar way upon impact with water.
+
+Family members of the victims arrived Tuesday at a Cairo morgue’s forensics department to give DNA samples to help identify the remains of their kin, a security official said. The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.
+
+An international effort to hunt for the plane's cockpit voice and data recorder resumed Tuesday, with ships and planes from Britain, Cyprus, France, Greece and the United States taking part in the search.
+
+The search area is roughly halfway between Egypt's coastal city of Alexandria and the Greek island of Crete, where the water is 8,000 to 10,000 feet deep.
+
+The head of Egypt's state-run provider of air navigation services, Ehab Azmy, told The Associated Press Monday that the plane did not swerve or lose altitude before it disappeared off radar, challenging an earlier account by Greece's defense minister.
+
+Azmy, head of the National Air Navigation Services Company, said that in the minutes before the plane disappeared, it was flying at its normal altitude of 37,000 feet, according to the radar reading. ""That fact degrades what the Greeks are saying about the aircraft suddenly losing altitude before it vanished from radar,"" he added.
+
+""There was no turning to the right or left, and it was fine when it entered Egypt's FIR (flight information region), which took nearly a minute or two before it disappeared,"" Azmy said.
+
+Greece's defense minister, Panos Kammenos, had said the plane swerved wildly and dropped to 10,000 feet before it fell off radar.
+
+Greek civil aviation authorities said the flight appeared normal until air traffic controllers were to hand it over to their Egyptian counterparts. The pilot did not respond to their calls, and then the plane vanished from radars.
+
+It was not immediately possible to explain the discrepancy between the Greek and Egyptian accounts of the air disaster.
+
+A 2013 report by the Egyptian ministry of civil aviation records that the Airbus 320 in the crash made an emergency landing in Cairo that year, shortly after taking off on its way to Istanbul, when one of the engines ""overheated.""
+
+It said that the EgyptAir A320 GCC took off from Cairo airport heading to Istanbul at 2:53 and that when it reached an altitude of 24,000 feet, the pilot noticed that one engine had overheated. A warning message appeared on the screen reading, ""engine number 1 stall."" After checking on best measures to take, the pilot headed back to Cairo’s airport where a maintenance engineer inspected the engine, disconnected it, and sent it to be repaired.
+
+There were no injuries, no fire, and no damage to the plane, the report read, adding that the engine had a technical problem.
+
+The report is one of over 60 reports classified by the ministry as incidents, serious incidents and accidents that took place between 2011 and 2014. Among them, 20 involved A320 Airbus planes, the highest among any other aircraft.
+
+Experts contacted by AP said that while an overheated engine is not a common problem, it is unlikely to cause a crash.
+
+David Learmount, a widely respected aviation expert and editor of the authoritative Flightglobal magazine, said, ""engine overheat is rare but it happens.""
+
+He said that the pilot can shut down the engine and aircrafts can operate with a single engine.
+
+""I don't think engine overheat alone has ever caused an aircraft to crash. An engine fire could cause a crash but has not done so in the modern aviation era,"" he added.
+
+Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+3638,US officials scanning terror databases in search for Paris attack suspects,"U.S. counterterrorism officials are reviewing databases of known terror suspects and other materials after the deadly Paris shooting Wednesday morning, as the Obama administration opened the door to increasing security in the U.S. in response.
+
+The terror attack on a satirical French publication known for lampooning Islam left at least 12 dead, and the attackers remain at large. U.S. officials already are in touch with their French counterparts.
+
+The attackers reportedly shouted ""Allahu Akbar,"" Arabic for ""God is great, before escaping.
+
+Two French officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, named the suspects to the Associated Press as Frenchmen Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, in their early 30s, as well as 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality wasn't immediately clear.
+
+One of the officials said they were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network.
+
+All three remain at large.
+
+Cherif Kouachi was convicted in 2008 of terrorism charges for helping funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
+
+Fox News is told investigators had been reviewing terror databases, including for individuals who have traveled to Syria. They also looked to closed-circuit television and evidence from the crime scene.
+
+In addition to identifying the suspects, the focus will be on determining whether this is isolated or part of a series of attacks.
+
+It is thought to be an attack carried out by a small cell, which distinguishes this from recent lone-wolf attacks, including one in Ottawa, Canada, and another more recent attack in Sydney, Australia. Officials are looking at the level of premeditation, given eyewitness accounts that the gunmen asked for individuals by name as they stormed the office.
+
+In addition, Fox News is told the assailants showed skill and familiarity with their weapons, and their escape also showed premeditation.
+
+A Department of Homeland Security official told Fox News that the department is ""closely monitoring"" the situation.
+
+""DHS will not hesitate to adjust our security posture, as appropriate, to protect the American people,"" the official said, urging the public to report suspicious activity to law enforcement.
+
+However, the office of the U.S. Embassy in France tweeted that there are ""no plans"" to close the embassy in Paris or other diplomatic facilities in France despite ""misleading"" press reports.
+
+U.S. investigators are expected to get more formally involved, but only after a request from the French government.
+
+Based on conversations with government officials and analysts, they are looking at three categories of suspects: self-radicalized individuals; members of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, specifically Al Qaeda's offshoot in North Africa known as AQIM; and those who have traveled to Syria and gotten training from Al Qaeda or the Islamic State.
+
+The latest edition of Inspire magazine, from the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, calls for attacks on France, as well as America and other allies.
+
+Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told Fox News he has confidence in French authorities who are pursuing suspects as well. ""I would think that one way or the other, they will find them,"" he said.
+
+King also said the attack should be a ""wake-up call"" for Congress not to cut funding for DHS, despite an ongoing fight over funding the administration's immigration initiatives.
+
+Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.",REAL
+6918,"ISIS Declares It Will kill Palestinians “One By One”’, Yet Remains Quiet On Israel","Email 
+ISIS has declared war on Palestine, threatening genocide against the Palestinian people, following the murder of Hamas’ senior commander Saber Siam on Sunday. ISIS militants said that Siam was killed due to the fact he was “a partner in a declared war against religion and against Muslims, working for the heretical government in Gaza”. Americans.org report: The attack was conducted by ISIS-affiliated Salafist rebels who have also warned local residents to stay away from Hamas offices and buildings as it plans to carry out more attacks. The conflict between Hamas and ISIS in Gaza started when Palestinian forces demolished a makeshift mosque used by Ansar al-Bayt al-Maqdis in early May. Ansar al-Bayt al-Maqdis is an Egyptian Islamist group that has pledged allegiance to ISIS and has been recruiting Palestinians for the Islamic State. After demolishing the Almtahabin mosque, Hamas then arrested seven men, including a local Salafist Sheikh Yasser Abu Houli. ISIS claims it will kill Palestinians “one by one” and that it knows the names and addresses of all the officers working for the Palestinian Intelligence agency.",FAKE
+9825,"Hillary, The Political Scientist","Happy Birthday, Hillary. You were destined to great things. And you knew it. *** I am astounded . I graduated in political science from the University of Naples, the university of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Giambattista Vico, and Benedetto Croce, in something like the 750 th graduating class; I have tried to keep up with the field as much as I could, even though I have preferred to concentrate on economics and political economy. I have always gotten along with the assumption that politics is ""the art of the possible."" But, let us give a good look at it. What is in this formula, if not a put down; a downgrading, so downgrading, characterization of this noble science? No wonder politics has become the art of bickering; the art of discord; the art of grasping at reefs, while we are drowning in perilous waters. No wonder, politics in the United States and much around the world has become polarized between two factions that fight for supremacy to the death. Not the death of the political class, but to the psychological and physical death of millions of people--in this country, the richest of the countries, the last best hope for mankind. Let alone the millions overseas. No wonder both the right and the left are focused on this set of policies: ""Deny them their rights; take their dignity away; give them a warm soup in a cold winter night; and go to sleep in peace."" What to say of this debasement of charity? What to say of this debasement of high morality? What to say of this debasement of politics? And there I was the other night, hearing and seeing the following words written on the screen of CNN, in their documentary on Hillary Clinton: - Advertisement - ""Politics is not the art of the possible"" politics is the art of making the impossible"" possible."" These are the words, not of Hillary of today or yesterday. These are the words of a young woman who breaks with tradition at the stodgy prestigious Wellesley College and becomes the first valedictorian in the history of that college. This is Hillary who is called to lead her class, not via invitation by academicians or administrators at Wellesley, but by her classmates who recognized the force of her leadership. This is Hillary Rodham, later to become Clinton, who throws away her prepared speech and delivers her oration extemporaneously: ""Politics is not the art of the possible"" politics is the art of making the impossible"" possible."" This is Hillary who is immediately recognized in the national press as a force of nature: woman's nature. This is a woman who could have been researching and writing and talking about political science for a lifetime. - Advertisement - This is a woman who could have climbed the rungs of academia with grace and ease. Instead"" She preferred to practice what she had discovered at such a young age. She rolled up her sleeves and went to work to make it possible for children to have a better life than the one to which they were clearly doomed by a society in thrall of control and scarcity and fear .",FAKE
+7713,"BOOM! This Is How President Reagan Handled Protesters: ""Negotiate? What is there to negotiate?"" [Video] » 100percentfedUp.com","Copyright © 2016 100PercentFedUp.com, in association with Liberty Alliance | All rights reserved. Proudly built by WPDevelopers . STAY IN THE LOOP Sign up for our email newsletter to become a 100% Fed Up insider. Subscribe ",FAKE
+1829,Clinton Picks Up The First Major Labor Endorsement Of 2016,"WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton picked up an early if not surprising endorsement on Saturday from one of the country's largest labor unions: the American Federation of Teachers.
+
+The executive council of the 1.6-million member AFT voted ""overwhelmingly"" in favor of backing the early frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, according to an announcement from the union. It marks the first endorsement from a major national labor union during the 2016 presidential campaign.
+
+""Hillary Clinton is a tested leader who shares our values, is supported by our members, and is prepared for a tough fight on behalf of students, families and communities,"" Randi Weingarten, the union's president, said in the statement.
+
+Weingarten and Clinton have been personal friends for years and the union threw its weight behind the Democrat during her 2008 campaign as well. In the resolution declaring its endorsement, the AFT said it polled its members twice and held two town halls before deciding which primary candidate to back.
+
+The endorsement comes at a helpful time for Clinton as Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders surges in polls. Still considered a long shot, Sanders has proven to be an attractive candidate to progressives in the labor movement, particularly those turned off by Clinton's unclear positions on President Barack Obama's looming trade deal. A number of local labor federations are flirting with the idea of getting behind Sanders, Politico reported.
+
+Clinton joined one of the AFT's executive council meetings last month, where she said teachers had become unfair targets of political attacks, according to the union.
+
+""It is just dead wrong to make teachers the scapegoats for all of society's problems,"" Clinton had said. ""Where I come from, teachers are the solution. And I strongly believe that unions are part of the solution, too.""
+
+Clinton plans to meet with officials from the AFL-CIO labor federation later this month to address their concerns with her unclear stance on the White House's trade pact, Reuters reported Thursday. The AFL-CIO vehemently opposed giving the president so-called fast-track authorization for the deal, though Congress ultimately granted it in June.",REAL
+6995,Links 11/12/16,"What Does Trump’s Victory Mean For NATO? NPR. Charles flags the close, which is an unusually pointed admission of the basis of our imperialist project. 
+Brexit 
+Turkey is swiftly heading towards a regime of terror Bangkok Post (furzy) 
+Trump Transition. I am trying, and hope you will help in comments, in pulling the noise out of the signal regarding what Trump will actually do when he becomes President and whether it will succeed, “success” consisting first of it being implemented and second, making him and his Administration appear to be legitimate (as in keeping campaign promises, delivering tangible benefits to voters or powerful interest groups he needs on board). Despite all the changes in messaging over the course of his campaign, Trump was consistent on immigration, trade and lack of infrastructure investment, and depicted all three as ways to improve conditions for workers. And political scientist Tom Ferguson says that the data shows that the propensity to vote for Trump was highly correlated with voters giving negative answers to questions like whether the economy or the job situation had gotten better. 
+Trump and Sanders found power lying in the street by virtue of both parities abandoning high employment levels and wage growth as major policy goals. But if Trump is to deliver on his promise of delivering on those goals, he is at odds with much of his own party, which is keen to keep workers weak and preserve free trade (the corporate Republicans, particularly ones whose constituents include globalized businesses like autos, for the obvious patronage reasons; libertarians, out of ideology). Given that trade policy and immigration enforcement are areas in which the President has considerable latitude, whether and how he engages in these fights will be early tests of whether he intends to and is able to execute. 
+Finally bear in mind that Trump not only has a thin bench staff wise, but also intellectually. Many of his sources of advice are ideologues who like the Brexiters in the UK, may cheerily recommend changes which might sound ducky (to them) without having the foggiest clue that the operational implications are nightmarish. For instance, I’m told the Trump transition team on policy is apparently planning on recommending that the US exit Nafta and the WTO on the first day of the Trump presidency. Pray tell, have they looked into what this means for US customs, and for US exporters dealing with foreign customs? 
+In other words, the right wing think tank types that the Trump team is relying on runs the risk of being as clueless about issues of organizational capacity as the Greeks were who thought they had a trump card (pun intended) in a Grexit (for those new to Naked Capitalism, we had an extensive series of posts on this topic, see here , here and here for some examples). 
+So for instance, see this BBC story: 
+Trump likes main Obamacare provisions ‘very much’ , specifically, covering pre-existing conditions and letting children up to age 26. The story describes how the Republicans might oppose Trump: 
+Complicating the matter is that a “revise and reform” effort may not fly with Mr Trump’s ardent supporters and the cadre of arch-conservative politicians in Congress, who want to tear up the law “root and branch”. 
+Mr Trump often broke with Republican orthodoxy while campaigning and didn’t pay a political price. He may learn that as president he won’t get far without his party establishment’s help. 
+In WSJ Interview, Trump Says He Is Willing to Keep Parts of Health Law Wall Street Journal. Note the heavy emphasis on job creation. This had been the Democratic party lode star through the Carter era. He also defines Pence’s job, which is to help on health care and sell Trump policies to Congress. This is similar to the role Joe Biden played. And he rejected the Administration “find those moderate Syrians” strategy.",FAKE
+2845,Obama: Syria war unlikely to end during his presidency,"Syrians wait near the Turkish border during clashes between ISIS and Kurdish armed groups in Kobani, Syria, on Thursday, June 25. The photo was taken in Sanliurfa, Turkey. ISIS militants disguised as Kurdish security forces infiltrated Kobani on Thursday and killed ""many civilians,"" said a spokesman for the Kurds in Kobani.
+
+Residents examine a damaged mosque after an Iraqi Air Force bombing in the ISIS-seized city of Falluja, Iraq, on Sunday, May 31. At least six were killed and nine others wounded during the bombing.
+
+Iraqi soldiers fire their weapons toward ISIS group positions in the Garma district, west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, on Sunday, April 26. Pro-government forces said they had recently made advances on areas held by Islamist jihadists.
+
+A member of Afghanistan's security forces stands at the site where a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up in front of the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Saturday, April 18. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The explosion killed at least 33 people and injured more than 100 others, a public health spokesman said.
+
+A Yazidi woman mourns for the death of her husband and children by ISIS after being released south of Kirkuk on April 8. ISIS is known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public executions, crucifixions and other acts.
+
+On April 1, Shiite militiamen celebrate the retaking of Tikrit, which had been under ISIS control since June. The push into Tikrit came days after U.S.-led airstrikes targeted ISIS bases around the city.
+
+A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani on Friday, January 30, after the city had been liberated from the ISIS militant group. The Syrian city, also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September.
+
+An elderly Yazidi man arrives in Kirkuk after being released by ISIS on Saturday, January 17. The militant group released about 200 Yazidis who were held captive for five months in Iraq. Almost all of the freed prisoners were in poor health and bore signs of abuse and neglect, Kurdish officials said.
+
+ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday, October 23. The United States and several Arab nations have been bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the militant group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.
+
+A Kurdish Peshmerga soldier who was wounded in a battle with ISIS is wheeled to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Duhuk, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 30.
+
+Syrian Kurds wait near a border crossing in Suruc as they wait to return to their homes in Kobani on Sunday, September 28.
+
+Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS militant positions from their position on the top of Mount Zardak, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 9.
+
+Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and some other Yazidi people are flown to safety Monday, August 11, after a dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar. A CNN crew was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. But only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.",REAL
+317,'Blue and Brave': Illinois town rallies around police as search for officer's killer goes on,"Dozens of police officers searched without success overnight for three suspects who shot and killed a 30-year veteran of the Fox Lake, Ill. police force.
+
+Lt. Charles Joseph ""Joe"" Gliniewicz, 52, was shot at approximately 8 a.m. local time Tuesday after he radioed in to tell dispatchers he was chasing three men on foot in Fox Lake. Communication with him was lost soon after. Colleagues who responded found Gliniewicz shot in a marshy area near U.S. Highway 12, a main road through the village of about 10,000 people near the Wisconsin border and about 55 miles northwest of Chicago. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
+
+Lake County Undersheriff Raymond Rose told the Chicago Tribune that Gliniewicz's gun was found nearby. He added that searchers were were working with ""limited descriptions"" of the suspects, described by police as three males, two white and one black, who should be treated as armed and dangerous.
+
+Helicopters aided about 100 officers who searched the area overnight, a sheriff's office spokesman said. Meanwhile, several schools in the area announced that they would be closed Wednesday due to the ongoing manhunt.
+
+As the search went on, dozens gathered for hours along a street in the village to show their support for law enforcement officers.
+
+Thirty-year-old Dan Raminick held a sign that said ""Police Lives Matter."" He lives a couple miles away and said officers came by Tuesday evening and thanked the crowd.
+
+Caitlyn Kelly, a 22-year-old student, said she felt compelled to come out after other recent police shootings. She held a sign that said ""Blue and Brave.""
+
+Authorities from across the state and region poured into Fox Lake throughout the day Tuesday, some wearing tactical gear and toting high-powered rifles. Federal agencies, SWAT teams and 48 police dogs assisted in the search for the suspects, Lake County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Christopher Covelli said.
+
+Officers could be seen taking up positions on rooftops and along railroad tracks, scanning the terrain with rifle scopes and binoculars. Others leaned out of helicopters with weapons at the ready. Residents were urged to stay indoors. The service of a local commuter train was halted, and residents who wanted to take their dogs out to relieve themselves were told to stay in their homes — with the job of walking the pets handled by police officers.
+
+An emotional Fox Lake Mayor Donny Schmit described the slain officer as a personal friend, a three-decade member of the department and a father of four sons.
+
+""We lost a family member,"" Schmit said of the 52-year-old officer known around town as ""GI Joe."" ''His commitment to the people of this community has been unmatched and will be dearly missed.""
+
+""This particular officer is a pillar in my community and definitely going to be missed, and (he) touched so many lives,"" said Gina Maria, a 40-year-old teacher who lives in the community.
+
+Gliniewicz's death is the third law enforcement fatality in Illinois this year, according to the Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. It says firearms-related deaths in the U.S. are down 13 percent this year compared to the same period last year, Jan. 1. to Sept. 1; there were 30 last year and 26 this year.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from the Chicago Tribune.",REAL
+3302,Senate Advances Bill To Approve Keystone Pipeline Despite Obama's Veto Threat,"WASHINGTON -- The Senate advanced legislation Monday night to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, even though President Barack Obama has already said he would veto it.
+
+The Senate voted 63-32 to clear a procedural hurdle and begin debate on the bill. Ten Democrats and one independent, Angus King (Maine), voted with every Republican to move the bill forward. Those Democrats included Sens. Michael Bennet (Colo.), Tom Carper (Del.), Bob Casey (Pa.), Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Tom Udall (N.M.) and Mark Warner (Va.). A final vote is expected later this week.
+
+Despite the strong vote, the Senate lacks the two-thirds majority vote needed to overcome a veto. The House passed the bill last week by a vote of 266 to 153 -- also shy of the 290 votes needed to clear a veto.
+
+Congressional action on Keystone comes after the Nebraska Supreme Court cleared the way last week for the proposed pipeline's route through the state. The Obama administration had been waiting for the Nebraska ruling to render its own decision on the pipeline, which is still forthcoming.
+
+White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Friday that the State Department is examining the court's decision as part of its process to evaluate whether the Keystone XL Pipeline project serves the national interest.
+
+""As we have made clear, we are going to let that process play out,"" Schultz said. ""Regardless of the Nebraska ruling today, the House bill still conflicts with longstanding Executive branch procedures regarding the authority of the President and prevents the thorough consideration of complex issues that could bear on U.S. national interests, and if presented to the President, he will veto the bill.""
+
+This article has been updated to include additional details on which senators voted to move the bill forward.",REAL
+9645,Comment on Indoor Gardening Made Easy: The Nutritower! by Indoor Gardening Made Easy: The Nutritower! – Collective EvolutionGardening Business News UK | Gardening Business News UK,"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter I’ve always dreamed of having my own indoor garden so that I can be self-sufficient during winter, but I live in a tiny apartment and have no room for a hydroponic system… Or so I thought! Thanks to the NutriTower , this dream of mine is now possible! The NutriTower The NutriTower is a vertical hydroponic system specifically designed for indoor use. It is the first system to use the patent-pending vertical lighting design. This technology allows you to grow more food than ever before without taking up valuable floor space! In just under 2 square feet of floor space, with up to 48 pots, it’s the most efficient method of growing food on the market. 
+
+The NutriTower is a vertical hydroponic system that is simple, elegant and efficient. The patent-pending vertical lighting design and the gravity fed nutrient delivery system make this the most effective way of growing food in your home year round. Strong custom extruded aluminium frame The only system with vertical lighting Energy efficient high output bulbs Standard 24 pot layout is highly customizable Pots are easily removed for maintenance Gravity does most of the work Large reservoir means less maintenance Quiet pump runs only a few minutes each hour Individual timers so you’re in control Small footprint allows it to be placed anywhere 
+The NutriTower is designed to be flexible to its users needs. You can customize your systems to be more oriented toward leafy greens or fruits and vegetables or a m i x ! Because it is a hydroponic system, there is no messy soil to deal with. 
+My friends from the Valhalla Movement who have personally seen and interacted with the system have loved it so much they will use it in their own greenhouse inspired earthship ! If you are still not convinced why this system is awesome, click here to learn 8 reasons why the food revolution might happen in your kitchen!",FAKE
+9251,US abstains from UN vote calling for end to Cuban embargo,"US abstains from UN vote calling for end to Cuban embargo US abstains from UN vote calling for end to Cuban embargo By 0 94 
+The US government abstained from the UN vote on a resolution calling for an end to the US economic embargo against Cuba, for the first time in 24 years. 
+The 193-member General Assembly adopted the resolution with 191 votes in favor on Wednesday. The only other abstention, besides the US, was Israel. The vote is non-binding but it can have political weight. 
+Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez described the abstention as a “positive step for the future of improving relations between the United States and Cuba,” according to Reuters. 
+Rodriguez said in September that the embargo cost Cuba $4.6 billion last year, and the full damage over the length of the 50-year embargo was estimated at $125.9 billion. 
+When it was first announced that the US government would abstain from the vote, the entire General Assembly applauded. 
+“Abstaining on this resolution does not mean that the United States agrees with all of the policies and practices of the Cuban government. We do not,” Samantha Power the US Ambassador to the United Nations told the General Assembly on Tuesday. 
+“We are profoundly concerned by the serious human rights violations that the Cuban government continues to commit with impunity against its own people,” she said, according to AP. 
+The Obama administration began normalizing relations with the Communist-run country in at the end of 2014, easing trade and travel restrictions. On July 20, 2015, diplomatic relations were restored, and embassies in the two countries were reopened. 
+Lifting the full embargo will take the support of the Republican-run Congress, which remains critical of the administration’s efforts, arguing it offered too many concessions to Cuba and accepted little in return, especially on human rights and the restoration of expropriated property. 
+Obama made the first visit to Havana by a US president in 88 years in March. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+8146,Young Turks Finds Out Why Trump Is About To Lose Utah For Republicans For First Time In Decades (VIDEO),"By Wes Williams Election 2016 , Politics , Videos October 27, 2016 Young Turks Finds Out Why Trump Is About To Lose Utah For Republicans For First Time In Decades (VIDEO) Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+Utah. It is one of, if not the most conservative states in the nation, largely thanks to the Church of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints, aka the Mormons. And as such it is usually a solid, bright red state on the electoral maps. Utah has gone for the Democratic presidential candidate exactly once in the past 64 years — in the anti-Goldwater wave of 1964. But this year it is possible that Utah will not be in the Republican column when the votes are added up. That is, at least not in the Republican column headed by Donald Trump, who is largely being rejected by voters in the Beehive State. 
+Many Utah voters with strong religious beliefs are not happy with Trump, and unlike many Christian evangelical leaders who have decided to stay hitched to his wagon despite the allegations of improper sexual conduct, Utahans are bolting, putting the state in play. The Young Turks sent Michael Shure to the state to find out what was on people’s minds, and what many of them had to tell him was quite clear — they don’t think Trump is a good representative of their Christian beliefs. 
+None of the young Utahans Shure spoke to said they planned to vote for Trump. Some said they would vote for Gary Johnson. One college student indicated that he would consider a vote for Hillary. But the name that seemed to come up more than any others was Evan McMullin. 
+McMullin is the Republican who is running an independent campaign for president. He is also a Mormon, which gives him a huge advantage in Utah. Some recent polls of the state have McMullin polling even with Clinton, but still trailing Trump. But as Benjamin Morris notes at FiveThirtyEight, there are questions about the methodology of those polls that could mean McMullin’s support in Utah is even greater than he is getting credit for. 
+Whether McMullin wins in Utah or whether Trump is able to squeak out a razor thin victory, one thing is certain: unlike many of their traditional “Christian” counterparts in the deep south and the rest of the Rocky Mountain region, many Mormons want no part of Trump or his policies, which some of them were quite willing to tell Shure that they considered to be un-Christian. Not only will a loss of Utah further hurt Trump’s slim chances of winning the White House, a McMullin win there would make him a footnote in future history books as the first third-party candidate since George Wallace in 1968 to win electoral votes. 
+Here’s Michael Shure’s report on the mood in Utah, via YouTube: 
+Featured image via George Frey/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+9722,Comment on Mayor de Blasio claims hot dog carts are causing global warming by Dr. Eowyn,"Posted on October 28, 2016 by DCG | 2 Comments 
+This guy is full of hot air. 
+Via NY Post : The de Blasio administration is trying to limit the number of food trucks in the city by claiming that each hot-dog and kabob cart causes more pollution than a truck ride to Los Angeles. 
+Deputy Health Commissioner Corinne Schiff made the claim at a City Council hearing Wednesday, in an apparent effort to sink a bill that would nearly double the number of food-vendor permits in the city by 2023 . 
+“Meat grilling is a significant source of air pollution in the city,” Schiff said. “One additional vendor grilling meat emits an amount of particle pollution in one day equivalent to what a diesel truck emits driving 3,500 miles.” 
+The new bill would boost the number of permits to 8,000 by 2023 and also create an enforcement team to sniff out violations. 
+Since 1983, the number of street-food vending permits has remained steady at 4,235. But there are likely more carts than that on the streets, as some vendors simply open shop without a license and work until they are caught. 
+Schiff argued any increase in the number of food carts needs to come with regulations stipulating that the carts operate in a more environmentally friendly manner. 
+City Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan), who is sponsoring the bill to increase the permits, wondered if this was already the case. “We have laws in the city about air quality that currently stipulate that any food establishment has got to have a hood over a grill,” Levine said. “Is that not currently the law?” 
+Schiff, however, said there are no such laws regulating the carts as she suggested the proposals be delayed to ensure better pollution safeguards. 
+“We really see this as an opportunity to work with the council to think through how we might use this modernization act to improve air quality,” she said. “The current laws don’t actually control the emissions that we’re concerned about.” 
+Business-improvement districts and residents throughout the city also pushed for delays on increasing vendor permits, saying there are too many already in some neighborhoods, but welcomed increased enforcement. 
+“The enforcement idea is a great idea,” said Ellen Baer, co-chair of the NYC BID Association. “Let’s see if this works, let’s see how it works, let’s see if it’s sufficiently funded, let’s see how many resources they need — before we start adding to the chaos.” 
+But street vendors argued they’ve waited too long for reforms that would allow them to transition from operating illegally to legally. 
+Sean Basinski, director of the Street Vendor Project, described the bills as “far from our dream,” but said he supports most of what they call for. “It is a reasonable compromise,” he said. “Vendors have been waiting 35 years for this change . . . We certainly welcome a study being done, but we don’t think that should delay the progress that needs to be made. The time for reform is now.” 
+Before the hearing, some vendors rallied outside, demanding that city officials and police stop harassing them and treating them like criminals . The bill will remain before the committee while members discuss possible changes.",FAKE
+162,Momentum to bar Syrian refugees slows,"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
+151,New evidence that the legal immigration system discriminates against Latin Americans,"People who don't believe that unauthorized immigrants in the US should be given legal status tend to emphasize that it would be unfair to immigrants who are in the US legally — because they deserve a reward for settling in the US ""the right way.""
+
+But what if the legal immigration process is itself unfair?
+
+A new study by researchers at MIT and Brown University suggest that might be what's going on — unintentionally. They looked at applications for employment-based green cards among immigrants who were already in the US. What they found was that, in the standard approval process, Latin American immigrants were much less likely than average to get approved — and Asian immigrants were more likely. But when the government went through a slower but more complete approval process, the disparities disappeared.
+
+For this study, the researchers (Emilio J. Castilla of MIT, and Ben A. Rissing of Brown) evaluated the phase in an application for an employment-based green card where the US Department of Labor has to approve or deny the immigrant's ""labor certification"" for a particular job. These applications get filed when a company decides to take an immigrant who's (almost always) already in the country on a temporary visa — like a work visa or student visa — and sponsor him or her for a green card, which would let him or her stay in the US permanently and eventually apply for citizenship. So this is the phase in the process where temporary immigrants can get approved to become permanent ones.
+
+Technically, this is supposed to be evaluating the immigrant's would-be employer, not the immigrant him- or herself. In order to get the immigrant ""labor certified"" for a green card — or any work visa — the would-be employer has to prove that they tried to find a US citizen to fill the job, but failed.
+
+One thing that isn't supposed to be a factor in the application is the immigrant's country of origin. But even when the researchers controlled for as many variables as they could — from the temporary visa that an immigrant held in the US when he filed the green-card application, to the skill level of the job — they found that approval rates varied widely from one nationality to the next. 90.5 percent of Asian immigrants were approved for labor certification. But only 66.8 percent of Latin American immigrants were.
+
+The regional disparity even showed up in immigrants applying for the same type of job. ""Immigrants from Asia seeking employment as restaurant cooks are 41.6 percent more likely to be approved than immigrants from Latin America, all else being equal,"" the researchers write. It's a problem for high-skilled workers, too: Asian immigrants weren't any more likely than Canadians (for example) to get approved to work as computer software engineers, but Latin American immigrants were over 25 percent less likely.
+
+The biggest problem with the study: the government agents looking over immigrants' applications could see each immigrant's educational background, but the researchers couldn't. That could be a huge factor explaining the variation: maybe Latin American immigrants are simply less educationally qualified for the positions they're applying for.
+
+But the study indicates that can't be the whole story. For example, the researchers looked at immigrants who were already on H1-B high-skilled visas (99 percent of whom have a bachelor's degree or higher) but were applying to upgrade to green cards. Among that group, Asian immigrants were still 11 percent more likely than Canadians to get approved for green cards — and H1B-holding Latin American immigrants were 20 percent less likely.
+
+There's also previous research showing that government officials profile immigrants based on their countries of origin. In one study, in which officials were asked to look over fictional visa applications, the author said that region of origin was being used strongly as a ""criterion of a visa applicant's desirability.""
+
+Most of the time, the DOL makes decisions based on basic information about the immigrant, the job, and the employer, as well as evidence of the employer's failed attempt to recruit US citizens. 90 percent of those cases get approved, and they're typically approved or denied in under 4 months. But in a few cases — thanks to a process that is partly random, and partly not — applications are ""audited,"" and agents take a more in-depth look at an immigrant's background, and the requirements for the position. In those cases, only 57 percent of applications are approved — and it takes about 2 years to come to a decision.
+
+According to the new study, audited applications had one big advantage over non-audited ones: the disparities in approval rates between immigrants from different regions disappeared. That might indicate that whatever is happening to favor Asian immigrants and disfavor Latin American ones in the quicker process is unintentional, since government officials don't appear to think there's good reason to be more suspicious of Latin American applicants.
+
+The study's authors suggest an easy fix: making it impossible for an official to see an applicant's country of origin, just like officials aren't allowed to see applicants' ages or sexes. If this really is a significant problem, however, it's not something that changing the process in the future will be able to fix.
+
+If the government is really making it harder for Latin American immigrants currently in the US legally to get green cards through their employers, they're unfairly forcing Latin American immigrants to make the difficult choice between leaving the country they've been living in for years, and staying in the US after their visas expire. In other words, the government's approval-rate problem might be driving more legal Latin American immigrants to become illegal.",REAL
+6170,"America Might Not Deserve Trump, But Dems and Hillary Deserved To Lose","Tweet Widget by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon 
+President Donald Trump? How did such a thing happen? A competent and purposeful Clinton campaign should have beaten Donald Trump. How did Hillary Clinton and one-percenter Democrats snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory? America Might Not Deserve Trump, But Dems and Hillary Deserved To Lose by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon 
+It’s over. The crotch-grabbing racist con man beat the lying corporate warmonger. Donald Trump is president-elect of the US. 
+It didn’t have to happen that way. Trump’s winning 58 million votes were a hair fewer than Clinton’s popular vote, a million or two less than Republican losers McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, six and ten million behind Obama’s 2012 and 2008 numbers. The buffoonish Trump was elected with such a low turnout because Hillary Clinton’s campaign was even less competent and credible. To borrow the condescending language Barack Obama deploys before black audiences, Hillary’s campaign never gave Cousin Pookie much reason to get up off the couch and vote. 
+Republican and Democratic parties are alike owned by their one-percenter investor/contributors. Democratic party shot callers decided they’d risk losing with Hillary Clinton rather than winning with Bernie Sanders. So Democratic party leadership, their media allies and the entire black political class got behind Hillary Clinton and helped collude and conspire to eliminate VT Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democrat with the best chance against any Republican opponent. 
+Once Bernie Sanders was eliminated Hillary waged a lazy and ineffective campaign, playing a hand with just three cards. 
+The first was the broken record of how unthinkable and unprecedented a disaster a Trump presidency would be… a clownish sexual predator who pronounced climate change a hoax and would criminalize abortion, open concentration camps, repeal Obamacare, legalize stop and frisk, build a wall, appoint neanderthals to the Supreme Court, deport six or ten million immigrants instead of Obama’s paltry two million and who might be in hock to the Russians. Except for the thing about the Russians, it’s roughly the same picture Democrats have drawn of every Republican presidential candidate since Nixon. A story told that many times just gets old. Party leaders counted on it anyway, and it wasn’t enough. That was incompetence. 
+A second and relatively weak card Democrats played was conjuring up an Imaginary Hillary Clinton, a defender of womens’ and human rights who held hands with the moms of killer cop victims, and occasionally mumbled about black lives mattering and the need to reform the criminal justice system. But Hillary’s decades-long record as a tool of banksters, billionaires and one-percenters was so well established in the public mind that Imaginary Hillary was a difficult sell, not credible. 
+The one-percenter Democrats’ third card, on which they staked a lot was the early and unconditional endorsement of Hillary Clinton by   and Michelle. This had proven effective in Chicago in 2011 and 2015 where Obama’s blessings in 2011 and 2015 were key to fastening Rahm Emanuel on the city’s jugular vein after a half century of Daley rule. The entire black political class got behind Hillary too, from civil rights icons who ruminated on how they hadn’t seen Bernie Sanders back in the day to some other wise heads who assured us a vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka was an act of “ narcissism ” or maybe white privilege . But at the end of  ’s time in office, the Obama endorsement didn’t carry the clout it used to. 
+Thanks to two generations of lazy Democrats who refused to try to consolidate the victory of the 1965 Voting Rights Act the Supreme Court in 2013 nullified its key provisions, enabling a constellation of laws and practices aimed at limiting access to the ballot on the part of students, minorities, the elderly and constituencies likely to vote Democratic. In the 2016 election cycle these practices stripped another few million Democratic voters from the rolls. 
+All in all, Democrats were the authors of their own defeat this presidential election. Hillary couldn’t campaign against the one percent because her party is a party of the one percent. Hillary Democrats including Bernie himself after the convention could no longer acknowledge joblessness, low wages, lack of housing, permanent war or the high cost of medical care or they’d be campaigning against themselves. 
+Donald Trump didn’t win because of some mysterious upsurge of racism and nativism. He won because Hillary Clinton’s campaign was even less inspiring and less competent than his own, and worked hard to snatch its own defeat from the jaws of victory. America might not deserve President Donald Trump. But Hillary Clinton didn’t deserve to win, Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and co-chair of the GA Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached  ",FAKE
+2714,Media turn blind eye to Hillary Clinton’s glaring mistakes,"When Hillary Clinton can study up, work out her one-liners, figure out the best way to deflect questions and fence with inquisitors she does well. She thrives, therefore, in a debate or as a witness. She is the quintessential “A” student. No one will cram harder before the big exam than she.
+
+Left to her own devices, however, she is consistently her own worst enemy. Before she worked out her lines, spontaneous answers about her finances (“We were broke”) or her initial stance toward the Benghazi scandal (“What difference does it make . . .?) disastrous. Refusing to take scandals seriously, her first attempts at brushing back the press come across as evasive, haughty and just plain false. In supposedly friendly settings, with her guard down, she winds up saying ludicrous things that come back to haunt her.
+
+If not for Jeb Bush’s self-immolation this week, more attention would have been paid to yet another clueless Clinton moment. Asked about the Veterans Administration scandal in a softball MSNBC interview, she argued that “it’s not been as widespread as it has been made out to be.” She claimed Republicans were exploiting the situation and wanted the VA to “fail.” Her instinct to cast blame and attack political opponents renders her entirely tone deaf at times.
+
+As you will recall, the scandal first uncovered in Phoenix turned into a nationwide investigation, forcing out the secretary and prompting new legislation. (From the Arizona Republic: “The Office of Inspector General concluded that hundreds of thousands of patients were subjected to unacceptable delays in care, and many died while awaiting appointments; wait-time records were falsified or inaccurate at 70 percent of the VA facilities nationwide; and department leadership was contaminated by bullying, reprisal and a lack of accountability. The public furor forced out VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and other administrators, while prompting the largest reform in department history.”)
+
+It is incomprehensible that she would want to downplay the suffering of vets. A series of officials at veterans groups decried her comment. Stars and Stripes reported:
+
+Veterans groups lobbed criticism at Clinton this week for being out of touch with veterans issues. The conservative group Concerned Veterans for America charged Clinton with downplaying and ignoring the VA’s problems. Paul Rieckhoff, CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, called her comments on the VA a “head-scratcher.” The VA scandal that began last year with an agency cover-up of health care delays “was so widespread it has its own Wikipedia entry,” Rieckhoff tweeted Tuesday.
+
+And lawmakers on both sides of the aisle lashed out. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said he was “appalled.” Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.) declared, “The problems we’ve seen at the Phoenix VA are devastating and real. The VA scandal has nothing to do with partisan politics and everything to do with systemic failure, negligence and lack of accountability.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) blasted her, observing that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose Senate committee investigated the VA, was better on veterans issues than Clinton.
+
+Her campaign tried to assure us she understands how “systematic” the problem is. No apology or correction from her was forthcoming.
+
+[Opinion: Republicans are right. We in the media do suck.]
+
+Now imagine if Republicans had said, well “Democrats are just exaggerating the impact of Hurricane Katrina.” The mainstream hardly blinked when it was Clinton, fresh from passing her endurance test at the House select committee on Benghazi.
+
+The Republican opposition research team America Rising later put out a devastating ad, recounting one news report after another detailing the abuses, corruption and ensuing deaths. It ends with McCain saying, “She doesn’t understand veterans, she doesn’t understand what they need, and she is politicizing the issue. Shame on her.”
+
+This episode reminds us of Clinton’s severe limitations as a candidate. It also should prompt Republicans to recognize the media is back in Clinton-rooting mood. Her outlandish statements will become headlines like: “Republicans try to exploit…” The media will shrug its collective shoulders at her inaccuracies and outright deceptions. This is all the more reason to find a superbly skilled nominee, one who can focus on her liabilities and cut through the media chatter.
+
+At the recent debate and in subsequent interviews, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) used his time in the spotlight to focus on the evidence that immediately after the Benghazi attack she told family members and the Egyptian prime minister it was a terrorist attack while the administration perpetrated a false cover story for weeks.
+
+Republicans cannot repeat often enough evidence of her ethical lapses and shoddy record. The press sure isn’t going to dwell on it.",REAL
+3327,State Department admits to deliberately cutting briefing footage on Iran deal,"State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters Wednesday that an unknown U.S. official made a request over the phone to delete several minutes of a December 2013 video of the exchange between reporters and a State Department spokeswoman. The State Department routinely posts on its site the briefing that it holds nearly every day with the diplomatic press corps.
+
+Kirby said the department technician who made the edit could not recall who requested it.
+
+The deleted portion of the video involves questions about a previous press briefing in 2012 in which then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland denied secret talks between the U.S. and Iran about a potential nuclear deal were taking place.
+
+After it was revealed in December 2013 that secret talks between the U.S. and Iran actually had taken place, then-spokeswoman Jen Psaki admitted the administration lied in order to protect the secret negotiations.
+
+Earlier this month Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes acknowledged to The New York Times that the administration was deceptive about the talks, creating a ""narrative"" that they did not take place. When James Rosen of Fox News -- who asked the original questions of Psaki -- tried to refer back to the video last month, he found the exchange had been deleted. Kirby, who originally called the deletion a ""glitch,"" said Wednesday that he asked State Department lawyers to look into the matter after being notified about the omission. ""They learned that a specific request was made to excise that portion of the briefing. We do not know who made the request to edit the video or why it was made,"" Kirby said. Another senior State Department official said the technician found the request ""unusual"" and consulted her supervisor before making the edit. The supervisor, who also could not remember the name of the person who called, approved the request because it came from someone ""from a certain level and credibility"" in the Department of Public Affairs. ""Although this person did not remember the person who called her, or the person they were calling on behalf of, she remembers it was not (Jen) Psaki,"" this official said. ""Jen did not request it, did not know about it and had nothing to do with it."" Psaki, who now is the White House communications director, tweeted Wednesday that she was unaware of the episode: ""I had no knowledge of nor would I have approved of any form of editing or cutting my briefing transcript on any subject while @StateDept."" Kirby noted that the full briefing transcript, including the exchange on Iran, had always been available on the State Department website and that the omitted video has since been replaced with a complete version that had been archived with the Defense Department. He said that was the only instance he was aware of in which briefing videos were edited, though he couldn't be sure there weren't others. He announced a new policy Wednesday in which every video would be posted immediately with all edits disclosed. ""To my surprise, the Bureau of Public Affairs did not have in place any rules governing this type of action,"" he said. ""Therefore, we are taking immediate steps to craft appropriate protocols on this issue, as we believe that deliberately removing a portion of the video was not and is not in keeping with the State Department's commitment to transparency and public accountability."" Because such rules weren't previously in place, Kirby said he found ""no reason"" to press forward with a more formal investigation.",REAL
+4147,"U.S. Economy Added 271,000 Jobs In October, Beating Expectations","In a jobs report that may influence the Federal Reserve's decision on interest rates, the Labor Department says that 271,000 jobs were added in October. The unemployment rate fell slightly to 5 percent, according to the report from the agency's Bureau of Labor Statistics.
+
+It's the biggest one-month jobs gain in all of 2015, according to Bloomberg News, which adds that the strong result is one of the positive signs the Fed's economists ""are looking for as they consider a year-end boost in borrowing costs.""
+
+Friday's announcement tops economists' consensus expectations, which had forecast a modest gain of about 180,000 jobs.
+
+Speaking in Congress this week, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen left open the possibility of an interest rate hike, while also saying it would be ""very gradual."" Citing good economic results, Yellen said there is a ""live possibility"" that policymakers might raise rates when the Fed meets in mid-December.
+
+Last month, the Labor Department reported that only 142,000 jobs were created in September, with unemployment holding at 5.1 percent. With today's announcement, the BLS said the job-creation number was being revised to 137,000.
+
+October's job growth occurred ""in professional and business services, health care, retail trade, food services and drinking places, and construction,"" the Bureau of Labor Statistics says.
+
+As for wages, the month also brought a 9-cent rise in the average hourly earning rate, with workers on private nonfarm payrolls now making an average of $25.20, according to the BLS, which adds that for the group, ""hourly earnings have risen by 2.5 percent over the year.""
+
+The agency also says that the number of people who are ""involuntary part-time workers"" due to reduced hours or the difficulty of finding a full-time job ""edged down by 269,000 to 5.8 million in October.""",REAL
+751,"Hillary Clinton narrowly wins Kentucky, a state Bernie Sanders needed by huge margins","For weeks, Hillary Clinton has looked for the knockout blow that finally forces Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic primary.
+
+She may have gotten it tonight in Kentucky.
+
+Sanders has to start winning every state by a landslide victory to have even a mathematical chance of catching Clinton's nearly 300-delegate lead. Kentucky was called for Clinton as an ""apparent winner"" at around 9:30 pm by NBC and after 10 pm by Kentucky's secretary of state, who called her the ""unofficial winner.""
+
+Sanders has maintained that he'll stay in the race until the end of voting, and we don't have any new reason to believe he'll fly the white flag after Clinton's victory tonight. And his hard-line response to the Democratic Party over this weekend's events in Nevada certainly doesn't suggest he's ready to call it quits.
+
+But Sanders needed to win Kentucky to maintain an increasingly far-fetched path to the Democratic nomination. The fact that he lost tonight — albeit by what appears to have been a very small margin — will only dramatically increase the calls for him to exit the race.
+
+The loss is particularly tough for Sanders's campaign given that Kentucky was one of the more favorable states for him remaining in the race.
+
+""Given the West Virginia results, I think Sanders is probably favored,"" said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics in an interview Tuesday morning, before voting began. ""Sanders has a very good chance in Kentucky.""
+
+Sanders will probably face steeper odds in the upcoming contests in California and New Jersey, where have polls have Clinton leading by as much as double digits. Polling from Kentucky was scarce, but the state's largely white and rural voters were widely expected to break for Sanders — as they have throughout the country.
+
+Kentucky has a large number of registered Democrats who are much more conservative than the rest of the party, a group that has in other states backed Sanders in part as a ""protest vote"" against the party's establishment, according to Kondik.
+
+""More than half of Kentucky’s registered voters are signed up with the Democratic Party, even though the state’s election results have hewed decidedly Republican in recent years,"" wrote the polling firm Morning Consult in a preview of tonight's contest ""That’s an indication of the rightward shift of downscale whites, especially in once union-heavy Coal Country; those are voters who used to call themselves Yellow Dog Democrats.""
+
+These voters broke for Sanders by a big margin in West Virginia, and they very well may have in Kentucky as well. But even if they did, it does not appear to have been enough to offset the big difference between Kentucky and West Virginia: diversity.
+
+African-American voters are far more numerous in Kentucky — in part because of its cities, like Louisville and Lexington. (Kentucky's 2008 primary electorate was 9 percent black, compared to just 3 percent in West Virginia.)
+
+Black voters have rescued Clinton's campaign since her first big win in South Carolina in February. And, tonight, they may have helped push her opponent out of the race.
+
+Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly said Kyle Kondik works for the Center for Responsive Politics, rather than the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.",REAL
+3993,"No, it's not 'World War 3'","Timothy Stanley is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph. He is the author of the new book ""Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between L.A. and D.C. Revolutionized American Politics."" The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+(CNN) Obama has called the Islamic State the ""face of evil"" but he's now under pressure from those who say he's not doing enough to beat it. Some insist that an attack on France was an attack on NATO and that it's time to go to war.
+
+But only a fool would confuse caution for weakness. On the contrary, to defeat the enemy we have to fully understand who the enemy is, what they want and what kind of conflict we're involved in here. There are good reasons to proceed cautiously.
+
+To clear something up: We are effectively at war with ISIS right now. A U.S.-led coalition has been bombing targets in Syria and Iraq for over a year, and in recent months Russia has been doing the same. How well it's worked is disputed: Obama has rhetorically shifted his objectives from crushing Isis to containing it.
+
+Nevertheless, late last week there were signs of success. The Kurds took Sinjar , a strategically significant area in northern Iraq. Mohammed Emwazi, a vicious killer and propagandist, was likely killed in a drone strike.
+
+Paris has obviously eclipsed the news of these breakthroughs.
+
+Who or what are we fighting? ISIS is different from al Qaeda, the group behind 9/11. The latter operated as an alliance of cells spread across the world; ISIS, by contrast, seeks to create a geographic space within which to build a caliphate. This shift in strategy perhaps explains why ISIS has been even more successful than al Qaeda at hitting so many different foreign targets with so many different methods -- from Sinai to Beirut to Paris.
+
+ISIS' caliphate offers a haven for tens of thousands of foreign jihadists: They come, they train and then many return home to create havoc. The caliphate also provides money and the moral encouragement of having an earthly ""paradise"" to fight for. In his groundbreaking essay on the motivations behind ISIS, Graeme Wood describes an ISIS recruiter calling it ""a vehicle for salvation.""
+
+Its fighters are obsessed with recreating Islam in its earliest form ( or as they interpret it to have been, because the early caliphate was far kinder ) and believe that most other Muslims have fallen from the standard -- one that includes the uses of crucifixion and slavery. Whereas al Qaeda limited itself to comparatively rational political objectives, like expelling Westerners from the Arab peninsula, ISIS wants to bring on the apocalypse. It is not nihilist. It is deeply — if distortedly -- religious and we need to learn to take its brand of religion seriously.
+
+The good news is that ISIS is isolated. Applying the phrase ""world war"" here is unhelpful because it conjures images of rival, equally sized nation states engaged in total war. But while ISIS' reach is global, it does not command sizable support beyond its shifting boundaries. Meanwhile, the alliance against it is one of the largest and most diverse in history, including America, Britain, France, Russia and Iran.
+
+Saudi money may well have once supported it but the Saudi state is now opposed. Indeed the exceptional evil of ISIS leads us to view many of the regional political agendas in a different light. Iran, for instance, certainly is exporting its theocratic government to other countries. But it doesn't desire the end of the world. The regime is murderous and must be contained. But it can be engaged.
+
+The complexity of Islamic world politics highlights another aspect of this conflict: It cannot be resolved entirely by force of arms. ISIS has exploited Sunni dissatisfaction with the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. This may mean Iraq as a whole has to be split up to work. Turkey probably has to accommodate Kurdish desires for a homeland . And, most importantly of all, Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria, will have to depart the stage.
+
+There can be no constructive government of Syria until there is law, order and democratic elections that legitimize proper opposition parties. If we give rebels the impression that the West wants to force Assad on them again, they will resist us, too.
+
+Finally, there is the question of how we handle the Islamic presence within Europe itself. This is partly a matter of improving security measures and making sure returnees from Syria don't just disappear into the crowd. There's also a refugee crisis to confront. But while the demographic pressures and security problems of allowing hundreds of thousands of people to cross Europe have to be addressed in a firm way, there's no escaping the fact that a large, settled part of the EU's population is now Islamic.
+
+And how we respond to ISIS has consequences for interfaith relations.
+
+Some American politicians have suggested a religious test for refugees seeking access to the United States. This kind of prejudiced rhetoric adds to that false sense that this is a world war-style clash between conservative Muslims on one side and Christian democracies on the other. It is also unChristian and cruel. Moreover, while Americans might fear Islamification as an existential concept, we here in Europe have actual experience of living with Muslims -- and I can report that the living is easy.
+
+Muslims are our friends, family and co-workers. They fear and despise ISIS as much as anyone else. And those of us in the center-ground of European politics are determined not to alienate, or discriminate against, citizens who are 100% British, French or German.
+
+Of course, it is equally irritating to see politicians who seem to counsel doing nothing and Westerners lacerating themselves because they believe their countries are to blame for all the evil in the world. ISIS is evil -- real, concrete evil. It must be stopped. But we must proceed carefully, with a grand game plan and with the desire to build just and representative Arab regimes that last. The legacy of poorly chosen words or unilateral action is there for all to see.",REAL
+3664,49 killed in shooting at Florida nightclub in possible act of Islamic terror,"EDITOR'S NOTE: Orlando's mayor on Monday revised the death toll in the nightclub shooting to 49, from 50. The 50th body was identified as gunman Omar Mateen.
+
+
+
+A gunman who pledged allegiance to ISIS opened fire early Sunday morning in a packed Orlando nightclub, killing 50 people and wounding at least 53 more in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
+
+ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack Sunday afternoon via its Amaq news agency, Reuters reported. Amaq said an ""Islamic State fighter"" carried out the assault. It was not clear, however, if the shooting was actually directed by the terror group or only inspired by it.
+
+
+
+The attack in Orlando at Pulse, which bills itself as ""the hottest gay bar"" in the city and was packed with more than 300 people for ""Latin Night,"" was reported minutes after 2 a.m. Sunday.
+
+It ended hours later when police stormed the building and killed the shooter.
+
+Dozens of partygoers remained hostage in the club for several hours after the initial shooting, prompting SWAT teams to rush inside. Shortly after 6 a.m. local time, Orlando police tweeted that the gunman had been killed. Authorities said there was not believed to be any further threat to the area.
+
+""We know enough to say this was an act of terror and an act of hate,"" President Obama said in a speech from the White House on Sunday, cautioning that it was still early in the investigation.
+
+House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Rep. Adam Schiff said in a statement that the timing and location of the attack and information coming from local authorities indicated ""an ISIS-inspired act of terrorism.""
+
+""The fact that this shooting took place during Ramadan and that ISIS leadership in Raqqa has been urging attacks during this time, that the target was an LGBT night club during Pride, and – if accurate – that according to local law enforcement the shooter declared his allegiance to ISIS, indicates an ISIS-inspired act of terrorism,"" Schiff said. ""Whether this attack was also ISIS-directed, remains to be determined. I’m confident that we will know much more in the coming hours and days.""
+
+The gunman, Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, was heard shouting ""Allah Akbar"" while engaging officers, law enforcement sources told Fox News. Mateen also called 911 during the shooting to pledge allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Fox News reported.
+
+Mateen was interviewed three times by FBI agents -- twice in 2013, once in 2014 -- as part of two separate investigations, FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ron Hopper said. However, both inquiries proved inconclusive and the cases were closed.
+
+Mateen was not under surveillance or the subject of an active investigation at the time of the shooting, Hopper said.
+
+The 2013 investigation was related to comments Mateen allegedly made to a co-worker ""alleging possible terror ties."" FBI agents were unable to ""verify the substance"" of his comments, Hopper said.
+
+Mateen was also interviewed in 2014 due to his ties to an American man who later drove an explosive-laden truck into a restaurant in Syria for an Al Qaeda affiliate. Mateen and the suicide bomber, Monar abu Salha, attended the same mosque, however, the FBI determined their contact ""was minimal,"" Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Mike
+
+ McCaul told Fox News.
+
+
+
+Mateen was a U.S. citizen, Rep. Alan Grayson said during a Sunday morning news conference, though that was ""not true of other family members of his."" Mateen, 29, lived in Fort Pierce, Fla. He was born in New York to parents of Afghan origin and was a Muslim, Fox News confirmed.
+
+Mateen was married in 2009 to a woman who was born in Uzbekistan, according to the couple's marriage license, but the two divorced in 2011.
+
+
+
+""He was not a stable person,"" the ex-wife, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told The Washington Post. ""He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.""
+
+A mortgage form from 2013 lists Noor Salman as his wife and Mateen also had a 3-year-old son. Mateen appears to have had no criminal record.
+
+
+
+A licensed security officer, Mateen also had a statewide firearms license. He purchased two guns -- a handgun and a long gun -- legally during the week before the shooting, an ATF official said.
+
+The FBI was scouring Mateen's cellphone and electronic devices on Sunday afternoon to identify any possible terrorist connections. This includes searching for any traces of propaganda, scrubbing of his web browsing history, and running down communications with individuals via social media and mobile messaging apps.
+
+As victims poured through their doors, Orlando Regional Medical Center officials called in six trauma surgeons, including a pediatric surgeon, Dr. Michael Cheatham said. Many of the wounded were ""critically ill"" due to their injuries, Cheatham said, and the hospital was trying to reach out to their families.
+
+""I think we will see the death toll rise,"" Cheatham told The Associated Press.
+
+
+
+Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency in Orange County following the attack and asked for a moment of silence throughout the country at 6 p.m. on Sunday.
+
+
+
+""This is an attack on our people,"" Scott tweeted around 11:40 a.m. ""It's an attack on Orlando. It's an attack on FL. It's an attack on America. It's an attack on all of us.""
+
+
+
+Chief John Mina of the Orlando Police Department said officers were initially engaged in a gun battle outside the club before the suspect, armed with a handgun and ""assault-type rifle,"" went back into the building, where more shots were fired. He said the gunman then took several hostages.
+
+""It appears he was organized and well-prepared,"" Mina said.
+
+Officials said Mateen had some communication with police during this standoff, though they did not reveal what was said.
+
+
+
+Eleven officers were involved in raiding the nightclub, and one officer was injured, according to Banks. The injured officer was hit by a bullet and his Kevlar helmet saved his life, Banks said.
+
+A hotline for victims' families was set up at 407-246-4357. Identities of victims were being released at cityoforlando.net/victims after family members had been notified.
+
+
+
+Witnesses in the club reported mass chaos after hearing several shots ring out inside the nightclub.
+
+Pulse posted on its own Facebook page around 2 a.m.: ""Everyone get out of pulse and keep running.""
+
+It's owner later said in statement that she was ""devastated by the horrific events that have taken place today.
+
+Pulse, and the men and women who work there, have been my family for nearly 15 years. From the beginning, Pulse has served as a place of love and acceptance for the LGTQ community.  I want to express my profound sadness and condolences to all who have lost loved ones,"" Barbara Roma.
+
+
+
+Mina Justice was outside the club early Sunday trying to contact her 30-year-old son Eddie, who texted her when the shooting happened and asked her to call police. He told her he ran into a bathroom with other club patrons to hide. He then texted her: ""He's coming.""
+
+""The next text said: 'He has us, and he's in here with us,'"" she said. ""That was the last conversation.""
+
+Jon Alamo said he was at the back of one of the club's rooms when a man holding a weapon came into the front of the room.
+
+Club-goer Rob Rick said it happened around 2 a.m., just before closing time.
+
+""Everybody was drinking their last sip,"" he said.
+
+Fox News' Catherine Herridge, Chad Pergram and Matthew Dean and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5438,Just Another Day In the Life of the Clinton Crime Family,"
+
+ 
+In the past 24 hours, some very stunning pieces of information have leaked out regarding the Clinton Crime Family. I am shocked about how pervasive the criminality is in what has been only a 24 hour news cycle.
+Assange’s Lawyers Are Dead There are two lawyers who represented WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who died and their deaths were in very close proximity, only a  mere month apart.
+Assange attorney, John Jones, suicide was committed by the top lawyer  when he jumped in front of a train in West Hamstead, in which the police did not even consider the possibility of foul play. The authorities, courtesy of the Clinton Foundation, found nothing suspicious about the manner of Jones’ death.
+Michael Ratner made a career out of defending government whistle-blowers and detainees, something that one could argue was right inside of Assange’s  wheelhouse. Ratner’s death was shrouded in mystery. It is important to note that Ratner had actually sued three sitting US Presidents and tried to get George W. Bush impeached for lying America into the Iraq war. Certainly, when someone like  Ratner who had begun to represent Assange, was a terrible threat to the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation and had to be dealt with.
+Chief Investigator for Bill Clinton’s Impeachment Trial Lives In Fear of His Life Aaron Klein, yes the same Aaron Klein who released emails, before they were purged, which demonstrated that Clinton was sending out, through her personal server the travel plans of Ambassador Stevens prior to his death at Benghazi, recently interview Dave Shippers the Chief Investigator of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. Shippers professed that he still lives in fear of his life.
+“Today, I am still terrified of Hillary. Absolutely I am terrified. Because if she gets into office. In fact, I’ve told my wife, I said, ‘If Hillary gets elected, look for the FBI or somebody to come and pick me up the next day.’ 
+“And I think I’m the only one left. [Former Congressman] Henry Hyde is dead. [Independent Counsel Kenneth] Star didn’t really hurt her. Yeah. I was scared when I was out there‌ I’ve been terrified ever since. Because things happen. Things happen.” 
+Klein allowed his interview to drift into the area of Vince Foster’s alleged suicide which Shippers was convinced that his event was a murder designed to cover up Hillary Clinton’s criminal behavior. Shippers also mentioned the impeachment investigation, centering around Clinton lying about his affair with Monica Lewinski, uncovered evidence of at least three murders connected to Hillary Clinton. However, as Shippers stated, the investigation was limited to to the Lewinski angle. This is really ashame because of the fact that Hillary Clinton could have been stopped in the 1990’s and this nation would not, today, be fighting for its life under the threat of an extinction level event such as the specter of a Clinton Presidency.
+Anthony Weiner Fears for His Life At the Hands of Hillary Clinton The perverted Congressman, who could not stop sexting grossly inappropriate images of himself to underage girls, may have unwittingly put another very large nail in the political coffin of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
+According to sources , we now know that the FBI accidentally discovered that Weiner had several emails that were suspiciously marked “life insurance”  and the FBI found that these email were directly related to the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton. Disturbingly, these same sources indicated that the sources were turned over to the FBI over  a month ago while the FBI was still running interference for the Clinton Crime Family. It is very concerning that Comey never mentioned these damning emails.
+The NYPD had the same information and they planned to leak the information despite intense pressure not to do so. This information not only shows that Anthony Weiner was in extreme fear of his life, from the Clintons, that he actually created his Julian Assange’s style of a dead man’s switch in the event of his death. I would add, that Huma may want to avoid subway trains and airplanes for awhile for her own safety. I predict that Weiner will become a star witness in either the immediate take down of Hillary, or her impeachment trial should George Soros be able to steal the election for her.
+Conclusion For the good of the country, Hillary needs to step down immediately. She has made our justice system and nation, as a whole, a complete laughing stock. Anyone, and I mean anyone, who would vote for Hillary Clinton, needs to take a long look in the mirror and ask yourself what kind of person are you. How can you face your kids and claim to be a moral authority in their lives and vote for this evil monster?
+This is just another day in the life of the Clinton Crime Family.
+
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+",FAKE
+6329,Muslims regularly use “Inshallah” (“God Willing” in Arabic) and nobody calls it ‘Christophobic’ hate speech…so why is “Deus Vult” (“God Willing” in Latin) graffiti being called ‘Islamophobic’ Crusader hate speech?,"BNI Store Nov 5 2016 Muslims regularly use “Inshallah” (“God Willing” in Arabic) and nobody calls it ‘Christophobic’ hate speech…so why is “Deus Vult” (“God Willing” in Latin) graffiti being called ‘Islamophobic’ Crusader hate speech? At the newly sharia-compliant University of Southern Maine, moronic school officials say “Deus Vult” Graffiti of Crusades’ rallying cry is being referred to the state Attorney General’s office after the Latin phrase used by Christians was written on a desk and wall in a student government office. Press Herald The phrase was used as a rallying cry for Christians during the Crusades in medieval times, and more recently has now is being called an anti-Muslim insult. In an email to the campus community, USM President Glenn Cummings condemned the “anti-Muslim graffiti” found in the office in the Woodbury Campus Center. “I want you to know that addressing this is our highest priority. Our campus security is fully investigating what we believe to be a hate crime,” Cummings wrote. “A team from our Dean of Students is working hard to uncover the facts while providing opportunities for intergroup dialogue and supporting students directly and indirectly affected by this reprehensible act. (It’s free speech, you idiot, and Muslims use the exact same phrase everyday, especially when trying to impose their death cult on non-muslims) British member of ISIS Mostly, to our Muslim students I want to express how sorry I am this has happened. Please know that such actions affect all of us. This is not who USM is or wants to be.” (USM is a school of politically correct asswipes who should be fired) According to USM’s student body president (a Muslim, of course) , Muhammad “Humza” Khan, a male student who is not part of student government drew the graffiti Tuesday afternoon, while two student Senate members were in the office. Khan, who declined to identify the student because of the investigation, said the two witnesses have said they didn’t understand the meaning of the phrase – which was written in small letters on an electrical wire cover on a wall, and on a wooden desk. USM officials also have not released the student’s name. In a Facebook post, USM student body Vice President Matt Raymond condemned the graffiti. “I just wanted to say that all this happened a day after five Muslim students asked for applications to Student Government to become Senators. I believe this act of “criminal intimidation” (Seriously? You should be taken away in a straitjacket) to be linked to that fact,” Raymond wrote, adding that student government is open to all students of any race, gender, religion, sexuality, economic background or nationality.” (It is, but you can’t blame students for hating Muslims, the biggest threat to America) Southwest Airlines knows what it means and acted accordingly Humza Khan, myself, and our Cabinet under the Executive branch condemn in the harshest terms this crime of bias and intimidation. Let’s show folks that USM is a diverse and inclusive university for all moving forward!” A group of about 40 students rallied in support of Muslim students at lunchtime Thursday. Raymond said he plans to ask the student Senate to vote out two members who he believes did not respond appropriately to the incident. Khan said he believes the person who wrote the graffiti intended to intimidate Muslim students who have expressed interest in joining the student Senate. “The way Muslims see (that Latin phrase,) we see it indirectly as ‘Let’s kill Muslims,’ ” said Khan, who is Muslim. (But Muslim students who keep saying Death to Israel/Death to America are said to be exercising their freedom of speech) “It’s not immediately seen as racist, it’s not a racial epithet, but it’s still there to intimidate a specific group of people,” Raymond said. “And it served its purpose, even though it was coded language.” (One can only hope. Muslims should be banned from holding office anywhere America. Look at the mess the Muslim in the White House has made)",FAKE
+4455,"Extreme rhetoric helping Cruz, Trump, Duke leaders say","The use of extreme rhetoric by presidential candidates has sparked nationwide debates about American political polarization.
+
+Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz have been the center of media attention for their use of inflammatory language, notably when Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug traffickers and when Cruz called for the carpet-bombing of the Islamic State group. Although news coverage of candidates’ rhetoric may be polarizing Americans and deepening the partisan divide, it has also arguably contributed to the current success of Trump and Cruz in the presidential race, explained Duke faculty and student leaders.
+
+“There’s a kind of anxiety in the air probably across the country, but certainly with certain populations in the U.S. that Cruz and Trump are tapping into,” said Frederick Mayer, professor of public policy, political science and environment. “Both of those candidates have found a way to frame their message that’s really resonating with the anxieties about American decline, threats from terrorists abroad and at home, perceived threats to the American way of life.”
+
+In last Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama assured Americans that the country is not in decline, despite inflammatory claims.
+
+“I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air,” he said. “Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. Let me tell you something—the United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth, period.”
+
+Mayer noted that factors such as low unemployment, low crime levels and fewer instances of terrorism on American soil should also ease the anxiety of Americans.
+
+“It’s ironic because you can make the claim that we have less to fear today than just about any people in any time in history,” he said. “All these factors that should make us feel good.”
+
+Junior Adam Lemon, president of the Duke College Republicans, said that extreme rhetoric was necessary for the success of Trump and Cruz in a field of more than 15 candidates, where standing out in any way was imperative. He also noted that cable news has used stories about Trump to boost ratings.
+
+“I think part of the reason that [Donald Trump] is polling so high is that his name is just so ubiquitous through all of the news media,” said freshman Steve Hassey, communications director for Duke Democrats. “Him being such a polarizing figure makes the mass coverage of him even more polarizing.”
+
+Both Lemon and Mayer discussed how news can have a negative impact when it focuses on polarizing comments.
+
+However, Mayer said he was optimistic that bipartisan reform is possible and will occur on certain issues. On campus, there have been a few bipartisan discussions, such as the Battle of the Brains debate between college Democrats and Republicans hosted by Duke Student Government last November in which students discussed issues ranging from racial discrimination to the national debt.
+
+Although there have been bipartisan discussions, Lemon noted that there are barriers to fostering discussion between students of opposing political parties on campus.
+
+“There are a lot more liberals on campus than conservatives,” Lemon said. “Liberals tend to talk amongst themselves. Conservatives are afraid to express their opinions, so they don’t really talk and neither side is really willing to engage too much.”
+
+Mayer attributed the polarization and the lack of engagement between the two sides to something more than just extreme rhetoric.
+
+“At some deep level, many of the problems we’ve been talking about are really manifestations of a loss of trust in each other, in our institutions and the like,” he said. “This whole dysfunction is a trust problem. We stopped trusting institutions. We don’t trust politicians. A world where you have very little trust is a much less functional world.”",REAL
+9769,"Hillary Clinton, FBI and the Real November Surprise     : Information"," Hillary Clinton, FBI and the Real November Surprise
+By Pepe Escobar ""As bad as it is the folks above the President make the decisions. They may have decided on Trump. These things do not happen by accident."" "" Sputnik "" - Thus spoke a high-level US business mover and shaker with secure transit in rarified Masters of the Universe-related circles, amidst the utter political chaos provoked by head of the FBI James Comey’s latest bombshell.
+It’s virtually established by now that US Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Comey not to release his letter to Congress. But Comey did it anyway. If he had not, and a scandal would – inevitably – spring up after the US presidential election, Lynch would be perfectly positioned to deny she knew anything, and Comey would be on the firing line.
+Lynch is a certified Clinton machine asset. In 1999 then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney’s office. She left in 2002, taking the private practice revolving door. She was back to the Brooklyn office in 2010, urged by Obama. Five years later she became the 83rd US Attorney General, replacing the dodgy Eric Holder.
+A plausible case has been made that Comey took his fateful decision based on a serious internal revolt at the FBI – led by key people he trust — as well as being egged-on by his wife.
+Yet one of the key questions that refuse to go away is why the FBI waited until 11 days before the US presidential election to supposedly ""find"" an email trove on certified sexting pervert Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
+A Deal With Donald?
+The business source, although unsympathetic to the Clinton machine, especially in foreign policy, is a realpolitik practitioner, not a conspiracy theorist. He is adamant that, “the FBI reversal could not have happened without orders above the President. If the Masters [of the Universe] have changed their mind, then they will destroy Hillary.”
+He adds, “they can make a deal with Donald just like anyone else; Donald wins; the Masters win; the people think that their voice has been heard. And then there will be some sort of (controlled) change.”
+What’s paramount in the whole soap opera is the faith in the US political system — as corrupt as it may be — must endure. That mirrors the faith in the US dollar; if confidence in the US dollar fails, the US as a hegemonic financial power is no more.
+The source is equally adamant that, “it is almost unprecedented to see a cover-up as extensive as Hillary’s. A secret meeting between Bill Clinton and the Attorney General; the FBI ignoring all evidence and initially clearing Hillary to near rebellion of the whole of the FBI, attested to by Rudolf Giuliani whose reputation as a federal prosecutor is unquestioned; the Clinton “pay for play” foundation. The Masters are troubled that this is getting out of hand.”
+The record shows that “the Masters do not usually have to go to such lengths to protect their own. They did manage to save Bill Clinton from the Monica Lewinsky perjury and keep him in the presidency. The Masters were not attacked in this case. They even got away with the 1987 cash settlement crash and the theft surrounding the Lehman debacle. In all these cases there were no overarching challenges to their control, as we see now open to the public by Trump. They antagonized and insulted the wrong man.”
+All Aboard the Huma Train
+Hillary Clinton is not at the center of Comey’s jaw-dropping October Surprise; it’s actually her right-hand woman and ersatz “daughter” Huma Abedin. This early January essay on Huma Abedin contains plenty of nuggets out and about – some of them positively eyebrow raising.
+In case Hillary Clinton becomes the next President of the United States (POTUS), Abedin, alternatively known as Princess of Saudi Arabia, will most likely become Hillary’s chief of staff – the power behind running all White House operations.
+A glimpse of the FBI-Huma Abedin connection is available here . Abedin was granted Top Secret security clearance for the first time in 2009, when Hillary named her deputy chief of staff for operations. Abedin later said she “did not remember” being read into any Special Access Programs (SAPs).
+It’s crucial to remember that one of Abedin’s emails was huma@clintonemail.com. Crucial translation: she was the only high-level State Dept. aide whose emails were hosted by the notorious Subterranean Clinton Email Server – which she claimed she didn’t know existed until she heard about it in the news.
+Abedin swore under oath in a lawsuit brought against the State Dept. by Judicial Watch that she had handed over all of her laptops and smart phones that could host emails relevant to the Subterranean Email Server investigation.
+That may not have been the case. The laptop at the center of Comey’s bombshell was shared by Abedin and her husband Wiener before they split. If Abedin lied, she could face up to five years in jail for perjury. As if the whole illegal email-cum-sexting saga was not sordid enough, the “climax” now seems to have turned into a mixed wrestling match between the former couple, with the big “prize” being the slammer.
+The FBI has finally obtained a warrant and is now frantically searching no less than 650,000 Abedin emails found on sexting freak Wiener’s laptop; the objective is to exactly determine which ones came from the Subterranean Email Server.
+As if this was not demeaning enough, the FBI continues to conduct an investigation on the Clinton Foundation. As former Assistant Director of the FBI Tom Fuentes said , “The FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation the investigation would go forward as a comprehensive unified case and be coordinated, so that investigation is ongoing and Huma Abedin and her role and activities concerning Secretary of State in the nature of the foundation and possible ‘pay to play’, that’s still being looked at now.”
+Whatever happens until election day, US voters will have to consider the startling fact they may choose a next POTUS that is the subject of a wide-ranging “comprehensive unified” FBI investigation.
+A Rotten, Rigged System?
+A former federal public corruption prosecutor volunteers a plausible take on Comey’s action. In a nutshell, FBI agents investigating Weiner’s sexting – and they are a different set of agents investigating Emailgate — saw evidence of State Dept emails on his laptop. Comey knew he needed a search warrant to comb the emails at Wiener’s computer. So he pre-empted the – inevitable – subsequent hype by “sending out a vague letter to the Hill” that in the end left everyone even more confused.
+That interpretation though may be only scratching the surface. Deeper and deeper, it seems that Comey’s decision was really precipitated by the senior FBI agents’ insurgence – fed up with the “extreme carelessness” Hillary cover-up. They’ve got to have some surefire material on the Clinton (cash) machine that never saw the light.
+Comey could have just waited to say something after the election; after all the FBI maintains they had checked all Clinton emails, including deleted ones, not to mention the Podesta emails. So the emails on sexting Wiener’s laptop may be no more than a limited hangout.
+A much more plausible explanation is that Comey had to do it not only because of the FBI internal revolt (or because he had an urge to upstage WikiLeaks?) He had to do it because the rot goes way beyond the Clinton “pay to play” racket and involves virtually the whole system, from the deep recesses of the Obama administration to the War Party scam, the Department of Justice, the CIA and the FBI itself.
+What next? Brace for impact; it may well be the ultimate November Surprise.",FAKE
+235,The Benghazi bust: Trey Gowdy and his GOP colleagues embarrassed themselves,"There’s not really any good news for the GOP in the aftermath of yesterday’s House Benghazi Committee interrogation of Hillary Clinton. There had been some flickers of hope among conservative activists that the committee Republicans, led by chairman Trey Gowdy, would finally produce the long-rumored “smoking gun” that would prove once and for all that Hillary did… whatever evil thing she supposedly did with regard the Benghazi. Or maybe they’d goad her into making a terrible gaffe that would ruin her politically. But that’s not what happened.
+
+After weeks of damaging stories about the Benghazi committee’s partisan agenda and vanishing credibility, it might have done Gowdy some good to put together a quiet and informative hearing that was befitting the “serious investigation” that he insisted he was leading. Instead, Gowdy took the lead role in proving correct each one of his Republican colleagues who said the committee was focused on damaging Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances.
+
+In his opening statement, Gowdy tried to shoot down allegations that the committee was focused on Clinton. “There are people frankly in both parties who have suggested that this investigation is about you,” Gowdy said to Hillary at the outset. “Let me assure you it is not.” But when it came time for Gowdy to ask questions, he focused singularly on Clinton’s emails with Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton friend and DC barnacle who was feeding Hillary intelligence “reports” from a source he knew in Libya. Gowdy used the volume of emails sent from Blumenthal to Clinton to portray him as a key advisor who had unfettered access to Clinton, and contrasted him with slain Libya ambassador Chris Stevens, who never emailed Clinton directly. “Help us understand how Sidney Blumenthal had that kind of access to you, Madame Secretary, but the ambassador did not,” Gowdy asked with much gravity.
+
+Gowdy’s implication – that Stevens either lacked access to Clinton or that Clinton prioritized her communications with Blumenthal – was flagrantly false, and Gowdy knows it was false. Stevens had access to Clinton through a variety of means and could have been in touch with her at a moment’s notice if he’d wanted. But Gowdy used the frequency of email communication – and only email communication – to give the impression that Blumenthal was in the loop while the ambassador was not.
+
+This theme was picked up on by his Republican colleagues, who weren’t nearly as subtle in their dishonesty as Gowdy was. Rep. Mike Pompeo grandiosely asked Clinton if Stevens had had Clinton’s cell phone number, fax number, or home address, and if he’d ever “stopped by your house.” After Clinton said no to all these things, Pompeo went in for what he thought was the kill: “Mr. Blumenthal had each of those and did each of those things. This man who provided you so much information on Libya had access to you in ways that were very different from the access that a very senior diplomat had to you and your person.” If you’re the sort of thick-headed dolt who thinks the ambassador was at a disadvantage because he couldn’t send the Secretary of State a postcard or pop in on her every Sunday afternoon, then this point was probably quite compelling.
+
+While the Republicans were wasting their time trying to portray Clinton as a tool of Sid Blumenthal, the Democrats used their time to make clear just how pointless they believe the entire investigation is and allowed Clinton her opportunities to offer sanitized and carefully worded defenses of the Libya intervention. At least one member of the committee used the hearing to pose useful and interesting questions about issues that arose from the Benghazi attack: Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL). She asked Clinton about policies for outsourcing security to local militias and security contractors, which has caused problems for the State Department and other government agencies. All in all it was a bust for Gowdy and the Benghazi committee, to the point that conservative pundits were griping about how poorly the Republicans fared against Clinton. Anyone who doubted that the committee was a partisan exercise in Clinton-bashing came away free of doubts. The only sliver of good news for the Republicans is that it likely won’t matter. The notion that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton engineered some sort of evil Benghazi cover-up is already assumed to be true in the minds of conservatives and Republican voters. The fact that Gowdy and crew spent the day stepping on rakes and scoring own-goals in a failed attempt to “prove” it won’t change their minds. And the House GOP won’t put the brakes on the investigation because the committee’s utility as a vehicle for strategic press leaks outweighs the bad press it’s enduring at the moment. The Benghazi committee will grind on, performing much the same role it always has.",REAL
+4359,"Obama seeks global climate pact in Paris, amid resistance at home","President Obama set out Monday to help seal a global climate pact at the opening of a major summit in Paris, though he faces stiff opposition at home from congressional Republicans and states worried his proposals will cost thousands of jobs.
+
+The president joined more than 150 world leaders for the two-week conference where countries are trying to negotiate an agreement aimed at slowing an increase in global temperatures. In opening remarks, Obama called the meeting a potential “turning point” for the effort.
+
+“What should give us hope that this is a turning point, that this is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet, is the fact that our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it,” he said.
+
+With the summit getting under way in the wake of the devastating terror attacks in the same city, some Republicans have questioned whether Obama is focusing too much on global warming and not enough on security. But Obama on Monday called the negotiations an “act of defiance” toward the attackers.
+
+“What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it?” Obama said. The president said that, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter (after China), “we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”
+
+The president also met one-on-one Monday with leaders of other nations responsible for the largest carbon emissions, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On the sidelines of the summit, Obama met as well with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss security matters.
+
+But as Obama makes a personal press for a climate deal, he faces practical challenges back in Washington.
+
+The president has pledged that the U.S. will cut its overall emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent by 2030, and a centerpiece of that is a push to reduce emissions from U.S. power plants. But half the states are suing to block the power plant rules, claiming Obama has abused his authority under the Clean Air Act.
+
+Further, Republicans on Capitol Hill are threatening to block committing U.S. dollars to a U.N. Green Climate Fund designed to help poorer countries combat climate change.
+
+In the days before the Paris summit, Republicans warned that any Paris deal with legally binding provisions must come before the Senate for a vote. And without that approval, they warned, lawmakers will not green-light the Green Climate Fund money.
+
+“Without Senate approval, there will be no money – period,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said at a recent hearing.
+
+Barrasso and Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, also sent a letter to Obama signed by more than three dozen senators likewise urging the president to have his special envoy relay to developing nations’ representatives that Congress “will not be forthcoming” with the Green Climate Fund money absent a Senate vote.
+
+The president wants to direct $3 billion – including $500 million in the near-term – for the U.N. Green Climate Fund.
+
+The Paris conference is aimed at the most far-reaching deal ever to tackle global warming. The last major agreement, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, required only rich countries to cut emissions, and the U.S. never signed on.
+
+Among several sticking points is money -- how much rich countries should invest to help poor countries cope with climate change, how much should be invested in renewable energy, and how much traditional oil and gas producers stand to lose if countries agree to forever reduce emissions.
+
+With that in mind, at least 19 governments and 28 leading world investors were announcing billions of dollars in investments to research and develop clean energy technology, with the goal of making it cheaper.
+
+Backers include Obama, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, billionaires George Soros and Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal, and Jack Ma of China's Alibaba.
+
+Meanwhile, Obama met on the sidelines with Putin to discuss the civil war in Syria, as well as Turkey’s shoot-down of a Russian jet last week amid allegations it crossed into Turkish airspace.
+
+According to a White House official, Obama “expressed his regret for the recent loss of a Russian pilot and crew member and reiterated the United States' support for de-escalation between Russia and Turkey.”
+
+Obama, though, also reiterated that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad must leave power as part of any political transition.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2462,"2 deaths possibly linked to 'superbug' at UCLA hospital after 7 infected, 179 exposed","UCLA reported Wednesday that nearly 180 patients were exposed to a potentially deadly ""superbug"" on contaminated medical instruments that infected seven patients and may have contributed to two deaths.
+
+A total of 179 patients at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center were exposed to antibiotic-resistant carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, during endoscopic procedures between October and January, the university said in a statement. The bacteria may have been a ""contributing factor"" in the deaths of two patients, the university said. Those who were exposed are being sent free home-testing kits that the university will analyze.
+
+Similar outbreaks of CRE have been reported around the nation. They are difficult to treat because some varieties are resistant to most known antibiotics. By one estimate, CRE can contribute to death in up to half of seriously infected patients, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
+
+The bacteria can cause infections of the bladder or lungs, leading to coughing, fever or chills. CRE infections have been reported in every state except Idaho, Alaska and Maine, according to the CDC.
+
+UCLA said infections may have been transmitted through specialized endoscopes used during the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic and bile-duct problems. The instruments are inserted into the patients' throats. The outbreak was discovered late last month during tests on a patient.
+
+The two medical devices may have carried the bacteria even though they were sterilized according to the manufacturer's specifications, UCLA said.
+
+The devices have been removed, and decontamination procedures upgraded, the university said.
+
+""We notified all patients who had this type of procedure, and we were using seven different scopes. Only two of them were found to be infected. In an abundance of caution, we notified everybody,"" said Dale Tate, a University of California, Los Angeles spokeswoman.
+
+On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an advisory warning doctors that even when a manufacturer's cleaning instructions are followed, infectious germs may linger in the devices. Their complex design and tiny parts make complete disinfection extremely difficult, the advisory said.
+
+National figures on the bacteria are not kept, but 47 states have seen cases, the CDC said.
+
+A similar outbreak occurred in Illinois in 2013. Dozens of patients were exposed to CRE, with some cases apparently linked to a tainted endoscope used at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital. The hospital later changed its sterilization procedures.
+
+A Seattle hospital, Virginia Mason Medical Center, reported in January that CRE linked to an endoscope sickened at least 35 patients, and 11 died, although it was unclear whether the infection played a role in their deaths.
+
+""This bacteria is emerging in the U.S. and it's associated with a high mortality rate,"" Dr. Alex Kallen, an epidemiologist in CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, told the LA Times. ""We don't want this circulating anywhere in the community.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from MyFoxLA.com.",REAL
+7877,Breaking: Ivanka Trump Makes Tragic Announcement Both Donald Trump and Supporters Are Shocked (Video) | Prophecy,"(Before It's News)
+Ivanka Trump is going to have to back off from her father’s campaign, because the hateful and sexist rhetoric of Donald Trump is severely hurting Ivanka’s clothing and lifestyle brand.
+Women are turning on Ivanka Trump as she continues supporting her father despite allegations of sexual harassment against him and a 2005 audio tape capturing him bragging in lewd terms that he can do whatever he wants to women.
+Now, the growing group of women are boycotting her line of clothing, jewelry, perfume and accessories sold as part of the Ivanka Trump Collection. They are also calling on the stores that carry the brand, including Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, to stop selling it.
+It has even created its own hashtag, #Ivankant, as well as #GrabYourWallet.
+From The Daily Mail :
+‘If Ivanka Trump had distanced herself from the campaign I would not be boycotting her,’ Shannon Coulter, who called on Americans to boycott the brand earlier this month, told the Guardian.
+‘But something changed for me when that tape was released.’
+Coulter, who shared her own experience of sexual harassment at the hands of a male superior, launched the hashtag ‘GrabYourWallet’ on October 11, a reference to Trump’s offensive ‘grab them by the p***y’ remark from the audio tape.
+The problem obviously for Ivanka, is that Donald Trump’s base, for the most part, doesn’t shop at Bloomingdale’s or Nordstrom, which are two of the largest stores that carry her clothing line, along with Macy’s.
+What are your thoughts, should Ivanka’s business be hurt because of the actions of her father?
+From Politico:
+The New York Times cited a deposition from a woman who claimed that Donald Trump groped her under the table decades ago, but the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is certainly not a groper, his daughter said Wednesday.
+“Look, I’m not in every interaction my father has, but he’s not a groper,” Ivanka Trump said in an interview broadcast Wednesday on “CBS This Morning.” “It’s not who he is. And I’ve known my father obviously my whole life and he has total respect for women.”
+The billionaire businessman launched a Twitter salvo the “failing” newspaper for its “false, malicious & libelous story,” catapulting the story to become the newspaper’s most popular of the year, according to assistant news editor Theodore Kim.
+—
+Ivanka Trump said she read the Sunday cover story and “found it to be pretty disturbing, based on the facts as I know them, and obviously I very much know them” as a daughter and an executive who’s worked alongside him for more than a decade.
+“I was bothered by it, but it’s largely been discredited since,” she said, referring to Brewer Lane’s criticism of the report. Brewer Lane, the ex-girlfriend whose first run-in with Donald Trump was used as the lead anecdote for the article, titled “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private,” accused the newspaper of putting a negative connotation on her words.
+“Most of the time when stories are inaccurate they’re not discredited, and I will be frustrated by that, but in this case I think they went so far,” Ivanka Trump continued. “They had such a strong thesis and created facts to reinforce it and, you know, I think that narrative has been playing out now and there’s backlash in that regard.”
+Source RealTimePolitics.com Check out more contributions by Jeffery Pritchett ranging from UFO to Bigfoot to Paranormal to Prophecy",FAKE
+5305,GOP Senator Silences the Entire Room With Remark About War Hero Opponent's Heritage at Debate,"Share on Twitter 
+Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) ignited a political firestorm Thursday night after he randomly brought up his Democratic rival’s heritage after she touted her military experience during a debate. 
+Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who is of mixed Thai and American descent, cited her military service as well as her family’s when making the case against rushing into war. 
+“I’m a daughter of the American Revolution. I’ve bled for this nation. But I still want to be there in the Senate when the drums of war sound,“ she said. ”Because people are quick to sound the drums of war and I want to be there to say, ‘This is what it costs, this is what you’re asking us to do’. Let’s make sure the American people understand what we are engaging in.” 
+When given a chance to respond, Kirk remarked, “I had forgotten that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.” Illinois Senator Mark Kirk Made A Racist Remark About His Opponent’s Heritage https://t.co/MmS5HnGEG7 pic.twitter.com/Q1bFnqviAG 
+— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) October 28, 2016 
+No one, including the debate moderator, quite knew how to react. After a brief awkward silence, the moderator moved the discussion forward. Critics immediately branded the comment as “racist” and distasteful. 
+Duckworth lost both of her legs while serving as a pilot in the Army during the Iraq war. Her father also served in the U.S.army and her family’s military service goes all the way back to the Revolutionary War, BuzzFeed reported . US Representative Tammy Duckworth of Illinois arrives to address delegates on the fourth and final day of the Democratic National Convention at Wells Fargo Center on July 28, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Image Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images 
+Duckworth responded on Twitter with an indisputable message. My mom is an immigrant and my dad and his family have served this nation in uniform since the Revolution #ILSEN pic.twitter.com/ehEBHswFMs — Tammy Duckworth (@TammyforIL) October 28, 2016 
+Kirk’s campaign later issued a statement addressing the controversy: 
+“Senator Kirk has consistently called Rep. Duckworth a war hero and honors her family’s service to this country. But that’s not what this debate was about. Rep. Duckworth lied about her legal troubles, was unable to defend her failures at the VA and then falsely attacked Senator Kirk over his record on supporting gay rights.” 
+But at that point, the damage was already done. ",FAKE
+8824,2:00PM Election Day Water Cooler 11/8/2016,"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce … Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 – 1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. 
+If you ever wondered where that quote came from, now you know! A fine example from the 2016 election is commentators comparing Clinton to Lincoln. 
+Stats Watch 
+NFIB Small Business Optimism Index, October 2016: “The small business optimism index rose 0.8 points in October to 94.9, slightly exceeding expectations and extending a rebound from the 2-year low at 92.6 set in April” [ Econoday ]. “A net 25 percent of owners reported raising worker compensation, a 3 point increase from September. Capital outlays, a leading strength of the index recently and important for future growth, remained at a strong 27 percent, the second highest reading of the recovery.” But the NFIB’s press release says: “Small business owners are rattled by uncertainty and unable to decide whether to expand, whether to hire, or whether to make other important decisions that might boost the economy” [ Econoday ]. And: “the highest level this year” [ Calculated Risk ]. 
+JOLTS, September 2016: “Job openings rose to 5.486 million in September, up from a revised 5.453 million in August but still on the low side of this year’s trend. Hires are down in the September data, to 5.081 million from August’s 5.268 million to suggest that employers are having a hard time filling slots” [ Econoday ]. “With it hard to find the right person for the right job, employers are holding onto their existing employees closely as the layoff rate fell… [I’m so old I remember when you could get training at your job! Good times….] Though hiring is down, these numbers nevertheless will confirm worries that wage inflation may be approaching, that employers will have to offer more to bring in the workers they need.” Time to screw the workers take away the punch bowl, Janet! And: “The data overall suggests that there was a slight cooling in the labour market during the third quarter, but not enough to discourage a December rate increase from the Federal Reserve” [ Economic Calendar ]. And: “[A]nother solid report” [ Calculated Risk ]. 
+Fed Loan Officer Survey: “The latest Federal Reserve senior loan officer survey on bank lending standards reported that standards were basically unchanged for the commercial sector during the third quarter of 2016. There had, however, been some tightening of conditions on Commercial Real Estate (CRE) loans” [ Economic Calendar ]. And: “Bank credit tends to tighten up as the economy slows, which slows lending and makes matters worse.The buzz word is ‘pro cyclical'” [ Mosler Economics ]. As we’ve seen, the bright spot in CRE is supply-chain related, e.g. distribution centers. And that’s a bet on globalization, no? 
+Shipping: “Investors are following online retailers into warehouses” [ Wall Street Journal ]. “Singapore’s sovereign-wealth fund agreed to pay $2.7 billion for P3 Logistics Parks and its portfolio of European warehouses… in one of the biggest real-estate deals in Europe this year. The high returns on the industrial properties are a big draw, but the bigger attraction over the long term is the growing need for space to serve e-commerce customers in a European market with a limited number of high-quality warehouses. This is the second big buy in logistics for Singapore’s GIC Pte. fund, which bought the Blackstone Group LP’s IndCor Properties and its network of U.S. warehouses. The upheaval in the market likely isn’t over—another Blackstone property, Logicor, is exploring either an outright sale or an initial public offering of a business that owns 660 warehouses in 18 European countries.” 
+Shipping: “The top U.S. maritime regulator [Federal Maritime Commission Chairman Mario Cordero] says the ongoing consolidation in the shipping industry isn’t leading to collusion to fix freight rates” [ Wall Street Journal ]. Of course not. That’s the purpose of setting up a ginormous cartel, right? 
+Shipping: “The Port of Oakland said today its October export volumes reached a three-year high, increasing 20 percent over 2015 levels and posting the fourth-largest monthly total in its history” [ DC Velocity ]. “Port executives said that export volumes benefitted from weakness in the U.S. dollar that made U.S. exports more competitive in world markets and a strong agricultural harvest. Oakland is the closet seaport to the verdant growing areas of the Central, Napa, and Salinas valleys, and as a result handles much of the state’s agricultural export cargo. The port reported that containerized import cargo volume increased 2 percent in October. Overall loaded container volume—imports and exports—was up 11.4 percent, the port said.” 
+Shipping: “[UPS] is buying medical-logistics specialist Marken Ltd., pushing deeper into the highly specialized and very profitable business of healthcare industry deliveries. The move is a play for high-yield business when many traditional industrial and retail customers are opting for slower, cheaper shipping….Closely-held Marken specializes in transporting clinical trial materials and medicine between 49,000 clinical trial locations around the world, work that is particularly sensitive in terms of time and temperature” [ Wall Street Journal ]. “For UPS, it also delivers a bigger entry into a growing market, particularly as aging populations in the developed world spend more on health care and clinical research expands.” 
+Shipping: “Packaging machinery shipments in U.S. could reach $8.5 billion in 2020” [ DC Velocity ] “[T]he fastest-growing machinery types scored by CAGR through 2020 will be the labeling, decorating, and coding (3.9 percent) and the case handling (2.5 percent) machinery groups. That rapid growth is largely a result of new legislation demanding increased labeling and coding, continuing developments in printing technologies, and the proliferation of SKUs, PMMI said. The other machinery groups include: filling and dosing; bottling line; form, fill, and seal; cartoning; palletizing; closing; and wrapping and bundling.” Fascinating to see the interface between big data and stuff . 
+Shipping: “Container ship demolition hits record high” [ Journal of Commerce ]. “Shipowners have demolished 4.2 times more 20-foot-equivalent units so far this year than in the same period of 2015, with 500,000 TEUs. Most of the activity has occurred in the last three months, which accounted for 41 percent of the demolition thus far in 2016. The demolition activity in the last three months surprised BIMCO [Baltic and International Maritime Council] positively and it exceeded our initial expectation based on the appalling 2015 demolition activity,’ said Peter Sand, chief shipping analyst, BIMCO. “The advance is a push in the right direction, as demolition activity is one of the essential measures needed to be taken to rebalance the container shipping industry.'”“Rebalance.” No Pakistanis burned to death lately , so we’re good! 
+Shipping: “Southern California chassis shortages recede as Hanjin boxes are cleared” [ Lloyd’s List ]. 
+Retail: “Panjiva Research Director Chris Rogers told Logistics Management that when specifically looking at import numbers for things like apparel, especially winter clothing, and toys, which are both down, it suggests that retailers are not feeling ‘hugely confident’ about the state of consumer spending. And he added that it is in direct contrast to recent data issued by the National Retail Federation, which is calling for holiday shipping season (the months of November and December) to be up 3.6 percent” [ Modern Materials Handling ]. From October. But still. 
+Retail: “A recent survey of shoppers weighed in with their answer to the question, “Do you like Black Friday?” Only 14.7% said that they love it, while 50.7% said it was okay. More than a third — 35.3% — said they hated it. A rather staggering 85% of those surveyed either hated Black Friday or didn’t care much about it” [ 247 Wall Street ] ( original survey ). Throw me in the “hate” bucket! 
+Housing: “It is so interesting to once again see the ‘drive until you qualify’ meme permeating the housing industry. People seem to think this is now a new permanent plateau, a new normal, yet ignore the low home ownership rate and the reality that momentum is turning. But of course many are not paying attention – they are stuck in traffic apparently. Mega commutes, rental Armageddon, and insane prices for crap shacks are all part of the game today” [ Dr. Housing Bubble ]. “If you look at the rise in these mega commutes in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley it shot up in 2010… Something fundamentally shifted here. Of course you have your house humpers saying that this is great and somehow reflects a healthy market but in reality, it simply shows a hyper manic market of people desperate to claw into a crap shack. And many are now having to endure Clockwork Orange like torture in traffic. Many Millennials are simply saying no and are renting closer to work (or living at home with parents).” 
+Honey for the Bears: “The restaurant recession has arrived” [ MarketWatch ]. “One factor is pressure on discretionary income from the rising costs of staples such as rent, medicine and education. Then there’s the steady rise in the cost of eating out, which has come just as grocery bills are getting cheaper. The cost of food purchased for home use—that is, groceries—has fallen 2.4% in the past year, government data showed in October. That’s the biggest decline over a 12-month period since the end of the Great Recession in 2009… Food costs have shrunk because of a global glut in farm products such as wheat, rice, soy and corn. Then there’s the effect of U.S. producers increasing the size of egg-laying chicken flocks and cattle herds, which has helped bring down the cost of eggs, beef and milk—egg prices alone have tumbled a staggering 50% in the last year.” 
+The Bezzle: “Amazon.com Inc. could be in the crosshairs of Europe’s taxman” [ Wall Street Journal , “Europe’s Taxman Could Have Amazon in Its Crosshairs”]. “That could be material for Amazon, which operates on thin margins for a large tech company. In 2015, it reported $596 million in profit on $107 billion in revenue—a profit margin of 0.56%.” 
+Currency: “Taking the nation by surprise, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday night announced demonetisation of Rs. 1000 and Rs. 500 notes with effect from midnight, making these notes invalid in a major assault on black money, fake currency and corruption” [ The Hindu ]. 
+Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 29 Fear (previous close: 26, Fear) [ CNN ]. One week ago: 22 (Extreme Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 8 at 11:22am. Mr. Market’s knuckles were white there, for a bit. 
+Guillotine Watch 
+“Amtrak boosts Wi-Fi speed on Acela Express” [ Progressive Railroading ]. Moar cowbell. 
+News of the Wired 
+“You Can Have Emotions You Don’t Feel” [ Nautil.us ]. 
+“6 reasons to think twice before moving to Canada” [ MarketWatch ]. 
+* * * 
+Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here . And here’s today’s plant: 
+Because it’s all about the lettuce, right? 
+Readers, Water Cooler is a standalone entity, not supported by the very successful Naked Capitalism fundraiser just past. Now, I understand you may feel tapped out, but when and if you are able, please use the dropdown to choose your contribution, and then click the hat! Your tip will be welcome today, and indeed any day. Water Cooler will not exist without your continued help. Donate",FAKE
+9453,News: A Somber Moment: Cubs Fans All Over The World Are Still Too Sad About Princess Diana To Celebrate The Cubs’ World Series,"Email 
+Last night the Chicago Cubs eked out a thrilling game 7 victory in the World Series against the Cleveland Indians and ended a championship drought that had lasted for 108 years. This is a historic moment to be sure, but there will be no smiling and cheering in Chicago: Fans of the Cubs are still too sad over the death of Princess Diana to do any celebrating. 
+“I honestly never thought I’d see the Cubs bring home the trophy, but everyone here is still too swept up with grief over Lady Di to really enjoy themselves right now,” said Cubbies superfan Raymon Lindley, who was among the thousands of fans who gathered outside Wrigley Field following last night’s edge-of-your-seat game to light candles in memory of the late Princess Of Wales. “It would be macabre to celebrate the win in light of what happened to Princess Diana on that fateful August night in 1997.” 
+Theo Epstein, the curse-breaking president of baseball operations for the Cubs, has shipped the World Series trophy overseas to Britain, where it is to be laid on the grave of the People’s Princess. While the people of Chicago are undoubtedly proud of their Cubs, no parade has been planned, as the general feeling of the city is that it would be too gratuitous at this time. 
+“I just called my 91-year-old grandfather, who waited his whole life to see the Cubs win the World Series,” said longtime season-ticket holder Karen Hunter. “We spent the entire call crying about Princess Diana together. She was so young.” 
+“I would give a thousand Cubs World Series wins if Lady Di could be alive for one more day,” Hunter added. 
+History has been made, and the Cubs finally have their much-sought-after championship, but fans clearly still have a long way to go before they’re comfortable celebrating the historic achievement. Aside from the occasional outburst of “Candle In The Wind” by groups of bereft fans, Wrigleyville will remain a quiet and mournful place until the Cubs faithful are ready to party with their victorious hometown heroes. And it’s anyone’s guess as to when that will be.",FAKE
+4289,Clinton media campaign follows BuzzFeed model,"Hillary Clinton’s campaign looks like a new media startup.
+
+The Democratic front-runner has a staff of dozens producing original content — including bylined news stories and professional video — all managed by an audience development team, a model similar to digital news pioneers BuzzFeed or Vox.
+
+A blog, called the ""Feed,” anchored by five full-time writers, pumps out articles, interactive trivia quizzes, GIFs of Clinton's late-night-show appearances and other content designed to engage supporters and court potential voters across social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.
+
+“They seem to be trying to mimic a publisher,” said Michael Wertheim, an adviser to media and tech startups and a former strategy director at Upworthy.
+
+President Obama's team was the undisputed powerhouse of the 2008 and 2012 cycles. Now his digital mastermind, Teddy Goff, is helming Clinton’s efforts, but, Goff says, succeeding in 2016 is far more challenging.
+
+In past campaigns, ""we felt that we could pretty much reach the people we need to reach by running a really good Twitter and Facebook account,” he said. Obama for America built Facebook and Twitter followings of more than 45 million and 33 million, respectively.
+
+Now, people have more power over what they consume, said Goff. They have “a higher set of expectations for how they’re going to be served,"" he said, and are steering away from overtly political messages.
+
+“When you put those together, it’s a pretty difficult task.""
+
+The Clinton approach is made possible by its resources, said Katie Harbath, Facebook’s global politics and government outreach director. Others are “having to be leaner, be more resourceful and deal with a smaller staff,” she said.
+
+Yet, in this election, “resources don’t necessarily mean they’ll resonate more or create more of a discussion on the platform,” said Jenna Golden, Twitter’s director of political ad sales. While the Democrat’s Brooklyn-based team crafts images and stories optimized for mobile viewing targeted at both broad and specific demographic audiences, Republican candidate Donald Trump’s approach is more basic: He sits at his computer and sends out missives. And Bernie Sanders, her main rival for the Democratic nomination, has more overall digital interactions than Clinton.
+
+Trump’s posted over 5,000 times since June, mostly on Twitter, according to CrowdTangle, a social analytics tool that monitors social media. Since June of last year, Trump has generated nearly 85 million interactions (positive and negative) on his campaign accounts, which include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Sanders comes in at 34.6 million and Clinton at 31 million.
+
+According to Facebook, Trump generated the most interactions across the social media network the week after his controversial proposal to temporarily ban non-citizen Muslims from entering the country. Clinton's peak came the last week of October after a successful debate and a marathon performance before a House Benghazi hearing.
+
+“Trump is absolutely dominating social this election cycle and it’s not even close,” said Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle chief executive. “It’s a way to skip the media and go directly to his audience,” he said. Yet dominating the conversation doesn't necessarily translate into votes.
+
+Trump and Clinton have “very different strategic goals,” said Silverman. While Trump is “brand building,” Clinton is converting her traffic into actions such as site registrations to acquire data critical to her get-out-the-vote efforts.
+
+Whether the Clinton or Trump model is more effective will be part of the election post-mortem, said Jake Horowitz, founder of Mic, a top millennial website.
+
+“You have a very sophisticated operation, and then you have someone who’s a total monster with media attention, and they’re competing for attention across social,” said Horowitz.
+
+A lot of the focus appears to be on evoking emotion as the former first lady battles perceptions that she isn't personable.
+
+A recent post getting a lot of clicks shows Clinton retelling, in a speech, the story of Army Captain Humayun Khan, a 27-year-old Muslim American who died in Iraq after waving his unit away from a vehicle that exploded.
+
+The video, set to background music, includes a cutaway shot to a visibly anguished man who, as Clinton speaks, bows his head and and chokes back tears as his fingers tweeze the bridge of his nose. It’s gotten over 2 million views on Facebook.
+
+There’s also a regular series, called “Quick Question” that catches the candidate spontaneously discussing fun topics, including lessons from her mother and what it’s like to watch football in the Clinton household. “They catch her randomly, and she just answers. It captures her,” said Goff.
+
+“They’re probably trying to get her to react in a genuine fashion and trigger some emotion,” said Wertheim.
+
+Similar to what you’d find on BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post, Clinton's site is interactive. In December, a quiz asked readers to guess whether certain statements came from Donald Trump or someone else.
+
+Another notes her summer job after college in Alaska “sliming” fish, or removing the guts from salmon with a spoon. Another featured five vintage photos telling “the story of how Bill and Hillary Clinton fell in love.”
+
+Many readers are probably unaware some posts are from the campaign since a number feature people other than the candidate, including one of a cute 8-year-old and another highlighting a 1986 letter from a grandfather who fled Germany ahead of WWII aimed at illustrating the historic role the nation has played in taking in refugees.
+
+Ultimately, though, digital experts say social media success depends on something only the candidate can deliver: authenticity.
+
+“The candidates who are willing to be more authentic and show who they are as a person get a lot more engagement,” said Horowitz.",REAL
+5434,Your Facebook Page Could Land You In a FEMA Camp,"Your Facebook Page Could Land You In a FEMA Camp 
+
+
+Against my better judgment, I often put my articles on Facebook. Lately, Facebook has been taking down my posts, particularily on topics related to World War III. One of my readers counted 14 sites saw my articles disappear. It is too late for me, but for most of you, you should consider not participating on Facebook. It is one more intelligence gathering tool designed to separate the sheep, from the independent thinkers! 
+No matter how annoying Facebook’s censors may be, there are real dangers associated with posting and reading on Facebook. 
+Facebook’s Friends Are Not Nice People 
+Facebook is aligned with both the CIA and the NSA. I have several credible sources tell me that all data posted on Facebook goes into series of cataloged files which culminates with each person being assigned a “Threat Matrix Score”. The mere existence of a Threat Matrix Score should send chills up and the collective spines of every American. 
+When, not if, martial law comes to America, this Threat Matrix Score, of which Facebook data is used to help compile an “enemies of the state” list, your future longevity could be seriously imperiled. It is too late for people like Steve Quayle, Doug and Joe Hagmann, John B. Wells and myself to avoid being placed on this list. However, it is not too late for the average American to limit their exposure by NOT posting and participating on Facebook. Facebook participation should come with a black box warning: 
+“WARNING: The views expressed on Facebook can and will be used against you. Participation in Facebook could prove detrimental to the length of your life. All political dissident views are immediately reported to the CIA and the NSA. Risk of repeated exposure on Facebook could result in you and your family being hauled out of their homes at 3AM, separated from your family and sent to a re-education camp”. 
+Before you dismiss this hypothetical black box warning as too much “tongue in cheek”, please consider that the NSA is presently extracting large amounts of Facebook data and I do not think they are compiling a Christmas card list. Facebook’s Welcome Is Wearing Off 
+Many of us in print and broadcast media are rethinking our association with Facebook. Several of our journalistic brothers and sisters have been censored and/or otherwise treated unprofessionally by this entity. Facebook has become replete with trolls who patrol the cyber corridors of this monolithic entity chastising and censoring whoever exposes the liberal, anti-human, depopulation agenda of the New World Order. Whether it is gun control, criticism of NWO puppet Obama or anything that the alleged grandson of David Rockefeller, Mark Zuckerberg, and his people disagree with, they will kick your Facebook account to the curb for daring to express a legitimate political opinion. 
+Facebook’s Zuckerberg, The Self-Perceived Purveyor of Integrity and Morality 
+Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, The Facebook Effect “ You have one identity, and the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity .” 
+Who appointed Mr. Zuckerberg to be the moral police and the judge of integrity? It sounds like Zuckerberg can take his place with Soros, Gates, Turner, et al., and the rest of the global elite who think they have the right to treat humanity as their own personal property and view the masses as a disposable commodity. Julian Assange Assessment of Facebook 
+Whistle blower, Julian Assange, once stated that “Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google , Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use.” 
+Never before in American cyber-history do we see such an arrogant and agenda serving entity operating their propaganda so far in the open as we do with Facebook. This propaganda end of the New World Order is being blatantly exposed. 
+Facebook’s arrogance was on full display when highly respected journalist, Jon Rappoport was banned from sharing his articles on Facebook. In this instance of blatant censorship, Jon’s banned article was merely a review of certain aspects of American presidents ranging from Nixon to Obama. Like so many of us that understand history and can see the tyrannical path that Obama is taking us down, Rappoport identified Obama’s unconstitutional missteps. And for daring to tell the truth, Facebook banned Rappoport for the mere expression of a legitimate political opinion. 
+Readers may also recall when members of Infowars.com and the popular talk show host, Michael Rivero were banned in December of 2012, until the public outcry for Facebook to reinstate their respective accounts backed Facebook into a corner from which they acquiesced and reinstated the previously banned media figures. Rules For Thee but Not For Me 
+Facebook does not apply their holier than thou attitude to their own corporate behavior. As Zuckerberg talks about rectifying Americans lack of integrity through timely Facebook exposure, Facebook fails to pay its own fair share of taxes as a result of tax loopholes and deductions. Facebook paid no income tax for the fiscal year 2012 , despite reaping $1.1 billion in U.S. corporate profits. While Americans have just been subjected to higher taxes, billion-dollar corporations like Facebook, General Electric, Boeing and Wells Fargo have all been able to avoid paying any corporate income taxes, reports the Citizens for Tax Justice .",FAKE
+6665,Watching These 55 ISIS Terrorists Get Blown to Smithereens is Sure to Brighten Your Day,"Next Story → Judge Judy LOSES IT on Hood Rat: “You Sound Stupid! You’re 19-Yrs-Old, You Have a 2-Yr-Old Child, a Dead Boyfriend…” You may also like...",FAKE
+743,"Exclusive: More than 100 lawsuits, disputes over taxes tied to Trump and his companies","While Donald J. Trump refuses to release his federal tax returns, saying his tax rate is “none of your business,” a USA TODAY analysis found Trump’s businesses have been involved in at least 100 lawsuits and other disputes related to unpaid taxes or how much tax his businesses owe.
+
+Trump’s companies have been engaged in battles over taxes almost every year from the late 1980s until as recently as March, the analysis of court cases, property records, and other documents across the country shows. At least five Trump companies were issued warrants totaling more than $13,000 for late or unpaid taxes in New York state just since Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, according to state records. This spring, as Trump flew to campaign rallies around the country aboard his trademark private jet, the state of New York filed a tax warrant to try to collect $8,578 in unpaid taxes from the Trump-owned company that owns the Boeing 757. The company has since paid that tax bill.
+
+As recently as last week, Trump said he was “willing to pay more” taxes personally and that “taxes for the rich will go up somewhat” if he becomes president. But the lawsuits and other tax-related disputes show a different reality for his businesses. They illustrate a pattern of systematically disputing tax bills, arguing for lower property assessments, and in some cases not paying taxes until the government takes additional action. At least three dozen times, Trump companies’ unpaid tax bills have forced the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance to go to local courts to get liens against his properties to try to collect overdue bills. New Jersey also had to go to court for a lien to collect a Trump company’s unpaid tax bill. Eventually, those disputes were resolved, and his companies paid some amount of taxes.
+
+The disputes surrounding Trump’s business taxes are uncharted territory for the presidential nominee of a major party. The GOP’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, also had extensive business interests as the leader of a private-equity fund. But Trump has a network of complicated real estate and other investments, and some of the tax disputes are ongoing.
+
+Trump has acknowledged that he tries to pay as little taxes as possible, and the public records across the country shed light on how he does it. In documents rarely seen by the public, Trump's businesses regularly minimize the value of his properties for tax purposes. Publicly, including in his presidential financial disclosure report, Trump’s team declares many of those same properties are worth tens of millions of dollars more.
+
+He’s fought tax collectors to lower the assessed values of his luxury golf courses in Briarcliff, N.Y., and Jupiter, Fla. Yet on his presidential financial disclosure report, he valued each at more than $50 million.
+
+USA TODAY’s examination of Trump’s track record as a business taxpayer found not just court actions, but dozens of additional tax disputes with local authorities that didn’t reach the courthouse in states including New York, Nevada, Florida and New Jersey. In some cases, Trump’s businesses have disputed tax assessments; in others, they have simply not paid the tax bill until after the government took additional action.
+
+In New York, for example, there are dozens of tax warrants against Trump businesses. Tax warrants are filed only after the state has exhausted all other options to collect what’s owed.
+
+“You have to ignore us to end up with a tax warrant,” said Geoff Gloak, spokesman for the state Department of Taxation and Finance. “We try to work with taxpayers to resolve the debt, long before it becomes a warrant.”
+
+If the tax warrant is ignored, the state can choose to take the matter to court – and in some cases has.
+
+In addition to the five tax warrants since his announcement, there are additional New York state tax warrants dating to the years before Trump became a candidate, including $1,580 in unpaid taxes in 2010 for Trump Mortgage, his failed mortgage venture, and $1,747 in unpaid taxes in early 2015 against Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, once known as the troubled Trump University, which was later paid.
+
+Alan Garten, general counsel to the Trump Organization, said he was unaware of the particulars of the tax warrant cases. He said disputes can arise over how one calculates sales-tax liabilities.
+
+“It happens all the time,” he said. “And some of the charges could have been mistaken.”
+
+Real estate developers often appeal assessments, and Morris Ellison, a commercial real estate tax attorney based in Charleston, S.C., said it’s difficult to compare one organization’s volume of property tax appeals vs. another’s.
+
+Garten said the companies do what any property owners have the right to do: challenge their property’s assessment to make sure they are fairly taxed.
+
+“We are a business, and we are in the business of making money,” he said. “Why should it be any different if we think the assessment is incorrect? It would be irresponsible if we didn’t. It’s got to be fair.”
+
+Trump has been particularly aggressive by any measure, acknowledging it’s part of his business strategy.
+
+“I fight like hell to pay as little as possible,” he said at a New York news conference announcing his own tax plan in September. “I fight like hell always, because it’s an expense. And you know, I feel ... and I fight. I have the best lawyers and the best accountants, and I fight, and I pay. But it’s an expense.”
+
+Trump’s boasts about his wealth have sometimes undercut his attempts to slash his taxes. In 1985, Trump scooped up Mar-a-Lago, the opulent estate built by Marjorie Merriweather Post in Palm Beach, Fla., for $10 million, bragging in his 1989 book, The Art of the Deal, that it was a sweet deal, worth far more than he paid. When the property was assessed at $11.5 million and later $17 million, Trump objected. Litigation dragged on until 1993 over the tax bills.
+
+A settlement hinged on Trump agreeing not to develop the Mar-a-Lago land into individual lots, said Jay Jacknin, outside counsel for Palm Beach County’s appraisal’s office. Last year, the county assessed the property at about $20 million — though Trump’s federal financial disclosure form values it at “more than $50 million.”
+
+Similarly, just up the road in Jupiter, Fla., Trump bought the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club and Spa in 2012 for a reported $5 million, then renovated it. For the past three years, his team has appealed the assessed value, of $13.7million as of 2015. In his financial disclosure forms, Trump claims that the course on 285 acres is worth “more than $50 million” and that it throws off more than $12 million in revenue.
+
+In Westchester County, N.Y., Trump has taken an aggressive approach toward the town of Ossining regarding the taxable value of Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor.
+
+The battle gained national prominence, after an investigation in September 2015 by The Journal News, which is part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, of the club’s audacious bid to slash its taxable value by 90%.
+
+Town Assessor Fernando Gonzalez valued the 140-acre complex at $14.3 million (a valuation since increased to $15.1 million) — but Trump’s team countered that it was worth $1.4 million. For perspective, a three-bedroom villa built at Trump National’s 16th hole on a separate tax parcel sold in 2005 for $2.4 million and was recently on the market for almost $2 million.
+
+Trump’s claimed value would slash the $471,000 in taxes he owes to the town, village county and its school district to $47,000.
+
+Residents are outraged. “What he’s claiming is way off,” said Briarcliff Manor homeowner Steve Cohen. “I see people playing there. The club looks fabulous. It certainly isn’t falling into disrepair.”
+
+The Trump team’s lowball valuation follows a pattern similar to other assessment battles. His camp’s estimate appears to be a mere opening bid in a negotiation.
+
+Trump’s attorney, Jeff Rodner, acknowledges that he is sure the property is worth more than the $1.4 million.
+
+“Maybe it’s worth $12 million, maybe $13 million,” Rodner told The Journal News. “Now, my value is my opinion until it’s proven otherwise.”
+
+The Briarcliff property is among 20 developments on Trump’s financial disclosure report that he values at “more than $50 million” — accounting for $1 billion of his net worth that Trump claims totals $10 billion.",REAL
+9554,Your dog probably has better healthcare than you do,"Below is a short email that my friend Sam posted this morning to his Facebook page about his surprisingly positive experience with the US healthcare system. 
+I thought it a fantastic read, and I wanted to pass it along to you: 
+I had to run to the emergency room today for what may be a neurological issue. Dizziness, staggering, loss of balance, that kind of thing. 
+I’m in San Diego, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and I have no insurance. I figured I was screwed. 
+But instead, the experience was unreal. 
+I got seen immediately. I didn’t even have time to sit down, they just whisked me into an examination room. 
+The doctor and nurse were ON IT, and they took their time with the exam and consultation. 
+The visit ultimately involved staying the whole day for observation, all kinds of tests, sedation and reversal, blood pressure check, a full blood panel work up (results tomorrow, yes TOMORROW keep your fingers crossed) and having both ears cleaned and flushed. 
+The bill was a mere $374.63. 
+Do I have some insane insurance plan? Nope. 
+Am I being super-subsidized by the rest of America? Nope. 
+Am I a privileged politician with a special “bosses only” healthcare plan? Don’t make me laugh. 
+It turns out that the care was for my dog, not for me. And we didn’t go to a ‘people’ hospital– I obviously took my dog to an animal hospital. 
+She and I are both biological machines, mammals made mostly of water (though she sheds more than I do). 
+The only other real difference is that the government is regulating the hell out of healthcare for people, while (relatively speaking), leaving healthcare for animals alone. 
+And that, my friends, is the reason Obamacare has flopped, and why your healthcare costs will keep going up. 
+It’s not greed. It’s not the drug companies. It’s not anything other than the application of government intervention in what should be a free market. 
+Simon again. 
+It’s not exactly controversial these days to suggest that the US healthcare system is in bad shape. 
+According to data collected by numerous independent agencies like the Institute of Medicine, Commonwealth Fund, and Kaiser Family Foundation, the US still ranks dead last among advanced economies in overall quality of its healthcare system. 
+In fact, the US healthcare system has the worst record in the number of deaths caused by mistakes or inefficient care. 
+And wait times in the US for urgent care and primary care visits rank lower than every other developed nation. 
+Americans pay at least 50% more for healthcare in terms of annual spending than people in other advanced nations, yet they receive less care as measured by the number of doctor visits. 
+Sure, it’s great that there are fewer uninsured people than ever before in the US, but this is a measure of QUANTITY, not a measure of QUALITY. 
+Undoubtedly the US is home to some of the finest medical professionals in the world. 
+But they’ve been buried under an expensive, over-regulated bureaucracy that continues to erode overall quality in the system. 
+A 2015 report from the National Academy of Sciences summed it up by stating, “For Americans, health care costs and expenditures are the highest in the world, yet health outcomes and care quality are below average by many measures.” 
+But instead of trying to understand WHY the system is so slow, bureaucratic, and expensive to begin with, politicians try to ‘fix’ it by creating more regulations. 
+It’s as if they believe they can legislate their way to a quality, efficient medical care system, just as they believe they can legislate their way to a better education system or economic prosperity. 
+This almost never works. 
+After all, the people who come up with these rules are notoriously unqualified and have rarely ever held a job outside of their giant government bureaucracy. 
+So despite what may be some very good intentions to fix the system, they invariably make things worse. 
+The end result is that your pet probably has access to more efficient healthcare than you do.",FAKE
+8925,Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Survey Finds That Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence,"in: Protestors & Activists , Special Interests , US News Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th? Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country. At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day… A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that. More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square. But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax… Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first. And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June … This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day. We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika. There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece… On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?” Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt. On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope. There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating. Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge. For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election… Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president. Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today … “Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election. Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another. Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 . If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then. And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month … As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be. But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome . Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House. Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it. Submit your review",FAKE
+5061,Historic firsts fill evening at Democratic National Convention,"Shattering the glass ceiling wasn't the only way historic firsts took the floor in Philadelphia Tuesday night, when the Democratic Party named Hillary Clinton as its presidential nominee.
+
+Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton addresses the Democratic National Convention via a live video feed from New York during the second night at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 26, 2016.
+
+With Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on the mic, addressing the crowds that thronged the Democratic National Convention hall in Philadelphia, history was made.
+
+“I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States,” Senator Sanders said. The crowd roared, the delegates ‘ayed,’ and Mrs. Clinton officially became the first woman to be nominated by a major political party for the position of president of the United States.
+
+Appearing on video from New York later Tuesday night, after a montage of the 43 men who have presided over the Oval Office filled the large screen overhead, Clinton thanked her party and the delegates for their role in helping her make “the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet.”
+
+Calling out to the American viewers, she said: “If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch, let me just say: I may become the first woman president, but one of you is next.”
+
+Clinton’s nomination comes 240 years into the existence of the United States of America and nearly a century after the Constitution was amended in 1919 to give women the right to vote. There were still state restrictions that continued to make it difficult for women (and men) of color to exercise that right into the 1960s.
+
+Her nomination was not the only precedent-setter at the convention. Tuesday night held echoes of both Clinton’s past roles and of the milestones reached by women in politics since they gained suffrage.
+
+The convention itself is being chaired by Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge, who has shattered her own share of glass ceilings. Ms. Fudge was both the first African-American and first female mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, a position she held from from 2000 to 2008. She is joined at the helm of the convention and the party by two other African-American women. Rev. Leah Daughtry, former chief of staff for the party's committee, is the chief executive officer of the convention for the second time, while Donna Brazile is the interim Democratic National Committee chair after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned last week, following an email scandal. Ms. Brazile became well-known in the party as Al Gore's campaign manager, the Washington Post reports.
+
+In an interview with NBCBLK in November, Reverend Daughtry said that this year’s convention, now underway, would be ""the most diverse and the most forward-looking convention that we've had in recent history.""
+
+The speaker line-up last night also included a fair share of ground-breakers. One of the senators who nominated Clinton during the state roll call was Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who said she was acting on behalf of ""all women who have broken down barriers for others."" Senator Mikulski herself was the the first Democratic woman to be elected to the Senate in 1987. Clinton held the role of senator for New York State between 2001 and 2009; the two women are among the group of 46 women to have ever held the role of US senator.
+
+Another of the evening’s speakers was Madeleine Albright. A distinguished diplomat, Ms. Albright was the country’s first female secretary of State, a position that Clinton held under Barack Obama, when she was the third woman in the job. Albright was selected for that role in 1996 by former President Bill Clinton.
+
+Mr. Clinton himself would break ground, were his wife to be elected to his former office, as both the first man in the role traditionally referred to as ""first lady"" and the first former president to hold that place. Mr. Clinton was the keynote speaker last night, offering a personal portrait of his wife to counter the narrative of corruption and scandal that has at times ensnared the campaign.
+
+Emphasizing his wife's history of activism, not just for women, but for socioeconomic and racial equality, Mr. Clinton called her the ""best darn changemaker I've met in my entire life."" She ""had done more positive change before she was 30 than many politicians do in a lifetime in office.""
+
+The theme of “firsts” will continue Wednesday night, on point for a party that distinguishes itself from the competition with a progressive agenda.
+
+This evening, President Obama, the first African-American president, will offer his support of Clinton. On Monday, she received the support of another historymaker, one who occupies another role Clinton herself once held: Michelle Obama, the nation's first African-American first lady.
+
+This report includes material from the Associated Press and Reuters.",REAL
+7953,Retired Bishop Explains Why The Catholic Church Invented Hell [Watch],"Without a doubt, religion is one of the more difficult topics to discuss. After all, the majority of wars that have taken place on this planet stem from religious differences. But when a retired... ",FAKE
+1146,"Cruz camp responds to Rubio Photoshop flap, brushes off criticism","Sen. Ted Cruz’s national spokesman Rick Tyler doubled-down on Friday following accusations that the campaign Photoshopped an image of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and President Obama.
+
+“Every picture in a political campaign is Photoshopped,” Tyler told Fox News. “It is absolutely true.”
+
+When pressed repeatedly by host Martha McCallum about why the campaign Photoshopped a picture of Rubio and Obama shaking hands in a picture on a website produced by the Cruz campaign, Tyler instead took aim at Rubio’s record.
+
+“Marco Rubio and Barack Obama have shaken hands. There are plenty of photos of him shaking hands,” he said. “If they don’t like the picture we picked, then send me a picture they like of Marco Rubio shaking hands with Barack Obama and we’ll swap it out.”
+
+The website, which features other digitally altered images of the Florida senator, offers visitors the chance to take a “stand against Rubio,” with a link to Ted Cruz’s get-out-the-vote site.
+
+""This is a disturbing pattern, they are making stuff up every day,"" Rubio told reporters Thursday.
+
+Rubio senior advisor Todd Harris said the body shown in the image in question is ""not Rubio.""
+
+“This person, we don’t know who that is, but they Photoshopped Marco’s face onto somebody else. This is how phony and how deceitful the Cruz campaign has become.”
+
+The campaign says the original image, apparently reversed, was from a stock photograph.",REAL
+6588,Will a No-Fly Zone Help the People of Aleppo?,"Email 
+Media coverage has recently been saturated with distressing scenes showing the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo, where aerial bombardment has led to a heavy loss of civilian life. The severity of the crisis instinctively makes us want to help – scores of protesters gathered outside the seat of the British prime minister on Saturday holding signs calling on the government to “Save Aleppo” and impose a “No-Bomb Zone Now”. While the anger is understandable, the way it is being channeled reflects a circumscribed policy debate – there are other options than a No-Fly Zone, which should be avoided as it would harm rather than help efforts to alleviate the suffering of Syrian civilians. 
+In any area of policy, the mainstream debate revolves around policy alternatives that reflect establishment divisions. For example, in economics, ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberalism, at least there wasn’t until Keynesianism was rediscovered by some elites after the 2008 crisis. The debate over what is to be done over Syria revolves around two policy alternatives: the hawks, including likely next U.S. president, Hillary Clinton, advocate a NFZ and the doves, including the current U.S. administration, maintain that the sanctions regime should be increased. This effectively reflects a division within the establishment on how to proceed. Serious policy alternatives are not discussed. In particular, discussion of increasing aid and support to refugees, surely the most obvious way of directly helping civilians in Syria, and what the UN has called on industrialized countries to do , is curious by its absence. 
+This circumscribed debate does not logically follow from its supposed pretext – stopping civilian loss of life. In fact, a NFZ is a policy that would unavoidably lead to civilians dying. Enforcing a NFZ means destroying air defenses, which are located to defend cities – i.e. they are located in areas where there are many civilians. Even the flagbearer for the hawks, Hillary Clinton, has admitted privately that with a No-Fly Zone “you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians”; such intervention will “take a lot of civilians”. This realization would seem inconsistent with the often-used humanitarian pretext, but it makes sense given Hillary Clinton’s recent admission that her top priority in Syria is removing Syrian President Assad. 
+There is a clear parallel with the imposition of a NFZ in Libya, which prolonged the conflict and worsened the situation for civilians. NATO bombing directly led to scores of civilian deaths and facilitated the overthrow of the regime by rebel militias that have killed, and are continuing to kill , thousands. Particularly repugnant was the ethnic cleansing of black people , including through public lynching . In a 2013 paper , Alan Kuperman, a Harvard academic, argued that NATO intervention extended the war by a factor of 6 and increased the death toll 7 to 10 times; given that Libya is now a failed state, torn apart by warlords, we can safely say that these estimates were too conservative. President Obama privately calls the situation in Libya a “ shit show ”. Only last month a report from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British Parliament found that the humanitarian justification was an insufficient pretext and based on falsehoods, the supposedly limited intervention led “ineluctably” to regime change, and that the (British) government, and by implication other participating Western powers, did not seriously consider diplomatic alternatives to military action. 
+Regardless, the mantra of Western foreign policy is “it will be different this time” – unlike all recent Western military interventions this one will be limited, successful and won’t leave a worse humanitarian situation in its wake. Although, if the dire humanitarian situation in Aleppo necessitates immediate action, then why are there not equally loud calls for action for civilians facing similar situations? U.S. bombing in Manbij and Kobane in Syria and Ramadi and Fallujah in Iraq has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and flattened entire neighbourhoods ; more than a third of US and UK backed Saudi airstrikes in Yemen have hit civilian sites, including schools , hospitals , weddings and funerals . 
+Talking about this is not meant as a distraction or relativization; the fact that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are engaged in similar activities does not make the bombing of Aleppo less objectionable. However, it does raise questions about the motives of those pushing so hard for a no-fly zone. If western foreign policy actors, and their allies in press, were motivated by humanitarian concerns, then surely stopping these atrocities should appear on the policy agenda – especially given that the action required is easier and does not risk war with Russia. 
+If humanitarian considerations were really the important factors in the foreign policy debate, then there would be discussion on the legitimacy of aerial bombardment of cities and towns, given that this invariably leads to civilian deaths. International agreements have been successful in making chemical and biological weapons illegal, a prohibition which is generally followed ( though not always ). The first well-publicized use of aerial bombardment, the Nazi bombing of Guernica in 1937, caused righteous, popular outrage. Tragically, however, its use became normalized during the Second World War and a ban on aerial bombing of cities was not included in the post-war international settlement. The fact that this seems so hopelessly idealistic reflects the fact that it is geopolitics, not humanitarian considerations, that govern international relations and foreign policy discussion; human suffering is nothing more than a useful pretext for whatever actions you want to take in order to secure geopolitical advantage. The U.S. and its allies want to remove Syria from Russia’s orbit, so therefore the dictator there must go, but airstrikes to support the dictator in Yemen are fine, because the dictator there is a friend of close U.S. ally Saudi Arabia. 
+There is an added complication with the NFZ in Syria in that it marks a return to Cold-War era brinkmanship and possible armed confrontation with Russia. The logic of brinkmanship runs that to make geopolitical gains, one must escalate to a level that will make the other side back down, partly by convincing your enemy you are ready to commit irrational acts. There is an inherent danger in this game: both states are nuclear armed and the consequences of a spiral of escalation could be devastating . 
+Syria hawks, or what close Obama aide Ben Rhodes called the “ pro-stupid shit ” caucus, argue that a NFZ will lead Russia to effectively back down: for example, Clinton argued that it will “give us leverage in our conversations with Russia”. (Interestingly, in the exchange this quote from Clinton indicated the war goal: a NFZ will make Russia “put the Assad future on the political and diplomatic track” – i.e. Russia will be forced to accept regime change.) After all, despite the panic in the press, Russia is actually a feeble successor state to a superpower, and would come off worse in a direct conflict with the preeminent might of North America, or so the logic runs. 
+However, ‘dovish’ Western foreign policy actors point to the danger that advanced Russian materiel support to Syria poses to the enforcement of a NFZ. Unlike other recent U.S. military adventures, enforcing a NFZ in Syria could lead to significant, and politically unpalatable, American casualties – pilots will be shot down. This realization means that saner establishment figures are opposed to a NFZ. For example, U.S. Army General Carter Ham, who oversaw the NFZ in Libya, said a NFZ is a “violent combat action that results in lots of casualties and increased risk to our own personnel”. 
+Instead, relative doves like current Secretary of State John Kerry advocate intensifying the sanctions regime against Syria and Russia. Again, this does not seem to be seriously about helping civilians. A leaked UN report has revealed that the existing Western sanctions regime is preventing humanitarian aid and creating a humanitarian disaster that threatens to rival that caused by the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq during the 1990s. The history of sanctions tends to show that the costs are borne by civilians, and a Petersen Institute study of all sanctions incidents since WWII shows that sanctions failed to achieve their goals in about ⅔ of cases, and are even less successful when applied against enemies and autocrats. 
+So, what is to be done? What should people in the West and globally push for to help the people of Syria? Unfortunately, there do not seem to be any quick fixes – the situation in Syria is complex and involves diverse actors, with competing interests. Immediate relief to the refugees fleeing the conflict should be a priority. In terms of foreign policy, campaigning for de-escalation and diplomacy against constant militarism remain the best solutions for the Syrian people, and humanity generally.",FAKE
+9586,"Experts Recommend Breaking Down Crushing Defeats Into Smaller, More Manageable Failures - The Onion - America's Finest News Source","Experts Recommend Breaking Down Crushing Defeats Into Smaller, More Manageable Failures Close Vol 50 Issue 20 · Lifestyle 
+SANTA BARBARA, CA—Offering advice to those who feel overwhelmed at the thought of becoming massive failures, a group of experts reported this week that the best way to approach a crippling defeat is to break it down into a set of smaller and more manageable setbacks. “The key to failing on a monumental scale is to take life one small misstep at a time,” life coach Jack V. Royce told reporters, emphasizing that people who hit absolute rock bottom seldom get there overnight. “Just start with a couple of minor fuckups and then build off that. It’s all about working through your long, humiliating downward spiral in workable increments: botch this, flub that, make a wreck of something else—and then, before you know it, you’re well on your way to being totally screwed.” Royce added that it’s also helpful every now and then to stop, take stock of your situation, and really beat yourself up about it. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
+Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
+6299,"Comment on Score one for the Second Amendment: Pizza Hut worker shoots, kills attempted robber by lynnmccrann","Posted on November 1, 2016 by DCG | 1 Comment 
+A good DRT* ending. 
+From Fox News : A Pizza Hut employee shot and killed a man during an attempted armed robbery after hours at the store early Sunday morning in west Charlotte, N.C., according to Charlotte Mecklenburg Police. 
+Officers were called about 1:38 a.m. to the Pizza Hut to a report of shooting and arrived to find Michael Renard Grace with a gunshot wound. 
+Grace was pronounced dead on scene. 
+According to police , three people entered the restaurant and were in the process of robbing the business when one of the employees fired his own personal handgun at one of the suspects . 
+Investigators said a handgun was recovered at the scene that was being carried by the robbery suspect at the time he was shot. 
+The other two robbery suspects fled the scene on foot and have not yet been apprehended. 
+*Dead Right There",FAKE
+10314,War on Drugs Heading in Wrong Direction?,"License DMCA My guest today is Maya Schenwar, Truthout's editor-in-chief, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better , and co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do you Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States . Joan Brunwasser: Welcome back to OpEdNews, Maya. We last spoke back in January, 2015. Now, I'd like to discuss your recent piece: Death Penalty for Heroin Dealers? More Proof the Drug War Is Not Over . Who thought the drug war was over in the first place and why? - Advertisement - Maya Schenwar: There has been a shift in mainstream politics toward condemning the drug war, and for good reason. It has done nothing to stem drug misuse, and meanwhile it has resulted in the criminalization and incarceration of millions of people, overwhelmingly Black and Brown people. With countless studies demonstrating its ""failure"" (I put this in quotes because I don't think the drug war was actually devised to help people in the first place), politicians who defend it end up looking pretty bad. So the current line is to say it's in the past, and that we have a new approach to drugs going forward. The Obama administration, many state governments, and even conservative politicians (including the ""Right on Crime"" crowd) have said that we need to leave behind the old war on drugs. In February, Eric Holder said the drug war is ""over,"" and Obama increasingly talks about treating drug-related issues as ""public health problems"" instead of criminal problems. JB: How does that change anything: the disproportionate numbers of minority members locked up for possession, more single moms incarcerated for the same, families split up and minors left with no parent at home? Are they, then, opening the prison gates and saying, ""We were wrong. This was all a big mistake; it didn't work and we diverted and wasted billions of dollars that could have been used to good purpose. And we ruined your lives for nothing. Oops. Sorry.""? MS: No, no one is opening the prison gates, unfortunately! There are some limited steps being taken toward scaling back drug-war-related incarceration. For example, Obama has issued hundreds of commutations to people serving super-long drug sentences. Some states have taken steps to reduce some very low-level drug offenses to misdemeanors instead of felonies, which means people are a lot less likely to be incarcerated for them. (California's Proposition 47 is an example of this, although the emphasis on ""low-level offenses"" has actually entrenched the idea that people should be severely punished for ""higher-level offenses.) - Advertisement - Obviously, in a number of states, marijuana is being decriminalized, and some are legalizing it. However, that doesn't mean there are no longer marijuana arrests -- in fact, an ACLU study released recently showed there were more marijuana possession arrests last year than arrests for all violent crimes. The study also showed that Black people are still disproportionately arrested in far greater numbers than white people, despite using marijuana at about the same rate as white people. JB: How do we understand this, Maya? Beyond being convinced that the whole penal system is seriously screwed up, what's the point of increased marijuana arrests? Is this a last gasp effort or at least partly to fill up jail cells and local or private prison coffers? MS: There wasn't an increase in marijuana arrests overall last year; there was a decrease. But obviously it was a small decrease, given that there was a larger number of possession arrests than all violent crime arrests. I don't think it's about filling private prison coffers. Ultimately, prisons are expensive for states, and I don't actually see money as a primary motivator to incarcerate people. Until we challenge criminality itself -- and challenge the white supremacy that underlies the US's version of criminality -- we won't be done with large-scale incarceration. We have to understand incarceration by looking at how people are being labeled as disposable and as ""dangerous,"" and how those things are racialized. Whether it's marijuana possession or something else, there will always be a convenient ""crime"" with which to charge Black and Brown people unless white supremacy itself is confronted. We also have to think about ableism, transmisogyny, patriarchy, economic injustice, capitalism -- really confronting the structures that make it possible for our society to lock millions of people in cages. If we look at the drug war through this lens, we understand that's it's not some stand-alone entity; it's one tool deployed by a larger power structure that continually targets marginalized people in order to keep itself going. JB: Good point. Does the fact that the penal dysfunction is part of a larger overarching dysfunction make it easier or harder to improve it? And what's ableism? I don't know that I'm familiar with that term. MS: I think the fact that it's part of an overarching structural problem means that it can't really been improved, per se -- it really has to be uprooted. I wouldn't say that can happen extremely easily; it's more a goal to move toward while making incremental changes. Ableism is the structural oppression against and devaluation of people with disabilities. One of the ways it plays out in relation to prison is the extremely high level of incarceration of people with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities. 'Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better' by Maya Schenwar(image by Berrett-Koehler Publishers) License DMCA JB: Quite true. I believe much of that shift occurred when President Reagan ""reallocated"" resources, closing many state mental hospitals and dumping the patients onto the streets and the unprepared public. And we've been paying the price, one way or another, ever since. What haven't we talked about yet? MS: There's of course much more to talk about, but we have to end things somewhere, right? One thing I'd caution people against is assuming that the automatic alternative to incarceration for people convicted of drug offenses should be drug treatment. First of all, most people arrested for drug offenses aren't dependent on drugs (most people who use drugs are not dependent on them); there are safe ways to use drugs and we have to challenge laws that stigmatize their use.",FAKE
+9648,"It Begins: Crowds Mass In Major Cities: DC, LA, NYC, Philly, Portland, More… | Will It Escalate? | “95% Chance Of Widespread Violence”","(Live Streams Available Below) 
+Anti-Trump protesters are massing all over the country at this moment. Thousands of angry people in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Portland, New York and Los Angeles. The New York Times reports that crowds have been peaceful thus far:
+Protesters claim they are there to reject Donald’s Trump racist policies and some say they fear mass deportations under a Trump Presidency.
+The anxiety began to build on social media this morning as scores of people called for protests, revolution and open threats to kill President Elect Donald Trump .
+In the build up to November 8th we warned that the situation post-election, regardless of who wins, could quickly escalate into open warfare and Mike Adams of Natural News warned of a 95% chance of widespread post-election violence .
+With large-scale protests now brewing in major cities across the country, we believe it is only a matter of time before some or all of these forecasts could come to fruition. Should things turn violent, though not confirmed by official sources, the Obama administration is prepared to respond. An insider leak last month indicated that the Federal government, including the military and the Department of Homeland Security, would be holding drills before and after the election in which they anticipate “no rule of law.” Such drills, should it be necessary, could very quickly go real-world.
+In such a scenario a lock-down of major cities following widespread rioting would be the likely course of action.
+There is a strong possibility that protests will be ongoing and that they may escalate. We encourage readers to take preventative measures by preparing for breakdown with a an easy to implement preparedness plan and necessary emergency stockpiles that may include food, water, self defense and protective breathing masks (for those who find themselves too close to the action for comfort) . 
+Live Streams (Some of these streams may become unavailable as the night progresses): 
+
+
+Related: 
+The Prepper’s Blueprint: A Step-By-Step Guide To Prepare For Any Disaster 
+Tactical Gas Masks and Filters 
+Riots, Flag Burning And Open “Threats to Kill Trump” Follow Hillary’s Election Loss 
+“This Quickly Escalates Into Open Warfare” – Why The Government Is Preparing For Post-Election Chaos 
+Unrest and Martial Law? Leaked Military Drill Anticipates “No Rule of Law” After Election Results 
+Prepping for a Full On Breakdown? Stockpile These Foods ",FAKE
+9437,Hillary Fan SLEEPS At Rally! Snoozy Smurf Steals Show! (ABC News) Coconut Creek FLA,"Posted on October 26, 2016 by Barry Soetoro, Esq Published on Oct 26, 2016 by Barry Soetoro HILLARY SUPPORTER (PAID OR UNPAID?) SLEEPS THRU HILLARY’S RALLY IN COCONUT CREEK, FLA. UNFORTUNATELY, THIS SNOOZING FAN IS POSITIONED OVER HILLARY’S SHOULDER ON LIVE TV. 
+NOBODY COMES TO HILLARY CLINTON RALLIES — BECAUSE SHE’S BORING AND MENTALLY ILL. WHO WANTS TO WATCH A COMMUNIST WITH DEMENTIA SCREECH ABOUT ROADS AND BRIDGES? 
+HILLARY HAS FINALLY EMERGED FROM HIDING, JUST IN TIME TO STEAL ELECTION 2016 VIA VOTER FRAUD. BUT WILL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BELIEVE SHE “WON” AFTER SEEING HILLARY’S PATHETIC TINY RALLY CROWDS? BEFORE SHE RIGS THE ELECTION, SHE’D BETTER DO A BETTER JOB RIGGING HER RALLIES. 
+HILLARY’S EYEBALL GONE WILD:",FAKE
+9444,"Neighbors Smell Smoke At Muslim Home, What They See In Window Is Horrific","Share This Abdul Barati, a 43-yera-old Afghan migrant, was arrested after investigators noticed something sinister about his house fire. 
+When neighbors awoke to strange noises and the smell of smoke coming from a Muslim family’s house, they quickly rushed over to see what was happening. However, as soon as they looked in the window, they immediately notified the authorities of the unspeakable horror they witnessed. 
+No matter what heinous crimes Muslims commit, there is always a leftist more concerned with preserving the already unsalvageable reputation of the religion that demands their submission. So, when a Muslim man carried out his gruesome plans in the middle of a suburban neighborhood in Australia, his neighbors were “shocked” to find that an adherent of the world’s most deadly religion could be so barbaric. 
+The Daily Telegraph reports that Sydney residents awoke at 3:35 a.m. on October 18 to blood-curdling screams and thick smoke filling the air. They rushed outside to find Abdul Barati, a 43-year-old Afghan migrant, using water from a tap in a half-hearted attempt to extinguish a massive blaze tearing through his home. Instantly, their eyes were drawn to the bedroom window where his wife, 30-year-old Adelah, was banging on the pane and screaming in agony as she slowly burned to death. 
+Desperately scrambling to save her life, neighbors told Abdul that they were going to try to help get his wife out of the house. Almost nonchalantly, he told them everything was “fine” and that he didn’t need their assistance except to call the fire department. It was not long after horrified residents were forced to watch the last few seconds of Abelah’s life that they realized this was all part of Abdul’s plan. 
+After the fire department quenched the flames, Abdul was arrested and charged with murder. Investigators quickly discovered that the migrant had locked his young wife in their bedroom, removed their 6-year-old and 9-year-old sons, and set the property on fire, the Daily Mail reports. Abdul then pretended to fight the blaze as petrified onlookers watched his poor wife burn to death. Even more appalling is that the two children were also on the front lawn watching their mother engulfed in flames. Neighbors and the Baratis’ two young sons, aged 6 and 9, helplessly watched Adelah burn to death through the bedroom window. 
+“There’s a lady screaming, but when my husband arrived to wake her up the screaming stopped already,” Manni Chen told Channel 9, according to News.com.au . “My husband tried to help the man, he said ‘do you need help?’ he said ‘no, no, no, just call the fire station’ and then my husband said ‘let the two kids get out’ and the man said ‘no we are fine.’ The man tried to use a water tap to get the fire down, but he just told my husband call the fire station.” 
+We expect liberal apologists to come out in full force, either excusing this behavior as the fault of “mental illness” or blatantly denying its ties to Islam. Of course, if this had happened in a Sharia country instead of Australia, things would play out much differently. 
+Earlier this month, a Pakistani Muslim father pardoned himself for the murder of his daughter after the Sharia court found him guilty of honor killing the young woman. In accordance with the country’s Islamic law, Faqeer Muhammad was granted acquittal after shooting and killing Kiran Bibi and Ghulam Abbas for their unapproved relationship, according to the Daily Pakistan . 
+According to the Sharia legislature, a murderer can be completely pardoned of his crime if the family of the victim forgives and excuses them. In many cases such as this, the family members are able to pardon themselves for killing their dishonorable kin. 
+“The deceased, Kiran Bibi, was my real daughter. She was a spinster at the time of her murder. There are no other legal heirs of the deceased except her mother, Bushra Bibi, and me,” Muhammad told the court. “I have forgiven the accused persons in the name of Almighty Allah, and have no objection to their acquittal. I also waive my right of Qisas (retribution) and Diyat (blood money).” 
+Although legislation passed in 2015 outlaws the pardoning of murderers in honor killings, Islamic law reigns supreme in Pakistan, still allowing many Muslim killers to walk scot-free. 
+Further proving the violent nature of Islam, fathers who murder their own children without a good Islamic reason are given more brutal sentences. At the same time as Muhammad was pardoning himself, Khalid Mehmood was sentenced to death for killing his 12-year-old daughter for not being able to make perfect bread. If only Mehmood would’ve told the court that he murdered the child for cursing Allah, he could’ve pardoned himself as well. 
+Good Muslims cannot coexist anywhere in the world because as long as they are trying to follow their religion, they must call for the destruction of all other laws, religions, and cultures until their ideology reigns supreme. It’s nothing short of incredible that so many Westerners still find it shocking when they do just what the Quran commands.",FAKE
+1027,Ben Carson Throws Support Behind Donald Trump,"Retired nuerosurgeon and former presidential candidate Ben Carson has formally endorsed Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for president.
+
+Carson, who dropped out of the race last week, made the announcement alongside Trump at Mar-a-Largo on Friday, the billionaire's luxury club in Palm Beach.
+
+""I have found that, in talking with him, that there's a lot more alignment philosophically and spiritually than I ever thought there was,"" Carson said during a press conference announcing his endorsement.
+
+""It's about 'we the people.' We need to empower the people,"" Carson said in response to a question about his decision. ""That is not going to be done through politics as usual, be that Republican politics as usual, or be that Democrat politics as usual.""
+
+""It requires somebody who's a bit of an iconoclast but someone who has the ability to listen and to make wise decisions,"" Carson said at the news conference, referring to why he endorsed Trump.
+
+During Thursday night's GOP presidential debate, Trump confirmed the two spent time together earlier Thursday and discussed education and how to improve schools.
+
+Citing sources close to Carson, the Washington Post reported he and Trump met in Palm Beach, earlier Thursday and reached an agreement.
+
+""I hope that we can bridge the gap with everybody,"" Carson said. ""All the policies that I have ever talked about -- and Mr. Trump is going to be on board with this, too -- we talk about things that are good for everybody, not for this group or that group.""
+
+""We will be looking at ways to do things that benefit all Americans that create an equal playing field -- equality of opportunity -- that's what we're looking for,"" he continued.
+
+One source said Carson had been torn between Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, but opted to support Trump because of a rumor circulated ahead of the Iowa caucuses by the Cruz campaign that Carson had dropped out of the race.
+
+In an interview with Fox News Radio's ""John Gibson Show"" Thursday, Carson was asked whether he was planning to join the Trump campaign.
+
+""Let's put it this way, I'm certainly leaning,"" he said earlier, adding that there are ""two Donald Trumps"" - the one seen on television and the one he's gotten to know behind the scenes.",REAL
+9560,The Middle East Crises Trump Inherits Could Still Suck Him in,"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+‘Make America Great Again’ was the slogan of Donald Trump’s election, but the immediate impact of his victory is to make the US less of a power in the world for two reasons: American prestige and influence will be damaged by a general belief internationally that the US has just elected a dangerous buffoon as its leader. The perception is pervasive, but is not very deeply rooted and likely be temporary, stemming as it does from Trump’s demagogic rants during the election campaign. Those about relations with foreign countries were particularly vague and least likely to provide a guide to future policy. 
+More damaging in the long term for America’s status as superpower is the likelihood that the US is now a more deeply divided society than ever. Trump won the election by demonising and threatening individuals and communities – Mexicans, Muslims, Latinos – and his confrontational style of politics is not going to disappear. Verbal violence produces a permanently over-heated political atmosphere in which physical violence becomes an option. At the same time, the election campaign was focused almost exclusively on American domestic politics with voters showing little interest in events abroad. This is unlikely to change. 
+Governments around the world can see this for themselves, though this will not stop them badgering their diplomats in Washington and New York for an inkling as to how far Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks were more than outrageous attempts to dominate the news agenda for a few hours. Fortunately, his pronouncements were so woolly that they can be easily jettisoned between now and his inauguration. Real foreign policy positions will only emerge with the formation of a Trump cabinet when it becomes clear who will be in charge. 
+But, if future policies remain unknowable, super-charged American nationalism combined with economic populism and isolationism are likely to set the general tone. Trump has invariably portrayed Americans as the victims of the foul machinations of foreign countries who previously faced no real resistance from an incompetent self-serving American elite. 
+This sort of aggressive nationalism is not unique to Trump. All over the world nationalism is having a spectacular rebirth in countries from Turkey to the Philippines. It has become a successful vehicle for protest in Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe. Though Trump is frequently portrayed as a peculiarly American phenomenon, his populist nationalism has a striking amount in common with that of the Brexit campaigners in Britain or even the chauvinism of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Much of this can be discounted as patriotic bombast, but in all cases there is a menacing undercurrent of racism and demonisation, whether it is directed against illegal immigrants in the US, asylum seekers in the Britain or Kurds in south east Turkey. 
+In reality, Trump made very few proposals for radical change in US foreign policy during the election campaign, aside from saying that he would throw out the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme – though his staff is now being much less categorical about this, saying only that the deal must be properly enforced. Nobody really knows if Trump will deal any differently from Obama with the swathe of countries between Pakistan and Nigeria where there are at least seven wars raging – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and South Sudan – as well as four serious insurgencies. 
+The most serious wars in which the US is already militarily involved are in Iraq and Syria and here Trump’s comments during the campaign suggest that he will focus on destroying Isis, recognise the danger of becoming militarily over-involved and look for some sort of cooperation with Russia as the next biggest player in the conflict. This is similar to what is already happening. 
+Hillary Clinton’s intentions in Syria, though never fully formulated, always sounded more interventionist than Trump’s. One of her senior advisers openly proposed giving less priority to the assault on Isis and more to getting rid of President Bashar al-Assad. To this end, a third force of pro-US militant moderates was to be raised that would fight and ultimately defeat both Isis and Assad. Probably this fantasy would never have come to pass, but the fact that it was ever given currency underlines the extent to which Clinton was at one with the most dead-in-the-water conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment in Washington. 
+President Obama developed a much more acute sense of what the US could and could not do in the Middle East and beyond, without provoking crises exceeding its political and military strength. Its power may be less than before the failed US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan following 9/11, but it is still far greater than any other country’s. Currently, it is the US which is successfully coordinating the offensive against Isis’s last strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa by a multitude of fractious parties in Iraq and Syria. It was never clear how seriously one should have taken Clinton’s proposals for “safe zones” and trying to fight Isis and Assad at the same time, but her judgements on events in the Middle East since the Iraq invasion of 2003 all suggested a flawed idea of what was feasible. 
+Trump’s instincts generally seem less well-informed but often shrewd, and his priories have nothing to do with the Middle East. Past US leaders have felt the same way, but they usually end up by being dragged into its crises one way or other, and how they perform then becomes the test of their real quality as a leader. The region has been the political graveyard for three of the last five US presidents: Jimmy Carter was destroyed by the consequences of the Iranian revolution; Ronald Reagan was gravely weakened by the Iran-Contra scandal; and George W Bush’s years in office will be remembered chiefly for the calamities brought on by his invasion of Iraq. Barack Obama was luckier and more sensible, but he wholly underestimated the rise of Isis until it captured Mosul in 2014. (Reprinted from The Independent by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+5237,"Clinton and Trump: How they view ISIS, Putin, and US generals","Donald Trump praised Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton defended her 2003 vote for war in Iraq in a televised Q&A Wednesday on national security.
+
+Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, with 'Today' show co-anchor Matt Lauer, left, speaks at the NBC Commander-In-Chief Forum held at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space museum aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier Intrepid, New York, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016.
+
+Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton confronted their key weaknesses in a televised national security forum, with the Republican defending his preparedness to be commander in chief despite vague plans for tackling global challenges and the Democrat arguing that her controversial email practices did not expose questionable judgment.
+
+Mr. Trump also renewed his praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his disdain for President Barack Obama, saying that the Russian enjoyed an 82 percent approval rating. ""The man has very strong control over a country,"" Trump said. ""It's a very different system and I don't happen to like the system, but certainly, in that system, he's been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.""
+
+Speaking to reporters in Laos, Obama said Thursday that Trump confirms his belief that Trump isn't qualified to be president ""every time he speaks"" and added: ""The most important thing for the public and the press is to just listen to what he says and follow up and ask questions to what appear to be either contradictory or uninformed or outright wacky ideas.""
+
+Trump and Mrs. Clinton spoke back-to-back Wednesday night, each fielding 30 minutes of questions. While the candidates never appeared on stage together, the session served as a preview of sorts for their highly-anticipated presidential debates.
+
+By virtue of a coin flip, Clinton took the stage first and quickly found herself responding at length to questions about her years in government. She reiterated that she had made mistakes in relying on a personal email account and private server as secretary of State and in voting for the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a senator. But she defended her support for U.S. military intervention to help oust a dictator in Libya, despite the chaotic aftermath.
+
+""I'm asking to be judged on the totality of my record,"" said Clinton, who grew visibly irritated at times with the repeated focus on her past actions.
+
+Clinton, who has cast Trump as dangerously ill-prepared to be commander in chief, tried to center the discussion on her foreign policy proposals. She vowed to defeat the Islamic State group ""without committing American ground troops"" to Iraq or Syria. And she pledged to hold weekly Oval Office meetings with representatives from the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs to stay abreast of health care for veterans.
+
+Trump did little to counter the criticism that he lacks detailed policy proposals, particularly regarding the Islamic State group. He both insisted he has a private blueprint for defeating the extremist group and that he would demand a plan from military leaders within 30 days of taking office.
+
+But he was also harshly critical of the military, saying America's generals have been ""reduced to rubble"" under Obama. Asked to square his request for military options with that criticism, Trump said simply: ""They'll probably be different generals.""
+
+Trump stood by a previous comment that appeared to blame military sexual assaults on men and women serving together, but added he would not seek to remove women from the military. And for the first time, he opened the door to granting legal status to people living in the U.S. illegally who join the military.
+
+""I think that when you serve in the armed forces, that's a very special situation,"" Trump said. ""And I could see myself working that out.""
+
+The Republican also repeated an incorrect claim that he was opposed to the war with Iraq before the invasion. That assertion is contradicted by an interview Trump did with Howard Stern in September 2002 in which he was asked whether he supported the invasion. He replied, ""Yeah, I guess so.""
+
+With just two months until Election Day, national security has emerged as a centerpiece issue in the White House race. Both candidates believe they have the upper hand, with Clinton contrasting her experience with Trump's unpredictability and the Republican arguing that Americans worried about their safety will be left with more of the same if they elect Obama's former secretary of State.
+
+This event – and the upcoming presidential debates – could be particularly important in the closing days of this election. As The Christian Science Monitor reports, this year an unusually large percentage of the electorate says it hasn’t made up its mind, or will vote for a third-party candidate. That’s a big chunk of folks who might swing in one way or another when the pressure of choosing on Election Day actually nears.
+
+For instance, Wall Street Journal/NBC polling shows 13 percent of voters undecided in 2016. The corresponding figure from this time in 2012 was 8 percent.
+
+“We are seeing a historically high number of potential voters who aren’t committing to either major party candidate at this point,” writes Middlebury College political science professor Matthew Dickinson on his“Presidential Power” blog.
+
+While GOP candidates are often seen by voters as having an advantage on military and national security issues, Trump is far from a traditional Republican. He has no military experience and has repeatedly criticized the skill of the armed forces.
+
+A flood of Republican national security experts have instead chosen to back Clinton, helping bolster her case that Trump is broadly unacceptable. Earlier Wednesday, former Defense Secretary William Cohen joined the list of GOP officials supporting Clinton.
+
+Ahead of the forum, Trump rolled out a new plan to boost military spending by tens of billions of dollars, including major increases in the number of active troops, fighter planes, ships and submarines.
+
+His address earlier in the day included plans to eliminate deep spending cuts known as the ""sequester"" that were enacted when Congress failed to reach a budget compromise in 2011. Republicans and Democrats voted for the automatic, across-the board cuts that affected both military and domestic programs, though the White House has long pressed Congress to lift the spending limits.
+
+Trump expressed support for the sequester in interviews in 2013 — even describing them as too small — but seemed to suggest at the time that military spending should be exempt.
+
+Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Erica Werner in Washington and Jonathan Lemire in New York contributed to this report.",REAL
+8133,John Kirby and the US State Department Blatantly Support Terrorists - Henry Kamens,"John Kirby and the US State Department Blatantly Support Terrorists 
+Kirby and the State Department serve as apologists and white-washers for barbarism Originally appeared at New Eastern Outlook 
+The US government, together with the MSM, blatantly supports terrorists. The nexus between politicians, terrorism and the media is well known to the intelligence community. However these links and cozy connections are usually written off as mere coincidence. We are told that the arms and funding which they illegally receive are but an accidental by-product of supporting “freedom fighters,” and that no one planned for these groups to be transformed into terrorist organisations. 
+This is but the tip of the iceberg as nowadays Radical Islamists are now just considered as rebels by the main stream media or described as “spoilers” by the US State Department, whose main spokesman, John Kirby just recently referred to Al-Nusra in East Aleppo as a spoiler to the ceasefire in Syria . 
+The way the US government and the MSM support terrorists is nothing that should come as any surprise. And this is not accidental, because a specific spokesperson has been appointed to run this media spin operation. 
+Meet John Kirby – the man who will call terrorism by anything other than what it is 
+Retired Rear Admiral Kirby is the official US State Department Spokesperson. He is a graduate of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, rather than the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, and holds degrees in history, international relations, national security and strategic studies. He has worked in information-based roles throughout his armed forces career, though usually speaking to the goverment rather than the public, and the steady, year-on-year increases in US military spending show he has been very effective in this role. 
+Kirby was once a Pentagon spokesman. He used to be a Pentagon spokesman, well positioned to present sensitive information in non-controversial packages for mass public consumption. The Pentagon is hardly likely to tell us the truth about the things the public should be interested in: rows between generals, unauthorised or illegal actions or what the generals really think about the politicians they serve. But it has a press service regardless, so has to turn all that into something benign and equally interesting, as far as security clearance will allow. 
+This is why, under Kirby’s direction, radical Islamist groups which commit acts which meet any definition of terrorism, even if you agree with their cause, are now referred to simply as “rebels” by the mainstream media, or “spoilers” by the State Department. Listen to this example: Kirby referring to Al-Nusra as a “spoiler” to the ceasefire in East Aleppo . 
+He also has a neat trick for minimising terrorism: he refers to Daesh by the silly name Dash, a word Americans are familiar with from athletics, which conjures up images of educated young people in running gear rather than hooded terrorists murdering, beheading and marauding. His statements about Dash are really questionable. 
+People probably think they are funny, what about those families of the beheaded people and those killed by ISIS, would they find it funny? It is sick. Readers should be disgusted with Kirby. 
+Perhaps these guys think they have the terrorists controlled and managed. However when you tell the public we are at war with radical Islamists, and Al Nusra and others are on the terrorist watch list, why are these “national security experts” allowed to give them the a pass as if allies? The key is that we have allies that are radical Islamists who have attacked us and lots of others. Those allies are supporting the conflict in Syria . 
+Western governments are always telling their public that we are at war with radical Islamists, and that Al Nusra and other groups are designated terrorists and will be eliminated (they are on a kill list). All kinds of actions are taken in the name of fighting terrorism, and Western soldiers are sent to die in faraway places doing it. 
+So why is Kirby, presented as a “national security expert”, allowed to talk about them as if they are cuddly allies, or so insignificant that they are hardly worth the billions being spent fighting them? 
+Terratwitter army 
+Wars are by definition controversial, and always attract comment. Everyone has an opinion about a given conflict, and an important point, as they see it, to make. So there is always an endless stream of people who could be called upon to comment in the media. The only way to give any credibility to the contributor chosen is to present them as having some particular qualification, and Kirby’s title unquestionably gives him one. 
+There will also be those up close to the action who disagree with anything Kirby says, including many of the troops the State Department has sent to fight in these conflicts. However there is more than one way to skin a cat. 
+If Homeland Security wants to track down some actual terrorists then they should look at the source of Twitter feeds, and you will find all shapes and forms, many are members of the Islamist Front. It is clear that even some very prominent main stream journalists are actually supporting “rebels” by engaging with them in these learned exchanges. 
+Have you ever noticed how certain articles and statements attract a large number of comments saying the same thing? These are allegedly from members of the public, and therefore by inference “neutral”, the response of the man or woman in the street rather than an interested party. However this “vox pop” system is easy to manipulate, and there is plenty of evidence this is actually happening.. 
+Many of the Twitter feeds and comments about conflicts involving terrorists, allegedly from “the general public”, are actually from members of the Islamic Front, and can be traced back to them. One example is the Twitter account Monther@amirramzi. Yet mainstream journalists do not call these individuals out as such. They engage with them as if they are impartial observers whose observations prove the points made in their articles, which the commenters just happen to have read, amongst the dozens available at any given time, when they have plenty of other things to do with their lives. 
+A State Department Spokesman has a long reach. You have to have a lot of weapons in place to take on the Pentagon, even in a verbal battle. Are we to believe that all these journalists are working with the Islamic Front independently, without help from above? 
+Too good for their own good 
+No one wants to live under a repressive regime. Consequently it is very easy to convey the notion that a “rebel” is simply a decent person fighting against injustice, as every individual likes to think they themselves are. People tend to make this connection without looking any deeper, and it takes a lot more effort than most casual observers are willing to make to go into the details of any conflict, and build a counter-narrative to the one presented by the mainstream media. 
+The term “rebel” is used to cover all kinds of combatants in Syria. It includes both the “moderate opposition” and self-avowed terrorists. In order to make this fiction stand up, a lot of claims need to be made and a lot of things not reported, as they would counter the picture of a homogenous group of decent people taking a stand which is so obvious it does not need to be explained. 
+It is rarely reported that the moderate opposition was persuaded to reject a UN plan to kick out Al Nusra, who are as much a threat to the ambitions of the moderate opposition as the Syrian government is. The opposition to Assad is now forcibly led by the terrorists the West claims to be fighting, because the more moderate forces have been subjected to it by the same West. This is why Kirby refers to Daesh as Dash – he is implying that the moderate forces are fully in agreement with it, and this somehow makes it something other than a terrorist group, in the same way Al Qaeda has been partially rehabilitated by saying its name over and over again until it becomes as familiar as breakfast to the reading public. 
+Similarly the word “Christian” is bandied about for an American audience which is increasingly influenced by the religious right which mushroomed as a backlash to failed liberalism. Kirby and his assistants claim that Christians are being persecuted by Assad the Muslim, without going into exactly who is meant by “Christians”, and what the ramifications of holding that faith are. 
+Most Syrian Christians describe themselves as Orthodox, but they are split into two very different groups. One is under the Patriarchate of Antioch, based in Damascus, and the other is under either the Jacobite Syrian church or the Nestorian Assyrian church, which have been outside the mainstream Orthodox communion since the 5th century. Politically these are very different animals – the Church of Antioch uses Arabic in its services as part of a deal with the state for protection, whereas the Syrians generally use Syriac and the Nestorians Aramaic. Nor do they receive the same protection, being treated as suspicious minorities by the Syrian state. 
+It is this which lies behind the kidnapping and ongoing detention of two bishops, the Syrian Church’s Archbishop John Ibrahim and the Church of Antioch’s Metropolitan Paul Yazigi, who have been held by ISIS since 2013. This is intended to convey the idea that all Christians are the same, and all must therefore hate Assad. We are told that the whereabouts of these two bishops are unknown, but we were told the same about Terry Waite, the Church of England peace envoy who was held captive in Beirut for five years by the Islamic Jihad Organisation. 
+On that occasion, with all the sophisticated weapons targeting systems and intelligence at its disposal, the West couldn’t find one captive in a city its raids demonstrated it knew backwards. Bishop Paul is the Metropolitan of Aleppo, strangely enough. 
+Too many friends to be true 
+The radical Islamists presented as cuddly flies in the ointment by Kirby are sponsored by external governments. We are often told that these include those of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. Many questions have been raised in Western countries about having state sponsors of terrorism as allies, and what those states’ real attitude to terrorism therefore is . Minimising the actions of these groups is therefore a domestic political imperative, not merely a foreign relations or security one, for Western governments. 
+This is why Channel 4 News published the report “Aleppo – Up Close With The Rebels” on October 5th. It was an attempt to promote known war criminals and child murderers and thus cleanse their actions, and those of the governments who support them and supply them with the means of committing them. When people started recognising certain faces in the video, and connecting them to actions which had caused journalists to question the US government’s support for this particular rebel group, Channel 4 removed its own report, most unusually . It has not however changed its editorial policy, and presents other groups with similar records in the same way in spite of this. 
+There is also a connection with John Kerry’s recent discussions with Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir. It is known that the 28 classified pages of the US government’s official 9\11 report, kept from public view, deal with the role Saudi Arabia played in those attacks. Now Kerry and al-Jubeir are trying to prevent the new Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act from having any effect. 
+If it is actually enacted, JASTA will restrict sovereign immunity and make it easier for individuals to prosecute the Saudi state over 9\11, on the basis of the official report. It will also make it easier for other countries to pass parallel legislation which will result in the US being prosecuted for its own actions. This may explain why Obama vetoed the bill, and it was only passed over his veto. 
+Now Kerry is trying to fix it so that the bill never comes into effect . If it was enacted, it could have a significant effect on future conflicts by enabling those who believe the actions of a sovereign nation, such as Syria, are criminal to pursue them through legal rather than military avenues. This is the option most “moderate” groups would doubtless prefer. This gives the US military-industrial complex, the only people to profit from any war, every motive for presenting radical terrorists as reasonable, sensible people doing a sensible thing. 
+Everyone wins except the future 
+Most terrorist groups would be equally radical in behaviour but not be able to achieve as much if just let to their own devices, as they would have neither the weaponry nor the intelligence support. The only reason terrorists who are happy to be martyred by the Western infidels accept their support is because it somehow legitimises them, and they can hope for future favours. 
+Menachem Begin, former Israeli PM and Nobel Prize Winner for Peace, was still wanted in the UK for a Zionist bombing when he attended the Leeds Castle Middle East peace negotiations in 1978, but by then enjoyed the dignity of then being a Prime Minister rather than a terrorist, because the West said so . 
+John Kirby is still serving the purposes of the Pentagon by presenting terrorists as reasonable, insignificant forces. Not only is he continuing the US sponsorship of terrorism by doing this, he is justifying the billions spent on fighting this apparently insignificant threat. Now the Pentagon can have unlimited funds to spend on anything it can sell to the public. 
+Isn’t this a wonderful picture once you connect the dots? “US mainstream media — the playground of spooks and hacks. A propaganda arm of the regime indeed — but that’s not nearly all of it ….” 
+Seems the terrorists have jokes of their own, and they are no laughing matter. Enemies are easy to manufacture, same as “manufacturing consent”, especially when you know your audience. It is also easy to turn them into friends in the same way. All you need to do is co-ordinate the effort like a military campaign. 
+Who better than John Kirby to tell us what’s what before we have the time to work it out for ourselves?  ",FAKE
+4122,"Paul Ryan’s big speaker hangup is reportedly his family. For a male lawmaker, that’s unusual.","First, let us get the known but essential details out of the way.
+
+Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has become what a lot of people consider the solution to the Republican Party's potentially very big and very messy problem in the House. Still, Ryan is reluctant to vie for the House speaker job. He has reminded colleagues and reporters that he is a married man with three young children with whom, because of his existing work in D.C., he already spends only weekends. The New York Times reported that in recent years, current Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the man who wants out of the job, spent as many as 200 days a year en route to fundraisers or fundraising somewhere.
+
+For Ryan, it's hard to imagine how the two travel patterns would not conflict.
+
+There's almost nothing about Ryan's conundrum that Americans haven't heard before. In fact, work-life balance is about two days away from joining the list of arguably meaningless cliches. More than a few public figures — particularly lawmakers — have used the old ""resigning to spend more time with my family"" excuse for bowing out of some political race or office. Oftentimes, the excuse seems dubious.
+
+And most of Ryan's own House colleagues seemed to have all but dismissed his family life concerns. Look closely at all those stories about which lawmaker has said what to Ryan to convince him to take the job. Not many have bothered to share a thought — at least in print — on how one might be speaker and a good father to three young children. Translation: Ryan should be more like them. He should leave the bulk of family responsibilities and relationship-building to his wife or the hired help a rising career can buy.
+
+The truth is, there's almost nothing about Ryan's dilemma that many working parents don't know. The real and important difference here is that this time, this is a conversation that is kind of, sort of, being had about a man.
+
+Let's admit at least this much: The way we think and talk about family life and work generally stays in some well-known territory.
+
+First, there's child-care costs. For a middle-income family with a child born in 2013, feeding, clothing, educating and caring for that child into adulthood will cost over $300,000. That's after inflation. The figure is $241,080 before it. But lest anyone comfort themselves with the idea that we must be talking about the cost of raising a family in a big, glamorous city or a childhood with all manner of lessons and camps and enrichment activities, check out and use this useful government calculator. It's digital birth control. For real.
+
+Here's just a taste. Check out the full report here.
+
+But that math often leads to the second topic America likes to cover on the occasion that family and work responsibilities are discussed. This is the one where people ask in the most obtuse fashion possible why so many mothers are leaving or have left the workforce (43 percent) and what on Earth can be done about it.
+
+The answer is beyond simple. Most women still make less than men. That's especially true for mothers. And when those who have a different-sex partner or husband sit down and do the math on child care costs and all the other items in that graphic above (we strongly suggest you check out the full thing), for some, work stops making much immediate financial sense.
+
+When all else fails, there's the inevitable trend story or I-know-a guy-who-knows-a-guy dinner discussion about the virtual sprinkle of men who have become stay-at-home dads. This group may be on its way to becoming a small puddle. But let's not pretend that the stay-at-home dads (a large share of which are, despite the content of most of most of those trend stories, black) have become common. They are important but remain relatively rare.
+
+As Ann Ann Marie Slaughter's Atlantic Magazine article and her book-length look at family and work issues have made plain, people are struggling and in many cases really distressed by this challenge. They are interested in these issues. And there's a lot of evidence that as Slaughter's book puts it, we need to rethink, reframe and, yes, revalue care (child care, family care, family time and relationship building) itself.
+
+[She said women can't have it all. Now she's recommending a revolution in family life.]
+
+Someone is sure to point out that Ryan's children are well past the swaddling and wake-up-at-night stage. That's true. But think long and hard about the implications of that idea, particularly if you are someone's boss.
+
+Ryan, a man in his mid-40s, has young kids. He is part of a younger generation of fathers who, while they do not match the time put in by their children's mothers, are spending more time with their kids and doing at least a little more housework than fathers in the past. Is that really something to discourage?
+
+And all politics and policy aside, anyone who has given the most cursory read to any child development research knows that children benefit from healthy, sustained and reliable contact with both their parents and, when possible, extended family. Certainly, Ryan has spent some enough time on Capitol Hill to see the sometimes sad results of another path. Is there any other professional community besides perhaps Hollywood where struggles with troubled and out-of-control children or rocky marriages are the subject of so many knowing jokes?
+
+Moreover, Ryan is a man who came to his family life with a personal history that, at the very least, has given him real reason to be deliberate. Ryan found his own father, an apparently hard-charging lawyer, dead of a heart attack in his bed when Ryan was just 16. At that point, as Ryan's older brother told the New York Times, his older siblings were away at college. Ryan's mother went back to school. And his grandmother, who lived with the family, had reached the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease. Before Ryan even left high school, he experienced the toll of a sudden and early death and a slow, merciless one.
+
+Is it really any wonder Ryan's wife said in an August interview that Ryan's time with his family is ""his oxygen?""
+
+Now, Ryan's biggest critics would no doubt argue that Ryan's budget ideas haven't advanced the work-life balance cause, particularly for families with less money than his own. But whatever happens, the Ryan conundrum should make this much clear.
+
+In the United States, talent is squandered, opportunities are missed and maybe even the common good sacrificed every day because hard choices like Ryan's too often have to be made.",REAL
+266,"McCarthy withdraws from speaker race, vote postponed","House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who was considered the front-runner to replace John Boehner, stunned his Republican colleagues Thursday by abruptly withdrawing from the race, throwing the leadership battle into chaos.
+
+McCarthy's decision, announced moments before Republicans were set to nominate their candidate, will postpone the vote for speaker. McCarthy had been running against Reps. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Daniel Webster, R-Fla., before he dropped out, and it's unclear whether other candidates will now step forward.
+
+While McCarthy, R-Calif., faced vocal opposition from some conservative members and groups, he was thought to have more than enough support to win the party's nomination in the vote initially set for Thursday. Fox News is told McCarthy, in revealing his choice, simply told colleagues it was not his time.
+
+His withdrawal rattled fellow lawmakers, particularly allies in leadership. But addressing reporters afterward, McCarthy said he thinks the party needs a ""fresh face.""
+
+""If we are going to unite and be strong, we need a new face to help do that,"" McCarthy said. ""We've got to be 100 percent united.""
+
+He said he will stay on as majority leader.
+
+Chaffetz, speaking shortly afterward, said McCarthy's withdrawal was ""absolutely stunning."" Chaffetz said he would remain in the race. ""I really do believe it is time for a fresh start,"" he said.
+
+While Boehner originally was set to resign at the end of the month, the speaker said in a statement Thursday afternoon he ""will serve as Speaker until the House votes to elect a new Speaker."" He added, ""I'm confident we will elect a new Speaker in the coming weeks.""
+
+Practically speaking, Republicans' overriding interest is to find a candidate who can muster an absolute majority on the House floor in a full chamber vote, originally set for Oct. 29. While McCarthy was likely to easily win the nomination, it was unclear whether he could muster a majority -- of roughly 218 members -- once lawmakers from both parties vote for speaker.
+
+McCarthy gave no indication of dropping out earlier in the day. ""It's going to go great,"" McCarthy said Thursday morning. But he later suggested he was concerned he'd only be able to win narrowly in a floor vote.
+
+Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said McCarthy actually felt he couldn't reach 218. Still, he said McCarthy's backing will be the ""most important endorsement"" for whoever seeks the post.
+
+Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the party's vice presidential nominee in 2012, swiftly put out a statement saying he would not run, while saying he's ""disappointed"" McCarthy dropped out.
+
+Conservative groups, meanwhile, cheered the decision. FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon said in a statement that McCarthy ""dropped out of the Speaker race because of the House Freedom Caucus and grassroots pressure. ... This is a huge win for conservatives who want to see real change in Washington, not the same go along get along ways of Washington.""
+
+He was referring in part to a decision Wednesday by the conservative House Freedom Caucus -- with its 30-40 members -- to back Webster as a bloc.
+
+The speaker's race already has seen several curveballs since Boehner suddenly announced his retirement and McCarthy swiftly positioned himself as the presumptive next in line.
+
+Shortly after announcing his candidacy, McCarthy was seen to stumble in a Fox News interview where he appeared to link Hillary Clinton's dropping poll numbers to the congressional Benghazi committee. His comments fueled Democratic charges that the committee is merely political, which GOP leaders deny.
+
+Amid the backlash over McCarthy's Benghazi remarks, Chaffetz entered the leadership race over the weekend.
+
+Republicans have nearly 250 members in the House and on paper have the numbers to win against the Democrats' nominee, likely Nancy Pelosi. But if the eventual Republican nominee comes out with a tally short of 218, he or she will have to try to rally support to get to that number.
+
+In a curious development, Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., also sent a letter to House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., urging a full vetting of all leadership candidates to avoid a repeat of 1998, when the conference selected then-Rep. Bob Livingston in November to succeed outgoing House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It then emerged Livingston had been conducting an affair. Jones asked that any candidate who has committed ""misdeeds"" withdraw.
+
+Asked by FoxNews.com to elaborate, Jones said he doesn't ""know anything"" specific about any of the candidates, but, ""We need to be able to say without reservation that 'I have nothing in my background that six months from now could be exposed to the detriment of the House of Representatives.'"" He said he wants to make sure the candidates have ""no skeletons.""
+
+Fox News' Chad Pergram and FoxNews.com's Cody Derespina and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+10548,Joe Giambrone on Hollywood’s Shameless & Underhanded Assault on Political Truth,"By the constant administration of lies, the media puppeteers manufacture wars, protect the super-wealthy, and destroy democracy. Joe Giambrone “ We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious President. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fictitious orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush.”–Michael Moore Oscar acceptance speech, moments before his mic was cut off. T his year may mark a turning point, where the moral bankruptcy was laid bare for all. I’m speaking of the Bernie Sanders flip-flop for Hillary Clinton, the predictable bait-and-switch, which Democrats never seem to imagine in real time. The rest of us have seen it so often that the ruse has become routine Standard Operating Procedure. A particularly notable case is Sarah Silverman (left) , the filthy-mouthed comedienne, who originally championed Bernie. But she quickly fell into lockstep for Hillary. Silverman had a soul empty enough to go and scold the United States to support a candidate whom she had just been fighting against , and who actually stole the nomination from her own candidate through back-room deals at the DNC and through apparent voting-machine hacking . The thief was rewarded instead of jailed for some reason, which Hollywood has had absolutely zero interest in, as if it didn’t happen. They moved on instantly to lambast us all about Donald Trump 24/7. Orwell couldn’t have written it better. Hollywood has a highly complex understanding of political philosophy and particularly of this presidential race: 1. Trump Bad 2. Hillary Woman 3. So-called “Lesser Evil” W e should acknowledge, those who are literate, that Hillary Clinton’s repeated threats to escalate World War 3 over Syria leave her as potentially the greater evil, not the lesser at all. The jury is very much out. “Goldwater Girl” Hillary Rodham Clinton has a lengthy record of supporting every US aggressive war and opposing none. She may have played a part in the killings of over 2 million human beings so far, merely tallying those casualties from the three countries of Iraq, Syria and Libya. One may opt to also add another half-million Iraqi children who died as a result of her husband’s eight years of sanctions. I noticed Hollywood’s widespread mindless support for Democrats back in 2000, when I kicked that shockingly corrupt party to the curb and joyfully cast a vote for Ralph Nader, an actual American hero whose efforts have saved lives. Die-hard whiners of the Democratic rank-and-file still falsely claim that big bad Ralph gave the election to Dubya Bush, when anyone with the ability to read can see that it was the Supreme Court which stopped the legitimate counting of Florida ballots. Add Bush’s brother Jeb purging nearly two-hundred thousand minority voters from rolls. But the mindless strategy of attacking third parties and attempting to delegitimize democracy itself persists among the ignorant (a majority of Democrats perhaps). This is by design; this is who they are. They do not believe in democracy, because the billionaires who fund them do not believe in any democracy they cannot control. But the mindless strategy of attacking third parties and attempting to delegitimize democracy itself persists among the ignorant (a majority of Democrats perhaps). This is by design; this is who they are. They do not believe in democracy, because the billionaires who fund them do not believe in any democracy they cannot control . George W. Bush’s theft of the presidency did help expose the moral bankruptcy of Democrats as well as Republicans. When Bush lied about Iraq, Hillary Clinton was right there with him embellishing and freestyling! She claimed Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” to be “undisputed.” Her lies helped sell the war to Congress, a war of aggression: what the Nazis did and were hung for at Nuremberg. Her role in aggressive war and in destroying International Law as a restraint against belligerence are profound crimes, grievous war crimes: “the supreme international crime” in the words of U.S. Judge Robert Jackson. When a handful of Democrats attempted to impeach the Bush junta for crimes relating to those wars, as well as to torture and cover-up, it was Democrat Nancy Pelosi who announced “Impeachment is off the table.” Criminal collusion, allowing the crimes to stand without recourse, that is what they did. The US federal government has served as a protection racket for international war crimes. The damage that Democrats inflicted upon the rule of law is equal to that of the Republicans. The former had a moral and legal responsibility to defend the Constitution, their oaths of office, but voluntarily opted not to. The Internet helped flood the world with information to pass around, both good and bad, but the crimes of both parties became difficult for them to wash away now that Google made all web searchers equal. Today, things have accelerated into realms of the absurd. CNN recently cut off a congressman in mid-sentence for uttering the word “Wikileaks.” This Soviet-style clampdown on dissent remains a shocker even in a society that’s pretty much seen it all. The media, distrusted by most , is only one aspect of the problem though. Americans get their views from joking heads as much as from stodgy teleprompter readers. Talk shows and comedy skits propagandize viewers every bit as much as do the Washington Post or New York Times . Celebrity endorsements matter. Documents recently emerged that confirm Oliver’s willingness to shill for Hillary. And he’s not alone among the so-called cutting-edge “perceptive” comedians. Bill Maher has long been a Democratic party loyalist, and recently Amy Schumer—for all her smarts and anti-status quo posturing—came out strongly for Hillary. Schumer may be a dupe and clueless about the true nature of the Hillary option, but Oliver cannot be so easily forgiven. A casual glance at those programs would reveal that democracy is non-existent in Hollywood today. All voices are not represented. Minority candidates cannot get air time, will not be interviewed, and will only be mocked in absentia as per John Oliver’s recent disgraceful hit piece on Green Party candidate Jill Stein , a cowardly move John. Shameful. But Oliver is far from alone. I single him out because he knows better and could have done justice to the Green Party and to its clear alternative to perpetual war, empire, and industrialized ecocide. But where would that have left him personally vis a vis the Hollywood political consensus? Nowhere is presidential candidate Jill Stein welcome, not on the debate stage where she belongs, not on the daily puff shows, not on the edgy comedy interview shows, and not on SNL. This blanket censorship is quite glaring, and clearly part and parcel of a system rigged in favor of Democrats―no matter who they are, nor how long their rap sheets happen to be. Hollywood’s strategy is as simple-minded as those who are easily programmed by it. They point the finger endlessly at the boogie-man, who happens to be Donald Trump this year―it’s the same every cycle. It was the evil Romney, the evil McCain and the evil Bush Jr. prior. In regimented fashion, the entire industry demonizes the enemy du jour , and so ensures that the crimes of their own candidate never receive any light of day. That’s the trick. In their manufactured hysteria over the latest Republican they omit the entire criminal history of the Democratic nominee, how she stole the nomination in the first place for instance, and they avoid mentioning all the non-criminal alternatives, who are not corrupted by Wall Street, the military-industrial-complex, and foreign tyrants. This manufactured hysteria is strategic, and it is a false dichotomy. The fake two-candidate only choice is never questioned by Hollywood. To do so would mark one as an aberration, a non-conformist, a free thinker. You would be outcast to hobnob with the likes of Charlie Sheen, Gary Busey, Roseanne Barr, and Randy Quaid. This conformism is a mechanism of social control, and it’s not a laughing matter. I use the word kakistocracy more often lately, rule by the worst. Only the worst, the most corrupt, the biggest liars can rise in this rigged system. A more formal study pegged it as “ oligarchy ,” but I find the term bland. It is very much rigged on numerous levels to keep out the honest and the moral. If that’s not a problem to you, Hollywood , then you are indeed living in a fantasy story: Michael Moore’s fictional times roll on. “ dems ? Do U have any thoughts on Obama’s transition from a progressive academic humanist 2 a regressive corporate warlord?” Joe Giambrone is an author and independent filmmaker . He publishes Political Film Blog mainly to store evidence of these ongoing crime sprees. Bonus Feature: Originally Posted on FEBRUARY 20, 2013 by JOE GIAMBRONE H ollywood likes to pretend that things aren’t political when they are. It’s that bi-partisan nationalist myth that if both corporate parties agree to cheer for the empire, then everyone cheers for the empire. It’s gotten so bad now that races like the Oscars and the Writer’s Guild screenwriting award are tight contests between one CIA propaganda film and another CIA propaganda film. The first one helps to demonize Iranians and set up the next World War scenario, while the second film fraudulently promotes the effectiveness of state-sanctioned torture crimes. If there ever was a time for loud disgust and rejection of the Hollywood / Military-Industrial-Complex, this would seem to be it ( contact@oscars.org ). Naomi Wolf made a comparison of Zero Dark Thirty ’ s creators Bigelow and Boal to Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl ( Triumph of the Will ). That, to me, seems inappropriately offensive to Leni Riefenstahl. The good German filmmaker never promoted torture through deception. Nor was Triumph a call to war. The film was simply an expression of German patriotism and strength, rebirth from the ashes of World War I. The current insidious crop of propaganda, as in the CIA’s leaking of fictional scenes about locating Osama Bin Laden through torture extraction, are arguably more damaging and less defensible than Riefenstahl’s upfront and blatant homage to Hitler’s leadership. The Zero Dark Thirty scandal should be common knowledge by now, but here is what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote to Sony Pictures about it: “We believe the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden… Instead, the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program.” The filmmakers had every opportunity to explore the issue more fully, instead of relying on the “firsthand accounts” of the torturers themselves , and/or their allies within the Central Intelligence Agency. Notably, torturers are felons and war criminals. Those who know about their crimes and help cover them up are guilty of conspiracy to torture. Thus, these self-serving fairy tales that illegal torture led to the desired results (bin Laden) are tangled up with the motivation to protect war criminals from prosecution. Not only does this claim of successful torture help insulate the guilty from legal prosecution, it also helps to promote further criminal acts of torture in the future. Once this red flag issue was raised by the Senate, the filmmakers could have taken a second look at what they had put up on screens and reassessed the veracity of their material and the way it was being sold to the world. Instead they doubled down. Bigelow and Boal want it both ways, extraordinary access to CIA storytellers for a documentary-like “factual” telling of the bin Laden execution, but they also want license to claim that it’s just a movie and can therefore take all the liberties they please. Jessica Chastain, who plays a state-employed torturer/murderer, who also allegedly located Osama bin Laden, said : “I’m afraid to get called in front of a Senate committee… In my opinion, this is a very accurate film… I think it’s important to note the film is not a documentary.” In a nutshell, that’s the Zero Dark Thirty defense. It’s a highly sourced “ very accurate film ,” but we can take all the liberties we like because it’s not a documentary, and so if we made up a case for torture based on the lies of professional liars in the CIA, then oops. Mark Boal went so far as to mock the Senate Intelligence Committee, at the NY Film Critic’s Circle : “In case anyone is asking, we stand by the film… Apparently, the French government will be investigating Les Mis.” Any controversy over the picture seems to help its box office, as more uninformed people hear about it. The filmmakers themselves suffer no penalty as a result of misleading a large number of people on torture, to accept torture, to accept a secretive criminal state that tortures with impunity. Kathryn Bigelow’s wrapped-in-the-flag defense of the film: “Bin Laden… was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.” (emphasis in original) Nice propaganda trick at the end equating those who “gave all of themselves” and “death” with the individuals who “ sometimes crossed moral lines.” Everyone’s dirty; you see. All heroes are torturers; so it’s okay. Bigelow’s half-assed response to getting called out by the Senate for putting false torture results into her film, is to say : “Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn’t mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn’t ignore . War, obviously, isn’t pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.” (emphasis added) Ignore? By her reasoning, because the Central Intelligence Agency tortured people, she was required to fit it into the plot somehow, whether it was relevant to the investigation or not. That’s her excuse. No matter that the scenes are fabrications, and the actual clues about bin Laden’s courier came from elsewhere (electronic surveillance, human intelligence, foreign services). Bigelow told Charlie Rose , when asked the same question about the torture: “ Well I think it’s important to tell a true story .” Unfortunately, when confronted with the Senate investigation, truth quickly takes a back seat. The truth Bigelow now clings to is that, “Experts disagree sharply on the facts and particulars of the intelligence hunt, and doubtlessly that debate will continue.” To Kathryn Bigelow, the fact that the so-called “experts” she has sided with are torturer criminals with a vested interest in her portrayal of their crimes never occurs to her. She can dismiss the entire matter as a “debate.” Perhaps she no longer finds it “ important to tell a true story?” Kathryn Bigelow basking in the spotlight secured by shilling for the imperialist state. Kathryn Bigelow, America’s Leni Riefenstahl, claims that Zero Dark Thirty tells “a true story,” even when confronted by evidence that it is a lie. She is unapologetic and completely divorced from the real world damage her propaganda encourages. If this film takes home the Best Picture Oscar, it should serve as the cherry on top of a brutal, deceptive, decrepit and immoral empire, and signal this reality to the rest of the world. If this is allegedly the “best” of America, then we are truly finished. As for Ben Affleck’s Argo, its sins aren’t so readily apparent. Both films show wonderful Central Intelligence “heroes” acting to further US interests and take care of imperial problems. The Argo scenario is a rescue, however, instead of a hit. The problem is that Iran, a country thrown into a bloodthirsty dictatorship after its nascent democracy was murdered by the very same CIA in 1953, is now the bad guy. There are clearly two sides, and the film takes sides with the people who destroyed democracy in Iran and propped up an illegitimate monarch in order to control its oil and its refineries. When this despotic monarch whose secret police disappeared, tortured and murdered the political opposition – with the help and training of the CIA – is overthrown, we are supposed to overlook all that, because America is always good. We rescue our people. We risk our lives, and we come up with elaborate creative plans to help our people. We are heroic and triumphant vs. the inferior wild-eyed Persians and Arabs of the world. Now I do believe there’s a real story there, and the situation is ripe for telling, but an extreme sensitivity to the political context would be required. As Jennifer Epps put it : “…[T]he Iran we see in the [ Argo ] news clips and the Iran we see dramatized are all on the same superficial level: incomprehensible, out-of-control hordes with nary an individual or rational thought expressed. … But we never go behind-the-scenes at this revolution. (Instead, Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio’s tempering historical introduction is soon outweighed by the visceral power of mobs storming walls, chador-clad women toting rifles, and banshees screaming into news cameras.) …The problem is that viewers who don’t already know their Chomsky or William Blum aren’t going to walk out of [ Argo ] muttering “gee, it’s more complicated than I thought.” Instead, they’ll leave with their fears and prejudices reaffirmed: that Middle Easterners create terror, that Americans must be the world’s policemen, and that Iranians cannot be trusted because they hate America. … Argo almost completely ignores individual Iranians; its portrait of an entire culture is neither refined nor sophisticated; and it does reinforce a simplistic, Manichean perspective.” Enough said? So why are Argo and Zero Dark Thirty receiving all these awards? Are the awarding bodies so full of hyper-patriots who believe pro-American films can deceive and demonize with impunity, that they want to send an unequivocal message of support for these practices? Is hyper-nationalist propaganda in vogue now? With the ascendancy of Barack Obama, there is no longer a moral anti-war voice of any significant size in America. Obama, the smooth talker, has soothed away morality, ethics, law and rights. The empire is beyond reproach because Obama runs it. So the liberal center/left says nothing. Nothing but empty blather and ignorant praise of the Democrats. Murder is being codified in secret as we speak. Bush’s wars are being publicly scaled down, only to ramp up new covert wars of conquest across Africa. Nothing substantial has changed since George W., only the style. There was a time when no one trusted the CIA. Far from heroes, they were the prime suspects in the assassination of president John F. Kennedy, and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. CIA support of terrorists was well known, if not loudly opposed. This agency has sponsored Cuban exiles to commit acts of terrorism inside Cuba. Its Phoenix Program kidnapped and murdered Vietnamese villagers by the thousands, torturing and killing them for alleged communist sympathies. The CIA overthrew democracies from Iran to Gutemala to Chile, and was instrumental in waging a terror war against Nicaragua by employing drug-running mercenary terrorists called “Contras.” When the Church Committee investigated the agency in the mid-70s, lots of dirty laundry was aired. The agency was reined in for a time. Assassination was made technically illegal. In the 1980s, the CIA fought a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by funneling money and arms to radical Islamic Jihadists – like Osama bin Laden – and creating an intelligence/military monster in Pakistan, known as the ISI. With untold billions of dollars of US tax money, plus Saudi oil money, the Pakistanis were propped up as a central hub for militant groups to operate throughout the region. Pakistan is where Osama bin Laden allegedly ended up living for the last decade of his life, half a mile from the Pakistani military academy. The CIA today is instrumental in the blitzkrieg of terror across Syria. It funnels arms and money to radical Islamic Jihadists, exactly as it did in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In 2011 it participated in the Libyan Crime Against the Peace doing much the same type of activity on behalf of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a group that helped take over that nation despite being included on the US State Department’s Terrorist List! The LIFG has sent its fighters over to Syria, after the fall of Qadaffi, to assist in the genocidal guerrilla war against the Syrian state, as well as civilians. The CIA assists in these activities. But of course those victims aren’t Americans. So none of that counts. “…Is it healthy for us to hold up images of Cold War CIA agents as selfless do-gooders?” –Jennifer Epps NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP INSTALLATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joe Giambrone is a filmmaker and author of Hell of a Deal: A Supernatural Satire . He edits The Political Film Blog , which welcomes submissions. polfilmblog at gmail. Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. Print this post if you want. Share This:",FAKE
+2551,The immigration swamp,"“This was not a subject that was on anybody’s mind until I brought it up at my announcement.”
+
+Not on anyone’s mind? For years, immigration has been the subject of near-constant, often bitter argument within the GOP. But it is true that Trump has brought the debate to a new place — first, with his announcement speech, about whether Mexican migrants are really rapists, and now with the somewhat more nuanced Trump plan.
+
+Much of it — visa tracking, E-Verify, withholding funds from sanctuary cities — predates Trump. Even building the Great Wall is not particularly new. (I, for one, have been advocating that in this space since 2006.) Dominating the discussion, however, are his two policy innovations: (a) abolition of birthright citizenship and (b) mass deportation.
+
+If you are born in the United States, you are an American citizen. So says the 14th Amendment. Barring some esoteric and radically new jurisprudence, abolition would require amending the Constitution. Which would take years and great political effort. And make the GOP anathema to Hispanic Americans for a generation.
+
+And for what? Birthright citizenship is a symptom, not a cause. If you regain control of the border, the number of birthright babies fades to insignificance. The time and energy it would take to amend the Constitution are far more usefully deployed securing the border.
+
+Moreover, the real issue is not the birthright babies themselves, but the chain migration that follows. It turns one baby into an imported village.
+
+Chain migration, however, is not a constitutional right. It’s a result of statutes and regulations. These can be readily changed. That should be the focus, not a quixotic constitutional battle.
+
+Last Sunday, Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd that all illegal immigrants must leave the country. Although once they’ve been kicked out, we will let “the good ones” back in.
+
+On its own terms, this is crackpot. Wouldn’t you save a lot just on Mayflower moving costs if you chose the “good ones” first — before sending SWAT teams to turf families out of their homes, loading them on buses and dumping them on the other side of the Rio Grande?
+
+Less frivolously, it is estimated by the conservative American Action Forum that mass deportation would take about 20 years and cost about $500 billion for all the police, judges, lawyers and enforcement agents — and bus drivers! — needed to expel 11 million people.
+
+This would all be merely ridiculous if it weren’t morally obscene. Forcibly evict 11 million people from their homes? It can’t happen. It shouldn’t happen. And, of course, it won’t ever happen. But because it’s the view of the Republican front-runner, every other candidate is now required to react. So instead of debating border security, guest-worker programs and sanctuary cities — where Republicans are on firm moral and political ground — they are forced into a debate about a repulsive fantasy.
+
+Which, for the Republican Party, is also political poison. Mitt Romney lost the Hispanic vote by 44 points and he was advocating only self-deportation. Now the party is discussing forced deportation.
+
+It is not just Hispanics who will be alienated. Romney lost the Asian vote, too. By 47 points. And many non-minorities will be offended by the idea of rounding up 11 million people, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding members of their communities.
+
+Donald Trump has every right to advance his ideas. He is not to be begrudged his masterly showmanship, his relentless candor or his polling success. I strongly oppose the idea of ostracizing anyone from the GOP or the conservative movement. On whose authority? Let the people decide.
+
+But that is not to say that he should be exempt from normal scrutiny or from consideration of the effect of his candidacy on conservatism’s future. If you are a conservative alarmed at the country’s direction and committed to retaking the White House, you should be concerned about what Trump’s ascendancy is doing to the chances of that happening.
+
+The Democrats’ presumptive candidate is flailing badly. Republicans have an unusually talented field with a good chance of winning back the presidency. Do they really want to be dragged into the swamps — right now, on immigration — that will make that prospect electorally impossible?
+
+Yes, I understand. The anger, the frustration, etc., etc., that Trump is channeling. But how are these alleviated by yelling “I’m mad as hell” — and proceeding to elect Hillary Clinton?
+
+Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+10363,"Blame government, not markets for monopoly","Blame government, not markets for monopoly Corporate mergers and “hostile” takeovers can promote economic efficiency By Ron Paul - November 1, 2016 
+When Time-Warner announced it planned to merge with another major communications firm, many feared the new company would exercise near-total monopoly power. These concerns led some to call for government action to block the merger in order to protect both Time-Warner’s competitors and consumers. 
+No, I am not talking about Time-Warner’s recent announced plan to merge with AT&T, but the reaction to Time-Warner’s merger with (then) Internet giant AOL in 2000. Far from creating an untouchable leviathan crushing all competitors, the AOL-Time-Warner merger fell apart in under a decade. 
+The failure of AOL-Time-Warner demonstrates that even the biggest companies are vulnerable to competition if there is open entry into the marketplace. AOL-Time-Warner failed because consumers left them for competitors offering lower prices and/or better quality. 
+Corporate mergers and “hostile” takeovers can promote economic efficiency by removing inefficient management and boards of directors. These managers and board members often work together to promote their own interests instead of generating maximum returns for investors by providing consumers with affordable, quality products. Thus, laws making it difficult to launch a “hostile” takeover promote inefficient use of resources and harm investors, workers, and consumers. 
+Monopolies and cartels are creations of government, not markets. For example, the reason the media is dominated by a few large companies is that no one can operate a television or radio station unless they obtain federal approval and pay federal licensing fees. Similarly, anyone wishing to operate a cable company must not only comply with federal regulations, they must sign a “franchise” agreement with their local government. Fortunately, the Internet has given Americans greater access to news and ideas shut out by the government-licensed lapdogs of the “mainstream” media. This may be why so many politicians are anxious to regulate the web. 
+Government taxes and regulations are effective means of limiting competition in an industry. Large companies can afford the costs of complying with government regulations, costs which cripple their smaller competitors. Big business can also afford to hire lobbyists to ensure that new laws and regulations favor big business. 
+Examples of regulations that benefit large corporations include the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulations that raise costs of developing a new drug, as well as limit consumers ability to learn about natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals. Another example is the Dodd-Frank legislation, which has strengthened large financial intuitions while harming their weaker competitors. 
+Legislation forcing consumers to pay out-of-state sales tax on their online purchases is a classic case of business seeking to use government to harm less politically-powerful competitors. This legislation is being pushed by large brick-and-mortar stores and Internet retailers who are seeking a government-granted advantage over smaller competitors. 
+Many failed mergers and acquisitions result from the distorted signals sent to business and investors by the Federal Reserve’s inflationary monetary policy. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the AOL-Time-Warner fiasco, which was a direct result of the Fed-created dot.com bubble. 
+In a free market, mergers between businesses enable consumers to benefit from new products and reduced prices. Any businesses that charge high prices or offer substandard products will soon face competition from businesses offering consumers lower prices and/or higher quality. Monopolies only exist when government tilts the playing field in favor of well-connected crony capitalists. Therefore those concerned about excessive corporate power should join supporters of the free market in repudiating the regulations, taxes, and subsides that benefit politically-powerful businesses. The most important step is to end the boom-bust business cycle by ending the Federal Reserve.",FAKE
+5060,'America is already strong': Obama continues Democrats' optimism,"President Obama offered enthusiastic support for Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention Wednesday as he painted a hopeful picture of the country.
+
+U.S. President Barack Obama (L) and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wave to the crowd after the president spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Penn., on July 27, 2016.
+
+President Obama described an optimistic, hopeful picture of America in a speech Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, pointedly diverging from the more foreboding tone of the previous week's Republican event.
+
+Mr. Obama offered an enthusiastic endorsement of Hillary Clinton, saying “nobody [is] more qualified” to be president, and galvanized delegates at the convention in Philadelphia by drawing a sharp contrast with the dark portrait of the country described by Republican nominee Donald Trump.
+
+""I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before,"" Obama said as delegates cheered at the Wells Fargo Center. ""America is already great. America is already strong,"" he said, referring to Mr. Trump's promise to ""make America great again.""
+
+""And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump,"" the president added.
+
+As Mrs. Clinton, formerly secretary of State and first lady, became the first woman to gain the presidential nomination of a major party on Tuesday, a sense of looking forward to the future emerged as a theme of the party's convention: largely hopeful, but with sharp criticism of a potential Trump administration.
+
+""Our convention is going to be optimistic, it’s going to be hopeful, and it’s going to be talking about specific plans,"" Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters Monday morning. As The Christian Science Monitor’s Amanda Paulson reports:
+
+And so far, that’s largely been the case, even down to the signs distributed for delegates to wave on the floor: “Love Trumps Hate.” “Stronger Together.” “Rise Together.” If Trump titled his book “Crippled America” and declared himself the “law-and-order candidate,” the only one who can fix a rigged system and “make America great again,” the themes echoed by speaker after speaker in Philadelphia have been ones of togetherness, diversity, and an emphasis on American values of inclusion rather than a need to close off borders.
+
+But despite the optimism evoked by many speakers, including first lady Michelle Obama and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Democrats could face an uphill battle. Trump’s narrative of an America divided along class and racial lines, and his accusations that the system is “rigged” against people still struggling economically, tap into many Americans' growing sense of distrust, particularly of political leaders in Washington.
+
+Trump’s message also reveals a divide on optimism that exists along both partisan and racial lines, Ms. Paulson notes. A poll conducted by the Atlantic and the Aspen Institute last year found that less than half of white Americans believe the country’s “best days” lie ahead of it, compared to about 80 percent of African Americans, she writes.
+
+On Twitter, Trump waved off Obama's depiction of the country.
+
+On the convention’s third day, many speakers focused on Trump’s own record, with vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine noting the businessman’s lack of political experience, calling him “a one-man wrecking crew” who could not be trusted in the White House.
+
+Attention now turns to whether Clinton, who is set to speak on the convention’s final day Thursday, can make a convincing argument for staking out her own path while also delivering on promises to continue Obama’s legacy, the Associated Press reported.
+
+She has focused on addressing income inequality, student debt, tightening gun control and reigning in Wall Street, seeking to woo supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who mounted a strong challenge to Clinton by focusing particularly on a sense that many Americans are struggling economically. On Monday, Senator Sanders offered an enthusiastic endorsement of Clinton, saying he was ""proud to stand with her.""
+
+Some Clinton delegates say the Democrats’ optimism also offers a counterbalance to Trump’s focus on looking backward.
+
+“I think there are solutions, moving forward solutions, and I don’t want to go back to the 1950s, thank you very much,” Bear Atwood, a lawyer from Mississippi, told the Monitor earlier this week. “Where’s the perfect moment? I think it’s ahead of us.""
+
+This article includes material from Reuters and the Associated Press.",REAL
+5183,Why the DNC's mysteriously hacked oppo file on Trump is a big yawn,"First we were told that a Russian hacker had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computers and gotten hold of its oppo file on Donald Trump.
+
+Now someone who goes by 'Guccifer 2.0,' a nod to the shadowy Romanian hacker, is claiming credit for putting the Trump file out there. Gawker and the Smoking Gun both published the report yesterday.
+
+But what I find so amusing is that the opposition research file is hardly filled with secret stuff, the product of private eyes digging up dirt or hired-gun sleuths poring over documents. This supposed treasure trove, submitted in December, consists mainly of published articles and televised segments.
+
+In other words, it’s all out there. You can Google it. Any reasonably sentient media consumer would know this stuff. It’s what we in the journalism racket call a clip job.
+
+“Trump is Loyal only to Himself.”
+
+“Trump’s Business Have Gone into Bankruptcy Several Times.”
+
+“He Has Devalued and Demeaned Women Repeatedly Throughout His Career.”
+
+“Out of Touch/Hand-Outs for the Wealthy at the Expense of the Middle Class.”
+
+And the sources? Wall Street Journal, AP, Politico, Washington Post, Forbes, etc.
+
+Trump, for his part, isn’t buying the DNC explanation that this is the work of some nefarious outside hacker. “Much of it is false and/or entirely inaccurate,” he says in a statement. “We believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader. Too bad the DNC doesn’t hack Crooked Hillary’s 33,000 missing emails.”
+
+Now that sounds far-fetched as well. Not only is there nothing new here, but no one can absorb 200 pages at once. Why not dribble out the attacks, package them as talking points, put them in attack ads, rather than create a bogus hacking story and dump it all out there? Or dress it up with some narrative and release it as a report?
+
+What we have here, whether it was done by Guccifer 2.0 or whoever, is a 21st-century Watergate. Instead of burglars breaking into DNC headquarters, a crime that led to the downfall of Richard Nixon’s presidency, we have cyberwarfare against DNC computers, only aimed at the de facto Republican nominee, and winding up in the now-bankrupt, sex-tape-publishing Gawker rather than the Washington Post.
+
+Simply vacuuming up negative material on a candidate doesn’t work in today’s cluttered media environment. Trump has been awash in negative media reports since he got into the race one year ago. The trick to getting traction is by packaging some of the stuff in a way that it sticks—as the Democrats successfully did to Mitt Romney, and the Republicans to John Kerry.
+
+Instead, the oppo file itself has become news—in a fleeting way that guarantees it will quickly become non-news.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+2822,Hillary Clinton: ‘No role whatsoever for American soldiers on the ground’ in Iraq,"HAMPTON, N.H. -- Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that she sees ""no role whatsoever for American soldiers on the ground to go back"" to Iraq as the Islamic State terrorist group makes gains.
+
+The remarks by Clinton -- who has disavowed her own 2003 vote for the Iraq war as a senator -- come amid growing fervor among Republicans to send ground forces back to Iraq in some capacity to assist the Baghdad government in its battle with Islamic State, which earlier this week overran the city of Ramadi.
+
+The Democratic front-runner made her comments during a brief news conference here at a brewery following a roundtable discussion with small-business leaders.
+
+""I think it's a very difficult situation and I basically agree with the policies that we are currently following,"" Clinton said. ""And that is, American air support is available. American intelligence and surveillance is available. American trainers are trying to undo the damage that was done to the Iraqi army by former prime minister Maliki, who bears a very big part of the responsibility for what is happening inside of Iraq today.""
+
+But she said ""this has to be fought by and won by Iraqis. There is no role whatsoever for American soldiers on the ground to go back, other than in the capacity as trainers and advisers.""
+
+The large field of Republicans vying for the 2016 nomination has set a hawkish tone and all have called on the United States to do more in Iraq, with varying degrees of specificity. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is running mostly on national security issues, has called for sending 10,000 U.S. troops into the country, and others -- including former Texas governor Rick Perry and pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson have advocated for an unspecified number.",REAL
+4305,Donald Trump: The key to his success (Opinion),"It seems almost quaint, really, to go back to the start of this presidential campaign when the question du jour was whether Chris ""just-sit-down-and-shut-up"" Christie was too much of a bully to become president. Temperament, it seems, was a requirement.
+
+Or even go back to Hillary Clinton's 2008 derision of Barack Obama as not ready to be president and take that 3 a.m. phone call about a national security crisis. Experience and depth of knowledge was also an issue.
+
+But that's ancient history. Somehow, the notions of temperament and experience have been overtaken by the desire -- at least according to the polls so far in the GOP race -- for what passes as a show of strength, unbound by convention and unattached to complexity. Donald Trump, the undisputed frontrunner, reigns supreme, no matter what the half-formed solutions. As in: Muslims are trying to kill us, so let's keep them out. Illegal immigrants are ""raping"" and taking our jobs, so let's keep them out. Civility -- now called political correctness -- is ruining our national conversation, so let's abandon it.
+
+The cliché is that presidential elections are about change, and that's true. Only this one may be about sea-change.
+
+This is not something that comes from nowhere, out of the blue. Americans are, with good reason, truly afraid. According to our CNN polling , nearly two thirds believe an act of terrorism is likely in the homeland -- and that poll was taken before the carnage of San Bernardino. Eighty-one percent are convinced that the terrorists are here, living among us -- a completely rational conclusion.
+
+Even more important -- and here's the key to Donald Trump's kingdom -- voters believe the political system, including (and maybe most of all) the President, have completely and utterly failed to get a handle on, or even appear to have a strategy for, security. And why would anybody blame anyone for thinking that? Sixty-eight percent say America's response to ISIS has not been tough enough, and a slightly smaller number say that when we do take action (in Iraq and Syria,) we fail. And that's not just among Republicans: Majorities in both parties say the United States has been ineffective in its response to the terror threat. This is not a new storyline. So this particular election-year story has all of the following: Disaffected and frustrated voters. Ineffective president. A level of public fear that has been rising steadily for at least a handful of years. Throw in anger at the collapsing political system, the establishment and the media, and Trump appears onstage like a vision emerging out of the clouds: the dark knight of our politics. Donald Trump is no fool. He's an experienced opportunist. He knows full well that he has stepped into a leadership vacuum that exists in American politics, and has been around for some time: Why should the American public have any respect at all for its institutions when they have been failing? When Congress can't legislate, or even behave? When the President -- elected with such high hopes -- fails to inspire or connect or even explain strategy? When others running for president often look like they're made of the same torn fabric, just with different holes? Trump flouts the conventions, and plays to fears. But for now, at least, it doesn't matter. In a large field of GOP candidates, Trump's solid core of support among one-third of Republicans -- a minority -- is enough to keep him on top, and any Republican running would like to have his numbers. His latest gambit -- a vague proposal to keep Muslims out of the country until ""our country's representatives can figure out what's going on"" is pure bombast, delivered to rally the faithful -- and he'll probably get a bump in the polls out of it. Jeb Bush calls it ""unhinged."" His fellow Republicans also punch at it, to varying degrees. But, for now at least, they're just punching jello. And hoping he doesn't break the mold.",REAL
+1786,"For First Time, Trump Shrinks In Spotlight; Fiorina Steals Show","For First Time, Trump Shrinks In Spotlight; Fiorina Steals Show
+
+Donald Trump was once again at center stage at Wednesday night's debate hosted by CNN — the second debate among the GOP candidates for president This time, however, he had a harder time holding the spotlight.
+
+Again and again throughout the seemingly interminable three-hour spectacle, the attention of the audience migrated to the the smallest figure on the set: Carly Fiorina.
+
+It could be lost on no one that Fiorina was the only woman in the cast of 11 hopefuls, nor that she had been admitted to the group only after CNN altered its original rules to take note of her recent surge in the polls. Even with this upgrade, propelled by her standout performance in the August debate among the lesser candidates, Fiorina has been languishing in the low single digits in most national polls.
+
+That could be about to change. Any leveling off in Trump's astonishing trajectory will create a need for new storylines, and Fiorina seems poised to provide.
+
+The other outsider phenomenon, Ben Carson, did not shine as brightly in the CNN event as he had on Fox in August. Soft-spoken and mild-mannered, the neurosurgeon disagreed with Trump about vaccines and autism but shied from any real conflict with him on the issue. At other times he seemed vague in explaining his 2003 Iraq War position and his willingness to de-emphasize armed conflict.
+
+Fiorina, however, was a picture of decisiveness and to-the-point presentation. Like the consummate sales professional she is, Fiorina came armed with pithy, precise answers. She had neatly anticipated nearly all the questions thrown her way — including the ones she seized in the general scramble for air and camera time.
+
+She was ready with the exact dimensions of the larger military she wanted, and the specifics of rebuttal to attacks on her stewardship of Hewlett-Packard. Trump made repeated, rather clumsy thrusts at Fiorina's executive history. She whipped them back at him with replies that cracked in the air.
+
+The Trump show in general did not seem as dominating as in the first debate, or in the many news cycles since, when anything and everything he said made headlines. Wags soon dubbed the night ""Lady and the Trump,"" but that was not the whole story, either.
+
+Trump was also set upon by a pack of his opponents, several of whom seemed to have boned up on his history of casino bankruptcies. He fended these off with breezy references to the way business works, but these did not seem to be working as well as in the past. Jeb Bush, though still a bit ill at ease, made his arguments with dignity and seriousness and jousted in his own restrained way with Trump (as well as with Rand Paul and others).
+
+Much has been written and said about Trump's capturing the imagination of the white, older, working-class voters within the Republican electorate. This he has done, but not by himself. He has had an assist from the wide-eyed media, promoting the ""Summer of Trump"" with wonder and hunger for more. At times, on this night, there were signs that this dynamic was losing some of its energy, that the shtick might be beginning to wear thin.
+
+This impression crept in despite the effects of the CNN debate format, which allowed any candidate mentioned by name to respond to that mention. As most of the candidates were, in varying degrees, gunning for Trump, moderator Jake Tapper was continually turning to The Donald for replies. Intended or not, this device kept the billionaire the center of attention even when Tapper was trying to distribute the airtime more equitably.
+
+Still, there was more than enough running room for Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. The senators from Florida and Texas fired the broadsides against both the Obama administration and the masters of the Senate that have been their stock-in-trade since the Tea Party movement first sent them to Washington.
+
+Both did well at connecting with hardcore conservatives who agree the GOP leaders in Congress are useless. Rubio did so with more human appeal, however, using his remarkably empathetic facial appeal. Cruz seemed intent on softening his image, tossing verbal bouquets to his wife and his parents.
+
+Chris Christie also seemed to thrive in the mix on this occasion. This in part because he interrupted the Trump-Fiorina fussing over who had done what in business. ""The 55-year-old construction worker who's out of a job doesn't care about your careers,"" Christie scolded. And he reinforced the point in an eloquent closing statement about refocusing national policy to benefit ordinary Americans.
+
+John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, once again offered a mix of high-level resume and aw-shucks Americana, tossing out more numbers than any of his data-happy rivals but still managing to be more boyish than wonkish. Kasich surely has the credentials to be legitimate in this race, but he remains the credential candidate in an anti-establishment and even anti-credential year.
+
+Among those getting the short end of the attention supply was Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. Walker had his lines down as well as anyone, but they all seemed to go back to Madison in 2011 and the massive protests against his first budget. Walker has raised eyebrows in the past by saying his facedown of these protests proved he could tame ISIS, Vladimir Putin and the ayatollahs of Iran. But he was back on that theme again Wednesday night.
+
+Rand Paul provided multiple moments of dissent, opposing not only the Iraq War of 2003 but also the proposals to intervene in the Middle East today. Mike Huckabee was reliable on the issue of religious liberty, which he defined as including the right of Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis to defy the Supreme Court and deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
+
+One final note about the ""happy hour"" debate that preceded the main event. Both Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina turned in sharp performances, with Jindal stressing harsh anti-Obama rhetoric and Graham a grim assessment of threats to national security — replete with a pledge to return more ""boots on the ground"" to the Middle East. The difference was that Graham mixed in a strong dose of sly Carolina humor, eliciting chuckles and even guffaws for things like a pledge to have ""more drinking"" in Washington.
+
+As the Fiorina promotion this time around proved so worthwhile, perhaps in the future the GOP and sponsoring media will see fit to elevate the unofficial winner of each ""undercard debate"" to participate in the main event in the next round. It could become a kind of tradition. Provided of course that the undercard debate survives another round in this campaign.",REAL
+5685,Carrot Top To Give Nobel Awards At Drive Thru Window,"Friday, 4 November 2016 Nobel Prize recipients will be able to go to the drive thru window to get their awards. 
+After accruing millions of dollars in debt, the Nobel prize committee will forgo a lavish award ceremony in favor of a webcast hosted by Carrot Top from a drive thru coffee kiosk. 
+Nobel Committee head Jørgen Myklebust is putting his experience in marketing for Supermac's to the task with the new drive thru format for this years award ceremony. He explained the decision when he talked to reporter Rance Penning of the Daily Maul. 
+""This will be the first year in a decade we don't lose money: the webcast costs us virtually nothing and Carrot Top has agreed to MC the award ceremony in exchange for a Nobel prize in chemistry. And having Carrot Top as the host is already giving us a boost with advertisers."" 
+Myklebust further explained: 
+""The nominees will be able to stream the webcast while in the parking lot at NK Stockholm, and the winners will drive up to the kiosk window to get their awards."" 
+When Penning asked if the entire Nobel operation was moving to the kiosk, Myklebust dismissed the question as silly. 
+""You know, it's not serious to ask if we are keeping our offices in the kiosk, of course our whole staff will not fit in a kiosk. For those who are curious, we'll continue to maintain our office space in a camping tent outside Tom Schuyler's house."" 
+This reporter visited with Carrot Top to talk about the new gig. I had a few minutes with him in his Las Vegas dressing room as his assistants made him up for that nights show. 
+""I can't wait to go to Sweden,"" said Scott Thompson (Carrot Top's real name). ""I can go incognito, you know, I don't stand out as a ginger there."" 
+When asked about props for the webcast, the beloved orange one jumped up and grabbed some vials and a butane torch from a toy box. 
+""Oh, yeah! Since my Nobel prize is in chemistry, I'm bringing my Meth Lab Jr.™ chemistry set, I should probably save that for the end of the show in case I blow anything up!"" 
+""And for sure I'm bringing my tip jar!"" 
+At which point Thompson showed this reporter an actual glass jar with a credit card reader embedded in it. Make XRhonda Speaks's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
+2057,Scott Walker's stealth 2016 strategy,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+6128,Gauis Publius: TPP Has Picked Up a Powerful Enemy — Black Lives Matter,"Mark Warner, Virginia Ron Wyden, Oregon 
+In both houses of Congress, these were the barest of margins — 218 Yes votes in the House and 60 Yes votes in the Senate, in each case exactly the minimum required for passage. Another indication of how toxic this “trade” bill is. No Democrat dared touch it who didn’t want to or have to. 
+Black Lives Matter and the TPP 
+And now the TPP has become even more toxic, since the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social-justice movement has endorsed the anti-TPP position. Politico Pro has this (sub. required; my emphasis): 
+Obama’s latest TPP foe: Black Lives Matter By Andrew Hanna Monday, Oct. 31, 2016 
+The Obama administration will face an unexpected adversary as it gears up for what could be a blockbuster lame-duck fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership: the Black Lives Matter movement. 
+The group — best known best for its protests of police shootings of African-Americans — has joined the fray over the Asian Pacific trade deal as part of its growing focus on economic issues, contending the pact would lead to greater racial injustice . It ties past trade deals to the closures of factories that have hurt black workers disproportionately and increased black poverty . 
+Its involvement could influence the votes of a handful of wavering Democrats, should Congress tackle TPP during the lame duck. 
+“There are groups that are going to pay a lot of close attention to what they say, especially the Congressional Black Caucus,” said Bill Reinsch, a fellow at the Stimson Center and close trade-vote watcher. 
+Only a small band of 28 House Democrats voted to give the president fast track authority to complete TPP, including three members of the Congressional Black Caucus: Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) and Terri Sewell (D-Ala.). A fourth black caucus member, Republican Mia Love of Utah, also voted for fast-track authority. 
+With anti-trade fervor whipped into a fever pitch by the presidential election campaign, their votes are considered key to passage of the pact — and all are under increasing pressure to abandon the president should the pact come to a ratification vote. 
+The pretend reason, of course, for TPP support is support for a major legacy “want” by the first black president. The pro-Clinton members of the Democratic Platform Committee, for example, resisted to the end any explicit language about TPP on the grounds that the Party must support its president. 
+Democrats Prioritize Party Unity Over Including Stand Against TPP In Platform 
+Members of the Democratic National Convention Platform Committee shot down an attempt to include specific opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal in the platform, despite the fact that both Democratic presidential candidates have taken positions against the TPP. 
+The attempt failed because members appointed by Hillary Clinton and DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed it was improper to oppose the TPP when President Barack Obama fervently believes in the agreement. However, by putting party unity before taking a firm stand against the trade agreement, the door was left open for Clinton to go back to supporting the TPP , which was the case when she was secretary of state. 
+“It is hard for me to understand why Secretary Clinton’s delegates won’t stand behind Secretary Clinton’s positions in the party’s platform,” Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said…. 
+Even platform committee chair, Representative E.J. Cummings [normally progressive on trade issues], chose to vote against the resolution. He, too, bragged about not voting for trade agreements. 
+“I don’t want to do anything as he ends his term to undercut the president of the United States. I’m just not going to do it. And that’s where I stand,” Cummings proclaimed. 
+That’s the pretend reason — supporting the first black president — for most of them anyway. The real reason is different and not unexpected — money and everything money can buy. The Democratic Party as it’s currently configured exists to enable the fire hose flow of corporate and big-wealth dollars into its coffers. Opposing that flow gets you the “Sanders treatment,” but I’m not spilling any new beans in saying that. 
+This move by Black Lives Matter takes away the pretend reason and thus puts some careers at risk. BLM has high visibility at the moment. It will be worth watching the result, the actual TPP vote, as this plays out later. 
+What to Watch For in the Lame Duck 
+Once the Democrats figure out how many Republicans will defect from their leadership in each house of Congress (there were 50 House Republican defections last time plus six not voting, and five Senate defections plus two not voting), they’ll know how many Democrats will have to “take one for the team” — vote Yes on TPP so others with reputations to protect (like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi ) don’t have to. 
+The numbers needed to pass TPP in the Senate have changed this time. Only 51 votes are needed there now (that’s part of what “fast track” means). Finding 50 No votes in the Senate is not an impossible task, but it’s a very high bar — depending on the way Republicans vote, as few as four “Democrats” like Ron Wyden could guarantee passage. 
+So the greatest vulnerability for TPP is in the House . Can Democrats again muster something like 28 pro-corporate votes? Which Democrats will chose to take the fall a second time? Corporatists like Ron Kind will eagerly comply. But will Earl Blumenauer ( bow-tie bicycle guy )? Will CBC members Sewell and Johnson, with BLM lobbying hard against them? Or will other House Democrats be needed (and willing) to take the fall so Pelosi can move TPP across the line? 
+Again, Fast Track passed the House with zero votes to spare. What if the Republican opposition — including the opposition to Speaker Ryan in the wake of the Trump debacle — swells to more than 50? This could be a very close vote. 
+TPP, Obama’s Legacy and “A Glide Path to His Life as an Ex-President” 
+The Politico article quoted above helpfully notes this about Obama’s legacy: 
+If successfully pushed through Congress, ratification of the trade accord would be the last major piece of legislation of the Obama presidency. The prospect that black lawmakers and activists could help to hand him a defeat is complicated by Obama’s position as the first black president. 
+“ This is part of President Obama’s legacy ,” said [CBC member Gregory] Meeks. 
+Will Barack Obama get his legacy wish, along with his legacy library and foundation? The New York Times a few weeks ago told us this about Obama’s future plans and needs: 
+Publicly, Mr. Obama betrays little urgency about his future. Privately, he is preparing for his postpresidency with the same fierce discipline and fund-raising ambition that characterized the 2008 campaign that got him to the White House. 
+The long-running dinner this past February is part of a methodical effort taking place inside and outside the White House as the president, first lady and a cadre of top aides map out a postpresidential infrastructure and endowment they estimate could cost as much as $1 billion . The president’s aides did not ask any of the guests for library contributions after the dinner, but a number of those at the table could be donors in the future…. 
+So far, Mr. Obama has raised just over $5.4 million from 12 donors, with gifts ranging from $100,000 to $1 million. Michael J. Sacks, a Chicago businessman, gave $666,666. Fred Eychaner, the founder of Chicago-based Newsweb Corp., which owns community newspapers and radio stations, donated $1 million. Mark T. Gallogly, a private equity executive, and James H. Simons, a technology entrepreneur, each contributed $340,000 to a foundation set up to oversee development of the library. 
+The real push for donations, foundation officials said, will come after Mr. Obama leaves the White House . 
+Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser, oversees an effort inside the White House to keep attention on Mr. Obama’s future and to ensure that his final 17 months in office, barring crises, serve as a glide path to his life as an ex-president . 
+“A glide path to his life as an ex-president.” I guess you could call him, after his 2008 trademark, “ever hopeful and looking for change” Interesting times indeed. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+7303,Training French soldiers to supervise Daesh,"Training French soldiers to supervise Daesh Voltaire Network | 27 October 2016 français Español italiano Deutsch Türkçe On 22 September 2016, while cleaning around an abandoned troglodyte refuge not far from the church of Saint-Florent on the outskirts of Saumur (France), a group of workers saw three men drive away hurriedly in a white van. Entering the cave, they discovered video equipment and a generator, as well as newspapers in the Arab language and Daesh flags.
+Wishing to calm not only the anxiety of the population, but also the police, the gendarmerie and the sub-prefect, General Arnaud Nicolazo de Barmon, commanding officer of the Military Schools in Saumur declared that the men were not terrorists, but students of a training exercise by the Inter-Army Centre for Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and Radiological defence (CIA NBCR).
+If such were the case, in the middle of the current state of emergency, the CIA NBCR would have violated the rules of notification for this exercise, which should have been transmitted to the different local authorities before the exercise began. Apart from this, it is not easy to discern how any of the equipment discovered might be in any way useful for exercises in nuclear, radiological, biological and chemical defence.
+In the same buildings as the CIA NBCR in Saumur are the schools specialised in Intelligence and Inter-Army Combat.
+The presence of French forces has been noted since the very beginning of the events in Syria, in 2011. In 2012, 19 French soldiers who had been taken prisoner were handed back, at the Lebanese border, to the Army Chief of Staff, Admiral Édouard Guillaud, with other soldiers supervising Baba Amr’s Islamic Emirate. The death of French soldiers supervising the Islamist troops was certified in several places, particularly in Sannayeh in 2013. While France, in 2014, had supported Al-Qaïda against Daesh, the presence of French officers within the Caliphate itself has been attested by several witnesses in 2016.
+In November 2014, the Pentagon declared that it had killed an agent of the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) in Samarda – the agent, David Drugeon, was working within Al-Qaïda, while the French Minister for Defence denied any link with the victim. Thereafter, the US Press confirmed that David Drugeon had trained Mohamed Mera (terrorist attacks in Toulouse and Montauban), and the Kouachi brothers (attack on Charlie Hebdo ).
+France has never officially recognised that it has troops on the ground in Syria, although it has admitted that it shares common headquarters there with allied special forces .
+Translation
+Pete Kimberley",FAKE
+4601,Let’s Make 2016 the Last Endless American Election,"Enough Is Enough
+
+If we really want to do something about the worst effects of our electoral process, let’s start by simply having less of it.
+
+You might think that Hillary Clinton has been running for president for, well, ever — but technically she began her campaign on April 12th last year, 18 months ago. Donald Trump launched his bid for the White House a more restrained 15 months ago. But if you want a real contrast, cross the Atlantic. I once ran elections in the UK, where the typical length of a campaign is not 18 or 15 months but four or five weeks.
+
+Look, I get it about the constitution, free speech and all that. Believe me: As a recent(ish) immigrant, living in Silicon Valley, having taught at Stanford and started a business here, I have all the zeal of the convert. I truly think that America is the greatest nation on earth, and I feel profoundly lucky to be able to be part of it.
+
+But can we just talk about the election process for a moment? Is there a single person in this country who feels better able to choose between Trump and Clinton today than a year ago? What have we learned about these candidates that we couldn’t have discovered over the course of the nine weeks since Labor Day? Nine weeks is double the length of a general election campaign in the UK. I’m not saying British democracy is perfect, not by a long way. But at least the flaws aren’t inflicted on the population on a continuous basis.
+
+The most common thing I hear people saying about the election right now is “Please let it be over!” Of course, you could argue that the reason is not so much the length of the process but the uniquely polarizing nature of the major party nominees this time, and the fact that unusually, they were both well-known to the American people before they even entered the race. If two relatively obscure candidates had been nominated, perhaps the cries of pain from the public wouldn’t be quite as anguished.
+
+There’s more to this question, though, than familiarity with — or contempt for — any individual politician at any given time. The length of election campaigns in America causes real, structural problems throughout our democratic system, regardless of who the candidates are.
+
+First, the relentless posturing involved in near-permanent campaigns contributes to the hyper-partisanship that makes reasonable debate on public policy issues increasingly difficult. An environment where any half-thoughtful comment can almost instantly find its way into an overnight online attack ad is one that incentivizes politicians to put ‘messaging’ ahead of problem-solving, and that’s not good.
+
+For example, I agree with Hillary Clinton’s emphasis on the importance of early intervention and parenting support as one of the best ways to tackle poverty and inequality. But if elected, I expect her administration would approach this priority in a disastrously old-fashioned, top-down, bureaucratic way that would end in failure.
+
+No candidate of either party could say that: it’s too nuanced a position. With most members of Congress literally starting their next election campaign the day after this one has ended, you won’t see any of them move beyond yelling platitudes like “nanny state” or “war on women.”
+
+For a start, it means that it’s harder for people who are not wealthy to run for office. Who has the time and the resources to take two years off work to get elected? Rich people, that’s who. It’s no surprise that the proportion of millionaires in Congress is at an all-time high.
+
+More than that, the cost of lengthy political campaigns is a direct factor in the systemic corruption that is such a notable feature of American democracy. In fact, if you look at what actually happens in Congress and in state legislatures, it is difficult to argue that America is in any meaningful sense of the word a democracy at all. It is a donocracy, where the funders of election campaigns literally buy the outcomes they want from the political system.
+
+Look too at the role of organized labor, providing campaign infrastructure, volunteers, get out the vote operations. None of that would be touched by campaign finance reform. And then look what the unions get in return: in my home state of California, budgets that increase compensation for corrections officers while cutting spending on public schools and state universities. Way to go, progressives!
+
+The truth is that even if Clinton wins, and by some miracle enacts some version of campaign finance reform, the assorted lobbyists, bloodsuckers, sleazebags and other hangers-on in Washington DC will breathe a huge sigh of relief because they know that for them, life in our nation’s capital will go on as corruptly as before.
+
+No, if we really want to do something about the worst effects of our electoral process, let’s start by simply having less of it. Think of it like pollution control: it doesn’t make the problem go away, but it does make the world a bit less toxic. Radically shortening election campaigns is no more a silver bullet than changing the law on political donations. But it would make a big difference, and has the advantage of being easier to implement.",REAL
+8367,November 8 Is (Finally) Here: An Abridged Election Day Resource Guide,By Common Dreams After a national election season that many called “interminable” and where the trending phrase to describe the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump became... ,FAKE
+1996,Going Back to the Future in 2016?,"(CNN) Who among the nascent field of 2016 contenders represents the future? For half of Americans, it's Hillary Clinton.
+
+Asked in a new CNN/ORC poll whether seven possible candidates better represent the future or the past, 50% said Clinton evoked the future, more than said so of any other candidate. By contrast, Joe Biden and Jeb Bush, whose names have been in the political conversation even longer than Clinton's, were each seen as representing the past by 64% of Americans.
+
+Even some relative newcomers to national politics are more closely linked to the past than the future. Half said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie represents the past, while 43% said he represents the future. On Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, 49% thought he represented the past, 41% the future. And 42% thought Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker represented the past, 39% the future.
+
+Overall, across the field of seven, just two were deemed more ""future"" than ""past,"" and both were women: Clinton (50% future, 48% past) and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (46% future, 37% past).
+
+Both Clinton and Warren prompt significant gender gaps, with women more likely than men to call each a representation of the future. Among men, 53% see Clinton as a representation of the past, while 55% of women see her representing the future. On Warren, women see her as more future than past by a 50% to 32% margin, while men split evenly, 43% on each side.
+
+Democrats generally see their own possible presidential contenders as representative of the future. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 74% called Clinton a candidate who represents the future, 61% said so of Warren and 51% of Biden.
+
+Last month, Mitt Romney bowed out of the presidential race with a nod to his party's future, saying he hoped ""one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well-known as I am today"" would wind up better prepared to beat the eventual Democratic candidate.
+
+But Republicans don't see the field as particularly future-oriented. Of the four Republican candidates tested, a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rated two of them as more representative of the future than the past, Walker (55%) and Paul (53%). Fewer saw Christie (49%) or Bush (47%) that way.
+
+Walker gained ground among Republicans in the race for the party's presidential nomination, the poll showed, while Christie and Bush both faltered. The shuffling field also saw a double-digit gain in support for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who now tops the field with 16%. The national survey found Huckabee closely followed by Bush at 14% (down 9 points), Walker at 11% (up 7 points) and Paul at 10%. Ben Carson lands in fifth with 8% and Chris Christie at sixth with 7% (down 6 points). No other candidate tops 5%.
+
+Walker's gains are concentrated among older voters. He leads the field among those age 65 or up with 22%. Among Republicans under 50, Huckabee and Paul fare better than they do among their 65 and over counterparts.
+
+Among conservative Republicans, it's a three-way tie: 15% each say they'd be most likely to support Bush, Huckabee and Walker, with 10% each behind Carson and Paul.
+
+The poll finds less change on the Democratic side. Clinton still leads the field with 61%. Her next closest competitor, Biden, has gained six points since December and stands at 14%. Warren follows at 10%. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley all remain in the low single digits.
+
+As overseas turmoil riles President Barack Obama's approval ratings for handling foreign affairs, terrorism now joins the economy at the top of voters' priority lists as the 2016 contest kicks off. Forty-two percent called terrorism an extremely important issue in their presidential vote, on par with the 41% calling the economy that important. Education (40% extremely important) and health care (39% extremely important) also rank near the top.
+
+Sharp partisan divides in priorities emerge outside the economy and health care. On terrorism, 87% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say it's extremely or very important, compared with 78% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to call illegal immigration an important issue (74% among Republicans vs. 55% among Democrats), while Democrats are more apt to prioritize the income gap (75% among Democrats vs. 45% among Republicans) and global warming (63% among Democrats vs. 23% of Republicans).
+
+The CNN/ORC International poll was conducted February 12-15, 2015, and interviewed 1,027 adult Americans, including 436 Republicans and independents who describe themselves as Republican, and 475 Democrats and independents who describe themselves as Democrats. Results for all adults have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 points. For results among Republicans or Democrats, it is 4.5 points.",REAL
+4267,A bad night for front-runners and a good night for governors,"It was a tough night for front-runners in New Hampshire and a good night for governors.
+
+Marco Rubio hit a wall named Chris Christie. Donald Trump couldn’t put down an aggressive Jeb Bush. And Ted Cruz had to issue a public apology to Ben Carson.
+
+Christie was the relentless prosecutor. Bush was knowledgeable and, in contrast to some earlier performances, tough and direct. Ohio Gov. John Kasich carved out space as a candidate ready and willing to work across party lines.
+
+Given the timing and the state of the Republican nomination contest, few debates have had the potential to shape the order of finish in a primary campaign more than Saturday night’s forum at Saint Anselm College. Trump holds a big lead. But the competition underneath him is fierce, and the outcome Tuesday likely to be consequential. Those with the most to lose were the ones who tried to make the most out of their time on stage.
+
+No one had a rockier night than Rubio, the senator from Florida whose strong third-place finish in Iowa made him the candidate on the rise in the Republican presidential race. But under a blistering attack from Christie, who characterized him as a politician with no notable accomplishments who had run away from the immigration reform bill he had co-sponsored, Rubio faltered.
+
+Rubio knew the attacks were coming, but instead of answering them directly, he sought to change the subject. Once, twice, three times he offered a quick counterpunch and then slid off the criticisms to turn to an attack on President Obama, repeating his language almost word for word and drawing boos from the audience.
+
+When he accused Christie of having to be shamed into going back to New Jersey to deal with the recent snowstorm, Christie came roaring back. “That’s what Washington, D.C., does,” Christie said. “The drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information and then the memorized 25-second speech that is exactly what his advisers gave him.”
+
+What was most striking was the fact that Rubio played directly into the criticism that, while he is a gifted and natural communicator, he is overly scripted and returns to his standard stump speech as quickly as he can.
+
+The strategy has worked for him in past debates, but repetition got the better of him on Saturday. Rubio wanted to debate Obama and Hillary Clinton, warning time and again that the president has deliberately led the country in the wrong direction and that Clinton would extend those policies. Those kinds of attacks bring cheers at his campaign rallies but were far less effective during Saturday’s debate.
+
+In the later stages of the debate, Rubio seemed to regain his footing both on foreign policy and on a question about abortion in which he talked about the balance between a woman’s right to make her own decisions and the right of an unborn child to live.
+
+Even when Bush drew a distinction with Rubio over whether there should be exceptions for rape, incest and life of the woman, which Bush favors, Rubio said he would sign a bill as president that included those exceptions but that he still stood by his personal convictions. Rubio said he would rather lose an election than be wrong on the issue.
+
+Trump struggled when the subject of eminent domain, a hot-button issue for many conservatives who dislike government, was introduced. The billionaire builder initially offered a ringing defense of the practice of government taking private property for such projects as roads and bridges.
+
+Bush countered, initially agreeing that eminent domain is necessary for the public good but then attacking Trump for attempting to use the practice to take property from an elderly woman in Atlantic City, N.J., for the purpose of a parking lot for one of his casinos.
+
+Trump reverted to attacks he has long leveled at Bush — that he lacks strength or energy. “He wants to be a tough guy,” Trump said dismissively.
+
+But Bush came right back at him: “How tough is it to take away a property from an elderly woman?” he said sarcastically.
+
+When Trump told Bush to keep quiet, the audience let out another round of boos, to which Trump said, “That’s all his donors and special interests.”
+
+Cruz, who won the Iowa caucuses, had two difficult moments at the start of the evening. The first came over criticism Cruz leveled at Trump earlier in the week, saying, “I don’t know anyone who would be comfortable with someone who behaves this way having his finger on the button.”
+
+Trump was given the first word and defended himself. He reminded everyone that he had opposed the war in Iraq, adding, “I’m not the one with the trigger.”
+
+“Other people up here, believe me, would be a lot faster,” he said.
+
+When Cruz was asked to explain why he thought Trump lacked the temperament to be president, he ducked. “The assessment the voters are making here in New Hampshire and across the country is they are evaluating each and every one of us,” he said.
+
+Reminded by ABC News anchor David Muir that he had not explained why he had made the earlier comment, Cruz ducked again.
+
+Trump responded: “He didn’t answer your question. And that’s what’s going to happen with our enemies and the people we compete against. . . . People back down with Trump. And that’s what I like, and that’s what the country is going to like.”
+
+That didn’t end the early hazing for Cruz. He was asked why his advisers had called Iowa volunteers on the night of the caucuses to say that Carson might be quitting the race and to encourage voters to back the senator from Texas.
+
+Cruz blamed the problem on what he said was a misleading news report on CNN that he said was not corrected for several hours. But he also apologized to Carson and said he had done so the day after the caucuses.
+
+Carson, in his typically quiet way, accepted the apology but not the explanation. “In fact, the timeline indicates that initial tweet from CNN was followed by another one within one minute that clarified that I was not dropping out,” he said.
+
+More than in other previous debates, this one turned into governors against the others. The three share common experiences, and when they talk about one another, it’s clear there is mutual respect, though they are in a battle in which they cannot all survive. And whether by design or accident, the three seemed to reinforce one another in taking down the candidates who finished first, second and third in Iowa.
+
+Christie delivered one of the strongest performances of the campaign, clearly determined to knock down Rubio, whom he described this past week as “a boy in the bubble.” Fighting for his political life, he was merciless in attacking Rubio for lacking the courage to fight for the immigration reform legislation that passed the Senate but faltered in the House.
+
+Rubio countered by attacking Christie’s record in New Jersey, noting that the state has gone through repeated credit downgrades during his two terms. The audience seemed to side with Christie. Whether voters will do the same is the test for the next three days.
+
+Kasich was the happy warrior, a governor who stressed jobs, the economy and dealing realistically with issues, not on the basis of pure ideology. Bush has tried for many months to make his record in Florida the centerpiece of his candidacy. Only now in these closing days has he appeared more comfortable as a candidate.
+
+Saturday’s debate here offered a last opportunity for candidates to make a persuasive argument before a primary election likely to winnow the field of realistic hopefuls to four at most.
+
+The New Hampshire electorate is famously fickle for upending front-runners and defying conventional wisdom and turning its back on winners in Iowa. A more charitable description is that this is a state where voters keep their options open as long as possible.
+
+While it’s true that many voters have been locked in for weeks or months, a sizable number are spending these last few days shopping and pondering. They are at every rally on this final weekend, looking for that connection that tips them firmly in one direction or another.
+
+That makes pollsters nervous and campaigns hopeful. The candidates know lightning can strike, and they grasp for every sign that it is happening to them. In the days after Iowa, there has been some movement in the polls but nothing definitive yet.
+
+What makes this year’s GOP primary distinctive from past campaigns is the number of candidates on this final weekend who still think they have a chance to move on to succeeding rounds of primaries and caucuses. Saturday’s debate underscored both the sense of possibility and the sense of urgency that surrounds the last days of campaigning here.",REAL
+3077,How public funding of elections makes politics even more polarized,"Public funding of elections — that is, relying on tax revenue more than private donations to fund candidate campaigns — is a popular campaign finance reform proposal, if one that many Americans don’t fully embrace.  Public funding is often thought to free candidates from the burden of fundraising and reduce the influence of wealthy donors and special interests.  That all sounds good.  Who likes “special interests,” after all?
+
+Now, new research shows that public funding has an unexpected consequence: increased polarization.  That is, public funding makes it harder, not easier, to elect moderate candidates.
+
+That is the conclusion of political scientist Andrew Hall.  He focuses on state legislative elections and compares trends in the five states that implemented robust public funding programs — Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, and Wisconsin — to trends in other states.  Here is what he finds:
+
+Below is a graph showing the distribution of ideology (“NP scores”) in legislatures in states that implemented public financing (the “treated” states) and those that did not (the “control” states).  The first group of states became more polarized after the implementation of public financing.  But no such change occurred during this time in the states that didn’t implement public financing.
+
+In a more elaborate statistical analysis, Hall examines the gap between Republican and Democratic legislators representing similar districts.  In a polarized legislature, a Republican and a Democrat will tend to vote in very different ways even though they represent essentially the same constituents.  Hall finds that public financing increases this gap between the parties by 30 percent.
+
+Why does public financing appear to have this effect?  Hall argues that public financing weakens the influence of a maligned, but moderating, force in elections: access-oriented interest groups.  Public financing reduces the funding supplied by these groups by over $20,000 per race, on average.  The problem is that these groups give relatively little to ideologically extreme legislators and much more to moderates.  Individual donors, however, have no such preference.
+
+This leads to a broader point about campaign finance and polarization.  Much of the debate over campaign finance is based on distinctions between “good” donors and “bad” donors.  Good donors are taxpayers, in a public financing system.  Or, in a privately funded system, good donors are ordinary citizens, sometimes called “small donors.”  Bad donors are political party organizations, wealthy people, political action committees, and interest groups.
+
+The problem is that if you want to reduce polarization, this way of thinking about donors gets things exactly backward.  Small donors are a polarizing influence, as Adam Bonica has shown.  Meanwhile, wealthy people tend to be a moderating influence.  The same is true of many political action committees and interest groups.  The same is true of political party organizations, as Brian Schaffner and Ray La Raja argue in this post.
+
+That’s not to say that there aren’t good reasons to favor public financing or small donors.  But favoring those things may also mean living with the trade-off: a more polarized, and probably less functional, politics.
+
+Note: For a response, see this follow-up post by Seth Masket and Michael Miller.",REAL
+2376,Gaming Obamacare,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+9553,The Anatomy of Crisis and the Decline of US Empire,"The Anatomy of Crisis and the Decline of US Empire Submitted by Danny Haiphong on Tue, 11/08/2016 - 12:18 Tweet Widget by Danny Haiphong 
+There are multiple dimensions to the crisis that afflicts U.S. imperialism. The latest election is evidence of a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling parties. Americans are estranged from a government that spies on every one its citizens – and on the rest of the world, too. “Unemployment, poverty, racist state repression, and war are all the system has to offer.” Unable to escape a 40-year economic slump, the U.S. instead plots the destruction of its rivals. The Anatomy of Crisis and the Decline of US Empire by Danny Haiphong 
+“ The vast majority of oppressed communities, particularly Black workers, have seen their labor become disposable in a post-industrial society.” 
+Whether one analyzes the economic, military, or political spheres of US imperialism, one thing is abundantly clear. The very fabric of the United States is in deep crisis. The crisis is largely misunderstood by the vast majority of working and oppressed people living under it. But a specter haunts the US and it isn't anything like Hollywood's scary movies. That specter is the possibility that the people will become a conscious force of opposition to the crisis and seek to dismantle the system of capitalist empire that governs it. 
+Crises are genuinely thought of in economic terms. The economic base of capitalism is indeed suffering from protracted economic crisis. The US capitalist economy, and thus the world capitalist economy pegged to its hip, entered a period of stagnation in the mid to late 1970s. What followed was a slowdown in production facilitated by the increased monopolization, financialization, and increased technological capacity of the system. Capitalism's source of profit, labor, was now being exploited by an apparatus too big to expand the profits of the system without intensified exploitation. The aftermath of capitalism's periodic collapses from overproduction and under consumption have been characterized ever since by a complete and total assault on all workers. 
+“Wages have declined or remained stagnant for nearly four decades.” 
+The conditions of the crisis speak for themselves. Workers in the US, and the entire Western world for that matter, have seen conditions rapidly deteriorate as the capitalist system has sought to maximize profits in the face of productive slowdown. Free trade agreements such as NAFTA have given corporations the freedom to eliminate production domestically in order to seek a better deal internationally. Wages have declined or remained stagnant for nearly four decades . Unemployment has become a permanent fixture of life for millions and nearly one of two people in the US are considered poor or ""near poor."" 
+At this time, the US is a low-wage capitalist economy dominated by service oriented, precarious employment. Racism has played a large part in the disparity inherent under these conditions. The wealth gap between Black America and White America is larger than it was in the Civil rights era. Not only has Black America been the target of racist housing policies from predatory lenders leading up to the 2008 crisis, but the burden of privatization and austerity has been directly aimed at Black families. Hedge funds, for example, have used working class Black communities as the guinea pig to test the effectiveness of massive school closures and teacher layoffs as well as the expansion of charter schools. Thousands of Black teachers have lost their jobs as a result to the mostly white demographic of Teach for America corps members. 
+“ The wealth gap between Black America and White America is larger than it was in the Civil rights era.” 
+However, it is not enough to understand the crisis of capitalism through an economic lens. The crisis possesses many forms. Repressive state activity has become more pronounced, especially in the aftermath of the War on Terror. Racist repression in particular has intensified as the vast majority of oppressed communities, particularly Black workers, have seen their labor become disposable in a post-industrial society. Nearly 1100 Black Americans are killed every year by law enforcement all over the country. The war on Black and indigenous peoples that laid the foundation of the United States has only become more severe, as evidenced by the fact that one of every eight prisoners in the world is a Black American. The Dakota Access Pipeline struggle has shown that not even the concentration camps forced upon indigenous people are safe from the profit-seeking tentacles of the crisis-ridden system. 
+And every American can guarantee that civil liberties are a thing of the past. The NSA, FBI, and the rest of the intelligence community possess access to the entire population's mail and phone devices. A massive surveillance dragnet accountable to no one but the ruling class allows the US state to keep tabs on whoever resists the conditions of the crisis. War at home is ultimately a reflection of the broader war being waged around the world. The US capitalist system is a global system with the largest military state in human history. War has thus played a critical role in the response to system crisis. 
+The US military acts as the enforcement arm of neo-colonialism and capitalist exploitation around the world. It has expanded into nearly every African state through the US African Command (AFRICOM). The US military state continues to support fascism in Ukraine and fundamentalist Islam in places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It has destabilized a number of nations in the last decade alone, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. The US has collaborated with NATO, Israel, and Turkey to militarily encircle Russia and China militarily and sponsor terror groups responsible for the massacres in Syria. 
+“The US imperialist system is predicated on the expansion of global capital by any means at its disposal, including the use military force to clear the way for corporate plunder. 
+But the US military is in crisis too. It is plagued by a disillusioned rank and file and the inevitability of a global confrontation with Russia and China if it continues on the current course. The demands of a stagnating global capitalist economy and the ever-increasing exploitation of masses of working people offer no potential for a reversal of fortune. The US imperialist system is predicated on the expansion of global capital by any means at its disposal, including the use military force to clear the way for corporate plunder. The US military state has grown both in size and in violence in order to prevent the global shift of power currently underway. 
+Russia and China have become the number one challengers to US global hegemony. China's economy will soon surpass that of the US and Russia's recovery from post-Soviet collapse has propelled the Putin-led nation back onto the global scene as a major factor in world affairs. These two powers are becoming increasingly close both economically and militarily. This has made the US ruling class increasingly nervous in the midst of economic decline. To maintain hegemony, the US military state set the world ablaze through endless war in every region of the world that dares to seek ties with Russia and China. 
+At this point, the US imperialist system cannot peacefully compete in any way with its so-called rivals to the East. The contradictions of the system have become unmanageable. Unemployment, poverty, racist state repression, and war are all the system has to offer. Another economic collapse is on the horizon. Crisis is built into the global capitalist system's constant drive to accumulate profit in the face of global misery. The decline of US imperialism and empire will not change regardless of the election. What is sure to change is the mass reaction to the decline as life becomes more and more unbearable under the grip of empire. Danny Haiphong is an Asian activist and political analyst in the Boston area. He can be reached at [email protected]",FAKE
+2570,Uncovered audio: Hillary was ‘adamantly against illegal immigrants’,"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+Buzz Cut:
+
+ • Uncovered audio: Hillary was ‘adamantly against illegal immigrants’
+
+ • Clintons on campaign cash: If disclosure ‘looks bad,’ don’t disclose
+
+ • Where’s Jeb? The whale is getting ready to surface
+
+ • Can Cameron come out ahead in U.K. kerfuffle?
+
+ • But the caucuses were really something
+
+UNCOVERED AUDIO: HILLARY WAS ‘ADAMANTLY AGAINST ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS’
+
+ The RNC today is shelling presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in her bunker with newly uncovered audio from a 2003 radio interview she gave as a senator. Apparently asked about the issue of illegal immigration, which was a hot button in the state at the time, Clinton swung hard: “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.” Clinton, on the campaign trail in Nevada Wednesday, promised to push for citizenship for those in the country illegally. She also vowed to go beyond President Obama’s executive amnesty for an estimated 5 million illegal immigrants if Republicans do not acquiesce. Obama’s order has so far been blocked by federal courts.
+
+ 
+
+ In the audio from the RNC of what the committee says is Clinton’s interview with radio host John Gambling, Clinton calls for more border security and for employers to stop hiring illegal immigrants. “Come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand in the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx,” she is heard to complain “You’re going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.”
+
+ 
+
+ CLINTONS GET CREATIVE ON CAMPAIGN CASH: IF DISCLOSURE ‘LOOKS BAD,’ DON’T DISCLOSE
+
+ If you thought that Hillary Clinton would be more bashful about buckraking given the current scandals surrounding her family finances and those of its foundation, you haven’t been paying attention. Clinton is vacuuming up money in California this week, but behind the scenes her campaign is busy blurring lines on campaign cash. First, Clinton will do what Democrats once reviled and raise cash for her super PAC. President Obama endorsed his super PAC, but stopped short of plumping for checks. (Candidates can’t legally make the ask, but they can probably stand next to the guy with his hand out – wink-wink, nudge-nudge – and swear up and down that they are not coordinating their efforts.)
+
+ 
+
+ Second, Clinton is so far not disclosing the identities of the bundlers, the mostly wealthy partisans who collect checks from their friends for campaigns. You know – bundlers. Releasing the names is not a legal requirement, but it has been standard practice for presidential candidates of both parties. You’d think Clinton would want to be more forthcoming about where her money comes from these days. But as her husband said​, “Any kind of disclosure is a target” that it “looks bad.” So the answer to the lengthening list of questions for the candidate and her campaign is less disclosure and more blurry fundraising lines.
+
+ 
+
+ Who made varsity this season? - A memo obtained by Bloomberg gives all the names of Clinton’s campaign A-team this time around. Not a lot of familiar faces, signaling a desire for change in this election cycle.
+
+ 
+
+ No pictures allowed, Clinton Foundation guests gather in Morocco - ABC News: “When ABC News producers attempted to take pictures of guests arriving at the front entrance, Moroccan police threatened their arrest. The foundation’s spokesman initially professed not to know where the reception was being held, and the location was among the only not included on schedules handed out to the media and published online.”
+
+ 
+
+ Hillary personal email use ‘not acceptable’ says State Dept. - The Hill: ""Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account run through a private server was 'not acceptable' and happened without officials’ knowledge, a top State Department record-keeper said on Wednesday. 'I think the message is loud and clear that that is not acceptable,' Joyce Barr, the State Department’s assistant secretary for the Bureau of Administration, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.""
+
+ 
+
+ TRADE ROILS BOTH PARTIES AS AIR OBAMA HEADS TO NIKE
+
+ As he laces up to tout his trade deal at Nike’s Oregon headquarters – an intriguing choice given the company’s sweat-shop past – President Obama’s push for fast track authority is proving to be far from a slam dunk in Congress. Indeed, with Obama pressing reluctant Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker John Boehner are trying put a buzzer beater. But opposition to the deal is stiff on both sides of the aisle and the pact is no more popular with Sixteeners of both stripes. Breaking with GOP frontrunners who support the deal, presidential candidate Mike Huckabee trash-talked the trade pact, warning that American workers could “take it up the backside” under the current proposal. “Fast-track means nobody’s paying attention,” Huckabee said. Among Democrats, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Gov. Martin O’Malley are strongly opposed. And where is Hillary Clinton in all this? On the bench, where she says she’s “watching closely.”
+
+ 
+
+ Bernie heckles - “Nike epitomizes why disastrous unfettered free-trade policies during the past four decades have failed American workers, eroded our manufacturing base and increased income and wealth inequality in this country,” Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., penned in a letter to the president Tuesday. “Just don’t do it,” Sanders wrote.
+
+ 
+
+ Why Nike? - National Journal takes a detailed look at the apparel giant, which is headquartered in the U.S. but does most of its business overseas: “Nike made $12.4 billion in profits last year, thanks in large part to 1 million subcontracted workers at factories primarily in low-wage countries in Asia. For years, the company has faced allegations that a number of those factories use sweatshop conditions and illegally low wages to produce sneakers and clothes that Nike then sells in much wealthier countries.”
+
+ 
+
+ WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…
+
+ One of the most famous photographs in sports journalism is of the 1965 game between rival schools Deerfield Academy and Mount Hermon in which the game went on before full stands as a huge fire consumed Mount Hermon’s science building right behind the bleachers. Would you like to know the story behind the famous photo? NYT has the details: “Halftime came. Officials conferred about how to handle the nettlesome situation. In a decision that surely would not be made in today’s safety-conscious, litigious world, they decided it would be better if the teams just carried on. ‘We were told to suck it up and play,’ [one Mount Hermon player] recalled.”
+
+ 
+
+ Got a TIP from the RIGHT or LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+ 
+
+ POLL CHECK
+
+ Real Clear Politics Averages
+
+ Obama Job Approval: Approve – 46.1 percent//Disapprove – 49.2 percent
+
+ Direction of Country: Right Direction – 29.5 percent//Wrong Track – 61.1 percent
+
+ 
+
+ WHERE’S JEB? THE WHALE IS GETTING READY TO SURFACE
+
+ As three more fish joined the growing school of Republican presidential candidates this week, the whale in the race, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has be staying far below the surface. Bush has been quiet lately, with no public events and an under the radar op-ed in the Chicago Tribune. Some advisers told the WaPo not to expect an announcement for at least a month. But others have told Fox News First that the official announcement will be sooner than that and done in a low key manner – as might befit a candidate with 99 percent name recognition among Republican voters. (While a candidate like Scott Walker, still unknown to 1 in 5 Republicans in the latest WSJ/NBC News poll needs a lift from his eventual launch, Bush will be risk-averse.) So when does the whale of a candidate come to the surface? Perhaps his speech at Liberty University’s commencement this Saturday will be just that spray.
+
+ 
+
+ How Jeb sank Christie - National Journal: “From the time a Bush candidacy started looking more likely, the wind came out of [New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s] presidential sails to the point when he was effectively dead in the water. It was mostly because Bush filled a void that Christie planned to fill in himself. The bridge mess was just icing on the cake.”
+
+ 
+
+ [Gov. Christie starts another two-day tour through New Hampshire today.]
+
+ 
+
+ Rubio snags top-drawer Nevada state director - Las Vegas Review-Journal: “U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio on Wednesday gained a strong ally when Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison announced would be the Florida senator’s presidential campaign director in Nevada…[Hutchinson] noted Rubio’s family ties to the Silver State, having lived in Las Vegas for six months while growing up. His father was a bartender and his mother a maid.”
+
+ 
+
+ Paul pays up for his own name - National Journal: “Days before [Rand Paul] launched his bid for president, his campaign shelled out more than $100,000 to a domain-buying firm to purchase a ‘domain name.’ Soon after, RandPaul.com, which had previously been a pro-Paul site run by his fans, emerged as the official portal for the campaign. Federal campaign records show Paul used his Senate reelection committee to pay $100,980 to Escrow.com, a domain service, on March 27.”
+
+ 
+
+ Carson meets with community leaders in Baltimore - Baltimore Sun: “Dr. Ben Carson, the former Hopkins neurosurgeon who announced his candidacy for president this week, will visit with Baltimore faith and community leaders on Thursday...A spokeswoman did not respond to a request to clarify if Carson's visit is related to the Freddie Gray case. Carson is also set to speak to at a Maryland Right to Life banquet later Thursday evening in Woodlawn.”
+
+ 
+
+ “And we have to re-instill that can-do attitude that is so important in our nation. It's what drove this nation from no place to the pinnacle of the world, and the highest pinnacle anybody else had ever reached. And it doesn't have anything to do with one's ethnicity. It has to do with the American spirit.” – Ben Carson on “The Kelly File.”
+
+ 
+
+ Huckabee strategy: Focus south and skip New Hampshire - Union Leader: “That Huckabee question looms large as the GOP field expands and the former Arkansas governor is reported to be concentrating on the first caucuses in Iowa and the southern primaries in the weeks after New Hampshire’s leadoff contest…Huckabee received 26,916 votes in the New Hampshire primary in 2008. Chuck Norris is again on the Huckabee bandwagon. How many of his old friends in the Granite State will say the same?”
+
+ 
+
+ As he cuts a deal with a former rival - The ad man famous for producing the “Willie Horton” ad in 1988, and working with Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Ma., in 2007 will host a Huckabee fundraiser in Phoenix on May 14, political strategist and producer Floyd Brown confirms to Bloomberg.
+
+ 
+
+ [Day two of Huckabee’s “Factories, Farms and Freedom” tour includes meet & greets at Charlie’s American Grill in Sioux City and the Pizza Ranch in Cedar Rapids.]
+
+ 
+
+ Perry defends tuition for illegal immigrants - Dallas Morning News: “[Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry] then had another chance to explain his support of the so-called Dream Act after a speech that focused on foreign policy. In answering a query from Jorge Baldor, founder of the Latino Center for Leadership Development, Perry said it made sense to educate children brought to the state illegally, but ‘through no fault of their own’…‘The fact is you’re either going to have givers or takers,’ Perry said, ‘If you’re not going to educate, and allow these kids to go through that process and become a giver, because they’ve been educated, then I would suggest you’ve been focused on the wrong issue.’”
+
+ 
+
+ Santorum announces he’s announcing – Former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., announced to Greta Van Susteren last night that he will announce his 2016 plans in his home state on May 27. Watch the clip here.
+
+ 
+
+ Fiorina rollout rolls on - Carly Fiorina gives a speech at a Dallas County GOP event in West Des Moines, Iowa and hosts a few meet and greets today.
+
+ 
+
+ Snyder not running? – Despite murmurings of a potential run two sources tell Politico Gov. Rick Snyder, R-Mich., is not running. A Snyder spokesperson declined to comment.
+
+ 
+
+ Campaign cinema - Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has a new campaign video out today that highlights his vision of a new America with a New Hampshire backdrop. Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas, also uses New Hampshire to show his connections with voters.  Gov. Mike Huckabee’s video focuses on commitment to family and faith.
+
+ 
+
+ CHANGES TO THE IOWA STRAW POLL LOOK GOOD FOR CANDIDATES
+
+ The traditional Iowa straw poll will be a little different this time around with a lot less pressure on the candidates. The event hosts are taking a lot of the cost for real estate and food on themselves, but candidates now need to be nationally viable candidates that are part of the discussion. Check out this op-ed for all the details.
+
+ 
+
+ THE JUDGE’S RULING: DEFLATE THE PATRIOT ACT
+
+ With the Patriot Act up for renewal on May 31 Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano analyzes the constitutional complications of the law and a growing movement called ‘Restore the Fourth,’ that advocates ending the Patriot Act under the Fourth Amendment. President Obama and Republicans agree on the renewal, but should they? Read here for the judge’s take.
+
+ 
+
+ CAN CAMERON COME OUT AHEAD IN U.K. KERFUFFLE?
+
+ Voting is in full swing in Britain and polls won’t close until 5 p.m. ET. What will happen? No one seems to know except that result will be messy as either of the two major parties are likely to need the help of at least one smaller group – liberals, Scottish separatists, anti-European Unionists, etc. – to build a majority coalition. Lacking an executive branch, Britain’s system gives control of the entire government to the party which wins a vote equivalent to the vote for speaker of the House of Representatives in the U.S. With polls showing neither the Labour nor Conservative parties likely able to win the 326 seats necessary to win an outright majority, control of the government for America’s most important ally will hinge on deal making with the niche parties. Can Prime Minister David Cameron and his Tories cling to power? Will Scots have their revenge by helping Ed Miliband and Labour topple the current ruling coalition? It is quite likely to be a mess. Lucky for you then that SkyNews will have all of the details.
+
+ 
+
+ Bibi survives with last-minute deal - AP: “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday completed the formation of a new coalition government, reaching a last-minute deal with a nationalist party just before a midnight deadline. The late-night deal saved Netanyahu from the unthinkable scenario of being forced from office. But it set the stage for the formation of a narrow coalition dominated by hard-line and religious parties that appears to be on a collision course with the U.S. and other allies.”
+
+ 
+
+ BIG NAMES LINE UP FOR MEMORIAL DAY PARADE
+
+ The list of participants and entertainers for the May 25 National Memorial Day Parade on the National Mall is out this morning: Actors Gary Sinise and Joe Mantegna; television chef Robert Irvine; musicians Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, Caleb Johnson from American Idol and country singer Beau Davidson; Miss America 2015 Kira Kazantsev, TNA Wrestling stars including Army vet Chris Melendez; and martial music and displays from the Marine Corps Equestrian Color Guard, the U.S. Army Band and marching platoons from all service branches. Get more info from American Veterans Center.
+
+ 
+
+ BUT THE CAUCUSES WERE REALLY SOMETHING
+
+ Reuters: “The Australian Sex Party, a tiny party known for its salacious name and election day antics, said on Thursday that it had been deregistered after the country’s election watchdog ruled it did not have enough activists. Co-founder Robbie Swan said in a statement that the party would ‘vigorously’ appeal a decision handed down by the Australian Election Commission (AEC) that removed its official status following a review of its membership. Under Australian law a political party must have either an elected representative in the federal parliament or 500 members to keep its registration. The Sex Party has one lawmaker in the Victoria state legislature, but none at federal level.”
+
+ 
+
+ AND NOW A WORD FROM CHARLES…
+
+ “[President Bill Clinton] said there was a guy who said he put the information in the wrong box, and now he says we have no idea how this information was left out. It’s sort of amusing.  It reminds you of what they said about a lot of other stuff they lied about consistently in the ‘90s.  And this is just a guarantee that if we elect Hillary, we’re going to get this for another eight years.” – Charles Krauthammer  on “Special Report with Bret Baier.”
+
+ 
+
+ Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News.  Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+4375,Obama says world should address ‘grievances’ that terrorists exploit,"President Obama defended his administration’s approach to the terror threat at a White House summit Wednesday, standing by claims that groups like the Islamic State do not represent Islam -- as well as assertions that job creation could help combat extremism.
+
+Obama, addressing the Washington audience on the second day of the summit, said the international community needs to address “grievances” that terrorists exploit, including economic and political issues.
+
+He stressed that poverty alone doesn’t cause terrorism, but “resentments fester” and extremism grows when millions of people are impoverished.
+
+“We do have to address the grievances that terrorists exploit including economic grievances,” he said.
+
+He also said no single religion was responsible for violence and terrorism, adding he wants to lift up the voice of tolerance in the United States and beyond.
+
+Obama’s address came as Republican lawmakers and others criticized the administration for declining to describe the threat as Islamic terrorism.
+
+State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf has also come under fire for suggesting several times this past week that more jobs could help address the terrorism crisis.
+
+On Tuesday, Rob O'Neill, former Navy SEAL Team 6 member who claims to have fired the shot that killed Usama bin Laden, told Fox News: ""They get paid to cut off heads -- to crucify children, to sell slaves and to cut off heads and I don't think that a change in career path is what's going to stop them.""
+
+Obama also called on Muslim leaders to “do more to discredit the notion that our nations are determined to suppress Islam, that there is an inherent clash in civilizations.”
+
+Obama acknowledged that some Muslim-Americans have concerns about working with the government, particularly law enforcement, and that their reluctance “is rooted in the objection to certain practices where Muslim-Americans feel they’ve been unfairly targeted.”
+
+He said it was important it make sure that abuses stop and are not repeated and that “we do not stigmatize entire communities.” He also said it was vital that “no one is profiled or put under a cloud of suspicion simply because of their faith.”
+
+Although Obama called for a renewed focus on preventing terrorists from recruiting and inspiring others, some thought his message seemed to miss the mark.
+
+“He was meandering, unfocused and weak,” said Richard Grenell, former U.S. spokesman at the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration and a Fox News contributor. “He was talking about isolating terrorists. He doesn’t understand the threat that we face… People are being burned in cages and he’s talking about more investments?”
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in an interview with Fox News, called Obama an ""apologist for radical Islamic terrorists."" And he mocked the president for recently comparing modern-day atrocities to those committed during the Crusades.
+
+""I don't think it's too much to ask the president to stay in the current millennia,"" Cruz said, describing the rhetoric as ""bizarre politically correct double-speak.""
+
+Recent Fox News polling showed most voters think Obama should be tougher on Islamic extremists. It showed 68 percent think Obama should be tougher; only 26 percent said he's being tough enough.
+
+The poll of 1,044 registered voters was taken Feb. 8-10. It had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
+
+Leaders from 60 different countries traveled to Washington for the summit this week.
+
+Community leaders from Boston, Minneapolis and Los Angeles were also in attendance and discussed how their cities could help empower communities to protect themselves against extremist ideologies.",REAL
+6917,7 Ways To Prepare For An Economic Crisis,"Bill White November 7, 2016 7 Ways To Prepare For An Economic Crisis 
+Using the past economic collapses as an example, we can see that people’s lifestyles changed dramatically. Even those who managed to keep their jobs and businesses have to make radical adjustments in their lies, just to be able to survive. 
+There is no reason for us to think that things will be any different here in the United States, than they were in Argentina; in fact, they could very well end up being worse. 
+The reason I say it could be worse is that there will be nobody to bail out the United States, as has been done with other countries. We know from the 2009 housing collapse that anything negative that happens in the U.S. economy has a worldwide effect. 
+Since other countries will end up suffering as well, there is no way that they will be able to help us. 
+Liberals have touted the idea of redistributing the wealth of the wealthy in order to take care of our country’s woes. I’m not going to discuss the morality or ideology of that right now; but I will say this: if you were to take all the wealth of the 100 richest people in the United States and add it together, it wouldn’t pay our federal government’s bills from January 1 st till tax day. 
+Of course, since their wealth isn’t really in cash, but rather in ownership of properties and companies, there’s no way of using it to pay the government’s costs or debts. 
+The other thing that could make the collapse worse here in the United States is that most Americans aren’t prepared to live without all of our comforts. If you go to other countries, people are more accustomed to doing things themselves, instead of expecting society to do them. They know how to do basic things like slaughter a hog and pluck a chicken ; things that the average American hasn’t had to do for generations. 
+Here are a number of lifestyle changes which can help your family to be ready to survive the meltdown: 
+Pay off Your Home 
+Home mortgages are dangerous in a financial crisis . If you don’t have enough income coming in to make the payment on your home, then you could very easily lose it. No matter how prepared you are, if you don’t have your home, you’re going to be in trouble. 
+There are a number of strategies around for paying off your home mortgage early. I won’t go into them here, because this really isn’t a book about personal finances. 
+You can find the necessary information on how to pay off your home early in a number of places. I highly recommend looking into Dave Ramsey’s teachings on the subject. 
+Another option you may want to consider is downsizing. By selling your existing home and moving into something smaller, you might be able to reduce your mortgage payments or even the length of your mortgage. That would help you to get rid of your mortgage sooner. 
+In the case of the financial crash coming before you manage to pay it off (which is very likely), your payments will be smaller, making it easier for you to keep making those payments. 
+Pay off All Other Debts 
+Any debt is a liability, enslaving your family’s finances to others. By paying off your outstanding debt, you eliminate the risk of lenders coming to take what you have. While other debt is not as important as your home mortgage, paying it off can make it easier to pay off your mortgage quicker. 
+Paying off your debt also reduces your monthly cost of living, freeing up more money for use in preparing for the pending crash or some other activity your family wants to do. 
+The vast majority of Americans have too much debt, which greatly limits their options and the decisions that they can make. 
+Learn to Do Things without Electricity 
+So much of our modern lifestyle depends upon electricity. We are used to using it for literally everything; from preserving our food to entertaining us. However, loss of electricity is a common problem during times of economic meltdown. 
+Oh, the electricity probably won’t go out and stay out, but you can count on a lot of service interruptions. 
+When service is lost, many of the things which we take for granted are lost as well. Our ability to store and cook food is compromised, as well as our ability to work. Lighting is gone, as well as most of our communications. For many people, the loss of electricity means the loss of being able to work as well. 
+For everything you use in your life that is electric powered, you need an alternative. That means having something that you can use to do the same job, should the power go out. In some cases, you might be able to do without that thing, but you need to analyze that and make that determination, not just accept it as an assumption. 
+Re-do Your Budget 
+Probably one of the best things you can do to prepare for a financial meltdown is to re-do your budget, establishing a more frugal lifestyle. Chances are, when the economic collapse happens, you’re going to have to be living that more frugal lifestyle. 
+By establishing it ahead of time, you not only train yourself and your family to be more careful of how you use your money, but you also save money which you can then use to buy and stockpile necessary supplies . 
+Many people today live from paycheck to paycheck. That doesn’t mean that they’re using their money wisely though. Their budget may include eating out three times a week, spending $400 per month on their cell phones and another $300 per month on entertainment. Yet they complain about not having enough money to buy some basic emergency supplies. 
+There are a lot of places where the average family spends more than they need to. Buying new cars is another one. Banks and the auto industry make a lot of money off of families who are making payments on two cars at a time. For some, their combined car payments are higher than their house payment. 
+While reliable vehicles are a necessity, having two car payments every month isn’t. It would be better to buy older cars and not have those high payments to make. 
+Eat Healthy 
+How can eating healthy be part of preparing for a financial meltdown? Easy; the most expensive things that most of us eat are junk food. As a nation, we spend a fortune on prepared foods, snack foods and sweets. 
+When the financial meltdown comes, you probably won’t be able to afford all that junk. You’ll end up eating much simpler foods, which carry more nutrition. 
+At the same time, eating all that junk food is not good for your health. Medical expenses can be extremely high, especially for those who have ignored eating healthy. 
+While it may sound a bit extreme, eating healthy can make the difference between life and death , by helping protect you from a life-threatening medical problem. 
+Get in Shape 
+This one goes hand-in-hand with eating healthy. People who are in good physical condition are much less likely to have medical problems, especially high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol; all of which can become life-threatening. 
+However, there’s another part to this as well. That is, preparing your body for the physical rigors of survival. 
+Living without all the modern conveniences requires much more physical work than living with them. That’s why so many of us are out of shape. We’ve become accustomed to allowing machines to do the things that we used to do ourselves. We’ve become softer. 
+Many of us can’t do the physical work necessary for surviving without all those modern machines. 
+Find Like-Minded People 
+Many experts on survival and preparedness recommend banding together with other like-minded people and forming a prepping community . The idea is that in the wake of a disaster, the community would gather in one place to live and work together. Each member of the team would have their assigned area of responsibility, based upon their unique skills. 
+There are many advantages of working together in a prepping community. The right community can increase your chances of survival. 
+However, the wrong one can cause severe problems, with people leaving the group and taking most of the supplies with them. 
+Be careful what group you join, investigating the morals and personalities of the people first, to make an informed decision about whether the group will stick together to help each other, or become selfish and steal from each other. 
+Our ancestors survived harsh times and their secrets can help you survive during the most treacherous conditions if the world is struck with a tragedy. 
+  Bill White for Survivopedia. 155 total views, 155 views today",FAKE
+781,"Press must share the blame: The shallow, ratings-obsessed media is as responsible for Trump as the GOP","“I’m going to walk away with it and win outright. I’m going to get in and all the polls are going to go crazy. I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me.” – Donald Trump
+
+Donald Trump’s blend of bombast, amorality and media savvy has carried him to the Republican nomination. He’s proven that an ability to dominate coverage and dictate the narrative is sufficient in today’s political climate. None of this is surprising: Trump’s a TV man with a gift for self-promotion. His entire career has been preparation for this moment, this campaign. He saw our broken, perverted process with clear eyes and he’s exploited it with aplomb.
+
+You have to give him credit for that.
+
+While the Republican Party is ultimately responsible for Trump (they welcomed him into their big tent, after all), the media is equally culpable for the calamity that is his candidacy. Every American is entitled to be as undiscerning and uncritical as they like. There’s nothing in the social contract that demands voters educate themselves. A democracy, for the most part, can tolerate its share of credulous citizens. But the media has a special obligation in a free society. It’s the only profession protected by the U.S. Constitution for a reason: it’s a check on power and a gadfly for crooked politicians and abusers of power.
+
+The media has failed spectacularly this election. “It [Trump’s campaign] may not be good for America,” said Les Moonves, the CEO and executive chairman of CBS, “but it’s damn good for CBS..Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” This is the plundering reaction Trump expected. “They will never take the lights off of me,” he famously said to Republican officials two years before announcing his candidacy.
+
+Importantly, Trump also understood how to navigate the process without engaging issues that matter. To call his campaign substance-free is too generous. It’s been a cavalcade of insults and ethno-nationalist dog-whistling, punctuated by populist platitudes. If we had a functional media, Trump would be challenged by journalists and anchors. Instead, they’re too busy monitoring the ratings to notice he’s using them to prop up his campaign.
+
+Part of the problem, as Columbia journalism professor Todd Gitlin notes in The Washington Post, is that Trump has “cracked the campaign reporters’ code.” Gitlin writes: “Trump regularly runs circles around interviewers because they pare their follow-up questions down to a minimum, or none at all. After 30-plus years in the media spotlight, he knows how to wait out an interviewer, offering noncommittal soundbites and incoherent rejoinders until he hears the phrase, ‘let’s move on.’ He takes advantage of the slipshod, shallow techniques journalism has made routine, particularly on TV – techniques that, in the past, were sufficient to trup up less-media-savvy candidates – but that Trump knows how to sidestep.” Examples of this abound. Gitlin cites interview after interview in which Trump rope-a-dopes reporters when they ask questions he can’t answer or when they suggest, however passively, that he’s wrong or lied about the record. “Trump is a master of darting from slogan to slogan,” Gitlin writes. “That’s why interviewers must do their homework and be prepared to go at least 2-3 questions deep on any issue.” Great idea, but it’s difficult to dive deep when interviewers are forced to shoehorn serious questions in limited time between competing toothpaste commercials. Trump gets away with this because of the mutually beneficial relationship he has with the press. He knows people like Moonves are interested in selling penis pill ads, not informing the electorate. Voters, for their part, are happy to project whatever they want onto the empty vessel that is Trump. Meanwhile, the truth is an afterthought and the whole sordid circus continues unimpeded. Gitlin urges journalists “to honor the good name of their profession and take off the kid gloves.” Sound advice, but I’m not holding my breath.",REAL
+7811,"14 Days to Do 14 Things, If Hillary’s Indicted-Extreme Violence Expected","
+
+ 
+UPDATE: HILLARY CLINTON IS AGAIN UNDER INVESTIGATION BY THE FBI. IF SHE IS INDICTED, HER PEOPLE WILL UNDOUBTEDLY LAUNCH A CYBER ATTACK ON THE ELECTIONS AND BLAME THE RUSSIANS. HILLARY HAS TIPPED HER HAND MANY TIMES. IF THIS HAPPENS, YOU MUST HASTEN YOUR PREPARATIONS. IF HILLARY SKATES, AGAIN, WE STILL ONLY HAVE A SHORT WINDOW TO ALL HELL BREAKING LOOSE. PLEASE PREPARE NOW! 
+The Common Sense Show issued an alert yesterday with regard to the likelihood of widespread violence, regardless of who wins the election. The violence may not be dramatic on November, but I believe that a crescendo will be reached by the holidays. There are literally dozens of troop movements and a number of martial law events taking place as I write these words. The bottom line is, half of the country hates the other half of the country and pressure valve is ready to blow. And if Trump wins, the violence factor will escalate exponentially as evidenced by the firebombed GOP building in North Carolina.
+When these events come to fruition, it could potentially paralyze this nation and bring the economy to a standstill. Subsequently, the grocery store shelves could be empty within two days and food riots would likely commence by sundown of the second day. All Americans would instantly be in danger. Local law enforcement would be overwhelmed. What would be your chances of survival? Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that FEMA has conducted research studies on America’s level of preparedness and the news is not good. FEMA concluded that 72% of all Americans are not prepared to survive what is coming In other words, when society begins to fragment, you and your fellow preppers are outnumbered by a 3 to 1 margin.
+Are you prepared for 3 out of 4 of your neighbors climbing through your windows in search of life-saving supplies?
+The FEMA Preparedness Reports In response to concerns about strengthening the nation’s ability to protect its population and way of life (i.e., security) and ability to adapt and recover from emergencies (i.e., resilience), the President of the United States issued Presidential Policy Directive 8: National Preparedness (PPD-8).
+PPD-8 is a directive for the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate a comprehensive campaign to encourage Americans to practice national preparedness. Despite efforts by FEMA and other organizations to educate American citizens on becoming prepared, growth in specific preparedness behaviors has been limited. Government programs to this end are nearly nonexistent.
+I have spent the past week illustrating how a coming economic collapse is unavoidable and how the elite have conspired to steal as many of your assets as possible prior to the collapse. This article presents some common sense things one can do which could increase the chances of surviving a major societal meltdown resulting from an economic collapse. If you have any doubts as to what is coming, I strongly encourage you to read what I have written about on this topic over the past several months. Even Ray Charles could see that our economy will not be around much longer in its present form.
+It is always best to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. For the purposes of this article, it is possible that society will not totally collapse even if the dollar does. However, large segments of societies always collapse when an economic collapse happens. Surviving the worst case scenario is the purpose behind what will be covered here.
+We have about 14 days to do the following 14 things: 1. The Creation of a Pseudo-Identity It may be necessary to become invisible in the event you think you believe that your name could be on a (Red) list because roundups will usually occur in dire situations. Therefore, the creation of a pseudo-identity could become very important.
+2. It Takes Money to Prepare If you have read the articles at the above links, you should have concluded that it is the height of stupidity to leave your life savings in an institution that is planning to steal from you. You need to divert your cash, other than the ability to pay basic bills, in preparation for what is coming.
+Getting your money out of the bank has become an art form and you need to be careful. There is a barrier to your ability to procure some of these life-saving and life-extending supplies. Right now, you do not have full access to your money.
+As you move to withdraw the bulk of your money, there are three federal banking laws that you should be cognizant of, namely, Cash Transaction Report (CTR), a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) and structuring.
+Cash Transaction Reports Federal law requires that the bank file a report based upon any withdrawal or deposit of $10,000 or more on any single given day.The law was designed to put a damper on money laundering, sophisticated counterfeiting and other federal crimes.
+To remain in compliance with the law, financial institutions must obtain personal identification, information about the transaction and the social security number of the person conducting the transaction.
+Before proceeding with the planned withdrawal of your money, I would strongly suggest that you read the following federal guidelines as it relates to CTR’s as produced by the The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). All the federal regulations contained in this article are elucidated in this series of federal reports.
+Structuring and SAR There will undoubtedly be some geniuses whose math ability will tell them that all they have to do is to withdraw $9,999.99 and the bank and its protector, the federal government will be none the wiser. It is not quite that simple. The bank is required to file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) which serves to notify the federal government of an individual’s attempt to structure deposits or withdrawals by circumventing the $10,000 reporting requirement.
+Structuring transactions to prevent a CTR from being reported can result in imprisonment for not more than five years and/or a fine of up to $250,000. If structuring involves more than $100,000 in a twelve month period or is performed while violating another law of the federal government, the penalty is doubled. 
+Enforcement Much like the enforcement of our tax laws, the federal government’s enforcement of its banking laws as it relates to CTR’s, SAR’s and subsequent structuring is quite draconian. Civilian asset forfeiture laws come into play. The government can seize your bank accounts while it determines if a crime has been committed. The government can literally seize your assets in perpetuity without an order of the court. Of course, you could try and sue but you will be up against the deep pockets of the federal government and the case could take years. By the time your case is decided, the financial banking crisis that you are so desperately trying to avoid by withdrawing your money, could be over. So, proceed with caution.
+Withdrawing Your Money From the Bank The best way to avoid getting your money caught in the bank in the midst of a bank run would be to not let the lion’s share of your money ever cross the bank. The simplest way to accomplish this is to prevent any form of deposit from going automatically into your account, as much as it is possible.
+Secondly, you need to begin to pay cash for everything. Let’s say that every 30 days, Bob cashes his check at the bank from his work worth $5,000 net pay. Bob leaves just enough in the bank to be able to conduct normal banking business. Bob walks out of the bank every month with the majority of the cash from his check. Bob should begin to pay cash for as much as he can, such as eating out, paying the electric bill (pay the bill in person), buying groceries, etc. When it becomes necessary to make a “big ticket” purchase, Bob could temporarily leave more in the bank to cover the writing of a check.
+You would also be wise to open multiple banking accounts ranging from the big five megabanks to your local credit unions. You could withdraw much smaller amounts until the sum total of your accounts is greatly diminished and is in your possession. To open the accounts, simply write a personal check from your home bank. Of course, in these cases, the bank could hold the check for 15-30 days.
+I cannot promise you that if you become the target of federal investigators, that you will not have your every financial move scrutinized and the feds will eventually discover the aggregate patterns of withdrawal. People who I interviewed told me that they believe that the federal government is in the process of getting the banking computers to “talk” to each other in a way that would reveal structuring, but that technology is not yet online.
+If you ever become the target of a federal investigation, do not, under any circumstances, allow yourself to be interviewed by federal officials without an attorney present. In many cases, people go to jail and pay huge fines, not because they have committed a federal crime, but because federal officials state that they have lied or misled them. And if you do not have an attorney present, it is your word versus the federal government. There are other sources besides banks that you can tap into for money which can be used to prepare for what is coming.
+4o1K’s, IRA, et al If you were 100% convinced of an imminent crash, you would be foolish not to take your money out. However, the prepayment penalty of 50% is steep if you withdraw your funds before you are 59.5 years old.
+If you are retiring soon, take the lump sum option and convert all of these retirement monies to survival supplies and gold which you will need as the world emerges from the crash.
+The moral of the story is to become as liquid as possible, from a cash perspective. Getting access to your money is only the first part of being prepared to survive an economic crash.
+3. Make a List Buy a good prepper book. Holly Deyo is an excellent source for this information (www.standdeyo.com). In the interim, procure your food, water, guns, ammo and home security adjustments. If you do not have a big dog, consider obtaining a pair. These animals will be your companion, home security system and ally if someone attempts to breach your home with bad intent. Of course, you will have to store dog food as well.
+Sit down and construct a list of what you will need after reading a good prepper book.
+Make all of you purchases in cash! You do not want to let the wrong people know what you are up to.
+ 
+4. Rural Vs. Urban We have to live our lives for today and it may not be possible to move to a rural area because of your job. However, one survivalist that I was speaking with estimates that the rate of survival for a country in economic chaos would be 10 times higher for rural residents as opposed to urban residents. Consider buying a place in an isolated area and commuting to work in the interim.
+5. Pay Off Your Mortgage and Car Loans If you have a CD, a 401k or any other long-term investment, you might want to consider taking the penalty and executing a withdrawal and apply what’s left of the principal, usually about 50% of the original value, and paying down your major debts.
+After an economic collapse, you most likely will not have a job and your retirement and savings will likely be wiped out and confiscated. That is why it would be wise to pay down your debt while you can afford to do so because after the collapse, there will still be foreclosures and repossessions and if you and your family survive, you could be on the street if you cannot pay your bills.
+ 
+6. Buy Gold and Silver While You Can Afford It Goldman Sachs has been shorting gold. The elite have been hording gold as have the BRICS. These entities are telling you, by action, what medium of exchange is going to be of value following the collapse that is coming.
+Storing gold and silver is an economic survival strategy which will pay dividends after the smoke begins to clear in the post-collapse era.
+
+ 
+7. Practice Austerity Before Austerity Is Imposed On You It is critical to immediately eliminate all unnecessary expenses. Give yourself some operating capital. You may be able to purchase a bug-out residence in a rural area. You will certainly be able to afford more survival gear.
+In order to increase your immediate cash flow, start an at-home business. Start a business which has virtually no upfront and startup costs. Even if you are not able to generate much income, you will create a legal tax evasion strategy in which you can legally deduct many of your present activities and expenses (e.g. mileage, the purchase of any office supply, etc.) including survival gear.
+ 
+8. Create and Store Your Own Food With regard to storing food, you need to do so immediately. I recommend storing two years worth of food. However, you need to master the art of growing food inside your home. There are plenty of resources which can teach you how to do that. However, you would be wise if you would create a hiding place in which you can store food and water safely in a hidden location . If you are ever robbed, you will not have exhausted your food supplies. You are most likely to be robbed by FEMA or one of their mercenary groups (e.g. Academia) during the beginning of the crisis because food and water will be used as weapons to control you. I am personally aware of FEMA going to selected homeowners to catalogue their reserve food and water supplies. Remember, water is sunlight and temperature sensitive. There are plenty of prepper manuals that you can consult for instructions on how to meet these needs. The time to do these things is yesterday.
+The biggest threat to survival is death due to dehydration and starving to death. Contaminated water will also pose a threat. There are plenty of places to purchase large drums and obtain water tablets for water purification purposes. Obtain a pair of water filters in case you have to go mobile to survive.
+Finally, learn to grow your own food within your residence. Your garden will likely be raided by humans and hungry animals alike. There are plenty of prepper manuals which can teach you how to accomplish this task.
+9. Personal Supplies Of course you will need toothpaste, toiletries, eating utensils, feminine hygiene supplies, etc. For a complete list of personal items see Steve Quayles list on his website .
+ 
+10. Horde Medicines and Medical Supplies If you or your family has a chronic health condition, it is critical that you have 6 months to a year in medicine. Also, you should research natural alternatives to treatment for health conditions in case you are not able to meet this goal due to the inability to obtain prescriptions. Don’t forget to obtain some pain medication and antibiotics in case of unforeseen emergencies. Make a trip to Mexico and sneak across medication in old pill bottles in order to escape detection by the Border Patrol who will ask you if you obtained medication in Mexico when you come back across the border.
+If you can safely ration your existing medication doses, do so and store the excesses. Make sure you also have a first aid kit. Take a First Aid class including CPR at your local fire station.
+Some are thinking that this is a lot of work. My response would be, how bad do you want you and your family to survive?
+11. Guns and Ammunition Regardless of your moral convictions, ask yourself if you want your family to survive.
+Buy your guns off the books from private parties and at gun shows. “Keep guns for show and guns for go”. In other words, have a safe location that you can bury guns so that when gun confiscation begins, you will not be left totally defenseless.
+America needs to not only create safe and secure homes, but to create as many Warsaw ghettos as possible (look it up). We need to make ourselves a hard country to conquer and occupy. We cannot stop a treasonous leader from handing off the country to some foreign entity (e.g. the UN). However, occupation of America should be problematic for the blue-helmet wearing Russians, Chinese and other proxy forces training on our soil to occupy us.
+It is recommended that you have 3 types of weapons: (1) pistols for close in fighting; (2) shotguns for defense of the entrance to your home; and, (3) a rifle with a scope in order to fight back against long-range snipers that do not want to storm your home because you appear to be prepared. Immediately, obtain weapons instruction for you and your family, firearms training and then practice! Conduct mock raids on your residence so that you can see your vulnerabilities. An armed populace makes a people more feared by an abusive government.
+Do not forget about gas masks for each member of your family and make sure to store extras. If you have the means to obtain body armor, do so now, because Congress is preparing to outlaw the private use of body armor.
+ 
+12. Prepare to Survive in the Raw Elements and Build a Way of Life 
+It is possible that you can learn to survive in the raw elements without heating and central air conditioning. You may not have lights. Obtain flashlights, many batteries and a hand crank radio.
+Make sure you have clothes befitting all weather that you may encounter because a crisis that begins in January, may not be over by August.
+Take a weekend and pretend the grid is down. This will allow you to see firsthand what supplies you will need. When should you perform this drill? There is no time like the present.
+To people with generators, congratulations on your foresight. However, if you are the only house on the block with lights, how long do you think it will be until you have unwanted visitors with bad intent?
+Get in shape, begin to walk, jog or run. The better shape you are in, the better.
+Don’t forget about procuring non-electronic forms of entertainment. This should include board games and educational materials for your children. You will want to establish some normalcy for the sake of your children. You are preparing to adopt a new way of life. Make the new life worth living.
+I would also recommend that every personal library contain The Constitution of the United States. After the chaos subsides, we will need to rebuild. You will not want to live in a “might makes right” society.
+13. For Goodness Sake, Do Not Tell Anyone If your four adjacent neighbors broach the topic of preparedness, gauge the situation and then make an informed decision. If your neighbors are on board with preparing, that will help you form a defensive perimeter and a mutual alliance pact. Otherwise, tell nobody of your preparation plans. Do not tell your friends, family members, and co-workers. Make your preparations in cash or cashier’s checks as much as possible. Limit the paper trail to you. You do not want the government to know that you are prepared because you could be the first one on your block that is visited at 3AM. You and your mate should prepare in stealth. Kids talk and so do their friends.
+14. PRAY! Survival is never guaranteed, salvation is! And do not forget one of your most important resources, your Bible. In a post-collapse America, it is likely that a religion will be forced upon the survivors and that religion will not be Christianity.
+Conclusion In an upside-down world in which the banks legally own your money, getting your money away from these criminal banks has become an art form. I cannot promise you that you will be able to retrieve all of your assets. However, I can promise you that if you do not act, you will lose everything and you will lack needed supplies to weather what is coming.
+I would strongly suggest that you keep your gas tank filled and you have plenty of cash, food and ammunition on hand. It is better to be safe than sorry.
+ 
+Breaking News: FBI Investigation Reopens The elite may be pulling their support for Hillary. She is, again, under investigation by the FBI. IF her plug is pulled, the violence may come sooner than we anticipated- Get to work America, we do not have long.
+DONATE TO THE COMMON SENSE SHOW Don’t wait for the collapse of the dollar because it will be too late.
+",FAKE
+7529,Daesh abducts 1000s near Mosul to use them as human shields: UN,"Iraq Civilians leave their homes as Iraqi troops fight against Daesh militants in the village of Tob Zawa. (Photo by AP) 
+Daesh terrorists have abducted tens of thousands of civilians from near Mosul to use them as human shields as government forces inch closer to the city proper in an operation to retake it, the UN says. 
+UN human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said the terrorist group also killed at least 232 people on Wednesday, including 190 former Iraqi security forces and 40 civilians, who refused to obey its orders. 
+“Many of them who refused to comply were shot on the spot,” Shamdasani said in Geneva, citing reports corroborated by the UN that were “by no means comprehensive but indicative of violations.” 
+As the news emerged, Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi volunteers said they were set to launch an offensive against Daesh west of Mosul imminently. 
+Ahmad al-Assadi, a spokesman for the popular forces, confirmed that the fighters had completed preparations to move in the direction of Tal Afar, a Daesh-held city 63 kilometers west of Mosul. 
+He added that the fighters would move to capture Tal Afar from their positions in the Iraqi town of Qayyara, situated some 60 kilometers south of Mosul. 
+“A few days or hours separate us from the launch of operations there,” Asadi said. 
+Iraqi forces liberated three key areas from Daesh terrorists east of Mosul. Army officials said troops also seized a tank and artillery from the terrorists, and found a two-kilometer-long tunnel full of ammunition. 
+The army is edging closer to Mosul by liberating villages around the city. Nearly 80 Daesh-held towns and villages have been retaken by the army since the Iraqi forces began the battle to liberate Mosul last week. Loading ...",FAKE
+8353,Oregon Standoff Leaders Acquitted For Malheur Wildlife Refuge Takeover,"Oregon Standoff Leaders Acquitted For Malheur Wildlife Refuge Takeover page: 1 link A federal court jury on Wednesday acquitted anti-government militant leader Ammon Bundy and six followers of conspiracy charges stemming from their role in the armed takeover of a U.S. wildlife center in Oregon earlier this year. Bundy and others, including his brother and co-defendant Ryan Bundy, cast the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as a legitimate and patriotic act of civil disobedience. Prosecutors called it a lawless scheme to seize federal property by force. This is news! I surely did not expect these guys n gal to get off. Someone lost their life during this event which is sad. Justice has spoken. Does this set a precedent going forward? The likelihood of this happening again in a similar fashion seems high given the current political climate. A more detailed article.",FAKE
+10250,"Muslims Start Chanting Allah On Plane, Flight Attendant Quickly Shuts Them Up","Muslims Start Chanting Allah On Plane, Flight Attendant Quickly Shuts Them Up Oct 29, 2016 Previous post 
+A Muslim couple has accused Delta Airlines of Islamophobia after their behavior forced a flight attendant to take action after they decided to parade their religious entitlement on a flight to the United States. 
+According to reports, the two had boarded the plane when they started chanting “Allah” repeatedly. When a flight attendant noticed what they were doing he sprang into action and stopped them dead in their tracks. 
+The couple has since taken issue with Delta, claiming that they had been ‘racially profiled,’ which is tough to do considering Islam is not a race but rather a religion. 
+The couple in question, Faisal and Nazia Ali, claim to be victims of religious discrimination after they had to be removed for “suspicious activity” on an airplane. Most people would probably find being the only two people on the plane that were hiding their phones as the steward passes, sweating, and repeating the word “Allah” on an international flight to the united states from Paris a little suspicious. 
+That’s exactly the type of behavior that this couple was exhibiting when the flight attendant had to take action and do so quickly, reports The Independent. 
+After the flight attendant noticed this odd behavior he chose to act, taking the safety of the passengers and the crew above any sort of reprimand he might receive for being a ‘racist’ or a bigot. 
+He told them to get up grab their things and get off of the plane. That’s when one of the Delta employees said that the pilot had made the final call because their behavior had made the rest of the passengers feel uncomfortable. 
+The couple then went through an interrogation process before they were determined to not be a threat and sent home on the next flight and then offered a full refund. Of course this wasn’t enough for this entitled couple. The couple took this so-called ‘offense’ and contacted the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which by the way has ties to terror organizations. 
+Once CAIR filed an official 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+2619,"Netanyahu: Iran A Threat to Israel, the World","""If the deal now being negotiated is accepted by Iran, that deal will not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons - it will all but guarantee that Iran will get those nuclear weapons, lots of them,"" the Israeli leader said in a 39-minute speech to the U.S. Congress that offered a point-by-point critique of Obama's Iran diplomacy.
+
+In an appearance that strained U.S.-Israeli relations and was boycotted by dozens of Obama's fellow Democrats, Netanyahu said Iran's leadership was ""as radical as ever,"" could not be trusted and the deal being worked out with world powers would not block Iran's way to a bomb ""but paves its way to a bomb.""
+
+""This deal won't be a farewell to arms, it will be a farewell to arms control ... a countdown to a potential nuclear nightmare,"" Netanyahu told lawmakers and visitors in the House of Representatives. His speech drew 26 standing ovations.
+
+Netanyahu's speech culminated a diplomatic storm triggered by his acceptance in January of a Republican invitation that bypassed the White House and Obama's fellow Democrats, many of whom considered it an affront to the president.
+
+Obama refused to meet Netanyahu, saying that doing so just ahead of Israel's March 17 general election would be seen as interference. Aides to Obama said he would not be watching the speech, broadcast live on U.S. television.
+
+Underscoring the partisan divide over Netanyahu's address, House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said afterwards that as a friend of Israel, she was near tears during his speech, calling it ""an insult to the intelligence of the United States."" She said she was ""saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran.""
+
+Netanyahu entered the chamber to a cacophony of cheers and applause, shaking hands with dozens of lawmakers, including House Speaker John Boehner, before taking a podium and telling lawmakers he was deeply humbled.
+
+At the start of the speech, he sought to defuse the intense politicization of his appearance, which has hardened divisions between Republicans and Democrats over the White House's approach to stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
+
+He said he was grateful to Obama for his public and private support of Israel, including U.S. military assistance and contributions to Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system.
+
+""I regret that some see my appearance here as political,"" he said. ""I know that no matter which side of the aisle you sit on, you stand with Israel.""
+
+Although given the cold shoulder by the U.S. administration, Netanyahu on Monday offered an olive branch, saying he meant no disrespect to Obama by accepting an invitation to speak to U.S. lawmakers that was orchestrated by the president's rival Republicans.
+
+On Tuesday, Netanyahu appeared to offer another possible avenue for an Iran deal but put very strict conditions on it.
+
+Having previously demanded a total elimination of Iranian nuclear projects with bomb-making potential, he said the United States should not ease its restrictions until Iran improves its overall conduct, a comment that could stiffen support among Republicans to maintain U.S. sanctions on Iran or seek to escalate them.
+
+But the Israeli leader did not specifically call for new penalties, something Obama has said would undermine ongoing talks and would prompt a veto if passed by Congress.
+
+""If the world powers are not prepared to insist that Iran change its behavior before a deal is signed they should at the very least be prepared to insist that Iran changes its behavior before the deal expires,"" Netanyahu said. The terms under consideration a suspension of restrictions on Iran's sensitive nuclear activities in as little as 10 years.
+
+He added that while Israel and similarly minded Arab states might not like such a deal, ""we could live with it"".
+
+He added that the drop in oil prices put the United States and other countries in a stronger position to negotiate with Iran.
+
+""Iran's nuclear program can be rolled back well beyond the current proposal by insisting on a better deal and keeping up the pressure on a very vulnerable regime, especially given the recent collapse of the price of oil.""
+
+As many as 60 of the 232 members of Congress from Obama's Democratic Party sat out the address to protest what they see as a politicization of Israeli security, an issue on which Congress is usually united.
+
+The absence of so many lawmakers could raise political heat on Netanyahu at home. Many Israelis are wary of estrangement from a U.S. ally that provides their country with wide-ranging military and diplomatic support.
+
+On Monday, Obama appeared to wave off any prospect that the bedrock U.S. alliance with Israel might be ruined by the rancor.
+
+Netanyahu, a right-wing politician who has played up his security credentials, had denied his speech would have any design other than national survival.
+
+He introduced Nobel peace laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, 86, to prolonged applause and said: ""Elie, your life and work inspires and gives meaning to the words 'Never Again.' I wish I could promise you, Elie, that the lessons of history have been learned. I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past."" Wiesel sat in the gallery next to Netanyahu's wife Sara.
+
+Netanyahu wants the Iranians stripped of nuclear projects that might be used to get a bomb - something Tehran insists it does not want. Washington deems the Israeli demand unrealistic.
+
+Netanyahu, who has hinted at the prospect of unilateral strikes as a last resort on Iranian nuclear sites, told lawmakers Israel would stand alone if needed but he made no threat of military action.
+
+Speaking just before Netanyahu's address, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in Switzerland for talks with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, said the Israel leader was ""trying to create tension"" in the negotiations, which face an end-of-March deadline to reach a framework accord.
+
+Under a 2013 interim deal, the United States and five other powers agreed in principle to let Iran maintain limited uranium enrichment technologies. U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice argued on Monday that this commitment could not be undone.
+
+A deal with Iran is far from guaranteed, given U.S. assessments that more than a decade of carrot-and-stick diplomacy with Iran might again fail to clinch a final accord.
+
+The United States and some of its allies, notably Israel, suspect Iran of using its civil nuclear program as a cover to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Iran denies this, saying it is for peaceful purposes such as generating electricity.",REAL
+8696,Unprecedented Surge In Election Fraud Incidents From Around The Country,"Unprecedented Surge In Election Fraud Incidents From Around The Country   Zero Hedge 
+Mounting evidence would suggest it's getting more and more difficult for the left to claim that there are ""no signs"" of fraud in the 2016 election cycle...though we're sure they will continue to try. Just this morning the Miami Herald noted that two arrests were made in Miami-Dade county on election fraud charges including efforts by one woman to illegally register voters (some of whom were dead...a recurring theme this election cycle) while another 74-year-old election worker was charged with actually "" illegally marking ballots"" . 
+A 74-year-old woman tasked with opening envelopes sent by Miami-Dade County voters with their completed mail ballots was arrested Friday after co-workers caught her illegally marking ballots, resulting in an unknown — but small — number of fraudulent votes being cast for mayoral candidate Raquel Regalado. 
+
+Investigators linked Gladys Coego, a temporary worker for the county elections department, to two fraudulent votes, but they suspect from witness testimony that she submitted several more. 
+
+In a separate election-fraud case, authorities also arrested a second woman for unlawfully filling out voter-registration forms on behalf of United for Care, the campaign to legalize medical marijuana in Florida. 
+
+The Miami-Dade state attorney’s office plans to accuse Tomika Curgil, 33, of filling out forms for five people without their consent. She also submitted at least 17 forms for people who apparently don’t exist — and several forms for people who are dead. 
+
+Police officers arrested Curgil at her Liberty City home Friday morning and intend to charge her with five felony counts of submitting false voter-registration information. 
+Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle was quick to praise the ""swift arrest of the wrongdoers"" and ensure voters of the "" integrity of the electoral process."" That said, we, like many others, wonder just how many similar cases of election fraud will go unnoticed between now and election day. 
+“Our law enforcement effort against these election law violators was swift and resulted in an immediate arrest of the wrongdoers,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The elections department was quick to detect and report these violations to our task force. 
+
+“Anyone who attempts to undermine the democratic process should recognize that there is an enforcement partnership between the elections department and our prosecution task force in place to thwart such efforts and arrest those involved. Now we need to move forward with the election.” 
+
+“I want to ensure the voters of Miami-Dade County that the integrity of the electoral process is intact because our procedures work,” White said in a statement. “While disappointed by these incidents, I am very proud of the safeguards the Elections Department has in place to prevent these fraudulent attempts, and I commend the employees who remained vigilant just as they were trained to do.” 
+Meanwhile, Florida isn't the only state with fraud problems as an NBC affiliate in Virginia is reporting that a former resident of Alexandia was also arrested after being caught creating fictitious voter registrations and faces up to 40 years in prison. Of course, Virginia, run by long-time Clinton confidant Terry McAuliffe, is no stranger to election fraud as one democratic organization was already caught earlier this month re-registering dead voters . 
+A former resident of Alexandria, Virginia, is facing up to 40 years in prison after he allegedly used fake names to fill out voter registration applications. 
+
+Vafalay Massaquoi, 30, is facing four felony charges related to allegations of voter registration fraud , the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office said. Each charge carries a maximum of 10 years in prison. 
+
+In the spring of 2016, Massaquoi was registering new voters as an employee of a local advocacy group. According to the Commonwealth's Attorney, Massaquoi fabricated applications and used fake names to fill out the registration forms. 
+
+The fake applications were filed with the Alexandria Office of the General Registrar, who reported the issue to Commonwealth's Attorney Bryan Porter. 
+All of these reports simply add fuel to the fire of Trump who has been relentlessly attacking the ""rigged"" elections for the past several weeks. The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD 
+— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016 'Obama Warned Of Rigged Elections In 2008.' Time to #DrainTheSwamp https://t.co/AkczH8l0FJ pic.twitter.com/7mIkwAHTuV 
+— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2016 
+
+Of course, these are just a few of the people who have actually been caught for their election ""rigging"" efforts. Meanwhile, there have seemingly been an unlimited number of other fraud cases pop up around the country involving everything from illegal voter registrations to dead people voting. In fact, a recent report from CBS Chicago found that over 100 dead Chicagoans had voted 229 times over the past decade. 
+Susie Sallee was buried in 1998. Yet records show she voted in Chicago 12 years later. 
+
+Victor Crosswell died in 1994, but records show he’s voted six times since then. 
+
+And then there’s Floyd Stevens. Records show he’s voted 11 times since his death in 1993. 
+
+“It’s crazy,” Sharon Stevens Anderson, Stevens’ daughter, tells CBS 2’s Pam Zekman. “I don’t see how people can be able to do something like that and get away with it.” 
+
+Those are just a few of the cases CBS 2 Investigators found by merging Chicago Board of Election voter histories with the death master file from the Social Security Administration. 
+
+In all, the analysis showed 119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade. 
+
+Moreover, an ABC affiliate in Philadelphia uncovered similar instances of dead voters in the ""City of Brotherly Love."" 
+So, Action News dug through a decade's worth of election and death records to see if there was any truth to the claim. 
+
+Some of what Action News investigation found was stunning. 
+
+Pezzano passed in 2006 . But state voting records show the South Philadelphia native still listed as an ""Active Voter"" who cast ballots in 2008, 2012, 2014, and the 2016 primary election. 
+
+Our investigation also found Joseph B. Haggarty resting peacefully in a Bucks County cemetery. His grave marker confirmed he died in 2010, but records show he voted five years after his death. 
+
+Action News also found Paul Bunch, who died in 2006, also cast a vote in this year's primary which was nearly ten years after death records show he died. 
+
+But, while all of this may seem shocking, in due time, we're confident these arrests and all other instances dead people voting, etc. will be seen for what they really are, namely another blatant attempt to suppress low-income and minority votes. Share This Article...",FAKE
+9749,Re: DOJ AG Loretta Lynch Advised FBI Director to Keep New Emails from Congress,"According to a report, Attorney General Loretta Lynch advised FBI Director James Comey to not send a letter to Congress that would inform them of new emails the agency discovered in their investigation of Hillary Clinton 's illegal email server. 
+The New Yorker reported : 
+On Friday, James Comey , the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e-mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton 's private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey's decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department's longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election , but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise. 
+Comey's decision is a striking break with the policies of the Department of Justice, according to current and former federal legal officials. Comey, who is a Republican appointee of President Obama, has a reputation for integrity and independence, but his latest action is stirring an extraordinary level of concern among legal authorities, who see it as potentially affecting the outcome of the Presidential and congressional elections. 
+""You don't do this,"" one former senior Justice Department official said. ""It's aberrational. It violates decades of practice."" The reason, according to the former official, who asked not to be identified because of ongoing cases involving the department, ""is because it impugns the integrity and reputation of the candidate, even though there's no finding by a court, or in this instance even an indictment."" 
+In the letter that Comey sent to staffers , he expressed that he was under an obligation to inform the people's representatives of the finding. 
+""Of course, we don't ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed,"" Comey wrote. ""I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record."" 
+""At the same time, however, given that we don't know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don't want to create a misleading impression,"" he added. ""In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season there is significant risk of being misunderstood."" 
+What I don't get, or maybe I really do, is that Comey would not recommend charges against Clinton when he knew for a fact that she broke federal law and had the evidence in hand to prove it. So, don't be deceived by this recent opening of the Clinton probe into her email crimes . Nothing is going to come of it because all of these people are in bed together and they are merely putting on a show for the American people. Mark my words. Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . shares",FAKE
+693,A report said Trump's donations to vets might be shady. His response was predictable.,"Donald Trump is adamant that he raised more than $5 million for military veterans this campaign season and that it is all going to veterans charities. After reports raised questions about whether that's true, Trump scheduled a press conference Tuesday to give more details about the donations' whereabouts.
+
+At his press conference, Trump explained the lack of clarity surfaced in a recent Washington Post report by stating he ""wanted to keep it private"": ""I don't think it's anybody's business if I wanna send money to the vets,"" before ultimately unveiling the list of recipients.
+
+According to reporting from the Associated Press, many of these donations were dated the same day as the Washington Post's article. Trump associated the timing with the vetting process, ""reviewing statistics, reviewing numbers and also talking to people in the military to find out whether or not the group was deserving of the money,"" he said Tuesday.
+
+But what his reaction to scrutiny of his alleged veterans donations really reveals about Trump is how he handles criticism from the press — viewing fact-checking from reporters as personal attacks rather than a nettlesome but necessary role in democracy.
+
+Last week, the presumptive Republican nominee responded to the Post's report which found his January charity event – which he claimed raised more than $6 million in donations for veterans charities – had come up short.
+
+It's not the first time reports have raised questions about the donations. In March, Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks shot down media inquiries in an interview with CNN that similarly wondered about these alleged donations.
+
+""If the media spent half as much time highlighting the work of these groups and how our veterans have been so mistreated, rather than trying to disparage Mr. Trump's generosity for a totally unsolicited gesture for which he had no obligation, we would all be better for it,"" Hicks told CNN.
+
+At the event, which Trump held as counterprograming to the Republican presidential debate he boycotted in January, the candidate said he ""broke $6 million"" in donations, $1 million of which he donated himself.
+
+But as of March, Hicks said they were still collecting donations. Now Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, says some of the event's biggest donors have backed down on their promises. The fundraiser actually brought in $4.5 million, or 75 percent of what was initially said, the Washington Post's David Fahrenthold reported. He later remarked on Twitter that even the adjusted numbers are still a hefty and admirable sum for a worthy cause:
+
+At the time of the report, the campaign said the amount was not $4.5 million, Trump tweeted it is somewhere between $5 million and $6 millions, and it was unclear where Trump's own pledge of $1 million ended up.
+
+But regardless of the numbers, something has become increasingly clear: Trump feels this isn't about the money. He's making it about him doing a good deed.
+
+""The press should be ashamed at themselves, and on behalf of the vets the press should be ashamed of themselves,"" Trump said Tuesday, even calling a reporter at his press conference a ""sleaze.""
+
+The reports were a personal attack, Trump said.
+
+""Instead of being like, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Trump,' or ‘Trump did a good job,' everyone said: ‘Who got it? Who got it? Who got it?'"" Trump said. ""And you make me look very bad. I have never received such bad publicity for doing a good job.""
+
+The Washington Post report was yet another ""dishonest"" ploy from the mainstream media, trying to spin his good deed into scandal, he tweeted when the report surfaced.
+
+In many ways, Trump's idea to host a fundraising event honoring veterans began as a reaction to the ""disgusting media."" In January, Trump decided to boycott the last GOP presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses because of Fox News host and debate moderator Megyn Kelly.
+
+It was an early chapter in their months-long feud — she represented the ""biased"" media; he felt she had personally targeted him in the first debate and intended to tank Fox News's ratings by hosting a charitable even in Iowa at the same time as the debate. (Trump and Kelly have, of course, now officially made up.)
+
+Trump's fundraiser was organized on a whim and featured the things that represent Trump the most: Middle America, an unyielding love for America, and Trump supporters.
+
+For Trump, the Washington Post's report was an attempt to turn a good deed sour.
+
+But Fahrenthold maintains that wasn't the intention, launching a 16-tweet response to Trump's comment. He has some questions:
+
+January's fundraising event raised a lot of money for veterans. It was also undeniably a political platform.
+
+It resembled a Trump rally as much as it did a charitable event, I reported in January:
+
+Since then, Trump has used the event to exemplify all the good he has done for the military and its veterans. In the weeks after, he used his campaign events to give large checks to various charities, rallying confidence that he can get good things done; with a snap of his fingers he raised millions.
+
+The point is clear: Trump, ""under no obligation,"" did a good thing.",REAL
+4621,How the confidence deficit is impacting the 2016 election,"First Read is a morning briefing from Meet the Press and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.
+
+A week out from Election Day, here's the only thing we're sure of after Friday's bombshell political news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is one again looking at Hillary Clinton's emails: Another U.S. institution -- the FBI -- has taken a hit. (It's especially true after all of the obvious leaks coming from the FBI and Justice Department.) And that news isn't good for the country's democracy. Back in 2014, our national NBC/WSJ poll looked at Americans' confidence in 15 different institutions and industries, and majority had confidence in just two of them.
+
+So this lack of confidence in American institutions was taking place BEFORE this presidential election, and you can only imagine what the situation is going to look like afterwards. As for Comey and his decision to make his announcement 11 days before an election, we understand he was in a lose-lose situation. (If he withheld this information before the election, it could have been equally damaging.) But the problem was how vague Comey's letter to Congress was, as well as the fact that it was sent before the FBI even had access to the emails. It's hard to reconcile Comey being so transparent with a July press conference and then testimony to Capitol Hill -- over a matter where there were no charges -- and then so opaque in a letter to Congress just days before the election.
+
+Team Trump deals with its share of negative stories
+
+While the Clinton campaign is still dealing with the fallout from Friday's news, Halloween night saw several tough stories aimed at Team Trump. There was the New York Times report on new tax documents showing Trump ""used a legally dubious method"" to avoid paying taxes; NBC News reported that the FBI ""has been conducting a preliminary inquiry into Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort's foreign business connections""; and Mother Jones reported that a veteran spy gave the FBI information alleging a Russian operation to cultivate ties to Trump.
+
+Today in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, Trump and running mate Mike Pence will deliver a policy speech to ""repeal and replace"" Obamacare. It's a smart move for the Trump camp to focus on policy when everyone is paying attention. A Trump aide previews the speech to NBC's Peter Alexander: ""The speech will be delivered along with several of those congressional leaders who the Trump Administration will work with to immediately repeal and replace it. What's even more powerful is that we'll have Gov. Pence there to address how he has successfully navigated Indiana through this mess and created a model for other states to follow.""
+
+This week's NBC|SurveyMonkey tracking poll has Clinton ahead by 6 points over Trump in the four-way horserace, 47%-41% -- which is exactly where it was last week. Moreover, that six-point 47%-41% lead was identical in interviews before the Comey news (Monday through Friday) and after (Saturday and Sunday). More from the poll: ""Likely voters were split on whether they thought the controversial announcement by the FBI was an important issue to discuss or more of a distraction to the campaign. A slight majority of likely voters nationwide—55 percent—said it was an important issue. Forty-four percent said the news was more of a distraction to the campaign."" Now the national Washington Post/ABC tracking poll has Trump up a point, though that's in contrast to the other tracking polls we've seen after the Comey news.
+
+The Comey Surprise might not have hurt Hillary Clinton's presidential chances. But it might have hurt downballot Democrats, who were counting on a large Clinton margin over Trump. ""While FBI Director James Comey's email bombshell is unlikely to dent her White House chances, Democrats fear it might shorten her coattails and threaten their prospects of retaking the Senate,"" NBC's Alex Seitz-Wald writes. ""'It's certainly not helpful,' said Missouri Democratic Party Chairman Roy Temple. 'It kind of pollutes the Democratic brand in a way that's unnecessary, simply because it doesn't actually involve any new information, which is why the frustration at Comey is so high right now.'"" More: ""'The slightest breeze in any direction can really push these races one way or another,' said Ian Prior of the Senate Leadership Fund, a deep-pocketed GOP Super PAC. 'All you need is need is .01 (percent) in a [close race].'"" By the way, a Monmouth poll from yesterday showed a tied race in Indiana's Senate race, which isn't good news for Democrats' bid to retake the Senate.
+
+Burr says gun owners may want to put a ""bullseye"" on Clinton
+
+But this story won't help Republicans in the key North Carolina Senate race. CNN: ""Sen. Richard Burr privately mused over the weekend that gun owners may want to put a 'bullseye' on Hillary Clinton… The North Carolina Republican, locked in a tight race for reelection, quipped that as he walked into a gun shop 'nothing made me feel better' than seeing a magazine about rifles 'with a picture of Hillary Clinton on the front of it.'"" Burr apologized. ""The comment I made was inappropriate, and I apologize for it. But the audio CNN obtained also contained this other sound from Burr, in which he said he'd work to keep Clinton from filling the vacant Supreme Court seat. ""[I]f Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.""
+
+First Read's downballot race of the day: Ohio Senate
+
+In a swing state during what's shaping up to be a tough year for many Republicans, GOP Sen. Rob Portman has executed a model campaign against Democratic former governor Ted Strickland. He's been a strong fundraiser and energetic campaigner who built an impressive independent GOTV effort that's targeting possible split-ticket voters rather than just a Republican base. Strickland has committed his fair share of unforced errors, including his August declaration that the death of Justice Antonin Scalia ""happened at a good time.""
+
+Hillary Clinton spends her day in Florida, hitting Dade City at 3:00 pm ET, Sanford at 6:15 pm ET, and Ft. Lauderdale at 8:45 pm ET… Donald Trump makes stops in King of Prussia, PA at 11:00 am ET and Eau Claire, WI at 8:00 pm ET… Mike Pence stumps in Pennsylvania… Tim Kaine is in Wisconsin… President Obama campaigns in Columbus, OH at 4:30 pm ET… Joe Biden is in North Carolina… Bernie Sanders campaigns in New Hampshire and Maine… And Bill Clinton has three events in Florida.",REAL
+7253,"Anonymous hacker Deric Lostutter faces 16 years in prison, while Steubenville rapists walk free","Anonymous hacker Deric Lostutter faces 16 years in prison, while Steubenville rapists walk free Please scroll down for video 
+Deric Lostutter was part of the group affiliated with Anonymous who exposed the rapists of an underage girl in Steubenville, Ohio. While his actions eventually helped to highlight the terrible crime against the young woman and helped to bring the perpetrators to justice, he has received no thanks from law enforcement who have instead elected to put him on trial for felony hacking. If he is found guilty, he will face up to sixteen years in prison. Incidentally, the rapists who were also found guilty at trial have already completed their exceptionally short detention sentences. Steubenville hacker indicted for bringing rapists to justice 
+The sobering details of the Steubenville rape case were detailed heavily in 2013 when the perpetrators came to trial. Members of a local football team gang raped a high school girl and posted pictures, and social media posts are bragging about they had done to her. Only two of the perpetrators were ever arrested on charges of rape and kidnap, Trent May and Ma’Lik Richmond, both of whom received far more local support then their victim. 
+Initially, local authorities showed a reluctance to prosecute any of the perpetrators of this senseless and violent act owing to their privileged place in local society. This led to international outrage and eventually a group called KnightSec, which is affiliated to Anonymous decided to step in. They hacked into the Steubenville High School sports fan website and exposed the cover-up by school administrators and the identities of the girl’s attackers. They also posted a video of several students making light of the rape victim. They threatened to expose more individuals associated with the cover-up if the rapists did not come forward and confess. Eventually, two young men did come forward and were convicted of the rape of a minor. Ma’Lik Richmond served a paltry ten-month spell at the juvenile detention facility, and Trent May served two years . 
+According to Tor Ekeland, a lawyer speaking for Lostutter, he and his client were both incredibly surprised that he had been targeted by the FBI about this hacking. He said; “I don’t understand why they are prosecuting somebody who helped expose the rape of a minor… This is not a situation where somebody, you know, hacked a hospital or took down a nuclear power plant. This was an act of political protest against the rape of a 16-year-old girl.” 
+Now Lostutter must wait and see whether he will face the full sixteen years in prison that his ‘crime’ can carry. Naturally, his supporters are appalled. “You get 16 years for forcibly entering your way into a computer, but you get one year for forcibly entering your way into a woman. I think that’s the precedent the government is setting here, ” said Ekeland. 
+This article (Anonymous hacker Deric Lostutter faces 16 years in prison, while Steubenville rapists walk free) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
+5869,McCain Pledges to Help Pentagon Fix Scandal Over Excessive Military Bonuses,"Get short URL 0 18 0 0 Officials responsible for overpaying re-enlistment bonuses to soldiers a decade ago and officials who ordered those bonuses repaid earlier this month need to be held responsible, US Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain said in a statement. 
+WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Members of the National Guard in the US state of California were paid excessive bonuses at the height of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and were ordered to repay those bonuses earlier this month after an audit discovered the overpayments. ""That is why I will work together with the Department of Defense and my colleagues in the Senate to explore all options available to hold those responsible for this unacceptable situation accountable and to ensure this never happens again,"" McCain stated on Wednesday. 
+McCain called a Defense Department decision to suspend collection of the payments ""a long overdue first step."" 
+However, he added that thousands of service members and their families, whose lives have been disrupted through no fault of their own, are still waiting for certainty that the problem will be fixed. 
+The Defense Department said earlier on Wednesday that about 2,000 soldiers are affected and that it will set up a system to review each case before any efforts to collect money resume. ...",FAKE
+1118,Romney's timely Trump trolling,"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+Buzz Cuts:
+
+ • Romney’s timely Trump trolling
+
+ • Rubio, Cruz sharpen attacks on Trump
+
+ • Carson wonders whether his campaign ripped off donors
+
+ • Hillary knocks Bernie on guns in fight for black votes
+
+ • Hey, it’s hard to book a good housepainter
+
+ 
+
+ ROMNEY’S TIMELY TRUMP TROLLING
+
+ Donald Trump argues that Mitt Romney is in no position to be asking for the 2016 Republican frontrunner’s tax returns on the grounds that Romney lost the 2012 general election. Romney is also, Trump wrote, a “dope.”
+
+But Romney is arguably the very best Republican to be asking Trump about his tax returns given how successfully Democrats exploited Romney’s filings to alienate potential voters. Democrats essentially called Romney a tax cheat for his low rates and the attack stuck. And it is a line, in some form or another, which Democrats will be sure to repeat against the billionaire Trump if he becomes the Republican nominee.
+
+Romney began releasing his tax returns amid pressure from his rivals in early Republican primaries in 2012. But because Trump’s rivals have neglected to actually attack the frontrunner very much, Trump is only just now being pressed on this crucial general election issue.
+
+Romney’s troll timing is perfect. Trump is either less than a week away from starting to put the Republican nomination in the bag or facing lengthening odds in his unlikely but so-far successful quest. He is also facing tonight what promises to be his most challenging debate yet.
+
+Trump’s detractors to this point have mostly knocked Trump for insufficient conservativeness, or flip flopping, or being of poor character. But voters primarily interested in conservative orthodoxy and personal virtue are probably not part of Trump’s long-term coalition. Trump’s voters don’t seem to care about his politics. They just want a winner.
+
+What few have hit the frontrunner on are his business failures and the unhappy chapters of his career. His business troubles and his finances have been a long-running part of Trump’s media feuds in the past but have oddly not been part of the political discussion. It is particularly odd given how much of a focus Romney’s relatively tame business record was four years ago.
+
+Romney’s mischievous speculation is using Trump’s tactics against Trump. When the celebrity billionaire speculated about Sen. Ted Cruz’s nativity, Sen. Marco Rubio’s sweat glands, or Ben Carson’s gifts as a teenaged knife fighter, he was doing exactly what Romney is doing now.
+
+Whether Trump can manage to lock up his party’s nomination – which could come as soon as March 15 – without divulging his tax returns will depend on the press and his competitors. Neither has shown themselves to have much snap in their noodles when it comes to taking on Trump so far, but the hour is late and the stakes are high.
+
+Rubio, Cruz sharpen attacks on Trump - Fox News: “Speaking at a special forum in Houston hosted by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz called on Republican voters Wednesday to unite around his campaign, saying that his was ‘the only campaign that can beat Donald [and] has beat Donald,’ a reference to his win in last month's Iowa caucuses…Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has finished second in each of the last two nominating contests, acknowledged that Trump was ‘the frontrunner and I’m the underdog, but I’ve been an underdog my entire life.’ Rubio added that his campaign ‘would not allow the conservative movement to be defined by a nominee who isn't a conservative.’ Rubio also took a shot at Trump, though he did not mention that candidate's name, for his remarks on Muslims.”
+
+Trump’s resort spurned American applicants for foreign workers - NYT: “Since 2010, nearly 300 United States residents have applied or been referred for jobs as waiters, waitresses, cooks and housekeepers [at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla.]. But according to federal records, only 17 have been hired. In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries.”
+
+White nationalists plump for Trump in robocalls - Daily Beast: “A xenophobic pro-Donald Trump robocall urges voters in Vermont and Minnesota not to vote for a ‘Cuban’ like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. The call comes from the American National PAC and is voiced by its founded William Daniel Johnson, the leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. ‘The white race is dying out in America and Europe because we are afraid to be called ‘racist,’ the call said. ‘I am afraid to be called racist. Donald Trump is not a racist, but Donald Trump is not afraid. Don’t vote for a Cuban. Vote for Donald Trump.’ Trump had previously disavowed the super PAC that released controversial robocalls on his behalf in Iowa.”
+
+Why it’s still a race - RCP’s Lou Cannon explains why Trump isn’t the inevitable nominee writing that Trump’s unfavorable rating and loss of late-breaking voters means Trump still faces competition heading into Super Tuesday.
+
+March 15: ‘Day of Reckoning’ - FiveThirtyEight: “March 15 is truly the GOP’s ‘day of reckoning,’ and Florida may be the most pivotal state on the entire calendar. If Trump defeats Rubio in his winner-take-all backyard, it would be game over. But if Rubio wins over enough of Jeb Bush’s old supporters to claim Florida’s 99-delegate jackpot, it could mark a long-awaited turning point in the race. At the very least, he could leverage such an outcome to try to prevent Trump from winning a majority of delegates by June.”
+
+Carson wonders whether his campaign ripped off donors - The Atlantic: “For months, reporters and political operatives…have been pointing out that Ben Carson’s campaign bears many of the hallmarks of a political scam operation. Now Carson seems to agree. On CNN on Tuesday, Carson discussed his year-end staff shake-up: ‘We had people who didn't really seem to understand finances,’ a laughing Carson [said] adding, ‘or maybe they did—maybe they were doing it on purpose.’ It’s a remarkable statement—especially because he’s so blithe about it… First, many of the companies being paid millions and millions of dollars are run by top campaign officials or their friends and relations, meaning those people are making a mint. Second, many of the contributions are coming from small-dollar donors. If that money is being given by well-meaning grassroots conservatives for a campaign that’s designed not to win but to produce revenue for venders, isn’t it just a grift?”
+
+Ed Note: Wednesday’s Fox First incorrectly listed Cruz’s delegate count. His number today is actually unchanged since the final tabulation of the Nevada Caucus results.
+
+ 
+
+ WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE
+
+ In a coral reef near Tahiti one photographer set out to capture as many species as he could in a single photograph. Smithsonian has the story: “What if you sifted through every last little organism that lives or passes through a single cubic foot of space in a day? On a coral reef? In a forest? How many species would you find? This was the question that [photographer Michael] Liittschwager wanted to answer—and photograph. He came up with the idea of a biocube; his proposed standard for sampling biodiversity. A 12-inch cube that he would set in one place and observe long enough to catalog everything within it. He started on Mo’ore’a [an island off Tahiti], but has since brought his biocube method to many locations around the world.”
+
+HILLARY KNOCKS BERNIE ON GUNS IN FIGHT FOR BLACK VOTES
+
+ USA Today: “Hillary Clinton’s gun-control offensive against Bernie Sanders in South Carolina will provide the template she follows in upcoming state contests with sizable African-American electorates. Two days in a row this week, Clinton campaigned with mothers who’ve lost children to gun violence, including Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin. Her campaign also cut a new web video and held a conference call highlighting Sen. Bernie Sanders’ record on guns, including his support of the so-called Charleston loophole, which allowed Dylann Roof to acquire a firearm before completing a background check.”
+
+Colorado caucus good for Bernie, superdelegates to Hillary - Denver Post: “The stakes in Colorado are significant for both campaigns, offering Sanders an opportunity to showcase the energy behind his campaign and giving Clinton a chance to demonstrate that her sizable organization can deliver votes…The caucus system mostly favors Sanders, as it gives an outsized voice to the most motivated party activists, who will gather at 7 p.m. for 3,010 precinct meetings that start the delegate-selection process…In the end, at the state and congressional district conventions in April, Colorado will award 66 delegates — in addition to the 12 superdelegates, most of whom are committed to Clinton.”
+
+Super Tuesday money race - Bernie Sanders is banking big on Colorado spending $1.2 million in the state alone, but overall his competitor Hillary Clinton outspends him across all 11 states voting next Tuesday at $4.1 million compared to Sanders $3.3 million, according to NBC News.
+
+ 
+
+ THE JUDGE’S RULING: APPLE VS. DOJ
+
+ Fox News’ Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano argues that the Department of Justice has no authority to force Apple to give them the ability to unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino terrorists, and says DOJ already has the information they’re seeking: “The DOJ knows where this data on this killer’s cellphone can be found, but if it subpoenas the NSA, and the NSA complies with that subpoena, and all this becomes public, that will put the lie to the government’s incredible denials that it spies upon all of us all the time. Surely it was spying on the San Bernardino killers.” Read here.
+
+CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS
+
+ Today, the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institute, and Center for American Progress are hosting an event on the changing demographics of voters in elections and what that means heading into November. The event is at AEI today starting at 10 a.m. ET and going through the afternoon. See here for details.
+
+HEY, IT’S HARD TO BOOK A GOOD HOUSEPAINTER 
+
+ Sky News: “A couple from Peterborough [England] have been revealed as the winners of a lottery jackpot of more than $45 million. Cambridgeshire pair Gerry Cannings, 63, and wife Lisa, 48, matched their numbers in the draw held on 13 February but delayed the collection of their winnings for a week…Mrs Cannings, a school teacher, explained why the couple took a week to come forward to claim the prize. She said: ‘I know it sounds mad but we had a guy in to paint the whole house. We’d been planning it for ages and had packed everything into boxes. We just thought it would be easier to wait, although it did mean that Gerry had to carry round the winning ticket in his wallet all week. It was very nerve-wracking.’”
+
+Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+6369,Like a “Concentration Camp” Police Mark DAPL Protesters with Numbers and Lock Them in Dog Kennels,"By Claire Bernish 
+On Thursday, police from no less than five states sporting full riot gear and armed with heavy lethal and nonlethal weaponry, pepper spray, mace, a number of ATVs, five tanks, two helicopters, and military-equipped Humvees showed up to tear down an encampment of Standing Rock Sioux water protectors and supporters armed with … nothing. 
+Under orders from the now-notorious Morton County Sheriff’s Office, this ridiculously heavy-handed standing army came better prepared to do battle than some actual military units fighting overseas. 
+But the target of their operation — a group of slightly more than 200 Native American water protectors and supporters opposing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline — never intended to do battle with the armed, taxpayer-funded, corporate-backed, state-sponsored aggressors. 
+Reports vary, but no less than 141 people were arrested Thursday, and — according to witnesses — police marked numbers on arrestees’ arms and housed them in cement-floored dog kennels , without any padding, before they were transported as far away as Fargo. 
+“It goes back to concentration camp days,” asserted Oceti-Sakowin coordinator Mekasi Camp-Horinek, who, along with his mother, was marked and detained in a mesh kennel, reports the Los Angeles Times. 
+Although Thursday’s incident remained relatively peaceful for some time, with only shouts, chants, and occasional attempts by water protectors to convince this standing army to examine its motives and reconsider, clashes nonetheless broke out — solely because of gratuitous police aggression. 
+After facing off for a couple hours, these militant cops began closing in on the water protectors to shut down the Treaty of 1851 camp — in reference to the Fort Laramie Treaty of that year, which established a large parcel of land designated exclusively Native American territory not to be disturbed by the U.S. government. Prior to his arrest, Camp-Horinek had established the camp, stating, as cited by Indigenous Rising : 
+Today, the Oceti Sakowin has enacted eminent domain on DAPL lands, claiming 1851 treaty rights. This is unceded land. Highway 1806 as of this point is blockaded. We will be occupying this land and staying here until this pipeline is permanently stopped. We need bodies and we need people who are trained in non-violent direct action. We are still staying non-violent and we are still staying peaceful. 
+Despite the water protectors’ commitment to nonviolence, the militarized police response went as would be expected — horribly awry. 
+“A prayer circle of elders, including several women, was interrupted and all were arrested for standing peacefully on the public road,” stated a press release from Indigenous Environment Network . “A tipi was erected in the road and was recklessly dismantled, despite law enforcement statements that they would merely mark the tipi with a yellow ribbon and ask its owners to retrieve it. A group of water protectors was also dragged out of a sweat lodge ceremony erected in the path of the pipeline, thrown to the ground, and arrested.” 
+Claims to the contrary by Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier aside, Native American and Indigenous water protectors and supporters have refrained from violent acts on the whole, preferring instead peaceful prayer vigils and acts of civil disobedience. 
+No matter how peacefully the opposition acts, armed defenders of Big Oil interests seem determined to brutalize , disrespect, and generally incite and inflict violence against those who desire unsullied water for generations to come. 
+In fact, at the beginning of September, a private security firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners, the company responsible for pipeline construction, indiscriminately unleashed vicious attack dogs on water protectors, press, and supporters — for reasons as yet unknown. 
+During the savage attack, a pregnant woman, young girl, and many others suffered serious dog bites thanks to the ineptitude of the dogs’ handlers. Afterward, a warrant for inciting a riot was issued Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman — for doing her job, filming events as they happened — though charges were subsequently thrown out. 
+Although ETP and some law enforcement officers defended the barbarous actions of the private security mercenaries, the Guardian now reports that — because the guards lacked proper licensing — they could now face criminal charges. On Wednesday, the Morton County Sheriff’s Office made the determination that “dog handlers were not properly licensed to do security work in the state of North Dakota.” 
+Bob Frost, owner of Ohio-based Frost Kennels, told the Guardian , “All the proper protocols … were already done. I pulled my guys out the next day because we weren’t there to go to war with these protesters.” 
+Frost insisted he had cooperated with authorities investigating the incident — but the sheriff’s department disagrees. Seven handlers and dogs were deployed to the scene in early September, allegedly in response to reports of trespassers; but, according to the Guardian , police have only managed to identify two people. 
+The sheriff’s department claims Frost has not provided necessary information, and unnamed security officials cited in the report said that “there were no intentions of using the dogs or handlers for security work. However, because of the protest events, the dogs were deployed as a method of trying to keep the protesters under control.” 
+In a statement cited by the Guardian , Morton County Captain Jay Gruebele said, “Although lists of security employees have been provided, there is no way of confirming whether the list is accurate or if names have been purposely withheld.” 
+Water protectors, in the meantime, are left to deal with absurdly disproportionate state violence — and the altogether unacceptable, disrespectful, and demeaning insult of being relegated to dog kennels after being arrested for exercising their rights. 
+As Lakota Country Times editor, Brandon Ecoffey, wrote in an editorial Thursday, 
+Over the course of the last several months the abuse of detainees by Morton County Law Enforcement has overstepped every boundary guaranteed by the American constitution. Water protectors have been seen being bound and hooded by police. People are being stripped searched and abused within their jail for misdemeanor crimes. And police have employed the use of mass surveillance through drones on the protector camps. This isn’t a war zone this is North Dakota. 
+Claire Bernish writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com , where this article first appeared . Share:",FAKE
+7701,You Can't Be Intersectional While at the Same Time Being Elitist and Exclusionary,"By Djuan Wash / filmsforaction.org 
+One cannot claim to be intersectional while at the same time being elitist and exclusionary. Everyone isn't hip to what heteronormativity, heterosexism, cisgendered, cissexism or many new-age terms mean. You can't write people off for not being where you are or prescribing to your beliefs. Being intersectional means to love and support people where they are and assist them in their efforts at gaining a better understanding of intersectional social justice. While the work ultimately lies on the individual to read/research further once you enlighten them, you can't do that if you brow beat them for being ignorant. If you're unwilling to meet people where they are, you're not being intersectional, you're being an asshole. This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License 4.0 ·",FAKE
+5223,A sharpened debate: Is it ethical to not vote this year for president?,"The most controversial presidential campaign  in modern American history has sharpened a long-standing debate: Is it ethical to not vote?
+
+More than 92 million Americans who were eligible to vote four years ago didn't cast ballots. But politics in the Age of Trump has prompted editorial writers, Democratic partisans and even some Republicans to argue that Donald Trump is so unacceptable as a potential commander in chief that citizens have a heightened duty to show up to cast their ballot against him.
+
+Some Trump supporters, presumably including those who chant ""Lock her up!"" at GOP rallies, feel the same way about Hillary Clinton.
+
+""Let's be clear: Elections aren’t just about who votes, but who doesn’t vote,"" first lady Michelle Obama said last week at a Clinton campaign rally at La Salle University in Philadelphia, with a cautionary message aimed at Millennials. ""And if you vote for someone other than Hillary, or if you don’t vote at all, then you are helping to elect Hillary’s opponent.  And the stakes are far too high to take that chance, too high.""
+
+""Some among the anti-Hillary brigades have decided, in deference to their exquisite sensibilities, to stay at home on Election Day, rather than vote for Mrs. Clinton,"" she wrote in Friday's The Wall Street Journal. But she warned, ""Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House.""
+
+On Team Trump, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani are among those who argue it is Clinton whose election would pose a threat to the republic. And some Republicans who oppose Trump make the case for sending a message by supporting a third-party candidate or not voting at all.
+
+Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, vanquished by Trump in the GOP primaries, told reporters Thursday after delivering a guest lecture at Harvard University that he planned to vote, but not for Trump or Clinton. ""If everybody didn't vote, that would be a pretty powerful political statement, wouldn't it?"" he said.
+
+Trump's temperament — criticism of Muslim-American Gold Star parents, a late-night Twitter storm against a former beauty queen — and policy views that include skepticism of the NATO alliance and admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin have fueled alarm even among some life-long Republicans about whether he should be trusted with the nation's highest office. Former president George H.W. Bush and 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney are among those who have said they won't vote for Trump.
+
+But concerns about Clinton, including questions about her honesty and trustworthiness, have complicated the calculations by some voters about just whom to support. All that has boosted Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, whose 7.3% level of support in the RealClearPolitics average of recent nationwide surveys is higher than any third-party candidate on Election Day since Ross Perot in 1996.
+
+When both major-party candidates get negative ratings from most Americans, will more voters just stay home?
+
+Inspirational contenders tend to do best in drawing voters to the polls. The highest rate of turnout since World War II was 63.8% of the voting-eligible population in 1960, when a youthful Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy narrowly won the White House. After decades of more-or-less steady decline, it spiked again to 61.6% in 2008, when Illinois senator Barack Obama was elected the nation's first African-American president.
+
+But scholars say fear can be as compelling as hope.
+
+""Fear is a pretty big motivator, just as is enthusiasm,"" says Michael Dimmock, president of the non-partisan Pew Research Center, which has studied voters and non-voters. Turnout in presidential elections tends to dip in years such as 1996 and 2000, when voters don't see the stakes as particularly high or the differences between the two major candidates as particularly sharp.
+
+Neither factor would apply this time. And high levels of interest this year may signal higher turnout.
+
+In a Pew study released this summer, more than eight in 10 said they were following news about the candidates closely, the highest level of interest in a quarter century. Eight in 10 said they had thought ""quite a lot"" about the election. Three of four said it ""really matters"" who wins.
+
+That said, two-thirds called the tone of the campaign too negative, and only four in 10 were satisfied with their choices, the lowest level in two decades. Just one in 10 said either candidate would make a good president. Four in 10 said neither would.
+
+""We've never had candidates like this for president,"" says Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who heads the United States Elections Project. He turns to Senate races for comparison, citing the 2010 Delaware contest when Democrat Chris Coons crushed Republican Christine O'Donnell. She was a controversial Tea Party-backed contender who, among other things, aired a TV ad denying she was a witch.
+
+Despite a contest that wasn't seen as competitive, turnout in the First State was among the highest in the country last year.
+
+""My guess is people are going to be activated to vote against these candidates,"" McDonald says. ""They may not like their particular candidate ... but they certainly don't like the other party's candidate.""
+
+""It's not: 'How much do I like these people?'"" says Jan Leighley, an American University professor and co-author of Who Votes Now? Demographics, Issues, Inequality and Turnout in the United States. ""It's: 'Does it make a difference between this person I do not like opposed to that person I do not like?'""
+
+This year, Trump has heightened that issue with rhetoric that seems ""outside the scope of reasonable conversation or respectable public dialogue,"" she says. If he continues to do that, she says the question for voters could be this: ""Is one being irresponsible by not casting a ballot?""
+
+In the first, tentative clues about turnout this year, McDonald says requests for absentee ballots in congressional districts in Iowa, Maine and North Carolina likely to favor Clinton have been running slightly ahead of requests at this point four years ago. Requests in districts in those three states likely to favor Trump have been running slightly lower.
+
+""Most Americans think there's an obligation to vote,"" says Jason Brennan, a Georgetown University professor and author of The Ethics of Voting, though the percentages may be inflated because they think that's what they're supposed to say. He doesn't agree, likening it to a lottery, when an individual ticket or vote isn't likely to make a difference.
+
+That said, he generally does vote himself.
+
+A look at the demographics of those least likely to vote explains why Democrats are more focused on turnout efforts than Republicans. A majority of eligible Latino voters and of voters under 30 didn't go to the polls in 2012. Both groups support Clinton over Trump, and they make up significant blocs in some battleground states — Millennials in Colorado and Virginia, Hispanics in Florida and Nevada.
+
+Clinton has vowed to encourage 3 million new Americans to register to vote before Nov. 8. She and her top campaign surrogates increasingly are focused on registering voters before state deadlines loom and encouraging supporters to cast early ballots.
+
+That said, Trump has done well among another group of voters not inclined to cast ballots: Those who don't have a college education. Only a third of eligible voters who don't have a high school diploma voted in 2012, and less than half of those with only a high school education did so.
+
+Most non-voters stay away from the polls not because they are making an ideological statement but because they say they are too busy, or they don't like either candidate, or they don't think it matters if they vote. As a group, they are younger, less educated and less affluent than voters. They express less interest in politics and public affairs, although a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll of unlikely voters in 2012 found two-thirds of them said they were registered.
+
+They are much more likely than voters to favor an activist government; eight in 10 said the government plays an important role in their lives. And the USA TODAY survey found they supported Obama over Romney by more than 2-1, a far wider margin than those who cast ballots.
+
+Get-out-the-vote efforts, a standard part of presidential campaigns for decades, have started earlier than ever this year, in part because of the rise in early voting. An estimated four in 10 voters will have cast early or absentee ballots before the polls open on Nov. 8. The GOTV campaigns also have taken on a fiercer intensity than, say, when the choice was between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
+
+""I agree with the premise of The Arizona Republic, The Detroit News and many others that Donald Trump is a unique kind of candidate who represents a unique kind of threat to our fundamental way of life,"" says Norman Ornstein, a veteran political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. USA TODAY, which in the past hasn't endorsed a presidential candidate, on Friday came out against Trump, urging voters to go to the polls to support someone else.
+
+Ornstein acknowledges some voters are wary of Clinton as well. ""Even if you see it as the lesser of two evils,"" he says, ""one of those evils is going to become president.""",REAL
+6113,The World Is About To Witness A Breathtaking Once In A Century Event,"31   GOLD , KWN King World News 
+On the heels of a historic election and chaos in global markets, the world is about to witness a breathtaking once in a century event. 
+Expect Stunning Changes Stephen Leeb: “ Donald Trump’s victory sparked some of the most tumultuous action in the markets in decades – by some measures far more extreme than in 2008…. IMPORTANT… To find out which company is set to become one of the highest grade producing gold mines on the planet and is one of the greatest precious metals investment opportunities in the world CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored 
+There is little doubt the market is signaling major changes ahead. These will almost certainly be more than just a change in market leadership, from big-cap high-tech stocks to metal miners, etc. They will be more than a reversal in the market’s overall direction, say from bull to bear. Rather the market is telling us to expect stunning changes in the entire nature of the world’s economy. And all investors should be listening. 
+Trump Win Initially Shocks Global Markets Let’s review this past historic week. On Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning as a Trump victory became ever clearer, stock futures dropped further and further into the red and at their low were down 5 percent. Gold rallied and at its high it was up about 5 percent. 
+Then it seemed to dawn on almost all investors at the same moment that whatever you thought about Trump’s temperament, his populist message had carried the day. His economic policies would be hell bent on growth. From climate change to financial regulation, all barriers to growth would be knocked down. And given his real estate background, leverage wouldn’t scare him one bit. 
+The thought of major infrastructure projects, tax cuts, less regulation, and a constrained Fed led to a 180-degree turn. Stocks were in, bonds and deflation out. Steady growth was out, leveraged cyclical growth was in. This was a trend that had been trying to take hold since mid-year, but the Trump victory sealed the deal big time. 
+Take a look at the chart below. Year Chart Of Caterpillar, FaceBook, Amazon, Rio Tinto 
+Four major companies diverged dramatically post-election. Facebook and Amazon sank against the rising market, while Rio, one of the world’s largest commodity producers, and Caterpillar, which as the largest earth-moving company is highly leveraged to infrastructure and mining, soared. Most commodities followed suit. Copper’s weekly gain was one of the largest ever. And from its low in late October, when Trump started to gain in the polls, copper has climbed 15 percent. 
+Gold was the other side of the coin. After rising 5 percent on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, the Midas metal turned tail and finished the week down nearly 5 percent. Blame the decline, if you want, on the spike up in bond yields and the strong buck. But as I said above, the market’s dramatic moves signal a lot more than relatively short-term shifts in market leadership. For the record, gold almost always falls at the onset of major market turmoil as investors raise cash to get aboard the new leaders. And when the switch involves investors ditching deflation fears and replacing them with enthusiasm for growth, there’s further reason gold initially was left out in the cold. 
+We Are About To Witness A Once In A Century Event But don’t let that obscure the bigger reality. While gold could fall a bit more in coming days and weeks, the table has been set for the next act in a massive – perhaps once-in-a-century – bull market in the metal, as commodity scarcities force the world into a new monetary system with gold at its center. 
+America’s plans for infrastructure will likely be followed by similar efforts within the E.U., albeit no doubt reluctantly and with a lag. But the only way the E.U. can remain intact is if it starts to generate growth. Even if Merkel holds on to power, we think Europe will move in this direction, which means infrastructure spending. And if Merkel is defeated or doesn’t run, a big infrastructure push in Europe becomes an even bigger bet. 
+But even more to the point, however, is the massive amount the East will be spending on infrastructure. Such spending already has accounted for the uptrend in commodities even prior to the Trump blast-off. 
+Speaking of Europe, the biggest infrastructure project on that continent was the Marshall Plan, which after World War II helped build up the economies of war-torn countries, in the process granting the U.S. major trade partners. Many still speak with wonder at the scope of that plan. The Chinese analog, which I talk about a lot, goes by the name of One Belt, One Road (OBOR) or the Silk Road initiative. Whatever you call it, it is massive, by some estimates 12 times the size of the Marshall Plan. Its goal is to connect more than 60 countries, which together have 4.4 billion inhabitants and currently account for nearly 40 percent of the world’s economy . And OBOR is just the start of development in the East. 
+OBOR and the ongoing economic activity it will foster will utterly dwarf the impact China’s development already has had on the global economy. China today is the largest consumer of just about all major commodities. Multiply Chinese consumption today by many-fold and you get the long-term message of the past week’s unprecedented stock market turbulence. 
+With zigs and zags, for the foreseeable future the market will be trying to price in not just an ordinary bull market in commodities, one in which demand temporarily exceeds supplies, but a bull market powered by fundamental scarcities in basic commodities ranging from copper to zinc to fossil fuels. There will be a scramble for virtually all commodities, even ones that are relatively plentiful, as all will be needed to build out a world relying on new sources of energy. As I have argued before, once you have fundamental scarcities, it is probably too late to switch monetary systems from paper to gold. The time to switch is when these scarcities come into view. What we saw this week was the first sign that this new world is, indeed, within sight. 
+The $50 Trillion Project And A New Monetary Order To give you a specific taste of what lies ahead, as the U.S. spends perhaps $1 trillion to repair its crumbling bridges, its ancient water pipes, its highways, and its electric grid, China will be adding 31 percent to its capacity to generate electricity as well as entering into agreements to build ultra-high-voltage grids (another area, along with super computers, in which China leads the world) that allow China to generate power it can transmit to countries ranging from Germany to Japan to India. This electricity will be needed to power electric cars and provide lighting in dense urban areas that have yet to be built. Wang Min, an executive vice president of the government-owned Chinese State Grid, has said ultra-high-voltage power networks can tie together the entire Silk Road by 2050. The cost estimate he gives is $50 trillion, well more than $1 trillion a year. But talking about this in dollars is misleading, indeed, meaningless. 
+As commodities grow scarcer, they won’t be available for dollars at all. Enter a new monetary order – and gold. I don’t expect to be around in 2050. But well before then, as signaled by the market this past week, we’re all likely to see Eastern development and the new gold-based monetary system it will spawn emerge as the dominant economic and socio-political stories for years to come. ” ***KWN has now released the extraordinary KWN audio interview with whistleblower Andrew Maguire, where he discusses the gold and silver smash, at what price the large sovereign wholesale bids are located, and much more, and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+***ALSO JUST RELEASED: Whistleblower Andrew Maguire – This Is What The Commercials Banksters Are Up To In The Gold Market CLICK HERE. 
+© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
+9696,Forbidden History. Secret Egyptology Exposed!,"Forbidden History. Secret Egyptology Exposed! # Grey 0 
+They built the Sphinx of Giza ancient Egyptians four thousand years ago, and it is responsible for elder completely unknown civilization? What do we know about the history of mankind? Tags",FAKE
+10124,THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CAN NO LONGER DEAL WITH THE LIMITLESS CORRUPTION OF THEIR GOVERNMENT,"Home › ECONOMIC › THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CAN NO LONGER DEAL WITH THE LIMITLESS CORRUPTION OF THEIR GOVERNMENT THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CAN NO LONGER DEAL WITH THE LIMITLESS CORRUPTION OF THEIR GOVERNMENT 8 SHARES 
+[10/28/16] MARY WILDER -The federal government has really been dropping the ball over the last few decades. Time and time again they prove that they are completely untrustworthy and do not care about the citizens of the United States’ best interests. As the recent Wikileaks emails have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, those that hold positions of power within the federal government are owned by the corporations that continue to put financial gain over individual freedom. It’s a scary reality, but there’s no denying it any longer. 
+Unfortunately this has been what Americans deal with for decades now. Nothing has ever been done about it because the American people felt as though there is nothing they could do in order to stop it. However, it appears as though we have lately gotten to the point where we are unwilling to put up with the corruption of our government any longer. 
+In an article published on The Daily Sheeple , Charles Hugh Smith writes that the ruling elite “have bamboozled, conned and misled the bottom 95% for decades, but their phony facade of political legitimacy and ‘the rising tide raises all boats’ has cracked wide open, and the machinery of oppression, looting and propaganda is now visible to everyone who isn’t being paid to cover their eyes.” 
+So what does this realization mean for the future of America? Hopefully that the rest of our country will continue waking up and opening their eyes to the truth. The longer the masses avoid the acknowledging the truth in regards to the federal government, the longer their control over the American people will last. During a time when our individual liberties are under attack every day, there is nothing more important than sending the message that we control our own lives. 
+Of course, it is also extremely important to prepare for retaliation. These are people whose entire existence revolves around being able to control the populous. They are most likely not going to go down without a fight. When we begin rejecting their corruption on a mass level, they will definitely do everything in their power to silence the outspoken ones. You could argue that it has already begun in regards to social media. Other forms of expression are probably next. 
+Human lives should be more valued than big governments. It’s time that we all realize that and completely reject the global elite’s plans to enslave us all. Our lives very well could depend on it. Post navigation",FAKE
+9390,CAN'T TRUST OBAMA! Look At Sick Thing He Just Did To STAB Trump In The Back... * LIBERTY WRITERS NEWS,"
+This story by Paris Swade . 
+President Obama is preparing to stab Trump in the back. He is using all of his remaining time to push the TPP through congress, according to the U.S. ambassador to Canada. 
+*** Look at Obama now!! Look Obama is doing work. 
+Where was your ass when there was stuff to do. Here is Obama’s normal work day. 
+Obama has now spent more time golfing than any other president in history and now that is about to lose his presidency he is working to pass a bill that will destroy America. 
+Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both oppose the TPP and it would make up 40% of the world’s economy. We simply cannot let this deal go through, patriots! According to Canadian press the US ambassador to Canada has stated that Obama will push for #TPP to passed before Trump takes power. 
+This is a corporate money grab. This will not bridge the wealth gap in this country. It will increase it. 
+*** Share this article 1 million times, y’all! 
+We cannot let Obama get away with the biggest steal of his entire presidency. Trump needs to know about this. He needs to stop this. SHARE THIS SO THAT TRUMP CAN SEE IT. 
+Comment ‘DOWN WITH THE GLOBALISTS!’ below if you love this country. (h/t Huffington Post Canada ) (Title photo by Johnathan Ernst ) 
+Thanks for reading. ",FAKE
+217,"Ryan so far proves he can 'make the sausage,' but he'll likely be serving a much different House party in 2016","And the Wisconsin Republican isn’t talking about moving legislation in Congress.
+
+Long before Ryan clutched the speaker’s gavel, bow hunting deer consumed his late-fall and early-winter weekends. Ryan aims to bag three or four deer a year. He then crafts jerky and sausage from the meat.
+
+Ryan has held the speaker’s job since late October. And so far, so good in the legislative sausage factory. Passage of major education and transportation bills. A tax relief package. The forging of a bipartisan pact to avoid a government shutdown.
+
+Ryan even challenged Republican Presidential frontrunner Donald Trump -- without mentioning the candidate by name. This came after Trump suggested the U.S. should ban Muslims from entering the country.
+
+“What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for, and more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for,” said Ryan after Trump’s proposal a few weeks ago.
+
+Ryan appears to have altered the course on Capitol Hill -- at least for a time.
+
+“I’m very happy with how the last sev­en weeks have gone,” he declared.
+
+But the sausage of late hasn’t been the political stuff Otto von Bismarck spoke of when describing the onerous legislative process.
+
+Next year is when Ryan’s real sausage-curing experiment is put to the test -- merging political pork, veal, beef and venison with intestines, salt, spices and breadcrumbs.
+
+The “barn” left to Ryan by former House Speaker Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, is now formally clean.
+
+Anything from here on is Ryan’s barn. Passing the annual spending bills. Dealing with the Obama administration. Deciding what to do about the Benghazi committee. A decision on a threat by House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. Wrangling over the Asian trade pact. Confronting the threat of terrorism. Chasms in the GOP. Internecine fighting over the 2016 race for president.
+
+Right now, most political observers are trained on the campaign for president. But Ryan is campaigning, too. Not for president (at least not yet). But a campaign to calm the House, return to the illustrative but elusive “regular order” and instill confidence in the public and lawmakers.
+
+But 2015 was marked by exceptional turmoil within the GOP ranks, calls for Boehner’s head and his eventual resignation, an aborted campaign for speaker by Majority Leader California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy, squabbling over funding the Department of Homeland Security and raising the debt ceiling vexed Congress this year.
+
+Ryan wants 2016 to go differently.
+
+Already, there are catcalls from the far-right that Ryan is the same as Boehner. Or maybe worse than Boehner. Or that he already sold out. In the new year, Paul Ryan will face the conservative wing of the GOP. There’s no more saying he came into the play during the second act or that Boehner is still on the hook.
+
+“There will always be contrarian voices out there,” Ryan said. “Members of the conservative movement know me as one of their own.”
+
+He hopes to hand the biggest legislative keys to the House Appropriations Committee and rank-and-file members as they try to fund the government next year.
+
+This involves plowing through the 12 annual spending bills to run each section of the government and avert a crisis next September. They had better get rolling.
+
+Congress is scheduled to be out of session for a staggering seven weeks stretching from July through early September to accommodate the Democratic and Republican parties’ conventions.
+
+That doesn’t leave much time to wrap things up by September 30, 2016, the end of the government’s fiscal year.
+
+When asked how and why things seem easier than under the tenure of his predecessor, Ryan momentarily ponders the question.
+
+“I’m not sure I can give you a good answer on that,” he finally replies.
+
+However, he made clear that his goal is to “loosen control.” Perhaps without realizing it, Ryan responds to the Boehner regime interrogatory, saying “this place used to pre-determine everything, down to the amendment.”
+
+Ryan believes he can empower members to influence policy through the appropriations process. They can do so by prescribing how much or how little money the federal government devotes to a given program. That invests everyone in the enterprise.
+
+Of course, that means Republicans won’t get a lot of things they want (and demand from Ryan). And Democrats sure won’t, either.
+
+Ryan got a taste of working with Democrats on the recent pact to fund the government and renew major tax breaks at the end of the year.
+
+“I didn't really know these people,” he said of the Democrats, pointing out that he talked to Senate Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, Nevada, once for about 30 seconds in 2012.
+
+He says he and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., never had a conversation before the omnibus spending talks.
+
+That’s to say nothing of negotiating with President Obama.
+
+Obama wants to dine with the new GOP speaker sometime in the new year. Ryan’s spoken with the president by phone on multiple occasions since claiming the gavel.
+
+Still, Ryan described the administration’s approach to governing as “arrogant, paternalistic and condescending.”
+
+Even if Ryan’s able to get along with Obama and congressional Democrats -- to say nothing of members of his own party -- the presidential sweepstakes will dominate 2016. And what happens if one particular candidate polls well as they approach the Republican convention in Cleveland?
+
+“I put up with politics in order to do policy,” he says.
+
+But there’s lots of GOP handwringing about whether Republicans can hold the Senate and maybe (maybe) the House if the party nominates Trump.
+
+“I think we’re going to have a good climate,” Ryan says optimistically of the GOP.
+
+But there’s already chatter about what happens if the party is torn and Trump is cruising toward victory at the Cleveland nominating convention.
+
+What does the GOP do? Some private Republican conversations involve a brokered convention. Maybe the party pulls a Steve Harvey and switches the nominee at the last minute. One line of thought is for the GOP to engineer a brokered convention that perhaps propels someone like Ryan to the nomination.
+
+“He’s the only person who can unify the Republican party,” opined one senior Republican House member, “and possibly beat Hillary Clinton.”
+
+Ryan publicly eschews that sort of talk. Of course, he also didn’t like talk about him running for speaker …
+
+Until he did.
+
+Some political observers point to the video Ryan released before Congress abandoned Washington for Christmas. Titled “A Confident America,” the slickly-produced, creatively-shot tape mimics a campaign commercial -- if not a movie trailer.
+
+It crescendos with dramatic music and inspirational oratory, liberally swiping segments from a speech Ryan delivered a few weeks ago in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress.
+
+“We believe in the American idea,” Ryan proclaims. “We stand for a more prosperous, a more secure and a more confident America.”
+
+Note that Ryan is one of few major GOP political figures who has been willing to take on Trump.
+
+But for now, there’s sausage to be made -- in Washington and in Wisconsin.
+
+Ryan knows what to do with the venison back home. And in 2016, we’ll see how he does in the Capitol Hill smokehouse.",REAL
+2634,Attorney general nominee offers careful backing of Obama policies,"Attorney general nominee Loretta E. Lynch carefully backed the Obama administration’s policies on immigration and drug enforcement Wednesday, sidestepping political tripwires before lawmakers deeply critical of the department she has been picked to lead.
+
+During an all-day confirmation hearing that highlighted Republican anger with the administration, Lynch declined repeated opportunities to disavow actions taken by the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
+
+Instead, the first African American woman nominated to be attorney general cast herself as a career federal prosecutor determined to uphold the rule of law and willing to provide honest counsel to the president even when he might disagree.
+
+In calm, polished replies, Lynch also acknowledged Republican concerns and pledged to foster a better relationship with lawmakers if confirmed.
+
+“You’re not Eric Holder, are you?” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) asked at one point.
+
+Lynch, 55, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said she supports the use of the death penalty as an effective punishment and considers waterboarding “torture and thus illegal.” She said it was the Justice Department’s job to enforce the laws Congress passes, but when pushed about Holder’s decision not to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act, she said there are “rare instances” when careful analysis of existing laws raises constitutional issues.
+
+Immigration proved to be the most significant flash point during the hearing, with Republicans voicing continuing outrage over the administration’s executive actions.
+
+At the start of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which was interrupted many times as senators left to vote, Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) asked whether the president could defer deportations “for millions of individuals in the country illegally and grant them permits and other benefits, regardless of what the U.S. Constitution or immigration laws say.”
+
+Lynch said that it was important for the Justice Department to ensure that any executive action be legal but that she was not involved in the decisions leading up to the president’s actions.
+
+Referring to a Justice Department memo on the president’s authority on immigration matters, she said, “I don’t see any reason to doubt the reasonableness of those views.”
+
+Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who has said he plans to vote against Lynch, said he was “very disappointed and frustrated” with her responses.
+
+“I have a huge concern regarding what I think is the president’s illegal, unconstitutional executive amnesty, and I have a huge concern of the fact that you think it is within the law,” Vitter said. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) agreed with Vitter and said after the hearing that he will vote against Lynch.
+
+Lynch is the first Obama Cabinet nominee to face a confirmation hearing since Republicans took over the Senate this year. The department she has been selected to oversee has been a regular target of Republicans’ ire on a range of issues, including investigations into the Internal Revenue Service and the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and a botched gun-trafficking operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
+
+Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked his colleagues not to “turn this exceptional nominee into a political point-scoring exercise” by badgering her on immigration and the controversy over the investigation into the IRS.
+
+He described Lynch as “one of the keenest legal minds that our country has to offer, someone who has excelled at every stage of her education and her career, while cultivating a reputation as someone who was level-headed, fair, judicious and eminently likable.”
+
+Holder — whose six-year tenure overshadowed Wednesday’s hearing — had a particularly rocky relationship with Congress. Lynch has chaired the Justice Department committee that advises him on policy decisions.
+
+Among the points of contention between the administration and Congress has been the Justice Department’s policy on marijuana in response to the legalization of the drug in Colorado and Washington state. The department announced that it would not challenge those state laws and said that in prosecutions it would prioritize marijuana offenses­ such as distribution to minors.
+
+Asked about her own views on marijuana, Lynch said she does not support legalization.
+
+Sessions asked Lynch whether she agreed with a remark made by President Obama — and published last year in the New Yorker magazine — that the drug was no more dangerous than alcohol.
+
+“I certainly don’t hold that view and don’t agree with that view of marijuana,” Lynch said. “I certainly think that the president was speaking from his personal experience and personal opinion, neither of which I’m able to share.”
+
+When pressed on the legality of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance programs, Lynch replied that she believed they were “constitutional and effective.”
+
+If Lynch is confirmed as the 83rd attorney general, she will take the reins of the Justice Department at a moment of high tension between law enforcement and minority communities across the country.
+
+In her testimony, she emphasized her strong bonds with law enforcement and her desire to heal the rifts between police and the communities they are tasked with protecting.
+
+One of her priorities, she said, will be to work to strengthen “the vital relationships between our courageous law enforcement personnel and all the communities we serve.”
+
+“In my career, I have seen this relationship flourish — I have seen law enforcement forge unbreakable bonds with community residents and have seen violence-ravaged communities come together to honor officers who risked all to protect them,” Lynch said. “As attorney general, I will draw all voices into this important discussion.”
+
+Lynch was accompanied by her husband, Stephen Hargrove; her father, the Rev. Lorenzo Lynch, who traveled from Durham, N.C., and sat behind her; and her only surviving brother, Leonzo Lynch, who is a preacher in Charlotte. Her other brother, Lorenzo Jr., a former Navy SEAL, died in 2009. She placed his Navy SEAL trident pin on the witness table in front of her while she testified.
+
+A group of two dozen of Lynch’s fellow U.S. attorneys from across the country were in Washington, watching the hearing together on television from the Justice Department building. In the audience at the hearing was a group of Lynch’s Delta Sigma Theta sorority sisters, dressed in bright red.
+
+Lynch told the committee about her family and the values instilled in her by her parents, both from North Carolina.
+
+“My mother, Lorine, who was unable to travel here today, is a retired English teacher and librarian for whom education was the key to a better life,” Lynch said. “She recalls people in her rural community pressing a dime or a quarter into her hands to support her college education. As a young woman, she refused to use segregated restrooms, because they did not represent the America in which she believed.”
+
+“She instilled in me an abiding love of literature and learning, and taught me the value of hard work and sacrifice,” Lynch said.
+
+Lynch’s father, a fourth-generation Baptist preacher, opened his Greensboro church in the early 1960s to those planning sit-ins and marches­, standing with the protesters while carrying her on his shoulders.
+
+“As I come before you today in this historic chamber, I still stand on my father’s shoulders, as well as on the shoulders of all those who have gone before me and who dreamed of making the promise of America a reality for all and worked to achieve that goal,” Lynch said. “I believe in the promise of America because I have lived the promise of America.”",REAL
+3134,The end of white Christian America is nigh: Why the country’s youth are abandoning religious conservatism,"There’s been a lot of media attention recently to the changing demographics of the United States, where, at current rates, people who identify as “white” are expected to become a minority by the year 2050. But in many ways, the shift in national demographics has been accelerated beyond even that. New data from the American Values Atlas shows that while white people continue to be the majority in all but 4 states in the country, white Christians are the minority in a whopping 19 states. And, nationwide, Americans who identify as Protestant are now in the minority for the first time ever, clocking in at a mere 47 percent of Americans and falling.
+
+The most obvious reason for this change is growing racial diversity. Most Americans still identify as Christian, but “Christian” is a group that is less white and less Protestant than it has been at any time in history. The massive growth in Hispanic Catholics, in particular, has been a major factor in this shift in the ethnic and religious identity of this country. White Catholics used to outnumber Hispanic Catholics 3 to 1 in the 2000s, but now it’s only by a 2 to 1 margin.
+
+But another major reason religious diversity is outpacing the growth of racial/ethnic diversity is largely due to the explosive growth in non-belief among Americans. One in five Americans now identifies as religiously unaffiliated. In 13 states, the “nones” are the largest religious group. Non-religious people now equal Catholics in number, and their proportion is likely to grow dramatically, as young people are by far the most non-religious group in the country. This isn’t some kind of side effect of their youth, either. As Adam Lee has noted, the millennial generation is becoming less religious as they age.
+
+These changes explain the modern political landscape as well as any economic indicator. While not all white Christians are conservative, these changing numbers definitely suggest that conservative Christians are rapidly losing their grip on power. And while some non-white Christians are conservative, their numbers are not making up for what the Christian right is losing. And whether conservative leaders are aware of the exact numbers or not, it’s clear that they sense that change is in the air. Just by speaking to young people, turning on your TV, or reading the Internet, you can sense the way the country is lurching away from conservative Christian values and towards a more liberal, secular outlook. And conservative Christians aren’t taking these changes well at all.
+
+To look at the Christian right now is to see a people who know they are losing power and are desperately trying to reassert dominance before it’s lost altogether. The most obvious example of this is the frenzy of anti-abortion activity in recent years. Anti-choice forces have controlled the Republican Party since the late ’70s, but only in the past few years have they concentrated so singlemindedly on trying to destroy legal abortion in wide swaths of the country. In 2011 alone, states passed nearly three times as many abortion restrictions as they had in any previous year.
+
+None of this is a reaction to any changes in people’s sexual behavior or reproductive choices. It’s not like there was a spike in abortions causing this panic. In fact, the abortion rate has been declining. And despite continuing media panic over adolescent sexuality, the fact is that teenagers are waiting longer to have sex, on average, than in the past. Despite this, not only are you seeing a dramatic increase in attacks on legal abortion, the Christian right has expanded its attacks to contraception access, suggesting that something has worked them into a panic they believe can only be resolved by trying to reassert their religious and sexual values.
+
+That something isn’t changes in sexual behavior, but it’s reasonable to believe it’s because of changes in sexual values. People might not be having more sex, but they are feeling less guilty about the sex they are having. Since Gallup first started polling people in 2001 on moral views, acceptance of consensual sex between adults has skyrocketed. In a decade’s time, acceptance of premarital sex swelled from 53% to 66% of Americans and acceptance of gay Americans grew from a mere 38% to a majority of Americans. Even polyamory has become more acceptable for Americans, rising from being accepted by 5% of Americans to 14%. The fact that these changes in attitude are rising alongside the growth of irreligiosity is not a coincidence. More perhaps even than the 1960s, Americans are in a period of questioning rigid sexual and religious mores, and concluding, in increasing numbers, that they are not down with guilt-tripping people for victimless behavior and demanding conformity for its own sake. Some of them–now a whopping 22% of Americans!–are leaving religion entirely. Some are continuing in their faith but choosing to interpret their values differently than Christian conservatives would like. And so we see Christian conservatives cracking down in a desperate bid to regain control. They claim that they’re being oppressed by increasing tolerancefor religious diversity. They have latched onto, with some success, the claim that “religious freedom” requires giving Christians the right to oppress others. The Republican Party is in complete thrall to the religious right, to the point where giving the Christian right one go-nowhere symbolic bill instead of another one created a major political crisis. The irony is that this panic-based overreach is just making the situation worse for the Christian right. One of the biggest reasons the secularization trend has accelerated in recent years is that young people see the victim complex and the sex policing of the Christian right and it’s turning them off. And they’re not just rejecting conservative Christianity but the entire idea of organized religion altogether. In other words, the past few years have created a self-perpetuating cycle: Christian conservatives, in a panic over changing demographics, start cracking down. In reaction, more people give up on religion. That causes the Christian right to panic more and crack down more. In the end, Christian conservatives are going to hasten their own demise by trying to save themselves. Not that any of us should be crying for them.",REAL
+8552,Can nuclear war break out on the Korean Peninsula?,"Can nuclear war break out on the Korean Peninsula? 02.11.2016 Print version Font Size Does China support Pyongyang? Can the Chinese intervene in a possible conflict between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the United States? Senior officer at the Center for Korean Studies at the Institute of the Far East, Yevgeny Kim, gave an interview to Pravda.Ru, in which we spoke about North Korea's nuclear program and the possibility of the denuclearization of South-East Asia. ""North Korea is a closed and little known country in many ways. Yet, who raised the question of a nuclear threat? After all, there are American atomic bombs in South Korea."" ""China has been involved in this actively during the recent years, but one should not attach much importance to it. The mandate of the six-party talks was about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The question is not only about the elimination of nuclear weapons in North Korea . One should remove US nuclear bombs from South Korea and exclude a possibility for any type of nuclear weapons to appear on the Korean Peninsula on the whole. ""US nuclear-powered submarines with nuclear weapons, US aircraft carriers with nuclear weapons and US aircraft with nuclear weapons violate the regime of the nuclear-free zone in South Korea. Look at the Goa Declaration that was signed by the leaders of Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. There are more than one hundred articles in this lengthy declaration, but it contains no word about the North Korean nuclear issue.""Last year's BRICS declaration did not mention anything about the the North Korean nuclear issue. Therefore, the leaders of the five countries do not believe that North Korea is guilty of this problem."" ""Vladimir Putin said once that no one will touch a country if this country has a nuclear bomb. If it does not have a nuclear bomb, this country may experience the fate of Libya. What is Russia's stance on North Korea? Does Russia recognize the right of North Korea to have a nuclear bomb?"" ""The Americans would have shipped air defense systems to South Korea regardless of what kind of weapons North Korea would have had - nuclear or not. Russia is one of the great powers that has nuclear weapons, but Russia is not interested in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Of course, Russia would not like to see the emergence of new nuclear powers in the world. ""At the same time, Russia understands why other countries have nuclear weapons. Russia always says that all countries should proceed from the interests of equal security. Why should the USA be worried about the presence of nuclear weapons in North Korea? North Korea cannot attack the USA. Even if North Korea has launched missiles into space , it does not mean that those missiles can carry nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have to be delivered to the territory of another state, and a missile has to reenter the atmosphere, where plasma can destroy it, but the missile has to remain guidable in such conditions to deliver its nuclear weapons to the target. North Korea does not have the technology."" ""Why does China keep silence?"" ""China understands the reason, for which North Korea has to develop its nuclear weapons. The Chinese realize that the Americans deploy air defense complexes to contain China and Russia, not North Korea. The Americans do not even hide the fact that they have another nuclear warhead to be delivered to Germany. Nowadays, one can test and further improve nuclear weapons without a physical explosion, and North Korea would need to switch to methods of mathematical analysis."" ""What will determine the economic development of North Korea - Sangun or reforms?"" ""Reforms, definitely. Sangun - the policy of the supremacy of the army - appeared in the mid-1990s, when the country was in dire straits. The country was forced to unite as a military camp and create the mobilization economy. Sangun made it possible to overcome a very difficult period in the history of North Korea, and the country continued its development, where rigid military control was not required. Now they conduct reforms."" ""Do you think a nuclear war may break out on the Korean Peninsula?"" ""No, a nuclear war will not break out on the Korean peninsula, as North Korea will not use military weapons first. The Americans have a theory of pre-emptive nuclear strike on North Korea, and Russia too, by the way. North Korea does not have such a theory."" Interviewed by Said Gafurov Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru North Korea threatens USA with 'unique' war",FAKE
+1590,Strong jobs number holds risks for Clinton,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+704,Sanders warns Clinton against moderate as VP,"But he's staying away from criticizing his rival over her private email use during her tenure as secretary of state, continuing to downplay an issue that Republicans have used heavily against Clinton.
+
+Still locked in a heated primary battle against Clinton, Sanders said Sunday on NBC's ""Meet the Press"" that she should find a vice-presidential pick who doesn't have a cozy relationship with corporations.
+
+""I would hope, if I am not the nominee, that the vice-presidential candidate will not be from Wall Street, will be somebody who has a history of standing up and fighting for working families, taking on the drug companies whose greed is doing so much harm, taking on Wall Street, taking on corporate America, and fighting for a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%,"" Sanders said.
+
+The Vermont senator's vice-presidential prerequisites look like a list of his campaign's top talking points. But his comments also served to lay out terms for Sanders embracing Clinton if she secures the Democratic nomination at the party's convention in Philadelphia in July.
+
+Host Chuck Todd asked Sanders specifically whether he'd support Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a former governor and Democratic National Committee chairman, for the vice-presidential nod. Sanders wouldn't answer directly, saying: ""I think we are once again into a little bit of speculation. I have known Tim Kaine for years. I really like him very much."" Asked whether he'd join Clinton as her running mate on a party unity ticket, Sanders said he's still ""knocking my brains out to win the Democratic nomination."" ""That's where I am right now. What happens afterwards, we will see,"" Sanders said. ""But right now, my focus is on winning the nomination."" The final major set of primary contests, headlined by California, is coming up June 7. But Sanders has focused much of his attention on Donald Trump in recent days -- hammering the presumptive Republican nominee while largely ignoring Clinton. On Sunday, days after a State Department inspector general's report harshly criticized Clinton for her use of a private email server, Sanders again let the issue slide. He'd sent a signal that he could be ready to hit Clinton over her email on Bill Maher's HBO show Friday, saying ""it has"" when asked if the story had ""moved a little bit"" from his initial refusal to criticize her on it, starting in last year's debates. But on ""Meet the Press,"" asked about the report, Sanders said that ""these are areas that I have stayed away from. There is a process, people will draw their conclusions from the inspector general report. But again, you know, I think the American people are tired of that type of politics. And I think the media and the candidates have got to talk about why the middle class is in decline and why we have massive levels of income and wealth inequality."" On CBS' ""Face the Nation,"" Sanders went just a step further, saying Clinton's email issue merits a ""hard look"" but still stopping short of criticizing her for it. ""Now, you're right -- the inspector general just came out with a report; it was not a good report for Secretary Clinton. That is something that the American people, Democrats and delegates are going to have to take a hard look at,"" he said. ""But for me right now, I continue to focus on how we can rebuild a disappearing middle class, deal with poverty, guarantee health care to all of our people as a right.""",REAL
+7863,Hacking Accusations Against Russia Are Sign of Washington's Desperation,"Hacking Accusations Against Russia Are Sign of Washington's Desperation 
+With Putin winning across the board, Washington is struggling to contain its humilitation Originally appeared at Strategic Culture Foundation 
+The Obama administration is now accusing Russia of cyber-crime and trying to disrupt the US presidential election. The claim is so far-fetched, it is hardly credible. More credible is that the US is reeling from Putin’s stunning humiliation earlier this week. 
+Since June, US media and supporters of Democrat presidential contender Hillary Clinton have been blaming Russian state-sponsored hackers for breaking into the Democratic party’s database. 
+It is further alleged that Moscow is stealthily trying to influence the outcome of the election, by releasing damaging information on Clinton, which might favor Republican candidate Donald Trump. 
+Russia has vehemently denied any connection to the cyber-crime charges, or trying to disrupt the November poll. 
+Now the Obama administration has stepped into the fray by openly accusing Russia. «US government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections», reported the Washington Post. 
+This takes the row to a whole new level. No longer are the insinuations a matter of private, partisan opinion. The US government is officially labelling the Russian state for cyber-crime and political subversion. 
+Predictably, following the latest allegations, there are calls among American lawmakers for ramping up more economic sanctions against Russia. While US intelligence figures are urging for retaliatory cyber-attacks on Russian government facilities. 
+Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov derided the US claims as «rubbish». He noted that the Kremlin’s computer system incurs hundreds of hacking attempts every day, many of which can be traced to American origin, but Moscow doesn’t turn around and blame the US government for such cyber-attacks. 
+There are several signs that the latest brouhaha out of Washington is a bogus diversion. 
+As with previous Russian-hacker claims by the Democrats and US media, there is no evidence presented by the Obama administration to support its grave allegations against the Russian government. Assertion without facts does not meet a minimal standard of proof. 
+When reports emerged in June – again through the Washington Post – that the Democrat National Committee (DNC) was hacked by Russian agents, the allegation relied on investigations by a private cyber security firm by the name of CrowdStrike. The firm is linked by personnel to the NATO-affiliated, anti-Russian think tank Atlantic Council. Again no verifiable evidence was presented then, just the word of a dubious partisan source. 
+Back then the Russian scare story, for that’s what it was, served as a useful diversion from far more important issues. Such as the 19,000 emails released from the DNC database showing that the party chiefs had preordained Clinton’s presidential nomination over her Democrat rival Bernie Sanders. Much-vaunted «US democracy» was exposed as a fraud, and so the Washington establishment quickly went into damage-limitation mode by smearing Russia. 
+It was the whistleblower site Wikileaks, run by Australian journalist Julian Assange, that released the embarrassing emails. It had nothing to do with Russia. Assange has since hinted that his source was within the Democrat party itself. 
+This is where it gets really explosive. Assange has vowed to release more emails that will prove that Clinton as Secretary of State back in 2011-2012 masterminded the supply of weapons and money to Islamist terror networks in Libya and Syria for the objective of regime change. Furthermore, Assange says that the emails prove that Clinton lied under oath to Congress when she denied in 2013 that she was had any involvement in facilitating arms to the jihadists. 
+Assange has said that Wikileaks is going to publish the incriminating emails on Clinton’s alleged gun-running to terrorists this month. If the evidence stands up, Clinton could be prosecuted for perjury as well as treason in aiding and abetting official terrorist enemies of the US. 
+The exposure of an American presidential candidate as being involved in state sponsorship of terrorism while serving as a top government official is a powerful incentive for the Obama administration to find a lurid diversion. 
+Hence, the latest charges by the US government against Russia as perpetrating cyber-crime and of trying to subvert American democracy. 
+This is just one more illustration of how irrational and unhinged the US government has become. 
+Day by day, it seems, leads to more damning revelations of Washington’s complicity in illegal wars, covert subversion of foreign states, and systematic collusion with terrorist networks which have inflicted thousands of deaths on American citizens, among many more thousands of other innocent civilians around the world. 
+In addition to exposure by sources like Wikileaks, much of revelation about US criminality and state-sponsored banditry has emerged from Russia’s principled military intervention in Syria. Russia’s intervention has not only helped salvage the Syrian nation from a foreign conspiracy of covert war for regime change. Russia’s intervention has also brought into clear focus the systematic links between Washington and its terrorist proxy army working on its behalf in Syria. 
+Washington’s mask of moral and legal superiority has been ripped from its face. And what the world is seeing is the vile ugliness beneath. 
+Such is Washington’s ignominious fall from pretend-grace to its grim, odious reality that Vladimir Putin this week was empowered to speak from the moral high ground. 
+In announcing Russia’s unilateral suspension of a 2002 accord with the US for the disposal of nuclear-weapon-grade plutonium, Putin went much, much further. He gave Washington a list of ultimatums that included the US ending its trumped-up sanctions against Russia, with financial compensation, as well as the scaling back of NATO forces from Russia’s border. 
+In other words, the Russian leader was talking truth to American power in a way that megalomaniac Washington, with all its ridiculous delusions of «exceptionalism», has never ever heard before. 
+American pretensions of greatness are eroding like a castle built on sand. Washington’s criminal enterprises and specifically the complicity in terrorism for the supreme crime of foreign aggression are being glaringly exposed. 
+And now with due contempt, Russia is putting manners on Washington. It must be excruciating the humiliation for the narcissistic American tyrant to be treated with the disrespect that it deserves and which is long overdue. 
+Moreover, the humiliation is not just in the eyes of the world. The American people can see the true ugly nature of their rulers too. When a giant banner declaring «Putin a peacemaker» was unfurled off Manhattan bridge in New York City this weekend, the popular enthusiasm went viral. 
+Washington is reeling from Putin’s righteous courage to call it out for what it is. The truth-telling is hard to take for this unipolar unicorn. Its deluded myth-making about its own virtues are being stripped bare. 
+What’s going on here is a world-class, historic exposure of American power as a nefarious excrescence on humanity. 
+The reaction is understandable: foaming-at-the-mouth, desperate, hysterical and panicked. Accusing Russia of hacking into the American «democratic process» is a wild attempt to divert from the paramount issues: Washington’s exposed descent into a vile morass of its own making; the emperor is a criminal; the people know it; and a genuine world leader like Vladimir Putin has the temerity to lay it on the line to this has-been.",FAKE
+3982,"Architect Of Paris Attacks Was Killed In Raid, French Authorities Say","Architect Of Paris Attacks Was Killed In Raid, French Authorities Say
+
+The suspected architect of the Paris attacks was killed during a violent police raid conducted by French authorities in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis on Wednesday, French authorities say.
+
+Abdelhamid Abaaoud was a Belgian national in his late 20s. Authorities believe that Abaaoud was close to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
+
+During a press conference, Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve said that Abaaoud was believed to be responsible for planning many of the Islamic State attacks in Europe.
+
+Of the six planned attacks that have been foiled in France, he said, Abaaoud was believed to have been involved in four of them. Authorities believe he orchestrated the the three teams that attacked six locations across Paris and killed 129 people.
+
+Announcing his death, Cazeneuve said that as promised, ""the Republic is doing everything it can to destroy terrorism.""
+
+The Saint-Denis raid on Wednesday were bloody and violent. Police fired more than 5,000 rounds and one suspect — presumed to be a woman — detonated a suicide vest. Another suspect, whom we can now assume was Abaaoud, was killed by either gunfire or a grenade explosion during the confrontation with police.
+
+Yesterday, authorities said because of the carnage, forensic evidence had to be used to identify the dead. Today, Paris Prosecutor François Molins said that Abaaoud's was identified using fingerprints.
+
+As we've reported, until recently authorities believed that Abaaoud was issuing orders from Syria. Cazeneuve said that authorities knew that he had left for Syria in 2014, but they had no indication that he had come back to Europe.
+
+However, three days after the Paris attacks on Nov. 16, Cazeneuve said they received a tip from an ""intelligence service outside of Europe,"" saying they had picked up signals that Abaaoud had passed through Greece. Authorities across the world knew, he said, that an international warrant had been issued for Abaaoud's arrest. The implication there is that somehow Abaaoud's presence in Europe had fallen through the cracks.
+
+Cazeneuve added that he has called for a meeting with other European countries to talk about ways they can bolster cooperation on border controls and the fight against weapons trafficking.
+
+""Things are not going far enough. Things are not moving fast enough,"" Cazeneuve said. ""Europe owes it to all the victims of terrorism to act.""
+
+NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports that the fate of Salah Abdeslam, whom police say was a key operative in the attacks, is still unknown. Another unidentified suspect may also still be on the loose.
+
+Meanwhile, in Belgium, police conducted raids at six locations across Brussels, including some in the Molenbeek suburb, which has become notorious for producing radicalized youth.
+
+NPR's Peter Kenyon reports that officials say they are looking for associates of Bilal Hadfi, one of the Islamist attackers who died during the Paris killings on Friday. Hadfi was one of two terrorists who detonated explosive vests just outside a packed stadium in north Paris.
+
+This is a breaking news story, we'll update this post with the latest as we get it, so make sure to refresh this page.
+
+Update at 8:11 a.m. ET. Lower House Votes To Extend State Of Emergency:
+
+France's National Assembly approved President Hollande's request to extend the state of emergency in the country by three months. The measure still has to be approved by the Senate.
+
+As NPR's Lauren Frayer reports, the state of emergency allows the government to:",REAL
+8614,Dr. MacDonald & Dr. Duke Expose the Vicious War on Trump by the Jewish Establishment!,"Dr. MacDonald & Dr. Duke Expose the Vicious War on Trump by the Jewish Establishment! November 10, 2016 at 11:25 am 
+Dr. MacDonald & Dr. Duke Expose the Vicious War on Trump by the Jewish Establishment! 
+Today Dr. Duke had Professor Kevin MacDonald as his guest for the hour. They discussed the importance of the Trump victory as well as what needs to be done. They agreed that regarding immigration, the most important thing in the long term is repealing the 1965 Act. 
+They also pointed out the phenomenon of whites voting their ethnic interests. While we have been hearing that white women were going to vote against Trump, they wound up supporting him by a 10% margin. Even almost half of white women with a college education supported Trump, despite the years of Jewish indoctrination at college. The same can be said for white millennials. 
+This is an important show in terms of showing the path forward. Please share it widely. 
+
+Our show is aired live at 11 am replayed at ET 4pm Eastern and 4am Eastern. 
+Click on Image to Donate! 
+And please spread this message to others.",FAKE
+3140,Why conservatives refuse to believe Obama is Christian,"The percentage selecting “Muslim” is notably higher than in other polls conducted on this topic. This difference likely depends on how the question is phrased. Previous survey questions about Obama’s religion tend to sound like a pop quiz — such as “do you happen to know the religious faith of Barack Obama?” But by asking “what Obama believes deep down?” I was intentionally granting respondents license to stray from the pesident’s self-reported Christian faith. This reveals a prevalent willingness to distrust this pesident or categorize him as “the other” in terms of religion. Of course, respondents could also be “cheerleading” — using a survey question to express their general dislike of Obama rather than a genuine view about his religious faith. But, if these results were largely driven by anti-Obama cheerleading, we should expect more respondents, especially Republicans, to choose the very unpopular category of “atheist.” Relatively few do so.
+
+Previous ruminations on the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim theme have suggested various sources for it: ignorance, Fox News, racism, too much World Net Daily in your diet.
+
+Theodoridis’ post was inspired by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s remarks that he didn’t know whether Obama is a Christian. But do other elected Republicans suggest that Obama is not only not a Christian, but a Muslim? I ran a search in the Congressional Record for recent floor speeches in which the word Islam or Islamic and the President appear. This is snapshot, of course, and the number of constituents who actually listen to these speeches is infinitesimal. But if elected Republicans aren’t afraid to question Obama’s religious commitments for the permanent record, think of what they might say to constituents in smaller settings, or the well that they are drawing from when they make remarks in Congressional sessions for which they receive no pushback, and in fact receive encouragement.
+
+Republicans drew from recent conservative complaints that Obama refuses to say that Islamic State and other terrorist groups are “Islamic,” that he doesn’t take the threat of terrorism seriously, and he is insufficiently protective of American exceptionalism.
+
+On February 24, 2015, Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC) said on the House floor that his constituents “shared with me their frustration at the ambiguous language from this administration in describing the evils of radical Islamist terrorism,” and that he himself has “grown weary at the timidity” of Obama, who “continues to be defensive, at best.” He went on:
+
+At first glance, the silence appears to be passive or poor leadership. But I am inclined to believe that the President’s posture is not one of weakness but, rather, an intentional directive in both rhetoric and action. It appears that his promise to take our country in a fundamentally new direction is being played out in realtime. Instead of defending our liberty and our way of life, which is the most charitable in the world, our President seems to scoff at the belief that our country has been uniquely blessed by God. I would be remiss today if I did not pause and remember our Egyptian Christian brothers in the recent barbaric attacks in Libya. ISIS murdered innocent husbands and fathers who clearly died for their faith and their beliefs. Just this morning, we hear further reports out of Syria that Islamic State militants have abducted dozens of Christians, including women and children. Weeks prior, the President chastised the Christian community for getting on their judgmental high horses. Yet, in describing our martyred brothers from Egypt, the President refused to even utter the word, “Christian.” The undermining of our beliefs has become an issue with this President.
+
+Contrary to Walker’s statement, which echoes a claim circulating in conservative circles that Obama did not identify the Coptic victims of the Islamic State massacre as Christians, at last week’s summit on countering religious extremism, Obama noted that that Islamic State’s “slaughter of EgyptianChristians in Libya has shocked the world.” Notice, in Walker’s speech, the juxtaposition of the statement that Obama “seems to scoff at the belief that our country has been uniquely blessed by God” (i.e., he’s not a Christian) with his own remembrance of the murdered Egyptian Christians “who clearly died for their faith and their beliefs.”
+
+Some of the floor statements come from ardent Christian supporters of Israel, who contrast Obama negatively with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a February 5, 2015 floor speech, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) called Netanyahu “one of the most prescient voices that we have in the entire world to address some of the subjects and some of the dangers that face the United States of America.” In contrast, Franks claimed, Obama “chooses to listen to these mysterious voices of those who did not vote in our Nation’s election,” yet “has sought to go after and silence” Netanyahu. (He did not specify whose “mysterious voices” were whispering in Obama’s ear.) Franks questioned whether Obama is “so naive or, worse, so arrogant as to believe that we can have any type of credible, diplomatic agreement” with Iran. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), in February 2, 2015 floor remarks, asked, “this administration also refuses to say that we are at war with radical Islam. There is so much sensitivity in the White House over its statements that one is puzzled to wonder: Why are they sensitive about calling terrorists ‘terrorists?’” The next day in a floor speech, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), after describing atrocities committed by terrorists, added, “I guess if you are part of this administration, you shouldn’t consider that to be all that radical because this administration, under their watch, with Commander in Chief Barack Obama, had orders given to remove crosses from the chapels on our military installations.” (Gohmert repeats this claim, despite it having been debunked in 2013; the military, according to FactCheck.org, “has a longstanding policy against permanent religious symbols being attached to military chapels.”) In the speech, two days before the National Prayer Breakfast, Gohmert noted Obama’s upcoming appearance, adding, “I am greatly appreciative of the President’s espoused faith.” (emphasis mine). In a January 14, 2015 stemwinder, after laying out a litany of Obama’s alleged sins in failing to recognizing “that radical Islam is a threat to our very existence and way of life,” Gohmert delivered a brief lecture on how Christians are supposed to act (and govern): I have Christian friends that say: Yes, but as Christians, we are supposed to turn the other cheek. That is as individuals. Individual Christians should live out the beatitudes as Christ gave them. But the government has a different role. If you do evil, you should be afraid because the government, within the bounds of Christianity–Romans 13:4–is supposed to punish the evil, eliminate the evils, and protect your people. I don’t try to convert anybody using my position in government, but for those who misunderstand Christian teaching, you need to read Romans 13. Romans 13 is about submission to governmental authority, and the particular verse Gohmert cited reads: “For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” In other words, Obama isn’t punishing (purportedly Islamic) wrongdoers; he therefore doesn’t understand what Gohmert believes to be biblical imperatives for governing. Draw your own conclusions. Of course Poe, Franks, and Gohmert represent the far right flank of their party, but their fellow Republicans don’t dispute them. As Theodoridis theorizes, Scott Walker is a “moderate” on the spectrum of misrepresenting Obama’s religion because he merely said he didn’t know whether Obama is a Christian. But you could argue that Poe, Franks, and Gohmert never explicitly said Obama is a Muslim. Yet according to Theodoridis’ research, a majority of Republicans think he is.",REAL
+1423,Why Donald Trump is beating Fox News -- and GOP rivals,"Mel Robbins is a CNN commentator, legal analyst, best-selling author and keynote speaker. In 2014, she was named outstanding news talk-radio host by the Gracie Awards. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author
+
+(CNN) If you understand nothing else about Donald Trump, understand this:
+
+He has a particular mindset we see all the time in business -- he's ""the disrupter.""
+
+The disrupter is someone whose entire ""brand"" is to break the mold, to turn the way we do things on its head. Amazon did this with retail, Uber did it with taxi services, Airbnb did it with travel, Tinder did it with dating, Slack is doing it with email, Spotify is doing it with music, peer-to-peer lending is changing banking.
+
+Disrupters don't fix what's broken because they don't innovate from inside the system. They break the mold, change our thinking about the mold and then hand us the new rules for how things work.
+
+Just look at the Big Five companies that drive the Internet economy -- all disrupters -- Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook. They were early movers, they played by their own rules. First they disrupted how we do business online, and now they define it. And they control it. Apple just reported its highest earnings ever. Looks like disruption is working.
+
+Today every taxi company in America could band together, and they still would not stop the power of Uber. That is because when you gain enough momentum, you dominate the market and the conversation.
+
+In his effect on everything from Fox News to the Koch Brothers to the newspapers that endorse candidates, Trump has disrupted every single aspect of the game of politics and created new rules -- and based on the polls, what he's done is working.
+
+And so far, most of the political establishment has been wrong about what this all means. They said he wouldn't last and now he's leading in the polls. They said he wouldn't disclose his financial information or quit reality TV and he did both. They said that every insulting, ridiculous, inaccurate and offensive thing that Trump has said would hurt him. No sign of this. They said no network would bow to his demands for shorter debates -- but they did.
+
+Who knows what will happen when the Republican National Committee has to officially pick its candidate for president, but -- holy cow -- it sure will be interesting to watch. And who will we be watching? Trump.
+
+We can call Trump the carnival barker or the political side show, but discrediting the one who is wielding new power is what we do when we lose control of the negotiation. It's not politics, it's business -- as usual. This is why Trump understands that he can ignore it.
+
+He also understands something powerful: leverage. He is above Fox News, because he IS the news. And he knows that what he says AND where he goes is the story and therefore it is the business asset. So he is keeping control of that asset.
+
+The establishment can't play by the disrupter's rules, because the rules are designed to destroy it.
+
+The Republican establishment has already lost. Trump will be the party's next nominee no matter how many times he says he won't call Megyn Kelly a bimbo. It doesn't matter how many backroom meetings the Koch brothers organize or what Reince Priebus does to rally RNC delegates. It's over.
+
+The newspaper endorsements are also irrelevant, as are the fringe politicians and reality stars who are lining up to endorse Trump. They are all too late.
+
+The only thing that can beat Donald Trump now is the one thing he doesn't control: Americans who don't want his services as president of the United States.
+
+And the only way they will make a difference if there are enough of them -- enough liberals, Democrats, independents, and yes, even some Republicans and conservatives -- who can appreciate the appeal of a disrupter, but don't want one to lead the country.",REAL
+10518,Election 2016 and the Weaponization of the American Public,"Waking Times 
+With the election behind us, and the cloud of 24/7 candidate propaganda lifting, some deep truths about the state of American society are becoming evident, and the slow-coming, but predictable effects of social engineering are more visible than ever. 
+Decades of fear programming, dumbing down, authoritarian leadership, violence entrainment, divisiveness, crooked economics , moral subterfuge, and physical pollution have changed the social fabric of the nation. The result is escalating madness, tension, chaos, violence, and mindless self-destruction as people unleash their frustration, hate and rage onto their neighbors, burning their own communities to the ground. 
+How is it that hundreds, thousands, even millions of Americans can be triggered to hit the streets in violent protest over soft social issues, while life and death matters such as war are completely left off the register, going entirely unchallenged by the public? How is it that in 2016 the main issues driving people to action are the socially divisive ones pitting Americans against each other along race, gender and political beliefs? Why are we so willing to hurt each other, yet so unwilling to confront the machine? Predictive Programming – A Snapshot of the Future 
+In the climactic scene of the 2014 film, Kingsman: The Secret Service , the hero is in a church among a congregation of people being whipped into a frenzy of hate by a bigoted pastor. Then, a signal is transmitted from the film’s villain to all the smartphones in the building, and everyone enters a trance. A mindless rage of murderous violence ensues, and no one has any idea why they are killing each other. 
+While it passes for entertainment, it’s impossible to ignore the parallels in today’s real world. Take, for example this scene from the children’s restaurant, Chuck E. Cheese’s: 
+Social media makes it possible to trigger many people in an instant, and now we can easily record acts of stupidity and mob violence and share them with the world. Violence against real human beings is now just as entertaining as scripted Hollywood violence. All some people need is the right signal and they’ll go nuts. 
+This is happening right now around the nation as the political left refuses to accept the outcome of the election, staging protests, beating people in the streets and threatening to kill Trump supporters. 
+
+Meanwhile, people on the extreme right are harassing and abusing immigrants around the nation, as though a Trump victory implies a holocaust is in order. Students in this high school chant ‘White Power’ while walking down the halls. 
+White students at this middle school scream ‘Build the Wall’ during lunchtime: 
+The fact that children and America’s youth are engaging in such mindless stupidity is terrifying, but it’s a direct result of the condition of their parents, and the American family has been under attack for generations. Here’s a sickening look at how some are transferring their rage and confusion onto the budding generation: Pawns Fighting Pawns on the Grand Chessboard 
+We are in the throws of a cultural revolution engineered by the likes of billionaire George Soros who uses his wealth to finance social unrest in America and in Europe. 
+Our lives are being manipulated by the powerful, and our frustrations with this corrupt, authoritarian matrix are skillfully directed onto issues that will only cause further public division, never onto the problems created by the elite themselves . It is to their advantage that we hurt each other, as it prevents us from challenging their rule while giving them license to crack down evermore. 
+Take for example the antiwar movement. Before the invasion of Iraq, millions of people around the world furiously protested the invasion. The media did its best to pretend like resistance was nil, and the bombs were unleashed anyway. In the years that followed, the Patriot Act gave us free speech zones, and the war on terror gave a freshly militarized police the mandate to unleash official brutality onto any who threatened the establishment in any meaningful way. 
+The net effect is that almost no one bothers objecting to war. 
+The media does, however, cover protests over social issues that divide us all, and so people vent their frustrations in the these arenas instead, mobilizing for softer social issues like gender bias and offensive language, with the target of blame being other Americans. Government even offers assistance for these types of protests as we see in places like Portland, Oregon where police are aiding anti-Trump rallies , and in California where students are being permitted and encouraged to skip school to protest the fair democratic election of Trump. 
+In other words, we’ve been trained to complain about getting our feelings hurt and blame each other, and trained to shut the fuck up about the big crimes of the state. 
+In the game of chess, pawns are the expendable masses. Their role is to serve as an advance force to draw the opponent into a predictable and controllable conflict. They are used by and dispensed of by royalty as tools in pursuit of a larger conquest. 
+We are being weaponized against ourselves, and our rulers couldn’t be more pleased. For how much longer will we consent to being their pawns? Read more articles by Dylan Charles . About the Author 
+Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com , the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com , a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. He may be contacted at . Like Waking Times on Facebook . Follow Waking Times on Twitter . This article ( Election 2016 and the Weaponization of the American Public ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. 
+~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
+3828,Obama seeks to calm fears over terrorism ahead of holiday season,"President Obama will be conducting visits to the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center this week. The visits aim to reassure the nation of the White House strategy for combatting terrorism.
+
+Starbucks will expand in China – and it looks like a smart idea
+
+President Obama addresses the nation from the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, Dec. 6. Fears of terrorism are hanging over America’s holiday season, and Obama plans a series of events this week aimed at trying to allay concerns about his strategy for stopping the Islamic State group abroad and its sympathizers at home.
+
+In an effort to ease fears relating to terrorism, President Obama will spend much of this coming week discussing his strategies for combatting the influence of the Islamic State (IS) militant group at home and abroad.
+
+In recent weeks, the president has taken an increasingly soothing tone in response to terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., urging Americans not to allow themselves to be pulled apart by distrust and fear.
+
+""Terrorists like ISIL are trying to divide us along lines of religion and background,"" Obama said in his weekly address on Sunday, using an acronym for the extremist group. ""That's how they stoke fear. That's how they recruit.""
+
+However, for an increasing number of Americans, such fears are very real, in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. In January a Press-GfK poll found 5 in 10 Americans believed the risk of a terrorist attack in the United States was high. A new survey reveals that number has increased to 7 in 10, despite attempts by the government to assure citizens there are no credible threats to the US.
+
+In effort to publicize his the government's counterterrorism efforts, the president has scheduled a series of high-profile visits to the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center this week, before leaving Washington for his annual two-week family holiday in Hawaii.
+
+The Dec. 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino raised concerns about the US government's ability to identify lone-wolf radicals who may have been inspired by Islamic State. The US government has been successful in intercepting would-be terrorists who have been in contact with terrorist recruiters online, but the fact that the shooters in the San Bernardino attacks managed to remain under the government's radar until they killed 14 people at a health department holiday party has fueled fears that the government may not be doing enough.
+
+The recruitment strategies employed by IS, including an online approach that focuses on inspiring lone attacks, has forced US intelligence officials to engage in a war on multiple fronts, from the Middle East to social media.
+
+Obama will start the week with a National Security Council meeting at the Pentagon, followed by a public update about the US strategy against Islamic State.
+
+On Thursday, Obama will visit the National Counterterrorism Center, which analyzes intelligence to stay abreast of recruiting methods and other information on terrorist groups. Obama is scheduled to address reporters after a briefing at the suburban Virginia facility.
+
+The visits are seen as counterweights to the increased fear over terror attacks in the public and in the widely-viewed presidential election campaigns. Previously, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the US, a suggestion that the president has alluded to in public comments urging Americans to remain united.
+
+""We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam,"" Obama said on Sunday.
+
+This report includes material from The Associated Press.",REAL
+9231,COMICAL: Larry the Cable Guy slams ‘indefensible’ hypocrisy from Donna Brazile,"COMICAL: Larry the Cable Guy slams ‘indefensible’ hypocrisy from Donna Brazile Posted at 3:57 pm on October 29, 2016 by Doug P. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
+The defenses of Hillary Clinton have reached comical proportions, so it’s only appropriate that a comedian helps point out a fresh round of hypocrisy: Lol. I swear this is getting ridiculous. The hypocrisy is indefensible RT @RyanBLeslie : This tweet didn't age well. https://t.co/8fPB4wnJ92 
+— Larry The Cable Guy (@GitRDoneLarry) October 29, 2016 
+Indefensible indeed! Check out this flashback from current DNC head Donna Brazile by way of Media Matters: Wash. Post Editorial Board: Republicans Are Damaging Rule Of Law By Attacking FBI Director Comey https://t.co/HEyZqdRsaK 
+— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) July 7, 2016 
+That’s from July 7th. Oh how the Democrats’ attitude has changed in the course of one day! Trending",FAKE
+8088,Hillary Clinton in lead a day before Election Day,"Hillary Clinton in lead a day before Election Day 11/07/2016 
+PRESS TV 
+Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leads her Republican rival by three percentage points nationally as they head into the final day of a tight race for the White House, according to a new poll. 
+The final Bloomberg Politics-Selzer & Co poll released on Monday has Clinton ahead of Trump, 44 percent to 41 percent. 
+Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was at 4 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein had 2 percent support. 
+Clinton also leads Trump by three points in a hypothetical two-way matchup when third-party candidates are not included. 
+Another tracking poll released early on Monday also put Clinton in the lead. 
+The former secretary of state held a four-point lead over the billionaire businessman in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. The survey showed 47 percent of likely US voters backed Clinton while 43 percent said they supported Trump. 
+The Clinton campaign received a late break with FBI Director James Comey announcing Sunday that no criminal charges were forthcoming in the probe of Clinton’s newly-found emails. 
+“Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July,” the FBI chief wrote in a new letter to congressional committee chairmen. 
+The development is a major relief to Clinton, who is spending the final hours of her campaign trying to close Trump’s path to presidency. Donald Trump walks off the stage after holding a rally at Loudoun Fairgrounds in Leesburg, Virginia, early in the morning on November 7, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
+Comey sent the presidential race into a frenzy last month when he sent a letter to Congress saying the FBI had discovered emails in a separate probe that could be linked to the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server when she was secretary of state. 
+The surprise move infuriated Democrats and lifted the presidential hopes of Trump, who has turned the email controversy into a favorite line of attack against Clinton. 
+Still, Trump continued to seize on the email issue, insisting that Clinton is “guilty.” 
+“Hillary Clinton is guilty. She knows it, the FBI knows it, the people know,” he said Sunday at a rally in Detroit, Michigan. “And now it’s up to the American people to deliver justice at the ballot box on November 8.” 
+Both Clinton and Trump plan to spend the last day of the campaign racing across key battleground states that could determine the results of Tuesday’s election. 
+Trump will visit Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire and finish the day with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 
+Clinton is travelling to Pennsylvania and Michigan before closing with a midnight-rally in Raleigh, North Carolina.",FAKE
+1722,Democratic debate: Fact-checking the candidates,"Washington (CNN) The Democratic candidates for president gathered in Las Vegas for their first debate Tuesday, and CNN's Reality Check team spent the night putting their statements and assertions to the test.
+
+The team of reporters, researchers and editors across CNN listened throughout the debate, selecting key statements and then rating them: True; Mostly True; True, but Misleading; False; or It's Complicated.
+
+Reality check: Martin O'Malley says U.S. has ""failed"" to invest in overseas human intelligence
+
+O'Malley said, ""We have failed as a country to invest in the human intelligence that would allow us to not only make better decisions in Libya, but better decisions in Syria today. It's a huge national security failing.""
+
+Given the opacity of the available data, it is difficult to issue a verdict on O'Malley's statement, but it is possible to provide some context to what he claims.
+
+The National Intelligence Program requests congressional funding for the intelligence-gathering activities of six federal departments, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
+
+As a matter of policy, the government does not disclose information about the budget of the NIP beyond the aggregate, or ""top-line"" amount requested and the amount approved by Congress.
+
+The most recent year for which data on the approved congressional appropriation for the NIP is available is FY 2014. The aggregate amount approved for the year ending March 2015 was $50.5 billion. This amount represents a 3% increase over the previous year, which saw an annual NIP appropriation of $49.0 billion, partially due to reductions associated with the sequester.
+
+The amount appropriated in FY 2012, the year during which the attack took place on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, was $53.9 billion, the second-highest appropriation during the decade 2005-2014.
+
+In August 2013, The Washington Post obtained documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden regarding the previously undisclosed $52.6 billion FY 2013 budget, and providing a level of detail that had never been released on a previous U.S. intelligence budget. The documents indicated that the United States has 107,035 employees in the intelligence community. Of these, the largest employer of civilian intelligence officials is the CIA, which had the equivalent of 21,459 full-time civilian employees.
+
+According to the leaked documents, in FY 2013, ""human intelligence operations,"" consisting of ""clandestine acquisition"" of documents and other material, ""collection by personnel in diplomatic and consular posts"" and ""official contacts with foreign governments"" comprised an annual budget of $3.6 billion.
+
+While specific data on human intelligence operations is not available for other years, CNN military analyst Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling notes that the government has cut human intelligence operations relative to other forms of intelligence collection, fueling a major debate in the intelligence community since the 1990s.
+
+An additional obstacle to effective human intelligence gathering is the lack of racial diversity within the CIA's own ranks, according to CIA Director John Brennan. Minorities make up less than 24% of the CIA workforce, and only 10.8% of its top senior intelligence service. Brennan noted that, in many of the countries that are the focus of the CIA's current work, it is harder for white employees, and easier for many minorities, to operate covertly.
+
+Chafee said: ""We just spent half a billion dollars arming and training soldiers, the rebel soldiers in Syria, they quickly joined the other side.""
+
+The Obama administration recently announced it was going to suspend the train and equip program in Syria and not take on new recruits while they assessed how to better to improve on the program. To be sure, the program faced many challenges despite the near $500 million price tag. In testimony last month, U.S. Central Command Commander Gen. Lloyd Austin said only ""four or five"" graduates of the program were on the battlefield at that time, nine months after the program began.
+
+An initial group of 54 rebels that had been put into northern Syria this summer came under attack by al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and ceased to function as a fighting force, the Pentagon said last month. At least five of those forces were captured by al Nusra but their fate is not clear. Pentagon officials told CNN in August that some of those rebels got stuck in Turkey and never actually crossed the border into Syria, while others just simply ran away after coming under attack and never came back to regroup with their unit.
+
+And then U.S. officials confirmed last month that coalition-issued pickup trucks and ammunition had fallen into the hands of al Qaeda-linked forces in Syria. But rather than evidence of rebels joining the other side, that equipment was given up in order to gain ""safe passage,"" according to Central Command spokesman Col. Patrick Ryder.
+
+To suggest that all graduates of the program defected from their ranks to groups opposing the U.S.-led coalition is not true.
+
+Reality check: Did Hillary Clinton not have a position on Keystone?
+
+Clinton said she never had a position on the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline before she said last month that she would oppose it.
+
+""I never took a position on Keystone until I took a position on Keystone,"" she said.
+
+But as a member of the Obama administration, the then-secretary of state indicated she was likely to support it -- though she never said so explicitly.
+
+""We haven't finish all of the analysis,"" Clinton told the Commonwealth Club in October 2010. ""So as I say, we've not yet signed off on it. But we are inclined to do so and we are for several reasons.""
+
+Over the next five years, Clinton would repeatedly decline to say what her opinion was while the Obama administration studied the project. Last month she finally said, ""I oppose it.""
+
+O'Malley made the pitch Tuesday night that he could do better than all the promises made by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and others because he had already pushed those priorities into law when he was governor.
+
+""We raised the minimum wage, passed the living wage, invested more in infrastructure, went four years in a row without a penny's increase for college tuition,"" O'Malley said.
+
+He also increased spending on roads and capital projects and succeeded, after many years of failed attempts, in increasing the state's gas tax to pay for those improvements.
+
+Clinton said, ""I did say when I was secretary of state three years ago that I hoped it would be the gold standard. It was just finally negotiated last week and in looking at it, it did not meet my standards.""
+
+Negotiations on the TPP trade agreement began while Clinton was secretary of state, but the significant details were worked out after she left that office.
+
+In fact, Clinton did not say she ""hoped"" the TPP would be the gold standard, at the time she said the deal set the gold standard.
+
+""This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field,"" Clinton said at an event in Australia in 2012. ""And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world's total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment.""
+
+Nearly three years have passed, and Clinton has been out of office for most of that time as talks have proceeded on the important details of the deal. As such, it is reasonable for Clinton to claim that the deal has changed since she supported it and was involved in its negotiation.
+
+However, in some ways, the deal has strengthened over the years in areas that Clinton has cited as key concerns.
+
+Clinton now says the deal doesn't do enough to address currency manipulation. But the deal didn't include clear language on that topic in 2013 either, when critics in Congress were calling for it to be added.
+
+She also says she is concerned about the benefits the deal gives to pharmaceutical companies -- which are strengthened under TPP, but less than they would have been under the deal in its 2013 state.
+
+VERDICT: Clinton's claim she said she ""hoped"" TPP would be the gold standard is false. She said it was the gold standard and fully supported the negotiations. Her broader point about the deal changing since she left office is True, but Misleading. The deal has changed in the past three years, but in some instances those changes have improved the very deficiencies she cites.
+
+CNN's Anderson Cooper grilled Sanders repeatedly on whether he was protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits. After some explaining, Sanders landed on a simple answer: ""Of course not.""
+
+Sanders has been nailed by liberals and his Democratic opponents for his positions on gun control, including his decision to vote against the Brady bill and for allowing Amtrak riders to bring guns in checked bags. And his comment during the debate sounded like a sharp stance in favor of clamping down on gun manufacturers, defending his vote to shield them from litigation as part of a ""large and complicated bill.""
+
+""Where you have manufacturers and where you have gun shops knowingly giving guns to criminals or aiding and abetting that, of course we should take action,"" he said Tuesday night.
+
+But in a July interview with CNN, Sanders sounded starkly different, saying that gun manufacturers could not be held responsible. The sole difference was that in that interview Sanders did not say the manufacturer was aware of the crime that would later be committed.
+
+""If somebody has a gun and it falls into the hands of a murderer and that murderer kills somebody with the gun, do you hold the gun manufacturer responsible?"" he asked. ""Not any more than you would hold a hammer company responsible if somebody beats somebody over the head with a hammer. That is not what a lawsuit should be about.""
+
+Reality check: Bernie Sanders said, ""African-American youth unemployment is 51%, Hispanic youth unemployment is 36%. It seems to me instead of building more jails and providing more incarceration maybe just maybe we should be putting money into education and jobs for our kids.""
+
+There is certainly an employment crisis among minority youth. But as he has done in the past, Sanders may have misspoken when he cited those statistics.
+
+The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has found that 51.3% of black and 36.1% Hispanic high school graduates, age 17 to 20, are underemployed. That means they either don't have a job, aren't working as many hours as they would like or aren't currently looking for work but would like a job.
+
+The comparable number for whites is 33.8%.
+
+The official unemployment rate for black youth, age 16 to 24, was 20.7%. For Hispanic youth, it's 12.7%, while for white youth, it's 10.3%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The government data is not limited to high school graduates and has a wider age range.
+
+Reality check: Hillary Clinton said, ""We have to look at the fact that we lose 90 people a day from gun violence. This has gone on too long and it's time the entire country stood up against the NRA.""
+
+According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 33,636 people killed by firearms in 2013, the last full year for which data is available. That averages to about 92 people a day. However, the number includes suicides, unintentional deaths, and incidents with undetermined intent as well as violence-related firearm deaths (homicide and legal intervention). In 2013, 11,675 people were killed in violence-related deaths by homicide or legal intervention, which equates to almost 32 deaths a day. The CDC reports 505 unintentional deaths by firearms in 2013, or just more than one death per day. They also report 281 deaths where the intent was undetermined in 2013.
+
+Ninety-two people did die each day in 2013 from a firearm injury. However, the number of people killed from violence-related homicides and legal interventions in 2013 was much lower -- about 32 deaths a day.
+
+Reality check: Bernie Sanders said, ""It is wrong today in a rigged economy that 57% of all new income is going to the top 1%.""
+
+The top 1% saw their incomes soar 27.1% during that time period, while the bottom 99% got an only 4.3% bump in income. Healthy stock market returns helped fuel income gains among the wealthy.
+
+But the good news for the bottom 99% was that 2014 was the first year of real recovery from Great Recession losses. That's thanks to a drop in the unemployment rate from 6.6% at the start of 2014 to 5.6% by year's end.",REAL
+9307,Teenage Boy KNOCKS OUT His Classmate For Assaulting Their Female Teacher In The FACE- And It’s EPIC!,"0 comments 
+Not a lot of teenage boys would go out of their selfish ways to stand up for a teacher like this. He stood up for his teacher when his peer punched her in the face. This young man is certainly respectable! 
+A shocking video has emerged showing the moment a protective student knocked out a classmate who had just attacked their female teacher. The footage shows that the teacher was trying to break up a fight between two students – one in a red hoodie and one in a black hoodie – when the boy in the red turns around and hits her in the face. The teacher, dressed in white and wearing glasses, appears to fall to the ground after being hit, and then leaves the classroom. 
+Then, a third student comes in and punches the boy in head, sending him straight down to the ground. The third student is heard saying: ‘Watch the f— out, you just hit the fucking teacher.’ He then adds: ‘Chill your s—, you just hit the f—ing teacher, you don’t f—ing do that. Who the f— do you think you are?’ 
+The teacher then reappears in the room, and appears relatively unscathed. She tells the group to stop fighting and separate.‘He just f—ing hit you, that’s not cool,’ says the boy that came to her defense.‘It’s not cool,’ the teacher replies. It is unclear where the video was filmed or what school was involved, however the clip was spreading quickly on social media on Wednesday after appearing on the website LiveLeak. Some viewers questioned whether the boy in red may have mistakenly hit the teacher, believing she were the other one of the students. However others said he clearly meant to hit the woman. 
+Shout out to the boy for standing up for what is right! Related Items",FAKE
+1479,Carson takes lead from Trump in new national poll,"Ben Carson has seized the national lead from Donald Trump in a new poll, in a development sure to force the billionaire businessman to modify his well-polished campaign stump boast that he's ""leading every poll.""
+
+Released ahead of Wednesday's third Republican presidential primary debate, the CBS News/New York Times Poll showed Carson leading nationally with 26 percent, to Trump's 22 percent.
+
+The survey follows a string of Iowa polls that showed the retired neurosurgeon pulling ahead in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. Trump, who had led the field nationally and in key states since the summer, has tried to downplay the results but on Tuesday acknowledged Carson is gaining momentum.
+
+""Ben Carson is now doing well,"" Trump said in an interview Tuesday morning on MSNBC.
+
+At the same time, Trump has made clear he plans to challenge Carson at Wednesday's primary debate as the two battle for the top spot.
+
+Trump previously called Carson ""low energy"" and questioned his immigration stance. On Tuesday, he predicted Carson would have to deal with more scrutiny from all directions.
+
+""One thing I know about a frontrunner, you get analyzed 15 different ways from China. A lot of things will come out,"" he said.
+
+He continued to tout his own numbers and support.
+
+""I have tremendous crowds and tremendous love in the room and, you know, we seem to have hit a chord. But some of these polls coming out, I don't quite get it. I was No. 1 pretty much in Iowa from the beginning, and I would say we're doing very well there. So I'm a little bit surprised,"" he said. ""The other polls, as you know, in other states are extraordinary.""
+
+The most recent Iowa poll showing Carson ahead was conducted by Monmouth University and released Monday. It showed Carson leading Trump by 14 points, his biggest lead to date.
+
+Trump has led the Republican field nationally in almost every poll until now.
+
+The CBS News/New York Times survey showed the rest of the candidates trailing in single digits. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was in third with 8 percent, followed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former HP chief Carly Fiorina with 7 percent.
+
+The poll of 575 GOP primary voters was taken Oct. 21-25, and had a margin of error of 6 percentage points.",REAL
+992,"Hillary isn't winning over many pundits, even on the left","Hillary Clinton is clobbering Bernie Sanders—and yet getting negative reviews from some of the pundits.
+
+How is that possible? The Democratic race is essentially over. President Obama is privately telling donors it’s time to get on the Hillary train, the New York Times reports. A front-runner who wins in state after state usually basks in a winner’s aura as the party coalesces around her, and draws glowing profiles of how she and her team did it.
+
+Sure, Hillary was always expected to beat Bernie. It’s also true that Clinton has never been beloved by the press, and the feeling is mutual.
+
+But the larger problem is the outlook as the commentary class looks ahead to the fall.
+
+Until the last couple of weeks, the conventional wisdom was that a Trump nomination would all but assure a second Clinton presidency. After all, she’s the former senator and secretary of State with an awesome political machine, and he’s the untested billionaire with a penchant for divisive rhetoric. Plus, Democrats have an Electoral College edge and have won the popular vote in five of the last six campaigns.
+
+But some commentators see troubling signs in Clinton’s performance so far and wonder how she would withstand a Trump onslaught. The Donald has high negatives, to be sure, but Hillary does as well.
+
+An unsparing assessment comes from Joe Klein, who has known the Clintons for a quarter century and mostly written sympathetically about them since his 1992 New York magazine cover story on Bill Clinton.
+
+Klein agrees with Hillary’s self-assessment that she is not a natural politician, but goes much further in weighing a Trump matchup:
+
+“Clinton seems particularly ill equipped for the task. She is our very own quinoa and kale salad, nutritious but bland. Worse, she’s the human embodiment of the Establishment that Trump has been running against…
+
+“Indeed, her real problem is that she’s too much of a politician. She still speaks like politicians did 20 years ago, when her husband was President. This year, the candidates who have seemed the most appealing–Trump, Sanders, John Kasich–don’t use the oratorical switchbacks that have been beaten to death since John F. Kennedy.”
+
+It’s no secret that Sanders has pushed Clinton to the left on trade, immigration, Wall Street and other issues. But Klein says that is often viewed as dissembling:
+
+“There is an odd new law of U.S. politics: You can lie, as Trump does all the time, egregiously, but you can’t temporize. You can’t avoid a position on the XL pipeline or the Trans-Pacific trade deal, as Clinton tried to do in the campaign. You can’t try to please too many people too much of the time. Raising your voice to make a point–which Clinton does all the time, disastrously, because it seems such a conscious act–won’t get you anywhere unless you’re really angry.
+
+“In the end, I’m not at all certain that Clinton can beat Trump.”
+
+A note about her speaking style: When Clinton won five states on Tuesday night, I tweeted that she was shouting her speech and that it would be more effective with the audience at home if she was more conversational. I didn’t say she was shrill, I didn’t say she should smile, and in the past I’ve criticized Sanders for shouting his way through debates.
+
+But I was hit with hundreds of tweets declaring me to be a horrible, misogynistic sexist. Some of this was a wave powered by what others had said about her speech. Maybe my quick take was wrong. But I hope we’re not entering a period where any criticism of the presumptive Democratic nominee is treated as sexism.
+
+Other left-wing pundits, driven in part by ideology, fear the worst. This Salon headline boils it down:
+
+“Hillary Will Never Survive the Trump Onslaught: It’s Not Fair, But It Makes Her a Weak Nominee.”
+
+Clinton’s largest problem, in my view, is her low polling marks on honesty, a result of the email scandal and perhaps decades of scars of accumulated accusations, some of them fair and some exaggerated.
+
+Veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield, writing earlier in Politico, spells out three reasons why Clinton could prove to be a weak candidate:
+
+“First, Hillary Clinton commands little trust among an electorate that is driven today by mistrust. Second, her public life—the posts she has held, the positions she has adopted (and jettisoned)—define her as a creature of the ‘establishment’ at a time when voters regard the very idea with deep antipathy. And finally, however she wishes it were not so, however much she argues that she represents the future as America’s first prospective female president,
+
+Clinton still embodies the past, just as she did in 2008 when she lost to Barack Obama. The combination of those three factors is already playing out in the Democratic primary, where younger voters are turning away from her and embracing a geriatric, white-haired alternative in droves.”
+
+When Clinton recalibrates, says Greenfield, “she always embraces the politically popular stand.”
+
+However lukewarm the Democratic base may be about Hillary, she enjoys broad support within the party and most Bernie backers should have no trouble shifting their allegiance to her. The same can’t be said for Trump, who is weathering a Republican revolt against the likelihood of his winning the nomination.
+
+We’ll know Hillary is solving her enthusiasm problem when she starts getting better reviews from journalists on the left.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+8483,"Meteor, space junk, rocket? Mysterious flash hits Siberia","Meteor, space junk, rocket? Mysterious flash hits Siberia 'It was as bright as day for 5 or 6 seconds! Sensation!' Published: 9 mins ago 
+(Russia Today) People in eastern Siberia have been left mystified by a flash that illuminated the sky with green light, resembling the famous Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013. The event has become a hot topic for discussion, with people suggesting the flash could have been anything from a meteor to space junk or even a rocket. 
+The phenomenon was observed by residents of Irkutsk Region and Buryatia Republic in eastern Siberia on Tuesday, local media reported. 
+According to local witnesses, the sky was illuminated by a green light, before an object resembling a comet fell from the sky. Some locals claimed that the object was moving towards Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth.",FAKE
+1343,5 takeaways from the Republican debate,"Manchester, New Hampshire (CNN) It was the revenge of the governors as Republicans met for their final debate before the Granite State's primary on Tuesday.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie knocked the rising Florida Sen. Marco Rubio down several pegs, while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush went toe-to-toe with billionaire businessman Donald Trump and equaled or got the better of his nemesis. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, meanwhile, stayed with his positive game and seized opportunities to tout his own record.
+
+Here are five takeaways from Saturday night's debate on ABC as the primary clock counts down.
+
+After a stronger-than-expected third-place finish in Iowa -- and taking a clear lead over other ""establishment"" candidates -- Rubio knew he'd be wearing a big target Saturday night.
+
+But whether he was over-rehearsed or under-prepared, Rubio was off-key as he responded to the attacks.
+
+The opponent responsible for most of them: Christie.
+
+From the debate's outset, he pestered Rubio. ""You have not been involved in a consequential decision where you had to be held accountable,"" he said.
+
+But he then opened up a brutal line of attack in suggesting that the Florida senator only knew how to turn a phrase rather than accomplish something.
+
+""Marco, the thing is this,"" Christie said. ""When you're president of the United States, when you're a governor of a state, the memorized 30-second speech where you talk about how great America is at the end of it doesn't solve one problem for one person.""
+
+In answering Christie, Rubio consistently turned to the same talking point, casting President Barack Obama as calculating rather than incompetent, and intent on changing America for the worse.
+
+The fourth time he invoked Obama, though, the audience turned on him, booing the answer. And then moderator David Muir drove in the knife, saying: ""The governor wasn't talking about the President.""
+
+Rubio rebounded a bit near the debate's end, when he hammered Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for supporting abortion rights -- and won applause from the audience for it.
+
+Of Democrats, Rubio said: ""They are the extremists on the issue of abortion, and I can't wait to expose them in a general election.""
+
+Christie, Kasich and Bush know that since they're all competing for the same pool of more moderate voters, there probably aren't enough tickets out of New Hampshire's primary for all three.
+
+But the trio were still happy to unite in attacking the senators in the race (and, in Bush's case, Trump).
+
+The only mild governor-on-governor criticism came from Christie, who noted that Kasich had increased the number of Ohio's government employees. But that followed praise of Kasich's job performance, with Christie saying he'd ""done a great job in Ohio.""
+
+And Bush, in arguing that money and authority should shift from the federal government to the states, said: ""I trust Kasich and Christie to build the roads in their states.""
+
+All three turned in strong performances Saturday night -- and their timing couldn't have been better, given Rubio's on-stage struggles and New Hampshire's reputation for voters who make their decisions at the last minute.
+
+Kasich played up his time as the House's lead budget-writer during the surpluses of the 1990s and his record in turning a deficit into a surplus in Ohio.
+
+Bush effectively traded blows with Trump, lighting into him on eminent domain with a brutal response to the real estate mogul's accusations that Bush wanted to sound tough: ""How tough is it to take property from an elderly woman?""
+
+And Christie, who risked coming across as a bully in order to knock Rubio down early in the debate, was moving when he talked about drug addiction, linking his position on helping addicts to his stance opposing abortion, saying he wants to support kids after they're born as well as before.
+
+""I'm pro-life when they get out, and it's a lot more complicated,"" he said.
+
+Still, there are two big questions: Is it too little, too late? And on a Saturday night, how many New Hampshire voters were watching?
+
+3. Trump vs. Cruz: The fight that didn't happen
+
+They've bashed each other on the campaign trail in recent days, but Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Trump -- the two top-finishing candidates in Iowa's caucuses -- seemed to want nothing to do with each other on the debate stage.
+
+It was one fight that was conspicuously absent Saturday night, and it contributed to Rubio's awful night. The Florida senator might have been hoping that those two would bash each other -- but it didn't happen, and he clearly was Enemy No. 1.
+
+Cruz had a revealing answer when asked who he expects will win the Super Bowl: ""With an eye toward February 20, Carolina,"" he said, alluding to the South Carolina primary.
+
+Why it matters: New Hampshire's more moderate electorate means it's not a state where Cruz is likely to shine. He could, though, win in South Carolina -- and his campaign's strategy largely relies on racking up delegates in Southern states with March primaries.
+
+Trump's answers were revealing in their own way, demonstrating that his support isn't about an ideological opposition to big government as much as a desire for strength and a sense that the government is incompetent.
+
+At one point, he defended eminent domain, a practice he's used as a real estate developer. Later Trump backed the role of government-sponsored health care, saying: ""You're not gonna let people die sitting in the middle of the street in any city in this country.""
+
+Trump was restrained for most of the night -- with the exception of a bit of audience-taunting when, during an exchange with Bush, he dismissed those booing as his donors, and with a single shot at Cruz during his closing statement (more on that later).
+
+Cruz made false claims about CNN's caucus-night reporting -- and the network immediately called him on it.
+
+As caucus-goers were still voting in Iowa, Cruz's staffers had wrongly cited CNN in playing up the idea that former neurosurgeon Ben Carson was dropping out of the race.
+
+""My political team saw CNN's report breaking news and they forwarded that news to our volunteers. It was being covered on live television,"" Cruz said Saturday. He said CNN reported that Carson was suspending his campaign ""from 6:30 p.m. to 9:15,"" and ""didn't correct that story until 9:15 that night.""
+
+""What Senator Cruz said tonight in the debate is categorically false,"" CNN responded in a statement put out while the debate was in progress. ""CNN never corrected its reporting because CNN never had anything to correct. The Cruz campaign's actions the night of the Iowa caucuses had nothing to do with CNN's reporting. The fact that Senator Cruz continues to knowingly mislead the voters about this is astonishing.""
+
+CNN had reported that Carson would continue campaigning after taking a break at home in Florida. His next stop, reporter Chris Moody said, would be Washington, D.C., for the National Prayer Breakfast.
+
+Carson passed on the opening to go after Cruz directly Saturday night: ""I'm not going to use this opportunity to savage the reputation of Sen. Cruz.""
+
+But he did say he was ""very disappointed that members of (Cruz's) team thought so little of me"" that they would believe he was dropping out after all the effort his campaign put into the race. He pointed to his dedicated volunteers and noted that ""one even died"" -- a reference to an auto accident in which one of his supporters was killed.
+
+Trump, who'd avoided Cruz all night, did take one shot at him at the debate's end. After Cruz cited his victory in Iowa during his closing statement, Trump said: ""That's because you got Ben Carson's votes, by the way.""
+
+Thought the 2016 debate season couldn't get any weirder? Think again.
+
+At the start of ABC's broadcast Saturday night, Carson -- the second man due to appear on stage -- seemed not to hear his name. So he lingered behind the curtain as other candidates, confused, walked past him.
+
+Soon, Trump -- who apparently had the same problem -- joined Carson in waiting.
+
+And Kasich wasn't introduced at all, until the moderators were told they'd missed the Ohio governor.
+
+Moderator Martha Raddatz defused the situation by pointing to a loud and rowdy audience that made it difficult to hear.
+
+But on television, it was baffling: The names of the candidates came through loud and clear.
+
+Carson -- late to the stage -- quickly disappeared on it. And while he got supportive chuckles from the audience for his cracks about not getting enough air time -- ""I thought maybe you thought already I had dropped out,"" he said -- that's not the way to climb above his fourth-place finish in Iowa.",REAL
+10531,‘Why is it the first time I’m hearing about this?’ asks office wanker,"November 14, 2016 ‘Communication within this company just infuriates me,’ said insufferable manager Steven Parker, after tweeting the same remark to his 3 online followers. ‘The silo mentality is toxic and we need to break down organisational barriers so that fundamental knowledge is shared. This firm is a breeding ground for interdepartmental turf wars, and we must implement some basic cross-functional solutions’. 
+Steven continued shouting quite loudly at every available opportunity about a matter of negligible significance – a chain email entitled: ‘Stationery cupboard low on blue pens’. 
+Mr. Parker runs his own family business and that his 2 support staff, wife Jenny and daughter Emma, completely despise him. jonessgl",FAKE
+5330,"BREAKING: New Law Stops Hillary In Her Tracks, She Is Now Officially Ineligible To Run","
+As if Hillary Clinton was not already facing enough legal trouble, new information has surfaced that the former Secretary of State could actually be legally ineligible to run for President of the United States. 
+In fact, Clinton could be ineligible to hold any kind of federal office. 
+This week, Cornell Law Library Former United States Attorney General Michael Mukasey spoke out to say that Clinton’s personal email server “disqualifies” her from the race. To support his argument, he cited federal law Title 18. Section 2071. 
+The law reads as follows: 
+(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both. 
+(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States. ",FAKE
+187,Lawmakers caught in battle between House ethics cops,"WASHINGTON —Two Capitol Hill panels that police the ethics of members of Congress appear to be battling about which has authority over 10 lawmakers accused of unwittingly accepting improper travel and gifts from the state oil company of Azerbaijan.
+
+A Washington Post story published Wednesday detailed the contents of a confidential Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) investigation of a 2013 trip to Azerbaijan, a former republic of the Soviet Union in Central Asia.
+
+The OCE was created in 2008 to vet ethics cases and recommend action to the Ethics Committee. The Ethics Committee retains sole authority to judge whether members have broken the rules and to mete out punishment. The committee apparently asked the OCE to drop this case. There is no evidence the committee has ever made such a request before.
+
+The OCE report indicated that 10 members of Congress had improperly accepted travel and gifts from the state-owned oil company of Azerbaijan, which secretly paid for the trip and not the non-profit groups that purportedly sponsored it. The lawmakers said they had no idea the non-profits were not the true sponsors of the trip, and apparently neither did the Ethics Committee, which approved the members' travel in advance.
+
+The report found no evidence that the lawmakers made any effort to aid an Azeri pipeline project that the state-owned oil company was pushing at the time.
+
+Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y. — one of the lawmakers involved in the case — said the Ethics Committee asked the OCE to stop its investigation of the trip because the committee had started one of its own. OCE declined, however, the Post reported.
+
+Such a refusal is ""pretty outrageous,"" said Chris DeLacy, a partner at the law firm Holland & Knight who represents lawmakers in ethics cases. ""It's like we've generated two separate Ethics Committees and OCE has gone rogue.""
+
+The OCE report indicates that Meeks did not cooperate with its investigation, according to the Post, but Meeks' office says that is not true.
+
+Meeks gave OCE ""documents and other information in response to its request,"" said spokeswoman Sophia Lafargue, but OCE did not tell him that the Ethics Committee had asked it to end its review despite House rules requiring it do so.
+
+""This is why he would not be interviewed by OCE, and this is why OCE said in the leaked report that he 'declined to cooperate,' "" Lafargue said. ""Congressman Meeks is committed to cooperate with the Ethics Committee in its review of this matter.""
+
+The 2008 House resolution that created the OCE states that when it is notified that the Ethics Committee is investigating a case, ""the board shall refer such matter to the committee and cease its preliminary or second-phase review ... and so notify any individual who is the subject of the review.""
+
+OCE's own rules, however, state it will stop its investigation when the Ethics Committee starts ""an investigatory subcommittee"" — the committee's rarely used formal investigative process. The committee makes a public announcement when it creates those subcommittees and has not announced one for the Azerbaijan trip.
+
+OCE may ""draw a lot of flak"" for the Azerbaijan case, but the process worked as it should except for the leak, said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at the liberal-leaning watchdog group Public Citizen.
+
+The OCE investigated and reported to the committee, Holman said, adding that if the committee ""prevailed upon the OCE to not do a report, (the case) probably would have been buried."" The report shows a real concern, Holman said: the use of bogus non-profits by a foreign government to circumvent congressional travel rules.
+
+Holman said the dispute between the two bodies is reminiscent of the early days of the OCE, when the two publicly feuded repeatedly over jurisdiction and the rules of investigations. But he said, ""I do not see it escalating to the point we saw in the very beginning.""
+
+The case also involves the first leak of a full OCE report before its public release, which has led lawyers who defend lawmakers to call the entire process unfair.
+
+There have been more ethics case since OCE started, DeLacy said, a trend for which the office deserves some credit. But if the intent of the law was to spur for Ethics Committee investigations, and the committee has launched a probe in a case, there is no reason for OCE to keep investigating.
+
+Earlier this year, the House changed its own rules to give lawmakers a new defense against ethics investigations. The language stated that the two ethics bodies ""may not take any action that would deny any person any right or protection provided under the Constitution of the United States,"" an apparent reference to long-simmering concerns that the OCE does not allow the subjects of investigations to see the evidence against them. At the time, Elliot Berke, a lawyer who has defended several Republicans in ethics cases, said, ""from Day One of the OCE's existence, there have been serious concerns about lack of due process.""
+
+The OCE report apparently found that the 10 members who traveled to Azerbaijan — Meeks; Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla.; Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y.; Danny Davis, D-Ill.; Rubén Hinojosa, D-Texas; Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; Leonard Lance, R-N.J.; Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M.; Ted Poe, R-Texas, and then-congressman Steve Stockman, R-Texas — were unaware that the trip was improperly funded by a foreign government. Nevertheless, in similar past cases, the Ethics Committee has required lawmakers to pay back the costs of travel, which for this trip would total thousands of dollars for each traveler. In past cases, lawmakers have been allowed to use campaign money instead of their personal funds to pay these costs.
+
+Airfare for the members and their spouses totaled more than $110,000, the Post reported.",REAL
+5209,"New O'Keefe Video: Clinton Campaign, DNC Coordinated With Organizations To Incite Violence At Trump Events","A new video investigation released Monday by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas Action shows how Democratic-aligned organizations used a tactic called 'bird-dogging' to incite violence and chaos at Trump rallies for media consumption. A key Clinton operative is captured on camera saying, ""It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker.""
+
+ 
+
+ In the video, Democratic activists Robert Creamer and Scott Foval reveal their strategy to create a sense of ""anarchy"" in and around Donald Trump events over the course of the campaign. Foval tells an undercover operative: ""One of the things we do is we stage very authentic grassroots protests right in their faces at their own events. Like, we infiltrate.""
+
+ 
+
+ ""So the term bird dogging: You put people in the line, at the front which means that they have to get there at six in the morning because they have to get in front at the rally, so that when Trump comes down the rope line, they’re the ones asking him the question in front of the reporter, because they’re pre-placed there,"" explains Foval. ""To funnel that kind of operation, you have to start back with people two weeks ahead of time and train them how to ask questions. You have to train them to bird dog.”
+
+ 
+
+ In another undercover interview, Creamer tells Project Veritas that his organization, Democracy Partners, has daily check-ins with the Clinton campaign in order to coordinate efforts. “I just had a call with the campaign and the DNC, every day at one o’clock,” says Creamer subordinate Zulema Rodriguez in the video.
+
+ 
+
+ Foval explains to O'Keefe's undercover journalist how the web of Democratic organizations is designed to subvert laws preventing Super PACs and political action groups from organizing directly with campaigns: ""The campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group, the Foval Group goes and executes the shit on the ground... Democracy Partners is the tip of the spear on that stuff.""
+
+ 
+
+ ""We're consultants so we're not the official entity and so those conversations can be had between consultants,"" Foval explains, “The campaigns and DNC cannot go near [Democratic super PAC] Priorities [USA], but I guaran-damn-tee you that the people who run the Super PACs all talk to each other and we and a few other people are the hubs of that communication.”
+
+ 
+
+ One event specifically mentioned by the Democratic operatives to have been 'bird-dogged' was the September incident in North Carolina where a 69-year-old woman was supposedly assaulted by a Trump supporter. In reality, the woman was ""trained"" by Foval as part of his operation. “She was one of our activists,” he says.
+
+ 
+
+ “I’m saying we have mentally ill people, that we pay to do shit, make no mistake,” says Foval in the video. “Over the last twenty years, I’ve paid off a few homeless guys to do some crazy stuff, and I’ve also taken them for dinner, and I’ve also made sure they had a hotel, and a shower. And I put them in a program. Like I’ve done that. But the reality is, a lot of people especially our union guys. A lot of our union guys…they’ll do whatever you want. They’re rock and roll. When I need to get something done in Arkansas, the first guy I call is the head of the AFL-CIO down there, because he will say, ‘What do you need?’ And I will say, I need a guy who will do this, this and this. And they find that guy. And that guy will be like, Hell yeah, let’s do it.”
+
+ 
+
+ ""It doesn't matter what the friggin' legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker,"" Foval also said. 
+
+ 
+
+ Update: James O'Keefe Demands The Corporate Media to Report Veritas
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ 
+
+ In this video, James O'Keefe explains how the corporate media, including Fox News, are allowing themselves to be intimidated by the Clintons and the DNC and are refusing to air the bombshell investigative video released by Project Veritas Action.",REAL
+6975,"We do not like trampolining, say hedgehogs","We do not like trampolining, say hedgehogs 10-11-16 
+HEDGEHOGS have confirmed they do not like trampolining and children should not make them do it. 
+Britain’s hedgehogs attacked this year’s John Lewis Christmas advert, featuring trampolining woodland animals, warning that children would now try to kidnap hedgehogs and force them to bounce up and down. 
+Hedgehog Roy Hobbs said: “I accidentally wandered across a trampoline once. I hated it and I wasn’t even bouncing up and down. It was just all wobbly underfoot. Made me queasy. 
+“The hedgehog in this advert is not real. It is an unnatural, computer generated abomination.” 
+Hobbs added: “Hedgehogs are very much ground-based creatures. We eat grubs and roll into a ball for protection. 
+“In our leisure time we watch stuff like Bake Off and Orange is the New Black . The most excitement we have is the occasional game of Buckaroo!. 
+“Anyway, keep your brats on a leash or we’ll give them scabies.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+9618,President Putin Asks US To Stop Provoking Russia,"Here is President Putin’s speech at Valdai Putin speech, Valdai 2016 – JRL, October 29, 2016. 
+President of Russia Vladimir Putin: 
+Tarja, Heinz, Thabo, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, It is a great pleasure to see you again. I want to start by thanking all of the participants in the Valdai International Discussion Club, from Russia and abroad, for your constructive part in this work, and I want to thank our distinguished guests for their readiness to take part in this open discussion. 
+Our esteemed moderator just wished me a good departure into retirement, and I wish myself the same when the time comes. This is the right approach and the thing to do. But I am not retired yet and am for now the leader of this big country. As such, it is fitting to show restraint and avoid displays of excessive aggressiveness. I do not think that this is my style in any case. 
+But I do think that we should be frank with each other, particularly here in this gathering. I think we should hold candid, open discussions, otherwise our dialogue makes no sense and would be insipid and without the slightest interest. 
+I think that this style of discussion is extremely needed today given the great changes taking place in the world. The theme for our meeting this year, The Future in Progress: Shaping the World of Tomorrow, is very topical. 
+Last year, the Valdai forum participants discussed the problems with the current world order. Unfortunately, little has changed for the better over these last months. Indeed, it would be more honest to say that nothing has changed. 
+The tensions engendered by shifts in distribution of economic and political influence continue to grow. Mutual distrust creates a burden that narrows our possibilities for finding effective responses to the real threats and challenges facing the world today. 
+Essentially, the entire globalisation project is in crisis today and in Europe, as we know well, we hear voices now saying that multiculturalism has failed. 
+I think this situation is in many respects the result of mistaken, hasty and to some extent over-confident choices made by some countries’ elites a quarter-of-a-century ago. Back then, in the late 1980s-early 1990s, there was a chance not just to accelerate the globalisation process but also to give it a different quality and make it more harmonious and sustainable in nature. 
+But some countries that saw themselves as victors in the Cold War, not just saw themselves this way but said it openly, took the course of simply reshaping the global political and economic order to fit their own interests. 
+In their euphoria, they essentially abandoned substantive and equal dialogue with other actors in international life, chose not to improve or create universal institutions, and attempted instead to bring the entire world under the spread of their own organisations, norms and rules. They chose the road of globalisation and security for their own beloved selves, for the select few, and not for all. But far from everyone was ready to agree with this. 
+We may as well be frank here, as we know full well that many did not agree with what was happening, but some were unable by then to respond, and others were not yet ready to respond. The result though is that the system of international relations is in a feverish state and the global economy cannot extricate itself from systemic crisis. At the same time, rules and principles, in the economy and in politics, are constantly being distorted and we often see what only yesterday was taken as a truth and raised to dogma status reversed completely. 
+If the powers that be today find some standard or norm to their advantage, they force everyone else to comply. But if tomorrow these same standards get in their way, they are swift to throw them in the bin, declare them obsolete, and set or try to set new rules. 
+Thus, we saw the decisions to launch airstrikes in the centre of Europe, against Belgrade, and then came Iraq, and then Libya. The operations in Afghanistan also started without the corresponding decision from the United Nations Security Council. In their desire to shift the strategic balance in their favour these countries broke apart the international legal framework that prohibited deployment of new missile defence systems. They created and armed terrorist groups, whose cruel actions have sent millions of civilians into flight, made millions of displaced persons and immigrants, and plunged entire regions into chaos. 
+We see how free trade is being sacrificed and countries use sanctions as a means of political pressure, bypass the World Trade Organisation and attempt to establish closed economic alliances with strict rules and barriers, in which the main beneficiaries are their own transnational corporations. And we know this is happening. They see that they cannot resolve all of the problems within the WTO framework and so think, why not throw the rules and the organisation itself aside and build a new one instead. This illustrates what I just said. 
+At the same time, some of our partners demonstrate no desire to resolve the real international problems in the world today. In organisations such as NATO, for example, established during the Cold War and clearly out of date today, despite all the talk about the need to adapt to the new reality, no real adaptation takes place. We see constant attempts to turn the OSCE, a crucial mechanism for ensuring common European and also trans-Atlantic security, into an instrument in the service of someone’s foreign policy interests. The result is that this very important organisation has been hollowed out. 
+But they continue to churn out threats, imaginary and mythical threats such as the ‘Russian military threat’. This is a profitable business that can be used to pump new money into defence budgets at home, get allies to bend to a single superpower’s interests, expand NATO and bring its infrastructure, military units and arms closer to our borders. 
+Of course, it can be a pleasing and even profitable task to portray oneself as the defender of civilization against the new barbarians. The only thing is that Russia has no intention of attacking anyone. This is all quite absurd. I also read analytical materials, those written by you here today, and by your colleagues in the USA and Europe. 
+It is unthinkable, foolish and completely unrealistic. Europe alone has 300 million people. All of the NATO members together with the USA have a total population of 600 million, probably. But Russia has only 146 million. It is simply absurd to even conceive such thoughts. And yet they use these ideas in pursuit of their political aims. 
+Another mythical and imaginary problem is what I can only call the hysteria the USA has whipped up over supposed Russian meddling in the American presidential election. The United States has plenty of genuinely urgent problems, it would seem, from the colossal public debt to the increase in firearms violence and cases of arbitrary action by the police. 
+You would think that the election debates would concentrate on these and other unresolved problems, but the elite has nothing with which to reassure society, it seems, and therefore attempt to distract public attention by pointing instead to supposed Russian hackers, spies, agents of influence and so forth. 
+I have to ask myself and ask you too: Does anyone seriously imagine that Russia can somehow influence the American people’s choice? America is not some kind of ‘banana republic’, after all, but is a great power. Do correct me if I am wrong. The question is, if things continue in this vein, what awaits the world? What kind of world will we have tomorrow? Do we have answers to the questions of how to ensure stability, security and sustainable economic growth? Do we know how we will make a more prosperous world? 
+Sad as it is to say, there is no consensus on these issues in the world today. Maybe you have come to some common conclusions through your discussions, and I would, of course, be interested to hear them. But it is very clear that there is a lack of strategy and ideas for the future. This creates a climate of uncertainty that has a direct impact on the public mood. 
+Sociological studies conducted around the world show that people in different countries and on different continents tend to see the future as murky and bleak. This is sad. The future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same time, people see no real opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events and shaping policy. 
+Yes, formally speaking, modern countries have all the attributes of democracy: Elections, freedom of speech, access to information, freedom of expression. But even in the most advanced democracies the majority of citizens have no real influence on the political process and no direct and real influence on power. 
+People sense an ever-growing gap between their interests and the elite’s vision of the only correct course, a course the elite itself chooses. The result is that referendums and elections increasingly often create surprises for the authorities. People do not at all vote as the official and respectable media outlets advised them to, nor as the mainstream parties advised them to. Public movements that only recently were too far left or too far right are taking centre stage and pushing the political heavyweights aside. 
+At first, these inconvenient results were hastily declared anomaly or chance. But when they became more frequent, people started saying that society does not understand those at the summit of power and has not yet matured sufficiently to be able to assess the authorities’ labour for the public good. Or they sink into hysteria and declare it the result of foreign, usually Russian, propaganda. 
+Friends and colleagues, I would like to have such a propaganda machine here in Russia, but regrettably, this is not the case. We have not even global mass media outlets of the likes of CNN, BBC and others. We simply do not have this kind of capability yet. 
+As for the claim that the fringe and populists have defeated the sensible, sober and responsible minority – we are not talking about populists or anything like that but about ordinary people, ordinary citizens who are losing trust in the ruling class. That is the problem. 
+By the way, with the political agenda already eviscerated as it is, and with elections ceasing to be an instrument for change but consisting instead of nothing but scandals and digging up dirt – who gave someone a pinch, who sleeps with whom, if you’ll excuse me. This just goes beyond all boundaries. And honestly, a look at various candidates’ platforms gives the impression that they were made from the same mould – the difference is slight, if there is any. 
+It seems as if the elites do not see the deepening stratification in society and the erosion of the middle class, while at the same time, they implant ideological ideas that, in my opinion, are destructive to cultural and national identity. And in certain cases, in some countries they subvert national interests and renounce sovereignty in exchange for the favour of the suzerain. 
+This begs the question: who is actually the fringe? The expanding class of the supranational oligarchy and bureaucracy, which is in fact often not elected and not controlled by society, or the majority of citizens, who want simple and plain things – stability, free development of their countries, prospects for their lives and the lives of their children, preserving their cultural identity, and, finally, basic security for themselves and their loved ones. 
+People are clearly scared to see how terrorism is evolving from a distant threat to an everyday one, how a terrorist attack could occur right near them, on the next street, if not on their own street, while any makeshift item – from a home-made explosive to an ordinary truck – can be used to carry out a mass killing. 
+Moreover, the terrorist attacks that have taken place in the past few years in Boston and other US cities, Paris, Brussels, Nice and German cities, as well as, sadly, in our own country, show that terrorists do not need units or organised structures – they can act independently, on their own, they just need the ideological motivation against their enemies, that is, against you and us. 
+The terrorist threat is a clear example of how people fail to adequately evaluate the nature and causes of the growing threats. We see this in the way events in Syria are developing. No one has succeeded in stopping the bloodshed and launching a political settlement process. One would think that we would have begun to put together a common front against terrorism now, after such lengthy negotiations, enormous effort and difficult compromises. 
+But this has not happened and this common front has not emerged. My personal agreements with the President of the United States have not produced results either. There were people in Washington ready to do everything possible to prevent these agreements from being implemented in practice. This all demonstrates an unexplainable and I would say irrational desire on the part of the Western countries to keep making the same mistakes or, as we say here in Russia, keep stepping on the same rake. 
+We all see what is happening in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and a number of other countries. I have to ask, where are the results of the fight against terrorism and extremism? Overall, looking at the world as a whole, there are some results in particular regions and locations, but there is no global result and the terrorist threat continues to grow. 
+We all remember the euphoria in some capitals over the Arab Spring. Where are these fanfares today? Russia’s calls for a joint fight against terrorism go ignored. What’s more, they continue to arm, supply and train terrorist groups in the hope of using them to achieve their own political aims. This is a very dangerous game and I address the players once again: The extremists in this case are more cunning, clever and stronger than you, and if you play these games with them, you will always lose. Colleagues, it is clear that the international community should concentrate on the real problems facing humanity today, the resolution of which will make our world a safer and more stable place and make the system of international relations fairer and more equal. As I said, it is essential to transform globalisation from something for a select few into something for all. It is my firm belief that we can overcome these threats and challenges only by working together on the solid foundation of international law and the United Nations Charter. 
+Today it is the United Nations that continues to remain an agency that is unparalleled in representativeness and universality, a unique venue for equitable dialogue. Its universal rules are necessary for including as many countries as possible in economic and humanitarian integration, guaranteeing their political responsibility and working to coordinate their actions while also preserving their sovereignty and development models. 
+We have no doubt that sovereignty is the central notion of the entire system of international relations. Respect for it and its consolidation will help underwrite peace and stability both at the national and international levels. There are many countries that can rely on a history stretching back a thousand years, like Russia, and we have come to appreciate our identity, freedom and independence. But we do not seek global domination, expansion or confrontation with anyone. 
+In our mind, real leadership lies in seeing real problems rather than attempting to invent mythical threats and use them to steamroll others. This is exactly how Russia understands its role in global affairs today. 
+There are priorities without which a prosperous future for our shared planet is unthinkable and they are absolutely obvious. I won’t be saying anything new here. First of all, there is equal and indivisible security for all states. Only after ending armed conflicts and ensuring the peaceful development of all countries will we be able to talk about economic progress and the resolution of social, humanitarian and other key problems. It is important to fight terrorism and extremism in actuality. It has been said more than once that this evil can only be overcome by a concerted effort of all states of the world. Russia continues to offer this to all interested partners. 
+It is necessary to add to the international agenda the issue of restoring the Middle Eastern countries’ lasting statehood, economy and social sphere. The mammoth scale of destruction demands drawing up a long-term comprehensive programme, a kind of Marshall Plan, to revive the war- and conflict-ridden area. Russia is certainly willing to join actively in these team efforts. 
+We cannot achieve global stability unless we guarantee global economic progress. It is essential to provide conditions for creative labour and economic growth at a pace that would put an end to the division of the world into permanent winners and permanent losers. The rules of the game should give the developing economies at least a chance to catch up with those we know as developed economies. We should work to level out the pace of economic development, and brace up backward countries and regions so as to make the fruit of economic growth and technological progress accessible to all. Particularly, this would help to put an end to poverty, one of the worst contemporary problems. 
+It is also absolutely evident that economic cooperation should be mutually lucrative and rest on universal principles to enable every country to become an equal partner in global economic activities. True, the regionalising trend in the world economy is likely to persist in the medium term. However, regional trade agreements should complement and expand not replace the universal norms and regulations. Russia advocates the harmonisation of regional economic formats based on the principles of transparency and respect for each other’s interests. That is how we arrange the work of the Eurasian Economic Union and conduct negotiations with our partners, particularly on coordination with the Silk Road Economic Belt project, which China is implementing. We expect it to promote an extensive Eurasian partnership, which promises to evolve into one of the formative centres of a vast Eurasian integration area. To implement this idea, 5+1 talks have begun already for an agreement on trade and economic cooperation between all participants in the process. 
+An important task of ours is to develop human potential. Only a world with ample opportunities for all, with highly skilled workers, access to knowledge and a great variety of ways to realise their potential can be considered truly free. Only a world where people from different countries do not struggle to survive but lead full lives can be stable. 
+A decent future is impossible without environment protection and addressing climate problems. That is why the conservation of the natural world and its diversity and reducing the human impact on the environment will be a priority for the coming decades. 
+Another priority is global healthcare. Of course, there are many problems, such as large-scale epidemics, decreasing the mortality rate in some regions and the like. So there is enormous room for advancement. All people in the world, not only the elite, should have the right to healthy, long and full lives. This is a noble goal. In short, we should build the foundation for the future world today by investing in all priority areas of human development. And of course, it is necessary to continue a broad-based discussion of our common future so that all sensible and promising initiatives are heard. 
+Colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, I am confident that you, as members of the Valdai Club, will actively take part in this work. Your expertise enables you to understand all angles of the processes underway both in Russia and in the world, forecast and evaluate long-term trends, and put forward new initiatives and recommendations that will help us find the way to the more prosperous and sustainable future that we all badly need. 
+Thank you very much for your attention. … (comments at end) 
+Vladimir Putin: I would just like to make a quick response to what Mr Fischer has just said. He mentioned discussions in the EU on the trade agreement with Canada. This is an internal EU matter, but if you permit, I would just like to make one small remark. 
+I know that some in Europe find Wallonia’s position irritating, after all, the region is home to only 3.5 million people, but these 3.5 million people are blocking a decision on an issue of global importance, namely, this trade agreement with Canada. But when Belgium took part in the EU’s creation, it did so on the basis of particular principles, including that Belgium overall, and Wallonia, would have certain rights. The EU has grown greatly since then and has a much different membership now, but the rules have not changed. Perhaps these rules need to be changed, but in this case, you would first have to give the people who created this organisation a chance to change it through a democratic process and then obtain their approval. 
+As for the dispute itself, I am not as familiar with all the details as the Europeans are, of course, but whatever the prerogatives of the EU supranational bodies (note that I have already spoken publicly on this point), the European Parliament adopts a far greater number of binding decisions with regard to the member states than did the USSR Supreme Soviet with regard to the Soviet Union’s constituent republics during the Soviet period. It is not for us to say whether this is good or bad. We want to see a strong and centralised Europe. This is our position. But in Europe itself there are many different views, and I hope that this whole issue will be resolved in positive fashion. 
+On the matter of the UN, I have said before but will say again now that we must return to what is written in the UN Charter, because there is no other such universal organisation in the world. If we renounce the UN, this is a sure road to chaos. There is no other universal alternative in the world. Yes, the world has changed, and yes, the UN and the Security Council do need reform and reconstruction. But as they say in our Foreign Ministry, we can do this in such a way as to preserve the organisation’s effectiveness. We can do this on the basis of broad consensus. We need to ensure that the vast majority of international actors give their support to these reforms. 
+Today, we must return to a common understanding of the principles of international law as enshrined in the UN Charter. This is because when the UN was established after World War II, there was a particular balance of power in the world. Later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States decided that there was no one to coordinate things with and they did not really need to get anyone’s approval on fundamental matters. This was the start of everything. 
+First, in the 1990s, we had the airstrikes against Belgrade. I will not go into the humanitarian aspect that preceded these decisions, but just seeing airstrikes carried out in the heart of Europe at the end of the twentieth century seemed to me simply barbaric. This was all the more so as it was done in violation of the UN Charter and without approval. When this happened, people immediately started saying that the old rules were outdated and something had to change. 
+Things got worse from there with the events in Iraq. Did the UN sanction the operations in Iraq? No. Before this there were operations in Afghanistan in 2001. Yes, we all know the tragedy of September 11, 2001, but even so, under existing international law, a relevant UN Security Council resolution should have been sought first, which was not done. 
+Then came Iraq, and then came the resolution on Libya. You are all experts here, you have read the resolution on Libya, and know that it was about establishing a no-fly zone there. But what kind of no-fly zone can we speak of if airstrikes began against Libyan territory? This was a flagrant violation of the UN Charter. And then came Syria. It was either Tarja or Heinz who said that the operations in Aleppo are only increasing the number of terrorists. But did the terrorist ranks start swelling only with Aleppo? Were there terrorists in Iraq? There were no terrorists there until the country’s state structures were destroyed. The same was true of Libya, where there were no terrorists at all. But as soon as this country’s statehood was destroyed, who came along to fill the vacuum? Terrorists. The same is happening in Syria. 
+I understand the insinuations made about our action in Aleppo or elsewhere. But let’s remember that as soon as the conflict began in Syria, and it began long before we became involved, terrorists appeared there and began receiving arms supplies. I mentioned this in my opening remarks. Attempts were made to train these terrorists and set them against al-Assad, because there were no other options and these groups were the most effective. This continues today because these are the most effective fighting units and some think that it is possible to make use of them and then sort them out later. But this is an illusion. 
+It won’t work, and this is the problem. 
+I would also like to respond to the absolutely proper developments in Finland, for instance. Bells are tolling for those who have been killed in Aleppo. Bells should also be tolling for those now losing their lives in Mosul and its vicinity. The operation in Mosul is getting underway now. As far as I know, the terrorists have already shot more than 200 people in the hope of stopping the offensive on the town. Let’s not forget this. And in Afghanistan? Whole wedding parties of 120 people were wiped out with a single airstrike. A single strike! Have we forgotten this? And what about what’s happening in Yemen? Let the bells toll for all of these innocent victims. I agree with you here. 
+We keep hearing Aleppo, Aleppo, Aleppo. But what is the issue here? Do we leave the nest of terrorists in place there, or do we squeeze them out, doing our best to minimise and avoid civilian casualties? If it is better to not go in at all, then the offensive against Mosul shouldn’t go ahead at all either. Let’s just leave everything as it is. Let’s leave Raqqa alone too. Our partners keep saying, “We need to take back Raqqa and eliminate the nest of terrorists there”. But there are civilians in Raqqa too. So, should we not fight the terrorists at all? And when they take hostages in towns, should we just leave them be? Look at Israel’s example. Israel never steps back but always fights to the end, and this is how it survives. There is no alternative. We need to fight. If we keep retreating, we will always lose. 
+Regarding what Tarja said on the subject of security in the Baltic Sea area, I remind you that this matter came up not on our initiative but during my visit to Naantali in Finland, and on the initiative of Mr Niinisto, the president of Finland. Quite out of the blue, he requested that Russian aircraft do not fly with their transponders off. For those not familiar with military matters, I note that transponders are instruments that signal an aircraft’s location in the air. Of course, if aircraft fly with their transponders on, this increases security in the Baltic Sea region. This is the truth of the matter. I responded immediately then, noting firstly that there are far more flights by NATO aircraft in the region than by our aircraft. 
+Secondly, I promised the Finnish President that we would definitely raise this issue with our partners at the next Russia-NATO Council meeting. I can tell you that we did this. The result was that our NATO partners rejected Putin’s proposal, as they said. But this has nothing to do with Putin. They rejected the proposal made by Mr Niinisto, the president of Finland. 
+This was not such a straightforward matter for us either, I would say, because there is a technical dimension involved, a purely military dimension. But I did give the Defence Ministry instructions to find a way to do this without detriment to our security. The Defence Ministry found a solution, but our NATO colleagues rejected it. So please, direct your questions to the NATO headquarters in Brussels. 
+Vladimir Putin: I think that intervention by any country in another country’s internal political process is unacceptable, no matter how these attempts are made, with the help of cyberattacks or through other instruments or organisations controlled from the outside within the country. 
+You know what happened in Turkey, for example, and the position taken by President of Turkey Recep Erdogan. He believes that the coup attempt in Turkey was undertaken by groups inspired by and with the direct help of an organisation run by a certain Gulen, who has lived in the United States for the last 9 years. This is unacceptable, and cyberattacks are unacceptable. 
+But we probably cannot avoid having an impact on each other, including in cyberspace. Your question was about the very specific matter of the electoral system though. I think this is absolutely unacceptable. How can we avoid this sort of thing, if it does happen? I think the only way is to reach agreement and come up with some rules on which we will have a common understanding and which will be recognised at the government and state level and can be verified. 
+Of course, the issue of internet freedom and everything related to it arises, but we know that many countries, including those that support internet freedom, take practical steps to restrict access out of concern for people’s interests. This concerns cybercrime, for example, attacks against banking systems and illegal money transfers. It concerns suicides too, crimes against children and so forth. These are measures taken at the national level. We can take appropriate measures both at the national level and at the intergovernmental level. 
+Vladimir Putin : On the question of favourites in the US presidential campaign, you said that the media have created this view. Yes, this is the case, and this is not by chance. In my observation, it is a rare occasion that the mass media forms a view purely by chance. I think that this idea, inserted into the public consciousness in the middle of the US presidential campaign, pursues the sole aim of supporting those defending the interests of Ms Clinton, the Democratic Party candidate, in her fight against the Republican Party candidate, in this case, Donald Trump. 
+How is this done? First, they create an enemy in the form of Russia, and then they say that Trump is our preferred candidate. This is complete nonsense and totally absurd. It’s only a tactic in the domestic political struggle, a way of manipulating public opinion before the elections take place. 
+As I have said many times before, we do not know exactly what to expect from either of the candidates once they win. 
+We do not know what Mr Trump would do if he wins, and we do not know what Ms Clinton would do, what would go ahead or not go ahead. Overall then, it does not really matter to us who wins. Of course, we can only welcome public words about a willingness to normalize relations between our two countries. In this sense, yes, we welcome such statements, no matter who makes them. That is all I can say, really. 
+As for Mr Trump, he has chosen his method of reaching voters’ hearts. Yes, he behaves extravagantly, of course, we all see this. But I think there is some sense in his actions. I say this because in my view, he represents the interests of the sizeable part of American society that is tired of the elites that have been in power for decades now. He is simply representing these ordinary people’s interests. 
+He portrays himself as an ordinary guy who criticizes those who have been in power for decades and does not like to see power handed down by inheritance, for example. We read the analysis too, including American analysis. Some of the experts there have written openly about this. He operates in this niche. The elections will soon show whether this is an effective strategy or not. As for me, I cannot but repeat what I have said already: we will work with whichever president the American people choose and who wants to work with us. 
+Question: Mr President, my question follows on the subject of security addressed just before. Obviously, cooperation is an essential part of this, and we realise that cooperation is not always easy. We saw an example just before with the case of the transponders. The planes can still fly at least. 
+But there are areas of vital importance, areas where innocent people’s lives are at stake. You mentioned recently the case of the Tsarnayev brothers. As far as I know, Russia passed on information but no action was taken. Does this mean that practical cooperation in security is now in a critical situation? 
+Vladimir Putin : I spoke about this matter at a meeting with French journalists, if I recall correctly. Yes, we passed information on the Tsarnayev brothers on to our American partners. We wrote to them but received no response. After we wrote a second time we got a reply that they are US citizens and so it was none of our business and they would take care of everything themselves. I told the director of the FSB to archive the file. The response we received is still there, in the archives. Sadly, a few months later, the Boston marathon terrorist attack took place and people were killed. 
+It is a great shame that this tragedy took place. If contacts and trust between us and our partners had been better this could have been avoided. The Americans came here immediately following the attack and we gave them the information in our possession. But it was too late. People had already lost their lives. This partly answers the last question too. We do not know if those who say they want to work with us really will or not, but they do say quite rightly that this is essential for all of us, especially in the fight against terrorism. In this sense, we welcome all who declare such intentions. 
+As I have also said in the past, the Americans have provided us with real help, during the preparations for the Olympic Games in Sochi, for example, and we are grateful to them for this. Our cooperation was very efficient here, on site and at the level of our intelligence service heads. There have been other good examples of cooperation too. 
+Overall, we have quite a good situation in this area with our European partners. We have open and professional contacts with the French intelligence services, for example, and exchange information. In general, the situation is not bad, but it could be a lot better. 
+Sabine Fischer : There was discussion about sending a policing mission to Donbass, and also emphasis on the roadmap that we saw in Russia, for example, in the media and in political debate. I think this was really a case of diverging interpretations of the results. 
+Vladimir Putin: This is no secret. I can tell you how it was. I might leave something out, so as not to put anyone in a difficult position or interfere with the process itself. As you know, the Minsk agreements, which I think the experts have all read, say in black and white: “Thirty days after the signing of the Minsk agreements Ukraine’s Rada must adopt a resolution outlining the geographical boundaries of areas where the law on the special status of these unrecognised republics would become effective immediately.” Because the only thing needed for it to work was the description of those geographical boundaries. 
+That had to be established, not by law, but by a parliamentary resolution, and the resolution was finally adopted, even if past the deadline. So one would think that this law was to take effect immediately. It was passed, I would like to remind you, by the Parliament of Ukraine. The lawmakers voted for it, and it was coordinated with the unrecognised republics, which is very important, and in this sense, in my view, makes it viable legislation and a key element of a political settlement. 
+But after passing this resolution, Ukraine and its Parliament adopted an amendment, a paragraph to Article 9 or 10, which said the law would take effect only after municipal elections in these areas. That once again postponed the law’s enforcement. I repeat, in our opinion, that law is absolutely key to a political resolution to the crisis in southeastern Ukraine. Moreover, that was done without even consulting anyone, least of all the unrecognised republics. 
+We discussed this very actively a year ago in Paris. I insisted that this be done then and done immediately, as it was part of the Minsk Agreements and is, in our view, a key component. But the Ukrainian president said that this was not possible and everything ended up in a dead end. In this situation, everything could have ended then and there a year ago in Paris, but Mr Steinmeier, the German Foreign Minister, suddenly proposed a compromise. 
+He suggested that we agree to have the law come into force on the day of the local elections in these regions, temporarily, and have it come into force permanently after the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights recognises the elections as having taken place in accordance with OSCE rules. This was not at all what was set out in the Minsk Agreements, but in order to get us out of the deadlock we were in, I expressed my agreement and said we would settle the matter with Donetsk and Lugansk, which we did. 
+But then in Berlin, the Ukrainian president suddenly also attempted to change this proposal, already the result of a compromise. He went even further, essentially renouncing the law’s implementation whatever the case. We thus found ourselves back in the same crisis we had in Paris a year before. But I want to note the Federal Chancellor’s role here. She found arguments to persuade everyone present that we could and should keep to the agreement we reached and said that it was not possible to change what we’d already agreed on a year later, or we would never reach an agreement. But we agreed to bundle the nuances and details of how it would be implemented together with the concept you spoke about, and which still has to be worked through. 
+That is it, really. But in principle, a lot was accomplished in terms of ensuring security. We reached agreement on nearly every point. We made very little progress on humanitarian matters. These regions remain tightly blockaded and are in a very difficult situation. But the so-called civilised world prefers not to notice this. I do not want to get into debate on this matter now. As far as the [Normandy] format goes and whether it is useful or not, we simply have no alternative. 
+Yes, the discussions proceed with difficulty, and this is not very effective, I agree, but we have no other option, and if we want to make progress, we have to continue working in this format. As for the question of getting any other actors involved, our position is that we are not opposed to the idea of others taking part, including our American partners. But we have reached an agreement with all participants in the process that we will work in parallel with our American colleagues. My aide and Ms Nuland have regular meetings, discuss these issues and look for compromise. This is not being done in secret though, of course. All participants in the Normandy format meetings are informed and we take into account our American partners’ position too, of course. 
+Angela Stent: This question is for President Putin. I’m Angela Stent; I’m a professor at Georgetown University in Washington. Mr President, Russia recently withdrew from an agreement with the United States to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium, but at the same time, the Russian Government said that it would consider re-joining the agreement if three conditions were met: firstly, that NATO troops should withdraw to the level that they were before 2000 in Europe; secondly, the Magnitsky Act should be repealed; and thirdly, that the sanctions imposed on Russia after the beginning of the Ukraine crisis should be lifted, and Russia should be paid compensation for them. 
+So my question is: we will have a new President on January 20, I’m optimistic about that. Are we to understand, in the United States, that these three conditions would form the basis of an initial negotiating position on the Russian part with the American president, when she re-establishes high-level relations with the Kremlin? Thank you. 
+Vladimir Putin: One can tell straight away that you are an academic and not a diplomat. If you ask the diplomats, they will tell you about the concept of ‘starting position’. As for our decision on the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement, we did not withdraw from it. The United States withdrew from the missile defence treaty, but we did not withdraw from the plutonium agreement, we suspended it. Why did we do this? What were this agreement’s provisions? Under its terms, both countries were to build facilities for disposing of the surplus weapons-grade plutonium that had accumulated in both Russia and the USA. 
+Not only did the USA not meet its obligations under the agreement, but said that it would not do so because of financial difficulties. As if Russia does not have financial difficulties of its own, but we built our facility and are disposing of this plutonium using industrial methods. Without any prior coordination with us, the United States made a unilateral announcement that they would not dilute this weapons-grade plutonium but would store it in some beds and so forth. 
+This means that they retain what the experts call return potential, in other words, the plutonium could be returned and re-enriched at any moment. But we are eliminating our plutonium using industrial methods. We built our facility and spent money on it. Are we wealthier than the United States? There are many issues it has become difficult to discuss with the current administration because practically no obligations are met and no agreements are respected, including those on Syria. Perhaps we will be able to come back to this. We are ready, in any case, to talk with the new president and look for solutions to any, even the most difficult, issues. 
+Question : Mr President, my question is on Russian policy towards Asia. The emphasis today in Russian foreign policy is on the construction of a multipolar world. But do you also give some thought to the importance of a multipolar Asia? Both in your speech today, and the general construction of the Russian foreign policy, points, I think, to the growing, deepening contradictions between the US and the West on the one hand, and the Eurasian situation. But it’s also a fact that there are internal contradictions within Eurasia. 
+The rise of new powers is creating a lot of fears; the breakdown of the old order in some parts is releasing primordial forces. These are internal to Eurasia. But is there a danger that Russia, by its emphasis on a multipolar world, is underestimating the dangers of a unipolar Asia, and the need for great powers to work together to construct a genuinely democratic multipolar Asia? 
+Vladimir Putin: We are actively developing relations with Asian countries not because of tension in relations with Europe or the United States, but simply because life itself dictates this choice. Why do I say that life itself dictates that we expand these contacts? 
+The Asian countries’ development and influence is growing and will continue to do so, and, what’s more, they are growing fast. With a sizeable part of its territory in Asia, Russia would be foolish not to make use of its geographical advantages and develop ties with its neighbours. 
+China is our neighbour and I mentioned this in my opening remarks. We have longstanding good relations with India and it would be a mistake not to make use of this and develop solid long-term relations with India today. We have many common interests. We can naturally complement each other in politics and the economy. As for the question of a multipolar or unipolar Asia, we see that Asia is not unipolar and this is very evident. 
+Life is very diverse and complex in general and is full of contradictions. It is important to resolve these contradictions in a civilised fashion. I think that the Asian countries’ leaders today have sufficient common sense to work in just this way with each other, and we are ready to work the same way with them all. 
+I visited India just recently and our Defence Minister has just returned from India. We have cooperation between our defence ministries and also between industry in the defence sector, as well as in the civilian sector, where we have many common interests with India, China, Vietnam and other countries in the region. These ties are extensive and promising. 
+Thomas Gomart : In September 2014, at the Valdai Club, you described the relations between Ukraine and Russia with the following sentence: “Two countries, one people”. Today, how would you describe the relations between the two countries? Thank you very much. 
+Vladimir Putin : I will not go into who is to blame for what now. I have always considered, and still do today, that Russians and Ukrainians are really one people. There are people who hold radical nationalist views both in Russia and in Ukraine. But overall, for the majority, we are one people, a people who share a common history and culture and are ethnically close. First we were divided, then we were set against each other, but we are not to blame for this. We must find our own way out of this situation. I am sure that common sense will prevail and that we will find a solution. 
+Question : Mr President, before putting my question, I would like to pass on my young students’ words. Two years ago, you came to Shanghai on other important business and our students missed the chance to meet at the university with you and ask their question, but they asked me to tell you that they would be happy to see you any time, regardless of whether you have retired or not. 
+My question is as follows: We have discussed the philosophical matter of international relations today. Humanity has already gone through different types of international systems. In your view, to what extent will future systems resemble past ones? What are the positive components we should emphasise in particular? Should we seek more universality or more diversity as far as principles go? What kind of combination of components would you prefer to see? 
+And I have a specific question too. We have been actively discussing here the relations between Russia, the West, and China. 
+Vladimir Putin : Heinz said that this is a very philosophical question and that we could spend a long time discussing it. 
+Will tomorrow’s world resemble the past? No, of course not. How is this possible? Does today’s China resemble the China of the 1960s-70s? They are two completely different countries, and the Soviet Union is gone today too. 
+Mr Mbeki spoke about Africa before. I share his arguments. But Africa cannot be some kind of peripheral place. If anyone thinks this way, they are deeply mistaken. If we follow this kind of thinking, we can expect very serious trials ahead. We already hear the talk about refugees and Syria. I saw today the news about the latest incident in the Mediterranean, where the Italian coastguard rescued refugees from Africa. What has Syria got to do with this? Africa’s future and the world’s future are very serious issues. The same goes for relations in Asia, where there are also many conflicts or potential conflict situations. 
+I want to repeat what I have just said. The question is whether we have the wisdom and the courage to find acceptable solutions to these various problems and complicated conflicts. I certainly hope that this will be the case, that the world really will become more multipolar, and that the views of all actors in the international community will be taken into account. No matter whether a country is big or small, there should be universally accepted common rules that guarantee sovereignty and peoples’ interests. 
+As for our relations with our partners in Europe, the United States, America in general, and the Asian countries, we have a multi-vector policy. This is not just in virtue of our geographical location. Our policy with regard to our partners is built on the basis of equality and mutual respect. 
+Alexei Mukhin: Alexei Mukhin , Centre for Political Technology. 
+Mr President, Ukraine is constantly trying to prohibit things Russian. We get the impression that everything Russian is being squeezed out of Ukrainian life. In this respect, I have a philosophical question too. Petro Poroshenko said that he plans to sell his Russian business interests. Does this business actually exist? What is your view on this? 
+Vladimir Putin : We seek to respect ownership rights. Mr Kudrin is a staunch advocate of property rights, seeing it as one of the pillars of economic policy, and I fully agree with him. We have not always been entirely successful in this area and we still have improvements to make and much legislative work to do, but we will always keep working in this direction. 
+The same concerns our foreign investors, including from Ukraine. Mr Poroshenko is one of our investors in the sense that he is the owner of a sizeable business in Lipetsk Region, the Roshen factory. Actually, there are two businesses there. The second is engaged in selling the products, as far as I know. There are a few problems there concerning non-return of VAT, and the courts have imposed some restrictions, but the factories are operating, paying wages and earning profits, and there are no restrictions on using these profits, including transferring them abroad. I do not recall the figures now and do not get into such detail, but I know the business is turning a profit and is working with success. 
+Pyotr Dutkevich : Pyotr Dutkevich, Canada 
+Mr President, I already put this question yesterday to the Deputy Foreign Minister, but I realise my mistake, because you are the only person this question should really be addressed to. 
+My question is as follows: We have heard reports, I do not know how accurate they are, that you discussed a ceasefire in Syria at your meeting with Mr Obama in September. I do not know how accurate this information is, but it seems a 7-day ceasefire was proposed. You expressed doubts and said that it would not be possible to separate the radicals from the moderates in such a short time and that this task would likely prove impossible. You were given the answer then that if we failed in this task, you would have a free hand. Can you recall this conversation? It is very important for the history of what is taking place in Syria now. 
+Vladimir Putin : Yes, I do not need to recall it because I never forgot it. It was a very important conversation. There was indeed talk on the lines that Russian and Syrian aircraft would cease their airstrikes against terrorist targets in Aleppo until the healthy opposition forces could be separated from the forces of Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist organisation recognised as such by the United Nations and included on the list of international terrorist organisations. 
+In this respect, I note that it is no secret that our American partners promised to do this. First, they recognised the need to do this, and second, they recognised that part of Aleppo is occupied by terrorist organisations – ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. We can see this for ourselves from the news reports, where you see the banners of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in some parts of the city. They recognised that this needs to be done and assured us that they would do this. 
+After this, we agreed that we would decide right there on the battlefield who the moderates were, and we would not touch them, and who the terrorists were, and we and our American partners would target the terrorists. They made repeated promises. These promises were made at the level of our defence ministers, foreign ministers, intelligence services, but unfortunately, this fell through each time and they did not keep their promises. 
+The question was raised again during our meeting in China. Yes, my American partner, President Obama, did indeed propose separating these different forces once again. But he insisted that we must first declare a D-day, cease hostilities, stop the airstrikes, and then, within 7 days, they would take on the responsibility of separating the moderates from Jabhat al-Nusra. I will not go into detail her because I do not think I have the right to make these details public. After all, when we have talks like these, there are always some things we say in confidence. But the fact remains. 
+Instead of separating the Jabhat al-Nusra terrorists from the healthy opposition, our American partners broke the ceasefire themselves. I had originally insisted that they first separate the terrorists from the moderates and we would then end the airstrikes, but in the end, I decided to agree with the American proposal at the talks. They were persistent and I decided to accept a compromise, said that we would go with their proposal, declare a ceasefire first and stop the airstrikes, giving them the seven days they asked for. 
+The ceasefire was declared on September 12, I think, and on the 17th, American aircraft carried out a strike against Syrian troops, and this was followed by an ISIS offensive. We were told that the strike was a mistake and that the ISIS offensive was only a coincidence. Perhaps this is so, but the ceasefire was broken and we are not to blame for this. 
+As for what the US President promised or didn’t promise, you should ask him. I imagine that he will speak with our European partners about this when he goes to Europe. I think this should be done openly and honestly and not simply in an attempt to use this to influence our position on Syria. 
+By the way, do you realise that Russian and Syrian aircraft have not been carrying out any operations around Aleppo for 9 days now. We gave them not 7 days, but already 9, soon to be 10 days. But where is the effort to separate the terrorists from the moderates? You have to realise that if we do not meet our obligations we will never succeed in this fight against terrorism. 
+I realise that this is not an easy task and we are not looking to make any accusations, but we do have to try to keep our promises. In any case, it should not be we who end up accused of every possible sin. This is simply indecent. We have been showing restraint and do not respond to our partners with insolence, but there is a limit to everything and we might have to reply at some point. 
+Vladimir Putin : I can turn to Tarja and Heinz who know very well how the OSCE works. But I will give my opinion. 
+President Poroshenko has advanced the initiative of a so-called policing mission for the duration of the possible future elections in Donbass, Donetsk and Lugansk. I was the only one there who supported him. It is another matter that I do not describe this as a policing mission because the other parties in the process have objected to it. They objected not because they do not want to help Mr Poroshenko, but because the OSCE has never done anything like this before. It does not have the experience, the people or any practice in implementing policing missions. 
+At this point, the other parties in the process have not supported the idea Mr Poroshenko advanced, while I did. However, we do not describe this initiative as “a policing mission” but as an opportunity for those responsible for the elections and security during the campaign to carry weapons. Those who objected to this initiative pointed out that it could provoke others to use weapons against the armed people. They believe that the power of OSCE observers is not in weapons but in the fact that they represent a respectable international organisation, and the use of weapons against them when they are not armed is absolutely unacceptable and will be seen as the least acceptable behaviour. This is their power, not their guns. 
+On the other hand, if Mr Poroshenko believes that this would help the cause, I agree with him. However, I was the only one to do so. The situation is strange; it is the only issue on which I agree with Mr Poroshenko. I have spoken about this more than once; there is nothing new here. Ultimately, all parties have agreed that it can be done, but only after careful consideration, including at the OSCE. I think this has never happened before in OSCE history. If I am wrong, Tarja can correct me. What do you think, Tarja? 
+T.Colton : Representative from Beijing, please. 
+Question: Thank you. Just now, former President of Austria Mr Fischer said that the relationship between the EU and Russia is not as expected 25 years ago. It’s unfortunate, and it’s hard to be optimistic. So I want to ask you, Mr President, from your point of view, why is this so? And were the expectations or the assumptions 25 years ago wrong, or did something go wrong along the way? And from a philosophical point of view, what do you think is the lesson to be learned for the next 25 years? 
+Vladimir Putin : What was done correctly and what was not? Expectations were high after the Soviet Union switched to a policy of openness, since ideological differences, which were considered the main cause of division between the Soviet Union and then Russia, and the Western world, have disappeared. Frankly, we, in the Soviet Union, under Gorbachev, and then in Russia, believed that a new life would begin for us. 
+One of our experts rightly said that there are things that, as we found out, run even deeper than ideological differences, namely, national and geopolitical interests. Could we have done things differently? Yes, indeed. During our previous meeting in this room, I said that there was a German politician, Mr Rau, a well-known figure from the Social Democratic Party of Germany, he is no longer with us, but he used to engage in lively discussions with Soviet leaders. Back then, he said (we have these conversations on record, but cannot get around to publishing them, which we need to do), that a new international security system should be built in Europe. 
+In addition to NATO, he said, it is imperative to create another entity, which would include the Soviet Union and former Warsaw Pact countries, but with the participation of the United States in order to balance the system out. He went on to say that if we fail to do so, ultimately this entire system created during the Cold War would work against the Soviet Union. He said that it bothers him only because it would unbalance the entire system of international relations, and security in Europe would be jeopardised in a big way. 
+What we have now is what this old gentleman warned us about in his own time. The people who worked on transforming the world, some of them did not want to change anything, as they believed that they already were riding high, while others did not have the political will to act on these absolutely correct ideas of this wise and experienced German politician. 
+However, I hope that as the global alignment of forces in the world changes, political, diplomatic and regulatory support for these changes will follow. The world will be a more balanced and multipolar place. 
+Heinz Fischer: I can also add that 25 years ago was the early ’90s. And in the early ’90s, the European Union had 12 members: Sweden, Finland and Austria joined only in ’94 or ’95. It was a sort of honeymoon time between Russia and Europe, in particular Russia and Germany, and Russia and other important European countries. It was the time before the economic crisis; growth rates were bigger. It was even the time before the introduction of the Euro; the Euro is very important, but the Euro is also accompanied with some problems, if you look at Greece or at Italy, etc. So these factors also have to be taken into consideration. Thank you. 
+Tarja Halonen : I will also add that 25 years ago, Russia was different, and the European Union was different. Russia joined the Council of Europe after quite a long process, and I was myself also involved in that. So I think that one lesson that we could perhaps learn, also on the EU side, and from the Council of Europe side, is that this was a very good time to make an enlargement. But perhaps we should, to be fair, invest more in the enlargement process, not only before the enlargement, but also afterwards, and perhaps then the process could be easier today. But you know, sometimes things have to be hurried up, and you have not quite enough time. But we cannot take back the past, we have to try to build further on how it is now. 
+Gabor Stier : My question to President Putin is about Ukraine. 
+In the past few years we have often talked about Ukraine and the safety of Russian gas exports. Will Ukrainian flats be warm? Will Kiev pay for the gas? Are talks on gas exports to Ukraine underway? Was this discussed with Ukrainian President in Berlin? 
+Vladimir Putin : We are concerned about what is happening now with this very important energy component in Ukraine because in our opinion, in the opinion of our specialists – and they are no worse than Ukrainian experts because in Soviet times this was a single complex – we do realise what is going on there. 
+To guarantee uninterrupted supplies to Europe, it is necessary to pump the required amount of gas into underground gas storage facilities. This gas is for transit, not for domestic consumption. This is the technological gist of what was done in Soviet times. 
+The amount of gas in these facilities is too low. It’s not enough. It is necessary to load from 17 to 21 billion and I think now only 14 billion have been loaded. Moreover, they have already started to syphon it off. These are grounds for concern. I discussed gas shipments to Ukraine with the Ukrainian President at his initiative. He wanted to know whether Russia could resume deliveries. Of course, it can do so anytime. Nothing is required for this. 
+We have a contract with an annex. Only one thing is necessary and this is advance payment. We will provide timely and guaranteed energy supplies for Ukrainian consumers for the amount of this advance payment. But today the price for Ukraine – and we had agreed on this before and said so last year – will not be higher than the price for its neighbours, for instance, Poland. 
+I do not know the current prices but when we had this conversation Poland was buying gas from us for $185 or $184 per thousand cubic metres in accordance with the contractual commitments that are still valid. We could sell gas to Ukraine for $180. I mentioned this price – $180 per thousand cubic metres of gas. But we were told that they prefer reverse supplies, so be it. By the way, this is a violation of Gazprom’s contracts with its partners in Western Europe but we are turning a blind eye to this and showing understanding. 
+If they prefer reverse supplies, okay, let them get that, but as far as I know the cost of gas for end users – industrial enterprises – has already topped $300 per thousand cubic metres. We sell gas for $180 but they do not want to buy it from us yet. I have reason to believe that the middlemen in these reverse deals are close to certain executives in Ukraine’s fuel and energy complex. Good luck to them; let them do this but, most importantly, they must guarantee transit to European countries. 
+Question: I have a question about the INF Treaty, which is under a lot of pressure today as I am sure you are aware; there are lots of bitter mutual recriminations, and so on. In this regard, it is important to understand Russia’s general approach to this treaty. Does Russia see any value in this treaty, and if yes, then what exactly? Is it even worthwhile to be part of this treaty? 
+Vladimir Putin: It would be of great value to us, if other countries followed Russia and the United States. Here’s what we have: the naive former Russian leadership went ahead and eliminated intermediate-range land-based missiles. The Americans eliminated their Pershing missiles, while we scrapped the SS-20 missiles. There was a tragic event associated with this when the chief designer of these systems committed suicide believing that it was a betrayal of national interests and unilateral disarmament. 
+Why unilateral? Because under that treaty we eliminated our ground complex, but the treaty did not include medium-range sea- and air-based missiles. Air- and sea-based missiles were not affected by it. The Soviet Union simply did not have them, while the United States kept them in service. 
+What we ultimately got was a clear imbalance: the United States has kept its medium-range missiles. It does not matter whether they are based at sea, in the air, or on land; however, the Soviet Union was simply left without this type of weapons. 
+Almost all of our neighbours make such weapons, including the countries to the east of our borders, and Middle Eastern countries as well, whereas none of the countries sharing borders with the United States, neither Canada nor Mexico, manufacture such weapons. So, for us it is a special test, but nevertheless we believe it is necessary to honour this treaty. All the more so since, as you may be aware, we now also have medium-range sea- and air-based missiles. 
+Vladimir Putin : Yes, of course. I fully agree that we should at least try to break this vicious circle. But we were not the first to start drawing it. Quite to the contrary, we opened up completely in the mid-1990s. 
+We expected to have an equal dialogue, that our interests would be respected, that we would discuss issues and meet each other halfway. It is impossible to offer only unilateral solutions and press towards your goal at all costs. 
+You mentioned the bombing of former Yugoslavia and Crimea. Thank you for this example; it is wonderful that you have said this. The bombing of Belgrade is intervention carried out in violation of international law. Did the UN Security Council pass a resolution on military intervention in Yugoslavia? No. It was a unilateral decision of the United States. 
+Now tell me what you meant when you mentioned Crimea. What was it you did in Yugoslavia, when you split it into several republics, including Kosovo, and then separated states from Serbia? In Kosovo, parliament voted on secession after the end of hostilities, intervention and thousands of casualties. But they made their decision, and you accepted it. 
+There were no hostilities in Crimea, no bombing raids and no casualties. No one died there. The only thing we did was to ensure the free expression of will by the people, by the way, in strict compliance with the UN Charter. We did almost the same you did in Kosovo, only more. 
+In Kosovo, parliament approved a secession resolution, while people in Crimea expressed their opinion at a referendum. After that, parliament ratified the decision, and Crimea as an independent state asked to be reintegrated with Russia. 
+Of course, we can keep exchanging caustic remarks, but I think this vicious circle must be broken. I have said this more than once, and I am prepared to say it again. Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and NATO’s expansion – what is this? And then promises are forgotten, and we are again provoked into protecting our interests, after which “aggressive” Russia is accused of doing this or that. 
+Why are you provoking us into taking action to protect our interests? Let us negotiate solutions instead. But it is impossible to agree on anything. And even when we agree on something, these agreements are not implemented. 
+I would like to have different relations with the next US administration, a partnership based on mutual respect for each other’s interests. SF Source Paul Craig Roberts  ",FAKE
+4883,"Yes, There Is a Clinton Double Standard","Anyone writing sentences like ‘nevertheless fuels the perception that the Clintons may have…’ might want to stop and think about whether they are reporting news or innuendo.
+
+It’s Labor Day weekend, and the polls have tightened in the last week. Donald Trump has done nothing to earn this, of course. His schizophrenic jaunt from Mexico to Arizona—I love the Mexican people! I love them so much I’m creating a police force to send them home to Mexico!—was a mess.
+
+Because Hillary Clinton is more unpopular than she’s been in a long time—or ever, if you believe the spin on the the new Washington Post/ABC poll. In that one, she’s 15 points underwater. Other recent polls have been both better and worse—she’s minus-17 in YouGov/Economist but only minus-8 in Fox. But the picture is pretty consistent overall, and it’s bleak.
+
+Her unfavorable numbers over the course of the last several months tell an interesting and mostly overlooked tale. The conventional wisdom is that her numbers went south after the Times broke the story in March 2015 of the email server, and they’ve been lower-hemispheric ever since. That’s true—but there are variations within that are worth examining.
+
+Through the summer of 2015, she was barely underwater—three to five points. By December and January it was marginally worse, six or seven in most polls. But she didn’t hit double digits until March and April, and then she really bottomed out around minus-20 in late May and early June.
+
+What was happening? Well, she and Bernie Sanders were going at it pretty good, which surely reduced some liberals’ opinions of her. But mostly she was getting buffeted about on the winds of scandal—the Benghazi committee was leaking a steady trail of morsels, and in late May the State Department inspector general came out with its report saying she hadn’t gotten White House approval for using the private server.
+
+In other words, there looks to be a link between fresh Clinton scandal stories in the newspapers and her approval numbers dropping from a still-lamentable-but-manageable minus-8 or 10 to a (gulp!) minus-15 or 17. And in the last two weeks, of course, as we’ve seen a new batch of such articles, her negatives have inched back up, and the head-to-head polls have tightened.
+
+What does this tell you to look forward to? You don’t need the political acumen of Lyndon Johnson to figure this out. It means the Republicans, and Judicial Watch, the source of most of these scandal stories, are going to do everything they can to keep them on the front pages between now and Election Day. Oh—with assists from Julian Assange and Vladimir Putin.
+
+That’s the only environment in which Trump has a remote chance of winning—if it “seems” like the Clintons are “up to their old tricks”; if there are stories out there that, while including “no smoking gun,” nevertheless “feed” the “perception” that the Clintons are corrupt.
+
+The media are showing every sign of falling for each and every breathless Judicial Watch press release that lands in their inboxes without the least bit of skepticism and scrutiny. I discussed the weaknesses of that big AP story in my previous column. There’ve been other lame stories recently, too. The Crown Prince of Bahrain one was another preposterous Clinton Rules piece. He made his donation to the Clinton Global Initiative—which wasn’t really a donation per se but seed money for a program for Bahraini students to study in America—long before Clinton became secretary of state—so he’d have to have been clairvoyant to know he was going to be corrupting a future secretary four and five years later.
+
+Matthew Yglesias cited a few of the whoppers in a strong piece that noted the curious difference in coverage received by the Clinton Foundation and one run by Colin Powell. America’s Promise was headed by Alma Powell while Colin was secretary of state in the early 2000s and, according to Yglesias, got money from disgraced Enron CEO Ken Lay while the State Department was helping Enron resolve a dispute in India.
+
+Why the difference in coverage? Yes, I know a lot of people would say because Colin Powell is clean and the Clintons are corrupt. I say the answer is more likely that Colin Powell didn’t have a Judicial Watch poking and prodding into every aspect of his life trying to make him look dirty and send him to jail. He also didn’t face an industry of “book” authors willing to print the most fantastical lies about him, lies gobbled up by hundreds of thousands of readers. Go look at the Times nonfiction best-seller list. Sit down first.
+
+That insane scrutiny means two things. One, the media really ought to try to be careful about just swallowing whatever connections and insinuations Judicial Watch and other right-wing Clinton haters trumpet for the next nine weeks. It’s a rather high-stakes time. If there’s a legit Clinton story, obviously, run with it. But if people find themselves writing sentences with phrases like “nevertheless fuels the perception that the Clintons or their associates may have…” they might want to stop and think about whether what they have on their hands is news or innuendo.
+
+But two—yes, the scrutiny places responsibility on the Clintons, too. It may not be fair that they and they alone have a Judicial Watch on their tail. But fair or not, it’s a fact. And they should behave accordingly. And they should know that the right is going to try to keep the words “Clinton” and “scandal” next to each other on the front pages for the next nine weeks, and they should do everything in their power to keep those words out of the papers. Announcing that they’ve rethought matters and Chelsea won’t remain on the foundation board would be a good start.",REAL
+4750,"Libertarian VP Candidate Gives Up, Will Focus on Preventing Trump Presidency","As some presumably small portion of Americans sat through a dull debate between the Republican and Democratic vice-presidential nominees on Tuesday night, a far more interesting drama was unfolding within the Libertarian ticket. VP candidate Bill Weld told the Boston Globe that he plans to focus on attacking Donald Trump for the remainder of the campaign — essentially admitting that running mate Gary Johnson can not become president.*
+
+Trump has Weld’s “full attention,” he explained, because his agenda is so terrible it’s “in a class by itself.” “I think Mr. Trump’s proposals in the foreign policy area, including nuclear proliferation, tariffs, and free trade, would be so hurtful, domestically and in the world, that he has my full attention,” Weld said.
+
+Apparently he avoided acknowledging that his new mission amounts to working to make Hillary Clinton president. He pointed out that he disagrees with Clinton on fiscal and military issues, though last week on MSNBC he said he’s “not sure anybody is more qualified than Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States.”
+
+It’s unusual for a candidate to admit defeat five weeks before the election, even though Johnson is at just 7.4 percent nationally in the Real Clear Politics polling average. However, Weld’s move doesn’t exactly constitute “going rogue,” since earlier in the day Johnson admitted in a CNN interview, “I guess I wasn’t meant to be president.” The Libertarian nominee was trying to argue that his lack of foreign-policy knowledge is an asset five days after he was unable to name a world leader he admires. Johnson described that as another “Aleppo moment,” referring to a previous gaffe in which he failed to recognize the name of the besieged Syrian city.
+
+The gaffes led many to say Weld should be at the top of the ticket, and Weld strategists reportedly looked into the possibility of doing that, only to be shot down by Johnson.
+
+Weld insists that he’s not abandoning Johnson, and that his running mate is fully in support of his strategy shift. “I have had in mind all along trying to get the Donald into third place, and with some tugging and hauling, we might get there,” he said.
+
+However, Weld’s claim that there’s no discord on the Libertarian ticket wasn’t very convincing. He also suggested to the Globe that he may abandon the Libertarian party in the future. “I’m certainly not going to drop them this year,” he said.
+
+Weld, a former two-term Republican governor of Massachusetts, said that after blocking a Trump presidency, he’d like to work with Republicans like Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour to rebuild the GOP.
+
+“Maybe somebody is going to come up with a new playbook, and I don’t know who it’s going to be, but it would be fun to participate,” he said.
+
+Maybe Mike Pence? Both vice-presidential candidates seem pretty eager to move past the humiliations of the 2016 campaign.
+
+* Update: In an interview with Reason on Wednesday, Weld tried to clarify — or walk back — his remarks to the Globe:
+
+He also posted a statement to Facebook:",REAL
+7589,“I’ve Always Been An Admirer Of Donald Trump” – Taoiseach,"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] “I’ve Always Been An Admirer Of Donald Trump”– Taoiseach November 9, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS , POLITICS Share 0 Add Comment 
+TAOISEACH Enda Kenny has congratulated US president-elect Donald Trump, after he beat Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton in a dramatic election count result this morning. 
+Mr. Kenny said the people of the United States have made a very clear choice and that he always knew Trump would win the presidency, stating he looks forward to meeting him soon. 
+“I’ve always been an admirer of Donald Trump,” Mr. Kenny opened up, scratching his nose, “Such a lovely man and a deserving president. I was rooting for him from the very beginning of this campaign, and I hope to meet him and his beautiful first lady very soon”. 
+However, sources in Leinster House confirmed that an emergency Government meeting was called early this morning in a bid to decide who goes to the US for St. Patrick’s Day 2017. 
+“The Taoiseach requested a box of straws and a scissors,” one insider said, “I think Leo Varadkar picked the short straw and may have to meet Mr. Trump with a bowl of Shamrock in the White House next year”. 
+Asked about his comments about Mr. Trump being ‘racist and sexist’ earlier this year, the Taoiseach claimed he was only messing at the time and that he was only poking fun at the future president of the United States. 
+“Donald will know I was only blaggarding with him,” Kenny stated, “we’re always messing and joking like that in politics. I look forward to playing a round of golf with him in Clare,” adding, “I’m more concerned about making the Irish recovery great again”.",FAKE
+9640,Now waiting for the results | Opinion - Conservative,"(Before It's News)
+Compare and contrast New Jersey and Florida voting protocols, In Florida the information on your voter registration card and ID have to match, you are issued a 12″ printout (similar to a cash register receipt) showing your name, date of birth and address which you then must confirm, and that is placed on a clear […]",FAKE
+8059,BrotherJohnF Silver Update: Fake Election,"October 27, 2016 at 4:21 PM 
+Listen, it doesn’t matter who wins…the system can not mathematically go on the way it has…..so please dont make it sound like Trump is going to bring it down…and fuck yes…people like me want to see heads roll…they should be rolling for what they have done to this country….politicians, newspeople, celebrities…. all of them. If you or I did what they have done…we would be in Leavenworth in heart beat. Trusy me, it will get worse before it gets better…but when you’re cutting a malignancy out, it’s going to hurt.",FAKE
+8692,"When They Asked Her What She Thinks of Hillary Clinton, They Never Expected Her to Say THIS!","Hillary Clinton When They Asked Her What She Thinks of Hillary Clinton, They Never Expected Her to Say THIS! 
+0 comments 
+Kids say the darndest things… ADORABLE! ""My dad told me that Hillary Clinton LIES A LOT, so if she wins she might take over the country! "" @realDonaldTrump #VoteTrump pic.twitter.com/cHrP8lkPbS",FAKE
+5020,'The only other option': Bernie Sanders backers turn to Green party's Jill Stein,"Vanessa Tijerina was not politically active until a couple years ago. Then she started looking closely at problems in the healthcare system, feeling that mainstream politicians were not delivering solutions – and discovered Bernie Sanders.
+
+Last September, at short notice, she drove three hours to San Antonio, Texas, from her home near the border with Mexico so she could join other Sanders supporters in a protest against a Democratic congressman who had criticised the Vermont senator. In January she marched through Manhattan for Sanders, inspired by his idealistic and unorthodox message.
+
+And then the 74-year-old lost the Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton, and backed her for the White House last month at the national convention. That was where Tijerina and Sanders diverged.
+
+“A lot of us waited with bated breath, wondering: what’s he going to do?” she said. “Because depending on what he did, that’s where the movement was either going to go or not go. He decided to stay there, and the movement can’t stay there. It cannot stay in a centrist environment. The movement is antagonising that environment so we can’t stay there.”
+
+Tijerina and others were calling for a new phase of a Sanders-style political revolution on Thursday, as the Green party kicked off its presidential nominating convention in the improbable location of Houston, Texas – Big Oil’s back yard. (The convention’s slogan is: “Houston, We Have a Solution”.)
+
+“To me the Green party was the only other option,” Tijerina said in a conference room at the University of Houston. “There’s just no way that anything centre or right of centre was going to get America where it needed to be.”
+
+The 38-year-old nurse is standing as a Green party candidate for a Texas congressional district this November.
+
+“When I found out about Jill Stein, which was literally a month after I found out about Bernie – depending on who you ask, she is perhaps more progressive than Bernie,” Tijerina said. “She is perhaps more aggressive politically than Bernie and she is perhaps, some would say, less afraid, or less intimidated – or whatever it is, she has what Bernie has and perhaps more.”
+
+Stein is set to be confirmed as the Green party’s nominee on Saturday and is openly courting the seemingly large number of Sanders supporters who are reluctant or refusing to heed his call to support Clinton. In a Real Clear Politics average of recent polls, Stein is at 3.9%, behind the Libertarian party’s Gary Johnson, at 8%; Donald Trump is at 36.9% and Clinton at 43.5%.
+
+Hardly numbers to threaten the duopoly, but enough to potentially complicate close races in swing states in November and indicative of significant unhappiness with the Democratic and Republican candidates. (In 2012, Johnson received only 0.99% and Stein 0.36% of the popular vote.) Enough also to awaken some deep-seated Democratic angst rooted in the trauma of 2000, when some blamed Green party candidate Ralph Nader’s presence in Florida for costing Al Gore the general election and sending George W Bush to the White House.
+
+Adding to the sense of the Green party as an irritant for Democrats, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may address the convention via video link on Saturday, about two weeks after carefully timed leaked emails showed that Democratic National Committee officials seemingly plotted to undermine Sanders’ campaign, causing a storm and adding to his loyalists’ antagonism towards Clinton and the party.
+
+Stein’s choice this week of the human rights activist Ajamu Baraka as her running mate might complicate the outreach. In a blogpost last September on the left’s response (or lack of it) to Saudi Arabia’s bombing of Yemen, Baraka wrote: “Sanders supporters have not only fallen into the ideological trap of a form of narrow ‘left’ nativism, but also the white supremacist ethical contradiction that reinforces racist cynicism in which some lives are disposable for the greater good of the west.
+
+“And as much as the ‘Sandernistas’ attempt to disarticulate Sanders ‘progressive’ domestic policies from his documented support for empire … it should be obvious that his campaign is an ideological prop – albeit from a center/left position – of the logic and interests of the capitalist-imperialist settler state.”
+
+A request for comment made through Stein’s campaign was not returned. But it would likely take much more than some debatable blog articles to persuade many of the convention-goers in Houston to vote for an establishment figure they see as emblematic of a dishonest, warmongering status quo that is in thrall to big corporations and unwilling or unable to solve systemic inequalities.
+
+“Voting for the oligarchy is not how you get rid of the oligarchy,” said Carlos Martinez, 40, an activist from Texas who creates social media content. “I in good conscience cannot vote for somebody that supports interventionist wars and supports what Hillary Clinton supports, and I will vote for Jill Stein.”
+
+Sanders, some Clinton supporters – and Trump himself – have argued that casting a ballot for the Green party is tantamount to helping the Republican candidate. Stein and her supporters, of course, reject that idea.
+
+“I really can’t tell who or what Donald Trump is,” Martinez said, “but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be fear-baited into supporting Hillary Clinton and I don’t think that the majority of Sanders supporters are scared to vote their conscience and they’re going to be fear-mongered into pulling the lever for somebody that’s against their own interests.”
+
+Wearing a red “Feel the Bern” T-shirt, Pam Ellis attended a boisterous evening event designed to woo the “Bernie or Bust” crowd that drew a couple of hundred people.
+
+“I have a conflict because I like Bernie; I never really cared that much for Hillary. Nothing specific or anything, I just feel like it’s more big money influence in politics,” the 57-year-old nurse said. Her top issues were access to education and healthcare, subjects that were at the heart of Sanders’ electoral pitch – focused, like Stein’s, on social justice.
+
+“I think he furthered the Green party platform whether he intended to or not, brought it to the forefront and caused me to do a lot of research on the Green party, and that’s why I’m here now,” she said.
+
+Ellis also dismissed the notion that voters should think tactically. “What good is it to live in the United States where you have the right to vote and the freedom to vote for who you want to, if you’re going to be scared into voting?” she said.
+
+“I’m tired of the lesser of the evils. I’m just sick of that. That’s not what my father and his brothers went and fought in world war two for, so we could be scared into voting for one of two candidates. This is a huge country. We should have debates with the Libertarian party and the Green party. We need to hear from everybody.”",REAL
+1171,"Trump, Clinton Head Into SC with Fierce Competition on Their Heels","The presidential candidates are laser-focused on South Carolina right now, with the Republican primary coming up on Feb. 20, and the Democratic primary on Feb. 27.
+
+The latest surveys show Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton as the clear frontrunners. But the other candidates are waging fierce battles for second place.
+
+Heading into South Carolina, Trump already has a solid lead. The latest Real Clear Politics average of recent polls shows the billionaire with 36 percent support, compared to about 20 percent for his nearest competitor, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
+
+Trump hopes to build on the momentum from his New Hampshire win.
+
+""If we win here after winning so big in New Hampshire, we will make America great again -- that I can tell you,"" Trump said.
+
+What's extraordinary about his New Hampshire win is the breadth of his victory. Trump won in virtually every category, capturing both men and women in the city and the countryside. He won voters of all ages, and both conservative and moderates, and in every issue group.
+
+Meanwhile, Cruz says it's clear he's the main challenger to Trump.
+
+""One of the most important conclusions coming out of these first two states is that the candidate who can beat Donald Trump is me,"" Cruz said.
+
+Polls show Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in third and fourth place right now.
+
+And as of Wednesday, two GOP candidates are no longer in the race: former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie dropped out after weak showings in New Hampshire.
+
+The Democratic race is also hotly contested. Bernie Sanders crushed Clinton in New Hampshire, but she leads him in South Carolina, with 62 percent compared to his 32 percent.
+
+Clinton has acknowledged that she must figure out how to reach young voters, especially women. In New Hampshire, Sanders pulled in more than 80 percent of women voters under 30. Now she's reaching out to them.
+
+""You may not support me, but I support you,"" Clinton said.
+
+Sanders is also threatening Clinton with an impressive fundraising machine – and he's invested heavily in Nevada, which holds its Democratic caucus on Feb. 20.
+
+He's clearly going after the minority vote, but so is Clinton. This week, the Congressional Black Caucus PAC voted to endorse the Democratic frontrunner.
+
+If the polls are correct, Clinton and Trump should easily win in South Carolina. But the other candidates are fighting to catch up and March is coming – when more than 20 states will cast their votes.",REAL
+9614,Which Non-OPEC Producers Can Be Expected To Cut?,"by Jerri-Lynn Scofield 
+Jerri-Lynn here: The following post summarizes the state-of-play regarding production cutbacks for twelve oil-producing states invited to participate in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) ongoing discussions regarding a much-anticipated output freeze. As the post suggests, failure to agree restrictions and stabilize prices might heighten the risks of terrorist attacks and political instability in some of the non-OPEC countries invited to participate in wider negotiations. Yet inviting new participants to the negotiating party is only likely to complicate the situation and slow further the implementation of an internal production reduction already delayed for nearly a year. 
+By Zainab Calcuttawala, an American journalist based in Morocco. She completed her undergraduate coursework at the University of Texas at Austin (Hook’em) and reports on international trade, human rights issues and more. Originally published at Oilprice.com 
+Last week, Venezuelan oil minister Eulogio del Pino released a list of states invited to participate in the OPEC ongoing negotiations regarding a much-anticipated output freeze. 
+Russia, Egypt and ten other oil exporters made the list, though the high variation between the economic and political standings of the non-OPEC participants add to the already complicated and delicate orchestration of the deal— if there is to be a deal, that is. 
+This past weekend, several of the invited non-OPEC countries sent representatives to Vienna for consultations regarding the terms of a potential freeze deal. No details have been finalized, but those who participated agreed to meet again before the 30 November OPEC summit. 
+Russian President Vladimir Putin and Energy Minister Alexander Novak have recently agreed to freeze output in coordination with OPEC, if the group’s members can flesh out a plan amongst themselves. 
+According to OPEC Secretary-General Mohammed Barkindo, the bloc is on track to deliver a deal by the end of November. Barkindo also said that Russia has agreed to participate in OPEC’s official meeting this month. 
+As outlined by the Jamestown Foundation last month, Kazakhstan is desperate for a freeze deal to help economic development rebound to the 6-7 percent expansion rate that the former Soviet Republic saw when barrel prices exceeded $100. But just because they are desperate for a cut doesn’t mean they will participate. 
+Kazakh Energy Minister Kanat Bozumbayev said on Tuesday that Kazakhstan itself would not be doing any cutting, because, according to Bozumbayev, their production levels are small in proportion to some of the others at the negotiating table, namely Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Iran, and Mexico. 
+This year, Kazakhstan does not expect its economy to grow more than 0.1 percent, while 2017 forecasts from the World Bank predict a low one-percent increase in GDP. Kazakhstan – which recently reopened its Kashagan field, depends on oil exports for over 60 percent of total government revenues and a quarter of its GDP. 
+A failed deal could mean renewed terrorist attacks and political instability for Kazakhstan as the Kazakh economy continues to spiral downwards. 
+Asked what he hoped Saturday’s meeting would achieve, a Kazakh official in attendance in Vienna desperately said: “We just hope the price will react and it will increase.” That desperation is shared by many other oil-dependent countries, but this desperation is also a sign that these countries are not in any position to scale back the production that generates the most revenue. 
+Azerbaijan was also at the table. Halfway through October, Azerbaijan – a country that produced more than half of the world’s oil a century ago – also announced its support of an OPEC/non-OPEC cut, which, as ClipperData noted , is convenient because the country’s September oil production was 10.2 percent lower than its August rate. 
+“Venezuela and Azerbaijan agree that some measures will be taken to stabilize the market,” Azeri Energy Minister Natig Aliyev said this weekend. “We agreed the price of oil can be around $60 per barrel.” Statements revolving around price, however, do not speak to who is ready to share the burden of cutting production, and do little to assuage market fears that a cut is but a wispy goal. 
+Oman wasn’t buying the feasibility of OPEC cuts either, and before the Algiers meeting in September, Oman said as much, stating that it did not believe in the bloc’s ability to solve the pricing crisis due to several failed efforts to freeze output over the past year. 
+Newer reports on Oman show that they officially support an output freeze and overall reduction, with the expectation that “similar measures be taken by other countries.” It remains unclear if Iraq, a war-torn nation currently defying production limits, and Iran, a country trying to regain its legs now that sanctions were lifted, count as one of the “other countries” that Oman expects to cut output. 
+As a net oil importer, Egypt does not have the market power or political capital to sway the momentum of a freeze one way or another. The North African country’s recent spat with Saudi Arabia – the de facto leader of OPEC – over suspended petroleum shipments will also limit the salience of Egyptian interests in the bloc’s proceedings. 
+Sources from the Egyptian Parliament say the country’s energy ministry will be asked to review Saudi Aramco’s five-year agreement to supply Egypt with petroleum derivatives in the coming weeks, further complicating relations between the two nations. 
+Ninety-nine percent of Canadian oil exports go straight to the United States, according to governmental data from the buyer and seller countries. 
+Neither of the two North American countries is part of OPEC, and they have their own agreements for energy supplies. So even though Canada has been invited to participate in the freeze talks, the country does not have the economic or political incentive to reduce output. 
+Brazil elected to “observe” Saturday’s meeting as the country prepares to increase production rates over the next few years. This makes them extremely unlikely participants in any efforts to scale back production. 
+Other countries present this weekend included Mexico, which has spent the better part of this summer building a hedge against low oil prices for the next fiscal year. 
+Small-scale producers such as Bolivia and Trinidad and Tobago have already turned down production over the past two years, which had a limited effect on market fundamentals. 
+Norway, a 1.6 million barrel per day producer that has increased output by 2.1 percent in 2014 and 3.08 percent in 2015, declined to meet with OPEC over the weekend. 
+The geopolitics of oil within OPEC has already delayed the implementation of an internal production reduction for almost an entire year. By adding new nations from previously uninvolved continents (North America and Europe), the bloc has flooded the negotiation table with new interests – creating a fresh slate of diplomatic obstacles to overcome before an output freeze can be implemented. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+7147,Trump Team Begins Making List Of Executive Orders To ‘Erase Obama’s Presidency’ On Day One,"  
+In what amounts to the first pang of just how profound America’s Election Day screw up truly was, Trump’s campaign is reportedly already working on a plan to scrub that last eight years of progress out of existence on Trump’s very first day in office . No Obama accomplishment will remain. They even have a name for the plan: The First Day Project. 
+Organized by the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to deprive Obama of any lasting effect to his time in office. It’s a perverse sort of vengeance from a group of clowns who have spent the last decade smearing the president at every possible step of the way. 
+Trump aides are organizing what one Republican close to the campaign calls the First Day Project. “Trump spends several hours signing papers—and erases the Obama Presidency,” he said. Stephen Moore, an official campaign adviser who is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained, “We want to identify maybe twenty-five executive orders that Trump could sign literally the first day in office.” 
+Thinking back over Obama’s list of wins – from gay rights to healthcare to the economy – the idea that these achievements can be erased by a collective of spiteful, bitter men in a matter of hours is almost too much to bear. The suffering to the people whose rights will surely be rolled back will be immense. 
+And on a separate, but equally terrifying front, Trump’s campaign surrogate Omarosa told reporters that Trump has been compiling an “enemies list”– an assortment of people on the right and left who openly stood against him – and he plans on punishing those on the list when he gets to office. 
+“I would never judge anybody for exercising their right to and the freedom to choose who they want. But let me just tell you, Mr. Trump has a long memory and we’re keeping a list.” 
+Erase his predecessor, punish his enemies. In this way, with pen and sword, Trump plans to dismantle a democracy. The oldest, greatest one in the world – up until the point when it wasn’t. 
+Featured image via Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+764,Why Trump is a shocking GOP choice,"(CNN) Sometimes political change comes from unexpected people and at unexpected moments. One of the biggest surprises of 2016 is that Donald Trump is poised to win the nomination of the Republican Party while defying key elements of GOP orthodoxy.
+
+While Trump may very well shift hard to the right in the general election (reversing the conventional pattern of running to the hard right in the primaries and then shifting to the center in the fall), the fact that he will win the nomination after having run such an eclectic and unorthodox campaign is something that party professionals will take note of.
+
+Whether or not Trump really believes any of the heresies he's stated about GOP positions is besides the point, at least for the moment. And while Trump is a unique case given his celebrity stature, one thing is clear -- he has made statements that until this year most experts would have characterized as touching a third rail for anyone seeking to win the nomination.
+
+Republican politicians have been pretty lockstep on policies for years. And Trump has stuck to the right, the far right, on questions like immigration. But the surprise of this year is that on a number of other issues Republican voters have been willing to vote for someone who refused to toe the party line.
+
+Just this past week Trump reiterated his statements about being willing to raise taxes, an unheard-of position for a GOP presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan came to town in the 1980s.
+
+Trump is certainly no Bernie Sanders. His overall tax agenda fits comfortably within the Reagan legacy: he would cut taxes for the wealthy and hope that supply side economics will work the magic its adherents claim. Yet he has refused to rule out some tax increases. Early on he announced that he favored higher taxes for hedge fund managers and last Sunday stated that taxes would go up on the wealthy.
+
+This kind of statement was sure to kill a Republican candidacy in years past. Ever since anti-tax activist Grover Norquist pressured Republicans to sign a pledge stating that they would not raise taxes—and Reagan blasted the Democratic presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, in a 1984 debate after he admitted in a debate that he would have to do this—Republicans on the campaign trail never concede that they would take this step.
+
+Even through his vacillations and flip-flops, Trump has now talked of higher taxes several times and many voters in the party seem willing to back him.
+
+He has also avoided the familiar rhetoric about cutting entitlements or privatizing Social Security. ""I want to leave Social Security as it is,"" he said. Sounding very much like a Democrat, Trump has been pretty insistent throughout that he has no intention of going after these giant programs.
+
+More to the point, he has offered rhetoric stating his support for what they accomplish. It is not because these programs are a third rail, according to Trump, but because they are good.
+
+In his conflict with House Speaker Paul Ryan, Trump has warned that he disagreed with Ryan who ""wants to knock out Social Security, knock it down, way down. He wants to knock Medicare way down.""
+
+In addition to being a sure-fire way to ""lose the election,"" Trump added that, ""more importantly, in a sense, I want to keep it. These people have been making their payments for their whole lives. I want to keep Social Security intact. Now, I want to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse. I want to do a lot of things to it that are going to make it much better, actually. But I'm not going to cut it, and I'm not going to raise ages (of eligibility), and I'm not going to do all of the things that they want to do.""
+
+Trump is on to the secret that many red-state Republicans like their entitlements and are not enthused by party rhetoric about taking those benefits away. When tea party Republicans warned President Obama in 2010 to ""Take Your Government Hands Off My Medicare,"" they meant it.
+
+Saying no to free trade
+
+On free trade, Trump has been saying things that make a conservative's head spin. He has done extremely well in a number of states by talking about how trade agreements like NAFTA were disastrous to U.S. workers, destroying jobs and undercutting wages. ""No more sweatshops or pollution havens stealing jobs from American workers,"" he has said.
+
+Of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement between the U.S. and 11 other countries, which Trump calls ""ObamaTrade,"" he said: ""The TPP is a horrible deal. It is a deal that is going to lead to nothing but trouble.""
+
+Trump has made attacks on free trade a core aspect of his campaign against other Republicans as well as against Hillary Clinton. His arguments have resonated in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, where workers have watched entire industries being slowly gutted as production moved overseas.
+
+He has talked about a return to trade restrictions and trade war with rhetoric that Republicans, and most Democrats, have rejected for decades.
+
+Conservative cultural values also have been absent from his stump speeches. Trump, who has lived a life more suited to Howard Stern's radio show than an evangelical church, has not really paid much attention to the religious right or their strand of conservatism, apart from a few moments like his visit to Liberty University.
+
+He is all about economics, and slowing the flow of immigrants and ""making American great again."" He has sometimes gone directly against many evangelicals' positions, such as when he stated his support for transgender people using any bathroom they wanted.
+
+He says he opposes abortion but has made statements supportive of Planned Parenthood that are anathema to many on the right. ""You can say whatever you want,"" Trump said, ""but they have millions of women going through Planned Parenthood that are helped greatly.""
+
+Evangelicals are certainly nervous, with many leaders saying they want a vice presidential pick that they can trust. But Trump has survived unscathed, even in many southern primary states.
+
+When it comes to foreign policy, Trump has stepped back from the hawkish neoconservative rhetoric that has dominated Republican circles for several decades. Although he still brandishes a big stick when talking about what he would do to ISIS and how he would combat the threat of terrorism, he has made statements that are skeptical about relying on the military as the prime instrument of U.S. foreign policy.
+
+In his ""America First"" speech, he talked about the need to recognize the limits of U.S. power and to only engage in conflicts that are directly essential to the national interest as he defines it.
+
+When former President George W. Bush joined the campaign trail in South Carolina to help his brother Jeb, Trump went right after Bush's war in Iraq and blasted it as a mistake. All of this talk seems to be just fine with many Republicans.
+
+It is much too early to tell what the long-term impact of Trump's candidacy will be on the Republican Party. But with all the attention that has been paid to the risks Trump poses as a leader and the ugly statements that have come out of his campaign, we have not looked closely enough at how and why a candidate who refused to accept the party's doctrine has won the nomination.
+
+This is a big story in an era of rigid party polarization. If Trump's campaign becomes a model for future candidates, we might see a very different Republican Party in years to come.
+
+Of course, if Trump goes on to suffer a landslide defeat against Hillary Clinton, rock-ribbed conservatives might say, ""I told you so,"" and the dynamics of GOP politics in 2020 could return to what they've been in the past.",REAL
+10396,What The Trump Skeptics Got Wrong,"Home This Month Popular What The Trump Skeptics Got Wrong What The Trump Skeptics Got Wrong FitzRoy Sommerset 
+FitzRoy is a British and American Nationalist who refuses to apologize for the British Empire. As a young man, he ""took a President's shilling"" and served in the U.S. Army. In his free time, he enjoys studying history and destroying the SJW revisionist narrative. November 12, 2016 Politics 
+There have been few true upsets in our history: Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Wellington’s victories at Assaye and Waterloo, and Washington’s victory at Yorktown over the most professional army in the world. It is often said that when General Charles O’Hara (who had the dubious distinction of surrendering to both George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte) surrendered Cornwallis’s sword, the band played “The World Turned Upside Down.” 
+Today, the establishment and the intellectuals cannot help but share a similar sentiment as Cornwallis or O’Hara did at Yorktown. And I fully admit: In spite of my vote for Trump, I fully expected him to lose. The polls, his 60% negative approval rating, and the sheer forces of the media, the FBI and even some Republicans were arrayed against him. My skepticism of Trump was not his ideas, but his chances of winning the election. Myself, and other conservative intellectual skeptics who voted for him, were wrong. 
+I am one of the intellectuals who expected a Trump defeat. I’ve been studying politics, history and economics for years, reading countless books on the matter from The Prince to Freakonomics to The Wealth of Nations. 
+And I was wrong. It was a Canadian housewife and an Iranian pickup artist who called it correctly for Trump. Trump beat the odds, he beat the intellectuals, and made the establishment “babies in the hands of a giant” as was said after Napoleon’s resounding victory at Austerlitz in 1806. 
+The left is currently in panic-mode in an attempt to explain how they lost. They are calling Trump supporters racist, sexists, homophobic and even sex offenders! But in the end, it was this same blindness that made them psychologically incapable of defeating Donald Trump. Trump was immune to almost all conventional political weapons. Trump won because of the following 
+1. The left seemed far more interested in calling Trump and his supporters racist than saying something of substance. 
+2. Outlets such as the New York Times did blatantly stupid crap like try to blame the NRA for the Orlando Shootings, and even tried to call them terrorists. In this, they beat even Trump in outrageousness: they thought the American people were stupid, so they just lied to them and said “fuck it, those peasants will believe anything we write.” 
+3. All Trump had to do was call them on their bullshit, and call them liars. And he was 100% right: the MSM has lied to the American people this entire election cycle. Subsequent to every terrorist attack perpetrated by a Muslim, the MSM continued to push the narrative that “home grown right-wing terrorism is the real problem.” Trump called them on their lies, and the American people, who are tired of being lied to by the MSM, cheered him on, even if he had a few issues with the truth himself. 
+4. The Democrats ran the absolute worst candidate possible. Hillary Clinton had negative approval ratings that rivaled Trump’s own. And she was bland. And she couldn’t decide if she was a moderate or a firebrand progressive. And she is corrupt, and lied about it, stupidly thinking the American people were too ignorant to understand that putting classified information on a private email server is a recklessly irresponsible thing to do. 
+5. Trump knew how to communicate with people. He knew that whites without a college degree were tired of being talked down to by progressives on the left and genuine intellectuals on the right (like myself). I freely admit I am guilty of this: when you study two thousand years of philosophy, economics and rhetoric (Cicero was particularly effective), it is sometimes frustrating when people don’t approach a situation in terms of axioms and proofs. The working class that built America go by what they feel in their gut, and often times, they are right. 
+All in all, the left failed because they failed to understand America. They bought into the idea that “Americans are stupid…haha!” Americans are not stupid: they may not be smart, but they sure as hell know when a liberal taking head is lying to them about now the NRA is basically the Taliban in an obviously biased hit piece. Hillary took working class Americans for granted, and she lost. This should stand as a parallel for black Americans whom the Democrats also take for granted. 
+I am pleased that Donald Trump is now President-Elect. He wasn’t just a candidate, he was the anti-candidate. He did everything a politician should not do. He used vulgar language. He talked freely about his ideas. He made no pretense about being polite to those who are destroying America. He turned weaknesses (such as his spotty track record) into strengths that would have ended any other candidate’s campaign. He was the un-candidate America needed. 
+I have high hopes for Trump’s presidency. In spite of my tepid support, I see Trump as a President who can do a lot of good, and has the potential to do more good than any President of recent memory. 
+First, Trump spat in the face of PC culture and won. Just as Scott Walker took on the Unions in Wisconsin and cucked them by winning the recall election by getting more votes than he did in the previous election, Trump defeated the SJW’s. If Trump can keep this up, we can achieve a major strategic victory in the war against political correctness, and get back to a concept called “actually being correct.” 
+Secondly, Trump is an unapologetic nationalist. He loves America, and doesn’t give a damn if you think Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is a great book. The Department of Cultural Guilt that has infected schools in America teaches children to hate their own country. I look forward to seeing Trump abolish the practice of teaching children that the Founding Fathers were evil racists, the British Empire did nothing good for the world, and that America is the greatest evil the world has ever seen. 
+Lastly, Trump is the antithesis of everything the Social Justice Warriors stand for: a successful alpha male who tells people to go fuck themselves and still gets elected. I hope to see a rise in masculinity in America: studies have shown that testosterone levels are down among the American male population. This should rise under Trump, as men embrace their masculinity instead of hiding it for fear of being accused of sexual assault. 
+I was a Trump skeptic. I underestimated him. I didn’t disagree with him on much (perhaps maybe 20% of his platform), but I had little faith he could pull it off. And I was vocal about my concerns regarding his elect-ability. But like the liberals, I was wrong. And a Canadian housewife and a former pickup-artist-turned-conservative-philosopher were 100% right. 
+I recall something I told a fellow soldier while on a long, boring convoy operation in Iraq: “When a genius says something, others say ‘wow, that is way above my head.’ But when a true genius says something, others say ‘wow, why didn’t I think of that before?!” Trump is a true genius: he stated the obvious to the American people and made them believe he wanted to Make America Great Again (and I think he genuinely does). He didn’t use fancy graphs or focus groups: he spoke the truth, without political correctness. 
+And now he is President-Elect.",FAKE
+1819,Donald Trump: ‘We have to take back the heart of our country’,"Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose caustic comments about Mexicans have inflamed the immigration debate, told thousands of cheering supporters here Saturday that “we have to take back the heart of our country.”
+
+In a rambling, defiant speech delivered in this border state that has been the epicenter of the nation’s divisive battle over immigration reform, Trump declared: “These are people that shouldn’t be in our country. They flow in like water.” One man in the crowd of 4,200 shouted back, “Build a wall!”
+
+Basking in polls that show he has risen to the top of the crowded Republican field, Trump took obvious glee in mocking former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite who is setting fundraising records.
+
+“Jeb Bush, let’s say he’s president — Oy, yoy, yoy,” Trump said. He asked the crowd: “How can I be tied with this guy? He’s terrible. Terrible. He’s weak on immigration.”
+
+Trump’s 70-minute address here, which sounded more like a stream-of-consciousness rant than a presidential-style stump speech, put an exclamation point on his bombastic push since his presidential announcement last month to return immigration to the forefront of the national conversation.
+
+Bush and illegal immigrants were not the only targets of Trump’s scorn: He also criticized Macy’s, NBC, NASCAR, U.S. ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and, several times, the media.
+
+Republican leaders say they believe the celebrity billionaire has virtually no chance of being their nominee, much less of making it to the White House. And, for now at least, his following seems limited to the far right as opposed to the party’s mainstream.
+
+Yet Trump has reignited a heated debate over an issue, immigration, that the GOP had been determined to settle after it hurt Republicans in the most recent presidential election.
+
+Party leaders increasingly fear that Trump could do damage to more viable candidates, such as Bush, who could lose their own footing on immigration. These candidates confront a familiar challenge: During the primary season, they must deal with the anger and anxiety that many on the right feel about illegal immigration. But they must do it in a way that will not damage their appeal to a broader electorate in November 2016.
+
+Republicans are handling Trump delicately for another reason as well: They fear that he could leave the GOP entirely and wage a well-funded third-party campaign, a possibility that Trump has not ruled out.
+
+[GOP leaders fear damage to party’s image as Donald Trump doubles down]
+
+After Trump repeatedly referred to illegal immigrants in the harshest of terms — calling them, among other things, killers and rapists — Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called Trump and asked him to tone things down. But that, if anything, has reinvigorated Trump and his vocal supporters.
+
+The crowd in Phoenix began lining up outside the convention center before dawn, with many spending hours in temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees. Hundreds of people, who stood in lines snaking down several downtown blocks, did not make it into the ballroom for his speech.
+
+Many of Trump’s supporters blame illegal immigrants for crime and economic problems but also express dismay over cultural changes.
+
+“We don’t recognize our country anymore,” said Jan Drake, 72, who lives in a retirement community outside Phoenix. “If you’re coming into our country, you have got to conform to what we stand for. You speak English. You don’t try to change our country to what your country was.”
+
+After watching Trump on television the past couple of weeks, Drake said that she has become convinced that “he would be a very strong president. He doesn’t kowtow to anybody. The Republican Party will try to squeeze him out because they’re afraid of him. But he can tell them where to go — to pound sand.”
+
+After he walked onto a catwalk stage here like a rock star, Trump basked in his crowd. “The word is getting out that we have to stop illegal immigration,” he said.
+
+While Trump was railing against Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, a handful of protesters in the crowd interrupted. Trump’s security guards arrived to break up the skirmish that followed. His supporters screamed “USA! USA! USA!” in the protesters’ faces as the guards escorted them out of the convention hall.
+
+“I wonder if the Mexican government sent them over here,” Trump said from the stage. He assured the crowd, “Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.”
+
+Trump also had harsh words for Islamic State terrorists. If he becomes president, Trump said, “They will be in such trouble . . . ISIS, believe me, I would take them out so fast. You have to do it.”
+
+But it was his crusade against illegal immigrants that had Trump’s crowd most enthused. After expressing shock that his immigration message has resonated so strongly with the GOP base, Trump said, “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back.” He walked off the stage to Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”
+
+Earlier, as his plush Boeing 757 headed from an appearance in Las Vegas to Phoenix, Trump sat in a leather chair, surrounded by binders of articles about him and sipping a Coca-Cola — the full-calorie kind, he noted, because, “Have you ever seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke?”
+
+“Something is happening in America. You may not want to see it, but something big is happening. People are sick and tired of politicians, and I’m here for them,” he said in an interview. “I’m ready to go right at the Mexican government. I’m going to charge them $25,000 per illegal immigrant and, oh, I’ll make them pay.”
+
+“Would Bush do that? Would Rubio? I don’t think so,” Trump added, taking aim at two of his more mainstream rivals, Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
+
+Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans, including most Republicans, support an overhaul of the law to give millions of undocumented immigrants a means of staying in this country legally. But a passionate fraction of the Republican electorate believe otherwise.
+
+Lou Brudnock, 71, said he is attracted to Trump’s brash “truthfulness” on immigration and his willingness to be politically incorrect.
+
+“This country today is sad, sad, sad,” Brudnock said. “You can’t say anything or they call you ‘a racist.’ It’s like we’re back in Nazi Germany. But look around, man. It’s people here reading and listening to his message.”
+
+Trump, by virtue of his celebrity, has provoked a backlash far more widespread than ever seen toward lesser-known immigration hard-liners, such as former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo (R). That means he could leave lasting damage to the GOP and whoever turns out to be its 2016 standard-bearer.
+
+All of those cross-pressures were in play Saturday at Trump’s appearances here and in Las Vegas. More mainstream Republicans had anticipated the spectacle and made no secret of their concern.
+
+“I had hoped that we had moved on from some of the coarse rhetoric,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). “When there’s so many candidates, you can appeal to a very small segment of the population and get news and get elevated.” Flake is a leading proponent of a comprehensive immigration measure that would include a path to citizenship for those who are in the country illegally.
+
+Arizona has been a hotbed of anti-immigration sentiment, having passed a 2010 law that requires law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of people they detain and suspect are in the country illegally.
+
+Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio — who in some ways is the face of that law, having been the subject of racial-profiling lawsuits — helped warm up the crowd before Trump’s arrival.
+
+“I know that Donald Trump is speaking out,” Arpaio said. “He’s getting a lot of heat. But, you know, there’s a silent majority out here.”
+
+“We’re not silent anymore!” a man in the crowd shouted.
+
+Arpaio brought up the mostly dormant questioning of President Obama’s birth certificate. He and Trump are perhaps the most vocal of the “birthers,” who falsely contend that Obama was not born in the United States.
+
+Immigration also has gained new attention after the June 30 shooting death of a woman along San Francisco’s heavily touristed waterfront, allegedly by an illegal immigrant who had been deported five times from the United States.
+
+Trump — along with much of the rest of the Republican field — has criticized the policies of “sanctuary cities,” where officials cannot detain those they suspect of being in the country illegally unless they have other grounds to do so.
+
+Republican strategists say that it is possible to address anxiety over illegal immigration within the GOP base without alienating the electorate at large. Advisers to Bush and Rubio, for instance, say that their candidates can play a long game on the issue, continuing to make a case for comprehensive changes to the law, while waiting for the Trump boomlet to subside.
+
+“You can give a fuller picture of those types of people who are coming to America who are not documented, who are not legal,” said Peter Wehner, who was a top official in George W. Bush’s White House. “And you can speak about them in a humane and decent and true way.”
+
+Karen Tumulty in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+569,Jeb Bush fights lonely battle defending Common Core,"Nashville, Tennessee (CNN) As opposition to Common Core began to swell in Tennessee, Jeb Bush showed up to an education forum in March of last year, advocating for state officials to keep the higher standards in place.
+
+Now, a little more than a year later, Bush returned to Nashville Saturday night to address the state's GOP dinner, but his push for the state to hold onto Common Core didn't succeed. Earlier this month, Republican Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill to review the controversial standards and rebrand them with a Tennessee-specific focus.
+
+The bill was widely viewed as a compromise between Common Core opponents -- who wanted to get rid of it altogether -- and supporters, including Haslam, who wanted to stay on track with the new assessments.
+
+What happened in Tennessee has already happened in a number of states as the political momentum against Common Core has caught fire in the past two years, fueled by an onslaught of criticism from conservatives who decry the standards as federal overreach.
+
+And with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie -- a once-staunch enthusiast of Common Core -- announcing this week that his state will gut the standards and come up with something else, Bush, who has yet to declare his all-but-certain candidacy, remains the only top-tier presidential hopeful who is still defending Common Core.
+
+That doesn't mean he takes issue with states doing what Tennessee and New Jersey are attempting. He's made it clear that he's fine with states choosing an alternative path, as long as those states maintain high benchmarks for students.
+
+""I think the governor [Haslam] has every right to do anything as it relates to education policy,"" Bush told reporters Saturday night, with Haslam standing by his side. ""This should be a state issue. And Washington should have nothing to do with this at all.""
+
+Still, Bush -- unlike other 2016ers -- is not backing away from his endorsement of Common Core as an effective method of measuring student learning. His brother, after all, pushed and ultimately signed No Child Left Behind in early 2002, which imposed test score standards on schools with lower-income students that received federal funding.
+
+As for Common Core, Jeb Bush has expressed frustration with how the standards have been prone to misinformation that have in part helped turn the issue into a political football.
+
+""Because people have a different view of what Common Core is, am I supposed to back away from something that I know works?"" he asked at the same event in Bedford.
+
+As two-term governor of Florida from 1999-2007, Bush focused heavily on education reform, which included implementing higher standards as well as a school voucher program. After he left office, he launched a nonprofit called the Foundation for Excellence in Education that ultimately became a leading proponent of Common Core.
+
+Contrary to what some believe, Common Core standards were not developed by the federal government but by the National Governors Association along with help from state education leaders, parents and teachers. The standards dictate what students in elementary school and high school should know by the end of each grade, and it's up to the states to come up with testing and curriculum that align with those measurements.
+
+The federal government got involved when it gave states financial incentives to adopt higher standards. Those standards didn't have to be Common Core, but since the standards were available, 46 states have adopted them since 2010, though some have since changed or eliminated them.
+
+While Common Core has sometimes been misunderstood, ""perception is reality in politics,"" said Gregory Gleaves, a Republican strategist in Tennessee. ""If the perception is out there that it comes from DC, then it is a political problem. And that was the case for those who supported Common Core.""
+
+Despite praising it during his first term, Christie on Thursday noted that he's heard constant complaints from parents and educators. ""I felt like we had to give it a fair chance, I think we did. We've given it a four-year chance,"" he said. ""They feel as if it's been imposed upon them from Washington.""
+
+Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal -- also potential Republican presidential contenders -- were initially on board with Common Core and helped implement the standards during their first terms, but later moved to get rid of them.
+
+Jindal especially has become one of the most vocal opponents of the standards, and a lawsuit he launched against the federal government over Common Core got a hearing in a Baton Rouge court on Thursday.
+
+That's why some states renamed the standards to give them a more local feel. Iowa, for example, named it the ""Iowa Core."" This method was encouraged last year by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who reportedly told state education officials to lose the ""Common Core"" name. ""Rebrand it, refocus it, but don't retreat.""
+
+For his part, Bush has politely tried to correct some misunderstandings about Common Core on the trail, without trying to get to deep in the weeds. At an event in Manchester, a retired math teacher told Bush that he got frustrated with spending more time testing than teaching.
+
+Bush explained that tests are only administered on the state and local level -- not by the federal government -- and proposed that states should mandate that school districts tell parents why they are giving so many tests. That would better facilitate a conversation between parents and educators on how to strike a balance.
+
+""And that's the way it should be. You can do that in New Hampshire,"" he said, urging the man, John Potucek, who's also a state representative, to push back on the state about his complaints. ""But please make sure you have accountability around students, 'cause the net result is you're going to have a decline.""
+
+After the event Potucek told CNN he was surprised by Bush's answer, and while he didn't agree with everything Bush said, he said his Common Core stance wouldn't be a deal-breaker.
+
+""He explained it in a way that I wasn't expecting, and I have to kind of chew on it a little bit,"" he said.
+
+It doesn't always go well, though. At a town hall in Dubuque, Iowa, a retired local school board member named Les Feldman grilled Bush about his support for Common Core. After a tense back-and-forth that lasted several minutes, a somewhat exasperated Bush ultimately concluded with, ""I'm just for higher standards, man.""
+
+""People want a clear 'yes' or 'no' answer""
+
+While opponents dislike Common Core for a number of reasons, Republican primary voters mostly disagree with it because they see it as federal overreach into what should be a local issue. Andy Ogles, the Tennessee state director for the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, said a one-size-fits-all approach to education doesn't work.
+
+""The education needs in Silicon Valley versus rural Iowa versus Tennessee are very different,"" he said. Ogles lead a grassroots campaign that helped mobilize opposition to Common Core in Tennessee and pressure state officials to search for a different approach.
+
+As for Bush, Ogles said he doubts conservative voters will buy the likely presidential candidate's argument that he supports both Common Core as well as a state's decision to opt out and choose their own standards.
+
+""There's certain core issues that most people want a clear 'yes' or 'no' answer, and I think this is one of those issues. You can't be for it and then also be for state standards,"" he said. ""Ultimately, he's going to have to make up his mind, especially here in the southern states.""
+
+Aides say there's no conflict in Bush's position. States had to opt in, and they can opt out.
+
+The bottom line, Bush has argued, is that students need better accountability and there are a variety of ways to make that happen with higher standards.
+
+""There's got to be a better way,"" Bush said at an event in Manchester, New Hampshire earlier this month, saying only half of high school graduates are college or career-ready. ""We can't just keep fooling ourselves and just say 'oh it's because ... kids in poverty can't learn'.""
+
+""That's crap,"" a man in the audience interjected.
+
+""Thank you, brother,"" Bush said forcefully. ""That is crap.""",REAL
+4770,Donald Trump can’t resist blaming Bill Clinton when his own sexism comes up,"Even by his standards, Donald Trump's reaction to the release of an audio tape of him joking about sexually assaulting women was astonishing:
+
+He seamlessly pivoted from a devastating revelation about his own misogyny to pointing out that Bill Clinton is the Real Sexist.
+
+This is part of a pattern. In the first presidential debate, he congratulated himself for not bringing up Bill's infidelities: ""I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, I can't do it. It's inappropriate. It's not nice."" In case anyone wasn't clear about what he was talking about, after the debate he told reporters, ""I’m very happy that I was able to hold back on the indiscretions with respect to Bill Clinton.""
+
+In case that was too subtle, he had his surrogates bring the matter up repeatedly. Arkansas Attorney General and Trump surrogate Leslie Rutledge told NBC News's Craig Melvin in response to questioning about Trump's treatment of Miss Universe Alicia Machado, ""If we want to dig back through the '90s on comments made about women, we can certainly look to Secretary Clinton referring to Monica Lewinsky as a neurotic loony-toon."" Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) went even further, making shocking new allegations about Hillary Clinton's infidelities with the same women as her husband: ""Look at what she has done: Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, my goodness.""
+
+What's the motivation for Trump and his team to dredge the Clinton affairs up? The '90s scandals are pretty old news. There are 18-year-olds voting in this election who weren't alive when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in January 1998, and millions more voters in their 20s and 30s who weren’t really old enough to remember.
+
+And more importantly (Blackburn’s apparent confusion aside), these are allegations about Bill Clinton. If anything, Hillary Clinton, as the cheated-on party in the Flowers and Lewinsky cases, is a victim. Why should any of this reflect poorly on her campaign?
+
+The best explanation we have is twofold. First, the Trump campaign thinks public perceptions around the scandals like those surrounding Bill Clinton have changed in a way that might make that history extremely damaging to the Clintons’ reputation with millennials — if those millennials are briefed on what happened. Thus, bringing it up whenever possible. Second, they view making the conversation about Bill as an effective way to deflect the many, many allegations of sexism against Trump that this campaign has brought to light.
+
+Steve Bannon, the CEO of Trump's campaign and former head of Breitbart News, has believed there’s potential in reviving the Bill Clinton scandals for some time now. In January 2015, way before Trump even announced his run for president, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green talked to Bannon about his and Breitbart’s efforts to gather dirt on the Clintons. Bannon was insistent that Bill Clinton’s marital indiscretions were promising ground:
+
+There’s an obvious counterargument to this claim: When people were aware of Bill Clinton’s indiscretions in the 1990s, it didn’t make him unpopular. Indeed, in the first weeks after the Drudge Report broke the Lewinsky story on January 17, 1998, Clinton’s approval rating spiked upward, from about 60 percent to 69:
+
+After the House impeached him in December, his popularity spiked again, only falling after the whole saga ended with a Senate acquittal in February. It’s hard to conclude anything besides that the scandal was good for Clinton’s reputation with the public at the time, and completely backfired for congressional Republicans, who faced losses in the 1998 midterms for good measure.
+
+And that’s nothing compared with what the scandal did for Hillary. If Bill’s approval ratings edged upward as a result of the Lewinsky affair, Hillary’s positively soared:
+
+So why in the world would a Republican-aligned operative want to replicate that experience?
+
+The answer lies in Bannon’s allusion to his younger female employees. Yes, these scandals didn’t hurt Clinton the first time around — but the constant barrage of scandals created a numbing effect that weakened the power of each individual charge. And, more pertinently, our norms around sexual misconduct have changed dramatically since the 1990s.
+
+The main line of attack against Clinton in the Lewinsky case from Republicans was a combination of a) the president was unfaithful to his wife, indicating moral bankruptcy on his part, and b) he lied about it under oath, undermining the rule of law. It definitely wasn’t that he was abusing the power of his office by having an affair with a subordinate. That would have been a hard argument for congressional Republicans to make, given that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was having an affair with a staffer (now his third wife) during the whole process.
+
+But in retrospect, this is clearly the most important and troubling aspect of the story. Adultery is wrong, but most Americans view it as a private failing that doesn’t necessarily reflect a politician’s ability to do their job. Perjury is also wrong, but the focus on that element reeked of an effort to find a charge, any charge, with which to impeach Clinton.
+
+A president sleeping with a White House intern, by contrast, is clear cut-and-dried sexual harassment. It’s absolutely unacceptable behavior toward a subordinate. In a private company, it’s a fireable offense. It might have been accepted as normal in the '90s, but sexual harassment has slowly come to be recognized as a serious offense in workplaces, and exploiting the power of a senior office to get a lower-ranked employee to consent to sex is a particularly egregious manifestation of it.
+
+More to the point, we now have 20 years of hindsight, and it’s clear that the real victim of the imbroglio was Lewinsky herself, who has been denied the ability to live a normal life with relative anonymity and has become an activist against online abuse after enduring loads of it herself.
+
+The even clearer examples of this are cases where Clinton was accused not of consensual sex but of sexual assault. Lewinsky and Clinton’s previous paramour Gennifer Flowers tend to get placed in the same bucket as Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey, but all three of the latter women accused him of sexual assault. Broaddrick claims that Clinton raped her; Jones alleged that he exposed himself to her; Willey accused him of grabbing her breasts and forcing her to touch his genitals.
+
+You can judge those claims credible or not (having reviewed the cases, I think the Broaddrick allegation is much more credible than the other two), but they’re not ""sex scandals."" They’re accusations of sexual violence. And recent public conversations about Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, and other prominent men accused of sexual assault suggest that the American public is much more willing now to treat those kinds of accusations seriously.
+
+There’s an issue with Bannon’s strategy, however. It depends not merely on getting young voters outraged about Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct. To work, this strategy has to convince them that Hillary Clinton is somehow complicit in, or responsible for, his behavior. And that is a much tougher sell, both because the evidence is far thinner (the closest thing to a smoking gun is Hillary calling Lewinsky a ""narcissistic looney-toon"" … in a private conversation with a friend) and because of the inherent perversity of blaming a wife for her husband’s crimes.
+
+It’s a move that denies Clinton her identity as a distinct person from her spouse, which in turn undermines any of the feminist appeal this attack line might have had to voters outraged by Clinton’s treatment of Lewinsky, Broaddrick, etc.
+
+Sure enough, when Rachel Kramer Bussel surveyed female millennial voters for Fortune on their views on the scandals, she found that most people she talked to thought it was gross to equate Clinton's behavior with that of her husband, with one commenting, ""I consider Hillary Clinton as a politician independent of her husband, Bill Clinton. Just as I would never associate Bernie Sanders as a politician with his wife, Jane Sanders, I would never associate a politician as a politician with their spouse.""
+
+It’s informative to look at the actual point in the debate where Trump brought-up-by-pretending-to-not-bring-up the Clinton sex scandals. It was directly in response to Hillary Clinton bringing up his treatment of Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and other instances of sexism:
+
+CLINTON: You know, he tried to switch from looks to stamina. But this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs, and dogs, and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said... TRUMP: I never said that. CLINTON: ...women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men. CLINTON: And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ""Miss Piggy."" Then he called her ""Miss Housekeeping,"" because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name. TRUMP: Where did you find this? Where did you find this? CLINTON: Her name is Alicia Machado. TRUMP: Where did you find this? CLINTON: And she has become a US citizen, and you can bet... CLINTON: ...she’s going to vote this November. TRUMP: You know, Hillary is hitting me with tremendous commercials. Some of it’s said in entertainment. Some of it’s said — somebody who’s been very vicious to me, Rosie O’Donnell, I said very tough things to her, and I think everybody would agree that she deserves it and nobody feels sorry for her. But you want to know the truth? I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, ""I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. It’s inappropriate. It’s not nice.""
+
+Trump was getting pummeled on his own record of mistreating women, and he immediately parried with a reference to the affairs.
+
+You see this relationship in the responses of his surrogates, as well. Recall what Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager said: ""He literally could have gone there and made very clear that he came ready to say some rough things if she was going to challenge him about his abuse – about his record on women."" (Emphasis mine.) Rutledge, the Arkansas attorney general, replied to questioning about Machado by saying, ""If we want to dig back through the '90s on comments made about women…"" and running through the Lewinsky scandal.
+
+This trend suggests that the Trump campaign has assigned a specific role for the candidate's attacks on Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct. They’re not deployed right off the bat, or in TV ads, but only as damage control in response to questions about his own record of mistreating women.
+
+That might be smart campaigning; as the old saying goes, ""If you’re explaining you’re losing,"" and trying to parry specific accusations might come off as defensive. But this strategy does have a side effect of implicitly conceding that Trump behaved poorly. Even he and his team aren’t willing to defend his own conduct on the merits. So they deflect to Bill’s — and try to pin it on Hillary in the process.",REAL
+10442,Hillary Clinton Jumps the Shark with ‘Trump’s Secret Russian Server’ Conspiracy Theory,"
+21st Century Wire says… 
+Yesterday, WikiLeaks editor and founder Julian Assange confirmed what 21WIRE already knew – that Hillary Clinton and the Obama White House’s claim of the US election process being “hacked by the Russian government” was a desperate work of fiction. Not content with that fish tale, Hillary Clinton took the narrative to an embarrassing new low (if that was even possible) with another, wilder made-up conspiracy story about the Russians. 
+The following statement made by Hillary Clinton yesterday epitomizes the term “ jumping the shark “: It's time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia. https://t.co/D8oSmyVAR4 pic.twitter.com/07dRyEmPjX 
+— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 31, 2016 
+Apparently, Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff fed her a planted online news story (by the Clinton campaign?) which ran on a questionable pro-Democratic Party online news outlet. On Monday, the Slate ran the story by one of its alleged “journalists” named Franklin Foer , complete with a clickbait blog-like headline, “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?” 
+Whatever legitimacy the Slate had before last night, just evaporated. 
+John Roberts from Forbes explains, “The bottom line is that Slate screwed up by publishing this in the first place, and by adding more kooky misinformation to an already addled election season. As for Foer, he says on Twitter a “follow up” piece is in the works.” 
+Roberts rightly points out that the only follow-up story for this lemon should start with the word “RETRACTION.” 
+CYBER FEUD: Assange believes Clinton has gone beyond the pale with her Russian conspiracy obsession. 
+During his exclusive interview with award-winning filmmaker John Pilger, when asked what he thought of Hillary Clinton’s shrill antics, Julian Assange said, “ “I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person, because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick.” 
+The saddest thing about this and the other dishonest and destructive actions of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party – is that no one in the party seems to see anything wrong with this level of deceit and dishonesty. Like Hillary Clinton in her sociopathic path to power, the party rank and file are acting like a cult coven following their high priestess. 
+Still, Clinton surrogates in the media are trying to equate Clinton simultaneously scapegoating and baiting another nuclear superpower – with a decade-old misogynist hot mic audio excerpt of Donald Trump in a TMZ-style tabloid sting. That pretty much sums up Democratic Party strategy for this election season. 
+Assange was right. Clinton, the Democratic Party and their surrogate, are eating themselves. Such are the spoils of power in Washington that men and women will do and say anything to have it. 
+READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Files 
+SUPPORT 21WIRE – SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV ",FAKE
+1920,Will Clinton’s experience be a liability?,"Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was supposed to be a central argument for her forthcoming run for president. Her globe-trotting record as the nation’s chief diplomat, her role championing women’s empowerment and gay rights, and her experience on tough national security issues were all supposed to confer credentials that none of her possible GOP opponents would possess.
+
+But over the past two weeks, with back-to-back revelations that she was working with foreign countries that gave millions of dollars to her family’s charitable foundation and that she set up and exclusively used a private e-mail system, that argument has been put in peril.
+
+Instead of a fresh chapter in which Clinton came into her own, her time as the country’s top diplomat now threatens to remind voters of what some people dislike about her — a tendency toward secrecy and defensiveness, along with the whiff of scandal that clouded the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton.
+
+That side of Hillary Clinton also plays directly into the main Republican argument against her, that she is a candidate of “yesterday” — as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida recently put it — who comes with decades of baggage the country no longer need carry.
+
+“Part of the reason the story is gaining traction is that it reminds people of what the Clinton White House was like,” said American University political science professor Jennifer Lawless. “It reminds people of the scandals, the secrecy and the lack of transparency that were often associated with Bill Clinton’s eight years in Washington.”
+
+Clinton was already certain to face sharp questions during a presidential campaign about her handling of the deadly attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. She has never been shown to have any direct role in events leading up to the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, but an inquiry that Democrats call a fishing expedition has been given new life by the revelation that her e-mails were not immediately given to Congress.
+
+Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), who chairs a special congressional committee on Benghazi, has subpoenaed Clinton’s e-mails and plans to call her as a witness once his investigation is further along. That will mean a showdown in the middle of a presidential campaign in which she will be trying to reintroduce herself to voters.
+
+“You do not need a law degree to have an understanding of how troubling this is,” Gowdy said in a news conference last week.
+
+Clinton has said nothing about the e-mail controversy beyond a tweet promising to seek to make the messages public. On Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Clinton needs to talk in more detail about the issue. “From this point on, the silence is going to hurt her,” Feinstein said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
+
+Clinton’s problems at the State Department also make it easier for Republicans to connect her to what they see as President Obama’s shaky foreign policy and his broken promise to operate the most transparent administration in history.
+
+Even the smallest things are being looked at anew. The iconic image of her at the State Department, which she chose as her Twitter avatar, shows her seated aboard a military transport plane, reading something — perhaps e-mail — on her BlackBerry.
+
+Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is weighing a 2016 bid, cast her reliance on private ­e-mail as a serious security risk. “It’s a little baffling, to be honest with you, that didn’t come up in Secretary Clinton’s thought process,” the Republican said in a Friday radio interview.
+
+And while Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite for her party’s nomination, some Democrats last week were more open about their misgivings about her candidacy. On Friday night in New Hampshire, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who might run against her, for the first time broke his silence on her use of the private e-mail account, saying that “openness and transparency are required of governing in the modern age.”
+
+For Clinton, the State Department years were a kind of protective cocoon from partisan politics, even though she was a visible member of a Democratic administration that was doing regular battle with congressional Republicans.
+
+She was rarely called upon to take public positions on partisan issues. Her history as a politically active first lady, senator and failed Democratic candidate for president were rarely mentioned in day-to-day news coverage of her trips and priorities as secretary.
+
+Clinton’s busy pace — she visited a record 112 countries — made it easy to deflect questions about the common assumption that she would make another run for the White House when her time at the State Department was over.
+
+After leaving office, she wrote a memoir of her time at the State Department that was published last year. The book, “Hard Choices,” marked her unmistakable entry into the 2016 presidential race and amounted to a virtual campaign manifesto.
+
+“We have to use all of America’s strengths to build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries, more shared responsibility and fewer conflicts, more good jobs and less poverty, more broadly based prosperity with less damage to our environment,” Clinton wrote.
+
+Clinton posted a Twitter message Wednesday night — two days into the e-mail controversy — saying she wants the public “to see my e-mails.” She said she has asked the State Department to review them for release.
+
+That review could also establish whether she broke any rules about the handling of sensitive information.
+
+The e-mail arrangement meant that Clinton’s work ­e-mails were being routed through a private server in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home and were not being archived by the government as now required. She handed over 55,000 pages of e-mails upon the State Department’s request last year, more than a year after she left her post.
+
+She has not explained the reason for the un­or­tho­dox arrangement, and her husband declined to weigh in on Sunday. “I’m not the one to judge that. I have an opinion, but I have a bias,” Bill Clinton said in response to a reporter’s question during a Florida appearance, according to Bloomberg Politics. He added: “I shouldn’t be making news on this.”
+
+The White House has distanced itself from the growing controversy. Obama said in an interview with CBS on Saturday that he did not know about Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail until reading news reports last week.
+
+“The president does have the expectation that everybody in his administration takes the steps that are necessary to be in compliance with the Federal Records Act and with the Presidential Records Act,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday. “And again, that means using, as often as possible, using your official government e-mail when you’re conducting official government business.”
+
+White House officials communicated with Clinton on her private account, and it is not clear that any White House official flagged the practice as a potential problem.
+
+The e-mail revelation came after the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation acknowledged in February that it had accepted a foreign-government donation in 2010 without submitting it for an ethics review, as required in a 2008 agreement with the Obama administration.
+
+The 2008 agreement had been reached to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Under the agreement, the foundation was to submit any donation from a foreign government that had not previously given money to the foundation.
+
+The goal was to allow ethics officers to analyze whether it might appear that the government was trying to influence U.S. policy with a donation to a charity so closely linked to the nation’s top diplomat.
+
+The foundation told The Washington Post that it had failed to follow that process in the case of an unsolicited $500,000 donation from the government of Algeria to assist in earthquake relief in Haiti. The donation coincided with a spike in lobbying by Algeria, which was defending its human rights record to U.S. officials.
+
+State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the donation did not pose a problem because U.S. support for rebuilding efforts in Haiti was well known before the Algerian donation came in.
+
+Prominent Clinton backers have dismissed the recent controversies as minor distractions unimportant to voters and blamed the e-mail flap on a Republican attack machine.
+
+But other Democrats expressed exasperation at what they called a slow and ham-handed response to the e-mail controversy by her small group of advisers. There is no in-house, campaign-grade rapid-response operation, and outside defenders had little notice that a problem was brewing.
+
+“I’d be surprised to find a lot of Democrats who think this is going to have a lot of legs,” said one senior Democratic strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Clinton is not yet a candidate. “But there is a level of angst and annoyance about how badly the thing has been mishandled.”
+
+Several Democrats said the controversy is being blown out of proportion and questioned whether Republicans are being subjected to the same level of scrutiny.
+
+Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) said that Clinton has been aboveboard and that the controversy will quickly fade.
+
+“She’s not trying to hide anything,” Sanchez said.",REAL
+4431,"Obama outlines plan to keep 5,500 troops in Afghanistan","President Obama said Thursday that he will keep 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan into 2017, ending his ambitions to bring home most American forces from that war-torn country before he leaves office.
+
+The president’s decision came after an extensive months-long review that included regular discussions with Afghanistan’s leaders, his national security team and U.S. commanders in the field. The move reflected a painful, if predictable, reality on the ground in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has seized new territory over the past year as Afghan troops have taken over the vast majority of the fighting.
+
+“Afghan forces are still not as strong as they need to be,” Obama said Thursday morning from the White House, explaining his decision. “. . . Meanwhile, the Taliban has made gains, particularly in rural areas, and can still launch deadly attacks in cities, including Kabul.”
+
+[The Islamic State is making these Afghans long for the Taliban]
+
+Obama said he will also dramatically slow the pace of the reduction of American forces and plans to maintain the current U.S. force of 9,800 through “most of 2016.” The post-2016 force will still be focused on training and advising the Afghan army, with a special emphasis on its elite counter­terrorism forces. The United States will also maintain a significant counterterrorism capability of drones and Special Operations forces to strike al-Qaeda and other militants who may be plotting attacks against the United States.
+
+The revised troop plans came after Afghan forces were driven from Kunduz, the first major city to fall to the Taliban since the war began in 2001. Two weeks passed before the Afghans, with some support from U.S. planes and Special Operations advisers, took the city back from the Taliban. Militants are now threatening other cities. “The bottom line is, in key areas of the country the security situation is still very fragile, and in some places there’s risk of deterioration,” Obama said.
+
+The president praised the Afghan government, under the leadership of President Ashraf Ghani, as a willing partner, and he lauded the Afghan troops, who have taken significant casualties. Both were critical factors in his decision to keep U.S. troops in the country.
+
+“Every single day, Afghan forces are out there fighting and dying to protect their country,” Obama said. “They’re not looking for us to do it for them.”
+
+The president insisted that his decision to abandon his plans to bring home U.S. troops was not a disappointment, even as he acknowledged the nation’s war weariness after more than 14 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. “I do not support the idea of endless war,” he said.
+
+His decision to keep troops in Afghanistan follows the surprising collapse of much of the U.S.-trained Iraqi army last year under pressure from Islamic State militants. Republican critics have charged that Obama withdrew troops too quickly from Iraq, precipitating the collapse of the Iraqi army and the rise of the Islamic State.
+
+The president did not mention the Iraqi failures in his statement from the White House. White House officials said that the Iraq setbacks did not influence Obama’s decision and that the two situations are not comparable, because the Afghan government was eager to maintain a long-term U.S. presence. Such conditions did not exist in Iraq.
+
+Afghan officials on Thursday welcomed the move to keep 9,800 troops in the country. “It’s very positive in light of the continued problems that this region is facing,” said Mohammad Daud Sultanzoy, a presidential candidate in 2014 who is now allied with Ghani. “Our security [forces] have shown the will and capability to fight, but we still need the support of our allies, especially the United States.”
+
+In Ghazni province, where Afghan forces are locked in a bloody fight with the Taliban, Gen. Sayed Malok called it a “good decision at the moment but a temporary solution.” He called for a more robust effort to train and equip Afghan forces.
+
+The decision is a significant departure from the exit plan that Obama announced in a White House Rose Garden speech in May 2014. In keeping with his promise to “turn the page” on the costly wars launched by his predecessor, Obama said then that he would reduce the U.S. footprint to about 1,000 troops, all based in Kabul, by the end of 2016.
+
+It is also a stark illustration of how persistent militant threats have stood in the way of Obama’s promises to end the ground wars that have dominated U.S. foreign policy since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
+
+In addition to a resurgent Taliban, al-Qaeda appears to have staked out new ground in Afghanistan, far from the group’s mountain enclaves to the northeast. Last week, U.S. forces began a major operation against al-Qaeda in Kandahar, launching 63 airstrikes on militant training bases.
+
+David Sedney, a former Pentagon official who is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the 2015 fighting season was “the most massive, fiercest” yet.
+
+“The Taliban are already signaling that next year’s offensive will be bigger and bloodier than this year’s. The Taliban are bad; Daesh is worse,” Sedney said, referring to the emerging Islamic State presence in Afghanistan.
+
+Administration officials portrayed the decision as a natural extension of a strategy that was making progress, rather than an indication that the president’s original plan had failed. “I don’t think anyone ever intended that the job, so to speak, would be finished” despite Obama’s time­table, said Lisa Monaco, a senior White House official. “We always said that we would continue to have a presence there.”
+
+[After Kunduz, Taliban is now targeting other Afghan cities]
+
+Under the new plan, the U.S. military will retain bases in Kabul, as planned, but also have forces at Bagram air base and at bases outside Kandahar and Jalalabad, the largest cities in Afghanistan’s southern and eastern regions.
+
+Obama emphasized that Afghans would continue to take the lead role in the fighting, with Americans providing advice and some counterterrorism support from bases outside Kabul. “These bases will give us the presence and the reach our forces require to achieve their mission,” he said.
+
+The larger force of 5,500 troops is projected to cost about $15 billion a year, or about $5 billion more than the smaller, 1,000-person Kabul-based force would have cost.
+
+Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, speaking at the Pentagon, said the next president will probably need to make decisions about the long-term position of U.S. forces­ in Afghanistan.
+
+“Is it going to be 5,500 forever?” he told reporters. “I can only say this: That is our best estimate now of what we should plan for and are planning for and budgeting for for 2017.”
+
+Although U.S. deaths have fallen off dramatically in recent years, the change may also mean more U.S. casualties. This year, 25 American service members and civilians have been killed in the country.
+
+Obama emphasized that the relatively small American military presence, down from 100,000 at the war’s peak, would not decide the war’s outcome, and he emphasized that peace talks offered the sole viable solution to the long, bloody civil war.
+
+“By now, it should be clear to the Taliban and all who oppose Afghanistan’s progress, the only real way to achieve the full drawdown of U.S. and foreign troops from Afghanistan is through a lasting political settlement with the Afghan government,” Obama said.
+
+Sudarsan Raghavan, Sayed Salahuddin and Mohammad Sharif in Kabul contributed to this report.
+
+In Afghanistan, the art of fighting extremism
+
+Afghans who once watched war from afar forced to flee as front lines shift
+
+Afghan forces straining to keep the Taliban at bay",REAL
+1675,Biden backers to naysayers: Not so fast,"Democrats loyal to Vice President Biden have a three-word response to the politicians and pundits who say Hillary Rodham Clinton’s performance in Tuesday’s Democratic debate makes a Biden campaign less likely: Not so fast.
+
+Appearing eager to tamp down talk that the window of opportunity for the vice president to launch a campaign nearly closed after the debate, loyalists are taking steps to assure potential supporters that there is still a path to the nomination, however competitive and challenging, if Biden decides to run.
+
+The clearest evidence came Friday as the International Association of Fire Fighters informed the vice president the union will endorse him if he enters the race, according to a source familiar with the union’s thinking. That followed a letter e-mailed late Thursday to Biden’s political support network by former senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware, who said a Biden campaign would be “optimistic,” “from the heart” and unscripted.
+
+“If he runs, he will run because of his burning conviction that we need to fundamentally change the balance in our economy and the political structure to restore the ability of the middle class to get ahead,” Kaufman wrote.
+
+Even as initial polls showed a bump for Clinton after her performance, Biden’s lingering shadow continued to leave a sense of instability over the Democratic race, leading to questions on the subject for President Obama during a Friday news conference with the South Korean president. “I am not going to comment on what Joe is doing or not doing,” Obama said. “I think you can direct those questions to my very able vice president.”
+
+And in a television interview Friday, Clinton declined to embrace a suggestion from John Podesta, her senior campaign adviser, that Biden must make a decision soon because the race is already engaged. “That’s up to Vice President Biden,” she said on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” “Certainly I’m not in any way suggesting or recommending that the vice president accept any timetable other than the one that is clicking inside of him. He has to make this decision.”
+
+Kaufman’s words were arguably less significant than the author behind them. The former senator — appointed to the seat after his ex-boss became vice president — is Biden’s longest-serving adviser, bridging the divide between the generation of staffers who worked for Biden as a senator in the 1980s and a new crop of lieutenants who came up through the past decade of the family’s public service.
+
+More important, Kaufman has been frequently portrayed as the most reluctant of the trio of inner-circle aides to the vice president to launch a bid and is known to be angry at the frequent portrayals of Biden as being on the brink of announcing his candidacy. A note from him to the alumni network is treated as having more credibility than any leak to the national press corps.
+
+The main issue, still apparently unresolved, remains whether Biden and his family feel ready for the rigors of a presidential campaign so soon after the death of his oldest son, Beau, in May. Nothing Biden has said publicly in recent weeks has suggested an affirmative answer, but he has not addressed the issue directly since before Pope Francis’s visit to the United States last month.
+
+According to those tracking the vice president’s deliberations, a decision could come at any time, although the only certain timetable is the one set by the deadlines for qualifying for primary and caucus ballots throughout the country. Those deadlines began to take effect at the end of the month.
+
+Outside Biden’s tight circle of advisers, many Democrats have long assumed that, beyond personal and family considerations, the biggest factor in the vice president’s decision-making involved Clinton’s political vulnerability.
+
+A month ago, as controversy over her use of a private e-mail account while serving as secretary of state damaged her image, she appeared seriously weakened. That prompted calls from nervous Democrats, or those in the party never particularly partial to Clinton, for Biden to jump in.
+
+[Family issues weigh heaviest on Biden as he considers a 2016 run]
+
+But assessments of Clinton brightened considerably after she delivered an impressive performance in Tuesday’s debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and two other candidates.
+
+Biden loyalists have tried not to be swept up by shifting assumptions about the strength or weakness of the Democratic front-runner, believing she was never as damaged as some were suggesting a month ago.
+
+At the same time, they are not persuaded that this week’s debate fundamentally changed the race in her favor. There is outside evidence backing up that view, including strong interest in Sanders on social media and the fact that the senator from Vermont raised more than $2 million in the 24 hours after the debate.
+
+In recent days, Biden has kept in touch with leaders of key constituency groups, including calls Friday morning. One recipient of a Biden call, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the private conversation, said the vice president actively discussed the emerging campaign strategy, its structure and what constituencies he would win over. Biden believes he has a persuasive message for Democratic voters and would have the resources to run a competitive and potentially lengthy campaign, the call recipient said. Moreover, Biden’s view of the debate, this source said, was that it confirmed that Clinton’s current competition is subpar at best.
+
+Polls and other evidence suggest that if Biden was to enter, the Democratic nomination campaign would quickly become a three-way contest. Clinton would remain the favorite, but it is clear that Sanders has more than enough money to continue well beyond the four earliest states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
+
+Biden has told those he has spoken with that he believes he, too, would have the money to remain in the race past those states. It remains unclear what other unions would follow the firefighters in endorsing Biden. “Any conversations I’ve had with the vice president would be private,” Harold A. Schaitberger, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said in a telephone interview Friday night.
+
+None of the first four contests appears ready to tip to Biden, although because he is not a declared candidate, the polls are not reliable. But some of those partial to Biden have seized on a little-remembered fact from 1992 to offer hope that early defeats need not drive a candidate out of the nomination contest.
+
+[As Biden weighs a 2016 campaign, does he want to be the anti-Clinton?]
+
+In that campaign, Bill Clinton lost 10 of the first 11 contests, from early February through the first days of March. He then secured a string of victories in western and Southern caucuses and primaries, followed by wins in Illinois and Michigan that effectively broke the back of his opponents.
+
+Hillary Clinton’s next major event will be an appearance Thursday before the House committee investigating the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012, along with her e-mail account. That highly charged appearance has taken a turn in her favor as a result of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) suggesting the goal of the committee had been to weaken her politically.
+
+Then on Oct. 24, Clinton and other Democratic candidates will speak at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa, a quadrennial proving ground for presidential hopefuls. Given the breadth of organizing that Clinton’s team has done in the Hawkeye State, Biden’s advisers assume the event will give her an additional boost, although Sanders will have plenty of supporters there, too.
+
+All that would suggest that Biden could delay announcing a decision until after those two events.
+
+There were many lines in Kaufman’s letter that suggested Biden still wasn’t ready to make a decision, despite the encroaching deadlines.
+
+“I know in the daily ups and down of the political swirl, we all get bombarded with the tactics. So sometimes it’s good to take a step back and get real again. Let’s stay in touch,” Kaufman wrote. “If he decides to run, we will need each and every one of you — yesterday!”",REAL
+5057,Clinton Enjoys Post-DNC Bounce - But Will it Last?,"Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton received a big convention bounce. A new CNN poll has her leading GOP rival Donald Trump 52 percent to 43 percent in a two-way matchup.
+
+The Republican nominee is still under fire for how he reacted over the weekend to the parents of Humayun Khan, a Muslim U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq.
+
+Khizr Khan blasted Trump at the Democratic convention, noting that unlike his fallen son, Trump has ""sacrificed nothing and no one."" Unwilling to the let the insult pass, Trump hit back, implying that Khan's wife wasn't allowed to speak during her husband's DNC address because of the family's Muslim faith.
+
+The GOP nominee's remarks have sparked outrage from veterans and members of his own party.
+
+""While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us,"" war hero Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said.
+
+Trump's campaign is now appealing to GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill to help quell the controversy.
+
+Meanwhile, a mother whose son was killed in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is also speaking out.
+
+Patricia Smith criticized Clinton at the Republican convention, noting that she has received much different treatment than the Khan family.
+
+""I was treated like dirt. I don't think the Khan family was treated that way. I was treated like dirt. I was called a liar… I don't imagine my son getting killed. I don't imagine that at all,"" Smith said.
+
+Meanwhile on the campaign trail, Clinton attacked Trump's tax cut plan, and again called on him to release his tax returns.
+
+""And while we're at it, we would like to see those tax returns wouldn't we? My husband and I put out, I think about 33 or 34 years' worth, if you're interested,"" Clinton pointed out.
+
+Trump alleges that former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., made a deal with the devil to endorse Clinton.
+
+""If he would have just not done anything, just go home, go to sleep, relaxed, he would have been a hero, but he made a deal with the devil. She's the devil. He made a deal with the devil,"" Trump said.
+
+There's still a long way to go until Election Day and many of today's controversies could easily be forgotten by November. Clinton's poll bounce could fade as bounces often do, turning this into a tight race once again.",REAL
+9738,Alabama Prison Officials Retaliate Against Prison Strike Leader By Cutting Water To Cell,"Advocates say prison officials at the Kilby Correctional Facility in Alabama turned off the water to Kinetik Justice Amun’s solitary cell after he initiated a hunger strike. Officials then transferred him to the Limestone Correctional Facility, which has a “behavioral modification program” known among prisoners as a “hot bay” dorm in which prisoners are forced to live in pairs in hot and squalid solitary confinement cells.
+Kinetik, also known as Robert Earl Counsil, is the second leader of the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) to be transferred to Limestone. FAM is a group of incarcerated people and their families struggling to end prison slavery and shed light on inhumane conditions in Alabama’s prison system.
+James Plesant, also known as Dhati Khalid, was the first leader to be transferred. Melvin Ray, also known as Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, is the last remaining leader of FAM not to be transferred to Limestone.
+According to a statement released by the Ordinary People Society, an Alabama-based human rights group for the incarcerated, Kinetik refused meals upon arrival at the Kilby Correctional Facility on October 21. Before the transfer, Kinetik spent three years housed in solitary confinement at the Holman Correctional Facility.
+As previously reported by Shadowproof, Kilby is said to be a “ bully camp .” When one Alabama prisoner learned of Kinetik’s transfer to Kilby, he explained the prison is where they send those that “they have to iron out with brutality.” He added, “When they send you to Kilby, that’s where they break your arms and break your legs.”
+Prison officials turned off the water to Kinetik’s cell in response to his hunger strike, advocates say. “They are trying to kill him,” argued Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, founder of the Ordinary People Society and an “outside” spokesperson for FAM. The Alabama Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
+The Alabama Department of Corrections is currently facing a federal investigation into the rampant violence, overcrowding, and structural decay in its prison system. Kinetik believes his transfer was an act of retaliation by prison officials for his political activity, and that they timed the transfer to prevent him from meeting with this lawyer.
+Kinetik is an outspoken advocate for the human rights of the incarcerated. Along with Dhati Khalid and Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, Kinetik and the Free Alabama Movement were some of the people behind the call-to-action for the national prison strike against prison slave labor, which began on September 9.
+Prominent human rights lawyer and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson, announced he will work with Pastor Glasgow and look into Kinetik’s case.
+Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun told Shadowproof the “behavioral modification” dorm or Hot Bay like the one at Limestone is “supposed to be a volunteer program where you volunteer to go into it, but there’s no volunteer aspect. They’re just putting people in it.”
+“You don’t have to have anything specific that you’ve done. They’re not serving you any paperwork, there’s not any kind of due process, and they’re getting funding from it,” he said. “So to justify funding, they have to have bodies.”
+“Really what they’re doing is they’re targeting individuals,” Bennu said. He noted there is a Hot Bay program at Donaldson, where he is incarcerated. “That’s where James Plesant was originally. T hey framed him. They’re constantly framing and jumping on people in that Hot Bay.”
+In the Hot Bay, prisoners are denied visitation, religious services, recreation, and social services, according to the Free Alabama Movement.
+“[The Hot Bay] is worse than solitary confinement because they take all of your property and you have a cell mate,” Bennu said. “So the one here at Donaldson is two men to a cell. You’re in the cell with another person for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Y’all defecating with each other. Y’all urinating with each other, passing gas, burping, sleeping, waking up. Constantly, you’re in the cell with the door locked 24/7 with someone else.”
+“They’re sending you up there, they’re torturing people up there. People first got exposed to the Hot Bay program from Bibb County,” Bennu recalled.
+“There was a bunch of young guys in there. They tore the Hot Bay up,” he said, referring to a July 2015 riot. “They made it where you couldn’t stay in it. They had to get everyone out of there. That’s how bad they are. That’s how bad it was.”
+“A lot of people think that when they say they put us in solitary confinement that it’s solitary confinement. In and of itself, that constitutes the torture. It’s not just putting me in the cell. It’s the conditions that they put me in inside of these cells,” Bennu argued.
+He continued, “They put us in contaminated cells. What they do is, they have people in solitary and they be complaining about the plumbing or complaining about the lights or the ventilation or something. And they will put us in those cells.”
+“They already know there are issues—there’s plumbing issues, there’s maintenance issues, and they’ll put us in these, what they call ‘black out cells’ or contaminated cells. The lights won’t work, we’ll be in the cells in the dark trying to read, ruining our eyesight. The mattress will be torn up, sleeping on top of these concrete slabs. The water will be leaking, running all over the cell. The vents and stuff are filthy. “
+“It’s all of these elements that are added on, but that doesn’t show up in the paperwork, and that’s what they’ve done to people like myself. They put me in an isolated cell. I’m on what they call, ‘Walk Along Status.’ That means I cannot interact with anyone. I can’t be around another person. Same thing with Kinetik and James Plesant,” Bennu concluded.
+A prisoner previously explained to Shadowproof that Limestone is “where they send everybody and you have to spend one year in isolation.” That prisoner hoped Kilby was not a “layover” on Kinetik’s way to Limestone.
+“If he doesn’t reach Limestone, he’ll be okay,” the prisoner said at the time. According to the website for the Alabama Department of Corrections, Kinetik is now incarcerated at Limestone.
+The post Alabama Prison Officials Retaliate Against Prison Strike Leader By Cutting Water To Cell appeared first on Shadowproof .
+",FAKE
+7410,Re: Texas Police Arrest Trump Voter for Wearing “Deplorable” T-Shirt,"Email 
+On Monday, a man who voted for Donald Trump was arrested for wearing a T-shirt that referenced Hillary Clinton 's comments about Trump supporters being ""deplorables"" to the polls. 
+Brett Mauthe, 55, was arrested after he went to the polls wearing a pro-Trump hat and a shirt that read, ""basket of deplorables."" 
+According to KSAT 12, Mauthe removed his hat at the request of those who were overseeing the polls. However, since the t-shirt did not violate the election code, he refused to turn it inside out nor remove it. 
+Subsequently, he was arrested and charged with electioneering. 
+KSAT 12 reports : 
+Bulverde police Chief Gary Haecker confirmed the arrest but declined to release details. Instead, he deferred to Comal County's election coordinator, Cynthia Jaqua. 
+Jaqua said the offense of electioneering isn't limited to people who stand outside polling places holding signs. Violations can be committed by voters as well. 
+""It can mean a T-shirt, a button, a hat, you know?"" she said. ""Anything related to the voting, the party, the candidate."" 
+Jaqua declined to release specific details about Mauthe's arrest. 
+Jaqua is quoted by My San Antonio : 
+It's in the election code. Electioneering is prohibited within a 100-foot marker. You cannot express views for or against a candidate or political party by wearing buttons, T-shirts, hats, whatever else or carrying signs,"" she said. 
+Most people who make the mistake manage to avoid going to jail, she added. 
+""Every election we have to advise people. Even if it's a school bond issue. They wear candidates' shirts and we just have to remind them. 'Please go into the restroom and turn it inside out.' This is the first time I recall someone getting arrested,"" she said, during two decades working at the county election office. 
+""A gentleman did walk in a little while ago with a slogan for Trump, and when I asked him to please take it off, he was real nice, and took it off,"" she added, while working a polling site Thursday afternoon in New Braunfels. 
+So, according to this nonsense, a perfectly legal shirt could be worn to the polls one day, but if a politician make reference to the phrase on that shirt it becomes illegal to wear it to the polls the next day? This is utterly ridiculous. 
+My question on all of that is, what happened to free speech? Is that recognized as a God-given right in the First Amendment? I mean, I realize that the Constitution is to restrict the federal government, but honestly, shouldn't the states recognize the right of free speech, even in a polling place? Seems to me those kinds of laws stifle the very thing you are electing representatives to ensure are protected. 
+Other voters agree with me. 
+""I don't feel like you should be preaching to anybody, but I do feel like you should be able to wear a shirt if you want and if it has the candidate,"" Georgina Pereida said after casting her vote. ""I'm kind of shocked, because I think that's part of the freedoms that we're voting for."" 
+Jose Tovar claims that you should know the rules and regulations if you are 18 and vote. Again, I ask, why are there laws and regulations restricting this freedom of speech? It's not inflammatory. It isn't a lie. It isn't slander. What's illegal about it? 
+I'll tell you, politicians want to control people, and this is one of many means they use to do that. This is what happens when you don't hold your elected officials accountable for the stupid regulations they impose. 
+Mauthe decided to not comment anymore after his story began to be altered in the media. 
+""The reason I'm not going to talk any more to the media is that the story gets twisted around, and I don't want to give you any comment,"" he said . 
+The charged of electioneering is a class C misdemeanor. Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . shares",FAKE
+5551,"NGOs should condemn terrorists in Syria, not Russia fighting them – Foreign Ministry","NGOs should condemn terrorists in Syria, not Russia fighting them – Foreign Ministry Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 22:53 Edited time: 26 Oct, 2016 23:12 Get short URL Aerial view of the Foreign Ministry building in Moscow. © Maksim Blinov / Sputnik The NGOs that demanded Russia’s removal from UN Human Rights Council lack impartiality as they ignore terrorist activities as well as violations by the US-led coalition in Syria, the Russian Foreign Ministry's Commissioner for Human Rights told RT. Trends Russian anti-terror op in Syria , Syria unrest 
+Targeting Russia was “a gross misstep on the part of the human rights defenders,” Konstantin Dolgov said. 
+“If they call themselves [human rights defenders] they have to be objective. Al least, they have to try to be impartial. How can they assess the human rights situation in Syria in this one-sided manner? Just to join the chorus of Western governments and politicians, groundlessly accusing Russia of bombing civilian targets in Syria, without providing any evidence of this,” Dolgov added. 
+READ MORE: US-led coalition killed 300 Syrian civilians in 11 probed strikes – Amnesty 
+The NGOs, which failed to provide any solid proof of Russia’s alleged wrongdoings, “completely ignore the bulk of the problem” in Syria, the commissioner stressed. “And the bulk of the problem is the activities of the terrorist organizations like Islamic State, [Jabhat] al-Nusra… which have been persistently killing dozens of thousands of civilians in Syria.” 
+Dolgov wondered “how can those NGOs ignore… numerous killings of civilians and destruction of infrastructure by the coalition led by the US?” when “there are multiple examples” of such violations. 
+“If you’re against violations of human rights, you should be against violation everywhere and by everybody,” he said. 
+The commissioner pointed out that, on Wednesday, Amnesty International – which had not signed the petition – blamed the US for killing hundreds of civilians in Syria and refusing to investigate those incidents. 
+The numbers of civilian victims provided by the group – around 300 – “aren’t complete,” Dolgov said. 
+“I don’t think that an accurate number. I don’t think anybody there has an accurate number.” Read more Over 80 NGOs call for Russia to be dropped from UN rights council over Syria 
+More than 80 international organizations – including Human Rights Watch, CARE International and Refugees International – have signed a petition for Russia to be thrown off the UN Human Rights Council. They claimed that Moscow was no longer fit to hold its position in the United Nations body, due to its military operation in Syria. 
+It turned out that most of the organizations are part of the very same Syria Relief Network based in Turkey, however, casting potential doubts over their impartiality. 
+The petition came ahead of the UN Human Rights Council election, scheduled to take place on Friday. The Foreign Ministry official opted not to predict the outcome of the vote, but said that Russia was “definitely” running to regain its seat on the council. 
+“We’re running because we have a very strong record in the protection of international law; in the protection of international human rights law. We don’t have right now, at this last moment before the election, to prove anything. Our policies are well known and we’ve been one of the most active and creative members of the UN Human Rights Council for many-many years now,” Dolgov stressed. 
+West, Arab states ‘protecting terrorists’ who will never win in Syria – Mother Agnes to RT 
+Moscow is aware that there some international players who want to block Russia’s activities in the Human Rights Council, because “we’re not professing double standards. We are consistently against politicizing human rights. We have a lot of supporters,” Dolgov added.",FAKE
+8648,Genetically Modified Crops in U.S. Fail to Deliver Expected Yields,"Genetically Modified Crops in U.S. Fail to Deliver Expected Yields 10/31/2016 
+ALL GOV 
+The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to eat. 
+But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides. 
+The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides. 
+Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise. 
+An analysis by The Times using U.N. data showed that the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany . Also, a recent National Academy of Sciences report found “there was little evidence” that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops. 
+At the same time, herbicide use has increased in the United States, even as major crops like corn, soybeans and cotton have been converted to modified varieties. And the United States has fallen behind Europe’s biggest producer, France, in reducing the overall use of pesticides, which includes both herbicides and insecticides. 
+One measure, contained in data from the U.S. Geological Survey , shows the stark difference in the use of pesticides. Since GM crops were introduced in the United States two decades ago for crops like corn, cotton and soybeans, the use of toxins that kill insects and fungi has fallen by a third, but the spraying of herbicides, which are used in much higher volumes, has risen 21 percent. 
+By contrast, in France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen 65 percent and herbicide use has decreased 36 percent. 
+To Learn More:",FAKE
+9968,The Fatal Expense Of American Imperialism," The Fatal Expense Of American Imperialism
+By Jeffrey D. Sachs
+ Boston Globe "" - THE SINGLE MOST important issue in allocating national resources is war versus peace, or as macroeconomists put it, “guns versus butter.” The United States is getting this choice profoundly wrong, squandering vast sums and undermining national security. In economic and geopolitical terms, America suffers from what Yale historian Paul Kennedy calls “imperial overreach.” If our next president remains trapped in expensive Middle East wars, the budgetary costs alone could derail any hopes for solving our vast domestic problems.
+It may seem tendentious to call America an empire, but the term fits certain realities of US power and how it’s used. An empire is a group of territories under a single power. Nineteenth-century Britain was obviously an empire when it ruled India, Egypt, and dozens of other colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The United States directly rules only a handful of conquered islands (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands), but it stations troops and has used force to influence who governs in dozens of other sovereign countries. That grip on power beyond America’s own shores is now weakening.
+The scale of US military operations is remarkable. The US Department of Defense has (as of a 2010 inventory) 4,999 military facilities, of which 4,249 are in the United States; 88 are in overseas US territories; and 662 are in 36 foreign countries and foreign territories, in all regions of the world. Not counted in this list are the secret facilities of the US intelligence agencies. The cost of running these military operations and the wars they support is extraordinary, around $900 billion per year, or 5 percent of US national income, when one adds the budgets of the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, homeland security, nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy, and veterans benefits. The $900 billion in annual spending is roughly one-quarter of all federal government outlays.
+The United States has a long history of using covert and overt means to overthrow governments deemed to be unfriendly to US interests, following the classic imperial strategy of rule through locally imposed friendly regimes. In a powerful study of Latin America between 1898 and 1994, for example, historian John Coatsworth counts 41 cases of “successful” US-led regime change, for an average rate of one government overthrow by the United States every 28 months for a century. And note: Coatsworth’s count does not include the failed attempts, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
+This tradition of US-led regime change has been part and parcel of US foreign policy in other parts of the world, including Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Wars of regime change are costly to the United States, and often devastating to the countries involved. Two major studies have measured the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One, by my Columbia colleague Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes, arrived at the cost of $3 trillion as of 2008. A more recent study, by the Cost of War Project at Brown University, puts the price tag at $4.7 trillion through 2016. Over a 15-year period, the $4.7 trillion amounts to roughly $300 billion per year, and is more than the combined total outlays from 2001 to 2016 for the federal departments of education, energy, labor, interior, and transportation, and the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
+It is nearly a truism that US wars of regime change have rarely served America’s security needs. Even when the wars succeed in overthrowing a government, as in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Moammar Khadafy in Libya, the result is rarely a stable government, and is more often a civil war. A “successful” regime change often lights a long fuse leading to a future explosion, such as the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government and installation of the autocratic Shah of Iran, which was followed by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In many other cases, such as the US attempts (with Saudi Arabia and Turkey) to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the result is a bloodbath and military standoff rather than an overthrow of the government.
+WHAT IS THE DEEP motivation for these profligate wars and for the far-flung military bases that support them?
+From 1950 to 1990, the superficial answer would have been the Cold War. Yet America’s imperial behavior overseas predates the Cold War by half a century (back to the Spanish-American War, in 1898) and has outlasted it by another quarter century. America’s overseas imperial adventures began after the Civil War and the final conquests of the Native American nations. At that point, US political and business leaders sought to join the European empires — especially Britain, France, Russia, and the newly emergent Germany — in overseas conquests. In short order, America grabbed the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, and Hawaii, and joined the European imperial powers in knocking on the doors of China.
+As of the 1890s, the United States was by far the world’s largest economy, but until World War II, it took a back seat to the British Empire in global naval power, imperial reach, and geopolitical dominance. The British were the unrivaled masters of regime change — for example, in carving up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Yet the exhaustion from two world wars and the Great Depression ended the British and French empires after World War II and thrust the United States and Russia into the forefront as the two main global empires. The Cold War had begun.
+The economic underpinning of America’s global reach was unprecedented. As of 1950, US output constituted a remarkable 27 percent of global output, with the Soviet Union roughly a third of that, around 10 percent. The Cold War fed two fundamental ideas that would shape American foreign policy till now. The first was that the United States was in a struggle for survival against the Soviet empire. The second was that every country, no matter how remote, was a battlefield in that global war. While the United States and the Soviet Union would avoid a direct confrontation, they flexed their muscles in hot wars around the world that served as proxies for the superpower competition.
+Over the course of nearly a half century, Cuba, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Namibia, Mozambique, Chile, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even tiny Granada, among many others, were interpreted by US strategists as battlegrounds with the Soviet empire. Often, far more prosaic interests were involved. Private companies like United Fruit International and ITT convinced friends in high places (most famously the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster and CIA director Allen) that land reforms or threatened expropriations of corporate assets were dire threats to US interests, and therefore in need of US-led regime change. Oil interests in the Middle East were another repeated cause of war, as had been the case for the British Empire from the 1920s.
+These wars destabilized and impoverished the countries involved rather than settling the politics in America’s favor. The wars of regime change were, with few exceptions, a litany of foreign policy failure. They were also extraordinarily costly for the United States itself. The Vietnam War was of course the greatest of the debacles, so expensive, so bloody, and so controversial that it crowded out Lyndon Johnson’s other, far more important and promising war, the War on Poverty, in the United States.
+The end of the Cold War, in 1991, should have been the occasion for a fundamental reorientation of US guns-versus-butter policies. The occasion offered the United States and the world a “peace dividend,” the opportunity to reorient the world and US economy from war footing to sustainable development. Indeed, the Rio Earth Summit, in 1992, established sustainable development as the centerpiece of global cooperation, or so it seemed.
+Alas, the blinders and arrogance of American imperial thinking prevented the United States from settling down to a new era of peace. As the Cold War was ending, the United States was beginning a new era of wars, this time in the Middle East. The United States would sweep away the Soviet-backed regimes in the Middle East and establish unrivalled US political dominance. Or at least that was the plan.
+THE QUARTER CENTURY since 1991 has therefore been marked by a perpetual US war in the Middle East, one that has destabilized the region, massively diverted resources away from civilian needs toward the military, and helped to create mass budget deficits and the buildup of public debt. The imperial thinking has led to wars of regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, across four presidencies: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The same thinking has induced the United States to expand NATO to Russia’s borders, despite the fact that NATO’s supposed purpose was to defend against an adversary — the Soviet Union — that no longer exists. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev has emphasized that eastward NATO expansion “was certainly a violation of the spirit of those declarations and assurances that we were given in 1990,” regarding the future of East-West security.
+There is a major economic difference, however, between now and 1991, much less 1950. At the start of the Cold War, in 1950, the United States produced around 27 percent of world output. As of 1991, when the Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz dreams of US dominance were taking shape, the United States accounted for around 22 percent of world production. By now, according to IMF estimates, the US share is 16 percent, while China has surpassed the United States, at around 18 percent. By 2021, according to projections by the International Monetary Fund, the United States will produce roughly 15 percent of global output compared with China’s 20 percent. The United States is incurring massive public debt and cutting back on urgent public investments at home in order to sustain a dysfunctional, militarized, and costly foreign policy.
+Thus comes a fundamental choice. The United States can vainly continue the neoconservative project of unipolar dominance, even as the recent failures in the Middle East and America’s declining economic preeminence guarantee the ultimate failure of this imperial vision. If, as some neoconservatives support, the United States now engages in an arms race with China, we are bound to come up short in a decade or two, if not sooner. The costly wars in the Middle East — even if continued much less enlarged in a Hillary Clinton presidency — could easily end any realistic hopes for a new era of scaled-up federal investments in education, workforce training, infrastructure, science and technology, and the environment.
+The far smarter approach will be to maintain America’s defensive capabilities but end its imperial pretensions. This, in practice, means cutting back on the far-flung network of military bases, ending wars of regime change, avoiding a new arms race (especially in next-generation nuclear weapons), and engaging China, India, Russia, and other regional powers in stepped-up diplomacy through the United Nations, especially through shared actions on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, including climate change, disease control, and global education.
+Many American conservatives will sneer at the very thought that the United States’ room for maneuver should be limited in the slightest by the UN. But think how much better off the United States would be today had it heeded the UN Security Council’s wise opposition to the wars of regime change in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Many conservatives will point to Vladimir Putin’s actions in Crimea as proof that diplomacy with Russia is useless, without recognizing that it was NATO’s expansion to the Baltics and its 2008 invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, that was a primary trigger of Putin’s response.
+In the end, the Soviet Union bankrupted itself through costly foreign adventures such as the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and its vast over-investment in the military. Today the United States has similarly over-invested in the military, and could follow a similar path to decline if it continues the wars in the Middle East and invites an arms race with China. It’s time to abandon the reveries, burdens, and self-deceptions of empire and to invest in sustainable development at home and in partnership with the rest of the world.
+Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and author of “The Age of Sustainable Development.”",FAKE
+6818,Comment on A Group Of Reluctant Men Hold Kittens For The First Time. Hilarity Ensures by para para dinle,"A Group Of Reluctant Men Hold Kittens For The First Time. Hilarity Ensures By Tiffany Willis on September 14, 2014 Subscribe Screengrab via YouTube 
+Not everyone is a cat fan, and not everyone finds kittens adorable. I confess: I’ve always been a dog person, actually, but in recent years, I’ve become very attached to my adorable cats , too. 
+In this video, a group of big burly guys visited a feral cat rescue shelter and were given the opportunity to play with the kittens. They were reluctant, but you can quickly see how they transformed. This is priceless. 
+Let us know your thoughts at the Liberal America Facebook page . Sign up for our free daily newsletter to receive more great stories like this one. 
+Tiffany Willis is the founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal America. An unapologetic member of the Christian Left, she has spent most of her career actively working with ?the least of these? and disadvantaged and oppressed populations. She’s passionate about their struggles. To stay on top of topics she discusses,?like her? Facebook page ,? follow her on Twitter , or? connect with her via LinkedIn . She also has?a? grossly neglected personal blog ?and a? literary quotes blog that is a labor of love . Find her somewhere and join the discussion. About Tiffany Willis 
+Tiffany Willis is a fifth-generation Texan, a proponent of voluntary simplicity, a single mom, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal America. An unapologetic member of the Christian Left, she has spent most of her career actively working with “the least of these"" -- disadvantaged and oppressed populations, the elderly, people living in poverty, at-risk youth, and unemployed people. She is a Certified Workforce Expert with the National Workforce Institute , a NAWDP Certified Workforce Development Professional, and a certified instructor for Franklin Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens . Follow her on Twitter , Facebook , or LinkedIn . She also has a grossly neglected personal blog , a Time Travel blog , a site dedicated to encouraging people to read classic literature 15 minutes a day , and a literary quotes blog that is a labor of love . Find her somewhere and join the discussion. Click here to buy Tiff a mojito. Connect",FAKE
+188,House yanks first spending bill off the floor,"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
+5028,Donald Trump Pushes Republican Party to Its Breaking Point,"Donald Trump has summoned a tornado of negative stories that threaten to rip his campaign from its foundation if he doesn't stop, supporters inside and outside Trump's orbit are warning.
+
+Several top backers — including Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — are trying to persuade Trump to move past his feud with the parents of the late Iraq War soldier Humayun Khan, stop bashing fellow Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. John McCain, and refocus his attacks on Hillary Clinton.
+
+But hopes aren't high among Republican allies that Trump, 70, can make such a fundamental change at this point. And the Trump campaign publicly denies that any intervention is occurring at all.
+
+""The reality is that I don't think anyone has any influence"" over Trump, a party source told NBC News.
+
+Within the GOP, strategists are increasingly wondering at what point candidates will aggressively break with Trump or the party will divert resources from the presidential race to head off a collapse down the ticket.
+
+""They don't want to, but he's forcing people's hands,"" GOP strategist Ryan Williams told NBC News. Williams described the campaign as ""free-wheeling and careening from one self-inflicted controversy to another.""
+
+Trump's allies within the party can complain, but they can't say they weren't warned.
+
+Trump has made outrageous and offensive statements from the minute he announced his campaign last year, and he slimed Republican rivals at every step along the way.
+
+He's resisted previous entreaties from party elders to change course after calling Mexican immigrants ""rapists,"" proposing a ban on Muslim visitors to the United States, linking Sen. Ted Cruz's father to the John F. Kennedy assassination and bringing up a federal judge's ""Mexican heritage"" as proof of bias.
+
+""He lacks any kind of self-control,"" a GOP operative said. ""That's not my opinion. It's well demonstrated.""
+
+As Trump regularly reminds voters at rallies, however, he's also survived numerous so-called crises to reach his current position. But the general election isn't the primaries, and the timing and intensity of the current episode stand out.
+
+CNBC's John Harwood quoted an unnamed ally of campaign manager Paul Manafort on Tuesday night who called the mood ""suicidal"" and said Manafort was ""mailing it in"" after concluding that Trump was incapable of taking his advice.
+
+Another source inside the campaign told NBC News that Harwood's account was ""all true"" and that the environment was ""way worse than people realize.""
+
+Lending particular urgency to this week's chaos is Trump's declining position in the polls against Clinton, who appears to be enjoying a major bump from last week's Democratic convention.
+
+Surveys indicate Clinton not only eliminating Trump's gains from his own convention, but also regaining the solid lead she held before FBI Director James Comey's criticism of her email practices depressed her support.
+
+The most recent NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll puts him behind Clinton, 50 percent to 42 percent, with registered voters. A Fox News poll released Wednesday gave Clinton a 49 percent-to-39 percent lead.
+
+Convention bounces are sometimes fleeting, but once the race settles, there are few opportunities for candidates to make up ground, making Trump's missteps especially dangerous.
+
+The Olympics begin this weekend, making it harder for Trump to win free media for much of the month. He could make it up by buying TV time, but the Clinton campaign and allied groups have reserved $98 million in ads through November — compared to less than $1 million on Trump's side.
+
+The less likely Trump looks to win and the more toxic he looks with key voting groups, the more pressure Republican candidates in competitive races will face to denounce him.""
+
+""If Trump wants us to make a choice between our senators and representatives and him, it won't be him,"" another GOP operative in a swing state told NBC News.
+
+But it's a delicate balance. If Republican candidates abandon Trump en masse, party operatives warn, depressed voters might stay home and leave federal and state candidates vulnerable to an electoral wipeout.
+
+While Republican candidates in some swing states have polled ahead of Trump by distancing themselves from his more controversial positions, they still need conservatives to show up and split their ticket to prevail.
+
+So far, few high-profile Republicans running for office have repudiated Trump — even Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire is sticking by him, despite Trump's recent insults and Ayotte's longtime discomfort with his rhetoric.
+
+The further Trump sinks, however, the harder it becomes to hold everyone together.
+
+A veteran GOP strategist suggested that the party should be able to win competitive House and Senate races with smart campaigns if Trump is trailing Clinton by 1 to 5 points. But if he starts to trail by double digits in polls — as he did in Fox's survey — it could create a panic as Republicans rush to disavow his candidacy in the hope that they might survive the coming disaster.
+
+Publicly, Trump and his top aides argue that talk of campaign troubles are overblown.""We're great — it's a terrible week for Hillary Clinton,"" campaign spokesman Jason Miller told NBC News with a smile Wednesday.
+
+Trump, Miller said, has always been the anti-establishment candidate. His refusal to support Ryan against a pro-Trump primary opponent only reinforced that brand.
+
+And the campaign has had some good news mixed with the bad. This week, it raised an impressive $80 million in campaign contributions along with party allies — short of Clinton's $90 million, but a strong improvement for a campaign that built its fundraising operation from scratch after Trump largely self-funded during the primaries.
+
+Some also note that Clinton and other Democrats are vulnerable to negative stories.
+
+The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the Obama administration shipped $400 million in cash to Iran as part of a deal over sanctions at the same time Iran released Americans it had detained. The State Department said that the payment was unrelated and that the negotiations were kept separate, but Republicans accused it of paying a ransom.
+
+Fact checkers have also pilloried Clinton this week for claiming that the FBI corroborated her previous defenses of her email practices.
+
+But other campaign aides expressed concern that Trump failed to capitalize on Democratic weaknesses or emphasize his core strengths because he's too often distracted by side stories and settling scores within the GOP.
+
+""We've got to get back to these basic issues that got him this far,"" former Trump adviser Barry Bennett told MSNBC.
+
+Trump's afternoon speech Wednesday in Daytona Beach, Fla., demonstrated the difficulty. He began with a long and focused recounting of the Iran story and Clinton's statements on her use of a private email server. He also praised Sen. Marco Rubio for endorsing him, extending an olive branch to a onetime critic after having baited Ryan and McCain the day before.
+
+""The campaign is doing really well,"" Trump said. ""It's never been so well united.""
+
+But the usual Trump, still nursing past grudges and falling into bizarre tangents, wasn't far behind.
+
+After discussing Iran, he turned to his old feud with Megyn Kelly, in which he said the Fox News host had ""blood coming out of her wherever."" Trump, who made the initial comment one year ago this week, told the crowd that ""perverted"" Democrats wrongly portrayed it as a comment on menstruation in attack ads, when, in fact, he meant ""her nose, her ears, her mouth.""
+
+Despite his outward confidence, Trump has sounded more concerned about his position. In several interviews and speeches, he's made unsubstantiated claims that the election could be ""rigged"" against him, raising concerns that he might be laying the groundwork to delegitimize a Clinton presidency after a loss.
+
+""Wouldn't that be embarrassing, to lose to Crooked Hillary Clinton?"" Trump said in Florida. ""That would be terrible.""",REAL
+3,"Trump, Clinton clash in dueling DC speeches","Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, now at the starting line of a general election race, traded shots across the capital Friday in dueling addresses before two very different D.C. audiences -- each warning the other would take the country backward.
+
+Trump headlined the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” summit while Clinton addressed a Planned Parenthood national conference.
+
+Trump, looking to solidify his standing with evangelical Christians, offered assurances Friday that he would “restore respect for people of faith” -- and stressed the “sanctity and dignity of life.”
+
+If there was any doubt he wanted to throw Clinton's Planned Parenthood speech into sharp relief, he took on his presumptive rival later in his remarks. Trump warned Clinton would ""appoint radical judges,"" eliminate the Second Amendment, ""restrict religious freedom with government mandates,"" and ""push for federal funding of abortion on demand up until the moment of birth.""
+
+He also cast her support for bringing in Syrian refugees as a potential clash of faiths. ""Hillary will bring hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of whom have hostile beliefs about people of different faiths and values,"" he said.
+
+Clinton, meanwhile, in her first speech as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, said a Trump presidency would take the country back to a time “when abortion was illegal … and life for too many women and girls was limited.”
+
+Clinton thanked the nonprofit women’s health group and abortion provider for their support in the Democratic primary race. In January, Planned Parenthood backed Clinton, offering its first-ever primary endorsement in the group’s 100-year history.
+
+Clinton made it clear that women’s issues would be a staple of her campaign, promising abortion rights supporters that she would “always have your back” if elected president.
+
+Clinton repeated claims that Trump wants to “take America back to a time when women had less opportunity” and freedom.
+
+“Well, Donald, those days are over. We are not going to let Donald Trump -- or anybody else -- turn back the clock,” she told the cheering crowd.
+
+Before arriving at the event, Clinton held a private meeting at her D.C. home with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has been rumored to be a consideration for running mate.
+
+Echoing some of the attacks Warren has made in recent days, Clinton attempted to elevate the importance of this election.
+
+“We are in the middle of a concerted, persistent assault on women’s health across the country,” warned Clinton, who said the 2016 election was “profoundly different” than previous elections.
+
+In what is a campaign trail staple of hers, Clinton highlighted Trump’s insults toward women and asserted that it would be “hard to imagine depending on him to defend the fundamental rights of women.”
+
+Trump, meanwhile, continued calling Clinton, “crooked Hillary” and referred to her ongoing email scandal. He took her to task on her domestic and foreign policy stances.
+
+Trump was interrupted by protesters at the annual gathering of evangelical Christians. The protesters shouted “Stop hate! Stop Trump!” and “refugees are welcome here.”
+
+Trump called the chants “a little freedom of speech” but added it was also “a little rude, but what can you do?”",REAL
+7103,Hillary Clinton BETRAYED by Her Own Family: “We’re Voting for Trump!”,"Hillary Clinton’s niece has revealed to Radar that she will be voting for Donald Trump next week. 
+Macy Smit is the daughter of Bill Clinton’s brother Roger. 
+“Something tells me the Clinton side of the family looks at me and my mother as not good enough, but we’re hard-working!” she said. 
+“I support Donald Trump — 100 percent! I have been a Democrat my entire life, but Trump is what we need right now — somebody who is going to stand up for us. I think at this point Hillary just wants it for the history books — to be the first woman president for selfish reasons.” 
+Macy, a hairstylist in Tampa, is married to a meteorologist with the U.S. Air Force. Her husband is currently stationed in Kuwait coordinating operations in Iraq. 
+“They’re not as good as everyone thinks they are,” Macy said in reference to the Clintons. “I went through some very personal things [without their support],” she added, speaking of a miscarriage she suffered last year. 
+“The Clintons are all talk!” said Macy’s mother, Martha. “Hillary says she’s all about family, but she’s got a niece she’s never met and never acknowledged. The Clintons have never helped us out.” 
+Even Hillary Clinton’s own family can’t stand her…",FAKE
+4561,'NO CAMP! NO CAMP!': Scuffles break out at Hungary train station after police stop migrant train,"Confusion reigned at Budapest's main railway station Thursday morning after Hungarian police allowed hundreds of migrants to enter the building, but the country's railway operator said that no direct trains would depart for Western Europe, the intended destination for many refugees.
+
+A Reuters photographer estimated that up to 1,000 migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia had poured into the Keleti railway station from the square outside. The photographer also reported that some people had stormed the first trains they could find and were trying to push themselves and their children into the carriages through the doors and windows.
+
+The Associated Press reported that announcements were made over the station loudspeakers in several languages, including English, that the trains were not heading west. Some migrants could be seen getting off the domestic trains, while others remained on the carriages amid the confusion.
+
+A train that managed to leave the station, which was  bound for a town called Sopron, was stopped by police about an hour from Budapest, The Guardian reported. The passengers were ordered to get off the train. Some of the passengers grabbed hold of the train track to prevent police from taking them to a refugee camp.
+
+Some reportedly banged on windows, chanting, ""No camp, no camp.""
+
+Some of the migrants had been forced to sleep in the streets of Budapest for two nights after Hungarian police closed the terminal to them Tuesday. At that time, migrants with valid tickets but no travel documents were prevented from boarding trains to Austria and Germany.
+
+There was no immediate explanation from the police or other authorities about why the migrants were allowed to enter the terminal Thursday. The rail company said its stance was due to ""railway transport"" security reasons. A Hungarian government spokesman confirmed to Sky News that no international trains would be leaving the station for ""safety reasons.""
+
+Later Thursday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said his country's military would be deployed at the country's southern border with Serbia as part of a crackdown on migrants and human traffickers.
+
+Orban told the Associated Press in Brussels that Hungarian parliament is pushing through new measures ""that will create a new legal situation at the borders, even more strict than it was."" He added that the migrant ""problem is not a European problem, the problem is a German problem, nobody would like to stay in Hungary ... all of them would like to go to Germany.""
+
+More than 160,000 migrants have crossed into Hungary this year as members of the 28-nation E.U. squabble over how to deal with its worst humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II.
+
+On Wednesday, the leaders of Germany, Italy and France called for a ""fair distribution"" of refugees throughout the E.U. Germany alone is expected to take in 800,000 migrants this year, four times more than its 2014 total. Meanwhile, Italy and Greece, which have had to deal with an increase in migrants attempting the dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossing, have complained that their resources are being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.
+
+The crisis was given new urgency on Wednesday when images of a drowned three-year-old boy whose body had washed up on the shore of Turkey's Bodrum peninsula spread rapidly on social media. Turkish authorities said the boy was one of 12 Syrians who had drowned trying to reach Greece when the boat they were traveling in sank. The boy's mother and five-year-old brother were also among the victims.
+
+Back in Hungary, migrants had threatened Wednesday to walk the 105 miles to the Austrian border if police would not let them board trains to their desired destinations.
+
+Hungary tantalizingly opened the way Monday, allowing more than 1,000 migrants to pack westbound trains -- and inspiring a migrant surge to the capital -- before it withdrew the option 24 hours later.
+
+Hungary, which for months had permitted most applicants to head west after short bureaucratic delays, now says it won't let more groups deeper into the European Union and claims EU backing for the move.
+
+With an estimated 3,000 people camping outside the station, conditions had grown increasingly squalid despite the efforts of volunteers distributing water, food, medicine and disinfectants.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+7938,Green Party’s Margaret Flowers Challenges US Senate Debate in Maryland as Undemocratic [1],"By BAR editor and columnist, Dr. Marsha Adebayo T he “revolving, rigged system” that purports to be American democracy was revealed in all its corporate vulgarity on a Baltimore university stage, last week. Two U.S. Senate candidates of the duopoly parties pretended to support the Green Party’s candidate’s right to join the debate, but failed to protest when cops hauled her away. “This was their ‘Rosa Parks’ moment when they could have stood for integrity and democracy” — but failed the test. “The corporate media and the political duopoly collaborated to ensure that the Green Party message would not be heard.” US corruption during this campaign season is on full display for the entire world to ponder. No one paying even scant attention can deny the thin veneer that is used to hide state sponsored police murder of Africans, structural poverty and the cozy relationship between the 1% rulers in the Democratic and Republican parties. Green Party candidates, such as Jill Stein, Ajamu Baraka and Margaret Flowers have forced sunlight’s disinfectant power to expose a rigged, racist and revolting political system that politically and economically devours communities of color, condones police murders of Black youth, intentionally exposes communities, like Flint, Michigan, to poisoned water, promotes drone warfare and the pilfering of the natural resources of Africa and South America. The system, however is finding it more difficult to block out the voices of dissent. Such was the situation this week at the University of Baltimore College of Public Affairs where Dr. Margaret Flowers, the Green Party candidate for the Maryland US Senate seat, was refused the opportunity to participate in the only televised debate alongside Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen and Republican state Del. Kathy Szeliga. The corporate media and the political duopoly collaborated to ensure that the Green Party message would not be heard. The sham excuse used to exclude Flowers was that her poll numbers had not reached 15%. But, of course it is difficult to reach the magic number of 15% in the polls when one is systematically excluded from debates and public events. This is the revolving rigged system that Black people know so well. “When the police came to escort her off the stage neither candidate provided a meaningful protest of the anti-democratic process unfolding.” When the rigged debate started, audience members called for Dr. Flowers to join Van Hollen and Szeliga. Shouts of “let her speak” could be heard from the audience. Responding to the audience, Dr. Flowers took her place on the stage shaking hands with both candidates. Standing on the stage, she turned her attention to the audience and said: “I think it’s important for voters to understand the differences between myself and Congressman Van Hollen and Delegate Szeliga.” With the police moving on stage to remove her, she said, …”I mean, you say you’re a public university and you want to educate the public, but without having a full public discussion, that doesn’t actually happen.” While Van Hollen and Szeliga seemed to agree with Dr. Flowers participating in the debate, when the police came to escort her off the stage neither candidate provided a meaningful protest of the anti-democratic process unfolding. Delegate Szeliga noted that a third podium was available but both politicians remained silent while Dr. Flowers was forced to leave the stage. This was their “Rosa Parks” moment when they could have stood for integrity and democracy but Van Hollen and Szeliga, failed to show the smallest amount of courage, leadership and commitment to anything greater than their individual ambitions and desire for power. Margaret was escorted by police to a sidewalk outside the debate hall and that symbolically represents the state of US democracy. After church on Sunday, a sister said to me, “I know a lot of Black folks are going to vote for Hilary Clinton but I can’t vote for the lesser of two evils. I’ve decided to vote for Jill Stein. I’m going to vote my conscience!” My only response after agreeing with her analysis was to add, “Don’t forget to also vote for Margaret Flowers.“ Dr. Margaret Flowers of Green Party Interrupts Maryland Senate Televised Debate: Margaret Flowers Campaign Information: http://www.flowersforsenate.org [4] Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/margaret_flowers_ejected_debate",FAKE
+4145,How a $15 minimum wage went from ‘extreme’ to enacted,"What once was considered “pie in the sky” is slowly becoming law. In New York, state legislators just agreed to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour, with the full effect beginning in New York City by December 2018. California just passed a compromise raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022. New Jersey and the District are planning to move similar laws. After New York and California, nearly 1 in 5 (18 percent) in the U.S. workforce will be on the path to $15 an hour.
+
+How did this reform go from being scorned as “extreme” to being enacted? Consensus politicians don’t champion it. Pundits and chattering heads tend to ignore it. Many liberal economists deride it as too radical. The idea moved only because workers and allies organized and demanded the change.
+
+Three years ago, fast-food workers walked off the job in what began the “fight for $15 and a union.” With the federal government as the largest low-wage employer, federal contract workers demonstrated repeatedly outside the Pentagon, Congress and the White House, demanding executive action under the banner of a “Good Jobs Nation.”
+
+Progressive politicians added their voices. In Seattle, Kshama Sawant, an engineer and economist running under the banner of Socialist Alternative party, won a seat on the city council in 2013. She made a $15 minimum wage a centerpiece of her campaign and pushed it when in office. The Service Employees International Union, one of America’s largest unions; business leaders such as Nick Hanauer; and political leaders such as Seattle Mayor Ed Murray helped build the coalition needed to get it done. Now wages in Seattle are headed to $15. And in SeaTac, the airport district that passed a $15 minimum wage in a referendum, the wage is in effect now.
+
+In New York, insurgent mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio made raising the minimum wage central to his campaign. He and the Working Families Party joined with striking low-wage workers, labor and community groups, and city council members. Zephyr Teachout’s surprisingly strong challenge to Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) put pressure on him to act.
+
+At the national level, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) joined with demonstrating contract workers. The CPC lobbied President Obama to use his executive power to raise wages for federal contract workers. The president responded with three historic executive orders, lifting the minimum wage for contract workers to $10.10, cracking down on wage theft and other workplace violations, and extending paid leave to contract employees.
+
+Obstacles remain. Today, 42 percent of American workers earn less than $15 an hour. And the right to a union has been trampled by relentless and at times lawless corporate resistance. The Republican leadership in Congress refuses even to allow a vote on raising the national minimum wage that, at $7.25 an hour, means full-time workers can’t even raise their families out of poverty.
+
+But now Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, says that “the Fight for $15 launched by underpaid workers has changed the nation’s economic trajectory, beginning to reverse decades of wage inequality.”
+
+Contrary to the business lobby, an analysis by economists at the University of California at Berkeley shows that New York’s increases will not lead to job losses. The higher wages will generate billions in new consumer spending; the increased sales will offset the costs to businesses. In Seattle, the unemployment rate reached an eight-year low after the initial increases in the minimum wage last year.
+
+This movement continues to build. The Fight for $15 and Good Jobs Nation initiatives will ratchet up their walkouts and demonstrations this month. On Monday, an interfaith coalition of religious leaders issued a call for “moral action on the economy.” They will press presidential candidates to pledge to “issue an executive order to make sure taxpayer dollars reward ‘model employers’ that pay a living wage of at least $15 an hour, provide decent benefits and allow workers to organize without retaliation.” As Jim Winkler, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, summarized: “This election is fundamentally about whether the next president is willing to take transformative executive action to close the gap between the wealthy and workers.”
+
+Sanders has made $15 and a union a centerpiece of his campaign. He has urged Obama to take executive action and surely will sign the pledge. Hillary Clinton supports raising the minimum wage to $12.50, allowing cities to go higher. Her position on the pledge is unknown. The Republican candidates — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Donald Trump and Ohio Gov. John Kasich — oppose raising the minimum wage and would likely repeal Obama’s executive orders on low-wage contract workers if elected.
+
+With inequality reaching record extremes, childhood poverty the worst in the industrial world and more Americans struggling simply to stay afloat, this country is desperately in need of bold reform. Yet bold ideas are repeatedly mocked as unrealistic and blocked by entrenched interests and conservative politicians. What the activists and low-wage workers have shown with their fight for $15 is that the changes we need will come if people organize and force them. Many commentators deride Sanders’s call for a political revolution, but that may be the most realistic idea of them all.
+
+Read more from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s archive or follow her on Twitter.",REAL
+479,Will Asia trade deal hurt US workers? Six tough questions answered.,"Critics of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal – and the Senate bill to give the president fast track authority to negotiate it – say it will hurt American workers. Here is a look at some of those claims.
+
+President Obama delivers remarks on trade at Nike corporate headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., Friday. Mr. Obama pressed fellow Democrats to support his push for a trade deal with Asian countries.
+
+The Obama administration has a tough sell convincing Congress to grant it “fast track” trade negotiating authority so it can complete negotiations on the biggest regional trade deal in United States history – the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, involving a total of 12 nations (though not China).
+
+The administration sees this as a tremendous opportunity for economic growth. It wants fast track – which would require Congress only an up-or-down vote on a final agreement – to help it secure the best deal it can. Opponents, mostly Democrats but some Republicans, too, say fast track and TPP will cost America jobs. But supporters say their approach is “new and improved.”
+
+Below are some of the critics’ chief concerns, and how fast track and TPP supporters respond:
+
+Critics say free trade kills jobs. Business says it creates them. However, it’s not that simple.
+
+Most economists agree that broadening trade results in economic growth, but benefits are shared unevenly.
+
+“Trade liberalization promotes overall economic growth among trading partners but … there are both winners and losers,” the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in an April 2015 report. It’s also extremely difficult to calculate how a trade deal affects job creation and loss “due to a lack of data and important theoretical and practical matters,” CRS said.
+
+In reviewing the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, CRS found that ""NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters.""
+
+The Obama White House admits that while the overall benefits of trade expansion “may be large” they may also be “unevenly distributed.” Trade, therefore, “can also have adverse effects for some workers” the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) said in “ The Economic Benefits of US Trade,” a report issued earlier this month.
+
+So the White House is arguing to members of Congress that policies the administration supports, such as investment in infrastructure, worker training, and education, can offset jobs lost as a result of trade deals.
+
+Assistance for the displaced: Is it enough?
+
+  
+
+ Trade adjustment assistance (TAA) programs provide help beyond traditional jobless benefits for workers displaced by trade. Displaced workers get help to train for a new career. Without such extra help, the thinking goes, these workers might find new jobs but have to take a big cut in pay – or they might drop out of the job market entirely.
+
+The programs are also designed to boost chances of passing trade legislation, drawing in some Democrats who might otherwise be in the ""no"" camp. In a separate bill, TAA has been beefed up to raise benefits and to include service sector workers for the first time.
+
+Whether TAA works, however, is a matter of debate. One 2012 Labor Department study found that, after four years, participants had earnings comparable to a group of non-TAA job losers.
+
+That can be viewed as bad news (even with the help, they aren't doing any better than other people recovering from joblessness). Or as good news (this is a particularly hard-hit group of workers, who might have fared worse without the training).
+
+Politically, “If TAA made even a relatively modest contribution to the ease of enacting free-trade policies, the program’s benefits would outweigh its costs,"" said the report.
+
+When countries such as China and Japan artificially lower the value of their currencies, it costs Americans jobs because foreign imports become cheaper and US exports more expensive. So critics want language in the fast-track bill against currency manipulation.
+
+The bill’s supporters don’t dispute the dangers. That’s why, for the first time, fast-track legislation makes the issue a “negotiating objective” for the administration.
+
+But an enforcement mechanism is too strong a remedy to include in the bill, the administration says, claiming that it would derail trade negotiations. It could also endanger America’s ability to manage its own currency, and lead to retaliation and trade wars, US officials say. They point to modest success in recent years in pressuring China to increase the value of its currency.
+
+Sen. Charles Schumer (D) of New York, who calls currency manipulation the “most significant trade challenge this country faces,” succeeded in getting a currency amendment in a related customs bill. It’s not yet clear what will happen to this measure or other attempts to address the issue.
+
+Don’t know what’s in the TPP? That’s because it’s “top secret,” criticizes Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts, a vocal opponent of fast track.
+
+That was a complaint that her colleague, Sen. Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon heard a lot at town halls. As a result, “I really went to the mat on these secrecy issues,” Senator Wyden said at a recent Monitor breakfast.
+
+Senator Wyden, who is the administration’s point man on trade in the Senate, points out that with the fast-track bill, the full text of the TPP and any other trade agreements will be public for the first time – 60 days before Congress starts voting on it. Under fast track, any member of Congress can have access to classified negotiating texts. Members can attend negotiating rounds or be briefed by the administration on request.
+
+That’s not good enough for Senator Warren. She’s pushing a petition that tells US trade officials: “No vote on a fast-track for trade agreements until the American people can see what’s in this TPP deal.” Members of Congress also complain about restricted access for their staffs, on whom they heavily rely.
+
+Critics are up in arms over the way corporations settle disputes over alleged violations of free-trade agreements. The investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, lets foreign countries sue governments in special tribunals, rather than going through the country’s court system.
+
+The problem with this, they argue, is that the tribunals grant huge payments to corporations for the violations – such big payments that countries are then incentivized to change their regulations. Not only do supporters of labor object, they worry that foreign companies will use the tribunals to force changes in US regulations and laws.
+
+The administration says it is writing safeguards into the TPP that will prevent this from happening.
+
+President Obama also told Yahoo Politics: ""There is no chance, zero chance, that the US would be sued on something like our financial regulations, and on food safety, and on the various environmental regulations that we have in place, mainly because we treat everybody the same."" He added, ""We treat our own companies the same way we treat somebody else's companies.""
+
+For the first time, a non-free-market economy such as Vietnam will be included in a broad trade deal involving the US, and that’s a problem, say critics. “Americans should not be forced to compete against desperately poor workers like those in Vietnam who make as little as 56 cents an hour,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont, wrote in a letter to to US Trade Representative Michael Froman last month.
+
+In 2013, the US trade deficit with Vietnam was $19.6 billion.
+
+But supporters argue that fast track and the TPP are precisely intended to protect against this problem. The fast-track bill raises the bar for labor, environment, and human rights standards, says Wyden. “Trading partners must adopt and maintain core international labor and environmental standards, with trade sanctions if they do not comply,” he said in a statement last month.
+
+Staff writers David Cook and Mark Trumbull contributed to this report.",REAL
+6132,#BoycottComedian…ROBERT DENIRO Wanted “To Punch Trump In The Face”…Supports Anti-Trump Rioters…Now Wants Americans To Support His New Movie [VIDEO],"Go to Article Donald Trump was willing to give up a very fulfilling life that took decades to build, so he could step up and take control of an out of control government. He and his family have already sacrificed so much because he chose to put his country first. Making sacrifices is certainly not something loudmouth liberals like Robert DeNiro are accustomed to. DeNiro was very vocal about his opposition to the wildly successful business man Donald J. Trump. He felt so strongly about his hate for Trump that made a video where he angrily stated he’d like to, “punch him in the face.” Now that Trump won the election in a landslide, DeNiro has chosen to get behind the Trump rioters who are terrorizing cities across America. Anti-Trump rioters are breaking windows, using baseball bats to smash the windshields of innocent citizens who get trapped in their hellish protests as they try to escape. Women who are taking part in the protests are being punched in the faces by men who are also taking part in the George Soros funded protests. American flags are being burned and families who are walking in major cities are being subjected to the most vile and disgusting, hateful language and images imaginable. If this is the kind of America that Robert DiNero is openly supporting? And if so, why would any American pay to see his movie,”Comedian”? 
+Robert De Niro gave anti-Donald Trump protesters across the United States his backing Friday as he spoke about how “depressed” the tycoon’s win in the presidential election had made him. 
+The 73-year-old star was on the red carpet at the world premiere of his new film “The Comedian” in Los Angeles when he was asked how he was coping with Trump’s victory over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. 
+“How am I doing? I’m very depressed,” the famously laconic “Raging Bull” actor told reporters. 
+“We have to just wait and see how things go and keep our eyes ever vigilant on the new government.” 
+Asked if he thought the protests were an appropriate response to the outcome of Tuesday’s election, he replied: “Yes, absolutely. Things aren’t being done right.” 
+Demonstrators took to the streets in Miami, Los Angeles, New York and other US cities for a third straight night on Friday. 
+In Manhattan, they held signs reading “Your Wall Can’t Stand in Our Way” — a reference to the anti-immigration barrier the billionaire has promised to build on the US border with Mexico. 
+De Niro hasn’t minced his words in his criticism of Trump, describing him as “a punk,” “a pig” and “an idiot.” 
+“I’d like to punch him in the face,” he said before the election. 
+Earlier in the day a town in southern Italy where De Niro’s grandparents came from offered the actor a means of escape. 
+“If, after the disappointment of Trump, he wants to take refuge here, we are ready to welcome him,” said Antonio Cerio, the mayor of Ferrazzano. 
+“The Comedian,” De Niro’s passion project which took him eight years to bring to the big screen, was part of this year’s program for the American Film Institute’s annual AFI Fest in Los Angeles. – Yahoo 
+Here’s a clip of Trump-hater Megyn Kelly promoting DiNero’s hateful rant against Donald J. Trump:  ",FAKE
+6865,Doctor Finds New Life As A Clown More Fulfilling | GomerBlog,"Tweet 
+Pediatrician Jim Smith is thrilled with his new career as a professional Clown. He specializes in children’s birthday parties but has the skill set to perform at kindergarten graduations as well. “Leaving the hospital was the best thing I’ve ever done. Can I say that again?” said an elated Dr. Jim Smith. 
+Dr. Jim Smith first became interested in becoming a Clown after suffering from extreme burnout. Catalysts included helicopter Moms, antivax Jenny Mccarthy supporters, and the general stress of saving the world. After dealing with one particularly overbearing soccer mom, he stormed out of the office ranting, “**** this noise; I can’t take this horse**** anymore!” and never returned. Using obscenities for the first time felt nothing short of liberating. 
+Dr. Jim Smith’s new lifestyle is entirely different from the clinic he used to work at. Previously, he woke up at 6am sharp but now he rolls out of bed in the neighborhood of 11:30am to ensure he is prompt for lunchtime birthday contracts. “I take my responsibilities very seriously,” said Dr. Jim Smith proudly. After a solid hour of challenging work, he practices his Downward Dog poses. 
+In spite of all the Clown perks, Jim has admittedly taken a rather large pay cut. As a pediatrician, the Doctor made $200,000.00 per year. Now he makes $17,500.00 a year if fully booked and tipped generously. However, Dr. Jim Smith says that eating Ramen noodles with his wife and kids is definitely worth the consistent joy he experiences performing slapstick routines. “Freedom really has no price tag,” said Clown Jim Smith. 
+Dr. Jim Smith’s favorite part of the job is showcasing his balloon skills. “Even though the kids cry sometimes, they don’t die,” he stated enthusiastically. Creating these balloon animals has proved to be significantly more meaningful than diagnosing heart defects. 
+Dr. Jim Smith sleeps soundly knowing the nurses aren’t “hunting (him) down like cattle.” Instead, parents and children alike watch him smile and laugh as if he’s the greatest entertainer in the world. He even gets to wear a red nose! And doing mime is endlessly entertaining and unpredictable too. 
+Dr. Jim Smith’s old colleagues have inquired what degree is needed to become a Clown. They’ve also expressed curiosity as to whether it is a high demand skill. 
+Dr. Jim Smith’s only regret is that he didn’t become a Clown sooner. 315 Shares ",FAKE
+2532,"City, County Leaders Ask Court To Lift Injunction On Obama Immigration Programs","WASHINGTON -- Leaders from more than 70 cities and counties, some going against their states, joined a legal brief filed Monday asking an appeals court to allow President Barack Obama's deportation relief policies to move forward.
+
+""Continuing to delay implementation of the president’s executive action on immigration hurts our economy and puts families at risk,"" New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D), who spearheaded the effort with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) as part of Cities United for Immigration Action, said in a statement.
+
+""Cities are where immigrants live, and cities are where the president's executive action will be successfully implemented,"" he continued. ""Our cities are united, and we will fight for the immigration reform this nation needs and deserves -- whether in the courtroom, in Congress, or in our communities. Make no mistake about it: our voices will be heard.""
+
+Under the policies Obama announced in November, as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants with longstanding ties to the U.S. may be able to stay and work temporarily.
+
+Twenty-six states, led by Texas, filed the lawsuit, arguing the relief programs would cause them harm and violate the Constitution. They've won support from some Republican members of Congress and governors.
+
+But 14 states and the District of Columbia, including some led by Republicans, filed an amicus brief, saying the programs should be allowed to move forward.
+
+Garcetti and de Blasio spearheaded a similar brief in January and received about 30 signatures. The latest brief is backed by mayors, county executives and governments from 73 cities and counties in 27 states. The National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors also have joined the brief. The cities and counties are home to 43 million people, according to organizers of the brief.
+
+Some cities signing onto the brief are in states that joined the lawsuit against the president's executive actions. Houston, the most populous city in Texas, is part of the cities' and counties' brief, as is the state capital, Austin. Cities and counties in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arizona, Ohio, Indiana, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Florida and Utah also signed on, even though their states are suing over the executive actions.
+
+The brief argues the executive actions would be good for public safety and the economy in their cities and counties, and would help immigrants integrate and keep families together. The delay in implementing Obama's orders, the brief argues, ""harms their cities and counties and all residents thereof by forestalling the critical benefits of that action.""
+
+The Obama administration is seeking a ruling to allow the programs to move forward. The Justice Department filed an appeal last week asking the court to lift the injunction.
+
+UPDATE: 3:45 p.m. -- Nearly every House Democrat -- 181 of them -- signed on to another amicus brief filed on Monday asking the appeals court to lift the preliminary injunction on Obama's immigration policies.
+
+The House Democrats' amicus brief says that they ""well understand the importance of ensuring that the executive does not exceed its constitutional or statutory authority."" But it goes on to say that the lawmakers understand the executive has the authority to use its discretion in enforcing the law.
+
+""The broad discretionary authority to set removal policies and priorities is both explicit and implicit in the Nation’s immigration laws and has been exercised also by prior Administrations of both parties in ways consistent with the Secretary’s actions,"" the brief states, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.",REAL
+7986,BREAKING : Bay of Pigs Veterans Association Endorses Donald Trump – TruthFeed,"BREAKING : Bay of Pigs Veterans Association Endorses Donald Trump BREAKING : Bay of Pigs Veterans Association Endorses Donald Trump Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 26, 2016 Our vets love Trump. 
+They know he’s the ONLY one who can fix the broken system. 
+Our vets are dying in the streets and the hallways of VA hospitals, while illegals and refugees enjoy taxpayer “freebies.” 
+The ONLY way this will change is by getting rid of the global liberals and voting AMERICA FIRST! 
+In an emotional meeting, Trump spoke to the Bay of Pigs veterans, who proudly endorsed him. 
+Donald reassured them all that we would “Make America Great Again.” 
+One vet, at the end of the clip, can be seen wiping his eyes. 
+He knows his country is LOST and this is the last chance to get it back. 
+Don’t let him down, America. 
+Watch the video: Truly honored to receive the first ever presidential endorsement from the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. #MAGA #ImWithYou pic.twitter.com/U7xVj1ajMs 
+— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+6622,Rigged Election: Hillary & Trump Caught Partying with Kissinger at Jesuit Gala,"By Covert Geopolitics
+We have been very, very suspicious of Donald Trump since he began his political run.
+Many believed he was an outsider who was our “only hope” to tame the US federal government beast. But it has become very clear he is not.
+First, Wikileaks showed that Killary herself actually approved Trump to be her competitor. According to an email sent from an assistant at the Clinton campaign, Hillary was aware that Trump was going to run before the political process was fully underway.
+Clinton advised the mainstream media to push his legitimacy as a “pied piper” candidate because she realized, after looking at the poll numbers, that she wouldn’t stand a chance at winning the presidency against any of the establishment republicans without making them “pied pipers” – it just so happened that Donald was the easiest to play the role considering his long history of friendship with the Clintons.
+
+In addition, the mainstream media was more than complicit in creating a narrative that the 2016 presidential elections were about Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump from the get go.
+But, barely reported in the media, was that after the 3rd presidential debate, Clinton and Trump went out for a night on the town together… and where they went is of great interest.
+They went to an annual Jesuit function which is usually full of New World Order types.
+THE JESUITS One of the more interesting things that occurred right at the end of the Jubilee year in early October, was that the Jesuits installed a new Superior General, with the date to commence being actually at midnight on the end of Jubilee.
+We found this interesting because there is plenty of evidence that the Jesuits are at least one major arm of what you can call the illuminati.
+In fact, the Jesuits were founded in Spain by what various reports call “crypto Jews” – those who are Jewish but pretending to be Catholic. Certainly at that time in Spain it was safer not to be a Jew.
+Even Wikipedia, which wouldn’t recognize a conspiracy if it were directly presented by its participants has this to say about the Jesuits:
+… In the first 30 years of the existence of the Society of Jesus there were many Jesuit conversos (Catholic-convert Jews) including the second Father General Diego Lainez … The original founder Ignatius … said that he, “would take it as a special grace from our Lord to come from Jewish lineage.” 
+At the beginning of the Al Smith dinner party after Cardinal Dolan was introduced, a joke was even made by a speaker that “everyone in attendance is doing their part in supporting their charitable efforts and that it couldn’t be done without the support of many of the other devoted “Catholics” on stage like Henry Kissinger, Howard Rubenstein, and Mort Zuckerman” – all of whom are obviously Jewish so this remark was naturally met with a lot of laughter…
+In fact, an extraordinary amount of controversy swirls around Jesuits. They are said to constitute the “Black Church” and thus adhere to the same Satanic religion as the world’s elite bankers supposedly hold.
+The leader of the Jesuit order is commonly recognized in conspiratorial circles as the “Black Pope” whose signature staff is a crooked cross. Historically, the Jesuit Order has been seen as one that shirks no crime in expanding the power of the Church.
+Lest this sound entirely outrageous, one must note that the Jesuits are, for instance, the inventors of concentration camps, which they established in Paraguay in order to incarcerate and then torture the native indians of the area.
+But the litany of attributed Jesuit evil is even darker than that according to those who believe in the order’s continued malicious pursuit. The supposed founder of the Bavarian-based Illuminati, Adam Weishaupt, was a Jesuit.
+In fact, the order is reputed to have been deeply involved in the Illuminati’s initial expansion, and chances are it is still deeply involved.
+One more thing that highlights the evil of the Jesuits is their extreme oath of induction which all superiors must take in order to be elevated to the higher rungs of the organization. This is taken from the book Subterranean Rome by Carlos Didier, translated from the French, and published in New York in 1843 and reads in part,
+“…promise and declare that I will, when opportunity present, make and wage relentless war, secretly or openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Liberals, as I am directed to do, to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex or condition; and that I will hang, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crush their infants’ heads against the walls, in order to annihilate forever their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly, I will secretly use the poisoned cup, the strangulating cord, the steel of the poniard or the leaden bullet, regardless of the honor, rank, dignity, or authority of the person or persons, whatever may be their condition in life, either public or private, as I at any time may be directed so to do by any agent of the Pope or Superior of the Brotherhood of the Holy Faith, of the Society of Jesus…”
+One of the most poignant quotes regarding the malevolence of the Jesuits comes from Marquis de LaFayette 1757-1834; who was a French statesman and general who served in the American Continental Army under the command of General George Washington during the American Revolutionary War.
+His quote is as follows:
+“It is my opinion that if the liberties of this country – the United States of America – are destroyed, it will be by the subtlety of the Roman Catholic Jesuit priests, for they are the most crafty, dangerous enemies to civil and religious liberty. They have instigated MOST of the wars of Europe.”
+THE BIG BASH When evaluating Jesuit behavior and influence, please keep in mind that both Donald Trump and Hillary’s VP, Tim Kaine, are Jesuit educated. And it should be of GREAT interest, therefore, that practically on the eve of the US election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton partied the night away at a Jesuit function that included such prominent Jesuit-trained attendees as Henry Kissinger.
+Not only did the two not look like sworn enemies… they looked like two star crossed lovers going to their first prom.
+We have long held to our stance that Killary will be the next President of the US. The amount of vote rigging, murders and shenanigans to even get her to where she is so far has been tremendous… and it won’t stop.
+That said, if by some fluke, and the Diebold machines malfunction or people in the US wake up slightly and Donald Trump gets elected… it is pretty clear they are on the same team and, as we’ve said previously, nothing major will change.
+So, if you were hoping that this election could change things in the US… get over that hope right now. It might change things, but only for the much, much worse.
+This charade is being played right in front of everyone’s eyes and most do not understand what is happening or why jokes like the “Catholic” joke is actually funny to these elite people.
+They are laughing at the peasants’ stupidity and lack of understanding, not because the men mentioned are Jews… anyone with half a brain knows that.
+… The groundwork for global governance has been laid, don’t let them blindside you as they attempt to carry out their nefarious plot. Donald Trump even stated at the dinner, “We’ve got to come together, not only as a nation, but as a world community.”
+https://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2016/10/25/rigged-election-hillary-trump-caught-partying-like-bffs-kissinger-jesuit-gala.html+https://youtu.be/rP45LHZ_kIM 
+
+
+Above image – the chief staff of EU paying homage to their emperor, the Jesuit pope.
+
+These people are called Magis because they can do magic, and the basic tenet why these Magicians are so very successful is that most people want to be fooled.
+***
+Aside from the fiat monetary scam and bloodsoaked petrodollar, another significant source of funds for the Nazionist Khazarian Mafia is the “healthcare” industry which registered a whopping $3.09 trillion in 2014 , and is projected to soar to $3.57 trillion in 2017, in the US alone. We believe that this is just a conservative figure. 
+We can all help the revolution by avoiding all Khazarian pharmaceutical drugs, defeat any viral attack and scaremongering, like the Zika virus, easily by knowing how to build our own comprehensive antiviral system. Find more about how we can kill three birds with one stone, right here . 
+Source: Covert Geopolitics 
+Related: The Jesuits: Priesthood of Absolute Evil The Rothschild’s Royal Papal Knights Are Jesuit Controlled The Jesuits Have Chosen Their New Black Pope Ultra-secret Plot Behind Hillary Exposed: Yes, The Jesuits Will Be The Power Behind The Throne The Revolutionary War: How America Became A Jesuit Enclave Revisionist History; The Jesuits Founded America! As Told By The Victors Illuminati, Jesuits, Obama & Government Connections The Jesuits: Historians Expose Conspiracy to Rule the World Obama’s Jesuit Connections Surface Former Jesuit Priest Exposes How the Vatican Created Islam CERN Watch: Jesuit Connection Confirmed! David Icke on the Jesuit Order — Exposing the Elite The Diabolical History of The Society of Jesus (aka The Jesuits) Knight of Malta: Controlled by the Diabolical Society of Jesus (aka Jesuits) ",FAKE
+4246,Democrats Clinton and Sanders pounce on Flint water crisis — and each other,"Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders clashed fiercely Sunday over jobs, trade and Wall Street while agreeing that much more must be done to address a two-year-old water-contamination crisis that has paralyzed this majority-black city.
+
+The session included the sharpest exchange yet between the Democratic presidential candidates over their economic plans and records. It included a heated argument over the auto industry bailout, which is of keen interest in Michigan, where both Democrats and Republicans will hold presidential primaries Tuesday.
+
+Clinton emphasized the “hard choices” that lawmakers and President Obama made in 2009, facing the prospect of a collapse in the auto industry, and she noted that Sanders, a senator from Vermont, voted against a bailout measure.
+
+Sanders said he voted against forcing “hard-working” Americans to bail out “the crooks of Wall Street.”
+
+“If everybody had voted the way he did, I believe the auto industry would have collapsed,” Clinton said.
+
+Sanders angrily hushed Clinton as she sought to interject. “Excuse me, I’m talking,” he said, drawing gasps from the audience.
+
+“If you’re going to talk, tell the whole story,” Clinton replied.
+
+“You’ll get your turn,” he snapped.
+
+The debate, which aired on CNN, was added to the Democrats’ schedule after Sanders emerged as a stronger-than-expected challenger. Flint was chosen as the site to highlight the water crisis, which has become a focus of liberal anger.
+
+The episode began two years ago, when state overseers who had taken over the city switched its water supply to the Flint River without treating the water to avoid corrosion of lead pipes. Lead leached into the water supply, and although residents began complaining immediately, the problems did not fully come to light until January, amid revelations that state officials had spent much of 2014 and 2015 dismissing those complaints.
+
+Both Clinton and Sanders have said that the crisis would never have happened in a richer, whiter city. The debate featured heartbreaking and harrowing stories about children who stopped growing, lost their hair or were intellectually stunted by poisoned water.
+
+Sanders used his opening statement to repeat his call for the state’s Republican governor to resign over what he called a “dereliction of duty,” before shifting to his core message about economic inequality.
+
+For the first time, Clinton agreed that Gov. Rick Snyder should “resign or be recalled.” Previously, she had said that her approach was to try to solve the problem and that assigning blame could wait.
+
+“The state should also be sending money immediately to help this city. I know the state of Michigan has a rainy-day fund for emergencies,” Clinton said. “It’s raining lead in Flint.”
+
+Sunday’s debate opened with a moment of silence in honor of former first lady Nancy Reagan, who died Sunday at 94. The session was the first Democratic debate since the Super Tuesday contests, when Clinton emerged with a lead of nearly 200 pledged delegates over Sanders.
+
+She slightly expanded her delegate lead after a win in Louisiana on Saturday, while Sanders claimed victories in Nebraska and Kansas. The debate had been underway for only a few minutes Sunday when Sanders’s victory in the Maine caucuses was announced.
+
+Sanders’s successes and his vow to remain in the race through the Democratic convention lent a new tension to the debate. Gone were the magnanimous and polite gestures each had offered the other in previous debates.
+
+“Let’s have some facts instead of some rhetoric for a change,” Clinton said testily.
+
+“Let me tell my story, you tell yours,” Sanders said at another point. “Your story is voting for every disastrous trade amendment and voting for corporate America.”
+
+Sanders mocked Clinton’s defense of the Export-Import Bank as helpful to small businesses. He would shutter the institution he called the “Bank of Boeing” for its efforts on behalf of the aircraft maker as it competes with rival Airbus.
+
+Sanders’s opposition to the Ex-Im Bank put him at odds with the Democratic caucus in Congress — a fact that he embraced.
+
+“I don’t want to break the bad news,” Sanders said sarcastically. “Democrats are not always right. Democrats have often supported corporate welfare. Democrats have supported disastrous trade agreements.”
+
+Both candidates have campaigned hard in Michigan. Tuesday’s vote here will serve as a test of Clinton’s institutional support from unions and of Sanders’s appeal with the working class.
+
+It could also set the stage for a contentious fall election. Clinton has already begun shifting her focus on the campaign trail to a potential general-election matchup against the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, although neither he nor the rest of the Republican field got much mention Sunday.
+
+“Donald Trump’s bigotry, his bullying, his bluster are not going to wear well with the American people,” Clinton said.
+
+Labeling Sanders a communist “was one of the nice things he said about me,” Sanders joked.
+
+Michigan is a swing state that both Republicans and Democrats see as a potential victory in November. Trump is favored to win here Tuesday, and his tough-guy message on international trade has found an audience here.
+
+Over several days of campaigning here, Sanders has focused squarely on jobs and trade, accusing Clinton of backing international trade deals that stripped Michigan of good-paying jobs.
+
+He also stressed his long opposition to trade pacts such as the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership with Pacific Rim nations. Clinton had backed the TPP deal, a signature initiative of President Obama, when she was secretary of state. She announced last year that she opposes it, which Sanders allies call an election-season conversion that she could reverse if elected.
+
+“I am very glad, Anderson, that Secretary Clinton has discovered religion on this issue,” Sanders said to moderator Anderson Cooper. “But it’s a little bit too late.”
+
+The Sanders campaign thinks that the primary map becomes more favorable to him as the race shifts out of the South, but his window to overtake Clinton is narrowing.
+
+But with momentum from other primaries that featured large numbers of African American voters, Clinton holds a comfortable lead in Michigan. She has focused her campaign here on black voters, who were about a quarter of the primary electorate in 2008, and on the Flint crisis.
+
+A Detroit Free Press-WXYZ poll released late Saturday shows her leading Sanders by 56 percent to 31 percent, a gap that “suggests it may be too late for him to battle back to a victory here despite a strong effort in recent days,” the newspaper wrote.
+
+The poll had her in a statistical tie with Sanders on the question of trustworthiness and up three points on the question of who would be the “more progressive president.” Only 17 percent of those polled felt Sanders had the best chance of winning in November.
+
+At a news conference before the debate, Sanders acknowledged that he trails Clinton in Michigan, in part because he has continued to struggle to reach African American voters, who represented about 23 percent of the Democratic primary electorate in 2008.
+
+During the debate, he fumbled a question about what “racial blind spots” he has by suggesting that only black people live in ghettos.
+
+“When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street or when you get dragged out of a car,” he said.
+
+For her part, Clinton misstated her own position on gun control, a central issue in her campaign.
+
+“I think we have to try everything that works to try to limit the number of people and the kinds of people who are given access to firearms,” she said.
+
+That goes further than her official position that loopholes in existing gun-control laws should be narrowed and that people on the federal terrorist no-fly list should be prevented from buying guns.
+
+Despite predicting a continued strong challenge from Sanders, Clinton’s advisers hope that by April, her delegate advantage will make it virtually impossible for Sanders to claim the nomination.
+
+The catastrophic failure represented by the Flint water crisis set the tone for the feisty debate, with both candidates expressing outrage and promising action.
+
+“President Sanders would fire anybody who knew about what was happening and did not act appropriately,” Sanders said.
+
+Sanders also demanded a rebate for Flint residents who paid their water bills throughout the crisis, something that has already been done. Snyder has obtained a $30 million appropriation to pay Flint water bills and give residents money back.
+
+“You are paying three times more than poisoned water than I pay in Burlington, Vermont, for clean water,” Sanders said.
+
+Clinton pledged to “get rid of lead everywhere” within five years if she is elected.
+
+Elahe Izadi in Washington and Steve Friess in Flint contributed to this report.",REAL
+9785,Israel: 1984 Everlasting,"Photo by SarahTz | CC BY 2.0 
+
+
+Empty Declarations of Democracy… Vacant Boasts of humanity 
+For decades, Israel has held itself out as being the lone “democracy” in the Middle East; a state where the rights of individuals could not and would not be held hostage to the autocratic whims of royalty, but rather a full partner to a free and robust electoral process that guarantees not just meaningful input from the governed but the ability to challenge state policies as the winds of change blow from “the river to the sea.” 
+Once again, recent events have proven this to be just so much a perverse myth… empty rhetoric… second only to the brazen unfounded Israeli boast of having the “most humane army in the world,” even as the body count of Palestinian children grows in cemeteries and prisons that have become very much its own unique brand of 21 st century youth hostel. 
+Recently, Hagai El-Ad , an Israeli and Jew, who serves as executive director of B’Tselem (The Israel Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), spoke before the UN Security Council urging it to take immediate action against Israel’s illegal settlements. 
+Demagoguery and Inhumanity Exposed 
+Not quite 1400 words in its entirety, one paragraph in particular of El-Ad’s testimony sums up life for millions of those captured by a democracy that sees day as night… pain as pleasure. Crushing, despite its brevity, the power and pain of these words could easily be part of an opening statement by a war crimes prosecutor at a tribunal called to hold Israel accountable for crimes unseen since the Nuremburg tribunals some 70 years ago. 
+“What does it mean, in practical terms, to spend 49 years, a lifetime, under military rule? When violence breaks out, or when particular incidents attract global attention, you get a glimpse into certain aspects of life under occupation. But what about the rest of the time? What about the many “ordinary” days of a 17,898-day-long occupation, which is still going strong? Living under military rule mostly means invisible, bureaucratic, daily, violence. It means living under an endless permit regime, which controls Palestinian life from cradle to grave: Israel controls the population registry; Israel controls work permits; Israel controls who can travel abroad – and who cannot; Israel controls who can visit from abroad – and who cannot; in some villages, Israel maintains lists of who can visit the village, or who is allowed to farm which fields. Permits can sometimes be denied; permits must always be renewed. Thus with every breath they take, Palestinians breathe in occupation. Make a wrong move, and you can lose your freedom of movement, your livelihood, or even the opportunity to marry and build a family with your beloved.” 
+In a free democratic society these comments, while perhaps controversial, would certainly not constitute sedition. In an open, healthy State these words would surely give reason to pause and reflect… but never serve as a rational trip-wire to strip their speaker of his birthright as an unbound citizen empowered to support his government for policies he finds just but condemn it for those that bear the star of tyranny. It is a distinction that Israel has failed to adopt or learn over the course of its 50 year subjugation of millions whose only crime is to be born Palestinian in occupied land with sign-posts everywhere that simply say “ Jews only.” 
+Beating of Chests 
+Not long after El-Ad’s powerful speech before a world body entrusted with securing fundamental rights and liberty for all of its citizenry, the hue and cry could be heard among Israeli political elite to silence such subversive talk. Thus, Coalition Chairman MK David Bitan of the Likud Party undertook the first steps of reprisal by announcing he was considering submitting a bill to the Knesset that could remove the citizenship of Israelis who act against their country in international organizations. According to Bitan, “El-Ad’s actions at the Security Council are a blatant violation of the trust citizens must have for their country, so he should go find another country where he could be a citizen.” 
+Alarming, one might ask; no, not at all… merely another in an endless daily stream of steps by a government second to none when it comes to autocratic, indeed dictatorial, control of every fiber of its citizens freedoms, particularly their ability to access and exchange information without fear of retribution. 
+Much is known and largely ignored about the thousands of Palestinian civilians that have been targeted and slaughtered by the Israeli military machine in occupied Palestine, whether in Gaza or the West Bank. Indeed, the killing fields of Gaza or execution alleys of back street Jerusalem no longer acquire more than a passing fancy or footnote in the evening news spread across a world now busy with outrages of more recent vintage. After 70 years of slaughter, it’s just so much business as usual. 
+So, too, we have seemingly become numbed to the reality that thousands of Palestinian political prisoners languish in isolation, many sitting year after year, some for decades, in administrative detention cells of political prisons… uncharged, undefended and untried, tortured in ways that leave the spirits of those still roaming the now empty cellblocks of South Africa’s notorious Robben Island relieved their misery was ended quickly through state sanctioned executions by “suicide.” 
+The Mighty Censor’s Sword 
+Closures of Palestinian news rooms and television stations are commonplace… yet no more remarkable than assaults by Israel upon Palestinian journalists that long ago moved into triple digits and show no sign of abating. The Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms ( MADA ) has documented a pattern of such attacks by Israel running, for some time now, at almost 400 per year. Although the exact number of Palestinian journalists killed or injured by Israel over just the last decade may never be known, it has been documented that seventeen lost their lives in Gaza, alone, during the months of bombings which it endured in 2014. 
+Dozens of Palestinian journalists and private bloggers have been arrested by Israel and held for violating vague administrative codes that typically come down to the application of entirely undefined prohibitions such as “incitement.” Dareen Tatour , a 35-year-old poet and Arab-Palestinian citizen of Israel, was arrested and placed under administrative detention on charges of inciting violence via her poetry which she posted on Facebook and which merely praises those who fight against Israeli domination. Also arrested and charged with criminal incitement was 19-year-old Anas Khateeb , on the basis of her Facebook posts which included such alarming statements as “Jerusalem is Arab,” and “Long live the Intifada.” 
+Recently, Palestinian journalist, Samah Dweik , was released from prison having served almost six months for an alleged incitement charge which resulted from comments about the occupation she posted on her private Facebook account. For most of her sentence, her family was banned from visiting or having any contact with her. She was but one of over 20 Palestinian journalists recently imprisoned by Israel for allegations of incitement, along with hundreds of other Palestinian activists or bloggers who have been targeted for arrest and prosecution for nothing more than postings of political opinions about the Israeli occupation and Palestinian resistance on social media. Dweik’s release came not long after Israel and Facebook entered into an agreement to “work together” to monitor Palestinian posts. 
+The Sword Cuts Deeper 
+Increasingly, Palestinians are not the sole victims of an Israeli policy to silence “dissent” or to dramatically curb the nature and extent of information made available to its citizens… Jews and Arabs alike. For example, not long ago, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman confronted the military station director after Army Radio broadcast a documentary on the life of the leading Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish , saying that material like Darwish’s shouldn’t darken Israeli airwaves. 
+In what can only be described as a systematic effort to control both journalists and citizens in their ability to read and write, to access and exchange information, and to reach informed opinions essential to a public and democratic dialogue about current and future Israeli policies, its machinery of censorship has become the linchpin of the State’s view of what is appropriate knowledge and speech and what is not. 
+Thus, of late, Israel has begun to demand of social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter that they have input, if not control, over what posts ultimately find their way into the stream of ideas and debate within the Israeli public at large. According to Quds Press, Facebook and Twitter recently deleted thousands of posts, pages and accounts as a result of demands made by the Israeli Ministry of Justice based upon little more than amorphous claims that the information posed a threat to the safety of Israel. 
+On an even more ominous note, the Knesset has begun to formulate legislation that would require foreign entities to actively monitor social media sites for information deemed to be offensive to Israel. Under the legislation, content based liability could be found for material published by foreign nationals, addressed to foreign nationals and posted on foreign websites thereby reducing the concept of free speech in Israel to one that is cast by the prevailing political winds of the day and little else. 
+Recently the chief Israeli censor notified dozens of Israeli bloggers and social media activists that any material they might wish to publish in their personal blogs or social media accounts, when dealing with a wide range of what was described as “security” related subject matters, must be vetted. Although provided a generic and ambiguous catalog of those areas to be submitted for clearance, the targets, themselves, were not permitted to disclose the makeup of the list under penalty of law. If history can be counted upon to be the guidepost of what subject matters must be prescreened before publication, in the past the list has included such security “sensitive” subject matters as: 
++ Cooperation agreements with foreign militaries; 
++ Letters to the editor on military or security matters; 
++ Contacts with foreign countries; 
++ Anything connected to the nuclear industry; 
++ Information about official delegations abroad; 
++ Any material which constitutes a “danger” to people’s lives; 
++ Immigration policies from “endangered” nations; 
++ Use of foreign sources or material that touch upon any of these areas; 
++ Detention of those suspected of security offenses; 
++ Any information about military industries; 
++ Appointments, resignations, firings, rumors about IDF activities or commanders 
+Finally, in a readily transparent effort to maintain a democratic illusion of a free and uncensored flow of information in the market place of ideas, pursuant to the censorship regulations there are complete prohibitions against leaving any blank spaces or other potential indicators in one’s writing or posts that might suggest or lead one to conclude that material has been deleted. 
+For those disturbed over this censorship procedure, it must be remembered that we are, after all, talking about a state that recently placed 101st out of 179 countries in the press Freedom index worldwide. Indeed, this appalling placement for the Middle East’s sole democracy is significantly better than Israel has scored in the Freedom index for quite a number of years. 
+For those wondering just how widespread, indeed systemic, Israel’s censorship procedures are, it is a country with a military censor procedure that has banned, outright, publication of, soon to be, some 2000 articles and redacted various information from 15,000 others in recent history. That is thousands of articles professional journalists and editors decided were of public interest but which never saw the light of day. Imagine how many more events of public interest went uninvestigated, or articles which were not written, issues debated, or challenges brought to bear for the Israeli body politic to consider because of self-censorship by journalists or editors too tired or principled to seek pre – approval of their body of work by government censors. Stories simply swallowed up and disappeared by an industry of censorship. 
+Human Rights… Israel Wrongs 
+Although not yet law, in what can only be described as an all-out onslaught against core democratic rights and values, over the last several days consideration of a bill has begun in the Knesset that would empower the Defense Minister to detain a citizen without trial; to deny one the right to pursue or obtain employment in a field of interest; to limit access to various public places; and “to impose any other order or restriction necessitated by considerations of national security or public safety”. 
+Earlier in January 2011, the Knesset endorsed a right-wing proposal to investigate some of Israel’s best-known human rights organizations for “delegitimizing” its military. Among others was B’Tselem. The proposed investigations would entail inquiries into the funding of several human rights groups that have a history of criticizing Israeli policies. At the time, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel described the proposal as a “severe blow” to Israeli democracy and critics labeled the policy as “ McCarthyist “. 
+Recently a variation on that bill became law in Israel compelling non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive more than half of their funding from foreign state entities to declare so publicly. Ultimately, the legislative criteria were tailored specifically to silence criticism of government policies by some 27 NGO’s… 25 of which, including B’Tselem, are considered to be left-wing… while the other two are non-affiliated. As intended, the bill will have absolutely no impact upon right-wing and pro-settlement NGOs which are funded almost entirely by private donations from powerful Zionists and Zionist entities from outside of Israel. 
+One can only imagine that upon returning home to the firestorm awaiting him, following his speech before the UN, Hagai El-Ad surely felt what it must have been like to be an activist leftist Jew in the United States during the dark days of McCarthy. 
+On the other hand, perhaps El-Ad should consider himself very fortunate indeed. On his twitter account, Arab-Palestinian MK Ahmad Tibi mocked MK David Bitan’s call for El-Ad’s de-citizenship saying: “Why stop at removing citizenship? Why not destroy the home of the B’Tselem director-general? Why not bar his entire family from entering the country, remove his land, submit them to administrative detention, and put checkpoints and closures in his neighborhood?”",FAKE
+708,"No, Sanders wouldn't be a better match for Trump","**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+Buzz Cut:
+
+ • No, Sanders wouldn’t be a better match for Trump
+
+ • Power Play: Senate flipping out?
+
+ • Reid tries to diffuse Dem tensions
+
+ • Fox News Latino poll: Hillary tops Trump by 39 points with Hispanics
+
+ • Look out below
+
+NO, SANDERS WOULDN’T BE A BETTER MATCH FOR TRUMP
+
+ Bernie Sanders is looking a lot like John Kasich these days. And, no, not because of their hand gestures.
+
+In the final round of “Super Sloppy Double Dare” that was the GOP nominating process, Kasich argued that he should be the nominee because he handily beat Hillary Clinton in hypothetical head-to-head matchups while now-presumptive nominee Donald Trump consistently lagged.
+
+Now, Sanders who is, as Kasich was, out of the running for the nomination is asking his party to throw over the frontrunner for the sake of general election viability. And there’s data to back him up.
+
+In this week’s Fox News poll and the most recent NYT/CBS News poll, Sanders outperforms Clinton against Trump. And it had been true for Kasich, too.
+
+But it doesn’t really matter. First, any Democrat without her enormous negative ratings would match up better with Trump than Clinton does. Throw Martin O’Malley or even an imaginary candidate (insofar as those are different concepts) in a poll, and you might see a similar result.
+
+And that’s because those candidates haven’t been the target of millions of dollars in attack ads or even garnered much in the way of media scrutiny. These are not just hypothetical matchups, they are, in many ways, hypothetical candidates.
+
+Head-to-head matchup polls in primaries can be useful if you’re talking about frontrunners and/or candidates who have been substantially defined in the minds of voters.
+
+Then there’s the question of how the process shapes the product. Competing for your party’s nomination definitely can damage your reputation. Lordy day, it can.
+
+But, there is also a payoff at the end of the line, as the party swings in behind its man or woman. So it’s not just that Sanders’ head-to-head matchups with Trump aren’t reflective of the general-election reality, neither are Clinton’s.
+
+The current Trump bump is real. The NYT/CBS News poll tells the tale: Eight in 10 Republicans said that the party should unite behind him, despite their disagreements. And in his battle with Clinton, Trump is getting the same post-victory boost his predecessor, Mitt Romney, got four years ago.
+
+After a primary season of unrivaled acrimony, the realities of the binary choice of the general election are setting in.
+
+The big question now is what Clinton’s bounce will look like.
+
+It will certainly be there. Eighty percent of Democrats in the poll said that party unity was essential to victory and 83 percent said Clinton could do that. For Republicans, just 63 percent said unity was essential to victory and just 64 percent believed Trump could deliver on that task.
+
+That discrepancy helps explain Trump’s deficit in this survey.
+
+What we must wait to see is how big a boost Clinton will get – perhaps less than Trump considering that her party is already more united. We also can’t know whether the surge in partisan loyalty we see for Trump today will last, or if the party’s underlying fracture will reassert itself.
+
+The answers to both sets of questions will depend on how well Clinton and Trump traverse the eight weeks until convention time.
+
+WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…
+
+ The Scientist: “They don’t snore, but might creak during their slumbers. For the first time, trees have been shown to undergo physical changes at night that can be likened to sleep, or at least to day-night cycles that have been observed experimentally in smaller plants. Branches of birch trees have now been seen drooping by as much as 10 centimetres at the tips towards the end of the night. ‘It was a very clear effect, and applied to the whole tree,’ says András Zlinszky of the Centre for Ecological Research in Tihany, Hungary. ‘No one has observed this effect before at the scale of whole trees, and I was surprised by the extent of the changes.’”
+
+POWER PLAY: SENATE FLIPPING OUT?
+
+ With the presidential picks in both parties essentially decided, party operatives are turning to the Senate as the next battle heading into the November election, and Republicans are on the defending side. Can they keep their majority, or will Democrats flip it back in their favor? National Republican Senatorial Committee National Spokeswoman, Alleigh Marre, gives her picks for seats she believes the GOP can maintain while Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Communications Director, Sadie Weiner, gives her take on seats she thinks Democrats can easily steal.
+
+Reid tries to diffuse Dem tensions - WSJ: “Divisions within the Democratic Party, including the eruption of violence on the part of Bernie Sanders’s supporters at a state party convention in Nevada, have thrust Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid into the center of an intraparty brawl in his final months in office.”
+
+[Matthew Continetti says Obama’s policy of non-intervention extends to his party’s own civil war.]
+
+Fox News Latino poll: Hillary tops Trump by 39 points with Hispanics - Fox News Latino: “With less than six months to go before the presidential elections, Latinos overwhelmingly support Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to a Fox News Latino poll released on Friday. The poll found that 62 percent of registered Latino voters would head to the ballot box for Clinton in November, while only 23 percent would support Trump on Election Day – a finding that many experts say is not surprising given the two candidates’ differing stances on issues important to Latinos.”
+
+[A new Fox News poll says that when it comes to most issues, Clinton comes out ahead of Trump, but trails badly on two of the most important: economy and terrorism.]
+
+Fox News Sunday - Trump policy adviser Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, join guest host John Roberts on “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.” Check local listings for broadcast times in your area.
+
+#mediabuzz - Host Howard Kurtz wraps the week’s media news. Watch Sunday at 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Guests include Bob Woodward, Brit Hume and Tucker Carlson.
+
+RACE NOTES
+
+ Thirty-five years ago, Trump released his taxes and showed he paid not one cent - WaPo
+
+Trump helps pay off Chris Christie’s campaign debt, but mocks gubernatorial girth - NYDN
+
+Minnesota State GOP trying to prevent funding for Trump - [St. Paul] Pioneer Press
+
+WITHIN EARSHOT
+
+ “I’m 3 million votes ahead of [Bernie Sanders] and I have an insurmountable lead in pledge delegates and I’m confident that just as I did with Senator Obama, where I said, you know what? It was really close. Much closer. Much closer than it is between me and Senator Sanders right now.” -- Hillary Clinton talking on CNN about the state of the Democratic primary race between her and Bernie Sanders.
+
+ 
+
+ LOOK OUT BELOW
+
+ AP: “The San Diego County Department of Animal Services says a baby opossum is doing well after being rescued from a toilet. The soaking wet little creature is seen in photos posted on the department’s Facebook page. The agency says a Pacific Beach woman found the critter in her toilet on May 1 and Animal Control Officer Carlos Wallis responded and took it to the San Diego Humane Society’s Project Wildlife. It will be released when it is old enough to survive on its own. A second opossum was found in the home later, along with a broken window which likely allowed the animals to enter. Animal Services Deputy Director Dan DeSousa says both opossums are doing OK.”
+
+Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Sally Persons contributed to this report. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+5485,Georgia Abandons Ukraine's Anti-Russian Obsession - Archil Sikharulidze,"Your daily reality snack Georgia Abandons Ukraine's Anti-Russian Obsession 
+After a brief period in which both Ukraine and Georgia appeared to be united against Russia, it now appears that the two nations are moving along very different paths Originally appeared at Russia Direct 
+In October, Georgia didn’t support any of Ukraine’s resolutions denouncing the Kremlin’s foreign policy within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). That is surprising, given how many analysts had by now assumed that Georgia and Ukraine were on the same page when it came to Russia. 
+The two resolutions deal with “the political implications of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine” and human rights abuses “on the occupied Ukrainian territories.” By supporting them, PACE recognized the military conflict in Ukraine as “Russian aggression” for the first time and called on the Kremlin to withdraw its forces from the eastern part of Ukraine. Moreover, it denounced the parliamentary elections , recently conducted by Russia in Crimea . 
+When the Georgian delegation in PACE didn’t support these resolutions, the nation’s pro-Western parties reacted strongly. For example, the United National Movement lambasted the Georgian government and accused the country’s former Prime Minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, of supporting Russia. Moreover, Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president and now the governor of the Odessa region in Ukraine, described such a stance as a “disgraceful” move. 
+However, an immediate response came from one of the members of the Georgian delegation in PACE, Eka Beselia. She retorted that Tbilisi needed to defend its own national interests. Even though this statement seems to have alleviated the increasing conflict, the video of Russian-Ukrainian journalist Matwey Ganapolsky, who accuses Georgia of betraying Ukraine in favor of Russia, fuelled the tensions. In contrast, Russian pundits see the unwillingness of Georgia to vote for the PACE resolution as a sign of improvement in Tbilisi-Moscow relations. 
+In reality, the reluctance of the Georgian Dream, the ruling party in Georgia, to approve these resolutions is just the logical conclusion of complicated relations with Kiev. Since the start of the color revolutions in the post-Soviet space , Georgia and Ukraine were largely in the same boat. 
+After the success of the Rose Revolution in Tbilisi and the Orange Revolution in Kiev, the newly elected governments were closely connected with each other and teamed up against Russia. This resulted from friendly relations between Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Timoshenko and former president Viktor Yushchenko on the one hand, and Georgia’s Saakashvili on the other hand. 
+However, their relationship was rather pragmatic in its nature, although officially Tbilisi recognized Ukraine as one of its closest allies. Since 2007 the democratic processes in the two countries have started moving in a reverse direction. Saakashvili’s penchant for conducting an aggressive policy as well as his authoritarian inclinations was increasing, while Ukraine faced the corruption and the political rivalry between Timoshenko and Yushchenko. 
+The more impact this had on the countries’ stability and development, the more obvious became the fact that the ruling elites from both sides did not support democratic reforms, but only the regimes that were friendly to them. Thus, Georgian-Ukrainian relations could be seen as a form of cooperation between governments, not between the people. 
+And this trend became relevant until the 2010 presidential elections, when Georgia’s civil society and population called on the government to support democratic processes and regime change in its “brother” country. From then on, Georgia has been shying away from supporting the political regime in Ukraine and focusing more on the support of the country’s own population. 
+However, Ukraine refused to consider such tactics, with its official representatives criticizing the Georgian Dream coalition for supporting Russia during the 2012 parliamentary elections. Moreover, Kiev cooperated with Georgia’s United National Movement, which was openly accused of building an authoritarian regime and egregious human rights abuses. 
+Logically, the new Georgian government under Ivanishvili cannot help paying attention to this fact. But it was relatively reticent and didn’t respond, even when Georgian volunteers came to fight in Eastern Ukraine to support Kiev and accused Tbilisi of supporting Russia. That had some implications for the Georgian Dream: It was seen as a political force that is capable of defending the country’s national interests. 
+Moreover, Georgian voters also saw the fact that Saakashvili was appointed as the governor of the Odessa region as an unfriendly move from Ukraine, as a slap in the face, because the former Georgian president was legally prosecuted in his home country, which meant that Ivanishvili couldn’t fulfill his pledges and restore justice [During the election campaign he promised to put Saakashvili in jail for corruption and the abuse of power — Editor’s note]. The problem was exacerbated when Kiev granted Saakashvili Ukrainian citizenship, which made it impossible to imprison the former Georgian president. 
+Saakashvili crossed the red line during the latest parliamentary elections in Georgia during the campaign. First, his colleagues from the United National Movement visited Ukraine. Second, he openly called for a coup d’état against the Georgian government, which he sees as pro-Russian. In fact, he threatened to conduct a new revolution in Georgia. This was the last straw for the Georgian Dream. 
+It is safe to say that the current Georgian political elites started seeing Ukraine as a real headache and the shelter for dubious and controversial Georgian politicians from the United National Movement accused of different wrongdoings and legal violations. 
+However, with the victory of the Georgian Dream in the 2016 parliamentary elections, a lot has changed. Moreover, the odds of the party of winning the constitutional majority are really high. It means that the influence of the party is growing in the Georgian parliament and even more could change. 
+As a result, the government won’t necessarily have to take into account the views of other political forces to take decisions. It can be pretty outspoken now that it won’t put up with anti-government moves and initiatives like the ones promoted by Saakashvili. Moreover, the Georgian voters, who are seeking to have those involved in the violations during Saakashvili’s tenure prosecuted. So, in this regard, the electorate supports the Georgian Dream. 
+Thus, all this indicates that Georgian-Ukrainian relations have always been more complex and nuanced than they seemed to be at first glance. During Saakashvili’s tenure, there was cooperation between his government and the ones of Timoshenko and Yushchenko. However, eventually, Tbilisi shifted its priority from supporting top political officials to supporting society and people. 
+Ukrainian politicians should keep in mind that the Russian factor is not the only one that determines the Ukrainian-Georgian agenda. Providing shelter to Saakashvili also does matter. So, to improve the relations with Tbilisi, Kiev should take into account its national interest and support the Georgian people instead of the country’s politicians.",FAKE
+9748,"Trump Vows To ""Renovate"" the Bill of Rights","Topics: Politics , Hillary Clinton , Donald Trump , 2016 Presidential Election , President , US Constitution Thursday, 10 November 2016 
+If anyone in this ""great"" land knows anything about renovation, it may well be presidential hopeful Donald J. Trump. A veteran of the real estate industry for several decades now, Trump surely has renovated his share of properties, buildings and even golf courses. His latest project, however, could be his most ambitious: the Bill of Rights itself. 
+""Look at this thing,"" The Donald said as he held a copy the seminal American document before a crowd of reporters. ""It's old. I mean, it's old, like really old. You hear what I'm saying? It is old."" 
+When asked what his intentions for the document were, Trump proposed a ""renovation"" of the foundational document ""just like he would any of [his] older buildings that didn't cut the mustard anymore. I mean, Ivana wasn't cutting it anymore, so I got Marla Maples. New is better. I think we all know that, new is better. New equals better. Sometimes you have to tear something down to make something new, right? And then it's all better."" 
+When asked what he specifically meant by ""tearing down the document"" that is the basis of this country's inalienable rights, Trump continued, ""Hey look, I don't know when this thing was written, probably a long time ago, like in the 1920's or something, but it doesn't make any sense anymore. I have a real problem with an old, stinky document telling me how to live my life. If we're gonna make America great again, the first thing we have to do is make these document new again, and that's what I'm gonna do on the first day in office. Bingo-bango, new document for the new America. I mean, really, no one reads this stuff anymore."" 
+The presidential hopeful was then asked how he planned to rejuvenate the Bill of Rights. ""First of all some of this spooky language needs to get cleaned up. Like how is a working-class guy like me, the average citizen, supposed to understand this stuff? The trial of all crimes (except in cases of impeachment, and in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia when in actual service in time of War or public danger) shall be by an Impartial Jury of the Vicinage, with the requisite of unanimity for conviction, the right of challenge, and other accostomed [sic] requisites; and no person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherways [sic] infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment by a Grand Jury; but if a crime be committed in a place in the possession of an enemy, or… blah, blah, blah. Vicinage? That's not even a word, is it? Unanimity? Impeachment? These aren't words like hammer, dumptruck or bigly. They're talking in circles. That's right, they're talking in circles. So that one's gone. Just out. Accostomed? Otherways? These Founding Father clowns can't even spell!"" 
+Trump's furor grew as he read more of the document. ""Freedom of religion? No one goes to church anymore. Who cares? That one's going too. All it does is protect these Muslims who blew up buildings. God forbid they blow up my towers. That's out. Freedom of speech? Freedom to lie, that's what I call it. Freedom to lie, like those bastards on CNN and Hillary over there. This seventh here, that's a doozy. It says in ""all matters involving more than 20 dollars"". That's a joke. I tip 20 dollars at Starbucks when I get my coffee. That one's out. ""Due process of law"" … another joke. Out! This third one, ""quartering soldiers,"" what's that? I have waaaay too much respect for our soldiers to start chopping them up into quarters. I mean, that's like serial killer stuff, right? No, absolutely not, I will not chop up soldiers. On my first day in office, I will find anyone who is trying to chop up American soldiers and make them pay."" 
+When prompted that he may be misinterpreting the articles in the Bill, Trump lashed back. ""Of course I am! Look at it some time. Who can understand this stuff? Of course I'm misinterpreting this stuff. Maybe this is how they talked in the 1920's, but not now, not in Trump's America. And the ideas are just stupid. Look at this fourth one. No illegal ""search and seizure""? If I can't walk into someone's house and arrest him, how am I gonna maintain law and order? If I can't just take someone's stuff, how am I gonna know what's going on in this country, huh? You tell me. And this old piece of paper is trying to tell me when I'm president - not if but when - I'm gonna restore law and order. This fourth one, how many shootings in Chicago happened because my police have their hands tied by this stupid fourth amendment. I mean, that's what I'm gonna do, starting on the first day of my term. The very first day. Here's another peach: no ""cruel and unusual punishment."" What's that? How else do you deal with terrorists? That's why we got soft. These terrorists knew they could come over, bombs some buildings, kill a bunch of people and know this piece of paper was gonna make sure they didn't get their precious feeling hurt. First day in office, that one's out!"" 
+One reporter asked The Donald if he knew that the ""stinky, old"" document he was holding was supposed to protect the American people from injustice, and false legal claims. (He was also asked if he knew what ""quartered"" meant). ""Hey, I'm not saying people don't have rights. People have rights. Of course people have rights. Sure they do. I'm just saying they don't need all this stuff. The first day I'm in office, the very first day, I'm gonna make a nice simple list of rights, you know, without all this fancy nonsense. It's outdated. We need something for 2016, something nice and simple."" 
+Trump then said he had to meet with his team of architects and engineers to draw up plans for a wall along the southern border of the US, which he would start building on his ""very first day in office."" Make Chris Dahl's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
+4563,‘People in Europe are full of fear’ over refugee influx,"The European Union’s sharpening divisions over a spiraling refugee crisis broke into the open Thursday with two leaders strongly disagreeing in public over whether the asylum-seekers were threatening “Europe’s Christian roots.”
+
+That was the language used by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as he warned Europe against allowing in mostly Muslim families. A day after a drowned Syrian toddler washed up on the Turkish coast, another European leader retorted that Christian values demanded helping the less fortunate.
+
+The furious exchange — a rare breach of the E.U.’s buttoned-down decorum — came as Hungarian authorities apparently laid a trap for thousands of asylum-seekers who had packed Budapest’s central train station after days of worsening conditions outside the station. Police had blocked them from entering the station for days but allowed them in early Thursday.
+
+But a refugee-packed train apparently bound for the Austrian border came to a halt just west of Budapest, in a small town where dozens of police officers were waiting on the platform. They tried to force people off the train to take them to a migrant-processing center, threatening their chances to make it onward to Western Europe.
+
+By day’s end, there was a standoff, with the packed train surrounded by police and the migrants refusing to budge. Some of the passengers received medical treatment on the platform.
+
+[European railways become ground zero for the migrant crisis]
+
+Orban, Hungary’s nationalist leader who has spearheaded attempts to turn back the migrants, said Thursday that he had little choice but to seal his nation’s border with razor wire, soldiers and a high fence.
+
+“We Hungarians are full of fear, people in Europe are full of fear, because we see that the European leaders, among them the prime ministers, are not able to control the situation,” he said in Brussels in a raw joint appearance with European Parliament President Martin Schulz. Orban and Schulz, a veteran politician from Germany, made no attempt to paper over their differences or their distaste for each other.
+
+The Hungarian leader blamed Germany for the crisis, saying that its open-door policy toward Syrian asylum-seekers was propelling a wave of migrants to undertake dangerous journeys toward Europe’s heart. Germany expects 800,000 asylum-seekers this year, and it has said that it does not plan to turn away Syrians.
+
+“The moral, human thing is to make clear: ‘Please don’t come. Why do you have to go from Turkey to Europe? Turkey is a safe country. Stay there. It’s risky to come,’ ” Orban said.
+
+Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have overwhelmed Europe’s capacity to respond in recent months, opening stark divisions. Some leaders believe that the world’s largest economic bloc — a vast territory of 503 million residents — is more than capable of accommodating refugees. Others, including Hungary’s Orban, believe the continent’s population is in a far more delicate state.
+
+The divisions could threaten some of the most basic tenets of the E.U., an alliance built on the ashes of World War II in a bid never again to allow such destruction. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said this week that a Europe with no internal borders — a key achievement of European unification — could be in question if no solution to the refugee crisis is found.
+
+He warned that the splits emerging during the refugee crisis could do lasting damage to the 28-nation alliance, which was founded on a spirit of consensus and burden-sharing.
+
+“This is a crucial moment for the European Union,” Schulz said. “A deeper split of the union is a risk we cannot exclude.”
+
+Orban’s fears are shared by many Eastern European nations, which have pushed hard against any attempt to require them to take in asylum-seekers. Slovakia has said it will accept only Christians. In Estonia, where fewer than 100 migrants have been resettled, police on Thursday were investigating a suspicious early-morning fire at a dormitory that was housing victims of Syria’s war.
+
+[Britain takes in so few refugees from Syria they would fit on a subway train]
+
+But the concerns also extend to Britain. There, fewer Syrians than would fit in a London subway train have been accepted this year. British media reported Thursday that Prime Minister David Cameron would soon announce plans to take in “thousands” more Syrian refugees, a striking turnaround for a leader who a day earlier had said that the answer to the crisis was not simply taking in “more and more” refugees.
+
+Elsewhere in Europe, the refusals brought mounting anger from leaders who are more sympathetic to the growing crowds of asylum-seekers.
+
+“For a Christian, it shouldn’t matter what race, religion and nationality the person in need represents,” European Council President Donald Tusk said Thursday, launching into Orban before the two met in Brussels. Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, proposed resettling at least 100,000 refugees across Europe.
+
+In France, President François Hollande said the death of the toddler is “a tragedy, but it’s also a call to the European conscience. Europe is made of values and principles.” Images of the child’s body lying facedown and partly in the water on a Turkish beach evoked consternation around the world.
+
+Hollande said he had just reached an agreement with Germany on a proposal for mandatory quotas to more equitably spread refugees across the E.U. Some European countries “are not shouldering their moral obligations,” he said.
+
+Merkel, meanwhile, said she understood that not every nation was prepared to take on as large a burden as her country was doing. But she said it was impossible for Germany, Sweden and Austria alone to continue taking in the vast majority of the incoming asylum-seekers.
+
+“The Geneva Convention does not apply only to Germany but also to every state,” she said, referring to the international treaty that requires countries to take in refugees of war.
+
+Orban has vowed to seal Hungary’s borders by Sept. 15, empowered by emergency measures expected to be approved by the country’s parliament in the coming days. The measures would give authorities broad powers to crack down on illegal migration.
+
+Outside Budapest’s elegant stone-and-glass-fronted station Thursday evening, people living in tents and atop worn woolen blankets sprawled across a vast public plaza and into an adjacent subway concourse. Tourists carrying frame backpacks slipped into the station entrance past women cradling babies, men pacing anxiously and children arguing over the few available toys.
+
+Refugees expressed a keen awareness that Hungary does not want them — and said the feeling is mutual.
+
+“Hungary is a poor country. They can’t give us the life we’re looking for. They can’t even give us food or water,” said Yahya Lababidi, a tank-top-wearing 21-year-old law student from the northern Syrian province of Idlib. “We want to go to the rich countries.”
+
+Lababidi said he had been traveling for a month, passing along “the usual route” — through Turkey, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia — with a plan ultimately to settle in the Netherlands. But he said that when he tried to enter the train station in Budapest five days earlier, police officers barred his path. Since then, he’s been sleeping on the cold stone of the plaza.
+
+“I escaped from war,” he said. “I thought things would be better than this.”
+
+[As tragedies shock Europe, a bigger refu­gee crisis looms in the Middle East]
+
+Hungarian leaders “have done all they can to stir up popular sentiment against immigrants and refugees,” said Marta Pardavi, a co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a group that offers legal advice to asylum-seekers. “This has become a totally divided issue. Friendships break up over this.”
+
+Critics of the European response said the continent’s 20th-century history of dictatorships and wars should instill in it more sympathy for others in need.
+
+“We are facing a historical moment, perhaps one of the biggest the E.U. has had to face over the last couple of decades,” said Yves Pascouau, director of migration and mobility policies at the Brussels-based European Policy Center. “European citizens have fled dictatorships and wars. This is a part of our history. We’ve been able to be protected elsewhere in our countries.”
+
+Witte reported from Budapest. Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.
+
+European railways become ground zero for the migrant crisis
+
+Why the language we use to talk about refugees matters so much
+
+E.U. leaders show little unity ahead of emergency conclave on refugees",REAL
+6351,CNN Breaking News: Trump Tells Supporters To Vote Multiple Times,"
+
+CNN (also known as the Clinton News Network) has gone out of its way to try to rig the election for Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton this year. It hasn’t even tried to hide its bias in an attempt to destroy Republican nominee Donald Trump’s chances at becoming president.
+Over the weekend, CNN tried desperately to find anything it could to distract the American people from the FBI’s announcement that it was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s use of an email server while she was secretary of state.
+CNN ran a story on Sunday about a Trump rally in Colorado, only it blatantly lied about what Trump said at the rally in an attempt to smear him, Mediate reported .
+The article in question originally ran with the headline “Trump, skeptical of mail-in balloting, encourages voting more than once if necessary.” Here’s a screen grab of the original.
+“If you go to university center, they’ll give you a new ballot, they’ll void your old ballot, in some places they do that four or five times, so by tomorrow, almost everyone will have their new ballots in,” Trump said at the rally, according to CNN’s original article.
+However there was more to that quote, which CNN decided not to run with.
+“If you go to university center, they’ll give you a new ballot, they’ll void your old ballot. They’ll give you a new ballot, and you can go out and make sure it get’s in. Now in some places, they do that four or five times, but we don’t do that. So by tomorrow, almost everyone will have their new ballots in,” is the full quote of what Trump said.
+By selectively editing the quote, CNN made it appear that Trump was encouraging voter fraud.
+After publishing the original story, CNN changed the headline, and the content, to actually reflect what Trump actually said. Initially, the network did not indicate it had done so. However, a line was later added at the end of the article to indicate it had been changed.
+The new headline can be seen below:
+
+CNN also took down the tweet that had the incorrect headline.
+Maybe next time CNN will think twice before publishing such blatant lies. Instead of trying to cover up Clinton’s corruption, maybe the network should just to its job and report on the news.
+This is what the media is doing these days, they chop speeches, edit them, falsify them! Let this be a warning to you for any future BS that may come out from the media. No matter how much they hype it. Do NOT believe anything the media tells you!
+You know what you have to do, go out and vote for Trump! Avoid electronic voting because the machines are owned by George Soros, a Clinton donor, request paper ballot because they are obligated by the law and if they refuse to give you a paper ballot, make a scene, call the cops on them.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+944,The GOP would unite against Trump at its own peril,"The other day I spied a high Republican official walking on the street and called out his name. He stopped, hit his smile app and exclaimed how glad he was to see me. “What are you going to do about Trump?” I asked. He paused and then uttered the dreaded word: unity. “We have to have unity,” he said. I got his message. He’s selling out.
+
+In the coming weeks, Republicans everywhere will be seeking unity by embracing a front-runner. If that person is Donald Trump, they will be ignoring his utter lack of qualifications for the presidency, his harebrained schemes for controlling migration, his knack for insulting billions people at a time (Muslims, women, the disabled), his gaudy womanizing past, his lying, his exaggerating, his enthusiasm for torture and his ingenious view of the Constitution as a lease that can be broken.
+
+That paragraph, politically lethal if I were writing about someone else, encapsulates precisely why Trump is so hard to stop. He is, among other things, scandal-proof. At the moment, an army of journalists is scouring the land looking for whatever Trump has done that we might not yet know about. Trouble is, there is little that can be revealed. Call him a womanizer, and he shrugs. Say he lies, and he lies by saying he doesn’t. Confront him with the truth and, as he did by insisting on Muslim revelry in New Jersey following the Sept. 11 attacks, and he just perseveres. He cannot be shamed.
+
+It’s trite to liken Trump to a Kardashian, but I shall do so anyway. What they have in common is the determination to outlast our moral or political revulsion. Kim Kardashian hit the big time with a sex tape. Revolting? Yes. But forgotten? Mostly. What lingers is the name.
+
+It is similar with Trump. The shock of his statements — calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” for instance — has worn off. The same with his insult to Megyn Kelly or his mocking of a disabled New York Times reporter. All that is now “old news,” blanched of its repellent ugliness by time: Oh, that’s just Trump. He’ll say anything. He doesn’t mean it.
+
+Bit by bit, Trump will accumulate more endorsements. The motley crew that now surrounds him will be supplemented and upgraded by establishment names. They will use the same reasoning that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) did last month when he endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), whom he hates — a higher purpose. In Graham’s case, it was to stop Trump. With others, it will be this thing called party unity or, its functional equivalent, stopping Hillary Clinton.
+
+But what is the point of a party that attempts to unify around a candidate such as Donald Trump? What then does the party stand for? Does the GOP endorse anti-Muslim bigotry? Shall the party have a plank about Mexican rapists or the physical attributes of women? If Trump is its nominee, will the party endorse what are certain to be misogynist and personal attacks on Clinton? (Trump’s campaign boasts he has the endorsement of Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, both associated with Bill Clinton’s sexual rap sheet. This could get ugly.)
+
+Trump’s message, we are incessantly told, is that the GOP has double-crossed its constituency with trade, immigration and just about anything else you can name. But it will do the Republican Party no good to win back the aggrieved at the cost of everyone else — not to mention what is good for the country.
+
+A glance at Trump’s endorsees — check his Web page — is an effective appetite suppressant. Imagine a Republican National Convention’s dais stocked with some of the people who have already endorsed Trump — not just the feckless Chris Christie or the bizarre Sarah Palin, but such figures as the disgraced football player Richie Incognito, Hulk Hogan and Teresa Giudice, from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” a fresh alumna of the federal prison system. A meeting of Trump supporters might have to be sanctioned by a pro wrestling promoter.
+
+When I spotted that Republican official, I did not say what I initially wanted to. I wanted to say that we are taking names — “we” being the American people. We will remember who endorsed a man who took American politics lower than it has ever been, no doubt extracting promises of good behavior that later will be broken. Party unity will not wash. The GOP is going to lose, the only question is how — with some honor, or craven and deservedly mocked by history.",REAL
+9652,Hillary’s “Big Tent” is Obama’s “Grand Bargain” on Steroids,"2016 presidential campaign by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
+Barack Obama tried to woo Republicans into a “Grand Bargain” that would have gutted Social Security. Bill Clinton let loose the banks. But Donald Trump’s destruction of the Republican Party will allow Hillary Clinton to “gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle.” The rich are about to get their best deal yet. Hillary’s “Big Tent” is Obama’s “Grand Bargain” on Steroids by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
+“ The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class.” 
+When Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to the Republican Party he provided the unexpected catalyst for completion of the corporate project begun by Bill Clinton, Al Gore and other white Democrats in the 1980s, with the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). To counter relentless attrition of whites to the GOP in their home states, these beleaguered, mostly southern Democrats sought national corporate funding to turn their party decisively to the right. They reckoned, correctly, that a steady stream of corporate capital would allow them to control the new wave of Black voters and politicians that had been mobilized by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns, while strengthening the hand of the South in national Democratic Party calculations. 
+Bill Clinton became the first DLC president in 1992, and moved swiftly and methodically to narrow the ideological differences between the duopoly parties. He completed much of Ronald Reagan’s agenda, claiming it as his own; destroyed welfare “as we knew it”; vastly expanded the mass Black Incarceration regime; pushed NAFTA through Congress over the objections of majorities in his own party; engineered the corporate monopolization of broadcast media; and removed the last safety straps from Wall Street banks. 
+“Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo.” 
+In foreign affairs, Clinton initiated what was to become the doctrine of “humanitarian” military intervention, dismantling and partially occupying the socialist nation of Yugoslavia. In the process, Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo, thus keeping operational the network created by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the previous decade in Afghanistan. In Africa, Clinton conspired with Uganda and exiled Tutsi rebels to overthrow the Hutu majority government in Rwanda, setting off a bloodbath in 1994, followed two years later by an invasion of Congo that has killed more than six million people -- and still counting. 
+Barack Obama was the second DLC president (although he lies about his membership). He, too, moved with unseemly haste to reach a “Grand Bargain” with the GOP -- not of necessity, since he had won a huge electoral mandate with the overwhelming financial backing of Wall Street, but as a matter of ideological principle. In January of 2009, before even taking the oath of office, Obama told the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post that all “entitlements,” including Medicare and Social Security, would be “ on the table ” for cutting in his administration. Obama’s first project, now considered the centerpiece of his legacy, was to resurrect the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s corporate health insurance scheme, adopted by Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996, and made into state law by Republican Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in 2006. Obama’s Affordable Care Act was, literally, written by lobbyists for the insurance and drug industries, and is now collapsing like a poorly constructed house at the end of its mortgage. 
+“For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his ‘Grand Bargain.’” 
+With the Democratic majority in Congress in no mood to tamper with Social Security and Medicare, Obama tried to maneuver the targeted entitlements into a financial crisis trap. He named two dependable reactionaries, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, as co-chairmen of his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, also called the Commission on Deficit Reduction. They dutifully recommended $4 trillion in budget cuts, mostly to social programs, including cuts to Social Security. Although the full commission did not endorse the chairs’ recommendations, and the Congress failed to pass bills modeled on the document, Obama used the Simpson-Bowles formula as a basis for negotiating what he hoped would be a “bipartisan” (GOP plus Obama and a minority of Democrats) massacre of entitlements. For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his “Grand Bargain.” Congressional Black Caucus chairman Emanuel Cleaver, of Kansas City, called the deal a “ Satan’s Sandwich ,” but Obama continued to pursue a political marriage made in hell until the 2012 reelection campaign clock called a halt to the spectacle. 
+“A de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie.” 
+The quest for a Grand Bargain was Barack Obama’s failed attempt to best Bill Clinton in erasing the distinctions between the two major parties – to create a de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie. It was the Republicans who ran away from the altar. And the Democrats did eat much of the Satan’s Sandwich, through sequestration and austerity that ravaged social programs by other means. 
+Why did the Republicans reject the deal? Although both halves of the duopoly ultimately answer to Wall Street, the Republicans, like any other party, have an institutional interest in winning office. It is true that Obama had crafted a deal that any Republican would love, but it was still his deal, and he planned to run for reelection as an historical dealmaker. Probably just as importantly, the Republican Party is the White Man’s party, meaning, white supremacy is its organizing principle, central to its identity among much of the masses. To embrace Obama, no matter how advantageous to their big business patrons, was a hug too far for the GOP. Racism doomed the Grand Bargain – Hallelujah! 
+A New, Bigger Bargain 
+Recently released Wikileaks emails reveal Hillary Clinton speaking to bankers at Morgan Stanley in 2013, a year after the debacle. “The Simpson-Bowles framework and the big elements of it were right,” she said. 
+Thanks to Donald Trump’s demolition of the Republican Party, the conditions have been created for Hillary Clinton, as DLC President #3, to achieve what #1 and #2 could not: gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle. With most of the ruling class and its attendants having vacated the building, the Republican Party has been reduced to Donald Trump and his “deplorables,” as Hillary calls them. Trump’s opposition to corporate trade deals violated the Holy Grail against prohibiting capitalists from moving money and jobs around the world as they see fit, and his reluctance to support regime change as an inherent right of American exceptionalism has frightened and outraged the military industrial complex, the national security establishment, and all sectors dependent on the maintenance of empire. 
+“An inherently unstable arrangement.” 
+Clinton’s Big Tent is not a temporary, election season dwelling. It is how she plans to govern. The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class, while at the same time the party nominally represents most of the folks who are abused and misused by that ruling class. It is an inherently unstable arrangement, and will soon be wracked by splits, as a post-Trump GOP attempts to lure its fat cats back and the darker and poorer constituencies consigned to the latrine area of Hillary’s high class tent break to the Left for air. 
+But in the interim, Clinton will have a unique opportunity to cut grand austerity deals with all the “big elements” of Simpson-Bowles, to renege on her corporate trade promises, and to wage war with great gusto in the name of a “united” country. Ever since the Democratic National Convention it has been clear that the Clintonites are encouraged to consider everyone outside of their grand circle to be suspect, subversive, or depraved. Their inclusive rhetoric is really an invocation of a ruling class consensus, now that Trump has supposedly brought the ruling class together under one banner. In Hillary’s tent, the boardrooms are always in session. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected] .",FAKE
+821,Kasich bows out. Did he do 'the right thing?',"Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a political insider who believed in civility, suspended his campaign Wednesday – one day after Sen. Ted Cruz bowed out.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Republican presidential candidate John Kasich arrives to Central Medford High School in Medford, Ore. on April 28. The Ohio governor suspended his campaign Wednesday.
+
+John Kasich, who ran as a hug-providing political insider in a year dominated by voter anger and the rise of outside candidates, suspended his political campaign on Wednesday. The move leaves Donald Trump standing alone as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
+
+Mr. Trump sounded conciliatory after news broke that Governor Kasich was quitting. He said that the Ohio governor might be helpful in the Buckeye State for the general election and that he would be interested in vetting Kasich as a possible vice presidential running mate.
+
+“I think John’s doing the right thing,” Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
+
+Did he? Not everyone was so sure. Kasich supporters bemoaned the loss of what they felt was the last source of civility in the race. Over the months of a campaign where other candidates resorted to deeply personal insults, innuendo, and shouting, the Ohio governor stood alone in emphasizing the complexity of political problems and the need to work with others to find answers.
+
+“If this is his last campaign, he went out admirably,” tweeted Yahoo News National Political Correspondent Matt Bai on Wednesday.
+
+Others pointed out that Kasich had finally reached his strategic goal – a one-on-one match-up with Trump – only to withdraw. Whether he could have beaten Trump or not was irrelevant, in this view. He’d have been able to rally anti-Trump forces in a way Ted Cruz could not, and show that Trumpism had not conquered the entire Republican Party.
+
+The problem is that Trump, if not Trumpism, does conquer all in the GOP. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus last night referred to Trump as the “presumptive nominee.” Given that, and fact that Trump is almost certain to pile up a winning majority of 1,237 delegates by the end of the primary season, Kasich felt he had no choice but to look for the exits.
+
+And there were never enough of those supporters, anyway. Kasich won only his home state of Ohio and by the end was at less than 20 percent in the national polls in a three-man race.
+
+Technically, Kasich finished 2016 in fourth, even though he was the last losing contender to drop out. Trump, Senator Cruz, and Marco Rubio all won more delegates. It’s amazing that he stayed in the race so long, given that he won more than 20 percent of the vote only once in the first 20 GOP primaries or caucuses, notes FiveThirtyEight polling guru Harry Enten.
+
+“Most candidates would have seen the writing on the wall and gone home. Kasich didn’t see the wall or the writing, or he didn’t care,” writes Mr. Enten.
+
+Would Trump actually ask Kasich to be his running mate, and if so would Kasich accept? Trump’s said he wants a politician as a VP, and the Ohio governor would provide balance to the billionaire in terms of experience and message. The pair never really clashed, though Trump did mock Kasich’s losing ways and his enthusiastic methods of eating.
+
+For Kasich, a VP slot might validate his quixotic effort and provide a cap to his long and varied political career. But Kasich also described himself as a “Prince of Light and Hope,” and he’d be joining a presidential candidate who’s shown no eagerness to embrace either of those characteristics.",REAL
+6893,October 28: Daily Contrarian Reads,"October 28: Daily Contrarian Reads By David Stockman. Posted On Friday, October 28th, 2016 My daily contrarian reads for Friday, October 28th. You need to login to view this content. 
+David Stockman’s Contra Corner isn’t your typical financial tipsheet. Instead it’s an ongoing dialogue about what’s really happening in the markets… the economy… and governments… so you can understand the world around you and make better decisions for yourself. 
+David believes the world -- certainly the United States -- is at a great inflection point in human history. The massive credit inflation of the last three decades has reached its apogee and is now going to splatter spectacularly. 
+This will have lasting ramifications on how governments tax and regulate you… the type of work you and your family members will have available and what you get paid… the value of your nest egg… and all other areas comprising your quality of life. Login 
+David Stockman's Contra Corner is the only place where mainstream delusions and cant about the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance and Beltway Banditry are ripped, refuted and rebuked. Subscribe now to receive David Stockman’s latest posts by email each day as well as his model portfolio, Lee Adler’s Daily Data Dive and David’s personally curated insights and analysis from leading contrarian thinkers.",FAKE
+7831,"How Western Media Teleported a Child 'Victim' from Homs to Aleppo (PHOTOS, VIDEO)","How Western Media Teleported a Child 'Victim' from Homs to Aleppo (PHOTOS, VIDEO) 
+Western media is capable of amazing feats which defy even the laws of physics Originally appeared at Russian Spring 
+The West keeps fighting its informational war on Russia blaming Russian Air Force for bloody crimes in Syrian Arab Republic. To persuade the world community of the fact that Moscow is to blame for catastrophic humanitarian situsation in Syria and not «moderate opposition» fighters turning the country into chaos world media descend into manipulating facts and publishing fakes. 
+The easily expected maximum effect has photos and videos showing children suffering from war and bombardments. Western readers keep on commenting such stories and blaiming “Assad’s regime and Putin”, but haven’t the slightest idea that those stories are skillfully made up. 
+«Russian Spring» has already covered a story of a girl who had been saved again and again, several times in just one month , and now we are offering a tear-squeezing vide about a girl who was teleported from Homs province to Aleppo by the Western media. 
+Child, where are you from? 
+On October 10 a footage showing allegedly one of the “bombardment victims» of Syrian Talbiseh in Homs province was published on YouTube channel of local informational resource talbisah. 
+And then the taer-sqeeinf video started its walk of fame thriugh media and social media: it was published on AJ+ Facebook page in particular (a Qatar-based telecom giant Al Jazzera) where it was reached by over 10 mln people (as of October 24). 
+Al Jazeea accompanied the video with pitiful subttles and corresponding title: «Happy Moday from Syria: this little girl is calling her dad after her house was destroyed by an airstrike». 
+BBC dealt with that video shortly and ""relocated"" the girl called Aya (as she introduced herself on the video) from Talbiseh to Aleppo by including a footage called «Aleppo: Where is my dad?» aya_bbc.jpg 
+Have a more attentive look on how medical staff working: even if we omit the shooting location fraud look at how strange the doctors behave. Instead of giving the first aid necessary for a kid after (alleged) bomberdment, instaed of cleaning head and face wound to minimize comtamination risk the doctors (or the actros playing doctors) keep walking around the girl wearing a troubled look not to hinder filming the vdeo. 
+Quite thick and artificail-looking blood cathes our eye as well as dark-blue bruises under girl’s eyes lookking a lot like make-up. 
+The whole video looks like a staged one, the authors and creators have just used a win-win tactics for their short film: a child wounded at war. 
+Twitter star 
+The journalists kept on using the pretty-looking mode in their propaganda. Som time later the girl was given a poster which read “Don’t bomb me again. It hurts. Aya” and made another tear-sqeezing photo which was then published by some Omar Qayson calling himself war journalists and media activist on his Twitter page . aya_twit.jpg 
+It’s laughable but “media activist’s” Twiiter «has only 11 posts open to public and the first of them is a photo of a bird killed by bombardments, the three last are reposts of the aforementioned Aya’s photograph. 
+Hashtags he chosen for his photo (Children of Syria and Russian kills us ) confirm the obvious fact: social media accounts like that are created by Western journalists with just one aim — to spread false photo and videos blaimimg Russia for «bloody crimes against Syrian people».",FAKE
+5114,The Sad Truth About Melania Trump’s Plagiarism Snafu,"First of all, poor Melania. She was just trying to do her part and get the hell out of there. She deviated not a word from the teleprompter, except when thrown by unfamiliar words—like when “adversaries” came out as “advisories.” Hey, they’re similar.
+
+Second of all, how the hell does this even happen? Watch the video of Melania and Michelle Obama superimposed upon each other, and you get a sense of how audacious the theft was and how perfect-for-TV this brouhaha is. If someone wrote the speech for Melania, how did that person get hired? And if Melania wrote it herself, who let that happen? (Rule for first gentlemen and first ladies: do not pick your own words.)
+
+In case you missed it, I’m referring to the Melania-Michelle plagiarism flap—that Melania lifted some paragraphs out of Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech. It is a major embarrassment to the Trump campaign and, without doubt, to Melania. That said, let’s not exaggerate its importance. Writing in The New Republic, Brian Beutler called it “incredibly damaging”—which seems over the top. It’s devouring the oxygen right now. In 24 hours, it won’t be.
+
+Every scandal has a half-life. The worst scandals brand you forever and keep unfolding forever. The least serious get forgotten fast and run out of gas in a day. I think Melania’s is of the latter sort.
+
+To brand you forever, a scandal needs to reveal something hugely distasteful. This wasn’t that big a deal. She’s Donald’s wife, not Donald. To keep unfolding forever, a scandal needs to have an interesting mystery. This isn’t that interesting or mysterious. The question of how this blunder happened is worth a story, but not a lot of stories.
+
+Contrast this with the scandal of erstwhile Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly yanked a female reporter’s arm in a boorish manner. That kept going and going because the allegations were very distasteful (assault!) and the mystery was interesting (did he really do it as claimed?). Every couple of days or so, it seemed, a new video emerged. It was an excellent dumb scandal.
+
+Plagiarism is one of those sins that doom journalists but not politicians or their wives. In 1987, when running for president, Joe Biden plagiarized vast passages from Labour Party politician Neil Kinnock, which made for humiliating coverage. In 2008, Barack Obama lifted passages from Massachusetts then-governor Deval Patrick, a misstep that Obama smoothly batted away by saying Patrick had suggested the lines because of the two men’s shared philosophy. Both men did okay in the long run.
+
+So this will damage Trump a little but not much. The pearl-clutching is taking place in newsrooms, not in America’s living rooms. It’s embarrassing, but it plays into no popularly accepted narrative. (That Trump’s campaign is bumbling and chaotic in its operations is known to political buffs but not the broader public.) Tomorrow, we’ll be arguing about some other snafu. And, the way things are going, we’ll have more than a few to choose from.",REAL
+4630,Will the Comey bombshell really shake up the 2016 race?,"First Read is a morning briefing from Meet the Press and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.
+
+After bombshell, does the remarkably stable '16 race stay stable?
+
+There's no hyperbole in stating that the 2016 Hillary Clinton-vs.-Donald Trump presidential race has been the craziest we've covered. Consider all of the jaw-dropping moments: Mexican rapists. WikiLeaks. Vladimir Putin. The Access Hollywood video. Alicia Machado. Trump's visit to Mexico. ""Basket of Deplorables."" Birtherism. And the debates -- all of them. Despite them all, however, the race has been remarkably stable. Just look at the national NBC/WSJ poll numbers since Sept. 2015.
+
+But does that stability change after FBI Director James Comey's bombshell Friday that his organization learned of the existence of new emails that appear ""pertinent"" to its previous investigation into Clinton's email practices? One the one hand, the polling we've seen -- so far -- suggests that voters remain in their partisan corners. According to this weekend's Washington Post/ABC poll, 63% of voters said the FBI's review makes no difference. And among the 34% who say it makes them ""less likely"" to back Clinton, those voters are disproportionately Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. What's more, the post-Comey polls we've seen (here and here) haven't really budged, at least not yet. On the other hand, it has never been a positive for Clinton throughout this entire presidential race when the focus has been on her, especially on the subject of emails. Eight days to go…
+
+The latest developments in the Comey Surprise
+
+Meanwhile, here are all of the latest developments in the Comey Surprise: The FBI obtained a warrant to search emails related to the probe of Hillary Clinton's private server that were discovered on ex-congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop... Also on Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid accused Comey of violating the Hatch Act, which bars government officials from using their authority to influence elections... Former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a ""scathing op-ed condemning FBI Director James Comey for his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. 'I fear he has unintentionally and negatively affected public trust in both the Justice Department and the FBI'""… And NBC's Ari Melber has a piece concluding that newly discovered emails -- even if they contain classified information -- would unlikely change the earlier conclusion not to charge Clinton.
+
+FBI's review of the emails could be quick
+
+Additionally, NBC's Pete Williams reports that it's possible the FBI's review of the emails could end quickly -- now that the FBI obtained a warrant to search them. ""They'll narrow them down to look at just those dating from the time Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Then they'll weed out any that are not about government business. Agents will use automated software to search what's left for duplicates they've already found during the investigation of the Clinton e-mail server. Any that remain will be checked for classified information,"" Williams reported on ""Today"" this morning. ""Officials say there's no way to tell how long that will take. But they say if it goes quickly, and nothing classified is found, the FBI could say so within the next few days. It largely depends on how many of the e-mails are duplicates and how many are new to the investigators.""
+
+NBC/WSJ/Marist polls: Clinton up in NC, deadlocked race in FL
+
+Over the weekend, we released brand-new NBC/WSJ/Marist polls of Florida and North Carolina (which were conducted before Friday's bombshell news). The numbers:
+
+The polls (conducted Oct. 25-26) also measure early voting in these two states. Among the 36% of likely voters in Florida who say they've already voted, Clinton is ahead, 54% -37%. Among those who haven't voted in the Sunshine State, Trump is up, 51%-42%. And Clinton leads by a 61%-33% margin among the 29% of North Carolinians who say they've already voted.
+
+It's amazing when news about Donald Trump -- no matter how controversial -- gets drowned out by other events. Still, don't miss this Washington Post piece into Trump's charitable giving, or lack thereof: ""For as long as he has been rich and famous, Donald Trump has also wanted people to believe he is generous. He spent years constructing an image as a philanthropist by appearing at charity events and by making very public — even nationally televised — promises to give his own money away. It was, in large part, a facade. A months-long investigation by The Washington Post has not been able to verify many of Trump's boasts about his philanthropy. Instead, throughout his life in the spotlight, whether as a businessman, television star or presidential candidate, The Post found that Trump had sought credit for charity he had not given — or had claimed other people's giving as his own.""
+
+How violence and retaliation are constant themes in Trump's rhetoric
+
+Also, do read NBC's Benjy Sarlin on how violence and retaliation are common themes in Trump's rhetoric and in his events. ""In his eyes, the world is an unforgiving place where cities are 'war zones,' where 'rapists' are streaming across the border and where jealous rivals are hatching plots to humiliate America and Trump personally. To prevail in such an environment, he suggests, the response to any slight must be swift and overwhelming. Dwelling on limits imposed by law or tradition is usually a secondary concern. This framework has expressed itself in policy, in which Trump has extolled the use of torture, threatened reprisals against the families of terrorists and pledged to jail Clinton, a former senator and secretary of state. It has expressed itself rhetorically in vicious insults against critics and in his encouragement of violence by supporters.""
+
+First Read's downballot race of the day: Florida Senate
+
+Marco Rubio rode to Republicans' rescue when he reversed his pledge not to seek re-election, although it's not a complete slam dunk that he'll hold onto his seat. The former presidential candidate faces challenges -- most notably his well-known national ambitions and his frustration with the Senate, as well as his tortured relationship with the GOP presidential nominee. But luckily for Rubio, his Democratic opponent, Rep. Patrick Murphy, is far from an ideal candidate. He's taken heat for overselling parts of his resume and for his reliance on his wealthy family for campaign donations. Our NBC/WSJ/Marist poll has it Rubio 51%, Murphy 43%.
+
+Hillary Clinton spends her day in Ohio, campaigning in Kent (in the Cleveland-Akron area) at 2:45 pm ET and then in Cincinnati at 6:15 pm ET… Donald Trump is in Michigan, hitting Grand Rapids at noon ET and Warren at 3:00 pm ET… Tim Kaine stumps in North Carolina… And Mike Pence is in Florida.",REAL
+3887,"Rating Obama, 50% say he's been a success","George Washington was the first President of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. He also served as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, and he has the distinction of being the only President unanimously elected by the Electoral College.
+
+The second U.S. President, John Adams, served from 1797 to 1801. He was also the first vice president of the United States, and he was the first President to reside in the White House, moving in on November 1, 1800, while the White House was still under construction.
+
+James Monroe (1817-1825) was the last of the Founding Fathers to be elected President. During his seventh State of the Union address, he outlined a foreign policy that warned European powers against further colonization of or meddling in the Western Hemisphere. This was later known as the Monroe Doctrine.
+
+Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) was the only President to serve in both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. He is also the only President to have been a former prisoner of war: Jackson was 13 when became a courier during the Revolutionary War, and he was later captured by the British.
+
+William Henry Harrison (1841) probably had only just finished unpacking his things at the White House when he died of pneumonia one month into his term. Harrison was the first U.S. President to die while in office, and he had the shortest tenure ever of any commander-in-chief.
+
+John Tyler's term (1841-1845) saw several presidential firsts. He was the first vice president to succeed office after the President died, he was the first to lose his wife while in office, and he was the first to marry while in office.
+
+Zachary Taylor (1849-1850), aka ""Old Rough and Ready,"" was a hero in the Mexican-American War. Mystery surrounds his actual cause of death from a stomach ailment. Did he just eat too many cherries, or was it murder? The 1991 exhumation of his body proved it wasn't arsenic poisoning at least.
+
+Franklin Pierce (1853-1857) was the first President to not get his party's nomination for re-election. He signed the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the people there to decide whether to allow slavery. This worsened the tension between the North and South.
+
+Just four months into his term, James Garfield (1881) was shot by a disgruntled lawyer who'd aspired to join the administration as a diplomat. The President was taken to the Jersey Shore, where doctors hoped the ocean air would help him recover. He died two weeks later.
+
+Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for proposing and creating the League of Nations. But he was never able to convince the United States to join. Although he was first opposed to a federal amendment allowing women to vote, Wilson shifted his position during his second term and the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.
+
+Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) was inaugurated on the year of the stock market crash that sent the country into the Great Depression. Although Hoover pushed for money to be appropriated for large-scale projects, he opposed federal relief payments directly to individuals. The national economy never recovered during his term, and the shantytowns that developed were nicknamed ""Hoovervilles.""
+
+Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was the only President elected to the office four times. During his 12 years as President, he championed numerous social programs and measures, including the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps and Social Security. Roosevelt contracted polio at age 39 and never recovered the use of his legs.
+
+John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) was the first Roman Catholic President. He was assassinated in his first term, which was marked by the signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, the creation of the Peace Corps, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and the beginning of military involvement in Vietnam.
+
+Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords, the agreement that led to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. At home, Carter's presidency was plagued by inflation and unemployment, and he lost his bid for a second term amid the hostage crisis in Iran.
+
+Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) was the only actor ever elected President, and his talent as a speaker earned him the moniker ""the great communicator."" An affable Republican who wooed many Roosevelt Democrats, the staunchly anti-communist Reagan is seen as having played a large part in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
+
+George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) was a former CIA director and served two terms as vice president under Ronald Reagan. His approval rating at home soared after he led an international coalition to oust Iraq from Kuwait, and communism in Eastern Europe fell on his watch. But he lost his bid for re-election amid a sluggish economy and after reneging on a promise not to raise taxes.
+
+Bill Clinton (1993-2001) ran on the slogan, ""It's the economy, stupid."" Plagued by various scandals -- including accusations of sexual impropriety -- he was the second president to be impeached. He was acquitted in 1999.
+
+George W. Bush (2001-2009) is the son of former President George H.W. Bush. His presidency was largely defined by his response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 2003, he ordered the invasion of Iraq on suspicion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
+
+Barack Obama (2009-2017) became the first African-American to hold the office of President. He took the oath of office amid the Great Recession, the biggest economic challenge since the Great Depression. Under the Affordable Healthcare Act, millions of uninsured Americans have gotten health insurance.",REAL
+9253,"James Comey to be taken out, knows too much about Clintons","James Comey to be taken out, knows too much about Clintons 08.11.2016 | Source: AP Photo James Comey, Director of the FBI, can be sacked for a 'thoughtless step' - intrusion into elections. Valerie Jarrett, Obama's adviser, managed to convince him of necessity to undertake such a step, Daily Mail reported with a reference to a source in the White House. At the same time, other sources assert that Comey himself is ready to resign, not waiting for Obama's decision. In the FBI many believe that the Director has prejudiced reputation of the bureau and lost his weight among employees . Reopening of investigation against the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton 'for no apparent reason' and spontaneous closure of the case... Isn't Comey though a political figure? Could he have initiated everything by himself? Viktor Olevich, a political analyst , has commented Pravda.Ru on the issue. James Comes is a high-ranking political manager in the American system. He has long-standing relationship with the Republican party, he has been its adherent for several decades. He was taking various stances, which correlated with the Republican party's policies, including that regarding a conflict between the US law-enforcement and Afro-American community, where his stance was closer to the Rights than the current Administration of the White House. Head of the FBI took part in a corruption investigation regarding Bill Clinton in the early-2000, when a multimillionaire Marc Rich was pardoned by the president Bill Clinton. As a result of the investigation, the former president was not prosecuted. Nonetheless, Comey's attitude to Clintons is still quite suspect, negative. It's not by chance that last Friday, 11 days before elections, investigation was renewed by decision of the FBI Director. Moreover, a dossier on that investigation of Clinton's corrupt activity - Jams Comey carried out 15 years ago - was leaked via the FBI Twitter account. These are absolutely interrelated events. In such way, Comey tried to pressurize Clinton's campaign. However, just two days ago Comey announced that the new investigation was stopped. It's clear that certain negotiations between Comey's bureau and other parts of the US establishment took place. Those talks resulted in the fact that a case on potential disclosure of a state secret while using a private server when Hillary Clinton was a State Secretary, was closed yer again. It's no surprise that Obama's Administration is going to get rid of unwanted head of the FBI and substitute him for a person that will be favourable for new administration of Hillary Clinton, as she will evidently win today. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru 
+FBI Plan B fails: Clinton to be next president",FAKE
+8577,"‘A noun, a verb and Donald Trump’: Rubio seeks to seize on Murphy’s flaw","Print 
+As Marco Rubio and Patrick Murphy squared off in the final debate of their Florida Senate race, the discussion turned to the Syrian civil war. Rubio, a former presidential candidate and member of the Senate intelligence committee, challenged his rival’s understanding of the factions on the ground. Murphy, a two-term congressman, reverted to a familiar line. 
+“It just goes back to the same point,” he said, “that Senator Rubio continues to support Donald Trump, and it is shameful that he stands there with him.” 
+The audience laughed, faintly, at one of nearly 20 mentions of the Republican presidential nominee during the one-hour debate. When Murphy next mentioned Trump, Rubio was quick with a rejoinder based on a famous Joe Biden rebuke of Rudy Giuliani : “A noun, a verb and Donald Trump: that’s his answer to everything.” 
+The race in Florida, among the most closely watched in the country, could help determine whether Republicans keep control of the Senate.",FAKE
+10130,The True Scandal of 2016 Was The Torture of Chelsea Manning     :," The True Scandal of 2016 Was The Torture of Chelsea Manning By Jeremy Scahill
+November 10, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" The Intercept "" - A few days ago, we learned that Private Chelsea Manning attempted to take her own life last month for the second time since being sentenced to 35 years at the U.S. military prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. The whistleblower, who provided the collateral murder video, the Iraq and Afghan war logs, and the hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. State Department cables to Wikileaks, was convicted of espionage. As I waited to vote today, I found myself thinking of her languishing in misery in isolation and incarceration.
+This election — particularly in its closing stages — has been dominated by controversies over emails, classified documents, and Wikileaks. We’ve heard endlessly about Hillary Clinton’s private basement server, her 33,000 deleted emails, the phishing and leaking of John Podesta’s emails, including parts of Clinton’s much discussed private speeches to Goldman Sachs. Trump, for his part, suddenly discovered a great love for Julian Assange, though he does have trouble correctly spelling Wikileaks in his tweets of praise. Taken together with Trump’s bizarre and consistent lauding of Vladimir Putin and leaks from the U.S. intelligence community, the country has been treated to an odd flashback of Cold War propaganda, including a fair dose of red-baiting from the Democrats. In the matter of Anthony Weiner’s computer, his wife Huma Abedin’s communications and the potential implications for Clinton, the FBI, whose overreach had not previously been of much concern to Democrats, suddenly became a deviant manipulator of the electoral process, while Trump and his supporters alternately praised the agency’s professionalism and denounced it as part of the rigged system.
+The U.S. public is now getting a taste of the way hacking, phishing, and an overwhelming dependence on fallible machines and networks can impact politics. But let’s be clear: None of the disclosures in this campaign — not one thing in any of the hacked emails or those declassified and released from Clinton’s private server — has brought to light anything of greater importance than the documents Chelsea Manning provided to Wikileaks. She revealed war crimes, including murder and torture, dirty and duplicitous dealings of the U.S. and its allies, exposed liars, documented a secret history of America’s longest running war, and forced a much needed debate about the U.S. role in the world. And for that, she is being tortured.
+The double standards of our society dictate that a perjurer like the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, faces no consequences for his crimes. Gen. David Petraeus gets a slap on the wrist, no jail time, and prestigious positions at universities for sharing classified information with his mistress. Only Gen. James Cartwright may face the inside of a prison cell for discussing classified information with journalists — and he is a sacrificial lamb for the cause of exonerating Clinton and Petraeus from any true accountability by the Obama Justice Department.
+But Chelsea Manning, whose motivation was noble, whose actions made our country better, faces the full wrath of the system. And it may end up killing her. When we talk about the high-tech scandals that marked this election, at the top of the list should be the torture of Chelsea Manning.",FAKE
+500,OPEC sees oil prices exploding to $200 a barrel,"Right now the oil market is totally focused on finding a bottom for oil prices. However, according to OPEC's Secretary-General Abdulla al-Badri we've already hit bottom. Not only that, but he sees a real possibility that oil prices could explode higher to upwards of $200 per barrel in the future. He's far from the only one that sees a return of triple-digit oil prices.
+
+According to the Secretary-General, speaking in London on Jan. 26, the oil market doesn't need to look for oil prices to bottom as the market has already bottomed. Instead, he offered quite bullish comments by saying, ""Now the prices are around $45-$55, and I think maybe they [have] reached the bottom and we [will] see some rebound very soon."" Now, normally that type of remark would be just another layer of noise, but this is coming from OPEC's Secretary-General so it comes with a lot of weight behind it.
+
+That said, he's not saying that OPEC will come in and rescue the oil market by reversing its previous decision to hold steady on production. Instead, he sees the signs that the oil market is self-correcting as oil companies have made deep cuts to spending, which will eventually lead to lower production growth. Further, the rig count in the U.S. is plunging, which is usually a key to a bottom in oil prices. However, in the midst of cutting back as the industry works through the current oversupply the Secretary-General is now warning that the industry is putting future oil supplies at risk by under investing today.
+
+The Secretary-General said that, ""if you don't invest in oil and gas, you will see more than $200"" when it comes to future oil prices. While he didn't give a timeframe, he did note the correlation between investment and future production. This is because oil production naturally declines and oil companies need to invest in new production to not only replace this decline in production from legacy oil fields but to add new production to meet growing demand. However, oil companies are reluctant to invest in new production as their cash flows decline.
+
+Over time this could become a problem as oil fields around the world naturally decline by an average of about 5% per year. In order to overcome this decline oil companies need to develop about 200 billion barrels of oil supplies over the next decade and a half just to meet demand.
+
+These supplies will require the industry to invest $7-$10 trillion. However, with the big capital budget reductions oil companies have announced this year it could make it harder for the industry to meet future supply needs. In fact, the industry might defer up to $150 billion oil projects this year due to the collapse in crude prices. Many of these investments, however, wouldn't have yielded actual production for a couple of years due to the long lead time of major projects.
+
+As an example, Chevron delivered first oil on two of its Gulf of Mexico projects late last year after beginning construction on the fields in 2011. Meanwhile, another $6 billion project it just sanctioned at the end of last year won't produce any oil until 2018. It's these long lead time projects that are being delayed, which is setting the world up for higher oil prices in the future as an under investment today has the potential to lead to a constriction in future supplies.
+
+OPEC's Secretary-General is calling the bottom in oil prices. While he's not the first to call a bottom, he does lead the organization that currently controls the oil market so his comments do have a lot of weight. Further, he's also suggesting that the cuts that oil companies are making could have a dramatic impact on future oil prices as the under investment has the potential to cause oil prices to rocket higher if demand grows faster than future supplies. That, however, would all be part of OPEC's plan as it purposely pushed for lower oil prices now so it could control market share once oil prices surged in the future. It's willing to endure short-term pain for the potential of a big long-term gain.
+
+The Motley Fool is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news, analysis and commentary designed to help people take control of their financial lives. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.",REAL
+10391,"“CLINTON, INC”: WATCH HOW’S IT PAINS MSM TO REPORT CLINTON CORRUPTION","Home › VIDEO › “CLINTON, INC”: WATCH HOW’S IT PAINS MSM TO REPORT CLINTON CORRUPTION “CLINTON, INC”: WATCH HOW’S IT PAINS MSM TO REPORT CLINTON CORRUPTION 0 SHARES Post navigation",FAKE
+2497,"United States v. Texas, the biggest immigration case in a century, explained","When it takes up the question of whether President Obama's 2014 immigration executive actions were constitutional, the Supreme Court will throw out its typical playbook.
+
+United States v. Texas is one of the most — if not the most — important cases before the highest court this term. It's certainly the most important immigration case the Supreme Court has taken up in a generation (or, arguably, a century). And the Court is treating it accordingly.
+
+On Monday, instead of splitting up 60 minutes of oral arguments between the two sides of the case, as usually happens, the Court will convene for 90 minutes — and bring in more parties to argue their case.
+
+Texas and the 25 other states suing will get 30 minutes. The federal government will get 35. But the Supreme Court has also given 10 minutes to a lawyer representing a group of immigrant women who'd benefit from Obama's executive actions. And that's not all — 15 minutes will go to the US House of Representatives (thanks to the Republican House majority), which has jumped in to support the states.
+
+The unusually complicated oral argument process reflects just how messy this case is. It's a case covering surprisingly narrow-sounding legal questions, but its outcome carries broad implications for the relationship between Congress and the president, and the relationship between the federal government and the states. Oh, yeah — and it's a presidential election year, and both immigration and the Court itself have become election issues.
+
+All this makes it something of a nightmare scenario for Chief Justice John Roberts, who tends to be more anxious than the typical Supreme Court justice to present the Court's opinions as drawn purely from law rather than politics.
+
+As the justices hear oral arguments and consider the case before issuing an opinion (which they're expected to do in late June, at the end of the term), Roberts and the other justices will have to work through legal questions that are both less contentious and more abstract than the broader immigration debate makes them seem.
+
+Then they'll have to figure out if there's any way they can cobble together a five-vote majority for a lasting opinion — or if the eight-person Court will deadlock, putting the most important case of the Court's term in limbo and creating the opportunity for chaos.
+
+In November 2014, President Obama issued a series of memos declaring executive actions on immigration. Two of those are at issue in this case.
+
+One memo expanded the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which since 2012 had allowed immigrants who'd come to the US as children to apply for temporary protection from deportation and work permits.
+
+The other one added a new deferred action program — the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program — which would have allowed millions of unauthorized immigrants who have US citizen or permanent resident children to apply for deportation protection and work permits as well.
+
+The two 2014 actions are usually referred to as DAPA/DACA+. Since the states won in the lower courts, both of them have been put on hold since the first ruling was issued in February 2015. The original DACA program from 2012, however, is still in place and isn't being challenged in this suit. (To prevent confusion, I'll just refer to DAPA instead of DAPA/DACA+ when talking about the 2014 actions.)
+
+Federal immigration enforcement has totally transformed over the past 20 years. More people are eligible for deportation than ever before. The growth of the unauthorized population pre–Great Recession meant there were more people to deport. After 9/11, the government got vastly more money and resources for deportation. And deportations escalated accordingly — from 183,000 in 1999 to a high of 400,000 during the first several years of the Obama administration.
+
+President Obama has spent most of his time in office trying to impose some sort of control on all of this — to make sure the government is choosing who's most important to deport, rather than arbitrarily deporting anyone Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents get their hands on. His first attempts — setting high and low ""priorities"" for deportation and telling immigration agents to follow them — were something both sides in the current court case agree he could do but that rank-and-file immigration agents frequently ignored in favor of their own judgment.
+
+So in 2012, President Obama created the first deferred action program, DACA — allowing people to proactively apply for protection from deportation, rather than simply hoping that ICE followed the memo not to deport them. It's been solidly effective. After comprehensive immigration reform stalled in Congress in 2013, pressure grew on Obama to use the tool that had worked — deferred action — to protect other groups of low-priority immigrants, and he did just that with DAPA and expanded DACA in 2014.
+
+DAPA was supposed to be the program that ensured Obama's legacy on immigration, turning him from the ""deporter in chief"" of his first term to a man who brought immigrants out of the shadows. If the Supreme Court lets the program go forward, that legacy is assured. If it strikes DAPA down, Obama's legacy — and immigrants' attitude toward the Democratic Party — will be an ambivalent and disappointing one.
+
+United States v. Texas is political in its origins. That doesn't at all mean that the states that sued the Obama administration are wrong on the merits — it's just an acknowledgment of the circumstances around the case's genesis shortly after Obama announced the executive actions.
+
+There wasn't a serious legal challenge to the original DACA program in 2012, even though many of the criticisms of DAPA in this case would have applied to DACA as well. But in June 2012 the country was in the middle of a general election campaign, and the Republican nominee was trying to run toward the center and appeal to Latinos. In November 2014, on the other hand, the relatively unpopular President Obama was responding to an electoral defeat in the midterm elections — including the loss of the Senate — with executive actions on an issue that mobilized the GOP base.
+
+The states on each side of the case have lined up along partisan lines. The Texas suit involves 23 states — all but three of them under unified Republican control — as well as four Republican governors (three of whom have Democratic attorneys general who wouldn't let the state officially join the case) and one Republican attorney general. The states that have filed briefs supporting the Obama administration, meanwhile, represent about two-thirds of the states with Democratic attorneys general.
+
+Texas is leading the coalition of states bringing the lawsuit for two reasons. One, it's offered the most persuasive case for how DAPA could actually hurt the state (more on that later). Two, it houses the Southern District of Texas, which was the court the states chose to file their case in, presumably because they knew they'd have a good chance there. (The administration and its allies have implied that this is unfair, but it happens all the time.)
+
+They chose wisely. In February 2015 — just a few days before the government was scheduled to start accepting applications for expanded DACA — Judge Andrew Hanen issued an injunction, preventing the government from moving ahead with the program on the logic that the states were ""likely"" to prevail on some of their claims. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction. And in January, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
+
+As the case has made its way through the courts, it's gotten much broader. Initially, the injunction was based on a narrow claim that the Obama administration hadn't used the right procedure in instituting DAPA. The Fifth Circuit ruled that DAPA was also (or at least, was likely to be) illegal on the merits. And now the Supreme Court has added a constitutional question: whether DAPA violates the ""take care"" clause of the Constitution.
+
+While this is theoretically still a ruling on the injunction, the Supreme Court is dealing with the merits of the case — ensuring that if a majority of the Court's eight justices side with the Obama administration, or with the states, the case is finished (and DAPA is alive, or dead) for the duration of Obama's time in office.
+
+The stakes have risen accordingly. The House of Representatives asked, and was granted, the chance to argue that DAPA violates laws that Congress has passed — something that isn't totally unheard of at the Supreme Court level but certainly raises the political temperature of the case.
+
+And on the federal government's side, the argument on behalf of the ""Jane Doe"" immigrant women — not to mention the likely presence of many potential DAPA beneficiaries in the Supreme Court during the oral arguments — will inevitably remind the justices that this is a question of the balance and separation of powers, and about immigrants themselves.
+
+Because immigration is such a divisive culture war issue — and because phrases like ""enforce the law"" get tossed around frequently as talking points — it sure seems like this case should be a massive legal dispute over what should happen to unauthorized immigrants in the US. But it's not. There are four questions at play in the case, and all of them are, given the importance of the case, relatively narrow.
+
+1) Is it even legal for Texas to sue the federal government to stop the DAPA program?
+
+The states' case, in one sentence: It costs the state government money to give subsidized driver's licenses to DAPA recipients who now qualify for them.
+
+The federal government's case, in one sentence: If that were all it took for a state to sue the federal government over a policy it didn't like, the courts would be clogged forever.
+
+The first question the Court has to address whether Texas and the other states had ""standing"" — whether they are legally able to bring the lawsuit at all. In order to show standing, Texas has to show that implementing DAPA causes some direct harm to the state.
+
+Even if the substance of Texas's legal argument against DAPA is correct, if it can't show that it had standing the whole suit gets dismissed — allowing DAPA to go into effect after all. (This route would give the Supreme Court some appealing options, as we'll get to in a bit.)
+
+The Republican governors and state attorneys general on Texas's side of the case clearly think that allowing unauthorized immigrants to remain in their states is harmful for all sorts of reasons. But as is often the case with Supreme Court cases — and is definitely the case with this one — the actual argument being put forward in the courtroom is a lot narrower than the argument over whether unauthorized immigrants are good or bad for America that's happening around the case.
+
+So far, courts have found that the states have standing for a single reason: Texas driver's license costs. Under Texas law, people who get deferred action are eligible for driver's licenses — and because fees only partially cover the cost of producing a license, the state government covers the rest of the cost. DAPA would make hundreds of thousands of Texans eligible to apply for driver's licenses for the first time, which would cost the state money.
+
+The Supreme Court now has to decide whether that's enough of a reason to allow Texas (and the other states) to sue the federal government over the entire policy.
+
+The federal government argues it's not President Obama's fault that Texas law would allow DAPA recipients to get driver's licenses. Furthermore, supporters of the federal government's side in this case argue there's a slippery slope: Allow the states to sue the government over a policy they don't like, as long as they can show that it costs the state something (even if that cost is recouped), and the courts will be clogged with lawsuits left and right.
+
+They're hoping that possibility will scare Chief Justice Roberts (who dissented in a previous case about states suing the federal government, Massachusetts v. EPA) into protecting the Supreme Court's legacy by remaining above the dispute.
+
+2) Is DAPA a substantive new regulation — which the Obama administration didn't follow the proper procedure for?
+
+The federal government's argument, in one sentence: Nope, it's just a general ""statement of policy,"" and we do those all the time.
+
+The states' argument, in one sentence: It sets pretty hard-and-fast standards for who qualifies for deferred action and work authorization; that seems pretty rule-like.
+
+This question also seems pretty narrow — it's a challenge about whether the Obama administration did DAPA the right way, instead of whether it was the right thing to do. So it might not get a lot of the Supreme Court's attention. But this was actually the basis for the original ruling freezing DAPA, issued in February 2015 by Judge Hanen of the Fifth Circuit.
+
+Under the Administrative Procedures Act, the government can't just issue new regulatory ""rules""; it has to propose them and then allow a certain period for public response. (Hence the term ""notice and comment,"" which comes up a bunch when people are discussing this aspect of the Supreme Court case.)
+
+The Obama administration didn't do this with DAPA. It argues it didn't have to, because it wasn't a real rule, just a general guideline. The states disagree.
+
+At root, this is a disagreement about how the deferred action programs actually work: whether immigration agents actually have the leeway to reject applications for any reason (policy-like) or whether the Obama administration has dictated that anyone who meets the standards should get protection (rule-like).
+
+And because DAPA hasn't gone into effect yet, this is really an argument about how the original DACA program is working — even though the existing deferred action program isn't being challenged in this case.
+
+3) Is DAPA within the president's authority, or does it encroach on parts of immigration law where Congress has already set down the rules?
+
+The federal government's argument, in one sentence: DAPA is just a way to tell immigrants they're not being deported — something that both sides agree is legal.
+
+The states' argument, in one sentence: DAPA goes beyond that, by bestowing ""lawful presence"" and work permits on immigrants Congress didn't want to grant either one to.
+
+Legally, this is the biggest question about DAPA: Does it violate US law by going beyond what the president is allowed to do on immigration? But again, the disagreement between the two sides in the actual court case is a lot narrower than you'd think (given the general heatedness of the immigration debate).
+
+US immigration law gives the president a lot of latitude to make policy decisions — more than he gets in a lot of other areas. So the states in this case agree that President Obama (and the rest of the executive branch) have the latitude to choose whom to deport and whom not to deport. The states even say it would be okay if the Obama administration issued cards to people who were ""low priorities"" for deportation indicating that they were low priorities.
+
+But they say DAPA goes beyond what the president is allowed to do, and crosses into areas where Congress has set firm rules on immigration, in two ways. It allows deferred action recipients to apply for work permits, which the states argue violates Congress's intent not to allow unauthorized immigrants to work legally in the US. And, they say, DAPA deems people to be ""lawfully present"" in the US even though Congress has said it's illegal for them to be here.
+
+The phrase ""lawful presence"" is probably going to be thrown around a lot at Monday's oral arguments — it's become increasingly central to the states' argument. The federal government argues that the states are simply getting confused. ""Lawful presence"" isn't the same thing as ""lawful status"" in immigration law — it doesn't grant anyone the right to be in the US. (The federal government has started arguing that it's really more like ""tolerated presence."")
+
+3) Is Obama abandoning his constitutional obligation to ""take care"" to enforce Congress's laws by implementing DAPA?
+
+The federal government's argument, in one sentence: Nope.
+
+The states' argument, in one sentence: Yep.
+
+This question wasn't even considered in the lower courts — the Supreme Court added it to the case on its own. It centers on the Constitution's ""take care"" clause: ""He shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.""
+
+There isn't a lot of Supreme Court jurisprudence on what this phrase actually charges the president to do, so it's interesting that the Court felt it was particularly appropriate here — though it's entirely possible that the justice interested in this was Antonin Scalia and the surviving justices don't have any interest.
+
+The answer to the ""take care"" question depends on whether DAPA violates US law to begin with. If the federal government is right, and DAPA is within the president's legal authority, then he's not abandoning his duty to execute the laws by implementing it. If the states are right, and DAPA is illegal, then Obama might be violating the ""take care"" clause in implementing it — but the program would be struck down in any event.
+
+For people who believe that President Obama is legally obligated to deport unauthorized immigrants under all circumstances, the idea that he's violating the constitution by not ""taking care"" to enforce immigration laws has some appeal. But again, neither side is actually arguing that in court.
+
+There are dozens of hypothetical possible answers the Court could reach to any of the four questions above. But in terms of the case's practical outcome, there are essentially four options.
+
+Furthermore — and this is where things get really messy — the absence of a Supreme Court opinion could allow another circuit court to hear a case on DAPA and rule that it could go forward. How such a lawsuit would proceed is unclear; maybe some of the states that sided with the Obama administration could find standing. But it would create a situation in which DAPA was legal in some parts of the country and illegal in others.
+
+It's entirely possible that the Supreme Court would go out of its way to avoid that level of chaos. That's why some analysts think the most likely outcome is this:
+
+If the Court sides with the states, nothing changes — programs that currently aren't in effect won't go into effect. But if the Court sides with the administration, an estimated 4.5 million immigrants who are currently vulnerable to deportation will get three years of protection and the ability to work in the US legally.
+
+The effects this could have on the lives of those immigrants (and their families) could be huge.
+
+The evidence from DACA, which has protected about 700,000 immigrants for the past three and a half years, is promising. Three-quarters of DACA recipients had been able to get better-paying jobs, 30 percent had gone back to school, and 59 percent said they could help support their families. There's evidence that DACA helps keep immigrants integrated into American life — instead of losing interest in school or career because they feel their immigration status holds them back.
+
+If the Supreme Court reinstates DAPA at the end of June, the Obama administration will only have seven months left in office to process applications — and many of the community groups that would have been able to help people get those applications will be busy mobilizing for the election.
+
+Furthermore, the election might discourage some immigrants from wanting to sign up to begin with — if they're worried that Donald Trump will be president come 2017, they'll be much less inclined to turn over their personal information to the government.
+
+DAPA is an Obama administration initiative. There's nothing stopping the next president from ending the program and rescinding its protections, even if the Supreme Court upholds it this year. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have already promised to do just that in their first few days in office.
+
+That doesn't mean that the immigrants who have gotten deferred action so far would necessarily get deported. In fact, that's the bigger decision that President Cruz or Trump would have to make: what to do with a database of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are unauthorized but who by definition are well-educated, speak English, or at least have kids who are US citizens.
+
+A President Trump might start his mass deportation campaign by targeting the immigrants he can most easily locate: former deferred action recipients.
+
+Some pundits have argued that this means the real immigration fight is what happens in November, rather than what happens in the courts this spring. Insofar as the next president will choose whether to end deferred action, that's true. But the Supreme Court decision could definitely shape what options a president has to expand it, as both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have promised to do.
+
+Sanders has explicitly said that he'd protect some 8 or 9 million people using deferred action; Clinton has said she wouldn't deport immigrants who hadn't committed crimes, but hasn't explained how she'd protect them.
+
+If the Supreme Court strikes down DAPA — or upholds it, but articulates a limiting principle that clarifies that this is the most a president can do — both of those plans will be a lot harder to implement, but a Democratic president would be under even more pressure to find a way to protect immigrants. That could create trouble.
+
+Conservatives siding with the states in United States v. Texas argue that if Obama wins this case, there's no limit to who could be protected from deportation. They make a persuasive case.
+
+The Obama administration argues that while DAPA was legal, it wouldn't have been legal to give deferred action to even more immigrants — say, parents of DACA recipients. But their reasoning on this point is fairly weak (and it doesn't help that both candidates for their own party's presidential nomination are promising to do just that).
+
+This lack of ""limiting principle"" gives conservatives a lot of pause. A president could do whatever he likes on a whole host of issues — say, refuse to enforce any environmental regulations, or even declare a tax cut by executive fiat. (Vox's Andrew Prokop lays out some of the options.)
+
+Hypotheticals like these raise some valid concerns about the use of prosecutorial discretion generally. But these are issues with existing law, and it's not clear that a ruling for the feds in this case would make them any worse.
+
+Many legal scholars believe that immigration law simply gives the president more discretion than other areas of law. So a ruling for Obama in this case wouldn't necessarily create a precedent for other issues.
+
+If the president has historically had a lot of leeway to set immigration policy, though, a ruling for the states would effectively constrain that power.
+
+The states in this case aren't asking the Supreme Court to issue a broad ruling. But that doesn't stop the Court from doing so if it wants. And if the Court finds that it's illegal for the president to allow a large group of immigrants to apply for work permits, that definitely calls the original DACA program into question — and raises questions for other uses of executive power on immigrations as well. (An extremely broad ruling against the president could even dictate that the executive branch can't declare immigrants ""low priorities"" for deportation, though that's extremely unlikely.)
+
+But even a relatively narrow ruling for the states would have implications for other issues where the president didn't have as much leeway to begin with.
+
+It's possible to imagine a Supreme Court ruling against Obama whose argument implicitly called into question other things he's done, from delaying the employer mandate to modifying key provisions of No Child Left Behind (not to mention the original DACA program). It wouldn't automatically strike down any of these, but it could open the door to future court challenges.
+
+What legal scholars who side with the administration are particularly concerned about, though, is what will happen if Texas and the other states are granted standing at all — even if the Court ultimately sides with Obama. They argue that this would essentially invite states to sue the federal government over any policy they don't like, and then hunt down some way the policy harms them. (In an amicus brief, for example, law professor Walter Dellinger argues that states could start suing the IRS over which organizations are exempt from federal taxes.)
+
+To a certain extent, this is what the states are doing anyway — no state has ever sued the federal government for doing something the state likes. But the Supreme Court has long tried to avoid becoming a way for states to challenge federal policy willy-nilly. That's the sort of politics it tends to want to stay out of.
+
+Then again, the lesson of United States v. Texas may very well be that even if politics stop at the Supreme Court door, the cases that come in — and what happens to decisions that come out — are political from start to finish.",REAL
+9742,I dare you to restrain yourself from laughing at Trump and Hillary in a stronger hot show,"I dare you to restrain yourself from laughing at Trump and Hillary in a stronger hot show # akajsaid 1 
+off court okay a woman of the people that's what you're a man of the people who don't like carbon i was living in the white boy tell you what professional wrestling skin like a Russian drive safe russian and get there you going back with any probably couldn't find me you don't the job drunk think that decade not quite y'all just American side ... Tags",FAKE
+7946,UFO Investigator - MAX SPIERS - Found Dead After Vomiting Black Liquid.,"link a reply to: carewemust ""Vomiting black liquid"" caught my eye. I know bleeding internally can cause black vomit, sometimes it looks like coffee grounds. But something in the HeatStreet article that Fox news linked too also caught my eye: Max was buried in Canterbury cemetery after his mother arranged to have his body flown home a week after his death. A post-mortem examination was carried out by a pathologist in east Kent, but Vanessa says that more than two months later she still does not know the result, or whether there will be an inquest. She added: “Apparently, he had not suffered any obvious physical injuries but he could have been slowly poisoned, which is why the results of toxicology tests from his post-mortem are so important. [bolding by me] Activated charcoal -- which is black and readily available to anyone -- is used to treat poisoning, and could cause black vomit also. Could Spiers have suspected he was being poisoned and tried to self-treat with activated charcoal? I can't find much more about the black vomit... as in if someone was with him before/during/after he vomited the black liquid... or if it was found at the same time as he was found dead.",FAKE
+6939,Jewish Press Releases Audio Tape Exposing Hillary Clinton Plotting to Rig Election,"
+Decade-old audio exposes then-Senator Hillary Clinton saying the US should have manipulated Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 to prevent a Hamas victory. The presidential candidate lamented that the US didn’t “determine who was going to win.”
+“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” then-New York Senator Clinton told the Jewish Press, a New York-based weekly newspaper, several months after the January election.
+“And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win,” she said.
+Until Friday, the comment Clinton made on September 5, 2006, only existed on a private audio cassette belonging to journalist Eli Chomsky. An editor and a staff writer for the Jewish Press, he interviewed Clinton at the newspaper’s office in Brooklyn.
+
+Chomsky, who shared and played the tape for the Observer, says it is the only existing copy of that meeting with Clinton, during which the Palestinian parliamentary election was among top topics. The comments have been posted on SoundCloud.
+Speaking to the news portal, he recalled being confused by the fact that “anyone could support the idea — offered by a national political leader, no less — that the US should be in the business of fixing foreign elections.”
+The interview took place nine months after the Hamas movement claimed 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats, pushing aside the US-favored Fatah movement and securing the right to form a new cabinet. That victory was neither welcomed in Israel, nor in the US. In Washington, where Hamas is considered a terrorist organization, officials repeatedly stated that they would not work with a Palestinian Authority that included Hamas.
+Then-President George W. Bush spoke of the elections as symbolizing the “power of democracy,” but refused to deal with Hamas as long as it opposed Israel’s existence and espoused violence.
+That day in September 2006, Clinton made “odd and controversial comments,” all now saved on the 45-minute record that Chomsky “held onto all these years.”
+“I went to my bosses at the time,” Chomsky told the Observer. “The Jewish Press had this mindset that they would not want to say anything offensive about anybody — even a direct quote from anyone — in a position of influence because they might need them down the road. My bosses didn’t think it was newsworthy at the time. I was convinced that it was and I held onto it all these years.”
+
+Source 
+",FAKE
+7317,Clinton Campaign STUNNED As FBI Reportedly Reopens Probe Into Hillary Clinton Emails,"Clinton Campaign STUNNED As FBI Reportedly Reopens Probe Into Hillary Clinton Emails Posted on Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » Clinton Campaign STUNNED As FBI Reportedly Reopens Probe Into Hillary Clinton Emails 
+A SHOCKING blow to the Clinton Campaign emerged unexpectedly Friday as the FBI has reportedly REOPENED probe into Hillary Clinton’s email server as “The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” 
+
+
+Here we go… 
+Yes. Exactly! 
+He’ll own it once we vote him in there. 
+Then he’ll pull the plug and drain it and put all those corrupt SOBs in prison. Maybe you too ; ) 
+A ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ! 
+Drain the swamp! 
+Reopened!??!?!??!? 
+This monster needs to be opened, all right. 
+I’ll leave up to the readers to come up with ways to execute that idea. 
+How many people were there when Nixon was reelected despite the fact that the Watergate investigation was in full swing? That ended pretty badly for Tricky Dick. And Killer was on the judicial investigation group at this time. This group was lead by a Democrat and he fired Killer for lying. I don’t recall the nature of the lie but it was enough to get her fired. 
+From Fox News Politics 
+
+FBI Director James Comey wrote in a letter to top members of Congress Friday that the bureau has “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” 
+Comey did not detail those emails, saying only that they surfaced “in connection with an unrelated case.” 
+He told lawmakers the investigative team briefed him on the information a day earlier, “and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” 
+He said the FBI could not yet assess whether the new material is significant and he could not predict how long it will take to complete “this additional work.”",FAKE
+2837,The Middle East’s sick state,"Will the Middle East be as unstable 10 years from now as it is today? I posed that question this week to a class of students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. About half answered yes — that things will be as bad or worse, no matter what the United States does.
+
+These graduate students sense what many Middle East experts are beginning to vocalize: The region is caught in a turbulent vortex of change that’s likely to continue for many years, perhaps decades. The drivers are political, social, economic and demographic forces over which the United States and other outside powers have little control. For the next generation, instability may be the rule in the Middle East, rather than the exception.
+
+Predictions about the future based on current trends are always risky because analysts can’t foresee the unexpected “black swan” events that produce radical change. Nobody could have anticipated that a Tunisian fruit vendor’s self-immolation in 2010 would begin a cascade of revolution and civil war in the Middle East. Similarly, we can’t forecast the process that may eventually restore balance.
+
+Economic and demographic data show a region already stressed by slow growth and high youth unemployment. These problems are compounded by refugee flows from wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya — and worsened by falling oil prices that hinder Saudi Arabia’s ability to provide a buffer.
+
+The International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook, released this month, presents a grim picture. Unemployment will top 13 percent in Egypt and Tunisia this year and reach nearly 12 percent in Algeria. Economies aren’t growing fast enough to provide enough jobs for young people: Growth this year is expected to be 1.3 percent in Iraq, 2.5 percent in Lebanon, 2.6 percent in Algeria, 3.8 percent in Jordan and 4 percent in Egypt.
+
+Saudi Arabia’s growth forecast has been slashed more than 1.5 points to 3 percent this year and is projected to decline further next year because of oil prices. The Saudis are waging a bloody air war in Yemen, apparently convinced that threats to their security are external. But the more intractable problems may be internal, with the Saudi budget falling into what the IMF warns will be “substantial deficit” this year and next.
+
+“Tepid” growth and falling oil exports mean larger trade and budget deficits, predicts the IMF. The region will suffer a cumulative current-account deficit of 1.9 percent of gross domestic product this year; even the oil-exporting countries will run a deficit of 1 percent. “Deepening conflicts and security disruptions in a number of oil-exporting countries could further undermine economic activity, delay reforms and dampen confidence,” warns the IMF.
+
+The Middle East’s body politic, enfeebled by these disorders, has been ravaged by sectarian and civil wars. The International Rescue Committee estimated this month that 11.4 million Syrians, or about half the population, have fled their homes. The Syrian disaster has affected the whole region. To take just one example, poverty has more than doubled in Iraqi Kurdistan, according to a recent World Bank report.
+
+As weak governance structures have buckled across the Middle East, extremist groups have become more powerful. The most potent is the Islamic State, which exploded out of the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq. But many other groups across the region are fusing popular rage with sectarian and tribal bases of support. Even if the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, can be “degraded” in Iraq and Syria over the next three years, as President Obama hopes, the underlying disorder in the region could spawn ISIS 2.0, or even 3.0.
+
+Observing the devastation in the Middle East is a bit like watching a hurricane pummel a vulnerable coastline. Outsiders can try to mitigate the destruction and provide humanitarian relief. They must also try to protect themselves from collateral damage. But they can’t stop the raging winds and surging tides from leveling fragile structures. As disaster-management experts have learned, a big storm has to blow itself out before rebuilding can begin.
+
+Graham Allison, who heads the Belfer Center here, argues that the U.S. government should be careful about trying to fix problems in the Middle East until it understands them better. He contrasts the deadly Ebola virus with the ideological contagion of the Islamic State. We know what causes Ebola and how to stop it, Allison wrote recently in Time magazine, but there is no such clarity about how the Islamic State toxin spreads or how it can be cured.
+
+What we do know is that this extremist virus has taken root in a body that is already severely weakened and showing no signs of recovering soon.
+
+Read more from David Ignatius’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+6814,Physicists just found more hints of an elusive particle that’s its own antiparticle,"Matter and antimatter, simultaneously. By BEC Crew
+Almost 80 years ago, an Italian physicist proposed that a particle could exist as both matter and antimatter at the same time. Called the Majorana fermion, this mysterious state of matter set off a decades-long hunt, with scientists finding the first real evidence of its existence earlier this year .
+And now physicists in China have discovered that an elusive type of quasiparticle can behave just like a Majorana fermion, and it could help us to finally understand this incredibly weird phenomenon.
+If you’re not familiar with the Majorana fermion , it was first proposed by Italian theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937. He predicted that a type of particle called a fermion could act as its own antiparticle.
+In the standard model of physics, every particle has an antiparticle. These antiparticles are usually an entirely separate particle, with the same mass but opposite charge of their partner.
+Even electrically neutral particles have antiparticles, such as the neutron, which is made of quarks, and the antineutron, which is made of antiquarks.
+In very rare cases, a particle with no mass and no charge can act as its own antiparticle, and we’ve only identified a few examples of these so far – photons (light particles), hypothetical gravitons , and WIMPs .
+Majorana fermions, if they exist, fall into this final category, and if we can find them and harness them, it would change everything about how we record and process information in the next generation of quantum computers.
+“The search for this particle is for condensed-matter physicists what the Higgs boson search was for high-energy particle physicists,” physicist Leonid Rokhinson from Purdue University noted back in 2012 . “It is a very peculiar object because it is a fermion yet it is its own antiparticle with zero mass and zero charge.”
+Unlike regular computers that use bits of 0 and 1, quantum computers use quantum bits that can exist in a state of 0, 1, or a superposition of both.
+The problem with building a computer out of quantum bits (or qubits) is that it’s incredibly difficult to make a record of what state they previously held once they’ve been switched, and there’s no point having a computer that can’t retain information.
+But physicists think Majorana fermions could be the key to solving all of that.
+“Information could be stored not in the individual particles, but in their relative configuration, so that if one particle is pushed a little by a local force, it doesn’t matter,” said Rokhinson .
+“As long as that local noise is not so strong that it alters the overall configuration of a group of particles, the information is retained. It offers an entirely new way of dealing with information.”
+In April this year, a team from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee discovered the first real proof of the existence of Majorana fermions in something called a quasiparticle.
+Unlike a regular particle, which is a physical object that makes up an atom, a quasiparticle is an entity that has some characteristics of a distinct particle, but is made up of a grouping of multiple particles instead. Finding a Majorana fermion quasiparticle is one thing, but the real goal is finding a Majorana fermion particle.
+Fast-forward to now, and physicists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences say they’ve identified another type of quasiparticle that behaves just like a Majorana fermion, called Majorana zero modes (MZMs).
+The team was able to synthesise these quasiparticles inside a quantum simulation, and manipulate them in ways that would work within a quantum computer system. Most significantly, they showed that they could retain information encoded in their Majorana zero modes, even when errors and ‘noise’ were applied to the system.
+“[W]e demonstrate the immunity of quantum information encoded in the Majorana zero modes against local errors through the simulator,” they describe in their paper, published in Nature Communications. 
+If the team’s simulation can be replicated in experimental conditions, it means we could have another candidate for Majorana fermion-like behaviours on our hands, and another shot at something to build the quantum computers of the future with.
+In the meantime, here’s more on those elusive Majorana fermions:
+
+Source: Science Alert 
+",FAKE
+5871,SHOCK: NSA Can Recover ALL of Hillary’s Deleted Emails,"REPORT: Hillary’s Friends Told To Lie About Her Email Scandal 
+How powerful is the NSA? 
+This secretive agency employs thousands of people and has literally weaponized our national information technology infrastructure. Most of the most powerful espionage tools are created by the National Security Agency’s elite group of hackers. 
+If there is anyone on the planet who best understands the NSA’s clandestine capabilities, it’s Kim Dotcom. The international encryption expert and open-source advocate wanted people to know that there was a clear path to recovering Clinton’s emails that she has claimed were deleted because of their “personal” nature.   
+You can see the list here: I know where Hillary Clintons deleted emails are and how to get them legally @TGowdySC @seanhannity @realDonaldTrump . 100% true. Retweet. pic.twitter.com/eir8r0FJ8M 
+— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 
+Clinton began using the now-famous private server at her home in 2009. Using XKeyscore, the surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden, NSA analysts could drill deeper into data as far back as 2012, when Clinton served as secretary of state, the Business Times reported. 
+Congress spent millions of dollars investigating Hillary Clinton’s missing emails and illegal use of a private server, and the liberal media , rather than reporting on the results of those investigations, has instead tried to use the conflict between Democrats and Republicans as a sideshow to distract from the issues that really matter to Americans.  ",FAKE
+3870,White House Monitoring Iran Aid Ship to Yemen,"An Iranian ship purportedly carrying aid to Yemen should change course and head to Djibouti where the United Nations is overseeing humanitarian deliveries, US officials demanded Tuesday.
+
+The US military is tracking the ship after Tehran reportedly said it would send warships to escort the vessel to Yemen, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told reporters.
+
+The ship, the Iran Shahed, had moved through the Strait of Hormuz and was now in the Gulf of Oman, according to the marinetraffic.com site. But the vessel was not under any naval escort at the moment, Warren said.
+
+""We are monitoring the Iranian ship,"" he said. ""We are aware of the Iranians' statement that they plan to escort this ship with warships.""
+
+The state Iranian IRNA news agency earlier quoted a naval commander, Rear Admiral Hossein Azad, saying naval forces would be ""safeguarding"" the vessel.
+
+Iran's Red Crescent had said last week that it would send a ship carrying 2,500 tons of humanitarian aid to Yemen, where Tehran-backed Huthi rebels are fighting pro-government forces supported by a Saudi-led coalition.
+
+""The Iranians have stated that this is humanitarian aid,"" Warren said.
+
+""If that is the case, then we certainly encourage the Iranians to deliver that humanitarian aid to the United Nations humanitarian aid distribution hub, which has been established in Djibouti.""
+
+""This will allow the aid to be rapidly and efficiently distributed to those in Yemen who require it,"" he added.
+
+When asked if the US military would try to search the ship or prevent it from docking in Yemen, Warren declined to comment.
+
+The warnings from Washington raised the possibility of a potential confrontation at sea after tensions flared in recent days in the Strait of Hormuz.
+
+The US Navy bolstered its presence in the Gulf after Iran seized a Marshall Islands-flagged vessel in the vital waterway.
+
+Iranian authorities later released the ship, citing a commercial dispute with Denmark's Maersk group, which chartered the vessel.
+
+""If the Iranians are planning some sort of stunt in the region, they know as well as we do that it would be unhelpful and in fact could potentially threaten the ceasefire (in Yemen) that has been so painstakingly brought about,"" Warren said.
+
+""We call on the Iranians to do the right thing here and deliver their humanitarian aid in accordance with UN protocols which is through the distribution hub that's been established in Djibouti,"" he added.",REAL
+868,Why Trump is still likely to fall 52 delegates short of nomination,"There’s nothing quite like playing in front of the hometown crowd to get your mojo back. And that’s exactly what Donald Trump did in the New York primary Tuesday, winning 61 of 62 counties and all but one congressional district en route to scooping up 90 delegates.
+
+In the end, Trump’s resounding victory may have been as vital to the tone of the race coverage as it was to his actual path to the Republican nomination. After a month of taking on water thanks to staff shake-ups, organizing failures and a big loss in Wisconsin, The Donald trounced his rivals in the media capital of the world.
+
+But it’s probably not enough as he tries to secure the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination before reaching the GOP convention in Cleveland. The most likely scenario will have Trump getting about 1,185 delegates. Here’s why.
+
+New York marks a crucial geographic segue in the race, as the calendar turns away from the Ted Cruz-friendly interior and into Trump’s mid-Atlantic wheelhouse. With 156 bound delegates at stake next Tuesday, the test for Cruz and John Kasich will be how many they can pick off.
+
+You can start by penciling in 39 delegates for Trump as the likely statewide winner in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Exceeding the 50 percent mark in Connecticut would mean another 13 delegates who would otherwise be split among the field.
+
+And Trump can expect to win about half of Rhode Island’s 19 proportionally allotted delegates. The rest will be awarded to the respective winners of each congressional district.
+
+The best delegate-poaching opportunity for Kasich comes in the affluent Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, where polls show Trump dead last behind Cruz. Winning three or four districts between the Beltway and the Connecticut Gold Coast would be a big success. The best news for Trump opponents is that the single biggest trove of delegates will be the 54 unbound Pennsylvanians elected independently of candidate affiliation or obligation. While many have pledged to support the winner of the state or their district, all would be in play in Cleveland, a wrinkle that complicates Trump’s path.
+
+Trump would be wise to maximize his April opportunities. Other than New Jersey on June 7, there are no more gimmes, and few opportunities to reap a disproportionate share of delegates even from those states Trump might win. The Mountain West has been inhospitable terrain. The Pacific Northwest states split their delegates proportionally. And even West Virginia, in the heart of Trump’s Appalachian sweet spot, has a delegate system so complicated that he may come away shortchanged.
+
+The bellwether to watch will be Indiana. The criminally under-polled state holds promise both for Trump (open primary, blue-collar sensibilities) and his opponents (affluent Indianapolis suburbs for Kasich, grassroots conservatives and evangelicals for Cruz), and awards 30 at-large delegates to the statewide winner. If Cruz can reprise the Midwestern magic that carried him in Wisconsin, he can stop the Trump offensive in its tracks. Short of that, he and Kasich must peel away as many congressional districts as possible to prevent Trump from heading into June needing only a glorified chip shot to clinch.
+
+In the end, the race will come down to California and its massive cache of 172 delegates in what will amount to 53 unpredictable mini-primaries across disparate terrain. Ninety delegates will be awarded in districts where President Obama received 60 percent or more of the vote. Two-thirds of those will be decided in seats where Mitt Romney won 30 percent or less, including eight bona fide “rotten boroughs” where he couldn’t even crack 20 percent.
+
+Trump can hardly expect a New York-style romp here, meaning he needs at least 1,100 delegates coming in.
+
+Cruz’s argument at an open convention will be stronger if he can claim more than 800 delegates while keeping the deficit to a minimum. The California endgame will hinge on what happens in Indiana. If Cruz can battle through the coming adversity for a Hoosier State victory, the odds are we’re headed to Cleveland.
+
+Bottom line: Even if Trump wins Indiana and staves off Kasich in the ’burbs, he’d probably end up just shy of what he needs — perhaps as close as 1,230 delegates. But it’s more likely that Indiana proves tougher for him and leaves him closer to 1,185 delegates — putting all eyes on Cleveland.",REAL
+1115,"Trump, Sanders trade blame over Chicago protests","CHICAGO —Donald Trump, the GOP presidential front-runner, on Saturday first blamed ""thugs"" for his decision to cancel a rally in Chicago over alleged security concerns and then said supporters of his Democratic rivals caused disruptions there.
+
+""It is (Hillary) Clinton and (Bernie) Sanders people who disrupted my rally in Chicago - and then they say I must talk to my people,"" Trump tweeted. ""Phony politicians!""
+
+""Obviously, while I appreciate that we had supporters at Trump’s rally in Chicago, our campaign did not organize the protests,"" the Vermont senator said in a statement. “What caused the violence at Trump’s rally is a campaign whose words and actions have encouraged it on the part of his supporters.""
+
+The Chicago Police Department said on that four men and a woman were arrested at the rally after brief scuffles broke out at the event at the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion. Four of the individuals were still in police custody on Saturday morning but had not yet been charged, said Officer Jose Estrada, a department spokesman. One individual was given an ordinance citation and released.
+
+However, CBS News said its reporter, Sopan Deb, was detained by law enforcement while covering the scene.
+
+Another man, activist William Calloway, said he was arrested and charged with misdemeanor criminal trespassing. Calloway said police told him they arrested him because he failed to immediately exit the arena after the rally was canceled and guests were ordered to exit. The police department, however, said he was not among the five they had taken into custody. Calloway said that he was arrested by UIC campus police.
+
+Calloway played a prominent role in the court-ordered release of a police video of a white officer fatally shooting a black teenager, which triggered months of protests in the city. Calloway said he believes that his role in the McDonald case may have factored into police detaining him. He said police released him about three hours after taking him into custody.
+
+""They knew who I was,"" Calloway said in a phone interview Saturday.
+
+Anthony Guglielmi, a police department spokesman, said the Trump campaign did not consult the police department before canceling. ""The decision was made by the campaign on its own,"" Guglielmi said.
+
+Trump held a rally in the Dayton suburb of Vandalia Saturday afternoon and planned an event in Cleveland ahead of primary voting in Ohio on Tuesday. Trump denied some media reports that a rally in Cincinnati on Sunday had been canceled.
+
+On Twitter, Trump blamed the protesters for Friday's canceled rally. ""The organized group of people, many of them thugs, who shut down our First Amendment rights in Chicago, have totally energized America!"" he said on Twitter.
+
+At the Dayton rally, Trump said some of the people taunting and harassing his supporters in Chicago ""represented Bernie, our communist friend.""
+
+""With Bernie, he should really get up and say to his people, 'stop, stop.' Not me,"" Trump said.
+
+Chaos ensued after organizers announced at 6:30 p.m. that Trump, who never arrived at the pavilion, had scrubbed the event. Some protesters rushed the arena floor in celebration, many shouting, ""Bernie, Bernie"" and ""We stopped Trump!""
+
+Police ejected at least a half dozen anti-Trump demonstrators, including one man who got onto the stage and approached the podium.
+
+Joe Fritz, 20, who came to hear Trump speak, said a woman punched him outside the arena after the rally was canceled.
+
+He said the woman, who was with a girl about 10 years old, landed a glancing blow to his chin after he questioned her for yelling epithets toward police and about Trump. ""I told her, 'What kind of example are you setting?'"" Fritz said.
+
+Fritz said he and his friend were then surrounded by other anti-Trump protesters who screamed at them before police pulled them out of the crowd.
+
+Still, the pushing and shoving was brief, and some protesters said security concerns were overstated.
+
+""(Trump) felt us tonight and felt our power tonight,"" said Angelica Salazar, 30, of West Chicago, Ill. Salazar, who went to speak out against Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric, said she did not feel unsafe.
+
+Matthew Ross, a Chicago activist, said suggestions from Trump that protesters presented a security risk don't hold up.
+
+""Have you seen what his supporters have incited at their rallies?"" asked Ross, who said a Trump supporter threw water on him after it was announced that the rally was canceled. ""I think what [Trump] is doing is inciting violence.""
+
+Afterward, Trump spoke by phone with several news networks and described many anti-Trump protesters, including those at previous rallies, as violent. ""I just don't want people hurt,"" he told MSNBC.
+
+Trump has been criticized about violent comments he and his supporters have made on the campaign trail. When attendees at an event in November kicked a Black Lives Matter activist, Trump said, ""Maybe he should have been roughed up.""
+
+Another supporter, John McGraw, sucker-punched a protester at a rally Wednesday in North Carolina. McGraw later told Inside Edition that ""we might have to kill him"" next time the protester shows up.
+
+Trump insisted that anti-Trump protesters were instigating incidents at his events. “I certainly don’t incite violence,"" he said.
+
+“If a protester is swinging a fist at a man or a group of men, and if they end up going back,"" he said, ""I’m not looking to do him any favors.""
+
+Trump's rivals for the GOP nomination quickly weighed in on the uproar.
+
+Sen. Marco Rubio, speaking Saturday in Florida, blamed the rhetoric of the front-runner for the violence, and the media for ignoring his ""offensive"" statements for too long.
+
+""This is what happen when a leading presidential candidate goes around feeding into a narrative of anger and bitterness and frustration,"" Rubio said.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump's closest rival in the race, noted that ""in any campaign, responsibility starts at the top.""
+
+""When the candidate urges supporters to engage in physical violence, to punch people in the face, the predictable consequence of that is that it escalates,"" Cruz told reporters in Illinois. ""Today is unlikely to be the last such incidence.""
+
+""Some let their opposition to his views slip beyond protest into violence, but we can never let that happen,"" the Ohio governor said in a statement.
+
+Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton said the ""divisive rhetoric"" of the Trump campaign should be of ""grave concern.""
+
+""We all have our differences, and we know many people across the country feel angry,"" Clinton said in a statement. ""We need to address that anger together.""",REAL
+6863,Electronic Voting Machines Caught Switching Trump Votes To Hillary: “Trying to Steal Texas” | Survival,"(Before It's News)
+This article was written by Michael Snyder and originally published at Economic Collapse blog .
+Editor’s Comment: In particular with electronic voting, the opportunity to flip votes and steal elections is almost unstoppable and will be very difficult to hold accountable. Nonetheless, that is exactly what activists in Texas and other key states should focus on. After decades of solid “red state” status, they are now talking openly about Hillary winning the Lone Star State and flipping it blue… despite being perhaps the most despised, unlikable and untrustworthy presidential candidate in modern history.
+Take a look at the electoral college, and the shades of ‘blue and red states’ as things have been… if Team Hillary is able to steal Texas, there will be no way for Trump to win 270 electoral college, even if he wins Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and other swing states. Perhaps this has been their secret weapon all along, and the reason that she has been so arrogant throughout the entire campaign:
+These are dangerous times, and the establishment – after systematically denying the voice of the people on many fronts – is now making a huge gamble at holding onto power even in the face of obvious fraud. Will there be any legitimacy left in this country? And what happens if/when this election is stolen and everyone knows it?
+It Is Happening Again! Voting Machines Are Switching Votes From Donald Trump To Hillary Clinton
+by Michael Snyder
+Is the 2016 election in the process of being stolen? Just a few weeks ago I issued a major alert warning that this exact sort of thing might happen. Early voting has already begun in many states, and a number of voters in Texas are reporting that the voting machines switched their votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. The odd thing is that none of the other choices were affected when these individuals attempted to vote for a straight Republican ticket. If Hillary Clinton is declared the winner of the state of Texas on election night, a full investigation of these voting machines should be conducted, because there is no way that Donald Trump should lose that state. I have said that it will be the greatest miracle in U.S. political history if Donald Trump wins this election, but without the state of Texas Donald Trump has exactly zero chance of winning. So those living down in Texas need to keep reporting anything unusual that they see or hear when they go to vote.
+Most Americans don’t realize this, but the exact same thing was happening during the last presidential election. The state of Ohio was considered to be the key to Mitt Romney’s chances of winning in 2012, and right up to election day the Romney campaign actually believed that they were going to win the state.
+Unfortunately for Romney, something funny was going on with the voting machines. In a previous article , I included a Quote: from an Ohio voter that had her vote switched from Mitt Romney to Barack Obama three times …
+“I don’t know if it happened to anybody else or not, but this is the first time in all the years that we voted that this has ever happened to me,” said Marion, Ohio, voter Joan Stevens.
+Stevens said that when she voted, it took her three tries before the machine accepted her choice to vote for Romney .
+“I went to vote and I got right in the middle of Romney’s name,” Stevens told Fox News, saying that she was certain to put her finger directly on her choice for the White House.
+She said that the first time she pushed “Romney,” the machine marked “Obama.”
+So she pushed Romney again. Obama came up again. Then it happened a third time.
+“Maybe you make a mistake once, but not three times,” she told Fox News.
+And we did see some very, very strange numbers come out of certain areas of Ohio four years ago.
+For example, there were more than 100 precincts in Cuyahoga County in which Barack Obama got at least 99 percent of the vote in 2012.
+If that happened in just one precinct that would be odd enough. But the odds of it happening in more than 100 precincts in just one county by random chance are so low that they aren’t even worth mentioning.
+And of course this didn’t just happen in Ohio. Similar things were happening all over the country .
+The reason why I bring all of this up is to show that there is a pattern. If a fair vote had been conducted, Romney may have indeed won in 2012, and now it appears that voting machines are being rigged again.
+In Wichita County, Texas so many people were reporting that their votes were being switched from Trump to Clinton that it made the local newspaper …
+Shortly after early voting booths opened Monday in Wichita County, rumors swirled online about possible errors in the process. Several online posts claimed a friend or family member had attempted to vote straight party Republican ticket, but their presidential nomination was switched to the Democratic nominee, Hilary Clinton. None of the local reports were from people who experienced the situation first hand. A Bowie woman posted that a relative who lives in Arlington saw her votes “switched.” The post was shared more than 100,000 times Monday.
+And Paul Joseph Watson has written about some specific individuals that are making allegations that their votes for president were switched by the machines. One of the examples that he cited was a Facebook post by Lisa Houlette of Amarillo, Texas …
+Gary and I went to early vote today…I voted a straight Republican ticket and as I scrolled to submit my ballot I noticed that the Republican Straight ticket was highlighted, however, the clinton/kaine box was also highlighted! I tried to go back and change and could not get it to work. I asked for help from one of the workers and she couldn’t get it to go back either. It took a second election person to get the machine to where I could correct the vote to a straight ticket. Be careful and double check your selections before you cast your vote! Don’t hesitate to ask for help. I had to have help to get mine changed.
+I don’t know about you, but major alarm bells went off in my head when I read that.
+A similar incident was reported on Facebook by Shandy Clark of Arlington, Texas …
+Hey everyone, just a heads up! I had a family member that voted this morning and she voted straight Republican. She checked before she submitted and the vote had changed to Clinton! She reported it and made sure her vote was changed back. They commented that It had been happening. She is trying to get the word out and asked that we post and share. Just want everyone’s vote to be accurate and count. Check your vote before you submit!
+And of course they weren’t the only ones reporting vote switching. It turns out that lots of other Texans have also experienced this phenomenon …
+So is there a serious problem with the voting machines?
+According to Breitbart , one county in Texas has already removed all electronic voting machines and has made an emergency switch to paper ballots…
+Chambers County election officials have executed an emergency protocol to remove all electronic voting machines available during early voting until a software update can be completed to correct problems experienced by straight-ticket voters .
+Chambers County Clerk Heather Hawthorne told Breitbart Texas Tuesday morning that all electronic voting was temporarily halted until her office completes a “software update” on ES&S machines that otherwise “omit one race” when a straight ticket option is selected for either major party. The Texas 14 th Court of Appeals race was reported to be the contest in which voters commonly experienced the glitch.
+Let’s keep a very close eye on this. If the state of Texas ends up in Trump’s column on election night, perhaps no harm has been done.
+But if Trump loses Texas there is no possible way that he will be able to make up those 38 electoral votes somewhere else.
+Despite what the mainstream media is saying, the truth is that election fraud is very real. Just the other day, WND published an article that contained a list of documented cases of election fraud in 23 different states . And Devvy Kidd just authored a piece that pointed out that there are 24 million voter registrations in this country that are “no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate“…
+In 2012 the highly respected Pew Research Center exposed the sickening state of voter rolls in this country:
+Nearly 2 million deceased registered to vote
+Close to 3 million registered in multiples states
+Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate
+More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters
+Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state
+But despite everything you just read, the mainstream media is trying very hard to prop up faith in the integrity of the process. In fact, just today CNN came out with an article entitled “ Poll: Most see a Hillary Clinton victory and a fair count ahead “…
+Almost 7 in 10 voters nationwide say they think Hillary Clinton will win the presidency next month, but most say that if that happens, Donald Trump will not accept the results and concede, according to a new CNN/ORC poll.
+Americans overall are more confident that the nation’s votes for president will be cast and counted accurately this year than they were in 2008. Whatever the outcome, however, nearly 8 in 10 say that once all the states have certified their vote counts, the losing candidate has an obligation to accept the results and concede to the winner.
+Unfortunately, CNN does not have much credibility left at this point, and it is getting harder and harder to believe the polls that are being put out by the mainstream media.
+And the mainstream media would also have us believe that if evidence of election fraud does emerge that it will be because the Russians have made it up …
+U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are warning that hackers with ties to Russia’s intelligence services could try to undermine the credibility of the presidential election by posting documents online purporting to show evidence of voter fraud.
+The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said however, that the U.S. election system is so large, diffuse and antiquated that hackers would not be able to change the outcome of the Nov. 8 election.
+But hackers could post documents, some of which might be falsified, that are designed to create public perceptions of widespread voter fraud, the officials said.
+Now that is a real “conspiracy theory”, and it would be incredibly funny if all of this wasn’t so serious.
+During this election season, if you see or hear anything unusual about voting in your area, please report it.
+The American people should be allowed to make a free and fair choice, and anyone that attempts to alter an election is committing a crime against all of us.
+And let’s watch the state of Texas very carefully. If it goes blue, you will know that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.",FAKE
+449,Gas prices could drop toward $1 a gallon,"In some gas stations around the country, the price of a gallon of regular has dropped below $1.42. AAA and GasBuddy, two organizations that follow gasoline prices, say that gasoline prices below $2 will not be unusual in most of the United States. As oil prices fall, and refinery capacity stays strong, the price of gas could reach $1 a gallon in some areas, a level last reached in 1999. As a matter of fact, the entire states of Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and South Caroline have gas prices that average at or below $1.75.
+
+Gasoline prices are driven mostly by four factors: oil prices, proximity to refineries, refinery capacity and state taxes and levies. Oil prices have dropped below $33 a barrel and continue to collapse. The recent decision by Saudi Arabia to continue to keep its oil exports high essentially has dissolved the OPEC cartel. The decision also has forced the kingdom to chop its 2016 budget. This ongoing supply glut guarantees oversupply of crude. At the same time, slowing national economies in the largest countries, including China, will lower demand. China now tops the list of oil importers, according to the Financial Times, having moved ahead of the United States.
+
+The cost of producing oil from shale deposits, particularly in the United States, is greater in some cases than what it can be sold for. Nonetheless, parts of this industry continue pumping, increasing supply, while others go bankrupt because they cannot survive with crude prices so low.
+
+Several states house large refineries or are close to those that do. This is particularly the case near the Gulf of Mexico, including the massive refinery operations south of Houston. Some owned by Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) process several hundreds of thousands of barrels per day. Proximity to refineries is a factor in gasoline prices, if the refineries are running at or near capacity and produce gasoline instead of other petroleum products.
+
+Finally, gas taxes in several states are well below the national average of $0.4869 a gallon, according to the American Petroleum Institute. In some low gas price states, these taxes are below $0.40. This includes South Carolina at $0.3515, Missouri at $0.3570 and Oklahoma at $0.3540. Low gas taxes in these states compound the effect of falling oil prices.
+
+The odds grow each day that gas prices will be $1 a gallon in some areas in the United States, particularly those where prices are already close to hitting $1.40 — and falling.
+
+24/7 Wall St. is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news and commentary. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.",REAL
+2768,"The Saber Rattling Between Saudis, Iran Just Got More Ominous","JERUSALEM, Israel – An unknown group in Iran posted an animated film on the Internet simulating a missile attack on Saudi Arabia, including an attack on their main oil fields.
+
+While it's unclear who made the video, it highlights the growing animosity between these two Middle East giants.
+
+The animation simulates an Iranian rocket attack using missiles fired from Yemen. The attack is designed to cripple Saudi Arabia on multiple fronts.
+
+The video states it's a ""response to the hallucinations and empty threats of the Saud clan"" and that ""the arm of vengeance of the Islamic world will emerge from the sleeve of the Yemenis.""
+
+The video reveals the GPS coordinates of Saudi Arabia's main oil facility at the Ghawar Oil Field and then shows the missiles destroying the Saudi Aramco facility and setting the area on fire.
+
+It also simulates attacks on Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh, which it calls the Freemason Tower. Then it shows missiles striking the Saudis' main air base and crippling its anti-missile system.
+
+The rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran intensified when the Saudis executed a top Shiite cleric. Iran followed by allowing protesters to ransack the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Tehran, prompting Saudi Arabia to cut diplomatic relations.
+
+Pakistan then weighed in on the side of the Saudis, saying they would wipe Iran off the map if it threatened the territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia.
+
+The concern for many in the region is that the rivalry between the two Middle East titans will go from a war of words to a war on the battlefield.",REAL
+10300,"India's Stonehenge: 7,000-Year-Old Megalithic Site is Oldest Observatory in South Asia","Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/10/indias-stonehenge-7000-year-old.html A remarkable 7,000-year-old megalithic site that served as an astronomical observatory has been found in Muduma village in Telangana, India. The discovery has been hailed as one of the most significant archaeological findings in India over the last few decades.According to Times of India , the team of archeologists described it as ""the only megalithic site in India, where a depiction of a star constellation has been identified."" The ancient observatory dates to 5,000 BC and the researchers believe that it is the earliest astronomical observatory discovered in India and perhaps even in the whole of South Asia.The site consists of around 80 huge menhirs (standing stones), which are 3.5 – 4 meters tall. There are also about 2000 alignment stones, which are 30-60cm tall.According to experts, no other excavation site in India has so many menhirs concentrated in such a small area. The maximum concentration of menhirs is located in the central portion of the monument.One of the surprising details discovered at the site is a depiction of the constellation known as Ursa Major, which is formed from small cup-sized pits carved into a standing stone. The group of about 30 cup-marks were arranged in the same shape in which Ursa Major can be observed in the night sky with the naked eye. The carving depicts not only the prominent seven starts, but also the peripheral stars too. The large standing stones that form an observatory in Telangana, India ( Satya Vijayi ) Moreover, as ArcheoFeed.com reported: an ""imaginary line drawn through the top two stars point to pole star or the North Star.""Researchers believe that the site still holds many secrets. The next planned research will take a place in December led by archeologists from Korea.Numerous prehistoric observatories have already been discovered around the world, including Peru, Britain and Armenia. Thousands of years ago people were trying to understand the sky and were often using their observations to make predictions for agricultural and ceremonial purposes. The site Zorats Karer from Armenia dates back to the same period as the observatory from India. The constellation Ursa Major as it can be seen by the unaided eye ( public domain ) As Natalia Klimczak from Ancient Origins wrote :“Zorats Karer is also known as Carahunge, Karahunj, Qarahunj. It is located in an area of around 7 hectares and covers the site nearby the Dar river canyon, close to the city of Sisan. The ancient site is often called the ""A rmenian Stonehenge ,"" but the truth of what it is may be even more fascinating. Related: Stonehenge is 5,000 Years Older Than Previously Thought According to researchers, Zorats Karer could be among the world's oldest astronomical observatories, and is at least 3,500 years older than British Stonehenge. The site was rediscovered in 1984 by a team led by researcher Onik Khnkikyan. After a few months of work, Khnkikyan concluded that the site of Zorats Karer must have been an observatory. Moreover, with time, Armenian archeologists, astronomers and astrophysicists found that there were at least two other ancient sites important for prehistoric astronomy in the vicinity: Angeghakot and Metzamor. A general view of the Karahunj site near Sisian, Southern Armenia. ( CC BY-SA 4.0 ) In 1994, Zorats Karer was extensively analyzed by Professor Paris Herouni, a member of the Armenian National Academy of Science and President of the Radio Physics Research Institute in Yerevan. His expeditions revealed a great deal of fascinating information about the site. First of all, his team counted 223 stones, of which 84 were found to have holes.They measured the longitude, latitude and the magnetic deviation of the site. The researchers also created a topographical map of the monumental megalithic construction, which became the basis of further work. Finally, the main treasure of the site was unearthed – a collection of many impressive and unique astronomical objects. The researchers realized that several stones were used to make observations of the sun, moon and stars. They were located according to knowledge about the rising, culmination moments, and setting of the sun, moon and specific stars. The stones are basalt, somewhat protected by moss but smoothed by the rain and wind and full of holes and erosion. Many of the stones were damaged over time.In ancient times, the stones were shaped and arranged in what are known as the north and south arms, the central circle, the north-eastern alley, the separate standing system of circles and the chord. The stones are between 0.5 and 3 meters tall and weigh up to 10 tons. Some of them are related to burial cists."" By Natalia Klimzcak, Ancient Origins / Cover image: Main: The Ursa Major constellation (Fotlia). Inset: The megalithic site in Telangana, India ( Bangalore Mirror ) This article was originally published on Ancient Origins and has been republished with permission. Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+9765,Top US General Pleads With Troops Not To Revolt Over 2016,"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / Top US General Pleads With Troops Not To Revolt Over 2016 Essential Reading General Ivashov: “International terrorism does not exist” By wmw_admin on February 24, 2007 
+Gen. Leonid Ivashov was Chief of Staff of Russian armed forces when the 9/11 attacks took place, but he says, they weren’t carried out by Osama or al-Qaeeda. The most likely culprits, says the General, were transnational mafias and international oligarchs Waco: The Untold Story. By wmw_admin on May 6, 2006 
+The real story behind Waco. A shocking revelation that ultimately led to the death of the man who sought to expose it, attorney Paul Wilcher. Bilderberg Meeting – Media Should Be Ashamed By wmw_admin on July 12, 2003 
+Why do the Bilderberg meetings receive so little coverage. Victor Thorn examines why, and how, real news is suppressed by the mainstream media BBC Report (Subsequently Deleted): Ukrainian Fighter Shot Down MH17 By wmw_admin on July 31, 2014 
+On the anniversary of its downing: BBC reporter interviews eyewitnesses (with English subtitles) who saw jet fighters fire on MH17. The BBC has since deleted the report They Live By wmw_admin on August 19, 2012 
+Considered by some as prophetic, many will find eerie echoes of present day concerns in John Carpenters 24-year-old ‘They Live’. View the cult classic here Juri Lina – In the Shadow of Hermes By wmw_admin on July 15, 2011 
+Fixed and a “must see” for all serious students of REAL history. This outstanding video from the author of “Under the Sign of Scorpio” challenges many modern myths. With English subtitles The Mastermind Behind 911? By wmw_admin on February 11, 2005 
+He recieved hardly any media attention while chief financial officer at the Pentagon, but he might just be THE KEY FIGURE behind the events of 911 The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part II By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
+Former City of London insider reveals that the depopulation program would begin with a planned war between Israel and Iran. More importantly, he goes onto to describe how we can derail their plans for global dominance America Before Columbus By Rixon Stewart on September 1, 2006 
+Could it be that certain powers have a vested interest in keeping our real history under wraps? Because a great deal has been unearthed which is completely at odds with conventional notions regarding the origins of what we know today as America The Essene Gospel of Peace II By wmw_admin on April 26, 2007 
+Translated by Purcell Weaver and Edmond Szekely from its original Aramiac, a language that today few know but 2000 years ago was the language that Christ spoke and taught with",FAKE
+9569,Why Director Comey jumped at the chance to reopen Hillary investigation,"By wmw_admin on October 31, 2016 Ed Klein — DailyMail.com Oct 30, 2016 
+New York Times bestselling author Ed Klein has just published his fourth book about the Clintons since 2005, Guilty as Sin. 
+Klein had told how Bill Clinton enjoyed foot rubs, massages and romps in his presidential library with female interns and has described new details about Hillary’s medical crises. Guilty as Sin is available in bookstores and for order from Amazon. 
+James Comey’s decision to revive the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server and her handling of classified material came after he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI, including some of his top deputies, according to a source close to the embattled FBI director. 
+‘The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary,’ said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week. 
+‘Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,’ said the source. ‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.’ 
+According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice. 
+He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom 
+‘He’s been ignoring the resignation letters in the hope that he could find a way of remedying the situation,’ said the source. 
+‘When new emails that appeared to be related to Hillary’s personal email server turned up in a computer used [her close aide] Huma Abedin and [Abedin’s disgraced husband,] Anthony Weiner, Comey jumped at the excuse to reopen the investigation. 
+‘The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,’ the source continued. ‘And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state. 
+‘He talks about the damage that he’s done to himself and the institution [of the FBI], and how he’s been shunned by the men and women who he admires and work for him. It’s taken a tremendous toll on him. 
+‘It shattered his ego. He looks like he’s aged 10 years in the past four months.’ 
+But Comey’s decision to reopen the case was more than an effort to heal the wound he inflicted on the FBI. 
+He was also worried that after the presidential election, Republicans in Congress would mount a probe of how he had granted Hillary political favoritism. 
+His announcement about the revived investigation, which came just 11 days before the presidential election, was greeted with shock and dismay by Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the prosecutors at the Justice Department. 
+‘Jim told me that Lynch and Obama are furious with him,’ the source said. 
+As I revealed in my latest New York Times bestseller Guilty As Sin Obama said that appointing Comey as FBI direct was ‘my worst mistake as president.’ 
+‘Lynch and Obama haven’t contacted Jim directly,’ said the source, ‘but they’ve made it crystal clear through third parties that they disapprove of his effort to save face.’",FAKE
+3855,Poll: Obama popularity on the upswing,"President Barack Obama's popularity with the public is on the upswing, according to a new Gallup poll that found him enjoying his strongest approval rating in nearly two years.
+
+That breaks down predictably along party lines, with 90% of Democrats viewing him favorably while only 13% of Republicans say the same. The overall boost in popularity seems to be driven in part by a steady improvement in his standing with independents — he's now seen favorably by 52% of independents, up 6 percentage points since April and 17 percentage points since last fall.
+
+That's when Obama was suffering from the lowest popularity his tenure, with only 37% of Americans viewing him favorably last fall.
+
+But the 53% of Americans that view him favorably don't all approve of his job performance, which typically lags a few points behind a president's personal popularity. Gallup's daily tracking poll found him still underwater with voters in terms of his job performance, with 43% approving while 51% disapprove of the job he's doing in office.
+
+Still, that, too marks a favorable upswing from last fall, when Obama was also facing some of the lowest approval ratings of his time in office. Gallup surveyed 1,024 adults from May 6-10 via landline and cell phone, and the poll has a margin of error of 4%.",REAL
+6220,BLOOMBERG-BACKED PENNSYLVANIA ATTORNEY GENERAL SENTENCED TO 10-23 MONTHS IN PRISON,"Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › BLOOMBERG-BACKED PENNSYLVANIA ATTORNEY GENERAL SENTENCED TO 10-23 MONTHS IN PRISON BLOOMBERG-BACKED PENNSYLVANIA ATTORNEY GENERAL SENTENCED TO 10-23 MONTHS IN PRISON 0 SHARES 
+[11/1/16] NRAILA – Back in August , we reported that Michael Bloomberg-backed then-sitting Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane had been found guilty of criminal conspiracy and perjury in a case stemming from the abuse of her office. Kane’s sentencing hearing was held Monday, where Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy sentenced the former attorney general to 10 to 23 months in prison. In 2012, Kane was elected Attorney General of Pennsylvania with the help of a $250,000 Bloomberg-funded ad campaign against her opponent. Even before assuming office, Attorney General-elect Kane attacked the Right-to-Carry by signing a letter opposing federal reciprocity legislation. Kane would go on to attack Right-to-Carry reciprocity again, unilaterally and illegitimately eliminating Pennsylvania’s recognition of non-resident Florida Concealed Weapon Licenses. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer , at the sentencing hearing, Demchick-Alloy admonished Kane for her conduct in leaking confidential grand jury materials as part of an attack on a political rival. Demchick-Alloy stated, “The case is about ego, ego of a politician consumed by her image from Day One… And instead of focusing solely on the business of fighting crime, the focus was battling these perceived enemies … and utilizing and exploiting her position to do it.” A colleague that testified at the hearing described Kane’s office by stating, “through a pattern of systematic firings and Nixonian espionage, she created a terror zone in this office.” In seeking a lenient sentence for his client, Kane’s attorney cited the consequences the convicted criminal had already suffered, telling the court, “She stands a convicted felon subject to public shame and public humiliation.” Further, the attorney argued that prison was a risk to Kane’s safety. According to the Inquirer, Demchick-Alloy appeared unimpressed, noting, “When you unfortunately dirty yourself with criminal behavior, you assume that risk.” Kane had faced a potential 12 to 24 years in prison for her crimes. Though Demchick-Alloy imposed only a fraction of the maximum sentence, Kane’s punishment should be enough to prevent her from obtaining a position where she could torment her political adversaries, or Keystone State gun owners. Post navigation",FAKE
+5849,Is A Birthday Surprise Coming For Hillary Criminalton? Kim Dotcoms Mysterious Tweet.,"We Are Change 
+Wikileaks helped celebrate Hillary Criminalton’s birthday Wednesday by gifting Hillary and the American people another glimpse into Clinton land. Corruption, dirty tricks all to get the Presidency the tactic hasn’t changed since Arkansas. Do whatever it takes. Wikileaks has now proven the Clinton’s past allegations of corruption likely to be true, all those talks over the years of Hillary claiming Bill’s sexual assaults were fraudulent are now bluntly obvious Hillary’s ill attitude towards staff is also confirmed the “right wing” conspiracy is clearly seen and it’s one against the American people to rig the election. Now Wikileaks may have something in the works a potential birthday surprise for Mrs. Clinton according to Kim DotCom a friend of Julian Assange.
+Kim Dotcom tweeted out a series of mysterious tweets today that suggest Wikileaks could potentially have a Birthday wish for Hillary Clinton containing her 33,000 work related emails later this evening.
+Does @Wikileaks have 33,000 explosive candles for Hillary's birthday cake? Maybe?! ?
+— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 
+Ring Ring ??
+— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 
+Oh no! @wikileaks pic.twitter.com/HcHRNl3pMq 
+— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 
+Bleachbit(ch) can't bleach it ?
+— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 
+
+ 
+Kim Dotcom additionally hinted in an interview in May, 14th, 2015 that “Julian Assange and Wikileaks would be Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016,” prior to Guccifer 2.0 prior to the DNC leak, Collin Powell’s emails, Podesta’s emails, Obama’s emails and the list goes on and on..
+Either Kim Dotcom knew what Wikileaks had or he’s the new age Nostradamus. The next keypoint is that Kim DotCom knows Julian Assange they talk as seen in the video below Kim Dotcom is asked by Bloomberg reporter, Ali Elkin , “How often do you talk to Julian Assange.” Dotcom responds, “Why is that important to you? Look I like these guys I look up to them I think they are very brave they are going through a very hard time you know and they chose to do that for the betterment of all of us so yeah I love to talk to them.”
+Later on in the interview DotCom was questioned about another previous tweet that “he would be Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016.” Dotcom then went on to correct himself saying “I have to say really it’s more Julian but I am aware of some of the things that are going to be roadblocks well he has access to information I don’t know the specifics.”
+Is it possible that Kim Dotcom was tipped off by Julian Assange that a birthday gift from Wikileaks the international whistle-blower organization to Hillary Clinton may drop later on tonight? We will soon find out, If these tweets were just Dotcom trolling or if he was serious and a massive leak is about to happen that could potentially end the campaign presidency of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Stay tuned to we are change we will keep you up to date and will break news if Wikileaks leaks “explosive candles” as Dotcom put it for Hillary Clinton.
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+The post Is A Birthday Surprise Coming For Hillary Criminalton? Kim Dotcoms Mysterious Tweet. appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+1318,Rachel Maddow made them fight: She’s the reason for the tense Hillary/Bernie fireworks,"It was, finally, the moment Democrats have been waiting for: Former Secretary Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders facing off one-on-one, unencumbered by extraneous candidates and audience questions. Last night’s MSNBC debate crackled with heat, as the two candidates stood very close to each other on stage and made their case to the watching public, answering questions from moderators Rachel Maddow and Chuck Todd. It led to both candidates becoming their most provocative—Clinton was forceful and dismissive, while Sanders was stern and evasive. The first hour exacerbated the tension between them, as both candidates seemed to entrench in their worldviews, no matter how unpopular. The two bickered over the definition of the word “progressive”—it comes from the word “progress,” did you know?—and of who, exactly, is part of the “establishment.” As I observed yesterday, during the CNN Democratic Town Hall, both Sanders and Clinton were attempting to finesse compromises (or the semblance thereof) between polar opposites, the rhetorical equivalent of walking the plank. But debates are about differentiation, and primaries are about being choosy, so here we stood, watching mom and dad argue after dinner as if the whole state of the free world depended on it.
+
+Things got kind of intense. They dug into each other’s differences, trying to make sound untrue what is patently obvious to the outside observer: Sanders is a stubborn college professor, obsessively dedicated to principle; Clinton is a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, doggedly focused on process. And frankly, neither candidate is served by a debate. This isn’t an election where adulation for a candidate’s ideology swept the other nominees, à la then-Senator Barack Obama in 2008. This is an election between two pragmatic, prickly politicians, two grandparents who have been in public service for decades. Debates make them fighters. And while this head-to-head match-up was long overdue, the first segment of the debate was honestly exhausting to watch, especially after the introspection of the informal town hall. Perhaps the Democratic party is just a little too bleeding-heart to revel in the bloodsport of two strong liberal politicians trying to take each other down, but it certainly seemed that every attack made from one candidate to the other looked mostly bad for that candidate; when Clinton railed against Sanders for his “artful smear” of her politics, she was booed, and when Sanders dismissed Clinton as a shill of the establishment, he dismissed for the obvious fact that a woman candidate for president is a revolution in and of itself.
+
+Process and principle sparred again and again, and moderators Maddow and Todd did well to let the two speak while also finding incisive, specific questions to address to each. It’s difficult for any moderator to hold a candle to Rachel Maddow, but especially when grilling both liberal candidates, she dazzled. She directed a question to Sanders that struck to the heart of the practical difficulties of his platform—asking him how he planned to work with the corporations that advanced progressive agendas, those corporations that had to be dealt with to pass the Affordable Healthcare Act, for example. She asked Clinton for the chance to see the transcripts of those Goldman Sachs speeches. Maddow asked Sanders how he really intended to win the presidency as, essentially, a third-party candidate. And she asked Clinton to justify how she still considered herself a viable candidate, multiple scandals into her career. If Sanders and Clinton were bickering, last night, over the custody of the American people, Maddow was the impish child playing them against each other; indeed, the night’s most heated exchanges came as a result of her pointed questioning.
+
+Which might be why about halfway through the debate, the tension of night noticeably defused. Maybe Sanders and Clinton wised up to Maddow’s game; maybe it was too late in the day, and too late in the campaign trail, to waste so much energy on being angry on television. Of course Clinton’s farther right than Sanders; come the general election, she’s going to be trying to appear moderate. Of course Sanders’ policies will be a bit harder to enact than Clinton’s; he is, in his own words, literally instigating a revolution. The segment on foreign policy allowed the candidates to take a breather; Clinton immediately was more confident, going over her area of expertise, and diverted from his primary issue of capitalism, Sanders was a bit of a wallflower, allowing for some breathing room in the discussion. By the time Todd and Maddow returned to discussing the scandals of the campaign, both candidates seemed like they’d gotten the sparring out of their system. A question about Clinton’s emails elicited a steadfastly neutral response from Sanders: “There’s not a day that goes by when I am not asked to attack her on that issue, and I have refrained from doing that and I will continue to refrain from doing that.” And when Maddow asked Clinton if she wanted 30 seconds to discuss an allegedly misleading advertisement from the Sanders campaign, Clinton just stared a bit, with an exasperation she deployed well at the Benghazi hearings, and then simply responded, “No.” It was a very parental “no.” Final, but with some warmth attached. And it indicated a deep respect for either the other candidate or for the optics of cooperation, which often are exactly the same. I think that Sanders and Clinton have real issues with each other, but I also think that neither Sanders nor Clinton really want to fight with each other, and at the end of the day, despite the whiz-bang of the zingers, neither do we. Beyond the artificial dichotomy of the debate, Sanders and Clinton are all we’ve got—two viable candidates against a stack of wildcards that are still funded and still in the race over on the other team. Of course, calling them Mom and Dad is reductive and gender-essentialist; I am being a little facetious. But there’s a certain degree of unearned faith I’m pinning on both that is the same desperate confidence we all invest in our parents, when we need to believe them when they say that they will keep us safe from danger. And it’s not just me that feels it. As is the habit of kids everywhere, Todd rushed into the awkward camaraderie between the candidates with a too-soon, too-intimate question. Secretary Clinton, you’ve made it clear when you look at Senator Sanders, you do not see a president, but do you see … do you see a vice president? [Clinton laughs.] Would you unite the party by trying to pick Senator Sanders as your running mate? There’s no better evidence of the Democratic Party’s desperate desire for a united front against the looming specter of loony Republicans than this question, the political equivalent of politely asking mom and dad if they will get back together. The debate was revealing, but the questions were even more so; arguments about how to arrange the deck chairs gave way to the realization that the Titanic is sinking. Sanders quipped, “On our worst days, I think it is fair to say we are 100 times better than any Republican candidate.” The crowd cheered. And after closing statements, when Maddow and Todd said goodbye to the candidates, Maddow made sure to hug each.",REAL
+972,Past cases suggest Hillary won’t be indicted,"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
+109,"U.S. Split Along Racial Lines on Backlash Against Police, Poll Finds","Americans are bracing for a summer of racial disturbances around the country, such as those that have wracked Baltimore, with African Americans and whites deeply divided about why the urban violence has occurred, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has found.
+
+A resounding 96% of adults surveyed said it was likely there would be additional racial disturbances this summer, a signal that Americans believe Baltimore’s recent problems aren’t a local phenomenon but instead are symptomatic of broader national problems.",REAL
+2691,The media unload on Donald Trump,"With Trump's call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, several of the nation's most esteemed journalists and influential news outlets have set aside traditional notions of balance and given themselves license to label the Republican front-runner a liar, a demagogue, a racist and worse.
+
+Tom Brokaw, the veteran NBC News anchor, has called Trump's proposal ""dangerous,"" and likened it to the Holocaust and the Japanese internment. On its front page, The New York Times has said Trump's idea is ""more typically associated with hate groups."" Dan Balz, of The Washington Post, has called Trump's rhetoric ""demagogic,"" while BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith has informed staff that it is acceptable to refer to Trump on social media as a ""mendacious racist,"" because, he said, those are facts.
+
+Several others have said Trump's proposal poses a national security threat. ""This is not small ball, actually. This matters,"" Richard Engel, the NBC News chief foreign correspondent, said Monday. ""It is...a black spot on our collective foreign policy and our conscience. And it also just feeds into the ISIS narrative.""
+
+The willingness to use such language and draw such analogies represents a watershed moment in the media's coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign, several journalists and political observers told CNN. For the first time in six months, news organizations are abandoning concerns about impartiality and evenhandedness and stating what they believe are objective truths about the Republican's most popular presidential candidate.
+
+""What Trump is doing is wildly outside American traditions and values, and that's what we're covering and responding to and I think you see that across major media outlets,"" Smith told CNN. ""I've never seen a candidate base his campaign on vilifying a minority group. So it would be misleading to characterize it any other way.""
+
+But the new media backlash also comes six months into a campaign that has been characterized by Trump's derogatory statements -- about Mexican immigrants, African-Americans and others -- since the day it began. That has left many observers feeling like the media's newfound confidence is late in coming.
+
+""As his comments have become more extreme, the mainstream media has been more willing to describe him -- accurately in my view -- as a demagogue, a national security threat, and a racist. But frankly, his racism and demagoguery were apparent from his first speech announcing his candidacy back on June 16,"" said Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker's Washington correspondent and CNN political analyst.
+
+To be sure, many journalists have been characterizing Trump's campaign in these terms for some time. In August, Lizza compared Trump to the ""far-right parties"" in Europe, and said that he was ""running a candidacy that is based on resentment of non-white people.""
+
+But for the most part, journalists stopped short of calling Trump demagogic or racist, despite the fact that he has often relied on false information about minorities to appeal to popular prejudices. At his campaign launch, Trump called Mexican immigrants criminals, drug dealers and ""rapists."" In November, Trump tweeted out inaccurate homicide statistics suggesting that blacks were responsible for 81 percent of white homicides. FBI statistics for 2014 put the actual number below 15 percent.
+
+If this were racism and demagoguery, the mainstream media was not quick to identify it as such. That may have been due, at least in part, to the unique nature of Trump's campaign. For a long time, many journalists didn't take the former reality television star seriously. When he became the front-runner, despite his incendiary remarks, many were simply confounded by his ability to flout the conventional rules of American politics.
+
+""I think the media has struggled to cover the dark side of the Trump phenomenon because political reporters do not have experience covering a major political figure who is both openly racist and -- let's be honest -- an extremely entertaining politician,"" Lizza said.
+
+Trump's call for ""a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States"" changed all that.
+
+""The media began by covering Trump as a sideshow, then grew more aggressive in challenging him on his 'facts', and now is more actively commenting on the character of his campaign,"" said David Axelrod, the chief strategist on Barack Obama's presidential campaigns and CNN senior political commentator.
+
+The new phase of Trump-media relations has ushered in an unusual moment in American politics, said media experts.
+
+Frank Sesno, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and a former CNN Washington bureau chief, said journalism ""has moved into the 'have you no shame' mode. There are thresholds and several have been crossed and that blows up so-called objective reporting. There are times when he-said she-said isn't enough.""
+
+Kelly McBride, the vice president for Academic Programs at The Poynter Institute, stressed that while some of the terms were appropriate, it was important for journalists to put Trump's remarks in context.
+
+""Rather than just calling him racist, there's more journalistic value in pointing out why it's racist,"" she said. ""So I like it when I see newsrooms making historical analogies. I like the editorials pointing out that he's dangerous and why.""
+
+The question now is, what impact will the media backlash have, if any?
+
+Trump has proven time and time again that incendiary remarks only bolster his support. Moreover, his supporters harbor little respect for the American media, and often give the candidate a standing ovation when he calls the media ""scum.""
+
+Frank Rich, the New York Magazine columnist, said the media's disdain would only ""enhance his support from his fans.""
+
+Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, agreed. ""Media disdain is a badge of honor for Trump and his supporters,"" he said. ""So this latest bout of criticism from the press won't hurt him.""
+
+""Perhaps the only way the media could dent Trump would be to have him on TV less often and become less obsessed with him--but that's not going to happen,"" Lowry added. ""Bottom line: Another Republican candidate is going to have to outmaneuver Trump or just flat-out beat him. It's that simple.""",REAL
+5772,How To Reduce Stress,"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter The root cause of stress is fear, as all fear is the threat of losing our attachments. If we’re attached to a desired outcome, anything that threatens it will be something we fear. The fear of losing control underpins stress, for example, and creates frustration over what can’t be controlled. As desirable as it is to be in a position of control, our attachment to it ultimately creates a fear that can manifest as stress, worry, anxiety, and panic. advertisement - learn more Fear brings disorder into our experience when it is within us, and it’s an energy that suppresses consciousness. Activation energy is the force required to get you from doing something when you’re on autopilot (such as habits, routines, procedural awareness, or relaxing) to doing something new. It is a manifestation of willpower. When we are in a state of fear (stress), our activation energy is diverted toward doing things to ourselves that are primarily against our will. Running late for work and caught in a traffic jam? You can either become frustrated and upset because you fear arriving to work late (which brings you no closer to your goal of getting there on time), or you can accept the present moment and use it as a learning lesson to leave earlier next time. You can also choose to enjoy the unexpected free time in the morning and listen to a podcast or some music. There are many choices you can make in that space of time that can affect or degrade even the most minute increments of your personal development. Stress causes you to divert attention and willpower away from your initial goal, bringing you no closer to it than when you began. In a state of stress and fear, your willpower gets diverted toward the threat, not the goal, and this is against your own best interest. Time is currency, so pay attention to what you spend your time on. advertisement - learn more Now of course there are valid situations where your willpower MUST be diverted toward dealing with the threat or there might not be any willpower left for you to use in the future! There are two types of fear: survival based fear and ego based fear. Ego fear includes fear of rejection, failure, humiliation, loss, uncertainty, lack of control, etc. These fears are not real, but may feel so to you. Ask yourself, what’s the worst that could happen? Is it death, the loss of freedom, a loved one suffering? If it’s none of those then you’re too attached to an outcome that is not essential to your wholeness. When we’re mindful of our awareness, extraordinary things await us on the opposite side of fear. Believe. Believe in what? Yourself? A higher power? Both? Believe in the truth of your situation by first accepting everything that is happening. You can’t move forward in a state of denial because denial is resistance. Then think about what you’re afraid of (an outcome, for example) and why it is making you feel afraid. What will you lose that is causing your anxiety? What is this thing that you’re holding onto that is vital to your security and wholeness? Fear should be an alarm, not a program. An alarm alerts you of danger, while a program controls and runs the show. When ALERTED by fear we can use the logic of our conscious mind to analyze if we are in any real danger, rather than allowing the subconscious mind and its primal instincts to impulsively control us. Even if we don’t lash out during times of stress and frustration, we may remain divided and chaotic internally, throwing emotional temper tantrums no one else sees. Do your job to parent yourself and take control of the inner child embedded in your subconscious mind (we all have one). Fear is an insecurity, and insecurity is the source of many malfunctions in the human condition. However, if it wasn’t for fear, we would never know who and what we really are. Fear is illusion. Life is designed to strip illusion from you by bringing you face to face with your fears again and again until you have no choice but to face them, release resistance to them, and become fearless. Once you become fearless you’re free from illusion because you have discovered the truth of what’s on the other side of your fear. We design our lives to run away from fear so we don’t have to feel it, but whatever we resist persists, chasing us into the corner. It’s understandable why we do this but it’s not helpful because this daunting tool that keeps offering itself to us is the tool of our expansion, the tool of truth if we are ready to accept it. You would be oblivious to yourself without fear, which makes it one of the greatest tools of awareness. You shouldn’t feel ashamed of it; regardless of how tough you are, every human being feels fear. People who suppress fear are glorified. Rather than suppress it, feel it and come to terms with it. This way you won’t feel the need to suppress it because you have already gotten to its source: truth. And the truth will always wipe out fear. By suppressing fear you’re ignoring your personal lesson. We often ignore what our emotional guidance system is trying to tell us because we don’t think fear is valid. Fear is a red flag within us that we should pay closer attention to so we can dig deep and find the source of that fear. Suppressing it is only ignoring the shadow, masking it as courage. We don’t examine the fear that we have; instead, we try to focus on anything that decreases the level of fear that we experience. Sometimes fear is legitimate and sometimes it is not, but we must always pay attention to it so we can get to the Truth of why it’s there. Fear of the unknown is also common. Since we know nothing about the unkown, what we actually fear is whatever we ourselves project into it. We think we know what potential negative thing the unknown might hold for us and we are running from the projection of that potential pain. We fear what we project into the unknown based on our previous experiences (mostly from childhood) of uncertainty and discomfort. The reptile brain seeks comfort, so anything that is uncomfortable alerts our primal survival drives. These red flags create anxious moments to our pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding ego. When faced with the unknown, the mind goes to work projecting its already acquired fears into the unknown so that it can predict what lies there. It’s those projections that we fear. It’s not the unknown of that experience that it fears, it’s what it thinks it knows that experience will create. We need to be brave enough to face and admit to what we actually fear. This may sound counterintuitive, but everything we do, regardless of how stupid or damaging it is for ourselves, has a positive intention at its core. Anxiety responses aim to help us — usually to get us out of a situation, to protect us. Every behaviour that we generate, even if it’s detrimental to our long-term growth and happiness, has a positive intention behind it, and recognizing this will allow you to change the behaviour. Your subconscious mind wants to protect you but it doesn’t think long-term with respect to your growth and happiness; it reacts in the present moment, and wants to deal with the perceived danger NOW. The subconscious is always thinking about what’s happening now, and how to fix it now. It thinks, “How do I get out of it? How do I survive it?” While your subconscious mind is intuitive, smart, and integral to the mind-body system, it is also deeply irrational and has the cognitive capacity of a 10-year-old child. Ask yourself, would you let a 10-year-old run your life? We need to educate and guide the subconscious mind using its own language and worldview. The subconscious mind’s job is to keep you happy, healthy, and safe, so when you give it a way to understand that what it’s doing is hurting you, it will stop the behaviour. If the subconscious mind has to choose between safety and happiness, it will always chose safety. Self-preservation is its primary objective, to protect you and keep you alive so you can move your genes forward. Do not justify your fear. While something could have happened to you that created the fear, such as a traumatic event, you must still move beyond it. It may be difficult, but when you justify your fear, in whatever terms, you remain a prisoner to it. You give yourself a reason to hold onto the fear because you’re telling yourself that this fear is coming from the outside instead of its true source, the inside. Once you become aware of something, you have the choice and power to change it. Your belief systems determine your ability to overcome your fears. If you tell yourself, “I can’t overcome this fear,” you ensure this remains true. As long as you believe it, it will be True in your reality. The perception we have of ourselves is greater than the perception other people have of us. Your perceptions will determine how you will react, which in turn determines how long the fear will last in your life. Facing your greatest fears will be your greatest liberation. Your fears are your unresolved issues; once you get to the Truth of why they exist, you can resolve those issues and stop feeding the fears. We must let go of and reexamine what we think is good and bad because our perspective shapes our fears. 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+4397,Popular Health Exchange In Jeopardy After Surprise Republican Win,"More than 500,000 people have gotten health insurance in Kentucky through the state's health care exchange, Kynect, and through expanded Medicaid. Kentucky has seen the second-steepest drop in uninsured of any state.
+
+Supporters of the health care law point to it as one of the success stories, but the man who very well could become the state's next governor is vowing to ""dismantle"" Kynect and cancel the Medicaid expansion.
+
+""We will have a very spirited discussion as it relates to health care in our state. Trust me on that,"" vowed Republican Matt Bevin, the surprising apparent winner of the contentious GOP gubernatorial primary. The Tea Party-backed Bevin finished just 83 votes ahead of James Comer, the state's agriculture commissioner, out of more than 200,000 votes.
+
+""Obamacare's been very good to the state,"" said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky.
+
+But President Obama is very unpopular in the state and anything associated with him is, too. Kentuckians and Bevin are stressing the ""first three syllables instead of the last one"" in Obamacare, Cross said.
+
+It is the latest example of the problems Obama's signature legislation has faced at the state level, where most governors and legislatures are in Republican hands. The Affordable Care Act, often called ""Obamacare,"" can be viewed very differently based on the name.
+
+In 2013, Hart Research and Public Opinion Strategies, the bipartisan pollsters who conduct the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, tested that in 2013 for CNBC. The poll asked separately about feelings toward ""Obamacare"" and the ""Affordable Care Act."" There was almost a 10-point difference in how much more negatively people felt toward ""Obamacare,"" and almost three times as many did not know the ""Affordable Care Act.""
+
+It was similar when the question was asked specifically in Kentucky about feelings toward ""Kynect"" and ""the new health care law."" An NBC News/Marist poll in May 2014 found by a 29 percent to 22 percent margin that Kentuckians had a favorable opinion of their state health care exchange. But 57 percent had an unfavorable view of ""Obamacare,"" while just 1 in 3 had a positive one.
+
+In Kentucky, the governor has the power to unilaterally create or disband programs like Kynect, Cross said. Incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear chose to both set up a state exchange and expand Medicare. But he is term-limited.
+
+Bevin, a venture capitalist who lost badly in a Senate primary last year to Mitch McConnell, would face off with Democrat Jack Conway. Conway, the state attorney general, starts as a slight favorite, but Kentucky is a conservative state, and Conway struggled in his 2010 Senate bid against Republican Rand Paul.
+
+Bevin made getting rid of Kynect and the Medicaid expansion central to his campaign. He is also vowing to implement right-to-work laws and shrink government, in part, through attrition of public sector workers.
+
+""I think it, too, is destined to crumble under the weight of its own instability,"" Bevin said of Kynect when he announced his long-shot bid for governor.
+
+Bevin wound up breaking through in the primary, in large measure, by pitting the two front-runners against each other. He did it with this memorable ad, depicting Comer and Hal Heiner, a former Louisville city councilman, as children at a backyard table throwing food at each other:
+
+""Hal Heiner and James Comer are acting like children, throwing insults and attacking each other,"" an announcer says as pasta splatters across the lens. ""Kentucky can do much better."" The ad pivots, labeling Bevin as ""grown-up leadership for Kentucky.""
+
+But now it will be Bevin's policies that come under sharper scrutiny. He argues the state cannot afford the Medicaid expansion, which was the biggest reason for the drop in the uninsured. Federal funds currently pay for it, but that money will eventually go away.
+
+""The fact that we have 1 out of 4 people in this state on Medicaid is unsustainable; it's unaffordable,"" Bevin said during the campaign, ""and we need to create jobs in this state, not more government programs to cover people.""
+
+But Medicaid expansion is different than Kynect, which has been held up as one of the best-functioning state exchanges in the country.
+
+""He won't get away with it,"" Cross maintained of Bevin's promise to get rid of Kynect. ""He'll have to get serious about it at some point and stop conflating Kynect and the Medicaid expansion.""",REAL
+8902,The First Space Photo Of Earth - Shot From A Third Reich Rocket In 1946,"« Previous - Next » The First Space Photo Of Earth - Shot From A Third Reich Rocket In 1946 
+Prior to 1946, the highest pictures that had ever been taken of the Earth were from the Explorer II balloon in 1935. At 13.7 miles up, the photos were understandably vague. At this point, our view of Earth was largely based on science, with a bit of support from the Explorer II photos. However, nothing was clear enough to be confirmed. 
+In October of 1946, the ideas of many scientists were confirmed, as new heights were reached. Something astonishing occurred at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Using a V2 rocket that had been captured from Nazis and brought to White Sands in 300 rail cars after the war, a camera was shot into space. The first rocket reached what is now a measly height of 65 miles. At nearly five times the height of previous photos, researchers now had their first view from space. While the camera was destroyed, plummeting back to earth at nearly 500 feet per second, the film had been protected by a steel case, completely untouched . 
+Fred Rulli recalls after the recovery of the film, “when they first projected them onto the screen, the scientists just went nuts”, speaking of the photos in 1946. He speaks of his friend, who realized the importance of the day, saying “Do you realize what’s going on here?” Many may not have. They had no idea that in the years following that spectacular day, the V2 rockets would reach even greater heights, traveling over 100 miles up. Hundreds of photos were taken and researchers were ecstatic at what they had discovered. 
+Today, when millions of people watch pictures of the Earth from cameras in outer space every day, it seems a perfectly natural thing. Since the V2 rockets, photos have been taken from the moon during the Apollo 8 mission, from space beyond Neptune in 1990 from the Voyager 1, and more recently from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It seems as though there is not much left to discover when it comes to the surface of the Earth and the photos we have captured of it. However, there will always be something greater. There will always be something new to be found, always a new way to capture beautiful, more technological photos of the surface of our Earth. 
+This article (The First Space Photo Of Earth - Shot From A Third Reich Rocket In 1946) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
+2052,Hillary’s No Slam Dunk in 2016,"Could Hillary Clinton be the next Richard Nixon? Now that’s a provocative question, but it isn’t quite what you think.
+
+The other day, I watched Hillary and Bill Clinton take in their close friend Terry McAuliffe’s inauguration as governor of Virginia. Neither Clinton spoke, but their presence said it all: Virginia, the Mother of Presidents long before it was a modern swing state, will be seeing a lot of the Clintons—and now they have a ready-made home-away-from-home in the gubernatorial mansion that adorns Richmond’s Capitol Square.
+
+Every time you observe the Clintons, you can’t help but ponder the long and winding road of their 40-year electoral saga, beginning with Bill’s unsuccessful 1974 run for Congress in Arkansas. Their lives are so suffused with politics that it seems incredible to consider that Hillary might not run in 2016.
+
+After all, with just one exception, a Clinton has always tried for public office whenever a tantalizing opportunity presented itself. The rule-breaker was Bill’s aborted run for president in the 1988 cycle. On the eve of his expected candidacy announcement in July 1987, with the national press gathering in Little Rock, his long-suffering chief of staff, Betsey Wright, she later told PBS, huddled with her boss and presented a list of women he was alleged to have been “seeing.” After a number of responses along the lines of “she’ll never talk,” Clinton belatedly awakened to the reality that he could self-destruct in the post-Gary Hart world—Hart had been forced out of the Democrats’ presidency sweepstakes just a couple of months earlier following allegations of adultery. The next day, Clinton declined to run, stunning the news media with the unconvincing excuse that he had decided to spend more time with his family.
+
+Nearly three decades later, Hillary needs no cover story should she surprise us and spurn another White House tour. Now in her mid 60s, she knows as much as any human being alive what an arduous journey lies ahead even for a heavily favored contender. Inevitably, she will consider how much she wants, or is able, to keep going at a killer pace throughout her 70s and, more important, her chances of prevailing in November 2016.
+
+Much of it is out of her hands. Low job approval numbers for President Obama, should they persist, will make it difficult for any Democrat to win, even with the party’s seeming Electoral College edge and growing demographic advantages among minorities and the young. Just ask John McCain how President George W. Bush’s unpopularity affected his 2008 White House bid. (Of course, you can’t rule out the very real chance that the Republicans will rescue the eventual Democratic nominee by putting forward an out-of-the-mainstream nominee.)
+
+The Clintons are nothing if not shrewd, and they’ve lived through the entire era of postwar American politics. So Hillary Clinton would be the last to believe what I have heard with increasing frequency: that, in the end, no one of real heft, even Vice President Joe Biden, will challenge her for the Democratic nomination she nearly won in 2008, and she will steamroll over the minor contenders who do. Most frequently mentioned in the “minor” category are former Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana and Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland. (O’Malley also made a little-noticed appearance at the McAuliffe inauguration.) Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would be a major opponent should she run, but she insists she will not. When California Gov. Jerry Brown also bowed out, NBC News’s First Read called it “a reminder that Hillary Clinton will probably face little to no serious competition if she runs.”
+
+Possible? Sure. But history’s guide tells us otherwise. A consensus choice for a major-party presidential nomination is exceedingly rare—and this is where the Nixon comparison comes in.
+
+Incumbent presidents often find their second-term nominations nearly unopposed, though even in this rarefied group, there are notable exceptions: Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. (Truman and Johnson withdrew in 1952 and 1968, respectively, partly because of intra-party opposition.)
+
+But when no incumbent was running, the only precedent for a consensus choice in the entire post-World War II era is Richard Nixon in 1960. This impressive feat was nonetheless achieved with some difficulty and embarrassment. Nixon thought he had averted a serious GOP challenge when New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller withdrew as a potential candidate in December 1959. But Nixon’s unappealing persona and substantial baggage from the political wars of the 1940s and 1950s worried many Republicans eager for a third consecutive White House victory. Rockefeller sensed it and reconsidered, toying with a surprise candidacy on the eve of the 1960 Republican National Convention. At the last instant, Rocky relented, mollified by the so-called “Treaty of Fifth Avenue,” a series of concessions by Nixon negotiated in an all-night session and announced by the New York governor himself.",REAL
+5760,"Russia, India will expand military cooperation with focus on Navy projects | Russia & India Report","Russia, India will expand military cooperation with focus on Navy projects 26 October 2016 TASS The Russian defence minister pointed out that the progress of joint production of Ka-226 helicopters, BrahMos and S-400 indicates technical cooperation with India should be expanded. Facebook india , russia , shoigu Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, and Defense Minister of India Manohar Parrikar at a ceremony of signing a final protocol of the meeting of the Russian-Indian Inter-Governmental Commission on Cooperation in Military Industry, in Delhi. Source:Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation 
+The Russian and Indian defence ministries have been instructed to expand military and military-technical cooperation, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Wednesday. 
+""The extra tasks set in the course of the meeting Russian and Indian leaders held on October 15-16 indicate that we should expand the sphere of our military-technical cooperation,"" Shoigu said as the Russian-Indian inter-government commission for military-technical cooperation met in session for the 16th time. 
+India could get delivery of the S-400 in 2020 
+The parties have already begun a discussion of all issues that are related to the post-warranty maintenance and life cycle contracts for the military technologies to be provided or provided earlier, Shoigu said. 
+""It goes without saying that we have noted with great satisfaction the progress achieved in our major projects, such as the joint production of Ka-226 helicopters, missile systems BrahMos and air defence systems S-400 ,"" he said. 
+Source: mil.ru 
+There is a special major program for naval ships, including submarines, Shoigu added. 
+""I believe that today there is a good opportunity for reviewing the results of the previous year and identifying targets for next year. We are ready to discuss all crucial problems, issues and prospects for our military and military-technical cooperation,"" Shoigu concluded. Fight against terrorism 
+Kadakin: Russia with India. Terrorism is greatest human rights violation 
+The struggle against international terrorism requires consolidation of all forces and rules out double or triple standards, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Wednesday. 
+""What is absolutely unacceptable in the struggle against terrorism is the use of double and sometimes triple standards. Those who are terrorists on Monday cannot turn into moderate opposition on Tuesday. There will have to be fundamental consolidation of all sound forces in the struggle against this ill of the 21st century,"" Shoigu said at a meeting of the Russian-Indian inter-governmental commission for military-technical cooperation. 
+He pointed out that the struggle against terrorism was a major issue. 
+First published by TASS . ",FAKE
+7169,"Make music great again, with these 10 Trumped up album covers","Next Swipe left/right Make music great again, with these 10 Trumped up album covers We’ve previously seen how the addition of Donald Trump can ruin perfectly good films , now the tiny-handed man baby ruins 10 albums.
+1. 
+— Suzanne McCusker (@SuzMcC72) November 2, 2016 
+2. https://twitter.com/Okeating/status/793820751782633472",FAKE
+7966,CNN Talker Famous for Saying 'Pu***' on Air Lashes Out at Newt for Saying Megyn's 'Obsessed with Sex',"Share on Twitter The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
+During a panel discussion on Wednesday's “Anderson Cooper 360,” Republican strategist and CNN regular Ana Navarro went off on Newt Gingrich over his meltdown on “The Kelly File”— during which he angrily accused Kelly of being “ fascinated with sex .” 
+After Cooper referred to Gingrich's rant as “ironic,” Navarro jumped to take issue, 'correcting' the host before torching Gingrich over the treatment of his wife: 
+“I think the word you were looking for was ‘hypocritical.' Remember Newt Gingrich’s wife? When he was running in 2012, told all of us, told the media [...] Gingrich offered her the choice between an open marriage or a divorce. 
+So maybe, just maybe, if all of that baggage is on your shoulders, maybe you shouldn’t be the surrogate out there wagging your finger and accusing the woman who was reporting on sexual assault. 
+Let me explain it slowly — sexual assault and sex are two things. One is unwanted. One is wanted. So maybe they need to understand that to begin with.” 
+Navarro told uber-Trump supporter Scottie Nell Hughes that Gingrich shouldn't be used by the campaign in any capacity, given his past. Image Credit: Screenshot/CNN YouTube 
+Incidentally, following the release of the now-infamous leaked 2005 video in which Trump brags about grabbing women by the p***y, Navarro angrily yelled the word during a CNN panel discussion after Hughes chastised her for saying it on-air. 
+We'll go ahead and put Ana down as a “maybe” for Trump. ",FAKE
+605,Senate GOP leaving tea party primary battles behind,The move would make it easier for the Trump administration to demolish the exchanges.,REAL
+6895,Meet The Man Who Started The Illuminati,"Today, they are the source of ‘all conspiracy theories’ they are the inspiration behind many fiction novels, movies.
+
+Illuminati is considered as the secret organization that is really controlling the world, pulling strings from behind ‘the scene’ and steering the world towards a New World Order. But this all started back in 1776, Ingolstadt, Germany by a man named Adam Weishaupt who was a respectable professor.
+
+
+Adam Weishaupt’s idea was creating a better world. As a boy he was an avid reader, consuming books by the latest French Enlightenment philosophers in his uncle’s library. He was convinced that the monarchy and the church were repressing freedom of thought.
+Adam Weishaupt was not, he said, against religion itself, but rather the way in which it was practiced and imposed.  His thinking, he wrote, offered freedom “from all religious prejudices; cultivates the social virtues; and animates them by a great, a feasible, and speedy prospect of universal happiness.” To achieve this, it was necessary to create “a state of liberty and moral equality, freed from the obstacles which subordination, rank, and riches, continually throw in our way.” In this period Freemasonry was steadily expanding throughout Europe. This secret group offered appealing alternatives to freethinkers. Adam Weishaupt wanted to join this lodge, however, he decided later to create his own.
+
+On the night of May 1, 1776, the first Illuminati met to found the order in a forest near Ingolstadt. Bathed in torchlight, there were five men.
+
+There they established the rules that were to govern the order.
+
+All future candidates for admission required the members’ consent, a strong reputation with well-established familial and social connections, and wealth.
+
+At the beginning the order had only 3 levels: ‘novices, minervals, and illuminated minervals…’ The name “Minerval” referred to the Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva, reflecting the order’s aim to spread true knowledge, or illumination, about how society, and the state, might be reshaped.
+
+A novice preparing to pass to the higher level of minerval, for example, had to present a detailed report on the titles of the books he owned, the identity of his enemies, and the weak points of his character. All members had to pledge the needs of a society before their personal.
+
+THE RISE OF THE ILLUMINATI: 
+
+
+Over the years the secret order grew considerably in size and diversity. By the end of 1784, the Illuminati had 2,000 to 3,000 members.
+
+Although, at first, the Illuminati were limited to Weishaupt’s students, the membership expanded to included noblemen, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and jurists, as well as intellectuals and some leading writers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
+
+They included important people in Bavarian public life, such as Baron Adolph von Knigge and the banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who provided funding.
+
+Baron von Knigge played a very considerable role in the society’s organization and expansion. As a former Freemason, he was in favor of adopting rites similar to theirs.
+
+Members were given ‘secret’ names from famous history characters. Weishaupt was Spartacus, for example, and Knigge was Philo.
+
+With more members the number of levels in the Illuminati had to increase. There were 13 degrees of initiation, divided into three classes.
+
+HERE IS THE COMPLETE LIST OF ILLUMINATI CLASSES AND LEVELS: 
+
+
+FIRST CLASS 
+Each novice was initiated in humanitarian philosophy until he became a minerval. He then received the order’s statutes and could attend meetings.
+Initiate Novice Minerval Illuminatus Minor 
+SECOND CLASS 
+
+The various degrees in this class were inspired by Freemasonry. The illuminatus major supervised recruitment, and the illuminatus dirigens presided over the minervals’ meetings.
+Apprentice Fellow Master Illuminatus Major Illuminatus Dirigens 
+THIRD CLASS 
+
+The highest degree of philosophical illumination. Its members were priests who instructed lower-degree members. The lower orders of this class were themselves under the authority of a king.
+Priest Prince Magus King 
+THE PROHIBITION OF ILLUMINATI: 
+
+
+The secret society stood for some controversial opinions. They considered that suicide was legitimate, that its enemies should be poisoned, and that religion was an absurdity. However, when the Duke-Elector of Bavaria found the secret society was planning to conspire against Bavaria on behalf of Austria, it was then when he issued an edict in June 1784 banning the creation of any kind of society not previously authorized by law.
+
+Bavarian police found highly compromising documents, including a defense of suicide and atheism, a plan to create a female branch of the order, invisible ink recipes, and medical instructions for carrying out abortions.
+
+The evidence was used as the basis for accusing the order of conspiring against religion and the state. In August 1787, the duke-elector issued a third edict in which he confirmed that the order was prohibited, and imposed the death penalty for membership.
+
+Adam Weishaupt lived the rest of his life in Gotha in Saxony where he taught philosophy at the University of Göttingen.
+
+The Bavarian state considered the Illuminati dismantled.
+
+THE ILLUMINATI WAS JUST GETTING STARTED: 
+
+
+Adam Weishaupt was accused of helping to plot the French Revolution.
+
+This was the start of a war that will give birth to some of the greatest money machines that still exist today.
+
+The secret society shifted its goals. They already had connections and knowledge. They didn’t need their society to be legal to exist.
+
+Members chose to use the connections for making more money and profit because they realized with enough money you can control the world. You can control the laws. You can establish your agendas without being conflicted by ‘less’ enlightened people’s opinions.
+
+
+The Illuminati have been fingered in recent events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Weishaupt’s ideas have also influenced the realms of popular fiction, such as Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons and Foucault’s Pendulum by Italian novelist Umberto Eco.
+
+Although his group was allegedly disbanded, Weishaupt’s idea still exists, pulling the strings.
+But this article raises one really important question. Considering Adam Weishaupt’s first intent ‘a state of liberty and moral equality, freed from the obstacles which subordination, rank, and riches, continually throw in our way’ is it possible for this to be achieved and integrated into a society where people are not fully awaken?
+
+Life Coach Code 
+SOURCE ",FAKE
+819,Anti-Trump delegates now responsible for nominating him,"The death threats were starting to get to Constantin Querard. They had been streaming in from Donald Trump supporters, who wanted to know why Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had won delegates at Arizona’s convention even though Trump had won the state. After the deluge, finally, a nice-seeming message appeared on his Facebook page.
+
+Querard, the Arizona political consultant who had managed Cruz’s delegate campaign, clicked to read the rest.
+
+“I’m praying for you to get prostate cancer.”
+
+Cruz’s delegates were girded for two more months of this, then a contested convention where they could force a second ballot and defeat Trump, making all the hate mail worth it.
+
+Instead, hundreds of Republican activists have been elected as delegates to a convention expected to be a coronation of Trump. Delegates such as Querard, who outfoxed Trump supporters at state conventions, were now trapped on a speeding Trump Train. They were legally bound to stand up and nominate him. That might be the last time they vote for him.
+
+“I’m a lifelong Republican and I love the party,” said Querard. “But don’t ask me how I’ll vote in November. I’ve been on the receiving end of enough death wishes where it’s pretty soon for me to strap on the jersey with any authenticity.”
+
+There are unhappy delegates at every party convention, but the captive audience of Trump skeptics bound for Cleveland is unique. For months, supporters of Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich worked to get their supporters elected as unbound delegates, or even as “Trojan horse” delegates bound to Trump on the first ballot but free to bolt if the contest continued.
+
+[Trump turns to general election — and away from past positions]
+
+For a few weeks, it seemed to be working. Kasich and Cruz both crowed about their ability to out-organize Trump’s forces, who in Cruz’s world were not “capable to run a lemonade stand.” As both men lost high-profile contests — Trump won all but two of them, in Utah and Wisconsin, after March 15 — Cruz took to counting up his state convention victories as proof that voters were rejecting Trump.
+
+Yet Trump turned the wins against them, telling his mega-rallies that a “crooked deal” was stealing his delegates. Roger Stone, a Trump ally who had promised to publish the names and hotel rooms of “Trojan horse” delegates, was happy to see them fail.
+
+“Many will not attend, leaving their seats to the alternates, who in most cases are Trump supporters,” Stone said. “I am not too concerned about their feelings.”
+
+The people who had out-organized Trump were dazed by the backlash. “North Dakota did it how it was supposed to be done,” said Bette Grande, a hard-charging Cruz delegate who helped him dominate that state’s weekend convention. “The media didn’t like that because it was something they didn’t understand, so they bought into the lie of Trump that something unfair was going on.”
+
+Grande, like almost all of the Cruz and Kasich delegates, intended to head to Cleveland anyway. In the days since the Indiana primary, delegates have occasionally sought instructions or solace from the Cruz and Kasich campaigns. There has been no instruction to stand down, and no hint that the results can be overturned.
+
+“It is time for those who supported others in the Republican Party to come together and help Mr. Trump be the best candidate he can be,” said Jim Brainard, the mayor of Carmel, Ind., whose election as a pro-Kasich delegate turned out to be one of that campaign’s last coups. “It’s a big tent, and those of us who disagree with Trump will hopefully have an opportunity to sway his views.”
+
+Some of the “Trojan horses” had only reluctantly backed Cruz or Kasich. Subba Kolla, a Realtor from Northern Virginia, had backed Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) in the state’s close primary, but allied with Cruz during the state convention. Cruz’s forces won a smashing victory, but Kolla was resigned to backing Trump.
+
+“I’m not sad,” he said. “I am a party loyalist. I am representing my community, the Indian American community, and I don’t want to disappoint them. Most of our community supported Rubio. Now there’s only Trump. I don’t have any bad feelings about him.”
+
+Several other delegates said that they would attend to keep Trump and the GOP honest. Virginia state Sen. Richard H. Black (Loudoun), a Cruz delegate, said he had actually preferred Trump’s “America first” policy to Cruz’s, but intended to go to Cleveland and defend the social conservative planks of the Republican platform.
+
+Kay Godwin, a Georgia conservative who had become a Cruz delegate, felt the same way. “It wasn’t the Lord’s plan for Ted to win, but maybe that’ll be his plan next time,” she said. “The reason I became a Republican is because the platform is wonderful. It stands for everything that I stand for in my heart.”
+
+Still, there were holdouts. Querard knew of one alternate who no longer wanted to spend the money to go to Cleveland. Russell Donley, a former speaker of the Wyoming House who had won one of Cruz’s slots, said the Trump victory made him inclined to stay home with his wife.
+
+“If Trump’s short one vote, and there’s an opening for Cruz, okay, then I go,” Donley said. “But I’m an old Wyoming boy, and going to Cleveland in the summer doesn’t really enthuse me.”
+
+Then there was Eric Brakey, a young state senator from Maine who had been part of a Cruz slate that triumphed so resoundingly that Gov. Paul LePage (R) denounced it. Four years earlier, Brakey had fought just as hard to become a delegate for former Texas congressman Ron Paul, only to watch the Republican National Committee overturn the state convention and replace some Paul delegates with Romney delegates. This year, Brakey was finally given a vote at the convention — and received yet another disappointment.
+
+“Donald Trump isn’t who my conscience tells me to support,” Brakey said. “Then again, neither was Ted Cruz. I voted for Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) at the caucuses, and when I ran for delegate I said I would reflect the will of the voters. Now I’m sort of jokingly telling people that I’ll cast my vote for Ron Paul — four years late.”",REAL
+9302,Syria’s UN Envoy ‘Appalled’ By Rebel Attacks On Civilians In Aleppo,"On Sunday Syrian state media said rebels had used chemical weapons against government-controlled districts of Aleppo. 
+
+RT reports: 
+Scores of civilians, including several children, were killed while hundreds of others were wounded in “relentless and indiscriminate” attacks carried out by opposition groups in the western districts of Aleppo, according to the UN statement. 
+“Those who argue that this is meant to relieve the siege of eastern Aleppo should be reminded that nothing justifies the use of disproportionate, indiscriminate [attacks,] including heavy weapons on civilian areas and it could amount to war crimes,” de Mistura said. 
+He echoed the condemnation voiced by the UN secretary-general regarding the attacks on schools. The special envoy also criticized the “use of heavy airpower on civilian areas.” 
+“The civilians of both sides of Aleppo have suffered enough due to futile but lethal attempts of subduing the city of Aleppo,” he said. “They now need and deserve a stable ceasefire covering this ancient city of Syria.” 
+Earlier on Sunday, state news agency SANA reported that “shells containing poison gases” had been fired at the residential district of al-Hamdaniya in western, government-held Aleppo. 
+RT Arabic’s crew in Aleppo reported 36 cases of suffocation. Al-Mayadeen reported that all the victims of the attack are civilians. 
+Just recently, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on a number of attacks in Aleppo that targeted schools and claimed the lives of at least three children in the period of 24 hours. Twelve more people died in an attack on a humanitarian aid corridor opened next to a school in the Al-Mashariq district, according to the ministry’s information. Twelve more people were injured. 
+Meanwhile, according to Russia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, over 16,000 people have fallen victim to opposition groups meant to be under US control. “From February to September, the opposition groups that are supposed to be under the US control committed 2,031 violations of the [cessation of hostilities], which claimed lives of 3,532 military personnel and 12,800 civilians,” the Mission’s statement, published on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry, reads. 
+According to Dr. Said Sadek, professor of Political Sociology at the American University of Cairo, it’s not likely that Western powers and the Gulf states will end their backing for rebel groups, even if they are found responsible for using chemical weapons in Aleppo. “We have to understand that for six years, the Western countries and the Gulf states invested in those ‘moderate’ or radical groups, and so they cannot abandon them,” Sadek explained. “They cannot pull out now and say, ‘OK we discovered that we are wrong, let’s get out and leave them.’ They have invested in them and they will still use them for bargaining in the future of Syria.”",FAKE
+9565,Collusion Between Facebook and Hillary’s Campaign Revealed in Clinton Emails,"Posted on October 29, 2016 by Michael DePinto 
+Who would have thought right? Hillary’s campaign establishing what appears to be some very close ties with the largest social media company ( Facebook ) on the Internet, right in the midst of her presidential campaign? It’s not enough that Hillary has Google hiding various stories from Clinton search queries, but it looks like she had to go and get Facebook on board to help her cheat as well. But should Trump supporters take any issue with that? 
+Sure, there’s been issues in the past with Facebook banning conservatives for merely looking at their monitors the wrong way, but all that changed this week right? If you recall, earlier this week we learned that despite donating huge amounts of money to Hillary’s campaign, allegedly Mark Zuckerberg betrayed Hillary Clinton, and actually jumped on board the Trump Train … or is there more to this? In the video below I dig a bit deeper into both these stories… 
+Emails Show Connection Between Facebook Executive, Clinton Campaign 
+… kept the interactions with Clinton private … 
+A new WikiLeaks email dump shows Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg eager and willing to be involved in helping Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
+Sandberg’s role in helping the research-driven Clinton campaign was revealed in a WikiLeaks email from Clinton aide Cheryl Mills. 
+“I have arranged for Sheryl Sandberg and her researcher to be available on 5 March at 10 am to step through the research on gender and leadership by women,” Mills wrote in a February 2015 email. 
+Two months after that meeting, Sandberg offered to do more for the campaign in response to an email from campaign chairman John Podesta expressing sympathy for the death of her husband. 
+“I still want HRC to win badly ,” Sandberg wrote in May 2015. “I am still here to help as I can. She came over and was magical with my kids.” 
+Facebook has said that Sandberg was acting in a private capacity in sharing research with the Clinton campaign. Sandberg kept the interactions with Clinton private, and did not formally, publicly endorse Clinton until early 2016. 
+However, she kept in touch with the campaign. In August 2015, she emailed Podesta offering to put him in touch with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , a staunch opponent of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump . 
+“Mark is meeting with people to learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action and it’s hard to imagine someone better placed or more experienced than you to help him,” she wrote. 
+“He’s begun to think about whether/how he might want to shape advocacy efforts to support his philanthropic priorities and is particularly interested in meeting people who could help him understand how to move the needle on the specific public policy issues he cares most about,” she added. 
+“He wants to meet folks who can inform his understanding about effective political operations to advance public policy goals on social oriented objectives (like immigration, education or basic scientific research),” she wrote. 
+The WikiLeaks emails from Podesta’s account imply a meeting was arranged later that month. 
+SOCIAL MEDIA GIANTS ARE ACTUALLY GOVERNMENT CREATIONS: 
+If you doubt that the CIA made Google, and Google made the NSA, but you don’t read the following: save your worthless drivel for someone who cares. If you don’t have the facts presented, how can you presume to dispute then? Conversely, if you dispute the facts presented with evidence stacked higher than Mt. Everest, by all means… let’s hear it, but support your opinions with FACTS, not platitudes.",FAKE
+1883,Pro-Obama super PAC shifts focus to possible Clinton 2016 bid,"The country's biggest liberal super PAC, which helped re-elect President Obama last year, is shifting focus to support a possible Hillary Clinton White House bid in 2016.
+
+A spokesman for Priorities USA Action, originally formed by ex-Obama advisers, confirmed to FoxNews.com that it is now raising money in support of Clinton.
+
+There have been sporadic efforts by Democratic groups to encourage Clinton -- who has not yet revealed her 2016 plans -- to run, but this would mark one of the earliest and highest-profile efforts to date to raise money for someone who, at this point, is not a candidate.
+
+To coincide with the shift in focus, the group has appointed new leaders, including ex-Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. The group also will be co-chaired by former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who has called for Clinton to run in 2016.
+
+""We couldn't be more proud and excited to be joined by Jim Messina and Governor Granholm, whose leadership and political acumen will be invaluable in our effort to elect a Democratic president in 2016,"" Priorities USA Action Executive Director Buffy Wicks said in a written statement.
+
+The New York Times first reported the shift. According to the report, Priorities USA is seeking six-and-seven-figure donations to fuel pro-Clinton ads and more.
+
+""I think the numbers clearly show that she's the strongest presidential candidate on the Democratic side,"" Messina told the Times. ""And Priorities is going to be there for her if she decides to run.""",REAL
+3682,3 dead in Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting,"Two civilians and one police officer died after a gunman opened fire at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood, leading to a five-hour standoff with law enforcement.
+
+Nine other people, four civilians and five police officers, were taken to local hospitals with gunshot wounds and are in good condition, according to police.
+
+The gunman is in police custody after surrendering just before 5 pm local time, police spokesperson Lt. Catherine Buckley told local reporters. The suspect has been identified as Robert Lewis Dear.
+
+The University of Colorado police officer who was killed, Garrett Swasey, 44, was described by family and friends as a loving father of two young children and a devoted co-pastor at his local church.
+
+The incident began at the Planned Parenthood Colorado Springs Westside Health Center just before noon Mountain Time. The gunman exchanged fire with police officers for hours before he was apprehended, and police worked to evacuate people still inside.
+
+Police described the suspect as a stocky, bearded white male wearing a trench coat. He was reportedly armed with a ""long gun."" Reporters have tweeted photographs of the suspect allegedly being taken into custody.
+
+The call to the police originated from the address of the Planned Parenthood clinic, although the motives of the shooter are still unclear.
+
+""We're not sure what the connection is to Planned Parenthood, but that was the initial address we were given for the service,"" Buckley said.
+
+The FBI warned of threats to reproductive health facilities this past September, in the wake of graphic sting videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood selling fetal body parts for profit. There have been at least four cases of arson perpetrated against Planned Parenthood clinics this year alone.
+
+Planned Parenthood released the following statement on the shooting:
+
+Colorado Springs is about one hour south of Denver. CBS News is running a live stream of the coverage, which you can watch here.",REAL
+5826,"Report from the Refugee Camp in Calais, France: “the Jungle”","Report from the Refugee Camp in Calais, France: “the Jungle” Report from the Refugee Camp in Calais, France: “the Jungle” By 0 114 “I was in jail with a Libyan man, his friends came and broke into the jail and let us go, too. There was fighting everywhere. You pray to be in jail with Libyans, because they do not recognize the current government, they will do what they want.” (spoken by a refugee in “the Jungle”) Forty-two percent of the people who came to the Jungle are from warring parts of Sudan and South Sudan; thirty-two percent are from Afghanistan. Others are from Syria, Yemen, Iraqi Kurdistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Egypt, and more; they have crossed between 6 and 13 countries to arrive in Calais, with their final goal to reach the U.K. In Calais, it seems they are facing the hardest border to cross. A plume of smoke rises from the Sudanese quarter of “The Jungle” in Calais as police begin demolishing the refugee camp. (Photo credit:Alexandra Vuillard) There are many who have died or been seriously injured in their attempts to cross the border to the U.K. One couple was trying to cross by train. Her boyfriend made it on; she leapt, wrapped her arms around him, but did not get her bottom half onto the train. She was cut in half. He was deeply traumatized by her tragic death. In another case, a brother and sister tried to cross to the U.K. by truck. They were both hit on the road; he died and she is in the hospital. Most people from the Jungle Camp who are in the hospital were wounded in accidents while trying to get into the U.K. Broken bones and deep cuts on arms,…",FAKE
+5190,Trump refuses to say whether he'll accept election results,"(CNN) Donald Trump on Wednesday refused to say he would accept the result of the presidential election if he loses to Hillary Clinton, raising the possibility of an extraordinary departure from principles that have underpinned American democracy for more than two centuries.
+
+""I will look at it at the time,"" Trump said when asked during the final presidential debate whether he would concede if he loses on November 8, following his claims that the election is ""rigged"" against him.
+
+He added: ""I will keep you in suspense.""
+
+The comments at the Las Vegas showdown marked a stunning moment that has never been seen in the weeks before a modern presidential election. The stance threatens to cast doubt on one of the fundamental principles of American politics -- the peaceful, undisputed transfer of power from one president to a successor who is recognized as legitimate after winning an election.
+
+The Republican nominee doubled down on his comments about the election Thursday during a rally in Delaware, Ohio, where he said he would accept the results ""if I win.""
+
+Trump's debate performance could doom his chance to win over any remaining undecided voters at this late stage in the campaign. His comments about the election results came during a debate in which he spoke of ""hombres,"" language that could offend Latinos. And he referred to Clinton as a ""nasty woman.""
+
+His campaign manager sought to blunt the election comments, appearing on CNN's ""New Day"" Thursday.
+
+""What Donald Trump has said, over time, if you take all of his statements together, he has said that he will respect the results of the election,"" said Kellyanne Conway, although she argued what he's saying is not without precedent.
+
+""Everybody, including Al Gore in 2000, waits to see what those election results are,"" she later added. That's a flawed comparison, however, since Gore's fate was in the hands of an automatic recount due to the narrow margin of George W. Bush's lead in Florida. Gore did not question the integrity of the election before Election Day.
+
+The election remarks also expose a divide with Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, who told CNN's Wolf Blitzer before the debate, ""We'll certainly accept the outcome of this election.""
+
+Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who is leading Trump in most polls, said her competitor's remarks were ""horrifying"" and accused him of taking refuge in the idea that any event that turns out against him -- even an Emmy award that goes to a rival -- is ""rigged.""
+
+""That is not the way our democracy works,"" Clinton said. ""We've been around for 240 years. We have had free and fair elections. We've accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them. And that is what is expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.""
+
+She continued: ""He is denigrating -- he's talking down -- our democracy. And I for one, am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.""
+
+Trump's remark about the election result is certain to dominate the aftermath of the debate with only 19 days to go before the election, and it seemed likely to overshadow the GOP's nominee's strongest performance in any of the three presidential debates.
+
+A CNN/ORC instant poll found 52% of debate watchers viewed Clinton as the winner compared to 39% who felt the same about Trump.
+
+Trump didn't have much margin for error going into the debate. He's down eight points in the latest CNN Poll of Polls and is nearly out of time to launch what would have to be one of the most remarkable comebacks of modern times.
+
+The showdown began in a more civil and calm way than the two previous debates, in which Trump and Clinton repeatedly flung sharp, bitter jabs at one another. He was far more disciplined for much of the debate, and did his best to avoid taking Clinton's bait, showing restraint as he and Clinton debated the Supreme Court, the Second Amendment, abortion and the economy.
+
+The billionaire reality star-turned-politicians did a better job than in the first two debates of prosecuting Clinton's weaknesses, lambasting her over her record as secretary of state and the controversy over her private email server, and painting her as the symptom of a tired political establishment who had achieved nothing in her 30 years in public life.
+
+But Trump seemed to lose his cool as the debate went on, harshly criticizing Clinton and occasionally getting testy with the debate moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News. The debate began to take a turn when Trump and Clinton clashed over the Republican nominee's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
+
+Clinton blasted Trump as a ""puppet"" of Putin and directly called on him to condemn what she said was a Russian effort to use cyberattacks to influence the election in her opponent's favor.
+
+Trump replied that Putin had no respect for Clinton or President Barack Obama.
+
+""That's because he would rather have a puppet as president of the United States,"" Clinton said, implying that Putin wanted Trump to win the election.
+
+""No puppet. You are the puppet,"" Trump said.
+
+Trump said he had never met Putin but allowed that the Russian leader had said nice things about him, and said it would be good if Washington and Moscow worked together to fight ISIS.
+
+But he added: ""This is not my best friend.""
+
+Clinton and Trump also bitterly sparred over the theme of who is qualified to be president. Wallace pressed Trump on why so many women had come forward to accuse him of sexual assault if the allegations were not true.
+
+Trump said the claims had been ""largely debunked.""
+
+""I think they want either fame or her campaign did it,"" Trump said, referring to the women that came forward after he said at the last debate that he had never been abusive to any women.
+
+Clinton noted that Trump had implied at several rallies that he could not have made inappropriate advances toward the women because they were not sufficiently attractive.
+
+Trump wrongly denied that he had ever made such a remark.
+
+""Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger. He goes after their dignity and their self worth,"" Clinton said.
+
+Clinton said that Trump's treatment of women was part of pattern of behavior that saw him insult a disabled reporter, go after the parents of a fallen Muslim soldier and question the impartiality of an American judge of Mexican descent.
+
+She said such tactics were in line with a divisive and very ""dangerous vision of our country.""
+
+The tone of the debate -- unusually substantial at the start -- never recovered once the atmosphere became charged. As the event wound down, Clinton said that under her economic plan, the payroll taxes of both herself and Trump would go up to ensure the solvency of Social Security -- unless her rival could figure out a way to avoid paying taxes.",REAL
+2139,Fiorina blames environmentalists for California drought,"The party looks to Kamala Harris, Catherine Cortez Masto, Tammy Duckworth and Maggie Hassan to help lead it out of the abyss.",REAL
+6437,AG Lynch told FBI Director Comey NOT to go public with the new Clinton email investigation,"Posted by Daisy Luther 
+According to a report in the New Yorker, James Comey , Big Kahuna of the FBI, went full-on cowboy in releasing details of the new Clinton email inquiry. Apparently, the Department of Justice advised him not to release the information just days before the presidential election. 
+Gosh. I wonder if the same advice would have been given if it was Donald Trump who was being investigated by the FBI. 
+Comey explained his decision in a letter to FBI employees : 
+“We don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.” 
+The DoJ – and by DoJ I mean Attorney General Loretta Lynch , who famously had a secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Bill Clinton to talk about her non-existent grandchildren – is implying that Comey is not playing fair and that the move is inconsistent with the rules which have been designed to make it seem like they are not interfering in an election. 
+Here’s Comey’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee: 
+Really? 
+The DoJ thinks that the public shouldn’t know that the person they may be voting for is being investigated by the FBI? 
+That’s the most absurd thing I have heard for quite some time, and considering this election, that’s really saying something. 
+This is from the New Yorker report, emphasis mine. 
+On Friday, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch , sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e-mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey’s decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department’s longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election, but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise . 
+Comey’s decision is a striking break with the policies of the Department of Justice, according to current and former federal legal officials. Comey, who is a Republican appointee of President Obama, has a reputation for integrity and independence, but his latest action is stirring an extraordinary level of concern among legal authorities, who see it as potentially affecting the outcome of the Presidential and congressional elections. ( source ) Is this investigation the iceberg to HRC’s Titanic campaign? 
+Hillary Clinton has said she finds the development “unprecedented and deeply troubling.” (source ) 
+Oh, I’ll bet she does. 
+I’ll bet if Trump had been the target of the investigation she would have been up on the stage, gripping the podium to stay upright , saying how wonderful it was that Comey decided to break the news so that voters could be aware that they might be voting for someone who was suspected of having broken federal laws. I’ll bet she’d be saying that the public has a right to know if a candidate was under investigation. I’ll bet she’d take the high road and say that those elected to the office of President of the United States have to be above and beyond reproach. 
+Of course, when it’s her, things are a little different, aren’t they? 
+We do have a right to know. We absolutely have a right to know that a person who could be elected to know all of the secrets was careless when she only knew some of the secrets. It seems like a no-brainer that the public should know that a candidate is being investigated for a second time for being criminally negligent with information entrusted to her. 
+And the fact that we know has severely damaged Clinton’s campaign. Although previous polls were incredibly skewed to the point of being outright fake , it looks like the mainstream is now trying to save face with a new batch of polls. A poll from ABC news and the Washington Post , both hotbeds of liberal voters, has shown that her lead has dropped to within a single point over Donald Trump due to the Clinton email scandal. 
+“About a third of likely voters say they’re less likely to support Clinton given FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure Friday that the bureau is investigating more emails related to its probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. “ 
+Finally, some people are actually paying attention to the character of Hillary Clinton. 
+But it may not be enough. There was one finding that was astonishing to me, even though it probably shouldn’t be: 
+“Given other considerations, 63 percent say it makes no difference.” 
+Meanwhile, on social media, the FBI emails are somehow not a trending topic. It certainly appears that Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Buzzfeed are blacking out the topic. My biggest question is this: Why now? 
+Why did James Comey, who has probably committed career suicide, along with a potential actual “suicide” via a shot to the back of his own head like others who have run afoul of the Clintons, feel the need to break the news, particularly after giving her a pass during the last investigation? 
+Opponents will jump on the fact that he’s a Republican and will say that he did it for political reasons. 
+They won’t admit that perhaps he felt guilty for being complicit in letting her off the hook in the first investigation into the Clinton email negligence. 
+They will never, ever admit that maybe his integrity and belief in the office he holds made it impossible for him to keep quiet until after the election and that, perhaps, when he was given a chance to right a previous wrong, he took it. Clinton isn’t taking it gracefully. 
+Clinton’s complaints, which have appeared in the press around the world, make her look even worse than she did before. 
+This is from The Telegraph , a UK publication: 
+Hillary Clinton was furiously fighting to keep her Presidential bid on track on Saturday night as her lead in the polls narrowed, after the FBI’s bombshell announcement that it had reopened its investigation into her emails. 
+James Comey announced on Friday afternoon that fresh evidence had emerged for his investigation into whether Mrs Clinton was criminally negligent in her handling of classified material. 
+On Saturday, the latest poll of polls by tracker site RealClearPolitics put Clinton 3.9 percentage points ahead of the Republican nationwide, down from 7.1 points just 10 days previously. 
+But wait – it gets better: 
+The Clinton campaign has responded with what amounts to a declaration of open warfare against Mr Comey, alleging that his actions are backed by a political motive. And Mrs Clinton herself called the decision “unprecedented” and “deeply troubling”. 
+“It’s pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election,” she complained, addressing cheering supporters at a rally in the must-win state of Florida. 
+Democrats questioned the timing of the agency’s decision, which comes as polls showed Mrs Clinton’s lead falling just 10 days before the presidential election. 
+“This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the worst possible time,” said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. 
+“The campaign is trying to cut through the noise as best it can. 
+“We don’t want it to knock us off our game. But on the second-to-last weekend of the race, we find ourselves having to tell voters, ‘Keep your focus, keep your eyes on the prize.’” 
+Hillary’s campaign manager sounds pretty desperate to me. As for the complaints from HRC, they just make her sound like the out-of-touch, money-grabbing, power-hungry, deceitful",FAKE
+7588,FBI reopens Clinton investigation as new emails found ‒ Comey,"The FBI has learned of more emails involving Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she headed the State Department, FBI Director James Comey told several members of Congress, telling them he is reopening the investigation. “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of email that appear to be pertinent” to Clinton’s investigation, Comey wrote to the chairs of several relevant congressional committees, adding that he was briefed about the messages on Thursday. “I agree that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” 
+FBI Director Comey, in letter to members of Congress, says FBI is investigating additional emails in Clinton private server case pic.twitter.com/Ue0qlhqT5w 
+— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 28, 2016 
+
+The FBI director cautioned, however, that the bureau has yet to assess the importance of the material, and that he doesn’t know how long that will take.
+FBI Dir just informed me, ""The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation."" Case reopened
+— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016 
+
+Stocks fell after Comey’s announcement, CNBC reported.
+Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, praised the decision to reopen the case.
+“Now that the FBI has reopened the matter, it must conduct the investigation with impartiality and thoroughness,” he said in a statement. “The American people deserve no less and no one should be above the law.” 
+Almost 15,000 new Clinton emails were discovered in September.
+
+In mid-October, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, promised at least “four new hearings” after Congress returns from recess in November based on the new emails, which lawmakers received but have not been made public.
+“This is a flashing red light of potential criminality,” Chaffetz said.
+The new evidence points to a “quid pro quo” arrangement between the FBI and the State Department, he noted.
+DEVELOPING — DETAILS TO FOLLOW
+Source: RT News 
+",FAKE
+9443,Congress Knew For At Least Two Years About Pentagon Efforts To Take Back Bonuses From Veterans,"Print 
+Although members of Congress are now absolutely outraged the Pentagon is trying to recoup bonuses given out to thousands of troops, it turns out, Congress actually knew about this problem for at least two years. 
+Andreas Mueller, chief of federal policy for the California National Guard, wrote an email to the California congressional delegation, stating the Guard told members of Congress about the bonus reclamation issue two years ago, The Los Angeles Times reports. 
+In fact, Mueller noted that the Guard had even offered a solution, but Congress took zero action. 
+In effect, the scandal stems back to about a decade when the National Guard was called upon to supply more troops. Guard officials were only supposed to give out bonuses to high-value positions like intelligence or civil affairs, to incentivize more soldiers to head to Iraq and Afghanistan during a marked troop shortage. But that rule was ignored and thousands of soldiers received bonuses they weren’t actually supposed to, unbeknownst to them. 
+Now, the Pentagon wants those bonuses back and with interest. 
+Since the story first broke Saturday, members of Congress have declared how abhorrent it is for veterans to be targeted with tax liens and wage garnishment for refusing to pay back these bonuses. GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Marine Corps reservist, wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter on Sunday, asking for him to get involved as to find a solution to this “boneheaded” decision . 
+On the other side of the aisle, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi sent House Speaker Paul Ryan a letter Monday arguing that as soon as Congress gets back in session, members should immediately pass legislation to halt the Pentagon’s collection efforts. 
+Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer also wrote a letter to Carter, insisting that he had the power to simply forgive the debts without any action from Congress. 
+“Thousands of our service members are paying the price for mistakes made by California National Guard managers, some of whom are now serving jail time or paying restitution for their crimes,” Feinstein and Boxer said . “It is outrageous to hold these service members and their families responsible for the illegal behavior of others.” 
+But in the meantime, the California Guard certainly does not have the legal power to forgive debts, however much it might want to do so. 
+Article reposted with permission from The Daily Caller shares",FAKE
+2646,Guilty Verdict Returned In 'American Sniper' Murder Trial,"A Texas jury reached a guilty verdict in the murder trial of Eddie Ray Routh, the ex-Marine charged with killing former U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, author of the memoir American Sniper.
+
+Routh was sentenced to life in prison without parole for shooting Kyle and his friend Chad Littlefield to death at a gun range near Fort Worth in 2013. Defense lawyers had argued that Routh suffers from paranoid schizophrenia; Routh had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
+
+Kyle's autobiography, published in 2012, spent months on The New York Times best-seller list and was adapted by director Clint Eastwood in the film American Sniper, in which Kyle is portrayed by Bradley Cooper.",REAL
+1604,"As Marco Rubio rises, GOP rivals are reluctant to take him on directly","As Marco Rubio settles into his new role as a rising top-tier candidate, most of his opponents in the Republican presidential race are showing a reluctance and even an unwillingness to engage him directly on the national stage.
+
+The spotlight on Rubio is intensifying in the media as journalists investigate the senator’s political record and background. But he otherwise is left facing relatively low hurdles for now, bypassing the kind of heated personal clashes that have shaped the 2016 nomination race.
+
+For Rubio, it is a return to the lofty status he had after he burst onto the national scene five years ago. Many Republican elites are once again celebrating him as the party’s golden boy, if not its strongest general-election candidate, and fear seeing him bruised too badly during the primary season.
+
+“He’s articulate, attractive and young. His rivals don’t want him to win, but no one wants to lose him,” said Vin Weber, a prominent Jeb Bush supporter. “Of course, politics is a rough-and-tumble sport, and he’ll need to take a few punches. But at the end of the day, this is a party that needs to find ways to appeal to Hispanic voters, and having him on our side is an asset.”
+
+The other candidates have not figured out how to deal with what some are calling “the Marco moment,” hinting at critiques and possible anti-Rubio ads to come but hesitating to make Rubio their main target.
+
+[Dan Balz: Ten months in, the GOP race has no obvious front-runner.]
+
+Donald Trump has castigated Rubio on the stump and in Twitter messages as a “total lightweight” who is “weak” on immigration. But under the prime-time glare of Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate, the outspoken mogul fell silent about the senator from Florida.
+
+When Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) tried to draw a contrast, he did so only with a thickly veiled line about sugar subsidies, something few voters could connect to Rubio.
+
+And although Bush’s campaign previewed a litany of possible attacks on Rubio, the former Florida governor didn’t say a word in Milwaukee about his onetime protege.
+
+Bush sees Rubio as a direct competitor for the support of wealthy donors and party leaders. Bush’s campaign and its allied super PAC, Right to Rise, have signaled possible lines of attack: In a strategy presentation to donors a couple of weeks ago, the Bush campaign branded Rubio disparagingly as a “GOP Obama.”
+
+In the candidates’ Oct. 28 debate, Bush lunged at Rubio over his spotty Senate voting record, even suggesting that he resign his seat. But the offensive backfired, and in the two weeks since, Bush has steered away from Rubio. The dilemma is further complicated by pressure from many of Bush’s Florida-based financial backers, who also like Rubio and want Bush to go easy on him.
+
+Asked why Bush did not scrutinize Rubio during the Milwaukee exchange, campaign manager Danny Diaz said the debate “was a serious one where important issues were discussed,” and he urged reporters to stay tuned for the next debate on Dec. 15. “We look forward to catching up with all our good friends in Las Vegas,” Diaz said.
+
+Bush’s surrogates indicated that more heat on Rubio would arrive in short order.
+
+“It’s a long campaign,” Al Cardenas, a Florida-based Bush supporter who also is close to Rubio, told reporters in Milwaukee. “Everybody’s going to be scrutinized. Those who do well will get scrutinized more.”
+
+GOP strategist Ari Fleischer put it more bluntly: “The candidates will chop each other up if they thought it would help them. Every one of those candidates think it should be them, and they can give you every reason why it shouldn’t be Rubio.”
+
+[Fourth GOP debate is more about party fault lines than personal attacks.]
+
+The mostly substantive nature of Tuesday’s debate, sponsored by Fox Business Network and the Wall Street Journal, did not invite many personal skirmishes. In one exception, Rand Paul went after Rubio for wanting to increase military spending. But in a tense exchange with the senator from Kentucky, Rubio responded by articulating a hawkish worldview and portrayed Paul as championing an “isolationist” foreign policy.
+
+Trump described the debate’s atmosphere as lacking fireworks. “It was amazing, because the lights went on and you never know what’s going to happen — are you going to be attacked and do you go for the kill, right?” he said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “That was not really necessary.”
+
+Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said the billionaire contender will continue to talk about his differences with Rubio, especially on immigration.
+
+“People are going to keep looking at Rubio’s record,” Lewandowski said. “They’re going to ask themselves if they really want another first-term senator as president, someone who may not have the right experience. Those concerns aren’t going away.”
+
+Rubio’s advisers presented the lack of engagement Tuesday night as a sign of Rubio’s strength.
+
+“The phrase where I come from is ‘There’s no education in the second kick of the mule,’ ” Terry Sullivan, Rubio’s campaign manager, told reporters. “I kind of feel like folks figured out that taking on Marco isn’t such a great idea. . . . I don’t think anybody’s really itching to take on Marco on the debate stage.”
+
+Perhaps the best encapsulation of Rubio’s good fortune came when moderator Maria Bartiromo asked him how his résumé stacks up against Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton’s decades of service. Rubio could not help but grin. It was the softest of softballs — an opening for the 44-year-old senator to cast himself as the candidate of the future.
+
+Eric Fehrnstrom, who was an adviser to 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, said Rubio “has a gift of the golden tongue.”
+
+But he added: “I don’t think any candidate on that stage thinks that they’re somehow immune from political attacks. Rubio’s biggest vulnerability is immigration. While he did not address that at length [in Tuesday’s debate], I would expect when the attacks go up on TV that immigration will be in the mix.”
+
+Supporters of rival campaigns voiced surprise that Rubio was not drawn into the immigration discussion, considering his leadership in 2013 on the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” pushing for comprehensive immigration reform. Rubio has since disavowed the legislation and has hardened his immigration positions overall.
+
+“There should be more scrutiny of Rubio, no doubt about it,” said Bob Smith, a former senator from New Hampshire who is backing Cruz. “It’s almost as if the media is ignoring his immigration record, or at least not giving it much coverage. Conservatives up here, however, are well aware of it, and my sense is that they’ll continue to vet Rubio on their own.”
+
+Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, said other Republican candidates may be afraid of tangling with Rubio in a debate.
+
+“Rubio is skilled at delivering a scripted, rehearsed counterpunch, and they had to know he would be prepared,” Pfeiffer said. He added that Cruz seems to be “patiently waiting for his moment to make this attack. Cruz wants to see the whites of Rubio’s eyes before he fires his biggest guns.”
+
+Indeed, Cruz has been laying the foundation for the contrast he hopes to make with Rubio if the nominating contest narrows to the two of them, as some pundits predict. In debate after debate, Cruz has positioned himself as a hard-line opponent of amnesty, and more generally as a conservative purist.
+
+In his immigration comments Tuesday night, Cruz did not single out Rubio. But his advisers did with reporters afterward.
+
+The freshman Texan “will draw contrasts on issues,” Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said. “Senator Rubio was for the Gang of Eight. Senator Cruz wasn’t. Right now, we’re just beginning that, and we’ve got three months till Iowa.”
+
+Jose A. DelReal in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+1424,Trump Will Skip GOP Debate As Feud With Fox News Boils Over,"Trump Will Skip GOP Debate As Feud With Fox News Boils Over
+
+This post was updated Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. ET
+
+The stage is set for Thursday's Fox News Channel final debate ahead of the Iowa caucuses — but front-runner Donald Trump won't be there.
+
+After teasing earlier Tuesday evening that he ""probably won't bother"" with the debate, Trump's campaign confirmed he won't participate, citing unfair treatment from the network:
+
+As someone who wrote one of the best-selling business books of all time, The Art of the Deal, who has built an incredible company, including some of the most valuable and iconic assets in the world, and as someone who has a personal net worth of many billions of dollars, Mr. Trump knows a bad deal when he sees one. FOX News is making tens of millions of dollars on debates, and setting ratings records (the highest in history), where as in previous years they were low-rated afterthoughts. 
+
+ 
+
+ Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground, Mr. Trump knows when to walk away. Roger Ailes and FOX News think they can toy with him, but Mr. Trump doesn't play games. There have already been six debates, and according to all online debate polls including Drudge, Slate, Time Magazine, and many others, Mr. Trump has won all of them, in particular the last one. Whereas he has always been a job creator and not a debater, he nevertheless truly enjoys the debating process - and it has been very good for him, both in polls and popularity.
+
+Trump's objections stem from last year's first GOP presidential debate, when anchor and moderator Megyn Kelly pressed him about his derogatory comments about women. Trump was outraged, and later said on CNN that Kelly had ""blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever"" with her angry questioning.
+
+On Tuesday evening, Trump doubled down when speaking to reporters in Iowa, dismissing Kelly as a ""third-rate reporter"" who is ""frankly not good at what she does.""
+
+Fox News hasn't backed down on picking Kelly again as one of its moderators, alongside Bret Baier and Chris Wallace. And earlier Tuesday, the network slammed Trump for trying to bully it into changing the moderators.
+
+""We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings,"" a Fox News spokesman said in a statement.
+
+That tongue-in-cheek statement seemed to push Trump to follow through on his threat to not participate in the debate.
+
+In lieu of attending the debate, Trump's campaign said he would ""instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors, who have been treated so horribly by our all talk, no action politicians. Like running for office as an extremely successful person, this takes guts and it is the kind mentality our country needs in order to Make America Great Again.""
+
+Fox News shot back in a statement late Tuesday evening, saying it was the Trump campaign who had threatened Kelly.
+
+""We're not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute, but it should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing – Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage,"" a Fox News spokesperson said. ""Capitulating to politicians' ultimatums about a debate moderator violates all journalistic standards, as do threats, including the one leveled by Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski toward Megyn Kelly. In a call on Saturday with a Fox News executive, Lewandowski stated that Megyn had a 'rough couple of days after that last debate' and he 'would hate to have her go through that again.' Lewandowski was warned not to level any more threats, but he continued to do so. We can't give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees. Trump is still welcome at Thursday night's debate and will be treated fairly, just as he has been during his 132 appearances on FOX News & FOX Business, but he can't dictate the moderators or the questions.""
+
+Earlier in the day, Trump posted an Instagram video, calling Kelly ""biased."" On Twitter, he asked followers to vote on whether he should debate.
+
+His absence would change the balance of the debate and give his rivals free shots to attack Trump.
+
+With Trump off the stage for the 9 p.m. ET debate, that means it's Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who will be center stage, followed by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who was kept off the main stage at the last debate.
+
+At 7 p.m. ET, the earlier undercard debate will feature former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore — who hasn't been on a debate stage since August.
+
+Cruz issued his own debate challenge to his main Iowa rival — a 90-minute one-on-one debate next Monday, the day of the Iowa caucuses.
+
+""Give the Republican primary voters the right to see a fair and policy-focused debate, not simply insults,"" Cruz said on the Mark Levin radio show, according to Politico.",REAL
+6745,The Dark Agenda Behind Globalism And Open Borders,"The Dark Agenda Behind Globalism And Open Borders   By Brandon Smith 
+When people unfamiliar with the liberty movement stumble onto the undeniable fact of the “conspiracy” of globalism they tend to look for easy answers to understand what it is and why it exists. Most people today have been conditioned to perceive events from a misinterpreted standpoint of “Occam’s Razor”— they wrongly assume that the simplest explanation is probably the right one. 
+In fact, this is not what Occam’s Razor states. Instead, to summarize, it states that the simplest explanation GIVEN THE EVIDENCE at hand is probably the right explanation. 
+It has been well known and documented for decades that the push for globalism is a deliberate and focused effort on the part of a select “elite;” international financiers, central bankers, political leaders and the numerous members of exclusive think tanks. They often openly admit their goals for total globalization in their own publications, perhaps believing that the uneducated commoners would never read them anyway. Carroll Quigley, mentor to Bill Clinton and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is often quoted with open admissions to the general scheme: 
+The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world. – Carroll Quigley, Tragedy And Hope 
+The people behind the effort to enforce globalism are tied together by a particular ideology, perhaps even a cult-like religion, in which they envision a world order as described in Plato’s Republic . They believe that they are “chosen” either by fate, destiny or genetics to rule as philosopher kings over the rest of us. They believe that they are the wisest and most capable that humanity has to offer, and that through evolutionary means, they can create chaos and order out of thin air and mold society at will. 
+This mentality is evident in the systems that they build and exploit. For example, central banking in general is nothing more than a mechanism for driving nations into debt, currency devaluation, and ultimately, enslavement through widespread economic extortion. The end game for central banks is, I believe, the triggering of historic financial crisis, which can then be used by the elites as leverage to promote complete global centralization as the only viable solution. 
+This process of destabilizing economies and societies is not directed by the heads of the various central banks. Instead, it is directed by even more central global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements, as outlined in revealing mainstream articles like “ Ruling The World Of Money “published by Harper’s Magazine . 
+We also find through the words of globalists that the campaign for a “new world order” is not meant to be voluntary. 
+… When the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the new world order … and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people. – HG Welles, Fabian Socialist and author of The New World Order 
+In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than f rom the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault. – Richard Gardner, member of the Trilateral Commission, published in the April, 1974 issue of Foreign Affairs 
+The New World Order cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the single most significant component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change its perceptions. – Henry Kissinger, World Action Council, April 19, 1994 
+I could quote globalists all day long, but I think you get the general idea. While some people see globalism as a “natural offshoot” of free markets or the inevitable outcome of economic progress, the reality is that the simplest explanation (given the evidence at hand) is that globalism is an outright war waged against the ideal of sovereign peoples and nations. It is a guerrilla war, or fourth generation warfare, waged by a small group of elites against the rest of us. 
+A significant element of this war concerns the nature of borders. Borders of nations, states and even towns and villages, are not just lines on a map or invisible barriers in the dirt. This is what the elites and the mainstream media would like us to believe. Instead, borders when applied correctly represent principles; or at least, that is supposed to be their function. 
+Human beings are natural community builders; we are constantly seeking out others of like-mind and like-purpose because we understand subconsciously that groups of individuals working together can (often but not always) accomplish more. That said, human beings also have a natural tendency to value individual freedom and the right to voluntary association. We do not like to be forced to associate with people or groups that do not hold similar values. 
+Cultures erect borders because, frankly, people have the right to vet those who wish to join and participate in their endeavors. People also have a right to discriminate against anyone who does not share their core values; or, in other words, we have the right to refuse association with other groups and ideologies that are destructive to our own. 
+Interestingly, globalists and their mouthpieces will argue that by refusing to associate with those who might undermine our values, it is WE who are violating THEIR rights. See how that works? 
+Globalists exploit the word “isolationism” to shame sovereignty champions in the eyes of the public, but there is no shame in isolation when such principles as freedom of speech and expression or the right to self defense are on the line. There is also nothing wrong with isolating a prosperous economic model from unsuccessful economic models. Forcing a decentralized free market economy to adopt feudal administration through central banking and government will eventually destroy that model. Forcing a free market economy into fiscal interdependency with socialist economies will also most likely undermine that culture. Just as importing millions of people with differing values to feed on a nation after it has had socialism thrust upon it is a recipe for collapse. 
+The point is, some values and social structures are mutually exclusive; no matter how hard you try, certain cultures can never be homogenized with other cultures. You can only eliminate one culture to make room for the other in a border-less world. This is what globalists seek to achieve. It is the greater purpose behind open border policies and globalization – to annihilate ideological competition so that humanity thinks it has no other option but the elitist religion. The ultimate end game of globalists is not to control governments (governments are nothing more than a tool). Rather, their end game is to obtain total psychological influence and eventually consent from the masses. 
+Variety and choice have to be removed from our environment in order for globalism to work, which is a nice way to say that many people will have to die and many principles will have to be erased from the public consciousness. The elites assert that their concept of a single world culture is the pinnacle principle of mankind, and that there is no longer any need for borders because no other principle is superior to theirs. As long as borders as a concept continue to exist there is always the chance of separate and different ideals rising to compete with the globalist philosophy. This is unacceptable to the elites. 
+This has led not so subtle propaganda meme that cultures that value sovereignty over globalism are somehow seething cauldrons of potential evil. Today, with the rising tide of anti-globalist movements, the argument in the mainstream is that “populists” (conservatives) are of a lower and uneducated class and are a dangerous element set to topple the “peace and prosperity” afforded by globalist hands. In other words, we are treated like children scrawling with our finger paints across a finely crafted Mona Lisa. Once again, Carroll Quigley promotes (or predicts) this propaganda decades in advance when he discusses the need for “working within the system” for change instead of fighting against it: 
+For example, I’ve talked about the lower middle class as the backbone of fascism in the future. I think this may happen. The party members of the Nazi Party in Germany were consistently lower middle class. I think that the right-wing movements in this country are pretty generally in this group. – Carroll Quigley, from Dissent: Do We Need It? 
+The problem is that these people refuse to confront the fruits of globalization that can be observed so far. Globalists have had free rein over most of the world’s governments for at least a century, if not longer. As a consequence of their influences, we have had two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Great Recession which is still ongoing, too many regional conflicts and genocides to count and the systematic oppression of free agent entrepreneurs, inventors and ideas to the point that we are now suffering from social and financial stagnation. 
+The globalists have long been in power, yet, the existence of borders is blamed for the storm of crises we have endured for the past hundred years? Liberty champions are called “deplorable” populists and fascists while globalists dodge blame like slimy slithering eels? 
+This is the best card the globalists have up their sleeve, and it is the reason why I continue to argue that they plan to allow conservative movements to gain a measure of political power in the next year, only to pull the plug on international fiscal life support and blame us for the resulting tragedy. 
+There is no modicum of evidence to support the notion that globalization, interdependency and centralization actually work. One need only examine the economic and immigration nightmare present in the EU to understand this. So, the globalists will now argue that the world is actually not centralized ENOUGH. That’s right; they will claim we need more globalization, not less, to solve the world’s ailments. 
+In the meantime, principles of sovereignty have to be historically demonized — the concept of separate cultures built on separate beliefs has to be psychologically equated with evil by future generations. Otherwise, the globalists will never be able to successfully establish a global system without borders. 
+Imagine, for a moment, an era not far away in which the principle of sovereignty is considered so abhorrent, so racist, so violent and poisonous that any individual would be shamed or even punished by the collective for entertaining the notion. Imagine a world in which sovereignty and conservatism are held up to the next generation as the new “original sins;” dangerous ideas that almost brought about the extinction of man. 
+This mental prison is where globalists want to take us. We can break free, but this would require a complete reversal of the way in which we participate in society. Meaning, we need a rebellion of voluntary associations. A push for decentralization instead of globalization. Thousands upon thousands of voluntary groups focusing on localization, self reliance and true production. We must act to build a system that is based on redundancy instead of fragile interdependency . We need to go back to an age of many borders, not less borders, until every individual is himself free to participate in whatever social group or endeavor he believes is best for him, as well as free to defend against people that seek to sabotage him; a voluntary tribal society devoid of forced associations. 
+Of course, this effort would require unimaginable sacrifice and a fight that would probably last a generation. To suggest otherwise would be a lie. I can’t possibly convince anyone that a potential future based on a hypothetical model is worth that sacrifice. I have no idea whether it is or is not. I can only point out that the globalist dominated world we live in today is clearly doomed. We can argue about what comes next after we have removed our heads from the guillotine. 
+You can read more from Brandon Smith at his site Alt-Market.com . If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here . We greatly appreciate your patronage. Share This Article...",FAKE
+7314,Re: 22 Reasons Why Starting World War 3 In The Middle East Is A Really Bad Idea,"Archives Michael On Television 22 Reasons Why Starting World War 3 In The Middle East Is A Really Bad Idea By Michael Snyder, on August 27th, 2013 
+While most of the country is obsessing over Miley Cyrus , the Obama administration is preparing a military attack against Syria which has the potential of starting World War 3. In fact, it is being reported that cruise missile strikes could begin “ as early as Thursday “. The Obama administration is pledging that the strikes will be “limited”, but what happens when the Syrians fight back? What happens if they sink a U.S. naval vessel or they have agents start hitting targets inside the United States? Then we would have a full-blown war on our hands. And what happens if the Syrians decide to retaliate by hitting Israel? If Syrian missiles start raining down on Tel Aviv, Israel will be extremely tempted to absolutely flatten Damascus, and they are more than capable of doing precisely that. And of course Hezbollah and Iran are not likely to just sit idly by as their close ally Syria is battered into oblivion. We are looking at a scenario where the entire Middle East could be set aflame, and that might only be just the beginning. Russia and China are sternly warning the U.S. government not to get involved in Syria, and by starting a war with Syria we will do an extraordinary amount of damage to our relationships with those two global superpowers. Could this be the beginning of a chain of events that could eventually lead to a massive global conflict with Russia and China on one side and the United States on the other? Of course it will not happen immediately, but I fear that what is happening now is setting the stage for some really bad things. The following are 22 reasons why starting World War 3 in the Middle East is a really bad idea… 
+#1 The American people are overwhelmingly against going to war with Syria… 
+Americans strongly oppose U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war and believe Washington should stay out of the conflict even if reports that Syria’s government used deadly chemicals to attack civilians are confirmed, a Reuters/Ipsos poll says. 
+About 60 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not intervene in Syria’s civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should act. 
+#2 At this point, a war in Syria is even more unpopular with the American people than Congress is . 
+#3 The Obama administration has not gotten approval to go to war with Syria from Congress as the U.S. Constitution requires . 
+#4 The United States does not have the approval of the United Nations to attack Syria and it is not going to be getting it. 
+#5 Syria has said that it will use “ all means available ” to defend itself if the United States attacks. Would that include terror attacks in the United States itself? 
+#6 Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem made the following statement on Tuesday … 
+“We have two options: either to surrender, or to defend ourselves with the means at our disposal. The second choice is the best: we will defend ourselves” 
+#7 Russia has just sent their most advanced anti-ship missiles to Syria. What do you think would happen if images of sinking U.S. naval vessels were to come flashing across our television screens? 
+#8 When the United States attacks Syria, there is a very good chance that Syria will attack Israel. Just check out what one Syrian official said recently … 
+A member of the Syrian Ba’ath national council Halef al-Muftah, until recently the Syrian propaganda minister’s aide, said on Monday that Damascus views Israel as “behind the aggression and therefore it will come under fire” should Syria be attacked by the United States. 
+In an interview for the American radio station Sawa in Arabic, President Bashar Assad’s fellow party member said: “We have strategic weapons and we can retaliate. Essentially, the strategic weapons are aimed at Israel.” 
+Al-Muftah stressed that the US’s threats will not influence the Syrain regime and added that “If the US or Israel err through aggression and exploit the chemical issue, the region will go up in endless flames, affecting not only the area’s security, but the world’s.” 
+#9 If Syria attacks Israel, the consequences could be absolutely catastrophic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promising that any attack will be responded to “ forcefully “… 
+“We are not a party to this civil war in Syria but if we identify any attempt to attack us we will respond and we will respond forcefully” 
+#10 Hezbollah will likely do whatever it can to fight for the survival of the Assad regime. That could include striking targets inside both the United States and Israel. 
+#11 Iran’s closest ally is Syria. Will Iran sit idly by as their closest ally is removed from the chessboard? 
+#12 Starting a war with Syria will cause significant damage to our relationship with Russia. On Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said that the West is acting like a “ monkey with a hand grenade “. 
+#13 Starting a war with Syria will cause significant damage to our relationship with China. And what will happen if the Chinese decide to start dumping the massive amount of U.S. debt that it is holding? Interest rates would absolutely skyrocket and we would rapidly be facing a nightmare scenario . 
+#14 Dr. Jerome Corsi and Walid Shoebat have compiled some startling evidence that it was actually the Syrian rebels that the U.S. is supporting that were responsible for the chemical weapons attack that is being used as justification to go to war with Syria… 
+With the assistance of former PLO member and native Arabic-speaker Walid Shoebat, WND has assembled evidence from various Middle Eastern sources that cast doubt on Obama administration claims the Assad government is responsible for last week’s attack. 
+You can examine the evidence for yourself right here . 
+#15 As Pat Buchanan recently noted, it would have made absolutely no sense for the Assad regime to use chemical weapons on defenseless women and children. The only people who would benefit from such an attack would be the rebels… 
+The basic question that needs to be asked about this horrific attack on civilians, which appears to be gas related, is: Cui bono? 
+To whose benefit would the use of nerve gas on Syrian women and children redound? Certainly not Assad’s, as we can see from the furor and threats against him that the use of gas has produced. 
+The sole beneficiary of this apparent use of poison gas against civilians in rebel-held territory appears to be the rebels, who have long sought to have us come in and fight their war. 
+#16 If the Saudis really want to topple the Assad regime , they should do it themselves. They should not expect the United States to do their dirty work for them. 
+#17 A former commander of U.S. Central Command has said that a U.S. attack on Syria would result in “ a full-throated, very, very serious war “. 
+#18 A war in the Middle East will be bad for the financial markets. The Dow was down about 170 points today and concern about war with Syria was the primary reason. 
+#19 A war in the Middle East will cause the price of oil to go up. On Tuesday, the price of U.S. oil rose to about $109 a barrel. 
+#20 There is no way in the world that the U.S. government should be backing the Syrian rebels. As I discussed a few days ago , the rebels have pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda , they have beheaded numerous Christians and they have massacred entire Christian villages . If the U.S. government helps these lunatics take power in Syria it will be a complete and utter disaster. 
+#21 A lot of innocent civilians inside Syria will end up getting killed. Already, a lot of Syrians are expressing concern about what “foreign intervention” will mean for them and their families… 
+“I’ve always been a supporter of foreign intervention, but now that it seems like a reality, I’ve been worrying that my family could be hurt or killed,” said one woman, Zaina, who opposes Assad. “I’m afraid of a military strike now.” 
+“The big fear is that they’ll make the same mistakes they made in Libya and Iraq,” said Ziyad, a man in his 50s. “They’ll hit civilian targets, and then they’ll cry that it was by mistake, but we’ll get killed in the thousands.” 
+#22 If the U.S. government insists on going to war with Syria without the approval of the American people, the U.S. Congress or the United Nations, we are going to lose a lot of friends and a lot of credibility around the globe. It truly is a sad day when Russia looks like “the good guys” and we look like “the bad guys”. 
+What good could possibly come out of getting involved in Syria? As I wrote about the other day , the “rebels” that Obama is backing are rabidly anti-Christian, rabidly anti-Israel and rabidly anti-western. If they take control of Syria, that nation will be far more unstable and far more of a hotbed for terrorism than it is now. 
+And the downside of getting involved in Syria is absolutely enormous. Syria, Iran and Hezbollah all have agents inside this country, and if they decide to start blowing stuff up that will wake up the American people to the horror of war really quick. And by attacking Syria, the United States could cause a major regional war to erupt in the Middle East which could eventually lead to World War 3. 
+I don’t know about you, but I think that starting World War 3 in the Middle East is a really bad idea. 
+Let us hope that cooler heads prevail before things spin totally out of control. It Is Illegal To Feed The Homeless In Cities All Over The United States » Boo-urns 
+There is no need for a *world* war. Just let them all kill each other; the sooner the world is free from the idiocy that abounds throughout the entire middle east — including Israel — the better off the rest of us will be. 2Gary2 
+Does anyone out there see this ending well? 
+Michael Rodster 
+The US and it’s Allies don’t care what happens in the Middle East. In fact it’s my view that they would prefer absolute chaos and a full blown out war. 
+As the mantra in 1992 Elections…”It’s all about the economy stupid”. And the same applies here as well. This is all desperation as the US knows what’s coming economically. If they can ramp up their Military Industrial Complex it could help boost the economy. That is the primary business the US is in. It’s all about war and spying. 
+I do hate constantly repeating the man but it’s needed here as well. This all played out during the Great Depression except this time all the fiat based currency nations are in the same boat as the US and this time they have nukes 
+“Trade wars, Currency wars, World wars”– Gerald Celente Adrian 
+On the contrary, a few may benefit…the CEOS and huge shareholders of Halliburton, Ratheon, etc…but the economy would be hurt by threats to oil, decreased stability in the ME, and so on. They don’t care about the economy, if they did they would have implemented stark programs to bring millions back to work. Instead, it’s been business as usual with downsizing, QE 2,3, 4, and shipping jobs overseas. davidmpark 
+No. It won’t. Bad Kitty Cat 
+Not at all… and I also wonder how many US allies are going to join in! I truely believe there is a strong desire for war! old fart 
+As usual they will join in for the first few months then slowly fade away leaving the US stuck with the whole mess. it has happened every time this time we are having a revisit to the crusades,, That mess lasted for 200 years and was never settled it just quieted down for a mutual draw. Hambone 
+Short of the second coming, I see no happy endings to this play. cateye 
+No good ending. Cataclysm perhaps. I got a bad feeling about this whole thing….like the US is being led like a lamb to slaughter. Colby Williams 
+We should just back off of the whole Syrian thing, its not worth it. JustanOguy 
+No. tom 
+No I don’t Michael. Thank you for keeping us informed on many fronts. I share your work everyday in e-mails and on FB. I hope that people are listening to what you are saying MeMadMax 
+Ochooma’s ego will kill us all… lupa 
+There would be plenty of sand for the building trade! or Rebuilding trade! RICHARD 
+I think we are on the verge of a economic collapse and a world war. With everything going on in just this country i will be surprise if we make in till the end of Oct. I have said this before. The train is just about to go over the cliff. lavista4u 
+Yes. true…I believe its a distraction. September is Illuminati New year and they do some crap during the Month of September like 911… 
+What is coming to Americans next month could be 100 times worse than what they would do to Syrians. 
+Americans needs to be more prepared and ready than Syrians it seems …It could be a distraction to cause chaos in America. 
+They know no one wants war in America and even lame stream is publishing that story and 99% of comments on main stream news sites like CNN is against war…. 
+I believe America is their next target not Syria even though they are making it look like its Syria and Iran…. 
+Even if this does not turn out this way…Americans need to be prepared for all scenarios….as they are center of all problems created by the cabal. good luck….Make friends and join forces….Unity is Strength…. patricia666 
+my mother in-law got Dodge Dart Sedan by working parttime from a home pc. see this website w­w­w.K­E­P­2.c­o­m old fart 
+How much was she charging per lay? Sueychop 
+When the stuff hits the fan every American should make sure to shoot at least two Russians before they get shot themselves. That way we win. seth datta 
+How can this not be a part of/prelude to the End Times? And yet ignorance and apathy are the order of the day for most folk. Tim 
+@Richard, I couldn’t agree more. I think this October we will have our eyes opened. This train is in full speed. I have been stocking up for the last 2 years on food, ammo and sanitation. The biggest problem I have run into is income and cost of ammo. The ammo price has come down and some sites are catching up (midland and foxtrotgear seem to be the best prices). The ammo shortage hurt the last year, but my income seems like it has dwindled over the last 2 years. Josh 
+It has been a rough couple of months. I always check ammoseek and it seems like bulk ammo and foxtrotgear have the best bulk prices. Don’t forget sanitation, food and medical. Keep your powder dry. MeMadMax 
+If possible, keep a full tank of gas at all times. It seems like things are going faster than what we know. Gay Veteran 
+as Gerald Celente says about the economy: when all else fails they take you to war Beanodle 
+Oil at above $150.00 per barrel will decimate many economies. Especially it the suppliers demand Gold or a currency other than U.S. dollars for it. 
+If Obama starts a foreign war without Congressional approval can he be impeached? Would his impeachment placate Russia and China? Celery Muncher 
+Impeachment didn’t faze Bill Clinton and it certainly won’t faze King Barry the rodeo clown. These people will simply laugh at the impeachment proceedings and there are not enough congressmen with guts to remove the putz from office even if he was impeached. Obama will go on his merry way doing what he pleases because everyone is so scared of being branded a racist that their balls are frozen in their pants…. Gay Veteran 
+There is bipartisan agreement on empire abroad and the national security/surveillance state at home obama_drama 
+Bingo dood! Arkaden 
+“If the President takes us to war without Congressional approval, I will call for his impeachment. The Constitution is clear. And so am I.” -Joe Biden, 2007 
+“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” -Barack Obama, 2007 
+THIS time must be different. Hambone 
+It’s sad, but those lying, two-faced hypocrites will never be held accountable for their words and actions by a great many of the lemmings in this country. We are truly getting the government we deserve. myrna652 
+my mom in law just got Hyundai Sonata Sedan by working at home online… see this page w­w­w.J­A­M­20.c­o­m Adrian 
+DOUBLESPEAK! CorrectionSir 
+Actually, the president can authorize military action, short of declaring war, if it is in support of allies, treaties or through the request of the UN. That’s the way things have been changed and rejiggered. Gay Veteran 
+and NONE of those apply in Syria Ralfine 
+Attacking a sovereign country is an act of war. And an attacked country has the right to defend itself, i.e. by sinking the attacking fleet. squashpants 
+He said that in 2007? Afghanistan started in 2001, and Iraq in 2003. What war was Biden referring to? MeMadMax 
+Prolly georgian conflict. GodHelpUs 
+Over amount of years U.S. prospered with the highest public debt. Without wars on it’s territory and so on.. Economy collapse is inevitable. To hold it over, U.S. needs to seed unstability and war in other countries. To keep ourselves stable country, to keep dollar high value (but without gold – dollar is just a paper). We intentonally made that “Arabic spring”, changed management of all those countries. Who didn’t agree – was murdered (like Kaddafi), who did like Egypt – was changed by our man. Now we expect another wave of economical collapse. We NEED to seed fear and distable east. And it’s not Obama! He’s just a puppet.. We made hugest and well trained army with the top weapons on other countries money 😀 But It won’t last forever… churchill 
+o aye pal for sure its diffrent obama changed his bacon for weetabix he goes for a 5 mile run now before thinking about war and fat soldiers not being able to run from their turbo tanks it takes an american soldier at least 2 hours to put his make up on first Elelei Guhring 
+Notice how neonics found in many pesticides most manufactured by Bayer/Monsanto and which have killed up to 70% of bee populations around the world are not an imminent threat to the nation, even though this action is considered Terrorism under US law: any action that endangers the food supply IS terrorism. davidmpark 
+We accepted our orders for NBC gas masks today. 2 adult sizes; 3 children sizes. Got them online for $6.99 ea/free shipping. 
+Also got some extra med kits, potassium iodine, and more food. 
+We will get hit. The US will get struck again and no country will cry for us. Could we take on the international community? Only if we use WMD’s on them, too. China, Russia, and Iran will retaliate. 
+Congress needs to move to stop Obama as this is enough to prove he and his entourage are incapable of ensuring the welfare of the United States. Impeachment needs to be done, arrests need to be made, trials must commence… and sentences if judge and congressional jury find guilty anyone for crimes against this people. 
+We must support such actions by Congress, or we will pay the price; not them. ?huh 
+Where did you get the masK? Were filters outdated? That is cheap! davidmpark 
+They’re IDF leftovers bought on Amazon. I also bought the new canisters – assuming the included cans are expired. ?huh 
+I looked and the Amazon review show the items are old and may not be useful and attack. Some are as old as 40 years. davidmpark 
+If you are worried about gas attacks, you can make a filter for an air conditioning unit. 
+First, get all of the supplies you can: a lot of baking soda and wood charcoal (not briquettes), piece of wood, a scale (any kind), a large pot, 2 pillow cases, a plastic or metal box, and duct tape. 
+Pour the baking soda into a pot and weigh it. After recording the weight, place on heat source and cook it for a few minutes. Remove and re-weigh, then repeat. When the scale no longer shows change in weight, pour the powder into a pillowcase and make more if necessary to fill to pillowcase about half way or more. This process converts the sodium bicarbonate into sodium carbonate (soda ash, or activated carbon). 
+Now pour the charcoal onto the pot and use a piece of wood to crush the charcoal into smaller pieces, about the size of wheat grains. Pour into pillow case and make more if necessary to fill to pillowcase about half way or more. Some dust will fall out – let it. 
+Now, drill or cut two holes big enough to snuggly fit the air intake hose of your A/C unit into the plastic or metal box on the shorter sides. Place the bag of soda ash on one side, the bag of charcoal on the other side. Seal with duct tape generously. Now attach the air intake hoses of your A/C unit on the unit with the air entering the charcoal first, and the soda ash second. Duct tape generously on both ends. 
+We built this last year when the ash and smoke from local wildfires were choking the air around us. We were supremely comfortable with filtered air. Will it work for chemical weapons? The soda ash is the same ingredient used in gas masks, but I really don’t know. Works great for smoke and ash, and chili cook-off’s, but I have no real data that it will work for WMD’s. Can some experts chime in? Truther 
+Two easy reasons to understand: Racial Guilt and Desire for Something for Nothing. There you go. saintmatty 
+A very good chance that we will get hit. Major city and who knows where else. Get some food and water together. Might be inside for a few days as chaos occurs in the streets. davidmpark 
+One of those times a carbine would be handy… Keywee 
+“Why did such a good nation decide to #$%& itself over this bad? We’re so much better than this!” I think that as a nation you became complacent, distracted with trivial “entertainment”. The world banking system got it’s claws back into you after all that hard work by the founding fathers to escape it. Hopefully once enough of your own people are affected by the actions of your government you will rediscover your revolutionary roots. Gay Veteran 
+“…Congress needs to move to stop Obama….” you assume they disagree with him davidmpark 
+I’m hoping they’ll do their job for once. Gay Veteran 
+we will all be disappointed, because there is NO difference between the 2 parties Ralfine 
+All people have the government they deserve. Syrin 
+Here’s how this could play out. We invade Syria. It’s a leaping point to go to war with Iran who has already threatened war with Israel if we invade. Obama will sign the UN Small Arms Treaty, and Russian troops have already been training on US soil for over a year to disarm Americans. I believe they will stage some false flag event in FEMA region 3 which has been urgently stockpiling by “no later than October 1″ according to all their requests for supplies. (do a search, they are stockpiling a A ton in FEMA region 3) Martial law will be declared enforced by our militarized polive, some Iranian patsy will be blamed, and they will jump from Syria to Iran. Obama had a behind the scenes meeting with the highest level financial people in the US last week. The last time this happened, they took out gold. I think they will use the war and false flag events to perform a simultaneous engineered collapse of the economy because they know we cannot recover from our debt burden hoping the no information GARY voters will blame the evil Syrians for our economic problems. Just like Nazzzi Germany, we become a dictatorship overnight. davidmpark 
+Okay, I looked it up about the stockpiling for region 3. That makes good sense to concentrate around there for the sake of the powers in DC. They’d want to make sure they don’t have any disruptions in their cocktail parties and lasciviousness. 
+They stockpiled around the furherbunker during the battle for Berlin. Makes sense to do that sort of thing when they make unpopular and more blatant illegal actions against their own people. K 
+Excellent comment. The idea behind Russian troops was, it would be easier to get them to fire on civilians. I wonder if the puppet masters every gave any thought to the fact, that would cut both ways. K 
+E4B spotted in Turkey yesterday. I have never heard of them deploying them outside the Country before. The Check is in the Mail 
+Over the top but I understand the concern. It is not like the fools in DC have earned any trust. old fart 
+How can that be after all Zero won the Nobel Peace Prize. xander cross 
+I blame white men who are profiting of the weapons dealing. Of course, all of you will ignore that fact. Smh Jason Mckenzie 
+1st Oct came and went, ya rumour-monger.. K 
+Ever since they passed that war on terror resolution in 2001. It seems no President feels they need clearance from anyone. Can this end well? Only if a backdoor agreement has been made with Russia and China. A certain number of missiles fired at certain agreed on targets. In exchange they stick to just stern words. If such an agreement does not exist. Then the first salvo, could easily cause everyone in the area, to bring out their new toys. And that will not end well. A D 
+OIL is naturally occurring – GOD created the earth & everything in it. There is enough OIL in the USA, but the eco-nazi’s and other idiots will not allow them to drill. Just like AIR now carbon is a threat, so many idiots believe all of the LIES trumped up by elites. davidmpark 
+“OIL is naturally occurring…” Yeah, the Abiotic Oil process. We won’t ever run out of oil. Ralfine 
+Any idea why it’s called organic chemistry? Trainwreck Coming Fast 
+That will change. It is ALL going to change once the fur begins to fly domestically and abroad. Things that will be different: 
+–Even the liberal fools will be begging to drill. But they will not understand that decades of no new refineries means terrifying shortages caused by them. 
+–No more discretionary spending on music, entertainment, parties, etc. Sure, it will occur, but a tenth of what is evident now. The boards, extra houses, luxuries, will no longer be part of life. Maybe not so bad. 
+–Roving bands of gangs and criminals will be put down by law abiding citizens with guns. People will no longer accept crime. Bring back the death penalty and frontier justice. It is coming. The “I was disadvantages” growing up will only get a bullet in the head. The nation will no longer be able to afford and tolerate the rape of society. 
+–Healthcare will be a disaster. Obama and the Left will blame it on the GOP but that will only work for the hardcore remnant of his supporters. The rest of the nation will marvel at its stupidity for not pushing back sooner. But they will realize the system has been so destroyed that it will take years to bring back what we had. 
+–WHERE TO STOP? It is so obvious. Gay Veteran 
+at what cost? yeah you can have all the oil you want here at $500 a barrel Ralfine 
+And, to get one barrrel you have to spend 5 barrels in energy. Keywee 
+Yay! Someone else who actually gets it! A D 
+AIR, WATER, OIL you name it, the eco-nuts and elitist will do whatever it takes NOT to let a good crisis go to waste.. quoted from OHBOMA thugs. ResilientNews 
+one of my local tv stations had a poll on their website if the u.s. should strike Syria and the results were 100% NO. Bill 
+Best poll of many asking the same question shows 25% in favor. Still doesn’t show the idiot in chief is listening to we the “real”people!!! Lennie Pike 
+The thugs who control the U.S. are allied with those who control China! Birds of a feather (elite Godless fascists) have joined forces for totalitarian worldwide rule!!!) 
+Our industry and gold has been intentionally transferred to China. 
+Expect to see Chinese militery in the U.S. – not Russian – if Russia allows it. clemster 
+The Russians will never look like the “good guys”. Tatiana Covington 
+It could be that a coup d’etat will be required. 
+I hope not. GodHelpUs 
+Over amount of years U.S. prospered with the highest public debt. Without wars on it’s territory and so on.. Economy collapse is inevitable. To hold it over, U.S. needs to seed unstability and war in other countries. To keep ourselves stable country, to keep dollar high value (but without gold – dollar is just a paper). We intentonally made that “Arabic spring”, changed management of all those countries. Who didn’t agree – was murdered (like Kaddafi), who did like Egypt – was changed by our man. Now we expect another wave of economical collapse. We NEED to seed fear and distable east. And it’s not Obama! He’s just a puppet.. We made hugest and well trained army with the top weapons on other countries money 😀 But It won’t last forever… Bill 
+It’s ironic that we have a war brewing as the debt limit comes to a head —–again. Big drop in the 10 yr as $ leave the stock market for the “safety” of bonds. Any guess where the 10 yr will be in 90 days? Tobias Smith",FAKE
+10056,"Fifteen years after NATO bombings, Montenegro wants to join NATO","Fifteen years after NATO bombings, Montenegro wants to join NATO 07.11.2016 | Source: AP photo Montenegro's prosecutor for investigations in the field of organized crime, Milivoye Katnich, said that a group ""Russian nationalists"" was plotting to assassinate Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, who is known for his pro-Western orientation. ""Organizers of a criminal group, who are nationalists from the Russian Federation, proceeded from the fact that the government of Montenegro chaired by Milo Djukanovic would not be changed as a result of elections, so one had to overthrow the government by force,"" the prosecutor said, Pravda.Ru reports. Pravda.Ru asked an expert opinion from an expert at the Institute of European Studies, Stevan Gayich. ""Is it a provocation of the pro-Western government? Who is standing behind it?"" ""What the prosecutor's office of Montenegro, and the Djukanovic regime in general, have been doing recently can be described as walking in the fog. The opposition does not recognize the elections, and the government has found itself in a deep political crisis. Djukanovic has already announced that he will not be prime minister if his Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) forms the government. The socialists already say that the DPS has supposedly formed a government, meaning that Montenegro is sure to be a NATO member. In fact, however, the government has not been formed. They defend the interests of the West, so the fight has risen to a higher geopolitical level. ""No evidence has been provided. In my opinion, this story is completely fabricated in a very poor way to stir up some noise during the elections and create an atmosphere of fear among opposition voters."" ""How should Russia respond?"" ""Russia should at least respond on the level of diplomacy. Montenegro, as a historically Serbian state, used to be a pro-Russian country. NATO bombed Montenegro 15 years ago, and one had to completely change the identity of the people to make Montenegro a NATO member. One of the key points of the identity of the people of Montenegro, the Serbian people, is their attachment to Russia. One had to strike a serious blow on this peculiarity of the people of Montenegro to create a new identity."" On October 16, Montenegro held parliamentary elections. Twenty Serbian citizens were detained on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack and a coup on the election day. According to preliminary data, the people wanted to attack citizens and police officers who gathered in front of the parliament with a view to proclaim the victory of one of the political parties and imprison the prime minister of Montenegro. Pro-Western Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) of Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic won the elections. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+4484,"Parts Of Patriot Act Expire, Even As Senate Moves On Bill Limiting Surveillance","Parts Of Patriot Act Expire, Even As Senate Moves On Bill Limiting Surveillance
+
+It was a dramatic day on the floor of the United States Senate on Sunday. Unable to overcome parliamentary maneuvers by Sen. Rand Paul, the body adjourned and let three controversial provisions of the Patriot Act expire at midnight.
+
+Trying to beat a midnight deadline during a rare Sunday session, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to fast track a House bill that would overhaul the government's bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
+
+At around 7 p.m. ET, the House bill cleared a key procedural hurdle, but as the sun set on Washington, it became clear that a Senate rule allowing for 30 hours of debate would force parts of the Patriot Act to expire at least temporarily.
+
+""The Patriot Act will expire tonight,"" Paul, the Kentucky Republican who has led the charge against the government's bulk collection program, said. ""But it will only be temporary. They will ultimately get their way.""
+
+Before this session, Paul promised to use any parliamentary moves available to him to force any Senate vote on the measure to happen after the 12 a.m. deadline.
+
+He was warned by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that he was putting the country at risk.
+
+""To go dark on this is a risk on Americans' lives,"" Sen. Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican, said on the floor of the Senate.
+
+McConnell, the senior Republican senator from Kentucky, said that blocking this legislation should be ""worrying for our country."" McConnell said that even though he had vehemently opposed this bill previously — his chamber had also failed to move it forward earlier this week — he would attempt to pass it.
+
+""We shouldn't be disarming unilaterally as our enemies grow more sophisticated and aggressive, and we certainly should not be doing so based on a campaign of demagoguery and disinformation launched in the wake of the unlawful actions of Edward Snowden,"" McConnell said.
+
+Paul fired back, saying he worried that the House bill actually made the government better at collecting phone records in bulk. He said he couldn't trust the secret court tasked with interpreting the law and that he wanted to add amendments to the bill. He added that the U.S. is using fear to convince Americans of the need for these programs, but the country already has the tools to fight terrorists. They could seek warrants, he said, instead of dragging Americans into what he said was an unconstitutional surveillance system.
+
+""Mark my words,"" he said, ""the battle is not over.""
+
+At around 9:45 p.m. ET, after a lengthy break, McConnell took the floor again and admitted defeat. He offered several amendments to the House bill and adjourned until 12 p.m. ET on June 1, guaranteeing that parts of the surveillance programs instituted by the U.S. after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 would end entirely at least temporarily.
+
+In a statement, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that the Senate had taken ""an important—if late—step forward tonight.""
+
+The White House has always supported HR 2048 — also known as the House's USA Freedom Act. The bill ends the bulk collection program as we know it. If passed, the government would still have access to the data, but it would now have to query databases kept by phone companies.
+
+""We call on the Senate to ensure this irresponsible lapse in authorities is as short-lived as possible,"" Earnest said. ""On a matter as critical as our national security, individual Senators must put aside their partisan motivations and act swiftly. The American people deserve nothing less.""
+
+We'll live-blogged the Senate action as it happened. Keep reading if you want a play-by-play.
+
+Update at 11:03 p.m. ET. The Most Dramatic Moment:
+
+We'll leave you tonight with video of the most dramatic moment of the night. It happened as Sen. Rand Paul tried to get five minutes to speak. Here's the video via Real Clear Politics:
+
+Paul, by the way, goes on to win the parliamentary tousle, finally getting his five minutes.
+
+The Senate has adjourned. Three provisions of the Patriot Act will expire at least temporarily.
+
+Update at 9:34 p.m. ET. Senate Still In Session:
+
+The Senate is still technically in session. A senator suggested the absence of a quorum, which has given the Senate time to figure out what will happen next.
+
+Update at 9:31 p.m. ET. Strong Support For 'Comprehensive Reform':
+
+In a statement, Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said today's vote and the likely temporary end of the bulk collection program are a reflection of strong support for ""meaningful and comprehensive reform of the surveillance laws.""
+
+He added: ""Congress should take advantage of this sunset to pass far reaching surveillance reform, instead of the weak bill currently under consideration.""
+
+Update at 8:16 p.m. ET. What To Expect?
+
+So, where do we stand right now? The Senate now has the ability to move on the House bill, but senators can debate the bill for 30 hours.
+
+Manu Raju of Politico reports that Majority Leader McConnell ""plans to employ a prerogative Reid rarely used: Making senators actually debate in post-cloture time — or he'll continue process.""
+
+Congressional Quarterly reports that a McConnell spokesman said there will "" 'likely' be no more votes tonight.""
+
+This means three provisions of the Patriot Act are likely to lapse, if only temporarily.
+
+Update at 8:00 p.m. ET. Bulk Collection Will Likely Lapse:
+
+Wyden and Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico, are still talking on the floor.
+
+It's worth noting that according to White House officials, who briefed reporters last week, it is now likely there will be a lapse in the government's bulk collection program.
+
+As we reported: While the statutory deadline is Monday, June 1, ""senior administration officials said they have to begin winding down their surveillance programs at 4 p.m. ET on Sunday. That process, they said, could be aborted as late as 8 p.m. ET.""
+
+We are now past that window.
+
+Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, just finished a speech on the floor. Wyden has been a long-time critic of the bulk collection program.
+
+During his speech, he reminded Americans that the administration had misled Congress in the past. He was specifically referring to a hearing in which he asked National Intelligence Director James Clapper if the National Security Agency collects ""any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans.""
+
+Clapper answered, ""No sir,"" before adding, ""not wittingly.""
+
+Clapper ended up apologizing for that answer.
+
+Wyden said that's why the Senate has to ask the ""hard questions.""
+
+""It is our job to ask the hard questions,"" Wyden said.
+
+Update at 7:53 p.m. ET. What Does The House Bill Contain:
+
+We've noted Paul's reservations about HR 2048 — or the House's USA Freedom Act.
+
+From a previous post, here's what that bill would do:
+
+Update at 7:42 p.m. ET. Patriot Act Will Expire:
+
+Sen. Paul said: ""The Patriot Act will expire tonight. But it will only be temporary. They will ultimately get their way.""
+
+With that, Paul stepped off the floor. Here's a quick recap of what he said:
+
+Update at 7:28 p.m. ET. 'Bill Will Ultimately Pass':
+
+Sen. Rand Paul took to the floor shortly after the cloture vote passed. He conceded that the House bill would ""ultimately pass,"" but ""tonight begins the process of ending bulk collection.""
+
+His issue with the House bill, he said, is that Congress may just be replacing one bulk collection program with another.
+
+""It's hard for me to have trust in the people who we are giving great power to,"" Paul said.
+
+The senator from Kentucky said he would offer up amendments to the bill.
+
+Update at 7:08 p.m. ET. Procedural Vote Passes By Large Margin:
+
+The procedural measure to move onto the House bill ultimately passed by a large margin — 77 to 17.
+
+It means the Senate has overcome a major procedural hurdle, but any senator can still debate the measure for 30 hours.
+
+The votes are still coming in, but the Senate has reached the 60 votes needed to limit debate and move on to the House bill.
+
+However, Paul, or any senator for that matter, can force the Senate to debate the matter for another 30 hours before they can vote on the bill. That is of course many hours after the midnight deadline.
+
+The vote so far: 75 in favor of cloture, 15 opposed.
+
+With a temporary extension off the table, Sen. McConnell said he had only two options: One, let the programs expire. Two, try to pass the House bill.
+
+The first option, he said, is ""completely unacceptable."" So, he said, he would move forward with the reconsideration of the House bill.
+
+That motion passed with a voice vote and the Senate is now voting to limit debate and move on to the House bill. That's also known as a cloture vote.
+
+As Fox's Chad Pergram reports on Twitter, that doesn't mean much because even if they get the 60 votes needed for cloture, ""Paul can still require 30 hrs burn off clock before Senate can get on Hse's NSA bill. Means pgms would lapse.""
+
+Update at 6:16 p.m. ET. McConnell Proposes To Extend Two Sections:
+
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor to propose a very limited bill — one that would extend Sections 206 and 6001, the so-called roving wiretaps and lone wolf provisions.
+
+Just like that, Paul objected, and McConnell said that his objection should be ""very worrying for Americans.""
+
+""The nature of the threat is very serious,"" McConnell said; therefore, we should not be ""disarming unilaterally.""
+
+The Senate has reconvened. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is on the floor.
+
+Update at 6:05 p.m. ET. The Debate So Far:
+
+While we wait for the Senate to reconvene, here's a little recap of what we've heard on the floor so far: Democratic Sens. Harry Reid and Patrick Leahy made the case that the Senate should act quickly to pass the House bill.
+
+Leahy said that it had been passed by the House in bipartisan fashion, and that it makes significant changes to the government's surveillance programs.
+
+Reid said that this is an important national security program. He said that CIA Director John Brennan and even Senate Republicans agree that allowing parts of this law to expire would ""threaten our national security."" In his words, this is ""big time stuff.""
+
+In his five minutes, Sen. Paul essentially scoffed at that notion.
+
+""How will we protect ourselves?"" he asked. ""What about using the Constitution? What about getting a warrant?""
+
+Update at 5:56 p.m. ET. What To Expect:
+
+Right now the Senate is in recess. Both parties are meeting to discuss how to go forward. When the Senate returns, we expect a series of votes to reconsider HR 2048 — also known as the House's USA Freedom Act.
+
+The Senate had already failed to move that measure forward earlier this month.
+
+It did not take long for the drama to get started. About an hour into the session, Sen. Rand Paul asked to speak for five minutes. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a fellow Republican, shot him down, and Sen. John McCain, another fellow Republican, suggested Paul should learn the rules of the Senate.
+
+That's when Paul called for a live quorum — a roll call that determines whether a majority of the Senate is in the chamber to continue doing business. To speed things up, the live quorum was called off and Paul was given his five minutes.
+
+""This in important debate,"" Paul said. ""This is a debate over the bill of rights, over the Fourth Amendment. ... It is a debate over your right to be left alone.""
+
+Paul said that the surveillance programs put in place by Section 215 were illegal. Then he issued a warning: ""I'm not going to take it anymore.""",REAL
+9835,"US charges 61 with India-based scam involving 15,000 victims","US charges 61 with India-based scam involving 15,000 victims US charges 61 with India-based scam involving 15,000 victims By 0 166 
+The US Justice Department has charged 61 people and entities with involvement in a major India-based scam that targeted thousands of Americans. 
+The scheme involved Indian call centers, where some workers called American citizens and convinced them to pay their non-existent debts by impersonating Internal Revenue Service (IRS), immigration and other federal officials, the Justice Department said in a statement on Thursday. 
+Some victims were even offered short-term loans or grants on condition of providing good-faith deposits or payment of a processing fee. 
+The scammers had stolen more than $300 million from at least 15,000 unsuspecting citizens, the department noted. 
+The victims’ money was laundered by an American network of criminals who used debit cards or wire transfers under fake identities, the indictment said. 
+Federal officials arrested 20 people across America on Thursday. Additionally, 32 individuals and five call centers in India were charged…",FAKE
+6787,US: Kurdish Troops Will Be Involved in Invading ISIS Capital of Raqqa,"Turkish Objections Won't Stop YPG's Involvement by Jason Ditz, October 26, 2016 Share This 
+US Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the leader of the US military forces in Iraq and Syria , today announced that Kurdish YPG forces will participate in the invasion of the ISIS capital city of Raqqa, despite Turkish government demands that the Kurds not be allowed to take part. 
+Townsend was a bit vague on the details of Kurdish involvement, saying the US are “going to take this in steps,” and that Turkey has to realize the only way that the US is going to have enough force to take over Raqqa any time soon is with a significant portion of the YPG involved. 
+Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu reiterated that his government wants only “local forces” involved in the Raqqa battle, and that the YPG, who Turkey considers a terrorist organization, must not be allowed to take part in any way. 
+Turkey’s military has been attacking the YPG in several locations around Syria over the past week, including heavy airstrikes which killed an estimated 200 YPG fighters who were engaged in an offensive against ISIS around Afrin. The Turkish government has repeatedly complained the YPG is gaining too much territory in Syria, and that they must abandon much of it. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+1297,Kasich: Voters Are ‘Starting to Pay Attention’,"CHARLESTON – John Kasich isn’t sure how he got to be the runner-up to in Tuesday’s New Hampshire GOP primary, an achievement that is drawing more South Carolina voters to his under-the-radar presidential campaign. “Frankly no one would have thought I would finish in second place, way ahead of everybody else, in New Hampshire,” Mr. Kasich told […]",REAL
+5821,Michael Moore Owes Me $4.99,"Posted on October 27, 2016 by DavidSwanson 
+Michael Moore has made some terrific movies in the past, and Where to Invade Next may be the best of them, but I expected Trumpland to be (1) about Trump, (2) funny, (3) honest, (4) at least relatively free of jokes glorifying mass murder. I was wrong on all counts and would like my $4.99 back, Michael. 
+Moore’s new movie is a film of him doing a stand-up comedy show about how wonderfully awesome Hillary Clinton is — except that he mentions Trump a bit at the beginning and he’s dead serious about Clinton being wonderfully awesome. 
+This film is a text book illustration of why rational arguments for lesser evilist voting do not work. Lesser evilists become self-delusionists. They identify with their lesser evil candidate and delude themselves into adoring the person. Moore is not pushing the “Elect her and then hold her accountable” stuff. He says we have a responsibility to “support her” and “get behind her,” and that if after two years — yes, TWO YEARS — she hasn’t lived up to a platform he’s fantasized for her, well then, never fear, because he, Michael Moore, will run a joke presidential campaign against her for the next two years (this from a guy who backed restricting the length of election campaigns in one of his better works). 
+Moore maintains that virtually all criticism of Hillary Clinton is nonsense. What do we think, he asks, that she asks how many millions of dollars you’ve put into the Clinton Foundation and then she agrees to bomb Yemen for you? Bwahahaha! Pretty funny. Except that Saudi Arabia put over $10 million into the Clinton Foundation, and while she was Secretary of State Boeing put in another $900,000, upon which Hillary Clinton reportedly made it her mission to get the planes sold to Saudi Arabia, despite legal restrictions — the planes now dropping U.S.-made bombs on Yemen with U.S. guidance, U.S. refueling mid-air, U.S. protection at the United Nations, and U.S. cover in the form of pop-culture distraction and deception from entertainers like Michael Moore. 
+Standing before a giant Air Force missile and enormous photos of Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore claims that substantive criticism of Clinton can consist of only two things, which he dismisses in a flash: her vote for a war on Iraq and her coziness with Wall Street. He says nothing more about what that “coziness” consists of, and he claims that she’s more or less apologized and learned her lesson on Iraq. 
+What? It wasn’t one vote. It was numerous votes to start the war, fund it, and escalate it. It was the lies to get it going and keep it going. It’s all the other wars before and since. She says President Obama was wrong not to launch missile strikes on Syria in 2013. She pushed hard for the overthrow of Qadaffi in 2011. She supported the coup government in Honduras in 2009. She has backed escalation and prolongation of war in Afghanistan. She skillfully promoted the White House justification for the war on Iraq. She does not hesitate to back the use of drones for targeted killing. She has consistently backed the military initiatives of Israel. She was not ashamed to laugh at the killing of Qadaffi. She has not hesitated to warn that she could obliterate Iran. She is eager to antagonize Russia. She helped facilitate a military coup in Ukraine. She has the financial support of the arms makers and many of their foreign customers. She waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states wise enough to donate to the Clinton Foundation. She supported President Bill Clinton’s wars and the power of the president to make war without Congress. She has advocated for arming fighters in Syria and for a “No Fly” zone. She supported a surge in Iraq even before President Bush did. 
+That’s just her war problem. What about her banking problem, prison problem, fracking problem, corporate trade problem, corporate healthcare problem, climate change problem, labor problem, Social Security problem, etc.? 
+Moore parts company from substantive critique in order to lament unproven rightwing claims that Hillary Clinton has murdered various people. “I hope she did,” screams Moore. “That’s who I want as Commander in Chief!” Hee hee hee. 
+Then Moore shamelessly pushes the myth that Hillary tried to create single-payer, or at least “universal” healthcare (whatever that is) in the 1990s. In fact, as I heard Paul Wellstone tell it, single-payer easily won the support of Clinton’s focus group, but she buried it for her corporate pals and produced the phonebook-size monstrosity that was dead on arrival but reborn in another form years later as Obamacare. She killed single-payer then, has not supported it since, and does not propose it now. (Well, she does admit in private that it’s the only thing that works, as her husband essentially blurts out in public.) But Moore claims that because we didn’t create “universal” healthcare in the 1990s we all have the blood of millions on our hands, millions whom Hillary would have saved had we let her. 
+Moore openly fantasizes: what would it be like if Hillary Clinton is secretly progressive? Remember that Moore and many others did the exact same thing with Obama eight years ago. To prove Clinton’s progressiveness Moore plays an audio clip of her giving a speech at age 22 in which she does not hint at any position on any issue whatsoever. 
+Mostly, however, Moore informs us that Hillary Clinton is female. He anticipates “that glorious moment when the other gender has a chance to run this world and kick some righteous ass.” Now tell me please, dear world, if your ass is kicked by killers working for a female president will you feel better about it? How do you like Moore’s inclusive comments throughout his performance: “We’re all Americans, right?” 
+Moore’s fantasy is that Clinton will dash off a giant pile of executive orders, just writing Congress out of the government — executive orders doing things like releasing all nonviolent drug offenders from prison immediately (something the real Hillary Clinton would oppose in every way she could). 
+But when he runs for president, Moore says, he’ll give everybody free drugs. 
+I’ll tell you the Clinton ad I’d like to see. She’s standing over a stove holding an egg. “This is your brain,” she says solemnly, cracking it into the pan with a sizzle. “This is your brain on partisanship.” This entry was posted in General . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
+6752,"A ""Gesture of Thanks"": Turkey arrests terrorists for extradition to Russia","November 3, 2016 - Fort Russ News -  RusVesna - translated by J. Arnoldski -  
+
+
+On October 27th, 2016, as a result of joint operative-investigative activities between Russian and Turkish intelligence, in Instanbul were arrested leaders and active participants of an underground gang from the North Caucasus region and Crimea, who were hiding from Russian law enforcement on Turkish territory.  
+During the course of the operation, representatives of the Crimean branch of Hizb -ut-Tahrir and the North Caucasus wing of ISIS, totaling 80 people, were arrested. 
+
+
+In line with the agreement with Turkey’s intelligence services, their extradition to Russia is being resolved. 
+
+A high-ranking source in security structures explained to Russian Spring that Turkish intelligence services’ transfer of information on the Crimean Tatar and North Caucasus terrorist network to the Russian side, timed for the meeting between Putin and Erdogan in Sochi, was a gesture of thanks for intelligence warnings about the coup that failed in July, 2016.  
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
+                                                   
+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+8524,Jack Heart: LUCIFER in the Temple of the Dog,"LUCIFER in the Temple of the Dog I By Jack Heart on October 28, 2016 By Jack Heart, Orage & Friends 
+Every story has a beginning and an end, everything in between is just a story… 
+The oldest stories known come from the Aborigine people of Australia. Their stories go back at least thirty thousand years. They are passed on orally by the tribe’s elders under a rigid tradition called “the law” which ensures the preservation of the Aborigines ancient tribal narratives. Linguistic scholars who have studied them have noted the Aborigines ability to sustain “the inter-generational scaffolding needed to transmit stories over vast periods.” 1 
+Aborigine tribal lore has been academically documented to chronicle the thawing of the Ice Age and the flooding of the Australian coastline thirteen-thousand years ago.2 According The Wisdom Keepers an episode of Ancient Aliens, the television show purporting to document alien intervention in human history, Aborigine lore also recounts meteorite impacts, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and solar eclipses…3 
+What is certain is that aborigine culture ignores the brutal realities of its own existence and focuses on what is now called the dreamtime. The word dreamtime itself is a mistranslation of the Aborigine word alcheringa, which means the uncreated source; a source which was always there, which perpetually yields fresh materials from which everything that is perceived is derived. 
+To the aborigine the dreamtime is an altered state of consciousness that lies across the uncharted chasms of the mind, a place where everything that ever was has been imprinted forever in the aether. Nothing that was, nothing that is, can be lost and it can always be accessed by going back to the beginning through ceremonies and dreams. 
+According to Ancient Aliens; “in many ways the concept of dreamtime mirrors the ancient Hindu idea of the Akashic records.” 4 This may not be true… 
+The idea of Akashic records go back no further than Madam Blavatsky and Theosophy, a system of mysticism which she founded. Akasha simply means aether in Sanskrit. 
+The expansion of the microcosm into the macrocosm and contraction back of the macrocosm into the microcosm is a doctrine of just about every reputable school of mysticism. “As it is above is so it is below” to the Hermitic. “And the living creatures rush forth and return” as it is written in verse 537 of the Zohar: Concerning the Eyes of Microprosopus… 
+If Blavatsky and her followers got the idea from anywhere other than a library that there was an astral hall of cosmic records it was from Tibetan lamas schooled in the all but forgotten ways of the ancient Bon religion. Bon was the mysterious religion of Tibet before Buddhism, a primal type of animism that believes all things animate and inanimate are sourced from an invisible world. 
+Ancient Aliens is a show that is often painful to watch yet is a necessity for any serious student of human history. The show has by far its finest moment in its decade long existence when it proposes that the Aborigines concept of the dreamtime matches a leading edge property of String Theory called the “Holographic paradigm.”5 
+There are tears in the fabric of Mans reality that upon scrutiny open to abysses of darkness. Quantum entanglement as been proven over and over again in laboratories whose annual budget would bankrupt a small country. Einstein was wrong and his precious “particles” do react with each other by some mechanism that travels faster than light. Anyone who’s ever had a premonition should have known that… 
+In the Holographic universe, quantum entanglement the enigma of superluminal interaction between particles –what a baffled Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” petulantly denying its existence in the face of all the evidence (even then) 6 – is easily explained. What are being observed in particle physics are not particles at all, but different aspects of interference patterns generated by the collision of spherical frequency waves emanating from an Event Horizon. 
+The Holographic paradigm postulates, in fact takes it as a given, that at the threshold of the time-space continuum, what physicists call the cosmological horizon, lay the source of everything that is, ever was, or will be. The information that composes the universe is never lost or changed. It’s immutable and is broadcast in oscillating signals, generating a chaotic sea of fluctuating frequencies that are picked up by mans senses and translated by the mind into the three dimensional world in which he finds himself. 
+In short; consciousness takes place inside a frequency receiver and “reality” is a television show… 
+The empirical evidence is overwhelming that the human brain works in the exact same manner as a hologram. This is called the Holonomic brain theory by neuroscientists. Many just cannot accept its implications. But its founder Karl Pribram, who held professorships for ten years at Yale and thirty at Stanford, was the Albert Einstein of neuroscience… 
+Pribram died in the beginning of 2015 at the age of ninety-five after a long and distinguished career working side by side with such giants in science as BF Skinner, Jon von Neumann and David Bohm; arguably the most brilliant physicist that the Anglo-American empire produced during the twentieth century. 
+Bohm collaborated closely with Pribram in the formulation of the Holonomic brain theory, but his earlier radical communist political affiliations would have barred him from the inner sanctums of the Stanford Research Institute. 
+There at Menlo Park, in the womb of madness, Pribram would have had access to at least some of the classified material of Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ. Throughout the seventies Puthoff and Targ were weaponizing the paranormal for Americas Department of Defense. They were working in the outer limits of quantum entanglement. In fact, Pribram admits to consulting with both Puthoff and Targ about it before beginning his collaboration with Bohm…7 
+In the same interview, from years ago, Pribram explains that “when an input comes in through one of the senses to the brain, it has to then become encoded in some way so that there is a representation.”8 Pribram calls these representations memory traces and says they have no localized point of origin in the brain. 
+“If you hack away at the brain” in surgery “you would expect that whatever representational process there is and –call it a memory trace if you will– that it would really be impaired tremendously, that you would remove a memory,” like cutting off a piece of a picture. “It doesn’t work that way.” 
+Pribram –a highly skilled neurosurgeon– noted among other things for his experimental work at the Yerkes Primate Center, of which he became director, recounts that “when lesions occur in the brain there is never any particular memory trace that is removed.” Recalling from over a half century of experience he continues “you may remove something, like the way to retrieve, to get back out the memory. For instance; you might not be able to talk about it but you can still write a note and say what it is you mean.”9 
+But the overall method by which these memories are spread throughout the brain, enabling them to avoid damage from injury, has always been a mystery. 
+Pribram explains that it was discovered in the late fifties that the input from the retina is organized in spots, then focused into lines in the cerebral cortex suggesting that the cerebral cortex is filled with cells that act as line detectors. These cells are sensitive to lines at multiple orientations and once you have lines you can create “circles, faces, stick figures, whatever” to formulate images.10 
+The idea that the cerebral cortex was interpreting interference patterns can be traced back to Germany in 1906.11 Decades later, John Lashley, Pribram’s mentor at the Yerkes Primate Center, reached the same conclusion. 
+Interference patterns can be seen in the water if you cast two stones in a pool. When the series of concentric waves generated by each of the stones clash the resulting confused ripples or wavelets are interference patterns. 
+In the interview Pribram asks “what might constitute those interference patterns in the brain” and “given interference patterns, how do you get an image out of that?”12 He then answers his own questions saying both problems were solved when people started building holograms at the University of Michigan and at Stanford (around 1962). He qualifies that by saying “because a hologram is a photographic store of ripples, of interference patterns. Instead of pebbles on a pond, what you have is light beams hitting the film.” 13The light then spreads in ripples over the surface of the film. 
+Pribram continues “Every light beam that hits does that and the neighboring ones do it and the neighboring ones and so you got every light beam, every part of a beam essentially spread over the entire surface. That’s why mathematically it’s called a spread function.”14 
+In a hologram that spread function is translated into images and with every passing year in neuroscience it becomes more and more apparent, Pribram uses the word “overwhelmingly,”15 that the brain functions in the same manner. 
+Pribram goes on to say that “over the last thirty years or so more and more evidence has accumulated to suggest strongly that the cerebral cortex acts as a resonator. It resonates to the frequencies of energies that are being transduced by the receptors; it’s the frequencies of energies.” He emphasizes that this is not an epiphany. German scientists were talking about it in 1906…16 
+Holography works by using interference patterns to encode information about a three dimensional object into what is, for all intents and purposes, a two dimensional light beam. The interference patterns can then be translated back into a three dimensional object. A tremendous amount of information can be stored and transferred this way. 
+Another profoundly functional feature of the hologram and analogous to the non-locality of memory in the human brain, is that all information is stored throughout the entire hologram. As long as a part of the hologram is big enough to contain the interference pattern, it can recreate the entire image stored in the hologram. 
+Holographic technology is based on the Fourier transform, a type of integral transfer sometimes called an improper Riemann integral. The Fourier transform itself is a mathematical function originally used in the nineteenth century to show the transfer of heat between two systems. Fourier transforms are the foundation of Spectral Analysis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. 
+In a Fourier transform two graphs are created; one showing the frequency domain and the other the time domain. The differential is then mapped between the two domains and through various permutations of the equations a spread sheet is achieved of all the individual frequencies that constitute a function of time, what is defined as a signal… 
+Often it is easier to solve a problem in the time domain by working on it in the frequency domain. Afterwards transformation of the result can be made back to the time domain by reversing the equation, what is called an inverse Fourier transform. The entire signal can be filtered simply by changing the frequencies in the frequency domain… 
+A Fourier transform can, theoretically, be used to send a function of the three dimensional continuum into a moving four dimensional mass or vice a versa… 
+The father of the Holograph is 1971 Nobel Prize recipient Dennis Gabor, who right after WW II produced the math –called windowed Fourier transforms– necessary to make one. Gabor served in a Hungarian artillery unit during WW I and in the twenties was instrumental in the development of the electron microscope in Berlin. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933 Gabor, a Hungarian Jew that had converted to Lutherism, fled Germany to England. 
+By the time Gabor worked with them, Fourier transforms had been infused with the genius of Bernhard Riemann, the nineteenth century German mathematician who broke the back of Euclidian geometry for good, making quantum physics and relativity possible. Erwin Schrödinger, the twentieth century Austrian physicist whose wave equation would become one of the two pillars of quantum physics and the foundation of wave mechanics. 
+David Hilbert, the German mathematician who taught most of the others and after whom Hilbert’s Space is named, and Werner Heisenberg the discoverer of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the other pillar of quantum physics… 
+Gabor would have at least had access if not worked directly with the legendary Jon von Neumann, Hilbert’s best pupil. Gabor and von Neumann were both Jews, native Hungarians and born to money, although von Neumann’s education under Hilbert had been paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation. Von Neumann was in fact titled nobility, besides being the man who named Hilbert’s Space in Hilbert’s honor. 
+Von Neumann was perhaps the most brilliant mathematician who ever lived. He would leave Berlin upon concluding his tutelage under Hilbert and be in Princeton by the end of 1929… 
+At Princeton, von Neumann delighted in playing Prussian marching music so loud on his gramophone that Einstein, who was in an adjoining office, would have to ask the authorities to intervene. In vain, there was nothing Einstein or anyone else could do about it. Von Neumann wrote the textbook for Quantum mechanics; Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik, or in English Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. 
+His mathematical contributions to civilization could fill a library, but his real achievements remain classified till this day. It is said that when von Neumann was dying of cancer, while under sedation he was surrounded by a Special Forces guard to insure he didn’t blurt out any of the empires secrets. 
+Von Neumann would tell anyone who would listen, delighted in it, that he had mathematically proven Einstein wrong. Most academics, although they could not understand his math, believed him and still do… Although they are now fonder of the experimental results of John Stewart Bell for their Einstein bashing…17 
+Einstein had always insisted that there were hidden variables that when discovered would reconcile quantum physics, which is indeterminate, and relativity, which is determinate. In Einstein’s vision of the future there would be just one unified field of physical phenomena and that would be determinant. 
+In physics, determinant means events transpire as a result of a mechanistic necessity and are therefore predictable. They follow laws. All physical phenomena should follow rules. 
+But they don’t. In Quantum physics, quantum entanglement is not the only enigma. There is the double slit experiment where an individual particle is fired through a slit and another through a different slit at a screen. What shows up on the screen is a wave interference pattern which could have only been made by waves passing through the slit… 
+There is the wave function collapse and quantum randomness in general. If the observer calculates the position of a “sub-atomic particle” in space they cannot calculate its momentum because the very act of locating it influences its trajectory. If they find its momentum, the act of their doing so prevents them from finding its position. That’s the short definition of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. 
+It’s all about predicting probabilities in a matrix, nothing is certain and the observer is part of the equation, anathema to ‘good science…’ 
+Erwin Schrödinger, who won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for providing the equation that makes it all work, was more than just a scientist. A philosopher and poet at heart, he was a lifelong student of the Vedas and believed individual consciousness was a manifestation of the universal whole. 
+Back then, Schrödinger described the prevailing interpretation of quantum physics, now called the Copenhagen interpretation, as making no distinction “between the state of a natural object and what I know about it, or perhaps better, what I can know about it if I go to some trouble. Actually — so they say — there is intrinsically only awareness, observation, measurement.”18 
+The Copenhagen interpretation is the prevailing school of thought in quantum physics to this very day. As George Berkeley, the father of Immaterialism and therefore the Copenhagen interpretation, said three hundred years ago; nothing can exist if there is nothing to see it, “esse est percipi,” to be is to be perceived. 
+After serving as an apprentice to the mysterious German scientist; Max Wien, heir of Friedrich Paschen’s late nineteenth century experimental research on hydrogen spectral lines in the infrared region, Schrödinger would begin publishing papers about atomic theory and the theory of spectra in the early twenties… 
+He would publish his famous equation in 1926. In the twenty-first century, it’s still the tool mathematicians use to describe a wave function. In the Copenhagen interpretation the wave function is the most complete description that can be given to a physical system. 
+In Quantum mechanics the Schrödinger equation predicts probability distributions from which results are drawn. A probability distribution is a mathematical description of a random phenomenon. There are no exact results and at the time Schrödinger is quoted as saying “I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.”19 
+Einstein was livid. Not only was special relativity no longer feasible but perhaps relativity itself. As every school child knows he said “God does not play dice with the universe!” 
+Schrödinger worked closely with Einstein in the ensuing years, attempting to formulate a unified field theory and reconcile the whole mess into one determinant science, but by the end of the forties he had abandoned those efforts. In a 1952 lecture, he made the first documentable reference to what has become known as the multiverse, prefacing it by saying that what he was about to say might “seem lunatic.” 20 
+Schrödinger went on to tell his perplexed audience that when his equations seem to be describing several different histories they are “not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously…”21 
+Famously, in 1956 Schrödinger would refuse to speak about nuclear energy at an important lecture during the World Energy Conference, giving a philosophical lecture instead because he had become skeptical about the entire subject. He would cause a great deal of controversy in the physics community after that, abandoning the idea of particles altogether and adopting the wave-only theory also put forth by Hugh Everett III in his many-worlds interpretation of the multiverse. 
+In the many-worlds interpretation, the wave in the quantum state is the only thing that is real and under the appropriate conditions it will exhibit particle-like behavior. In Everett’s multiverse, everything that ever could have happened in the past did and every possibility spawns its own universe where that possibility did and does occur. 
+After Jon von Neumann died prematurely of cancer in 1957 Hugh Everett III would become the Anglo-American empires go-to guy on Quantum physics… 
+Pilot Waves were first proposed by Einstein in an effort to explain the wave interference patterns produced by particles in cases like the double slit experiment. He had hoped that they could be explained deterministically if the particle were somehow guided by an electromagnetic field; “which would thus play the role of what he called a Führungsfeld or guiding field.”22 
+The idea of a pilot wave was picked up and made mathematically feasible by Louis de Broglie in 1927, but with little support from a physics community now enamored by Heisenberg and the Copenhagen interpretation it died a slow death from neglect. 
+De Broglie’s math was resurrected by David Bohm in 1952 and renamed Bohmian mechanics. Heisenberg, who had been “profoundly unsympathetic”23 to the idea from its inception in the twenties wrote in 1955 that it was nothing more than an “exact repetition” of the Copenhagen interpretation “in a different language…”24 
+Regardless of the value of “Bohmian mechanics” the rest of what David Bohm had to say about the holographic universe may be a summation of everything that was really learned by man in the twentieth century (outside of course all those in this account who had an above top secret clearance…). 
+Bohm said there were two worlds. The primary one he called the Implicate Order or the enfolded order. He said the enfolded order was “the ground out of which reality emerges.”25The other world, “reality,” the world of the human senses, the world where consciousness dwells, he called the Explicate Order or the unfolded order. 
+“What we take for reality, Bohm argues, are surface phenomena, explicate forms that have temporarily unfolded out of an underlying implicate order. Within this deeper order forms are enfolded within each other so systems which may well be separated in the Explicate Order are contained within each other in the Implicate Order.”26 
+Superficially it would appear the two worlds are “dual forms related by an integral transfer” but the reality is the unfolded order cannot exist independent of the enfolded order.27 
+Bohm, always a pariah to the powers that be because of his politics sometimes had his work classified before he could even finish it. In the Manhattan project he was barred access to Los Alamos and was not allowed to write the thesis for his own scattering equations. 
+Einstein had always been his mentor, shielding him and preventing his ostracism from academia and Bohm had always worked closely with him in Einstein’s quest to save physics as he knew it. But by the end of the war Bohm had come to the conclusion that quantum mechanics would never become a deterministic science. He stopped looking for deterministic mechanisms as the cause of quantum phenomena and set out to show that the events could be attributed to a far deeper underlying reality. 
+Bohm’s idea of an Implicate and Explicate order mirror the conclusions reached by Mircea Eliade, the world’s foremost theological scholar of the WW II era… Eliade said there are only the Sacred and the Profane. The Sacred is the place of mythology, where the gods and archetypes dwell together with all the things that establish the very structure of this world. The Sacred is the First Cause of the Gnostics, the alcheringa of the Aborigine and the Implicate Order of Bohmian mechanics. 
+The Profane is the material things of this world, the things that have nothing to do with the Sacred. They are basically just like the set in an old black and white movie story… Eliade said they “acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.”28 In other words, it is only through its participation in the Sacred that the Profane finds validation. 
+Through his myths, his ceremonies and his rituals, even in his behavior and dreams, man manifests the Sacred into the Profane. It is Man himself that breaths reality into the fleeting and phantasmagorical world of the Profane… 
+Eliade said that in order to uphold the world of the Profane, the Scared must be manifested into it, over and over again. He called these incarnations, these places where the Sacred intersects with the Profane, the Eternal Return (not to be confused with Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, just as important but more to do with the cycle of the Yuga’s and the Mandela). Eliade called these manifestations of the Sacred into the Profane hierophanies. 
+Eliade maintained that all Shamanic practices in cultures uncluttered by the poisons of twentieth century rationalism, indeed the foundation of all Paleolithic spiritual practices, was an attempt to produce these hierophanies. 
+No one was, nor ever will be, more influential than Mircea Eliade, not even the vaunted Joseph Campbell. But present day academia with its penchant for semantics and cutting the whole up into smaller and smaller pieces till there is nothing left to see at all (both Pribram29 and Bohm30 warned the world about this), still rails against him. They say Eliade painted all cultures with too broad a brush stroke and seem to feel that their exceptions are more important than his whole, the same mistake Einstein made… But even Eliade’s staunchest critic; Geoffrey Kirk, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1974 to 1984 and prolific author himself, concedes that what Eliade said about the Eternal Return fit the culture of Australia’s aborigines like Cinderella’s slipper… 
+There has always been something dark and foreboding about Australia. Master of horror H P Lovecraft wrote about it in The Shadow out of Time. There is something menacing, something unspoken and threatening, a nameless fear of the stark and unforgiving land and an instinctual loathing of its native aborigine inhabitants that runs like an unseen current through the hard White men who dispossessed them. 
+In 1770 a British exploratory expedition led by James Cook would land in Botany Bay where the great city of Sidney now stands. They began shooting the natives immediately and the fighting would continue for over a hundred and fifty years. It finally subsided after the Coniston massacre in 1928 in the Northern Territory, which left over a hundred Aborigine dead. 
+Overall the fighting left thousands of Whites dead and hundreds of thousands of Aborigines. There were no pitched battles; the fighting was at close quarters, often hand to hand before repeating rifles were invented and savagely brutal, more like gang fights than military engagements. Atrocities were committed by both sides and in the interest of political correctness a well documented history of cannibalism among the Aborigine has been kept suppressed by the authorities.31 
+The Aborigine bore no animosity towards Whites because of their skin color. Eating the dead was strictly business in a land where distances are endless and the sun relentless. As settlers claimed the rights to all Australia’s fertile land the Stone Age hunting and gathering lifestyle of the Aborigine provided less and less sustenance. Resentment, and hunger, became inevitable. 
+But a journal from as late as 1849 explains how the Aborigine viewed Whites as their “ancestors who have returned to them again.”32 The archived diary describes how the Aborigine, before eating each other, would “scorch off the entire outer skin or epidermis which reveals the ‘true skin’ which in all branches of the human race is quite white.”33 
+“Their impression being that when they die ‘The black fellow England walk and by and by jump up white fellow.’”34 Australia is rivaled for geological anomalies only by its nearest neighbor Papua New Guinea. Both have stood in isolation for what academia says is sixty thousand years. Only their indigenous tribes, more like ghosts than men, can testify as to what cataclysmic events they may have witnessed. 
+In the Kimberley region of Western Australia four thousand year old cave paintings depict fantastic beings from the dreamtime called Wandgina. Local Aborigine believe the actions of the Wandgina in the dreamtime manifest themselves as features in the landscape of Australia’s Great Western Desert. They believe these beings control the wind, the rain and the lighting… The Wandgina 
+Rising like a specter out of the center of the Australian continent and on an otherwise almost unbroken horizon is Uluru or Ayers Rock, an isolated hill that appears like a single great stone has been imbedded into the earth. Uluru, a Mecca for tourists, is famous for its glowing red appearance at dusk and dawn and is sacred to the Aborigine. 
+At two miles long, over a mile wide and eleven hundred feet high Uluru is by far Australia’s best known geological anomaly. But just as striking is Kata Tjuta, fifteen and a half miles to the west and Mount Conner, slightly to the south and forty-five miles east of Uluru. 
+Kata Tjuta or the Olga’s consists of thirty six domes covering a little less than eight and half square miles, the tallest being Mount Olga at over seventeen hundred feet high. Mount Conner covers eight and half square miles and rises nine hundred and eighty-four feet at its highest point. All of them are conglomerates of granite-like stone and gravel cemented by a matrix of sandstone, about 50% feldspar, 25–35% quartz and up to 25% rock fragments. 
+Explanations abound for how the island mountains, called inselbergs by academics, got to be in the western desert. They range from the electric universe theory which postulates that they are the result of an immense electrical discharge, to creationism which of course believes they were scoured out by the deluge, all the way to academia’s old standby of a greased pig, erosion… 
+Local Aborigines believe most of the south face of Uluru is the result of a war fought in the dreamtime between the carpet-snakes (Kunyia) and the venomous-snakes (Liru). The northwestern corner of Uluru and most of its north face were formed as a result of the activities of the hare-wallaby’s (Mala) and the comings and goings of other dreamtime entity’s fill in the rest of Uluru’s geological features. 
+To the Aborigine it is the dreamtime that generates this world and with it the landscape… 
+Black Mountain National Park is located at the northern end of Queensland, a little over five miles from the Coral Sea. “The park” is just a restricted three square mile area around a pile of dark colored granite boulders, some the size of houses. The pile reaches almost a thousand feet in height. Academics have explanations for this striking geological anomaly but to the untrained and perhaps the more objective eye the boulders appear to have been placed there by unknown methods for unknown reasons. 
+Black Mountain has a sinister reputation among Whites as well as the Aborigine. The Aborigine call it Kalkajaka or place of the spear and avoid it. People disappear around Kalkajaka and the people who go looking for them disappear too. 
+Some believe the missing have simply been lost forever in the labyrinthine passages between the boulders. Others claim the missing were eaten or enslaved by reptilian aliens that, among other things, have been sighted around the rocks. They believe reptilian aliens have a secret base under Black Mountain where UFO sightings are a regular occurrence. 
+UFO’s have been receiving a lot of attention lately in Australia. An Australian himself, Duncan Roads –editor of Nexus Magazine for over a quarter century and the most respected name in the alternative media– recounts “Australia is certainly a hot spot of UFO sightings. We’ve had a phenomenal growth in the reporting of UFO sightings by the general public especially since the advent of the internet.”35 
+Roads points to the area around the Blue Mountains in Australia’s New South Wales “as a hotspot of UFO sightings and other mysteries. There is certainly a lot of mystery in the Blue Mountains. Campers, bushwalkers, explorers all have got tails of mystery, disappearing people, strange tunnels, strange noises and strange creature sightings…”36 
+According to Aboriginal tribal elder Kevin Gavi Duncan “the Blue Mountains is a very sacred area, sacred place, especially the highest places, because we would be closer to Baiame, closer to god.”37 
+The human disappearances in the Blue Mountains seem to be focused around Mount Yengo. Called the Uluru of the east, the flat top of Mt. Yengo rises about a thousand feet above a plateau and is believed by academics to be all that remains of an ancient volcano. Perhaps because of its prominent flat top, Aborigine tribes believe that after he was done with the act of creating this world their creator god Baiame leapt back up into the spirit world from Mt. Yengo. 
+Roads continues “UFO sightings of the Blue Mountains have triggered many magazine articles, radio shows and books. A lot of people have come forward over the last few decades to document and put onto the record their own experiences.”38 Rex Gilroy, author of Mysterious Australia, has unearthed accounts of UFO sightings in the Blue Mountains by nineteenth century pioneers…39 
+Ancient Aliens straight man David Hatcher Childress theorizes that the Blue Mountains are a “stargate, some portal to another dimension and jumping to hyperspace perhaps…”40 Childress speculates “For some reason Australia was the place where they put this hyperspace portal used by extra terrestrials.”41 
+Duncan continues “there are stories that elders would say, that some people have actually travelled back to the Morning Star and have come back again.”42 Earlier, standing in front of an ancient rock carving depicting Baiame about forty miles southeast of Mt. Yengo, Duncan explained “Baiame came from a place that we call the Morning Star within the Mirrabooka. Mira means stars and booka means river. That is the Milky Way that flows across the North Star. ”43 Baiame, Bulgandry Aboriginal Engraving site, Brisbane Water National Park, New South Wales, Australia 
+Duncan then gives his interpretation of the petroglyph. Baiame “holds the Moon in one hand and the Morning Star in the other. Which is a bit like what we call planet earth and these are the two moons which exist around the Morning Star in the Mirrabooka.”44 
+What the petroglyph shows is Baiame with his arms outstretched and a giant knife horizontal across his naval. The hilt is under his left arm. He is holding a circle in his right hand and a crescent in his left. Below the crescent is another circle suspended in mid air and slightly smaller than the one he holds in his right hand. To the right of the free floating circle, perfectly horizontal to it, is a much smaller almost tiny circle. Slightly to the right of the tiny circle and above it is another tiny circle.45 
+If the two tiny circles are rotated about two hundred and eighty degrees clockwise or ninety degrees counter clockwise so that the tiny circle that was furthest from Baiame is now in the hilt of the knife you would have close to an image of what, left to right, is in the middle of Australia. Mount Conner would be the large circle, now furthest right. 
+The Three Sisters rock formation is about fifty miles to the Southwest of Mt. Yengo. The three craggy pillars of sandstone tower above the lush Jamison Valley. No doubt conjuring memories in Australia’s early Anglo-Saxon settlers of the three Wyrd Sisters crouched at their cauldron casting spells on both gods and men in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. 
+Wyrd is an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning destiny, to come to pass, to become. By the fifteenth century it had come to mean having the power to control fate. In sixteenth century Scotland and northern England wyrd implied that an event was miraculous. It wasn’t till the early nineteenth century that weird came to mean something was odd. The Proto-Indo-European root is wert meaning to turn or to rotate… 
+In the 1965 epic science fiction novel Dune by Frank Herbert the Wyrding Way is an overwhelming close quarter fighting technique used by the story’s messianic hero and his rebel armies with devastating effectiveness. In hand to hand combat its adepts are able to maneuver around and strike their opponents at speeds that resemble teleportation to the observer and words and sounds can be amplified to become lethal weapons. 
+Mastery of the Wyrding Way required the adoption of a completely different concept of what the space-time continuum is and what its cause and effect are. The essence of the Wyrding Way is summed up in both the motto and the mantra of its practitioners “my mind affects my reality.” 
+Wyrd is a notion taken from the pre-Christian religion of the Norseman. In Old Norse the word is Urðr. It is also the name of the mother of the Norns, female beings who rule over the destiny of gods and men. There are many Norns, good and evil, who appear at a person’s side at their birth and decide upon their future. 
+Urðr (fate), Verðandi (present) and Skuld (karmic debt) are the most powerful of the Norns and said to have come to intervene in a time long past when the gods ruled too haughtily over men. The three beautiful maidens pour the purifying waters of the Urðarbrunnr (Well of Urðr) over the Yggdrasil (Tree of Life) to keep it eternally rejuvenated. 
+The Urðarbrunnr is said to be one of three wells, one under each of the three roots of the Yggdrasil. Each root reaches to a different far off land. The other two wells are Hvergelmir (bubbling boiling spring), located beneath a root in Niflheim (Abode of Mist), and Mímisbrunnr (Mímir’s well), located beneath a root near the home of the frost jötnar (Giant). It was said that Odin gave one of his eyes to drink from the Mímisbrunnr, the well of wisdom and understanding. 
+Aside from Tasmania and parts of New Zealand Australia’s Blue Mountains is the last real stop in the Pacific Ocean before the Antarctic. The Blue Mts. are about as far away as you can get from the land of the Norsemen on the Baltic Sea. But as Caroline Cory author of The Visible and Invisible Worlds of God notes “there are several umbilical cords on the planet. This particular location is located exactly at negative thirty-three latitude.”46 
+Cory then recites the standard alien enthusiast dogma about the thirty-three degree latitude of planet earth aligning with the center of the galaxy and how it is “continuously being visited from different parts of the planetary system from different parts of the galaxy and even from beyond this galaxy, from way out in the universe.”47 
+Most amateur UFO enthusiasts have never heard of Bruce Cathie and his book; Harmonic 33, published way back in 1968. But most professional researchers are well acquainted with the book and many new age authors use Cathie’s math to validate their Tinkerbellian speculations. 
+“Even while you read this interplanetary space ships are rebuilding a world grid system from which it appears they can draw motive power and they are possibly using the grid for navigational purposes.” 48 
+This is the cover sentence in Harmonic 33. There are rumors that the original book was immediately pulled from bookstore shelves, edited, then rereleased with Cathie put under wraps and assigned a handler, never to produce anything again of any consequence for the general public, though he would write a few more books. 
+Cathie, a New Zealand airline pilot, saw his first UFO in 1952. He would be fascinated till he died in 2013. He began collecting data and collating it with sightings by other pilots over New Zealand. Using techniques borrowed from French UFO researcher Aimé Michel he was able to establish two track lines where aerial anomalies were being regularly encountered. From there he “was able to form a complete grid network over the whole of the New Zealand…”49 
+Cathie learned that the American survey ship Eltanin had taken some of the strangest photographs of the twentieth century off the west coast of South America. There, thirteen thousand feet beneath the waves mounted on the pacific sea bed was an “aerial-like object” that was “two-to-three-feet high and had six main crossbars spaced evenly up its stem with a smaller one at the top. Each set of crossbars had a small ball at the end of each arm.”50 
+Later one of the scientists who had been on board the Eltanin told Cathie the object was thought to be metallic and an artifact of some kind. Cathie was able to align his New Zealand grid with the coordinates of the artifact fashioning what he reasoned was a world energy grid and perhaps used as a galactic navigational tool by extra-terrestrials. 
+Interestingly enough, in light of Erwin Schrödinger’s actions at the World Energy Conference in 1956, Cathie did not believe nuclear weapons could be detonated randomly but would have to be at exactly the right coordinates at exactly the right time to work. Using his world energy grid he started publically predicting the exact times and places of test sites before they got him muzzled… 
+In Cathie’s own words “It was only a matter of time before I realized that the energy network formed by the grid was already known to a powerful group of international interests and scientists. It became obvious that the system had many military applications, and that political advantage could be gained by those with secret knowledge of this nature. It would be possible for a comparatively small group, with this knowledge, to take over control of the world.” 51 
+Cathie concluded that the “whole of physical reality was in fact manifested by a complex pattern of interlocking wave-forms.”52 
+Aliens are a very grey area, as is reality itself. What the Explicate Order translates out of the Implicate Order, what the Sacred manifests in the Profane, they are like points in a wave that show up as a particle. Just as surely they are guided only by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle… 
+Something is going on in the Blue Mountains, always has been. It’s been categorized by twenty-first century academia as paranormal but it’s something Australia’s aboriginal people are well acquainted with. 
+Duncan Roads is the man who introduced Bruce Cathie to the general public. He knows words like von Neumann knew numbers. He says “the Australian aborigines have a connection and a relationship with what we call extra terrestrials and UFO’s which goes back tens of thousands of years. Their rather nonplussed by their existence, they have developed an awareness of individual types of visitors from what we call outer space.”53 
+The Three Sisters crouch at the south edge of the town of Katoomba, an Anglo-Saxon enclave of artists and artisans. They can be viewed from its golf course and are the most famous landmark in The City of Blue Mountains, a ribbon of contiguous towns, which lie on New South Wales Main Western railway line. The City of Blue Mountains has dubbed itself ‘The City within a World Heritage National Park.’ It has Sister City Relationships with Sanda City, Japan and Flagstaff, Arizona in the USA. 
+Located in the southwest of the Four Corners, an area famed for its paranormal activities, Flagstaff is the unofficial capital of the Navaho (Diné) Nation and the Hopi, the priestly tribe who are the keepers of the Diné’s most profound secrets. 
+Like a penitent kneeling at the foot of the alter Flagstaff prostrates itself at the south foot of Agassiz Peak, Freemont Peak and Doyle Peak in the Kachina Peaks Wilderness. 
+To the Hopi this area, part of the San Francisco Peaks, the remains of an eroded composite volcano, is the most sacred place in the Four Corners. In fact it is the most sacred place in the world… 
+The San Francisco Peaks are where the doorways open up for their gods, which they call Kachina, to come forth when they are called in the powerful ceremonies performed by the Hopi. 
+The Kachina are supernatural beings said to control the wind, the rain and the lighting… 
+At 11,464 feet Doyle Peak was the site of the world’s highest astronomical observation point from 1927-1932. Built by the Lowell Observatory, the stated purpose of the cabin on the south side of the summit was to scan the heavens and make spectroscopic observations, especially in ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths… 
+In 2005 “a collaborative project team formed, the heart of which is still active today, including NASA scientists, Navajo Medicine Men, and both NASA and Navajo educators.”54 Flagstaff is the home of the Lowell Observatory, the U.S. Naval Observatory and the United States Geological Survey Flagstaff Station… Rock art from Sego Canyon at the northern frontier of the Four Corners. 
+Citations 
+1 – Reid, Nick, and Patrick D. Nunn. “Ancient Aboriginal Stories Preserve History of a Rise in Sea Level.” The Conversation. 13 Jan. 2015. Web. 25 July 2016. http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010 
+2 – Ibid. 
+3 – “Ancient Aliens S11E07 – The Wisdom Keepers.” 11:00. YouTube, 7 July 2016. Web. 26 July 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-mX1eWoj6I 
+4 –Ibid. 29:33. 
+5 –Ibid. 30:09. 
+6– MARKOFF, JOHN. “Sorry, Einstein. Quantum Study Suggests ‘Spooky Action’ Is Real.” Science. New York Times, 21 Oct. 2015. Web. 3 Aug. 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/science/quantum-theory-experiment-said-to-prove-spooky-interactions.html?_r=0 
+7 – “Karl Pribram ‘Holographic Brain’ New Dimensions 1:12:52.” Youtube. Insightfreeman, 5 Dec. 2012. Web. 15 Aug. 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awFleswtH2Y 
+8 –Ibid. 23:34.",FAKE
+2732,President Obama really really really really hates Maureen Dowd,"President Obama's affection for the New York Times op-ed section is pretty well-documented at this point. David Brooks and Tom Friedman are regulars at Obama's occasional off-the-record conversations with columnists, and attended one right before the start of airstrikes against ISIS, along with fellow columnist Frank Bruni; Brooks in particular has been a longtime White House favorite.
+
+But according to David Axelrod's new memoir, Obama reserves an intense loathing for their colleague Maureen Dowd. Here's how Axelrod remembers an encounter during Obama's campaign trip to Europe in the summer of 2008:
+
+Maureen Dowd, the talented but tart columnist for the Times, was traveling with us and was granted a brief interview with Obama. When we brought her to the front of the plane for the interview, however, Obama proceeded to blister her for a previous column she had written. No one got under Barack's skin more than Maureen, whose penchant for delving into the psyches of her subjects was particularly irritating to the self-possessed Obama. Normally polite under any circumstances, he was patronizing and disrespectful to Maureen in a way that I had rarely seen. This was not well received by Dowd who, like most journalists, was accustomed to firing off salvos, yet decidedly uncomfortable when fired upon herself. After that awkward encounter, she seemed to take particular delight in psychoanalyzing Barack and belittling him in print, which only deepened his contempt. Maureen, who is as gracious and loyal to her friends as she is rough on the high and mighty, would become a friend of mine in Washington, which became a minor source of tension with Obama. ""Why are you friends with her?"" he would demand after Maureen sent one of her acid darts his way.
+
+In an email to the Huffington Post's Michael Calderone, Dowd denied that her writing was motivated by a desire to avenge Obama's slight, writing ""The idea that I punished him for giving me his opinion is not true and plays into an unfortunate stereotype of women, the Furies swooping down.""
+
+In any case, Obama's certainly not the first person to lodge this particular complaint against Dowd, that she is excessively interested in psychoanalyzing political figures while neglecting what it is they're actually advocating, that, in her own words, she ""focuses too much on the person but not enough on policy."" In a 2005 profile by Ariel Levy in New York Magazine, Dowd dismissed this criticism as sexist: ""All the great traumatizing events of American history— Watergate, Vietnam, the Iran/contra stuff — have always been about the president’s personal demons and gremlins. So I always thought that criticism was just silly … as if it was a girlish thing to be focused on the person.""
+
+WATCH: Obama on why he's such a polarizing president",REAL
+4088,U.S. Congressional Delegation travels to Cuba this weekend,"Their itinerary includes meetings with Cuban government officials, a possible meeting with Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino, possible meetings with representatives of Cuba's civil society, a visit to the U.S. Interests Section, and a meeting with other ambassadors to Cuba. The delegation will travel to Cuba on Saturday, and return Monday evening.
+
+A spokesman for Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, tells CNN, the delegation will seek ""clarity from Cuba on what they envision normalization of relations to look like, and, ""going beyond past rote responses such as 'end the embargo.""
+
+The spokesman says the congressional members, ""hope to develop a sense of what Cuba and United States are prepared to do to make a constructive relationship possible. "" The delegation will also, ""impress upon Cuban leaders the importance of concrete results and positive momentum,"" and, ""Convey a sense of Americans' expectations, and perceptions in Congress."" Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who is heading the delegation Looking forward to #Cuba visit to discuss our relationship & potential collaboration w/ #RI's academic institutions http://t.co/AO5r782ea0 — Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) January 17, 2015",REAL
+578,How Democrats killed Obama's college savings plan,The president-elect hasn't made clear how he will avoid conflicts between his vast empire and his official duties.,REAL
+1723,Clinton Takes First Step To Dispel Doubts About Candidacy,"Clinton Takes First Step To Dispel Doubts About Candidacy
+
+Both of the leading Democrats probably helped themselves in their party's first debate of the 2016 presidential campaign, held in Las Vegas and carried by CNN. But Hillary Clinton, the candidate with the most to lose, may have come away having gained the most.
+
+The longtime front-runner has been beset by controversy, falling poll numbers and a brittle relationship with the media. A bad performance before this season's first national audience would have deepened doubts about her candidacy.
+
+At a minimum, Clinton needed to hold her own and provide as little fresh ammunition as possible to her critics. She met this standard and far exceeded it, performing more ably than in any major media appearance since her best debates and speeches in 2008. Her answers were substantive, measured and confident. But even more important, her demeanor was both relaxed and energetic. At times, she even seemed to be enjoying herself.
+
+Her main challenger, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, also had a good night. His strong views on the left bank of the American mainstream found a receptive audience in the partisan crowd. He even got applause for saying he could and would defend his philosophy by ""explaining what Democratic socialism is."" Questioned about his distaste for capitalism, he turned the issue to income inequality and banks ""too big to fail.""
+
+Several of the ""focus group"" interviews conducted by news organizations found their participants liking Sanders the best of the group.
+
+But Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland who has been running a distant third to Clinton and Sanders, also had his moments of connection with the crowd. He made several appeals to environmentalists, especially on climate change. And he told a moving story of parents from Colorado who lost a child in the Aurora theater shooting and then were denied a day in court suing the gun dealer who sold 4,000 rounds of military ammunition to the shooter.
+
+Less successful on balance were the debate's lesser-known entrants, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and former Rhode Island Sen. and Gov. Lincoln Chafee. The latter, a former Republican turned independent turned Democrat, had trouble finding an angle of attack against his former Senate colleagues.
+
+In fact, the entire proceeding was notable for its tone of collegiality. While the candidates disagreed about guns, trade legislation, the use of coal and the use of U.S. military power abroad, they did so in a manner that was more than civil. Whether intentional or not, their behavior contrasted with the rancor and personal confrontations that studded the first two presidential debates on the Republican side.",REAL
+7047,Guardian Front Page: “A 16-Year-Old Migrant Cries…”,"Store Guardian Front Page: “A 16-Year-Old Migrant Cries…” This image of a ""16-year-old"" migrant crying – which is currently plastered on the front page of The Guardian – is nothing short of laughable Chris Menahan | Information Liberation - October 27, 2016 Comments 
+Won’t you take pity on this poor, innocent little child? 
+This image of a “16-year-old” migrant crying – which is currently plastered on the front page of The Guardian – is nothing short of laughable. 
+“A 16-year-old from Ethiopia cries while he awaits registration at a processing centre in the makeshift refugee camp near Calais,” the photo’s caption reads. The image is placed under a headline reading: “Councils resist pressure to take children from Calais.” 
+
+This crying “child” is supposed to make Brits feel guilty and demand their government allow “children” like him into their nation. 
+The image is not a fake, nor is it being used satirically. It comes from the Associated Press’ Emilio Morenatti , you can see four pictures of the man for sale on their website . 
+The “child migrant” is clearly in his 40’s, yet their editors evidently believe their readers are so incredibly stupid they’ll actually believe they’re looking at a 16-year-old boy. 
+A look at Emilio’s twitter shows one person appears to have actually bought the lie: @morenatti2004 Imposible no hacernos mirar y luego, un nudo en la garganta. pic.twitter.com/A7zvz5440q 
+— Luján Artola Paulos (@rowley_bel) October 25, 2016 
+“Impossible not make us look, then, a lump in the throat,” the tweet reads. 
+Incidentally, Ethiopia is not even a war zone, so I’m not sure how this 45-year-old man can even be considered a “refugee.” NEWSLETTER SIGN UP  ",FAKE
+10133,Restaurant Chain Tim Hortons Blocks Independent Journalist’s Website on WiFi,By Dan Dicks Tim Hortons Doesn’t Want You To See The Truth. Press For Truth has been banned from Tim Hortons! In this video Dan... ,FAKE
+3256,Why raising the Social Security retirement age really does hurt the poor the most,"On Wednesday, I wrote about why raising the Social Security retirement age is a particularly cruel policy to people who hate their jobs and die young — a group that tends to be poor.
+
+On Twitter, the very smart Marc Goldwein, who works for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, took issue with the piece. Twitter is good for a lot of things, but debating the distributional impacts of changes to Social Security isn't one of them. So let's move the debate here.
+
+In case you don't want to read the rest of this, here's the short version of my response: a Social Security check means something very different to someone with no retirement savings than it does to someone with hefty retirement savings. Cutting 11 percent of the check someone lives on and 11 percent of the check someone barely notices are not the same thing. And, finally, cutting 11 percent of the check of someone who loves his job is very different from cutting 11 percent of the check of someone who desperately wants to retire.
+
+Goldwein's tweet uses a table from the Social Security administration showing that the cut lops a roughly equal percentage off the benefits of people at all income levels — and of course it does; raising the retirement age is an across-the-board cut. But a 6.5 percent cut to Social Security benefits for someone with no other income is much more harmful than an identical cut for someone with $100,000 a year in income from retirement savings.
+
+This debate is complicated a bit by the fact that there are actually two ""retirement ages"" for Social Security: the early retirement age, which is the earliest age at which someone can begin receiving benefits, and the full retirement age, at which Social Security grants ""full"" benefits (though, confusingly, you can get still larger Social Security checks by retiring later than the full retirement age). Some proposals raise only the early retirement age, some raise only the full retirement age, and some, like Chris Christie's plan, raise both. But the Congressional Budget Office finds that increasing either retirement age — or both retirement ages — hurts the poor more than the rich.
+
+Here's what it says about raising the early retirement age:
+
+Here's what it says about raising the full retirement age:
+
+In both cases, the basic effect is the same: raising the retirement age is manageable so long as you can continue working, and want to continue working. But it's a much bigger problem if you can't continue working, or you desperately want to stop working, and were going to rely on Social Security to support you in retirement.
+
+Which is to say, raising the retirement age is a cut that targets people who hate their jobs and want to retire, but can't do so without Social Security.
+
+And then there's the fact that the poor live shorter lives than the rich. If we raised the early retirement age from 62 to 65, then someone who lives until 80 would see their 18 years of retirement cut to 15 years — a loss of about 16 percent of their retirement. Someone who only lives until 73, however, would see their retirement cut from 11 years to eight — a loss of about 27 percent of their time in retirement.
+
+This speaks, by the way, to one of the main justifications given for raising the retirement age: that Americans are living longer lives these days. But as this chart from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation shows, the recent increase in life expectancy has been much larger among the affluent.
+
+This is where we get into questions not of budget but of values: I think in a country as rich as ours, it should be possible for people who hate their jobs to retire relatively young, so they can spend a good portion of their adult life in retirement. I think it's easy for people who love their jobs to underestimate how soul-crushing it is to hate going into work every day. And so I prefer fixes to Social Security that don't force people who hate their jobs to spend longer in the workforce.
+
+Perhaps that would change if we didn't have other options for closing Social Security's shortfall — but there are so, so many other paths that it baffles me why so many in Washington have fixated on this one.",REAL
+2786,Afghanistan: 19 die in air attacks on hospital; U.S. investigating,"(CNN) Aerial bombardments blew apart a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the battleground Afghan city of Kunduz about the time of a U.S. airstrike early Saturday, killing at least 19 people, officials said.
+
+The blasts left part of the hospital in flames and rubble, killing 12 staffers and seven patients -- including three children -- and injuring 37 other people, the charity said.
+
+As the United States said it was investigating what struck the hospital during the night, the charity expressed shock and demanded answers, stressing that all combatants had been told long ago where the hospital was.
+
+""(The bombing) constitutes a grave violation of international humanitarian law,"" Doctors Without Borders, known internationally as Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, said.
+
+""We were running a hospital treating patients, including wounded combatants from both sides -- this was not a 'Taliban base,' "" said Dr. Joanne Liu, international president of Doctors Without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières, upon release of the group's internal review of the attack.
+
+""We were running a hospital treating patients, including wounded combatants from both sides -- this was not a 'Taliban base,' "" said Dr. Joanne Liu, international president of Doctors Without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières, upon release of the group's internal review of the attack.
+
+The attacks came as fighting intensified between Afghan government forces -- supported by U.S. air power and military advisers -- and the Taliban, which invaded Kunduz in late September.
+
+The attacks came as fighting intensified between Afghan government forces -- supported by U.S. air power and military advisers -- and the Taliban, which invaded Kunduz in late September.
+
+Doctors Without Borders is asking for an indepedent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. President Barack Obama has apologized to the charity group for the attack.
+
+Doctors Without Borders is asking for an indepedent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. President Barack Obama has apologized to the charity group for the attack.
+
+Doctors Without Borders said it had emailed the GPS coordinates of its main hospital and administration office building at the Kunduz center before the airstrike. The U.S. commander said airstrikes were called after Afghan troops advised they were ""taking fire from enemy positions.""
+
+Doctors Without Borders said it had emailed the GPS coordinates of its main hospital and administration office building at the Kunduz center before the airstrike. The U.S. commander said airstrikes were called after Afghan troops advised they were ""taking fire from enemy positions.""
+
+Flames are visible inside a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, after a U.S. airstrike on Saturday, October 3. At least 30 people died in the attack, the charity said in its internal review of the strike released Thursday, November 5. The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has said the hospital was hit accidentally.
+
+Flames are visible inside a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, after a U.S. airstrike on Saturday, October 3. At least 30 people died in the attack, the charity said in its internal review of the strike released Thursday, November 5. The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has said the hospital was hit accidentally.
+
+""There are many patients and staff who remain unaccounted for. The numbers may grow as a clearer picture develops of the aftermath of this horrific bombing,"" MSF said, adding all the dead and injured were Afghans.
+
+The bombardments continued even after U.S. and Afghan military officials were notified the hospital was being attacked, the charity said.
+
+The circumstances weren't immediately clear, but the U.S. military was conducting an airstrike in Kunduz at the time the hospital was hit, U.S. Army Col. Brian Tibus said.
+
+The military is investigating whether a U.S. AC-130 gunship -- which was in the area firing on Taliban positions to defend U.S. special operations troops there -- is responsible, a U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity.
+
+The White House released a statement from President Barack Obama offering condolences to the charity from the American people.
+
+""The Department of Defense has launched a full investigation, and we will await the results of that inquiry before making a definitive judgment as to the circumstances of this tragedy,"" the President said. ""I ... expect a full accounting of the facts and circumstances.""
+
+The top U.S. and NATO military commander in Afghanistan said he spoke to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani about the deadly airstrike, the U.S. military said.
+
+""While we work to thoroughly examine the incident and determine what happened, my thoughts and prayers are with those affected. We continue to advise and assist our Afghan partners as they clear the city of Kunduz and surrounding areas of insurgents. As always, we will take all reasonable steps to protect civilians from harm,"" said Gen. John F. Campbell.
+
+The incident occurred on roughly the sixth day of fighting between Afghan government forces -- supported by U.S. air power and military advisers -- and the Taliban, which invaded the city early this week.
+
+According to MSF, the compound is gated and no staff members saw any fighters there or nearby.
+
+""If there was a major military operation going on there, our staff would have noticed. And that wasn't the case when the strikes occurred,"" Christopher Stokes, the charity's general director, told CNN.
+
+One nurse said in an article on the MSF website that he was sleeping in a safe room when he was awakened by a large explosion. The bombing lasted about an hour, Lajos Zoltan Jecs said.
+
+As he went to help the wounded, he and others tried to save a doctor. He died on an office table, Jecs said. The nurse saw six patients who had burned to death in their beds. Another patient was dead on an operating table.
+
+""I have no words to express this. It is unspeakable,"" he said.
+
+Charity: We told everyone of our location
+
+The charity, which had had been caring for hundreds already hurt in days of fighting, said it had told all warring parties the exact location of the trauma center, including most recently on Tuesday.
+
+When the aerial attack occurred, 105 patients and their caretakers were in the hospital. More than 80 MSF international and national staff were present.
+
+The U.S. special operations troops were in the area advising Afghan forces, the military official who was speaking anonymously said. The official stressed that the information about the probe was preliminary.
+
+Pribus said a ""manned, fixed-wing aircraft"" conducted a strike ""against individuals threatening the force"" at 2:15 a.m. local time, and that the strike ""may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.""
+
+The U.N. mission in Afghanistan sharply condemned the airstrike.
+
+""I condemn in the strongest terms the tragic and devastating air strike on the Médecins sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz early this morning, which resulted in the deaths and injury of medical personnel, patients and other civilians,"" said Nicholas Haysom, head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.
+
+The U.S. Embassy in Kabul expressed condolences on its Facebook page.
+
+""The U.S. Embassy mourns for the individuals and families affected by the tragic incident at the Doctors Without Borders hospital, and for all those suffering from the violence in Kunduz,"" it read. The embassy praised the group's work as ""heroic.""
+
+The International Committee of the Red Cross also expressed condemnation.
+
+""Such attacks against health workers and facilities undermine the capacity of humanitarian organizations to assist the Afghan people at a time when they most urgently need it,"" said Jean-Nicolas Marti, Head of the ICRC delegation in Afghanistan.
+
+Bullets broke windows and punctured the roof of the intensive care unit.
+
+The Taliban captured Kunduz earlier this week in the group's biggest victory in 15 years. It was a major setback for Afghan forces.
+
+Afghanistan said it reclaimed most of the city Thursday in a big operation backed by U.S. airstrikes.
+
+But hours later, there were signs that the Taliban were back in Kunduz, a resident told CNN. Gunshots erupted near the airport.
+
+Kunduz is a strategic hub on the main highway between Kabul and Tajikistan.
+
+On Thursday, Taliban fighters also took the Warduj district of Badakhshan, east of Kunduz province.
+
+Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen Mark Hertling said it was common for facilities such as hospitals to give combatants their coordinates.
+
+""The coalition air forces will put something called a no-fly area on that GPS coordinate, so you have a pinpoint dot on a map, where you say something is there ... don't hit it,"" Hertling said.
+
+""But when the fluidness of the battlefield takes place and you have engagements with troops on the ground, sometimes there are mistakes,"" he said.",REAL
+9930,Trump Makes Last-Minute Push To Appeal To Whites - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Hillary Clinton Waiting In Wings Of Stage Since 6 A.M. For DNC Speech PHILADELPHIA—Saying she arrived hours before any of the members of the production crew, sources confirmed Thursday that presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been waiting in the wings of the Wells Fargo Center stage since six o’clock this morning to deliver her speech at the Democratic National Convention. Depressed, Butter-Covered Tom Vilsack Enters Sixth Day Of Corn Bender After Losing VP Spot WASHINGTON—Saying she has grown increasingly concerned about her husband’s mental and physical well-being since last Friday, Christie Vilsack, the wife of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, told reporters Thursday that the despondent, butter-covered cabinet member has entered the sixth day of a destructive corn bender after being passed over for the Democratic vice presidential spot. DNC Speech: ‘I Am Proud To Say I Walked In On Bill And Hillary Having Sex’ A friend of the Clinton family describes a Hillary who America never gets to see: the one he saw having sex. Trump Sick And Tired Of Mainstream Media Always Trying To Put His Words Into Some Sort Of Context NEW YORK—Emphasizing that the practice was just more evidence of journalists’ bias against him, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stated Thursday that he was sick and tired of the mainstream media always attempting to place his words into some kind of context. Who’s Speaking At The DNC: Day 4 Here is a guide to the major speakers who will be addressing attendees on the final night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention Bound, Gagged Joaquin Castro Horrified By What His Identical Twin Brother Might Be Doing Out On DNC Floor PHILADELPHIA—Struggling to free himself from the tightly wound lengths of rope binding his wrists and ankles together, bruised and gagged Texas congressman Joaquin Castro was reportedly horrified by what his identical twin brother, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, might be out doing on the floor of the DNC Thursday. Obama: ‘Hillary Will Fight To Protect My Legacy, Even The Truly Detestable Parts’ PHILADELPHIA—Emphasizing the former secretary of state’s competence and tenacity during his Democratic National Convention address Wednesday night, President Barack Obama praised Hillary Clinton as someone who would work tirelessly to defend and advance the legacy he had built, even the “truly repugnant parts.” Tim Kaine Clearly Tuning Out In Middle Of Boring Vice Presidential Acceptance Speech PHILADELPHIA—Describing the look of total disinterest on his face and noting how he kept peering down at his watch as the speech progressed, sources at the Democratic National Convention said that Virginia senator Tim Kaine clearly began tuning out partway through the boring vice presidential acceptance address Wednesday night. Cannon Overshoots Tim Kaine Across Wells Fargo Center PHILADELPHIA—Noting that the vice presidential nominee had been launched nearly 100 feet into the air during his entrance into the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night, sources reported that the cannon at the back of the Wells Fargo Center had accidentally overshot Tim Kaine across the arena, sending him crashing to the stage several dozen feet beyond the erected safety net. Biden Regales DNC With Story Of ’80s Girl Band Vixen Breaking Hard Rock’s Glass Ceiling PHILADELPHIA—Devoting a large portion of his speech to the “pioneering, stiffy-inducing” all-female quartet, Vice President Joe Biden regaled the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night with the rousing story of the metal band Vixen breaking hard rock’s glass ceiling in the late 1980s. ",FAKE
+4514,A new 9/11 memorial to Flight 93: ‘Our loved ones left a legacy for all of us’,"—Debby Borza stood before a wall of photos of 40 people who died here Sept. 11, 2001, and gently tapped her daughter’s face on a computer touch screen, not knowing exactly what to expect.
+
+“What do they have to say about my dear, sweet daughter?” she said, her face brightening as the screen filled with photos of Deora Frances Bodley, 20, at her high school graduation, working as a volunteer reading tutor, visiting Paris — an album of a promising young life cut short 14 years ago Friday, when four al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked United Airlines Flight 93.
+
+Borza was among the family members given an early look at the $26 million Flight 93 National Memorial visitor center that opened this week, remembering the legacy of the 9/11 attacks and honoring the courage of 40 passengers and crew members who fought back against their four hijackers, preventing the plane from hitting its presumed target, the U.S. Capitol.
+
+“It’s important to me that the visitor sees what these 40 people took on, to take a stand for freedom, to take the kind of stand that cost their lives,” said Borza, whose daughter was the youngest female passenger on Flight 93. “Maybe there will be some special thing they see about Deora that will inspire them.”
+
+As Americans mark the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, thousands will gather at long-established monuments at Ground Zero in New York, at the Pentagon in Virginia and at other sites honoring the nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives in the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history. But those who come to the national monument in Shanksville, to honor Bodley and the passengers who kept 9/11 from becoming even more catastrophic, will find a work still in progress.
+
+The stunning concrete-and-glass visitors center and museum are finally open, but landscaping and other finishing touches are still underway. Yet another structure, the Tower of Voices, a nearly 100-foot bell tower with 40 chimes, is scheduled to be built during the next two years.
+
+A memorial plaza close to the crash site, in a field that was once a strip mine, was completed in time for the 10th anniversary in 2011.
+
+At the time, former president Bill Clinton, visiting the site with former president George W. Bush, expressed frustration with the pace of the project.
+
+Clinton and Bush soon became personally involved, speeding fundraising and development, according to Gordon Felt, president of Families of Flight 93.
+
+“President Clinton and President Bush both came through for us,” said Felt, whose brother, Edward Porter Felt, 41, died in the crash.
+
+Felt said the families were closely involved in all aspects of the complex development, working with private donors and state and federal officials — as well as the National Park Service, which operates the memorial — to raise money, acquire land, select a design and complete construction.
+
+“Our loved ones left a legacy for all of us,” Felt said, noting that the plane, which was traveling at 563 mph, was less than 20 minutes of flying time from Washington. “If the Capitol building was destroyed that day, just think how much more devastating an impact that day would have had on our country.”
+
+The legacy of Flight 93 might already have inspired others to stand up against terrorist attacks, Felt said. Last month, three Americans acted to avert a massacre on a train in France.
+
+“It’s important that we don’t forget the events of the day, but the individual people who stood up to say no,” Felt said. “They could have sat back and let others dictate the end of their lives. But they fought back and became heroes in the process.”
+
+In the chill and rain
+
+On Thursday, several hundred people huddled under umbrellas in a heavy, chilly drizzle for the official opening of the visitors center. Speakers remembered the passengers and crew of Flight 93, who “changed the course of American history,” said Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D).
+
+“They are modern-day heroes who represent the very best in us,” said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who also quoted from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered on another remote Pennsylvania field: “We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”
+
+Alan Hantman, the appointed architect of the Capitol from 1997 to 2007, addressed family members in the crowd, noting that he was in the building on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and saying, “I’m one of those who was saved by your loved ones.”
+
+Paul Murdoch, the architect of the memorial, said it is designed to highlight the power of the story of Flight 93.
+
+“In its raw severity, we acknowledge their sacrifice. In its solemn darkness, we acknowledge their loss. In its calm serenity, we offer solace at their final resting place. And in its monumental scale, we praise their heroic deeds,” Murdoch told the crowd.
+
+The visitors center and museum is set between two soaring concrete walls that rise 40 feet high, one foot for each of those who died. It is set directly on Flight 93’s flight path, with a black stone walkway indicating the precise route that the plane followed. On the valley floor below, a large boulder marks the point of impact, serving almost as a headstone in a place where very few human remains were recovered.
+
+The center presents the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as they unfolded. The first display that visitors encounter features that morning’s Wall Street Journal; photos of local students entering an elementary school; a diagram showing that there were 4,500 planes in the air when Flight 93 took off at 8:42 a.m. from Newark on its way to San Francisco.
+
+The next display features video clips of a stunned Katie Couric telling viewers of NBC’s “Today” that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. There follows video of the second plane hitting, the South Tower collapsing, the voice of ABC News anchor Peter Jennings saying, “My God.”
+
+Display cases are filled with tiny fragments of the plane; bits of metal and wire and electronics; a charred seat belt; a safety instruction card; bent metal spoons and forks; the Oracle employee identification card of passenger Todd Beamer; the New Jersey driver’s license of passenger Colleen Fraser; a Visa card that belonged to one of the hijackers.
+
+At one display, visitors can pick up a phone and listen to some of the 37 calls that were made from Flight 93 that morning, some to 911 and some to family members. Those calls allowed passengers to understand that what they faced was not a normal hijacking, and it also allowed them to say goodbye.
+
+“I just wanted to tell you I love you. We’re having a little problem on the plane. I’m totally fine. I just love you more than anything, just know that,” Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas says in a message on her husband’s answering machine.
+
+Passenger Linda Gronlund calls her sister and says: “I just love you and I just wanted to tell you that. I don’t know if I’m going to get the chance to tell you that again or not.”
+
+Another wall is dedicated to a life-size photograph of a Boeing 757 cabin, showing the plane as the passengers would have seen it after the hijackers forced them all to the back. When they decided to rush their attackers, they had to move 100 feet to the front of the plane, down an aisle 20 inches wide.
+
+Ed Root, whose cousin, flight attendant Lorraine Bay, died in the crash, stood in front of the photograph, contemplating that daunting prospect.
+
+“We all ask ourselves, ‘What would I have done if I was here?’ ” Root said. “What would you do? Would you have just stayed back there and hoped for the best? Or would you have reacted? Thankfully, they did react.”
+
+While 9/11 is a defining event for America, Root noted that it is getting to be “history” for younger Americans, even those now in college.
+
+“We need them to remember,” he said. “This history is not over. This is a story that goes on.”",REAL
+1612,Fact checking the fourth round of GOP debates,"Fox Business News aired two GOP presidential debates Tuesday: a prime-time event starring eight candidates and an earlier debate featuring four second-tier contenders, based on an average of recent polls.
+
+Not every candidate uttered facts that are easily fact checked, but following is a list of 15 suspicious or interesting claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.
+
+This was a great line by Rubio, well delivered, but it’s totally off base.
+
+The median wage of welders is $37,420, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median wage for philosophy teachers is $63,630, according to BLS.
+
+In fact, the average first-year salary for a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy is $42,200 — with a mid-career average of $85,000, according to Payscale.com. For college professors, the median salary is $89,913, with the top 10 percent having a salary near $200,000.
+
+By contrast, the top 10 percent salary for welders is only about $58,590, BLS says.
+
+Carson has a point, but such a trend did not play out every time the federal minimum wage was raised.
+
+Our friends at PolitiFact have compiled a chart showing the years Congress raised the minimum wage, and the months of job growth in the following one-year period. The chart shows that between 1978 and 2009, raising the federal minimum wage did not always result in job loss or job growth. In fact, it was split almost evenly; out of the 11 times the minimum wage was raised, there was overall job growth six times, and overall job loss five times.
+
+Still, the Congressional Budget Office projected that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 from the current wage of $7.25 per hour would result in about 500,000 fewer workers having jobs — and possibly up to 1 million workers would be affected. Raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour could result in 100,000 to 200,000 jobs lost, the CBO projected.
+
+However, many more low-wage workers’ earnings would increase as a result of raising the minimum wage, the CBO found. Under the $10.10 option, 16.5 million workers with hourly wages less than the proposed minimum would see an increase in their earnings. Under the $9 option, 7.6 million workers would see an increase.
+
+Conventional economic analysis may show that increasing the minimum wage reduces employment by increasing the cost to employers, and by raising the cost of low-wage workers relative to other inputs like machines or technology, the CBO wrote. But conventional economic analysis might not always apply, according to the CBO: “For example, when a firm is hiring more workers and needs to boost pay for existing workers doing the same work — to match what it needs to pay to recruit the new workers — hiring a new worker costs the company not only that new worker’s wages but also the additional wages paid to retain other workers.”
+
+Trump likes to cite this historical example to defend his plan to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, but never uses its now-politically-incorrect name, “Operation Wetback.”
+
+As our colleague Yanan Wang documented in September, this campaign dumped hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants back into Mexico, with few resources to fend for themselves: “Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home. … After one such round-up and transfer in July, 88 people died from heat stroke.”
+
+Moreover, researchers now believe claims that more than 1 million people were deported to be highly exaggerated, with the actual figure closer to 250,000.
+
+A Brookings Institution report appears to confirm Paul’s claim. But at The Fact Checker, we always warn readers against correlating the economic trends in a city or state to policy decisions of a single executive — or in this case, his or her party.
+
+A study by the Brookings Institution ranked the top 10 and bottom 10 largest cities in the country by income inequality, using 2012 Census data. PolitiFact rated Paul’s statement Half True, based on this study.
+
+Among the 10 cities with the highest income inequality, nine had Democratic mayors. Atlanta, under a Democratic mayor, had the highest inequality out of the nation’s largest cities. The other cities led by Democrats were San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York, Oakland, Chicago, Los Angeles and Baltimore.
+
+PolitiFact found that seven of the 10 cities in the report with the least income inequality had Republican mayors: Oklahoma City; Omaha, Neb.; Fort Worth, Texas; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Mesa, Ariz.; Arlington, Tex.; and Virginia Beach, Va.
+
+The 10 cities with the least inequality obviously are smaller cities than the ones in the top 10. The range of income distribution is wider in larger cities with bigger populations.
+
+This is stale statistic, derived from a report published in 2014 by the Brookings Institution, which studied Census Bureau data called Business Dynamic Statistics. Brookings analysts tracked data back to 1978 and found that starting in 2008, business deaths exceeded business births through 2011.
+
+It soon became a favorite GOP talking point (Marco Rubio used it in the last debate). But that report is out of date. More recent data shows the trend shifted in 2012 and in the past two years, business starts began to exceed business deaths.
+
+In saying he was against increasing the minimum wage, Carson cited a figure for black teenage unemployment that seemed suspiciously high to some viewers. Apparently he meant to refer to the unemployment rate, though it came out sounding like he was saying 80 percent were unemployed.
+
+But then a 19.8 percent unemployment rate sounded suspiciously low. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that it stood at 25.6 percent as of October.
+
+The Carson campaign initially sent a 2013 report from the American Enterprise Institute that said the jobless rate for black male teens was 44.3 percent — but 19.8 percent for white male teens. Oops. Then we were sent a pair of studies that show the summer jobless rate for black teens was 19 percent. Seems like a shifting of the goal posts, but apparently he was talking about summer employment. He just didn’t make that very clear.
+
+We note this comment because it is very puzzling. The Chinese are in Syria? The Carson campaign did not respond to a query. (Update: Spokesman Doug Watts sent links to blog posts from September 2015 speculating that China was in Syria and a 2012 article about possible Chinese participation in war games with Russia and Syria, which noted the reports were unconfirmed.)
+
+But while there were reports in Middle Eastern media that China would fight alongside Russia in Syria, that has been dismissed by the Chinese media as “speculative nonsense.” A newspaper tied to the ruling Communist Party noted, “It’s not China that brought chaos to Syria, and China has no reason to rush to the front lines and play a confrontational role.”
+
+This may have been true at the start of his campaign, but it’s no longer valid though Trump loves to keep saying this line. In the third quarter of this year, the Trump campaign received $4 million in unsolicited donations, according to the campaign’s latest financial filing. Since launching the campaign, Trump has spent about $2 million of his own money, the filing said.
+
+Carson appears to cite the common statistic that 22 veterans commit suicide a day. At best, this figure is a rough, outdated estimate based on partial data.
+
+This statistic comes from the VA’s 2012 Suicide Data Report, for which researchers analyzed death certificates of veterans from 21 states, from 1999 to 2011. They took the percentage of veteran deaths identified as suicides, out of all suicides from those states during that period. Then they applied that percentage to the number of suicides in the United States in a given year. That comes out to 22 suicides a day.
+
+But the sample size was fewer than half the states, and did not include some states with the largest veteran populations (such as Arizona, California, Texas and North Carolina). Researchers who wrote this report provided a major caveat about their findings: “It is recommended that the estimated number of veterans be interpreted with caution due to the use of data from a sample of states and existing evidence of uncertainty in veteran identifiers on U.S. death certificates.” The Department of Veterans Affairs, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Defense Department have been working on a larger study to accurately quantify the suicide problem among veterans.
+
+Suicide is a serious concern among veterans, and Americans at large. In fact, suicides among veterans happen at a higher rate than Americans in general.
+
+Huckabee appears to be citing data from a flawed article that appeared in the tabloid Daily Mail in September. That one in five figure is simply wrong.
+
+The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reports that of the nearly 800,000 refugees arriving by sea in 2015, 52 percent are from Syria, followed by 19 percent from Afghanistan and 6 percent from Iraq. (Nearly 3,500 people were dead or missing because of the sea journey.) Obviously, both Afghanistan and Iraq are also war-torn countries.
+
+About 650,000 refugees arrived in Greece, followed by nearly 150,000 in Italy.
+
+UNHCR also says there are nearly 4.3 million registered Syrian refugees, with more than 2 million living in Turkey, 1 million in Lebanon and more than 600,000 in Jordan.
+
+The former Arkansas governor gets this depressing factoid correct. In January of 2000, there were 17.3 million manufacturing jobs in the United States, according to government statistics. As of October this year, there were just 12.3 million manufacturing jobs.
+
+Huckabee was also right to reach back to 2000, during the Bill Clinton presidency, as that was the high point for manufacturing in the past 20 years. Almost 5 million manufacturing jobs were lost during George W. Bush’s term in office — and the nadir was reached during President Obama’s term, when the United States had only 11.5 million manufacturing jobs. Some of those jobs have been recovered, but the total number of manufacturing jobs is still lower than when Obama took office.
+
+None of the Democratic candidates have said they would boost tax rates so high, even on the wealthy.
+
+Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has not yet released a tax plan, but he has repeatedly denied that he would increase taxes from the current marginal rate of 39.6 percent to as high as 80 or even 90 percent. (The marginal rate is what you pay on each additional dollar earned.) Sanders claims he would fund his $1 trillion plan to rebuild U.S. infrastructure by tapping corporate profits now stashed in overseas tax havens.
+
+The United States had a marginal tax rate of 90 percent in the Dwight Eisenhower administration, and then John F. Kennedy proposed to reduce it to 70 percent. (The plan was approved by Congress after his assassination.) But even such rates would not take 90 percent of a person’s income.
+
+The crime rate has been decreasing for decades, but you wouldn’t know it just listening to what Christie says about the rampant “lawlessness” in the country.
+
+The violent crime rate has been decreasing steadily since 1991, despite overall population growth. The FBI Uniform Crime Report, which compiles data from law enforcement agencies, shows the violent crime rate decreased by 15 percent since President Obama took office in 2009. In 2011, the violent crime rate was the lowest it had been since 1971.
+
+The murder rate also has been dropping in major American cities, including in New York City. This has been the trend for the past decade, even in cities that once were overrun by crime. This trend holds even despite a blip in some cities this summer.
+
+It’s not entirely clear where Santorum got his figure, or how the father “living” at the time the child is born is an incentive not to marry the mother. Perhaps Santorum meant that the father was living in the home at the time the child was born, leading to his argument about cohabiting.
+
+In any case, a 2014 Pew Research Center analysis of 2013 Census data show that 46 percent of children younger than 18 years old are living in a “traditional” family — a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage. According to the analysis, 34 percent of children in 2013 were living with an unmarried parent, and most of the unmarried parents were single. Four percent of all children were living with two cohabiting parents.
+
+Santorum may be referring to a report, referenced in a 2014 Associated Press article, by researchers at Harvard University and Cornell University that found found that at least half of mothers who were cohabiting when their child was born were still in relationships with the child’s biological father five years later. More couples are cohabitating, and the trend likely will continue because many couples are postponing marriage until their finances are more stable, according to the article, citing research by the National Center for Health Statistics.
+
+The National Center for Health Statistics also found that nonmarital births increasingly are likely to occur among cohabiting couples, though the rate of births of unmarried women has decreased since the peak in 2008.
+
+This is one of Jindal’s favorite boasts about his record, but he takes too much credit for saying he “cut” the state budget 26 percent.
+
+The state budget in fiscal 2009, Jindal’s first budget after taking office in 2008, was $34.3 billion. In fiscal 2016, the proposed budget was $25.1 billion. That is a $9.2 billion decrease, or 26.8 percent.
+
+But this budget decrease was not due to his executive decisions alone. Federal funding also decreased by $10 billion during those eight years, from $19.7 billion to $9.7 billion. Part of this decrease was due to waning federal funding for hurricane recovery, according to the Times-Picayune.",REAL
+1951,OnPolitics | 's politics blog,"What you need to know about the election recounts
+
+Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein intends to seek recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.",REAL
+9189,CLINTON CAMPAIGN COOPERATED WITH POLITICO ON ‘DEMYSTIFYING’ HUMA ABEDIN,"Home › MEDIA | POLITICS › CLINTON CAMPAIGN COOPERATED WITH POLITICO ON ‘DEMYSTIFYING’ HUMA ABEDIN CLINTON CAMPAIGN COOPERATED WITH POLITICO ON ‘DEMYSTIFYING’ HUMA ABEDIN 0 SHARES 
+[11/1/16] Asked to provide a quotation for a Politico profile of Huma Abedin in July 2015, Clinton Campaign manager John Podesta wanted to use the phrase “wicked smart” instead of “bright,” and he emphasized Abedin’s “strategic sense.” 
+Podesta also agreed with a campaign staffer’s suggestion to describe Abedin as “an integral part of the team.” 
+The Wikileaks email exchange , dated July 2, 2015 and released on Tuesday, begins with Clinton’s press secretary Nicholas Merrill telling Milia Fisher, Podesta’s aide, that “Politico has been working on a profile on Huma that we are being what I’d call partially cooperative with.” 
+Merrill said after consulting with Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri and Huma herself, the campaign decided to have the reporter sit down with Huma “off the record.” 
+“We think there is some value in demystifying her a bit in general, and Politico isn’t a bad place to do it,” Merrill wrote to Fisher. 
+Merrill asked Fisher to see if Podesta “would be willing to weigh in, which I think would be good in the spirit of showing team unity.” 
+“The piece will be about Huma’s evolution from body person to senior staffer, so if he’s up for it, maybe John could say something about her being a multi-faceted team player,” Merrill wrote. Then he offered a suggested quotation: 
+“Like: I was there at the White House when Huma was a young intern, and now she’s an integral part of the team. She’s as multi-faceted as she is bright, and when you combine that with her humility, you couldn’t ask for a better colleague.” 
+Merrill tells Fisher, “Feel free to tweak that, put it in John’s voice, or blow it up.” 
+Fisher forwarded Merrill’s email to Podesta, asking him if he’d be willing to provide a quote. “Comms (communications) thinks it might lend an air of community to the piece,” she wrote to Podesta. 
+Podesta’s reply: “Change bright to ‘wicked smart’ and after humilty add ‘and strategic sense.'” 
+The complete email exchange, as provided by WikiLeaks, can be seen here : 
+The July 2, 2015 Politico profile of Abedin described her as “Clinton’s longest-serving aide.” It said that “like a mother monitoring her child on the playground, she never let Clinton drift out of her line of sight, ever vigilant and poised to act.” Post navigation",FAKE
+5105,What I Learned From Speaking to an R.N.C. Attendee From Every State,"“I was in Kentucky when Sen. Rand Paul announced his candidacy and I worked on his campaign.”
+
+So you're still warming up the idea of Donald?
+
+“I’m here for a totally different reason . . .the issue I’m passionate about is medical cannabis oil to treat my autistic son. . . I was up here last week trying to get it in the platform.”",REAL
+5401,Zakharova: Kiev's talk of an armed OSCE mission is disinformation,"October 27, 2016 - Fort Russ News - Novorossiya - translated by J. Arnoldski -  
+
+
+During a press conference in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, official spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told journalists that Ukraine is purposefully disinforming the public on the question of providing weapons to OSCE observers in Donbass. 
+“Kiev’s statement that some kind of agreement on deploying an OSCE police mission in Donbass has been achieved does not match reality. The mission will have a purely civil character,” Zakharova explained. 
+According to her, Russia supported the possibility of providing observers with  service weapons  during discussions , but the issue did not go forward due to a lack of consensus. 
+
+Zakharova added that the deployment of a police mission is possible only on the contact line.  
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
+                                                   
+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+2987,"Final votes on Patriot Act, trade deal bill set dramatic stage for Congress’ return","The Senate’s failure to extend the USA Patriot Act will bring the legislation on NSA phone-record collection and other key surveillance activities perilously close to expiring on June 1, forcing senators to return early from recess for a rare Sunday session.
+
+The Senate vote was just one of two this weekend that set the stage for dramatic showdowns on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks and months.
+
+The GOP-led upper chamber passed bipartisan legislation Friday night to strengthen President Obama's hand in global trade talks. However, the legislation must now pass the Republican-led House, with help from Democrats because some conservative members oppose the legislation.
+
+Speaker John Boehner supports the measure and says Republicans will do their part to pass it.
+
+Dozens of House Republicans oppose the legislation either out of ideological reasons or because they are loath to enhance Obama's authority, especially at their own expense.
+
+Senate and now House Democrats are showing little inclination to support legislation that much of organized labor opposes.
+
+On the Patriot Act bill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he will bring the upper chamber back into session on Sunday, May 31 -- roughly 24 hours before the post-9/11 legislation expires.
+
+Meanwhile, the National Security Agency is starting to winding down its bulk collection of domestic-calling records in preparation for the Senate voting again against the legislation, according to the Justice Department, which says the collection takes time to halt.
+
+The Senate went into the early hours on Saturday morning to vote on the legislation before leaving Washington for Memorial Day recess.
+
+By the time senators broke for the holiday, they had blocked a House-passed bill and several short-term extensions of the key provisions in the Patriot Act.
+
+The main stumbling block was a House-passed provision to end the NSA collecting the phone-call metadata and instead have the records remain with telephone companies subject to a case-by-case review.
+
+McConnell warned against allows the NSA and other key surveillance programs under the act to expire.
+
+However, he and other key Republican senators oppose the House approach, backed by officials who argued it is the best way for the United States to keep valuable surveillance tools.
+
+Fellow GOP Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, also a 2016 presidential candidate, called the Senate's failure to allow the extension a victory for privacy rights.
+
+""We should never give up our rights for a false sense of security,"" Paul said in a statement. ""This is only the beginning -- the first step of many. I will continue to do all I can until this illegal government spying program is put to an end, once and for all.""
+
+The White House has pressured the Senate to back the House bill, which drew an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote last week and had the backing of GOP leaders, Democrats and the libertarian-leaning members.
+
+But the Senate blocked the bill on a vote of 57-42, short of the 60-vote threshold to move ahead. That was immediately followed by rejection of a two-month extension to the existing programs. The vote was 54-45, again short of the 60-vote threshold.
+
+McConnell repeatedly asked for an even shorter renewal of current law, ticking down days from June 8 to June 2. But Paul and other opponents of the post-Sept. 11 law objected each time.
+
+At issue is a section of the Patriot Act, Section 215, used by the government to justify secretly collecting the ""to and from"" information about nearly every American landline telephone call. For technical and bureaucratic reasons, the program was not collecting a large chunk of mobile calling records, which made it less effective as fewer people continued to use landlines.
+
+When former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the program in 2013, many Americans were outraged that NSA had their calling records. President Obama ultimately announced a plan similar to the USA Freedom Act and asked Congress to pass it. He said the plan would preserve the NSA's ability to hunt for domestic connections to international plots without having an intelligence agency hold millions of Americans' private records.
+
+Since it gave the government extraordinary powers, Section 215 of the Patriot Act was designed to expire at midnight on May 31 unless Congress renews it.
+
+Under the USA Freedom Act, the government would transition over six months to a system under which it queries the phone companies with known terrorists' numbers to get back a list of numbers that had been in touch with a terrorist number.
+
+But if Section 215 expires without replacement, the government would lack the blanket authority to conduct those searches. There would be legal methods to hunt for connections in U.S. phone records to terrorists, said current and former U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. But those methods would not be applicable in every case.
+
+Far less attention has been paid to two other surveillance authorities that expire as well. One makes it easier for the FBI to track ""lone wolf"" terrorism suspects who have no connection to a foreign power, and another allows the government to eavesdrop on suspects who continuously discard their cellphones in an effort to avoid surveillance.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+1653,Don’t write Donald Trump’s political obituary just yet: Why surging Ben Carson looks like a flavor of the month,"Trump has been the leader for several months now, but Carson appears to have broken through with key demographics, particularly evangelicals. The CBS report sums up Carson’s advantages well:
+
+Carson has made gains across many key Republican groups. In a reversal from earlier this month, he now ahead of Trump among women and is running neck and neck with him among men. Carson’s support among evangelicals has risen and he now leads Trump by more than 20 points with this group. Carson performs well among conservative Republicans and those who identify as Tea partiers.
+
+It’s not terribly surprising that Carson leads Trump among women and evangelicals: Trump is the misogynist par excellence and Carson is a proud religious fanatic – these are natural demographics for Carson. But Carson’s rising support among men and Tea Partiers, relative to Trump, is somewhat surprising.
+
+Tea Partiers don’t do policy. Their project is essentially negative, which is why the GOP’s nihilism and obstructionism began in earnest when Tea Partiers were elected to Congress in 2010. Neither Carson nor Trump have anything resembling a platform or a plan. They’re outsiders with no political experience who want to disrupt the status quo – that’s a message that resonates with conservative men and Tea Partiers.
+
+If there’s a difference, it’s that Trump is louder and more aggressively obnoxious than Carson, which ought to endear him to these demographics. Evidently, though, Carson’s unhinged nice guy routine is working. His new campaign ad perfectly illustrates both his appeal and his vacuousness.
+
+In a 30-second TV spot, Carson manages to hit all the right conservative notes without coming close to explaining what he’s going to do. “I’m Ben Carson and I’m running for president,” he says. “The political class and their pundit buddies say: ‘Impossible. He’s too outside the box.’ Well, they do know impossible. Impossible to balance the budget, impossible to get border security, impossible to put aside partisanship…I’m Ben Carson, I’m running for president, and I’m very much outside the box.”
+
+If you’re waiting for the part where he says how he’s going to balance the budget or get border security or put aside partisanship, you don’t know Ben Carson or the new GOP. Carson is basically doing the same thing as Trump: bashing the “political class” and promising to fix everything that’s broken – only Carson does so with a lukewarm smile whereas Trump pounds his fist on the table with Tri-State bravado. It doesn’t matter that neither candidate has a discernible plan to accomplish any of these things – the empty rhetoric is more than enough for Republican voters. One of the more interesting findings in the new CBS/NYT poll is that 55 percent of Trump backers say their support is firm, while 80 percent of Carson supporters say they could change their minds. This is good news for Trump; it suggests Carson is far more of a flavor of the month candidate than Trump. Whatever the reason, Trump has real staying power – he’s proven that. Carson, however, remains a question mark. He may well win in Iowa, thanks to his support among evangelicals, but the GOP’s last two Iowa winners – Santorum and Huckabee – lost the nomination. Trump, moreover, is well-positioned in the other early primary states like New Hampshire and South Carolina, where he remains comfortably ahead of Carson. Carson’s boost in the polls will be a boon to his campaign, but his long-term viability is still debatable. If this trend continues for another month or two, however, Trump might be in real trouble.",REAL
+10061,Manny Pacquiao's Son Dead? Report Says Jimuel Pacquiao Dies Of Asthm Complications - Morning News USA,"Continue Scroll down to preview in browser Manny Pacquiao’s Son Dead? Report Says Jimuel Pacquiao Dies Of Asthm Complications NCAA Season 87: Opening Day, July 2, 2011 inboundpass/ Flickr cc",FAKE
+6323,Hillary Clinton's Postapocalyptic Hellscape Plan??,"Hillary Clinton's Postapocalyptic Hellscape Plan?? ""Important we avoid age of peace..."" Re: Hillary Clinton's Postapocalyptic Hellscape Plan?? That has to be BS..look at the email.. even the .com is wrong, and is ;comdingdangaramaramaflimflam?? Mail with questions or comments about this site. ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.007s (7 queries)",FAKE
+6742,Carmel Institute celebrates 5th anniversary with jazz concert,"Carmel Institute celebrates 5th anniversary with jazz concert October 27, 2016 RBTH u.s.-russia relations , jazz The Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History celebrated its 5th Anniversary. Source: Press photo 
+The Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History celebrated its 5th Anniversary by hosting a standing room only concert at the historic Lincoln Theatre celebrating Cultural Dialogue and the Giants of Jazz. Over 1200 guests and students from all over the Washington DC metropolitan area thoroughly enjoyed this memorable concert celebrating the common language and mutual love of jazz that the United States and Russia share. 
+Source: Press photo 
+Said Carmel Institute Founder and Advisory Chair Susan E. Carmel, “The Carmel Institute emphasizes shared values, common interests and cultural dialogue. These are important qualities necessary to achieve cooperation, mutual respect and to overcome pervasive stereotypes. I am honored and grateful to have two incredible cultural Ambassadors at our Fifth Anniversary celebration for the Carmel Institute. Igor Butman and Wynton Marsalis exemplify the best of cultural diplomacy and cultural dialogue, and help us represent the Institutes' focus on enhancing greater cultural understanding through shared common interests and face to face interactions. By continuing to emphasize the importance of these qualities to our younger generations and future leaders, we are making an investment into the future that will be paid back ten-fold over time.” 
+Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the U.S. and Honorary Co-Chair of the Institute acknowledged the Institute’s milestone by saying, “We would like to congratulate the Carmel Institute for Russian Culture and History and its leadership with the fifth anniversary and express our gratitude for their support and dedication. What started as a modest cultural initiative, five years later has grown both in scope and scale. Far surpassing the initial plans, it has now turned into an Institute that creates an opportunity to strengthen interest and knowledge of culture and history of Russia, thus contributing to the increase of mutual understanding between the two nations.” 
+Source: Press photo 
+According to jazz great Igor Butman, “I am honored to contribute to the rich tradition of jazz diplomacy by performing with Wynton Marsalis at the fifth anniversary concert of the Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History. It is an even greater honor to perform at the Lincoln Theater where so many giants of jazz have expressed themselves in the universal language of music. I wish the Carmel Institute many more years of success in its tireless campaign to promote culture as a medium of communication between two great cultures that have always achieved success through dialogue and cooperation.” 
+Source: Press photo 
+Dr. Anton Fedyashin, Director of the Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History, added, “The Carmel Institute has become an integral part of American University’s commitment to an education that prepares students for global responsibilities in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Without ignoring problems of which history provides so many examples, our program emphasizes shared values, common interests, and cooperative achievement, and always points towards the positive stages in the US-Russian relationship from which we hope that students can learn in order to guide their decisions as they emerge as global leaders.",FAKE
+5891,Trump’s Twitter Access Revoked - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Cleveland Indians Worried Team Cursed After Building Franchise On Old Native American Stereotype CLEVELAND—Having watched in horror as their team crumbled after a 3-1 World Series lead, members of the Cleveland Indians expressed concern Thursday that the organization has been cursed for building their franchise on an incredibly old Native American stereotype. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Nurse Reminds Elderly Man She’s Just Down The Hall If He Starts To Die DES PLAINES, IL—Assuring him that she’d be at his side in a jiffy, local nurse Wendy Kaufman reminded an elderly resident at the Briarwood Assisted Living Community that she was just down the hall if he started to die, sources reported Tuesday. ",FAKE
+462,Raise the wage: Paul Krugman shatters the myth that we can’t afford to boost workers’ pay,"Three things are inevitable in this life: death, taxes, and conservative claims that we simply can’t afford to give low-wage workers a pay boost. Nobel Prize-winning economist takes on the latter inevitability in his New York Times column today, seizing on recent developments to illustrate why arguments against wage increases don’t withstand serious scrutiny.
+
+Take McDonald’s announcement this week that it would pay its workers $1 above the minimum wage per hour at the 1,500 outlets owned and operated by McDonald’s itself. (The move, which still falls well short of what workers and their advocates seek, affects 90,000 workers, but it doesn’t apply to the 750,000 workers employed by McDonald’s 3,100 American franchisees.) While modest in scope,McDonald’s move — coming on the heels of similar wage boosts by bold-faced names like Walmart and Target — suggests that “[m]aybe it’s not that hard to give American workers a raise, after all,” Krugman writes.
+
+While free market fundamentalists might retort that global competition will sink firms that boost worker pay, Krugman responds by noting that most American workers are “employed in service industries that aren’t exposed to international trade.”
+
+What about technology? Isn’t it an unassailable maxim of modern economics that we can afford to pay larger wages only to highly skilled workers — ones who can’t be replaced by machines? As Mike Konczal wrote recently, technology is but a small part of the larger inequality phenomenon. The key factors, he pointed out, include tax policy, the financialization of the American economy, deunionization, and the conscious political choice not to raise the minimum wage.
+
+What’s more, Krugman observes, “Workers are people; relations between employers and employees are more complicated than simple supply and demand.” This truism is borne out in empirical evidence, with comparisons of states that raised their minimum wages with neighboring states that didn’t showing that higher pay does not mean fewer jobs.
+
+Similar factors explain another puzzle about labor markets: the way different firms in what looks like the same business can pay very different wages. The classic comparison is between Walmart (with its low wages, low morale, and very high turnover) and Costco (which offers higher wages and better benefits, and makes up the difference with better productivity and worker loyalty). True, the two retailers serve different markets; Costco’s merchandise is higher-end and its customers more affluent. But the comparison nonetheless suggests that paying higher wages costs employers a lot less than you might think. And this, in turn, suggests that it shouldn’t be all that hard to raise wages across the board. Suppose that we were to give workers some bargaining power by raising minimum wages, making it easier for them to organize, and, crucially, aiming for full employment rather than finding reasons to choke off recovery despite low inflation. Given what we now know about labor markets, the results might be surprisingly big — because a moderate push might be all it takes to persuade much of American business to turn away from the low-wage strategy that has dominated our society for so many years. There’s historical precedent for this kind of wage push. The middle-class society now dwindling in our rearview mirrors didn’t emerge spontaneously; it was largely created by the “great compression” of wages that took place during World War II, with effects that lasted for more than a generation.",REAL
+2102,Obama’s Arctic Trip Comes as Climate Change Builds as 2016 Issue,"President Barack Obama’s trip to Alaska’s Arctic on Monday likely will reverberate much farther south, on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, where global warming is expected to emerge as a key issue.
+
+His visit to the North Pole region, the first ever for a sitting president, coincides with a growing public consensus that the earth is heating up and that humans have something to do with it.",REAL
+6074,YouTube censoring videos – on censorship!,"YouTube censoring videos – on censorship! share in: Education , Google , Journalism YouTube has yet again censored another educational video from Prager University. The content of the banned video? Criticism of censorship; hopefully the irony of their choice to remove it isn’t lost on YouTube’s executives. The video, titled The Dark Art of Political Intimidation, was released last week and features Kimberly Strassel. Strassel is a Wall Street Journal columnist who explains tactics commonly used by the leftists to shut down free speech from the right. This included blackmail, harassment and intimidation. Back in 2010, the IRS started to target conservative non-profit organizations intentionally. Groups were experiencing heavy delays when trying to aquire tax exempt non-profit status. This was an attempt to curb their political involvement in the 2012 election, explained Strassel. A Democratic prosecutor in Wisconsin launched a shadow campaign of financial investigation against conservatives. Their houses were raided before sunrise, with accompanying gag orders to keep them quiet about the raids. The reason for all that was revenge for supporting the Republican Governor Scott Walker. Kimberly Strassel highlights even more examples in the five-minute video showing censorship of political opponents. Youtube placed the video into restricted mode — which is a common filter used by schools, libraries and parents to shield their children from outrageously obscene and graphic content. NewsBusters reports: “Conservative radio host Dennis Prager’s idea for PragerU is to give students alternative, non-progressive takes on history, civics and other issues. there’s no cursing, no violence or any kind of indecency in any of them.” Prager University’s videos including those that have been censored are all G rated. This leaves questions about why the popular video platform is placing restrictions on them. At least 21 additional videos produced by the conservative not for profit educational organization that is Prager University have been placed into restricted mode by Youtube. There is a petition circulating to stop the censorship, which has aquired over 76,000 signatures so far. Hopefully, YouTube will get its act together about restricting videos that pose no threat to children. Better yet, they should make some key changes to their algorithms to prevent this from happening in the future. A Youtube statement given to Wall Street Journal stated, “[V]ideo restrictions are decided by an ‘algorithm’ that factors in ‘community flagging’ and ‘sensitive content.’” Basically progressives tripped the algorithm in an attempt to limit free speech and political involvement from conservatives. YouTube has lifted the restriction on The Dark Art of Political Intimidation this past weekend, thanks to the Wall Street Journal giving them a very hard time over the censorship. Sources: ",FAKE
+1530,Hillary Clinton should proactively set out ethics rules,"Richard J. Davis is a former assistant Watergate special prosecutor and assistant secretary of the treasury for enforcement in the Carter administration. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
+
+(CNN) As we enter 2016, things certainly are looking more positive for Hillary Clinton than they appeared six months ago.
+
+The email controversy , while not gone, is fading. The Benghazi House Committee has been exposed as more about politics than a serious examination of security failings. Vice President Joe Biden has decided not to challenge her in the primaries.
+
+This then may be the ideal time for Clinton proactively to take steps to minimize the potential damage to her candidacy from other sources of controversy: the Clinton Foundation and speaking fees earned by former President Clinton. Such steps need to include significant restrictions on who the foundation will accept donations from as well as on where the former president will speak for money.
+
+Taking these steps now is particularly important for Hillary Clinton because one area where her poll numbers remain problematic is whether she is viewed as honest and trustworthy . And, as demonstrated by a recent Washington Post article, there remains media interest in the extraordinary amounts of money the Clintons have raised for their political and philanthropic activities.
+
+It is important to understand that the issue regarding the Clinton Foundation is not whether the foundation is (or was) a conduit for illegal bribes and it certainly is not about whether the foundation does truly humanitarian work. I am not aware of serious evidence that the former is the case. I am aware of many projects that the foundation has undertaken in the areas, among others, of global health and economic development, particularly in places where children and their mothers are severely disadvantaged. (Full disclosure: I am not supporting a candidate in the election at this point; I did contribute to the draft Biden movement before he decided not to run.)
+
+The issue is how, at a time when Americans have understandably become cynical about government, and where money in politics is already out of control, do we avoid adding to the impression that our government is for sale, and how does this candidate demonstrate to an already super suspicious public that she truly is an honest person committed to ethical government.
+
+In thinking about the foundation and speaking fees we are not operating on a clean slate. Questions have already been raised about how the foundation operated while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Donations in the hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars were accepted by the foundation from foreign governments and others when they had issues being considered by the State Department.
+
+Where we are talking about a foundation run by the secretary of state's husband, in both of these circumstances -- contributions to the foundation from those then having business before the department and the foundation doing business with the State Department -- the appearance of receiving favored treatment may be clearly present.
+
+Clinton cannot avoid having to respond to questions about foundation activities and speaking fees while she was secretary of state. History cannot be rewritten. She can, however, meaningfully address this controversy by announcing now that if she becomes President the foundation will not do business with the United States government, and that neither the foundation nor her husband will accept fees or contributions either from foreign entities or from those doing business or seeking to do business with the government.
+
+One objection to this approach might be that such restrictions would make it difficult if not impossible for the foundation to operate, or at least operate at its current level. The answer to this possible complaint is straightforward: No one is required to seek to become president of the United States, but if you do, you and your family simply cannot do certain things. And one of those things is accept fees or contributions that make it appear our government is for sale and that the way to influence U.S. policy is to contribute money to entities controlled by the President's family or pay huge fees to her husband.
+
+If fees or contributions were made to the spouse of the President of Zimbabwe or her foundation we would not tolerate it and, indeed, our government might well investigate such payments under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. We certainly should not tolerate it if such payments involve the family of the President of the United States. Hillary Clinton should act now to address this problem before it becomes a larger threat to her candidacy.",REAL
+2588,Israel hawks to Pope Francis: Stay out of politics,"There is an path for Democrats to regain the presidency — and it does not run through Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin.",REAL
+6982,"Budgeting the Good War, for 75 Years","Share This 
+Today we call it the status quo, or endless war, or we just don’t bother to notice it. Indeed, now more than ever we don’t notice it. It’s barely part of the 2016 election, even though we’re engaged in active conflict in half a dozen countries, toying with a relaunch of the Cold War with Russia and, of course, hemorrhaging, as always, more than half our annual discretionary budget on “defense.” 
+World War II has been going on for seven decades now and has no intention of ever stopping . . . of its own volition. But this year’s rocking electoral craziness – not just Hurricane Donald, but the unexpected staying power of the Bernie Sanders campaign – may well be the harbinger of transcendence. Apparently there’s another force in the universe capable of standing up to the American, indeed, the global, military-industrial status quo. 
+Slowly, slowly this force is organizing itself and taking human shape. This isn’t a simple process. After all, the game of empire – the game called war, the game of domination – has been coalescing political power for several thousand years now. 
+But our current military budget was birthed by the wars of the 20th century. William Hartung , writing recently at TomDispatch, shows the fascinating connectedness of the wars that followed VE and VJ Days, as the corporate beneficiaries of the Big War aligned with mainstream politicians of both major parties and coalesced into the Washington consensus. Over the decades they have engaged in an ongoing struggle to maintain military spending at breathtakingly high levels and avoid any sort of transition to something called peace. 
+The two pillars of this consensus, as Hartung points out, are the ideology of “armed exceptionalism,” that a shifting array of enemies are out there itching to destroy us, but we will persist in our mission to maintain order in every corner of the planet; and the “strategic placement of arms production facilities and military bases in key states and Congressional districts,” ensuring entrenched political power for the arms lobby. 
+So World War II initially, as we know, morphed into the Cold War, America’s crusade against communism, which was set into motion in 1950 by a long-classified report (NSC-68) prepared by the State and Defense departments and the CIA, urging the vigorous containment of Soviet expansion and the development of the hydrogen bomb. 
+President Truman “was somewhat taken aback at the costs associated with the report’s recommendations,” according to history.com , and “he hesitated to publicly support a program that would result in heavy tax increases for the American public, particularly since the increase would be spent on defending the United States during a time of peace.” 
+Peace! What a nuisance! But: “Thank God Korea came along,” as an aide to Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it at the time. The Korean War gave the militarists the enemy they needed and the nuclear arms race, and so much else, was born. The military budget was set for decades. 
+As Hartung points out, the next terrible hurdle the budget boys faced was in the wake of the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. That war, and the universal draft that essentially pulled the whole country into a front-row seat for it, spawned a passionate antiwar movement and, ultimately, a moldering national disgust for war, known as Vietnam Syndrome. The Cold War continued, but the U.S. military was confined to proxy wars for a while and had to rethink its strategy. 
+Two things happened. The universal draft was ended, removing most of the American middle class from a life-and-death stake in our military operations; and Saddam Hussein, our ally, was recast as Adolf Hitler. And in 1991, President George H.W. Bush embarked on a month of war with Iraq known as Operation Desert Storm. Not only did the US“win” this war and kill over 100,000 Iraqis (and ultimately cause hideous health problems for American soldiers), but, perhaps most importantly: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” So the president proclaimed. 
+Unfortunately for the war consensus, the Soviet Union dissolved a short time later and the Cold War ended . . . and a “peace dividend” loomed. Hartung notes that Gen. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed the situation thus: “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.” 
+Would military spending be diverted to infrastructure repair, free education, universal health care? 
+Well, no. The Bill Clinton presidency found a few new demons. It fought a war in Kosovo and, on the domestic front, vastly expanded the prison-industrial complex. Meanwhile, the neocon think tanks cogitated and one of them, the Project for a New American Century, reflecting the fact that geopolitical thinking had stopped with World War II, decided that what America needed was a new Pearl Harbor . And then came the presidency of George W. Bush, 9/11, and the Global War on Terror. And the US military budget was carved, seemingly, in stone. 
+Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 on the promise of serious change, but any hope that he intended to upend W’s wars was soon dispelled. He dumped the name but kept the wars, essentially settling “for a no-name global war,” Hartung writes. “He would shift gears from a strategy focused on large numbers of ‘boots on the ground’ to an emphasis on drone strikes, the use of Special Operations forces, and massive transfers of arms to US allies like Saudi Arabia. . . . (O)ne might call Obama’s approach ‘politically sustainable warfare.’” 
+And here we are, immersed in a no-name global war that has no logical end and few serious critics in the world of mainstream media and politics. But maybe the American democracy is not the closed system it’s supposed to be. 
+For instance, John Feffer , director of Foreign Policy in Focus, points out that Donald Trump, in all his fun-house recklessness, is shaking up the consensus: “Democrats and Republicans disagree about many things. But with a few exceptions they all support an enormous military budget, an expensive overseas expeditionary force, and unilateral acts of force when necessary to protect US national interests (understood broadly). 
+“It’s an odd paradox that Trump, who blathers on about making America great again, departs from this consensus.” 
+He won’t win, and he shouldn’t win for a million reasons, but in his recklessness he has touched the raw anger of a sizable chunk of the American electorate. Sanders, speaking with compassion and integrity and delivering a far different message, managed to tap the same well of public outrage. And, as Feffer noted, “the mainstream is worried that the political parties will realize that the ‘bring the war dollars home’ message can win a national election and disrupt the comfortable revolving-door consensus.” 
+And World War II will finally end? Not this year, but maybe four years from now, if we refuse to let the war consensus have any peace in the interim. 
+Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at or visit his website at commonwonders.com . Reprinted with permission from PeaceVoice . Read more by Robert Koehler",FAKE
+7498,Will the anti-Clinton revolt among American elites gain momentum?,"Will the anti-Clinton revolt among American elites gain momentum? November 7, 2016 - Fort Russ Mikhail Khazin , one of the top Russian economists- Translated from Russian by Kristina Kharlova There are rumors of revolt in the US state apparatus in the broad sense of the word against Hillary Clinton. Note that the top layer of the US establishment still supports Clinton, squashing any signs of disobedience: FBI closes cases, newspapers stop printing nasty things about her and so on. But one way or the other the issue floats to the surface. One of the likely reasons for this, is that Hillary Clinton is actively trading the national sovereignty of the United States in the framework of the activities of her foundation. In other words, American patriots consider her a traitor. And, as it turned out, this factor may play a decisive role. Previously it was not so obvious. In particular, the latest issue — the sale by Lockheed Martin to Turkey of a few dozen fighters of the fifth generation. Clinton is an old lobbyist for this company, so there is no doubt that it's her achievement. The problem is that Turkey under the current circumstances may cease to be a US ally, and no one can guarantee that these fighters do not fall into the hands of potential adversaries. For this reason, I do not exclude that these actions led to the resumption of the case against Clinton by the FBI. The results of tomorrow's elections remain unclear. But one thing is for sure: there are many people in the US who do not advertise their fondness of Trump, but in reality are ready to support him in the election. That is why the result of the vote may be surprising. Follow us on Facebook!",FAKE
+10060,American Funhouse: Manufacturing Consent,"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / American Funhouse: Manufacturing Consent Essential Reading By Smoking Mirrors on September 8, 2011 
+Smoking Mirrors at his creative best writing about … well you decide what he’s writing about Hellstorm – Exposing The Real Genocide of Nazi Germany (Full Documentary) By wmw_admin on May 10, 2015 
+What happened in the aftermath of World War II has been one of the darkest and best kept secrets in world history. The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop! By wmw_admin on August 21, 2010 
+The sacrifice of “six million Jews” was being talked about before Hitler rose to power. A photocopy from the American Hebrew dated Oct. 1919, speaks openly about a holocaust of six million Jews before declaring “Israel is entitled to a place in the sun”!! The Advent of the Anti-Christ By Rixon Stewart on August 2, 2010 
+A few words on the market meltdown and how it may assist the debut of a truly sinister figure Does God Play Dice with the Universe? By Rixon Stewart on December 1, 2003 
+Research into particle physics is revealing a world full of almost magical qualities. Could it be that this mysterious, puzzling world is in fact the world of the spirit – the spiritual world that saints and mystics throughout history have sought to explo “Holocaust” declared 7 years before there was a “Holocaust” By wmw_admin on December 13, 2014 
+The New York Times was already reporting of Jewish persecution and an ongoing “Holocaust” in May 31, 1936 Magic Thermite and the 9/11 Fairytale By Smoking Mirrors on April 15, 2009 
+The evidence is in and it’s irrefutable: scientists have discovered traces of hi-tech explosives in the WTC debris. Which means the UK/US/Israel will have to stage another event on the scale of 9/11 to counter the brushfire this report will ignite",FAKE
+9093,Why Hillary Clinton Will Appoint Old World Nationalists to Cabinet Positions,"Posted on November 5, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 
+By George Eliason, an American journalist living in Ukraine. 
+Whether you are for Hillary Clinton or against her, the problem with Hillary Clinton isn’t her lack of experience. Almost the entire political establishment is behind her. Throughout all the bumps and scandal in this whole election cycle, Republicans and former presidents are coming out of the woodwork supporting her. According to the LA Times she may well be one of the most experienced candidates in US history, while even accounting for severe conflicts of interest inside the Clinton Foundation. Neither friend or foe doubt Hillary Clinton’s experience after 30 years in politics. 
+The problem is even Hillary Clinton’s friends say she has a history of acting without thinking, of making bad decisions. According to Neera Tanden : “Almost no one knows better than me that her instincts can be terrible.” 
+Does Hillary Clinton show bad instincts and terrible decision-making skills, and if she does, how will this affect the USA? 
+According to journalist Robert Parry “the people that will be taking senior positions and especially in foreign policy believe “This consensus is driven by a broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East… Taken together, the studies and reports call for more aggressive American action to constrain Iran, rein in the chaos in the Middle East and check Russia in Europe.”One of the lead organizations revving up these military adventures and also counting on a big boost in military spending under President Clinton-45 is the Atlantic Council, a think tank associated with NATO that has been pushing for a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.” 
+The Atlantic Council is the think tank for the CEEC which is associated with NATO. The CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition) has only one goal. At the beginning of the presidential campaign they put out a small list of questions for the candidates to decide who they would support for the president. 
+The first question was essentially “Are you willing to go to war with Russia?” Hillary Clinton has answered that question and received their unqualified support throughout the campaign. Who is the CEEC? 
+The Central and Eastern European Coalition represent the various Central and Eastern European countries to the US government. What makes them special in an election is that they control a 20 million person strong bloc vote in key states across the country and sway elections by themselves. The price of a Clinton win is war with Russia. 
+If that seems a little too much to be believable, reconsider the Iraq war. All it took was for the Iraqi diaspora to develop strong ties with like-minded people from “The Project for the New American Century” that wanted regime change in Iraq. Many of the people associated with the PNAC crossed over into the Bush administration . They pushed the invasion together. 
+“ Walt Vanderbush’s essay, “The Iraqi Diaspora and the US Invasion of Iraq” (chapter 9), traces the collaboration between leaders of the Iraqi diaspora and neoconservative Americans, many of them linked to the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), to convince the US government to wage war and bring about “regime change” in Iraq… The INC claimed credit for placing 108 articles in the news media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Times (of London), during a nine-month period before the war.” 
+It wasn’t terror, Osama, or even oil that the Iraq war was fought for. It was a guy named Ahmed Chalabi who was the only victor of the Iraq war. 
+American-emigre groups use their strategically settled populations in key battleground states, deep pockets, and unbridled political ambition to gain control over their home “old” countries. Even more insidious is the influence they exert over the United States to destroy old enemies. 
+Do we want senior cabinet and policy positions filled by people that think starting WWIII is a good goal? Let’s take a look at the make-up and politics of some of these. 
+Starting at the top let’s look at the Ukrainian emigres which lead the CEEC and the Atlantic Council. One thing anyone represented by the UCCA (Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America) or the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) has in common is Axis-political heritage and beliefs. The OUN is the political grouping of Ukrainian nationalists and it would vote for Adolf Hitler if he was running in a heartbeat. 
+Unless real Nazi political views (not neo-nazi) found a way to survive all these years with this group of people, the statement is just insulting. Anyone reading should be insulted because that level of offensiveness in a politically charged environment is wrong. 
+Nazism or Axis-Nazism are political beliefs and principles that structure your government the same as Republican or Democratic control would. The only difference is the “ism.” The “ism” means everything you do in your life revolves around your politic so it’s not just political or social guides or guidelines. It’s your lifestyle and everything wraps around it. Anything or anyone that goes against it is an enemy of the state, and it is personal. 
+From their own words in the Ukrainian Weekly, real, active political Nazi’s are alive, kickin’ and ready for a Clinton win! It is the sheer number of groups self-identifying as practicing real Nazi beliefs in the US gaining policy and cabinet positions under a Clinton win that is incredible. 
+The Ukrainian World Congress with its affiliates in over 40 countries and others work tirelessly in trying to keep Ukraine and the Ukrainian spirit front and center. 
+“We have had a minister of finance, Natalka Jaresko, in the Cabinet. We now have Ulana Suprun as acting minister of health. We have many from the diaspora assisting with strategizing, reforming and supporting the overall cause. We have a highly successful program in Patriot Defence. We are out to change the way business is done. 
+Unity to act when required has been the diaspora’s mantra – this cannot be disputed. 
+As time moves on, we see that things take a natural course. We see that two wings of the OUN – (OUNb)Banderivtsi and (OUNm)Melnykivtsi – are working actively on the international level, working in partnership and currently are in strong negotiations about becoming a single entity again.” 
+With all you’ve heard about Stepan Bandera’s OUN since the Maidan coup in Ukraine, I’ll bet you didn’t know they call New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia home. 
+The UCCA and the UWC still celebrate their Nazi SS because they are still Axis-nazis. The OUN were the vile Holocaust murderers during and after WWII and their politics live on in their children today. This is no different from the children of other Waffen-SS leaders or if Hitler had surviving children that stood up and ran other countries based in Hitler’s policy. These American kids are sent to Ukraine to learn how to copy and act like Stepan Bandera before they come back to America and get involved in policy making. 
+“ OUNb leader Ivan Kobasa also took responsibility of making sure the Ukrainian-Americans received the proper secondary education at Ukrainian nationalist schools(MAUP) in Ukraine. From the mid-2000’s enrollment in this educational system has skyrocketed. Today almost all members of the current Ukrainian government are graduates of this ideological system that was taught to them by moderates like David Duke who is also a graduate of the MAUP system.” 
+While American media criticizes David Duke’s support for Donald Trump, they say nothing about Hillary’s strongest supporters hiring David Duke as a professor to teach their children college level history. Is Hillary Clinton too far right for David Duke? After all, he has no plans to conquer Russia. 
+When you look at her campaign coffers and the most active political activists supporting Hillary Clinton, many are groups whose politics are not republican or democrat, but old-world nationalist. They are spread across America and still idolize their Waffen SS heroes, literally. They have statues and holidays and children’s groups across America in cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago celebrating some of the vilest mass murderers in history. And they teach their children to idolize them and grow up using them as role models. They also bring up their children in the same political mold of ultra-nationalism. 
+Now they want an America that will do the same. Over the last 30 years, the old world nationalists have moved into media and policy positions to make this happen. If that wasn’t enough they control a 20 million person bloc vote in key states and swing states in important cities across America. 
+I am not using the word nazi as an insult, this isn’t neo-nazi or even a nazi revival. These groups have been the most extreme political activists in the USA over the last 50 years and are a continuation of what their parents were in the 1930’s. In their own words, they never assimilated into American culture. They assimilated the culture to them. In the words of the CIA, they are political animals. Today, their wagons are circled around a Hillary Clinton presidency. 
+The OUN were the guards at the Holocaust prison camps, Waffen SS, and volunteer brigades that were famous for torture and murder. In Ukraine, they killed over 3 million people and conducted the first act of Holocaust at Babi Yar. 
+The funny part if there was one is that with every fiber of your being, you want to argue against these facts. The OUN on the other hand featured at least one of my articles on their rise in American politics even though I called them devils. The fact they find me credible shouldn’t get lost on you. 
+When these good friends of Hillary Clinton from the CEEC start getting tapped for advisory posts, and cabinet positions through the Atlantic Council or Project for a new American Century, will they automatically become Democrats or Republicans? 
+Does America want a war with Russia so the losers of WWII can settle old scores? 
+For the first time, under a Clinton presidency, America will have unbridled Axis-nazis/old world nationalists/ nazis in most of the cabinet and policy positions. They are getting the positions because they are delivering donations, bloc votes, political propaganda, and hard activism in battleground states. 
+The results for the Clinton campaign in emigre dominated states is the same as it was when they first got together. Clinton is up by 11 points in important emigre bloc voting districts. 
+…In last month’s heavily publicized Pennsylvania Senate race. Ukrainian and Baltic groups, protesting the administration’s attempts to prevent the break-up of the USSR, supported the Democratic candidate, Harris Wofford. This position contributed to the defeat of Dick Thornburgh, a former attorney general in the Bush administration….”The Ukrainian Weekly, December 8, 1991, No. 49, Vol. LIX 
+In a Ukraine Weekly interview with candidate Bill Clinton-“For the last 40 years, many Ukrainians have been supporters of the Republican Party. However, Mr. Bush severely damaged his relations with Ukrainians with his “Chicken Kiev” speech, and by his unwillingness to see Ukraine’s point of view in disputes with Russia. How will your party seek to secure the goodwill of voters concerned by this issue?” … 
+Clinton’s answer…“The Bush administration has had a spotty record abroad…including the president’s insulting warning against “suicidal nationalism” made before proindependence forces in Kiev in the summer of 1991 — and a failed economic record at home. We hope Ukrainian Americans will join our effort to put people first.” – Interview with Candidate Bill Clinton-Ukrainian Weekly Issue 43, 1992 
+In what has become the ultimate pay to play scheme, the Clinton’s gave over Ukraine to OUNb nationalists to run as they saw fit. This was payment for political support and bloc votes that won the 1992 elections for Bill Clinton. American citizens were given a country to run and represent in any manner they chose to do it. 
+According to Ukrainian nationalist scholar Taras Kuzio , the Axis- nazi political beliefs started to be taught to children in Ukraine after the OUNb took the reins. This was the preparation for what would become a nationalist coup in 2014 Ukraine. 
+This pattern follows the Clinton-NATO expansion and every CEE (Central and Eastern European) country freed by the Clintons followed suit. In Croatia, Croatian-Americans have more parliamentary seats and representation than any group from Croatia. 
+Other than American-emigre groups gaining rule and representing the “home country” in the US, there is only one other universal factor each of them revived. Axis- nazi politics and political views became normal in their home countries. In Croatia, they even revived the Waffen SS Battalions. 
+The people at the CEEC are behind the Atlantic Council and PNAC will be making the domestic and foreign policy decisions in a Clinton administration. While I would not call Hillary Clinton a Nazi, the people she surrounds herself with actively are. There is very little doubt that Victoria Nuland, a Ukrainian-American brought up in these beliefs will be Secretary of State under a Clinton Administration. 
+To get an understanding of what that means, the same people that are deciding Ukrainian domestic and foreign policy will be sending their people to those cabinet positions. 
+The one thing for sure is even publications that support her candidacy wonder about Hillary Clinton’s lack of judgment and surrounding herself with nationalist war-hawks that want war with Russia. 
+According to the WEEK “At first, Obama went over the top of public opinion to avenge American honor against ISIS. Slowly, America’s mission has crept to include some form of regime change with the ouster of Assad. Now Clinton is selling the American people on greater military interventions so that the U.S. can challenge Putin. Clinton seems unable to distinguish between what is of vital interest to the Russians and peripheral interest to America. She combines this with her bias toward always taking action — of any sort, for good or ill. The combination is dangerous.” 
+The article ends in the hope that Clinton is once again lying. Both current president Obama and Hillary Clinton are trying to sell America on the idea that there are moderates fighting a civil war in Syria. We are arming and training them. Are there moderates in Syria worth supporting? Do we have any business there to begin with? The article goes as far as stating the US is determined to overthrow every country that is friendly to Russia. 
+Right now Clinton wants to establish a no-fly-zone to protect her moderates. Who are they? US Special Forces on the ground are adamant that Clinton wants to give US military support to ISIS even if it means starting an open war with Russia. 
+“ Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘Fuck this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’” “I don’t want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans,” the Green Beret added. 
+Since 2014, Ukraine has fully supported al Nusra and at the beginning of the civil war pulled 200 ISIS fighters to the Ukrainian front lines. These fighters are jihadis from Crimea. They have also set up an ISIS training camp near Mariupol. Like all other volunteers, they don’t receive government support and rob to make a living. 
+Before this, the Kosovo example looms large. Does inviting indicted mass murderers and people preparing for illegal organ trade (crimes against humanity) trials to your national party convention as special guests qualify as good judgment? Does it showcase Hillary Clinton’s good instincts to be president? 
+Welcome to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Hillary Clinton’s special guest from Kosovo took time-out from preparing for his crimes against humanity case to give support and wish her well. 
+“Invited as a guest to the 2016 Democratic National Convention is none other than Kadri Veseli, the Speaker of the Kosovo Assembly. Veseli is a former Kosovar Albanian leader of the KLA and its spy organization SHIK. He’s being indicted along with the current president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci for small things like organ trafficking and crimes against humanity .’ 
+The main witness against Clinton friends, Veseli and Thaci, is a man that was ordered to cut the heart out of another man that was begging for mercy. In a 1998 interview with the BBC , US special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard had this to say about Veseli and Thaci; “I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists.” 
+Clinton’s relationship with the Albanian and Kosovo killers stretches back to the first Clinton election in 1992. During the campaign season the Clinton duo found out quickly how powerful the emigre national vote was in America. In one fell swoop, the Albanians and the KLA after them went from what the USA definitely recognized as Islamic terrorists to victims we were going to war for. 
+The Clinton humanitarian bombing in the Balkans drove victims into the waiting clutches of the KLA, and the spread of Islamic terrorism worldwide. 
+In what became her first executive decision, first lady, Hillary Clinton brow-beat the unwilling president Clinton into bombing the Balkans and creating a humanitarian catastrophe. Today, as a result of this, ISIS is setting up training camps in what is widely referred to as Clinton country. 
+“On the territory of Kosovo and Metohija, the local police detained three militants of so-called “Islamic State” (a terrorist organization banned in Russia), is going to organize a series of terrorist attacks in Serbia.” Terrorists LIH (IGIL/ISIS) break through the Balkans to Western Europe March 2016 
+Clinton’s jihadi bloc vote in America remains central to her winning this election along with the rest of the CEEC. Does America want people advising the president that openly support genocide like the Kosovars, Albanians, or Ukrainians? 
+Hillary Clinton is not an Islamist. Hillary Clinton is not a Nazi. But the question remains. Why is she surrounded by and listening to people that are? Is that her best judgment?",FAKE
+4797,Here’s What Clinton and Trump Must Do on the Debate Stage to Win the Night,Tonight’s presidential debate figures to be one of the most-watched political events in American history. Viewership for the first one-on-one showdown between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump is expected to approach the 80 million who watched Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980. One-third of voters say the presidential debates will be very important in helping them […],REAL
+5134,Both Clinton and Trump would bring a war-time posture to the White House,"Republican Donald Trump’s and Democrat Hillary Clinton’s efforts to portray themselves as assertive adversaries of the Islamic State terror group are increasingly defining the 2016 presidential race — and never more so than in the wake of the massacre in Nice, France, this week.
+
+Although authorities have not yet tied the attack to jihadist-inspired terrorism, both candidates immediately responded to the latest in a string of attacks at home and abroad that have heightened voter anxiety by vowing aggressive efforts to combat the Islamic State.
+
+They have done so in strikingly different ways, she with specific proposals and he with broad promises. But together, their messages effectively assure a war-time posture in the White House next year no matter who becomes president — and they mark a sharp departure on the campaign trail from the non-interventionist sentiment that then-Sen. Barack Obama rode into office eight years ago.
+
+The intense jockeying was encapsulated in a round of dueling telephone interviews Thursday evening with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, following the deadly truck attack in southeastern France that killed more than 80 people assembled to celebrate Bastille Day. The interview was especially notable for Clinton, who rarely speaks to Fox News but may have been trying to engage with conservative voters who care deeply about national security and may not be sold on Trump.
+
+“We’ve got to do more to understand that this is a war against these terrorist groups, the radical jihadist groups,” Clinton said. “It’s a different kind of war. We need to be smart about how we wage it, but we have to be determined that we’re going to win it.”
+
+In his interview, Trump ticked through a list of recent attacks as evidence that a change in management style at the top is a necessity to blunt future attacks.
+
+“You look at San Bernardino. You look at Paris. A hundred and thirty people killed and so many injured in Paris from that attack. And you look at Orlando. It’s out of control,” Trump said. “And Bill, unless we get strong and you know, really strong and very, very smart leadership, it’s only going to get worse.”
+
+[In truck rampage, experts see potential shift toward cruder, deadlier acts of terror]
+
+The back-to-back interviews underscored the differences in the two candidates’ approaches. Trump has embraced the debate over terrorism to emphasize his proposed ban on most foreign Muslims — which Clinton vigorously opposes — and advance a muscular but nebulous strategy to stamp out terrorists abroad.
+
+Clinton has been more specific, arguing for a “smart” but strong effort to combat the Islamic State, focusing on ratcheting up intelligence cooperation between the United States and its allies and fighting radical propaganda online.
+
+Clinton must walk a fine line. Even as she pursues centrist Republicans, including veterans of the Bush administration’s foreign policy shop, she is trying to consolidate support among Democrats after a bruising primary with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Many liberals already see her as too hawkish, going back to her vote for the war in Iraq in 2002, which contributed heavily to her primary defeat six year later against Obama.
+
+“There’s a lot of concern about another war in the Middle East,” conceded Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a Sanders endorser who helped the candidate win a landslide in his own state’s primary. “But look, this is not a choice between Hillary Clinton and Gandhi. This is a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and I’d be far more terrified of Trump’s reckless foreign policy than of Hillary Clinton.”
+
+Trump faces challenges of his own. While his freewheeling rhetoric and his controversial Muslim ban and proposed wall along the Mexican border were big hits in the Republican primary, they have exposed him to accusations in the general election that he is not serious and ill-prepared for the rigors of major security decisions.
+
+With the Republican and Democratic conventions taking place over the next two weeks, Clinton and Trump will be auditioning on the national stage at a time when the public’s attention has been repeatedly directed to global terrorism threats.
+
+“It’s an electorate that is profoundly insecure and unsure about what happens next both in terms of the economy and increasingly in terms of international policy and terrorism,” said Anita Dunn, former White House communications director in the Obama administration. “Making the case to the American people that you are the person to address their issues and to make the country feel secure again is really the predominant challenge for both campaigns.”
+
+[Assailant was ‘entirely unknown’ to anti-terror units, prosecutor says]
+
+In his Fox News interview, Trump said he would ask Congress for a war declaration on the Islamic State, a move rarely used in American history.
+
+“If you look at it, this is war coming from all different parts. And frankly it’s war, and we’re dealing with people without uniforms,” Trump said.
+
+In her interview, Clinton used similar language to describe the threat posed by the Islamic State. But asked on CNN whether she would endorse Trump’s proposal to seek authorization from Congress for war, she made clear that she has no intention of drawing U.S. or NATO troops into a fight with the Islamic State. She called it the Islamic State’s “dream” to pull U.S. ground troops into a war in the region.
+
+“I would point people to read more about what the hopes and ambitions of ISIS happen to be,” Clinton said, using a common acronym for the group. “They would love to draw the United States into a ground war in Syria.”
+
+“They actually think the end times could be hastened if we had some great confrontation in that region,” she added.
+
+Hours after the coup attempt in Turkey, Clinton became the first candidate to issue a statement calling for calm and “respect for laws, institutions, and basic human rights and freedoms.” The sentiment closely echoed the comments of Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry and offered an implicit contrast with Trump, who had not yet commented on the situation.
+
+Still, Clinton has not shied away from supporting an aggressive and frontal approach to the threat.
+
+She has argued that the United States and its allies should continue to reclaim territory from the Islamic State, boxing their fighters into smaller and smaller territory. She has criticized allies in the region for not doing enough to stop radicalization within their own borders, and she called on countries including Saudi Arabia and Qatar to invest more in the global effort to fight the Islamic State.
+
+She has also embraced the language of more conservative politicians. After the Orlando attack on a gay nightclub by a self-radicalized convert to the Islamic State, Clinton said “radical jihadist terrorism” and “radical Islamist terrorism” are virtually the same, after once refusing to use the word Islam in the context of terrorism out of concern that it would only embolden the enemy and enable recruitment.
+
+Trump, like many Republicans, has repeatedly slammed Obama for refusing to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism.” And he has accused Clinton of moving closer to his point of view.
+
+In fact, Clinton’s positions are not that divergent from the policies of the current White House. Her hawkishness has been mostly displayed through rhetoric, or by degree — though she has strayed from the president on a key issue, stating that the Islamic State threat cannot be “contained,” as Obama has stated, but rather must be “defeated.”
+
+Liberal Democrats who support Clinton have struggled to get Sanders supporters past her foreign policy record. At Netroots Nation, the annual conference of progressives held this year in St. Louis, Clinton’s campaign was nearly invisible. Foreign policy, a focus of some past conferences, was discussed only at a few crowded panels.
+
+Rania Khalek, 30, a journalist who has written critically of Clinton, said the Democrat poses a more direct threat to the Muslim world than Trump.
+
+“People are not going to protest when she decides to put boots on the ground in Syria,” Khalek said. “People are not going to protest when she decides to give Israel more military aid. She has a record of killing people. Donald Trump doesn’t have that record, yet.”
+
+Jennifer Miller-Smith, a 50-year old Clinton supporter from Florida, argued that some progressives subjected Clinton to tests they never demanded of Kerry or Vice President Biden — for example, their support for the Iraq War.
+
+“Iraq was a long time ago, and she’s learned since then,” Miller-Smith said. “We’ve all learned since then.”
+
+“Even I believed Colin Powell,” she said about the former secretary of state.
+
+Charles Khan, 28, a financial reform activist who was in seventh grade at the start of the Iraq War, said that polling and politics might curb Clinton’s hawkish tendencies.
+
+“I think Hillary is smart and doesn’t want to do anything that is unpopular,” Khan said. “With a huge majority of Americans not wanting to be involved in another war, that’s probably the stance she’d take.”",REAL
+1535,"The GOP debate fear cauldron: According to the Republican candidates, you’re going to die","Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate was the first since the Islamic State-inspired terrorist shooting in San Bernardino, California, and not surprisingly, most of the questions tossed out by CNN moderators dealt with national security and terrorism. In the days since San Bernardino, public fears over terrorism have grown, and President Obama has been doing what he can to tamp down anxiety and encourage people not to give in to the fear that terrorists work to inspire. But as the CNN debate made painfully clear, the Republican presidential candidates have quite the opposite goal in mind: They want everyone to be scared witless by the looming terrorist menace and worried that they will be the next to die.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, back on the main stage thanks to CNN’s expansive inclusion rules and his own improved poll numbers in New Hampshire, did the most to actively scare the shit out of every person unfortunate enough to be watching. In his opening statement he announced that “America has been betrayed” by “the leadership that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have provided to this country.” As proof of that betrayal and treason, Christie pointed to yesterday’s closing of the Los Angeles Unified School District “based on a threat.” He never got around to mentioning that the “threat” had long since been revealed as a hoax. But still Christie was worried about the “children filled with anxiety,” and the “mothers who will take those children tomorrow morning to the bus stop,” and the “the fathers of Los Angeles, who tomorrow will head off to work and wonder about the safety of their wives and their children.” They live in terror, these nameless gendered stereotypes, because Obama couldn’t protect them from the threat posed by “madbomber@cock.li.”
+
+Asked what he would do to ensure that fear does not “paralyze” American in the aftermath of terrorism, Christie explained that paralyzing fear is, unfortunately, “the new normal under Barack Obama.” “Everywhere in America is a target for these terrorists,” he said, giving everyone a reason to be afraid always. Christie’s closing statement was a riff on 9/11. “Many of our friends and others in our neighborhood lost their lives that day.” Christie even offered himself as a menacing presence, leaning forward and shifting back and forth behind his lectern like a rhinoceros sizing up a Jeep full of safari tourists. His message all evening was blunt and terrifying: you will die, unless you vote for me.
+
+Not far behind Christie was Sen. Marco Rubio, who made a point of spelling out in detail the menacing nature of the Islamic State. “This is the most sophisticated terror group that has ever threatened the world or the United States of America,” he warned. “This is a very significant threat we face. And the president has left us unsafe.” He made a special point of noting the Islamic State’s sophistication: “This is a radical jihadist group that is increasingly sophisticated in its ability, for example, to radicalize American citizens… This is not just the most capable, it is the most sophisticated terror threat we have ever faced.” He warned about “the next time there is an attack on this country” while pushing for reinstatement of metadata collection provisions in the Patriot Act. Sen. Ted Cruz went a slightly different route, linking Republican panic over Syrian refugees to both the San Bernardino terrorist attack (which had nothing to do with refugees) and the 2013 Senate immigration reform bill to score a bank-shot hit on Rubio: CRUZ: Because the front line with ISIS isn’t just in Iraq and Syria, it’s in Kennedy Airport and the Rio Grande. Border security is national security. And, you know, one of the most troubling aspects of the Rubio-Schumer Gang of Eight Bill was that it gave President Obama blanket authority to admit refugees, including Syrian refugees without mandating any background checks whatsoever. Now we’ve seen what happened in San Bernardino. When you are letting people in, when the FBI can’t vet them, it puts American citizens at risk. All in all it was a grim, bleak, and frightful debate that saw several leading candidates try to stoke heightened public anxiety over terrorism. There were no acknowledgements that acts of terrorism are exceptionally rare, with just “45 Americans killed in jihadist terrorist attacks” since 9/11. (More Americans have died as a result of homegrown right-wing terrorism, but that threat didn’t earn a single mention at the debate, even though one such attack took place just days before San Bernardino.) This was more about resurrecting the national security politics of the Bush years, when Republicans would conjure the threat of imminent terrorist slaughter on American soil to cast Democrats as weak and to justify the rollback of civil liberties in the interest of safety. A scared voter is a motivated voter, and Republicans have every interest in keeping people as terrified as possible.",REAL
+5128,Clinton holds narrow lead over Trump on eve of conventions,"On the eve of the two national political conventions that will shape the images of the major-party presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in a competitive contest nationally but with the presumptive Republican nominee facing deficits on key character attributes and issues, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
+
+The survey shows Clinton leading Trump by 47 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. That represents a shift in Trump’s direction since last month’s Post-ABC poll, which showed Clinton leading by 12 points. In the new poll, Clinton leads by 10 points among all adults — 50 percent to 40 percent — compared with a 14-point lead among this wider group last month.
+
+Both candidates remain highly unpopular — the two most unpopular in the history of Post-ABC polling. By about 2 to 1 (64 percent to 31 percent), Americans view Trump unfavorably. Clinton’s numbers are not quite as negative — 42 percent favorable and 54 percent unfavorable. Half of all registered voters say they have strongly unfavorable views of Trump, while 47 percent say they have strongly unfavorable views of Clinton — the highest ever in a Post-ABC poll for her.
+
+The survey also highlights the degree to which Americans are motivated by negative impulses rather than seeing the choice in positive terms. Almost 6 in 10 say they are dissatisfied with the choice of Trump vs. Clinton. Fifty-four percent of Clinton’s supporters say they are mainly voting against Trump, while 57 percent of Trump supporters say they are mainly voting against Clinton.
+
+Given the dissatisfaction, there is the possibility that candidates from minor parties will attract the support of disaffected voters. In a four-way matchup that also includes Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party, the poll results are Clinton 42 percent, Trump 38 percent, Johnson 8 percent and Stein 5 percent.
+
+The new poll comes after a tumultuous two weeks that included the killings of five police officers in Dallas and deadly shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota. As the calling for the poll was closing came news of an apparent terrorist attack in Nice, France. All these events have added to the tensions of a country on edge and heightened the importance of security and racial issues in the choice of a president.
+
+The poll also comes after Clinton was spared prosecution by the government for her use of a private email server as secretary of state. But while avoiding any criminal charge, Clinton received a stern rebuke from FBI Director James B. Comey, who said she and her aides had been “extremely careless” in their handling of sensitive classified material in their email exchanges.
+
+The previous Post-ABC poll showed Clinton with a larger lead than some other national surveys taken around the same time. Whether or how much the shift toward Trump in the current survey was affected by how the FBI investigation was resolved can’t be measured. Other recent polls show the difference in the race nationally to be in low single digits, with Clinton generally enjoying the advantage.
+
+Republicans begin their nominating convention here in Cleveland on Monday and will conclude Thursday with the expected nomination of Trump, with Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as his running mate.
+
+The Democratic convention, in Philadelphia, will begin July 25, with Clinton poised to become the first woman nominated for president by a major party. She is still mulling her vice-presidential choice and met with several contenders Friday.
+
+Trump hopes to produce a convention that helps to alleviate questions about his fitness to be president among many Americans, but he begins with an enormous deficit on that issue. The Post-ABC poll found that nearly six in 10 registered voters say he is not qualified to serve as president — with 49 percent saying they strongly believe that. Meanwhile, Clinton is seen as qualified to serve as president by 56 percent of voters.
+
+Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, about 7 in 10 see Trump as qualified to be president — but almost one-quarter of that part of the electorate still questions the presumptive GOP nominee’s fitness.
+
+The survey highlights familiar fault lines in the electorate. Trump leads among men, 49 percent to 41 percent, while Clinton enjoys an even larger margin among women, 52 to 38 percent. Voters ages 18 to 39 support Clinton 54 to 34 percent, while those 65 and older back Trump 51 to 42 percent. Those between 40 and 65 are almost evenly divided. Trump leads by 15 percentage points among white voters, while Clinton has a huge 52 percentage point lead among nonwhite voters.
+
+At this point, the Democrats are slightly more united behind Clinton than Republicans are behind Trump. One goal of the Trump campaign is to leave Cleveland at the end of the week with the party more united and enthusiastic about the nominee. Currently, 86 percent of Democrats back Clinton, while 82 percent of Republicans back Trump.
+
+Independent voters lean toward Trump, 47 to 41 percent, although winning independents is no guarantee of winning the presidency. Four years ago, Mitt Romney won among independents while losing to President Obama.
+
+Clinton enjoys the support of 8 in 10 self-identified liberals, while 7 in 10 conservatives back Trump. Moderates go decisively for Clinton, 52 to 36 percent.
+
+The contest between Clinton and Trump highlights one potential shift in the electorate that will be closely watched between now and November: the division among voters based on educational attainment.
+
+Trump’s most important block of voters are whites without college degrees, who support Trump by a margin of 60 to 33 percent. But college-educated white voters have been shifting toward the Democrats, and the poll underscores that the competition for those voters will be hard-fought and potentially decisive in the election’s outcome. Republicans historically have carried the votes of whites with college degrees, and Romney won the group by 14 points over Obama four years ago.
+
+The Post-ABC poll finds whites with college degrees are evenly divided — 43 percent Trump, 42 percent Clinton, with an outsize 10 percent volunteering support for “neither.” When gender is included in the analysis, the poll finds that white women with college degrees narrowly support Clinton, while white men with college degrees support Trump by a slightly larger margin.
+
+Of seven issues tested, Clinton has double-digit advantages over Trump on three — race relations, handling an international crisis and immigration. Clinton has smaller edges on looking out for the middle class and handling terrorism, while Trump holds small edges on taxes and the economy.
+
+Across six attributes, Trump has an 11-point margin among registered voters on the question of which candidate would do the most to bring needed change to Washington. By a margin of five points, he is seen as more honest and trustworthy. Clinton has a similar edge on empathy with people’s problems and representing people’s values and holds double-digit edges on having better judgment and having a presidential personality and temperament.
+
+In an election that is likely to be framed as a choice of continuity with Obama’s policies vs. a change in direction led by a Washington outsider with no previous political experience, a bare majority of voters say they prefer experience in politics to someone outside the establishment. That’s a narrower margin than earlier in the year, when 59 percent said they favored a politically experienced candidate. The poll indicated there was growing support for an outsider among Republicans and independents.
+
+Clinton’s trust deficit is highlighted on another question in the poll: whether she is too willing to bend the rules. Seven in 10 Americans (72 percent) said she is. The poll also asked whether respondents saw Trump as biased against women and minorities. On that question, 56 percent said yes. When people were asked which was the greater concern, a plurality (48 to 43 percent) cited Trump’s possible bias.
+
+The Post-ABC poll was conducted July 11-14 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults reached on cellular and landline phones. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; the error margin is 4 points among the sample of 816 registered voters.",REAL
+4126,Kevin McCarthy announces he's a candidate for House speaker (+video),"The California congressman has worked by John Boehner's side for the past year. Now, he's actively seeking the top post.
+
+House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is officially declaring his candidacy for House speaker to replace John Boehner.
+
+Boehner announced his resignation on Friday under pressure from conservatives.
+
+McCarthy, who is Boehner's No. 2, sent a letter to GOP lawmakers on Monday pledging to fight for conservative principles — and asking for their support as the next speaker.
+
+""If elected speaker, I promise you that we will have the courage to lead the fight for our conservative principles and make our case to the American people,"" McCarthy wrote in the letter to his House Republican colleagues. ""But we will also have the wisdom to listen to our constituents and each other so that we always move forward together.""
+
+McCarthy is strongly favored to get the job though he faces a challenge from Florida Republican Rep. Daniel Webster.
+
+He is currently serving his fifth term in Congress and has been endorsed by Boehner.
+
+The Christian Science Monitor detailed McCarthy's background and his short term as House majority leader.
+
+In his tenure as the deputy, McCarthy has been loyal to Boehner, for instance, “backing up the outgoing speaker's plan to remove a controversy over ""defunding"" Planned Parenthood from a stopgap spending bill that's needed to avoid a government shutdown next week. And he supported Boehner last year as one of only 28 Republicans to vote to raise the so-called debt limit without seeking concessions from Obama,” The Associated Press reports. After Boehner’s announced that he'll step down next month, McCarthy issued a statement calling Boehner a leader and a mentor, according to NBC News. ""It takes profound humility to step down from a position of power, and John's depth of character is unmatched."" McCarthy said. ""Now is the time for our conference to focus on healing and unifying to face the challenges ahead and always do what is best for the American people."" According to the Boston Globe, Republicans will hold their internal leadership elections Oct. 1 to avoid drawing out the process of electing a successor to Boehner. ""I'll tell Kevin, if he's the next speaker, that his No. 1 responsibility is to protect the institution. Nobody else around here has an obligation like that,"" Boehner told reporters on Friday. ""Secondly, I'd tell him the same thing I've just told you. You just do the right thing every day for the right reasons, the right things will happen.""
+
+Material from Reuters was used in this article.",REAL
+9102,A guide to the Paradoxroutine,"A guide to the Paradoxroutine page: 1 Hah I'm here randomly post, and be good at nothing. If I were to sum up myself in one form or another it would be this: What is it that I wish to create? In a seamless dance of hope and intrigue, I jitter and pounce on that which does define. But in an ends' motion what is it that I have made? More musing of a solid soul, a gasp of an angel brought forth upon the devils mask. Shattered within a hopeless contextual void of self dissolution. To dissolve in ones own thoughts of regard of high and mighty being? In the beginning what is it that we seek? In hell and high water, in times of disregard. What is it that seeks us. From times of happenstance to those of remorse. Again we beckon the call to purpose and resolve. Every time, even without a moments clarity we call too and forth of the void, to give us direction. Show me ways beyond vice, ways not wanted of founded living, shallower within such a world. Should they be down caste or sought without voice? Give me guidance before the light. Hope before the void. I shall know of the kingship of a heralds' life, before the life of a herald be know to his people. To this preponderance I shadow skirt my minds eye, to a veil beyond the guise that which is a worded Maya. I find such things a mere hope of sound falling. Give me hope or the hope of death. Give me light or knowledge of only darkness. Give not guidance, but a misadventured fall into the abysmal realm of chance and near do wells shortcomings. Shall be you chance or stones carved Providence? I beckon the call to truth, yet I hope and pray tell that none does exist. The only way to continue searching, is to never find the answer we seek. To find is to know, to know is to be content. To be content is to stagnant in truth. To find death in one truth, one truth among many. To live is to know nothing, but to know what you understand has already become false by nature is to understand that my musings are bull****. edit on 10|27|2016 by Paradoxroutine because: Because I'm a dumbass.",FAKE
+7132,AT&T-Time Warner Merger: Another Media Consolidation That Puts Profits Over Consumers,"Videos AT&T-Time Warner Merger: Another Media Consolidation That Puts Profits Over Consumers ‘The deals are driven by Wall Street’s insatiable desire for short-term growth at any cost,’ a media analyst at a consumer advocacy NGO wrote, warning about the risks of the deal. | November 2, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! 
+MINNEAPOLIS — Media analysts warn that a proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner is more likely to enhance corporate bottom lines and pad the pockets of Wall Street investors than benefit consumers. 
+“Big mergers like this inevitably mean higher prices for real people, to pay down the money borrowed to finance these deals and compensate top executives,” said Matt Wood, policy director at Free Press, an NGO that protects net neutrality and online press freedom, in an Oct. 22 press release . 
+The media first reported that AT&T was in “informal” talks to merge with Time Warner on Oct. 20 . By Oct. 24, AT&T announced that Time Warner had agreed to be bought out by the telecommunications giant for $85.4 billion. 
+Currently, Time Warner represents one of a shrinking number of mass media conglomerates that increasingly control the vast majority of news available to Americans. AT&T is one of the world’s largest providers of mobile phone and landline services, and, as owner of DirecTV, a major player in the television marketplace as well. 
+Corporate executives have promised that the merger could make more content available to consumers , offer new options for mobile viewing , and provide alternatives to traditional cable TV. Representatives of both companies have also tried to mollify concerns that the deal would violate antitrust laws, claiming it represents the “vertical integration” of two different markets , rather than a merger of competitors. 
+Many media experts have expressed concern and skepticism about these claims, particularly in regard to the potential benefits to consumers. Wood suggested AT&T’s buyout of DirecTV, which was completed in July 2015 , should serve as a warning about the possible effects of this new, larger merger model. He warned: 
+“The deals are driven by Wall Street’s insatiable desire for short-term growth at any cost. And just as AT&T’s recent purchase of DirecTV was quickly followed by price hikes, there’s every reason to expect this potential tie-up would cost internet users and TV viewers dearly too.” 
+Kevin Kelleher , a reporter at Time magazine, weighed in on Oct. 24. He wrote that the deal “makes sense for media executives, less so for consumers,” as it’s unclear how bringing content creators and internet service providers together would actually benefit the end user. He continued: 
+“For now, concerns over the deal seem to be outweighing the benefits, which could end up being negligible. For decades, the pipes that streamed digital content remained largely independent from the companies that provided the content. And no consumers complained.” 
+Meanwhile, several senators have come out in opposition to the proposed merger, citing concerns about the ultimate implications for consumers, the role of Washington’s “revolving door” into the corporate world, and what this buyout could mean for the future of media consolidation. 
+On Sunday, Al Franken , a former TV actor and senator representing Minnesota, told The New York Times’ media reporter Jim Rutenberg that the merger could increase prices and reduce the number of choices available to consumers. 
+“When the company that controls the pipes, so to speak, owns this very, very large content provider, it can cause a whole bunch of different horribles for consumers,” Franken said. 
+Elizabeth Warren , a senator from Massachusetts known for her consumer advocacy, objected to Christine Varney’s involvement in the deal. Varney, an antitrust lawyer who has been hired to oversee the AT&T and Time Warner merger, previously worked for the Obama administration investigating antitrust claims. On Monday, Warren told Fortune: 
+“Americans have had it with regulators like Varney, who talk a good game about holding the bad guys accountable while counting down the days until they can collect a fat paycheck from the corporations they were supposed to regulate. The revolving door is out of control. If we want to hold corporate lawbreakers accountable, we can’t ask their friends to do it.” 
+Bernie Sanders , the senator from Vermont and former 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, also objected to the deal in an open letter published Wednesday on Medium. In addition to echoing the concerns shared by others like Franken, he warned that the buyout could provoke future media mergers that would further consolidate an already limited market. 
+“At a time when our telecommunications and media industries are already too concentrated, we should be focused on opening those markets to more competition, not less,” he wrote. 
+In the case that the merger does go through, AT&T’s ties to the national security state may also give rise to serious privacy concerns. A day after the AT&T-Time Warner merger was officially announced, Kenneth Lipp, a reporter at The Daily Beast, revealed that AT&T is storing customer information and selling it for profit . That, of course, came more than three years after Edward Snowden leaked classified information which detailed the telecommunications giant’s close collaboration with the NSA to spy on millions of Americans. 
+“Where you go, what you watch, text and share, with whom you speak, all your internet searches and preferences, all gathered and ‘vertically integrated,’ sold to police and perhaps, in the future, to any number of AT&T’s corporate customers,” Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and her frequent collaborator, Denis Moynihan, wrote in an editorial published on Thursday . 
+“We can’t know if Alexander Graham Bell envisioned this brave new digital world when he invented the telephone. But this is the future that is fast approaching, unless people rise up and stop this merger.” Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
+1222,Fall of the House of Bush: How last name and Donald Trump doomed Jeb,"For Jeb Bush’s campaign, August was a cruel month. Donald Trump’s attacks on the former Florida governor as a ­“low-energy” politician were beginning to stick, and the two were bickering over immigration. The issue before the Bush team was what to do about it.
+
+Some advisers argued for an aggressive response, even to the point of challenging Trump to some kind of one-on-one confrontation. Others resisted, believing Trump’s candidacy was unsustainable, while some cautioned against getting “into a pigpen with a pig,” as one adviser recalled. Others described it as “trying to wrestle with a stump.”
+
+Those summer days crystallized the plight of a campaign that had begun with enormous expectations and extraordinary resources, as the scion of one of America’s dynastic political families sought to follow his father and brother to the presidency.
+
+At what would become a crucial moment, Bush’s team had no clear strategy for a rival who was beginning to hijack the Republican Party that the Bush family had helped to build, other than to stay the course set months earlier of telling Bush’s story to voters.
+
+“There was no consensus,” senior strategist David Kochel said of the discussions about how to combat the threat of Trump’s candidacy. Other campaigns were wrestling with the same problems, but as the front-runner in the polls at the time, Bush would suffer more than the others.
+
+On Saturday night, the candidacy that had begun with such promise ended quietly after a disappointingly weak fourth-place finish in South Carolina.
+
+Ever the gracious realist, Bush announced in his concession speech that he would end his campaign as Trump continued to soar as the GOP front-runner. “I have stood my ground, refusing to bend to the political winds,” he said.
+
+Whether Jeb Bush ever had a chance to win the Republican nomination in a campaign year that proved so ill fitting for a rusty politician who preferred policy papers to political combat is a question that will be debated long after the 2016 race has ended.
+
+“Donald Trump channeled the worst fears, frustrations and anxiety of voters, but he also magnified those same feelings,” Sally Bradshaw, Bush’s chief strategist and confidant, said Sunday in an email. “It would be difficult for any solutions-oriented conservative to tackle Trump in this environment, much less one who was seen as having been so much a part of the establishment. He was never going to be an angry guy — and voters wanted angry.”
+
+Mike Murphy, the chief strategist for Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise, explained what had happened this way on Sunday. “Our theory was to dominate the establishment lane into the actual voting primaries,” he said. “That was the strategy, and it did not work. I think it was the right strategy for Jeb. The problem was there was a huge anti-establishment wave. The establishment lane was smaller than we thought it would be. The marketplace was looking for something different, and we’ll find out how that ends when we have a nominee.”
+
+The result is one of the most startling failures in the modern history of American politics: the fall of the House of Bush. It is a human story about the struggles of one of the most successful former governors in America in his bid to become president, like his father and brother, set against the backdrop of one of the strangest political cycles the country has seen in years.
+
+Beyond underestimating the anger in the electorate, three other problems led to Bush’s downfall. First, the candidate and his team misjudged the degree of Bush fatigue among Republicans.
+
+Aides said an internal poll conducted last fall showed discouraging news: Roughly two-thirds of voters had issues with Bush’s family ties. “Bush stuff was holding him back,” said one aide who saw the polling data. “We obviously knew it was an issue, but even still, the gap between it and other issues — I don’t think we thought it would be that big.”
+
+[For Jeb Bush, the challenge remains making it about ‘Jeb,’ not ‘Bush’]
+
+Second, Bush and his team miscalculated the role and power of money and traditional television commercials in the 2016 race. During the first six months of 2015, Bush raised more than $100 million, most of it stockpiled in Right to Rise, a strategy that seemed right at the time but came at the cost of not dealing with other pressing needs.
+
+“We didn’t use that time to introduce him as a unique brand,” said Vin Weber, an outside adviser. “We used it to raise money. I don’t want to say they made an obvious and clear mistake, but in retrospect, it was a mistake.”
+
+The aggressive fundraising came to be known as “shock and awe,” an echo of the initial bombing of Iraq by U.S.-led forces before the 2003 invasion. In the campaign context, it could be read as code to other potential candidates to get out of the way. But the prodigious fundraising of Bush’s broad network scared off no one. As the Bush campaign would learn, every credible candidate today has a few billionaire friends who can enrich a super PAC. In the end, all that money came to symbolize frustration rather than power.
+
+Third, Bush ran a campaign that, whether deliberate or not, was rooted in the past, managed by loyalists who admired Bush and enjoyed his confidence but who, like the candidate, found themselves in unfamiliar political terrain.
+
+His advisers were convinced from the start that the more voters learned about what Bush had done as governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, they would flock to him as their presidential candidate. Bush stubbornly held to that approach — even as evidence mounted that it was out of step with voters.
+
+Doug Gross, a prominent Iowa Republican, recalled meeting with Bush in July 2014 in Kennebunkport, Maine, to talk about the impending campaign. “He definitely wanted to run. He’s always had it in him and knew this was his last chance,” Gross said. “He was trying to figure out how to do it his own way. I was struck by his obstinate avoidance of any political discussion. . . . He wanted to do it his way or no way.”
+
+In contrast to the doldrums of August 2015, July seemed a glorious time for the Bush team. Early that month, Team Jeb gathered in Kennebunkport to celebrate that the campaign and two allied political committees had together raised nearly an unprecedented $120 million. The numbers were made public as nearly 300 major Bush fundraisers assembled to mingle with the Bush family and campaign advisers.
+
+Guests were transported in black-and-red trolleys to Walker’s Point, the Bush family compound. The group gathered for a photo with former president George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush.
+
+That evening, Bush touted the team’s record fundraising as guests dined on lobster rolls and hamburgers at a luxury resort tucked among a forest of birch groves and balsam fir. “It was incredibly memorable to be there with several generations,” said Jay Zeidman, a Houston-based investor who helped raise money from young professionals.
+
+The next day, the donors got briefings from senior Bush aides including Bradshaw, campaign manager Danny Diaz and finance director Heather Larrison. They laid out how the campaign planned to take on contenders such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Throughout, there was little mention of Donald Trump.
+
+[That time Jeb Bush invited 300 top donors to his parents’ house]
+
+“None of us thought he would last the summer,” said one person who was in attendance.
+
+At that moment, however, Trump was already in the process of undermining Bush’s candidacy. If Bush had ever gone up against someone like Trump, it didn’t show. Trump was a new and different kind of rival, one given to personal insults rather than policy debates, who monopolized media coverage and got away with provocative statements that would have sunk normal politicians.
+
+After marching in two July 4 parades on a rainy Saturday in New Hampshire, reporters asked Bush about Trump’s claim that Mexico was allowing immigrants to illegally cross into the United States. It was one of the hundreds of times he would face such questions.
+
+Bush said “absolutely” he was offended by Trump’s rhetoric. “We’re going to win when we’re hopeful and optimistic and big and broad rather than ‘grrrrrr’ ” he said — literally, growling – “just angry all the time.”
+
+That very night, Trump attacked Bush as soft on immigration and took aim as well at Bush’s wife, Columba, who was born in Mexico and entered the country legally — retweeting and then deleting a disparaging comment about her.
+
+Nothing, however, cut as close to the bone as Trump’s claim that Bush was too “low-energy” to serve as president.
+
+The accusation was laughable — until it began to stick. Trump’s charge was in fact a proxy for a different and more difficult argument to combat: that Bush was neither strong nor edgy enough for a party seething with anger at the grass roots.
+
+[Inside the Bush-Trump melodrama: Decades of tension and discomfort]
+
+“Nobody tapped into it, for all the polling, all the focus groups,” said Theresa Kostrzewa, a North Carolina lobbyist who raised money for the campaign. “The biggest thing they did was miss was just how angry the American electorate was and that Trump would be their Captain Ahab.”
+
+Bush’s advisers would contest that claim. They could see the anger, they said. The issue was what to do about it. “Donors, political operatives and big thinkers from around the country urged us to ignore Trump for months,” Bradshaw said. “There was no one in the news media or the operative class at the time who felt Trump would ultimately be a serious contender for the nomination.”
+
+At the same time, others feared that engaging Trump was almost beneath Bush and would thrust the candidate into a never-ending game of charge-countercharge. “Jeb should be bigger than this,” another aide recalled thinking.
+
+Over at Right to Rise, Murphy sent a clear signal: Trump is not our fight right now.
+
+“If other campaigns wish that we’re going to uncork money on Donald Trump, they’ll be disappointed,” Murphy told The Washington Post in late August. “Trump is, frankly, other people’s problem.”
+
+At that moment, the Bush team’s analysis showed that no Trump voters were likely to shift their support to Bush. On Sunday, Murphy said that attacking Trump would only have benefited other candidates. Bush’s campaign needed to consolidate the establishment lane while hoping that Trump and Cruz would sort out the competition among the anti-establishment candidates.
+
+Bradshaw also dismissed complaints from some donors that she cut the candidate off from advice. Noting that Bush long has been active on email, Bradshaw responded in a message by saying: “Donors constantly gave conflicting advice — attack Trump, don’t attack Trump; smile more; smile less — you look like you are smirking. I didn’t tell people they were wrong — not my style — I did a lot of listening, and I’m sure there were things we could have done better — but withholding info from the Governor simply did not happen in our campaign.”
+
+For much of the autumn, Bush’s engagement with Trump was on-again, off-again — skirmish, then turning away. Not until late last year did he truly start a concerted and sustained series of attacks. Aides said Bush was particularly affected by the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., and felt, as one adviser put it, that it was “time to stand up to the bully.”
+
+“Jeb was the only candidate with the political courage at the time and frankly throughout the last six months to take on Trump directly for doing something that the governor felt was very harmful to the Party and to the country,” Bradshaw wrote. “There was no hesitation at that point given his comments about women, about Hispanics, his lack of knowledge on issues of national security and on and on.”
+
+Bush’s failure to come to terms with one of the downsides of his family name came to a head over a four-day period in May, when he stumbled over the decision by his brother, former president George W. Bush, to go to war in Iraq.
+
+Changing his answer on a daily basis, Bush came across as a flat-footed campaigner clearly uncomfortable articulating his views on the most critical moment of his brother’s presidency. But it also highlighted the ­double-edged nature of being a candidate named Bush.
+
+In a January Washington Post-ABC News poll, nearly 6 in 10 Americans held an unfavorable view of Bush. He was the only Republican with a negative favorability rating: 44 percent said they had a favorable impression of the former governor while 50 percent rated him negatively. His rankings grew worse as the campaign progressed.
+
+A fundamental weakness, supporters said, was the lack of a coherent rationale for Bush’s candidacy and the failure to make inroads with activists on the right. “At the end of the day, it wasn’t clear the name was ever surmountable,” said a Bush donor. “If the name was going to be surmounted, it would have to be because there was a fresh set of ideas.”
+
+Bush offered ideas, but in a campaign dominated by Trump, they were ignored or lost to most voters.
+
+One of the biggest tactical advantages Bush appeared to have early on — a richly endowed super PAC — was not the invincible weapon his team thought it would be. It cut off his access to a key adviser, Murphy, whom he installed at the group’s helm.
+
+It also meant that during the first six months of last year, nearly all of the coverage about Bush focused on how he was socking away millions into the super PAC, all while maintaining that he had not decided whether to run. In an election brimming with anger toward the wealthy elite, Bush seemed almost flippant about his pursuit of big dollars.
+
+Murphy was convinced that much of what was taking place was noise and that when the voters began to check in, the super PAC’s financial might would be overpowering.
+
+First, the committee would use it to lay out Bush’s biography. Then, as necessary, the group would turn its arsenal on his rivals. “Our job is just to amplify his story and what he’s saying and we banked enough cash that nobody’s turning our speaker off,” Murphy told Bloomberg Politics in October.
+
+Back at campaign headquarters, the team hewed to that timetable and sensibility. Once the Bush record was burned into voters’ minds, attitudes would shift, Bradshaw said at the time. A Bush donor complained, “Murphy had a timetable, and nothing mattered until December and January.”
+
+By the end of January, Right to Rise had raced through at least $95.7 million out of the $118.6 million it had collected, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Almost $87 million went into a barrage of television ads, online videos, slick mailers and voter phone calls—to no avail.
+
+Mel Sembler, a former Bush ambassador who helped raise money for the super PAC and served on its governance board, said he believes the group’s strategy was sound.
+
+“We had confidence in Mike, and I think we did the best we could in deploying of resources,” Sembler said. “That’s not where the problem is. . . . The timing was not right for Jeb. Our candidate was just not connecting with the electorate.”
+
+The final months were difficult for Bush. After a particularly weak performance during a debate in Boulder, Colo., in October in which Rubio appeared to get the better of him, there were suggestions that he might quit the campaign right then.
+
+Reporters who made inquiries about the possibility were brushed off. In the middle of it all, Bush spotted a reporter who was a regular on the trail with him. “Hey — I didn’t drop out, did I?” he shouted. “You know, that kind of stuff really gets my juices going. I’m going to win this thing, and when I do — you’re going to give me a big hug.”
+
+Through it all, Bush attempted to keep both good humor and determination in the face of the inevitable.
+
+“I was stunned by how well he handled the last month of this campaign when the writing was on the wall,” said Tim Miller, Bush’s communications director. “It is hard to go out there every day and put on a fake smiley face. He was in really high spirits and didn’t lash out at people in private throughout the last two months.”
+
+The final indignity in a campaign that had suffered through many came three days before Saturday’s primary, when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley endorsed Rubio rather than a man she described as a friend and mentor.
+
+When it ended Saturday night, Bush told saddened supporters: “We put forward details, innovative, conservative plans to address the mounting challenges that we face. Because despite what you might have heard, ideas matter, policy matters.”
+
+His final remarks as a presidential candidate were a reflection of the campaign he had constructed from the start, one he had built to his unique specifications, which nonetheless proved to be a mismatch for a political environment that caught him by surprise — and for which he paid a hefty price.",REAL
+2005,Mitt Romney Fans Speculation Over Another White House Run,"There were several reports this month, based on former and current aides, that Mitt Romney is actively weighing another presidential run. The biggest sign yet comes from a recent interview with The New York Times, where the former 2012 Republican nominee offered a less than Shermanesque response to the million-dollar question.
+
+This was the obvious opening for me to ask if there was a chance. Romney's response was decidedly meta — ""I have nothing to add to the story"" -- but he then fell into the practiced political parlance of nondenial. ""We've got a lot of people looking at the race,"" he said. ""We'll see what happens.""
+
+Buoyed by good poll numbers and a wide-open prospective Republican field, Romney went farther than his ""circumstances can change"" reply in August, and certainly miles forward from the, ""Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no,"" answer in January.
+
+If he does throw his hat into the ring for a third time, the former governor of Massachusetts told the Times that he would employ a cameraman -- essentially his own tracker -- to follow him around in order to guard against statements that derailed his 2012 campaign. ""I want to be reminded that this is not off the cuff,"" Romney said.
+
+Romney said the tactic could potentially prevent another ""47 percent"" incident, which by his telling, was nothing more than a problem of setting.
+
+""My mistake was that I was speaking in a way that reflected back to the man,"" Romney said. ""If I had been able to see the camera, I would have remembered that I was talking to the whole world, not just the man.""",REAL
+9514,US Airstrike Kills Four Iraqi Troops Near Mosul,"Nine Others Wounded in 'Friendly Fire' Attack by Jason Ditz, October 29, 2016 Share This 
+As Iraqi forces continue to struggle to get closer to the ISIS city of Mosul during the ongoing invasion, a US friendly fire incident has been reported in the town of Tal-Kayf, a town which fell quite some time ago and in which recent fighting hadn’t been reported. 
+According to Iraqi military officials, the US airstrikes against the town killed at least four Iraqi soldiers and wounded nine others . The details are still scant on what happened, and the US has yet to comment on the incident at all. 
+Iraqi officials are chalking it up as a mistake, but it is unclear why the town would be struck by US planes in the first place, as the Iraqi troops had been there for almost a week and there did not appear to be ISIS forces in the immediate vicinity. 
+Iraqi forces confirmed the incident amid an announcement of more villages captured in the area west of Mosul. Many of the villages more than 5 km from the city have already fallen, and ISIS appears to be only sparsely defending those that remain, with the vast majority of their fighters hunkered down in Mosul itself, prepared for a major battle. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+7940,"‘Tolerant’ Liberals Show Nothing But Contempt, Hatred Toward Nation’s Only Black Supreme Court Justice","Pinterest 
+It’s been a quarter-century since Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made history by becoming only the second black judge ever to serve on the nation’s highest court. 
+But you won’t see celebrations, recognition, or even acknowledgement of this feat – in fact, the “Thomas-derangement,” as The Daily Caller calls it, has not abated one bit. 
+This despite the fact that the impact Thomas has had is unequaled. Thomas is one of the nation’s most influential lawmakers and has admirers from all legal corners. 
+Yet, he is ridiculed, belittled, and assaulted with the type of disgusting comments usually reserved for common criminals and deviants. 
+Writing in The New York Times , Maureen Dowd referred to the Justice as “the creepy guy who acted pervy toward [Anita Hill] and won. 
+This barrage of insults is not just among his legal and intellectual peers, either. Thomas has been completely wiped clean from any mention in the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. 
+His accuser Anita Hill, however, is given prominent display. The exhibit features testimonies trumpeting her courage and the surge of women’s activism that ensued, while making only peripheral reference to Thomas. 
+Despite these slights, Thomas continues to speak out. At a speech at the Heritage Foundation, the justice warned that we are “destroying our institutions.” 
+“At some point, we are going to have to recognize that we are destroying our institutions,” he said, acknowledging that the Court might also partially be at fault. “What have we done to gain their confidence?” he asked. “Perhaps we should ask ourselves what we have done to not earn it or to earn it.” 
+The court’s lone African-American justice also defended his view that even prior Supreme Court precedents must be bent or broken to comply with the Constitution — something most of his colleagues don’t believe. 
+“You’ve got lots of precedents out there that have been changed,” Thomas said. “I believe we are obligated to rethink things constantly.” 
+Thomas ended with some positive words about former Justice Antonin Scalia, who he affectionately referred to as “Nino.” 
+The court has become evenly divided between liberals and conservatives, a change that could become even more pronounced if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency and controls who will replace Scalia. But Thomas chose to dwell more on his friendship with “Nino” than ponder the future without him. 
+“He was from the north, and I was from the south, but we wound up at the same place,” he said, referring to their views on the paramount importance of the Constitution and individual freedoms. Scalia, he said, fretted over big principles as well as smaller things such as punctuation and syntax.",FAKE
+3081,"Us vs Them: When Politics is Treated Like a Football Game, No One Wins","A collaborative effort between Patrick Miller of the University of Kansas and Pamela Johnston Conover of the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers new insight into the growing phenomenon behind political polarization in the United States. The study, titled Red and Blue States of Mind: Partisan Hostility and Voting in the United States, was published in Political Research Quarterly on March 30.
+
+When Only Partisan Voters Vote, Only Partisan Candidates Are Elected
+
+The authors argue that the voters who are most likely to participate in elections are those who hold a very strong partisan identity. As a result, elections become less about substance, and more reminiscent of a sports game, where the goal is to win at any cost. The University of Kansas news service summed up the study, saying:
+
+“They found that many average voters with strong party commitments — both Democrats and Republicans — care more about their parties simply winning the election than they do either ideology or issues. Unlike previous research, the study found that loyalty to the party itself was the source of partisan rivalry and incivility, instead of a fundamental disagreement over issues.”
+
+The trend toward greater polarization within the American electorate has been happening for years, but the contributing factors are numerous and complex
+
+A study by Pew Research shows polarization has steadily increased since 2002. Miller and Conover’s study examined a few possible causes, one of which was the tendency for partisans to consume only media content that reinforces their own worldview.
+
+In a video, Miller explained that these tendencies are having an impact on Congress itself by stifling compromise and breeding a political environment that lacks civility.
+
+“We’re not thinking about politics in the way that most Founders wanted, which is to think about issues, be open to compromise and not be attached to parties,” said Miller. “We’re looking at politics through a simplistic partisan view in which we think our side is good and their side is bad.”
+
+Among other things, the study found:",REAL
+324,Manhunt shifts to lone cabin in upstate New York: Prisoner hideout?,"The hunt for two convicts who escaped from a maximum-security prison in New York has shifted back upstate, following an intense search near the Pennsylvania border this weekend.
+
+Two Sunday attacks add to recent rise in fatal shootings of US police
+
+New York State Police engage in a manhunt for two prisoners Richard Matt and David Sweat in Friendship, New York on Sunday. Heavily-armed police converged on towns in western New York state on Saturday to investigate possible sightings of the two convicted murderers who escaped a maximum-security prison two weeks ago, police said.
+
+The latest sighting of two convicts who escaped from a New York prison now places them close to the Canadian border — more than 350 miles from where state police conducted their search less than a day before.
+
+Investigators and military trucks arrived at Mountain View and Owls Head in Franklin County, N.Y., late Sunday in response to reports that a person had been seen fleeing from a hunting camp in the area after breaking into a cabin, Glenn MacNeill, acting Franklin County district attorney, told local NBC affiliate WPTZ.
+
+The Associated Press reported Monday afternoon that State Police Maj. Charles Guess said at a news conference that authorities had ""specific items"" from the Adirondack cabin some 20 miles west of the prison and sent them to labs for DNA and other testing. He would not elaborate on the items but characterized the latest search effort — one of many over the past 17 days — as a confirmed lead.
+
+""There are a number of factors that make this a complex search: the weather, the terrain, the environment and frankly the vast scope of the north country of the Adirondacks,"" Major Guess said.
+
+Police said the cabin sighting was unconfirmed, but authorities nonetheless shifted the hunt for Clinton Correctional Facility inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt from a rural mountainous area near the Pennsylvania border to upstate New York.
+
+Witnesses told WPTZ that helicopters are in the air and checkpoints are in place on roads in the area, which is 25 miles west of the prison where the two inmates used power tools to cut holes through their cell walls to escape on June 6.
+
+Still, state police said in a news release late Sunday that though they will continue to respond to reports of sightings, a “primary focus of the search continues to be in the Dannemora area,” close to Clinton Correctional. The statement urged Dannemora residents to stay alert, adding:
+
+If these men are spotted, please call 911 immediately. Do not approach, as both are considered to be very dangerous.... New York State is offering a reward of $50,000 for information that leads to the capture of either suspect ($100,000 for both). The U.S. Marshals Service has placed Sweat and Matt on their 15 Most Wanted Fugitives List, and is also offering a $25,000 reward for information that leads to the capture of either suspect.
+
+“We will search under every rock, behind every tree and structure until we are confident that that area is secure,” State Police Maj. Michael J. Cerretto said at a news conference.
+
+Sweat was serving a life sentence without parole for killing a sheriff's deputy, while Mr. Matt was doing 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnapping, torture, and murder of his former boss.
+
+The Christian Science Monitor reported that prison worker Joyce Mitchell remained in custody on charges that she provided the two men hacksaw blades, chisels, and other tools to aid in their escape. She has pleaded not guilty.
+
+Officials said a corrections officer also has been placed on administrative leave as part of the investigation into the men's escape.
+
+State police will hold a media briefing with Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wiley and County Sheriff Dave Favro on Monday at noon to provide updates on the search.",REAL
+5482,Armed Dakota Access Contractor Accused Of Trying To Infiltrate Water Protectors,"An armed Dakota Access security contractor confronted indigenous water protectors fighting the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota. He had an assault rifle, which he pointed at the water protectors, and he wore a bandana over his face. He was arrested by the Bureau of Indian Affairs police and later released without charge.
+In video aired by “Democracy Now!”, as host Amy Goodman described, the man carrying the rifle, who has been identified as Kyle Thompson, points a rifle “at the protectors as he attempts to flee into the water.”
+“A Standing Rock Sioux tribal member says he saw the man driving down Highway 1806 toward the main resistance camp with an AR-15 rifle on the passenger side of his truck,” Goodman reported. “Protectors chased down his truck and then pursued him on foot in efforts to disarm him.”
+“Protectors said inside the man’s truck they found a DAPL security ID card and insurance papers listing his vehicle as insured by DAPL. That’s the Dakota Access pipeline,” according to Goodman.
+Dallas Goldtooth, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, witnessed the encounter between the armed contractor and water protectors. He said on “Democracy Now!”:
+It was a very terrifying moment for a lot of us watching, I mean, to see this man pulling an assault rifle at our water protectors. And I think that—many blessings and gratitude to some of the military veterans within our security, from within our Oceti Sakowin camp, who stepped up to negotiate and to de-escalate this man, to really talk to him to make sure that he did not hurt anybody, until the Bureau of Indian Affairs police officers could show up.
+Thompson appeared on the scene about the same time that hundreds of police with militarized equipment surrounded a newly formed camp called the 1851 Treaty Camp, which was setup by water protectors to reclaim “unceded Dakota territory affirmed as part of the Standing Rock Reservation in the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1851.”
+Sacred Stone Camp, which has led indigenous resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline, reported that police cleared blockades, attacked water protectors with pepper spray and concussion grenades, and used shotguns to fire rubber bullets. A sound cannon was also deployed against water protectors as well, as the police brutally tore down the encampment.
+Dakota Access denies Thompson was working for the company, however, Thompson posted on Facebook and claimed he was “doing his job to photograph burning company equipment when he was confronted by demonstrators,” according to APTN National News .
+The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe apparently claims Thompson fired off shots while Thompson vehemently denies that any shots were ever fired. He maintains FBI agents, who took him into custody, could back up his story.
+However, Thompson’s story becomes incredibly suspicious, as he insists the water protectors “had knives and were dead set on using those knives.” He says a water protector fired a flare.
+The video of Thompson’s confrontation in the water definitely does not show any knife-wielding water protectors trying to attack him.
+What is troubling is the fact that he was not dressed in a manner that would clearly indicate he was a security contractor for DAPL. He looked like an infiltrator. One wonders what would have happened if he made it to the 1851 Treaty Camp and engaged in disruptive behavior that the police could then use to justify the brute force used against water protectors.
+It is unknown what company Thompson worked for, but he was previously deployed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
+Separately, another suspicious act against the indigenous water protectors occurred overnight on October 29, when a fire spread near the Oceti Sakowin camp.
+“There was some mysterious incident of a vehicle that came out of nowhere, that was almost acting as a distraction, was spinning doughnuts in the middle of the road, and then it sped off to the south,” Goldtooth shared on “Democracy Now!”. “And immediately after that, flames were seen on top of the hill to the west. There’s documented footage [of] what appears to be a drip line, which is from what I understand, is a technique used in firefighting. I mean, it was very, very clear that that brush fire that happened was an act of arson by unknown individuals.”
+“Given the recent events with the Dakota Access worker, given the escalation of law enforcement, that, you know, a lot of fingers are pointing towards Dakota Access as being a culprit behind this late fire. And thank god that the wind was pushing away from the camp. The fire spread pretty large.”
+The post Armed Dakota Access Contractor Accused Of Trying To Infiltrate Water Protectors appeared first on Shadowproof .
+",FAKE
+10241,18 State Swat Team Drill In Prep for Backlash Against a Stolen Election,"Previous 18 State Swat Team Drill In Prep for Backlash Against a Stolen Election 
+Paul Martin, through his sources has learned of an 18 state Swat Team Drill. The drill is exceptionally covert but The Common Sense Show has learned that the intent of the drill is centralize and coordinate martial law activities over a large swath of states at the same time. 
+It is apparent that the election is going to be stolen and the establishment and their minions are expecting a violent backlash. Remember, both the New York Times and the Washington Post contacted Dave Hodges and Mike Adams fishing for information regarding any potential headlines related to a planned violent backlash should Clinton steal the election. 
+More on this coming suppression of the will of the people is included in the following video. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US 
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.",FAKE
+9364,Michael Moore: Joe Blow Will Vote Trump As “Ultimate F–– You to the Elite… A Human Molotov Cocktail”,"Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » Michael Moore: Joe Blow Will Vote Trump As “Ultimate F–– You to the Elite… A Human Molotov Cocktail” 
+He is the human Molotov cocktail that they have been waiting for. The human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them. So, on November 8th, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, take that lever — or felt pen or touchscreen — and put a big f**king X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump. Trump’s election is going to be the biggest F**K YOU ever recorded in human history. 
+From Mac Slavo, SHTFPlan : 
+A tidal wave is coming. 
+Michael Moore, a liberal’s liberal who holds die-hard loyalty to Hillary Clinton, is acknowledging what everyone with a clear head recognizes: that she doesn’t even remotely connect with the average voter, doesn’t understand their problems – and above all, doesn’t care about them. 
+Although Moore can’t support Donald Trump, he seems to admire his ability to resonate with the actual problems that the people who formerly made up the middle class are going through – economic and otherwise. Moore, like Trump, understands the pulse of the people, though they differ in just about every other way. 
+This election represents a pivotal point, and an end of the line for the deal that people once held with their leaders. After decades of broken promises and deals to sell them short and sell them out, people have had enough. 
+THAT’S what this election is about. 
+Right or wrong, Trump represents a rebuke of the system – as Moore calls it, the ultimate “F––– You” ever directed at the system. 
+Here’s some of what he said in an epic rant (reportedly excerpted from his rush-election film Trumpland) that is strangely validating of Trump’s entire campaign: 
+Whether Trump means it or not, it’s kind of irrelevant because he’s saying the things that people who are hurting. And it’s why every beaten down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle-class loves Trump. 
+“They’re not racists or rednecks, they’re actually pretty decent people. So, after talking to a number of them, I sort of wanted to sort of write this.” 
+[…] 
+Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of the Ford Motor executives and said: if you close these factories, as you are planning to do in Detroit, and rebuild them in Mexico, I am going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody’s going to buy them. 
+It was an amazing thing to see. No politician — Republican or Democrat — had ever said anything like that to these executives. It was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Brexit states. You live here in Ohio. You know what I am talking about. 
+He is the human Molotov cocktail that they have been waiting for. The human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them. And on November 8th — Election Day — although they have lost their jobs. Although they’ve been foreclosed on by the bank. Next came the divorce and now the wife and kids are gone. The car’s been repossessed. They haven’t had a real vacation in years. They’re stuck with the shitty Obamacare bronze plan. They can’t even get a f**king percocet. 
+They have essentially lost everything they had…except one thing. The one thing that doesn’t cost them a cent and is guaranteed to them by the American Constitution: the right to vote. 
+[…] So, on November 8th, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, take that lever — or felt pen or touchscreen — and put a big f**king X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump. 
+[…] 
+They see that the elites who have ruined their lives hate Trump. 
+Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The Media hates Trump… 
+The enemy of my enemy is who I am voting for on November 8th. 
+Trump’s election is going to be the biggest F**K YOU ever recorded in human history. 
+And it will feel good. 
+What red-blooded American, working stiff or laid off schmo wouldn’t want to stick it to the establishment and rebuke the very system that brought them to this point? After all, it is their fault. 
+People have been hurting and in decline for eight long years – and for all his smiles and posturing, Obama hasn’t done a damned thing. And Hillary can’t even pretend. 
+The people who will be deciding the popular vote in this election want to take down that system and put someone in who will – once and for all – stand up for them. Basically, Americans want revenge. 
+What the electoral college decides is another matter altogether, of course. On Sale At SD Bullion… This Week Only…",FAKE
+7276,"More Beer, Less Vodka as Russians Mull Ongoing Crisis - Rustem Falyakhov","Bias bashers More Beer, Less Vodka as Russians Mull Ongoing Crisis 
+With the crisis continuing, Russians are not only eating less, they are also drinking less - particularly vodka and other hard drinks. Against the background of an overall decline in alcohol consumption, Russian preferences are shifting to beer and wine Originally appeared at Russia & India Report 
+The volume of retail trade turnover in Russia continues to decrease. In August, it fell by 0.1 percent compared to the previous month, compared to January-August last year, when it fell by 5.7 per cent, said analysts from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). They were citing data from the state statistical agency Rosstat and a survey conducted by the Institute for Social Analysis and Forecasting. 
+The turnover is decreasing because Russians are not only eating less and cutting back on spending on services, but they are also drinking fewer alcoholic beverages. 
+Sales of vodka dropped catastrophically’ 
+From January to August 2016, vodka, liqueurs and brandies accounted for 42 percent of sales volume. Beer amounted to 44-45 percent of total sales of alcohol. Another 12-13 percent was wine production. 
+Other beverages (cider, mead, etc.) made up less than 1 percent of alcohol products bought by people, according to RANEPA's monitoring data. 
+The range of sales is clearly seasonal. Retailers usually sell more wine, champagne and vodka in December while sales of beer increase by 15-20 percent in mid-summer compared to the beginning of the year. 
+""Retail sales of alcohol have significantly decreased over the past two years. 10.6 percent fewer alcoholic beverages were sold between January and August this year than during the same eight months of 2014,"" the survey report stated. Retail sales of alcoholic beverages bottomed out in January and April 2016. 
+""Sales of vodka have dropped catastrophically,"" Alexandra Burdyak, a senior researcher at RANEPA and one of the authors of the study, said. ""The drop was 13.4 percent against the same period of last year. The main decline occurred last year, when sales of vodka decreased by 12.6 percent compared to 2014."" 
+However, the wine production sector showed a different trend. The traditional New Year increase in sales of wine and champagne dragged on, with wine sales remaining at 2015 levels until May 2016. 
+Burdyak said consumers first finished their earlier stored wine and then, as stocks in cabinets dried out, and lovers of wine and sparkling wines made sure that nothing was happening in the economy, the ruble was not strengthening and the prices of imported alcohol were not decreasing, they began to buy this type of alcohol again. 
+The new generation of consumers 
+According to Burdyak, the decrease in consumption of vodka and other alcoholic beverages has been steady since 2013. Strong alcohol consumption peaked in 2007, and it has been in decline since then. 
+The taste of Russians, born in 1985 and later, has been shaped by western, primarily European influences; they prefer wine, beer and other light alcoholic beverages. 
+However, Vadim Drobiz, director of the Centre for Federal and Regional Alcohol Market Studies (TSIFRRA), believes it is a little too early to talk about a reduction in alcohol consumption in Russia. 
+""Because of the crisis, the main consumers of alcoholic drinks could have switched to cheaper options, this is possible,"" he said. ""But few people are capable of seriously saving on alcohol."" Drinking away the crisis 
+Vodka consumption fell from 53 percent of retail sales, measured in terms of absolute alcohol content, in 2007-2009 to 39 percent in 2015. During the same period, the share of beer increased from 31-32 percent to 43 percent of total sales of alcoholic beverages. 
+The total volume of retail sales is calculated in terms of absolute alcohol content as follows: Half a litre of vodka (40 percent alcohol) is equal to 200 grams of ethanol; one litre of beer (4 percent) is equivalent to 40 grams, and one litre of wine (12 percent) contains 120 grams of ethanol. 
+These trends appear likely to continue over the next few years, though some analysts have reservations. 
+""It should be borne in mind that consumers, and the Russians certainly in my experience, consider strong alcohol to be an antidepressant,"" Drobiz said. ""And that means that consumption of vodka and other spirits in the context of the ongoing economic crisis is not likely to fall.""",FAKE
+17,Stop the vendetta against Planned Parenthood,"THE STING videos targeting Planned Parenthood are hard to watch. Doctors talk clinically, some say callously, about harvesting fetal tissue. Technicians identify and isolate tiny organs. References are made to “it’s a baby” or “it’s another boy.” The videos were taken surreptitiously and were artfully edited to produce maximum discomfort about complicated issues that, for many, are inherently uncomfortable.
+
+That truths were distorted to paint an inaccurate and unfair picture of a health organization that provides valuable services to women — as well as to demonize research that leads to important medical advances — doesn’t matter to antiabortion activists. Or, sadly, to the politicians who pander to them.
+
+Planned Parenthood is under virulent attack for the role a small portion of its affiliates play in helping women who want to donate fetal tissue for medical research. The antiabortion group Center for Medical Progress has orchestrated a propaganda campaign accusing the nation’s largest provider of abortions of profiting from the illegal sale of fetal tissue, a charge refuted by Planned Parenthood.
+
+None of the videos released shows anything illegal and, in fact, the full footage of Planned Parenthood executives meeting with people presumed to be buyers for a human biologics company include repeated assertions that clinics are not selling tissue but only seeking permitted reimbursement costs for expenses. Indeed, the Colorado clinic featured in the videos refused to enter into a contract with the phony company because of its failure to meet its legal and ethical standards.
+
+Such facts, though, haven’t stopped officials in several Republican-led states, including Texas, Louisiana and Ohio, from launching investigations of Planned Parenthood, even though affiliates in those states don’t facilitate fetal tissue donations. In Washington, Senate Republicans have fast-tracked a bid to defund Planned Parenthood, with a vote set for Monday. Fortunately, it’s unlikely there will be 60 votes to advance the bill, as cutting off funds to Planned Parenthood would be irresponsible.
+
+No federal money is used by Planned Parenthood to provide abortions except in some rare exceptions. So cutting off government funds, mostly through Medicaid and grants, would only hurt the thousands of people, most of them low-income women, who each day depend upon Planned Parenthood for birth control, cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections and other health services. Given that many of the clinics are in medically underserved areas, it’s a myth, as Republicans claim, that other providers can fill the gap. Shutting down clinics would make it harder for many women to obtain birth control — and the last thing either side of the abortion debate should want is an increase in unwanted pregnancies that result in more abortions.
+
+We are under no illusions that the vendetta against Planned Parenthood will end. Conservative Republicans are already threatening to shut down the federal government in the fall by blocking any spending that includes money for Planned Parenthood. It’s clear from how quickly Republican presidential hopefuls seized on the issue that it will be a staple of the campaign trail. Consequently, it’s important that congressional Democrats and others continue to stand up for Planned Parenthood and the women whose health depends upon its services.",REAL
+7789,Understanding Propaganda - The Art Of Distraction And Disinformation,"5 
+Most American spend over 9 hours a day using media. Is this making us dumber?? 
+Are you living in a media induced trace? Do you know the truth of the world or do you know what the manipulators want you to know?! 
+Professor Jerry Kroth (Ph. D. Psychology) examines the ties between advertising and factual knowledge. Most people can name every mascot of most companies, but they can not name hardly any historical figures. How did we get here? 
+These are questions that Professor Kroth explains in this well thought out presentation. 
+This talk is based on Dr. Kroth's recent book, ""Duped! Delusion, Denial, and the end of the American dream."" 
+More information at collectivepsych.com",FAKE
+8906,Huffington Post Continues Campaigning for Hillary Clinton,"https://web.archive.org/web/20161109183253/http://www.huffingtonpost.com They pretend Trump’s win is a victory for bigots, instead of a defeat for the aristocracy (‘Wall Street’, ‘The Establishment’, or America’s billionaires and their agents such as lobbyists and the leading politicians). However, a close look at the evidence shows Huffington Post to be wrong: Trump’s win was overwhelmingly driven by Americans’ repudiation of the aristocracy itself (such as, for example, repudiation of the Institute that runs Huffington Post’s neoconservative international edition, World Post , the Berggruen Institute (including Eric Schmidt , Lawrence Summers , Fareed Zakaria , Arianna Huffington, Nicholas Berggruen , Ernesto Zedillo , Carl Bildt, Niall Ferguson, and Joseph Nye , all being proponents of Obama’s building war against Russia — such as : “To confront Putin, Europe will have to make changes that will be deeply controversial on a continent long committed to environmentalism and marked by an aversion to the use of force”). And, as far as global warming is concerned, which is a real problem about Trump, it’s also very much and demonstrably — not merely in words — a real problem about Hillary too (and one that outside the context of the Presidential campaign has even been courageously reported by some of HuffPo’s own reporters ), but HuffPo and other Democratic Party propagandists pretend there’s reason to believe that Trump’s actions would be even worse than hers have been, and HuffPo’s readers thus end up being little else than Democratic Party suckers who feel satisfied in their ‘news’ reading to soak up what is almost entirely Democratic Party propaganda, which means the propaganda emanating out of the White House whenever a Democrat resides there — sort of like a Democratic Party version of the Republican Party’s Fox ‘News’. The aristocracy ( all of it, both its Republican and its Democratic Party branches) continue their campaign, and expect to crush their opposition — the public (of all parties). And that’s what a close look at the evidence shows explains Trump’s win — not bigotry on the part of the American public. Bigotry is a huge problem in every society, but especially amongst the aristocracy, who love to pretend that it’s mainly a problem ‘down below’ — so that they can continue to exploit the public while claiming to be superior to it. That’s the Big Lie, which Obama and the Clintons — and Huffington Post — promote and get paid very well to promote. Their campaign never ends. Only the personnel do.",FAKE
+10522,TRUNEWS 10/31/16 Dr. Lance Wallnau | Answered Prayer: The Cabal Crumbles,"TRUNEWS 10/31/16 Dr. Lance Wallnau | Answered Prayer: The Cabal Crumbles October 31, 2016 Is the new FBI investigation into Hillary Rodham Clinton God’s answer to His saints? Today on TRUNEWS, Rick Wiles expands on James Comey’s Friday announcement, and the scandalous tie in with long time aide, and Muslim Brotherhood darling, Huma Abedin. Pastor Rick also speaks with Dr. Lance Wallnau regarding the Lord’s use of Donald Trump as a spiritual wrecking ball in The Body of Christ. Edward Szall provides updates on the latest from WikiLeaks, and Fior Hernandez details the major spiritual shift occurring in the pews of America as Election Day approaches. 
+Today’s Audio Streamcast. Click the audio bar to listen: <span itemprop=""name"" content=""TRUNEWS 10/31/16 Dr. Lance Wallnau | Answered Prayer: The Cabal Crumbles""></span> <span itemprop=""description"" content=""Is the new FBI investigation into Hillary Rodham Clinton God’s answer to His saints? Today on TRUNEWS, Rick Wiles expands on James Comey’s Friday announcement, and the scandalous tie in with long time aide, and Muslim Brotherhood darling, Huma Abedin. Pastor Rick also speaks with Dr. Lance Wallnau regarding the Lord’s use of Donald Trump as a spiritual wrecking ball in The Body of Christ. Edward Szall provides updates on the latest from WikiLeaks, and Fior Hernandez details the major spiritual shift...""></span> <span itemprop=""duration"" content=""5123""></span> <span itemprop=""thumbnail"" content=""http://static.panda-os.com/p/1305/sp/130500/thumbnail/entry_id/0_kvyhphja/version/1 /acv/62""></span> <span itemprop=""width"" content=""350""></span> <span itemprop=""height"" content=""25""></span> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/products/video-platform-features"">Video Platform</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Products/Features/Video-Management"">Video Management</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Video-Solutions"">Video Solutions</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Products/Features/Video-Player"">Video Player</a> 
+Right-click to download today’s show to your local device in mp3 format: Streamcast MP3 
+Email: | Twitter: @EdwardSzall | Facebook: Ed Szall DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP on Apple and Google Play ! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media How To Listen To TRUNEWS 
+Here on our show pages, there are two ways to listen to TRUNEWS. The first is to use the embedded player on the page. It is the black bar that you see above. Just click the arrow on the player for today’s broadcast. If you prefer to save the program to listen to it later on your PC or mobile device, just click the ‘DOWNLOAD MP3’ link above to archive that particular streamcast. Streamcast Archives",FAKE
+1005,Ted Cruz victory shows GOP's impossible conundrum (+video),"The Wisconsin GOP primary suggests that, no matter what the Republicans do from here on out, they will anger some major faction of a fractured party.
+
+Ted Cruz accomplished what he set out to do in the Wisconsin Republican primary: beat front-runner Donald Trump soundly, winning most of the state’s delegates and raising the probability of a contested GOP convention in July.
+
+But Senator Cruz’s big victory – he beat Mr. Trump by 13 points, 48 percent to 35 percent – doesn’t prove that he is “uniting the Republican Party,” as he claimed in his victory speech Tuesday night. It merely demonstrates that the Texas senator is consolidating his role as the “anti-Trump” in a presidential nomination race that has plunged the GOP into crisis.
+
+The Wisconsin exit polls tell the story.
+
+“More than half of Cruz’s supporters, and two-thirds of [Ohio Gov.] John Kasich’s, said they were ‘scared’ of what Trump would do in the White House – a remarkable rejection of the leading candidate in the race,” write analysts for ABC News.
+
+“Notably, among Cruz’s own voters, only a quarter were excited about what he’d do as president – further suggesting that he garnered substantial anti-Trump, not necessarily, pro-Cruz, support.”
+
+Governor Kasich underperformed in Wisconsin with only 14 percent of the vote, but he remains adamant about taking his campaign to the convention as the only “mainstream” Republican still in the race. The effect, though, has been to split the anti-Trump vote.
+
+Perhaps more troubling for the GOP were responses to how Wisconsin Republicans would vote in the general election. If Trump is the party’s nominee against Democrat Hillary Clinton, only 61 percent of GOP primary voters said they would vote for him; 19 percent said they would vote for a third-party candidate, 10 percent said they would vote for Mrs. Clinton, and 8 percent said “no one.”
+
+If it’s Cruz vs. Clinton in November, only 66 percent of Wisconsin Republicans said they’d back Cruz; 18 percent said they’d vote third party, 6 percent said Clinton, and 6 percent said “no one.”
+
+These numbers are similar to national polling that shows a deep divide within the GOP between Trump supporters and Republican voters who oppose him. It’s also true that, inevitably, as Election Day nears, many unhappy voters will surely end up holding their nose and voting for their party’s nominee anyway. Clinton, in particular, inspires revulsion among many Republicans.
+
+But Trump is no mere Republican candidate. The brash billionaire inspires rock-solid loyalty among a third of the GOP electorate, including the first-time voters he has lured into the process with his populist, nativist message. If Trump is not the nominee, many of his supporters say, they will abandon the party altogether – especially if they believe Trump is treated unfairly at the convention.
+
+On the issue of “fairness,” one exit poll question was particularly devastating to the Republican establishment: If no one wins a majority of the delegates before the convention, whom should the party nominate? voters were asked. A majority,  55 percent, said “the candidate with the most votes in the primaries.” Only 43 percent said “the candidate who the delegates think would be the best nominee.”
+
+“In all likelihood, Donald Trump will go to the convention with the most delegates. Wisconsin doesn’t really change that,” says Matthew Kerbel, chairman of the political science department at Villanova University in Philadelphia.
+
+If Trump arrives at the convention without a majority of the delegates, then it becomes easier to deny him the nomination.
+
+“But the cost of denying him is to split the party,” says Professor Kerbel. “And the cost of not denying him is it becomes his party, and Donald Trump becomes the face of the party.”
+
+That could have a profound impact on other Republicans on the ballot.
+
+Among general election voters, Trump has sky-high negatives. Cruz and Clinton also have high negatives – but not close to Trump’s. Kasich argues he’s the most electable, and general election matchups bear that out, but his path to the nomination through a contested convention is impossibly narrow. He’ll need to convince a deadlocked convention that a candidate who finished at the back of the pack deserves to jump the line. His argument is “electability” – polls do show him performing better than Trump or Cruz against Clinton. But Tuesday’s exit polls showed electability held little sway with voters.
+
+The next test comes in two weeks with the New York primary – home turf for both Trump and Clinton, who, like Trump, needs to overcome an embarrassing defeat in Wisconsin. Clinton’s 13-point loss to Bernie Sanders – 56 to 43 percent – was nevertheless expected. Wisconsin’s electorate is largely white, and very liberal, both playing to the Vermont senator’s strengths. Trump also wasn’t a good fit for Wisconsin, both demographically and culturally.
+
+Before Wisconsin, New York polls showed both Trump and Clinton well ahead of their top competitors. If either underperforms, it will be clear that Wisconsin was a turning point. Both will be damaged, but still on track to head to their respective conventions with the most delegates. The math, at this stage in the race, is almost impossible to overcome.",REAL
+9397,A Tea Party Congressman Just Called For Armed Uprising If Trump Loses,"Former Tea Party congressman and conservative radio host Joe Walsh (R-IL) recently took to Twitter to announce his plans for armed insurrection against the government when Republican   loses the election in a few weeks. On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. 
+On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. 
+You in? 
+— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
+This is not the first time the outspoken radical has made controversial remarks. He responded to the tragic shootings of police officers in Dallas by a lone wolf sniper by openly calling for a race war. Before that, Walsh called for the journalists at MSNBC and CNN to be beheaded for refusing to show the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that provided the justification for the terrorist attacks committed by a cell claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) against the publication’s offices in January 2015. 
+The denizens of Twitter quickly responded with vicious mockery of the outrageous Tea Party demagogue: Joe Walsh, charging the Capitol steps 
+flintlock musket in hand 
+barks his shin real bad 
+thus the revolution died 
+— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom shouldn’t that musket be auctioned off to pay the child support you owe? 
+— jacqui rodham (@heyjdey) October 26, 2016 . @WalshFreedom I would highly encourage you to take your musket and point it at the nearest armed police officer 
+— evil roy slade (spoo (@EvilRoySladeDS) October 26, 2016 . @WalshFreedom Do you often invite people to joint musket-grabbing sessions?",FAKE
+4050,"US pullout from Yemen eases pressure on Al Qaeda, lawmakers warn","The evacuation of American diplomats, soldiers and even CIA operatives from Yemen is stirring deep concerns that the U.S. is losing a vital foothold in territory that the most notorious Al Qaeda affiliate calls home.
+
+The White House says Defense Department officials remain on the ground and are coordinating with Yemeni counterparts, but the retreat of most U.S. personnel is seen as a significant setback for what had been a cornerstone of American counterterrorism operations.
+
+""Bottom line is increased danger to the United States homeland,"" House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, told Fox News.
+
+President Obama last fall, in announcing military action against the Islamic State, cited counterterrorism efforts in Yemen as a model and a success story.
+
+But Thornberry said there is now ""less pressure"" on America's chief enemy in that region, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which he described as a ""serious"" threat.
+
+""That makes it easier for them to plot and plan against us,"" he said.
+
+The State Department confirmed earlier this week it had closed the U.S. Embassy in Yemen and evacuated its staff because of the political crisis and security concerns following the takeover of much of the country by Iran-linked Shiite Houthi rebels.
+
+But The Washington Post reported that the embassy closure also has forced the CIA to withdraw personnel. Officials told the Post the CIA has pulled ""dozens"" of operatives and other staffers from the country, including senior officials who were working with Yemen's government against Al Qaeda operatives.
+
+One former U.S. official called the development ""extremely damaging"" to the CIA mission there.
+
+Some CIA personnel reportedly remain in Yemen as the agency tries to maintain its intelligence network. But coordination with Yemeni agents undoubtedly becomes more difficult.
+
+House intelligence committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., predicted the pull-out would ""hinder the United States' campaign against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,"" the group which claimed responsibility for the recent Paris terror attack -- and which has attempted attacks inside the U.S. over the past several years.
+
+Nunes also said the chaos in Yemen should fuel concerns about Iran -- with whom the U.S. and other countries are negotiating regarding its nuclear program -- since the Yemen rebels are Iran-backed.
+
+Yemen has been in crisis for months, with Houthi rebels besieging the capital and then taking control.
+
+The Houthis last week dissolved parliament and formally took over after months of clashes. They then placed President Hadi and his Cabinet ministers under house arrest. Hadi and the ministers later resigned in protest.
+
+On Tuesday, U.S. officials said the embassy closure would not affect counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda's Yemen branch.
+
+""The United States remains firmly committed to supporting all Yemenis who continue to work toward a peaceful, prosperous and unified Yemen,"" State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. ""We will explore options for a return to Sanaa when the situation on the ground improves.""
+
+Both the CIA and the military's Joint Special Operations Command run separate drone killing programs in Yemen, though the CIA has conducted the majority of the strikes, U.S. officials have said.
+
+On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest also said counterterrorism operations are still ongoing.
+
+""There continue to be Department of Defense personnel ... on the ground in Yemen that are coordinating with their counterparts in Yemen ... and continuing to carry out the kinds of actions, the counterterrorism actions that are necessary to protect the American people and our interests,"" he said.
+
+Earnest stressed that Yemen has long had a weak central government and faced challenges, but the U.S. nevertheless has ""succeeded in applying significant pressure to the AQAP leadership that's operating in Yemen.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+419,Obama trade bill in trouble,"“We obviously spoke about my passion and his passion, which [is] veterans and veterans issues,” he said.",REAL
+3897,Secret Service testing ways to intercept rogue drones with late-night flights over Washington,"Mysterious, middle-of-the-night drone flights by the U.S. Secret Service during the next several weeks over parts of Washington -- usually off-limits as a strict no-fly zone -- are part of secret government testing intended to find ways to interfere with rogue drones or knock them out of the sky, The Associated Press has learned.
+
+A U.S. official briefed on the plans said the Secret Service was testing drones for law enforcement or protection efforts and to look for ways, such as signal jamming, to thwart threats from civilian drones. The drones were being flown between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to publicly discuss the plans. The Secret Service has said details were classified.
+
+Some consumer-level drones, which commonly carry video cameras, are powerful enough to carry small amounts of explosives or a grenade.
+
+The challenge for the Secret Service is quickly detecting a rogue drone flying near the White House or the president's location, then within moments either hacking it to seize control over its flight or jamming its signal to send it off course or make it crash.
+
+The Secret Service has said only that it will openly test drones over Washington, but it declined to provide details such as when it will fly, how many drones, over what parts of the city, for how long and for what purposes. It decided to tell the public in advance about the tests out of concern that people who saw the drones might be alarmed, particularly in the wake of the drones spotted recently over Paris at night. Flying overnight also diminishes the chances that radio jamming would accidentally affect nearby businesses, drivers, pedestrians and tourists.
+
+It is illegal under the U.S. Communications Act to sell or use signal jammers except for narrow purposes by government agencies.
+
+Depending on a drone's manufacturer and capabilities, its flight-control and video-broadcasting systems commonly use the same common radio frequencies as popular Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies. Jamming by the Secret Service -- depending on how powerfully or precisely it works -- could disrupt nearby Internet networks or phone conversations until it's turned off. Testing in the real-world environment around the White House would reveal unexpected effects on jamming efforts from nearby buildings, monuments or tall trees.
+
+Signals emanating from an inbound drone -- such as coming from a video stream back to its pilot -- could allow the Secret Service to detect and track it.
+
+Federal agencies generally need approval to jam signals from the U.S. telecommunications advisory agency, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. That agency declined to tell the AP whether the Secret Service sought permission because it said such requests are not routinely made public.
+
+The Federal Aviation Administration has confirmed it formally authorized the Secret Service to fly the drones and granted it a special waiver to fly them over Washington. The agency declined to provide specifics about the secret program.
+
+In January, a wayward quadcopter drone, piloted by an off-duty U.S. intelligence employee, landed on the White House lawn. At the time, the Secret Service said the errant landing appeared to be accidental and was not considered a security threat.
+
+The agency had been looking at security issues surrounding drones before the January crash, but the crash of that drone led the agency to focus more attention on security issues surrounding small, unmanned aircraft that can be hard to detect. Previously published reports have disclosed that the Secret Service already uses jammers in presidential and vice presidential motorcades to disrupt signals that might detonate hidden remotely triggered improvised explosive devices.
+
+Researchers with the Homeland Security Department's science and technology directorate are working on strategies to interdict an unauthorized drone flying inside security areas. The research arm of DHS is trying to balance security concerns of the small, hard-to-detect devices, with the burgeoning commercial use and interests of hobbyists. Likewise, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said last week it's studying how the U.S. can resolve privacy risks with increasing use of drones.
+
+The Homeland Security Department hosted a two-day meeting last month with industry officials, law enforcement and academics to discuss balancing security and commercial interests and establishing security practices. Days later, the Secret Service, which is part of the Homeland Security Department, distributed a three-sentence press release saying it will ""conduct a series of exercises involving unmanned aircraft systems, in the coming days and weeks.""
+
+Trying to keep drones out of a secure area can be tricky.
+
+There are basically three ways to stop a drone, said Jeremy Gillula, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: block the radio signals linking the drone to its controller, hack the aircraft's control signals and trick it into believing it is somewhere else, or physically disable it. Some drone manufacturers program a ""geo fence"" -- location coordinates their drones treat as off-limits and refuse to fly past -- into the drone's programming. Police could physically knock a drone out of the air with a projectile or use a net to catch it.
+
+""If it were me that would actually be the first thing I would think about doing,"" Gillula said. ""You would have to basically encase the White House in this net. It sure wouldn't look pretty, but in some ways it would be the most effective way.""",REAL
+3761,Source: Baltimore mayor ordered police to stand down,"Despite a firm denial by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a senior law enforcement source charges that she gave an order for police to stand down as riots broke out Monday night, raising more questions about whether some of the violence and looting could have been prevented.
+
+The source, who is involved in the enforcement efforts, confirmed to Fox News there was a direct order from the mayor to her police chief Monday night, effectively tying the hands of officers as they were pelted with rocks and bottles.
+
+Asked directly if the mayor was the one who gave that order, the source said: ""You are God damn right it was.""
+
+The claim follows criticism of the mayor for, over the weekend, saying they were giving space to those who ""wished to destroy.""
+
+By Tuesday night, despite the chaos a day earlier, Baltimore police along with the National Guard and other law enforcement contingents seemed to be restoring order in the city, which was under a curfew overnight.
+
+Rawlings-Blake has defended her handling of the unrest, which grew out of protests over the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.
+
+The mayor, in an interview with Fox News' Bill Hemmer on Tuesday, denied any order was issued to hold back on Monday.
+
+""You have to understand, it is not holding back. It is responding appropriately,"" she said, saying there was no stand-down directive.
+
+She said her critics have a right to their opinion.
+
+Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, just days into the job, addressed the unrest on Wednesday. She offered her ""deepest condolences"" to the Gray family, but said the ""senseless acts of violence"" are a ""grave danger to the community"" and ""counterproductive."" She reiterated that the FBI and DOJ civil rights unit are investigating, and ready to offer assistance.
+
+She said she's been in direct contact with Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and others.
+
+On Monday, Hogan suggested the mayor waited too long to request a state of emergency.
+
+That followed criticism over her remarks over the weekend, when she said it's important to give protesters the opportunity to exercise their right to free speech.
+
+She seemed to take that notion a step further: ""It's a very delicate balancing act, because, while we tried to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.""
+
+As her ""destroy"" remarks faced a buzzsaw of criticism amid the riots Monday, the mayor initially tried to deny she said them.
+
+""I never said nor would I ever say that we are giving people space to destroy our city, so my words should not be twisted,"" the mayor said Monday.
+
+In a press conference, she accused critics of a ""blatant mischaracterization.""
+
+But her office eventually released a written statement acknowledging she said those words -- while attempting to explain them.
+
+Howard Libit, director of strategic planning and policy, said: ""What she is saying within this statement was that there was an effort to give the peaceful demonstrators room to conduct their peaceful protests on Saturday. Unfortunately, as a result of providing the peaceful demonstrators with the space to share their message, that also meant that those seeking to incite violence also had the space to operate. ...
+
+""The mayor is not saying that she asked police to give space to people who sought to create violence. Any suggestion otherwise would be a misinterpretation of her statement.""
+
+On Wednesday, Ben Carson, a potential Republican presidential candidate who was a pediatric neurosurgeon at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins, urged against ""piling on"" the mayor, whom he knows.
+
+He told Fox News the bigger issue is what big-city mayors should be doing to prepare - early - for situations like this, particularly in what he described as a ""tinderbox"" atmosphere.",REAL
+8332,MARKETWATCH LEFTIST: MSM’s “Blatant” Anti Trump Bias May Be Suicidal, ,FAKE
+4197,Jane Sanders to FBI: Get on with Clinton email probe,"The FBI should get the lead out on its investigation over Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, Jane Sanders said Thursday.
+
+During an interview with Neil Cavuto aired Thursday on Fox Business, the wife of Bernie Sanders and one of his closest political advisers also said that the campaign would continue to draw distinctions with Clinton on policy issues and not personal affairs.
+
+Sanders noted that her husband's campaign has said as much from the very beginning of the campaign, particularly after he remarked during the first Democratic debate that the American people are ""sick of hearing about your damn emails.""
+
+But Jane Sanders also noted that the Democratic candidate said there was a process, remarking that the FBI investigation is going forward.
+
+""We want to let it go through without politicizing it, and then we’ll find out what the situation is. And that’s how we still feel,"" Sanders said. ""I mean, it would be nice if the FBI moved it along,"" she added, with a laugh.",REAL
+193,"Happy New Year, Wall Street: Congress Has Another Gift For You","The Volcker Rule is a key reform adopted after the 2008 financial meltdown that bans banks from gambling in securities markets with taxpayer money -- a tactic known as proprietary trading. But under legislation slated for a Wednesday vote, banks would be given a two-year reprieve from unloading some of their riskiest holdings -- known as collateralized loan obligations.
+
+The deregulation measure is one of 11 changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that Republicans will bring to the floor under a single bill Wednesday. The legislation can only pass the House if dozens of Democrats support it, since the bill will be brought up under special rules that require a two-thirds majority for approval. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) will lead the opposition to the bill for Democrats on the House floor. Ellison will likely be opposed by House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who voted for a similar bill in April, and supported the bank subsidy in December.
+
+“One day into the new Congress, House Republicans are picking up right where they left off: trying to gut Wall Street reforms so that big banks can make more risky bets using taxpayer-backed money,"" Warren said. ""This is yet another big bank giveaway that makes our economy and middle class families less safe.”
+
+""It's all about the bonus pool,"" said Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, a financial reform nonprofit. ""The attack on the Volcker Rule has been nonstop, because proprietary trading is about big-time bets that result in big-time bonuses. Wall Street has been fighting it from day one, and they're not going to stop.""
+
+""It's absurd,"" said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform. ""It's getting on five years after the passage of the Volcker Rule, and the banks have still not actually been required to stop doing anything that they want to be doing. And anytime we get close to the point where they could, somebody comes in with an extension.""
+
+Collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs, are complex contracts similar to the mortgage securities that crashed the economy in 2008. To create a CLO, banks package dozens of risky corporate loans together and sell slices to investors. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a major bank regulatory agency, warned in December that the corporate debt market is overheating and becoming increasingly dangerous.
+
+The nation's largest banks dominate the CLO market. According to an April letter from five federal regulators, banks with at least $50 billion in assets hold between 94 percent and 96 percent of the domestic market, valued at $84 billion to $105 billion.
+
+A similar version of the bill was initially introduced by Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) and cosponsored by Rep. Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.), passing the House by a voice vote in April. The legislation received another vote in September, when it passed the House 320 - 102, with 95 Democrats voting in favor and just one Republican, Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) voting against it.
+
+""Alvarez wants to kill the Volcker Rule, so it's being delayed until they can kill it. He made the decision to delay it until 2017, and this is consistent with that strategy,"" a frustrated Democratic aide told HuffPost.
+
+Alvarez -- a bank-friendly holdover from the years when Alan Greenspan chaired the Fed -- in December delayed the moment of truth for a host of other risky bank investments through 2017. The Federal Reserve wasn't immediately available for comment after normal business hours.
+
+The flurry of activity on the Volcker Rule follows the December passage of a $1.1 trillion spending bill that included subsidies for risky Wall Street derivatives trading. The bill repealed a key section of President Barack Obama's 2010 financial reform legislation. Obama said that he opposed the plan, but didn't want to derail the broader spending bill over it.
+
+If the latest bill to aid big banks clears the House, the Republican-controlled Senate likely has the votes to pass it as well, unless new filibuster rules provide Democrats with more leverage. Obama has the authority to veto the legislation, but bank watchdogs are wary of Obama after his support for the December spending bill that included the Wall Street subsidy.",REAL
+8974,"The Left Turns on Bob Dylan for His Pro-Israel Views, Refusal to Acknowledge Nobel Prize","The Left Turns on Bob Dylan for His Pro-Israel Views, Refusal to Acknowledge Nobel Prize Oct 28, 2016 Previous post 
+So Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” His name is now enshrined among a list of laureates that includes luminaries like T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 
+It’s a tremendous honor for the legendary singer-songwriter, that’s for sure. But it’s also stirred up its share of controversy. I won’t debate Dylan’s award—I’ll leave that to my esteemed colleagues Andrew Klavan and Ron Radosh —except to say two quick things. First, when the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to people like Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, did it dim the luster of the prizes in other categories? And second, I like the idea of songs like “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Saved” (and, apologies to Andrew, even “It Ain’t Me, Babe”) joining the pantheon of Nobel Prize-winning literature. 
+But now that the reliably left-leaning Nobel Prize Committee has given Dylan an award, a funny thing has happened. The left has begun to turn on Dylan for being less than the predictable leftist they have expected him to be. In Defense of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature—He Deserves it! 
+The first example comes to us from that cherished source of unbiased news, Al Jazeera. In a recent editorial , French sociologist and “media critic” Ali Saad takes the media to task for reporting the news of Bob Dylan’s award without mentioning that he— gasp— supports Israel. Saad gripes that: 
+…media outlets, both Arab and international, framed the story without taking issue with Dylan’s pro-Israel stance and instead portrayed him exclusively through the prism of his constructed image as defender of the oppressed. 
+Saad goes on to cite “Neighborhood Bully,” an early ’80s tune from Dylan that expresses support for the nation of Israel. 
+The song, that Stephen Holden described in The New York Times in 1983 as “ an outspoken defence of Israel “, begins by stating two key precepts emphasising the Israeli perspective: first by comparing Israel to a man in exile whose enemies unjustly “claim he’s on their land”, a sentence that serves as a scolding to those who refute the legitimacy of Israel’s historic claim to Palestine’s land. Then, by metaphorically presenting Israel as a man “outnumbered by a million to one”, which postulates the frequent representation of Israel as the underdog of the Middle East.Such a stance by an anti-war activist raises serious doubts over Dylan’s commitment to humanity 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+9008,FACEBOOK Nazi Thought Police editors threaten to quit if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t ban Donald Trump for hate speech,"October 26, 2016 @ 9:37 pm 
+FaceBook has censored my posts on Donald Trump. Susan K October 26, 2016 @ 9:09 pm 
+It will not work. They can try and try and try again. Going around in circles. I must admit it is very pleasant to know how distressed some groups are because of Donald Trump. When Donald Trump is elected, and he will be, he should make it very clear he will not deal with any country persecuting freedom of speech. Az gal October 26, 2016 @ 8:32 pm 
+The Globalists are waging war on Donald Trump. Democracy is dead or dying. We are the soldiers for freedom. Our most important weapon is our vote! VOTE TRUMP!",FAKE
+1014,Rivals Slam Trump over Violent Rallies: 'He Incites Violence',"Five key states will hold Republican and Democratic primaries on Tuesday. The outcome could define the race for both parties.
+
+But as voters prepare to head to the polls, controversy over a string of violent brawls continues to swirl around Donald Trump.
+
+At a Trump rally in Ohio Sunday, Secret Service agents rushed to protect the Republican frontrunner after a protestor stormed the stage. And at other rallies throughout the weekend, Trump was constantly interrupted by hecklers.
+
+Five key states will hold Republican and Democratic primaries on Tuesday. CBN News' David Brody shares his thoughts on the upcoming contests and how they could define the race for both parties. Watch below:
+
+
+
+Even so, his Democratic rivals are placing the blame squarely on him.
+
+""He actually incites violence in the way that he urges his audience on,"" Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton charged.
+
+""Trump has to get on the TV and tell his supporters that violence in the political process in America is not acceptable, end of discussion,"" Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, said.
+
+But Trump has refused to take responsibility for clashes at his campaign events. He insists outside agitators are at fault, and even laid some of the blame on Sanders supporters – and indeed many of the Vermont senator's supporters did show up.
+
+""It was totally organized, troublemakers, troublemakers,"" Trump said. ""They are not protestors; they are disrupters. They are supposed to disrupt.""
+
+But with hours left to go before voters head to the polls in Tuesday's five critical states, Trump's Republican rivals aren't backing down.
+
+""This will be a disaster for the country because if Donald is the nominee, it makes it much, much more likely that Hillary Clinton wins the general,"" Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said.
+
+""We've reached the point in this country where our political discourse looks like the comments section of a blog where people can just say whatever they want about anyone without any rules of civility, no norms that govern how we interact with one another,"" he said.
+
+Still, polls show Trump will likely be the big winner Tuesday, except perhaps in Ohio, where Gov. John Kasich is out front with 39 percent.
+
+Meanwhile in Florida, with 99 delegates and winner takes all, it's a must-win for Rubio. But a CBS poll has him currently in third place. Experts say a defeat in his home state would likely kill his campaign.
+
+Meanwhile, the Democrats were the butt of the joke in a fake Saturday Night Live campaign commercial showing Clinton, played by Kate McKinnon, slowly-- and literally -- transforming into rival Bernie Sanders just to win more young supporters.
+
+""As Millennials, your voice is important. You're the ones who will decide this election,"" McKinnon says. ""And luckily, I Hillary Clinton, share all of your exact same beliefs...""
+
+""I'm whoever you want me to be and I approve this message,"" she says, drawing laughter from the audience.
+
+Jokes aside, Clinton is hoping to add to her lead in the delegates as polls show her ahead of Sanders in all five states.
+
+Whatever happens, the outcome of Tuesday's primaries will be critical for both the Republican and Democratic candidates and the results are almost certain to shape the dynamics of the race.",REAL
+126,Oklahoma Fraternity Is Closed Over Video Of Racist Chant,"Oklahoma Fraternity Is Closed Over Video Of Racist Chant
+
+Responding to a video that allegedly shows members of its University of Oklahoma chapter chanting racist slurs about African-Americans and lynching, the national office of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity has closed the chapter and suspended its members.
+
+The video reportedly captured a scene of members of the fraternity, dressed in formalwear, chanting slurs as they rode on a chartered bus. It surfaced Sunday, immediately drawing wide condemnation for the chant's mention of lynching and the promise that the fraternity will never have a black member.
+
+Update at 2:15 p.m. ET: More Reaction From School President
+
+""To those who have misused their free speech in such a reprehensible way, I have a message for you. You are disgraceful,"" says University of Oklahoma President David Boren. ""You have violated all that we stand for.""
+
+He added, ""Real Sooners love each other and take care of each other like family members.""
+
+Boren said he has ordered all ties severed between the school and the SAE chapter, stating, ""I direct that the house be closed and that members will remove their personal belongings from the house by midnight tomorrow.""
+
+""The fraternity's national president Brad Cohen said he called a board meeting Sunday night when the organization learned of the incident, and decided to close the chapter immediately. ""Students were seen moving their belongings out of the house in Norman late last night and early this morning. A minority-rights student group hosted a protest Monday morning on the University of Oklahoma's campus. ""In a statement last night, OU President David Boren called the behavior 'reprehensible' and contrary to the university's values.""
+
+Late Sunday night, the national fraternity posted a statement about the Oklahoma incident, saying:
+
+""We apologize for the unacceptable and racist behavior of the individuals in the video, and we are disgusted that any member would act in such a way. Furthermore, we are embarrassed by this video and offer our empathy not only to anyone outside the organization who is offended but also to our brothers who come from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities.""
+
+Sigma Alpha Epsilon was founded in 1856, at the University of Alabama; the fraternity initially confined its growth only to Southern states but has since grown to more than 200 chapters around the nation, with more than 15,000 collegiate members currently, according to the organization's website.",REAL
+1857,"Jeb Bush in 2016: The good, the bad and the ugly","Jeb Bush announced Tuesday morning that he has set up an exploratory committee to pursue running for president. Virtually every person who takes this step ultimately throws his or her hat in the ring. It’s only a matter of time.
+
+How should we assess Jeb Bush’s candidacy?
+
+Polls show him at or near the top of the prospective Republican nominees for 2016. The recent McClatchy-Marist poll has Mitt Romney and Bush leading with 19 and 15 percent respectively. And a PPP poll has Bush ahead of Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Paul Ryan and both Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.
+
+Despite this, Bush by no means has an insurmountable lead. And while the Bush name for some is a positive and will help Jeb enormously, for others it is an unalterable negative both because of prior history, ideology and perceived performance in office.
+
+That said, there is one constituency that I fully expect to support Jeb Bush: the donors, bundlers and those who pursue independent expenditure. There’s every reason to believe that this community – the money community – will rally behind Bush’s candidacy and given the importance of independent expenditure political action committees in the last presidential election, it’s fair to assume that between his own campaign committee and outsiders, he will be the best funded candidate in the Republican field.
+
+Nevertheless, it will be far from a cakewalk for Bush in the primary. His problems are three fold.
+
+First, his ardent support for Common Core does not sit well with many in his party.  Second, he has come out in support of comprehensive immigration reform, a hot button issue today with the GOP and its supporters, especially in light of President Obama’s executive action last month. And third, he’s considered tax increases as part of an overall reform package to help balance the budget in the past – anathema to those that control the GOP today.
+
+For all these reasons, it may be hard for Tea Party Republicans and the right wing of the party more generally, to support his candidacy.
+
+This is not to say that Jeb Bush will not be smart enough to try to neutralize these potential disadvantages. He surely will. To this end, Bush’s thoughtful and reasonable message at the Wall Street CEOs conference was a positive and uplifting one, exactly what the Republican Party needs to go mainstream and what the Tea Party itself abhors.
+
+Should Bush make the general election he will be a compelling candidate against the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The most recent poll numbers show the race between them tightening, and I suspect the campaign itself will reflect that reality.
+
+Put another way, both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton represent the center of their parties and both are practical politicians, if nothing else.
+
+They’re both also smart and serious about the issues and we can expect, if they’re the nominees, to have a thoughtful debate about America’s future with the possibility of candidate agreement on a number of issues, something we haven’t seen in decades.
+
+I know Jeb Bush and I know Hillary Clinton. They are both considerate people, committed to the broader interests of the American people regardless of political party.
+
+Jeb Bush’s entry into the race prospectively gives the Republicans their strongest candidate and possible nominee. It also gives the American people the prospect of the best debate and dialogue we’ve had in a very long time.",REAL
+1059,A whirlwind day in D.C. showcases Trump’s unorthodox views and shifting tone,"Donald Trump endorsed an unabashedly noninterventionist approach to world affairs Monday during a day-long tour of Washington, casting doubt on the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and expressing skepticism about a muscular U.S. military presence in Asia.
+
+The foreign policy positions — outlined in a meeting with the editorial board of The Washington Post — came on a day when Trump set aside the guerrilla tactics and showman bravado that have powered his campaign to appear as a would-be presidential nominee, explaining his policies, accepting counsel and building bridges to Republican elites.
+
+On Monday night, Trump delivered a scripted address in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, prompting ovations with pledges to stand by Israel and take a hard line on peace talks with the Palestinians.
+
+Trump’s whirlwind day of appearances around the nation’s capital was intended in part to head off an establishment push to deny him the Republican Party’s nomination. But in the Post meeting, the billionaire mogul also made clear that he would not be beholden to the GOP’s long-held orthodoxies.
+
+During the hour-long discussion, during which he revealed five of his foreign policy advisers, Trump advocated a light footprint in the world. In spite of unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere, he said, the United States must look inward and steer its resources toward rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.
+
+“At what point do you say, ‘Hey, we have to take care of ourselves?’ ” Trump said in the editorial board meeting. “I know the outer world exists, and I’ll be very cognizant of that. But at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially the inner cities.”
+
+Trump said U.S. involvement in NATO may need to be significantly diminished in the coming years, breaking with nearly seven decades of consensus in Washington. “We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore,” he said, adding later, “NATO is costing us a fortune, and yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money.”
+
+[A transcript of Donald Trump’s meeting with The Washington Post editorial board]
+
+Throughout his unlikely campaign, Trump’s unpredictable, incendiary persona has been his rocket fuel. But with the nomination now within his reach, he is trying at times to round out his sharp edges to convince his party’s leaders — not to mention general-election voters — that he has the temperament and knowledge to be president.
+
+This was one of Trump’s goals as he addressed AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington. For perhaps the first time in his campaign, Trump read from a prepared text on teleprompters — a device he has colorfully mocked other politicians for using.
+
+On Israel, Trump mostly hewed to the party line, giving a full-throated defense of the nation and its interests and arguing that no candidate is a more forceful champion of the Jewish state. His eyes pinging back and forth between the teleprompter screens, Trump embellished his prepared text only to deliver a few criticisms of President Obama and his first-term secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner.
+
+“When I become president, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on Day One,” Trump vowed. He received enthusiastic applause from the crowd of thousands, and the much-rumored walkouts during his speech were either called off or went unnoticed in the cavernous Verizon Center arena.
+
+Earlier Monday, Trump sought to cultivate ties with his party’s establishment at a private luncheon he hosted on Capitol Hill. It was attended by about two dozen Republicans, including influential conservatives in Congress and prominent figures from GOP policy and lobbying circles.
+
+Those with whom he met directly urged Trump to “be more presidential,” according to one attendee. This person, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to relate details of the closed session, described it as “a very serious conversation,” adding: “This was the Donald Trump who talks with bankers, not the Donald Trump who is on the stage.”
+
+Trump also sought to showcase his business acumen and dealmaking prowess. He staged an afternoon news conference at the historic Old Post Office Pavilion, which his real estate company is turning into a Trump International Hotel, a few blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. The candidate, flanked by employees wearing hard hats, led journalists on a tour of the construction zone.
+
+Trump’s visit to Washington comes amid an intensified effort by some in the Republican establishment, including 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, to deny him the nomination by forcing a contested convention at which the party could rally around an alternative.
+
+At his luncheon meeting, Trump warned party leaders against using parliamentary maneuvers to block his nomination. He later told reporters that he had a productive conversation recently with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and that he has “many millions of people behind me.”
+
+“Now, they can play games, and they can play cute,” Trump said of Ryan and other GOP leaders. “I can only take [Ryan] at face value. I understand duplicity. I understand a lot of things. But he called me last week, he could not have been nicer. I spoke with Mitch McConnell, he could not have been nicer. If people want to be smart, they should embrace this movement.”
+
+Neither Ryan nor McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate majority leader, attended Monday’s meeting with Trump. It was held at Jones Day, the law firm of Donald F. McGahn, a Trump campaign attorney, and was convened in part by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a key Trump ally.
+
+Attendees included Heritage Foundation President Jim De­Mint, a former senator from South Carolina and a conservative movement leader, as well as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and former House Appropriations Committee chairman Bob Livingston (R-La.). A group of House members who have endorsed Trump also attended.
+
+“We met with Senator Sessions and some of the great people in Washington,” Trump said. “We had a really good meeting. . . . They can’t believe how far we’ve come because, you know, I think a lot of people maybe wouldn’t have predicted that.”
+
+Trump began the day at The Post, where his on-the-record meeting with the editorial board covered media libel laws, violence at his rallies and climate change, as well as foreign policy.
+
+For the first time, Trump listed members of a team chaired by Sessions that is counseling him on foreign affairs and helping to shape his policies: Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Walid Phares and Joseph E. Schmitz. All are relatively little known in foreign policy circles, and several have ties to the George W. Bush administration.
+
+Trump praised George P. Shultz, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, as a model diplomat and, on the subject of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, said America’s allies are “not doing anything.”
+
+“Ukraine is a country that affects us far less than it affects other countries in NATO, and yet we’re doing all of the lifting,” Trump said. “They’re not doing anything. And I say: ‘Why is it that Germany’s not dealing with NATO on Ukraine? . . . Why are we always the one that’s leading, potentially, the third world war with Russia?’ ”
+
+While the Obama administration has faced pressure from congressional critics who have advocated for a more active U.S. role in supporting Ukraine, the U.S. military has limited its assistance to nonlethal equipment such as vehicles and night-vision gear. European nations have taken the lead in crafting a fragile cease-fire designed to decrease hostility between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists.
+
+Trump sounded a similar note in discussing the U.S. presence in the Pacific. He questioned the value of massive military investments in Asia and wondered aloud whether the United States still is capable of being an effective peacekeeping force there.
+
+“South Korea is very rich, great industrial country, and yet we’re not reimbursed fairly for what we do,” Trump said. “We’re constantly sending our ships, sending our planes, doing our war games — we’re reimbursed a fraction of what this is all costing.”
+
+Such talk is likely to trigger anxiety in South Korea, where a U.S. force of 28,000 has provided a strong deterrent to North Korean threats for decades.
+
+Asked whether the United States benefits from its involvement in Asia, Trump replied, “Personally, I don’t think so.” He added: “I think we were a very powerful, very wealthy country. And we’re a poor country now. We’re a debtor nation.”
+
+Jenna Johnson, Paul Kane, Missy Ryan and David Weigel contributed to this report.",REAL
+7236,"Andrew Maguire – Paper Gold Market Trades Jaw-Dropping 6,800 Tonnes In One Day!","59 Views November 11, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+In the aftermath of a brutal takedown in the gold and silver markets, today whistleblower and London metals trader Andrew Maguire told King World News that the paper gold market traded a jaw-dropping 6,800 tonnes of gold in just one day. 
+Andrew Maguire: “Just to illustrate how ludicrous the paper markets have become, during the U.S. election day daily session the total swap of Comex Open Interest constituted a staggering 2,268 tonnes (of paper gold)! This volume does not include the unallocated paper-centric over-the-counter markets, where volume exceeded the Comex by a factor of (more than) 2 times… Continue reading the Andrew Maguire interview below… Advertisement To hear which company investors & institutions around the globe are flocking to that has one of the best gold & silver purchase & storage platforms in the world click on the logo: 
+Andrew Maguire continues: “Now brace yourself; in total this conservatively places the swap of paper gold positions at a ludicrous 6,800 tonnes. That’s unprecedented, Eric. The record daily volume totals more than two years of (annual global gold production or total annual) mine supply…To continue listening to this extraordinary KWN audio interview with whistleblower Andrew Maguire that will be released within hours, where he discusses the gold and silver smash, at what price the large sovereign wholesale bids are located, and much more, you can listen to it when it’s released by CLICKING HERE. 
+  Is This Why The Smash In Gold & Silver Is Happening? A Shocking Game-Changer For Gold & Silver Is Now Unfolding…  ",FAKE
+10001,What A Hillary Presidency Would Bring,"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / What A Hillary Presidency Would Bring Essential Reading Untold Truths About the Planned War on Iran By wmw_admin on April 9, 2013 
+Dynamite documentary: Press TV talks to former White House insider Gwenyth Todd about the push for war with Iran. She has subsequently escaped to Australia to avoid FBI prosecution. Essential viewing Inside 9/11: Hijacking the Air Defense By wmw_admin on August 13, 2011 
+Why did U.S. air defense fail so spectacularly on 9/11? As this video explains, it was likely due to one man and he wasn’t sitting in a Afghan mountain cave Who Are The Illuminati? By wmw_admin on April 24, 2004 
+Conspiracy theory is now an accepted turn of phrase but sometimes one hears the expression, sometimes whispered rather than spoken. “The Illuminati”. 9/11 and Zion: What Was Israel’s Role? By Nick Kollerstrom on August 31, 2012 
+When Netanyahu said the very next day, ‘This is very good for Israel”, he wasn’t just blurting out something indiscreet, he was publicly congratulating the various agents who had worked so hard The Essene Gospel of Peace I By wmw_admin on April 26, 2007 
+Based on texts found in the Vatican library and the Royal Library of the Hapsburg’s and dated to the first century AD, the following is considered by some to be the real words of Christ The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part II By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
+Former City of London insider reveals that the depopulation program would begin with a planned war between Israel and Iran. More importantly, he goes onto to describe how we can derail their plans for global dominance London Beheading Hoax Confirmed? By wmw_admin on May 24, 2013 
+Was the London beheading a hoax? After Sandy Hook anything is possible and the authors present a very convincing case that it was. Judge for yourself",FAKE
+3456,Supreme Court Readies Blockbuster Rulings,"WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) - Tensions are building inside and outside the white marble facade of the U.S. Supreme Court building as the nine justices prepare to issue major rulings on gay marriage and President Barack Obama's healthcare law by the end of the month.
+
+Of the 11 cases left to decide, the biggest are a challenge by gay couples to state laws banning same-sex marriage and a conservative challenge to subsidies provided under the Obamacare law to help low- and middle-income people buy health insurance that could lead to millions of people losing medical coverage.
+
+Many legal experts predict the court will legalize gay marriage nationwide by finding that the U.S. Constitution's guarantees of equal treatment under the law and due process prohibit states from banning same-sex nuptials.
+
+In three key decisions since 1996, Kennedy has broadened the court's view of equality for gays. The most recent was a 2013 case in which the court struck down a federal law denying benefits to married same-sex couples.
+
+During oral arguments in the gay marriage case on April 28, Kennedy posed tough questions to lawyers from both sides but stressed the nobility and dignity of same-sex couples.
+
+The healthcare decision is tougher to call. Chief Justice John Roberts, the swing vote when the court upheld Obamacare in 2012, said little during the March 4 oral argument to indicate how he will vote.
+
+The court will issue some rulings on Monday, with more likely later in the week.
+
+For the justices, the pressure is on to have the rulings ready. That can be difficult as the cases in which they are closely divided are generally the ones left until the end.
+
+James Obergefell, one of the plaintiffs in the gay marriage case, said he will be at the court for all the remaining decision days.
+
+Obergefell sued Ohio, challenging its ban on same-sex marriages, after the state refused to acknowledge his marriage to John Arthur on Arthur's death certificate. They were married in Maryland, a state that allows gay marriages, just months before Arthur died in 2013.
+
+The Supreme Court does not announce in advance which rulings will be issued on any given day.
+
+""It's nerve-racking, it's exciting, but it's also scary,"" Obergefell said while waiting in line to enter the courtroom on Thursday.
+
+On the other side of the issue, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian group that opposes gay marriage, will have at least two attorneys in the courtroom, spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said.
+
+As for the closed-door deliberations at the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hinted during a June 12 speech at the turmoil to come. ""Sharp divisions, one can confidently predict, will rise in the term's final weeks,"" Ginsburg said.
+
+Prior to June 15, the court was split 5-4 in only seven of the 46 cases decided at that point. But last week alone, four of the nine rulings were 5-4 decisions. In the rulings, several justices wrote separate opinions in which they aimed pointed comments at their colleagues.",REAL
+9613,This is What Will Happen to Mosul After ISIS is Evicted,"Email 
+I visited Mosul on the day it fell to Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and a small detachment of US Special Forces on 11 April 2003. As we drove into the city, we passed lines of pick-up trucks piled high with loot returning to the Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq. US soldiers at a checkpoint, over which waved the Stars and Stripes, were shooting at a man in the distance who kept bobbing up from behind a wall and waving the Iraqi flag . 
+If there had ever been any sympathy between liberators and liberated in Mosul, it was disappearing fast. Inside the city, every government building, including the university, was being systematically looted by Kurds and Arabs alike. I saw one man who had stolen an enormous and very ugly red and gold sofa from the governor’s office dragging it slowly down the street. He would push one end of the sofa a few feet forward and then go to the other end and repeat the same process. The mosques were soon calling on the Sunni Arab majority to build barricades to defend their neighbourhoods from marauders. 
+We parked our vehicle near a medieval quarter of ancient stone buildings while we went to see a Christian ecclesiastic. When we got back, we found that our driver was very frightened and wanted to get out of Mosul as fast as possible. He explained that soon after we left a crowd had gathered, recognised our number plates as Kurdish and debated lynching him and setting fire to his car before being restrained by a local religious leader moments before they took action. 
+The oil city of Kirkuk was captured at about the same time by the Peshmerga, despite having promised the Americans and Turks that they would do no such thing. Again, there was looting everywhere and I saw two Peshmerga stand in the middle of the road to stop an enormous yellow bulldozer that was being driven off. Instead of slowing down, the driver put his foot on the accelerator so the Peshmerga had to jump aside to avoid being crushed. 
+Inside the newly established Peshmerga headquarters, I ran into Pavel Talabani, whose father Jalal Talabani headed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political party whose militia now held the city. He stressed the temporary nature of the Kurdish occupation of the city. “We came to control the situation,” he said. “We expect to withdraw some of our men in 45 minutes.” 
+Some Peshmerga, but not all: 13 years later the Kurds still hold Kirkuk, whose population is Kurdish, Arab and Turkoman, and to which the Kurds claim an historic right saying they have only reversed anti-Kurdish ethnic cleansing by Saddam Hussein. 
+By now the rest of the world has forgotten that there was a time when the Kurds did not hold the city. The Kurdish leaders had understood that the US-led invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein had created conditions of unprecedented political fluidity and it was an ideal moment to create facts on the map, which would become permanent whatever the protestations of other players. 
+The current multi-pronged offensive aimed at taking Mosul is producing a similar situation as different countries, parties and communities vie to fill the vacuum they expect to be created by the fall of Isis, just as in 2003 the vacuum was the result of the fall of Saddam Hussein. 
+The different segments of the anti-Isis forces potentially involved in seizing Mosul – the Iraqi army, Kurds, Shia and Sunni paramilitaries, Turks – may be temporary allies, but they are also rivals. They all have their own very different and conflicting agendas. Presiding over this ramshackle and disputatious alliance is the US, which is orchestrating the Mosul offensive and without whose air power and Special Forces there would be no attack. 
+The Shia-dominated Iraqi government needs to take and hold Mosul, Iraq’s main Sunni Arab city, if it is to be convincing as the national government of Iraq. To achieve this, Baghdad’s rule must be acceptable to the Sunni majority in the city in a way that was not true when Isis took it in 2014. It needs to establish its rule while it still has full military and political support from the US. 
+The Kurds, for their part, want to solidify their control of the so-called “disputed territories” claimed by both the central government and the Kurdish regional authorities. The Kurds opportunistically used the defeat of the Iraqi Army in northern Iraq by Isis two years ago to take these territories inhabited by both Kurds and Arabs, thereby expanding by 40 per cent the area of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). They know that once Isis is defeated, the Kurds will no longer get international and, above all, American backing to hold this expanded version of the KRG. 
+These problems have only begun to surface because Mosul is still a long way from being besieged or even encircled. 
+The Shia militia forces are surprisingly calm about being excluded from a military role in the siege. They may calculate that the Iraqi army, if it gets sucked into street fighting, will not be able to take Mosul on its own and will have to look to them for support. The Shia paramilitaries are making up for their lack of participation in the battle for Mosul by sending reinforcements – some 5,000 men, according to reports – to join the Syrian Army in the siege of East Aleppo. 
+Turkey wants to be a player and, as a great Sunni power, the defender of the Sunnis of Mosul. To this end, it has soldiers based at Bashiqa, north east of Mosul, and claims to be taking part in the attack. But so far at least, Turkish ambitions and rhetoric in Iraq and Syria have exceeded its performance. Both interventions may be designed to impress a domestic audience which is deluged with exaggerated accounts of Turkish achievements in the government-controlled Turkish media. 
+These participants in the struggle for Mosul may be dividing the tiger’s skin before the tiger is properly dead. Isis showed that it still has sharp claws when it responded to the assault on Mosul with raids on Kirkuk and Rutbah on the main Iraq-Jordan road. It is fighting hard to slow down the anti-Isis advance towards Mosul with a mix of suicide bombers, IEDs, booby-traps, snipers and mortar teams. But it is unclear if it will make a last stand in Mosul where, at the end of the day, it must go down to defeat in the face of superior numbers backed by the massive firepower of the US-led air forces. 
+The likelihood is that Isis will fight for Mosul, the site of its first great victory, in order to prolong the battle, cause casualties and to let divisions emerge among its enemies. But its strategy over the last 12 months has been not to stage heroic but doomed last stands in any of the cities it has lost in Iraq and Syria. 
+At Ramadi, Fallujah, Sinjar, Palmyra and Manbij it has staged a fighting withdrawal at the last moment. The same may now happen in Mosul.",FAKE
+6972,Mall of America to Close for First Time Ever on Thanksgiving,"Mall of America to Close for First Time Ever on Thanksgiving Nov 11, 2016 0 0 
+For the first time ever the Mall of America will close on Thanksgiving Day. This represents a sea change. Instead of fighting crowds on Black Friday to buy the latest gadgets, hundreds of thousands of Americans will instead be home spending time with their families and friends, and 15,000 employees will enjoy the same opportunity which many consumer-focused shoppers have often taken for granted. 
+Mall of America officials just announced that they were veering from their tradition of staying open from the morning of Thanksgiving day into Black Friday. The super mall, home to 520 stores in Bloomington, Minnesota, will stay closed on November 24th except for certain operations like the Walk to End Hunger fundraiser. The mall will reopen the following morning at 5am with a ribbon cutting ceremony for anxious customers. Americans are Drowning in Their Stuff The Average American Household Contains 300,000 Items 
+You don’t have to be an extreme minimalist to appreciate the fact that Americans, more than in almost any other country, have too much stuff. The LA Times reports that there are more than 300,000 items in the average American home. Even the size of the average home has tripled over the last ten years. You’ve got to have the space to put all that stuff! And yet, one in five Americans rents an off-site storage space to put their overflow. This is the fastest growing sector of commercial real estate in the past four years, according to the NY Times, even though America is home to 50,000 storage facilities – more than five times the number of Starbucks. It could do us good if malls closed their doors more often. 
+Americans spend trillions on goods and services that they don’t really need. This includes booze, jewelry, and sports paraphernalia. We spend more on shoes, jewelry and watches than we do on education. 
+While this fact alone doesn’t necessarily point to a habit of overt consumerism, in many cases it does point to an ethos of unsustainability. Much of Our Stuff is Toxic 
+As the Story of Stuff details, many of the products we purchase contribute to the degradation of our environment – from the petro-chemicals used in our cars, and in our hand lotions, to a seemingly benign glass of water which comes from a plastic bottle. 
+From non-stick cookware, to hand-sanitizer, shower-curtains, to furniture , we are living with a multitude of consumer purchases that are not good for us. Our children’s toys are toxic, and even our carpets and the paint we put on our walls is health-destroying , yet we’ve come to expect that ‘more’ is better, without demanding quality. Moving Toward a Shared Economy 
+What is more, many of the things we use can be shared. Why do we need to ‘own’ something that we only use sporadically? This goes for garden tools, and sports equipment as well as human resources, even. House swapping and Uber were based on people’s growing realization that sharing works. 
+Ask yourself – how many times are you actually going to watch that DVD? Are you children really going to play with that plastic toy for more than ten minutes before its tossed aside? Then there’s the clothes we wear for special occasions. Often a dress or suit is worn once, and then never again. Companies are now capitalizing on the trend to re-use and share resources, and the trend couldn’t have come at a better time. 
+Services and space are also growing into the shared-economy. If you have a garden only you and a handful of people enjoy, why not open it up to the community? Are you taking your dog for a walk? Why not offer to take the neighbor’s too? Or share the fees of a dog-walker with dog-loving friends. Looking for the Root Cause 
+Through repetitive advertising, we have been subconsciously programmed to believe that our lives are empty without more things in them. We unknowingly seek quantity over quality in everything we purchase because we are trying to fill an emotional void. By playing on our innate emotional responses, and our base urges, the advertising industry overarchingly promotes the products and services of companies which pollute the planet, divide communities, rape the earth of its resources, and promote slave and child labor. 
+If a ruling elite can create docile, easily controlled subjects, they don’t question the goods and services they are being sold, let alone its geo-political agendas. This is the undercurrent of an ogilopolistic , mechanized system designed to make consumers – not dreamers, thinkers, and doers. 
+When we start to pull out this programming at the roots, and see it for what it is, we can start making more informed choices. Does this mean we can never buy a new pair of shoes again, or travel to a foreign country? Absolutely not, but it means you can make wiser (hopefully fewer) purchases, and share resources where applicable. Instead of staying in a hotel you can make a new friend overseas, and trade houses. You can purchase goods from companies that give back to their communities and uphold fair trade practices. The sustainable company is indeed peeking out from our consumer-based programming, and if the Mall of America is closing, even for one day, it portends a brighter future for Americans who have been obsessed with spending money they don’t have for things they don’t need. 
+Image credit: StartatSixty.com , Featured image: source Vote Up Christina Sarich Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and *See the Big Picture*. Her blog is Yoga for the New World . Her latest book is Pharma Sutra: Healing The Body And Mind Through The Art Of Yoga .",FAKE
+5728,Former Director Of National Budget Warns That Markets Will Tank After US Election,"Former Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan, David Stockman, warns that regardless of who wins the US presidential election, Americans can expect the stock market to drop by... ",FAKE
+7166,Delete Your Account – Episode 23: Don’t Get Sick,"If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon page for as little as $5 a month. Also, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes . We can’t do this show without your support!!! On this episode, Roqayah and Kumars speak with a married father of one who has spent over ten years as a biologist and environmental protection specialist, planning large scale projects to minimize environmental impacts for several federal agencies. John (not his real name) was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in March and he’s now found himself stuck in between massive gaps in our healthcare system and an out-of-control drug war.
+John tells us about his initial diagnosis, a diagnosis that came many months late because of his inability to get the care he needed in a timely fashion. This delay in care happened despite him having some of the best health insurance available as a federal employee. Once diagnosed, John tells us about how he was forced to continue working full-time so as not to lose his life insurance or health insurance policies. Without life insurance, his family would be severely impacted if he should die, and without health insurance, he could not afford the care required to keep him alive. If he were to get insurance on the private market, it would be too expensive to afford, even with his current salary, and the benefits would be severely limited compared to what he currently has.
+John also tells us how he is at risk for losing his job (hence the pseudonym) because of his use of medical marijuana, the only treatment that has allowed him to deal with the horrible effects of his cancer and chemotherapy treatments. There are strict rules against federal employees using medical marijuana, even if they work in states where it is legal. Recently, it was announced that random drug-testing would be extended to all federal employees, putting John at-risk for losing his job, his healthcare, and his life insurance. We discuss the pharmaceutical industry’s role in fighting the legitimacy of medical marijuana, as well as their role in perpetuating skyrocketing healthcare costs. We also discuss the importance of writing to government officials to speak out on behalf of John and those in a similar position who are denied life-saving treatment, whether due to cost or due to our indefensible drug laws.
+Look for a story from Roqayah in Shadowproof on John’s situation shortly!
+
+The post Delete Your Account – Episode 23: Don’t Get Sick appeared first on Shadowproof .",FAKE
+9965,"CNN Reach New Low, Call Sheriff Clarke A ‘Terrorist’ After Trump Gave Him The Most Important Job! | EndingFed News Network","President Donald Trump has given very hard thought into who will be in his Cabinet. He has several names in mind, names that will literally change America and CNN doesn’t like this at all. Well, too bad! VIA Conservative 101 According to Politico , some of those names include Gingrich for Secretary of State, Mnuchin, a 17 year veteran of Goldman Sachs for Treasure Secretary and Mayor Giuliani for Attorney General. And of course Sheriff David Clarke as the Homeland Security Secretary. He has been an incredible patriotic American and leader in Blue Lives Matter. CNN was terrified by this. “I think the one major flag I have is that someone like Sheriff Clarke would be considered as his Homeland Security secretary? Someone who I very much see as if he’s not a terrorist inciting terrorism?” said CNN commentator Angela Rye. “If people are afraid of Sheriff Clarke, afraid of the policies which he represents, I think that’s terrorism,” she said. This of course, makes no sense. You can’t just call people who disagree with you terrorists. Check out the video below and see for yourself. 
+Now, this makes me wonder… what gives Angela the right to call an honest person like Sheriff Clarke a terrorist? Is it jealousy? 
+You can’t call someone a terrorist just because you don’t agree with them. It’s absurd! 
+What are your thoughts on this? Do you think that Anglea Rye is a disgrace to journalism? 
+Share us your thoughts in the comments section below. 
+Thank you for reading. 
+If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
+7264,(((Smithsonian))) Refuses to Include Judge in Black Museum Because He has Normal People Opinions,"(((Smithsonian))) Refuses to Include Judge in Black Museum Because He has Normal People Opinions 
+Eric Striker October 27, 2016 Dat nigga ain’t even smoke crack. 
+The Smithsonian Museum, run by American Jewish Committee award-winning mankind harasser (((David J. Skorton))), has decided to exclude Supreme Court Justice Judge Clarence Thomas from its African-American Museum, showing that Jews only want to empower certain kinds of blacks that advance Jew-specific agendas. This Jew gets to decide who gets into the black museum and who doesn’t. 
+While I don’t agree with Thomas’ conservative philosophy, he has long been a constitution-respecting thorn in the side of the Jewish activist judge bloc of Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan. Whenever these Jews (and Sotomayor, along with the Jew Merrick Garland if he gets confirmed) vote to get something insane through, Thomas has been a reliable voice of reason tempering and often downvoting them in defense of free speech, freedom of association, etc. 
+Coming from a background of poverty and homelessness, Thomas has genuinely worked hard and shown remarkable aptitude in the art of jurisprudence, he wasn’t appointed to fill an Affirmative Action quota. He is a member of the “talented tenth” of the black race and if there’s going to be an African-American museum, he has certainly earned his place in it, yet won’t be included , because he has refused to abuse his gavel in pursuit of violent anti-White discord. Rather than commending him for his legal ethic, Jews are punishing him by obliterating his memory as soon as he dies to serve as an example to any other unusually intelligent blacks out there. 
+It’s not a secret that Jews filter just who and what Negroes in America should aspire to, from founding the pro-race mixing NAACP and sabotaging black nationalist Marcus Garvey, to running virtually all media intended for black people (BET-owned by Sumner Redstone’s Viacom, or The Root  – run by Israeli citizen Haim Saban’s Univision), and now picking and choosing what individuals blacks should exemplary members of their race. 
+So who is being included? 
+Well, the African-American Museum has an entire section dedicated to the Jewish-financed and extreme anti-white Black Panthers , Black Lives Matter, convicted Cultural Marxist terrorist Angela Davis. Examples of some of the ideological indoctrination featured at this Jewseum. Is (((Gloria Steinem))) “African-American”? So why is she there? 
+Cracked out James Brown, famous for shuckin’ and jivin’ while smoking crack and not much else, is according to reports treated by the Smithsonian as the second coming of Christ. 
+Is that appropriate? 
+I won’t go as far as to claim that blacks would be astrophysicists if all Jews vanished tomorrow, but I will say that blacks would not only be far better off according to every metric, they also would instinctively respect and emulate the White man as Booker T. Washington believed they should, rather than lash out at us for no reason as Jews instruct them to. 
+Blacks in the 1930’s once had a crime rate lower than urban Italian and Irish in the law and order South, along with their own small businesses, farms, fairly in-tact families. But because the Jew capitalizes on dysfunctional societies full of dysfunctional people, James Brown is made immortal while they pretend Clarence Thomas ain’t a REAL nigga . 
+Jewish cultural mandate socializes some Whites into acting like low-lives as well. While the manifestations are different depending on natural temperament and abilities of race, one thing we can all agree on is that neither the White man nor the black man are living up to their full potential in this age of decline and decay.",FAKE
+2211,Iran Nuclear Deal: Does Obama want Israel to commit suicide?,"In 1982, during one of many visits to Israel, I had the opportunity to speak with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who told me, ""Israel needs friends."" He added that in the end, his nation could not trust any nation with its fate and security. The protection of Israel, he said, was ultimately the responsibility of Israelis.
+
+Begin's comment was prophetic given the petulance of our current president, who behaves like an enemy of Israel when he attempts to impose a Palestinian state on Israel and negotiate a deal with Iran that can only lead to new threats against the Jewish state and further destabilize the chaotic Middle East.
+
+In his determination to strike a deal with Iran over its nuclear weapons program (which Iran has denied exists, so what is the U.S. negotiating?), President Obama has traded history, facts and reality for a potential deal with a regime that promotes terrorism around the world and is busy attaching Iraq to its vision of a greater Persian Empire.
+
+Last Saturday, Iran's Supreme leader Ali Khamenei again called for ""Death to America,"" just one day after President Obama appealed to Iranians in a video message to seize a ""historic opportunity"" for a nuclear deal and a better future. The leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, also continues to use inflammatory rhetoric about the ultimate destruction of Israel. What should this tell us?
+
+The president is cozying up to a nation that oppresses women, has an apocalyptic view of the world and believes that if it starts a nuclear war the 12th Imam -- the Islamic messiah -- will emerge from a well and bring peace on Earth and good will, at least to Shia Muslim men. Women will remain subject to male domination and have only the few rights given to them by men.
+
+Israel, which embraces Western values of free elections, religious tolerance and pluralism, a free press and equal rights for women is treated by President Obama and his administration as Iran should be treated. Do these people suffer from diplomatic dyslexia, or anti-Semitism?
+
+The coming nuclear deal with Iran, if it occurs, will be a sham from the start. Agreements between nations require at least some trust, but Iran has as much credibility as a double-your-money promise from Bernie Madoff.
+
+Why should Israel be forced to surrender more land to an enemy that has sworn to destroy it? A Palestinian state would likely be used as a launching pad for an attack. Gaza is a perfect example. It has been used by Hamas to attack Israel, which unilaterally and foolishly gave it up in hopes of promoting peace.
+
+Suicide is not in Israel's interests, or that of the United States, but suicide is what President Obama seems to want Israel to commit by pressuring it to return to indefensible 1967 borders and accept a nuclear deal with Iran.
+
+That two states is not what Israel's enemies want was made clear enough when President Clinton brought then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO leader Yasser Arafat to Camp David in 2000. Barak offered Arafat virtually everything he asked for -- 95 percent by some estimates -- and Arafat rejected the offer. Arafat, his contemporaries and those who have come after him, desire only one state headed by themselves with no Jewish state and no Jewish presence, as evidenced by the wars and terrorist attacks they have launched and continue to wage against Israel.
+
+In Deuteronomy 17:7, God instructs the ancient Israelites: ""You must purge the evil from among you.""
+
+In his dangerous pursuit of a problematic nuclear weapons deal with Iran and his attempt to marry a cancerous Palestinian state to the land of Israel, President Obama is not purging evil; he's inviting it to spread. History will judge him for this as it has every other nation that has harmed ""the apple of His eye."" (Zechariah 2:8)
+
+Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated op-ed columnist. He joined Fox News Channel in 1997 as a political contributor. His latest book is ""What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America"" is available in bookstores now. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.",REAL
+8421,"Syrian War Report – November 7, 2016: Russian Attack Helicopters Swarm in Homs Province | The Vineyard of the Saker","Be the First to Comment! Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Search articles ",FAKE
+5177,Bernie's swan song begins,"**Want FOX News Halftime Report in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+On the roster - Bernie’s swan song begins - Dubya back in the game - Rubio leans towards a run, GOP insiders say - Save yourself, no really
+
+ 
+
+ BERNIE’S SWAN SONG BEGINS
+
+ In Sen. Bernie Sanders’ address Thursday he said a lot of things, except that he would concede his bid for the Democratic nomination. But on the heels of his meeting with Hillary Clinton, subsequent matching statements, and his promise that he would do everything he could to defeat Donald Trump the signs that the end is near couldn’t be clearer.
+
+ 
+
+ So why not drop out now?
+
+ 
+
+ Well, there are two schools of thought on that.
+
+ 
+
+ One is that Sanders is trying to hold on to as much leverage as he can to make his policy positions part of the party platform and institute changes in the primary process. The idea is that the longer he remains in the race the more Clinton and the party will concede for the sake of the much coveted word this cycle: unity.
+
+ 
+
+ But that theory has some holes in it.
+
+ 
+
+ A prolonged holdout by Sanders actually weakens his hand. Supporters like Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., the first member of congress to back Sanders, have started to throw their support behind Clinton. The small donations that once poured in have dried up. And the much-reported massive rallies have dwindled with time and are now absent.
+
+ 
+
+ All this to say Sanders’ momentum doesn’t look quite as threatening as it did back in March, or even May. Any hope that Sanders could win, or pose some sort of mathematical challenge based on delegate count, ended with the California primary 10 days ago.
+
+ 
+
+ Not to mention President Obama’s endorsement for Clinton this week…
+
+ 
+
+ Which is exactly why those in the second school of thought believe Sanders remaining in the race is a strategy to benefit Clinton and the Democrats more than anything else.
+
+ 
+
+ In this notion, the longer Sanders remains in the more his fire continues to burn out on its own, leaving Clinton in better graces with his supporters than if she appeared to force him out while he still had momentum. Clinton appears as the magnanimous candidate letting her challenger run his own course instead of the political powerhouse choking the competition, and Sanders doesn’t look like he cut and ran. Everyone wins.
+
+ 
+
+ The cordial meeting the two candidates had this week seems to show that is exactly what’s happening. Since Clinton has officially secured presumptive nominee status Sanders is no longer a distraction from her general election strategy or a threat of division within the party. His presence in the race doesn’t hold the same ire for her it once did.
+
+ 
+
+ But remember, Sanders is not a dyed in the wool Democrat and he doesn’t feel obliged to abide by any party’s rules. Although his campaign has said they’re no longer recruiting superdelegates it doesn’t mean the independent, socialist-turned-Democratic-challenger will bow out quietly.
+
+ 
+
+ So however long he remains in the race, how he bows out will be on his terms regardless of party unity or strategy.
+
+TIME OUT
+
+ On this day in 1885, a ship sailed into New York harbor carrying 350 individual pieces of cargo that would become one of America’s most iconic symbols: the Statue of Liberty. Since that time Lady Liberty has welcomed immigrants through Ellis Island, bid farewell to thousands of troops going “over there,” witnessed an attack on the city to which she lights the way, and seen the same city rebound with spirited purpose.
+
+ 
+
+ As President Ronald Reagan said at the statue’s centennial celebration: “[W]e too dare to hope -- hope that our children will always find here the land of liberty in a land that is free. We dare to hope too that we’ll understand our work can never be truly done until every man, woman, and child shares in our gift, in our hope, and stands with us in the light of liberty.”
+
+ 
+
+ Flag on the play? - Email us at HALFTIMEREPORT@FOXNEWS.COM with your tips, comments or questions
+
+ 
+
+ SCOREBOARD
+
+ Average of national presidential polls: Clinton vs. Trump: Clinton +5.8 points
+
+ Generic congressional vote: Democrats +2.2
+
+ 
+
+ DUBYA BACK IN THE GAME
+
+ NYT: “After eight years of largely abstaining from politics, former President George W. Bush is throwing himself into an effort to save his party’s most vulnerable senators, including several whose re-election campaigns have been made more difficult by Donald J. Trump’s presence at the top of the ticket. In the weeks since Mr. Trump emerged as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Mr. Bush has headlined fund-raisers for two Republican senators and has made plans to help three more. Among them are Senators John McCain of Arizona, who was one of Mr. Trump’s earliest targets of derision, and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire… Next week, he will appear in St. Louis at a fund-raiser for Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri. And similar events are being planned for Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rob Portman of Ohio.”
+
+ 
+
+ RUBIO LEANS TOWARDS A RUN, GOP INSIDERS SAY
+
+ WashEx: “Marco Rubio is leaning toward running for re-election, say Republicans monitoring the senator’s movements for signs of a decision…The Florida Republican is now re-considering, motivated in part by Sunday’s jihadist terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that left 49 dead plus the shooter. But Republican insiders are predicting that Rubio will in fact jump into the race because they believe there have been smoke signals for weeks indicating he planned to change course…Perhaps telling, it’s GOP operatives in Florida who are most convinced that Rubio is going to run. Rubio’s team has been organizing and preparing to launch a 2016 Senate campaign for weeks, one veteran Florida Republican strategist said.”
+
+ 
+
+ And Dems are ready - The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released a video this morning attacking Rubio for his absence in the U.S. Senate showing they are already preparing for the Florida senator’s potential reelection bid in the Sunshine State.
+
+ 
+
+ IN COVERAGE
+
+ Fox News Sunday – Chris Wallace hosts Attorney General Loretta Lynch to discuss gun restrictions in wake of the Orlando shootings, and Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski talks the 2016 race on “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.” Check local listings for broadcast times in your area.
+
+ 
+
+ #mediabuzz - Howard Kurtz breaks down how the media covered the biggest news stories, including Bill Hemmer on his experience reporting from Orlando. Watch #mediabuzz Sundays at 11 a.m. and a reairing at 5 p.m. ET.
+
+ 
+
+ PLAY-BY-PLAY
+
+ Clinton, Trump Twitter wars wage on - WashEx
+
+ 
+
+ Major companies pull sponsorship from GOP convention - The Hill
+
+ 
+
+ How game theory helps explain Trump’s strategy - WaPo
+
+ 
+
+ Hillary pushes DNC towards general election focus - Time
+
+ 
+
+ Over 50 State Dept. employees call for a regime change in Syria - Fox News
+
+ 
+
+ AUDIBLE
+
+ “Election days come and go but political and social revolutions that attempt to transform our society never end.” -- Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in his live webcast Thursday.
+
+ 
+
+ SAVE YOURSELF, NO REALLY
+
+ [Victoria, British Columbia] Times Colonist: “Vancouver firefighters, eager to deploy two new boats, were disappointed last week when one of the vessels was, ironically, damaged by fire during transport…The two boats, worth approximately $1.5 million apiece, were custom built for Vancouver in Kingston, Ont., by MetalCraft Marine to replace the fire department’s two aging water craft…But as the long-awaited, 43-foot vessels were being transported to Vancouver by tractor trailer last week, there was a malfunction with the packaging…There is no concern that the boat is unsafe because of the fire [Vancouver Fire and Rescue spokesman added] adding that the vessel had been taken apart to transport.”
+
+ 
+
+ AND NOW A WORD FROM CHARLES…
+
+ “You can keep all the Muslim immigrants you want away from our shores. It will make no difference. In the end, the only thing that will work – as it worked to a large extent with al Qaeda – you have to go after them where they live, and drive them out.” -- Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier” Watch here.
+
+ 
+
+ Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Sally Persons contributed to this report. Want FOX News Halftime Report in your inbox every day? Sign up here.",REAL
+5185,Would Trump presidency threaten rule of law?,"Trump proposals that seem startling now – such as killing terrorists’ spouses – might be less so after years of a Trump administration, political experts say.
+
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves to the crowd over the heads of media photographers as he arrives to speak at a campaign rally on June 11, 2016, at a private hangar at Greater Pittsburgh International Airport in Moon, Pa.
+
+Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been extraordinary in many ways. But one of its most unprecedented – some would say shocking – aspects is the way the blustery billionaire keeps promising to do things that are likely beyond the limits of presidential authority set by the Constitution of the United States.
+
+His supporters thrill to Mr. Trump’s promise of raw power, of course. Tearing up treaties, torturing terrorists, threatening Muslims – all are huge applause lines at Trump rallies. President Obama is already stretching the legal bounds of his office, many Republicans insist. Trump would be just going Democrats one better.
+
+But others think Trump’s talk raises important questions about the extent to which he could threaten American law and democratic norms. The most likely change might not involve out-and-out authoritarianism as much as a coarsening of acceptable US political behavior. Trump proposals that seem startling now – such as killing terrorists’ spouses – might be less so after years of a Trump administration.
+
+“What would be activated would be a normalization of certain kind of things ... The law might not change but the attitude would,” says Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and author of “The New Imperial Presidency.”
+
+Many of Trump’s more outrageous proposals involve enemies, perceived and real.
+
+Take the media. (Please, as Trump might paraphrase Henny Youngman.) Trump, who has barred organizations such as The Washington Post and Politico from covering his campaign events after coverage he deemed unfair, has promised to loosen libel laws to make it easier to sue media companies. Never mind the First Amendment, or that Congress is the body of government that actually writes laws.
+
+Then there’s US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing a pair of class action lawsuits charging the defunct Trump University with fraud. Trump’s personal and racial attacks on the US-born judge show a high degree of disregard for judicial independence, say critics, especially his insistence that somebody should “look into” Curiel’s background. If elected, how will Trump deal with losses in personal business or executive branch litigation?
+
+Trump’s been particularly bombastic about what he’d do in terms of national security. He insists he’d target the wives and children of terrorists – a deliberate killing of civilian bystanders. Former CIA director Michael Hayden has said that if Trump orders such action the US military would likely refuse, setting off a dispute that could spiral into a constitutional crisis. Trump has also said numerous times that he would reinstitute waterboarding of terror suspects, or “worse.”
+
+“That’s a really troubling thing. Waterboarding is torture, pretty clear. And if waterboarding is torture it violates criminal law,” says Chris Edelson, an assistant professor of government at American University in Washington and author of “Power Without Constraint: The Post 9/11 Presidency and National Security.”
+
+As for Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants entering the US, that may – or may not – pass constitutional muster. Traditionally the executive branch has broad latitude to set immigration regulations. However, the Supreme Court might look askance at a ban on a particular religious group, even if applied to people outside the US, according to Professor Edelson. It’s uncharted legal territory. And Congress might weigh in. After all, GOP lawmakers from House Speaker Paul Ryan on down have said they oppose such a ban.
+
+“Trump could try to act against Congress, but that would put him on a weak footing,” notes Edelson.
+
+Trump’s bombast has put many of his nominal Republican supporters in a difficult position. For years, GOP lawmakers been accusing Mr. Obama of abusing his office and bypassing the will of Congress, and now their party’s presumptive presidential nominee is promising to go even farther.
+
+In response, some have taken the position that Trump will inevitably be restrained by existing checks on presidential power, both legislative and judicial. His staff will curb his enthusiasm for things he really can’t do. “He’ll have a White House counsel,” says Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
+
+Well, maybe. The job of a White House counsel isn’t primarily to point out the limits of presidential authority. It’s to figure out legal justifications for things presidents already want to do, says Professor Rudalevige of Bowdoin.
+
+That should not be a surprise. They’re lawyers, and the president is their client. Even if they conclude something can’t be done, the government has lots and lots of other legal offices. The Oval Office can pick and choose the opinion it likes best.
+
+As to legislative and judicial checks on presidential power, those are not automatic. If a president oversteps their bounds, much would depend on what the people who staff those branches of government decide to do.
+
+“The Constitution does not enforce itself,” says Edelson of American University.
+
+That, in turn, could depend on the domestic political and international security situation facing the nation at that moment. Consider World War II: President Franklin Roosevelt, facing a grave threat, decided that it would be OK to go ahead and imprison Japanese-Americans in internment camps. He issued an executive order to that effect.
+
+Today that seems pretty clearly unconstitutional, and it probably did then, too. But most US citizens accepted it due to the nature of the times.
+
+That’s the civil liberties danger associated with national security fears. Power flows to the Oval Office, and when the danger is passed, not all of that power flows back.
+
+Since 9/11 the presidency has changed, argues Edelson. President George W. Bush pioneered sweeping surveillance powers, some of which have since been enacted into law. Obama has intensified a nominally secret drone war that includes the extra-judicial killing of American citizens deemed to be terrorists. The next president will inherit that war intact.
+
+This increase in presidential security power will be an issue whoever wins the presidency, says Edelson. It’s not specific to Trump or presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
+
+“The reality is we shouldn’t trust anyone with unlimited power,” he says.
+
+As for Trump, if he wins the White House in the fall, he can argue that voters have approved his many proposals. He has made no secret of how he would move to try and deport the millions of unauthorized immigrants currently living in the US. He has broadly hinted that he considers all Muslims in America complicit in some manner with Islamic State-inspired domestic terrorist attacks. It would be of a piece for Trump to propose heightened scrutiny for Muslims in the US.
+
+In that case, the US would still be a democracy. But it might not still be a liberal democracy, according to Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
+
+By “liberal democracy,” Mr. Hamid does not mean a government leftish on the political spectrum, but one that respects broadly recognized personal rights and freedoms. Under Trump, the US might become an illiberal democracy, according to Hamid: a place where a majority has voted to restrict the personal rights of a minority, or minorities.
+
+“Regardless of the final [election] outcome ... the billionaire’s rise offers up a powerful – and frightening – reminder that liberal democracy, even where it’s entrenched, is a fragile thing,” Hamid writes.",REAL
+7433,Google And God,"(16 fans) - Advertisement - Yeah. I know, I know. I'm an iconoclast. Yep and I'm proud of it. So the other day I got to thinking about religion and other things in the Homo Sapiens space called life. You know I get philosophical from time to time. And then I get inspired to tackle some very touchy and sensitive subjects that usually set off a lot of people. I get a perverse joy in rubbing people the wrong way and send them into WFT hissy fits. So you know that this article is going to have some folks seeing red and the God-police will start pulling out their truncheons to give me a whack on the ole noggin just to prove their point that I should not meddle in the affairs of the Great Father somewhere in a place called Heaven. The fact is that today, with the click of a mouse button the era of seeking answers and advice about God directly from rabbis, pastors, or imams is gradually coming to an end. And the cause of this backsliding and undermining of the hitherto unquestioned role of these ""emissaries of God on earth?"" Well, it's not a human person but Artificial Intelligence personified and its called ""Google."" Google may be the well-known supercomputer system that processes information by nano-seconds but AI has been with us for a long time. Consider the following: Self-driving cars have arrived; Siri (on your Iphones and Ipads) can listen to your voice and find the nearest movie theatre; and I.B.M. set the "" Jeopardy""- conquering Watson to work on medicine, initially training medical students, perhaps eventually helping in diagnosis. Nowadays, scarcely a week goes by without the announcement of a new A.I. product or technique. And for all the constant complaining about the religious right's inappropriate influence in politics and religious conservatives' attempts to tear down the church-state wall, the secular movement in America is actually doing quite well. The most recent Pew Research Center poll says 23 percent of Americans are religiously unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics and no-religion people); that percentage increases to 35 percent for Americans under thirty-five -- young people are not doing too many religious conversions, and see God as part of a belief system of their parents. So, for Americans in the Bible Belt and elsewhere this is alarming news - if secularism hasn't yet taken over the country, its on track for that to happen. And its all the fault of artificial intelligence as epitomized in the incredible superpower of Google . Now I do NOT intend to be dismissive of religion or disrespect people's beliefs OR their right to worship and believe what they want to. Me? I believe that every Thursday night when karaoke takes place in Brooklyn my bulldog Max turns into a werewolf seeking cats to relieve them of their hemoglobin fluids. You get my drift -- you can believe what you want but that does not make what you believe true. But one thing is not in doubt -- Google and God are on our daily human agendas. Indeed, the questions that Americans type into Google searches about God appear to confirm the country's rising secularism. For example, according to an economist writing in the New York Times : ""Despite the rising popularity of Pope Francis, who was elected in 2013, Google searches for churches are 15 percent lower in the first half of this decade than they were during the last half of the previous one. The top Google search including the word ""God"" is ""God of War,"" a videogame, with more than 700,000 searches per year."" Bummer, people searching for a videogame with the word ""God"" in it? WFT! Are people losing their cotton-picking minds? And to make matter worse the same economist, Stephens-Davidowitz, also discovered that ""Searches questioning God's existence are up."" He went further to seek what questions people Google whilst in their periods of doubt: The No. 1 question? In the United States of America? Is without a doubt: ""who created God?"" And the second? ""why God allows suffering?"" in number 3 ""why does God hate me? And in fourth place: ""why God needs so much praise?"" - Advertisement - It now appears from this data that people in America are looking to Google for answers to some pertinent and serious questions about God and in an oblique way questioning what they were taught by their parents and learned in churches on Sundays for so many years. There is absolutely no doubt that the Internet and Google have been at odds with religion. The Google phenomenon is also explainable in the context of the adversarial relationship between science and religion -- they just don't mix. Religion -- all religions -- are based on a system of blind, unquestioning belief and a rejection of objective inquiry that is substituted with faith. Religions place and validate this faith by statements found in their Holy Books that's interpreted by preachers, pastors, priests and ministers. These writings and teachings MUST be accepted without question by the faithful. Science on the other hand believes that ALL things in nature should be questioned and examined. And that it is only by this kind of objective inquiry that humankind has progressed and will progress. The Internet and Google are not the products of a Sunday sermon or the dogmatic faith or prayers of the faithful. Advances in medicine, communications technology, transportation, and other things that define modern human existence are the results of science -- not faith or belief. In fact, the cornerstone of the scientific method is to question everything; science accepts nothing that is not provable -- again and again and again. The rise of American secularism and of individuals with no religious affiliations is directly due to the rise and use of the Internet. Hitherto the Internet, and in particular Google , people used libraries and their church leaders for research on questions of faith, belief, and the existence of God. Religion had a stranglehold on knowledge and issues of God and Sin. But with the advent of Google information and knowledge became readily available and a new generation is now growing up in a society more open to doubting old canards and traditional belief systems. Google has undermined religion's central premise for the belief in God -- his all-knowing faculty. Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. Google can bring up literally millions of hits SIMULTANEOUSLY on every conceivable topic that the human mind can imagine -- including Biblical history, origins and that of other religious books, and their pros and cons. For iconoclasts like me declining religious affiliation is akin to social improvement. It's evidence of the clarifying influence of scientific rationality that's the end result of the global information revolution. I know that one of the questions here will undoubtedly be about personal faith in the context of our ability to pay bills, order clothes and food, communicate with friends and family and send emails across the word in seconds. And too, I'll hear the issue of the difference between Google as a profit-making, altruistic organization, and the church whose primary concern is about the condition of our souls. These are valid arguments when it comes to God and Google. I'm not suggesting that this is an either or situation. But what I am suggesting is that modern experiences in the secular world are now impacting religious belief and not in a very positive manner. - Advertisement - And yes, from a religious standpoint the question is: because of the rise of Google are religious institutions that used to answer questions about God and Sin crowdsourcing the acts of faith that the entire system is built on? Put another way, does religion risk losing its ability to provide answers to life on earth when Google's data cannot do so? And, in today's Internet and Google dominated world will faithful people when in doubt, Google ""who created God?""",FAKE
+5682,Bernie Sanders Says What The Media Won’t: Trump Is A Gutless Political Coward,"— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 27, 2016 If you don’t have the guts to run for office on your ideas @realDonaldTrump , then you shouldn’t run for office at all. 
+— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 27, 2016 
+Sen. Sanders was correct. Elections are supposed to be contests about ideas and visions for the future. However, the Republican Party ran out of ideas decades ago and has been on a slow and steady descent into substituting beliefs for facts, and hopes for visions. 
+Trump is trying to suppress the vote because voter suppression is the only tactic that he has left that may lead him to victory. 
+It takes guts and courage to run a presidential campaign based on ideas and principles. Donald Trump lacking in both the guts and courage departments which is why he is spending the final days of his presidential campaign trying to con and scheme his way into the Oval Office. 
+The media will never say it, but real candidates for office don’t try to win by discouraging people from voting. The best candidates get people excited to vote and play their vital role in the democratic process. 
+Bernie Sanders gets it. Donald Trump never will.",FAKE
+5082,Sanders delegates' convention agenda,"Philadelphia (CNN) The Democrats search for a rising star. Convention calculations for Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump makes a Western foray. And the superdelegate saga continues.
+
+These storylines are all part of this week's ""Inside Politics"" forecast, which previews what political observers will be talking about in the coming days.
+
+No one expects the Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton relationship to devolve into Donald Trump-Ted Cruz territory. But there are lingering frustrations from the primary season, so there may be a few dustups in Philadelphia.
+
+Or even brush fires, as CNN's Jeff Zeleny put it in describing the potential for Clinton-Sanders tensions during this week's Democratic National Convention.
+
+""Some Sanders delegates are hoping that Monday is an opportunity for them to have their say. They were watching in Cleveland with great interest. Yes, the rules are different. Almost everything is different. The Clintons are definitely running a tighter convention here, but, the Sanders people are not that thrilled with her pick for a vice president . And they're enraged by this leak episode at the DNC .""
+
+Why make a decision when you can appoint a commission?
+
+Another big Sanders convention priority was getting rid of the so-called superdelegates who have favored Hillary Clinton. Those are the elected officials and party activists who wield convention votes and can decide who to support regardless of voting in their home states.
+
+The party establishment wants to protect its perks, and so Sanders' proposal ran into trouble in the convention rules committee. But the proposed rules do call for a study, which may steer the commission toward Sanders' priorities.
+
+It recommends the commission keep the superdelegates, but requires that all but a select few be bound by results of the primary or caucus in their home state.
+
+3) Boston is to Obama as Philadelphia is to ...?
+
+Who will be this year's Barack Obama?
+
+As in, do the Democrats have a next-generation star who will become a household name this week?
+
+Obama made his big jump in 2004 as a prime-time speaker at the convention in Boston that nominated John Kerry for president.
+
+Julie Pace of the Associated Press noted that the list of Democratic prospects this year isn't as long because the GOP has had so much success in state and local elections during the Obama years.
+
+""There just isn't a big bench for the Democratic party, particularly in governor's mansions across the country,"" she said. ""You have Democratic leaders who will be watching some of these lesser-known Democrats to see if one of them may be the next rising star who could be up for (a presidential) election in four or eight years.""
+
+4) History through the eyes of Willie Brown
+
+Willie Brown is now a fixture at Democratic conventions, but he wasn't always treated as a party icon.
+
+The liberal activist and former San Francisco mayor recalls when it was hard for African-American delegates to get their credentials.
+
+Jonathan Martin of The New York Times shared snippets from an oral history of sorts that Brown recorded.
+
+""It was fascinating talking to him about the changing nature of these conventions,"" Martin said. ""You know, he was a young man in his 30s fighting folks from the South who did not want to have black delegations seated. He is now here at the end of a two-term black president, and watching him ... and what the party has become was a fascinating hour for me.""
+
+Donald Trump heads west this week, looking to make inroads in a region that has been difficult for him.
+
+Colorado is the swing-state prize Trump hopes to sway, and CNN's Maeve Reston notes that recent polls there have shown a steady lead for Hillary Clinton. But Trump being more competitive in Colorado could help tilt the electoral college.
+
+""Talking to people in that state, though, it's really interesting to see the reaction to the Pence pick there because in some ways Pence could help Trump turn out social conservatives, but (he) hurts him with so many of those key swing voters who are critical to him winning there,"" she said. ""So it will be fascinating to see how he plays that this week.""",REAL
+8594,Is it necessary to break the law to improve your standard of living?,"law , economy , society , standard of living , RBTH Daily The study assessed attitudes about non-violent legal violations, such as working ""off the books"" or not officially registering a business. Source: Vyacheslav Prokofyev/TASS 
+Thirty percent of Russians believe that they can increase revenues or improve their standard of living only by violating the law, a recent survey carried out by RANEPA's Center for Socio-Political Monitoring found. ""Alarming symptom"" 
+Respondents' agreement with this point of view depends on their economic well-being, experts say. The worse their financial situation, the more they believe they need to break the law to become wealthier. For example, 52 percent of respondents with low incomes feel this way. U.S. asked to join probe into Russian anti-corruption official 
+The study assessed attitudes about non-violent legal violations, such as working ""off the books"" or not officially registering a business, the Center's director Andrei Pokida told RBC. The survey was conducted by personal interviews with 1,600 people from 35 regions. 
+""This is an alarming symptom, as citizens' attitudes toward the shadow economy and their willingness to engage in this process can be observed against the background of a gradual decline in real incomes of the population,"" the researchers state. The average income of Russians has decreased by 6.1 percent during the past last year, a record decline since 1999. Almost half of Russians justify the shadow economy 
+Experts found that working people have a ""very approving"" attitude towards various forms of the shadow economy. 
+While only 7.2 percent of respondents believe that it does more benefit than harm, 34.5 percent of respondents believe the shadow economy is more beneficial than harmful, and 38.3 percent are inclined to think that it brings both benefit and harm equally; the rest found it difficult to reply. These statistics imply that about 45 percent of the employed population of Russia justify the informal economy. Russian official received a bribe of 2 bags of Whiskas 
+Compared to previous survey results, the number of people who clearly approve of the informal economy decreased, down from 10.5 percent in 2013. However, the proportion of those who were neutral slightly increased, up from 33.2 percent. But Russians were even more tolerant of the shadow economy in 1990: 49.5 percent were convinced that it brought both benefit and harm, 21 percent supported it and only 13.5 percent opposed it. 
+Over the subsequent 11 years, though, attitudes changed dramatically. In 2001, the number who supported the informal economy dropped to a historic low of 2.1 percent, while those opposing it increased to 49 percent; 26.7 percent remained neutral. 
+According to RANEPA's June estimates, about 30 million people are engaged in Russia's shadow labor market, or 40.3 percent of the economically active population. Of these, 8.7 million people (11.7 percent) are completely excluded from the official workforce, while the remaining receive a portion of their salary ""under the table"" or have additional unreported earnings.",FAKE
+2086,Paris climate summit: What to expect from historic talks,"For the first time, nearly all of the countries are committing to some level of action.
+
+Fog and smog swallow up the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Monday, Nov. 2, 2015. The UN's environmental authority has quietly raised its assessment of the level global greenhouse gas emissions can reach in 2020 while still avoiding dangerous climate change, ahead of the Paris climate summit scheduled for late November.
+
+Negotiators from 195 countries are set to meet in Paris for two weeks, beginning Nov. 30, to wrap up a new, historic pact to limit global warming. A committed group-effort approach replaces top-down strategies that haven’t worked.
+
+For the first time, nearly all countries are committing to some level of action, eroding a long-standing divide between developed and developing countries. To get there, however, negotiators jettisoned specific targets on greenhouse gas emissions imposed in a binding treaty. Those targets have been replaced by an overall goal countries have accepted: to hold global warming to no more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F.) by 2100. Each country will determine its own approaches and how much it can contribute to curbing emissions – through cuts or a reduction in the growth rate of emissions – that, collectively, would put the world on the 2-degree path.
+
+These commitments have deadlines of 2030, and in some cases 2025. They represent the first step in a process that would lead to periodic reviews and intensification of these efforts until atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel, are stabilized at a level that holds warming to 2 degrees C.
+
+Q: What do the commitments look like?
+
+More than 150 countries have submitted “intended nationally determined commitments” (INDCs), according to Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. These countries represent about 90 percent of global emissions. The commitments vary in ambition. Each country sets its own baseline against which it gauges progress. And some commitments are contingent on receiving financial help.
+
+China has pledged to slow the growth in its CO emissions so that they peak around 2030. That includes a pledge to increase the share of electricity generated by renewable and nuclear sources to 20 percent by 2030. The United States has pledged to cut carbon emissions to at least 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Others, such as Ethiopia and Guatemala, use “business as usual” projections as their baselines and hold part or all of their emissions pledges contingent on receiving aid to pay for green energy technologies and for adaptation.
+
+Q: What effect will these have on global warming?
+
+These commitments represent an encouraging shift away from business as usual. But if they all are fully implemented and nothing more is done in the interim, they will have placed the planet on a path to warming around 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F.) by 2030 rather than 2 degrees. The draft agreement recognizes this, however. It envisions regular reviews aimed at assessing progress and intensifying efforts. If the reviews are set up at five-year intervals, as some expect, the first would come in 2020.
+
+Q: What gives people hope that this will work?
+
+Climate policy specialists cite several factors. One of the most important is a change in attitude. Strategies that once seemed burdensome are increasingly seen as economic opportunities, notes Taryn Fransen, a climate policy specialist with the World Resources Institute in Washington who leads an international collaboration tracking the INDCs and efforts to fulfill them. In addition, over time countries have become more aware of how global warming is affecting them. And renewable technologies are taking hold faster than many had predicted, a pace many models don’t incorporate.
+
+Still, that growth may not be enough, others argue. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has noted that to hold warming to 2 degrees C by 2100, countries will need two more arrows in their quivers: the use of bioenergy combined with trapping the CO emissions and sequestering that carbon underground. Both are controversial and, for now, neither is available on a large scale.
+
+Q: What are the remaining hurdles to the agreement?
+
+One critical element is money: How much financing will be forthcoming for developing countries, and what sort of compensation might there be for loss and damage? Developing countries still have doubts about the credibility of past commitments from rich countries to increase access to financing for climate-related projects. In 2009, rich nations pledged $100 billion by 2020. Even when that is met, questions remain about what follows. Developing countries are looking for language that indicates this help will continue and increase.
+
+On loss and damage, the US, for instance, is working to ensure that the agreement has no language that implies open-ended liability on the part of developed countries for the damage global warming inflicts on developing countries. That issue may await the final week of the talks to get sorted out, notes Alden Meyer, with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. Another issue is the gap between the commitments and emissions reductions needed to put the planet on the 2-degree C path and how that will be addressed. Provisions for some sort of review process will come out of the talks, Mr. Meyer says.“But how they are couched and how effective they will be, and whether they really create an opening to stand back and look at this again in four or five years – that’s a question,” he says.",REAL
+4844,"Trump doctor’s letter: He takes cholesterol drug, is overweight but is in ‘excellent’ health","This post has been updated.
+
+Donald Trump released a letter from his personal doctor on Thursday that summarizes his latest physical exam, saying he takes a cholesterol-lowering drug and is overweight but overall is in “excellent physical health.”
+
+Trump discussed the results of the exam on ""The Dr. Oz Show"" on Thursday afternoon, saying that presidential candidates have an ""obligation"" to voters to be healthy and that he feels like he is still in his 30s.
+
+""When you're running for president, I think you have an obligation to be healthy. I just don't think you can do the work if you're not healthy. I don't think you can represent the country properly if you're not a healthy person,"" Trump, 70, said on the health talk-show, adding that the last time he was hospitalized was when he had his appendix removed at age 11.
+
+[Trump admits he wouldn’t release his medical results if they were ‘bad’]
+
+The one-page letter is signed by Trump's  longtime doctor, Harold N. Bornstein, a gastroenterological specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. The letter states that Trump is 6 foot 3 inches tall and weighs 236 pounds, making him overweight and on the verge of being obese for his height. Trump said in the interview that he would like to lose 15 to 20 pounds but that weight loss has always been difficult for him because of his lifestyle.
+
+The letter also lists the results of recent lab tests, which Bornstein says are all within the normal range. The letter says that Trump takes a statin, a drug for lowering cholesterol, along with a low dose of aspirin. During the talk show, Trump said that both of his parents lived to an old age and many of his mother's relatives in Scotland lived into their 90s. The letter states that there ""is no family history of premature cardiac or neoplastic disease.""
+
+While the letter released by Trump gives more information on his health and physical makeup than previously known, it does not constitute his medical records nor does it give extensive detail about past health matters.
+
+Trump discussed the document with talk-show host and surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz during a taping in New York on Wednesday that aired on Thursday afternoon. Oz is popular nationally but his credibility has been questioned by critics. Trump disclosed the one-page letter to The Washington Post on Thursday soon before the campaign released it publicly. In the letter, which is dated Sept. 13, Bornstein states that Trump has been under his care since 1980, and sits for an annual physical exam.
+
+Bornstein's letter this week lacked the creativity of a letter he signed in December that called Trump's health “extraordinary” and declared he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Bornstein told NBC News last month that he wrote the letter in about five minutes as a Trump associate waited to collect it, though he stood by his glowing assessment.
+
+In the letter released on Thursday, Trump’s “laboratory results” from a blood test and other exams are also given. He has a cholesterol level of 169, with his level of high-density lipoproteins at 63, his low-density lipoproteins at 94.
+
+The businessman’s blood pressure is 116 over 70. His blood sugar level is 99 milligrams per deciliter. Trump’s level of triglycerides, which are a type of fat in blood, is 61 milligrams per deciliter. And his prostate-specific antigen level is measured as 0.15.
+
+“His liver function and thyroid function tests are all within the normal range,” Bornstein writes, adding that “his last colonoscopy was performed on July 10, 2013 which was normal and revealed no polyps.”
+
+Trump’s latest electrocardiogram test and chest X-ray took place in April 2016 and were “normal.""
+
+With regard to Trump’s heart, Bornstein writes that “his cardiac evaluation included a transthoracic echocardiogram” in December 2014 and “this study was reported within the range of normal.”
+
+Bornstein notes that there is “no family history of premature cardiac or neoplastic disease” and that Trump’s parents, Fred and Mary, “lived into their late 80s and 90s.”
+
+[Despite gestures, Trump is still the least transparent U.S. presidential candidate in modern history]
+
+Overall, Trump seems to be relatively healthy, said Allen Taylor, chief of cardiology with MedStar Heart and Vascular Institute, which is based at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.
+
+“He could lose a few pounds,” said Taylor, who reviewed Trump's information. “His BMI could be improved upon.”
+
+Because Trump is taking medication, his cholesterol levels are normal to optimal, Taylor said. The information released shows he has had a complete cardiovascular screening evaluation, and shows him to be at low to intermediate risk for someone his age of developing heart disease in the next 10 years. Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States, and men typically have a higher risk than women. Using two conventional risk calculators for heart disease risk, Taylor said Trump has a 7 to 8 percent chance of developing heart disease—stroke, heart attack, sudden death—in the next 10 years.
+
+The metric that raised some eyebrows was the inclusion of his testosterone level. Some doctors will screen older patients for testosterone levels, but usually only if there are symptoms suggesting low levels, such as extreme fatigue and lack of libido. Some doctors may prescribe testosterone supplements, a relatively controversial practice, Taylor said. He said Trump’s level is in the normal range, and is not a factor or indication for overall health.
+
+“To me, it’s a non-number. It’s like a vitamin D level. It would not be an indication of a presidential candidate’s overall health,” he said.
+
+Trump’s activity comes as Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is returning to the campaign trail following a bout of pneumonia. Clinton’s campaign on Wednesday released a two-page letter from her doctor that said she had been treated this week for “mild” bacterial pneumonia but is in overall good health and “fit to serve as president.” For months Trump has raised questions about Clinton’s health and stamina, and on Wednesday wondered aloud, tauntingly, about whether Clinton could hold hour-long rallies.
+
+“I don’t know, folks. Do you think Hillary could stand up here for an hour?” Trump asked thousands of supporters on Wednesday in Canton, Ohio, where he held an event.
+
+Read the full text of the letter here.",REAL
+10152,Game changer? Trump supporter charged in voter fraud case,"Print 
+According to CBS News , a Des Moines woman has been charged a woman with election misconduct, a Class D felony, after officials said she voted twice. 
+Des Moines police Sgt. Paul Parizek says officers charged 55-year-old Terri Rote with first-degree election misconduct on Thursday after being notified by elections officials that she had submitted two absentee ballots. 
+The real bombshell comes in paragraph 3: 
+According to an Iowa Public Radio report, Rote voted two times for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. 
+After quoting Trump’s “oft-repeated line on the … campaign trail: ‘The polls are rigged,'” the CBS reporters note that Thursday’s development is not a one-off deal. They quote Polk County Attorney John Sarcone as saying, “This [is] maybe the third [time] we’ve had some irregularity that’s resulted in a criminal charge.” 
+From there, the writers go on to express their newfound support of voter ID laws, adding that Republicans have been right all along and some method for keeping elections honest is long overdue. 
+Oh, wait a seond: No they don’t. That would be the logical conclusion, but since when are liberals capable of logical thought? 1 shares",FAKE
+4494,"Supreme Court: your right to a ""speedy trial"" ends when you're declared guilty","The Supreme Court unanimously decided that once a defendant is found guilty or pleads guilty to a crime, the ""speedy"" part of the constitutional Sixth Amendment's ""right to a speedy and public trial"" no longer applies.
+
+""Does the Sixth Amendment’s speedy trial guarantee apply to the sentencing phase of a criminal prosecution? That is the sole question this case presents. We hold that the guarantee protects the accused from arrest or indictment through trial, but does not apply once a defendant has been found guilty at trial or has pleaded guilty to criminal charges,"" Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered in the Court's opinion.
+
+The case, Betterman v. Montana, specifically referred to Brandon Thomas Betterman, who was given his seven-year prison sentence 14 months after he initially pleaded guilty to felony bail jumping in a Montana state court. He took the case to Montana's Supreme Court, which ruled that sentencing was not part of the ""trial"" in a ""speedy trial"" – a ruling the Supreme Court upheld Thursday.
+
+Criminal proceedings take place in three parts: an investigation prior to arrest, a charge and trial where the accused is assumed innocent until proven guilty, and finally, after a conviction, a sentencing. The Court ruled that the language in all three of these stages – ""accused,"" ""convicted,"" ""trial,"" and ""sentencing""– have distinctly separate protections.
+
+""The Sixth Amendment’s Speedy Trial Clause homes in on the second period: from arrest or indictment through conviction. The constitutional right, our precedent holds, does not attach until this phase begins, that is, when a defendant is arrested or formally accused. Today we hold that the right detaches upon conviction, when this second stage ends,"" the Court's opinion said.
+
+In constitutional cases like these, as Rory Little wrote for SCOTUSblog, it is in the high court's benefit to provide as much specificity as possible:
+
+In Betterman v. Montana, a cut-and-dried Sixth Amendment case with a simple question, the Supreme Court took the opportunity to raise – but not rule on – additional questions about protections afforded under separate due process clauses. While ""the speedy trial right — like other similarly aimed measures — loses force upon conviction,"" Betterman may have had ""other recourse"" under the due process clauses of the Fifth and 14th Amendments, the opinion reads.
+
+Both the Fifth Amendment, which grants the right of a grand jury and protect against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, and the 14th Amendment, which protects the rights of citizens more broadly, require a ""due process of law"" in any proceeding that could deny a citizen ""life, liberty, or property.""
+
+However, because Betterman brought forward a Sixth Amendment case, the Court had ""no reason to consider today the appropriate test for such a Due Process Clause challenge.""
+
+In concurring with the Court's decision however, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a point to note that Betterman was not wrong to question inordinately long sentencing times – he just argued the wrong case.
+
+""I write separately to emphasize that the question is an open one,"" Sotomayor wrote.",REAL
+7913,We told you so! The Zika virus is harmless,"In March we wrote: Reading About Zika May Hurt Your Brain . We listed 35 sensational ""news"" headlines about potential catastrophes related to a Zika epidemic. The common factor of those panic creating media wave - all those headlines included the miraculous little word may . The pieces were pure speculations with some quoting this or that ""expert"" who was hunting for research funds or lobbying for some pharmaceutical or pesticide conglomerate. In June we added: Zika Virus Does Not Cause Birth Defects - Fighting It Probably Does . New serious research found what some people in Brazil had suspected from the very start of the small and strictly locally limited jump in microencephaly cases in Brazil: [D]octors in the Zika affected areas in Brazil pointed out that the real cause of somewhat increased microcephaly in the region was probably the insecticide pyriproxyfen, used to kill mosquito larvae in drinking water: The Brazilian doctors noted that the areas of northeast Brazil that had witnessed the greatest number of microcephaly cases match with areas where pyriproxyfen is added to drinking water in an effort to combat Zika-carrying mosquitoes . Pyriproxyfen is reported to cause malformations in mosquito larvae, and has been added to drinking water in the region for the past 18 months. Pyriproxyfen is produced by a Sumitomo Chemical - an important Japanese poison giant. It was therefore unsurprising that the New York Times and others called the Brazilian doctors' report a ""conspiracy theory"" and trotted out some ""experts"" to debunk it. ... But [s]cientist at the New England Complex Systems Institute also researched the pyriproxyfen thesis. They found : Pyriproxifen is an analog of juvenile hormone, which corresponds in mammals to regulatory molecules including retinoic acid, a vitamin A metabolite, with which it has cross-reactivity and whose application during development causes microcephaly . ... [T]ests of pyriproxyfen by the manufacturer, Sumitomo, widely quoted as giving no evidence for developmental toxicity, actually found some evidence for such an effect , including low brain mass and arhinencephaly—incomplete formation of the anterior cerebral hemispheres—in rat pups. Finally, the pyriproxyfen use in Brazil is unprecedented—it has never before been applied to a water supply on such a scale. ... Given this combination of information we strongly recommend that the use of pyriproxyfen in Brazil be suspended pending further investigation. Today the Washington Post finally admits that the Zika virus does not cause birth defects: [T]o the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil. Instead, Zika has left a puzzling and distinctly uneven pattern of damage across the Americas. According to the latest U.N. figures, of the 2,175 babies born in the past year with undersize heads or other congenital neurological damage linked to Zika, more than 75 percent have been clustered in a single region: northeastern Brazil. The wide areas where the flue virus occurred outside of the small area in Brazil saw no increase in birth defect numbers. The number of (naturally occurring) microcephality cases stayed constant despite a very large increase in (harmless) Zika virus infections. The numbers in Brazil also turned out to be partially inflated because of a lack of standard diagnosis criteria and unreliable statistics. A factor we had pointed to in our very first piece. The WaPo piece today muses about several ""possible"" causes for the local increase in cases in northeastern Brazil that indeed happened. It quotes some of the very ""experts"", like from the pharmaceutical industry influenced CDC, that were wrong on the issue since the very first panic headline. It strenuously avoids to even mention the most likely cause - the excessive local use of an insecticide that is supposed to cause birth defects - in developing mosquitoes. Thus the reporting is still void of journalistic ethics and irresponsible in its conclusions. It did not take much effort to get this right. An hour or two of skimming through publicly available sources of good standing, some basic higher education and sound reasoning was enough. But instead of doing such basic inquiries ""journalists"" and media ""served"" panic and speculations by biased ""experts"". Keep this story in mind for the next sensationalist onslaught of panic headline. There surely will be some ""interests"" behind those; just don't expect unbiased facts and basic logic reasoning. Comment: And Zika -- like Ebola, SARS, bird flu, West Nile, etc. -- will fall down the memory hole...until the next scare comes along.",FAKE
+2222,Debating the Future of American Power Abroad,"The early 2016 presidential debate already is full of conversation about when and how to use American power abroad. An equally important but often overlooked question is this: Why use American power?
+
+This part of the debate over national-security policy focuses on what Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, calls “the purposes of American power.” Broadly speaking, there are four potential reasons to use American power, including military power, on the world stage:",REAL
+9275,Sesame Seeds for Knee Osteoarthritis,"Sesame Seeds for Knee Osteoarthritis VN:F [1.9.22_1171] Close Transcript Transcript: Sesame Seeds for Knee Osteoarthritis 
+Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. 
+Ever since the 1920s, doctors have been injecting arthritis patients with gold. Evidently, “gold-based medicines have been in use for thousands of years,” and remarkably, are still in clinical use as so called disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs—meaning they can slow the progression of rheumatoid arthritis. 
+Unfortunately, such drugs can be toxic, even fatal, causing conditions such as gold lung, a gold-induced lung disease. “Although its use can be limited by the incidence of serious toxicity,” injectable gold has been shown to be beneficial. But maybe, some researchers suspected, some of that benefit is the sesame oil that’s injected, which is used as the liquid carrier for the gold. 
+Sesame seeds contain anti-inflammatory compounds, with names like sesamin and sesamol, which researchers suspect “may serve as a potential treatment for various inflammatory diseases.” But, these were in vitro studies. First, we have to see if it has an anti-inflammatory effect in people, not just cells in a petri dish. But, there haven’t been any studies on the effects of sesame seeds on inflammatory markers in people with arthritis, for example—until now. 
+“Considering the high prevalence of osteoarthritis…and since until now there has not been any human studies to evaluate the effect of sesame in [osteoarthritis] patients, this study was designed to assess the effect of administration of sesame [seeds] on inflammation…” And, they found a significant drop in inflammatory markers. But, what effect did it have on their actual disease? 
+Fifty patients with osteoarthritis of the knee were split into two groups; standard treatment, or standard treatment plus about a quarter-cup of sesame seeds a day, for two months. Before they started, they described their pain as about 9 out of 10—where zero is no pain, and 10 is the maximum pain tolerable. After two months, the control group felt a little better—pain down to 7. But, the sesame group dropped down to 3.5—significantly lower than the control group. 
+The researchers conclude that sesame appeared to have a “positive effect,”“improving clinical signs and symptoms in patients with knee [osteoarthritis].” But, the main problem with this study is that the control group wasn’t given a placebo. It’s hard to come up with a kind of fake sesame seed. But, without a placebo, they basically compared doing nothing to doing something. And, any time you have patients do something special, you can’t discount the placebo effect. 
+But, what are the downsides? I mean that’s the nice thing about using food as medicine—only good side effects. Though the results are mixed, there have been studies using placebo controls that found that adding sesame seeds to one’s diet may improve our cholesterol and antioxidant status. And, the amount of sesamin found in as little as about one tablespoon of sesame seeds can modestly lower blood pressure a few points within a month—enough, perhaps, to lower fatal stroke and heart attack risk by about 5%; potentially saving thousands of lives. Please consider volunteering to help out on the site. Close Sources Video Sources",FAKE
+5413,Now We Can Finally Get to Work,"Posted on November 9, 2016 by DavidSwanson 
+Dear Democrats, 
+Are you finding yourselves suddenly a bit doubtful of the wisdom of drone wars? Presidential wars without Congress? Massive investment in new, smaller, “more usable” nuclear weapons? The expansion of bases across Africa and Asia? Are you disturbed by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen? Can total surveillance and the persecution of whistleblowers hit a point where they’ve gone too far? Is the new Cold War with Russia looking less than ideal now? How about the militarization of U.S. police: is it time to consider alternatives to that? 
+I hear you. I’m with you. Let’s build a movement together to end the madness of constantly overthrowing governments with bombs. Let’s propose nonviolent alternatives to a culture gone mad with war. Let’s end the mindset that creates war in the first place . 
+We have opportunities as well as dangers. A President Trump is unpredictable. He wants to proliferate nuclear weapons, bomb people, kill people, stir up hatred of people, and increase yet further military spending. But he also said the new Cold War was a bad idea. He said he wanted to end NATO, not to mention NAFTA, as well as breaking the habit of overthrowing countries left and right. Trump seems to immediately back off such positions under the slightest pressure. Will he adhere to them under massive pressure from across the political spectrum? It’s worth a try . 
+We have an opportunity to build a movement that includes a focus on and participation from refugees/immigrants. We have a chance to create opposition to racist wars and racism at home. We may just discover that what’s left of the U.S. labor movement is suddenly more open to opposing wars. Environmental groups may find a willingness to oppose the world’s top destroyer of the environment: the U.S. military. Civil liberties groups may at long last be willing to take on the militarism that creates the atrocities they oppose. We have to work for such a broader movement. We have to build on the trend of protesting the national anthem and make it a trend of actively resisting the greatest purveyor of violence on earth. 
+I know you’re feeling a little beat down at the moment. You shouldn’t. You had a winning candidate in Bernie Sanders. Your party cheated him out of the nomination. All that stuff you tell yourselves about encouraging demographic trends and the better positions of young people is all true. You just looked for love in all the wrong places. Running an unpopular candidate in a broken election system is not the way to change the world. Even a working election system would not be the central means by which to improve anything. There’s no getting back the mountains of money and energy invested in this election. But activism is an unlimited resource. Directing your energies now in more strategic directions can inspire others who in turn can re-inspire you. 
+
+Dear Republicans, 
+Your outsider is threatening insiderness. He’s got the same tribe of DC corporate lobbyists planning his nominations that Hillary Clinton had lined up for hers. Can we resist that trend? Can we insist that the wars be ended? Can those moments of off-the-cuff honesty about dinosaurs like NATO be turned into actual action? Donald Trump took a lot of heat for proposing to be fair to Palestinians as well as Israelis, and he backed off fast. Can we encourage him to stand behind that initial inclination? 
+Can we stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership and end NAFTA as well? We heard a million speeches about how bad NAFTA is. How about actually ending it? Can we stop the looming war supplemental spending bill? Can we put a swift halt to efforts in Congress to repeal the right to sue Saudi Arabia and other nations for their wars and lesser acts of terrorism? 
+How about all that well deserved disgust with the corporate media? Can we actually break up that cartel and allow opportunities for media entrepreneurs? 
+
+Dear United States, 
+Donald Trump admitted we had a broken election system and for a while pretended that he would operate outside of it by funding his own campaign. It’s time to actually fix it. It’s time to end the system of legalized bribery, fund elections, make registration automatic, make election day a holiday, end gerrymandering, eliminate the electoral college, create the right to vote, create the public hand-counting of paper ballots at every polling place, and create ranked choice voting as Maine just did. 
+Voter suppression efforts in this year’s elections should be prosecuted in each state. And any indications of fraud in vote counting by machines should be investigated. We should take the opportunity created by all the McCarthyist nonsense allegations of Russian interference to get rid of unverifiable voting. 
+There are also areas in which localities and states, as well as international organizations and alliances, must now step up to take the lead. First and foremost is investing in a serious effort to avoid climate catastrophe. Second is addressing inequality that has surpassed the Middle Ages: both taxing the overclass and upholding the underclass must be pursued creatively. Mass incarceration and militarized police are problems that states can solve. 
+But we can advance a positive agenda across the board by understanding this election in the way that much of the world will understand it: as a vote against endless war. Let’s end the wars, end the weapons dealing, close the bases, and cut the $1 trillion a year going into the military. Hell, why not demand that a businessman president for the first time ever audit the Pentagon and find out what it’s spending money on? 
+
+Dear World, 
+We apologize for having elected President Trump as well as for nearly electing President Clinton. Many of you believe we defeated the representative of the enlightenment in favor of the sexist racist buffoon. This may be a good thing. Or at least it may be preferable to your eight-year-long delusion that President Obama was a man of peace and justice. 
+I hate to break it to you, but the United States government has been intent on dominating the rest of you since the day it was formed. If electing an obnoxious president helps you understand that, so much the better. Stop joining in U.S. “humanitarian wars” please. They never were humanitarian, and if you can recognize that now, so much the better. The new guy openly wants to “steal their oil.” So did the last several presidents, although none of them said so. Are we awake now? 
+Shut down the U.S. bases in your country. They represent your subservience to Donald Trump. Close them. 
+Want to save the earth’s climate? Build a nonviolent movement that resists destructive agendas coming out of the United States. 
+Want to uphold the rule of law, diplomacy, aid, decency, and humanitarianism? Stop making exceptions for U.S. crimes. Tell the International Criminal Court to indict a non-African. Prosecute the crime and crimes of war in your own courts. Stop cooperating in the surrounding and threatening of Russia, China, and Iran. Clinton wanted to send weapons to Ukraine and bomb Syria. Make sure Trump doesn’t. Make peace in Ukraine and Syria before January. 
+It’s time that we all began treating the institution of war as the unacceptable vestige of barbarism that it can appear when given an openly racist, sexist, bigoted face. We have the ability to use nonviolent tools to direct the world where we want it to go. We have to stop believing the two big lies: that we are generally powerless, and that our only power lies in elections. Let’s finally get active. Let’s start by ending war making . This entry was posted in General . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
+7742,Trick-Or-Treaters Get Their Socks Rocked By BADASS Hillary Pumpkin Outside,"Trick-Or-Treaters Get Their Socks Rocked By BADASS Hillary Pumpkin Outside Posted on October 31, 2016 by Robert Rich in Politics Share This 
+An incredible video is being shared on social media after someone wanted to go political with their jack-o-lantern carving this year. Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, this badass pumpkin seemed to center around her – and it will surely knock the socks right off any trick-or-treater headed to their house tonight. 
+Halloween is a fun time for many people – especially families with younger ones. However, it seems that a few homeowners decided to try and entertain the adults that may cross their path. Proving just that is a video shared to the Facebook page called “ Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children ,” which shows how one person went political with theirs. 
+As can be seen in the short clip , the jack-o-lantern was emptied and carved to look like a set of jail bars. Making it just that much better, the person responsible for carving the pumpkin actually stuffed a picture of Hillary in there to make it appear as though she is in prison – where she belongs. 
+Within just a few short days, the video has already been seen over 3 million times with that number on the rise. However, if you think people on social media are ramped up over the ingenious carving, you can imagine the reactions that thing will get from trick-or-treaters tonight. 
+As it turns out, the cool idea actually sparked a bit of a movement with several other people doing the same. In fact, in order to make it crystal clear, others even wrote the words “Hillary 4 Prison” on their creations as well:",FAKE
+8651,Amurexit from NAFTA TPP Wall Street and Global Policeman,"Topics: Hillary Clinton , Donald Trump , 2016 Presidential Election , Brexit , FBI Director Comey Sunday, 13 November 2016 
+Despite the continuing wailing and tears and gnashing of teeth from angry Hillary supporters, the Trump Party is officially the winner of the 2016 presidential election. 
+Foremost now in all the post-election sound and fury is the new United States of Amurkier, according to analyst Dmitri Globulus, of the website Times Die Hard. 
+Hillary and the Clintonistas are lining up all the culprits for the defeat--since that obviously had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton herself--starting with FBI Director James Comey. 
+It wasn't her politics of more of the same, including beefing up wars in the middle east, continuing the policies of Obama, and renewing hostility with Russia. 
+No, it was Comey. 
+Comey was very nasty in announcing new emails had been discovered in Anthony Weiner's computer, which tipped the balance. 
+If only he had kept his mouth shut, according to the Clinton DieHards, she would have prevailed. 
+Her failure to talk Amurexit had nothing to do with it, whereas Trump continually signaled ""The System is Rigged!"" 
+But Dmitri Globulus says Trump was on target, not Clinton. 
+""It's basically a grapes of wrath syndrome. Too much imbalance in wealth distribution, severe economic depression, and Government Pretense of a 'recovery' that fooled nobody."" 
+Add in free trade ideas and shipping jobs to the cheapest labor markets in the world leaving ordinary citizens out of work and you've got a lot of anger. 
+Add in Obamacare with its premiums going up and the Pharmaceutical Industry leaping up its profit margins--more anger. 
+Add in stupid wars with the only logic behind them making money for the munitions people and The War Establishment--more anger. 
+Add in refugees fleeing somewhere, anywhere, with their countries either blasted economically or from continuing, monstrous war--more anger. 
+Add in Washington-As-Usual with its talking heads and scoffing and labeling its opposition ignorant and stupid--more anger. 
+The Brexit people across the Atlantic are calling out: ""Welcome to the Club! We're done with the Plutocrat Trans-nationalists!"" 
+Many Amurkier people have responded: ""So are we! Time to change it!"" 
+The Clintonistas meanwhile continue to enjoy their outrage. Make joseph k winter's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
+3566,Islamic State accepts Boko Haram allegiance pledge,"BEIRUT (AP) — Islamic State militants have accepted a pledge of allegiance by Nigerian-grown Boko Haram extremist group, a spokesman for the Islamic State movement said Thursday.
+
+Boko Haram has been weakened by a multinational force that has dislodged it from a score of northeastern Nigerian towns. But its new Twitter account, increasingly slick and more frequent video messages and a new media arm all were considered signs that the group is now being helped by IS propagandists.
+
+Then on Saturday, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Sheka posted an audio recording online that pledged allegiance to IS. On Thursday the Islamic State group's media arm Al-Furqan, in an audio recording by spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, said that Boko Haram's pledge of allegiance has been accepted, claiming the caliphate has now expanded to West Africa.
+
+Al-Adnani had urged foreign fighters from around the world to migrate and join Boko Haram.
+
+""We announce our allegiance to the Caliph of the Muslims ... and will hear and obey in times of difficulty and prosperity, in hardship and ease, and to endure being discriminated against, and not to dispute about rule with those in power, except in case of evident infidelity regarding that which there is a proof from Allah,"" said the message.
+
+The Boko Haram pledge to IS comes as the militants reportedly were massing in the northeastern Nigerian town of Gwoza, considered their headquarters, for a showdown with the Chadian-led multinational force.
+
+Boko Haram killed an estimated 10,000 people last year, and it is blamed for last April's abduction of more than 275 schoolgirls. Thousands of Nigerians have fled to neighboring Chad.
+
+The group is waging a nearly 6-year insurgency to impose Muslim Shariah law in Nigeria. It began launching attacks across the border into Cameroon last year, and this year its fighters struck in Niger and Chad in retaliation to their agreement to form a multinational force to fight the militants.
+
+Boko Haram followed the lead of IS in August by declaring an Islamic caliphate in northeast Nigeria that grew to cover an area the size of Belgium. The Islamic State had declared a caliphate in vast swaths of territory that it controls in Iraq and Syria.
+
+The Nigerian group has also followed IS in publishing videos of beheadings. The latest one, published March 2, borrowed certain elements from IS productions, such as the sound of a beating heart and heavy breathing immediately before the execution, according to SITE Intelligence Group.
+
+In video messages last year, Boko Haram's leader sent greetings and praise to both IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and leaders of al-Qaida. But Boko Haram has never been an affiliate of al-Qaida, some analysts surmise because al-Qaida considers the Nigerians' indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim civilians as un-Islamic.
+
+Recent offensives have marked a sharp escalation by African nations against Boko Haram. An African Union summit agreed on sending a force of 8,750 troops to fight Boko Haram.
+
+Military operations in Niger's east have killed at least 500 Boko Haram fighters since Feb. 8, Nigerien officials have said.
+
+Members of the U.N. Security Council proposed Thursday that the international community supply money, equipment, troops and intelligence to a five-nation African force fighting Boko Haram.
+
+Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.",REAL
+9381,Wife of Muslim jihadist who killed and wounded over 100 in Orlando nightclub massacre says she “knew nothing”,"BNI Store Nov 4 2016 Wife of Muslim jihadist who killed and wounded over 100 in Orlando nightclub massacre says she “knew nothing” “I was unaware of everything,” says Omar Mateen’s wife, 30-year-old Noor Salman (whose whereabouts were a matter of controversy for some time after the massacre), has given her first interview since the Pulse Nightclub massacre to the New York Times. The New York Times piece does not go into detail about her movements since the FBI seemingly lost track of her, although it suggests she is still a person of interest to law enforcement. Her lawyers pop up early in the article to insist she “did nothing wrong” and to forbid questions about her discussions with federal agents. Salman said she had no idea what Mateen was up to on the day of the attack. She knew her husband watched jihadist videos, but she did not think much of it. But how could she have not suspected what her husband was planning – she knew he had the weapons, she drove him to the nightclub and dropped him off: Noor Salman, wife of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, had all the hallmarks of a willing accomplice to her husband’s jihadist slaughter. Georgia State University professor Mia Bloom told The Times that studies show relatives and friends are aware of budding terrorist activities about 64% of the time and argued that Mateen’s abusive relationship with Salman “doesn’t give her a free pass as a bystander to not come forward.” Salman insists she had no dark suspicions about several trips she took with Mateen that have been viewed as preparation for his terrorist career, although the lawyers notably intervened to prevent her from discussing the most notorious of these incidents – the April 2015 trip to Disneyworld that Mateen may have used to case the park for an attack. Salman did nothing to warn the police of her husband’s intentions. When the FBI first questioned Salman, she admitted to bringing Mateen ammunition and a holster. The piece describes her as “shattered and afraid,” to the point that she sometimes has trouble getting out of bed. (Awww…I bet those 49 people her husband slaughtered in cold blood in Orlando would love to have that problem)",FAKE
+6837,Farming Invented Many Times by Many Different Farmers Over A Vast Landscape. @CarlZimmer. @NYTimes. - Russia News Now,"
+Twitter: @ batchelorshow 
+Farming Invented Many Times by Many Different Farmers Over A Vast Landscape. @ carlzimmer . @nytimes. 
+“…In the 1990s, archaeologists largely concluded that farming in the Fertile Crescent began in Jordan and Israel, a region known as the southern Levant. “The model was that everything started there, and then everything spread out from there, including maybe the people,” said Melinda A. Zeder, a senior research scientist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. 
+But in recent years, Dr. Zeder and other archaeologists have overturned that consensus. Their research suggests that people were inventing farming at several sites in the Fertile Crescent at roughly the same time. In the Zagros Mountains of Iran, for example, Dr. Zeder and her colleagues have found evidence of the gradual domestication of wild goats over many centuries around 10,000 years ago. 
+People may have been cultivating plants earlier than believed, too. 
+In the 1980s, Dani Nadel, then at Hebrew University, and his colleagues excavated a 23,000-year-old site on the shores of the Sea of Galilee known as Ohalo II. It consisted of half a dozen brush huts. Last year, Dr. Nadel co-authored a study showing that one of the huts contained 150,000 charred seeds and fruits, including many types, such as almonds, grapes and olives, that would later become crops. . A stone blade found at Ohalo II seemed to have been used as a sickle to harvest cereals. A stone slab was used to grind the seeds. It seems clear the inhabitants were cultivating wild plants long before farming was thought to have begun. 
+“We got fixated on the very few things we just happened to see preserved in the archaeological record, and we got this false impression that this was an abrupt change,” Dr. Zeder said. “Now we really understand there was this long period where they’re playing around with resources.” 
+re ",FAKE
+2624,Netanyahu warns Iran deal could 'threaten the survival' of Israel,"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Monday that a potential nuclear deal with Iran ""could threaten the survival of Israel,"" as he kicked off a contentious visit to the United States meant to build the case against such an agreement.
+
+The centerpiece of his visit will be an address to Congress on Tuesday. But speaking first to The American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, the Israeli leader underscored the dangers he said are posed by Iran, which he called the world's ""foremost sponsor of state terrorism.""
+
+""Iran envelops the entire world with its tentacles of terror,"" he said, displaying a map showing various connections between Iran and terror groups. He warned Iran could pursue Israel's destruction if it obtained a nuclear weapon.
+
+""We must not let that happen,"" Netanyahu said.
+
+Both the Obama and Netanyahu administrations, as a matter of policy, agree that Iran must not be able to obtain a nuclear weapon. But the Israeli leader has concerns that the framework of the current diplomatic talks could lead to an ineffective deal.
+
+His address to Congress on Tuesday has meanwhile become the source of immense tension between the two governments. The speech was arranged at the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner, but without the involvement of President Obama. Some Democrats plan to boycott that speech, and the U.S. president has no plans to meet with the prime minister -- though the White House insists this is out of a desire not to appear to be influencing upcoming Israeli elections. On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry said in an interview with ABC's ""This Week,"" before he arrived in Switzerland for talks with Iran's foreign minister, that the administration did not want the event ""turned into some great political football.""
+
+But it appeared too late for that. With accusations flying on Capitol Hill, Netanyahu's visit has plunged the rocky Obama-Netanyahu relationship to perhaps its lowest point.
+
+Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Fox News on Monday this is the ""worst"" he's ever seen the U.S.-Israel relationship. He claimed critics are acting ""in such a hysterical fashion"" because they're concerned Netanyahu will make a ""compelling argument"" against the pending Iran agreement.
+
+Netanyahu, though, stressed Monday that the alliance is ""stronger than ever"" despite the current disagreement, as he gently mocked the recent media coverage.
+
+""Never has so much been written about a speech that hasn't been given,"" he said. Netanyahu also said he meant no ""disrespect"" to Obama or his office in agreeing to address Congress. He said he ""deeply"" appreciates all Obama has done for Israel and did not intend to ""inject Israel into the American partisan debate.""
+
+But he said he had a ""moral obligation"" to speak up about the dangers Israel faces, and stressed that these dangers are, for his country, a matter of ""survival.""
+
+The prime minister's address was to be bracketed by speeches from two senior U.S. officials: U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
+
+Power, who spoke Monday morning, tried to ease tensions and offer assurances of the strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship. She said that partnership ""transcends politics"" and always will.
+
+She stressed that diplomacy with Iran is the ""preferred route"" but the U.S. will keep its security commitments.
+
+""The United States of America will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, period,"" she said. ""There will never be a sunset on America's commitment to Israel's security.""
+
+In Washington, Netanyahu has positioned himself squarely against the Obama administration on the issue of the Iran talks. The Israeli leader is expected to press his opposition to a diplomatic accommodation of Iran's program in his speech Tuesday to Congress.
+
+""We are not here to offend President Obama whom we respect very much,"" said a Netanyahu adviser, who was not authorized to be identified. ""The prime minister is here to warn, in front of any stage possible, the dangers"" of the agreement that may be taking shape.
+
+The adviser, who spoke shortly before the delegation touched down in Washington, said Israel was well aware of the details of the emerging nuclear deal and they included Western compromises that were dangerous for Israel. Still, he tried to lower tensions by saying that Israel ""does not oppose every deal"" and was merely doing its best to warn the U.S. of the risks entailed in the current one.
+
+The Obama administration apparently is concerned about the details Netanyahu might discuss. An Associated Press journalist traveling with Kerry in Geneva tweeted Monday that Kerry said the U.S. is concerned by reports that ""selective details"" of the talks may be revealed.
+
+Netanyahu considers unacceptable any deal that does not entirely end Iran's nuclear program. But Obama is willing to leave some nuclear activity intact, backed by safeguards that Iran is not trying to develop a weapon. Iran insists its program is solely for peaceful energy and medical research.
+
+White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Monday afternoon again touted the U.S.-Israel bond, and stressed that options remain on the table -- including a military option -- if Iran does not comply with any nuclear agreement.
+
+He continued to give the chances for a deal a ""50-50"" shot, citing lingering questions over whether Iran's political leadership would sign off on one.
+
+The invitation to speak to Congress extended by Boehner, R-Ohio, and Netanyahu's acceptance have caused an uproar that has exposed tensions between Israel and the U.S., its most important ally.
+
+By consenting to speak, Netanyahu angered the White House, which was not consulted in advance, and Democrats, who were forced to choose between showing support for Israel and backing the president.
+
+Netanyahu's visit comes as Congress weighs legislation to trigger more sanctions against Iran if talks fail. Obama adamantly opposes that bill, but supporters could use Netanyahu's expected warnings to build their case for it.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9771,Why Comey Reopened the Hillary Investigation,"By Joachim Hagopian October 31, 2016 
+This last Friday it became public record that FBI Director James Comey reopened the Hillary Clinton email server investigation after repeatedly testifying before Congress and the world up to last July that he’d closed the case , after in his words not finding sufficient evidence of “any criminal wrongdoing ” to indict her in spite of her four years as Secretary of State egregiously breaching our national security , committing obstruction of justice and willful tampering with evidence, deleting 30,000 emails after receiving a court subpoena constituting destruction of evidence, not to mention repeatedly engaging in perjury before Congress and the FBI. 
+But obviously, a federal investigation still in process in late June never stopped serial rapist-crime boss Bill Clinton’s illegal ambush at the Phoenix airport of Comey’s boss US Attorney General Loretta Lynch “clearing” the way for Hillary to proceed without consequence to be anointed as the next US figurehead puppet president by the ruling elite. Because it’s so blatantly obvious to the entire world that Hillary is guilty as sin, Comey’s whitewash didn’t go over well with either Americans or longtime FBI agents who reacted angrily to Comey’s over-the-top corruption. Subsequently, in recent months Comey has had a virtual mutiny on his hands as in the FBI boss has lost all credibility, respect, and moral authority. 
+A former federal attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova spelled it all out in a WMAL radio interview last Friday just hours after the news was released that Comey had sent a letter informing Congress that the case is being reopened. DiGenova said that with an open revolt brewing inside the FBI, Comey was forced to go public on Friday with reopening the investigation. The former DC attorney added that the FBI investigators discovered more emails on a phone confiscated from the former New York Congressman and separated husband Anthony Weiner that also included his wife and longtime Hillary’s right-hand woman Huma Abedin’s communications that allegedly bear pertinent relevance to the Hillary case. Funny how things have a karmic way of coming full circle – the Clintons first introduced Weiner and Abedin 15 years ago and they married a half dozen years ago. 
+In a separate FBI investigation involving Weiner’s alleged sexting messages with a 15-year old minor , the phone in question was handed over to the FBI. The investigating teams of both the Weiner and Hillary cases compared notes and apparently additional emails not already issued by WikiLeaks or already in FBI possession recently came to light on Weiner’s phone . The legions of rank and file FBI agents were already fuming over Comey’s complete ethical and legal lapses in his choice not to indict Hillary. Joe diGenova believes that FBI personnel forced Comey’s hand to reopen the investigation after giving him the ultimatum that if he failed to do so, the FBI defiantly would. According to diGenova, this latest plot twist only proves that: 
+The original investigation was not thorough, and that it was an incompetent investigation. 
+Otherwise, had a real investigation been conducted, that Weiner phone used by both Anthony and Huma would have been picked up by the FBI and its contents thoroughly scrutinized long before now. 
+In addition to stating the obvious, that the higher-up feds had already made the decision to not consequence Hillary for her crimes, speculating on why that phone was not already submitted to the FBI as evidence, the former DC attorney concluded: 
+There could be one explanation: Huma Abedin may have denied that any other phone existed, and if she did, she committed a felony. She lied to the FBI just like General Cartwright , and if she did, she’s dead meat, and Comey knows it, and there’s nothing he can do about it. 
+Finally, diGenova dropped one more bombshell in Friday’s interview. An inside source has revealed to him that the laptops belonging to key Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, both wrongly granted immunity , were not destroyed after all as previously reported, but have been secretly kept intact by investigating FBI agents refusing to destroy incriminating evidence as part of the in-house whitewash. Additionally like their boss, Hillary’s aides also sent classified material using private servers. On top of that, longtime aide Cheryl Mills on multiple occasions has perjured herself lying under oath for the Clinton crime family, tasked with “cleaning up” (aka covering up) their countless scandals over the past several decades. Indeed the whole Clinton entourage not already “mysteriously” winding up in the growing Clinton dead pool are all unindicted criminals protected by the corrosively corrupt DC cronyism where backroom deals (a la Bill’s airport ambush) are brokered based on whatever dirt’s been gathered and used as bargaining blackmail chips against all parties involved. That’s how the Washington crowd stays immune from any and all accountability as well as stays alive. Violate that crime syndicate code of conduct and you lose your life as more recent victims earlier this year have. 
+In a “leaked” memo to his FBI that surfaced on Fox Friday night, Comey outlined his reasons for reopening the case in light of the new information the director believes would have ultimately been leaked to Congress and the public anyway. So in full damage control/CYA mode, the beleaguered director now going public really had no choice in the matter. His underlings were chomping at the bit to both out and oust him. In an obvious attempt to weakly claim some moral high ground, Comey wrote in his memo: 
+I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. 
+Though his leadership and character are perceived by the vast majority of both FBI personnel as well as American citizens to presently lay in ruin as a pathetically shameful stain and humiliating joke on both the FBI organization and Washington in general, James Comey appears to be feebly attempting to save his own career and reputation for appearing now to “come clean.” But make no mistake, his moral turpitude displayed throughout this Hillary debacle from early 2015 to now has over-exposed him as a total lackey and fraud, so at this late stage of the game, redemption is not even an option. But the criminal misconduct, rampant corruption and diabolical evil committed by those at the highest puppet levels of federal power, and especially the elite puppet masters controlling them, their sins produce far more devastating consequences than this morally lacking man in the middle of this latest controversy. 
+Because there is no way that the FBI will properly conclude this part 2 of the Hillary investigation saga before the November 8 th election, Hillary, and her Democrats are predictably crying foul , demanding that the FBI immediately disclose what it has, which of course is a moot point that won’t happen. It seems highly unlikely that the email texts from Abedin and Weiner found on his phone would not contain clear criminal evidence that implicates Hillary. Since Hillary was the globalist choice after Obama was selected in 2008, it seems unlikely that the puppet masters would not permit this latest development to even occur. But then perhaps the ruling elite is pulling the plug on Hillary, concluding that she simply carries too much liability baggage with her deteriorating health condition and never-ending scandals, maybe the globalists are rethinking an alternative replacement like her obnoxiously aggressive VP candidate, the Jesuit-trained and educated Tim Kaine. 
+That said, there are some cynics who believe that this recent odd turn is the last ditch desperado attempt being staged to overturn Trump winning by a landslide. This conjectured scenario goes something like this: a few days prior to the election the FBI will once again “clear” Hillary of all charges. This, in turn, would offer her the last minute much needed boost being able to cash in on her worn out persecution complex , plagued forever by her “right wing conspiracy” theory against the “much maligned” woman of destiny. 
+In response to all her scandals, Hillary’s M.O. has always been to falsely blame some villainous sinister force. This year it’s been Putin hacking into her emails, and Trump, Putin, and Assange colluding and plotting behind her back. She’s always been as paranoid as Richard Nixon , attempting to deflect the heat she draws from her own skullduggery lies by constantly pointing fingers to externalize blame onto others. It’s a deeply rooted pathological complex that certain tightly screwed sociopaths possess. 
+This latest sudden turn of events obviously has James Comey incurring the wrath of Hillary Democrats as well as the Justice Department. By disclosing the reopened investigation so close to the election date that undoubtedly casts some influence on the potential outcome, Comey is defying his AG boss while clearly violating DOJ written policy . Lynch herself even tried to quash Comey’s letter to Congress. But as diGenova alluded, by Comey’s own past misdeeds (and those of his boss and Obama as well), the FBI director placed himself between this rock and a hard place by his own slipshod, half-ass probe failing to acquire Weiner’s phone the first time around. 
+The entire sordid affair of this year’s totally rigged political election – pre-fixed in Hillary’s favor – blatantly reveals to America the gross misnomer of the US “justice” system being two-tiered, one for elitist crime cabal bosses like Hillary and the other for the rest of us 99% no longer protected in a totalitarian police state by our once rule of law the US Constitution. Regardless of what happens in the future, the truth genie’s already been let out of the bag, and for eyes open enough to see, it’s floating in the Washington cesspool of filth, debauchery and deception regularly perpetrated by our “entrusted perps” we have as our so called leaders. 
+Moreover, this year’s unending batches of Wiki-leaked DNC/Hillary emails and Project Veritas undercover campaign videos confirm that the entire US political, as well as economic system, is morally and financially bankrupt, irreparably broken and in need of complete overhaul. Voter fraud and election fraud are rampant. Soros funded electronic voting machines that are preprogrammed to vote for Hillary are operating in 16 key battleground states. America’s internal house now is in total disarray, badly in need of a deep cleaning purge like never before. Mainstream media is strongly biased against Trump in its blind support for Hillary . As Secretary of State she treasonously sold out our nation, placing us all at high security risk and under foreign interest control at the hands of high rolling bidders so she and her fat cats can get richer as fellow partners-in-crime from places like Saudi Arabia and Israel, destroying our once sovereign country while aiding, abetting, financing and supporting our enemies the global terrorists around the world. She helped create ISIS and plans world war against Russia, China and Iran. The traitors in our government and their globalist puppet masters – the Rothschilds, Rockefellers , the Bushes and Clintons all need to be rounded up, imprisoned and tried at The Hague for both treason and their endless crimes against humanity. The Best of Joachim Hagopian Tags: Joachim Hagopian [ ] is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at http://empireexposed.blogspot.com .",FAKE
+6474,Hillary: Leaked Audio of Her Discussing Rigging an Election in Palestine,"On September 5, 2006, Eli Chomsky was an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press, and Hillary Clinton was running for a shoo-in re-election as a U.S. senator. Her trip making the rounds of editorial boards brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press.",FAKE
+1066,"After Brussels, Trump's 'strength' resonates with GOP voters (+video)","[Updated at 2 p.m. ET] Over and over, as Republican voters spoke of the presidential race – and of Donald Trump in particular – one word kept coming up: “strong.”
+
+The nation needs a strong leader, said the 12 voters, gathered Tuesday night in St. Louis for a focus group. That’s hardly a surprising conclusion, especially following the deadly terror attacks by the Islamic State in Brussels earlier in the day. And Mr. Trump, the GOP presidential front-runner, projects strength, they said.
+
+After Tuesday’s nominating contests, in which Trump gained more delegates than his top rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the billionaire is one step closer to accomplishing an extraordinary feat: winning the Republican presidential nomination as a political novice, while bucking party orthodoxy on a range of issues, from trade to entitlements to the US’s role in the world to Planned Parenthood.
+
+Some in the group expressed reservations about Trump. He needs a “filter,” two of the women said. He needs to “turn the noise down just a tad,” said another. “Be a bit more humble,” said one of the men. Two of the 12 voters in the focus group – organized by veteran pollster Peter Hart, with reporters watching via live stream – said they would vote for Trump in November only as “a last resort.”
+
+So why do some voters see Trump as strong?
+
+“Because he’s direct and outspoken, and uses language that they understand and relate to,” Mr. Hart told the Monitor Wednesday. “I don’t want to say the swear words, but the way in which he approaches it, it’s not political speak. It’s straight talk, and he gets credit for it.”
+
+Hart describes Trump’s style as “authoritarian.” In fact, recent academic research shows that Trump supporters are united by one common trait – not income, education level, or race, but an inclination toward authoritarian leadership. That finding could have profound implications for the Democrats come November, if Trump is the Republican nominee.
+
+“Because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow,” wrote Matthew MacWilliams, the author of the study and a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Politico last December.
+
+Placing Trump in the American historical context is tricky. In many ways, the real estate mogul/reality TV star/Twitter maven has no historical precedent. But in his ability to project strength, at least, Hart sees a hint of Ronald Reagan.
+
+“If you were looking for the one link between President Reagan and Trump, it is the clear, straightforward, declarative language,” says Hart. “The difference is, Reagan was always the smiling face, with an upbeat, sunny message of ‘morning in America,’ and Trump is obviously stern and tough. And while he says he will ‘make America great again,’ essentially his language is much more negative and harsher.”
+
+After Tuesday’s nominating contests, in which Trump gained more delegates than his top rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the billionaire is one step closer to accomplishing an extraordinary feat: winning the Republican presidential nomination as a political novice, while bucking party orthodoxy on a range of issues, from trade to entitlements to the US’s role in the world to Planned Parenthood.
+
+But ultimately, if Trump wins the Republican nomination, only one said they would never vote for him. That result flies in the face of polls that show major reservations about Trump by Republican voters. One recent survey shows more than a third of Republican voters in the “never Trump” camp.
+
+On Tuesday, Trump and Senator Cruz performed as expected: Trump won the Arizona primary, and all 58 delegates at stake, with 47 percent of the vote. Senator Cruz won the Utah caucuses, and all 40 of the state’s delegates, with 69 percent of the vote. A contested GOP convention in July remains a possibility, but Trump still has potential to lock up the nomination before then.
+
+In Arizona, about half of the voting took place before Tuesday, and the attacks in Brussels. Among those who voted on primary day, it’s not clear how the terror attack might have affected voters’ choices.
+
+But Brussels certainly weighed heavily on the focus group voters in St. Louis. When asked for the “one thing” they’re looking for in the next president, voters named a range of qualities, including ability to get things done, high moral character, and toughness.
+
+“You’ve got to be strong,” said Trump supporter Kevin Rotellio, a restaurant manager in his 40s. “We can’t be weak, or we might be the next terror attack.”
+
+At another point, when the discussion turned to leadership style, one participant brought up a world leader whom Trump has said he admires.
+
+“This business about Trump’s being outspoken and harsh and all that – isn’t Putin the same way? And he seems to be doing OK, so I don’t know that that’s bad,” said Joseph Glass, a retired engineer who voted for Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the Missouri primary.
+
+The biggest reservations over Trump were voiced by women – a reflection of polling that shows women are more concerned than men by Trump’s manner, and an overall gender gap. When the group was asked by Mr. Hart if Trump would be different as president than he has been as a candidate, some expressed hope that that would be the case.
+
+“If he surrounds himself with reasonable people, he will be different,” said Joyce Reinitz, a teacher who lists her party affiliation as “not strong Republican.” “He’ll still be opinionated. But he will have perhaps some of the social filters built in as personalities that will try to calm him down.”
+
+Another woman, homemaker Gabrielle Ritter, also hoped for the calming influence of advisers, if Trump is elected. Ms. Ritter, an independent who voted for Cruz in the primary and came into the focus group with a “very unfavorable” view of Trump, wished “he could just come across more reasonable.”
+
+“I’m concerned about him discussing deals with Putin or Iraq or the Middle East or Mexico,” she said. “I’m concerned, because of how he is portrayed in the media right now, how he is going to handle those situations, so that we don’t end up in a worse international situation. I think that the best decision that he could make is to choose a good cabinet of advisers to help him.”
+
+Cherri Crenshaw, another independent woman who voted for Cruz, said she is looking for a president who is ""strong plus respectful."" When asked to elaborate, she responded: “It’s the opposite of Donald Trump. I think he is very strong, but I think he comes across as a bully. I don’t think you can lead the country when you’re demeaning people in such blatant ways.”
+
+And yet of the 12, only one focus group participant said they could never vote for Trump. And when asked if they had reservations about Trump’s understanding of foreign policy, only one person raised their hand.
+
+Dissatisfaction with the status quo is that high – high enough to put a foreign policy novice in the Oval Office. Frustration over the Obama years, and the inability to “get things done,” burns hot. And Republican voters, at least most of these voters, are prepared to bet on someone who is untested in government – even someone they don’t much like. They dismissed the concerns of the GOP “establishment” as “Washington politicians” who have nobody but themselves to blame for the rise of Trump.
+
+Focus groups are an imperfect way to gauge public sentiment. (Though it must be noted that Hart as moderator, with the sponsorship of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, is considered the gold standard.) Sometimes a form of “group think” can set in.
+
+That may have been the case with this group, when all but one said they’d vote for Trump if he’s the nominee. But exasperation with the Obama administration, and the state of the country, may be so high by November that the vast majority of Republicans would be willing to pull the lever for Trump, despite the polls today.",REAL
+7217,The Intercept Outs Neocon Democrat’s Smear Against Trump as ‘Putin’s Puppet’ - Eric Zuesse,"On November 1st, The Intercept headlined ""Here's The Problem With The Story Connecting Russia To Donald Trump's Email Server” , and the reporting team of Sam Biddle, Lee Fang, Micah Lee, and Morgan Marquis-Boire, revealed that: 
+""Slate’s Franklin Foer published a story that’s been circulating through the dark web and various newsrooms since summertime, an enormous, eyebrow-raising claim that Donald Trump uses a secret server to communicate with Russia. That claim resulted in an explosive night of Twitter confusion and misinformation. The gist of the Slate article is dramatic — incredible, even: Cybersecurity researchers found that the Trump Organization used a secret box configured to communicate exclusively with Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest commercial bank. This is a story that any reporter in our election cycle would drool over, and drool Foer did.” 
+The Intercept team concluded their detailed analysis of the evidence by saying: 
+""Could it be that Donald Trump used one of his shoddy empire’s spam marketing machines, one with his last name built right into the domain name, to secretly collaborate with a Moscow bank? Sure. At this moment, there’s literally no way to disprove that. But there’s also literally no way to prove it, and such a grand claim carries a high burden of proof. Without more evidence it would be safer (and saner) to assume that this is exactly what it looks like: A company that Trump has used since 2007 to outsource his hotel spam is doing exactly that. Otherwise, we’re all making the exact same speculation about the unknown that’s caused untold millions of voters to believe Hillary’s deleted emails might have contained Benghazi cover-up PDFs. Given equal evidence for both, go with the less wacky story.” 
+However, they failed to dig deeper to explain what could have motivated this smear of Trump: was it just sloppiness on the part of Slate, and of Foer? Hardly — it was anything but unintentional: 
+A core part of the Democratic Party’s campaign for Hillary Clinton consists of her claim that Donald Trump is secretly a Russian agent. This is an updated version of the Republican Joseph R. McCarthy’s campaign to “root communists out of the federal government,” and of the John Birch Society’s accusation even against the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower that, ""With regard to ... Eisenhower, it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason."" 
+Neoconservatives — in both Parties — are the heirs of the Republican Party’s hard-right, which now, even decades after the 1991 end of communism and the Soviet Union, hate Russia above all of their other passions. Neoconservatism has emerged as today’s Republican Party’s Establishment, and (like with the Democratic Party’s original neocon, U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the “Senator from Boeing”) they’ve always viewed Russia to be America’s chief enemy, and they have favored the overthrow of any nation’s leader who is friendly toward Russia, such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Yanukovych, and Bashar al-Assad. Hatred and demonization of Russia is the common core of neoconservatism — the post-Cold-War extension of Joseph R. McCarthy and the John Birch Society. 
+Both Slate and especially Foer have long pedigrees as Democratic Party neoconservatives — champions of U.S. invasions, otherwise called PR agents (‘journalists’) promoting the products and services that a few giant and exclusive military corporations such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Dyncorp, and the Carlyle Group, offer to the U.S. federal government. I’ll deal here only with Foer, not with his latest employer (in a string, all of which are neocon Democratic ‘news’ media). 
+Foer wrote in The New York Times, on 10 October 2004, against ‘isolationist’ Republicans, who regretted having supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and he headlined about them there, “Once Again, America First” , equating non-neoconservative Republicans with, essentially, the pro-fascist isolationists of the 1930s. He concluded that they would come to regret their regret: “Conservatives could soon find themselves retracing Buckley's steps, wrestling all over again with their isolationist instincts.” That’s how far-right Franklin Foer is: he’s to the right of those Republicans. 
+On 7 June 2004, Foer, in a tediously long, badly written and argued, article in New York Magazine, “The Source of the Trouble” , described the downfall of The New York Times’s leading stenographer for George W. Bush’s lies to invade Iraq, their reporter Judith Miller. He closed by concluding that “the source of the trouble” was that Miller was simply too earnest and tried too hard — not that she was a stenographer to power: 
+“People like Miller, with her outsize journalistic temperament of ambition, obsession, and competitive fervor, relying on people like Ahmad Chalabi, with his smooth, affable exterior retailing false information for his own motives, for the benefit of people reading a newspaper, trying to get at the truth of what’s what.” 
+(She was anything but “trying to get at the truth of what’s what.” She was the opposite: a mere stenographer to George W. Bush and to the Administration’s chosen mouthpieces, such as the anti-Saddam exiled Iraqi Ahmad Chalaby.) 
+On 20 December 2004, when the question of whether to bomb Iran was being debated by neoconservatives, Foer, who then was the Editor of the leading Democratic Party neoconservative magazine, The New Republic, headlined in his magazine, “Identity Crisis: Neocon v. Neocon on Iran” , and he introduced a supposed non-neocon from the supposedly non-neocon Brookings Institution, Kenneth Pollack, to comment upon the conflict among (the other Party’s) neocons: 
+“In part, the lack of neocon consensus [on whether to, as John McCain was to so poetically put it, ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’ ] can be attributed to the nature of the problem. Nobody — not the Council on Foreign Relations, not John Kerry’s brain trust — has designed a plausible policy to walk Iran back from the nuclear brink. Or, as Kenneth M. Pollack concludes in his new book, The Persian Puzzle, this is a ‘problem from Hell’ with no good solution.” 
+But, actually, both Pollack and Brookings are Democratic Party neocons themselves; and among the leading proponents of invading Iraq had been not only Pollack but Brookings’s Michael O’Hanlon . Brookings had no prominent opponent of invading Iraq. 
+(Brookings has a long history of neoconservatism , and routinely leads the Democratic Party’s contingent of neocon thinking, even urging a Democratic administration to have its stooge-regimes violate international laws .) 
+The real reason why neocons (being the heirs of the far-right extremists’ Cold-War demonization of Russia, even after communism is gone) wanted to conquer both Iraq and Iran, was that both countries’ leaders were friendly towards Russia, and were opposed by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, which family quietly worked not only with the U.S. government but with Israel’s government, against both Iraq and Iran, as well as against Syria — those three nations (Iraq, Iran, and Syria) all being friendly toward Russia, which both the Saudi aristocracy, and not only the U.S. aristocracy, hate. 
+It’s not just the conservative ‘news’ media that are neoconservative now. The so-called ‘liberal’ media are so neoconservative that, for example, Salon can condemn Donald Trump for his having condemned Hillary and Obama’s bombing of Libya. Salon condemned Trump’s having said “We would be so much better off if Qaddafi were in charge right now”— as if Trump weren’t correct, and as if what happened after our overthrow and killing of Qaddafi weren’t far worse for both Libyans and the world than what now exists in Libya is. (But, of course, for Lockheed Martin etc., it is far better). CBS News and Mother Jones condemned the Trilateralist Joseph Nye for having veered temporarily away from his normal neoconservatism. Then, Nye wrote in the neocon Huffington Post saying that David Corn of Mother Jones and Franklin Foer of The New Republic had misrepresented what he had said, and that he was actually a good neocon after all. Nye closed: “In any case, I have never supported Gaddafi and am on record wishing him gone, and also on record supporting Obama’s actions in recent weeks. We now know that Gaddafi’s departure is the only change that will work in Libya.” Sure, it did. Oh, really? It’s Trump who is crazy here? 
+More recently, Foer headlined at Slate, “Putin’s Puppet: If the Russian president could design a candidate to undermine American interests — and advance his own — he’d look a lot like Donald Trump.” Foer proceeded to present the view of Trump that subsequently became parroted by the Hillary Clinton campaign (that Trump=traitor). Wikipedia has a 450-person ”List of Republicans opposing Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016"" , and it’s almost entirely comprised of well-known neoconservatives — the farthest-right of all Republicans, the people closest to Joseph R. McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Foer cited many neoconservative sources that are not commonly thought of as Republican, such as Buzzfeed; and he even had the gall to blame the Russian government for having made public its best evidence behind its charge (which was true ) that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 was no authentic ‘democratic revolution’ such as the U.S. government and its ‘news’ media said, but was instead a very bloody U.S. coup d’etat in Ukraine , which was organized from the U.S. Embassy there, starting by no later than 1 March 2013 , a year beforehand. Foer wrote: 
+“The Russians have made an art of publicizing the material they have filched to injure their adversaries. The locus classicus of this method was a recording of a blunt call between State Department official Toria [that’s actually ‘Victoria’] Nuland [a close friend of both Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney] and the American ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. The Russians allegedly planted the recording on YouTube and then tweeted a link to it — and from there it became international news. Though they never claimed credit for the leak, few doubted the White House’s contention that Russia was the source.” 
+To a neoconservative, even defensive measures (such as Russia’s there exposing the lies that America uses to ‘justify’ economic sanctions and other hostile acts against Russia) — indeed, anything that Russia does against America’s aggressions against Russia, and against Russia’s allies (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych) — anything that Russia does, is somehow evil and blameworthy. And, of course, America’s aggressions are not. 
+The U.S. government and its neocon propagandists are outraged that some people are trying to expose — instead of to spread — their lies. The American government isn’t yet neocon enough, in the view of such liars.",FAKE
+825,"Done Deal? Clinton, Trump Shift to General Election after Big Wins","The front-runners in the race for president are one step closer to clinching their parties' nomination.
+
+Donald Trump completed a five-state sweep in Tuesday's Republican presidential primaries, while Hillary Clinton won four out of the five states, losing only Rhode Island to her rival Bernie Sanders.
+
+Now the two front-runners are beginning to shift their focus, with each expecting to go up against the other in the General Election.
+
+""Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she would get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she has got going is the woman's card,"" Trump told supporters.
+
+Clinton fired back, saying, ""Well, if fighting for women's healthcare and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the 'woman's card,' then deal me in!""
+
+The former secretary of state now has nearly 90 percent of the delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination, and after a sweep of Tuesday's primaries, Trump is one step closer to avoiding a contested convention.
+
+Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are hoping their alliance to stay out of each other's way in Indiana, Oregon, and New Mexico will help slow down Trump's momentum and block him from winning the nomination before the convention.
+
+""I got good news for you tonight. This campaign moves back to more favorable terrain,"" Cruz told his supporters.
+
+Currently, Trump has 950 delegates, Cruz has 560, and Kasich has 153. It takes 1,237 to win the nomination.
+
+Meanwhile on the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders refuses to go quietly into the night.
+
+""The fight we are waging is not an easy fight, but I know you are prepared to wage that fight,"" the Vermont lawmaker told supporters.
+
+The candidates now move on to Indiana, with Sanders, Cruz, and Trump all holding events there Wednesday.
+
+With Kasich pulling back in the Hoosier State, Cruz will basically have a shot at a one-on-one race against Trump. But if he loses, it could turn out to be his last stand.",REAL
+9701,What You’re Not Told: 90% Of American Media Is Controlled By Six Corporations,"Unless you go out of your way to seek truthful news from reputable sources, chances are you – like the majority of the populace – are fed regurgitated current events received from a small... ",FAKE
+5445,"Steve Quayle On Economic Collapse, World War 3 and U S elections",source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments,FAKE
+2706,What Brian Williams’s Chopper Whopper Says About Modern News Media,"Embarrassing and infuriating: the NBC anchor’s ‘misstatements’ reveal much about America’s media environment.
+
+By now, it may be time to paraphrase a famous remark by Rep. Mo Udall at an endless political dinner and conclude that, “Everything that can be said about Brian Williams has been said; it’s just that not everyone has said it yet.”
+
+Consider what follows as a few footnotes to the Big Stuff—“Why did he do it?” “How bad were his misdeeds?” “Are there others?” “Can he survive?” In the reactions to the story of the Flak Attack That Wasn’t lie some telling realities about today’s media world.
+
+There Is No “Wall of Silence.” My Twitter feed was—and still is—filed with assertions that the mainstream media will circle the wagons to protect one of their own. This is precisely what has not happened. The New York Times has published accounts that cast serious doubt not only on Williams’s later storytelling, but also on the original NBC story 12 years ago. Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column is brutal, reporting concerns within NBC News of Williams’s tendency to aggrandize himself. In The New Yorker, satirist Andy Borowitz wrote an acidic “diary” painting the NBC anchor as the embodiment of upper-class privilege. The Washington Post, CNN, Slate and The Daily Beast—media outlets that would never be confused with right-wing zealotry—have been highly critical of Williams. Only a few familiar faces—Dan Rather and TIME’s Joe Klein—have spoken up in Williams’s defense.
+
+You can argue that these outlets been “forced” into this because the digital world makes it impossible to ignore the depredations of traditional media. Or you can note that the media themselves have come to accept that they need to be subject to the same critical gaze as other institutions. Thus the birth of ombudsmen and public accountability—from The New York Times and Jayson Blair’s tall tales, to the Washington Post’s Janet Cooke and her eight-year-old addict, to CBS and the George W. Bush National Guard story, to CNN’s Tailwind scandal and beyond. Whatever the reason, the notion that the “mainstream media” has rushed to protect Brian Williams is laughable.
+
+Williams Made Himself A Perfect Target. There’s no more attractive story than one suggesting that an important or powerful figure is a hypocrite. It’s the war hawk urging the dispatch of young men and women into harm’s way, but whose draft deferments or sketchy medical condition exempted him from the draft. It’s the liberal voting to bus children to school while sending her kids to private academies. It’s the tribune of moral virtue paying for abortions for the staff assistant he knocked up. It’s the environmentalists flying to a climate change rally in a private jet.
+
+Brian Williams is, in this sense, a perfect fit. His inaccurate, or misleading, or deeply dishonest account of what happened in Iraq seems to put the lie to a career that has featured him in the midst of one danger or another. To be clear on this point: Williams in fact has been in many places where natural disasters or violence have indeed involved risk. (I write as someone who, in more than 30 years of network TV reporting, found himself in physical danger exactly once, in South Africa, for a period of perhaps 15 minutes.)
+
+But by steadily exaggerating the perils of his helicopter journey, he’s permitted critics to suggest that it was all an act; that he is not who he wanted us to think he is. He’s also opened the door to those who scoff at the danger journalists face. On Thursday, Rush Limbaugh scornfully referred to journalists who “put on a trench coat and stand in a street in Beirut.” This is a slanderous smear on the critically wounded Bob Woodruff and Kimberly Dozier, on Mike Kelly and David Bloom (who died in Iraq), on James Foley and other journalists beheaded by ISIS, on the 61 journalists killed in 2014. It is, however, a slander that will resonate, and it will resonate because Williams was apparently unwilling to let his record, unvarnished, speak for itself.
+
+Have You Looked In the Mirror Lately? Brian Williams is one of many in the mainstream or traditional or legacy media who have warned about the difficulty of judging the credibility of “new media.” When a story is coming from somewhere “out there,” in the digital universe, with no imprimatur, where’s the institutional backup, where are the researchers, the editors, the fact-checkers, the accountability?
+
+Well, in this case, it was the toolbox of the “new media” that exposed the holes (or lack of them) in the helicopter story. Facebook gave a member of the U.S. military the forum on which to challenge Williams (“Sorry, dude, I don't remember you being on my aircraft”). Moreover, there are a lot of questions still to be answered about why the NBC staffers who were with Williams never raised their voices to say: “Um Brian, about that story…”
+
+As for what happens next: I don’t know what NBC—or outside investigators—are going to find. I don’t know if it makes sense (assuming no other transgressions) for Williams to sit down with a smart, tough but fair inquisitor—Megyn Kelly? Jon Stewart? The scheduled appearance on Letterman Thursday?—and answer whatever questions are thrown his way. It probably makes sense for Williams to shelve his considerable comedic gifts and stay away from Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live.
+
+I do know that there’s one idea that struck me as eminently on point. It comes from Matt Dowd, the recovering political operative and ABC News analyst, who tweeted: “Maybe [the] news media can learn from this episode and start being a little more compassionate when others mess up.”",REAL
+2574,"Republicans have little reason to act on immigration — both today, but also before the 2016 primaries","Any idea that the Republican Party would vote on and pass reforms to immigration law apparently evaporated when voters in Virginia ousted then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in early June. But even before Cantor lost, there wasn't a lot of political incentive for Republicans to move on policy this year, as The Upshot blog of the New York Times pointed out on Monday. Looking at it cynically, most of the closely contested races this year are in states that have very small Hispanic populations.
+
+But compared to the 2016 primary season, 2014 is practically a bonanza of diversity. If the metric is how much will this help me win my next election, there's very little incentive for the next Republican nominee to embrace reform until he or she has already accepted the party's nomination.
+
+We'll start at the beginning. According to data from the Census Bureau, Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to weigh in on nominees, both had relatively small percentage of the voting age population that was Hispanic: 5.2 and 2.8 percent, respectively. Extrapolating out from 2008 to 2016, those numbers will grow slightly -- but only slightly. In the 2012 Iowa Republican caucus, a negligible percentage of voters -- essentially zero -- were Hispanic, according to entrance polls. In New Hampshire, it was about the same.
+
+Josh Putnam, visiting assistant professor of political science at Davidson College in North Carolina, is tracking likely primary dates for 2016. (For the most part, they haven't yet been set as states jockey for influence.) Using his list as a guide, we can roughly game out the rest of primary process beyond Iowa and New Hampshire.
+
+It's certain that voting will take place in Nevada and South Carolina at the front end of the calendar. South Carolina's got a similarly small percentage of voting-age Hispanics as New Hampshire, and, sure enough, it had a similarly tiny percentage of Hispanic voters in 2012.
+
+Nevada is interesting. According to that Census data, Hispanics comprised about 22.8 percent of the voting age population in 2012 -- and if the trend from 2008 continues, will top 25 percent in 2016. Which is where we get into the other limiting factor: the type of election. Data from the George Mason University's United States Election Project indicates that about 57.1 percent of people of voting age in the state voted in the 2012 general election. But in picking the nominees? That dropped to 1.9 percent -- because Nevada, like so many other states, has a caucus system, which tends to limit involvement from all but the diehards. Only 5 percent of those who voted in Nevada's 2012 Republican caucus were Hispanic -- vastly under-represented as a share of the population.
+
+The next states on Putnam's schedule are Colorado, Minnesota and Utah. They might try to jump ahead of South Carolina and Nevada. Colorado, which The Upshot notes is the only state that is both important in 2014 and has a decent-sized Hispanic population, will likely see Hispanics as about 20 percent of the population in 2016 and 12 percent of the voters -- in the general election. Colorado, too, has a caucus system; in 2012, according to the George Mason project, one voter participated in the caucus for every 39 that voted in November. As for the other two, Minnesota's voting-age Hispanic population is small -- likely under 4 percent of the total such population in 2016. Utah's should be bigger, nearly 17 percent. But only 7 percent of the people that come out to vote in the 2016 general in Utah will be Hispanic, if the trend holds.
+
+The next three states, per Putnam, will likely be North Carolina, Arizona and Michigan. Arizona is the most heavily Hispanic, and its primary had about 12 percent turnout of the voting age population in 2012. But despite that population being about 17 percent Hispanic, exit polls showed that only about 8 percent of Republican primary voters were Hispanic.
+
+There are two reasons for that lower turnout in the primary process. The first is that Hispanic turnout has been lower than the general public consistently in general elections. There's no reason to suspect that this is different in primaries.
+
+The second reason for reduced turnout in Republican primaries in particular is that Hispanic voters tend to vote Democratic. In the 2012 general, Hispanic voters went for President Obama 71-27, with the older population trending slightly more toward Romney. This is the vicious political cycle the Republicans had hoped to escape: lower support among Hispanics because Republicans oppose immigration reform, but Republicans opposing comprehensive immigration reform in part because their base is so heavily non-Hispanic.
+
+This map shows the expected percentage of the voting-age population of each state that will be Hispanic in 2016 (again, assuming trends hold).
+
+The highest percentage of 2012 turnout from Hispanic voters was in those states in the southwest: Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. California and New Mexico are slated to vote in June -- at the very end of the process. Arizona, we mentioned above. Which leaves Texas.
+
+In 2012, you might remember Texas's governor, Rick Perry (R), ran for president. Perry scolded critics of in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants, telling the critics, ""I don't think you have a heart."" For a variety of reasons -- that position included -- voters in Iowa and New Hampshire didn't reward Perry, and he dropped out before South Carolina.
+
+But it reinforces the operative point: that you have to make it through a lot of very white states before Hispanic voters are a substantial part of the electorate. Perry didn't, dropping out long before Texas even voted.",REAL
+4996,We don’t just need to see Trump’s taxes — we need a real medical report on him,"In the latest twist on the weirdest campaign ever, Donald Trump seems to have encouraged supporters to kill Hillary Clinton.  Trump said, “By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although, the Second Amendment people maybe there is. I don’t know.”  Of course in the immediate aftermath of the loony homicidal comment, the Trump campaign is now saying that the “dishonest media” is misreading his claim.  That might hold water if it weren’t actually the second time that his campaign has supported killing Trump’s competition in the last month.
+
+This latest attack also comes on the heels of  Trump’s crack at Clinton’s mental state last week in a rally in New Hampshire. “She is a totally unhinged person. She’s unbalanced. And all you have to do is watch her, see her, read about her.  She will cause — if she wins, which hopefully she won’t — the destruction of our country from within.”  If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was talking about himself.
+
+Trump has spent his whole campaign attacking his competition. Name-calling, insulting, and bullying have been campaign staples.  But calling Clinton “unbalanced” is more than a simple tactic; it is a strategy that reverses one of the most pointed attacks on Trump—whether or not he might be well enough to serve and whether or not his limited mental capacity might lead to the destruction, not just of our country, but of the entire planet.
+
+There has been a recent flurry of news media coverage that has focused on whether or not Trump might not be well, whether he might suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s, and whether or not his thin skin and uncontrollable temper might be a problem for a president. Even more disturbing we learned of his inability to understand why we should not nuke Europe.  Then–after all that–we get the frightening and unhinged 2nd Amendment comment. Clearly we have reason to question whether or not he has the ability to do the job.
+
+Anticipating that concern, Trump released a letter from his physician back in December attesting that“if elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” When the letter was first released many laughed it off.  It seemed like yet another sign of a bombastic and surreal campaign.  But now that we are only months away from the general election it is time to return to that letter and wonder if it is further proof that Trump is scamming the US public.
+
+Experts have mixed opinions on whether or not candidates should be required to release medical records.  Does a candidate have an expectation of privacy or does the public have the right to know about the health of their president? According to CNN, “In 2008, a high-profile panel of doctors recommended that presidential and vice-presidential candidates be required to undergo a health exam by an independent team of doctors from the American College of Physicians.” That effort failed, though, when it became clear that such a practice would become immediately politicized.
+
+So, even though we require physicals of pilots, it is still not a requirement that a candidate for president release a full medical report.
+
+That means Trump’s letter was optional, which makes it even more odd, given the fact that he isn’t interested in voluntarily releasing his tax returns.  What could have been the motivation for releasing what may well be the weirdest medical report in the history of presidential elections?
+
+The letter does not uphold even the flimsiest medical standard and it uses hyperbolic language that has no connection at all to facts.  Aside from making the outrageous and completely unverifiable claim that Trump would be the healthiest president ever, it makes other odd statements.  We read, for instance, that he has had a medical exam that revealed “only positive results.” In the medical community a “positive result” means a bad prognosis. What we want are “normal” results.   The letter uses the word “excellent” twice in relation to medical tests—another oddity since again the standard would be to say “normal.”  The letter also states that Trump’s only medical issue was an appendectomy but there is no mention of the bone spur, which kept him from serving in Viet Nam.
+
+Apart from the lack of scientific rigor, the letter starts with “To Whom My Concern.” It is worth pausing to worry that the physician who has been taking care of Trump since 1980 has such a poor command of the English language. In fact, the language in the letter mirrors the same sort of bombastic language common to Trump-speak. The writing was so bizarre that it led Robert Reich to wonder if it had been written by Trump himself. So who exactly is the doctor that signed this letter? Well, as if the letter weren’t strange enough,Trump’s post on Facebook said it had been “written by the highly respected Dr. Jacob Bornstein of Lenox Hill Hospital.” But, Trump can’t even seem to get the name of his physician right, since the letter states it was written by Jacob’s son, Dr. Harold Bornstein who took over care for Trump after his father retired. Bornstein junior is a gastroenterologist, hardly the sort of specialty designed to offer a comprehensive overview of a patient’s health.  The irony that Trump’s bill of good health comes from a doctor who specializes in the gastrointestinal tract should not be missed.  Recall that when Stephen Colbert introduced “Trumpiness” to his viewers while covering the RNC, he explained that “Trumpiness” was a lot like “Truthiness”—except that rather than describe truth coming from the gut, “Trumpiness” comes from lower down the digestive track.  If Trump gets all of his ideas from his bowels, then maybe a gastroenterologist is exactly the sort of doctor he needs. But all kidding aside, Bornstein’s specialty simply doesn’t qualify him to speak of the fitness of Trump overall.  He attests to facets of Trump’s health that are well outside of his area of expertise.  Even more bizarre, since the letter went public, Bornstein has stayed mostly under the radar. His websitehas been pulled down.  And his Facebook account is mostly inactive. If you want to check out the doctor, your best shot is this wacky profile picture.  There were also lots of memes produced after the letter surfaced. Even The Daily Show did a funny bit on it. It all makes for a good laugh, but the time for joking about Trump is over.  While his tax returns might give us a glimpse into the reality of his business practices, his medical letter may be even more revealing.  It was optional to release it, but now that it is in the public domain we have a right to question it. It is blatantly obvious that it isn’t fully accurate. Now it is worth wondering if any of it is true. Imagine if the media decided that this letter was as important to investigate as just one of Clinton’s emails.  Until they do, we can only guess which of the two candidates is the most “unbalanced.”",REAL
+3764,Police morale can wait: How the Baltimore riots should reshape Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s agenda,"But even though it is ultimately an egalitarian ruler, wreaking havoc on the old, young, good and bad alike, Time seems to hold a special grudge against Loretta Lynch, the woman who, after an unprecedented delay, was finally sworn in on Monday as the 83rd attorney general in the history of the United States.
+
+The first indication that Time has it in for Lynch was also the most obvious: the Senate’s 167-day-long dawdle. But while it was obviously wrong to make the first African-American woman ever nominated for the post wait so absurdly long to be confirmed (only two of Lynch’s 82 predecessors waited longer), I’m hesitant to throw the fault entirely on Time’s shoulders. The attack was launched by Republicans, after all; Time was merely their weapon.
+
+But the second piece of evidence that Time may be holding a particular grudge against the attorney general was more palpable: the riots that convulsed Baltimore this weekend and paralyzed the city on Monday. Because although Lynch obviously had nothing to do with the disorder, the riots’ fires show with blinding clarity that Lynch’s first goal — which is “improving police morale,” according to the Times — is entirely premature. The wanton destruction of property cannot be legitimated; but simply criticizing anarchy and praising law enforcement won’t bring the mayhem to an end. And it won’t provide justice.
+
+In many ways, the chaos in Baltimore is just the latest iteration of one of America’s saddest and longest-running stories. It is another example of what Martin Luther King once called “the language of the unheard.” King was speaking then of the riots that traumatized much of the country during the summer of 1966. But the social ills he described as kindling for the riot’s fire — poverty, police brutality and malign neglect — are, despite the nearly 49 years that followed, still powerful forces in America today.
+
+For this particular moment, though, it’s Baltimore Police Department’s documented history of lawless violence that’s been identified as the riots’ inspiration. Protestors and rioters — who, it’s worth noting, are usually not the same — cite as their catalyst the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man and Baltimorean. On April 12, Gray was arrested by officers from the BPD. When police detained Gray and put him in a van for transportation, he was walking; by the time the trip was over, he had a broken neck. He died on April 19th.
+
+No one yet knows for sure exactly what happened to Gray during that trip and in that van. There are reports that he was taken out at one point and beaten, but an autopsy showed no injuries except for those to his spinal cord and neck. The BPD has already admitted that its officers did not provide Gray with the necessary medical care. But the main question — Why was he able to run from the police in the morning, but struggling to breathe by nightfall? — has gone unanswered, though an increasing number suspect the widespread, grotesque practice of giving “a rough ride” is to blame.
+
+Yet the fact that such a thing could happen, and only become a major story after the activism of peaceful protesters (and the destructive hijacking of violent rioters), is exactly the problem. The fact that the BPD’s reputation is such that many Baltimoreans heard Gray’s story with weary outrage rather than shock or indignation is exactly the problem. The fact that the BPD rank-and-file evidently feels so comfortable with extralegal brutality, and are so accustomed to wielding it, that demands for accountability has left them panicking — that, too, is exactly the problem. I’m quite certain that, at least to some extent, Attorney General Lynch would agree. But that’s why it’s so unfortunate that news of her interest in “finding common ground between law enforcement and minority communities” came when it did. Because once the last stone is thrown, the fires are put out, and the state of emergency in Maryland is lifted, what Baltimore and the countless places in the U.S. like it will need is not another conversation. And finding “common ground” won’t be what America needs from its attorney general or its Department of Justice. What will be needed instead is for the authorities in Baltimore, Maryland and D.C. to stop pandering to the police unions who demand carte blanche in the field and an endless line of officials singing about their valor. What will be needed instead are signs that the authorities take fears of the rise of the “warrior cop” and police militarization seriously, and that they will no longer see the deaths of people like Gray as “tragic.” Because they’re not cosmic acts of injustice; they’re crimes. To suspend (with pay) the officers who may be responsible is not enough — and Lynch needs to make clear that she understands that, and that her predecessor’s groundbreaking report on Ferguson, Missouri, was no aberration. What will be needed, in short, is for the people most apt to use “the language of the unheard” to feel that someone who matters is finally listening. And that those in public office prove with actions that they believe it when they say an African-American life is worth no less than a cop’s. Now is not the time for Lynch to focus on making law enforcement happy. Now is the time for her to promote equal justice. Improving police morale can wait.",REAL
+7313,The Militarized Police at Standing Rock is Working for This Man,"The Militarized Police at Standing Rock is Working for This Man The months long Dakota Access Keystone XL pipleine protest at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/10/the-militarized-police-at-standing-rock.html The months long Dakota Access Keystone XL pipleine protest at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation by Native Americans and those sympathetic to protection of our water supply has been met with heavy-handed and brutal clamp down by police and national guard. Militarized goons in battle dress have stormed protector camps with LRAD sonic weapons, attack dogs , tear gas, tazers , and even live ammunition ( killing horses ), while politicians and mainstream media do their best to ignore this growing atrocity, hoping to wait it out until the protestors give up. But, as the saying goes, Water Is Life , and the issue of life and death is at the root of this protection movement, therefore, for people concerned with life, giving up on this is simply unthinkable. The root issue justifying state oppression of the protest is capitalism, and the perception that money is more important than life itself.When the police and national guard attack U.S. citizens on private property to protect corporate interests, who are they really working for? The corporate dream of the Keystone XL pipeline is to create a profit stream for a small number of people at the expense of the natural world and anyone in the way. At the top of this pyramid of profit is Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the company responsible for the project. So who is Kelcy Warren? A native of East Texas and graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington with a degree in civil engineering, Warren worked in the natural gas industry and became co-chair of Energy Transfer Equity in 2007. With business partner Ray Davis, co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, Warren built Energy Transfer Equity into one of the nation’s largest pipeline companies, which now owns about 71,000 miles of pipelines carrying natural gas, natural gas liquids, refined products and crude oil. The company’s holdings include Sunoco, Southern Union and Regency Energy Partners. Forbes estimates the 60-year-old Warren’s personal wealth at $4 billion. Bloomberg described him as “among America’s new shale tycoons”— but rather than building a fortune by drilling he “takes the stuff others pull from underground and moves it from one place to another, chilling, boiling, pressurizing, and processing it until it’s worth more than when it burst from the wellhead.” [ Ref. ] Shockingly, in 2015 the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, appointed Warren to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission which is an insult to environmentalists working to protect Big Bend National Park and surrounding sacred tribal lands from another $770 million pipeline project .“According to the governor’s office, the state parks and wildlife commission “manages and conserves the natural and cultural resources of Texas,” along with ensuring the future of hunting, fishing and outdoor recreation opportunities for Texans.” [ Ref. ] This glaring conflict of interest has inspired Environmental Science major at UTSA and former Texas State Park Ambassador Andrew Lucas to begin a drive to have Warren removed from this environmental post. His petition is described here : Most people may know Kelcy Warren as the man behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. The Dallas-based billionaire and CEO of Energy Transfer Partners has been making headlines for fast-tracking a 1100 mile crude oil pipeline across the Midwest and under the Missouri River, just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. No environmental impact assessment, no respect for cultural sites, and no regard for the local and widespread communities living along the river. A similar story is unfolding out in West Texas, where Warren’s company has split through the pristine Big Bend region with the 200 mile Comanche Trail Pipeline and nearly-complete 143 mile Trans Pecos Pipeline. These Pipelines mark the way for massive natural gas and oil developments in the Trans Pecos region. With untold damages unfolding for cultural and environmental resources at the hands of Energy Transfer Partners, it would surprise most to know that nearly a year ago, Texas Governor Greg Abbott appointed Kelcy Warren for a 6 year term as 1 of the 10 commissioners who preside over Texas Parks And Wildlife… Why? Probably the $550,000 in campaign contributions Abbott received from Warren. ( Read More… ) Footage of militarized police using the Long Range Acoustic Device ( LRAD ) crowd control weapon against protectors at standing rock on October 27th, 2016: Final Thoughts Warren is listed as number 150 on Forbes list of wealthiest Americans with an estimated net worth of $4.2 billion in September of 2016. He is the head of the Dakota Access Pipeline snake. If you are scratching your head wondering why militarized police and private security contractors are beating, gassing and attacking peaceful resistors, including women, children and the elderly, the answer is, they are doing it to protect the interests of Kelcy Warren and others invested in this pipeline project. By Isaac Davis, Waking Times About the author: Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here . Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+8956,Bundy Ranch occupiers acquitted on all counts after challenging the corrupt Bureau of Land Management,"Bundy Ranch occupiers acquitted on all counts after challenging the corrupt Bureau of Land Management 
+Saturday, October 29, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes Tags: Ammon Bundy , Oregon ranchers , court decision (NaturalNews) In what freedom fighters across the country are calling a stunning victory against a tyrannical government agency, a jury in Oregon has acquitted all seven defendants involved in the armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in January.Cheers broke out in the Portland, Ore., federal courtroom when the jury announced the acquittals of Ammon Bundy, along with brother Ryan Bundy and five others, the Chicago Tribune reported .The seven were charged with conspiracy to impede federal workers from their jobs at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which is located about 300 miles southeast of Portland. Also, the jury could not reach a verdict on even one count of theft for Ryan Bundy. Shocked by the acquittals The announcement by the jury did not come without additional drama, however. Upon hearing the jury's decision, Marcus Mumford, one of Ammon Bundy's attorneys, demanded his client be released, even shouting at the judge. That prompted U.S. marshals to tackle Mumford to the ground and use a stun gun on him a number of times before arresting him, the Tribune reported.U.S. District Judge Anna Brown said she was not able to release Bundy because he faces federal charges in Nevada, his home state, related to an armed standoff with federal Bureau of Land Management agents at his father Cliven Bundy's ranch in 2014 .As reported by KATU , the armed standoff began Jan. 2 and lasted nearly six weeks. The incident brought new attention to the long-running issue of too much federal ownership of lands in the American West. The confrontations at the refuge earlier this year and on Cliven Bundy's ranch in 2014 essentially reignited arguments between private citizens – mostly ranchers – and the federal government that stem from the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion in the late 1970s, when Western states like Nevada attempted to wrestle more control of their own territory from the federal government .As noted by The New York Times the federal government owns nearly half of the land – 47 percent – in the West.The Tribune noted that even the defendants' attorneys were shocked by the acquittals.""It's stunning,"" said Robert Salisbury, an attorney for defendant Jeff Banta. ""It's a stunning victory for the defense. I'm speechless.""The U.S. Attorney in Oregon , Billy J. Williams, said in a statement that his office stood by its decision to prosecute the seven defendants.""We strongly believe that this case needed to be brought before a Court, publicly tried, and decided by a jury,"" the statement said. 'When the jury hears the story, I expect the same result' The Oregon case was, in a sense, an extension the tense standoff between federal officials with the BLM and other authorities, and the Bundy's two years ago in Nevada. Cliven, Ammon and Ryan Bundy are all scheduled to go on trial for that standoff early next year.It's not clear what the outcome of the Nevada trial will be. Federal attorneys have said they don't feel like the outcome in Oregon will have any effect whatsoever on the Nevada trial.But defense attorneys involved in the Nevada trial aren't so sure. Daniel Hill, an attorney for Ammon Bundy , says the Oregon acquittal bodes well for his client and the other defendants, all of whom are facing felony weapon, conspiracy and other charges, the Tribune reported.""When the jury hears the whole story,"" he told The Associated Press , ""I expect the same result."" Sources:",FAKE
+6551,The Truth About Atlantis [Video],"Leave a reply 
+Alexandra Bruce – Celebrated author Graham Hancock explains why Atlantis existed. 
+Hancock specializes in theories involving ancient civilizations, stone monuments or megaliths, altered states of consciousness, ancient myths and astronomical/astrological data from the past… SF Source Forbidden Knowledge TV  ",FAKE
+3168,Major Corporate Sponsors Are Scaling Back Support for GOP Convention,"From Coca-Cola to Microsoft, companies that gave big bucks to the 2012 convention that nominated Mitt Romney are slashing this year’s budgets for the July coronation of Donald Trump.
+
+Some of America’s largest corporations, which backed the Republican National Convention that nominated Mitt Romney in 2012, are lurching away from sponsoring the 2016 confab. Under pressure from anti-Trump advocacy groups, corporations that have traditionally not hesitated to drop millions on national conventions are limiting their contributions and scaling back their activities.
+
+Coca-Cola, for example, contributed $660,000 to the convention in 2012 but is dramatically drawing down the amount it is giving this year. The corporation gave $75,000 to both parties’ conventions this time around, a company spokesman told The Daily Beast, stressing that the contribution took place in 2015. Coca-Cola has indicated to anti-Trump groups that it will not give any more.
+
+And Microsoft, which contributed $1.5 million in cash and services to the Republican National Convention in 2012, said in a press release just days ago that it “decided last fall to provide a variety of Microsoft technology products and services instead of making a cash donation.” If it did indeed make that decision last fall, it put off the announcement until just last week, after an anti-Trump coalition had began pounding its drums.
+
+“Both Coca-Cola and Microsoft have agreed to end cash donations to political conventions that promote hate and bigotry, and we applaud their decision to do so,” said Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates, which is part of the coalition. “We hope that other companies will take their lead and send a strong message against hate.”
+
+Still, some of America’s largest technology companies are charging full steam ahead. AT&T, which provided $3 million in 2012, will be an official communications provider for the July convention. Google will serve as the official livestream provider in Cleveland. And Facebook will support both Republican and Democratic conventions.
+
+Many of the 2012 Republican convention’s biggest sponsors didn’t respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast, including the American Petroleum Institute, Florida Power and Light, and Lockheed Martin, which were responsible for combined millions in contributions last cycle.
+
+Sheldon Adelson contributed $5 million to the 2012 convention, making him the largest individual donor, but a spokesman didn’t respond to a question about this year’s convention. Marketing Solution Publications, run by financier William Edwards, gave the largest corporate donation last cycle at $4 million. But Edwards had nothing to say after The Daily Beast called his office asking if he would re-up this year.
+
+Or, as in the case of Walmart, companies said they had not yet made up their mind about whether they would sponsor the convention, less than three months before the event.
+
+In off-the-record asides, corporation spokespersons insisted to The Daily Beast that the convention is really about supporting the city of Cleveland, or the democratic process, or open political dialogue. The contributions aren’t an endorsement, they said, and in any case the corporations donate the same amount to both parties.
+
+“They are sponsoring a party for Trump,” said Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, another group urging corporations not to contribute to the event. “Muslim kids being bullied, Latino kids being yelled at with threats of deportation at sporting events…these corporations are closing their eyes, closing their ears, closing their mouths, and handing over their wallets.”
+
+Corporations could be forgiven for seeking to distance themselves from the Cleveland convention. Even leading Republicans are going skip the event: four of the past five GOP presidential nominees—Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, and George H.W. Bush—are declining to attend.
+
+The Cleveland 2016 Host Committee, which aims to raise $64 million for the Republican convention, had a relatively slow month of fundraising—coinciding with a period of intense uncertainty over who the Republican nominee might be, or whether the nominee would even be decided by July.",REAL
+3494,Admit it: You love Tax Day! (Opinion),"Edward J. McCaffery is Robert C. Packard trustee chair in law and a professor of law, economics and political science at the University of Southern California. He is the author of ""Fair Not Flat: How to Make the Tax System Better and Simpler."" The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+It turns out that the group for whom things ended well had significantly more positive recollections of the whole affair from its beginning. The psychology of it is simple to understand: Happy endings matter. Even an unpleasant experience can lead to happy memories in hindsight if it ends well.
+
+So too with taxes.
+
+Let's just say that when it comes to taxes for the average American, ""stuff"" happens (keeping the colonoscopy metaphor running), paycheck to tax-reduced paycheck. But recent statistics suggest that 8 out of 10 American taxpayers get a refund when they file their taxes, and the average amount is close to $3000 . That pays for a lot of stuff. To make the good news even better, tax filing has gotten rather simple for most people, with various software and service providers offering to do the dreaded paperwork for free. No filing headaches and a check to boot. What's not to like?
+
+The fact of the matter is there is plenty not to like when it comes to the U.S. tax system. For example, the laws are biased against two-worker marriages; taxes go up when two relatively equal earners marry, as the rate brackets for couples are less than double that for single filers. Taxes are also overly complex and essentially optional for the truly rich , who make their wealth off of their existing wealth, the largely untaxed returns from capital, rather than by getting ordinary paychecks like most of us.
+
+But now is not the time to explain such serious matters; the people are too busy spending their refunds. The once dreaded Tax Day has become a happy spending spree for most Americans. This state of short-term bliss follows from some deep trends in our tax laws. In brief, the U.S. income tax system is increasingly a wage tax, with limited taxes on capital (what the rich have) and limited deductions for most of us. For example, 3 out of 4 Americans using a standard deduction get no break for their charitable contributions. All of this has been hashed and rehashed by politicians, professors and pundits. But who has time for that? Let's go to our television sets and check out the commercials. One clever spot ran during the recent Super Bowl, suggesting that the Boston Tea Party -- a tax revolt -- could have been averted with free online filing, which the sponsor was eager to provide. Filling out 1040s was part of what made the income tax so odious for the masses for such a long time -- who doesn't remember our parents fretting over shoeboxes of receipts sometime in April, the cruelest month? Now as Tax Day approaches, we are flooded with advertisements about America getting its billions back, without even having to pay to prepare the forms. We get paid to play! Here is the happy ending that Kahneman and others have shown can mitigate the memories of unpleasantness past. The simple fact is that a simple tax is also rather simple to administer. Service providers kindly offer to help out the masses of befuddled Americans. Of course, these kind souls want their happy endings too. They are betting that once the large refunds become obvious to their customers, the grateful taxpayers-turned-consumers will happily purchase add-on services, such as ""audit protection insurance,"" or perhaps deposit the money in financial accounts managed by the provider. Just as lottery winners notoriously go on impulsive spending sprees, the ""found money"" of tax returns can finance many nice purchases. Of course, there are still those annoying matters of the deep unfairness of the tax laws, biased against modern families and wage earners, and in favor of the rich living off capital. No real bother -- stuff happens. Let others fret about fairness. As long as our taxpaying or colon procedures end with a smile -- or a check -- who has time to dwell on the bad stuff that came before?",REAL
+9014,Western QLD Drovers Show Solidarity With C.U.B Workers By Only Drinking Sauv Blanc – The Betoota Advocate,"Follow on Facebook Print This Post 
+CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT 
+The nationwide boycott of all Carlton United Brewery products reached new heights over the weekend, after it was revealed that a camp of ringers in Queensland’s Channel Country have only been drinking Sauvignon Blanc for the last five weeks. 
+They join a growing political movement of punters that are abstaining from drinking any of Australia’s highest-selling beer brands, in a showing of support for 55 workers who lost their jobs at Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) in June. These men and women are also known as the #CUB55. 
+The maintenance workers lost their jobs after CUB terminated a machine maintenance contract with employer Quant, they were then offered their jobs back again at a 65% lower wage, after penalty rates and other entitlements. 
+E.H Pearson Cattle Company ‘s head stockman, Ronnie Austin says although he and his mates often punch on with the unionised Betoota shearing contractors, joining the CUB Boycott was a “no fucking brainer”. 
+“I’m usually not a big supporter of the Unions, but you can’t carry on the way these blokes have been” 
+“It’s fucking crook, mate” 
+Austin says it’s been hard work trying to avoid getting stuck into a few green demons at knock off after pushing cattle all day, but it’s their duty as fellow workers to support the CUB 55. 
+“It’s been tough. But we are all starting to get around the lively fruit flavours of the Jacob’s Creek Sauvignon Blanc” 
+“The passionfruit and citrus prevail across the palate, which is pretty much enhanced by the fresh natural acidity which provides vibrancy and length on the finish” 
+With the Mount Isa New Years Eve Rodeo as the next big event pencilled in on their calendars, Austin says the Betoota boys are prepared to throw down with anyone who questions their choice of drink. 
+“If CUB haven’t sorted this mess out by then, well yes of course we will still be drinking white wine on New Years Eve” 
+“If anyone has problem with it then they can come and talk to me and Rocko. It won’t be the first time we’ve had to bust heads in the Isa” 
+“In fact anyone who wants to drink VB around me better have a note from their doctor because It’s just bloody unaustralian” 
+It seems the CUB boycott has travelled across all cultures and state borders in Australia, with workers unions in Brisbane marching as well as hipster musicians now being forced to choose between supported the workers and drinking Melbourne Bitter ironically. 
+",FAKE
+6552,CNBC Just Confirmed Comey Is Abusing His Power To Help Trump,"Comments 
+A bombshell report from CNBC confirms that FBI Director James Comey had in fact concluded that the government of the Russian Federation was interfering with the election, but fought to keep that information from being released to the public because it was “too close to the election.” 
+Instead, Comey prevented the name FBI from appearing on the statement the government ultimately made on October 7th. 
+This attitude stands in stark contrast to the cavalier way in which Director Comey threw a wrench into the election by writing a letter to “update” Congress on the Hillary Clinton email investigation since the FBI discovered emails that “may” be pertinent to their previous inquiries. 
+That announcement has drastically shifted the polling landscape of the election and given the Republican Party the final stretch ammunition that the Donald Trump campaign, sinking after weeks of sexual assault revelations, needed to bail themselves out and redirect the national narrative away from their own bad press. 
+The hypocrisy is astounding; it appears that the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation attempted to hide the machinations by a foreign power to interfere in the elections of the United States to protect the Republican nominee, who has a long documented history with the operatives of said foreign power and a personally profitable reason to cultivate their support. 
+The Director then said that he couldn’t release that information to the public – which definitely deserves to know if a foreign power is interfering with our electoral process – because it was “too close to the election” but then releases an intentionally vague and misleading letter concerning new emails that “may or may not be” pertinent to an investigation which the FBI itself had already exonerated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over? 
+It’s obvious that Director Comey has joined Congressional Republicans in their efforts to conduct a witch-hunt against one of our nation’s most devoted public servants and usher in the election of a treasonous sexual predator instead.",FAKE
+5325,JASON CHAFFETZ EXPOSED HILLARY CLINTON’S PLAN TO BRIBE FBI AGENTS TO LET HER GO,"The Corruption of the Clinton’s is like an endless dark pit of lies and manipulation. 
+I am so sick of Clinton’s and I can’t believe anyone would vote for her. This FBI that is lying and trying to change documentation should be held to a legal standard and people who have tried to hide documentation and have lied should be thrown in prison for treason! 
+As far as how the media treats Hillary Clinton, if you’ve noticed, they treat her like a queen. The liberal media likes to pamper, lie, and make sure America knows she is the best option. We, however, know better. So does Jason Chaffetz. 
+For those of you who do it know who Chaffetz is, he is the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman who famously told the guy who destroyed Hillary’s email server that he was served on live TV. Now he just served up a brutal threat to Hillary Clinton and she is running scared. 
+HOUSE COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM CHAIRMAN JASON CHAFFETZ CONFIRMED IT WILL HOLD ADDITIONAL HEARINGS ON DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE HILLARY CLINTON’S PRIVATE EMAIL SERVER WHEN MEMBERS RETURN FROM RECESS. 
+NEW FBI DOCUMENTS RELEASED MONDAY SHOW UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE PATRICK KENNEDY PUSHING THE FBI TO DECLASSIFY EMAILS IN EXCHANGE FOR A “QUID PRO QUO” DEAL — A MOVE CHAFFETZ AND HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE CHAIRMAN DEVIN NUNES FOUND DEEPLY TROUBLING. 
+“Undoubtedly there will be, based on the documents the FBI released today there are new facts that need to be investigated. I’m very concerned about the quid pro quo that was in negotiation between the State Department and the FBI,” Chaffetz told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Chairman Nunes and I believe Patrick Kennedy should be relieved of his duties immediately pending an investigation. This is a manipulation if not an outright crime and so we’re gonna drive into that.” 
+While the downgrade discussed between the agency officials didn’t come into fruition, the congressmen were clear they believe the proposal was inappropriate.",FAKE
+131,Obama On Baltimore: 'This Is Not New',"President Barack Obama on Tuesday addressed the eruption of protests and riots in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, condemning the violent demonstrations while acknowledging that the underlying problems plaguing the city are ""not new"" and will require national ""soul-searching"" to solve.
+
+During a press conference with Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, Obama was asked by NBC News' Chris Jansing about the growing frustration that not enough is being done in communities like Baltimore.
+
+Obama said his thoughts are with Gray's family as well as the police injured in Monday's protests, and he criticized the violent approach taken by some demonstrators.
+
+""There's no excuse for the kind of violence we saw yesterday,"" he said. ""It is counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they're not protesting. They're not making a statement. They're stealing. When they burn down a building they're committing arson, and they're destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities that rob jobs and opportunities from people in that area.""
+
+""They were constructive and they were thoughtful,"" he said of those demonstrations. ""And frankly it didn't get much attention. And one burning building will be looped on television ... and the thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way have been lost in the discussion.""
+
+He continued, ""Since Ferguson and the task force that we put together, we have seen too many incidences of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals -- primarily African-American, often poor -- in ways that raise troubling questions. It comes up, it seems like, once a week now. Or once every couple of weeks. So I think its pretty understandable why the leaders of civil rights organizations, but more importantly moms and dads, might start saying this is a crisis. What I'd say is this has been a slow rolling crisis.""
+
+""We have to own up to the fact that occasionally there are going to be problems here,"" he said.
+
+""We can't just leave this to the police. I think there are police departments that have to do some soul-searching. I think there are some communities that have to do so some soul-searching. But I think we as a country have to do some soul-searching. This is not new. It's been going on for decades,"" he said. ""If we are serious about solving this problem, then we're going to not only help the police, we're going to have to think about what we can do, the rest of us.""
+
+""That's hard. That requires more than just the occasional news report or task force,"" he said. ""If we really want to solve the problem, we could, it's just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant and that we just don't pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns. And we don't just pay attention when a man gets shot or has his spine snapped.""
+
+Violent protests broke out in the Maryland city on Monday following the funeral for Gray, the 25-year-old who died last week after suffering a spinal injury while in police custody. At least 15 police officers were injured and 27 individuals were arrested during Monday's protests.",REAL
+7038,US Not Ruling Out Daesh Involvement in Afghanistan Offensive,"Get short URL 0 16 0 0 The United States cannot rule out the possibility that the Daesh was involved in attacks that led to the deaths of more than 30 civilians in central Afghanistan, US Department of State spokesperson John Kirby said in a briefing on Wednesday. 
+WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Earlier in the day, local media reported that Daesh militants , previously active in eastern Afghanistan, had killed 36 noncombatants in the terrorist group’s first major offensive in the country’s central region. © REUTERS/ Alaa Al-Marjani Daesh May Bring Unpleasant Surprise to US-Led Coalition in Mosul ""I can’t stand here before you and rule out that Daesh or ISIL [Daesh] had a hand in this or was responsible,"" Kirby told reporters. 
+It is no secret, Kirby continued, that the United States has long been concerned about the Daesh aspirations to establish a presence in Afghanistan. 
+According to TOLOnews, Daesh militants attacked the Chaghcharan district of the central Ghor province on Tuesday evening. Afghan security forces responded to the attack, killing one of the Daesh commanders. 
+The Daesh is outlawed in Russia and numerous other countries in the world. ...",FAKE
+6728,The United States Is Pre-Positioning “Enemy Assets” In Preparation For A Rigged Election,"The United States Is Pre-Positioning “Enemy Assets” In Preparation For A Rigged Election Posted on Tweet   The United States Is Pre-Positioning “Enemy Assets” In Preparation For A Rigged Election 
+With civil rest or a world war, the administration will be handed the country on a platter – indefinitely – and the election will be a moot point, whether it happened or not. 
+
+From Jeremiah Johnson, SHTFPlan : 
+There are a number of excellent pieces circulating that hypothesize on what will happen before, during, and after the election. Mike Adams of Natural News and Dave Hodges of The Common Sense Show have both dug deeply, examining the overall situation with outstanding insights as to the possibilities. Mike’s piece listed the scenarios that can happen regarding either outcome, and government actions that can be triggered by the result. Dave’s videos and telephone conversations expose the fact that the government is indeed preparing to have plans ready and in place with drills and exercises that can turn into an actual operation immediately. 
+You can watch Dave Hodge’s full report with Paul Martin below: 
+That being mentioned, an article came out the other day written by Deb Riechmann of the Associated Press, October 26 entitled US Official: Russia Might Shoot Down US Aircraft in Syria . The article highlights dialogue from a Charlie Rose interview via CBS at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York that was conducted with National Intelligence Director James Clapper . The answers that Clapper gave to the questions gives two “insights” into the Obama administration’s mindset. This comment came regarding the potential for the US and Russia engaging one another militarily: 
+“I wouldn’t put it past them to shoot down an American aircraft if they felt that [it] was threatening to their forces on the ground. Russia has deployed a very advanced and capable air defense system in Syria and would not have done that if it [Russia] wouldn’t use it.” 
+James Clapper 
+Then Clapper was questioned about North Korea, and he had this to say: 
+“…the U.S. policy of trying to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons is probably futile. Perhaps the only thing the U.S. could get would be limitations on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause. They are under siege and they are very paranoid, so the notion of giving up their nuclear capability, whatever it is, is a nonstarter with them.” 
+All of this sounds very lackadaisical, coming from the Director of National Intelligence. That is because it is: Obama is pursuing a laissez-faire policy regarding “threats,” either from Russia or North Korea. The reason? He created them to use later. Clapper’s next responses are very interesting regarding the questions of whether or not Russia has been tampering with the election process and the recent threat by Vice President Joe Biden that the U.S. will respond to the (alleged) tampering with a Cyberattack designed “to embarrass and humiliate” the Kremlin. Here is an excerpt of that interview: 
+“Clapper also was asked about the Obama administration’s claim that recent hacking of political sites was orchestrated by top Russian officials. The U.S. response might not come in the form of a reciprocal cyberattack on Russia, Clapper said. 
+Pressed on the subject, Rose, the interviewer, noted that there is a sense that the Russians were not paying any price for the hacking. 
+“Maybe not yet,” Clapper replied. 
+“Maybe after the election?” Rose asked. 
+“I’m not going to pre-empt,” Clapper said.” 
+There we have it, in the absence of verbal commitment, no matter how nebulous the answer may seem. Just because it is nebulous, however, does not belie the nefarious nature of the answer, and it is obvious: The Obama administration is setting the Russians up for the time of the election to blame any deviance or hacks on them. 
+It is no secret that election fraud is being committed now, even with the early voting that is occurring in several states. The Cyberattacks conducted on Friday, October 21st were a Beta-test for what is to come: full-blown election fraud and an attack on the infrastructure of the U.S. , to be blamed on Russia or North Korea and used as justification to either suspend the elections or declare them null and void. 
+On October 25 , an article was released entitled DMV Computer Outage Raises Fear of Election-Day Cyber Attacks , as presented on losangeles.cbslocal.com . Apparently 100 DMV offices in California had a gigantic computer malfunction that was not attributed to hacking. The article interviewed a USC professor who had the following to say: 
+“Election day may be a different story. Government computer systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks. I think there will certainly be some sort of cyber security issue in some location.” 
+Clifford Neuman, Director, USC Center for Computer Systems Security 
+From a standpoint of greater simplicity, the government can simply collapse the power grid, and this can be blamed on an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) weapon from North Korea or Russia. If this is not done, the government can use the Soros-provided voting machines and other nefarious measures (such as dead people’s names being used to vote, illegal aliens casting a ballot, or people voting in numerous states, to name a few) to steal the votes. Then blame can be shifted to the Russians. 
+Keep in mind that the Cyberattack on October 21 was found to “not be done by a government’s actions through state actors,” as the Mainstream media termed it. How true. Not one concrete shred of justification that Russia has been conducting any Cyberattacks has been provided. Certainly the Russian government has taken the time to investigate the source of the hacking on the U.S. systems. They will certainly monitor the elections in some manner to protect themselves from any accusations of hacking and prove they do not hold any culpability when the Democrats skew the numbers of the election and steal it themselves. 
+This is why the federal government has warned Russia that simply to monitor the elections may warrant criminal charges being brought against the Russian government. 
+But it’s OK to have UN election monitors, which in itself is a violation of the 10 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, right? 
+The law doesn’t apply to the Democrats; the law only matters as long as they can inflict it upon you. Soros just came out recently and cursed democracy in general: though toad like in appearance and mannerisms, this communist foreigner is responsible for the collapse and/or debilitation of almost a dozen governments. In a previous article we covered how the voting machines in the early voting in Illinois did not register the original choice of the voter and “chose” the Democratic candidates. This was labeled as a “calibration error,” so simply and innocently. The communists masquerading as Democrats know the truth of the matter, that it is those who count the votes and not the voters who decide the elections. 
+In summary, the U.S. is pre-positioning its “enemy-assets” to blame – on what the administration does – for a collapsed election labeled as “rigged” or the suspension of the election for any number of reasons, real or illusory, such as a genuine attack the U.S. provokes or an attack the U.S. carries out on itself . 
+Civil unrest and/or war are the escape hatches to bail out of the Constitution and to take control of the country…not letting either crisis go to waste. With civil rest or a world war, the administration will be handed the country on a platter – indefinitely – and the election will be a moot point, whether it happened or not. 
+Buy 2017 Gold Pandas and Buy 2017 Silver Panda Coins On Pre-Sale Now! Secure Your 2017 Panda Coins Today at SD Bullion!",FAKE
+3073,Booze Brands Polarize Just Like Politicians,"A gay man is selling beer during the NBA playoffs.
+
+In a light-hearted ad airing repeatedly during the pro basketball games, television- and Broadway-star Neil Patrick Harris is hawking Heineken Light. I noticed the commercial in part because it's such a stark counterpoint to a more traditional alcohol ad airing during the playoffs.
+
+In that ad, part of a series, actor Ray Liotta sidles up to a bar silent and cool, staring down another guy who lacks the requisite guyness to order the same 1800 Tequila as Liotta. (Before Liotta, another actor who became famous playing a mobster, Michael Imperioli, played the tequila brand's tough guy.) The chief creative officer of the ad agency behind the Liotta ads told Adweek, ""It's about what tequila used to be, which is mystery and toughness -- a guy's guy's drink.""
+
+Actually, it's about something even more rudimentary: preying (dully, predictably) on masculine insecurity for profit.
+
+Beer advertising has traditionally been a bro world, with a visual vocabulary limited to stereotypical expressions of masculinity. Tough guys and hot babes rule. Heineken is offering a different vision. Although light beer tends to get less macho treatment, a clever, funny, glib, gay, Tony-winning, song-and-dance man is not the beer-hawking norm -- Harris's past engagement with bro culture notwithstanding.
+
+A few years ago, Heineken targeted masculine insecurity in the ugliest way, basically marketing misogyny in 12-ounce increments. An ad featured Jay Z fetching himself a Heineken and disregarding a female friend's request to refill her champagne glass. Like Liotta in the tequila ad, Jay Z conveyed his contempt for the unworthy other in the frame. Jay Z is world-renowned for his remarkable capacity to articulate. Yet to sell beer, the mega-famous rapper went mute.
+
+A 2013 Harvard Business Review article on brand polarization cited a competition between two hard cider brands in the U.K. After a new advertising campaign helped transform Magners, a cider, into ""a hip drink for young upscale professionals, a demographic that hadn’t consumed much cider in the past,"" a rival brand, Strongbow, decided to ""drive a wedge in the market.""
+
+Heineken's choice of Harris seems indicative of a similar kind of polarization, although class seems a less obvious wedge here than cultural politics. In the familiar landscape of beer marketing, Harris counts as counter-cultural. Even less obvious choices have caused friction. A 2013 Cheerios ad featuring a multiracial family may not have been intended to polarize -- but judging from the racist reactions it elicited, it surely did. When the cereal brand opted to follow up with another ad using the same multiracial actors, however, it knew exactly where it was planting its cultural flag: with the emerging multiracial majority and in opposition to racial conservatives.
+
+Likewise, a 2014 Cadillac ad that all but screams ""Republican"" is too knowingly crafted to be any kind of mistake. It traffics in snide stereotypes about Europeans and suggests that buying more ""stuff"" -- including a Cadillac -- is the reward for people who make their own luck. (So spare me your liberal sob story about inequality and lack of opportunity.)
+
+The linkage of political identities and brands isn't new. (Democratic Subarus, Republican Cadillacs, as the New York Times reported.) It makes sense that a polarized cultural and political sphere would encourage polarized consumer branding, as well. If you watch the Harris Heineken ad and the Liotta tequila ad, you can't help but make assumptions about a host of underlying values being conveyed. Harris may like plenty of ""stuff,"" for example -- he's rich and famous and can afford it -- but he seems a better fit with the Cheerios family. And we don't have to guess where he stands on gay marriage. After Liotta's character leaves the bar, by contrast, it's not hard to imagine him riding off into the sunset, silent and alone -- in a Cadillac with a Ted Cruz sticker on the bumper.
+
+Perhaps we'll know that political polarization is easing when we can watch a game on TV without having to choose teams even during the commercial breaks.
+
+This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg View's editorial board or Bloomberg LP, its owners and investors.
+
+To contact the author on this story:
+
+ Francis Wilkinson at fwilkinson1@bloomberg.net
+
+To contact the editor on this story:
+
+ Zara Kessler at zkessler@bloomberg.net",REAL
+4047,Why Greece and Iran seem willing to take on the world (+video),"As they navigate their respective crises, both Greek and Iranian governments are trumpeting a historical narrative that portrays them as the victim of big-power efforts to subjugate the less powerful.
+
+Who do Greece and Iran think they are?
+
+As global powers find themselves locked in face-offs with two relatively small states – economic powerhouse Germany and the European Union with Greece over its debt, and the United States and five other world powers with Iran over its nuclear program – exasperation is growing among the “bigs” that their smaller counterparts are not bowing to reality and accepting compromise faster than they are.
+
+After all, it’s Greece that risks a full financial collapse without another European bailout, and Iran whose economy has been slammed by international sanctions that will only be lifted if Tehran agrees to a deal limiting its nuclear ambitions and opening its nuclear facilities to inspection.
+
+The major powers in both crises see mounting brinkmanship and intransigence where they feel reason should prevail. But both Greece and Iran are engaging their more powerful interlocutors in a manner that suggests how much they are driven by the more ephemeral motivations of dignity and mutual respect.
+
+The Greek and Iranian examples aren’t the first instances where smaller states have used the scenario of the little guy being stepped on by big, bad bullies to further their cases, particularly with domestic audiences. The imbalance of power in both diplomatic confrontations has seemed to reinforce the determination in Athens and Tehran to stand firm on what they see as their sovereign interests.
+
+But even if the appeal to a sense of national dignity resonates, some diplomatic analysts say taking pride too far can end up closing off escape routes to countries in crisis – ultimately working against their public's interests.
+
+“In both these cases of high-powered negotiations – Greece over its debt crisis and Iran over its nuclear program – the smaller country feels it’s facing the opprobrium of the rest of the world,” says Mark Hibbs, a Berlin-based senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That has led to an us-versus-them sentiment that has fed off of each country’s strong sense of national pride, and in both cases the leaders have played that card with their populations.”
+
+But in both cases, too much focus on national dignity has helped push the negotiations to the brink of failure, Mr. Hibbs adds – an outcome he says does not serve the interests of either country.
+
+In the Iran case, international negotiations in Vienna that faced a Tuesday deadline were extended to the end of the week, with both sides saying significant progress was made in recent days but that critical sticking points remained.
+
+As for Greece, a referendum Sunday that screamed nationalist pride as voters rejected Europe-imposed austerity measures has been followed by Greek calls for renewed debt-relief talks and a European cold shoulder, particularly from Germany.
+
+As they navigate their respective crises, both the Greek and Iranian governments are trumpeting a historical narrative that portrays them as the victim of big-power efforts to subjugate and dominate the less powerful, some analysts say.
+
+“In both Iran and Greece they have spent decades cultivating a narrative of grievance,” says Peter Feaver, a professor of international relations at Duke University in Durham, N.C. “So in that atmosphere you have [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel transformed into Adolf Hitler, and the America of Obama turned into the America of the 1950s,” when the US engineered a coup in Tehran that installed the late Shah Reza Pahlavi in power, he adds.
+
+To the Western powers and international institutions dealing with Iran on nuclear ambitions and Greece on its debt, “that narrative is beside the point of the matters at hand, it’s not today’s story,” Dr. Feaver says. “But to the Iranian and Greek delegations, that longer historical context does make sense,” he adds. “It serves as a filter for distorting the policy options.”
+
+The narrative of smaller countries confronting the injustices of the world’s arrogant powers is a longtime staple of Iranian rhetoric in particular, Carnegie’s Hibbs says. Iran has claimed an international right to an indigenous nuclear power program since the early 2000s, he notes, and has portrayed international efforts to investigate Iran’s nuclear facilities as a veiled attempt by “the Great Satan” and other world powers to deny Iran an international right.
+
+To a large extent that narrative fell into disuse in Greece as the country joined the powerful club that is the European Union, and then entered the even more restricted inner circle in the Eurozone. But the narrative of the aggrieved has returned with a vengeance, Hibbs says, as Germany’s powerbroker role in the country’s debt-relief negotiations has revived memories of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Greece.
+
+But Hibbs says that both Greece and Iran are “picking and choosing” among historical facts to suit their narrative, leaving aside those that don’t fit the story they wish to tell.
+
+“In both cases there’s a kind of historical amnesia,” he says. “You hear about rights and dignity, but you don’t hear Iranians acknowledging their country’s two decades of systematically violating international obligations” related to the nuclear program, he says.
+
+“You don’t hear the Greeks saying they’re in this mess because of past [financial] commitments they didn’t honor,” Hibbs adds. “At some point, you’d like part of the picture to be the Greeks facing their responsibilities in addressing their problems.”
+
+Duke’s Feaver agrees that Greece has played up the “powerful narrative of big countries imposing things on a smaller country” when it should be looking at its own role in its difficulties.
+
+But he also sees a danger in equating the Greek and Iranian cases, when the game he sees Iran playing is much more about expansive ambitions than about addressing grievances.
+
+“Iran is a country with imperial ambitions and it plays a much more problematic role in the region, and that does figure in the nuclear talks,” Feaver says. “Greece’s peccadilloes are much more of the ordinary sort,” he adds, “things like a dysfunctional public sector and overspending and petty corruption. So in that sense it’s not fair to lump them together.”
+
+Moreover, he says that the Greeks face real-life upheaval and impoverishment as a result of coming to terms with Germany and the EU that go beyond the ephemeral injuries of a supposed wounded national pride.
+
+“The Greeks are being asked to do things that are not just a matter of pride, but which would be very disruptive of Greek citizens’ lives,” he says. “But in material terms, what is being asked of Iran [in the nuclear talks] does not put in jeopardy the average Iranian citizen – although it may be problematic for the military part of the Iranian state.”
+
+The injured dignity argument may have won the Iranian regime some points at home, and it may even resonate with other “small” states.
+
+But Feaver says Western powers, and in particular the US, should stand up to it and address it for the negotiating tactic that it is.
+
+“I think President Obama wants to say, ‘Wait a minute Iran, this is not about the little guy defying the strong, it’s not about the powerful trying to dominate the weak; this is about the rule of law.’ ”",REAL
+5484,Comment on “This is My Second One” — Virginia Cop Caught Bragging About Killing Two Unarmed People by Jamieson,"Home / Badge Abuse / “This is My Second One”— Virginia Cop Caught Bragging About Killing Two Unarmed People “This is My Second One”— Virginia Cop Caught Bragging About Killing Two Unarmed People Claire Bernish July 27, 2016 7 Comments 
+A former Virginia police officer and U.S. Navy veteran, whose trial for murder begins this week, told a witness, “this is my second one,” after killing an unarmed 18-year-old black man in April 2015. 
+While unclear whether or not the jarring statement amounted to a boast, the camera on ex-Portsmouth Officer Stephen Rankin’s Taser recorded him saying this to a Walmart employee mere seconds after he fatally shot unarmed teen and alleged shoplifter William Chapman in the store’s parking lot in April 2015. 
+Rankin had, indeed, killed another unarmed man, Kirill Denyakin — under circumstances similarly and sufficiently questionable to earn three years’ administrative leave — just four years prior to the shooting for which he now stands accused of first-degree murder. 
+During the final pretrial hearing on Tuesday, the Guardian reported , Rankin’s lead defense attorney, James Broccoletti, argued the former officer’s “statement is not probative of anything,” in an unsuccessful attempt to have it suppressed. 
+Prosecutors countered to Judge Johnny E. Morrison they should not have to “sanitize the evidence” surrounding the fatal shooting. 
+“The defendant made the comment, not just in the presence and earshot of a witness, but to the witness,” argued Commonwealth’s Attorney Stephanie N. Morales , who heads the case against Rankin. 
+Although Morrison had previously disallowed direct statements to jurors concerning Rankin’s fatal shooting of Denyakin, as the Guardian noted , it now appears the officer’s prior use of deadly force will play an albeit limited role in the prosecution’s case. 
+Troubling details about the killing of unarmed 26-year-old Kazakhstani cook, Kirill Denyakin, on April 23, 2011, would seem to suggest a glib tone in the officer’s later statement to the Walmart employee. 
+Rankin responded to a call about Denyakin drunkenly pounding on the door of a residence where he had been staying with friends. Alleging the cook reached for his waistband and then charged toward him, Rankin shot Denyakin 11 times in the chest and limbs, as The Free Thought Project reported . No weapons were recovered on Denyakin’s body or at the scene — but when the man’s family filed a $22 million civil suit against the officer, the situation took a dark turn. 
+Defending his use of deadly force, Rankin — who had chosen a photograph of a dead Serb who had been lynched by the Nazis in 1943 as his Facebook profile picture — took to a local newspaper’s website, posting roughly 250 comments derisively attacking Denyakin’s character and insulting his family’s attempt to seek compensation, writing : 
+“22 mil won’t buy your boy back … let alone a habitual drunk working as a hotel cook.” 
+Weeks prior to that deadly interaction, one of the officer’s supervisors cautioned senior commanders Rankin was “dangerous” and likely to harm someone. Further revelations included Facebook posts in which the cop referred to his firearms case as “Rankin’s box of vengeance.” 
+A grand jury refused to indict Rankin for the Denyakin’s killing — and though the department placed him on administrative leave for nearly three years, it took just over a year after his return to active duty for Rankin to fatally shoot Chapman under circumstances suspicious enough to now stand accused of murder. 
+On the morning of April 22, 2015, Portsmouth Walmart employees summoned police to report a shoplifter. Rankin responded and confronted 18-year-old Chapman in the store’s parking lot. Several witnesses reported seeing Rankin attempting to handcuff the teen, but their observations of what happened next differ to some degree. 
+Two construction workers said Chapman broke free from the officer, knocking his Taser to the ground; but, in speaking to separate reporters afterward, one described the man “ whaling on ” the officer, the other noted the pair’s subsequent interaction was a “ tussle ” in which the teen had not been close enough to physically strike Rankin. 
+In a report , pathologists noted Rankin would have been at least 30 inches away from Chapman when he was shot, and the medical examiner did not find gunpowder burns or residue suggestive of a point-blank or near point-blank shooting. No stolen items were listed among the victim’s personal effects. 
+Further, body cam footage recorded Rankin holding his Taser, but abruptly and perhaps conveniently, if not outright suspiciously, stopped for the 15 seconds surrounding the shooting — only to pick up after the deadly interaction, with the Taser on the ground. 
+Chapman’s family’s attorney, Jon Babineau, recounting what he was told for Pilot Online , said in December, “The video was operational up until just before the shooting, and then it was not operational for about 15 seconds,” though an unnamed source told him the gap had been caused by a “power source issue” and did not necessarily believe the tape had been edited. 
+In September 2015, a grand jury indicted Rankin for murder and the illegal use of a firearm. 
+Rankin has since been terminated from the Portsmouth force and continues to maintain his innocence. 
+Jury selection for the murder trial is slated to begin this morning. Share Google + Fred Ziffel 
+Anytime the calculated death of a human being is forced by another knowing these actions are not ABSOLUTELY necessary and there was no other immediate threat to life, the act of taking or ending said life becomes murder. Who the perpetrator is, or what his/her occupational profession is, is totally irrelevant. Murder is not justifiable. 
+I hope they prosecute this vigorously and relentlessly. Bill Allyn 
+Justice System Reform List America has a serious, institutionalized, systemic law enforcement problem. Over the last 4 decades, our law enforcement has become increasingly militarized, putting every citizen at risk of being shot and killed for nothing more than reaching for their wallet, as instructed, or less. This may increase safety for police officers (debatable, in the long run), but at the expense of making American citizens far less safe, which is the exact opposite of the goals of law enforcement. We need to create systems that bring back accountability within every level of the justice system. Nationally, we need to: 1. Create citizen oversight committees with powers of subpoena and prosecutorial discretion for every law enforcement agency in the country. A special independent prosecutor must be assigned immediately for officer-involved shootings. Committee members should be randomly selected and replaced often, like grand jurors, to avoid corruption. 2. Require law enforcement officers to be personally insured to protect taxpayers from lawsuits. Too risky for insurance? No insurance, no badge. Insurance could be partially publicly subsidized. 3. Require every law enforcement officer to wear a camera. No camera, no gun. Also, implement GPS tracking on all police cars and cameras. 4. Require yearly psyche tests to screen out potentially abusive officers. 5. Require random drug and steroid tests. 6. All police agencies must keep a database of every officer-caused civilian injury, shooting or killing, and that data must be periodically transmitted to a third-party, non-biased national database. 7. Any officer involved in a shooting must be alcohol and drug tested immediately. 8. Officers should be made aware of studies on abuse of power, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures. Ensure there are clear policies on use of force. 9. More training to deal with mentally ill, or a mental illness crisis unit. More training and encouragement to use peacemaking, conflict resolution, and de-escalation skills. Increase educational requirements, focusing on psychology, sociology, and social work. 10. Create a special number (third party, independent of police) to report police brutality. Victims of police brutality and the families of police shootings should immediately be appointed an attorney to represent their position/case. 11. Create national database of abusive officers, so they don’t just get hired elsewhere. 12. Reverse militarization of police forces. Take away military weapons, APC’s, uniforms, and especially the attitude. Police officers are civilians, not a branch of the military. Require at least 5 years between active duty military and civilian police employment. Keep SWAT/military weapons and equipment under lock and key only to be used in genuine emergencies. Quit viewing the community you police as a “war zone”. 13. Prohibit television shows that glorify bad, illegal, or unconstitutional policing, such as “Cops”. Glorifying these behaviors creates a dangerous situation for American citizens and should not be tolerated. 14. Increase community outreach. Hire officers from the community. Officers need to be more in touch with the people they are sworn to protect. 15. End no-knock raids. It is perfectly legal for a home owner to respond to a break in with gun in hand, which gets them killed when the police are the intruders. This makes it unreasonably dangerous on citizens, especially when cops often go to the wrong address. 16. Reform forfeiture laws to protect citizens’ property rights and due process. No forfeiture proceedings until after conviction. All forfeiture proceeds go directly to the victims of police brutality and the families of police shootings. 17. End drug prohibition/war on drugs. Use harm reduction strategies. 18. End private prison industry. 19. Create a national organization dedicated to these ideals. Jamieson 
+This list is brilliant! Great post. Ibcamn 
+cops are just criminals with a badge. Occams 
+Sad that there will be lots of tax-dollars spent just to simply let him walk away, but then, that will satisfy the sheep, as did Hillary’s ‘exoneration’….. As Bill’s ‘Limited Hangout Op’– $650m spent on a blowjob – to hide selling missile secrets to the Chinese. 
+Treason runs deep in the White, these last 30 years. 
+The US military is in Syria, helping ISIS, and US planes recently bombed and murdered over 100 civilians. Treason and murder. 
+Why should the public see any better when it allows all this? Brian King 
+Another psychopath kkkop that needs to get locked up Social Trending",FAKE
+5083,"Hillary Clinton Promises Steady Leadership, More Jobs in Historic Speech","Twenty four years ago Hillary Clinton walked on stage at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, as the hopeful future first lady. Thursday night she walked on stage at the 2016 convention as the first woman to accept the presidential nomination of a major U.S. political party.
+
+""Stronger together"" was the overwhelming theme Thursday evening as Clinton took the stage, with an early shout-out to Bernie Sanders supporters, some of whom protested her nomination with glow in the dark shirts.
+
+Clinton's main efforts focused on differentiating herself from rival Donald Trump, as well as focusing on the ""steady leadership"" she would provide on foreign policy and the economy.
+
+Largely absent from her speech: mentions of faith, religious liberty and abortion. She did get in a dig at Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the country, saying ""we will not ban a religion.""
+
+She also referenced her Methodist faith, telling of her mother's admonition to ""do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.""
+
+Aside from Clinton making history as the first female presidential nominee from a major U.S. political party, her daughter Chelsea is also making history, having both of her parents run as the presidential candidate for their party.
+
+""I am here as a proud American, a proud Democrat, a proud mother, and tonight in particular a very, very proud daughter,"" Chelsea Clinton said in her speech introducing her mother.
+
+""I am so grateful to be her daughter, she makes me proud every single day,"" Clinton said.
+
+Although Hillary Clinton won the nomination, the big question surrounding her historic night was would she be able to garner the attention and popularity she needs in order for Democrats to get behind her. She was quick to praise President Barack Obama whose legacy she hopes to build on.
+
+""America is stronger because of Obama's leadership,"" Clinton said.
+
+In an attempt at party unity she also pointedly affirmed her former opponent Bernie Sanders in the first few minutes of her speech, hoping to appease his supporters.
+
+Her focus later turned to rival Donald Trump as she alternately fired away at his campaign and cast a vision for her own.
+
+""Don't let anyone tell you our country is weak. We are not. Don't let anyone tell you we don't have what it takes--we do,"" Clinton said.
+
+She continued to tell the audience to never believe someone who says he can fix the country on his own, referring to Trump.
+
+""He is forgetting every last one of us,"" Clinton said.
+
+She went on to use her campaign slogan saying, ""We can fix it together,"" and referenced her book, It takes a Village.
+
+""'Stronger together' is not just a slogan for our campaign, but a guiding principle,"" she said.
+
+Clinton made multiple promises throughout the nearly one-hour speech, from her plan to support ""local forces"" to take out ISIS to creating ""more good jobs with rising wages"" in the United States.
+
+She also promised to work with Sen. Bernie Sanders on education.
+
+""Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition free for the middle class and debt-free for all. We will also liberate millions of people who already have student debt,""  she said.
+
+Clinton assured her audience that she'll provide the necessary leadership in foreign policy and attacked Trump's ability to handle complicated foreign affairs.
+
+""Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis,"" she said. ""A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.""
+
+Clinton said the United States will prevail over ISIS, promising to strike its sanctuaries from the air, support local forces on the ground and increase intelligence.
+
+Earlier on Thursday, FBI Director James Comey warned of the great threat the U.S. faces with the growing terrorist organization.
+
+Clinton ended the night on a note of promise for the future, telling Americans, ""We are stronger together.""",REAL
+8039,News: Election Night Disaster: John King Tapped His Electoral College Map Too Hard And Fell Headfirst Into A Digital Hellscape,"Email 
+With millions of eyes watching CNN for election results tonight, the network really couldn’t afford any high-profile screwups. But unfortunately, that’s exactly what they got when John King tapped his touchscreen electoral map too hard and plunged himself straight into a digital hellscape from which there seems to be no escape. 
+Ouch. That’s some major egg on CNN’s face! 
+The night appeared to be going smoothly in the network’s Washington studio, until King tried to zoom in on a breakdown map of crucial Ohio swing districts. When the map seemed to freeze up, a frustrated King tapped the Magic Wall with enough force that his whole arm plunged through the suddenly fluid surface of the screen. Before Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper could step in, he had been fully engulfed in a vast virtual expanse of colorful, swirling data. 
+With millions of Americans tuning in to watch the results of this historic election, CNN has been forced to press on even as they try to free John King from the computerized map. A noticeably emotional Wolf Blitzer mouthed the words “I’m sorry” to his imprisoned colleague before tapping the board to call up a gender breakdown of likely Oregon voters, the bar graph of which animated right into John King’s spine, launching nearly all the way to the mid-Atlantic states. If CNN producers thought that they had stabilized the situation by urging King to take refuge in the bottom corner of the screen, it did not take long for them to realize how wrong they were. When Connecticut was called for Hillary Clinton, the trapped John King was also turned entirely blue and let loose a horrible scream as if he were being burned alive. This level of panic was matched moments later when King tried to fend off a ravenous piece of malware with just his loafer, only for the shoe to shatter into pixels that the code devoured. 
+Yikes. CNN will be wondering for a while how this all went so wrong, and on their biggest night, too. 
+With plenty of states left to declare tonight, there’s still time for King to be rescued from the computerized nightmare. But with uploading a JPEG of a ladder for him to climb up and trying to shepherd him onto a thumb drive having already failed to return King to the studio, CNN may be running out of options. 
+No matter how this shakes out, it’s clear CNN has a MAJOR technology fail on their hands. Then again, this is just what happens when anchors play with tech toys without reading the instructions. Well, better luck in 2020, guys.",FAKE
+6936,CLINTON EMAIL INVESTIGATION HAS SHIFTED THE POLLS SIGNIFICANTLY IN TRUMP’S FAVOR,"Home › POLITICS › CLINTON EMAIL INVESTIGATION HAS SHIFTED THE POLLS SIGNIFICANTLY IN TRUMP’S FAVOR CLINTON EMAIL INVESTIGATION HAS SHIFTED THE POLLS SIGNIFICANTLY IN TRUMP’S FAVOR 4 SHARES 
+[11/1/16] MICHAEL SNYDER -Donald Trump has all the momentum now. Will it be enough to propel him to victory on election day? Trump’s poll numbers were improving even before we learned that the FBI had renewed its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the new survey results that came out over the weekend and on Monday make it clear that Clinton’s “certain victory” is not so certain after all. Unless something changes, Americans are going to go to the polls on November 8th with an FBI criminal investigation hanging over the Clinton campaign like an ominous cloud, and that is very good news for Trump. 
+The Clinton campaign was hoping that this renewed investigation would not “move the needle”, but unfortunately for them that appears not to be the case. Hillary’s unfavorable rating just hit an all-time high , a whopping 45 percent of all Americans believe that this scandal is “worse than Watergate”, and a Rasmussen survey has found that 40 percent of all undecided voters that are leaning toward voting for Hillary Clinton are still open to changing their minds before election day. 
+And even before this story broke on Friday, Clinton was having a difficult time getting her voters to the polls. According to the New York Times , early voting among young adults and African-American voters is significantly down compared to 2012, and those are demographic groups that Clinton desperately needs to turn out in large numbers. 
+But of course the key to winning the election is getting to 270 electoral votes, and poll numbers appear to be shifting in the key swing states that Trump and Clinton both desperately need. For a moment, I would like to examine what the numbers currently look like in some of the most important states… 
+Florida 
+Without Florida, Donald Trump has absolutely no chance of winning. This is something that even the Trump campaign has admitted. That is why it was so alarming that most of the polls in October had Hillary Clinton leading in the state. 
+Fortunately for Trump, a new survey that was conducted on Sunday shows him leading in Florida by four points . 
+Georgia 
+Georgia wasn’t supposed to be a problem. Georgia has traditionally been a deep red state, but polling throughout this election season had shown a very tight race. This had Republicans deeply concerned and the Clinton camp very happy. 
+But now the momentum has seemingly shifted and the latest poll has Trump up by seven points . 
+North Carolina 
+Mitt Romney won North Carolina in 2012, and Donald Trump very much needs to win it if he hopes to be triumphant on November 8th. Hillary Clinton was shown to be leading in the eight most recent polls before the email story broke, but in the first major survey conducted afterwards she is now down by two points . 
+Ohio 
+No Republican has ever won the presidency without Ohio, and Trump knows how important it is to his chances. The three most recent polls conducted before the FBI renewed the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails all showed a tie, but now the very first survey conducted afterwards shows Trump up by five points . 
+Colorado 
+Hillary Clinton has consistently been in the lead in Colorado throughout this campaign, and most experts didn’t give Trump much of a chance in the state, but the latest survey shows that Clinton’s lead has been whittled down to just one point . 
+Arizona 
+A survey that was conducted in mid-October showed Clinton having a five point lead in John McCain’s home state, but now the latest major poll has Trump up by two points . 
+Nevada 
+One of the most important swing states out west is Nevada, and most surveys showed Hillary Clinton with a strong lead throughout the month of October. Unfortunately for her, a poll that was conducted on Sunday shows Donald Trump with a four point lead . 
+Clearly Trump has the momentum at this point, and it will be very interesting to see how the numbers change over the next few days. 
+And as we learn more about what is in these newly discovered emails, will her fellow Democrats stick with her? Already, some are publicly wavering. The following example comes from WND … 
+Longtime Clinton confidante and former Democratic pollster Doug Schoen told Fox News the newly renewed FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server is forcing him to “reassess” his support for the Democratic nominee for president. 
+Schoen, a Fox News contributor, made the comments to host Harris Faulkner during a live television appearance Sunday night on “Fox Report Weekend.” 
+Public opinion is shifting quickly, but the bad news for Trump is that more than 23 million Americans have already voted. So millions upon millions of Americans cast their votes before they even learned of this new FBI investigation. If the race is very close, that could end up making the difference. 
+And of course the race could dramatically change once again if the FBI comes to some sort of resolution about these new emails prior to November 8th. On Monday, CNN reported that a resolution before election day did not appear to be likely… 
+FBI officials are unlikely to finish their review of new emails potentially related to its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server before the November 8 election. 
+The initial work of cataloging top Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s emails found on her estranged husband Anthony Weiner’s laptop could be done in the next few days, US law enforcement officials told CNN. 
+But the investigators are expected to spend more time doing other work, including likely working with other federal agencies to determine what — if any — classified materials are in the emails. This makes it unlikely there will be a resolution prior to the election. 
+However, late on Monday evening the Drudge Report reported that the L.A. Times has learned that investigators may have a “preliminary assessment” completed “in coming days”… 
+LA TIMES TUESDAY: FBI Investigators had planned to conduct new email review over several weeks. It now hopes to complete ‘preliminary assessment’ in coming days, but agency officials have not decided how, or whether, they will disclose results publicly… Developing… 
+Whether good or bad, I do believe that the American people deserve to hear something conclusive about these emails before November 8th. 
+If nothing is found to implicate Clinton, the American people should be told that. 
+And if evidence of very serious crimes is discovered, there is no way in the world that should be held back until after the election. 
+Even if it throws the election into complete and utter chaos , the American people deserve to know the truth. 
+But will we get it? 
+Stay tuned, because I think that this is going to be a crazy week. Post navigation",FAKE
+10028,"People Power! Natives declare treaty rights, police admit defeat - cite lack of 'manpower' to remove DAPL protesters","Wed, 26 Oct 2016 23:00 UTC Authorities in North Dakota may be feeling the heat from the international attention the Dakota Access Pipeline is getting. They're now saying they lack the manpower to remove the encampment of protesters located on federal land near the controversial pipeline. The announcement may signal a softening of the treatment the protesters, up until now, have been receiving. For months now, The Free Thought Project 's spotlight has been shining on the, some might say, dark and dirty deeds of law enforcement and their treatment of largely Native American peaceful protesters. Attack dogs were unleashed on the protesters in September, injuring six, and an additional 30 protesters, including children, were sprayed with pepper spray. In all, more than 260 people have reportedly been arrested since the protests began in Morton County — over 100 this weekend alone. The sheriff's office's announcement comes just two days after The Free Thought Project encouraged readers to contact Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier's office demanding him to allow for peaceful protest, even providing a link to a petition for his removal. Spokeswoman Donnell Preskey told The Associated Press the department doesn't ""have the manpower"" to remove the more than 100 protesters from the property. ""We can't right now,"" she said. Preskey said the land belongs to a Texas-based firm, Energy Transfer Partners, and was purchased from a local rancher for an undisclosed price. According to the AP , the Native Americans claim the land is theirs by way of an, ""1851 treaty and they won't leave until the pipeline is stopped."" ""We never ceded this land,"" said protester Joye Braun. ""The $3.8 billion pipeline, most of which has been completed, crosses through North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. Opponents worry about potential effects on drinking water on the Standing Rock Sioux's reservation and farther downstream on the Missouri River, as well as destruction of cultural artifacts,"" writes the AP. The disputed ranch is more than 100 years old and was the first one to be inducted into the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. According to the AP: ""It is within a half-mile of a larger encampment on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' land where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and hundreds of others have gathered in protest. Protesters do not have a federal permit to be on the corps' land, but the agency said it wouldn't evict them due to free speech reasons . Authorities have criticized that decision, saying the site has been a launching point for protests at construction sites in the area."" While the announcement by the Morton County Sheriff's office may signal a change in tone and the potential for more relaxed police tactics, it remains to be seen. Late Monday, Standing Rock Sioux chairman Dave Archambault II issued the following statement, calling on the Obama Administration's U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the militant treatment of its peaceful protesters, and asked for an injunction to the pipeline's construction. Archambault wrote; The militarization of local law enforcement and enlistment of multiple law enforcements agencies from neighboring states is needlessly escalating violence and unlawful arrests against peaceful protestors at Standing Rock. We do not condone reports of illegal actions, but believe the majority of peaceful protestors are reacting to strong-arm tactics and abuses by law enforcement. Thousands of water protectors have joined the Tribe in solidarity against DAPL, without incident or serious injury. Yet, North Dakota law enforcement have proceeded with a disproportionate response to their nonviolent exercise of their First Amendment rights, even going as far as labeling them rioters and calling their every action illegal. We are disappointed to see that our state and congressional delegations and Gov. Jack Dalrymple have failed to ensure the safety and rights of the citizens engaged in peaceful protests who were arrested on Saturday. Their lack of leadership and commitment to creating a dialogue towards a peaceful solution reflects not only the unjust historical narrative against Native Americans, but a dangerous trend in law enforcement tactics across America. For these reasons, we believe the situation at Standing Rock deserves the immediate and full attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. Furthermore, the DOJ should impose an injunction to all developments at the pipeline site to keep ALL citizens - law enforcement and protestors - safe. The DOJ should be enlisted and expected to investigate the overwhelming reports and videos demonstrating clear strong-arm tactics, abuses and unlawful arrests by law enforcement. The chairman's request seems to validate many of the reports coming from the field, that peaceful protesters are being labeled as rioters and are not being treated with the dignity they feel they deserve. As The Free Thought Project reported two days ago, many of the protesters are being thrown to the ground, squashed underfoot, strip-searched, and forced to remove sacred hair braids — all considered ""strong-arm tactics, abuses, and unlawful,"" by Archambault.",FAKE
+4027,Obama: U.S. cannot solve the world's problems alone,"President Obama told the United Nations on Monday that they must all work together on an array of challenges — from Syria to Ukraine, from poverty to climate change — because ""the United States cannot solve the world's problems alone.""
+
+While making a largely thematic address to the U.N. General Assembly about the need for global cooperation, Obama also had harsh words for Russia just hours ahead of a tense meeting with President Vladimir Putin later on Monday.
+
+The president criticized Russia's aggression in eastern Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea, saying ""we cannot stand by when the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a nation is flagrantly violated.""
+
+While not citing the Russian president by name, Obama also challenged Putin's assertion that the only solution to the conflict and refugee crisis Syria is to back Bashar al-Assad, describing him as a tyrant ""who drops barrel bombs to massacre innocent children.""
+
+Throughout his 42-minute speech, Obama also defended the Iran nuclear agreement and questioned a Chinese military build-up in the South China Sea that has drawn protests from U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea. He extolled the new U.S. approach to Cuba, and called on Congress to lift the decades-long economic embargo against the communist island.
+
+Obama also pledged to continue the fight against the threats of the Islamic State — ""we will not be outlasted by extremists"" — but said other nations need to participate, a common theme of his U.S. address.
+
+""Together, we must strengthen our collective capacity to establish security where order has broken down, and to support those who seek a just and lasting peace,"" Obama said.
+
+U.N. members also need to work together to face challenges ranging from extreme poverty to violence against women to trade and global economic development to the ravages of climate change, Obama said.
+
+Referring to a conference in December seeking a global climate change agreement, Obama said ""the United States will work with every nation that is willing to do its part so that we can come together in Paris to decisively confront this challenge.""
+
+In stressing the need for multi-lateral action, Obama cited the U.S. problems with the war in Iraq, citing ""the hard lesson that even hundreds of thousands of brave, effective troops, trillions of dollars from our Treasury, cannot by itself impose stability on a foreign land.""
+
+Obama also criticized dictatorships and authoritarian governments across the globe, including Iran where hard-liners continue to criticize the United States in spite of the lifting of sanctions in the wake of the nuclear deal. ""Chanting Death to America does not create jobs, or make Iran more secure,"" Obama said.
+
+Recent history proves that ""dictatorships are unstable,"" Obama said: ""You can jail your opponents but you can't imprison ideas.""
+
+Speaking 70 years after the founding of the United Nations, Obama praised the work of the organization founded in the ashes of World War II and designed an to prevent a third global conflict.
+
+Through its work, Obama said, lives have been saved, agreements forged, diseases conquered, and mouths fed, although ""we come together today knowing that the march of human progress never travels in a straight line, that our work is far from complete, that dangerous currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.""
+
+Later on Monday, Obama meets separately with two powerful world leaders: Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, and Putin of Russia.
+
+Speaking to the General Assembly shortly after Obama, Putin said countries should back Assad because his government in Syria is fighting Islamic State militants. The Russian leader chided the U.S. for backing Syrian rebels, saying some of them have defected to the IS.
+
+As for Ukraine, Putin said a ""coup"" that evicted a pro-Russian leader has led to a civil war in that country.
+
+Obama will also attend a U.N. luncheon, chair a meeting on peacekeeping efforts, and host a reception for General Assembly delegates.
+
+As Obama spoke to delegates at the United Nations, the White House issued a memorandum pledging support for peacekeeping missions, and ordering executive agencies to help. The United States is looking for similar pledges from other nations, and Obama told U.N. delegates that ""we have to do it together.""
+
+During his speech to the General Assembly, Obama also made references of some of politics surrounding the U.S. presidential election. In an apparent reference to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Obama denounced voices who call for ""walls"" designed to ""keep out immigrants.""
+
+In his repeated call for greater global cooperation, Obama noted what he called ""increasing skepticism of our international order,"" and of government in general. He blamed some of it on ""greater polarization, more frequent gridlock,"" and various movements ""on the far right, and, sometimes, the left.""
+
+Critics of the system are also exploiting ""the fears of ordinary people,"" Obama said, creating ""a politics of us versus them.""
+
+Globalization is fact, however, and ""we cannot look backwards,"" Obama said.
+
+""We live in an integrated world,"" he said, ""one in which we all have a stake in each other's success.""",REAL
+4587,How hackers eroded Americans' trust in democratic process,"Even if hackers don't strike on Election Day, the drumbeat of cyberattacks and leaks this campaign cycle has affected the way citizens view the electoral process.
+
+—Even if hackers don't actually try to tamper with voting Tuesday, the unprecedented amount of cyberattacks this campaign cycle – and the public warnings of possible Election Day digital fraud – has already had a profound impact on American democracy.
+
+Consider this: In the wake of widespread hacks against political organizations this summer, a survey from cybersecurity firm Carbon Black found that 38 percent of Americans are ""concerned"" that the election itself could be hacked, while another 18 percent are ""very concerned."" Just 11 percent of respondents said they were ""not concerned at all.""
+
+These fears of digital sabotage, apparently, led 1 out of 5 respondents to say they might not even vote.
+
+If that's representative of the entire electorate, it means that some 15 million people could stay home Tuesday – as a result of a hacking campaign the Obama administration has blamed on Russia.
+
+After an unknown group or person known as Guccifer 2.0 claimed responsibility for the hack on the Democratic National Committee this summer, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence blamed senior Russian officials for orchestrating the breach as part of a broader effort to sway American public opinion and undermine trust in the election.
+
+But the high-profile accusation didn't quash Guccifer: It resurfaced once again over the weekend to hint at more Election Day tampering: ""I will monitor that the elections are held honestly. I also call on other hackers to join me, monitor the elections from inside and inform the US society about the facts of electoral fraud.""
+
+While election and cybersecurity experts dismissed that claim as hyperbole, it may be a ""last-ditch effort"" to sway the vote or deter people from heading to the polls, Justin Fier, director for cyber intelligence and analysis with security firm Darktrace, told PCWorld. ""His goal during all this time has been public influence.""
+
+Warnings that voting booths might be hacked have certainly put state election officials on alert for any abnormalities Tuesday. DHS officials say they've spoken to all 50 states about providing help with scanning their systems for risks and offering other services, but wouldn’t detail the assistance specific states had received.
+
+But even if foreign hackers can't compromise actual voting systems, the internet campaign to spread fear of vote hacking and manipulation may be enough to have a major impact on public trust.
+
+Daniel Chiu, deputy director of the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council, noted that since Republican candidate Donald Trump and others are claiming the election could be rigged, hackers don't need to actually strike on Tuesday to discredit the vote. ""Merely a credible claim of doing so could compel voters to cry foul and undermine the legitimacy of the vote both at home in the US and abroad,"" said Mr. Chiu.
+
+To be sure, successfully compromising voting machines would be difficult, say experts.
+
+""The US election landscape is made up of approximately 9,000 different state and local jurisdictions, providing a patchwork of laws, standards, processes, and voting machines,"" noted Ian Gray, cyber intelligence analyst at the firm Flashpoint, in a blog post today. ""This environment is a formidable challenge to any actor – nation-state or not – who seeks to substantially influence or alter the outcome of an election.""
+
+But that's probably not Russia's aim, he said. ""Russia can most likely achieve a more reliable outcome with fewer resources not by attacking the election infrastructure directly, but rather by organizing a disinformation campaign attacking confidence in the election itself.""
+
+Some experts say that mere reports of possible Election Day hacking on social media, blogs, and in mainstream news outlets could fuel post-election challenges to the results.
+
+""If you lose faith in the process, then what? There could be appeals for months,"" said Ben Johnson, chief security strategist at Carbon Black. ""There could be appeals for months. We need to have enough integrity and transparency in the process so people are comfortable that the election wasn't tampered with.""
+
+State officials are on guard for any potential signs of tampering. ""There's a heightened awareness and a heightened concern,"" said Karen Jackson, Virginia Secretary of Technology. ""If you're paying attention to cybersecurity, then election systems are just one of the systems you're paying attention to anyway.""
+
+The idea of nameless, faceless hackers or foreign spies disrupting the election, clearly, is a major concern on Tuesday. But it's not just a cyberattack that could have an impact, she notes. ""Somebody could pull a fire alarm. All of those things have the power to disrupt the voting process.""",REAL
+9242,Boy With Autism Makes His First Friend Ever And His Mom Can’t Stop Crying,"Approximately 1 in 68 children has an autism spectrum disorder, making the disorder more common than it used to be and a force to be reckoned with. There are even service dogs that are specially... ",FAKE
+9623,Julian Assange October Surprise REVEALED,"Julian Assange October Surprise REVEALED 10/28/2016 In today’s video, Christopher Greene of AMTV reports on the Julian Assange October Surprise & Rants about a Complacent Mainstream Media. 10/27/2016 TRUTH REVOLT http://youtu.be/PsVNKmb6jEc There’s a lot of accusations going around that the 2016 election is r ... Netflix Ceo: TV’s Future includes Hallucination Pills 10/27/2016 INDEPENDENT The future of TV might everyone taking hallucinogenic drugs, according to the head of Netflix. The thr ...",FAKE
+6159,First Contact Film Trailer,"Posted by Madeline | Oct 29, 2016 | 2016 , Daily Blog | 0 | Thanks Barbora!
+First Contact Film! 
+ABOUT FILM 
+FIRST CONTACT is a unique documentary, narrated by Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe winning actor JAMES WOODS, that tells the true story of Darryl Anka’s UFO encounters that led him to channel an extraterrestrial being known as BASHAR, who delivers messages to prepare Earth for contact with another civilization. 
+The film not only explores the potential positive impact of ET contact on our society, but also demystifies channeling, the medium through which Darryl is able to communicate with the inter-dimensional being. 
+FIRST CONTACT will not only astound viewers with starting eyewitness accounts and scientific evidence, but the film also explores many of the questions we’ve been asking for millennia: Why are we here? What’s the nature of existence? Where are we headed? 
+Bashar answers these questions via channeling and, accompanied by state-of- the-art graphics, explains how the universe works and how each person creates the reality they experience. 
+Over the past three decades, thousands of individuals around the globe have listened to Bashar’s messages and have had the opportunity to apply these principles in their lives and create the reality that they desire. 
+FIRST CONTACT proposes that we are not alone and that Truth is Stranger Than Fiction. Share: Rate:",FAKE
+6367,370 Economists Sign Letter Urging America Not To Vote For Donald Trump,"By Jason Easley   5:03 pm 370 of nation's top economists have come together to urge the American people not to elect Donald Trump to be the next President Of The United States.   
+370 of nation’s top economists have come together to urge the American people not to elect Donald Trump to be the next President Of The United States. 
+In the letter , the economists listed a dozen economic policy reasons why voters should not vote for Trump, but it as their conclusion that was stunning, “He promotes magical thinking and conspiracy theories over sober assessments of feasible economic policy options.Donald Trump is a dangerous, destructive choice for the country. He misinforms the electorate, degrades trust in public institutions with conspiracy theories, and promotes willful delusion over engagement with reality. If elected, he poses a unique danger to the functioning of democratic and economic institutions, and to the prosperity of the country. For these reasons, we strongly recommend that you do not vote for Donald Trump.” 
+Trump’s thoughts on the economy are dangerous to the prosperity of the country. It isn’t just that Trump is a person of bad character who lacks any of the human traits that voters should seek in a president. It is also that his policies are nonsense. 
+Economists don’t write these types of letters ever. The economists aren’t discussing partisan politics. They view Trump and his ideas as a threat to the American economy. 
+Donald Trump’s economic ideas aren’t based in reality. Trump is selling a fantasy, and when 370 of the nation’s top economists warn that a vote for Trump is a dangerous choice for the country, voters would be wise to listen.",FAKE
+497,"Here come the jobs, finally","Even the long-term unemployed are starting to find work. But how strong is the jobs recovery, really?
+
+Trevor Parkes has been through the tunnel called unemployment in post-recession America and come out the other side. In the summer of 2013, he moved from Texas to Tennessee so his family could be closer to his wife’s parents. But when his new job evaporated with a layoff after just four months, Mr. Parkes was in trouble: unemployed in a difficult job market, edging toward age 50, and with two kids moving through school.
+
+Not least among his challenges: He was still a newcomer to the Nashville area, with few friends or connections to turn to for support. “I was basically terrified, because I didn’t know anyone here,” he says.
+
+Even with his wife working in youth ministry, the year that followed was one of emotional turmoil. Parkes tried it all. Temp work. Networking with other parents at his kids’ school. Contacting former employers. Mining online job boards. Each week, more résumés went out into the void.
+
+Then this past fall, something changed. First came a small regional bank that actually wanted to interview him. Not long after came a call from the very bank that had laid him off. It was starting a new flood insurance underwriting division and hired Parkes to be part of the team.
+
+The job means new confidence and financial security for Parkes and his family. It also represents a larger story of employment revival in the US economy.
+
+Today’s US job market is healthier than you might realize. True, the recovery is incomplete. Even a good job market today won’t mean conditions are easy for US workers.
+
+Yet the progress is real. And crucially, it’s helping to address one of the defining features of the Great Recession and its aftermath: the large number of people who are long-term unemployed and in many cases at risk of dropping out of the workforce altogether.
+
+An improved job climate has, more broadly, revived economic spirits across America. For the first time since the Great Recession officially ended some 5-1/2 years ago, Gallup and CNN polls find a majority of Americans having a positive view of the economy.
+
+Last year saw the strongest US employment growth since 1999, and the official US unemployment rate has fallen to 5.7 percent of the labor force as of January, down from 6.6 percent a year before.
+
+“It’s certainly good news that payroll growth has eliminated a lot of the employment gap that resulted from the recession,” says Andrew Levin, who is joining the economics faculty of Dartmouth College. “But at the current pace of job creation, another 18 months to two years will probably be needed to reach full employment.”
+
+In fact, even as the undeniable gains give the United States lower joblessness than many European nations, the set of remaining challenges is also clear:
+
+• Middle-class incomes had been stagnating and inequality widening even before the recession. Those trends have now become central political questions, gaining attention from Republican and Democratic leaders alike in the run-up to a presidential election in 2016.
+
+• From robots to smart phones, technology has opened new opportunities for consumers but is also disrupting traditional occupations. Economist Tyler Cowen distilled the worry in a 2013 book, “Average Is Over,” forecasting a future in which an educated elite pulls increasingly far ahead of everyone else.
+
+• As the US emerges from the most protracted jobs bust since the Great Depression, a historically high number of working-age civilians are still without work or underemployed. Some have part-time jobs rather than the full-time ones they hope for. Some have grown so discouraged that they’ve stopped even looking for work.
+
+One key worry is that many of the recession-sidelined Americans have become so detached from the workforce – losing skills, connections, marketability – that they may never work again.
+
+Reviving the rate of labor force participation (the share of US adults who are working or wanting to work) may be a vital measure of whether America is really nearing “full employment.” That’s why, at this point, a month in which the unemployment rate edges up isn’t necessarily a bad thing – if it’s a sign of more people being drawn into the job hunt.
+
+Economist Stephen Rose of George Washington University sees the challenges, but he also cautions against buying into a view of long-term pessimism. Time and again, he says, forecasts of a grim future have emerged in times of economic distress, technological change, or global competition – and then been proved wrong.
+
+Already, in at least a few industries, a shortage of workers is starting to surface. Tim Bowe, chief executive of a product-development firm based near Boston, says the college- and graduate-degree scientists he’s looking to hire are hard to find.
+
+“The market is not even tightening,” he says. “It’s tight.”
+
+The company, called Foliage, hopes to grow its 600-person US workforce by 20 percent this year as it brings technology solutions to clients in industries from cars to industrial equipment.
+
+Even beyond strong fields like math and sciences, employers have been adding jobs lately across a broad range of industries. The new positions include many low-paid ones in restaurants and retail shops. But many are also in professional services, sales, and skilled factory work. Fully 1 in 10 new jobs over the past year has come in construction, a welcome revival for an industry that was hit especially hard by the recession.
+
+The job gains have actually been coming since the end of 2010 – and slower than anyone wished. But last year saw a pickup in the pace, a shift toward the better in public opinion about the economy, and forecasts of continued job creation in 2015.
+
+Even states such as Michigan and Ohio have seen high unemployment rates plummet, in part because of a revival of automotive and other manufacturing. And in 28 states, led by many west of the Mississippi, employment is now back above 2007 levels.
+
+This is welcome news for workers of all ages.
+
+Young people between 16 and 24 years old, actually, have been the age group whose connections to work have most frayed since 2008. Their rate of participation in the labor force took a drop after the recession that was twice as big as the drop for workers ages 25 to 34 or ages 45 to 54.
+
+Now that is changing. Rashid Nelson, a senior at Boston University, says he’s seen the job outlook improving steadily each year he’s been in college. And now he knows he has a job waiting, as an account manager for AT&T, selling telecommunication technologies to both small and large businesses.
+
+“I just wanted to put myself in a good position,” he says of his intensive job hunt last fall. “I didn’t want to be that one student who graduated and didn’t know what he was doing.”
+
+That focus, not just an improved job market, contributed to his finding a position. He majored in an area that’s in demand (marketing), planned carefully (leaving his Fridays clear of classes for potential travel for job interviews), and kept sending out applications during fall semester.
+
+Today, as a student ambassador for Boston University’s Center for Career Development, he’s urging peers to do similar planning.
+
+Older workers, too, are glad to see an improving employment climate. Sam Jarman of San Diego went through a long stint of unemployment – twice. Working in the mortgage industry, an epicenter of the financial crisis, he lost one job in 2008. He found another in 2009, making loan modifications for people at risk of foreclosure.
+
+It was a high-level job (managing other managers on the team) but his job security was inversely related to the health of the economy. By early last year he was laid off again.
+
+The business of making regular home loans was picking up, but he was 51 years old and says no one would hire him. “They said, ‘You’ve been out of the origination side for five years and a lot has changed. We want to hire someone who has more recent experience.’ ”
+
+Call it wisdom or desperation, Mr. Jarman began widening his efforts. “I prayed, I networked, I was ready to take anything. I looked in health care, at Petco, Jack in the Box,” he says. “For the first time in 27 years, I considered leaving California because there were no jobs here.”
+
+But in October he landed one, in the lending industry and at a local credit union. He took a 25 percent pay cut and is one step down from his prior managerial level, but he’s glad to be there. “I like it. There are good people here, and [the company] isn’t going to leave San Diego,” he says. “I feel more secure.”
+
+As of January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics still counts 2.8 million Americans as unemployed for more than half a year and still looking for work. Even when people do move forward, it’s not unusual for the process to be start-and-stop – with new jobs that don’t last very long.
+
+The positive thing is simply this: From blue-collar workers to people like Jarman, more and more jobless workers are finding their way back to work.
+
+One day last fall, Lidia Sotomayor was doing a dress rehearsal for that pivotal few minutes that could make or break her future – a job interview.
+
+Her mock interviewer, a woman from a group called Platform to Employment, was in effect the drill sergeant in a boot camp for the long-term unemployed. (“They coddled you for the first hour,” Ms. Sotomayor recalls of the five-week intensive program.)
+
+Sotomayor fought through the tough questions, drawing on her training. Don’t be intimidated. Pause to think, but not for too long. In the end, the room of about two dozen other jobless people erupted in applause at her performance.
+
+The rehearsal, and the confidence boost, soon bore fruit. She now has a job as a bookkeeper in a small company, based in her home city of Bridgeport, Conn., that makes electric cable assemblies for business clients.
+
+Her story offers a window on how today’s job market, though reviving, remains tougher than before the recession – and is being transformed by evolving technology.
+
+Sotomayor was coached on how to craft a profile on the website LinkedIn and how that would help. She learned how companies are besieged by electronic job applications – and quickly weed through them in ways that winnow out lots of viable candidates.
+
+Joseph Carbone, who heads the organization that created Platform to Employment, says the challenges for workers are long term as well as partly cyclical.
+
+“The days of getting a job and staying there for the rest of your working life, and not blending in any additional education or training – they’re gone, they’re over,” he says. Managing one’s career means “you’ve got to be vigilant.”
+
+As Mr. Carbone describes it, employers are simply warier of making a full-time hire than they used to be. If they can meet a workplace need with part-timers, temp workers, or contractors, that takes financial and regulatory liabilities off their shoulders. When they do hire full-timers, it comes with the expectation of continuous advancement in skills.
+
+These aren’t new trends. “Lifelong learning” was becoming more than just a catchphrase even in the 1990s. But workplace change has accelerated. Switching jobs is fine, but being unemployed can quickly make one’s skills look out of date – not to mention being a financial drain.
+
+Sotomayor says the training program hammered home a simple message: “Stop the bleed” by getting reemployed, even at a lower salary. If a new job isn’t within reach, Carbone urges people to do something to show they’re active – taking courses or volunteering, for instance. Such lessons apply to young and old alike.
+
+Mr. Nelson, the soon-to-be college grad, is already steeped in the notion that he should keep his eye more than a few steps down the career trail. He has a long-term goal to build experience toward working as a sports marketing agent in professional basketball.
+
+As more Americans who want jobs find them, they are shifting from belt-tightening to a new sense of confidence and new possibilities.
+
+A job doesn’t define a person, after all, but for millions it does contribute to everything from their sense of purpose to their ability to help a charity or a neighbor in need.
+
+For Andre Miles near Chicago, a job means something as simple as being able to treat his young children to a night of special fun.
+
+“I’m taking the whole family to Chuck E. Cheese’s tonight,” he says by phone as he commutes homeward from his customer service job toward his wife and three young kids. That’s the kind of thing that had been cut out of the family budget in late 2012, when his old job moved to Atlanta and he decided to stay in Illinois.
+
+After a long time out of work, Mr. Miles landed a job in December with an assist from a group called Skills for Chicagoland’s Future. “I have something to offer,” Miles says, referring to his skills in customer service. But jobs are also allowing him and his wife to pursue possible new paths through additional schooling.
+
+Randy Candelaria, who lives near Salt Lake City, found that getting a paycheck opened an even bigger door of opportunity: the potential to reconnect with his family and leave homelessness behind. His job is paying for a cellphone, which in turn has put him back in touch with his daughter and grandsons, ages 4 and 6.
+
+After two years without work and living in homeless shelters and at friends’ homes, Mr. Candelaria considers his new employment at a custom countertop company an amazing breakthrough. For workers like him, with prison time in their past, the job market is tougher than for most.
+
+“It’s hard when you make mistakes and you wish you could go back and ‘would have, should have, could have,’ ” he says. “Because of those choices, I have consequences, but it’s nice to know there are still programs and people who are willing to help.”
+
+Help came for him when he stopped in at the Utah Department of Workforce Services on a day when the office was uncommonly empty. He was just there to use the fax machine, not to do any prospecting. Still, he had registered with the agency, and began talking to employees who mentioned a job that was a possible fit for him. One phone call later, he had an interview – and later a job.
+
+In Tennessee, Parkes no longer winces when he meets other parents who ask what he does for a living. The family budget has also expanded. While he was unemployed, the couple had shopped only at discount grocery stores, skipped getting health and dental insurance for themselves, and relied on help from family members and their church.
+
+Now Parkes can focus on paying down his debts and looking more than a month down the financial road for himself and his family.
+
+After persisting in maintaining a positive attitude through it all, Parkes also says the year of joblessness has put material success in perspective.
+
+“I was talking with my son the other day about wealth and I asked him to define what being rich means,” he says. “To me, you just need a place to live. A place that keeps you warm at night, keeps you cool in the summer. Not being tied to debt – that’s what it means to be rich.”
+
+Contributing to this report were Carolyn Abate in San Francisco, Eilene Zimmerman in San Diego, Emiley Morgan in Salt Lake City, and Michael Holtz in Boston.",REAL
+1532,What Walker's Departure Means for GOP Field,"Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a once rising star of the GOP presidential pack, has dropped out of the race. Now the field is scrambling to re-align.
+
+Just this summer, Walker led the Republican field in Iowa. But on Monday, he called it quits and suggested that someone could emerge from a smaller pool of candidates with a clear conservative alternative to the current frontrunner, Donald Trump.
+
+""Today, I believe that I am being called to lead by helping to clear the race so that a positive conservative message can rise to the top of the field. With that in mind, I will suspend my campaign immediately,"" he said.
+
+But will others drop out so that support can build around an alternative to Trump? None are expected to do so anytime soon. In fact, they're all vying for the Walker campaign assets.
+
+Some believe that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., will benefit the most from Walker's departure. They're both considered ""fresh faces"" with next generation appeal.
+
+Late Monday, Rubio was already welcoming Walker staff to his team, as was Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
+
+The latest CNN poll shows political outsiders Trump, former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson leading the presidential pack, with Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in fourth and fifth place respectively.
+
+Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is battling off an unexpectedly strong challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. She's also waiting to see if Vice President Joe Biden decides to enter the race.
+
+In her latest campaign move, the former secretary of state is promising not only to protect Obamacare from GOP plans to repeal it – but to improve it.
+
+""As the latest census numbers show, the number of uninsured continues to fall and Americans are now seeing, hearing, and feeling the full benefits of the Affordable Care Act,"" a Clinton campaign official said Saturday.
+
+It's already a presidential campaign year that no one could have predicted, and voters have never had so many candidates to consider.
+
+But whether any of them will follow Walker's advice to lead by falling back is unlikely for now.",REAL
+6090,Julian Assange Ends The Suspense: “The Source Of Hacked Emails Is Not Russia”,"
+With countless hours of media, and Clinton campaign, speculation and accusations that the source of hacked Wikileaks Democratic emails including the Podesta files, is none other than Russian president Vladimir Putin, either directly or indirectly, Julian Assange has decided to close the book on that particular loose end, and as RT reports , in a John Pilger Special, to be broadcast by RT on Saturday courtesy of Dartmouth Films, Assange categorically denied that the troves of US Democratic Party and Clinton work and staff emails released this year have come from the Russian government. 
+“The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source,” Assange told the veteran Australian broadcaster as part of a 25-minute interview.
+Assange spoke with Pilger at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been for four years, and accused the US presidential candidate of being a pawn of behind-the-scenes interests, and voiced doubts about her physical fitness to take charge of the White House.
+“Hillary Clinton is just one person. I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person, because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick – for example faint – as a result of going on, and going with their ambitions. But she represents a whole network of people, and a whole network of relationships with particular states.”
+Over the past nine months, WikiLeaks uploaded over 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, while she was Secretary of State. This was followed by nearly 20,000 emails sent to and by members of the US Democratic National Committee, exposing the party leadership’s dismissive attitude to Bernie Sanders, and his outsider primaries campaign.
+Finally, last month, WikiLeaks posted over 50,000 emails connected to John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and a close associate of the current presidential frontrunner.
+A preview of the upcoming interview is below. The Homeland Security Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted a joint statement in October, claiming they were “confident” that the Russian government “directed” this year’s leaks. Moscow has rejected the accusation, with presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov calling the claims “nonsense,” while Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the “public bickering with Russia” before the US election is probably a “smokescreen” to draw the voters’ attention away from serious domestic issues.
+Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Zero Hedge of www.zerohedge.com . ",FAKE
+4696,Dem Operative Who Oversaw Trump Rally Agitators Visited White House 342 Times,"A key operative in a Democratic scheme to send agitators to cause unrest at Donald Trump’s rallies has visited the White House 342 times since 2009, White House records show.
+
+Robert Creamer, who acted as a middle man between the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and “protesters” who tried — and succeeded — to provoke violence at Trump rallies met with President Obama during 47 of those 342 visits, according to White House records. Creamer’s last visit was in June 2016.
+
+Creamer, whose White House visits were first pointed out by conservative blog Weasel Zippers, is stepping back from his role within the Clinton campaign. (RELATED: Second O’Keefe Video Shows Dem Operative Boasting About Voter Fraud)
+
+Hidden camera video from activist James O’Keefe showed Creamer bragging that his role within the Clinton campaign was to oversee the work of Americans United for Change, a non-profit organization that sent activists to Trump rallies. (RELATED: Activist Who Took Credit For Violent Chicago Protests Was On Hillary’s Payroll)
+
+Scott Foval, the national field director for Americans United for Change, explained how the scheme works.
+
+“The [Clinton] campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group, The Foval Group goes and executes the shit,” Foval told an undercover journalist.
+
+One example of the “shit” Foval executes was an instance in which a 69-year-old woman garnered headlines after claiming to be assaulted at a Trump rally.
+
+“She was one of our activists,” Foval said.
+
+Creamer’s job was to “manage” the work carried out by Foval.
+
+“And the Democratic Party apparatus and the people from the campaign, the Clinton campaign and my role with the campaign, is to manage all that,” Creamer told an undercover journalist.
+
+“Wherever Trump and Pence are gonna be we have events,” he said.",REAL
+6210,TRUMP TSUNAMI INCOMING: What Trump Did In Florida Today Will Make Him President!,"Home / News / TRUMP TSUNAMI INCOMING: What Trump Did In Florida Today Will Make Him President! TRUMP TSUNAMI INCOMING: What Trump Did In Florida Today Will Make Him President! fisher 5 mins ago News Comments Off on TRUMP TSUNAMI INCOMING: What Trump Did In Florida Today Will Make Him President! TRUMP TSUNAMI INCOMING: What Trump Did In Florida Today Will Make Him President! 
+Breaking! Breaking! Bad news for Hillary in Florida. Early voting numbers from Florida are showing that Republicans have cast 17,000 more votes than Democrats. 
+*** 6 days before the Election in 2012, Democrats in Florida cast 39,000 more votes than Republicans. 
+*** Today, six days before the election, Republicans have now cast 17,000 more votes than Democrats. 
+Watch Trump in Miami, FL today: 
+",FAKE
+8283,Trump’s Star Vandalized On Hollywood Walk Of Fame - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Report: Friend Has Been Going By Middle Name This Whole Fucking Time CALABASAS, CA—Astounded that it had never come up at any point in the six years they had known each other, local woman Lucy Reed, 25, reported Tuesday that her friend Nicole Silberthau had apparently been going by her middle name this whole fucking time. Teary-Eyed Tim Kaine Asks Clinton If His Hair Will Grow Back In Time For Election Day NEW YORK—His lower lip quivering while showing his running mate the uneven patches on his head where he attempted to give himself a trim, a teary-eyed Tim Kaine reportedly asked Hillary Clinton this morning if his hair would grow back in time for Election Day. ",FAKE
+3821,Obama’s trip to Ethiopia alarms some human rights activists,"President Obama embarks on a trip to Africa on Thursday that includes a controversial stop in Ethiopia, where the authoritarian government has come under sharp international criticism for its handling of political dissent.
+
+The Ethi­o­pia visit has raised hackles among human rights advocates who question the administration’s level of concern about the issue as it seeks to advance new security and economic goals on a continent where good governance and democratic freedoms often do not top the priority list. But to others, it reflects the evolution of America’s relationship with the continent, which now offers opportunities for the United States in a way it didn’t decades ago, when it was primarily an aid recipient.
+
+“The decision to go to Ethiopia greatly undermines the stated goals and commitments of this administration when it comes to support for human rights, the rule of law and good governance in Africa and beyond,” said Sarah Margon, Human Rights Watch’s Washington director. “It shows that it ranks priorities and shows that security and development often trump human rights concerns, which is a very shortsighted policy approach.”
+
+Dozens of journalists left Ethiopia last year, saying they faced threats from the government because of the work they do. In April 2014, the government charged seven bloggers known as Zone 9, as well as three reporters, under the country’s anti-terrorism law. A few months later, the owners of six private publications were charged under Ethiopia’s criminal code. In early July, the government released two of the bloggers and all three of the reporters who had been arrested, along with a journalist who had served roughly four years in prison, though the Committee to Protect Journalists said at least a dozen members of the media remain jailed on terrorism charges.
+
+Ethi­o­pia’s ambassador to the United States, Girma Birru, described Obama’s decision to visit his country as “confirmation of the strong relationship that’s been built between the two countries.”
+
+Birru said prosecuting journalists was not evidence of human rights violations. “If a journalist, or a teacher, or a professor, or a farmer is supporting these types of groups to instigate violence, then he should be charged,” he said. “But the fact that he is carrying the name of ‘journalist’ should not save him from being charged on this ground.”
+
+White House aides acknowledge that visits like the one to Ethi­o­pia can bestow a measure of credibility to foreign governments and often use the lure of a presidential visit to win diplomatic concessions from non-
+
+democratic and repressive regimes. Obama often meets with members of civil society during his overseas visits, as a way of encouraging independent groups to pursue their goals in the face of government opposition.
+
+Speaking to reporters Wednesday, national security adviser Susan Rice said the president would not hesitate to raise difficult topics during his trip, including the way Ethiopia’s ruling party treats its opposition and discrimination against Kenya’s LGBT community.
+
+“Not just in Africa, but around the world — when we are traveling to countries where we have concerns about the rule of law, human rights, corruption, whatever, democratic governance — we make those concerns known publicly and privately,” Rice said. “And we have done so continuously in the case of these two countries and will continue to do so.”
+
+Some experts say that Obama must weigh human rights against other important factors.
+
+Princeton Lyman, who served as U.S. special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan from 2011 to 2013 and did stints as the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa, said that the United States must now consider the opportunity for investment in Africa even as the continent has become increasingly important for national security reasons, in the fight against international terrorists and other destabilizing regional forces.
+
+“The question for policymakers is: How do you balance these different interests when they sometimes run up against each other?” Lyman said.
+
+The Obama trip will try to balance several of those interests: In Ethi­o­pia, he will visit the Addis Ababa headquarters of the African Union, which has played an increasingly active role in trying to maintain regional and economic stability in the region. The Ethi­o­pia stop will follow a visit to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which is being held this weekend in Kenya, where Obama’s father was born.
+
+Kenya has made strides in recent years with increasingly democratic elections, though it has still come under fire for its restrictions of two Muslim groups on the coast, Haki Africa and Muslims for Human Rights, and abuses by members of its security forces.
+
+But Samuel R. Berger, who served as President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser and is currently co-chairman of the Albright Stonebridge Group, said one cannot view foreign policy through the single lens of human rights. “The world is too complicated right now,” he said, “and too dangerous in this part of the world, to think of human rights and security as an either-or proposition.”
+
+When President George W. Bush was contemplating a trip to Vietnam in 2006, it set off similar questions inside the White House, said Joseph Hagin, the deputy chief of staff for operations from 2001 to 2008.
+
+“The real key on any of these trips is: ‘What’s the deliverable? What good would the visit do?’ ” Hagin said. “If you think you’re going to get a commitment to change behavior, and you think that’s valuable, that could be enough to go.”
+
+Hagin said that, in the end, Bush aides concluded that Hanoi had made enough progress on opening its economy that the trip would be beneficial. Bush visited the nascent stock market in Ho Chi Minh City and used a red mallet to strike a gong that opened trading on the day he arrived.
+
+Obama is reportedly considering a trip to Vietnam during a planned Asia tour this fall. Vietnam is one of the 11 nations negotiating with the United States on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an expansive free trade deal that Obama has placed high on his second-term agenda. But human rights advocates protested this month when the president played host to Communist Party Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong at the White House.
+
+Foreign policy experts said a Vietnam visit makes sense for a president who has already made history in Southeast Asia, becoming in 2012 the first U.S. president to visit Burma, also known as Myanmar. His stop in Malaysia in 2014 was the first by a sitting president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967.
+
+At a town hall-style appearance with young activists during his April 2014 visit, Obama pressed the Malaysian government, which is also part of the TPP deal, to improve its human rights record but declined to meet with opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.
+
+“You can’t expect an American president to go solve Malaysia’s problems in Malaysia. Malays have to solve them,” said James Keith, who served as U.S. ambassador to Malaysia from 2007 to 2010.
+
+And presidential human rights advocacy has clear limits. Ahead of Obama’s historic visit to Rangoon, Burma, in 2012, the nation’s ruling military junta released dozens of political prisoners, and President Thein Sein agreed to allow human rights advocates to inspect prisons. Obama met with democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been released two years earlier after 15 years of house arrest, and he gave a speech at Yangon University saying the “flickers of progress . . . must become a shining North Star for all this nation’s people.”
+
+But by the time Obama returned to Rangoon — and to the country’s capital, Naypyidaw — last fall, many of those political gains had been reversed. Thein Sein’s regime had jailed journalists and political activists, Suu Kyi was banned from running in this fall’s presidential election and violence was displacing tens of thousands of Muslim Rohingya in the countryside.
+
+“One has to recognize that more and more, ever since the Cold War ended, the value to foreigners of an American visit — our ability to influence change — has gone down,” Keith said. “It’s the rise of the rest. It’s not American decline. It’s just natural.”
+
+Once the Africa trip is over, the White House will have more difficult decisions to make regarding presidential travel, such as whether Obama should visit Cuba now that the two countries have normalized relations. Asked on Friday what the United States would need to see from the Cuban government before Obama would visit, White House press secretary Josh Earnest rattled off a long list of human rights initiatives.
+
+“We would like to see the rights of political opponents of the Cuban government inside of Cuba not be thrown in jail just because of their political views,” he said, adding, “A respect for a free and independent media would be another step that we would like to see them take.”",REAL
+7271,Nearly All Wild Animals Face Mass Extinction By 2020,"  Sean Adl-Tabatabai in News , World // 0 Comments 
+A disturbing new report suggests that over two-thirds of wild animals living on Earth are set to become extinct by the year 2020. 
+The comprehensive report by the WWF and Zoological Society of London says animal populations across the globe will continue to plummet by 67% by 2020 due to a mass extinction that is killing the natural world. 
+Thegaurdian.com reports: 
+The creatures being lost range from mountains to forests to rivers and the seas and include well-known endangered species such as elephants and gorillas and lesser known creatures such as vultures and salamanders. 
+The collapse of wildlife is, with climate change, the most striking sign of the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological era in which humans dominate the planet. “We are no longer a small world on a big planet. We are now a big world on a small planet, where we have reached a saturation point,” said Prof Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, in a foreword for the report. 
+Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF, said: “The richness and diversity of life on Earth is fundamental to the complex life systems that underpin it. Life supports life itself and we are part of the same equation. Lose biodiversity and the natural world and the life support systems, as we know them today, will collapse.” 
+He said humanity was completely dependent on nature for clean air and water, food and materials, as well as inspiration and happiness. 
+The report analysed the changing abundance of more than 14,000 monitored populations of the 3,700 vertebrate species for which good data is available. This produced a measure akin to a stock market index that indicates the state of the world’s 64,000 animal species and is used by scientists to measure the progress of conservation efforts. 
+The biggest cause of tumbling animal numbers is the destruction of wild areas for farming and logging: the majority of the Earth’s land area has now been impacted by humans, with just 15% protected for nature. Poaching and exploitation for food is another major factor, due to unsustainable fishing and hunting: more than300 mammal species are being eaten into extinction, according to recent research. 
+Pollution is also a significant problem with, for example, killer whales and dolphins in European seas being seriously harmed by long-lived industrial pollutants. Vultures in south-east Asia have been decimated over the last 20 years, dying after eating the carcasses of cattle dosed with an anti-inflammatory drug. Amphibians have suffered one of thegreatest declines of all animals due to a fungal disease thought to be spread around the world by the trade in frogs and newts. 
+Rivers and lakes are the hardest hit habitats, with animals populations down by 81% since 1970, due to excessive water extraction, pollution and dams. All the pressures are magnified by global warming, which shifts the ranges in which animals are able to live, said WWF’s director of science, Mike Barrett. 
+Some researchers have reservations about the report’s approach, which summarises many different studies into a headline number. “It is broadly right, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts,” said Prof Stuart Pimm, at Duke University in the US, adding that looking at particular groups, such as birds, is more precise. 
+The report warns that losses of wildlife will impact on people and could even provoke conflicts: “Increased human pressure threatens the natural resources that humanity depends upon, increasing the risk of water and food insecurity and competition over natural resources.” 
+However, some species are starting to recover, suggesting swift action could tackle the crisis. Tiger numbers are thought to be increasing and the giant panda has recently been removed from the list of endangered species. 
+In Europe, protection of the habitat of the Eurasian lynx and controls on hunting have seen its population rise fivefold since the 1960s. A recent global wildlife summit also introduced new protection for pangolins, the world’s most trafficked mammals, and rosewoods, the most trafficked wild product of all. 
+But stemming the overall losses of animals and habitats requires systemic change in how society consumes resources, said Barrett. People can choose to eat less meat, which is often fed on grain grown on deforested land, and businesses should ensure their supply chains, such as for timber, are sustainable, he said. 
+“You’d like to think that was a no-brainer in that if a business is consuming the raw materials for its products in a way that is not sustainable, then inevitably it will eventually put itself out of business,” Barrett said. Politicians must also ensure all their policies – not just environmental ones – are sustainable, he added. 
+“The report is certainly a pretty shocking snapshot of where we are,” said Barrett. “My hope though is that we don’t throw our hands up in despair – there is no time for despair, we have to crack on and act. I do remain convinced we can find our sustainable course through the Anthropocene, but the will has to be there to do it.”",FAKE
+2519,Illegal Immigrants Could Elect Hillary,"Illegal immigrants—along with other noncitizens without the right to vote—may pick the 2016 presidential winner. Thanks to the unique math undergirding the Electoral College, the mere presence of 11-12 million illegal immigrants and other noncitizens here legally may enable them to swing the election from Republicans to Democrats.
+
+The right to vote is intended to be a singular privilege of citizenship. But the 1787 Constitutional Convention rejected allowing the people to directly elect their President. The delegates chose instead our Electoral College system, under which 538 electoral votes distributed amongst the states determine the presidential victor. The Electoral College awards one elector for each U.S. Senator, thus 100 of the total, and D.C. gets three electors pursuant to the 23rd Amendment. Those electoral numbers are unaffected by the size of the noncitizen population. The same cannot be said for the remaining 435, more than 80 percent of the total, which represent the members elected to the House.
+
+The distribution of these 435 seats is not static: they are reapportioned every ten years to reflect the population changes found in the census. That reallocation math is based on the relative “whole number of persons in each state,” as the formulation in the 14th Amendment has it. When this language was inserted into the U.S. Constitution, the concept of an “illegal immigrant,” as the term is defined today, had no meaning. Thus the census counts illegal immigrants and other noncitizens equally with citizens. Since the census is used to determine the number of House seats apportioned to each state, those states with large populations of illegal immigrants and other noncitizens gain extra seats in the House at the expense of states with fewer such “whole number of persons.”
+
+This math gives strongly Democratic states an unfair edge in the Electoral College. Using citizen-only population statistics, American University scholar Leonard Steinhorn projects California would lose five House seats and therefore five electoral votes. New York and Washington would lose one seat, and thus one electoral vote apiece. These three states, which have voted overwhelming for Democrats over the latest six presidential elections, would lose seven electoral votes altogether. The GOP’s path to victory, by contrast, depends on states that would lose a mere three electoral votes in total. Republican stronghold Texas would lose two House seats and therefore two electoral votes. Florida, which Republicans must win to reclaim the presidency, loses one seat and thus one electoral vote.
+
+But that leaves the electoral math only half done. The 10 House seats taken away from these states would then need to be reallocated to states with relatively small numbers of noncitizens. The following ten states, the bulk of which lean Republican, would likely gain one House seat and thus one additional electoral vote: Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. 
+
+
+
+Iowa has gone Democratic six out of the last seven times. Michigan and Pennsylvania have both gone comfortably Democratic in every election since 1992. But five states—Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma—all went by double-digit margins to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. And Romney carried North Carolina by two percent while losing nationally by nearly four percent, a large difference. Likewise, despite solidly beating 2008 GOP nominee John McCain by seven percent nationally, President Obama eked out a bare 0.3 percent win in the Tar Heel State. The current Ohio polls also look promising for the right GOP nominee, and no Republican has ever won the Presidency without carrying the Buckeye State. There is no plausible statistical path for the Republican Party’s nominee to win an electoral majority without these states.
+
+Accordingly, for analytic purposes, three of the states that would gain electoral votes are Democratic. The remaining seven are fairly put in the GOP column. Combining the two halves of the citizen-only population reapportionment, states likely in the Democratic column suffer a net loss of four electoral votes. Conversely the must-win Republican leaning states total a net gain of four electoral votes. These are the four electoral votes statistically cast by noncitizens.
+
+U.S. elections have been decided by far narrower margins. One electoral vote decided the 1876 presidential election. A swing of three electoral votes in 2000 would have elected Al Gore. A glitch in the Electoral College system enabled Aaron Burr to come within one vote of winning the presidency over Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Though they can’t cast an actual ballot, we effectively allow noncitizens to have an indirect, and possibly decisive, say in choosing the President.
+
+Three years ago, President Obama became the first Democrat in 76 years to win a second term with a repeat majority vote. Yet Romney still won two-dozen states with a total of 206 electoral votes. Based on current polling and historical trends, a credible GOP ticket right now must be considered likely to carry all the 24 Romney states and their 206 electoral votes. The key to Republican hopes to win 270 electoral votes next year therefore revolves around the three biggest swing states: Florida, Ohio and Virginia.
+
+Yet a credible future GOP nominee has reason to be hopeful. Obama carried Florida last time by only 0.9 percent. Hillary Clinton suffers from an upside down image among Sunshine State voters, 37 percent having a favorable opinion but 57 percent holding a negative one in a recent poll. She is in a statistical tie with highly unpopular GOP hopeful Donald Trump and loses by 11 percent to former Governor Jeb Bush. Florida statistically should be the easiest of these key swing states for the GOP to win.",REAL
+9917,15 Foods That Contain the Most Vitamin E | Alternative,"(Before It's News)
+What is Vitamin E? Vitamin E is an important fat-soluble antioxidant compound that aids the body in neutralizing the harmful after-effects of oxidation of fats. Current research is even looking into the important role that this vitamin plays in stopping free-radical production, a key method of preventing the development of chronic diseases and aging. It is also a vital element in the overall maintenance of a healthy immune system.
+Some studies are even looking into its role in preventing degenerative mental imbalances such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. And while many of us may do well in taking extra vitamin E supplements, we can use an organic diet to get a large amount of the daily requirements for this powerful antioxidant lipid. In fact, there are many common foods with vitamin E. You probably have a few in your house right now.
+Foods With Vitamin E
+Here are fifteen foods with vitamin E that you should strongly consider adding to your diet.
+1. Almonds
+Almonds are one the best vitamin E foods. Just an ounce of almonds offers a whopping 7.4 milligrams of vitamin E. You can also get your vitamin E needs in the form of almond milk and almond oils. We would recommend eating raw almonds, if possible.
+2. Raw Seeds
+Select raw seeds , such as sunflower, pumpkin and sesame, are another common food with vitamin E. In fact, eating just ¼ of a cup of sunflower seeds gives you 90.5% of your recommended daily value, making them one of the best vitamin E foods you can eat daily.
+3. Swiss Chard
+Swiss chard is easily one of the healthiest vegetables you can eat on a daily basis. Commonly known to be high in vitamin K, vitamin A and vitamin C, Swiss chard is another food high in vitamin E. Just one cup of boiled swiss chard greens will provide you with almost 17% of your daily recommended values.
+4. Mustard Greens
+Similar to swiss chard, mustard greens are very nutrient dense and will provide a variety of health benefits. Not only are they one of the best vitamin E foods, but mustard greens are also high in vitamin K, vitamin A, folate , and vitamin c. Eating just one cup of boiled mustard greens contains about 14% of your daily dietary requirements. We would recommend eating organic mustard greens, if possible.
+5. Spinach
+Spinach may not be your favorite veggie, but it is one of the best leafy greens you can add to your diet. Not only is it one of the best calcium foods and naturally high in folate, it’s also one of the best vitamin E foods as well. Just one cup of boiled spinach will provide you with approximately 20% of your daily needs. Try adding fresh spinach to your sandwiches to make them extra healthy.
+6. Turnip Greens
+While turnip greens may have a slightly bitter taste, they are very high in many essential nutrients. Like the rest of the leafy greens on this list, just one cup will provide you with plenty of vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin C and folate. Not to mention approximately 12% of your daily requirements of vitamin E.
+7. Kale
+Kale is another great cruciferous vegetable you should eat as often as possible. Kale is very high in many nutrients, in fact, just one cup of boiled kale can give you almost 6% of your daily vitamin E requirements. We would recommend eating organic kale, if possible.
+8. Plant oils
+Most plant seed oils are very good sources for Vitamin E as well. The best oil with vitamin E is Wheat germ oil. In fact, one tablespoon of this oil holds 100% of your daily Vitamin E requirements. Sunflower oil is another excellent option, as it provides over 5 mg of the vitamin, and can easily be be used for cooking. Other great Vitamin-E-rich oils include hempseed oil, coconut oil, cottonseed oil (with almost 5 mg of vitamin E), olive oil and safflower oil. We would recommend only buying oils that are cold pressed unrefined and organic.
+9. Hazelnuts
+A perfect snack during a long workday, eating just one ounce of hazelnuts can provide you with approximately 20% of our daily requirements of vitamin E. For an alternative to eating nuts, try drinking hazelnut milk in your morning coffee instead of milk or flavored creamer.
+10. Pine Nuts
+Add an ounce of these nuts to anything you please! One serving contains 2.6 mg of vitamin E. You can also use pine nut oil for added health benefits.
+11. Avocado
+Perhaps one of the tastiest foods with Vitamin E, avocados represent natures creamiest, oil-rich food. Just half of an avocado holds more than 2 mg of vitamin E. Avocados are very easy to incorporate into your diet. We would recommend adding sliced avocados to your salad, a sandwich, or mashed up as guacamole!
+12. Broccoli
+For generations now, broccoli has been considered one of the best detox foods , but it’s also one of the healthiest foods high in Vitamin E. Just one cup of steamed broccoli will provide you with 4% of your daily requirements. Broccoli may not be as nutrient dense as other Vitamin E foods on this list, but it is definitely one of the healthiest foods you can eat daily.
+13. Parsley
+An excellent spice, parsley is another great Vitamin E food. Try adding fresh parsley to salads and dishes for an extra Vitamin-E kick. Dried parsley will also provide you with this important vitamin, but the fresher the better.
+14. Papaya
+This popular fruit is most commonly known as one of the best vitamin C foods , but it’s also high in Vitamin E. Just one papaya will give you approximately 17% of your daily needs. Try adding fresh or frozen papaya to fruit smoothies, along with other fruity vitamin E foods on this list for an extra healthy snack!
+15. Olives
+From the oil to the fruit, eating olives is an excellent way of getting your daily needs for vitamin E. Just one cup of olives can give you approximately 20% of your daily recommended amount.
+These are just a few examples of foods with vitamin E. There are plenty more that aren’t listed here. Which vitamin E food is your favorite? Let’s hear your thoughts below.
+The post 15 Foods That Contain The Most Vitamin E appeared first on The Sleuth Journal .",FAKE
+7524,TREY GOWDY: “WHAT IN THE WORD IS LORETTA LYNCH DOING TALKING TO COMEY”,Home › VIDEO › TREY GOWDY: “WHAT IN THE WORD IS LORETTA LYNCH DOING TALKING TO COMEY” TREY GOWDY: “WHAT IN THE WORD IS LORETTA LYNCH DOING TALKING TO COMEY” 4 SHARES Post navigation,FAKE
+9913,The Northern Sea Route: New Prospects for the Pacific Rim | New Eastern Outlook,"Region: Asian-Pacific region Twenty years ago, eight Arctic states established the Arctic Council (AC) to jointly develop the Arctic Region and preserve the environment and culture of the indigenous peoples. Initially, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Norway, Russia, the United States, Finland and Sweden held memberships in the Council. Later, other states with interests in the Arctic Region joined the AC. India, China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan were granted the observer status by AC several years ago. Considering financial capacity and vast experience in the marine logistics of these countries, they can render valuable assistance to the AC member states. They all had to make strenuous effort to join the AC. Today they are doing their best to gain access to the Arctic resources and maritime routes. The real treasure of the Eurasian sector of the Arctic Ocean is, of course, the Russian Northern Sea Route (NSR), running through the Arctic Ocean along the Russian Federation’s northern coast. Lately, Russia has been devoting much attention to the development of this unique transport corridor. In his December 2015 address to the Federal Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin talked about the significance of the NSR. The NSR has been repeatedly referred to as the corner stone of economic growth and transport safety for the northern territories and Russia as a whole. This is the shortest sea route from the European part of Russia to the Far East. In a broader sense, the NSR is a huge section of the shortest sea route connecting Europe and Asia and the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Access to the NSR would mean for Asian states a major reduction of time and cost required to ship goods to Europe. Currently, almost all cargo is delivered to Europe via the Suez Canal, along the southern coast of Eurasia. Not only is this way much longer, but also riskier since there is a threat of pirate and terrorist attacks. In recent years, the risks associated with shipping goods along this route doubled because of tense situation in the Pacific Rim. Territorial disputes between China and other countries of the region, attempts of the US to retain its influence there might trigger a situation when someone decides to block the southern route for navigation. It would not be hard to do either since this route has several vulnerable areas that could be easily seized and controlled by relatively small groups of people. They are narrow passages, including the Suez Canal and the Strait of Malacca. If, God forbid, something like that happens, the NSR can become a life saver for the countries of the Asia Pacific region trading with Europe. It is worth mentioning that the NSR runs through Russian territorial waters, which means that the countries looking to use it have to build rapport with Russia. This circumstance might play an important role in the development of Russian international relations. What is more, the states wishing to use the NSR would have to participate in its development, including as investors. It is a complicated and costly task to upkeep the NSR. Russia has to employ its icebreaker fleet, and more so in wintertime, which is very expensive, to support navigation. As of today, Russia uses the NSR mostly to ship cargo and deliver the goods manufactured by local industry from the Extreme North ports. One of the key users of the NSR is the Russian company Norilsk Nickel. It owns more than half of all goods shipped via the NSR. Since Norilsk Nickel owns icebreakers, the company is able to deliver its products year round. Gazprom and Rosneft are two other companies forwarding goods via the NSR. The Russian Northern Territories development program implies engagement of foreign companies willing to participate in the maintenance of the NSR’s navigability. Japan is one of the countries showing a genuine interest in cooperation. At the beginning of 2016, Japan’s Arctic ambassador Kazuko Shiraishi made a curious statement. She said that Japan was willing to ship up to 40% of all cargo it currently delivers to Europe via the NSR. Japan, in turn, can render assistance in the monitoring of ice conditions. China is another major potential user of the NSR. At first glance, it might seem rather odd since China is developing its Maritime Silk Road, which will connect Asia to Europe via the southern route mentioned above. Some experts predicted that the Maritime Silk Road and the Northern Sea Route would become rivals. However, it looks like China sees certain advantages in having a backup route understanding the volatility of situation in the Asia Pacific region. For whatever reasons, the Chinese government has demonstrated its interest in the NSR on a number of occasions. In 2013, the first Chinese ship Yong Sheng sailed along the NSR. It began its journey in the port of Dalian (China) and arrived in Rotterdam (Netherlands). However, much remains to be done for the NSR to become an adequate alternative for a longer southern sea route, including the development of a sophisticated infrastructure featuring marine terminals in different sections of the route for yearlong loading and unloading (currently, only one NSR port, Dudinka, can accommodate ships all year long). The Russian side is casting a hopeful eye on Chinese investors as prospective partners for this project. Apparently, the “Celestial Empire” is also committed to secure its foothold in the NSR. Currently, China is energetically participating in the development of the Arkhangelsk Region. For several centuries, Arkhangelsk has been the Russia’s strategic foothold in the Arctic Region. This is one of the key sections of the NSR with high concentration of industrial facilities and important seaports. Today as before, the Arkhangelsk Region is given high priority in the new “Socio-economic Development of Russian Arctic Region” project. In October 2016, the Russian company Arctic Transportation and Industrial Hub “Archangelsk” signed a contract with the Chinese Poly International Holding Co. According to the document, the Chinese company will fund the construction of a deep-water port near the Madyug Island in the White Sea. This will be a weighty contribution to the development of the NSR. It is anticipated that by 2030 the new port’s turnover could exceed 30 million tons of goods. China’s profound interest in the Arkhangelsk Region was demonstrated once again when a major Chinese company Huadian decided to invest funds in the region’s power sector. Last summer, the joint Russian-Chinese enterprise “Huadian-Arkhangelsk CHPP” bought out the only source of central heating in the region, the Arkhangelsk CHPP, by paying off its 2.7 billion rubles debt. It is clear that China is really interested in gaining access to the Arctic territories of the Russian Federation. The Northern Sea Route is a unique transport corridor with a potential of placing Russia among the most important transit countries in the world. Besides, the NSR can attract many major foreign investors. And Russia’s foremost task is to give them a warm welcome. Dmitry Bokarev, expert politologist, exclusively for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook. ” Popular Articles ",FAKE
+806,Cruz campaign: We could have stopped Trump if Rubio became running mate,"Top officials of the Cruz campaign are convinced there is one specific step that could have stopped Trump -- and they blame Sen. Marco Rubio for not taking that step.
+
+In early March, it became clear that Trump was well on his way to the nomination and would even likely defeat Rubio in his home state of Florida's March 15 primary. According to several sources close to Cruz, the Cruz campaign conducted several secret polls to see what the impact would be if Rubio joined Cruz as his running mate, with Cruz at the top of the ticket.
+
+Politico reported in March that Rubio rejected the idea of a ""unity ticket."" But the sources close to Cruz and Rubio are now offering a much fuller picture of the extent of Cruz's polling, the reasons why Rubio said no, and the resentment the Cruz people have about Rubio's rejection of the idea.
+
+The Cruz campaign polled in three March 15 primary states, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina -- though not in Ohio, home to Kasich, or in Florida.
+
+They also tested the matchup in a poll in Arizona, which would hold its contest on March 22, and in Wisconsin, which would hold its primary on April 5. What did polls suggest a Cruz-Rubio ticket would do in those states? ""Blowout,"" said a source close to Cruz. ""65%-35%,"" with Trump losing. Through friends and emissaries, the Cruz campaign tried to get Rubio on board. But Cruz could not reach him on the phone, and others reported back to the Cruz campaign that Rubio did not seem interested in having a discussion about this at all. ""He went off the grid,"" said a source close to Cruz. Cruz campaign officials speculated that Rubio was interested in preserving his political viability for a contested GOP convention or the 2020 race. A source familiar with Rubio's thinking says there never really was a concrete offer from the Cruz campaign to team up -- just vague discussions from donors about polls and the potential for such a move -- but either way, he was not interested. For one, the source said, Rubio thought the notion of two senators from Washington, D.C., teaming up against Trump would fit all too easily into the Trump outsider narrative. Second, Rubio was concerned that as a fellow Cuban-American freshman senator, he didn't think he complemented Cruz particularly well. Lastly, Rubio felt that the nominee should have the freedom to pick whomever he or she wants at the convention to help win in November and not be bound to a short-term decision made in the thick of the primaries. The lack of bounce after Cruz attempted such a move with Carly Fiorina reinforced his belief that he was right, the source said. A source close to Kasich reported that the Ohio governor tried to broach the subject with Rubio as well, and the campaigns discussed it as well, before and after the March 8 Michigan primary. Kasich's team did not conduct any polling but they are also convinced if the two men had teamed up, ""we would have swept the rest of the primaries."" What the result would have been in these alternate universes where a Cruz-Rubio ticket was on the ballot, or a Kasich-Rubio team, is unknown. Trump, in this reality went on to win in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, and Arizona. He was not stopped.",REAL
+6633,FREE Summit from Health Experts Teaches About Healthy Fats to Reverse Disease and Lose Weight,"by Brian Shilhavy Editor, Health Impact News 
+15 years ago, I was the first one to import a high quality saturated fat called “Virgin Coconut Oil” from the Philippines and market it in the U.S. market. Coconut oil is a traditional fat that has been consumed for thousand of years in tropical climates, where historically western diseases like heart disease, diabetes, obesity and others were not common, in spite of their high saturated fat diet. 
+During World War II when the Japanese cut of the supply of the high saturated fat edible oils like coconut oil and palm oil with their occupation of the Philippines and other Southeastern nations, industry in the U.S. developed the “expeller-pressed” method of extracting oil from seeds that had not previously been a source of dietary oil, mainly the U.S. cash crops of soybeans and corn. These polyunsaturated oils were not shelf-stable edible oils, so the industrial process of “homogenization” was developed to make them more shelf stable, and behave more like shelf-stable saturated fats. 
+Politics, not science, influenced government agencies like the USDA to promote these new polyunsaturated oils as more healthy than saturated fats. A new dietary dogma of “low-fat” was developed, and history now shows that America’s health greatly suffered as a result. Until even today, we have seen very high numbers of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease plaguing Americans. 
+So it was with much opposition 15 years ago that I presented the real science behind coconut oil and saturated fats, but many now are waking up to the terrible consequences of following the government-sponsored low-fat diet dogma for so many years. 
+One can truly turn their health around by simply making a dietary choice as to the types of fats one consumes, and increase the consumption of healthy fats, particularly when those fats in the diet replace harmful processed carbohydrates. The Science of Fats: Information that Could Change Your Life 
+From November 7 – 14 Dr. Mark Hyman , Dr. Carrie Diulus, and over 30 of the world’s top experts on fats will participate in an online FREE summit dispeling the biggest MYTHS about fat, and revealing the latest research about how to eat, move and supplement your diet for improved health and longevity. Join these world-renowned experts, such as Aseem Malhotra, MD (one of Britain’s top cardiologists), Amy Myers, MD , Gary Taubes (famous science author that challenged mainstream media’s dogma on fats), Sayer Ji (Founder of GreenMedInfo.com), best-selling author Nina Teicholz , Peter Attia, MD , and dozens of others! 
+There’s so much confusion and misinformation out there about FAT…both the fat on our bodies, and the fats we eat. You’ve been told that eating fat makes you fat — and increases your risk for heart disease and other chronic illnesses — but fat is NOT the enemy. The truth is: eating MORE FAT can help shut down cravings, accelerate weight loss and potentially prevent or reverse disease. 
+Register today for FREE to watch this online summit! Published on November 2, 2016",FAKE
+5236,Kentucky governor: Electing Hillary Clinton may eventually lead to violence,"Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) told religious conservatives at the Values Voters Summit this weekend that blood might have to be shed if Hillary Clinton is elected president.
+
+""I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don’t have to do it physically,” Bevin said Saturday. “But that may, in fact, be the case.""
+
+He added, citing Thomas Jefferson's ""blood of patriots and tyrants"" quote: ""The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood. Of who? The tyrants, to be sure. But who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren.""
+
+Bevin, a tea party supporter who has been known to make a controversial comment or two, clarified his comments to the Lexington Herald-Leader, saying he was referring to military sacrifice.
+
+""Today we have thousands of men and women in uniform fighting for us overseas, and they need our full backing,” Bevin said in a statement. “We cannot be complacent about the determination of radical Islamic extremists to destroy our freedoms.""
+
+Bevin's comments echo a tea party rallying cry that has cropped up from time to time. Activists and even some lawmakers have cited Jefferson's quote to reinforce the stakes for their political movement.
+
+As for the 2016 campaign, Bevin's comments are the latest example of elected officials promising very bad things if the wrong candidate is elected. And it's not just Democrats warning about Donald Trump having his finger on the nuclear button — a prospect that has been the subject of a Hillary Clinton campaign ad.
+
+Former congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) warned recently that a Clinton win might mean this could be the ""last election"" in which Americans would be able to elect a president with ""godly moral principles.""
+
+Similarly, other Republicans have warned that nominating Trump might lead to the end of the Republican Party as we know it. George W. Bush even suggested he might be the last Republican president.
+
+Conservative talk show hosts have warned of even worse, up to and including civil war. But Bevin's comments appear to be the most full-throated warning about a Clinton presidency so far from a high-ranking GOP elected official.",REAL
+8389,Contaminated Food from China Now Entering the U.S. Under the 'Organic' Label,"Contaminated Food from China Now Entering the U.S. Under the 'Organic' Label The Chinese food production industry is one of the world's least-regulated and most corrupt, as ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/contaminated-food-from-china-now.html The Chinese food production industry is one of the world's least-regulated and most corrupt, as has repeatedly been proven time and again. Now, it appears, there is no trusting anything that comes from China marked ""organic.""Natural Health 365 reports that several foods within the country are so contaminated that Chinese citizens don't trust them. What's more, the countries that import these tainted foods are putting their citizens at risk.U.S. Customs personnel often turn away food shipments from China because they contain unsavory additives and drug residues, are mislabeled, or are just generally filthy. Some Chinese food exporters have responded by labeling their products ""organic,"" though they are far from it.There are several factors at play which make Chinese claims of organic unreliable. First, environmental pollution from unrestrained and unregulated industrial growth has so polluted soil and waterways with toxic heavy metals that nothing grown in them is safe, much less organic. Also, there is so much fraudulent labeling and rampant corruption within the government and manufacturing sectors that it's not smart to trust what is put on packaging.In fact, farmers in China use water that is replete with heavy metals, Natural Health 365 noted in a separate report . In addition, water used for irrigation also contains organic and inorganic substances and pollutants. Chinese ""organic"" food is so contaminated that a person could get ill just by handling some of it. 'Dirty water' is all there is The report noted further:""This is reality – all of China's grains, vegetables and fruits are irrigated with untreated industrial wastewater. The Yellow River, which is considered unusable, supports major food producing areas in the northeast provinces.""Many Chinese farmers won't even eat the food they produce, if you can believe that. That's because it's clear that China's water pollution issues are so pronounced that it threatens the country's entire food supply.Chinese farmers have said there is no available water for crops except ""dirty water."" As part of the country's industrial prowess, it is also one of the largest producers (and consumers) of fertilizers and pesticides, Water Politics reported.The site noted further that as China's industrial might grows, so too does the level of contaminants in the country's water supply. Lakes, rivers, streams and falling water tables are becoming more polluted by the year.In addition to man-made pollutants, animals produce about 90 percent of the organic pollutants and half of the nitrogen in China's water, say experts at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning. There are times when water is so polluted it turns black – yet it is still used to irrigate crops, and of course, that affects so-called organic farming operations as well. These nine foods are particularly vulnerable to becoming tainted, Natural Health 365 noted: Fish: Some 80 percent of the tilapia sold in the U.S. come from fish farms in China, as well as half the cod. Water pollution in China is a horrible problem, so any fish grown there are suspect. Chicken: Poultry produced in China is very often plagued with illnesses like avian flu.Apples and apple juice: Only recently has the U.S. moved to allow the importation of Chinese apples, though American producers grow plenty for the country and the world. Rice: Though this is a staple in China and much of the rice in the U.S. comes from there, some of it has been found to be made of resin and potato. Mushrooms: Some 34 percent of processed mushrooms come from China. Salt: Some salt produced in China for industrial uses has made its way to American dinner tables. Black pepper: One Chinese vendor was trying to pass off mud flakes as pepper. Green peas: Phony peas have been found in China made of soy, green dye and other questionable substances. Garlic: About one-third of all garlic in the U.S. comes from China.Shop wisely.",FAKE
+9487,Forget Wikileaks...this is the real October Surprise that is going to stop Hillary,"Forget Wikileaks...this is the real October Surprise that is going to stop Hillary page: 1 link People have a hard time wading through all of the twists and turns, and convoluted political intrigue, that are the devastating stream of revelations about just how corrupt the Democratic Party...and its supreme leader Hillary Clinton...is. Most people don't have the time, or the attention span, to pour over the tens of thousands of documents being released by Wikileaks - and the MSM is trying their hardest to ignore the subject. Having said that, my father once told me that, ""There are two things you don't mess with. A man's wife, or a man's paycheque...and not necessarily in that order."" Substitute ""woman"" and ""husband"" if you like, but the message is very clear. And now...even CNN cannot ignore it...we have the issue that directly affects people's pocketbooks. Plain and simple. The pain and the impacts are very real and very personal. Obamacare Premiums... Just watch the Polls swing on this issue leading up to November 8...and watch as State after State goes from Blue to Red - just like the American peoples' bank accounts, due to the astonishing increases in Obamacare Premiums! edit on 27-10-2016 by mobiusmale because: link not working edit on 27-10-2016 by mobiusmale because: typo link a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. link a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. People will vote with their wallets. Looks like the people least likely to afford it get hit the hardest. time.com... Yet it’s also true that for Americans who don’t get insurance through work, and who make too much money to qualify for federal subsidies, the cost of health coverage is about to soar dramatically, with premiums sometimes rising $1,000, even over $2,000 for the year. If one were making 45k per year and the cost of a service increased 1k-2k for THAT year one would find other service providers or not use the service at all. But if you did not pay for health insurance you would owe the irs a penalty of 2k. Damned if you do Damned if you do not. 5% of someones income is alot, enough to make them think about who to vote for. a reply to: kruphix I am 27, never get ill, have low blood pressure, and am in good shape. My premiums doubled since this mess. So I ditched it. This was a redistribution of health care. link I don't understand why Trump hasn't been all over this opportunity. He should stop with the nonsense shooting himself in the foot crap and focus on this news to sway more voters to his side. Instead he has been babbling about his awesome golf course. It is times like these that make me think he must be taking a dive on purpose. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because ""OBAMACARE,"" so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. link a reply to: kruphix The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. Yeah the people in the ""basket of deplorables"" are a small minority as well. Perhaps in your opinion they are all in the same basket. Nice to be told ""you're a amall minority"" your fate won't effect an election. originally posted by: kruphix a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. cool, then abolishing the abortion that is ""Obamacare"" should be quick and easy. Then we can get insurance companies back to competing for our business and maybe get insurance back to where most people can afford it and not just those making less than $23k a year. You do realize that Obamacare is the single biggest failure in the history of the US last 8 years right? Much like a monkey #ing a football. link a reply to: mobiusmale It's going to cost Hilary some votes but is NOT going turn a blue state red. Might sway a poorer purple one toward red, but I'm unsure of what state fits that bill exactly. Fl maybe? a reply to: Greggers Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because ""OBAMACARE,"" so who knows. ""Work with her""? really kind of like the dems worked with the gop to pass the ACA to begin with? Pass it before you read it? Like your plan keep your plan? That kind of cooperation? originally posted by: kruphix a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. Considering you're talking about small and medium business owners who the current administration (and HRC) says they want to support, I am fairly certain the OP is accurate. The price hikes are a direct slap in the face to those of us that own our own small businesses and pay for insurance on our own. Shows how out of touch the top is with the middle. Employer sponsored rates are high too. It's cutting into employees' pay. Wake up voters !!! originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because ""OBAMACARE,"" so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. yes, the young ones who are also making minimum wage or close. If they make any money at all, they will miss the subsidies and be paying the $500 to $800 a month the rest of us have to pay. The way it was before Obamacare was much much better for everyone except the one's with pre-existing conditions. It's a shame we couldn't have someone who was smart enough to grasp that. Then they could have just tried to fix that tiny slice of the population instead of jamming a broomstick up the rest of us. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because ""OBAMACARE,"" so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. ""More Federal Funding"" is just code for, ""we are going to increase taxes""...so Hillary's solution for high Health insurance Premiums, is to move the taxpayer drain a little farther to left and call it something else. I mean what choice would she have, if she wants to keep some semblance of this disaster intact? The Obama/Clinton regime doubled the National Debt to over $20 trillion dollars in 8 yearts...how much deeper can that go before the whole bubble bursts? a reply to: Vasa Croe The price hikes are a direct slap in the face to those of us that own our own small businesses and pay for insurance on our own. That's right they forgot if you have less than 50 people employed you do not have to provide insurance to your employees. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because ""OBAMACARE,"" so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. And where exactly does federal funding come from? *looks at wallet* No such thing as a free lunch. My healthcare costs have gone up almost 50% while benefits have gone down, and I'm on an employer provided plan. I'm 33yo and healthy as a horse. Healthcare is not a right, quit treating it as such. Get some actual competition in the system as well as some tort reform and maybe you'll see some improvement. Start jailing cronies and letting unprofitable companies fail you'll see some improvement. I feel sorry for anyone who believes that Democrats/Republicans are one dimes worth of different from each other... edit on 10-27-2016 by cynicalheathen because: (no reason given)",FAKE
+8326,Donald Trump: The next President of the United States of America,"Donald Trump: The next President of the United States of America   Donald Trump will be the new President of the United States of America . Trump won 276 electoral votes with the necessary minimum of 270 votes. During his speech as the winner, Trump has promised the Americans to be president for all citizens of the country. According to him, America will not be satisfied with anything but the best. At the same time, the newly elected president has promised to seek common ground, not enmity, with partners in the world. formal voting procedure for electors will be held on December 19 and January 6, 2017, Congress will adopt its outcome. The inauguration of the president-elect is scheduled for 20 January. To win the election, a candidate needs to enlist the support of 270 electors. The procedure for their formal vote will be held on December 19, while on January 6, 2017 Congress will approve its results. The inauguration is scheduled for January 20, when the US president-elect takes office. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+7381,14 Days and Counting-There Will Be a Civil War No Matter Who Wins the Election,"
+
+It is 1860 and Stephen Douglas is running against Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s election will lead to a civil war. The pitfalls of catastrophic events were ever present.
+In 2016, it is Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. It is becoming clear that the election of either candidate will set off civil unrest and possibly lead to a civil war.
+We are now just beginning to see a myriad of pieces fall into place in which will irrevocably divide this country for at least a generation.
+When Hillary Clinton wins, the awakened American people, and some in the military will not accept this country being handed off to the UN and ultimately the Chinese. Hillary has no plan for America and the reason is clear. America has no future is she is elected by hook or crook.
+If Trump even gets close to winning, the forces are of the NWO are not going to forsake the continued raping of the American people and just give up. They will fight!
+The Electoral College Through out this week, I have documented case after case of voter fraud through the use of George Soros voting machines. Soros is omnipresent in the voting fraud fiasco. Also, I have broken a story about the attempted bribe of an elector in Arizona and this is only the beginning.
+This summer we will begin to hear rumors of the officials of the Electoral College being bought off by TPTB, for it is their vote, not the people, whose votes will elect the next President. Trump could win 70% of the vote and not carry one state if the Electoral College refuses to cast their vote in accordance with the popular vote. And you thought you lived in a Republican form of Democracy.
+As I just pointed out, there is always the question of “dirty” voting machines. Most pollsters will tell you that if the general vote is reported with more than 3-4% variation from the polls, one can easily demonstrate voter fraud. However, do you think TPTB, the criminal elite running this country, will care at this point that you know what they are doing? This is why they do the fake polls to condition us to the fact that Trump is losing. He is not, he is winning in a landslide. Further, the globalists always have their finger on the false flag button. This is why they have economic collapse, World War III, power grid down, a manufactured food crisis, etc., etc., etc., and the ultimate martial law to accompany any and all of these potentialities waiting in the wings.
+Right now, UWEX 16 is practicing for Civil War and foreign troops are in play. UWEX 16 (i.e. Jade Helm 16) will be spreading to other states as announced in their operational plans. The Federal Reserve has met with Obama and Biden. The only thing that Obama could the Fed is the use of the military to put down any populist uprising over a stolen election or a false flag attack to prevent the election from happening.
+Now, Paul Martin’s sources have learned and are communicating that there is a coordinated 18 state swat team drill. Could they be practicing for anything else but civil unrest over a stolen election? In short, if by some manner of Divine intervention, Trump wins, we will see massive terrorism in this country on an unprecedented scale from the Clinton Democrats and the terrorists we have let into the country through the Refugee/Resettlement program. I believe that Obama will not leave the White House and will impose his version of martial law, Executive Order 13603 style.
+If Clinton is able to steal the election, America is done and unfortunately, the streets will run red with blood.
+More Foreign Troops The knot in the noose, consists of the foreign troop movements that are taking place on our soil. I am getting repeated reports of large armored columns of UN vehicles being transporting or traveling on their own in the South stretching from Texas to Georgia. However, wide scale proof, with clear and convincing photos, not photo shopped, are lacking. Do I think that foreign military are planning for civil unrest in America? Yes, there is no question. I am encouraging all to keep their eyes open, take raw footage and transmit the raw footage to outlets like the The Common Sense Show .
+Yesterday, when I said on a radio interview that America is grave danger because of Trump securing the nomination, these are just a few of the things that I had in mind. Yesterday, I was reading about massive revivals in West Virginia. Pray that these revivals sweep the country because we, the American public are defenseless and our faith is our best defense.
+Conclusion Barring a miracle from the Almighty, the forces of subjugation have lined up against Trump and appear to have stolen the election. Pray, pray and pray some more that this 4th degree Coven Witch is not allowed to occupy the White House.
+P lease Donate to The Common Sense Show 
+ 
+PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US 
+
+ 
+
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.
+
+
+",FAKE
+7216,Internet Is On Fire With Speculation That Podesta Emails Contain Code for Child Sex,"We Are Change 
+Emails revealed by Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta’s account contained lots of strange emails about food, ties to human trafficker Laura Silsby, and a photo of Asian girls eating pizza — so naturally the internet has been set on fire with theories about secret codes and a child sex ring.
+Is this Laura Ling in the Podesta Pizza email pic? Bill Clinton rescued? ID 8673 #HillaryIndictment #PrisonPizza pic.twitter.com/YuuKOpvywJ 
+— Jupider Leigh (@jupiderleigh) November 4, 2016 
+
+On Wednesday, a Reddit post titled “I believe I have connected a convicted child abductor who was caught stealing children in Haiti with the Clintons,” contained a list of email links regarding Laura Silsby, former director of The New Life Children’s Refuge.
+BREAKING: Redditor may have connected a child abductor who was caught stealing children in Haiti with the Clintons. https://t.co/REW7RwPn4S 
+— Brittany Pettibone (@BrittPettibone) November 3, 2016 
+
+Silsby was found guilty in Haiti of child trafficking in 2010, after she attempted to cross the Haiti-Dominican Republic border with 33 Haitian children — all but one of the children had at least one living parent and were not orphans. Nine others who were arrested along with her were freed, thanks to the efforts of the Clintons .
+“Along with the Haitian justice system, some observers excused the missionaries’ actions, even though they rose to the level of child trafficking. They did so essentially because we place such little value on the integrity of poor families; the idea that the missionaries were acting to ‘save’ these children justified the damage they would have caused to the children and their families,” Shani M. King wrote for the Harvard Human Rights Journal. “In this way, the Silsby case offers a window into international and domestic child placement schemes that disrupt poor families and disregard traditional forms of child placement.”
+Jorge Puello Torres, Silsby’s legal adviser, was later arrested for running an international sex trafficking ring. Torres was accused of luring girls from the Caribbean and Central America into prostitution by offering to make them “models.”
+In 2011, he was sentenced to three years and one month in federal prison for “alien smuggling.”
+Were 33 children for Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein's ""use""? Forget corruption, these emails expose connections to child sex trafficking. https://t.co/9CvlndNTDs 
+— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) November 3, 2016 
+
+“Hillary has a LONG history of interest in Ms. Silsby. Wikileak emails dating back till at least 2001 have been found in her archives discussing Laura’s NGO (EmailID 3776). Laura had claimed she planned to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, but authorities in the country said she never submitted an application for this purpose. They instead located to Haiti,” the Redditor wrote.
+On Friday, Wikileaks released their 28th installment of the Podesta Files and the speculation online grew even stranger.
+Search all Podesta emails for these keywords. We are uncovering a child sex ring. #PodestaEmails28 pic.twitter.com/h6N6O76sAw 
+— Jared Wyand ?? (@JaredWyand) November 3, 2016 
+
+Theories and screenshots began to swirl, claiming that bizarrely-worded emails about food were codes for child sex trafficking. It is important to note that this is originated on anonymous message boards, and the “keywords” were not listed in any of the emails.
+Please read this Podesta email. Is this code for something SICK? #Trump #MAGA pic.twitter.com/3gRlCQVbJH 
+— GuthDaddy (@mediumsexy) November 3, 2016 
+Simple, either Podesta feeds everyone walnut sauce or he arranges orgies with Black boys
+So many cryptic emails like this #PodestaEmails28 pic.twitter.com/JcEAnDcpZw 
+— Jared Wyand ?? (@JaredWyand) November 3, 2016 
+
+Lawyer and popular author/journalist Mike Cernovich was among those sharing and discussing the theories.
+""I'm dreaming about your hotdog stand in Hawaii…""
+This is code for something.
+Sex trafficking? https://t.co/BNulNKBi4u pic.twitter.com/L3l5j40ahy 
+— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) November 3, 2016 
+
+“As a lawyer who has handled many criminal cases, I have strong instincts for when ‘code’ is being used. Reading these emails gives me the sense that they are speaking code words, like criminals,” Cernovich told We Are Change. “However the reports I’ve seen online do not seem credible and I myself have not fully cracked the code.”
+""I think it has a map that seems pizza-related.""
+This is code. I know this from representing drug dealers. https://t.co/9mX3kivmPz pic.twitter.com/yk1vJIOlMd 
+— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) November 3, 2016 
+
+Cernovich added that because of the facts that Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin’s husband is currently under investigation for sexting a minor, and Bill Clinton flew on convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet (which is called “The Lolita Express”), the whole inner circle deserves scrutiny.
+“Bill Clinton took six trips to Epstein’s island without Secret Service. Weiner was sexting 15 year old girls. Whole inner circle is suspect,” Cernovich said.
+Whether this is a case of confirmation bias, or something more sinister — one thing is certain:
+People really do not trust Hillary Clinton — to the point where thousands of people are actually having serious discussions about whether or not she is involved in a child sex ring. 
+Perhaps the Democrats should consider bringing Bernie Sanders back now.
+The post Internet Is On Fire With Speculation That Podesta Emails Contain Code for Child Sex appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+1994,Inside Jeb's 'shock and awe' launch,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+9314,Southern Poverty Law Center Targets Anti-Jihad Crusaders (Ann Corcoran Honored!), ,FAKE
+5329,Babylon Mystery Religion Series,"Part 1 BABYLON ""SUN WORSHIP"" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDHZaMeIwRs",FAKE
+4070,Relief efforts to find survivors intensify amid powerful aftershocks,"Relief efforts intensified in Katmandu on Sunday as Nepal continues to reel from powerful aftershocks and a devastating earthquake that left more than 3,200 dead.
+
+The international effort geared up to hunt for survivors and provide aid as a second American victim was identified as one of 18 who died on Mount Everest in a massive avalanche triggered by Saturday's magnitude-7.8 earthquake.
+
+Marisa Eve Girawong, of Edison Township in New Jersey, was working as a base camp medic for a Seattle-based group leading a mountain-climbing expedition. The former physician's assistant joined Madison Mountaineering a year earlier.
+
+Relief groups, which began arriving in Nepal in large numbers Sunday, say there is still time to save lives. Government agencies and aid groups began rushing doctors, volunteers and equipment into Nepal as Katmandu's international airport reopened. Some aid vehicles were able to travel overland from India to the stricken Nepalese city of Pokhara.
+
+""That means supplies could potentially come in overland from India. That is a positive sign,"" said Ben Pickering, Save the Children's humanitarian adviser in Britain. ""The airport opening is a small miracle.""
+
+The Pentagon dispatched a cargo plane Sunday to Nepal with about 70 disaster-relief and rescue personnel and their gear to aid the earthquake-ravaged country. The Air Force C-17 is expected to arrive in Nepal on Monday, according to Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman.
+
+Pickering cautioned that chaotic conditions may create a bottleneck at the airport as governments and aid agencies try to bring in personnel and supplies in the coming days.
+
+UNICEF said Sunday that at least 940,000 children in areas affected by the earthquake are in ""urgent need"" of humanitarian assistance. UNICEF staff reported dwindling water supplies, power and communications breakdowns.
+
+""Day two is just as bad as day one. We get the aftershocks every five minutes,"" said Basanta Adhikari of Biratnagar, in eastern Nepal.
+
+Adhikari said his uncle was killed in Katmandu on Saturday near where he was admitting his son to a hospital.
+
+""He was standing at a shop with his friend chatting when the Earth started shaking. He ran out to try to survive, but to no avail as a tall house fell on him, and he was buried under the rubble,"" Adhikari said.
+
+Vast tent cities have sprung up in Katmandu. The earthquake, the strongest to hit the country in 80 years, destroyed swaths of the oldest neighborhoods and was strong enough to be felt all across parts of India, Bangladesh, China's region of Tibet and Pakistan.
+
+With people fearing more quakes, many Nepalese felt safer spending the night under chilly skies, or in cars and public buses. Sunday's aftershocks made people only more tense.
+
+""There were at least three big quakes at night and early morning. How can we feel safe? This is never-ending and everyone is scared and worried,"" Katmandu resident Sundar Sah told the Associated Press. ""I hardly got much sleep. I was waking up every few hours and glad that I was alive.""
+
+Nepal authorities said Sunday that at least 2,430 people died in that country alone, not including the 18 dead on Mount Everest. Another 61 people died from the quake in India and a few in other neighboring countries. At least 5,900 have been injured. With search and rescue efforts far from over, the death toll is expected to rise.
+
+But as the first stunned survivors of the avalanche on Mount Everest reached Katmandu, they said that dozens of people may still be missing and were almost certainly dead.
+
+""The snow swept away many tents and people,"" said Sherpa, a guide the first group of 15 injured survivors to reach Katmandu.
+
+Those 15 survivors, most of them Sherpa guides or support staff working on Everest, flew from Lukla, a small airstrip not far from Everest. None were believed to be facing life-threatening injuries, but many limped to a bus taking them to a nearby hospital, or they were partially wrapped in bandages.
+
+The overwhelming devastation destroyed or damaged many of Nepal's traditional temples, palaces and historic sites.
+
+The Dharahara Tower, one of Nepal's most famous landmarks, was reduced to little more than a pile of rubble. Up to 180 people were killed and 200 people were trapped in what was left of the structure, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported.
+
+The world reacted quickly to the disaster, offering money, relief materials, equipment, expertise and rescue teams to the country of 28 million people that relies heavily on tourism, principally trekking and Himalayan mountain climbing.
+
+The U.S. Mission in Nepal released an initial $1 million for immediate assistance. Australia pledged $5 million in aid. Pakistan, and Britain said they would assist in the relief effort.
+
+At the Vatican, Pope Francis led prayers for the dead and those injured in the massive earthquake. He called for assistance for survivors, and ""all those who are suffering from this calamity,"" during his weekly Sunday blessing.
+
+Rescuers were continuing to dig through the rubble of concrete, bricks, wood and iron to hunt for survivors.
+
+In one particularly harrowing incident Sunday, police in Katmandu's Kalanki neighborhood managed to save a man who was trapped under a dead person. His family stood nearby crying and praying.
+
+Police were eventually able to dig out the man, who was surrounded by concrete and iron beams. His legs and hips were crushed under the weight of the debris.
+
+Contributing: Naila Inayat in Lahore, Pakistan; Cheryl Makin in Edison, N.J.; Tom Vanden Brook and Doug Stanglin in McLean, Va.; the Associated Press",REAL
+612,The early 2016 primary calendar is now set. It will change.,"The Democratic National Committee over the weekend set its preliminary 2016 presidential primary calender, with the four traditional carve-out states -- Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada -- holding contests in February and everybody else after that.
+
+The calendar mimics what we've seen from Republicans, who have basically agreed on the same order of succession. Here's how that looks:
+
+From there, all other states would be permitted to hold contests between March 1 and June, with party conventions being held in the early or mid-summer.
+
+Seems reasonable, right? Well, the problem is that there isn't much hope the calendar will stay this way. And all it takes is for one state to be the spoilsport and force a re-casting of the entire calendar. (Translation: New Year's in Des Moines.)
+
+In recent years, a handful of the other 46 states have bucked the committees and moved their primary dates to compete with or preempt the early states, wanting the limelight (and campaign spending) that comes along with being one of the primaries that actually, you know, matters. And it's pretty easy for a state like Florida to just crash the party and set its date for late January, as it has done the last two presidential elections.
+
+About the only thing stopping it or others from doing so are the penalties, which generally entail decreasing the number of delegates they get to the national party conventions, among other, lesser things. Those penalties have been ratcheted up in recent years, with the Republican National Committee trying out even-harsher penalties this time around. As I wrote in January:
+
+Penalties for states moving in February or January will be more serious than in the past. While the committee previously stripped them of half their delegates, they will now lose more than that, in most cases. States with at least 30 delegates would be left with just 12 representatives at the convention, while states with less than 30 delegates would have nine.
+
+The reason the rules have been tightened? Because they didn't work. Even faced with losing half their delegates, Florida, Arizona and Michigan all moved their contests ahead of March 1, pushing the earliest states to move from February to January.
+
+But while the RNC has tightened its rules for 2016, the DNC has not. Rather than going further than the halving of delegates, the DNC is sticking with the same rules as last time, which allow for harsher penalties but don't mandate them. So while the DNC is reserving the right to increase penalties after a state sets a date in violation of party rules, it's all hypothetical.
+
+In reality, though, neither set of rules is likely to have the desired effect of actually stopping renegade states from jumping ahead. Will Florida really balk at jumping the line again because it would have 12 delegates instead of 50? Maybe. Will a smaller state that loses only a few more delegates under the new RNC rules feel that strongly? Probably not. And will the DNC actually increase penalties on a state that has already set its primary date by deducting more delegates, just to send a message? I guess we'll see.
+
+And delegates remain overrated anyway. Despite the delegate races we've seen in recent years, it's still clear that momentum is a bigger factor in determining presidential nominees. The 2012 GOP primary and 2008 Democratic primary both included relevant delegate counts, but in both cases, the races continued in spite of their being a clear delegate frontrunner and likely nominee.
+
+In addition, all of the states that jumped ahead in 2008 and 2012 got the desired effect of holding an important presidential primary: relevance. And until those early states are actually boycotted by the candidates or somehow excluded from the horse-race/momentum game that is the early primary process, states will have motivation to move up -- delegates be damned.
+
+We aren't yet seeing the so-called ""front-loading"" of the primary calendar, but there's still lots of time. And the off-year (2015) is when the game of leap-frog usually begins.",REAL
+5089,Trump: I wouldn't accept Cruz's endorsement,"""If he gives it, I will not accept it,"" Trump said at a news conference in Cleveland at the close of the Republican National Convention.
+
+""I don't want his endorsement,"" he added. ""Just, Ted, stay home, relax, enjoy yourself.""
+
+He also suggested that if Cruz were to seek the White House, he would set up a super PAC to oppose him.
+
+And Trump, speaking the end of a week dedicated to unifying the party, once again revived the conspiracy theory published in the National Enquirer that linked Cruz's father to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald -- an accusation that has no evidence behind it.
+
+Trump doubles down on denial of linking Cruz's dad to JFK assassination Trump doubles down on denial of linking Cruz's dad to JFK assassination ""I don't know his father. I met him once,"" Trump said. ""I think he's a lovely guy, a lovely guy. All I did was point out the fact that on the cover of the National Enquirer, there was a picture of him and crazy Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast. Now Ted never denied that it was his father."" Trump first suggested that Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of Kennedy the morning of the Indiana primary, citing the tabloid story. Cruz allies have since repeatedly pointed to that low blow from Trump as a reason for refusing to support the Republican nominee. And on Thursday, Cruz referenced the incident, as he drew an angry reaction from members of his state's own GOP delegation. ""I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,"" Cruz said. Trump: Heidi the best thing Cruz has got going for him Trump: Heidi the best thing Cruz has got going for him Trump devoted a significant portion of Friday's event, billed as a thank you to convention staff and organizers, to attacking his former primary rival. Speaking at the RNC on Wednesday, Cruz had declined to endorse Trump, instead urging delegates to vote their ""conscience."" Cruz said that the Trump campaign had seen the speech beforehand, and that he told Trump personally that he would not make an endorsement. But Trump appeared to dispute that on Friday morning, saying Cruz went off-script at the convention. ""So Ted Cruz took his speech that was done, was on the Teleprompter, said hello, then made a statement that wasn't on the speech, then went back to his speech,"" Trump said. ""See, to me, that's dishonorable."" Trump likewise said it was ""dishonorable"" of Cruz to abandon his pledge to support the Republican nominee. But Trump said that Cruz's camp started it with an ad that ran in Utah showing racy photos of his wife, Melania Trump. The ad was put out by a PAC with no official ties to the Cruz campaign, but Trump said Friday that he doesn't buy that. ""Folks, a lot of us are political people,"" Trump said. ""We're not babies. His people are on the PAC."" At one point in his remarks, Trump even suggested forming his own PAC to oppose Cruz if the senator runs again in four years. ""I don't see him winning anyway, frankly. But if he did, it's fine,"" Trump said. ""Although maybe I'll set up a super PAC if he decides to run."" Turning to his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trump asked, ""Are you allowed to set up a super PAC, Mike, if you are the president to fight somebody?""",REAL
+10270,What is Federalism?,"Email 
+We all know that our national government — the one headquartered in Washington, D.C. — is called the “federal government.” The word “federal,” as well as its equivalent in other languages, is also used to describe certain other national governments, such as Mexico’s, and words such as “federation” and “confederacy” are evidently related to it. But what does the term “federal” mean? 
+The word comes from the Latin foedus , meaning “covenant,” and denotes a form of government that, if not wholly invented by America’s Founders, was certainly perfected by them and applied to the governance of a much larger territory than anyone else had ever managed. The proper name for the methodology of creating and sustaining a “federal” government is “federalism.” And many historians and students of political philosophy believe federalism to be among the greatest of all the American Founders’ contributions to civilization. 
+When the Founders first won independence from the British Empire, they drafted a document known as the “Articles of Confederation,” America’s first national constitution. The former 13 colonies, having fought together in the war for independence despite being technically separate, now wished to create a bare-bones national government that would unite them in a loose confederation — that is, a union of mostly independent states wishing to enjoy some of the advantages of political union while maintaining most of their independence. Early America was not the first such confederation; the country of Switzerland had existed (and continues to exist) as a federation among separate so-called cantons speaking four different languages and possessing very different cultures for several centuries before the American founding. And Canada, founded almost a hundred years after the United States and consisting of two major ethnic groups speaking different languages (English and French), also refers to itself as a confederation. 
+For a variety of reasons, the American Founders came to believe that a more robust arrangement than loose confederation was needed. Because of this, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia was convened by representatives from 12 of the original 13 states. (Rhode Island did not participate.) After nearly four months of discussion and sometimes acrimonious debate, the final draft of a new U.S. Constitution contemplating a stronger national government than the Articles of Confederation had countenanced was signed and submitted to the governments of the 13 states for ratification. 
+This entire process, including ratification, had been undertaken by the separate states. They in effect created a national government that, in most respects, was inferior in authority to the states. Those powers delegated to the national government that the states agreed to renounce, such as the power to form treaties with foreign governments, were understood to have resided with the states as well until delegated to the newly formed federal government. The covenant implied by the term “federal” was among the formerly independent states to delegate some of their powers to an agreed-upon central authority. This covenant also bound the federal government to respect the limits on its powers clearly spelled out in the Constitution, and to otherwise defer to the states or to the people — as the 10th Amendment makes explicit. 
+The federal government, in other words, exists entirely by the license of the states, and its powers are derived from theirs, and not the reverse. This was (and remains) in stark contrast with most other national governments, wherein states, provinces, departments, oblasts, or other political subdivisions are created by a pre-existing strong central government. There was, for example, no interest in federalism in the founding of each of modern France’s successive revolutionary republics; the government in Paris merely divided French territory into administrative units known as departments, mostly for bureaucratic convenience. Many of Russia’s oblasts date all the way back to the czars, and the remainder were created during the Soviet period. On the other hand, some modern states, such as Mexico, India, and Argentina, are divided into states or provinces with significant autonomy, but in none of these did the national government arise as a consequence of a pact among previously independent state governments. 
+The intent of the Founders was that the federal government, formed by a covenant among the states, would be primarily their servant and not their master, and that it would likewise serve the people. The division of powers among the states, and between the state and federal governments, would make it much more difficult for would-be tyrants to subvert these aims and to grind the people down as in an Old World autocracy. But the history of the United States since the very early 19th century, only a few decades after its founding, has seen a steady migration of power from the states and the people into the federal government. In a wide array of concerns — from education to public lands to the regulation of food to marriage — the federal government is making itself the supreme authority, while converting the states into mere geographical administrative units expected to implement federal laws, regulations, and rulings, regardless of whether those laws, regulations, and rulings are constitutional. In this way, the doctrine and practice of federalism is being turned on its head. 
+Much of this has taken place, not because the states have permitted the federal government to wrest existing legal authority from the states (although this has taken place, particularly under the pretext of equal rights), but because the federal government has been allowed to usurp power where none has been enumerated in the Constitution — and then claim that states are subordinate in the exercise of such powers. 
+In our day, the system of federalism has been all but abandoned. Most Americans believe that all government authority comes from Washington, trickling down by the consent of elected national rulers to state and local governments. We will not be able to restore constitutional government without first restoring federalism. Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
+Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
+No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language. 
+No product advertisements. 
+Please post comments in English. 
+Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
+8752,Confirmed: Public overwhelmingly (10-to-1) says media want Hillary to win,"Print 
+[Ed. – Every now and then the facade cracks. Somebody asks a question the media haven’t intervened to spin yet, and a bit of truth peeks out about what the public really thinks. CNN is our poster child on this one, but it could be any number of them.] 
+Two national polls released late last week confirmed the public widely recognizes the news media’s agenda in favor of Hillary Clinton and decidedly against Donald Trump, a reality documented in a NewsBusters study earlier in the week. 
+“By nearly 10-1, all those surveyed say the news media, including major newspapers and TV stations, would like to see Clinton rather than Trump elected,” Susan Page and Karina Shedrofsky reported deep into a Thursday USA Today story on the latest USA Today /Suffolk University poll on the Clinton-Trump race. 
+The October 27 article elaborated on how even a solid majority of Clinton supporters also realize journalists want Clinton to win: “That includes 82% of Trump supporters and 74% of Clinton supporters. Six in 10 Trump supporters say the news media is coordinating stories with individual campaigns, rather than acting on its own accord. Three in 10 of Clinton supporters feel that way.”",FAKE
+1162,"Mitt Romney Calls Donald Trump 'A Phony, A Fraud'; Trump Hits Back","The most recent Republican presidential nominee is taking shots at Donald Trump's fitness to be president.
+
+And he's not mincing his words.
+
+Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, called the current GOP front-runner ""a phony, a fraud"" in a speech Thursday morning in Salt Lake City. And he didn't stop there.
+
+Romney described Trump as ""a con artist"" whose demeanor is ""recklessness in the extreme."" As for Trump's record as a ""huge business success""? ""No, he isn't."" And when it comes to Trump's prescriptions to bring back jobs from China and Japan? ""Flimsy at best.""
+
+Trump quickly hit back at Romney during a rally Thursday afternoon, again calling him a ""choke artist"" and saying he was disappointed by his 2012 campaign. ""The guy ran one of the worst campaigns in the history of politics,"" Trump said.
+
+Trump added that Romney ""chickened out"" from running in 2016 because of Trump's candidacy.
+
+Romney spoke for 20 minutes at the Hinckley Institute at the University of Utah and got specific, digging into aspects of Trump's record as a businessman.
+
+""His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat,"" Romney said, referring to a real estate seminar Trump launched in 2005 that was forced to change its name because it wasn't a real university. It is now the subject of multiple lawsuits alleging fraudulent behavior.
+
+Romney then added to the list of failed business ventures: ""There's Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage?"" Romney concluded, ""A business genius he is not.""
+
+Then came the attacks on Trump as a human being.
+
+""After all, this is an individual who mocked a disabled reporter, who attributed a reporter's questions to her menstrual cycle, who mocked a brilliant rival who happened to be a woman due to her appearance, who bragged about his marital affairs, and who laces his public speeches with vulgarity.""
+
+Romney remarks are unprecedented in the way he — the party's most recent presidential nominee — attacks the man who seems on track to secure this year's GOP nomination.
+
+Romney began the speech by saying he is not declaring his own candidacy, adding, ""I am not going to endorse a candidate today.""
+
+He said one of three others still in the race — Sens. Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, or Gov. John Kasich — should be the nominee. Then, without saying so specifically, he seemed to endorse a strategy to bring about a brokered GOP convention this summer.
+
+""Given the current delegate selection process, this means that I would vote for Marco Rubio in Florida, for John Kasich in Ohio, and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state,"" said Romney.
+
+The goal would be to deny Trump the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination on the convention's first ballot in July.
+
+After reports surfaced that Romney was planning to speak out against Trump on Thursday, the billionaire was quick to fire back at Romney on Twitter.
+
+Will Romney's blunt words have any impact? It's not likely Trump supporters will be moved by the critique of a man they see as the ultimate establishment insider — who failed in attempts to win the presidency.
+
+In the past year, Trump has hardly needed excuses to lay into Romney. In stump speeches, he regularly calls Romney a ""loser"" who blew the chance to defeat President Obama in 2012.
+
+In an interview Thursday morning with the Today show, Trump called Romney a ""stiff.""
+
+But it wasn't always so contentious between these two wealthy Republican businessmen. Trump endorsed Romney's 2012 White House bid, and Romney eagerly reciprocated the love.
+
+Romney has been critical of Trump's tone for months, but this speech comes as Trump has won 10 of the first 15 nominating contests, holds a lead in convention delegates and shows little sign of flagging. While many Republican insiders are eager to rally around a non-Trump candidate, there's no indication voters are consolidating around an alternative.
+
+In addition to criticizing his temperament, Romney argued that Trump is unelectable in a general election.
+
+""Trump relishes any poll that reflects what he thinks of himself. But polls are also saying that he will lose to Hillary Clinton,"" said Romney.
+
+This week, a group of more than 60 conservative foreign policy experts wrote an open letter denouncing Trump's statements, concluding that Trump is ""fundamentally dishonest"" and would ""use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world.""",REAL
+4052,"In Jamaica, Obama indicates that he will remove Cuba from terrorism list","President Obama indicated Thursday that he is preparing to announce Cuba’s removal from the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, a move that should quickly lead to a full restoration of diplomatic ties and the opening of embassies in Havana and Washington.
+
+Speaking at a gathering of Caribbean leaders here, Obama said the State Department had finished a review of the issue. There is little doubt that it recommends he drop Cuba from the list, and the only real question is when the announcement will be made.
+
+That could come as early as this week, as Obama attends a summit of Latin American leaders that for the first time will be joined by Cuban President Raúl Castro. Administration officials said a decision on when the president will take action has not been finalized and awaits formal consultation with other affected government agencies.
+
+[Read: Rare poll shows vast majority of Cubans welcome closer ties with U.S.]
+
+But anticipation is already running high, and Caribbean leaders with whom Obama met on Thursday voiced strong approval for the new era in U.S.-Cuba relations. 
+
+In Washington, Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued a statement saying he welcomed what he said was the positive State Department recommendation.
+
+Obama confirmed that the White House had received the review but said he would “not make an announcement today.” He added, “I do think we’re going to be in a position to move forward on opening embassies.”
+
+As he began a meeting with Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, Obama noted that a new poll of Cuban public opinion, published in Thursday’s edition of The Washington Post, demonstrated “overwhelming support” for the normalization process and “overwhelming interest by most Cubans to put one era behind us and move forward.”
+
+[Read: What it means to drop Cuba from list of terrorism sponsors]
+
+A positive announcement on the terror-list decision would be welcomed at the two-day Summit of the Americas, which Obama will attend on Friday and Saturday in Panama with up to 35 other leaders from across the Western Hemisphere. The summit is held every three years, and this will be Castro’s first time in attendance. It will be Obama’s third time, following meetings in 2009 and 2012 that were overshadowed by U.S. insistence that Cuba be excluded.
+
+Administration aides have strongly hinted that Obama and Castro will meet for more than a handshake at the summit, but they have not specified the nature of the encounter.
+
+A White House official said Thurwday: “I can confirm that President Obama spoke with President Castro on Wednesday, before President Obama departed Washington.”
+
+Secretary of State John F. Kerry also met with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla late Thursday in Panama City, the Associated Press reported.
+
+As delegations gathered on the eve of the summit, the presence of communist Cuba made for some extraordinary and also ugly scenes.
+
+In one part of town Thursday, at a forum for the chief executives of major U.S. companies including Facebook, Coca-Cola and Boeing, a Cuban trade official invited America’s corporate leaders to visit the island, telling them his country was open for business.
+
+But at a parallel event at a different location, raucous pro-
+
+Castro crowds disrupted a gathering of nonprofit and civil society groups, blocking Cuban dissidents from participating and denouncing the event’s organizers for daring to invite them.
+
+The tensions, which had boiled over into a wild melee Wednesday in a city park, were a reminder that Cubans’ deep divisions will persist long after the United States reopens an embassy in Havana.
+
+“We are deeply concerned by reports of attacks targeting civil society representatives in Panama for the Summit of the Americas exercising freedom of speech and harassment of those participating in the Summit of the Americas Civil Society Forum,” said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, adding that the U.S. “condemns those who use violence against peaceful protesters.”
+
+The situation was also a sign that while the Castro government is increasingly willing to tinker with its economic model, the experiment doesn’t extend to politics. The government also remains determined to stifle critics well beyond Cuba’s borders.
+
+But Rodrigo Malmierca Díaz, Cuba’s minister of foreign trade and investment, said in a speech that although U.S. sanctions continued to limit American business with the island, Obama’s recent moves were “a positive step.”
+
+Malmierca said the Castro government is seeking more than $8 billion in foreign investment in its new effort to spur growth.
+
+Once Obama approves the recommendation to delist Cuba, Congress will have 45 days to consider the proposal. But legislators have no power to alter such a recommendation except through new legislation, a move that is seen as unlikely. The administration has made the case to Cuba that Obama’s decision — even before the end of the 45 days — should be enough for the two countries to move forward on reopening embassies.
+
+Cuba has said it cannot envision having full diplomatic relations with a country that has charged it with supporting overseas terrorism. In many ways, the U.S. designation, first imposed in 1982, is a Cold War relic. Although the United States strongly objects to Cuba’s domestic policies, it has offered no evidence for decades that Cuba is actively involved in terrorism abroad.
+
+Leaders of 14 of the 15 members of the Caribbean Community, known as Caricom, met here with Obama. Those in attendance ­welcomed the broader move toward normalization, which ­Simpson Miller called “a bold and courageous move . . . for the good of all of our people.” Obama, she said, is “on the right side of history.”
+
+[Obama moves to normalize relations with Cuba as American is released by Havana]
+
+While the focus of the Caricom talks covered regional security and economic development, Obama’s visit here is also part of a larger plan, which includes his outreach to Cuba. The move is directly related to the administration’s efforts to improve U.S. standing in the region and to undermine Venezuela’s attempts to draw the Caribbean states into its orbit. For years, Venezuela has used cut-rate oil to buy anti-
+
+American support from cash-strapped Caribbean governments.
+
+In recent weeks, Caracas, with money problems of its own, has rolled back energy subsidies to Caricom members. With an energy security program announced in January by Vice President Biden, the Obama administration hopes to help fund island infrastructure to receive and use U.S. gas and petroleum, and then to subsidize U.S. sales of energy products to the Caribbean.
+
+As they try to wean island governments away from Venezuela, administration officials have also attempted to play down their difficulties with Caracas. Thomas A. Shannon, a senior aide to Secretary of State John F. Kerry, was in Venezuela on Thursday for meetings with President Nicolás Maduro. The visit aimed to give at least the impression that the United States is trying to smooth over its differences with the Maduro government before the Caricom meeting and the larger Summit of the Americas.
+
+Miroff reported from Panama City. David Nakamura in Washington also contributed to this story.
+
+Where U.S.-Cuba relations stand and what may change
+
+At the Summit of the Americas, focus is likely to be on the U.S. and Cuba
+
+Argument between U.S., Venezuela puts Cuba in awkward position
+
+Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
+7114,Turkey Rounds Up Erdogan’s Political Opponents as Crackdown Widens,"November 4, 2016 Turkey Rounds Up Erdogan’s Political Opponents as Crackdown Widens 
+Salahhatin Demirtas, once hailed as the “Kurdish Obama,” among the pro-Kurdish opposition lawmakers held on Friday 
+A Turkish court placed the two leaders of a major pro-Kurdish opposition party under arrest on Friday in a dramatic widening of a political crackdown that followed July’s failed military coup that will raise concerns about the future of Turkey’s parliamentary democracy. 
+Police detained the co-chairs of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahhatin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, early on Friday morning along with nine other lawmakers. The measures against pro-Kurdish officials more than three months after president Recep Tayyip Erdogan narrowly survived an attempt by part of the military to seize power on July 15 could also open a new season of conflict with armed Kurdish insurgents. Hours after the arrests, a car bombing reportedly killed at least eight people in the city of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish-majority southeast of Turkey.",FAKE
+10444,Trump controlled by Mossad,"By wmw_admin on October 30, 2016 By Timothy Fitzpatrick — The Fitzpatrick Informer Oct 29, 2016 Anno Domini Donald Trump and Mossad asset Ghislaine Maxwell out on the town in New York City in 1997. Click to enlarge Part I Any inquisitive person should be asking themself why a seemingly anti-establishment candidate like Donald Trump has been allowed to get as far as he has in the U.S. presidential race for election November 8. The simplest answer is that he isn’t anti-establishment and is only fronting a very convincing facade for public consumption. The family-made rich man has been strategically propped up as the all-accommodating GOP extremist opponent of candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, herself part of the very same establishment and even personal friend to Trump—at least prior to the race. The two candidates come from the same organized criminal syndicate that leads back to Israel, its murderous Mossad terrorist organization, and the Lansky international crime syndicate. Furthermore, as we shall see, Trump is nothing more than a puppet of Mossad and is likely under their control through opportunism and, darker yet, blackmail. What Trump and his cronies all share in common is sexual compromise and their loyalty to the international Judeo-masonic power structure. Sexual blackmail and Illuminism Jeffrey Epstein and alleged child sex procurer Ghislaine Maxwell Perhaps the most powerful form of blackmail is that which involves sexual matters, and so it is that throughout human history, many men of power have been brought down upon revelation of some sexual scandal. It was through this channel that Adam Weishaupt’s illuminism (blackmail) was so successful in his time through to today (Weishaupt stole the Catholic sacrament of confession and used for his own personal gain—so that he could gain knowledge of people’s sins in order to use it against them). Since then, it has proven to be the most useful form of blackmail employed, especially in the political world. Every person in a position of power should be suspected of being controlled through this form of blackmail, since the Judeo-masonic cryptocracy controls virtually every aspect of organized government, the press, and the financial system, to name a few. You may have heard of the bizarre sexual initiation of Yale University’s Skull and Bones secret society, where the would-be bonesman reveals his sexual secrets to his fellow initiates and initiators. [ i ] From the very start of their societal ascent, you could say, a bonesman is blackmailed and falls under control of the society. Former Israeli Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky revealed in his first tell-all book about the Mossad: “… there are three major “hooks” for recruiting people: money; emotion, be it revenge or ideology; and sex.” [ ii ] This scenario is played out in virtually every sphere of influence at one degree (pun intended) or another. As it happens, both presidential candidates are connected to sexual scandals, the likes of which we shall explore in Trump’s life. Mossad’s child-sex ring procurers Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein",FAKE
+7146,THE POLLS CAN NO LONGER BE RIGGED THIS ELECTION,"We Are Change 
+In this video Luke Rudkowski interviews Matt a computer programmer who’s allowing everyone to run there own election polls. Already 800,000 people in the U.S were independently polled and the findings contradict the main stream media polls.
+https://www.callforamerica.com/ 
+The post THE POLLS CAN NO LONGER BE RIGGED THIS ELECTION appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+5538,New Lunar Craters Mystery | Space News,"« on: Today at 01:06:08 AM » New Lunar Craters Mystery | Space News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz0GhlVKQuk Oct 26, 2016 ThunderboltsProject New scientific reports are once again forcing planetary scientists to rewrite the history of our own moon. Study reveals lunar surface features younger than assumed http://phys.org/news/2016-10-reveals-lunar-surface-features-younger.html A new study into the lunar surface contradicts the notion that cratering on the moon occurs incrementally over vast eons of time. A team of scientists studied several thousands of before and after images of the moons’ surface, with the visual data covering nearly a million square miles. What they found is that lunar cratering appears to occur at a rate more than 100 times faster than the standard impact model has predicted. Could electrical processes on the moon be responsible for the cratering? Our Electrically Scarred Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9WOucaz-0 The Missing Ceres Craters Mystery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibSeyMzPClU Electric Crater Chains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5EjXhtKagg Logged",FAKE
+2004,Cruz's immigration gambit,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+9804,Donald Trump Wins The Presidency In Historic Victory,"4 Replies 
+Jonathan Turley – It appears that that “ basket of deplorables ” was a bit larger than Hillary Clinton expected. I was up to 4 am at Fox participating in the coverage of the election from New York. This was my fourth such presidential election as part a media team and it was fascinating to watch [results] unfold at the campaign headquarters at Fox. 
+History will judge the decisions of Democrats leaders in this election. As I have previously written, the Democratic National Committee and establishment (including allies in the media) did everything they could to engineer the election of Hillary Clinton. While they had an extremely popular candidate in Bernie Sanders as well as Vice President Joe Biden, they insisted on advancing Clinton despite her being deeply disliked and the ultimate symbol of the establishment that the public was rallying against. 
+As the close race indicated, the selection of a Sanders or Biden would have likely produced a sweep of both the White House and the Senate for the Democrats. Instead, they lost them both by forcing voters to vote for someone with record negatives. 
+Voters were clear that they did not want Clinton, but the Democrats assumed that the “lesser of two evils” approach would again prevail. They were wrong. Many people voted for third party candidates and many people on the fence refused to pick the candidate most associated with the establishment and the status quo. 
+I expect that history will judge the work of figures like Debbie Wasserman-Shultz and Donna Brazile harshly in the roles that they played and more generally in the failure of Democratic leaders to heed the clear demand from voters for a change in leadership. Hillary Clinton was a talented and historic nominee. However, she was also the very symbol of the establishment and heavily laden with the type of associations that the public was clearly reacting against. 
+The wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania shows precisely how reckless and cynical the DNC strategy proved to be. Clinton won only 18 states and the District of Columbia, though it did earn her 242 electoral votes. Now for the first time in decades, the Democrats have handed a Republican president both houses of Congress. They solved gridlock but not in the way that they had hoped. 
+I was astonished to see Clinton decline to speak to her supporters who had wait so loyally at their campaign headquarters. While she did concede over the telephone to Trump, I thought it was bad form not to come down to the headquarters and address the nation and her supporters. They worked incredibly hard and the loss was a terrible blow for them. They deserved better in my view and I felt truly sorry for both their disappointment and effective abandonment at that moment. 
+Looking at the results coming into the headquarters, it was clear that no further “counting” would change the result as Clinton’s telephone call affirmed a short while later. It is the final obligation of a candidate in a presidential campaign to be with your supporters and show the nation that the transition of power would proceed, as it always has, in an orderly fashion. It was highly ironic given the well-founded criticism of the statement of Trump that he might not accept the results of the election — a view driven home by Chris Wallace (who was the gold standard for moderators in these election debates). 
+The greatest loser in this election was the mainstream media. As I previously discussed , I believe that Trump did bring much of the negative coverage on himself. However, I saw many journalists discard any semblance of neutrality in their coverage, as vividly shown in Wikileaks emails of coordination with the Clinton campaign. The priority for the media should be a serious reexamination of its coverage in this election. 
+In the end, the public wanted change and they got it. The fact is that many of the public has long felt that they no longer controlled their government and they were right. That is what makes this so revolutionary and transformative for American politics. Whatever a Trump Administration may hold, it will be shock to the system and that is precisely what tens of millions of Americans wanted. SF Source Jonathan Turley  ",FAKE
+911,Trump slams GOP nominating process as top aide accuses Cruz of 'gestapo tactics' to win delegates,"Republican front-runner Donald Trump took a new round of shots at the GOP's nominating process Sunday, while his newly-hired convention manager Paul Manafort accused Trump's rival Ted Cruz of using ""gestapo tactics"" to earn delegate support at nominating conventions across the country.
+
+Speaking to thousands packed in a frigid airport hangar in western New York, Trump argued anew that the person who wins the most votes in the primary process should automatically be the GOP nominee.
+
+""What they're trying to do is subvert the movement with crooked shenanigans,"" Trump said. The real estate mogul compared himself to Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who is well behind Hillary Clinton in that party's delegate race despite a string of state wins.
+
+""We should have won it a long time ago,"" Trump said. ""But, you know, we keep losing where we're winning.""
+
+Trump was introduced at the rally by Buffalo real estate developer and 2010 New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who said that talk of a brokered Republican convention ""suggests that they can take that right away from the American people to choose their leader.""
+
+Manafort, a veteran GOP strategist who worked on White House campaigns for President Gerald Ford in 1976 and Kansas Sen. Bob Dole in 1996, told NBC's ""Meet The Press"" that the Cruz campaign was using a ""scorched earth"" approach in which ""they don't care about the party. If they don't get what they want, they blow it up.""
+
+Manafort added that the Trump campaign is filing protests because the Cruz campaign is ""not playing by the rules.”
+
+“You go to his county conventions and you see the gestapo tactics,"" he said.
+
+
+
+Trump has a 743-to-545 delegate lead over the Texas senator, with the end of the primary/caucus season fast approaching. Over the weekend, Cruz completed his sweep of Colorado's 34 delegates by locking up the remaining 13 at the party's state convention in Colorado Springs. He already had collected 21 delegates and visited the state to try to pad his numbers there.
+
+Cruz came out ahead in the Colorado contest, though, after dedicating resources to the convention process and putting in personal face time on the day of the final vote, something Trump did not do. The Trump campaign’s flyers in Colorado naming their preferred delegates were also riddled with errors. While Trump aides blamed the state party for giving them bad information, the party pushed back.
+
+And on Twitter, the Colorado GOP retweeted a message, saying: “You may not like CO's caucus system, but it's representative, and claiming delegates were 'stolen' insults the Republicans who participated.”
+
+Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier also retweeted a message saying the rules “were publicly available for months to people who know how to read and understand words.”
+
+Polls show Trump holding a sizable lead in the next big state contest, New York's April 19 primary, but Cruz is trying to chip away at Trump's home-state advantage in conservative pockets of the Empire State.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich is third with 143 delegates, behind Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who ended his campaign March 15 with 171 committed delegates.
+
+Manafort insisted Sunday that he’s still connected enough to wrangle delegates.
+
+""You would be surprised who's been calling me over the last week and where they're from,"" he said. ""Do I know the 25-, 30-year-old delegates? No. Do I know the people who push buttons in a lot of these states? Yes.""
+
+However, Manafort made clear the Trump campaign won’t use strong-arm tactics.
+
+“That’s not my style,” he told NBC. “That’s not Donald Trump’s style. That’s Ted Cruz’s style.”
+
+Manafort also dismissed the notion that the Trump campaign has missed opportunities to get delegates through insider tactics and boasted that Cruz has and will continue to lose that way.
+
+He said the Trump campaign has gotten all of the committee spots in Alabama and that it “wiped [Cruz] out"" in a similar effort in Michigan.
+
+“You’re going to see Ted Cruz get skunked in Nevada,” Manafort added.
+
+Manafort made clear the race to get 1,237 delegates will likely extend until early June, which includes California’s GOP primary, with 172 delegates, and the New Jersey primary with 51 at stake.
+
+“I’m confident there are several ways to get to 1,237,” he said.
+
+Trump would need to win nearly 60 percent of all the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination before this summer's convention in Cleveland. So far, he's winning about 45 percent.
+
+Manafort insisted being hired by the Trump campaign was not a shakeup, particularly amid Cruz’s come-from-behind win last week in Wisconsin.
+
+He argued the campaign season is entering its end stages and that Trump must move from the free-wheeling, free-media style that made the first-time candidate the GOP presidential front-runner.
+
+“Donald Trump has recognized that,” Manafort said, while arguing Trump still runs the campaign.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8376,Battle for the Ages,"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+Donald Trump’s red wave on Election Day was an unprecedented body blow against neoliberalism. The stupid early-1990s prediction about the ‘end of history’ turned into a – possible – shock of the new. The new global nativism? Perhaps a new push towards democratic socialism? Too early to tell. 
+Once again. A body blow, not a death blow. Like the cast of The Walking Dead, the zombie neoliberal elite simply won’t quit. For the Powers That Be/Deep State/Wall Street axis, there’s only one game in town, and that is to win, at all costs. Failing that, to knock over the whole chessboard, as in hot war. 
+Hot war has been postponed, at least for a few years. Meanwhile, it’s enlightening to observe the collective American and Eurocrat despair about a world they can’t understand anymore; Brexit, Trumpquake, the rise of the far-right across the West. For the insulated financial/tech/think-tank elites of liquid modernity, criticism of neoliberalism – with is inbuilt deregulation, privatization a-go-go, austerity obsession – is anathema. 
+The angry, white, blue collar Western uprising is the ultimate backlash against neoliberalism – an instinctive reaction against the rigged economic casino capitalism game and its subservient political arms. That’s at the core of Trump winning non-college white voters in Wisconsin by 28 points. Blaming “whitelash” , racism, WikiLeaks or Russia is no more than childish diversionary tactics. 
+The key question is whether the backlash may engender a new Western drive towards democratic socialism – read David Harvey’s books for the road map – or just nostalgic nationalism raging against the neoliberal Washington/EU/NAFTA/ globalization machine. 
+Read my lips: much lower taxes 
+Trump is proposing to turn the tables on the neoliberal game. Throughout his campaign he criminalized free trade – the essence of globalization – for decimating the American working class, even as US businesses blamed free trade for forcing them to squeeze workers’ wages. 
+So let’s see how Trump will be able to impose his priorities. In parallel to addressing the appalling structural decline in US manufacturing, he wants to pull a China: a massive $1 trillion infrastructure project over 10 years via public-private partnerships and private investments encouraged by lower taxes. That’s supposed to create a wealth of jobs. 
+Lower corporate taxes in this case translate into a whopping $3 trillion over 10 years, something like 1.6 percent of GDP. That would be the way to incite huge multinationals to repatriate the hundreds of billions of dollars in profits stashed abroad. This fiscal shock would create 25 million jobs in the US over the next 10 years, and propel a 4 percent growth rate. 
+And then there’s the protectionist drive that will renegotiate NAFTA and kill TPP for good. Not to mention raising import tariffs over manufactured products (many by de-localized US multinationals) imported from China and Mexico. 
+It’s open to fierce debate how Trumponomics will manage to square the circle; with more economic growth fueled by less taxes, imports will rise to satisfy internal demand. But if these products are subjected to stiffer tariffs, they will become more expensive, and inflation will inevitably rise. 
+Anyway, the bottom line of protectionist Trumponomics would be a huge blow against global trade. Deglobalization, anyone? 
+Asia braces for impact 
+Predictably, the heart of deglobalization will be the Trump-China relationship. Throughout the campaign, Trump blamed China for currency manipulation and proposed a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports. 
+In Hong Kong banking circles, no one believes in it. Key argument: the already strapped basket of “deplorables” simply won’t have the means to pay more for these Chinese imports. 
+Another thing entirely would be for Trumponomics to find mechanisms to hurt US companies that de-localize in Asia. That would translate into serious problems for outsourcing Meccas such as India and the Philippines. Outsourcing in the Philippines, for instance, serves mostly US companies and attracts revenue as crucial to the nation as total Filipino worker remittances from abroad, something like 9 percent of GDP. 
+It’s quite enlightening in this context to consider what Narayana Murthy – founder of Indian IT major Infosys – told the CNBC TV-18 network; “What is in the best interest of America is for its corporations to succeed, for its corporations to create more jobs… to export more… so I’m very positive.” 
+Four months ago Nomura Holdings Inc. issued a report titled “Trumping Asia” . No less than 77 percent of respondents expected Trump to brand China a currency manipulator; and 75 percent predicted he will impose tariffs on exports from China, South Korea and Japan. 
+So no wonder all across Asia the next months will be nerve-wracking. Asia – and not only China – is the factory of the world. Any Trump trade restriction over China will reverberate all across Asia. 
+Brace for impact: deglobalized Trumponomics vs. Neoliberalism will be a battle for the ages. 
+Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). His latest book is Empire of Chaos . He may be reached at . (Reprinted from RT by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+7090,Discrimination and Condemnation: Australia’s War on Boat People,"Email 
+The boat, along with other means of travel, are often undertaken as matters of freedom. Movement keeps one alive in times of peace, and in conflict. The Australian government, and those backing its practices, have wished over the years to limit, if not halt such movement altogether. 
+Since the last decade, extreme measures have been implemented that effectively qualify Australian sovereignty while singling out a particular breed of asylum seeker. The former aspect of that policy was specifically undertaken to excise the entire mainland from being qualified as territorially valid to arrive in. 
+The entire policy effectively assumed a military character, most conspicuously under the Abbott government’s embrace of a creepily crypto-fascist border protection force, equipped with uniforms and patriotic purpose. Operation Sovereign Borders effectively meant that the refugee and asylum seeker were fair game – not to be processed and settled equitably with a minimum of fuss, but to be repelled, their boats towed back to Indonesia, and people smugglers bribed. 
+An entire intelligence-security complex has also been created, fed by private contractors and held in place by the promise of a two-year prison sentence for entrusted officials in possession of “protected” information. 
+Such statements as those made today by Prime Minister Turnbull, announced with note of grave urgency at a press conference, tend to resemble a typical pattern in Australian politics since the Howard years. 
+The borders, even if supposedly secure, are deemed to be in a permanent state of siege, forever battered by potential invaders keen to swindle Parliament and the Australian people. Yes, boasted the Abbott, and now Turnbull government, the boats laden with desperate human cargo have stopped coming. Yes, all is well on the sea lanes in terms of repelling such unwanted arrivals. But for all of this, the island continent is being assaulted by characters of will, those keen to avail themselves of desperate people and their desire for a secure, safe haven. 
+The policy has also received international attention from such establishment institutions as The New York Times. “While that arrangement,” went an editorial this month, “largely stopped the flow of boats packed with people that set off from Indonesia weekly, it has landed these refugees – many from Iran, Myanmar, Iraq and Afghanistan – in what amounts to cruel and indefinite detention.” 
+As the editorial continued to observe, “This policy costs Australian taxpayers a staggering $US419,000 per detainee a year and has made a nation that has historically welcomed immigrants a violator of international law.” 
+While this obscenity has been powdered and perfumed as humanitarian, designed to halt the spate of drowning cases at sea, the latest announcements have abandoned the stance. “They must know,” claimed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, “that the door to Australia is closed to those who seek to come here by boat with a people smuggler.” 
+Finally, an honest statement twinning two perceived demons in Australian refugee policy: the people smuggler and the asylum seeker, both equivalently horrible to Australian authorities. To that end, not a single asylum seeker arriving by boat will be permitted to settle in Australia. This policy will also affect arrivals from July 2013. 
+Such a stance of finality seems little different to pervious ones made by Abbott’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd. What is troubling about it is the element of monomania: never will any asylum seeker, who had arrived after a certain date, will be permitted to settle in Australia. 
+The intention there is to make sure that those designated refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, facilitated by Australia’s draconian offshore regime, will have the doors shut, effectively ensuring a more prolonged, torturous confinement. Absurdly, they will then be permitted to slum away indefinitely in such indigent places as Nauru, with a population hostile to those from the Middle East and Africa. 
+Turnbull’s stance may also suggest a degree of desperation. Not all has gone swimmingly with the offshore detention complex. The PNG Supreme Court rendered an aspect of the Australian refugee policy redundant in finding that detaining individuals indefinitely on Manus Island breached constitutional rights. 
+Peter Dutton, the hapless Minister for Immigration, has struggled in managing what can only be described by the border security obsessives as an administrative disaster. Rather than admitting to the realities that searching for refuge over dangerous routes will always find a market, the Australian government persists in a cruel delusion that continues to deny international refugee law while punishing the victims.",FAKE
+5146,Obama hits the trail for Hillary Clinton: Will he help or hurt?,"President Obama campaigns Tuesday with Mrs. Clinton for the first time. He's more popular than she is, and can excite the Democratic base. But Obama also faces risks.
+
+President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived at Yangon International Airport in Yangon, Myanmar in 2012. The last time they traveled together was to the country, which had recently adopted democratic reforms. They’ve been bitter rivals, allies and colleagues. When they take the stage at their first joint campaign appearance on July, 5, 2016, Obama and Clinton will show off a new phase in their storied relationship: co-dependents.
+
+President Obama is set to hit the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton for the first time, the next step in what Democrats hope is a march to four more years in the White House.
+
+Mr. Obama has been itching to campaign for Mrs. Clinton for a while. But there was this little thing called the primaries that had to play out first. Then there was the Orlando massacre on June 12, which forced the cancellation of their first joint appearance, which was to take place a few days later.
+
+Obama, too, has been mindful of Bernie Sanders, who still hasn’t endorsed Clinton, and of Senator Sanders’s supporters. Still, polls show that most Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters are ready to vote for Clinton, so the big question is  turnout. That’s where Obama comes in, beginning Tuesday, when he joins Clinton on stage in Charlotte, N.C. He’s more popular than Clinton, and can (Democrats hope) rally the troops. But Obama also faces risks as a surrogate.
+
+Here’s a list of the ways Obama can both help and hurt Clinton’s candidacy. First, the positives:
+
+He’s better at campaigning. There’s a reason he beat Clinton in 2008, when she was the heavy favorite going in to win the Democratic nomination. He’s the master at soaring rhetoric, and she is all about 10-point plans.
+
+He has higher approval ratings. Obama is more popular than Clinton. His job approval rating is hovering around 50 percent, which is pretty good, considering that he was “under water” for much of the last three years – that is, more voters disapproved of his job performance than approved.  Clinton, in contrast, is deeply underwater, seen favorably by only 40 percent of Americans and 56 percent unfavorably. Maybe Obama can offer her some coattails.
+
+As president, Obama still commands the bully pulpit. Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump is a master at attracting media attention, but Obama is pretty good at it too. Wherever Obama goes, so do the media – and that’s good for Clinton when he’s campaigning for her. Attracting free media, which amplifies her message at no cost, saves campaign cash for other purposes, such as get-out-the-vote efforts.
+
+Obama can troll Mr. Trump in a way Clinton can’t. Obama clearly loves to make fun of Trump. Remember the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, when Obama mocked him mercilessly as the real estate mogul sat stone-faced in the audience? Trump had harangued Obama on his place of birth to the point where Obama released his long-form birth certificate just to end the distraction, and at that dinner, Obama got his payback.
+
+Obama has a deeper connection to key constituencies. Obama won the presidency twice in part by winning big among minorities, young voters, and single women. Clinton is beating Trump handily among all three constituencies, but Democrats are concerned about getting those groups excited about turning out. Obama is expected to play an important role in inspiring those groups, especially minorities and Millennials, to show up at the polls.
+
+Obama is sharing his campaign data. The president’s vaunted “data-driven machine,” the operation that elected him twice, is now at Clinton’s disposal – including Obama’s massive email list. That explains all the emails showing up in supporters’ inboxes offering a chance to go see the Broadway musical “Hamilton” with Clinton.
+
+Fundraising. Obama is still a major rainmaker for his party, and that benefits everyone up and down the Democratic ticket.
+
+Obama is no longer the ‘change’ candidate. Eight years ago, Obama was the candidate of hope and change. Now an older, grayer Obama represents the status quo, which for some Americans isn’t good, and Trump is the candidate of change. So it will be harder to jazz up crowds.
+
+It’s the Republicans’ ‘turn.’ After two terms of the Democratic Obama, voters would usually be ready for a swing of the pendulum toward the GOP. So Obama and Clinton are trying to buck history. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and unorthodox policies give the Democrats hope. But Obama has to be mindful that, in theory, this shouldn’t be a Democratic year.
+
+Obama can’t campaign everywhere. He'll avoid solidly red states. Even in battleground states, the president has to pick his spots, and that probably means avoiding heavily blue-collar areas. Pennsylvania is one example. It’s shaping up to be an important state for Trump, if he’s going to have a shot at winning. But after Obama’s secretly recorded comments during the 2008 campaign about voters in small-town Pennsylvania who “cling to guns or religion,” he should probably steer clear of rural western Pennsylvania and similar areas in the old rust belt.
+
+Obama and Clinton differ on some important policies. Under pressure from Sanders’s unexpectedly strong campaign, Clinton has moved to Obama’s left on issues relevant to working Americans, such as trade and the minimum wage. And she remains more hawkish on military intervention abroad.
+
+In a way, these policy differences help refute the idea that a Clinton presidency would be just a third Obama term. But if voters bring them up during campaign appearances, it could be awkward for both the president and Clinton.
+
+Obama has to beware the Trump trap. Too much trolling could drag the president down.
+
+Bottom line: Obama can do a lot of good for Clinton over the next four months, as he works to convince American voters that they should warm up to her just as he did. But there’s only so much a lame-duck president can do for his hoped-for successor.",REAL
+10,Scalia’s death comes just a month before the court’s biggest abortion case in years,"The unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia comes less than a month before the Supreme Court hears its biggest abortion case in a decade.
+
+On March 2, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstadt, a challenge to a Texas law that has closed about half of the state's abortion clinics since 2013.
+
+If the law is allowed to stand, abortion rights supporters say it would close all but about 10 of Texas's abortion clinics. Advocates on both sides of the abortion issue say this case could be the most important decision on abortion in 25 years.
+
+Scalia has been a staunch opponent of abortion rights, and critical of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1972, which established a constitutional right to abortion. ""You want a right to abortion? There's nothing in the Constitution about that,"" Scalia said in a 2011 interview.
+
+Scalia was a near-certain vote in favor of upholding the Texas law. Without him, things get a bit more complicated. But the key thing to know is this: Without Scalia, its very hard to see a world where the Supreme Court affirms the Texas law's constitutionality.
+
+Here's why: There are almost certainly four votes against the law from the Court's liberal wing. And it's possible there are five votes, as justice Anthony Kennedy has been a swing vote on abortion cases. A 5-3 decision would be the best case for abortion rights supporters, as it would repeal the Texas law and prevent other states from passing similar restrictions.
+
+The best case outcome for the abortion rights opponents, meanwhile, is a 4-4 tie. In that case, Supreme Court rules say that the decision of the circuit court is left in place without setting any constitutional precedent.
+
+In that case, this would let the Texas law stand, since the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the restriction. That would be far from an ideal outcome for the law's challengers and would leave abortion access greatly restricted in Texas.
+
+But it also wouldn't give other states the clear signal that these types of restrictions are constitutional — something that abortion opponents would very much like to see.
+
+The case, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, was brought by Texas abortion providers challenging Texas's House Bill 2, which the legislature enacted into law in July 2013.
+
+That bill has two main restrictions, both of which the clinics challenge in this case. One was a requirement that all abortion clinics have admitting privileges at local hospitals. That piece of HB2 went into effect in September 2013, and forced 14 clinics that could not obtain admitting privileges to close.
+
+HB2 also requires abortion clinics to become ambulatory surgical centers, essentially mini emergency rooms that can handle complex medical situations. Ambulatory surgical centers, for example, must have wide enough hallways to fit a gurney and larger operating rooms than abortion clinics typically use.
+
+Abortion clinics in Texas have said that upgrading to these new standards would cost upward of $1 million. They have argued that the new requirements are unnecessary, as abortions tend to have a very low complication risk. Approximately 0.05 percent of first-trimester abortions have complications that require hospital care.
+
+Texas clinics have said because these upgrades are so costly, many facilities would close. Their lawyers previous stated that about 900,000 of Texas's 4.5 million reproductive-age women would live more than 150 miles from a clinic if HB2 stands.
+
+The Supreme Court has, in previous rulings, articulated standards for judging the constitutionality of abortion restrictions like these. And one key standard the justices have settled on is whether a restriction places an ""undue burden"" on women seeking to terminate a pregnancy.
+
+The Supreme Court has previously defined an undue burden as a law with the ""purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus."" The Supreme Court has previously ruled that laws requiring women to notify their spouses of their abortion, for example, are an undue burden, as it could make it impossible for some women to access the procedure.
+
+The Texas law requires abortion clinics to become mini emergency rooms
+
+The Texas clinics argue that HB2 ought to fit the ""undue burden"" definition: Because it would force most Texas abortion clinics to close, it would become the type of ""substantial obstacle"" that the Supreme Court has previously found to be unconstitutional.
+
+If the Texas law stands, the clinics argue, ""every woman in Texas would have to live under a legal regime that fails to respect her equal citizenship status and would force her to grapple with unnecessary and substantial obstacles as a condition of exercising her protected liberty.""
+
+Texas has defended its new restrictions as not placing a substantial burden on those seeking abortions. As evidence, it points to the fact that the admitting privileges portion of the law has been in effect for more than a year, forcing 14 clinics to close. The clinics, they pointed out, presented no evidence of women who wanted to obtain an abortion not being able to do so.
+
+The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals used that argument to uphold the law in October.
+
+""Demand for abortion services in Texas may decrease in the future, as it has done nationally over the past several years,"" the Fifth Circuit ruled. ""The record lacks evidence that the previous closures ... have caused women to be turned away from clinics. Without any evidence ... plaintiffs do not appear to ... show that the ambulatory surgical center provision will result in insufficient clinic capacity.""
+
+The Fifth Circuit continued that ""the evidence does not indicate, without specificity, that by requiring all abortion clinics to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers, the overall costs of accessing an abortion provider will likely increase.""
+
+Texas has also challenged the clinics' argument that the new restrictions are unnecessary because abortion is generally a safe procedure, saying it's not the place of the courts to second-guess the possible outcome of the law.
+
+Abortion rights supporters have pointed to new research that suggests the state was wrong on this. According to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, major Texas cities have seen significant increases in wait times at abortion clinics. In Dallas, where the average wait time for an abortion was five days prior to HB2, women may now wait as long as 20 days.",REAL
+8505,The Empire Files: Inside Palestine's Refugee Camps,"The Empire Files: Inside Palestine's Refugee Camps The Empire Files: Inside Palestine's Refugee Camps By 0 59 
+In her first on-the-ground report from Palestine, Abby Martin gives a first-hand look into two of the most attacked refugee camps in the West Bank: Balata and Aida camps. 
+With millions of displaced Palestinians around the world, hundreds of thousands are refugees in their own country — many have lived packed into these refugee camps after being ethnically cleansed from their villages just miles away.",FAKE
+2893,New Saudi king ascends to the throne as terrorism threat grows,"At 3 a.m. on a cold desert night earlier this month, four Islamic State militants carrying guns, grenades and cash slipped into Saudi Arabia here through a hole in the new heavy fencing that separates this country from Iraq.
+
+They were immediately spotted by Saudi border guards in a state-of-the-art control room 35 miles away, appearing first as blips on radar, then as ghostly white figures on night-vision cameras scanning the desolate desert landscape.
+
+Heavily armed troops were dispatched to confront them. When the battle ended, the four intruders — all Saudi citizens — and three Saudi soldiers were dead, including the local base commander, who was killed when a militant pretending to surrender detonated a suicide vest.
+
+“Thanks to God and our new systems, we are ready for whatever they try,” said the new commander, Ali Mohammed Assiri, whose troops have now been issued orders to shoot on sight anyone breaching the border. “If you are not willing to defend the country, you don’t deserve to live in it.”
+
+Except for Syria and Iraq, where the Islamic State controls territory, no country is more directly threatened by Islamist militants than Saudi Arabia, which the extremists regard as a traitor to Islam for Riyadh’s close associations with the United States and the West.
+
+No king of Saudi Arabia has ascended the throne amid more regional turmoil than King Salman, who was crowned Friday upon the death of his brother King Abdullah.
+
+With war raging in Syria and tensions with Iran increasing, Saudi Arabia is threatened by a disintegration of the national government in Yemen across its southern border and by the Islamic State militants who are dominating the Iraqi desert just over its northern border.
+
+Salman indirectly mentioned the threat of rising violence and regional instability on Friday in his first speech to the Saudi people, saying that “the Arab and Islamic nation is in dire need today to be united and maintain solidarity.”
+
+Militants have staged four attacks inside the kingdom in the past six months, resulting in the deaths of eight civilians, 11 police or border guards and 13 militants, according to Saudi officials.
+
+As in the recent attacks in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper and a kosher supermarket, most of the Saudi attacks have been carried out by homegrown radicals influenced or trained by the Islamic State, al-Qaeda or other extremist groups. Saudi authorities said that they have arrested 293 people in connection with the incidents and that 260 of them are Saudi nationals.
+
+Saudi officials are anticipating more attacks, either by some of the 2,200 or so Saudi citizens they say have gone to fight with the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq, or by others who infiltrate Saudi Arabia’s borders, especially the nearly 600-mile frontier with Iraq, which runs mainly through empty desert.
+
+“They are targeting Saudi Arabia, and they want to have a very big terrorist act in this country,” said Gen. Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
+
+The Saudi government has responded by sharply beefing up border security and by creating new laws that give the government broad power to arrest anyone who joins, or even praises, the radical groups — which has led to complaints from human rights groups that the laws are being unfairly used against activists who merely criticize the government.
+
+Officials have also made it illegal for imams in the country’s 85,000 mosques to give sermons sympathizing with religious extremists. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs has launched the al-Sakinah Campaign for Dialogue, an anti-radicalization program that includes a Web site offering anonymous counseling.
+
+“We are also educating the imams to tell people that what ISIS is saying is against Islam,” said Tawfeeq al-Sediry, Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister of Islamic affairs. “They represent violence. We represent the real Islam.”
+
+Saudi officials said they have also tightened controls on charities suspected of channeling money to radicals. Wealthy Saudi individuals are widely believed to be a significant source of funding for the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
+
+Critics point to that funding as evidence that many Saudis quietly support the Islamic State, seeing it as a Sunni Muslim force fighting to protect other Sunnis, especially in Syria and Iraq, where Shiite Muslims control the government with the support of Saudi Arabia’s chief rival, Iran.
+
+“In the Middle East, it’s nothing new: You create your own terrorists, then pretend you are fighting them,” said Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi activist who runs the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington. “The Saudis didn’t even invent it, but they’re good at it.”
+
+Ahmed said the Saudi government is “playing both sides” to give “the appearance that they are the good guys.”
+
+“They get a lot of political traction out of it,” Ahmed said. “To the Americans, they are the guardians of safety, and no matter how horrible they are on human rights, the way they treat women and all that, they are the ones who are keeping things under control. Really, they are very clever.”
+
+Awadh al-Badi, a researcher and scholar at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, rejects those assertions. He says the Islamic State is offering arguments that attract some idealistic young Muslims.
+
+Islamic State leaders say they want to establish a vast Islamic caliphate or “khalifa,” including taking control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which are in Saudi Arabia.
+
+“For many young people, the idea of khalifa is the idea of the great Islam,” Badi said. “The idea itself is attractive to many people who aspire to see a return of Islamic dignity and influence.”
+
+One Western diplomat based in Riyadh said Saudi cooperation in the fight against Islamist militants has been unwavering. He noted that Saudi Arabia has joined the U.S.-led military coalition against the Islamic State and sent fighter jets to bomb militant targets — including one F-16 piloted by King Salman’s son Prince Khaled.
+
+“We have had to fight the perception that the Saudis are not doing enough,” the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “From here, we think they are doing plenty. They tell us, ‘We’ve been fighting these guys and their ilk for 12 years, so don’t tell us how to fight these people.’”
+
+The kingdom faced a wave of al-Qaeda attacks in the mid-2000s, but officials were able to stop them with a fierce crackdown that resulted in the jailing of thousands of suspected militants.
+
+The decree issued last spring making it illegal to belong to or publicly support the Islamic State and other radical groups has slowed the flow of Saudis joining the militants, said Turki, the Interior Ministry spokesman, because it allows police to arrest anyone trying to go as well as those returning.
+
+The most visible sign of Saudi Arabia’s response to the rising militant threat is the extensive new system of fences, ditches, razor wire and berms along the border with Iraq, which stretches from the border with Kuwait in the east to Jordan in the west.
+
+King Abdullah inaugurated the barrier system in September after six years of construction on the project, which was initially conceived as a defense against the sectarian chaos in Iraq but is now primarily a defense against the Islamic State.
+
+Saudi officials have also embarked on a multiyear project to similarly fortify all the thousands of miles of land borders, with Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and especially Yemen — where the government was recently toppled by rebels aligned with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s main rival for power in the region.
+
+Sometimes jokingly referred to as the “Great Wall,” the Iraq border defense system involves two high fences topped with concertina wire, backed by deep ditches and tall sand berms designed to make it impossible for any vehicle to cross.
+
+The physical barriers are reinforced by technological ones, with 40 radar towers, each 125 feet high, that constantly sweep a radius of nearly 25 miles looking for any movement. Each tower is fitted with two cameras — one for daytime, one for night — that can zoom in on objects up to 12 miles away.
+
+At the border’s main control room, at the border guard base in Arar, a town of about 100,000 people in the empty desert nearly 600 miles northwest of Riyadh, operators sit at computer monitors watching 24 hours a day.
+
+When radar spots something moving in a suspicious place, the operators use a mouse to swivel the camera in its direction. Most of the time it’s nothing dangerous — a camel or a shepherd’s dog — but in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 5, it was four heavily armed militants.
+
+Not far from a remote and desolate border crossing, which is only open during the hajj pilgrimage season, the four militants slipped through a hole left by a construction crew working on the fence.
+
+Turki said the men were trying to get to Arar, where police arrested three Saudis and four Syrians suspected of plotting with the infiltrators. The four militants were carrying nearly $20,000 in cash, four suicide vests, six grenades, five assault rifles and pistols and two silencers.
+
+“Even if they got to Arar, were they waiting for the people to rise with them? I doubt it,” said Badi, the King Faisal Center scholar. “They send messages: We are capable of coming to you. We will target you. Terrorism will come to you.
+
+“It’s the same idea as the attacks in France,” he said. “They are not planning to take over France, but they send a message that they can do this.”",REAL
+4434,"With Another Deadline Looming, Whispers Of Iran Nuclear Deal Emerge","With Another Deadline Looming, Whispers Of Iran Nuclear Deal Emerge
+
+As Iran and world powers faced yet another self-imposed deadline on Monday, whispers of a deal began to leave the negotiating room.
+
+Quoting two unnamed diplomats, The Associated Press reported that the deal, which would limit Iran's nuclear program in exchange for a lifting of sanctions, would be announced Monday.
+
+NPR's Peter Kenyon, who is reporting from Vienna, reports that Iranian TV is adding to an expectation for a deal. He filed this report for our Newscast unit:
+
+""The signals from Iran are positive, with state-run media predicting an agreement will happen, and Iranian officials describing the document as running to almost 100 pages, including several technical annexes. ""Most reports of an imminent deal, however, include the caveat that a few issues need to be worked out, and the various capitals must sign off on any agreement. ""If they do get an accord, exhausted negotiators will have little time to celebrate their achievement. Critics in congress warmed up their attacks on Sunday talk shows in Washington, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu re-stated his argument that Iran is a bigger threat than the self-proclaimed Islamic State.""
+
+The BBC rounds up what high-level officials said on the record about the negotiations on Sunday:
+
+""US Secretary of State John Kerry said 'a few tough things' needed to be resolved but added: 'We're getting to some real decisions.' ""French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who cancelled a trip to Africa to stay at the talks, said: 'I hope we are finally entering the final phase of these marathon negotiations. I believe it.' ""In Iran, President Hassan Rouhani said the sides had 'come a long way.' 'We need to reach a peak and we're very close,' the Isna news agency quoted him as saying.""
+
+If, indeed, the deal is reached, it would mark the culmination of decades of diplomacy. The deal, however, would have to be approved by several capitals — including the U.S. Congress.",REAL
+814,Donald Trump's Clintonesque foreign policy,"In a speech Wednesday outlining his would-be foreign policy, Donald Trump tried to sound presidential. The Republican presidential candidate succeeded in sounding tough if contradictory. But he outlined a foreign policy that isn’t so different from that of Hillary Clinton.
+
+Take ISIS for example. Trump acknowledged in his speech the jihadist army that is slipping its tentacles into the West and promised that its “days are numbered.” But Trump refused to provide any details of how he would fight ISIS—implying he doesn’t want to telegraph his brilliant strategy to the enemy.
+
+This is too clever by half.  Given that ISIS is rampaging in the Middle East and has massacred Americans there, in Europe, and right here in the United States, it’s insufficient for a presidential candidate effectively to say “yadda, yadda I’ll beat ISIS” and provide no more information.
+
+Frankly, it sounds like a teenager who has failed every quiz during the semester but implausibly promises to save the day by acing the final.
+
+The reality is Trump’s strategy to defeat ISIS is basically the same as that of President Obama and Secretary Clinton, which is to say he has no strategy at all.
+
+Earlier Wednesday Trump all but endorsed Obama’s announcement that he’ll send 250 more troops to Syria, saying “I could agree with it,” but declaring he would dispatch them secretly.
+
+Trump doesn’t know how to go beyond the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of using gestures to appear be reacting to events without actually solving anything.
+
+Evidently, Trump would also mirror Clinton on Russia.  Despite promises to regard Moscow “with open eyes” Trump observed Wednesday, “we are not bound to be adversaries,” and added, “I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia.”
+
+This is no different than the self-regard and conceit that led Clinton to offer the Russians a plastic “reset” button, believing the force of her personality would change the Russians’ calculation of their national interests.
+
+Wednesday in Washington Trump laudably called for containing the spread of radical Islam while observing that is not just a military struggle but a “philosophical contest”—a reality that has eluded much of the U.S. government since 9/11.
+
+It seems like Trump is newly willing to borrow a few ideas from Ted Cruz and other conservatives who have been pressing these issues throughout the presidential campaign.  However, the businessman undercut himself by saying he will stick with the Iran nuclear deal he allegedly disdains, promising merely to implement it strictly.
+
+There is no way to defeat radical Islam without ceasing the grand accommodation of the Iranian regime that Obama enacted as Secretary Clinton cheered.
+
+The biggest takeaway from Trump’s foreign policy speech should be that the only remaining candidate with a conservative, Reaganesque foreign policy prepared for today’s threats is Ted Cruz.
+
+Trump’s speech was helpful for that reason alone.
+
+
+
+Christian Whiton is a member of the Cruz National Security Coalition. He was a State Department senior advisor in the George W. Bush administration and a policy advisor on the Giuliani and Gingrich presidential campaigns. He is author of ""Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War"" (Potomac Books 2013).",REAL
+9432,The Israeli Trumpess,"What will Donald Trump do if he loses the elections in a week and a half from now, as most polls indicate? 
+He has already declared that he will recognize the results – but only if he wins. 
+That sounds like a joke. But it is far from being a joke. 
+Trump has already announced that the election is rigged. The dead are voting (and all the dead vote for Hillary Clinton). The polling station committees are corrupt. The polling machines forge the results. 
+No, that is not a joke. Not at all. 
+This is not a joke, because Trump represents tens of millions of Americans, who belong to the lower strata of the white population, which the white elite used to call “white trash”. In more polite language they are called “blue collar workers”, meaning manual workers, unlike the “white collar workers” who occupy the offices. 
+If the tens of millions of blue-collar voters refuse to recognize the election results, American democracy will be in danger. The United States may become a banana republic, like some of its southern neighbors, which have never enjoyed a stable democracy. 
+This problem exists in all modern nation-states with a sizable national minority. The lowest strata of the ruling people hates the minority. Members of the minority push them out of the lower jobs. And more importantly: the lower strata of the ruling majority have nothing to be proud of except for their belonging to the ruling people. 
+The German unemployed voted for Adolf Hitler, who promoted them to the “Herrenvolk” (master people) and the Aryan race. They gave him power, and Germany was razed to the ground. 
+The one and only Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is a bad system, but that all the other systems tried were worse. 
+As far as democracy is concerned, the United States was a model for the world. Already in its early days it attracted freedom-lovers everywhere. Almost 200 years ago, the French thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote a glowing report about the “Democratie en Amerique”. 
+My generation grew up in admiration of American democracy. We saw European democracy breaking down and sinking into the morass of fascism. We admired this young America, which saved Europe in two world wars, out of sheer idealism. The democratic America vanquished German Nazism and Japanese militarism, and later Soviet Bolshevism. 
+Our childish attitude gave way to a more mature view. We learned about the genocide of the native Americans and about slavery. We saw how America is seized from time to time by an attack of craziness, such as the witch hunt of Salem and the era of Joe McCarthy, who discovered a Communist under every bed. 
+But we also saw Martin Luther King, we saw the first black President, and now we are probably about to see the first female President. All because of this miracle: American democracy. 
+And here come this man, Donald Trump, and tries to rip apart the delicate ties that bind American society together. He incites men against women, whites against blacks and hispanics, the rich against the destitute. He sows mutual hatred everywhere. 
+Perhaps the American people will get rid of this plague and send Trump back where he came from – television. Perhaps Trump will disappear like a bad dream, as did McCarthy and his spiritual forefathers. 
+Let’s hope. But there is also the opposite possibility: that Trump will cause a disaster never seen before: the downfall of democracy, the destruction of national cohesion, the breaking up into a thousand splinters. 
+Can this happen in Israel? Do we have an Israel a phenomenon that can be compared to the ascent of the American Trump? Is there an Israeli Trump? 
+Indeed, there is. But the Israeli Trump is a Trumpess. 
+She is called Miri Regev. 
+She resembles the original Trump in many ways. She challenges the Tel Aviv “old elites” as Trump incites against Washington. She incites Jewish citizens against Arab citizens. Orientals of eastern descent against Ashkenazis of European descent. The uncultured against the cultured. The poor against all others. She tears apart the delicate ties of Israeli society. 
+She is not the only one of her kind, of course. But she overshadows all the others. 
+After the elections for the 20 th Knesset, in March 2015, and the setting-up of the new government, Israel was overrun by a band of far-right politicians, like a pack of hungry wolves. Men and women without charm, without dignity, possessed by a ravenous hunger for power, for conspicuousness at any price, people out for their own personal interest and for nothing else. They compete with each other in the hunt for headlines and provocative actions. 
+At the starting line they were all equal – ambitious, unlikable, uninhibited. But gradually, Miri Regev overtakes all the others. All they can do, she can do better. For every headline grabbed by another, she can grab five. For every condemnation of another in the media, she gets ten. 
+Benyamin Netanyahu is a dwarf, but compared to this bunch he is a giant. In order to remain so, he appointed each of them to the job he or she is most unsuited for. Miri Regev, a rude, vulgar, primitive person became Minister of Culture and Sports. 
+Regev, 51, is a good-looking woman, daughter of immigrants from Morocco. She was born as Miri Siboni in Kiryat-Gat, a place for which I have deep feelings, because it was there that I was wounded in 1948. Then it was still an Arab village called Irak-al-Nabshiyeh, and my life was saved by four soldiers, one of whom was called Siboni (no connection). 
+For many years, Regev served in the army as a public relations officer, rising to the rank of Colonel. Seems that one day she decided to do public relations for herself, rather than for others. 
+Since her first day as Minister of Culture, she has supplied the media with a steady stream of scandals and provocations. Thus she gradually overtakes all her competitors in the Likud leadership. They just cannot compete with her energy and inventiveness. 
+She declared proudly that she sees her job as the elimination of all anti-Likud people from the cultural arena – after all, “that’s what the Likud was elected for.” 
+All over the world, governments subsidize cultural institutions and creative people, convinced that culture is a vital national asset. When Charles de Gaulle was the President of France, he was once approached by his police chiefs with the request to issue an arrest warrant for the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, because of his support for the Algerian freedom fighters. De Gaulle refused and said: “Sartre too is France!” 
+Well, Regev is no de Gaulle. She threatens to withdraw government subsidies from any institution that publicly opposes the policy of the right-wing government. She demanded the cancelation of the program of an Arab rapper who read from the works of Mahmoud Darwish, the adored national poet of the Arab citizens and of the entire Arab world. She demanded that all theaters and orchestras perform in the settlements in the occupied territories, if they want to keep their subsidies. 
+This week she won a resounding victory when Habima, the “national theater”, agreed to perform in Kiryat-Arba, a nest of the most fanatical fascist settlers. Indeed, no day passes without news of some new exploit by Regev. Her colleagues explode with jealousy. 
+The basis of Israeli Trumpism and of Miri Regev’s career is the deep resentment of the Oriental – or Mizrahi – community. It is directed against the Ashkenazim, the Israelis of European descent. They are accused of treating the Orientals with disdain, calling them “the second Israel”. 
+Since those recruits of Moroccan descent saved my life near the birthplace of Miri Regev, I have written many words about the tragedy of Mizrahi immigration, a tragedy of which I was an eye-witness from the first moment. Many injustices were committed by the established Jewish population against the new immigrants, mostly without bad intentions. But the greatest sin of all is rarely mentioned. 
+Every community need a sense of pride, based on its past achievements. The pride was taken away from the Mizrahim, who arrived in the country after the 1948 war. They were treated as people devoid of culture, without a past, “cave-dwellers from the Atlas mountains”. 
+This attitude was a part of the contempt for Arab culture, a contempt deeply embedded in the Zionist movement. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist leader and forefather of the Likud party, wrote in his time an article entitled “The East”, in which he expressed his disdain for Oriental culture, Jewish and Arab alike, because of its religiosity and inability to separate between state and religion – a barrier to any human progress, according to him. This article is rarely mentioned nowadays. 
+The Oriental immigrants came to a country that was predominantly “secular”, non-religious and Western. It was also very anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. The new immigrants understood quickly that, in order to be accepted in Israeli society, they must get rid of their traditional-religious culture. They learned to distance themselves from everything Arab, such as their accent and their songs. Otherwise it would be difficult to become part of the country’s new society. 
+Before the birth of Zionism – a very European movement – there was no enmity between Jews and Muslims. Quite the contrary. When the Jews were expeled from Catholic Spain, many centuries ago, only a minority immigrated to anti-Semitic, Christian Europe. The vast majority went to Muslim lands and was received with open arms all over the Ottoman Empire. 
+Before that, in Muslim Spain, the Jews achieved their crowning glory, the “Golden Age”. They were integrated in all spheres of society and government and spoke Arabic. Many of their men of letters wrote Arabic and were admired by Muslims as well as Jews. Maimonides, perhaps the greatest of Sephardic Jews, wrote Arabic and was the personal physician of Saladin, the Muslim warrior who vanquished the Crusaders. The ancestors of these Crusaders had slaughtered Jew and Muslim alike when they conquered Jerusalem. Another great Mizrahi Jew, Saadia Gaon, translated the Torah into Arabic. And so on. 
+It would have been natural for Oriental Jews to take pride in this glorious past, as German Jews take pride in Heinrich Heine and French Jews in Marcel Proust. But the cultural climate in Israel compelled them to give up their heritage and pretend to admire solely the culture of the West. (Eastern singers were an exception – first as wedding performers and now as media stars. They became popular as “Mediterranean singers”.) 
+If Miri Regev were a cultured person, and not merely a Minister of Culture, she would have devoted her considerable energy to the revitalization of this culture and giving back pride to her community. But this does not really interest her. And there is another reason. 
+This Mizrahi culture is totally bound up with the Arab-Muslim culture. It cannot be mentioned without noticing the close relationship between the two for many centuries, during which Muslims and Jews worked together for the advancement of mankind, long before the world heard of Shakespeare or Goethe. 
+I have always believed that restoring pride was the duty of a new generation of peace-lovers that will arise from among the Mizrahi society. Lately, men and women from this community have reached key positions in the peace camp. I have high hopes. 
+They will have to fight the present culture minister – a minister who has nothing in common with culture, and a Mizrahi woman who has no Mizrahi roots. 
+I hope for a Jewish-Mizrahi revival in this country because it can advance Israeli-Arab peace and because it can strengthen again the loosened ties between the different communities in our state. 
+As a non-religious person I prefer the Mizrahi religiosity, which has always been moderate and tolerant, to the fanatical Zionist-religious camp that is predominantly Ashkenazi. I have always preferred Rabbi Ovadia Josef to the Rabbis Kook, father and son. I prefer Arie Der’I to Naftali Bennett. 
+I detest Donald Trump and Trumpism. I dislike Miri Regev and her culture.",FAKE
+7677,Comment on Sheriff Says Cannabis Makes People Murderers Because “Rational Thought” Leads to Violence by Isaid Dilligaf,"Home / Be The Change / The State / Sheriff Says Cannabis Makes People Murderers Because “Rational Thought” Leads to Violence Sheriff Says Cannabis Makes People Murderers Because “Rational Thought” Leads to Violence Claire Bernish May 10, 2016 35 Comments 
+It isn’t gang violence. It isn’t even domestic violence. What is the leading cause of murder in Carson City? According to Sheriff Ken Furlong, it’s marijuana. 
+“It’s against that law,” Furlong told local ABC affiliate, KOLO 8. “It does change people’s attitude and we do see people dying as a result of it, needlessly, and there’s no excuse for it. 
+“In the last 13-15 years, all of the violence we’ve seen that has turned deadly, have [sic] been in someway related to a marijuana issue.” 
+Before you get too excited, thinking Furlong nailed it — the fact cannabis remains a federal Schedule 1 drug and thus technically illegal in the ongoing yet utterly failed war on drugs — that isn’t all he had to say on the matter. 
+KOLO 8 noted the 2016 deaths of 18-year-old Grant Watkins and 40-year-old Dennis Watkins, Jr. — both killed during transactions involving the sale of cannabis. 
+“During a transaction, they set it up, ‘I’m going to sell this to you,’ then all of a sudden someone gets shot and killed,” Furlong continued. “It’s not because they were under the influence; it’s because they were doing something deadly and it turned out that way.” 
+As Furlong explained, the threat to life isn’t due to the drug’s effects on the system, per se , but the ‘culture and crimes’ surrounding it ‘that can be overwhelming,’ as KOLO 8 paraphrased. 
+“It’s a very cherished culture and people have very strong beliefs,” the Sheriff elaborated. “When you violate someone’s beliefs, you put them in a position where they can act out.” 
+But Furlong’s complete lack of understanding of all things cannabis — including both medicinal and recreational aspects — didn’t stop there. According to the Sheriff, the community faces repercussions following a law enforcement drug bust — because addicts suddenly have no way to procure their … cannabis. 
+“We’re watching very closely, not only for a spike in crime, but for people who are in critical need of medical care because of that lack of treatment, based on withdrawal from the drug,” he asserted. 
+Yes, you read that right. Carson City’s Sheriff-in-charge firmly believes depriving people of cannabis — a plant scientifically and anecdotally proven to save lives — will lead to a crime wave and health crisis of no small proportions. 
+But what he explained next, as paraphrased by KOLO 8, harkens back to the earliest days of cannabis prohibition and the propagandist classic, Reefer Madness: 
+‘Sheriff Furlong says unlike other drugs like heroin or methamphetamines that can distort your mind, people using marijuana usually have rational trains of thought which give them the ability to act out and become violent when someone takes away or violates their drug.’ 
+At this point, if you’re having a good laugh, stunned, or shaking your head, you most certainly are not alone. 
+Obviously, Sheriff Furlong grasps the potential perils in black market trade — but he wholly fails to recognize removing cannabis’ illegality would thus remove the risk of violence. When the State is removed from consensual business transactions, individuals are free to conduct trade as they see fit — if cannabis were abundant and legal, it would be highly unlikely people would continue killing each other over soured deals. 
+But Furlong’s stupefying lack of knowledge concerning the effects cannabis has on the body, though certainly laughable, also should concern the residents he’s tasked with overseeing. 
+Mischaracterizing cannabis so broadly as to believe it will warp people’s minds to a heightened frenzy where they’re likely to commit violence is downright dangerous. 
+For one thing, this inexcusable misperception could color the training Sheriff Furlong decides to give law enforcement trainees and officers. Considering the absolutely epidemic national spate of violence inflicted by trigger-happy cops who already seem to have an irrational fear of the public, training them to further view cannabis users as likely to act out physically is nothing short of dangerous. 
+If sheriff’s deputies conduct a raid on a residence known for cannabis transactions with the preconception the people inside could turn violent instantly, it’s arguable they would be more likely to misinterpret anything they encounter. This unnecessarily heightened fear that their life could be in peril from a cannabis-crazed maniac would have obvious influence on their decisions for whether or not to employ deadly force. 
+Sadly, Sheriff Furlong likely isn’t alone among law enforcement in the United States. As long as the drug war remains firmly entrenched in policy and culture, dangerous misunderstandings and lack of knowledge will arguably be the greater source of violence than would the substances be were they not illegal. 
+In the meantime, while forced to pick apart drug laws state by state, perhaps drug and cannabis education — not fear- and prohibition-based propaganda, but serious education — should be mandatory in law enforcement training. Share Google + Lannim 
+All he did, without knowing it, was admit that the real criminals are the ones who enforce prohibition and create this culture of violence. When you suppress a legitimate market it will be replaced by a black market that is regulated by force instead of voluntary interaction. Violence begets violence, and it doesn’t get any more violent than the state. ACAB Matt Agorist 
+EXACTLY! James Michael 
+Considering the government never created a constitutional amendment allowing prohibition the entire drug war is treason and felonius…. EVERY killing a murder…. EVERY raid a felony home invasion…. EVERY jailing a false imprisonment…. EVERY fine extortion…… The cops and the courts are a criminal enterprise…. AKA RICO….. and meet the definition of it perfectly…. Lannim 
+Exactly. I would say that the drug war would be just as illegitimate and criminal with an amendment, but being able to argue that it’s ALSO unconstitutional helps, considering most Americans think their rights are contingent upon what’s written on sacred documents. b4integrity 
+The federal government is a continuing, criminal, domestic, terrorist enterprise. 
+We need a DEA eradication program. Paschn 
+Goddamn it does my old heart good to see folks lay things out as you did! Couple that with SCOTUS’ treason with corporate citizenship, Patriot act, Habeas corpus gone, Posse Comitatus, gone granting civil immunity to big pharma, setting up a federal committee to “review” claims made by citizens harmed by “safe” vaccines, then paying off those claims WITH TAX PAYER MONEY to protect the bottom line of the elites…. Murdering Ranchers for pointing out the FED’s treason.. Let us not forget the 2 sets of books most governments run (CAFR). Let me know when you folks have had enough SEWER NATION – IDIOT CULTURE. Centrist Force 
+This is easy to solve. end the criminal part of this. There is no need for marijuana to be illegal. You want to end drug deals and guns get the cops out of the equation and nobody needs to play this mob games. Gregory Pius 
+We did that in Oregon and Washington. Tax revenues are bursting the state coffers, and the police now have to find honest work (or at least overzealously enforce something else). Everybody wins. Sadly, almost all LEOs I’ve ever heard to talked to have a deeply-held conviction that legalization of cannabis will result in the loss of their job. A … kaynash 
+We have far too many ignorant people in positions of power…..of course our press doesn’t help either, they are just as ignorant, so no one is getting educated from that source any longer. But really, a Sheriff? If you are going to criminalize people, you should have a much better understanding of what you are saying. Because thinking people in law enforcement are more than aware that it’s criminalizing drugs that is the problem….and this guy actually comes close to realizing that and then draws the totally wrong conclusions from it. dufas_duck 
+“When you violate someone’s beliefs, you put them in a position where they can act out.” 
+Sounds like he described the average policeman…….. Gregory Pius",FAKE
+7095,Seven World-Historical Achievements of the Iraq Invasion of 2003,"Photo by The U.S. Army | CC BY 2.0 
+
+Here is a list of the noteworthy, ongoing results of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq beginning in March 2003. (Recall that invasion was denounced by the UN as illegal, based entirely on lies, and—given the U.S.’s hegemonic position in the world, allowing it to act with impunity—the crime’s architects have never punished.) 
+1/ The principal achievement of the war and occupation was the dramatic expansion of the al-Qaeda network that had attacked the U.S. on January 11, 2001. An al-Qaeda franchise was established in Iraq for the first time, playing a key role in the Sunni “insurrection” against the occupiers and their Shiite allies, then expanding across the border into Syria where it split into the al-Nusra affiliate and its even more savage rival, ISIL. Iraq also served and serves as a training ground for jihadis now operating from Iraq to Libya and beyond. 
+2/ The invasion and its consequences encouraged the cause of Kurdistan , an imagined state straddling Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Kurds are the largest stateless people in the world, victims of British and French colonialists who divided the region between them after World War I. After the Gulf War of 1991, the U.S. established a “no-fly” zone over northern Iraq to discourage Baghdad from deploying troops in the region. Iraqi Kurdistan had already obtained a degree of autonomy before the invasion but the status became official under the occupation and a referendum for independence is likely to pass soon. This would infuriate Iraq and perhaps provoke Turkey’s intervention. As it is, the autonomous region is locked in struggle with Baghdad over territorial claims and control over oil fields. 
+3/ The invasion destroyed the Iraqi state , causing it to fracture into three: Kurdistan, the Sunni zone in the west, and the Shiite-majority areas around Baghdad. The Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein had been extremely repressive and brutal. But it had maintained order; discouraged religion in politics; protected the Christian and other religious minorities; promoted women’s rights; imposed no dress code; enforced a criminal code modeled after the Napoleonic (not the Sharia); licensed rock n’ roll radio stations, allowed the brewing of beer and its sale etc. The Shiite-led regime boosted into power by the occupation has reversed much of this. (A bill to ban the production and sale of beer was just passed by Parliament last week.) But the regime’s power does not extend into much of Anbar Province, ISIL still governs Mosul, and again, Kurdistan has become autonomous. 
+4/ Because Shiites are the majority in Iraq (60%), and dominate Iran next door; and because the leaders of Shiite parties have studied in Iran or lived their in exile and are sympathetic to Iran’s mullah-led regime; and because the U.S. was forced by peaceful mass protests to allow elections and the emergence of Shiites as the leaders of the country, Iran’s power and influence in the region has expanded dramatically. (Apparently no one in the State Department thought about that.) Since Iran has not attacked another country in centuries—but was savagely attacked by Saddam Hussein in 1981, sparking a long war killing over half a million people—and since Iran’s friendliness to its neighbor, one of the few Arab countries in which its co-coreligionists hold power, is entirely natural, one can ask why anyone might be alarmed by this. But it does alarm some, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, that crucial U.S. Arab ally governed by Wahhabi Sunnis, most of all. 
+5/ The invasion produced a regional power struggle between Sunni Islamists on the one hand, and their Shiite (and other) enemies on the other. This is often portrayed as a contest between Saudi Arabia (whose government-backed clerics condemn Shiites as heretics, and who fear the prospects for rebellion in Saudi Arabia’s own oppressed Shiite minority) and Iran, depicted as the protector of Shiites in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen etc. (The so-called “Shiite Crescent” extending from Iran to Hizbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon in fact embraces states and movements that have little in common with the Islamic Republic of Iran. But they are all targeted by the medieval regime in Riyadh which tars them all with the Iranian brush.) The Saudis were keen advocates for a U.S. strike on Iran (on the false pretext of a nuclear threat); are major supporters of al-Nusra in Syria and have funded ISIL as well, preferring such Islamist forces to the secular if Alawite-led Syrian regime; and are bombing the hell out of Yemen with active U.S. and British assistance under the false pretext that the Shiite Houthi “rebels” are agents for an expanding Iran. These things would not be happening, had the U.S. not ripped the lid off Pandora’s box in Iraq in March 2003. 
+6/ The invasion has produced friction between the U.S. and its important NATO ally Turkey (which has the second largest military in the alliance). Turkish war planes are bombing Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) militia in Syria who constitute the U.S.’s most reliable allies, producing U.S. protests (which the Turks ignore, arguing straight-faced that the YPG are just as terrorist as ISIL). The Turks warned before the invasion of Iraq that it would likely produce regional instability. But Ankara would have allowed the U.S. to attack from Turkish soil if Turkish forces as part of the “coalition of the willing” could be stationed around Mosul, once part of Turkey—the idea being to contain Kurdish nationalism. 
+Fortunately the parliament rejected the deal. But the predicted instability has occurred. The Arab Spring of 2011 in Syria was not directly connected to the Iraq invasion, but gave the U.S. the opportunity to pontificate that “Assad has lost legitimacy,” demand his immediate resignation, and bankroll the armed opposition including the Kurds. The fact that U.S. efforts to find and recruit Syrian Arab forces as allies—who are not in bed with al-Nusra—to topple Assad have failed so dismally binds the Pentagon ever closer to forces that Turkey wants to wipe out. (The conflict and contradiction are embarrassing to Washington. Oh, by the way, did you notice that the Turkish foreign minister just announced that Turkey would invade Iraq if it “felt threatened”?) 
+Having declared in 2011 that Bashar al-Assad must go, the U.S. was faced in 2014 with the horrible embarrassment of ISIL (that toxic fruit of its Iraq invasion) winning lightening victories from Raqqa to Fallujah, obliterating the Sykes-Picot line dividing Syria and Iraq. The now-Syria based terrorists were approaching Baghdad. So now the U.S. having withdrawn all troops in Iraq was back in action, bombing to prevent such a disaster. And it started bombing ISIL positions in Syria (although with far less efficacy than the later Russian efforts) in league with a list of largely reluctant allies dragooned into formal membership in what Washington likes to call a “coalition” to make its unilateral program for the region sound like the will of what they like to call “the international community” regardless of how many key nations that imagined “community” includes. 
+The U.S. command that Assad step down was made in the summer of 2011. Turkey’s President Erdogan, hitherto a friend and even mentor of the Syrian leader, opportunistically took up the U.S. demand and demanded his resignation. And Ankara itself began to interfere big-time in the neighboring country it once dominated, targeting Kurds more than anyone else. Since the U.S. relies on these allies, how could there not be a sharp conflict here? 
+7/ The invasion of Iraq and aftermath resulted in four million Iraqi refugees fleeing the country as of 2007. Hundreds of thousands have poured into Europe, alongside people displaced by U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Libya, and by the turmoil in Syria exacerbated by U.S. actions, producing a massive continent-wide crisis. Many Europeans aptly blame the deluge on the U.S., pointing to the U.S.’s paltry record of admitting refugees from the Middle East and complaining of strained national resources to handle the humanitarian catastrophe. (Another embarrassment.) *** 
+This is all what Buddhists call “karmic retribution” for past acts. Or what the Hebrew prophet Hosea referred to when he said “Those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind.” Or what the CIA meant when it invented the term “blowback.” It’s all heading towards something, unless decent people stop it. 
+But when I watch people like Michael Moore line up behind the foremost advocate of war in U.S. politics, joining (consciously, philosophical) amoral thugs hell-bent on maintaining and expanding the empire when it’s in a stage of precipitous decline, I am not optimistic. Not only will she win, but she will rival Dick Cheney as a cold-blooded latter-day Cold Warrior, cynically exploiting fear and stupidity to try to bring Russia to its knees. 
+Hillary doesn’t recognize any of these seven points, which to recapitulate are: 
++ US actions have greatly strengthened al-Qaeda 
++ US actions have encouraged Kurdish nationalism (with unpredictable ramifications) 
++ The US through its vicious illegal actions has destroyed the modern Iraqi state 
++ US actions have solidified ties between Iran and Iraq’s majority Shiite community, strengthening a country still targeted for “regime change” 
++ The invasion of Iraq and the regime change there exacerbated the historical Sunni-Shiite divide, and encouraged Saudi Arabia as the ultra-Islamist protector of the shrines to redouble its efforts to support extremist Sunnis everywhere in the region 
++ The results of the invasion place Turkey and the U.S. at loggerheads over the question of Kurdish nationalist movements in both Iraq and Syria 
++ US interventions in the Middle East and North Africa since 2001 have produced a massive refugee crisis, inflicted mainly on Europe 
+She does not acknowledge that George W. Bush’s invasion (that she so passionately endorsed, fully exposing her Valkyrie soul, was criminal and not somebody’s well-meaning “mistake”). She doesn’t have any analysis of the Kurdish question. (She is not—as sometimes alleged by supporters—a “policy wonk” but a lazy intellect who doesn’t know jack-shit about the real world.) 
+She has never expressed regret for the horrific destruction of Iraq, nor given any attention to the plight of its women, who were (as she surely knows) much better off under Saddam Hussein. (To acknowledge that would be to suggest that sometimes U.S. imperialism favors misogynist Islamists over relatively progressive secularists, for its own pragmatic empire-building purposes. She can’t mention that publicly.) 
+She deals with the rise of Iran—made inevitable by the U.S. invasion of Iraq—by doubling down on her crude clueless Iran rhetoric, which rests on the assumption—repeatedly debunked by U.S. intelligence agencies—that Iran might pose a nuclear weapons threat. She doesn’t understand the history of the Sunni-Shiite divide; I believe she rolls her eyes in irritation that these people have these differences so hard to understand, impeding the Exceptional Nation’s ability to straighten everything out by bombing, and conquering, and making people die. She doesn’t understand anything about the history of the Kurds and their fate in the region. 
+She feels no guilt at all about her orchestration of the ruin of Libya. She sees no reason to link her own actions to the flooding of Europe with refugees fleeing terror. But she will probably be the next president, with fellow shieldmaidens Michele Flournoy (as “secretary of defense”) and Victoria Nuland or Samantha Power (as secretary of state). 
+Never acknowledging what happened yesterday, never able to absorb historical lessons, determined to maintain and expend its global hegemony (just as that becomes absolutely impossible to do, because other nations rise too, and great nations like Spain and Britain actually get humbled over time), the U.S. under Clinton will likely head methodically towards a showdown with Russia. She wants so badly, to show she can do it. She’ll do it for women, everywhere, to show how strong a woman can be. 
+And then there will be a sudden strange change in your environment. As you wonder what’s going on you’ll be painlessly vaporized, on account of Hillary’s passion to topple Assad, or forcibly reintegrate the Donbass into Ukraine. 
+The brilliance of the 2003 invasion will be clarified as never before in that bright blast, as Hillary—a very strong woman—cackles in the background from her bunker about how she came, saw, and a million died.",FAKE
+6859,Major Voter Fraud Already Running Rampant Against Republicans,"
+
+We have compiled a huge list of voter fraud incidents which were caught in the early voting process, all of it done by Hillary Clinton’s supporters against Republican candidate Donald Trump.
+So far there hasn’t been a single case where Republicans were caught doing voter fraud for Donald Trump.
+Remember the following list is a compilation of CAUGHT cases. Imagine how many more there might be out there uncaught.
+NEVADA 
+– CAUGHT ON VIDEO Hillary Supporters Commit Voter Fraud in Las Vegas — Again!
+INDIANA 
+– More Crooked Democrats : Police Raid Offices of Indiana Voter Registration Project in Voter Fraud Case
+NORTH CAROLINA 
+-North Carolina Hillary Supporter Brags on Facebook About Voting Multiple Times
+PENNSYLVANIA 
+– BREAKING: PA STATE POLICE RAID Democrat Group For Evidence Of Voter Fraud
+FLORIDA 
+– GOP Alleges VOTER FRAUD in Broward County – Democrats Opened TENS OF THOUSANDS of Ballots
+TEXAS 
+-Texas Woman – Who Is Not a US Citizen – BUSTED for Voting 5 Times in Texas 
+CALIFORNIA 
+– Voter Fraud: 83 Ballots , With 83 Different Names, Sent to One Address in LA County
+NATIONWIDE 
+– Election “results” have already been shown in advance, in error, on multiple major news outlets such as CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC.
+– Third-party Voters Are “Trading Votes” With Clinton Voters To Defeat Trump
+– Democrats are suing Roger Stone on bogus charges of “voter intimidation” for only wanting to conduct AFTER -voting exit polling! Exit polling is not only legal but its something done in all civilized countries in the world. Democrats want to steal and prevent anyone from exposing their thievery. Exit polling provides perfectly accurate results and if in some state GOP gets for example 55% in exit polls and then 40% or whatever in final results, then we know there was fraud involved in that state. The usual accepted error between actual final results and exit polling can’t be bigger than 2%.
+",FAKE
+2036,Backers: Romney more open to 2016,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+7305,"Re: Yes, There Are Paid Government Trolls On Social Media, Blogs, Forums And Websites","Yes, There Are Paid Government Trolls On Social Media, Blogs, Forums And Websites   February 26th, 2014 
+Do you want solid proof that paid government shills are targeting websites, blogs, forums and social media accounts? For years, many have suspected that government trolls have been systematically causing havoc all over the Internet, but proving it has been difficult. But now thanks to documents leaked by Edward Snowden and revealed by Glenn Greenwald, we finally have hard evidence that western governments have been doing this. As you will see below, a UK intelligence outfit known as the Government Communications Headquarters, through a previously secret unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, has been systematically attempting “to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse”. This should be deeply disturbing to anyone that values free speech on the Internet. 
+It isn’t just that the British government is trying to influence what people are thinking. The reality is that this is far bigger than a mere propaganda campaign. As Greenwald recently noted on his new website , the “integrity of the Internet itself” is at stake… 
+By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger , the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “ honey traps ” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses . But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse , and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself. 
+So what techniques are the British using to control and manipulate discourse on the Internet? According to Greenwald, the documents that Snowden has uncovered show that they are willing to sink to despicable lows in order to get the results that they desire… 
+Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “ false flag operations ” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “ negative information ” on various forums. 
+The following is a list of Internet infiltration techniques that were listed on one particular slide that Snowden leaked… 
+– Infiltration Operation 
+– Sting Operation 
+You can check out this slide for yourself right here . 
+There is also evidence that the Canadian government has been involved in this sort of thing as well.   Natural News … 
+You’ve probably run into them before — those seemingly random antagonizers who always end up diverting the conversation in an online chat room or article comment section away from the issue at hand, and towards a much different agenda. Hot-button issues like illegal immigration, the two-party political system, the “war on terror” and even alternative medicine are among the most common targets of such attackers, known as internet “trolls” or “shills,” who in many cases are nothing more than paid lackeys hired by the federal government and other international organizations to sway and ultimately control public opinion . 
+Several years ago, Canada’s CTV News aired a short segment about how its own government had been exposed for hiring secret agents to monitor social media and track online conversations, as well as the activities of certain dissenting individuals. This report, which in obvious whitewashing language referred to such activities as the government simply “ weighing in and correcting ” allegedly false information posted online, basically admitted that the Canadian government had assumed the role of secret online police . 
+You can see a video news report about this activity up in Canada right here . 
+Are you disturbed yet? 
+You should be. 
+So what kind of people are the governments of the western world targeting online? 
+Well, when it comes to the U.S. government, all you have to do is to look at their official documents to see who they consider the “problems” to be. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “ 72 Types Of Americans That Are Considered ‘Potential Terrorists’ In Official Government Documents “. 
+Sadly, the reality of the matter is that the days of the free and open Internet are numbered. The governments of the world are increasing their control over the Internet with each passing day, and eventually a time will likely come when we will not be able to communicate openly like this any longer. 
+Things have gotten so bad in the U.S. already that even Google is spooked … 
+A recent court decision that endorsed a broad view of the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over the Internet has Google and other Web companies nervous. 
+In closed-door meetings with regulators and Capitol Hill staff, Google’s lawyers have said they’re worried how the FCC may use its newfound powers, according to multiple people familiar with the meetings. 
+The extent of the FCC’s authority over Google and other Web services remains unclear, and the current FCC has given no indication that it is interested in pushing aggressive new regulations. But the possibility that the commission could begin telling Google how to organize its search results or handle its users’ data is enough to spook the company’s army of Washington lobbyists. 
+And this is just the beginning. 
+If you think that the control freaks that are running things now are bad, just wait until you see the next generation of control freaks. 
+For example, there is one prominent student writer at Harvard that apparently believes that free speech at her university should be abolished and that any professor that does not advocate for her politically-correct version of “justice” should be fired … 
+A student writer at Harvard University is raising eyebrows after publishing her belief that free speech on campus should be abolished and professors with opposing views be fired. 
+Sandra Korn, a senior who writes a column for the Harvard Crimson newspaper, thinks radical leftism is the only permissible political philosophy, and the First Amendment only hinders colleges from brainwashing students with her viewpoint. 
+“Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice,” states the subtitle of her Feb. 18 column , in which she insists Harvard stop guaranteeing students and professors the right to hold controversial views and conduct research putting liberalism in a negative light. 
+“If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals?” Korn asks. 
+This is what control freaks always want. 
+They always want to shut down those that are presenting opposing views. 
+They don’t believe in free speech and a “marketplace of ideas”. Rather, they believe in shoving what they believe down the rest of our throats. 
+And now we have solid proof that the governments of the western world are paying people to manipulate discourse on social media, blogs, forums and websites. 
+So will there be great outrage over this, or will the apathetic public just roll over and ignore this like they have so many other times the past few years? 
+My guess, most will just roll over and ignore this. People don’t care. Hammerstrike 
+At least I know why people disagree with me other dem intrenets now, they are paid trolls! Paid by the governement to spread falsehoods and hurt muh feelins! seth datta 
+Most of my comments get deleted by bankster paid control freaks if they don’t troll my comments. Banksters truly are the psychopaths destroying the world. K 
+The amazing thing is, they are not that hard to spot. But since like so many other things, people will not face the truth. This information will only help a very few. For those of you still sitting on the fence. How much more evidence do you need? How many more ways does the Government have to mess with you? What will it finally take, to say enough? Rodster 
+“Don’t confuse me with the facts. I already made up my mind.” SupernaturalCat 
+“The amazing thing is, they are not that hard to spot. But since like so many other things, people will not face the truth.” 
+Indeed. Never underestimate the power of denial. DJohn1 
+This is called doing anything for a paycheck. Otherwise known in the world as prostituting for money. Snowden probably has a few other “surprises” in the material he has not released yet. This also dates back to way before the internet was ever thought of. PR firms for the government have been making fun of anything that they truly want to hide. Such as any legitimate UFO reporting over the last 50 or so years. Anyone with a thorough knowledge of Solar System Astronomy was made to feel like a nut as far back as the 50s. One Russian Scientist came up with a fantastic theory of how Venus came to be where it is in the Solar System. In 1949 or 1950 scientists all over the planet wanted his books banned from publication and actually boycotted anyone that would pub his work. His theory said that Venus was extremely hot(800 degrees Fahrenheit). That the planet had a weird rotation. That it possibly came into the Solar System around the time of Joseph of Egypt and 400 years later caused the plagues of Egypt under Moses. That placed it in BIblical times. Well Venus does have a weird day. It is longer than its year. Venus is full of hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide. It has an atmosphere much thicker than the Earth’s. All of which sort of lend credit to the theory. It is volcanic and has a very hot surface. In 1950, astronomers were guessing that Venus was a twin to Earth with a slightly higher temperature. Possibly 150 at the equator and comfortable at the poles. Then the Russian Drones sent to Venus told an entirely different story and blew all of the astronomers out of the water. I hope I am embarrassing them for their efforts to ban the man from publication. He spent his years at Princeton University after leaving Russia. Two aspects of the theory should make us all sit up and listen. He claimed the Hydrocarbons rained oil over the surface of the Earth and that might be where a lot of Earth’s supply of oil came from. The Russians are acting on that theory to find new oil reserves. The second aspect is that Venus played a kind of bounce game as it came down through the Solar System and removed the second planet from the Sun in the process and dumped it out further in the Solar System. He thought that Mars was originally in the orbit where Venus is today. His theory was that mankind forgot what happened in a kind of national amnesia. IF what he says was true, then Mars could have had a thick enough atmosphere and water to support life! More important it might have had a thick magnetic layer that filtered out the Sun and kept the planet temperate at one time. All of which was ruined as Venus dragged it out of orbit. That might have happened in biblical times. The Earth might have been slightly closer to the Sun with a 360 day year instead of 365 and a quarter day year. This of course is all speculation until we go out there and find out the real truth of what is going on. My own guess is that if there is life on Mars it is in caves under the surface with a slightly heavier atmosphere and possibly seas in these huge caverns. If there is any surface life left, it is likely to be about the size of a dog or a racoon. If there is large life, I suspect it will be Sand Worms deep in the sands of Mars. I mention this because it is very easy to ridicule ideas. The one I just told you about actually happened in the 50s and was ridiculed coast to coast by actual scientists. We are in a universe with over 100 billion galaxies out there. The number of stars with life possible is at a fantastic number. If one in a million stars has life, that is still a whole lot of life out there. The only explanation that makes sense to me is we are far off the trade lanes between the stars. Otherwise we would have been contacted years ago. Or have we been? I suggest that when a civilization reaches the level of using Atomic Bombs then that civilization bares watching. We had a lot of UFO activity after World War II and the setting off of bombs all over the planet as governments tested these weapons. Governments all over the world that are big enough are probably hiding a lot of things from all of us. I think we might all be amazed at just exactly what has been withheld. NowAlive 
+This is quite a postulation on the mere evidence that was correct, namely the temperature of Venus. The plagues of Egypt were localized. You had firstborns killed unless you used a passover lamb. Second, what about the oils raining down all over the Earth? I was quite young when Valdez crashed. The oil rig explosion in the Gulf is more recent. The hydrocarbon dumping would have killed off most life on the planet. Basically my point is that observational science shows that virtually none of what you just stated has been proven or even has any legitimate evidence. It’s wild speculation. I’m not an astrophysicist, but I doubt you are either. The governments hiding things is obvious. This in no way shows life on Mars or Venus dumping oil or switching orbital positions. It does not even slightly point to alien visitations or life. I’m not trying to offend you. I’m just trying to understand what you just said in a way that shows there is some evidence for it. DJohn1 
+You are quite right. It is wild speculation on my part. Except the temperature is not the only evidence. Venus rotates the wrong direction in its spin or day. It is the only planet in the entire solar system to do so. The day is 268 of our days long. The year is 222 of our days. That the temperatures are so high could just be the closeness to the Sun. The atmosphere is 15 times thicker than our planet’s atmosphere. That speaks to me that something unusual is going on. As for the oil, it is showing up in places that only a rain of oil might explain. The critical thing that we do not know is When it occurred or if it occurred at all. If I am right, there is a good possibility that the Moon will have some fairly large deposits of oil under the surface. There is a lot of unexplained discoloration on face of the Moon. If there is oil under the surface of the Moon, it might also mean that the Moon was a small planet at one time with an atmosphere and life. Again, I am speculating. The theory did not come from astrophysics. It came from examining a lot of stories all over the planet from the approximate time of Moses. That was Velinkovsky’s specialty, ancient languages and psychology of ancient cultures. Rastus 
+A field of study that you may or may not have heard of is called “catastrophism”. Not without its critics and highly controversial among biblical scholars, you may find the subject a good scratch to your itch. A book by Donald Wesley Patten called “Catastrophism And The Old Testament” might be in accordance with your fancy. Johnny 
+Are you speaking of Immanuel Velikovsky? He is the Author of Worlds in Collision. He points out the chaos of the universe. I found him interesting to read in 1958. DJohn1 
+Yes. He was not a specialist in astronomy. He simply pointed out what the beliefs of the ancient world were. He did upset the scientific world of his time. I think he was at least 50% right about things. We now know that Venus could not have come from Jupiter or Saturn. My own thought is that it had to come from the outer solar system or beyond. We have well over 100 moons around the planets. Most of which are around the gas giants. Most of which have a nickel/iron core. None of which could have come from the major gas giants in the Solar System. They had to come from something much more dense and much older. The man most likely to shake the core beliefs of astrophysics and astronomy is an accomplished astronomer, Dr. Mike Brown. What he is finding is there are a series of small, Pluto sized planets, some with small moons in the outer solar system. Scientists have been looking in the wrong place. Of the four new planets he has found, they seem to be 40-50 degrees off the orbits of the gas giants. Some are in extremely comet like orbits and at least one is on its way out of the Solar System. I am no scientist. A lot of what I read about it makes little sense with current theories. Unless there is something out there that is big enough to drag small planets and moons out of their original orbits around the Sun. Some think we have a brown dwarf about a light year out at the edge of the Sun’s influence(gravity). So far no one has found it. I think we are looking in the wrong places. IF there is a brown dwarf, it is quite small as stars go. IF it is in a comet-like orbit, then somewhere down the road it will return causing all kinds of changes in the Solar System. IF it has planets around it, then those planets might cause a lot of destruction as they come close to existing planets and moons in our solar system. Our planets as viewed from the North and top of the Solar System rotate around the Sun counter-clockwise. IF this brown dwarf is rotating clockwise around the Sun, that might complicate finding and plotting an orbit for it. IF it is way off the angle that most planets orbit the Sun, that might also keep it from being discovered. I do find it interesting that a lot of astronomy telescopes are moving towards the South Pole for observations. Known Brown Dwarf Stars do exist around stars in our stellar neighborhood and some are independent of any other stars all within about 12 light years of our Sun. A lot of what we do know is kept fairly low key and doesn’t really get a lot of news headlines. How many people know about Dr. Brown’s work in the outer solar system? How many know about the gap(hole) in the orbits of the ORB cloud? A gap big enough for something the size of Venus or much larger could have made in the outer asteroid belt. I think it is possible that an object possibly the size of a gas giant might be out there somewhere but so little light is coming from it that we will only discover it by accident. What is significant is we are still learning about new planets in our own solar system. The governments have spent enormous amounts of money in this area through NASA. So someone must think we have things out there we need to know. GrimReaperLady 
+I found your reply facinating! There is no way we are the only planet with life. I think I am going to go read some scientific journals, any suggestions. jaxon64 
+Awesome distraction technique…you turned a discussion of govt media control and trolling into a lengthy discussion of planetary formation?…truly masterful. You deserve a raise. DJohn1 
+Thank you. Just for the record, I have no salary from the U.S. Government for trolling. The only funds from them I see is my monthly Social Security Check as someone that has retired. Not sure how long that lasts before they steal what they haven’t all ready spent out of the general fund. The true masters are the PR people hired to keep the sheep all sleeping peacefully while the government steals everything in sight. I started getting suspicious about 20 years ago, when the entire newspaper business stopped mud raking and went with bland stories handed out by the wire services. It appears stirring up things has legal penalties and newspapers do not want to get hung up in legal battles. So they run news from wire services and leave the real reporting to others. Making advertisers angry has financial penalties as well, so lord help the reporter that angers an advertiser. Everything is wrapped up in money motivations. That above anything else is what has destroyed the country’s estate that used to bring down the crooked politicians. The only way this related to planetary formation is that this media was used to go against this man by scientists that were angry at his claims. These scientists literally boycotted the publishers willing to pub his work. My own thought is that controling the scientific discovery press is just as bad. Jonathon von Tischner 
+A good video on that is “Return of the Nephilim” by Chuck Missler. DJohn1 
+Immanuel Velikovsky wrote the book in question. Worlds in Collision was the title. He was wrong about a lot of things. For instance I do not think it is possible to have Venus come out of Jupiter. The elements are different. Venus has a heavy core vs Jupiter has a Hydrogen and Helium core. What he did get right was a lot of facts about what Venus actually consisted of. My own idea is Venus might have been a wondering planet not orbiting any Star. I mentioned this man because by coincidence he did get a lot of things right. His ideas should not have been debunked or censored in any way. How was Venus created? I think it might have come from Brown Dwarf that was coming apart at the seams. That would make it a whole lot older than Velinkovsky thought. The idea is Brown Dwarfs might have a lot of heavy materials on them than regular stars and gas planets. We have an entire solar system full of heavy objects like that. We also have at least 4 gas giants that consist mostly of hydrogen and helium. The question is where did all of those heavy material objects consisting of nickel/iron cores come from? That is a question that most astronomy scientists do not have a good answer yet. 2¢Wurth 
+Wow, less than two sentences into the article and the icon of Gary2 started appearing on the left and right sides of the screen. I used to think of a troll as a small ugly creature, now I think of this perverted looking plastic muppet who barks out this “take from the rich, give to me” mantra. Must be very weird living in that world… Chris 
+Yes the Purple colored Cookie Monster from Sesame Street! seth 
+Half my comments get deleted or trolled outright. There is little to no freedom of speech in the West. Heck, other countries are the lands of the free, relatively speaking. blackciti_fo5 
+So they’re doing with the internet what has already been done to television basically? Great. Just great. Eric Blair 
+Those who propose that only one perspective is viable and that all competing viewpoints should be abolished by decree are the worst trolls of all, no matter what ideals they hold up to justify their actions. America was founded on the idea of freedom, and primarily freedom of speech and ideas. Any who would seek to deter that freedom are as tumors on the political body of this country, and as such should be excised lest their disease continue to spread. Goebbels and Bernays would be proud of such people, but they have no place in a truly free country. Nicholas Mull 
+yes brotherjohnf 
+We have been telling people this for years as we have battled these trolls for more than a decade. People just refuse to believe it. Sad. Syrin 
+Anyone reading my unrelenting attacks on GARY at Michael’s other web site knows that I believe without a doubt he is a paid disinformation gov’t agent. NO ONE can read the facts that Michael presents, and logically reach the conclusions he does when faced with pages of data and facts unless they are brain dead or have an agenda. He might have both. Guest 
+LOL. I don’t think Gary is a disinformation agent. I think he’s just an angry man who feels that he’s owed something. But that’s just my opinion. jaxon64 
+agreed…now gay vet may actually be a troll. Gary at least discusses the issues,-albeit from his redundant and close-minded viewpoints which are inalterable by facts—yet gay vet and a few others are always trying to distract from the topic and turn any intelligent discourse in the comments section into a name calling and Repub vs Democrat discussion. His very name was probably chosen to distract from article content. Another tactic I see from some here consistently is that if anyone mentions any faith, or God or just finishes a post with “God help us”…then trolls who never post anything else will pounce in and start attacking God—I think the true motive is to turn the conversation toward one of atheism/religion/creation instead of the topic of the article… You see it from the same people over and over–then they disappear and someone new with a different moniker will take their place ( quite possibly the same shill but different name.) All said, they are very effective at distraction if one reads through the comments, they often take over an entire article and it never gets back on topic. Gay Veteran 
+speak of trolls and jaxon64 pops up. 
+“…yet gay vet and a few others are always trying to distract from the topic and turn any intelligent discourse in the comments section into a name calling and Repub vs Democrat discussion… 
+hey Einstein, get a clue, there is no differences between the 2 parties 
+…His very name was probably chosen to distract from article content….” 
+I’ll choose my own name, j-hole. 
+“…Another tactic I see from some here consistently is that if anyone mentions any faith, or God or just finishes a post with “God help us”…then trolls who never post anything else will pounce in and start attacking God…” 
+OR you post something incredibly stoopid and get hammered for it FirstGarden 
+You know a tree by its fruit. Veteranforpeace 
+Some folks take pride in being prime slime. They’re so desperate for attention that any kind would be better than none. Veteranforpeace 
+They’ll do it for buck too, Paid prime time slime. 
+Facts seldom stand in the way of what someone wants to believe English Kev 
+I think Gary has genitalia dimension disorder. Syrin 
+Michael, I actually believe the gov’t push to take over the internet will HELP America. Why? because most Americans are fat, lazy brain dead zombies who let Jon Stewart do their thinking for them. They’re intellectual sloths and are 100% unaware of the noose being placed around their neck. HOWEVER, they are internet addicts, and take away an addicts fix, and he/she will react potentially violently. It might just shake enough people from their stupor to effect meaningful change. FirstGarden 
+How dare you speak my mind? :-) 
+Media-mesmerized couch potatoes. Derp 
+So basically, what you’re saying is that the only way to save the internet (and all that it represents) is to destroy it? Apple Cider 
+Your beliefs step on the rights of free citizens and we are not here to serve your needs. Please stick your head in a bucket of water and drown yourself. Gay Veteran 
+you’ll get more truth from Jon Stewart than from the corporate media (including Fox) rkb100100 
+Public sector employee unions troll everything. FirstGarden 
+The New “Free Speech”– no speech tolerated but their own. (If you disagree, you’re automatically a hater and a phobe.) 
+The New “Diversity”– Everyone except veterans and white males in their 50s. 
+The New “Constituency”– Left wing voting blocks 
+(Formed by tax incentives to corporations for target hiring; promotion of welfare vs. workfare.) Rastus 
+Their father is the “father of lies” FirstGarden 
+Aye, but he is an equal-opportunity father, with children in many a camp. Derp 
+Freedom of Speech means that you have the freedom to speak your mind. That doesn’t mean that what you say is automatically correct or true. FirstGarden 
+You’re correct. Unfortunately, Statism does not tolerate free speech, dissent, nor true diversity. Joey D’Fixer 
+I dont know why they even bother anyway. Its not like this garbage works and they are so easy to spot. For instance, on YT, they are always a dead give away, as for 95% of the time, they use a First and Last name, which from what i can tell, is autogenerated through some script they use. I had seen in a video, the FedBizOpps site putting out a contract for a system to make multiple IDs for use in some Social Media program. If i recall, it was the Air Force or something like that. Operation Earnest Voice was another one as well. But they basically log in through some front-end of sorts, and they dont actually use YT like we do. The profiles are ALWAYS empty: no dates, no vids, no likes, no uploads, no playlists, nothing on the ‘About’ section. Its all pure vapor. 
+And Cass Sunstein was the one who recommended all this in his paper, calling it ‘cognitive infiltration’, and who is another Dr Goebbels wanna-be and who should be hung from a tree. And its not like they are ‘going to change our minds’ on anything. Troll or no troll, if i dont like what youre saying to me, i have 3 words for you ‘Go F yourself.’ This is what actually enrages me more than anything, that they feel everyone but themselves, are going to be that malleable, zombified and sloth-like, to just believe everything they spew. If its one thing i hate, its people with superiority complexes, they are just a total scourge on the planet and its mindset of every control-freak authoritarian out there, past, present and future. Randall Thrift 
+The illusion of privacy is just that, AN ILLUSION. My granddaddy always taught me that once an idea, thought, or opinion leaves you mind it is no longer private and you no longer should have any expectations of privacy. In today’s world of the high tech social media this truth is more evident than ever. GrimReaperLady 
+Wow that is scary, this my last post until I think this through. Captain Canuck 
+Yeah if you guys are worried about Obama’s NSA, then you wouldn’t believe Prime Minister Harper. He’s diabolical. He’s managed to remove or control most press and cameras from Parlaiment Hill. This is huge, as media used to have access and reporters had a presence at the capital. He’s also managed to muzzle ANYONE who comes out and questions the Big Oil agenda. c p 
+Corrupt governments hate free speech, and ours will be gone for good with the next major terrorist attack or natural disaster. Then the internet will be every bit as dumbed down as the broadcast media. Blitzkrieg 
+Oh Gay Veteran… Paging Gay Veteran. Blitzkrieg 
+…and Gary — if they’re not already the same person. Gay Veteran 
+sorry junior but I detest our fascist government Charles Reece 
+By the way, since Britain and America are BOTH English-speaking countries – and the closest of allies, along with France; that therefore, England is ALREADY “in league” with whatever almost EVERTHING that the U.S. does in the first place, AND therefore, given Edward Snowden’s revelations of the U.S. Government’s intelligence apparatus “spying” on its own citizens; that accordingly, why not EXPECT Britain to do the “same” – to not only their OWN people, but also ours as well, anyway. 
+And besides, truly, during the 1960’s, the English-speaking countries; such as England itself, and Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have already been SHARING “signals-intelligence” information – or electronic “eavesdropping” information – with each other and with Uncle Sam; through the ECHELON electronic eavesdropping network; which was set up back in 1964. 
+By each member nation of ECHELON electronically spying on each other’s respective private citizens – and passing on intelligence-gathered information to the OTHER member nations; that consequently, each member nation could actually CIRCUMVENT their own respective government’s laws PROHIBITING ECHELON from “spying” on its OWN country’s citizens. They’ve been doing this ever since ECHELON was “set up” back in ’64. But very few Americans have already known about what’s been “going on” all of these past five decades; that being, with ECHELON members permitting each other to electronically “spy” and “share” intelligence information dealing with each other’s country’s citizens. Thus, by ONE member nation allowing ANOTHER one to gather information on its own citizens – and sharing that same “information” with the others; that consequently, each member nation COULD NOT legally be “accused” of violating its own respective government’s laws prohibiting domestic spying. BART SIMPSONSON 
+Hey, it’s just another means of getting the prog’s agitprop out there and countering any notion of Free Speech on the internet. In case you haven’t noticed they also pretty much have the non-Fox TV news networks, channels, and programs fellating them daily……. James 
+It’s not really a surprise tho is it? And I don’t think it’s a Lib vs Dem thing, I imagine most governments do it. And it’s not just governments either. Big business is up to exactly the same thing. Big pharma, oil companies spreading disinformation about climate change. Sad times we live in really, difficult to know who to trust on the Internet these days. We all seek out the stories and opinions that support our view on the world. ButIDigress 
+In any society, most people do nothing. It’s up to the minority to defend the naive majority. It’s how things are done. Bob G 
+If I read the article correctly the government is targeting conservative thought. I always wondered why liberals would deliberately read conservative web sites and then harass the commentators. I certainly have no wish to read liberal web sites let alone comment on them. It all makes sense now. OGIS 
+The DNC is behind a lot of this. False flag operations to make “conservative” posters sound ignorant, stupid and racist. (Not to say that there are not elements of that in many conservatives AND liberals, but these j@ck@sses ramp it up to 11.) Tami Chapman 
+I almost posted this until you mentioned the Harvard Student’s article, which was taken totally out of context. Great article until the very end when you very sneakily try to place all of the blame on liberals when we all know the the real villains completely control both parties, especially the conservatives. It’s Independents like Sanders who will fight for our rights…people who are not bought by the power elite.",FAKE
+10453,The REAL REASON Hillary Was Not Prosecuted For Her Email Scandal Will Infuriate You,"The REAL REASON Hillary Was Not Prosecuted For Her Email Scandal Will Infuriate You Oct 28, 2016 Previous post 
+Oh, Governor Terry McAuliffe… The smelly, Democratic cat of politics that just keeps returning to our doorstep. 
+Just this summer he restored voting rights to thousands of felons with the hopes of garnering more votes for Clinton (I’m surprised his legislation wasn’t entitled, “Felons for Felons!”). 
+Now we’ve found out that he and his money are likely part of the reason why Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted for her e-mail scandal. 
+In a story line that would make the writers of House of Cards salivate, Governor McAuliffe donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign of the Deputy FBI Director’s wife. 
+Yes, you read that right. 
+According to Zero Hedge : 
+The latest allegation of potential impropriety and conflict of interest involving the Democratic Party and the FBI, which over the summer famously cleared Hillary Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing as relates to her personal email server, comes not from a Podesta email or a Wikileaks disclosure, but the WSJ which overnight reported that the political organization of Virginia Govenor Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use . 
+Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+90,Why Rachel Dolezal's assertion that she is black could pave way for folks choosing a 'racial identity',"Rachel Dolezal, the former head of the Spokane NAACP, has insisted she is black, despite having white parents. She has been quoted as saying, ""That question is not as easy as it seems. There's a lot of complexities ... and I don't know that everyone would understand that.""
+
+I do understand. Years ago, even before Sen. Elizabeth Warren was exposed for identifying herself as Native American (which she is not), I believe I was the first person in the world to assert that transgender activism by Chaz Bono (and now by Caitlyn Jenner) could sow the seeds for people not only to assert their core gender identities, despite DNA evidence to the contrary, but also to assert their racial identities, despite physical and historical evidence to the contrary. If a man with male anatomy and a “Y” chromosome can assert he is female and be put on the covers of celebrity magazines and given awards for bravery, why can’t a white woman assert that her internal identity is that of a black woman?
+
+If a blond man with Scandinavian roots visits Japan and feels a gripping sense of belonging, such that he is certain he is among his own people, why can’t that man return to America, dye his hair, have facial surgery and be accepted as an Asian-American?
+
+Why does factual history have to dictate current reality if a human being feels very deeply that that factual history is not in tune with his or her inner sense of self?
+
+I mean the question sincerely, because we are rushing into this philosophical and psychological landscape with almost no consideration of its implications. And I am not taking sides with either transgender advocates or those who oppose them. Let others consider the implications of the transgender movement for our collective grip on reality, as a culture and as a species.
+
+I am merely stating what seems obvious to me. If our measure of what a person is must be no more and no less than what she feels she is, then Rachel Dolezal can be black, if she wants to be, and if she can show evidence that she has sincerely adopted that vision of herself. And Elizabeth Warren can be a Native American. To do otherwise would be to stigmatize them for their “racial identity,” in the same way that Caitlyn Jenner would object to being stigmatized for Caitlyn’s “gender identity.”
+
+Racial identity need not be the end of this, by the way. Here’s one to ponder: If a man feels, to the core of his being, that he is 65 when he is chronologically 35, and if he can show evidence that he has voiced this self-concept, repeatedly, and has objected vigorously to being treated as though he is 35, who are we to lace him to his actual date of birth? Why not let him choose another that feels “right”? And if he applies for Medicare, why should he be denied? Isn’t that discriminating against him based on his age identity?
+
+You may think this is ridiculous (and I might), but a leading attorney with whom I have consulted has suggested that the case of such a man would not be without some merit, given the case law regarding transgender individuals.
+
+As my artist friend Lincoln Agner puts it, “When we cross enough boundaries, millions of people can end up playing air guitar.”
+
+I have warned and warned and warned that breaking free of certain apparent realities that define us as human beings – genetically and historically – can have profound implications for how closely people remain tied to reality, in general. Let us see how far down this path of “self”-assertion we travel, and with what results.
+
+
+
+Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team.",REAL
+5546,Brexit and the Law,"by Lambert Strether 
+Lambert: A round-up of Brexit options, hard and soft. Wouldn’t the Brits have an easier time of it if they wrote their Constitution down? 
+By Silvia Merler, an Italian citizen, who joined Bruegel as Affiliate Fellow at Bruegel in August 2013. Her main research interests include international macro and financial economics, central banking and EU institutions and policy making. Originally published at Bruegel . 
+What’s at stake: last week, the UK High Court ruled that the triggering of Article 50 – and therefore the Brexit process – should involve the UK Parliament. The Government will appeal the decision but this has created a new wave of uncertainty about the timing of Brexit, and on what this involvement can mean in practice. We review the different opinions. 
+Jo Murkens on the LSE blog has a very good explainer of the legal basis of the judgement, which he considers exemplary in its clarity and reasoning. The decision’s focus is strictly constitutional, not political: the only question it examined was whether, as a matter of UK constitutional law, the Crown, acting through the government, is entitled to use prerogative powers to trigger Article 50 in order to cease to be a member of the European Union. This – it turns out – hinges on a balance between constitutional requirements and individual rights. 
+Article 50 allows the UK to withdraw from the EU “in accordance with its own constitutional requirements”. Turning to these requirements, the government argued that the Crown – through the government – has a prerogative power to authorise the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, and that this power can only be taken away by express terms in an Act of Parliament. The court acknowledges the government’s position as correct, but only with respect to rights and obligations created as a matter of international law. As soon as individual rights protected by domestic law are affected, Parliament must be involved, especially because some individual rights would be lost upon withdrawal, as they cannot be replicated in UK law. Murkens argues that the decision amounts to a proper drubbing for the government particularly because it was not the claimants that landed the hammer blow, but the government itself, by acknowledging that the Art.50 notification would inevitably lead to the loss of some individual rights. The next stop, however, is the UK Supreme Court. 
+David Allen Green writes in the FT that the High Court decision is as strong as it could be and creates a substantial problem for the prime minister’s Brexit policy. The government should look hard at the reason for the court’s judgment. Central to the judges’ thinking is the impact that leaving the EU will have on the rights of UK citizens: the court has said that extinguishing such rights cannot be done by mere executive action. But the problem is more than one of form. The difficult and interlocking legal issues created by the UK leaving the EU are such that the matter is not for a prime minister, or indeed a court, to decide. 
+Allen Green argues that the government is not taking the opportunity offered by the judgment to start the exercise again, properly: an appeal has been announced and the court has been denounced. Those in favour of the UK remaining in the EU can draw only limited comfort from the decision, because there is no reason to believe parliament will directly defy the result of the referendum. The only thing that has been undermined by the High Court’s decision is May’s superficial approach to achieving Brexit. Eventually, the government will have to adopt a broader, more collaborative and more open approach to the process, as there is no alternative to making a success of it. 
+Camilla Macdonald discusses three options and argues that the ruling is not a victory for “soft” Brexit. The first option is for the government to succeed in overturning the result on appeal to the Supreme Court. MPs will then have the chance to debate at length, but they will have lost the leverage over the Government that the current ruling affords them. Second, the Government may lose the appeal and yet manage to “face down the rebels” in the Commons in time to meet May’s timetable of triggering Article 50 by March. This could be achieved by passing a non-amendable motion that presents MPs with a binary choice to approve or reject triggering article 50, assuming most MPs would not dare to risk the ire of the leave voting public. The third option – which Macdonald considers the most likely – is that the Government loses its appeal and is forced to introduce primary legislation, i.e. a Brexit bill, that will make it difficult, but not impossible, to meet the deadline. This is likely to force the Government to make concessions to MPs, but not necessarily in any form that will amount to a commitment to a “soft” Brexit. 
+“Soft Brexit” is what the majority of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and part of Conservatives now want, but the biggest obstacle to this outcome is the lack of unity and of a negotiating strategy among this would-be coalition. In this situation, it is hard to see what red lines could be imposed on the government. Yet, Mcdonald thinks that involving Parliament in a process that will ultimately be defined by many complex and cross-cutting trade-offs might help to dispel the myths of simplistic “hard” and “soft” labelling. Nationalist parties would no longer plausibly be able to claim that they are excluded and the ruling could end up being an important victory for thought and reflection over rabble rousing on both sides. 
+Jolyon Maugham writes on FT Alphaville that after the High Court’s Brexit decision, we should forget about the activation of Article 50 in March. The Government’s appeal is likely to be heard in the Supreme Court in early December and this opens new risks. Lingering, unaddressed, in the background to this litigation is a question about whether an Article 50 notification is reversible. The High Court in reality proceeded on the assumption that a notification, once given, could not be withdrawn. But the Supreme Court has a different legal obligation and it might feel legally compelled to address that assumption directly. Addressing it would require a politically explosive referral to the European Court of Justice, because the question of whether a notification is reversible is one of European law. Beside the likely delay of around three months, a finding by the Supreme Court that an Article 50 notification could be “pulled” would leave ajar the door to a prospectively damaging continuation of the Referendum campaign until the time exit is formalised. 
+Assuming instead that the appeal fails, the government will have to draft a Bill and place it before parliament. And that Bill would have to pass both Houses of parliament. In the Commons there would be little or no enthusiasm for rejecting it, but it is likely that MPs would impose conditions on the triggering of Article 50, thus constraining the government’s negotiating position. Parliament may wish to choose whether to accept the outcome of the negotiations and it may even require that the deal negotiated by the government be put back to the people in the form of a second referendum. In practical terms, it is difficult to contemplate that these steps – drafting a Bill, debating it in the Commons, voting on amendments, placing it before the House of Lords and then addressing amendments introduced by the Upper Chamber in the Commons again – can sensibly be taken after the result of the Supreme Court appeal is known but before March. So, unless the Supreme Court overturns the High Court’s decision, Maugham thinks we should consider May’s March deadline ancient history. 
+Stephen Booth at Open Europe makes four main points about what this decision means going forward. First, if Government loses the appeal, then legislation is likely to be necessary. The reasoning of the ruling illustrates that, if the claimants’ argument holds (which regards rights stemming from EU membership set down in parliamentary legislation), the courts were never likely to be satisfied by anything short of legislation to trigger Article 50. Second, parliamentary moves to block Article 50 trigger would be politically explosive. It is unlikely that a majority of MPs in the Commons would actually move to block Brexit by preventing the Government triggering Article 50, especially having voted to give the public the opportunity to vote to leave the EU in the referendum. Booth argues that the same is probably true for the House of Lords, which would create a full-blown constitutional crisis if it opposed Article 50 outright. 
+Third, Parliament’s leverage over process is far greater than over any negotiating mandate or outcome. So process is likely to be the focus of any parliamentary tussles over legislation to trigger Article 50, with MPs and Lords seeking to amend the Bill to give them greater and more formal powers to scrutinise. Fourth, Booth argues that a general election is not out of the question. This would certainly mean missing the end of March 2017 deadline but would also mean that any MPs seen to be blocking the referendum result would find it very hard to keep hold of their seats and this is why he thinks it is likely that an Article 50 Bill would be passed. 
+Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics argues that for now, this turn of events exposes the hypocrisy of May’s government position of wanting to repatriate all EU political powers back to the United Kingdom, but wishing to deny the country’s sovereign lawmakers a say on the Article 50 process. Whatever happens, the court ruling has dealt a blow to the small right-wing clique of hardcore euro skeptics in the Conservative Party and May’s government and the potential direct involvement of Parliament is good political news for Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party – as his only path to becoming prime minister is the one that opens up if May and the Conservatives completely botch the Brexit negotiations. He also argues that this should also harden further the EU negotiating position. These developments make it more likely that May will soon be forced to call an early election to seek a new mandate on Brexit. The Conservatives would probably win, but an accelerating economic downturn, the United Kingdom’s first past-the-post-electoral system, and a potential rallying of Remain supporters, could spring a surprise. 
+Tyler Cowen argues that the British parliamentary vote might matter. The more likely scenario in his view is simply that Parliament stalls, demanding that Theresa May give them “the right Brexit”. Of course there is no such thing, wrong Brexit is wrong Brexit, if only because EU-27 cannot agree on very much. But with enough stalling, eventually another national election will be held and of course Brexit would be a major issue, probably the major issue. That in essence would serve as a second referendum, and if anti-Brexit candidates did well enough, parliamentarians would have cover to go against the previous expression of the public will. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+3559,Tsarnaev Mom: Americans Are ‘Terrorists’,"Convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s mother, Zubeidat, has reportedly posted a statement online declaring Americans “the terrorists here” and calling her son “the best of the best.” In a message sent to a family friend on Russian social media site VKontakte, Zubeidat Tsarnaev wrote, “I will never forget it. May god bless those who helped my son. The terrorists here are the Americans and it’s known to everyone. My son is the best of the best.” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty on all 30 counts against him and now faces the death penalty.
+
+Zubeidat said she was outraged at the verdict in an interview with Vocativ over WhatsApp:
+
+""TODAY THEY ARE KILLING MUSLIMS, AND TOMORROW WILL COME YOUR TURN AND HE, WHO DOUBTS THIS IS DEEPLY MISTAKEN!!!!!” . ""THEY WILL PAY FOR MY SONS AND THE SONS OF ISLAM, PERMANENTLY!!! THE TEARS OF THEIR MOTHERS WILL BE FUEL FOR THEM IN HELL, AND ALSO THEIR BLOOD, I AM DOUBTLESS AND ETERNALLY GLAD THAT I KNOW THIS FROM THE WORDS OF THE CREATOR, NOT JUST ANYONE’S WORDS!!!!!!""",REAL
+7425,It isn’t ‘Islamophobia’ when an Oklahoma GOP State Rep. says “Islam is a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out”,"BNI Store Oct 31 2016 It isn’t ‘Islamophobia’ when an Oklahoma GOP State Rep. says “Islam is a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out” Unfortunately, some Christians in Oklahoma, where there has been one savage beheading of a Christian woman by a Muslim and at least one other beheading attempt, seem to think so, and blindly condemn all outspoken critics of Islam…especially the Christians. Nondoc Whining about so-called “Islamophobia is exactly what James Davenport, a Christian political science professor of at Rose State College, is doing . Specifically, he attacks State Rep. John Bennett for holding an interim stud y this past week on the impact of “radical Islam, Shariah Law, the Muslim Brotherhood and the radicalization process” on Oklahoma and the nation. During the course of this study, Rep. Bennett referred to Adam Soltani, the executive director for designated terrorist group CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter of Oklahoma), and Imam Imad Enchassi, of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, as “terrorists.” As someone who grew up in the Evangelical Christian tradition, and as someone who believes religious freedom remains a fundamental principle of our system of government, I am both offended and saddened at this spectacle. I am offended that a state representative from my state would use the cloak of Christianity to spew hate and bigotry such as this. I am also offended that he would do so while arguing he is defending freedom. Imam Enchassi then got up from his seat in the audience and hugged two members of other faiths who were in attendance. Bennett asked Rep. Randy Grau, R-Edmond, chairman of the Judiciary and Civil Procedure Committee, to admonish members of the audience not to hug a Muslim. In fact, during one exchange between Bennett and Imam Enchassi, the Imam stated, “It’s a free country,” to which Bennett, who served in the U.S. Marines replied, “I know, I fought for it in two wars.” John Guandolo, the founder of UnderstandingtheThreat.com , who served in the Marines and is a former FBI agent, said the Islamic movement in Oklahoma has made significant strides, and he called CAIR-Oklahoma executive director Adam Soltani a terrorist. Under questioning from Bennett, Guandolo said groups in the country’s jihadi network use relationships with other faiths as a tool. But one wonders what, exactly, Bennett fought for. It clearly wasn’t freedom. Neither freedom of religion nor freedom of association seem high on his list of priorities, especially if you happen to be a member of Islam. Perhaps he was fighting for Christianity. The problem with that line of reasoning is there rests absolutely no instruction in the New Testament for believers to physically fight for Christ, or for the faith. In fact, if one were to hold strictly to Christ’s own words on this, one could easily reach the conclusion that Christ expects us not to fight for him (read John 18:36 ). So if Bennett wasn’t fighting for freedom, and he wasn’t fighting for Christianity, what was he fighting for? Perhaps he should spend more time reading the history of his own faith rather than fretting about the supposed threat from Muslims. He would find that this combining of religion and state power never ends well — for anyone. I also mentioned I was saddened by this event. That sadness comes from the fact that I know I will receive pushback from members of my own faith community on this matter. I will be told I do not understand the true threat posed by Islam. I’ll also be told I’ve been blinded to the truth by my immersion in the liberal world of academia. Too many Evangelicals have been convinced by opportunistic political and religious leaders that any acknowledgement or accommodation of Islam is a threat to Christianity itself. I disagree. If allowing others to freely practice their faith, if providing (special and excessive) accommodations to those of Islam and if refusing to use the levers of government to intimidate, harass or oppress minority faiths (the one faith determined to subjugate and dominate those of every other faith) is a threat to Christianity, we Christians have bigger problems than we know. 
+If Christians want to have real influence on our society — if we want to spread the good news of God’s love — we must reject the type of political religion promoted by Rep. Bennett and his ilk. We must stand with those of other faiths and affirm that, unlike some in the Oklahoma Legislature , we believe all people of faith are entitled to practice their religion freely without fear of official sanction. “If you are concerned that there are some who wish to destroy the Christian faith, follow Christ’s instructions: “Love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you…You must be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.” ( Luke 6:27-36 ) (And we see how well that idea has worked out for Christians in the Middle East who are very close to becoming extinct because of the ethnic cleansing by the Muslim majority) RELATED STORIES/VIDEOS:",FAKE
+6880,WELCOME TO PARIS where tour buses have to navigate around all the new Muslim tent cities filling the streets,"BNI Store Oct 31 2016 WELCOME TO PARIS where tour buses have to navigate around all the new Muslim tent cities filling the streets Now that France has shut down the filthy Calais ‘jungle’ camp where thousands of illegal alien Muslim invaders had been squatting, Muslim tent cities are sprouting up all over the streets of Paris. Gee, I guess French tourism hasn’t taken a big enough hit yet, following several Islamic terrorist attacks.Â",FAKE
+1241,Clinton braces for Nevada nail-biter,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+9998,The Israeli Trumpess,"WHAT WILL Donald Trump do if he loses the elections in a week and a half from now, as most polls indicate? 
+He has already declared that he will recognize the results -- but only if he wins. 
+That sounds like a joke. But it is far from being a joke. 
+Trump has already announced that the election is rigged. The dead are voting (and all the dead vote for Hillary Clinton). The polling station committees are corrupt. The polling machines forge the results. 
+No, that is not a joke. Not at all. - Advertisement - 
+THIS IS not a joke, because Trump represents tens of millions of Americans, who belong to the lower strata of the white population, which the white elite used to call ""white trash."" In more polite language they are called ""blue collar workers,"" meaning manual workers, unlike the ""white collar workers"" who occupy the offices. 
+If the tens of millions of blue collar voters refuse to recognize the election results, American democracy will be in danger. The United States may become a banana republic, like some of its southern neighbors, which have never enjoyed a stable democracy. 
+This problem exists in all modern nation-states with a sizable national minority. The lowest strata of the ruling people hates the minority. Members of the minority push them out of the lower jobs. And more importantly: the lower strata of the ruling majority have nothing to be proud of except for their belonging to the ruling people. 
+The German unemployed voted for Adolf Hitler, who promoted them to the ""Herrenvolk"" (master people) and the Aryan race. They gave him power, and Germany was razed to the ground. 
+THE ONE and only Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is a bad system, but that all the other systems tried were worse. - Advertisement - 
+As far as democracy is concerned, the United States was a model for the world. Already in its early days it attracted freedom-lovers everywhere. Almost 200 years ago, the French thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote a glowing report about the ""Democratie en Amerique."" 
+My generation grew up in admiration of American democracy. We saw European democracy breaking down and sinking into the morass of fascism. We admired this young America, which saved Europe in two world wars, out of sheer idealism. The democratic America vanquished German Nazism and Japanese militarism, and later Soviet Bolshevism. 
+Our childish attitude gave way to a more mature view. We learned about the genocide of the native Americans and about slavery. We saw how America is seized from time to time by an attack of craziness, such as the witch hunt of Salem and the era of Joe McCarthy, who discovered a Communist under every bed. 
+But we also saw Martin Luther King, we saw the first black President, and now we are probably about to see the first female President. All because of this miracle: American democracy.",FAKE
+6830,US Insiders – Not Russia – Leaked Clinton Emails,"Posted on November 2, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 
+We’ve repeatedly shown that it’s much more likely that American insiders – not Russian hackers – leaked the Clinton emails. 
+Today, the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – told Washington’s Blog: 
+My vote all along has been on an insider passing all these emails to Wikileaks. 
+If it were the Russians, NSA would have a trace route to them and not equivocate on who did it. It’s like using “Trace Route” to map the path of all the packets on the network. In the program Treasuremap NSA has hundreds of trace route programs embedded in switches in Europe and hundreds more around the world. So, this set-up should have detected where the packets went and when they went there. 
+Binney has previously explained to us that a Russian hack would have looked very different, and that he thought the hack may have been conducted by an NSA employee who was upset at Clinton’s careless handling of America’s most sensitive intelligence. 
+The former intelligence analyst, British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and chancellor of the University of Dundee (Craig Murray) – who is close friends with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange – said he knows with 100% certainty that the Russians aren’t behind the leaks. 
+Murray said today: 
+“The source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all. I discovered what the source was when I attended [a] whistleblower award in Washington. The source of these emails comes from within official circles in Washington DC. You should look to Washington not to Moscow .” 
+Prominent investment advisor and economic forecaster Martin Armstrong writes today: 
+All our indications from behind the curtain are suggesting that there are many within the “intelligence” sector and “law enforcement” sector who are deeply troubled with the Clintons. They are trying to release documents and info to stop the Clinton Inc. Machine. That’s all we can say on this topic right now. Suffice it to say, there is a real internal battle going on in Washington. 
+And the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under numerous administrations – both Democratic and Republican – (Steve Pieczenik ) said recently that a group of officers from various U.S. intelligence and military agencies have staged a “counter-coup” to save America from corruption, and are the source of the leaked emails: 
+Interesting times, indeed …",FAKE
+7000,Is This Why The Smash In Gold & Silver Is Happening? A Shocking Game-Changer For Gold & Silver Is Now Unfolding…,"174 Views November 11, 2016 GOLD , KWN , KWN II King World News 
+With gold down over $31 and silver plunging $1.08, is this why the smash in gold and silver is happening? Today King World News is reporting on a shocking game-changer in the gold and silver markets that is now unfolding. 
+Eric King: “Keith, you are a legend in the business and you have been on a long road trip that’s taken you around the world, including into Asia and Europe. You are in London currently but talk about about what you discovered in Hong Kong? I understand that a huge transformation is coming to the gold and silver sector.” 
+A Game-Changer For Gold & Silver Is Now Unfolding Keith Neumeyer: “That’s correct, Eric. I have been building relationships in Hong Kong for many, many years, but up to now there has been no way for Chinese investors to invest in North American companies. But for the first time ever Chinese investors can set up an account through Interactive Brokers, which has just opened an office in Hong Kong. This is going to be a massive game-changer for the gold and silver sector… IMPORTANT: To hear which legend just spoke with KWN about $8,000 gold and the coming mania in the gold, silver, and mining shares markets CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+Keith Neumeyer continues: “What this means, Eric, is that for the first time ever Chinese investors will now be able to directly buy U.S. and Canadian mining stocks.” 
+Eric King: “When you talk about the Chinese coming into the mining share market, even though the sector is currently experiencing the final stages of a correction, you are talking over time about a radical flow of money into the mining shares, aren’t you?” 
+The Tip Of The Iceberg Keith Neumeyer: “Yes, and it will just be the tip of the iceberg compared to what is coming. This is a new phenomenon and as more and more Chinese investors open up new accounts through brokerage firms in both China and Hong Kong, they are going to be looking to add to their exposure in the gold and silver space and they will now be able to do that by investing in mining stocks for the first time ever. 
+We are in the beginning stages of a new bull market in gold and silver and the mining shares, so that will translate into huge money flowing into North American, and Canadian companies specifically, from China.” 
+Eric King: “I know you are familiar with the mania that took place in the mining shares in the late 1970s and into 1980 time frame. Despite the pullback, like the one we are seeing today and this week, what we will eventually see is a super-charged mania in gold, silver, and the mining shares because of the ocean of money that will be part of the secular bull market in gold and silver, this time around from China and the rest of Asia. Pierre Lassonde has spoken with me in the past about this but it was in relation to physical gold and silver prices. However, what you have uncovered now opens the door for oceans of money to eventually pour into the mining shares. Meaning, this mania will see upside moves that are difficult to comprehend because the Chinese are notoriously aggressive gamblers.” 
+Keith Neumeyer: “The key thing you and Pierre have discussed many times is the fact that the Chinese are gamblers. They love to play the stock market now and that will add a new dynamic to the gold and silver mining share market that we have never seen in the North American marketplace. 
+We have experienced bull runs in the mining share market over the last 15 or so years but it has never had the Chinese buyer coming in as part of the whole equation. What that means is that over the next few years in this new bull market in the mining sector we will see these new buyers, the Chinese, coming into the market and setting the stage for a major run in the mining shares. 
+China has a huge population, the largest population on the planet, and they are getting wealthier by the day. The Chinese are very familiar with the gold and silver markets and they love the physical metal. For them to be able to buy mining stocks, which generally trade at 3 – 5 times the move in gold and silver, they will be all over that upside leverage in the gold and silver markets. 
+Chinese Buying Causes A Major Silver Stock To Skyrocket! As I said earlier, Eric, this is a new phenomenon. I was just in Hong Kong with some of my staff and we met a large number of investors who are already shareholders in First Majestic Silver and First Mining Finance. This is quite interesting and it represents the beginning of what is going to be massive change in the mining share industry. We all know what happened to First Majestic Silver in the first six months of this year when it went from $4 Canadian to nearly $25 a share (see stunning 10-year chart below of First Majestic Silver). 
+Yes, the share price has corrected over the past couple of months but you can be assured that the massive spike to nearly $25 was due in part to Chinese buying.” 
+Eric King: “Keith, when I saw that move in First Majestic Silver I knew it was a short squeeze combined with new money entering the stock and I was trying to figure out where that money was coming from because the stock essentially went back to the all-time highs when the price of silver was around $50. Now I know where that new money was coming from — China. And of course this time the price of silver was only $20 and change when the Chinese money helped propel the stock back to the previous all-time high. Was that just a preview of what is to come in the mining sector and in First Majestic Silver? Because I am trying to figure out what happens to the share price of First Majestic Silver when the price of silver goes to $25 or $30 or even higher.” 
+Keith Neumeyer: “Eric, you mentioned an important point about short covering. First Majestic had 14 million shares short in January when the stock was $4 Canadian. The short position dropped to only 4 million shares by July. That’s when the stock peaked at nearly $25 Canadian. That was indeed a huge, huge move. And now today the short position is back to 18 million shares, which is ridiculous but it’s the highest short position in the First Majestic Silver’s history. 
+Interestingly, the price of silver went from $13.50 (U.S.) to around $21 in late July. But the price of First Majestic Silver went from a low of $2.40 (U.S.) to over $19 a share. You have to remember that is only with a little more than a $7 move in the price of silver. That was a pretty amazing move. So when we look forward to $25 or $30 silver, you will see some pretty interesting prices for First Majestic Silver.” 
+Neumeyer added: “Eric, we have also seen a very nice move in gold, even with the correction here, and I think this is a great opportunity for investors to take advantage of this down-move in gold and take a look at high-quality equities. One of those companies is First Mining Finance (symbol FF in Canada and FFMGF in the U.S.). I believe First Mining Finance has the best portfolio of development projects in the world. I don’t believe that the market fully understands what the company has achieved as a business. 
+The company has amassed 14 million ounces of gold in the ground with projects in great jurisdictions in the province of Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland. If a major is looking for a portfolio of gold projects, this portfolio will make their mouth water looking at what First Mining Finance possesses. The company has about 25 projects throughout Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. 
+As I said earlier, it is probably the best assembly of projects in the world and the company’s share price is highly undervalued at current levels. At 68 cents a share (Canadian) we are talking about roughly $21 for every ounce of gold in the ground. And in a healthy market the price for gold in the ground should be priced at 3, 4 or 5 times that amount.” 
+Eric King: “Keith, where do you see the price of silver trading in 2017?” 
+Price Of Silver To Soar By The End Of The Year And Into 2017 Keith Neumeyer: “I would never have believed that the price of silver would have traded down from $50 to $13.50 an ounce and it happened for all kinds of ridiculous reasons, from manipulation and short selling to sentiment and other things your guests have pointed out on King World News. 
+I projected the price of silver would end at $21 an ounce by the end of 2016. The price of silver hit $21 in July of this year, which was a fantastic move, and has since pulled back. This has positively impacted First Majestic Silver with cash flows that we haven’t seen for 5 or 6 years and our treasury is building every week — at new record highs — and our balance sheet is extremely strong. 
+But getting back to the price of silver and the fact that it hit $21 in July of this year, I wouldn’t be surprised to see $21 to $23 by the end of 2016. And while we have seen about a $100 move down in the price of gold in the last couple of days, the price of silver has pulled back but it has remained much stronger and I think that bodes very well for the price going forward. So I am expecting $25 – $30 silver in 2017.” ***Within hours KWN will be releasing Andrew Maguire’s powerful interview, where he discusses what to expect next after the gold and silver smash. 
+  For People Who Are Worried About Druckenmiller Selling His Gold…  ",FAKE
+8417,Dad in weird mood since 2004,"Dad in weird mood since 2004 07-11-16 A 54-YEAR-OLD man has been in a bit of a mood for the past 12 years, his family has noticed. Engineer Roy Hobbs has seemed reluctant to spend time with family members for the last decade or so, preferring to be in the shed or slumped in his chair with a can of lager and a forbidding look on his face. Son Paul Hobbs said: “Come to think of it, dad has seemed a bit pissed off since a few years after I was born. “Maybe something happened near the start of the 20th century that annoyed him. “I suppose we could ask him but that might just make it worse. I sometimes hear whistling from the shed so he seems to be okay when he’s on his own.” Hobbs’s wife Linda said: “He was quite chirpy during the 90s. He’s probably just hungry.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+8422,NATO Buildup in Eastern Europe: ‘We’ve Only Seen the Tip of the Iceberg’,"Sputnik October 27, 2016 
+NATO and Washington’s activities in Eastern Europe and the Baltics de facto amount to permanent military presence, Sergei Ermakov, a senior analyst at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, told RT, adding that we have seen “only the tip of the iceberg” so far. “Endless war-games and rotational deployments essentially amount to permanent military presence. NATO is testing a drastic military buildup. We have witnessed the alliance deploy expeditionary forces and assault troops to Eastern Europe. These are offensive, not defensive forces. What we have seen is only the tip of the iceberg,” Ermakov said. 
+The North Atlantic Alliance has pledged to refrain from deploying substantial forces along the NATO-Russia border on a permanent basis, but has been increasingly active in the region. The bloc approved its largest military buildup in Eastern Europe and the Baltics since the end of the Cold War at the 2016 Warsaw summit, a development viewed with deep concern in Moscow. 
+As part of this initiative, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US will establish and lead four battle groups expected to be deployed in Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Each will total up to 1,000 soldiers. These battalions are said to become operational in early 2017. The alliance has justified its massive buildup by blaming Russia for its ostensibly “assertive” behavior. Moscow has consistently denied these groundless claims. 
+Ermakov further explained that forces of NATO’s European members are not as lethal as they might seem. “On paper this is a force exceeding Russia’s [military] potential by several times. But it lacks real combat power. This is why Americans need to be everywhere. The US was forced to boost US European Command’s budget,” he said. 
+Earlier this year, the Pentagon requested $3.4bn for its operations in Europe in 2017, a four-time increase compared to its $789-million budget this year. A d v e r t i s e m e n t 
+Russian officials and experts have repeatedly pointed out that NATO increasing assertiveness has put regional stability at risk. 
+The bloc’s muscle flexing and aggressive rhetoric “greatly reduce European security and the chances for a revival of constructive dialogue between Russia and NATO, something Russia has been calling for so many years. Instead, the bloc is doing its best to provoke an arms race with unpredictable results,” Peter Korzun, an expert on wars and conflicts, wrote for the Strategic Culture Foundation. Ermakov also said that the United States wants to increase its presence in the Black Sea region to counter Russia. “Americans can no longer count on Turkey due to the failed coup attempt. Ankara has become a complicated partner. [Washington] is instead focusing on Bulgaria and Romania,” he said. 
+NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg mentioned Romania during a press conference held following the latest meeting of NATO’s defense ministers. He said that Romanian troops will join the US-led battle group in Poland. He also said that the ministers discussed progress made in strengthening NATO’s presence in the Black Sea region “in the air, at sea and on land.” This initiative will include among other things “a Romanian-led multinational framework brigade on land,” he observed, providing no additional information on the subject. 
+Ermakov further said that Washington also wants to counter Russia in Central Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. This article was posted: Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 6:39 am Share this article",FAKE
+10439,California & Oregon Want To Secede From The U.S. After Trump Election,"California & Oregon Want To Secede From The U.S. After Trump Election Nov 12, 2016 2 0 
+In what is shaping up to be the beginning of a revolution within the United States, residents from California and now Oregon are wanting to secede from the U.S. after Donald Trump was elected President…and they want Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Washington state to join them to create an entirely new country altogether. 
+Two days after the Trump election in the U.S. residents in California began a campaign called “ Yes California Independence Campaign ,” which is to initiate the process to officially secede from the U.S. California residents are pushing for secession. 
+Ruiz Evans said Yes California intends to launch an initiative that asks Californians whether they believe the state should remain part of the United States or break away on its own. Similar to the Citizens United ballot measure voters approved Tuesday, it would begin as an advisory proposal to kick-start an arduous process. Marcus Ruiz Evans is the vice president of the group and s aid that Californians have a choice : 
+“The reason that we’re here today is we wanted to point out to everybody in California that the American system is broken. It’s failing. It’s sinking. You as a Californian have a choice to make: Do you go down with that ship out of tradition or sail on your own?” 
+Their website states that Californians should follow Brexit’s lead: In our view, the United States of America represents so many things that conflict with Californian values, and our continued statehood means California will continue subsidizing the other states to our own detriment, and to the detriment of our children. However, this independence referendum is about more than California subsidizing other states of this country. It is about the right to self-determination and the concept of voluntary association, both of which are supported by constitutional and international law. In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the international community with their “Brexit” vote. Our “Calexit” referendum is about California joining the international community. You have a big decision to make. To add to Calexit’s momentum, an Oregon lawyer has joined the movement and filed the Oregon Secession Act , which has formally invited the states of California, Alaska, Washington, Hawaii and Nevada to secede with them and form a new nation together. The Act was filed by lawyer Jennifer Rollins and writer Christian Trejbal, who said that Oregonian values are no longer the values held by the rest of the United States and that joining with these other states to create a new nation “is a viable way to go forward.” However, just 24 hours after the Act was filed, they withdrew it due to the amount of violence they saw in the streets around the world. Trejbal said that they were receiving death threats and that their movement is not about violent protesting, so it was best to withdraw it at this time. Though Oregon has suspended their secession campaign for now, California’s campaign is growing stronger. With Texas speaking of secession just months ago, we now have the most populated state in the U.S. speaking of secession as well. Regardless of one’s political stance, it is clear to see that the people are growing restless and that something is going to have to give, and give soon. How do you see this playing out? Will California be able to secede and will other states join them? Will the U.S. Congress allow something like this to happen? Will revolution be the result?  ",FAKE
+4806,Here are the top five things to watch in tonight's debate,"First Read is a morning briefing from Meet the Press and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.
+
+HEMPSTEAD, NY -- Well, we're finally here: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tonight square off in their first presidential debate at Hofstra University, making it arguably the most consequential night so far of the 2016 election. The stakes are enormous, with recent polls showing the national race ranges from a six-point lead for Clinton (in the NBC/WSJ) to a dead-even tie (in Bloomberg's). There are five storylines we're watching heading into the debate.
+
+Which Donald Trump shows up? After observing him over the last 15 months, including during the GOP debate season, we're pretty confident who Trump is -- he's aggressive, loaded with zingers and oppo hits, and shaky on policy. But there the possibility that a different Trump could show up tonight. But if we were in Las Vegas, we'd bet heavily on the Trump we know showing up. (Just see Trump's Gennifer Flowers tweet from over the weekend.)
+
+Which Hillary Clinton comes to play? Meanwhile, we've spent the last eight years watching Clinton at presidential debates, and she's good. (Remember, she's a former lawyer.) Clinton was at her absolutely best last October in that first Democratic debate, where she ran circles around Bernie Sanders and her other opponents. But Clinton also has had some uneven performances -- think of that Democratic debate in Iowa right after the Paris terrorist attacks. And there was her game-changing rough moment when Tim Russert asked her about drivers' licenses for undocumented immigrants in Oct. 2008.
+
+How does Trump fare in his first one-on-one debate? That's right. Tonight will be the first time that Trump has ever debated an opponent one-on-one. Indeed, he thrived (and sometimes simply survived) during the GOP debate season with as many as eight to 10 other Republicans on the stage. So even though he was always in the spotlight, he only had to speak 12-18 minutes in a two-hour debate. Tonight will be different.
+
+How does Clinton fare in facing off against the ultimate Alpha Male? In his preview of tonight's debate, the Atlantic's James Fallows interviewed the famous anthropologist Jane Goodall. ""In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,"" Goodall said. ""In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position."" How Clinton responds could be one of the most important parts to tonight's debate.
+
+What happens in the first 30-40 minutes? As Politico's Shane Goldmacher observes, history has shown that most memorable moments of a debate typically happen early. ""That's when Al Gore first sighed, Mitt Romney knocked President Obama on his heels, and Marco Rubio, earlier this year, glitched in repeating the same talking point — over and over and over. It's when Gore tried, unsuccessfully, to invade George W. Bush's space, Richard Nixon was first caught wiping away sweat with a handkerchief (during the moderators' introductions!) and Gerald Ford in 1976 made the ill-advised declaration that, 'There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.'""
+
+Do the debates really matter?
+
+That's the fascinating question our colleague Dante Chinni asks. And his answer: not really. ""Looking at pre-debate NBC News/Wall Street Journal presidential polls and the final election results since 1992, there is only one campaign where the debate may have made a serious difference — 2000. In every other case, the candidate that led going into the debates wound up winning on Election Day. And, to be fair about 2000, Democrat Al Gore actually did get more votes than Republican George W. Bush (but lost the Electoral College), so technically — where the popular vote is concerned — the numbers above show a perfect 6 for 6. The candidate that led in the poll going into the debate period won the election."" On the other hand, 34% of voters in our new NBC/WSJ poll said that debates will be either ""extremely important"" or ""quite important"" in deciding their vote. Also, don't be surprised if the third-party vote in polls starts to drop after tonight. And how that vote gets distributed in the post-debate polls will be important to watch.
+
+NBC's Alex Seitz-Wald and Benjy Sarlin tee up tonight's debate. ""The good news for Trump, Republicans say, is that the expectations for his performance are about at rock bottom. While he's been more a more disciplined campaigner in recent weeks, he's struggled to stay on message and answer substantive policy questions. He also has never faced the bright spotlight of a one-on-one debate. His campaign, looking to reinforce his underdog image, claims he's eschewing typical debate preparations... Clinton, meanwhile, faces sky-high expectations. She's an experienced debater, having participated in nearly 40 debates since her first campaign for senate in New York 16 years ago, and has been holding marathon prep sessions at a debate camp set up in a hotel near her Chappaqua home.""
+
+The debate starts at 9:00 pm ET, and it lasts 90 minutes - divided into six 15-minute segments. Clinton gets the first question of the debate (on the result of a coin toss). About 1,000 audience members will be in attendance, and they are encouraged to remain quiet. We've got everything else you need to know about all the presidential debates, all in one place -- nbcnews.com/debates.
+
+Tim Kaine campaigns in Florida, making stops in Lakeland and Orlando… And Mike Pence holds a rally in Milford, NH at 1:30 pm ET.",REAL
+7667,The NRA Just Admitted It Was Always Lying About Obama Confiscating Guns,"  
+The NRA has just s tated the obvious – that President Obama does not have the ability to confiscate guns, nor has he ever tried. This statement is an acknowledgment directly from the NRA, after years of warning their members that a Democratic president is going to take away their guns. This debunks the ludicrous “Obama conspiracy” to repeal the Second Amendment and confiscate guns, once and for all. 
+The article was featured in NRA magazine, “America’s 1 st Freedom” on June 9 th , in which the author admits that “Congress writes the laws, not the president” and therefore the president does not have the power to repeal the right to bear arms. The piece was written after the author took issue with Obama’s “rude” response to a gun store owner named Rhune, on “gun control,” which is below as follows: 
+“First of all, the notion that I or Hillary or Democrats or whoever you want to choose are hell-bent on taking away folks’ guns is just not true. And I don’t care how many times the NRA says it,” declared Obama. 
+“I’m about to leave office. There have been more guns sold since I’ve been president than just about any time in U.S. history. There are enough guns for every man, woman and child in this country. And at no point have I ever proposed confiscating guns from responsible gun owners. So it is just not true.” 
+The author’s response proves that the NRA has known all along that Dems will not take their guns and now they have publicly admitted it: 
+“Congress writes the laws, not the president. He could then have listed the many attacks on the right to bear arms — from Operation Fast and Furious to Operation Choke Point to Obama’s attempted ban on common ammunition for AR-15-type rifles to his using a “pen and phone” to push anti-gun executive actions. But Rhude respectfully stayed silent.” 
+Although neither Clinton or Obama have ever claimed they are going to take away guns from law-abiding gun owners, this has been the NRA’s campaign against Democrats for years. The NRA has basically just admitted to blatantly manipulating their members through scare tactics – but it hasn’t stopped them from reviving this tired old conspiracy theory and applying it to Hillary Clinton, who, for the record, does not want to take your guns. 
+Indeed, even in the doubtful scenario that Congress and the president agreed to repeal guns, the Supreme Court would veto this as unconstitutional. NRA members need to acknowledge once and for all that a democratic president is not going to seize their firearms and stop listening to the organization that clearly does not have their best interests in mind.",FAKE
+4398,"Head Of Medicare, Who Oversaw Obamacare Rollout, Will Step Down","Head Of Medicare, Who Oversaw Obamacare Rollout, Will Step Down
+
+Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who oversaw the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, will step down.
+
+Tavenner announced her departure on Friday in a message to staff.
+
+""I have great pride and joy knowing all that we have accomplished together since I came on board five years ago in February of 2010,"" Tavenner said.
+
+Tavenner was at the center of the problematic rollout of Obamacare, the president's signature domestic program. When the HealthCare.gov insurance marketplace was first introduced in October of 2013, the website was essentially useless.
+
+After the mess, Obama shook up the staff — Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius left last year — but Tavenner remained. After much controversy and congressional hearings, the problems were eventually solved.
+
+In a message to staff, Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell called Tavenner ""one of our most esteemed and accomplished colleagues.""
+
+""It goes without saying that Marilyn will be remembered for her leadership in opening the Health Insurance Marketplace. In so doing, she worked day and night so that millions of Americans could finally obtain the security and peace of mind of quality health insurance at a price they could afford. It's a measure of her tenacity and dedication that after the tough initial rollout of HealthCare.gov, she helped right the ship, bringing aboard a systems integrator and overseeing an overhaul of the website. ""She is a big part of the reason why, as of this past spring, roughly 10 million Americans had gained health coverage since last year – the largest increase in four decades.""",REAL
+8032,Republican Protester Says He Was Nearly Killed After Trump Says ‘Take Him Out’,"Videos Republican Protester Says He Was Nearly Killed After Trump Says ‘Take Him Out’ Secret Service whisk candidate off stage as supporters create scare by attacking lone anti-Trump Republican at Nevada rally   Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Laconia Middle School, Thursday, Sept. 15, 2016, in Laconia, N.H. 
+So who nearly killed whom in Reno, Nevada on Saturday night? 
+A fracas at a Donald Trump rally captured on live television Saturday night saw the Republican candidate whisked off the stage by Secret Service agents and left those watching perplexed by what happened in the front rows as police in military gear appeared on the scene with one man ultimately led away by officials. 
+But while one of his sons joined another top campaign aide in “ irresponsibly ” and falsely suggesting it was an assassination attempt against Trump, the man at the center of the incident says that all he did was hold up a sign reading “Republicans Against Trump” before being tackled and beaten by those around him at the rally. 
+Speaking with the Guardian following the event, the man, who identified himself as Austyn Crites from Reno, said it was the hysteria of his fellow Republicans at the rally—and incitement by the presidential candidate himself—which turned a simple gesture of dissent into a much more dangerous situation. Watch protester relives Trump fans’ attack at Nevada rally: 
+“I just went with sign that said ‘Republicans Against Trump,'” Crites told the Reno Gazette-Journa l . “It’s a sign that you can find online. I held up the sign and initially people around me were just booing me telling me to get out of there. Then a couple of these guys tried grabbing the sign out of my hands.” He said he had no intentions other than to let his opinion be known. He expected to be booed and perhaps led away, but not pummeled nearly to death. 
+“Multiple people just tackled me down, kicking me choking me and just beating me up,” he said. “That’s when things even got crazier. I was on the ground and people were holding my arms, legs and I kept saying I can barely breathe. I was turning my neck just to get a little bit of air to keep from passing out.” The police, he said, intervened just in time. 
+According to the Guardian : The 33-year-old – who says he has been a registered Republican for about six years – said he was kicked, punched and choked, and feared for his life when the crowd turned on him at the gathering in Reno, Nevada . Crites cited Trump’s treatment of Mexicans, Muslims and women as the reason he decided to protest again Trump, who he described as “a textbook version of a dictator and a fascist”. There were panicked scenes at the Trump rally, apparently prompted by shouts from at least one person in the crowd that the protester had a gun. Hundreds of people fled to the the back of the auditorium in panic as Trump was hurriedly rushed from the stage by his security detail. 
+As the following clip of the unfolding incident shows, Trump acknowledges someone in the crowd during his remarks, saying, “Oh we have one of those guys from the Hillary Clinton campaign. How much are you being paid, $1,500?” As the crowd begins to agitate and boo, Trump then says, “Okay. Take him out.” Just seconds later, as the scuffle appears to intensify, is when agents quickly approach Trump and take him off stage. Watch Donald Trump Rushed Off Stage by Secret Service: After Crites was removed from the event by security and police, Trump returned to the stage and told his supporters. “No one said it would be easy.” 
+Though Republicans and Trump supporters on social media overnight were calling him a “thug”“infiltrator” and “Clinton shill,” Crites posted a Facebook message (subsequently deleted) which said he has nothing official to do with the Clinton campaign, though he is supporting the Democratic candidate this year over Trump and has donated to her campaign. 
+“Take what happened to me tonight,” Crites wrote to his fellow Republicans in the post, “as a classic example of dictator incitement of violence — against your own Republican brother with a stupid sign.” This work by Common Dreams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
+756,"Donald Trump, president of the Confederacy: The Southern strategy created the GOP civil war","Of course, Republicans and conservatives find these twin facts offensive and unbelievable. They hold onto their founding myth of Lincoln and “Great Emancipator” while simultaneously being dependent on voters from the former Confederacy for power—states that still fly and honor the American swastika, a rebel flag of treason and anti-black hatred.
+
+Despite their protests, the evidence is overwhelming.
+
+The ascendance of Donald Trump and his coronation as the presumed 2016 Republican presidential candidate is the logical outcome of a several decades-long pattern of racism, nativism, and bigotry by the American right-wing and its news entertainment disinformation machine.
+
+For example, in response to the triumphs of the black freedom struggle and the civil rights movement, the Republican Party has relied on the much discussed “Southern Strategy.” Lee Atwater, master Republican strategist and mentor to Karl Rove explained this approach as:
+
+You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
+
+Ronald Reagan and other Republican elites would leverage Atwater’s approach to winning white voters and elections. To point, Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the locale where American civil rights freedom fighters Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were killed by white racial terrorists. In that speech, Reagan signaled to the ghosts of Jim and Jane Crow and the neo-Confederacy by stating his support for “states’ rights.”
+
+Reagan would continue to use overt and coded racial appeals to gin up white support through his references to a “lazy,” “violent” and “parasitic” class of black Americans who he described as “welfare queens” and “strapping bucks.” George Bush would continue with the Southern Strategy when he summoned up white racist stereotypes and fears of “the black beast rapist” in the form of Willie Horton during the 1988 presidential election.
+
+The Age of Obama witnessed an explosion of anti-black racism by the Republican Party and conservatives en masse. Birtherism, the rise of the Tea Party, the use of antebellum language (which was used to defend the Southern slaveocracy) such as “secession” and “nullification”, both overt and coded racist invective by Republican officials and news media, and a pattern of disrespect towards both the idea and literal personhood of Barack Obama as the United States’ first black president has been the norm. This deluge of anti-black animus towards Barack Obama does not exist in a separate universe outside of American society: it has real impact on the values and behavior of citizens.
+
+To wit: in discussing his recent work on racial attitudes and political polarization, Professor Michael Tesler has noted how:
+
+In all, Barack Obama’s presidency has been so disruptive to the white right-wing political imagination that it has resurrected a type of overt racism which was thought to be largely vanquished from American public life.
+
+The intersection of white racism (“modern” and “old-fashioned”), nativism, a sense of white victimhood, and grievance mongering in the form of conspiracy theories and other unfounded beliefs is evident in other ways as well.
+
+Fifty-four percent of Republicans believe that Barack Obama is a “secret Muslim.” Forty-four percent also believe that Obama was not born in the United States. Forty-two percent of Republicans believe that Muslims should be banned from the United States. Sixty-four percent of Republicans believe that “racism” against white people is as big a problem as discrimination against black Americans.
+
+In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 66 percent of Republican and Republican-inclined respondents want to return to the “good old days.. This number is higher for Trump backers. It is important to note that this era was one of Jim and Jane Crow anti-black racism, legal sexism, and unapologetic discrimination against gays and lesbians. This yearning for a return to a fictive golden age of white male Christian domination over American social and political life is reflected in other work that shows how white people are much more pessimistic about their futures than Hispanics and African-Americans. Donald Trump is not a political genius. He understands what the Republican base yearns for and has been trained to believe–like a sociopolitical version of Pavlov’s dog–by its leaders. Trump says that Muslims should be banned from the United States because Republican voters respond to such hatred and intolerance. Trump lies that undocumented Hispanic and Latino immigrants are rapists and killers who want to attack white women because Republican voters find such rhetoric compelling. Trump uses social media to circulate white supremacist talking points about “black crime” because modern conservatives nurtured on “law and order” politics believe that African-Americans are out of control “thugs” possessed of “bad culture” who live to prey on innocent and vulnerable white people. Trump talks about China “raping” the United States because this arouses anger and fear of a new “yellow peril” where the manhood and honor of (white) America is sacrificed to a “sneaky” and “scheming” “Oriental” horde who twist their Fu Manchu mustaches and seduce white women in opium dens while simultaneously negotiating multibillion dollar trade deals. And perhaps most damning, Donald Trump has been endorsed by neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the Ku Klux Klan: he has been reluctant to publicly reject and denounce their support. The corporate news media has aided and abetted “Trumpmania” by normalizing his racist, nativist and bigoted behavior. In response to Trump’s crucial win in last week’s Indiana primary, Slate’s Isaac Chotiner skewered this failure of journalistic integrity and responsibility among the TV news chattering class as: On TV Tuesday night, there was hardly a whimper. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox contented themselves with bright chatter about Ted Cruz’s hurt feelings, about Donald Trump’s political skill, about the feckless, pathetic Republican establishment. None of the commentators I saw mentioned the import of what was happening. Large chunks of the media have spent so long domesticating Trump that his victory no longer appeared momentous. He is the new normal….There was little talk of ideology, or racism, or bigotry, or fascist appeals. Instead, the conversation was about process; Trump had been fit into the usual rhythms of an election season. The closest thing I heard to open-mouthed shock came from Rachel Maddow, who wondered, correctly, why out of 330 million people the Republican Party had chosen this particular reality-television star. Elizabeth Bathory was a 16th century Hungarian countess who killed hundreds of young virgin girls and then bathed in their blood with the hope that it would maintain her beauty. Since at least the end of the civil rights movement, the Republican Party and movement conservatives have followed a similar “beauty” regimen. Instead of the blood of female virgins, they have washed themselves in racism and bigotry in order to buoy their political vitality. Donald Trump decided to move this political ritual out of the shadows and into the light of prime time television and the 24/7 news cycle. Trump, with his background in professional wrestling and reality TV simply took what has always been implied by the American Right-wing and made it obvious. The question now becomes, will Trump’s version of Elizabeth Bathory be enough to defeat Hillary Clinton and win the White House in November 2016?",REAL
+7304,"Former Miss Finland accuses Trump of sexual assault, bringing number of accusers to 12","Former Miss Finland accuses Trump of sexual assault, bringing number of accusers... Former Miss Finland accuses Trump of sexual assault, bringing number of accusers to 12 By 0 58 
+Miss Finland 2006 has become the 12th woman to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault. Ninni Laaksonen claims the presidential candidate groped her while they took a picture together before an appearance on ‘The Late Show with David Letterman’ 10 years ago. 
+Laaksonen, now 30, told Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat on Thursday that Trump groped her in New York in July 2006. A translation provided by the Daily Beast explains that the incident occurred when she and three other Miss Universe contestants were taking photos outside the Late Show studio. 
+“ Trump stood right next to me and suddenly he squeezed my butt. He really grabbed my butt, ” she said. “ I don’t think anybody saw it but I flinched and thought, ‘What is happening?’ ” 
+The beauty queen also attended parties at Trump’s residence with Melania, whom he had married one year prior to the incident. 
+“ Somebody told me there that Trump liked me because I looked like Melania when she was younger ,” she told The Telegraph. 
+Trump has vowed to sue all of his accusers, calling them “ horrible, horrible liars .” However, he may have a difficult time taking Laaksonen to court, as she currently lives in Finland where she runs Ninnin Lifestyle and Living, a beauty and cosmetic company. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+3386,Kerry orders State Department review of records retention amid Clinton email controversy,"The State Department has ordered an internal audit of its recordkeeping, officials said Friday, outlining a top-to-bottom look at the agency's practices in the aftermath of revelations that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used a private email account and server during her tenure.
+
+The department released a letter that Secretary of State John Kerry sent to the department's inspector general earlier this week, asking for the review and calling it critical to ""preserve a full and complete record of American foreign policy"" and for the U.S. public to have access to that information. Among the questions he outlined were how best to retain records in light of changing technology, the agency's global presence and increasing demands from Congress.
+
+Department spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters Friday the review would include the archiving of emails as well as Freedom of Information Act and congressional inquiries. He said it was not specific to Clinton, a likely presidential candidate who has been dogged by questions since it became clear she didn't use a government email account while in office and only provided the State Department with copies of work-related emails late last year.
+
+The full trove of Clinton emails will be published on a website after they are reviewed. She says they contain no classified information. The State Department says emails pertaining to a congressional panel's examination of the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, will be released in advance of the others.
+
+In the letter, Kerry said his department has undertaken significant efforts to promote preservation and transparency, including through better technology and training of staff. But he said the burden was significant, with more than 18,000 FOIA requests arriving each year that put a ""significant strain"" on diplomats whose main job is the advancement of U.S. foreign policy. In addition, he said, congressional investigations and requests have ""greatly increased.""
+
+Kerry also didn't mention Clinton specifically, but noted that officials were ""facing challenges regarding our integration of record-keeping technologies and the use of nongovernment systems by some department personnel to conduct official business.""
+
+He asked Inspector General Steve Linick to make several recommendations. They range from how to make improvements across more than 280 diplomatic posts worldwide to ways to streamline efforts to preserve appropriate documents. Kerry questioned whether the agency has even the resources and tools necessary to meet its obligations.
+
+The department has particularly struggled with the backlog of public records requests. Some have languished for years without being met.
+
+Earlier this month, The Associated Press sued to gain access to Clinton's correspondence after repeated FOIA requests to the department went unfulfilled. They included one request made five years ago.
+
+An inspector general's report in 2012 criticized the State Department's practices as ""inefficient and ineffective,"" citing a heavy workload, small staff and interagency problems.
+
+Kerry asked if outside expertise might be advisable on how best to manage, preserve and make transparent its documents. He asked the inspector general to conduct ""an expedited review of these issues.""",REAL
+10501,United States – Reformation or Fracture?," United States – Reformation or Fracture?
+By Thierry Meyssan Observing the US presidential electoral campaign, Thierry Meyssan analyses the resurgence of an old and weighty conflict of civilisation. Hillary Clinton has just declared that this election is not about programmes, but about the question ŤWho are the Americans?ť. It was not for reasons of his political prgramme that the Republican leaders have withdrawn their support from their candidate, Donald Trump, but because of his personal behaviour. According to Thierry Meyssan, until now, the United States was composed of migrants from different horizons who accepted to submit to the ideology of a particular community . This is the model which is in the process of breaking down, at the risk of shattering the country itself. "" Voltaire "" - During the year of the US electoral campaign that we have just weathered, the rhetoric has profoundly changed, and an unexpected rift has appeared between the two camps. If, in the beginning, the candidates spoke about subjects which were genuinely political (such as the sharing of wealth or national security), today they are mostly talking about sex and money. It is this dialogue, and not the political questions, which has caused the explosion of the Republican party – whose main leaders have withdrawn their support from their candidate - and which is recomposing the political chess-board, awakening an ancient cleavage of civilisation. On one side, Mrs. Clinton is working to appear politically correct, while on the other, ŤThe Donaldť is blowing the hypocrisy of the ex-ŤFirst Ladyť to smithereens.
+On one side, Hillary Clinton promises male / female equality - although she has never hesitated to attack and defile the women who revealed that they had slept with her husband – and that she is presenting herself not for her personal qualities, but as the wife of an ex-President, and that she accuses Donald Trump of misogyny because he does not hide his appreciation of the female gender. On the other, Donald Trump denounces the privatisation of the State and the racketing of foreign personalities by the Clinton Foundation to obtain appointments with the State Department – the creation of ObamaCare not in the interest of citizens, but for the profit of medical insurance companies - and goes as far as to question the honesty of the electoral system.
+I am perfectly aware that the way in which Donald Trump expresses himself may encourage racism, but I do not believe for a second that this question is at the heart of the electoral debate, despite the hype from the pro-Clinton medias. It is not without interest that, during the Lewinsky affair, President Bill Clinton apologised to the Nation and convened a number of preachers to pray for his salvation. But when he was accused of similar misconduct by an audio recording, Donald Trump simply apologised to the people he had upset without making any appeal to members of the clergy. The currrent divide re-awakens the revolt of Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran values against those of the Calvinists, mainly represented in the USA by the Presbyterians, the Baptists and the Methodists.
+While the two candidates were raised in the Puritan tradition (Clinton as a Methodist and Trump as a Presbyterian), Mrs. Clinton has returned to the religion of her father, and participates today in a prayer group composed of the army chiefs of staff, The Family, while Mr. Trump practises a more interior form of spirituality and rarely goes to church. Of course, no-one is locked into the systems in which they were raised, but when people act without thinking, they unconsciously reproduce these systems. The question of the religious environment of the candidates may therefore be important.
+In order to understand the stakes of this game, we have to go back and look at 17th century England. Oliver Cromwell instigated a military coup d’etat which overthrew King Charles 1st. He wanted to install a Republic, purify the soul of the country, and ordered the decapitation of the ex-sovereign. He created a sectarian régime inspired by the ideas of Calvin, massacred thousands of Irish Papists, and imposed a Puritan way of life. He also created Zionism – he invited the Jews back to England, and was the first head of state in the world to demand the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This bloody episode is known by the name of the ŤFirst British Civil Warť.
+After the monarchy had been reinstated, Cromwell’s Puritans fled from England. They set up in Holland, from where some of them left for the Americas aboard the Mayflower (the ŤPilgrim Fathersť), while others founded the Afrikaneer community in South Africa. During the War of Independence in the 18th century United States, we saw a resurgence of the struggle of the Calvinists against the British monarchy, so that in current manuals of British History, it is known as the ŤSecond Civil Warť.
+In the 19th century, the American Civil War opposed the Southern States (mainly inhabited by Catholic colonists) to the North (mostly inhabited by Protestant colonists). The History of the winning side presents this confrontation as a fight for freedom in the face of slavery, which is pure propaganda. The Southern states abolished slavery during the war when they concluded an agreement with the British monarchy). As a result, we once again saw the revolt of the Puritans against the Brititsh throne, which is why some historians speak of the ŤThird British Civil Warť.
+During the 20th century, this interior confrontation of British civilisation seemed over and done with, apart from the re-appearance of the Puritans in the United Kingdom with the Ťnon-conformist Christiansť of Prime Minister David Lloyd George. It was they who divided Ireland and agreed to create the Ť Jewish national homelandť in Palestine.
+In any case, one of Richard Nixon’s advisors, Kevin Philipps, dedicated a voluminous thesis to these civil wars, in which he noted that none of the problems had been solved, and announced a fourth confrontation [ 1 ].
+I have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton will be the next President of the United States, or that if Mr. Trump were to be elected, he would be rapidly eliminated. But over the last few months, we have witnessed a large electoral redistribution within an irreversible demographic evolution. The Puritan-based churches now account for only a quarter of the population, and are swinging towards the Democrat camp. Their model looks like a historical accident. It disappeared in South Africa, and will not be able to survive much longer, either in the United States or in Israël. Beyond the Presidential election, US society will have to evolve rapidly or split once again. In a country where the youth massively rejects the influence of the Puritan preachers, it is no longer possible to displace the question of equality. The Puritans envisage a society where all men are equal, but not equivalent. Lord Cromwell wanted a Republic for the English, but only after he had massacred the Irish Papists. This is how it is at the moment in the United States – all citizens are equal before the law, but in the name of the same texts, black people are systematically condemned, while attenuating circumstances are found for white people who have committed equivalent crimes. And in the majority of states, a penal condemnation, even for a speeding ticket, is enough to cancel the right to vote. Consequently, white and black people are equal, but in most states, the majority of black people has been legally deprived of its right to vote. The paradigm of this thought, in terms of foreign policy, is the Ťtwo-stateť solution in Palestine – equal, but above all, not equivalent.
+It is Puritan thinking that led the administrations of preacher Carter, Reagan, Bush (Sr. and Jr. are direct descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers), Clinton and Obama to support Wahhabism, in contradiction to the declared ideals of their countries, and today, to support Daesh.
+A long time ago, the Founding Fathers built communities in Plymouth and Boston which were idealised in the US collective memory. And yet the historians are formal – they claimed to be creating the ŤNew Israëlť, and chose the ŤLaw of Mosesť. They did not place the Cross in their temples, but the Tables of the Law. Although they are Christians, they attach more importance to the Jewish scriptures than the Gospel. They oblige their women to veil their faces and re-established corporaI punishment. Thierry Meyssan , French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate . Translation - Pete Kimberley
+[ 1 ] The Cousins’ Wars , Kevin Philipps, Basic Books, 1999.",FAKE
+4178,A sharp exchange over election-year polling offers thoughts for the rest of us,"In a political season marked by nonstop polling, a lively exchange took place recently about the state of public opinion research and what to believe about all of the numbers describing the state of the race.
+
+The context for the discussion was set by a series of national and state surveys showing Donald Trump gaining on or overtaking Hillary Clinton in the general-election campaign. It broadened into an examination how polls are produced and used in a competitive media environment.
+
+Earlier this spring, Clinton enjoyed a substantial lead over Trump. Now, the RealClearPolitics poll average in the presidential race shows Clinton with a lead of just one point: 43.8 to 42.8 percent. Some recent polls showed Trump ahead, including a Washington Post-ABC News poll of registered voters released a week ago.
+
+The shift raised questions: Is this merely a bounce for Trump because he has wrapped up the Republican nomination while Clinton is still fighting a campaign against Bernie Sanders? In that case, will Clinton reverse Trump’s gains once she has claimed the Democratic nomination? Do the current polls mean that the general election will be close and hard-fought? Most provocatively, is there something wrong with some of these polls?
+
+The first salvo in the exchange came from Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Alan I. Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University. Both are scholars to whom I’ve gone many times as I’ve reported campaigns and politics generally. The two co-authored an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Stop the Polling Insanity.”
+
+They pointed to what they said were “wild fluctuations and surprising results” in recent Trump-Clinton polls. They also underscored how news organizations are producing polls at a rapid rate and using them to make news and generate clicks. “Too many of this year’s polls, and their coverage, have been cringeworthy,” they wrote.
+
+Ornstein and Abramowitz took issue with a Reuters-Ipsos tracking poll that showed Clinton with a 13-point lead on May 4, a tie five days later and then a six-point lead for Clinton on May 15. They questioned whether opinions could have shifted that much during a time “when there were no major events” in the campaign.
+
+They challenged an online NBC-SurveyMonkey poll that showed Trump within three points of Clinton and said that Trump was receiving 28 percent of the Hispanic vote when “most other surveys have shown Mr. Trump eking out 10 to 12 percent among Latino voters.”
+
+They also raised doubts about a trio of Quinnipiac polls in the battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, arguing that the samples used in the surveys were “whiter than the states had in 2012” exit polls.
+
+“When polling aficionados see results that seem surprising or unusual, the first instinct is to look under the hood at things like demographic and partisan distributions,” they wrote. “When cable news hosts and talking heads see these kinds of results, they exult, report and analyze ad nauseam. Caveats or cautions are rarely included.”
+
+The two scholars went on to cite well-known challenges for all types of polls. Traditional polls, considered the most reliable over a long period of time, use random samples of the population, call landlines and cellphones, and use real people to conduct the interviews. But those surveys are extremely costly, and response rates for many have plummeted over the years.
+
+Online surveys use panels of potential respondents rather than randomly drawn samples. The methodology differs among the practitioners and is in a regular state of examination and refinement. They are much less expensive to produce.
+
+Ornstein and Abramowitz’s op-ed prompted a rejoinder from Jon Cohen, SurveyMonkey’s chief research officer, and Mark Blumenthal, the firm’s head of election polling. (For the record, Cohen is a former polling director at The Post and someone with whom I’ve worked closely and collaboratively over many years.)
+
+The SurveyMonkey duo took issue with the suggestion that polls showing Trump and Clinton in a close race are almost by definition to be questioned. “It’s not enough for Trump’s opponents to wish him away,” they wrote. “It’s important for political professionals to actually explore what is buoying Trump — even if they find his rise unfathomable.”
+
+They argued that the polls have not been on a wild ride. In fact, they said, there was a clear trend based on the moving average of an average of all polls. Once Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee after his victory in the May 3 Indiana primary, Clinton’s lead began to shrink.
+
+As for the NBC-SurveyMonkey poll showing Trump winning 28 percent of the Hispanic vote, they noted that six other national surveys taken after the reality TV star effectively secured the nomination showed his Hispanic support ranging from 15 percent to 31 percent, while acknowledging they were on the high end. But they said Clinton’s margin over Trump among Hispanics across the six polls ranged from 23 points to 53 points. The NBC-SurveyMonkey poll’s margin was in the middle of that range at 37 points.
+
+Citing the late Andrew Kohut, the founder of Pew Research, they said those in the field of survey research should be measurers not handicappers. “Now more than ever at this moment of reinvention for public opinion polling, we need many independent estimates of voter preferences, not a herd of handicappers issuing their best guesses about the eventual outcome,” they wrote.
+
+Those exchanges prompted another voice to enter the conversation, that of Mark Mellman, a respected Democratic pollster to whom many journalists long have gone for his insights into polls and elections. Noting that Ornstein, Abramowitz, Cohen and Blumenthal were all “very smart people,” Mellman sought to avoid taking sides and instead offered a few thoughts of his own on the issues raised.
+
+Writing in the Hill, Mellman began by saying that an examination of polling averages of RealClearPolitics and the Huffington Post’s Pollster’s model showed that there is “little doubt that the presidential race has tightened considerably” since March and April. But he added that the current state of the race does not necessarily mean the outcome in November will be close.
+
+He reminded everyone that, in the spring of 2008, when John McCain had wrapped up the Republican nomination while Barack Obama was still engaged in a hard contest against Clinton, the general-election polls showed the Arizona senator ahead. He lost the general election by 7 percentage points.
+
+Looking at the issue of Trump’s support among Hispanics in the NBC-SurveyMonkey poll, he said that 28 percent “seems high, but not bizarrely out of sync,” given other polls and history. He also said that if Trump were getting, say, 13 percent of the Hispanic vote rather than 28 percent, Trump’s overall number in the horse race would be just 1.5 points lower.
+
+Polls have played a significant role in this campaign. They’ve determined participation in the GOP debates and how the candidates were aligned on the stage, and they’ve driven a lot of coverage of the race. There is no question that news organizations have sometimes been indiscriminate in the way they have highlighted individual polls.
+
+So there is food for thought in this series of exchanges. The traditional method of polling has become prohibitively expensive for most organizations at a time when the demand for public opinion surveys continues to grow, in politics and other fields. The methodology of all types of polls is under challenge. There is a serious and urgent debate underway among public opinion researchers about the way forward.
+
+For the rest of us, the exchanges lead to common points of agreement, all of which might seem obvious but should not be forgotten. Don’t put too much emphasis on any single poll. Look closely at averages of groups of polls to determine whether there are real shifts in the race. And don’t expect polls to predict the future. Leave that question to the voters in November.",REAL
+1845,Romney’s reboot: Can the 2012 loser really fix his problems in 2016?,"Will Mitt 3.0, as he’s already been dubbed, be a better model than the earlier two incarnations?
+
+Without so much as a single syllable uttered in public, Mitt Romney has shaken up the 2016 race, employing a strategy of calculated leaks to indicate that he wants to mount a third presidential bid. I was skeptical of what seemed like a trial balloon to buy some time as Jeb Bush claimed the mantle of establishment candidate, but this has mushroomed into Mitt trying to get the gang back together.
+
+But given that Romney muffed what Republicans viewed as a prime opportunity to oust President Obama, the media are asking this question: What exactly would be different next time?
+
+The exercise is reviving some bad memories of Romney’s flaws as the GOP nominee. And Romney would have to explain his change of heart after he (and Ann) so repeatedly declared that they were done trying to move into the White House. What’s his rationale? To save the party from Jeb? Or has he just been badly bitten by the presidential bug?
+
+Let’s stipulate that beating an incumbent president, even with an anemic economic recovery, was tough. Let’s also stipulate that Romney is an experienced businessman, has a good temperament, can raise truckloads of money, and proved to be a strong debater.
+
+But there were so many self-inflicted wounds that it’s hard to catalogue them. Self-deportation. I like being able to fire people. Binders full of women. The 47 percent.
+
+Not even Romney’s biggest fans would suggest he’s a natural campaigner. I watched him up close with crowds and while he gamely tried to connect with folks, there’s an awkwardness rooted in his natural reserve. And that extended to his arm’s-length relationship with the press corps.
+
+Part of the chatter now is that Romney could fare better
+
+Politico quoted one Romney campaign alumnus as saying the new effort would “tell the story of Mitt better.” Several Romney veterans recalled how well the accounts from parishioners in Romney’s Mormon community resonated with voters who had been bombarded with ads about his tenure at Bain Capital.” Romney, of course, mostly avoided talking about his religion.
+
+Politico quoted another former top adviser as saying “he really has to show people that he’d do it differently, rather than just say he’d do it differently. He needs to assure folks he’d take a much more direct approach to laying out the vision for his campaign versus having those decisions driven by a bunch of warring consultants.”
+
+So why is Romney gearing up to do this? The Washington Post’s Robert Costa, who has set the pace on this story, quoted yet another anonymous Romney adviser as saying, “Mitt’s a very restless character. He is not the type to retire happily, to read books on the beach. . . . He believes he has something to offer the country and the only way he can do that is by running for president again.”
+
+But that explanation is more about Romney’s feelings than how he’d be a stronger candidate than last time around. And not everyone in the GOP is wild about the idea. John McCain, who defeated Romney in 2008 (and wants his friend Lindsey Graham to run this time) says: “I thought there was no education in the second kick of a mule.”
+
+“Why would Republicans, who grudgingly submitted to a Romney nomination in 2012 only after every other possibility had exhausted itself, give him another try when so many alternatives are available? What qualities would make a Romney candidacy more attractive to Republican voters in 2016 than it was in 2012?”
+
+The Fix columnist Chris Cillizza admits he’s stunned by the prospect of a third Mitt campaign:
+
+“I don't doubt Romney's sincerity. But I do think he and those close to him are fooling themselves that he can simply proclaim that he is running a new and different campaign -- one based on foreign policy and poverty, according to Politico -- and that will be that. It's literally impossible for me to imagine such a scenario.”
+
+Breitbart goes back to the Netflix film “Mitt” that some acolytes are fondly remembering, and doesn’t give it two thumbs up:
+
+“The best that can be said for the Romney portrayed in ‘Mitt’ is that, had he conveyed his behind-the-scenes personality to voters better, Romney might have mitigated the damage from Obama’s attacks. Maybe some of his self-effacing humor, or seeing Romney wear duct-taped gloves while skiing and pick up hotel-room trash like a normal person might could have offset the ruthless out-of-touch businessman image portrayed by his opponent.
+
+“But the subtext of  ‘Mitt’ is Romney’s tragic inability to actually be that person in public.
+
+“For a man seeking his third shot at the presidency amidst the strongest GOP bench in decades, it’s not a flattering portrait.”
+
+The former Massachusetts governor doesn’t have to win over the pundits, of course, but he does need a smarter approach to using the media to get out his message. There’s already talk that he won’t be bringing back his old communications team, which often didn’t bother to respond to reporters.
+
+The media love the idea of a Mitt-vs.-Jeb showdown. But Romney, who once mused about how those who lose presidential elections are branded losers, needs to offer a compelling rationale for why he can win.
+
+Click for more from Media Buzz
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+3032,Is it possible to fix the polarization of American politics?,"At the end of last week’s Republican debate, moderator Bret Baier questioned each of the candidates about their commitment to the Republican Party. Would Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich support Donald Trump if he was chosen as the GOP’s presidential nominee?
+
+After the past few weeks of intense in-fighting — in which Trump has been called a “con artist” and a threat to conservative principles — a casual spectator would have expected an unequivocal “no” from at least one candidate. But, of course, that wasn’t the case. All said they would support the businessman and, instead, strongly denounced their Democratic counterparts.
+
+The moment illustrates the widely discussed notion of political polarization, a growing disdain our two parties have for one another and the subsequent dysfunction from divided government. Members of the Republican Party have made clear that winning the White House back from our Democratic president is their highest priority, even if that means handing it over to a man they expressly detest.
+
+Our political parties are more polarized today than they were in the decades after the Civil War, the result of decades of growing political divide. Bipartisanship is openly scorned by congressional leaders, and even the more moderate Senate Republicans have refused to consider a nomination by President Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy, suggesting that a growing part of the party is unwilling to negotiate with the president on any level.
+
+Democrats, on the other hand, have also rejected cooperation. Obama has routinely made it clear that he would use whatever power he has to work around or override Republicans in Congress. He has threatened vetoes outright in his State of the Union addresses and his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, assured reporters this year that “audacious” executive action would continue throughout the election year.
+
+There’s no sugarcoating it. No one gets along. And this polarization is not just a Washington phenomenon. Polling suggests a sustained decline in centrism among the general public. Both conservative and liberal voters see their opposing party with greater animosity than in the past two decades, and as a result, liberal Republicans and so-called “Blue Dog” conservative Democrats have become a dying breed.
+
+Political polarization has become so entrenched that some commentators are beginning to predict doomsday scenarios for the U.S. political system. Under this narrative, polarized politics stem from flaws in our Constitution and are the norm of U.S. history, and over the past few decades we have been exiting an unnaturally civil period of post-World War bipartisanship. Eventually, these pundits say, polarization will continue to rebound and increase to the degree that the federal government won’t be able to sustain itself or deal with national emergencies. Thinking back to the government shutdown in 2013 and multiple threats to repeat it, such a scenario doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.
+
+These predictions are somewhat extreme, but at the same time, there doesn’t seem to be a quick-and-easy solution on hand. That’s because consensus among political scientists studying polarization is as rare as consensus among politicians. There is little agreement as to what is causing the trend. Some academics blame electoral policies, such as gerrymandering or an emphasis on the primary system, that have resulted in a mismatch between the more moderate general public and extreme political representatives. Others suggest that the problem is a deeper trend, reflecting the complicated political movements that have occurred in the past half-century. And still others have blamed a long list of other factors, from media coverage to genetic selection to women taking a greater role in populist movements.
+
+But there’s one thing most experts agree on: Polarization at this heightened level is a problem. That’s because, in addition to halting crucial legislative initiatives and making it difficult to fill key government appointments, it hurts the economy by leading to more regular federal crises, such as debt ceiling impasses or the “fiscal cliff.”
+
+The stakes are high and warrant an energetic debate. Is polarization a design flaw of our presidential system? What would be necessary to curtail our legislative dysfunction, and from where does it stem? What does the future hold for our two-party system?
+
+Over the next few days, we’ll hear from:
+
+Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, authors and scholars at the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute, respectively;
+
+Dana Nelson, author and professor of English at Vanderbilt University;",REAL
+8938,CETA: Canada Has Challenged The EU’s Chemical Regulations 21 Times,"A man protests against international trade agreements TTIP and CETA in front of EU headquarters in Brussels on Thursday, Oct. 27, 2016.
+The Canadian government raised concerns over the European Union’s regulations on chemicals on more than 20 occasions over the course of a decade, according to a letter seen by Energydesk .
+In a note sent to the Belgian government on October 19 , the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) claims that the Canadian state challenged the EU’s REACH regulations at the World Trade Organisation 21 times between the years 2003 and 2011.
+The UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) describes the REACH regulations as providing “a high level of protection of human health and the environment from the use of chemicals.”
+The news will raise concerns that Canadian companies may use the trade and investment deal CETA to undermine EU regulations.
+“The threat of undue Canadian influence on environmental regulations such as REACH is real,” CIEL CEO Carroll Muffett wrote .
+The CETA deal – which sets up private courts that enable foreign corporations to sue countries – has been held up by the British government as a model for post-Brexit free trade deals.
+Corporate courts Canadian companies have also used the trade agreements to take legal action against countries on 42 occasions, according to data from the Investment Policy Hub — with Canada ranked 5th among the nations in which this type of investor-to-state lawsuit have been filed.
+Earlier this year, for example, the Canadian pipeline company TransCanada sued the United States government for $15 billion over its decision to scrap the Keystone XL project — using a provision in the NAFTA trade deal.
+CETA, which is currently being signed by EU members following a week-long blockade by Wallonia and two other Belgian regions, sets up an investor dispute system called the Investment Court System (ICS) .
+In fact the ICS was among the reasons that the Wallonian government took a stand, with the region’s leader Paul Magnette saying: “I would prefer that [the ICS] disappears pure and simple and that we rely on our courts or at the very least, if we want an arbitration court, it must provide equivalent guarantees to domestic ones.”
+As part of the newly negotiated agreement, the Belgian government will ask the European Court of Justice to rule on the legality of the deal — and the ICS in particular.
+Beyond REACH REACH – the r egistration, e valuation, a uthorisation and restriction of ch emicals – is a set of extensive rules “adopted to improve the protection of human health and the environment from the risks that can be posed by chemicals” — so says the European Chemicals Agency .
+Canada’s concerns – which were not formal actions, but rather issues raised at the WTO – largely related to rules around competition and whether the regulations would be burdensome to business .
+The 21 complaints spanned the administrations of the Liberal Paul Martin, when REACH was just a draft, and the Conservative Stephen Harper.
+Essentially Canada – like the United States – takes issue with the European approach to regulation, which is described as the ‘precautionary principle’.
+This approach means products need to be proven safe by companies who seek to market them, before they enter the market. In North America, the burden of proof is on public authorities, which have to prove that a product is dangerous.
+Documents unearthed by CIEL show that Canada has filed objections to the EU using this approach to regulate endocrine disrupting chemicals, arguing that the “EU’s hazard-based approach could unnecessarily disrupt trade in food and feed”.
+Scientific studies show a range of health impacts caused by exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals – which are found in food containers and plastics – including IQ loss and adult obesity.",FAKE
+6600,Tiny Homes Banned In U.S. At Increasing Rate As Govt Criminalizes Sustainable Living,By Justin Gardner As the corporatocracy tightens its grip on the masses – finding ever more ways to funnel wealth to the top – humanity... ,FAKE
+5612,"Life: When These Third-Graders Saw Their Classmate Didn’t Have A Lunch, They Kept Feeding Him More And More Lunches Until He Clogged The Door And Got School Canceled","Email 
+Life can be tough, but students at Willow Creek Elementary School in Duluth, Minnesota, have done something this year that will make you cry tears of joy: When they noticed that a fellow student wasn’t eating lunch at school, they brought him so many lunches that he clogged the door and school got canceled. 
+Compassion for the win! 
+When caring students saw that 9-year-old Bryce Oswald was showing up to school every day without a lunch, they knew they had to do something. They started giving Bryce fruit snacks and pats of butter from their lunches, and even pooled their allowances to buy Bryce hoagies and rotisserie chickens in an effort to make sure that he wouldn’t go hungry and would instead get massive enough to clog the door to the school and get school canceled. 
+“Bryce didn’t have anything to eat, so we knew we had to help him out,” said Willow Creek student Kali Summers. “We gave him our lunches every day, even if we got really hungry. We knew if he kept eating he would get fat enough to clog up the door and we wouldn’t have to go to school.” 
+The plan worked perfectly. In a matter of months, Bryce went from having no lunch at all to having so many lunches that he packed on 115 pounds, got stuck in the door, and school got canceled. The students were so successful in plumping Bryce up that it took four firefighters with a jackhammer to finally be able to pry him out. 
+Mission accomplished! 
+Due to these kids’ selfless dedication, not only did Bryce not go hungry, but all of the kids and teachers were able to stay home from school to play, watch TV, and relax instead of going to school for a full two days. They aren’t stopping there, either: Even though Bryce is now bigger than any other student in the district, the kids are going to continue to give him lunches in hopes that he can get stuck in the door so tightly that school gets canceled for a full week. 
+Beautiful! Adults could learn a thing or two about kindness and commitment to your dreams from these remarkable kids.",FAKE
+2905,US faces calls to ‘walk away’ from Iran talks,"A leading Republican critic of the Iranian nuclear talks is calling on the U.S. to ""walk away"" from the table after negotiators missed a key deadline, while other lawmakers joined in voicing concern that Iran could extract critical final-hour concessions in the scramble to salvage an agreement.
+
+Negotiations resumed in Switzerland on Wednesday but were almost immediately beset by competing claims, just hours after diplomats abandoned a March 31 deadline to reach the outline of a deal and agreed to press on. And as the latest round hit the week mark, three of the six foreign ministers involved left the talks with prospects for agreement remaining uncertain.
+
+Amid the confusion, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told Fox News he's concerned the framework of a deal could allow Iran keep its uranium stockpiles and continue to enrich uranium in an underground bunker.
+
+""You have to be willing to walk away from the table and to reapply leverage to Iran,"" Cotton said. ""And the fact that they're not willing to do that, that we're still sitting in Switzerland negotiating when three of our negotiating partners have already left just demonstrates to Iran that they can continue to demand dangerous concessions from the West.""
+
+Speaking on MSNBC, former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean seemed to agree. He said that while President Obama is ""right"" to seek a deal, it might be time to ""step away"" from the table and make clear that the U.S. is not backing off key positions -- including on Iran's uranium stockpile and the pace of sanctions relief.
+
+""I am worried about this,"" Dean said.
+
+Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., also told Fox News ""we're potentially [legitimizing] them having a nuclear infrastructure."" She added: ""We don't know exactly what's behind closed doors.""
+
+Despite all sides agreeing to blow by their deadline in pursuit of a rough agreement, even the White House threatened to abandon the talks if Iran wouldn't budge.
+
+""If they're unwilling to make those kinds of commitments that give us that assurance -- and by us I mean not just the United States, I mean the international community -- then we'll have to walk away from the negotiating table and consider what other options may be available to us, and there is certainly the possibility that that could happen,"" White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.
+
+Earnest indicated Wednesday that's still an option but called the scenario ""hypothetical"" as talks are ""making some progress."" He said talks continue to be ""productive"" but that ""we have not yet received the specific, tangible commitments we and the international community require.""
+
+On Tuesday, negotiators had been trying to agree to simply a joint statement that could justify talks continuing until a final June deadline.
+
+Iran's deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told reporters that if the sides make progress on the text of a joint statement, then that could be issued by the end of the day. But he suggested the statement would contain no specifics.
+
+A senior western official quickly pushed back, saying that nothing about a statement had been decided and that Iran's negotiating partners would not accept a document that contained no details.
+
+The German Foreign Ministry tweeted that ""nothing is agreed,"" although ""progress is visible.""
+
+Araghchi named differences on sanctions relief on his country as one dispute, along with disputes on Iran's uranium enrichment-related research and development.
+
+""Definitely our research and development program on high-end centrifuges should continue,"" he told Iranian television.
+
+The U.S. and its negotiating partners want to crimp Iranian efforts to improve the performance of centrifuges that enrich uranium because advancing the technology could let Iran produce material that could be used to arm a nuclear weapon much more quickly than at present.
+
+The exchanges reflected significant gaps between the sides, and came shortly after the end of the first post-deadline meeting between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, his British and German counterparts and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif in the Swiss town of Lausanne. They and their teams were continuing a marathon effort to bridge still significant gaps and hammer out a framework accord that would serve as the basis for a final agreement by the end of June.
+
+Eager to avoid a collapse in the discussions, the United States and others claimed late Tuesday that enough progress had been made to warrant an extension after six days of intense bartering. But the foreign ministers of China, France and Russia all departed Lausanne overnight, although the significance of their absence was not clear.
+
+Kerry postponed his planned Tuesday departure to stay in Lausanne, and an Iranian negotiator said his team would stay ""as long as necessary"" to clear the remaining hurdles.
+
+Officials say their intention is to produce a joint statement outlining general political commitments to resolving concerns about Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. In addition, they are trying to fashion other documents that would lay out in more detail the steps they must take by June 30 to meet those goals.
+
+The additional documents would allow the sides to make the case that the next round of talks will not simply be a continuation of negotiations that have already been twice extended since an interim agreement between Iran, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany was concluded in November 2013. Obama and other leaders, including Iran's, have said they are not interested in a third extension.
+
+But if the parties agree only to a broad framework that leaves key details unresolved, Obama can expect stiff opposition at home from members of Congress who want to move forward with new, stiffer Iran sanctions. Lawmakers had agreed to hold off on such a measure through March while the parties negotiated. The White House says new sanctions would scuttle further diplomatic efforts to contain Iran's nuclear work and possibly lead Israel to act on threats to use military force to accomplish that goal.
+
+Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to question the course of talks on Wednesday.
+
+He said Iran views Israel's destruction as non-negotiable, ""but evidently giving Iran's murderous regime a clear path to the bomb is negotiable. This is unconscionable,"" he said. ""At the same time, Iran is accelerating its campaign of terror, subjugation and conquest throughout the region, most recently in Yemen.""
+
+Netanyahu said a better deal would ""significantly roll back Iran's nuclear infrastructure"" and link a lifting of restrictions on its nuclear program to ""a change in Iran's behavior.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2593,Netanyahu warns supporters he may lose in Tuesday’s election,"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned supporters at a rally here Sunday that he and his Likud party may not win Tuesday’s election, a potentially dramatic fall for a consummate political survivor whose nine years in office transformed him into the public face of contemporary Israel.
+
+A loss by Netanyahu — or a razor-thin win and the prospect that he would be forced to enter into an unwieldy “government of national unity” with his rivals — would mark a sobering reversal for Israel’s security hawks, in a country where the electorate has been moving steadily rightward for the past 15 years.
+
+The final round of opinion polls Friday showed Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party facing a surprisingly strong challenge by Isaac Herzog, leader of the center-left Labor Party, and his running mate, former peace negotiator ­Tzipi Livni, who hold a small but steady lead. Their campaign has emphasized economic issues and the soaring cost of living.
+
+[Read: A guide to the political parties battling for Israel’s future]
+
+Netanyahu charged in a radio interview Sunday that hostile Israeli journalists and shadowy “foreign powers” were behind an anti-Netanyahu campaign that could be his undoing.
+
+Livni, his longtime rival and the former justice minister, countered that Netanyahu was panicking and looking for scapegoats.
+
+“The citizens of Israel will replace Netanyahu, not because of what is written in the newspapers,” she said Sunday, “but because they don’t have enough money to buy a newspaper . . . or buy apartments for their children.”
+
+The Netanyahu campaign assumed the prime minister would get a bump in support after his speech before a joint meeting of Congress two weeks ago, when he directly challenged President Obama and warned that the United States was about to sign a disastrous pact that would not halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
+
+[Read: Why Israel’s top right-winger wants his people to ‘stop apologizing’]
+
+His supporters boasted of his Churchillian skills as a master orator. Their high hopes were raised as a rapturous Congress gave him repeated standing ovations. Yet the speech did little to move the electorate — even as it angered the White House and congressional Democrats and undermined bipartisan relations between Israel and its closest ally.
+
+“It’s clear that Netanyahu thought what he did in Washington would help him, but it didn’t do him any good at home,” said Yehuda Ben Meir, a director at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
+
+[Read: Could Isaac Herzog become Israel’s next prime minister?]
+
+Two highly critical reports released in the past month have also taken a toll on the prime minister and the Likud campaign.
+
+Netanyahu was personally hurt by embarrassing revelations about profligate spending of state money at his official residence in Jerusalem and his private beachside villa north of Tel Aviv. Israelis were mildly shocked to see how much the premier and his wife, Sara, spend on hairdressers and maid service — in addition to an eye-popping $24,000 a year on takeout food.
+
+Netanyahu and his party were also dinged by a scathing report last month that concluded they had failed to do much to address the soaring cost and availability of housing for financially strapped Israelis, who are frustrated by the high cost of living here.
+
+Netanyahu’s ally on the hard-line right, Naftali Bennett, the economy minister, said he was surprised that threats at Israel’s borders were not as important in this campaign.
+
+“It’s the first time that I can recall that the voters are zeroing in on the economy,” Bennett said in an interview. “Some thought there might be other issues, like Iran, but there hasn’t been.”
+
+Bennett is leader of the Jewish Home party, which draws electoral support from religious nationalists and the pro-settler camp. According to opinion polls, backing for his party has not grown since the 2013 election.
+
+“Bennett was the darling who got a lot of attention at the expense of everyone around him, but he made some serious mistakes,” said Reuven Hazan, who chairs the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
+
+Bennett tried to bring a retired Israeli soccer star onto his list of candidates for parliament, but core party members revolted, complaining that Eli Ohana was a celebrity who played games on the Jewish Sabbath and supported Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, anathema to the pro-settler wing of the party.
+
+Both Netanyahu and Bennett, a tech millionaire and former commando, are viewed as strong on security, and both talk tough about the Palestinians.
+
+Bennett is out front saying he would never give away occupied land in the West Bank to create an independent Palestinian state. During the campaign, Netanyahu also distanced himself from peace talks. He vowed there would be no concessions or withdrawals from the West Bank and suggested that the two-state solution was no longer relevant.
+
+Both may be sailing into contrary winds. The last polls for Israel Army Radio found that more than half of Israelis surveyed plan to vote based on social and economic issues and that fewer than 1 in 3 put security at the top of their concerns. Nine of 10 respondents said the cost of living would influence their choice.
+
+After shunning debates, public appearances and media interviews for most of the campaign, Netanyahu in the past few days has popped up on radio and television and, on Sunday, at a large rally in Tel Aviv.
+
+At the event, attended by thousands, Netanyahu warned, “If we don’t close the gap, there is a real danger that a left-wing government will rise to power.”
+
+On Israeli Channel 2’s “Meet the Press” show Saturday night, the host pressed Netanyahu on why he is trailing in opinion surveys.
+
+“I am liked,” he protested. “The public prefers me to continue to lead by many percentage points over my rival.” He referred to polls that ask voters who they would like as prime minister (which is different from which party they will vote for).
+
+The prime minister complained that the world was against him and wanted to weaken Israel. “Foreign consultants are here in droves,” he said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, “and the money is flowing here. All of it is intended to make the Likud lose.”
+
+Bennett blamed outsiders, too. “All the media and all the NGOs are out to overthrow the right,” he told students at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv. “I’ve never seen such a concentrated effort, with money from abroad.”
+
+Neither Bennett nor Netanyahu has alleged which foreign governments are seeking influence, but both have pointed the finger at an Israeli grass-roots organizing group calling itself V15, which is dedicated to ousting Netanyahu. Its social media networks helped bring 35,000 people out to a rally last week in a Tel Aviv park under the banner “Anyone but Bibi,” Netanyahu’s nickname.
+
+One of V15’s top advisers is a former Obama campaign director named Jeremy Bird, an expert on grass-roots politicking and voter mobilization.
+
+A shift from right to center in Israel would likely please the Obama White House. It would help Obama if the administration reaches an imperfect deal with the Iranians. It might also reinvigorate moribund peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and give Secretary of State John F. Kerry another chance to help solve one of the world’s longest-running conflicts.
+
+It is possible that Netanyahu and Likud could either win or come in a close second and then emerge as the ultimate victors, because their challengers could not put together a governing coalition from the small parties, whose leaders can emerge as kingmakers.
+
+Many Likudniks blame Moshe Kahlon, a former Likud minister who started a new party called Kulanu, for siphoning off moderate voters. The candidate is popular in Israel because he broke up the cellphone monopolies and slashed mobile per-minute rates. He gets high marks for focusing on socioeconomic issues but is also tough on security, seemingly an ideal candidate for today’s voter mood.
+
+Kahlon is expected to win more than enough seats to help form a coalition government for either Netanyahu or Herzog. He has not said which candidate he would join in the next government.
+
+-A guide to the political parties battling for Israel’s future
+
+-Why Israel’s top right-winger wants his people to ‘stop apologizing’
+
+-Could Isaac Herzog become Israel’s next prime minister?",REAL
+3837,Harry Reid Calls Trade Push By Obama And GOP 'Insanity',"The president and Republican leaders are pushing hard to pass legislation known as Trade Promotion Authority that allows a White House to fast-track trade deals through Congress with no amendments, no procedural hurdles or filibusters, and a simple up-or-down vote in limited amount of time.
+
+That fast-track authority likely would make it possible for the Obama administration to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership with a dozen Pacific Rim nations, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe. Together, those pacts would cover about 80 percent of the global economy.
+
+The much-maligned North American Free Trade Agreement of the 1990s covered about 10 percent of the word's trade, and Reid said that deal and many since have all been disastrous for American workers, costing millions of jobs.
+
+""It causes huge job losses,"" Reid said. ""As Einstein said, you keep doing the same thing over and over again, and you expect a different result, that's the definition of insanity.""
+
+""We can look at these trade bills over the years -- every one of them without exception causes to American workers job losses. Millions of job losses,"" Reid added. ""But yet they're going to try the same thing again and hope for a different result. That's insanity.""
+
+Obama has tried to counter such complaints by pointing to some of the benefits of free trade deals, insisting they do create jobs, and that his will be the ""most progressive"" trade pact in history. He's also accused people like Reid and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) of ""making stuff up.""
+
+""I would not be promoting any agreement that I didn't think at the end of the day was going to be creating jobs in the United States and giving us more of an opportunity to create ladders of success, higher incomes and higher wages for the American people, because that's my primary focus,"" Obama argued last week.
+
+Democrats have pushed back on that, though, with Warren releasing a report this week that details the same sorts of promises made in trade agreements for decades, most of which were broken, according the report.
+
+ 
+
+ Obama got support Wednesday from his would-be trade ally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who spoke just before Reid, accusing Democrats of blocking progress and jobs for America.
+
+“Our friends on the far left may try to cynically spin their war against the future as something other than what it truly is, but we know better,"" McConnell said. ""It’s no wonder President Obama has called them 'wrong' and suggested they make stuff up.""
+
+He said the main result of failing to craft trade agreements that lower barriers would be to cost the United States and its businesses markets.
+
+“What happens if the far left actually succeeds in its apparent quest to retain foreign tariffs that unfairly impact American workers and their paychecks?"" McConnell said. “It would mean lost opportunities for American risk-takers. ... It would mean lost opportunities for American manufacturing, lost opportunities for Kentucky farmers and lost opportunities for more jobs, better wages and a growing economy that can lift everyone up.""
+
+A vote on the Senate's fast-track bill could come by the end of the week. If McConnell can find a way to satisfy about a dozen Democratic fast-track backers in negotiations of amendments, it is likely to pass. Such agreement remained uncertain Wednesday, however, and prospects for the measure's success in the House are also highly uncertain, with most Democrats there, as well as dozens of Republicans, opposed.",REAL
+10113,Sex and the Presidential City,"Email 
+Why does everyone think that presidential campaigns are about “issues,” when anyone over the age of consent knows they are all about sex? But it says a lot about the lasting power of Viagra that this is still the case when we have a couple of seventy-year-olds on the ballot. (“ For an election lasting more than four years, please call your doctor .”) 
+In last week’s newspaper there was a report on the tenth or eleventh woman (I have lost track) to come forward to say that Donald Trump made suggestive and “inappropriate” advances to her during a golf tournament that took place about ten years ago. 
+The woman in question is Jessica Drake, who during her press conference announced that at the time of the tournament, she was working in the “the adult industry” (that’s what People Magazine calls porn) for Wicked Pictures (the 20th Century Fox of gang banging) when the randy Donald kissed and hugged her in his room. 
+Trump was already in his pajamas when she knocked on his door, together with two friends. Normally, in the adult business, when three porn stars knock on your hotel door, it’s considered foreplay. 
+When Trump’s effusive greeting of Miss Drake did not lead to more snuggling, let alone the suggestion to preview some of her work on the hotel television, he offered her $10,000 to satisfy his suite dreams. 
+Drake again demurred, saying that the next morning she needed to get back to Los Angeles “for work.” By that point in her career she had already notched screen credits for “Extreme Doggie” and “Fornocopia.” I would mention other titles, but as they say at the New York Post , “This is a family newspaper.” 
+That rejection prompted Donald to offer Jessica an early morning ride (of shame?) on his Trump airliner back to LA, which still didn’t turn the trick. * * * 
+Then last week, in the presence of her lawyer, Gloria Allred (the Perry Mason of many cases against Bill Cosby) Miss Drake tearfully repeated in primetime her shock and dismay that Mr. Trump had tried to take liberties with her reputation, which, after all, includes the 2009 Adult Video News Award for the “Best Double Penetration Sex Scene” in her classic work, “Fallen.” 
+Drake said she was coming forward now to stand in “solidarity” with the other women Trump has manhandled, although there were suggestions that her outing was timed to coincide with the launch of Drake’s new online store, where devoted viewers can purchase such classics as her “Guide to BDSM for Beginners,” among other titles. 
+Normally scenes such as the one I am describing would be consigned to John Oliver, Monty Python, or Saturday Night Live , but in the new normal of presidential politics, even Miss Drake gets a respectful hearing on the issues. 
+For example, the next day the Huffington Post reported: “Woman Says Trump Sexually Assaulted Her, Offered Her $10,000 For Sex.” 
+The deadpan New York Times wrote: “Ms. Drake, who appeared Saturday with the women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred, said Mr. Trump had hugged and kissed her and the other women without permission.” 
+The headline in New York Magazine read: “Adult Actress Jessica Drake Details Trump Assault, Blasts Him for ‘Uncontrollable Misogyny’.” 
+Look, I have no doubt that Trump is a pig who routinely gropes and propositions women, but since when does the press in a presidential election have to source its stories in the “adult” industry? * * * 
+Sadly, the answer to this question dates to winter 1992 when Bill and Hillary Clinton figured out that unless a presidential candidate has a sexual storyline, few of the voters will pay much attention to their positions on nuclear disarmament or welfare reform. 
+During the 1992 Super Bowl, the Clintons appeared on a halftime special of 60 Minutes to deny jointly (Bill: That allegation is false ) that he had ever had an affair with Gennifer Flowers, who lived in Little Rock, Arkansas when Bill was governor and often out jogging. 
+In this vaudeville performance, Hillary played the straight man, adding: “You know, I’m not sitting here—some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” (At least she didn’t reference The Eagles.) 
+Only in 1998, under oath in a sworn deposition, did Bill admit to having a 12-year affair with Ms. Flowers. But neither her allegations in 1992, nor his lying about it, cost him the election that year. 
+Just the opposite: Clinton’s wanderlust might have won him sympathy among the voters (no strangers to sexual boredom) who found they had more in common with a soft-shell Baptist (Bill) than an uptight Protestant (George H.W. Bush). 
+Nor did Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky under oath in the Paula Jones case hurt his post-presidential career (worth $200 million +) or the electoral prospects of his wife in 2016. 
+But it did turn sexuality into a mainstream presidential campaign issue, which is one of the reasons why this year’s race seems only to be about sex. * * * 
+No doubt the Clintons do find some delicious irony in Trump’s groping charges, as payback for what they view as the Republican use of sexuality to impeach Bill in 1998 and, in 2016, for the GOP plan to make his many adulterous affairs fair game for their campaign soundbites. (Cut to an online image of the White House and over it a fading picture of Bill smoking a cigar, with the caption “Here we go again?”) 
+Without the pageant-loving, casino operating Donald Trump as the Republican nominee in 2016, Hillary Clinton could well have been vulnerable on the sexual front, with Bill’s mistresses steady fodder for negatives ads and the many allegations from his scorned lovers that Hillary organized the slut-shaming. 
+Instead of the 2016 election turning on Hillary’s marriage to Hugh Hefner’s doppelgänger, the storyline that has played best in the media is Donald’s secret life as a groper. 
+The press actually has given Trump a pass for his adultery (which produced all those wonderful children) but zeroed in on his groping, in part because he confessed to it on an NBC videotape and also because—think of ratings—gropers belong in the same basket of deplorables as child abusers and others lurking on subways, crowed elevators, or near schoolyards. 
+Best of all for the Clintons, politically anyway, is that the charge of groping is impossible for Trump to refute. Even denying it sounds sleazy. 
+And it colors all aspects of the campaign. To wit: the New York Times headline when at Gettysburg Trump outlined his vision for America: “Donald Trump Pledges to ‘Heal Divisions’ (and Sue His Accusers).” * * * 
+For its mud-slinging, I am sure the Trump campaign has spent many long hours brainstorming how to tar Hillary as a lesbian. But even that innuendo has fallen flat, despite the rumor mongering that she’s in a Boston marriage with her assistant Huma Abedin (whose husband, Anthony Weiner, is otherwise distracted in high school chat rooms). 
+Several of Bill’s former lovers (Sally Miller, Dolly Kyle, and Flowers) have tried to play up Bill’s pillow talk that Hillary prefers the nighttime company of women. But none of these allegations have gone further than Infowars or the supermarket press. (“ Hillary Hit Man Tells All !”) 
+Nor have out-of-wedlock children, a staple of the 1884 campaign (as was chanted to Grover Cleveland: “ Ma, Ma, Where ’ s my pa ?”), gotten much play in this year’s presidential race. 
+Trump and his casino gumshoes have put considerable effort into tracking down the rumor that Danney Williams is Bill Clinton’s illegitimate son by a Little Rock prostitute named Bobbie Ann Williams. 
+Trump invited Danney (a sympathetic man) to the third presidential debate, as if to press on Bill a Scarlet Letter. Despite Williams looking very much like President Bill, the story got no more traction than did the news that Malik Obama, the president’s shunned half-brother, is supporting Trump. He, too, got a debate invitation, to sit in the box presumably marked “Shame.” 
+Also in the dustbin of history are the allegations that Flowers aborted Bill’s baby in 1977 and the whispering campaign (a great political standby when proof is elusive) that Chelsea is the product of an affair between Hillary and her then law firm colleague, Webb Hubbell. 
+The Williams and Hubbell stories come with some convincing Internet similarities, at least in the photographs, although in both cases politically, this rumor milling whiplashed against Trump, as voters have only equated such tawdry allegations with his Birther past, something that has stuck as campaign mud. * * * 
+Technically, Birtherism does’t directly involve sex, although it lingers on its fringes, as it speaks to Barack Obama’s illegitimacy, his foreign allegiances, and possibly disputed paternity, including the claim that Frank Marshall Davis was actually Obama’s biological father (another subterranean creed of Trumpism). 
+Again, the documentary proof is a series of look-a-like photographs, as close as the Internet gets to DNA. That Davis was an American Communist works well in the campaign, as it suggests the origins of Obama’s political genetic code. 
+Ironically, for all his efforts at smear, Trump came out the loser in the debates when Hillary nailed him to Birtherism, which has become a convenient code word for Trump’s racism, misogyny, and intolerance of immigrants, especially muslims. 
+Nor, in response, did Trump have any luck in linking the Birther movement to Clinton’s 2008 campaign, when, according to Donald, consigliere-journalist Sidney Blumenthal delighted in the suggestion that Barack was born in Kenya. 
+Instead, the debate claim only made Trump look disingenuous. Clinton got a pass on what her campaign may or may not have insinuated in 2008. And at this point, no one cares. But voters do remember Trump as the Imperial Wizard of Birtherism. * * * 
+Republicans can only blame themselves for wanting to divide the electorate in 2016 along lines of sexual preference or deviance, although this strategy was based on Hillary being the Democratic nominee and anyone other than Trump standing for the Republicans. 
+Had the GOP nominee been Carly Fiorina, Jeb Bush, or John Kasich, Clinton Inc. might well have been vulnerable to possible storylines about infidelity, illegitimacy, and rape. (Cue up the Paula Jones description of Bill, during a business meeting, exposing himself in a Little Rock hotel and settling her lawsuit for $850,000.) 
+Instead, the Republicans went with the polyamorous Trump, who, in addition to three marriages, has bragged on morning radio about his success with young women and who since 1996 has been leering at Miss Universe contestants—a bit like Austin Powers. ( Shall we shag now, or shall we shag later ?) 
+With Trump’s resumé of creepy perversion, you might have thought that the Republicans would drop sexual misconduct from the electoral playbook. Instead, they doubled down to make the case that both Clintons, if elected, would turn the White House into a strip club. 
+Not only did the Clintons shrug off such innuendo, but, in response, they said (in effect), if they did, it would be to cater to the likes of players such as Donald J. Trump (leisure suit and open collar optional). * * * 
+For the moment—and I can’t see anything changing in the last days of the campaign—the accepted wisdom of most front pages is that Donald Trump has groped as many women as Tiger Woods has watched pole dancing in Vegas. Even the gallery of “their women” looks about the same. 
+Conversely, few voters seem to care that Bill might have forced himself on several women or that Hillary helped to cover up his brutality. That’s a narrative of the 1990s, which is perhaps the last time Austin Danger Trump read the newspaper. ( I’ve been frozen for 30 years. I’ve got to see if my bits and pieces are still working .) 
+For most voters in 2016, names such as Kathleen Willey or Juanita Broaddrick are as lost in time as Nan Britton, who just before the 1920 election bore a love child with then candidate Senator Warren Harding. 
+Britton and the child got Republican hush money and a sad little house in Asbury Park, New Jersey. After Harding won, she was invited to the White House but their affair, so to speak, was kept in the closet. * * * 
+If you think about elections as political sitcoms, in 1960 the Kennedys had to run as Rob and Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show , complete with twin beds, long flannel pajamas, and prudent kisses on the cheek to say good-night, even if The JFK Reality Show would make Trump, Bill Clinton, and Tiger look like apprentices at adultery. 
+Come 2016, only something that resembles Modern Family and a desperate-housewives reality show can crack network primetime, and who better to put on air than The Clintons, with their Dallas -like money, communal sexuality, and more illicit storylines than CSI . 
+For more than twenty years, Bill and Hillary have been bringing us seasons of lust, affairs, “I-did-not-have-sex-with-that-woman”, Vince Foster, Travelgate, foundation slush funds, basement servers, commodity trading, Whitewater, Bosnian snipers, pay-to-play, Benghazi, lost e-mails, and the like, and the ratings only continue to go up. 
+Sure, The Apprentice was fun for a few episodes, but the sameness of insulting young people grew tedious. How is that supposed to compete with Bill making a pass at Huma, while her husband goes to prison for airing his junk, and Chelsea finding out about her real father. Next on The Clintons ?",FAKE
+3666,San Bernardino massacre: A horror that affects us all,"David M. Perry is an associate professor of history at Dominican University in Illinois. He writes regularly at his blog: How Did We Get Into This Mess? Follow him on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+(CNN) The horror began late Wednesday morning in San Bernardino as at least two gun-wielding people stormed into a conference center at the Inland Regional Center, a state-funded nonprofit that works with the California Department of Developmental Services, and killed 14 people.
+
+The killers fled, and two suspects have been killed, and so far we still can only speculate at their motives. Reports suggest the violence was focused on a holiday banquet celebrating county workers, with at least some suggesting it was a targeted killing , and police identified one of the attackers as Syed Rizwan Farook , an inspector for the county health department.
+
+The shootings took place at a government center that provides services to adults and children with developmental disabilities. It's an important facility, one of about 20 that serve tens of thousands of individuals throughout California. As reporters rushed to the scene, rumors flew that the killing involved disabled children, or a mental health patient, or a disgruntled parent, or any number of horror stories. The disability community braced, then felt a kind of guilty relief.
+
+The killers, it seems, were not aiming at children with disabilities nor the people who provide them with services. But they hurt those children, their parents and caregivers, and the staff who have dedicated their lives to serving disabled Americans, nonetheless.
+
+As the father of a child with Down syndrome, though not a Californian, I know these types of buildings well. I've spent so much of the last decade in and out of such offices, signing up for services, getting treatments and learning about the world of disability. While every mass shooting is horrific, the carnage can often feel remote, especially as Americans become inured to the regularity of the violence. There have, after all, been more mass shootings in 2015 than days in the year
+
+And yet, this time it was far too easy for me to imagine the terror of people with and without disabilities as the guns fired, the fire alarm sounded, and the sirens rang out. We'll certainly start hearing stories about children and adults with disabilities as we begin to sort through the aftermath. I spoke with one parent in the area, Shannon Jenkins, who told me that her daughter, ""receives services at Inland Regional Center. At any given time, there are hundreds there between employees, kids and adults with special needs, and their parents/(caregivers)."" On a crowded Wednesday afternoon, we're lucky the body count wasn't worse.
+
+But the survivors don't escape unscathed. Some of the children and adults with developmental disabilities experienced the trauma of being present at a mass shooting. My son, as is relatively common, reacts with real panic to certain kinds of sounds and lights, including close proximity to alarm.
+
+What kind of trauma will disabled children carry forward from this event? And, of course, disabled children are not the only ones at risk for trauma and its consequences. Post-traumatic stress disorder is one of the most common forms of disability in America, a condition for which everyone involved is now at risk.
+
+The social media feeds of the Inland Regional Center are filled with pictures of joy and friendship. A Christmas party with a child sitting on Santa's lap. People dancing and singing to ""Celebration."" Signs for the upcoming winter dance on Friday, perhaps intended to be held in the very hall now riddled with bullets and blood. This was a place that was doing the hard work of building an inclusive community.
+
+Worst of all, there continues to be no reason to think that any degree of horror will spur cultural or policy change when it comes to the easy access to firearms in America. The empathy I felt for the people at a disability services building made the violence more real to me. But I've felt this degree of empathy before. When Adam Lanza killed all those first-graders on December 14, 2012, I thought about my own son, then a 5-year-old, and imagined him experiencing the horror of a shooter in his school. Surely every parent in America had such thoughts as they sent their children off to school in the following days, and perhaps every day since.
+
+And yet, we've done nothing. The pace of mass shootings is accelerating . Thanks to the power of the gun lobby and their cronies in Congress, all we do is offer empty thoughts and prayers, while we slowly become more and more afraid.",REAL
+2219,Netanyahu's Iran Speech: Why it's important for Congress to at least listen to Israel's leader,"The speech Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is slated to give to a joint session of Congress Tuesday is one of the most critical of recent times. It concerns not only the very existence of his nation, but also the terribly real possibility of nuclear holocaust in the foreseeable future. Our own security is at stake as well: Iran is developing intercontinental missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons that will reach our shores.
+
+The question isn’t why should Congress listen to what he has to say, but rather why in the world would certain members not to hear him out?
+
+Prime Minister Netanyahu will speak on the prospect of Iran being able to develop nuclear weapons.  He is making this speech because – like many people – he is fearful that the agreement President Obama wants to strike with Iran would not put in place effective controls to prevent the mullahs – and plausibly in turn the many terrorist organizations they actively support – from acquiring weapons-grade fissionable material.
+
+The Obama administration has tried to discredit Prime Minister Netanyahu and dismiss his appearance on Capitol Hill as a political stunt tied to the upcoming Israeli elections.  Some of the president’s followers in Congress have vowed to boycott the speech.  But their red herring arguments cannot be allowed to disguise the crucial importance of his visit or of the issue that has prompted it.
+
+Allowing Iran to join the nuclear club – or come perilously close -- would trigger a frightening round of weapons proliferation.  Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the region would all be understandably motivated to similarly arm themselves. The Middle East of today, which far too often teeters on the brink of meltdown, could in comparison seem a relatively stable, peaceful place.
+
+And make no mistake, the specter of the revolutionary government of Iran armed with nuclear weapons does not just threaten the Middle East. Iran is believed to already possess missiles capable of delivering a warhead to Israel and perhaps even Europe.  Development of more powerful models that would extend their range to include the United States is just a matter of time. Iran’s ability to not only attack, but also to intimidate other countries into meeting its demands would increase exponentially with its acquisition of nuclear capabilities. Imagine Tehran “suggesting” to European countries how to treat their growing Muslim populations? Sharia law, anyone?
+
+But obviously, the nation most likely to first suffer from Iran’s nuclear ambitions is Israel.  That is why it is so important for members of Congress to listen to Prime Minister Netanyahu.  The United States and Israel have a longstanding friendship that has always enjoyed strong bipartisan support.  We cannot refuse our close ally at least the opportunity to explain how a nuclear Iran would affect it.  No one demands that every member of Congress agree with the Prime Minister, but they all have a duty to listen to him.
+
+Additionally, Congress definitely has a fundamental obligation – to the American people and the world - to be actively involved in this policy decision.  This is not Obamacare or regulating the Internet.  The consequences of allowing President Obama to go it alone with another opaque executive action could not only be catastrophic, but also impossible to remedy with after-the-fact legislation.  Once Iran has the bomb, the game is over.
+
+The stakes here could not be higher – Israel’s continued existence, America’s moral authority, nuclear conflict, and the ghastly breakdown of world order.  Party politics cannot be allowed to interfere with bringing this matter to the most successful resolution possible.  Congress must listen to Prime Minister Netanyahu -- and so should President Obama.
+
+Steve Forbes is Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media. His latest book, ""Reviving America: How Repealing Obamacare, Replacing the Tax Code, and Reforming the Fed will Restore Hope and Prosperity"" (McGraw-Hill Education, December 10, 2015).",REAL
+3848,Obama: Warren 'Absolutely Wrong' On Trade Deal,"Elizabeth Warren announced a bill creating a Financial Product Safety Commission with House and Senate Democrats in March 2009. The body was designed to have oversight over mortgages and other financial instruments to protect consumers against predatory practices. She said if the agency had existed before the subprime collapse then ""there would have been millions of families who got tangled in predatory mortgages who never would have gotten them."" HuffPost's Ryan Grim reported : Without all these toxic assets on banks' balance sheets, the institutions wouldn't be on the brink of collapse and the recession would be more manageable. ""Consumer financial products were the front end of the destabilization of the American economic system."" Sen. Charles Schumer's cosponsorship of the bill is notable because of his proximity to Wall Street. The bill's merit, the New York Democrat said, is that it regulates the actual financial product rather than the company producing it.",REAL
+9409,The Guardian is Going Friggin Nuts Over Calais,"The Guardian is Going Friggin Nuts Over Calais 
+Andrew Anglin Daily Stormer October 27, 2016 Where is this innocent little boy supposed to go if he can’t live in a squatter camp and throw rocks through car windshields, The Guardian asks. 
+Okay, so earlier today I already posted a front page story from The Guardian featuring an imagine of a “16-year-old child” who was obviously a man in his forties who was forced out of his home in the Jungle camp in Calais. 
+But I’ve gotta post more. 
+They are going absolutely nuts over this. 
+The rest of the media is too, of course, but The Guardian epitomizes liberal hysteria, so we’ll focus on them. 
+All of these headlines are from the last 24 hours – the period since the camp was officially closed. I won’t even bother to link them, because who cares. You already know what they’re saying. 
+Three of them are written by the same woman, Lisa O’Carroll. 
+One has to wonder if she wasn’t one of the women who were using the Calais camp as a sex tourism destination . 
+You can ask her about it on Twitter. 
+@lisaocarroll 
+This situation is insane though, holmes. 
+These people invaded Europe, mostly from Africa. None of them are legitimate “refugees,” or they would claim that status. They are allowed to stay in France indefinitely, where they are clothed and fed, but they want to go to Britain because the welfare system is so good. They set up an illegal squatter base next to the freeway, and used it to break into trucks bound for the UK and to launch random violent attacks on cars – very often just throwing rocks for no reason. 
+This week, 7 years after it was founded in 2009, they finally closed it and forced out the inhabitants, because basically it had become impossible to safely pass from France to England in a car. And the entire media is saying that the act of closing the camp is nothing short of pure and unadulterated evil. 
+The way they’re selling it? 
+By showing pictures of men between the ages of 25 and 45, saying they’re teenagers and calling them “children.” 
+It’s like something out of an absurdist comedy. But most everything is these days. 
+Anyhow, these women, cucks and kikes are eventually going to get their way. Migrants are already moving back in, as the fires have died down from where they set their own squat on fire when they were asked to leave. 
+Migrants have started moving back into the “Jungle”, hours after French authorities announced they had finished clearing out the Calais camp. 
+Thousands of migrants were evacuated as multiple large blazes raged across the sprawling camp in northern France. 
+By midday, regional prefect Fabienne Buccio had said operations to clear the camp, which began on Monday, had been completed days earlier than planned. 
+“There are no more migrants in the camp,” she told the Associated Press news agency. 
+I said this would happen. Everyone knew it would happen. White Europeans have no will to do what needs to be done, so these animals are simply allowed to do whatever they want. 
+What needs to be done is of course race war. 
+These people need to be rounded up and deported back to Africa, and if they refuse and start fires, they need to be shot. 
+This situation isn’t complicated or nuanced in any way. 
+But that won’t happen. 
+Because Europe is ruled by the coalition of evil: empowered women, cucks and kikes.",FAKE
+5268,Swing-state stunner: Trump has edge in key states,"Did Donald Trump really just surge past Hillary Clinton in two of the election's most important battlegrounds?
+
+New swing-state polls released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University show Trump leading Clinton in Florida and Pennsylvania — and tied in the critical battleground state of Ohio. In three of the states that matter most in November, the surveys point to a race much closer than the national polls, which have Clinton pegged to a significant, mid-single-digit advantage over Trump, suggest.
+
+The race is so close that it's within the margin of error in each of the three states. Trump leads by three points in Florida — the closest state in the 2012 election — 42 percent to 39 percent. In Ohio, the race is tied, 41 percent to 41 percent. And in Pennsylvania — which hasn't voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1988 — Trump leads, 43 percent to 41 percent.
+
+Clinton's campaign responded to the surveys by cautioning that while the swing states were always expected to be close, the urgent stakes of a possible Trump election remain high.
+
+""We know the battlegrounds are going to be close til the end. That's why we need to keep working so hard,"" Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon tweeted Wednesday morning. ""Trump is a serious danger, folks.""
+
+Trump, meanwhile, thanked his supporters for the strong showing, tweeting a celebratory series of images featuring Fox News graphics showing the Quinnipiac results. ""Thank you!"" Trump tweeted, adding ""#ImWithYou,"" an implicit shot at the Clinton campaign's initial slogan, ""I'm With Her.""
+
+In another blow to Clinton, a McClatchy-Marist poll of registered voters nationwide released on Wednesday showed Clinton's lead over Trump slip to three points, 42 percent to 39 percent, after leading by six points in a Fox News poll conducted in late June.
+
+But other polls give Clinton an advantage in all three states. Including the new Quinnipiac surveys, POLITICO’s Battleground State polling average — which include the five most-recent polls in each state — gives Clinton a 3.2-point lead in Florida, a 2.8-point edge in Ohio and a larger, 4.6-point advantage in Pennsylvania.
+
+By Wednesday afternoon, a quartet of battleground polls painted a hazy picture of the race in those three states, as well as in Colorado and Wisconsin. The latest NBC News/Marist/Wall Street Journal polls showed Clinton up by three points against Trump in Iowa (42 percent to 39 percent), tied in Ohio (41 percent to 41 percent) and up by nine points in Pennsylvania (45 percent to 36 percent), in contrast to her two-point deficit in the Quinnipiac poll.
+
+Monmouth University's survey of likely Colorado voters found Clinton with a significant 13-point advantage, while Trump cut into Clinton's Wisconsin advantage by five points compared to last month, trailing 45 percent to 41 percent compared to last month, when Clinton led 46 percent to 37 percent.
+
+While the Quinnipiac results are eye-popping, they don’t represent any significant movement — except in Florida. In three rounds of polling over the past two months, the race has moved from a four-point Trump lead in Ohio in the first survey, then tied in the next two polls. In Pennsylvania, Clinton led by one point in the first two polls and now trails by two.
+
+But in Florida, the race has bounced around. Clinton led by one point in the first poll two months ago, but she opened up an eight-point lead in June — a lead that has been erased and more in the new Quinnipiac survey.
+
+The polls from the Connecticut-based school are likely to be met with some skepticism. When Quinnipiac released their first round of polls in the same three states two months ago, they prompted a round of sniping from Democrats and an F-bomb on Twitter from Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight founder who has built a career using poll results to make political predictions.
+
+But subsequent polls later confirmed the May Quinnipiac surveys: Trump pulled virtually even with Clinton nationally after knocking out his rivals for the GOP nomination.
+
+It’s possible the results of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s private email server dating back to her service as secretary of state — FBI Director James Comey called Clinton and her staff “extremely careless,” even as he said the government shouldn’t press charges because there wasn’t evidence of criminal intent — are driving Clinton’s poll numbers down leading into the conventions, typically a critical time for campaigns.
+
+In the poll release, the school suggested the investigation could have played a role, pointing to other lingering questions about Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness. “While there is no definite link between Clinton’s drop in Florida and the U.S. Justice Department decision not to prosecute her for her handling of emails,” Quinnipiac pollster Peter Brown said, “she has lost ground to Trump on questions which measure moral standards and honesty.”
+
+But the Quinnipiac polls are imperfect measures of a post-email investigation race. That’s because, like many of the school’s other polls, they were conducted over an unusually lengthy, 12-day time period: June 30 through July 11.
+
+The national polls conducted since Comey’s statement are mixed: Clinton posted a 3-point lead in this week’s NBC News/SurveyMonkey online tracking poll, down from a 5-point lead the week prior. Morning Consult, another online tracking poll, gave Clinton identical 1-point leads in the days before and after Comey’s statement.
+
+Overall, Clinton leads by 4.3 points in the latest national HuffPost Pollster average, and she has a 3.7-point advantage in the RealClearPolitics average.
+
+The polling in other battleground states since the announcement are also cloudy. Monmouth University surveys conducted after the Comey statement gave Clinton a 4-point lead in Nevada — but showed Trump ahead by two points in Iowa.
+
+In the Quinnipiac polls, there are warning signs for both candidates in all three states. First, despite near-universal name-ID, neither candidate can break out of the low 40s on the ballot test. That points to two very unpopular candidates.
+
+But, in a reversal from earlier surveys, it’s a more acute problem for Clinton. Clinton’s unfavorable ratings (59 percent in Florida, 60 percent in Ohio, 65 percent in Pennsylvania) are higher than Trump’s (54 percent in Florida, 59 percent in Ohio, 57 percent in Pennsylvania) in all three battleground states. And majorities in all three states — which together account for 67 electoral votes, or nearly a quarter of the 270 necessary to win the presidency — have a “very unfavorable” view of Clinton.
+
+Another measure of voters’ ambivalence about Clinton in the Quinnipiac poll: a second ballot-test question, this time adding two third-party candidates to the mix. When voters are asked to consider the general election again, this time given the option of choosing Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Trump’s advantage over Clinton grows in each state. Trump leads on the four-way ballot by five points in Florida, one point in Ohio and six points in Pennsylvania.
+
+There are some eyebrow-raising results from the polls, however. On the two-way ballot test in Florida, Clinton trails Trump despite the Republican winning just 21 percent of non-white voters in the increasingly diverse state.
+
+In Ohio, Clinton wins 90 percent of Democrats, but Trump only captures 77 percent of Republicans, putting him at a significant disadvantage. In Pennsylvania, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by close to 10 percentage points, both candidates are at 82 percent among their own partisans, with Trump only three points ahead among self-identified independents.
+
+Former presidential candidate Herman Cain on Wednesday said he was not surprised by Trump's upswing.
+
+""And that's because Donald Trump's substance is finally starting to cut through some of the media clutter and Hillary Clinton's shallowness is also starting to emerge. She is the free-stuff candidate disguised as wanting to help people, but that's not coming through. But Donald Trump's substance is what's finally starting to emerge,"" Cain told ""Fox & Friends,"" in the same interview in which he praised former 2012 rival Newt Gingrich as the right choice for Trump's vice president.
+
+For Bernie Sanders, Clinton's dismal showing is more proof that his former rival needs to more effectively make her policy-based case against Trump.
+
+""This is not a beauty contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton,"" Sanders said on ABC's ""Good Morning America."" ""This is the fact that the middle class of this country is in trouble. Which candidate has more to say about education, more to say about health care, more to say about climate change, more to say about income and wealth inequality, more to say about a sensible foreign policy? And I think the more the people hear the contrast between the two I think Secretary Clinton's support will grow.""
+
+",REAL
+7823,AUSTRIAN DISGRACE: No jail for Muslim migrant who dumped his own baby in the middle of the road after he got drunk and enraged,"BY CHRISTINE WILLIAMS 
+The West has in effect developed a two-tier legal system for Muslims. 
+The article below is about a baby being dumped in the road, with the Muslim migrant perpetrator escaping jail time. This follows another shocking recent report about the rape of a 10-year-old boy at a swimming pool in Vienna by a Muslim refugee from Iraq; his sentence was overturned because the judge accepted, outrageously, that the man thought the little boy consented. 
+Our senses have seemingly gone numb to Muslim crime. This is similar to the phenomenon of how Muslim Arab violence against Israel is tolerated, as suggested by Middle East scholar Ephraim Karsh: 
+The sight of Arabs killing Jews (or other Arabs for that matter) is hardly news; while the sight of Jews killing Arabs is a man-bites-dog anomaly that cannot be tolerated. 
+Karsh’s comment is based on the unflattering principle of low expectations toward Muslims, which is a costly malady, as Western civilized society is slowly descending into the barbarism seen in Islamic states. 
+Less than two decades ago, no one could could have imagined reports such as these: Violent “asylum seekers hurl chairs and throw punches in ‘wild west’ fight that left five in hospital”; a 90-year-old woman gets raped by a Muslim; a 79-year-old woman visiting her sister’s grave also gets raped by a Muslim; up to a million girls in the UK are sexually assaulted by Muslim rape gangs; and crime has seized Europe, with coverups of Muslim crime in the U.S. as well. 
+“No jail time for asylum seeker who dumped baby in road”, by Paul Gillingwater, The Local , October 19, 2016: 
+The 27-year-old had been living in an asylum centre in Vienna’s Floridsdorf district and had already been given several warnings for being drunk and violent. 
+So when he turned up again intoxicated with a beer in his hand and was told to leave, he flew into a furious rage. 
+Spotting his baby daughter in a pram nearby, he grabbed her and ran into the busy road, and put her in the middle of a traffic lane. 
+The man’s lawyer denied however that he wanted to cause the child any harm, saying he wanted to take a photograph 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+5596,The Modern History of ‘Rigged’ US Elections," The Modern History of ‘Rigged’ US Elections Donald Trump claims the U.S. presidential election is “rigged,” drawing condemnation from the political/media establishment which accuses him of undermining faith in American democracy. But neither side understands the real problem, says Robert Parry.
+By Robert Parry
+ "" Consortium News "" - The United States is so committed to the notion that its electoral process is the world’s “gold standard” that there has been a bipartisan determination to maintain the fiction even when evidence is overwhelming that a U.S. presidential election has been manipulated or stolen. The “wise men” of the system simply insist otherwise.
+We have seen this behavior when there are serious questions of vote tampering (as in Election 1960) or when a challenger apparently exploits a foreign crisis to create an advantage over the incumbent (as in Elections 1968 and 1980) or when the citizens’ judgment is overturned by judges (as in Election 2000).
+Strangely, in such cases, it is not only the party that benefited which refuses to accept the evidence of wrongdoing, but the losing party and the establishment news media as well. Protecting the perceived integrity of the U.S. democratic process is paramount. Americans must continue to believe in the integrity of the system even when that integrity has been violated.
+The harsh truth is that pursuit of power often trumps the principle of an informed electorate choosing the nation’s leaders, but that truth simply cannot be recognized.
+Of course, historically, American democracy was far from perfect, excluding millions of people, including African-American slaves and women. The compromises needed to enact the Constitution in 1787 also led to distasteful distortions, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation (although obviously slaves couldn’t vote).
+That unsavory deal enabled Thomas Jefferson to defeat John Adams in the pivotal national election of 1800. In effect, the votes of Southern slave owners like Jefferson counted substantially more than the votes of Northern non-slave owners.
+Even after the Civil War when the Constitution was amended to give black men voting rights, the reality for black voting, especially in the South, was quite different from the new constitutional mandate. Whites in former Confederate states concocted subterfuges to keep blacks away from the polls to ensure continued white supremacy for almost a century.
+Women did not gain suffrage until 1920 with the passage of another constitutional amendment, and it took federal legislation in 1965 to clear away legal obstacles that Southern states had created to deny the franchise to blacks.
+Indeed, the alleged voter fraud in Election 1960, concentrated largely in Texas, a former Confederate state and home to John Kennedy’s vice presidential running mate, Lyndon Johnson, could be viewed as an outgrowth of the South’s heritage of rigging elections in favor of Democrats, the post-Civil War party of white Southerners.
+However, by pushing through civil rights for blacks in the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson earned the enmity of many white Southerners who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party via Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy of coded racial messaging. Nixon also harbored resentments over what he viewed as his unjust defeat in the election of 1960.
+Nixon’s ‘Treason’
+So, by 1968, the Democrats’ once solid South was splintering, but Nixon, who was again the Republican presidential nominee, didn’t want to leave his chances of winning what looked to be another close election to chance. Nixon feared that — with the Vietnam War raging and the Democratic Party deeply divided — President Johnson could give the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a decisive boost by reaching a last-minute peace deal with North Vietnam.
+The documentary and testimonial evidence is now clear that to avert a peace deal, Nixon’s campaign went behind Johnson’s back to persuade South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to torpedo Johnson’s Paris peace talks by refusing to attend. Nixon’s emissaries assured Thieu that a President Nixon would continue the war and guarantee a better outcome for South Vietnam.
+Though Johnson had strong evidence of what he privately called Nixon’s “treason” — from FBI wiretaps in the days before the 1968 election — he and his top advisers chose to stay silent. In a Nov. 4, 1968 conference call , Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford – three pillars of the Establishment – expressed that consensus, with Clifford explaining the thinking:
+“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”
+Clifford’s words expressed the recurring thinking whenever evidence emerged casting the integrity of America’s electoral system in doubt, especially at the presidential level. The American people were not to know what kind of dirty deeds could affect that process.
+To this day, the major U.S. news media will not directly address the issue of Nixon’s treachery in 1968, despite the wealth of evidence proving this historical reality now available from declassified records at the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas. In a puckish recognition of this ignored history, the library’s archivists call the file on Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks their “X-file.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ LBJ’s ‘X-File’ on Nixon’s ‘Treason. ’”]
+The evidence also strongly suggests that Nixon’s paranoia about a missing White House file detailing his “treason” – top secret documents that Johnson had entrusted to Rostow at the end of LBJ’s presidency – led to Nixon’s creation of the “plumbers,” a team of burglars whose first assignment was to locate those purloined papers. The existence of the “plumbers” became public in June 1972 when they were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate in Washington.
+Although the Watergate scandal remains the archetypal case of election-year dirty tricks, the major U.S. news media never acknowledge the link between Watergate and Nixon’s far more egregious dirty trick four years earlier, sinking Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks while 500,000 American soldiers were in the war zone. In part because of Nixon’s sabotage — and his promise to Thieu of a more favorable outcome — the war continued for four more bloody years before being settled along the lines that were available to Johnson in 1968. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ The Heinous Crime Behind Watergate .”]
+In effect, Watergate gets walled off as some anomaly that is explained by Nixon’s strange personality. However, even though Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, he and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who also had a hand in the Paris peace talk caper, reappear as secondary players in the next well-documented case of obstructing a sitting president’s foreign policy to get an edge in the 1980 campaign.
+Reagan’s ‘October Surprise’ Caper
+In that case, President Jimmy Carter was seeking reelection and trying to negotiate release of 52 American hostages then held in revolutionary Iran. Ronald Reagan’s campaign feared that Carter might pull off an “October Surprise” by bringing home the hostages just before the election. So, this historical mystery has been: Did Reagan’s team take action to block Carter’s October Surprise?
+The testimonial and documentary evidence that Reagan’s team did engage in a secret operation to prevent Carter’s October Surprise is now almost as overwhelming as the proof of the 1968 affair regarding Nixon’s Paris peace talk maneuver.
+That evidence indicates that Reagan’s campaign director William Casey organized a clandestine effort to prevent the hostages’ release before Election Day, after apparently consulting with Nixon and Kissinger and aided by former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, who was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate.
+By early November 1980, the public’s obsession with Iran’s humiliation of the United States and Carter’s inability to free the hostages helped turn a narrow race into a Reagan landslide. When the hostages were finally let go immediately after Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, his supporters cited the timing to claim that the Iranians had finally relented out of fear of Reagan.
+Bolstered by his image as a tough guy, Reagan enacted much of his right-wing agenda, including passing massive tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, weakening unions and creating the circumstances for the rapid erosion of the Great American Middle Class.
+Behind the scenes, the Reagan administration signed off on secret arms shipments to Iran, mostly through Israel, what a variety of witnesses described as the payoff for Iran’s cooperation in getting Reagan elected and then giving him the extra benefit of timing the hostage release to immediately follow his inauguration.
+In summer 1981, when Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes learned about the arms shipments to Iran, he checked on their origins and said, later in a PBS interview:
+“It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment. [This operation] seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration. And I understand some contacts were made at that time.”
+Those early covert arms shipments to Iran evolved into a later secret set of arms deals that surfaced in fall 1986 as the Iran-Contra Affair, with some of the profits getting recycled back to Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist government.
+While many facts of the Iran-Contra scandal were revealed by congressional and special-prosecutor investigations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the origins of the Reagan-Iran relationship was always kept hazy. The Republicans were determined to stop any revelations about the 1980 contacts, but the Democrats were almost as reluctant to go there.
+A half-hearted congressional inquiry was launched in 1991 and depended heavily on then-President George H.W. Bush to collect the evidence and arrange interviews for the investigation. In other words, Bush, who was then seeking reelection and who was a chief suspect in the secret dealings with Iran, was entrusted with proving his own guilt.
+Tired of the Story
+By the early 1990s, the mainstream U.S. news media was also tired of the complex Iran-Contra scandal and wanted to move on. As a correspondent at Newsweek, I had battled senior editors over their disinterest in getting to the bottom of the scandal before I left the magazine in 1990. I then received an assignment from PBS Frontline to look into the 1980 “October Surprise” question, which led to a documentary on the subject in April 1991.
+However, by fall 1991, just as Congress was agreeing to open an investigation, my ex-bosses at Newsweek, along with The New Republic, then an elite neoconservative publication interested in protecting Israel’s exposure on those early arms deals, went on the attack. They published matching cover stories deeming the 1980 “October Surprise” case a hoax, but their articles were both based on a misreading of documents recording Casey’s attendance at a conference in London in July 1980, which he seemed to have used as a cover for a side trip to Madrid to meet with senior Iranians regarding the hostages.
+Although the bogus Newsweek/New Republic “London alibi” would eventually be debunked, it created a hostile climate for the investigation. With Bush angrily denying everything and the congressional Republicans determined to protect the President’s flanks, the Democrats mostly just went through the motions of an investigation.
+Meanwhile, Bush’s State Department and White House counsel’s office saw their jobs as discrediting the investigation, deep-sixing incriminating documents, and helping a key witness dodge a congressional subpoena.
+Years later, I discovered a document at the Bush presidential library in College Station, Texas, confirming that Casey had taken a mysterious trip to Madrid in 1980. The U.S. Embassy’s confirmation of Casey’s trip was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson to Associate White House Counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. in early November 1991, just as the congressional inquiry was taking shape.
+Williamson said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown,” Beach noted in a “ memorandum for record ” dated Nov. 4, 1991.
+Two days later, on Nov. 6, Beach’s boss, White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, convened an inter-agency strategy session and explained the need to contain the congressional investigation into the October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to ensure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992.
+At the meeting, Gray laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation. The prospect that the two sets of allegations would merge into a single narrative represented a grave threat to George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it , the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.”
+Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns and be of special interest to the President ,” Gray declared, according to minutes . [Emphasis in original.]
+Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings.
+Timid Democrats
+But Bush’s White House really had little to fear because whatever evidence that the congressional investigation received – and a great deal arrived in December 1992 and January 1993 – there was no stomach for actually proving that the 1980 Reagan campaign had conspired with Iranian radicals to extend the captivity of 52 Americans in order to ensure Reagan’s election victory.
+That would have undermined the faith of the American people in their democratic process – and that, as Clark Clifford said in the 1968 context, would not be “good for the country.”
+In 2014 when I sent a copy of Beach’s memo regarding Casey’s trip to Madrid to former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, who had chaired the October Surprise inquiry in 1991-93, he told me that it had shaken his confidence in the task force’s dismissive conclusions about the October Surprise issue.
+“The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he [Casey] did make the trip” to Madrid, Hamilton told me. “Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”
+Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation.
+“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said, adding that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests. But that trust was at the heart of the inquiry’s failure. With the money and power of the American presidency at stake, the idea that George H.W. Bush and his team would help an investigation that might implicate him in an act close to treason was naďve in the extreme.
+Arguably, Hamilton’s timid investigation was worse than no investigation at all because it gave Bush’s team the opportunity to search out incriminating documents and make them disappear. Then, Hamilton’s investigative conclusion reinforced the “group think” dismissing this serious manipulation of democracy as a “conspiracy theory” when it was anything but. In the years since, Hamilton hasn’t done anything to change the public impression that the Reagan campaign was innocent.
+Still, among the few people who have followed this case, the October Surprise cover-up would slowly crumble with admissions by officials involved in the investigation that its exculpatory conclusions were rushed , that crucial evidence had been hidden or ignored , and that some alibis for key Republicans didn’t make any sense .
+But the dismissive “group think” remains undisturbed as far as the major U.S. media and mainstream historians are concerned. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative or Trick or Treason: The 1980 October Surprise Mystery or Consortiumnews.com’s “ Second Thoughts on October Surprise. ”]
+Past as Prologue
+Lee Hamilton’s decision to “clear” Reagan and Bush of the 1980 October Surprise suspicions in 1992 was not simply a case of miswriting history. The findings had clear implications for the future as well, since the public impression about George H.W. Bush’s rectitude was an important factor in the support given to his oldest son, George W. Bush, in 2000.
+Indeed, if the full truth had been told about the father’s role in the October Surprise and Iran-Contra cases, it’s hard to imagine that his son would have received the Republican nomination, let alone made a serious run for the White House. And, if that history were known, there might have been a stronger determination on the part of Democrats to resist another Bush “stolen election” in 2000.
+Regarding Election 2000, the evidence is now clear that Vice President Al Gore not only won the national popular vote but received more votes that were legal under Florida law than did George W. Bush. But Bush relied first on the help of officials working for his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, and then on five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to thwart a full recount and to award him Florida’s electoral votes and thus the presidency.
+The reality of Gore’s rightful victory should have finally become clear in November 2001 when a group of news organizations finished their own examination of Florida’s disputed ballots and released their tabulations showing that Gore would have won if all ballots considered legal under Florida law were counted.
+However, between the disputed election and the release of those numbers, the 9/11 attacks had occurred, so The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other leading outlets did not want the American people to know that the wrong person was in the White House. Surely, telling the American people that fact amid the 9/11 crisis would not be “good for the country.”
+So, senior editors at all the top new organizations decided to mislead the public by framing their stories in a deceptive way to obscure the most newsworthy discovery – that the so-called “over-votes” in which voters both checked and wrote in their choices’ names broke heavily for Gore and would have put him over the top regardless of which kinds of chads were considered for the “under-votes” that hadn’t registered on antiquated voting machines. “Over-votes” would be counted under Florida law which bases its standards on “clear intent of the voter.”
+However, instead of leading with Gore’s rightful victory, the news organizations concocted hypotheticals around partial recounts that still would have given Florida narrowly to Bush. They either left out or buried the obvious lede that a historic injustice had occurred.
+On Nov. 12, 2001, the day that the news organizations ran those stories, I examined the actual data and quickly detected the evidence of Gore’s victory. In a story that day, I suggested that senior news executives were exercising a misguided sense of patriotism. They had hid the reality for “the good of the country,” much as Johnson’s team had done in 1968 regarding Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris peace talks and Hamilton’s inquiry had done regarding the 1980 “October Surprise” case.
+Within a couple of hours of my posting the article at Consortiumnews.com, I received an irate phone call from The New York Times media writer Felicity Barringer, who accused me of impugning the journalistic integrity of then-Times executive editor Howell Raines. I got the impression that Barringer had been on the look-out for some deviant story that didn’t accept the Bush-won conventional wisdom.
+However, this violation of objective and professional journalism – bending the slant of a story to achieve a preferred outcome rather than simply giving the readers the most interesting angle – was not simply about some historical event that had occurred a year earlier. It was about the future.
+By misleading Americans into thinking that Bush was the rightful winner of Election 2000 – even if the media’s motivation was to maintain national unity following the 9/11 attacks – the major news outlets gave Bush greater latitude to respond to the crisis, including the diversionary invasion of Iraq under false pretenses. The Bush-won headlines of November 2001 also enhanced the chances of his reelection in 2004. [For the details of how a full Florida recount would have given Gore the White House, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ Gore’s Victory ,” “ So Bush Did Steal the White House ,” and “ Bush v. Gore’s Dark American Decade. ”]
+A Phalanx of Misguided Consensus
+Looking back on these examples of candidates manipulating democracy, there appears to be one common element: after the “stolen” elections, the media and political establishments quickly line up, shoulder to shoulder, to assure the American people that nothing improper has happened. Graceful “losers” are patted on the back for not complaining that the voters’ will had been ignored or twisted.
+Al Gore is praised for graciously accepting the extraordinary ruling by Republican partisans on the Supreme Court, who stopped the counting of ballots in Florida on the grounds, as Justice Antonin Scalia said, that a count that showed Gore winning (when the Court’s majority was already planning to award the White House to Bush) would undermine Bush’s “legitimacy.”
+Similarly, Rep. Hamilton is regarded as a modern “wise man,” in part, because he conducted investigations that never pushed very hard for the truth but rather reached conclusions that were acceptable to the powers-that-be, that didn’t ruffle too many feathers.
+But the cumulative effect of all these half-truths, cover-ups and lies – uttered for “the good of the country” – is to corrode the faith of many well-informed Americans about the legitimacy of the entire process. It is the classic parable of the boy who cried wolf too many times, or in this case, assured the townspeople that there never was a wolf and that they should ignore the fact that the livestock had mysteriously disappeared leaving behind only a trail of blood into the forest.
+So, when Donald Trump shows up in 2016 insisting that the electoral system is rigged against him, many Americans choose to believe his demagogy. But Trump isn’t pressing for the full truth about the elections of 1968 or 1980 or 2000. He actually praises Republicans implicated in those cases and vows to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia.
+Trump’s complaints about “rigged” elections are more in line with the white Southerners during Jim Crow, suggesting that black and brown people are cheating at the polls and need to have white poll monitors to make sure they don’t succeed at “stealing” the election from white people.
+There is a racist undertone to Trump’s version of a “rigged” democracy but he is not entirely wrong about the flaws in the process. He’s just not honest about what those flaws are.
+The hard truth is that the U.S. political process is not democracy’s “gold standard”; it is and has been a severely flawed system that is not made better by a failure to honestly address the unpleasant realities and to impose accountability on politicians who cheat the voters.
+Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).",FAKE
+4328,Carly Fiorina will appear in top-tier Reagan Library debate,"Thursday marked the close of the two-month window for determining eligibility based on averages of national polls. The results were based on 14 polls including interviews with more than 6,000 potential Republican primary voters. The top 10 candidates overall -- plus Fiorina, whose average support places her within the top 10 in polls conducted after the first debate held August 6 -- have all qualified for the 8:00 p.m. debate next Wednesday in Simi Valley. The remaining four candidates will appear during an earlier debate beginning at 6:00 p.m.
+
+The overall rankings based on an average of all qualifying polls for the 16 candidates who met the requirements for participation are:
+
+The rules for inclusion were amended late last month so that any candidate who made the top 10 in an average of polls conducted after the Fox News/Facebook debate held on August 6 would also be included in the later debate. Fiorina is the only candidate to move from the bottom six to the top 10 in that post-debate average. Here are the averages for qualifying polls conducted after the August 6 debate and released by September 10: Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, who participated in the August 6 debate, did not meet the criteria for inclusion in next Wednesday's debate. Candidates were required to average 1% support in any three polls released during the two-month window. Out of the 14 polls released during that time, Gilmore had 1% support in only one poll. The post-debate polls were also used to determine the order that the candidates would appear on stage. Trump will anchor the center of the stage for the 8:00 p.m. debate, flanked by Carson to his right and Bush to his left. Walker, Fiorina, Kasich and Christie, in that order, will stand to Bush's left, while Cruz, Rubio, Huckabee and Paul will appear to Carson's right. In the earlier debate, Santorum and Pataki will stand to the left and Jindal and Graham will be on the right. Perry was originally tabbed to be center stage before he announced on Friday that he was dropping out of the race. The overall average includes results from a Fox News poll released July 17; a Washington Post/ABC News poll released July 20; a CNN/ORC poll released July 26; a Quinnipiac University poll released July 30; a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released August 2; a Monmouth University poll released August 3; a Fox News poll released August 3; a Bloomberg Politics poll released August 4; a CBS News poll released August 4; a Fox News poll released August 16; a CNN/ORC poll released August 18; a Quinnipiac University poll released August 27; a Monmouth University poll released September 3; and a CNN/ORC poll released September 10",REAL
+9293,STRANGE THING moving up Alaska’s Chena River caught on video,"STRANGE THING moving up Alaska’s Chena River caught on video   
+An employee from the Alaska Bureau of Land Management was checking out the Chena River on Wednesday, but on this day when he was looking at the surface from an aerial view, he saw something never seen before. Labeled as a ""strange thing"", a creature was swimming along the surface of the river but looked like no ordinary creature. Unique Creature Captured On Tape In Alaska 
+As of now, it is being called an ice monster, though some have called it a variety of things. Some individuals think it is a huge eel, while others have indicated that it is simply a large fish. 
+There has not been a further investigation by the individual and the company who spotted the monster, but they provided a very vague response and indicated that they would leave it up to the public to make the guesses and dictate whatever the creature is. The creature is unique in that it appears to be an incredibly light white color with a wiggly body, much like a fish. It seems to have a fin of some sort. However, it is extremely long. The length is equivalent to an adult rattlesnake. The visual features are vague in that only parts of its body can be seen during the recording. The head can not be seen, but the mid-section and rear areas of the body are slightly shown . 
+It is very possible that it could be an eel as eels can reach extremely large lengths, though the average one is not of this length. The idea of it being a pike is a lot less likely because pike can grow to relatively long sizes, there is a very unlikely chance that a pike could possibility grow to the length and pike are not that bright white. Some are white with spots; however, they are not as noticeably white as the recording shows. 
+Ultimately, it is still left to the public to guess what this unique creature is. It brings up an interesting question of why the employee nor the company would further look into what the creature was or why no one else has attempted to look more into the creature. Icy cold conditions would make this endeavor a lot more difficult. However there have to be some individuals who are overly curious about what this monster is. 
+This article (STRANGE THING moving up Alaska’s Chena River caught on video)  ",FAKE
+5142,Trump Expected to Name Running Mate Soon: Looking for an 'Attack Dog',"Donald Trump has just five days until the Republican National Convention begins in Cleveland, Ohio, and many expect he will name his running mate by the end of this week.
+
+Among the frontrunners right now: Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
+
+Pence introduced Trump at an Indianapolis rally Tuesday night and compared him to Ronald Reagan.
+
+""I think he is someone who has connected with everyday Americans like no one since Ronald Reagan,"" Pence said of Trump.
+
+According to CNN, a Trump source says that Pence has already passed a major hurdle, noting that his vetting ""was completely clean and that mattered. No one needs an extra hassle.""
+
+CBN Chief Political Correspondent David Brody says Pence is a ""solid movement conservative"" and that most evangelical leaders would support a Pence pick, despite his ""religious liberty misstep"" in Indiana.
+
+On Tuesday, Fox News reported that it is suspending Gingrich's contract since the former speaker is also a vice presidential contender. Gingrich would bring years of Capitol Hill experience to the ticket and has publicly campaigned for Trump for months.
+
+Trump told the Wall Street Journal this week that he's looking for an ""attack dog"" in his running mate. That person would help him fend off attacks from Democrats, the media, fellow Republicans, and even Supreme Court justices.
+
+Meanwhile, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has spoken out against Trump in a series of interviews, recently calling him among other things ""unqualified"" to serve as president.
+
+Trump hit back overnight, tweeting that ""Justice Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me. Her mind is shot--resign!""
+
+Even Democrats have chided Ginsburg, noting that justices historically have kept out of politics.
+
+On the Democratic campaign trail, Bernie Sanders gave his long-awaited endorsement to Hillary Clinton Tuesday night in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It comes after party platform talks, a process that Sanders wanted to influence.
+
+With the platform including a $15-an-hour minimum wage and tougher restrictions on Wall Street, it looks like he did.
+
+For now, with the Republican convention coming up before the Democratic convention, the focus is on Trump and who will be on the ticket with him in the race for the White House.",REAL
+7480,President Obama’s Interview With Samantha Bee Will Have You Rolling On The Floor Laughing (VIDEO),"  
+President Obama is known for his humor, but his interview with Samantha Bee is downright hilarious. 
+During his final days in office, Obama has been making rounds on talk shows. When he sat down with the host of Full Frontal this week, the result was simply priceless. 
+Bee took a few shots at him for his age, asking if he would consider an appearance on Antique Roadshow and pointing out the white in his hair. Obama reminded her that he was still president, after all, but Bee was hell bent on making this an interview to remember. 
+She finally asked Obama if he would “mess” with Donald Trump once he was done serving as Commander in Chief. 
+“After you leave office, have you thought of just whispering in Donald Trump’s ear, ‘You were right, I wasn’t born here,’ just to, like, mess with him?” Bee asked. 
+“I think it’s fair to say that I will be organizing my post-presidency where I’m not close enough to him to whisper into his ear,” Obama shot back. 
+They did discuss some important issues, such as young voters and the struggles that Hillary Clinton may face as the first woman to serve as President of the United States. But the playful back and forth between President Obama and Bee is too funny to miss. It also reminds us just why it is that we are going to miss this man so much when he is gone. 
+Watch the interview, here : 
+Featured image via video screen capture Share this Article!",FAKE
+837,The End of the Road for John Kasich,"That’s not to say that his campaign was especially successful. Many observers felt Kasich was pursuing a replay of former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman’s failed 2012 bid for the Republican nomination. Huntsman and Kasich even shared a campaign architect, the heterodox GOP strategist John Weaver. The playbook may have gotten Kasich farther than it did Huntsman, but that still wasn’t enough to win the nomination, or even to come close. (As for Huntsman, he now backs Trump .)
+
+While hardly anyone predicted Trump’s success in the Republican campaign, few expected Kasich would get this far either. In a crowd of young, charismatic GOP figures, Kasich was the odd man out, a somewhat more grizzled figure who had run abortively for president in 2000, and a comparatively moderate figure in a party trending increasingly to the right. Somehow, Kasich managed to hold on to the bitter end, the final challenger to Trump.
+
+The Ohio governor’s exit leaves Donald Trump as the last man standing in the Republican field. Though he’d already assumed the mantle of presumptive nominee with Senator Ted Cruz’s exit Tuesday night —after Trump trounced both of them in the Indiana primary—Kasich’s exit seals the deal. Kasich has been mentioned for weeks as a potential vice-presidential candidate for Trump, who will need to shore up his policy and political credentials ahead of the general election.
+
+John Kasich will end his bid for the presidency Wednesday afternoon in Columbus, according to multiple reports. Kasich had planned to hold a press conference at Dulles Aiport near Washington Wednesday morning, but he never took off—perhaps an apt metaphor—staying home and scheduling a press conference for 5 p.m., where he is expected to make his announcement.
+
+For a time, before Trump’s ascendancy became inevitable, Kasich’s plan seemed plausible. In New Hampshire, the nation’s first primary and second nominating contest, he placed (a distant) second to Trump, and hoped to portray himself as the reasonable alternative to the entertainer. But having placed a huge bet on the Granite State, Kasich had little infrastructure in place for the rest of the campaign, and was a non-entity in the South Carolina primary. By the time the campaign reached his home state, Kasich was effectively out of the running. Ohio turned out to be the only state that he won. He closes out the campaign with fewer delegates than Senator Marco Rubio, who dropped out on March 15.
+
+Kasich’s sell to voters was that amid a sea of volatile, unpredictable characters like Trump and wild-eyed radicals like Cruz, he was an old-style true conservative who could also win swing states like Ohio. To the extent that his campaign had a policy theme, it was his advocacy for a balanced-budget amendment—a vague promise, tethered to his work on balancing the national budget while in the U.S. House in the 1990s. (Opinions about just how central Kasich had been in that work differed widely.)
+
+But some of his other policy stances were at odds with much of the Republican Party. As governor, he had circumvented the GOP-led Ohio legislature to accept Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. As though that were not bad enough, he compounded his offense in the eyes of conservatives by justifying his choice by faith. “Now, when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small,” he said. “But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.’”
+
+Many of Kasich’s former colleagues viewed his image as a soft, cuddly, friendly politician with skepticism—they remembered a more irritable, angry Kasich—it seemed to take with many voters. The problem was that Republican primary voters didn’t want a sane, rational nominee in 2016. They wanted a Trump.",REAL
+2087,Why Negotiators At Paris Climate Talks Are Tossing The Kyoto Model,"Why Negotiators At Paris Climate Talks Are Tossing The Kyoto Model
+
+Negotiators and heads of state from nearly 200 countries are meeting for the next two weeks near Paris to craft a new treaty to slow global warming.
+
+It's the 21st ""Conference of the Parties"" held by the United Nations to tackle climate change. One treaty emerged, in 1997, after the conference in Kyoto, Japan. That's no longer in effect, and, in fact, the Kyoto Protocol, as it's known, didn't slow down the gradual warming of the planet.
+
+Now governments are ever more desperate to do something to slow warming — so much so that they've thrown out the model set in Kyoto and opted for a new approach for Paris.
+
+Valli Moosa, a former climate negotiator from South Africa, says the main reason Kyoto failed to slow warming lies largely with who wasn't included in the treaty. ""You actually cannot have a meaningful agreement without China and the United States being part of it,"" he says.
+
+The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty, so the world's biggest greenhouse-gas emitter didn't have skin in the game. And developing countries, including China and India, were not required to reduce emissions. Now those countries are becoming the biggest sources of greenhouse gases as their economies thrive. China, in fact, is now the world's biggest emitter, and India isn't far behind. Moreover, the Kyoto treaty had U.N. bureaucrats and negotiators setting goals for the participating countries to lower their greenhouse gases. Many countries didn't make their targets; others dropped out. Economies were at stake, and few countries were comfortable marching to a U.N. beat.
+
+So what negotiators are bringing to the table at the Paris talks is an arrangement whereby each country is offering to reduce its own emissions by whatever amount it can manage. And everybody participates, not just developed countries.
+
+Most nations arrive with a reduction target already in hand. What will be difficult is deciding who will pay how much to developing countries to build economies that won't keep producing high emissions.
+
+French negotiator Laurence Tubiana points out that the key to success is convincing governments that those economies can be ""low-carbon,"" and that this won't be a bar to developing wealth. ""How much I'm sacrificing for the sake of emissions reductions, that's no more,"" she says of the message that negotiators are pushing. ""And now ... the Chinese, even the Indians are really coming in. It's about low-carbon economy.""
+
+Previous attempts to replace the Kyoto treaty have failed. This new approach is voluntary, and most of the world has agreed theoretically to participate, which negotiators hope will sweeten things enough to get a deal. Still to be determined, however, is who will pay for this massive revolution in the world's energy economy, and what strings will be attached to their largesse.",REAL
+5547,"WHAT HAPPENED? In 2014, Quebec tried to pass a Charter that would have banned all religious attire in public, specifically to prevent Muslim women from hiding their faces","BNI Store Nov 6 2016 That was then… Sadly, this is now: Quebec seems to have done a 180 and is considering allowing Muslim women to wear the most offensive, most oppressive, and most potentially dangerous (terrorists often dress in burqas to hide bombs) kind of clothing of all – big black garbage bags that cover everything but the eyes. Is Canada trying to become Sweden? All these leftist idiots preaching diversity should go around the world and see what a lack of white people has done for the 3rd world. This is nothing more than white genocide, perpetrated by those in power, who want a population they can easily control and enslave…like Islam.",FAKE
+10410,Election 2016 and the Growing Global Nuclear Threat,"Election 2016 and the Growing Global Nuclear Threat Playing a Game of Chicken with Nuclear Strategy Email This Page to Someone Your Name Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+Once upon a time, when choosing a new president, a factor for many voters was the perennial question: “Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?” Of all the responsibilities of America’s top executive, none may be more momentous than deciding whether, and under what circumstances, to activate the “nuclear codes” — the secret alphanumeric messages that would inform missile officers in silos and submarines that the fearful moment had finally arrived to launch their intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) toward a foreign adversary, igniting a thermonuclear war. 
+Until recently in the post-Cold War world, however, nuclear weapons seemed to drop from sight, and that question along with it. Not any longer. In 2016, the nuclear issue is back big time, thanks both to the rise of Donald Trump ( including various unsettling comments he’s made about nuclear weapons) and actual changes in the global nuclear landscape. 
+With passions running high on both sides in this year’s election and rising fears about Donald Trump’s impulsive nature and Hillary Clinton’s hawkish one, it’s hardly surprising that the “nuclear button” question has surfaced repeatedly throughout the campaign. In one of the more pointed exchanges of the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton declared that Donald Trump lacked the mental composure for the job. “A man who can be provoked by a tweet,” she commented , “should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes.” Donald Trump has reciprocated by charging that Clinton is too prone to intervene abroad. “You’re going to end up in World War III over Syria,” he told reporters in Florida last month. 
+For most election observers, however, the matter of personal character and temperament has dominated discussions of the nuclear issue, with partisans on each side insisting that the other candidate is temperamentally unfit to exercise control over the nuclear codes. There is, however, a more important reason to worry about whose finger will be on that button this time around: at this very moment, for a variety of reasons, the “nuclear threshold” — the point at which some party to a “conventional” (non-nuclear) conflict chooses to employ atomic weapons — seems to be moving dangerously lower. 
+Not so long ago, it was implausible that a major nuclear power — the United States, Russia, or China — would consider using atomic weapons in any imaginable conflict scenario. No longer. Worse yet, this is likely to be our reality for years to come, which means that the next president will face a world in which a nuclear decision-making point might arrive far sooner than anyone would have thought possible just a year or two ago — with potentially catastrophic consequences for us all. 
+No less worrisome, the major nuclear powers (and some smaller ones) are all in the process of acquiring new nuclear arms, which could, in theory, push that threshold lower still. These include a variety of cruise missiles and other delivery systems capable of being used in “limited” nuclear wars — atomic conflicts that, in theory at least, could be confined to just a single country or one area of the world (say, Eastern Europe) and so might be even easier for decision-makers to initiate. The next president will have to decide whether the U.S. should actually produce weapons of this type and also what measures should be taken in response to similar decisions by Washington’s likely adversaries. 
+Lowering the Nuclear Threshold 
+During the dark days of the Cold War, nuclear strategists in the United States and the Soviet Union conjured up elaborate conflict scenarios in which military actions by the two superpowers and their allies might lead from, say, minor skirmishing along the Iron Curtain to full-scale tank combat to, in the end, the use of “battlefield” nuclear weapons, and then city-busting versions of the same to avert defeat. In some of these scenarios, strategists hypothesized about wielding “tactical” or battlefield weaponry — nukes powerful enough to wipe out a major tank formation, but not Paris or Moscow — and claimed that it would be possible to contain atomic warfare at such a devastating but still sub-apocalyptic level. (Henry Kissinger, for instance, made his reputation by preaching this lunatic doctrine in his first book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy .) Eventually, leaders on both sides concluded that the only feasible role for their atomic arsenals was to act as deterrents to the use of such weaponry by the other side. This was, of course, the concept of “ mutually assured destruction ,” or — in one of the most classically apt acronyms of all times: MAD. It would, in the end, form the basis for all subsequent arms control agreements between the two superpowers. 
+Anxiety over the escalatory potential of tactical nuclear weapons peaked in the 1970s when the Soviet Union began deploying the SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missile (capable of striking cities in Europe, but not the U.S.) and Washington responded with plans to deploy nuclear-armed, ground-launched cruise missiles and the Pershing-II ballistic missile in Europe. The announcement of such plans provoked massive antinuclear demonstrations across Europe and the United States. On December 8, 1987, at a time when worries had been growing about how a nuclear conflagration in Europe might trigger an all-out nuclear exchange between the superpowers, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. 
+That historic agreement — the first to eliminate an entire class of nuclear delivery systems — banned the deployment of ground-based cruise or ballistic missiles with a range of 500 and 5,500 kilometers and required the destruction of all those then in existence. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation inherited the USSR’s treaty obligations and pledged to uphold the INF along with other U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements. In the view of most observers, the prospect of a nuclear war between the two countries practically vanished as both sides made deep cuts in their atomic stockpiles in accordance with already existing accords and then signed others, including the New START , the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 2010. 
+Today, however, this picture has changed dramatically. The Obama administration has concluded that Russia has violated the INF treaty by testing a ground-launched cruise missile of prohibited range, and there is reason to believe that, in the not-too-distant future, Moscow might abandon that treaty altogether. Even more troubling, Russia has adopted a military doctrine that favors the early use of nuclear weapons if it faces defeat in a conventional war, and NATO is considering comparable measures in response. The nuclear threshold, in other words, is dropping rapidly. 
+Much of this is due, it seems, to Russian fears about its military inferiority vis-à-vis the West. In the chaotic years following the collapse of the USSR, Russian military spending plummeted and the size and quality of its forces diminished accordingly. In an effort to restore Russia’s combat capabilities, President Vladimir Putin launched a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar expansion and modernization program. The fruits of this effort were apparent in the Crimea and Ukraine in 2014, when Russian forces, however disguised, demonstrated better fighting skills and wielded better weaponry than in the Chechnya wars a decade earlier. Even Russian analysts acknowledge, however, that their military in its current state would be no match for American and NATO forces in a head-on encounter, given the West’s superior array of conventional weaponry. To fill the breach, Russian strategic doctrine now calls for the early use of nuclear weapons to offset an enemy’s superior conventional forces. 
+To put this in perspective, Russian leaders ardently believe that they are the victims of a U.S.-led drive by NATO to encircle their country and diminish its international influence. They point, in particular, to the build-up of NATO forces in the Baltic countries, involving the semi-permanent deployment of combat battalions in what was once the territory of the Soviet Union, and in apparent violation of promises made to Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not do so. As a result, Russia has been bolstering its defenses in areas bordering Ukraine and the Baltic states, and training its troops for a possible clash with the NATO forces stationed there. 
+This is where the nuclear threshold enters the picture. Fearing that it might be defeated in a future clash, its military strategists have called for the early use of tactical nuclear weapons, some of which no doubt would violate the INF Treaty, in order to decimate NATO forces and compel them to quit fighting. Paradoxically, in Russia, this is labeled a “ de-escalation ” strategy, as resorting to strategic nuclear attacks on the U.S. under such circumstances would inevitably result in Russia’s annihilation. On the other hand, a limited nuclear strike (so the reasoning goes) could potentially achieve success on the battlefield without igniting all-out atomic war. As Eugene Rumer of the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace explains, this strategy assumes that such supposedly “limited” nuclear strikes “will have a sobering effect on the enemy, which will then cease and desist.” 
+To what degree tactical nuclear weapons have been incorporated into Moscow’s official military doctrine remains unknown, given the degree of secrecy surrounding such matters. It is apparent, however, that the Russians have been developing the means with which to conduct such “limited” strikes. Of greatest concern to Western analysts in this regard is their deployment of the Iskander-M short-range ballistic missile, a modern version of the infamous Soviet-era “Scud” missile (used by Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988 and the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991). Said to have a range of 500 kilometers (just within the INF limit), the Iskander can carry either a conventional or a nuclear warhead. As a result, a targeted country or a targeted military could never be sure which type it might be facing (and might simply assume the worst). Adding to such worries, the Russians have deployed the Iskander in Kaliningrad, a tiny chunk of Russian territory wedged between Poland and Lithuania that just happens to put it within range of many western European cities. 
+In response, NATO strategists have discussed lowering the nuclear threshold themselves, arguing — ominously enough — that the Russians will only be fully dissuaded from employing their limited-nuclear-war strategy if they know that NATO has a robust capacity to do the same. At the very least, what’s needed, some of them claim , is a more frequent inclusion of nuclear-capable or dual-use aircraft in exercises on Russia’s frontiers to “signal” NATO’s willingness to resort to limited nuclear strikes, too. Again, such moves are not yet official NATO strategy, but it’s clear that senior officials are weighing them seriously. 
+Just how all of this might play out in a European crisis is, of course, unknown, but both sides in an increasingly edgy standoff are coming to accept that nuclear weapons might have a future military role, which is, of course, a recipe for almost unimaginable escalation and disaster of an apocalyptic sort. This danger is likely to become more pronounced in the years ahead because both Washington and Moscow seem remarkably intent on developing and deploying new nuclear weapons designed with just such needs in mind. 
+The New Nuclear Armaments 
+Both countries are already in the midst of ambitious and extremely costly efforts to “ modernize ” their nuclear arsenals. Of all the weapons now being developed, the two generating the most anxiety in terms of that nuclear threshold are a new Russian ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) and an advanced U.S. air-launched cruise missile (ALCM). Unlike ballistic missiles, which exit the Earth’s atmosphere before returning to strike their targets, such cruise missiles remain within the atmosphere throughout their flight. 
+American officials claim that the Russian GLCM, reportedly now being deployed, is of a type outlawed by the INF Treaty. Without providing specifics, the State Department indicated in a 2014 memo that it had “a range capability of 500 km [kilometers] to 5,500 km,” which would indeed put it in violation of that treaty by allowing Russian combat forces to launch nuclear warheads against cities throughout Europe and the Middle East in a “limited” nuclear war. 
+The GLCM is likely to prove one of the most vexing foreign policy issues the next president will face. So far, the White House has been reluctant to press Moscow too hard, fearing that the Russians might respond by exiting the INF Treaty altogether and so eliminate remaining constraints on its missile program. But many in Congress and among Washington’s foreign policy elite are eager to see the next occupant of the Oval Office take a tougher stance if the Russians don’t halt deployment of the missile, threatening Moscow with more severe economic sanctions or moving toward countermeasures like the deployment of enhanced anti-missile systems in Europe. The Russians would, in turn, undoubtedly perceive such moves as threats to their strategic deterrent forces and so an invitation for further weapons acquisitions, setting off a fresh round in the long-dormant Cold War nuclear arms race. 
+On the American side, the weapon of immediate concern is a new version of the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile, usually carried by B-52 bombers. Also known as the Long-Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO), it is, like the Iskander-M, expected to be deployed in both nuclear and conventional versions, leaving those on the potential receiving end unsure what might be heading their way. In other words, as with the Iskander-M, the intended target might assume the worst in a crisis, leading to the early use of nuclear weapons. Put another way, such missiles make for twitchy trigger fingers and are likely to lead to a heightened risk of nuclear war, which, once started, might in turn take Washington and Moscow right up the escalatory ladder to a planetary holocaust. 
+No wonder former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry called on President Obama to cancel the ALCM program in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece. “Because they… come in both nuclear and conventional variants,” he wrote, “cruise missiles are a uniquely destabilizing type of weapon.” And this issue is going to fall directly into the lap of the next president. 
+The New Nuclear Era 
+Whoever is elected on November 8th, we are evidently all headed into a world in which Trumpian-style itchy trigger fingers could be the norm. It already looks like both Moscow and Washington will contribute significantly to this development — and they may not be alone. In response to Russian and American moves in the nuclear arena, China is reported to be developing a “ hypersonic glide vehicle ,” a new type of nuclear warhead better able to evade anti-missile defenses — something that, at a moment of heightened crisis, might make a nuclear first strike seem more attractive to Washington. And don’t forget Pakistan, which is developing its own short-range “tactical” nuclear missiles, increasing the risk of the quick escalation of any future Indo-Pakistani confrontation to a nuclear exchange. (To put such “regional” dangers in perspective, a local nuclear war in South Asia could cause a global nuclear winter and, according to one study , possibly kill a billion people worldwide, thanks to crop failures and the like.) 
+And don’t forget North Korea, which is now testing a nuclear-armed ICBM, the Musudan, intended to strike the Western United States. That prompted a controversial decision in Washington to deploy THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-missile batteries in South Korea (something China bitterly opposes), as well as the consideration of other countermeasures, including undoubtedly scenarios involving first strikes against the North Koreans. 
+It’s clear that we’re on the threshold of a new nuclear era: a time when the actual use of atomic weapons is being accorded greater plausibility by military and political leaders globally, while war plans are being revised to allow the use of such weapons at an earlier stage in future armed clashes. 
+As a result, the next president will have to grapple with nuclear weapons issues — and possible nuclear crises — in a way unknown since the Cold War era. Above all else, this will require both a cool head and a sufficient command of nuclear matters to navigate competing pressures from allies, the military, politicians, pundits, and the foreign policy establishment without precipitating a nuclear conflagration. On the face of it, that should disqualify Donald Trump. When questioned on nuclear issues in the first debate, he exhibited a striking ignorance of the most basic aspects of nuclear policy. But even Hillary Clinton, for all her experience as secretary of state, is likely to have a hard time grappling with the pressures and dangers that are likely to arise in the years ahead, especially given that her inclination is to toughen U.S. policy toward Russia. 
+In other words, whoever enters the Oval Office, it may be time for the rest of us to take up those antinuclear signs long left to molder in closets and memories, and put some political pressure on leaders globally to avoid strategies and weapons that would make human life on this planet so much more precarious than it already is. 
+Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular , is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left . A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation . Follow him on Twitter at @mklare1. (Reprinted from TomDispatch by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+2181,"How Barack will juggle Bibi, Vlad and Hillary","The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+5590,Pentagon: No Plan ‘So Far’ For US Troops to Enter Mosul,"Officials Concede Plan Could Change, as Could Definition of 'Mosul' by Jason Ditz, November 03, 2016 Share This 
+The US has made much of its troops involved in the Mosul invasion not being “combat” troops, even though one of the troops was killed in a roadside bombing while embedded with Kurdish combat troops. As the troops near Mosul, however, Pentagon spokesman Col. John Dorrian insists there are no plans so far for troops to enter Mosul. 
+Col. Dorrian insisted that Iraq’s government has said “it’s just gonna be their forces.” He did, however, say he didn’t want to say US troops would “never” be involved, insisting that the plans could change at any time. 
+Other officials, quoted anonymously by Reuters , suggested that the definition of Mosul could also change, saying that suburbs and parts of the city’s outskirts could easily be redefined as not Mosul, allowing US troops to enter those areas without having to technically “enter Mosul.” 
+The Obama Administration initially promised “no boots on the ground” in Iraq, but with some 6,000 such troops in Iraq, they’ve seen been trying desperately to claim they are in “non-combat” roles. This too has been difficult to sell, with a number of those troops embedded in combat units. Those troops are nominally “advisers,” but are regularly being put into combat areas. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+5502,Russian pianist Denis Matsuev terrorized in US for supporting Putin,"Russian pianist Denis Matsuev terrorized in US for supporting Putin   AP photo The US tour of outstanding Russian pianist Denis Matsuev was marred with attacks from rabid members of anti-Russian Signerbusters group.The group organized a picket at Carnegie Hall prior to the concert of Denis Matsuev and accused the musician of supporting ""Putin's criminal regime."" Later, Arts Against Aggression group in Boston organized a Halloween-style installation called ""Putin & Matsuev House of Horror s"" near the building of a local concert hall. According to the organizers of the above-mentioned acts, US citizens should ask themselves whether it is appropriate to continue cooperation with the Russian artists, who support the policies of President Vladimir Putin.Denis Matsuev runs many charitable programs, conducts youth music competitions and festivals for youth and children, such as ""Stars on Baikal"" and ""Crescendo.""In December 2011, Matsuev became an honorary professor at the Moscow State University. He headed the Interregional Charitable Foundation ""New Names,"" the purpose of which is to provide education to talented children.Denis Matsuev is also the art director of the Foundation named after Sergei Rachmaninoff. Matsuev appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin with a request to buy back Rachmaninoff's Swiss estate ""Senart"" to establish the International Cultural Centre at the property. In February 2006, the pianist became a member of the Council for Culture and Arts under the Russian President.Noteworthy, it is not the first time, when Russian musicians face such obstruction due to the political situation in the world. After the concert of the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre in Palmyra, some pundits found the performance ""rather weak"". Thus, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond called the concert in Palmyra a tasteless and cynical idea.In general, however, the majority of Western officials supported the cultural campaign of the prominent and world-famous Moscow orchestra. United States Department of State Mark Toner said, in particular, that he would never condemn such a wonderful act.  ",FAKE
+3247,"In Rand Paul and Marco Rubio’s feud over Cuba policy, a preview of GOP’s 2016 foreign policy debate","Two of the Republican Party’s top White House hopefuls clashed sharply Friday over President Obama’s new Cuba policy, evidence of a growing GOP rift over foreign affairs that could shape the party’s 2016 presidential primaries.
+
+Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), who backs Obama’s move to normalize relations with communist Cuba, accused Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) of being an “isolationist” with his hard-line opposition to opening up trade and diplomatic engagement with the island nation. Paul suggested that Rubio “wants to retreat to our borders and perhaps build a moat.”
+
+Paul’s comments came after Rubio — the son of Cuban exiles who has stepped forward as a leading voice of resistance to Obama’s policy — told Fox News that Paul had “no idea what he’s talking about” when it comes to Cuba.
+
+The feud is the loudest public dispute so far between potential GOP 2016 candidates and lays bare the divergent world views of traditional hawks — including Rubio and past Republican presidents and nominees — and the emerging, younger libertarian wing represented by Paul.
+
+For decades, Rubio’s position has been the GOP’s natural default. But Paul is testing that convention.
+
+“Are we still cold warriors or are we entering a brave new world in diplomacy?” Republican strategist John Feehery said. “Rubio’s perspective is we have Cuba, we have North Korea, we need a bold, internationalist, America-led world that fights the bad guys. Rand Paul is taking his father’s position to a new level, which is constructive engagement, but America isn’t really the policeman of the world.”
+
+Hawkish Republicans have long called Paul’s foreign policy “isolationist,” a label he rejects. In this week’s Cuba debate, Paul applied the label to Rubio.
+
+Paul’s comments were unusually personal, beginning with a series of tweets aimed at Rubio followed by a two-paragraph message on his Facebook page. “Senator Rubio is acting like an isolationist” and “does not speak for the majority of Cuban-Americans,” he wrote.
+
+Paul followed up with an op-ed on Time’s Web site Friday afternoon in which he wrote that he grew up learning to despise communism but over time concluded that “a policy of isolationism against Cuba is misplaced and hasn’t worked.” He noted that public opinion has shifted in favor of rapprochement — especially among young people, including young Cuban Americans — and that U.S. businesses would benefit by being able to sell their goods in Cuba.
+
+“Communism can’t survive the captivating allure of capitalism,” Paul wrote. “Let’s overwhelm the Castro regime with iPhones, iPads, American cars, and American ingenuity.”
+
+Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who traveled to Cuba this week with the U.S. entourage to secure contractor Alan Gross’s release, shared Paul’s sentiments. Flake said that he supported Obama’s decision to normalize relations and that after a five-decade embargo, it was time “to try something different.”
+
+Rubio responded to Paul’s comments Friday evening, telling conservative radio host Mark Levin, “I think it’s unfortunate that Rand has decided to adopt Barack Obama’s foreign policy on this matter.”
+
+For both Paul and Rubio, there are short-term political benefits to the tussle. With potential donors and other influential Republicans deciding between roughly a dozen presidential hopefuls, the pair are generating media attention and staking out ground on a high-profile policy issue.
+
+The spat was also the latest example of Paul’s combative tendencies. He has been the most aggressive GOP presidential contender in taking on Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former secretary of state and likely Democratic candidate, and showed Friday that he will not hesitate to throw punches at fellow Republicans as well.
+
+Ana Navarro, a Miami-based Republican strategist close to Rubio and former Florida governor Jeb Bush, said it was an example of the “silly season.”
+
+“There are some issues, like eye surgery and Kentucky bourbon, Paul knows something about,” she said of the ophthalmologist turned lawmaker. “But to try to outdo Rubio on Cuba policy — and to do it by trolling him on Twitter in 140-character spurts — is frankly not productive, mature or senatorial.”
+
+Paul is trying to chart a new course for Republicans on foreign policy and areas such as race relations, working with Democrats on legislation to address drug sentencing guidelines.
+
+“Paul is going to stretch the limits and try to grow the party in directions Republicans aren’t used to,” said Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary to George W. Bush. “I think the only upside he’ll have is with young people. Outside of that, I think it’s going to be tough going for him. . . . The history of the party is much more interventionist, muscular, strong, Ronald Reagan foreign policy.”
+
+Paul’s aides said the senator considers Cuba policy an economic and diplomatic issue and not a partisan one.
+
+But GOP primary voters may see it differently. “There’s a certain willingness among conservatives to reconsider our Cuba policy, but the fact that it’s been negotiated by Obama — whom we have no confidence or trust in — makes it suspect,” said Richard Viguerie, a longtime conservative leader. “If this had been done by a trustworthy, conservative Republican, it would have been different.”
+
+Rubio, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has worked to distinguish himself as a leading voice on international affairs. Almost immediately after Wednesday’s Cuba announcement, Rubio spoke out aggressively and in personal terms. Raised in Miami by parents who fled Cuba in the 1950s, Rubio grew up surrounded by other Cuban American families and now represents them in Washington.
+
+“It is just another concession to a tyranny by the Obama administration rather than a defense of every universal and inalienable right that our country was founded on and stands for,” Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill.
+
+Most 2016 GOP hopefuls — including Bush, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — issued statements similar to Rubio’s. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has not spoken specifically on Cuba but generally shares Rubio’s more hawkish worldview.
+
+William Kristol, a prominent neoconservative and editor of the Weekly Standard, noted that most of the potential candidates, as well as the party’s congressional leaders, are “all in the same neighborhood” on foreign policy.
+
+“Rand Paul is a lonely gadfly,” he said. “Rand Paul speaks for a genuine sentiment that’s always been in the Republican Party, but maybe it’s 10 percent? 15 percent? 20 percent? I don’t think he’s going to be a serious competitor for guiding Republican foreign policy.”",REAL
+7127,Former GOP Representative Calls For Armed Insurrection (VIDEO),"Former GOP Representative Calls For Armed Insurrection (VIDEO) By Carrie MacDonald on October 27, 2016 
+Former Representative Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) has called for armed insurrection if Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wins the election. Walsh: ‘I’m Grabbing My Musket’ 
+Joe Walsh is a stain on the history of my little part of the country. He served for a blessedly short time before being demolished by Representative Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) in the 2012 election, but he still has ardent supporters around here. He’s relatively well-known for his outrageous tweets, but this one, posted on October 26, made some real waves: On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump. 
+On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. 
+You in? 
+— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
+Wow. 
+I will grant that a musket is not going to do you much good these days. So perhaps, PERHAPS, it was a metaphor. 
+But what does this say to the droves of Trump supporters, armed with much more than a musket, who believe the election will be stolen from their anointed one? 
+Walsh, facing both harsh criticism and hilarious jabs on Twitter for his comment, did not back down: I'm serious. I don't think a musket would do much good these days, but it's time for civil disobedience on the right. https://t.co/ThJPEbALWZ 
+— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
+Yahoo! News interviewed Walsh about the comment, and he said : “I’m not talking about inciting violence. I’m saying, ‘If Trump loses, man, game on, grab your musket. We’re going to protest. We’re going to boycott. We’re going to picket. We’re going to march on Washington. We’re going to stop paying taxes. We’re going to practice civil disobedience.’ Whatever it takes.” 
+This has become the standard operating procedure of Republicans, particularly Trump-supporting Republicans. Make veiled threats and then walk them back (“Aww, c’mon, I was kidding! Can’t you guys take a joke?”), but make sure the knuckle-draggers who support them get wind of it. It’s disgusting. 
+This morning, Walsh tweeted: I told Thomas Jefferson gov forced a baker out of biz for defending her religious beliefs. 
+""Can't happen here"" he said. ""Grab your musket!"" 
+— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 27, 2016 
+While this tweet is asinine on so many levels, it also suggests that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically in his initial tweet. After all, in Jefferson’s time, muskets were one of the weapons of choice. Walsh Is A Disgrace 
+Language like this has no place in political discourse. If Walsh were nothing more than the radio host he currently is, it would be disgusting. Given that he used to be a representative in the United States Congress, it is downright abhorrent. 
+It’s also not the first time Walsh has suggested violence. 
+After the shooting of several police officers in Dallas this summer, Walsh tweeted — and later deleted — the following: Screenshot via Chicago Tribune 
+So it’s really not out of the question to think he’s actually looking to incite violence with his “grabbing my musket” comment. 
+I’m just happy his Congressional office is no longer sullying the quaint town square. 
+Watch Don Lemon take Walsh to task for his Dallas tweet here: 
+Featured image via screenshot from YouTube video About Carrie MacDonald 
+Carrie is a progressive mom and wife living in the upper Midwest. Connect",FAKE
+2844,Jeb Bush blames Iraq unrest on Obama,"The former Florida governor, appearing at a business roundtable here, also called for a strategy to ""take out"" ISIS but did not go into specifics. He mostly argued that the war started during his brother's administration helped create stability in Iraq and since been unraveled because of Obama's policies.
+
+""The focus ought to be on knowing what you know now, Mr. President, should you have kept 10,000 troops in Iraq?"" said Bush, who's expected to announce his presidential bid in the coming months.
+
+In December 2011, the United States withdrew its final combat troops from Iraq, bringing an end to the nearly decade-long conflict that started under George W. Bush. The Obama administration asked for more troops to remain on the ground, but negotiations with the Iraqi government did not ensure that U.S. military personnel would be granted immunity.
+
+Jeb Bush argued that Obama ""could have kept the troops in and he could have had an agreement,"" adding ""the United States had enough influence to be able to deal with the immunity issue.""
+
+""He made the decision to get out. I don't begrudge him that. It was a decision made based on a campaign promise,"" he told reporters in New Hampshire. ""It wasn't based on conditions in Iraq at the time and I think we're paying a price for it."" Critics at the time warned that extremist elements would grow more powerful without a U.S. presence, and now Republican presidential contenders are pointing to the rise of ISIS as proof that the United States should have pushed harder to stay in Iraq. In his remarks at the business roundtable -- an event organized by New Hampshire activist Renee Plummer -- Bush defended his brother's leadership during the Iraq war. ""ISIS didn't exist when my brother was President. Al Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was President,"" he said. ""There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure, but the surge created a fragile but stable Iraq that the President could've built on and it would've not allowed ISIS."" He called for a plan to ""take out ISIS"" with help from other countries, saying there is currently ""no strategic imperative"" to restore stability in Iraq. Asked later by reporters what that strategy should be and whether it should include combat troops in the area, Bush said he would rely on advice from military advisers. ""We have ground troops in Iraq. I would take the best advice that you could get from the military. Make the decisions based on conditions on the ground, not for some political purpose,"" he said. ""Whether we need more than 3,000 -- which is what we have now -- I would base that on what the military advisers say."" Panel: Bush should have been prepared for Iraq question Panel: Bush should have been prepared for Iraq question Bush struggled to answer questions last week about whether he would have gone into Iraq knowing what's known now about faulty intelligence that initially spurred military action. After multiple days of unclear answers, he ultimately said he would not have invaded in hindsight. RELATED: Can Jeb Bush escape his brother's legacy on Iraq? His difficulty in answering the question -- one that pits his loyalty to his brother against political calculation -- created a narrative that drew criticism from other White House hopefuls and sparked questions of whether Bush was ready for prime time. At the roundtable in Wednesday, however, Bush was met with encouragement from voters. When one man called Bush's family an ""asset,"" the room broke out into applause. As he's done at every event, Bush maintained that he loved his family, and he sought to assure the audience that he's gotten through last week's storm. ""It got bumpy, but all is well now,"" he said. ""The ship is stable."" Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush waves as he takes the stage as he formally announces he is joining the race for president with a speech June 15, 2015, at Miami Dade College in Miami. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush shakes hands with attendees after speaking at the 42nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference on February 27 in National Harbor, Maryland. Bush takes a selfie with a guest at a luncheon hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on February 18 in Chicago. Bush delivered his first major foreign policy speech at the event. Bush hands out items for Holiday Food Baskets to those in need outside the Little Havana offices of CAMACOL, the Latin American Chamber of Commerce on December 17 in Miami. Bush waves to the audience at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in Tampa, Florida, on August 30, 2012, on the final day of the Republican National Convention. Bush (left) and wife Columba Bush attend the 2012 Lincoln Center Institute Gala at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center on March 7, 2012, in New York City. President Barack Obama (left) speaks about Bush (center) while visiting Miami Central Senior High School on March 4, 2011 in Miami, Florida. The visit focused on education. Bush (left) speaks with Brazilian President in charge Jose Alancar during a meeting at Planalto Palace in Brasilia, April 17, 2007. Bush was in Brazil to speak about sugar and ethanol business. Then-Texas Governor Rick Perry (center) testifies as Bush (right) and then-Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano (left) listen during a hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Capitol Hill October 19, 2005. Bush gives a thumbs up signal from his car as he leaves a local polling station after casting his vote in Coral Gables, Florida, November 5, 2002. Bush walks out of the West Wing after meeting with his brother, then-President George W. Bush, at the White House January 9, 2002. Governor Bush participated in the signing ceremony of the Everglades Protection Agreement. Then-Mexican President Vincente Fox (left) and Bush hold a press conference September 7, 2001, in Miami. Fox visited Florida to attend the Americas Conference and deliver a speech to speak about issues such as immigration. Then-President George W. Bush (right) is greeted by Jeb Bush on March 21, 2001, at Orlando International Airport in Orlando, Florida. President Bush was in Orlando to attend the American College of Cardiology Annual Convention. Bush speaks during a press conference at the Carandolet Government Palace in Quito, January 18, 2006. Bush and a businessmen delegation were in a two-day visit to talk about a free trade agreement. Bush speaks to reporters after meeting with the Florida State Cabinet at the Florida State Capitol Building November 16, 2000, in Tallahassee, Florida. Then-President George W. Bush (left) and Jeb Bush (right), raise their arms onstage following a rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds, October 25, 2000, in Brandon, Florida. Jeb Bush (left) and then-President George W. Bush stand with their arms around each other's shoulders at a rally in Miami, Florida, September 22, 2000. Then-President George W. Bush (right) and Jeb Bush go through the line for strawberries during a stop at the Stawberry Festival March 12, 2000 in Plant City, Florida. The Bush family, (left to right) former U.S. President George W., former Florida Governor Jeb, former President George H.W. and his wife Barbara, watch play during the Foursomes matches September 25, 1999 at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts the site of the 33rd Ryder Cup Matches. Former President George H.W. Bush (second left), his wife Barbara Bush (left), their son Jeb Bush (center), then-first lady Hillary Clinton (second right), and former then-President Bill Clinton (right) look up to see the U.S. Army Golden Knights parachute team November 6, 1997 at the conclusion of the dedication ceremony of the George Bush Library in College Station, Texas. Portrait of the Bush family in front of their Kennebunkport, Maine house August 24, 1986. Pictured, back row: Margaret holding daughter Marshall, Marvin Bush, Bill LeBlond. Pictured, front row: Neil Bush holding son Pierce, Sharon, George W. Bush holding daughter Barbara, Laura Bush holding daughter Jenna, Barbara Bush, George Bush, Sam LeBlond, Doro Bush Lebond, George P. (Jeb's son), Jeb Bush holding son Jebby, Columba Bush and Noelle Bush.",REAL
+9169,Cop Versus Two Informed Teens who Refuse to Submit to an Unlawful Detainment,"posted by Eddie Below is a great example of how police harass the innocent. C.J. and Matt were simply walking, at night. They had committed no crime and presented no threat to another’s property or person when a police officer decided to detain them. 
+This police officer had no reasonable suspicion to stop these guys so he says they were loitering. Apparently walking through a public space at night, is now loitering. After stopping them, the officer claims that not answering questions is ‘suspicious activity.’ Apparently the 5th Amendment to the Constitution is ‘suspicious’ to this cop. Some people will say that he should have consented and answered the questions this cop was asking. However they have probably never heard this lecture, by officer George Bruch of the Virginia Beach Police Department, explaining why you should ‘never, never, never, ever talk to the police, ever.’ The police will all to often use your own words to imply that a crime has been committed, even if you are innocent. Around the 4:30 mark in the video, C.J. makes this officer look pretty silly. It was good that C.J. got this jab in early as the night had apparently just started for these cops. Tax payer money well spent.",FAKE
+3622,Al Qaeda rep says group directed Paris magazine attack; US issues travel warning,"A member of Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen said Friday that the group directed the massacre earlier this week at a Paris magazine, as the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning to citizens, saying they faced an increased risk of reprisals.
+
+Earlier Friday, near simultaneous raids by French police killed the two Islamist brothers behind the attack and another terrorist. The raids, conducted at locations 25 miles apart, took out Cherif and Said Kouachi and a suspect in a policewoman's killing who had seized hostages at a Paris grocery on the brothers' behalf, but also left four hostages dead, according to authorities and reports from the scene.
+
+The Al Qaeda member on Friday provided a statement in English to The Associated Press saying ""the leadership of AQAP directed the operations and they have chosen their target carefully.""
+
+There was no independent confirmation of the report, and U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials say it is too early to conclude who is responsible for the massacre on Wednesday that left 12 dead.
+
+However, Cherif Kouachi told a French TV station before Friday's raid at an industrial park that he was sent by Al Qaeda in Yemen and had been financed by the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Yemen in 2011.
+
+The State Department's warning says attacks against Americans are becoming increasingly prevalent. It also cites an increased risk of reprisals against U.S. and Western targets for the U.S.-led intervention against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, and comes in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Australia and Canada, as well as the Paris massacre.
+
+If confirmed, the attack would be the first time Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen has successfully carried out an operation in the West after at least two earlier attempts.
+
+The Al Qaeda member said the attack was in line with warnings from the late Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden to the West about ""the consequences of the persistence in the blasphemy against Muslim sanctities,"" adding that it was ""revenge for the honor"" of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, which the satirical Charlie Hebdo had occasionally lampooned.
+
+The lightning-quick strikes earlier Friday ended two tense, hours-long standoffs, one at a printing plant north of the city and the other at a kosher supermarket on Paris' east side, where four hostages were killed, as many as 15 were freed. A hostage held north of the city by the brothers, who killed 12 in a commando-style attack at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, was reportedly freed. The fast-moving developments, signaled by explosions and gunfire at a printing plant in Dammartin-en-Goele, followed by similar sounds at Hypercacher (Hyper Kosher), a Jewish supermarket in eastern Paris, brought to a climax a three-day terror ordeal and manhunt involving nearly 90,000 police and military personnel.
+
+The Kouachi brothers, the radicalized French-born slackers whose attack on Charlie Hebdo left two police officers among the dozen dead, were both killed in the first raid. The brothers, 32 and 34, respectively, are believed to have ties to Al Qaeda in Yemen, and military experts who viewed footage of their bloody, late-morning raid on Wednesday said they appeared to be well-trained terrorists. Charlie Hebdo had long angered Muslim radicals with its penchant for publishing cartoon images of Prophet Muhammed.
+
+In Paris, police said Amedy Coulibaly, who is believed to have know the brothers and was suspected of killing Paris Police Officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe Thursday, as she attended to a routine traffic accident in the city, was killed in a raid moments later, ending his supermarket siege. Police had identified him and his longtime girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddiene, as suspects in the police killing, but her whereabouts were not immediately known. Police were searching for another possible suspect who may have escaped the grocery store siege, but it was not clear if that person was Boumeddiene.
+
+At the kosher grocery near the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood of the capital, the gunman burst in shooting just a few hours before the Jewish Sabbath began, declaring ""You know who I am,"" an official recounted.
+
+The attack came before sundown when the store would have been crowded with shoppers, and President Francois Hollande called it ""a terrifying anti-Semitic act.""
+
+Coulibaly killed the four people in the market shortly after entering, Molins said.
+
+Several people wounded in the grocery store were able to flee and get medical care, the official said.
+
+Coulibaly, 33, and Cherif Kouachi were committed followers of convicted terror kingpin Djamel Beghal, according to Le Monde.
+
+Earlier Friday, a French security official told the AP that shots were fired as the brothers stole a car in the town of Montagny Sainte Felicite in the early morning hours. French officials told Fox News that the suspects threw the car's driver out at the side of the road. The driver, who recognized the suspects, then called police and alerted them to the suspects' whereabouts.
+
+On Thursday, U.S. government sources confirmed that Said Kouachi, 34, had traveled to Yemen in 2011 and had direct contact with an Al Qaeda training camp. The other brother, 32-year-old Cherif, had been convicted in France of terrorism charges in 2008 for trying to join up with fighters battling in Iraq. The sources also confirmed that both brothers, who had been orphaned as youngsters and spent years committing petty crimes and doing menial jobs, were on a U.S. no-fly list.
+
+Fox News was told the investigators have made it a priority to determine whether he had contact with Al Qaeda in Yemen's leadership, including a bomb maker and a former Guantanamo Bay detainee.
+
+Hollande called for tolerance after the country's worst terrorist attack since 1961, in the middle of the conflict over Algerian independence from France.
+
+""France has been struck directly in the heart of its capital, in a place where the spirit of liberty -- and thus of resistance -- breathed freely,"" Hollande said.
+
+Charlie Hebdo had long drawn threats for its depictions of Islam, although it also satirized other religions and political figures. The weekly paper had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, and a sketch of Islamic State's leader was the last tweet sent out by the irreverent newspaper, minutes before the attack. Nothing has been tweeted since.
+
+Eight journalists, two police officers, a maintenance worker and a visitor were killed in the attack.
+
+Charlie Hebdo planned a special edition next week, produced in the offices of another paper. Editor Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, who was among those slain, ""symbolized secularism ... the combat against fundamentalism,"" his companion, Jeannette Bougrab, said on BFM-TV.
+
+""He was ready to die for his ideas,"" she said.
+
+Authorities around Europe have warned of the threat posed by the return of Western jihadis trained in warfare. France counts at least 1,200 citizens in the war zone in Syria -- headed there, returned or dead. Both the Islamic State group and Al Qaeda have threatened France -- home to Western Europe's largest Muslim population.
+
+The French suspect in a deadly 2014 attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium had returned from fighting with extremists in Syria; and the man who rampaged in southern France in 2012, killing three soldiers and four people at a Jewish school, received paramilitary training in Pakistan.
+
+Fox News' Greg Palkot, Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5850,Did Trump Make a “Secret Deal NOT To Prosecute Hillary” In Exchange for Her Concession?,"Admittedly, the question is speculative, but not without merit.
+During the debates and in the heated final days of the campaign, Donald Trump vowed to assign a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary and send her to jail.
+
+It was easily the highlight of the entire campaign:
+But when you talk about apology, I think the one that you should really be apologizing for and the thing that you should be apologizing for are the 33,000 e-mails that you deleted, and that you acid washed, and then the two boxes of e-mails and other things last week that were taken from an office and are now missing.
+And I’ll tell you what. I didn’t think I’d say this, but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it. But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor. 
+When I speak, I go out and speak, the people of this country are furious. In my opinion, the people that have been long-term workers at the FBI are furious. There has never been anything like this, where e-mails — and you get a subpoena, you get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 e-mails, and then you acid wash them or bleach them, as you would say, very expensive process.
+So we’re going to get a special prosecutor, and we’re going to look into it, because you know what? People have been — their lives have been destroyed for doing one-fifth of what you’ve done. And it’s a disgrace. And honestly, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. ( source )
+But, now that victory has set in, and the election is officially over, can anybody expect that he will actually do it?
+Certainly, we must wait until he is inaugurated and has a chance to show what kind of president he will be.
+However, Trump’s victory speech gives good reason to doubt the prospects for his actually assigning a “special prosecutor” against Hillary Clinton.
+He opened the speech with praise for Clinton and a call for unity – certainly a different chord for now-president-elect Trump:
+TRUMP: I’ve just received a call from Secretary Clinton. (APPLAUSE) She congratulated us — it’s about us — on our victory, and I congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign. I mean, she — she fought very hard. Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. 
+(APPLAUSE) I mean that very sincerely. (APPLAUSE)
+Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division; have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.
+
+Certainly, there is something to be said for being a gracious winner – and for Trump, proving to his critics that he won’t be their worst nightmare.
+But what really accounts for the shift in tone?
+Late in the evening, John Podesta – top aide to Hillary, thoroughly implicated in wickedness by Wikileaks – announced, in essence, that the campaign would not concede, that they would wait until every last vote was counted.
+Clearly, Team Hillary was fully prepared to challenge a recount, to take it to court in every venue possible. Al Gore did so (and with good cause), and she could too.
+Hillary and her campaign had every opportunity to deny Trump easy victory, even when there was no real chance left for her.
+And yet, shortly after Podesta’s announcement, Trump gave his victory speech, noting a call from Hillary Clinton herself in which she conceded – but on what terms?
+Though it is admittedly speculative – can anyone else claim to know what was said during that call? – it is entirely possible that the primary demand for her swift admission of defeat was that any and all possibility of prosecution and investigation for her sordid and illegal activities be taken off the table.
+Did Hillary make THAT call? Did Trump essentially grant her immunity from his own special court in exchange for the win he otherwise already earned?
+Only time will tell.
+But it STILL seems that Hillary knows something that we all do not – because she has said all along that it is not going to happen… that there isn’t even the slightest chance:
+Hillary Clinton: Criminal Indictment “Not Going to Happen”
+
+HILLARY CLINTON INDICTMENT FURY – Hillary Claims Indictment “Not Gonna Happen”
+
+So, is she right about that?
+What will Trump do in the first 100 days?
+Don’t be surprised if campaign rhetoric ends up being just all talk. For Trump supporters who were, above all, opposing Hillary Clinton and urging her being prosecuted and held accountable – don’t hold your breath.
+Read more: 
+Trump Calls Out Hillary at Debate: “You Should Be in Jail… I’ll Call A Special Prosecutor” 
+5 Wikileaks Revelations That Should’ve Tanked Hillary’s Campaign 
+Where Are The Handcuffs? This Video Blows The Doors Open On Hillary’s Corruption, Obfuscations and Outright Lies 
+Emails Reveal Hillary Literally Read Up On “How to Delete Something So It Stays Deleted” 
+",FAKE
+3551,What 'Draw Muhammad' shootings say about Islamic State reach (+video),"The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the foiled terrorist attack at a Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas Sunday. But that doesn't mean the group had much to do with the attack.
+
+The attempted terror attack by two Muslim-Americans in Garland, Texas, Sunday so far appears to confirm what terrorism experts have been saying for months: The Islamic State has no ability to carry out attacks in the United States.
+
+But the incident shows that the Islamic State’s ability to inspire and, to a limited degree, direct “lone wolf” jihadis remains a challenge with no simple answers.
+
+No evidence yet shared with the public suggests that the two men killed by a security officer when they opened fire on a building hosting a “Draw Muhammad” contest were hardened Islamic State operatives. They pledged fealty to the Islamic State in a tweet minutes before the attack.
+
+But one of them, Elton Simpson, had been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s radar screen since 2006, and he faced charges in 2011 over claims that he wanted to join jihad in Somalia.
+
+The degree to which he and his Phoenix-area roommate, Nadir Soofi, reached out to the Islamic State – or the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) reached out to them – is unclear. The FBI is combing through the men’s social media histories for clues.
+
+But it is becoming increasingly clear that the Islamic State’s greatest threat to the US is in its online messaging, which Jessica Stern, co-author of the new book “ISIS: The State of Terror,” calls a “social contagion.” What is known about Sunday’s attack underscores that “it’s less important that ISIS actually speaks [directly to attackers], because ISIS’s goal is to inspire this kind of attack.”
+
+This is terrorism on the cheap. The Islamic State doesn’t have to try to send operatives to the US. It can simply prod disgruntled Americans and claim the credit.
+
+For the Islamic State, “trying to get guys from Syria or Iraq into the United States [to fight] would be stupid and fruitless, because it would take time and money, it would take guys away from the fight, and why would you even do it when you have a great force multiplier in the Internet, where you can get people to pop up anywhere, making you seem omnipotent and universal?” asks Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent.
+
+On one hand, Sunday’s attack gave that impression. But it also suggested the limitations of outsourcing terrorism operations. America’s legal dockets are strewn with the stories of homegrown terrorists who were rumbled by the FBI or simply failed. CNN notes that the attackers had body armor and semiautomatic weapons and yet were killed by a traffic officer with a pistol.
+
+The events showed that the attackers were “wannabes who have never really done anything legitimate, and who hope this act will give them acceptance,” Mr. Clemente says.
+
+For that reason, the attack in Garland “doesn’t suggest to me that this is a clear escalation,” says Ms. Stern. Rather, it points to the Islamic State’s opportunism – both in recruiting would-be terrorists and in capitalizing on their exploits.
+
+“This is something ISIS has been hoping will happen,” she says.
+
+The Islamic State has made many claims of responsibility in attacks throughout North Africa and Europe, though this is the first time it has done so for an attack in North America.
+
+The attack last October on the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa by a lone gunman seemed taken out of the Islamic State playbook, investigators said, but Canadian intelligence never found a credible connection.
+
+The Garland attack also stirred memories of the attack by jihadists on the satirical Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo, as well as an attack at an event this spring attended by Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist who has caricatured Muhammad.
+
+Sunday’s event, sponsored by controversial free-speech activist Pam Geller, promised the artist behind the best cartoon of Mohammad a $10,000 prize. It included a keynote address from controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has decried the “Islamicization of the Netherlands.”
+
+The Islamic State message does appear to hold some appeal for a minuscule fringe. In addition to Islamic State-inspired attacks, an estimated 3,000 Westerners – including perhaps “hundreds” of Americans – have traveled to Syria since 2011 to join violent jihad.
+
+As of last October, Norwegian terrorism analyst Thomas Hegghammer found a low “blowback rate” for those fighters coming back to their home countries to engage in terrorism – only about 1 of every 150 to 300, much lower than the rate for foreign fighters in Afghanistan, for example.
+
+He suggested that was because of the Islamic State’s primary focus on establishing a caliphate in the Middle East. “ISIS is unlikely to go all in on global [terrorism] operations the way al Qaeda Central has. The organization is not designed for that, and such a strategy is not compatible with its state-building ambitions,” he wrote on CNN.
+
+In the months since, ISIS’s messaging campaign has become more global, but its operational reach has apparently remained focused on the Middle East. The result, experts say, is attacks like the one Sunday.
+
+“It’s not as if ISIS has a cell in the United States or trains people,” Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an Islamic State expert at the Interdisciplinary Center in Harzliya, Israel, tells The New York Times. “This is not ISIS coming to America.”",REAL
+8762,4 Truly Important Items for Your Post-Election List of Things to Protest,"Waking Times 
+Supporters of Clinton in the painfully long 2016 presidential campaign warned us before the vote that if Trump lost the election, his supporters would stop at nothing to disrupt Clinton’s inauguration. They said riots, violence and revolution would break out, and that Republicans would claim voter fraud and refuse to respect the democratic process or accept the results should Hillary have won. 
+This scare tactic and all the other nightmare fantasies about Trump projected into public consciousness by the left were insufficient to persuade enough voters to go for Hillary, and as many suspected would happen, Clinton voters are now doing the precise things they had previously declared to be unacceptable. 
+Hypocrisy is now as American as apple pie, and no one is really all that surprised that phony idealists are taking to the streets, destroying property, threatening to assassinate the president elect , and organizing to prevent Trump’s inauguration . Some are even openly calling for revolution. The deeper irony here, though, is that people from all walks of life should be out protesting the government as well, but for much more significant reasons than to protest the outcome of the election. 
+In the true American spirit of redressing grievances, and as a public service to a nation struggling to find purpose and reason, here are four critical issues that any worthwhile protestor should add to their post-election list of complaints against the machine. 1.) The Orwellian Permanent War and The Military Industrial Complex 
+This is the biggest elephant in the room. The U.S. has ongoing military operations in dozens of nations, and it has at least 800 military bases in eighty something foreign nations . Hundreds of non-combative foreign civilians a year are killed by U.S. bombs and drones and written off as collateral damage. The military industrial complex has fully commandeered the progress and development of technology, and sells billions of dollars of weapons each year to countries around the world including severely oppressive dictatorships states like Saudi Arabia . 
+At home, expenditures on ‘defense’ account for over half of every dollar U.S. taxpayers give Uncle Sam, diverting resources away from improving our country here at home. Surplus military equipment and battle hardened veterans are increasingly moving into the civilian law enforcement sector, dramatically exacerbating social issues such as police brutality and racism . The security industry has expanded to include the mass surveillance of every American and continues to invade our privacy in evermore creative ways . Genuine organic terrorism against Americans at home and abroad is the indirect result of destroying foreign nations and entire civilizations , stealing oil and other resources from foreign nations, while murdering innocents. 
+War has become the health of the state and it’s poisoning every segment of our society and culture. 2.) Serious Human Rights Abuses Committed by Government 
+Protestors today are taking to the streets to reject the verbal and emotional abuse of minority and sensitive members of our society, while actual physical human rights abuses are going under-addressed. 
+Members of America and the world’s elite are involved in covering up and participating in a global trade of sex slaves , and widely believed to be involved in pedophilia, child abduction and occult worship and rituals . 3.) Debt Slavery 
+The top-tier of the banking and investment world have created a global system of economic slavery which intentionally creates ever-increasing public debt. The human race owes so much money that no one really understands to whom it is owed . It could be aliens for all we know, but if the status quo remains, it would take the daily productivity of many generations to come to pay off only what is owed today, and the debt increases every minute. 
+This is a stealthy form of slavery that is written into the matrix code of society. To be born on earth is to owe money. This is utterly unacceptable, and so systemically unstable it’s guaranteed to collapse, causing worldwide suffering . 4.) Environmental Stewardship is Criminally Negligent 
+Viewpoints on the environmental stress we see in our world today vary wildly depending on who you talk to and what their background or agenda may be. Call it global warming, climate change, or whatever you like, but at its core, our natural world is being sold off and destroyed for corporate profit. Massive unchecked pollution and environmental destruction by the energy industry and corporations at large is destroying this planet at an exponentially increasing rate. Industrial disasters like Fukushima go unaddressed while the world’s rainforests are being decimated and indigenous cultures driven to extinction . This sad list just goes on and on. It’s just too much to put down here. Final Thoughts 
+You could easily add so much more to this if you like, as there are a thousand and one causes rebelling against, yet so very few ever seem to make it into public consciousness and onto the corporate mainstream news . If you’re outraged about what is happening in America today, but haven’t yet included these issues on your ‘mad as hell’ list , then your protest isn’t living up to its full potential, and your idealism is only half-assed. Read more articles by Dylan Charles . About the Author 
+Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com , the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com , a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. He may be contacted at . This article ( 4 Truly Important Issues for Your Post Election List of Things to Protest ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. 
+~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
+9428,Public vs. Media on War,"Email 
+A new poll from an unlikely source suggests that the U.S. public and the U.S. media have very little in common when it comes to matters of war and peace. 
+This poll was commissioned by that notorious leftwing hotbed of peaceniks, the Charles Koch Institute, along with the Center for the National Interest (previously the Nixon Center, and before that the humorously named Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom). The poll was conducted by Survey Sampling International. 
+They polled 1,000 registered voters from across the U.S. and across the political spectrum but slanted slightly toward older age groups. They asked: 
+“Over the last 15 years, do you think U.S. foreign policy has made Americans more or less safe?” 
+What, dear reader, do you say? 
+If you say less safe, you not only agree with dozens of top U.S. officials the week after they retire, but you agree with 52.5% of the people polled. Those who said “more safe” add up to 14%, while 25.2% said “about the same” and 8.3% just didn’t know. 
+Well, at least all these humanitarian wars to spread democracy and eliminate weapons and destroy terror have benefited the rest of the world, right? 
+Not according to the statistics that show terrorism on the rise during the war on terrorism, and not according to 50.5% of poll respondents who said U.S. foreign policy has made the world less safe. Meanwhile 12.6% said “more safe” while 24.1% said it was about the same and 12.8% didn’t know. 
+Asked about four wars in particular, registered U.S. voters said each of them had made the U.S. less secure, by a margin of 49.6% to 20.9% on Iraq, 42.2% to 18.9% on Libya, 42.2% to 24.3% on Afghanistan, and 40.8% to 32.1% on bombing ISIS in Syria. 
+These answers should not immediately be taken to prove that the U.S. public is universally wise and well informed, and (not coincidentally) at odds with U.S. media. Not only is that margin pretty slim on ISIS, but 43.3% of those polled said ISIS was the greatest threat the United States faces. Meanwhile 14.1% named Russia, 8.5% North Korea, 8.1% the national debt, 7.9% domestic terrorists, and bringing up the rear with the correct answer of global warming as the greatest threat were a grand total of 4.6% of those polled. 
+A survey of U.S. news reports would certainly suggest a point of agreement here between the public and the media. But here is where it gets interesting. Although the public believes the hype about danger emanating from these foreign forces, it does not favor the solution it is endlessly offered by the media and the U.S. government. When asked if, compared to last 15 years, the next president should use the U.S. military abroad less, 51.1% agreed, while 24.2% said it should be used more. And 80.0% said that any president should be required to get congressional authorization before committing the U.S. to military action, while 10.2% rejected that radical idea that’s been in the U.S. Constitution since day 1. 
+The U.S. public may look quite depressingly ignorant in a quick survey of Youtube videos, but check this out: Asked if the U.S. government should deploy U.S. troops on the ground in Syria 51.1% said no, compared to 23.5% who said yes. Only 10% said yes on Yemen, while 22.8% said no — however, 40.7% said the U.S. government should keep “supporting” Saudi Arabia in that war. 
+Good majorities also oppose Japan acquiring nuclear weapons, Germany acquiring nuclear weapons, or the U.S. defending Taiwan against a Chinese attack. (Who invents these scenarios?) 
+This moderately encouraging survey of public sentiment stands in stark contrast to U.S. media coverage of wars in general and Syria in particular. The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof is ready for a bigger war as are columnists in the Washington Post and USA Today, as well as, of course Chuck Todd and other televised talking head. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton’s comment to Goldman Sachs that a “no fly zone” would require “killing a lot of Syrians” has received dramatically less press than her brave calls for creating a humanitarian no fly zone, and the steady depiction of that proposal as “doing something”— in contrast to the only other option: “doing nothing.” 
+The public, however, rejects the only “something” that’s on offer and just might leap at the opportunity to try something else, if anyone ever proposed anything else.",FAKE
+3736,"In Baltimore's call for federal police probe, a new search for answers (+video)","While some Justice Department investigations are adversarial, a new model of collaborative reform is surprising police in some cities, as they find themselves included as part of the solution.
+
+Searching for a ""framework ... [to] heal,"" Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake put in a 911 call to the US Department of Justice to ask for a civil rights investigation into the Baltimore Police Department’s beat cop tactics.
+
+Her call, not even a week after a local prosecutor charged six police officers with crimes including murder for their alleged role in the death of Freddie Gray, is part of a broader trend of ""collaborative reform"" between Washington and local jurisdictions.
+
+What's striking about such investigations is that they don't just slam the police, but also aim to help officers stay safe and protect citizens, as well as show that they are part of the solution.
+
+In fact, following a Baltimore Sun series on police abuses in the city last year, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts approached the Justice Department to conduct a collaborative review, which had been under way the day Mr. Gray died while in police custody.
+
+Some DOJ investigations are adversarial, as police bristle at court orders and federal monitors. But a federal investigation into whether Baltimore cops routinely violate people’s civil rights is likely to mirror similar probes in Las Vegas and Philadelphia, where police chiefs have been able to use federal findings to gain leverage with elected officials and also use facts to rebut claims by police officers that they’re doing nothing wrong, says Sam Walker, a criminologist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
+
+To be sure, Mr. Walker says, it’s “too early to tell” whether such interventions can bring the kind of fundamental reforms that Mayor Rawlings-Blake is hoping to find in the aftermath of Gray’s death and injuries to nearly 100 cops during violent riots.
+
+But there is growing evidence that such collaborative efforts can help communities grapple with deep tensions between police and neighborhoods and build trust around common goals like respect, dignity, and sanctity of life.
+
+After Las Vegas police shot a record 25 people in 2010, the city began its own reforms and asked the Department of Justice for help a year later. In 2011, the DOJ began the new collaboration program, delving deep into practices, training procedures, and policies to root out where officers were going wrong and where policies failed the people.
+
+As of 2012, the Las Vegas department had completed dozens of difficult reforms, including rewriting its use-of-deadly-force policy to include a reference to officers acknowledging the “sanctity of human life” as they make critical split-second decisions. The department added so-called reality-based training to give officers more options than quick deployment of deadly force as they interacted with drugged, drunk, or mentally ill citizens. Since then, the number of officer-involved shootings in Las Vegas has stayed below historical averages, year to year.
+
+In March, the Justice Department reported back on practices of the Philadelphia Police Department, which had seen a stretch of years in which police killed a person nearly every week, many of them unarmed. The DOJ team, which was made up of policing experts and not prosecutors, released a string of findings that pointed to problems in both policy and training.
+
+Surprisingly to some, many complaints came from officers themselves. Among the findings were complaints from officers that they were not properly trained to deal with violent suspects. The training needed to be less staged and more reality-based, officers said, including allowing trainees to grapple with each other to learn tactics.
+
+“Interview participants generally thought that the defensive tactics training offered at the academy focused too much on legal liability and not enough on teaching practical and realistic methods for surviving a physical encounter,” the DOJ report stated. “They did not believe that [training] sufficiently prepared them for a physical encounter.”
+
+Aside from giving leaders hard facts to work with, such reports can also help defend police officers. Even though many police shootings have a racial backdrop, the Justice Department found that Philadelphia police did not have a problem with racial stereotyping. In fact, unarmed white males were more likely to be shot and killed by Philadelphia police than unarmed black males.
+
+“I want to express regrets for all who have been shot in Philadelphia, civilians or police officers.... Every life is precious in this city and this country, so we need to maintain this level of focus,"" Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said in March. ""We're one big city. Everyone wants to be safe. Citizens want to be safe. Police officers want to be safe.""
+
+The Justice Department has conducted 19 civil rights investigations since 2000, stepping up the efforts in the Obama era, with five police departments coming under federal monitoring in 2012 alone. Some of those investigations have been scathing, including a report in March that documented abuses by the Ferguson (Mo.) Police Department that helped fuel protests in the wake of Michael’s Brown death last August, at the hands of a police officer.
+
+So far, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has not replied to the Baltimore mayor’s request for a separate civil rights abuse probe.
+
+But the request makes clear that the city’s police probably have problems that go beyond the treatment of Gray.
+
+Since 2011, the city has settled more than 100 lawsuits equaling nearly $6 million in cases where people were bruised and battered by officers, only to have trumped-up charges later dropped by a judge.
+
+True, institutional change can be difficult. After the Baltimore Police Department promised the courts in 2010 it would curb the large percentage of false arrests in the city by offering better training, the department dragged its feet, the American Civil Liberties Union has alleged. The issue has reared up again in the Gray case, since prosecutor Marilyn Mosby has charged that officers falsely arrested Gray for carrying a legal knife.
+
+But so far in Philadelphia and Las Vegas, one key to success has been the efforts to engage police officers in the process by showing them that they are part of the solution, and that the collaboration isn't about outsiders second-guessing their actions. In Philadelphia, Commissioner Charles Ramsey sent every officer a link to the Las Vegas report, so they could see for themselves that it was more an attempt to help officers stay safe and protect citizens than blaming them for their actions.
+
+""Cops are always leery of something,"" Mr. Ramsey told the Baltimore Sun. ""We did as much as we could to alleviate any concerns and fears.""",REAL
+9535,Freedom Rider: Organizing in the Age of Hillary,"By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley T he resistance to a Hillary Clinton presidency has already begun. Activists gathered in Chicago “to strategize the fight against police violence, neoliberalism and imperialism,” all of which promise to be hallmarks of her administration. The Black Misleadership Class plays its usual, toadying role. “The liars who said they would hold Obama’s feet to the fire are repeating their empty words and hoping no one pays attention.” “All forms of mass action must be used to deprive Clinton of support or claim of a mandate.” The Hillary Clinton administration, Slick Willie part II, will bring catastrophe unless there is constant agitation waged against it. The same woman who bragged that her party platform was progressive now brags that Republicans endorse her. The situation is urgent but there is no need to despair or to reinvent the wheel. There are groups across the country engaging in protest and they show a clear path for a liberation movement. This columnist joined with 200 activists in Chicago for the Right to Exist, Right to Resist [3] conference organized by the International League of Peoples’ Struggles (ILPS USA). The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Police Oppression, Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice, Peoples Organization for Progress, Bayan USA, Chicago Teachers Union, US Palestinian Community Network, Committee to Stop FBI Repression and others met to strategize the fight against police violence, neoliberalism and imperialism. If it is true that no person is an island then no struggle should be waged in isolation. The people of Ferguson, Missouri received support from Palestine during their rebellion against police occupation. The neoliberal onslaught that privatizes education and closes schools also deprives Flint, Michigan of clean water and its democratic rights. American imperialism threatens all life on this planet with its constant provocations against Russia and China which risk world war. “The black “misleaders” are silenced yet again by a prospective Democratic presidency.” Moore: A former Bernie Sanders supporter and recent 100% convert to Hillary—in the name of what? Good proof that liberals are forever blind to much of the world’s realities. This presidential election repeated the sleight of hand which presents the Democrats as the party which defends us from the barbarians. Donald Trump is the foil used to fool millions of people into believing that the errand boys and girls of neoliberalism can also be the guarantors of human rights. Hillary Clinton’s administration will be disastrous for black Americans in particular. The black “misleaders” are silenced yet again by a prospective Democratic presidency. They will not speak up against Hillary Clinton any more than they did against her husband or Barack Obama. They said nothing when Bill Clinton ended the 60-year long entitlement to government benefits. They said nothing when he used the war on drugs as an excuse to lock up thousands of black people with draconian prison sentences. They said nothing when Obama wouldn’t allow those people to request their freedom or when he declined to prosecute even one killer cop. They say nothing when American presidents wage wars of aggression all over the world. We can expect more going along to get along when “two for the price of one” becomes a reality. WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO THREAD FOOLS RUSH IN . This presidential election repeated the sleight of hand which presents the Democrats as the party which defends us from the barbarians. Donald Trump is the foil used to fool millions of people into believing that the errand boys and girls of neoliberalism can also be the guarantors of human rights . Not only must activists do their utmost to fight back against the real life Lady MacBeth but they must call out those who falsely claim to be in their camp. The liars who said they would hold Obama’s feet to the fire are repeating their empty words and hoping no one pays attention. They must be exposed right now and again after election day because they will surely make good on their history of appeasement. The Right to Exist, Right to Resist conference took place on the second anniversary of Laquan McDonald’s murder at the hands of Chicago police. McDonald was only 17 years of age, a child according to American law. His death, the existence of the Homan Square secret prison and other instances of torture and brutality resulted in demands for community control of the police. “She may bring the mothers of police murder victims on to the stage but she has said nothing about ending the death toll.” Chicagoans are struggling to establish an elected Civilian Police Accountability Council [4] (CPAC). Black community control of the police is a mobilizing issue all across the country. The demands began under Obama and must continue after Hillary Clinton takes office. She may bring the mothers of police murder victims on to the stage but she has said nothing about ending the death toll. That task is left for activists who know better than to expect any justice from her. Millions of Americans struggle financially and are displaced by gentrification or fear the police or want to keep their public schools open. But in 2016 they have been led astray by one of the most cynical presidential campaigns of all time. Hillary Clinton preferred Donald Trump as her rival because she was likely to lose to any other Republican. She then used the man she wanted to run against to rally otherwise skeptical voters to her side. The ego maniacal Trump performed as expected and is driving all but dead-ender right wingers to Hillary’s side. There must be no celebrating when her victory is announced. That is the moment when the fights must begin in earnest. All forms of mass action must be used to deprive her of support or claim of a mandate. The champion of the ruling classes cannot be allowed to claim the progressive mantle. That title belongs to the people who met in Chicago and marched in memory of Laquan McDonald. Frederick Douglass’ advice to “Agitate, agitate, agitate,” must still be followed. If not Hillary Clinton will privatize Social Security and find a rationale to start one last disastrous war. She will be stopped only if we assert our right to exist and right to resist. Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/organizing_in_age_of_hillary",FAKE
+4306,The Iowa caucuses are closer than you think,"The Iowa caucuses are 11 weeks away. That is a lifetime in a political campaign. Except that it’s really not.
+
+The campaign is about to enter its holiday period — a time when people, including Iowans and New Hampshire types, start paying much more attention to how to stuff their turkey and what’s under the Christmas tree than they do to politics. TV ads, stump speeches and even debates tend to get lost — or plain ignored — in the holiday maelstrom.
+
+Thanksgiving is in less than two weeks. Christmas is four weeks after that. A week later, it’s New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day. Suddenly, it’s Jan. 4, and the caucuses are only 28 days away.
+
+That’s the real calendar math of 2016. The race is almost certain to freeze in place — or close to it — in 10 days, only to thaw a few days into the new year.
+
+That prospect should worry Republicans who have an eye on retaking the White House after eight years in the political wilderness. Why? Because the top tier of the GOP field, as of today, is just two candidates large: former pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson and real estate investor Donald Trump.
+
+In virtually every national poll of Republican voters, Carson and Trump not only lead the rest of the field by a wide margin, but also combine to take well north of 50 percent of the total vote. Carson is the favorite in Iowa, while Trump remains the front-runner in the New Hampshire primary.
+
+[Time for GOP panic? Establishment worried Carson or Trump might win.]
+
+The problem for Republicans is that in an election likely to be focused on foreign policy — the Paris attacks late last week make this an even greater likelihood — neither Carson nor Trump have demonstrated a depth of knowledge likely to reassure voters that they are up to the job of commander in chief.
+
+Trump, in particular, would be a very problematic nominee for Republicans — not just because of his relative cluelessness on foreign policy but also because of his comments on immigration, women, prisoners of war, Iowans and lots (and lots) of other things.
+
+Establishment Republicans had long believed that former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s massive financial edge — a super PAC that supports him raised $100 million in the first six months of the year — would allow him to overtake the likes of Carson and Trump as actual votes neared.
+
+But Bush has been far less than advertised as a candidate, and it’s not clear that all the money in the world can sell a message that Republican caucus and primary voters simply don’t want to buy.
+
+That leaves Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, as the establishment pol best positioned to overtake the outsiders at the top of the field. And it could happen. But, Rubio’s fundraising has been less than impressive, and although he has moved up in polling, he has less than half of the support enjoyed by Trump or Carson in both early-state and national surveys.
+
+[The Take: Why no one is dropping out of the GOP presidential race]
+
+Put simply: Any Republican who tells you that Trump and/or Carson are a fad who will fade before Iowa is engaging in the most wishful of thinking. It’s a near-certainty at this point that the top tier going into Iowa will look almost exactly like it does today — Carson and Trump at the top, with Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) inching upward.
+
+The state of the Democratic race is far less in flux — and, therefore, is causing much less agita for the party establishment.
+
+Hillary Rodham Clinton, after months of listless campaigning, almost certainly secured the Democratic nomination with her strong showing in October — a month bookended by a standout performance in the first presidential debate and her marathon testimony in front of the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
+
+Clinton remains far from a perfect candidate — her decision to exclusively use a private e-mail server while at the State Department will be a major point of emphasis for Republicans in the general election — but she is by far the most complete candidate in the Democratic field.
+
+Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders seems comfortable being a protest candidate rather than a serious challenger to Clinton — as evidenced by his refusal in each of the first two debates to use questions about Clinton’s e-mail issue to draw a broader contrast between the two candidates.
+
+Sanders’s viability in Iowa and, especially, New Hampshire, a state where he is a slight favorite as of today, means that he will remain a relevant part of the race all the way through February. But it’s hard to see a path to victory for Sanders unless he can significantly expand his coalition beyond whites or peel voters off of Clinton — neither of which seem likely.
+
+The state of both parties’ races today will almost certainly be the state of those races when actual voters begin to start paying attention again right around Jan. 4. That prospect should make Republicans frown and Democrats smile.",REAL
+3974,Entering U.S. as refugees would be hard for terrorists,"Washington (CNN) Even before the debris from the Paris terrorist attacks was swept away, politicians began sounding the alarm that Syrian refugees could be a national security threat to the United States. The issue has dominated the U.S. political conversation during the week since gunmen and suicide bombers terrorized Paris on a Friday night.
+
+All Republican presidential candidates called on President Barack Obama to renege on his pledge to admit 10,000 refugees fleeing Syria's brutal civil war into the U.S. and argued instead for a full stop, fearing terrorists could infiltrate their ranks.
+
+Thirty-one governors have declared Syrian refugees unwelcome in their states and on Thursday the House passed a bill to bar refugees from Syria and Iraq from entering the U.S. Nearly 50 Democrats joined 242 Republicans to pass the bill, which the White House has threatened to veto. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate, suggested the U.S. only accept Christian refugees . Ben Carson, another candidate, likened refugees to ""rabid dogs"" threatening the neighborhood.
+
+But those responses ignore one very important fact: the refugee program is quite simply the toughest way for a foreigner to legally enter the United States. There are other security gaps that would be easier for would-be terrorists to exploit.
+
+Were any of the Paris attackers refugees?
+
+As of now, none of the Paris attackers have been confirmed as having entered Europe as refugees.
+
+In fact, most of the Paris attackers were European citizens born in France or Belgium. Two of them appear to have entered Europe through Greece although it doesn't appear that they came in through a refugee program.
+
+Perhaps more importantly, the European refugee admission system is dramatically different from the U.S. system for Syrians, in large part because the U.S. is geographically separated from Syria. The U.S. has the opportunity to do far more vetting before refugees arrive on their shores.
+
+How does a refugee get into the U.S.?
+
+Refugees must undergo an 18- to 24-month screening process, minimum, that the United Nations' refugee arm oversees. And that's before individual countries even begin to consider a refugee's application and conduct their own additional interviews and background checks.
+
+The screening process generally includes multiple interviews, background checks and an extensive cross-referencing process that tests refugee's stories against others and accounts from sources on the ground in their home country.
+
+Throughout that process, U.N. officials and local government officials in temporary host countries like Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon look to determine the legitimacy of asylum seekers' claims and ensure that they meet the criteria of a refugee, including that they are not and have not been involved in any fighting or terrorist activities.
+
+Refugees also have their retinas scanned and have their fingerprints lifted.
+
+Christopher Boian, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, called the process ""stringent"" and ""long and complex.""
+
+""If at any stage in that process there is ever the slightest shadow of a doubt or the slightest whisper of suspicion, they are removed from the process. That is that,"" Boian said.
+
+""The very, very few Syrian refugees who are accepted and referred for consideration for resettlement in another country -- there simply is no more closely scrutinized population on earth these days,"" he added.
+
+That's because other countries have so far pledged to resettle just 159,000 of the more than 4 million Syrian refugees -- setting an extremely high bar for resettlement.
+
+And refugees aren't automatically considered for resettlement: only the most vulnerable refugees -- such as torture victims, female heads of household, people with serious medical conditions and other especially vulnerable groups.
+
+So after they go through that process by the U.N., the U.S. does an additional screening?
+
+That's right. After a rigorous screening process and several interviews carried out by the U.N. refugee agency, refugees the U.S. agrees to consider for resettlement have to undergo an additional interview, medical evaluation and security screening.
+
+According to one U.S. government official, there's an additional layer of vetting that's specific to Syrian applicants, including special briefings for interviewers and information from the U.S. intelligence community.
+
+The security screening involves checks against several government agencies' databases and terrorist watch lists using biographic and biometric information. It's a process Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, recently called ""the most stringent security process for anyone entering the United States.""
+
+And Syrian refugees get an additional, more targeted layer of screening involving the U.S. Intelligence agency, according to a government official.
+
+Sounds pretty rigorous. How does the refugee process stack up to other ways of getting into the U.S.?
+
+The refugee program is simply the toughest way for any foreigner to enter the U.S. legally.
+
+For most people, getting a tourist visa to enter the United States is much easier, but still requires an in-person interview and involves a typical background check. The process takes anywhere from a few days to a couple months.
+
+But there's an even easier way to get into the U.S. if you're a citizen of one of 38 mostly European countries, including France and Belgium.
+
+As a sign that the Obama administration agrees that there are gaps that need closing, one of the U.S. officials said, in the coming days the administration expects to announce plans for additional steps to be taken with European countries that participate in the visa waiver program.
+
+Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who sits on the intelligence committee, said it ""would be much harder"" for a terrorist to get into the country through the refugee program than with a passport from one of the 38 countries in the visa waiver program.
+
+""(The refugee process) would take 18 months to two years. Under the visa waiver program, it could take 24 hours,"" King told CNN in a phone interview. ""The target of our work should be strengthening the visa waiver program.""
+
+""We do need to pay attention to whether the terrorists could infiltrate the refugee flow. I don't think it's something we should ignore, but the amount of vetting that goes on there already is very through,"" King added.
+
+So is that program getting strengthened?
+
+A bipartisan proposal to do just that is gaining momentum on Capitol Hill.
+
+Noting that 20 million people each year use the visa waiver program to visit the United States, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, said in a Thursday news conference that a bill she is proposing with Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, would help guard against terrorists trying to exploit the program.
+
+""Terrorists could exploit the program, could go from France to Syria, as 2,000 fighters have done, come back to France, use the visa waiver program and without further scrutiny come into the United States,"" said Feinstein, a senior member of the intelligence committee.
+
+The Feinstein-Flake bill, which is set to be formally introduced after Thanksgiving, would keep foreigners who've traveled to Syria or Iraq in the last five years from using the visa waiver program. It would also mandate fingerprinting for all travelers entering the U.S. from visa waiver countries and requires all foreigners from those countries to have a modern passport that has an embedded e-chip that is more secure and includes an individual's biometric information and other data.
+
+Flake, the bill's Republican sponsor, told reporters Thursday the refugee program could be strengthened to include better tracking of refugees once they arrive in the country, but said touted the rigorous process as something that shouldn't be a source of concern.
+
+""On the front end, it is a very thorough vetting that they get. So of all the things that we ought to be concerned about, that is not at the top of the list,"" he said.",REAL
+6246,"As Crooked HIllary Investigation Reopens, Democrat Cities Push To Allow Illegal Immigrants Voting","  As Crooked HIllary Investigation Reopens, Democrat Cities Push To Allow Illegal Immigrants Voting 'Look at illegal immigrants voting all over the country,' Donald Trump recently claimed in a Fox News interview, part of his ongoing effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the presidential election. There’s no evidence to support the Republican nominee’s claims of election fraud, but some cities are moving to expand voting rights to include noncitizens.   29, 2016 Some Democrat-Run Cities Want Their Illegal Alien Population to Vote 
+EDITOR’S NOTE: Yesterday, FBI director James Comey announced that they have reopened the investigation into Crooked Hillary’s illegal email server. Yay! But even before that, Democrat operatives are working around the clock to skew the election results in any way they can. Today we present to you Democrat-run cities in America allowing illegal immigrants to vote in the upcoming election. Should illegal immigrant voting be legal? Wha…??? 
+‘Look at illegal immigrants voting all over the country,’ Donald Trump recently claimed in a Fox News interview, part of his ongoing effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the presidential election. There’s no evidence to support the Republican nominee’s claims of election fraud, but some cities are moving to expand voting rights to include non-citizens (illegal immigrants) . Trump Opposes Same-Day Voter Registration to Prevent Illegal Immigrants from Voting: 
+The latest is San Francisco , where the Nov. 8 ballot will include a measure allowing the parents or legal guardians of any student in the city’s public schools to vote in school board elections. The right would be extended to those with green cards, visas, or no documentation at all. “One out of three kids in the San Francisco unified school system has a parent who is an immigrant, who is disenfranchised and doesn’t have a voice,” says San Francisco Assemblyman David Chiu, the son of Taiwanese immigrants. “We’ve had legal immigrants who’ve had children go through the entire K-12 system without having a say.” Undocumented immigrants should also have the right, Chiu adds, to bypass the “broken immigration system in this country.” Should Illegal Immigrants Be Allowed to Vote in US Elections? 
+Today there are six jurisdictions in Maryland that let non-citizens (illegal immigrants) vote in local elections. Chicago allows them to take part in elected parent advisory councils but not to vote in school board elections. Four towns in Massachusetts have moved to allow noncitizen voting and are awaiting state approval. And in New York City, where non-citizens (illegal immigrants) make up 21 percent of the voting-age population, the city council is drafting legislation that would allow more than 1.3 million legal residents to take part in municipal elections. The city previously allowed non-citizens (illegal immigrants) to vote in school board elections, but that ended when New York’s school boards were dissolved in 2002. Liberals Sign Petition to Allow Illegal Immigrants to Vote in 2016 Presidential Election: 
+San Francisco has tried in the past to grant noncitizens access to school board elections. A 2004 measure narrowly failed, with 51 percent voting against it. “There was an opposition campaign at that time,” Chiu says. He sponsored another ballot measure in 2010, which also failed. This time, Chiu says, he’s hoping for a victory. So far he’s seen no organized opposition: “I think that’s because of the ugly, anti-immigrant statements expressed by Donald Trump and his supporters.” SHARE THIS ARTICLE  ",FAKE
+5602,CNN Calls Sheriff Clarke A ‘Terrorist’ After Trump Considers Giving Him An Incredible New Job | EndingFed News Network,"VIA Conservative 101 According to Politico , some of those names include Gingrich for Secretary of State, Mnuchin, a 17 year veteran of Goldman Sachs for Treasure Secretary and Mayor Giuliani for Attorney General. And of course Sheriff David Clarke as the Homeland Security Secretary. He has been an incredible patriotic American and leader in Blue Lives Matter. CNN was terrified by this. “I think the one major flag I have is that someone like Sheriff Clarke would be considered as his Homeland Security secretary? Someone who I very much see as if he’s not a terrorist inciting terrorism?” said CNN commentator Angela Rye. “If people are afraid of Sheriff Clarke, afraid of the policies which he represents, I think that’s terrorism,” she stated. Naturally, this is ridiculous. It is just outrageous to name someone as a terrorist just because you disagree with them. Watch the video below and be sure to let us know what you think of it in the comment section. 
+If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
+9303,Town in Wisconsin Passes Law That Fines Parents of Bullies,"Most people can agree that a solution to bullying must be found. This Wisconsin town believes it may have the answer. 
+
+In recent years, bullying-related suicides account for over 6,000 deaths per year for people ages 15 through 24. This Wisconsin town passed a law that forces parents to pay a fine if their child is a bully. 
+
+As the connection between bullying and suicide becomes undeniable, parents, teachers, and students alike are trying to find a solution to this very important issue. Yet, there are too many adults who still see bullying as just another aspect of growing up. It has been proven that bullying is a prevalent problem that leads to many negative effects for it’s victims. Some of these negative effects include depression, fear, lack of motivation to attend school, and suicide. 
+
+Police in Shawano, Wisconsin are trying to curb bullying by holding parents accountable if their child is involved in bullying. 
+
+The city council of Shawano just passed an ordinance that allows police to intervene when aggression happens. The law applies to anyone under the age of 18 and covers various forms of harassment ranging from taking lunch money to cyberbullying on social media. 
+
+Shawano parents will be warned after the first incident, but if the child’s behavior doesn’t change within 90 days, parents will be fined $366. A repeat offender will be fined $681. 
+
+While the majority of parents agree that bullying needs to stop, the new ordinance has raised a lot of controversy. Some critics believe that there could be difficulty distinguishing between playful banter and harassment. But police Chief Mark Kohl assures the public that the ordinance is not generated towards ‘kids being kids’ and playground banter, but instead towards kids who are meticulously using social media or their words to purposefully hurt others. 
+
+While some parents embrace the fining idea, others disagree believing it will not solve the issue, only burning a hole in the pockets of already stressed out parents. 
+
+It is an interesting solution and only time will tell if it works. Feel free to share you own thoughts on the subject. 
+
+Share this to start a dialogue about the issue of bullying in your community. 
+
+Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science. Follow her adventures on Instagram.",FAKE
+3202,Here's why moderate Republicans aren't running for Congress anymore,"Hey, you! Any interest in running for the US House or, maybe better, the US Senate? A few seats are up for grabs in 2016. It's a very powerful, prestigious, decently well-paying job. Lots of important decisions. Great on a résumé.
+
+What's that you say? Not interested. Not for you? Yeah, I get it. I wouldn't want to run for Congress either. I know, you're probably a reasonable person, a nuanced thinker with a bit of an independent streak. You don't want to get drawn into the maw of that tribal trench warfare down there on the DC swamp. It's a bitter, angry place. And no fun.
+
+But hey, somebody has to do the job. And, flippant tone aside, it really matters who does do the job. If reasonable, level-headed people like you don't want to run for Congress, that means only hair-on-fire ideologues will put run the place, and ... oh wait. That does seem to be happening a bit these days.
+
+Which takes us to that upcoming 2016 congressional election.  Yet another golden opportunity to bring some fresh talent into Washington, maybe for some folks who are more excited about governing than about trying to make government disappear altogether?
+
+If such optimism sounds like the triumph of hope over experience, it probably is. Which raises an important question: Why don't we get many moderates, especially moderate Republicans, running for office these days?
+
+I've gathered here two good explanations from some recent political science literature:
+
+Say you're a moderate Republican. You might look at the Republican Party in Congress and feel like it's not exactly your people in charge of the place. You'd see that the leaders in Congress tend to be on the extremist side, and you'd make a reasonable guess that you wouldn't get too far in Congress as a moderate. By contrast, if you're a True Conservative, you'd see an opportunity to fit right in.
+
+This is the ""Party Fit hypothesis,"" as developed by political scientist Danielle Thomsen in a paper titled ""Ideological Moderates Won't Run: How Party Fit Matters for Partisan Polarization in Congress."" (She also has a forthcoming book on this.) Thomsen looked at some surveys of state legislators and some data on who actually runs for Congress. Her conclusion based on the data is simple: ""The more liberal the Republican state legislator, the less likely she is to run for Congress; the more conservative the Democratic state legislator, the less likely she is to do so.""
+
+In an email, Thomsen told me that there are indeed moderates in the state legislatures. She estimates that ""about 20% of Republican state legislators are as liberal as former Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and nearly 30% of Democratic state legislators are as conservative as former representative John Tanner (D-TN)."" It's just that they are much less likely to run for Congress.
+
+Like most aspects of polarization, the ""party fit"" story is asymmetrical — the polarizing impact is much stronger for Republicans. Democrats have maintained more ideological diversity and get more moderates to run. This is not true for Republicans.
+
+And like most aspects of polarization, it feeds on itself. As Thomsen also wrote in her email to me, "" As moderates gradually lost their place in both parties, polarization has become self-reinforcing.  The hyper-partisanship in Congress has discouraged moderates from running for and remaining in Congress, which has further exacerbated the ideological distance between the parties.""
+
+Again, say you're a moderate Republican. Chances are your local and state party leaders are not all that interested in encouraging you to run. Most likely, they are ideologues themselves, and they'd like to find people who share their beliefs, especially if they are Republicans. They want True Conservatives.
+
+This is a conclusion I draw from a fascinating survey of 6,000 county-level political party leaders, conducted by political scientists David Broockman, Nicholas Carnes, Melody Crowder-Meyer, and Christopher Skovron. They asked what qualities party leaders wanted.
+
+Sure, the party leaders said they looked for the usual things — honesty, experience intelligence, dedication, good looks, and, yes, ability to raise money.
+
+But they also cared about ideology — particularly the Republicans. Broockman et al. write:
+
+And party leaders do play a very important role in candidate recruitment, as Broockman documented in a separate paper: In pretty much every study trying to explain why candidates decided to run for office, recruitment was a major factor.
+
+Again, we have a self-reinforcing loop here: The more ideologues run the party, the more they are going to recruit other like-minded candidates to run for office.
+
+There is also probably a fundraising aspect to this. Most of the big donors tend to be pretty ideological (again, especially on the right). If they give a lot of money, it's almost always because they feel very strongly that one or the other of the two major parties needs to be in charge. Active passion and strong partisanship tend to go together.
+
+For example, in explaining ""leapfrog representation"" (the phenomenon of extremist candidates jumping over the median voter in a district when a seat changes partisan control), political scientists Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron point that active donors tend to be more extreme than non-donors. They argue that this may offer one explanation why candidates do not converge on the middle — if you can't raise money from (ideological) donors, it's harder to run for office.
+
+Sure, you might argue, party leaders may be ideologues themselves, especially on the right. But most of all, they want to stay in power. And to stay in power, they need to win elections.  And to win elections, they need to converge on the median voter who is, by definition, in the middle of the left-right ideological distribution. Ergo, the moderating pressures of electoral competition should overcome these forces of extremism.
+
+Fair enough. In close races, party leaders may indeed face a trade-off between ideology and electability.
+
+But one problem is there just aren't that many close races.
+
+By the latest Cook Political Report 2016 projections, 378 out of 435 House seats are considered safe — that's 87 percent. Add in the 25 ""likely"" seats, and we're at 403 out of 435, or 93 percent, at low or no risk. So it doesn't matter whether parties pick moderates or ideologues — they're almost certainly going to win as long as they don't pick a convicted felon (or maybe even if they do).
+
+In the Senate, 19 or 33 seats up in 2016 are solid for one party or another by the Cook assessment. If we add in the likely seats, we're at 25 or 33, or 75 percent low or no risk. In state legislatures, meanwhile, 43 percent of seats are not even contested.
+
+In other words, the proposed moderation of the median voter theory doesn't have very many seats on which to work its supposed magic.
+
+But then again, it's not even clear that competitive elections actually bring candidates to the middle. Research by political scientists Anthony Fowler and Andrew B. Hall suggests that partisans who win in close congressional elections vote just as extreme as partisans who win by landslides. Fowler and Hall conclude, ""Elected officials do not adapt their roll-call voting to their districts' preferences over time, and ... voters do not systematically respond by replacing incumbents.""
+
+No wonder, then, that political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have described the median voter theory as a failure in a recent paper criticizing the ""Downsian"" paradigm (Anthony Downs popularized the median voter theory). As Hacker and Pierson conclude, ""Parties not only fail to converge, they diverge asymmetrically."" One key reason for this, they argue, is that organized interests within the parties make strong demands, and ""party leaders will be attentive to such demands because groups can provide resources they need, offering critical financial and organizational support.""
+
+Okay, so you're probably not going to run for Congress in 2016. Nor am I.
+
+But somebody out there is going to put up with all the endless fundraising calls and the invasions of privacy and the negative ads attacking them and the endless recitation of the same platitudinous speeches over and over again. And, especially on the right, that somebody is probably going to be an ideologue. Because who else wants to run these days? And who else do party leaders want to recruit?
+
+The obvious suggestion is that we need to get some different people running for national office — again, especially on the right.
+
+More broadly, we might want to think a little more about the pipeline of who's getting involved in politics at all. And yeah, we probably also ought to do something about this problem of only a tiny share of the millennial generation viewing politics as a worthwhile career. But there's plenty of time ahead to work through these problems.
+
+So watch this space for some ideas in the months ahead. I'm going to be thinking a bit about this problem.
+
+This post is part of Polyarchy, an independent blog produced by the political reform program at New America, a Washington think tank devoted to developing new ideas and new voices. See more Polyarchy posts here.",REAL
+3466,"Supreme Court to consider redefining 'one-person, one-vote' principle","WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to define what it meant by ""one person, one vote"" a half century ago.
+
+The justices will consider a challenge brought by two rural voters in Texas who claim their state Senate ballots carry less weight than those cast in urban areas with large numbers of non-citizens ineligible to vote.
+
+Under the current system in nearly all states, state legislative districts are drawn with roughly equal populations. The standard dates back to decisions made by the Supreme Court in the early 1960s.
+
+If the justices change the standard from total population to legal voters, illegal and some legal immigrants would not be counted, along with children and most prisoners who have committed felonies. That would equalize the power of each vote but result in districts of unequal population.
+
+It also would make it harder for Hispanics in ethnic areas to elect the candidate of their choice, because their voting strength would decline, or the districts would be less compact and subject to legal challenge. That could help Republicans in rural areas and hurt Democrats in cities.
+
+States and localities most likely to feel the effect of any change include Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida and the New York metropolitan area. While only state legislative districts would be affected, a separate challenge could be filed to change the way congressional districts are drawn.
+
+In the Texas case, Sue Evenwel's mostly rural district has about 584,000 citizens eligible to vote, while a neighboring urban district has only 372,000. As a result, voters in the urban district have more sway to influence the outcome.
+
+A federal district court in Texas ruled that the state Legislature's use of total population could not be appealed. But as far back as 2001, at least one justice, Clarence Thomas, had said the issue should be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
+
+""The one-person, one-vote principle, by its terms, entitles voters to an equal vote,"" the challengers said. ""Unless the districting process no longer protects that right, the judgment below cannot stand.""
+
+The organization behind the challenge, the Project on Fair Representation, also was the source of other major Supreme Court cases challenging minority preferences. Among them: Fisher v. University of Texas, challenging the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions, and Shelby County, Ala., v. Holder, challenging a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
+
+The challengers were backed by a half-dozen conservative and libertarian groups, an unusually large number for a case that had yet to be granted by the high court.
+
+Texas responded that the justices had never required legislative districts to be drawn based on the number of voters, rather than total population. ""Multiple precedents from this court confirm that total population is a permissible apportionment base under the Equal Protection Clause,"" the state said.
+
+The case will be taken up during the court's next term, which begins in October.",REAL
+1364,Iowa nightmare revisited: Was correct winner called on caucus night?,"DES MOINES — It's Iowa's nightmare scenario revisited: An extraordinarily close count in the Iowa caucuses — and reports of chaos in precincts and computer glitches — are raising questions about accuracy of the count and winner.
+
+This time it's the Democrats, not the Republicans.
+
+Even as Hillary Clinton trumpeted her Iowa win in New Hampshire on Tuesday, aides for Bernie Sanders said the eyelash-thin margin raised questions and called for a review. The chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party rejected that notion, saying the results are final.
+
+The situation echoes the events on the Republican side in the 2012 caucuses, when one winner (Mitt Romney, by eight votes) was named on caucus night, but a closer examination of the paperwork that reflected the head counts showed someone else pulled in more votes (Rick Santorum, by 34 votes). But some precincts were still missing entirely.
+
+Like Republican party officials in 2012, Democratic party officials worked into the early morning on caucus night trying to account for results from a handful of tardy precincts.
+
+But at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Andy McGuire announced that Clinton had eked out a slim victory, based on results from 1,682 of 1,683 precincts.
+
+After voters from the final missing Democratic precinct tracked down party officials Tuesday morning to report their results, Sanders won by two delegate equivalents over Clinton in the final missing precinct, Des Moines precinct No. 42.
+
+The Iowa Democratic Party said the updated final tally of delegate equivalents for all the precincts statewide was:
+
+That's a 3.77-count margin between Clinton, the powerful establishment favorite who early on in the Democratic race was expected to win in a virtual coronation, and Sanders, a democratic socialist who few in Iowa knew much about a year ago.
+
+Sanders campaign aides told the Register they've found some discrepancies between tallies at the precinct level and numbers that were reported to the state party. The Iowa Democratic Party determines its winner not based on a head count like in the Republicans' straw poll, but based on delegate equivalents tied to a math formula. And there was enough confusion, and untrained volunteers on Monday night, that errors may have been made.
+
+""We feel like that there’s a very, very good chance that there is,"" said Rania Batrice, a Sanders spokeswoman. ""It's not that we think anybody did anything intentionally, but human error happens.""
+
+Team Sanders had its own app that allowed supporters and volunteers to send precinct-level results directly to the campaign. At the same time, caucus chairs sent their official results to the state party, either over a specially built Microsoft app or via phone. Sanders aides hope to sit down with the state parties and review the paperwork from the precinct chairs, Batrice said.
+
+""We just want to work with the party and get the questions that are unanswered answered,"" she said.
+
+McGuire, in an interview with the Register, said no.
+
+""The answer is that we had all three camps in the tabulation room last night to address any grievances brought forward and we went over any discrepancies. These are the final results,"" she said.
+
+McGuire in her 2:30 a.m. statement said: ""Hillary Clinton has been awarded 699.57 state delegate equivalents, Bernie Sanders has been awarded 695.49 state delegate equivalents, Martin O’Malley has been awarded 7.68 state delegate equivalents and uncommitted has been awarded .46 state delegate equivalents. We still have outstanding results in one precinct — Des Moines 42 — which is worth 2.28 state delegate equivalents. We will report that final precinct when we have confirmed those results with the chair.""
+
+Team Clinton quickly embraced that news, and flatly stated that nothing could change it.
+
+Clinton's Iowa campaign director, Matt Paul, said in a statement at 2:35 a.m.: ""Hillary Clinton has won the Iowa caucus. After thorough reporting — and analysis — of results, there is no uncertainty and Secretary Clinton has clearly won the most national and state delegates. Statistically, there is no outstanding information that could change the results and no way that Senator Sanders can overcome Secretary Clinton's advantage.""
+
+McGuire repeated that Tuesday afternoon, saying the reporting app had a built-in failsafe to prevent volunteers from reporting more delegates than were assigned to each precinct.
+
+Clinton, who saw her expected Iowa win slip away in 2008, grasped the prize Tuesday.
+
+""I can tell you, I've won and I've lost there, and it's a lot better to win,"" she said at a rally in New Hampshire, the state that votes next on the presidential nominating calendar.
+
+But that didn't quell doubts back in Iowa.
+
+“Politics is a contact sport with few referees, so torturing your opponents with questions about the transparency of an election can be very harmful and damaging,” said Steffen Schmidt, a longtime political observer and professor at Iowa State University in Ames.
+
+Discrepancies can occur in official elections, and caucuses are not even official election events run by the secretary of state's office, noted Dennis Goldford, a Drake University professor who closely studies the Iowa caucuses.
+
+""The caucus system isn't built to bear the weight placed on it,"" he said. ""There aren't even paper ballots (in the Democratic caucuses) to use for a recount in case something doesn't add up.""
+
+Democrats have never released actual head counts, and McGuire said they would not be released this time, either. Determining a winner based on state delegate equivalents rather than head count is a key distinction between how the Democrats conduct their caucuses versus conducting a primary, she said. New Hampshire and Iowa are generally careful to maintain such distinctions as part of their effort to preserve their status as the first caucus state and first primary state.
+
+There were reports of disorganization and lack of volunteers Monday evening. Party officials reported a turnout of 171,109, far less than the record of 240,000 seen in 2008. Democratic voters reported long lines, too few volunteers, a lack of leadership and confusing signage. In some cases, people waited for an hour in one line, only to learn their precinct was in a different area of the same building. The proceedings were to begin at 7 p.m. but started late in many cases.
+
+The scene at precinct No. 42 — the one with the final missing votes — was ""chaos"" Monday night, said Jill Joseph, a rank-and-file Democratic voter who backed Sanders in the caucuses.
+
+None of the 400-plus Democrats wanted to be in charge of the caucus, so a man who had shown up just to vote reluctantly stepped forward. As Joseph was leaving with the untrained caucus chairman, who is one of her neighbors, ""I looked at him and said, 'Who called in the results of our caucus?' And we didn't know.""
+
+The impromptu chairman hand-delivered the results to Polk County Democratic Party Chairman Tom Henderson Tuesday. Sanders won seven state delegates, Clinton won five.
+
+Ames precinct 1-3 started caucusing two hours late, at 9 p.m., because the crowd was so big and the check-in line so slow, said Peter D. Myers, a finance major and member of the student government at Iowa State University, who caucused for the first time.
+
+Capacity at the caucus site, Heartland Senior Center, was 115, but 300 people turned out, Myers said. At one point, they considered moving to the parking lot of the Hy-Vee grocery store.
+
+“It was so chaotic that we ended up making the building work even though capacity was doubled,” he said.
+
+Myers said he registered to vote in August but “was alarmed to find out I wasn't on the list, so I had to go to the back of the line. The gentleman in front of me has caucuses the past three cycles and he wasn't on the list, either.”
+
+No one was there to lead the caucus, so “a pregnant lady took charge and counted the Bernie supporters, and a Hillary captain took the small group to a corner and counted the supporters,” he said.
+
+Sanders ended up with four delegates and Clinton one, he said.
+
+An Indianola precinct that gathered in Hubbell Hall at Simpson College had a discrepancy between the number who checked in, and people counted in the first vote.
+
+“The chair and secretary knew the count was off but proceeded anyway,” said Paige Godden, a reporter for The Record Herald and Indianola Tribune. “We did the final count at least three times. People were very frustrated by the end.”
+
+New voters made up nearly 40% of the caucusgoers — 207 of 521 — at Democratic precinct No. 59 on at Des Moines Central Campus, organizers said. The precinct ran out of voter registration forms and had to print more.
+
+When the caucus began, the one-by-one head count discovered 58 more people voting than had checked in. Organizers asked anyone who had not signed in to do so, and then recounted. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, a Clinton supporter who lives in the precinct, stepped in to help with the recount.
+
+The precinct’s caucus chair, Mark Challis, wasn’t sure if the counts were accurate, but changes wouldn’t have affected the final vote tally, which had Sanders substantially ahead.
+
+Democrat Mary Ann Dorsett of Des Moines told the Register that 492 voters turned out in her precinct, but there were only a handful of people assigned to check people in.
+
+“It was a very large room, so clearly they expected a large turnout,” Dorsett said. “The lines snaked through the corridor and out the door. It took over an hour to check in. Republicans in the same precinct were seated long before this, and already listening to speeches.”
+
+Dorsett thinks the one-by-one head-counting system is “a real head-scratcher in terms of the possibility of inaccuracy as well as time wasted.”
+
+“If all the smartphones were eliminated, it could have been 1820, and we were re-enacting the roles of a bunch of farmers sitting in a church hall, counting heads. Is this the 21st century?” she said. “This may well be my last caucus unless the Democratic Party cleans up its act.”
+
+Meanwhile, Republican Party of Iowa officials are doing a review — they’re comparing the app results for each candidate with what the precinct chairs jotted down on their “e-forms” on caucus night.
+
+“When you’re counting thousands of votes you’ve always got to be careful,” Iowa GOP spokesman Charlie Szold said.
+
+Microsoft, one of the premier tech companies in the world, had developed websites to deliver results in real time. But both the Democratic website, idpcaucuses.com, and GOP website, iagopcaucuses.com, struggled intermittently throughout the night, crashing for periods of time and locking out the public from access to the results.
+
+McGuire said the app system the volunteers in the precincts used to file their numbers was never down. ""They (Microsoft) had plenty of capacity for our results,"" she said.
+
+Microsoft spokeswoman Angela Swanson-Henry said: ""National interest in the Iowa Caucuses was high, and some who attempted to access websites may have experienced delays which were quickly addressed.""
+
+Contributing: Tony Leys and Kevin Hardy, The Des Moines Register. Follow Jennifer Jacobs on Twitter: @JenniferJJacobs",REAL
+7200,FBI Investigating New Clinton Emails - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"New Report Finds Voters Have No Idea How Outraged They Supposed To Be About Anything Anymore WASHINGTON—Saying that at this point, they were just taking their best guesses at how they should react to each new scandal that emerged about the presidential nominees, voters across the country admitted Monday they had no clue how outraged they are supposed to be about anything anymore. Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign BROOKLYN, NY—In response to the FBI’s announcement that its investigation of him had produced new evidence that could pertain to its probe of the Democratic presidential nominee, Anthony Weiner reportedly sent an apology sext early Monday morning to the entire Hillary Clinton campaign. ",FAKE
+1019,"In a revealing interview, Trump predicts a ‘massive recession’ but intends to eliminate the national debt in 8 years","Donald Trump said in an interview that economic conditions are so perilous that the country is headed for a “very massive recession” and that “it’s a terrible time right now” to invest in the stock market, embracing a distinctly gloomy view of the economy that counters mainstream economic forecasts.
+
+The New York billionaire dismissed concern that his comments — which are exceedingly unusual, if not unprecedented, for a major party front-runner — could potentially affect financial markets.
+
+“I know the Wall Street people probably better than anybody knows them,” said Trump, who has misfired on such predictions in the past. “I don’t need them.”
+
+Trump’s go-it-alone instincts were a consistent refrain — “I’m the Lone Ranger,” he said at one point — during a 96-minute interview Thursday in which he talked candidly about his aggressive style of campaigning and offered new details about what he would do as president.
+
+The real estate mogul, top aides and his son Don Jr. gathered over lunch at a makeshift conference table set amid construction debris at Trump’s soon-to-be-finished hotel five blocks from the White House. Just before, he had met there with his foreign-policy advisers and just after he visited officials at the Republican National Committee — signs that, in spite of his Trump-knows-best manner, the political novice is making efforts to build a more well-rounded bid.
+
+[Read the full transcript of the Trump interview]
+
+Over the course of the discussion, the candidate made clear that he would govern in the same nontraditional way that he has campaigned, tossing aside decades of American policy and custom in favor of a new, Trumpian approach to the world.
+
+In his first 100 days, Trump said, he would cut taxes, “renegotiate trade deals and renegotiate military deals,” including altering the U.S. role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
+
+He insisted that he would be able to get rid of the nation’s more than $19 trillion national debt “over a period of eight years.”
+
+Most economists would consider this impossible because it could require taking more than $2 trillion a year out of the annual $4 trillion budget to pay off holders of the debt.
+
+Trump vehemently disagrees: “I’m renegotiating all of our deals, the big trade deals that we’re doing so badly on. With China, $505 billion this year in trade.” He said that economic growth he foresees as a consequence of renegotiated deals would enable the United States to pay down the debt — although many economists have said the exact opposite, that a trade war would be crippling to the U.S. economy.
+
+Trump also said that the United States has lost its standing in the world and that he would make people “respect our country. I want them to respect our leader.” Asked how he would do so, Trump cited an “aura of personality.”
+
+As a group of world leaders attended President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit less than a mile away, Trump said that, like Obama, he would support full-scale nuclear disarmament but quickly added: “I love that. But from a practical standpoint, not going to happen.”
+
+Were he to be elected president, Trump said he would want high-level employees of the federal government to sign legally binding nondisclosure agreements so that staffers couldn’t write insider accounts of what it’s like inside a Trump White House.
+
+“When people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don’t like that,” Trump said.
+
+But first, Trump must get elected, and his campaign is struggling through one of its most challenging stretches. In the past week, his campaign manager has been charged with battery for grabbing a reporter, Trump has been criticized for mocking the looks of an opponent’s wife as compared with those of his own spouse, and he has backtracked from comments about abortion that offended many in his own party.
+
+Trump said that everyone close to him — family, friends, Republican leaders — has been urging him to tone down his attacks and reach out to former rivals, both to reassure wary voters and to begin the difficult process of unifying a party in which many have sworn to never back him. Trump does not intend to take the advice. He said such overtures are “overrated.”
+
+“I think the first thing I have to do is win,” he said. “Winning solves a lot of problems. And I have two people left”: his two remaining Republican rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
+
+“Sometimes you have to break an egg,” Trump said, and Cruz and Kasich were the two remaining eggs.
+
+Trump did offer some concessions to the realities of being a political novice, saying that he would not pick an outsider like himself as a vice-presidential running mate, but rather, “somebody that can walk into the Senate and who’s been friendly with these guys for 25 years, and people for 25 years. And can get things done. So I would 95 percent see myself picking a political person as opposed to somebody from the outside.”
+
+In another unprecedented move, Trump said he plans to announce a list of 10 to 12 judges from which he would pick to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court to allay concerns from conservatives that he wouldn’t choose someone to their liking.
+
+“I’m getting names. The Federalist people. Some very good people. The Heritage Foundation,” Trump said. “I’m going to announce that these are the judges, in no particular order, that I’m going to put up. And I’m going to guarantee it. I’m going to tell people. Because people are worried that, oh, maybe he’ll put the wrong judge in.”
+
+And after a series of violent incidents at his rallies between supporters and protesters, Trump acknowledged that, at least for a little while, he has tried to calm things down.
+
+“We’ve purposefully kept the crowds down this past week,” he said. “You know, we’ve gone into small venues and we’re turning away thousands and thousands of people, which I hate, but we didn’t want to have the protest. You know, when you have a room of 2,000 people, you can pretty much keep it without the protesters.”
+
+The question posed to Trump about his decision to run: “Where do you start the movie?”
+
+A wry smile spread over his face as he repeated the question about the moment when he decided to turn what had long been a flirtation with running for the presidency into something real.
+
+Asked who he talked to about this critical decision, Trump answered: “To myself.”
+
+“To my family, but to myself.”
+
+So it was an interior dialogue?
+
+“This is thought process. And I’m saying to myself, you know, look, they put me in these polls. I’m number one.”
+
+Trump said his interest really started to pick up in the summer of 2014, when he was still busy with his hit NBC reality show, “The Apprentice.” He kept his ambition mostly to himself, slowly thinking it through into early last year, when he hired political advisers, months before he formally jumped in.
+
+Trump said his experience throughout the last two years wasn’t like 1987, when he first made a speech in New Hampshire that he “forgot about” soon after delivering it. This time, as he read the daily newspapers, printed-out online articles (his preferred method of reading) and kept tabs on cable news, he felt the pull.
+
+“I said, ‘You know, this is something I really would like to do.’ I think I’d do it really well. Obviously the public seems to like me,” Trump recalled.
+
+“I’ll tell you a moment when it kicked to yes. Because it was a monetary moment also. . . . There was a moment in, I would say February of last year, so that would be four months, three, four months before I announced, when Steve Burke, great guy, of Comcast . . . came to see me with the top people at NBC. And they wanted to extend my contract.”
+
+Trump told them he was going to run for president instead.
+
+“I just felt there were so many things going wrong with the country,” Trump said of his thinking at the time. He was frustrated with what he saw as the “stupidity” of trade deals and Iran nuclear negotiations that were “terrible” and dominated by “Persians being great negotiators.”
+
+Trump’s wife, Melania, heard most of his complaints, but was not enthused about him becoming a candidate. “She said, ‘We have such a great life. Why do you want to do this?’ ”
+
+“I said, ‘I sort of have to do it, I think. I really have to do it.’ . . . I could do such a great job.”
+
+Later, Melania said, “I hope you don’t do it, but if you run, you’ll win,” according to Trump.
+
+Now, more than a year later and with the Republican nomination in sight, Trump’s family is giving him different advice. “My family said to me — and Don [Jr.] has said this, and Ivanka, and my wife has said this — ‘Be more presidential.’ ”
+
+Trump said he is getting similar guidance from close friends. He had a story to share. A couple weeks ago, a friend, a famous athlete, called. This was right after Trump beat Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida, the senator’s home state. “That was a big beating. Don’t forget, he was the face of the Republican Party. He was the future of the Republican Party. So [the athlete] called me up. And he said, ‘Hey Donald, could you do us all a favor? We love you. Don’t kill everybody. Because you may need them on the way back.’ ”
+
+But Trump doesn’t see it that way, at least not yet. “I think you have to break the egg initially,” he said, adding that he has to beat his opponents and secure the nomination before he is willing to consider reaching out or easing off in any way.
+
+When it was suggested that he seems comfortable being the Lone Ranger — the famous old-time TV and radio masked vigilante who fought for good outside the law — Trump immediately concurred.
+
+“I am,” he said. “Because I understand life. And I understand how life works. I’m the Lone Ranger.”
+
+Asked how he would build a coalition for the general election, Trump responded that he hasn’t focused on Hillary Clinton yet — an implication that once he starts attacking her, voters would rally to his side.
+
+Pressed on whether it is incumbent on him to tame the anger within his party, Trump said it was, but also: “I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I think it was, I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do. I also bring great unity out, ultimately. I’ve had many occasions like this, where people have hated me more than any human being they’ve ever met. And after it’s all over, they end up being my friends. And I see that happening here.”
+
+Not with everyone, though. Trump acknowledged that he has been “rough” and “nasty” in debates — so much so that some relationships with his former rivals are likely beyond repair. “One of the problems I have is that when I hit people, I hit them harder maybe than is necessary,” he said. “And it’s almost impossible to reel them back.”
+
+Like Rubio, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. “Some of the people that I was competing against, I’m not sure they can ever go back to me,” Trump said. “I was very rough on Jeb.” It was “Jeb: Low energy. Little Marco. Names that were devastating.”
+
+Trump seemed unsure whether Cruz would ultimately fit that category. Trump noted that they had gotten along quite well for many months and suggested they could again, but he was also ambivalent about potentially reaching out to Cruz if he beats the senator from Texas for the nomination.
+
+“I’ll never have to call him,” to get his help and support, Trump said, adding that if Cruz did reach out, he would congratulate him. “Because out of 17 people, you beat 16. Okay? Which is pretty good.”
+
+Still, Trump admitted that he needed to do more outreach. “Honestly, a lot of people are calling me, but I should be calling them,” he said. “Because to a certain extent, I should be calling them, they shouldn’t have to be calling me.”
+
+Trump noted that two of his former rivals, Ben Carson and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, are supporting him. As for some others, “They will be loved. At the right time, they will be loved.”
+
+Asked specifically at this uncertain moment in his campaign whether “all politics, all successful politics, is about coalition building,” he responded: “It’s true.”
+
+“I do,” Trump said, his arms folded across his familiar dark suit, white shirt and red tie, as he sat in what he hopes will be his newest trophy hotel. “I agree. I agree.”
+
+Pressed on when that coalition building might begin, he turned to stories about boxing great Muhammad Ali and football coaching icon Vince Lombardi.
+
+Ali, he said, earned respect “through having the goods. You know, so Muhammad Ali is a friend of mine. He’s a good guy. I’ve watched many people over the years. Muhammad Ali would get in the ring, and he’d talk and talk and scream and talk about the ugly bear, and this, that — you know. And then he’d win. And respect is about winning. We don’t win anymore. I see it in my — we don’t win anymore. And he’d win. I’ve seen many fighters that were better than Muhammad Ali, in terms of talking. I’ve seen guys that were so beautiful, so flamboyant, they’d get into the ring — and then they’d get knocked out. And guess what? It’s all gone.”
+
+“The coalition building for me will be when I win. Vince Lombardi, I saw this. He was not a big man. And I was sitting in a place with some very, very tough football players. Big, strong football players. He came in — these are tough cookies — he came in, years ago — and I’ll never forget it, I was a young man. He came in, screaming, into this place. And screaming at one of these guys who was three times bigger than him, literally. And very physical, grabbing him by the shirt. Now, this guy could’ve whisked him away and thrown him out the window in two seconds. This guy — the player — was shaking. A friend of mine. There were four players, and Vince Lombardi walked in. He was angry. And he grabbed — I was a young guy — he grabbed him by the shirt, screaming at him, and the guy was literally. . . . And I said, wow. And I realized the only way Vince Lombardi got away with that was because he won.”
+
+Trump has for months contended that the U.S. economy is in trouble because of what he sees as an overvalued stock market, but his view has grown more pessimistic of late and he is now bearish on investing, to the point of warning Americans against doing so.
+
+“I think we’re sitting on an economic bubble. A financial bubble,” Trump said. He made clear that he was not specifying a sector of the economy but the economy at large and asserted that more bullish forecasts were based on skewed employment numbers and an inflated stock market.
+
+“First of all, we’re not at 5 percent unemployment. We’re at a number that’s probably into the twenties if you look at the real number,” Trump said. “That was a number that was devised, statistically devised to make politicians — and, in particular, presidents — look good. And I wouldn’t be getting the kind of massive crowds that I’m getting if the number was a real number.”
+
+[The bizarre optimism in Donald Trump’s theory of the economy]
+
+Trump’s assertion does not match data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its analysis of joblessness beyond the unemployed — such as “marginally attached” workers and those who have dropped out of the labor force — was under 10 percent nationally last month.
+
+Trump’s view also runs counter to that of most economists, whose rough consensus is that the U.S. economy has about a 20 percent chance of slipping into recession this year largely because growth remains weak across the world, according to a Wall Street Journal survey of economists in March.
+
+Most economists aren’t overly worried about an imminent downturn because job creation remains strong, workers are starting to see their wages grow and the Federal Reserve remains cautious about shifting away from the low-interest-rate stance that has helped stimulate the economy.
+
+Any number of Trump’s predictions haven’t worked out. In 2012, for instance, he predicted that if Obama were reelected, oil and gas prices would go “through the roof like never before.”
+
+In 2011, Trump said that when Obama’s health-care law took effect, national unemployment would “go even higher” than 9 percent. He was also bullish on real estate investments in the run-up to the housing bust.
+
+Nonetheless, Trump said, “it’s precarious times. Part of the reason it’s precarious is because we are being ripped so badly by other countries. We are being ripped so badly by China. It just never ends. Nobody’s ever going to stop it. And the reason they’re not going to stop it is one of two. They’re either living in a world of the make-believe, or they’re totally controlled by their lobbyists and their special interests.”
+
+“I’m pessimistic,” Trump said. “Unless changes are made. Changes could be made.”
+
+By Trump, for instance: “I can fix it. I can fix it pretty quickly.”
+
+Trump firmly believes that a turnaround on trade would be the necessary beginning of a solution to any looming recession.
+
+He mentions the Trans-Pacific Partnership as one pact he would immediately seek to renegotiate, putting him at odds with congressional Republicans who supported giving the president fast-track trade authority last year.
+
+Coupled with his push on trade would be a “very big tax cut,” which Trump unveiled last September. That proposal increases taxes on the “very rich” but reduces taxes for most taxpayers and would cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent. To woo companies back to the United States, he would offer an incentive of a deeply discounted rate and would no longer allow corporations to defer taxes on income earned overseas.
+
+In the center of Washington on Thursday, world leaders were attending a summit focused on reducing nuclear stockpiles around the world. A day earlier, Trump had made headlines for saying at an MSNBC forum that he would “possibly” use a nuclear weapon as president. Less than a week before, in an interview with the New York Times, Trump had suggested that Japan and South Korea should consider acquiring nuclear arms as a way of disengaging the United States from its role as a military protector — a proposal that the Obama White House promptly called “catastrophic.”
+
+Told that Obama had said in 2010 that his greatest worry is a nuclear device exploding in an American city, Trump at first took a dig at the president.
+
+“It’s funny. It’s very interesting. I’m surprised he said that because I heard him recently say that the biggest problem we have is global warming, which I totally disagree with. Okay?” Trump said.
+
+But after mocking, Trump turned solemn on the topic, calling the nuclear threat the “single greatest problem” for global peace. “You look at Hiroshima and multiply it times a thousand,” he said, shaking his head.
+
+Trump said if other countries would agree to do so simultaneously, he would be open to eliminating nuclear weapons held by the United States. “If it’s done on an equal basis, absolutely,” he said.
+
+But Trump added a caveat. He said as much as he supports the idea of eliminating nuclear weapons, it may not be feasible in the current climate and with countries such as Russia and Pakistan perhaps unwilling to relinquish their arms since they are “spending a tremendous amount of money.”
+
+“That’s something that in an ideal world is wonderful, but I think it’s not going to happen very easily. I would love to see a nuclear-free world. Will that happen?” Trump said. “Look, Russia right now is spending a tremendous amount of money on redoing their entire nuclear arsenal.”
+
+Turning to Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, Trump said he continues to appreciate praise from Putin, even though his human-rights record and incursions into Ukraine and elsewhere have alarmed many. “I want Putin to respect our country, okay?” Trump said. “I think he respects strength. Okay? I think Putin respects strength. And I’ve said it before, I think I will get along well with Putin. Now you never know. I don’t say that — only a fool would say, ‘I will,’ but I feel that I will get along well with Putin.”
+
+After talk of Putin and strength, Trump was read a few lines from Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Obama in the Atlantic, which quotes Obama as saying, “Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence.”
+
+Trump listened carefully and said: “Well, I think there’s a certain truth to that. I think there’s a certain truth to that. Real power is through respect. Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, fear. But you know, our military is very sadly depleted. You look at what’s going on with respect to our military, and it’s depleted from all of the cuts,” Trump said, noting that he frequently sees advertisements for former U.S. military bases being available for purchase.
+
+“I don’t want people to be afraid. I want them to respect our country,” he said. “Right now, they don’t respect our country.”
+
+Trump said the United States should not retreat from the world but should reevaluate its relationships and role in many international groups and alliances, including NATO.
+
+“First of all, it’s obsolete,” he said. “Our big threat today is terrorism. Okay? And NATO’s not really set up for terrorism. NATO is set up for the Soviet Union more than anything else. And now you don’t have the Soviet Union.”
+
+But for Trump, NATO, Putin, nuclear weapons, all of that is for later. For now, against mounting calls from friends, loved ones and fellow Republicans, remains the fight.
+
+“My natural inclination is to win,” Trump said. “And after I win, I will be so presidential that you won’t even recognize me. You’ll be falling asleep, you’ll be so bored.”
+
+Jim Tankersley and Evelyn M. Duffy contributed to this report.",REAL
+5336,Euro-Russian Mars Lander May Have Exploded Due to Software Glitch,"Get short URL 0 13 0 0 This would actually be a best-case scenario for the European Space Agency, as a software glitch on the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander, which crashed on the surface of Mars October 19, would be easier to remedy than a hardware issue. 
+Andrea Accomazzo, the ESA’s head of solar and planetary missions told the journal Nature, ""If we have a serious technological issue, then it’s different, then we have to re-evaluate carefully…But I don’t expect it to be the case."" © Photo: Pixabay If a Trip to Mars Doesn't Kill You It Might Cause Massive Brain Damage and More The spacecraft consisted of a Schiaparelli entry, descent and landing demonstrator module, and a Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), and was a joint venture between ESA and Russian space agency Roscosmos. 
+ExoMars’ chief objective was to confirm markers of active geological and biological processes on the red planet by seeking evidence of methane gases, which have been detected by past Mars missions, along with other atmospheric gases. 
+Nature noted that the mission was ""a prelude to a planned 2020 mission, when researchers aim to land a much larger scientific station and rover on Mars, which will drill up to 2-metres down to look for signs of ancient life in the planet’s soil."" © Photo: Pixabay Next Small Step & Giant Leap: United States to Send Humans to Mars by 2030 
+The TGO entered Mars orbit last week after a seventh-month trek and now makes it way around the planet every 4.2 days, but never sent back signals indicating that the descent module made a successful landing on the planet’s surface. NASA released images Friday taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) that show what appeared to be scorch marks near the area where the craft was supposed to have touched down, implying that it may have exploded on impact. 
+Project scientist Jorge Vago suggested that ExoMars’ parachute and heat shields may have deployed prematurely, and the thrusters, which are supposed to engage for 30 seconds, shut after three seconds due to a software glitch. © Photo: Pixabay Mars 'Ain't No Limit': Elon Musk Envisions Future Colonization of Space 
+He told Nature, ""My guess is that at that point we were still too high…And the most likely scenario is that, from then, we just dropped to the surface."" An investigation is ongoing, and data gleaned over the near future will determine whether ExoMars is intact, but the ESA said all of the craft’s main goals had been achieved and the mission was a success, despite the unexpected impact. 
+""As it is, we have one part that works very well and one part that didn’t work as we expected,” said Vago. “The silver lining is that we think we have in hand the necessary information to fix the problem."" 
+The ESA had a similar experience in 2003 when the British-led Beagle 2 mission disappeared attempting to make a Christmas Day landing on Mars. ...",FAKE
+9764,The Limitations of Randomised Controlled Trials,"by Yves Smith 
+Yves here. Even though this post is a bit wonky, it’s short and very important. And you need to read about something other than the election. Recall that Angus Deaton is the winner of the Swedish-National-Bank-named-for-Albert-Nobel prize and with Anne Case, performed an important study that exposed the spike in death rates among less-educated middle aged whites . 
+By Nancy Cartwright, Professor of Philosophy, University of Durham and University of California, San Diego and Angus Deaton, Senior Scholar and Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Economics Department, Princeton University. Originally published at VoxEU 
+In recent years, the use of randomised controlled trials has spread from labour market and welfare programme evaluation to other areas of economics (and to other social sciences), perhaps most prominently in development and health economics. This column argues that some of the popularity of such trials rests on misunderstandings about what they are capable of accomplishing, and cautions against simple extrapolations from trials to other contexts. 
+Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have been sporadically used in economic research since the negative income tax experiments between 1968 and 1980 (see Wise and Hausman 1985), and have been regularly used since then to evaluate labour market and welfare programmes (Manski and Garfinkel 1992, Gueron and Rolston 2013). In recent years, they have spread widely in economics (and in other social sciences), perhaps most prominently in development and health economics. The ‘credibility revolution’ in econometrics (Angrist and Pischke 2010) putatively frees empirical investigation from implausible and arbitrary theoretical and statistical assumptions, and RCTs are seen as the most ‘credible’ and ‘rigorous’ of the credible methods; indeed, credible non-RCT designs typically pattern themselves as closely as possible on RCTs. Imbens (2010) writes, “Randomised experiments do occupy a special place in the hierarchy of evidence, namely at the very top.” 
+In medicine, Pocock and Elbourne (2000) argue that only RCTs “can provide a reliably unbiased estimate of treatment effects”, and without such estimates, they “see considerable dangers to clinical research and even to the well-being of patients”. The link between bias and risk to patients is taken as obvious, with no attempt to show that an RCT experimental design does indeed minimise the expected harm to patients. The World Bank has run many development related RCTs, and makes claims well beyond unbiasedness. Its implementation manual states, “we can be very confident that our estimated average impact” (given as the difference in means between the treatment and control group) “constitute the true impact of the program, since by construction we have eliminated all observed and unobserved factors that might otherwise plausibly explain the differences in outcomes” (Gertler et al. 2011). High-quality evidence indeed; the truth is surely the ultimate in credibility. What Are Randomised Controlled Trials Food For? 
+In a recent paper, we argue that some of the popularity of RCTs, among the public as well as some practitioners, rests on misunderstandings about what they are capable of accomplishing (Deaton and Cartwright 2016). Well-conducted RCTs could provide unbiased estimates of the average treatment effect (ATE) in the study population, provided no relevant differences between treatment and control are introduced post randomisation, which blinding of subjects, investigators, data collectors, and analysts serves to diminish. Unbiasedness says that, if we were to repeat the trial many times, we would be right on average. Yet we are almost never in such a situation, and with only one trial (as is virtually always the case) unbiasedness does nothing to prevent our single estimate from being very far away from the truth. If, as if often believed, randomisation were to guarantee that the treatment and control groups are identical except for the treatment, then indeed, we would have a precise – indeed exact – estimate of the ATE. But randomisation does nothing of the kind, even at baseline; in any given RCT, nothing ensures that other causal factors are balanced across the groups at the point of randomisation. Investigators often test for balance on observable covariates, but unless the randomisation device is faulty, or people systematically break their assignment, the null hypothesis underlying the test is true by construction, so that the test is not informative and should not be carried out. 
+Of course, we know that the ATE from an RCT is only an estimate, not the infallible truth, and like other estimates, it has a standard error. If appropriately computed, the standard error of the estimated ATE can give an indication of the importance of other factors. As was understood by Fisher from the very first agricultural trials, randomisation, while doing nothing to guarantee balance on omitted factors, gives us a method for assessing their importance. Yet even here there are pitfalls. The t-statistics for estimated ATEs from RCTs do not in general follow the t-distribution. As recently documented by Young (2016), a large fraction of published studies have made spurious inferences because of this Fisher-Behrens problem, or because of the failure to deal appropriately with multiple-hypothesis testing. Although most of the published literature is problematic, these issues can be addressed by improvements in technique. Not so, however, in cases where individual treatment effects are skewed – as in healthcare experiments, where a one or two individuals can account for a large share of spending (this was true in the Rand Health Experiment); or in microfinance, where a few subjects make money and most do not (where the t-distribution again breaks down). Once again, inferences are likely to be wrong, but here there is no clear fix. When there are outlying individual treatment effects, the estimate depends on whether the outliers are assigned to treatments or controls, causing massive reductions in the effective sample size. Trimming of outliers would fix the statistical problem, but only at the price of destroying the economic problem; for example, in healthcare, it is precisely the few outliers that make or break a programme. In view of these difficulties, we suspect that a large fraction of the published results of RCTs in development and health economics are unreliable. 
+The ‘credibility’ of RCTs comes from their ability to get answers without the use of potentially contentious prior information about structure, such as specifying other causal factors or detailing the mechanisms through which they operate. A sceptical lay audience is often unwilling to accept prior economic knowledge and even within the profession, there are differences about appropriate assumptions or controls. Yet, as is always the case, the only route to precision is through prior information and controlling for factors that are likely to be important, just as in a (non-randomised) laboratory experiment in physics, biology, or even economics, scientists seek accurate measurement by controlling for known confounders. Cumulative science happens when new results are built on top of old ones – or undermine them – and RCTs, with their refusal to use prior science, make this very difficult. And any RCT can be challenged ex post by examining the differences between treatments and controls as actually allocated, and showing that arguably important factors were unevenly distributed; prior information is excluded by randomisation, but reappears in the interpretation of the results. 
+A well-conducted RCT can yield a credible estimate of an ATE in one specific population, namely the ‘study population’ from which the treatments and controls were selected. Sometimes this is enough; if we are doing a post hoc program evaluation, if we are testing a hypothesis that is supposed to be generally true, if we want to demonstrate that the treatment can work somewhere, or if the study population is a randomly drawn sample from the population of interest whose ATE we are trying to measure. Yet the study population is often not the population that we are interested in, especially if subjects must volunteer to be in the experiment and have their own reasons for participating or not. A famous early example comes from Ashenfelter (1981), who found that people who volunteer for a training programme tend to have seen a recent drop in their wages; similarly, people who take a drug may be those who have failed other forms of therapy. Indeed, many of the differences in results between experimental and non-experimental studies can be traced not to differences in methodology, but to differences in the populations to which they apply. The ‘Transportation’ Problem 
+More generally, demonstrating that a treatment works in one situation is exceedingly weak evidence that it will work in the same way elsewhere; this is the ‘transportation’ problem: what does it take to allow us to use the results in new contexts, whether policy contexts or in the development of theory? It can only be addressed by using previous knowledge and understanding, i.e. by interpreting the RCT within some structure, the structure that, somewhat paradoxically, the RCT gets its credibility from refusing to use. If we want to go from an RCT to policy, we need to build a bridge from the RCT to the policy. No matter how rigorous or careful the RCT, if the bridge is built by a hand-waving simile that the policy context is somehow similar to the experimental context, the rigor in the trial does nothing to support a policy; in any chain of evidence, it is the weakest link that determines the overall strength of the claim, not the strongest. Using the results of an RCT cannot simply be a matter of simple extrapolation from the experiment to another context. Causal effects depend on the settings in which they are derived, and often depend on factors that might be constant within the experimental setting but different elsewhere. Even the direction of causality can depend on the context. We have a better chance of transporting results if we recognise the issue when designing the experiment – which itself requires the commitment to some kind of structure – and try to investigate the effects of the factors that are likely to vary elsewhere. Without a structure, without an understanding of why the effects work, we not only cannot transport, but we cannot begin to do welfare economics; just because an intervention works, and because the investigator thinks the intervention makes people better off, is no guarantee that it actually does so. Without knowing why things happen and why people do things, we run the risk of worthless casual (‘fairy story’) causal theorising, and we have given up on one of the central tasks of economics. 
+See original post for references 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+2089,Climate change: What you can do (Opinion),"Susan Goldberg is the editor in chief of National Geographic magazine, which dedicated its entire November issue to climate change. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+(CNN) When National Geographic first sent some of the world's best photographers and mapmakers on assignment more than 125 years ago, we didn't set to capture the ""before"" photos for an imperiled planet. But that's exactly what happened.
+
+Over the decades, from the Matterhorn to the Great Barrier Reef to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, these intrepid explorers became the visual record-keepers of climate change.
+
+Today, that record is alarmingly clear. Since the late 19th century, Earth's average temperature has increased 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, melting glaciers and raising sea levels.
+
+As President Barack Obama noted this year, ""shrinking ice caps forced National Geographic to make the biggest change in its atlas since the Soviet Union broke apart.""
+
+Meanwhile, roughly a fifth of the Amazon rainforest , which stores a quarter of the world's carbon found on land, has been destroyed over the past 40 years. In 1980, scientists logged 291 ""catastrophic"" floods, droughts, storms and other weather events; last year, that number tripled to 904.
+
+Humans are a highly adaptive species. Just ask Greenland's Inuits who, in the words of one anthropologist, ""went from subsistence hunting to Facebook in less than a century."" But our adaptability has limits.
+
+Climate change is affecting nearly everything. It's displacing entire cultures, posing challenges to our health, weakening our economies and threatening our national security.
+
+The question we face as journalists who chronicle the state of the planet is stark: Will we write a new chapter in the progress of humankind? Or will we write the obituary of Earth?
+
+As world leaders meet in Paris this month for the U.N. Climate Change Conference, it appears, thankfully, that the years of dithering and denial finally may be behind us. While some leading presidential candidates continue to question the science and impact of climate change, recent polls show that three-quarters of Americans now acknowledge that climate change is happening.
+
+It is critical that we build on this momentum.
+
+For all the talk of alternative energy technologies, ultimately, the most important source of energy is all of us. That's why all of us -- individuals, businesses and governments -- have a responsibility to fix the problems we have caused.
+
+Take personal consumption. It's easy to assume that one person can't affect our warming world, and that's part of what makes climate change such a daunting issue to tackle. But one person can make a difference.
+
+Leaving your car at home twice a week can cut 2 tons of carbon emissions annually. If the average American family did laundry with cold water, that could save 1,600 pounds of CO2 a year. As for all the phone chargers and other electronics that we plug in and don't use? Those consume the equivalent of a dozen power plants , meaning that simply switching on and off a power strip could save your household up to $200 a year while also helping to save the planet. It just goes to show that when it comes to climate change, there's no such thing as chump change.
+
+At the same time, scientists, business leaders and entrepreneurs alike are realizing the benefits of a green economy, whether it's major U.S. corporations saving millions by cutting energy use to nascent businesses selling solar lights to off-grid vendors in India and Myanmar.
+
+Currently, just 13% of electricity in the United States comes from renewable technology. But if American industry truly commits to this undertaking, the United States could be to the Age of Climate Change what we were for the Information Age -- the driver and beneficiary of a revolutionary economy.
+
+Finally, governments need to galvanize a national and international response to this defining challenge of our time. Whoever takes the oath of office in 2017 will not only need to negotiate and adhere to strict limits on carbon emissions, but he or she will need to encourage America's transformation into a sustainable society.
+
+Already, we've seen countries such as Germany lead the way, generating more than a quarter of its electricity from renewable sources. In the United States, policymakers at every level will be responsible for upgrading outdated infrastructure, building smarter cities and spurring the development of wind, solar and other renewable technologies.
+
+The message of magazines past and future is clear. One way or another, we inhabitants of Earth need to cool it. The choice -- and the opportunity -- is ours.",REAL
+2189,Obama: Gov. Scott Walker needs to ‘bone up’ on foreign policy,"President Obama and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker traded barbs Monday after the president suggested that the likely Republican presidential candidate ""bone up on foreign policy.""
+
+Obama made the remarks in an interview with NPR published Monday, responding to a question from reporter Steve Inskeep about Walker's vow to undo a nuclear pact with Iran on his first day in the White House.
+
+In defending his administration's tentative framework with Iran over its nuclear program, Obama told NPR that he is confident that it does not need congressional approval. He added that he hopes lawmakers ""won't start calling to question the capacity of the executive branch of the United States to enter into agreements with other countries. If that starts being questioned, that's going to be a problem for our friends and that's going to embolden our enemies.""
+
+Obama added: ""And it would be a foolish approach to take, and, you know, perhaps Mr. Walker, after he's taken some time to bone up on foreign policy, will feel the same way.""
+
+Walker, who has been eager to establish his foreign policy chops ahead of a likely bid for the GOP presidential nomination next year, didn't take long to fight back with a string of Twitter messages.
+
+Walker has been overshadowed the past two weeks as a pair of rivals — Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Rand Paul (Ky.) — announced their candidacies for the Republican nomination. The governor has not impressed many of the party's leaders with his knowledge of international affairs, drawing mockery last month for refusing to talk about foreign policy on a trip to London and then for comparing his experience battling labor protesters to taking on Islamic State terrorists.
+
+Obama has been eager to sell the Iran nuclear framework to a skeptical Congress as his administration seeks to finalize a deal without lawmakers approving additional sanctions on Tehran that could scuttle the talks.",REAL
+2258,Watch: Obama criticizes Kenya's president on gay rights as they stand right by each other,"President Barack Obama forcefully disagreed with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on gay rights as they stood right by each other in a joint news conference on Saturday.
+
+""With respect to the rights of gays and lesbians, I've been consistent all across Africa on this,"" Obama said. ""I believe in the principle of treating people equally under the law, and that they are deserving of equal protection under the law, and that the state should not discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation.""
+
+Kenyatta responded later on, saying LGBTQ rights is just one of the issues that he and Obama disagree on, CNN's Kristen Holmes and Eugene Scott reported. ""Kenya and the United States, we share so many values,"" he said. ""But there are some things that we must admit we don't share — our culture, our societies don't accept. It's very difficult for us to be able to impose on people that which they themselves do not accept.""
+
+A Supreme Court decision recently legalized same-sex marriages across the US. But many countries in Africa, including Kenya, still ban same-sex relations altogether. Other countries punish same-sex relations with the death penalty.
+
+Here's a thorough breakdown of national laws from the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, which is now slightly outdated since it's missing the Supreme Court decision affirming marriage equality in the US (click to enlarge):
+
+So while the US is making great strides on LGBTQ rights, much of the rest of the world lags far behind — sometimes dangerously so for LGBTQ people.",REAL
+7375,Shallow 5.4 magnitude earthquake rattles central Italy; shakes buildings in Rome," 00 UTC © USGS Map of the earthquake's epicenter An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.4 rattled a broad swath of central Italy, including Rome, on Wednesday (Thursday NZT), just two months after a powerful temblor toppled villages, killing nearly 300 people. There were no immediate reports of damage. Italy's National Vulcanology Center said the epicenter was near Macerata, near Perugia. The US Geological Survey said it had a depth of some 10 kilometres, which is relatively shallow. The quake was felt across a broad swath of central and southern Italy, shaking centuries-old palazzi in Rome's historic centre. The Aug. 24 quake destroyed hilltop village of Amatrice and other nearby towns. Wednesday's quake was felt from Perugia in Umbria to the capital Rome to the central Italy town of Aquila, which was struck by a deadly quake in 2009. The mayor of Aquila, however, said there was no immediate report of damage. ​The quake struck at 7.10pm on Wednesday (local time). ""The earthquake only happened a few minutes ago. It's dark here, so impossible to determine if there has been any damage outside,"" one resident in Penna San Giovanni told EMSC. ""All services - electricity, internet, etc - are still working normally."" MORE TO COME",FAKE
+524,Obama’s plan to boost defense budget points to brewing national security debate,"The battle over the budget that President Obama will submit Monday is emerging as a preview of the 2016 presidential election debate on national security, an area that for now appears to be the greatest vulnerability of Obama and the Democrats.
+
+The president will ask Congress to break through its own spending caps — commonly referred to as “sequestration” — and allocate about $561 billion for Pentagon expenditures, about $38 billion more than is currently allowed under the law.
+
+There’s broad consensus in both parties that the military needs more money to modernize its forces and meet its responsibilities in a world that seems to have grown more chaotic and dangerous in the past 12 months. It’s unclear, however, how Congress and the White House can come to an agreement on where to find the additional funds.
+
+Even if both parties share the blame, a cash-strapped Pentagon could still provide an opening for Republicans — whose standing on national security issues was damaged by the Iraq war — to make an argument that they are the party best positioned to keep the country safe.
+
+“A lot of Republicans see opportunity in an election that’s a referendum on Obama’s foreign policy,” said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. A presidential election featuring Hillary Rodham Clinton, who served as Obama’s secretary of state, would raise the profile of international issues.
+
+Democrats, though, are determined to prevent the re­emergence of their pre-Iraq-war reputation as being the weaker party on defense.
+
+The impasse over the defense budget has left the Pentagon’s top generals complaining that the spending caps, which have been in place since 2013, are damaging the military at a time when the country can least afford it. The list of new threats includes Islamic State fighters, who last year seized major cities in Iraq and Syria, a Russian-backed insurrection in eastern Ukraine and the collapse of the government in Yemen.
+
+“The global security environment is more dangerous, and sequestration is still on the books as the law,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week. “It’s absolutely crazy for this country.”
+
+Obama has in recent months been able to cite a resurgent economy, strong job growth and a low unemployment rate as proof that his economic policies are delivering for the nation. “Because of the policies that this administration put in place, our economy has bounced back stronger than ever,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Friday.
+
+The public perception of the president’s handling of national security matters, amid the growing unrest in the Middle East and Ukraine, has not been nearly as strong. “We’ve had an interesting and, I would acknowledge, up-and-down year with respect to the perception of our foreign policy,” said a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the formal budget announcement.
+
+In recent years, Republicans and Democrats have been able to blunt the worst effects of the budget caps by cobbling together short-term deals that modestly increased defense and domestic spending by finding offsets — essentially, cuts to other programs or fee increases. But each year that the budget caps are in place, it gets harder to find new savings to meet the Pentagon’s needs, lawmakers and White House officials said.
+
+Republicans have shown little willingness to raise taxes to cover the costs of a bigger military budget. The White House, meanwhile, is not likely to back a budget compromise that would boost defense spending at the expense of prized domestic programs that have also been slashed in recent years.
+
+“It looks like the administration is trying, but I don’t think the fundamentals are there for a compromise,” said Kathleen Hicks, who served as a top official in the Pentagon under Obama and now is a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
+
+Republicans, long divided between deficit and defense hawks, have not made additional spending on defense a top priority in recent years. But as the economy improves and the presidential election nears, they appear to be coalescing around the need for more Pentagon spending “for no reason other than expediency,” Hicks said.
+
+“They’ll have to move to the center” on defense spending, she said. “And I do think world events are pushing them in that direction.”
+
+It is unclear how hard the Obama administration is willing to fight for more military spending. Although the president’s blueprint includes a big boost for the Pentagon, some in the president’s party have questioned his commitment on the issue. The president did not mention the need for more military spending in his State of the Union address or in a major foreign policy speech at the U.S. Military Academy in late May— an omission that some hawkish Democrats found “worrisome,” Hicks said.
+
+White House officials, though, insist that a failure to provide relief to the Pentagon would be devastating to the country’s military and its national security and that Obama will not accept a budget that carries the caps forward.
+
+The promises of more money from Congress and the White House have yet to ease concerns in the Pentagon. The top brass have been complaining for years that the budget caps have forced them to pare back training, slash troop levels and gut their modernization programs.
+
+Now their biggest worry is that lawmakers and the public have stopped listening to them on the issue and, absent a major crisis, will not fix the problem.
+
+“At what point do we lose our soldiers’ trust, the trust that we will provide them the right resources, the training and equipment?” said Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff.
+
+The military’s case for more money also has been hindered by the turmoil at the top of the Defense Department.
+
+Former defense secretary Chuck ­Hagel, who was essentially fired by Obama in November, had little background in Pentagon budget issues and generally seemed overwhelmed by the job, military officials said. Obama’s pick to replace him, Ashton B. Carter, has not been confirmed by the Senate. He has a long background serving at top levels of the Pentagon and is expected to be a more forceful and articulate advocate for lifting the budget caps.
+
+Meanwhile, liberal Democrats, eager to fend off the Republican critique that excessive domestic spending and government waste have caused the Pentagon’s budget woes, cite the supporters of the 2003 Iraq war as the real problem.
+
+“These are the same guys who voted for a war in Iraq and forgot how it was going to be paid for,” said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a possible Democratic presidential candidate. “You know how it’s paid for? It’s paid for on the credit card. We don’t know how much it will cost by the time we take care of the last veteran . . . $3 trillion or $4 trillion. They weren’t worried about that.”
+
+Missy Ryan and Steven Mufson contributed to this report.",REAL
+5147,What Trump and Clinton are looking for in a VP,"Donald Trump is looking for a veep with the political experience Trump lacks, while Hillary Clinton is looking to diversify the ticket.
+
+Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (l.) stands with Sen. Elizabeth Warren at a campaign rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, June 27. According to campaign insiders, Senator Warren is on the shortlist to be Mrs. Clinton's running mate.
+
+According to insiders, Donald Trump wants a running mate who has what he lacks – political experience –while Hillary Clinton is putting a premium on competence and diversity.
+
+Yet the presidential rivals are running strikingly similar processes for tapping their vice presidential picks: relying on prominent Washington lawyers to comb through the background of top contenders, seeking guidance from a small circle of trusted advisers and family members, and weighing their personal chemistry with prospects.
+
+Mr. Trump, a wealthy businessman who has never held public office, is mulling a small number of political veterans. He's seriously considering former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, according to people with direct knowledge of the vetting process.
+
+""We're vetting a lot of good people, and we have a lot of interest in people that want to leave high positions and do this,"" Trump said Thursday.
+
+The right VP candidate could help bring party leaders, Republican voters, and big donors into the Trump fold, all people the campaign desperately needs ahead of the general election.... With more than 60 percent of voters feeling unfavorable about Trump at the end of June, the right VP pick could help voters feel more positive about the Republican ticket.
+
+But in light of their own low favorability ratings, Ms. Hinckley wrote, ""Gingrich and Christie might not be the ones to do it.""
+
+The presumptive Republican nominee appears less concerned about diversity, considering only white men over age 50 for the role. His campaign chairman said that Trump is not interested in choosing a woman or minority for the sake of appealing to a particular segment of the electorate.
+
+Former Secretary of State Clinton has said she wants a running mate who is well-prepared to become president, and Democrats say she's giving priority to diversity and has been weighing women, Hispanic candidates, and black candidates — a nod to the voting blocs Democrats need to win in presidential elections.
+
+Top contenders for the Democratic ticket include Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of Washington's most prominent female lawmakers; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, a telegenic 41-year-old Hispanic politician; and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a white man over 50 from a swing state.
+
+New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, one of two black senators, was also being considered, though it's unclear whether he is still in the running.
+
+A running mate rarely shifts the trajectory of a presidential race, but it's still among the most important decisions nominees face during the general election, and their choice is viewed as a reflection of their priorities and values.
+
+Clinton has veteran Democratic lawyer James Hamilton overseeing her selection process, with input from longtime confidants John Podesta and Cheryl Mills. Clinton is expected to begin meeting with candidates herself next week, according to two Democrats with knowledge of the process.
+
+Given Clinton's decades in the public eye, her advisers don't expect her selection of a running mate to change her electoral prospects significantly. But one Clinton aide said it was important that her running mate help tell the ""story"" of her candidacy.
+
+Clinton has increasingly said her campaign is about Americans being ""stronger together"" — a phrase intended to convey the importance of a diverse country fighting for common goals.
+
+Aides who have worked in senior White House posts under President Obama and former President Bill Clinton have also been emphasizing the need for personal chemistry, noting that a strained relationship between a president and vice president can be destructive in the West Wing.
+
+Clinton and Trump face fast-approaching deadlines as they evaluate their choices.
+
+Trump has said he plans to announce his running mate at the Republican National Convention, which kicks off in Cleveland in just over two weeks — but the campaign has also considered pushing up the date. A person familiar with Trump's decision-making process said the one-time reality television star is weighing how to maximize the suspense of his choice. He might do it showbiz-style at the convention.
+
+Trump has spent weeks discussing his options with his adult children, business associates, and even friends from his country clubs. A.B. Culvahouse, a lawyer who has overseen vice presidential vetting for previous GOP nominees, sent vetting paperwork to top contenders late this week.
+
+While the businessman has made clear he'll tap a political veteran for the post, those close to him say that's not the only element.
+
+""He's not going to pick someone he doesn't personally like,"" according to one person with knowledge of the process. Like others who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity, they were not authorized to discuss the vice presidential process publicly.
+
+The businessman has a close relationship with most of the vice presidential finalists. He's less familiar with Governor Pence, though Marc Lotter, a spokesman for the Indiana governor, has said the two plan to meet this weekend.
+
+In choosing a political veteran, Trump would not be sending a message only to voters, but to the numerous GOP leaders who are wary of his candidacy.
+
+""That would soothe some concerns — but not all of them,"" said Kevin Madden, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee.
+
+Clinton is expected to wait until after the Republican convention to announce her running mate, allowing her to use her pick to distract from any boost Trump receives from the GOP gathering. She and her running mate will be nominated at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia the last week in July.
+
+Lemire reported from Erie, Penn. Associated Press writer Steve Peoples contributed to this report.",REAL
+7014,Trumps Hollywood Walk of Fame star Destroyed with a Sledgehammer and Pick,"Trump's Hollywood Walk of Fame star Destroyed with a Sledgehammer and Pick page: 1 link I guess you could say it a sign of the strength of feeling this election has generated but in the real world it's just a mindless piece of vandalism that achieves nothing. A man wearing high visibility jacket and helmet was filmed taking out his frustration in front of a group of onlookers. News report on the incident. I suppose it made him feel better but it will return before he goes to prison. edit on 26-10-2016 by gortex because: (no reason given) I suppose it made him feel better but it will return before he goes to prison. So he was charged then? You didn't provide a link. edit on 10/26/2016 by ColdWisdom because: (no reason given) You don't think he will be arrested and charged ? He may not be in custody yet but he will be , he will be caught. link pure filth that guy is. I get it...Donald sucks, whatever..cast your vote against him on the 8th. Consider if Obama gets a star, will some dumbass redneck be smashing that up also because he didn't like the politics? morons. followers of the DNC in action. Such peaceful folks. link a reply to: gortex Poor sumbeyotch. The low IQs are always on display on both sides. I hope he just gets probation. This is how sore losers everywhere will react when Trump wins by a landslide. I like how safety-conscious he was by wearing a high visibility jacket, though. This is how sore losers everywhere will react when Trump wins by a landslide. I like how safety-conscious he was by wearing a high visibility jacket, though. If a mouth breather like this is so upset before the election, damn, if Trump does win, how many of these ass clowns will go full retard after the 8th? Thought these stars were for artists like actors. What did Trump get the star for? For this ""not-scripted"" TV show? Is it like with the Nobel Peace Prize, everybody nowadays gets one(thinkig of Obama and the EU...) originally posted by: network dude followers of the DNC in action. Such peaceful folks. No one said he was a DNC supporter He may just be a bloke who hates racist, homophobic, misogynistic narcissists. Thought these stars were for artists like actors. What did Trump get the star for? For this ""not-scripted"" TV show? Is it like with the Nobel Peace Prize, everybody nowadays gets one(thinkig of Obama and the EU...) He got it for his role as producer on The Apprentice. originally posted by: roadgravel It could be a psyop by a Trump supporter. Make people feel for Trump's lost star and therefore vote for him. That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Nobody is going to vote for him just because somebody vandalized his star in Hollywood. edit on 10/26/2016 by AdmireTheDistance because: (no reason given)",FAKE
+1783,The GOP’s nuclear option for Donald Trump: Why the only way to beat him is so scary,"But before you really devote yourself to purging this cherisher of women from your mind, do yourself a favor and read Evan Osnos’s recent New Yorker piece on the “loose alliance” of scared and angry Americans who are driving the Trump phenomenon. As Osnos understands, Trump’s supporters, who are part of a nativist resurgence throughout Western politics, are more important than the man himself. And regardless of Trump 2016’s ultimate fate, these people aren’t going anywhere.
+
+I’ve written previously about the Trumpites (or Trumpeteers, if you prefer) and how they’re defined as much by their authoritarianism as their ethno-nationalism. But while those characteristics are certainly present among the people Osnos spoke to for his report, another trait jumps out, too. And it’s one that helps explain why the Republican Party establishment is so out of touch, and so incapable of defeating Trump in a zero-sum battle for influence.
+
+The trait is a lack of belief. Not in God or country, both of which Trump supporters rather enjoy, but rather in the fundamental legitimacy of American society’s most powerful and entrenched institutions; the government, the banks, the media, the academy, etc. Because aside from one extremely notable exception (which we’ll talk about in a bit), there’s not a single major institution of American political life that these folks wouldn’t like to see Trump conquer — the Republican Party itself very much included.
+
+For a sense of how this plays out in the real world, think of the now-infamous opening question of the GOP’s first top-tier presidential debate. In truth, the question was more of an order: Any candidate who would not promise to support the GOP in 2016, regardless of the candidate, was asked to raise their hand. The request was ostensibly directed toward all of the debate participants, but everyone knew its real target was the only candidate who hadn’t ruled out a third-party run: Trump.
+
+The question was an attempt to bring Trump to heel by leveraging the Republican Party’s institutional prestige against him. The goal was simple: expose Trump as a bad team-player. And if we lived in a time when party loyalty mattered, it probably would’ve worked. But the devoted reactionaries who now comprise the GOP base don’t trust — much less like — the “RINOs” among them. The patent anti-Trump bias of the Fox News/Republican Party borg only made them love him more.
+
+That’s certainly the impression you get reading Osnos’s piece, or this Time report on a recent focus group run by Frank Luntz. One woman tells Luntz that she is “frustrated beyond belief.” She says she feels like she’s been “lied to,” because despite Republican gains in the 2014 midterms, “[n]othing’s getting better.” Her sentiment was widely and deeply shared. “We’ve got to show the Republicans that we’ve had it with them,” another woman said. “They treat us like crap,” she added. “That’s why we want Trump.”
+
+It’s hard to imagine there’s anything the Republican Party can do in this climate to win the favor of Trump’s supporters. But state Republican Party efforts in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia to “compel” Trump to swear loyalty to the GOP are especially doomed. Such an ultimatum is not only “[t]he kind of thing that could make [Trump] bolt the GOP,” as ex-Trump advisor Roger Stone tweeted. It’s the kind of thing that could make Trump supporters in those states vote for a third-party. Or simply not vote. So the GOP is in quite a bind. If it goes after Trump, it will only bring him and his supporters closer together. But if the Republican Party tries to ignore him, or allow him to transform it into an American version of UKIP, then it will no longer be able to serve its fundamental purpose of winning elective office for Republican candidates — especially the ones aiming for the White House. And if you’re looking at this from the perspective of the GOP as an institution, that’s unacceptable. For conservatives trying to win the Trumpites back to the GOP, it seems, the Holy Grail would align the party with an institution that has even more gravitas and authority than Donald Trump. And as I said earlier, polling suggests there is at least one institution that fits the bill. Using it as a wedge to separate Trump from his admirers, however, would raise some major ethical questions. For example, what if the cure for Trumpism is somehow even worse? Because the institution in question is the military — which Americans trust far more than the media, organized religion, and the rest of the government — that’s a real concern. It was when he spoke of the armed forces that Luntz’s focus group adored Trump the most. “[T]he military is going to be so strong,” he promised, “nobody is going to mess around with the United States.” He got nearly unanimous 100s for that boast, apparently; “a seldom occurrence among focus groups,” according to Time. Perhaps the world should be thankful, then, that there is no war hero or celebrity general for the GOP to task with destroying Trump. (Thanks, Paula!) But if we assume that Trump is succeeding mainly because he reaches voters who felt otherwise ignored, and not because of any extraordinary political talents, then there’s no reason to think the problem Trump represents will go away once he does. It could just as easily come back again and again and again, each time in a slightly different form. And if the GOP eventually does find a military figure who is acceptable to the establishment while simultaneously bringing the Trumpites back into the party tent? Well, then there may be a time in the not-so-distant future when we’ll pine for the relatively benign and innocent days of the Summer of Trump.",REAL
+171,Checking a claim that 'nobody did anything wrong' on Benghazi,"As part of a partnership with Factcheck.org, a look at Hillary Clinton's recent claim regarding the various congressional investigations into the 2012 Benghazi attacks. Clinton claimed that the seven investigations have found that 'I and nobody did anything wrong.' Did they really?
+
+Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said all of the government investigations into the terrorist attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi concluded that ""nobody did anything wrong."" That's not exactly accurate.
+
+An independent accountability board appointed by Clinton found ""systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels."" On the day the report came out, four State Department employees were placed on administrative leave, and all four were later reassigned.",REAL
+736,Who's winning Indiana? It's anybody's guess,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+4283,"Palin’s endorsement the latest prize as Trump, Cruz battle for conservatives","The escalating feud between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz has expanded into a fight for the backing of the GOP’s anti-establishment establishment, with both seeking validation from figures with immense influence on the right.
+
+Trump unfurled a highly anticipated endorsement from former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin while campaigning in Iowa on Tuesday, giving him a jolt among the party’s restless base. Palin’s endorsement came a day after Trump received the effusive praise of evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr., whose views could help Trump among religious voters.
+
+But other conservative voices, many of whom had cheered Trump in recent months, have rallied to Cruz’s side. On talk radio, Mark Levin and Glenn Beck have fumed over Trump’s recent questions about Cruz’s Canadian birth. In Cruz, they see a movement leader who champions their values, whereas they say Trump is an interloper who lacks an ideological core.
+
+The frenzied courting of conservatives is testament to their power in shaping a contest that is being dominated by two Washington outsiders. Neither has won the backing of a single governor or senator — and it’s unclear that either man even wants to. In this race, it is the media titans, personalities and activists who have long stood on the GOP’s fringe who now have all the cachet.
+
+“You need a scorecard to keep track,” said Craig Shirley, a conservative historian. “Talk radio and bloggers — anyone outside of the system is at the center of the party, and we’re witnessing in real time the shift away from the Republican establishment in deciding who the nominee will be.”
+
+Palin on Tuesday described Trump as someone who could change the status quo in American politics, and she praised his values as a father and community leader.
+
+“He builds big things, things that touch the sky,” she said as Trump looked on, glowingly. “He has spent his life looking up.”
+
+Of the GOP leadership and critics of Trump, she said: “They are so busted. . . . What the heck would the establishment know about conservatism?”
+
+After Palin finished, Trump waved and put his arm around her. “We’re going to give them hell,” he said as the crowd roared.
+
+The value of Palin’s endorsement was hotly debated Tuesday, with Trump supporters saying her popularity in Iowa will give the reality-TV star a significant lift and Cruz backers playing down her impact.
+
+Barry Bennett, Ben Carson’s former campaign manager, sided with those who thought it was consequential. “I think Sarah Palin actually helps Trump a lot because she’s showing them that it’s okay,” Bennett said. “Whatever lack of credentials he has, he’s making some inroads into places where we didn’t think he’d play.”
+
+One key Cruz ally said Palin could help Trump win over women. “He’s a thrice-married, non-churchgoing billionaire, and she gives him credibility with conservative women,” said Kellyanne Conway, who manages a Cruz super PAC. “It’s a net positive.”
+
+Palin’s move came as a surprise to some in her orbit, given her friendly rapport with both Trump and Cruz. In 2011, she dined with Trump at a pizza shop in New York as she mulled her own White House bid, and, according to Republicans familiar with her thinking, she has been increasingly enthusiastic about Trump as he has surged in the current race. Their circles also overlap: Trump’s political director, Michael Glassner, is a former Palin aide.
+
+Aside from Palin, Trump’s campaign is backed by prominent conservatives such as activist Phyllis Schlafly and radio host Michael Savage. Willie Robertson, a star of the “Duck Dynasty” ­reality-TV show, is with Trump, too.
+
+Last week, it was Cruz who won the support of another “Duck Dynasty” star, when Phil Robertson signed on. The senator from Texas is also backed by longtime activists such as L. Brent Bozell III and Richard Viguerie, social conservative leader James Dobson, and actor James Woods.
+
+It is on talk radio, especially, where Cruz has built support, which has proved critical now that Trump has taken to attacking him relentlessly. Most of these drive-time and lunch-hour heroes to rank-and-file Republicans were initially complimentary of Trump’s focus on illegal immigration last year, but they have since soured.
+
+“I’m sick and tired of stupid talk!” Levin said Monday on his program. “This is why I’m sick and tired of stupid issues! I didn’t spend 40 years of my life — 45 to be exact — to reach a point where we actually might take back the White House with somebody who is conservative, whomever that is, to be discussing birther issues!”
+
+On Saturday, Beck will appear in Waterloo, Iowa, at a rally hosted by a pro-Cruz super PAC. Those who are planning to be with Beck onstage attest to Cruz’s strength on the right in the state: Rep. Steve King, conservative author David Barton and Christian organizer Bob Vander Plaats. Cruz is banking on that deep goodwill, carefully built up over the course of the 2013 government shutdown and the 2014 elections, to sustain him.
+
+Trump and Cruz had spent most of the campaign praising each other, but they have switched to attack mode ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1.
+
+Trump’s case against Cruz is more temperamental than ideological. He has called the Texan “nasty” and disliked by his Senate colleagues, and has wondered aloud, repeatedly, whether Cruz’s birth in Canada leaves him vulnerable to lawsuits over his citizenship.
+
+“When you talk about temperament, Ted has got a rough temperament,” Trump said Tuesday in Winterset, Iowa, ahead of the Palin event. “You can’t call people liars on the Senate floor, when they are your leader.”
+
+Cruz has a more understated approach. He mostly avoids taking personal shots at Trump and keeps his emphasis on the policy differences between them, pointing out where the businessman has sided with Democrats, in particular.
+
+“If you’re looking for someone who’s a dealmaker, who will capitulate even more to the Democrats and give in to Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, then perhaps Donald Trump is your man,” Cruz told reporters Tuesday at a stop in Barnstead, N.H.
+
+Palin’s endorsement, which came after days of teasing by Trump’s campaign and widespread speculation on cable TV, riled the right in the hours before it was made official.
+
+Appearing Tuesday morning on CNN, Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler called Palin’s expected nod a “blow” to her reputation because “she would be endorsing someone who’s held progressive views all their life.”
+
+“I think if it was Sarah Palin — let me just say, I’d be deeply disappointed,” he said.
+
+Supporters of Palin and Trump responded with fury. In a blog post, Palin’s eldest daughter, Bristol, wrote that Tyler’s remark “makes me hope my mom does endorse Trump.”
+
+By the afternoon, after Sarah Palin’s endorsement, Cruz felt compelled to clarify that Tyler’s view did not reflect his own. “I love Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is fantastic,” he told reporters. “I will always remain a big, big fan of Sarah Palin’s.”
+
+The drama Tuesday was not limited to the right. Fault lines were beginning to be drawn by members of the GOP leadership as they grappled with the possibility of having the race come down to Trump or Cruz, rather than a candidate who is a more natural fit with donors and party brass.
+
+Speaking at an Iowa energy summit, Gov. Terry Branstad (R) called Cruz an “opponent of renewable fuels” who should be defeated.
+
+Trump reacted gleefully on Twitter: “Wow, the highly respected Governor of Iowa just stated that ‘Ted Cruz must be defeated.’ Big shocker! People do not like Ted.”
+
+Branstad’s position reflects a broader unease with Cruz among Republican leaders. In Trump, most party leaders see a candidate who is unpredictable and controversial, but far less ideological than Cruz and, therefore, more likely to work with them. Several have reached out to Trump in recent weeks as their preferred candidates have stalled in the polls.
+
+Cruz was dismissive of Branstad and said the development signals his own stature as the race’s only true conservative outsider. “It is no surprise that the establishment is in full panic mode,” Cruz told reporters Tuesday.
+
+Rush Limbaugh, who has not picked a side in the Trump-Cruz standoff, said on his program Tuesday that “Trump is trying to position Cruz as angry, unstable, can’t get along with anybody, and thus will not be able to do deals. . . . Cruz is trying to highlight Trump’s past liberalism, ‘New York values,’ what have you. . . . Now, we’ll see if this works.”
+
+Jenna Johnson and Jose DelReal in Iowa, and Philip Rucker, David Weigel and Katie Zezima in New Hampshire contributed to this report.",REAL
+10304,Refugee Resettlement Watch: Swept Away In North Carolina, ,FAKE
+3691,Unravelling Chattanooga: What do we know about shooter?,"The man authorities say killed four Marines in Chattanooga, Tenn., Thursday has no known connections to terrorist organizations and was seen by his peers as 'normal.'
+
+A mugshot of Muhammod Youssuf Abdulazeez from a DUI charge in April in Hamilton County is seen in this image provided by the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office Thursday. Investigators on Thursday sought to determine what led a 24-year-old gunman to open fire at two military offices in Chattanooga, Tenn., killing four Marines in an attack officials said could be an act of domestic terrorism. Abdulazeez, identified as the shooter by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was shot to death in the rampage that also injured three people.
+
+Authorities say the man they believe killed four Marines in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Thursday had not previously been on their radar, and that no connection has been found yet tying him to an international terrorist organization.
+
+Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was a 24-year-old, Kuwait-born, naturalized American. Officials and witnesses say Mr. Abdulazeez opened fire on a military recruiting center and a Navy-Marine training center several miles away. Three people were wounded, in addition to the four Marines killed.
+
+Abdulazeez was also killed during the attack, by what a US official said was a shot fired by Chattanooga police.
+
+Details on the motives for Abdulazeez’s attack and on the ""numerous weapons"" used in the attack are still unknown.
+
+""We are looking at every possible avenue, whether it was terrorism, whether it's domestic, international, or whether it was a simple criminal act,"" FBI agent Ed Reinhold said.
+
+The FBI issued the following statement Thursday:
+
+The FBI’s Knoxville Field Office, along with the Chattanooga Police Department and other law enforcement partners, are working jointly to investigate today’s shootings at a military recruitment center and a reserve center in Chattanooga, Tennessee in which four individuals were killed and three injured. The shooter, Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, 24, is also deceased. While it would be premature to speculate on the motives of the shooter at this time, we will conduct a thorough investigation of this tragedy and provide updates as they are available.
+
+Marilyn Hutcheson, who works across the street from where one of the attacks took place, says she heard a barrage of gunfire begin around 11 am. The incident lasted about 20 minutes, she said.
+
+""I couldn't even begin to tell you how many,"" Ms. Hutcheson told The Associated Press. ""It was rapid-fire, like pow-pow-pow-pow-pow, so quickly. The next thing I knew, there were police cars coming from every direction.""
+
+Abdulazeez, an electrical engineering graduate from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, had been popular among his peers, says Hussnain Javid, who attended both high school and college with Abdulazeez.
+
+“He was very outgoing,” Mr. Javid told AP. “Everyone knew of him.”
+
+Another high school peer, Greg Raymond called Abdulazeez “creative” and “light-minded,” but disagreed that he was popular.
+
+""He was a really calm, smart, and cool person who joked around. Like me, he wasn't very popular so we always kind of got along. He seemed like a really normal guy,"" Mr. Raymond told AP.
+
+Residents in the neighborhood where authorities believed he lived also said they did not know Abdulazeez or his family very well.
+
+The attacks come at a time when the US military and law enforcement officials have warned about “lone wolves” threatening domestic targets, as well as during the month of Ramadan, when the Islamic State has threatened intensified violence and has encouraged extremist attacks in the United States.
+
+Evidence connecting Abdulazeez to the Islamic State has not been found, but the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks extremist groups, said Abdulazeez wrote online Monday that “life is short and bitter” and that Muslims should take opportunities to “submit to Allah.”
+
+President Obama said Thursday that a prompt investigation would ensue, and that the White House had told the Pentagon to keep military installations vigilant.
+
+""It is a heartbreaking circumstance for these individuals who served our country with great valor to be killed in this fashion,"" Mr. Obama said.
+
+This report contains material from Reuters and the Associated Press.",REAL
+8709,November Kale,"This is the planet Post Article Comment 
+These discussions are not moderated. We rely on users to police themselves, and flag inappropriate comments and behavior. In accordance with our Guidelines and Policies , we reserve the right to remove any post at any time for any reason, and will restrict access of registered users who repeatedly violate our terms. OpEdNews welcomes lively, CIVIL discourse. Personal attacks and/or hate speech are not tolerated and may result in banning. Comments should relate to the content above. Irrelevant, off-topic comments are a distraction, and will be removed. By submitting this comment, you agree to all OpEdNews rules, guidelines and policies.",FAKE
+2627,'There appear to be no rules anymore',"There is an path for Democrats to regain the presidency — and it does not run through Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin.",REAL
+2237,"University of Missouri, please immediately fire employees who taunted media","To watch the video of photographer Tim Tai getting pushed around by a turf-protecting scrum of protesters at the University of Missouri is to experience constitutional angst.
+
+“You don’t have a right to take our photos,” said one protester at the university’s Mel Carnahan Quadrangle following the news that University system President Tim Wolfe and chancellor R. Bowen Loftin would resign amid an uproar about racial issues on campus.
+
+“I do have the right to take photos,” replied Tai, a 20-year-old senior at the university who was shooting the proceedings on Monday on assignment for ESPN.com. A former staff photographer for the Columbia Missourian, Tai was forced by circumstances to double-task as he attempted to take photographs and provide civics lessons.
+
+Following the announcement of the resignations, Tai chronicled a celebration including the protest group Concerned Student 1950. After 10 minutes or so of jubilation, said Tai in an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog, protesters decided that it was time to push the media away from an encampment of tents on the quad’s lawn. ” ‘Media, get off the grass,’ ” said the organizers, as Tai recalls.
+
+Yet he wasn’t backing up. He wanted some good shots of the tents, and that’s where the trouble started.
+
+“You’re an unethical reporter; you do not respect our space.”
+
+Those were just a few of the taunts that Tai received as he attempted to do his work. His references to a certain founding document persuaded precisely none of his opponents. “Ma’am, the First Amendment protects your right to be here and mine,” he said. At one point, Tai tangled with a protester about the absence of any law proscribing his presence on this disputed grass. “Forget a law — how about humanity?” protested the protester.
+
+So much for the ideal of the American collegiate quad as a locus of tolerance and free expression. Time to usher in a new ethic of intimidation, a twist that carries some irony at the Columbia, Mo., campus. Back in February 1987, 58 protesters seeking the university’s divestiture from companies that do business in South Africa were arrested for trespassing on the quad. They were dropped in all cases but one, who secured an acquittal on the grounds that the quad was a highly public space.
+
+“The people who were trying to impede the photographer, in effect, were trying to impede his rights to be there,” says Sandy Davidson, a curators’ teaching professor at the University of Missouri school of journalism. Nor was Tai intent on peering into the tents with his lenses. “I was not trying to get into the tents,” says Tai. “I wanted a picture of the tents, placing it in the quad … because that’s part of the story.” Regarding the restraint that the protesters were demanding, Tai felt this wasn’t the time. “I think … there are times when it’s best for photographers to put their camera down,” he says. However: “In this situation, this was national news, breaking news … at a public university and the students involved have become public figures.”
+
+Upon checking his photos, Tai realized that the obstruction worked. “They didn’t turn out well because all the hands were in the way, and you know …,” he says. Were he to be given a redo, he’d likely just move to another spot. “At the moment, I felt I had to stand up for being there,” he says.
+
+Tom Warhover, executive editor of the Columbia Missourian, said the Tai video aligns with recent events. “The protesters all week have asked people kind of to stay out of the tent area proper, if you will, and so we’ve had many confrontations because it is a public space and … other students have a right to be there,” says Warhover, who approves of how Tai carried himself: “I’m pretty proud of Tim’s actions, both standing up for himself and his job but doing it in a way that didn’t provoke.” Through his travels, Tai has learned that on one hand, the protesters “want to protect idea of privacy and protect a safe space where not they’re not overwhelmed with the attention. On the other hand, they want to control the narrative themselves because they feel the media has not treated minority or black stories accurately.”
+
+There’s no excuse for protesters to push a photographer in a public square; there’s no excuse for protesters to appeal for respect while failing to respect; there’s no excuse for protesters to dis the same rights that allow them to do their thing.
+
+And there’s even less excuse for faculty and staff members at the University of Missouri to engage in some of this very same behavior. In his chat with this blog, Tai cited the involvement of Richard J. “Chip” Callahan, professor and chair of religious studies at the university. In the opening moments of the video, Callahan faces off with Tai over whether the photographer can push to get any closer to the tents. “I’m not gonna push them,” says Tai.
+
+Moments later, the protesters resolve to throw up their hands (literally) to show Tai who owns this public roost. Callahan participates in this collective action. As Tai swivels his camera from place to place, Callahan shuffles to block the sight paths. Behold these screenshots:
+
+Callahan, after moving a bit to the left and holding up his hands.
+
+Callahan again, after moving to the right with hands aloft. The religious studies prof paired agility drills with his censorship.
+
+A source with access to Callahan’s tweets (they’re “protected“) passes along these screenshots to yield some insight on his views regarding the media and the protests at the university:
+
+Callahan didn’t respond to e-mails and phone calls. The university’s media office said it has no comment at this point on the staffers. Not only did Tai identify Callahan as the person at the start of the video, but so did Peter Legrand, a graduate who took courses from Callahan.
+
+At the 2:00 minute mark in the above video, Janna Basler, the university’s assistant director of Greek life and leadership, adds her own thuggish sensibilities to the mix: “Sir, I am sorry, these are people too. You need to back off. Back off, go!” In her showdown with Tai, Basler lays bare how little she knows about photography. As they tussle about a woman with whom Tai had just finished arguing, Basler says, “She gets to decide whether she’s going to talk to you or not.”
+
+Tai responds like someone who’s interested in securing images, not quotes: “I don’t want her to talk to me,” he says as Basler gets in his face. When Tai asks her whether she’s with the office of Greek life, Basler responds, “No, my name is Concerned Student of 1950.”
+
+And the video ends with assistant professor of communication Melissa Click essentially threatening a journalist: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”
+
+These three university employees had a chance to stick up for free expression on Monday. Instead, they stood up for coercion and darkness. They should lose their jobs as a result.
+
+UPDATE: The university’s journalism school dean has released a statement reading, in part, as follows:",REAL
+1064,How Trump vs. Clinton could reshape the electoral map,"A prospective general election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could significantly alter which states are in play this fall and heighten more than in any recent election the racial, class and gender divisions within the national electorate.
+
+After successive campaigns in which President Obama expanded the Democrats’ electoral map options by focusing on fast-growing and increasingly diverse states, a 2016 race between Clinton and Trump could devolve principally into a pitched battle for the Rust Belt.
+
+With a focus on trade issues and by tapping anti-establishment anger, Trump would seek to energize white working-class Americans, who Republicans believe have been on the sidelines in recent elections in substantial numbers. Trump would also attempt to peel away voters who have backed Democrats, a potentially harder task.
+
+At the same time, Clinton could find Trump a powerful energizing force on her behalf among African Americans and Latinos, which could help to offset the absence of Obama on the ticket after two elections that drew huge minority turnout. That could put off-limits to Trump some states with large Hispanic populations where Republicans have competed intensely in recent elections.
+
+Although polls give Clinton a solid advantage over Trump in a general election, many Democrats remain wary because of what one party strategist called “the unpredictability of Trump.” As one former member of Obama’s campaign team put it, “I feel like in some ways my brain has to think differently than it ever has.”
+
+Democrats will assess the landscape in several ways: which states are likely to be in play, which of those are different from past elections, and which voting groups present particular problems. They expect to update their analyses constantly, given how quickly Trump can have an impact on events.
+
+A Washington Post-ABC News poll from earlier this month showed stark divides among those backing Trump and Clinton.
+
+Overall, the former secretary of state led 50 to 41 percent among registered voters. Trump led 49 to 40 percent among white voters, while Clinton led 73 to 19 among non-whites. Trump led by five points among men, and Clinton was up by 21 among women. Trump led by 24 points among whites without college degrees, while Clinton led by 15 among whites with degrees.
+
+Many Republicans fear that numbers like those could doom the party to defeat in the fall, and they remain hopeful that they can stop Trump in the primaries or at a contested convention. But some Democrats worry that polling data about Trump could provide a false sense of security because voters might be reluctant to acknowledge that they intend to back him.
+
+Party strategists and independent analysts have just begun to explore in-depth the contours of a Trump vs. Clinton election, examining in particular how the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate might affect the preferences of specific voter blocs. More difficult to assess, but no less important, is how a Trump-Clinton contest would affect turnout among those groups.
+
+The main conclusion to date is that a Trump nomination would test theories among some Republicans about the potential strength and power of the white vote to change the electorate and give the GOP the White House. Given what is known, Trump would appear to have no choice but to center his energies on states in the industrial and upper Midwest.
+
+The eventual conclusions of party strategists about Trump’s possible route to victory will affect critical choices for both campaigns as they decide where to invest tens of millions of dollars in resources for television ads, where to deploy their most extensive voter mobilization and get-out-the vote operations, and where the nominees will concentrate their campaign travel in the fall.
+
+Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the progressive Center for American Progress, said Trump’s only path to victory lies in “a spike of white working-class support. . . . It’s trying to break apart the heartland part of the ‘blue wall,’ with less emphasis on the rest of the country.”
+
+The “blue wall” is a term coined by journalist Ronald Brownstein of Atlantic Media and refers to the 18 states plus the District of Columbia that Democrats have won in the past six elections. Those states add up to 242 electoral votes, giving Democrats a foundation and therefore several combinations of other states to get to 270.
+
+Among the 18 states that have been in Democratic hands since the 1992 election are Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Along with Ohio and Iowa, those heartland states are likely to be the most intensely contested battlegrounds in the country if a Trump-Clinton race materializes.
+
+All those states have higher concentrations of white voters, including larger percentages of older, white working-class voters, than many of the states in faster-growing areas that Obama looked to in his two campaigns.
+
+“If he drives big turnout increases with white voters, especially with white male voters, that has the potential to change the map,” said a veteran of Obama’s campaigns, who spoke anonymously in order to share current analysis of the fall campaign.
+
+Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist and veteran of past presidential campaigns, said Trump’s overall general election strength is unpredictable at this point, in part because Trump could campaign as a different candidate from the one on display throughout the primaries. But he said that what Trump has shown to date is an ability to surprise his opponents and offer crosscutting messages to draw support.
+
+“To be successful as a Republican candidate you have to be the equivalent of a neutron bomb,” Schmidt said. “He’s a neutron bomb. Donald Trump has been disruptive in the way Uber has been disruptive in the taxi industry.”
+
+No one expects a totally different electoral map in a Trump-Clinton campaign, given the hardening of red-blue divisions. Analysts say that nearly all the same states that have been fought over in recent elections will remain potential targets, especially at the start of the general election. Ohio, Florida and likely Virginia in particular will be fought over until the very end of the election.
+
+On the other hand, states such as Nevada, New Mexico and possibly Colorado could see less competition unless Trump can overcome his extraordinarily high negative ratings within the Hispanic community.
+
+The two pairs of presidential campaigns since the beginning of the 21st century proved to be remarkably static in terms of the number of battleground states and whether they voted Republican or Democratic.
+
+Those campaigns collectively also highlight the shrinking number of truly contested states. In 2000, there were 12 such states decided by fewer than five points. By 2012, there were just four.
+
+The 2000 and 2004 campaigns produced close finishes in the electoral college, with Republicans winning both with fewer than 290 electoral votes. The 2004 campaign was a virtual rerun of 2000, with just three states shifting to the other party: Iowa and New Mexico in the direction of the Republicans and New Hampshire to the Democrats.
+
+Obama’s 2008 campaign changed the map, with nine states that had supported then-president George W. Bush in 2004 backing the Democratic nominee. The 2012 campaign, like 2004, reinforced the status quo. By the end of the campaign, there were only a handful of real battlegrounds and just two states shifted from 2008: Indiana and North Carolina. Both moved in the direction of the Republicans.
+
+William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that if Trump were to carry Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and either New Hampshire or Minnesota, he would not need some of the traditional Southern battlegrounds. Frey hastened to add that such a sweep of the Midwest appears highly unlikely. Nonetheless, he said that path through the Midwest would hold the keys to victory for Republicans if the New York businessman is their nominee.
+
+What makes the coming campaign so intriguing is that Trump’s and Clinton’s demographic strengths are near-mirror opposites. He has drawn significant support among white working-class voters during his march toward the Republican nomination, especially white men. Clinton has drawn sizable support among minority voters, particularly African Americans, in her contest against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
+
+Trump’s strength among men is offset by his weakness among women. Clinton has at times struggled to attract younger women in her battle with Sanders, but few doubt she would have a significant advantage in a general election campaign against Trump.
+
+Similarly, Trump’s support among white voters without college degrees could be offset by the prospect of similarly strong support among whites with college degrees — a growing force in the Democratic coalition.
+
+The focus on white working-class voters will not negate the key role minority voters could play in the outcome next November. “I think that energy underneath the wings of the minority community could be as strong as it was for Barack Obama, only this time against Donald Trump,” Frey said.
+
+One Democratic strategist said that on the basis of preliminary analysis of poll data, Trump’s vote share among Hispanics could be lower than Mitt Romney’s 27 percent share in 2012 and that his margin among African Americans could be nearly as low as Romney’s.
+
+A recent Washington Post-Univision poll of Hispanic voters showed Trump currently doing worse than Romney, trailing Clinton in a hypothetical general election by 73 to 16 percent.
+
+Republican Schmidt, however, warned Democrats that Trump could prove more appealing to minority voters, especially African Americans, than they assume. “He’s an asymmetric threat,” Schmidt said. “He fits into none of the conventions. He has a completely unorthodox style.”",REAL
+849,Trump ups the ante in Indiana,"Encouraged by a new poll giving him a double-digit lead in the state and eager to pivot to the general election, the Republican front-runner stressed the importance of Indiana's Tuesday GOP primary more than he or his top advisers have previously.
+
+""Indiana is so important and we have to win it,"" Trump said to a crowd of approximately 1,500 people packed into a theater here in Terre Haute, Indiana. ""If we win Indiana, it's over.""
+
+While also echoing his top advisers' comments that he can clinch the nomination without Indiana's 57-delegate prize, Trump urged Indiana Republicans to put him over the top -- a victory that would solidify Trump's increasingly clear path to winning the GOP nomination on the first ballot of the party's summer convention.
+
+Still, Trump didn't relent in his attacks against the Texas senator, whom Trump accused of being a liar. Trump also focused on Cruz's now non-existent path to winning the GOP nomination on the first ballot of the convention and mocked Cruz for announcing a running mate , former GOP candidate and businesswoman Carly Fiorina , under those circumstances. Cruz can only stake a claim to win his party's nomination if he can keep Trump from clinching the 1,237 delegates needed before the party's July convention.
+
+""I've been saying that!"" Trump exclaimed.
+
+Cruz was born in Canada to an American citizen mother -- his Cuban-born father later became a citizen. Trump has that used to claim Cruz is not a ""natural-born citizen"" and therefore ineligible to be president.
+
+The Cruz campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
+
+A win in Indiana Tuesday could depress Trump's rivals' hopes of keeping him from the 1,237 delegate mark necessary for a GOP nomination win. Trump suggested Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich -- who formed a pact with Cruz to stay out of Indiana and focus on other states -- might drop out if Trump triumphs in the Hoosier State.
+
+That, Trump said, would give him a chance to try and bring much-needed unity to a fractured Republican Party.
+
+""It's really important that we win because if we win -- you know, we want to raise money for the party and we want to raise money for the Senate races and the congressional races and do a lot of things instead of wasting our time with these people,"" Trump said.
+
+But Trump's ongoing primary battle didn't stop him on Sunday from knocking the former secretary of state repeatedly before a rowdy crowd of Hoosier supporters.
+
+Still, he pressed a plea for Indiana voters to deliver him a victory Tuesday that he said would empower him to focus on Clinton.
+
+""Please. Let's focus on Hillary,"" he said.",REAL
+1802,"Plutocrats love Jeb, but voters don’t: Bush’s “electability” argument is getting even weaker","A CNN/ORC poll released Wednesday pins Jeb Bush’s favorable rating at 35 percent compared to 57 percent who view him unfavorably. The only good news is that he’s 30 points above water among Republicans, 61 percent to 31 percent, and Republicans are the demographic that counts in a Republican primary. (He remains underwater among Tea Party supporters, though.) He’s way underwater among Democrats — but also among independents, who view him unfavorably 30 percent to 62 percent.
+
+Then there’s ol’ Don Trump, who’s long held the position of candidate viewed most unfavorably (though very much liked by the people who do view him favorably, hence the high national and early-state polling numbers). Trump’s favorability rating sits at 38 percent, with his unfavorable at 58 percent. Not that different from Bush.
+
+And then consider how each fares in a matchup with Hillary Clinton, whose favorables aren’t in such great shape either. Clinton defeats Trump by six percentage points, 51 percent to 45 percent. Against Bush? She leads by nine percentage points, 52 percent to 43 percent.
+
+All of which raises some questions about what, exactly, the GOP establishment and the many, many wealthy donors who have donated to Bush see in him, expect from him. Or as the New York Times’ Nate Cohn puts it:
+
+Jeb Bush is supposed to be the electable one. That’s why establishment donors flock to him: get him past the primary by giving his super PAC over $100 million, with which he can slam everyone else for as long as necessary, and then he can win the general election in a way that Cruz or Walker or Trump cannot. That’s because Jeb is supposedly the most reasonable of the general election candidates, the least beholden to ideological overreach, and the one most rhetorically open-armed about wooing Hispanic voters into the Republican coalition.
+
+The only problem is that the more the public sees of Jeb, the more they dislike him and the thought of him becoming president. That wretched 30-62% figure among independents, combined with a head-to-head hypothetical in which he fares worse against Hillary Clinton than TRUMP! does, would seem to throw the whole rationale behind the Jeb Bush campaign down the toilet. Which is funny, because Jeb Bush doesn’t come across as nearly as much of an asshole as many of the other candidates do. He can seem mumbly or boring or stilted, but not actively malevolent. That he’s doing so poorly among independents — and that 92 percent of independents know enough about him to have an opinion — is likely a function of his last name. Bush hopes that the more he shows himself and explains his plans, the more he’ll be viewed as his own person. He’s not executing this plan especially well. The smartest thing that Jeb Bush has done this year was convince a whole host of wealthy Republican donors and establishment operatives to get behind his candidacy early. Now that they’ve invested so much into this candidate, they’re willing to stick it out well past the point at which the candidate has proven himself to be a boob.",REAL
+7670,300 US Marines Deployed To Norway Near Russian Border For First Time Since World War II,"By wmw_admin on October 29, 2016 US Preparing For War With Russia? Cristina Silva — IBT Oct 25, 2016 This 1997 aerial photograph shows the entrance to a cave facility the U.S. military uses in the Trondheim region of central Norway. Heavy armour, tanks, artillery and Armoured Personnel Carriers are pre-positioned in the cave complex ready for use by thousands of NATO troops who could be flown into Norway should conflict erupt with Russia. (Defense Department photo courtesy of the National Archives). Click to enlarge 
+More than 300 Marines will be deployed to Norway along the Russian border as tensions between Moscow and Washington over conflicts in Ukraine and Syria have provoked new threats of sanctions and military upgrades. The deployment marks the first time a foreign military will be on the ground in Norway since World War II, according to Reuters. 
+The Marines will take part in training and manoeuvres in near Arctic conditions. They will be stationed at the Vaernes military base in central Norway about 600 miles from Russia and will “increase NATO’s ability to rapidly aggregate and employ forces in northern Europe,” Major General Niel Nelson, commander of U.S. Marines in Europe, said Monday. 
+Norway typically maintains good relations with the Kremlin and the two nations share a 122-mile border in the Arctic. But the Russian military has raised concerns in recent months after ordering its troops to train along Norwegian airspace and expand remote border roads. Moscow’s recent military exercises near Sweden, Denmark and Finland, as well as the former Soviet Union states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have also stroked fears of a miltary build-up. 
+“This U.S. initiative is welcome and also fits well within ongoing processes in NATO to increase exercises, training and interoperability within the Alliance,” Norwegian Defence Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide said in the statement. “The defence of Norway is dependent on allied reinforcements, and it is crucial for Norwegian security that our allies come here to gain knowledge of how to operate in Norway and with Norwegian forces.” 
+NATO previously deployed four multinational battalions to Poland and the Baltic States to temper Russian agression, and U.S. tanks have been stationed in Europe. Norway has been a NATO member since 1949, but under a deal with Russia it had prevously said it would not allow foreign troops on its land. But Russia’s ongoing military conflicts in Ukraine and Syria have drawn rebuke from Europe and the United States, including threats of further sanctions. Meanwhile, Moscow continues to spend big on defense . 
+Former senior Norwegian army officer Jacob Borresen told broadcaster NRK the latest deployment “sends negative signals eastwards” that could incite a Cold War-style “confrontation zone.” 
+Russia has already denounced the move . “Taking into account multiple statements made by Norwegian officials about the absence of threat from Russia to Norway, we would like to understand why Norway is so much willing to increase its military potential, in particular through the stationing of American forces in Vaernes, “embassy spokesman Maxime Gourov said in an email to Agence France-Presse.",FAKE
+10462,Julian Assange: Why We Published What We Have on the US Elections,"By Julian Assange / counterpunch.org 
+In recent months, WikiLeaks and I personally have come under enormous pressure to stop publishing what the Clinton campaign says about itself to itself. That pressure has come from the campaign’s allies, including the Obama administration, and from liberals who are anxious about who will be elected US President. 
+On the eve of the election, it is important to restate why we have published what we have. 
+The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks – an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself. Our organization defends the public’s right to be informed. 
+This is why, irrespective of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election, the real victor is the US public which is better informed as a result of our work. 
+The US public has thoroughly engaged with WikiLeaks’ election related publications which number more than one hundred thousand documents. Millions of Americans have pored over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us. It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment. 
+We publish material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere. When we have material that fulfills this criteria, we publish. We had information that fit our editorial criteria which related to the Sanders and Clinton campaign (DNC Leaks) and the Clinton political campaign and Foundation (Podesta Emails). No-one disputes the public importance of these publications. It would be unconscionable for WikiLeaks to withhold such an archive from the public during an election. 
+At the same time, we cannot publish what we do not have. To date, we have not received information on Donald Trump’s campaign, or Jill Stein’s campaign, or Gary Johnson’s campaign or any of the other candidates that fufills our stated editorial criteria. As a result of publishing Clinton’s cables and indexing her emails we are seen as domain experts on Clinton archives. So it is natural that Clinton sources come to us. 
+We publish as fast as our resources will allow and as fast as the public can absorb it. 
+That is our commitment to ourselves, to our sources, and to the public. 
+This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election. The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers. I spoke at the launch of the campaign for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, because her platform addresses the need to protect them. This is an issue that is close to my heart because of the Obama administration’s inhuman and degrading treatment of one of our alleged sources, Chelsea Manning. But WikiLeaks publications are not an attempt to get Jill Stein elected or to take revenge over Ms Manning’s treatment either. 
+Publishing is what we do. To withhold the publication of such information until after the election would have been to favour one of the candidates above the public’s right to know. 
+This is after all what happened when the New York Times withheld evidence of illegal mass surveillance of the US population for a year until after the 2004 election, denying the public a critical understanding of the incumbent president George W Bush, which probably secured his reelection. The current editor of the New York Times has distanced himself from that decision and rightly so. 
+The US public defends free speech more passionately, but the First Amendment only truly lives through its repeated exercise. The First Amendment explicitly prevents the executive from attempting to restrict anyone’s ability to speak and publish freely. The First Amendment does not privilege old media, with its corporate advertisers and dependencies on incumbent power factions, over WikiLeaks’ model of scientific journalism or an individual’s decision to inform their friends on social media. The First Amendment unapologetically nurtures the democratization of knowledge. With the Internet, it has reached its full potential. 
+Yet, some weeks ago, in a tactic reminiscent of Senator McCarthy and the red scare, Wikileaks, Green Party candidate Stein, Glenn Greenwald and Clinton’s main opponent were painted with a broad, red brush. The Clinton campaign, when they were not spreading obvious untruths, pointed to unnamed sources or to speculative and vague statements from the intelligence community to suggest a nefarious allegiance with Russia. The campaign was unable to invoke evidence about our publications—because none exists. 
+In the end, those who have attempted to malign our groundbreaking work over the past four months seek to inhibit public understanding perhaps because it is embarrassing to them – a reason for censorship the First Amendment cannot tolerate. Only unsuccessfully do they try to claim that our publications are inaccurate. 
+WikiLeaks’ decade-long pristine record for authentication remains. Our key publications this round have even been proven through the cryptographic signatures of the companies they passed through, such as Google. It is not every day you can mathematically prove that your publications are perfect but this day is one of them. 
+We have endured intense criticism, primarily from Clinton supporters, for our publications. Many long-term supporters have been frustrated because we have not addressed this criticism in a systematic way or responded to a number of false narratives about Wikileaks’ motivation or sources. Ultimately, however, if WL reacted to every false claim, we would have to divert resources from our primary work. 
+WikiLeaks, like all publishers, is ultimately accountable to its funders. Those funders are you. Our resources are entirely made up of contributions from the public and our book sales. This allows us to be principled, independent and free in a way no other influential media organization is. But it also means that we do not have the resources of CNN, MSNBC or the Clinton campaign to constantly rebuff criticism. 
+Yet if the press obeys considerations above informing the public, we are no longer talking about a free press, and we are no longer talking about an informed public. 
+Wikileaks remains committed to publishing information that informs the public, even if many, especially those in power, would prefer not to see it. WikiLeaks must publish. It must publish and be damned. 
+Julian Assange is the founder of Wikileaks. His most recent book is The Wikileaks Files (Verso). 0.0 ·",FAKE
+9463,Pakistan expels India diplomat in tit-for-tat move,"Pakistan This photo taken in Lahore on October 27, 2016 shows Pakistani protesters burning the Indian flag to show their support for the Kashmiri people. (Photo by AFP) 
+Pakistan has declared an Indian diplomat persona non grata and given him 48 hours to leave the country, in a tit-for-tat move that comes a day after India said it would deport a Pakistani official. 
+Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said it had declared Indian diplomat Surjeet Singh persona non grata and that it had informed India’s diplomatic mission in Islamabad of the decision. 
+The statement said Singh was accused of activities “that were in violation of the Vienna Convention and the established diplomatic norms.” 
+An aide to India’s prime minister in New Delhi said the Indian government was looking into the matter. 
+The decision came after India said on Thursday it had declared a Pakistani consular official persona non grata for “espionage activities” against New Delhi. 
+Mehmood Akhtar, the visa official at the Pakistani mission, had been briefly detained by Indian police on Wednesday outside the gates to the Delhi Zoo where he met two Indian associates. 
+Indian police said the Pakistani diplomat and his alleged accomplices were found in possession of forged documents, defense-related maps, deployment charts and lists of officers working along India’s border with Pakistan. Kashmiris protesters shout anti-India slogans at a rally in Muzaffarabad, October 26, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
+Pakistan’s High Commission in New Delhi dismissed the allegation, saying it “never engages in any activity that is incompatible with its diplomatic status.” 
+Relations between India and Pakistan have been strained in recent months, with New Delhi blaming Islamabad for a raid on an army base in Indian-controlled Kashmir in September that killed 19 soldiers. 
+Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan but claimed in full by both since the two countries gained independence from Britain in 1947. They have fought four wars with each other, three of which have been over Kashmir. 
+'Indian soldier, civilian killed in Kashmir' 
+An Indian paramilitary officer claimed that Pakistani troops had opened fire along the volatile frontier in Indian-controlled Kashmir, killing a civilian and a soldier. Pakistan's army denied the claim. 
+The Indian officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Pakistani soldiers fired mortars and automatic gunfire at several border posts in Jammu region on Friday in an ""unprovoked"" violation of a ceasefire accord between India and Pakistan in the disputed region. 
+Troops from the two countries regularly trade fire, causing casualties. 
+On Thursday, protesters in Kashmir and Pakistan observed the Black Day, demonstrating against what they called Indian occupation. Loading ...",FAKE
+10340,News Shot: Detroit Airport Uses New System To Control Travelers,"In this News Shot, Joe Joseph quickly discusses a new system being put in place at Detroit International Airport and sixteen other airports nationwide. This is classic “problem, reaction, solution” where they make it so incredibly miserable to travel, that people will gladly give their rights away for convenience.
+
+Watch on YouTube 
+Source: New Technology At Detroit Metro Airport Allows Travelers To Move Through Security Lines In A Flash Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by The Daily Sheeple of www.TheDailySheeple.com . 
+This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.TheDailySheeple.com. ",FAKE
+1875,"Chris Christie: If I Run, I Will Beat Hillary Clinton","New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) hasn't yet said he'll run for president in 2016, but during an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, he didn't seem fazed by the prospect of potentially challenging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
+
+""If I run, I will beat her,"" Christie said.
+
+Christie said should he run for president, he's confident he could win Pennsylvania, New Mexico and New Hampshire -- three states that voted for President Barack Obama over his 2012 Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.
+
+Christie's currently visiting New Hampshire, though he told Yahoo earlier this week the trip shouldn't be seen as a likely start to a 2016 campaign.
+
+""Whether I decide to run for president or not, ultimately, is something I won't decide until May or June of this year,"" he said.",REAL
+62,"Christie Hides $800,000 in Travel Bills","New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is refusing to hand over $800,000 in credit-card bills as part of a probe into his travel expenses. The monitoring organization New Jersey Watchdog alleges that Christie has been costing the public a pretty penny for his travels, including an 1,800 percent increase in the governor’s security detail since he took office. “Last year, Christie traveled out-of-state more than 100 days while visiting 36 states, Mexico, and Canada, primarily to help raise $106 million in campaign contributions as chairman of the Republican Governors Association,” wrote reporter Mark Lagerkvist. Christie’s office denied the request for the American Express bills because “the monthly statements indicate the names of the Executive Protection Unit members, the number of Executive Protection Unit members, and the location of these members on a day-to-day basis.”",REAL
+3957,Russia deploys missiles in Syria after Turkey shoots down bomber,"Russia deployed long-range air defense missiles at its air base in Syria Thursday in a rapid response to the downing of one of its bombers by a Turkish warplane.
+
+Russia's state-owned RIA Novosti news agency, quoting its own reporter on the ground, reported that the shipment of S-400 long-range missiles had been delivered. They will be based in Syria's coastal province of Latakia, just 30 miles away from the border with Turkey and are capable of striking targets within a 250-mile range with deadly precision.
+
+The deployment of the missiles came hours after Turkey released audio recordings of what it says are the Turkish military's warnings to the pilot of the Russian Su-24 bomber that was shot down at the border with Syria early Tuesday.
+
+The recordings indicate that the plane was warned several times that it was approaching Turkey's airspace and asked to change course. The voice is heard saying: ""This is Turkish Air Force speaking on guard. You are approaching Turkish airspace. Change your heading south immediately.""
+
+Turkey has informed the United Nations that two Russian planes disregarded warnings and violated Turkish airspace ""to a depth of 1.36 miles and 1.15 miles in length for 17 seconds.
+
+The plane's surviving pilot has denied that his jet veered into Turkey's airspace ""even for a single second""and rejected Turkey's claim that it had issued repeated warnings to the Russian crew. The other pilot was killed by militants in Syria after bailing out, while his crewmate was rescued by Syrian army commandos and delivered in good condition to the Russian base early Wednesday. A Russian marine was also killed by the militants during the rescue mission.
+
+The Kremlin also moved the navy missile cruiser Moskva closer to the shore to help protect Russian warplanes with its long-range Fort air defense system.
+
+""It will be ready to destroy any aerial target posing a potential danger to our aircraft,"" Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said at a meeting with military officials. He also announced the severance of all military ties with Turkey and said that from now on, Russian bombers will always be escorted by fighters on combat missions over Syria.
+
+Tuesday's incident was the first time in half a century that a NATO member shot down a Russian plane. If Russia responds by downing a Turkish plane, NATO member Turkey could proclaim itself under attack and ask the alliance for military assistance.
+
+Most observers believe that a direct military confrontation is unlikely, but that the shooting down of the plane will further fuel the Syrian conflict and complicate international peace efforts.
+
+The situation is also alarming because the Russian and Turkish presidents both pose as strong leaders and would be reluctant to back down and seek a compromise.
+
+The announcements came as Russian forces launched a heavy bombardment against Syrian rebel-held areas in Latakia province. At least 12 airstrikes hit the area Wednesday as pro-government forces clashed with fighters from the Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda, and Turkmen insurgents, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Reuters.
+
+The Russian plane's downing has marked a dramatic turnaround in relations between Russia and Turkey, who have proclaimed themselves to be ""strategic partners"" in the past and developed booming economic ties despite differences over Syria.
+
+Putin described the Turkish action as a ""crime"" and a ""stab in the back,"" and called Turkey an ""accomplice of terrorists."" In a sign of the escalating tensions, protesters in Moscow hurled eggs and stones at the Turkish Embassy, breaking windows in the compound. Police cleared the area and made some arrests shortly after the protest began.
+
+Putin has also dismissed Turkey's claim that the Russian warplane intruded its airspace, voicing particular annoyance about Ankara turning to NATO instead of speaking to Russia, ""as if it were us who shot down a Turkish plane.""
+
+Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu sought to ease tensions Wednesday, calling Russia Turkey's ""friend and neighbor"" and insisting relations cannot be ""sacrificed to accidents of communication."" He told his party's lawmakers that Turkey didn't know the plane was brought down Tuesday was Russian until Moscow announced it.
+
+NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in turn said that the downing of the plane ""highlights the need to strengthen mechanisms to avoid such incidents in the future.""
+
+""We should not sleepwalk into unintended escalation,"" he wrote in an op-ed that is to be published Thursday and was made available to The Associated Press.
+
+Iran meanwhile lashed out at Turkey, with the official IRNA news agency quoting Presidednt Hassan Rouhani as saying Ankara is responsible for the heightened tensions in the region.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from Sky News.",REAL
+9525,Lawbreaking AirBnB At It Again: Sends Out Spam That Violates CAN-SPAM Act,"by Yves Smith 
+I just received an e-mail from AirBnB which patently violates the CAN-SPAM Act by virtue of not having an unsubscribe option. It’s even cheekier for AirBnB to be contacting me since I am deeply opposed to AirBnB and have never once visited their site, and never have or would use their service, either as a lodger or a host. That means they are very likely to have violated the CAN-SPAM Act in a second manner, by virtue of having harvested my e-mail address . 
+A big problem with CAN-SPAM is the only parties with a right of action are “Internet Access Services” and not “natural persons,” as in end recipients. 
+Here are the relevant provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act per Wikipedia : 
+The 3 basic types of compliance defined in the CAN-SPAM Act, unsubscribe, content and sending behavior compliance, are as follows: 
+Unsubscribe compliance A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails. Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 business days. Opt-out lists also known as Suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes. 
+Content compliance Accurate “From” lines (including “friendly froms”) Relevant subject lines (relative to offer in body content and not deceptive) A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present. PO Box addresses are acceptable in compliance with 16 C.F.R. 316.2(p) and if the email is sent by a third party, the legitimate physical address of the entity, whose products or services are promoted through the email should be visible. A label is present if the content is adult. 
+Sending behavior compliance A message cannot be sent through an open relay A message cannot be sent without an unsubscribe option. A message cannot be sent to a harvested email address A message cannot contain a false header A message should contain at least one sentence. A message cannot be null. Unsubscribe option should be below the message. 
+Here’s the offending message, with the subject line, “Discrimination and Belonging: What it Means for You,” in its entirety: The Airbnb Community Commitment Hi, Earlier this year, we launched a comprehensive effort to fight bias and discrimination in the Airbnb community. As a result of this effort, we’re asking everyone to agree to a Community Commitment beginning November 1, 2016. Agreeing to this commitment will affect your use of Airbnb, so we wanted to give you a heads up about it. What is the Community Commitment? You commit to treat everyone—regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias. How do I accept the commitment? On or after November 1, we’ll show you the commitment when you log in to or open the Airbnb website, mobile or tablet app and we’ll automatically ask you to accept. What if I decline the commitment? If you decline the commitment, you won’t be able to host or book using Airbnb, and you have the option to cancel your account. Once your account is canceled, future booked trips will be canceled. You will still be able to browse Airbnb but you won’t be able to book any reservations or host any guests. What if I have feedback about the commitment? We welcome your feedback about the Community Commitment and all of our nondiscrimination efforts. Feel free to read more about the commitment . You can also reach out to us at . The Airbnb Team Sent with ♥ from Airbnb ‌A‌i‌r‌b‌n‌b‌,‌ ‌I‌n‌c‌.‌,‌ ‌8‌8‌8‌ ‌B‌r‌a‌n‌n‌a‌n‌ ‌S‌t‌,‌ ‌S‌a‌n‌ ‌F‌r‌a‌n‌c‌i‌s‌c‌o‌,‌ ‌C‌A‌ ‌9‌4‌1‌0‌3‌ Airbnb Ireland, The Watermarque Building, South Lotts Rd, Ringsend, Dublin 4, VAT Number: 9827384L 0 0 0 0 0 0 This entry was posted in Guest Post on",FAKE
+4268,Marco Rubio self-destructs in New Hampshire,"Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Marco Rubio knows what he’s doing.
+
+A week ago, the youthful senator from Florida was in great shape. His surprisingly strong finish in the Iowa caucuses left him with a clear chance to consolidate mainstream Republican support — and a path to the GOP presidential nomination.
+
+But in just a few minutes Saturday night, Rubio undid everything he had worked for during the past year — really, the past five years. His singularly disastrous debate performance, in which he repeated irrelevant, canned phrases, caused would-be supporters to flee for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and other more stable candidates.
+
+And Tuesday night, Rubio proved true the axiom popularized by Alan Simpson, the wisecracking former senator from Wyoming: “One day you’re the toast of the town, the next you’re toast.”
+
+The culprit here, as in most things that have gone wrong this campaign season, is Donald Trump, who after his convincing win in New Hampshire is once again the front-runner for the nomination. Typically, Iowa and New Hampshire serve as proving grounds for the candidates. Voters there scrutinize the contenders, who rise and fall in the polls as various candidates gain and lose the status of front-runner. But Trump’s celebrity short-circuited the process. With Trump dominating the coverage and the polls, Iowa and New Hampshire failed to fulfill their traditional vetting roles.
+
+Rubio was one who never got the scrutiny. And when he emerged, blinking, into the spotlight after Iowa, voters found an empty suit. Watching him campaign last week, I wrote: “Rubio’s strong Iowa finish has brought new attention — and overcapacity crowds — in New Hampshire. But the would-be supporters are greeted by a robot.”
+
+[What Marco Rubio would have said if he had won New Hampshire]
+
+This wasn’t necessarily a surprise to those who watched Rubio closely (or even to those who recall his water-gulping response to the State of the Union three years ago). Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins, who wrote about Rubio in a 2015 book, observed that he had an “incurable anxiousness — and an occasional propensity to panic in moments of crisis, both real and imagined.”
+
+He had seemed to be a good debater — but with 10 or more candidates crowding the stage in early debates, he didn’t have to go far beyond canned lines. On Saturday, exposed to withering attacks from rival Chris Christie, a former prosecutor, Rubio suffered what was perhaps the most memorable lapse at the presidential level since Edmund Muskie appeared to weep in the New Hampshire snow in 1972.
+
+“Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Rubio proclaimed early in the debate, as ungrammatical and off-point. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
+
+A moment later, Rubio said again: “But I would add this. Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
+
+And again: “Here’s the bottom line. This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
+
+Even when called out by Christie for the mindless repetition, Rubio said again: “We are not facing a president that doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows what he is doing. That’s why he’s done the things he’s done.”
+
+The reviews were savage, and then, on Monday night, RubioBot malfunctioned again. “Janette and I are raising our four children in the 21st century, and we know how hard it’s become to instill our values in our kids instead of the values they try to ram down our throats,” he told supporters, then added: “In the 21st century, it’s becoming harder than ever to instill in your children the values they teach in our homes and in our church instead of the values that they try to ram down our throats.”
+
+Exit polls left little doubt that Rubio’s glitches ruined his prospects in New Hampshire. Two-thirds said the debates were important, and of the nearly half of GOP voters who made choices in the last few days, Kasich did far better than Rubio.
+
+This left Rubio, with 70 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday night, languishing at 10 percent of the vote. He trailed not only Trump (34 percent) but also Kasich (16 percent), Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, who was once left for dead. “I’m disappointed with tonight,” Rubio said Tuesday, acknowledging that “I did not do well on Saturday night.”
+
+The results also left Republicans, once again, without a consensus alternative to Trump — and with dwindling hope of finding one. Had Rubio received scrutiny earlier, voters might have been able to find a candidate who didn’t wilt in the spotlight. But Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t serve their functions this time. Trump got in the way.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+8949,"Comment on Entitled Customer Slams Restaurant On Yelp, What Happens Next Is Sheer Badassery by customize your own jerseys","Entitled Customer Slams Restaurant On Yelp, What Happens Next Is Sheer Badassery By Tiffany Willis on October 11, 2014 Subscribe 
+A customer ( Yelp name Sonal B) was visiting Kansas City for a conference when she decided to try to get take-out food from Voltaire , “an upscale restaurant across the street from her conference building. The only problem with that is that Voltaire doesn’t offer take-out and they never have, by policy.” The customer pitched a fit, threatened to get her “lawyer” husband involved (and did), and threatened the manager with a bad Yelp review, which she did minutes after leaving the restaurant. 
+But Voltaire’s owner responded. And it was fabulous. 
+The Yelp review: Most unfriendly and arrogant restaurant in KC. Just called Voltaire to try to order some food because we’re in a late business meeting across the street. First, they refused to answer our question about what type of broth is used in the risotto. Then they said they won’t pack food to go. My husband spoke to the manager and explained that we’re in a conference room across the street, and asked if they can pack our dinner (which we would pick up). The hostess flat-out refused to answer our question about the food or to try and work with us so we could get food in our meeting. My husband asked to speak with the manager. The manager, Jamie, said, “our food is plated beautifully, and we can’t put it in a ‘to go’ container.” So thanks, Jamie, we’ll just starve. (What the manager said is just not true by the way we’ve eaten there before, and they did pack our food to go.) When my husband said that he was going to post a Yelp review about the way the restaurant was treating us, the manager questioned, “Are you a grown man and an adult?” Yes, Jamie, we are grown adults, and we do not do business with people who behave like you do. We regularly travel to NYC and eat at a variety of restaurants, which are more than happy to accommodate people by packing food to go. This restaurant thinks they’re too good for their customers. They will soon learn that if you ignore your customers, they’re going to start ignoring you. I would not even give this place one star after this experience, and I’m dismayed by their unprofessional and arrogant behavior. 
+The owner’s response: I sincerely apologize that we don’t offer ‘take-out’ food at our restaurant. Being a Yelp user, I’m sure you were aware that on our Yelp business page, on the right side of the screen, it lists details about our establishment. There is an item listed ‘Take-Out : No.’ We have never offered take-out food as we believe the food we prepare should be presented as we see fit, (usually) on a plate inside the dining room. As for the risotto, its made with a vegetable stock – this dish is vegetarian, and I’m certain that who you were speaking with wanted to make extra certain the information provided to you was accurate. On your previous visits, you say you have witnessed dishes being boxed up as proof that we provide ‘take-out’ food. Although we do allow our guests to take their uneaten food with them in to-go boxes after they have dined with us, we have never offered ‘take-out’ food. If you were actually starving, as in a life threatening condition requiring nutritional sustenance, we would be happy to assist you..we do make exceptions for emergency situations. Our general manager did question the age/maturity of your husband after he became combative and threatened us with a negative Yelp review if we did not alter our operational practice and provide him with ‘take-out’ food. 15 minutes later you indeed came through with this threat. I can assure you that we don’t offer ‘take-out’ food because we feel we are ‘too good’ for our customers; we just prefer to have our guests dine with us, allowing for the proper presentation (and temperature) of their fare that has been skillfully prepared by our kitchen. I am very pleased that you frequent New York. We travel often as well. And I can assure you that there are many restaurants in NYC that do not offer ‘take-out’ food. Although there are many other options that do – in Kansas City as well (Go Royals!). It was made REPEATEDLY clear in the conversation with your husband that he is a lawyer. Let me provide the following analogy/role reversal-it may assist in clarifying your request. YOU: I want to hire you to handle my divorce. ME: But, I’m a tax lawyer. YOU: I don’t care I want you to handle my divorce. ME: Sorry, but I don’t practice that form of law. YOU: Just handle my divorce, I’ll pay you-it will be fine. ME: I don’t feel comfortable providing my services as a divorce lawyer, as I am a tax lawyer. You won’t receive the service you are wanting or that I am willing to provide. YOU: Well, I travel to NYC often, and in NYC, Tax lawyers handle my divorce litigation all the time. I don’t know what the problem is. I’ve told you I’m a chef, right? ME: Well, that’s nice sir, but I really can’t help you. It goes against my business practice. YOU: If you don’t represent me in my divorce, I’m going to post it all over the [most frequented social media review of lawyers] that you refused to provide me with the service I requested, and make baseless allegations about how you are very pretentious, arrogant and unprofessional. I will also try to prevent you from getting any additional business by damning you on said social media platform. Now will you represent me? ME: I don’t take kindly to threats. Thanks for your feedback. We will let you know if we decide in the future to practice divorce law, I mean, provide ‘take-out’ food. 
+Let us know your thoughts at the Liberal America Facebook page . Sign up for our free daily newsletter to receive more great stories like this one. 
+h/t NextShark About Tiffany Willis 
+Tiffany Willis is a fifth-generation Texan, a proponent of voluntary simplicity, a single mom, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal America. An unapologetic member of the Christian Left, she has spent most of her career actively working with “the least of these"" -- disadvantaged and oppressed populations, the elderly, people living in poverty, at-risk youth, and unemployed people. She is a Certified Workforce Expert with the National Workforce Institute , a NAWDP Certified Workforce Development Professional, and a certified instructor for Franklin Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens . Follow her on Twitter , Facebook , or LinkedIn . She also has a grossly neglected personal blog , a Time Travel blog , a site dedicated to encouraging people to read classic literature 15 minutes a day , and a literary quotes blog that is a labor of love . Find her somewhere and join the discussion. Click here to buy Tiff a mojito. Connect",FAKE
+6989,Exclusive: Foreign Isis Fighters Defend Mosul Frontline as Locals Flee,"  
+Foreign fighters for Isis are choosing to stand and fight the Iraqi army in east Mosul, while the group’s local militants are crossing the Tigris river with their families to the more defensible western side of the city, a former jihadi has told The Independent . 
+In an exclusive interview, the fighter, who calls himself Faraj, described scenes of growing chaos and an apparent breakdown of discipline among Isis forces in Mosul. He said that local fighters seeking to leave the east of the city, which Iraqi forces entered on Tuesday, were being stopped at checkpoints and cross-questioned by Isis security officers, whom he said were mostly Libyans and much feared for inflicting severe punishments. On this occasion, he said that “fighters accompanied by families are being allowed to cross the bridges to the west bank, while individuals are being sent back to the front line”. 
+Faraj said he had a cousin who left Raqqa, the de facto Isis capital in Syria, four months ago and had gone with his family to live in east Mosul. His cousin was not fighting on the front line, but was manning checkpoints and carrying out other activities for Isis. Nevertheless, when the Iraqi army entered Gogjali district on the extreme east side of Mosul, he found himself at the front with 15 other fighters, but they later retreated over one of the five bridges that span the Tigris and took up positions in the Yarmouk neighbourhood on the west bank. 
+He said that imams in the mosques were calling over loudspeakers for people “to stay and resist the apostates and unbelievers”. But their pleas were being ignored by many as the anti-Isis forces backed by US-led air strikes close in on Isis’s last great stronghold in Iraq. Faraj quotes his cousin as saying that that “thousands of civilians on the eastern bank were fleeing and seeking safety with the Iraqi forces without our men [Isis] preventing them because some of them were also running away though others continued to fight.” 
+Faraj’s account of the confusion inside Mosul, which remains overwhelmingly under Isis control, confirms reports from other eyewitnesses of a partial breakdown of order, particularly in the east of the city. He adds that “most local fighters who had families have withdrawn from the eastern bank, but most of the foreign fighters have stayed”. 
+There are signs that Isis’s iron control of Mosul may be eroding, but it is still a force to be feared as it seeks to eliminate anybody who might oppose it. Some 90 former police officers have been detained and confined in a school in central Mosul. There are reports of local resistance units ambushing and assassinating Isis officials and small groups of fighters. Heavy weapons have been evacuated from east Mosul to the west and defensive positions by the bridges abandoned, suggesting that Isis intends to blow up the bridges. 
+Residents speak of little movement on the streets of Mosul with people keeping to their houses. Markets are still operating in the west, but there is a shortage of petrol, food and medicine and no public supply of electricity and drinking water (though many people have generators and others have dug wells). 
+The main assault on Mosul by the Iraqi army forces will come from the south rather than the east, and here army units are still some 20 miles from the city. But the encirclement by the different elements in the shaky alliance looking to take part in the siege is getting tighter. The Shia paramilitary forces known as the Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilisation Units, on Thursday cut one of the main Isis supply routes linking Mosul to Syria. Hadi al-Amiri, the leader of the Shia Badr organisation, said that the next step would be to cut the route between Mosul and the small city of Tal Afar, whose Sunni Turkman population is notorious for its past support for Al-Qaeda in Iraq and later for Isis, several of whose leading commanders and officials come from there. 
+As the struggle for Mosul reaches a crisis point, the leader of Isis and self-declared caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has emerged for the first time in almost a year to issue a call to arms. The tape of his speech was released late on Wednesday night, but it is not known when or where it was recorded. He calls on his followers to obey orders and to remain resilient and aggressive: “Oh you who seek martyrdom! Start your actions! Turn the night of the disbelievers into day.” He calls for a general attack on the territories of the enemy so their blood will “flow like rivers”. He calls in particular for attacks on Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 
+Baghdadi is believed to be in Mosul according to multiple sources of information cited by Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of the Kurdish President Massoud Barzani, in an interview with The Independent earlier this week. He said that the death of the self-declared caliph would be a decisive blow to Isis, which has no alternative leaders with anything like his authority and charisma to replace him. It was he who in June 2014 declared the caliphate after the surprise capture of Mosul by Isis. 
+At the height of its success the caliphate covered an area the size of Britain, but it has prepared its own defeat by declaring war on much of the world. The outcome of its extreme belligerence, and targeting of anybody who did not agree with it as an enemy to be destroyed, has produced the present diverse coalition which is moving to besiege Mosul. It includes forces backed by the US, Iran, Turkey and many other powers along with Shia and Kurdish armies that in the past have come close to fighting each other. Though Baghdadi has called for all-out resistance, there is an air of desperation to his defiance as if he knows that defeat is unavoidable. (Reprinted from The Independent by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+7210,The President Of The United States of America: Donald J. Trump,"Election Results Confirmed Via: Bloomberg , Google 
+NBC Reports: Hillary Clinton has phoned Donald Trump To Concede 
+Ladies and gentlemen, The President-Elect Of The United States of America: 
+
+(Pictured: The cover Newsweek refused to print. Millions of copies of Hillary’s cover were printed and sent to book stores.) 
+Coming Soon to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. : 
+
+And the cover that never made it (but was printed because of a “business decision” at Newsweek) 
+
+",FAKE
+3215,The GOP Is Dying Off. Literally.,"It turns out that one of the Grand Old Party’s biggest—and least discussed—challenges going into 2016 is lying in plain sight, written right into the party’s own nickname. The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older, and as the adage goes, there are two certainties in life: Death and taxes. Right now, both are enemies of the GOP and they might want to worry more about the former than the latter.
+
+There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all.
+
+The party’s core is dying off by the day.
+
+Since the average Republican is significantly older than the average Democrat, far more Republicans than Democrats have died since the 2012 elections. To make matters worse, the GOP is attracting fewer first-time voters. Unless the party is able to make inroads with new voters, or discover a fountain of youth, the GOP’s slow demographic slide will continue election to election. Actuarial tables make that part clear, but just how much of a problem for the GOP is this?
+
+Since it appears that no political data geek keeps track of voters who die between elections, I took it upon myself to do some basic math. And that quick back-of-the-napkin math shows that the trend could have a real effect in certain states, and make a battleground states like Florida and Ohio even harder for the Republican Party to capture.
+
+By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats.
+
+Here is the methodology, using one age group as an example: According to exit polls, 5,488,091 voters aged 60 to 64 years old supported Romney in 2012. The mortality rate for that age group is 1,047.3 deaths per 100,000, which means that 57,475 of those voters died by the end of 2013. Multiply that number by four, and you get 229,900 Romney voters aged 60-to-64 who will be deceased by Election Day 2016. Doing the same calculation across the range of demographic slices pulled from exit polls and census numbers allows one to calculate the total voter deaths. It’s a rough calculation, to be sure, and there are perhaps ways to move the numbers a few thousand this way or that, but by and large, this methodology at least establishes the rough scale of the problem for the Republicans—a problem measured in the mid-hundreds of thousands of lost voters by November 2016. To the best of my knowledge, no one has calculated or published better voter death data before.
+
+“I’ve never seen anyone doing any studies on how many dead people can’t vote,” laughs William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in demographic studies. “I’ve seen studies on how many dead people do vote. The old Daley Administration in Chicago was very good at that.”
+
+Frey points out that, since Republicans are getting whiter and older, replacing the voters that leave this earth with young ones is essential for them to be competitive in presidential elections. But the key question is whether these election death rates will make any real difference. There are so many other variables that dead voters aren’t necessarily going to be a decisive factor.
+
+“The [GOP] does rely too much on older and white voters, and especially in rural areas, deaths from this group can be significant,” Frey says. “But millennials (born 1981 to 1997) now are larger in numbers than baby boomers ([born] 1946 to 1964), and how they vote will make the big difference. And the data says that if Republicans focus on economic issues and stay away from social ones like gay marriage, they can make serious inroads with millennials.”
+
+But what if Republicans aren’t able to win over a larger share of the youth vote? In 2012, there were about 13 million in the 15-to-17 year-old demo who will be eligible to vote in 2016. The previous few presidential election cycles indicate that about 45 percent of these youngsters will actually vote, meaning that there will about 6 million new voters total. Exit polling indicates that age bracket has split about 65-35 in favor of the Dems in the past two elections. If that split holds true in 2016, Democrats will have picked up a two million vote advantage among first-time voters. These numbers combined with the voter death data puts Republicans at an almost 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016.",REAL
+9474,Michael Bloomberg Names Technological Unemployment as the Next Administration’s “Greatest Conundrum”, ,FAKE
+1753,Carly Fiorina swipes at Trump: ‘Look at this face.’,"PHOENIX - ""Ladies,"" Carly Fiorina said, ""look at this face!""
+
+Fiorina took direct aim at Donald Trump here Friday evening, offering up a sharp rejoinder to comments by Trump that appeared to mock Fiorina's appearance.
+
+""Look at that face,"" Trump told Rolling Stone in an interview published Wednesday. ""Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!""
+
+Absolutely, Fiorina said at the National Federation of Republican Women's annual conference here.
+
+""This is the face of a 61 year old woman. I am proud of every year and every wrinkle,"" ""Fiorina said as the overwhelmingly female crowd laughed and cheered.
+
+The real estate mogul defended himself Thursday, saying that he was ""talking about persona. I'm not talking about look."" Critics pounced on Trump, saying that his remarks about Fiorina reinforced the notion that he is a misogynist.
+
+Fiorina also hit Trump on the issue of leadership, saying that wealth does not a leader make.
+
+""Leadership is not about position. It is not about title. It is not about how big your office is or how big your plane or your helicopter or your ego,"" Fiorina said.
+
+Fiorina had additional words for Trump after the speech, according to Fox News.
+
+Fiorina pitched herself as a proven leader who challenged the status quo and has done business with world leaders. She tried to project an authoritative informality, repeatedly addressing the crowd as ""ladies,"" commiserating with the hopes, dreams and struggles of many and lamented that those in the political sphere try to pigeonhole women's interests.
+
+""Our experiences, our views, our hopes, our desires, are as diverse as the other half of the nation. The men. And I personally am so tired of hearing about women’s issues,"" she said. ""All issues are women's issues.""
+
+Women, she said, still bear a disproportionate burden of poverty and child care duties and the pace of change for women has been slower. She recounted stories of sexism and the double standards that women face,  including being called a ""token bimbo"" at work and the time a colleague told her she can't come to a meeting with a client, because he wanted to get together at a strip club called the Board Room.
+
+""I said, 'I hope you don't feel too uncomfortable, but I'll see you at The Board Room,'"" Fiorina recalled saying. ""I got in the cab and I gave him the name and address of the strip club and he said 'oh are you the new act?'""
+
+Fiorina recounted being asked if a woman's hormones would prevent her from serving in the Oval Office.
+
+""So, ladies, let’s just think: can we think of a single instance in which a man’s judgement was clouded by his hormones?"" she asked as the crowd whooped, applauded and gave her a standing ovation.
+
+""I'm not standing up,"" a man in the crowd said.
+
+Fiorina also called out Hillary Clinton numerous times, saying she took ""photo-ops"" with world leaders while Fiorina did business with them -- Fiorina said on her first day in office she would call ""my friend"" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pledge her stalwart support for Israel and the Supreme Leader of Iran to tell him that the Iranian nuclear deal is off. She said that a commander-in-chief must ""understand technology,"" a dig at the controversy surrounding Clinton's e-mail while she was at the State Department.
+
+Even though Republican majorities were elected in Congress, she said, nothing has happened: the border isn't secure and Planned Parenthood isn't defunded, an issue that drew loud applause.
+
+Most of all, she told the women, she wants them to vote for her because she is up for the job.
+
+""I am not asking for your vote and your support because I am a woman. I am asking for your vote and your support because I am the most qualified candidate to win this job and do this job,"" she said.",REAL
+4906,Where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stand on economic issues,"In the end, elections usually come back to the economy—to jobs, wages, taxes, imports and exports, the price of goods and the cost of an education. Differences over all these issues—from tax rates and immigration to globalization and the minimum wage—are particularly sharp this year between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Here’s a look at where the two candidates stand on the top economic issues.",REAL
+1235,Can Anyone Beat Trump in the Primary? History Says No,"If you’re looking to stop Trump, history won’t be providing you with any roadmaps.
+
+Let’s say you’re a Republican who is looking with abject terror at the thought of a Donald Trump nomination. You look at poll numbers from upcoming states—Trump by six! Trump by eight! You read and hear about “vectors” and “glide paths”, and you start looking for reassurance that it’s still early, that the last shall be first. Examples abound in sports—didn’t the Red Sox trail the Yankees 3-0 in the 2004 League Championship Series? Weren’t the New York Giants 13 1/2 games out of first in 1951? Surely there are cases where a doomed candidate turned the campaign around, right?
+
+Well…sort of. There are any number of primary campaigns that saw a significant shift of fortunes, but they provide cold comfort for the anti-Trumpeteers. Why? Because 1) they happened a relatively long time ago, 2) they all happened in two-candidate races and 3) none of them resulted in a victory for the come-from behind candidate.
+
+When President Gerald Ford barely beat ex-California Governor Ronald Reagan in New Hampshire in 1976, it might have been seen as a strong showing against a sitting President. But because the Reagan campaign had touted his strength there, the close finish was portrayed as a loss. When Ford won the next four primaries, including a landslide win in Illinois, Reagan’s challenge was on life-support.
+
+In North Carolina, however, a combination of Senator Jesse Helms’ organizational muscle and a half-hour TV speech centered on foreign policy gave Reagan a victory that kept his campaign alive. Over the next 10 weeks, Reagan won 10 primaries, turning the fight into a delegate-by-delegate battle. In the end, the power of incumbency and a last-minute flip by the Mississippi delegation on a crucial rules fight gave the nomination to Ford. We have not seen a genuinely contested nomination fight since.
+
+Of the first ten contests, he won only his native Massachusetts. With polls showing him headed to a big loss in New York, his campaign prepared to fold its tents. But the polls were wrong. Kennedy won the state by an 18-point landslide. That gave his campaign enough energy to keep the fight going all the way through the primaries—he won California, New Jersey, and seven other states—and the convention. He was never able to close the gap, but with more than a third of the delegates, Kennedy was able to win platform concessions and a much-celebrated prime-time speech. (He was also able, intentionally or not, to subject Carter to the humiliation of pursuing him at the rostrum in an attempt to stage a hands-clasped unity photo opportunity.)
+
+Few campaigns have seen more twists and turns than the 1984 Democratic primary. What began as a ceremonial coronation of former Vice President Walter Mondale was upended, with no advance warning, when Senator Gary Hart and his “new ideas” campaign won a landslide in New Hampshire. He followed that with five wins in the next two weeks; only Mondale victories in Georgia and Alabama, with crucial margins provided by black voters, kept him afloat.
+
+Then a tried-and-true pattern -- rise, scrutiny, decline—kicked in. Hart (unlike Reagan and Kennedy) was a relatively unknown political commodity. When the spotlight turned on him, questions great and small arose: Why had his changed his name from Hartpence? Why was his real age a mystery? More seriously, did the core of the Democratic Party freely want to nominate a figure who regularly challenged liberal orthodoxy (“We’re not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” he once said to a party that revered Humphrey’s liberal passions).
+
+With big-city Democrats, labor, and African-Americans rallying to his side, Mondale won Illinois and then New York by a landslide. Once again, the nomination seemed to be in Mondale’s grasp. But Hart then won a string of primaries in May, and in June beat Mondale in California. Pre-primary polls also showed Hart with a big lead in New Jersey. But when he told a California audience by telephone that he was consigned to a “toxic waste dump in New Jersey,” Garden State Democrats responded by giving Mondale a 16 point win. But for that careless comment, Hart might well have turned the convention into a genuine battle.
+
+That was more than thirty years ago. And in the decades since, there’s been nothing like a sharp turn of fortune in any nominating contest. There have been early challenges to favorites; there has been at least one case—Clinton in 1992—where it took a month or so for the ultimate nominee to win his first primary. There have been years—2008 for Democrats, 2012 for Republicans—when it took months for the nominee to claim enough delegates to end the contest. Moreover, there’s no historical parallel to today’s Republican race. Far from being an unknown commodity like Hart in 1984, Trump is better known than any of his rivals. And given that what he has handily survived, it is hard to imagine what he might say or do that could properly be described as “self-destructive.”
+
+This doesn’t mean a Trump nomination is a done deal. With a majority of the party still opposing him, a two-person race offers a theoretical possibility. There may be enough left of “traditional Republicans” that a unified chorus proclaiming Trump a disaster could prove effective. But if you’re a Republican looking to find a clue to derailing Trump, history is not going to offer you anything like a roadmap.",REAL
+4360,"Morning Plum: Get ready for another ideological death struggle, this time over climate","Today, President Obama will roll out the final version of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, an ambitious effort to reduce carbon emissions from power plants by nearly one-third from 2005 levels by 2030. This seems likely to set in motion an ideological death struggle that will rival the one over Obamacare — but with arguably even higher stakes.
+
+That’s because the long-term success of the new EPA rule — presuming it survives legal challenges — will depend to no small degree on the actions of the next president. The states don’t have to tell the federal government how they will seek to meet the rule’s carbon emissions targets — many GOP states may not comply — until around the time Obama’s presidency is ending and beyond. With implementation set to stretch out over many years, a Republican president could seek to relax or undo the plan, as Jason Plautz notes.
+
+What’s more, the stakes are extremely high here because the success of this plan could help determine the viability of long-term international efforts to combat climate change. With an international climate accord expected soon, the fate of Obama’s plan will help determine whether the U.S. can keep its end of the carbon-emission-reducing bargain. As the New York Times puts it:
+
+Climate scientists warn that rising greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly moving the planet toward a global atmospheric temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the point past which the world will be locked into a future of rising sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, and shortages of food and water. Mr. Obama’s new rules alone will not be enough to stave off that future. But experts say that if the rules are combined with similar action from the world’s other major economies, as well as additional action by the next American president, emissions could level off enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change.
+
+Ben Adler adds that Obama’s plan is “the centerpiece of any realistic program to meet…the intended targets we have outlined ahead of the Paris climate talks that will take place later this year.” (Indeed, Congressional Republicans are encouraging GOP governors to resist the new rule with the explicit purpose of undermining the chances of getting an international climate deal by sowing doubts as to whether the U.S. can meet its own pledges.)
+
+Thus, the next president may well determine whether this plan helps lay the foundation for future international cooperation designed to avert an outcome that many scientists think could be irreversible. That will thrust the issue into the presidential race, making it perhaps more important than in previous cycles.
+
+Hillary Clinton issued a strong statement pledging to defend Obama’s plan against “Republican doubters and defeatists,” a sign her campaign sees this issue as a good point of contrast with which to cast the GOP as the party of the past. And indeed, the major Republican presidential candidates have already come out against the plan. But this is only the beginning. An international climate accord could be reached at the end of the year — just when the GOP presidential primaries are (sorry, I can’t resist this) heating up in a big way.
+
+Given that this would combine Obummer Mandates with a new effort at international engagement that many GOP primary voters will likely oppose, it could perhaps make Obama’s climate push even more ideologically toxic to Republicans, requiring the GOP candidates to outdo one another in their zeal to oppose it.
+
+* KEY DEM CONGRESSMAN BACKS IRAN DEAL: Dem Rep. Adam Schiff, a pro-Israel moderate who is respected on foreign policy by many Democrats, comes out in favor of the Iran deal in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg:
+
+As Goldberg notes, this could influence undecided Jewish Dems. Proponents are increasingly pushing back on the notion that opposing the deal is the only “pro-Israel” position.
+
+* SCHUMER LEANING AGAINST IRAN DEAL? Politico reports on the intense pressure from both sides on Senator Chuck Schumer as he makes up his mind on whether to support the Iran deal. Politico suggests he’s leaning against it. But:
+
+Keep an eye on that: if Schumer does oppose the deal, he may not do so all that loudly, and enough Dems could still support it to prevent Obama’s veto of disapproval measure from being overridden. The White House can’t lose more than a dozen Dems.
+
+* WARREN COMES OUT FOR IRAN DEAL: Senator Elizabeth Warren has just come out in favor of it. That isn’t surprising, but it’s a reminder that if Schumer opposes it, he’ll antagonize the left in a big way — and he’s set to become next Senate Dem leader.
+
+* POLL FINDS BROAD OPPOSITION TO IRAN DEAL: A new Quinnipiac poll finds that Americans oppose the “nuclear deal with Iran” by 57-28. The poll doesn’t define the deal, and a recent Washington Post poll that did define it found majority support. But this does suggest that proponents may have a great deal of work to do if Americans are broadly inclined against it out of distrust of Iran.
+
+Meanwhile, a new YouGov poll that does define the deal found support for the deal has dropped from 51 percent to 36 percent, though only 38 percent oppose it.
+
+* REPUBLICANS OPPOSE HIKING TAXES ON RICH: Another interesting tidbit from the new Quinnipiac poll: 61 percent of Americans think the federal government should try to reduce the gap between well off and less well off Americans, and 60 percent support increasing taxes on higher income earners to reduce middle class taxes.
+
+But Republicans oppose both those things by 57-35 and 65-31.
+
+* HILLARY GOES UP ON THE AIR: The Clinton campaign is airing two ads in Iowa and New Hampshire with strong biographical emphasis: One discusses her mother’s influence on her, and the other talks about her work for children. “We’re going to make sure everyone knows who Hillary Clinton really is,” the Clinton camp says. “We’ve planned for a competitive primary with Hillary herself working to earn every vote.”
+
+The Beltway pundit consensus appears to be that Clinton’s favorability ratings are in free fall, so perhaps this is also part of an effort to “get her positives up,” as the jargon has it.
+
+* WHAT REALLY MATTERS AT GOP DEBATE: E.J. Dionne has a nice column arguing that what really matters at this week’s GOP debate isn’t Donald Trump’s antics; it’s the question of whether the GOP candidates will deviate even a tiny bit from stale GOP economic doctrine:
+
+Nope. All signs are that the GOP candidates all believe the answer to stagnating wages and the failure of the recovery to achieve widespread distribution is to get government out of the way.
+
+* AND TRUMP-MENTUM RAGES ACROSS THE LAND: A new NBC News poll finds Donald Trump continues to surge among Republican voters nationally: He’s first with 19 percent; Scott Walker has 14; and Jeb Bush has 13. Breakdown:
+
+So Trump is winning lots of GOP-leaning independents while also cutting into the conservative support of Walker and Cruz.",REAL
+9977,Two Points About the Hillary Clinton Email Fiasco,"Much is being made of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which she used when she was Secretary of State. To me, the real issue is not that Hillary endangered national security by sending classified information in the clear. No – the real issue is that the Clintons act as if they are above the rules and laws that apply to “the little people.” They are superior and smug, totally devoted to themselves and their pursuit of power and the privileges that come with it. It’s a matter of character, in other words. Hillary’s evasiveness, her lack of transparency, her self-righteousness, her strong sense of her own rectitude, make her a dangerous candidate for the presidency.
+My second point is this: The issue of classification should be turned on its head. The real issue is not that Hillary potentially revealed secrets. No – the real issue is that our government keeps far too much from us. Our government uses security classification not so much to keep us safe, but to keep the national security state safe – safe from the eyes of the American people.
+
+As The Guardian reported in 2013 :
+“A committee established by Congress, the Public Interest Declassification Board, warned in December that rampant over-classification is ‘imped[ing] informed government decisions and an informed public’ and, worse, ‘enabl[ing] corruption and malfeasance’. In one instance it documented, a government agency was found to be classifying one petabyte of new data every 18 months, the equivalent of 20m filing cabinets filled with text.”
+Nowadays, seemingly everything is classified. And if it’s classified, if it’s secret, we can’t know about it. Because we can’t be trusted with it. That’s a fine idea for an autocracy or dictatorship, but not so fine for a democracy.
+Government of the people, by the people, for the people? Impossible when nearly everything of any importance is classified.
+Too bad Hillary didn’t send everything in the clear – what a service she would have done for the American people and for democracy!
+William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views . He can be reached at wastore@pct.edu . Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. 
+",FAKE
+6167,IT Firm Wins $63Mln US Army Contract in South Korea - NCI,"Get short URL 0 4 0 0 NCI Information Systems has been awarded a $63 million contract to provide engineering and integration services to the US Army’s Garrison Humphreys in South Korea, the company stated in a press release Wednesday. 
+WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The work will require NCI to relocate technical equipment and staff for the United Nations Command and US Forces Korea from Yongsan in the Seoul metropolitan area to areas north of the South Korean capital, the release added. 
+It noted that Army Garrison Humphreys is projected to grow from 9,000 to 44,000 soldiers, civilians and family members. “NCI will provide services for command, control, communications, computers and intelligence/information technology (C4I/IT) infrastructure and systems within sensitive compartmented information facilities,: the release said. ""The work will be performed at four facilities currently under construction at Camp Humphreys, including the Communications Center, Battle Command Training Center, US Forces Korea Operations Center and US Army 2nd Infantry Division."" ...",FAKE
+4076,"Terror attack over, 147 dead at Kenya university","NAIROBI, Kenya — Armed terrorists stormed a university in northern Kenya on Thursday, killing 147 people, wounding dozens and taking hostages during a 15-hour siege until four militants were killed by security forces. Christians and converts to Islam appeared to have been the targets.
+
+More than 550 students were evacuated and 79 were injured in the standoff on the Garissa University campus, about 90 miles from the Somali border. The Somali-based Islamic terrorist group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack — the al-Qaeda-linked organization's deadliest in Kenya.
+
+Students said the gunmen separated Christians from Muslims and held hostages in a dormitory, where they placed explosives around the Christian hostages, according to Kenya's National Police Service.
+
+Kenyan Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery said some students were killed during morning prayers at the mosque. Jackson Kamau, a student at the university, said the militants killed those who were likely converts to Islam. Locals can differentiate between Somali Muslims born into Islam and those who have converted because they come from different ethnic groups.
+
+""We'll not allow terrorists to divide our country on religious lines,"" said Aden Duale, majority leader in Kenya's National Assembly.
+
+Most of the 147 dead were students. Two security guards, one policeman and one soldier also were killed in the attack, Nkaissery said.
+
+One suspected extremist was arrested as he tried to flee, Nkaissery told a news conference in Nairobi.
+
+Heavy gunfire erupted at the college as the Kenyan military worked to end the siege. Police Inspector General Joseph Boinett said a dusk-to-dawn curfew will be in place in Garissa and three neighboring counties starting Friday through April 16.
+
+The White House strongly condemned the attack and said the United States was providing assistance to the Kenyan government.
+
+""We extend our deep condolences to the families and loved ones of all those killed in this heinous attack, which reportedly included the targeting of Christian students,"" White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement.
+
+Kenyan police offered a $220,000 bounty for Mohammed Mohamud, also known as Dulyadin and Gamadhere, who they suspect planned the attack.
+
+Students who were able to escape said gunmen stormed the university, setting off explosives and shooting people on the campus just after 5 a.m. local time.
+
+""Most of us were asleep when the incident happened,"" said Nicholas Ntulu, a student at the university. ""We heard heavy gunfire and explosions. Every person ran for dear life as we passed the gunmen. Several (students) were shot dead.
+
+""There was nobody to help us at the time of the attack,"" he said. ""The police officers took more than an hour to arrive at the scene.""
+
+President Uhuru Kenyatta urged Kenyans to stay calm. ""This is a moment for everyone throughout the country to be vigilant as we continue to confront and defeat our enemies,"" he said.
+
+Kenyatta ordered the inspector general of police to accelerate the applications of 10,000 recruits for the Kenya Police College.
+
+""We have suffered unnecessarily due to shortage of security personnel,"" he said. ""Kenya badly needs additional officers, and I will not keep the nation waiting.""
+
+Frightened students rescued from the university gathered at a military camp near the Garissa airstrip.
+
+""The sounds of gunfire was all over — we couldn't tell what was the right direction to go to be safe,"" said Ann Musyoka, a second-year student. ""We had to face the gunmen — they shot several people as we escaped towards the gate.""
+
+Victims were rushed to a hospital, and those critically injured were airlifted to the capital, Nairobi.
+
+""I was not at the institution when the incident occurred, but several students phoned me, crying over the attacks,"" said Jacktone Kweya, the dean of students. ""When I tried calling them back, their phones were off. It's very disturbing.""
+
+Robert Godec, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, said the United States ""strongly condemns"" the attack.
+
+""We extend our deepest condolences to all who have been affected,"" he said in a statement. ""The attack once again reinforces the need for all countries and communities to unite in the effort to combat violent extremism.""
+
+The assault comes in the wake of an intelligence report issued last week by security officials warning that al-Shabab was planning an attack on major institutions in retaliation for Kenyan military action in Somalia as part of an African Union initiative against the group.
+
+Al-Shabab has carried out several attacks in Garissa and across Kenya in the past few years, including an attack in 2013 at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi that left 67 people dead, and others on mosques in Mombasa, a coastal city in the east.
+
+Nairobi-based security analyst Abdiwahab Sheikh said the incident highlights how the government has failed to shore up security in the country.
+
+""The government has not learned anything from the Westgate attack,"" he said. ""How do you allow terrorists to take students hostage for more 10 hours? I think our security forces need to learn from the past.""",REAL
+9019,"Wall Street, Hollywood, The Media And SJWs Fail To Stop Donald Trump From Becoming America’s 45th President","Gentlemen, Donald J. Trump is the new President-elect of the United States. Though a a few results may still be unclear, Trump has captured the perennial large battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina, plus Georgia. And, in a change not seen in more than a generation, he has seized Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
+Pennsylvania and Michigan have not voted for a Republican Presidential candidate since 1988 and Wisconsin since way back in 1984. It appears also that states the Democrats thought were well and truly in the bag for them, such as Minnesota, Maine and Virginia, have stayed blue with only wafer-thin or very disappointing margins. The 2nd Congressional district of Maine, a state which divides its electoral votes along with Nebraska, has been called for the Republicans for the first time in nearly 30 years. The last time any Maine district voted for a GOP Presidential candidate was 1988, when George H. W. Bush seized all four electoral votes there.
+Importantly, too, avowedly liberal states have seen significant turnouts for Trump. For example, counts so far show that some 40% of voters in Connecticut and Rhode Island, states with even more liberal media bias than the nation generally, have opted for the “racist,” “sexist,” and “homophobic” Republican candidate. Their votes ultimately did not change the electoral college map, but it is heartening to know that even in the eye of the liberal storm, plenty of people are happy to support Trump. This is despite them facing fierce rebukes and, often enough, violence if they make their views public.
+The “clown” candidate has beaten 16 more “experienced” Republican challengers and now Hillary Clinton, the most elite-backed candidate in the world’s political history.
+As tonight’s results have shown, plenty of Trump voters in red and blue states alike have been forced to keep their beliefs quiet. Media airtime for pro-Trump views and stories has been deliberately minimized and frequently demonized by the major networks. Mainstream “journalists” such as Glenn Thrush , Wolf Blitzer , Jake Tapper , Jessica Valenti , and Brent Budowsky have been caught collaborating with both the DNC and Clinton campaign (if you believe that these two groups are actually separate). This only increases the esteem in which the emphatic, resounding Trump victory needs to be held.
+And let’s not forget the Senate and House races! After months of spineless GOP cucks rushing to differentiate themselves from Trump, The Donald has still carried them to victory in both Houses of Congress . The White House, Senate and House of Representatives are all in Republican hands until at least the 2018 House midterms. Can you taste the very salty tears of the liberals and SJWs yet?
+Every powerful vested interest not only supported Hillary, but did everything they could to ruin Trump Yes, it’s happening.
+Did you see the last major Hillary Clinton rallies? Celebrities-cum-political hacktivists, chief among them Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Jay Z, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and Katy Perry, all fell into Clinton’s corner well before their final appearances for her, excoriating anyone who had the gall to support Donald Trump. Even long-term Republicans who betrayed Trump, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, were attacked by celebrity SJWs such as Robert DeNiro after they joined the “Never Trump” ranks, as if they were dangerous saboteurs. The celebrity paranoia has been palpable for months. Hollywood, that broad industry taking in not just film stars but also singers, silver screen actors, and comedians, has become little more than an overpaid trade union for Hillary Clinton.
+Likewise, every major American company that has come out for a candidate has come out for Hillary. Plenty of “neutral” corporations have undoubtedly been funneling support to the Clinton campaign behind the scenes as well. Prominent billionaires like George Soros and Warren Buffett have done all they could to drag Hillary’s stumbling half-corpse, both literally and figuratively, across the line. Whilst Trump has been supported by a number of ten-figure businessmen, these men are regularly attacked in the media. They include the scapegoated but brave Peter Thiel and Carl Icahn.
+And then there’s the mainstream media. Countless studies have indicated that about 85-90% of all journalists are liberal. This over-representation is more salient still in the upper echelons of newsmen and women, particularly prominent mastheads such as The New York Times , Washington Post , and Huffington Post , plus Democratic TV surrogates like CNN and NBC. The 2016 campaign has inflated this preexisting liberal bias, one that plagued the two George W. Bush Administrations but raged even more ferociously against Donald Trump over the last 18 months.
+All of these media elites have lambasted Trump for over a year, at the same time they give the paltriest coverage of the disgusting Hillary, Podesta and DNC emails. Everything newsworthy on this front, from the overwhelming presence of Clinton Foundation donors in Hillary’s Secretary of State diary book to more recent revelations about John Podesta’s involvement with Satanic rituals, has been brushed off the balcony by the Wolf Blitzers and Chuck Todds of the American mainstream media. Yet Trump has triumphed nonetheless!
+The new administration must crush the criminal Democratic elites and Clinton Foundation with the rule of law Will Hillary now find herself stumbling into jail?
+Inasmuch as the Clinton campaign, the SJWs, and their big business and media enablers have been defeated in this year’s election, they retain very well-oiled and effective means for trying to undermine President Trump once he takes office. Trump’s first priority as Commander-in-Chief must be to remove the bureaucratic apparatchiks preventing a full and frank investigation of the Clinton Foundation. He also needs to clear the way for legal inquiries into the various criminal activities, as uncovered by Wikileaks, perpetrated from within the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
+The Department of Justice in particular has engaged in all manner of skulduggery, most notably when Attorney-General Loretta Lynch had a private meeting with Bill Clinton during the most crucial time of the FBI investigation into Hillary’s emails. Additionally, elements of the State Department illegally informed Hillary about new developments in that same case. Enough is enough. It’s time to drain the swamp.
+Election night produced another curve-ball: after weeks of calling Donald Trump a “sore loser” for him not saying if he would respect the final result, Hillary Clinton refused to speak to her supporters and the American people. It would seem that she only telephoned Trump privately. So who’s the sore loser now?
+Last night we were witnesses to the greatest electoral sea-change in American—and perhaps global—history. We cannot lose sight of the work to be done, but for the next 24 hours we can bask in this unprecedented victory against all odds.
+Hail to the Chief, Donald J. Trump.
+Read More: 4 Reasons Donald Trump Will Win The Presidential Election Of 2016 
+
+",FAKE
+347,Robert Durst of HBO's 'The Jinx' charged with murder,"(CNN) Millionaire real estate heir Robert Durst was ""lying in wait"" when he shot and killed his longtime friend because she ""was a witness to a crime,"" prosecutors alleged Monday.
+
+The evidence behind that accusation wasn't revealed in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's court filing, which charged Durst with first-degree murder. If he's convicted in the December 2000 killing of Susan Berman, prosecutors said, he could face the death penalty.
+
+The charges, filed two days after FBI agents arrested Durst in New Orleans, set the stage for a new courtroom battle for a man who's no stranger to run-ins with the law.
+
+Durst's alleged connections with Berman's death and two others became the focus of HBO's true crime documentary, ""The Jinx.""
+
+He admitted to shooting and dismembering his neighbor but was acquitted of murder.
+
+He was suspected in his first wife's disappearance, but no one could pin him to it.
+
+And just before Berman, his longtime confidante, was going to speak to investigators about his wife's case, she was killed.
+
+He's long denied any connection to her death or his wife's disappearance. But some say his mutterings picked up on a live microphone and broadcast in the HBO documentary make it sound like Durst could be changing his tune.
+
+""What the hell did I do?"" Durst says from a bathroom at the end of the documentary. ""Killed them all, of course.""
+
+His attorney says not to read too much into those comments. But more on that later.
+
+To understand the complexities of Durst's life -- and the deaths linked to it -- we have to start at the beginning:
+
+His first wife, Kathie McCormack, was on her way to medical school in New York when she vanished in 1982.
+
+""I put her on the train in Westchester to go into the city that evening. That was the last time I ever saw her,"" Durst testified in a separate case over a decade later.
+
+Despite a cloud of suspicion over the years, Durst has never been arrested in the disappearance.
+
+What we know: Crime writer Susan Berman was a longtime friend of Durst's.
+
+In 2000, when investigators reopened the 1982 disappearance case of Durst's first wife, they made plans to visit Berman in Los Angeles.
+
+""She was a confidante of Robert Durst. She knew him well,"" CNN's Jean Casarez said. ""And it was just days before investigators were to fly out to California to talk with her about what she may have known about the disappearance of Kathleen Durst that she was shot execution-style in her living room.""
+
+Fast forward 15 years, to this past weekend: Durst's arrest was in connection with Berman's death. (See below.)
+
+What we don't know: We don't know whether Durst was the person who sent an anonymous letter to police telling them there was a body in Berman's home.
+
+A police handwriting analysis said the writing on that card looked like Durst's, author Miles Corwin told CNN in 2004. But even with that, at the time, Corwin said police didn't have enough evidence to arrest Durst. So what's changed?
+
+In ""The Jinx,"" Berman's stepson reveals a letter from Durst he found among her possessions.
+
+""You look at the letter, and the handwriting is astonishingly similar,"" said Michael Daly, a special correspondent for The Daily Beast.
+
+What we know: In 2001 -- almost two decades after his wife's disappearance and after Berman's killing in late December 2000 -- millionaire Durst was living in the coastal Texas city of Galveston.
+
+Durst testified that he hid out in Galveston and posed as a mute woman because he was afraid as he faced increasing scrutiny, Court TV reported at the time.
+
+He got into a scuffle with his neighbor, Morris Black, and admitted to shooting and killing him.
+
+Prosecutors said Durst planned Black's killing to steal his identity. Defense attorneys said Black sneaked into Durst's apartment, and Durst accidentally shot him as both men struggled for a gun.
+
+Durst testified he panicked and decided to cut up Black's body and throw away the pieces.
+
+What we don't know: Why Durst chose Pennsylvania to escape to after shooting and dismembering his neighbor.
+
+He had jumped bond and almost got away -- if not for a sandwich that the heir stole from a store. He was captured in Pennsylvania for shoplifting, even though he had hundreds of dollars in his pocket.
+
+What we know: Durst is now accused of killing Berman, the crime writer.
+
+Authorities found him Saturday at a New Orleans hotel, where he was staying under a false name and was carrying a fake driver's license, according to a law enforcement official who's been briefed on the case. Durst had a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver on him when he was arrested, according to New Orleans Police Department records.
+
+He'd paid for the hotel in cash, and authorities believe he was preparing to leave the country and flee to Cuba, the official said.
+
+Investigators found marijuana and a ""substantial"" amount of cash in Durst's hotel room, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN.
+
+Police said they arrested Durst ""as a result of investigative leads and additional evidence that has come to light in the past year.""
+
+The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office on Monday charged him with first-degree murder. In New Orleans, he's also facing felony firearms and drug charges.
+
+What we don't know: What the new evidence is that led authorities to arrest Durst, why they arrested him when they did and when he'll be taken to Los Angeles.
+
+Susan Criss, a former Texas District Court judge who presided over the 2003 murder trial, told CNN that producers of ""The Jinx"" gave all the evidence they uncovered to police, and it's likely Durst's statements on the show are part of the case against him.
+
+""That case has been several years in the making,"" she said. ""The investigation has been going on. The making of the cases has been going on. And I think these are pieces of evidence that are going to be used, and they're going to be very powerful pieces of evidence.""
+
+But that doesn't mean investigators only learned about evidence as the show aired, she said.
+
+""They turned over the handwriting sample a couple years ago, at least two or three years ago,"" she told CNN. ""They told me when they did it. The police had it. The police didn't just learn this when they watched television. They've had that.""
+
+""Do I think this is a coincidence? Hell, no,"" he said. ""There has been rumor, innuendo and speculation for a number of years, and now we're going to get our day in court on this.""
+
+Once that day comes, prosecutors said Monday that Durst could face the death penalty if convicted.
+
+He waived his right to fight extradition to Los Angeles during an appearance Monday before a New Orleans Magistrate Court. But Durst remains in jail in New Orleans, where he was booked Monday on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm and possession of a firearm with a controlled substance. That could delay his extradition.
+
+The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office says he'll be brought back to Los Angeles for arraignment ""at a future date.""
+
+Durst's lawyers deny that he had anything to do with Berman's death and say they're eager for him to go to Los Angeles.
+
+""Bob Durst didn't kill Susan Berman,"" DeGuerin told reporters Monday. ""He's ready to end all the rumor and speculation and have a trial.""
+
+What we know: The HBO documentary series ""The Jinx"" aired in six episodes, ending Sunday.
+
+Immediately after the finale's last shot, Durst went into the bathroom, apparently not realizing his microphone was still on.
+
+""There it is. You're caught,"" he said.
+
+He then rambled a series of seemingly unrelated sentences before saying, ""He was right. I was wrong.""
+
+Then, the most intriguing remarks: ""What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.""
+
+What we don't know: What did those words really mean?
+
+Criss told CNN that it wasn't the first time Durst made statements that seemed to incriminate himself while being recorded.
+
+""In our trial, he had been recorded on the phone talking to his wife and friends, making a lot of admissions, and the state never used that,"" she said. ""But he was aware that he had been recorded, saying things that could implicate him in the murder we were trying. Earlier in those interviews, in a previous interview for that very program ('The Jinx'), there was a break where he was caught practicing his testimony. And so he realized, he knew he had a mic on. This is the third time he's made that mistake.""
+
+While the comments may appear incriminating, his attorney told Fox News' ""Justice With Judge Jeanine"" that the offhand remarks might not mean anything.
+
+""Your honesty would lead you to say you've said things under your breath before that you probably didn't mean,"" attorney Chip Lewis said.
+
+When asked for comment, HBO praised the series' director and producer in a statement Sunday.
+
+""We simply cannot say enough about the brilliant job that Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling did in producing 'The Jinx,' "" said HBO, which is owned by Time Warner -- the parent company of CNN. ""Years in the making, their thorough research and dogged reporting reignited interest in Robert Durst's story with the public and law enforcement.""
+
+Jim McCormack, the brother of Durst's first wife, said he's glad Durst's ability to avoid conviction may be unraveling.
+
+""The dominoes of justice are now starting to fall,"" he said. ""Through our faith, hope and prayers the last domino will bring closure and justice for Kathie.""",REAL
+2921,Why the Iraq offensive will fail,"American officials said this week they plan to train up to 25,000 Iraqi troops in a major mission to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, from Islamic State militants sometime this spring.
+
+The mission is welcome, but frankly it is unlikely to succeed unless there is, at the same time, a deeper understanding on the part of our government of the real threat that the Islamic State and its adherents pose to us as a nation—and what our role in this broader fight must be. Unless the United States takes dramatically more action than we have done so far in Iraq, the fractious, largely Shiite-composed units that make up the Iraqi army are not likely to be able, by themselves, to overwhelm a Sunni stronghold like Mosul, even though they outnumber the enemy by ten to one. The United States must be prepared to provide far more combat capabilities and enablers such as command and control, intelligence, logistics, and fire support, to name just a few things.
+
+Yet to defeat an enemy, you first must admit they exist, and this we have not done. I believe there continues to be confusion at the highest level of our government about what it is we’re facing, and the American public want clarity as well as moral and intellectual courage, which they are not now getting.
+
+There are some who argue that violent Islamists are not an existential threat and therefore can simply be managed as criminals, or as a local issue in Iraq and Syria. I respectfully and strongly disagree.
+
+We, as a nation, must accept and face the reality that we and other contributing nations of the world are at war, and not just in Iraq. We are in a global war with a radical and violent form of the Islamic religion, and it is irresponsible and dangerous to deny it. This enemy is far broader than the 40,000 or so fighters in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. There also exists a large segment of this radical version of Islam in over 90 nations abroad as well as here at home. Just ask those countries from which foreign fighters are flowing into the Levant to support this “jihad.”
+
+Nor is this enemy going away any time soon. As abhorrent as this form of radical Islam is, we must recognize and understand that it is a political ideology with the foundation of its laws emanating from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s life as its guide—and nothing else is needed. This form of radical Islam is in direct conflict with a large segment of the Islamic community; a community that must stand taller and be counted right now or they will be counted among the dead—killed at the hands of these radical militants (this includes both Sunni and Shia).
+
+Having served in the theaters of war of Iraq and Afghanistan for many years, and faced this enemy up close and personal, I have seen first hand the unrestrained cruelty of our enemy. While they may be animated by a medieval ideology, they are thoroughly modern in their capacity to kill and maim as well as precisely and very intelligently transmit their ideas, intentions and actions via the Internet.
+
+In fact, they are increasingly capable of threatening our nation’s interests and those of our allies, and it would be foolish for us to wait until they pose an existential threat before taking decisive action. Doing so would only increase the cost in blood and treasure later for what we know must be done now.
+
+Not surprisingly, the recent draft authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF (a minor component of a still required comprehensive strategy), signals that we are willing to wait for them to become existential. Again, this is irresponsible and dangerous thinking. This authorization requires far more and far stronger objectives and authorities for our military commanders and not be simply another limiting timetable that sets unreal expectations.
+
+Instead, this authorization should be broad and agile, and unconstrained by unnecessary restrictions. These restrictions cause not only frustration in our military and intelligence communities but they also significantly slow down the decision-making process for numerous fleeting opportunities. If this is due to a lack of confidence in our military and intelligence leadership, get rid of them and find new ones.
+
+And if there is not a clear, coherent, and comprehensive strategy inclusive of all elements of national power forthcoming from the administration, there should be no authorization at all, simply leave the existing one in place.
+
+There are solutions to this problem. However, solving tough, complex problems such as eliminating this radical form of Islam from the face of the planet will require extraordinary intellect, courage, and leadership. Leadership that isn’t consensus building, but thoughtful, insightful, yet, when it matters, decisive.
+
+We have seen this type of leadership throughout world history and we have examples in our own history—Washington, Lincoln, FDR to Ronald Reagan. When faced with threats to our way of life and the lives of our friends and allies around the world—they stepped up to lead. Whether that leadership meant forcing our will on the enemy or outmatching them with our wits and imagination, they faced the difficult reality head on.
+
+To that end, I offer the following three strategic objectives:
+
+• First, we have to energize every element of national power in a cohesive synchronized manner—similar to the effort during World War II or the Cold War—to effectively resource what will likely be a multi-generational struggle. There is no cheap way to win this fight.
+
+• Second, we must engage the violent Islamists wherever they are, drive them from their safe havens and kill them. There can be no quarter and no accommodation. Any nation-state that offers safe haven to our enemies must be given one choice—to eliminate them or be prepared for those contributing nations involved in this endeavor to do so. We do need to recognize there are nations who lack the capability to defeat this threat and will likely require help to do so inside of their own internationally recognized boundaries. We must be prepared to assist those nations.
+
+• Third, we must decisively confront the state and non-state supporters and enablers of the violent Islamist ideology and compel them to end their support to our enemies or be prepared to remove their capacity to do so. Many of these are currently considered “partners” of the United States. This must change. If our so-called partners do not act in accordance with internationally accepted norms and behaviors or international law, the United States must be prepared to cut off or severely curtail economic, military and diplomatic ties.
+
+Winning doesn’t come without cost and solving difficult messy problems is never easy, but that’s what leaders do. Let’s lead!",REAL
+3002,Hope and hype of Hiroshima can’t conceal Obama’s dismal record on nuclear disarmament,"Seven years ago, in the Czech capital of Prague, Barack Obama delivered his first major foreign policy speech as president. To rapturous applause, he laid out his vision for “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”. It earned him that year’s Nobel peace prize.
+
+On Friday he will bookend his two terms in office with another appeal for nuclear disarmament, this time during a historic trip to Hiroshima. No other sitting US president has ever visited the Japanese city that was razed to the ground by a single atomic bomb in the final days of the second world war.
+
+An estimated 140,000 people, almost all of them civilians, perished instantly in the vast inferno, or died within a few months from severe burns, blast injuries or radiation sickness. Many more succumbed years later to cancers and other radiation-related illnesses.
+
+The president will make no apology on behalf of his nation for this horrific attack. That he has made clear. But most of the remaining survivors, known as hibakusha, have not demanded one. Their focus instead is on the future – how to realise the oft-cited, long-elusive goal of a nuclear weapon-free world, lest anyone else ever suffer as they have.
+
+Many hibakusha have been dismayed by the president’s dismal record on disarmament. Setsuko Thurlow, who was 13 years old when the building she was in collapsed around her from the atomic blast, wrote in the New York Daily News last week: “We are frustrated by Obama’s eloquent propensity to say one thing and do another.”
+
+Under the Obama presidency, contrary to perceptions, the pace of nuclear warhead dismantlement has slowed, not hastened. Indeed, the two presidents Bush and Bill Clinton each made greater gains in downsizing the colossal US nuclear stockpile amassed during the cold war.
+
+But more alarming than this failure to destroy old nuclear weapons has been the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of new, “smaller” ones, for which the threshold of use would be lower, according to former military commanders.
+
+At great expense, the president has bolstered all three components of the nation’s “nuclear triad”: the strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched missiles. This was the price paid for securing Republican support in 2010 for the ratification of a modest bilateral arms reduction treaty with Russia.
+
+Obama’s much-publicised “nuclear security summits” largely ignored the greatest source of nuclear insecurity in the world today: 15,000 nuclear weapons, including 1,800 on hair-trigger alert. Instead, they focused on measures to keep “vulnerable nuclear material” out of terrorists’ hands – a vital endeavour, certainly, but for all the fanfare the results were small.
+
+Now the United States is stridently resisting diplomatic moves by two-thirds of the world’s nations to declare nuclear weapons illegal. It boycotted UN talks in Geneva this month aimed at setting the stage for negotiations on a prohibition treaty. But it cannot veto this initiative, just as it could not veto the processes that led to bans on landmines in 1997 and cluster munitions in 2008.
+
+While a prohibition on nuclear weapons will not result in disarmament overnight, it will powerfully challenge the notion that these weapons are acceptable for some nations. It will place them on the same legal footing as both other types of weapons of mass destruction – namely, chemical and biological weapons.
+
+In Geneva, Australia spoke neither for nor against a ban. Under the caretaker government, it was compelled to remain silent on matters for which there is no bipartisan agreement. The Coalition government has fervently opposed the “ban the bomb” movement, arguing that the so-called US “nuclear umbrella” guarantees Australia’s “security and prosperity”.
+
+Labor, by contrast, has declared its firm support for “the negotiation of a global treaty banning [nuclear] weapons”, welcoming “the growing global movement of nations that is supporting this objective”. This was an important addition to its revised national platform in 2015.
+
+Its new policy, no doubt, will prove unpopular with our powerful ally – whoever may serve as the next commander-in-chief – but it is in harmony with the policies of our nearest neighbours, from whom we have grown increasingly isolated on this issue in recent years. Among the most outspoken proponents of a ban are New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.
+
+Australia should look to these and other nuclear-free nations in our region, and beyond, for guidance on disarmament matters – not to a nation bristling with 7,000 nuclear weapons. The US will not, alas, lead the way to a world without these horrible weapons. Even under one of its most progressive presidents, it has failed abysmally to do so.
+
+The promise of Prague was broken. Let us not get caught up in the hope and hype of Hiroshima. To succeed in eliminating nuclear weapons, we must begin by stigmatising and prohibiting such weapons. The US will not support us in this endeavour. But the overwhelming majority of nations will. We must stand firmly on the right side of history.
+
+The problem is not North Korea or Russia or China, or whoever else we may perceive as the enemy. The problem is the weapons these and others possess and threaten to use every day through the doctrine of “deterrence”. They are inherently indiscriminate, inhumane and immoral weapons. Soon, too, they will be illegal. Australia must stop defending them simply out of deference to its ally.",REAL
+7484,"650,000 Emails Found On Anthony Weiner’s Laptop; DOJ Blocked Foundation Probe","
+Yesterday, we reported that the FBI has found “ tens of thousands of emails ” belonging to Huma Adein on Anthony Weiner’s computer, raising questions how practical it is that any conclusive finding will be available or made by the FBI in the few days left before the elections.
+Now, according to the WSJ , it appears that Federal agents are preparing to scour roughly 650,000 emails that, as we reported moments ago were discovered weeks ago on the laptop of Anthony Weiner , to see how many relate to a prior probe of Hillary Clinton’s email use, as metadata on the device suggests there may be thousands sent to or from the private server that the Democratic nominee used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter.
+As the WSJ adds, the review will take weeks at a minimum to determine whether those messages are work-related emails between Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide and the estranged wife of Mr. Weiner, and State Department officials; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe, which FBI officials call “Midyear .”
+And, as we further reported earlier today , the FBI has had to await a court order to begin reviewing the emails, because they were uncovered in an unrelated probe of Mr. Weiner, and that order was delayed for reasons that remain unclear.
+More stunning is just how many emails were found on Weiner’s computer. And while one can only imagine the content of some of the more persona ones, the WSJ writes that the latest development began in early October when New York-based FBI officials notified Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s second-in-command, that while investigating Mr. Weiner for possibly sending sexually charged messages to a minor, they had recovered a laptop with 650,000 emails. Many, they said, were from the accounts of Ms. Abedin, according to people familiar with the matter.
+Those emails stretched back years, these people said, and were on a laptop that both Mr. Weiner and Ms. Abedin used and that hadn’t previously come up in the Clinton email probe. Ms. Abedin said in late August that the couple were separating.
+The FBI had searched the computer while looking for child pornography , people familiar with the matter said, but the warrant they used didn’t give them authority to search for matters related to Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement at the State Department. Mr. Weiner has denied sending explicit or indecent messages to the teenager.
+As reported yesterday, it appears that there are potentially tens of thousands of Abedin linked emails on Weiner’s computer:
+In their initial review of the laptop, the metadata showed many messages, apparently in the thousands, that were either sent to or from the private email server at Mrs. Clinton’s home that had been the focus of so much investigative effort for the FBI . Senior FBI officials decided to let the Weiner investigators proceed with a closer examination of the metadata on the computer, and report back to them.
+The WSJ then connects the dots between how the Weiner emails were linked to the Clinton reopening of the Clinton probe, despite Loretta Lynch’s and the DOJ’s vocal urges not to do so :
+At a meeting early last week of senior Justice Department and FBI officials, a member of the department’s senior national-security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop, the people familiar with the matter said. At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant, these people said. 
+Mr. McCabe then instructed the email investigators to talk to the Weiner investigators and see whether the laptop’s contents could be relevant to the Clinton email probe, these people said. After the investigators spoke, the agents agreed it was potentially relevant. 
+Mr. Comey was given an update, decided to go forward with the case and notified Congress on Friday, with explosive results . Senior Justice Department officials had warned Mr. Comey that telling Congress would violate well-established policies against overt actions that could affect an election, and some within the FBI have been unhappy at Mr. Comey’s repeated public statements on the probe, going back to his first press conference on the subject in July.
+But wait – it gets better.
+Recall that this is the same Andrew Mcabe whose wife the Wall Street Journal reported last week received $467,500 in campaign funds in late 2015 from the political action committee of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime ally of the Clintons and, until he was elected governor in November 2013, a Clinton Foundation board member. 
+Mr. McAuliffe had supported Dr. McCabe in the hopes she and a handful of other Democrats might help win a majority in the state Senate, giving Mr. McAuliffe more sway in the state capitol. Dr. McCabe lost her race last November, and Democrats failed to win their majority.
+FBI officials have said Mr. McCabe had no role in the Clinton email probe until he became deputy director, and there was no conflict of interest because by then his wife’s campaign was over.
+Which brings us to the second big topic: the Clinton Foundation, and how the DOJ made sure that particular probe never made the light of day. At the same time as the Clinton server was being investigated, other Clinton-related investigations were under way within the FBI, and they have been the subject of internal debate for months.
+Early this year, four FBI field offices—New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark.—were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling, according to people familiar with the matter.
+The WSJ touches on something fascinating: Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation, these people said . So where did that trail go? Apparently nowhere.
+The Washington field office was probing financial relationships involving Mr. McAuliffe before he became a Clinton Foundation board member, these people said. Mr. McAuliffe has denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyer has said the probe is focused on whether he failed to register as an agent of a foreign entity.The FBI field office in New York had done the most work on the Clinton Foundation case and received help from the FBI field office in Little Rock, the people familiar with the matter said.
+In February, FBI officials made a presentation to the Justice Department, according to these people. By all accounts, the meeting didn’t go well.
+Some said that is because the FBI didn’t present compelling evidence to justify more aggressive pursuit of the Clinton Foundation, and that the career public integrity prosecutors in the room simply believed it wasn’t a very strong case. Others said that from the start, the Justice Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive of the case. 
+“That was one of the weirdest meetings I’ve ever been to,” one participant told others afterward, according to people familiar with the matter.
+Needless to say, the probe into the Foundation faded.
+But back to the Clinton probe, according to a person familiar with the probes, on Aug. 12, a senior Justice Department official called Mr. McCabe to voice his displeasure at finding that New York FBI agents were still openly pursuing the Clinton Foundation probe, despite the department’s refusal to allow more aggressive investigative methods in the case. Mr. McCabe said agents still had the authority to pursue the issue as long as they didn’t use those methods.
+At this point a question emerges: did McCabe seek to defend or press on with a Clinton probe:
+Mr. McCabe’s defenders in the agency said that following the call, he repeated the instruction that he had given earlier in the Clinton Foundation investigation: Agents were to keep pursuing the work within the authority they had.
+Others further down the FBI chain of command, however, said agents were given a much starker instruction on the case: “Stand down.” When agents questioned why they weren’t allowed to take more aggressive steps, they said they were told the order had come from the deputy director—Mr. McCabe. Others familiar with the matter deny Mr. McCabe or any other senior FBI official gave such a stand-down instruction.
+At this point the two probes, into Hillary’s email and the Clinton Foundation converged:
+For agents who already felt uneasy about FBI leadership’s handling of the Clinton Foundation case, the moment only deepened their concerns, these people said. For those who felt the probe hadn’t yet found significant evidence of criminal conduct, the leadership’s approach was the right response to the facts on the ground.
+Things accelerated over the past two months, when in September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on non-government laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information.
+Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. McCabe, these people said, told them no and added that they could not “go prosecutor-shopping.”
+Not long after that discussion, FBI agents informed the bureau’s leaders about the Weiner laptop, prompting Mr. Comey’s disclosure to Congress and setting of the furor that promises to consume the final days of a tumultuous campaign.
+While much of the latest developments are known, or could have been inferred assuming more corruption within government agencies, the punchline is that the weeks if not months of upcoming work means that if Clinton wins the White House, she will likely do so amid at least one ongoing investigation into her inner circle being handled by law-enforcement officials who are deeply divided over how to manage such cases . It also means that Trump will be hounding Hillary for the remainder of the campaign as being the only presidential candidate to seek election with a recently reopened criminal probe hanging over her head. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Zero Hedge of www.zerohedge.com . ",FAKE
+3067,Congress Undermines U.S. Global Economic Standing,"The debacle in Congress last week over President Barack Obama's trade agenda was further evidence that domestic political wrangling is harming U.S. leadership in the global economy.
+
+By failing to pass Trade Adjustment Assistance, which provides help to American workers affected by international trade, Congress has raised doubts about the U.S.'s ability to conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement with 11 other Pacific Rim economies. It also dims the prospects for the negotiations on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe.
+
+It wasn't the first time recently that Congress sought to derail an agreement the executive branch had successfully advanced abroad. In recent months, lawmakers have again failed to approve reforms to the International Monetary Fund that were crafted by the administration, approved by most of the fund's global membership and are in the U.S. national interest (and they entail neither additional financial obligations nor an erosion of U.S. influence, representation and veto power on major IMF decisions).
+
+As with trade, congressional blockage of IMF reforms had less to do with the merits of the case than with the posturing of individual lawmakers as they prepare to seek re-election. The dysfunction reflects a legislative branch that has been operationally undermined not just by extreme polarization of the two parties, but also by the influence of the extremes within the parties as they set up the terms of the debate for the next presidential-nomination primaries.
+
+Outside the U.S., the image of an uncooperative Congress has also been fueled by the Republican lawmakers who took the unprecedented step of sending a letter to Iran's leadership warning that the nuclear agreement being pursued by Obama could well be overturned after the November 2016 elections.
+
+To be fair, such signals to the rest of the world haven't been emitted by Congress alone. The administration itself slipped in its handling of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
+
+Ignoring advice to join this new institution and seek to shape and influence it from within, the U.S. embarked on a concerted public campaign to block it. Those efforts were thwarted as U.S. allies joined the China-led initiative, forcing a rather embarrassing retreat.
+
+All this justifiably worries those who believe that effective U.S. economic leadership is essential to a well-functioning global system. This is especially true now, when world growth is struggling, there are genuine concerns about currency wars and countries have fallen further behind in dealing with some collective challenges, including environmental ones.
+
+Historically, the U.S. has been the most effective in coordinating crisis management efforts, pushing forward multilateral reforms and enabling global policy cooperation. Moreover, there is no credible alternative to U.S. leadership on the international economic stage.
+
+The Group of Seven isn't representative of the realities of recent global economic realignments. The G-20 is unwieldy and lacks sufficient continuity. Europe, with its endless challenges, is too internally focused and preoccupied. China is hesitant to step up to broader international responsibilities. And too many international institutions are burdened with longstanding legitimacy and credibility deficits related to outmoded representation and governance features.
+
+After Congress's loud statement last week, many hope that lawmakers will find a way to put trade authorization back on track this week. Yet such a stop-go strategy is far from cost-free. It does little to restore confidence in Congress, whose public approval rating languishes at or close to record lows. And it suggests to the rest of the world that, due to seemingly endless internal political polarization and dysfunction, the U.S. cannot be relied on to play its natural role as the world’s economic conductor.
+
+Congress would be well advised to take note of this before turning other international economic initiatives into spectacles. And, while it is at it, it should really move to approve IMF reforms that are in both the national and global interest.
+
+This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
+
+To contact the author of this story:
+
+ Mohamed A. El-Erian at melerian@bloomberg.net
+
+To contact the editor responsible for this story:
+
+ Max Berley at mberley@bloomberg.net",REAL
+2912,Iran nuclear talks: What if the deal falls through?,"Washington (CNN) No deal is better than a bad deal, say critics of President Barack Obama's nuclear talks with Iran.
+
+But what if Republican and Democratic opponents succeed in their intensifying effort to derail the diplomacy?
+
+The price of failure could be an ugly blame game and cascade of political reprisals leading to nuclear chicken between Iran and the West -- potentially leading to war.
+
+""We would have to deal with a resumption of Iran's nuclear activities, which we don't want to see take place. Iran would have to deal with the resumption of sanctions, which they don't want,"" said Gary Samore, a top nonproliferation official during Obama's first term.
+
+For now, the grave consequences of a breakdown in talks are one reason the United States and Iran are still at the table, as a grueling diplomatic process reaches critical deadlines and painful political decisions beckon.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif are haggling over the remaining issues in Lausanne, Switzerland, ahead of an end-of-the-month deadline for a framework agreement, which then must be finalized by July 1.
+
+But time may be running out for a deal in which six world powers would lift sanctions that have throttled Iran's economy in return for assurances that Tehran will continue to stay a year or so away from developing a nuclear bomb.
+
+The White House puts the chances of a deal at only 50-50: Disputes still rage over the scale of nuclear infrastructure Iran will be allowed to keep, the pace of sanctions relief and the extent of nuclear site inspections.
+
+Despite the controversy stoked last week in Washington when 47 GOP senators sent a letter to Iran's leaders warning that the future of a deal was not guaranteed, many analysts believe that the talks will go on, even if the end-of-March deadline slips.
+
+""Not because all sides are desperate to keep talking. But I think sufficient momentum has been created in the last month or so that they see real possibilities,"" said Robert Einhorn, a former senior U.S. State Department arms control official.
+
+Obama may now have slightly more political leeway on the talks than before -- ironically because of attempts by U.S. and Israeli critics to pen him in.
+
+A few weeks ago, skeptical Democrats appeared to be lining up with Republicans and approaching a veto-proof Senate majority that could have forced Obama to submit a deal to Congress or accept the passage of new sanctions. Either move could have killed the agreement.
+
+But the Republicans' letter and a fiercely critical speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the proposed deal prompted some skeptical Democrats to close ranks, at least temporarily.
+
+But Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN's Dana Bash on ""State of the Union"" that Obama was on the cusp of agreeing a ""very bad"" deal that would allow Iran to keep its nuclear infrastructure intact. He said that if an agreement is reached, he would bring up legislation that would give Congress 60 days to back or reject a deal, despite fresh pleas from the White House for the GOP to hold off. If no deal is reached, McConnell said on Sunday that he would press ahead with toughening sanctions on Iran, he said.
+
+Republican sources, meanwhile, said that despite the furor over the letter from the senators, no Democrats had yet formally pulled support for legislation requiring the Senate to have a say on the deal. That leaves the real possibility of a pitched political showdown on Iran in the coming months.
+
+The opening for diplomacy is meanwhile not endless. And if no deal emerges by July, political pressure for a tougher administration stance towards Iran may be unstoppable.
+
+If diplomacy fails, how events unfold will be dictated by how the process collapses; who gets the blame; and the political pressures exerted on Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Washington and Tehran.
+
+""If, at the end of June, there is not a deal, and talks have broken off, I think that it is inevitable that the Congress will adopt new sanctions legislation,"" said Einhorn, now with the Brookings Institution.
+
+""What that will mean is the Iranians will reciprocate.""
+
+Iran could start up centrifuges halted during the nuclear negotiations, bring more advanced machinery online and enrich uranium to the potent 20% level that would get it closer to a weapon.
+
+And if it bars international inspectors, the world would have no idea how far Iran is from making a bomb.
+
+The administration thinks that if the United States gets the blame for using hardball tactics that derail talks -- if, say, Congress imposes more sanctions, as administration critics want -- there is no way its international partners would keep existing sanctions in place, let alone double down and impose new ones.
+
+In addition to unilateral U.S. sanctions Congress has imposed, the United Nations, European Union and other countries have put in place their own sanctions cutting off Iran from international partners and not just the American economy.
+
+Cornelius Adebahr, a European security specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, predicted Iran would reap a propaganda victory.
+
+""It would give ammunition for Iran to say the U.S. is not reliable,"" he said.
+
+Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Jim Walsh, a specialist on the talks, said the Iranian government would have little choice but to hit back at a tougher U.S. stance.
+
+""The Iranians are just not going to take it. They are going to feel condemned to respond. Both sides will take their shovels and dig the holes deeper.""
+
+Walsh continued, ""We would be between a lame duck (U.S.) president for whom negotiations had just failed, a weakened Rouhani, for whom negotiations have just failed, and a coming U.S. presidential election -- not exactly the best environment to return to talks and accomplish a diplomatic settlement.""
+
+Aborted negotiations that leave Iran rededicated to its nuclear program raise the specter of Tehran with a bomb -- or some enemy country taking military action to stop it.
+
+But critics of the deal being worked out in Switzerland don't agree that such an outcome is the likeliest scenario.
+
+GOP hawks and Israel believe Tehran is so desperate for sanctions relief, especially at a time of low oil prices, that it will have no choice but to offer a better deal than the one currently on the table and agree to the complete halt to uranium enrichment that Israel and conservatives demand.
+
+""If Iran threatens to walk away from the table -- and this often happens in a Persian bazaar -- call their bluff. They'll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do,"" Netanyahu maintained in his Congress speech.
+
+Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made the case in a USA Today op-ed Friday that Obama should ""walk away from a flimsy nuclear agreement.""
+
+Those opposed to the deal reject the administration that follow their advice would likely blow up the talks and set Washington on an inevitable path to war as the only remaining way to disable Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
+
+Instead, GOP congressmen counter that several bills they are pushing, with significant Democratic support, do not forestall the possibility of continued diplomacy if talks fail. They say that extra sanctions would increase Obama's leverage in diplomacy, not weaken it.
+
+Even if talks do succeed this year, the long-term future of an agreement still wouldn't be assured.
+
+The diplomatic effort has powerful critics among hardliners in Tehran who, whatever's written on paper, could push to illicitly expand Iran's nuclear program and close in on a bomb. It's not just Republicans who fear Tehran may violate any deal or test the limits of compliance. Some people who back the talks admit that may be the case, too.
+
+In Washington, Congress will be required to lift the existing sanctions on Iran to sustain the agreement in years to come -- a step that is hardly a given.
+
+And the stiff Republican opposition means a deal is not assured of surviving the arrival of a new president in the White House come 2017. A future Republican president could reverse Obama's sanctions waivers fairly quickly, as the senators warned in their letter to Iran.
+
+Whether the new president would want to do so is another matter, however, especially if Iran lives up to the terms of a deal, which would include stringent verification by international inspectors.
+
+He or she would risk a heavy political price. A unilateral Washington pullout would likely infuriate U.S. partners and leave the rookie president facing a boiling crisis that could overwhelm the new administration's nascent foreign policy.
+
+""That's what the administration is counting on -- if there is compliance and the deal is working well,"" said Einhorn.
+
+Kerry reminded Congress this week that Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia would all be cosignatories of a deal.
+
+""If all those countries have said this is good and it's working, (will a new president) just turn around and nullify it on behalf of the United States?"" he asked. ""That's not going to happen.""
+
+Congress would face the same cost-benefit calculation when it comes to the sanctions only lawmakers can expunge. In the event of a Democratic White House victory in 2016, the congressional math could also change in favor of a deal.
+
+And if Republicans keep their majorities, lawmakers who are bent on thwarting Obama may be less willing to handcuff a new GOP president.",REAL
+6432,Election’s Rape And Sexual Assault Accusations Need to Be Taken Seriously,"Election’s Rape And Sexual Assault Accusations Need to Be Taken Seriously Posted on Oct 27, 2016 
+By Sonali Kolhatkar Protesters organized by the National Organization for Women gather near the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York City on Oct. 12, as sexual assault allegations about GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump emerged on the heels of The Washington Post’s bombshell report about Trump’s 2005 “Access Hollywood” hot-mic comments regarding his treatment of women. (Frank Franklin II / AP Photo) 
+Less than a day after the third and final 2016 presidential debate, GOP nominee Donald Trump faced new accusations from a woman who recounted a story of her sexual assault at his hands. Karena Virginia told members of the press how Trump groped her in public at the U.S. Open in 1998 while asking, “Don’t you know who I am?” 
+Two days later, two more women, Kristin Anderson and Summer Zervos, made similar allegations . Earlier this year, a woman named Katie Johnson said Trump raped her in 1994 when she was 13 years old; she filed a lawsuit against him that was later thrown out on a technicality. Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana Trump, has also accused him of raping her. To date a dozen women have publicly alleged that Trump in some way assaulted them. 
+Jane Piper, an activist who faced her rapist in court in 2014 , told me in an interview that she believes the women who have accused Trump. “I take their word as their word, and I believe them,” she said. “We have this documented evidence of [Trump’s] attitude and behavior toward women,” added Piper, referring to his numerous public statements revealing a callous and disrespectful attitude toward women. To Piper, the idea that Trump might be a serial perpetrator of sexual assault is consistent with his language and the attitude he has publicly displayed. 
+Advertisement Square, Site wide 
+Think about Bill Cosby. While he has not been convicted on charges of sexual assault, in the court of public opinion, he is already considered guilty. He has admitted to drugging women in order to have sex with them, and the sheer volume of accusers against him leaves one wondering: “How could they possibly all be lying?” As Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Trump during the final presidential debate, “Why would so many different women from so many different circumstances, from so many different years, why would they all ... make up these stories?” 
+Indeed, in cases such as those involving Cosby and Trump, there is little to be gained by publicly proclaiming oneself the victim of rape and assault. All a woman gains is to be forever known as someone who accused a famous man of a vile crime. According to Piper, “It is not comfortable to be known in this way. It makes no sense, and it is ridiculous and offensive and insulting” to imply that a woman might make it all up for fame. 
+Like Cosby, Trump has bragged about assaulting women. In a now infamous recording obtained by The Washington Post , Trump revealed to TV host Billy Bush that he simply has his way with women: “Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” And, as in Cosby’s case, women are emerging from the woodwork as the election looms to reveal sordid stories about Trump’s alleged assaults on them. 
+One major difference here is that Cosby is an actor (who will indeed face the accusations against him in court), while Trump is running for the highest office in the nation. While all men, including Cosby, need to be held to high standards on sexual assault, those who run for president deserve the utmost scrutiny. 
+Piper dismissed the response by Trump’s supporters that the timing of the accusations now emerging is suspect. “Of course, this timing is perfect,” she told me, “because [Trump’s accusers] just listened to him in that video describe what he did and [be] proud of it, and the next day, in the debate, lie and say that he never ever actually did that.” Piper said that if she had been one of the women who had alleged assault by Trump, she “would be doing everything in my power to make sure that the public knew what kind of person this man was so that they would know what kind of leader they were choosing to elect.” Essentially, anyone running for president of the United States should expect his or her past and present to be scrutinized under the most stringent of microscopes. 
+“Womanizing,” or having affairs, as presidential candidate Gary Hart was accused of in 1987, is very different from being accused of sexual assault or rape. Hart was brought down by a media frenzy that began with a single, provocative photograph. Trump is heading straight into an election dogged by repeated accusations of crimes—not affairs—and all he has offered are simplistic denials and deflections.",FAKE
+5088,Democratic convention: passionate end to day one steadies early drama,"A stormy opening night of the Democratic convention battered the Philadelphia arena on Monday as defiant Bernie Sanders supporters resisted attempts to persuade them to embrace Hillary Clinton.
+
+Impassioned pleas for unity from a trio of Democratic women led by Michelle Obama raised hopes that the tumultuous first day of the convention may provide catharsis.
+
+But despite a direct plea for calm from Sanders, many of his 1,846 delegates in the arena repeatedly jeered at mentions of the party’s presumptive nominee for the first hour or two of the evening.
+
+Only after the Vermont senator appeared on stage at the Wells Fargo Center to urge them that the decision to choose between Clinton and Trump was “not even close” did the rebellion that has divided the party for much of the year show signs that it had reached its peak.
+
+“Any objective observer will conclude that – based on her ideas and her leadership – Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States,” Sanders said, after three minutes of trying to quiet the floor.
+
+Signs that a week of big-name Democratic speakers may help overcome the uncomfortable split also emerged when the first lady delivered a speech that brought the room to a standstill.
+
+“Because of Hillary Clinton our daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that woman can be president of the United States,” said Obama with evident emotion in her voice.
+
+“In this election we cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best ... Between now and November we need to do what we did eight years ago and four years ago,” added the first lady. “We need to pour every last ounce of our passion and our strength and our love for this country into electing Hillary Clinton as president of the United States of America.
+
+Earlier, even a live rendition of Bridge over Troubled Water from Paul Simon, ripe with symbolism, could not disguise scenes of open revolt that proved far more vocal than expected and caused consternation on stage.
+
+“Can I just say to the Bernie or Bust people: you are being ridiculous,” said Sanders-supporting comedian Sarah Silverman as she called for unity and backed Clinton “with gusto”.
+
+“I will be respectful of you. And I want you to be respectful of me,” demanded Ohio congresswoman Marcia Fudge of the vocal Sanders supporters after she was repeatedly interrupted. “We are all Democrats and we need to act like it.”
+
+The tone of the evening was set when the religious invocation at the start of the session was interrupted by rounds of competitive chanting for different corners for the room: “Bernie! Bernie!” drowned out by “Hillary! Hillary!” and back again, as the pastor stood awkwardly on stage.
+
+Congressman Elijah Cummings had his speech about the struggle of his family against racism interrupted by Sanders supporters protesting against trade deals. Other speakers nervously approached applause lines not knowing whether they would be booed or cheered by the fractious crowd.
+
+At times, there was a faint echo of the mood at the Republican convention last week, where every mention of Clinton’s name also prompted boos, albeit much louder and without the balancing cheers of her supporters.
+
+During a two-minute pause while an official photograph was taken of the hall, a lone shout of “Bernie” punctuated the awkward silence.
+
+And as a violent thunder storm forced the evacuation of marquee tents outside the arena, party officials sent a warning to those outside:
+
+A text to Sanders delegates was also sent to try to calm the storm inside. “I ask you as a personal courtesy to me to not engage in any kind of protest on the floor,” said the text signed “–Bernie”. “It is of utmost importance you explain this to your delegations.”
+
+Yet the anger was intensified by leaked emails suggesting bias against the Sanders campaign by party officials, and the Democratic National Committee began the night with an apology.
+
+“These comments do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process,” it said. “The DNC does not – and will not – tolerate disrespectful language exhibited toward our candidates. Individual staffers have also rightfully apologized for their comments, and the DNC is taking appropriate action to ensure it never happens again.”
+
+The turning point came when Obama took to the stage, to a rapturous welcome from Democrats waving a sea of “Michelle” purple placards.
+
+She called Clinton “the president I want for my girls” and someone “who knows that the world is not black and white and easily boiled down to 140 characters”.
+
+“Only one person I trust with the responsibility to be president and that is our friend Hillary Clinton,” said Obama.
+
+Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a popular figure on the left, also focused her attention on defeating Trump in a calm speech that drew out what was at stake in November’s election.
+
+“For me this choice is personal; it’s about who we are as a people,” said Warren, blasting Trump as “a man who thinks of nothing but himself”.
+
+In an extended call for Sanders supporters to join her on the journey toward backing Clinton, Silverman memorably described her Republican opponent as “calling people names from his gold-encrusted sandbox because [he] was given money instead of human touch”.
+
+Richard Trumka, president of the labor organisation the AFL-CIO, struck a similar note: “He thinks he’s a tough guy. Well Donald, I worked in the mines with tough guys. I know tough guys, they’re friends of mine. And Donald, you’re no tough guy. You’re a bully.
+
+But it fell to Sanders himself to list the ways in which Clinton’s policies increasingly matched the priorities of his supporters.
+
+“I understand that many people here in this conventional hall and around the country are disappointed at the result ... I think it’s fair to say no one is more disappointed than I am,” he said.
+
+“Our revolution continues … Election days come and go but the struggle of the people to create a government that represents all of us and not just the one percent continues.”
+
+After he left the stage, an email to supporters announced he was creating a new organisation, called Our Revolution, which would “transform American politics to make our political and economic systems once again responsive to the needs of working families”.
+
+John Parker, a delegate from Florida, said he was not too concerned with the rancor within the party on the first day of its convention.
+
+“Democracy is not always pretty and people have the right to their opinion,” he said. “It is what it is. But look around, we’re all good now.
+
+“There’s no choice but Hillary Clinton. We can’t take Donald Trump.”
+
+Gary West, a Sanders supporter and delegate from Texas, said the email leaks revealed “a major bias in the party”. Having volunteered out of pocket to organize for Sanders across the country, West said he had not yet warmed up to Clinton and the controversy “made it more difficult”.
+
+“We all suspected that these things were going on, the rigging of the primaries and the collusion between the DNC and the Hillary campaign,” West said. “And we were all told we were crazy.
+
+“Nobody on stage has brought it up as an apology to Bernie, as an apology to the delegates.”
+
+“It’s an uphill battle for Hillary to get the support of the progressive movement,” he added. “She has to prove herself.”",REAL
+602,The GOP's big-money plan to save the Senate,The move would make it easier for the Trump administration to demolish the exchanges.,REAL
+8181,It Turns Out Trump Put off Investigators for 6 Months While He Destroyed Emails,"By Hrafnkell Haraldsson on Mon, Oct 31st, 2016 at 12:20 pm Trump “refused 2 produce records sought by prosecutors for 6 months. Said under oath: Was destroying them whole time.” Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+Newsweek’ s Kurt Eichenwald has struck again, reporting that Donald Trump “refused 2 produce records sought by prosecutors for 6 months. Said under oath: Was destroying them whole time.” 
+The whole strategy, he writes at Newsweek in an article he swears was written before Comey’s announcement, was “deny, impede and delay, while destroying documents the court had ordered them to hand over.” 
+In 1973, he reveals, “the Republican nominee, his father and their real estate company battled the federal government over civil charges that they refused to rent apartments to African-Americans.” 
+Shortly after the government filed its case in October, Trump attacked: He falsely declared to reporters that the feds had no evidence he and his father discriminated against minorities, but instead were attempting to force them to lease to welfare recipients who couldn’t pay their rent.The family’s attempts to slow down the federal case were at times nonsensical. Trump submitted an affidavit contending that the government had engaged in some unspecified wrongdoing by releasing statements to the press on the day it brought the case without first having any “formal communications” with him; he contended that he’d learned of the complaint only while listening to his car radio that morning. But Trump’s sworn statement was a lie. Court records show that the government had filed its complaint at 10 a.m. and phoned him almost immediately afterward. The government later notified the media with a press release. […] Six months after the original filing, the case was nowhere because the Trumps had repeatedly ignored the deadlines to produce records and answers to questions, known as interrogatories….Finally, under subpoena, Trump appeared for a short deposition. When asked about the missing documents, he made a shocking admission: The Trumps had been destroying their corporate records for the previous six months and had no document-retention program. They had conducted no inspections to determine which files might have been sought in the discovery requests or might otherwise be related to the case. Instead, in order to “save space,” Trump testified, officials with his company had been tossing documents into the shredder and garbage. 
+So Trump can accuse Hillary Clinton of destroying emails – and he does, nearly every day – but only as a means of covering up and deflecting his own misdeeds in that regard. 
+“With false affidavits and ‘deny and delay” strategies,” writes Eichenwald, “Trump & his cos hid and destroyed records sought in court.” 
+Donald Trump is a world class liar and a man known for his deflection tactics, projecting his own guilt onto others. His Foundation in trouble? Point the finger at the Clinton Foundation. Sexual assault allegations? Point the finger at Bill and Hillary Clinton. 
+Once again, Kurt Eichenwald has dug into Donald Trump’s deplorable past and revealed the real Donald Trump. It’s not pretty. And each revelation from Eichenwald and David Fahrenthold shows Trump to be an even worse human being than the last. 
+It is no wonder his deplorables love him so much. 
+It Turns Out Trump Put off Investigators for 6 Months While He Destroyed Emails added by Hrafnkell Haraldsson on Mon, Oct 31st, 2016",FAKE
+8635,Russian Navy Moves Guided Missile Ships to Baltic,"By wmw_admin on October 28, 2016 The Volgodonsk, a Buyan-m class Russian corvette. Click to enlarge Reuters — Oct 26, 2016 
+Russia is sharply upgrading the firepower of its Baltic Fleet by adding warships armed with long-range cruise missiles to counter NATO’s build-up in the region, Russian media reported on Wednesday. 
+There was no official confirmation from Moscow, but the reports will raise tensions in the Baltic, already heightened since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and cause particular alarm in Poland and Lithuania which border Russia’s base there. 
+The reported deployment comes as NATO is planning its biggest military build-up on Russia’s borders since the Cold War to deter possible Russian aggression. 
+Russia’s daily Izvestia newspaper cited a military source as saying that the first two of five ships, the Serpukhov and the Zeleny Dol, had already entered the Baltic Sea and would soon become part of a newly formed division in Kaliningrad, Russia’s European exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. 
+Another source familiar with the situation told the Interfax news agency that the two warships would be joining the Baltic Fleet in the coming days. 
+“With the appearance of two small missile ships armed with the Kalibr cruise missiles the Fleet’s potential targeting range will be significantly expanded in the northern European military theater,” the source told Interfax. 
+Russia’s Defence Ministry, which said earlier this month the two ships were en route to the Mediterranean, did not respond to a request for comment, but NATO and the Swedish military confirmed the two warships had entered the Baltic. 
+“NATO navies are monitoring this activity near our borders,” said Dylan White, the alliance’s acting spokesman. 
+The Buyan-M class corvettes are armed with nuclear-capable Kalibr cruise missiles, known by the NATO code name Sizzler, which the Russian military says have a range of at least 1,500 km (930 miles). 
+Though variants of the missile are capable of carrying nuclear warheads, the ships are believed to be carrying conventional warheads. 
+“The addition of Kalibr missiles would increase the strike range not just of the Baltic Fleet, but of Russian forces in the Baltic region, fivefold,” said Ben Nimmo, a defense analyst at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who has been tracking the ships’ progress. 
+“The two small corvettes, with their modern, nuclear-capable missiles, may yet have an impact out of proportion to their size in the Baltic.” SWEDEN, POLAND WORRIED Russian cruise missile launch from ships in the Caspian Sea to targets in Syria. Click to enlarge 
+Izvestia said Russia’s Baltic Fleet would probably receive a further three such small warships armed with the same missiles by the end of 2020. 
+It said the Baltic Fleet’s coastal defenses would also be beefed up with the Bastion and Bal land-based missile systems. The Bastion is a mobile defense system armed with two anti-ship missiles with a range of up to 300 km (188 miles). The Bal anti-ship missile has a similar range. 
+Sweden’s Defence Minister said his country was worried by the presence of the warships in the Baltic Sea, complaining the move was likely to keep tension in the region high. 
+“This is … worrying and is not something that helps to reduce tensions in our region,” Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist told Sweden’s national TT news agency. “This affects all the countries round the Baltic.” 
+Swedish media said the Kalibr missiles had the range to hit targets across the Nordic region. The Russian Defence Ministry said in August that the two corvettes had been used to fire cruise missiles at militants in Syria. 
+Polish Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz, in Brussels for a NATO meeting, called the deployment “an obvious cause for concern,” the PAP news agency reported. “Moving such ships into the Baltic changes the balance of power,” he said. 
+Earlier this month, Russia moved nuclear-capable Iskander-M missiles into Kaliningrad leading to protests from Lithuania and Poland.",FAKE
+3173,Cruz blasts Trump as phony conservative in front of CPAC crowd,"Republican presidential candidate Sen.Ted Cruz blasted Donald Trump Friday as a phony conservative who must be stopped before he wins the presidential nomination.
+
+In a speech to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., Cruz said, “It’s easy to talk about making America great again -- you can even put that on a baseball cap.
+
+“But do you understand the principles that make America great in the first place?”
+
+Cruz said Trump was in no position to answer that question.
+
+Fresh from a bitter Super Tuesday battle and rancorous debate Thursday night, Cruz appeared relaxed in jeans. He took full advantage of Trump’s announcement earlier in the day that he would be skipping the event, which is typically considered a required stop for Republican candidates seeking to woo the conservative base.
+
+Dr. Ben Carson, who spoke after Cruz on Friday, announced he was formally leaving the race. Sen. Marco Rubio was expected  to appear on Saturday, while Ohio Gov. John Kasich spoke earlier on Friday.
+
+Citing rallies in Kansas and Florida, where there are upcoming primary battles, Trump demurred, leaving a hole in the CPAC schedule.
+
+“I think someone told him (Fox News host) Megyn Kelly was going to be here,” Cruz said, joking. “But worse, he was told conservatives were going to be here. Even worse, he was told there would be libertarians here. Even worse, young people were going to be here.”
+
+“I hope none of you have a degree from Trump University,” he said, referring to the lawsuits against Trump’s now defunct online school.
+
+Cruz was only interrupted once by audience members chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” The audience applause was otherwise enthusiastic as Cruz revived a key charge against Trump from Thursday night - that he has been funding and cozying up to Democrats for years.
+
+Referring to the loss of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, Cruz warned that the court is now “one justice away” from the loss of religious liberty and the second amendment right to bear arms.
+
+“Let me be very clear to every man and woman here at CPAC, I will not compromise away your religious liberty. I will not compromise away your second amendment right to keep and bear arms,” Cruz said.
+
+He also poked at Trump, whom he said suggested in a previous debate that the U.S. should be neutral in order to negotiate in the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. “As president I have no intention of being neutral. America will stand unapologetically with the nation of Israel.”
+
+Joking on stage with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Cruz also suggested Hillary Clinton should get used to “orange pant suits” in case she's indicted in the ongoing email controversy and that for the first time, a general election debate may be “convened in Leavenworth.”",REAL
+4689,Taking Trump voters’ concerns seriously means listening to what they’re actually saying,"Donald Trump’s supporters deserve to have their concerns taken seriously.
+
+If the media and commentators in 2016 can agree on nothing else, it’s this. It’s a bit of an odd meme. I can remember literally no one in 2012 dwelling on the importance of taking the concerns of Mitt Romney voters seriously, even though they made up a considerably larger share of the population than Trump supporters. No one talks about taking the interests of Hillary Clinton supporters, a still larger group, seriously.
+
+But Trump supporters, a smaller group backing a considerably more loathsome agenda, have received an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy, undertaken as a sort of passive-aggressive snipe at unnamed other commentators and politicians perceived to not be taking their concerns seriously.
+
+“Trumpism has, in part, made the rest of the nation all the more eager to ignore the millions of white voters living on the edges of the economy,” Michelle Cottle worries at the Atlantic.
+
+“Many decent, sincere people who feel disregarded, disrespected, and left behind — in ways that I do not feel and have never felt — can disproportionately embrace political opinions that I view as bigoted or paranoid,” David Blankenhorn empathizes at the American Interest. “Today’s upscale Americans are less and less likely even to interact with, much less actually give a damn about, those other Americans.”
+
+“Their problems should still be addressed,” Michael Brendan Dougherty writes at the Week, “not because the elite views them as virtuous and thus deserving of the help of the state and its political class, but by virtue of our common citizenship.”
+
+I agree with a lot of this. The government should help people who are materially struggling. Globalization definitely left some segments of the population struggling, and they deserve help. White people, while still economically dominant over black and Latino Americans in basically every way possible, can suffer from poverty too.
+
+But there’s something striking about this line of commentary: It doesn’t take the stated concerns of Trump voters, and voters for similar far-right populists abroad, seriously in the slightest.
+
+The press has gotten extremely comfortable with describing a Trump electorate that simply doesn’t exist. Cottle describes his supporters as “white voters living on the edges of the economy.” This is, in nearly every particular, wrong.
+
+There is absolutely no evidence that Trump’s supporters, either in the primary or the general election, are disproportionately poor or working class. Exit polling from the primaries found that Trump voters made about as much as Ted Cruz voters, and significantly more than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Trump voters, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver found, had a median household income of $72,000, a fair bit higher than the $62,000 median household income for non-Hispanic whites in America.
+
+A major study from Gallup's Jonathan Rothwell confirmed this. Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people. Trump supporters were less likely to be unemployed or to have dropped out of the labor force. Areas with more manufacturing, or higher exposure to imports from China, were less likely to think favorably of Trump.
+
+This shouldn’t be surprising. Lower-income whites are always likelier to support Democrats than other whites. It’d be very odd if Trump singlehandedly reversed that longstanding trend in American public opinion. But it suggests that the image of Trump supporters as whites on the economic margins, being failed by the elites in Washington and New York, is wrong.
+
+So what is driving Trump supporters? In the general election, the story is pretty simple: What’s driving support for Trump is that he is the Republican nominee, a little fewer than half of voters always vote for Republicans, and Trump is getting most of those voters.
+
+In the primary, though, the story was, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has explained at length, almost entirely about racial resentment. There’s a wide array of data to back this up.
+
+UCLA's Michael Tesler has found that support for Trump in the primaries strongly correlated with respondents' racial resentment, as measured by survey data. Similarly, Republican voters with the lowest opinions of Muslims were the most likely to vote for Trump, and voters who strongly support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants were likelier to support him in the primaries too.
+
+In April, when the Pew Research Center asked Republicans for their views on Trump, and their opinions on the US becoming majority nonwhite by 2050, they found that Republicans who thought a majority nonwhite population would be ""bad for the country"" had overwhelmingly favorable views of Trump. Those who thought it was a positive or neutral development were evenly split on Trump.
+
+By contrast, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 got less primary support from voters with high racial resentment and anti-immigration scores than they did from less racially resentful or anti-immigrant voters. Those two primaries were lost by the white nationalist wing of the Republican Party at a time when that wing was gaining in number. As New America's Lee Drutman has found, Republicans’ views of blacks and Latinos plummeted during the Obama years:
+
+The white nationalist wing was gaining in strength, and due for a win. It got one in Trump.
+
+Even in the general election, while support for Trump is correlated most strongly with party ID, the second biggest factor, per the analysis of Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner, was racial resentment. Economic pessimism and income level were statistically insignificant.
+
+The message this research sends is very, very clear. There is a segment of the Republican Party that is opposed to racial equality. It has increased in numbers in reaction to the election of a black president. The result was that an anti–racial equality candidate won the Republican nomination.
+
+Given that the US is one recession away from a Republican winning the presidency, this is a concerning development.
+
+The American press is overwhelmingly made up of left-of-center white people who live in large cities and have internalized very strong anti-racist norms. As a result, it tends to be composed of people who think of racism as a very, very serious character defect, and who are riddled with anxiety about being perceived as out of touch with “real America.” “Real America” being, per decades of racially charged tropes in our culture, white, non-urban America.
+
+So in comes Donald Trump, a candidate running on open white nationalism whose base is whites who — while not economically struggling compared with poor whites backing Hillary Clinton and doing way better economically than black or Latino people backing Clinton — definitely live in the “real America” which journalists feel a yearning to connect to and desperately don’t want to be out of touch with.
+
+Describing these people as motivated by racial resentment, per journalists’ deep-seated belief that racism is a major character defect, seems cruel and un-empathetic, even if it’s supported by extensive amounts of social scientific research and indeed by the statements of Trump’s supporters themselves.
+
+So it becomes very, very tempting to just ignore this evidence and insist that Trump supporters are in fact the wretched of the earth, and to connect them with every possible pathology of white America: post-industrial decay, the opioid crisis, labor force dropouts, rising middle-age mortality rates, falling social mobility, and so on. This almost always fails (globalization victims and labor force dropouts are less likely to support Trump, per Rothwell), but if there’s even a small hint of a connection, as when Rothwell found a correlation between Trump support and living in an area with rising white mortality, you’re in luck. If you can squint hard enough, the narrative will always survive.
+
+There’s a parallel temptation among leftists and social democrats who, in their ongoing attempt to show that neoliberal capitalism is failing, attempt to tie that failure to the rise of Trump. If economic suffering among lower-class whites caused Trump, the reasoning goes, then the solution is to address that suffering through a more generous welfare state and better economic policy, achieved through a multiethnic working-class coalition that includes those Trump supporters. Yes, these supporters may be racist, but it’s important not to say mean things about them lest they fall out of the coalition.
+
+I actually agree that the current capitalist regime is failing. We need truly universal health care, universal child care, a universal child allowance or basic income, and programs to address deep poverty. Redistribution is a very good, necessary thing.
+
+But we have a good case study we can examine to see if Western European–style welfare states can prevent far-right racist backlashes from popping up. It’s called Western Europe. And Sweden’s justly acclaimed welfare state did not prevent the rise of the viciously anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, which has its origins in the Swedish neo-fascist and white supremacist movements and is now the third-largest party in Swedish parliament.
+
+Nor did Austria’s welfare state prevent the far-right Freedom Party — led by Jörg Haider, who praised Hitler for having a “proper employment policy” — from entering government in 1999. France’s crèches and best-in-the-world government health care didn’t prevent Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has been repeatedly convicted of Holocaust denial, from reaching the runoff for the 2002 presidential elections. It has not stopped his successor and daughter Marine from leading polling for next year’s presidential elections. The Netherlands’ comprehensive welfare state has not prevented first Pim Fortuyn and then Geert Wilders from becoming major political forces, with the latter leading most polls for the next elections.
+
+Nor has Germany’s strong, manufacturing-heavy and export-oriented economy, arguably the strongest in Europe, kept the far-right AfD party from gaining in recent local elections. It’s telling to note that while economically thriving Germany is facing a far-right menace, Spain, where unemployment is 20 percent (similar to the US in the Great Depression), has no far-right movement of much consequence.
+
+Comprehensive welfare states are very, very good. They do not solve racism. Whites in both Europe and America have made it very clear that they will not accept becoming a demographic minority without a fight, and will continue to vote for candidates that speak to that concern and promise immigration policies that put off white minority status for as long as possible.
+
+One thing this analysis decidedly does not imply is “Hey, Trump supporters are just racists, let’s give up on them.” Trump’s nomination is a threat to America that must be addressed and never allowed to happen again. Giving up is not an option. We have to figure out some way to respond.
+
+Nor is somehow denying Trump supporters material support they need an option (though this is a proposal I’ve only ever heard attacked by journalists sympathetic to Trump supporters; I’ve never heard it actually proposed). Hillary Clinton, to her great credit, has offered programs ranging from expanded child care to free college to a plan to fight the opioid epidemic to child tax credit expansions to improvements to Obamacare that will leave millions of white Trump supporters much better off. This isn’t worth doing to win back their votes; it’s worth doing because it’s the right thing to do.
+
+Notably, Trump is not proposing anything like this and would in fact raise taxes on many middle-class families. Insisting, as many journalists have, that his supporters aren’t voting for the white nationalist candidate because they agree with him on race seems like a way to be charitable to those voters. But the idea that voters are motivated by economic struggles and so are voting for a candidate who would make their economic situation far worse is much more insulting than accepting they are uncomfortable with racial equality. The implicit idea is that Trump’s voters aren’t motivated by genuine political disagreement about race, but are just dupes voting for the wrong candidate because they’re too dumb to Google his tax plan.
+
+Any solution has to begin with a correct diagnosis of the problem. If Trump’s supporters are not, in fact, motivated by economic marginalization, then even full Bernie Sanders–style social democracy is not going to prevent a Trump recurrence. Nor are GOP-style tax cuts, and liberal pundits aggressively signaling virtue to each other by writing ad nauseam about the need to empathize with the Trump Voter aren’t doing anyone any good.
+
+What’s needed is an honest reckoning with what it means that a large segment of the US population, large enough to capture one of the two major political parties, is motivated primarily by white nationalism and an anxiety over the fast-changing demographics of the country. Maybe the GOP will find a way to control and contain this part of its base. Maybe the racist faction of the party will dissipate over time, especially as Obama’s presidency recedes into memory. Maybe it took Trump’s celebrity to mobilize them at all, and future attempts will fail.
+
+But Donald Trump’s supporters’ concerns are heavily about race. Taking them seriously means, first and foremost, acknowledging that, and dealing with it honestly.",REAL
+4327,Donald Trump’s campaign of terror: How a billionaire channeled his authoritarian rage — and soared to the top of the polls,"Ever since The Donald descended that escalator at Trump Tower a couple of months ago to announce his entry into the presidential race, Democrats have been laughing. Watching the Republicans squirm and Fox News jump through hoops has made the GOP presidential primary a delightful entertainment for their rivals on the other side of the aisle. I don’t know how many of them had it in them to watch the whole Trump Town hall extravaganza in Derry, NH, on Wednesday — but those who did were unlikely to be laughing by the end of it.
+
+There was the standard braggadocio and egomania that characterizes his every appearance and weird digressions into arcane discussions of things like building materials (for The Wall, naturally.) He complained about the press and politicians and declared himself superior to pretty much everyone on earth. But after you listen to him for a while, you come away from that performance with a very unpleasant sense that something rather sinister is at the heart of the Trump phenomenon.
+
+Trump was still talking when Chris Hayes opened his show that night with this comment:
+
+I want to talk about what we are seeing unfold here because I think what we are seeing is past the point of a clown show or a parody. I believe it is much more serious and much darker…You have someone now who is getting huge crowds, who is polling at the top of the GOP field, who polls show is beating Jeb Bush by 44 to 12 percent on the issue of immigration, going around the country calling little children, newborn babies, anchor babies saying that he’s going to use that term which I find a dehumanizing and disgusting term. Talking about giving the local police the ability to “do whatever they need to do to round up” the “illegals”. Building a wall, talking about basically chasing 11 million people out, talking about deporting American citizens to “keep families together”, talking about what would essentially be the largest most intrusive police state in the history of the American republic to go about this task, that is the person that is right now at the head of the Republican party’s presidential contest.
+
+And the delirious crowd applauded all those those things just as they loudly cheered this reference to Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier held by the Taliban for more than five years:
+
+It’s that pantomime of him shooting Berghdahl dead and saying “when we were strong, when we were strong” that appeals so much.
+
+Trump repeatedly paints a picture of America in decline — weak, impotent and powerless, in terrible danger of losing everything unless we get a leader who will cast off all this “political correctness,” this effete insistence on following the rules. He promises to “make America great again” by cracking down on the “bad people” and being very, very strong.
+
+When talking about Iraq, he characterized the the Iraqi people as cowards, “running whenever the bullets are flying.” He said “the enemy has our best equipment, we have the old stuff”  and that the country is a mess because of all the “years of fighting unsuccessfully — because of the way we fight.” (The implication is that we didn’t take the gloves off.) He said, “the problem is that as a country we don’t have victories anymore. When was the last time we had a victory?” And he declared, “I believe in the military and military strength more strongly than anybody running by a factor of a billion… We are gonna make our military so strong and so powerful and so incredible, so strong that nobody’s gonna mess with us, folks, nobody. And we don’t have that right now.” This garnered huge cheers from the crowd.
+
+On economics, it’s all about other countries taking advantage of the US.  He said, “They’re up here, we’re down there. I don’t blame China or Mexico or Japan. Their leaders are smarter and sharper and more cunning — and that’s an important word, cunning — than our leaders. Our leaders are babies…our country is falling apart.” He explains the problem:
+
+China is killing us. They’ve taken so much of our wealth. They’ve taken our jobs. They’ve taken our business, they’ve taken our manufacturing, [audience member screams out “our land”] Our land? The way they’re going they’ll have that pretty soon.Think about it, we have rebuilt China — somebody said to me “that’s a harsh statement”  — it’s the greatest theft in the history of the United States.  Now I have great respect for China and their leaders.  The largest bank in the world is from China. They’re a tenant of one of my buildings. I love China I think it’s great.  But we don’t have the people that know what they’re doing so … they’re killing us. You know what that is? They call it a sucking action. They’re sucking the jobs and the money right out of our country.That’s what they’re doing. We’ve rebuilt China. They have bridges, they have airports so do other countries and we’re like a third world country…They’re taking our jobs, they’re taking our money.They take our jobs they take everything and we owe them money. How does that happen? It’s magic.  That’s not gonna happen with Donald Trump.
+
+If a person feels as if this country isn’t what it used to be, that they’ve lost their place, that their future isn’t promising, Donald Trump is telling them right up front that foreigners are to blame. It isn’t the government being unwilling to collect taxes from people like Donald Trump so we can build infrastructure — we’re rebuilding China instead of our own country. It isn’t that we spend vast sums of money to maintain the world’s only superpower military, it’s that people from other countries are stealing us blind. And Trump will fight all these foreigners to take our country back from them wherever they are. Of course, there is no foreigner who is wrecking this once great country more than the undocumented immigrant and he plans to cleanse our culture of their evil influence: …we have crime all over the country, we have … the borders, the southern border is a disaster…The other night a 66 year old woman, a veteran, raped sodomized, brutally killed by an illegal immigrant. We gotta stop we gotta take back our country. We’ve gotta take it back! [huge applause] I love this country and I know that I can make it great again. We have to build a wall, we have to get the bad people out. A lot of the illegals, if you look at Chicago with the gangs,… you look at Baltimore, you look at Ferguson, a lot of these gangs, the most vicious, are illegals. They’re outta here. The first day I will send those people … those guys are outta here. [cheers] They talk about guns, I’m a big second amendment person, I believe in it so strongly [cheers]. Big.  But they talk about guns and you look at Chicago, Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the US by far, and people are being shot with guns all over the place. You need enforcement but you also have to get the bad people out, the people that aren’t supposed to be here and we’re gonna get em out so fast, so quick — and it’s gonna be tough. It’s not gonna be “oh please will you come with us please will you please come with us.” Because you know these law enforcement people, and I know the guys in Chicago, the police commissioner’s a great man. They can do it, if they’re allowed to do it. I know the guys, I know em, New York, they’re great. Bratton, great. They can all do it. They can all do it. But they have to be allowed to do their job, they have to be allowed to do their job. [Cheers] It isn’t just liberals like Chris Hayes who are becoming alarmed by this. Republican strategist Alex Castellanos sees the attraction of Trump in similar terms: When a government that has pledged to do everything can’t do anything, otherwise sensible people turn to the strongman. This is how the autocrat, the popular dictator, gains power. We are seduced by his success and strength… As our old, inflexible government grows beyond its capacity to service a complex and adaptive society, and its failures deface our landscape, it creates demand for efficiency. Who can bring order to this chaos? Who has the guts and the strength to make the mess we have made work? Then, the call goes out for the strongman. Who cares what he believes or promises? And with the voice of the common man, though he is anything but, the strongman comes and pledges to make America great again. Castellanos agrees with Trump that America is going to hell in a handbasket largely due to liberal failure, but doesn’t think that consolidating power in the hands of a single billionaire is a great way to deal with it. It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s ramblings as the words of a kook.  But he’s tapping into the rage and frustration many Americans feel when our country is exposed as being imperfect. These Republicans were shamed by their exalted leadership’s debacle in Iraq and believe that American exceptionalism is no longer respected around the world — and they are no longer respected here at home. Trump is a winner and I think this is fundamentally what attracts them to him: I will be fighting and I will win because I’m somebody that wins. We are in very sad shape as a country and you know why that is? We’re more concerned about political correctness than we are about victory, than we are about winning. We are not going to be so politically correct anymore, we are going to get things done. But his dark, authoritarian message of intolerance and hate is likely making it difficult for him, or any Republican, to win a national election, particularly since all the other candidates feel compelled to follow his lead. (Those who challenged him, like Perry and Paul, are sinking like a stone in the polls.) And while Trump’s fans may want to blame foreigners for all their troubles, most Americans know that their troubles can be traced to some powerful people right here at home.  Powerful people like Donald Trump. Still, history is littered with strongmen nobody took seriously until it was too late. When someone like Trump captures the imagination of millions of people it’s important to pay attention to what he’s saying. For all his ranting, you’ll notice that the one thing Trump never mentions is the constitution.",REAL
+10179,BRICS Countries to Invest $500 Million in Russian Gold Deposit - Kira Egorova,"Taming the corporate media beast BRICS Countries to Invest $500 Million in Russian Gold Deposit 
+A new agreement to restart exploration and extraction at a mine in Siberia marks a milestone in the development of economic ties among the BRICS nations. Originally appeared at RBTH 
+A consortium made up of the Chinese state-owned mining firm China National Gold Corporation, India’s SUN Mining Group and the Russian Far East Development Fund, as well as funds from South Africa and Brazil is prepared to invest up to $500 million in the development of the Klyuchevskoye gold field in the Transbaikal region (over 4,000 miles east of Moscow). The agreement was signed during the most recent BRICS summit, which that took place in the Indian resort of Goa on Oct. 15-16. According to plans for the site, Klyuchevskoye will become operational three years after investment becomes available and will yield some 6.5 tons of gold per year. 
+This is the first mining deal in the history of BRICS that involves all five member states, which makes it particularly significant, says Wiktor Bielski, global head of commodities research at VTB Capital. Bielski adds that the agreement paves the way for bigger projects in the future that can benefit a wide range of BRICS investors. 
+Benefits for the partners 
+The Klyuchevskoye gold deposit was explored a long time ago, however, the bulk of the gold was not extracted because of the costly development process that was halted some 20 years back, according to Alexei Kalachev, an expert analyst with FINAM investment firm in Moscow. The China National Gold Corporation, however, has the relevant technological experience to extract and process the gold, Kalachev said. 
+The deposit is currently owned by India’s SUN Gold, Ltd., part of the SUN Mining Group, which has not begun to develop it. In August 2016, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service said that the China National Gold Group intended to buy 70 percent in the deposit from SUN Gold. According to Kalachev, the idea of a consortium may have evolved from an attempt to speed up the deal at the highest levels. 
+The Klyuchevskoye gold deposit is not especially rich; at its stated production volumes and reserves, it will have a life cycle of 11-12 years, while the average life cycle of gold mines worldwide is 15-16 years, says Artem Kalinin, a portfolio manager at Leon Family Office. Additionally, the cost of production at Klyuchevskoye is being forecast at the average global level. “That said, the Chinese are used to operating in this mode: the country’s steel and coal industries have very weak production costs, but they have so far been feeling quite alright thanks to cheap financing and state support,” Kalinin said. 
+Russian gold mining companies are currently not taking part in developing Klyuchevskoye, but according to Kalinin, Russia stands to gain regardless of who develops the site. “The Russians will get an opportunity to borrow new technologies and to get an infrastructure that the Chinese will build,” he said. 
+Alexei Kalachev notes that other obvious upsides for Russia include a rise in tax revenues, new jobs and an inflow of foreign investment. 
+What’s in it for China? 
+Despite the fact that China is the world’s leader in gold mining and one of the world’s largest consumers of the precious metal, its resource base is rather weak, says Kalinin. The CIS countries host the majority of the world’s gold reserves — 28 percent. Another 20 percent of the reserves are located in North America while Asian reserves make up just 11 percent. 
+Oleg Remyga, head of China studies at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, notes that China’s gold production is falling — it was down 0.4 percent in 2015 — while consumption is rising — up + 3.7 percent in 2015. “Hence, the clear ambition of Chinese companies to enter international markets,” Remyga explained. 
+According to Remyga, the China National Gold Group’s investment in the Klyuchevskoye deposit is part of this bigger drive for resources. Chinese companies have already purchased shares in Canada’s Pinnacle Mines, Ltd. as well as 50 percent of shares in a deposit in Papua New Guinea owned by Barrick Gold Corp. “I am convinced that it is just the beginning of acquisitions of Russian gold-mining assets by Chinese companies, such as Zijin Mining, China Gold, Zhaojin Mining Industry, and Shandong Gold,” Remyga said, adding that negotiations with them have been going on already for five years.",FAKE
+2084,“There is such a thing as being too late”: Obama issues a desperate call for a global climate deal,"The global climate negotiations scheduled to take place at the end of this year in Paris are not a time for empty rhetoric or half-hearted commitments to cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions, President Obama reminded the world Monday evening. On the contrary, he stressed, “This year, in Paris, has to be the year that the world finally reached an agreement to protect the one planet that we’ve got — while we still can.”
+
+Speaking at a meeting of Arctic Circle nations in Anchorage, Alaska, Obama outlined the science behind his urgent call for climate action, and stressed that failure, this time, is not an option. “On this issue, of all issues, there is such a thing as being too late,” he said. “That moment is almost upon us.”
+
+The warning rings frighteningly true, as time is indeed running out not just for an Obama climate deal, but for any climate deal. As talks began last year in Lima, Peru for a draft of the agreement intended to be signed and sealed this December in Paris, experts reminded the delegates that the world has already used up nearly two-thirds of its carbon budget — the amount of carbon we can continue to pour into the atmosphere while still having a chance at keeping warming below two degrees Celsius. It’s a limit, some experts contend, that we’ve already in effect blown past. Yet with the day of reckoning nearing, negotiations aren’t where they should be, to say the least: fewer than 60 countries, representing just 61 percent of the world’s emissions, have submitted their goals for cutting back, many of which are considered to be not nearly ambitious enough. In June, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon complained that talks were moving “at a snail’s pace.”
+
+Obama emphasized that the U.S. is on track to meet its submitted goal — a 26 to 28 percent decrease in emissions from 2005 levels by 2025 — thanks in large part to the finalization of the EPA’s new regulations for coal-fired power plants. There is, unfortunately, still reason to doubt the sincerity of the president’s commitment to the radical action he says is needed. Obama continues to press the fact that climate change is not only real — deniers, he scoffed, are “on their own shrinking island” — but a crisis that we’re experiencing right now, a point driven home by his decision to speak from Alaska, where the impacts of climate change are already taking a significant toll. Yet at the same time, his administration has allowed Shell to go ahead and drill for oil in the Arctic, a decision that to many feels irreconcilable with his insistence that the world must address the key causes of climate change as quickly as possible — not to mention the contention, among experts, that our best hope of preventing climate catastrophe requires us to leave all of the Arctic’s oil and gas reserves in the ground. “I am not trying to suggest that there are not going to be difficult transitions that we all have to make,” Obama conceded. Still, he said, “This is within our power. This is a solvable problem if we start now.”",REAL
+5671,Hybrid Wars 8. Strategies Against Africa – Introduction,"Africa , China , Hybrid Wars , United States By Andrew KORYBKO (USA) 
+The most colonized and exploited continent in the history of the world is once more the center of global competition, albeit this time the form of rivalry between the Great Powers has taken on a much more nuanced, though no less intense, form. The US, France, and their unipolar allies want to retain Africa as their exclusive labor, market, and resource reserve for the foreseeable future, both out of their own material self-interest and with the added strategic benefit of depriving China and others of its economic fruits. Contrarily, China wants to integrate the world’s fastest growing economies and populations into the unfolding multipolar world order and give them a fair chance at succeeding in the global system. The contrast between the West’s neo-colonialism and China’s liberating sovereignty couldn’t be more crisp, and it’s this opposition of diametrically opposed global strategies and development models that sets the stage for the grand proxy battle between the US and China over Africa. 
+Just as much as China needs Africa in order to maintain its steady growth rates into the foreseeable future and ensure its domestic stability, so too does the US want to ‘poach’ Africa from China in order to offset the structural sustainability of its number one rival’s global leadership. The nature of the African-wide proxy conflict is that China is ardently working to finance, construct, and connect various infrastructural projects to one another in order to create a supraregional web of intermodal transport corridors that could then perfectly complement the maritime portion of the One Belt One Road (“New Silk Road”) global vision, while the US is trying with equal fervor to seize control of key nodes along these transnational routes as well as strategically disrupt crucial portions in order to increase China’s dependence on the unipolar-influenced areas. As the ultimate last resort, however, the US, the “world island” in all the manners that it can be strategically understood as, will pull out all the stops and unleash a ‘scorched earth’ trail of Hybrid War destruction in its wake while it strategically retreats back to its self-sufficient “Fortress North America” as the final coup de grace in the African proxy war against China. 
+More than likely, it won’t ever get to that dramatic of an absolute point whereby the US fully retreats from Africa or totally destroys the continent with Hybrid War, but realistically speaking, there’ll likely be a blended development of scenarios that takes place in this heated theater of competition over the coming decades that integrates elements of both extremes. China will predictably succeed in spearheading several ultra-strategic New Silk Road development corridors in Africa, while the US will probably sabotage a few others and unleash a handful of Hybrid Wars to keep the existing ways indefinitely at bay from fully actualizing their envisioned geo-economic potential. There’s no surefire way to know with absolutely certainty what the future will bring, but it’s possible to acquire an educated expectation about the structural and systemic manner in which the identified group of states will be targeted by US-provoked Hybrid Wars. Even accounting for the possibility that some of the forthcoming examined scenarios might be “naturally occurring” in that they require little if any external pressure to instigate, there’s still a strong likelihood that at least some of the investigated possibilities will eventually occur to varying extents and that the geopolitical repercussions will indisputably impact quite negatively on China and the larger multipolar world’s grand position in the New Cold War. 
+This section of the book is organized in such a manner that Part I will describe Africa’s overall geopolitical situation, highlighting the influence of hegemonic and institutional regionalism (sometimes overlapping, other times not) over the continent’s affairs in order to clearly illustrate the preexisting advantages and obstacles to China’s New Silk Road vision. The subsequent chapters of the African Hybrid War research will then comprehensively examine the five separate categories of states and their pertinent neighbors that the author has already identified as being relevantly incorporated into the immediate thesis. To remind the reader about what was described in Part III of the book’s Introduction and to expand upon the earlier presented paradigmatic map in a more structurally detailed manner, the following cartographic revision will be henceforth used as the point of reference in guiding the research beyond Part I: 
+Key 
+* Yellow – East Africa/East African Federation 
+* Blue – Central-Southern Africa 
+* Black – Failed State Belt 
+* Red – Lake Chad Region 
+* Hashed/Thatched Lines – countries that will inevitably become involved in the targeted category states’ Hybrid War destabilization, whether as an aggressive actor, a passive victim, or a blended mix thereof. Schematic Observations 
+A few comments need to be stated about the above map before commencing Part I of the African Hybrid War research: 
+Southern African Cone: 
+Firstly, while it’s conceptually possible for all states in Africa (or anywhere in the world, for that matter) to be afflicted by Hybrid War, keeping in accordance with the axiom that this method of warfare is more often than not applied in disrupting multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects and/or seizing control of them, it can be surmised that the ones which could most radically revolutionize the continent’s geopolitical and geo-economic would be most actively targeted and consequently receive the highest likelihood of some sort of Hybrid War destabilization in the coming future. All of this will be described in detail in Part I, but for now it’s enough to know that the identified states lay along the paths of China’s presently constructed Silk Road routes or most probable forthcoming projects that it could pursue in achieving its grand strategic ends. 
+It should be clarified at this point that the Southern African Cone was not included in the above model because its economic corridors are relatively well-established and have already been utilized for some time by all sorts of Great Powers, the West obviously included. Furthermore, concerning Namibia and Botswana’s global connectivity via South Africa, and to an extent, even Zimbabwe and Mozambique’s as well, this mostly deals with the one-way transport of natural resources and less so with each respective state’s labor and market potential. While each of these countries have a given role that they play vis-à-vis the Chinese economy, none of them except for South Africa (the hub through which most of their exports, barring Mozambique’s, pass) is integral enough to be targeted by their own Hybrid War. 
+Theoretically speaking, disruptions in the regional periphery around South Africa could have a strategic effect in putting pressure on the country’s multipolar leadership and pave the way for a regime change scenario, but given the rotten nature of corrupt South African politics, it’s more expected that traditional ‘soft coup’ means such as constitutional technicalities and simple Color Revolutions (i.e. the anti-Rousseff coup in Brazil) would be used in this instance. Additionally, the resources of the population-sparse countries of Namibia and Botswana and the general market and labor potential of South Africa are already pretty much integrated into the larger global economy, so there are many existing unipolar stakeholders that would also be adversely affected by a severe disruption in or around their common point of African access. The same can’t be said so much about Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the former rich in minerals such as diamonds and platinum while the latter is poised to become one of the world’s largest LNG exporters, so it’s entirely possible that they may be targeted sometime in the future. But even so, it would be less in connection with China’s multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects than with their own individual standalone potentials in their respective fields, thus strategically differentiating them from the other countries included in the present study (although that is not to say that Hybrid War techniques would not be used – they probably would to a large extent). 
+Insular Importance: 
+In relation to the above, the insular countries of Africa were also not included in the continental overview, although they too play an important role in its evolving geopolitical paradigm. Nevertheless, because they’re island nations, they’re not directly connected to anything else besides the high seas, so although they may have valuable transit node status for China as an integral component of its Sea Lines of Communication, they’re not as directly affected by the region-stretching Hybrid War study that was commenced for the mainland. Nevertheless, because each of them could play a pivotal role in influencing continental affairs if properly utilized by a partnering Great Power, it’s worthwhile to very concisely comment on how they fit into the larger strategic equation that will be described throughout this work: 
+* Yellow – Canary Islands (Spain): This legacy holding allows Madrid to exert influence near the coasts of Morocco and Western Sahara, both thought to be rich with fish and possible energy resources. 
+* Green – Cabo Verde (formerly Cape Verde prior to late-2013): The former Portuguese colony connects the North and South Atlantic and offers a strategic position near the mouth of the Senegal River, as well as being positioned along an important oceanic route that the US and EU must take to access West Africa. 
+* Blue – São Tomé and Príncipe: Another former Portuguese colony, this one is crucially located in the hydrocarbon-rich waters of the Gulf of Guinea and in close proximity to the shoreline of Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria. 
+* Violet – Comoros and the French overseas department of Mayotte: These two locations are almost on top of northern Mozambique’s LNG-prospected Rovuma Basin and thus near what will likely become a major energy exporting area in the near future. 
+* Orange – Seychelles: The former UK-colonized island chain lies along the route of approach that India and China must take in accessing the burgeoning East African marketplace, and it’s for this strategically competitive reason that New Delhi has proactively sought to build a naval base and position some of its military units there in order to “contain” China. 
+* Unmarked – Mauritius and the French island of Reunion: These two insular areas are not directly relevant to Africa’s mainland geopolitical order, although they do acquire significance vis-à-vis Madagascar and the US-controlled Indian Ocean bastion of Diego Garcia. 
+Transregional Conflict Overspill: 
+One of the most striking aspects of the reference map is that it clearly delineates the geopolitical fault lines where Hybrid War conflicts could easily become transregional: 
+Out of all of the areas designated by the map, it’s most probable that the uncontrollably violent processes in the Failed State Belt of the Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan would be the ones to spread to other parts of Africa, at least as regards the continent’s conflicts that are presently ongoing (and not accounting for those that have yet to possibly erupt). In particular, CAR’s chaos could result in a refugee and militant overspill to Cameroon and Chad, possibly leading to these respective Christian- and Muslim-led governments supporting their own confessional sides in the country’s unresolved civil war. The misleading “Clash of Civilizations” narrative that would assuredly be purposely pushed by the Western mainstream media will be discussed later on when addressing the Failed State Belt, but at this moment it’s useful just to be aware of the transregional “infection” potential that the CAR has in affecting the Lake Chad region. Additionally, the country’s domestic difficulties could also spread southward into the northern reaches of the Central-Southern state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), representing a dual destabilization threat emanating from the CAR. 
+South Sudan can do something similar to the CAR in relation to the northern part of the DRC, but possibly even to the Horn of Africa state of Ethiopia and the East African state of Uganda as well. Tellingly, these latter two states are actively involved in the conflict resolution process in South Sudan and are jostling against one another for influence there in order to carve out defensive buffers (but also markets, of course) to protect themselves from this scenario. It should go without saying that South Sudan was only brought into existence because it was forcibly severed from Sudan proper over a three-decade-long civil war period, and the dynamic of anti-Khartoum action hasn’t stopped since Juba gained its independence in 2011. Therefore, South Sudan represents an even larger asymmetrical regional threat than CAR does, and their combined destabilization potential explains why they’re both categorized together as part of the Failed State Belt. 
+If their respective conflicts somehow merged into a transnational conflagration, then that would represent a large-scale Hybrid War threat in the geographic heart of Africa, but the closest this has henceforth come has been the over-exaggerated threat of Joseph Kony. With reference to the Failed State Belt’s Hybrid War vulnerabilities and the transregionalization that its internal conflicts pose, it’s little wonder then that the US exploited the mystique around this warlord in order to deploy a limited but very strategic contingent of its special forces to Uganda, South Sudan, DRC, and CAR. Almost as an afterthought but drawing on the tangent of transregional conflict overlap, it’s topically pertinent to recall the Darfur Conflict and how this essentially was a proxy competition between the Lake Chad regional state of Chad and the extended Failed State Belt and somewhat Gulf-influenced state of Sudan. It’s no longer as relevant of a geopolitical item as it once was during the mid-2000s, but it nevertheless still has the potential to re-erupt in the future, especially if the externally directed Sudanese dissolution process speeds up and makes headway in the states of Blue Nile and South Kordofan. 
+Lastly, there’s the realistic possibility that the US’ attempts to instigate a Hybrid War in Burundi could set off a chain reaction of destabilization in the eastern DRC, Rwanda (and by extent, possibly up to Uganda), and western Tanzania, thereby making this geographically tiny state a disproportionately large trigger in upsetting the regional balance. Although there’s not yet an active conflict in Burundi anywhere on par with the scale of what’s been raging in the CAR and South Sudan over the past couple of years, this doesn’t mean that one can’t quickly develop if the entire state collapses under Hybrid War pressure, and this disturbing scenario will certainly be explored more at length later on in the work. 
+Mapping out the expected transregional conflict overspill zones in Africa, one can unmistakably see that it’s the entire Upper-Central (Failed State Belt) and the eastern portion of the Central-Southern zones of Africa that are most at risk of this destructive process unfolding. Accordingly, this realization leads one to conclude that the DRC and the areas immediately abutting it provide the most fertile ground for the transnationalization of domestic conflicts, which somewhat (but not totally) explains why the Second Congo War eventually came to involve states located far away from the actual battlespace and be nicknamed “ Africa’s World War ”. To put it another way, the Hybrid War vulnerabilities of the identified area combined with its obvious geostrategic centrality to the African continent makes it doubly capable of sucking countless states into a literal Black Hole of Chaos that could easily become the ultimate proxy war climax between the US and China. 
+To be continued… 
+Andrew Korybko is the American political commentator currently working for the Sputnik agency. He is the author of the monograph “ Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change ” (2015). This text will be included into his forthcoming book on the theory of Hybrid Warfare. 
+PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:",FAKE
+8497,We’re All Going To Lose On November 8th: Get Prepped With This Post-Election Chaos Checklist (VIDEO),"in: Preparedness\Survival , US News Darned if we do and darned if we don’t. That basically sums up the current election cycle. I’d go so far as to say that everybody loses during this election, especially if the promised chaos erupts when the winner is announced. Regardless of which candidate “wins” the presidential election, I have a bad feeling about the aftermath. I think we could be on the cusp of the most widespread civil unrest since the Civil War. If you are interested in getting prepared for it but don’t want to read over all of the frightening possibilities, go here and sign up for a Prepping Crash Course that will help you be ready for impending chaos in a mere 24 hours. For those who are wondering how things might go down, let’s look at some scenarios. If Trump wins… There is so much anti-Trump wrath among Progressives that violence has already erupted at campaign rallies. Trump supporters had eggs and bottles thrown at them in San Jose , a police car was smashed and nearly 20 were arrested at a violent protest in Orange County, and a man was even arrested for trying to grab a police officer’s gun to assassinate Trump . And look at what Clintonites did to this homeless woman who was trying to protect Donald Trump’s star from being further defaced on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. YouTube Notice how many of these mob-minded cowards it took to terrorise one homeless woman…Classy, right? Now, think about how these people will react if Trump is somehow elected. If you have a sign in your yard, you will be a target for their rage. Got a Trump/Pence sticker on your car? Expect that it could be defaced. Even more recently, Penn State students were “triggered” by a pro-Trump rally and began tearing down signs, swearing at the pro-Trump kids, and disrupting their event. What’s more, it isn’t just Social Justice Warriors and Progressives folks would need to worry about. A top activist in the group, Black Lives Matter, took to Twitter to inform everyone exactly what would happen if Trump were to win the presidency. This was deleted but is archived here . The tweet was followed by this one, which is still u p… Don’t delude yourself. With a Trump victory, trouble is coming. And don’t think living in a small town keeps you safe. The population of Ferguson, Missouri is barely over 20,000 people – hardly a metropolis. If Clinton wins… With the newly intensified investigation into her corruptio n, it hardly seems possible that she could still win this election, but her supporters seem blind to the crimes she has committed. Instead of looking at the facts, they’re saying “First woman president YA !!!” With all of the collusion , it seems like the FBI is fighting a tough battle to see her indicted. There once was a day that this suspicion would be enough to keep the American people from voting for a person who is blatantly in it for she can personally gain. The Wikileaks email scandal continues, with new revelations about our government leading to possible criminal proceedings, impeachment and heaven only knows what else. As well, there’s a very, very good chance that the election will be rigged . Somehow, despite all that is going on, Clinton’s campaign is still planning her celebratory fireworks party , scheduled to start several hours before all the votes could even be counted. If this happens, Trump supporters will be enraged – and justifiably so. Joe Walsh, a former congressman, has already tweeted he’s “grabbing his musket.” And Walsh is not alone. Many Americans are sick and tired of the blatant, in-our-faces corruption. There is talk of revolution and even a quiet counter-coup going on behind the scenes. Others concur that unrest is coming. I’m not the only blogger out here in Bloggerland who thinks all hell will break loose regardless of who becomes presidents. Mike Adams of Natural News wrote , “My ANALYSIS of possible outcomes from the upcoming presidential election reveals that America only has a 5% chance of remaining peaceful after November 8. This does not mean the violence will occur on November 9th, but rather that events will be set into motion on that day which will lead to an escalation of violence (95% chance…) Check out his predictions of the possible scenarios . And from the more liberal side of the unrest coin, an essayist for Cracked.com still comes to a similar conclusion. “Over the last few weeks a growing number of people have started wondering, “Is it possible the United States is heading for a new civil war?”…Every time I wanted to dismiss those headlines I thought about my visit to Ukraine last year, to cover their ongoing civil war . The most common sentence I heard was, “It’s like a bad dream.” Up to the minute the shooting started, almost no one thought civil war was a serious possibility.” You need to get prepped. Immediately. What it all boils down to is that we need to be prepared. We need to be ready for any unrest that comes about as a direct result of the election – and I really believe that there will be some form of uprising against the result. I hope it will be nothing more than a few minor, isolated incidents, but I can’t get past the niggling feeling that all hell is just about to break loose. November 7 could be the last day of normalcy for quite some time. The governments of Germany and the Czech Republic have told their citizens to stock up on food, water and basic survival supplies in case of a national emergency. We need to be doing the same. If you would like to take a class to help you prepare for this, you can learn more here. If you don’t want to invest in a class, use this FREE handy checklist to make sure you’ll have everything you need. Post-Election Chaos Checklist Make sure everything is in order. While it’s unlikely that services like internet, electricity, and municipal water will be affected, it doesn’t hurt to be ready for that possibility. The key here is to make certain you don’t have to leave your home for the duration of the unrest, should it come your way. Check your pantry and fill any gaps in your food preps. Order emergency food buckets – if you order right away there is still time to get them before the election.",FAKE
+5673,HIV ‘Cure’ Almost Complete after Scientists Remove Virus’s DNA from Living Tissue,"Research could ‘potentially serve as a curative approach for patients with HIV’, scientist says 
+
+Scientists have managed to remove DNA of the HIV virus from living tissue for the first time in a breakthrough that could lead to an outright cure.
+
+At the moment, treating the disease involves the use of drugs that suppress levels of the virus so the body’s immune system can cope.
+
+Now researchers in the US have revealed they used gene-editing technology to remove DNA of the commonest HIV-1 strain from several organs of infected mice and rats.
+
+
+In April, the same team reported that they had successfully eliminated the virus from human cells in the laboratory, but a paper in the journal Nature Gene Editing revealed they had managed to do the same thing in live animals for the first time.
+
+The researchers’ team leader, Professor Kamel Khalili, of Temple University, said: “In a proof-of-concept study, we show[ed] that our gene-editing technology can be effectively delivered to many organs of two small animal models and excise large fragments of viral DNA from the host cell genome.”
+
+The current antiretroviral drugs for HIV are not able to eliminate HIV-1 from the infected cells.
+
+And if treatment is interrupted, the virus can start replicating quickly, putting patients of risk of getting full-blow AIDS. 
+This is because it is able to persist in immune system T-cells and other places where it is not actually active and is unaffected by the current treatments. 
+
+The researchers used a specially adapted virus to deliver the gene-editing system into the cells.
+“The ability of the rAAV delivery system to enter many organs containing the HIV-1 genome and edit the viral DNA is an important indication that this strategy can also overcome viral reactivation from latently infected cells and potentially serve as a curative approach for patients with HIV,” Professor Khalili said. In a statement, Temple University said the implications of the new study were “far-reaching”.
+“The gene-editing platform by itself may be able to eradicate HIV-1 DNA from patients, but it is also highly flexible and potentially could be used in combination with existing antiretroviral drugs to further suppress viral RNA. It also could be adapted to target mutated strains of HIV-1,” it added. Professor Khalili said a clinical trial could happen within the next few years, but he first planned to carry out a similar study involving a larger group of animals.
+
+TMZ Breaking 
+SOURCE ",FAKE
+6319,Vortex Structured Water [Video],"This video shows you how to structure water inexpensively using magnets and a kid’s toy (for less than $10). 
+Hat tip, Minty! SF Source THE OLD LAB RAT Oct. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+1155,Missing on GOP debate stage: A future president (Opinion),"Mel Robbins is a CNN commentator, legal analyst, best-selling author and keynote speaker. In 2014, she was named outstanding news talk-radio host by the Gracie Awards. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+It was a verbal cage fight. There was no winner -- only a loser, the American people.
+
+Fox News' Bret Baier started the debate by asking the audience to behave as if they were sitting between a library and Red Wings game.
+
+It was a request the audience ignored by hooting, jeering, cheering and booing throughout the entire debate.
+
+It went downhill from there, fast.
+
+As the first question went to Trump, my husband said, ""He says the same thing every time."" I answered: ""Yes because it works and he's winning.""
+
+In less than seven minutes, Trump was making a reference to his own penis size.
+
+""(Rubio) referred to my hands, if they're small, something else must be small,"" he said. ""I guarantee you, there's no problem.""
+
+This debate was somewhere between a cage fight and a reality show. It had plenty of insults, bickering, private parts and bad spray tans. But it lacked what America needs.
+
+It lacked policy. It lacked substance. And it lacked something very important: a future president.
+
+Tonight, it became clear that the GOP would rather be angry, broken and righteous than win an election. Americans are supporting Trump because they are angry, they are sick of Washington, they want to see change and they want an outsider. I can respect that, and I understand it.
+
+Trump was so out of control with his insults and trash talk. It got old fast. I've written extensively about Trump for CNN.com.
+
+Here's the crazy part. It doesn't matter. He's still going to be the GOP nominee.
+
+In the most interesting moment of the debate, Fox's Megyn Kelly confronted Trump with video clips of him contradicting himself. It was the first time Trump was differential.
+
+They showed Trump clips of himself reversing his decision on Afghanistan, on Syrian refugees and on George W. Bush and the issue of weapons of mass destruction. It was the only time he wasn't on the attack. He explained his flip-flopping by saying ""you have to show a degree of flexibility.""
+
+Yet overall Trump's campaign is based on only two words: ""Believe me."" It'll be Trump and Rubio heading into the GOP Convention.
+
+John Kasich was the smartest and most reasonable guy on the stage, and he promises not to leave anyone ""behind."" However, he's been left behind. It's over.
+
+Cruz proved Thursday night that he's too ""scary"" to moderates and independents to win a national election.
+
+And Rubio had some incredible moments -- particularly when he addressed the issues related to Flint's water crisis and when he was asked directly about comparing Trump to Kim Jong Un of North Korea. But he couldn't rise above the screaming match that Trump created. He tried to rise above it. But he was still the ""little"" Rubio, as Trump has said.
+
+This was embarrassing to watch, and if the next four years are marked by the kind of nastiness we saw on the stage tonight, that's down right scary.",REAL
+486,Senators Seek ‘Living Wage’ for Capitol Hill Contractors,"A group of senators is calling for higher wages and better health care for the contractors who work in Senate office buildings.
+
+Private companies receive contracts to provide many of the services for government buildings on Capitol Hill, from running the cafeterias to cleaning offices to restoring aging buildings.",REAL
+2735,Brian Williams Under Fire Over His Shifting Story Of Iraq Helicopter Attack,"""On this broadcast last week, in an effort to honor and thank a veteran who protected me and so many others after a ground-fire incident in the desert during the Iraq War invasion, I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,"" Williams said. ""It did not take long to hear from some brave men and women in the air crews who were also in that desert. I want to apologize.""
+
+He clarified Wednesday that he had been in a helicopter following the one hit by an RPG. He recalled how his NBC News team and the air crew next ""spent two harrowing nights in a sandstorm in the Iraq desert,"" a detail that is not in dispute.
+
+The on-air apology, however, may not suffice. Williams' public recollection of the events that day has changed several times over the past decade, ranging from his being unaware of the lead helicopter having been struck when changing course, to his apparently witnessing the attack, to his most recently claiming that he was in the rocket-damaged helicopter.
+
+The Iraq helicopter controversy is the first to shake Williams' decade-long tenure as anchor of ""NBC Nightly News,"" the top-rated evening newscast. A network star, he may be able to ride out the unflattering press and social media swipes. But the same might have been said about then-""CBS Evening News"" anchor Dan Rather, whose career at the network unraveled in 2004 after bloggers challenged documents he reported as detailing the young George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.
+
+""I don't know the particulars about that day in Iraq. I do know Brian,"" Rather said in a statement provided to The Huffington Post. ""He's a longtime friend and we have been in a number of war zones and on the same battlefields, competing but together. Brian is an honest, decent man, an excellent reporter and anchor -- and a brave one. I can attest that -- like his predecessor Tom Brokaw -- he is a superb pro, and a gutsy one.""
+
+Williams, reporting from Kuwait City, described how the lead helicopter pilot of four Chinooks flying in formation had observed a man in a pickup truck fire an RPG and another man shoot a rifle. Williams didn't say in the report that the helicopter in which he was traveling had been hit. He noted that ""all four choppers dropped their load and landed immediately.""
+
+""We quickly make our drop and then turn southwest,"" Williams said. ""Suddenly, without knowing why, we learned we’ve been ordered to land in the desert. On the ground, we learn the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky.""
+
+That version of the story, in which Williams doesn't witness the attack, matches what former crew members told Stars and Stripes. They described the anchor as being ""nowhere near"" the attack, having arrived in a fourth helicopter about an hour after the three helicopters in front were forced to make an emergency landing.
+
+In a television segment on Downing's death, Williams said that the helicopters ""we were traveling in at the start of the Iraq War were fired on and forced down for three days in a stretch of hostile desert in a sandstorm."" He didn't distinguish between an RPG and small-arms fire, such as from a rifle.
+
+A couple of months later, Williams again suggested that his helicopter had been fired upon. In a Sept. 12, 2007, interview with Gen. David Petraeus, he said that ""at the start of the war, when I was flying in a Chinook with General Downing, that helicopter was shot at by a farmer.""
+
+Later that month, he recounted the story to David Letterman, saying that ""two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in -- RPG and AK-47.""
+
+ 
+
+ On Jan. 30 of this year, Williams recalled on the ""Nightly News"" that the ""helicopter we're traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG."" The segment was offering tribute to Sgt. Tim Terpack, who led the platoon that protected the NBC News crew in the desert that day. Williams and Terpack were shown at a New York Rangers game while the arena announcer described how the anchor's ""Chinook helicopter was hit and crippled by enemy fire.""",REAL
+5812,Getting 10 Minutes of Sunlight Per Day Can Stop Depression,"Getting 10 Minutes of Sunlight Per Day Can Stop Depression Vitamin D is one of the most important vitamins your body needs Image Credits: Michael Pollak/Flickr . 
+Vitamin D is one of the most important vitamins you can give your body. 
+This vitamin can affect nearly 2,000 genes in your body, and the best part of it is that you don’t even need a supplement to get your full recommended amount of vitamin D – you only need to get out in the sun for a few minutes a day. 
+Vitamin D is beneficial for staving off depression. Without the required amount of vitamin D in your diet (or the necessary amount of time spent in the sun), you can experience and excessively low mood and other signs of depression. 
+And one of the most well-known and important benefits of vitamin D is the effect it has an calcium absorption and building healthy bones. 
+This is especially important for children, as the vitamin helps with bone growth as well as developing strong teeth. Those who do not have enough vitamin D may find themselves at risk for fractures or soft bones. 
+Thus, vitamin D is not only important for children, but also women who can be susceptible to brittle bones as they age. 
+The vitamin may also play a crucial role in helping your body ward off disease. Studies suggest that getting in enough vitamin D can help ward off multiple sclerosis, heart disease and help your body steer clear of the dreaded flu. 
+If you don’t get enough vitamin D, you may find yourself feeling tired or experiencing general aches and pains. If the deficiency is severe enough, you may also find yourself developing stress fractures. 
+So how do you get enough vitamin D in your diet? 
+You can always purchase supplements, most of which contain enough, or in some cases, more than enough of your daily recommended allowance. 
+It is also naturally found in salmon, sardines, egg yolk and shrimp. Milk, cereal, yogurt and orange juice are often fortified with vitamin D to ensure that you get the recommended amount. 
+For those who live in a sunny climate, spending 10 minutes outside per day can actually give you the required amount of vitamin D. Although it is not advisable to spend too long outside without protection from the sun in the form of sun block or extra layers of clothing, it is recommended that you do get outside for at least a small part of the day to soak up those rays. 
+You can, however, get all of the benefits of vitamin D in your diet or by taking supplements during the winter months when the sun takes a rest, or if you happen to live in a colder climate. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+7222,AUSTRIA: Freedom Party leader calls Chancellor Angela Merkel the “most dangerous woman in Europe”,"AUSTRIA: Freedom Party leader calls Chancellor Angela Merkel the “most dangerous woman in Europe” Heinz-Christian Strache (right), chairman of the anti-Islamization Freedom Party roasted the German Chancellor for allowing an unlimited amount of Muslim illegal aliens which he claims has left Europe on the verge of civil war. Talking to supporters, Strache argued “the uncontrolled influx of migrants alien to our culture who seep into our social welfare system… makes civil war in the medium-term not unlikely.” Austrian Freedom Party (FPOe) party leader Heinz-Christian Strache (L) and Freedom Party’s presidential candidate Norbert Hofer UK Express (h/t Terry D) Strache added that his party’s presidential candidate, Norbert Hofer, “will be there for all Austrians” in a rallying speech to drum up support ahead of the general election. Hofer has attempted to keep a neutral tone in a bid to broaden the typical appeal of the Freedom Party from an anti-immigration stance to the wider Austrian population ahead of a re-run of the earlier election. Yet the 45-year-old’s recent election posters carry the phrase “so help me God” – a term which has been slammed by both Islamic and Christian officials who say introducing God into the campaign is not appropriate. “Vienna must not become Istanbul” He says what Vienna thinks Three branches of the Protestant church in Austria released a joint statement denouncing the slogan. It reads: “God cannot be instrumentalised for one’s own intentions or for political purposes. “We consider that mentioning God… to attack other religions and cultures indirectly amounts to an abuse of his name and religion in general.” The Freedom Party claim Hofer used the rallying phrase as it came “directly from the heart” and “is strongly anchored in Christian and Western values” which the party holds. Two-thirds of Austrians identify as Catholic while just four per cent are Protestant. The Freedom Party narrowly lost the election by just 31,000 votes to Alexander Van der Bellen’s left-leaning Green party, but the result was ruled void after voting irregularities were discovered. The initial re-run of the election was due to take place in October but has been pushed back to December after defects were found in the postal vote envelopes.",FAKE
+7223,The Sex Scandal That Could Change The Election,"We Are Change 
+With only days away from the most followed and extraordinary Presidential election of all time, the debate has devolved into the sexual behaviors surrounding the candidates more than ever.
+Donald Trump, the GOP nominee, Hillary’s husband Bill Clinton, the former President of the United States, and now Anthony Weiner has somehow entered the fray. It is quite sad indeed that the media has chosen to run with this angle, and it speaks volumes about the tabloid celebrity obsessed nature of the United States, but if we are going to go there, let’s go there.
+First we have Donald Trump, a man who has been married 3 times, has been very open and frankly arrogant about his opinion of women, especially in televised interviews over the last 3 plus decades, and is now being crucified for grabbing the world by the pussy. Seriously? Folks everybody knew what they signed up for when he announced he was running. He ran beauty pageants for Christ’s sake. Has Trump been a misogynist in the past? Absolutely .
+The truth is how many men out there can say they haven’t acted in that manner at some point in their lives, let alone yesterday? It’s not something I, or any other man should be proud of, but lets put the shoe on the other foot for a second. If a group of women were having a conversation and the most attractive one of them stated “Sometimes I just walk up to the hottest guy at the bar and grab him by his cock, they let me do it,” would anybody really be outraged? I highly doubt it.
+Now let’s take a look at Bill Clinton. Ever since Bill Clinton first ran for President in 1992, his sexual promiscuities and alleged predatory sexual behavior, including rape , have been widely available to the public. I would never defend any type of unwanted sexual advances, but once again we all knew this years ago. Although the mainstream has underplayed this, perhaps the most striking thing they have failed to detail in any depth is his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein.
+
+It was revealed in May that Clinton’s flight logs had him traveling with Epstein at least 26 times during his presidency. Epstein, a billionaire, flew in a private jet dubbed “The Lolita Express” . Those unfamiliar with Epstein should note that he is a convicted pedophile who allegedly ran what many refer as “Sex Slave Island” which trafficked in underage girls for the upper echelon of society in the Virgin Islands. To be fair, there have been allegations of Trump being tied to it as well, but so far there is no hard evidence. Meanwhile, Hillary reportedly went with Bill to the sex island – six times . 
+
+Where is the outrage regarding the sexual abuse of children among global heavyweights including the political elite?
+Now this brings us to some of the latest revelations regarding Anthony Weiner who is now somehow involved in the email scandal with his regards to SEXTING A 15 YEAR OLD GIRL ! Huma Abedin happens to be married to Weiner and up until the scandal hitting the news, Hillary’s top aide. Weiner is probably the worst of the worst at being caught in his serial deviant sexual behavior, but those in the know understand this is par for the course.
+Little is yet to be reported on what is actually in these emails other than they apparently contained classified information, and the fact is we can’t be expected to know before the election what’s in them…unless of course Wikileaks is planning on one last dump in the next day or so. It is again worth noting of the under-reporting of the pedophilia angle of this story.
+So what’s missing here? Um, well, how about Hillary Clinton herself? The mainstream media has NEVER strayed into the possibility Hillary has been unfaithful to Bill, or that their is an open marriage arrangement between the two of them. House of Cards anyone? Those unfamiliar with the show should note that the protagonists of the series, the Underwoods, a political power couple, have an open marriage that also take part in all sorts of sexual decadence , the type only reported upon briefly in the media, if at all.
+The truth is that Hillary has been rumored to have a plethora of sexual partners outside of her marriage , both male and female, the latest of which is her aid Huma. However we are not here to speculate in such matters. Instead let’s look at one case in particular. Webb Hubbell.
+
+Those unfamiliar with Hubbell should note that he, Hillary Clinton, and Vince Foster all came up together in the Rose Law Firm during the 70’s. By all accounts they were a tight knit unit that spent countless hours together in their quests for social mobility. Hubbell would become the Mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas in 1979. Bill Clinton, who married Hillary in 1975, would take the Governorship the year prior.
+
+So what evidence is their of an affair between the two? Many believe the existence of Chelsea Clinton, based on looks alone. Chelsea appears to have no physical resemblance whatsoever to Bill, however she looks ASTOUNDINGLY like Hubbell.
+
+The interesting thing is that Hubbell has refused to deny that he is her biological father! When asked by World Net Daily Hubbell responded “No Comment” . Truly bizarre if indeed their is no possibility of such a thing.
+In the end why would this matter? It just goes to show you the level of secrets the Clintons have kept for decades upon decades in their continued quest for more and more power. It also gives a very candid portrayal on how the media has handled scandals involving the Clintons over the years. When you go to the voting booth keep that in mind.
+The post The Sex Scandal That Could Change The Election appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+3809,Obama administration announces halt on new coal leases,"The Obama administration announced Friday it will temporarily halt new coal leases on federal lands until it completes a comprehensive review to determine whether fees charged to mining companies provide a “fair return” to taxpayers.
+
+The decision immediately triggered accusations from business groups and Republican lawmakers of a renewed ""war on coal.""
+
+Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, on a conference call, stressed that the move “is not a pause on coal production” entirely -- but will give the government time to study the benefits of coal as well as its impact on the environment.
+
+Jewell told reporters she is “confident” the pause on new leases will not disrupt the country’s ability to meet production needs.
+
+Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for 21st Century Energy, slammed the decision. Herbert called the move “a foolish crusade” that strips America of one of its “diverse mix of energy sources.”
+
+""Another day, another front on the war on coal from this administration,” she said in a statement following the announcement. “At this point, it is obvious that the president and his administration won't be satisfied until coal is completely eradicated from our energy mix.”
+
+Roughly 40 percent of the coal produced in the United States comes from federal lands. The vast majority of that mining takes place in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.
+
+It's unclear what impact the moratorium will have on many coal companies given the declining domestic demand for coal and the closure of numerous coal-fired power plants around the country. Coal companies have already stockpiled billions of tons of coal on existing leases.
+
+But the announcement will no doubt please environmental groups that have long said the government's fee rates encouraged production of a product that contributed to global warming.
+
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called Friday's announcement the ""latest front in an ideological war on coal that has contributed to devastation in communities in Eastern Kentucky and to the loss of thousands of jobs across the commonwealth.""
+
+The administration held a handful of public hearings last year to get feedback on the adequacy of the fees charged companies for coal mined on federal lands. The government collects a 12.5 percent royalty on the sale price of strip-mined coal. The rate was established in 1976. The money is then split between the federal government and the state where the coal was mined. Coal companies also pay a $3 fee annually for each acre of land leased.
+
+Government auditors have in the past questioned whether the rate provided an appropriate return, though they did not make specific recommendations to raise it. Industry groups counter that any increase in royalty rates will hurt consumers and threaten high-paying jobs.
+
+President Obama said during the State of the Union address Tuesday that he would push to change the way the federal government manages its oil and coal resources.
+
+The review will look at such issues as how, when and where to lease, how to account for the public health impacts of coal, and how to ensure American taxpayers earn a fair return on their resources.  An administration official noted that reviews of the federal coal program have occurred twice before, once in the 1970s and again in the 1980s, and pauses on the approval of new mining leases accompanied each review.
+
+Jewell said some exceptions to the moratorium will be allowed, most notably for small lease modifications. And while the federal government will proceed with environmental reviews for pending lease applications, no final decision will be made.
+
+The administration held hearings in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico last year on the federal coal program. Several people representing tribes, local ranchers and environmental groups spoke in favor of increasing royalty rates, saying it would hasten the transition to cleaner energy sources.
+
+Several GOP lawmakers sent staff to relay their concerns about the Interior Department's efforts.
+
+For example, Penny Pew, a district director for Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, said that ""President Obama and his agency minions are trying to put the coal industry out of business by imposing a flurry of draconian mandates not based in reality.""
+
+Meanwhile, David J. Hayes, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress, said Thursday the current rules for coal mining on federal lands were written when people could still smoke on planes and dump sewage in the ocean.
+
+""President Obama and (Interior) Secretary (Sally) Jewell are absolutely right to launch this comprehensive review and to set the federal coal program in a more fiscally and environmentally responsible direction,"" Hayes said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2386,"ObamaCare has cancer. And if it’s not treated quickly and aggressively, it will die","Cancer is the proliferation and growth of abnormal cells that, over time, can invade tissue and cause severe damage to the body’s organs. It’s often hard to spot in its early stages, but once it’s detected, it can reach a point of no return if it isn’t treated.
+
+That’s where ObamaCare is today. It has cancer. And if it is not treated quickly and aggressively, it will die.
+
+The cancer started to grow soon after the Affordable Care Act went into effect, but the spread was too slow to display visible damage. But now it’s detectable, and it has started to invade much of the U.S. economy and our health care systems. Here are some of the symptoms:
+
+Declining enrollment numbers. ObamaCare was designed to provide quality health insurance to people who couldn’t afford it – and for a few years we saw a significant number of early adopters. But a disproportionate number of them were people who previously couldn’t buy health insurance because it was too expensive or because the insurance companies wouldn’t cover their pre-existing conditions. After the ACA was passed, they jumped at the chance to get insurance – and there was a benefit for them.
+
+But look at what’s happening now: The projected number of enrollees for 2016 – 20 million on the federal and state health exchanges – has been cut in half to 10 million, according to Health and Human Resources Secretary Sylvia Burwell. Most of the shortfall is attributed to young, healthier individuals who have decided not to sign up. But their contribution to the system is critical, because it helps cover the losses of the older, less healthy people who participate.
+
+If the government’s marketing efforts are successful and those who are already enrolled don’t drop out, the government predicts that 3 to 4 million people will join the system next year. But the economics that were the basis of financing ObamaCare have already been sliced in half, and there is no plan to compensate for the shortfall that will result.
+
+Rising premiums. In the past few weeks, many state insurance regulators have approved all or most of the premium increases sought by the largest health plans in their states. When ObamaCare went into effect, many of these plans offered low rates, anticipating that they would bring in new customers.
+
+Instead, they dug themselves a very deep hole. The customers they took on were less healthy than they expected, and they cost them much more than they’d anticipated. They priced themselves at an unsustainable rate, and now they can’t dig out because the projected number of new members has been cut in half.
+
+You don’t need a math degree to know what a company facing this kind of loss will do to stay afloat: It will raise its prices. This change in market dynamics also has fueled a consolidation in the insurance industry, which will result in decreasing competition that will face a lot of resistance and could drive costs even higher.
+
+The demise of the co-ops. Health care cooperatives – non-profit alternatives to for-profit insurers – were designed to drive more competition among insurers and provide more choices for consumers, especially in places where those choices are limited.
+
+The government set aside billions of dollars in loans to prop up these co-ops, but many have failed in the last couple of months because they lacked the infrastructure they needed to market their product and they failed to understand the risk pools of the populations they were insuring.
+
+A major flaw in government budgeting across healthcare.gov, the state exchanges and the co-ops has been the inability to forecast accurately what it will take to make new models work and keep them running. We have seen numerous explosions along the way because of this. The co-ops’ failure could indicate what will happen to underfunded state exchanges, as well.
+
+ 
+
+ Another key ObamaCare provision whose outcome is still in limbo is the Accountable Care Organizations, which were set up to improve the efficiencies of care.
+
+The jury is still out on whether ACOs will be able to deliver quality care, but it is very clear that they have not received the money they need to share information across key stakeholders and coordinate care that is truly cost effective.
+
+Employer Backlash. While the number of people without health insurance has gone down in five years from 17.5 percent to 10.7 percent, most of that is due to a vast expansion of Medicaid and to subsidies that help lower-income people buy insurance. Most of the coverage gains did not come from workers getting affordable health care from their employers.
+
+For many employees on or near minimum wage, the plan options their employers offer are still not affordable. And in a bizarre twist, the health care law considers a worker able to afford employer-sponsored insurance if it costs 9.5 percent or less of his annual household income. But how do employers know how much the household income is when they don’t employ the entire household?
+
+ 
+
+ In an effort to stay afloat and not pay a penalty, some employers have resorted to coaxing their employees to get coverage from private or public exchanges. But when employees choose to go without coverage, they don’t get the care they need, and that becomes a huge problem for employers when they get sick and don’t show up to work.
+
+At the same time, insurers are becoming increasingly reluctant to offer policies to small employers, since the employees who sign up for the insurance tend to be the ones who are less healthy and cost more. As a result, many insurers have started gaming the system – offering policies for the first year, as required by law, and then using a loophole in the law that allows them not to renew.
+
+The projections of ObamaCare’s success were overestimated. The projections of its cost were underestimated. And we still haven’t found a way to provide health care for everyone at a price that is sustainable and ensures quality care for the long haul. There is a consistent theme in all of this: ObamaCare has cancer, and it’s spreading. Its diseased organs are now surfacing.
+
+It’s time to recalibrate the financing of the Affordable Care Act, subject it to a rigorous analysis of what works and what doesn’t and present a new business plan that American taxpayers can live with.
+
+Dr. Sreedhar Potarazu is an acclaimed ophthalmologist and entrepreneur who has been recognized as an international visionary in the business of medicine and health information technology. He is the founder of VitalSpring Technologies Inc., a privately held enterprise software company focused on providing employers with applications to empower them to become more sophisticated purchasers of health care. Dr. Potarazu is the founder and chairman of WellZone, a social platform for driving consumer engagement in health.",REAL
+7922,OFF TOPIC: Unlike Muslims…horses actually do have a sense of humor,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. PLEASE DONATE TO KEEP BARE NAKED ISLAM UP AND RUNNING. Choose DONATE for one-time donation or SUBSCRIBE for monthly donations Payment Options GET ALL NEW BNI POSTS/LINKS ON TWITTER Subscribe to Blog via Email 
+Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address",FAKE
+8397,This Irish TV channel killed their weather presenter for Halloween,Next Swipe left/right This Irish TV channel killed their weather presenter for Halloween What did you do to celebrate Halloween last night? Irish language broadcaster TG4 killed their weather presenter. RIP Caitlín Nic Aoidh. Wtf just happened to caitlin on the weather tonight? #TG4XX pic.twitter.com/IOUR3xiLgy,FAKE
+8525,Scientists Claim To Have Found 234 Alien Civilizations,"posted by Eddie It seems that the long wait to receive a signal from outer space has finally paid off because after years of silence two astronomers from the Laval University in Quebec claim to have found 234 signals from alien civilizations. Ermanno Borra and his graduate student Eric Trottier, the astronomers we mentioned, begun analyzing stars and galaxies in search of light emitted at regular intervals. After analyzing 2.5 million of them they found what they were looking for in234 stars which resemble our Sun in size. According to the researchers, the signals are emitted by alien civilizations. The team was focused on the light spectrum’s Fourier Transform (FT). For the uninformed, an FT is a mathematical device that helps scientists to find the origin of the signal’s components and how they came to be. For example, if the light is a muffin, using the FT formula will reveal the recipe, couldn’t be simpler than that. The FT analysis revealed periodic modulated components which the scientists believe are a result of the super quick light pulses (less than a trillionth of a second) sent by Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI). Their paper is published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and it reveals that the scientists discard any other possible explanation like instrumental effects, rotation of molecules, rapid stellar pulsations, and peculiar chemistry. They write: “ We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis . The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the Sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis .” Only extremely powerful lasers, such as the one found at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , could generate these superfast pulses. Furthermore, Ermanno Borra has previously published articles where he states that this is the least explored area of astronomy. An inevitable question then arises: Why would these aliens choose such a complex and energy-consuming way to communicate? Surely they could have figured out a better way, after all they’re supposed to be millions of light years ahead of us in terms of technology and science. Although the team believes that the most logical explanation would be that aliens are trying to communicate with us, they are aware that further research is needed to confirm their findings. Breakthrough Listen , a Stephen Hawking-backed project will take up the task of further analyzing the 234 stars the team found, but the UC Berkeley team (the project’s science program base) encourages people to be skeptical regarding the findings, until further proof is available. The Breakthrough Listen team released a statement saying: “ The one in 10,000 objects with unusual spectra seen by Borra and Trottier are certainly worthy of additional study. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations .” Source:",FAKE
+9232,I Am A Syrian Living in Syria: “It was Never a Revolution nor a Civil War. The Terrorists are sent by your Government”,"Theme: 9/11 &‘War on Terrorism’ , Crimes against Humanity , US NATO War Agenda Two years ago, “Majd” wrote these words on a Facebook posting: “ I am Syrian… living in Syria in the middle of everything. We have seen horrors. It was never a revolution nor a civil war. The terrorists are sent by your goverment. They are al Qaeda Jabhat al Nusra Wahhabi Salafists Talibans etc and the extremist jihadists sent by the West, the Saudis, Qatar and Turkey. Your Obama and whoever is behind him or above him are supporting al Qaeda and leading a proxy war on my country. We thought you are against al Qaeda and now you support them. The majority here loves Assad. He has never committed a crime against his own people… The chemical attack was staged by the terrorists helped by the USA and the UK, etc. Everyone knows that here. American soldiers and people should not be supporting barbarian al Qaeda terrorists who are killing Christians, Muslims in my country and everyone. Every massacre is committed by them. We were all happy in Syria: we had free school and university education available for everyone, free healthcare, no GMO, no fluoride, no chemtrails, no Rothschild IMF- controlled bank, state owned central bank which gives 11% interest, we are self-sufficient and have no foreign debt to any country or bank. Life before the crisis was so beautiful here. Now it is hard and horrific in some regions. I do not understand how the good and brave American people can accept to bomb my country which has never harmed them and therefore help the barbarian al Qaeda. These animals slit throats and behead for pleasure… they behead babies and rape young kids. They are satanic. Our military helped by the millions of civilian militias are winning the battle against al Qaeda. But now the USA wants to bomb the shit out of us so that al Qaeda can get the upper hand. Please help us American people. They are destroying the cradle of civilization. Stop your government. Impeach that bankster puppet you have as president… support Ron Paul or Rand or anyone the like who are true American patriots. but be sure of one.thing..if they attack and I think they will….it will be hell. Be sure that if it were to be a world war, many many will die. Syria can and will defend itself and will sink many US ships. Iran will go to war..Russia and China eventually if it escalates… and all this for what ? For the elites who created al Qaeda through the US government and use it to conduct proxy wars and destabilize countries which do not go along with their new world order agenda !!? American people…you gotta regain control of your once admirable country. Now everyone hates you for.the.death you bring almost everywhere. Ask the Iraqis…the Afghans…the Pakistanis…the Palestinians…the Syrians…the Macedonians and Serbs…the Libyans…the Somalis…the Yemenis ….all the ones you kill with drones everyday. Stop your wars, Enough wars. Use diplomacy..dialogue…help..not force.” Consistent testimonies from Syrians, as well as well-documented, open-source Western sources, and historical memory, all serve to reinforce the accuracy of the aforementioned testimony. Syrians are living the horror brought to them by the criminal West. They can not afford the complacency of shrugging their shoulders in indecision, not when their lives and their ancient civilization is being threatened by Western-paid terrorist mercenaries of the worst kind. “Our” proxies, slit throats, chop heads, and take no prisoners as we waffle in indecision, ignore empirical evidence, and take the comfortable easy road of believing the labyrinth of lies promulgated by Western media messaging. The veil of comfortable confusion, nested in an unconscious belief that our government knows best or that it is patriotic to believe the lies and fabrications implicit in the hollow words of politicians (who no longer represent us) and the false pronouncements of Imperial messengers, is concealing an overseas holocaust . Western societies are rotting from the inside out because of these lies and this barbarity. We are protecting a criminal cabal of corporate globalists who do not serve our interests and never will. Our democracies, which we should be protecting, have long disappeared – except in the hollow words of newspaper stenographers. Instead we are supporting transnational corporate elites and their delusional projects. Poverty and unemployment are all soaring beneath the fakery of government pronouncements, as the public domain evaporates beneath words like “efficiency” or the “economy” — all false covers that serve to enrich elites and destroy us. Internal imperialism at home is a faded replica of the foreign imperialism abroad. As countries are destroyed, and its peoples are slaughtered — think Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and others — by abhorrent Western proxies — public institutions are contaminated, and ultimately replaced by parasitical “privatized” facsimiles. Public banking is looted and destroyed in favour of transnational banksterism, World Bank funding, and IMF usury. Food security is destroyed and replaced by biotech tentacles and engineered dependencies on cash crops and unhealthy food. Currencies are destroyed, sanctions are imposed, and the unknown, unseen hand of totalitarian control imposes itself, amidst the cloud of diversions and confusions, aided by comprador regimes, oligarch interests, and shrugging domestic populations. Syria refuses to submit. That is why the West is taught to hate her, and the rest of the world learns to love and respect her. Yet, Syria’s struggles are our struggles. Syria represents international law, stability, and integrity: the same values that western peoples overtly cherish but stubbornly reject, as our countries wilt beneath suffocating veils of lies and delusions . I support Syria, because I respect what remains of international law. I support Syria because I reject Wahhabism, Sharia law, and terrorism. I support Syria because I reject the undemocratic, transnational oligarchies that are subverting our once flourishing, now dead, democracies. I reject the lies of our propagandizing media , the hollow words of our politicians, and the fake “humanitarian” messaging that demonizes non-belligerent countries and their populations. In the name of justice, humanity, and the rule of law, I support the elected government of Syria led by its President, Bashar al-Assad. Syria, an ancient cradle of civilization, is leading the way towards a better future for all of us. All we have to do is open our eyes. The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Mark Taliano , Global Research, 2016 NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS",FAKE
+4370,President Obama's persistent and puzzling passivity on terrorism,"As soon as the terror in Brussels ended, the post-terror rituals began. Photos and videos of the carnage emerged, victims were given names and faces and allies expressed their sorrow and pledged assistance. Citizens of Brussels, following the lead of New Yorkers after 9/11 and Parisians after two attacks last year, created shrines and odes to the dead.
+
+In America, security ramped up as millions feared their cities would be next, and officials vowed to harden our defenses in the fight against ­Islamic State.
+
+Unfortunately, the rituals also include President Obama doing something stupid.
+
+After each atrocity, Obama acts weirdly detached, a pattern that continued after Brussels. His happy-go-lucky tourist antics in Cuba, followed by tango dancing in Argentina, provided a shocking contrast to fear at home and manhunts in Europe.
+
+To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.
+
+Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist.",REAL
+10247,Baby Bonds: A Plan for Black/White Wealth Equality Conservatives Could Love?,"by Yves Smith 
+Yves here. I strongly suspect that Naked Capitalism readers will find a lot not to love about this proposal, but I’ll let you have at it in the comments section. I’ll start with two. The first is setting up this program as bonds, when they are most like a trust account. And why should the amount of the grant be set at birth? A lot of children suffer severe setbacks after birth, like the death of a parent or debilitating injury. 
+Second is that this proposal does nothing to address the expressed problem. The issue is that even though children from lower-income backgrounds might get into college, they can’t mix much/at all socially with the better off students because they don’t have the spending money to allow them to do that. But these “bonds” provide for spending money only for perceived-to-be-legitimate purposes, like the education itself. Even though going on ski trips with the other kids might be key to economic advancement, it would be politically unacceptable for a government program to pay for that sort of thing. 
+By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website 
+Imagine that a black child from a family of modest resources gets the opportunity to attend an elite college preparatory school. Motivated by a love of learning and strong desire to achieve, he excels in school and goes on to attend highly regarded universities, earning advanced degrees. Surely that child is well positioned to ascend the ladder of economic prosperity in America, right? 
+Not so fast. 
+The goal of broadening financial wealth to all Americans, regardless of race, gets plenty of applause across the political spectrum. But so far this goal has remained devilishly elusive. To understand why you have to know how people come by wealth in the first place. It’s popular to say that we build wealth through discipline — by hitting the books, working hard and saving money. The reality is a little different. 
+Past Injustice Shapes Present Reality 
+Darrick Hamilton knows this from personal experience. Despite his family’s modest means — not poor but hardly affluent — he attended the Brooklyn Friends School, an elite private institution where teachers emphasized social justice. Hamilton started college at Oberlin excited to seek out his path to the American Dream. But he soon found out that the path was smoother for some than for others. 
+All around him, white kids from affluent families were getting checks in the mail from their parents — money that could be spent on tuition, extracurricular activities, and the kind of socializing that builds professional networks. Black students of more modest means, on the other hand, were often at a disadvantage even when their parents were able to help financially. If they received money from home, things besides books demanded financial attention. The same was true if they had a job. Even when black students worked hard and saved diligently, the money was often spoken for before it was time to pay the tuition bill for the semester. 
+The reason has to do with the cumulative effects of centuries of gross economic disadvantages that black families have endured, from slavery to Jim Crow and beyond. The legacy of those severe headwinds is that even when an individual family is able to reach the middle class, there is still likely to be a constellation of poorer extended family members in need of various kinds of financial assistance. When they call, you help, if you can. Economists call this “wealth leakage.” 
+Hamilton noticed this phenomenon play out among black students at school and in the professional realm. Rather than enjoying resources from parents and grandparents, they often had to provide money for cousins, nieces, uncles, and siblings. After obtaining his Ph.D. in economics at UNC-Chapel Hill, Hamilton, who now teaches economics and urban policy at The New School in New York, focused on how poverty in the family increases the racial wealth gap for middle class black individuals. 
+The source of wealth building in America, he realized, is less what you save than your capacity to invest in an asset through money given by parents and grandparents. These transfers are critical to the acquisition of assets, like a home or a small business — the kinds of things that require huge down payments. 
+“If you’re not fortunate enough to get that down payment or have that resource at a key juncture of your life,” observes Hamilton, “you will not have that pathway towards building economic security that somebody else has. You could be a jerk. You could be a good person. It has little to do with the particular individual.” 
+This logic flies in the face of the long-cherished belief that education and hard work are the great equalizers in American society. Many still insist that much present day inequality is caused by bad individual decisions and not by structural problems associated with discrimination. But the vast inequality between black and white citizens suggests that there’s more going on than poor choices. In 2013, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the median household wealth was $134,230 for whites compared to a paltry $11,030 for black Americans. 
+The reason, says Hamilton, is pretty clear: “In a capitalist system, if you lack capital, it just locks in inequality.” 
+Fortunately, he thinks the problem can be alleviated if we are willing to aim the attack at the source. Hamilton and his colleague William A. Darity, Jr. of Duke University are stratification economists, pioneers in an emerging subfield of social science who focus on the structural dimensions of a person’s economic position. They propose a solution to wealth inequality that may appeal across the political spectrum: Why not give every American baby seed capital so they can grow up to take part in the capitalist system? This could be done, they argue, through “Baby Bonds” that would be set up for every child born. 
+How Baby Bonds Work 
+Baby Bonds, in Hamilton’s formulation, would be funded directly out of Treasury and held in an account by the federal government, similar to Social Security. The amount a child receives would depend on the wealth position into which she is born. If she’s the offspring of Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates, she might get $500, but upwards of $50,000 if she is born at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. The average amount for a child would be around $20,000. Accounts would be guaranteed a nominal one and a half rate of return, and the payout would not take place until the child becomes an adult. At that time, you get to spend the money — but not just on anything. The funds would have to be used for a “clearly defined asset enhancing activity,” like financing a debt-free education, purchasing a business, or buying a home. (The program would need to be coupled with financial reform and regulation to mitigate predatory effects, including extraordinary tuition increases aimed at exploiting better-resourced young adult baby bond recipients). 
+A commission would be set up to identify exactly what kinds of activities might qualify. 
+“These conditions are set up to protect the resource,” says Hamilton. “In my own situation, if I had received an infusion of cash as a young adult, there would have been a lot of family needs to take care of before I could begin thinking about self-investment like purchasing a home. Specifying what the money can be spent on may not guarantee an outcome, because people still choose the investment they engage in, but it at least ensures that the investment is an asset-enhancing endeavor which can help build wealth over the long run.” 
+Unlike some past proposals for child savings accounts, Baby Bonds are designed so that it doesn’t matter if your parents can contribute or not. Hamilton says this is done so that however good or bad or affluent or poor your parents may be, as a citizen you get some seed capital so that you can take part in the American economic mobility system. 
+But wouldn’t such a program be too costly? 
+Not at all, says Hamilton. He notes that there are about 4 million children born every year, so if the average account is at $20,000, the whole program might cost $80 billion. If you add another $10 billion, the very highest estimate for administering the program, it comes to $90 billion maximum. That might sound like a lot, but not when you consider what the federal government already spends trying to promote asset ownership through the tax code. He cites a report on all such policies (like the mortgage interest reduction and reductions in capital gains) by CFED , a Washington-based non-profit focused on expanding economic opportunities for low-to-moderate income Americans. All told, these programs cost over $500 billion dollars . (The mortgage interest deduction alone is estimated to cost more than $405 billion for tax years 2014 through 2018 ). 
+Next to these figures, Baby Bonds looks like a bargain. They also have the advantage of distributing the capital where it’s needed most. Federal programs already in place tend to funnel money towards the more affluent, says Hamilton, noting that the bottom 60 percent of earners get about 5 percent of that $500 billion, while the top 10 percent get well over half. He thinks that Baby Bonds could be fully funded simply by capping the existing mortgage interest reductions. 
+So how would a race-blind program help to close gaps in wealth and income between black and white Americans? 
+Hamilton points out that about 85 percent of black households fall below the national median of the wealth distribution, so the means test for the Baby Bonds program as well as its target needs to be keenly focused on wealth. 
+Baby Bonds address wealth in two ways: First, because of the way black people are clustered at the poorer end of the wealth distribution, more will qualify for the program. Secondly, because the program is focused on asset-enhancing activities, they will benefit when they become adults and are able to use the funds to build the kinds of assets that have so often been out of reach historically. 
+A Potential Political Winner? 
+Inequality has been a hot topic this political season, but much of the discussion has focused on student debt. Hamilton acknowledges that this is important, but it’s not enough to close the racial wealth gap. 
+“It will help avoid wealth leakage for millions of people and black individuals that end up going to college,” he says. “It’s certainly the case that black students are disproportionately impacted by student debt. But this only helps those who actually end up going to college. It’s limited in its approach.” 
+Something more is needed. He notes that in other countries, programs similar to Baby Bonds have already been implemented, such as a child trust program set up in 2005 that gave every British citizen born on or after September 1, 2002 an investment account to build savings that would help fund their transition to adult life. 
+The U.K. program differed from Baby Bonds in several key ways: it was smaller in scale, parents could add to the account, and the trust was unconditional, meaning that the money could be used for anything rather than a specific set of potentially wealth-building activities. Unfortunately, the program sank under a wave of austerity in 2011 following the global recession, so it’s unclear exactly how well it worked because the children who received the accounts are not yet old enough to have used them. 
+Could Baby Bonds work in America? Hamilton observes that in the past, both conservatives and liberals have endorsed programs designed to give American children a stake in the future. KidSave, a program conceived by then-Senators Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, with then-Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as co-sponsor, would have allotted each child a small deposit at birth (around $1000), with additional $500 deposits every year for five years. The money would then be invested in a limited number of mutual funds, but it couldn’t be withdrawn until retirement, when a substantial nest egg would have theoretically grown. Various versions of the plan attracted support from conservatives like Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and the Heritage Foundation. 
+The premise behind Baby Bonds is slightly different; it’s based on the recognition that the problem in building wealth is not savings. 
+“Most Americans don’t save, period,” says Hamilton. “It’s really getting access to that asset that’s going to appreciate. Homes give Americans most of their wealth, or, if not homes, some other asset. So this is moving us a bit from that narrative of how to leverage poor people to do better things by giving them incentives to saying, well, why don’t we empower them with an account so that they actually can make decisions that can lead to their mobility.” 
+Hamilton observes that Baby Bonds simply arm everybody with the opportunity to benefit from the markets— an idea the most die-hard free market champion might appreciate. “If conservatives really believe in the fairness of the markets,” he says, “then let’s give everybody opportunity to participate. We’re talking about babies, so this is before we start coming up with narratives about the deserving poor or the undeserving poor. We’re saying, at birth, we’re going to give everybody a chance to engage in economic mobility in America.” 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+7345,Two-time world champion in kickboxing killed in Moscow. Video,"Two-time world champion in kickboxing killed in Moscow. Video 07.11.2016 | Source: Pravda.Ru On November 6, a man was killed in the south-west of Moscow. The victim was identified as 29-year-old native of the North Caucasus region, a two-time world champion in kickboxing. Representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Irina Volk, said that the murder suspect was detained at Sheremetyevo Airport, from where he was going to fly to Baku, Azerbaijan. The 31-year-old suspect was said to be an acquaintance of the victim, also a native of the North Caucasus. The video of the incident was released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. The video shows a man falling out from the driver's door of the parked car. The other man leaves the car and escapes from the crime scene. ""According to preliminary reports, the men stopped by the shopping center. A conflict sparked between them in the car. Most likely, the cause of the conflict was a question of money. One of them men shot the other one in the chest from a Makarov pistol that he was possessing illegally and then escaped,"" Irina Volk said, Interfax reports. Immediately after the incident, the murderer booked a plane ticket. He was not allowed to board the plane at Sheremetyevo Airport and was arrested. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+2018,Jeb's invisible man strategy,"Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) In the so-called Invisible Primary of 2016, Jeb Bush is the invisible man — and he prefers it that way.
+
+After taking the political world by surprise in early January with the formation of a shiny new political committee, Bush has largely receded from public view, instead putting an acute focus on raising money and building what his growing team of aides describe as a ""shock and awe"" campaign operation.
+
+Aside from some previously-booked paid speeches, a series of banal postings on Instagram and Twitter and a few random run-ins with scrap-hungry reporters, the former Florida governor seems determined to avoid the traps of the horse race-driven daily news cycle and the expectations game that comes with it.
+
+Bush's mission in these early days of the cycle is to keep his head down and raise as much money as possible in an effort to muscle out his closest Republican rivals, hire a talented staff and build a high-octane campaign apparatus that can go the distance against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
+
+""There is a lot going on under the surface,"" said one Bush-aligned strategist who, like most allies interviewed for this story, refused to talk on the record about any campaign plans. ""He is still in the process of considering whether to run, but we are building and organizing. It's a pretty muscular financial and political organization.""
+
+His staffers, meanwhile, are fiercely tight-lipped about his plans and calendar, including a forthcoming book rollout, offering only the blandest of comments to reporters.
+
+""I like to ski, I can't comment,"" Bush told one reporter.
+
+When big issues have surfaced -- like President Barack Obama's dramatic changes to the country's decades-old Cuba policy -- Bush has played it safe, opting to make his opinions known on Facebook rather than on television news.
+
+Bush's decision to shun the limelight in January 2015 makes sense to veterans of the presidential process. Though the 2016 race would be his first presidential bid, Bush seems determined to avoid the flame wars and Twitter spats that other first-time candidates are dabbling in, attention-sucking moments that can distract a candidates and staffers from their day-to-day goals.
+
+""There is still plenty of time,"" said Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad. ""The caucuses are more than a year away.""
+
+Bush's most high-profile appearance came last Friday during a paid speech to the National Automobile Dealers Association convention in San Francisco. Close-political watchers mined his appearance for clues about a possible message, but he revealed little new about his thinking beyond now-familiar calls for immigration reform and a more ""adult"" political tone in Washington.
+
+Bush advisers are promising a splashier showing on Feb. 4, when Bush is set to address the Detroit Economic Club, a frequent stopover for ambitious Republicans.
+
+In the meantime, Bush has been flying around the country courting big Republicans donors and asking them to contribute to his political action committee, Right to Rise PAC, and an affiliated super PAC.
+
+""It's a smart strategy, because you have got to have a lot of money to run,"" said Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, who said Republicans ""will have a better chance"" in 2016 if they nominate a governor or ex-governor not associated with the unpopularity of Congress.
+
+According to some Republicans, the Bush committees together are raking in daily sums in the mid-to-high six figures, an intake that should guarantee an impressive showing once the first fundraising quarter concludes in March.
+
+""Other candidates aren't doing that,"" said one unaffiliated Republican in Washington who had been recently briefed on the fundraising.
+
+Still, Bush backers vigorously deny a report from earlier this month that they are planning to haul in $100 million in the first quarter, a near impossible goal.
+
+Much of the news about Bush's financial activities is emerging from supportive donors leaking tidbits to reporters. On the staff side, it's no-comment, all the time.
+
+""It's the Jeb Bush culture,"" said one Florida Republican who knows the likely candidate. ""It's consistent with how he ran previous campaigns. Consistent with how he governed. Focus is execution, getting things done and lack of turmoil. That's the goal anyway. You always fall short from time to time.""
+
+The no-nonsense posture of Bush-world makes for a striking contrast when compared to the daily palace intrigue swirling around Romney, Bush's closest competitor for establishment Republican support.
+
+Ever since Romney told a room full of New York donors — many of them already committed to Bush — that he was seriously considering a 2016 bid, seemingly every Romney meeting, lunch, phone call and ""private meeting"" has surfaced in the press.
+
+The read-all-about-it Romney drama is fueled, in part, by a circle of advisers that forged chatty relationships with the national press over eight years of campaigning and are happy to puff up their boss in the media. But despite Romney's bold moves in recent weeks, even some of his most devoted aides remain uncertain about his 2016 chances. Some believe he's best-positioned in a wide-open field while others are more torn about his re-emergence, but remain loyal to him nonetheless.
+
+Romney's will-he-or-won't-he act has a short shelf life, a range of top Republicans and donors groused to CNN.
+
+""I think there is a clear connection between endless leaks about high-level staff meetings and tremendous campaign insecurity,"" said one senior Republican sympathetic to Bush who has spoken with people in both the Bush and Romney orbits. ""Jeb-land seems too busy organizing to worry about leaking trivia.""
+
+Romney is expected to make a decision about the race in the next two weeks, according to people who have spoken with him in recent days.
+
+But Bush's quick start might have already boxed out Romney on the fundraising front. In Republican financial circles, talk over the last week has centered on how Bush has already secured commitments from a large swath of Romney's biggest bundlers and contributors, raising the former Massachusetts governor's barrier to entry.
+
+Bush is also ahead of Romney in the race for campaign talent, though the hiring process is moving at a somewhat slower pace than the money chase.
+
+Since before the holidays, Bush's two closest political advisers — Sally Bradshaw and Mike Murphy — have been recruiting staffers and consultants with a blizzard of phone calls and a cascade of meetings in Washington and elsewhere. They have focused heavily on staff talent from party committees in Washington and consultancies with ties to the Republican establishment. Already, Bush has tapped U.S. Chamber of Commerce political director Rob Engstrom, who helped engineer the Republican establishment's national drubbing of the tea party in 2014, as a top adviser.
+
+It remains unclear who will run the campaign. Bradshaw, several Republicans said, is likely to remain in a senior adviser role. Sara Taylor Fagen, an Iowa native and former political director for George W. Bush, has been frequently mentioned as a likely campaign manager. Fagen did not respond to a request for comment.
+
+Several Republicans familiar with the moves said Bush's high command has been very aggressive on the digital side, promising to build a state-of-the-art data and digital operation. Bush team has had conversations with a variety of top digital firms in Washington, and Chris Georgia, a former digital staffer for the National Republican Congressional Committee now working for Bush, has already tried to hire away staffers from a handful of leading digital firms.
+
+In the pivotal early caucus and primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Bush has been careful to manage expectations, moving slower than most of his rivals. Bush has called the Iowa GOP Chairman, Jeff Kaufman, and Grassley said he has made arrangements to speak with Bush on Tuesday. He has also dialed some party leaders in New Hampshire and South Carolina, but for now appears to be relying on goodwill from early state veterans of his father's and brother's political orbits.
+
+Bush is also keeping an eye on Michigan, which has yet to move its primary date from a February slot to later in the year despite the threat of penalties from the Republican National Committee. Former Michigan governor John Engler is keeping tabs on on the state's primary for Bush and his team.
+
+Bush's organizational strength, fundraising prowess and blooming establishment support have impressed Washington insiders. But his strengths have yet to be tested in the wilds of the campaign trail, where goodwill for Romney still lingers among rank-and-file Republicans. Bush will have to introduce himself to Republican voters, hold steady throughout the ups-and-downs primary grindhouse and explain thorny positions to a GOP electorate that has drifted right since Bush last held office almost a decade ago.
+
+At some point in the coming months, Bush will have to show some more leg to the public.
+
+In Iowa, Branstad said he spoke to Bush about coming to an Agriculture Summit for presidential candidate in March. Bush, he said, ""has some real interest in that.""
+
+""My advice to all the candidates is come early and come often,"" Branstad said. ""I hope he does.""",REAL
+6672,"Death of millions of Yemenis in the ""forgotten war""","Email 
+
+The Times made a reference on Thursday to the suffering of millions of Yemenis using the phrase ""the forgotten war"". 
+An18-year-old Yemeni girl's image catches the attention on the front page of the newspaper. Her malnutrition reduced her to a skeleton and she has disturbingly become emaciated as a result of food shortage. 
+This newspaper reported that Saida has been hospitalized in the port city of Hodeidah because of malnutrition while the city is under economic siege of Saudi Arabia.",FAKE
+3641,"Charlie Hebdo attack: Suspects' names, photos released","(CNN) French police say two suspects in Wednesday's terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine are still on the loose after escaping onto the streets of Paris.
+
+In a statement on their website, French national police ask for information on the whereabouts of suspects Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi, warning that both could be armed and dangerous.
+
+Police released photos of the two men, who Paris Deputy Mayor Patrick Klugman told CNN are brothers in their 30s.
+
+Cherif Kouachi, left, and Said Kouachi, right, are suspects in the Paris attack.
+
+Police found an ID document of Said Kouachi at the scene of the shooting, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported. ""It was their only mistake,"" said Dominique Rizet, BFMTV's police and justice consultant, reporting that the discovery helped the investigation.
+
+Citing sources, the Agence France Presse news agency reported that an 18-year-old suspect in the attack had surrendered to police. CNN has not independently confirmed whether the suspect has surrendered.
+
+Police fanned out across France in an intense manhunt for the suspects, who were masked and dressed in black when they burst into the satirical magazine's office Wednesday, killing 12 people.
+
+A tactical unit was deployed in an operation about a 144 kilometers (about 90 miles) from Paris in Reims, France, following the attack, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported. Authorities haven't revealed details about the target of the operation, but speculation surged in French media that investigators could be closing in on the suspects.
+
+French authorities vowed to step up security and apprehend those responsible.
+
+""Everything will be done to arrest (the attackers),"" French President Francois Hollande said in a speech Wednesday night. ""... We also have to protect all public places. Security forces will be deployed everywhere there can be the beginning"" of a threat.
+
+It's too soon to say whether the suspects were operating alone, CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said.
+
+The gunmen said they were avenging the Prophet Mohammed and shouted ""Allahu akbar,"" which translates to ""God is great,"" Molins said.
+
+A witness who works in the office opposite the magazine's told BFMTV that he saw two hooded men, dressed in black, enter the building heavily armed.
+
+""We then heard them open fire inside, with many shots,"" he said. ""We were all evacuated to the roof. After several minutes, the men fled, after having continued firing in the middle of the street.""
+
+The men reportedly spoke fluent French with no accent.
+
+One unsettling video, posted to YouTube, shows two men shooting on a Paris street, then walking up to and firing point-blank at a seemingly wounded man as he lay on the ground.
+
+Video shows a gunman approaching his getaway car and raising his finger in the air in what appears to be a signal, possibly to another vehicle or other people who might have played a role in the attack, a Western intelligence source briefed on the French investigation told CNN.
+
+'Parisians will not be afraid'
+
+At an event in Paris' Place de la Republique, demonstrators held up pens in honor of the slain cartoonists and chanted, ""We are Charlie!"" Pictures posted online showed similar demonstrations in other cities, including Rome, Berlin and Barcelona.
+
+""Parisians will not be afraid,"" Klugman said. ""We will fight terrorism with our common values, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. ... We are at war, but we still want to behave as a leading democracy.""
+
+Armed soldiers could be seen standing guard outside monuments, in transit stations and elsewhere in well-trafficked spots around France by Wednesday evening.
+
+Police impounded a black Citroen in northeastern Paris similar to the one purportedly used by the attackers as a getaway car. Video from CNN affiliate BFMTV shows the vehicle being towed from Porte de Pantin, in Paris' 19th district.
+
+Investigators will do a complete DNA work-up on the Citroen, including soil signatures that might suggest where the gunmen came from, a Western intelligence source briefed on the probe told CNN.
+
+The same source said that French authorities are searching all travel records from the past 17 days to see whether any of the attackers entered the European nation over the holidays. This includes checks at Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports, as well as whatever limited information is available from train stations.
+
+Thursday will be a national day of mourning for those killed in the attack, Hollande said. He asked for a moment of reflection Thursday and said flags will be at half-staff for three days.
+
+Its last tweet before Wednesday's attack featured a cartoon of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
+
+Earlier cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed spurred protests and the burning of the magazine's office three years ago.
+
+A year later, in an interview with Le Monde newspaper, Charbonnier gave little indication that he planned to change Charlie Hebdo's ways.
+
+""It may sound pompous,"" he said, ""but I'd rather die standing than live on my knees.""
+
+The attack on the magazine spurred a wave of support for the publication and its practices around France and the world.",REAL
+1556,Why the Ted Cruz-Marco Rubio debate mattered most (+video),"Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, both rising in the polls, staged their own spirited debate on immigration and national security in Tuesday's Republican presidential debate.
+
+Marco Rubio, left, and Ted Cruz, right, both speak as Ben Carson, second from left, and Donald Trump, second from right, look on during the CNN Republican presidential debate at the Venetian Hotel & Casino on Dec. 15, 2015, in Las Vegas.
+
+In the final Republican presidential debate of 2015, no subplot mattered more than the growing feud between Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida.
+
+Senator Cruz, surging in the polls, is an anti-GOP-establishment outsider – like front-runner Donald Trump – but with stronger conservative bona fides than Mr. Trump and significant appeal among evangelicals.
+
+Senator Rubio, now polling third nationally, represents a kinder, gentler face of Republicanism, one with a more collegial relationship with fellow senators than Cruz and more potential to attract swing voters in the general election.
+
+With Trump’s national lead continuing to grow, to the chagrin of party leaders, the battle to become the main alternative to Trump is more pitched than ever as the kickoff Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1 draw closer.
+
+But the battle didn’t play out Tuesday night in attacks on Trump. Indeed, Cruz and Rubio both went easy on the flamboyant billionaire, in a likely effort to woo his supporters should they cool to his unorthodox campaign persona and style. Instead, the two Cuban-American senators went after each other in Las Vegas on national security and immigration, the evening’s dominant themes in the wake of terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. Here’s how those exchanges played out:
+
+NSA phone record surveillance. Rubio has been going after Cruz lately over his vote for the USA Freedom Act, which imposed new limits on the collection of phone metadata by US intelligence agencies in an effort to protect civil liberties.
+
+“I promise you, the next time there is attack on – an attack on this country, the first thing people are going to want to know is, why didn't we know about it and why didn't we stop it?” Rubio said Tuesday. “And the answer better not be because we didn't have access to records or information that would have allowed us to identify these killers before they attacked.”
+
+Cruz defended the legislation as expanding the potential universe of records the government has access to. What he didn’t say is that the government now must get a court order to access them, which defenders say does not represent a serious hurdle.
+
+Defense spending and approach to Islamic State. Rubio also went after Cruz for voting multiple times against legislation that authorizes defense spending.
+
+“You can’t carpet bomb ISIS if you don’t have planes and bombs to attack them with,” Rubio charged, referring to the so-called Islamic State. “They cannot be defeated through air forces.”
+
+Cruz has promised to “carpet bomb” ISIS with air strikes, and is less enamored of sending US ground troops to Syria and Iraq than is Rubio. In the debate, he defended his “no” votes against the defense authorization act as fulfillment of a promise to oppose the federal government’s authority to detain US citizens without due process.
+
+Cruz also tried to lash Rubio to the policies of President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
+
+""We need to focus on killing the bad guys, not getting stuck in Middle Eastern civil wars,"" Cruz said.
+
+Immigration. For Rubio, this issue is the most fraught, as it gives some conservatives pause over his candidacy. As a new senator, he co-authored comprehensive immigration reform legislation, only to renounce the bill – which included a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
+
+Rubio has sought to paint Cruz as favoring “legalization” of the undocumented, over his support for big increases in the caps on green cards and the number of visas for high-tech workers. Cruz has since backed off that position, and in the debate, he fought back.
+
+“I led the fight against [Rubio’s] legalization and amnesty,” Cruz said, adding that “to suggest our record's the same is like suggesting the fireman and the arsonist have the same record because they are both at the scene of the fire.""
+
+In debate post-mortems, both senators were deemed to have had strong performances, and their duel is likely to intensify in the weeks ahead.
+
+That Cruz and Rubio are both Cuban-American first-term senators in their mid-40s may be an accident of history, but it matters to a Republican Party anxious to showcase diversity. Whether either could make major inroads into the Hispanic vote is an open question, particularly for Cruz, who doesn’t speak Spanish and who only uses his heritage to highlight his Cuban-born father’s journey to freedom in the US.
+
+Rubio, on the other hand, is fluent in Spanish and has made his Cuban-immigrant parents’ humble lives as service-workers a central part of his optimistic view of the American dream.
+
+If any of the Republican candidates are capable of channeling Ronald Reagan, whose sunny demeanor helped him to the presidency twice, it may be Rubio. Likability is a key ingredient to presidential campaign success, and if support for Trump begins to wane, one can’t assume that his voters go to Cruz.
+
+“Too often [Cruz’s] message seems negative, and I think that’s a challenge for him,” says Henry Barbour, Republican national committeeman from Mississippi, speaking before Tuesday’s debate. “The key is to come across as the guy with the positive agenda – the Ronald Reagan of the group. And everybody wants to be the Ronald Reagan.”",REAL
+322,"David Sweat shot, captured alive after New York manhunt","Malone, New York (CNN) After a massive, more-than-three-week manhunt for David Sweat, the escaped murderer is back where he started -- in custody.
+
+Authorities said a New York State Police sergeant -- identified as Jay Cook -- spotted Sweat, and after Sweat ran, the sergeant gave chase.
+
+""At some point, running across a field, he realized that Sweat was going to make it to a tree line, and possibly could have disappeared, and he fired two shots,"" New York State Police Superintendent Joseph A. D'Amico told reporters.
+
+Sweat, who was unarmed, was hit twice in the torso.
+
+A photo exclusively obtained by CNN shows Sweat in custody moments after his capture. He appears bloodied and was wearing a camouflage outfit, not prison garb.
+
+He was taken into custody in the town of Constable, in upstate New York, very close to the Canadian border.
+
+""I can only assume he was going for the border, that he was that close,"" D'Amico said.
+
+Sweat was captured about 16 miles north of the location where fellow escapee Richard Matt was killed last week. The officer was alone when he shot Sweat.
+
+Sweat was transported to the Alice Hyde Medical Center in Malone, an officer at the hospital told CNN. He was later moved to Albany Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition, according to Dennis McKenna, medical director there.
+
+Emergency, trauma, intensive care, radiology and vascular surgery specialists are involved in his care, McKenna said.
+
+No law enforcement officers were injured during Sweat's apprehension.
+
+""The nightmare is finally over,"" said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. ""We wish it didn't happen in the first place. But if you have to have it happen, this is how you want it to end.""
+
+Sweat was imprisoned at the Clinton Correctional Facility for shooting dead an officer who pursued him after a robbery he committed.
+
+Guards discovered them missing on June 6, during a routine bed check.
+
+Law enforcement experts stressed Sunday that it's crucial Sweat survive so that officials can learn exactly how he and Matt escaped, and who helped them.
+
+""Now that we have Mr. Sweat, it gives us the opportunity to have some more questions and provide more facts on the overall situation,"" Cuomo said. ""Anyone who we find who was culpable and guilty of cooperating in the escape will be fully prosecuted.""
+
+D'Amico told reporters that investigators haven't yet interviewed Sweat, but that they hope to soon.
+
+Investigators have questioned guards at the Clinton Correctional Facility about what conversations they had with the escapees about life outside the prison, according to a law enforcement official.
+
+They believe Sweat and Matt were gathering information for almost a year about hunting cabins and the fields around the prison to help them navigate the terrain.
+
+It's believed their conversations with the guards might have given the escapees some knowledge of how to get around, the official said.
+
+Earlier Sunday, about 1,300 federal, state and local law enforcement officers were searching vehicles at roadblocks and scouring dense woods in upstate New York for Sweat.
+
+Searchers had at times followed two sets of footprints, but when they gunned Matt down one day after his 49th birthday, there was no sign of Sweat nearby.
+
+So, on all-terrain vehicles and in helicopters, they continued looking for the man who eluded them for three weeks, using infrared vision devices to peer through the night.
+
+D'Amico admitted that authorities had a hard time tracking the fugitives and offered a possible explanation: pepper.
+
+""We believe that possibly these two males were using pepper to throw the scent off of the dogs that were tracking them,"" he said.
+
+The search Sunday was focused on an area along New York's State Route 30 between County Route 41 in the town of Malone and County Route 26 in the town of Duane.
+
+Audra Buchanan of Constable said she was stunned to hear recently that Sweat could be near her home.
+
+""We were so nervous,"" she said. ""We've had our housed locked down.""
+
+When she saw on CNN that Sweat had been shot and was in custody, she said she felt ""an incredible sigh of relief.""
+
+When she heard sirens and saw ambulances fly by her home, she thought, ""Oh my God, thank God!"" she told CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.
+
+Her 9-year-old daughter has been begging to go outside and play for weeks, and Buchanan said she's glad she can now let her.
+
+Sweat's mother described a similar feeling of relief. Pamela Sweat spoke to Time Warner Cable News after her son was captured.
+
+""We started crying because (he) wasn't killed,"" she said.",REAL
+5408,Texas county switches to 'emergency paper ballots',"Texas county switches to 'emergency paper ballots' After 'glitches' reported with election software Published: 30 mins ago 
+(INFOWARS) A county in Texas has switched to “emergency paper ballots” after electronic voting machines in the region suffered technical glitches. 
+Chambers County Clerk Heather Hawthorne issued a press release Tuesday night announcing electronic voting would be suspended until the glitches affecting voting machines could be corrected. 
+“The Straight Party vote for both the Republicans and Democrats did not automatically select one race on each ballot,” states the press release.",FAKE
+10372,"Police Family Fakes Robbery, Vandalizes Own Home to Blame it On Black Lives Matter","Home / Badge Abuse / Police Family Fakes Robbery, Vandalizes Own Home to Blame it On Black Lives Matter Police Family Fakes Robbery, Vandalizes Own Home to Blame it On Black Lives Matter Matt Agorist October 31, 2016 Leave a comment 
+Millbury, MA — If you want to scam your insurance company while painting a group in a negative light who wants your husband and his peers to be held accountable for beating and killing unarmed black people, you can simply fake a robbery on your police officer’s home and blame it on Black Lives Matter. But, you have to do it better than Maria Daly, who was busted last week for that very act. 
+According to CBS Boston, police say on October 17 Maria Daly reported a burglary at the family home, saying jewelry and money had been stolen. She also reportedly said her house was tagged with graffiti that appeared to reference the Black Lives Matter movement. 
+After investigators looked at the supposed crime scene, however, they quickly determined the entire account was false. 
+“Something wasn’t quite right,” said Millbury Police Chief Donald Desorcy. “I think that was pretty obvious and as a result of that investigation, the officers did their due diligence and followed through with the investigation that we had.” 
+“Basically we came to the conclusion that it was all fabricated,” said Desorcy. “There was no intruder, there was no burglary.” 
+After Daly robbed and vandalized her own home, she reported it to police and then went on social media to decry the ‘hatred’ against her husband from Black Lives Matter. 
+“We woke up to not only our house being robbed while we were sleeping , but to see this hatred for no reason,” she said. 
+Naturally, chief Desorcy quickly exonerated Daly’s police officer husband, noting that he had no role in the deception. Whatever you say chief. 
+“She must have tagged the place herself,” one neighbor said. “I don’t know why you’d do that if you’re gonna stage a robbery, I mean really come on, you’re a cop’s wife. You should know better.” 
+Maria Daly faces charges of filing a false police report and misleading a police investigation, according to CBS Boston. 
+People vandalizing their own property to blame Black Lives Matter is not an isolated incident. 
+A man who accused Black Lives Matter activists of vandalizing and spray-painting his car was recently arrested because police believe that he vandalized the car himself to stage a hoax and to scam his insurance company. Scott Lattin, a self-described supporter of police, reported in September of 2015, that his truck was torn apart and tagged with the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” Lattin alleged that his vehicle was targeted because he had a number of pro-police stickers and symbols displayed. 
+Lattin’s story received national press, and he even appeared on a number of news programs where he showed the damage that was done to his truck. However, shortly after the hype, Whitney police arrested Lattin on a misdemeanor charge of making a false police report. 
+“We had initial video when the officers took the report and then when we saw your story on Channel 4. When we looked at those two videos, there were some differences in those and that led us to take the investigation into a different direction,” Whitney Police Chief Chris Bentley said, adding that the case was “very disturbing.” 
+Lattin was apparently so excited about going on TV he further vandalized his own truck, more so than what was initially reported. When police noticed the extra damage on the TV report, they knew he was lying. Share",FAKE
+2797,"Obama opens up on Iran: What he's learned about war, Republicans, and his foreign policy","Toward the end of our meeting with President Obama, one of us asked whether the Iran nuclear deal might change the future of that country's poisonously anti-American politics, and Obama drifted from the technical and political details he'd otherwise focused on into something of a more reflective tone.
+
+""I just don’t know,"" he said, leaning back a bit in his chair for the first time since he'd arrived. ""When Nixon went to China, Mao was still in power. He had no idea how that was going to play out.
+
+""He didn’t know that Deng Xiaoping would suddenly come in and decide that it doesn’t matter what color the cat is as long as it catches mice, and the next thing you know you’ve got this state capitalism on the march,"" Obama said, paraphrasing the famous aphorism by Mao's successor that capitalistic policies were acceptable if they helped China. ""You couldn’t anticipate that.""
+
+It was surprising to hear Obama, normally more restrained in how he discusses the Iran nuclear deal, refer to it, however cautiously, as a moment when the arc of history might curve.
+
+It was one of several interesting moments during an intimate 90-minute meeting Obama held with 10 journalists in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Wednesday. What follows is a description of that conversation and what it reveals about how the president sees the nuclear deal and the larger problems of the Middle East, as well as the opposition to the deal, a subject he returned to frequently and at times with a visceral frustration that seemed to verge on disgust.
+
+But Obama's primary message was one of certainty. That the meeting was on the record — such gatherings, a routine event at the White House, are normally off the record — spoke to this, as did his easy manner and his eagerness to discuss fine-grained details of the deal, as well as criticisms.
+
+""Of all the foreign policy issues that I've addressed since I've been president,"" he said, ""I've never been more certain that this is sound policy, that it's the right thing to do for the United States, that it's the right thing to do for our allies.""
+
+Since world powers had reached the agreement on limiting Iran's nuclear program, three weeks earlier in Vienna, Obama has calibrated his remarks on the deal to a narrow political mission: Get it enough support to get past Congress. That has meant emphasizing only ways in which the deal will serve US (and Israeli) security interests to limit Iran's nuclear program, and downplaying everything else.
+
+To hear him draw a connection between the nuclear deal and China's transformation, then, was striking. It suggested that Obama, though he has repeatedly insisted he does not expect the character of Iran's regime to change, does see it as a possibility, one potentially significant enough that it evokes, at least in his mind, President Nixon's historic trip to China.
+
+At the same time, the lesson Obama seemed to draw from the comparison was not that he, too, was on the verge of making history, but rather that transformations like China's under Deng, opportunities like Nixon's trip, can have both causes and consequences that are impossible to foresee. His role, he said, was to find ""openings"" for such moments.
+
+He cited his 2012 trip to Myanmar — the first ever by a sitting president, and part of his effort to reopen the dictatorship to the world — and his detente with Cuba.
+
+With regards to Myanmar, also known as Burma, ""we still don’t know yet how that experiment plays itself out,"" he said. In listing Myanmar's reforms since his trip, he mistakenly referred to dissident Aung San Suu Kyi running for president — in fact, the regime has barred her from running — before realizing his error and correcting himself. It was an unintentionally revealing comment, hinting at the ways that reforms can reverse and ""openings"" can close.
+
+""We don’t know whether it’s going to get over the hump and suddenly Burma is completely transformed, or whether it retrenches as the generals in that country get scared about losing their privileges and prerogatives,"" he went on. ""But what we’ve done is we’ve created a possibility for change.""
+
+His point seemed to be that he could imagine such a possibility for an opening in Iran as well, though the results were uncertain. He said of Iran's future, echoing his point about Myanmar, ""We don’t know how it’s going to play itself out.""
+
+From there, Obama drifted back to discussing what he had brought us to the White House to discuss, which was his case for the Iran nuclear deal, which meant reasserting, as he had many times before, that the deal did not assume Iran's good behavior on nuclear issues but rather that it was a means for enforcing it.
+
+He was careful at all times not to premise the deal on Iran's good intentions, much less the country undergoing any sort of transformation. Still, in that unguarded moment, he seemed to suggest a hope that the deal could help create ""a possibility for change"" all the same.
+
+Several times, Obama was asked — and resisted answering — a simple question: What is his plan if the deal falls apart?
+
+Congress, for example, could block the deal, something that looked more possible by Friday, when Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer announced he would oppose it. Yet while Obama was eager to talk about why killing the deal would be bad, all the ways that it would allow Iran's nuclear program to proceed and set back US foreign policy, he refused to say what he would do if that happened. At one point, when one of the journalists present began asking about his plan B, Obama cut him off, joking that he wanted to save the journalist from wasting his question.
+
+Politically, it's understandable that he'd refuse to answer: if he says he has no Plan B, he would look foolish, but if he says he has a good plan B, he would make it easier for Republicans to justify killing the deal. Yet it's an important question.
+
+The closest he got to providing an answer was when he was challenged on whether the only alternative to the deal was really war, as he's frequently asserted. He did not describe a clear plan B, but he did rule out a number of options.
+
+""I do not say that a military option is inevitable just to be provocative, just to win the argument. Those are the dictates of cold, hard logic,"" he said.
+
+If Congress killed the deal, ""doubling down on unilateral sanctions"" against Iran would not be enough, he said, to get another deal. And he was ""quite certain"" that it would not be possible to ""force our P5+1 partners [the world powers that are party to the nuclear deal] or other countries, like India or South Korea or even Japan"" to go along with Congress's demand to set a new, higher bar for what the nuclear deal has to accomplish.
+
+If that happens, he said, ""we’ve sort of run out of options at that point. ... At minimum, what we’ve done is we’ve put Iran in the driver’s seat."" In one scenario, he said, Iran could pull out of the deal and resume its nuclear development immediately: ""The scenario that everybody talks about happening 15 years from now happens six, nine, 12 months from now.""
+
+In another scenario, Iran would declare its intention to abide by the deal. Sanctions would fall away, Russia and China would exploit the opening to hijack the process, and the US would possibly, he said, be excluded from the inspections regime and enforcement systems set up by the deal. In other words, the US would get shut out of the very process of monitoring Iran's behavior that it had set up.
+
+""In that scenario, then, Iran is going to get some of that sanction relief anyway, and our credibility in terms of now being able to exercise any influence on how the Security Council thinks about this thing has been completely eroded,"" he said. ""I’d have to talk to the lawyers as to what standing we would even have, since Congress would have rejected this deal, for us to be a party to it, in which case we’re not in the room, potentially.""
+
+Any of these, he said, would make it easier for Iran to grow its nuclear program and harder for the US to do anything about it: ""In almost every scenario, our ability to monitor what’s happening in Iran, our ability to ensure that they are not breaking out, our ability to inspect their facilities, our ability to force them to abide by the deal has gone out the window.""
+
+Obama would not spell out what he planned to do in such a scenario, but he did say he would try to piece together a new sanctions coalition, though he was not optimistic about it. ""Maybe it’s possible that for a certain period of time we can hang on to the Europeans — not certain; maybe. Maybe we can twist some arms to have some of our Asian allies hang on,"" he said.",REAL
+1224,Why Bernie Sanders's campaign makes me worry about how he’ll manage the White House,"Of late, Bernie Sanders has been under assault from the technocratic wing of the Democratic Party. The charge? His campaign has circulated economic projections that show stunning — and rather implausible — benefits from Sanders's agenda.
+
+Sanders's ""promises runs against our party's best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic,"" wrote four Democratic ex-chairs of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers. ""These are numbers we would describe as deep voodoo if they came from a tax-cutting Republican,"" agreed Paul Krugman.
+
+Amidst this onslaught, Steve Randy Waldman has penned what is, I think, the best defense of Sanders. He admits that the campaign's policy proposals are sketchy and the economic projections it's circulating are fantastical. But he argues that none of that really matters.
+
+The president's ""role is to define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details,"" he says. ""In a democratic polity, wonks are the help.""
+
+Waldman has a point. If elected president, Sanders could certainly get some top economists to tighten his policies. He would have the vast machinery of the federal government available to sweat the details. The best experts in academia would be honored to advise him. Every think tank in town would produce reams of research on how to implement his ideas.
+
+And, hell, let's just be honest: All this policy talk is just a way to pass the time between now and the election. It doesn't matter how strong Bernie Sanders's single-payer health care plan is — it's not going to pass, just like Donald Trump isn't going to get Mexico to pay for a wall and Hillary Clinton isn't going to get universal pre-K past a Republican Congress and Ted Cruz isn't going to set up a value-added tax.
+
+It's obvious that debating the details of campaign proposals is, on some level, fantasy football for wonks. Events will intercede, bureaucracies will weigh in, Congress will balk, promises will be broken. Remember when Barack Obama ran for president opposing an individual mandate and then flip-flopped and supported one? So what's the point of paying attention to any of this at all?
+
+As someone who pays quite a lot of attention to campaign policy processes, here's my answer: Watching a candidate run his campaign's policy processes is one of our best ways of predicting how he would run his White House.
+
+The key word there, by the way, is run. Some of the most important decisions the president makes are about how to run the processes that translate vision into policy. Those decisions include whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas make sense, which strategies are likely to work. The presidency is one damn decision like that after another. Obama, famously, is so exhausted by the decision fatigue of the job that he wears the same color suit every day so he has one less thing to decide in the morning.
+
+This is one way in which campaigns give us insight into presidencies. Presidential candidates also have to decide whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas are truly good ones, which strategies are likely to work. To make those decisions well, they need a sound philosophy, yes, but they also need to want to hear good advice, they need to want advisers who will tell them when they're wrong, they need to have good instincts for when something they want to believe is true simply isn't, and they need to be realistic about the strategies that are likely to work and the ones that aren't.
+
+My worry about Sanders, watching him in this campaign, is that he isn't very interested in learning the weak points in his ideas, that he hasn't surrounded himself with people who police the limits between what they wish were true and what the best evidence says is true, that he doesn't seek out counterarguments to his instincts, that he's attracted to strategies that align with his hopes for American politics rather than what we know about American politics. And these tendencies, if they persist, can turn good values into bad policies and an inspiring candidate into a bad president.
+
+The reason I care about the puppies-and-rainbows promises of his single-payer proposal is that I think Sanders believes them — I don't think he's a cynical politician simply eliding the weaknesses of his plan. The reason I care about his campaign's circulation of fairly outlandish economic projections is that it makes me worry there's no one around Sanders with the sense to say that those results don't pass the smell test. The reason I'm frustrated by Sanders's promise that a political revolution will overcome all opposition to his plans is I think he believes it, and so I'm not sure he has a real plan B for when the political revolution doesn't happen. The reason Sanders's persistently superficial answers on foreign policy matter to me is that they're a test of his ability to learn on the fly about topics he's not terribly interested in.
+
+In a democratic polity, wonks are the help. But that only underscores the importance of electing someone good at hiring and managing them. A President Sanders could hire excellent technocrats to help him make policy, but would he want to? A President Sanders could surround himself with experts who know the shortcomings of his ideas, but would he listen to them? A President Sanders could become deeply engaged on foreign policy, but would he decide to?
+
+Management isn't the sexiest or most inspiring of topics. But, as Jimmy Carter can tell you, it matters. A good vision can be destroyed by a bad strategy; high ideals can be muddied by weak staffing; a pure heart can be led astray by bad advice.
+
+There are plenty of criticisms to be made of Obama's presidency, but I think the baseline competence of his administration has begun to dim memories of how important presidential management really is.
+
+The Bush administration was, from this perspective, a genuine disaster — a festival of tax cuts that didn't make sense and wars that were ill-planned, and all of it run by a man who clearly couldn't separate experts from hacks (""Heckuva job, Brownie!"") and good advice from ideological fantasies. I have always thought this story, reported by Megan McArdle, showed the mundane ways in which Bush's deficiencies diminished his presidency:
+
+A senior economic adviser for George W. Bush once told me a rather haunting story about the administration’s decision to sign the 2002 farm bill ... Like virtually all sound economists, Bush’s advisers disliked the bill, a subsidy-laden monstrosity that was considerably worse than the farm bill that had preceded it in 1996—but they reluctantly allowed it to go forward, because they thought passing the farm bill would buy legislative support for something they considered even more important: the authority the president needed to advance the next round of treaty negotiations at the World Trade Organization. As compromises go, this one didn’t seem too bad, so Bush’s advisers put on their game faces as the president signed it into law on May 13, 2002, with a touching speech about providing a safety net for farmers. All went well until later, when someone cracked a joke about how ""we don’t need another farm bill."" The president, shocked, demanded an explanation. ""What’s wrong with the farm bill? No one told me to veto the farm bill."" The adviser wasn’t trying to hide the football, but had just assumed that Bush knew. So had everyone else. It was so obvious to economists, no one thought to tell the president.
+
+On the other hand, George W. Bush's father wasn't the most brilliant policy mind to ever occupy the Oval Office, but he was an excellent manager who chose good staff, made decisions he didn't like but knew were necessary, and ran a competent and mostly scandal-free bureaucracy. There's a reason esteem for his presidency has grown greatly since he left office.
+
+Voters are hiring managers, and the presidential campaign is a long, strangely constructed job interview. Among the qualities people are looking for are inspiration and decency, and Sanders has shown he has both in spades. But the presidency demands more than that, and Sanders's success means he needs to show he's up to the more mundane rigors of the job, too.",REAL
+5439,What DNC Donors REALLY think of African Americans,"This Video is REALLY Disturbing... 
+Not just to African Americans but to Americans in General... 
+Many of The DNC Policies that pertain to African Americans are deeply insulting and condescending in implication. 
+Voter ID Laws are not restrictive to The average African American but are portrayed as impediments to them because of the Intellectual Entitlement Mentality of The Democratic Nation Party. 
+The Racism Game is a cover for manipulation of both minorities and the majority... 
+Divide and Conquer... 
+They Divide the Voting Block... 
+To Conquer The Election.",FAKE
+5623,Leaked email shows Monsanto Executive V.P. invited to 'Hillraiser' fundraiser to put Clinton into the White House for Monsanto's benefit,"Leaked email shows Monsanto Executive V.P. invited to 'Hillraiser' fundraiser to put Clinton into the White House for Monsanto's benefit 
+  Monsanto , Hillary Clinton fundraiser , Charles Burson (NaturalNews) Wikileaks email 28657, part of the John Podesta email leaks, reveals that the Hillary Clinton campaign sought money from a top Monsanto executive to put her into the White House. See the email here .Hillary Clinton, known as the Bride of Frankenfood , is a longtime supporter of Monsanto, a corporation whose deceptive tactics of collusion, intimidation and bullying are a perfect fit for the Clinton regime, which even a former FBI official now describes as a criminal operation .The Monsanto operative invited to the fundraiser was none other than Charles W. Burson, Monsanto's former Executive V.P., Secretary and General Counsel. Burson, who retired from Monsanto in 2006 but still maintained an active Monsanto.com email address all the way through 2015, was praised by Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant for pushing the corporation's international imperialism agenda to force patented seeds down the throats of poor farmers in developing nations. It's sickening. Via PR Newswire : ""On behalf of the Monsanto Board of Directors and the employees of Monsanto, I thank Charles for his service to our company,"" said Hugh Grant, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Monsanto. ""During his tenure, Monsanto successfully transitioned from an agricultural company fueled by its chemistry business to one led by its seeds and traits businesses. Charles has played an important role in building the company's legal organization to better serve our growing business, not only in the United States but also in Latin America and Asia-Pacific, where farmers are increasingly choosing to plant Monsanto seeds and technologies. Clinton fundraiser sought money from one of the most evil corporations in the history of humankind In other words, Charles Burson was instrumental in Monsanto suing farmers whose fields were contaminated by genetically modified Monsanto seeds . This legal action by Monsanto is globally considered to be one of the most evil, anti-human rights abuses of legal power ever witnessed in the modern world, yet the Hillary Clinton campaign saw this man as an opportunity to raise more money to put Hillary Clinton into the White House (where, no doubt, she would return the favor to Monsanto through government policy decisions at the USDA and FDA).Fully consistent with the criminal conduct of the Clinton crime mafia, Charles Burson also took part in excusing Monsanto's illegal bribery of over 140 Indonesian officials as part of its international agricultural imperialism march against subsistence farmers.After caught committing massive bribery and collusion in Indonesia, Monsanto's then general counsel Charles Burson explained that no, Monsanto isn't a bad company. They're super honest, and transparent and ethical, too!""The company has taken remedial actions to address the activities in Indonesia. At every stage of this process -- beginning with our voluntary disclosure and throughout the governmental investigations and settlement process -- Monsanto has been fully cooperative, and has made clear that improper activities will not be tolerated by the company. We are pleased today to begin the process of putting these matters to rest,"" wrote Burson. Surprise! The Justice Department then ""defers prosecution"" of Monsanto and forgets these crimes ever happened... Whaddaya know! With the corrupt, lawless Justice Department calling the shots, Monsanto was then given a get out of jail free card by the political elite in Washington.From the same link above: The Justice Department said it had agreed to defer prosecution on the criminal information for three years, saying it would dismiss it after the period if Monsanto fully complied with the terms of the agreement. So, wait. You mean to tell me that a corporation which got caught bribing 140 foreign officials in Indonesia -- a felony crime under U.S. law -- was able to get away with it by claiming they will be honest from now on? And the Justice Department says oh yes, you're fine now, there will be no prosecution for your serious crimes? And then the Clinton fundraiser people specifically reach out to the Monsanto attorney who orchestrated all this and said, ""Hey, this guy would be awesome to help support a Clinton presidency?""Yep.That's Hillary Clinton in a nutshell: Hopelessly corrupt... criminally involved... collusion at every level and the total abandonment of human rights and human dignity. This woman shouldn't be behind a desk at the Oval Office... she should be behind bars! Oh, and it case you're curious, here are all the other emails that were cc'd in that same Hillary Clinton fundraiser message . Check out some of the names. Do you now see how deep the Clinton corruption really is?From:ldavis@lannyjdavis.comTo: aegis1865@gmail.com, agoldberg@tridentpllc.com, teaguelr@aol.com, Alan.Kreczko@thehartford.com, amy@weisspublicaffairs.com, annedwards@gmail.com barry_toiv@aau.edu, benjaminmaxwelladams@gmail.com, bethnolan@gmail.com, blindsey@wlj.com, bobjnash@sbcglobal.net, bdsmith@cov.com, mimbroscio@cov.com, bwnussbaum@wlrk.com, c_moscatelli@yahoo.com, cadavis8@gmail.com, charles.w.burson@monsanto.com, cheryl.mills@gmail.com, ches.johnson@gmail.com, christopherlehane@sbcglobal.net, cliffmauton@hotmail.com, dnionakis@gmail.com, davidfein@icloud.com, dmchirwa@live.com, debbzerwitz@gmail.com, ddoufekias@mofo.com, dkendall@wc.com, don@bluetext.com, donna.peel@comcast.net, dsosnik@nba.com, Doug.band@technoholdings.com, dpeel@rddlaw.net, efhughes4@yahoo.com, eangel@legalaiddc.org, Erskine@2Bowles.com, ericgioia@gmail.com, ecomite@scott-scott.com, fitztoiv@yahoo.com, gterzano@hotmail.com, dcanter434@aol.com, Goodstein8@aol.com, gradymccoy@yahoo.com, wgreggburgess@gmail.com, hickes@ickesenright.com, ira.fishman@nflplayers.com, iraij@foley.com, jjohnson@gloverpark.com, jkagan@supremecourt.gov, jkennedy2006@gmail.com, jlockhart@jplgrp.com, jquinn@quinngillespie.com, jakesiewert@gmail.com, jamie.baker@armfor.uscourts.gov, Jane.Sherburne@BNYMellon.com, jennifer.m.palmieri@gmail.com, jeremymgaines@gmail.com, jklein@newscorp.com, jlwitt@wittassociates.com, john.podesta@gmail.com, Jonathan.Yarowsky@wilmerhale.com, joshua.king@thehartford.com, josh@personal.com, juliampayne24@gmail.com, juliemziemba@gmail.com, karen_kucik@yahoo.com, KARacine@venable.com, kathiwhalen@comcast.net, kathyruemmler@gmail.com, kearney_j@sbcglobal.net, kengskov@starbucks.com, kpopp@sidley.com, kumiki.gibson@gmail.com, lbreuer@cov.com, lbrown@georgetown.edu, lisa.krim@georgetown.edu, lizdave@me.com, loriwier@comcast.net, lorriemchugh@comcast.com, moconnor@wc.com, mmelendez@lannyjdavis.com, margaretwhillock@sbcglobal.net, marnacooks@gmail.com, marsha@scottyandura.com, marvin.krislov@oberlin.edu, marystreett@hotmail.com, maryellen_glynn@yahoo.com, marymfrench@sbcglobal.net, Mary_B._DeRosa@nsc.eop.gov, maura.pally@gmail.com, Mdf@markfabiani.com, melissaprober@gmail.com, mecabe@verizon.net, michelle_aronowitz@hotmail.com, mmccurry@psw-inc.com, nadjanaomi@me.com, neal.wolin@gmail.com, claire_e_mccombs@who.eop.gov, ernewman@alumni.princeton.edu, nicole.seligman@us.sony.com, pambcashwell@gmail.com, pmarple@chadbourne.com, info@panettainstitute.org, pauloetken@gmail.com, peter.erichsen@ropesgray.com, prundlet@humanityunited.org, rklain@aol.com, Robert.Weiner@aporter.com, RSlater@PattonBoggs.com, srutherford@clintonschool.uasys.edu, sbradley@mclarty.com, sreich@akingump.com, swilson@cov.com, sally@thepaxtongroupconsulting.com, Sbwhoeop@aol.com, emkarcher.schmitt@yahoo.com, shelia.cheston@ngc.com, shelli_peterson@fd.org, stacyr404@gmail.com, stephenneuwirth@quinnemanuel.com, steveR@metalrecyclingcorp.com, sricchetti@cox.net, stevenfreich@gmail.com, sylvia.burwell@hotmail.com, tfmclarty@maglobal.com, todd_j_campbell@tnmd.uscourts.gov, tschroeder@texarkanalaw.com, vcanter434@aol.com, wdellinger@omm.com, wendy.white@ogc.upenn.edu, wpmarsha@email.unc.edu",FAKE
+8473,Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied,"Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied
+http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/10/clintons-are-under-multiple-fbi-investigations-as-agents-are-stymied/ 
+The post Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+5606,"First Iraqi Troops Enter Mosul, But Fighting Remains Largely in Suburbs","Military: Goal Is to 'Liberate' Eastern Bank of Tigris River by Jason Ditz, October 31, 2016 Share This 
+Iraq’s invasion of Mosul has entered its third week with a noteworthy first, as the first Iraqi special forces entered the city itself in the area around Karama District, in the far east. There was fighting reported both within the district and in surrounding suburbs. 
+Indications are that the vast majority of the fighting in the area remains in the suburbs, with only a small incursion into the city itself. Still, Iraqi military officials say their goal is to take the whole eastern bank of the Tigris River, which divides the city. 
+The area entered is near a key industrial site within Mosul. It is unclear how well secured this area is from ISIS’ perspective, as they’ve laid heavy traps and tunneled in around the city in anticipation of the invasion, but indications were that a lot of these defensive measures were taken in residential areas. 
+ISIS is believed to have several thousand fighters in Mosul, and with the US announcing they intend to kill anyone who tries to escape, they are likely to resist all the more fiercely, knowing they don’t have any place to go after Mosul. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+5753,SHOCK VIDEO : Hillary Needs Help Climbing ONE SINGLE STEP in Florida – TruthFeed,"SHOCK VIDEO : Hillary Needs Help Climbing ONE SINGLE STEP in Florida SHOCK VIDEO : Hillary Needs Help Climbing ONE SINGLE STEP in Florida Videos By TruthFeedNews October 27, 2016 
+Hillary Clinton needed a helping hand to trek up a single step during a visit in Florida today. 
+Clinton was outside to greet supporters in Lake Worth when she attempted to stand on a small riser. With help from her Secret Service agents, she finally conquered the single step. 
+Watch the video: 
+Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+2775,"After vowing to end two wars, Obama may leave three behind","President Obama’s decision to expand the U.S. war effort in Iraq and Syria is a reflection of the conflicting pressures on a commander in chief who doubts that military force alone can end the conflicts in those countries, but who also feels compelled to act in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe and a growing threat to the United States.
+
+The president on Friday said that he was sending about 50 Special Operations troops to northern Syria to work with Kurdish and Arab fighters battling the Islamic State. The deployment, though small, marks the first full-time deployment of U.S. forces to the dangerous and chaotic country.
+
+The troops will be accompanied by more U.S. attack planes, based across the border in Turkey, and plans for more joint raids — led by Iraqi counterterrorism forces — to capture and kill Islamic State leaders.
+
+The troops, planes and plans for more raids represent an “intensification” of the president’s existing strategy, said senior administration officials. Few of those officials, however, suggested that the moves would be enough to break open the stalemated conflict or produce sudden battlefield gains.
+
+“This is a very complex battle space, and we’re not directly involved in the way we’ve been in the past,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
+
+Without a clear overarching strategy to resolve the conflict, “we’re looking at things in a granular way,” the official said. The goal, for now, is simply to incrementally reinforce those areas that are working and abandon initiatives that are not.
+
+Obama began his second term having brought one war in Iraq to an end and pledging to bring home America’s ground troops from a second in Afghanistan. To that end he set hard limits on U.S. deployments and firm time frames for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
+
+Before deploying forces, Obama would regularly demand that his commanders explain the “theory of the case” behind the moves. The phrase is evocative of the president’s legal training and his deep skepticism that U.S. military power can bring lasting change to broken societies. He wanted assurances that the operations would work as intended as well as coherent explanations of how and when they would end.
+
+As he nears the end of his presidency, Obama faces the prospect that he will leave office with ground forces deployed to three combat zones.
+
+Last month, the president said he would keep 5,500 ground troops in Afghanistan to advise struggling Afghan army and to pursue the remnants of al-Qaeda. In Iraq and Syria, the president has incrementally boosted the U.S. force, beginning an initial deployment of several hundred troops to Iraq in 2014, after Iraqi army forces in Mosul were overrun by Islamic State fighters. The president sent 450 more American trainers and advisers after Iraqi forces were routed at Ramadi by a much smaller Islamic State force in the spring.
+
+Those forces were supposed to work with the Iraqi army and local tribal fighters to plan an offensive on Ramadi that has largely stalled. “We have four axes converging on Ramadi, and on any given day, none of them makes any movement at all,” said a senior U.S. official involved in the war planning.
+
+Frustrated with the lack of progress, Obama in July made a rare visit to the Pentagon to push Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and his top commanders for options to increase the intensity of U.S. military operations without putting U.S. troops in a direct combat role.
+
+More ambitious and costly measures such as no-fly zones or buffer zones that would require tens of thousands of ground troops to effectively protect civilians were rejected. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton has said that she favors a no-fly zone in Syria. Other riskier proposals, such as the introduction of Apache helicopters or combat advisers who would move closer to the front lines and call in airstrikes or bolster the Iraqi attack on Ramadi, weren’t explicitly rejected but were deemed unnecessary for now.
+
+The president’s final decision balanced his desire for the United States do more with his determination to keep American forces from being pulled too deeply into conflicts in which U.S. effectiveness was limited or where there were no clear military solutions.
+
+The 50 Special Operations troops and the new attack planes heading to Syria and Turkey will bolster Kurdish and Syrian Arab forces that were able to make surprising gains over the summer with the backing of U.S. warplanes.
+
+“The success in northern Syria wasn’t the result of any strategic planning,” said a senior defense official who tracks operations in the region. “Really, it was an opportunity that fell into our laps.”
+
+Syrian Arab and Kurdish forces have fought to within 30 miles of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital. With additional American help, U.S. officials said the fighters could isolate the city, cutting its supply lines running up to the Syrian border.
+
+Over the longer term, U.S. officials said that a loose coalition of Syrian Arab, Turkmen and Kurdish fighters might be able to dislodge the Islamic State from a 68-mile stretch of the border, creating a space where refugees can find haven. The hope is that the coalition can also begin to provide some level of governance and take part in diplomatic negotiations to replace Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
+
+But even the most optimistic U.S. officials said such an outcome could take years.
+
+In the near term, administration officials expressed cautious optimism that the combination of more U.S. air power, a bigger Iraqi push against Islamic State forces in Ramadi along with Kurdish and Syrian Arab efforts in Raqqa and along the border could shift the momentum on the battlefield.
+
+“If you get all these things in motion, you put a lot of pressure on the Islamic State to move and communicate,” a senior U.S. official said. “As they do, they become targets.”
+
+So far, it’s a strategy that hasn’t draw much support in Washington. Republicans and some Democrats, who have been pressing Obama to do more, criticized the president’s caution.
+
+“His incremental step-by-step approach is an effort to manage risk and keep tight reins on the mission, but ultimately it could mean that the whole is less than the sum of its parts,” said Michele Flournoy, the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security, who was among Obama’s top choices to be defense secretary last year before Carter was selected.
+
+Flournoy said the addition of U.S. air controllers to call in airstrikes, a more robust bombing campaign and more support to moderate rebels, combined with the measures the president is already taking, could accelerate gains on the battlefield.
+
+“If he took these actions all at once, it could have a greater impact,” she said.
+
+Some liberal Democrats described the president’s moves as a slippery slope to a deeper U.S. commitment. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) called the president’s announcement last week the “latest in a series of alarming signs that the U.S. war against ISIS will continue to accelerate in the absence of congressional action.”
+
+White House officials, meanwhile, described the president’s moves as the product of hard lessons learned on a complicated and chaotic battlefield. “We always envisioned this as a three-year campaign,” the senior U.S. official said. “In year one we learned some of our local partners did well and others didn’t. So we are doubling down on those who did well.”",REAL
+10085,Climate Engineering And Cryosphere Collapse,"geoengineeringwatch.org 
+Global climate engineering programs are mathematically the single greatest assault against nature ever launched by the human race. Incredibly, the majority of global populations still remain oblivious to the ongoing blatant climate engineering atrocities occurring overhead day after day. This willful blindness of the masses is largely due to the total betrayal of the truth by the vast majority of the science community and all of mainstream media , both of whom are heavily invested in covering up the crimes of their paymasters. How badly damaged is our once thriving biosphere? We are past the point of no return in regard to the once thriving planet we have known. Below is a quote from a powerful and moving recent article by Dr. Glen Barry which accurately outlines the reality we collectively face. 
+Miraculous nature is being murdered. Everywhere we look inequitable over-consumption is devastating the natural ecosystems that sustain a living Earth. Together we yield to ecological truth – personally embracing a global ecology ethic, and demanding others do so as well – or we all needlessly die at each others’ throats as the global ecological system collapses and being ends. 
+A primary sign of biosphere collapse is clearly evident by the rapidly imploding cryosphere. Arctic sea ice continues to advance further into record low levels . Though official agencies like NASA will never admit to the ongoing climate engineering crimes, they are beginning to acknowledge that the excessive cloud cover over the Arctic in recent years (solar radiation management) is exacerbating the overall warming , not mitigating it. Other studies also confirm the overall planetary warming is being fueled by ""contrails"" (which are in reality solar radiation management sprayed particulate trails ). The 30 second video below fully illustrates the shocking loss of Arctic sea ice. 
+Not only is the Arctic sea ice at a record low level, but now the ice on the opposite end of the Earth, Antarctica, is also rapidly retreating to record low levels as well. This is a fact that the US corporate media is not covering. The 2 minute video below elaborates on the rapidly accelerating loss of Antarctic sea ice. 
+Antarctic sea ice extent has been the last vestige of denial for those who still desperately cling to the ""global warming is a hoax"" fossil fuel industry false narrative. To dogmatically cling to this false narrative is also to toe the line for the power structure, big oil, and the climate engineers . The poles are not the only part of the cryosphere that is imploding, the Himalayan glaciers are disappearing at blinding speed. The 8 minute video below is a recent update from the Himalayas. 
+Our planet is already free-falling into a runaway warming scenario , global climate engineering is further fueling this scenario. The graph below illustrates the rapid increase of warmer days being recorded on our planet. 
+Global climate engineering programs not only worsening the overall warming of the biosphere, but also destroying the ozone layer , derailing the hydrological cycle , and contaminating the entire planet due to the highly toxic heavy metal and chemical fallout . 
+Where do we go from here? How can we stand against the power structure that currently controls the fate of the world in which we live? The single greatest leap we could collectively make in the right direction is by fully exposing the climate engineering issue to the masses. If we can expose the geoengineering assault, populations around the globe would unite in a common cause. If we can expose it, we can stop it. Those, that are still clinging to the insanely false ""global warming is a hoax"" narrative, are doing great harm to credibility of the overall anti-geoengineering community, and thus to the cause itself. The planet is accelerating into total meltdown. Climate engineering is making an already horrific anthropogenic warming scenario far worse overall. Those who truly claim to be committed to the fight to stop climate engineering have an obligation to objectively examine frontline facts and film footage . Sadly, even some major ""independent"" news sites are pushing the ""global warming is a hoax"" false narrative . Pushing this patently false narrative is exactly what climate engineering/industrial complex wants, and is extremely harmful to the cause of exposing and halting the ongoing weather warfare assault. Why? If we are to have any chance of stopping the climate engineering insanity, if we are to have any chance of convincing the climate science community to start telling the truth about the climate engineering assault, the anti-climate engineering community must stand on frontline facts and not on ridiculously false ideological dogma. Investigate, and make your voice heard , time is not on our side. 
+May be freely reprinted, so long as the text is unaltered, all hyperlinks are left intact, and credit for the article is prominently given to geoengineeringwatch.org and the article’s author with a hyperlink back to the original story. 6 Responses to Climate Engineering And Cryosphere Collapse jim stewart October 27, 2016 at 4:18 pm 
+""Sadly, even some major 'independent' news sites are pushing the 'global warming is a hoax' false narrative."" Indeed, shame on Infowars, considering they should know better. But then, so much hyperbolic & elipitical rhetoric is geared to sell to what folks wish to believe, rather than what truthseekers pursue to be savvy and shrewd.",FAKE
+6057,Donald Trump Wins The Presidency In Historic Mandate Victory As Hillary Clinton Concedes,"  Donald Trump Wins The Presidency In Historic Mandate Victory As Hillary Clinton Concedes Reaction to the prospect of a Trump presidency rippled across the globe, with financial markets abroad falling as American television networks raised the prospect that Mrs. Clinton might lose. Asian markets were trading sharply lower, down around two percentage points, and in the United States, Dow Jones futures were down as much as 600 points in after-hours trading.   The American people have voted, Donald Trump is president, and the world is in shock 
+“And he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding:” Daniel 2:21 (KJV) Tonight. the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob spoke quite loudly. Change like this country has never seen, like the world has never seen, has arrived at our doorstep. President Trump has been elected leader of the free world . People, you better buckle up because things are about to become unglued. For well over a year now, we here at NTEB have been telling you that Donald Trump is God’s man for the White House, and that Bible prophecy would be fulfilled in the process. Two very eye-opening articles you need to read are The Real Reason Why Donald Trump Was Chosen To Be The Republican Candidate For President and Why A Bible Believer Is Supporting Donald Trump For President Of The United States . I wrote those articles on May 4 and February 13, respectively. Are YOU ready for what comes next? The liberal news media certainly does not seem to be ready, in fact, they seem to be in quite the state of shock as you can see below. The NYT declared just after 11:30 p.m, Donald Trump was declared the victor in Florida , earning him the state’s 29 electoral votes and giving him a more certain grip on the presidential contest with Mrs. Clinton. How the world is reacting to Trump’s victory: Reaction to the prospect of a Trump presidency rippled across the globe , with financial markets abroad falling as American television networks raised the prospect that Mrs. Clinton might lose. Asian markets were trading sharply lower, down around two percentage points, and in the United States, Dow Jones futures were down as much as 600 points in after-hours trading. CNN: This Sea of Red Has Got to Make You Feel Better Fox News projects: Donald Trump wins FL, Clinton wins CA Chris Wallace: Trump could be our next president Donald Trump wins Florida, CNN projects: 
+Get ready for momentous change like this country has never seen, and while you do that, get ready for the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. 
+Because it’s coming…  ",FAKE
+5544,"Illegal Thug Returns After Deported Twice, Gives Sick ‘Gift’ To Girlfriend","Share This 
+Our nation is out of control, and perhaps the biggest threat is our lax border policy, courtesy of Barack Obama. Proving just that is an illegal alien who managed to sneak his way back into this country after being deported twice. However, it’s the sick surprise he had for his girlfriend that landed him behind bars – and hopefully, it’s for good. 
+It all started when the daughter of illegal alien Raul Perez, 43, got an odd phone call from her father that just couldn’t be ignored. After hanging up with her father, Perez’s daughter immediately called 911, prompting dispatch to send a few officers to the home of the girl’s mother, 31-year-old Karla Guadalupe-Magana, a mother of 5 and Perez’s girlfriend. Raul Perez (left), Karla Guadalupe-Magana (right) (Source: Mail Online ) 
+Unfortunately, the situation would take a horrid turn as officers made their way into the home to find the woman dead on the bathroom floor with Perez asleep in the bed just feet away. Come to find out, the illegal alien decided to strangle her to death for reasons unknown – but it only gets worse from there . 
+According to reports, Perez is actually a Mexico national in the United States illegally and had already been deported twice, but making matters worse, he was actually in police custody just 4 days prior to the murder. Unfortunately, he was released on bond due to a technicality. 
+Perez had been arrested for operating a vehicle while intoxicated, but he reportedly used a fake name to fly under the radar. Although his fingerprints were taken and sent to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seeing how the agency “ doesn’t monitor this type of thing 24/7 ,” Perez was released on bond before the local jail heard anything back. 
+Right now, Perez is facing life in prison and deportation once he has answered for his crimes – not that it really does any good. As it stands, this illegal alien could live the rest of his life, leeching off the American taxpayer while in our prison system, because our border is so porous that he just walked across three separate times. If he’s deported, that would solve the drain on our taxpayers, but as he’s already proven, it also means he could do it all again if our border issue isn’t solved. 
+This is the type of problem that America is dealing with, and it all stems from Barack Obama’s presidency and the man’s dangerous policies. Beyond tying Border Patrol’s hands behind their backs, our so-called leader has left our nation’s border literally open for anyone to simply walk across. 
+Unfortunately, because of that lunacy, a mother of 5 is now dead. However, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel if Donald Trump gets elected. Not only will he allow Border Patrol to do its job, he’ll build a wall, making it just about impossible for scum like Perez to come into this country – and that, my friends, is exactly what we need.",FAKE
+144,Barack Obama Marks 50th Anniversary Of 'Bloody Sunday' With Powerful Speech In Selma,"WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama joined nearly 100 members of Congress in Selma, Alabama, on Saturday for the 50th anniversary of ""Bloody Sunday"" -- a watershed moment of the civil rights movement -- where he honored the men and women who stood their ground in a violent confrontation with police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
+
+""We gather here to honor the courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod, tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching toward justice,"" Obama said in a soaring speech that addressed race and civil rights.
+
+The president hailed Selma as a city of extreme importance to America's history -- on par with wartime settings of Concord, Lexington and Gettysburg, and places where innovation took great strides such as Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral. And he paid deference to the foot soldiers who sparked a movement: Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Joseph Lowery, Hosea Williams, Amelia Boynton, Diane Nash, Ralph Abernathy, C.T. Vivian, Andrew Young and Fred Shuttlesworth, among others.
+
+""What they did here will reverberate through the ages,"" Obama said. ""Not because the change they won was preordained, not because their victory was complete, but because they proved that nonviolent change is possible; that love and hope can conquer hate.""
+
+In attendance for the event were Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., and Lewis, who rallied alongside the civil rights leader and still bears visible scars from his involvement in the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Joining them at the famed bridge were thousands of citizens, civil rights activists and politicians, including former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura.
+
+""We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true,"" he said. ""We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. We know the march is not yet over, the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character -- requires admitting as much.""
+
+But he noted that race relations in the country had come a long way since Selma, pointing to major progress in gender and marriage equality. ""What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic, or sanctioned by law and custom; and before the civil rights movement, it most surely was,"" he said.
+
+Obama also took direct aim at Congress for failing to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, one of the major achievements of the civil rights movement that arguably owes its existence to the confrontation in Selma. Republicans on the Hill stand broadly opposed to renewing the law, with no signs of bringing it up for a vote.
+
+""How can that be?"" Obama asked. ""The Voting Rights Act was one of the crowning achievements of our democracy, the result of Republican and Democratic effort. President Reagan signed its renewal when he was in office. President Bush signed its renewal when he was in office. One hundred Members of Congress have come here today to honor people who were willing to die for the right it protects. If we want to honor this day, let these hundred go back to Washington, and gather four hundred more, and together, pledge to make it their mission to restore the law this year.""
+
+""What is our excuse today for not voting? How do we so casually discard the right for which so many fought? How do we so fully give away our power, our voice, in shaping America’s future?"" he asked.
+
+""You are America. Unconstrained by habits and convention. Unencumbered by what is, and ready to seize what ought to be,"" he said. ""For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, and new ground to cover, and bridges to be crossed. And it is you, the young and fearless at heart, the most diverse and educated generation in our history, who the nation is waiting to follow.""",REAL
+750,"Ryan meets Trump, says ‘very encouraged’ but unity will take time","Donald Trump and Paul Ryan might not have built the bridge but they at least may have established the framework toward presenting a unified front against Democrats in November, after their sit-down Thursday morning on Capitol Hill.
+
+Following a bruising primary season where Trump and House Speaker Ryan were publicly cool toward one another, the two met at Republican Party headquarters in downtown Washington, and later described it as a “great conversation.”
+
+Much was at stake for the presumptive nominee, for Ryan and for the party itself. The meeting was called after Ryan last week declined to endorse Trump – at a press conference following the meeting, Ryan still would not publicly do so.
+
+Reprising comments from a day earlier, Ryan said: “This is a process. It takes a little time. You don’t put it together in 45 minutes. … I don’t want us to have a fake unification process here.”
+
+At the same time, Ryan said he was “very encouraged” and they are “planting the seeds” to get unified.
+
+Trump on Thursday had lined up three meetings with members of the Republican establishment he’s spent much of his campaign railing against. He met first with Ryan and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who also tweeted that the meeting was a “very positive step toward party unity.” He then sat down with House GOP leaders, followed by a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other top Senate Republicans.
+
+“While we were honest about our few differences, we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground,” Trump and Ryan said in a joint statement. “We will be having additional discussions, but remain confident there’s a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall, and we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal. … This was our first meeting, but it was a very positive step toward unification.”
+
+A source inside the first meeting also described it as “very positive” and a “good step toward achieving party unity.” According to the source, Trump and Ryan discussed a range of policy issues. The source would not characterize, though, whether Ryan was “there” yet on Trump himself.
+
+But the source provided an unvarnished assessment to Fox News: “No B.S. Very helpful.”
+
+On the sidelines, lawmakers had conflicting views over how to handle Trump as their party nominee.
+
+Pro-Trump Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., told Fox News he’s “baffled” by colleagues who won’t get behind Trump.
+
+Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., though, said he’s among those “who would love to see [Trump] tone it down.”
+
+On Wednesday, explaining his hesitation about outright endorsing Trump, Ryan said he wanted to pursue ""real unification"" among Republicans after a hotly contested primary campaign.
+
+""We cannot afford to lose this election to Hillary Clinton,” Ryan said at a news conference Wednesday.
+
+In a closed-door GOP meeting Wednesday, a number of Republicans stood up and argued in support of Trump, with one saying that anyone who cares about ""unborn babies"" should get behind him because of the likelihood the next president will make Supreme Court appointments, and Trump's would be better than Clinton's, lawmakers who were present told the Associated Press.
+
+Others expressed reservations, and asked Ryan to raise concerns with Trump about where he really stands on social issues and budgetary policies, including changes to Social Security and Medicare. Trump has said in the past that he doesn't want to touch Social Security or Medicare, whereas Medicare cuts have been a centerpiece of GOP budgets Ryan has shepherded over the years.
+
+Earlier Wednesday, Trump sought to downplay the stakes of his visit with Ryan, telling ""Fox and Friends"", ""If we make a deal, that will be great. And if we don't, we will trudge forward like I've been doing and winning all the time.""
+
+Trump's allies and advisers have repeatedly insisted that he can claim the White House with or without leading congressional Republicans. Additionally, Trump's team doesn't believe Ryan or the GOP's other congressional leaders have any significant influence on the majority of general election voters.
+
+Some congressional Republicans have made clear that they would like to see Ryan come around to supporting Trump sooner rather than later.
+
+""Donald Trump is unifying the party already,"" said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Trump's chief Washington ally. ""The party is the people who vote.""
+
+Another Trump supporter, Rep. John Fleming, R-La., predicted it was ""very unlikely"" that Ryan would not ultimately back the Republican nominee.
+
+Wednesday night, Trump's campaign released an endorsement signed by the chairs of seven House committees. ""It is paramount that we coalesce around the Republican nominee, Mr. Donald J. Trump,"" the GOP lawmakers wrote.
+
+While Trump's team is prepared to shrug off much of the party's establishment, that does not include the RNC.
+
+The political novice plans to rely heavily on the committee's expansive political operation to supplement his bare-bones campaign, which has so far ignored seemingly vital functions such as voter data collection, swing-state staffing and fundraising infrastructure.
+
+""As we turn our focus toward the general election, we want to make sure there's the strongest partnership,"" said Sean Spicer, the RNC's chief strategist.
+
+Absent a viable Republican alternative, there were new signs on Capitol Hill that Trump's conservative critics were beginning to fall in line.
+
+""As a conservative, I cannot trust Donald Trump to do the right thing, but I can deeply trust Hillary Clinton to do the wrong thing every time,"" said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., adding that he would vote for Trump if that's the choice he has.
+
+Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho., said he will support Trump, although ""I'm not enthusiastic about it.""
+
+""He can get us enthusiastic if he comes to talk to us,"" continued Labrador.
+
+Meanwhile, more Republican voters appear to be moving behind Trump, despite big-name holdouts such as Ryan, both former president Bushes and the party's 2012 nominee Mitt Romney.
+
+Almost two in three Republican-leaning voters now view Trump favorably, compared to 31 percent who view him unfavorably, according to a national Gallup Poll taken last week. The numbers represent a near reversal from Gallup's survey in early March.
+
+Fox News' John Roberts and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+72,Eleven States Sue Obama Admin. over Transgender Directive,"Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with attorneys general in 10 other states, are suing the Obama administration over the president's directive to allow transgender students to use whatever bathroom that matches their gender preference.
+
+The lawsuit is an attempt to make sure states can ignore the federal government's mandate.
+
+The 10 other states joining the lawsuit include Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Maine, Louisiana, Utah and Georgia.
+
+They're asking the courts to declare the directive unlawful, accusing the administration of engineering a ""massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.""
+
+Supporters of the lawsuit argue that in addition to violating privacy and safety rights of women and children, the White House directive is a major overreach of power.
+
+""Simply put, the Obama administration is creating new law, outside the boundaries of the Constitution - making changes only Congress can make,"" Paxton said.
+
+""I think the problem with the way the Obama administration has carried this out is that they haven't candidly assessed the cost of this type of policy,"" Trotter said on NPR.
+
+""So we understand that women need privacy. They need safety in places that they frequent. And yet the Obama administration has decided to reinterpret an old law that never included transgender people for over 40 years,"" she said.
+
+Trotter said the president is doing this from a Washington one-size-fits-all edict instead of going through Congress and having a national discussion.
+
+Some schools are now worried if they don't comply, they will lose funding.
+
+""We don't have a rule of law if we can reinterpret a more than 40-year-old law and say that the plain language, the black letter of the law is meaningless because someone has become enlightened about it,"" Trotter said.
+
+Texas' lieutenant governor previously went as far as to say the state is willing to give up the $10 billion it receives in federal education dollars rather than comply.
+
+The directive from the U.S. Justice and Education Departments represents an escalation in what the Obama administration calls a civil rights issue.
+
+""This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them - indeed, to protect all of us,"" U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said.
+
+This isn't the only legal fight over transgender rights. Earlier this month the Justice Department and the state of North Carolina sued each other over a state law curbing public restroom access for transgender people.
+
+The question of whether federal civil rights law protects those who identify as transgender has no definitive answer and will likely be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
+
+Still, schools that refuse to comply with the Obama administration's directive could very likely be hit with civil rights lawsuits from the government and a cutoff from federal aid to education.",REAL
+7363,A brutal spoof advert for the new Macbook that highlights everything it doesn’t have,"Next Swipe left/right A brutal spoof advert for the new Macbook that highlights everything it doesn’t have What if instead of useful features, your shiny new laptop has less stuff that before? You need a 2016 Macbook Pro!",FAKE
+3946,"US sailors freed by Iranians. No US apology issued, says Joe Biden","All 10 US Navy sailors detained by Iran after drifting into its territorial waters have been released, the US and Iran said Wednesday.
+
+Could the juvenile suspects in the Tennessee wildfires be tried as adults?
+
+Detained American Navy sailors shown in an undisclosed location in Iran. Iranian state television reported that all 10 U.S. sailors detained by Iran after entering its territorial waters have been released. Iran's Revolutionary Guard said the sailors were released Wednesday after it was determined that their entry was not intentional.
+
+All 10 U.S. Navy sailors detained by Iran after drifting into its territorial waters a day earlier have been freed, the U.S. and Iran said Wednesday.
+
+The Navy said the American crew members returned safely and there were no indications they had been harmed while in custody.
+
+The nine men and one woman were held at an Iranian base on Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf after they were detained nearby on Tuesday. The tiny outpost has been used as a base for Revolutionary Guard speedboats as far back as the 1980s.
+
+The sailors departed the island at 0843 GMT aboard the boats they were detained with, the Navy said. They were picked up by Navy aircraft and other sailors took control of their boats for the return voyage to Bahrain, where the U.S. 5th Fleet is based.
+
+The Navy added that it ""will investigate the circumstances that led to the sailors' presence in Iran.""
+
+The Revolutionary Guard's official website published images of the detained U.S. sailors before their release, showing them sitting on the floor of a room. They look mostly bored or annoyed, though at least one of the sailors appears to be smiling. The sole woman had her hair covered by a brown cloth. The pictures also showed what appeared to be their two boats.
+
+""After determining that their entry into Iran's territorial waters was not intentional and their apology, the detained American sailors were released in international waters,"" a statement posted online by the Guard said Wednesday.
+
+US Vice President Joe Biden says that America did not apologize to Iran over U.S. sailors allegedly entering Iranian territorial waters.
+
+Biden made the comments Wednesday in an interview with ""CBS This Morning.""
+
+The vice president said: ""There's nothing to apologize for. When you have a problem with the boat you apologize the boat had a problem? No, and there was no looking for any apology. This was just standard nautical practice.""
+
+Biden said that the Iranians realized the U.S. sailors ""were there in distress and said they would release them and released them like ordinary nations would do.""
+
+Gen. Ali Fadavi, the navy chief of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard, was quoted earlier Wednesday by Iranian state TV as saying that an investigation had shown the Americans entered Iranian territorial waters because of ""mechanical problems in their navigation system.""
+
+U.S. officials also blamed mechanical trouble for the incident. They had said on Tuesday that Tehran assured them the crew and vessels would be returned safely and promptly.
+
+Fadavi said the American boats had shown ""unprofessional acts"" for 40 minutes before being picked up by Iranian forces after entering the country's territorial waters. He said Tehran did not consider the U.S. Navy boats violating Iranian territorial waters as an ""innocent passage.""
+
+The sailors were nonetheless allowed to make contact with the U.S. military, based on Iran's ""responsibilities and Islamic mercy"" late Tuesday, he said.
+
+U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who forged a personal relationship with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif during the three years of nuclear negotiations, called his Iranian counterpart immediately on learning of the incident, according to a senior U.S. official. Kerry ""personally engaged"" with Zarif on the issue, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
+
+Kerry said in a statement Wednesday: ""That this issue was resolved peacefully and efficiently is a testament to the critical role diplomacy plays in keeping our country safe, secure and strong.""
+
+Kerry has a close relationship with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif after the recent nuclear deal between the Islamic Republic and world powers.
+
+Kerry learned of the incident around 12:30 p.m. EST as he and U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter were meeting their Filipino counterparts at the State Department, the official said.
+
+Fadavi said Zarif ""had a firm stance"" during the telephone conversation with Kerry about the sailors' presence in Iran's territorial waters and ""said they should not have come and should apologize.""
+
+Carter said he was pleased with the sailors' release and he thanked Kerry for his diplomatic efforts. ""Around the world, the U.S. Navy routinely provides assistance to foreign sailors in distress, and we appreciate the timely way in which this situation was resolved,"" Carter said.
+
+The Guard's 200,000-strong force is different from the regular Iranian military and is charged with protecting the ruling system. Its naval forces are heavily dependent on armed speedboats that can be used in teams to swarm much larger vessels.
+
+The incident came amid heightened tensions with Iran, and only hours before President Barack Obama gave his final State of the Union address to Congress and the public. It set off a dramatic series of calls and meetings as U.S. officials tried to determine the exact status of the crew and reach out to Iranian leaders.
+
+Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told The Associated Press late Tuesday U.S. time that the sailors' boats were moving between Kuwait and Bahrain when the U.S. lost contact with them.
+
+The sailors were part of Riverine Squadron 1 based in San Diego and were deployed to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain. When the U.S. lost contact with the boats, ships attached to the USS Harry S Truman aircraft carrier strike group began searching the area, along with aircraft flying off the Truman.
+
+The Riverine boats were not part of the carrier strike group, and were on a training mission, the officials said. The craft are not considered high-tech and don't contain any sensitive equipment, so there were no concerns about the Iranians gaining access to them, they added. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive incident publicly.
+
+In an earlier incident, in late December, Iran launched a rocket test near U.S. warships and boats passing through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, the route for about a fifth of the world's oil.
+
+Last February, Iran sank a replica of a U.S. aircraft carrier near the strait and has said it is testing ""suicide drones"" that could conduct kamikaze missions on naval ships. It has also challenged foreign cargo ships operating in the Gulf, opening fire on at least two in April and May.
+
+In one of those incidents, Iran temporarily seized a Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship over what it said was a commercial dispute before releasing it with its crew more than a week later.
+
+Meanwhile, Iran was expected to satisfy the terms of last summer's nuclear deal in just days. Once the U.N. nuclear agency confirms Iran's actions to roll back its program, the United States and other Western powers are obliged to suspend wide-ranging oil, trade and financial sanctions on Tehran. Kerry recently said the deal's implementation was ""days away.""
+
+Schreck reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Matthew Lee, Lolita C. Baldor, Bradley Klapper and Richard Lardner in Washington, Jon Gambrell in Dubai and Nasser Karimi in Tehran contributed to this report.",REAL
+1006,Could This Be the Real 'Super Tuesday'? A Look at What's at Stake,"It's a big primary day in the race for the White House, with Donald Trump trying to lock down his GOP frontrunner status. Democrat Hillary Clinton is trying to do the same.
+
+""Super Tuesday 2,"" as some are calling it, is a day that could be the critical turning point in the race for president: there'll be contests in five states, including the delegate-rich, winner-take-all states of Florida and Ohio.
+
+""This is a place I want to win. This is the place, this is going to do it,"" said Trump, who was in Ohio overnight attacking its governor and his rival John Kasich. The two are neck-and-neck in the polls there.
+
+""Kasich cannot make America great again,"" Trump said. ""He can't do it.""
+
+If Trump loses Ohio, some analysts believe that when the Republicans meet in Cleveland it could be a contested convention. If Kasich loses, he's likely out of the race.
+
+Nevertheless, the ""Stop Trump"" movement was in full effect, with the billionaire's rivals spending Monday reminding voters of the recent violence at some of Trump's rallies.
+
+""This country is not about us tearing one another down,"" Kasich said.
+
+""Oh look, a Bernie Sanders sign,"" Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., noted at one of his rallies. ""Don't worry, you're not going to get beat up at my rally.""
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said, ""One difference between this and a Donald Trump rally is I'm not asking anyone to punch you in the face.""
+
+But Trump insisted, ""There's no violence. There's a love fest. These are love fests.""
+
+Meanwhile in Florida, Rubio is determined to claim victory in his winner-take-all home state, despite polling behind Trump – in some cases by more than 20 points.
+
+And in Charlotte, North Carolina, Clinton was blaming Trump for the violence at his rallies.
+
+""I do call him responsible. I think if you go back several months, he's been building this incitement,"" she charged.
+
+Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was in Illinois, far behind in the delegate count but confident – and getting much closer in the polls in recent days.
+
+""Let us see this great state lead this country into a political revolution,"" he told supporters.
+
+Clinton holds a wide lead in Florida and North Carolina, but recent polls show a tight race in Missouri and Sanders narrowing her advantage in Illinois and Ohio.",REAL
+3506,"Thanks to Obama, the terrorist cancer is growing","We still do not know who or what is responsible for the crash of EgyptAir Flight 804, but we know this much for certain: The terrorist danger is growing, and it won’t be contained to the Mediterranean.
+
+Responding to criticism of President Obama’s handling of terrorism, White House press secretary Josh Earnest boasted Thursday of all the setbacks the Islamic State has experienced in recent months, noting that in Iraq “45 percent of the populated area that ISIL previously controlled has been retaken from them. In Syria, that figure is now 20 percent.”
+
+That’s like a patient who ignored a cancer diagnosis bragging that he finally reduced the tumor in his lung — glossing over the fact that he let it spread and metastasize to his other organs. If he had attacked the Islamic State cancer early, Obama could have stopped it from spreading in the first place. But instead, he dismissed the terrorist group as the “JV team” that was “engaged in various local power struggles and disputes” and did not have “the capacity and reach of a bin Laden” and did not pose “a direct threat to us.” He did nothing, while the cancer grew in Syria and then spread in Iraq.
+
+Now the cancer has spread and metastasized across the world.
+
+According to a recent CNN analysis, since declaring its caliphate in 2014, the Islamic State has carried out 90 attacks in 21 countries outside of Iraq and Syria that have killed 1,390 people and injured more than 2,000 others. The Islamic State has a presence in more than a dozen countries and has declared “provinces” in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Post reported in 2015 that “since the withdrawal of most U.S. and international troops in December, the Islamic State has steadily made inroads in Afghanistan” where it has “poured pepper into the wounds of their enemies . . . seared their hands in vats of boiling oil . . . blindfolded, tortured and blown apart [villagers] with explosives buried underneath them.”
+
+And while the Islamic State spreads and grows, al-Qaeda is making a comeback. Obama is touting the killing of Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour as “an important milestone,” but the truth is that the Taliban has made major military gains in Afghanistan — and that has opened the door to al-Qaeda. The Post reported in October that “American airstrikes targeted what was ‘probably the largest’ al-Qaeda training camp found in the 14-year Afghan war.” Sounds good except for one small problem: There were no major al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan when Obama took office. Now it is once again training terrorists in the land where it trained operatives for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
+
+Al-Qaeda has also regained lost ground in Yemen, the country where it trained and deployed the underwear bomber who nearly blew up a plane bound for Detroit in 2009. And as a recent report from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project notes, the “Syrian al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra poses one of the most significant long-term threats of any Salafi-jihadi group” and “is much more dangerous to the U.S. than the ISIS model in the long run.”
+
+Overall, Gen. Jack Keane recently testified that al-Qaeda has “grown fourfold in the last five years.”
+
+We’re lying to ourselves if we think that the violence we are witnessing is going to be confined to the Middle East . . . or South Asia . . . or North Africa . . . or Europe. It is only a matter of time before the Islamic State and al-Qaeda bring this violence here to our shores.
+
+Indeed, in many ways we face a situation far more dangerous and complex than we did before Sept. 11, 2001. Before 9/11, we largely faced a danger from one terrorist network (al-Qaeda) with safe haven in one nation (Afghanistan). Today, we face danger from multiple terrorist networks with safe havens in a dozen or more countries.
+
+Moreover, we face something we have never seen before: two terrorist networks — the Islamic State and al-Qaeda — competing with each other for the hearts of the jihadi faithful and the backing of jihadi financiers. The way to win that competition is to be the first to carry out a catastrophic attack here in the United States.
+
+When it came to terrorist networks, the George W. Bush administration had a mantra: We’re going to fight them over there so that we do not have to face them here at home. Obama abandoned that mantra. And now the danger is getting closer to home with each passing day.
+
+Read more from Marc Thiessen’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+8560,"Politico Tries to Destroy Trump, But It Backfires IMMEDIATELY","You are here: Home / US / Politico Tries to Destroy Trump, But It Backfires IMMEDIATELY Politico Tries to Destroy Trump, But It Backfires IMMEDIATELY October 28, 2016 
+Sometimes you want so desperately for something to be true, you print it in an article and dispense it for public viewing. 
+Wait. That’s not a saying at all. Hmmm… 
+Well, that is what Politico must think and that’s certainly what they did. 
+You wonder why we can’t trust liberal news media … 
+According to The Blaze : 
+Politico ran a story Thursday night that suggested that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s “Trump Victory” fund had transferred no money to the Republican National Committee in the month of October. The actual truth is that Trump has transferred about $2.2 million so far this month, along with several hundred thousand dollars to various state committees. It is not clear what caused the error, but Politico’s site now reads: 
+This story has been corrected. An earlier version said the RNC did not receive any money directly from Trump Victory. POLITICO regrets the error. 
+Of course, even that “small” amount of money would seem shocking to Politico considering their candidate of choice flies around the world in a Boeing on charitable donations, kowtows to the wealthy for donations to the slush-fund, and only wears the finest of all pantsuits. 
+Trump’s funds may be small because, unlike the Hillz, he is not a part of the political establishment. 
+Although the donations are “anemic” this year, and come nowhere near the monstrous amount of dollars the Clintons are using to dupe Americans into standing with her, Donald Trump has a real chance at winning this election. 
+Despite the attempts by the liberal media to silence real stories of Clinton corruption, despite the smoke and mirrors the Clinton campaign created to make Trump look like a monster, he’s still in the fight. 
+Let’s take a lesson from Politico and continue to raise suspicions over liberal media sources. 
+It is pretty bad that a press is so incredibly desperate to cast Trump in a poor light that they resort to flat out lies. 
+Silly Politico , that’s what Hillary does!",FAKE
+9097,ICE Agent Commits Suicide in NYC; Leaves Note Revealing Gov’t Plans to Round-up & DISARM Americans During Economic & Bank Collapse | EndingFed News Network,"Email Print After writing a lengthy suicide note exposing terrifying plans the government has for American citizens, a US Customs Agent walked onto a pier in NYC and blew his brains out. Sources inside the New York City Police Department have revealed to SuperStation95, the contents of a suicide note found on the body and they are utterly frightening. The note, which says it was written over the course of a full week in advance, outlines why the officer chose to shoot himself: “The America I grew up in, and cherished, has been murdered by its own federal government. Our Constitution has become meaningless and our laws politicized so badly, they are no longer enforced except for political purposes” the note said. “Our elected officials are, to a person, utterly corrupt and completely devoid of any love or respect for the country which pays them. To them, everything is about getting and keeping power, and making illicit money from backroom deals.” The 42-year-old U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation officer shot himself with a 40 caliber service pistol inside Pier 40 in Hudson River Park at around 11 am. (1) A source at the scene described how the officer calmly walked into the park, took out his pistol and shot himself in the head. A ICE federal agent fatally shot himself in the head at waterfront Chelsea park (pictured) in New York Friday The 42-year-old worked as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation officer and his offices were nearby to the scene of the shooting. He was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital but doctors were unable to save him. (2) ICE released a statement Friday afternoon: ‘Tragically, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation officer from the New York field office suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound and has passed away.’ It added: ‘The agency is not releasing further details pending notification of the officer’s next of kin. According to the suicide note, the Officer said: “I was hired to enforce the law; to capture and deport people who come to this country against our laws. But now, if I dare to do that, I face being suspended or fired because our President refuses to faithfully execute the duties of his office. Instead, I come to work each day, and collect a paycheck twice a month, for intentionally doing little to nothing. I cannot and will not be party to this fraud; to this usurpation of the law, or to the despicable politicians betraying our nation” the note continued. ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility is reviewing the matter and coordinating with the New York Police Department on the investigation. The agent worked at a field office in lower Manhattan, just blocks away from the scene of the shooting. MENTIONS “FEMA CAMPS” FOR AMERICANS (3) In the suicide note, the officer revealed what he claimed are terrifying plans the feds have been finalizing: “If the American people knew what this government is planning, they would rise-up and overthrow it. If I or anyone else in the federal government revealed what is coming, we would be killed anyway, so now I will reveal what I know. We in federal law enforcement have been drilling for several years to control riots and uprisings from a coming financial collapse and widespread bank failures. The drills involve life-sized images of American men, even women and children, whom we are told to shoot for “practice” and to “get used to it.” We have been told that the economy is terminally ill and will fail in 2016. We are also told the banks are all insolvent and the FDIC doesn’t have nearly enough funds to bail out depositors. We are told these events are unavoidable and it is imperative that the government survive when people rise-up over this. When the collapse takes place, detention camps created under the FEMA REX-84 program in the 1980’s to house illegal aliens whom we were going to deport, will instead be used to imprison American Citizens whom the government feels constitute a “threat.” American citizens will be rounded-up without warrants and imprisoned without trial for God knows how long. These camps have been equipped to carry out Hitler-scale killings! An actual “purge” of Americans citizens by the very government which they, themselves, created and pay for! I cannot be party to this.” The Note goes on to say talk about state-level national guard being disarmed by the feds (4) and over 1 Billion rounds of ammunition purchased by the feds (5) and the Military over-deployed and being shrunk (6) : “The government knows the military will rise-up to stop this, so our military is being deployed overseas, intentionally involved in foreign fights, and deliberately shrunk in size so they cannot be here or help Americans! This is why certain ammunition and weaponry has been removed from state-level National Guard Armories and over a Billion rounds of hollow point ammunition has been bought by the federal government. The states themselves have been disarmed of military-grade firepower so they cannot defend themselves from the federal activities. This is also why local police departments have been militarized and provided with armored vehicles and weapons of war” the note says. “When the inevitable collapse begins to take place, electric power to the entire country will be shut off, as will all forms of communication. All banks will be immediately closed; no one will be able to get any money because all ATM’s will be offline. Credit, Debit and EBT cards will not function. Anyone without cash will have no way to get any. The Emergency Alert System will be used to takeover all broadcast stations and tell the public this is a result of a cyber attack. But while the American people patiently await things to get back to normal, the government will unleash round-ups of citizens they deem militants or dangerous . With all civilian communications out, and all TV and radio stations taken over by the Emergency Alert System, by the time word spreads of what is taking place, the government will already have the upper hand. Federal Prisoners to be GASSED TO DEATH The note goes into a wide array of very specific plans and does so in extremely specific detail about what the feds are allegedly planning. For instance, it talks about federal prisons: “Every federal prison has been outfitted with lethal gas systems. When things go bad, all prisoners in all prisons will be placed in their cells on lock-down. Prison staff will depart the facility, and a certain designated person will trigger a lethal gas system. All federal prisoners, regardless of their crime or their sentence, will be gassed to death in their cells. Once the gas clears, the dead will be removed and the prisons will then be used to house citizens who fight against the federal onslaught.” PRIESTS RECRUITED TO QUELL OPPOSITION (7) The note makes mention about Priests, Rabbis and Clerics from various religious denominations having been recruited and trained to quell resistance: “So intent is the government to succeed they have recruited priests, rabbis and clerics from various religions to quote appropriate Scriptures about “obeying government.” They are being trained to tell people not to fight back and that their best hope is to pray.” EXECUTIVE ORDER 13603 (8) The suicide note goes to great lengths about Executive Order #13603 signed by President Obama on March 16, 2012. The note details: 
+Executive order 13603 about “National Defense Resources Preparedness.” 
+This 10-page document is a blueprint for a federal takeover of the economy. Specifically, Obama’s plan involves seizing control of: 
+* “All commodities and products that are capable of being ingested by either human beings or animals” 
+* “All forms of energy” 
+* “All forms of civil transportation” 
+* “All usable water from all sources” 
+* “Health resources – drugs, biological products, medical devices, materials, facilities, health supplies, services and equipment” 
+* Forced labor ( or “induction” as the executive order delicately refers to military conscription) 
+Moreover, federal officials would “issue regulations to prioritize and allocate resources.” SuperStation95 took a look at this Executive Order from the Government Printing Office (GPO) web site and, sure enough, everything contained in the Officer’s suicide note about this Executive Order is true! To be sure, much of this language has appeared in national security executive orders that previous presidents have issued periodically since the beginning of the Cold War. But more than previous national security executive orders, Obama’s 13603 seems to describe a potentially totalitarian regime obsessed with control over everything. Obama’s executive order makes no effort to justify the destruction of liberty, no effort to explain how amassing totalitarian control would enable government to deal effectively with cyber sabotage, suicide bombings, chemical warfare, nuclear missiles or other possible threats. There’s nothing in executive order 13603 about upholding the Constitution or protecting civil liberties. In what circumstances, one might ask, would a president try to carry out this audacious plan? Executive order 13603 says with ominous ambiguity: during “ the full spectrum of emergencies .” DATABASE OF PREPPERS The suicide note touches on the subject of “Preppers:” “We in federal law enforcement have also been told that the government has a full database of all so-called “Preppers.” Those people will be dealt with first — by armed federal agents coming to take their guns, then their food stocks, so food can be re-distributed as the government sees fit.” If the dead Officer’s claims about an unavoidable economic and banking collapse are true, would it then follow that the Executive Order put in place by Obama, might be activated? Would all of us find ourselves in forced labor, while the government takes OUR food and re-distrubutes it under the Executive Order’s paragraph about “allocating resources?” This is terrifying stuff! There is much more to the suicide note and SuperStation95 is considering how much more to publish. As such, this is a developing story and readers should check back for further updates. THESE COULD SIMPLY BE INSANE RAMBLINGS It is not our intent to cause panic or alarm and while we expect readers to be intelligent enough to discern this on their own, we feel compelled to point out that these could simply be paranoid ramblings of an insane person who killed himself. On the other hand, these could also be revelations by a person who was so distraught over the ugly truth, that he killed himself. We at SuperStation95 just don’t know. We urge everyone to stay calm, think rationally, and decide whether or not to take any action to prepare, in case this person’s suicide note is telling the truth. SOURCING / CORROBORATION 
+(1) ICE Agent Suicide in NYC: NY Daily News 
+(2) Taken to Lenox Hill Hospital NY Post 
+(3) REX-84 FEMA CAMPS Wikipedia 
+(4) National Guard being stripped of Crew-Serviceable Weapons and communications gear – Republic Broadcasting, John Stadmiller 
+(5) Dept. of Homeland Security Orders 1.6 BILLION rounds of ammunition Forbes Magazine 
+(6) US Army over-deployed and intentionally shrunk ARMY TIMES 
+(7) Clergy Recruited by Gov’t to quell opposition KSLA-TV Channel 12 
+(8) Executive Order 13603 White House US Government Printing Office UPDATE – MAY 10, 2016 10:00 PM EDT– The web site SNOPES.com has issued a declaration that our story is some sort of hoax, that we are somehow NOT a radio station and attributed the story – and this web site – to a former FBI National Security Intelligence Asset named Hal Turner, whom she smears as a “White Supremacist.” This is not the first time SNOPES.com has made accusations against us simply because we have been the exclusive source of politically-incorrect news. And while we stand-by our stories in every regard, this barrage of attacks by SNOPES.com is becoming libelous. 
+We address the SNOPES.com accusations one at a time: 1) No aspect of our story above is a hoax. What Snopes.com seems to take issue with is the existence and content of a suicide note which was revealed to us by the NYPD. The person from NYPD who gave us this information did so after trying to get two other New York Media outlets, (one TV, the other a newspaper) to publish the story and was rebuked within minutes by media contacts who said “we won’t touch this with a ten foot pole.” The fact that the NYPD now claims “no note was found” does not surprise us at all; NYPD has very close ties with the feds and the feds have an intense interest in concealing or discrediting the information it contained. 2) According to the FCC Licensing Bureau, 95.1 FM in New York City is the HD-4 frequency for WNSH 94.7 FM as licensed by the FCC as shown HERE 3) Our story was written by our News Room staff, not anyone named Hal Turner. 4) Mr. Turner was formerly a paying customer of this radio station from October 7, 2015 thru March 30, 2016. He bought air time from us to air his personal radio show “The Hal Turner Show.” Finances caused Mr. Turner to cancel his programming on our radio station and continue his show on WBCQ International Shortwave , where he is on the air live from 9-11 PM every Wednesday evening. Mr. Turner’s web site is: HalTurnerShow.com . He is welcome to return to our airwaves if his finances improve. 5) SNOPES.com claims Mr. Turner is a “white supremacist.” In reality Mr. Turner worked for the FBI from 1993 – 2008, with his TOD as the Joint Terrorism Task Force from 2003-2008. His job was to infiltrate white supremacist groups to thwart violent criminal acts by such persons. This information came out when the Obama Administration betrayed Mr. Turner in 2009 and arrested him for writing in 2009, what the government PAID HIM $3,000 TO SAY on DATELINE NBC and FOX NEWS CHANNEL just four years earlier in 2005! After three trials (two hung juries) Mr. Turner was Bankrupted by legal fees, was appointed a public defender, who threw the case, resulting in Mr. Turner’s conviction. For SNOPES.com to smear Mr. Turner as a “White Supremacist” when federal court records show the exact opposite, is a prime example of the utterly shoddy research and reporting provided by SNOPES.com 
+The criticism and SNOPES.com outright falsehoods about this story, and others, have been written mostly by: 
+Ms. Kim A Lacapria, Age 37 (born Mar 20, 1979 ) 
+39 Cockonoe AVE 
+Babylon, NY 11702-1901 Those of you who are offended by this type of journalistic misconduct, may wish to contact Ms. LaCapria in a peaceful, lawful, non-threatening and non-violent manner to complain about her shoddy journalism. PLEASE DO NOT HARASS THIS IGNORANT PERSON and PLEASE,PLEASE,PLEASE do not make any threats or commit any intimidation. None of us need that and it will only result in serious legal trouble. 
+Ms. La Capria can be reached at: Tel. (516) 422-7943 
+(516) 422-7494 ",FAKE
+9780,Gold prices on the way to all-time highs,"Font Size ""What does the rising gold price mean for the Russian economy and ordinary consumers?"" ""It means that the Russian Central Bank has been running a justifiable policy, because the bank has been purchasing gold during the recent three years. Now gold will cost even more. Citizens still have an opportunity to buy gold investment coins that are VAT-free in Russia, unlike bullions. ""In Russia, there are three ways of investing in gold. They include unallocated bullion accounts in banks - bullions and coins. This method is bad because unallocated bullion accounts are excluded from the deposit insurance program. Therefore, if a bank collapses, the state will not give you anything back. ЭA bullion is a good investment, but in Russia, this investment shall include 18% of value added tax. Therefore, your price per one gram or one ounce of gold will be 18 percent higher. Gold investment coins are exempt from VAT, so this is the most profitable way among those that exist. ЭIn Russia, the most common gold coin is known as ""Pobedonosets"" or ""Victorious."" This is a quarter of an ounce coin. The global standard is one ounce or 31 grams. In Russia, however, we produce quarter of an ounce coins - approximately 7.7 grams of pure gold. Today, this coin costs about 20,000 rubles. I bought it in the early 2000s when it was 4,000 rubles. The price grows in both rubles and dollars. ЭThe most popular foreign coin is known as the ""Australian Kangaroo,"" because it depicts a kangaroo. This coin costs about 91,000 rubles today. This is an ounce coin, 9999 purity. Since the beginning of the year the price on the coin has increased by 20 percent,"" said Alexey Vyazovsky. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+639,Trump doesn’t have a national campaign. So the GOP is trying to run one for him.,"Katie Walsh, the Republican National Committee’s chief of staff, was just a few hours from meeting with Donald Trump’s new political director this week when the television outside her office blared the latest news breaking out of the Trump orbit. “Christie defends Trump: He’s not a racist,” the CNN headline declared.
+
+The scene illustrates the tricky task facing the party, which is serving as the main engine behind Trump’s presidential bid: How do you a run a disciplined campaign for a candidate who is anything but?
+
+“He’s the nominee, and he’s going to make sure his views are known,” Walsh said carefully during an interview. “He’s made that pretty clear. We will leave it to Mr. Trump to speak for Mr. Trump . . . and we will keep hitting Hillary and raising money to be ready for November.”
+
+Trump’s failure to build a truly national campaign has left it to the GOP to run one on his behalf, while also trying to extinguish the regular political brush fires set off by the unpredictable candidate. The arrangement has intensified the burden on the Republican National Committee, forcing it to absorb core campaign tasks and testing whether it has improved the field and data capabilities on which it fell short in 2012.
+
+The real estate mogul’s operation has centered on his ability to gobble up news time with a stream of tweets, rallies and television hits, while largely outsourcing basic political functions such as fundraising and rapid-response efforts. He is leaning on the RNC even more as the race moves into the general-election phase, which requires intensive work to identify, persuade and mobilize voters.
+
+The Trump campaign has yet to build out its headquarters or national staff, ending the primaries with 70 employees, compared with 732 on the payroll for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. His backstop is the party: The RNC has deployed 461 field staffers to 16 states — more than it has ever had on the ground at this point in an election — while spending $100 million on its data and digital operations since the last presidential campaign. The investments were pushed by Chairman Reince Priebus after the Democrats outgunned the GOP in 2012.
+
+“It creates an opportunity for the party to, for lack of a better term, show off what it’s been working on for the last three and a half years and provide the campaign with the infrastructure they don’t have the time to build right now,” Walsh said.
+
+“We are kind of the infantry coming up behind the campaign saying, ‘We’re here. How can we be helpful?’ And the Trump campaign has embraced that,” she added.
+
+For the RNC to successfully take over many of the campaign’s traditional tasks requires trust, coordination and a unified strategy — all difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. But this year is anything but normal.
+
+Priebus ended up deeply immersed in a behind-the-scenes effort this week to persuade Trump to walk back his accusations that a Latino federal judge was biased against him because of the judge’s ethnicity, even making editing suggestions for the statement that the candidate eventually released, according to people familiar with his role.
+
+[The rant that could derail Trump — and the GOP rush to get him back on track]
+
+“The team they have in place is very good,” said GOP strategist Mike DuHaime, who served as RNC political director during George W. Bush’s second term and helped guide the 2008 turnout effort. “I think what ultimately is missing is that it needs to mesh with the nominee’s. . . . No matter what the RNC does, it’s still up to the campaign to set the direction.”
+
+That direction has been coming from Trump, who serves as his own strategist. He personally responds to nearly every critique, including that his operation is too meager. “I am getting bad marks from certain pundits because I have a small campaign staff,” Trump tweeted this week. “But small is good, flexible, save money and number one!”
+
+Senior RNC officials are offering daily advice and resources to their less-experienced campaign counterparts. Communications strategist Sean Spicer is in constant contact with Trump press secretary Hope Hicks, while chief digital officer Gerrit Lansing is coordinating with Trump’s small digital staff.
+
+“It’s a collaborative effort,” said campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. “They are working hand-in-glove with us. We are working with their team; they are working with our team. Everyone is happy.”
+
+Party officials have been making the case that the campaign needs to expand its footprint, but persuading Trump has been a slow process. The candidate scrutinizes proposed budgets, sending them back with skeptical queries, according to people familiar with the discussions. His main argument: I spent only $56 million in the primary, and I beat 16 opponents — why do I need all this?
+
+“It’s not so much, ‘We don’t trust you’; it’s, ‘Help me understand why I need this,’ ” Walsh said of the campaign’s reaction. “There’s a dialogue that maybe wouldn’t exist with a more traditional candidate that had used more traditional methods in his primary campaign.”
+
+Lewandowski said the campaign will soon expand its political, communications and fundraising teams. “We will keep growing, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. Among the additions: political director Jim Murphy, a longtime GOP consultant who was tapped after predecessor Rick Wiley was abruptly dismissed.
+
+[Many Trump supporters don’t believe his wildest promises — and they don’t care]
+
+Because of his unrivaled ability to reach millions of voters through social media, many party officials think that Trump will be able to forgo some of the expenses that have bloated presidential campaigns in the past.
+
+“Look, Donald Trump has thrown out the rule book and rewritten it and run the most nontraditional, unorthodox campaign in my lifetime, and it’s worked so far,” said Steve Duprey, an RNC committeeman from New Hampshire.
+
+Still, even round-the-clock media domination will not be enough to secure an Election Day victory, GOP strategists warned.
+
+“People can talk all they want to about how this race will be determined on the big-picture message and Hillary’s approval numbers and how horrible they are,” said Matt Borges, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. “It always comes down to good, old-fashioned blocking and tackling. We turn out our voters, we win. They do a better job, they win.”
+
+And the underfunded state parties alone cannot carry the weight of a fall turnout operation, which typically is buttressed by hundreds of presidential campaign staffers.
+
+Getting the right voters to the polls to support Trump and the rest of the GOP ticket falls to Chris Carr, a garrulous Louisiana native who serves as the RNC’s political director. From his third-floor office at RNC headquarters, Carr has spent the past 16 months remaking the party’s field program. In doing so, he has looked at the RNC’s vaunted turnout apparatus in 2004 for lessons, increasing the emphasis on volunteer training and metrics.
+
+He also has studied the methods used by President Obama’s team, which he saw up close as the Nevada state director for Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012. Romney’s main field office in the state that year was in Summerlin, down the street from a small Obama for America office.
+
+“Any time of the day you could go and pull on that door, it was locked,” Carr recalled. “We were like, what is this guy doing? . . . He was in his turf, working. He was organizing.”
+
+Carr has sought to bring that model to the RNC. Rather than assign staff to battleground states based on population, the terrain has been carved up into small “turfs” that each contain 8,000 to 10,000 low-propensity or swing voters. The party deployed an early wave of staffers last fall to key states to focus on voter registration. Volunteers have been cultivated with one-on-one coffee meetings and monthly house parties.
+
+Beginning last Friday, each state team was required to begin a daily door-knocking regimen — an effort that will feed fresh voter data into the national database through ­Nov. 8. Augmenting the party’s voter file has been one of the top priorities of the RNC, which hopes to weaponize personal information about voters this year the way Obama’s team did in 2012.
+
+“We’ve spent over $100 million between data and digital over the last four years, investing in that voter file, making sure we have that ability to know everything we can about every voter out there — not only from a knowledge perspective, but how do you talk to them?” Walsh said. “Do they respond to email? What time of day? What issues do they respond to?”
+
+[After briefing with Trump’s chief strategist, House Republicans see ‘pivot’]
+
+In June 2012, the RNC had 170 field staffers on the ground; now there are more than double that, with the largest contingents in Florida (59), Wisconsin (49), Pennsylvania (54) and Ohio (53). That remains short of what the RNC had promised state parties if a nominee had been selected back in March, worrying local officials who had hoped for a bigger ground force by now. National Republican officials said they are on track to hit their staffing goals by July 31.
+
+To do so, the RNC needs the infusion of cash that usually comes with the selection of a presidential nominee. But fundraising has been slow to ramp up, in part because Trump largely self-financed his primary bid and had no structure to solicit donors.
+
+In the meantime, the party is seeking to draw on a major resource the Trump campaign can provide: enthusiasm.
+
+This week, the campaign emailed supporters urging them to take part in a national day of action that the RNC is holding Saturday to register new voters. Before the Trump appeal went out, several hundred volunteers in Virginia had committed to attend. By Thursday morning, that number had soared to 1,000.",REAL
+5899,Republicans in Congress are ready for Hillary as they prepare for new probes into Clinton Foundation,"Daily Mail October 27, 2016 Republicans say they’ll keep the heat on Hillary Clinton if she wins the Oval Office with new investigations into her family charity and quid pro quo allegations. Judicial Watch, a conservative group that’s been at the forefront of Clinton’s email scandal, is already talking impeachment for the not-yet president. ‘I know this generation of Republican leaders is loath to exercise these tools, but impeachment is something that’s relevant,’ the organization’s president, Tom Fitton, told NBC News. Fitton noted, however, that congressional Republicans were unlikely to follow his advice. ‘They see [the oversight process] as an opportunity in some measure to keep their opponents off-kilter, but they don’t want to do the substantive and principled work to truly hold corrupt politicians, or the administration, or anyone accountable,’ he charged. Republicans on Capitol Hill are gearing up for a bevy of new investigations involving Clinton in the next Congress.   8:32  ",FAKE
+4207,Some GOP elites aren’t quite convinced by Trump charm offensive,"Out on the campaign trail, Donald Trump relishes his feud with his own party. He threatened to sue the Republican National Committee. He called its nominating system “rigged,” “deceptive” and “a disgrace.” And he has suggested he might try to depose the party chairman.
+
+But as RNC members gathered at a palatial beach resort here this week, Trump’s aides launched an urgent effort aimed at rebranding the mogul’s persona and thawing hostilities with the skittish party elite.
+
+“We need unity as soon as possible,” said Ed Cox, the New York party chairman and a Trump supporter.
+
+Yet while the charm offensive has made some progress, interviews with dozens of GOP officials here showed that the celebrity billionaire still has to overcome a host of lingering concerns — both about his loyalty to the party as well as his discipline and electability as a candidate.
+
+“We’re the ones that built this party,” said Jonathan Barnett, a national committeeman from Arkansas. “You see so many states where they have never reached out or built an organization. . . . Remember, we’re good people. We’re the grass roots. We’ve been around a long time. And Trump needs us.”
+
+Trump’s top campaign aide, Paul Manafort, assured RNC members here that Trump views the party leadership as “partners,” both in raising money and crafting a state-by-state strategy, and that his hot rhetoric has been “a part that he’s been playing” and will soon give way to a more presidential demeanor.
+
+[Trump is playing ‘a part’ and can transform for victory, aide says]
+
+Some members were skeptical of Manafort’s pitch.
+
+“Trump keeps saying that he’s going to be so presidential that he’ll put you to sleep,” said José Cunningham, chairman of the District of Columbia GOP. “He loves to say that. His people say he’ll do that, have that demeanor. I’d still like to see that because, well, we haven’t.”
+
+Trump himself is taking steps to repair relations. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus called the billionaire mogul on Wednesday to congratulate him on his blowout victory in the New York primary.
+
+“We had a great talk, no problem,” Priebus said in an interview. “Donald Trump is conciliatory. You notice he hasn’t been saying ‘RNC’ lately. He hasn’t been saying that lately. He certainly hasn’t been talking about me lately.”
+
+Priebus acknowledged that there probably are political benefits for Trump to rail against the process and use the RNC as a foil.
+
+“They’ve made a calculation somehow that it works, ginning people up over accusations that the delegate selection process is rigged,” Priebus said. “I don’t think they would be doing it on a lark.”
+
+Priebus said that the process is not skewed against Trump: “Nothing’s rigged, just like nothing was rigged in New York when the top vote-getter got 60 percent of the vote but received 90 percent of the delegates.”
+
+Trump’s rhetoric fits into his broader playbook to run against what he sees as corruption across the economic and political spectrums. Manafort said in an interview that Trump’s portrayal of the GOP nominating rules “is no different than the rigged economy, the rigged banking system.”
+
+“It fits into the whole narrative of the system is broken and certain types of establishment situations don’t meet the expectations of people,” he said.
+
+[It’s on: Tensions between Trump and the GOP escalate in public fight]
+
+For much of the campaign, the Trump operation seemed to alienate, even shun party officials who are accustomed to courtship by candidates.
+
+Many officials took particular umbrage at Trump’s on-and-off public flirtation with ousting Priebus.
+
+“Stop the attacks on Reince and the RNC leadership,” South Carolina GOP Chairman Matt Moore said. “Reince is the best chairman, I think, in the party’s history, and there is no question that he is the guy to lead us into the general election. Any discussion about a new chairman is completely stupid.”
+
+On that point, Manafort said, “This discussion over the last few weeks has not been an anti-Reince campaign.”
+
+Trump has been outfoxed by his chief Republican rival, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, at state conventions and other gatherings where delegates to the national convention are selected. Manafort said Trump is not seeking to upend the existing rules but believes the system lacks transparency and is trying to lay the groundwork for changes in future years.
+
+Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich addressed the RNC this week. Also present were leaders of Our Principles PAC, an anti-Trump super PAC, who huddled privately with some members Friday. The group’s chairwoman, Katie Packer, distributed a memorandum urging party leaders to do everything possible to stop Trump from locking up the nomination.
+
+“It is not too late,” Packer wrote. “You are under no obligation to wrap your arms around a candidate who has not won a majority of GOP votes, or a majority of delegates, and perhaps wouldn’t even be the frontrunner had the original field been much smaller.”
+
+Yet in hallway chatter here, there was a growing sense of resignation about Trump as the nominee.
+
+“I sense that everybody has come around to the position that what we choose is what we choose and that to have an opponent to Hillary Clinton, you take what you got and you run with it as fast as you can,” said David Norcross, a former RNC general counsel.
+
+[Is it too late for a Donald Trump makeover?]
+
+The conversations in Florida come amid a revamping of Trump’s campaign. Manafort said Trump is assembling teams of communications specialists, schedulers, policy advisers, speechwriters, researchers and liaisons to Capitol Hill, think tanks and other GOP power centers — all traditional campaign elements that had been lacking in Trump’s shoestring structure.
+
+“We couldn’t run a general election with eight people,” Manafort said.
+
+Manafort suggested that the individuals who have been appearing on cable television shows as Trump representatives will begin playing smaller roles as he asserts control over what he called “the narrative.”
+
+“Now we’re transitioning,” Manafort said. “He’s trying to be the nominee, and people want to see the entire package.”
+
+Among the newest members of Trump’s team is Rick Wiley, who is well known to RNC members, serving as the committee’s political director in 2012. When he addressed RNC members on Thursday, Wiley sought to emphasize those connections and went out of his way to praise the work of the committee’s staff under Priebus.
+
+Wiley said the party and its nominee would be fully committed to waging a successful fall national campaign. Arguing that the RNC had adapted the organizing model developed by the 2008 Obama campaign, he added, “We are going to inherit a field program second to none.”
+
+In his presentation, Wiley addressed worries among many Republicans that Trump as the nominee could lead the party to a catastrophic defeat in the fall, one that could put its Senate majority at risk and cost Republicans House seats.
+
+“You’re going to see this map expand,” he said, contending that Trump’s potential appeal to Reagan Democrats — working-class white voters — could make states in the upper and industrial Midwest that long have been in the Democrats’ column competitive in the fall.
+
+“If we’re playing in these states and we’re winning in some of these states and the Democrats are playing and having to spend money in those states,” he said, “it’s a good thing for us, it’s a good thing for the party.”",REAL
+7590,Puh-LEEZE! DOJ’s ‘policy’ reminder to FBI is shameless (especially considering THIS) – twitchy.com,"
+— Dan Curry (@dancurry) October 29, 2016 You mean THIS #JusticeDept ?Such a paragon of virtue 😭 @washingtonpost pic.twitter.com/y8beKaHmnA 
+— Chris Matthew's Leg (@_RaulRevere) October 29, 2016 
+An ethics lecture from a DOJ that did something that shady looking is laughable. @washingtonpost Lynch is one of the corrupt ones. She illegally met with WJC on a plane, fbi goes around her now. #DrainTheSwamp #MAGA 
+— Santa Barbara News (@_Santa_Barbara) October 29, 2016 What's the DOJ policy on giving immunity to everyone who was in the same room as Hillary at some point in their life? https://t.co/JEfTcgjMRG 
+— Liars Never Win (@liars_never_win) October 29, 2016 If nothing else this whole debacle illustrates the clownshow that is Obama's DOJ. https://t.co/q1Gkfb8dzt 
+— Jason C. (@CounterMoonbat) October 29, 2016 
+Bingo. ",FAKE
+7587,Show biz: Business and breakthroughs,"Show biz: Business and breakthroughs Exclusive: Vanessa Frank learns what makes or breaks members of film industry Published: 29 mins ago About | | Archive Vanessa Frank has been involved in the film industry first as an actress and then in production, distribution and international sales. At 31, she directed her first film, “Let The Lion Roar,” starring Oscar nominated Eric Roberts, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Sorbo and Grammy nominated singers Jaci Velasquez, Tim Rushlow and Jamie Grace. The film was an indie distribution success, with sales in 52 nations. Print 
+About Film Talk 
+Film Talk podcasts takes you inside the minds of some of the brightest filmmakers in the world. Learn from award-winning filmmakers as they teach the secrets to their success – the daily habits, routines and practices they employ to be the best in their industry. Guests include Oscar winners, Emmy Award winners, and Golden Globe winners. You can access the archive of all Film Talk podcasts here . 
+Making independent films happen with Atit Shah 
+Atit Shah is a film producer with five films releasing within the next 12 months, including “Jekyll Island” starring Oscar-nominated Minnie Driver, Emmy Award-winner John Leguizamo, AnnaSophia Robb and Ed Westwick, and “Money” starring Kellan Lutz. 
+He is the CEO of Create Entertainment, and is represented by UTA. 
+Breaking through as a female director with Melanie Aitkenhead 
+Melanie Aitkenhead is the director of the reboot of “Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?”, Oscar-nominated James Franco’s retelling of the 1996 classic film of the same name. The film stars Tori Spelling, with a cameo by Franco and premiered on Lifetime. 
+She’s also the director of the film adaption of James Franco’s popular novel “Actors Anonymous,” which explores the lives of young actors in Hollywood and stars Franco alongside Oscar-nominated Eric Roberts, Keegan Allen and Scott Haze. 
+Building the franchise with Scott Mitchell Rosenberg 
+Scott Mitchell Rosenberg is the CEO of Platinum Studios, one of the world’s largest independent libraries of comic book characters. Scott has played an integral role in creating one of the largest bibles in comic book history: the Platinum Studios “Macroverse,” which includes anchor titles such as “Cowboys & Aliens.” 
+A constant innovator, Scott established Platinum in 1997, following a successful career as the founder of Malibu Comics, which sold to Marvel in 1994. At Malibu, Scott led many successful comic spinoffs into toys, television and feature films, including the billion-dollar film and television mega-hit, “Men in Black.” 
+The art of entrepreneurship with Kent Speakman 
+Kent Speakman is a producer and entrepreneur at the intersection of entertainment and technology. Examiner.com has called him “one of the most influential entrepreneurs in the entertainment industry.” He has won the iMedia Entertainment Marketing award for “Best Digital Campaign” and “Best Mobile Entertainment Startup,” and he was awarded Evan Carmichael’s “Top 100 Entrepreneurs to Follow” in 2013 preceded by the “iMedia Top Ten Digital Marketers” in 2009. 
+Kent founded KONNECT – a digital, mobile and experiential agency that works with startups, brands and entertainment properties – before he co-founded FAMEUS, a new social network that connects members of the entertainment industry in innovative ways with a unique technology and that was listed on the Huffington Post’s “Top 10 Startups in LA” in 2015. 
+Kent has an international network of professionals and influencers, having orchestrated a variety of film and technology projects in Canada, the US, the United Kingdom, Asia and India. He has produced hundreds of events across Canada and the US, whilst working with clientele ranging from A-list celebrities, to tech mobile startups. 
+The Legal Aspect of Filmmaking with Dan Satorius 
+Dan Satorius is a world-class entertainment lawyer, with a practice that focuses principally on transactions, intellectual property, business structuring and financing. Furthermore, he is a nationally regarded attorney on clearance issues including Fair Use. His clients include Academy Award, Emmy Award, Independent Spirit Award, and Peabody Award-winning independent producers, writers and broadcasters in the film and television industry. 
+After graduating from film school and law school, Dan produced award-winning documentaries and short dramatic films. His graduate thesis film was selected as a finalist for a student Academy Award. In addition to practicing entertainment law for more than 25 years, Dan has been an adjunct professor at William Mitchell School of Law where he taught Entertainment Law. 
+Dan is an active member of the American Bar Association’s Forum on the Entertainment and Sports Industries, Co-Vice Chair of the Film and Television Division, and a member of the Governing Committee.",FAKE
+382,Canada Just Threw A Grenade Into Elizabeth Warren's Trade Fight With Obama,"The Volcker Rule bars banks operating in the U.S. from speculating in securities markets for their own profit -- a risky activity that can put taxpayers on the hook for big bailouts if the bank bets turn sour. But there are exceptions to the rule. For instance, banks are allowed to hold U.S. government debt in their own accounts.
+
+But those same banks aren't allowed to trade in Canadian government debt. Oliver thinks that's a NAFTA violation. Although he didn't lay out his argument in detail on Wednesday, NAFTA, like the TPP, generally bans countries from discriminating against each other's financial services. NAFTA prohibits policies that limit cross-border trade in financial services and requires the U.S. to treat Canadian companies the same way that it treats U.S. companies.
+
+""The Volcker Rule is clearly not a violation of NAFTA or any other trade agreement, all of which explicitly safeguard the ability of the United States to protect the integrity and stability of our financial system,"" a Treasury spokesperson said. ""The Volcker Rule is a key prudential financial regulation that prohibits risky proprietary trading while protecting taxpayers and the depth, liquidity, and stability of U.S. capital markets. NAFTA does not weaken our ability to implement Wall Street Reform now or in the future, and neither would any trade agreement we're negotiating.""
+
+ 
+
+ It's true that NAFTA contains an exemption for ""prudential"" regulation, and financial reform watchdogs strongly agree with the Treasury Department's interpretation. But it's not an airtight case.
+
+Sorting out whether the Volcker Rule qualifies for that exemption is the sort of thing that a court would traditionally determine under U.S. law, and U.S. courts typically give significant deference to the views of the executive branch. U.S. courts, however, don't have jurisdiction over NAFTA or any other free trade pact. International tribunals do.
+
+""The administration can say whatever it wants about its interpretation of these trade agreements,"" said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, a Wall Street watchdog group. ""The problem is, under the terms of these agreements, they are not going to be interpreting them. Private tribunals of trade lawyers are going to be interpreting them, and there are going to be plenty of openings, as this shows, to make claims that critical prudential regulations conflict with trade agreements. And eventually one of those is going to win out.""
+
+Treasury has known about Oliver's objection to the Volcker Rule for more than a year. As far back as 2011, a lobbying group representing Canadian banks claimed that the Volcker Rule runs afoul of NAFTA in arguments presented to U.S. regulators. But none of this turmoil prevented Obama from flatly rejecting Warren's contention that trade agreements, particularly the TPP, can be used to attack financial standards.
+
+""The notion that corporate America is going to be able to use this provision to eliminate our financial regulations and our food safety regulations and our consumer regulations -- that's just bunk,"" Obama told reporters in an April conference call. ""It's not true.""
+
+Canada may not opt to pursue a NAFTA case against the U.S. over the Volcker Rule. If it doesn't, Canadian banks won't have the right to sue on their own because NAFTA bars individual companies from suing sovereign nations over most financial services violations.
+
+But the TPP would be different, according to congressional briefings by the U.S. Trade Representative, which are reflected in a December letter from Warren to Ambassador Michael Froman, the top Obama trade official. The TPP wouldn't just empower foreign governments to sue the U.S. over bank regulations; it would allow individual companies and investors to bring such cases.
+
+Under the ""investor-state dispute settlement"" process, an international tribunal cannot overrule a law or regulation, but it can assess financial penalties to encourage countries to change said law or regulation. In the past, under other trade deals, the mere existence of such cases has sometimes pressured governments into abandoning non-financial services regulations.
+
+Moreover, the TPP would reportedly allow foreign banks to sue the U.S. government for failing to provide them with a ""minimum standard of treatment."" The term is vaguely defined, but international tribunals have interpreted it very broadly to make corporations eligible to receive damages for lost profits caused by policy changes that occurred after they invested in a country. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) raised similar concerns in her own December letter to Froman over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a pending trade deal with Europe.",REAL
+6433,"New Company Aims To Explore Intersection Of Technology, Other Thing - The Onion - America's Finest News Source","Pediatricians Ease Screen Time Guidelines New Company Aims To Explore Intersection Of Technology, Other Thing Intuihub officials say the particular thing needs to incorporate the latest technology if it wants to stay relevant. Close Intuihub officials say the particular thing needs to incorporate the latest technology if it wants to stay relevant. NEWS October 26, 2016 Vol 52 Issue 42 · News · Technology 
+SAN FRANCISCO—Explaining how their company was poised to usher in a bold new era of innovation, founders of local startup Intuihub told reporters Wednesday that their mission is to explore the intersection of technology and another thing. 
+“When you look at where the world is going right now, it just makes a lot of sense to take cutting-edge technology and incorporate it into this other thing,” said Intuihub co-founder Martin Fiske, who explained that the other thing will be modernized and streamlined once it is integrated with the latest technological breakthroughs. “We’re looking out at an exciting new frontier, one in which technology will be used to push the boundaries of what the other thing is capable of.” 
+“And we believe there’s no limit to what we can accomplish when we take technology and the other thing and put them together,” Fiske added. 
+Intuihub will reportedly employ groundbreaking advancements in technology to take the other thing in a variety of new and intriguing directions, including some directions, company officials promised, that have never before been imagined. According to the startup’s founders, their work will forever change the way people think about and interact with the thing. 
+Fiske, who reportedly began his career working solely with the other thing but soon realized that adding technology to what he was doing would “open amazing new doors for the thing,” told reporters that his company has an incredible opportunity to revolutionize both technology and the other thing. Five years from now, he said, the thing is likely to be completely unrecognizable by today’s standards. 
+He pointed out that Intuihub is already disrupting the entire landscape by using technology to make the other thing more accessible and convenient. 
+“Technology is evolving, and the other thing needs to evolve along with it,” said Fiske, noting that no other company focusing on the other thing is using technology the way Intuihub is. “The synergy between technology and this thing will be so strong that when the two come together, they may actually create a third thing, one that we believe could be truly world-altering.” 
+After describing their plans to launch a revolution that will change the lives of millions for the better, Intuihub founders confirmed they were also interested in partnering with brands to create more personalized experiences for the thing’s consumers. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
+Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
+5751,When Will It End? Police Clash with Pipeline Protesters,"License DMCA 
+It's like we are back to the 1800s when the U.S. Army rampaged against Native American tribes across the American West. The militarized police and the use of the National Guard this week in responding to the Standing Rock Sioux Native American challenge in North Dakota to big oil and its dangerous pipelines reminds one of Custer's Last Stand against Sitting Bull. 
+In fact, the portrait of Sitting Bull is on one of the most popular t-shirts available to supporters of the ""water protectors,"" as those are known who protest yet one more oil pipeline that crosses sensitive watershed areas and major rivers of the United States. 
+Four days last week, I joined hundreds of Native Americans and social justice campaigners from around the United States and around the world, in challenging the Dakota Access Pipe Line (DAPL), the 1,172-mile, $3.7 billion dollar scar across the face of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. 
+Last week, I photographed the area along Highway 6 south of Bismarck where the Energy Transfer Partnership contractors were busy digging the trench for the ""Black Snake"" as the pipeline is called. License DMCA - Advertisement - 
+I also counted 24 police cars returning to Bismarck at shift change around 3 p.m., a huge number of state law enforcement personnel and vehicles dedicated to protection of corporate business, instead of the rights of citizens. 
+Huge machines were chewing up the earth near water sources for all of North Dakota. The pipeline was rerouted from near Bismarck so if the pipeline breaks it would not endanger the water supply of the capital city of the state. But it was relocated to where it will cross the Missouri River and will jeopardize the water supply of the Native Americans and all Americans living in southern North Dakota and downstream of the Missouri River. Security forces protecting the Dakota Access pipeline construction spray protesters with pepper spray. License DMCA - Advertisement - 
+On Thursday, the digging took a more confrontational turn. The huge digging equipment arrived to cut across State Highway 1806 at a spot where water protectors had set up a front-line camp several months ago, one mile north of the main encampment of over 1,000 people. As the equipment arrived, the ""water protectors"" blocked the highway. 
+In a dangerous incident, an armed private security guard of DAPL came onto the camp and was chased off into the water abutting the camp by water protectors. After a lengthy standoff, tribal agency police arrived and arrested the security guard. Water protectors set his security vehicle on fire. 
+On Friday more than 100 local and state police and North Dakota National Guard arrested over 140 people who blocked the highway attempting to stop the destruction of the land. Police in riot gear with automatic rifles lined up across a highway, with multiple MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected military vehicles), a sound cannon that can immobilize persons nearby, Humvees driven by National Guardsmen, an armored police truck and a bulldozer. 
+Police used mace, pepper spray, tear gas and flash-bang grenades and bean-bag rounds against Native Americans who lined up on the highway. Police reportedly shot rubber bullets at their horses and wounded one rider and his horse. 
+As this police mayhem was unfolding, a small herd of buffalo stampeded across a nearby field, a strong symbolic signal to the water protectors who erupted in cheers and shouts, leaving law enforcement officials wondering what was happening. The security forces protecting the Dakota Access pipeline against protesters are heavily militarized.",FAKE
+1471,GOP Debate Round 3: Expect Another Wild Night,"BOULDER, Colo. -- It's expected to be another fiery, wild night as the Republican presidential candidates get together in Boulder, Colorado, Wednesday for their third debate.
+
+So far, this presidential soap opera has clearly been entertaining and surprising.
+
+The latest turn is a new CBS/New York Times national poll that shows retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson overtaking Donald Trump as the GOP frontrunner – a development that has the billionaire scratching his head.
+
+""Trump losing in polls to Carson. Carson? I don't think Carson is going to negotiate really well with China folks in all fairness, okay? I don't think so and I like him. I don't think so,"" Trump remarked at a recent rally.
+
+Expect some Trump jabs Wednesday night. As for Carson, the doctor told CBN News he's hoping voters will see what he represents.
+
+""I hope they will look at my life, look at the entirety of my life and see that it has been dedicated to the uplifting of people by leading a life that's not full of scandal, and adhering to the values and principles of our Judeo-Christian foundation,"" he said.
+
+Carson's not the only candidate who is relying on faith to help his case. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, believes he will eventually move higher in the polls.
+
+""I'm the only one on that stage that has a record of standing up to Washington over and over again, of defending the Constitution, of defending liberty, defending religious liberty, and I think that's why we're seeing such incredible enthusiasm among the grassroots,"" Cruz declared.
+
+Cruz, Carson, Trump and others want to strike gold with the key evangelical voting bloc. While this debate could begin to show movement, political strategist Ralph Reed doesn't expect any tidal waves.
+
+""This idea that there's going to be a coalescing behind one candidate, that's a myth. That's not going to happen. The evangelical community is very vibrant. It's not monolithic and it doesn't march to a single drummer and it's not easy to command,"" Reed explained.
+
+Wednesday night's debate will focus mostly on the economy. That will give candidates like Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush a chance to tout their economic records.
+
+Bush will take the opportunity to lay out his recently announced entitlement reform plan, a subject he spoke about at Regent University.
+
+ 
+
+""My belief is that once you reach 67, or 66 now, your payroll tax as an employee – you should keep it because that's the way you're going to save money more directly and be able to live a life of independence,"" Bush told the crowd.
+
+It's just one of the topics on tap for what is expected to be yet another night of presidential must see TV.",REAL
+10557,A List of Best Password Managers Offering Both Free and Premium Services,"You want to support Anonymous Independent & Investigative News? Please, follow us on Twitter: Follow @AnonymousNewsHQ This article (A List of Best Password Managers Offering Both Free and Premium Services) is a completely free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com .",FAKE
+5313,New bionic eye implant connects directly to brain,"New bionic eye implant connects directly to brain 11/03/2016 
+RUSSIA TODAY Scientists may have made a significant breakthrough in restoring human sight, as a woman who had been blind for seven years has regained the ability to see shapes and colours with a bionic eye implant. 
+The 30-year-old woman had a wireless visual stimulator chip inserted into her brain by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) surgeons in the first human test of the product. As a result, she could see colored flashes, lines, and spots when signals were sent to her brain from a computer. 
+The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, suffered no significant adverse side effects in the process, according to a statement. 
+The device, which was developed as part of the Orion 1 programme by Second Sight, uses technology to restore sight by bypassing the optic nerve to stimulate the brain’s visual cortex, according to chairman Robert Greenberg. 
+It is designed for those who cannot benefit from the Argus II retinal system that was unveiled at Manchester Royal Eye Hospital last year, but has limited application, as it depends on the patient having some retinal cells. 
+This new system goes one step further by sending signals directly to the brain. It has the potential to restore sight to those who have gone completely blind for virtually any reason, including glaucoma, cancer, diabetic retinopathy, or trauma, according to the manufacturer. 
+The next step is to connect the implant to a camera on a pair of glasses, and the company plans to seek FDA approval in 2017 to get the go ahead to conduct these trials. 
+UCLA neurosurgeon Nader Pouratian, who implanted the stimulator, said the results of the surgery are promising. 
+“Based on these results, stimulation of the visual cortex has the potential to restore useful vision to the blind, which is important for independence and improving quality of life,” he said.",FAKE
+9927,GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISTS DISAPPOINTED THAT HURRICANE MATTHEW WASN’T WORSE,"Home › SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY › GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISTS DISAPPOINTED THAT HURRICANE MATTHEW WASN’T WORSE GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISTS DISAPPOINTED THAT HURRICANE MATTHEW WASN’T WORSE 0 SHARES 
+[10/26/16] J.D.HEYES – Only the sickest, most warped and ideologically polluted minds would secretly hope for greater death and destruction to their own people and country, but such is the case with “climate change” zealots . 
+As pointed out by Investor’s Business Daily (IBD), it was former President Obama crony and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel who once infamously remarked that political leaders should never let serious crises “go to waste,” because they can use them to advance a political agenda where they could not do so before. 
+As for the recent Hurricane Matthew, it appears as though a number of political operatives and true believers in the global warming religion likely wanted it to be worse than it actually was (which, to many people, was bad enough). 
+Why? Because that would be consistent with their history. 
+For the record, the storm killed 30 Americans and more than 1,000 people in total. Early damage estimates were put at about $5 billion. Yet that is not enough death and destruction for the global warming hoaxers. 
+For the record, the hoaxers have tried advancing the narrative that in this day and age, thanks to man-caused actions, the weather is getting worse and more severe . Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton enlisted the assistance of the hoaxer-in-chief, Al Gore, her husband’s vice president and today’s chief global warming liar, to use Matthew to advance the phony narrative. 
+Only, before the hurricane actually made landfall days ago in South Carolina, it had been more than 4,000 days since a hurricane actually struck the United States. That’s 10 years, 11 months and some change. 
+Alarmists were “itching for a large-scale disaster,” IBD reported, because every day that passed that didn’t herald a major weather event, especially one on an epic scale, meant that their dire predictions of more and bigger storms made them look like clueless, silly con artists (which they are). 
+Their sick impatience for a major weather-related crisis was summarized very well a couple of years ago when a guy named Greg Blanchette announced that since the weather is getting worse and more severe , that he “kind of” hoped that North America “gets it’s a** kicked this hurricane season. It would motivate us on climate action.” 
+Like we said, sick . 
+This may or may not be the same Greg Blanchette who advocated placing scary global warming warnings on gasoline pumps – which is now law in North Vancouver, British Columbia. That doesn’t matter, though, because if it’s not the same person, that only means there are two global warming hoaxer cranks out there sharing the same name. 
+Then, as IBD noted, a couple of years before this Blanchette dude was hoping for weather-related death and destruction, British naturalist David Attenborough noted that a “disaster” was required to wake people up to the massive threat of climate change. 
+Up to that point, the “disasters” that the U.S. had experienced “with hurricanes and floods … [didn’t] do it.” So, a cataclysmic event was needed in order to scare enough people into demanding some sort of action, which of course would come in the form of costly government regulations that are not based on sound, demonstrable and replicable scientific data. 
+Then, as Matthew tore up Florida’s Atlantic Coast, Marshall Shepherd, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Georgia, outed the sick hoaxers , tweeting that he was hearing “ridiculous complaining” that the hurricane was actually less powerful than anticipated. 
+“Some seem disappointed there isn’t tragic loss of life/apocalyptic,” he noted, adding: “I am thankful.” 
+IBD summed up the facts: While the environmental movement contains sincere people, it is also replete with idiots and lunatics who yearn for a planet devoid of humans (with the exception of themselves, of course). Attenborough himself has complained to the British press that human beings are a “plague on the Earth.” (We assume he is counting himself as well, which – if he is – seems even less rational, if that’s possible.) 
+There are nothing but theories claiming that man-caused activity is responsible for changing weather patterns. There is no hard evidence and there is no replicable data, which there should be if such claims were provable outside of anecdotal findings . If this was a real issue the language would not have changed from “global cooling” in the 1970s, to “global warming” in the 1980s and ’90s, to “climate change” today. Post navigation",FAKE
+4842,His campaign’s statement that Trump accepts the truth of Obama’s birthplace is filled with falsehoods,"On Thursday night, Donald Trump finally acknowledged an obvious, proven fact: President Obama was born in the United States. Or, rather, Trump's campaign said that he acknowledged it, in a statement that was itself riddled with falsehoods.
+
+""Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President,"" the statement begins. That's untrue — and it's been fact-checked any number of times. In 2011, Politico outlined the origins; in May, our fact checkers dubbed it ridiculous.
+
+""This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer,"" the statement continues. Again, Clinton wasn't looking for an ""answer"" to the non-question of where Barack Obama was born because her campaign wasn't pressing the issue. Even before the release of Obama's long-form birth certificate, an announcement of Obama's birth was found in a Honolulu newspaper. His 2008 campaign had released a statement of live birth demonstrating where he was born. Anyone who asked the question for whatever reason had the answer in front of them, if they chose to see it.
+
+""Even the MSNBC show 'Morning Joe' admits that it was Clinton’s henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump,"" the statement goes on. Whether or not someone on ""Morning Joe"" said it — a show, we will note, that has spent an awful lot of time of late disparaging Trump — that doesn't make it true.
+
+""In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate,"" it reads. ""Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised."" This is a remarkable pair of sentences. Terming the incident ""ugly"" and saying he's resolved it is a bit like a person intentionally running someone over, dumping them outside a hospital and then asking for a letter of commendation for wrapping things up so neatly. The ""incident"" was fostered and nurtured by Trump in the spring of 2011, who used his position of celebrity to draw attention to it — as part of his first exploration of running for president. It was only when Obama first released his full birth certificate and then mocked Trump at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner that year that Trump seemed to drop the issue.
+
+The Trump team tries to spin that as a win. ""Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States,"" the statement continues.
+
+This compresses an awful lot of time. As I wrote last week, Trump continued to raise questions about Obama's birthplace for years after the release of the birth certificate. At a news conference immediately afterward, Trump said that ""hopefully"" the issue was resolved. He then encouraged Sheriff Joe Arpaio's quixotic attempt to prove the birth certificate a forgery, which was of course unsuccessful.
+
+In 2015, he said, ""I don't know"" when challenged on the subject. In January, when the subject came up, he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, ""Who knows?"" That was eight months ago.
+
+The statement then moves into a campaign sales pitch: ""Mr. Trump is now totally focused on bringing jobs back to America, defeating radical Islamic terrorism, taking care of our veterans, introducing school choice opportunities and rebuilding and making our inner cities safe again."" That last point is important: It's part of Trump's sales pitch to black voters. And lest you think that Trump's outreach to black voters didn't play a role in this, the campaign made clear to BusinessWeek's Joshua Green that it did.
+
+It seems hard to believe that this statement will do much to assuage those voters' concerns. After all, this isn't an apology for Trump's birtherism, it's a rationalization for it — and not a very good one.
+
+What's more, a critical part of the Trump campaign's statement is the signature it bears: ""Jason Miller, Senior Communications Advisor."" Clearly we can take Mr. Miller's word as the word of the candidate, right?",REAL
+2877,"White House, Dems seek to water down Iran bill",The online comment fits closely with his campaign platform.,REAL
+2241,Reporter says Clinton camp denying him access to events,"The simmering dispute over media access to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign erupted again Monday when a reporter for DailyMail.com was told by the campaign he couldn’t attend her events in New Hampshire.
+
+David Martosko, a reporter for DailyMail.com, a website affiliated with the Daily Mail in London, said the Clinton camp said his newspaper wasn’t part of the official group -- known as the print pool -- that covers the White House on a rotating basis. As a result, he was blocked Monday from covering her events in person for the pool.
+
+""I got there when I was told to get there,"" Martosko told Fox News' Megyn Kelly Monday night. ""Quarter to eight in the morning, I showed up in the parking lot, told them who I was, and they said 'No, you can't come.'
+
+""This happened twice today,"" Martosko told Kelly later in the interview. ""I just came right over here from an evening event where Mrs. Clinton was the keynote speaker ... I showed up again and said 'I'm the designated pool reporter' and I was told 'you need to leave.' I find that unacceptable and offensive, and I think most of my journalistic colleagues do as well.""
+
+The campaign said it is trying to resolve the issue. However, it denied any suggestion that Martosko was denied access because of his newspaper’s critical coverage of Clinton.
+
+“The Daily Mail can sensationalize [the incident] as they see fit for their readers, but that's what happened,"" a Clinton aide told Fox News.
+
+Major media organizations in Clinton’s traveling press pool issued a statement Monday night defending Martosko and rejecting any attempt by the Clinton campaign to “dictate” who covers the candidate.
+
+“We haven't yet had a clear explanation about why the pool reporter for today's events was denied access,” said the statement signed by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Tribune Publishing, as well as the Daily Mail and others.
+
+“But any attempt by the campaign to dictate who is in the pool is unacceptable.”
+
+""The pool in general is tight-knit organization,"" Martosko told ""The Kelly File"" Monday night. ""And to a man and woman, they all said, 'No. The Clinton campaign does not get to choose who covers them.'""
+
+Most presidential campaigns essentially follow the procedures outlined by the White House Correspondents Association. To accommodate the frequent media crush, a newspaper reporter, a photographer and a TV crew, known as the pool, covers an event. Then the details are widely shared via email to reporters and others.
+
+However, in covering Clinton, a group of 14 news organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, have formed to cover events and share the information on a limited basis.
+
+Group members argue that those who don’t share the expenses of covering a campaign shouldn’t have immediate access to the information, or “pool reports.”
+
+Still, this is not the first time a member affiliated with the foreign press has complained about being excluded from covering Clinton up close.
+
+“My feeling is that some people have established the rules and that we haven’t been part of the discussion,” a reporter for the French TV network Canal Plus recently told The Post. “I went to Iowa to cover [Clinton’s] first event. I only saw her van. … I am fighting for equality and access for all.”
+
+The Clinton camp on Monday also said: ""We have been working to create an equitable system, and have had some concerns expressed by foreign outlets about not being a part of the rotation.”
+
+A DailyMail.com spokesperson on Monday afternoon confirmed that Martosko was denied access to the Clinton event and kept from boarding a van that her campaign is using to transport pool reporters around New Hampshire. However, the campaign has yet to provide a full explanation, considering Martosko was scheduled to be the designated print pool reporter, the spokesperson also said.
+
+Martosko tweeted: “For those of you asking: What I've seen online re: today is accurate, and I intend to report here whether they want me to or not.""",REAL
+2186,Congress's fight over Iran deal enters new phase,"The Obama administration says new visa rules passed by Congress could undermine the Iran nuclear deal. But Congress embraces its role as a watchdog.
+
+The Iran nuclear deal may be signed, sealed, and on the road to implementation, but there are signs that the sparring between the Obama administration and Congress is merely taking new forms.
+
+The newest flashpoint is a new visa-waiver law designed to reduce the risk of terrorists entering the country. The measure appears to force anyone who has traveled to Iran since 2011 to get a visa before visiting the United States.
+
+Some administration officials worry that this kind of provision could be opponents' way of undermining an agreement that they couldn’t defeat outright. Secretary of State John Kerry responded by telling Iran that President Obama would waive the provisions that might interfere with the nuclear deal.
+
+For their part, critics see Mr. Obama’s proposed waiver as another sign that he’s going soft on Iran in order to preserve a major piece of his foreign policy legacy.
+
+The tension points to the deep mutual suspicions that remain on Iran. As a result, the path forward could be a narrow one, with Congress embracing its role as an Iran watchdog while Obama pushes for the space to allow the agreement to take hold.
+
+For the moment, some officials say the administration is eyeing upcoming parliamentary elections in Iran. The hope is that smooth implementation of the nuclear deal will boost moderate candidates in the February voting.
+
+But others say this is the wrong time to be placating Iran.
+
+Secretary Kerry’s promise “suggests the administration will bend over backwards to implement the nuclear deal, when actually this is the time when the US should react stronger and show more firmness towards Iran,” says Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the National Council of Resistance of Iran in Washington, an opposition group of exiled Iranians. “Otherwise they’ll pave the way to further Iranian defiance.”
+
+The new visa law was passed amid heightened concerns over visa-less travel in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist attacks. It affects the citizens of 38 countries whose citizens do not need visas to enter the United States. Under the new law, citizens of those countries will now need to obtain a visa if they are also citizens of Iraq, Sudan, Syria, or Iran. Moreover, some interpret the law to mean that anyone who has visited those four countries since 2011 will also need a visa.
+
+Iran officials worry that the new law could hurt the Iran economy. Business representatives who know they could have a harder time entering the US could be deterred from visiting Iran, they say.
+
+Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told the New Yorker the new visa provisions were “absurd,” adding no Iranian or visitor to Iran had attacked the West. “Whereas many people have been targeted by the nationals of your allies [or] people visiting your allies… So you’re looking at the wrong address.”
+
+The comment seemed a thinly veiled reference to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, whose nationals or recent visitors were involved in the Paris and San Bernardino attacks.
+
+Kerry pledged in a letter to Mr. Zarif that the US would implement the new visa rules “so as not to interfere with legitimate business interests in Iran” and was looking into ways to “waive” any aspects that violated the nuclear deal.
+
+Administration officials say they have no intention of going soft on Iran. Indeed, they recently held a closed-door briefing for members of Congress at which they laid out actions undertaken to counter Iran’s efforts to spread its influence in the Middle East. The officials revealed the recent US intercept of a shipment of Iranian arms destined for Houthi rebels fighting a war against the US-backed government in Yemen.
+
+Nuclear deal critics like Mr. Jafarzadeh say they cringed at Kerry’s quick reassurances to Iran. “It was very troubling to say the least to see Secretary Kerry rush to send a letter to Zarif that gives unwarranted promises of multiple-entry business visas to a government whose economy is run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an organization whose agenda includes terrorism, buying influences in international affairs, and exporting Islamic fundamentalism.”
+
+Even some congressional supporters of the nuclear deal are warning that strict vigilance of Iran must continue. Members of Congress have expressed particular concern about two Iranian ballistic missile tests in recent weeks. At least one of them violated a Security Council resolution barring Iran from testing missiles that could potentially carry nuclear warheads, according to the United Nations.
+
+On Thursday, Sen. Chris Coons (D) of Delaware – a backer of the deal – warned against anything short of “relentless implementation” of the agreement and “aggressive enforcement” of separate sanctions aimed at curbing Iran’s “support for terrorism, human rights violations, or their ballistic missile program.”
+
+“If we take our eye off this ball,” he said, “they will take that as a clear signal that … they have carte blanche to continue their actions that are antithetical to our values and interests.”",REAL
+4759,Why LeBron James’s Endorsement Could Help Clinton Retake Ohio,"While Ohio has been a presidential bellwether for decades, Hillary Clinton has largely focused her efforts elsewhere, as polls consistently put the Buckeye State in Donald Trump’s column. Still, the G.O.P. nominee’s lead is narrow, and now a huge new endorsement could put Ohio back in play, thanks to one of the state’s biggest stars: LeBron James.
+
+“When I think about the kinds of policies and ideas the kids in my foundation need from our government, the choice is clear. That candidate is Hillary Clinton,” the Cleveland Cavaliers star wrote in an op-ed Sunday, published by Business Insider. James drew on his experiences working with kids in Akron, Ohio, through his charity—the LeBron James Family Foundation—as motivation for his support of Clinton, who he argues will also build on the legacy of President Barack Obama. “Only one person running truly understands the struggles of an Akron child born into poverty,” he wrote.
+
+James’s endorsement of Clinton comes at a crucial time in the presidential race. Unlike Clinton, who has multiple potential paths to the White House, a victory for Trump in less than six weeks hinges on winning Ohio and its 18 electoral votes. Right now, the New York billionaire is enjoying a 3.8-point edge on average in the polls in the battleground state, thanks in part to the state “growing older, whiter and less educated than the nation at large,” as The New York Times reports.
+
+But to triumph over Clinton, Trump needs more than just the white vote. And in Ohio, James is as close to royalty as you can get. The fact that the star forward is backing Clinton could potentially mobilize minority voters and tip the scales toward the Democratic nominee. For weeks Trump, has struggled to make inroads with the African-American community as he faces charges of running a campaign fueled by bigotry. His tone-deaf appeals to black voters (“What do you have to lose?”) and advocacy for widespread use of the controversial policing tactic “stop and frisk” hasn’t helped. In the wake of a number of high-profile deaths of black men at the hands of police officers, James argues that Clinton is better suited to respond to the heightened racial tensions in the U.S. “We must address the violence, of every kind, the African-American community is experiencing in our street and seeing on our TVs,” he wrote. “We need a president who brings us together and keeps us unified. Policies and ideas that divide us are not the solution. We must all stand together—no matter where we are from or the color of our skin. And Hillary is running on the message of hope and unity that we need.” With enthusiasm for her candidacy flagging, Clinton needs celebrity endorsements like James’ to help get out the vote—especially among black voters who are a critical Democratic constituency but, like other voting blocs, are less excited about Clinton than Obama.
+
+James is far from the only high-profile athlete who has shared his political views during this election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who throughout the N.F.L. season has protested police violence by choosing not to stand during the national anthem, said that both Clinton and Trump “are proven liars,” and that voters will have to “pick the lesser of two evils.” Last week, two Seattle Seahawks players commented on the recent police shootings. On Conan, Marshawn Lynch said he hopes “people open up their eyes and see that there’s really a problem going on.” And Richard Sherman refused to take reporters’ questions during a news conference last week as a form of protest. Even, Michael Jordan, who is famously said to have quipped, “Republicans buy sneakers too,” wrote a statement earlier this year condemning violence against African-Americans and the killing of police officers, and donated $1 million each to the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund and the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s Institute for Community-Police Relations.",REAL
+402,White House warns Congress: Fight Zika or live to regret it,"""Congress has completely abdicated their responsibility,"" White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters, speaking of its inaction on the Obama administration's request for nearly $2 billion to take extensive preventative measures, such as developing vaccines and widespread mosquito control.
+
+""I take no joy in suggesting that Republicans are going to look back on this time that they've had to act on the Zika virus and deeply regret it,"" Earnest added.
+
+The White House slammed members of Congress over the administration's decision to shift more than half a billion dollars that was designated for fighting Ebola to instead be used against Zika.
+
+The Zika virus has been linked to microcephaly -- a condition in which a developing fetus' brain fails to fully grow and babies are born with unusually small heads -- as well as Guillain-Barre syndrome, which causes the body to attack its own nerves.
+
+Officials said Wednesday there have been 64 confirmed cases of Zika in pregnant women in the continental U.S. One baby has been born with microcephaly in Hawaii and more cases are being investigated. So far, the U.S. cases appear to have been contracted in other countries where the virus has been circulating. The White House stressed that even with the shift in funds from the Ebola coffers, the current amount of money available won't be enough to adequately prepare for what the World Health Organization has called a global health emergency. ""At some point, later this spring or maybe later this summer, all of you and your news organizations are going to be sounding the alarm about the significant threat that is posed by the Zika virus,"" Earnest said. ""That is going to happen."" But as Earnest was briefing reporters, the House Appropriations Committee put out a statement explaining its position. ""More than a month ago, we called on the administration to use existing funding and legal authorities to provide the most immediate and effective response to the Zika outbreak,"" the statement said. ""We are pleased to hear today that federal agencies are heeding our call."" And offering some reassurance in the face of the White House's ominous predictions, the statement said, ""As we move forward, the Appropriations Committee will continue to monitor the changing needs resulting from this unpredictable crisis to assure the resources necessary for the response are available."" In the White House's view, though, until Congress approves more funding, there's a risk. The Office of Management and Budget devoted a blog post to the problem on Wednesday, saying, ""Without the full amount of requested emergency supplemental funding, many activities that need to start now would have to be delayed, or curtailed or stopped, within months.""",REAL
+2421,Cuba has a possible lung cancer vaccine that America can now test,"The United States and Cuba have taken major steps to end their 50 years of hostility, and some researchers think Americans could reap an unexpected benefit: better access to Cuban medical innovations.
+
+""The US may be the world leader in basic cancer research, biotechnology, and treatment,"" explained Marga Gual Soler, who studies science diplomacy. ""But Cuba has built a universal, free, and public health care system, [and] has the highest number of medical doctors per capita in the world, a robust biotechnology industry developed with very low resources, and guaranteed access to drugs and advanced diagnostics for the population.""
+
+
+
+
+
+One of the first diplomatic exchanges involved Cimavax, a lung cancer vaccine first developed in Cuba. But it doesn't work for prevention like a traditional vaccine; instead, it stimulates the immune system in a different way, to stop cancers from growing in people who already have the disease. Researchers down there found that the vaccine increased survival rates and had few side effects in patients with late-stage disease.
+
+There's reason to be cautious: US studies will need to replicate these findings in order to meet federal regulatory standards. And it's still a long way from clinical trials to being widely available for patients.
+
+For now, scientists are excited about the possibility — and the exchange raises questions about how a political shift might spur medical innovation.
+
+To learn more, I spoke to Dr. Kelvin Lee of Buffalo's Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Lee helped lead America's collaboration with Havana's Center of Molecular Immunology, which discovered the vaccine. Here, he explains why he thinks Cimavax is particularly promising, and why he's so enthusiastic about more Cuba-US medical exchanges.
+
+Julia Belluz: How did your exchanges with the Cubans change how you think about medical innovation coming out of there?
+
+Kelvin Lee: Everybody believes Cuba is this country stuck in the 1950s without realizing that the reason Cuban biotech is so innovative is because Cuba as a country has put a very high priority on health care. The public health care metrics are comparable to the US in terms of longevity and infant mortality. Cuba punches way above its weight. Because it is economically constrained, it has to be extraordinarily innovative.
+
+""Many people think what Cuba has to offer the US is rum, cigars, and baseball players"" They have two other anti-cancer vaccines [in addition to Cimavax] that are equally exciting but earlier in development. They also have a monoclonal antibody called Nimotuzumab [to treat brain cancer]. The US has monoclonal antibodies that target colon and lung cancers. However, those antibodies cause a fair amount of toxicity. Nimotuzumab does not have those side effects, so it's applicable for pediatric patients. They’ve used it in pediatric brain cancer. We don't have anything we can give to kids safely. That’s another drug we’d be very interested in seeing.
+
+JB: So how did the warming of relations between the US and Cuba impact bringing Cimavax here?
+
+KL: We got the license to import it, but what we needed were manufacturing documents from the Center for Molecular Immunology that described how the vaccine was manufactured, what quality control measures were taken, etc. This is 1,000 pages the FDA needs to review.
+
+
+
+A trade mission [last year] allowed us to go down there and sign the agreements to move the documents forward. So the mission finalized the last piece and allowed us to march into clinical trials. This was one of the biggest obstacles for us. Many people think what Cuba has to offer the US is rum, cigars, and baseball players. Through the trade mission, many realized the biotech sector in Cuba is really remarkable.
+
+JB: This vaccine is being called a revolutionary lung cancer vaccine. But it's actually more a treatment than what we typically think of as a vaccine. Can you explain exactly what Cimavax does?
+
+KL: This vaccine has been developed by the Center for Molecular Immunology in Havana. They've been developing it since the late 1990s and have done a lot of interesting clinical trials, including a large phase 3 randomized controlled trial in 405 patients in Cuba. The patients had advanced-stage lung cancer, primarily because that’s their No. 1 cancer burden in Cuba and they don't have anything else other than first-line chemotherapy. Now it has been approved by the Cuban FDA for the treatment of lung cancer.
+
+The vaccine is made out of a man-made protein that is called epidermal growth factor. This is a protein your body normally produces, and it helps support the growth of normal cells like skin cells. [It can also help cancer cells grow.] In those cells that become cancerous, this vaccine initiates an immune response against the epidermal growth factor protein, thus depleting an important thing the cancer needs to grow and survive. So the cancer can’t grow anymore. 
+
+
+
+ JB: Could this method be applied to vaccines for other types of cancers or used for cancer prevention?
+
+KL: Our Cuban colleagues have not tested that, because they’re economically constrained. They've only tested it in the No. 1 cancer burden in Cuba, lung cancer, and they haven't had the resources to do clinical trials in other types of cancer. [We'll study that.]
+
+Can it be used in prevention? We already know patients that have early-stage lung cancer can get their cancers removed. We also know many are smokers who have damaged their lungs all over the place and have pre-cancerous lesions all over their lungs. They have a very high risk of relapse with a second lung cancer. We think the real potential for this vaccine is we can reduce the risk of relapse in this patient population.
+
+One can think even further: If we develop an algorithm to predict a person's lung cancer risk, we could potentially vaccinate the very highest-risk cohorts to try to reduce their risk of lung cancer. That patient population is potentially in the millions, especially if you go worldwide.
+
+JB: How far are we away from this vaccine reaching the US?
+
+KL: Cuba has done the phase-three studies [the final preapproval phase studies to confirm safety and effectiveness], and there are other phase 3 studies going on internationally in lung cancer. But there has been no experience in the US because of embargo issues.
+
+So we are predicting that the FDA is going to ask for a phase 1 study [which will test the drug in healthy people to confirm it's safe] in the US, just to replicate the safety data that our Cuban colleagues already reported. Once we get through that, we anticipate we won't see very much toxicity or anything different from what’s been reported. After that phase 1 study, we'll move on to other phase 1 studies in prevention and potentially in other cancers.
+
+We will be filing an investigational drug application with the FDA. Hopefully we can get that document together and submitted this spring.
+
+On a parallel track, we have two clinical trials that are in the institutional approval process here at Roswell Park. We are hoping to get those approved within the same time frame. That would mean we have trials here opening at the end of this year.",REAL
+10441,FBI REDUX: What’s Behind New Probe into Hillary Clinton Emails?,"
+In a stunning turn of events 11 days before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI announced it is reopenning its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server case, by probing newly emerging emails linked to Hillary Clinton. 
+‘NEW PROBE’– The FBI gives Hillary Clinton a second look. (Photo illustraion 21WIRE) 
+FBI October Surprise? 
+According to reports , in a letter written today, FBI Director James Comey , stated that the FBI has begun a new probe into Hillary Clinton related emails once again. Comey offered scant details about the new probe, but due to an unrelated case, additional classified material may have been mishandled on Clinton’s personal email server. 
+CNBC reported the latest FBI developments, including a passage from Comey’s letter discussing the new investigation: 
+“In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton’s personal email server. Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony,” Comey wrote. 
+In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation,” he added. 
+Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony,” Comey concluded.” 
+Huma’s Estranged ‘Sexting’ Husband 
+According to a new report released via The New York Times : 
+“The presidential campaign was rocked on Friday after federal law enforcement officials said that emails pertinent to the now-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton ’s private email server were discovered on a computer belonging to Anthony D. Weiner, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide.” “ In a letter to Congress , the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said the emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, which law enforcement officials said was an F.B.I. investigation into illicit text messages from Mr. Weiner to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, is married to Huma Abedin, the top aide.” Comey has come under fire recently for apparently letting Clinton off the hook for mishandling, and lying to Congress, about classified emails coming through her ‘home brew’ email server while she was Secretary of State. After previously closing the case, Comey has done a U-turn and is now saying the FBI will review the new emails to for classified information, and see whether it was mishandled. 
+This unprecedented investigative move comes just two days after a Wikileaks docu-dump revealed a memo containing detailed financial information between Clinton Foundation donors and former president Bill Clinton ‘s private financial activities. Among those included in the memo, was a $30 million dollar business arrangement under “Bill Clinton, Inc.,” with another $66 million dollar deal scheduled over nine years. 
+The following is a tweet from Brad Jaffy of NBC Nightly News containing the new FBI recommendation… 
+The new investigation into the Clinton camp will most certainly spark new ‘Pay-to-Play’ allegations , as the new FBI revelations also comes days after a Project Veritas hidden camera sting operation revealed that the Democratic consultant Robert Creamer of Democracy Partners, discussed ways to commit ‘large-scale’ voter fraud as well as paying political agitators to cause violence at Donald Trump rallies. Out of Creamer’s 342 visits to the White House, also included his wife, a 9-term Illinois Democratic congresswoman, Jan Schakowsky some 47 times. White House visitor records show that Schakowsky took 47 “private meetings with Obama or his senior staff,” also over the past year. The consultancy Democracy Partners appears to have applied Schakowsky as a political buffering point, possibly in the event of a fallout over their operations at a grassroots level. The impetus of this type of procedural separation is to keep certain high-ranking officials of the hook in case of a massive upheaval over various underhanded campaign tactics – thus giving a political campaign or political entity plausible deniability. ‘CAUGHT ON FILM’ – Robert Creamer resigns over a massive Democratic Party controversy. (Image Source: CNN ) Creamer, a convicted felon , (in 2005, Creamer plead guilty $2.3 million in bank fraud and tax violations) was promptly “shoved out of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s inner circle,” following a heavily publicized video sting revealing his discussion about voter fraud and violence at Trump rallies. ‘PAY TO PLAY?’– Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe closely allied with the Clinton’s negotiated a a campaign contribution involving the FBI. (Image Source new republic ) It remains unclear what exactly reopened the new Clinton probe, but perhaps the FBI had its own cobwebs to clear out after it was revealed that a longtime Clinton associate , Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe , “helped steer $675,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an FBI official who went on to lead the probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system, according to a report.” The NY Post also reported on the matter this past week: 
+“The political action committee of McAuliffe, the Clinton loyalist, gave $467,500 to the state Senate campaign of the wife of Andrew McCabe, who is now deputy director of the FBI, according to the Wall Street Journal . 
+The report states Jill McCabe received an additional $207,788 from the Virginia Democratic Party, which is heavily influenced by McAuliffe. 
+The money directed by McAuliffe began flowing two months after the FBI investigation into Clinton began in July 2015. Around that time, the candidate’s husband was promoted from running the Washington field office for the FBI to the No. 3 position at the bureau.” 
+In a CNN report from October 18th, a week before the McAuliffe revelations, “…According to notes from interviews conducted during an FBI investigation into Clinton’s email practices, Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy personally tried to convince FBI officials that the email should be declassified. One interviewee described feeling “pressured” by another FBI official at Kennedy’s request.” 
+The newly reopened FBI investigation into Clinton could be related to all or some of the items listed above, but there’s no doubt that due to public backlash the FBI received following the first Clinton investigation, in addition to concerns over dealings between the FBI and Clinton associates – the agency needed to save face. 
+It remains to be seen how new case will impact the US Presidential election. 
+More from RT below… ",FAKE
+7732,"Hillary Isn’t Only One Who Suffers Memory Loss, Look What Bill Just Did….","You are here: Home / US / Hillary Isn’t Only One Who Suffers Memory Loss, Look What Bill Just Did…. Hillary Isn’t Only One Who Suffers Memory Loss, Look What Bill Just Did…. October 27, 2016 Pinterest 
+Bill Clinton will probably have to avoid Hillary even more than usual after his latest showing on the campaign trail, in which it became clear that it isn’t just his wife that has memory issues. 
+Slick Willy was out on the campaign trail on Tuesday, angling to get his lecherous, alleged-rapist butt back in the White House, and apparently he forgot his own criminal business partner wife’s campaign slogan. 
+“But we were growing together,” Bill said. “This slampaign slogan of Hillary’s, ‘growing together,’ it’s more than just two words that sound good.” 
+That’s not a typo either; according to IJR , Bill called Hillary’s “campaign slogan” a “slampaign slogan,” before mangling Hillary’s already-stupid actual campaign slogan: “Stronger Together.” 
+Bill probably shouldn’t use “I’m With Her” either, since he might lapse into, “and her, and her over there, and her right there too.” 
+“Stronger Together” is also the name of Hillary’s flop of a book, which I highly doubt Bill bothered to read, although you can’t really blame him for that; he has a hard enough time staying awake when his wife speaks — he must be immune to shrill cackling by now. 
+I’m guessing Bill is going to want to stay as far away as he can from Hillary while she likely has one of her infamous “cooling off” periods. Hillary has been widely reported to have a nasty temper , so it’d certainly be wise for Bill to stay far away. 
+Hillary can’t be mad for too long though, because it’s likely that she’s going to need Bill to run the White House. Although neither of them appear to be in the greatest health, they can do a great deal of damage between the two of them. 
+Bill and Hillary have had a painfully obvious agreement throughout their “married life” to help each other politically. Now it’s Hillary’s turn and she’s surely not going to take too kindly to Bill screwing up her ascendancy. 
+No need to worry Hillary, you’re responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, ruining the life of a 12-year-old rape victim, and numerous other crimes and disgusting deeds, so a few memory lapses from Bill won’t affect the election. 
+Hillary managed to forget answers nearly 40 times during the FBI investigation into her use of private servers to send and receive classified information as secretary of state, so forgetting a dumb campaign slogan should be no big whoop. 
+What would be nice is if Bill’s memory lapses led to a moment of clarity and human decency and he let everyone know where the bodies have been buried during the Clinton mafia’s assault on American politics. Won’t happen though; we can’t have nice things…",FAKE
+1791,White House counsel reportedly kept in dark on Clinton’s personal email use,"The White House counsel's office reportedly was kept in the dark about Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of personal email while secretary of state, in the latest detail raising questions over how and why she stayed off the government system despite administration guidance to the contrary.
+
+Clinton used non-official personal email, and also used a server traced to her New York home.
+
+An unnamed source told The Associated Press the White House counsel's office only found out about her heavy personal email use as part of the congressional investigation into the Benghazi attack.
+
+The person said Clinton's exclusive reliance on personal email as the nation's top diplomat was inconsistent with the guidance given to agencies that official business should be conducted on official email accounts. According to the source, the counsel's office asked the State Department to ensure that her email records were properly archived, after finding out in the course of the Benghazi probe she did not follow the guidance.
+
+Meanwhile, lawmakers and others were stepping up efforts to get to the bottom of the issue.
+
+The House select committee investigating the 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi subpoenaed her personal emails on Wednesday. And the Republican National Committee's chief counsel formally requested a State Department inspector general investigation.
+
+Amid the pressure, Clinton said on Twitter late Wednesday she has asked the State Department to make her emails available to the public, in her first public response to the controversy.
+
+""I want the public to see my email,"" she tweeted. ""I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.""
+
+This means the State Department will vet the 55,000-plus pages she handed over, leaving the diplomatic agency with the intensely politicized task of determining which can be made public.
+
+The State Department said it would review the emails as quickly as possible but cautioned it would take some time.
+
+The email saga has developed as the first major test for how the White House and President Obama's administration will deal with Clinton's likely 2016 presidential campaign -- and the inevitable questions that will only get louder as 2016 approaches.
+
+In his letter to department Inspector General Steve Linick, RNC Chief Counsel John Phillippe urged an investigation into whether Clinton's system posed a cybersecurity risk, what the department email policies were, how Clinton was allowed to use the personal system and other issues.
+
+""The American public deserves to know whether one of its top-ranking public official's actions violated federal law,"" he wrote. ""With transparency and openness in government being one of President Obama's guiding principles, it is incumbent upon your office to determine the facts surrounding this issue.""
+
+Since the revelations surfaced this week, the Obama administration has been pummeled by endless questions about Clinton, who hasn't formally announced a run. In the absence of an official campaign to defend her, the White House press secretary has been put in the awkward position of being a de facto Clinton spokesman and the most public voice speaking on her behalf.
+
+While trying to avoid doing political damage to Clinton, the White House has put the onus on her aides to explain exactly what happened.
+
+White House press secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged Wednesday that Clinton would have emailed White House officials on a non-government account. But the source familiar with the matter who spoke to the AP said the White House was not aware that was her sole method of email and that she wasn't keeping a record of her emails at the State Department.
+
+The person said the White House's concern was that agencies must maintain records for historical and legal purposes in the case of a Freedom of Information Act request or subpoena. If the State Department didn't control the records, officials there could not search and ensure they are turning over what is required and that could create a legal issue for the agency.
+
+Earnest said the guidance given to government officials is that they should forward work emails on a personal address to official accounts or even print them out and turn them over to their agency to ensure they are properly maintained.
+
+The Associated Press also has reported that Clinton's account was set up on a computer email server traced to her home in Chappaqua, New York.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2863,Iran talks to be extended another day,"Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program appeared to take a sour turn Wednesday after pushing on past a key deadline, but Secretary of State John F. Kerry decided to stay in Switzerland an extra day in search of a breakthrough.
+
+State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said that progress had been made and that Kerry would remain “until at least Thursday morning.” But the short period appeared to reflect the difficulties in the talks between six world powers and Iran over a preliminary agreement on restricting the Islamic republic’s ability to use its civilian nuclear technology to build atomic weapons.
+
+“We continue to make progress but have not reached a political understanding,” Harf told reporters.
+
+The talks with Iran appeared to be on ever-more-shaky ground as the day elapsed. The White House said Iran had not made commitments about its nuclear program in Wednesday’s sessions, and Iran’s foreign minister described negotiations with the West as “always problematic.”
+
+Though the talks continued, Germany’s foreign minister said it was possible they could collapse.
+
+[The big questions any nuclear deal with Iran would have to answer]
+
+“It is clear the negotiations are not going well,” two prominent Republican senators who have been wary of an agreement — John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) — said in a joint statement. “At every step, the Iranians appear intent on retaining the capacity to achieve a nuclear weapon.”
+
+The Obama administration had sought a broad political framework for an agreement by Tuesday, with three additional months to negotiate the technical details. But a deadline that perhaps was intended to pressure Iran to make concessions came and went as the country’s representatives bargained hard. A temporary nuclear agreement with Iran remains in effect until June 30.
+
+Diplomats and politicians sounded exasperated Wednesday, even as they acknowledged they were still exploring proposals to find a way out of their impasse.
+
+In Washington, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that the talks were productive but that there were unresolved details. He said the United States would not arbitrarily end the negotiations if they were making progress, “but if we are in a situation where we sense that the talks have stalled, then yes, the United States and the international community is prepared to walk away.”
+
+In Lausanne, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that new proposals would be considered but that the two sides were still far apart.
+
+When asked whether the talks could collapse, Steinmeier told German reporters: “Naturally. Whoever negotiates has to accept the risk of collapse. But I say that in light of the convergence [of views] that we have achieved here in Switzerland, in Lausanne, it would be irresponsible to ignore the possibility of reaching an agreement.”
+
+Steinmeier said he would reassess on Thursday morning whether to stay or return home. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who went to Paris on Wednesday morning, was headed back to the talks in Lausanne that night.
+
+Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammed Javad Zarif, was critical of his counterparts when he was approached by reporters as he strolled along the shores of Lake Geneva.
+
+“I’ve always said that an agreement and pressure do not go together; they are mutually exclusive,” he said. “So our friends need to decide whether they want to be with Iran based on respect or whether they want to continue based on pressure. They have tested the other one. It is high time to test this one.”
+
+Earlier, speaking to Iranian reporters outside the Beau Rivage Palace, where talks are being conducted, Zarif sounded weary with the approach taken by the multiple negotiating teams on the other side of the table.
+
+“The negotiations’ progress depends on political will,” he said, according to Iran’s Mehr News Agency. “The other party’s political will has always been problematic.”
+
+With the departure of several foreign ministers who had arrived over the weekend, Kerry was joined at the table by the British and German foreign ministers and the European Union’s foreign policy chief. France, China and Russia were represented by their ministers’ deputies.
+
+The Obama administration and its negotiating partners are seeking an agreement that will sharply limit Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons for at least a decade and maintain lesser restrictions in subsequent years. Iran says that its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian purposes. It is seeking the lifting of international sanctions that have battered its economy.
+
+The day’s negotiations started amid hopes of a preliminary agreement on at least some issues.
+
+Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he expected the talks to end late Wednesday with a statement “announcing progress.” That was quickly contradicted by diplomats from other countries.
+
+Araghchi also offered some insight into Iran’s position on two central issues — the lifting of sanctions and the future of Iran’s research on centrifuges to enrich uranium.
+
+“We insist on lifting of financial and oil and banking sanctions immediately,” he told Iranian state television, adding that the pace for lifting other sanctions was still being negotiated.
+
+“We insist on keeping research and development with advanced centrifuges,” he added, referring to Iran’s desire to eventually replace its outdated centrifuges with more modern technology that enriches uranium more quickly. The United States and its negotiating partners want to keep restrictions on Iran’s nuclear research through the final years of a potential 15-year accord. They also want economic sanctions lifted more gradually.
+
+For months, the State Department avoided the word deadline, a term that was used in Congress and the press. Officials called it a goal. In recent weeks, though, even U.S. diplomats began using the term.
+
+“We’ve said that March 31st is a deadline; it has to mean something, and the decisions don’t get easier after March 31st,” Harf said Monday.
+
+Some say the White House should never have adopted the “D” word.
+
+“It was a mistake to set the March 31 deadline in the first place, because we need a positive outcome more than anyone else,” said Gary Samore, a former nuclear arms adviser to President Obama. “Naturally, the Iranians are taking advantage and playing hard ball.”
+
+Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kept up his unrelenting criticism of an agreement with Iran.
+
+“Yesterday, an Iranian general brazenly said, and I quote, Israel’s destruction is nonnegotiable. But evidently giving Iran’s murderous regime a clear path to a bomb is negotiable,” he said in a statement from Jerusalem.
+
+House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who was visiting Israel on Wednesday with a congressional delegation, said in an appearance with Netanyahu: “Regardless of where in the Middle East we’ve been, the message has been the same: You can’t continue to turn your eye away from the threats that face all of us.”
+
+William Branigin in Washington, William Booth in Jerusalem and Karoun Demirjian in Moscow contributed to this report.
+
+A framework? A deal? The semantics of the talks.",REAL
+9848,Our Debt to Paula Jones,"Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation October 29, 2016 
+[Classic: January 22, 1998] — Suddenly nobody is questioning Paula Jones’s veracity anymore. Mrs. Jones told a simple story and has stuck with it, while the president has shifted ground, equivocated with his patented “carefully worded denials,” and let his thuggish, blundering, and very expensive lawyer handle public relations. 
+The Clinton team’s line, echoed by the major media until recently, has been that Mrs. Jones is “trailer-park trash” whose allegations are credible only to dirty-minded right-wing Clinton-haters. Never mind that her allegations are consistent with a great many other allegations from a great many sources. The Clinton strategy was to scare her off, and then, when that didn’t work, to make her character the issue, leaking their own allegations to the press. 
+But her tenacity created enormous pressure, forcing the president to make a humiliating appearance in her presence a few days ago to give his deposition — and possibly to try to tamper with other witnesses. Only he knows how many other potential witnesses there are. 
+The new charges of creepy lechery and criminality have finally cost Clinton his protective press. Though Newsweek spiked its own scoop, the story exploded anyway. All those journalists who have covered for Clinton now feel he’s yanked the rug out from under them once too often 
+And it happened because a story they didn’t want to dignify with coverage refused to go away. The story Newsweek spiked was written by Michael Isikoff, who had left the Washington Post in fury two years ago when the paper spiked a similar story he’d written on the Jones suit. But now the “respectable” press has finally caught up with the “crazy” press, leaving Hillary Clinton to repeat her usual gripe — Bill’s just the victim of someone’s political agenda — to an empty gallery. 
+Clinton is standing on a precipice, staring down into the abyss of impeachment and prison. One nudge — another story, witness, allegation, or tape recording — could push him over. And the market value of any damaging evidence has skyrocketed, with the media fighting fiercely for the kind of information they used to spurn. He’s at the mercy of any bimbo who wants to step forward. 
+After being driven from office, Richard Nixon was able to make a comeback by claiming, however speciously, that his motive had always been to defend the dignity of the presidency. That’s a claim Clinton won’t be able to make. If he seduced a twenty-one-year-old White House intern and urged her to perjure herself for his sake, the dignity of the presidency was the last thing on his mind. Nor will he have the diehard it-didn’t-start-with-Watergate defenders Nixon had. In Clinton’s case, it started long ago in Arkansas. 
+He arrived in Washington with a trail of sleazy rumors, some of them substantiated. The “respectable” press ignored all that, including the fact that Gennifer Flowers had enjoyed rapid promotion as a state employee (and had tapes of Clinton urging her to lie about their liaison). It ignored “right-wing” reports that he’d used state troopers to procure women. Such stories illustrated his readiness to abuse power for sleazy purposes, but they were treated as cheap sex gossip. When Paula Jones told her story, it fit the pattern — but was rejected as unworthy of serious attention. 
+Now that the pattern is undeniable, Clinton is still Clintonizing — issuing new carefully-worded-denials, as if he might yet exculpate himself with verbal cleverness. It hasn’t sunk in that he no longer has many supporters who will seize on any excuse for believing his version. His guilt isn’t an epistemological puzzle. 
+Supporting Clinton has become extremely costly. He has destroyed the Democrats’ congressional majorities in both houses, and though he managed to win reelection (by methods that will now get redoubled scrutiny), he has destroyed his own presidency. And his disgrace will be contagious. 
+The major media should not be allowed to ask: “How were we supposed to know?” It’s their business to know — and to inform the public. But their job had to be done by Paula Jones and the “right-wing” press. ### 
+This is one of 82 essays in Joe Sobran’s collection of his writing on the President Clinton years, titled Hustler: The Clinton Legacy , which has just been republished by FGF Books.",FAKE
+8082,“Billionaire” Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign Is Flat Out Broke,"The Washington Post reported : 
+Donald Trump raised just $29 million for his presidential campaign committee in the first 19 days of October, about half as much as his Democratic rival, putting him at a severe financial disadvantage in the crucial final days of the White House contest, new campaign finance reports filed Thursday night showed. 
+The GOP presidential nominee had just $16 million left in his campaign coffers on Oct. 19, compared to Hillary Clinton’s $62 million. When the cash reserves of their joint fundraising committees are included, Clinton’s war chest grew to $153 million, while Trump’s totaled $68 million. 
+Trump’s total fundraising dropped 39% in the first 19 days of October. $29 million is close to nothing for a national presidential campaign in the closing weeks of the race. At a time when Trump needs boots on the ground to get out the Republican vote, his presidential campaign is broke, and in debt to the tune of $2 million. There isn’t going to be a last-minute ad blitz for Trump, or a reservation of television time so that the Republican nominee can speak directly to voters before election day. 
+The plan for Trump is for the campaign to continue to limp along with lots of rallies, which are good for Trump’s ego, but not effective in getting voters to the polls. Trump promised to donate $100 million to his campaign but has only given $56 million . The billionaire who promised to self-finance has run his presidential campaign into the ground. Trump took ten times more money out of his campaign in reimbursements to his own businesses than he gave in October. 
+Fundraising is an indicator of expected election outcomes. The money tends to go towards the winner at the end of an election. Hillary Clinton is having no trouble raising money, which suggests that enthusiasm is high among her supporters. Trump’s cash crush points to a depressed base that doesn’t expect him to win. 
+Trump has done what he does best. He talked a big game while bankrupting the Republican Party for his own personal gain. Convincing Republicans to give him their nomination may go down in history as Trump’s biggest con of all.",FAKE
+10457,Reasons to Risk Nuclear Annihilation,"Reasons to Risk Nuclear Annihilation   latest neocon/liberal-hawk scheme is for the U.S. population to risk nuclear war to protect corrupt politicians in Ukraine and Al Qaeda terrorists in east Aleppo, two rather dubious reasons to end life on the planet, says Robert Parry. 
+By Robert Parry 
+Obviously, I never wanted to see a nuclear war, which would likely kill not only me but my children, grandchildren, relatives, friends and billions of others. We’d be incinerated in the blast or poisoned by radiation or left to starve in a nuclear winter. 
+But at least I always assumed that this horrific possibility would only come into play over something truly worthy, assuming that anything would justify the mass extinction of life on the planet. Peter Sellers playing Dr. Strangelove as he struggles to control his right arm from making a Nazi salute. 
+Now, however, Official Washington’s neocons and liberal interventionists are telling me and others that we should risk nuclear annihilation over which set of thieves gets to rule Ukraine and over helping Al Qaeda terrorists (and their “moderate” allies) keep control of east Aleppo in Syria. 
+In support of the Ukraine goal, there is endless tough talk at the think tanks, on the op-ed pages and in the halls of power about the need to arm the Ukrainian military so it can crush ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who dared object to the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 that ousted their elected President Viktor Yanukovych. 
+And after “liberating” eastern Ukraine, the U.S.-backed Ukrainian army would wheel around and “liberate” Crimea from Russia, even though 96 percent of Crimean voters voted to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia – and there is no sign they want to go back . 
+So, the world would be risking World War III over the principle of the West’s right to sponsor the overthrow of elected leaders who don’t do what they’re told and then to slaughter people who object to this violation of democratic order. 
+This risk of nuclear Armageddon would then be compounded to defend the principle that the people of Crimea don’t have the right of self-determination but must submit to a corrupt post-coup regime in Kiev regardless of Crimea’s democratic judgment. 
+And, to further maintain our resolve in this gamble over nuclear war in defense of Ukraine, we must ignore the spectacle of the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev wallowing in graft and corruption . 
+While the Ukrainian people earn on average $214 a month and face neoliberal “reforms,” such as reduced pensions, extended years of work for the elderly and slashed heating subsidies, their new leaders in the parliament report wealth averaging more than $1 million in “monetary assets” each, much of it in cash. 
+A Troubling Departure 
+The obvious implication of widespread corruption was underscored on Monday with the abrupt resignation of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili who was the appointed governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region. A scene from “Dr. Strangelove,” in which the bomber pilot (played by actor Slim Pickens) rides a nuclear bomb to its target in the Soviet Union. 
+Though Saakashvili faces charges of abusing power back in Georgia, he was nevertheless put in charge of Odessa by current President Petro Poroshenko, but has now quit (or was ousted) amid charges and counter-charges about corruption. 
+Noting the mysterious wealth of Ukraine’s officials, Saakashvili denounced the country’s rulers as “corrupt filth” and accused Poroshenko and his administration of sabotaging real reform. 
+“Odessa can only develop once Kiev will be freed from these bribe takers, who directly patronize organized crime and lawlessness,” Saakashvili said . Yes, that would be a good slogan to scribble on the side of a nuclear bomb heading for Moscow: “Defending the corrupt filth and bribe takers who patronize organized crime.” 
+But the recent finger-pointing about corruption is also ironic because the West cited the alleged corruption of the Yanukovych government to justify the violent putsch in February 2014 that drove him from office and sparked Ukraine’s current civil war. 
+Yet, the problems don’t stop with Kiev’s corruption. There is the troubling presence of neo-Nazis , ultranationalists and even Islamic jihadists assigned to the Azov battalion and other military units sent east to the front lines to kill ethnic Russians. 
+On top of that, United Nations human rights investigators have accused Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service of hiding torture chambers . 
+But we consumers of the mainstream U.S. media’s narrative are supposed to see the putschists as the white hats and Yanukovych (who was excoriated for having a sauna in his official residence) and Russian President Vladimir Putin as the black hats. 
+Though U.S. officials, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, helped organize or “midwife” the coup ousting Yanukovych, we are told that the Ukraine crisis was a clear-cut case of “Russian aggression” and Crimea’s decision to secede (and rejoin Russia) was a “Russian invasion” and an “annexation.” 
+So, all stirred up with righteous indignation, we absorbed the explanation that economic sanctions were needed to punish Putin and to destabilize Russian society, with the hoped-for goal of another “regime change,” this time in Moscow. 
+We weren’t supposed to ask if anyone had actually thought through the idea of destabilizing a nuclear-armed power and the prospect that Putin’s overthrow, even if possible, might lead to a highly unstable fight for control of the nuclear codes. 
+Silencing Dissent 
+Brushing aside such worries, the neocons/liberal-hawks are confident that the answer is to move NATO forces up to Russia’s borders and to provide military training to Ukraine’s army, even to its neo-Nazi “shock troops.” Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine’s Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV) 
+After all, when have the neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks ever miscalculated about anything. No fair mentioning Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or other lucky countries that have been on the receiving end of a benighted “regime change.” 
+An American who protests or even mentions the risk of nuclear war is dismissed as a “Kremlin stooge” or a “Putin puppet” or a “useful fool” repeating “Russian disinformation” and assisting Moscow’s “information war” against the U.S. government. 
+But if you’re still a bit queasy about risking nuclear annihilation to keep some Ukrainian kleptocrats in power, there is the other cause worth having the human race die over: protecting Al Qaeda terrorists and their “moderate” rebel comrades holed up in east Aleppo. 
+Since these modern terrorists turn out to be highly skilled with video cameras and the dissemination of propaganda, they have created the image for Westerners that the Syrian military and its Russian allies simply want to kill as many children as possible. 
+Indeed, most Western coverage of the battle for Aleppo whites out the role of Al Qaeda almost completely although occasionally the reality slips through in on-the-ground reporting , along with the admission that Al Qaeda and its fellow fighters are keeping as many civilians in east Aleppo as possible, all the better to put up heartrending videos and photos on social media. 
+Of course, when a similar situation exists in Islamic State-held Mosul, Iraq, the mainstream Western media dutifully denounces the tactic of keeping children in a war zone as the cynical use of “human shields,” thus justifying Iraqi and U.S. forces killing lots of civilians during their “liberation.” The deaths are all the enemy’s fault. 
+However, when the shoe is on the Syrian/Russian foot, we’re talking about “war crimes” and the need to invade Syria to establish “safe zones” and “no-fly zones” even if that means killing large numbers of additional Syrians and shooting down Russian warplanes. 
+After all, isn’t the protection of Al Qaeda terrorists worth the risk of starting World War III with nuclear-armed Russia? And if Al Qaeda isn’t worth fighting a nuclear war to defend, what about the thieves in Ukraine and their neo-Nazi shock troops? Calling Dr. Strangelove. 
+Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).",FAKE
+1983,Election 2016: Clinton email stumble fuels Dem critics,"A string of damaging stories about Hillary Clinton's activities as Secretary of State -- including the new controversy surrounding her email habits -- are giving fresh ammo to Clinton skeptics who have grown resigned lately to the idea of a Democratic coronation instead of a genuine, competitive primary.
+
+Now, those Democrats clamoring for a Clinton alternative are once again speaking up about the need for a primary that will, at the very least, serve as a vetting process and prepare Clinton for the general election.
+
+Political observers expect New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to yield to Hillary Clinton's run in 2016, fearing there wouldn't be room in the race for two Democrats from the Empire State.
+
+Political observers expect New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to yield to Hillary Clinton's run in 2016, fearing there wouldn't be room in the race for two Democrats from the Empire State.
+
+Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a social conservative, gave Mitt Romney his toughest challenge in the nomination fight last time out and has made trips recently to early voting states, including Iowa and South Carolina.
+
+Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a social conservative, gave Mitt Romney his toughest challenge in the nomination fight last time out and has made trips recently to early voting states, including Iowa and South Carolina.
+
+Republican Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, announced in 2013 that he would not be seeking re-election, leading to speculation that he might mount a second White House bid.
+
+Republican Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, announced in 2013 that he would not be seeking re-election, leading to speculation that he might mount a second White House bid.
+
+Democrat Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor, released a ""buzzy"" political video in November 2013 in tandem with visits to New Hampshire. He also headlined a Democratic Party event in South Carolina, which holds the first Southern primary.
+
+Democrat Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor, released a ""buzzy"" political video in November 2013 in tandem with visits to New Hampshire. He also headlined a Democratic Party event in South Carolina, which holds the first Southern primary.
+
+Texas Sen. Ted Cruz announced his 2016 presidential bid on Monday, March 23, in a speech at Liberty University. The first-term Republican and tea party darling is considered a gifted orator and smart politician. He is best known in the Senate for his marathon filibuster over defunding Obamacare.
+
+Texas Sen. Ted Cruz announced his 2016 presidential bid on Monday, March 23, in a speech at Liberty University. The first-term Republican and tea party darling is considered a gifted orator and smart politician. He is best known in the Senate for his marathon filibuster over defunding Obamacare.
+
+Sen. Rand Paul officially announced his presidential bid on Tuesday, April 7, at a rally in Louisville, Kentucky. The tea party favorite probably will have to address previous controversies that include comments on civil rights, a plagiarism allegation and his assertion that the top NSA official lied to Congress about surveillance.
+
+Sen. Rand Paul officially announced his presidential bid on Tuesday, April 7, at a rally in Louisville, Kentucky. The tea party favorite probably will have to address previous controversies that include comments on civil rights, a plagiarism allegation and his assertion that the top NSA official lied to Congress about surveillance.
+
+Rep. Paul Ryan, a former 2012 vice presidential candidate and fiscally conservative budget hawk, says he's keeping his ""options open"" for a possible presidential run but is not focused on it.
+
+Rep. Paul Ryan, a former 2012 vice presidential candidate and fiscally conservative budget hawk, says he's keeping his ""options open"" for a possible presidential run but is not focused on it.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has started a series of town halls in New Hampshire to test the presidential waters, becoming more comfortable talking about national issues and staking out positions on hot topic debates.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has started a series of town halls in New Hampshire to test the presidential waters, becoming more comfortable talking about national issues and staking out positions on hot topic debates.
+
+Vice President Joe Biden has twice before made unsuccessful bids for the Oval Office -- in 1988 and 2008. A former senator known for his foreign policy and national security expertise, Biden made the rounds on the morning shows recently and said he thinks he'd ""make a good President.""
+
+Vice President Joe Biden has twice before made unsuccessful bids for the Oval Office -- in 1988 and 2008. A former senator known for his foreign policy and national security expertise, Biden made the rounds on the morning shows recently and said he thinks he'd ""make a good President.""
+
+Jim Webb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, is entertaining a 2016 presidential run. In January, he told NPR that his party has not focused on white, working-class voters in past elections.
+
+Jim Webb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, is entertaining a 2016 presidential run. In January, he told NPR that his party has not focused on white, working-class voters in past elections.
+
+Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat former governor and senator of Rhode Island, said he's running for president on Thursday, April 16, as a Democrat, but his spokeswoman said the campaign is still in the presidential exploratory committee stages.
+
+Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat former governor and senator of Rhode Island, said he's running for president on Thursday, April 16, as a Democrat, but his spokeswoman said the campaign is still in the presidential exploratory committee stages.
+
+Sen. Marco Rubio announced his bid for the 2016 presidency on Monday, April 13, a day after Hillary Clinton, with a rally in Florida. He's a Republican rising star from Florida who swept into office in 2010 on the back of tea party fervor. But his support of comprehensive immigration reform, which passed the Senate but has stalled in the House, has led some in his party to sour on his prospects.
+
+Sen. Marco Rubio announced his bid for the 2016 presidency on Monday, April 13, a day after Hillary Clinton, with a rally in Florida. He's a Republican rising star from Florida who swept into office in 2010 on the back of tea party fervor. But his support of comprehensive immigration reform, which passed the Senate but has stalled in the House, has led some in his party to sour on his prospects.
+
+Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid Sunday, April 12, through a video message on social media. She continues to be considered the overwhelming front-runner among possible 2016 Democratic presidential candidates.
+
+Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid Sunday, April 12, through a video message on social media. She continues to be considered the overwhelming front-runner among possible 2016 Democratic presidential candidates.
+
+South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has said he'll make a decision about a presidential run sometime soon. A potential bid could focus on Graham's foreign policy stance.
+
+South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has said he'll make a decision about a presidential run sometime soon. A potential bid could focus on Graham's foreign policy stance.
+
+On March 2, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson announced the launch of an exploratory committee. The move will allow him to raise money that could eventually be transferred to an official presidential campaign and indicates he is on track with stated plans to formally announce a bid in May.
+
+On March 2, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson announced the launch of an exploratory committee. The move will allow him to raise money that could eventually be transferred to an official presidential campaign and indicates he is on track with stated plans to formally announce a bid in May.
+
+Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is establishing a committee to formally explore a White House bid. ""If I run, my candidacy will be based on the idea that the American people are ready to try a dramatically different direction,"" he said in a news release provided to CNN on Monday, May 18
+
+Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has created a political committee that will help him travel and raise money while he considers a 2016 bid. Additionally, billionaire businessman David Koch said in a private gathering in Manhattan this month that he wants Walker to be the next president, but he doesn't plan to back anyone in the primaries.
+
+Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has created a political committee that will help him travel and raise money while he considers a 2016 bid. Additionally, billionaire businessman David Koch said in a private gathering in Manhattan this month that he wants Walker to be the next president, but he doesn't plan to back anyone in the primaries.
+
+Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has said his decision to run for the Republican nomination will be based on two things: his family and whether he can lift America's spirit. His father and brother are former Presidents.
+
+Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has said his decision to run for the Republican nomination will be based on two things: his family and whether he can lift America's spirit. His father and brother are former Presidents.
+
+""The closer we get to 2016, the more the electorate pays attention, which we're now seeing with foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation and in Hillary's undisclosed emails,"" said Boyd Brown, a Democratic National Committee member and former state legislator from South Carolina. ""These are problems that raise real leadership and transparency concerns, concerns that can be addressed in caucuses and primaries, but would go ignored in a coronation process.""
+
+In conversations with grassroots Democrats around the country and in key nominating states, there is renewed concern that Clinton is saddled with too much baggage and dubious political instincts that could sink her against the GOP nominee if the kinks are not worked out in a contested primary.
+
+""The Democratic base that isn't wedded to her is nervous about it,"" said Deborah Arnie Arnesen, a progressive radio host in Concord, New Hampshire. ""It makes her more vulnerable. What is this anointed candidate getting us? A much more flawed candidate than we thought. And Republicans now have material they never thought they would have.""
+
+""We need to litigate this in a primary so that she will better at it, or it will be the Republicans who will be doing it for her,"" she added.
+
+The latest round of bad press began last week when the Washington Post reported on foreign government contributions made to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation while she was serving as Secretary of State, including one donation from the Algerian government that may have violated the Obama administration's ethics policy.
+
+This week, the New York Times broke the news that Clinton exclusively used a private email account to do business at the State Department, allowing her to skirt federal record-keeping practices. The revelation also raised security concerns, though State Department officials said nothing classified passed through her account.
+
+And late Wednesday, Clinton sought to realign herself on the side of transparency, tweeting that she wants ""the public to see my email.""
+
+But that doesn't mean they'll be released anytime soon. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in a statement Thursday that the review process will take ""some time"" because of the volume of emails to sift through.
+
+Clinton supporters have pushed back against the media and Republicans, waving off the stories as yet another Twitter-fueled much-ado-about-nothing that has little resonance with the typical voter beyond Washington.
+
+""Voters do not give a sh-t about what email Hillary used,"" said Democratic strategist Paul Begala, a longtime Clinton ally and CNN contributor. ""They don't even give a fart.""
+
+But if regular voters aren't paying attention, the Democratic power brokers who hold sway over the nomination process in key states — the legislators, local party chairmen and plugged-in activists — most definitely are. The questions some of them are raising are less about the specifics of the stories and more about the long-established narratives they feed: That the secretive Clintons, enabled by unquestioning loyalists, play by their own rules.
+
+""The questions relating to Hillary are more about, are we tired of the same old thing?"" asked one prominent Democratic state Senator in South Carolina who wished to remain anonymous. ""It's time to turn the page and find something that will appeal to voters in South Carolina. People just don't relate to these national stars like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi or whatever.""
+
+The critical voices in the Democratic Party should not be confused for the majority view. Many Democrats are siding with Clinton through the e-mail flap, underscoring her broad popularity within the party and her undisputed frontrunner status. Recent polls of Iowa Democrats have put Clinton's lead over her closest potential rival, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, at anywhere from 40 to 56 points.
+
+""This stuff feels kind of petty to me,"" said Cindy Pollard, a Clinton backer and vice-chairman of the Jasper County Democrats in Iowa. ""Like, this is all they got?""
+
+But the stories have given new fuel to stalwart Clinton skeptics who, anxious about the prospect of a nominee who hasn't been challenged seriously in the national political arena since her ill-fated 2008 campaign, have been demanding other prominent Democrats to join the 2016 race and not give Clinton a free ride.
+
+Some of her critics are unabashed anti-Wall Street progressives who have urged Warren to join the fray. Some are younger Democrats who see the Clintons as emblems of the past, and others are simply skeptical of Clinton's ability to stir the passions of the Democratic base.
+
+Whatever their motivations, the Anybody-But-Hillary voices have been happy over the last several years to prop up potential rivals and feed reporters quotes about the importance of a Democratic nomination fight instead of a free walk to the nomination for Clinton.
+
+But in recent months, with Warren looking unlikely to run and Clinton lining up blue chip talent for her nascent campaign staff, the critics have lowered their voices and braced for the coming reality of Clinton-as-nominee, even if potential contenders like Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders make a run.
+
+While many Democrats are still reluctant to publicly criticize the Clintons — ""Everybody is kind of afraid right now to say anything,"" one of Iowa's most well-connected Democratic organizers told CNN when asked about the new controversies — others are less likely to pull punches.
+
+In New York, Zephyr Teachout, who challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo from the left in last year's Democratic Primary, chided Clinton in the New York Daily News over the e-mail flap.
+
+""She shouldn't have done it,"" Teachout said. ""She should come forward and give a press availability on it. Just as a matter of leadership, she should address it directly ... This is why we need a primary, to force debate both about policy and leadership style.""
+
+Dick Harpootlian, a former South Carolina party chairman and supporter of Vice President Joe Biden, said the e-mail story is yet another Clinton scandal to throw on the pile.
+
+'Always another shoe to drop'
+
+""There's always another shoe to drop with Hillary,"" Harpootlian told the Washington Post. ""Do we nominate her not knowing what's in those e-mails? If the e-mails were just her and her family and friends canoodling about fashion and what they're going to do next week, that's one thing. But the fact that she's already turned e-mails to the Benghazi committee because she was doing official business on it means she's going to die by 1,000 cuts on this one.""
+
+Brown, the DNC member, said that party leaders in his state are feeling ""shaky"" about Clinton.
+
+""Folks are remembering why they pushed back in 2008, and a candidate with the right message and retail politics could pick the lock Clinton thinks she has on the party faithful,"" Brown said.",REAL
+4429,"Kurdish forces, backed by U.S. airstrikes, launch offensive in Iraq","At 7 a.m., the Kurdish forces began their assault.
+
+Backed by a barrage of U.S.-led airstrikes, about 7,500 Kurdish peshmerga fighters, including thousands of minority Yazidis, launched a three-pronged attack against the ­Islamic State in the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar.
+
+They had gathered at the base of Mount Sinjar at dawn Thursday. Some prayed and others huddled by campfires before moving to their positions. The dirt tracks to the front lines were jammed with vehicles full of fighters.
+
+On the western side of the mountain, Kurdish special forces tentatively advanced on foot into Islamic State-held territory followed by a snaking convoy of armored vehicles. By nightfall they had succeeded in cutting the highway next to the city, which runs from Raqqa in Syria to Mosul in Iraq, splitting the Islamic State’s territory apart.
+
+Peshmerga forces had entered a former Iraqi military base and cleared a string of ­villages, Kurdish officials said.
+
+The drive to retake Sinjar is the largest offensive launched by Iraqi Kurds against the Islamic State and a key test of their military capabilities. It comes as the militants face attacks on multiple fronts, from Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital in Syria, to Ramadi in western Iraq.
+
+The loss of Sinjar would deal the Islamic State a severe setback, cutting its supply lines between Iraq and Syria. But it is also a particularly emotive fight.
+
+The sudden fall of Sinjar to Islamic State militants in August 2014 devastated the Yazidi community. Hundreds of thousands fled Sinjar and the surrounding area — many straight into the hands of the extremists, who ­consider Yazidis heretics. Yazidi men were summarily executed en masse, and women were rounded up to be bought and sold as sex slaves. Tens of thousands of people fled to Mount Sinjar.
+
+As troops gathered Thursday at dawn at the base of the mountain to launch their attack, the Yazidi fighters pledged vengeance.
+
+“It was a tragedy, and we carry a great sorrow in each of us,” Salim Shevan, a 28-year-old Yazidi fighter, said as he left for the front lines. “We will have revenge.”
+
+[Horrifying tales of sexual slavery for Yazidis who could not flee]
+
+After the Kurdish forces began advancing, bulldozers broke through the earthen barrier that previously marked the front line to make way for dozens of armored vehicles, led by a U.S.-
+
+supplied MRAP, designed to withstand roadside bombs.
+
+While the closest villages appeared abandoned, the attackers soon encountered resistance as they turned toward Sinjar.
+
+In the distance, a vehicle sped toward the convoy from the direction of Syria.
+
+“Suicide bomber! Suicide bomber!” Brig. Gen. Rawan Barzani, the special forces commander and son of the Kurdish region’s president, radioed to his men on the front line. The convoy fired two antitank missiles, but they missed. Another finally hit as the car neared the convoy, and a plume of gray smoke rose into the air.
+
+[The Islamic State’s attacks on Yazidis constitute genocide, report says]
+
+Sinjar lies on Highway 47, the route used by the Islamic State to transport fighters, weapons and commodities such as oil.
+
+“Getting Sinjar is crucial because then [the Islamic State] has to decide between Raqqa and ­Mosul,” the group’s stronghold in northern Iraq, Barzani said. “It won’t be able to hold both.”
+
+Kurdish commanders said they expected the offensive to last about a week. Despite quick progress made Thursday, few believed the fighting in the city will be easy.
+
+Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said that advisers from the United States and other countries were taking part in the Sinjar operation but declined to provide the number of foreign forces involved.
+
+“Most of those folks . . . are behind the front lines, advising and working directly with peshmerga commanders,” Cook said. “There are some advisers who are on Sinjar Mountain, assisting in the selection of airstrike targets.”
+
+British officials said they are also supporting the operation. “The Royal Air Force has been playing a full part in coalition reconnaissance and strike missions to provide effective air support to them and other Iraqi ground forces,” a Defense Ministry spokesman said.
+
+U.S. officials estimate that about 400 to 550 Islamic State militants are in the city.
+
+Lt. Col. Dilgash Zebari, a peshmerga commander, said militants have dug tunnels and hideaways in the city. “We’ve had suicide bombers; we are expecting more when we go inside,” he said.
+
+If the offensive bogs down, ­rivalries between various factions fighting the Islamic State will be to blame, Zebari said.
+
+The long-planned operation had stalled for weeks because of bad weather and political wrangling between factions of Kurdish soldiers. Fighters affiliated with the Turkish-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, have held positions in the city, but Kurdish peshmerga forces launching the offensive said they are not directly coordinating with them.
+
+“If the liberation takes too long, it will be because of having troops from different parties, each of them flying their own flag,” said Zebari.
+
+The Kurdish-led efforts also have significance in the wider ­efforts to cripple the Islamic State. In Syria, Kurdish militiamen emerged as a linchpin in Pentagon plans after the failure of Washington’s strategy to arm and train other Syrian rebel units to fight the Islamic State.
+
+Syrian Kurds have waged a ­series of strikes against the Islamic State and last year withstood the group’s siege of Kobane, a town near the Turkish border.
+
+But the rising profile of Kurdish fighters poses potential complications for the U.S.-led alliance. Turkey, a NATO member that has battled PKK separatists for decades, has deep concerns over growing Kurdish political and military influence, fearing it could encourage greater calls for autonomy.
+
+The U.S. military said Thursday that it dispatched an additional six F-15E fighter jets to the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey to join the air campaign against the Islamic State.
+
+Bryan Murphy, Missy Ryan and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.
+
+Sinjar was escape route or trap for thousands
+
+Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
+6970,BAHAHA! Wanna bet Hillary made THIS face when she found out about the FBI? [photo],"— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) October 28, 2016 
+She did finally land … Everyone at Hillary's Cedar Rapids ""rally"" knew about the FBI reopening the case before she did. pic.twitter.com/WoPaBmhF3v 
+— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) October 28, 2016 
+Sounds like there was a wait on the tarmac for Hillary … but it supposedly wasn’t FBI story related. Clinton delay on tarmac wasn't about the FBI, it turns out. Pool report notes that Annie Leibovitz came off after, likely had a photo shoot. pic.twitter.com/xE5pm3ITRC 
+— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) October 28, 2016 
+Photo shoot must be code for a “holy crap, what do we do with this FBI thing” meeting. Trending",FAKE
+5939,Comment on The Science is “Overwhelming At This Point” Wifi Industry Appeals Brain Tumor Association Ordinance by THE SCIENCE IS “OVERWHELMING AT THIS POINT” WIFI INDUSTRY APPEALS BRAIN TUMOR ASSOCIATION ORDINANC - WAKING SCIENCE,"  This ordinance is a big step forwards by creating awareness about this topic, which is clearly something we need more of. It specifically requires all cellphone retailers in the area to provide consumers with a notice on radio frequency (RF) radiation exposure and the proper guidelines to help users avoid this type of exposure. Warnings may include the dangers associated with carrying a phone in a shirt, pants, tucked into a bra or anywhere else on a person that may exceed federal safety guidelines. The ordinance was created with the help of Lawrence Lessig, a Law Professor at Harvard University, and Robert Post, the Dean of Yale Law School, as well as the California Brain Tumor Association, who believes, along with hundreds of other scientists, that the research is sound. In retaliation, the wireless industry has filed an appeal against the ordinance. Notifying consumers of the harms associated with cell phone use at the point of sale would clearly hurt their profits. Some companies already have warnings in their packaging, but it’s only found in the fine print and isn’t mentioned at the point of sale. For example, here’s a statement from Apple about the issue, who already has existing safety recommendations for cellphone use; however, most people don’t know about them: “To reduce exposure to RF energy, use a hands-free option, such as the built-in speakerphone, the supplied headphones, or other similar accessories. Carry iPhone at least 10mm away from your body to ensure exposure levels remain at or below the as-tested levels. Cases with metal parts may change the RF performance of the device, including its compliance with RF exposure guidelines, in a manner that has not been tested or certified.” ( source )   A similar statement from Blackberry reads as follows: “Use hands-free operation if it is available and keep the BlackBerry device at least 0.59 in (15mm) from your body (including the abdomen of pregnant women)… ( source ) The issue here is that Berkeley citizens and most other cell-phone users are completely unaware of these guidelines and the dangers surrounding cell phone usage, which has obviously been downplayed by the industry. For example, a poll conducted by Lessig and his colleague before the ordinance was finalized found that: 74% of Berkeley residents carry their cell phones against their bodies 70% said they didn’t know that cell phones were tested assuming they would not be carried against the body 80 % said they might change their behavior if they knew knowing that “radiation tests to assure the safety of cell phones assume a cell phone would be carried away from your body” 85 % said they had never known or read any of the manufacturer’s recommendations 82% said they would want this information made available to them at the time they purchased their cell phone. The underlying purpose of this poll, and the ordinance in general, is to shed light on the apparent disconnect that exists between the current safety recommendations and customer knowledge and understanding of those recommendations. Here’s the text of the required notice, as Lessig writes in his blog : “The City of Berkeley requires that you be provided the following notice: To assure safety, the Federal Government requires that cell phones meet radio frequency (RF) exposure guidelines. If you carry or use your phone in a pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is ON and connected to a wireless network, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation. This potential risk is greater for children. Refer to the instructions in your phone or user manual of information about how to use your phone safety.” This is a Very Minimal Requirement Despite the fact that informing customers of the dangers of cell phone usage is the ethical thing to do, the wireless industry has filed an appeal to stop this effort. Specifically, CTIA (wireless association) filed the appeal after a judge ruled in favor of the ordinance. However, the California Brain Tumour Association claims that: One of the members of the three-judge panel, Michelle Friedland, is married to Daniel Kelly, a DSP senior engineer with Tarana Wireless Inc. and has worked on the 5G technology for the upcoming rollout to the market. According to the California Brain Tumor Association, AT&T is a major investor in Tarana, which also has a past chief technology officer of Ericsson and Sony Mobile sitting on its board of directors. The association also assumes that Kelly is a stockholder in Tarana, giving him a vested interest in the wireless industry…. If a judge has any financial interest in a controversy before her, she should have rescued herself from the case…Just the fact that her husband is in the industry and the timeliness of this with the 5G rollout is probably enough for her to rescue herself. ( source ) Below is a picture of Tom Wheeler, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair & former Senior Lobbyist, announcing the roll out of 5G microwave technology. So, what exactly is happening here? Basically, the privatization of this rollout may remove oversight and standards. Unfortunately, big industry has paid off the scientists, bought the lawmakers, and ruled the proliferation of microwaves and other phenomena as “safe.” A powerful group of people have infiltrated these organizations along with most international health agencies. “The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.” – ( source )( source ) Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal The Science Dr. Joel M. Moskowtiz, the Director and Principal Investigator at the Center for Family and Community Health at Berkeley School of Health, and Dr. Martin Blank of the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics and Colombia University, are two out of hundreds of scientists from more than 30 countries who have produced more than 2,000 peer-reviewed articles about the hazardous effects of RF radiation. All of these scientists united together and formally signed and sent a letter to the United Nations requesting more thorough and unbiased research be performed regarding the dangers of RF radiation. Below is a video of Dr. Blank outlining the potential hazards associated with these devices: HERE is a video of him giving a lecture about the issue. Did you know that The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified radio frequency fields (including those from cell phones) as a possible carcinogen in 2011? (source) The dangers of cell phone usage gained significant mainstream credibility in 2011 when the World Health Organization (WHO) admitted that cell phone radiation may cause cancer. The statement was based off a cumulative decision made by a team of 31 scientists from 14 different countries after reviewing evidence in support of their claim. You can read more about that HERE. It’s pretty startling news, especially given the fact that a child’s brain absorbs much more radiation than that of an adult. Below is a video of Dr. Devra Davis, one of the most well-respected and credentialed researchers on the dangers of cellphones: “[A] cellphone is a two-way microwave radio…Industry has fought successfully to use the phrase ‘radiofrequency energy’ instead of microwave radiation. Because they know radiofrequency energy sounds fine. We listen to music with radios. Everybody needs more energy. What could be better than that? But radiofrequency energy is another word for microwave radiation. If people understood that they were holding a two-way microwave-radiating device next to their brain or next to their reproductive organs, they might think differently about it.” ( source ) Things You Can Do To Limit Your Exposure & Why You Shouldn’t Worry Worrying is pointless, and solves nothing. That being said, coming across such information can be scary, and that’s the last reaction you should have; after all, our thoughts feelings and emotions alone have shown to have a significant effect on our biology, and letting go of fear could possibly be the first step in helping you limit the effect that EMFs could be having on your body. That being said, here are some others measures you can take: As Dr. Mercola points out, until the industry starts taking this matter seriously, the responsibility to keep children safe falls on the parents. To minimize the risk to your brain, and that of your child, pay heed to the following advice: Don’t let your child use a cell phone . Barring a life-threatening emergency, children should not use a cell phone, or a wireless device of any type. Children are far more vulnerable to cell phone radiation than adults, because of their thinner skull bones. Keep your cell phone use to a minimum. Turn your cell phone off more often. Reserve it for emergencies or important matters. As long as your cell phone is on, it emits radiation intermittently, even when you are not actually making a call. Use a land line at home and at work. Reduce or eliminate your use of other wireless devices. Just as with cell phones, it is important to ask yourself whether or not you really need to use them every single time. If you must use a portable home phone, use the older kind that operates at 900 MHz. They are no safer during calls, but at least some of them do not broadcast constantly even when no call is being made. You can measure your exposure from your cordless phone is to measure with an electrosmog meter, and it must be one that goes up to the frequency of your portable phone. As many portable phones are 5.8 Gigahertz, we recommend you look for RF meters that go up to 8 Gigahertz. You can find RF meters at EMFSafetyStore.com . Even without an RF meter, you can be fairly certain your portable phone is problematic if the technology is labeled DECT, or digitally enhanced cordless technology. Alternatively, you can be very careful with the base station placement as that causes the bulk of the problem since it transmits signals 24/7, even when you aren’t talking. “If you can keep the base station at least three rooms away from where you spend most of your time, and especially your bedroom, they may not be as damaging to your health. Ideally it would be helpful to turn off or disconnect your base station every night before you go to bed.” – Dr Mercola Limit cell phone use to areas with excellent reception. The weaker the reception, the more power your phone must use to transmit, and the more power it uses, the more radiation it emits, and the deeper the dangerous radio waves penetrate into your body. Ideally, you should only use your phone with full bars and good reception. Avoid carrying your cell phone on your body, and do not sleep with it under your pillow or near your head. Ideally, put it in your purse or carrying bag. Placing a cell phone in your bra or in a shirt pocket over your heart is asking for trouble, as is placing it in a man’s pocket if he seeks to preserve his fertility. The most dangerous place to be, in terms of radiation exposure, is within about six inches of the emitting antenna. You do not want any part of your body within that area while the phone is on. Don’t assume one cell phone is safer than another. There’s no such thing as a “safe” cell phone. Respect others; many are highly sensitive to EMF. Some people who have become sensitive can feel the effects of others’ cell phones in the same room, even when it is on but not being used. If you are in a meeting, on public transportation, in a courtroom or other public places, such as a doctor’s office, keep your cell phone turned off out of consideration for the “secondhand radiation” effects. Children are also more vulnerable, so please avoid using your cell phone near children. Use a well-shielded wired headset: Wired headsets will certainly allow you to keep the cell phone farther away from your body. However, if a wired headset is not well-shielded — and most of them are not — the wire itself can act as an antenna attracting and transmitting radiation directly to your brain. So make sure the wire used to transmit the signal to your ear is shielded . One of the best kinds of headsets use a combination of shielded wire and air-tube. These operate like a stethoscope, transmitting the sound to your head as an actual sound wave; although there are wires that still must be shielded, there is no wire that goes all the way up to your head. Tips for Avoiding Dirty Electricity Risks Additional options to minimize your risks from dirty electricity, compiled by Paula Owens, M.S. for the Ahwatukee Foothill News, include: 13 “Avoid using laptop computers on your lap. Switch out compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs for incandescent light bulbs. Consider replacing Wi-Fi routers with Ethernet cables. Avoid electric water beds, blankets and heating pads. Remove electrical devices from your sleeping area. If you must use an electric alarm clock, keep it at least five inches from your body when sleeping. Or, opt for a battery-operated clock. Move power strips at least three inches away from your feet. Switch to flat-screen TVs and computer monitors as these emit less EMFs than the older styles. If you live in close vicinity to or underneath electrical wires, power lines or cell phone towers, you may want to consider moving. Stand three to four feet away from microwave ovens when in use [or stop using them altogether]. Consider shielding devices to reduce EMFs from cell phones, cordless phones and landline speaker phones. Ask your electric utility provider to remove wireless smart meters and replace them with a wired smart meter. Walk barefoot on the sand, grass or dirt. This common practice known as earthing or grounding allows the healing negative ions from the ground to flow into our body and have been shown to reduce stress hormones and inflammation. Use 100 percent beeswax candles and Himalayan salt lamps in your home and office to absorb EMFs from the air. Salt lamps serve as natural room ionizers, emitting negative ions into the environment that effectively bind with all the excess positive ions, reducing EMFs, killing bacteria and purifying the air.” 
+
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+10016,"“We won, you lost, get over it” Brexiters told outside High Court","Thursday 3 November 2016 “We won, you lost, get over it” Brexiters told outside High Court 
+Brexit supporters have been ‘gently encouraged’ to accept the rule of law and allow parliament to vote on whether Article 50 should be triggered. 
+The High Court has ruled that Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the European Union, leaving all Brexit supporters having to get over it. 
+Remain campaigner, Simon Williams, told us, “The entire Brexit movement is really big on accepting results, so we have no doubts whatsoever that they will give a knowing nod at this result and simply get over it. 
+“I shouldn’t imagine there’ll be a single dissenting voice to be heard anywhere in their ranks, as they tell each other they lost fair and square, and it’s time to move on with their lives. 
+“After all, when you lose, you’ve got to try and get over it. That is the only option available to losers, as they have taught us all so well over the last few months. 
+“Of course, they might want to try and overthrow the democratic rule of law, but then we might find we get some new portmanteaus like ‘crying Brexitears’ and ‘throwing a Brexitantrum’.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently witterings below - why not add your own? ",FAKE
+9203,Political Correctness for Yuengling Brewery; What About Our Opioid Epidemic?,"We Are Change 
+
+In today’s political climate even our beer is up for debate. And why shouldn’t it be? This is America. We debate things here. That’s how democracy works. (At least when the issues aren’t taboo.) Recently, it’s shown up in the state of Pennsylvania with Eric Trump, Donald Trump’s son, garnering an endorsement for the Republican candidate from Yuengling, America’s oldest brewery.
+And now the debate turns to political action.
+With the most recent statement from Richard “Dick” Yuengling Jr., the 73-year-old owner of D. G. Yuengling & Son’s, located in Pottsville, Pennsylvania — the seat of Schuylkill County — Yuengling said that his company was “behind” Trump. Inevitably, a lashing out occurred in the digital realm with regard to political correctness and expressively personal views. Customers weren’t pleased. They were offended. In fact, some even claimed that they’d never drink Yuengling again.
+This is what democracy is, and should be. Sure. And yet, something is lost in the politicized scramble of this ugly election year.
+A Pennsylvania state representative, Brian Sims, announced on his Facebook page that he was saying “GOOD BYE” to Yuengling Brewery.
+“I’m not normally one to call for boycotts but I absolutely believe that how we spend our dollars is a reflection of our votes and values! Supporting Yuengling Brewery, that uses my dollars to bolster a man, and an agenda, that wants to punish me for being a member of the LGBT community and punish the black and brown members of my community for not being white, is something I’m too smart and too grown up to do.” 
+Sims represents the 182nd district of Philadelphia , which includes a majority of Center City, in addition to parts of Rittenhouse Square, Grays Ferry, and South Philadelphia. I live here. I walk those areas of the city.
+And I see, feel, and hear other elements of our society that go unnoticed or receive little to no attention. To observe this sort of outcry against a presidential candidate is expectantly what democracy was birthed upon, as we know in the city of Philadelphia. We take action. (We like to think.) However, along the way I’ve seen the incessant results of many issues that get buried, in favor of political expediency and trending topics that ultimately define our aggressive actions towards “voting with our dollars”.
+If that’s the case, then what about all the other detriments to our standard of living? For instance, the opiate epidemic that is sweeping Pennsylvania and the surrounding states and the rest of the country by storm.
+According to a June 2016 report from the Philadelphia Department of Public Health , entitled “The Epidemic of Overdoses From Opioids in Philadelphia”, drug deaths involving the fatal use of opioids, from 2000-2014, had tripled. In 2014, approximately 47,000 people died from overdoses in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). Sixty-one percent of that total was attributed to the use of opioids.
+“Since 1999, the number of prescriptions for pharmaceutical opioid pain relievers in the U.S. more than quadrupled.” 
+Opioid-related overdose deaths in Philadelphia were nearly three times higher in men than among women in 2015. Those deaths were also more than two times as high among whites, as opposed to deaths among African Americans.
+Between 2003 and 2015, in Philadelphia, cocaine and benzodiazepines were detected in overdose deaths in tandem with opioids at a rate of 70% and 90%, respectively. During that same period, overdose deaths related to heroin more than doubled in the city, with approximately 400 deaths reported in 2015.
+In that same year, there were nearly 700 drug overdose deaths in Philadelphia. That’s more than twice as many deaths from homicide in that same year.
+From 2014-2015, 10% of the nearly 1,300 overdose deaths in Philadelphia were from non-residents. Most of those non-residents were people from New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and other parts of Pennsylvania.
+Once the president is elected, these issues won’t go away. In fact, they’re extant — some as a surrogate to the system we attribute to healthcare. (One of the most hotly contested issues of partisan bickering in the country.)
+Additionally, these effects are increasingly felt in Philadelphia hospitals.
+“The percentage of Philadelphia hospital emergency department visits related to opioid overdoses increased from approximately 0.4% in 2007 to nearly 0.7% in 2015. In 2015, there were over 6,500 emergency department visits for opioid overdoses. For each opioid-related death, there were approximately 12 hospital emergency department visits.” 
+So while the country politically corrects itself — whatever that means — myriad issues get buried beneath picking and choosing a side, in response to the emotional disturbances of partisan bickering.
+Rather than dealing with facts, the web of society becomes entangled with He Said, She Said.
+Ultimately, this coercive cultural backwardness and evolutionary substandard, the rattle-mouthed bickering of intellectual thought and deceptive, manipulative action, that matches up more closely with the reptilian species, rather than the spirit of the human heart and the cultural celebration of life and all its wonder, is exactly what gave rise to Trump.
+And our opioid epidemic.
+Somewhere along the way, the facts were buried beneath the lie. And the truth has become something else, entirely.
+ 
+Sources
+http://www.phillyvoice.com/beer-drinkers-disavow-yuengling-after-owner-shows-support-for-trump/ 
+The post Political Correctness for Yuengling Brewery; What About Our Opioid Epidemic? appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+1020,"As Always, U.S. Adores a Good Sex Scandal","Amid the hand-wringing over the gutter-level sexual exchanges between Trump and Cruz, it doesn’t hurt to remember that it has been ever thus in American politics.
+
+The innuendos flying back and forth between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump about the mutual sexual peccadillos of the candidates and their wives has elicited an abundance of hand-wringing over how such mud-slinging has dragged presidential politics into the gutter. Actually, it has returned it to the steamy, if seamy, flow of American history that harkens back to the Founding Fathers. The only surprise is that pundits affect to be surprised by this turn of events. In fact, sexual indiscretion and its consequences are an indelible part of our nation’s political tradition
+
+The issue is not whether our forbears who attained, or aspired to, the White House were plaster saints but, rather, how the times in which they lived responded to their behavior. The ink had hardly dried on the Constitution in 1791 when our first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, entered into a liaison with Maria Reynolds, whose scoundrel of a husband, James, blackmailed Hamilton in return for his silence, further implicating Hamilton in corruption charges. It wasn’t until six years later that Hamilton’s political enemies exposed the affair. Hamilton responded by coming clean, admitting that he’d slept with the lady but denying the corruption charges. His response won him points for candor but the mud never quite came unstuck.
+
+Ted Cruz might not want to follow the path pursued by Andrew Jackson, who killed Charles Dickinson in a duel in 1806 for impugning the reputation of Jackson’s wife, Rachel. The duel did nothing to mar Jackson’s reputation, as evidenced by his being elected president two decades later. The more notorious sexual scandal of Jackson’s political career occurred during his presidency when he insisted on defending the virtue of Peggy Eaton, the wife of his War Secretary, John Eaton. Peggy, a local tavern keeper’s daughter disparaged in Washington society for her allegedly easygoing ways, was shunned by the wives of Jackson’s cabinet. What started out as a contretemps of social snubs soon grew into a full-blown political schism. Eaton eventually resigned, but Jackson revenged himself on his recalcitrant cabinet members by dismissing several of them. Jackson won the battle but at a cost that contributed to a growing schism in the Democratic Party.
+
+A different set of circumstances entirely arose from two men who entered the White House as bachelors: James Buchanan (1857-1861) and Grover Cleveland, who served two terms in the Gilded Age. There, their similarities end. Buchanan was rumored to have had a homosexual friendship with William Rufus King, himself a former vice president, whom Jackson disparagingly referred to as “Miss Nancy.” The real scandal of Buchanan’s tenure was his virtual abdication of executive responsibility as the nation unraveled in the months leading up to the Civil War.
+
+Grover Cleveland was another story. Running as a reforming Democrat in 1884, he was vilified by his Republican enemies as the father of an out-of-wedlock son whom he’d sired during an earlier sojourn in Buffalo. The GOP, which had run the bribe-receptive Sen. James G. Blaine against Cleveland, sought to detract from their own candidate’s turpitude by sullying Cleveland’s reputation. Cleveland was mocked with the chants of “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?” accompanied by cartoons lampooning the errant father who’d abandoned his illegitimate son. Cleveland turned the tables on his tormenters by acknowledging responsibility for the boy and providing for his welfare, although he never fully owned up to admitting paternity. The exposure may have dented his campaign but didn’t derail it as he went on to win the White House.
+
+Then there was Warren Harding, the first president to be elected with the women’s vote, who displayed his fondness for the ladies by maintaining a long-term affair with his best friend’s wife, Carrie Phillips, when he was elected in 1920, and, for good measure, embarking on a second liaison in the White House with the youngish Nan Britton. Their trysts led to the birth of an illegitimate daughter, Elizabeth. Monthly payments to the parties involved assured their discretion. Harding’s tenure was ushered in by Prohibition and the ensuing Jazz Age. But his teetotaling supporters came to have greater concerns than rumors of randy hijinks in the Executive Office when the Teapot Dome scandal blew the roof off the GOP White House.
+
+The age of Democratic ascendancy, which roughly stretched from the New Deal through the Great Society, provided an Era of Good Feeling where the human lapses of our Chief Executives were overlooked by a forgiving press. It was only after their tenures that a more prurient, or judgmental, posterity examined their private affairs more closely. Thus, the discreet indiscretions of Franklin Roosevelt with Lucy Mercer and Missy LeHand (or, for that matter, Eleanor with Lorena Hickock), Jack Kennedy’s serial philandering, or LBJ’s randy ways, were all suppressed  by a media that was more concerned with presidential policies than peccadillos.
+
+With the sexual abandon of the Cultural Revolution came a new approach to residents of the Oval Office or aspirants for the job. Those who sought or won the post, for the most part, had the same human frailties as their predecessors. The difference was in the Anything Goes approach of the media, whetted by the success of exposing the Watergate scandal and abetted by a technological revolution that made what was once the province of intimacy the source of prurient interest under the rubric of “the public’s right to know.” Watergate, whatever its virtues, made the president fair game and encouraged an “investigative” journalism that devolved from monitoring public malfeasance to invading what had once been considered private affairs.
+
+So by the 1988 campaign, when Democratic Sen. Gary Hart’s presidential hopes and political career became caught in the maw of tabloid journalism and left to the mercies of reporters on the scent of sexual scandal, the quest for the presidency had become an adjunct of the entertainment industry. The Oscars for this spectacle went to the Clinton impeachment proceedings.
+
+Donald Trump took it to the next logical step from turning a candidate into a celebrity to simply making a celebrity a candidate. Americans love a circus and the circus has now come to town, or rather the electronic Town Hall of social media, digital dazzle, squawk radio, and cable wrestling that passes for discourse in our political arena. The unrestrained passions of partisan politics and party faction that Washington futilely warned against were there from the beginning. They have simply been amplified by technology. The list cited above is a short one.",REAL
+4030,Migrants Refuse To Leave Train At Refugee Camp In Hungary,"Migrants Refuse To Leave Train At Refugee Camp In Hungary
+
+Thousands of migrants flooded into a train station in the Hungarian capital Thursday after police lifted a two-day blockade, but some who boarded a train they thought was going to Germany ended up instead at a refugee camp just miles from Budapest.
+
+The Associated Press reports that ""excited migrants piled into a newly arrived train at the Keleti station in Hungary's capital despite announcements in Hungarian and English that all services from the station to Western Europe had been canceled. A statement on the main departures board said no more trains to Austria or Germany would depart 'due to safety reasons until further notice!'
+
+""Many migrants, who couldn't understand either language and were receiving no advice from Hungarian officials, scrambled aboard in a standing-room-only crush and hoped for the best,"" the AP said.
+
+Scuffles broke out when police ordered the passengers off the train at Bicske, according to the BBC.
+
+Meanwhile, Hungary's prime minister says his country is doing all it can to manage a growing migrant crisis, even as European officials said they will meet this month in Brussels to discuss an effort to ""strengthen the European response"" to the situation.
+
+Viktor Orban said the influx of refugees into his country is really ""a German problem"" because that is the intended destination for most of them. Hungarians, along with other Europeans, are ""full of fear"" he says, because ""they see that the European leaders, among them the prime ministers, are not able to control the situation.""
+
+""If we would create an image ... just come because we are ready to accept everybody, that would be a moral failure, because that is not the case,"" Orban said after a meeting with European Parliament President Martin Schulz, according to The Washington Post. ""The moral human thing is to make clear, please don't come. Why do you have to go from Turkey to Europe? Turkey is a safe country. Stay there. It's risky to come.""
+
+Meanwhile, Voice of America reports that British, French and German officials have called for urgent action and plan to hold talks on Sept. 14 in Brussels to address the crisis.
+
+VOA reports: ""The three ministers also called for better processing of migrants in Italy and Greece.""
+
+As we've reported, the United Nations believes that more than 300,000 migrants have set out for Europe from North Africa and the Middle East on the Mediterranean Sea so far this year, a 40 percent increase on all of last year.
+
+As NPR's Middle East editor Larry Kaplow writes: ""On any given day now, hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, are drifting in ships or clinging to boats that are little more than inflatable rafts. They go in other ways, too. Jumping fences in Morocco to get to Spanish territory. Cramming into trucks from Turkey. Riding trains across Europe.""",REAL
+1760,Biden previews battle against Clinton,The president refuses to say he’d hold to the tradition of avoiding public comment or political attacks on the successor.,REAL
+5585,Links 11/11/16,"Ten-Step Program for Adjusting to President-Elect Trump New York Times. Actually not bad. 
+Donald Trump Ran on Protecting Social Security But Transition Team Includes Privatizers / Intercept (martha r). Looks like the answer as to whether Trump was getting rolled by the Republican establishment is coming pretty quickly. Remember that Trump doesn’t owe Wall Street anything; this appears to be the result of turning to Republican “experts”. 
+Trump Recruiting Among the Lobbyists He Once Denounced New York Times. 
+Donald Trump: JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon Being Considered for Treasury Fortune (resilc). Wonder if Trump is running this trial balloon to make Elizabeth Warren see red and make Trump’s good buddy Carl Ichan look good by comparison. 
+Trump’s Transition Team Works to Form Cabinet Wall Street Journal. Story flogs Hensarling as a possible Treasury Secretary candidate (gah!) along with other scary ideas. But I tend to discount this because Hensarling is a buddy of Pence, and so far, Trump’s interactions with Pence have featured lots of friction. And Hensarling is plenty useful to Trump right where he is now. Let’s hope this reading proves to be correct. 
+U.S. consumer financial agency could be defanged under Trump Reuters 
+Trump Ascends to the Cherry Blossom Throne – Tyler Sic Semper Tyrannis (Kfathi). A contrary view to the links above, and today’s must read. Bear in mind that he exaggerates the role of Soros in US politics (Eastern Europe is a completely different kettle of fish). Too many other squillionaires throwing $ at candidates and think tanks. See his comment about John Bolton in particular (mind you I don’t see how anyone can think Bolton is a good idea), and his warning: “Instead, my friends on the Left, worry that he will not only do what he said he would, but he’ll go above and beyond, and the people will love him for it.” But this cheery reading discounts the difficulty Trump will have in securing the ability to govern. Saboteurs on what is nominally your side are a tougher obstacle than external opponents. 
+Blankfein Says Trump Infrastructure Commitment Good for Growth Bloomberg (resilc) 
+Before Taking the White House, Trump Due in Court over Fraud Vanity Fair. A President’s power of pardon is absolute save for impeachment, so Trump could pardon himself. But would he dare? And I’m not an expert on immigration law, but it’s hard to see how Trump is on shaky legal ground in deporting undocumented aliens. Other countries do it all the time. Try overstaying your visa and watch what happens if you get caught out. 
+Trump Shows Every Sign of Carrying Out Sweeping Immigration Crackdown Bloomberg. If Trump moves too fast on deportations, as opposed to policy changes (as in relying on loud noises, including warnings to employers, to induce many undocumented workers to leave of their own accord), Trump could precipitate sustained and serious protests. But the Feds may lack the staffing to increase deportations all that much near term. 
+Record Numbers of Undocumented Immigrants Being Detained in U.S. Bloomberg. Resilc: “Last I checked a demo has been in control since 2008.” 
+Trump bucks protocol on press access Associated Press. Lambert: “And where were they when Clinton didn’t hold a press conference for ~300 days?” 
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/58393 . Martha r: 
+When you go to the link, click on Attachment to download the pdf of the 9-page report. 
+from the bottom of page 6: 
+OTHER INSIGHTS: Based on group discussion, and debate exercises distributed prior to the debate. By the Numbers • Who won the debate: 27 to 2(or 3*) in favor of Sanders • Who is more electable in November: 15 to 13 in favor of Sanders • Who has a stronger message: 17 to 11 in favor of Sanders • Who will win the South Carolina primary: 10 for Sanders, 9 for Clinton, and 11 unsure • Who moved undecided voters: 14 lean Sanders, 2 lean Clinton, 14 remain undecided *One of the HRC supporters was uncertain about her position post group. 
+The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why. FiveThirtyEight. Resilc: “Because they are a con and mumbo jumbo?” Moi: Notice how Silver focuses on how “pollsters” missed to exculpate his own failings. As Keynes said: 
+A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.",FAKE
+5701,VIDEO : Sean Hannity “The American People Have Finally Been Heard” – TruthFeed,"VIDEO : Sean Hannity “The American People Have Finally Been Heard” VIDEO : Sean Hannity “The American People Have Finally Been Heard” Videos By TruthFeedNews November 10, 2016 
+Sean Hannity Reacts to Trump’s Historic Victory. 
+“The Washington Establishment is TERRIFIED and they should be. These people do NOT get it. I’m going to try to explain it to them.” 
+Watch the video: 
+Support the Trump Presidency and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+3777,"Mike Brown Family Suing Ferguson, Wilson","Michael Brown’s parents plan to bring a civil lawsuit for the wrongful death of their son against Darren Wilson and the city of Ferguson, Missouri. The announcment came a day after the Justice Department released its report on the abuses of the city’s police department and said Wilson wouldn’t be charged for violating Brown’s civil rights. Brown family lawyers note that the burden of proof is lower in a civil case than the criminal cases that were considered by both the federal government and a St. Louis County grand jury.",REAL
+10394,SWEDISH OUTRAGE as Muslim colonizers get preference for housing while native Swedes are out in the cold,"A Swedish MP has lashed out after it was revealed Muslim freeloaders posing as refugees would be allowed to jump ahead of Swedish families in the housing queue. NOT ANYMORE! UK Express Earlier this month Express.co.uk reported several councils in the Scandinavian country are prioritising the requests of asylum seekers ahead of their own citizens, with Muslim migrants given housing straight away, despite Swedes being placed on a huge waiting list. Now 20 accommodations in Klippan, in south Sweden, are being prepared for Muslim migrants after a new policy demanded all available apartments owned by the municipal property company be put aside for asylum seekers. The move has been criticised by Therese Borg, of the Swedish Democrats (SD) party, as she argued the Muslim invaders should be placed on the list and wait their turn. Ms Borg said asylum seekers urgently needed to be placed on the list alongside regular people because hardworking citizens risked growing resentful of the preferential treatment. She told Nyheteridag : “You can see a lot of comments on Facebook. People are pissed off. “There are a lot of teenagers living at home and who are looking for [a small apartment] to move into as it is a good place to start [building a life]. “The small apartments are necessary for [the youth] moving out, but they are not offered them unless the newly arrivals decline to take the property.” Meanwhile aid workers helping migrants say they have been terrified by Muslim attacks which have left them too scared to leave their homes. The SD politician also said the council should start focusing on the migrants already living in the area, rather than focusing funds on asylum seekers who might arrive in the future. Lashing out against the Government and Migration Board, Ms Borg demanded they take responsibility for the migrants they have allowed into the country. Even worse, a lot of Swedish families are being kicked out of their homes in order to accommodate Muslim freeloaders: However, Bert-Inge Karlsson, of the Christian Democrats, blasted Ms Borg’s comments as he insisted her portrayal of the situation was out-of-touch with reality. Mr Karlsson said: “I [question] the way Theresa Borg has portrayed it as if we have an extraordinary housing crisis in the nation. How is it then possible for us to take in so incredibly many. “She has returned to the kind of insinuation… which suggests the entire world could be on its way here.” In March this year, Sweden passed a law requiring all municipalities accept and provide housing for migrants, allowing families and others on the waiting to be placed at the back of the queue. The turmoil nation, which has been plagued with increasing levels of violence and criminal activity , with three police officers quitting each day , is experiencing chronic housing shortages as a result of the country’s generous asylum and migration policies over the last decade.",FAKE
+7635,U.S. LAWMAKERS RAISE PRIVACY CONCERNS OVER NEW HACKING RULES,"Home › SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY › U.S. LAWMAKERS RAISE PRIVACY CONCERNS OVER NEW HACKING RULES U.S. LAWMAKERS RAISE PRIVACY CONCERNS OVER NEW HACKING RULES 0 SHARES [10/27/16] A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the U.S. Congress on Thursday asked the Justice Department to clarify how a looming rule change to the government’s hacking powers could impact privacy rights of innocent Americans. The change, due to take place on December 1, would let judges issue search warrants for remote access to computers located in any jurisdiction, potentially including foreign countries. Magistrate judges can normally only order searches within the jurisdiction of their court, which is typically limited to a few counties. “We are concerned about the full scope of the new authority that would be provided to the Department of Justice,” 23 senators and representatives wrote to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The Supreme Court in April approved amendments to Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure that would allow judges to issue warrants in cases when a suspect uses anonymizing technology to conceal the location of his or her computer or for an investigation into a network of hacked or infected computers, such as a botnet. Those amendments will take effect on December 1 of this year unless Congress passes legislation that would reject, amend or postpone the changes. Some lawmakers, led by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, have introduced legislation that would halt the changes, but it has yet to gain much traction. Post navigation",FAKE
+1742,Sanders’ challenge: Winning over Obama supporters,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+7258,U.S. Currency Hidden Images,"www.youtube.com 0 
+Hypothesis: There are Major Bombings that have been printed on the U.S. Currency many years BEFORE the events actually happened. 
+There is a common denominator between all the images and how they were spiritually discerned by what was recorded in the prophets of Isaiah spoken 2,700 years ago. 
+There are multiple layers of ink and watermarks printed on the bills when magnify appear to produce animations. Tags",FAKE
+244,GOP lands no solid punches while sparring with Clinton over Benghazi,"After 11 hours, a House committee’s questioning of Hillary Rodham Clinton provided few new details about the 2012 attacks on American installations in Benghazi, Libya – and no clear victory for Republicans seeking to trap Clinton in an admission of bad judgment.
+
+The marathon hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi concluded at 9 p.m. with a whimper. As the hours passed, Republican lines of questioning became increasingly opaque and partisan conflict riled members on both sides of the aisle.
+
+Clinton, maintaining calm throughout the hearing, received ample opportunity to defend her record and describe her commitment to the safety of U.S. personnel while serving as secretary of state. Only a handful of times did Republicans succeed in putting her on the spot, more often engaging Clinton on topics that seemed tangential to understanding the 2012 attacks that killed four Americans.
+
+Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), an ardent defender of the impartiality of his investigation, insisted the time was being put to good use.
+
+“Learning about the four people who died ... is worth whatever amount of political badgering that may come my way. I’ve seen the personification of courage and public service. I’m a better person for it,” he said late in the evening.
+
+Clinton only obliquely mentioned the conflict surrounding Gowdy’s panel, which two Republican lawmakers have suggested is politically motivated. “I recognize that there are many currents at work in this committee, but I can only hope that the statesmanship overcomes the partisanship,” she said.
+
+Republicans on the committee through the day had repeatedly asked Clinton about the special access she gave longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal, who sent reports about Libya to the private e-mail address that Clinton used for government business while she was secretary of state. They have contrasted that with the treatment of U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens, whose requests for greater security measures went through official channels and never bubbled up to Clinton’s desk.
+
+“Help us understand how Sidney Blumenthal had that kind of access to you, Madam Secretary, but the ambassador did not,” said Gowdy.
+
+The sharpest questions of the day came from Republicans Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Mike Pompeo (Kan.). Jordan accused Clinton of misleading the public about the 2012 attacks in order to help President Obama’s reelection prospects.
+
+“You picked the [account] with no evidence. You did it because Libya was supposed to be . . . this great success for the White House,” said Jordan, who charged that Clinton had blamed the attacks on reaction to an anti-Muslim video, while knowing that was false. “And now you have a terrorist attack. It’s a terrorist attack in Libya. And it’s just 56 days before an election.”
+
+Jordan was the first Republican in this hearing to spell out the alternate history of the Benghazi episode that many on the right believe is the correct one. He spoke rapidly, interrupting Clinton at times, and personally accusing her of falsehoods.
+
+“Where did the false narrative start? It started with you, madam secretary,” Jordan said. After his questioning period ended, Gowdy gave Clinton a chance to respond.
+
+“I wrote a whole chapter about this in my book, ‘Hard Choices.’ I’d be glad to send it to you,” Clinton said. “I think that the insinuations that you are making do a grave disservice” to those in government.
+
+Clinton said she had not intended to mislead, but instead had sought to make sense of confusing intelligence reports from Libya and other places where protesters had overrun American diplomatic installations. After that — prompted by a friendly Democratic congressman — Clinton told the committee that she had felt the loss of four Americans in Benghazi deeply.
+
+“It’s a very personally painful accusation” that she had misled the public, Clinton said. “Having it continued to be bandied around is deeply distressing to me. I would imagine that I’ve thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together. I’ve been wracking my brain about what could have been done, or should have been done.”
+
+In the next round, Jordan returned to the line of questioning. It became a parsing of a statement Clinton had issued about the attack afterward, with Clinton and Jordan arguing about whether Clinton had blamed an anti-Islam video as the cause of the Benghazi attacks. Jordan became animated as he asked the questions, repeating and re-stating his case in fast bursts.
+
+Clinton, on camera, smiled a small smile that indicated amused tolerance. Her answer was slow and utterly forgettable, which was the victory she wanted.
+
+[Clinton testifies — then and now]
+
+Pompeo pressed Clinton about why no one at the State Department had been fired in the aftermath of attacks.
+
+“Why don’t you fire someone?” Pompeo said. “How come no one has been held accountable to date?”
+
+Clinton responded that she had relied on inquiries into the attacks, which found that State Department officials had made mistakes but no misconduct rose to the level of a firing offense. “In the absence of finding dereliction or breach of duty, there could not be immediate action taken,” Clinton said.
+
+“The folks in Kansas don’t think that was accountability,” Pompeo said.
+
+Pompeo also asked Clinton a question related to her unusual e-mail arrangement, in which she used a private e-mail account — and a private e-mail server housed at her home in New York — to conduct State Department business. That meant that people with her e-mail address, including longtime friend Blumenthal, could reach her directly. Why, Pompeo asked, had she not been made aware of requests for greater security at U.S. outposts in Libya — passed through official State Department channels — but Blumenthal’s ideas about Libya got to her inbox?
+
+“He’s a friend of mine. He sent me information that he thought might be of interest,” Clinton said of Blumenthal. “He had no official position in the government, and he was not at all my adviser on Libya.”
+
+Republicans asked relatively few questions about the issue that has dogged Clinton’s presidential campaign — her use of a private e-mail account to conduct public business as secretary of state.
+
+They did not delve into Clinton’s e-mail practices until more than 9½ hours of the hearing had passed. At that point, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) aggressively said that Clinton has shifted her story on the topic and questioned whether she has now turned over all her work-related e-mails.
+
+Clinton merely repeated what she has said on the topic many times before — she said using a private account was a mistake but the State Department now has all of her work correspondence.
+
+[What Clinton’s e-mails tell us about her management style]
+
+Pompeo’s questions put Clinton on the defensive for the first time on Thursday, after other Republicans misfired with questions that strayed — in time or in subject matter — from the attacks that were supposed to be the hearing’s focus. It was damaging enough that the next Democratic questioner, Rep. Linda Sanchez (Calif.), played a video clip designed to attack Pompeo himself, in which TV journalist Andrea Mitchell told Pompeo that he was wrong to say Blumenthal was a major adviser for Clinton on Libya.
+
+But by 5:15 p.m., the hearing seemed to have lost steam.
+
+Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.) was no longer pressing Clinton about whether she’d fulfilled her duties as secretary of state – instead, she asked whether she had owed Stevens a personal phone call, because he was her friend.
+
+“Why did it not occur to you to pick up the phone and call your friend?” Roby asked. “I just want to hear from you why, with all this information…did it not occur to you to pick up the phone and call your friend, Ambassador Stevens, and ask him what he needed?”
+
+Clinton replied again that Stevens had been given the chance to make those requests through official channels.
+
+After an evening break, around 6:30 p.m., Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) sought to bring new vigor to the questioning. In a choreographed gesture, he tore a sheet of paper meant to symbolize Stevens’s requests for additional security in Benghazi. “You created an environment, Madam Secretary, where [requests] didn’t get through. They didn’t get through to you, they didn’t get through to your inner circle ... [the State Department] breached [its] fundamental duty to secure his safety,” he said.
+
+“I think it’s a disservice for you to make that statement,” Clinton replied.
+
+Democrats, as expected, have used their time to toss Clinton softballs — or to attack the existence of the committee itself. “The questions are increasingly badgering, I would even say increasingly vicious,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told Clinton late in the evening. “It seems to me that really, the majority simply wish to wear you down. It is clear that they are trying to attack you personally.”
+
+As the second round of questions came toward a close, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking Democrat, asked Clinton about an allegation that has circulated among conservatives for years: that she or somebody else in the Obama administration had told U.S. military personnel to “stand down,” and not rush to the rescue of those in Benghazi.
+
+“Of course not,” Clinton told the Maryland congressman. “Everybody in the military scrambled to see what they could do . . . logistics and distance made it unlikely that they could be anywhere near Benghazi in any kind of reasonable time.”
+
+Republicans – including Gowdy – seemed to hurt their own cause at times. Several spent their 10-minute periods on oddball lines of questioning: One pressed Clinton repeatedly about an e-mail exchange between two State Department staffers that Clinton said she did not know. Others loudly remarked that Clinton was reading notes passed from aides, a common practice at Washington hearings. Another spent several minutes trying to prod Clinton into saying she’d done something even more common than hearings: A politician taking credit for something.
+
+And, repeatedly, the Republicans were baited by Democrats into a time-wasting fight over whether this committee was a partisan tool, and if any of them should be there at all. Just before lunch break, Gowdy and several Democrats got into a loud argument about whether to release Blumenthal’s interview transcripts, while cameras showed Clinton shuffling papers.
+
+“I don’t know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of deaths of four Americans,” Clinton said to Gowdy, before the intra-legislator bickering began.
+
+For Clinton, her performance at the hearing was the continuation of a remarkable turnabout. As of several weeks ago, a revelation from this very committee – the existence of that private e-mail account – had put her on the defensive, and threatened to undermine her presidential campaign.
+
+But since then, she’s gotten help from another Democratic candidate: Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who said in the Democratic debate that he, like many Americans, was tired of hearing about the e-mails. A Republican, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) seemed to validate Clinton’s longtime contention that the committee was a partisan tool, not a real investigation.
+
+[The Fix: Why. Was. Hillary. Clinton. Speaking. So. Slowly?]
+
+In her opening statement, Clinton sought to portray herself as above political questions and to portray the panel as second-guessing the necessary risks taken by U.S. diplomats abroad.
+
+She began her testimony by naming the four dead. She said she’d known Stevens, recommended him for the job, and met his casket when it returned to American soil after the 2012 attacks.
+
+“Nobody knew the dangers of Libya better [than Stevens]. A weak government. Extremist groups. Rampant instability,” Clinton said. “But Chris chose to go to Benghazi because he knew that America had to be represented there at this critical time.”
+
+In her statement, Clinton sought to get in front of the day’s questions, which are likely to focus on the security precautions at the two American facilities where the four died. It was a “pre-buttal,” to use the political term, in which Clinton portrayed that kind of question as contrary to the spirit of diplomatic work.
+
+“Retreat from the world is not an option,” Clinton said. “America cannot shrink from our responsibility to lead.”
+
+Clinton ended her opening statement with an admonition to the committee itself, to ask questions that were not intended to undermine her politically.
+
+“I’m here. Despite all the previous investigations, and all the talk about partisan agendas, I’m here to honor those we lost,” Clinton said. “My challenge to you, members of this committee, is the same challenge I put to myself. Let’s be worthy of the trust the American people have bestowed upon us.”
+
+[Clinton needs to avoid a “what difference does it make” moment ]
+
+The committee’s chairman opened the hearing with a long defense of its right to exist. Gowdy began by talking about his own work — defending his committee from allegations that it is a partisan effort disguise as a fact-finding panel. That suggestion was made by a top member of the House GOP, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), a few weeks earlier. McCarthy, pressed to say what results the Republican majority had produced, noted that Clinton’s presidential poll numbers had declined after the House investigation began its work.
+
+“There are people — frankly in both parties — that have suggested that this investigation is about you. It is not,” said Gowdy, a former prosecutor elected to Congress in 2010. “It is about what happened before, during and after the attacks that killed them. It is about what this country owes to those who risk their lives to serve it. And it is about the fundamental responsibility of government to tell the truth.”
+
+Gowdy, in his opening statement, listed what he said were flaws in past investigations, saying they were either incomplete or too close to the Obama administration. He said that his committee was the first to discover valuable facts, including that Clinton had used a private e-mail server to conduct government business at the time of the attacks.
+
+He said that Clinton had not been interviewed on the Hill until now because of Clinton’s own e-mail arrangement, which meant she took valuable e-mails with her when she left office.
+
+“You kept the public record to yourself for almost two years,” Gowdy said. “And it was you and your attorneys who decided what to turn in and what to delete.”
+
+Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, followed Gowdy with his own opening statement — an attack on his own panel’s credibility. Cummings charged that the committee had passed up chances to interview other government officials, in order to focus on Clinton herself.
+
+“They set up this select committee with no rules, no deadline, and an unlimited budget. And they set them loose, madam secretary, because you’re running for president,” the Maryland congressman said. “Republicans are squandering millions of taxpayer dollars on this abusive effort to derail Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”
+
+Cummings noted comments from McCarthy and others that he said indicated the partisan nature of the committee’s work, under Gowdy’s leadership. He called the committee “this taxpayer-funded fishing expedition.”",REAL
+2806,"A nuclear deal has been reached, but Iran must free Jason Rezaian","JUST AS negotiators were completing an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program on Monday, Post reporter Jason Rezaian was summoned to a Tehran court for another session of his secret, irregular and blatantly political trial. We find it hard to believe this was a coincidence.
+
+Mr. Rezaian, a 39-year-old California native who was arrested just under a year ago, has been cruelly forced into an auxiliary role in the long negotiations between Tehran and a U.S.-led coalition — a pawn used by hard-liners to undermine goodwill, or perhaps to demonstrate that any accord Iran strikes with the West will not alter its repressive domestic regime or its anti-Western policies. The ordeal has inflicted untold physical and psychological suffering on a journalist who moved to Iran with the ambition of improving Americans’ understanding of its people and culture.
+
+Enough. Now that the nuclear deal is completed, it is past time for Iranian authorities to release Mr. Rezaian, along with two and possibly three other Americans imprisoned in the country, including pastor Saeed Abedini and retired U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati. President Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry have spoken hopefully of charting a new course in relations between the countries. If that is to happen, the release of the prisoners must be the first step.
+
+Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister who also has hinted at a new era of cooperation, ought to understand this imperative. He has called Mr. Rezaian a “friend” and “a good reporter”; he is clearly aware that there is no basis for the espionage charges brought against him. During the negotiations, Mr. Zarif dodged questions about the Post reporter and at one point even suggested, absurdly, that he might have been duped into wrongdoing. Now he and President Hassan Rouhani should be obliged to put a stop to a travesty that is showing them to be powerless to control the domestic hard-liners who seek to sabotage the nuclear agreement.
+
+An opportunity for clemency is imminent. According to Mr. Rezaian’s mother, Mary Breme Rezaian, her son should soon be eligible for release on bail. A law sets a detention limit of one year for Iranian detainees whose trials have not been completed. Mr. Rezaian is regarded by Iran as a citizen, so the provision should apply to him. He was taken from his home on July 22 along with his Iranian wife, Yeganeh Salehi, who is also on trial but has been released on bail.
+
+Though U.S. officials have raised Mr. Rezaian’s case and Mr. Obama publicly called for his release, his case and those of the other Americans were not part of the nuclear negotiation. While that may have been appropriate, Mr. Rezaian’s release should be a condition for any further improvement in relations. If the Rouhani government wishes to show that it can cooperate with the West on matters beyond its nuclear program, let it start by freeing Jason Rezaian.",REAL
+1734,"South Carolina, Nevada polls find Clinton far ahead","(CNN) With Hillary Clinton behind in New Hampshire and holding on to a narrowing margin over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in Iowa, new CNN/ORC polls in Nevada and South Carolina suggest Clinton holds strong support in the two states that could prove to be a firewall for her.
+
+Clinton has the support of 50% of those who say they are likely to attend the Democratic caucus scheduled for February 20 in Nevada -- which plays host to the first debate among the declared Democratic candidates on Tuesday and is the first state to elect delegates after Iowa and New Hampshire.
+
+Sanders follows at 34%, then Vice President Joe Biden at 12%, with the rest of the field garnering less than 1% support.
+
+After conceding the presidency to Trump in a phone call earlier, Clinton addresses supporters and campaign workers in New York on Wednesday, November 9. Her defeat marked a stunning end to a campaign that appeared poised to make her the first woman elected US president.
+
+Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Cleveland on November 6, two days before Election Day. She went on to lose Ohio -- and the election -- to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
+
+Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Cleveland on November 6, two days before Election Day. She went on to lose Ohio -- and the election -- to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
+
+Clinton arrives at a 9/11 commemoration ceremony in New York on September 11. Clinton, who was diagnosed with pneumonia two days before, left early after feeling ill. A video appeared to show her stumble as Secret Service agents helped her into a van.
+
+Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.
+
+Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.
+
+After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""
+
+After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""
+
+Clinton walks on her stage with her family after winning the New York primary in April.
+
+Clinton walks on her stage with her family after winning the New York primary in April.
+
+Clinton is reflected in a teleprompter during a campaign rally in Alexandria, Virginia, in October 2015.
+
+Clinton is reflected in a teleprompter during a campaign rally in Alexandria, Virginia, in October 2015.
+
+U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""
+
+U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""
+
+Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.
+
+Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.
+
+Clinton, now running for President again, performs with Jimmy Fallon during a ""Tonight Show"" skit in September 2015.
+
+Clinton, now running for President again, performs with Jimmy Fallon during a ""Tonight Show"" skit in September 2015.
+
+Clinton ducks after a woman threw a shoe at her while she was delivering remarks at a recycling trade conference in Las Vegas in 2014.
+
+Clinton ducks after a woman threw a shoe at her while she was delivering remarks at a recycling trade conference in Las Vegas in 2014.
+
+Obama and Clinton bow during the transfer-of-remains ceremony marking the return of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.
+
+Obama and Clinton bow during the transfer-of-remains ceremony marking the return of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.
+
+Clinton arrives for a group photo before a forum with the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2012. The forum was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
+
+Clinton arrives for a group photo before a forum with the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2012. The forum was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
+
+Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.
+
+Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.
+
+In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
+
+In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
+
+The Clintons pose on the day of Chelsea's wedding to Marc Mezvinsky in July 2010.
+
+The Clintons pose on the day of Chelsea's wedding to Marc Mezvinsky in July 2010.
+
+Clinton, as secretary of state, greets Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during a meeting just outside Moscow in March 2010.
+
+Clinton, as secretary of state, greets Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during a meeting just outside Moscow in March 2010.
+
+Obama is flanked by Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference in Chicago in December 2008. He had designated Clinton to be his secretary of state.
+
+Obama is flanked by Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference in Chicago in December 2008. He had designated Clinton to be his secretary of state.
+
+Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.
+
+Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.
+
+Clinton and another presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, applaud at the start of a Democratic debate in 2007.
+
+Clinton and another presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, applaud at the start of a Democratic debate in 2007.
+
+Sen. Clinton comforts Maren Sarkarat, a woman who lost her husband in the September 11 terrorist attacks, during a ground-zero memorial in October 2001.
+
+Sen. Clinton comforts Maren Sarkarat, a woman who lost her husband in the September 11 terrorist attacks, during a ground-zero memorial in October 2001.
+
+Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year.
+
+Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year.
+
+President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999.
+
+President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999.
+
+The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998.
+
+The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998.
+
+Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
+
+Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
+
+The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
+
+The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
+
+The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook ""It Takes a Village"" in 1997.
+
+The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook ""It Takes a Village"" in 1997.
+
+The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President.
+
+The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President.
+
+Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
+
+Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
+
+Clinton accompanies her husband as he takes the oath of office in January 1993.
+
+Clinton accompanies her husband as he takes the oath of office in January 1993.
+
+During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus.
+
+During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus.
+
+In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.
+
+In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.
+
+Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of ""60 Minutes"" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992.
+
+Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of ""60 Minutes"" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992.
+
+The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President.
+
+The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President.
+
+Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985.
+
+Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985.
+
+In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea.
+
+In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea.
+
+Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974.
+
+Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974.
+
+Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School.
+
+Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School.
+
+Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.
+
+Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.
+
+Among those who say they are likely to vote in South Carolina's primary, set for one week after Nevada's caucuses, Clinton holds a larger edge, 49% to Biden's 24%, with Sanders at 18% and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley at 3%.
+
+Should Biden decide to sit out the race for the presidency, Clinton's lead grows in both states. In South Carolina, a Biden-free race currently stands at 70% Clinton to 20% Sanders with O'Malley holding at 3%, and in Nevada, Clinton gains 8 points to 58%, while Sanders picks up just 2 points and would stand at 36%.
+
+In South Carolina, Clinton's advantages stem largely from Sanders' unpopularity with black voters, who made up a majority of Democratic primary voters in the state in 2008, the last time there was a competitive Democratic primary. Back then, black voters broke 78% for Barack Obama to 19% for Clinton.
+
+In the new poll, 59% of black voters say they back Clinton, 27% say Biden and just 4% for Sanders. Among white voters, Sanders has the edge, 44% to 31% for Clinton and 22% for Biden. Without Biden in the race, it's a near-even split among whites, 48% Clinton to 47% Sanders, while blacks break 84% to Clinton and just 7% would back Sanders.
+
+These two states, along with Iowa and New Hampshire, are the only ones permitted by both major parties to hold primaries or caucuses in February, and the outcome of the contests in these early states can make or break a presidential campaign.
+
+Clinton's stronger support in Nevada and South Carolina could bolster her campaign heading in to the large batch of ""Super Tuesday"" contests set to be held on March 1.
+
+In both Nevada and South Carolina, Clinton holds double-digit advantages as the candidate who would do the best job handling the economy, health care, race relations, foreign policy and climate change, and is broadly seen as the candidate with the best chance to win in 2016 (58% say so in South Carolina, 59% in Nevada).
+
+The margins between Clinton and Sanders narrow when it comes to which candidate is most honest and trustworthy (in South Carolina, 35% say Clinton, 27% Biden, 21% Sanders, in Nevada, 33% Sanders, 32% Clinton and 22% Biden), and in Nevada, on who best represents Democratic values (44% say Clinton, 37% Sanders) and understands the problems facing people like you (42% Clinton, 39% Sanders).
+
+The four other candidates tested in the polls -- former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee, Harvard professor Larry Lessig, O'Malley and former Virginia senator Jim Webb -- lag well behind Clinton, Sanders and Biden on the issues and attributes tested. None of them top 3% on any of those questions.
+
+The economy is the clear top issue in both states, with 45% in Nevada and 43% in South Carolina calling it the most important issue in determining their vote for presidency next year. Health care and social issues follow in both states, though South Carolina voters are more apt to say health care is key than Nevada caucus-goers (29% health care, 10% social issues in South Carolina, 16% for each issue in Nevada).
+
+Clinton's biggest issue advantage comes on foreign policy (she's up 38 points over Biden in South Carolina and 30 points over him in Nevada), while the margins are narrower on the economy (47% Clinton, 24% Biden, 18% Sanders in South Carolina, 46% Clinton, 31% Sanders, 15% Biden in Nevada) and climate change (44% Clinton, 22% Sanders and 21% Biden in South Carolina, 41% Clinton, 30% Sanders and 16% Biden in Nevada).
+
+While Sanders and Clinton have been sparring over the economy for quite some time, both foreign policy and energy policy have earned attention from the two campaigns recently. Sanders has highlighted his opposition to the Iraq war in 2002 as a foreign policy credential, while Clinton declared her opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.
+
+The CNN/ORC polls were conducted by telephone October 3-10. A total of 1,009 South Carolina adults were interviewed, including 301 who said they were likely to vote in the Democratic presidential primary. In Nevada, interviews were conducted with 1,011 adults, including 253 who said they were likely to participate in the Democratic presidential caucus. Results among likely Democratic voters in South Carolina have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.5 percentage points, for Nevada Democratic caucusgoers, it is 6 points.",REAL
+4629,Will Hillary Clinton lose the election because of the FBI email investigation?,"A week ago, the US election looked to be over. Hillary Clinton was riding so high in the polls after a disastrous series of gaffes by Donald Trump that few could conceive of a Republican path to victory on 8 November. Friday’s shock intervention by the FBI may not be enough to change that outcome on its own, but it has certainly set political imaginations running wild.
+
+
+
+The worry for Democrats is that fresh inquiries regarding Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state come at a difficult time. Not only is it hard to prove a negative and re-establish her innocence with barely a week to go until the election, but the letter to congressional officials from director James Comey capped a tricky run of news that was already making a sizable dent in her polling lead.
+
+Momentum for Trump began to recover first thanks to another set of emails, the contents of which perhaps explain why the Clintons risked so much to try to retain control of her electronic communications in the first place. Released by WikiLeaks, a factor that US intelligence agencies have blamed on Russian hackers, these emails to and from campaign chairman John Podesta have been trickling out for weeks, with mostly embarrassing rather than damaging content.
+
+That changed on Wednesday with the release of a report that appeared to confirm just how much the Clinton family has blurred the boundaries between its business, charitable and political interests. Though almost all of the new information related to Bill rather than Hillary, it gave Trump supporters fresh ammunition at a moment when they were desperate to shift attention from their candidate’s own scandals over taxes and alleged inappropriate behaviour towards women.
+
+In an election that many pollsters describe as an unpopularity contest, it does not take much to swing the mood of independent voters. By Friday, the combination of no news from Trump and bad news from Clinton had halved her average lead in the polls since the last presidential debate.
+
+“When the attention was on Trump, Clinton was winning. Now, the attention is on Clinton,” said political consultant Frank Luntz, who has predicted the winner in 2016 will be the campaign that keeps the focus on its opponent.
+
+Sunday’s average lead for Clinton in national polls of 3.4% ought still to be a healthy safety margin. Bill Clinton’s lead over George Bush shrank from 11 points to just three in the last two weeks of the 1992 election, yet he won by nearly double that margin.
+
+But among Democrats, a cause for concern – if not yet panic – is that very few polls published so far were carried out after news broke about the FBI and the emails.
+
+One reputable survey that got close, an ABC News-Washington Post tracking poll released on Sunday, showed just a one-point overall lead for Clinton. It asked some voters on Friday evening what they thought and found the news had mostly hardened existing opinions but could also play a role at the margins.
+
+“About a third of likely voters say they are less likely to support Clinton given FBI director James Comey’s disclosure,” said pollster Gary Langer. “Given other considerations, 63% say it makes no difference.”
+
+Only 7% of Clinton supporters felt it would make any difference, but this rises “much higher among groups already predisposed not to vote for her”, the poll found.
+
+“The potential for a pullback in motivation of Clinton supporters, or further resurgence among Trump’s, may cause concern in the Clinton camp – especially because this dynamic already was under way,” Langer added. “Intention to vote has grown in Trump support groups in the past week as the intensity of criticisms about him has ebbed.”
+
+The notion that the FBI may not change any minds but will bolster opinion, and thus perhaps turnout, was also supported in a poll of voters in 13 battleground states. This CBS poll showed just 5% of Democrats said the issue might make them less likely to support Clinton, compared with more than a quarter of registered Republicans.
+
+This risk also helps explain the ferocity of Democratic calls for the FBI to urgently exonerate Clinton.
+
+Many loyalists are convinced the latest trove of emails, discovered on equipment shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner, are an irrelevance.
+
+Even if some show more classified information passed its way through the private server, it should not change the FBI’s earlier decision that a criminal charge would be unfair without evidence of intent or coverup.
+
+But so long as this is not categorically established, there may be a nagging doubt in some minds that the FBI suspects otherwise. Not everyone will be prepared to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt. Some studies have shown just 11% of voters describe Clinton as “honest and trustworthy”, lower even than Trump’s score of 16%.
+
+While it may not be enough to the tip the balance, running for president while facing potential criminal investigation is never a good look.",REAL
+6722,"Monsanto Behind 4-Years-in-the-Making, Failed Peace Deal in Colombia","Monsanto Behind 4-Years-in-the-Making, Failed Peace Deal in Colombia Nov 7, 2016 1 0 
+Colombians just refused a peace deal championed by President Juan Manuel Santos Calderón with the narrow margin of just .05% of the votes. This would have ended 52 years of war in the country that has resulted in 250,000 deaths thus far. 
+Though recent stories suggested the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels who had been waging a guerilla war in Colombia had put down their arms , a surprising contributor to the prolonged hardship Colombians now face can be traced directly to Monsanto . 
+Negotiations for the failed peace deal took four long years, but behind the attempts to start fresh, with hopes of incorporating FARC rebels into civil Colombian life, the biotech and seed-monopolizing company, Monsanto, was waging a war of their own. 
+Members of the FARC rebel resistance have spent decades roaming the jungles of Columbia – bathing in creeks and sleeping in crude campsites . They, like almost no other Colombian, are familiar with the U.S.-Colombian so-called anti-narcotic war which allows Monsanto to spray the air with glyphosate, widely known as the trademarked herbicide, Roundup. 
+Once this herbicide reaches the jungle floor, it destroys not only coca, but also the many other plants that provide for indigenous Colombian’s needs. 
+This practice began in the 1980s. In 1999 the campaign to spray glyphosate acquired an official status known as ‘Plan Colombia.’ Only just recently, the Colombian government defied the U.S. agreement and stopped the aerial spraying of crops used to make cocaine, ending the 20-year long, Monsanto-led environmental devastation. 
+What many don’t know is that the U.S. government pledged to fund the purchase of glyphosate herbicides from Monsanto, supply the aircraft equipped with the means to spray, and to train Colombian commandos to carry out the aerial onslaught . 
+These planes faced an ongoing threat of receiving ground fire by FARC rebels. 
+FARC leader Timoleón Jiménez (real name is Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri), known as ‘Timochenko’ among partisans and a graduate of the Peoples’ Friendship University in Russia as well as a trained doctor, said in an interview to Colombian newspaper VOZ: 
+“In the regions, where farm communities live close to coca crops, the government accuses landowners of illegal coca production and using this excuse constantly air-sprays their fields with glyphosate. This chemical destroys coca randomly along with other agricultural crops, causing irretrievable harm to animals and people, especially to children, seniors and pregnant women.” 
+The result was that rebels attempted to shoot down planes to escape chemical death. In an attempt to avoid the ground fire, the U.S.-supplied, Monsanto-herbicide-filled crop dusters would fly higher, but continue their spraying, becoming more willy-nilly in their aim. 
+The Colombian tropical rainforests, are thus barbarically sprayed with millions of tons of Monsanto’s herbicide. This is extraordinarily troublesome due to the fact that Colombia is considered one of the most important countries for maintaining biodiversity, with almost 10% of all endemic plant species growing within its forests. 
+Moreover, 6 million Colombians have had to flee their homes due to Monsanto’s spraying . Instead of eradicating crops, you’d think the biotech company was trying to eradicate people. Indigenous Shuar leader from Scumbios, Ecuador explains the situation , 
+“We always used to have a pharmacy in the jungle. But now we can’t find the trees and animals that we need. The animals and fish have disappeared. The birds, too. We have never seen anything like this before. It has to be the result of the spraying. We notice the effects immediately after the area is sprayed. Birds, animals, and fish begin to disappear within a few weeks. The health effects linger for weeks, and even longer.” 
+Additionally, soil has lost its fertility, water is polluted, and multi-generational homesteads are uprooted. Forests are quickly dying, also. 
+Instead of the land being shepherded by Colombians, biotech corporations use them to expand their genetically-modified crop empires, which are resistant to glyphosate. 
+What has assisted this expansion? The war against Colombian guerrillas. FARC representatives at peace talks in Havana were the ones who demanded Monsanto and the US stop spraying . 
+As Russian journalist, Elena Sharoykina has stated , 
+“Despite the support of the head of the government, the glyphosate moratorium was criticized by the Colombian ‘war faction’ and its U.S. bosses. Juan Carlos Pinzón Bueno, the defense minister, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the former head of the government, and Kevin Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador in Bogota, have publicly opposed it. They claimed it an undeserved concession for FARC and appealed to continue the aerial spraying of the herbicide ‘for the sake of combating narcotics’. 
+Of course, it’s not only about coca plantations. The U.S. uses the anti-narcotic campaign in Colombia as an easy excuse to eradicate FARC. Washington is usually surprisingly tolerant to drug production, when it brings profit. 
+. . .Nowadays, the estimated number of active FARC members hardly exceeds 5-6 thousand people. It’s naive to think that several thousand of rebels trapped in jungle can control a transnational joint venture known as the ‘Colombian cocaine industry’, worth tens of billions U.S. dollars .” 
+One thing is clear in the face of a lost vote for peace. 
+“‘Glyphosate’ and ‘war’ have become synonyms now in Colombia. That is why the moratorium on the aerial spraying of the herbicide wouldn’t last long. Already in April 2016 the Colombian government under U.S. pressure and on the pretext of fighting the drug business resumed the use of glyphosate .”",FAKE
+8590,Oathkeepers to Prevent Voter Fraud- Operation Sabot,"Previous Oathkeepers to Prevent Voter Fraud- Operation Sabot 
+I recently interviewed Oathkeepers Stewart Rhodes and one of his writers who goes by the handle of “Navy Jack” about their plans to oversee the elections for fairness and to remove the intimidation that is coming from the Soros/Clinton cabal. 
+This interview produced some of the best election analysis that is on the airwaves. Among the many points discussed centered around the possibility of Clinton being indicted after winning the election but before the the Inauguration. We would have an old-fashioned Constitutional crisis. 
+Listen to this fascinating interview and then please circulate this widely. Make it go viral!",FAKE
+9375,Non-mainstream poll shows Trump poised to win with 76% chance,"Non-mainstream poll shows Trump poised to win with 76% chance Alternative media poll shows Trump leaving Clinton in the dust November 6, 2016 Momma Loves The Donald/Flickr ( INTELLIHUB ) — An independent, non-mainstream poll shows Trump is favored to win the presidential election against Hillary 76 — 24, which is quite the contrast to so-called mainline polling data. 
+An open poll taken by Intellihub News via Twitter shows Hillary with 24%, compared to Trumps 76%, at the time this article was published. Who will win the #election2016 and become our next President? 
+— Intellihub (@intellihubnews) November 6, 2016 
+Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has reported that Hillary “holds a 4-point lead over Donald Trump.” 
+There are still some 16 hours left on the poll until it expires, so cast your vote now. ©2016. INTELLLIHUB.COM. All Rights Reserved.",FAKE
+1190,Stossel: Why Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton are 2016's likely nominees,"Donald Trump is way ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination.
+
+Bernie Sanders will win the New Hampshire Primary on Tuesday, and he’s close to Hillary Clinton in national polls.
+
+But neither Trump nor Sanders is likely to win!
+
+In our new Fox News TV special, “Tech Revolution” at 8 and 11 pm ET Sunday night, we’ll explain why the better way to predict winners is to look at betting odds. They give Marco Rubio more than a 50 percent chance of winning the nomination, and Hillary Clinton an 80 percent chance.
+
+Betting odds have a better track record than polls or pundits. They come from people who put their own money on the line, rather than people who just mouth off.
+
+George Mason University economist Robin Hanson puts it this way:  Imagine you’re in a bar…
+
+“You're pontificating -- and somebody challenges you and says, ‘want to bet?’ All of us, as soon as somebody says ‘want to bet?’ -- we pause. And go, ‘do I really believe that?’”
+
+You are more careful when you bet.  If you aren’t, you lose money.  Think the odds above are wrong?  Put your money where your mouth is.
+
+American politicians banned most political prediction markets, but they’ve allowed a few, like PredictIt.org.
+
+PreditctIt’s odds are a little off because bettors may not trade more than $850 per candidate. The odds on bigger unrestricted markets, like England’s Betfair.com, are more informative.   Because Betfair posts those odds in confusing gambling formulas, the two of us simplify them for Americans here: ElectionBettingOdds.com.
+
+These odds update every five minutes.
+
+Prediction markets like Betfair are not run by sketchy bookies.  They are businesses that operate the way stock markets do – people buy and sell “shares” that pay out based on whether a candidate is successful. Today, for about 10 cents, you can buy a share of Trump. If he becomes president, you win a dollar.
+
+These odds have a good track record. In November, Ben Carson surged to first place in polls, but bettors knew he would fade--Betfair had him at just 9 percent. Now his odds are below 1 percent.
+
+Betting odds do sometimes fail: Until the evening of the Iowa caucus, bettors thought Donald Trump would win.
+
+But they still beat polls and pundits. Part of the reason they’re good is the “wisdom of crowds.”
+
+Some people betting may be fools making bad bets -- but enough of them have good information that the whole group of bets is likely to be accurate.  You see this on the TV show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.”
+
+Contestants can ask the audience, or an expert.  Experts do pretty well.  They get the answer right 65 percent of the time, but the audience gets it right 91 percent of the time.
+
+Bets on a prediction market called Intrade accurately predicted “American Idol” winners, Oscar winners, and the election results in almost every U.S. state. They even predicted when Saddam Hussein would be captured.
+
+Sadly, our government said betting is “contrary to the public interest.” It sued Intrade and put them out of business.   We no longer have access to Intrade’s interesting and useful predictions.
+
+Fortunately, a few sites still allow political betting, and the best odds are easily readable at ElectionBettingOdds.com.  And we’ll explain this better on TV Sunday night!
+
+John Stossel’s special “Tech Revolution” airs Sunday night on Fox News Channel at 8 pm ET.
+
+Maxim Lott is a Fox News supervising producer and is on Twitter at @MaximLott.
+
+John Stossel is the author of ""No They Can't! Why Government Fails -- But Individuals Succeed"" and host of ""Stossel"" (Fridays at 9 PM/ET), a weekly program highlighting current consumer issues with a libertarian viewpoint. Stossel also appears regularly on Fox News Channel (FNC) providing signature analysis. Click here for more information on John Stossel.",REAL
+10420,The Source of our Rage       :," The Source Of Our Rage The Ruling Elite Is Protected from the Consequences of its Dominance By Charles Hugh Smith
+Please read my election note at the end of the essay.
+November 10, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" Of Two Minds "" - There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance.
+We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape.
+If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the Ruling Elite and the non-elites, it is this chart of wages as a share of the nation’s output (GDP): 46 years of relentless decline, interrupted by gushing fountains of credit and asset bubbles that enriched the few while leaving the economic landscape of the many in ruins.
+The Ruling Elite once had an obligation to uphold the social contract as a responsibility that came with their vast privilege, power and wealth (i.e. noblesse oblige ).
+America’s Ruling Elite has transmogrified into an incestuous self-serving few unapologetically plundering the many. In their hubris-soaked arrogance, their right to rule is unquestioningly based on their moral and intellectual superiority to “the little people” they loot with abandon.
+Rather than feel a responsibility to the nation, America’s Elite views the status quo as a free pass to self-aggrandizement.
+Much has changed in America in the past 46 years. Not only have wages and salaries declined as a share of “economic growth,” but the wealth that has been generated has flowed to the top of the wealth/power pyramid (see chart below).
+Social mobility has also declined drastically: Restoring America’s Economic Mobility , as has trust in government and key institutions.
+As Frank Buckley, the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America observed:
+“In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center.”
+The top .01% has seen its share of the household wealth triple from 7% to 22% in the past four decades, while the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the bottom 90% has plummeted from 36% to 23%.
+As I described in America’s Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired and Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending . , the economy is rapidly undergoing structural changes that tend to reward the top 5% class of technocrats and managers and the top .1% with millions in mobile capital, while leaving the bottom 95% in the dust.
+Rather than address this rising inequality directly and honestly, the Ruling Elite has parroted propaganda and policies that protect their gains while obfuscating the reality that most American households have been losing ground for decades, a decline that has been masked by replacing real income with rising debt.
+The ceaseless parroting of the Ruling Elite and the Mainstream Media that prosperity has been rising for everyone is nothing less than the destruction of truth. This propaganda has one purpose: to mask the inequality and injustice built into the American status quo.
+The rapid concentration of wealth has also concentrated political power in the hands of a few who seamlessly combine public and private modes of power.
+This wealth and power protects the Ruling Elite from the perverse consequences of their dominance. Their precious offspring rarely serve at the point of the American military’s spear, they never lose their jobs or income when corporations shift production (and R&D, etc.) overseas, and they are never replaced with illegal immigrants paid under the table.
+Rather, the Ruling Elite is pleased to pay immigrants a pittance to care for their children, clean their luxe homes, walk their dogs, etc.
+This is why we’re enraged: we bear the consequences of the Ruling Elite’s dominance. The system is rigged to benefit the few, who use their wealth and power to protect themselves from the destructive consequences of their self-serving dominance.
+This rage is as yet inchoate, sensed but not yet understood as the inevitable result of a broken system and a predatory Elite that exploits the system to maximize their private gain by any means available .
+ELECTION NOTE: As I write this Tuesday evening, it appears Donald Trump may win the presidency. For those who cannot understand how anyone could possibly vote for Trump, please read the above essay again and ponder what people were voting against by voting for Trump .
+They may well have been voting against the corrupt, self-serving status quo rather than voting for the individual Donald Trump.
+There are very few opportunities for powerless non-elites to register their disapproval of the nation’s Ruling Elite and the corrupt status quo. Voting for an outsider in a national election is one such rare opportunity.
+As I noted in October, The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed (October 20, 2016).
+If you still don’t understand how Trump could win, please read the above essay as many times as is necessary for you to get it: the status quo of corrupt self-serving insiders generates injustice and inequality as its only possible output.
+My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book’s website . http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html",FAKE
+5176,Donald Trump Campaign Manager Is Out,"NEW YORK  — Donald Trump fired his hard-charging campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Monday in a dramatic shake-up designed to calm panicked Republican leaders and reverse one of the most tumultuous stretches of Trump's unconventional White House bid.
+
+Lewandowski, in some ways as brash and unconventional as the candidate himself, had been by Trump's side since the beginning of his unlikely rise to presumptiveGOP nominee. But he clashed with longtime operatives brought in to make the seat-of-the-pants campaign more professional.
+
+The former conservative activist played a central role in daily operations, fundraising, and Trump's search for a running mate, but Lewandowski's aggressive approach also fueled near-constant campaign infighting that complicated Trump's shift toward the general election.
+
+Reached by the AP on Monday, Lewandowski deflected criticism of his approach, pointing instead to campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
+
+""Paul Manafort has been in operational control of the campaign since April 7. That's a fact,"" Lewandowski said, declining to elaborate on his dismissal. Asked by CNN why he was fired, he said: ""I don't know the answer to that.""
+
+Lewandowski also says his relationships with Trump's top adviser, Paul Manafort, and the candidate's daughter, Ivanka are good.
+
+Lewandowski was fired Monday after a tumultuous period for the campaign, marked by infighting and rumors. Spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in a statement earlier in the day that she wishes Lewandowski the best.
+
+He is the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party's delegation to the GOP national convention.
+
+Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks described Lewandowski's departure as a ""parting of ways."" A person close to Trump said Lewandowski was forced out largely because of his poor relationship with the Republican National Committee and GOP officials. That person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
+
+The move came as Trump faced continued deep resistance from many quarters of his party concerned by his contentious statements and his reluctance to engage in traditional fundraising. Trump was upset that so many Republicans — House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell among them — were reluctant to support him, the person said, and at least partially blamed Lewandowski.
+
+People close to Trump, including adult children Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., also had long-simmering concerns about Lewandowski, who had limited national experience before becoming Trump's campaign chief. Some of Trump's children were among those urging the billionaire businessman to change tactics for the general election.
+
+""Firing your campaign manager in June is never a good thing,"" said veteran Republican operative Kevin Madden. ""The campaign will have to show dramatic changes immediately on everything from fundraising and organizing to candidate performance and discipline in order to demonstrate there's been a course correction. Otherwise it's just cosmetics.""
+
+Lewandowski has long been a controversial figure in Trump's campaign, but benefited from his proximity to the presumptive Republican nominee. Often mistaken for a member of the candidate's security team, he traveled with Trump on his private plane to nearly every campaign stop, giving him more direct access to the businessman than nearly any other campaign staffer.
+
+He was a chief promoter of the idea that the best campaign strategy was to ""Let Trump be Trump."" Lewandowski frequently dismissed the notion that Trump needed to hire more experienced political hands, spend on polling and sophisticated data operations, and moderate his rhetoric as he moved toward the general election. That approach clashed with seasoned operatives hired in recent months.
+
+Minutes after news of Lewandowski's departure was announced, Trump aide Michael Caputo tweeted, ""Ding dong the witch is dead!"" and included a link to the song from the film, ""The Wizard of Oz.""
+
+Lewandowski was charged with misdemeanor battery in the spring for an altercation involving a female reporter during a rally. The charges were later dropped. Trump defended Lewandowski throughout the episode and repeatedly framed his own actions as a sign of loyalty and a demonstration that he would not give in to outside pressure.
+
+""Folks, look, I'm a loyal person,"" Trump told voters at the time.
+
+""It's so important,"" he said of loyalty in a subsequent interview. ""And it's one of the traits that I most respect in people. You don't see it enough.""
+
+Lewandowski's consulting firm, Green Monster, was paid more than $360,000 by the Trump campaign through the end of April, and reimbursed an additional $15,000 for travel expenses, according to fundraising reports.
+
+Yet his approach within the campaign sparked intense criticism from experienced Republican operatives inside and outside of the campaign.
+
+The move comes a day before Trump is to attend a major New York City fundraiser, organized by longtime GOP financier Woody Johnson, the NFL Jets owner. Trump will spend part of Tuesday and Wednesday at finance events in his home city.
+
+Many of the top Republican fundraisers had encountered turbulence between worried donors and a campaign manager who did not seem fully onboard with the idea that Trump and the party needed to buckle down and raise the money needed to build a robust general election operation.
+
+Republican strategist Ryan Williams, a frequent Trump critic, said Lewandowski's dismissal ""is the first major public admission from Donald Trump that his campaign is not going well.""
+
+""This shows donors, activists and party officials that he is willing to make significant changes, even if it means parting ways with a trusted political aide,"" Williams said. ""Now Trump needs to demonstrate that he is willing to change his own approach by toning down his rhetoric and becoming a more disciplined general election candidate.""",REAL
+1039,"We must smash the Clinton machine: Democratic elites and the media sold out to Hillary this time, but change is coming","A Times story headlined “Obama Privately Tells Donors Time Is Coming to Unite Behind Hillary” had Obama telling DNC high rollers to “come together.” In it Obama “didn’t explicitly call on Sanders to quit” but a “White House official” confirmed his “unusually candid” words. It was a plant dressed up as a scoop. Obama spoke not privately but on background, and not to his donors but through them (and the paper) to his base. It was a different portrait of Obama as unifier: political, financial and media elites, all working as one to put down a revolt.
+
+Obama’s neutrality is a polite scam. His “private” chat came before voters in 29 states even had their say. Presidents never let appointees make endorsements, but three Obama cabinet secretaries — Agriculture’s Tom Vilsack, HUD’s Julian Castro and Labor’s Thomas Perez — backed Clinton early, thus shepherding whole economic sectors into her camp. At Obama’s DNC, ethically challenged Debbie Wasserman Schultz brazenly violates party rules by daily rigging the game for Clinton.
+
+Sanders often says he took on “the most powerful political machine in America,” by which he means the Clintons. He’s really fighting the whole Democratic Party: White House, Congress, DNC, elite media and, sad to say, national progressive groups. That includes organized labor but also nearly every liberal lobby in town. He’s been a more constant friend than Hillary Clinton to almost all of them — but he must face and defeat them all. That he’s done so in 14 states — 15 counting Iowa-and fought four more to a draw is a miracle — and a sign their days are truly numbered.
+
+Donald Trump has accomplished little by comparison. Everything was easier for him. When he hit party elites, no one hit back. Democratic elites had a flawed but still formidable Clinton to carry their water. Republicans had Jeb Bush, and now Ted Cruz. Trump took the low road and then lowered it some more, yet could help himself to issues of broad populist appeal without an establishment type feigning agreement. The media that ignored or dismissed Sanders coddled and appeased Trump. Eight years of open GOP warfare prepared Trump’s way. Bernie’s in the first wave to hit the Democratic beach.
+
+With each call to surrender, Sanders just gets stronger. The day the Politico story ran, he swept Democrats Abroad 69 percent to 30 percent. The next day Hillary took Arizona with 58 percent of the vote but Sanders blew her out in Idaho and Utah, polling an unheard-of 79 percent in caucuses that shattered turnout records. On Saturday he’d chalked up three more wins in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington with average margins of 76 perfent. In a Times/CBS poll out this week the man who started the race 60 points down closed the gap to five. In a Bloomberg poll released Saturday he took a 1 point lead.
+
+It raises a question that the elites who rig rules, stifle debate and call on Sanders to withdraw must answer: Who do you think you are? It also raises a question for Washington-based organizations allegedly safeguarding progressive values: What have you done? With all her money, contacts and celebrity and full, albeit covert support of her president and party, Clinton needed every last liberal endorsement to survive Iowa, Nevada, Missouri, Illinois and Massachusetts. How did she get them? If those endorsements don’t strike you as at least counterintuitive, ponder the record:
+
+Clinton backed NAFTA and the TPP, dithered on the minimum wage and still doesn’t support a living wage. Why would labor help her defeat a man who never once left its side on these and countless other vital issues?
+
+She backed the Defense of Marriage Act in the ’90s, opposed same-sex marriage till 2013 and recently recalled Nancy Reagan as a hero of the AIDS crisis. The Human Rights Campaign may be the bravest and most loyal of all liberal lobbies. Why abandon a stalwart ally like Sanders for one who dithered and dodged on every tough issue?
+
+From Sister Souljah in 1992 to Barack Obama in 2008, the Clinton record on racial politics is highly mixed. She backed the Clinton/Gingrich welfare bill that left millions of African Americans in poverty and the Clinton crime bill that landed millions more in jail. Why did a PAC run in the name of the Congressional Black Caucus pick her over a guy who went to jail to protest segregated housing?
+
+The answers are many and complicated. One is that some once great, grass roots movements pledged their troth to a political party and lost touch with their values and their members. Led by hired technicians and assorted other Washington lifers, many froze members out of their decisions. It’s a big part of the story but not the whole story. Another part pertains to ideology and the tyranny of tactical thinking.
+
+Ideology is easy to spot in those we deem extremist; it’s harder to see in those we deem “centrist.”  All ideologues think their ideology is empirical — Engels called his “scientific socialism” — but centrists get away with it. We call their shared ideology “neoliberalism.” Its adherents include deficit hawks, military interventionists, market deregulators, free traders and, the key to it all, pay-to-play politicians.
+
+This ideology is bipartisan. Without the full support of Democratic elites, NAFTA, the TPP, the Iraq war, Wall Street deregulation, every revolving door and no bid contract, every cut ever made to Social Security or Medicare, would be impossible. The culture wars we so loudly deplore are mostly a sideshow staged by political elites to hold onto their base while conducting their business. This election exposes the real divide in American politics, the one separating us from them.
+
+Neoliberal politics is entirely tactical and tactical thinking is static. Most people oppose Wall Street crooks, Mideast ground wars and cuts to Social Security so they talk endlessly about what the Congress they’ve corrupted won’t pass and what other voters allegedly won’t support. Neoliberals love horse-race politics because it never favors reform. Polls favor known quantities. Endorsements go to people in power; money to those willing to reward the investment. Tacticians rely on marketing tools made to manipulate, not illuminate.
+
+Since global finance capitalism runs on pay to play politics, neoliberals promise “change” but can never deliver reform. They can’t talk us out of wanting a living wage or universal health care so they argue tactics: change is impossible because someone else doesn’t want it; we can’t afford it, even though it saves us money.
+
+The tyranny of tactical thinking surely led some progressives to Clinton despite knowing she’d likely let them down again. It even infects the minds of voters. In hopes of catching a Democratic ear or two, I’ll illustrate the point using polls.
+
+Eight month ago Bernie was a stranger to Democrats. In a recent CNN poll his popularity among them surpassed Clinton’s. (85 percent /10 percent versus 76/19). The Times poll shows the gap widening. In it, 56 percent of Dems say if he’s the nominee they’ll support him “enthusiastically.” Just 40 percent say the same of her. On issues his lead is far greater; that’s why she mimics him rather than the other way around. Yet this is the same poll in which she beats him by 5 percent. Some Democrats who prefer him vote for her. I put it down to tactical thinking. In that same poll 72 percent of Democrats say regardless of how they feel she’ll be the nominee. Seventy-eight percent say her ideas are “realistic”; 56 percnt say his are. The case she makes is purely tactical; she can win; she can pass her program; she has more delegates. They’d be reasonable arguments if they were true, but all evidence says they aren’t. That so many smart people buy into them only proves my point: ideology makes you stupid. Like all ideologues, neoliberals see themselves as fact driven free thinkers. Last fall polls started showing Bernie beating Republicans who beat Hillary. Clintonites said early polls mean nothing. In their best ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’ voices, neoliberal pundits treated this baseless assertion like a law of physics. It’s not. We take early polls with big grains of salt but Clinton and Trump were very well known with high, hard negatives. That’s different. Six months later he still beats her in every general election poll; her people still dismisses the polls. She says Republicans haven’t attacked him yet, but she sure has. The result: people like her less and him more. She says wait till voters find out he’s a socialist. They did and guess what: socialism got more popular. If they find out how honest and frugal his brand of socialism is they’ll like it even more. Pundits tout Clinton’s foreign policy cred. As Secretary of State she no doubt took copious notes but she’s wrong on every issue she and Sanders dispute. She says her Iraq war vote was a long time ago and anyway she apologized but her theory of the case resembles Jeb Bush’s. (She blames W. Jeb blames the staff) As Secretary she applied her Iraq War logic to Libya and Syria. She promoted fracking, bugged the office of the U.N. Secretary General and meddled illegally in a Honduran coup. At what point is her experience cancelled out by her inability to learn from it?  And does Bernie ever get credit for being right? She has vast political experience but may be the most gaffe-prone major candidate ever to run for president. Bernie on the other hand rarely misspeaks. Pundits who prize “message discipline” seem not to notice. They used to say independent voters decide elections, but independents abhor Hillary and adore Bernie so they say it less now. Hillary ranks worst of all the candidates on honesty and Bernie best.  He has the highest favorability rating of any candidate in the race. Save for Trump, she has the lowest of any major candidate in the history of polling. To fact driven, free thinking neoliberals none of it matters. Facts that contradict ideology never do. Clintonites say Bernie should quit so she can focus on Trump. But Trump’s no more inevitable than Clinton. If he gets croaked in Cleveland, does anyone believe she has a better shot than Bernie of bringing some of his followers back into the Democratic fold? In any case it’s not Bernie but her response to him that kills her. Coming out against the TPP or the banks would help if she seemed at all sincere. Her clumsy smears—Bernie wants to repeal Medicare, Bernie opposed the auto bailout, Bernie loves the Minutemen etc., etc.—serve only to fuel doubts about her character. Her shameless surrogates accuse him of partisan disloyalty.  Could voters care less? Bernie won’t quit but even if he did it wouldn’t fix what ails her. Both Clinton and Trump argue their inevitability. It’s an illusion propped up by rules meant to stifle dissent. (Superdelegates in her case, winner-take-all in his) She’d be the weakest candidate Democrats have nominated in half a century or more. He’d be the worst ever nominated by either party. Neither will finish strong. Both may crumble. Each will then say early wins in a rigged system entitle them to nominations. Will either party have the wisdom to say no? Current rules of both parties are undemocratic All conventions are free to adopt their own rules. Victory may well go to whichever one has the courage to change. Hillary Clinton’s closing argument, other than her inevitability, is the impossibility of the middle class getting what it wants: a living wage, single payer health care, an end to pay-to-play politics. One thing’s for sure; we’ll never get them without new leader and new rules. The range of possible outcomes includes a Clinton/Trump race but also a Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz or John Kasich-led ticket coming out of Cleveland 10 points ahead of Hillary Clinton or 5 points behind Bernie Sanders. It also includes a Sanders/Trump race in which Bernie beats Trump by more than FDR beat Alf Landon. It only sounds crazy if you’re wearing neoliberal blinders. Two polls in the last five days (Bloomberg and CNN) say that’s exactly what would happen. For this to happen, lots of other stuff has to happen first. Republicans have to flinch and nominate Trump. Bernie has to pick all the low hanging fruit that’s left and win a couple of tougher races. The Democrats have to unstack the deck. I have a suggestion. Start with the superdelegates. For a solid year the Democratic National Committee has broken its own rules. As Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard noted in resigning as a DNC vice chair to back Bernie, officers may not back candidates until a nominee emerges. Schultz and other Clintonites mock the rule. In slashing debates from 26 in 2008 to six in 2016 and repealing a ban on federal contractor donations, Schultz, a payday loan industry ally, acted with zero due process; no notice, minutes, meeting or vote. DNC members said not a word. 435 of them, all unelected, are superdelegates. They had no business voting to begin with. All their votes should be allotted to candidates in proportion to their performance in each state. Bernie Sanders must stay in the race not only till the convention but till the end of whatever ballot nominates him or Hillary Clinton. He must do so because he and not she would make the stronger candidate and the better president. Regardless of how the next primaries, he should do it because his campaign isn’t just a revolution, it’s a movement that must outlast this election and many more to come. Blinded by ideology and self-interest, party elites say everything we want is impossible. The people in the movement know if we keep eyes on the prize we can do great things, even a thing as great as electing Bernie Sanders president.",REAL
+4786,5 takeaways from the first presidential debate,"There were a couple of not-so-very-subtle signals here inside of Hofstra University that Donald Trump lost Monday night’s highly-anticipated debate against Hillary Clinton, and badly.
+
+The first was the audible sound of groaning by some of his supporters (picked up by my attentive colleague Steve Shepard) inside the debate hall as Trump meandered self-defensively through a succession of answers against a very focused, very energized and very well-rehearsed Hillary Clinton.
+
+Another tell: After the 90-minute sparring match finished, Clinton’s team practically bounded into the spin room – more in glassy-eyed disbelief than visible elation that things had gone so much better than expected. The GOP nominee’s people, by contrast, dribbled into the media pen like surly seventh-graders headed for homeroom the day before summer vacation. “F—k, let’s do this,” a prominent Trump surrogate said before diving into a scrum.
+
+Trump and his new-ish messaging team have labored mightily to turn the avatar of populist rage into a reasonable facsimile of someone who you could see sitting in the Oval Office. But this best-laid plan unraveled on Monday – amid Clinton’s steely assault and the dignified interrogation of NBC’s Lester Holt, who struck a deft balance between facilitator, BS detector and lion tamer.
+
+Within minutes of the opening bell, Clinton’s attacks forced domesticated Donald to go feral – he bellowed, interrupted her repeatedly, grunted, and toward the bedraggled end, became muted and pouty.
+
+“It was bizarre,” said Barack Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe, who, like many Clinton allies, seemed visibly relieved. “He was clearly rattled, and clearly focused on defending himself, which I’m told narcissists are prone to do, and he clearly faded at the end. It’s not like she’s going to jump out to a 10-point lead, but this was good.”
+
+Whether or not this reverses Trump’s momentum, or reestablishes Clinton's control of the race is an open question. Who won is not. Here are five takeaways.
+
+Trump was wimpy when defensive. He is supposed to be the big meanie but it was Clinton who hit him where it hurt most. It doesn’t take a Jung (or even Dr. Phil after a couple of Bud Lights) to figure out that the GOP nominee – who boasts like a barfly – just might be over-compensating. Hence, Clinton, who started the debate a little tentatively, quickly launched into a carefully planned program of Freudian mind-games, contrasting her own middle-class businessman dad (who had his own issues) with Trump’s imperious, larger-than-life father Fred who launched his son’s business career but also was said to be extremely tough on him.
+
+First she started in with a paean to her father’s running a small printing business in Chicago (This might be the first time a candidate has described, in detail, the silk-screen squeegee process on a debate stage) – then she pivoted to mocking supposedly self-made Trump’s start in the real estate business. “You know, Donald was very fortunate in his life and that's all to his benefit. He started his business with $14 million, borrowed from his father,” she said icily.
+
+“My father gave me a very small loan in 1975 and I built it into a company that's worth many, many billions of dollars,” he responded weakly – and so it went on a range of topics.
+
+Whether it was because Clinton was so well prepped, and Trump was so breezily unprepared – or had a simple case of opening night jitters – the bully-boy nominee abandoned his most effective mode of debate combat, answering an attack with a harsher one. She went right for Trump’s ego – questioning his questionable $11 billion net worth, his boastful record on job creation and picking apart his tough talk on fighting ISIS.
+
+In 2007, preparing for a primary race she’d eventually lose, Clinton told me that the key to presidential political campaigns was understanding that the most effective attacks weren’t about exploiting someone’s weaknesses but challenging an opponent’s perceived strengths. When confronted with that assault, Trump wilted and offered a series of meandering answers that had his Republicans wincing. “It was a draw,” former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown said. “But he was on the defensive far too much. That’s a direct result of his inexperience.”
+
+What about the Clinton Foundation? The former secretary’s debate team (including longtime aide Phillippe Reines, who snapped a pre-debate photo in a Trump circled-finger pose) expected him to savage her on the various questions raised about her family’s foundation. They were worried about it. While he hammered her ever-so-briefly on emails, he was so engaged in self-justification, he flat-out forgot to pursue an attack that could have made the night a lot less lousy.
+
+His “30 years” attack worked – and he’ll use it again. Trump may have lost the first debate, but he’s proven to be a fast learner, and is likely to come back stronger in early October for the second debate, a town hall style affair, in St. Louis. And there were a few gold nuggets strewn in the wreckage of Hofstra – the most valuable an assault (demonstrable and fact-checker-friendly) on Clinton’s effectiveness in 25-plus years of public life.
+
+The been-there-not-done-that argument was particularly useful when coupled with his usual slams on Bill Clinton’s passage of the increasingly unpopular NAFTA agreement from the 1990s and Hillary Clinton’s election-year flip-flop from TPP booster to opponent.
+
+“When she started talking about this, it was really very recently,” Trump said of her opposition to the trade deal. “She's been doing this for 30 years. And why hasn't she made the agreements better? The NAFTA agreement is defective. Just because of the tax and many other reasons, but just because of the fact.”
+
+When Clinton claimed that she planned to “really work to get new jobs and to get exports that helped to create more new jobs.” He scoffed, and shot back, “But you haven't done it in 30 years or 26 years.”
+
+Clinton effectively attacked his business career. Trump’s attempt to head off debate-night questions about his five-year campaign promoting the birther slander against Barack Obama was a humbling face-plant. His attempt to pin the origin of the charge against Clinton associate Sid Blumenthal was semi-effective with the political press, but it withered under the insistent interrogation of an African-American moderator determined to extract an apology or reasonable explanation. Trump offered neither – and suggested Obama should actually be grateful he pursued the canard because it’s now been resoundingly put to rest.
+
+Politically, his tortured explanation helps energize black voters – who already oppose him in historic numbers. But later in the debate, Clinton plucked the strains of what could be a genuine crossover hit this fall among ever-elusive white working-class voters and independents: Trump’s failure to turn over his tax returns. Clinton went there with a vengeance – engaging in a little Trump-esque fact-free speculation about the motives of the billionaire developer-turned-reality TV star.
+
+“So you've got to ask yourself, why won't he release his tax returns?” Clinton mused, with relish. “And I think there may be a couple of reasons. First, maybe he's not as rich as he says he is. Second, maybe he's not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don't know all of his business dealings... Or maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax.”
+
+Trump’s answer did more harm than good:
+
+“That makes me smart,” he said – referring to his business, not his political, acumen.
+
+Her most effective attack – and his worst answer. If the GOP nominee needed any more proof that preparation trumps bombast in a general election debate, he got it when Clinton launched a merciless attack on his habit of stiffing contractors who have labored on his construction projects over the years. Again, Clinton brought it back to her father, describing how bad he would have felt if one of his clients had accepted his work without paying his bill.
+
+""I’ve met dishwashers, painters, architects, marble installers, drapery installers, who you refused to pay when they finished the work you asked them to do,” Clinton said, delivering a carefully scripted attack. “We have an architect in the audience who designed one of your clubhouses at one of your golf courses. It's a beautiful facility. It immediately was put to use. And you wouldn't pay what the man needed to be paid, what he was charging you to do.”
+
+This is a particular dangerous issue for a candidate whose entire campaign is rooted in fighting for the working class -- and his flippant response, yet again, gave comfort to his enemies.
+
+“Maybe he didn't do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work,” Trump quipped.",REAL
+3859,"@POTUS joins Twitter, jokes with @BillClinton","So, it's official. After years of signing ""-BO"" at the end of @BarackObama t o signal the tweets he crafted himself from an account operated by the Organizing for Action staff, the President now has his very own handle @POTUS , tweeting for the first time:
+
+""Hello, Twitter! It's Barack. Really! Six years in, they're finally giving me my own account.""
+
+And some asking the question on a lot of people's minds, what happens to the handle when a new President takes office?
+
+According to a White House official, @POTUS handle will transfer to the next President when Obama leaves office on 2017. President Bill Clinton even had some fun with the news, tweeting: Welcome to @Twitter, @POTUS! One question: Does that username stay with the office? #askingforafriend
+
+For his banner photo, the President chose a powerful image from the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, where he, first lady and Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia) led a commemorative march, hand in hand, over the Selma Bridge. Per a statement from t he White House , the @POTUS handle ""will serve as a new way for President Obama to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him."" Naturally, folks on social are having a little fun with this new presidential social presence: — The First Lady (@FLOTUS) May 18, 2015 The bear is loose on the Twittersphere! Welcome to the interwebs, Mr. President. https://t.co/SrlAbK3rfK — Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) May 18, 2015 .@POTUS joined Twitter just in time to live tweet The Bachelorette premiere tonight. — Erin Ruberry (@erinruberry) May 18, 2015 I'm going to enjoy the brief 10 minute period where I have more Twitter followers than @POTUS. pic.twitter.com/w28RPLGY09 — Byron Tau (@ByronTau) May 18, 2015 And Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy tweeting a gif of the President with a selfie stick: Welcome to twitter @POTUS! Looking forward to lots of Presidential selfies pic.twitter.com/jjWnkwX14h — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) May 18, 2015 In the meantime, we'll just wait for your first GIFs and selfies, Mr. President.",REAL
+6223,Trump Supporters Booby Trap Polling Place And Spill Blood Of Election Volunteer (VIDEO) | Addicting Info | The Knowledge You Crave,"on November 3, 2016 12:22 am · 
+Donald Trump’s deplorable supporters aren’t waiting for the election results to start spilling blood. 
+They’ve been threatening bloody violence ever since Trump began claiming that the election is “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton. And Trump has called for them to intimidate voters at polling places. 
+In Texas last week, a Trump supporter was arrested for electioneering at a polling place because he was wearing one of Trump’s stupid hats and a “Deplorables” T-shirt to vote. 
+Election code prohibits any person from electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place. 
+Of course, Trump supporters threw a temper tantrum because they think the rules don’t apply to them. 
+Well, now it looks like they have retaliated by setting up a booby trapped Trump sign at a polling place knowing that an official or volunteer would have to take the sign down. 
+At Collin College in Plano, Texas a Trump sign was discovered zip-tied to an official polling location sign in direct violation of the election code that forbids electioneering at polling places. 
+But when a volunteer went out to remove the sign they got a nasty surprise in the form of box cutter blades that were strategically hidden inside. The blades sliced into the volunteer’s hands and drew blood, requiring medical attention and prompting officials to order that signs be checked thoroughly before removal. 
+“It just shows how far we have come in politics where people want to be so mean and so hateful to try and injure somebody who’s probably not got any political party persuasion one way or the other,” local Democratic Party campaign chair Steve Spainhouer said in response . “I think most people have already made their minds up at this point how they’re going to vote and so there’s nothing to gain by being mean spirited or hateful.” 
+Here’s the video via KTVT . 
+Frankly, this should be considered an act of domestic terrorism. Trump’s supporters have gone too far and it could get worse as Election Day approaches. And if Trump loses, his supporters have already threatened to try to overthrow the federal government in a bloody coup. 
+Clearly, these people are deranged and the safety of voters and election officials are in danger. But you won’t hear Donald Trump condemning this act of violence. After all, he is the one inciting it. 
+Featured Image: Darren McCollester/Getty Images Share this Article! ",FAKE
+4459,Obama on 'The Daily Show:' What happened to common conversation? (+video),"President Obama talks political polarization and the 'Balkanization' of the media in his seventh and final appearance on 'The Daily Show' on Tuesday night.
+
+President Obama made his seventh and final appearance on “The Daily Show” Tuesday night to reflect on his time spent in office and the lessons he’s learned.
+
+“The one thing I know as I enter my last year as president is the country is full of good and decent people and there is a sense of common purpose at the neighborhood level and at the school and in the workplace,” Mr. Obama told host Jon Stewart.
+
+“And that dissipates the further up it goes because of the money and all the filters and all the polarizing that takes place in how politics are shaped,” he continued.
+
+Part of this polarization, Obama said, is due to the changing nature of the media.
+
+“I think [the media] gets distracted by shiny objects and doesn’t always focus on the big, tough choices and decisions that have to be made. And part of that is just the changing nature of technology,” he said.
+
+The president admitted that the White House was “way too slow in trying to redesign and reengineer” the structure of its Press Office to adapt to online and social media, and lamented the “Balkanization” of the media in recent years.
+
+“You’ve got folks who are constantly looking for facts that reinforce their existing point of view as opposed to having a common conversation,” Obama said. “I think one of the things that we have to think about, not just the president but all of us, is how do we join together in a common conversation about something other than the Super Bowl.”
+
+The only way everyday citizens can prevent this polarization, the president continued, is by getting involved and contacting local representatives. He went on to “guarantee” that “if people feel strongly about making sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon without us going to war and that is expressed to Congress, then people will believe in that.”
+
+Other topics discussed in the 22-minute interview were the Iran deal, which Obama portrayed as the best achievable compromise, and progress made in the fields of healthcare and climate change. He also cited improvements in the Department of Veteran Affairs, the economy, and the efficiency of government in general.
+
+“What I do think has happened is a lot of the work that we did early starts bearing fruit later,” Obama said, giving the example of the Iran negotiations. “So it finally comes to fruition. But it represents a lot of work.”",REAL
+3727,It’s not about mental illness: The big lie that always follows mass shootings by white males,"We barely know anything about the suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina, atrocity. We certainly don’t have testimony from a mental health professional responsible for his care that he suffered from any specific mental illness, or that he suffered from a mental illness at all.
+
+We do have statistics showing that the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence do not have a diagnosis of mental illness and, conversely, people who have mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.
+
+We know that the stigma of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day — it costs people relationships and jobs, it scares people away from seeking help who need it, it brings shame and fear down on the heads of people who already have it bad enough.
+
+But the media insists on trotting out “mental illness” and blaring out that phrase nonstop in the wake of any mass killing. I had to grit my teeth every time I personally debated someone defaulting to the mindless mantra of “The real issue is mental illness” over the Isla Vista shootings.
+
+“The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop-out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health sphere, or anyone who actually has any kind of informed opinion on mental health or serious policy proposals for how to improve our treatment of the mentally ill in this country.
+
+What I hear from people who bleat on about “The real issue is mental illness,” when pressed for specific suggestions on how to deal with said “real issue,” is terrifying nonsense designed to throw the mentally ill under the bus. Elliot Rodger’s parents should’ve been able to force risperidone down his throat. Seung-Hui Cho should’ve been forcibly institutionalized. Anyone with a mental illness diagnosis should surrender all of their constitutional rights, right now, rather than at all compromise the right to bear arms of self-declared sane people.
+
+What’s interesting is to watch who the mentally ill people are being thrown under the bus to defend. In the wake of Sandy Hook, the NRA tells us that creating a national registry of firearms owners would be giving the government dangerously unchecked tyrannical power, but a national registry of the mentally ill would not — even though a “sane” person holding a gun is intrinsically more dangerous than a “crazy” person, no matter how crazy, without a gun.
+
+We’ve successfully created a world so topsy-turvy that seeking medical help for depression or anxiety is apparently stronger evidence of violent tendencies than going out and purchasing a weapon whose only purpose is committing acts of violence. We’ve got a narrative going where doing the former is something we’re OK with stigmatizing but not the latter. God bless America.
+
+What’s also interesting is the way “The real issue is mental illness” is deployed against mass murderers the way it’s deployed in general — as a way to discredit their own words. When you call someone “mentally ill” in this culture it’s a way to admonish people not to listen to them, to ignore anything they say about their own actions and motivations, to give yourself the authority to say you know them better than they know themselves.
+
+This is cruel, ignorant bullshit when it’s used to discredit people who are the victims of crimes. It is, in fact, one major factor behind the fact that the mentally ill are far more likely to be the targets of violence than the perpetrators–every predator loves a victim who won’t be allowed to speak in their own defense.
+
+But it’s also bullshit when used to discredit the perpetrators of crimes. Mass murderers frequently aren’t particularly shy about the motives behind what they do — the nature of the crime they commit is attention-seeking, is an attempt to get news coverage for their cause, to use one local atrocity to create fear within an entire population. (According to the dictionary, by the way, this is called “terrorism,” but we only ever seem to use that word for the actions of a certain kind — by which I mean a certain color — of mass killer.)
+
+Elliot Rodger told us why he did what he did, at great length, in detail and with citations to the “redpill” websites from which he got his deranged ideology. It isn’t, at the end of the day, rocket science — he killed women because he resented them for not sleeping with him, and he killed men because he resented them for having the success he felt he was denied.
+
+Yes, whatever mental illness he may have had contributed to the way his beliefs were at odds with reality. But it didn’t cause his beliefs to spring like magic from inside his brain with no connection to the outside world.
+
+That’s as deliberately obtuse as reading the Facebook rants of a man who rambled on at great length about how much he hated religion and in particular hated Islam and deciding that the explanation for his murdering a Muslim family is that he must’ve just “gone crazy” over a parking dispute.
+
+Now we’ve got a man who wore symbols of solidarity with apartheid regimes, a man who lived in a culture surrounded by deadly weapons who, like many others, received a gift of a deadly weapon as a rite of passage into manhood. He straight-up told his victims, before shooting them, that he was doing it to defend “our country” from black people “taking over.” He told a woman that he was intentionally sparing her life so she could tell people what he did. There is no reasonable interpretation of his actions that don’t make this a textbook act of terrorism against black Americans as a community. And yet almost immediately we’ve heard the same, tired refrain of “The real issue is mental illness.” Well, “mental illness” never created any idea, motivation or belief system. “Mental illness” refers to the way our minds can distort the ideas we get from the world, but the ideas still come from somewhere. One of the highest-profile cases of full-blown schizophrenia in history is that of John Nash, who, unlike the vast, vast majority of mentally ill people, really did develop a whole system of delusions entirely separate from reality. And yet even then the movie A Beautiful Mind whitewashes what those beliefs actually were–when he came up with an all-powerful conspiracy that was monitoring his every move, that conspiracy by sheer coincidence was a conspiracy of the world’s Jews. Was it just sheer bad luck for Jewish people that a random genius’ random fertile imagination made them into demonic villains? Or did he get that idea from somewhere? Misogynistic rants that exactly match Elliot Rodger’s are just a Google search away, if you have a strong stomach. So are racist threats that exactly match Dylann Roof’s. Are all those people “mentally ill”? And if so is there some pill you could distribute to cure it? Dylann Roof is a fanboy of the South African and Rhodesian governments. As horrific as Roof’s crime was, the crimes that occurred over decades of apartheid rule were far, far worse, and committed by thousands of statesmen, bureaucrats and law enforcement officials. Were all of them also “mentally ill”? At the risk of Godwinning myself, John Nash wasn’t the only person to think the Jews were a global demonic conspiracy out to get him–at one point in history a large portion of the Western world bought into that and killed six million people because of it. Were they all “mentally ill”? Even when violence stems purely from delusion in the mind of someone who’s genuinely totally detached from reality–which is extremely rare–that violence seems to have a way of finding its way to culturally approved targets. Yeah, most white supremacists aren’t “crazy” enough to go on a shooting spree, most misogynists aren’t “crazy” enough to murder women who turn them down, most anti-government zealots aren’t “crazy” enough to shoot up or blow up government buildings. But the “crazy” ones always seem to have a respectable counterpart who makes a respectable living pumping out the rhetoric that ends up in the “crazy” one’s manifesto–drawing crosshairs on liberals and calling abortion doctors mass murderers–who, once an atrocity happens, then immediately throws the “crazy” person under the bus for taking their words too seriously, too literally. And the big splashy headliner atrocities tend to distract us from the ones that don’t make headline news. People are willing to call one white man emptying five magazines and murdering nine black people in a church and openly saying it was because of race a hate crime, even if they have to then cover it up with the fig leaf of individual “mental illness”–but a white man wearing a uniform who fires two magazines at two people in a car in a “bad neighborhood” in Cleveland? That just ends up a statistic in a DoJ report on systemic bias. And hundreds of years of history in which an entire country’s economy was set up around chaining up millions of black people, forcing them to work and shooting them if they get out of line? That’s just history. The reason a certain kind of person loves talking about “mental illness” is to draw attention to the big bold scary exceptional crimes and treat them as exceptions. It’s to distract from the fact that the worst crimes in history were committed by people just doing their jobs–cops enforcing the law, soldiers following orders, bureaucrats signing paperwork. That if we define “sanity” as going along to get along with what’s “normal” in the society around you, then for most of history the sane thing has been to aid and abet monstrous evil. We love to talk about individuals’ mental illness so we can avoid talking about the biggest, scariest problem of all–societal illness. That the danger isn’t any one person’s madness, but that the world we live in is mad. After all, there’s no pill for that.",REAL
+1630,GOP Candidates Say Paris Attacks Highlight U.S. Leadership Failure,"GOP presidential candidates called for prayers for victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris and a swift response from the U.S., while criticizing President Barack Obama‘s foreign policy.",REAL
+3750,Report: Freddie Gray sustained injury in police van,"(CNN) The mystery into the death of Freddie Gray grew more complex Thursday as several new reports put the focus on what might have happened during a roughly 40-minute ride in the back of a police transport van.
+
+• Investigators found that Gray was mortally injured in the van and not during his arrest, a Washington television station reported, citing multiple law enforcement sources.
+
+• Police told reporters they have learned of an additional stop the van made as it was traveling to a police precinct.
+
+• An officer involved in the arrest believes Gray was injured before being put into the vehicle, according to a relative who gave the officer's account to CNN.
+
+• A second prisoner, who was picked up after Gray, told investigators that he thought Gray ""was intentionally trying to injure himself, according to The Washington Post.
+
+What happened to Gray, the 25-year-old Baltimore man who suffered a severe spine injury and died one week after his arrest, has led to angry debate and protests nationwide. For the first time Thursday, Baltimore police walked with marchers and stopped traffic for them at intersections.
+
+When the 10 p.m. curfew went into effect for the third night, there were still many protesters on the streets. Activists and local leaders were telling people to go home.
+
+A body was found a block away from a CVS pharmacy that had been looted and set on fire during Monday's rioting. CNN's Ryan Young saw authorities tending to it.
+
+It was discovered in a parked semi truck. Investigators did not say if the body was that of a man or a woman or if there was any connection to the riots.
+
+But a dispatcher from an Illinois-based trucking company that commissions the truck said Baltimore police called to ask about one of its drivers hailing from Baltimore. His family had reported him missing for two to three days during a trip home, said dispatcher Brad Rhodes from Henderson Trucking Company.
+
+The driver was supposed to return to work Wednesday, but did not show up. Rhodes did not confirm if the driver of that vehicle was the missing man and did not know the missing driver's fate.
+
+The sources quoted by the Washington-based station said the medical examiner had determined Gray's death was caused by a catastrophic injury after he slammed into the back of the police transport van while inside it, ""apparently breaking his neck; a head injury he sustained matches a bolt in the back of the van.""
+
+The station said it was unclear what caused Gray to slam into the back of the van and whether Gray caused the injury.
+
+An official in the state's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner wouldn't comment to CNN on the report, citing an ongoing investigation. The official said the autopsy report on Gray could be delivered to the State's Attorney Office ""as soon as tomorrow or early next week.""
+
+Staff members were still doing examinations Thursday, the official said. The completion and delivery of the final report will depend on how quickly that evaluation is completed and compiled. While it could be sent Friday, there is still the possibility it won't be ready until early next week, the official said.
+
+How Gray was injured and whether police are liable for his death are questions now in the hands of the state's attorney for Baltimore City.
+
+Police led a news conference by announcing they handed their investigative files over to prosecutors a day earlier than planned.
+
+The state's attorney for Baltimore City confirmed she had received the report and said that while police have regularly briefed her office on their findings, her team has been conducting its own independent investigation.
+
+""While we have and will continue to leverage the information received by the department, we are not relying solely on their findings but rather the facts that we have gathered and verified,"" prosecutor Marilyn Mosby said. ""We ask for the public to remain patient and peaceful and to trust the process of the justice system.""
+
+Mosby will ultimately decide whether to file charges against any of the officers.
+
+Investigators delivered their report early because ""I understand the frustration. I understand the urgency,"" police Commissioner Anthony Batts said.
+
+""This does not mean that the investigation is over. If new evidence is found, we will follow it,"" he added. ""Getting to the right answer is more important than speed.""
+
+The announcement of the additional stop by the police van was treated almost as a footnote in the police news conference.
+
+""This new stop was discovered from a privately owned camera,"" Deputy Commissioner Kevin Davis said without elaborating.
+
+Many observers, though, say that revelation and other reports makes the Gray case even more suspicious -- and there has been no shortage of protesters taking to the city's streets to express their doubts about police accounts of what happened between Gray's April 12 arrest and his death.
+
+The Rev. Jamal Bryant of Baltimore's Empowerment Temple has been helping organize protests and speaking to people in the community. Young people have told him in the past two days that they are ""absolutely frustrated and their confidence level is absolutely shattered"" and that Thursday's news only exacerbates those feelings.
+
+""They don't believe that Mr. Gray was hurting himself in the van, and this additional stop lends credence to the suspicion that something is absolutely off track,"" he said.
+
+Batts told CNN's Chris Cuomo that people are jumping to conclusions and no one is trying to cover anything up.
+
+""I think it's unfortunate that these little things are coming out. I think that it's inappropriate,"" he added while out checking on his officers Thursday night. ""I think people should take a deep breath to wait for state's attorney to come out with the entire information.""
+
+Attorney Andrew O'Connell, who is part of the Gray family's legal team, described the police time line as a ""moving target,"" meaning it keeps changing over time.
+
+""What I would like to know and what we have been asking for from the beginning are the radio runs that are recorded during these stops,"" he said. ""Whenever a police officer makes a stop, he's supposed to radio it in. We haven't seen those. Those are usually the best way to get an accurate picture of what happened during an arrest.""
+
+An official who had been briefed on the investigation told CNN that the stops are key to determining what happened, and as O'Connell pointed out, each stop is supposed to be logged, generally by the van's driver, and that didn't happen in this case. That's why the initial police time line was missing the new stop, the official said.
+
+But where O'Connell stopped short of leveling accusations, CNN legal analyst Mel Robbins was more incredulous.
+
+""They found out about it after doing this investigation where they interviewed over 30 people,"" she said. ""So what that says to me is that if it's going to take a closed-circuit, private camera to show the stop, that they were not getting that information from the police officers during the investigation.""
+
+'This is why they investigate'
+
+CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes contended, however, that it was too early to assert something nefarious was at play and said finding and reviewing videos in an investigation is laborious.
+
+""This could be a private security camera that was from a business, looking down the sidewalk and the street from their business that maybe just got turned over,"" he said. ""This is why they investigate. More facts come up gradually. When you have private citizens turn over videos to look at, they may not have realized it was that van, the business owner may not have known that it had anything to do with this case.""
+
+Hwang Jung, owner of the market at North Fremont Avenue and Mosher Street where the newly disclosed stop took place, said officers in suits came into his store last week asking to see surveillance footage from April 12 at around 8:30 a.m.
+
+After viewing the footage, the officers gave him their number and said two more officers would come copy the footage, which happened a few hours later, Hwang said.
+
+The footage was lost, he said, when his store was looted in the days after Gray's death. He said he couldn't be sure exactly what day the officers came by but he thought it was early in the week of April 19.
+
+It was April 24, a Friday, that Deputy Commissioner Davis told reporters that there had only been three stops en route to the police station: the first to put leg irons on Gray, the second ""to deal with Mr. Gray"" (an incident, he said, that remained under investigation) and the third to pick up a prisoner in an unrelated matter.
+
+The new stop, Davis said Thursday, came between the first and second stops.
+
+The six officers involved in the case have been suspended, and none has spoken publicly about what occurred.
+
+But a relative of one of the officers spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity. She is related to one of the six officers but said the officer didn't request the interview.
+
+The relative said she worries all six of the officers who encountered Gray during his April 12 arrest will be incriminated when only some might be responsible.
+
+""Six officers did not injure this man,"" she said. ""Six officers didn't put him in the hospital. I'm worried that instead of them figuring out who did, that six officers are going to be punished behind something that maybe one or two or even three officers may have done to Freddie Gray.""
+
+She also told CNN that the officer doesn't know how Gray was injured but said he believes it happened during the arrest.
+
+""He believes that Freddie Gray was injured outside the paddy wagon,"" the relative said.
+
+She also gave an explanation of why Gray was not buckled into the police van: He appeared belligerent.
+
+""They didn't want to reach over him. You were in a tight space in the paddy wagon. He's already irate,"" she said.
+
+Police have said five of the six officers have been interviewed by detectives, while the sixth invoked the right to decline to be questioned.
+
+WJLA reported the van driver was the officer who has not be interviewed.
+
+Report: Gray was trying to hurt himself, prisoner says
+
+The news of what the second prisoner told police was in a Washington Post account that cites an investigative document written by a Baltimore police investigator.
+
+In it, a prisoner who was in the police van with Gray said he could hear Gray ""banging against the walls"" of the van and thought Gray ""was intentionally trying to injure himself.""
+
+The prisoner was separated from Gray by a metal barrier and could not see him, police have said.
+
+When asked about the report, Gray family attorney Jason Downs said they cannot react to rumors and the family wants to see the medical examiner's findings.
+
+He disputed the notion that Gray caused his own fatal injury.
+
+""Any suggestion that Mr. Gray harmed himself in the back of that van is something that Freddie Gray's family strongly disagrees with,"" Downs told CNN's ""Erin Burnett OutFront"" on Thursday. ""In this case, common sense dictates that Freddie Gray did not sever his own spinal cord whether it was outside of the van or inside the van.""
+
+Regardless of what happened, the police commissioner said Gray should have gotten medical help sooner.
+
+""We know our police employees failed to get him medical attention in a timely manner multiple times,"" Batts said last week.",REAL
+3829,"Sure, We Want An Honest And Trustworthy President, But It's Complicated","Sure, We Want An Honest And Trustworthy President, But It's Complicated
+
+Americans say they like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton the most for president, but they don't think they're honest and trustworthy.
+
+Such a lack of trust, according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll, might be astonishing if we were not already accustomed to hearing about it — about our politicians in general and about these two candidates in particular. But the new polls shows one of the starkest divides yet.
+
+Polling at 27 percent, Trump is at least 10 points ahead of any of his many rivals among registered Republicans. Clinton is the choice of 60 percent of Democrats, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders a rather distant second at 30 percent.
+
+Yet 60 percent of poll respondents said they did not find Clinton ""honest and trustworthy."" Fifty-nine percent said the same of Trump.
+
+Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Poll said this anomaly has been apparent over months of polling.
+
+""We've always found bad numbers on 'honest and trustworthy' for both Clinton and Trump, but good numbers for both on leadership,"" Malloy said.
+
+Indeed, Clinton scored exactly as well on ""strong leadership qualities"" in this poll (60 percent agreeing) as she did poorly on honest and trustworthiness. And Trump, by the same token, got similar numbers for strong leadership (58 percent yes, 39 percent no).
+
+""The one (judgment) seems to eclipse the other,"" said Malloy. ""I mean, what else could it be?""
+
+The preference for strength as the premier quality in a leader has a long history both in the U.S. and around the world. In times of stress, in particular, many countries have turned to leaders regarded as tough and decisive – even if those same politicians were also controversial and distrusted by many.
+
+In terms of the whole sample, this does appear to be the case. But the apparent contradiction between leading the pack and failing the trust test seems less pronounced upon closer inspection.
+
+With their own supporters, Trump and Clinton were rated as honest and trustworthy. Among those planning to vote for Trump next year, 90 percent said he was honest and trustworthy while only seven percent said he was not. Among those planning to vote for Clinton, 84 percent said she was trustworthy while and 13 percent disagreed.
+
+There are, of course, reasons someone might vote for a candidate without entirely trusting that person. It could simply reflect a preference for them over the other available alternatives.
+
+In Clinton's case, Democrats might see her as the party's most electable candidate, even though the Quinnipiac poll finds Sanders runs better against some Republicans in hypothetical match-ups.
+
+In Trump's case, the willingness to back him despite controversy and doubts may indicate the absence of any other consistent GOP rival who's been able to challenge him. Trump's closest competitor to date has been neurosurgeon Ben Carson, but this poll shows Carson fading as many of his former supporters are split between Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
+
+We also need to remember that Trump and Clinton's front-runner status in the candidate preference numbers reflects only the choices within their respective parties. Quinnipiac talked to 672 Republicans and 573 Democrats, but the bad numbers for both Trump and Clinton on whether they are ""honest and trustworthy"" were based on the responses of all 1,453 registered voters surveyed.
+
+Among Republicans, Trump's trust number was much higher (58 percent) than it was from all people in the survey. Among Democrats it was just 12 percent, while independents gave him 36 percent— nearly matching the 35 percent average for all respondents.
+
+Similarly, among Democrats Clinton has a much higher trust number (73 percent). With Republicans it was just seven percent, and among independents it hit 26 percent— leading to an overall average among all respondents of 36%.
+
+The news in this poll may be more worrisome for Clinton, if only because her trust number among independents was 10 points lower than Trump's marks.
+
+While many numbers in the poll could be cautionary for her backers, a remarkable 63 percent of all respondents (and 60 percent of independents) said she had ""a good chance of beating the Republican nominee,"" whomever that might be. That measure was the highest figure in the hypothetical general election test for any candidate in either party.
+
+Meanwhile, only 46 percent of all respondents believed there was ""a good chance"" of Trump beating an unnamed Democratic nominee next November, with independents split evenly on the question.
+
+The poll was conducted nationwide using live interviewers calling both land lines and cell phones from November 23rd-30th (after the November 13th Paris attacks). The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points for the whole survey sample and plus or minus 3.8 points for the Republican sample and plus or minus 4.1 points for the Democrats.",REAL
+7560,"Comment on ‘Voting Is Rigged & Used To Pacify The Public’ Says Three-Time US Presidential Candidate Ron Paul by Anonymous: There Is No One Way To Live On This Planet, But We Can Be Harmonious – Collective Evolution","Share on Facebook Share on Twitter “This is the way the system works, it’s a rotten system, and I see elections as so much of a charade. So much deceit goes on. . . . whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat president, the people who want to keep the status quo seems to have their finger in the pot and can control things. They just get so nervous so, if they have an independent thinker out there, whether it’s Sanders, or Trump, or Ron Paul, they’re going to be very desperate to try to change things. . . . More people are discovering that the system is all rigged, and that voting is just pacification for the voters and it really doesn’t count.” advertisement - learn more Above are the words of Dr. Ron Paul, three-time presidential candidate and a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Similar to Bernie Sanders, Dr. Paul attracted significant attention while he was in the running, appealing to the intellect of the masses and helping to wake people up to the realities of the U.S. electoral system. U.S. presidential elections are rigged. This is the truth that he, and Sanders, and so many others, hope to make clear. Voting only provides the illusion of democracy, it does not actually serve democracy. In the video below, Dr. Paul goes on to describe how the electoral process has become a giant charade, meant to entertain rather facilitate democracy. He also argues that who exactly is chosen for president is irrelevant, because corporate interests will always prevent them from effecting real change. In a recent debate with Hilary Clinton, Bernie Sanders made the same arguments, saying that “no matter who is elected to be president, that person . . . will not be able to succeed because the power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, (and) the power of campaign donors is so great that no president alone can stand up to them.” ( source ) It is an uncomfortable truth, as Bernie himself admits, but it is a reality we must face. And hearing this for the first time can be jarring, to be sure. We’ve been told that the world operates in a specific way, that we decide who our political leaders will be, but as with anything in life, it’s important that we discover the truth for ourselves rather than trusting blindly the words of others. We have been programmed to believe everything we are told, and corporate media is not telling us the truth. Dr. Paul and Bernie Sanders are not the only major political figures to speak out about this issue. Various presidents and politicians have been saying this for decades. For example, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26 President of the United States, told the world that “behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.” He also stated that “presidents are selected, not elected.” Even the very first British MP, Benjamin Disraeli, warned us that “the world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Here is a very memorable quote from former New York City (1918-1925) Mayor John F. Hylan: advertisement - learn more The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation . . . The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties . . . [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection. ( source )( source ) Here is another great one from the 28th president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, taken from his book The New Freedom : Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United State, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. ( source ) As you can see, the idea that the system is corrupt and ruled by outside influence is not a new one, but it is only recently that the general population has begun to see it for themselves. Your Inbox Will Never Be The Same Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. 
+“Democracy is popular because of the illusion of choice and participation it provides, but when you live in a society in which most people’s knowledge of the world extends as far as sports, sitcoms, reality shows, and celebrity gossip, democracy because a very dangerous idea. Until people are properly educated and informed, instead of indoctrinated to be ignorant mindless consumers, democracy is nothing more than a clever tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the rest of of us.” – Gavin Nascimento. Presidents now seem to be little more than figureheads, meant to capture the hearts and attention of the people while leaving corporations (controlled by the big banks) free to do as they will, polluting and destroying our planet in their endless quest for profit. Barack Obama was a big time celebrity, and there is no doubt in my mind that Hillary Clinton will be the same by taking on the role of “first female president.” While this is obviously a commendable and much-needed step forward for gender quality, I think we need to take a step back and consider the bigger picture. We can’t look to our political leaders for change, we have to look to ourselves, because our desires are not being represented or addressed in the political sphere. The ongoing GMO debate is just one example of this, but there are many. If we want to change the things which matter the most — the degradation of the environment, the military industrial complex, poverty, among others — we can’t keep looking to political ‘leaders’ like Obama or international organizations like the UN, all of whom give empty speeches, year after year, like they’ve always done, without taking real action. And nothing ever seems to get done. Don’t let them fool you any longer. Change will not come from them; it never has and it never will. Change can only come from you and from me, and the first step is awareness. See the circus for what it is and choose not to participate. If we keep looking to ‘them’ to provide the solutions we need to take care of our planet, we will continue down this road to destruction. It’s how we got here in the first place. I will leave you with these words from the late Carl Sagan, which neatly explain how it is we continue to be blinded by those in control: “ One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” 
+
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+3127,The Pope vs. America,"Pope Francis has been brushing up on his English ahead of his arrival in Washington in September, and tickets to his U.S. events are already a hot commodity. But anyone expecting his message to be simply one of mercy and love could be in for a distinct surprise.
+
+In his speech to a joint meeting of Congress, the pope of the poor could well deliver a harsh message for the world’s richest nation. For all the genuine warmth of his smile, his track record suggests he sees it as his job not just to comfort the afflicted, but also to afflict the comfortable. And however delicately he fine-tunes his language, the hard fact is that he believes the United States is as much a part of the problem as the solution.
+
+For more than a century, popes have made nuanced criticisms of the free-market capitalism that drives the American dream. But Pope Francis, with an unprecedented vigor, is locking horns with much that Washington and Wall Street hold dear. Why does he take such a hard line?
+
+In the two-plus years since his election, he has enchanted and bewildered the world in equal measure with his compassion and his contradictions. But he has also proved himself a wily and sophisticated politician. Understanding this side of Francis—capable of crafty maneuvering, unafraid of confrontation, ready to seek out unlikely allies—is essential for understanding the complicated effect he is having on American politics.
+
+The pope born in Argentina as Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been called both a Marxist and a reactionary. But unpack the long biography of this 78-year-old cleric, and a more complex and intriguing reality emerges. Francis has never embraced one particular political ideology, though he has been comfortable around people who have. His first boss, the woman who ran the Buenos Aires chemistry laboratory where he worked, was a Communist whose diligence and integrity he greatly admired. “Marxist ideology is wrong,” the pope said in 2013, “but in my life I have known many Marxists who are good people, so I don’t feel offended.”
+
+What has shaped Francis, instead, is his lived experience. Born into an Italian immigrant family, he has a long-standing bias toward the underdog and those who must struggle to survive. The most formative part of his priestly life was the 19 years he spent among the very poorest in the shantytowns of Buenos Aires, where he was known as the “bishop of the slums.”
+
+But there is another key to understanding the pope’s worldview. His predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, was above all a theologian. Pope John Paul II, before that, was originally an actor and a philosopher. But Francis trained as a scientist. One of his adages is: “Facts are more important than ideas.” The intersection of these two threads in Francis’ life—his sympathy for the poor and his insistence that reality comes before theory—help account for how the United States and its unrestrained capitalism have come into the papal crosshairs.
+
+Like many Latin Americans, Pope Francis is ambivalent toward America. “He combines both a sense of respect and a feeling of resentment at the economic and cultural dominance of his bigger neighbor,” one senior member of the Roman Curia told me. As a young man, Bergoglio was schooled in the politics of Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón. “Peronism” was a curious alliance of labor unions, the army and the church. It sought what Perón called a “third position” between communism and capitalism. It favored authoritarian nationalism and looked to the state rather than the market for solutions; Francis was much influenced by the latter.
+
+In his later years, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis saw firsthand the devastation wrought upon ordinary people by economic policies originating in Washington. During Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, when half the population was plunged into poverty, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and U.S. Treasury agreed to policies that imposed severe austerity on Argentina’s lower class. Six years later, Francis took the leading role in shaping the pro-poor, anti-colonial spirit of the Latin American church articulated by the region’s bishops at their seminal meeting in Aparecida, Brazil.
+
+Pope Francis is no knee-jerk liberal. He has held the traditional Catholic line on issues like abortion, gay marriage and even contraception, yet he has radically shifted the focus of the Catholic Church away from sexual ethics onto the morality of money.
+
+That became clear in the eco-encyclical he released this year, Laudato Si. To the horror of climate skeptics, it endorsed the worldwide scientific consensus that global warming is largely human-created. It was ironic that, before publication, Catholic Republican presidential candidates like Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum had been admonishing the pope that science is better left to scientists. That was exactly what Francis, the former chemist, thought he was doing by accepting the view of 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists. For Francis, the source of the Earth’s degradation was clear: “[T]he degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey.”
+
+
+
+
+
+In July, Pope Francis delivered his fiercest condemnation of contemporary capitalism to date, addressing an assembly of political and community activists in Bolivia. Behind global capital’s indifference to the poor and the planet and all the “pain, death and destruction” it brings, he said, there lies “the stench of what Basil of Caesarea—one of the church’s first theologians—called ‘the dung of the devil.’ An unfettered pursuit of money rules. The service of the common good is left behind.” In this “subtle dictatorship,” capital has become an idol. In response, Francis called for change—“real change, structural change”—using the word no fewer than 32 times. Land, lodging and labor were “sacred rights,” and working for their “just distribution” was a “moral obligation” and, for Christians, a “commandment.”
+
+Such talk has had an immediate impact in American politics. The AFL-CIO’s policy director Damon Silvers, who is not a Catholic, said: “I couldn’t recall any leader of any religion in my lifetime speaking so plainly about economic justice and how that is at the core of how we human beings are supposed to treat each other.” At the other end of the political spectrum, Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld, a former altar boy, labeled the pope “the most dangerous man on the planet.” Big Catholic donors like American billionaire Ken Langone, working to raise $180 million for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, have been so upset by the pope’s unvarying pronouncements that they warned cardinals that wealthy Catholics might stop giving to the church. The pope’s aversion to red-blooded capitalism is just too apocalyptic for America’s tycoons—overlooking the curative powers of technology, ignoring the way the free market had lifted millions from poverty and refusing to consider that Catholic teaching on contraception is partly to blame for our overcrowded planet.
+
+Yet Francis’ supporters argue that he is not advocating a specific political program; rather than taking political sides, he is trying to open people’s minds to the generosity, openness and inclusiveness of the gospel. “It’s not Marxism,” one cardinal told me. “It’s classic Catholic social teaching, as developed by previous popes.” What, after all, is Francis’ joyful embrace of the poor and the rejected—kissing a man with a terrible skin disease, visiting thousands of African migrants washed up on Europe’s shores in Lampedusa, Italy—but an echo of Jesus of Nazareth?
+
+It’s this appeal to ordinary people that underscores just how bold Francis’ agenda truly is. He addresses his message not only to Catholics but, as his documents have insisted, to “all people of good will.” His call for society to break with “compulsive consumerism” and move to a more “sustainable” pattern of life will affect thousands of Catholic schools, parishes and hospitals throughout the United States and the world. But his plea that rich nations should turn down the air-conditioning, embrace carpooling and make other lifestyle changes has the capacity to enthuse many who do not normally look to Catholic moral theology for inspiration.
+
+And it has left free-market advocates and politicians around the world with a troubling question: What if the people actually respond?",REAL
+1902,Bernie Sanders to announce 2016 intentions on Thursday,"Sanders, an independent senator who caucuses with Democrats, has been inching towards a presidential run for months by traveling the country and speaking to liberal groups in critical presidential states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
+
+Sanders' Senate office would not comment on his 2016 plans, but the source close to the senator said Sanders' Thursday announcement will likely be subdued.",REAL
+908,The problem with Cruz and Kasich aligning to stop Donald Trump,"Sunday night's public proclamation that Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich had reached a truce aimed at ceding states to one another was not predicted but also entirely predictable. With his failure to gain any delegates in New York, Cruz is no longer able to win enough pledged delegates to clinch the nomination — a position in which Kasich has found himself for weeks. So the only viable path to the nomination for each is a contested convention — which necessitates that Donald Trump not win enough delegates to clinch it himself.
+
+And so, on Sunday, the public revelation that the two candidates would split upcoming states. Cruz will be cleared to win Indiana — with Kasich canceling upcoming events in the state — and Cruz will allow Kasich to win in Oregon and New Mexico. Each needs Trump to fall short of the 1,237 delegates it would take for him to win the nomination, with Cruz poised to potentially win on the second ballot and Kasich, in a more nebulous set of circumstances, to win somewhere else down the line. Allowing for Cruz to gobble up as many of Indiana's 57 delegates as he can and for Kasich to scoop up Oregon and New Mexico's 52 would put a dent in the 391 delegates Trump still needs to hit 1,237.
+
+But the plan isn't as foolproof as it might seem.
+
+The two made it public in part so that the various super PACs supporting each candidate would get the message. As our Matea Gold notes, Kasich's announcement was explicit in suggesting to his super PAC supporters that they should allow Cruz to win Indiana, writing in his statement that the campaign ""would expect independent third-party groups to do the same and honor the commitments made by the Cruz and Kasich campaigns."" But the announcement was also meant to present a united Not Trump front, of the kind that Trump opponents have been seeking for a while (though usually by virtue of hoping either Cruz or Kasich dropped out).
+
+The problem, though, is that the math is much trickier than simply handing one state to Cruz and another to Kasich.
+
+Let's start with Indiana. It was one of the four states that we identified in March as being key to the Republican contest by virtue of the number of delegates it offers. Two of those four, New York and Pennsylvania, will have voted by Wednesday morning, with Trump almost certainly winning over 100 of the pledged delegates the two have to offer. (Most of Pennsylvania's delegates are unpledged, meaning they could vote for Casper the Friendly Ghost, if inclined to do so.) The fourth state still outstanding is California, which we'll get to.
+
+A Fox News poll released Friday showed Trump with an eight-point lead over Cruz in Indiana. But FiveThirtyEight's forecast, including factors besides polls, has Cruz as a slight favorite. Trump has won most of the states around Indiana (save Ohio) by small margins, and Cruz should similarly be close in the state. Getting Kasich out of the picture means that the state's delegates — given out to whoever wins the state or its nine congressional districts — are much more likely to go to Cruz. Indiana has 8 percent of the delegates left to acquire and 15 percent of the delegates Trump needs to clinch. Handing them to Cruz would be a big win for those who want a non-Trump nominee.
+
+The delegates in Oregon and New Mexico, though? Ehh. There hasn't been good polling in either state recently, but each state allocates its delegates proportionally. Meaning that if Trump would get, say, 33 percent against Kasich's 33 and Cruz's 33, consolidating behind Kasich so that he gets 66 percent of the delegates doesn't really subtract from Trump's total at all.
+
+Where the two really need to stop Trump is in winner-take-all states such as New Jersey (where Trump currently has the support of a majority of the state's Republicans). That's 51 delegates — 13 percent of what Trump still needs — that Cruz and Kasich want to disrupt. And the big prize, California, where the winner of the state gets 13 delegates and the winner of each of its 53 congressional districts gets three. The idea, apparently, is that Kasich and Cruz might target specific congressional districts? That's optimistic.
+
+After all, Cruz tried to target specific districts in New York and still got goose-egged. Those Fox polls released Friday showed Trump with a wide lead in the state, making the task for Kasich and Cruz trickier. Kasich had only about $1.1 million on hand at the end of March, meaning that his ability to campaign anywhere, much less in specific congressional districts, is limited. (It's part of the reason that his pulling out of Indiana helps his campaign.)
+
+This also raises the question of how much of an effect the will of the candidates might actually have on the outcomes. There's a lot of talk about strategic voting, particularly from surrogates, but there's not much evidence that voters really care. Here are the apparent talking points for Cruz's campaign, via the Wall Street Journal's Reid Epstein:
+
+That's political finger-crossing. Primary voters are more engaged than your average voter, but will thousands of Cruz supporters in Oregon mark their ballots for Kasich simply to help fulfill the campaigns' grand strategies? If I were a betting man, which I am, I'd probably take the under.
+
+What's at the heart of this plan is the simple fact that Trump's got a narrow path to those 1,237 delegates. There are a number of scenarios where he hits the mark and perhaps more where he doesn't. Cruz and Kasich have little choice but to try to keep him from getting there and have few options for doing so beyond trying to parcel out states like poker chips.
+
+But as the Republican Party has learned repeatedly since the Iowa caucuses Feb. 1, voters are impressively immune to the whims of party poobahs. Cruz and Kasich need Trump to fail in his push for delegates. This could theoretically help. It could also be another few strands of spaghetti, clinging tenuously to the wall for a brief instant, but then, like so many strands before them, dropping to the ground, impotent. At least, Cruz and Kasich can say they tried.",REAL
+7426,Brexiters set up demented ‘people’s courts’,"Brexiters set up demented ‘people’s courts’ 07-11-16 BREXIT supporters have set up a network of ‘people’s courts’ where justice is based on popular opinion. Anti-EU Britons’ dissatisfaction with the legal system has led to the creation of makeshift courts dealing with everything from witchcraft to disputes over borrowed garden tools. Accountant and people’s judge Roy Hobbs said: “The court convenes in my living room, with the legal cases argued by our ‘barristers’ Sandra the local florist and Degsy, an unemployed decorator who’s seen A Few Good Men five times. “Our biggest case so far has been the legality of Brexit. The court came to the unanimous decision that it is totally brilliant and anyone who disagrees deserves a toe up their arse. “You can accuse anyone of anything. Last week we dealt with 48 cases of people being shortchanged at the local Sainsbury’s, a French spy and an old lady who put a curse on a horse than made it go lame. “Punishments range from the stocks for not wearing a poppy to hanging for more serious crimes, such as men having long hair. “Tomorrow I’ve got the case of a man who’s guilty of liking Nicola Sturgeon. He won’t be spouting his lies when he’s being hit in the forehead by turnips.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+5674,"Prime Minister of France says, “if we grant immediate asylum to illegal alien Muslim invaders, by tomorrow they will be speaking French and sharing French values”","Lincoln Applegate Hahn November 4, 2016 @ 6:30 pm 
+We’ve seen your “French Values”…. and they are the problem …. comme ci comme ca (like this and that) ? Etti November 4, 2016 @ 6:09 pm 
+What a foolish man! He believes that accepting migrants and teaching them to learn French will see them in the French Parliament. Of course you will and they will be forcing sharia law on to the French population not making the country more civilised. Lisa November 4, 2016 @ 6:03 pm 
+Because rightly or wrongly, people project their view of the world onto others.We live according to the golden rule and don’t do to others that which we do not want them to.do to us. Many cannot fathom or conceive just how vile the followers of the murderous paedophile can be. It’s incomprehensible. Even animals that have been traumatised and abused don’t behave like that when rescued. Europeans have mostly been peaceful for the last 70 years because they made a concerted effort to live in peace and to uphold dignity of life and human rights. That came at a price. Followers of the paedophile savage are socialised differently. They are pathetic and emotionally infantile. In the West we are taught to take personal responsibility for our actions. They are taught to blame everyone but themselves often turning victims into the guilty in the case of raped women. In the West violent displays of anger are frowned upon and we are taught to apologise for our wrong doIngs. Muslims have a warped and messed up sense of honour. An honour they will gladly kill their families to restore. In short they accept everything that is a crime in our countries as somehow permissible. Incompatible. In the West they are given human rights they don’t deserve and freedoms they can’t handle. Proven recipe for disaster. You have to be very very naive to believe that people who are fed a steady diet of intolerance, opression and hatred since birth will miraculously change just because they cross a border from hell hole to civilsed country. It should be obvious by now that Muslims born in europe cannot be integrated so what hope do we have integrating the rest. Nicolai sennels wrote a great paper on why islam is prone to creating monsters. Puts it all into perspective and is a must read in my opinion.",FAKE
+8699,US Presidential Elections Sound a Warning of Catastrophes to Come,"US Presidential Elections Sound a Warning of Catastrophes to Come By Daily Bell Staff - November 08, 2016 
+What’s wrong with Hillary Clinton’s brand? … As momentous an occasion as this should be for women around the world, Ms. Clinton would begin her term in the Oval Office with her unpopularity ratings at near-record levels. All of which leads to the question: What’s wrong with Brand Hillary? – The Globe and Mail 
+In the run-up to today’s election, many articles on Hillary in the mainstream media have tried to explain more fully why Hillary is electable and desirable as the leader of the US. 
+A common theme of these articles is that Hillary’s troubles are not mentioned or analyzed in detail. The Economist magazine, like many other publications, recently came out with an endorsement of Hillary. 
+But the endorsement simply dealt with Hillary’s legislative and professional history. As always when it comes to Hillary in the mainstream media, deeper questions are glossed over. 
+This approach to covering Hillary is deliberate and has generated increasing skepticism among large portions of the American public. Correctly, alternative media reports have pointed out this declining credibility but not enough have explained its widening ramifications. 
+More: 
+Ms. Clinton is one of the most qualified presidential candidates in recent memory – and her credentials are that much more impressive compared to those of her opponent. 
+After her time as first lady – in the state of Arkansas, and in the White House – Ms. Clinton served her country as a U.S. Senator and as secretary of state. 
+The article goes on to ask why Hillary has not been “able to break through in a way that inspires fervent support and popularity.” 
+At this point a significant analysis would grapple with underlying issues regarding Hillary’s background and approach to politics and life. These issues are well known. But instead, these issues are presented as “multiple scandals, ranging from Lewinsky to Benghazi, and most recently, her e-mails.” 
+The use of the word “scandal” implies something embarrassing. The significance of these problems in her personal and professional life goes far beyond embarrassment. It illustrates her approach to the US political system and generally how she wields power. 
+Having skipped past this analysis, the article then minimizes the scandals themselves, stating, ”Any politician who has been in the game that long has their fair share of scandal.” 
+The article continues to evolve toward ephemera, suggesting that a big problem with Ms. Clinton is her inability to “appear likable to voters.” This is a political problem to be sure, but it is not the UNDERLYING problem, which is much more significant. 
+Finally, the article brings up the idea that a big reason for the disconnect between Hillary and voters has to do with her gender. “As disheartening as that still is, society and the media still stereotype women and paint them with a negative brush.” 
+The article explains that much criticism of Hillary is gender-related. She has been scrutinized because of her health problems and has too-often been seen by the media as a wife and mother rather than as a businesslike politician with a long, professional history. 
+As stated, articles like this are at variance with what many believe to be true. Hillary is seen, at this point, by tens of millions as a person with an extremely shady past who may be part of a larger political mafia with her husband that deals in extortion, cover-ups, drug-dealing and even murder to generate vast profits for their Clinton Foundation, and thus for themselves. 
+Since this information is so widely dispersed, articles that don’t deal more directly with these issues can be seen either as painfully naive or as concealing something. It is one of the reasons that trust in the mainstream media has plunged so precipitously. 
+Additionally, as we pointed out recently, belief in “conspiracy theories,” has risen to over 50 percent. Hillary’s campaign and its coverage may be directly responsible. Once people were increasingly and regularly exposed to the disconnect between what they believed about Hillary and what was being presented, they began to reexamine various “conspiracy” reports they’d previously discounted. 
+Even among those voting for Hillary, there is widespread sentiment that she may have committed criminal wrongdoings and deserves a trial rather than the presidency. 
+We’ve advanced the idea that none of this has come about by accident, not the FBI fumblings, nor reports of her healthcare problems, nor even the email “scandals.” All of this in fact was known well in advance of her latest presidential run. 
+This is simply not a coincidence in our view. The idea, increasingly it seems, is to shatter cultural cohesion in the West with an eye toward creating increased globalization and an internationalized society. This presidential election and its mainstream coverage has done just that. 
+Going forward, it is probable that cultural destruction will be increasingly significant throughout the West, employing numerous strategies – political, ethnic, economic and military. 
+These elections – whether Hillary wins or Trump – are evidently the starting gun, along with the European immigrant crisis, for a new series of elite programs. These will likely yield up serial catastrophes that will change lives and belief structures going forward for millions and even billions 
+Conclusion: Building an international world, whether the effort is to be successful or not, is a massive and horribly disruptive and bloody prospect. Americans would be wise to perceive this latest presidential elections as a kind of warning of what it is to come.",FAKE
+68,The Overwhelming Stress of Being Denied a Bathroom,"A recent viral video showed a woman wielding a Bible overhead and marching through a Target, ringing out her message through the brightly lit aisles. “I’m a mother of 12 and I’m disgusted by this wicked practice,” she cried. “Mothers, get your children out of this store … it’s a dangerous place!”
+
+The woman, who has not been identified, is not the only one incensed by Target’s announcement that it would allow transgender customers to use the restroom that matches their gender identity. More than 700,000 people have pledged to boycott the store. Target’s move, meanwhile, was seen as a response to a new North Carolina law that requires people in government buildings to use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex on their birth certificate—in effect forcing post-transition transgender people to use the bathroom of the opposite sex.
+
+The idea that children, especially girls, will somehow be hurt by relieving themselves alongside transgender women has been one of the main arguments of the law’s proponents. In the words of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, “Men should not be going to the bathroom with little girls.”
+
+There’s no evidence that municipalities that have protected trans people’s restroom access have seen a spike in public-safety issues. But according to some studies, not having protected restroom access can be harmful for trans people.
+
+According to a study by Georgia State University’s Kristie L. Seelman, being denied bathroom access is correlated with an increased risk of suicide attempts among trans people.
+
+Transgender people have said bathroom access is one of their “most pressing challenges,” Seelman writes in the study, which was published in February in the Journal of Homosexuality. Trans people have reported getting stared at or being asked to leave, something that causes them “great stress,” according to researchers. Seelman highlights an earlier study of 93 trans people that found 68 percent had been verbally harassed in bathrooms, and 9 percent were physically assaulted.",REAL
+8773,DONALD TRUMP & DEUTSCHE BANK: DID CLINTONS LEAN ON US JUSTICE DEPARTMENT?,"Clinton perversion of electoral procedures, manipulation of media and the Justice system should make every American voter think twice about Hillary 
+Before we get into the meat of this thing, let me make two things very clear: The evidence presented here is not the usual half-checked/chosen at random/doctored stuff we’re used to in madcap conspiracy rumours. Everything shown here is a matter of undisputed public record – a rare thing in this Presidential campaign I’m not trying to prove a theory here, as I lack the resources to do so. I am merely using informed logic to establish those four things required to build any credible case: behavioural track record, means, motive and opportunity. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that in terms of capability of performing dirty tricks, the Clinton campaign ticks all four boxes. The Clintons’ track record on dirty tricks 
+Negative advertising, smear rumour, making rally halls look more full/empty on TV and innate media bias have all been obvious for many years in Western election campaigns. Not surprisingly, during Presidential campaigns this is heightened by the physically more personal nature of the contest. 
+Huffington Post banned The Slog from commenting in 2012 after I alleged the use of troll swarms by Obama to mess up Republican sites. Three months later, his White House CoS casually confirmed the story. 
+This is truth bending, and isn’t illegal. But the Clinton track record against Bernie Sanders is of a quite different order. I was given first-hand evidence, for example, of blatant threats to Democratic National Convention (DNC) workers that anyone helping organise Sanders rallies would have no future or place in a Clinton White House. But there is also disturbing evidence of electoral irregularity as well. October 2015 – over 120,000 voting registrations lost in Brooklyn – & rock solid Sanders neighbourhood, plus nearly a third of Sanders supporters complaining that, on pitching up to vote, their Party registrations had been changed Over nine straight 2015 primaries, Sanders won seven: in the other two, “massive voter irregularities” were reported. Hillary won them. The supposedly neutral DNC is stuffed with overt Clinton activists. The private company collecting sensitive poll/registration information NPG van has close ties to Bill Clinton and worked for him in 1992. Leaks from NPG are, to say the least, recurrent. On the eve of the Democratic party’s convention in Philadelphia, a whopping 20,000 emails were made public by Wikileaks showing supposedly ‘neutral’ senior party officials tried to undermine Mr Sanders’s insurgent left-wing campaign by publicly portraying him as an atheist. Solidly Sanders locations in Arizona’s Maciopa County found their polling booths available reduced from 200 to 60. Odd behaviour during a Primary campaign. Undercover videos just four days ago showed two senior DNC operatives openly admitting to paid interference with Trump rallies and voter registration manipulation. 
+These days, one talks to Washington pundits who – sadly – shrug and say “both sides are at it – they cancel each other out”. But what I’ve shown above is just a fraction of highlights compared to the total media exposure of Clinton criminality. Doing a quick count from 78 sites, press titles and broadcasters last night, allegations against the Clinton campaign outnumber all others by 5/2. 
+However, it’s at this point that we go beyond even electoral irregularity and into suggestions of Hillary Clinton perverting the course of events at the Department of Justice (DoJ). Here, we segue neatly into ‘means’. The means to destroy Trump 
+Without any shadow of doubt, the biggest bubbling-under scandal of the campaign (until complaints about Trump’s locker-room and sex abuse behaviour ‘surfaced’) was that involving emails sent by Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State. 
+The headline here is this: while heading up State, she only used her own personal and heavily abuse-protected server to send official emails – rather than official State Department email accounts maintained on federal servers. On leaving that job, the State Department hurriedly classified all the emails retrospectively. 
+This suggestive of the fact that Ms Clinton has something to hide. Her behaviour was also highly irregular, and cannot solely be explained by national security concerns: if there are fears about how secure State is, then we may as well all pack up and go home. (There are as it happens; but their security is a hundred times more sophisticated than hers). 
+Hillary maintains that her behaviour did not break federal rules, and there are precedents to show that. The hole in her defence is that there are no precedents for all the emails to have produced on her private server. 
+Having seen the content of some 150 emails, the FBI began by being quite bullish on the subject of an investigation. But then suddenly it wasn’t. An anodyne report was eventually issued in July 2016, criticising her “extreme carelessness”. 
+Her behaviour does not support that finding. Over at the DoJ, Dan Metcalfe, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy (FOIA), said this gave her even tighter control over her emails by not involving a third party such as Google, and helped prevent their disclosure by Congressional subpoena. He added: “She managed successfully to insulate her official emails, categorically, from the FOIA, both during her tenure at State and long after her departure from it—perhaps forever”, making it “a blatant circumvention of the FOIA by someone who unquestionably knows better” . 
+But neither State nor the DoJ did anything. The former issued a report making it clear that Secretary Clinton had lied to employees about the ‘permission’ she had, and confirmed that permission had never been sought. She also lied to the media about never sending classified material via her own server: a review of the 55,000-page email eventually released found “hundreds of potentially classified emails”. 
+There is a clear – very clear – scenario that scopes out here: that of an ambitious wannabe US President conspiring to hide her guilt about stuff in perpetuity. Among the forty emails held back by US security agencies are those assumed to refer to the Benghazi Compound disaster, during which the Ambassador lost his life in the most bestial manner. 
+However, the FBI having been quietly told to pipe down, the job facing the Clintons now was to get the DoJ onside. Bill went right to the very top. 
+In late June 2016, it was reported that Bill Clinton met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on her private plane on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Three days later, a Justice Department official categorically told the media that Attorney General Lynch will accept “whatever recommendation career prosecutors and the F.B.I. director make about whether to bring charges related to Hillary Clinton’s personal email server”. 
+Washington sources confirm that Lynch “already pretty much knew what the FBI would say”. Did the Clintons have a strong motive? 
+Nothing is ever conclusive in these areas. But the overwhelming suggestion from these events is that the Clintons most certainly do have the means to influence the activities and output of the Justice Department. 
+However, it’s easy to argue that Candidate Clinton had little to fear from Trump; the media almost universally dismissed him as a no-hoper. So why take the risk of, potentially, using the DoJ to put her adversary in a spot? 
+It’s easy to argue that, but the US media have been wrong about Donald Trump since Day One. And the facts don’t support the argument. 
+Last night, the BBC released this trend map of the poll support for each candidate throughout the campaign: 
+On this diagram, I have indicated in green ink the two points at which Clinton and Trump are neck and neck. In early to mid July – following embarrassing email revelations – Clinton’s support dips, and Trump briefly overtakes her. 
+From the word go, the Clinton campaign saw Trump’s financial background, practices and exposure as an obvious weakness. Having pressed hard for his tax returns, once his official election as the GOP presidential nominee was confirmed – June 19th 2016 – they began demanding to see his financials. 
+In fact, they already knew of one unfortunate link: on March 20th, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal had featured a piece showing Donald Trump’s massive dependence on Deutsche Bank as a credit supplier. The Murdoch press is campaigning solidly for Hillary, and Rupert himself has given substantial donations to her presidential bid. His motives towards her and Deutsche have been detailed by The Slog elsewhere . 
+The dates here are key – particularly the dates from which Deutsche Bank ceases to be ‘troubled’ in the background, and increasingly becomes a foreground, front-page crisis . 
+In early to mid June, Trump racks up his support and closes the gap with Clinton.Other financial papers pick up on the WSJ story….despite the fact that Trump’s cash flow and personal salary alone would be enough to pay off all the Deutsche loans. At this point, the International Monetary Fund releases a report saying that Deutsche Bank “appears to be the most important net contributor to systemic risks in the global banking system.” 
+The IMF – and its boss Christine Lagarde – are prime movers in aiding Clintonian foreign policy relating to the EU and North Africa. But still Trump’s support leaps from 34-40%. Then early July, S&P Global Ratings lowers its outlook on Deutsche Bank to negative. At the same time, Deutsche Bank’s U.S. unit fails the U.S. Federal Reserve’s stress test. The story filters down into non-specialist media. Clinton consolidates her lead. 
+But by this time, DB is starting to look like a basket case – which it has been for years – and the ‘ailing’ bank gets kicked out of the STOXX blue-chip Europe 50 index. 
+And yet, the Donald starts to recover momentum. By mid September, he’s back to almost neck and neck. It’s now that the DoJ Establishment goes for the throat.The Justice Department chooses this precise moment – September 16th – to splash with the news that Deutsche Bank faces a whopping $14.5 billion malpractice fine. Within hours, its shares go into freefall. 
+Between September 20th and 28th, a broader media blitz and online campaign openly calls Trump “massively dependent on Deutsche loans”. Counterspin from the Deutsche camp claims negotiations to reduce the DoJ fine are well in hand. Two days later Justice splashes again: no, it alleges, they haven’t even started yet. 
+But still, general awareness of the Trump-Deutsche link remains low….and Trump himself steadies his poll ratings. Locker rooms, pussy grabbing abuse allegations suddenly sprout via close Clinton ally David Farenthold. Donald’s poll ratings dive. 
+Donald Trump is just beginning to recover his position. Already pro-Democrat sites are switching tack to say that Trump “is a puppet candidate of foreign banks” – a silly allegation, given that he only works with one, and it’s more dependent on his business than vice versa. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has Deutsche CEO John Cryan by the balls; as far as the Clintons are concerned, it holds all the cards. Opportunity 
+For myself, I doubt very much that Hillary & Co will go any further down the ‘dodgy credit’ road. With only two weeks to go to Election day, an imminent Deutsche collapse would play into Trump’s allegedly wandering hands: it is, after all, the US unit that faces the fine, and Trump’s populism is anti Wall Street. 
+I think an equal (if not bigger) force behind pushing Deutsche Bank into the limelight is that of forcing it into a Middle East role where it can be a Rottweiller controlled by State, its old boss Hillary Clinton, and massive regional investor Rupert Murdoch. 
+But while the opportunity was there, it’s obvious that Bill Clinton had all the influence his wife needs to help her get elected. Indeed, by being so unpopular in his own Party, Donald Trump has made this a much easier task: nobody but nobody in the US élite wants Trump in the White House. 
+As I endeavoured to stress at the outset, the object in this post is not to prove a conspiracy, but rather to present an avalanche of evidence to support one simple – and widespread – observation about the Hillarybillies: as their power has increased, so too has their megalomania inflated to a frightening degree. 
+Where once there were only crooked land deals and cigars to go on, today it is easy to argue that this creepy couple are operating at the kind of level where the American systems of Law, foreign policy, power separation and democracy itself are being perverted. This much has been obvious for some time; but American voters need to make their minds up by November 8th which they want least – Donald Trump in the White House, or Mr and Mrs Clinton doing the bidding of corporate globalism…while dragging the US further and further towards geopolitical confrontation. 
+Looked at in that way, while this has probably been the most superficial and childish Presidential contest in American history, it will probably also turn out to have been the most important.",FAKE
+8933,Why You Should Stop Apologizing for Doing All That You Can,"Why You Should Stop Apologizing for Doing All That You Can Illustration by Kim Ryu By Kelly Hayes / transformativespaces.org 
+I’ve noticed lately that lot of allies and accomplices I talk to about NoDAPL and other struggles will name what they are trying to contribute to the cause, and then promptly apologize that they can’t do more. Often, the apologies seem perfunctory, or even insincere, but sometimes, they seem quite heartfelt. Personally, I deal with enough ideological tourists and movement loitering to feel a little sad when good people are doing good things, and feeling shitty about themselves anyway. 
+Maybe they don’t realize how many people applaud themselves for “standing on the right side of history,” as though reading an article or a book, and figuring out where to “stand,” is how one affects the course of history. 
+Or perhaps they just don’t know how to appreciate themselves — or have even been taught not to. 
+So I just want to say to everyone — whether you see yourself as an ally, accomplice or frontline struggler: 
+If you are really doing all that you can, you have nothing to apologize for. 
+Because if you are really and truly doing all that you can, you’re actually setting a pretty high standard for the rest of us. 
+And if you are really and truly doing all that you can, you should appreciate that about yourself, and allow yourself to be appreciated by others. Because as simple as it may sound, it’s often hard for us to internalize the fact that, on the scale of what we can all contribute, all you can is actually everything. 
+If you’re accustomed to selling yourself short, that may seem a little grandiose, so let’s vision this through for a moment: 
+Can you imagine how much closer to free we could get if everyone really did all that they could — within their own capacity, without martyring themselves in a heap of burnout? 
+What would it look like? 
+What could we build? 
+I think some of us have seen snapshots of what that could look like, in moments of consuming, fast-paced community collaboration, where we had to take care of each other to sustain community, and the work. But those breakneck sprints of action and inspiration, and the community-care triage that they necessitate, are not a model for day-to-day living. Because that intensity burns out. A broad, sustainable vision — and a simple one really — of community where everyone who claims to care passionately about a thing simply does all they can, and does their best… that’s obviously a dream that’s still under construction. 
+When we think about what obstacles impede that dream, we might first think of the internal failings of individuals: apathy, selfishness, etc. But what informs these tendencies? Is it possible that we are taught that some contributions are too small to matter, and that some are so great that they’ll make all the difference? Are we caught in a mythology where we are deemed either heroic or insignificant? 
+The idea that heroic individuals somehow marshal their talents, and resources (hello, Batman), to liberate the masses has, to put it mildly, an oppressive functionality. If internalized, it has the potential to shorten our social and political reach, due to our own self obsession. In movement building, we learn that heroic communities, rather than heroic individuals, propel our freedom dreams. Such communities are made up of people of all capacities, who bravely and lovingly do all they can. 
+Respecting our differing capacities is part of taking care of each other, and personally, I want to live in world where we honor each other’s contributions, celebrate one another, and love and care for each other. 
+So the bottom line here is: Be glad to acknowledge that you do all you can. 
+Let’s not teach others, who might take an interest in movement work, that feelings of insufficiency and guilt are the inevitable consequences of those efforts. We can be humble without erasing or diminishing ourselves. We can tell people what it means to us to do what we can, and we can discuss the different shapes that can take — and how fulfilling it can be. 
+If you’re reading this and thing to yourself, “Well, I really could do a lot more,” you could be right. I don’t know your story, or who depends on you, what your health is like or what resources you have to give. But if you think you have more to offer, don’t approach those efforts from a place of guilt — because as you may have noticed, the guilt of the privileged has never gotten anyone free. 
+So take joy in sharing your efforts and ideas with others. Celebrate what it means to be a resistor acting in defense of your community, or acting in solidarity with others. And if you’re a white accomplice, appreciate what it means to be a full-fledged traitor to white supremacy. Because that’s a beautiful thing and worth smiling about. 
+I’m not saying we should gloss over the messes we make and wade through in our organizing spaces. As communities, we need to be real about the rough places movement work can go — especially when discussing the structural oppressions we replicate in our own spaces. But we also need to feel right about the things we deserve to feel right about, and to remind each other of that. 
+If your goal is to be enough to put right everything that’s wrong, you will never be enough. But if your goal is to build a culture and a community that upends its oppressions, then the best you’ve got — the best that a whole lot of us have got — is exactly what it’s going to take. 
+It’s easy to tell people not to burn out, but I think it sometimes helps to think of movements as larger forces of nature — as constellations of actions, movements, stories and freedom fighters. There are all kinds of action-takers who show us what the pursuit of freedom looks like. 
+So just do your best today, and do it again tomorrow, and feel right about that. Because together, we will get there. 0.0 ·",FAKE
+1280,Clinton Gets Back In The Game After Blowout Loss To Sanders In N.H.,"Clinton Gets Back In The Game After Blowout Loss To Sanders In N.H.
+
+Just 48 hours after his landslide win in New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders was in Milwaukee, Wis., reminding everyone how far he had come in his quest for the presidency — and perhaps realizing how far he still has to go.
+
+It was a night both candidates could feel good about. Hillary Clinton had more than ample opportunity to show off her mastery of policy, while Sanders' progressive passion was on display as well. As in the five previous meetings between the two, it was Sanders' big vision versus Hillary Clinton's store of knowledge. It was Sanders' idealism soaring and Clinton's realism bringing it to earth. It was his inspiration versus her preparation.
+
+""The American people have responded to a series of basic truths,"" said Sanders in his opening statement. ""We have today a campaign finance system which is corrupt, which is undermining American democracy, which allows Wall Street and billionaires to pour huge sums of money into the political process to elect the candidates of their choice.""
+
+Sanders said Americans understand that the economy is rigged, that ordinary workers are putting in longer hours for less pay and that income growth is going almost entirely to the top 1 percent of incomes.
+
+Clinton stressed from the start that she wanted to ""knock down all the barriers that are holding Americans back, and to rebuild the ladders of opportunity that will give every American a chance to advance, especially those who have been left out and left behind.""
+
+The packed house of Democratic activists on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee was strongly supportive of one candidate or the other — and at least receptive to both. They loved Clinton's two potshots at the state's Republican governor, Scott Walker.
+
+Clinton scored the governor for his battles with labor unions, especially those representing public employees, and said she doubted governors such as Walker would support Sanders' goal to provide free tuition for all at public colleges and universities. Both times, the local crowd of Democrats roared its approval.
+
+And while Sanders had moments guaranteed to make his core supporters ecstatic, he did not dominate the evening as one might expect the 22-point winner of the first primary to do. Part of that was Clinton's persistent cool, which included her answer when asked why 55 percent of the women in New Hampshire had just voted for Sanders.
+
+""I have spent my entire adult life working toward making sure that women are empowered to make their own choices — even if that choice is not to vote for me,"" Clinton said. ""I believe that it is most important that we unleash the full potential of women and girls in our society.""
+
+Sanders also seemed the less disciplined of the two contenders. At one point, after Clinton had made a ""once I'm in the White House"" reference, Sanders shot back: ""Well, Secretary Clinton, you're not in the White House yet."" While it might have pleased his partisans, the remark drew some audible disapproval in the hall.
+
+Sanders also indulged in several asides of a historical nature, tipping his hat to Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and ripping into former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whom Clinton had cited as someone she listened to.
+
+Still another factor hovering over the proceedings was the coming shift in the demographics of the early-state primary voters. Both the upcoming Democratic contests (Nevada caucuses on Feb. 20, South Carolina primary on Feb. 27) have far more Latino and African-American voters than Iowa and New Hampshire. They also have fewer progressive activists and far less penchant for underdogs. Neither borders either candidate's home state.
+
+The importance the candidates place on these more diverse constituencies was readily apparent in the answers and examples both gave on Thursday night. Sanders talked about the criminal justice system, the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos and the exaggerated difficulty of finding jobs in minority communities.
+
+Sanders said that once he is able to increase taxes on Wall Street and other centers of wealth, he would be able to provide ""jobs for millions of young people"" and also education to equip them for those jobs. At that point, he said in response to a question, race relations in the U.S. would ""absolutely"" be better than they have been in the Obama era.
+
+Clinton, for her part, cited the late Nelson Mandela, the legendary leader of South Africa, as her foreign role model in international affairs. But she also repeatedly used her relationship with President Obama as both a human shield and an advertisement for herself.
+
+Questioned about accepting campaign contributions from Wall Street, she noted that Obama had done the same in 2008 and yet still enacted laws Wall Street opposed. When Sanders again dinged her for voting to authorize force against Iraq in 2002, she noted that Obama — like Sanders — had opposed the invasion, yet still tapped her for Secretary of State when he took office.
+
+Clinton also attacked Sanders for praising a book that said Obama in office had disappointed progressives and suggesting someone from the left should challenge his re-nomination in 2012.
+
+Sanders said any senator would have some disagreements with a president, but Clinton responded that Sanders' assessments of Obama as weak and failing the test of leadership were another matter. Sanders noted that Clinton herself had run against Obama in 2008.
+
+The Sanders team also knows that before the next debate takes place, 11 states will have voted on March 1 — Super Tuesday — and another three states on March 5. By the time these two candidates take the stage together again, the race could look quite different.
+
+Even now, the walloping Clinton took in the Granite State has barely cost her anything in the delegate count. She got a share of the delegates in both Iowa and New Hampshire. And she has been endorsed by a big majority of the so-called ""superdelegates,"" the elected officeholders and party officials who will have about a fifth of all the votes at the convention in July in Philadelphia.
+
+All of which makes it important for Sanders to build on his Iowa and New Hampshire performances and maintain his momentum in the 16 states weighing in between now and that next debate on March 6 in Flint, Mich.",REAL
+6017,WikiLeaks Documents Reveal United Nations Interest In UFOs,"WikiLeaks Documents Reveal United Nations Interest In UFOs 11/02/2016 
+HUFFINGTON POST 
+Revelations in a set of hacked emails released by WikiLeaks earlier this month have sparked new conversations about UFOs and speculation that extraterrestrials have been visiting Earth. But a very significant ― and possibly overlooked ― group of WikiLeaks items relevant to the topic was released on May 18, 2015. 
+WikiLeaks posted more than half a million U.S. State Department diplomatic documents from 1978 detailing America’s interactions with countries all around the world ― including Grenada Prime Minister Eric Gairy’s efforts to organize a United Nations-based committee to research and investigate global UFO reports. 
+Many of the documents, written by American UN officials, indicated how closely they were monitoring Grenada’s UFO-related activities. 
+One document , from Nov. 18, 1978, revealed my involvement in helping Grenada to produce a credible UFO presentation. 
+I had an opportunity in early 1978 to meet Gairy in New York to present an idea about how I thought the UN would pay attention to his UFO crusade. Through his ambassadors, I gave him a copy of a documentary record album, “UFOs: The Credibility Factor,” that I produced for CBS Inc. in 1975. 
+Gairy and I met, and after I convinced him I could bring a very credible group of speakers to the UN, he agreed to sponsor my proposal (see image below). Shortly after a handshake deal, he made me a temporary delegate-adviser of Grenada and the rest was, well, history. COURTESY OF LEE SPEIGEL This 1978 letter from Grenada to Lee Speigel confirmed that country’s commitment to sponsor Speigel’s UFO presentation at the United Nations. 
+The following image shows part of the group I brought together in July 1978 to meet with UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. He wanted to know what we were planning to do at our November event in front of the Special Political Committee, which included representatives from the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. COURTESY OF LEE SPEIGEL On July 14, 1978, producer Lee Speigel (now a Huffington Post writer) brought together a group of military, scientific and psychological experts to meet with United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to discuss Speigel’s upcoming presentation to the U.N. Special Political Committee later that year. Topic: The importance of establishing an international UFO committee. Pictured from left: USAF astronaut Col. Gordon Cooper, astronomer Jacques Vallee, astronomer/astrophysicist Claude Poher, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, Grenada Prime Minister Sir Eric Gairy, Waldheim, Morton Gleisner of the Special Political Committee, Lee Speigel, researcher Leonard Stringfield and University of Colorado psychologist David Saunders. 
+Another cable posted on WikiLeaks , from Nov. 24, 1978, refers to Ambassador Richard Petree’s meeting with Grenada representatives “to discuss their UFO resolution. Ambassador Petree acknowledged the high level of interest in UFOs among some elements of the private sector and scientific community … and pointed to the budgetary impact as a major concern of the U.S. and other countries.” 
+On Nov. 28, 1978, the day after our presentation at the UN, this document was sent through official channels, detailing the actual UFO event, describing what each of the invited scientific and military speakers had to say to the member nations. 
+A few days after that, on Dec. 2, 1978, a follow-up cable was transmitted, including the following: 
+Subsequent to the introduction of the Grenadian UFO resolution, Misoff [Mission Officer] has engaged in two separate informal negotiating sessions, which included representation from Austria, USSR and Grenada, in an attempt to arrive at a mutually acceptable compromise solution to the problem. 
+A draft decision to be taken by the Special Political Committee (SPC) has been agreed upon by the participants in the informal negotiations, subject to concurrence of their respective capitals. We think referral of the [UFO] matter to the Outer Space Committee (OSC) without a preordained mandate as to what action is to be taken, provides the flexibility the OSC needs to take whatever action it deems appropriate. 
+It will also obviate the need to vote on a resolution (and gamble on the results). 
+The following week brought forth another document , on Dec. 8, 1978, which stated: 
+“The General Assembly invites interested member states to take appropriate steps to coordinate on a national level scientific research and investigation into extraterrestrial life, including unidentified flying objects, and to inform the secretary-general of the observations, research and evaluation of such activities.” 
+It was further suggested that Grenada’s views on UFOs could be discussed in 1979. Unfortunately, that didn’t come to pass, as Grenada Prime Minister Gairy was overthrown in a 1979 coup. 
+Needless to say, without the Gairy-based initiative on UFOs, it was quietly relegated to Grenada’s back burner. 
+This is the tip of the UFO-UN iceberg. It shows how the subject of UFOs wasn’t merely officially ridiculed or slapped aside. There was, and perhaps still is, some interest there, just waiting to emerge.",FAKE
+3303,The Senate's 46 Democrats got 20 million more votes than its 54 Republicans,"On Tuesday, 33 US senators elected in November will be sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden — including 12 who are new to the chamber. The class includes 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, a big reason why the GOP has a 54-46 majority in the Senate overall.
+
+But here's a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, ""the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes.""
+
+Here's what that looks like in chart form:
+
+This doesn't mean that the Republican majority is illegitimate or anything like that. Indeed, after 2008 and 2012, the tables were turned: Democrats got more Senate seats than their vote share suggested they should. The problem isn't that the deck is stacked in favor of Republicans. The problem is that the deck is stacked in favor of small states, which receive equal representation in the Senate despite dramatic variance in population. The Senate is a profoundly anti-democratic body and should be abolished.",REAL
+10534,Fashwave Friday: Endgame,"6827 N. High Street, Suite 121 Worthington, Ohio 43085 
+Sound and Vision 
+It’s pretty simple now. The ZOG has been mortally wounded. They’ve been caught manipulating the news and polls. Basically they have one foot on a banana peel and the other in their graves. 
+Now the investigation has been reopened. 
+We stand at the threshold of infinity. 
+Remember to continue with Operation Endgame Hillary to eliminate all remaining resistance. 
+Takes a few minutes out of your day to click on this link, and drag a few over to your social media. 
+If you missed Memetic Monday on Wednesday, check it – instructions are detailed therein. 
+Operation Endgame Hillary is not optional. 
+Remember what Andrew said: 
+“Everybody Memes! Nobody Quits! Or Ill Kill You Myself!” 
+We are at the threshold, fam. 
+The Colonel",FAKE
+6754,"Blog: If Donald Trump Pardons Me, I Would Be Honored To Serve As Secretary Of Agriculture","Email 
+One year ago, I was arrested for both statutory rape and possessing child pornography, and I deeply regret my disgusting crimes. Since that fateful day, I’ve been serving a 16-year jail sentence, using every second of that time to reflect on, and repent for, what I have done. I’ve truly learned a lot about myself as a person, and if our president-elect, Donald Trump, were to recognize my transformation and to pardon me, I would be honored to serve as his Secretary of Agriculture. 
+In the event Donald J. Trump pardons and then appoints me to his future Cabinet, I, Jared Fogle, current federal inmate and former Subway spokesperson, could think of no greater privilege than to serve our commander in chief, and our country, as the head of our Department of Agriculture. 
+It is the Secretary of Agriculture’s sworn duty to provide assistance to our nation’s farmers, as well as to protect farmland and enforce food safety, and if I am let out of jail, I believe I am ready for the task. To have Donald Trump both forgive my child-sex crimes and recognize how useful my deep knowledge of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers, hot Italian peppers, olives, and other sub toppings could be to his administration would make my heart swell with pride. 
+To serve our farmers at the federal level would be greater than any Subway sandwich I ever ate, greater than any Subway commercial I ever made, and greater than any large pair of pants I ever wore. 
+As someone who has sold hundreds of millions of Subway sandwiches to the American people since the year 2000, I know the burden of working for the public, and I would not let our new president, nor the American people, down. It would be an immense privilege to serve for a full four years, and pending Donald Trump negating my seven federal counts of production of child pornography, I would start that process immediately. 
+I lost over 245 pounds and ate thousands of Subway sandwiches before I was arrested for paying for sex with a minor, and I do hope that President-elect Trump considers that fact when making his decision whether or not to pardon and appoint me secretary of agriculture. To serve our farmers at the federal level would be greater than any Subway sandwich I ever ate, greater than any Subway commercial I ever made, and greater than any large pair of pants I ever wore. 
+So, hopefully, the next time I address you, it will be not from my prison cell in Englewood Federal Correctional Institution but from the National Mall, in Washington, D.C. Believe me, the next four years would be incredible not just for me, but for you, should our president-elect look deep into his heart and give the department the spokesperson it deserves!",FAKE
+3788,Hung jury in Jodi Arias sentencing phase removes possibility of death sentence,"The jury in the Jodi Arias case tasked with deciding whether she should be sentenced to life in prison or death for killing her lover nearly seven years ago was unable to agree on terms of sentencing Thursday, removing the possibility of a death sentence.
+
+The judge declared a mistrial and will sentence Arias to either life in prison or a life term with the possibility of release after 25 years.
+
+It marked the second time a jury has deadlocked on her punishment -- a disappointment for prosecutors who argued for the death penalty during the nearly seven-year legal battle against Arias.
+
+Arias was convicted of murder in 2013 after a lengthy trial that became a sensation with its tawdry revelations about her relationship with victim Travis Alexander.
+
+The victim's sister, Samantha Alexander, sobbed in court while the decision was announced.
+
+The jurors deliberated for 26.5 hours over a five-day span. Earlier this week, Arias' attorneys said jurors were at an impasse, but the judge denied a mistrial request. A verdict does not rule out the possibility of a hung jury.
+
+Arias stabbed and slashed Alexander nearly 30 times, slit his throat so deeply that she nearly decapitated him, and shot him in the forehead. She left his body in his shower at his suburban Phoenix home where friends found him about five days later.
+
+She initially denied having anything to do with the killing. She later admitted that she killed Alexander but claimed it was self-defense after he attacked her. Prosecutors said it was premeditated murder carried out in a jealous rage after he wanted to end their affair and planned a trip to Mexico with another woman.
+
+That jury deadlocked on her punishment, prompting the sentencing retrial that began in October.
+
+Chris Hughes, a friend of Alexander, told KPHO that a hung jury would be frustrating.
+
+""My personal opinion is that she earned the death penalty,"" Hughes said. ""I would be OK with life in prison, if she never gets out again, but she deserves the life of a death row inmate.""
+
+The day she was convicted of murder, Arias gave a jailhouse interview with a local Fox reporter in which she said she'd rather have the death penalty. ""I believe death is the ultimate freedom,"" she said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report",REAL
+1980,Chris Christie Bolsters Political Team as Allies Launch Super PAC,"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is bulking up his political team in preparation for a likely presidential bid, adding three veteran operatives who played senior roles in George W. Bush’s re-election.
+
+The Christie team is expanding its political operation as his allies launch a super PAC to raise large sums from wealthy supporters in order to advertise and conduct voter outreach on behalf of the New Jersey governor, in what most expect to be a prolonged and expensive nominating fight.",REAL
+7438,Re: Why Did Attorney General Loretta Lynch Plead The Fifth?,"Why Did Attorney General Loretta Lynch Plead The Fifth? Barracuda Brigade 2016-10-28 Print The administration is blocking congressional probe into cash payments to Iran. Of course she needs to plead the 5th. She either can’t recall, refuses to answer, or just plain deflects the question. Straight up corruption at its finest! 
+100percentfedUp.com ; Talk about covering your ass! Loretta Lynch did just that when she plead the Fifth to avoid incriminating herself over payments to Iran…Corrupt to the core! Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. 
+Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) initially presented Lynch in October with a series of questions about how the cash payment to Iran was approved and delivered. 
+In an Oct. 24 response, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded on Lynch’s behalf, refusing to answer the questions and informing the lawmakers that they are barred from publicly disclosing any details about the cash payment, which was bound up in a ransom deal aimed at freeing several American hostages from Iran. 
+The response from the attorney general’s office is “unacceptable” and provides evidence that Lynch has chosen to “essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries regarding [her]role in providing cash to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio and Pompeo wrote on Friday in a follow-up letter to Lynch. More Related",FAKE
+2291,The Fear of Being Gay in Russia,"Moscow’s first gay pride parade was held in May 2006, thirteen years after homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia. It was supposed to be a joyous occasion, the beginning of a new era of openness for the LGBT community.
+
+It didn’t quite work out that way. LGBT marchers that day clashed with riot police, who tried to stop the event. “We disturbed something very deeply rooted in Russian society, some very evil power of intolerance and violence,” says Nikolai Baev, a prominent LGBT rights activist who attended the march.
+
+Only a few months later, Russia saw its first regional anti-gay law passed in Ryazan, 200 miles east of Moscow. It was the first official sign that the Russian authorities would resist the LGBT movement—a resistance that has grown and become increasingly violent as LGBT activism has grown over the last decade.
+
+That violence hit Dmitry Chizhevsky in November 2013 when he attended a weekly meeting for the LGBT community and friends called the Rainbow Tea Party in Saint Petersburg. “It was a place to socialize, drink some tea and play some games,” Chizhevsky says. It wasn’t a political event, and Chizhevsky wasn’t much for protests.
+
+The old town had a hectic feeling that weekend as the 10 th Annual March Against Hatred took place in the city’s gracious main streets. The next day, on November 3, the tea party was more crowded than usual.
+
+“I saw two guys next to the door wearing masks,” Chizhevsky recalls. “After that I heard shots. The first one hit my eye. They yelled, ‘Where will you run, faggot?’ and one hit me several times with a baseball bat. Then the attackers ran away. One of the small balls [from a pneumatic pistol] stayed behind my eye.” The police ran a rather lackluster investigation and no one was ever arrested.
+
+He became an unsolved statistic—just one of a growing number in Russia’s LGBT community who’ve been attacked or harassed in what has become an unprecedented crackdown. In most of the West, gay rights has seen startling breakthroughs in the last decade. Russia has not just been left behind, but has become demonstrably worse and more dangerous, according to more than two dozen individuals we spoke with in five Russian cities over six weeks of reporting. On the local and national level, a series of so-called anti-gay propaganda laws were passed that made it illegal to discuss LGBT themes with minors or to distribute such information to them, even if it dealt with health issues.
+
+In a country that increasingly punishes the “other” and where violence against select groups and individuals is often tolerated—and even encouraged—by the state, there’s become no greater target than being LGBT. A community that was just beginning to organize found itself under assault, the target of a deep-seated Russian homophobia that had now been embedded in law.
+
+And for Chizhevsky, although he thought about staying in his native land, the price of being gay in Russia was ultimately just too high. Like more and more gays and lesbians over the last two years, Chizhevsky had had enough of Russia, a place where his sexual orientation alone seemed to make him an enemy of the state.
+
+“Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about it,” Chizhevsky says about the trauma of that day. “I feel that I have gotten used to it over the past year. I am thinking more about the opportunities ahead and the future I want to build” in the United States. In July 2014, a little more than six months after the attack, Chizhevsky arrived in New York.
+
+A self-educated software developer, Chizhevsky made his way to Washington, D.C., where he discovered an LGBT community that was out and open and living without fear. Chizhevsky decided to try to make a life here and to seek political asylum in the United States.
+
+He was one of many Russian gays and lesbians to make that trek. U.S. asylum applications from Russians rose 15 percent overall in 2014, when there were 969 new cases. The U.S. government does not release the reasons people seek asylum, but asylum seekers like Chizhevsky say the spike is at least in part a result of the crackdown on the LGBT community.
+
+“Everyone says that my case is not very difficult because it has been so well documented,” Chizhevsky says over coffee at Busboys and Poets on 14 th Street in Northwest D.C. “Even the United Nations asked Russia about my case”—a fairly typical part of the process since asylum seekers need to prove that they are in danger at home.
+
+Despite the trauma, Chizhevsky is one of the lucky ones. LGBT activists interviewed in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan and Archangelsk say there is a pitched level of anxiety for those who stay behind. “All of a sudden, people started calling us Sodomites,” says Tatiana Vinnitchenko, 41, a lesbian activist with a group called “Rakurs” (Perspective). Rakurs is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that provided legal advice and community centers for the LGBT community in Arkhangelsk, which lies some 600 miles from Moscow and is the site of Russia’s first major seaport.
+
+Vinnitchenko says she expects to be fired this  month from her job as a professor at Northern Arctic Federal University because of her activism. A Russian language instructor, Vinnitchenko says she’s been given an ultimatum: “I had to leave my job or stop my activities in Rakurs.” Leonid Shestakov, the acting rector at the university, says there have been “conversations of a personal nature held with Vinnitchenko,” but focused only on the performance of her duties.",REAL
+2995,Federal court: NSA phone record collection is excessive,"The National Security Agency's bulk phone record collection program was dealt a blow Thursday as a federal appeals court said the controversial program exceeds what Congress has allowed and urged lawmakers to step in.
+
+A three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan permitted the National Security Agency program to continue temporarily as it exists, and all but pleaded for Congress to better define where the boundaries exist.
+
+""In light of the asserted national security interests at stake, we deem it prudent to pause to allow an opportunity for debate in Congress that may (or may not) profoundly alter the legal landscape,"" the opinion written by Circuit Judge Gerald Lynch said.
+
+Attorney General Loretta Lynch and other Obama administration officials said they are reviewing the decision, while civil liberties-minded lawmakers cheered the ruling.
+
+""This is a monumental decision for all lovers of liberty,"" Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a Republican presidential candidate, said in a statement.
+
+The ruling comes at a key time, with relevant provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire June 1 and Congress debating potential changes.
+
+Paul on Thursday reiterated his call for Congress to repeal the relevant Patriot Act provisions. The House is planning a vote on the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would effectively end bulk data collection and curb other provisions of the Patriot Act. But in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he's pursuing a ""clean"" extension of the law.
+
+Thursday's ruling said that if Congress decides to authorize the collection of data as it is done now, ""the program will continue in the future under that authorization.""
+
+But the judges added: ""If Congress decides to institute a substantially modified program, the constitutional issues will certainly differ considerably from those currently raised.""
+
+The appeals judges said the issues raised in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union illustrated the complexity of balancing privacy interests with the nation's security.
+
+A lower court judge in December had thrown out the case, saying the program was a necessary extension to security measures taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The appeals court, which heard two hours of arguments by lawyers in December, said the lower court had erred in ruling that the phone records collection program was authorized in the manner it was being carried out.
+
+During the December arguments, the judges said the case would likely be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
+
+A spokesman with the White House National Security Council said they are ""evaluating the decision. ""
+
+The spokesman stressed that President Obama ""has been clear that he believes we should end the Section 215 bulk telephony metadata program as it currently exists by creating an alternative mechanism to preserve the program's essential capabilities without the government holding the bulk data,"" and said, ""We continue to work closely with members of Congress from both parties to do just that.""
+
+In 2013, secret NSA documents were leaked to journalists by contractor Edward Snowden, revealing that the agency was collecting phone records and digital communications of millions of citizens not suspected of crimes and prompting congressional reform. Snowden remains exiled in Russia.
+
+A spokeswoman for government lawyers in New York declined to comment Thursday.
+
+The ACLU did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9723,BREAKING: THE REAL REASON HILLARY CLINTON WONT BE CHARGED BY THE FBI,"We Are Change 
+In this video Luke Rudkowski breaks down the real reason that Hillary Clinton isn’t facing charges in the FBI’s renewed investigation into her private server as secretary of state.
+Support WeAreChange by Subscribing to our channel HERE:
+http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c… 
+Visit our main site for more breaking news http://wearechange.org/ 
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+Rep WeAreChange Merch Proudly: http://wearechange.org/store 
+OH YEAH since we are not corporate or government WHORES help us out http://wearechange.org/donate 
+We take BITCOIN too
+12HdLgeeuA87t2JU8m4tbRo247Yj5u2TVP
+The post BREAKING: THE REAL REASON HILLARY CLINTON WONT BE CHARGED BY THE FBI appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+7180,"Blame Government, Not Markets, for Monopoly","Blame Government, Not Markets, for Monopoly Written by Ron Paul Email 
+When Time-Warner announced it planned to merge with another major communications firm, many feared the new company would exercise near-total monopoly power. These concerns led some to call for government action to block the merger in order to protect both Time-Warner's competitors and consumers. 
+No, I am not talking about Time-Warner’s recent announced plan to merge with AT&T, but the reaction to Time-Warner’s merger with (then) Internet giant AOL in 2000. Far from creating an untouchable leviathan crushing all competitors, the AOL-Time-Warner merger fell apart in under a decade. 
+The failure of AOL-Time-Warner demonstrates that even the biggest companies are vulnerable to competition if there is open entry into the marketplace. AOL-Time-Warner failed because consumers left them for competitors offering lower prices and/or better quality. 
+Corporate mergers and “hostile” takeovers can promote economic efficiency by removing inefficient management and boards of directors. These managers and board members often work together to promote their own interests instead of generating maximum returns for investors by providing consumers with affordable, quality products. Thus, laws making it difficult to launch a ""hostile"" takeover promote inefficient use of resources and harm investors, workers, and consumers. 
+Monopolies and cartels are creations of government, not markets. For example, the reason the media is dominated by a few large companies is that no one can operate a television or radio station unless they obtain federal approval and pay federal licensing fees. Similarly, anyone wishing to operate a cable company must not only comply with federal regulations, they must sign a “franchise” agreement with their local government. Fortunately, the Internet has given Americans greater access to news and ideas shut out by the government-licensed lapdogs of the ""mainstream"" media. This may be why so many politicians are anxious to regulate the web. 
+Government taxes and regulations are effective means of limiting competition in an industry. Large companies can afford the costs of complying with government regulations, costs which cripple their smaller competitors. Big business can also afford to hire lobbyists to ensure that new laws and regulations favor big business. 
+Examples of regulations that benefit large corporations include the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulations that raise costs of developing a new drug, as well as limit consumers ability to learn about natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals. Another example is the Dodd-Frank legislation, which has strengthened large financial intuitions while harming their weaker competitors. 
+Legislation forcing consumers to pay out-of-state sales tax on their online purchases is a classic case of business seeking to use government to harm less politically-powerful competitors. This legislation is being pushed by large brick-and-mortar stores and Internet retailers who are seeking a government-granted advantage over smaller competitors. 
+Many failed mergers and acquisitions result from the distorted signals sent to business and investors by the Federal Reserve’s inflationary monetary policy. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the AOL-Time-Warner fiasco, which was a direct result of the Fed-created dot.com bubble. 
+In a free market, mergers between businesses enable consumers to benefit from new products and reduced prices. Any businesses that charge high prices or offer substandard products will soon face competition from businesses offering consumers lower prices and/or higher quality. Monopolies only exist when government tilts the playing field in favor of well-connected crony capitalists. Therefore those concerned about excessive corporate power should join supporters of the free market in repudiating the regulations, taxes, and subsides that benefit politically-powerful businesses. The most important step is to end the boom-bust business cycle by ending the Federal Reserve. 
+
+Ron Paul is a former U.S. congressman from Texas. This article originally appeared at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and is reprinted here with permission.  ",FAKE
+8801,Michael Oliver – Here Is The Big Picture For Gold After The Takedown,"11 Views November 13, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+On the heels of a remarkable week where the world witnessed the greatest political upset in history and subsequent chaos in global markets, today King World News is pleased to present an extremely important update on the war in the gold market from Michael Oliver at MSA. Oliver allowed KWN exclusively to share this key report with our global audience after last week’s takedown in the gold market. 
+By Michael Oliver, MSA (Momentum Structural Analysis) November 13 ( King World New s) – Gold: If one seeks to capture large trends, then measure large… If one does not have a long-term map to watch as the trend unfolds, then it’s all too easy to run when some bullets fly. And they always fly… Continue reading the Michael Oliver piece below… Advertisement To hear which company investors & institutions around the globe are flocking to that has one of the best gold & silver purchase & storage platforms in the world click on the logo: 
+How We Got To Where We Are Today MSA projected a blow-off type move in gold, commencing in September 2009, based on price and momentum concurrence and especially its relative performance breakouts vs. global stocks, (report was entitled “Gold is Speaking!”) Momentum then broke out over a three point downtrend, noted by the first red line. 
+During that rise a very large price selloff occurred in early 2010 that no doubt shook teeth and generated widespread doubt. Big as the drop was, it did not negate any long-term structural factors on momentum. Nothing reversed that bull view on our part until momentum broke down in early 2012 (second red structure was violated – a line defined by many points along the line) at around price of $1700 (see middle of second chart above). 
+Then after the top in 2011/2012 and after momentum had already begun to cave, there came a hair curling rally in late summer 2012. But for annual momentum it was a laughable and uneventful rally. It did not alter the major downside that had already been signaled by momentum early that year. Therefore MSA was not impressed. Many no doubt went long thinking the gold bull was on again. Not! 
+The Gold Bull Market Breakout Then with momentum basing action that was optimally clear and massive, gold’s momentum broke out upside as price moved up into the mid-$1100s in February 2016. The massive flat red line on momentum was blasted through (see breakout on far right hand side of chart two above. 
+MSA remains resolutely bullish and asserts that a long-term annual momentum uptrend is underway . Exit if you must, based on your own level of risk tolerance (each investor and asset manager is different, after all), or if your time scale of participation is short-term. 
+MSA defines trends, often intermediate and short-term ones in many markets, but in the case of gold we argue that a long-term vista must dominate at this point in time, due to massive shifts underway in other asset categories. Implications of those shifts going forward are quite large, such that gold is likely to be at the forefront of world attention in the coming few years . 
+The Dream Of Investors But remember that the long-held dream of investors to capture and profit from large trends (like the three massive but simple trends shown on the prior page) can never be accomplished if one allows short-term or even intermediate-term trend indicators to have more gravitas than the ongoing long-term trend factors . In some markets that’s a reasonable approach, but at this point in time, with the annual trend dynamics underway, we caution about “trading” gold . 
+This annual bull signal is simply too young, has not reached any levels of upside excess, and the downturn on long-term momentum charts in the current selloff is not negating that which was screamed by gold’s annual momentum breakout in February. ***KWN has just released one of Art Cashin’s greatest audio interviews ever discussing the gold market at length, including the recent takedown in gold, what to surprises to expect in key markets as Trump becomes president, and what impact massive public works projects will have on the United States, inflation, gold, bonds, and much more. and you can listen to this extraordinary interview by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+***KWN has now released the extraordinary KWN audio interview with whistleblower Andrew Maguire, where he discusses the gold and silver smash, at what price the large sovereign wholesale bids are located, and much more, and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+***ALSO JUST RELEASED: Whistleblower Andrew Maguire – This Is What The Commercials Banksters Are Up To In The Gold Market CLICK HERE. 
+© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
+2162,Hillary Clinton speech to attack Donald Trump's 'dangerous' foreign policy plans,"Hillary Clinton plans to attack Donald Trump’s national security plans in a major speech on foreign policy on Thursday, as the frontrunners campaign in California ahead of the state’s primary next week.
+
+Clinton’s campaign said the speech, which will be delivered in San Diego at 11.30am local time, will draw a clear line between the former secretary of state’s plans and those outlined by Trump, which include having Mexico pay for a border wall that its president, Enrique Peña Nieto, said his country would not support, and temporarily banning Muslims from entering the US.
+
+Clinton campaign senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan said the speech would outline why Trump was “fundamentally unfit” to be president.
+
+“And you will hear in her speech a confidence in America and our capacity to overcome the challenges we face while staying true to our values – a strong contrast to Donald Trump’s incessant trash-talking of America,” Sullivan said.
+
+Clinton’s campaign has said it expects to secure the final delegates she needs to officially become the party’s nominee after the California and New Jersey primaries on 7 June.
+
+“She will rebuke a litany of dangerous policies that Trump has espoused,” Sullivan said, “ranging from nuclear proliferation to endorsing war crimes, from denouncing Nato to banning Muslims.
+
+“But Clinton’s critique will go beyond specific policies and she’ll make clear that the choice in this election goes beyond partisanship. Donald Trump is unlike any presidential nominee we’ve seen in modern times and he is fundamentally unfit for the job.”
+
+Clinton’s campaign has steered its plan of attack towards Trump while fending off the other remaining Democratic hopeful, Bernie Sanders.
+
+Clinton has 2,312 delegates, including 543 super delegates, to Sanders’ 1,545 delegates, including 44 super delegates, according to the Associated Press.
+
+Clinton did not mention Sanders on in a Wednesday night speech at Rutgers University in New Jersey, in which she called Trump a “fraud”.
+
+Her remarks focused on newly released documents that show Trump’s defunct business training program, Trump University, encouraged staff to target prospective students’ financial weakness in order to move them to enroll in expensive courses.
+
+“This is just more evidence that Donald Trump himself is a fraud,” she said. “He is trying to scam America the way he scammed all those people at Trump U.”
+
+The same day, Barack Obama delivered a hit on Trump in a speech in Elkhart, Indiana. The US president told his audience a Trump presidency would increase the risk of a financial crisis.
+
+“The Republican nominee for president has already said he’d dismantle all these rules that we passed,” Obama said, referring to Wall Street reform. “That is crazy.”
+
+Trump is also ampaigning in California. Speaking in Sacramento on Wednesday night, he responded to Obama’s claims from earlier in the day by calling the president “a total lightweight”.",REAL
+4709,‘Take The Money!!’: Emails Show How Clinton Campaign Manages Lobbyist Donations,"The latest batch of emails released by WikiLeaks provides a rare glimpse into how Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign handles money from U.S. lobbyists who are registered agents for foreign interests.
+
+In an email chain with the subject, “Re: Foreign registered agents,” various figures in her presidential campaign discuss the best way to handle donations from U.S. lobbyists who are registered agents for foreign parties.
+
+The chain features Dennis Cheng, national finance director for the Clinton campaign, asking, “We really need make a policy decision on this soon – whether we are allowing those lobbying on behalf of foreign governments to raise $ for the campaign. Or case by case.”
+
+The emails continue with a debate about the best way to manage lobbyists working for foreign interests who want to raise money for the campaign.
+
+Jesse Ferguson, deputy national press secretary and senior spokesman for Clinton, tries to understand just how much money is up in the air. “Is there anyway to ballpark what percent of our donor base this would apply to (aka how much money we’re throwing away) Cost benefits are easier to analyze with the costs. :)”
+
+The emails feature a list of foreign agents that the Clinton campaign was worried about possibly excluding from fundraising, including people lobbying on behalf of Somalia, United Arab Emirates, Kurdistan, the Transitional Government of Libya, and the Republic of Iraq, among others.
+
+Later, Cheng seems worried about losing this potential fundraising, writing, “Hi all – we do need to make a decision on this ASAP as our friends who happen to be registered with FARA are already donating and raising. I do want to push back a bit (it’s my job!): I feel like we are leaving a good amount of money on the table (both for primary and general, and then DNC and state parties)… and how do we explain to people that we’ll take money from a corporate lobbyist but not them; that the Foundation takes $ from foreign govts but we now won’t. Either way, we need to make a decision soon.”
+
+Finally, Robby Mook, campaign manager for Clinton, writes, “Marc made a convincing case to me this am that these sorts of restrictions don’t really get you anything…that Obama actually got judged MORE harshly as a result. He convinced me. So…in a complete U-turn, I’m ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks. Are you guys ok with that?”
+
+Jennifer Palmieri, director of communications for Clinton’s campaign, responds to that email, “Take the money!!”
+
+Editor’s note: This post has been updated
+
+Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].",REAL
+8640,Military op to retake Mosul from ISIS,"17 mins ago 2 Views 0 Comments 0 Likes Check Keiser Report website for more: http://www.maxkeiser.com/ In this episode of the Keiser Report Max and Stacy discuss howls at the moon as the Bank of Japan attempts to taper the Tokyo condo market ponzi. They also discuss the newly announced interventions by the UK government in the nation’s deflating property pyramid. In the second half Max interviews journalist and comedy writer, Charlie Skelton, about his observations on the US elections. He concludes that Hillary is the face in the machine of the Matrix and that the craziness is the system. WATCH all Keiser Report shows here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL768A33676917AE90 (E1-E200) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC3F29DDAA1BABFCF (E201-E400) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPszygYHA9K2ZtV_1KphSugBB7iZqbFyz (E401-600) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPszygYHA9K1GpAv3ZKpNFoEvKaY2QFH_ (E601-E800) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPszygYHA9K19wt4CP0tUgzIxpJDiQDyl (E801-Current)   Subscribe   Like    ",FAKE
+1386,"Iowa caucus results: Ted Cruz wins, Hillary Clinton declares victory","(CNN) Hillary Clinton declared victory early Tuesday morning in a razor-thin contest against Bernie Sanders in Iowa. But Democratic party officials have not yet declared a winner.
+
+""Hillary Clinton has won the Iowa Caucus,"" the Clinton campaign said. ""After thorough reporting -- and analysis -- of results, there is no uncertainty and Secretary Clinton has clearly won the most national and state delegates.""
+
+The state party indicated in a separate statement that it was not ready to make a call.
+
+""The results tonight are the closest in Iowa Democratic caucus history,"" Iowa party chairman Andy McGuire said. ""We will report that final precinct when we have confirmed those results with the chair.""
+
+One thing is clear after Monday night's Iowa caucuses: there's a long, volatile election season ahead before two deeply fractured parties can unite behind a nominee.
+
+Cruz's victory sets him up as a formidable force in delegate-rich, Southern states to come and offers movement conservatives hope that one of their own can become the Republican nominee for the first time since Ronald Reagan.
+
+Claiming victory, Cruz fired immediate shots at both Trump and the party elites he has so infuriated by waging an anti-establishment crusade that has nevertheless endeared him to the GOP's rank and file.
+
+""Iowa has sent notice that the Republican nominee and the next President of the United States will not be chosen by the media, will not be chosen by the Washington establishment,"" Cruz said.
+
+With about 99% of the GOP vote in, Cruz was ahead of Trump 28% to 24%. Rubio was at 23%.
+
+""It is breathtaking to see what happens when so many Americans stand up and decide they're fed up with what happens in Washington and they want something different. They want a leader they can trust, they want a leader that stands for them against the corruption of Washington,"" Cruz told CNN's Dana Bash in an interview aired Tuesday on ""New Day.""
+
+Trump, hours after predicting a ""tremendous"" victory, delivered a short but gracious speech that lacked his normal bombast, saying he loved Iowa and vowed to bounce back next week in New Hampshire.
+
+""We will go on to get the Republican nomination and we will go on to easily beat Hillary or Bernie,"" Trump told supporters. ""We finished second, and I have to say I am just honored.""
+
+Rubio will also leave Iowa with a leg up over other establishment rivals including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who have a lot at stake in New Hampshire.
+
+""This is the moment they said would never happen. For months, they told us we had no chance,"" a jubilant Rubio said. ""They told me that I needed to wait my turn, that I needed to wait in line. But tonight here in Iowa, the people of this great state have sent a very clear message — after seven years of Barack Obama, we are not waiting any longer to take our country back.""
+
+On the Democratic side, Clinton and Sanders are deadlocked at 50% with 99% of the votes counted. Clinton, the national front-runner, admitted breathing a ""big sigh of relief"" after escaping Iowa -- the state she handily lost to Obama in 2008 -- but promised a vigorous campaign with Sanders.
+
+""It's rare that we have the opportunity we do now,"" she said in a speech that didn't explicitly claim victory but sought to position her as the authentic progressive in the race.
+
+Sanders, who trailed Clinton in Iowa by 30 points three months ago, told a raucous crowd chanting ""Bernie, Bernie"" that his campaign made stunning progress.
+
+""Nine months ago, we came to this beautiful state, we had no political organization, we had no money, we had no name recognition and we were taking on the most powerful political organization in the United States of America.""
+
+""And tonight,"" he said, ""while the results are still not known, it looks like we are in a virtual tie.""
+
+Though Sanders fared well in Iowa and is nicely posited in New Hampshire, his hurdle is proving that he can appeal to more ethnically diverse electorates in later contests in places such as South Carolina.
+
+Sanders made the case to CNN's Chris Cuomo, when he campaign plane landed in New Hampshire early on Tuesday morning, that he expects to challenge Clinton among nonwhite voters.
+
+""We lost (the nonwhite vote), but that gap is growing slimmer and slimmer between the secretary and myself. I think you'll find as we get to South Carolina and other states, that when the African-American community, the Latino community, looks at our record, looks at our agenda, we're going to get more and more support,"" Sanders told Cuomo on ""New Day.""
+
+The caucuses resulted in two casualties -- one on each side. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican, both dropped their candidacies after faring poorly.
+
+Even before the caucuses began, Ben Carson's campaign said he wouldn't go directly to New Hampshire or South Carolina -- the site of the next primary contests. Instead, the retired neurosurgeon, who was briefly the Iowa front-runner last fall, will go to Florida to rest and see his family.
+
+Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is also skipping New Hampshire but will go straight to South Carolina, which holds its Republican presidential primary on February 20.",REAL
+10042,"Lesson learned? Goldman Sachs says not to expect ""Brexit-type surprise"" on Nov. 8","Thu, 27 Oct 2016 17:02 UTC © Daniel Acker-Bloomberg/Getty Images With their candidate lagging in most of the major polls, Donald Trump's supporters are hoping the election holds a surprise akin to June's Brexit vote. Goldman Sachs, though, believes the chances of a Nov. 8 surprise in the U.S. are remote. The two races differ in several key ways , Goldman economist Alec Phillips said, diminishing the possibility of a repeat where polling incorrectly suggested that Britons would vote to stay in the European Union. ""We think the situation is different for two reasons. First, and most importantly, while both situations represented an opportunity for voters to endorse a change in the status quo, voters in the U.K. were asked to decide on an idea whereas in the U.S. they are being asked to decide on a person ,"" Phillips said in a note to clients Wednesday. ""Second, the polls are simply not as close in the current presidential contest as they were ahead of the U.K. referendum."" On the first point, Phillips obviously is correct. The second, though, isn't as clear. True, some polls have showed a yawning gap between the two candidates. The latest NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll put the Hillary Clinton lead at 11 points , the last ABC tracking poll had the Democrat ahead by 8 and CNN has the advantage at 6 points. However, the Real Clear Politics average of all major polls gives Clinton just a 4.4-point edge, and the Los Angeles Times ' tracker even sees Trump with a 1-point lead. By comparison, the final London Telegraph poll heading into the June 23 vote had the ""remain"" vote with a comfortable 4-point lead . Betting odds in the U.K. had given ""remain"" an 88 percent chance of prevailing, against the ""leave"" victory of 4 points. In his analysis, Phillips noted that The Economist magazine published an average of polls that showed the referendum tied, with a large percentage of undecided voters. He also said polls showing Trump ahead, like the LA Times and Rasmussen, use methodology different from many of the other mainstream outlets (though he concedes that polls showing Clinton with outsize leads also could be outliers). Comment: Translation: the other MSM polls are rigged, e.g., with their tendency to oversample Democrats. Phillips mostly dismisses the importance of third-party voters, whom he said often break toward a major-party candidate as Election Day approaches. ""In theory, if undecided voters broke entirely in favor of Mr. Trump on Election Day, this could change the election outcome ,"" he wrote. ""However, the views of undecided and third-party voters suggest that they are more likely to vote for Sec. Clinton than Mr. Trump, if they vote at all."" Specifically, he cites a Washington Post poll showing that 46 percent of voters not supporting either Clinton or Trump had a ""strongly unfavorable"" view of Clinton, against 71 percent for Trump . Finally, he believes Trump won't be aided significantly by stronger-than-expected turnout, while early voting trends don't appear to favor the Republican either. However, Phillips does not address recent polls showing Trump with a solid chance of winning critical swing states Florida and Ohio, or narrowing gaps in Pennsylvania and North Carolina . ""Overall, while one cannot rule out the possibility of an electoral surprise, most of the theories as to how this might occur are not borne out by the recently available data,"" Phillips said. ""The declining share of undecided and third-party voters is shrinking, leaving fewer voters left to persuade, and while a shift in turnout could upend the models most pollsters use, there are no signs thus far in early voting that such a shift is occurring and, if anything, recent data suggest a slight Democratic turnout advantage."" Wall Street is heavily invested in a Clinton victory. Securities and investment firms have poured nearly $65 million into her campaign coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Goldman Sachs employees have donated $284,816 to Clinton and just $3,641 to Trump, who has received $716,407 from Wall Street. Comment: Two possibilities stand out: 1) The puppet masters have learned their lesson from Brexit. In other words, when rigging an election, don't underestimate the number of people who will actually vote the 'wrong' way. If you think you can swing 10% of the vote in your favor when you need 20-30%, you're going to fail, leading to an unexpected and undesired outbreak of actual democracy. 2) Goldman Sachs is just as myopic as their anti-Brexit peers. U.S. voters are not just voting for a person. For many, voting for Trump really is voting for an idea (rightly or wrongly). Even though he's a moron, Michael Moore captured this sentiment quite well: In other words, it's possible Goldman Sachs have started believing their own propaganda and the data from their media partners' fake polls. If so, they may be in for a bigger surprise than they expected.",FAKE
+5569,Three Ways to Recharge Your Energy Using Crystals,"by Tanaaz 
+Crystals are a great tool for healing, awakening and raising your vibration. When I first started out on my spiritual journey it took me a while to truly appreciate the power of a crystal. 
+When you find a crystal that really resonates with you and that you feel really attracted to, you know you have found the right one. 
+For years, I chose crystals based on the written metaphysical properties and for some reason they always felt “off” to me. When I started choosing crystals based on feeling alone, that is when I truly noticed their amazing abilities. 
+Crystals contain a powerful energy for helping you to recharge your own vibration and connection to Spirit. 
+Here are 3 ways to use your crystals to recharge: Mind, Body, Spirit Recharge 
+Perfect for an all-over recharge for your energy, best done just before bed. 
+1.) Choose 3 crystals that resonate with you- one for your mind, one for your body and one for your spirit. Make sure your crystals are cleansed. 
+2.) Hold the physical body crystal in your hand and set your intention into the stone. Whisper what outcome or feeling you would like to create in your physical body. Hold the stone close to you as you repeat and feel your intention. Repeat this process for the mind and spirit crystals as well. 
+3.) After setting your intention into your crystals, sleep with them under your pillow or by your bedside. 
+4.) Keep your crystals close to you whenever you need an energy recharge. Positive Energy Recharge 
+Perfect for recharging your energy after being around a negative person or situation. 
+1.) Choose 2 powerful, cleansed crystals that resonate with you and place them in each hand. Gently close your hand around the crystals and breathe. 
+2.) As your breathe feel the energy of the crystal moving up through your arms and travelling around your entire body. Feel the beautiful, vibes of the crystal cleansing and clearing your aura and energy. 
+3.) Keep breathing through the cleansing until the energy of the crystal has travelled to every part of your body. 
+4.) Cleanse your crystals if needed after you are done. Self- Empowerment Chakra Recharge 
+Perfect for when you are lacking confidence in yourself. 
+1.) Choose one crystal that resonates with you and place it out to be charged in the sunlight for at least 30 minutes. Alternatively, you can choose 7 crystals – one for each chakra. 
+2.) Once the crystal has been charged, start rubbing it between your hands to generate heat and more energy. 
+3.) When you feel the heat or charge of the crystal, place your hands over your root chakra or pelvis area (touch your skin not your clothes). Allow the energy to sink in to this area of your body. 
+4.) When you feel the energy has gone in, rub the crystal again and place it on your next chakra. Keep repeating this process until you have done all 7 chakras. 
+Happy recharging!",FAKE
+3856,"Obama Spends Earth Day In The Everglades, Taunting Republicans On Climate Change","""2014 was the planet's warmest year on record. Fourteen of the 15 hottest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century,"" Obama said. ""Yes, this winter was cold in parts of our country, including Washington. Some people in Washington helpfully used a snowball to illustrate that fact. But around the world, in the aggregate, it was the warmest winter ever recorded.""
+
+It's of course a huge coincidence that the visit is in the backyard of two Republican presidential hopefuls who have been squishy on the subject of climate change, and a Republican governor who reportedly told state employees they can't even use the words ""climate change.""
+
+""Climate change can no longer be denied,"" Obama said. ""It can't be edited out. It can't be omitted from the conversation. And action can no longer be delayed."" 
+
+ 
+
+ Ahead of the visit, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on a call that Obama would ""use the occasion of Earth Day to highlight his commitment to fighting to protect public health and to fighting the carbon pollution that contributes to climate change."" And the president picked Florida, Earnest said, because it's a place ""where these kinds of issues have traditionally been bipartisan.""
+
+Earnest was coy about the fact that Florida also happens to be the home of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, two likely Republican presidential contenders who haven't been as enthusiastic about climate action. Bush has said he's a ""skeptic"" when it comes to climate change, while Rubio says he doesn't believe human activity is causing the planet to heat up.
+
+The president, Earnest said on the call, hopes the visit ""will prompt an elevated political debate about making climate change a priority."" However, he added, the trip is ""not an effort to go to anyone's home state, but to raise the debate.""
+
+Earnest maintained that Obama's visit ""isn't about campaigns, this is about making progress on a priority."" But he also noted that ""the Republicans who choose to deny the reality of climate change, they do that to the detriment of the people they're elected to represent.""
+
+Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), also no big fan of the concept of climate change, has taken to Twitter to criticize Obama's Everglades visit. Scott argued that the president should do more to get federal funding for Everglades restoration, because, he said, ""Our environment is too important to neglect.""
+
+Earnest fired back against Scott on Wednesday. ""It's a little tough to take criticism from someone who has banned the words 'climate change' for the accusation that the president has been insufficiently committed to fighting climate change,"" he said, referring to reports that Florida officials were forbidden from using the terms ""global warming"" and ""climate change"" in official communications. ""That's a tough case to make, but it sounds like that didn't stop him.""
+
+The White House also used the occasion to tout the benefits of the National Park Service, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year. A new report from the NPS released Wednesday finds that every dollar invested in the parks returns $10 to the U.S. economy through tourism and other related industries. The NPS reported a record 293 million visitors in 2014.",REAL
+1785,Donald Trump doesn't challenge anti-Muslim questioner,"Trump, who has shaken off several high-profile controversies that would have ended other presidential campaigns, faced an immediate backlash from advocacy groups, and members of his own party distanced themselves from the GOP front-runner. The incident recalls Trump's 2011 quest to challenge Obama on where he was born, which ended with Obama releasing his long-form birth certificate. It also follows a debate performance Wednesday that garnered mixed reviews for the billionaire businessman.
+
+""We have a problem in this country. It's called Muslims,"" an unidentified man who spoke at a question-and-answer town hall event in Rochester, New Hampshire asked the mogul at a rally Thursday night. ""You know our current president is one. You know he's not even an American.""
+
+A seemingly bewildered Trump interrupted the man, chuckling, ""We need this question. This is the first question.""
+
+""Anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us,"" the man, wearing a ""Trump"" T-shirt, continued. ""That's my question: When can we get rid of them?""
+
+""We're going to be looking at a lot of different things,"" Trump replied. ""You know, a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening. We're going to be looking at that and many other things."" The real estate mogul did not correct the questioner about his claims about Obama before moving on to another audience member. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest condemned the remarks Friday, but added ""Is anybody really surprised that this happened at a Donald Trump rally?"" The audience members comments and Trump's response were quickly denounced by Democrats. Hillary Clinton, the party's front-runner for president, personally tweeted late Thursday that Trump's remarks were ""just plain wrong,"" and followed up on it Friday morning at a press conference. ""I was appalled,"" Clinton said bluntly to a question from CNN's Suzanne Malveaux. ""Not only was it out of bounds, it was untrue. He should have from the beginning corrected that kind of rhetoric, that level of hatefulness."" Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, called the incident a sign of ""a lack of moral courage."" ""I don't know if Trump is using dog-whistle politics to win support in the polls, or if he genuinely believes the racist things he says. Either way, he showed a complete lack of moral courage in that clip, and he has shown once again that he completely unqualified to be President of the United States."" ""GOP front-runner Donald Trump's racism knows no bounds. This is certainly horrendous, but unfortunately unsurprising given what we have seen already. The vile rhetoric coming from the GOP candidates is appalling,"" Schultz said. ""(Republicans) should be ashamed, and all Republican presidential candidates must denounce Trump's comments immediately or will be tacitly agreeing with him."" READ: Chris Christie: I would have said Obama is Christian After the event, several reporters asked Trump why he didn't challenge the questioner's assertions. Trump did not answer. But Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign manager, later told CNN that the candidate did not hear the question about Obama being a Muslim. ""All he heard was a question about training camps, which he said we have to look into,"" Lewandowski said. ""The media want to make this an issue about Obama, but it's about him waging a war on Christianity."" Trump announced Friday that he would cancel his trip to South Carolina, citing ""a significant business transaction."" New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Friday that he would not ""lecture"" Trump on how to respond to comments like that, but said that leaders are responsible for correcting voters on certain issues. ""I'll tell you what I would do and I wouldn't have permitted that if someone brought that up at a town hall meeting of mine. I would have said, 'No, listen. Before we answer let's clear some things up for the rest of the audience.' And I think you have an obligation as a leader to do that,"" Christie said on NBC's ""TODAY"" Friday. RELATED: Misperceptions persist about Obama's faith, but aren't so widespread Obama, who has spoken openly about his Christian faith, was born to an American mother and Kenyan father in Hawaii. But Trump has been one of the leading skeptics of Obama's birthplace, saying he did not know where Obama was born as recently as July A recent CNN/ORC poll found 29% of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim, including 43% of Republicans. Trump is not the first Republican candidate to raise eyebrows over comments involving Obama and his ethnic and religious background. In February, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker became embroiled in a brief controversy when he told The Washington Post that he didn't know if Obama was a Christian. ""I've never asked him that,"" Walker said. A spokeswoman later clarified that he did believe Obama was Christian, but disagreed with the media's obsession with ""gotcha"" questions. And in 2008, Republican presidential nominee John McCain was booed after he famously told an audience member at a campaign event that Obama was a ""good family man."" ""He's a decent family man ... (a) citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues,"" McCain said then. ""That's what this campaign is all about.""",REAL
+8396,Lawyer Who Kept Hillary Campaign Chief Out of Jail in DOJ Hillary Probe,"Lawyer Who Kept Hillary Campaign Chief Out of Jail in DOJ Hillary Probe November 1, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
+Peter Kadzik kept Hillary's campaign chief out of jail. And he hopes to do the same for her. 
+Hillary's people have gone on the warpath against the FBI. Their allies are Obama's political appointees at the DOJ. And this is who is in their corner. 
+The Justice Department official in charge of informing Congress about the newly reactivated Hillary Clinton email probe is a political appointee and former private-practice lawyer who kept Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta “out of jail,” lobbied for a tax cheat later pardoned by President Bill Clinton and led the effort to confirm Attorney General Loretta Lynch. 
+Peter Kadzik, who was confirmed as assistant attorney general for legislative affairs in June 2014, represented Podesta in 1998 when independent counsel Kenneth Starr was investigating Podesta for his possible role in helping ex-Bill Clinton intern and mistress Monica Lewinsky land a job at the United Nations. 
+“Fantastic lawyer. Kept me out of jail,” Podesta wrote on Sept. 8, 2008 to Obama aide Cassandra Butts, according to emails hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account and posted by WikiLeaks. 
+Kadzik’s name has surfaced multiple times in regard to the FBI’s investigation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for using a private, homebrewed server. After FBI Director James Comey informed Congress on Thursday the FBI was reviving its inquiry when new evidence linked to a separate investigation was discovered, congressional leaders wrote to the Department of Justice seeking more information. Kadzik replied. 
+“We assure you that the Department will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” Kadzik wrote on Oct. 31. 
+Kadzik had been an attorney with Dickstein Shapiro LLP for 18 years before he represented Podesta in the Clinton/Lewinsky investigation. He was hired in 2000 as a lobbyist for tax cheat Marc Rich, who was controversially granted a pardon by President Bill Clinton during Clinton’s final days in office. Kadzik got the job “because he was ‘trusted by [White House Chief of Staff John] Podesta,’ and was considered to be a ‘useful person to convey [Marc Rich’s] arguments to Mr. Podesta,’” according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report. 
+Marc Rich? Funny you should mention his name. FBI boss Comey was the prosecutor in that case. And the FBI recently released material from the investigation into that case. 
+So there's a lot of Clinton history coming full circle here.",FAKE
+5113,"Trump claims GOP nomination, tells struggling Americans 'I am your voice'","Just over a year after Donald J. Trump descended his iconic escalator in Manhattan to announce he was joining a packed field of political veterans seeking the Republican nomination for president, the New York billionaire completed an astonishing and historic political ascent Thursday night in Cleveland, officially claiming his party’s nomination — and declaring to struggling Americans, “I am your voice.”
+
+Trump electrified the convention crowd on closing night, with chants of “U.S.A.” frequently breaking out as the nominee vowed to put “America first.” He used the speech to align his campaign squarely on the side of struggling American workers of all political stripes, as he moved to broaden his appeal beyond the Republican base that largely decided the primaries.
+
+“Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned. … These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice,” Trump said. “I am your voice.”
+
+And he delivered a tough law-and-order message throughout, declaring from the convention floor in Cleveland, “Safety will be restored” under a Trump presidency.
+
+“America will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced,” Trump vowed.
+
+He described the nation at a “moment of crisis,” citing terror attacks, violence against police and “chaos in our communities” including rising inner-city crime. “I will restore law and order to our country,” he said, while vowing to crack down on illegal immigration.
+
+Trump’s highly anticipated speech -- at 75 minutes, the longest convention acceptance address since 1972‎ --  amounts to his closing argument before Clinton and the Democrats get their turn starting Monday in Philadelphia. As much as Republican leaders bashed the presumptive Democratic nominee in Cleveland, Democrats are likely to be just as tough on the Republicans at their convention.
+
+The next big step for Clinton, though, will be to name her running mate, a decision that could come as early as Friday.
+
+But before the attention turns to Clinton, Trump got in his final shots.
+
+The businessman closed his address by turning rival Clinton’s “I’m with her” campaign slogan on its head.
+
+“I choose to recite a different pledge. My pledge reads, I’m with you,” Trump said.
+
+He blasted Clinton’s foreign policy record as secretary of state – citing the bloody tumult in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya – saying her legacy is “death, destruction, terrorism and weakness” and a “change in leadership” is needed.
+
+“Hillary Clinton’s legacy does not have to be America’s legacy,” he said.
+
+And defending his aversion to political correctness, he said for anyone who wants to hear “the corporate spin, the carefully crafted lies, and the media myths, the Democrats are holding their convention next week -- go there. But here, at our convention, there will be no lies.”
+
+Trump also cycled through his campaign promises, including the controversial calls to build a southern border wall and “immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place.”
+
+He added, “We don’t want them in our country.”
+
+Trump vowed as well to protect LGBTQ citizens from terrorism like the Orlando club shooting. In a moment that allowed him to show his gay-rights support, Trump thanked the crowd for cheering that line: “It is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.”
+
+The speech caps a dramatic convention week marked by powerful displays of party unity but also tensions, flaring most recently when Ted Cruz withheld his endorsement Wednesday night.
+
+The omission prompted boos from pro-Trump delegates, and the unrest continued into Thursday, when the Texas senator defended his decision before an audience of Texas delegates clearly divided over Cruz’s handling of the convention speech.
+
+At the same time, Trump’s newly anointed running mate Mike Pence deftly set the stage for Trump’s big night, effectively making the conservative case for the billionaire businessman in his own nomination acceptance speech on Wednesday. The choice of Pence – a classic conservative with Midwestern roots – helped bring various factions of the party together even before the convention began.
+
+Despite the Cruz commotion, top party leaders from House Speaker Paul Ryan to RNC Chairman Reince Priebus worked to heal divisions in the party over the course of the Cleveland coming-together.
+
+“He’s brought millions of new voters to our party because he’s listening to Americans” anxious about the state of the country, Priebus said. “With Donald Trump and Mike Pence, America’s ready for a comeback after almost a decade of Clinton-Obama failures.”
+
+Priebus claimed Republicans are the party with new ideas, while Democrats are the “same party doing the same old thing,” trotting out the “same old candidate” next week.
+
+Members of Trump’s family also spent the week giving voters a glimpse into the tycoon’s more personal side, with daughter Ivanka introducing her father Thursday night. Appealing to women, she praised the businessman’s record supporting female employees at his organization. And touting her dad as a tireless fighter who can bring his work ethic and aptitude to the nation’s highest office, Ivanka asked all voters to put their faith in him.
+
+“For more than a year, Donald Trump has been the people’s champion, and tonight he is the people’s nominee,” she said. “… When my father says he’ll make America great again, he will deliver.”",REAL
+5903,Quit Smoking! Smoking Cigarettes Causes 150 Genetic Mutations and Cancer,"You Are Here: Home » Health News » Quit Smoking! Smoking Cigarettes Causes 150 Genetic Mutations and Cancer Quit Smoking! Smoking Cigarettes Causes 150 Genetic Mutations and Cancer Prev post Next post 
+Breakthrough research discovered that smoking one pack of cigarettes every day can lead to 150 cell mutations in a year. These mutations can occur in different regions of the body, increasing the risk of smokers to develop cancers not just in areas that are in direct contact with inhaled chemicals. 
+A comprehensive study, the first of its kind, probed deeper into the effects of smoking on the human body through the use of a pattern recognition program. The methodology is likened to recording the noise in a roomful of people and then separating individual voices to better hear them. 
+A group of collaborating researchers studied and compared 5,000 cancerous tumors from those who are habitual smokers and those who have not smoked a single cigarette in their life. The results were staggering with 150 different kinds of mutations in different parts of the body. The Main Reasons to Quit Smoking Quit Smoking Now! 
+You reduce your risk of getting serious disease no matter what age you give up. However, the sooner you stop, the greater the reduction in your risk. In fact, researchers have found that if you quit smoking before the age of 50 your risk of dying is virtually reduced to that of a non-smoker. 
+Even if you give up after the age of 60, your risk of dying at any given age is reduced by about 39% compared to a person who carries on smoking. If you stop smoking you: Reduce the risk of getting serious smoking-related diseases such as heart disease, cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and peripheral vascular disease. Reduce the risk of getting various other conditions which, although not life-threatening, can cause unpleasant problems. For example: Erection problems (impotence). Optic neuropathy – this is a condition affecting the nerve supplying the eye. Cataracts. A breakdown of the tissue at the back of the eye (macular degeneration). A skin condition called psoriasis. Gum disease. ‘Thinning’ of the bones (osteoporosis). Raynaud’s phenomenon – in this condition, fingers turn white or blue when exposed to cold. Reduce the risk of pregnancy complications if you are pregnant. If you have smoked since being a teenager or young adult: If you quit smoking before the age of about 35, your life expectancy is only slightly less than it is for people who have never smoked. If you stop smoking before the age of 50, you decrease the risk of dying from smoking-related diseases by 50%. 
+It is never too late to quit smoking to gain health benefits. Even if you already have COPD or heart disease, your outlook (prognosis) is much improved if you quit smoking. 
+Planning and support can help you quit smoking for good. Before your quit day, take time to prepare for challenges. Make a plan for quitting. Know what to expect in the first days of being smokefree. Identify your reasons for quitting and plan how to ask for help if you need it. Quit Smoking! Smoking Cigarettes Causes 150 Genetic Mutations and Cancer 
+Breakthrough research discovered that smoking one pack of cigarettes every day can lead to 150 cell mutations in a year. These mutations can occur in different regions of the body, increasing the risk of smokers to develop cancers not just in areas that are in direct contact with inhaled chemicals. A comprehensive study, the first […] How to Detox the Lymphatic System 
+Do you experience any of the lymphatic congestion symptoms? The fact is almost every condition and disease process can be linked to poor waste removal in the lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is a network of tissues and organs. It is made up of Lymph – a fluid that contains white blood cells that defend […] Foods That Boost ‘Super-Antioxident’ Glutathione 
+Glutathione is a substance found in every cell in the body, where it acts as an antioxidant to neutralize free radicals and prevent cellular damage. Since glutathione is so effective for detoxification, it could be tempting go out and buy some supplements. However, studies have found that taking glutathione in oral supplements has practically no effect […] Overcoming Nightmares Through Lucid Dreaming 
+by Kerry McGlone Nightmares can be defined as an unpleasant and frightening dream. They’re completely harmless, but not something anyone wants to experience as they sleep. They can leave individuals scared, and even have them traumatized; leaving them unable to sleep the next night in fear of it occurring again. Just imagine yourself having the […] Nestle CEO says You Shouldn’t Have the Right to Water 
+Get ready to feel infuriated: the CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck, has been caught on video saying he believes water should not be a public right, that instead it should be something only the wealthy have access to. By Matt Hall — Staff Writer As Nestle is the 27th largest company in the world and does […] 5 Things Everyone Should Know About Introverts 
+The following five traits are what I consider to be some commonly misunderstood characteristics of introverts, coming from a true introvert herself! by Rebecca McKown – MindBodyGreen I’m an introvert to the core, and there’s a good chance that either you or someone you know is, as well. As a child I was called shy, a […] Top 10 Foods That Increase Sex Drive 
+Do you feel like your sex drive just isn’t what it used to be? You aren’t alone — many people feel that way at some point in their lives. In some cases, a decrease in libido may be due to a medical issue. For many people, however, the situation may be remedied without resorting to […] 11 Natural And Effective Uses For Lavender Oil 
+If you’re looking to get some bang for your buck, lavender oil is a godsend.! by Elizabeth Seward – Staff Writer Whether you want to use the fragrant essential oil for practical purposes around the house or holistic healing, lavender oil is packed with health benefits and everyday uses that shouldn’t be ignored. The oil, which is […] Homemade Body Wash Recipe 
+Try this awesome homemade body wash recipe today! by Jillee – Onegoodthingbyjillie.com When I was growing up…I don’t think we ever bought “body wash”. It was Ivory or Dove bar soap…or nothing at all. 🙂 Even after I first got married we still did the bar soap thing…because I remember trying to convince the hubster that Dove soap was better than Irish Spring. lol. (I still try to convince him […] Chia Seeds Health Benefits 
+by Kris Gunnars – Authority Nutrition Chia seeds are among the healthiest foods on the planet. They are loaded with nutrients that can have important benefits for your body and brain. Here are 11 health benefits of chia seeds that are supported by human studies. 1. Chia Seeds Deliver a Massive Amount of Nutrients With […] Scientists Officially Link Processed Foods To Autoimmune Disease 
+by April McCarthy – Preventdisease.com The modern diet of processed foods, takeaways and microwave meals could be to blame for a sharp increase in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, including alopecia, asthma and eczema. A team of scientists from Yale University in the U.S and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in Germany, say junk food diets […] Cancer Drug Melts Away Deadly Cancer Cells in 80% of Patients 
+A new breakthrough cancer drug has been shown to significantly reduce or even completely destroy cancer cells in almost 80% of patients with an advanced form of leukaemia in a four-year clinical trial. In 20% of patients, it caused complete remission of the disease. “Many patients have maintained this response more than a year after […] Pneumonia cured in 3 hours using natural medicine 
+Pneumonia is a deadly disease caused by both bacteria and viruses, but what if one simple vitamin could cure the disease in only 3 hours!! by Jonathan Landsman – Naturalhealth365.com The numbers are staggering. The eighth leading cause of death, in the United States, is pneumonia and influenza – killing over 50,000 people per year. Conventional […] Join For Free! Discover Little Known Health Secrets and Useful Tips For Healthy Living! First Name ",FAKE
+2526,Claire McCaskill Accuses Marco Rubio Of Shirking Principles On Immigration,"Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) knocked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Sunday for backing away from his push for comprehensive immigration reform, saying on ABC's ""This Week"" that he had ""folded like a cheap shotgun.""
+
+Rubio, who announced his bid for president last week, has gotten heat from some conservatives for co-authoring an immigration reform bill that would allow some undocumented immigrants to eventually become citizens, along with ramping up border security and enforcement measures.
+
+He then said in February that he'd since learned a comprehensive approach was the wrong one, and that border security should be done separately and before other reform.
+
+McCaskill said, ""He took a principled, courageous stand on immigration reform"" while helping to draft the bipartisan bill that passed the Senate in 2013 -- but then dropped those principles.
+
+""Then the minute his party's base starting chewing on about it, the minute Rush Limbaugh criticized him, he folded like a cheap shotgun,"" she said. ""That's old politics. That's not what we need right now. That is the stalest trick in the book. That is shirking on your principles because of the political necessities of your party.""
+
+Rubio said on CBS's ""Face the Nation"" in an interview that aired on Sunday that it was wrong to say he ""walked away from"" immigration reform.
+
+""Well that's not an accurate assessment,"" he said. ""What I'm saying to people is we can't do it in a massive piece of legislation, and I know because I tried. We understand that we have to deal with 12 million human beings that are in this country, that have been here longer than a decade. We know we have to deal with this. We are not prepared to deal with it until first you can prove to us that this will never happen again.""
+
+""Well that's a hypothetical that will never happen,"" Rubio said, reiterating he would first ask for border security and enforcement bills.
+
+Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is considering a run for president and is another author of the 2013 immigration bill, also referred to Rubio's shift on immigration Sunday in an interview with ""Fox News Sunday."" When he was asked to give his thoughts on Rubio, he threw in a slight dig while praising the senator.
+
+""He embraced immigration reform,"" he said. ""He seems to have backed off -- I'll let him explain why. I think comprehensive immigration reform, securing our border and dealing rationally with the 11 million [undocumented immigrants], is the only way you're going to solve this problem.""",REAL
+2445,"Obamacare Is Back At The Supreme Court, And These 6 Lives Hang In The Balance","bamacare is back before the Supreme Court in a case that could gut the health care law and leave millions of Americans facing severe consequences.
+
+King v. Burwell, a lawsuit that originated in conservative and libertarian think tanks, alleges that a stray phrase in the Affordable Care Act -- “an exchange established by the state” -- means the federal government isn’t allowed to provide subsidies to the residents of states that refused to establish health insurance exchanges under the law.
+
+Only 13 states and the District of Columbia have their own exchanges. If this bid to derail the Affordable Care Act succeeds, the subsidies would disappear -- maybe immediately, maybe a little later -- for Obamacare enrollees everywhere else.
+
+Behind the numbers, however, is a very human story. Without the subsidies, health insurance costs would spike beyond the means of low- and moderate-income recipients. As a result, close to 10 million people would lose their health coverage. Many others would face major increases in the premiums they pay for insurance.
+
+The Huffington Post interviewed six Americans at risk of the worst effects of a high court ruling against Obamacare. We wanted to know how the law has affected their lives already, and how the absence of subsidies might affect them in the future. They told stories of life and death, financial ruin, lifelong plans in jeopardy and families disrupted. Here are those stories, as told by the people who would be living them.",REAL
+1326,4 Things The New Hampshire Primary Will Tell Us,"4 Things The New Hampshire Primary Will Tell Us
+
+New Hampshire voters go to the polls Tuesday, and they will resolve a lot of questions. Here are four things the first-in-the-nation primary will tell us:
+
+1. How much damage did the last debate do to Marco Rubio?
+
+Rubio came into New Hampshire with a head of steam. He quickly moved into second place in the polls, and there was even some hope he could overtake Donald Trump in the Granite State. But then, the needle got stuck on his talking points in the ABC debate on Saturday, earning him the worst reviews of his — until now — charmed presidential run.
+
+Eager to dispel the perception that he's ""a broken record in an empty suit,"" Rubio's campaign has been denying the debate was a disaster — and lowering expectations. In an interview with NBC on Monday, Rubio seemed to be giving up on his hope of becoming the clear establishment alternative to Trump and Cruz after New Hampshire, saying the race was going to go for a while longer. Few tracking polls were in the field after Saturday's debate, so it's hard to measure whether Rubio's shaky performance hurt him with voters. We'll find out tonight.
+
+He certainly did in Iowa, where his lead disappeared at the end. Trump has said he wasn't even familiar with the term ""ground game,"" but has now invested more in get-out-the-vote infrastructure in New Hampshire. Still, he is relying most on his own popularity — he's called himself ""the product"" — and his commanding lead in the polls. No poll has shown Trump's big lead in New Hampshire sliding, but New Hampshire voters are famous for making fools of pollsters — and front-runners.
+
+Clinton expects to lose to Bernie Sanders. Tomorrow's results will tell us by how much. Margins matter. Her minuscule victory in Iowa gave her no momentum at all in New Hampshire. So a big, double-digit win for Sanders would give him a huge boost heading into next week's Nevada caucuses, where the Clinton campaign is hoping its union-based ""firewall"" is still strong.
+
+If she can close the gap in New Hampshire — even by a little — and hold Sanders' lead to single digits, she will be able to boast that she pulled off a little bit of yet another Clinton comeback.
+
+4. How much (or how little) will the GOP field shrink?
+
+Before Saturday's debate, many people were expecting the GOP field post-New Hampshire to be a three-man race — Trump, Ted Cruz and Rubio. But if one or more of the governors place in the top three, or even four, they may refuse to drop out until after South Carolina.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey's Chris Christie all say they are going on to South Carolina, but if they don't place in the top tier, their fundraising will evaporate, and there will be tremendous pressure on them to get out. New Hampshire voters could decide how big the GOP field is going forward.",REAL
+8265,The Latest ABC/WaPo Poll Has the Hillary Campaign Sounding the Alarms,"Share on Twitter The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
+The 2016 presidential race is tightening by all measures, and a poll just out from ABC/Washington Post shows that Donald Trump has a legitimate shot at winning the election. 
+The gap has shrunk to just four points nationally among Likely Voters: 
+The lead has shrunk to such an extent that the Hillary campaign is warning that “Donald Trump could win.” 
+Hillary campaign adviser Robbie Mook released the following statement: 
+""We’ve seen polls tighten since the last debate, and we expect things to get even closer by election day,” he said. 
+“Donald Trump could win this election,” Mook added. 
+Just recently, the Clinton campaign was confident of a massive victory and was looking to run up the tally. 
+As FiveThirtyEight pointed out , look for polls to tighten leading up to election day. Hillary's national average is currently around five points, and Trump has regained the edge in the battleground states of Florida and Nevada. 
+It looks like the campaign picture has changed and election day could be more of a nailbiter than many had recently believed. ",FAKE
+4523,"32,000 emails recovered in IRS targeting probe amid allegations agency chief may have lied","Investigators said Thursday they have recovered 32,000 emails in backup tapes related to the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative organizations.
+
+Though they don't know how many of them are new, they told a congressional oversight committee that IRS employees had not asked computer technicians for the tapes, as directed by a subpoena from House oversight and other investigating committees.
+
+That admission was in direct contradiction to earlier testimony of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.
+
+“It looks like we’ve been lied to, or at least misled,"" said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. at a congressional hearing Thursday evening,
+
+IRS Deputy Inspector General Timothy Camus, who testified alongside Inspector General J. Russell George, said his organization was investigating possible criminal activity. He did not elaborate, other than to suggest a key factor is whether documents were intentionally withheld.
+
+The emails were to and from Lois Lerner, who used to head the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. Last June, the IRS told Congress it had lost an unknown number of Lerner's email when her computer hard drive crashed in 2011.
+
+At the time, IRS officials said the emails could not be recovered. But Camus said investigators recovered thousands of emails from old computer tapes used to back up the agency's email system, though he said he believed some tapes had been erased.
+
+""We recovered quite a number of emails, but until we compare those to what's already been produced we don't know if they're new emails,"" Camus told the House Oversight Committee.
+
+Neither Camus nor George would describe the contents of any of the emails at Thursday's hearing.
+
+The IRS says it has already produced 78,000 Lerner emails, many of which have been made public by congressional investigators.
+
+Camus said it took investigators two weeks to locate the computer tapes that contained Lerner's emails. He said it took technicians about four months to find Lerner's emails on the tapes.
+
+Several Oversight committee members questioned how hard the IRS tried to produce the emails, given how quickly independent investigators found them.
+
+""We have been patient. We have asked, we have issued subpoenas, we have held hearings,"" said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the Oversight Committee. ""It's just shocking me that you start, two weeks later you're able to find the emails.""
+
+Though the IG's office is looking at possible criminal activity, Washington, D.C.-based attorney Patrick O'Donnell said the Justice Department would have the final say on whether anyone at the IRS would face charges. O'Donnell, who has worked on government enforcement matters, told FoxNews.com the IG's office typically refers their recommendation to the DOJ, though in some cases the IG will work in tandem with the DOJ throughout an investigation.
+
+At the hearing, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., questioned the significance of the recovered emails in an exchange with Camus.
+
+""So as I understand it from your testimony here today, you are unable to confirm whether there are any, to use your own words, new emails, right?"" she asked Camus.
+
+Maloney: ""So what's before us may be material you already have, right?""
+
+Maloney. ""So may I ask, why are we here?""
+
+The IRS issued a statement saying the agency ""has been and remains committed to cooperating fully with the congressional oversight investigations. The IRS continues to work diligently with Congress as well as support the review by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.""
+
+The IRS estimated it has spent $20 million responding to congressional inquiries, generating more than one million pages of documents and providing agency officials to testify at 27 congressional hearings.
+
+The inspector general set off a firestorm in May 2013 with an audit that said IRS agents improperly singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status during the 2010 and 2012 elections.
+
+Several hundred groups had their applications delayed for a year or more. Some were asked inappropriate questions about donors and group activities, the inspector general's report said.
+
+The week before George's report, Lerner publicly apologized on behalf of the agency. After the report, much of the agency's top leadership was forced to retire or resign, including Lerner. The Justice Department and several congressional committees launched investigations.
+
+Lerner's lost emails prompted a new round of scrutiny by Congress, and a new investigation by the inspector general's office.
+
+Lerner emerged as a central figure in the controversy after she refused to answer questions at two House Oversight hearings, invoking her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself at both hearings. At the first hearing, Lerner made a statement saying she had done nothing wrong.
+
+Last year, the House voted mostly along party lines to hold her in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions at the hearings.
+
+Fox News' Doug McKelway and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8527,Banana Republic Election in the United States?,"Banana Republic Election in the United States? 07.11.2016 Print version Font Size Nothing is more hypocritical than to hear that the US government is going to send ""election observers"" to other countries. For nowhere on the planet are elections more easily rigged than in the United States of America. In ""Votescam: The Stealing of America"" (1992) the late Collier brothers summarized the alarming state of affairs, which still prevails today. In Chapter one, ""Electronic Hoodwink"", they begin by quoting the first words spoken by President-elect, George Bush in his Nov. 8, 1988 victory speech in Houston, Texas. Bush said: ""We can now speak the most majestic words a democracy can offer: ""The people have spoken . . . "" The Colliers comment in the following brilliantly written passage: ""It was not ""the People"" of the United States who did 'the speaking' on that election day, although most of them believed it was, and still believe it. In fact, the People did not speak at all. The voices most of us really heard that day were the voices of computers strong, loud, authoritative, unquestioned in their electronic finality . . . It only makes common sense that every gear, every mechanism, every nook and cranny of every part of the voting process ought to be in the sunlight, wide open to public view. How else can the public be reasonably assured that they are participating in an unrigged election where their vote actually means something? Yet one of the most mysterious, low-profile, covert, shadowy, questionable mechanisms of American democracy is the American vote count . . . Computers in voting machines are effectively immune from checking and rechecking. If they are fixed, you cannot know it, and you cannot be sure at all of an honest tally."" In fact, according to the Nation Magazine article published in August, 2005, ""How They Could Steal the Election This Time,"" by veteran reporter Ronnie Dugger, only four mega-election vendors, ES &S (Election Systems & Software), Hart, Diebold and Sequoia processed 96% of the USA vote on election night. Circa 2013, a company named Dominion acquired Diebold and Sequoia. Privately owned computer software And the processing of the nation's ballots are done, in 1988, in 2004, and in 2016, on secret, privately owned computer software which election officials in the USA agree by contract not to inspect. In other words, the vote in America is utterly unverifiable on these machines. America processes over eighty percent of the presidential vote on secret computer programs owned by only three mega-election vendors. This is at the very least an unholy concentration of power. If the three mega-vendors are working together behind the scenes, then it is the few that own this election software that selects the President. As Joseph Stalin said, ""Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything."" This issue of computerized election fraud simmered sub rosa from 1988 until August 1, 2016, when Donald Trump stated at a Columbus, Ohio Rally that he was afraid the ""November election is going to be rigged against me."" The nation's national press went into a frenzy. Jonathan Chait screeched in his headline for nymag.com, ""Donald Trump, Discovering New Way to Undermine Democracy, Calls Election Rigged."" In fact, it was NOT the raising of healthy questions by Trump that was undermining democracy. It was so-called reporters like Chait who didn't like anyone raising any concerns at all. On C-Span on August 21, 2016, best-selling author Roger Stone asserted that is was dangerous NOT to ask questions about how the vote was counted. After all, the Founding Fathers did encourage a healthy skepticism of government, including the part of the government that runs the elections. The situation in the United States is absurd. The fact that the public has no guarantee that the vote is actually that of the people is insane, and tears at the very fabric of democracy. Press concern is so grave about Trump's charge of a possibly rigged election, that in the last two of the three Presidential debates, NBC's Lester Holt and FOX's Chris Wallace both asked Trump if he would accept the election results. In the third debate, Trump stunned Wallace by saying he'd wait and see after he looked at the evidence, and that he was going to keep everyone in suspense. No way votes can be verified Three Supreme Court cases stated that the US voter's right to vote consisted of two parts: 1) the right to cast a ballot; and 2) the right to KNOW that one's ballot is counted accurately. With secret computer counts, there is simply no way to verify the vote. None. This is the first major election in America where the people are learning just how compromised the computer based vote has become. On October 18, 2016, computer expert Ethan Pepper appeared on the Sean Hannity radio show and noted that any election computer can be hacked; that if you get in you can switch a million votes as easy as switching one vote; and he also raised the question of WHO owns the election computer software by noting that George Soros was closely associated with those who provided 16 states with the Smartamatic voting machines. This highlights the greatest danger: that the election vendors themselves OWN the election software and that THEY are the prime suspects for rigging elections. After all, they don't have to hack in, they ARE in as the programmers of the software. And with local election officials signing contracts not to inspect the source code of the computer software, these same election vendors know that no one is looking over their shoulder. On October 26th, FOX Cable News discussed the computer voting machines in Texas that were caught by numerous voters switching their Trump vote to a Hillary vote in early election voting. This phenomenon also surfaced in Maryland. Trump has tweeted and facebooked his 21 million followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram about the computerized ""vote-flipping"" from Trump to Hillary in Texas. The issue of computerized election fraud was now planted in the public mind as a serious issue for the first time since election computers were introduced into the USA circa 1973. On October 31, 2016, the Drudge Report led with two links on how election computers were hacked. He linked to the new video by Bev Harris on youtube and on blackboxvoting.org entitled, ""Fraction Magic."" The Big TV Networks have been playing defense ever since. Rigging the election Every few hours one of the big Networks are running a story about how it would be almost ""impossible"" to rig a national election. But the networks had to report between airing these stories about a week ago that Ebay, Twitter, and the New York Times websites had been hacked, thus totally undermining their stories about the safety of election computers. The situation can be fixed in the USA, or prevented in other countries, by throwing the computer systems out altogether, and counting the paper ballots by hand, in public with all invited to observe, BEFORE the ballots leave the public sight. On November 5, 2016, FOX news carried commentary that whichever side wins in the Presidential race, the other will cry ""computer votefraud."" So the issue has finally become front and center in the Presidential campaign. Dr. David Dill of Stanford University is quoted in a 2004 Nation Magazine article, ""How They Could Steal the Election This Time"": ""Why am I always being asked to prove these systems aren't secure? The burden of proof ought to be on the vendor. You ask about the hardware. 'Secret.' The software? 'Secret.' What's the cryptography? 'Can't tell you because that'll compromise the secrecy of the machines.'... Federal testing procedures? 'Secret'! Results of the tests? 'Secret'! Basically we are required to have blind faith."" People of the USA act like citizens of Banana Republic Blind faith? That's what the subjects and slaves of Banana Republics and tin-horn dictatorships are reduced to. And that's what the people of the United States have now been reduced to since at least as far back as 1988, even though most Americans don't know it. 2016 has been a year of awakening on the election fraud issue. Will that awakening continue to grow so that the United States of America and all other nations? Will the United states and other nations replace easily-rigged election computers, and restore transparent, honest elections with hand-counted paper ballots at the neighborhood polling place once again? As it stands, there is absolutely no way to know who really won the upcoming presidential election in America. The power elite can rig their voting machines to whatever outcome they want. One of the ways the cabal in the United States can be stopped is by a verifiable vote where the America people can be assured they live in a democracy where their vote actually counts and that the will of the people is carried out in the elections. Nancy O'Brien Simpson Ms. Simpson was a radio personality in New York. She was a staff writer for The Liberty Report. A PBS documentary was done on her activism for human rights. She is a psychotherapist and political commentator.",FAKE
+9205,TIME MAGAZINE Reaches NEW LOW: It’s “Sexist” To Investigate Hillary Clinton!”,"0 comments 
+With just days to go until the election, the Democrats are trying to salvage what little remains of Hillary Clinton’s reputation. Time Magazine is now trying to defend the left-wing candidate with a last resort–using the sexism card. 
+As we get closer to Election Day, the left seems to be running out of excuses for their floundering candidate. Left-wing heads are on the verge of exploding. Not unlike the Galaxy S7. So, in Time Magazine’s latest attempt to play off Hillary Clinton’s FBI investigation , they’re digging deep and pulling out… the sexism card ?! 
+I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. 
+No it isn’t. Emailgate, or my preferred term “Dikileaks” is about a candidate mishandling confidential email. A flagrant abuse of the law and our national security. Also, Hillary Clinton doesn’t represent all women. But nice try, dummy. 1 
+The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around. 
+Actually yes, we can imagine this happening to a man. Men cannot hide behind their vagina, or Time readers’ stupidity. Which means they’re usually punished. See also General Petraeus . Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is running for President. She might even win. While under FBI investigation. So “muh sexism” charges are lazy. And insulting to anyone who has three brain cells (like the writer of the Time article). 
+The people are demanding Clinton act like moral exemplars, thundering from the pulpit like Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather. But Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and their many conservative friends are not remotely Clinton’s moral superiors. They are simply bullies, using gender discrimination to give a veneer of plausibility to their accusations. 
+“Moral exemplars”? “Thundering from the pulpit”? No, Time Magazine feminist shill, Robin Lakoff. People are demanding Hillary Clinton not be a criminal liar. Not really that much to ask of someone who wants to lead the country. 
+Trump and the other men on Time Magazine’s list haven’t done anything illegal. That’s the difference, not their sex organs. Not their fashion choices. Evidence is piling up against Hillary more and more each day. Even the mainstream media is turning against her . Which means pantsuits or regular suits enter not into the Hillary is a Criminal equation. Her investigation isn’t about sexism. It’s about Hillary breaking the law. 
+But desperate Time calls for predictable, desperate measures: SEXISM! Just as any criticism of Obama was deemed RACISM. 
+Leftists are running out of defenses for the pantsuited devil-spawn. So they resort to old hat tactics. Just like they do when they say Wikileaks is the product of Russian hackers. 
+If we had a brick for every Clinton scandal and misdeed, the wall wouldn’t cost a cent. There’s nothing sexist about holding someone, male or female, accountable for their actions. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite. It would be sexist NOT to hold Hillary to the same standards as all the boys. This is absolutely ridiculous. It’s not that we are against having a woman for president. We’re just against that woman being Hillary because she is corrupt and a pathological liar. Related Items",FAKE
+5513,"If Donald Trump Wins The Election, It Will Be The Biggest Miracle In US Political History","If Donald Trump Wins The Election, It Will Be The Biggest Miracle In US Political History Posted on Home » Headlines » World News » If Donald Trump Wins The Election, It Will Be The Biggest Miracle In US Political History 
+Are we about to see the largest election day miracle of all time? 
+
+From Michael Snyder : 
+Because as I will show in this article, that is precisely what it is going to take in order for Donald Trump to win. Before I go any further, I want to make it exceedingly clear that I am not saying what the outcome will be on November 8th. As I recently told a national television audience, I do not know who is going to win. 
+In this article I am simply going to examine the poll numbers and the electoral map as they currently stand. But in this bizarre election things can literally change overnight, and it is entirely possible that we could still have another “October surprise” or two before it is all said and done. And without a doubt Donald Trump desperately needs something “to move the needle”, because if the election was held today Hillary Clinton would almost certainly win. 
+What we have witnessed so far during the 2016 election season has been absolutely unprecedented. Just consider some of the things that we have seen up to this point in time. 
+We have never had a bigger “October surprise” than the release of the lewd audio tape from 11 years ago in which Donald Trump claimed to grope women without their consent. 
+We have never seen the mainstream media openly attack a presidential candidate as much as they have attacked Donald Trump. In the past, the big mainstream news outlets at least pretended to be fair and balanced, but this year they have completely discarded all notions of objectivity. 
+They should be completely and utterly ashamed of themselves, and no matter who wins the election they will never be able to get their integrity back. 
+We have also never seen a major party at war with itself this close to a presidential election. It has been said that a house divided against itself will surely fall, and a whole host of prominent Republican leaders have been openly attempting to sabotage the Trump campaign. 
+If Donald Trump is able to overcome all of these factors, it truly will be a miracle of Biblical proportions. 
+As it stands at the moment, however, the numbers are looking quite ominous for Trump. Right now, the Real Clear Politics average of national polls has Hillary Clinton ahead by 6.2 percent. Most political experts consider that to be an insurmountable lead at this stage in the game. 
+But even if Trump can close that gap and pull ahead, that does not mean that he will win the election. In fact, Trump could beat Clinton by millions of votes nationally and still lose. 
+In order to win the election, one candidate has got to get to 270 electoral votes. And on the latest Real Clear Politics electoral map, 262 electoral votes are being projected to go to Hillary Clinton, 164 electoral votes are being projected to go to Donald Trump, and 112 electoral votes are in the “toss up” category. 
+So unless something dramatically changes, Donald Trump is essentially going to have to run the table in all of the closely contested states in order to win, and the mathematical odds of that happening are extremely slim. 
+Let’s take a closer look at this. The first thing that Donald Trump is going to have to do in order to get to 270 electoral votes is to win all of the states that Mitt Romney won in 2012. That would get him up to 206 electoral votes. 
+Unfortunately, it looks like that may be very difficult to do. Romney won North Carolina, but the six most recent polls all have Clinton ahead in that state. Romney also won Arizona, but the most recent poll to be taken there has Clinton ahead by five points. 
+But for a moment, let’s assume that Trump can win all of the states that Romney won. On top of that, there are four other states that Trump must win… 
+#1 Trump must win Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Without Florida, Trump has no realistic path to 270 electoral votes. So on election night if it is announced that Trump has lost Florida, you might as well turn off your television and go to bed because Trump is going to lose the election. 
+Unfortunately for Trump, four recent major surveys all show Trump down by four points in the Sunshine state. 
+#2 Trump must win Ohio’s 18 electoral votes. No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio, and the two most recent major surveys show that Trump and Clinton are tied in the state. 
+#3 Trump must win Iowa’s 6 electoral votes. Fortunately for Trump, most recent surveys show him actually leading in Iowa. 
+#4 Trump must win Nevada’s 6 electoral votes. At this point that is looking like it will be very tough to do, because all of the recent polls have Clinton leading in Nevada, including the most recent one that has her up by 7 points. 
+If Donald Trump can win those four states, that still does not get him to 270 electoral votes. Instead, it gets him to 265 electoral votes, and so he would still need one more medium-sized state to win. 
+The most likely candidates for that last state are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin or Minnesota. Unfortunately for Trump, Clinton appears to have big leads in all four of those states right at this moment. 
+But even if Trump can somehow pull off a miracle and squeak past the 270 electoral vote mark, the truth is that Utah could still mess everything up. 
+Do you remember Evan McMullin? 
+He was the third party “conservative alternative” candidate that was hyped for a couple of days but that seemingly fell off the map afterwards. 
+He is only on the ballot in 12 states, but one of those states is Utah, and it turns out that Evan McMullin is a Mormon. 
+Many Mormons believe that a Mormon will be elected president someday when the U.S. Constitution hangs “like a thread“. According to this belief, this Mormon president will turn the country around and all sorts of wonderful things will start to happen. Many Mormons thought that Mitt Romney was going to be this president, but now Evan McMullin has become the target of these expectations. 
+So how in the world could Evan McMullin become president? 
+Well, their plan is to have Evan McMullin win Utah, and that could potentially keep both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton from both getting to 270 electoral votes if the election is super close. If that happens, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives. 
+It is being projected that the House will still be controlled by the Republicans after this election, and so the choice would come down to either Trump or McMullin, and those backing McMullin believe that he would have a realistic shot in that scenario. 
+I know all of this sounds very strange, but this is actually being discussed around family dinner tables all over Utah tonight. 
+And in recent days Evan McMullin has been soaring in Utah. One recent survey shows Trump with a one point lead over McMullin, and another recent survey actually show McMullin leading Trump by four points in the state. 
+So Trump could pull off a miracle and do everything else that he needs to do to get to 270 electoral votes, and Utah could end up messing up everything for him. 
+In addition, it is also very important to keep in mind that Trump could actually get all of the legitimate votes that he needs to win and still have it stolen from him by election fraud. There was widespread evidence of “funny business” in 2012, and this is something that I detailed for a live studio audience down at Morningsideearlier this month… 
+Are you starting to see why I would consider this to be the biggest miracle in American political history if Donald Trump actually overcomes all of these factors and wins the election? 
+And we don’t have to wait until November 8th to get some indications about how the vote is going to go. Early voting is already taking place is some states, and so far the signs are not encouraging for the Trump campaign. The following comes from CNN… 
+Democratic early turnout has stayed steady in North Carolina compared to 2012, while Republicans have dropped by about 14,500. In Nevada, Democrats have a smaller early voting deficit today than they did at this point in 2012. And Democrats are slightly ahead in Arizona in the early vote so far, though they are lagging Republicans in the tally of how many Arizonans have requested ballots. 
+Perhaps most surprisingly, Democrats improved their position in conservative and Mormon-heavy Utah, where recent polls have shown a tight race. At this point in 2012, Republicans led Democrats in early voting by more than 22,000 voters. But so far this year, the GOP advantage is only 3,509. 
+But if you do want Trump to win, the good news is that we still have more than two weeks before November 8th. 
+We have seen some extremely bizarre things happen already in this election, and a miracle is definitely not out of the question. 
+In fact, I am of the opinion that it is quite likely that some very strange events could take place between now and early November. So hold on to your hats, because the most interesting portion of the 2016 election may still be ahead of us.",FAKE
+9964,"Comment on Creating a National Security State ‘Democracy,’ Or How the American Political System Changed and No One Noticed by James Miller","By Tom Engelhardt, a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture . He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com . His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World . Originally published at TomDispatch < /p> 
+To say that this is the election from hell is to insult hell. 
+There’s been nothing like this since Washington forded the Rubicon or Trump crossed the Delaware or delivered the Gettysburg Address (you know, the one that began “Four score and eleven women ago…”) — or pick your own seminal moment in American history. 
+Billions of words, that face, those gestures, the endless insults , the abused women and the emails, the 24/7 spectacle of it all… Whatever happens on Election Day, let’s accept one reality: we’re in a new political era in this country. We just haven’t quite taken it in. Not really. 
+Forget Donald Trump. 
+Doh! Why did I write that? Who could possibly forget the first presidential candidate in our history preemptively unwilling to accept election results? (Even the South in 1860 accepted the election of Abraham Lincoln before trying to wave goodbye to the Union.) Who could forget the man who claimed that abortions could take place on the day of or the day before actual birth? Who could forget the man who claimed in front of an audience of nearly 72 million Americans that he had never met the women who accused him of sexual aggression and abuse, including the People magazine reporter who interviewed him? Who could forget the candidate who proudly cited his positive polling results at rallies and in tweets, month after month, before (when those same polls turned against him) discovering that they were all “ rigged ”? 
+Whatever you think of The Donald, who in the world — and I mean the whole wide world (including the Iranians ) — could possibly forget him or the election he’s stalked so ominously? When you think of him, however, don’t make him the cause of American political dysfunction. He’s just the bizarre, disturbed, and disturbing symptom of the transformation of the American political system. 
+Admittedly, he is a one-of-a-kind “politician,” even among his associates in surging right-wing nationalist and anti-whatever movements globally. He makes France’s Marine Le Pen seem like the soul of rationality and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte look like a master tactician of our age. But what truly makes Donald Trump and this election season fascinating and confounding is that we’re not just talking about the presidency of a country, but of the country. The United States remains the great imperial state on Planet Earth in terms of the reach of its military and the power of its economy and culture to influence the workings of everything just about everywhere. And yet, based on the last strange year of election campaigning, it’s hard not to think that something — and not just The Donald — is unnervingly amiss on Planet America. 
+The World War II Generation in 2016 
+Sometimes, in my fantasies (as while watching the final presidential debate), I perform a private miracle and bring my parents back from the dead to observe our American world. With them in the room, I try to imagine the disbelief many from that World War II generation would surely express about our present moment. Of course, they lived through a devastating depression, light years beyond anything we experienced in the Great Recession of 2007-2008, as well as a global conflagration of a sort that had never been experienced and — short of nuclear war — is not likely to be again. 
+Despite this, I have no doubt that they would be boggled by our world and the particular version of chaos we now live with. To start at a global level, both my mother (who died in 1977) and my father (who died in 1983) spent decades in the nuclear age, the era of humanity’s greatest — for want of a better word — achievement. After all, for the first time in history, we humans took the apocalypse out of the hands of God (or the gods), where it had resided for thousands of years, and placed it directly in our own. What they didn’t live to experience, however, was history’s second potential deal-breaker, climate change, already bringing upheaval to the planet, and threatening a slow-motion apocalypse of an unprecedented sort. 
+While nuclear weapons have not been used since August 9, 1945 , even if they have spread to the arsenals of numerous countries, climate change should be seen as a snail-paced version of nuclear war — and keep in mind that humanity is still pumping near-record levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I imagine my parents’ amazement that the most dangerous and confounding issue on the planet didn’t get a single question , not to speak of an answer, in the three presidential debates of 2016, the four and a half hours of charges, insults, and interruptions just past. Neither a moderator, nor evidently an undecided voter (in the town hall second debate), nor either presidential candidate — each ready to change the subject on a moment’s notice from embarrassing questions about sexual aggression, emails, or anything else — thought it worth the slightest attention. It was, in short, a problem too large to discuss, one whose existence Donald Trump (like just about every other Republican) denies, or rather, in his case, labels a “hoax” that he uniquely blames on a Chinese plot to sink America. 
+So much for insanity (and inanity) when it comes to the largest question of all. On a somewhat more modest scale, my mom and dad wouldn’t have recognized our political world as American, and not just because of Donald Trump. They would have been staggered by the money pouring into our political system — at least $6.6 billion in this election cycle according to the latest estimate, more than 10% of that from only 100 families. They would have been stunned by our 1% elections ; by our new Gilded Age ; by a billionaire TV celebrity running as a “populist” by riling up once Democratic working-class whites immiserated by the likes of him and his “brand” of casino capitalism, scam, and spectacle; by all those other billionaires pouring money into the Republican Party to create a gerrymandered Congress that will do their obstructionist bidding; and by just how much money can be “invested” in our political system in perfectly legal ways these days. And I haven’t even mentioned the Other Candidate, who spent all of August on the true “campaign trail,” hobnobbing not with ordinary Americans but with millionaires and billionaires (and assorted celebrities ) to build up her phenomenal “ war chest .” 
+I would have to take a deep breath and explain to my parents that, in twenty-first-century America, by Supreme Court decree, money has become the equivalent of speech, even if it’s anything but “free.” And let’s not forget that other financial lodestone for an American election these days: the television news, not to speak of the rest of the media. How could I begin to lay out for my parents, for whom presidential elections were limited fall events, the bizarre nature of an election season that starts with media speculation about the next-in-line just as the previous season is ending, and continues more or less nonstop thereafter? Or the spectacle of talking heads discussing just about nothing but that election 24/7 on cable television for something like a full year, or the billions of ad dollars that have fueled this never-ending Super Bowl of campaigns, filling the coffers of the owners of cable and network news? 
+We’ve grown strangely used to it all, but my mom and dad would undoubtedly think they were in another country — and that would be before they were even introduced to the American system as it now exists, the one for which Donald Trump is such a bizarre front man. 
+What Planet Is This Anyway? 
+I wish I still had my high school civics text. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember it: the one in which a man from Mars lands on Main Street, USA, to be lectured on the glories of American democracy and our carefully constructed, checked-and-balanced tripartite form of governance. I’m sure knowledge of that system changed life on Mars for the better, even if it was already something of a fantasy here on Earth in my parents’ time. After all, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower — my mom and dad voted for Democrat Adlai Stevenson — was the one who, in his farewell address in 1961, first brought “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” and “the military-industrial complex” to the attention of the American people. 
+Yes, all of that was already changing then, as a peacetime war state of unparalleled size developed in this country. Still, 30-odd years after my father’s death, surveying the American landscape, my parents might believe themselves on Mars. They would undoubtedly wonder what exactly had happened to the country they knew. After all, thanks to the Republican Party’s scorched-earth tactics in these last years in bipolar Washington, Congress, that collection of putative representatives of the people (now a crew of well-paid, well-financed representatives of the country’s special interests in a capital overrun with corporate lobbyists), hardly functions anymore. Little of significance makes it through the porticos of the Capitol. Recently, for instance, John McCain (usually considered a relatively “moderate” Republican senator) suggested — before walking his comments part way back — that if Hillary Clinton were elected president, his fellow Republican senators might decide a priori not to confirm a single Supreme Court justice she nominated during her tenure in office. That, of course, would mean a court now down to what looks like a permanent crew of eight would shrink accordingly. And his comments, which once would have shocked Americans to the core, caused hardly a ripple of upset or protest. 
+On my tour of this new world, I might start by pointing out to my mom and dad that the U.S. is now in a state of permanent war , its military at the moment involved in conflicts in at least six countries in the Greater Middle East and Africa. These are all purely presidential conflicts, as Congress no longer has a real role in American war-making (other than ponying up the money for it and beating the drums to support it). The executive branch stands alone when it comes to the war powers once checked and balanced in the Constitution. 
+And I wouldn’t want my parents to simply look abroad. The militarization of this country has proceeded apace and in ways that, I have not the slightest doubt, would shock them to their core. I could take my parents, for instance, to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan, their hometown and still mine, and on any day of the week they would see the once-inconceivable: actual armed soldiers on guard in full camo. I could mention that, at my local subway stop, I’ve several times noted a New York police department counterterror squad that could be mistaken for a military Special Ops team, assault rifles slung across their chests, and no one even stops and gawks anymore. I could point out that the police across the country increasingly have the look of military units and are supplied by the Pentagon with actual weaponry and equipment directly off distant U.S. battlefields, including armored vehicles of various sorts. I could mention that military surveillance drones, those precursors of future robotic warfare (and, for my parents, right out of the childhood sci-fi novels I used to read), are now regularly in American skies ; that advanced surveillance equipment developed in far-off war zones is now being used by the police here at home; and that, though political assassination was officially banned in the post-Watergate 1970s, the president now commands a formidable CIA drone force that regularly carries out such assassinations across large swaths of the planet, even against U.S. citizens , and without the say-so of anyone outside the White House, including the courts. I could mention that the president who, in my parents’ time, commanded one modest-sized secret army, the CIA’s paramilitaries, now essentially presides over a full-scale secret military, the Special Operations Command: 70,000 elite troops cocooned inside the larger U.S. military, including elite teams ready to be deployed on what are essentially executive missions across the planet. 
+I could point out that, in the twenty-first century, U.S. intelligence has set up a global surveillance state that would have shamed the totalitarian powers of the previous century and that American citizens, en masse, are included in it; that our emails (a new concept for my parents) have been collected by the millions and our phone records made available to the state; that privacy, in short, has essentially been declared un-American. I would also point out that, on the basis of one tragic day and what otherwise has been the most modest of threats to Americans, a single fear — of Islamic terrorism — has been the pretext for the building of the already existing national security state into an edifice of almost unbelievable proportions that has been given once unimaginable powers, funded in ways that should amaze anyone (not just visitors from the American past), and has become the unofficial fourth branch of the U.S. government without either discussion or a vote. 
+Little that it does — and it does a lot — is open to public scrutiny. For their own “safety,”“the People” are to know nothing of its workings (except what it wants them to know). Meanwhile, secrecy of a claustrophobic sort has spread across significant parts of the government. The government classified 92 million documents in 2011 and things seem not to have gotten much better since. In addition, the national security state has been elaborating a body of “ secret law ”— including classified rules, regulations, and interpretations of already existing law — kept from the public and, in some cases, even from congressional oversight committees. 
+Americans, in other words, know ever less about what their government does in their name at home and abroad. 
+I might suggest to my parents that they simply imagine the Constitution of the United States being rewritten and amended in secrecy and on the fly in these years without as much as a nod to “We, the People.” In this way, as our elections became elaborate spectacles, democracy was sucked dry and ditched in all but name — and that name is undoubtedly Donald J. Trump. 
+Consider that, then, a brief version of how I might describe our new American world to my amazed parents. 
+America as a National Security State 
+None of this is The Donald’s responsibility. In the years in which a new American system was developing, he was firing people on TV. You could, of course, think of him as the poster boy for an America in which spectacle, celebrity, the gilded class of One Percenters, and the national security state have melded into a narcissistic, self-referential brew of remarkable toxicity. 
+Whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is elected president, one thing is obvious: the vast edifice that is the national security state, with its 17 intelligence agencies and enormous imperial military, will continue to elaborate itself and expand its power in our American world. Both candidates have sworn to pour yet more money into that military and the intelligence and Homeland Security apparatus that goes with it. None of this, of course, has much of anything to do with American democracy as it was once imagined. 
+Someday perhaps, like my parents, “I” will be called back from the dead by one of my children to view with awe or horror whatever world exists. Long after the America of an unimaginable Donald J. Trump presidency or a far-more-imaginable Hillary Clinton version of the same has been folded into some god-awful, half-forgotten chapter in our history, I wonder what will surprise or confound “me” then. What version of our country and planet will “I” face in 2045? 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+2434,Superbug cases spur FDA warning on dirty medical scopes,"WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration warned doctors and hospitals Thursday to use extra caution in disinfecting a hard-to-clean medical scope that has been linked to the spread of powerful ""superbugs"" in outbreaks across the country.
+
+The agency said that even meticulous cleaning of the duodenoscopes, which are used on about 500,000 patients a year, may not entirely eliminate the risk. And it advised doctors and hospitals that it is studying possible solutions, including new disinfection protocols.
+
+The FDA announcement followed a report from Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center that seven patients — including two who died — were infected with the superbug CRE in an outbreak tied to contaminated duodenescopes. The hospital said in a statement that as many as 179 patients who had undergone procedures using the scopes were potentially exposed to the bacteria from January 2013 to January 2014.
+
+The UCLA cases are the latest of several CRE outbreaks nationwide that have been linked to duodenoscopes, which are used to treat gallstones, certain cancers and other disorders in the digestive system. USA TODAY first reported on the outbreaks in an investigation published last month, and other cases have come to light since.
+
+CRE bacteria are formally known as Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae, reflecting their resistance to carbapenem antibiotics — the last line of defense in the medical toolbox. While it is possible that other infections also may be transmitted from contaminated duodenoscopes, CRE cases generate particular concern because of their risks -- fatality rates for patients with CRE infections can run as high as 40%-50%.
+
+""Meticulously cleaning duodenoscopes prior to high-level disinfection should reduce the risk of transmitting infection, but may not entirely eliminate it,"" the FDA said in its advisory. It noted that the agency is working with duodenoscope manufacturers ""to identify the causes and risk factors for transmission of infectious agents and develop solutions to minimize patient exposure.""
+
+The scopes are used for a procedure called ERCP, or Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography, in which the devices are used with contrast dyes and X-rays to help doctors locate and treat blockages in the bile and pancreatic ducts. The scopes have ""elevator"" mechanisms at their tip that control tiny tools used to trim tissue or insert stents.
+
+While there are surgical options for much of the work done in ERCP procedures, the duodenoscopes typically are considered the less invasive and less dangerous option.
+
+Colleen Schmitt, a physician and president of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, says that ERCP remains a relatively safe procedure that generally carries lower risks of complications than surgery.
+
+""Some of these patients (needing ERCP) are very sick and to take them into a surgical procedure could be risky,"" she says, noting that ERCP is ""less invasive than surgical options.""
+
+Still, she says, more research is needed ""so we can be sure we understand the scope of this (infection) problem,"" as well as the best strategies for minimizing risks to patients. In the meantime, she adds, the society is looking to raise awareness among doctors and hospitals on the need for special attention in cleaning duodenoscopes.
+
+Lawrence Muscarella, a biomedical engineer and independent consultant who advises hospitals on endoscope safety, says more need to be done to advise patients of the risks so they can make informed decisions on their treatment options. He also called for better tracking of infections associated with contaminated duodenoscopes, noting that many outbreaks likely are going unreported.
+
+The FDA says in its advisory that it is aware of 135 patients nationwide who may have contracted bacterial infections from contaminated endoscopes. However, the agency acknowledges that ""it is possible that not all cases have been reported.""
+
+USA TODAY's investigation identified three CRE outbreaks linked to duodenoscopes -- in Pittsburgh, Chicago and Seattle. Another outbreak subsequently was reported in Philadelphia. In the UCLA case, like the others, fatalities of infected patients couldn't necessarily be linked directly to the CRE, because most of those patients had other conditions that also could have contributed to their deaths.
+
+In the Seattle outbreak, which occurred in 2012 and was particularly large, 32 patients were diagnosed with CRE and seven died within 30 days -- a window health officials used in identifying potentially associated deaths. Another four patients who had the infection died later.",REAL
+6616,PATRIOT Act At 15: Do You Feel Safer?,"Posted on October 28, 2016 by Joe from MassPrivateI Streamed live 21 hours ago by RonPaulLibertyReport Fifteen years ago yesterday, President George W. Bush signed the PATRIOT Act into law. It was said to be a necessary – and temporary – response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. It has since become a permanent scar on the Fourth Amendment and the national-security state in Washington D.C. tells us we are in more danger than ever. Is this working? Share this:",FAKE
+1126,The 8th Democratic Debate In 100 Words (And 4 Videos),"The 8th Democratic Debate In 100 Words (And 4 Videos)
+
+In Miami and on Univision, the eighth Democratic debate focused heavily on issues important to Latinos. It meant Sanders and Clinton parted ways with Obama, promising to end deportations. Clinton was asked some tough questions, including whether she would suspend her campaign if she was indicted over her email issue. ""It's not going to happen,"" Clinton said. ""I'm not even answering that question."" Sanders was faced with a video in which he praised Fidel Castro. He said despite all the bad, Cuba did make strides in health and education. The two sparred again on her Wall Street speeches. The highlights:
+
+That's the quickie version of what happened in the eighth Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 race Wednesday night. The politics team has wall-to-wall coverage.",REAL
+5793,"Rebels Escalate Attacks on Western Aleppo, Killing 12 Civilians","Attacks Ramp Up Ahead of Russia's New Ceasefire by Jason Ditz, November 03, 2016 Share This 
+A coalition of Syrian rebels led by the Nusra Front have been attacking government-held Western Aleppo since Friday, and escalated the strikes ahead of Russia’s new ceasefire. Reports out of the city suggest heavy firing against government-held neighborhoods. 
+While details are still emerging, 12 civilians were reported slain in the firing, and around 200 others were wounded . This toll is independent of the toll from fighting on the ground between rebels and military forces, for which no official figures have yet been released. 
+The Russian ceasefire is intended to offer a 10-hour window during which the rebels can leave the city freely through two corridors, taking their weapons and anything else with them, though the rebels have already denounced both the offer and the ceasefire, insisting they will never surrender the city. 
+Both sides have been trading fire for months, often shelling one another’s neighborhoods, attacks which tend to kill a lot more civilian bystanders than combatants. They also trade offensives and counteroffensives, aiming to take control of the entire city. 
+So far, neither side has been able to get serious gains in the fighting over the city. Some smaller gains by the Syrian military last month appear to be getting reversed with this new offensive by the rebels from outside the city. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+7209,Militias prepare for election unrest while Christians fast,"Militias prepare for election unrest while Christians fast November 02, 2016 Members of the III% Security Force militia gather for a field training exercise in Jackson, Georgia, U.S. October 29, 2016. REUTERS/Justin Mitchell 
+Prominent patriot militia groups are preparing for potential unrest following the elections, while millions of Christians fast for a peaceful transition. Chris Hill, a paralegal, code named ""Bloodagent”: ""How many people are voting for Trump? Ooh-rah!"" Hill admires Trump’s promise to deport illegal immigrants, stop Muslims from entering the country and build a wall along the Mexico border. Hill: ""This is the last chance to save America from ruin.” ""I'm surprised I was able to survive or suffer through eight years of Obama without literally going insane, but Hillary is going to be more of the same."" Hill on possible post-election march on DC: ""I will be there to render assistance to my fellow countrymen, and prevent them from being disarmed, and I will fight and I will kill and I may die in the process.” Hill: “We've building up for this, just like the Marines. We are going to really train harder and try to increase our operational capabilities in the event that this is the day that we hoped would never come."" Southern Poverty Law Center: Estimates there were 276 active militias last year, up from 42 in 2008. Three Percent Security Force draws its name from the notion that no more than 3 percent of the American population fought in the Revolutionary War against Britain. Former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh: ""If Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket.” 
+(JACKSON, GA) Down a Georgia country road, camouflaged members of the Three Percent Security Force have mobilized for rifle practice, hand-to-hand combat training -- and an impromptu campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. 
+""How many people are voting for Trump? Ooh-rah!"" asks Chris Hill, a paralegal who goes by the code name ""Bloodagent."" 
+""Ooh-rah!"" shout a dozen militia members in response, as morning sunlight sifted through the trees last weekend. 
+As the most divisive presidential election in recent memory nears its conclusion, some armed militia groups are preparing for the possibility of a stolen election on Nov. 8 and civil unrest in the days following a victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton. 
+They say they won't fire the first shot, but they're not planning to leave their guns at home, either. 
+Trump's populist campaign has energized militia members like Hill, who admire the Republican mogul's promise to deport illegal immigrants, stop Muslims from entering the country and build a wall along the Mexico border. Trump has repeatedly warned that the election may be ""rigged,"" and has said he may not respect the results if he does not win. At least one paramilitary group, the Oath Keepers, has called on members to monitor voting sites for signs of fraud. 
+The Oath Keepers, a prominent Pro-Constitution militia force that sent gun-toting members to the 2014 race riots in Ferguson, Missouri, called on members last week to monitor voting sites on election day for any signs of fraud. 
+An hour south of Atlanta, the Three Percent Security Force started the day around the campfire, taking turns shooting automatic pistols and rifles at a makeshift target range. They whooped with approval when blasts from one member's high-powered rifle knocked down a tree. 
+Millions of Christians are praying and fasting for a peaceful transition following the election results on November 9th. TRUNEWS President Rick Wiles announced a 21 day fast leading up to November 8th, encouraging believers around the country to join in intercession during this dangerous period for our nation.",FAKE
+7015,Saudi Arabia to behead disabled man for taking part in protests,"Posted on November 5, 2016 by DCG | 3 Comments 
+From The Independent : Saudi Arabia is set to behead a disabled man for taking part in anti-government protests. 
+A specialised criminal court in Riyadh , the Arab kingdom’s capital, sentenced Munir al-Adam, to death for “attacks on police” and other offences they said took place during protests in the Shia-dominated east in late 2011 . 
+The 23-year-old is partially blind and was already partially deaf at the time of arrest; he alleges he is now completely deaf in one ear as a result of being severely beaten by police. His family issued a statement rejecting the verdict and claiming that Mr. Adam was tortured into confessing, The Times reported. 
+The steel cable worker said he had only signed a document admitting the offences after being repeatedly beaten. He said he had been accused of “sending texts” when he was too poor to own a mobile phone. 
+Forty-seven protesters and alleged supporters of al-Qaeda were executed in a single day in January. In July, the number of beheadings in Saudi Arabia reached 108 this year, putting the country, which has a population of nearly 29 million people, on track to exceed its 2015 execution total. 
+Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most prolific executioners. Research last year by human rights organisation Reprieve found that, of those identified as facing execution in Saudi Arabia, some 72 per cent were sentenced to death for non-violent alleged crimes, while torture and forced confessions were common. 
+“Munir Adam’s appalling case illustrates how the Saudi authorities are all too happy to subject the most vulnerable people to the swordsman’s blade,” said Maya Foa, of Reprieve. “Saudi Arabia’s close allies, including the UK, must urge the kingdom to release Munir, along with juveniles and others who were sentenced to death for protesting.” 
+The traditionally close relationship between Saudi Arabia and Britain has become strained in the past year as people in the West have protested against the use of the death penalty, including against minors. Protests also erupted across the Middle East in January. 
+Sara Hashah, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa spokesperson, said Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran were responsible for 90 per cent of all recorded executions globally and were out of step with the rest of the world . 
+“In Saudi Arabia, where people are routinely sentenced to death after grossly unfair trials, we have seen a dramatic surge in the number of executions in the past two years which has shown no sign of abating in 2016,” she told The Independent in July. 
+“This clearly demonstrates that Saudi Arabia’s authorities are increasingly out of step with a global trend of states moving away from the death penalty. “Saudi Arabia’s authorities must end their reliance on this cruel, inhuman and degrading form of punishment immediately.” 
+Mr. Adam was reportedly detained in February 2012 for taking part in protests in his home town of Qatif the previous year, when he was 18 years old. 
+Read the rest of the story here . 
+DCG",FAKE
+4718,Donald Trump threatens to jail Hillary Clinton in second presidential debate,"A cornered Donald Trump prowled the presidential debate stage on Sunday, threatening to jail an opponent he called “the devil” in a last-ditch bid to staunch his hemorrhaging campaign hopes.
+
+Swaying malevolently behind Hillary Clinton as she parried attacks on everything from her husband’s sex life to Wall Street and her foreign policy judgment, the Republican dominated the night but made little effort to seduce new voters.
+
+Instead, he began the night by assembling a group of women in a press conference to revisit alleged sexual assaults by Bill Clinton, before confronting his opponent hardest on her private email server.
+
+“OK Donald, I know you are into big diversion tonight,” shot back Clinton. “Anything to get away from your campaign and how Republicans are deserting you.
+
+“Everything you have heard from Donald just now is not true. I am sorry to keep saying this but he lives in an alternative reality,” she added.
+
+The Democratic frontrunner fired off occasional attacks of her own, accusing Trump of being in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, but looked rattled by the brutal onslaught over her record in office.
+
+Trump, embracing the spirit of the “lock her up” mob chants at his rallies, threatened: “If I win I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation – there has never been so many lies and so much deception,” he threatened.
+
+Clinton said it was “awfully good” that someone with the temperament of Trump was not in charge of the law in the country, provoking another Trump jab: “Because you’d be in jail.”
+
+“She got caught in a total lie and now she is blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln,” added Trump as Clinton attempted to defend leaked Wall Street speech transcripts.
+
+The Republican’s leonine menace even turned on the moderators at Washington University, demanding half a dozen times why they were interrupting him but not asking tougher questions of Clinton.
+
+Within moments of the candidates meeting on stage – without shaking hands – the night sank into an ugly war of words between two nominees devoid of civility, a spectacle unlike any presidential debate in recent memory.
+
+After briefly sticking to general talking points about Barack Obama’s record and the need to “make America great again”, Trump was easily baited into a contentious exchange with Clinton.
+
+The sparring followed shortly after Trump was asked to address the recently leaked 2005 video which captured him bragging about groping women without their consent. The former reality TV star apologized, saying he was “embarrassed by it”, but brushed off as “locker room talk” the unguarded content that has sent dozens of Republican lawmakers fleeing from his candidacy.
+
+“I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do,” Trump said.
+
+Clinton responded that the leaked video revealed “what he thinks about women, what he does to women”.
+
+“He has said that the video doesn’t represent who he is. But I think it’s clear to anyone who heard it that it represents exactly who he is,” Clinton said.
+
+“With prior Republican nominees for president, I disagreed with them. Politics, policies, principles … but I never questioned their fitness to serve,” she added. “Donald Trump is different.”
+
+The real estate mogul was visibly fuming, scowling and pacing as Clinton spoke. Shedding any semblance of contrition over the video, Trump pounced on the indiscretions of Bill Clinton while raising unproven accusations that the former president had assaulted women.
+
+“There’s never been anybody in the history of politics that’s been so abusive to women,” Trump said. “Mine are words and his are action.”
+
+Declining to hit back, Clinton invoked first lady Michelle Obama’s memorable speech at the Democratic national convention in July: “When they go low, we go high.”
+
+But Trump was in no mood to switch gears. His rejoinder to Clinton’s criticism of Trump’s rhetoric against immigrants, Muslims, prisoners of war and women was to falsely pin conspiracy theories surrounding Obama’s birthplace on Clinton’s 2008 campaign – even though Trump rose to political prominence on a crusade to obtain the president’s birth certificate.
+
+The debate turned even chillier as the topic turned to Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state – and Trump’s bulldozing attack caused damage.
+
+“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Trump told his rival, jabbing his finger repeatedly in her direction.
+
+Clinton once again attacked Trump for his praise for Vladimir Putin and noted the repeated cyber-attacks by Russian-backed hackers in an attempt to influence the election. “The Kremlin, meaning Putin and the Russian government, are directing attacks on American accounts to influence our election. WikiLeaks is part of that,” said Clinton. She added: “Never in history has a foreign power [worked] so hard to influence outcome of election.”
+
+Trump responded by suggesting “maybe there is no hacking” and disclaimed any ties to Russia. “I don’t know Putin, I think it would be great if we got along with Russia but I don’t know Putin.” He went to insist: “I know nothing about Russia.”
+
+Only right at the end of a verbally violent 90 minutes was there a brief truce when the candidates were asked to name one positive thing about each other. “I respect his children,” said Clinton after first throwing back her head and laughing.
+
+“She doesn’t quit,” responded Trump. “She doesn’t give up. She’s a fighter and I consider that to be a very good trait.”
+
+While the debate was widely characterized as both bitter and nasty, Clinton’s campaign was confident voters were capable of discerning the difference between the two candidates.
+
+“There was only one president on the stage tonight,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon told reporters in the spin room.
+
+“There was only one person that showed the demeanor, the temperament, the resolve and the discipline to actually be president.”
+
+He then added of Trump: “Everything from his meandering answers on policy, which showed a complete lack of understanding on important issues like Syria and healthcare, to his body language on stage where he was menacingly stalking her during parts of her answers, suggested that this is not someone with the temperament to be president of the United States.”
+
+Jason Miller, senior communications adviser to the Republican’s campaign, argued that when Trump “turned the Honest Abe question around on Mrs Clinton that was a knockout”.
+
+Trump supporters in the spin room also stood by their candidate in the wake of the latest audio revelations. Ben Carson, a former primary season rival of the Republican nominee, insisted that when Trump made those remarks “that was a very different time in his life and at that time he was a billionaire playboy and the language that he used was consistent with that”.
+
+Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani also dismissed the wave of Republicans who had announced in the past 48 hours that they were no longer voting for Trump. “Sometimes Republicans get a little weak-kneed,” said Giuliani. “I happen to be a Republican with very strong knees.”
+
+Only two Republican officials were in the spin room to praise Trump’s performance: longtime Trump ally Senator Jeff Sessions and congressman Jason Smith of Missouri. When asked about the paucity of Republican elected officials defending Trump after the debate, Smith told the Guardian: “I am reminded of what my grandfather told me, that ‘people will hurt you a lot to help themselves a little’ and elected officials that are willing to go out and have kneejerk reactions when they are losing the focus of issues, that is the problem.”
+
+The Missouri Republican went on to dismiss those who have abandoned Trump, adding: “Most of the people who have been leaving were last to arrive and first to leave and what we have to know and remember as a party that we are fighting for principles and issues and don’t make personality such a big part.”
+
+Nigel Farage, interim leader of the UK Independence Party, was also in the spin room to defend Trump and attack Clinton as a threat to democracy. “If you value democracy and if you value being in control of your own destiny then you have to reject Hillary Clinton’s ideas. Simple,” said Farage.
+
+An hour before the debate started, Trump sought to distract attention away a newly released recording of him boasting of molesting women by staging a surprise stunt to highlight claims once made against his opponent’s husband.
+
+Despite recently claiming that he would rather the second presidential debate be about “policy” rather than “in the gutter”, the Republican nominee held the extraordinary three-minute press event with four women who have accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing. One of them claimed: “Bill Clinton raped me and Hillary Clinton threatened me.”
+
+Speaking in a conference room to handful of reporters in an event aired on Facebook Live, Trump appeared with Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathy Shelton and Kathleen Willey. Three of the four women have claimed inappropriate sexual contact with Bill Clinton, which he has denied. Shelton was the victim of a 1975 rape where Hillary Clinton was assigned by an Arkansas court to represent her assailant.
+
+The women took turns in speaking after Trump praised them as very courageous. They then joined him in the debate hall as guests.
+
+“We’re not surprised to see Donald Trump continue his destructive race to the bottom,” said Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri in response to the press conference.
+
+“Hillary Clinton understands the opportunity in this town hall is to talk to voters on stage and in the audience about the issues that matter to them, and this stunt doesn’t change that.”
+
+The press stunt came just 48 hours after a tape was released of Trump making obscene boasts about using his fame to kiss and grope women without their consent. The tape caught Trump on a live microphone with then-Access Hollywood host Billy Bush in 2005, and includes the statement “I am automatically attracted to beautiful women. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss, I don’t even wait … and when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.” Trump, who was then 59 years old and newly married to his third wife, Melania, added “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
+
+Although the Republican nominee issued a videotaped apology after midnight on Friday, the mounting controversy has led to a growing number of Republicans to announce that they will not vote for Trump in November. These included the party’s 2008 nominee, John McCain, as well as a number of other senators in tight re-election battles including Rob Portman of Ohio and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire.
+
+Many have argued in favour of letting Trump’s running mate, Indiana’s governor, Mike Pence, fight the remainder of the election against Clinton, even though such a scenario remains highly unlikely under Republican party regulations.
+
+Trump is struggling to overcome deep scepticism among women voters, which has led to plummeting poll numbers in recent days and risks putting his chances of winning the presidency out of reach.
+
+Clinton appeared to be in a jovial mood following the debate, chatting and laughing with husband Bill and members of her staff at the front of her plane back to New York.
+
+Before departing St Louis, she came back to talk to reporters. 
+
+
+
+Asked if she was aware of Trump standing behind her as she answered questions, Clinton let out a laugh. “I could tell, yes,” she said. “Well, it was a very small space and I tried to give him space when he was talking to people. I would go back and lean up against my stool, but he was very present.”
+
+She added: “I was surprised by the absolute avalanche of falsehoods. I really find it almost unimaginable that someone could stand and just tell falsehood after falsehood.
+
+“You all remember Politifact said that he was the most untruthful candidate they’d ever evaluated … I think they said he was 70% untruthful and so I think he exceeded that percentage tonight.”",REAL
+8715,Cars That Broke Bad,"Eric Peters Autos October 31, 2016 
+Automotive good ideas gone bad range far and wide – whether it’s a classic fail like the exploding Pintos of the early ’70s – or a late-model train wreck like the Pontiac Aztek. 
+Here are ten automotive atrocities that will be remembered for as long as the warranty claims (and class-action lawsuits) linger: 
+* The entire American Motors Corp. (AMC) lineup – 
+From dreadful dreadnoughts like the malformed Matador to demented detritus like the Gremlin and Pacer, no other automaker ever managed to build such a seemingly endless conga line of bizarre, poorly conceived (and often, poorly built) cars within such a short span of time (from the late 1960s to the early-mid 1970s). 
+Only bankruptcy eventually succeeded in stopping the madness. Exceptions deserving of a kind word include the Javelin and AMX, which were decent efforts hobbled by AMC’s perpetual lack of adequate development funds. 
+* Chrysler’s “lean burn” engines – 
+While Honda was developing highly efficient combustion chambers to lower engine emissions via engineering advances such as the CVCC cylinder head (which allowed the cars to meet federal exhaust emissions standards without catalytic converters) Chrysler was duct-taping its V8s with leaned-out carburetors that mainly made them even harder to start than they were before – and prone to stalling in the middle of busy intersections. 
+In addition, you also got gelded performance and terrible gas mileage. 
+Now you know why “rich, Corinthian leather” never made a comeback. 
+* General Motors’ diesel V8 – 
+Imagine a luxury car that was both slow and inefficient as well as prone to early and catastrophic engine failures and you have a taste of the bitter flavor that was the diesel-powered Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs of the late ’70s and early ’80s. 
+These “diesel” engines were actually converted gas engines, which (contrary to the myth) wasn’t the problem. Poor quality control was. 
+The resultant debacle not only soured an entire country on the otherwise perfectly sound concept it helped hustle Oldsmobile to the boneyard of automotive has-beens and nearly killed off Cadillac, too. 
+* The Sterling – 
+Japanese automakers rarely screw the pooch, but this was an exception. 
+Back in the late 1980s, in collusion with British car maker Land Rover, Acura Legends were re-sold as “British” Sterling 825s and 827s. The alliance was as enduring as the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact – and just as awkward. Parts for these cars – especially interior pieces – are all but impossible to find. Dealer support is nonexistent. Resale values are lower than current highs for well-worn Yugos. 
+If Truman had had another bomb left to drop, the childhood home of the dude who would grow up to create Sterling would have been a worthy target. 
+* Pontiac Fiero – 
+A great idea ruined by upper management skinflints and con men – who thought it would be slick take Chevette underthings (front suspension, engine) and put them in a car that looked sporty and then charge the suckers top dollar. 
+First-year sales were great – until the word got out. They then nose-dived into the ground like the Air France Concorde, forcing the car’s cancellation just four years after it came out. Just in time to hand over the entire market for a car of this type to Mazda , which brought out the Miata a year after the Fiero was sent to the crusher. The Best of Eric Peters Tags: Eric Peters [ ] is an automotive columnist and author of Automotive Atrocities and Road Hogs (2011). Visit his website Copyright © 2016 Eric Peters",FAKE
+9089,“Has science gone too far?”,"“Has science gone too far?” Smew over on Reddit has spotted an awesomely awful food mash-ups:
+“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”, replies horheezusbobeezus . 
+We thought we’d check out if this is actually any good and there’s a review over on pizzabacker.com , “Is this something I can recommend? I would say skip it.”",FAKE
+4804,Tics and tricks: Here's what Trump and Clinton's body language reveals,"When speaking, he sometimes holds his elbows into his body as if protecting something. He repeatedly gestures with an “A-OK’’-type sign, and waves his open palms back and forth, like he’s playing an accordion. He forces a smile — mouth corners up! — looks self-satisfied and insincere at the same time.
+
+When speaking, she emphasizes a point by shaking a right fist with her thumb out on top — a gesture that wouldn’t be so distracting if it weren’t so reminiscent of the one from whom she apparently picked it up, her husband, the former president, at his most didactic.
+
+When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton debate Monday night, they’ll express themselves physically as well as verbally. Their body language — movements, posture, facial expressions — may inadvertently reveal as much about them as their words. Consultants call it “leakage.’’
+
+It’s one thing to repeat talking points; it’s another to control the message you convey with your body. And it’s one thing to be coached on such nuances, as both candidates have been; it’s another to remember it with 100 million people watching.
+
+Ruth Sherman, a prominent communications consultant and speaking coach, analyzed the candidates’ body language for the USA TODAY NETWORK.
+
+Although Sherman admires Trump’s communications skills, some of his ticks and tendencies drive her crazy, because they distract an audience from his message (“It’s called ‘noise.’ You just get sick of it.’’) or contradict it.
+
+• The self-hug. Trump gestures with his arms stuck out and elbows held unnaturally close to his sides. “It looks like he’s protecting something,’’ Sherman says — undesirable in one who claims to be a strong leader. (See 0:07-0:10)
+
+• The A-OK. To the point of distraction, Trump forms his thumb and forefinger into the A-OK sign, except that the extra three fingers are curled instead of sticking out straight. (See 0:12-0:15)
+
+• The chop. It’s what it sounds like, an annoying hand reflex that’s drummed out of every novice scholastic debater. (Starting at 0:12-0:15)
+
+• The accordion. With his palms open toward each other, he moves his arms back and forth for emphasis, evoking those mechanical monkeys crashing the symbols.
+
+• The grimace. With seemingly Herculean effort, Trump turns up the corners of his mouth. But the rest of his facial muscles are not cooperating — check the eyes. It undercuts credibility and looks incredibly uncomfortable.
+
+Sherman says Clinton is well dressed and well groomed, uses her hands effectively and moves well. She particularly liked the way Clinton took the stage for her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, moving from right to left and basking in applause from around the hall.
+
+• The thumb-over. When most people make a fist, they tuck their thumb across their knuckles. But Clinton rests her thumb on top of her forefinger, which is fine — she doesn’t look like she’s going to slug anybody — but reminds us that the gesture was popularized by the 42nd president. (See 0:25-0:27)
+
+• The shrug. Clinton sometimes gives a little shrug while she’s making a point, which suggests subconscious uncertainty about what she’s saying.
+
+Sherman has more technical complaints about Trump’s body language, but feels he’s a much better performer and communicator than Clinton — partly because he practiced before a national reality TV show audience for 14 years and partly because he’s a natural.
+
+However grating his Queens accent or distracting his idiosyncratic gestures, Trump has trained his audience to accept him as he is — “that’s Donald.’’
+
+Since in a televised debate performance tops content, Sherman says, “it’s his to lose. Content is not enough. Words are not enough.’’
+
+But didn’t words sink President Gerald Ford in 1976, when he said in a debate with Jimmy Carter that the Soviets didn’t dominate Eastern Europe? She chuckles. “Gerald Ford was no Donald Trump.’’
+
+• QUIZ: Test your memory of general election debates
+
+• INTERACTIVE: Decide the next president's path to the White House",REAL
+10101,Green Party’s Margaret Flowers Challenges US Senate Debate in Maryland as Undemocratic,"2016 elections by BAR editor and columnist, Dr. Marsha Adebayo 
+The “revolving, rigged system” that purports to be American democracy was revealed in all its corporate vulgarity on a Baltimore university stage, last week. Two U.S. Senate candidates of the duopoly parties pretended to support the Green Party’s candidate’s right to join the debate, but failed to protest when cops hauled her away. “This was their ‘Rosa Parks’ moment when they could have stood for integrity and democracy” -- but failed the test. Green Party’s Margaret Flowers Challenges US Senate Debate in Maryland as Undemocratic by BAR editor and columnist, Dr. Marsha Adebayo 
+“ The corporate media and the political duopoly collaborated to ensure that the Green Party message would not be heard.” 
+US corruption during this campaign season is on full display for the entire world to ponder. No one paying even scant attention can deny the thin veneer that is used to hide state sponsored police murder of Africans, structural poverty and the cozy relationship between the 1% rulers in the Democratic and Republican parties. Green Party candidates, such as Jill Stein, Ajamu Baraka and Margaret Flowers have forced sunlight’s disinfectant power to expose a rigged, racist and revolting political system that politically and economically devours communities of color, condones police murders of Black youth, intentionally exposes communities, like Flint, Michigan, to poisoned water, promotes drone warfare and the pilfering of the natural resources of Africa and South America. 
+The system, however is finding it more difficult to block out the voices of dissent. Such was the situation this week at the University of Baltimore College of Public Affairs where Dr. Margaret Flowers, the Green Party candidate for the Maryland US Senate seat, was refused the opportunity to participate in the only televised debate alongside Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen and Republican state Del. Kathy Szeliga. The corporate media and the political duopoly collaborated to ensure that the Green Party message would not be heard. The sham excuse used to exclude Flowers was that her poll numbers had not reached 15%. But, of course it is difficult to reach the magic number of 15% in the polls when one is systematically excluded from debates and public events. This is the revolving rigged system that Black people know so well. 
+“When the police came to escort her off the stage neither candidate provided a meaningful protest of the anti-democratic process unfolding.” 
+When the rigged debate started, audience members called for Dr. Flowers to join Van Hollen and Szeliga. Shouts of “let her speak” could be heard from the audience. Responding to the audience, Dr. Flowers took her place on the stage shaking hands with both candidates. Standing on the stage, she turned her attention to the audience and said: 
+“I think it’s important for voters to understand the differences between myself and Congressman Van Hollen and Delegate Szeliga.” With the police moving on stage to remove her, she said, …”I mean, you say you’re a public university and you want to educate the public, but without having a full public discussion, that doesn't actually happen.” 
+While Van Hollen and Szeliga seemed to agree with Dr. Flowers participating in the debate, when the police came to escort her off the stage neither candidate provided a meaningful protest of the anti-democratic process unfolding. Delegate Szeliga noted that a third podium was available but both politicians remained silent while Dr. Flowers was forced to leave the stage. This was their “Rosa Parks” moment when they could have stood for integrity and democracy but Van Hollen and Szeliga, failed to show the smallest amount of courage, leadership and commitment to anything greater than their individual ambitions and desire for power. 
+Margaret was escorted by police to a sidewalk outside the debate hall and that symbolically represents the state of US democracy. 
+After church on Sunday, a sister said to me, “I know a lot of Black folks are going to vote for Hilary Clinton but I can’t vote for the lesser of two evils. I’ve decided to vote for Jill Stein. I’m going to vote my conscience!” My only response after agreeing with her analysis was to add, “Don’t forget to also vote for Margaret Flowers.“ 
+Dr. Margaret Flowers of Green Party Interrupts Maryland Senate Televised Debate: 
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix98YXLWUJg 
+Margaret Flowers Campaign Information: http://www.flowersforsenate.org Dr. Marsha Adebayo is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated: No FEAR: A Whistleblowers Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA . She worked at the EPA for 18 years and blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation that endangered South African vanadium mine workers. Marsha's successful lawsuit led to the introduction and passage of the first civil rights and whistleblower law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act). She is Director of Transparency and Accountability for the Green Shadow Cabinet and serves on the Advisory Board of ExposeFacts.com.",FAKE
+2938,Obama ISIS war authorization: Request sent to Congress,"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama on Wednesday made the case for Congress to formally authorize the use of military force in the war against ISIS, declaring that congressional passage of the measure makes the U.S. ""strongest"" in the fight, and that ""ISIL is going to lose.""
+
+""Now, make no mistake, this is a difficult mission and it will remain difficult for some time,"" he said during an afternoon press conference. But, he added, ""Our coalition is on the offensive, ISIL is on the defensive and ISIL is going to lose.""
+
+Obama, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, outlined the parameters of the request he delivered to Congress earlier that day. He said the bill reflects ""our core objective to destroy ISIL,"" and includes authority for a ""systemic and sustained campaign of airstrikes,"" support and training for forces on the ground and humanitarian assistance.
+
+He made clear, however, that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, does not call for the deployment of ground troops in Iraq or Syria.
+
+""I am convinced that the U.S. should not get back into another ground war in the Middle East -- it's not in our national security interest and not necessary for us to defeat ISIL,"" he said.
+
+The joint resolution would limit the President's authority to wage a military campaign against ISIS to three years and does not authorize ""enduring offensive ground combat operations,"" according to text of the resolution.
+
+The resolution would also sunset the 2002 AUMF that spawned the Iraq War. Obama withdrew American troops from Iraq in 2011, but the military authorization remains in effect.
+
+The resolution drafted by the White House does not repeal the 2001 military force authorization that has served as the legal justification for the military campaign against ISIS and other U.S. military efforts to combat terrorism around the world.
+
+The document also specifically notes that ISIS poses a ""grave threat"" to U.S. national security interests and regional stability.
+
+And Obama detailed the ISIS threat in a letter to Congress accompanying the draft legislation.
+
+""The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) poses a threat to the people and stability of Iraq, Syria, and the broader Middle East, and to U.S. national security,"" Obama writes. ""It threatens American personnel and facilities located in the region and is responsible for the deaths of U.S. citizens""
+
+As in the draft resolution, Obama goes on to name the Americans killed in ISIS captivity, ""including James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Abdul-Rahman Peter Kassig, and Kayla Mueller.""
+
+There is broad support in Congress for a formal AUMF, though lawmakers disagree on the scope of the military powers that should be handed to the President.
+
+House Republican leaders were quick to dismiss the White House draft authorization as too limited, insisting that the President should have fewer limitations.
+
+""If we are going to defeat this enemy, we need a comprehensive military strategy and a robust authorization, not one that limits our options,"" House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement Tuesday. ""Any authorization for the use of military force must give our military commanders the flexibility and authorities they need to succeed and protect our people...I have concerns that the president's request does not meet this standard.""
+
+Boehner's No. 2, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, echoed Boehner's support for an AUMF as well as his criticism of the limits the White House's draft would impose.
+
+""I am prepared to support an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that provides new legal authorities to go after ISIL and other terrorist groups. However, I will not support efforts that impose undue restrictions on the U.S. military and make it harder to win,"" McCarthy said in a statement.
+
+House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi took the opposite path during a press conference Wednesday.
+
+""We hope to have bipartisan support for something that would limit the power of the President, but nonetheless protect the American people in a very strong way,"" Pelosi said.
+
+Pelosi added that she hoped the three-year authorization would be longer than needed to defeat ISIS.
+
+Pelosi also offered her support for repealing the 2002 authorization, another provision included in Obama's draft resolution.
+
+""I don't see any reason -- in fact I actively support -- repealing the 2002 authorization. It was based on a false premise,"" Pelosi said. ""Nonetheless, it should go, and it should go now.""
+
+Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is staffing up for a potential 2016 presidential bid, took the opportunity to slam likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
+
+""I do really blame Hillary Clinton's war in Libya,"" Paul said Wednesday on Fox News referring to the NATO campaign to oust Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi authorized by Obama while Clinton was secretary of state.
+
+Libya has erupted into civil war and has become a breeding ground for radical Islamic fighters, many of whom have left to join ISIS's ranks.
+
+Paul also said the U.S. needs to supply more weapons to Kurdish fighters fighting ISIS in Iraq, but said the U.S. should refrain from getting involved in the war in Syria -- fearing weapons supplied to moderate fighters could get into ISIS's hands.
+
+Paul has been at odds with his Republican colleagues on many aspects of foreign policy, especially in urging for a more restrained, and not limitless, authority to fight ISIS.
+
+Obama urged Congress during his State of the Union address to formally authorize the military campaign to ""show the world that we are united in this mission"" and Secretary of State John Kerry urged Congress to swiftly pass the resolution.
+
+""We are strongest as a nation when the Administration and Congress work together on issues as significant as the use of military force,"" Kerry said. ""This is a moment where Congress can make it clear all over the world that no matter differences on certain issues, at home we're absolutely united and determined in defeating ISIL.""
+
+Obama again noted in his letter to Congress Wednesday that he already has the authority to fight ISIS, ""I have repeatedly expressed my commitment to working with the Congress to pass a bipartisan authorization for the use of military force"" against ISIS.
+
+Obama also stressed that the White House's draft resolution would constrain the U.S. military effort and would not authorize ""long-term, large-scale ground combat operations"" like in Iraq and Afghanistan.
+
+While Obama did not repeal the 2001 military authorization, he explained in his letter that he remains ""committed to working with Congress and the American people to refine, and ultimately repeal, the 2001 AUMF.""",REAL
+5165,Donald Trump's Problems Are Much Deeper Than A Campaign Manager,"Donald Trump's Problems Are Much Deeper Than A Campaign Manager
+
+Things are not going well for Donald Trump.
+
+
+
+On Monday, he fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. Lewandowski ran the campaign on a shoestring budget and a strategy that was largely built off and fueled by the candidate's say-whatever personality and brand.
+
+That worked great in a primary — not so much in a general election. But Trump's problems are far deeper than an embattled campaign manager, who just four months ago was described as Trump's ""alter ego.""
+
+Trump's family stepped in Monday in a scene that could have been ripped from The Apprentice.
+
+Lewandowski was summoned to a morning meeting, but it was a setup, New York magazine's Gabe Sherman reports:
+
+Tension has persisted in the campaign between Lewandowski and a faction led by veteran political operative Paul Manafort, a former Ronald Reagan aide, who was brought on in the spring to manage a potential battle for delegates at the convention. But doubts started to grow about Lewandowski's management. The bottom line is Lewandowski didn't run a campaign that could win a modern-day presidential campaign.
+
+Here were some of the problems:
+
+Money: Trump didn't need much of it in the primary campaign. He was able to get himself on TV without much problem. But Trump, who claims to be worth $10 billion, vowed not to fund his general-election campaign. That, combined with Trump's lackluster fundraising, has made lots of Republicans wring their hands. At the end of May, Trump's campaign had just $1.3 million cash on hand — and owed Trump himself $45.7 million. That figure is so paltry, it's less than every Republican senator up for re-election in competitive races. In something of an exit interview on CNN Monday after his firing, Lewandowski bragged twice that ""the money is pouring in."" He said the campaign had raised some $6 million to $8 million at recent events.
+
+Trump would have to raise that amount of money every single day for two to three months to total the $500 million he said he would need to fund a general-election campaign. And that's half of what most real campaigns for president would need nowadays. In 2012, Romney and Obama spent roughly $2 billion combined.
+
+Travel: Trump wasted a monthlong advantage over Hillary Clinton when he had vanquished his rivals and she was still battling Bernie Sanders. Instead of focusing on traditional swing states, Trump traveled to states where he is likely to win or likely to lose.
+
+Staff: Trump's campaign has fewer than 100 staffers. He boasts how ""efficient"" his operation is, with 73 employees. Clinton is estimated to already have around 800 paid staffers. Those are people who can be used to register voters and then get them to the polls in key states. You could believe Trump's boast that his campaign is more ""efficient"" and that his constant presence on TV compensates for a smaller staff. Or you could look to history: By August of 2012, Obama had 901 people on his payroll; Mitt Romney had 403.
+
+And never mind the size of the staff; what is the campaign doing with them? Trump has eschewed data and behavioral analytics so far. That's something the Clinton team not only is all over, but something the Republican Party recognized was a problem after losing twice to Obama. The president broke the mold on this, and Republicans have tried hard to make up ground in the use of data.
+
+Ads: Hillary Clinton and groups supporting her are spending more than $23 million on ads in eight key battleground states, according to NBC/SMG Delta.
+
+For those who think it's still early, it's not really. Consider 2012 — back then, Romney and his allies were on air with almost $40 million in ads, compared with Obama and his supporters with $45 million. And one of the lessons of 2012 was that Romney allowed his opponents to define him with negative advertising early on. Trump's negatives are far worse than Romney's were at this point in the campaign.
+
+But here's the reality: Blame the campaign manager all you want, he's not really the problem. Trump's problems go well beyond a campaign manager and straight to him. Problems in a campaign usually stem from the top, and that's especially true in this one.
+
+Message: Trump has myriad problems, including a lack of policy depth, a dereliction of facts and an overall message — especially when he talks about race and identity — that has offended lots of voters he didn't have to worry about in a nearly all-white Republican primary. But a general election is a whole different ballgame. Some 14 million people voted for Trump in the primaries — a record. But Obama won almost five times as many votes in the 2012 general election (66 million).
+
+Image: Trump may have been the Teflon Don with GOP voters, but he was Velcro with the rest of the country. Coming out of the primary, Trump's negative rating is higher than any other presidential candidate in history. And it has gotten worse in the past month following (1) his inflammatory comments that the presiding judge in the Trump University fraud case was biased because of his Mexican heritage and (2) the veterans fundraiser imbroglio. Trump donated $1 million only after the Washington Post reported there was no evidence he had done so as promised. That led to a press conference at which Trump called reporters names like ""sleaze"" and, derisively, ""a real beauty."" (Both reporters are children of Cuban immigrants.)
+
+Disunity: All of that has led to a split with Republican Party leaders. Never before has the sitting speaker of the House called his party's presumptive nominee's comments ""racist"" (as Paul Ryan did with Trump's comments on the Trump U judge). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell chided Trump to get on message and stick to the script. One Republican senator said he would not entertain any more Trump questions and others are refusing to defend him and even threatening not to support him.
+
+Inconsistency And A Lack Of Discipline: Trump himself months ago had promised to be ""more presidential than anybody other than the great Abe Lincoln."" Back in March, on the night of the Michigan primary and five days after he became the first presidential candidate in history to defend the size of his genitalia during a live national presidential debate, Trump vowed, ""I could be more presidential than anybody. I can be more presidential, if I want to be, I can be more presidential than anybody.""
+
+He called it ""easy."" It's proved to be not so easy. Instead, Trump seems to have an internal conflict choosing which self he wants to be. He delivered two wooden speeches, reading from a teleprompter twice in a week after GOP disunity came to a head. And then he was back to his free-wheeling self at a rally in Atlanta on Wednesday. His rambling speech went on for more than an hour, with Trump sometimes ducking out of incomplete thoughts midway through a sentence, sometimes coming back to them much later.
+
+You just never know which Trump you're going to get — and both have their flaws.
+
+Polls: Trump is now facing a minor collapse of his poll numbers against Hillary Clinton. After Trump wrapped up the nomination, he pulled even with Clinton, according to the Real Clear Politics average of the polls. (That was when the Democratic race was not yet settled.) Over the past month, Trump has dipped below 40 percent. Clinton holds, on average, a 6-point lead. Polls this far out are hardly predictive of what will happen in the fall, but the trend is unmistakable and worrying many in the GOP.
+
+Besides the horse-race numbers are other worrisome figures for the GOP:
+
+— An ABC/Washington Post poll found 70 percent of Americans dislike Trump, including 56 percent who have a ""strongly unfavorable"" view. That's unheard of. What's more, 9 in 10 Hispanics have an unfavorable view of Trump, including more than three-quarters who said so ""strongly.""
+
+— A CBS/New York Times poll found that 41 percent said they thought Clinton had done something illegal with her emails and private server setup in her home. Yet Trump was pulling in only 37 percent against Clinton's 43 percent in a head-to-head matchup. That means Trump isn't even getting all of the people who thought Clinton had done something illegal.
+
+All of this has led to ""Free the Delegates,"" the latest of the Stop Trump/Never Trump/Dump Trump movements.
+
+""It's good news for us, bad news for the Trump supporters,"" contended Kendal Unruh, a delegate from Colorado, speaking Monday on MSNBC of Lewandowski's ouster. She's one of the leaders of ""Free the Delegates,"" which is encouraging the Republican National Committee to change its rules and allow delegates to vote their conscience at the convention.
+
+""There is not a campaign, there is not an organization,"" Unruh said of the Trump team, adding, it would be ""impossible to win against Hillary Clinton"" with Trump on the ticket.
+
+But Free the Delegates, like past Stop Trump efforts, is unlikely to succeed. It, too, has little organization. And, perhaps most importantly, no candidate.
+
+""Zero chance of success, unless Ted Cruz, who controls almost 1,000 delegates, joins in,"" is how veteran GOP operative Charlie Black described the effort. Black worked for John Kasich's presidential campaign, but also has ties to Manafort, with whom he founded the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly. ""This likely will calm down before the convention.""
+
+Another veteran strategist called it ""unlikely"" that the RNC rules would be changed to derail Trump and said it is ""highly improbable"" that most of the delegates would ""go against the will of millions of Republican primary voters.""
+
+""The ball is the hands of one person, Donald Trump,"" said Danny Diaz, who managed Jeb Bush's presidential campaign. ""If he proves he can campaign without attacking fellow Republicans and employing divisive rhetoric, he will have few issues becoming the nominee, despite getting grudging support on the floor of the convention.""
+
+If Trump continues to be critical of fellow Republicans, however, it's possible there could be at least a protest vote on the floor of the convention. Sure, Trump would still be the nominee, but the last thing the party wants is a demonstration of disunity shown live on national television months before voting.
+
+Either way, Trump has a lot of work to do — and it starts with himself.",REAL
+6905,Marcus Mumford after Bundy verdict.,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 14 + 5 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
+8024,#2816: Clinton Pride’s 8(a) Pig Farm Bridge – Serco Zulu Server Snuff –Soros's Patented Voter Key,"United States Marine Field McConnell  Plum City Online - ( AbelDanger.net )  October 26, 2016 
+1. Abel Danger ( AD ) claims that Hillary Clinton used DOJ Pride 8(a) actors to blackmail mentors of the Federal Bridge Certification Authority – including erstwhile directors of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman – with child pornography originating from a B.C. pig farm. 
+
+2. AD claims that in early 2001, Clinton's 8(a) companies used their pig-farm network (cf. Starnet) to set up a server to the federal bridge in the basement of her Chappaqua home where she allegedly used Serco Zulu timing signals to synchronize and watch 'the first live-broadcast mass snuff film in human history' on 9/11. 
+
+3. AD claims that Serco 8(a) companies at the US Patent and Trademark Office have issued phony keys for an electronic voting pad input device (US 7537159 B2) so the George Soros-tied company Smartmatic can switch votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton – a former patent lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas. 
+
+4. United States Marine Field McConnell – Global Operations Director of Abel Danger – has offered to serve as a five-star general in a Trump administration and destroy Clinton's pig farm friends at DOJ Pride and the federal bridge with which they can activate weaponized devices through the Serco patent office. 
+
+
+Soros Linked Voting Machines To Be Used In Key Battleground States   
+Note the ransom equals the bonus paid by Lockheed Martin Sister Lynne Cheney to JonBenet's father 
+
+Media Coverage of Starnet Raid - August 20, 1999   
+
+Hillary Clinton vs. James Comey: Email Scandal Supercut  
+Copy of SERCO GROUP PLC: List of Subsidiaries AND Shareholders! [Note British and Saudi Governments, AXA, HSBC , Teachers' and Gold man Sachs]    
+Defense Ammunition Center [Outsourced to Serco ]   
+Serco ... Would you like to know more?  
+
+""Digital Fires Instructor Serco - Camp Pendleton, CA Uses information derived from all military disciplines (e.g., aviation, ground combat, command and control, combat service support, intelligence, and opposing forces) to determine changes in enemy capabilities, vulnerabilities, and probable courses of action."" 
+
+"" Serco Processes 2 Millionth Patent Application for U.S. Patent and Trademark Office   
+Date: 18 Mar 2013  
+Serco Inc., a leading provider of professional, technology, and management services to the federal government, announced today that their Pre-Grant Publication (PGPubs) Classification Services team recently processed their 2 millionth patent application for the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). Each application was also processed within the contractually required 28-day window."" 
+
+For sure, defence counsel have made much of Taylor's involvement with the missing and murdered women, all but pointing the finger at her as homicidal maniac, the real killer. What's not in dispute is that Taylor is one scary character ? street-hardened, menacing, a procurer of prostitutes lured to the Pickton farm, contemptuous of both sex-trade workers (especially street walkers) and drug addicts. 
+
+""Concern Grows Over Soros-Linked Voting Machines   
+Sixteen states may be using balloting equipment from a company tied to the leftist billionaire  
+by Edmund Kozak | Updated 24 Oct 2016 at 5:21 PM  
+Concern is growing over revelations that voting machines in a significant number of states could be linked to a company tied directly to billionaire leftist George Soros and his personal quest to create a nationless, borderless global state. 
+
+The U.K.-based Smartmatic company posted a flow-chart on its website that it had provided voting machines for 16 states, including important battleground states like Florida and Arizona. Smartmatic Chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is a former U.N. official and sits on the board of Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Since the story first broke, the flow-chart has disappeared from Smartmatic’s website, raising further questions about the real status of the Soros-tied voting equipment and whether it is truly being deployed in U.S. elections. 
+
+If Malloch-Brown's Soros ties weren't troubling enough, he also has ties to the Clintons through his work at two consulting firms. 
+
+According to a spokesperson for the National Association of Secretaries of State, Smartmatic is not on a list of federally certified providers for election systems and officials in several states’ have contested that their equipment came from Smartmatic. Why, then, had Smartmatic bragged about providing over 50,000 voting machines for U.S. elections?"" 
+
+""Check http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/309533/opinion/why-have-all-the-digital-signatures-from-the-election-returns-been-stripped "" 
+
+""Electronic voting pad input device, system and method  
+US 7537159  
+B2 ABSTRACT  
+In the preferred embodiment, the invention is a data entry device intended for use by voters during an election to enter selected choices. Its basic functions are to display available options and accept voter input. Its design achieves simplicity in its preparation, deployment, and operation at any given electoral event. It also furnishes accuracy, reliability, durability, and reusability. It connects in a standard protocol to a voting station's host processor. It accepts up to 300 key codes, each one potentially a unique selection. Names, symbols, or pictures identifying candidates are printed on a paper template compliant with the device's geometry, inserted prior to an election, and visible through the device's transparent cover. When the number of candidates or valid options in a contest exceeds its capacity, additional identical units can be chain-connected, until a sufficient number of voting options are available. 
+
+Publication number: US7537159 B2  
+Publication type: Grant  
+Application number: US 11/160,782  
+Publication date: May 26, 2009  
+Filing date: Jul 8, 2005  
+Priority date: Jul 8, 2005  
+Fee status: Paid  
+Also published as: US20070007340   
+Inventors: Antonio Mugica , 4 More »  
+Original Assignee: Smartmatic International Corporation   
+Export Citation: BiBTeX, EndNote, Ref Man Patent Citations (12), Referenced by (4), Classifications (7), Legal Events (7)  
+External Links: USPTO , USPTO Assignment , Espacenet "" 
+
+""BREAKING: @HillaryClinton's E-Mail Server Company Got Almost $1 Million In Gov't Loans After Wiping E-Mails   
+OCTOBER 26, 2016  
+BY CHARLES C. JOHNSON 6 COMMENTS  
+Give it up already. It's over. K. J. Gillenwater was the primary researcher behind this story. 
+
+Hillary Clinton's e-mail server company got almost $1 million in government loans starting immediately after they were secretly asked to wipe Hillary Clinton's name from her e-mails. 
+
+Platte River Networks (PRN) got a $493,000 loan from the Small Business Administration in August 2014 and another $350,000 loan in September 2015: 
+
+Public government data available as USAspending.gov 
+
+The first half-million dollar loan arrived not one month after PRN employee Paul Combetta was caught accidentally revealing his company was deleting evidence at Hillary's request in July 2014 . 
+
+The second $350,000 loan came about one year later. 
+
+You won't hear this stuff from the lying mainstream media. Keep the GotNews mission alive: donate at GotNews.com/donate or send tips to editor@gotnews.com. If you'd like to join our research team, contacteditor@gotnews.com. 
+
+After getting the first loan, PRN moved to a large office space after previously working out of the owner’s condo. The head of the Small Business Administration is Maria Contreras-Sweet , a Mexican immigrant who was appointed to the office by Barack Obama two months before Hillary's PRN got the first loan. 
+
+WikiLeaks leaks have proven Hillary's corrupt pay-to-play scheme. GotNews has shined a light on how Hillary gets favors from Hispanic and Democratic government bureaucrats before . 
+
+Did Hillary Clinton pay her e-mail server company Platte River Networks (PRN) with almost $1 million in favorable government loans — given out by a political friendly — in order to alter her illegal e-mails and get her name off them? 
+
+It sure looks like it. 
+
+A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has been lodged for more information. 
+
+Stay tuned for more. 
+
+K. J. Gillenwater was the primary researcher behind this story."" 
+
+""WHY BILL CLINTON'S 26 TRIPS ON THE LOLITA EXPRESS CHILD RAPE JET MATTER May 15, 2016  
+Daniel Greenfield   
+We don't know what Bill Clinton did or didn't do in company with Jeffrey Epstein. But we certainly know what Epstein did and, almost as outrageously, what he got away with doing . 
+
+Some of the most shocking allegations against Epstein surfaced only after the conclusion of an FBI probe, in civil suits brought by his victims: for example, the claim that three 12-year-old French girls were delivered to him as a birthday present. But the feds did identify roughly 40 young women, most of them underage at the time, who described being lured to Epstein's Palm Beach home on the pretense of giving a ""massage"" for money, then pressured into various sex acts, as well as the ""Balkan sex slave"" Epstein allegedly boasted of purchasing from her family when she was just 14. More recently, a big cash payment from Mail on Sunday coaxed one of Epstein's main accusers out of anonymity to describe what she claims were her years as a teenage sex toy. This victim, Virginia Roberts, produced a photo of herself with Prince Andrew in 2001 and reported that Epstein paid her $15,000 to meet the prince. Then 17 years old, she claims that she was abused by Epstein and ""loaned"" to his friends from the age of 15. 
+
+Sex crimes of the kind Roberts alleges took place typically carry a term of 10 to 20 years in federal prison. Yet when all was said and done, Epstein served his scant year-plus-one-month in a private wing of the Palm Beach jail and was granted a 16-hour-per-day free pass to leave the premises for work. 
+
+In short, Epstein was never actually in jail. During his ""house arrest,"" he flew around the country on his jets from his New York City place to his private island. At least one of Epstein's victims claimed to have met Bill Clinton. And it turns out that Bill Clinton was a much more regular passenger on the Lolita Express. 
+
+Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender's infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the ""Lolita Express"" -- even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com. 
+
+Clinton's presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein's Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including ""Tatiana."" The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls. 
+
+It doesn't help that the Democratic establishment seems to have played a role in getting Epstein a pass on child rape, that Bill Clinton already had rape accusations in his past or that the Clintons had become notorious for their willingness to do favors for criminals in exchange for money. 
+
+Either way we've come a long way from Gary Hart being bounced for ""Monkey Business"" to Bill Clinton flying around on a child rapist's plane without anyone in the media seeming to care much about it. 
+
+Social conservatives often get a bad rap. But there really is no limit to how low standards can fall when any trace of a moral code vanishes out the window. What did Bill Clinton actually do? Who knows. More importantly these days, who cares 
+
+ABOUT DANIEL GREENFIELD 
+
+Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam."" 
+
+""For sure, defence counsel have made much of Taylor's involvement with the missing and murdered women, all but pointing the finger at her as homicidal maniac, the real killer. What's not in dispute is that Taylor is one scary character ? street-hardened, menacing, a procurer of prostitutes lured to the Pickton farm, contemptuous of both sex-trade workers (especially street walkers) and drug addicts. 
+
+""She's pure evil,'' says one outreach worker, who asked that her name not be used in any story about Taylor. 
+
+... 
+
+Court has heard that Taylor's DNA was found on 113 items retrieved from the Pickton property ? including handcuffs, condoms, clothing, syringes ? and also on items that belonged to some victims ? Brenda Wolfe's lipstick, Mona Wilson's rosary. 
+
+One witness, Pickton pal Pat Casanova, told the court he once received fellatio from a woman he knew as ""Angel,"" who'd been brought to the farm by Taylor. He said he gave the money to Taylor, who shared some of it with ""Angel."" 
+
+Another witness, Gina Houston, put Taylor on the same bed with victim Sereena Abotsway, in Pickton's trailer. 
+
+In his lengthy police interview, Pickton repeatedly tells police he wants to speak with Taylor. 
+
+On the stand, Houston recounted a conversation she'd had with Pickton about Taylor, shortly before his arrest. 
+
+""Willie told me that he believed she (Taylor) would do the right thing when she came back. That she would take responsibility for what she said she would take responsibility for."" 
+
+Source 
+
+Jeff Wells points to other odd things. 
+
+A week or so ago a man called Steve Remian committed suicide-by-cop but: The name ""Steve Remian"" surfaced at the Robert ""Willie"" Pickton murder trial in New Westminster, B.C., last March, when jurors were told that Remian's name ? with a Burnaby, B.C., address ? was on the label of a suitcase packed into a box found in Pickton's workshop. 
+
+In April, jurors heard further evidence that DNA testing on two hairs found on a Hudson's Bay blanket removed from Pickton's motorhome linked one to Pickton, and the other to a ""Steve Remian."" 
+
+A source involved in the Oakville shooting investigation told the Star that the man shot by police had been charged with sexual assault earlier in life while living in Oakville, but had been acquitted, although a co-accused was convicted. 
+
+Source 
+
+It does seem like a regular hive of activity: Robert Pickton's pig farm was a constant buzz of activity, with people and vehicles coming and going all the time, a woman who lived in Pickton's trailer for a time testified on Wednesday. 
+
+Tanya Carr, 35, told the jury in Pickton's murder trial that people were coming and going all day long at the Port Coquitlam, B.C., farm and it wasn't unusual for people to show up late at night looking for Pickton or his brother Dave. 
+
+Source 
+
+Also there are those Hells Angels and the ""Piggy Palace"": 
+
+""It was a rough crowd"" at Piggy's Palace, said Brian, a musician who played there a few years ago with the hard-rock band South City Slam. 
+
+The nightclub, he said, was inside an old building on a property Dave Pickton and his brother Robert own at 2552 Burns Rd., near their pig farm on Dominion Road in Port Coquitlam.... 
+
+""Even the women were tough- looking -- a lot of leather and denim. It wasn't a cocktail-gown kind of place ,"" he recalled. 
+
+Brian, who didn't want his last name used, recalled that there was a coat-check girl and a sign saying, ""Check your knives and other weapons at the door."" ... 
+
+The crowd at Piggy's Palace often included men wearing Hells Angels biker club colours. 
+
+""They were there a lot,"" said Brian. ""The people who came all seemed to know one another.""  
+
+""Super Serco bulldozes ahead  
+By DAILY MAIL REPORTER UPDATED: 23:00 GMT, 1 September 2004 
+SERCO has come a long way since the 1960s when it ran the 'four-minute warning' system to alert the nation to a ballistic missile attack. 
+
+Today its £10.3bn order book is bigger than many countries' defence budgets. It is bidding for a further £8bn worth of contracts and sees £16bn of 'opportunities'. 
+
+Profit growth is less ballistic. The first-half pre-tax surplus rose 4% to £28.1m, net profits just 1% to £18m. Stripping out goodwill, the rise was 17%, with dividends up 12.5% to 0.81p. 
+
+Serco runs the Docklands Light Railway, five UK prisons, airport radar and forest bulldozers in Florida.""  
+
+"" Serco farewell to NPL after 19 years of innovation 8 January 2015 Serco said goodbye to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) at the end of December 2014 after 19 years of extraordinary innovation and science that has seen the establishment build a world-leading reputation and deliver billions of pounds of benefit for the UK economy. During that period under Serco 's management and leadership, NPL has delivered an extraordinary variety and breadth of accomplishments for the UK's economy and industry. Some of the key achievements during that time have been:… It has been estimated that work carried out by the Centre of Carbon Measurement at NPL will save eight million tonnes of carbon emissions reductions (2% of UK footprint) and over half a billion pounds in economic benefit over the next decade…. NPL's caesium fountain atomic clock is accurate to 1 second in 158 million years and NPL is playing a key role in introducing rigour to high frequency trading [for Serco 's front running banks] in the City through NPL [Zulu] Time."" 
+
+""UK Cabinet Office – Emergency Planning College – Serco …..Types of Exercise Workshop Exercises These are structured discussion events where participants can explore issues in a less pressurised environment. They are an ideal way of developing solutions, procedures and plans rather than the focus being on decision making. Table Top Exercises These involve a realistic scenario and will follow a time line, either in real-time or with time jumps to concentrate on the more important areas. The participants would be expected to be familiar with the plans and procedures that are being used although the exercise tempo and complexity can be adjusted to suit the current state of training and readiness. Simulation and media play can be used to support the exercise. Table-top exercises help develop teamwork and allow participants to gain a better understanding of their roles and that of other agencies and organisations. Command/Control Post Exercises These are designed primarily to exercise the senior leadership and support staff in collective planning and decision making within a strategic grouping. Ideally such exercises would be run from the real command and control locations and using their communications and information systems [Feeling lucky, Punk?] . This could include a mix of locations and varying levels of technical simulation support. The Gold Standard system is flexible to allow the tempo and intensity to be adjusted to ensure maximum training benefit, or to fully test and evaluate the most important aspects of a plan. Such exercises also test information flow, communications, equipment, procedures, decision making and coordination. Live Exercises These can range from testing individual components of a system or organisation through to a full-scale rehearsal. They are particularly useful where there are regulatory requirements or with high-risk situations. They are more complex and costly to organise and deliver but can be integrated with Command Post Exercises as part of a wider exercising package.""  
+
+""Christopher Rajendran Hyman CBE (born 5 July 1963 in Durban, South Africa)[1] was Chief Executive of Serco Group plc from 2002 to October 2013.[2] … On graduation, he worked for Arthur Andersen. In 1989, he won an 18-month exchange with Ernst & Young in London, who employed him after four months.[1] Head hunted in 1994 by Serco , Hyman became European finance director, and in 1999 was made group finance director. In 2002, Hyman became chief executive. .. Hyman resigned from his role of Chief Executive of Serco on 25 October 2013 following allegations that Serco had overcharged government customers. .. He was [making a presentation to Serco shareholder, including British and Saudi governments] on the 47th floor of the World Trade Center [North Tower] at the time of the September 11 attacks in 2001."" 
+
+""July 7, 2016 Developments in PKI occurred in the early 1970s at the British intelligence agency GCHQ , where James Ellis , Clifford Cocks and others made important discoveries related to encryption algorithms and key distribution.[ 19 ] However, as developments at GCHQ are highly classified, the results of this work were kept secret and not publicly acknowledged until the mid-1990s. 
+
+The public disclosure of both secure key exchange and asymmetric key algorithms in 1976 by Diffie, Hellman , Rivest, Shamir , and Adleman changed secure communications entirely. With the further development of high-speed digital electronic communications (the Internet and its predecessors), a need became evident for ways in which users could securely communicate with each other, and as a further consequence of that, for ways in which users could be sure with whom they were actually interacting. 
+
+Assorted cryptographic protocols were invented and analyzed within which the new cryptographic primitives could be effectively used. With the invention of the World Wide Web and its rapid spread, the need for authentication and secure communication became still more acute. Commercial reasons alone (e.g., e-commerce, online access to proprietary databases from web browsers) were sufficient. Taher Elgamal and others at Netscape developed the SSL protocol ('https' in Web URLs); it included key establishment, server authentication (prior to v3, one-way only), and so on. A PKI structure was thus created for Web users/sites wishing secure communications. 
+
+Vendors and entrepreneurs saw the possibility of a large market, started companies (or new projects at existing companies), and began to agitate for legal recognition and protection from liability. An American Bar Association technology project published an extensive analysis of some of the foreseeable legal aspects of PKI operations (see ABA digital signature guidelines), and shortly thereafter, several U.S. states (Utah being the first in 1995) and other jurisdictions throughout the world began to enact laws and adopt regulations. Consumer groups raised questions about privacy, access, and liability considerations, which were more taken into consideration in some jurisdictions than in others. 
+
+The enacted laws and regulations differed, there were technical and operational problems in converting PKI schemes into successful commercial operation, and progress has been much slower than pioneers had imagined it would be. 
+
+By the first few years of the 21st century, the underlying cryptographic engineering was clearly not easy to deploy correctly. Operating procedures (manual or automatic) were not easy to correctly design (nor even if so designed, to execute perfectly, which the engineering required). The standards that existed were insufficient. 
+
+PKI vendors have found a market, but it is not quite the market envisioned in the mid-1990s, and it has grown both more slowly and in somewhat different ways than were anticipated.[20] PKIs have not solved some of the problems they were expected to, and several major vendors have gone out of business or been acquired by others. PKI has had the most success in government implementations; the largest PKI implementation to date is the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) PKI infrastructure for the Common Access Cards program.""  
+
+Base One Technologies – Corporate Strategy – We are a Government Certified Women-Owned Business   
+We practice Diversity Recruitment and Staffing for IT positions Base One was founded in 1994 by a women engineer who had made a career in technology research for many years. Base One has been very successful in focusing on diversity recruiting and staffing for IT projects. It has been our experience that the greater the diversity mix, the more creative the solution. As in any field the more diverse the viewpoint the more thorough your analysis. Our engineers can think out of the box. 
+
+Because of our affiliations we have access to pools of resources among more diverse groups & individuals. We work with a large pool of minority professionals who specialize in IT skills. We are able to have access to these resources through our status as a D/MWBD firm and our affiliations. These affiliations assist us in working with resources among more diverse groups & individuals. We are also partnered with firms that are 8A certified as Minority firms, Disabled Veteran firms, Native American firms, Vietnam veteran firms, women owned firms. 
+
+Our hub zone location keeps us close to the professional organizations of great diversity. We are active in recruiting from and networking with these community organizations of local IT professionals. This has given us access to a large pool of diversity talent. 
+
+Base One's staff of engineers are a diverse group of professionals. This diverse network of engineers helps us to branch out to other engineers and creates an even larger network of resources for us to work with. 
+
+The greater the diversity the more complete & thorough the analysis. The broader the spectrum of points of view the broader the scope of the analysis. We feel that a diverse team gives us a greater advantage in creating cutting edge solutions. To that end we will continue to nurture these relationships to further extend our talent pool. 
+
+The greater the diversity mix, the more creative the solution. 
+
+The more diverse the viewpoint, the more thorough the analysis. 
+
+The more diverse our team, the more our engineers can think out of the box. 
+
+This is why Base One Technologies concentrates on diversity recruitment in the belief that a diverse team gives us a greater advantage in creating cutting edge solutions."" 
+
+Information Security Planning is the process whereby an organization seeks to protect its operations and assets from data theft or computer hackers that seek to obtain unauthorized information or sabotage business operations. 
+
+Key Clients Benefiting From Our Information Security Expertise: Pentagon Renovation Program, FAA, Citigroup, MCI. 
+
+Base One Technologies 
+
+Expertly researches, designs, and develops information security policies that protect your data and manage your firm's information technology risk at levels acceptable to your business. 
+
+Performs architectural assessments and conducts both internal and external penetration testing. The results of these efforts culminate in an extensive risk analysis and vulnerabilities report. 
+
+Develops, implements and supports Information Security Counter measures such as honey-pots and evidence logging and incident documentation processes and solutions."" 
+
+""Base One Technologies, Ltd. is a DOMESTIC BUSINESS CORPORATION, located in New York, NY and was formed on Feb 15, 1994. This file was obtained from the Secretary of State and has a file number of 1795583. "" 
+
+""Serco's Office of Partner Relations (OPR) helps facilitate our aggressive small business utilization and growth strategies. Through the OPR, Serco mentors four local small businesses under formal Mentor Protégé Agreements: Three sponsored by DHS (Base One Technologies, TSymmetry, Inc., and HeiTech Services, Inc.,) and the fourth sponsored by GSA (DKW Communications, Inc.). Serco and HeiTech Services were awarded the 2007 DHS Mentor Protégé Team Award for exceeding our mentoring goals."" http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/100515p.pdf 
+
+""Opened in 1994 as the successor to the Transitional Immigrant Visa Processing Center in Rosslyn, Va., the NVC centralizes all immigrant visa pre-processing and appointment scheduling for overseas posts. The NVC collects paperwork and fees before forwarding a case, ready for adjudication, to the responsible post. 
+
+The center also handles immigrant and fiancé visa petitions, and while it does not adjudicate visa applications, it provides technical assistance and support to visa-adjudicating consular officials overseas. 
+
+Only two Foreign Service officers, the director and deputy director, work at the center, along with just five Civil Service employees. They work with almost 500 contract employees doing preprocessing of visas, making the center one of the largest employers in the Portsmouth area. 
+
+The contractor, Serco , Inc., has worked with the NVC since its inception and with the Department for almost 18 years. 
+
+The NVC houses more than 2.6 million immigrant visa files, receives almost two million pieces of mail per year and received more than half a million petitions from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) in 2011. Its file rooms' high-density shelves are stacked floor-to-ceiling with files, each a collection of someone’s hopes and dreams and each requiring proper handling. …. 
+
+The NVC also preprocesses the chief of mission (COM) application required for the filing of a petition for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV). Such visas, for foreign nationals who have performed services for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan, require COM concurrence before the applicant can file a petition with USCIS. The NVC collects the requisite documents from such applicants and, when complete, forwards the package to the U.S. embassies in Baghdad or Kabul for COM approval"" 
+
+Yours sincerely, 
+
+Field McConnell, United States Naval Academy, 1971; Forensic Economist; 30 year airline and 22 year military pilot; 23,000 hours of safety; Tel: 715 307 8222 
+
+David Hawkins Tel: 604 542-0891 Forensic Economist; former leader of oil-well blow-out teams; now sponsors Grand Juries in CSI Crime and Safety Investigation 
+",FAKE
+4542,"Obama's Presidential Library Will Be In Chicago, Foundation Announces","Obama's Presidential Library Will Be In Chicago, Foundation Announces
+
+President Obama's presidential library will be in Chicago, his foundation announced on Tuesday.
+
+""The future Presidential Center will include the library, museum, as well as office and activity space for the Foundation to inspire and engage citizens here and globally,"" the foundation said in a press release.
+
+""It wasn't as easy for Chicago to win the Library as might be expected. The city had to scramble to find a solution when using park land for the location became an issue. Hawaii and New York also had strong bids, but Chicago is where President Obama grew up politically. He was a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School for more than a decade.""
+
+The foundation puts it simply: The Obama family was ""shaped by Chicago"" from their ""wedding day to Election Day.""",REAL
+4373,Republicans are crossing a dangerous new line: sabotaging US foreign policy,"Throughout Barack Obama's presidency, Republicans in Congress have deployed a strategy that has worked remarkably well for them: oppose, obstruct, and sabotage the Obama administration at every turn.
+
+""The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,"" Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader, said in 2010.
+
+A few months later, McConnell acknowledged that Republicans had decided to deny President Obama any bipartisan support, not because they necessarily opposed each and every initiative, but to hurt Obama politically. ""We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,"" he said. ""Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan.""
+
+This strategy led Republicans to adopt largely unprecedented tactics of obstructionism and sabotage. But no matter how far they went, there was one line they always avoided crossing: undermining US foreign policy.
+
+That line is now being crossed. Republicans, driven by earnest policy disagreements with Obama over his approach to Iran, are bringing the tactics they used to undermine Obama's legislative agenda into the previously sacrosanct realm of foreign policy.
+
+""the GOP are blazing new trails in politicization of foreign policy — and debasement of their institutions""
+
+Republicans are overtly sabotaging not just  Obama's Iran policy, but also his constitutionally enshrined authority over foreign policy. This is unprecedented. If the trend continues — Republicans have already extended their efforts to Obama's relationship with Israel — it endangers not just US policy toward the Middle East, but the very way that the United States makes foreign policy.
+
+The possible implications for the United States and its role as global leader should worry Americans of every political stripe.
+
+Until now, for all the tactics of obstruction Republicans used against Obama's legislative agenda, they generally treated foreign policy as sacrosanct. They got close only once before, when they threatened to block Obama's 2010 nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia. But they backed down when foreign policy graybeards from Henry Kissinger to Colin Powell told them to knock it off.
+
+Republicans, after all, tend to prize America's role as the world's sole superpower. They see this as crucial to the future of the United States and would not put their own partisan political goals ahead of it. Even if they disagree with Obama's execution of foreign policy, and would say so openly, they refrained from sabotaging him in the way they had on domestic policy. Until the Iran talks.
+
+Republicans are earnestly alarmed about the Obama administration's effort to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. They believe Iran is negotiating in bad faith and will exploit any deal to further its nuclear program. Though many analysts find this argument unpersuasive, it is a valid position, and it's fair play to oppose the Iran deal on those grounds. But that opposition has grown into something much bigger than that, and with consequences beyond Iran policy.
+
+Republicans, joined by some Democrats, tried for months to pass new economic sanctions on Iran. The aim was clear: to kill the negotiations, humiliating Obama on the world stage in the process. The US is offering sanctions relief to Iran as part of any deal. By passing new sanctions while the talks are still ongoing, Congress would send the message that the president is not actually in charge of foreign policy and that the US cannot be trusted to uphold its word. Iran would have little choice but to walk away.
+
+Republicans have not been able to pass new sanctions; Democrats, and even a number of Republicans, have seemed unwilling to so openly embarrass their own president on the world stage.
+
+The moment the line was crossed came on January 8, when McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner took matters into their own hands. They secretly arranged for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also opposes Iran talks and has a famously poor relationship with Obama, to speak to a joint session of Congress urging them to kill the negotiations.
+
+Even Fox News was outraged: here was a foreign ally going behind the president's back, working with an opposition party to undermine the sitting president of the United States. And Republicans were helping him do it.
+
+""We are sailing into uncharted waters,"" Robert Kagan, a prominent foreign policy hawk who worked in the Reagan-era State Department and later on John McCain's foreign policy team, wrote in an alarmed Washington Post op-ed. ""Bringing a foreign leader before Congress to challenge a US president’s policies is unprecedented.""
+
+Kagan warned that in some ways, the even greater danger was that such tactics could well become routine: ""After next week,"" he wrote, ""it will be just another weapon in our bitter partisan struggle.""
+
+After Netanyahu's visit, Republicans went further still. Forty-seven Republican senators signed an open letter, organized by superhawk Sen. Tom Cotton, to Iranian leaders hinting that they could blow up any deal between the US and Iran if they disapproved.
+
+""Congress violates the Constitution by hosting the speech""
+
+The mere act of senators contacting the leaders of a foreign nation to undermine and contradict their own president is an enormous breach of protocol. But this went much further: Republicans are telling Iran, and, by extension the world, that the American president no longer has the power to conduct foreign policy, and that foreign leaders should assume Congress could revoke American pledges at any moment.
+
+""Iran's ayatollahs need to know before agreeing to any nuclear deal,"" Sen. Cotton told Bloomberg View, that ""any unilateral executive agreement is one they accept at their own peril.""
+
+A foreign leader reading this letter — whether he or she is Iranian or not — is learning that you are better off walking away than trying to negotiate, in good faith or bad, with the United States of America.
+
+""Between the Netanyahu invite and the Cotton letter, the GOP are blazing new trails in politicization of foreign policy — and debasement of their institutions,"" David Rothkopf, the CEO of the Foreign Policy group and a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tweeted. (I've cleaned up the abbreviations common to Twitter.)
+
+In some ways, it looks like Obamacare all over again. Much as Republicans attempted to stop or subvert Obamacare by undermining the institutions responsible for passing and implementing it, they are now seeking to stop or subvert the Iran negotiations by weakening US foreign policy itself. And much as their brinksmanship and obstructionism on Obamacare exacerbated the partisan polarization that has broken Congress, they are now risking similar damage to the ability of the world's lone superpower to conduct its foreign affairs — well beyond just Iran policy.
+
+There are legitimate policy disagreements over Iran negotiations in Washington, so the line between principled policy opposition and unprincipled partisan sabotage can be blurry. It may help, then, to examine how Republicans' new approach is damaging a US policy that should be less controversial: support for Israel.
+
+The bipartisan consensus on Israel goes back decades. Republican leaders, by inviting Netanyahu to Congress behind Obama's back, and by pressuring members of Congress to side with Netanyahu against their own president, are both exploiting and endangering that bipartisan consensus.
+
+Republicans' hope is that by forcing members of Congress to choose between Israel and Obama, Congress will side with Israel, and thus against Obama. But the risk is that some will side with Obama and against Israel — many Democrats signaled as much by refusing to attend the speech — and that support for Israel will thus become an increasingly partisan issue.
+
+As ""pro-Israel"" becomes increasingly coded as a Republican issue rather than a bipartisan one, it will likely help Republicans win certain races, but it will substantially erode the consensus on Israel and thus risk eroding US support for Israel. If you earnestly care about Israel, and about the US-Israel relationship, then this trend should alarm you.
+
+A premise of Republican meddling on Iran and Israel is that Congress has a right — indeed, a responsibility — for oversight of some aspects of US foreign policy. This is true, and Sen. Cotton's letter points out as an example that the Senate will have to approve any formal treaty between the US and Iran.
+
+Still, Congress' role in foreign policy is constitutionally quite limited. For over 200 years the president has been designated as the ""sole organ of the nation in its external relations, and its sole representative with foreign nations,"" as founding father John Marshall put it in an 1800 speech that the Supreme Court codified into constitutional law in 1936.
+
+The idea of what became known as the ""sole organ"" doctrine is that the US government needs to be a single unified entity on the world stage in order to conduct effective foreign policy. Letting the president and Congress independently set their own foreign policies would lead to chaos.
+
+There is disagreement over where constitutional law draws the line between what role Congress is and is not allowed in US foreign policy. But it seems awfully clear that House Speaker John Boehner going behind the president's back to negotiate with the Israeli leader violates at the very least the spirit of constitutional limits on Congress.
+
+Indeed, a number of constitutional legal scholars — some of them quite conservative — have questioned the constitutionality of Republicans' actions.
+
+David Bernstein of George Mason University wrote at the Washington Post that Boehner's invitation to Netanyahu ""violates constitutional norms that have been observed for generations"" and was contrary to the separation of powers. He explained, ""Direct diplomatic relations with foreign governments are exclusive in the executive."" Boehner disobeyed that.
+
+Another constitutional scholar, Michael Ramsey, put it more simply: ""Congress violates the Constitution by hosting the speech."" The point is not that John Boehner is going to be dragged before the Supreme Court — he won't — but that Republicans crossed a line that wasn't just a matter of protocol, but of strict and meaningful constitutional limits in how foreign policy is conducted.
+
+And that was before Sen. Cotton and 46 other Republican senators wrote the Iranian leader to tell him to disregard President Obama's promises.
+
+It's worth pointing out there is a law specifically prohibiting US citizens from negotiating with foreign governments without official permission, and thus interfering in the foreign policy of the United States. Called the Logan Act, it's named for a state legislator who corresponded with French officials in 1798 without his government's permission because he disapproved of US policy toward France.
+
+Cotton is not going to face prosecution for violating the Logan Act. ""No one is ever actually prosecuted under the measure,"" legal scholar Peter Spiro wrote recently. ""It’s more a focal point for highlighting structural aspects of foreign relations."" And that's the point: the letter goes way beyond the legally articulated limits on Congress' role in foreign policy.
+
+The spirit of the Logan Act, like the ""sole organ"" doctrine, is meant to enforce the idea that the president is in charge of foreign policy. It's not supposed to be like legislation, where Obama and Congress fight it out on a somewhat level playing field. It's meant to be unified. Republicans, by trying to change that, are undermining the very premise of how US foreign policy is supposed to work.
+
+The greatest harm, should Republicans continue this trend, would be to the ability of the US president to credibly conduct American foreign policy.
+
+Even if you agree with Republicans that Obama's Iran talks are a bad idea, the fact that Republicans have gone beyond opposing a deal to overtly undermining US foreign policy should worry you. Republicans are now freelancing their own foreign policy, conducting shadow diplomacy with both Israel and Iran, dividing US foreign policy against itself.
+
+Who, a foreign leader might reasonably ask, is really in charge in Washington? How can I risk negotiating with the US when Congress might sabotage any deal we strike? How can I make difficult, politically painful concessions to the US if Republicans might end up pulling out the rug from under me? How much can I really trust the US to uphold its word? How safe a bet is working with the Americans?
+
+One of the central lessons of this dysfunctional era in American politics is that one side's overreach quickly becomes the other side's tactic. If you're a Republican, you should ask what you will think if these practices are normalized. What will you think when Democrats in Congress employ these tactics to undermine a Republican administration?
+
+This is not to say that the world will shrug off American leadership; the US is still the Earth's most powerful and important country. But foreign policy is won or lost on the margins more often than you might think. International agreements can succeed or fail with just a smidge more or less trust between the parties. A major US foreign policy challenge this century will be competing for regional influence with powers such as China and Russia. If you're, say, the foreign minister of Myanmar, trying to decide whether to throw in with China or with America, you are going to be a little less likely to hedge toward the US if you think its foreign policy-making apparatus is fundamentally broken.
+
+Throughout Obama's presidency, Republicans have frequently warned that he is projecting insufficient strength or will to maintain America's global standing. It seems odd, then, that their answer to this is to publicly undermine and humiliate the president — and thus sacrifice, for short-term partisan gain, the American resolve and leadership they see as so important for the world.
+
+WATCH: 'Obama on his foreign policy goals - The Vox Conversation with the POTUS'",REAL
+1204,Bully Backs Blowhard for President: Now Christie Likes Trump,"In a surprising move after Marco Rubio had a strong debate performance, Donald Trump unveiled the endorsement of Chris Christie.
+
+Donald Trump is a burning inferno that thrives by sucking the oxygen out of the room. On Friday, he did it again by announcing the endorsement of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, temporarily stepping on Rubio’s Terminator-like savagery of Trump in Thursday’s debate.
+
+Nothing should shock in a presidential race that has been defined by its surprises, but the image of the bruising governor proudly standing behind the carrot-faced mogul at a press conference in Texas was jarring nonetheless.
+
+“Generally speaking, I’m not big on endorsements,” Trump started, casually dismissive of the kind of establishment support his main competitor Rubio has received. “I could have had quite a few good ones. This was an endorsement that really meant a lot. Chris is an outstanding man with an outstanding family.”
+
+Christie is also a man who has been blamed for allowing Atlantic City’s crime rate to skyrocket as his plan to turn around the casino city tanked. Trump also failed in Atlantic City with his Taj Mahal casino, which filed for bankruptcy in 2014.
+
+According to Christie, the two came to a final decision about the endorsement and its rollout in a meeting Thursday but he had contemplated further involvement in the race when he returned home to New Jersey after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary.
+
+“I concluded along with Mary Pat and the children [to support] the person we thought to provide the best leadership for America and the person who could best make sure that Hillary Clinton never gets within 10 miles of the White House,” Christie said, trading the podium back and forth with Trump like tag-team WWE wrestlers.
+
+“Once we made that decision, it was clear the only choice was Donald Trump. The best choice was Donald Trump. And last thing is our family is one that prides loyalty and the fact is that we have been good friends with Donald and his family for many years.”
+
+Yet Christie sold off his list of donor emails and supporters to Rubio this morning, which was just two weeks after he kneecapped Rubio as a “robot” in the debate before the New Hampshire primary. Even when a Christie confidant was asked recently if a Trump endorsement was in the works, he demurred and said, “You never know.”
+
+“You’re telling me it wasn’t this weird when Herman Cain was winning nationally four years ago or Michele Bachman was winning nationally? I mean, this happens,” Christie said at the time.
+
+That same month, Christie said in an interview with Greta Van Susteren that Trump doesn’t have what it takes to be president. “I don’t think his temperament is suited for that and I don’t think his experience is,” he said.
+
+Similarly Trump didn’t used to have nice things to say about the governor. During a visit to New Hampshire in December, Trump ribbed Christie for his Bridgegate scandal, telling a crowd that “the people of New Jersey want to throw him out of office.”
+
+Yet today, the two were thick as thieves, perhaps motivated by the joint hate they share for Rubio, who grasped the media limelight for only a brief moment in the sun after last night’s debate.",REAL
+4676,Adelson's Review-Journal Gives Trump First Major Endorsement,"Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump landed his first major newspaper endorsement Sunday as the Las Vegas Review-Journal proclaimed its support for the embattled nominee.
+
+ 
+
+ ""History tells us that agents for reform often generate fear and alarm among those intent on preserving their cushy sinecures,"" the paper said.
+
+""It’s hardly a shock, then, that the 2016 campaign has produced a barrage of unceasing vitriol directed toward Mr. Trump. But let us not be distracted by the social media sideshows and carnival clatter. Substantive issues are in play this November,"" it stated.
+
+ 
+
+ The Review-Journal represented Trump's first endorsement from a major newspaper, most of which have backed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, or simply opposed the real estate tycoon. The Review-Journal is owned by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who reportedly has become disillusioned with Trump.
+
+Dozens of major newspapers have endorsed Clinton. Trump was the only major-party candidate without a major paper endorsement until Saturday.",REAL
+1247,"Jeb’s Sad, Quixotic South Carolina Slog","Jeb’s tried to be what the voters want him to be, but it hasn’t been enough and on Friday, it all seemed to be drawing to a close.
+
+Bush is polling on average at 10.3 percent in the state, behind Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. On Friday, the biggest story about his campaign was one that declared it was “running on fumes,” hemorrhaging confidence from his supporters and donors just when he needs it most. As a last resort, 24 hours before the Republican primary, he dragged his 90 year old mother, Barbara, out on the campaign trail with him for three separate town hall events.
+
+He stood at the center of the stage, no lectern, and awkwardly dangled his stiff arms at his sides as he spoke. Thanks to his Paleo diet, he is a shell of his former self, sleek and modern in a slim-cut blazer and pants. On this particular day, he wore no glasses.
+
+Much has been said about Bush’s demeanor throughout this campaign. He seems to vacillate between detachment and frustration with the process. At times he just seems sad, giving the sort of contemplative, spaced out looks that make for the perfect absurdist Vines. It’s not the kind of viral content a campaign hopes for, exactly, but then this is not the sort of campaign that the candidate had hoped for, either.
+
+In Bush’s mind, the media has dictated the supposedly Democratic process in 2016 and treated it like a tabloid story, feeding the American public’s appetite for more drama (read: Trump). Too wonky and polite to serve as a lead, Bush has become a bit character in this season of America, and frankly this is not the sort of arc he was promised at the initial casting.
+
+“We’re all part of a ‘narrative,’” he said, mockingly borrowing the language of TV political pundits. “I always thought narratives were part of a play, you know, where you just kind of play out your part. The ‘narrative’ is that there’s an ‘establishment lane’ and then there’s the ‘outsider lane’ and I’m in the establishment lane because I am the son of George H.W. Bush and the brother of George W. Bush. I got that. I’m proud of it. It doesn’t bother me a bit.”
+
+Later, as he posed for a photo, he complained to a supporter about how hard it is to break through because of the media. The media, as it was, stood huddled around him, within earshot. He made awkward eye contact and swiftly told the supporter that the media’s job of vetting presidential candidates is actually important work and, personally, he welcomes the scrutiny.
+
+A man jostled to get his baby girl’s photo taken with “the next president of the United States,” getting into an argument with a photographer who stood in his way in the process. It was jarring to hear someone describe Bush that way, as the next president, because unlike other candidates, he doesn’t even pretend like he thinks it’ll happen.
+
+During a speech in January, Cruz said, “When Heidi’s first lady, french fries are coming back to the cafeteria!” It was a joke, ostensibly, but you get the feeling sometimes that before they’ve even won a considerable number of delegates, candidates are making plans to redo the molding and install a hot tub in the Oval Office.
+
+In contrast, during his speech on Friday, Bush said at one point, “I think the first thing that our president should do—” Not, the first thing that I will do as president, but, the first thing that our president should do.
+
+And maybe that’s why he hasn’t gained “momentum,” to borrow another phrase from the pundits. Bush, a genteel WASP, spent a great deal of time on Friday condemning what he perceives to be Trump’s rudeness but what Trump’s supporters believe is his matter-of-factness. “Donald Trump, man, insulting women, Hispanics, the disabled, POWs like John McCain,” he said. “Donald Trump has never showed any interest in anybody else other than himself.”",REAL
+3991,"U.S. strike believed to have killed ‘Jihadi John,’ Islamic State executioner","The drone strike that U.S. officials believe killed “Jihadi John,” the Islamic State executioner whose beheading of Western hostages came to symbolize the militants’ brutality, appeared this week as a rare success in the struggling U.S. campaign against the group.
+
+More than a military feat, the death of the Islamic State’s most well-known spokesman, if confirmed, would be a step forward in the U.S. effort to counter the group’s sophisticated social-media operations and to up the ante in a two-way propaganda war.
+
+Speaking the day after the strike in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, U.S. military officials said they were “reasonably certain” that the two Hellfire missiles fired from an American MQ-9 Reaper drone late Thursday killed the British militant, whose real name is Mohammed Emwazi, and a second individual.
+
+Army Col. Steven Warren, a U.S. military spokesman, did not give details about why military officials were confident that Emwazi, 27, was dead, but he said the drone strike was carried out as planned.
+
+Warren said officials were now working to definitively establish that Emwazi was killed. His death would be a blow to the Islamic State’s public image, Warren said, even if Emwazi was not a top operational commander. “This guy was a human animal,” he said.
+
+In London, British Prime Minister David Cameron lauded the operation, which he described as a “combined effort” between U.S. and British forces. “If this strike was successful, and we still await confirmation of that, it will be a strike at the heart of ISIL,” he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
+
+A senior U.S. defense official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said three drones took part in the operation, one of them British. An American plane conducted the strike.
+
+In a statement at 10 Downing Street, Cameron described Emwazi as a “barbaric murderer” who was the Islamic State’s “lead executioner.”
+
+“This was an act of self-defense. It was the right thing to do,” he said.
+
+U.S. officials said the car believed to have been carrying Emwazi and another person pulled up at a two- or three-story building, a business, around 11 p.m. local time Thursday. Emwazi went inside the building for a short time, came out and got back in the car. At that moment, the American missiles destroyed the vehicle.
+
+The Syrian activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which monitors events in the city, reported that a drone strike targeted a car near the Islamic court in downtown Raqqa shortly before midnight. It was among a dozen blasts heard during an intense wave of airstrikes, the group said on its Twitter feed.
+
+Emwazi appeared in a video in August 2014 as the unknown masked man with an English accent who beheaded American journalist James Foley.
+
+Emwazi subsequently beheaded Steven Sotloff, another American journalist, and appeared in a video in which American aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig was decapitated. ­He also killed David Haines and Alan Henning, both British aid workers, and Japanese journalist Kenji Goto.
+
+“It is a very small solace to learn that Jihadi John may have been killed by the U.S. government,” Foley’s parents, John and Diane Foley, said in a statement. “His death does not bring Jim back. If only so much effort had been given to finding and rescuing Jim and the other hostages who were subsequently murdered by ISIS, they might be alive today.”
+
+Art and Shirley Sotloff, the parents of Steven Sotloff, said Emwazi’s death would change nothing for them. “It’s too little too late. Our son is never coming back,” they said. “More importantly, today, we remember Steven’s remarkable life, his contributions and [others who have] suffered at the hands of ISIS.”
+
+The Obama administration attempted to rescue the Americans during the summer of 2014, when Delta Force commandos stormed a prison where they were thought to be held. Officials later concluded that the prisoners had been moved days before the raid.
+
+U.S. officials have said that confirmation of Emwazi’s death will probably require information gleaned from intercepted militant communications. They say it is probably impossible to obtain a DNA sample, making it more difficult to establish his death conclusively.
+
+“We could potentially never know” with certainty, another defense official said.
+
+[The moment Jihadi John may have become a terrorist]
+
+Emwazi is the best-known militant the United States has killed in more than a year of airstrikes against the group in Iraq and Syria.
+
+Emwazi was born in Kuwait but grew up in London. He studied computer programming before gradually becoming radicalized. In 2010, British authorities detained Emwazi and barred him from leaving the country. He is believed to have traveled to Syria around 2012 and later joined the Islamic State.
+
+Emwazi was one of a group of English-speaking militants that former hostages dubbed “the Beatles.” Those former prisoners described Emwazi as a frequently brutal captor who took part in waterboardings and beatings. It’s not clear if one of the so-called Beatles was the other passenger in the destroyed car.
+
+While the stature of Emwazi and his fellow English-speaking militants was enhanced by the propaganda effect of the execution videos, which drew intense international attention, his operational influence was limited.
+
+Peter Neumann, director of King’s College’s International Center for the Study of Radicalization, said Emwazi was a “low-ranking officer.” Symbolically, Neumann said, his death would show that the Islamic State is reeling, which could undercut recruitment.
+
+“It feeds into the narrative of ISIS, in its core territory, losing,” he said.
+
+While the Obama administration has said it has contained the expansion of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, local forces have been unable to dislodge militants from important cities. At the same time, Islamic State affiliates have spread across the region.
+
+Faysal Itani, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, cautioned that the Islamic State still counts on substantial support in the region.
+
+“Killing a high-profile propagandist is in itself a significant propaganda win,” Itani said. “But this organization is extremely adaptable and, so long as it has access to an aggrieved Sunni population, will always reemerge in one way or another.”
+
+Witte reported from London. Julie Tate and Thomas Gibbons-Neff in Washington, Karla Adam in London, and Liz Sly in Beirut contributed to this report.",REAL
+7526,Dems File Complaint w/DOJ Against FBI for Investigating Hillary,"Dems File Complaint w/DOJ Against FBI for Investigating Hillary   
+It's an obviously absurd move, but considering that the DOJ has become a transparently political organization that abuses and attacks law enforcement on a regular basis including, in the Eric Garner case, the FBI, this is just how things work in the hall of mirrors that the left has made . 
+The Democratic Coalition Against Trump filed a complaint with the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility on Friday against FBI Director James Comey for interfering in the Presidential election, following the FBI’s decision to open up an investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails this close to Election Day. Federal employees are forbidden from participating in political activities under the Hatch Act. 
+“It is absolutely absurd that FBI Director Comey would support Donald Trump like this with only 11 days to go before the election,” said Scott Dworkin, Senior Advisor to the Democratic Coalition Against Trump. “It is an obvious attack from a lifelong Republican who used to serve in the Bush White House, just to undermine her campaign. Comey needs to focus on stopping terrorists and protecting America, not investigating our soon to be President-Elect Hillary Clinton.” 
+It's silly grandstanding and seems easy enough to dismiss.Except that bizarre and unlikely tactics, no longer are. There was outrage over MoveOn's attack on Petraeus and even most Dems thought that it was unhelpful. This attack on Comey I suspect will meet with little criticism. Some Dems will consider it a helpful preemptive move even though with his track record, Comey is as likely to hurt Hillary as he is himself.",FAKE
+9615,Tradesman keeps promise,"October 27, 2016 
+Ivy Pollard, 73, from the backend of Brighton was all set for a binge-watching session of her favourite TV series when the tradesman who said he would arrive between 7am and Midday arrived between 7am and Midday. 
+‘I’d just finished skinning up the first spliff of the day when the miracle took place’ she said. ‘There was this unexpected knock at the door which I was hoping would be the new clown costume and accessories that I ordered 3 weeks ago!’ 
+‘But it wasn’t! It was the guy from Swirlpool! The one thing I wasn’t expecting! Someone actually doing what they said they were going to do! The only time I experience that level of follow-through is on the toilet, or in my pull-ups, but even that doesn’t happen all that often.’ 
+‘It was all a bit embarrassing actually, because there wasn’t anything wrong with the oven yet. The warranty had just expired so I knew it was only a matter of time. I thought I was being clever by booking an engineer straight away, confident that by the time he turned up, there would be something wrong with it.’ 
+‘Mind you, he didn’t mind. It turns out he’s a big Game of Thrones fan as well. So we had a smoke and cracked on with the show. We had a jolly old day in the end, much to the chagrin of the other customers he was scheduled to see that day, but, then again, that’s tradesmen for you.’ Jodster",FAKE
+4922,"Clinton, Trump and Obama aren't telling American workers the truth. Here it is","Labor Day is the one day every year when we come together as a nation to celebrate the achievements of the American worker and the history of the labor movement in this country. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will join President Obama (who spent the weekend meeting with G20 leaders issued a Labor Day message on September 1) as well as a variety of politicians and public officials from across the country, in commemorating the day.
+
+You can bet that their lofty rhetoric will be accompanied by a promise to restore the nation to its manufacturing heyday.
+
+At the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, for instance, Clinton promised to push policies that will help foster a “manufacturing renaissance.”  Not to be outdone, Donald Trump has long said he will be “the greatest job-producing president in American history.”
+
+What neither Clinton, Trump, Obama, or any other public official is likely to do on Labor Day, however, is to level with the American worker. None of them are likely to confess the hard truth: the jobs they keep talking about bringing back to the United States are not coming back. None of them are likely to have the guts and foresight to tell the public that instead of making empty promises they will focus their energy on helping the American worker prepare for a time, in the next decade or so, in which many of the tasks they perform at their current job are increasingly automated. None of them are likely to acknowledge what is the reality: that we need to prepare collectively for “new” types of work and learn to co-exist in an economy alongside artificial intelligence and robotics.
+
+How do we know these jobs are not returning? Consider the following evidence. First, over the last several years, a small but growing number of companies have reopened factories in the United States. Unfortunately, jobs have not returned with them because many of these plants are increasingly automated. Second, since 2009, manufacturing output has increased more than twenty percent, but that hasn’t resulted in an equivalent increase in the number of jobs, i.e., manufacturing employment has grown just five percent in the same period. Third, manufacturing output is higher than it has been for decades – it is up $2.2 trillion in 2015 from $1.7 trillion in 2009. Despite this, employment in the sector is lower than it has been since the mid-twentieth century and total employment has decreased by a third since 1970.
+
+Automation is not the sole reason for this, but it is seen by most experts as an increasingly important factor. In 2014 almost half of the leading economists and other experts interviewed for a PEW research study said that they “envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order.”
+
+There is no question that a portion of the jobs many of us perform today will be lost to robotics, automation, and the rise of artificial intelligence in the next few decades. A recent study by AppliedTechonomics, for instance, found that we currently have the technological capacity to automate 52 percent of the activities performed by workers in the manufacturing sectors. Moreover, the study found that manufacturing is the second most automatable sector in the global economy, just behind the services industry.
+
+Given this reality it is bordering on malpractice that our current candidates and public officials have not done more to help prepare us all for a future in which accelerated technological change has a major impact on our labor force.
+
+There are many steps we can take to confront that reality -- from better education and training for impacted workers, to more controversial proposals like offering incentives to corporations to encourage them not to automate at such a fast past or even providing a guaranteed minimum income to everyone in our country.
+
+There is much that can and should be done to prepare all of us for the future, beginning with an honest discussion about the changes workers are going to face – prepared or not – in the coming years.
+
+Labor Day 2016 is not too late to begin having this discussion. Our current crop of candidates, as well as our elected leaders, have a responsibility to all Americans to get the conversation started.
+
+Saquib Hyat-Khan is Founder and Chief Executive at AppliedTechonomics.
+
+Jeanne Zaino, Ph.D. is professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona College and Senior Advisor at AppliedTechonomics, Public Sector. Follow her on Twitter @JeanneZaino.",REAL
+6609,"BREAKING : LGBT Group Endorses Trump, Says, “Hillary is Detrimental for Gays” – TruthFeed","BREAKING : LGBT Group Endorses Trump, Says, “Hillary is Detrimental for Gays” BREAKING : LGBT Group Endorses Trump, Says, “Hillary is Detrimental for Gays” Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 1, 2016 
+Hillary is NOT a champion for gays. 
+She takes MILLIONS from countries who abuse, imprison, and execute gays. 
+Clinton turns a BLIND EYE to these grotesque atrocities to gays (and women) so she can keep lining her pockets. 
+She even laughed when Trump asked her to return the BLOOD MONEY to these hateful countries. 
+On top of that, Clinton wants to FLOOD America with Muslin refugees from these “moderate Muslim” countries that abuse, imprison, and execute gays and women. 
+These people do not want to assimilate to Western culture – they come here and spread their 7th-century HATE. 
+This is why so many gays support Trump. 
+From Washington Examiner : 
+The Miami chapter of LGBTQ Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) announced on Monday its decision to break with the national organization to support GOP nominee Donald Trump for president. 
+“We, as Log Cabin Republicans of Miami, we’re Americans first, we’re Republicans second, and we happen to be gay or allies of the LGBT community. American national security is our government’s first and foremost responsibility, then the economy – those two issues really are paramount to any American,” Miami chapter president Vincent Foster told the Washington Examiner on Monday evening. 
+“Our membership has gotten behind the Republican national nominee and it’s unfortunate that other Republicans are unable to do so. Regardless of differences, we understand that a Hillary Clinton presidency is only going to be detrimental to the LGBT community and the general American population.” 
+LCR announced on Oct. 22 that it would not support Trump despite his being “perhaps the most pro-LGBT presidential nominee in the history of the Republican Party” because he has “concurrently surrounded himself with senior advisers with a record of opposing LGBT equality.” 
+Foster said the national organization’s decision was a “big surprise” and prompted the South Florida chapter to re-evaluate the matter. On Oct. 26, the 20 members of Miami LCR unanimously voted to endorse Trump. 
+The Miami chapter has had a long-standing relationship with Trump, Foster explained. The billionaire businessman’s campaign initially reached out to the group months ago to work together in the battleground state. Foster added the campaign attended the group’s Lincoln Day dinner and has been fully supportive of them. 
+“To have a Republican presidential nominee who cares so much, especially after Orlando – that resonated so much,” Foster said. 
+Although LCR typically does not allow local chapters to support other candidates, the organization is allowing for flexibility in this election. The Washington, D.C.-based national group is permitting regional chapters to endorse or not endorse Trump in this election. 
+Log Cabin Republicans in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Orange County, Texas and Georgia have also endorsed Trump, according to Angelo. This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+10509,The Political Songs Of Leonard Cohen,"It was rare for poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen to venture into the realm of politics, however, quite a few of his songs, including some of his love songs, were infused with a bleakness that confronted morality and the darkness of humanity. He also wrote a song of hope and possibility about the experiment of democracy in the United States that, perhaps, takes on a new kind of resonance in the wake of the election of Donald Trump.
+Cohen was asked in 2014 if songs can offer solutions to political problems. He replied, “I think the song itself is a kind of solution.”
+And so, to pay tribute to a troubadour who died at 82 and whose artistic work only seemed to get better as he aged and his voice grew deeper, here is a retrospective on some of the more philosophical and sociopolitical songs he composed.
+“Joan Of Arc” (1971) Cohen declared in an interview for Rolling Stone in 1971, “Women are really strong. You notice how strong they are? Well, let them take over. Let us be what we’re supposed to be – gossips, musicians, wrestlers. The premise being, there can be no free men unless there are free women.” He believed it was just for women to gain control of the world.
+With that context, this elegiac narrative takes on greater gravitas. It consists of a dialogue between Joan of Arc and the Fire, as she is burnt at the stake. The women’s movement was flourishing at the time, and Cohen saw Joan of Arc as a symbol of courage. Yet, he also recognized she may have been lonely because she had to disguise herself as a male soldier, and he imagined what it was like to fight English domination of France and in her final moments face down the fact that she would never return to what could be considered an ordinary life.
+“Dance Me To The End Of Love” (1984) During a CBC radio interview in 1995, Cohen said the song came from “hearing and reading or knowing that in the death camps” during the Holocaust “beside the crematoria” the string quartet would be “pressed into performance” while “this horror” unfolded. Cohen sings in the opening, “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin. Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in. Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove.” The song represents an embrace of passionate acts in the face of atrocities and death.
+“If It Be Your Will” (1984) This is a truly grim song in which Cohen is probably using the specter of a benevolent oppressor or fascism as a metaphor for the next stage of a relationship. And yet, the lyrics are subtle enough that Cohen may be addressing morality and how easy it is to convince men to carry out heinous acts. He sings, “All your children here in their rags of light/In our rags of light/All dressed to kill/And end this night/If it be your will.”
+“First We Take Manhattan” (1987) The song is about terrorism or militant extremism. It is told from the perspective of an individual who tried to work within the system in order to change it. That failed. Now the individual has taken solace in the “beauty of his weapons” and turned to Manhattan and to Berlin to make his or her mark.
+In a 2007 interview for XM Radio, he said, “There’s something about terrorism that I’ve always admired. The fact that there are no alibis or no compromises. That position is always very attractive. I don’t like it when it’s manifested on the physical plane. I don’t really enjoy the terrorist activities, but psychic terrorism. I remember there was a great poem by Irving Layton that I once read, I’ll give you a paraphrase of it. It was ‘well, you guys blow up an occasional airline and kill a few children here and there’, he says. ‘But our terrorists, Jesus, Freud, Marx, Einstein. The whole world is still quaking.'”
+What Cohen meant, albeit in a very cynical way, is the philosophies of these people have such a history of being used to justify horrible acts. He never engages with the subject fully (and probably never wanted to do so), but Cohen’s song clearly approaches the issue of state-sponsored political violence versus political violence of the individual.
+“Everybody Knows” (1988) It is one of the most well-known songs he ever recorded. The wry cynicism diagnoses the realities of a cruel world. In the neoliberal age of austerity, the opening lyrics are exceptionally appropriate, “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. Everybody knows that the war is over. Everybody knows the good guys lost. Everybody knows the fight was fixed. The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.”
+Cohen sings, “Everybody knows that you’re in trouble.” Those in charge of the social order are indifferent to the pain and suffering of the masses. But are the owners and politicians capable of maintaining control? Because everybody also knows that it is coming apart.
+“Democracy (1990) Cohen described in an interview with Paul Zollo that he wrote the song after the Berlin Wall came down. “Everyone was saying democracy is coming to the east, and I was like that gloomy fellow who always turns up at a party to ruin the orgy or something. And I said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen that way. I don’t think this is such a good idea. I think a lot of suffering will be the consequence of this wall coming down.'”
+That seems strikingly backward. But it motivated Cohen to ask, “Where is democracy really coming?” He thought there may be more democracy coming to the United States. From a love of America, he wrote a song that is really about the irony of America, “a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country.” He added, “This is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy.”
+Given the American exceptionalism of Cohen’s statement, he could have easily produced something with lyrics Lee Greenwood would have proudly belted out on stage. However, each time Cohen sings, “Democracy is coming to the USA,” there is a raw irony it, like he does not believe the forces running this nation are capable of democracy. Then, there’s the inimitable line, “I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean. I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.” It makes it clear Cohen was a disappointed idealist. Like so many, he liked the idea of America but seeing it play out on that “hopeless little screen” was never quite what he had in mind.
+“The Future” (1990) For this song, Cohen’s character looks into the future, and it is not good at all. It is so frightening, in fact, that he thinks he would be willing to see fascist society restored. “Give me back the Berlin wall. Give me Stalin and St Paul. Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima.”
+The song hurdles onward into more nostalgia for familiar horror, “Destroy another fetus now. We don’t like children anyhow. I’ve seen the future, baby: it is murder.” He has no hope that humanity can right itself. Civilization can try and erect a social order with a tyrant or it can unravel tyranny and push for something more just. Yet, inevitably, to Cohen’s character, there will be murder. In which case, what really is the right thing to do?
+“On That Day” (2004) Cohen wrote this as a response to the September 11th attacks. It is an artifact that represents reactions to what happened. He sings, “Some people say it’s what we deserve for sins against god, for crimes in the world.” There are others who blame it on the fact that women live “unveiled” or because the country has its fortunes as well as people who are subjugated. Whatever the case may be, Cohen does not seek to settle the discussion. Rather, he seems more interested in whether those who survived were able to press onward. So he poses a rhetorical question: “Did you go crazy or did you report on that day?” Then the song abruptly ends.
+“Amen” (2012) This song comes from the latter era of Cohen’s life, where the sultry nature of his music took on a much more wistful and brooding characteristic. He wrote about love but love in a time of war or love with inescapable horror all around.
+In “Amen,” the character Cohen channels desperately wants to love. He must first see through the terror around him. He does not think he can love until the “victims are singing and laws of remorse are restored.” He does not think he can love until the “day has been ransomed and night has no right to begin.” He awaits some kind of redemption and only then will he be able to feel wanted again, but there is too much despair and destruction right now for the character to indulge in pleasure.
+“Almost Like the Blues” (2014) We live in a world of permanent war, and so, in this gorgeously layered piece of music, Cohen grapples with atrocities he witnessed. “I saw some people starving. There was murder, there was rape. Their villages were burning. They were trying to escape. I couldn’t meet their glances. I was staring at my shoes. It was acid. It was tragic. It was almost like the blues.”
+Few of Cohen’s songs are as profound. The song, which appears on “Popular Problems,” could easily be grappling with what goes through the minds of war criminals. He sings, “I have to die a little between each murderous thought, and when I’m finished thinking, I have to die a lot.” The soldier witnesses torture or is party to it. He witnesses killing or is party to it. “And there’s all my bad reviews.” It seems his superiors are unhappy with his performance. Maybe, they do not think he is killing enough. Whatever the case may be, he has lost his grip on morality entirely and finds himself confronting the scope of his sins.
+“A Street” (2014) To Cohen, “Popular Problems” was all about dealing with defeat . He told the Telegraph the lyrics were about facing down failure, disappointment, bewilderment—especially the “dark forces that modify our lives.” What is a person to do?
+“Recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s,” Cohen suggested. “I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise, we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social, or spiritual.”
+While referring to “A Street,” which is about a faltering romance during war, he added, “When I say ‘the party’s over but I’ve landed on my feet . I’m standing on this corner where there used to be a street,’ I think that’s probably the theme of the whole album. Yeah, the scene is blown up, but you just can’t keep lamenting the fact. There is another position. You have to stand in that place where there used to be a street and conduct yourself as if there still is a street.”
+In a very basic sense, the master of romantic despair, the high priest of pathos, has now gone up to that Tower of Song, meant people have to find ways to keep living. They have to exist, and by existing, that is in and of itself an act of resistance to all the depravity that unfolds around them.
+The post The Political Songs Of Leonard Cohen appeared first on Shadowproof .
+",FAKE
+2527,Alabama Sen. Sessions Backs Trump’s Immigration Platform,"Donald Trump received a key endorsement for his immigration platform: Sen. Jeff Sessions, one of the strongest proponents in Congress of restricting immigration.",REAL
+4830,Gary Johnson’s Post-Debate Reactions,"Well, we did the pre-game last night, so it's time for the Tuesday morning quarterbacking: Watch Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson take my questions and yours on Reason's Facebook page (and right here). What do you want to know about the campaign strategy ahead?",REAL
+6886,How the Oligarchy Has Prepared the Groundwork for Stealing the Election,"How the Oligarchy Has Prepared the Groundwork for Stealing the Election 
+In addition to the cyber manipulation of electronic voting (see http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/11/01/very-easy-to-invisibly-steal-us-elections/ ), Finian Cunningham explains a second method the Oligarchy has prepared that would allow the election to be stolen for Hillary. The groundwork that has been officially established indicates that a false flag cyber attack is the preferred method.
+A Digital 9/11 If Trump Wins by Finian Cunningham 
+There are disturbing signs that a digital 9/11 false flag terror attack is being readied for election day in the US to ensure that Donald Trump does not win. 
+Such an attack – involving widespread internet and power outage – would have nothing to do with Russia or any other foreign state. It would be furnished by agencies of the US Deep State in a classic “false flag” covert manner. But the resulting chaos and “assault on American democracy” will be conveniently blamed on Russia. 
+That presents a double benefit. Russia would be further demonized as a foreign aggressor “justifying” even harsher counter measures by America and its European allies against Moscow. 
+Secondly, a digital attack on America’s presidential election day this week, would allow the Washington establishment to pronounce a Trump win invalid due to “Russian cyber subversion”. Invalidation is a prepared option if the ballot results show Republican candidate Donald Trump as the imminent victor. 
+Democrat rival Hillary Clinton is the clear choice for the White House among the Washington establishment. She has the backing of Wall Street finance capital, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex and the Deep State agencies of the Pentagon and CIA. The fix has been in for months to get her elected by the powers-that-be owing to her well-groomed obedience to American imperialist interests. 
+The billionaire property magnate Trump is too much of a maverick to be entrusted with the White House, as far as the American ruling elite are concerned. 
+The trouble is that, despite the massive campaign to discredit Trump, polls show his support remains stubbornly close to Clinton’s. The latter has been tainted with too many scandals involving allegations of sleazy dealings with Wall Street, so-called pay-for-play favors while she was former Secretary of State, and her penchant for inciting overseas wars for regime change using jihadist terrorist foot-soldiers. 
+As one headline from McClatchy News only days ago put it: “Majority of voters think Clinton acted illegally, new poll finds”. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article112635048.html#emlnl=Evening_Newsletter 
+Trump is right. The US presidential election is rigged. The system is heavily stacked against any candidate who does not conform with the interests of the establishment. The massive media-orchestrated campaign against Trump is testimony to that. 
+But such is popular disgust with Clinton, her sleaze-ball husband Bill and the Washington establishment that her victory is far from certain. Indeed in the last week before voting this Tuesday various polls are showing a neck-and-neck race with even some indicators putting the Republican narrowly ahead. 
+Over the weekend, the Washington Post, which has been one of the main media outlets panning Trump on a daily basis, reported this: “The electoral map is definitely moving in Trump’s direction”. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/04/dont-look-now-the-electoral-map-is-definitely-moving-in-donald-trumps-direction/?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1 
+In recent days, American media are reporting a virtual state of emergency by the US government and its security agencies to thwart what they claim are Russian efforts to incite “election day cyber mayhem.” 
+In one “exclusive” report by the NBC network on November 3, it was claimed that: “The US government believes hackers from Russia or elsewhere may try to undermine next week’s presidential election and is mounting an unprecedented effort to counter their cyber meddling.” http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/white-house-readies-fight-election-day-cyber-mayhem-n677636?cid=sm_tw 
+On November 4, the Washington Post reported: “Intelligence officials warn of Russian mischief in election and beyond.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russia-seen-as-unable-to-alter-election-but-may-still-seek-to-undermine-it/2016/11/03/b7387160-a1cd-11e6-8832-23a007c77bb4_story.html 
+Apparently, the emergency security response is being coordinated by the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the National Security Agency and other elements of the Defense Department, according to NBC. 
+These claims of Russian state hackers interfering in the US political system are not new. Last month, the Obama administration officially accused Moscow of this alleged malfeasance. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/07/us-russia-dnc-hack-interfering-presidential-election 
+Russian President Vladimir Putin has lambasted American claims that his country is seeking to disrupt the presidential elections as “hysterical nonsense”, aimed at distracting the electorate from far more deep-rooted internal problems. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/putin-rejects-claims-russian-interference-us-election-43103312 
+The Obama administration and its state security agencies have not provided one iota of evidence to support their allegations against Russia. Nevertheless the repeated charges have a tendency to stick. 
+The Clinton campaign has for months been accusing Trump of being a “pro-Russian stooge”. Clinton’s campaign has also claimed that Russian hackers have colluded with the whistleblower organization Wikileaks to release thousands of private emails damaging Clinton with the intention of swaying the election in favor of Trump. 
+Wikileaks’ director Julian Assange and the Russian government have both rejected any suggestion that they are somehow collaborating, or that they are working to get Trump elected. 
+But on the eve of the election, the US authorities are recklessly pushing hysteria that Russia is trying to subvert American democracy. 
+Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 is quoted as saying: “The Russians are in an offensive mode and the US is working on strategies to respond to that, and at the highest levels.” 
+NBC cites a senior Obama administration official as saying that the Russians “want to sow as much confusion as possible and undermine our process”. 
+Ominously, the news outlet adds that “steps are being taken to prepare for worst-case scenarios, including a cyber-attack that shuts down part of the power grid or the internet.” 
+Nearly two weeks ago, on October 21-22, the US was hit with a widespread internet outage. The actors behind the “distributed denial of service” were not identified, but the disruption was nationwide and it temporarily disabled many popular consumer services. One former official at the US Department of Homeland Security described the event as having “all the signs of what would be considered a drill”. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/white-house-readies-fight-election-day-cyber-mayhem-n677636?cid=sm_tw 
+Could that cyber-attack have been the work of US Deep State agencies as a dress rehearsal for an even bigger outage planned for November 8 – election day? 
+The Washington establishment wants Clinton over Trump. She’s the marionette of choice for their strategic interests, including a more hostile foreign policy towards Russia in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere. But Trump might prove to be the voters’ choice. In which case, the shadowy forces that really rule America can trigger a “digital 9/11”. 
+It’s not difficult to imagine the chaos and mayhem from internet blackout, power, transport, banking and communications paralysis – even for just a temporary period of a few hours. Months of fingering Russia as a destabilizing foreign enemy intent on interfering in US democracy to get “Comrade Trump” into the White House would then serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In that event, the US authorities could plausibly move to declare the election of Donald J Trump null and void. 
+In fact the scenario could be contrived to a far more serious level than merely invalidating the election result. The US authorities could easily feign that a state of emergency is necessary in order to “defend national security”. That contingency catapults beyond “rigged politics”. It is a green light for a coup d’état by the Deep State forces who found that they could not win through the “normal” rigging methods.
+Originally published: https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201611061047117877-digital-9-11-if-trump-wins/ 
+The post How the Oligarchy Has Prepared the Groundwork for Stealing the Election appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+957,Reince Priebus is in over his head,"Reince Priebus, the beleaguered and balding Republican National Committee chairman, was asked a few days ago about his mane.
+
+“How much gray hair do you think you’re going to have by December?” CNN’s Jake Tapper inquired.
+
+“Gray is fine,” the party boss replied. “I just want to make sure I have hair.”
+
+Alternatively, he could try a Whig.
+
+This could be the first time in 160 years when a major American political party splits, and Priebus, the young technocrat from Wisconsin brought in to improve the Republicans’ infrastructure, is in over his head.
+
+The Whigs were essentially undone by their inability to agree on slavery; the attempt to satisfy both sides, with the Compromise of 1850, caused Northern and Southern Whigs to part. Though the current situation is quite different, Republicans are now split by their own moral dilemma: whether to embrace as their nominee a man who stands for isolationism and ethno-nationalism and who disparages women and minorities. Priebus is preaching party unity above morality.
+
+[Let’s scrap the GOP and start over]
+
+If the party accepts Trump, it could consign itself to political oblivion by antagonizing women, minority groups and immigrants. If it accepts Ted Cruz instead, it risks a riot by the Trump populists and the loss of all but far-right voters. And if Priebus and his fellow Republicans try to rally around a mainstream figure such as Paul Ryan, they could salvage the party in the long run but would risk alienating the majority of this year’s GOP voters.
+
+“Well,” Priebus said in a radio interview Thursday with former Republican senator (and Trump booster) Scott Brown, “I haven’t started pouring Bailey’s in my cereal yet, but I’ve certainly considered it.”
+
+In fairness, there is no good option for Priebus now, except perhaps to resign if Trump secures the party nomination. His defenders point out that each time he disagrees with Trump, the criticism only emboldens Trump supporters, as it was likely to do again after Priebus said Monday that the Colorado GOP convention’s decision to award all 34 delegates to Cruz was not “a crooked deal,” as Trump charged.
+
+But Priebus failed to act to stop Trump when he could have, or to coordinate Republicans to clear the field for a mainstream alternative. And now he compounds the damage by sticking with the same moral neutrality and happy talk of GOP unity that allowed the situation to develop.
+
+After the Jan. 14 debate, in which Trump said he would “gladly accept the mantle of anger” and traded charges with Cruz about their constitutional eligibility for the presidency, Priebus tweeted: “It’s clear we’ve got the most well-qualified and diverse field of candidates from any party in history.”
+
+In the Feb. 13 debate, Trump blamed George W. Bush for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and said Bush “lied” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Trump, Cruz and Marco Rubio took turns calling one another liars, and Rubio ridiculed Cruz’s Spanish skills. “Our well-qualified & experienced candidates continue to put forth serious solutions to restore prosperity & strength to America,” Priebus tweeted.
+
+And after the March 3 debate, in which Trump spoke about the size of his genitals, Priebus tweeted that “Republican candidates are the only ones offering the course correction voters overwhelmingly want.”
+
+Priebus sounds like a fortune cookie when he says “the impossible is always possible with unity.” But unity behind bigotry? My conservative colleague Jennifer Rubin notes that Priebus’s position requires “moral vapidity.”
+
+This all might have turned out differently if Priebus, and other Republicans in positions of responsibility, had turned against Trump sooner. In January, he called the Trump-dominated debates “a good thing for our party.” He said he was “100 percent” sure he could rally the party behind either Trump or Cruz. He has since praised Trump for bringing “millions of new voters to our party.”
+
+With 4 in 10 Republicans saying they wouldn’t get behind Trump in a general election, it’s clear he would lose the party more votes than he gains. But Priebus is still talking like a fortune cookie. “With unity the impossible is possible; with division the possible is impossible,” he informed Brown in Thursday’s radio interview.
+
+Priebus spoke about the wonder of his role. “It’s unbelievable to be in the middle of history that will be talked about forever,” he said.
+
+But history is unlikely to remember kindly a Republican chairman who turned the party of Lincoln over to a populist demagogue or to an ideologue loathed even by Republican colleagues. Hopefully those twin menaces will be enough to wig out Priebus — before his Republicans get Whigged out.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+6541,New Leak Exposes Hillary’s Real Plan For Clinton Foundation Foreign Donors,"Share This 
+The Clinton Foundation and its foreign donors have been an area of concern should Hillary Clinton become president due to accusations of pay-to-play scandals. Knowing this, Hillary gave her word that the Clinton Foundation would stop accepting foreign donations should she be elected president. However, a new leak just exposed her real plan for foreign donors, and it’s not looking good. Hillary Clinton 
+Once again, Hillary has landed herself in the middle of more scandalous activity. With the FBI reopening her email and private server investigation and WikiLeaks continuously exposing her corruption, she can’t seem to catch a break — and she shouldn’t. Her long list of scandals continues to grow, as should her nose, after being busted lying to the American people yet again to manipulate her way into our White House. 
+According to a leaked memo, Hillary’s words mean nothing. Although she promised that the Clinton Foundation would cease accepting foreign donations if she were to be elected president, a leaked memo has exposed her real plans and proven that she didn’t mean what she said. Two-faced Hillary told the public one thing, while her secret plan was for something much different. 
+Thanks to WikiLeaks, the truth is again being revealed after the organization published an email that was sent to John Podesta, the Clinton Campaign chair. The email contained the leaked memo, which appears to have been crafted by Cheryl Mills, a Clinton aide, who wrote, “I connected with HRC this am regarding the steps she will take with regard to the Foundation should she announce a decision to explore a run for the Presidency,” just days before Hillary announced her run for president. 
+Although she’s said otherwise throughout her campaign, Hillary’s personal preference, as indicated by the leaked memo dated April 7, 2015, is for the foundation to continue accepting money from foreign governments, The Daily Caller reports, and this could mean bad news for Hillary as five FBI field offices are currently investigating her “nonprofit” foundation due to pay-to-play allegations, although the Department of Justice did their best to suppress investigations into the corrupt Clinton Foundation. 
+The leaked memo clearly shows that Hillary indicated to staffers that her personal preference is for the foundation to continue to accept money from foreign governments, even if she is elected president . What’s worse, the corrupt Clintons were hesitant to limit the foundation’s financial operations in any way, as the memo says, Hillary “does not want to limit the Foundation’s ability to operate programs now or in the future,” adding, “ we don’t want to close the door to unexpected opportunities. ” 
+The memo goes on to mention a “compromise” option, where it says they could “say that the Foundation will not accept contributions from foreign governments unless that funding is part of an ongoing program or a disbursement for a completed negotiation.” However, under that option, the foundation would continue to accept money from Qatar despite Hillary’s own admission that the country is financially supporting ISIS . 
+The “final option” mentioned “would mirror the 2008 [Memorandum of Understanding] agreement whereby the Foundation submits new foreign government contributions and those of a substantial size increase to an independent body (e.g. White House, State Department) for review. The obvious challenge with this is that there is no independent body to make that review.” However, as The Daily Caller notes, Hillary “did not uphold her end of the 2008 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU),” and even liberal-leaning PolitiFact ruled the claim that Hillary acted in accordance with the 2008 MOU “mostly false.” 
+When is enough, enough? The Clinton crime family will never change their ways and their fake foundation is only a front for their shady deals. The Clintons’ greed for money and power is endless and nothing — not even our laws — will stand in the way of Hillary and Bill as they grab as much of both as they can. There’s only one place Hillary belongs while on this earth, and that’s not the Oval Office, it’s a cinderblock cell. After her time there is done, she has a one-way ticket to hell, where she probably hopes to overthrow the devil. That is how evil, corrupt, and power hungry she is. Her deceit and depravity know no bounds, and she would even give the devil a run for his money. Do you really want that kind of person to be our next president?",FAKE
+1079,Excruciating choice for GOP leaders: Take a risk on Trump?,"Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and a New America fellow. He is the author of "" Jimmy Carter "" and "" The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society. "" The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
+
+(CNN) What could possibly motivate a Republican to formally endorse Donald Trump and join his raucous brigade? With each primary and caucus victory, the pressure for prominent Republicans to take a stand on his candidacy greatly intensifies. But taking this step is not easy.
+
+Announcing that you will back Donald Trump is to enter into an alliance with a person who is controversial, explosive and who can often get extremely nasty on the campaign trail.
+
+This is someone who has repeatedly said things that offend women, Latinos and Muslims; who was slow to disavow white supremacist support and who has chosen to stoke, rather than calm, flareups of violence at his rallies.
+
+This week, he predicted ""riots"" should he fail to be given the GOP nomination, even if he lacks the required delegate total. And even if a politician is willing to be associated with the incendiary things Trump has already said, it is impossible to know what he will do next, and that can be frightening for anyone in the political arena.
+
+As New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie learned last week, you might even find yourself humiliated by Trump after you take the risky step of supporting and going out to campaign for him.
+
+Thus far, Trump has received a few high-profile endorsements, including those of Christie, Sarah Palin, Sen. Jeff Sessions, Ben Carson, Jerry Falwell, and, at a much lower level, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. This is still a pretty limited list for someone as far ahead as Trump.
+
+So why would any other Republicans decide to take this step? The question is becoming much more important with each week. As Trump closes in on the delegates that he needs to secure the nomination in this three-person race (though it is not clear he will reach the required majority), he will be pressing harder to secure more endorsements so that he can avoid a brokered convention in Cleveland.
+
+Obtaining a job in a Trump administration will be a major motivating factor for many Republicans. As the possibility of a Trump presidency becomes more real, a larger number of Republicans will make the calculation that if they want to be part of his administration they will need to get off the fence sooner rather than later.
+
+Trump is the kind of person who punishes anyone who stands in his way.
+
+Those officials who come out in the next few weeks and play a role in helping him win some of the bigger states that loom ahead are hoping to be in a good position to be part of the White House should Trump manage to win the election.
+
+Loyalty to party is a powerful force in our current era of polarized politics.
+
+While the primary season is about deciding what kind of person you want to represent your party, the general election is about making sure that your party has power. Gradually the path forward for Trump's opponents is becoming less clear. If Trump demonstrates the potential to build a diverse electoral coalition that can defeat Hillary Clinton, this will be enough for some Republicans to line up behind him.
+
+As Ben Carson explained when he announced his support, ""I didn't see a path for Kasich, who I like,or for Rubio, who I like. As far as Cruz is concerned, I don't think he's gonna be able to draw independents and Democrats unless he has some kind of miraculous change.""
+
+These Republicans will separate their support for the campaign from the man.
+
+Given that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate, the intense feelings that she elicits within the GOP will be enough to move some Republicans into Donald Trump's camp. There will be the moment, perhaps in the near future, when Republican turn their attention to the competition against the Democrats rather than among themselves.
+
+If the anti-Trump coalition headed by Mitt Romney does not show any signs of strength, some Republicans may decide that it is time to heal the divisions in the party by accepting Trump to maximize their chances in the fall.
+
+As Trump looks more and more like a winner in the party contest, there will be Republicans who actually like the candidate or at minimum are excited about what he can offer in the electoral arena who will finally step forward.
+
+There might be a tipping point where this insurgency becomes legitimate, becoming less of a political circus than an actual competition. Once this happens, this will be a key moment for Trump to start securing a huge number of endorsements as more candidates are willing to stand up for a candidacy that once may have seemed too dangerous.
+
+Nor will Republicans necessarily be worried about the risk of endorsing Trump only to have a brokered convention select a different candidate this summer.
+
+If the nomination is decided at the convention, Cruz or Kasich -- or anyone else who enters the competition -- will need the support of everyone who backed Trump and have reason to court their vote.
+
+The final factor that can move Republicans into the Trump camp will be animosity toward his opponents, particularly Ted Cruz. Though he is trying to position himself as the new ""establishment"" choice, Cruz has been as much, if not more, of an insurgent to the party than Trump.
+
+He is also a politician who has personally burned many bridges with fellow party members in the Senate and the campaign. If Kasich no longer looks like a viable choice for a brokered convention, some Republicans might support Trump as a way to pay back their anger toward Cruz.
+
+Taking the step of standing on the podium with Donald Trump will not be easy.
+
+Every politician realizes the high costs that can come with this, particularly since the outcome of the fight might not be totally settled until the summer.
+
+For many Republicans, this will come down to balancing political and self-interest with the difficulty of supporting a candidate who is genuinely distasteful to them and who risks bringing them embarrassment and anger from people they respect. But as Trump looks like the only real game in town, we'll see more Republicans deciding that this is a risk worth taking.",REAL
+7221,WIKILEAKS : Hillary Receiving Donations from Radical Muslims in Turkey – TruthFeed,"WIKILEAKS : Hillary Receiving Donations from Radical Muslims in Turkey WIKILEAKS : Hillary Receiving Donations from Radical Muslims in Turkey Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 29, 2016 
+We have learned through Wikileaks released emails that Hillary and her team are actively disenfranchising American voters by accepting foreign donations. 
+We also know that Hillary LOVES Middle Eastern countries who ABUSE WOMEN and TOSS GAY PEOPLE off buildings. 
+She and her husband take MILLIONS from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. 
+Now, we can add Turkey to that list. 
+Hillary is a disgusting, greedy little pig. 
+Do you really think THIS WOMAN would fight Islamic terror? 
+They FUND her. ",FAKE
+3529,Identity of ISIS terrorist known as 'Jihadi John' reportedly revealed,"The true identity of the ISIS terrorist known as ""Jihadi John,"" who has appeared in several videos showing the beheading of hostages, reportedly has been revealed.
+
+The Washington Post first reported Thursday, citing friends and human rights workers familiar with the case, that the man's real name is Mohammed Emwazi, a west London man who had been detained by counterterror officials in Britain at least once, in 2010.
+
+Two U.S. government sources who spoke to Reuters Thursday said investigators believe the man is Emwazi.
+
+According to The Washington Post and the BBC, Emwazi was born in Kuwait and studied computer programming at the University of Westminster. The university confirmed that a student of that name graduated in 2009.
+
+""If these allegations are true, we are shocked and sickened by the news,"" the university said in a statement.
+
+Emwazi is also thought to have traveled to Syria sometime in or around 2012.
+
+The BBC reported that British intelligence had previously identified the man, but had chosen not to disclose his name for operational reasons.
+
+Commander Richard Walton of the London Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command released a statement saying, ""We have previously asked media outlets not to speculate about the details of our investigation on the basis that life is at risk. We are not going to confirm the identity of anyone at this stage or give an update on the progress of this live counter-terrorism investigation.""
+
+London-based CAGE, which works with Muslims in conflict with British intelligence services, said Thursday its research director, Asim Qureshi, saw strong similarities between Emwazi and ""Jihadi John,"" but because of the hood worn by the militant, ""there was no way he could be 100 percent certain.""
+
+The Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King's College London, which closely tracks fighters in Syria, also said it believed the identification was correct.
+
+The masked and hooded terrorist achieved instant notoriety when he appeared in a video released by ISIS last August that showed the beheading of American journalist James Foley. At the time, many commentators and analysts remarked on the man's distinct London accent.
+
+The man is believed to have appeared in other videos that showed the beheading of other hostages, including American journalist Steven Sotloff, British aid worker David Haines, British taxi driver Alan Henning, and American aid worker Peter Kassig, known as Abdul-Rahman after his apparent conversion to Islam in captivity.
+
+The man's most recent appearance came last month in a video with Japanese hostages Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa. Both men also were killed by the terror group.
+
+The terrorist was given the nickname ""Jihadi John"" after interviews with former ISIS hostages revealed him to be part of a group of British jihadists who guarded the hostages and were dubbed ""The Beatles.""
+
+The BBC reported that Emwazi is believed to be an associate of a known terror suspect who traveled to Somalia in 2006, and is allegedly linked to a funding network for the Somali-based militant group Al Shabaab.
+
+CAGE said it has been in contact with Emwazi for more than two years after he accused British intelligence services of harassing him. It said that in 2010 he alleged British spies were preventing him from traveling to the country of his birth, Kuwait, where he planned to marry.
+
+No one answered the door at the brick row house in west London where the Emwazi family is alleged to have lived. Neighbors in the surrounding area of public housing projects either declined comment or said they didn't know the family.
+
+Neighbor Janine Kintenda, 47, who said she'd lived in the area for 16 years, was shocked at the news.
+
+""Oh my God,"" she told The Associated Press, lifting her hand to her mouth. ""This is bad. This is bad.""
+
+Shiraz Maher of the King's College radicalization center said he was investigating whether Emwazi was among a group of young West Londoners who traveled to Syria in about 2012.
+
+Many of them are now dead, including Mohammad el-Araj, Ibrahim al-Mazwagi and Choukri Ellekhlifi, all killed in 2013.
+
+He said Emwazi's background was similar to that of other British jihadis, and disproved the idea ""that these guys are all impoverished, that they're coming from deprived backgrounds.""
+
+""They are by and large upwardly mobile people, well educated,"" he said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8507,Jeremy Vine already tripping his tits off,"Tuesday 8 November 2016 by Lucas Wilde Jeremy Vine already tripping his tits off 
+Veteran election reporter Jeremy Vine has embarked on his usual pre-election broadcast ritual by taking a load of drugs and hallucinating maps of the USA, pie-charts and various other election-themed visages. 
+The least-funny of the Vine brothers usually waits until the polls close before cracking open his thermos flask full of hallucinogens, but has decided to get on it early this year. 
+“I can’t say I blame him” said Lucy Millwall, Head of CGI for BBC News. 
+“This election has been impressive only for sheer scale of mind-numbing awfulness. 
+“Honestly, you try pretending to give a shit about what Gary Johnson is up to without yawning. 
+“It’s actually intriguing watching him dance around an empty green room, imagining he’s kicking a football marked “Florida” between Trump and Clinton. 
+“We just computer-generate images around whatever he’s imagining. Technically we are ‘enabling’ him but fuck it; it’s really good telly. 
+“We’re always careful to cut away from him before he starts talking to Peter, the ‘Rapiest Giraffe of Them All’.” Jeremy Vine election coverage 
+Jeremy Vine has been taking LSD ever since John Major’s first election victory; the campaign proving so overwhelmingly dull that recreational drug use became BBC protocol for several weeks. 
+Vine is thought to be the only one to keep this up, apart from the Chuckle Brothers, who owe their youthful energy to a vigorous cocaine regimen. 
+After ballot day, it is thought that Vine will commence the mother of all comedowns, which should wear off just before his next pre-election bender for a Brexit-inspired snap election sometime next month. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+9824,“Homicides Up 55 Percent”–Chicago Stays Vibrant,"“Homicides Up 55 Percent”–Chicago Stays Vibrant > November 8, 2016, 10:44 am A+ | a- Warning   
+With Black Lives Matter seemingly on ice until after the election, Hillary’s campaign made it through October without America’s monthly riot (although I’d forgotten the big black flash mob attack on white Temple University students in Philadelphia). But Chicago, America’s role model for one-party Democratic rule, remained vibrant. From the Chicago Tribune : 
+Homicides up 55 percent in Chicago after another violent weekend 
+For the second weekend in a row, more than 50 people were shot in Chicago as the number of homicides this year rose to more than 50 percent above the same period last year. 
+More than 660 people have been killed in the city so far this year, according to data compiled by the Tribune. The number of people shot in Chicago this year is more than a thousand above what it was this time last year, from 2,620 to 3,795, according to Tribune data. 
+Mayor Rahm released video of a dubious police shooting late last November. Ever since, blacks have been blasting away at blacks in vast numbers, because Black Lives Matter. Or something. 
+From Friday afternoon to late Sunday, 10 people were killed and 41 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago, in addition to a man shot to death by police on Saturday, police said. 
+Among the wounded was a 78-year-old man who was dragged out of a car in Englewood on Sunday and shot in the head. He was listed in serious condition. 
+Five people were shot in a single attack in Uptown early Saturday morning, police said. 
+I used to live in Uptown. It’s diverse! 
+Two men, two women and a 17-year-old boy were shot about 1:35 a.m. in the 4800 block of North Winthrop Avenue. They were all taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in good condition. 
+Law enforcement sources said none of them provided details of the shooting to investigators.",FAKE
+3209,Jake Tapper to moderate 's first GOP debate,"Tapper, the host of the network's ""State of the Union"" Sunday show and ""The Lead"" on weekdays, was picked to lead the event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library on Sept. 16.
+
+The prime-time debate will actually be split into two parts: One with the candidates that national polls rank as the top 10 GOP contenders, and one with the candidates who didn't make that cut.
+
+The broad GOP field has presented a challenge for both Fox News and CNN as debate hosts.
+
+Fox News announced a plan for an August 6 debate that would only include the 10 candidates that were at the top of the heap, as determined by an average of national polls. Fox's proposed criteria created the most consternation, partly because it is hosting the first debate, partly because it is a favorite of conservatives, and partly because its rules are more restrictive than CNN's. Some Republican Party leaders in Iowa and New Hampshire have said they feel the use of national polls stomps on their roles as the first in the nation caucus and primary states, respectively. Tapper announced that he'll moderate the debate on Sunday, at the end of his first show as CNN's new ""State of the Union"" host.",REAL
+3124,"After tragic shooting, Charleston church reopens with prayer, songs and tears","CHARLESTON, S.C. — Emanuel AME Church swung open its doors for services Sunday, four days after a 21-year-old white man who told police he wanted “to start a race war” allegedly killed the pastor and eight congregants attending a Bible study in the church basement.
+
+Hundreds lined up in the hot Charleston sun to climb the stairs to the sanctuary of “Mother Emanuel,” one of the country’s oldest African American churches and one with a rich history of resilience. The organist played and church bells chimed as the choir sang “Blessed Assurance.”
+
+Worshipers from Charleston and across the country filled the pews and balcony of the church. Some watched the sermon from seats in the fellowship-hall basement — where the shooting occurred Wednesday.
+
+“This is our house of worship,” said the Rev. Norvell Goff, presiding elder of the Edisto District of the State Conference of the AME Church, addressing the congregants. “The doors of the church are open, praise be to God.”
+
+“No evildoer, no demon in hell or on Earth can close the doors of God’s church.”
+
+Many in the pews fanned themselves furiously, beating back a thick heat and their fragile emotions. People fought tears, rocking back and forth. Some comforted each other in long embraces. Ushers passed out bottles of cold water. And above them all loomed the pastor’s usual seat, empty, covered by a black cloth.
+
+In Emanuel AME’s nearly 200-year-old history, the congregation has withstood slavery, segregation, racially motivated laws to keep worshipers from meeting and fires set by angry, white mobs. But the massacre Wednesday of state Sen. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was the church’s pastor, and eight church members left many wondering how such a horrible tragedy could occur in a place they consider a safe haven.
+
+[For Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, shooting is another painful chapter in rich history]
+
+“It has been tough, it’s been rough, and some of us have been downright angry. But through it all, God has sustained us and encouraged us,” Goff said. “When times of trouble come into our lives, how do we respond? Do we respond by being afraid? Or do we respond in faith?”
+
+Goff encouraged the congregation to continue to pray and look to God for healing.
+
+“The blood of the Emanuel Nine requires us to work for not only justice in this case, but for those living on the margins of life,” he said. “We must stay on the battlefield until there is no more fight to be fought.”
+
+Reporters, he said, had asked him how some grieving family members who attended the bond hearing of suspect Dylann Roof could say they would forgive him. Roof, who was arrested Thursday in Shelby, N.C., about four hours away from the church, was charged with nine counts of murder and possessing a firearm in the commission of a violent crime.
+
+The families, Goff said, were holding on to a strong faith that teaches them to love their neighbors. “God is our refuge and our strength,” Goff said. “We ought to put our hope and trust in God.”
+
+Daniel E. Martin Jr., 52, who said his family has been on the membership rolls of Emanuel for more than 100 years, said the church would heal and grow stronger. “It’s painful and difficult, but if you know anything about the people of faith, Charlestonians, members of the church, you will understand when we come to church we receive the word of God.”
+
+His wife, Reba Martin, 54, a steward in the church, said when she walked in the church Sunday, she thought she saw Pinckney. “Pastor was so tall,” she said. “I can almost see him standing there with all the people who sat next to him in the pulpit.”
+
+Reba Martin said the congregation full of people who had come to share in the service was an answer to Pinckney’s dream of getting more people to come to church: “When pastor first came, our congregation was so small, he would say, ‘One day you will see the church full to the rafters.’ That happened today.”
+
+On Saturday, Charleston police gave church leaders permission to open the church. Church leaders met in the basement, which police had cleaned, covering bullet holes.
+
+“I was pleased when authorities made a phone call and said you can go back in Mother Emanuel,” Goff said. “The open doors of Emanuel on this Sunday sends a message to every demon in hell that no weapon formed against me shall prosper.”
+
+Many members said they looked forward to the church opening its doors. Others were still hesitant.
+
+“How do you bring yourself to a place where tragedy struck?” said Brandon Robinson, 26, minister of music of “Little Emanuel,” a sister church. “There is an opened wound. Someone lost a brother, a husband, a father, a sister and auntie.”
+
+Before sunrise Sunday, sextons — keepers of the church — began clearing a path amid hundreds of flower bouquets left on the church steps by mourners. Some lit white votive candles and prayed. Others threaded long-stemmed red and pink roses through the bars of the church’s gate.
+
+Police officers swept the church early in the morning and screened worshipers as they filed in. No backpacks were allowed in the building. At least half a dozen officers stood watch, sometimes passing out water and butterscotch candies to churchgoers.
+
+People, shaken by the tragedy, stood looking up at the church’s white steeple and prayed.
+
+“You have individuals across the country asking, ‘How could God allow something like this to happen?’ ” said the Rev. Branden Sweeper, 30, who was close friends with Pinckney. “Church is still the best place to be.”
+
+“Mother Emanuel,” as members call the church founded in 1816, is one of the oldest and largest AME churches in the South. The white stucco church with towering steeples, wooden rafters and arched stained-glass windows sits in downtown Charleston on Calhoun Street. The church was the site where in 1822, Denmark Vesey, a freed slave, planned one of the biggest slave insurrections in U.S. history.
+
+“When authorities were made aware of his plot, Vesey and a number of his followers were executed,” according to the book “African Methodism in South Carolina,” a collection of histories compiled by the AME Church.
+
+The church was burned down by white crowds. “And even more strict regulations were imposed on Charleston’s Black Churches,” the book said. By 1834, all black churches were closed by state law. Some members of the church joined white churches, and “others continued the tradition of the African church by worshiping underground.” In 1865, Emanuel AME resurfaced with 3,000 members.
+
+With the latest tragedy still looming large in the church Sunday, some members doubled over in grief, weeping for the victims.
+
+“There they were in the house of the Lord studying your word, praying with one another, but the Devil also entered,” an elder said in a prayer Sunday. “And the devil was trying to take charge. But thanks be to God — hallelujah — that the devil cannot take control over your people, and the devil cannot take control of the church.”
+
+Eartha Ugude drove eight hours Saturday from Port St. Lucie, Fla., compelled to be in the service. “I felt such a tremendous loss,” she said from her seat, 10 rows from the pulpit. “I felt helpless and tired — one more tragedy against our people.”
+
+The shooting, she said, was cowardly. The gunman “sat amongst them.”
+
+[Night of S.C. killings started with prayers and a plot against humanity]
+
+Goff preached that the members should not respond to the tragedy with fear. “Do we respond by being afraid? Or do we respond in faith?” Goff asked. “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord, because it is by faith we are standing here this morning.”
+
+Acknowledging the congregation has difficult days ahead, Goff said: “The only way evil can triumph is for good people to sit down and do nothing. We are children of God. We will march on to victory.”
+
+The service ended with a prayer, “May the people of God say Amen.” Members who filed out of the church said they were encouraged by the sermon.
+
+Marlene Coakley-Jenkins, whose sister Myra was killed in the church basement, said she was inspired.
+
+“I think the message was powerful, positive and compassionate,” Coakley-Jenkins said on the church steps. “Everything the family needed at this particular time. It gave us strength and faith. It allowed us to have all the emotions that an experience like this might conjure and more.”
+
+Someone asked her whether she was thinking of the shooter. “I pray at some point he finds God’s mercy,” she said. “God’s mercy is even there for him. We can’t afford to lose one soul on Earth. I am ready to forgive him. I have to because that would block so many blessings. Nothing grows positive out of hate.”
+
+[This post has been updated.]",REAL
+4016,Acting out of weakness? Why Obama's dangerously wrong about Putin's intentions in Syria,"In last Friday’s press conference, President Obama called Vladimir Putin’s incursion in Syria “an act of weakness.” It’s his pat answer when Putin misbehaves.
+
+The White House likes to portray the Kremlin as a place filled with petulant children who don't understand what's in their own best interest and will one day rue their misguided behavior. A mixture of condescension and patience may be an appropriate tactic in child rearing. But in a dangerous world, it's a lackadaisical prescription for disaster.
+
+Mr. Obama sees Putin's military adventure as a quagmire-in-waiting for the Kremlin. In the end, he believes, Moscow will lose more than it gains and find itself isolated and censured by the international community. This, he concludes, will leave Putin weaker than when he started.
+
+But there’s a problem with the president's line of thinking. Actually, there are several.
+
+First, there is no reason to believe that, just because entering a hot war in Syria is a bad idea, Putin won't pursue it with single-minded determination. After all, that is exactly what the Russian strongman did in Ukraine. Back then, Mr. Obama said it was a mistake and Putin would pay a price. And Putin did. The West tsunamied Russia with sanctions.
+
+The problem is: Putin hasn't stopped. He is still meddling in Ukraine. He’s also messing with Georgia. In fact, most Central European countries are on Russia watch.
+
+Second, powers inclined to “act out of weakness” can take some very dangerous and destructive steps when undeterred.
+
+That’s what happened Dec. 7, 1941. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor out of weakness. It was a foolish and risky overreach that eventually doomed the fortune of the Axis powers. But that’s cold comfort for the 2,403 who died in the attack or the millions who had to go to war to make things right.
+
+Sometimes it might make sense to give some actors space to ""learn their lesson."" But it’s simply irresponsible to let dangerous powers run amok in dangerous places, responding only with assurances that everything will work out in the end.
+
+In fact, Putin is using Syria as a distraction to get Europe and the U.S. to back off on countering Moscow's mischief in Ukraine. In the Kremlin's calculus, the best way follow-up bad behavior is… more acting badly.
+
+The White House, of course, can't really keep Moscow and Tehran from propping up Syrian not-so-strongman Bashar Assad if that is what they really want to do. In fact, Mr. Obama has effectively encouraged them to do so by negotiating at least $150 billion in sanctions relief for Iran—money that Tehran can use to bankroll the effort.
+
+And let's face it: the Syrian civil war is going to get worse. The U.S. lacks a compelling vital interest that demands we solve the problem. Nor does it make much sense to fight it out with Moscow and Tehran over Damascus.
+
+That said it would be wrong to ignore this disaster. And it would be wrong to condone Putin's irresponsible military gambit to bolster Assad, one of the top mass murderers of the 21st century.
+
+Instead, the White House should be taking reasonable steps to keep the region from getting worse: bolstering allies on the frontline; working with the Europeans to stem the flow of refugees; defeating ISIS, and marginalizing Russian and Iranian influence in the region.
+
+The president has a long Middle Eastern and European to-do list. But that’s largely the result of his failed foreign policy, which has helped empower all the wrong people while offending our best friends.
+
+Mr. Obama has a little over a year to make amends. He needs to get started now.
+
+
+
+James Jay Carafano is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies  The Heritage Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @JJCarafano.",REAL
+6632,"Black Agenda Radio for Week of Nov. 7, 2016","News, information and analysis from the black left. Black Agenda Radio for Week of Nov. 7, 2016 Submitted by Nellie Bailey a... on Mon, 11/07/2016 - 19:35 Venezuela Hi-Tech Production in the Service of Humanity in Mississippi 
+Renaissance Jackson, the organization that briefly won the mayor’s office in predominantly Black Jackson, Mississippi, has launched a campaign to purchase a coding and programming capacity and a 3-D fabrication facility. They call it “Fab Lab.” This technology, “if it is democratically controlled, could actually serve humanity,” said Cooperation Jackson spokesman Kali Akuno . These kinds of projects are crucial, “first and foremost, to satisfy some of the basic needs of our community, and -- on a deeper level -- to really put this means of production directly in our community’s hands.” High tech is “one of these areas of the so-called ‘digital divide’ that Black people have been sorely and strategically absent from,” said Akuno. “So, we are doing it for ourselves.” Obamacare “Imploding and Beyond Repair” 
+The current wave of insurance rate hikes and medical service cutbacks is the predictable result of an Affordable Care Act (ACA) that “was pretty much a gift to the health insurance industry” when Congress passed it, in 2010, said Dr. John Geyman , professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, in Seattle. ACA “was never designed for affordability -- it’s a misnomer in the name of the bill,” he said. Obamacare is “imploding and beyond repair,” and unsustainable. “Tweeks cannot work in the long term. The main fight should be for what will save money and give universal coverage to everyone: namely, single payer national health insurance.” Dr. Geyman said single payer healthcare could save $500 billion a year -- about the same as the entire U.S. “defense” budget. The Fight for Education for Liberation in Detroit 
+At a “Community Conversation on the Crisis in the Schools,” Detroit activists, educators and parents gathered to address the question: “Who Created the School Crisis, and How are We Responding to it?” Among those wrestling with the issue was Dr. Thomas Pedroni , professor of Curriculum Studies at Wayne State University. He said the decline began with the state takeover of schools in the 1990s, and worsened dramatically after the imposition of state-appointed “emergency managers.” “School could be one of the most meaningful places for our communities, but instead, it’s deadened,” Dr. Pedroni told the crowd at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. “But, we’re going to fight to get back to the place where we have culturally relevant curriculum, not just producing a test score but to develop people who are self-empowered and who know how to fight for their community.” Venezuela Weathering Financial Storm, Despite Disinformation Campaign 
+“I challenge you to find one item of news that is positive to Venezuela in these last 16 or 17 years,” said Maria Paez Victor , a Venezuelan-born sociologist living in Toronto, Canada, and author of an article titled “Hating Venezuela.” Ms. Victor said the United States and its rightwing allies in Venezuela have kept up a non-stop disinformation campaign ever since the late Hugo Chavez and his Socialist Party were democratically elected in 1998. A crisis triggered by the collapse of world oil prices allowed the opposition to capture the legislature, last year, but Victor says the government is coping. “Venezuela has managed to weather a terrible financial situation, but this is bad news for corporate capitalism and for the United States, because they want Venezuela to be controlled by their lackies.” Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.",FAKE
+7794,Juror in Oregon militia trial dismissed for bias: judge,"Reuters 
+A juror in the trial of seven militia members charged with seizing a U.S. wildlife refuge in Oregon at gunpoint earlier this year was dismissed for bias, a federal judge said on Wednesday. 
+Prosecutors and defense attorneys in the case agreed to the dismissal of the juror, who formerly worked for the federal Bureau of Land Management, after U.S. District Judge Anna Brown said the juror would be questioned more closely about comments he may have made about his bias. 
+“It’s a new jury, a new day, a new start,” Brown said. 
+Brown said deliberations by the jury would start over. An alternate will step in for the dismissed juror. 
+The attorney for Ammon Bundy, the leader of those charged, asked the court in a motion on Wednesday morning to dismiss the juror in question and order the jury to begin deliberations again or declare a mistrial. 
+The jury’s integrity came under scrutiny on Tuesday when it sent the judge a letter saying one juror admitted being “very biased” as deliberations began last week. 
+“Can a juror, a former employee of the Bureau of Land Management, who opens their remarks in deliberations by stating ‘I am very biased …’ be considered an impartial judge in this case?’ the letter stated, according to the motion by Bundy’s lawyer, Marcus Mumford. 
+While it was unclear whether the supposed bias of the juror, identified as Juror No. 11, was for or against the government, Mumford had said further questioning of the person was needed. 
+Brown interviewed the juror in private on Tuesday and said she found “no basis” for determining he was biased. Prosecutors had previously opposed additional interrogation of the jury.",FAKE
+10538,An Angry John Podesta Issues A Statement On “Reopening” Of FBI Probe,"While Hillary has yet to address today’s stunning letter by FBI director Comey, who reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigations has “opened” a probe into Hillary Clinton’s email as a result of “findings” on what the NYT reported was an electronic device belonging to Anthony Wiener, a clearly angry John Podesta, Clinton’s recently hacked campaign chair, issued the following statement in Response to FBI Letter to GOP Congressional Chairmen.
+In response to the letter sent by FBI Director James Convey to eight Republican committee chairman in Congress, Hillary for America Chair John Podesta released the following statement Friday: 
+Upon completing this investigation more than three months ago, FBI Director Comet’ declared no reasonable prosecutor would move forward with a case like this and added that it was not even a close call. In the months since, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have been baselessly second-guessing the FBI and, in both public and private, browbeating the career officials there to revisit their conclusion in a desperate attempt to harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
+FBI Director Comey should immediately provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter he sent to eight Republican committee chairmen . Already, we have seen characterizations that the FBI is ‘reopening’ an investigation but Comey’s words do not match that characterization. Director Comey’s letter refers to emails that have come to light in an unrelated case, but we have no idea what those emails are and the Director himself notes they may not even be significant.
+It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election. 
+The Director owes it to the American people to immediately provide the full details of what he is now examining. We are confident this will not produce any conclusions different from the one the FBI reached in July.”
+Source: Zero Hedge 
+",FAKE
+9280,300 US Marines To Be Deployed To Russian Border In Norway,"« Previous - Next » 300 US Marines To Be Deployed To Russian Border In Norway 
+It has long been a controversy for the United States often getting involved in affairs that shouldn't necessarily involve them. Many other countries believe that the United State is nothing more warmongers who lust for more power and authority over the many weaker countries throughout the world, hence the history of unwarranted wars that have taken place throughout. 
+Some of these range from the Vietnam War, which was shown to have been a basis that never existed in the Gulf of Tonkin event. Another infamous event includes the idea to invade Iraq, which included the destruction of many innocent people, but did not assist in any way for any other country. It created more hatred however. Troops From US May Open Up Shop In Norway 
+Despite all this, it is now being believed that US troops may be joining their NATO ally in Norway by stationing troops in the country of Norway. It is expected to involve over 300 marines going to Norway. This is troubling as it is the first time foreign troops have come to the country, since the devastating events of World War ll. Could this possibly be a preparation for World War lll, if the United States is coming to a country that is near Russia? 
+It could affect Norway as the Defense Minister has expressed serious concern regarding the Russian military, which has continued to flex its muscles through the takeover of many smaller countries with mere ease. Norway has come under some fire about the decision to involve the United States as some believe this is not a good signal to show to someone that opposes them as it looks like they are welcoming the idea of a war . 
+Some also believe that Norway should try to defend itself by reinforcing its own army rather than involving the United States troops to give them a helping hand. Some also believe that it makes them look rather weak if they are instantly calling upon their strongest ally in the United States to help them as soon as they start to have a fear of a certain situation. 
+What remains unknown is what may develop upon stationing these troops. Is World War lll on the cusp of existence with the strategic and sudden move by Norway? Hopefully not, because this could easily be as devastating as all of the other wars combined, given the advancement of fighting techniques. 
+This article (300 US Marines To Be Deployed To Russian Border In Norway) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
+2946,"Jordanian fighter jets strike hard at ISIS, pay tribute to murdered pilot","Jordanian fighter pilots carried out devastating sorties against ISIS early Thursday, making good on their king's vow of vengeance for the horrific burning death of a captured airman -- whose hometown the jets buzzed triumphantly after the mission.
+
+Reports from the Middle East said the latest strikes killed 55 members of ISIS, including a senior commander known as the “Prince of Nineveh.” They came a day after King Abdullah stepped up his angry rhetoric at the terrorist army in neighboring Iraq and Syria following the horrific death of Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, who was burned alive in a cage in a shocking atrocity caught on a videotape released by Islamic State on Tuesday.
+
+""The blood of martyr Muath al-Kaseasbeh will not be in vain and the response of Jordan and its army after what happened to our dear son will be severe,"" said King Abdullah in a statement released by the royal court on Wednesday. A day earlier, he told U.S. lawmakers in Washington, where he had been on a diplomatic mission when the video was released, that Jordan would fight Islamic State until it ran ""out of fuel and bullets.""
+
+Jordanian state-run media did not specify where the strikes took place, but U.S. officials told Fox News the strikes by 20 Jordanian F-16s took place at Thursday at 1 p.m. local time near the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, and said “lots of ammunition” was expended. They said U.S. Air Force flew air refuellers and radar jammers in support.
+
+Jordan had previously been divided on its participation in airstrikes against Islamic State, with many questioning why the country was involving itself in the fight. But rage expressed on the street and given clear voice by the king has shown public sentiment in Jordan, where the military is revered, is solidly behind the newly invigorated campaign.
+
+Jordan’s information minister, Mohammad al-Momani told AFP: Amman was “more determined than ever to fight the terrorist group Daesh,” using another name for Islamic State, which is also commonly referred to as ISIS. And a government spokesman said Jordan would step up its role in the U.S.-led fight against the militant group.
+
+Thursday's airstrikes came just hours after Jordan executed two militant prisoners in response to the killing of Kasseasbeh. But the pilot’s father told Reuters the two executions were not enough to avenge his son’s death.
+
+""I want the state to get revenge for my son's blood through more executions of those people who follow this criminal group that shares nothing with Islam,"" Safi al-Kasseasbeh told Reuters.
+
+The returning fighter jets roared over Al-Kaseasbeh's hometown in southern Jordan as the king paid a condolence visit to the pilot's family, and the monarch, himself a former general and special forces commander, pointed at the planes as he sat next to the pilot's father.
+
+Abdullah has said Jordan's response ""will be harsh because this terrorist organization is not only fighting us, but also fighting Islam and its pure values.""
+
+In prepared remarks delivered in Washington Thursday by Jordan's ambassador to the U.S., Abdullah said the global Muslim community is the primary target of terrorists in the Middle East.
+
+“These criminals aim to stamp out life and rights everywhere. Their hate and murder has reached Asia, Europe, Africa, America and Australia,"" Abdullah said. ""By the brutal killing of their prisoners and captives, they seek to hold families across the world hostage to their cruelty.""
+
+The Guardian reported that radio and television stations played patriotic songs and F-16 jets performed flyovers over the capital and Al-Kaseasbeh's hometown.
+
+""I swear to God we will kill all those pigs,"" one man said of the terror group. ""Whatever it takes to finish them is what we will do.""
+
+""We are all Hashemites and we are following the government with no reservations in this fight against these godless terrorists,"" a cafe patron, Yousf Majid al-Zarbi, told the paper. ""Have you seen that video? I mean really, how in humanity could this be a just punishment for any person?""
+
+Jordan had previously been thought to be home to thousands of supporters of ISIS. The kingdom is beset by several social problems, including a sharp economic downturn that has led to high unemployment among young men, who are typically a reservoir of potential ISIS recruits. Adding to a potentially destabilizing mix are the presence of hundreds of thousands of war refugees from Iraq and Syria who have poured across the border in the preceding decade.
+
+In recent months, Jordanian authorities have rounded up dozens of suspected ISIS supporters. In an early response to the grisly video, Jordan executed two Iraqi Al Qaeda prisoners, Sajida al-Rishawi and Zaid al-Karbouly, before sunrise Wednesday.
+
+In Washington, lawmakers from both parties have called on the Obama administration to speed up deliveries of aircraft parts, night-vision equipment and other weapons to Jordan.
+
+Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he expected his panel to swiftly approve legislation calling for increased aid. He repeated his criticism that the Obama administration has ""no strategy"" for dealing with the Islamic State group, and said he hoped the video of Al-Kaseasbeh's death will galvanize not only U.S. leadership but ""the Arab world.""
+
+All 26 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Jordan's situation and the unanimity of the coalition battling the extremists ""demands that we move with speed to ensure they receive the military materiel they require.""
+
+At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest said the administration would consider any aid package put forward by Congress, but that the White House would be looking for a specific request from Jordan's government.
+
+Fox News' Mike Emanuel and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8336,ISIS shoots down Russian helicopter near Palmyra (VIDEO+PHOTOS),"November 4, 2016 - Fort Russ News -  RusVesna - translated by J. Arnoldski -  
+
+
+As previously reported by Russian Spring, ISIS’ media wing, and the Al-Amak agency, on the evening of November 3rd, a Russian helicopter was shot down near Palmyra in the Khveisis village district in the Syrian province of Homs.  
+Later, the Ministry of Defense of Russia denied reports that Russian servicemen were killed. The ministry did confirm that during the execution of a special operation on humanitarian cargo delivery on November 3rd, a Russian military helicopter made an emergency landing 40 kilometers northwest of Palmyra and its crew was successfully evacuated by Russian search and rescue forces.  
+Earlier, ISIS terrorists reported that the Russian armed force’s helicopter was shot down by a guided missile.  
+The terrorists have just published footage of the rescue operation and the destruction of the Mi-35 helicopter in the desert near Palmyra. The video and photos clearly show Russian special forces on armored Tiger cars and KamA3 “Vystrel” evacuating the crew with an Mi-8 military transport helicopter. 
+
+
+During the rescue helicopter’s takeoff, the damaged Mi-35 exploded, after which special forces orderly left the scene on armored vehicles and in the Mi-8. The rescue helicopter shot flares to protect against MPADS. 
+On social networks, it has been suggested that the helicopter could have been detonated by special forces because of the impossibility of taking it back to base. According to another theory, the Mi-35 exploded after being hit by an MPAD rocket fired by militants. 
+The Center for Reconciliation of Warring Parties in Syria subsequently reported the details of the emergency situation: “During the inspection of the helicopter by the crew on the scene, the landing area was subjected to mortar fire by militants. The helicopter was damaged, preventing it from independently returning to its air base.”  
+The Russian defense ministry also specified that the Mi-35 crew did not suffer and was rapidly evacuated by the search and rescue helicopter to the Russian military base at Hmeimim in the province of Latakia. At the time, the fate of the damaged aircraft was not known. 
+
+The Mi-35 combat helicopter was alleged to have been carrying out the military task of covering a transport helicopter delivering humanitarian aid.  
+
+
+    
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
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+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
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+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+8883,The Sad Evolution Of Education Summed Up By One Meme,"You are here: Home / US / The Sad Evolution Of Education Summed Up By One Meme The Sad Evolution Of Education Summed Up By One Meme October 26, 2016 Pinterest 
+Robert Gehl reports that the City of Portland has come up with a genius idea to get America’s schoolchildren back on track. 
+With our nation’s educational system in shambles and our students doing worse and worse compared with other nations (worse than Slovakia? ), school officials have decided to ban homework. 
+That’s the big plan from folks whose city has the most strip bars per capita and whose motto is: “Keep Portland Weird.” 
+The plan – to ban all homework in elementary schools – went into effect with the start of school this week. 
+Instead, OregonLive reports , here is what the school tells students to do with their free time: “Cuddle with your parents. Play board games with your siblings. Pick up a favorite book to read or be read to. Run around and be as active as you can.” 
+Officials claim that giving young kids homework doesn’t help their test scores at all … 
+Why ban homework? A team of teachers at Cherry Park Elementary in the David Douglas school district in East Portland dug into the research and found that, while high school students learn more when they do homework, for elementary pupils, there is little to no evidence homework does any good. 
+But further down, we discover the true motive behind their homework ban: Racism . 
+Principal Kate Barker says assigning regular homework isn’t a fabulous idea at any elementary school, but especially not at Cherry Park, where at least 75 percent of students live at or below the poverty line and families speak more than 30 different languages. 
+“We find that homework really increases that inequity,” Barker said. “It provides a barrier to our students who need the most support.” 
+That’s right. They’re not saying homework doesn’t help. What they’re saying – and trust me, I’m a teacher – is that homework doesn’t help poor people (they mean minorities) and that if it doesn’t help poor people, then nobody should do it. 
+The truth is that lower-income families have less time to spend with their children – making sure they do their homework, helping them with it. So fewer of the lower-income, minority kids do it. 
+So rather than find a way to get these parents to spend more time helping their kids, they’re giving up and just banning homework altogether. 
+Barker says the school will carefully monitor if students are making enough academic progress and will tweak things if they are not. But making better use of the school day, not assigning homework, will be the strategy if change is needed, she said. 
+Teachers got on board with the no-homework policy once the rationale was explained, Barker said. Parents have been 100 percent in favor of the change. 
+And the students? They, she said, “are cheering.” 
+And that’s why our school system is failing. 
+Keeping Portland weird. Weird and stupid.",FAKE
+3869,Obama Plans to Press Ahead With Guantanamo Bay Closure,"The White House is emphasizing President Barack Obama’s willingness to take executive action to meet one of his earliest campaign promises – closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – a rhetorical shift that suggests growing recognition that Congress is unlikely to take the steps needed to shutter the controversial facility.",REAL
+6887,German Defense Minister warns Donald Trump to stay away from Russia and commit full to NATO,"November 12, 2016 2703 German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said the US president-elect needs to understand NATO is more about values than business-like behavior. Share on Facebook 
+German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen is in panic mode. Her fear is that Trump may actually call out NATO’s uselessness…and that would mean Germany, and other NATO freeloaders, may actually have pay for their own security. 
+That is why, when von der Leyen warns Trump to not even think about rapprochement with Russia, she is signaling her fear that such a rapprochement would mean the end of her and her war hungry cronies. 
+When von der Leyen tells Trump that NATO stood by the US after the 9/11 attacks, and that NATO “isn’t just a business,” she is trying to kiss Trump’s ass, and admitting that NATO is in fact a “business.” 
+And of course no NATO grand standing would be complete without the exhausted and fictional argument that NATO is actually useful in countering Moscow on Syria and Ukraine. 
+RT reports … 
+Appearing on the ZDF Thursday show ‘Maybrit Illner’, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen emotionally argued that the US president-elect needs to understand NATO is more about values than business-like behavior. 
+She also went on to address some unfounded speculation circulating in Western capitals, namely that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are in a ‘bromance’ – a kind of relationship between the two leaders that would benefit bilateral ties between Moscow and Washington. 
+Therefore, the Defense Minister continued, the issues of the Ukrainian conflict and the ongoing anti-terrorist efforts in the Syrian city of Aleppo are not to be taken off the table during discussions with Moscow. 
+Here are some of von der Leyen remarks to Trump with regard to NATO… 
+“What his advisers will hopefully tell him and what he needs to learn is that NATO isn’t just a business. It’s not a company.” 
+“I don’t know how he values NATO.” 
+“You can’t say ‘the past doesn’t matter, the values we share don’t matter’ but instead try to get as much money out of [NATO] as possible and whether I can have a nice deal out of it,” 
+“Donald Trump has to say clearly on which side he is. Whether he is on the side of the law, peaceful order and democracy or whether he does not care about this and is looking instead for a best buddy.” 
+For his part, Trump has been lukewarm on the whole NATO charade…and rightly so. RT reminds us of what Trump has said about NATO … 
+During his election campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly voiced skepticism towards the bloc, calling it “obsolete” in the era of fighting terrorism worldwide. 
+“Maybe NATO will dissolve and that’s OK, not the worst thing in the world,” he said earlier. 
+Trump, however, earlier dismissed claims he favors Putin both personally and as a political leader, saying on NBC in September: 
+“I don’t know him, I know nothing about him really. I just think if we got along with Russia that’s not a bad thing.” 
+Trump has also suggested that the US should not engage too much in defending European allies. 
+“Hey, NATO allies,” Trump wrote in a Facebook post in July, “If we are not reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting you, I will tell you – congratulations, you will be defending yourself.” ",FAKE
+2611,Netanyahu walks back Palestinian state comment,"(CNN) President Barack Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the United States would ""reassess"" aspects of its relationship with Israel after Netanyahu's provocative statements leading up to Tuesday's Israeli election.
+
+The phone call Thursday was officially described as a message of congratulations on Netanyahu's victory, but it also carried a serious warning after the prime minister opposed the creation of a Palestinian state in the last days of his campaign.
+
+""The President told the Prime Minister that we will need to re-assess our options following the Prime Minister's new positions and comments regarding the two state solution,"" according to a White House official.
+
+According to an official statement put out after the call, the president also emphasized the United States' ""long-standing commitment to a two-state solution"" during their conversation.
+
+Earlier Thursday, Netanyahu walked back his disavowal of a two-state solution, a position he endorsed in an effort to appeal to right-wing voters with polls showing him facing tough competition.
+
+U.S. officials had already said that they have been waiting to see if Netanyahu would stand behind the campaign comments nixing a Palestinian state as he moves toward forming a governing coalition.
+
+It took two days for Netanyahu's about face.
+
+""I don't want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution,"" Netanyahu said Thursday in an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. ""I haven't changed my policy.""
+
+White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, speaking before the call, had stopped short of saying that the U.S. reassessment would include offering support for a U.N. resolution calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state. The resolution is opposed by Jerusalem, but U.S. officials have floated it as a possibility in the wake of Netanyahu's remarks.
+
+Asked by Israeli news site NRG on Monday if he was ruling out the formation of a Palestinian state while he's prime minister, Netanyahu responded, ""Indeed."" He also blasted the idea of such a state given the security challenges facing Israel.
+
+Netanyahu's comments Monday were seen as a key part to his Tuesday election victory but also ""raised significant concerns"" with senior administration officials back in Washington, who view ruling out a two-state solution as a significant setback for U.S.-Israel relations as it goes against more than a decade of American policy.
+
+On Thursday, Netanyahu said his comments were a reflection of changing conditions on the Palestinian side, pointing to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's pact to form a unity government with Hamas, which Israel, the U.S. and most European countries consider a terrorist organization. He put the onus on Palestinian leaders to create conditions favorable for peace.
+
+""I'm talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable,"" Netanyahu said Thursday. ""If you want to get peace, you've got to get the Palestinian leadership to abandon their pact with Hamas and engage in genuine negotiations with Israel.""
+
+Netanyahu said he supports the same conditions for negotiating a sustainable peace that he staked out in 2009: a demilitarized Palestinian state whose leadership recognizes Israel as a Jewish state.
+
+Netanyahu also walked back another controversial campaign remark, in which he urged his supporters to go out to counteract the effect of Arab voters who he said were rushing to the polls ""in droves.""
+
+Earnest on Thursday said those comments ""erode at the values that are critical to the bond between our two countries.""
+
+""I wasn't trying to suppress the vote ... I was calling on our voters to come out,"" Netanyahu said. ""I'm very proud to be the prime minister of all Israel's citizens.""
+
+Netanyahu went on to say that he drew support from ""quite a few Arab voters"" and spoke of ""free and fair elections"" in Israel that aren't commonplace in the rest of the Middle East.
+
+Netanyahu also shrugged off the criticism of the Obama administration.
+
+The Israeli prime minister pointed to the ""unbreakable bond"" between the U.S. and Israel and downplayed strains in his personal relationship with Obama.
+
+""America has no greater ally than Israel and Israel has no greater ally than the United States,"" Netanyahu said. ""We'll work together. We have to.""",REAL
+9119,Trump Votes Are Being Flipped To Clinton,"Trump Votes Are Being Flipped To Clinton There have already been multiple reports of faulty electronic voting machines The Alex Jones Show - October 28, 2016 Comments 
+The election fraud is already being documented with many votes for Donald Trump flipping to Hillary Clinton. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . The Most Offensive Halloween EVER! - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force",FAKE
+3904,Angela Merkel to Visit White House on Feb. 9,"President Barack Obama will play host to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Washington, D.C. next week, the White House announced Monday.
+
+Ms. Merkel will visit the White House on Feb. 9, where she and the president are expected to discuss issues like Russia, Ukraine, counterterrorism and the challenges in the broader Middle East. The two leaders will have an Oval Office meeting followed by a working lunch.",REAL
+292,Will Nancy Pelosi miss John Boehner? Depends.,"""It depends on what comes next,"" Pelosi told CNN's Jake Tapper in an interview set to air in full Sunday on ""State of the Union.""
+
+Pelosi, who has been the top House Democrat opposite Boehner at the negotiating table since Boehner took the helm of the House GOP caucus in 2007, called Boehner a ""very fine person.""
+
+Boehner announced Friday that he has decided to resign his seat in Congress effective Oct. 30.
+
+""We can agree to disagree without being negative about each other. But, uh, yeah, I don't know if I'll miss him,"" Pelosi said. ""We just work. We barely have time for our close friends and some of our close friends are across the aisle.""
+
+But as hardline conservatives within the House GOP caucus eye Boehner's exit as an opportunity to install a new House speaker who will be more intransigent on conservative causes and less willing to compromise with Democrats, Boehner's absence could also signal a more difficult legislative process for Democrats. While Pelosi and Boehner have engaged in numerous partisan spats over the years, Boehner ultimately drew fire from tea party conservatives in his party who wanted him to take a harder line in negotiations with Democrats -- believing that he was too quick to compromise. Just a day before Boehner announced his resignation, the top House Democrat and Republican together enjoyed the visit of Pope Francis. The two are both devout Catholics and Pelosi noted Boehner's role in helping to organize the visit. ""He had his glorious moment with the Pope coming this week. He is a devout Catholic,"" Pelosi said.",REAL
+7325,War is eminent,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 13 + 12 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
+2216,Why Obama Has His Work Cut Out For Him On Getting Trade Votes,"Why Obama Has His Work Cut Out For Him On Getting Trade Votes
+
+The Obama administration finds itself in the rare position of fighting alongside House Republicans this week as it tries to overcome Friday's stinging defeat to its massive trade package, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
+
+The defeat came when Speaker John Boehner split the president's agenda that passed the Senate in May into two parts: one was Trade Promotion Authority, also known as fast-track — a law that allows Obama to negotiate the deal, then have Congress pass it with an up-or-down vote, with no debate. The other was Trade Adjustment Assistance, a safety net aimed at retraining any U.S. workers who might lose their jobs as a result of the new trade package.
+
+The simplified version of what happened is this: Democrats really like TAA. Republicans like TPA. Boehner split them into separate votes, hoping Dems and Republicans would vote for the respective parts they liked. The Obama administration really needs TPA to negotiate the trade deal, and so to torpedo the whole deal, Democrats voted down the worker assistance package in huge numbers.
+
+So now, there's nothing to do but wait. The House voted today to give themselves until July 30 to get the votes they need to get the package passed. And by the numbers, it's clear that Obama and the House GOP have their work cut out for them in procuring those votes.
+
+In an extremely polarized Congress, that's an unusually haphazard-looking mix of votes. To understand exactly who voted how and why, we've broken the vote down into four groups.
+
+No on both: 143 Democrats, 49 Republicans
+
+Who they are: Liberal democrats (including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi) and conservative Republicans.
+
+What it means: The Democrats that have tended to be against TPP have also tended to be more liberal Dems — like Maryland's Donna Edwards and Minnesota's Keith Ellison — who have no problem breaking with President Obama. This group of House Dems are so against TPP that they were willing to sink TAA, a policy Dems tend to like. The other thing that makes this group notable? It's huge — 143 Democrats voted no on both parts of a deal the administration badly wants to pass. The question is how many (if any) Obama can peel away from this group, given that Rep. Pelosi herself, House minority leader, was willing to break with him.
+
+The Republicans on this side, meanwhile, include many members of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of lawmakers trying to swing their leadership's agenda even further to the right, like Idaho's Raul Labrador and Michigan's Justin Amash. These Republicans who voted against the trade agenda have given a mix of reasons — they're concerned about jobs, they think the deal is too secretive, and they simply don't want to give Obama more power, for example.
+
+Yes on both: 27 Democrats, 81 Republicans
+
+Who they are: Pro-TPP Republicans, Obama allies, and members in centrist, contested districts.
+
+What it means: This group includes Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, one of the loudest supporters of TPP over the last few months. Among the few Democrats was Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, falling in line behind Obama, and more centrist Dems like Texas' Henry Cuellar and California's Jim Costa. It also notably contains a few lawmakers facing tough reelection challenges from the other party next year — Nebraska Democrat Brad Ashford and Republicans Carlos Curbelo of Florida, Iowa's Rod Blum, and Illinois' Bob Dold. Voting for both TPA and TAA may be a way for these lawmakers to show they're capable of reaching out across the aisle.
+
+This group also notably includes some Democrats — Kathleen Rice of New York and Ami Bera of California — who took heat from labor for their support. Labor ran ads in those states slamming those lawmakers, even saying they didn't mind if a Republican won in Bera's district, as Politico reported.
+
+No on worker assistance, yes on fast-track: 1 Democrat, 109 Republicans
+
+Who they are: John Boehner and the largest chunk of Republicans.
+
+What it means: There's a reason virtually no Democrats (save Texas' Ruben Hinojosa) voted this way — this is the vote for what Republicans wanted and against the Democrat-friendly portion of the bill. Republicans have in the past viewed TAA as an expensive, ineffective, necessary evil for getting trade deals passed, as AEI's Alex Brill wrote after the vote. These are the lawmakers who took the opportunity to make it clear they see TAA as unnecessary.
+
+Yes on worker assistance, no on fast-track: 13 Democrats, 5 Republicans
+
+Who they are: Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and a dozen other Dems, plus a few moderate Republicans.
+
+What it means: This tiny, Democrat-dominated group did what Boehner had expected many Dems would do — they took the opportunity to vote for worker assistance and against Trade Promotion Authority, thinking that even if a trade deal they didn't like passed, they would at least be supporting the policy they do like.
+
+Now, there's potentially a month and a half for Obama and pro-TPP Republicans to try to get the votes they need on TAA. But not everyone is optimistic. As Maryland Democratic Rep. and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer told reporters on Tuesday, ""There's more time now. Now, whether there's – six weeks, that's what we're talking about, six, seven weeks approximately – whether there's sufficient time to bridge the gaps is probably questionable.""",REAL
+10529,Women Should Vote With Their Husbands,"Taki's Magazine October 28, 2016 
+This election is going to have unprecedented political infidelity. A good 20 percent of husbands for Trump predict their wife won’t vote with them. This is wrong for a number of reasons but the biggie is, a family is supposed to be a cohesive unit. He can’t have his better half canceling out his vote. Even if a husband wants to vote badly—say, for Hillary—his wife should stand by her man and make the same mistake. Nobody’s saying there can’t be discussions and women shouldn’t have their own political beliefs, but the final decision comes down to the guy paying the bills and she should abide by that. This is counterintuitive because we live in a feminist fantasyland, but it’s really the same as deciding where your family is going to live. A married couple agree where they’re going to go based on what’s best for the kids. If he gets an amazing job offer in Cleveland but she’s a city gal from Manhattan, she needs to accept that Ohio is best for the future of their family. Voting is the same. You’re deciding where the country is going to go based on what’s best for future generations. 
+Unfortunately, this is not happening. A map of America “if just men voted” is almost completely red, whereas a map of America “if just women voted” is almost completely blue. The maps don’t differentiate between married and single, but judging by this massive split in what gender likes what candidate, we can assume the married map would be similar. Single people are a lost cause anyway. The women vote almost exclusively out of spite. They are voting for Hillary because she has a pussy, they hate Trump because he grabbed one, and they elected Obama because he makes theirs wet (they elected Trudeau because he is one). As for single men, I’m not convinced they even vote . There are also stay-at-home dads and situations where the woman is the breadwinner. This is awkward, but if you’ve made her the patriarch then her husband (a.k.a. wife) needs to vote with her. For the most part, however, we’re talking about a home where the father makes the lion’s share of the money and the woman’s contribution is using her magic powers to make babies. They have a symbiotic relationship where they’re both utilizing their greatest strengths. Patriarchs are best at driving, so he’s the helmsman. He doesn’t want to fight about it because he doesn’t want to rock the boat, but for her to turn starboard while he’s going port is to split everything in half and now the whole family is drowning. Voting against your husband is a tiny divorce. The Best of Gavin McInnes Tags: Described as ""The Godfather of Hipsterdom,"" Canadian expat Gavin McInnes is a writer who cofounded Vice Magazine in 1994. After selling his shares in early 2008, he cofounded the website Street Carnage as well as the advertising agency Rooster New York where he serves as creative director. He is a regular on the Fox News show Red Eye and recently published a book of memoirs with Simon & Schuster entitled How to Piss in Public. Follow @Gavin_McInnes on Twitter.",FAKE
+4686,"Trump won’t commit to accepting election results, at fiery final debate with Clinton","Donald Trump would not commit Wednesday night to accepting the results of the presidential election if he loses on Nov. 8, in a striking moment during his final debate with Hillary Clinton that underscored the deepening tensions in the race – as the bitter rivals defined the choice for voters on an array of issues not three weeks from Election Day.
+
+The debate in Las Vegas, moderated by Fox News’ Chris Wallace, started with a measured discussion on policy disputes ranging from gun rights to abortion to immigration. But it ended with the candidates hurling a grab-bag of accusations and insults at each other.
+
+Trump called Clinton a “nasty woman.” Clinton called Trump the “most dangerous” person to run for president in modern history.
+
+The most pointed moment came when Trump – who for weeks has warned of a “rigged” election – was asked whether he will commit to accept the results of the election.
+
+“I will look at it at the time,” Trump said, citing his concerns about voter registration fraud, a “corrupt media” and an opponent he claimed “shouldn’t be allowed to run” because she committed a “very serious crime” with her emails.
+
+Pressed again whether he’s prepared to concede if he loses, Trump again said: “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.”
+
+“That is not the way our democracy works,” she said. “He is denigrating, he’s talking down our democracy and I for one am appalled.”
+
+Trump responded by calling the Justice Department’s handling of her email probe “disgraceful.”
+
+The exchange was among many contentious moments at Wednesday’s debate, which covered several issues including the national debt that have gotten little attention in the race so far – but flared with arguments between the candidates over WikiLeaks, over Russia, over the Clinton Foundation and over women’s allegations of groping against Trump.
+
+Through the thicket of accusations and personal animus – they never shook hands on stage – the candidates tried generally to mount a closing debate-stage argument about experience.
+
+“For 30 years, you’ve been in a position to help. … The problem is you talk, but you don’t get anything done, Hillary,” Trump said. “If you become president, this country is going to be in some mess, believe me.”
+
+Clinton countered by contrasting some of her experiences against Trump’s. She said when she was monitoring the Usama bin Laden raid in the Situation Room, “He was hosting ‘The Celebrity Apprentice.’”
+
+“I’m happy to compare my 30 years of experience … with your 30 years, and I will let the American people make that decision,” Clinton said.
+
+Trump, meanwhile, again disputed the multiple allegations of groping that women have leveled against him since the candidates’ last encounter. He also said he thinks the Clinton campaign is behind the claims, charging, “They either want fame or her campaign did it.”
+
+Clinton said, “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger.” Trump repeated that “nobody has more respect for women” than him.
+
+Trump then shifted to blast the Clinton Foundation as a “criminal enterprise.” He pointed to donations from countries like Saudi Arabia to question Clinton’s commitment to women’s rights. He asked her if she would return money from countries that treat certain “groups of people horribly,” which she did not answer directly.
+
+The candidates’ third and final debate now sets a bitter tone for the homestretch of the 2016 presidential campaign – a race that already stands out as arguably the most personal, caustic and unpredictable White House battle in modern politics.
+
+Trump, slipping in the polls amid various campaign controversies, said at the last debate that Clinton should be in jail. Clinton has blasted Trump all along as temperamentally unfit for office.
+
+Since the second debate, numerous women have come forward to accuse Trump of groping them, allegations he denies. WikiLeaks also has embarrassed the Clinton campaign by releasing thousands of hacked emails purportedly from her campaign chairman’s account. FBI files alleging a State Department official sought a “quid pro quo” to alter the classification on a Clinton server email added to the campaign’s – and Obama administration’s – woes.
+
+The WikiLeaks controversy came up Wednesday night when Clinton asked if Trump would “condemn” Russian espionage. He denied knowing Vladimir Putin but said the issue is the Russian president has “no respect” for her.
+
+“That’s because he’d rather have a puppet,” Clinton shot back.
+
+Trump later said he condemns any interference by Russia in the election.
+
+The candidates also sparred over gun rights, with the Republican nominee charging that the Second Amendment is “under absolute siege” and would be eroded if his opponent wins.
+
+“We will have a Second Amendment which will be a very, very small replica of what we have now” if Clinton wins, Trump said.
+
+The Democratic nominee countered, “I support the Second Amendment.”
+
+In a graphic exchange, Trump said Clinton’s position on abortion is nearing a point where one could “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month.” Clinton accused him of “scare rhetoric.”
+
+They also clashed on immigration, with Trump saying they need to deport “drug lords” and deal with “bad hombres” in the country. Clinton said violent offenders should be deported but then mocked Trump for not pushing his controversial border wall proposal during his high-profile meeting with the Mexican president. “He choked,” she said.
+
+Trump said Clinton “wanted a wall” when she voted for an immigration overhaul a decade ago – and now wants “open borders,” which she denied.
+
+To date, the mounting controversies facing both campaigns have appeared to hurt Trump more than Clinton, who gradually has expanded her lead over the GOP nominee in recent polls.
+
+A Fox News national poll released on the eve of the Las Vegas debate showed Clinton with a 6-point, 45-39 percent lead over Trump in a match-up that includes Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
+
+Trump, in the final three weeks, is thought to be zeroing in on several key battlegrounds including Florida, Ohio and North Carolina – but the polls suggest his path to the presidency remains narrow, as even once-reliably red states like Texas are being contested by the Clinton campaign.",REAL
+22,What do Americans really think about abortion? The answer may surprise you.,"An anti-abortion protester stands with a sign at Boulder County Justice Center, in Boulder, Colo., Friday, March 27. A recent survey on abortion policy shows that despite what media coverage, politicians, and frequent protests would have the public believe, plenty of Americans have nuanced opinions on the issue of abortion.
+
+Abortion is one of the most polarizing issues in the United States today, but public opinion may not be as black and white as it seems.
+
+In a Vox survey on abortion policy published earlier this month, careful questioning of more than 1,000 respondents suggests that plenty of Americans identify neither as only ""pro-choice"" nor as only ""pro-life."" On the contrary, 21 percent said they were neither, while 18 percent said they were both.
+
+The poll’s findings unearth the nuances in public opinion often neglected when the media, politicians, and other opinion surveys frame the abortion debate as purely two-sided. The poll could also open up discussion about the issue in ways that – as Fordham University ethicist Charles Camosy put it – involves critical thinking, and takes into account the importance of precise language and constructive engagement when tackling such sensitive subjects as the life of an unborn child and a woman’s rights concerning her body.
+
+“We’ve framed our abortion debate all wrong. It isn’t black and white – it’s thousands of different shades of gray that exist somewhere in the middle,” Vox senior editor Sarah Kliff wrote. “This matters because by ignoring that gray space, we miss something important: there are abortion policies that a majority of Americans could agree on.”
+
+The majority of respondents, for instance, said that they would want to hear from elected officials of both genders talking about the issue. Nearly 70 percent would not want a woman to feel ashamed to admit if she had an abortion. But when asked about abortion being completely illegal or legal, and given various options in between, the largest percentage (34) chose this answer: ""Abortion should only be legal in cases of rape, abuse, or if the woman’s health is at risk.""
+
+A big challenge to moving the abortion debate forward is overcoming the stereotypes that have evolved as a result of years of framing the discussion in binary terms such as ""pro-life"" versus ""pro-choice,"" or ""liberal"" versus ""conservative,"" according to Mr. Camosy, who teaches Christian ethics at Fordham in the Bronx and wrote, “ Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation.”
+
+“It is no secret that popular media have a real struggle communicating complexity,” Camosy wrote. “Thus they struggle not only to accurately describe what Americans think about abortion, but also the complex reasons many women have abortions … the reality for women is far messier and cannot be captured by a headline or Tweet.”
+
+In other words, there’s room for discussion beyond yes or no, pro or anti. And that may be a lesson applicable to other issues, such as immigration, that appear to have divided the nation.
+
+In an op-ed for news magazine The Week, for example, journalist Damon Linker pointed out that looking at only two sides of the immigration debate tends to lead exactly where it has gone so far: Nowhere. A viable policy, he wrote, is one that is based neither solely on moral grounds, which would give anyone who shows up at the border full citizenship, nor on the tenets of exclusivism, which would oppose the ideals of the US Constitution.
+
+“What we're left with, then, is a position situated somewhere between the universalists and the tribalists,” Mr. Linker wrote. “We need a tightly controlled border, but with relatively liberal quotas for legal immigration, some allowances made for humanitarian refugees, and a path to citizenship for those already here. We can and should debate precisely how liberal those quotas should be, how many refugees to let in, and how arduous to make the path to citizenship.”
+
+The path to useful policies thus lies in how we approach an issue, Camosy wrote. In the abortion debate, he added, that means avoiding using words and phrases – “radical feminist,” “war on women,” “anti-science,” or “heretic” – that lead to rhetorical victories at the cost of understanding.
+
+Promoting meaningful discussion also requires humility and, instead of assuming the other side has a secret personal agenda, giving them the courtesy of listening to their arguments.
+
+Such practices, Camosy wrote, “often reveals that many of us are ultimately after very similar things (such as women being able to choose to keep their baby) and we simply need to be able to talk in an open and coherent way about the best plan for getting there.”",REAL
+7330,"They Said What?!: Find Out What Reba McEntire, Whoopi Goldberg, And Pope Francis Have To Say","Email Ever wonder what’s on the mind of today’s most notable people? Well, don’t miss our unbelievable roundup of the best and most talked about quotes of the day: “ The government likes to get a bunch of people in a room and decide what’s best for us. If I were running the show, I’d have way less people and let them each have their own room. ” —Reba McEntire On government “ People ask me if I would do another Sister Act movie. All the time they ask me, pleading with me to do the film. They storm my dressing room on The View to throw the nun costume in my face. I find DVDs of Sister Act in my trunk, in my mail, sometimes in my drawers! I want to give the people what they want, but sometimes I’m not sure they really want what they think they want, you know? ” —Whoopi Goldberg On the responsibility of fame “ We hold our hands together in prayer in the hopes that God will put a dollar bill—which we signed beforehand—in between our palms, so that when we open them we can be amazed and delighted. So far it seems this privilege has only been granted to the pope. ” —Pope Francis",FAKE
+668,Was California The Last Weekend At Bernie's House Of Hope?,"Was California The Last Weekend At Bernie's House Of Hope?
+
+The legendary Route 66 wound its way from middle America to Southern California, a ribbon of aspiration ending on a pier reaching out into the Pacific from the coastal town of Santa Monica.
+
+That pier still exists, a symbol of America's hopeful journey west and a touchstone for politicians such as Bernie Sanders, who brought his grandchildren there on Sunday.
+
+Whatever happens Tuesday in California and the other states still voting, Sanders had a marvelous time on the last weekend when he could sell his dream of being the Democratic nominee for president.
+
+That may sound harsh to the legions of Bernie Believers for whom the dream may never die. This weekend, they listened with faith to a candidate who could still speak of prospects, possibilities and promise. There was still a way to win.
+
+But over the same weekend, Hillary Clinton almost reached her magic number of 2,383 delegates with the vote tallies in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Barring an utter collapse by her forces across the board on Tuesday, she will garner, on that night, the delegates needed for a first-ballot nomination in Philadelphia in July.
+
+Sanders probably knows this as clearly as Clinton herself. He should be able to assess his predicament as easily as any observer who is paid to see the numbers with clear eyes.
+
+But it also remains absolutely essential for any underdog in Sanders' position to maintain, to the very end, that the goal is within sight, victory can still be won. Without that hope, supporters will not be energized and engaged. And without energized and engaged supporters on this last Big Tuesday, everything Sanders has achieved in a year of campaigning might be in jeopardy.
+
+A disappointing final day of multi-state voting would undercut the Sanders narrative, which is all about a populist hero vanquishing the will of the party hierarchy and slaying the dragon of the establishment.
+
+That is why Sanders goes on feeding red meat to his stadium crowds, threatening to contest the convention and leveling accusations about coronations and rule-rigging and party corruption. He does this now because his chances of making a difference in Philadelphia depend on a strong finish in this last round of soundings of the voters' feelings.
+
+But here is what will happen on Tuesday. By the time the New Jersey results are in, sometime after 8 p.m. in the Eastern time zone, the numbers will add up and Clinton will be the presumptive nominee. Not the official nominee, as that will depend on the convention. But she will have a clear majority of the delegates, both pledged and unpledged, reflecting the will of a clear majority of the votes cast by primary and caucus participants.
+
+Sanders has said he will contest every last vote, including in the District of Columbia on June 14. But does anyone think he will command as much attention next weekend as he still did this past weekend?
+
+Winning California, as Sanders may still do, will not net him enough delegates to alter the math, because the delegates will be split in proportion to the vote. That is the highly democratic model by which Democrats allocate delegates to reflect the primary voting. It means that even a fabulous Sanders breakout in the state would not prevent Clinton from winning the delegates she needs.
+
+Only the prospect of a shocking report from the FBI probe into Clinton's use of a private email server would now seem to stand between her and a first-ballot victory at the Democratic convention.
+
+If Sanders had some other issue in mind this weekend when he told interviewers that ""the world may look very different by the end of July,"" he did not say what it was. That is also the issue raised by the Republican Party, when it argues that Sanders is right to contest the convention. On Sunday, GOP spokesman Sean Spicer referred to the FBI probe in saying that no one should call Clinton the ""presumptive nominee.""
+
+It might have been embarrassing for the Sanders campaign to find itself arguing in tandem with the Republicans, but such are the bedfellows of politics.
+
+This is the moment to stop and salute what Sanders has achieved. He started as a party outsider with little national name recognition. To some extent, that anonymity helped him create his campaign in a year of national resentment against the elite and the power structure. His outsider status helped make him the focal point of a youth movement within the Democratic Party.
+
+At his best, Sanders has wed the rebellious 1960s with the exuberance of a new generation that questions the establishment. That is a feat no one could have expected him to achieve in the polls or in the primaries and caucuses. Today, he leads in hypothetical matchups against Donald Trump by more percentage points than Clinton does. This has become his main argument for displacing Clinton as the nominee.
+
+Who would have thought the Democratic nomination in 2016 would devolve to an argument over who might best beat Donald Trump?
+
+Joining the Democratic Party officially for the first time, Sanders has made quite a run for that venerable institution's highest honor. But if the goal was to win by the rules, or even to win by something resembling what the rules should be, then Sanders has fallen short. He mobilized a new army, but Clinton's older version of the party prevailed.
+
+On this last weekend in California, both candidates campaigned with vigor and an upbeat message. Sanders went to a community center in the heart of Spanish-speaking Los Angeles, and he posed for selfies with beachgoers on the Santa Monica pier. Everywhere he kept alive the notion of a contested nomination.
+
+Clinton's many appearances included one at West Los Angeles College, a two-year community college not far from the LA airport.
+
+At this event, she was introduced by no fewer than 17 preliminary speakers, all of them women. They included several members of Congress and an array of Hollywood actors such as Sally Fields, Elizabeth Banks and Mary Steenburgen. The crowd lasted throughout the preliminaries to cheer lustily for Clinton herself. One of those cheering and waiting for a handshake was Sarah Griebe, an events planner who lives in Los Angeles.
+
+""I understand where Sanders supporters come from,"" said Griebe, who supported Clinton in 2008. ""It's hard when you invest so much time and energy in a candidate and they don't win. But Sanders and Clinton are pretty much on the same side. It's most important for us to continue movement forward and for the progress we've made in the last eight years to continue.""
+
+It may be easy for the Clinton people to speak of unity at this stage of the campaign, because they see the end in sight with the nomination going to their candidate. It will be much more difficult for Sanders' troops to forget their current opposition to Clinton.
+
+But for this one last weekend, the Sanders backers could imagine the roles reversed. And they could imagine shocking the world, eclipsing Clinton and marching on to defeat Donald Trump.",REAL
+10036,Media Roll Out Welcome Mat for ‘Humanitarian’ War in Syria,"Media Roll Out Welcome Mat for ‘Humanitarian’ War in Syria Media Roll Out Welcome Mat for ‘Humanitarian’ War in Syria By 0 49 Hillary Clinton told Goldman Sachs that a no-fly zone is “going to kill a lot of Syrians.” (cc photo: Gage Skidmore) 
+As she marches toward the US presidency, Hillary Clinton has stepped up her promotion of the idea that a no-fly zone in Syria could “save lives” and “hasten the end of the conflict” that has devastated that country since 2011. 
+It has now been revealed, of course, that Clinton hasn’t always expressed the same optimism about the no-fly zone in private. The Intercept (10/10/16 ) reported on Clinton’s recently leaked remarks in a closed-door speech to Goldman Sachs in 2013: 
+To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk—you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians. 
+Other relevant characters, such as US Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Joseph Dunford ( Daily Caller , 9/26/16 ), have warned that a no-fly zone in Syria would simply intensify the conflict—which presumably isn’t the best way to hasten its end. 
+Luckily for those who prefer to rally around illogic, however, plenty of media have already rolled out the welcome mat for peddlers of the “humanitarian” vision of increased Western military interference in Syria. The New York Times ‘ Nicholas Kristof ( 10/6/16 ) argues against “Obama’s paralysis” and for “more robust strategies advocated by Hillary Clinton.” 
+The New York Times ’ self-appointed savior of women , Nicholas Kristof ( 10/6/16 ), invoked the plight of a young Syrian girl in Aleppo to conclude that Obama’s alleged “paralysis” on Syria “has been linked to the loss of perhaps half a million lives” in the country, as well as to “the rise of extremist groups like the Islamic State,” among other unpleasant outcomes. We have no “excuse,” we’re told, for “failing to respond to mass atrocities.” 
+Never mind that the rise of ISIS has much to do with that mass atrocity known as the US invasion of Iraq, thanks to which many young Iraqi girls and other human beings have suffered rape, mutilation and death. It’s convenient for certain industries, at least, when US weapons are deemed the solution for problems US weapons helped to create in the first place. 
+Furthermore, plenty of US weapons continue to flow to countries known for arming and funding ISIS and similar outfits—an arrangement unlikely to be rectified by a no-fly zone targeting the Syrian government and the Russians. 
+USA Today ( 10/8/16 ), meanwhile, ran an opinion piece by an American doctor who worked briefly at a now-destroyed hospital in Aleppo, arguing that the US “should lead the way in establishing real no-fly zones, either under United Nations auspices or with the British and the French”—because “otherwise, our inaction will continue to be an embarrassment and stand as an example of our spineless irresponsibility.” 
+But considering that there has already been plenty of US action in Syria—including the mistaken “pulverization” of whole families with children—it would seem we’ve already exhibited a fair amount of lethal irresponsibility. 
+Beyond the opinion pages, media figures are pushing the “humanitarian” approach with varying degrees of subtlety. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd ( 10/16/16 ) recently pressed Vice President Joe Biden on the lack of a no-fly zone over Aleppo, suggesting that the Obama administration will “look back and wonder what if? What if? What if? What if?” 
+Of course, no campaign for saving lives with bombs would be complete without everyone’s favorite examples of feel-good destruction from the former Yugoslavia. The Washington Post ( 9/9/16 ) hosted an opinion by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first ambassador to the UN, Muhamed Sacirbey, straightforwardly headlined: “Western Military Intervention Saved Lives in Bosnia. It Can Work in Syria, Too.” 
+Sacirbey warns that “Syria’s largest city is on the brink of starvation. Bombed from the skies and besieged on the ground, Aleppo’s 2 million residents may soon be exterminated.” Gone, apparently, are the days of factchecking, when someone at the Post might have alerted the author to the reality that the vast majority of Aleppo’s residents live in government-controlled areas and are thus not under attack by said government. 
+Comparing Aleppo to besieged Sarajevo, Sacirbey determines that Sarajevans ultimately “escaped many of the horrors now awaiting Aleppo’s residents… because NATO opted (albeit belatedly and, too often, inadequately) to uphold its responsibility to protect Bosnian civilians.” 
+After lauding Bosnia’s no-fly zone, Sacirbey pulls this prediction out of a hat: “Limited military intervention in Syria would save civilian lives, perhaps as many as 200 a week.” 
+In their indispensable essay for Monthly Review ( 10/07 ), “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in In humanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse),” Edward S. Herman and David Peterson make it unavoidably clear that the West’s business in Bosnia had nothing to do with saving lives—and much to do with the contrary. 
+The Bill Clinton administration, they note, actively sabotaged agreements to end the war at an earlier date, while “helping arm the Bosnian Muslims and Croatians and helping bring thousands of Mujahedin to fight in Bosnia.” America’s support in this case for jihadists—a secret alliance also discussed by scholar Tariq Ali ( Guardian , 9/9/06 )—further complicates the assumption that the US is somehow capable of fixing the current jihad problem. 
+In predictable fashion, US media led the charge to the Bosnian intervention ( Extra! , 10-11/92 ), dutifully painting the Serbs as demonic aggressors, parroting inflated Bosnian casualty estimates and otherwise behaving as the official PR arm of the establishment. 
+A similar performance was repeated shortly thereafter with Kosovo, where minimal regard was given to actual facts on the ground and the specter of Serbian-waged genocide was instead hysterically invoked. Noam Chomsky ( Monthly Review , 9/08 ) cited various reports, including from the British government, that the US-backed Kosovo Liberation Army was actually responsible for more killings than the Serbs in the run-up to NATO’s bombing campaign—a project that naturally also managed to kill several thousand people. 
+While Yugoslavia has now been fully dismantled, the myth of Western humanitarian intervention there has emerged unscathed; in his recent dispatch on Syria, Kristof brought up Kosovo as an example of how “the military toolbox has saved lives.” 
+To be sure, “saving lives” is a much nobler goal than, say, endowing NATO with a new lease on life or clearing the way for total neoliberal assault —two outcomes of the West’s Yugoslav ventures. Hence the utility, as Herman and Peterson write, of the “edifice of lies that serves and protects the Western interventions in the former Yugoslavia—and which laid the ideological foundations for the US role in Iraq and for future so-called humanitarian interventions.” 
+In Syria’s brutal war, meanwhile, humanitarian motives will presumably be utilized as a veneer for pursuing more fundamental goals, like neutralizing resistance to US/Israeli regional designs and promoting that profitable sort of chaos that produces massive arms sales. 
+And just as those in the West who failed to leap onto the bandwagon in Yugoslavia were denounced as “ apologists for genocide ” and the like, opponents of increased Western military action in Syria will be increasingly assailed as pro-Assad fanatics with Syrian blood on their hands. 
+One strong candidate for fanatic-hood is Greg Shupak, who in a recent Jacobin magazine dispatch ( 10/20/16 ) dared to argue that a no-fly zone “would actually represent an escalation of war that is guaranteed to harm civilians in the name of protecting them.” Emphasizing that opposition to said zone is not meant in any way “to minimize or rationalize the torture, mass killings or severe sieges enacted by the Syrian state and its allies,” Shupak continues: “The imminent question, however, is not, ‘Is the Syrian government good?’; it’s ‘Should America drop more bombs on Syria?’” 
+Because, at the end of the day, humanitarian war just isn’t humanly possible.",FAKE
+7478,Nuclear weapons: how foreign hotspots could test Trump’s finger on the trigger,"November 11, 2016 Nuclear weapons: how foreign hotspots could test Trump’s finger on the trigger 
+On Donald Trump’s first day in office he will be handed the “nuclear biscuit” – a small card with the codes he would need to talk to the Pentagon war room to verify his identity in the event of a national security crisis. 
+Some presidents have chosen to keep the “biscuit” on them, though that is not foolproof. Jimmy Carter left his in his clothes when he sent them to the dry-cleaners. Bill Clinton had it in his wallet with his credit cards, but then lost the wallet. 
+Others have chosen to give the card to an aide to keep in a briefcase, known as the “nuclear football”, together with a manual containing US war plans for different contingencies and one on “continuity of government”, where to go to ensure executive authority survives a first nuclear strike. 
+The “biscuit” and “football” are the embodiment of the awesome, civilisation-ending power that will be put in Trump’s hands on 20 January. They only become relevant in very rare moments of extreme crisis, but a US president’s ability to manage crises around the world will help determine whether they become extreme.",FAKE
+2436,Milestone House Vote Would Take Health Care Away From Millions,"Milestone House Vote Would Take Health Care Away From Millions
+
+After dozens of votes attacking Obamacare in recent years, House Republicans' latest attempt Tuesday finally gets real.
+
+Not in the sense that the full repeal bill will become law — it's not likely to pass the Senate and, in any event, faces a certain presidential veto even if it somehow does. What makes today a milestone is that, for the first time, House Republicans plan to vote on whether to actually take health coverage away from millions of Americans who now have it.
+
+More precisely: 19 million of them by the end of the year, according to a recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. And with a new study showing that 60 percent of Affordable Care Act beneficiaries receiving subsidies from the federal exchange are from the South and 60 percent of them non-Hispanic whites, House Republicans would be casting votes to eliminate a program that to a large extent benefits their own constituents.
+
+How this new reality will affect the vote count is unclear. Republicans have been solid in their opposition to the health care law. The last time the House voted to repeal the law in entirety — rather than tweak one or more small provisions — was May 16, 2013. Not a single Republican voted against it. But that was when the first enrollment period was still months away, and the vote could still largely be framed as a matter of political philosophy.
+
+That was also before Republicans picked up 13 Democratic seats in the 2014 midterm elections, some of which are in swing districts that could swing right back to Democrats.
+
+One of those new Republicans, in fact, could serve as the poster child for the party's potential problems with the vote: Rep. Carlos Curbelo, who represents the western suburbs of Miami, some of Florida's poorest communities. The majority-Latino district also happens to contain one ZIP code with one of the highest Obamacare enrollments in the country and is blocks away from two others.
+
+This could be one reason why Curbelo's Spanish response to President Obama's State of the Union address last month avoided the Affordable Care Act altogether. Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, in the English response, described Obamacare as an example of ""failed policies."" Curbelo, though, spoke instead about education and the income gap — and chided Washington for not working ""toward a health economy that offers opportunities to everyone who lives in this country, not just the most privileged,"" according to a comparison done by the Miami Herald.
+
+Other Republicans have recognized for some time that taking away access to health care for the working poor was not necessarily good politics and have advocated a ""repeal and replace"" strategy to show that the GOP also cares about the issue.
+
+No Republican alternative to the ACA has yet emerged since the party took control of the House in 2011, and none is in today's bill, either. However, the proposal does instruct three House committees to recommend ideas to replace Obamacare, including such things as limiting medical malpractice lawsuits and giving states more flexibility in administering Medicaid.",REAL
+8596,"China, Russia, The Silk Road, Commodities, Nixon And A Massive Bull Market In Gold & Silver","52 Views October 31, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+With most markets on lockdown on Halloween trading day, here is a big picture view of where the world is headed. 
+Stephen Leeb: “This past week a New York Times headline that caught my eye was: “At Heart of U.S. Strategy; Weapons That Can Think.” The gist was that over the next few years the U.S. will be spending billions of dollars to make “smart” weapons, while also boosting our cyber budget by billions of dollars. It struck me as another example of how anytime we in the U.S. pound our chest about our mighty military, we always point to how much money have spent and plan to spend… IMPORTANT: To hear which legend just spoke with KWN about $8,000 gold and the coming mania in the gold, silver, and mining shares markets CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Michael O’Harlan and David Petraeus, men with exceptional military pedigrees, declare: “U.S. forces have few, if any, weaknesses and in many areas…they play in a totally different league from the militaries of other countries…Nor is this likely to change anytime soon, as U.S. defense spending is almost three times as large as that of the United States’ closest competitor, China.” 
+Reassuring words? Maybe for a moment. But as soon as you think about it, they become anything but reassuring, showing that even when it comes to our most vital security issues, we make the fundamentally flawed assumption that money equates to wealth. 
+I’ve long been convinced that if the U.S. continues on what appears an ever more inevitable slide, historians will point to the day Nixon dropped the gold standard as launching that skid. Gold is wealth; paper is merely money. Money can facilitate the exchange of wealth, but by itself it is just paper or entries on a computer ledger and a very poor substitute for wealth. Commodities are wealth, and many vital commodities, as we pointed in a recent interview, can’t even be purchased any more – period. Information is also wealth. And no amount of money can guarantee an edge in information. 
+A few weeks ago, a 15- or 16-year-old who had recently become interested in chess wrote a letter to a chess blog asking how much he’d need to spend to become a Grand Master – how much for training, how much for practice time, coaches, etc. The only possible answer: not all the money in the world could turn a novice who’s already a teenager into a world-class player. Grand masters have a wealth of knowledge and savvy that can’t be acquired once you’re much past 7 or 8 years old. You’ve missed the boat. 
+Similarly, no amount of money enabled U.S. experts to crack the cell phone of the San Bernardino terrorists. But cyber experts from Israel, which spends a lot less on cyber issues, cracked it with relative ease. Israel, along with China and Russia, are among a number of countries, mostly located in Asia, that develop the skills of their gifted children at early ages. This has left the U.S. a poor second in critical areas ranging from cyber security to super computers, which will be the most essential tools in the next generation of a gold-centered monetary system. 
+Even nonbelievers should be starting to perceive the inevitability of gold replacing paper. A few metrics tell the story. First is the relationship between the dollar and economic growth. Despite the recent report of better-than-expected third-quarter GDP, the economy’s growth has been declining as the dollar has risen. In the wake of the Great Recession the dollar traded in a fairly tight range, while GDP growth in fits and starts peaked at 5 percent in the third quarter of 2014. The higher dollar has held GDP growth to less than 2 percent for the past two years. 
+But commodities have begun to rise. Most major commodity indexes have climbed 10 percent or more this year. Even the temporary setback in obtaining an OPEC agreement won’t hold back real goods. Recently, for the first time since China announced its Silk Road initiative in 2013, a major article on the undertaking appeared in a major magazine, Foreign Affairs. Gal Luft , a senior advisor to the United States Energy Security Council, urged Washington to get aboard or lose out on the chance to benefit from the greatest infrastructure project in the history of civilization, many times the size of the Marshall Plan and already the destination of $1 trillion in Chinese exports this year, with dramatic growth likely for the foreseeable future. 
+But instead we’re likely to continue to use our dollars in ways that bear ever less connection to real wealth. Bear in mind that any effort to hold inflation down will crumble in the face of Western economies even weaker than ours. The result is that real interest rates will remain negative, an unalloyed positive for gold. At the same time the currency used along the Silk Road will be some combination of gold, the SDR, and the yuan. As we have said before, China’s edge in critical information technologies ensures its domination in virtual currencies such as the bitcoin, which will have multiple advantages in tomorrow’s gold-based world. 
+How High Will Gold & Silver Trade? How high will gold go? Much depends on how much trade the Silk Road generates. Which means that if think gold could go to five digits, you don’t need a shrink – you’re sane as can be. And let’s not overlook gold’s poor cousin, which in the end could make you even richer, silver. The energies of our future will be anchored to solar, nuclear, and wind. The solar anchor will mean that already peaking silver will become some of the scarcest wealth around. If you’re dreaming of $100 silver, your dreams will be coming true before long. 
+To me it’s an ironic footnote to the Nixon years. Yes, history will record that America’s decline began when the much-maligned Nixon delinked the dollar from gold and let us conflate money and wealth. Meanwhile, though, you can make a fortune on the coming bull market in gold that will be the direct result of that decision.” 
+  The Coming Super Depression,   Cyberwars, $10,000 Gold & $1,000 Silver CLICK  ",FAKE
+701,"Yes, Bernie Polls Better Against Trump Than Hillary—but There’s a Catch","Sanders was on ‘Meet the Press’ again Sunday touting his polling advantage against Trump. He’s right, but there’s a key reason Hillary does worse in head-to-head matchups.
+
+On Meet the Press, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to endorse the Republican presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, saying he would disclose his position on the presidency at a later date. On CNN, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said he would support Trump because he so strongly opposes Hillary Clinton. And on ABC’s This Week, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said it was time for Bernie Sanders to consider ending his campaign for the Democratic nomination.
+
+In an interview on Meet the Press, Sanders sounded as if had no intention of dropping out anytime soon. Sanders said he believes he still has a chance to win the Democratic nomination by winning the California primary against Clinton.
+
+""Right now,” Sanders said, “in every major poll, national poll and statewide poll done in the last month, six weeks, we are defeating Trump, often by big numbers, and always at a larger margin than Secretary Clinton is.""
+
+For example, the most recent poll, the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, showed Clinton beating Trump by 3 points and Sanders beating Trump by 15 points. That means Sanders bested Clinton’s performance by 12 points. In other polls, Sanders’s lead on Clinton was less but never fell below a margin of 3 points.
+
+Clinton has been scrutinized and attacked as a public figure for a quarter century, but Sanders—even after running for president for a year—is a relatively new figure to voters nationally. It remains to be seen how open voters will be to supporting Sanders once Republicans start airing negative attacks, especially ones that note his identification as a democratic socialist. (According to polls, being a socialist is a less attractive quality for voters than being an atheist.)
+
+“General election polls don’t mean much until the conventions are over and you get to late summer or early fall,” said Kerwin Swint, a political scientist at Kennesaw State University. “A lot of voters don’t look at Sanders as a legitimate threat. It’s almost like he’s an imaginary candidate.”
+
+And it’s worth adding, as Meet the Press host Chuck Todd noted, that Clinton can be expected to poll better against Trump after she officially secures the nomination and many former Sanders supporters come to her side.
+
+Sanders also said he will continue to make the case that his positions are more in line with the Democratic base than Clinton’s.
+
+“Our campaign is about defeating Secretary Clinton on the real issues,” he said. “I want to break up the Wall Street banks. She doesn’t. I want to raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour. She wants $12 an hour. I voted against the war in Iraq. She voted for the war in Iraq. I believe we should ban fracking. She does not. I believe we should have a tax on carbon and deal aggressively with climate change. That is not her position. Those are some of the issues that I am campaigning on.”
+
+Sanders is right about Clinton’s Iraq war vote and where she stands on breaking up the banks, a $15 minimum wage, and fracking. But is he also right about their differences on carbon tax and climate change? That claim rates Mostly True.
+
+There’s no doubt that Sanders’s rhetoric on climate change and his plan to deal with it are aggressive and, unlike Clinton, he has advocated for a carbon tax. Clinton does, however, have a climate change plan. While some environmentalists have said it isn’t tough enough, others have given it positive reviews.
+
+Both the Sanders and Clinton campaigns referred us to each candidate’s climate change plan. Sanders’s climate change plan is long and comprehensive. Beyond a tax on carbon, it includes an array of proposals such as banning certain drilling and mining practices; cutting tax subsidies for oil and gas companies; investing in clean energy, alternative fuels, and energy efficiency programs; and improving the national public transit system.
+
+But some are skeptical of Clinton’s “boldness.” Pulitzer Prize-winning website InsideClimate News called Clinton’s plan ambitious but said it “falls short of bold.” The Washington Post’s editorial board said her ideas are “second best.” Environmental news magazine Grist summed up her plan as not bad but “not quite the climate hawkishness we need.”",REAL
+3932,EgyptAir crash: official dismisses claim that remains suggest blast,"The head of Egypt’s forensics authority has dismissed a suggestion that the small size of the body parts retrieved since an EgyptAir plane crashed last week indicated there had been an explosion on board.
+
+All 66 people on board were killed when the Airbus A320 crashed in the Mediterranean early on Thursday while en route from Paris to Cairo, and an international air and naval effort to hunt for the black boxes and other wreckage continues.
+
+On Tuesday an unnamed senior Egyptian forensics official told Associated Press that he had personally examined human remains recovered from the crash site and that they suggested there had been an explosion.
+
+Speaking on condition of anonymity he said all 80 pieces brought to Cairo so far are small human fragments, leading him to conclude that “the logical explanation is that it was an explosion”.
+
+
+
+He added: “There isn’t even a whole body part, like an arm or a head.”
+
+However Egypt’s head of forensics later denounced the reports as “completely false”, state news agency Mena said.
+
+
+
+“Everything published about this matter is completely false, and mere assumptions that did not come from the forensics authority,” Hesham Abdelhamid was quoted as saying in a statement.
+
+Another senior forensics official told Reuters only a tiny number of remains had arrived so far and it was too early to specify whether there had been an explosion on board.
+
+In the aftermath of the crash both the French and Egyptian leaders said that terrorism could not be ruled out, but there has been no claim of responsibility from any group.
+
+The black box could hold clues as to why the plane crashed. Minutes earlier, smoke was detected in multiple places on board.
+
+On Monday, the head of Egypt’s state-run provider of air navigation services, Ehab Azmy, said the plane plunged directly into the sea and challenged an account by the Greek defence minister that it made “sudden swerves” before the crash.
+
+
+
+Azmy said radar had shown the plane was flying at its normal altitude of 37,000 feet (11,270 metres) in the minutes before it disappeared.
+
+
+
+“That fact degrades what the Greeks are saying about the aircraft suddenly losing altitude before it vanished from radar,” he said. 
+
+
+
+“There was no turning to the right or left, and it was fine when it entered Egypt’s [flight information region], which took nearly a minute or two before it disappeared,” Azmy added.
+
+The Greek defence minister, Panos Kammenos, said last week that the plane took a normal course through Greek airspace before abruptly taking sharp turns.
+
+“The plane carried out a 90-degree turn to the left and a 360-degree turn to the right, falling from 37,000ft to 15,000ft and the signal was lost at around 10,000ft,” he said.
+
+Another senior Egyptian navigation services official, Ehab Mohieeldin, meanwhile told a local broadcaster that Egyptian officials had been able to track the plane on radar for one minute before it crashed but were unable to communicate with the crew.
+
+The same channel, CBC, was told by air accident investigator Hani Galal that the plane’s black box recorder would be analysed in Egypt if it is found intact, but would be sent abroad for analysis if it is found to be damaged.
+
+Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report",REAL
+5195,More anti-Trump action planned after second night of protests across US,"Protesters across the US were on Friday gearing up for weekend demonstrations over the election of Donald Trump, as other activists began work on plans to disrupt the Republican’s inauguration in Washington early next year.
+
+Rowdy protests against Trump and his divisive campaign have spread to cities all over the country following his victory on Tuesday, leading to dozens of arrests and a complaint from Trump in one of his first public remarks as president-elect.
+
+More than 10,000 people have signed up to attend a noon march on Saturday from New York’s Union Square to Trump Tower, the future president’s home and corporate headquarters, while several other actions are planned for other cities.
+
+“Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda,” the organizers of the New York event said in a Facebook post.
+
+Trump complained in a tweet late on Thursday that “professional protesters, incited by the media” were tarnishing his electoral success, which he said was “very unfair”. Amid intense criticism, Trump said hours later in a second post that he appreciated the “passion for our great country” shown by demonstrators.
+
+Activists expressed determination to build momentum for major activity on 20 January, when Trump will officially enter the White House.
+
+A “million women” march on the capital is being planned for the day of Trump’s inauguration, amid intense anger that the next US president allegedly sexually assaulted multiple women and boasted of doing so in a leaked recording.
+
+Leftwing and anarchist groups were also making plans for protests in Washington on inauguration day, according to flyers circulating online, raising the prospect of chaotic scenes as Trump takes the oath of office.
+
+Other activists were biding their time before mounting a response to Trump’s election. Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, said their movement was “grieving and mourning” following the result.
+
+“We are bringing folks together to imagine what kinds of organizing we will need to do under a Trump presidency,” said Cullors. “I do think we can organize as we have been, and build something bigger and stronger than the hate Trump and his team have exhibited towards marginalized communities.”
+
+
+
+Thousands of people took to the streets from Thursday night into Friday in Denver, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Portland, Oakland and several other US cities, as well as Vancouver, Canada. The protests were for the most part peaceful and orderly, though there were scattered acts of civil disobedience and damage to property.
+
+
+
+The rowdiest scenes were in Portland, Oregon, where about 4,000 people marched into the city centre late on Thursday. At least 29 people were arrested after a minority of protesters threw objects at officers, smashed shop windows and damaged a car dealership, the Portland police department said, declaring the demonstration a riot. Officers used pepper spray and rubber projectiles to disperse the crowd, the department added.
+
+In Minneapolis, dozens of people marched on to Interstate 94, blocking traffic in both directions for at least an hour as police stood by. A smaller band of demonstrators briefly halted traffic on a busy Los Angeles highway before police cleared them off.
+
+
+
+Baltimore police reported that about 600 people marched through the Inner Harbor area, with some blocking roadways by sitting in the street. Two people were arrested, police said. One of the largest demonstrations was in Denver, where a crowd estimated to number about 3,000 gathered on the grounds of the Colorado state capitol and marched through the city centre.
+
+Earlier in the day, high school students staged walkouts across the country. Authorities told the LA Times that at least 4,000 students from the LA County school system had walked out in protest by Thursday afternoon.
+
+Hundreds of high school students in San Francisco walked out of class too, and took to the streets of downtown, shouting “Not my president”, “My body, my choice” and “Love trumps hate” as they marched in the middle of traffic.
+
+Malkia Williams, 15, who carried a sign that said “Pussy grabs back” – a reference to a leaked recording where Trump bragged he could sexually assault women because of his fame – said it was important for students to speak out since they could not vote.
+
+“A lot of adults voted for Donald Trump and they think we don’t care, but we do,” she said as she marched down a busy downtown street where student activists were temporarily halting vehicles, with many honking in support. “My loved ones and friends could be taken out of this country.”
+
+Williams said she was still processing Trump’s victory. “I still don’t feel it’s real. This is not the future we want,” she said.
+
+In Oakland, where 30 people were arrested on Wednesday night, a crowd gathered on Thursday but the protests were more subdued than the previous evening, when a series of small fires were set, some windows were smashed and a few people threw rocks at police.
+
+Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, according to a local ABC affiliate station, WISN 12, a number which later swelled to over 2,000 as the group marched downtown, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
+
+Lewis & Clark College student Gregory McKelvey, who organised a protest in Portland on Thursday, told local NBC affiliate KGW: “We think that because Trump is president, it becomes even more urgent for our city to become what people want it to be. It’s an anti-Trump protest but also a call for change in our city because we need to push for progress here.”
+
+Elsewhere on Thursday, hundreds protested in Salt Lake City, Utah; San Francisco; Houston, Texas; and in Washington DC, where about 100 protesters marched from the White House to Donald Trump’s newly opened hotel several blocks away.
+
+At least 200 people rallied there after dark, many of them chanting “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” and carrying signs with such slogans as “Impeach Trump” and “Not my president.” 
+
+
+
+“I can’t support someone who supports so much bigotry and hatred. It’s heart-breaking,” said 25-year-old Joe Daniels from Virginia.
+
+While protesters marched against Trump, at least one group was preparing to take to the streets in celebration. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan said on their website they would be holding a “victory parade” in North Carolina next month. Men in KKK-style white hoods were seen walking in the state on the morning after Trump was elected.",REAL
+9401,Twitter has been looking into the future: read the best 16 predictions,"Next Prev Swipe left/right Twitter has been looking into the future: read the best 16 predictions Predictions are notoriously unreliable, even when they’re backed up by expert knowledge and thorough research. It’s fair to say that the good people of Twitter have used neither of these but they’ve still come up with some startling visions of the future. 
+Here are the best 16 tweets. 1. The year is 2017, Marmite is the UK's official currency, old people are burned as fuel, an evil clown is PM, Brexit still means Brexit. 
+— Mitten d'Amour (@MittenDAmour) October 12, 2016 2. The year is 2018. Facebook is just one long clip of James O'Brien talking to some Leave-voting idiot and hammering his head on the desk. 
+— Alan White (@aljwhite) October 13, 2016 3. The year is 2020. 
+A Buzzfeed article titled ""President Trump's Wars Summarised In 13 AMAZING Cat GIFs"" wins the Pulitzer Prize. 
+— Dai Lama (@WelshDalaiLama) September 27, 2016 4.",FAKE
+7854,Powerful Photo Series Challenges Society’s Perception Of The Obese,"Society might demean and bully those who are overweight or obese, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that approximately 60-70% of the population in the U.S. carries excess weight. Largely a... ",FAKE
+1502,"Trump suggests he might have prevented 9/11 attacks, extending feud with Bush","Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump suggested Sunday that he could have prevented the 9/11 attacks had he been president in 2001 -- escalating his feud with primary rival Jeb Bush about the fatal terror strikes.
+
+Trump, a first-time candidate, implied his stance on immigration could have kept out the terrorists who slipped into the United States and trained in the country to hijack the four commercial airliners and kill nearly 3,000 people on American soil on Sept. 11, 2001.
+
+“I am extremely, extremely tough on illegal immigration,” Trump told ""Fox News Sunday."" “I believe that if I were running things,  … I doubt that those people would have been in the country.”
+
+The 19 hijackers crashed one airliner each into the Pentagon and the twin World Trade Center towers in New York City, roughly nine months after Bush’s older brother, President George W. Bush, took office in 2001.
+
+Passengers in one airliner overpowered the radical Islamic hijackers, forcing the craft to crash in Shanksville, Pa., with no survivors.
+
+The Trump-Bush feud essentially started during the second 2016 GOP presidential primary debate when Jeb Bush defended his brother against Trump’s criticism about the attacks.
+
+“You remember the rubble at the World Trade Center? He sent a clear signal that the United States would be strong and fight Islamic terrorism, and he did keep us safe,” Bush said to huge audience applause.
+
+Trump responded: “You feel safe right now? I don’t feel so safe.”
+
+Bush, a former Florida governor, has since shaped his response to suggest his brother united Americans and kept then safer after the attacks.
+
+The exchanges also have put Bush in a challenging position, defending his family while trying to distance himself from Bush political dynasty, included shortcomings in the administrations of his brother and father, George H.W. Bush.
+
+On Friday, Trump returned to his attacks when talking on Bloomberg TV about how and why, if elected, he could best handle national emergencies.
+
+“Blame him or don’t blame him, but (Bush) was president,” said the billionaire New York real estate mogul. “The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
+
+Hours later Jeb Bush tweeted, “How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”
+
+Trump also said Sunday that during the debate he was just responding to Bush saying the country was safe under his brother’s watch.
+
+“I'm not blaming anybody,” Trump said. “But the World Trade Center came down.  So when he said, we were safe, that's not safe.  … It was probably the greatest catastrophe ever in this country.”",REAL
+987,How far can campaigns go to win support from a Republican delegate?,"Imagine this: Donald Trump wooing delegates with rides on his gold-accoutered private jet. A wealthy Ted Cruz supporter wining and dining them at the Cleveland convention. Welcome bags stocked with expensive swag awaiting party activists in their hotel rooms, courtesy of a well-funded super PAC.
+
+The already freewheeling ­Republican presidential contest is fast turning into a personal persuasion game as the candidates pursue no-holds-barred ­efforts to lock up delegates — and there are relatively few limits on how far they can go.
+
+The jockeying has already led to accusations of unfair play. Trump has accused Cruz of luring delegates with unspecified “goodies” and “crooked shenanigans,” charges that the Cruz campaign dismissed as “falsehoods.”
+
+Under regulations established in the 1980s, delegates cannot take money from corporations, labor unions, federal contractors or foreign nationals. But an individual donor is permitted to give a delegate unlimited sums to support his or her efforts to get selected to go to the convention, including money to defray the costs of travel and lodging.
+
+A candidate’s campaign committee can also pay for delegate expenses. Some legal experts believe a campaign could even cover an all-expenses-paid weekend prior to the convention to meet with senior staff at, say, a Trump-owned luxury golf resort in Florida.
+
+Given that the last contested Republican convention was 40 years ago — Gerald Ford vs. Ronald Reagan in 1976 — many of Washington’s top campaign ­finance experts are furiously paging through old Federal Election Commission opinions, trying to discern what delegates can accept.
+
+“We’re in uncharted territory,” said Kenneth Gross, a former associate general counsel at the FEC. “And when you get into the heat of battle and the stakes are as high as they possibly can be in terms of who will be the nominee, people are going to push the envelope.”
+
+Trump and Cruz, who have shown their relentlessness in this season’s rough-and-tumble campaign, are expected to look for every legal edge possible if neither is able to secure 1,237 delegates before the July convention. Also in the mix is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who forged an alliance with Trump on Saturday in a delegate fight in Michigan.
+
+The candidates “will be in a bidding war for delegates,” said Brett Kappel, a veteran campaign finance lawyer who has represented Democrats and Republicans. “They’ll live like kings at the convention.”
+
+[Trump team vows to win delegate majority as rivals prepare for open convention]
+
+The FEC delegate rules were established long before super PACs came on the scene and offer little guidance about how such groups can lobby delegates. One possibility floated by strategists in recent days: a super-PAC-
+
+financed war room that collects reams of personal data — political background, hobbies, family details — that can be used to target the nearly 200 activists and elected officials who are not bound to a specific candidate.
+
+The lack of clear guardrails has left party activists feeling unsettled.
+
+“It’s almost like we need a campaign finance system for delegates,” said Gregory Carlson, 27, who ran unsuccessfully to be a delegate in Colorado over the weekend. “This is why we need to put serious thought into this and who are immune to being paid off with below-board messages.”
+
+Since most delegates are expected to cover their own travel and stay in Cleveland, they could be offered thousands of dollars in assistance. Just how far those payments can go has not been tested.
+
+“If they decide to go to Cleveland via Cabo, that might be a problem,” said Anthony Herman, a former FEC general counsel.
+
+But it’s unclear that such a perk would be made public if it were provided by a single donor. Under FEC rules, a contribution from an individual to a delegate does not have to be disclosed, as long as it was not made in coordination with a campaign or as an independent effort to boost a candidate. That means gifts could flow to delegates unseen.
+
+“Beyond subsistence expenses, in the weeks ahead, are there cash and items of value given to these delegates?” asked Michael Toner, a Republican election-law attorney. “Is someone going to show up in the Cayman Islands in January with a three-week paid trip? That’s not going to be readily apparent before the election.”
+
+Still, Toner added, “I think the vast majority of the deals are going to be political deals. People want attention, a seat at the table.”
+
+[Trump still leads, but Cruz keeps winning the trickier delegate contests]
+
+That was the case in 1976, when Ford leveraged the prestige and trappings of the presidency to try to bring uncommitted delegates over to his side. He invited entire state delegations to lunch and dinner at the White House and even hosted a group on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal to watch the July 4 bicentennial celebration in New York Harbor, according to Jules Witcover’s 1977 book “Marathon.”
+
+Reagan tried to match him with his Hollywood connections, recruiting entertainers such as John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Pat Boone to call wavering delegates.
+
+“It was hand-to-hand combat,” said Reagan biographer Craig Shirley, who detailed the fight in his book “Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All.” “When it comes to getting delegates, it is the wild, wild West. Anything goes.”
+
+Well, not absolutely anything. State and federal anti-bribery laws would probably forbid delegates to sell their votes outright, although it is unclear how those statutes apply to those who are private citizens rather than elected officials. Election-law attorneys noted that the Justice Department has recently stepped up its focus on campaign finance violations and could scrutinize suspicious transactions.
+
+And most experts doubt there will be systematic efforts to try to win over delegates with cash.
+
+“I think it’s a pretty dangerous game to play,” Herman said. “The optics are just so bad. Putting aside FEC exposure or even criminal exposure, I think the political exposure if it were disclosed and the public knew about it — it would just seem so unseemly.”
+
+The campaigns declined to offer specifics on how they plan to woo delegates.
+
+“Well, there’s the law, and then there’s ethics, and then there’s getting votes,” Trump convention manager Paul Manafort said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’m not going to get into what tactics are used. I happen to think the best way we’re going to get delegates is to have Donald Trump be exposed to delegates, let the delegates hear what he says.”
+
+Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said the senator from Texas has been “building an organization that will allow us to secure the delegates we need to win should this race be determined at convention.”
+
+[Somebody used the Colorado GOP Twitter account to tweet #NeverTrump]
+
+Several delegates interviewed this week said they would not be swayed by inducements. They were exasperated by the suggestion that their support could be bought with money or gifts.
+
+Wendy Day — a 43-year-old mother of four in Michigan who was elected to be a delegate for Cruz — said her delegation is looking for ways to keep their convention expenses down, perhaps by renting homes outside the city, so they will not have to depend on a benefactor to cover their expenses.
+
+“We wouldn’t want to feel like we were being bought off,” she said, adding: “I don’t think Cruz supporters would be swayed by gifts and money. We are in this to save our country.”
+
+Joy Hoffman, chairwoman of the Republican Party in Arapahoe County, Colo., said she would view any kind of monetary gift or offer to pay for expenses as a bribe.
+
+The candidates can “call me and talk to me,” said Hoffman, who will be an unpledged alternate delegate to the convention. But she warned that she will not be easily dazzled.
+
+“I already know these people,” Hoffman said. “They’ve been bugging me for months. I had breakfast with Kasich not long ago, and I’ve had conversations with the Trumps. At the end of the day, that’s nice. They put their pants on the same way, they eat the same kind of food we eat.”
+
+O’Keefe reported from Colorado Springs. David Weigel in Rochester, N.Y., and Katie Zezima in Irvine, Calif., contributed to this report.",REAL
+4292,They’re already trying to steal 2016: Inside the GOP voting-rights scheme intended to derail democracy,"Ever since African-American men were granted the right to vote with the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, programs were enacted to make it impossible for them to exercise the franchise. And needless to say, the passage of the 19th Amendment 50 years later, which opened the franchise to women, only resulted in even more programs to deny African-Americans their ability to vote in many states. All of this was quite legal under the states’ rights doctrine until the 1960s, when President Johnson and Congress finally passed the Voting Rights Act, which put the federal government in charge of monitoring the election processes of jurisdictions that were proven to have discriminated in the past. Trying to keep racial and ethnic minorities from voting is as American as apple pie.
+
+Over the years, the right wing, which has always been hostile to the idea of “too much” democracy, worked to create an illusion that there was a great threat of “voter fraud” in America that needed to be dealt with by enacting extremely restrictive voter eligibility requirements. There is no evidence of systematic voter fraud anywhere in America, but that hasn’t stopped the right from doing everything in its power to make it difficult for ordinary people to exercise the right to vote. (If only they were as vigilant about preventing the very real threat of gun violence.)
+
+And they have been helped in this task, unbelievably, by Democrats who are so afraid of right-wing hysteria that they actually helped the Republicans destroy one of their voting rights institutions, ACORN, when a right-wing con artist produced a doctored video to tarnish its reputation. They didn’t even wait for the facts; they immediately wrung their hands and joined the metaphorical lynching. It was a low point in recent civil rights history and it proved that voting rights activists cannot count on the political class to have their backs even when it means their own party will suffer.
+
+Vote suppression was, of course, the way they kept African-Americans from voting during Jim Crow, so even as they destroyed ACORN, the usual suspects simultaneously worked to undermine the VRA and finally succeeded in having a right-wing Supreme Court majority overturn it. Now Republican state governments are much freer to restrict voting so that the undesirable minorities, whom they assume will vote for the Democratic Party (and rightly so since Republicans are openly hostile to them), will have a much more difficult time voting. They will naturally keep up their assault on the ability of urban black voters to participate by eliminating polling places and reducing early voting, which makes it difficult for hardworking people to participate. But the latest attacks are coming from a number of other directions, some of which are openly undemocratic, and are increasingly focused on Hispanics.
+
+For instance, the argument in Evenwel v. Abbott, the latest voting case to come before the Supreme Court, is that only eligible voters are entitled to representation by the government. This means, essentially, that children, legal residents, former felons or the mentally ill have no representation. Obviously, it will mean that undocumented workers, many of whom are counted in the census, will not be represented. As a practical matter this will have the fortuitous result (for Republicans) of making voting districts more rural and more white. And that is the point.
+
+Nobody knows how such a thing can be implemented because there is no count of “eligible voters” — the census doesn’t ask the question and there would be no way of determining its validity anyway. But the consensus among legal observers seems to be that the court will likely divide along the usual partisan lines and thus change the way representation is apportioned to favor white Republicans once again.
+
+That’s not the only thing they are doing. For obvious reasons, the biggest fear among Republicans these days is no longer the threat of black Americans voting. They will certainly continue to do everything in their power to make it hard for them to exercise their rights  — they are the Democrats’ most reliable constituency. But the major threat today comes from the fast-growing Latino population. Indeed, the campaign to deport immigrants and end birthright citizenship is hugely influenced by their fear that they will be demographically smothered in a few years by the American offspring of undocumented workers. The “path to citizenship” has them terrorized as they see it as an obvious electoral advantage for the Democratic Party.
+
+There was a time when this prospect was actually considered an opportunity for Republicans who believed that they could appeal to this voting bloc through their shared belief in family values and small business entrepreneurship. One of George W. Bush’s greatest assets was considered to be his ability to attract Hispanics and he managed to get almost 40 percent of the vote in 2000. Unfortunately for Republicans, their older white constituency wants nothing to do with this — indeed, they are repelled by the idea of being in the same party as a group of immigrants who don’t look and sound like them. George W. Bush was abandoned by his party not only because of his Iraq debacle, but because he was widely considered to be soft on immigration.
+
+As you can see from the presidential campaign, notwithstanding the party leaders’ understanding of their electoral challenge, this has hardened into a litmus test within the party. Republican voters want immigration stopped, they want a wall, they want deportation of undocumented immigrants and they want birthright citizenship to be repealed. (The last may require a constitutional amendment, although there are some cranks who insist it can be done legislatively. With this right-wing majority, they may even be able to get that endorsed by the Supreme Court.) GOP presidential candidates are required by the older white base to be openly hostile to Latinos, which ensures they will not get their votes. In that case, since the Latino population is growing very fast and is younger than the white population, the only option (aside from ethnic cleansing) is to try to prevent them from voting for Democrats by making it difficult at the voting booth and diluting their representation. Jim Rutenberg is writing a series on this subject for the New York Times Magazine that exposes the depth and breadth of this program. It’s being road-tested in Texas where there exists a serious possibility, if they are unable to succeed in turning back the tide, of a Democratic majority in a very few years due to the rapid growth in the Hispanic population. They are pulling out all the stops from local reapportionment of city council seats to the above-mentioned Supreme Court case attempting to deny representation to people who are ineligible to vote. And unfortunately, the Republicans have one very big advantage: fear. They have managed to make the process so harrowing that many Latinos don’t feel comfortable voting even though they have a perfect right to do so. And perhaps more relevantly, they are discouraged and depressed about participating in the system because of the invective and hostility coming from so many white Americans, particularly those in power. Getting them to turn out to vote is a huge challenge. But then that’s nothing new either. Historian Rick Perlstein quoted documentation on the subject back when he was researching his book “Before the Storm” about the 1964 Goldwater campaign and the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party. It’s a memo written by a Johnson staffer outlining the GOP vote suppression scheme called “Operation Eagle Eye.” This quote from the memo says it all: “Let’s get this straight, the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confidence in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration. But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. It is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.” Operation Eagle Eye was in every state in 1964, for all the good it did them. One Republican lawyer very assiduously worked in Arizona that year to keep Hispanic voters from the polls and was reputed to have been very effective at intimidation. His name was William Rehnquist. He went on to become chief justice of the Supreme Court. His successor, John Roberts, worked with the recount team during the infamous election theft of 2000, presided over the 2008 “voter fraud” case that allowed states to require ID, and wrote the opinion overturning the Voting Rights Act in 2014. These people play a very long game. But it’s unlikely they will be able to suppress the Latino vote forever. Their hostility may be intimidating to an older generation but the new generation is not going to accept this. And there are a whole lot of young Americans of Hispanic descent. If they vote, this right-wing program will finally fail and fail spectacularly. And it will likely take the whole Republican agenda down with it. These young Americans will never identify with such a party. These conservative bigots are sowing the seeds of their own demise.",REAL
+10238,The People Are Laughing at the Liberal Media,"  The People Are Laughing at the Liberal Media The People Are Laughing at the Liberal Media  53 am by Cliff Kincaid   Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media 
+Members of the media continue to talk among themselves, as if they had not been repudiated by the people on November 8. Mass firings and new faces are needed if the media are going to have any hope of regaining any credibility with the public. 
+Some on the far-left are waking up. Anis Shivani of the AlterNet news service asked , “Is the liberal media dead?” She answered: “One of the positives of this campaign is that despite relentless 24/7 propaganda about Trump, exaggerating his personal foibles while painting anyone not supportive of Hillary as a closet misogynist, racist or even sexual predator, the message failed to get through. In the end, no one paid any attention. Those inside the elite bubble were persuaded that they were headed for victory, hearing nothing contrary in their own ecosphere, when they were in fact doomed. The people have shown that they can tune out this noise. The media has fragmented so much that only those who are already persuaded come within the ambit of any new message, so in essence they have pounded their way into their own irrelevance (emphasis added).” 
+Hillary Clinton had the endorsements of most major newspapers in the United States. Her own website declared , “By all accounts, this election is historic—and so is the list of newspapers from across the country endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. That list includes a number of papers that, for decades, have exclusively endorsed Republican presidential candidates—until now.” 
+Reid Wilson of The Hill newspaper calculated that Clinton got 57 newspaper endorsements and Trump got only 2. 
+In addition to The Washington Post and The New York Times, which both endorsed Hillary, some of the other notable losers included: The Columbus Dispatch endorsed a Democrat (for the first time since Woodrow Wilson), and urged voters to elect Hillary. Ohio went for Trump anyway. The Akron Beacon said that Hillary was the change this country needed. The Cincinnati Enquirer broke a century-old tradition to endorse Hillary. The Sun Sentinel editorial board urged Floridians to vote for Hillary. Florida went for Trump. The Arizona Republic broke a 120-year tradition to endorse Hillary. Arizona went for Trump. The Dallas Morning News broke a 75-year tradition of supporting Republicans to endorse Hillary. Texas went for Trump anyway. The Houston Chronicle, the largest newspaper in Texas, usually backs Republicans but endorsed Hillary. 
+Among major voting blocs, one of the most amazing turnarounds can be found in the Catholic population. 
+On November 2, the Catholic Jesuit publication America was reporting that Clinton was leading Trump in the polls thanks to the Catholic vote. Citing a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America, Clinton was getting support from 51 percent of Catholics, compared to 40 percent for Donald Trump. This is what liberal Catholics wanted to believe and encourage. Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta was a liberal Catholic who got a job as professor at Catholic Jesuit Georgetown University. He had communicated with other campaign officials about a scheme to force the church even further to the left. Elizabeth Yore’s article at The Remnant explained the relationship between George Soros, the Clinton campaign and the Jesuit-led Vatican. 
+However, exit polls show that Trump won the Catholic vote by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. What happened? 
+One answer is that Catholics are bypassing the liberal media and turning to alternative sources of news and information, such as The Remnant. Another such source is Boston Catholic Insider, which argued in an article, “ Why Catholics Should Vote for Trump ,” that Hillary had a “monstrous” position on abortion that justified the gruesome procedure up to and including the time of birth. 
+Another growing source of news and information for Catholics and non-Catholics is LifeSite . Its post-election stories include “Liberal media in meltdown over Trump election” and “America rejects Planned Parenthood and its party.” 
+Another important development was the airing of the film “ A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing ” by the EWTN Catholic cable channel. As we noted in a previous column, the film examined how Marxists have subverted the church from within by recruiting clergy into revolutionary socialist activities that divide people and cause conflict. The film was described as “a lens into America’s cultural Marxism euphemistically called ‘progressivism.’” 
+As long as the members of the liberal media continue in their old and discredited ways, without major changes in the journalism business, the alternative sources of news and information will continue to grow in power and influence. The new conservative network CRTV has just announced that Steven Crowder , from the popular show “Louder with Crowder,” is joining the new media venture. 
+Even with major changes in the liberal media, such as the firing of liberal hacks and the hiring of solid conservatives, it is doubtful that viewership can be maintained. On outlets like CNN, they will continue to talk and act like they still have some credibility left. The public is laughing at them and declaring, “You’re fired.” Cliff Kincaid 
+Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid . 0",FAKE
+2413,"Cruz eyes insurance via Obamacare, a law he vows to scrap (+video)","With the wife of the GOP presidential candidate having taken an unpaid leave of absence from her job, the family will soon lose access to health insurance.
+
+Will Trump's plan to register Muslims make it to The White House?
+
+Tesla under Trump: How will electric cars fare under the next president?
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz, his wife Heidi, and their two daughters Catherine, left, and Caroline, right, wave on stage after he announced his campaign for president on Monday at Liberty University.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz could soon be buying his family's health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act, a law the Republican presidential candidate has vowed to repeal should he win the White House.
+
+Sen. Cruz formally launched his presidential campaign on Monday, and his wife, Heidi Cruz, began an unpaid leave of absence from her job as a managing director in the Houston office of Goldman Sachs. That meant the family would soon lose access to health insurance through Mrs. Cruz's job, triggering a need for the Cruz family to find a new policy.
+
+The first-term senator from Texas said he is looking at options available on a health insurance exchange, or a clearinghouse of policies available to Americans who don't receive coverage through their employers. The Democrats' health care law, also known as Obamacare, created the exchange system.
+
+Under an amendment to the law crafted by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the government can only offer members of Congress and their staff health care insurance that's sold through an exchange.
+
+""We will presumably go on the exchange and sign up for health care, and we're in the process of transitioning over to do that,"" Cruz said in an interview with The Des Moines Register.
+
+Cruz could go without insurance, or his family could get its coverage directly from an insurance company at what would likely be a far higher rate than is available via an exchange. Doing so would mean Cruz would not get the contribution from his employer to help offset the full cost of his coverage.
+
+Asked about his plans for health care insurance on Tuesday, Cruz's staff initially pointed reporters to his interview with the Register. Several hours later, Rick Tyler, a Cruz spokesman, said Cruz and his family had not yet settled on an option or the financial implications of such a choice.
+
+""Let's let them make a decision on what coverage they'll get before we start speculating on every variable,"" Mr. Tyler said.
+
+Cruz has been a vocal critic of the health care law and, in 2013, set in motion a partial government shutdown as part of an unsuccessful effort to choke off funding for the law.
+
+In his campaign kick-off speech, Cruz pledged to dismantle the law. His advisers said that remains his plan and pointed to his comments to the newspaper from Iowa, which hosts the lead-off caucuses in early 2016.
+
+""I believe in 2017, a new president, a Republican president, will sign legislation repealing every word of it,"" Cruz told the Register.
+
+Democrats highlighted that Cruz is now enrolling in a program he frequently criticizes.
+
+""The Affordable Care Act, by design, helps Americans who have gaps in employment get coverage, and it's working,"" Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Holly Shulman said. ""We encourage others to follow presidential candidate Ted Cruz to www.healthcare.gov and get covered.""",REAL
+2092,"On climate change, ideological and partisan polarization hardens","Later this week, Pope Francis will reportedly make a moral case for combating climate change, arguing that it is mostly a problem created by humans and that we must make fundamental lifestyle and energy consumption changes to reverse course — on behalf of the world’s poor, but also on behalf of all of us. This, among other factors, could help push climate change on to the national political agenda, giving it more relevance to this cycle than it has enjoyed in previous years.
+
+But if anything, the partisan and ideological divide over global warming is as wide as ever, and perhaps is getting worse.
+
+That’s what a new Pew poll indicates. The Pew poll finds that worry about global warming is on the rise: Some 69 percent of Americans now say it is a “very” or “somewhat” serious problem. However, Pew also finds: “views about the significance of global warming as a problem continue to diverge.”
+
+The Pew poll finds that 68 percent of Americans think there is solid evidence of global warming. But the partisan divide is stark: 86 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents say there is evidence of it, while Republicans are split, 45-48, on the question.
+
+That’s driven (not surprisingly) by conservative Republicans, the only ideological group that says there’s no solid evidence of climate change — and when you get deeper into the partisan and ideological breakdown, the differences get more stark:
+
+Today, roughly nine-in-ten liberal Democrats (92%) say that there is solid evidence the earth’s average temperature is rising, and 76% attribute this rise mostly to human activity. Very few liberal Democrats (5%) say there is not solid evidence of warming. A clear 83% majority of conservative and moderate Democrats also say the Earth is warming, but just 55% say this is the result of human activity. By contrast, just 38% of conservative Republicans say that there is solid evidence of global warming. Reflecting a divide within the GOP, conservative Republicans stand out as the only ideological group in which a majority (56%) says that there is not solid evidence of a rise in the earth’s temperature (a 61% majority of moderate and liberal Republicans say the earth is warming).
+
+Meanwhile, as David Leonardt notes, skepticism about global warming is running high among GOP voter groups, such as older voters, whites, men, and white evangelicals.
+
+While there are reasons to doubt that Hillary Clinton will be quite the climate hawk that some advocates hope for, in her Saturday kick-off speech she leaned harder than expected into arguments for robust action to combat climate change and transition towards a clean energy economy and future. It’s often said that climate is not a motivating issue for voters, and it’s true that Democrats and advocates have not cracked this problem yet. That said, whatever the impact on the electoral outcome, it’s still plausible that climate will have a significantly higher profile this cycle than it has in previous ones.
+
+It’s not just that Clinton appeared to signal that she will campaign on climate, as part of a broader bet on the Obama coalition of millennials, non-whites, and socially liberal college educated whites. It’s also a confluence of other factors: The Obama administration will roll out new EPA rules for existing power plans this summer, and the court battles over them will intensify. Meanwhile, President Obama will be trying to negotiate a global climate deal later this year in Paris. All indications are he’ll be talking about the issue more and more, as a key piece of his legacy. These developments may coincide with the intensifying GOP presidential primary, in which the candidates will all be showcasing the zeal with which they’d roll back Obama’s agenda — the climate piece included.
+
+All of which seems likely to only make polarization around climate change worse. No matter what Pope Francis has to say about it.
+
+UPDATE: I should also have noted that the Pew poll finds that worry about global warming is on the rise: Some 69 percent of Americans say it is a “very” or “somewhat” serious problem. I’ve edited the above to add that.",REAL
+9827,#DraftOurDaughters: Pro-War Hillary Faces Backlash Over Female Draft,"#DraftOurDaughters: Pro-War Hillary Faces Backlash Over Female Draft Hillary combines equality with war against Russia Kit Daniels - October 28, 2016 Comments 
+Hillary Clinton’s support for a female draft is sparking outrage as she continues to fuel war tensions with Russia. 
+Clinton initially backed requiring women to register for the draft back in June, but the backlash really exploded as Clinton started taunting Russia after the last presidential debate. 
+The Twitter hashtag #DraftOurDaughters is trending, with memes mocking Hillary’s “total war” policies which could easily ignite World War 3.",FAKE
+469,Neither Bush nor Rubio is placing above 4th in Iowa or New Hampshire,"At various points in 2011, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich all surged to the front of national GOP primary polls. But all along, establishment favorite Mitt Romney had one bit of comfort. He always remained ahead in the New Hampshire primary — by double digits, in fact. With the Granite State in his back pocket, Romney didn't have to worry about coming up empty in all the early contests.
+
+But Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — this year's GOP candidates who seem most likely to get establishment support — have no such relief. Here's where they currently stand in the first two states to vote, according to the relevant RealClearPolitics averages:
+
+My headline is generous to Rubio, who's been in fourth place in the most recent two Iowa polls, with a mighty 6 percent and 8 percent support.
+
+Every Republican nominee in the modern system has managed to win either Iowa or New Hampshire. And it's long been believed that since Jeb Bush had little chance of winning the evangelical-dominated Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire was effectively a must-win state for him.
+
+Bush still has time to make a comeback — millions of dollars in ad spending from his Super PAC might help — but the fact that he hasn't topped 9 percent in any poll there since August is surely setting off alarm bells in his camp.
+
+Marco Rubio, meanwhile, has been raising eyebrows with his ""relatively light schedule"" in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, as Bloomberg's Michael Bender recently reported. New Hampshire operatives in particular are in ""disbelief"" that Rubio has ""largely ignored"" their state, Bender writes.
+
+This seems to be deliberate on Rubio's part — an effort to lower expectations for his own performance in the Granite State, so the media doesn't consider it a must-win for him. If Bush is discredited by a loss there, Rubio seems to hope, the party will rally to him instead. Yet a decision to effectively skip both Iowa and New Hampshire is a very risky one — as Rudy Giuliani found out with his infamously failed ""Florida strategy"" in 2008.
+
+Like national presidential primary polls, early polls of the first states to vote have frequently proven volatile and inaccurate. For instance, the eventual winners of the 2008 and 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses — Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum — were both in fifth place or lower in October of the previous year. The stability of the New Hampshire polls for Romney in 2011 and 2012 is actually rather unusual in recent years.
+
+And the good news for Bush and Rubio, such as it is, is that most of the candidates ahead of them are the political neophytes who most observers believe will flame out eventually — Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina.
+
+However, Ted Cruz — a candidate despised by the party establishment but who has a more traditional political background — is also ahead of Rubio in both states, and John Kasich is leading both Bush and Rubio in New Hampshire.
+
+It certainly remains possible that there could be a late rally to either Bush or Rubio from voters in one or both early states. In 2004, for instance, John Kerry surged out of nowhere late to win the Iowa caucuses. He then won 45 other states and, of course, the nomination. As of now, though, supporters of these candidates will find little encouraging news in the latest numbers.",REAL
+5908,From Berkeley to Kent State,"GaryNorth.com November 1, 2016 
+Here is a video of a recent protest at the University of California, Berkeley, the nation’s most academically prestigious tax-funded university. It is the premier state school today. It was in 1964. It was in 1880. 
+This is not a threat to the social order. It is an annoyance for students who want to go to class. 
+WHERE AND WHEN THE SIXTIES BEGAN 
+On September 10, 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at Berkeley. Almost no one remembers why. 
+The University’s Board of Regents had long imposed restrictions on what kinds of recruiting were possible on school property. Everyone involved in student government knew the rules. Every group had to be approved: fraternities, sororities, religious groups, and political activists. The underlying motivation, more than anything, was to restrict religious proselytizing: the church/state separation issue. 
+There were almost no conservative political groups on any of the six campuses (San Diego was opening with under 200 undergraduates that semester). As an undergraduate, I was probably the hardest core right-winger in any of the student governments on the five campuses. I had been involved in student government. I had been president of the sophomore class (1960) and president of the Associated Men Students (1961). I was part of an elite group of campus leaders called the California Club. The president of the University, Clark Kerr, met with us once year. 
+In the fall of 1964, a 26-foot strip of land close to the Berkeley campus on Telegraph Avenue had long been used by Left-wing activists for recruiting. They set up tables at the beginning of the school year. In early September, the University’s administration learned that this strip of land was actually inside the boundaries of the campus. So, the rules governing recruiting applied. 
+The Assistant Dean of Students, Katherine Towle, decided to enforce the rules. She sent out a letter on September 14. 
+“Provisions of the policy of The Regents concerning `Use of University Facilities’ will be strictly enforced in all areas designated as property of The Regents… including the 26-foot strip of brick walkway at the campus entrance on Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue…””Specifically, Section III of the (Regents’) policy…prohibits the use of University facilities `for the purpose of soliciting party membership or supporting or opposing particular candidates or propositions in local, state or national elections,’ except that Chief Campus Officers `shall establish rules under which candidates for public office (or their designated representatives) may be afforded like opportunity to speak upon the campuses at meetings where the audience is limited to the campus community.’ Similarly, Chief Campus Officers “shall establish rules under which persons supporting or opposing propositions in state or local elections may be afforded like opportunity to speak upon the campuses at meetings where the audience is limited to the campus community.” 
+“Section III also prohibits the use of University facilities `for the purpose of religious worship, exercise or conversion.’ Section IV of the policy states further that University facilities `may not be used for the purpose of raising money to aid projects not directly connected with some authorized activity of the University…’ 
+“Now that the so-called `speaker ban’ is gone, and the open forum is a reality, student organizations have ample opportunity to present to campus audiences on a `special event’ basis an unlimited number of speakers on a variety of subjects, provided the few basic rules concerning notification and sponsorship are observed… The `Hyde Park’ area in the Student Union Plaza is also available for impromptu, unscheduled speeches by students and staff. 
+“It should be noted also that this area on Bancroft Way… has now been added to the list of designated areas for the distribution of handbills, circulars or pamphlets by University students and staff in accordance with Berkeley campus policy. Posters, easels and card tables will not be permitted in this area because of interference with the flow of (pedestrian) traffic. University facilities may not, of course, be used to support or advocate off-campus political or social action. 
+“We ask for the cooperation of every student and student organization in observing the full implementation of these policies. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to come to the Office of the Dean of Students, 201 Sproul Hall.” 
+This was reasonable. She was enforcing the rules. The Best of Gary North Tags: Gary North [ ] is the author of Mises on Money . Visit http://www.garynorth.com . He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible . Copyright © 2016 Gary North",FAKE
+2266,High Court Ruling Against Gay Marriage Would Produce 'Chaos',"Gay and lesbian couples could face legal chaos if the Supreme Court rules against same-sex marriage in the next few weeks.
+
+Same-sex weddings could come to a halt in many states, depending on a confusing mix of lower-court decisions and the sometimes-contradictory views of state and local officials.
+
+Among the 36 states in which same-sex couples can now marry are 20 in which federal judges invoked the Constitution to strike down marriage bans.
+
+Those rulings would be in conflict with the nation's highest court if the justices uphold the power of states to limit marriage to heterosexual couples. A decision is expected by late June in cases from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.
+
+Top officials in some states, including California, seem determined to allow gay and lesbian couples to continue to marry no matter how the court decision comes out. But some county clerks, who actually issue marriage licenses, might not go along, experts said.
+
+In other states, a high court ruling in favor of state bans would serve to prohibit any more such unions, but also could give rise to new efforts to repeal marriage bans through the legislature or the ballot.
+
+The scenario may be unlikely, given the Supreme Court's role in allowing those lower court rulings to take effect before the justices themselves decided the issue. But if the court doesn't endorse same-sex marriage nationwide, ""it would be chaos,"" said Howard Wasserman, a Florida International University law professor.
+
+Marriages already on the books probably are safe, said several scholars and civil liberties lawyers. ""There's a very strong likelihood these marriages would have to be respected, no matter what,"" said Christopher Stoll, senior staff attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
+
+Gay and lesbian couples could continue to marry in the 16 states that have same-sex marriage because of state court rulings, acts of the legislature or statewide votes.
+
+Similarly, the 14 states that prohibit same-sex couples from marrying, including the four directly involved in the Supreme Court cases, could continue enforcing their state marriage laws. That would include Alabama, where a federal judge has struck down the state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, but put her ruling on hold pending the high court's decision.
+
+Of the remaining 20 states, any that fought unsuccessfully to preserve marriage bans would not have much trouble resuming enforcement. ""That state can immediately start saying we're going to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples going forward,"" said Cornell University law professor Michael Dorf.
+
+That list might include Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
+
+Officials in some of those states refused to comment on how they would respond, citing the ongoing Supreme Court case. ""I'm just not going to speculate on what the court may or may not do,"" said Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback.
+
+Things might be different in California, Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Virginia because top elected officials did not contest lower-court rulings in favor of same-sex marriage. Courts in those states issued orders, or injunctions, that forbid the state from enforcing the constitutional amendments or state laws that limit marriage to a man and a woman.
+
+Typically, a participant in the lawsuit that led to the injunction has to ask the judge to undo it. But if the governor and attorney general are same-sex marriage supporters, they may have little incentive to go back into court. In California, for instance, Gov. Jerry Brown and Attorney General Kamala Harris both opposed Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment that prohibited same-sex marriage. ""I think it's very unlikely that anyone would try to turn back the clock in California,"" Stoll said.
+
+But Gene Schaerr, a Washington-based lawyer who has defended same-sex marriage bans, said he thinks even in states where the political leadership favors gay and lesbian unions, county clerks who actually issue marriage licenses would be on safe ground if they were to deny licenses to same-sex couples.
+
+In Schaerr's view, only the clerks in Alameda and Los Angeles counties are bound by the 2010 injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker. A Supreme Court ruling rejecting a constitutional right to marry for same-sex couples would ""free the clerks in counties other than Los Angeles and Alameda to adhere to Proposition 8,"" Schaerr said.
+
+Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, a Republican, said she supports same-sex marriage, but believes voters need to remove the marriage ban from the state constitution — and would replace it with legal protection for same-sex marriage if given the chance. Coffman said she would ""gladly defend"" such an outcome.
+
+If same-sex marriages cease in Virginia, Attorney General Mark Herring would try to get the state General Assembly to repeal the state's statutory and constitutional bans, Herring spokesman Michael Kelly said.
+
+Some gay rights groups and state officials said the chance the court would not come out in favor of same-sex marriage is remote.
+
+""Recent history of the past eight months, plus all the rulings of the past 20 years, don't indicate that to us this is going to go against us,"" said Tom Witt, executive director of gay rights organization Equality Kansas. ""It could, but a giant meteor could fall on my head in the next five seconds.""",REAL
+4567,"Shift in Cuba politics boosts Obama, challenges Rubio","Miami (CNN) The oppression felt by many under the Castro regime still looms large at the epicenter of Cuban America: Miami's Little Havana neighborhood.
+
+Cuban-born Americans at the popular Domino Park chat casually in Spanish as the domino tiles click, but most of them refuse to discuss President Barack Obama's new policy of normalizing relations with the communist country.
+
+This past weekend, Obama shared a historic handshake with Raul Castro at the Summit of the Americas, and on Tuesday, Obama told Congress he intended to take Cuba off the state sponsors of terrorism list, moves that would have been unthinkable just years ago.
+
+The Cuban immigrants in Miami, though, are concerned that if they talk about Obama's actions, their words could travel back to Havana and cause trouble for their families.
+
+It's a fear, said Helena Jimenez, that's very real: ""You talk the wrong way, you're put in jail, your family is hurt.""
+
+And yet Jimenez, who immigrated to the United States from Cuba when she was 8 years old, nearly 55 years ago, supports Obama's new policy.
+
+Speaking outside Café Versailles, the famous Cuban eatery where exiles young and old gather for café con leche, Jimenez called the U.S. embargo against Cuba a ""cane of support"" that Cuban President Raul Castro has been leaning on as an excuse for poor conditions in his country -- and now that the cane is gone, she's hopeful he could tumble and fall.
+
+Jimenez is emblematic of a broader shift within in the Cuban population in America, one that ultimately opened up the political space for Obama to start to change the U.S. stance toward the island nation.
+
+But the same shift in attitudes that helped pave the way for Obama's course change has also diluted some of the potency of what was once a clear political winner for Republicans. Fernand Amandi, a principal at Bendixen & Amandi International, which specializes in polling Cuban Americans, said what was once a reliable GOP base vote has now become more of a swing vote.
+
+""Going into 2016, the Cuban American vote in Florida will arguably be even more important than ever before, because now you're going to see both sides, Republicans and Democrats, go after them in ways we haven't seen before,"" he said.
+
+It's a transformation that makes Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio's intense opposition to the Cuba opening a potential obstacle in his presidential pitch to voters who share his background, rather than the surefire crowd-pleaser it has long been.
+
+The senator leaned heavily on the story of his immigrant parents' exile from Cuba in his presidential announcement on Monday, and he chose Miami's Freedom Tower, which served as a landing hub for many Cuban exiles through the latter half of the 20th century, for the launch itself.
+
+Though the 43-year-old cast himself as a leader of the future, his focus on reasserting tough sanctions and freezing relations with Cuba is seen by many, especially younger Cuban Americans, as a policy of the past.
+
+And that was the gist of the attack launched by the Democratic National Committee when Rubio on Tuesday condemned Obama's call for Cuba to be removed from the state sponsors of terrorism list.
+
+""For a guy who just yesterday said he wanted to be a new leader and usher in a new American century, it sure sounds like Marco Rubio is clinging to an outdated foreign policy relic from the Cold War,"" said DNC spokesman Mo Elleithee.
+
+Distance and time have transformed the Cuban American population, and in turn, its politics.
+
+Orlando Feliciano, a 20-year-old sophomore at Miami University, is one of those young Cubans who say it's time for change. He described his family as split along generational lines, with his mother in favor of the move and his grandparents opposed ""because they feel like, that's a strategy that the Cuban government is using to generate more money.""
+
+But Feliciano's own view is that thawing relations is the right decision.
+
+""I mean, Cuba has been stuck with this government for over 50 years now, and I feel like it's time for something to change,"" he said Monday on his way to class on the sunny campus. ""The people deserve it.""
+
+Carl Meacham, director of the Americas Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it was difficult to ""pin down"" the Cuban American population as a voting bloc because of the diverse opinions within it.
+
+""They are much more split today on the way forward than they have ever been,"" he said. ""You have more Cuban Americans supporting a change to how the United States is supporting Cuba than you have in the past.""
+
+But it's still a potent political issue for older Cuban Americans, which helps explain Rubio's -- and the rest of the GOP field's -- Cuba focus, as older voters remain a key portion of the GOP base.
+
+And Meacham noted that the stance on Cuba plays into the broader GOP campaign against executive overreach from the President, with Republicans portraying it as yet another example of Obama acting without congressional approval.
+
+Part of the policy shift stems from Obama being a second-term president unconcerned with the politics of the issue -- and perhaps wanting to test his own theories of international engagement.
+
+That's what Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami and an opponent of the thaw, said was behind Obama's move.
+
+""He comes with a philosophy based on the idea that you make nice with your enemies and they become your friends,"" Suchlicki said. ""The President is doing this based on his own mindset, not on the reality of what is happening.""
+
+He warned: ""The administration takes a significant risk that by taking this unilateral action, they get nothing from Cuba.""
+
+Potential political backlash from the estimated 2 million Cuban Americans in the United States -- a huge portion of whom live in the key swing state of Florida, with a sizable enclave in heavily Democratic New Jersey -- has helped keep previous Democratic presidents from moving on promises to normalize relations.
+
+That was the case in the early 1990s, when President Bill Clinton ended up signing the Helms-Burton Act, which further entrenched the embargo and restricted the president's ability to roll it back, rather than moving toward normalization.
+
+""[It] was good election-year politics in Florida,"" he admitted in his memoir, before acknowledging that ""it undermined whatever chance I might have if I won a second term to lift the embargo in return for positive changes in Cuba.""
+
+Meacham, who supports the policy shift, said the fact that Obama was freed from some of those concerns likely influenced the move.
+
+""The President isn't going to have to run for office again and wasn't being overly careful with maintaining support in places like Florida, where the Cuban vote is pivotal,"" he said.
+
+But not only do Democrats have less reason to fear a backlash on the Cuba shift, they have more Cuban voters to count on their side of the aisle.
+
+Cuban Americans historically have been seen as a monolithic Republican voting bloc, but polling shows they have started to switch allegiances as the population has grown younger and more distant from Cuba.
+
+Those shifts, Meacham argued, have made the Cuba issue ""one in which the train has sort of left the station.""
+
+And they also mean that Rubio could have even less to gain by making the Cuba embargo a major issue.
+
+""[Republicans] run the risk of losing a big chunk of support within the Cuban community"" by campaigning so aggressively against the diplomatic thaw, Amandi warned. ""It's not the type of issue where they can count on appealing to all Cuban Americans anymore.""
+
+It is, however, the issue that entices 73-year-old Miguel Coppola, who came to the United States from Cuba on New Years' Eve 1951, to Rubio. After finishing a cafecito at the Versailles, Coppola said that ""of course"" the Florida senator will have the support of the Cuban American community.
+
+""He's got the same values we have,"" he said, listing ""freedom in Cuba, freedom of speech, electing people in Cuba against dictatorships"" as examples of those values.
+
+But for others, particularly the younger immigrants, it makes less of a difference.
+
+Jimenez, who left Cuba in the late 1960s, said the Cuba issue isn't much of a deal-breaker. She said she's most interested in former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, because ""what we need in this country is a good person.""
+
+And anyway, she said, ""It'll be hard to go back to the way we were,"" with an embargo against Cuba.
+
+""It hasn't worked for more than 50 years, so why go back to that, you know?"" she said.",REAL
+4732,"Giuliani, suggesting Trump may have ‘exaggerated’ in lewd comments, says, ‘talk and action are two different things’","Former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani struggled to defend Donald Trump against suggestions of sexual harassment and assault during uncomfortable interviews Sunday morning, amid the uproar over a 2005 video in which Trump made lewd comments and suggested he could grab women against their will because he is a celebrity.
+
+“You're saying that the words are wrong. How about the actions?” Chuck Todd asked Giuliani on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
+
+“Well, the actions would be even worse if they were actions. Talk and action are two different things,” Giuliani said.
+
+“I'm not implying it was made up. I said we're talking about things that he was talking about. I don't know how much he was exaggerating; I don't know how much is true,” Giuliani added. “I certainly don't know the details of it. But I do know that this is unfortunately the kind of talk that goes on among a lot of people and they shouldn't talk about this.”
+
+Giuliani was pressed on that point during a separate interview on ABC’s “This Week.” During that conversation, Giuliani appeared to acknowledge that Trump’s description during the conversation suggested sexual assault.
+
+“The problem isn't just the words. As both Senator McCain and Vice President Biden pointed out, what Trump is describing in that tape is sexual assault,” George Stephanopoulos told Giuliani on ABC’s “This Week.”
+
+“That's what he's talking about. Whether it happened or not, I don't know. How much exaggeration was involved in that, I don't know. I do know there's a tendency on the part of some men at different times to exaggerate things like this. I'm not in any way trying to excuse it and condone it,” Giuliani responded.
+
+Giuliani also signaled that Trump had not ruled out using Bill Clinton’s marital infidelities to attack Hillary Clinton during the second presidential debate. Meanwhile, Trump once again tweeted Sunday morning about Juanita Broaddrick, whose accusation that the former president raped her in 1978 was never litigated in criminal court and has been denied by the Clintons. Trump also appeared to lash out at politicians on social media who were critical of his lewd remarks.
+
+During a tense exchange on CNN’s State of the Union, host Jake Tapper tore into the defense that Trump had merely engaged on “locker room” talk. Giuliani at one point suggested that many others have had similar conversations, which Tapper aggressively dismissed.
+
+“First of all, I don’t know that he did that to anyone. This is talk, and, gosh almighty, he who hasn’t sinned cast the first stone here,” Giuliani told Tapper.
+
+Tapper responded tersely: “I will gladly tell you, Mr. Mayor, I have never said that, I have never done that. I am happy to throw a stone. I don’t know any man, I’ve been in locker rooms, I've been a member of a fraternity. I have never heard any man, ever, brag about being able to maul women because they get away with it. Never.”
+
+Giuliani said on “Meet the Press” that Trump would definitely attend Sunday night's debate and that he is “as prepared as he's ever been.” He said that Trump feels bad and that he'd like to move beyond the controversy to turn his attention to an issue-focused campaign.
+
+Asked by Todd if Trump would bring up Bill Clinton’s infidelities, Giuliani initially said that he believed Trump would not. But he volunteered that he believed “Hillary Clinton's situation” — her role in questioning the character of the women who her husband had affairs with — was on the table to an incredulous Todd.
+
+“What I'm talking about, the things that she has said and that have been reported in various books and magazines and other places about the women that Bill Clinton raped, sexually abused and attacked. Not Bill Clinton's role, but her role as the attacker,” Giuliani said.
+
+The former New York City mayor dismissed questions about whether last-minute changes to the campaign’s TV surrogates Sunday morning. Originally, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus were supposed to appear on the shows.
+
+“I don’t think anyone was going to defend his remarks. Is Kellyanne still a very strong supporter of Donald Trump,” Giuliani said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think this is a question of scheduling, not being willing to explain.”
+
+Giuliani said that Trump was embarrassed by the comments.
+
+“I think when he heard them, he was shocked. I'm not going to say that he didn't remember them, but they probably weren't at the top of his mind. And when he was confronted with it, he was pretty darn shocked that he had said such terrible things, and he feels terrible about it,” Giuliani said on “Meet the Press.” “He feels terrible for his family and how embarrassing it is for them; he feels terrible from his own point of view. But he also realizes he has a responsibility. And I think the last 14 months have driven that into him.”",REAL
+6606,Twenty Years of a Dictatorial Democracy     : Information," Twenty Years of a Dictatorial Democracy By James Bovard
+ "" Washington Times "" - The 2016 election campaign is mortifying millions of Americans in part because the presidency has become far more dangerous in recent times. Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have lived in a perpetual emergency, which supposedly justifies routinely ignoring the law and Constitution. And both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have signaled that power grabs will proliferate in the next four years.
+Politicians talk as if voting magically protects the rights of everyone within a 50-mile radius of the polling booth. But the ballots Americans have cast in presidential elections since 2000 did nothing to constrain the commander in chief.
+President George W. Bush’s declaration in 2000 that America needed a more “humble” foreign policy did not deter him from vowing to “rid the world of evil” and launching the most catastrophic war in American history. Eight years later, Barack Obama campaigned as the candidate of peace and promised “a new birth of freedom.” But that did not stop him from bombing seven nations, claiming a right to assassinate American citizens, and championing Orwellian total surveillance.
+Mr. Bush was famous for “signing statements” decrees that nullified hundreds of provisions of laws enacted by Congress. President Obama is renowned for unilaterally and endlessly rewriting laws such as the Affordable Care Act to postpone political backlashes against the Democratic Party and for effectively waiving federal immigration law. Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama exploited the “state secrets doctrine” to shield their most controversial policies from the American public.
+While many conservatives applauded Mr. Bush’s power grabs, many liberals cheered Mr. Obama’s decrees. After 16 years of Bush-Obama, the federal government is far more arbitrary and lethal. Richard Nixon’s maxim — “it’s not illegal if the president does it” — is the lodestar for commanders in chief in the new century.
+There is no reason to expect the next president to be less power hungry than the last two White House occupants. Both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton can be expected to trample the First Amendment. Mr. Trump has talked of shutting down mosques and changing libel laws to make it far more perilous for the media to reveal abuses by the nation’s elite. Mrs. Clinton was in the forefront of an administration that broke all records for prosecuting leakers and journalists who exposed government abuses. She could smash the remnants of the Freedom of Information Act like her aides hammered her Blackberry phones to obliterate her email trail.
+Neither candidate seems to recognize any limit on presidential power. Mr. Trump calls for reviving the brutal interrogation methods of the George W. Bush era. Mrs. Clinton opposes torture but believes presidents have a right to launch wars whenever they decide it is in the national interest. After Mrs. Clinton helped persuade Mr. Obama to bomb Libya in 2011, she signaled that the administration would scorn any congressional cease-and-desist order under the War Powers Act.
+If Americans could be confident that either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton would be leashed by the law, there would be less dread about who wins in November. But elections are becoming simply coronations via vote counts. The president will take an oath of office on Inauguration Day, but then can do as he or she pleases.
+We now have a political system which is nominally democratic but increasingly authoritarian. The rule oflLaw has been defined down to finding a single federal lawyer to write a secret memo vindicating the president’s latest unpublished executive order.
+By the end of the next presidential term, America will have had almost a 20-year stretch of dictatorial democracy. Our rulers’ disdain for the highest law of the land is torpedoing the citizenry’s faith in representative government. Forty percent of registered voters have “lost faith in American democracy,” according to recent Survey Monkey poll.
+The United States may be on the verge of the biggest legitimacy crisis since the Civil War. Whoever wins on Nov. 8 will be profoundly distrusted even before being sworn in. The combination of a widely detested new president and unrestrained power almost guarantees greater crises in the coming years.
+Neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton are promising to “make America constitutional again.” But as Thomas Jefferson declared in 1786, “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.” If presidents are lawless, then voters are merely designating the most dangerous criminal in the land.
+• James Bovard is the author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006) and “Lost Rights” (St. Martin’s, 1994).",FAKE
+8927,"Decorated ‘Hero’ Cop Caught Using His Authority to Steal $170,000 in State Fees","Home / Be The Change / Government Corruption / Decorated ‘Hero’ Cop Caught Using His Authority to Steal $170,000 in State Fees Decorated ‘Hero’ Cop Caught Using His Authority to Steal $170,000 in State Fees John Vibes October 28, 2016 Leave a comment 
+Detroit, MI – Disgraced Michigan State Trooper Seth Swanson was charged with embezzlement this week for pocketing thousands in false fees. 
+The 31-year-old trooper allegedly stole $170,100 in vehicle fees through an inspections scheme that he ran, where he would forge documentation on potentially stolen vehicles. 
+The Michigan Attorney General’s Office issued the following state ment detailing Swanson’s theft operation: 
+“Police officers are given great trust and responsibility, and for that reason are held to a higher standard. When you break the trust you are given and in the process break the law, there are consequences, no matter who you are or what your profession. I want to thank the Michigan State Police and FBI’s Detroit Area Public Corruption Task Force for their hard work on this investigation.” 
+According to investigators, Swanson was a state-certified salvage vehicle inspector since 2011. As an inspector, Swanson was responsible for overseeing salvage vehicle inspections, during which a $100 fee is collected. For over a year, Swanson allegedly pocketed these fees and forged the forms that authorized the salvage. 
+Swanson is accused of applying this scam to 1,701 vehicles, bringing in a total of $170,100. 
+After he was charged, Swanson was forced to resign from the police department. 
+Police spokesperson Andrea Bitely told reporters that “Our office , in conjunction with the Michigan State Police and Secretary of State, are working together to make sure that all vehicles involved in this case have, actually have a proper salvage vehicle inspection, and we’ll contact the registered owners of the vehicles to make sure we arrange for now inspection in a timely manner.” 
+Prior to his crimes as an inspector, Swanson was praised in the media as a “hero” in 2013 for being one of the first responders to a large pile-up. 
+Swanson and his lawyers are attempting to use his past media fame as a defense in this most recent case, despite the fact that it is entirely irrelevant. 
+Defense attorney John Freeman said that Swanson is still a “hero.” 
+“These charges don’t detract from the fact that Trooper Swanson was a real-life hero and was a good trooper. It’s easy for people to lose sight of that fact,” Freeman said. 
+Swanson was released on $10,000 bond and is currently awaiting trial. 
+Below is a video from 2013 in which Swanson was hailed as a hero. John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. John is currently battling cancer naturally , without any chemo or radiation, and will be working to help others through his experience, if you wish to contribute to his treatments please donate here . Share Social Trending",FAKE
+7625,Cop Caught on His Own Body Camera Stealing Money From Unconscious Crash Victim,"Home / Badge Abuse / Cop Caught on His Own Body Camera Stealing Money From Unconscious Crash Victim Cop Caught on His Own Body Camera Stealing Money From Unconscious Crash Victim Matt Agorist November 1, 2016 1 Comment 
+Denver, CO — A Denver cop has been arrested and suspended without pay after his own body camera footage caught him stealing $1,200 in cash from a crash victim. 
+Instead of helping an unconscious crash victim, officer Julian Archuleta took advantage of the situation for his own personal gain by going through the man’s clothing and robbing him. Archuleta now faces charges of misdemeanor theft, 1st-degree official misconduct and tampering with physical evidence. 
+According to an arrest affidavit, Archuleta responded to a call of shots fired in the early morning hours of October 7. The call then led to a short pursuit which ended as the car crashed. The driver got away while the passenger of the vehicle was knocked unconscious. 
+Archuleta’s body camera then recorded the officer for the next 24 minutes and 40 seconds. In the footage, he took pictures of the scene and then searched the man’s clothing which had been removed by paramedics. 
+In the video, Archuleta finds a stack of cash in the man’s pants with a $100 bill on top, according to the arrest affidavit. He then separates the $100 bill from the stack and a $1 bill remains on top. 
+Throughout the footage, Archuleta shuffles money and rearranges paperwork in his patrol car, the affidavit said. 
+According to the Denver Post, when a detective collected the cash and logged it into the property bureau as evidence, he counted $118 and did not find any $100 bills, the affidavit said. But while reviewing Archuleta’s body camera footage as part of the investigation, the detective noticed the $100 bill. 
+Amazingly enough, instead of covering up the theft, the detective crossed the thin blue line and reported the inconsistency with the $100 bill to internal affairs. When confronted by investigators, Archuleta told them he would “check his war bag” to see if any of the money had slipped into a crevice in his patrol car. 
+According to the arrest affidavit, Archuleta called the detective back an hour later and claimed he found 12 $100 bills that “must have fallen in his bag.” After being caught red-handed, Archuleta then turned in the money. 
+According to the Post, the Denver district attorney’s office declined to prosecute the shooting suspect because of the missing cash and because Archuleta allegedly moved evidence inside the suspect’s vehicle before detectives had a search warrant, the affidavit said. 
+Earlier this year, the Denver police department was equipped with body cameras. We now know why it took so long for the department to adopt them. Archuleta will now go down in history as the first Denver cop to be criminally charged based on body camera evidence. 
+Like most cases of police theft, this incident is not isolated. In fact, just 2 months ago, Grants Police Department Sgt. Roshern C. McKinney, 33, was arrested after an investigation found that he’d stolen both money and marijuana from the police department. Like Archuleta, he entire theft was captured on the officer’s own body camera. McKinney has since been charged with marijuana distribution, conspiracy, and felony embezzlement. 
+State police also charged McKinney’s 23-year-old girlfriend Tanicka Gallegos-Gonzales, for drug distribution and conspiracy. Both were arrested in Albuquerque and booked into the Sandoval County Detention Center, according to KOB. 
+Public Information Officer for the New Mexico State Police, Elizabeth Armijo said Grants police chief, Craig Vandiver alerted state police after the department found video from Mckinney’s lapel camera that “exposed possible illicit activity by a Grants Police Department sergeant.” 
+What does it say about the criminal tendency of some police officers when they are unable to practice restraint from theft — knowing that they are being recorded? Share Google + The Kali Whrite Boi 
+Ok am NOT cool with corrupt criminal cops, but still this MSM puppet is infuriating. This “civilian” was fleeing a scene of “shots fired” leading the cop in a short chase before crashing. 
+Stupid MSM puppets.",FAKE
+1929,Scott Walker’s economic mess: How worker wages were gutted in Wisconsin,"The Washington Post returned to Wisconsin this past weekend to empty union halls and a depressed workforce. The public employee union law – which barred contract negotiations on everything but base wages and limited annual salary increases to the rate of inflation, forced most unions to collect their own dues rather than having them deducted automatically by the state and mandated annual recertification of affiliates – has been more successful than even its supporters hoped.
+
+In the state where public employee unions got their start, public workers see no need to stay enrolled, since unions cannot by law effectively advocate on their behalf. Membership in the Wisconsin affiliate of the National Education Association is down one-third; the American Federation of Teachers dropped by one-half; the state employees union fell 70 percent.
+
+There are fewer public employees working, too, even though Gov. Walker claimed that the passage of the anti-union law would save jobs. The Wisconsin Budget Project finds that the ratio of public employees to total population is at its lowest level in at least two decades.
+
+Overall, union membership in Wisconsin has fallen to 11.7 percent, down from 16 percent 10 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, suggesting a spillover into the private sector labor force as well. That will only continue if Walker gets his wish to turn Wisconsin into a right-to-work state, an effort being undertaken right now in the state Legislature.
+
+Local unions are decreasing dues charges and walking door-to-door to persuade workers to return, but it hasn’t worked so far. The tables have been turned, from non-union workers coveting the good pay and decent benefits of their union counterparts, to demonizing them as greedy leeches that must get dragged down like everyone else. “I don’t see the point of being in a union anymore,” one ex-member told the Washington Post.
+
+In many respects, the point of Walker’s anti-union crusade was to destroy the electoral muscle of the main opposition to his conservative agenda. But the most important impact of the creeping death of public unions in Wisconsin may be on take-home pay.
+
+The Washington Post didn’t take note of this, but according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, median household income in Wisconsin is $51,467 a year, nearly $800 below the national average. And it has fallen consistently since the passage of the anti-union law in 2011, despite a small bounce-back nationally in 2013. The Bureau of Economic Analysis puts Wisconsin in the middle of the pack on earnings growth, despite a fairly tight labor market with a headline unemployment rate of 5.2 percent.
+
+This actually undercounts the problem a bit, because it doesn’t cover total compensation. For example, in the wake of the anti-union law, public employees lost the equivalent of 8-10 percent in take-home pay because of increased contributions to healthcare and pension benefits.
+
+Moreover, the meager earnings growth that has come to Wisconsin has mostly gone to the top 1 percent of earners. Another Wisconsin Budget Project report shows that the state hit a record share of income going to the very top in 2012, a year after passage of the anti-union law. That doesn’t include the $2 billion in tax cuts Walker initiated in his first term, which went disproportionately to the highest wage earners. (This is precisely the agenda Walker is likely to run on in his presidential campaign.) The trends mirror those in the country at large, where labor has similarly stumbled. Real hourly wages fell for almost everyone nationwide in 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute, except for the low-wage sector, bolstered by minimum wage increases at the state and local level. Wisconsin has not joined that movement, with its minimum wage still consistent with the federal floor, at $7.25 an hour. You can argue that squashing unions in Wisconsin had no bearing on income stagnation in the state. But you would have to ignore how the labor market works. If public employees cannot bargain for wages and benefits, they stay depressed. And employers who compete for well-educated workers, like those who take jobs in teaching and government administration, similarly don’t have to increase wages to attract their services. Blunting worker power in one sector has ripple effects everywhere else; as Larry Mishel wrote in the New York Times yesterday, “the erosion of collective bargaining is the single largest factor suppressing wage growth for middle-wage workers over the last few decades.” And Wisconsin provides a salient example of that. Collective worker action was behind the biggest wage announcement in the past several years: Wal-Mart’s move to increase entry-level pay to $9 an hour this year, and $10 an hour by 2016. This will act like Wisconsin’s wage depression in reverse: retailers will be forced to compete with Wal-Mart’s slightly higher wages, and the entire wage floor will push upward. And while an improving economy, tighter labor markets and the need to retain personnel may have factored into Wal-Mart’s decision, you cannot deny the role of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ campaign to organize Wal-Mart workers. “This is not an act of corporate benevolence,” said Marc Perrone, president of UFCW, in a statement on the Wal-Mart announcement. “Walmart is responding directly to calls from workers and their allies to pay a living wage.” In fact, the last time Wal-Mart faced significant labor unrest in 2006, it raised wages as a direct result, according to Federal Reserve minutes. It, like most businesses, makes changes that benefit workers only when its reputation is threatened and poor publicity ensues. That means that worker voices play a powerful role in wage growth. Scott Walker has taken that voice away from public unions, and effectively the entire Wisconsin labor movement, which finds itself crippled. That has real consequences for middle-class wages. Since Walker wants to bring this policy menu to the rest of the country in 2016, people on Main Streets outside of Wisconsin should take note.",REAL
+6589,Clinton Aide Says Future WikiLeaks Releases Are 'Probably Fake',"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves as she takes the stage to speak at a fundraiser at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, Friday, Oct. 14, 2016.
+Months of embarrassing leaks released by WikiLeaks and other sources related to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic leadership have time and again proven to be true , while allegations of Russia being behind the effort have not been substantiated with any evidence. Still, that’s the talking point the campaign continues to go with.
+And indeed Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri today warned against believing any new things released by WikiLeaks that are embarrassing to the Clinton campaign, even though the other releases were spot on, insisting that anything else they release is “ probably fake .”
+Friends, please remember that if you see a whopper of a Wikileaks in next two days – it's probably a fake.
+— Jennifer Palmieri (@jmpalmieri) November 6, 2016
+This isn’t a brand new claim, either, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D – CA) making claims as far back as August that any future mass leaks would probably include “ Russian lies ” designed to embarrass Clinton and the Democrats.
+These preemptive warnings appear to recognize the reality that more embarrassing information is likely to come out, and aiming to get out in front of the next batch by preemptively declaring them “probably” not true, whatever it turns out to be.",FAKE
+2124,California slashes water use for upstate farmers,"State officials announced major water cutbacks for Northern California farmers Friday, a historic step that could challenge claims the agriculture industry is getting a free pass during the state's epic drought.
+
+The cutbacks will affect some of California's oldest water rights holders — farmers who laid claim to surface water more than a century ago — for the first time in four decades. They will not be allowed to draw water from the San Joaquin River, the Sacramento River and the delta that forms where the two rivers meet. State officials said the rivers simply don't have enough water to meet the demands of all rights holders.
+
+This isn't the first time during the current drought that state has cut off supplies to surface water users, including farmers. The water board has already ""curtailed"" nearly 9,000 water rights this year, all of them ""junior"" water rights that were established post-1914.
+
+But for the first time since a severe drought in the late 1970s, California is starting to tell ""senior"" water rights holders, who laid claim to surface water before 1914, that there just isn't enough water for them. The cutbacks announced Friday impact rights holders who established their claims between 1903 and 1914.
+
+And more historic cuts could be coming over the summer. The State Water Resources Control Board said Friday that it's continuing to monitor conditions in watersheds across the state, and that cutbacks could be on the horizon for even more senior rights holders.
+
+""Curtailment notices for other watersheds and for more senior water right holders in these watersheds may be imminent,"" the water board said in a statement.
+
+State officials said in a conference call that the water rights being curtailed comprise 1.2 million acre-feet, but it's unclear whether the cutbacks will save quite that much. The water board has indicated in recent months that curtailments for senior rights holders were coming, leading some farmers to store extra water in preparation.
+
+Sammy Roth writes about energy and water for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.",REAL
+5755,Re: French Political Leader: “France is about to Enter a Holy War with Islam” – “Embrace Christianity… Never Accept the Religion of Satan”,"Email 
+A major political leader in France, Francois-Xavier Peron, has declared that France is about to enter into a devastating war against Islam , and its going to be extremely violent. His solution to prepare? Embrace the Christian Faith and never accept the antichrist masonic religion . 
+I did an interview with Mr. Peron about this coming war, and why the Christian Faith must be the religion of the world: 
+  Shoebat.com  ",FAKE
+2411,Bernie Sanders is unleashing a plan to make prescription drugs cheaper,"Generic drug prices have nearly quadrupled in the past five years — and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has a plan to fix it.
+
+On Monday, Sanders, who is also running for the Democratic presidential nomination, rolled out a proposal that would place strict limits on how quickly pharmaceutical companies could hike generic drug prices. Specifically, drug manufacturers would have to pay a rebate back to Medicaid if their drug prices grew faster than inflation. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) is introducing the same bill in the House.
+
+Generic drugs are cheaper versions of drugs that have lost their patent. But in recent years, the prices for generic drugs have been rising quickly and inexplicably. One report from pharmacy benefits manager Catamaran found that consumers paid, on average, $13.14 for each prescription of the 50 most popular generics in 2010. By 2014, they paid $62.10 — a 373 percent increase.
+
+Sanders has previously cited federal records at hearings, showing that the prices of more than 1,200 generic medications rose an average of 448 percent between July 2013 and July 2014.
+
+Generic drugs are typically meant to make medicine cheaper, giving patients less-expensive access to the costly drug formulations that pharmaceutical companies develop. You can see this clearly in the over-the-counter market: you can get 100 generic ibuprofen pills for $7.49 — or pay $9.99 for the brand-name drug Advil.
+
+Generic drugs now compose more than 80 percent of all prescriptions dispensed annually in the United States, and experts think that's helped slow the growth of overall drug spending.
+
+In recent years though, the market for generic prescription medications has become increasingly expensive, with drug manufacturers hiking up generic prices. This seems especially likely to happen when there is just one drug company making the generic, giving that manufacturer pretty complete control over the prices it wants to charge.
+
+Consider the case of albendazole, an antiparasite drug that helps kill an infection caused by worms. It's not an especially common drug because it treats a relatively uncommon problem among lower-income populations, particularly refugees and immigrants.
+
+Albendazole's patents expired years ago but there's still only one company that makes it, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). And recently the drugmaker has quietly hiked the price. Data published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that the average cost Medicaid paid for an albendazole prescription has increased from $36.10 in 2008 to $241.30 in 2013.
+
+This is the exact same drug; the only difference is that in the span of six years, its price tag rose six-fold.
+
+And albendazole isn't alone — there is a lot of data showing a steep increase in generic drug prices. The National Community Pharmacist Association says its members have seen generic prices increase ""as much as 600 percent"" in recent years.
+
+The United States is one of the only developed countries that do not negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.
+
+In Spain, the United Kingdom, and pretty much all other European countries, the government sits down with drugmakers and haggles over how much it will pay. Each country uses different negotiating tactics. The United Kingdom, for example, runs its bargaining through the National Institute for Clinical Evaluation, typically known by its acronym, NICE.
+
+The United States works differently. Federal law bars Medicare, the country's largest insurance plan, from negotiating with drugmakers. Once a pharmaceutical company sets its price, the government-run plan that insures 49 million seniors is required to accept it.
+
+There are thousands of private insurers, though, and they often have little clout to demand lower prices. Other countries are essentially buying in bulk, like shopping at Costco. The United States does the equivalent of going to the local grocery store — and paying more.
+
+""We don't have a NICE in the United States,"" said Steven Pearson, founder and president of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Reviews, a nonprofit that evaluates evidence on medical tests. ""We have a system that says, ‘If it's better, we have to provide this pill, and you, the drugmaker, get to name the price.' It's not a market. It's drugmakers saying what they want.""
+
+Sanders's new proposal wouldn't give the government the power to negotiate drug prices (although that is also an idea the Vermont senator supports).
+
+Instead, it would require generic drug manufacturers to give Medicaid, the program that covers low-income Americans, a rebate for any growth in drug prices above and beyond overall inflation.
+
+Drug companies will almost certainly oppose this idea, as it would cut into their profits — and, they'll argue, into their development of generic drugs. Sometimes they will cite a shortage of raw materials as a reason for the price hikes, and would likely point to that as reasons why they couldn't produce the drugs for less. Pharma is a strong lobby, and that (along with overall gridlock in Congress) would be a significant obstacle for this type of bill.
+
+Still, the idea of rebates is not unprecedented in American health policy. Federal law requires that Medicaid get a 23 percent discount on all brand-name drugs' sticker prices. And individual state Medicaid programs are allowed to negotiate even lower prices with drugmakers if they so choose. The idea there was similar to the one in the Sanders bill: making drug prices cheaper for the program that serves the lowest-income Americans.",REAL
+8919,John Podesta’s New Global Order,"Accuracy in Media – by Cliff Kincaid 
+In one of her secret speeches, Hillary Clinton said, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders…” Before this comment was revealed, Adam Taylor of The Washington Post tried to assure everyone that the idea of a North American Union, like the meddlesome and bureaucratic European Union, was dead. Such talk, he said, emanated from “fringe websites” and “conspiracy theorists.” 
+The Hillary speech was made to a Brazilian bank known as Itaú BBA, which describes itself as “Latin America’s largest Corporate & Investment Bank” and part of the Itaú Unibanco group, “one of the world’s largest financial conglomerates.” 
+The problem for Taylor and other faux journalists is that there is a whole body of research on the topic of a “ North American Law Project ,” designed to integrate the legal systems of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The project is run out of American University’s Center for North American Studies, where students can concentrate in North American Studies . As a matter of fact, such degrees are being offered by several different colleges and universities, including Canada’s McGill University . 
+Passed in 1993, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, began the process of harmonizing laws among the U.S., Canada and Mexico. But the Council on Foreign Relations admits that the U.S.-Mexico trade balance swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus in 1993 to a $54 billion deficit by 2014. This has led to a loss of about 600,000 jobs. 
+In addition to shipping jobs to Mexico, NAFTA constituted subversion of our constitutional system. President Clinton submitted NAFTA as an agreement, requiring only a majority of votes in both Houses of Congress for passage, and not a treaty, which would have required a two-thirds vote in favor in the Senate. NAFTA passed by votes of 234-200 in the House and 61-38 in the Senate. 
+A money crash soon followed in 1995 as Mexico was hit by a peso crisis, and a U.S. bailout was arranged. Congress would not bail out Mexico, so Clinton arranged for loans and guarantees to Mexico totaling almost $40 billion through the International Monetary Fund and the “Exchange Stabilization Fund.” 
+Meanwhile, pressure has been building for the creation of a “North American Community”—also known as a “North American Union”—with regular meetings involving the leaders of the three countries. On June 29, 2016, the Obama White House issued a fact sheet on this year’s “North American Leaders’ Summit.” It said, “The economies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico are deeply integrated. Canada and Mexico are our second and third largest trading partners. Our trade with them exceeds $1.2 trillion dollars annually.” 
+The leaders of these countries agreed to establish a “North American Caucus” to “more effectively work in concert on regional and global issues by holding semi-annual coordination meetings among our foreign ministries.” One item on the agenda was for the leaders to reaffirm “North America’s strong support for [Colombian] President Santos’s efforts to finalize a peace accord with the FARC guerrillas.” That fell apart on October 2 when a “peace deal” with the communist terrorists was voted down by the people of Colombia. 
+But notice how these leaders claim to speak for “North America.” 
+Going global, they also declared, “North America is committed to joint and coordinated actions to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda.” 
+This is U.N.-speak for global taxes and other forms of foreign aid from the U.S. to the rest of the world. 
+We noted in a column last year that the American people, through their elected representatives, have had absolutely no input in developing the new global agenda that President Obama has tried to implement without the input or approval of Congress. 
+Interestingly, one of those deeply involved in this global agenda, as we noted at the time, was John Podesta, the chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign who previously served as counselor to Obama. Podesta’s emails are at the center of the WikiLeaks disclosures about the operations of the Clinton campaign, the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic Party. 
+Podesta, founder of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress and a member of the elitist Trilateral Commission , went to work for Obama as a senior policy consultant on climate change. A liberal Catholic, he has been a professor at Georgetown Law School. One of the leaked emails shows Podesta saying that he applauds the work of Pope Francis on climate change and that “all my Jesuit friends say the Pope is the real deal.” 
+Podesta was picked by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to be a member of the “high-level panel” of “eminent persons” planning the future of the globe. This so-called “High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda” released an 81-page report titled, “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development.” 
+“In simplest terms,” explains Patrick Wood, author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation , “Sustainable Development is a replacement economic system for capitalism and free enterprise. It is a system based on resource allocation and usage rather than on supply and demand and free economic market forces.” 
+In this context, Wood argues that the major significance of the transfer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is not the immediate need by the U.N. or some countries to censor websites, but to generate revenue for global purposes. ICANN will do this, he argues, through management of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), the links between the Internet and networks, electronic devices and embedded technology with IP addresses. “IoT are the connections between inanimate objects and the humans that depend upon them,” he notes. To accomplish this, ICANN has devised a new IP numbering system called IPV6, described as the “ vital expansion ” of the Internet. 
+“In terms of ‘follow the money,’ IoT is expected to generate upwards of $3 trillion by 2025 and is growing at a rate of at least 30 percent per year,” Wood argues . “In other words, it is a huge market and money is flying everywhere. If the UN can figure out a way to tax this market, and they will, it will provide a windfall of income and perhaps enough to make it self-perpetuating.” 
+He adds, “Congress never understood this when they passively let Obama fail to renew our contract with ICANN. However, Obama and his globalist handlers understood it perfectly well, which makes the deception and treachery of it even worse.” 
+Under the cover of “sustainable development,” Wood predicts the Internet will be used to construct a massive database on human activities, in order to monitor and control nations’ and peoples’ access to resources. It will constitute ultimate socialist control and a form of “digital slavery,” from which he warns there may be no return. 
+Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid .",FAKE
+7232,Hipster dog only likes 80s dog food that you can’t get any more,"Hipster dog only likes 80s dog food that you can’t get any more 07-11-16 A DOG hipster will only eat an obscure type of vintage dog food that he enjoys in a semi-ironic way. Labrador Wayne Hayes refuses to eat normal dog biscuits, preferring a discontinued American 80s brand of dog food called Chunkiez that his owners have to buy off the internet at vast expense. Hayes said: “I’m all about Chunkiez Beefy Mix because the box they come in has such a cool design aesthetic. It just speaks to my vibe. “I realise it’s £17 a box because they stopped making it in 1984 and there’s only one warehouse in Canada that has stock, but like everything in my life it’s paid for by my parents.” Hayes, who also claims to like postmen and fireworks, reckons he is friends with all the working class bull terriers at his local park even though they growl at him whenever he approaches. 
+Share:",FAKE
+6678,Press release on Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s meeting with Namibian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah - Russia News Now,"This post was originally published on this site 
+On October 26, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Namibian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, who has come to Moscow on a working visit to attend the sixth session of the Russian-Namibian Intergovernmental Commission on Trade and Economic Cooperation. 
+The parties spotlighted the traditional high level of the two countries’ mutual political understanding. They discussed partnership prospects in many spheres, particularly energy, fishing, railway transport, mining, and supplies of food and equipment. They exchanged opinions on topical international and African issues, including the UN reform, and confirmed their shared determination to work for enhancing the United Nations’ role in global affairs. 
+Ms Nandi-Ndaitwah highly evaluated Russia’s policy to promote peace and security, build up a broad international anti-terrorist front, and move towards a settlement in Syria. 
+The parties expressed concern over the remaining hotbeds of tension in Africa – in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Western Sahara, Sahara-Sahel region and elsewhere, and spoke in favour of conflict settlement by political means through dialogue and compromise. Related ",FAKE
+4407,Boehner 'baffled' by Israeli spying report,"Washington (CNN) U.S. lawmakers and administration officials expressed skepticism Tuesday that Israel had access to information on the Iran nuclear talks that went beyond what the White House had already shared with Capitol Hill, following a report that the Israeli government had given them secret details.
+
+Members of Congress were both surprised by and dismissive of a Wall Street Journal story that the Israeli government spied on the U.S.-led negotiations and leaked information on the developing deal to legislators.
+
+More than a half-dozen lawmakers in both parties and chambers denied receiving such briefings from Israel.
+
+""I'm not sure what the information was. But I'm baffled by it,"" Boehner told reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. ""No information (was) revealed to me whatsoever"" on the talks.
+
+Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, too, said he hadn't been privy to any leaks from Israeli officials and joked to CNN that he felt ""left out"" after he saw the WSJ report. Published late Monday, the article said that Israelis had eavesdropped on the confidential talks and leaked selective intelligence with the intent of rallying Democratic opposition to the developing agreement.
+
+Israel has been vocally opposed to the emerging deal and made its concerns crystal clear to lawmakers, including in a controversial address to Congress earlier this month by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The administration, which opposed Netanyahu's speech, has tried to counter Israel's lobbying for bills that would give Congress a vote on the deal, which many in both chambers oppose.
+
+Corker hinted to reporters that he felt the Journal report was a continuation of that White House effort.
+
+""I think y'all all understand what's happening here. I mean, you understand who's pushing this out,"" he said.
+
+The administration, for its part, aggressively pushed back against suggestions that it hadn't been briefing Congress adequately, prompting lawmakers to search elsewhere for information on the talks.
+
+""We have not just briefed Congress about the progress, or lack thereof, that's being made, but we've also briefed the Israelis and our other partners in the region and around the world,"" President Barack Obama said during a news conference on Monday afternoon.
+
+He added that any agreement negotiators reach would be presented for scrutiny by all stakeholders, and said he felt there was ""significant transparency in the whole process.""
+
+State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, meanwhile, called it an ""absurd notion"" that Congress would have to rely on a foreign government to get information about the administration's negotiations with Iran.
+
+But some Republicans maintained Tuesday that they have had to rely on other countries for information.
+
+Corker said he gets ""a lot of information"" from foreign governments and suggested it was the White House's own fault if their failure to brief lawmakers had them turning to leaks from foreign governments. Congress has repeatedly complained about not receiving adequate information from the administration on Iran.
+
+""If the White House was actually doing the normal advise and consent with the Senate then it wouldn't be necessary for us to get our information"" from foreign governments, Corker said.
+
+Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, however, said the White House had been helpful in its briefings on the Iranian nuclear talks. Psaki pointed Tuesday to hundreds of conversations the administration has held with members.
+
+""The extent of the administration sharing with us has been very significant and I know the administration has been briefing Israel as well,"" Kaine said.
+
+The substance of the alleged leaks — and whether they actually occurred — was unclear on Tuesday, with Congress members' professed ignorance matched by a senior official in the Israeli Prime Minister's office calling the allegations ""utterly false.""
+
+""The state of Israel does not conduct espionage against the United States or Israel's other allies. The false allegations are clearly intended to undermine the strong ties between the United States and Israel and the security and intelligence relationship we share,"" the official told CNN.
+
+But members of both parties said it was understandable the country would try to get whatever information it could.
+
+Kaine, who noted that he hadn't received any information from Israeli officials he hadn't already gotten from the White House, said that if Israel had been trying to glean details about the talks through clandestine channels, he didn't find ""any of that that controversial.""
+
+""I don't look at Israel or any nation directly affected by the Iranian program wanting deeply to know what's going on in the negotiation ... as spying,"" he said. ""I look at that as, that's what you would do if you're directly affected.""
+
+And Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the number two House Democrat and someone who has worked across the aisle on Iran, acknowledged that spying is not an unusual practice for most nations.
+
+""All nations try to get as much information as they can about what's going on that affects them -- including the United States of America, as we know,"" said Hoyer, who added that he hadn't received any leaked information from Israel.
+
+But Psaki said that the U.S. continues to share information with Israel on Iran and other shared interests even as the administration has made an effort to protect the sensitive negotiations against leaks.
+
+""I think we've spoken in the past to our concern in the past has been about leaks of certain sensitive information. And obviously, we've taken steps to ensure that the negotiations remain private,"" she said.",REAL
+5420,12 and 63-minute videos: Donald Trump connects to false flag targeting Muslims. Did you really think our ‘masters’ offer anything other than false choice between Left and Right arms of a .01% US rogue state?,"Posted on November 7, 2016 by Carl Herman 
+John Hankey ’s documentary of the assassination of President Kennedy is the single most favorite of my US History students among ~100 film clips I show as a National Board Certified Teacher (shown below). John is a retired Advanced Placement US History teacher, and the best documentary I’ve found on that game-changing history revealing the US rogue state . 
+John’s sharp 12-minute video, Is Donald Trump for Real? 
+John has rushed to create the following 63-minute documentary connecting Donald Trump to the .01% criminal rogue state leaders: The first 27 minutes document that the Orlando “shooting” included concocted rhetoric to promote fear of so-called “radical Muslims.” This connects to FBI Director James Comey, who refused to prosecute Hillary Clinton for obvious crimes of secret State Department communications hiding Clinton Foundation looting in the billions, then attempting to destroy the e-mail evidence . This expands into CIA/US intelligence interests to recruit assets they use for rogue state actions , but pitch to assets as patriotic undercover service. John’s analysis concludes that since 9/11, any so-called “leader” fear-mongering of “radicalized Islam” are the real terrorists of the US rogue state. The head cheerleader for this fear is Rudy Giuliani, John Trump’s alleged Director of Homeland Security . 
+John’s commentary for this work: 
+I didn’t expect Trump to bring Rudy Giuliani into his campaign. I didn’t anticipate the speeches either of them would give at the convention. I didn’t expect Trump to pick someone as dark and dirty as Mike Pence as his vice President. Trump has tied himself, through his policies and speeches, to the perpetrators of both 911 and Orlando. That’s what I learned making this video. 
+What is the lesson from the 9-11 attacks? Who did the Orlando attacks? This video answers both questions. FBI director, Comey, and the entire FBI organization, began lying and covering up, within hours, perhaps minutes, of the Orlando shooting. He is clearly implicated. This is the same Comey that is in the news right now, holding himself up as a paragon of virtue. 
+I didn’t expect to learn what I did learn about the shooter: that he went along on ride-alongs with police in high school; that he told his high school friends that he wanted to be a cop; that he was hired by the state of Florida directly out of high school as a prison guard; that he got a degree in police science from the local college; that he worked for the most prestigious, high-security, government-contracted security firm in the world for the last 10 years. He received good reviews in every one of these positions from his supervisors. The FBI saw fit to not mention any of that in their discussions of him. The shooter was gay, and most definitely not devout as a Muslim. Dozens of witnesses say he was the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. And he supported Hillary for president. Clearly he was expendable. 
+John’s game-changing documentary on the JFK assassination, Dark Legacy, in its 2-minute trailer : 
+1-minute video of George Bush, Sr.’s apparent duping delight of JFK’s assassination: 
+Dark Legacy highlights in ten minutes : 
+Full Dark Legacy documentary in 103 minutes : 
+My context for the .01% immediate history: The Crimes The US is a literal rogue state empire led by neocolonial looting liars. The history is uncontested and taught to anyone taking comprehensive courses. If anyone has any refutations of this professional academic factual claim for any of this easy-to-read and documented content , please provide it. US ongoing lie-started and Orwellian-illegal Wars of Aggression require all US military and government to refuse all war orders because there are no lawful orders for obviously unlawful wars. Officers are required to arrest those who issue obviously unlawful orders. And again, those of us working for this area of justice are aware of zero attempts to refute this with, “War law states (a, b, c), so the wars are legal because (d, e, f).” All we receive is easy-to-reveal bullshit . When Americans are told an election is defined by touching a computer screen without a countable receipt that can be verified, they are being told a criminal lie to allow election fraud . This is self-evident, but Princeton , Stanford , and the President of the American Statistical Association are among the leaders pointing to the obvious (and here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here ). Again, no professional would/can argue an election is legitimate when there is nothing for anyone to count. And, duh, corporate media are criminally complicit through constant lies of omission and commission to “cover” all these crimes. Historic tragic-comic empire is only possible through such straight-face lying, making our Emperor’s New Clothes analogy perfectly chosen. The top three benefits each of monetary reform and public banking total ~$1,000,000 for the average American household, and would be received nearly instantly. Please read that twice. Now look to verify for yourself . Demanding arrests as the required and obvious public response rather than ‘voting’ for more disaster: 
+The categories of crime include: Wars of Aggression (the worst crime a nation can commit). Likely treason for lying to US military, ordering unlawful attack and invasions of foreign lands, and causing thousands of US military deaths. Crimes Against Humanity for ongoing intentional policy of poverty that’s killed over 400 million human beings just since 1995 (~75% children; more deaths than from all wars in Earth’s recorded history). 
+US military, law enforcement, and all with Oaths to support and defend the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, face an endgame choice: Demand arrests , with those with lawful authority to enact it. An arrest is the lawful action to stop apparent crimes , with the most serious crimes documented here meaning the most serious need for arrests. Watch the US escalate its rogue state crimes that annually kill millions, harm billions, and loot trillions. 
+In just 90 seconds , former US Marine Ken O’Keefe powerfully states how you may choose to voice “very obvious solutions”: arrest the criminal leaders (video starts at 20:51, then finishes this episode of Cross Talk ): Solutions worth literal tens of trillions to ‘We the People’: 
+Again: The top three benefits each of monetary reform and public banking total ~$1,000,000 for the average American household, and would be received nearly instantly. Please read that twice. Now look to verify for yourself . We can quantify the end of the lie-started and illegal Wars of Aggression quickly into the trillions, and that said, it’s worth a lot more than what we quantify. Truth : a world in which education is expressed in its full potential to only and always begin with good-faith effort for objective, comprehensive, and verifiable data. 
+** 
+Note: I make all factual assertions as a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History, with all economics factual claims receiving zero refutation since I began writing in 2008 among Advanced Placement Macroeconomics teachers on our discussion board , public audiences of these articles , and international conferences (and here ). I invite readers to empower their civic voices with the strongest comprehensive facts most important to building a brighter future. I challenge professionals, academics, and citizens to add their voices for the benefit of all Earth’s inhabitants. 
+** 
+Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS , for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at 
+Note: Examiner.com has blocked public access to my articles on their site (and from other whistleblowers), so some links in my previous work are blocked. If you’d like to search for those articles other sites may have republished, use words from the article title within the blocked link. Or, go to http://archive.org/web/ , p aste the expired link into the box, click “Browse history,” then click onto the screenshots of that page for each time it was screen-shot and uploaded to webarchive. I’ll update as “hobby time” allows; including my earliest work from 2009 to 2011 (blocked author pages: here , here ). This entry was posted in General . Bookmark the permalink . Donate Recent Posts",FAKE
+7859,Tribute to the Last Honorable US Senator: The Story of Paul Wellstone’s Suspected Assassination,"14th Anniversary of His Passing By Joachim Hagopian
+On October 25th, 2002 the last great hero of the common people in the US Senate was very likely murdered by agents of the shadow US crime cabal government otherwise known as the Bush-Cheney regime. His wife and daughter and two pilots also died in the air crash. Paul Wellstone’s story deserves to be retold and Americans need to be reminded that criminals in and out of our government still need to be punished for their unindicted crimes. This article was written as both a tribute to an outstanding American patriot and a reexamination of his probable assassination by criminals still on the loose.
+Minnesota Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone was a man of integrity who was among the few politicians openly and adamantly opposing the Iraq invasion as well as the creation of the US version of Gestapo-land Security. As a fearless populist leader he’d been a constant thorn in the side ever since then President George H. W. Bush responding to the junior senator’s uncomfortable questions at a reception asked, “Who is this chickenshit?” 
+Years later as the only senator up for reelection who voted against the Iraq War when Democrats held just a one seat edge over the Republicans in the Senate (with one independent caucusing with Democrats), his thorny side made him the #1 GOP target . With the Karl Rove led Republican Party just one seat away from gaining Republican control over the US Senate, Wellstone’s death gave his Republican challenger Norm Coleman the 49-49 split and, as the President of the Senate, Cheney’s tie breaking vote would deliver the GOP 50-49 advantage needed to steamroll yet more tax cuts through for the rich, unending bankers’ wars and a never seen before boom for the military-security industrial complex. Again, motive and means tilt heavily towards assassination. The facts make it more than probable.
+A month prior to the November 2002 election Vice President Cheney had arranged a meeting with Wellstone, threatening him with grave consequences should he vote against the preplanned Iraq invasion. A few days later speaking to a group of war veterans, Wellstone publicly recalled Cheney’s threatening words :
+“If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota.”
+Then just days after that, 11 days prior to the midterm election and a year to the exact day after the deadly anthrax pushed Patriot Act victory , on October 25th Paul Wellstone, his wife and daughter along with three staffers and two pilots all died in an extremely suspicious plane crash.
+The FBI was at the crash site within 90 minutes , indicating they’d left their Minneapolis office before the “accident” at about the same time Wellstone’s plane was just taking off that morning, indicating the possibility of pre-knowledge.
+“The authors note that it would’ve taken agents at least three hours to reach the swampy and remote crash site. How they got there from the Twin Cities so quickly remains a mystery”.
+Additionally, the NTSB as the national agency that normally takes the lead role investigating all US plane crashes suddenly wasn’t. The FBI moved in ahead immediately proclaiming just another bad weather accident. Yet all on the ground witnesses and reports disagree, from pilots landing at the destination airport just two hours prior to the Wellstone flight to the airport manager who less than an hour after the crash was himself flying over the crash site. The plane considered a Rolls Royce among small planes was in tiptop shape and the two pilots steeped in skilled experience.
+As the feds’ rogue cops for go-to cover-ups, as in 9/11 and the anthrax attacks the year before, and the 1993 World Trade Center and 1995 Oklahoma City bombing s, the FBI has a long shady history of leaving its corrupt dirty fingerprints all over these well documented false flag, history changing events.
+A couple of brave Democratic House members anonymously stated that they believe Wellstone was murdered. In one Congressman’s words :
+I don’t think there’s anyone on the Hill who doesn’t suspect it. It’s too convenient, too coincidental, too damned obvious. My guess is that some of the less courageous members of the party are thinking about becoming Republicans right now.
+An unnamed CIA source admitted :
+Having played ball (and still playing in some respects) with this current crop of reinvigorated old white men, these clowns are nobody to screw around with. There will be a few more strategic accidents. You can be certain of that.
+A number of other Democratic politicians at a 2 to 1 margin to Republicans have also incurred mysterious deaths holding “unpopular” views just ahead of hotly contested elections. Two years earlier while traveling in Colombia Senator Wellstone had already experienced one known attempt on his life when a bomb planted enroute from the airport was discovered. Since that plot failed, he was then sprayed with the highly toxic poison glyphosate.
+As a longtime critic of the CIA and covert operations, Wellstone was targeted for assassination in both Colombia and in Minnesota by the masters of mayhem, murder and deceitful cover-ups – the FBI/CIA Criminals-In-Action at the behest of mastermind Cheney.
+So far in our two-tiered justice system, murder pays off for those high up on the psychopath food chain like Cheney, the Bushes and Clintons . Renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh exposed Cheney’s “executive assassination ring.” Cheney used the CIA as well as the military Joint Special Operations Command as his personal army of hitmen reporting directly to him. (see video below)
+
+If the neocons can live with themselves for murdering 3000 Americans on 9/11, they certainly never lose sleep over a few more targeted eliminations that include the genocidal 4 million Muslim bloodbath caused by the Bush crime family wars.
+The heavy-handed Bush-Cheney push for Iraq War and a DHS congressional vote prior to their 2003 invasion cast enormous high stakes in the Senate. Then add the known history of contempt from former CIA director Bush, the Cheney threat just days prior to Wellstone’s death, a slew of brazenly contradictory crash site anomalies , and the exposed murderous means used to pass the Patriot Act and the 9/11 false flag tragedy the year prior, all of this circumstantial evidence taken together strongly points to yet more diabolical skullduggery perpetrated by Skull & Bones criminals against humanity.
+The neocons grabbed the Hegelian solution they needed for waging unlimited war in the name of terrorism anywhere in the world while simultaneously at home merging FEMA into their newly created Homeland Security tasked with stripping away the rest of America’s constitutional liberties in the name of “national security.” In its first dozen years alone, deep state’s gluttonously monolithic DHS cancer has metastasized into the third largest federal department boasting near a quarter million fulltime employees. By hook, crook and murder the Cheney-Bush gang in 2003 got what they’d been wanting and plotting for years, two concurrent never-ending wars in the Middle East and the monstrous apparatus Homeland Security whose purpose is making war against the American people. Sadly the rest of the Western vassal nations play follow the leader.
+If examined according to the Hegelian Dialectic of 1) problem, 2) reaction and 3) solution, a draconian formula used by deep state to manufacture increased authoritarian control over the US populace, Paul Wellstone’s death can easily be explained.
+More than any other single member of Congress, the Minnesota senator posed a serious threat as the major opposition leader standing in the way of war criminals Bush and Cheney’s Iraq invasion as well as their formation of the Department of Homeland Security, two preplanned agendas rooted in the neocon think tank the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Prior to their stealing the 2000 election and their PNAC’s “Pearl Harbor” event they created called 9/11, their regime had already called for attacking Iraq for regime change and erection of the DHS cancer. The Bush-Cheney reaction to their problem Paul Wellstone was to assassinate him making it appear as an accident.
+By murder once Wellstone was out of the way, the neocons’ solution sent a loud and clear message of intimidation and a death threat in order to effectively silence any other potential Congressional opponents to the war in Iraq. Wellstone’s elimination paved the way for the war criminals’ successful campaign to win national support for the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq. That said, the month before the invasion on February 15th, 10-15 million people around the world in over 600 cities assembled in massive protest against the US intervention, the biggest one day antiwar demonstration in history. But unfortunately once the US military occupation began, the antiwar movement gradually fizzled out.
+And the PNAC (members of PNAC project, image left) calling for regime change in seven sovereign nations including Iraq within five years was underway. The predatory rape and pillaging of Iraq as the world’s second largest oil producer was justified by lies of Saddam’s non-existent WMD’s and ties to terrorism. Sadly the neocons who are still at the helm wreaking havoc in 2016 were able to implement an enormous new Department of Homeland Security monstrosity masquerading as public “safeguard” against terrorism. So without Wellstone and virtually no further opposition in Congress, the neocons created their multibillion dollar security state apparatchik promoting and enforcing draconian counterterrorism laws leading to increasing centralized authoritarian government control that is ushering in their New World Order.
+This tried and true Hegelian strategy has also been regularly utilized to further identify deep state obstacles as problems based on perceived neocons’ threats to US global unipolar hegemony.
+American Empire’s relentless efforts to isolate, weaken and target for global war designated international enemies Russia, China and Iran through propagandized demonization and orchestrating fake crises illustrate yet more examples of the Hegelian Dialectic in action. And just as the US crime cabal was successful in eliminating Wellstone as their New World Order threat, for decades the crime cabal government has been planning its war against identified American dissenters as enemies of the state who object to its heavy-handed tyranny.
+Paul Wellstone’s courageous opposition to the powerful Washington establishment’s evil cost him and his family’s life. Since we Americans are now in the same crosshairs of the same still entrenched shadow assassins, it’s time to make their arrests for treason and mass murder prior to our own death and destruction.
+Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/ . 
+Source: Global Research 
+",FAKE
+4096,There’s a good reason protesters at the University of Missouri didn’t want the media around,"Video of a confrontation between a news photographer and protesters at the University of Missouri on Monday led to a dispute between journalists and the activists’ sympathizers beyond the campus walls. In response to a series of racial issues at the university, a circle of arm-linked students sought to designate a “safe space” around an encampment on the campus quad. When they blocked journalist Tim Tai from photographing the encampment, reporters complained that media were denied access to a public space.
+
+Certainly, Tai – like any journalist – had a legal right to enter the space, given that it was in a public area. But that shouldn’t be the end of this story. We in the media have something important to learn from this unfortunate exchange. The protesters had a legitimate gripe: The black community distrusts the news media because it has failed to cover black pain fairly.
+
+As a journalist, I understand how frustrating it is to be denied access to a person or place that’s essential to my story. I appeared with other journalists on local media in New York City to discuss our frustration over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s sometimes standoffish attitude towards the press. He is a public figure whose salary is paid with tax dollars. He is obligated to be accessible to us.
+
+[Campus racism makes minorities drop out of college. Mizzou students had to act.]
+
+The student protesters Tai encountered, though, didn’t owe him anything. They did not represent a government entity stonewalling access to public information. They were not public officials hiding from media questions. They were young people trying to build a community free not only of the racism that has recently wracked Mizzou’s campus but also of the insensitivity they encounter in the news media: Newspapers, Web sites and TV commentary had already been filled by punditry telling black students to “toughen up” and “grow a pair.” Then, in the noisy conversation about First Amendment rights that Tai elicited, journalists compounded the insult by drowning out the very message of the students Tai was covering.
+
+As journalists, we should strive to understand the motivations of the people we cover. In this case, black students at the University of Missouri have had a string of racist encounters on campus: The president of the students’ association was called the n-word and other black students have been racially harassed while participating in campus activities. A Missouri journalism professor wrote in the Huffington Post that she has been called the n-word “too many times to count” during her 18 years at the university. In February 2010, black students woke up to cotton balls strewn over on the lawn of the black culture center on campus. The crime, carried out by white students, was designed to invoke plantation slavery. University president Tim Wolfe resigned Monday after graduate student Jonathan Butler went on a hunger strike and the school’s football players boycotted team activities to protest the very public racism he and many black students believe the school did little to address.
+
+Establishing a “safe space” was about much more than denying the media access; it was about securing a zone where students’ blackness could not be violated. Yes, the hunger strike, the safe space and other demonstrations were protests, and protests should be covered. But what was fueling those protests was black pain. In most circumstances, when covering people who are in pain, journalists offer extra space and empathy. That didn’t happen in this case; these young people weren’t treated as hurting victims. Instead, after the confrontation with Tai, aggrieved journalists responded with a ferocity usually reserved for powerful entities with the means to inflict lasting damage on their First Amendment rights.
+
+This wasn’t a problem with Tai’s character or his journalistic integrity; he was doing his job, and his past outstanding work speaks for itself. But in this conversation over “public space,” we’ve overlooked the protesters’ message — that conditions on campus make it an unbearable environment for black students to live and learn in. Their approach to creating a safe space should have been better conceived, but reporters should also feel a responsibility to try to understand and respect their pain, instead of rushing to judge them and panicking about an imagined assault on press freedoms.
+
+[Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?]
+
+Further, as reporters, we have to drop our sense of entitlement and understand that not everyone wants to be subjects of our journalism. Our press passes don’t give us the license to bully ourselves into any and all spaces where our presence is not appreciated. It’s one thing to demand access to public lands; it’s another to demand access to people’s grieving.
+
+In many communities that historically have been marginalized and unfairly portrayed by the media, there’s good reason people do not trust journalists: They often criminalize black people’s pain and resistance to racial oppression. We saw it in coverage of Ferguson and Baltimore, when news stations seemed more concerned with the property damage than with the emotional damage that prompted it. Though peaceful protests in Ferguson had been going on for days, reporters didn’t descend on the town in large numbers until there were clashes with police. Suddenly, coverage spiked, but most of it was about “cars vandalized” and “buildings burned.” On Fox News, the channel most watched for Ferguson coverage at the height of the unrest, protesters were called “thugs.” Reporting from the protests, CNN’s Don Lemon noted, “Obviously, there’s a smell of marijuana in the air.” We heard comparatively little about the residents’ long-held grievances about police harassment and brutality.
+
+The unfair portrayal of black people in the news media is well documented. One study analyzing news coverage by 26 local television stations, black people were rarely portrayed unless they had committed a crime. A 2015 University of Houston study found that this imbalanced coverage may lead viewers to develop racial bias against black people because it often over-represents them in crime rates. Recognizing this kind of bias in news media, black Twitter users started the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag to call out news images of Mike Brown that many felt criminalized him in his death.
+
+That black students would be skeptical of media is understandable. We’ve already seen the kind of headlines they undoubtedly feared. In an Atlantic piece headlined “Campus Activists Weaponize ‘Safe Space’,” Conor Friedersdorf calls the protesters a mob and insists they are “twisting the concept of ‘safe space.’” Again, a journalist criminalizes black people for expressing their pain. It was another piece centering the reporter’s privilege over the students’ trauma. Friederdorf’s piece completely ignores the intolerable racial climate that forced the students to establish a safe space in the first place.
+
+[Black college football and basketball players are the most powerful people of color on campus]
+
+There were other ways to cover these students’ protest without breaching their safe space and without criminalizing them.The human chain students formed provided ample b-roll and still photos. Students could have been interviewed outside of that space. I would have pitched a story to my editors with the headline, “Why Black Students Were Forced To Secure A Safe Space On A Public Campus.”  But to do that requires self-reflection and not a condescending, self-absorbed soliloquy about the First Amendment.
+
+For journalists, the Missouri protests are a big news story. For the black students we’re covering, however, it’s a fight for their humanity and liberation. Tai is correct: he was doing his job. But in that stressful moment he may have failed to realize that the space he wanted to enter was a healing one that black people had worked to secure.
+
+Black pain is not an easy subject to cover, but the lesson we can take from this encounter at Missouri is that our presence as journalists, with the long legacy of criminalizing blackness that comes with it, may trigger the same harmful emotions that led to the students’ protests in the first place.
+
+We used to count black Americans as 3/5 of a person. For reparations, give us 5/3 of a vote.
+
+Don’t criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did, too.
+
+This is what white people can do to support #BlackLivesMatter",REAL
+8550,Putin: Crimean Integration Into Russian Legal Framework Goes Forward,"Get short URL 0 23 0 0 The integration of Crimea into the Russian legal and administrative systems is a complex process, but the majority of the key issues have already been addressed, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday. 
+YALTA (Russia), (Sputnik) — During the All-Russia People's Front forum in Crimea, Putin said: ""There are a lot of questions and small problems, which are invisible at first glance. The federal authorities try to do something themselves, but they do not know the local conditions… That's why the question of entering, as I said, the Russian legal and administrative framework has turned out to be a difficult process, but we have practically overcome the main issues."" 
+The president also noted that one of the main impediments to progress has been the fact that local authorities, who have volunteered to oversee the integration, ""do not know how the laws and the system of Russia are organized."" Putin: Drinking Water Issue in Crimea No Longer Acute The two-day regional All-Russia People's Front forum, called the 'Forum of action. Crimea,' covered issues of energy, gas supplies, development of agricultural industry and other promising sectors of the economy.
+Crimea , Russia's historical southern region, seceded from Ukraine to rejoin Russia in March 2014. Almost 97 percent of the region's population voted for reunification in a referendum. Sevastopol, which has a federal city status, supported the move by 95.6 percent of votes. The referendum was held after a coup in Ukraine in February 2014. ...",FAKE
+8354,Comment on 10 Strange Facts About Our Presidents by tania de saram,"10 Strange Facts About Our Presidents   July 25, 2015 Subscribe 
+They may well be some of the most recognizable men on the face of the Earth: Our Presidents. Think you know all there is to know from history about these men? Think again and take a look at these strange facts: Presidential Alligators 
+
+Two different Presidents had pet alligators: John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover. 
+Adams received his pet alligator as a gift from a French general, and it lived in an unfinished bathroom of the White House. Hoover’s son had two alligators that frequently roamed the White House grounds. Bet that kept the Secret Service on their toes. Greek and Latin 
+
+James Garfield, our 20th President, could write well with each hand, but he also could write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other at the same time! Try that sometime! Cool Coolidge 
+Calvin Coolidge was fond of pranking the White House staff by pressing all the buttons in the Oval Office just to watch everyone run in frantically, unsure of what was wrong. The Rough Rider Roosevelt 
+During a speech in Milwaukee, a failed assassin shot Teddy Roosevelt in the chest. His next words were, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.” When everyone attempted to take him to the hospital, he waved them off and finished his 90 minute speech with the bullet still lodged in his chest! Now that’s toughness! Dueling Jackson 
+President Andrew Jackson was involved in over 100 duels, most to protect the reputation of his wife. In one, Jackson offered his opponent the first shot. The man shot Jackson, but Jackson merely shook it off, like it was a bee sting, then shot and killed the unlucky opponent. Fashion Model Before Gerald Ford was President, he worked as a fashion model in New York City. He even made it to the cover of Cosmopolitan with Phyllis Brown in 1942. Out-Of-This-World Carter 
+Before he became President, Jimmy Carter was making a speech in Georgia when he saw a UFO. He filed a report of the incident with the International UFO Bureau stating that it was a self-illuminating, bright white object hovering in the sky. Bartender-In-Chief 
+Before Abraham Lincoln was the President, he was a lawyer. But before that he was he was a bartender. He owned a saloon, Berry and Lincoln, with his friend William Berry. Bushusuru 
+Poppy Bush was in Asia for a trade conference. At a state event held by the Japanese Prime Minister, Bush fainted after vomiting all over the banquet host. The Japanese later coined the term “Bushusuru” meaning “to do the Bush thing” or “to vomit.” Gambling Harding 
+Warren Harding loved to play poker, and during one game he bet a set of priceless White House china, which he promptly lost. 
+h/t and All Images: BrainJet  ",FAKE
+10549,French Political Leader: “France is about to Enter a Holy War with Islam” – “Embrace Christianity… Never Accept the Religion of Satan”,"Posted on October 31, 2016 by Theodore Shoebat 
+A major political leader in France, Francois-Xavier Peron , has declared that France is about to enter into a devastating war against Islam , and its going to be extremely violent. His solution to prepare? Embrace the Christian Faith and never accept the antichrist masonic religion . 
+I did an interview with Mr. Peron about this coming war, and why the Christian Faith must be the religion of the world: 
+Courtesy of Freedom Outpost 
+Theodore Shoebat is the Communications Director for Rescue Christians , an organization that is on the ground in Muslim lands, rescuing Christians from persecution. He is the author of two book, For God or For Tyranny and In Satan’s Footsteps: The Source and Interconnections of all Evil , he also has a DVD series called “Christian Militancy,” which is on Christian warfare and our fight against evil and tyranny. 
+Article posted with permission from Shoebat.com Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+590,Matt Bevin is the next governor of Kentucky. He has President Obama to thank.,"Matt Bevin, the Republican nominee in the Kentucky governor's race, wasn't a very good candidate.  By all accounts, he was standoffish and ill at ease on the campaign trail, and inconsistent — to put it nicely — when it came to policy.  The Republican Governors Association, frustrated with Bevin and his campaign, pulled its advertising from the state.  Polling done in the runup to today's vote showed Bevin trailing state Attorney General Jack Conway (D).
+
+And yet, Bevin won going away on Tuesday night. How? Two words: Barack Obama.
+
+Obama is deeply unpopular in Kentucky. He won under 38 percent of the vote in the Bluegrass State in 2012 after taking 41 percent in 2008. In the 2012 Democratic primary, ""uncommitted"" took 42 percent of the vote against the unchallenged Obama. One Republican close to the Kentucky gubernatorial race said that polling done in the final days put Obama's unpopularity at 70 percent.
+
+So, when the RGA returned to Kentucky for the final two weeks with $1 million worth of ads, you can guess who was prominently featured.
+
+Yup! President Obama. And, in particular, his famous/infamous comments about his policies being on the ballot during an October 2014 economic speech at Northwestern.  Here are the key 28 words from Obama: ""I am not on the ballot this fall. Michelle’s pretty happy about that. But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.""
+
+Republicans clubbed Democrats in swing and GOP-leaning states with Obama's comments in the 2014 midterms. So, why not repeat the same blueprint a year later?
+
+""Our families can't afford four more years of the liberal policies of President Obama and career politicians like Jack Conway,"" the ad's narrator says as ominous pictures of the two men are shown on the screen. ""Can you really trust Obama and Conway to make things better?""
+
+Now, it wasn't solely Obama's popularity that cost Conway on Tuesday night. ""Conway was the anchor around Conway,"" said one Democratic strategist familiar with the polling in the contest. ""In many ways Conway is the [former Massachusetts state attorney general] Martha Coakley of Kentucky. There's just something about him that voters simply don’t want to vote for.""
+
+Conway might not be Kentucky's cup of tea. But, Bevin, from his odd and less-than-promised primary challenge to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) in 2014 all the way through his surprise primary win in this race and rough-around-the-edges general election campaign was far from the ideal GOP candidate either.
+
+The difference? Conway had a ""D"" after his name — just like President Obama. And, in a state like Kentucky, that appears to be more than enough.",REAL
+4174,"Fear of Trump sparking a surge in citizenship, voter applications","- The campaign of the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, is sparking a surge in the number of citizenship applications and voter registrations among Hispanics fearful of his immigration policies. Since January, California alone has seen a boost of 218 percent in Democratic registration and among Hispanics, registration is up 123 percent. ()",REAL
+6949,Dr. Duke and Andrew Anglin discuss the most important vote and election of our lives!,"Dr. Duke and Andrew Anglin discuss the most important vote and election of our lives! November 7, 2016 at 12:32 pm 
+Dr. Duke and Andrew Anglin discuss the most important vote and election of our lives! 
+Today Dr. Duke had Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin as his guest for the hour. They talked about the importance of the election tomorrow. They remarked that the Clinton campaign makes baseless accusations that the Russians could hack our voting machines to manipulate the election, but then insisting that Trump is beyond the pale for suggesting that the Hillary forces could possibly rig the vote. 
+They also talked about New York Times columnist David Brooks admission on the PBS News Hour that as a result of globalization, immigration, and feminism, white men in America have been “displaced,”“shafted,” and “ruined,” and that their support for Trump is due to them “going with their gene pool.” Brooks, a Jewish Republican, says the one person he cannot support for President is Donald Trump. 
+And now, a message from Andrew Anglin: 
+Meanwhile, the media is admitting that voting machines will be hacked . 
+We have to overwhelm the polls tomorrow. You must get everyone you know to vote . Call them right now. Don’t wait. Go through your phonebook on your cellphone and call up every single person you know who is not a totally liberal commie, and make sure they are going to vote. Offer to give them a ride if they need it. 
+Let’s do this, people. 
+Immediately following the show Dr. Duke got an mailbox full of emails saying this was the most powerful and inspiring radio broadcast they ever heard! Spread it around. 
+
+Our show is aired live at 11 am replayed at ET 4pm Eastern and 4am Eastern. 
+Click on Image to Donate! 
+And please spread this message to others.",FAKE
+3435,John Roberts helps overthrow the Constitution,"Conservatives are dismayed about the Supreme Court’s complicity in rewriting the Affordable Care Act — its ratification of the IRS’s disregard of the statute’s plain and purposeful language. But they have contributed to this outcome. Their decades of populist praise of judicial deference to the political branches has borne this sour fruit.
+
+The court says the ACA’s stipulation that subsidies are to be administered by the IRS using exchanges “established by the State” should not be construed to mean what it says. Otherwise the law will not reach as far as it will if federal exchanges can administer subsidies in states that choose not to establish exchanges. The ACA’s legislative history, however, demonstrates that the subsidies were deliberately restricted to distribution through states’ exchanges in order to pressure the states into establishing their own exchanges.
+
+The most durable damage from Thursday’s decision is not the perpetuation of the ACA, which can be undone by what created it — legislative action. The paramount injury is the court’s embrace of a duty to ratify and even facilitate lawless discretion exercised by administrative agencies and the executive branch generally.
+
+The court’s decision flowed from many decisions by which the judiciary has written rules that favor the government in cases of statutory construction. The decision also resulted from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s embrace of the doctrine that courts, owing vast deference to the purposes of the political branches, are obligated to do whatever is required to make a law efficient, regardless of how the law is written. What Roberts does by way of, to be polite, creative construing (Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting, calls it “somersaults of statutory interpretation”) is legislating, not judging.
+
+Roberts writes, almost laconically, that the ACA “contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting.” That is his artful way of treating “inartful” as a synonym for “inconvenient” or even “self-defeating.”
+
+Rolling up the sleeves of his black robe and buckling down to the business of redrafting the ACA, Roberts invents a corollary to “Chevron deference.”
+
+Named for a 1984 case, Chevron deference has become central to the way today’s regulatory state functions. It says that agencies charged with administering statutes are entitled to deference when they interpret ambiguous statutory language. While purporting to not apply Chevron, Roberts expands it to empower all of the executive branch to ignore or rewrite congressional language that is not at all ambiguous but is inconvenient for the smooth operation of something Congress created. Exercising judicial discretion in the name of deference, Roberts enlarges executive discretion. He does so by validating what the IRS did when it ignored the ACA’s text in order to disburse billions of dollars of subsidies through federal exchanges not established by the states.
+
+Chevron deference does for executive agencies what the “rational basis” test, another judicial invention, does for legislative discretion.
+
+Since the New Deal, courts have permitted almost any legislative infringement of economic liberty that can be said to have a rational basis. Applying this extremely permissive test, courts usually approve any purpose that a legislature asserts. Courts even concoct purposes that legislatures neglect to articulate. This fulfills the Roberts Doctrine that it is a judicial function to construe laws in ways that make them perform better, meaning more efficiently, than they would as written by Congress.
+
+[Bernstein: Why the Affordable Care Act is so messed up]
+
+Thursday’s decision demonstrates how easily, indeed inevitably, judicial deference becomes judicial dereliction, with anticonstitutional consequences. We are, says William R. Maurer of the Institute for Justice, becoming “a country in which all the branches of government work in tandem to achieve policy outcomes, instead of checking one another to protect individual rights. Besides violating the separation of powers, this approach raises serious issues about whether litigants before the courts are receiving the process that is due to them under the Constitution.”
+
+The Roberts Doctrine facilitates what has been for a century progressivism’s central objective, the overthrow of the Constitution’s architecture. The separation of powers impedes progressivism by preventing government from wielding uninhibited power. Such power would result if its branches behaved as partners in harness rather than as wary, balancing rivals maintaining constitutional equipoise.
+
+Roberts says “we must respect the role of the Legislature” but “[A] fair reading of legislation demands a fair understanding of the legislative plan.” However, he goes beyond “understanding” the plan; he adopts a legislator’s role in order to rescue the legislature’s plan from the consequences of the legislature’s dubious decisions. By blurring, to the point of erasure, constitutional boundaries, he damages all institutions, not least his court.
+
+Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.",REAL
+1602,Poll gives Biden edge over Clinton against GOP candidates; VP meets with Trumka,"A new national poll shows Vice President Biden faring better than Hillary Clinton in match-ups against top Republican presidential candidates, as the VP weighs jumping into the race -- and meets Thursday with a top labor leader.
+
+Fox News has learned that Biden is meeting later in the day with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. This comes after he met last weekend with liberal icon, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
+
+He's making the rounds amid a flurry of polls showing Clinton potentially vulnerable. The latest Quinnipiac University National Poll shows Clinton polling better than Biden – who is not a declared candidate – in the Democratic primary race. But the poll gives Biden the slight edge when squared against leading GOP contenders.
+
+""Note to Biden: They like you, they really like you, or they like you more than the others,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement.
+
+The poll shows Biden leading Republican front-runner Donald Trump, 48-40 percent. He also leads former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, 45-39 percent.
+
+The former secretary of state also edges those candidates, but not by as much. She leads Trump 45-41 percent; she leads Bush 42-40 percent.
+
+Both candidates narrowly lead Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. The survey comes on the heels of another showing Biden running strong in head-to-head match-ups against Republicans in key swing states.
+
+Biden continues to weigh a potential bid, as Clinton struggles with the controversy over her personal email and server, and faces eroding poll numbers. The Quinnipiac poll showed her with her worst favorability rating yet – with only 39 percent holding a favorable view of her, compared with 51 percent who don’t.
+
+Clinton weighed in on the Biden rumors Wednesday, saying in Iowa that, “He should have the space and the opportunity to decide what he wants to do.”
+
+“I’m going to be running for president regardless,” she added.
+
+The Quinnipiac poll of 1,563 registered voters was conducted Aug. 20-25. It has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.",REAL
+8997,UN’s Yemen Peace Plan Would Sideline Former President Hadi,"Hadi Would Be Figurehead to Placate Saudis by Jason Ditz, October 27, 2016 Share This 
+Heavily backed by Saudi Arabia, former Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s ambition to return as the ruler of Yemen appears to be waning, with a new UN peace plan proposal making the rounds that would sideline him more or less entirely. 
+Hadi’s position has been contentious from the start. “Elected” in 2012 in a UN-mandated vote in which no opposition was allowed, Hadi was supposed to serve two years in office leading to a new constitution and free elections. The constitution never happened, and Hadi extended his reign unilaterally in 2014. He resigned in January 2015 when his anti-Houthi military offensive turned sour and he lost the capital. 
+The Saudis, primarily opposed to the Houthis because they’re Shi’ites, insists to this day that Hadi remains the rightful ruler, and in March 2015 attacked Yemen, vowing to reinstall him. While the Houthis have expressed openness to a unity government that ends the conflict, they’ve also opposed it involving Hadi or his vice president Ali Mushin Ahmar, who they say were too corrupt to work with in a transitional government. 
+The UN plan seems largely to agree, as it would require Ahmar to resign outright, and would allow Hadi to remain only as a figurehead with no real power, instead seeking to stack the government with people both sides are likely to accept. 
+The decision to leave Hadi in at all appears to be designed to placate the Saudis, who vowed to reinstall him through their war, and would be able to claim that they succeeded under this deal, even if it ultimately means Hadi doesn’t get any power. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+3112,Pope Francis’ address to Congress: what it means for six Catholic lawmakers (+video),"More Catholics are in Congress than ever before – and in positions of power. To each, however, Pope Francis' visit means something different.
+
+Pope Francis talks with President Obama after arriving at Andrews Air Force Base Sept. 22. (First lady Michelle Obama is shown at right.) This is the pope's first visit to the United States, and he will become the first pontiff to ever address a joint session of Congress Thursday.
+
+When Pope Francis addressed a joint meeting of Congress on Thursday morning – a first for a pope – he looked out on the most Catholic Congress ever. Just over 30 percent of the lawmakers are Roman Catholic, with that group evenly balanced between Democrats and Republicans.
+
+While these members may be in agreement on religious affiliation, they’re often at odds over politics. Indeed, Francis arrives at a time of great tension on the Hill, as abortion politics plays out in a funding battle that could trigger a government shutdown next week. And because of the pope’s views on climate change, one Catholic lawmaker, Rep. Paul Gosar (R) of Arizona, says he’s boycotting the address.
+
+Still, Catholic members are clearly honored – and excited – by the visit, which has caused them to reflect on their faith and the message of this popular pope.
+
+Here are the views of six Catholic lawmakers ahead of the address – their hopes for healing of the body politic and the effect of their religious beliefs on their outlook as legislators.
+
+Before he got into public service, the congressman – originally from Boston – considered the priesthood. He spent six years studying at a Catholic seminary. He views the pope’s visit through the lens of history, recalling his boyhood excitement over John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
+
+“I was an Irish-Catholic Bostonian bursting with pride that one of our own was running for president,” Representative Connolly relates in an interview in the chandeliered speaker’s lobby of the House. “Imagine the chagrin I felt when I saw the headline of Time magazine and Newsweek at that time, saying, ‘Can a Catholic be president?’ and questioning our patriotism, our allegiance to the country.”
+
+It was a “shock” that anyone would even ask such a question, or that the nominee would have to answer it, he says.
+
+Connolly describes the integration of Catholics and their religion in the “great American mosaic” as coming to “full resolution” with the invitation to Francis to address the Congress – and the nation.
+
+Can other religions, such as Islam, make a similar journey?
+
+“I think so. America is always a work in progress,” he says. “We’re about ultimately expanding rights. Widening inclusivity. Broadening opportunity. And so acceptance and tolerance is in our future, and more of it.”
+
+Like other lawmakers, Senator Collins says her faith “informs” her political philosophy but doesn’t “dictate” it.
+
+For instance, she doesn’t agree with the Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception and early-term abortions. But unlike many of her Republican colleagues, she’s very glad the pope is sounding the alarm over climate change.
+
+In her college days at St. Lawrence University, the senator took a course in Christian ethics. She was surprised that a whole unit was devoted to the environment and stewardship.
+
+“The concept of stewardship, and that we should leave the earth in a better condition for the next generation, is very much a biblical concept,” she says. Francis’ views on that “reinforce” her own.
+
+“This pope’s message of inclusiveness, forgiveness, mercy, and love is so appealing to me as well as to lapsed Catholics and people who aren’t even Catholic,” says Collins, who planned to bring her mother, in her late 80s, to the address.
+
+The senator hoped that the pope “appeals to our better natures, that he preaches a message of unity and compassion for others that are less fortunate, and that he challenges us.”
+
+Over the past 20 years, Mr. Boehner has invited three popes to speak before Congress. One finally accepted. It fulfills a dream for a man with Catholicism deeply anchored in himself.
+
+Boehner grew up in a big working-class family – the second of 12 children. He went to Mass before school and said prayers with his football teammates and coach at his Catholic high school.
+
+Prayer is a big part of the speaker’s life. When friends first suggested he run for Congress, he declined. But he went each morning for a month to church and prayed about it.
+
+“Apparently, after a month, he got the answer,” says his former chief of staff Mick Krieger, in a video about the speaker.
+
+“I have my conversations with the Lord. They start in the morning early, and they go on all day long. You can’t do this job by yourself,” Boehner has said.
+
+The speaker had a one-on-one with Francis before the pontiff took his place in the House. After the address, the pope moved out to the speaker’s balcony to greet the crowds on the West Lawn of the Capitol.
+
+The speaker’s office planned to record the visit from beginning to end at speaker.gov/pope.
+
+""I think there's a lot of interest in what the pope is saying, his outreach to the poor, the fact he thinks people ought to be more religious,"" Boehner said in a video released by his office. ""He's got some other positions that are a bit more controversial. But, it's the pope!”
+
+Italian-American, the daughter of a politician father (who was mayor of Baltimore), and a longtime public figure herself, the top Democrat in the House has an unusual history of encounters with popes.
+
+They started in the eighth grade, when she visited Pope Pius XII in Rome with her family, she recounts to reporters. As a young woman, she stood along the papal parade route in Manhattan, thinking that Pope Paul VI had seen her waving. She knows better now, she laughs.
+
+She speaks reverently of Pope John Paul II, whom she welcomed to San Francisco in 1987, and of the writings and speeches of Pope Benedict XVI, whom she met in Rome in 2009. He is the author of her favorite encyclical, “God is love.”
+
+The visit of Francis to Congress “is thrilling beyond words.” He will speak as a head of state, she says, so “it won’t be a blessing.” And yet, Catholics such as herself are “overwhelmingly almost emotional about the religious experience of his coming.”
+
+She may not agree with the church on abortion – a woman has God-given free will, in her view – but the pope’s “commitment to focusing on the climate crisis” is an “act of worship.” Ditto on his emphasis on helping the needy.
+
+“To minister to those needs is an act of worship, to ignore those needs is to disown the God who made us. That’s how I see his visit.”
+
+The freshman lawmaker from Miami says that “being a practicing Catholic makes me very hopeful about my role as a legislator” and what Congress can do to help the neediest people in the country and the world. His faith, he says, “indirectly” influences his policy decisions.
+
+Representative Curbelo is a product of a prestigious Catholic boys’ school, Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in Miami. Its motto is “Men for Others,” and he carried that interest into his work on the Miami-Dade County School Board before being elected to Congress last year. His focus in the House is on reforming poverty programs, K-12 schooling, and higher education.
+
+Curbelo hoped that the pope would speak broadly about issues, rather than make specific policy recommendations. Highlight climate change? A good idea. Prescribe a carbon tax? Not so good. Call attention to the Syrian refugee crisis? Please. Ask the United States to take 100,000 refugees? That would be an “inappropriate” suggestion.
+
+More than anything, Curbelo hoped Francis “inspires us and shows us that we can work together here.” Being from a swing district, the young congressman is taking a pragmatic approach to politics and is willing to compromise.
+
+“Maybe the pope can help renew the Congress in some way,” he says.
+
+Up in his office on the third floor of the Capitol, the second-ranking Democrat keeps a Roman Catholic prayer book that belonged to his grandmother. It’s in Lithuanian. She brought it with her and her three children when she crossed the ocean to immigrate to America in 1911.
+
+In the old country, the book was contraband, because Russians were imposing their orthodox religion. But in America, said Senator Durbin on the Senate floor on Tuesday, his grandmother could use that prayer book freely.
+
+The senator told this story in a windup of praise for the Constitution’s religious-freedom provisions, including that there is no religious test for elected office. The broader context was Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson’s recent comment that a Muslim should not be president, as well as GOP antiabortion measures in the Senate this week.
+
+Caught as he exited the chamber, Durbin commented on the effect of Catholicism on his outlook as a legislator.
+
+“I’ve always tried to be thoughtful about the relationship between religion and democracy,” he said. “My values guide me, but I want to make my decisions in the context of our Constitution and our democracy.”
+
+Francis is “wildly popular” in his family and comes up at the dinner table, with praise for his decision to dress in an unadorned way and to live in a simple apartment. “A humble life. What an inspiration!”
+
+As for the pope’s message, Durbin smiles and laughs: “It is no surprise that all of us in political life are thinking about the political impact of his message. Is it going to be more Democratic, more Republican? What is he going to say that makes us feel good or makes us squirm?”
+
+His guess is that the pope will transcend the political and speak to larger issues.
+
+“I have such faith in this man.... I didn’t think I would live long enough to see another pope in the mold of John XXIII, and Pope Francis has answered my prayers.”",REAL
+926,Kasich: ‘My Republican Party doesn’t like ideas’,"Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) criticized his party for a lack of ideas Wednesday in a wide-ranging and occasionally combative interview with The Washington Post’s editorial board.
+
+Kasich, who sees the April 26 primary in Maryland as a way to increase his delegate total, argued that neither of his rivals could win the presidency, because of their negativity.
+
+“If you don’t have ideas, you got nothing, and frankly my Republican Party doesn’t like ideas,” ­Kasich said. “They want to be negative against things. We had Reagan, okay? Saint Ron. We had Kemp, he was an idea guy. I’d say Paul Ryan is driven mostly by ideas. He likes ideas. But you talk about most of ’em, the party is knee-jerk ‘against.’ Maybe that’s how they were created.”
+
+[Read the transcript of John Kasich’s interview with the Washington Post edtiorial board]
+
+After Tuesday’s New York primary, where weeks of campaigning landed Kasich half a dozen delegates, the governor repeatedly emphasized his conservative credentials while taking care to define what “conservative” was.
+
+“I’m gonna kill the Commerce Department,” Kasich said. “I don’t know why you don’t have an Education Department tied to the Labor Department.”
+
+Kasich derided the idea of a carbon tax — “I’m not big on tax increases” — and when challenged on the math behind his tax-cut plan, which many analysts say would increase deficits, he mocked the pretenses of experts.
+
+“The Center for a Responsible Budget — what have they ever balanced?” he asked. “When there is certainty, both on the regulatory side, on the tax side, and on the spending side, you basically get economic growth. And look, if we find out that we’re getting off the path, then we’ll have to adjust.”
+
+For more than a month, Kasich has been mathematically eliminated from winning the Republican nomination with the pledged delegates awarded in primaries. Tuesday’s result in New York came close to slamming the same door on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), something the senator addressed in an impromptu news conference Wednesday. While Cruz went on to call Kasich a “spoiler,” the Ohio governor agreed with him on one point: Front-runner Donald Trump was not entitled to the nomination if he failed to reach a simple majority of 1,237 delegates.
+
+“One time I made an 83 on my math test, and I did better than everybody else, and I asked the teacher: How come I don’t have an A?” Kasich said. “The teacher said, ‘An A is 90.’ I said, ‘Oh, I get it.’ Say he gets in there with 1,100 — go get the rest of ’em.”
+
+Kasich went on to imagine a convention where he could appeal to Trump voters by respecting them. Citing his work in Ohio to calm tensions after a police shooting in Cleveland, Kasich said he’d advanced past his “bombast years, where I was pounding on everybody.” He boasted of Ohio’s fracking boom but emphasized that the state had probably “the most” regulation of the ­natural gas industry in the country.
+
+He also rejected the idea that he had moderated by opposing “birthright citizenship” when he was a congressman and endorsing it as a governor.
+
+“I probably signed onto some bill,” shrugged Kasich. “Somebody probably walked up to me on the floor and said, ‘how ’bout putting your name on this?’ ”
+
+At other points, Kasich vigorously defended his record. He said that changes to Ohio’s early voting law, opposed by Democrats, were simply fair and had been requested by local officials.
+
+“Do you think 28 days of voting is restrictive?” Kasich asked. “How many other states have 28 days of early voting?”
+
+Kasich made a few stabs at populism, criticizing the President Obama-era Federal Reserve for its multiple rounds of quantitative easing. To Kasich, that only resulted in companies “buying up more of their stock and making the rich richer.” He was otherwise light on criticism of the Obama administration.
+
+On the District, Kasich dismissed the idea of statehood or a vote in Congress.
+
+“I just don’t see that we really need that, okay?” Kasich said. Referring to the Republicans who have stopped such proposals, ­Kasich said that “they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party.”
+
+But as he pondered the question some more, Kasich softened.
+
+“They send me a bill, and I’m president of the United States?” he said. “I’ll read your editorials.”",REAL
+9654,Experts Speechless! Countless People Miraculously Relieved of Serious Illness & Diseases-Must See!,"Experts Speechless! Countless People Miraculously Relieved of Serious Illness & Diseases-Must See! by IWB · October 27, 2016 Tweet 
+An absolutely must-see! This new scientific breakthrough has been proven to cure cancer and all sorts of diseases and ailments! The results and success stories are out of this world! The FDA and government organizations do not want you to know about this!",FAKE
+1777,What does Rick Perry have?,"We’ve looked at the arguments for the presidential candidacies of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Turning to former Texas governor Rick Perry, one might conclude he is the most underestimated candidate. Pundits who rank candidates tend to put him in the bottom tier of contenders. Like generals, however, pundits tend to fight the last campaign, and in the case of Perry that means affixing a dunce cap to his head and writing him off. He certainly has a tiny margin for error, but I tend to think voters care less about past mistakes and more about what they see before them. So what does Perry have to show them?
+
+1. People do like a comeback story. His rotten performance ushered in a “new” Perry, more humble and studious.
+
+2. He is a grown up. In a field of freshman senators, a couple media figures (Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee) and a rising but less experienced star from the ranks of governors (Scott Walker of Wisconsin) Perry unarguably has the advantage of 14 years as governor, a background including the border crisis and other situations demanding crisis management and the experience of having run for president once before. In a New Hampshire round table, he reiterated the argument: “Americans are going to want someone who has been tested, someone who’s got results in their background and we’re not going to choose another young, untested United States senator. I don’t think that is where Americans are going to want to go.” Again he stressed, “Rhetoric is fine. Nobody loves a barn burning speech any more than I do, but if you don’t have the record to back that up — if you’re not road-tested — then I think there is always a concern.”
+
+3. He is the only candidate with military experience. Oddly, he rarely mentioned this in the 2012 race. He is not making that mistake this time around. “I think it’s important to understand that, and having that very real life experience of knowing what these conflicts do in terms of treasure and blood,” he said in New Hampshire. “Somehow, we thought we could stop [the Islamic State] with some simple bombing missions but that was just not the case, and now we’re left with some really, less than desirable opportunities to stop ISIS. It’s going to require our personnel to be engaged on the ground and I would suggest having experience, having a track record of dealing with issues and having experienced people who you trust who also have track records dealing with issues [is an asset].”
+
+4. He has battled the federal government. To the extent voters are angry with Washington politicians and federal meddling, they have a champion in Perry. He battled the feds on everything from Obamacare to Environmental Protection Agency regulations. In his recent clash with the president, he castigated the president for not securing the border, and then took it upon himself to deploy the state’s national guard troops. He’s remained an advocate of state control and state-led reform on education and health care.
+
+5. He’s an excellent retail politician with lots of free time. That is a powerful combination in early primary states where voters expect to be engaged directly and repeatedly.
+
+6. He’s feisty but not obnoxious. Republican voters are itching for a fight and Perry is pugnacious enough to give it to them. He’s been in the trenches fighting the administration, and will not be shy about taking on Hillary Clinton.
+
+7. There is an opening in the field. Mitt Romney did not run. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is the victim of self-inflicted wounds. So if you want an experienced conservative governor who is not a Bush? That’s Perry’s spot. His biggest problem may be Walker, whom Perry will need to show is less prepared on foreign policy and less accomplished than he is. It’s a tall order, but with everyone gunning for Walker, Perry may be the beneficiary.
+
+8.  He can handle the media. He is forceful enough and generally knowledgeable enough to push back on a tough interviewer and, as we saw on a late night appearance, relaxed enough (and sufficiently plugged into popular culture) to come across well in informal settings. He’d be smart to use non-news media to reset his image.
+
+9. He’s a law and order figure. In defending the border and Second Amendment rights and championing prison reform, he has struck an appropriate balance between individual rights and public safety. No one will accuse him of being anti-police or, on the other hand, of defending government excess.
+
+10. He’s led a rags to a not-very-many-riches life. No one will say he started out life with privilege or wealth. He does not have Ivy League degrees, nor does he live an ostentatious life style (he currently lives in a”1,400-square foot, 2 bedroom, 2 bath condo, full of boxes, four dogs”).",REAL
+10023,"Minnesota Man Arrested, Sentenced to 6-Months in Jail for Having a Windmill On His Property","Minnesota Man Arrested, Sentenced to 6-Months in Jail for Having a Windmill On His Property Nov 14, 2016 0 0 Now the State claims the right to tell you what you can and can’t have on your own property. 
+Orono, MN – For more than a year, we have been following the story of a Minnesota man, Jay Nygard, who is routinely risking jail time because he refuses to remove a wind turbine from his property. Nygard has been in and out of court over the years, and despite a short-lived victory last October, he was recently back in front of a judge facing a contempt of court charge for refusing a court order to remove the turbines from his property. 
+He did eventually remove the turbines, leaving only the cement bases because removing them would cause structural damage to their house. This was not good enough for the local government, who ignored the advice of three different engineers and demanded that they remove the bases, despite the risk of damaging the home. This is all that remains of the windmill on Nygard’s property, a concrete footing, in the ground. 
+On Friday, Nygard was arrested and, according to his son, has been given six months in prison for refusing to remove the base. 
+According to Kahler Nygard, Jay’s son, his father even attempted to make peace with the county and compromise on a number of different issues, but they ignored his appeals. 
+“The choices for my dad were to potentially destroy our foundation in the house or go to jail, he even offered an olive branch saying he would add an easement to the deed saying when the house is demolished the pad must be removed, but that was ignored also, ” Kahler said in an exclusive interview with The Free Thought Project. 
+“The base was level with the ground and 4 feet cubed. We removed the top half of the concrete and used a metal cutting tool to remove the top half of the bolt assembly, rendering the structure unusable,” Kahler explained. 
+“They say that we have to remove to footing 100% and have it inspected by the city, which we have three different engineers all saying we should just leave it , one of them even does contract work for the city, ” he added. 
+Kahler said that although there are no ordinances against windmills, the county has a personal vendetta against his family. 
+Nygard has the right to do whatever he wants with his own property, but unfortunately in a democracy such as the United States, the property rights of an individual can be overridden according to the whims of politicians and the demands of uninvolved third parties. 
+Please share this story with your friends and family in hopes of keeping a good man, whose only “crime” was self-sustainability, out of jail. 
+John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter-culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work , he organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference , which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled “Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance” at bookpatch.com. 
+This article was originally featured on The Free Thought Project Vote Up",FAKE
+8319,"This is tyranny not democracy, says party with single MP","This is tyranny not democracy, says party with single MP 03-11-16 
+UKIP has asserted that democracy can only be upheld if everyone does what they and their single MP demands. 
+Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, speaking because UKIP’s elected leader was forced to resign by people who did not agree with the result, said Britain risks having its future decided by an unelected group of ideologues. 
+He continued: “Democracy means something, and if it can be overridden by those who are unable to gain power legitimately it is no longer democracy but something much darker. 
+“I do not care who in the media elite supports these fanatics, who are determined Britain will bend to their will and tell whatever lies it takes to get their way. 
+“UKIP will certainly vote for hard Brexit in Parliament. Well, I hope we will. I’m not on speaking terms with our MP right now.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+10378,Re: DePaul: “Unborn Lives Matter” Posters Are Veiled Bigotry,"Print 
+There are times that we are guilty of doing things that are offensive and we are unaware. Not knowing the culture you offend puts you in a position to seem bigoted. But are you responsible for how others perceive your words? Are you accountable to ensure that no one is ever offended by your words and actions? Is that even possible? 
+It seems that this is now what is expected of DePaul University students. They are only to express themselves in ways that others will not take offense. 
+The Washington Times reports : 
+The nation’s largest Catholic university told a group of pro-life students that it could not display posters reading “Unborn Lives Matter,” lest they provoke the Black Lives Matter movement. 
+In a letter to the College Republicans, DePaul University president Father Dennis Holtschneider said the posters contained “bigotry” veiled “under the cover of free speech,” the Daily Wire reported. 
+“By our nature, we are committed to developing arguments and exploring important issues that can be steeped in controversy and, oftentimes, emotion,” Mr. Holtschneider said in the letter. “Yet there will be times when some forms of speech challenge our grounding in Catholic and Vincentian values. When that happens, you will see us refuse to allow members of our community be subjected to bigotry that occurs under the cover of free speech.” 
+So to twist the popular slogan of one group to fit another group is bigoted? Would they feel this way if the sign were different? What if the sign read, “Black Unborn Lives Matter,” would that be bigoted? 
+The truth is, the university is beginning to crack down on freedom of speech and expression, if those thoughts and expressions are conservative. More mind control from the left. 
+Article reposted with permission from Constitution.com shares",FAKE
+7665,Bill Clinton’s Lover: He Called Ruthless Hillary ‘The Warden’,"  Bill Clinton is a sex-addicted ‘monster’ who mocked Hillary Clinton by calling her ‘The Warden’ in front of friends and privately boasted about his high notch count, according to his long-time mistress and childhood friend Dolly Kyle. Kyle, now 68, says she had a decades-long affair with   before and during his marriage and had a front-row seat to Bill’s salacious double-life in the 1970s and ’80s. Their on-again, off-again relationship ended abruptly in the 1990s, after Bill Clinton allegedly threatened to ‘destroy’ Kyle if she spoke to the media about their relationship. Kyle’s decades of observations, shared in an interview with the DailyMail.com as well as in her 2016 book The Other Woman, provide a unique perspective on the Clintons’ marriage and the couple’s treatment of the women who have accused   of infidelity or sexual assault over the years. Kyle, an Arkansas native who has since befriended several of Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers, said she was determined to come forward with her story after hearing Hillary Clinton say on the campaign trail that women who have been sexually assaulted have the ‘right to be believed’.  35  ",FAKE
+6115,Did You Notice Anything Different In The MSM Lately?,"in: Mainstream Media , Politics , Propaganda Last week, I reported that the MSM was doing a great deal to try and undermine the truths that are being revealed about our government, the rigged election , and their darling, Hillary Clinton. My suspicion was that they were going so far as to set up fake websites and use skewed polls to prepare us for a Clinton victory. It appears I was not alone in that suspicion because all sorts of people began to bring up the topic of skewed polls, including the Trump campaign. Today, I noticed in the headlines that all of the “ official polls ” are telling a different story. They’re telling a story of a battle that is too close to call. Some are even saying that Trump is ahead by a point or two. Some are saying Clinton is a little bit ahead. It’s because they’ve been busted and they’re scrambling to cover the evidence of their dishonesty, of course. Politico even wrote a scathing article about the conspiratorial nature of the very idea of rigged elections . How did this happen? I believe that the combined voices of people who are sick of their baloney have made a difference. They realized that they weren’t pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes and they regrouped. Don’t let this convince you that the election is somehow magically “unrigged.” They’re just dialing back the rhetoric because it was so blatant that everyone was noticing it. It’s still a disgusting mess but the truth is our defense. Who can you trust? Here are at least two organizations who have a strong record for telling the truth: Project Veritas (It’s hard to doubt your own eyes on secret videos – find them on YouTube and Twitter ) Wikileaks (In 10 years their documents have never once been discredited – find them on Twitter and on their website ) Alternative media sites that have been around for a few years are likely to be more trustworthy than the mainstream sites, but let’s be honest. We have a bias too – nearly all of us despise Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and the Clinton Money Machine that has so overloaded the system with corruption that it’s becoming obvious to even the most oblivious Kool-Aid drinker that something is awry. Check the sources. The bottom line is, don’t just blindly trust anyone. Vet your sources. Click the links the websites provide and decide whether or not the sources they’re quoting seem to be legitimate. When you see the exact same wording repeated over and over, generally it’s because it’s a talking point that someone has informed the media they are to emphasize. Have you ever noticed phrases like “an abundance of caution” or “for your own safety” getting used over and over? It’s a talking point and the collusive media is using it as a propaganda tool. Never trust a talking point. We’re all being played. I believe that the decision of who will be the next president has already been made. It would take a scandal of massive proportion to derail this train before it gets to the station on November 8th. And that’s really saying something, considering the scandals that have already been unearthed, many of which should have landed Clinton in an orange jumpsuit but have somehow been glossed over with little mention in the MSM. If you’re as worried about a Clinton presidency as I am, the biggest thing that you can do is fight for the truth to be known. Share reliable information about Hillary Clinton where everyone can learn about it. When we all raise our voices together, we are heard. Telling the truth – and doing so loudly – has never been more important than it is right now. Article first posted at DaisyLuther.com Submit your review",FAKE
+7538,BOMBSHELL: Hillary Clinton’s Leaked Audio Proves She Rigs Elections,"BOMBSHELL: Hillary Clinton’s Leaked Audio Proves She Rigs Elections Posted on October 30, 2016 by Dawn Parabellum in Politics Share This 
+Astonishing, newly released leaked audio of Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has just surfaced, and what it reveals is damning. In her own voice, we hear the corrupt Democrat telling reporters that elections can and should be rigged to ensure who wins. This throws the validity of every government on earth in the shredder because she isn’t only talking about rigging American presidential elections. 
+Since the FBI reopened their investigation into the criminal Democrat and Hillary seeks a powerful position to dictate the lives of others, it’s important to hear this audio. She is blatant when she say elections shouldn’t take place unless we make “sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” 
+Hear it from her own mouth: 
+Hillary clearly said, “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win. ” 
+This conversation took place in 2006 during a discussion with Eli Chomsky, an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press. At the time, Hillary Clinton was running for a “shoo-in re-election” as a U.S. senator. 
+Her trip, making the rounds of editorial boards, brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press. Her conversation was secretly recorded, and the audio hasn’t been released until now. 
+According to Chomsky, this little audio clip has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room. He claims his copy is the only copy and no one has heard it since 2006 — until now. Election rigging Democrat, Hillary Clinton 
+It proves she is willing to do whatever it takes to win. With massive amounts of voter fraud already being reported in favor of the most criminal and corrupt politician of our time, in combination with this audio, it’s hard to deny that Hillary wouldn’t rig the election to win. 
+Luckily, Americans are wising up to her disturbing antics. We all saw her cheat during the debates , and the proof came out in leaked emails, thanks to WikiLeaks. 
+It’s important to hear this, coming directly from Hillary herself, and we can all tell that it is her voice. We all know she’s rigging this election to beat Donald Trump, but she obviously has had her hands in rigged elections before. 
+It is hard to say how many elections across the globe she has influenced or just stolen. Hillary Clinton will stop at nothing to grab even a small amount of power, and she continues to prove she is as corrupt as they come.",FAKE
+2009,Rubio reignites Cuba debate with Senate hearing,"While two of his potential Republican presidential opponents were dodging press and scrambling to clean up gaffes on vaccinations, Rubio on Tuesday presided over his first hearing as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Western Hemisphere Subcommittee.
+
+He peppered two panels of witnesses with pointed questions on President Barack Obama's move to normalize relations with Cuba, which he called ""disgraceful.""
+
+And immediately after the hearing, Rubio became one of the GOP's fiercest advocates for vaccinations since the issue emerged as a political football this week, asserting children should ""absolutely"" be vaccinated.
+
+It was a senatorial move from a senatorial perch for the Florida Republican, who has told his staff to prepare as though he'll run for president in 2016, though he hasn't yet made a decision publicly.
+
+The hearing highlighted two of his primary advantages in the potential presidential race: His measured, charismatic speaking style, and compelling personal story and heritage. But the hearing also hinted at the troubles ahead for Rubio, as he's vies for attention in a party crowded with rising stars and a different high profile issue seemingly each week. The U.S.-Cuba relations remain a less-than-glamorous storyline, and an initially packed hearing room cleared out midway through when most of the senators left to vote. And with the threat from ISIS taking center stage in the debate over U.S. foreign policy, and others with considerable foreign policy chops, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, contemplating a run, it remains to be seen whether the Cuba issue will be a sufficient launching pad to keep Rubio in the national spotlight. Rubio opened the initially full hearing with a series of assertive and pointed questions for a State Department official, seeking to pin her down on whether the U.S. would agree to limit its meetings with democracy activists as a condition for the U.S. government opening an embassy in Havana. ""Can you categorically say we will never accept that condition?"" he ultimately asked. ""It's not a real condition,"" the official replied. While the questions were incisive, they came in stark contrast to Sen. Rand Paul's prickly interview with a CNBC host on Monday, during which he shushed her and yawned while she asked questions. The interview quickly went viral and drew him negative press. And Rubio's appeal as the son of Cuban immigrants for a party seeking to make inroads with Latinos was on display during the second panel, which featured witnesses delivering testimony almost entirely in Spanish, with the help of a translator. At one point, Rubio moved to ask a question after a witness had given her answer in Spanish, interrupting the interpreter. He apologized, adding, ""I could understand."" ""I told Sen. Flake...not to worry about the translation. I'll let you know what they said later"" he joked, drawing laughter from the audience. The senator's backers believe his experience on national security issues, and particularly his leadership on Cuba, could give him a leg up on the competition in the primary. Just last month, Rubio won high praise for his command of foreign policy issues at a Koch-sponsored panel that allowed him to differentiate himself from fellow 2016 contenders Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. He emerged as the administration's most ardent critic after Obama announced in late December plans to thaw diplomatic relations with Cuba. And he's kept up the heat on the issue since, appearing on local and national media and writing op-eds hammering the move. The subcommittee chairmanship, too, doesn't come without risks. If he ultimately decides to run for president, as is expected, he'll face questions about his ability to get things done on Capitol Hill. Leadership of a subcommittee raises the expectations to deliver with concrete results — and can underscore the limits of a first-term senator's power.",REAL
+4803,Lester Holt: presidential debate moderator and proven fact-checker,"What will Lester Holt do when Donald Trump says that he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning?
+
+Holt, 57, the most-watched daily news broadcaster in the country, has been tapped to moderate the first presidential debate Monday between Trump and Hillary Clinton. To say there is a lot riding on the night is not quite to capture it.
+
+A record 100m Americans are expected to watch the showdown, probably making it one of the biggest television broadcasts ever. The political stakes are higher: many partisans on both sides think the fate of the republic, all 330m strong, is on the line.
+
+Although under intense pressure from the Democratic side to play fact-checker as a bulwark against Trump’s baloney, and under equal pressure from the Republican side to stay out of it, Holt has not talked about how he sees his role. But he has shown persistence, in exclusive interviews with both candidates in recent months, in pinning the candidates down where they would rather speak unaccountably.
+
+Hillary Clinton supporters hope that means that Holt might intervene, unlike his network colleague Matt Lauer at a forum earlier this month, should Trump repeat his lie about having opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning, or should Trump roll out any of the other 48 “pants-on-fire” lies that the nonpartisan group Politifact has counted him telling.
+
+Trump supporters may hope that a different Holt shows up, one closer to the amiable broadcaster who co-hosted a weekend morning show for 12 years. They want the man who announced the Westminster Kennel Club dog show for three consecutive years in the aughts, not a fact-checker of the nightly news.
+
+After 35 years as a newscaster, Holt currently hosts the top-rated nightly news program in America, NBC Nightly News, attracting 7 to 8 million viewers on an average weeknight. Any doubts about the calibre of his talent that accompanied his unusual arrival in the role – amid the career implosion of his predecessor, Brian Williams – quickly dissipated. Holt drove the ratings still higher.
+
+A native Californian who has written that he “grew up on air force bases”, Holt has reported from zones of armed conflict and natural disaster while charismatically serving up lighter stories as weekend anchor of NBC’s morning news and variety show, Today. He also plays upright bass.
+
+Holt will encounter an unprecedented challenge, however, on Monday night, when he will mediate between two hungry candidates now tantalizingly close to claiming the most powerful post on Earth. He has interviewed both candidates in recent months, and brought a healthy journalistic antagonism to the job.
+
+In June, Holt sat three feet away from Trump on gaudy Louis XVI chairs in Trump Tower, nearly knee-to-knee, and demanded that the candidate show evidence for a recent claim that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked. Anyone who doubts Holt’s ability to fact-check Trump should watch the exchange, in which he reduces Trump to the lame assurance, “I will report back to you.”
+
+Two weeks later, Holt pressed Clinton on the opposite side of the email issue, confronting her with a finding by FBI director James Comey that she had been “extremely careless” in handling classified information. She ended up squirming, too.
+
+Trump has expressed displeasure with Holt. “Lester is a Democrat,” Trump flatly told Fox News a week ago. But whether Holt checks that “fact” at the debate or not, it is false. Holt is a registered Republican.
+
+",REAL
+3778,Patriots Day 2015: Boston does not stand alone,"In the two years since the horrific marathon bombing, Boston has been nothing less than resilient. The city has stood defiant and proud even as it painfully relived those grim events during a trial and persevered through a winter of record blizzards. But now, spring has come again, and we remember on this Patriots’ Day that if history is any guide, it holds not only the promise of Boston’s continued steadfastness, but also an affirmation from across America that Boston does not stand alone, and never has.
+
+As far back as 1775 and predating our nation’s independence, Boston stood strong against those who would do the city harm. Punished for the singular act of dumping tea into Boston Harbor and the far broader initiatives of Massachusetts toward representative government, Boston chafed under the onerous provisions of what rebels called the Intolerable Acts. Chief among them was the Boston Port Bill, which closed Boston Harbor to commerce and effectively strangled the city. The question on the minds of many—regardless of political persuasion or sympathy—went to the crux of the future: Would Boston stand alone or would a slowly evolving fabric of national identity and purpose rally to its support?
+
+A wide swath of colonial America responded. Support in the form of cash, goods, livestock, and crops poured into Boston, not only from surrounding Massachusetts and New England, but also from Virginia, South Carolina, and even far-off Georgia. Samuel Adams, rebel chairman of Boston’s quasi-governmental Committee of Correspondence, was quick to dispatch effusive letters of thanks for this generosity, but Adams also used these communications to emphasize the broader ramifications of Boston’s plight: If the British crown could do this to Boston, what was to keep it from visiting similar retribution on other cities?
+
+In Farmington, Connecticut, almost one thousand people gathered to protest blocking the port of Boston and find the resulting indignities and deprivations to Boston oppressive as well as personal. “We, and every American,” the townspeople declared, “are sharers in the insults offered to the town of Boston.”
+
+But humanitarian aid was one thing, armed rebellion in support of political ideals quite another. The spark drawing an irrevocable line between the two came on the April morning commemorated by Patriots’ Day, when British regulars marched onto Lexington Green and confronted local militia. Before the day was out, sporadic gunfire there and at Concord’s North Bridge unleashed a fury of pent-up emotions on both sides that exploded into all-out warfare. Within weeks, Boston was a city tightly guarded by nervous British soldiers and besieged by colonial militias.
+
+Rebel leaders who fled Boston were determined that whatever happened next, the city must not stand alone. John Hancock and the Adams cousins, Samuel and John, aggressively recruited further support from throughout the colonies. These April events could not be seen as just a local Boston incident or even a Massachusetts insurrection, but rather as an American revolution. Patriots from Connecticut to New York and from Virginia to South Carolina responded and recognized that but for the spark at Lexington and Concord, Boston’s fight might very well be occurring in their own backyards.
+
+Two hundred and forty years ago, patriots throughout the colonies recognized that the fundamental liberties at stake in Boston went well beyond its streets and thus, the fundamental duty to fight when necessary to preserve those liberties also went well beyond Boston. For my part,” a gentleman farmer from Virginia by the name of George Washington had written a few months earlier, “I shall not undertake to say where the line between Great Britain and the colonies should be drawn, but I am clearly of opinion, that one ought to be drawn, and our rights clearly ascertained.” It is no different today. We have so much in this country that is good and just, but we must not take any of it for granted. The times remain tenuous and uncertain. We will not bend to terrorism. We will not compromise principle.
+
+Boston’s resiliency these past two years in the face of unspeakable and senseless tragedy comes as no surprise. Boston has and always will stand strong, and its resolve is a summons that America will not allow random acts of terrorism or any force to threaten the underlying fabric of our national identity. Then as now, this city calls us to patriotism and reminds us of the strength of our nation. Merely remembering Boston is not the same as standing with Boston. This Patriots’ Day we remember that only by standing with Boston can we preserve our fundamental freedoms and affirm that Boston does not stand alone.
+
+Historian Walter R. Borneman is the author of ""MacArthur at War: World War II in the Pacific"" just published by Little, Brown.",REAL
+6010,| Man whose son was killed by illegal immigrant files two suits against feds,"The Hill – by Don Rosenburg 
+I always cared about the immigration issue, even before my son was killed. As a 30-year resident of southern California, I’d been noticing for years the extent to which concrete and sprawl was swallowing up the natural environs of my corner of the state. Of all states, I always thought, why is it the one that’s most beautiful and with the most arable and productive land that’s being torn up and paved over. And just how much traffic and gridlock are people willing to take, I would think to myself. Then my son, in his second year of law school, was run over three times and killed by an illegal-alien driver. That’s when I became an immigration-control activist and that’s why I can’t support Hillary Clinton , the open-borders candidate for president. 
+And that’s why I’ve just filed two lawsuits; one against the Department of Homeland Security and one against the Justice Department. With the help of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), I’m pursuing a complaint against DHS for refusing to consider the environmental impacts of its mass immigration policies, a gross violation of environmental law we argue. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), all federal agencies must take a “hard look” at every “major action” they commit to and produce for the public an environmental assessment which a) explores all potential impacts of the action, and b) considers all possible alternatives. Since the law was enacted in 1970, California’s population has doubled from 20 to 40 million and DHS (including its predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Services), has never published a single report exploring the possible impacts associated with its immigration policies. As we argue in our brief, if the public knew the effects of runaway population growth maybe they would have rallied that much harder for tougher enforcement and lower immigration-levels. Having ignored their obligations under the statute for so long, this could be one the biggest environmental law violations ever committed in the nation’s history. 
+DHS, I must add, does write some NEPA reports. For instance, it calculates the impacts caused by its illegal-alien detainment facilities, just not for the people detained inside them then released to the public. This has to be done, we argue. America’s environmental footprint is gargantuan, the biggest in the world only next to dictatorial China. The American public’s constantly harangued that so-called “Dreamers”, that insufferably inane term, simply want an American standard of living and a piece of the American pie. But as I used to tell my son as a child, ‘wanting’ is different than ‘needing.’ America is a mere 5 percent of the world’s population, yet it consumes 20 percent of its petroleum. So every time a legal or illegal alien comes into the country and settles, the level of greenhouse gases in the world goes up just a little bit more. As for urban sprawl, between 1980 and 2000 America paved over a piece of land (much of it arable) that was around the size of Illinois . But does the correlation between population growth and environmental impact, a simple logical connection your average 3rd -grader could grasp, ever get even a moment’s discussion in the major media? For the future of our kids, it must. 
+Same goes for illegal alien-crime. Routinely, we’re told there’s a “ scholarly consensus ” that illegal aliens commit fewer criminal offenses than citizens. As if this could be supportable. Most illegal aliens are absolutely skill-less and skill-less people commit far more crime on average—Never mind for now the labor markets-argument that the last thing our increasingly knowledge-based and roboticized economy needs is more skill-less workers. And nothing, of course, is stopping criminals on the run in Mexico from simply relocating here, out of the policia ’s reach. 
+In any case, we know anyway that illegal alien-crime is a Rumsfeldian “known unknown”, as DOJ apparently doesn’t even bother to tally this information–My son’s death was counted as having been killed by a citizen with a driver’s license. At least for the public, that is. And that’s why IRLI and I are suing them as well. The agency has refused to comply with our requests for records on this issue. Why they can’t divulge to the American public these sorts of facts is telling in itself. After all, the Justice Department can tell me how many pick-pocketing crimes there were last year but not how many people were killed by illegal aliens. Not that this should matter in the debate over illegal immigration. Since they shouldn’t have been here in the first place, any crime an illegal alien commits against our own, like the killing of my boy, is a special tragedy. A nightmare that will occur again and again if Hillary Clinton takes the White House. 
+Don Rosenberg is the founder of advocacy group Unlicensed to Kill and lives in Los Angeles County.",FAKE
+4250,Mitt Romney to give big speech on 2016 race. Joining #NeverTrump? (+video),"Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, will be talking about the 'state of the race' Thursday.
+
+As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?
+
+Mitt Romney on Thursday will give a major speech on his view of the 2016 presidential election, according to a news release from his office.
+
+The Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee will be appearing at the Hinckley Institute of Politics in Salt Lake City. The announcement said the subject of his talk was the “state of the race” but gave no further details.
+
+Hmm. “Major speech,” “state of the race,” what’s that mean? Is Mr. Romney going to endorse Marco Rubio or (less likely) one of the other remaining GOP hopefuls?
+
+We’d guess that’s not the case. If he were, he’d be appearing onstage with the endorsee wherever he is campaigning. That wouldn’t be in Utah. Also, his friends and aides are saying it’s not that kind of speech.
+
+“Close @MittRomney aide says he won’t endorse or get in, but tomorrow’s speech ‘will be worth covering,’ ” tweeted NBC campaign reporter Andrew Rafferty.
+
+Hold it a second, “get in”? It’s kind of late for that since the primaries are about half over. Yes, Romney tried to run again at the start of the 2016 cycle, but he got elbowed out of the race by the juggernaut of the Jeb Bush campaign, if you remember. So maybe he’s having second, or third, thoughts. Or hoping that other people think he might be having those thoughts even if he isn’t.
+
+Is Romney going to anti-endorse Donald Trump? This seems more likely. Romney is clearly unhappy with the rise of The Donald, whose demeanor is the opposite of his and whose rise could mean the end of the low-tax, small-government, corporate-friendly GOP that Romney knows and presumably loves.
+
+In recent weeks, Romney’s been sniping at Mr. Trump from the safety of social media and doing a decent job of it. His style has been to pile on when Trump is already getting pressure on certain stuff.
+
+Thus Romney has urged Trump to release his back tax returns. He’s pushed Trump to make public off-the-record conversations with The New York Times. Most notably, he hit Trump for the latter’s slowness to disavow the endorsement of former KKK official David Duke.
+
+“A disqualifying & disgusting response by @realDonaldTrump to the KKK,” Romney tweeted on Monday. “His coddling of repugnant bigotry is not in the character of America.”
+
+Tough words. Also effective words, since they roused Trump to respond with a fairly predictable “loser” taunt. Romney hasn’t fallen into the trap of exchanging adolescent jibes about body parts with Trump, as Senator Rubio has. Instead, Romney’s hit him quick on political substance and then moved on.
+
+That may change Thursday. It’s even possible Romney will join the #NeverTrump movement and say he’d never vote for Trump if he’s the Republican nominee.
+
+Would that matter? Well, it won’t derail Trump, who at this point is only a Florida primary win away from wrapping up the GOP presidential prize. Like so many Republican establishment figures, Romney is coming to the anti-Trump battle too late, with too little, to make a difference.
+
+What it might do is give Romney a little free media exposure at a time when the GOP establishment may be mulling over its options. If there’s a revolt at a contentious convention, whom can the establishment offer as a legitimate Trump alternative? If the old GOP wants to split and field its own third-party candidate, who might that be?
+
+Unlike Rubio or Ted Cruz, Romney’s never lost to Trump. So Romney may be implicitly offering himself as an alternative, whatever his speech’s specific words.",REAL
+3428,Is there any way Obama can fill Supreme Court vacancy?,"Probably not. So he needs to decide how he wants to pressure Republicans. He has several options.
+
+Why Trump says he wants to ditch plans for new Air Force One
+
+A group with 'People for the American Way' from Washington gathers with signs in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington Monday to call for Congress to give fair consideration to any nomination put forth by President Obama to fill the seat of Antonin Scalia.
+
+President Obama has promised to uphold his “constitutional responsibility” to nominate a replacement for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative stalwart who died over the weekend. Now, he just needs to decide whether to try to soften Republican senators with the pick or make it a full-throated, election-year political statement.
+
+Numerous Senate Republicans have already said they will not confirm a new Supreme Court justice before this fall's presidential elections. Given that the new appointment could tilt the court’s balance of power from conservative to liberal for the first time in decades, there is little reason to think Republicans are bluffing.
+
+“I don’t see the Republicans just giving in and giving President Obama the opportunity to do that,” says Mark Hurwitz, a political scientist at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.
+
+So that leaves Mr. Obama with a strategic choice: What does he want to accomplish?
+
+Constitutionally, he can’t force the Senate to vote on his nominee, but he can use Republican inaction to generate public pressure – the only tool available to him. Some Democrats have expressed the hope that Republicans will at least allow a hearing, even if they block Obama's nominee.
+
+But even if his nominee doesn't even get a hearing, Obama can make a statement. He could put pressure on Republicans by choosing a lower court judge who has already survived a rigorous vetting process. Or he could put pressure on them by reaching out a hand in the form of a politically acceptable candidate.
+
+Or he could do both.
+
+One of the leading candidates to replace Scalia is District of Columbia Circuit Court Judge Sri Srinavasan, who was confirmed by the Senate 97 to 0 in May 2013. (A Republican filibuster had pushed a previous candidate to withdraw her nomination.)
+
+“Democrats believe that unambiguous verdict on Srinivasan could make it awkward for [Senate majority leader Mitch] McConnell to block a vote on his nomination,” reported Politico.
+
+Republicans might not be in any mood to play along, however. Even beyond the political ramifications of filling Scalia's seat, Republicans are still fuming over Democrats' move in 2013 to eliminate filibusters for lower court federal judges. Such judges can now be approved by a simple majority vote, though Supreme Court justices still must reach the 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster.
+
+“Republicans were furious about the 2013 changes,” The Washington Post reported, “and that residual anger could be a huge obstacle for any Obama nominee.”
+
+As Obama has already made Democratic appointees the majority on nine of the nation’s 13 circuit courts, the Post notes, Republicans are unlikely to give in on Scalia's replacement easily.
+
+That could lead Obama to nominate an overtly liberal candidate, using the political fallout from the stymied nomination to help drive voters to the polls in November.
+
+“If Obama knows for sure that his pick is not going to get formally considered, he can go with someone who gives his party maximum political leverage,"" writes the Post’s James Hohmann.
+
+The political maneuvering speaks to the stakes behind the nomination. It will “likely have enormous consequences for constitutional law in the nation,” affecting issues from campaign finance and affirmative action, to religious freedom and the Second Amendment, writes Jay Wexler, a professor at the Boston University School of Law, in an e-mail.
+
+“Republicans became very aware, particularly during the Reagan administration, how important judicial nominations were,” adds Professor Hurwitz of Western Michigan University. With a presidential election looming, “they smell the White House right now, and they don’t want to lose this.”",REAL
+2948,"Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah was incremental reformer, US ally (+video)","King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who Saudi state TV says has died, sought to counter Iran's influence in the Middle East while opposing pro-democracy movements at home.
+
+How much do you know about Saudi Arabia? Take our quiz!
+
+In this Wednesday, June 3, 2009 file photo, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, right, speaks with U.S. President Barack Obama, during arrival ceremonies at the Royal Terminal of King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. On early Friday, Jan. 23, 2015, Saudi state TV reported King Abdullah died at the age of 90.
+
+Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, the powerful U.S. ally who joined Washington's fight against al-Qaida and sought to modernize the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom with incremental but significant reforms, including nudging open greater opportunities for women, has died, according to Saudi state TV.
+
+More than his guarded and hidebound predecessors, Abdullah assertively threw his oil-rich nation's weight behind trying to shape the Middle East. His priority was to counter the influence of rival, mainly Shiite Iran wherever it tried to make advances. He and fellow Sunni Arab monarchs also staunchly opposed the Middle East's wave of pro-democracy uprisings, seeing them as a threat to stability and their own rule.
+
+He backed Sunni Muslim factions against Tehran's allies in several countries, but in Lebanon for example, the policy failed to stop Iranian-backed Hezbollah from gaining the upper hand. And Tehran and Riyadh's colliding ambitions stoked proxy conflicts around the region that enflamed Sunni-Shiite hatreds — most horrifically in Syria's civil war, where the two countries backed opposing sides. Those conflicts in turn hiked Sunni militancy that returned to threaten Saudi Arabia.
+
+And while the king maintained the historically close alliance with Washington, there were frictions as he sought to put those relations on Saudi Arabia's terms. He was constantly frustrated by Washington's failure to broker a settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He also pushed the Obama administration to take a tougher stand against Iran and to more strongly back the mainly Sunni rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.
+
+Abdullah's death was announced on Saudi state TV by a presenter who said the king died at 1 a.m. on Friday. His successor was announced as 79-year-old half-brother, Prince Salman, according to a Royal Court statement carried on the Saudi Press Agency. Salman was Abdullah's crown prince and had recently taken on some of the king's responsibilities.
+
+Abdullah was born in Riyadh in 1924, one of the dozens of sons of Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. Like all Abdul-Aziz's sons, Abdullah had only rudimentary education. Tall and heavyset, he felt more at home in the Nejd, the kingdom's desert heartland, riding stallions and hunting with falcons. His strict upbringing was exemplified by three days he spent in prison as a young man as punishment by his father for failing to give his seat to a visitor, a violation of Bedouin hospitality.
+
+Abdullah was selected as crown prince in 1982 on the day his half-brother Fahd ascended to the throne. The decision was challenged by a full brother of Fahd, Prince Sultan, who wanted the title for himself. But the family eventually closed ranks behind Abdullah to prevent splits.
+
+Abdullah became de facto ruler in 1995 when a stroke incapacitated Fahd. Abdullah was believed to have long rankled at the closeness of the alliance with the United States, and as regent he pressed Washington to withdraw the troops it had deployed in the kingdom since the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. finally did so in 2003.
+
+When President George W. Bush came to office, Abdullah again showed his readiness to push against his U.S. allies.
+
+In 2000, Abdullah convinced the Arab League to approve an unprecedented offer that all Arab states would agree to peace with Israel if it withdrew from lands it captured in 1967. The next year, he sent his ambassador in Washington to tell the Bush administration that it was too unquestioningly biased in favor of Israel and that the kingdom would from now on pursue its own interests apart from Washington's. Alarmed by the prospect of a rift, Bush soon after advocated for the first time the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
+
+The next month, the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks took place in the United States, and Abdullah had to steer the alliance through the resulting criticism. The kingdom was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, and many pointed out that the baseline ideology for al-Qaida and other groups stemmed from Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.
+
+When al-Qaida militants in 2003 began a wave of violence in the kingdom aimed at toppling the monarchy,Abdullah cracked down hard. For the next three years, security forces battled militants, finally forcing them to flee to neighboring Yemen. There, they created a new al-Qaida branch, and Saudi Arabia has played a behind-the-scenes role in fighting it.
+
+The tougher line helped affirm Abdullah's commitment to fighting al-Qaida. He paid two visits to Bush — in 2002 and 2005 — at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
+
+When Fahd died in 2005, Abdullah officially rose to the throne. He then began to more openly push his agenda.
+
+His aim at home was to modernize the kingdom to face the future. One of the world's largest oil exporters, Saudi Arabia is fabulously wealthy, but there are deep disparities in wealth and a burgeoning youth population in need of jobs, housing and education. More than half the current population of 20 million is under the age of 25. For Abdullah, that meant building a more skilled workforce and opening up greater room for women to participate. He was a strong supporter of education, building universities at home and increasing scholarships abroad for Saudi students.
+
+Abdullah for the first time gave women seats on the Shura Council, an unelected body that advises the king and government. He promised women would be able to vote and run in 2015 elections for municipal councils, the only elections held in the country. He appointed the first female deputy minister in a 2009. Two Saudi female athletes competed in the Olympics for the first time in 2012, and a small handful of women were granted licenses to work as lawyers during his rule.
+
+One of his most ambitious projects was a Western-style university that bears his name, the King AbdullahUniversity of Science and Technology, which opened in 2009. Men and women share classrooms and study together inside the campus, a major departure in a country where even small talk between the sexes in public can bring a warning from the morality police.
+
+The changes seemed small from the outside but had a powerful resonance. Small splashes of variety opened in the kingdom — color and flash crept into the all-black abayas women must wear in public; state-run TV started playing music, forbidden for decades; book fairs opened their doors to women writers and some banned books.
+
+But he treaded carefully in the face of the ultraconservative Wahhabi clerics who hold near total sway over society and, in return, give the Al Saud family's rule religious legitimacy.
+
+Senior cleric Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan warned against changes that could snap the ""thread between a leader and his people."" In some cases, Abdullah pushed back: He fired one prominent government cleric who criticized the mixed-gender university. But the king balked at going too far too fast. For example, beyond allowing debate in newspapers, Abdullah did nothing to respond to demands to allow women to drive.
+
+""He has presided over a country that has inched forward, either on its own or with his leadership,"" said Karen Elliot House, author of ""On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines.""
+
+""I don't think he's had as much impact as one would hope on trying to create a more moderate version of Islam,"" she said. ""To me, it has not taken inside the country as much as one would hope.""
+
+And any change was strictly on the royal family's terms. After the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in particular, Saudi Arabia clamped down on any dissent. Riot police crushed street demonstrations by Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority. Dozens of activists were detained, many of them tried under a sweeping counterterrorism law by an anti-terrorism court Abdullah created. Authorities more closely monitored social media, where anger over corruption and unemployment — and jokes about the aging monarchy — are rife.
+
+Regionally, perhaps Abdullah's biggest priority was to confront Iran, the Shiite powerhouse across the Gulf.
+
+Worried about Tehran's nuclear program, Abdullah told the United States in 2008 to consider military action to ""cut off the head of the snake"" and prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic memo.
+
+In Lebanon, Abdullah backed Sunni allies against the Iranian-backed Shiite guerrilla group Hezbollah in a proxy conflict that flared repeatedly into potentially destabilizing violence. Saudi Arabia was also deeply opposed to longtime Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom it considered a tool of Iran oppressing Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority.
+
+In Syria, Abdullah stepped indirectly indirectly into the civil war that emerged after 2011. He supported and armed rebels battling to overthrow President Bashar Assad, Iran's top Arab ally, and pressed the Obama administration to do the same. Iran's allies Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite militias rushed to back Assad, and the resulting conflict has left hundreds of thousands dead and driven millions of Syrians from their homes.
+
+From the multiple conflicts, Sunni-Shiite hatreds around the region took on a life of their own, fueling Sunni militancy. Syria's war helped give birth to the Islamic State group, which burst out to take over large parts of Syria and Iraq. Fears of the growing militancy prompted Abdullah to commit Saudi airpower to a U.S.-led coalition fighting the extremists.
+
+Toby Matthiesen, author of ""Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn't,"" saidAbdullah was not ""particularly sectarian in a way that he hated Shiites for religious reasons. ... There are other senior members of the ruling family much more sectarian."" But, he said, ""Saudi Arabia plays a huge role in fueling sectarian conflict.""
+
+Abdullah had more than 30 children from around a dozen wives.
+
+Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.",REAL
+5560,"Re: The U.S. Will Lose Global Reserve Status, Expect 80-90% Devaluation Of the U.S. Dollar","Email 
+In the following interview with the X22Report Spotlight report, Dr. Jim Willie unleashes with both guns blazing on a subject I’ve been warning about for about for over two years now, which is the loss the U.S. Dollar’s status as the World’s Global Reserve Currency. 
+For the simple fact that no one under the age of 70 has never known a planet earth where the U.S. Dollar has not been the World’s Reserve Currency, most Americans in particular have no idea what it will mean when we lose that status. 
+The subject is not one that is taught in schools until well into the graduate school level in most cases, so unless a person has done independent research on the subject, the average American cannot comprehend how painful it will be for individual American families not IF, but WHEN the inevitable finally happens. 
+Losing the World Reserve Currency status is a process, just like losing the world’s faith in the U.S. was a process. Both are processes that have been well underway for the better part of the last two decades, especially this past decade. Roughly ten years ago, 75% of global trade was denominated in U.S. Dollars, and that makes sense. After all, we’ve been the Reserve Currency. 
+Over the last ten years, that figure has dropped to roughly 35% of all global trade which is now settled in U.S. Dollars, because countries are rushing to distance themselves from the U.S. for many of the reasons Dr. Willie outlines in another interview from earlier today titled, Dr. Jim Willie: Unprecedented Bond Dumping Means U.S. Dollar Collapse Ahead . 
+The bottom line is this: The U.S. has grossly abused its privilege of being the World Reserve Currency, largely because we've adopted the practice of monetizing our debt by printing money out of thin air. Giving that process a fancy name like Quantitative Easing, doesn't change the reality of what it is. We print money out of thin air, and rip-off every country we've borrowed from when we pay them back with Dollars worth less than the ones we borrowed. 
+Now, the world has lost all faith in the only thing that backs the U.S. Dollar in the first place: The Full Faith and Credit of the United States Government. In the interview, Dr. Willie gives a BLISTERING account of what to expect. He begins the first 30 seconds of the interview by explaining how once the U.S. Dollar is finished being phased out, a process that as I’ve said is well underway, he expects the Dollar to experience a massive currency devaluation of 30% almost instantly. 
+After the initial devaluation of 30%, Dr. Willie expects there to be another another 30% devaluation six to eight months down the road, followed by a long series of 20% devaluations over the next several years, until we reach a point in about 4-5 years when our currency is completely devalued, and worth about 10% of what it is today. 
+For a country with a trade deficit of over $500 BILLION, and as a country that imports over 50% of our food… that means conditions Americans once considered to be unthinkable here in the United States, will soon become ordinary. Let that sink in for a moment. The unthinkable will become ordinary. The time to prepare is now. Brace yourself for a very intense interview… one of Dr. Willie’s most intense ever! 
+DO NOT MISS THE SECOND VIDEO BELOW WITH CANADIAN BILLIONAIRE NED GOODMAN, AS HE LECTURES ON THE COMING COLLAPSE OF THE U.S. DOLLAR! 
+
+As individual Americans or as families, in the past when we’ve heard news from pundits or politicians talking about issues like trade deficits, bad trade deals, or the federal debt, many times what we hear goes in one ear and out the other, because many of us cannot SEE or FEEL how those reports affect our families on a daily basis, or in our every day lives. 
+The loss of the Reserve Currency is not something that might happen. It’s not something that could happen. It’s an eventually that there’s no chance of avoiding. That ship set sail far too long ago to fix the damage already done, and what lies ahead. It’s not an event where a vote is taken, and we’ll lose the status over night thanks to anything done by a U.N. vote, or by our own politicians in Washington. What's done is done, now it just has to play out. 
+As explained, it’s a process, and it’s well underway. I could not be more serious when I say that conditions Americans once considered to be unthinkable in the United States, will soon become ordinary. If you’re fortunate enough to still be working, and you have an income, do not squander your opportunity to protect your family. Begin preparing. There is a reason Peter Schiff has said: The Collapse of the Dollar Will Be the Single Biggest Event In All of Human History . 
+How The Coming Dollar Collapse Will Leave Americans Destitute 
+An increasing number of financial experts are saying the United States dollar is no longer a reliable and dependable currency – and that its downfall is inevitable. There are even some experts who think the dollar is so unstable that the Chinese Yuan will soon become the world’s reserve currency, or currency of choice. 
+“Our addictions to debt and cheap money have finally caused our major international creditors to call for an end to dollar hegemony and to push for a ‘de-Americanized’ world,” investment advisor and financial strategist Micheal Pento wrote in an op-ed piece for CNBC . 
+Others agree. 
+“In my view the dollar is about to become dethroned as the world’s defacto currency basically,” Canadian billionaire investor Ned Goodman said. “We’re headed to a period of stagflation , maybe serious inflation , and the United States will be losing the privilege of being able to print at its will the global reserve currency.” 
+Goodman believes the US already is in another recession. The unemployment numbers are understated and the “real” unemployment number likely is closer to 15 percent, he said. 
+Over half of 200 international institutional investors surveyed by the Economist think that the Yuan will eventually replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The reserve currency is the money most commonly accepted for international trade. 
+
+Why Reserve Currencies Matter 
+Having money with a reserve currency status enables a nation to dominate and control the world’s financial markets, as their currency is used for international trade and transactions. The US has the ability to maintain a $17 trillion national debt largely because the dollar is the reserve currency. 
+A nation with a reserve currency can simply print money to pay its debts. 
+In past centuries nations such as Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Portugal lost their status as super powers in part when their money lost reserve currency status. Reserve currencies collapse because people no longer trust or believe in the governments that issue them. 
+Goodman says that the US dollar became the reserve currency in the 1970s because Saudi Arabia agreed to only accept only the dollar as payment for oil. Goodman noted that at least one major producer, Russia, is now accepting Yuan in payment for oil. 
+Goodman was referring to a deal that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin made last May. Under the terms of deal, Russian companies can borrow money directly from China in exchange for oil. 
+The US dollar once was backed by gold and silver, Goodman said, but now is “backed by nothing.” 
+Australia Starts Using Yuan 
+One of America’s oldest and closest allies may have taken the first step to ending the dollar’s reign as the reserve currency. CNBC reported that the Yuan will now be traded in Australia’s financial markets. Among other things that will let Chinese customers pay Australian firms in Yuan. China is the biggest market for Australia’s exports such as iron and coal. 
+Story continues below video 
+
+The Australian government has endorsed the deal because China is Australia’s biggest trading partner. Arthur Sinodinos, Australia’s Assistant Treasurer (treasury secretary) even went on CNBC’s Asia Squawk Box show to endorse the deal. 
+“It’s a big vote of confidence by both countries in the future of the relationship,” Sinodinos said. Not even recent economic problems in China seemed to dampen Sinodinos’ enthusiasm for the arrangement. 
+“There’s no doubt that the Chinese authorities are having to manage issues in the financial sector to make sure that growth is sustained, but they’ve shown great skill at that in the past they were very adept at the fallout from the global financial crisis,” Sinodinos said. In other words, Sinokinos believes the Chinese are doing a very good job of managing their economy and their currency is reliable. 
+
+How will the Dethroning of the Dollar Affect You? 
+Observers disagree widely on how the end of the dollar’s reign as reserve currency would affect the US economy and average Americans. Retired neurosurgeon and pundit Dr. Ben Carson thinks it would turn the US into a third world nation and lead to unrest that would lead to martial law, as Off The Grid News recently reported. 
+Goodman believes there will soon be a massive sell off of US dollars that will lead to inflation. He also suggested a way for people to protect their assets. 
+“The Chinese have three and a half trillion US dollars and they’re spending these dollars as quickly as they can, and it will not be long before the rest of the world and the US will be thinking likewise. I do.” Goodman said. 
+In the 1930s, everyone wanted US dollars, he said, but today they’re trying to get rid of them. He thinks that many investors are trying to spend all of their dollars to buy hard assets in order to avoid losing money invested in dollars. 
+That means average people might be able to protect themselves by investing in hard assets such as gold, real estate or silver, Goodman said. 
+Article posted with permission from The Last Great Stand   shares",FAKE
+6055,How The Oligarchs Plan To Steal The Election," The Failure of Democracy
+How The Oligarchs Plan To Steal The Election By Paul Craig Roberts
+ I am now convinced that the Oligarchy that rules America intends to steal the presidential election. In the past, the oligarchs have not cared which candidate won as the oligarchs owned both. But they do not own Trump.
+Most likely you are unaware of what Trump is telling people as the media does not report it. A person who speaks like this:
+is not endeared to the oligarchs.
+ Who are the oligarchs?
+—Wall Street and the mega-banks too big to fail and their agent the Federal Reserve, a federal agency that put 5 banks ahead of millions of troubled American homeowners who the federal reserve allowed to be flushed down the toilet. In order to save the mega-banks’ balance sheets from their irresponsible behavior, the Fed has denied retirees any interest income on their savings for eight years, forcing the elderly to draw down their savings, leaving their heirs, who have been displaced from employment by corporate jobs offshoring, penniless.
+—The military/security complex which has spent trillions of our taxpayer dollars on 15 years of gratuitous wars based entirely on lies in order to enrich themselves and their power.
+—The neoconservartives whose crazed ideology of US world hegemony thrusts the American people into military conflict with Russia and China.
+—The US global corporations that sent American jobs to China and India and elsewhere in order to enrich the One Percent with higher profits from lower labor costs.
+—Agribusiness (Monsanto et.al.), corporations that poison the soil, the water, the oceans, and our food with their GMOs, hebicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers, while killing the bees that pollinate the crops.
+—The extractive industries—energy, mining, fracking, and timber—that maximize their profits by destroying the environment and the water supply.
+—The Israel Lobby that controls US Middle East policy and is committing genocide against the Palestinians just as the US committed genocide against native Americans. Israel is using the US to eliminate sovereign countries that stand in Israell’s way.
+What convinces me that the Oligarchy intends to steal the election is the vast difference between the presstitutes’ reporting and the facts on the ground.
+According to the presstitutes, Hillary is so far ahead that there is no point in Trump supporters bothering to vote. Hillary has won the election before the vote. Hillary has been declared a 93% sure winner.
+I am yet to see one Hillary yard sign, but Trump signs are everywhere. Reports I receive are that Hillary’s public appearances are unattended but Trumps are so heavily attended that people have to be turned away. This is a report from a woman in Florida:
+“Trump has pulled huge numbers all over FL while campaigning here this week. I only see Trump signs and stickers in my wide travels. I dined at a Mexican restaurant last night. Two women my age sitting behind me were talking about how they had tried to see Trump when he came to Tallahassee. They left work early, arriving at the venue at 4:00 for a 6:00 rally. The place was already over capacity so they were turned away. It turned out that there were so many people there by 2:00 that the doors had to be opened to them. The women said that the crowds present were a mix of races and ages.”
+I know the person who gave me this report and have no doubt whatsoever as to its veracity.
+I also receive from readers similiar reports from around the country.
+This is how the theft of the election is supposed to work: The media concentrated in a few corporate hands has gone all out to convince not only Americans but also the world, that Donald Trump is such an unacceptable candidate that he has lost the election before the vote.
+By controllng the explanation, when the election is stolen those who challenge the stolen election are without a foundartion in the media. All media reports will say that it was a run away victory for Hillary over the misogynist immigrant-hating Trump.
+And liberal, progressive opinion will be relieved and off guard as Hillary takes us into nuclear war.
+That the Oligarchy intends to steal the election from the American people is verified by the officially reported behavior of the voting machines in early voting in Texas. The NPR presstitutes have declared that Hillary is such a favorite that even Republican Texas is up for grabs in the election.
+If this is the case, why was it necessary for the voting machines to be programmed to change Trump votes to Hillary votes? Those voters who noted that they voted Trump but were recorded Hillary complained. The election officials, claiming a glitch (which only went one way), changed to paper ballots. But who will count them? No “glitches” caused Hillary votes to go to Trump, only Trump votes to go to Hillary.
+The most brilliant movie of our time was The Matrix. This movie captured the life of Americans manipulated by a false reality, only in the real America there is insufficient awareness and no Neo, except possibly Donald Trump, to challenge the system. Americans of all stripes—academics, scholars, journalists, Republicans, Democrats, right-wing, left-wing, US Representatives, US Senators, Presidents, corporate moguls and brainwashed Americans and foreigners—live in a false reality.
+In the United States today a critical presidential election is in process in which not a single important issue is addressed by Hillary and the presstitutes. This is total failure. Democracy, once the hope of the world, has totally failed in the United States of America. Trump is correct. The American people must restore the accountability of government to the people.
+ Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order .",FAKE
+1406,GOP insiders: It was a rough night for Ted Cruz,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+5503,"Space Wars Likely In The Future As US, Russia Develop Satellite Weapons","Videos Space Wars Likely In The Future As US, Russia Develop Satellite Weapons Mankind will have to decide whether to militarize space or not. There are very difficult negotiations in process. Moreover, the US wants to pass a bill to declare certain orbits exclusively American."" | October 27, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! A United Launch Alliance Delta IV lifts off from Space Launch Complex-37 with the Air Force’s Global Positioning System (GPS) IIF-5 satellite. Recently, the Russian space agency Roscosmos kicked off tenders for three GLONASS satellites to be launched in 2017-2018. The company is expected to spend over one billion rubles ($16 million) on the program. 
+The first launch is scheduled for December 25, 2017, the other two – for November 25, 2018. The satellite will be carried by a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome spaceport. 
+In February and May 2016, two Glonass-M satellites were added to the GLONASS system. Currently, the system involves 27 satellites, 23 of which are in operation, two are put in orbital reserve, one is undergoing flight tests, and the last is undergoing maintenance. 
+In the event of a military conflict, communication satellites would be an important target, military expert and observer Viktor Baranets said. “The current situation in space is that no satellites are protected, no matter at what orbits they are. The reason is that alongside with development of space systems, the US is running on all cylinders developing space weapons,” Baranets told Radio Sputnik. Moreover, China already joined the game, with an anti-satellite missile test in 2007. 
+“Russia has its own plans too. I think that if Washington keeps ignoring Russia’s calls for the demilitarization of space, the so-called ‘combat cosmonautics’ would become reality,” Baranets pointed out. 
+His words were echoed by Russian defense expert Vasily Kashin. In an interview with Sputnik China , Kashin said that modern satellites are almost devoid of any opportunity to protect themselves from the impact of interceptor missiles. 
+In 2008, the Russian and Chinese governments proposed an international agreement to prevent the deployment of weapons in outer space but the US government under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama has consistently rejected launching negotiations to conclude such a treaty. 
+Before Barack Obama became president, during his presidential campaign, he called for talks with Russia on anti-satellite weapons which started back in the 1970s but then was terminated by Washington. However, no progress has been made on the issue. 
+Baranets said it could not be ruled out that in the future space might be militarized which would pose a threat to the entire world. “Mankind will have to decide whether to militarize space or not. There are very difficult negotiations in process. Moreover, the US wants to pass a bill to declare certain orbits exclusively American,” Baranets said. 
+According to him, the defense industries of both Russia and the US are working to develope space combat systems. If the process is not stopped “space wars may be possible.” 
+The expert stressed that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty between the US, the USSR and Britain should be revised. The document represents the legal framework of international space law, including prohibition of weapons of mass destruction in orbit. 
+“The treaty should be revised as soon as possible. This will prevent militarization of space. Now, space is becoming a place for effective strikes against the enemy,” the expert concluded. 
+In turn, Kashin assumed that anti-satellite weaponry is a new reality that should be considered while planning a possible military operation. In this new reality, Russia, China, the US, as well as India and Iran will most likely possess domestically-made sophisticated anti-satellite weapons, according to him.",FAKE
+666,Donald Trump is blatantly racist — and the media is too scared to call him out on it,"Donald Trump, the actual Republican candidate for president, now endorsed by his party leaders, openly said he wants to exclude someone from a government job because of his race and ethnicity.
+
+As the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, Trump said he wants to disqualify the federal judge overseeing the Trump University case because of his ""Mexican heritage"" and membership in a Latino lawyers association:
+
+Mr. Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had ""an absolute conflict"" in presiding over the litigation given that he was ""of Mexican heritage"" and a member of a Latino lawyers' association. Mr. Trump said the background of the judge, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants, was relevant because of his campaign stance against illegal immigration and his pledge to seal the southern U.S. border. ""I'm building a wall. It's an inherent conflict of interest,"" Mr. Trump said.
+
+This is pure racism. There's no subtlety, no dog whistle, no coded language.
+
+Somehow this isn't too surprising. Trump is, after all, the presidential candidate who launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants criminals and ""rapists,"" and he proposed banning all Muslims from entering the US.
+
+And with this latest remark, Trump is just turning the thinly veiled subtext into text. He had already previously brought up Curiel's Mexican heritage, suggesting that there was a conflict of interest because of it but not saying it quite so explicitly.
+
+Reading this, it's hard for me, a Hispanic American, to avoid feeling a little personally insulted. This suggests that Trump would probably dismiss my opinion — indeed, this article — because of my name. Yet millions of Americans — and a major political party — want him to be president, despite his clear racism.
+
+Maybe the media plays a role here. After all, instead of calling it like it is, CBS News, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have called Trump's comments about Curiel ""racially charged"" and ""racially tinged,"" the weasel words the media typically uses to describe racism. It makes one wonder: What would it take for them to finally call Trump or his remarks just plainly racist? If claiming a qualified, vetted judge shouldn't be able to do his job because of his race and ethnicity isn't racist, then what the hell is?
+
+Perhaps the problem is Hispanic people are vastly underrepresented in media. As the journalism organization ASNE found, racial minorities make up less than 13 percent of the field — despite making up about 38 percent of the total US population. That might make it harder for a lot of journalists to see just how racist Trump's remarks are.
+
+If that's the case, maybe it would be helpful for the predominant white journalists in the field to consider: If President Barack Obama or President Marco Rubio said all white people should be banned from acting as judge in a court case against him, would that be considered racist? And how is that any different from what Trump is doing?
+
+There should be no doubt about it now: Donald Trump is racist. He wants to exclude people from government jobs because of their race and ethnicity. That is the literal definition of racism. The media shouldn't shy away from pointing that out, and the people supporting Trump should know that's exactly what they're supporting.",REAL
+4740,Can Donald Trump recover from this?,"Donald Trump's October Surprise is so explicit, shocking, offensive and vile that even he felt the need to apologize -- defiantly.
+
+In a video released after midnight Saturday, Trump expressed regret for stunning comments that surfaced Friday about women.
+
+""Anyone who knows me knows these words don't reflect who I am,"" he said. ""I said it. I was wrong. And I apologize.""
+
+But that step -- unprecedented for a candidate loathe to ever admit a mistake -- may not be enough to rescue a campaign that is now in a full-fledged crisis . And Trump quickly attempted to pivot, criticizing Bill and Hillary Clinton in the video and suggesting he would take that argument to Sunday's debate.
+
+""Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims,"" Trump said. ""We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.""
+
+Trump's candidacy has revealed a long history of demeaning and shaming women. But the comments that emerged Friday go further than anything that has been attributed to him before as he seemed to bask in the power he felt his celebrity conferred to do whatever he wanted with women.
+
+The bombshell couldn't come at a worse time for Trump's campaign as he prepares for the next debate against Clinton. And Republicans must now decide whether to stand by him or cut him loose just 32 days before the election.
+
+The debate, co-moderated by CNN's Anderson Cooper, is especially crucial because Trump botched his first match with Clinton — and then spent the next two weeks in a cycle of recrimination, denial and feud with former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.
+
+The political uproar over the latest revelation was so momentous that it overtook coverage of a hurricane lashing Florida and a stunning US government accusation of a Russian hacking operation to disrupt the elections.
+
+It has been one of the cliches of the 2016 presidential race that Trump can get away with comments and outrages that would sink any normal politician. But the video tests the limits of that assumption in a way unlike any of Trump's many previous controversies.
+
+""I moved on her and I failed. I'll admit it,"" Trump said. ""I did try and fuck her. She was married.""
+
+""I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn't get there. And she was married,"" Trump adds, after saying he took the woman -- who is identified only by her first name -- out furniture shopping.
+
+""Then all of a sudden I see her, she's now got the big phony tits and everything. She's totally changed her look,"" Trump says of the woman.
+
+Before Trump stepped off a bus, he and Bush appear to see a soap actress who greets them.
+
+""Whoa!"" Trump says. ""I've gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful -- I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait.""
+
+""And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,"" Trump says.
+
+Trump advisers huddled in Trump Tower Friday night to plot a path forward. They clearly knew they had a problem on their hands when they moved quickly to release a statement that bizarrely blamed Bill Clinton after the Post published its story.
+
+""This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course - not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended,"" Trump said.
+
+There were signs that Trump's campaign was in disarray as some of his aides expressed exasperation in unusually blunt terms.
+
+""It's appalling. It's just flat out appalling,"" a Trump adviser said.
+
+The stunning developments are forcing a moment of reckoning for Republican Party leaders who have made a pact with a nominee many of them privately view as vulgar and unacceptable, and must now decide whether to cut him loose.
+
+Trump was due to appear alongside Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — both pillars of the conservative movement — on Saturday. Ryan didn't withdraw his endorsement of Trump Friday but he did condemn the nominee and said Trump will no longer attend the event.
+
+""I am sickened by what I heard today,"" Ryan said in a statement. ""Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified. I hope Mr. Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests. In the meantime, he is no longer attending tomorrow's event in Wisconsin.""
+
+Every Republican office holder from GOP vice presidential pick Mike Pence — who often calls Trump ""this good man"" -- to vulnerable senators running for re-election will now face the same question: How can you stand with a nominee who would say such a thing?
+
+Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican running for re-election who stumbled this week over the question of whether Trump represented a good role model for children, quickly condemned Trump's statement.
+
+""His statements are totally inappropriate and offensive,"" Ayotte said.
+
+Sen. Pat Toomey, a vulnerable Pennsylvania Republican, tweeted that Trump's comments were ""outrageous and unacceptable.""
+
+Trump's possible implosion also appeared to validate the central theme of Clinton's campaign — that a man like Trump with a colorful personal past, a life lived in the tabloids and a runaway mouth is simply not fit to be president.
+
+Clinton and her top surrogates have been driving a narrative for months that the Republican nominee lacks the gravity, knowledge and character to sit in the Oval Office or to represent the United States overseas.
+
+It was a case that appeared to be gaining traction given Trump's outspoken comments about Mexicans, women, Muslims and other sectors of society.
+
+Trump's most loyal supporters sought to shrug off the latest controversy.
+
+""We're not choosing a Sunday school teacher,"" Corey Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager who is now a CNN contributor, told Wolf Blitzer on ""The Situation Room."" ""We're electing a leader to the free world.""
+
+The controversy is likely to hammer Trump's standing among crucial demographics who may decide the election on November 8.
+
+Trump had already busted established standards on rhetoric about women in this campaign, questioning last year after a tough debate whether moderator Megan Kelly was menstruating and having his words that some women were ""pigs"" and ""slobs"" thrown back at him by Clinton in the first debate.
+
+But the revelations in the hot mic moment will surely doom any hope the GOP nominee has of improving his standing among women voters, especially highly educated, suburban women in swing states like Colorado and Pennsylvania.
+
+Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, campaigning in Las Vegas, said Trump's comments ""makes me sick to my stomach.""
+
+Trump's aides across the country seemed to feel similarly.
+
+Asked about the reaction at a campaign field office, a Trump field staffer told CNN there were ""gasps. Collective gasps. We're trying to get our heads around it right now, but there's no way to spin this. There just isn't.""
+
+The staffer, who is also paying close attention to Senate efforts, also added, unsolicited: ""Just think of the down-ballot effect. Brutal.""
+
+""This is bad. I think this thing is over,"" the staffer said.",REAL
+9098,The She-Devil,"By Patrick J. Buchanan October 29, 2016 
+Should Donald Trump surge from behind to win, he would likely bring in with him both houses of Congress. 
+Much of his agenda — tax cuts, deregulation, border security, deportation of criminals here illegally, repeal of Obamacare, appointing justices like Scalia, unleashing the energy industry — could be readily enacted. 
+On new trade treaties with China and Mexico, Trump might need economic nationalists in Bernie Sanders’ party to stand with him, as free-trade Republicans stood by their K-Street contributors. 
+Still, compatible agendas and GOP self-interest could transcend personal animosities and make for a successful four years. 
+But consider what a Hillary Clinton presidency would be like. 
+She would enter office as the least-admired president in history, without a vision or a mandate. She would take office with two-thirds of the nation believing she is untruthful and untrustworthy. 
+Reports of poor health and lack of stamina may be exaggerated. Yet she moves like a woman her age. Unlike Ronald Reagan, her husband, Bill, and President Obama, she is not a natural political athlete and lacks the personal and rhetorical skills to move people to action. 
+She makes few mistakes as a debater, but she is often shrill — when she is not boring. Trump is right: Hillary Clinton is tough as a $2 steak. But save for those close to her, she appears not to be a terribly likable person. 
+Still, such attributes, or the lack of them, do not assure a failed presidency. James Polk, no charmer, was a one-term president, but a great one, victorious in the Mexican War, annexing California and the Southwest, negotiating a fair division of the Oregon territory with the British. 
+Yet the hostility Clinton would face the day she takes office would almost seem to ensure four years of pure hell. 
+The reason: her credibility, or rather her transparent lack of it. 
+Consider. Because the tapes revealed he did not tell the full truth about when he learned about Watergate, Richard Nixon was forced to resign. 
+In the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan faced potential impeachment charges, until ex-security adviser John Poindexter testified that Reagan told the truth when he said he had not known of the secret transfer of funds to the Nicaraguan Contras. 
+Bill Clinton was impeached — for lying. 
+White House scandals, as Nixon said in Watergate, are almost always rooted in mendacity — not the misdeed, but the cover-up, the lies, the perjury, the obstruction of justice that follow. 
+And here Hillary Clinton seems to have an almost insoluble problem. 
+She has testified for hours to FBI agents investigating why and how her server was set up and whether secret information passed through it. 
+Forty times during her FBI interrogation, Clinton said she could not or did not recall. This writer has friends who went to prison for telling a grand jury, “I can’t recall.” 
+After studying her testimony and the contents of her emails, FBI Director James Comey virtually accused Clinton of lying. 
+Moreover, thousands of emails were erased from her server, even after she had reportedly been sent a subpoena from Congress to retain them. 
+During her first two years as secretary of state, half of her outside visitors were contributors to the Clinton Foundation. 
+Yet there was not a single quid pro quo, Clinton tells us. 
+Yesterday’s newspapers exploded with reports of how Bill Clinton aide Doug Band raised money for the Clinton Foundation, and then hit up the same corporate contributors to pay huge fees for Bill’s speeches. 
+What were the corporations buying if not influence? What were the foreign contributors buying, if not influence with an ex-president, and a secretary of state and possible future president? 
+Did none of the big donors receive any official favors? 
+“There’s a lot of smoke and there’s no fire,” says Hillary Clinton. 
+Perhaps, but there seems to be more smoke every day. 
+If once or twice in her hours of testimony to the FBI, grand jury or before Congress, Clinton were proven to have lied, her Justice Department would be obligated to name a special prosecutor, as was Nixon’s. 
+And, with the election over, the investigative reporters of the adversary press, Pulitzers beckoning, would be cut loose to go after her. 
+The Republican House is already gearing up for investigations that could last deep into Clinton’s first term. 
+There is a vast trove of public and sworn testimony from Hillary, about the server, the emails, the erasures, the Clinton Foundation. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, there are tens of thousands of emails to sift through, and perhaps tens of thousands more to come. 
+What are the odds that not one contains information that contradicts her sworn testimony? Cong. Jim Jordan contends that Clinton may already have perjured herself. 
+And as the full-court press would begin with her inauguration, Clinton would have to deal with the Syrians, Russians, Taliban, North Koreans and Xi Jinping in the South China Sea — and with Bill Clinton wandering around the White House with nothing to do. 
+This election is not over. But if Hillary Clinton wins, a truly hellish presidency could await her, and us. The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan Tags:",FAKE
+4818,Can Hillary rebuild her campaign with an upbeat message? And will anyone even notice?,"One of the most tedious moments of any presidential campaign is when everyone in the country decides they are better campaign strategists than the professionals. It’s like watching the World Series at a bar full of drunken fans in the losing team’s hometown. They all know more than the experts, or so they think, because they’ve watched a lot of baseball. This time it’s more tiresome than usual because it’s pretty much tied going into the ninth inning, and both team’s supporters are yelling their advice at the TV screen.
+
+In recent days we’ve seen most prescriptions directed at the Hillary Clinton campaign, as the always nervous Democrats are waking up the startling reality that the flamboyant, white nationalist demagogue on the other side might just pull this off. And they have as many different ideas as there were GOP all-stars Donald Trump smoked in the primaries. These range from “She needs to take the fight to Trump and call him out” to “She should attack the Republican officials who endorse him” to “She should stop attacking him and lay out a positive policy agenda so people have a reason to vote for her” — which, to be fair, sounds like a good idea.
+
+But the question is, if someone lays out a positive policy agenda and nobody hears it, did it really happen? Let’s take Wednesday as an example, when Clinton gave a big speech about something that is important to millions of Americans. She went to Orlando, a major city in a crucial swing state, and spoke about disability rights, expressing her plans in terms of American values of equality and inclusiveness. This is the fourth in a series of “Stronger Together” speeches the Democratic nominee has given recently about faith, community service, families and children, designed to display her values and vision for the future and show how her policies will achieve them.
+
+Clinton also published an Op-Ed in the New York Times on Wednesday called “My Plan for Helping America’s Poor,” in which she discussed a comprehensive policy including one modeled on Rep. Jim Clyburn’s 10-20-30 plan, “directing 10 percent of federal investments to communities where 20 percent of the population has been living below the poverty line for 30 years,” putting “special emphasis on minority communities that have been held back for too long by barriers of systemic racism.”
+
+Did you know about any of that? Has the press asked her questions about those issues in the now-frequent press avails she’s given over the last few weeks? Did you see any of those speeches in their entirety? Probably not. And that’s not the campaign’s fault. I get inundated with notices and press releases from the Clinton campaign, its surrogates and outside groups promoting her public speeches and other appearances. There’s no coverage of this “good news” stuff. Unless she’s thumping Trump the media is basically not interested.
+
+Harvard’s Shorenstein Center has been tracking media coverage throughout this campaign and yesterday released a fascinating study of the four weeks around the political conventions in the middle of the summer. The study’s author, Prof. Thomas E. Patterson, wrote about it for the Los Angeles Times, and its conclusions are depressing. Clinton’s so-called email scandal was the single most important story of that period, and the coverage of it was overwhelmingly negative and without context. In fact all the coverage of Clinton was overwhelmingly negative:
+
+How about her foreign, defense, social or economic policies? Don’t bother looking. Not a single one of Clinton’s policy proposals accounted for even 1 percent of her convention-period coverage; collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4 percent of it. But she might be thankful for that: News reports about her stances were 71 percent negative to 29 percent positive in tone. Trump was quoted more often about her policies than she was. Trump’s claim that Clinton “created ISIS,” for example, got more news attention than her announcement of how she would handle Islamic State. Even with the email story that dominated Clinton coverage, of course, journalists largely failed to provide the context that would allow voters to put the issue into proper perspective. The Shorenstein study was backed up by an ongoing Gallup survey that asks people to give them the first word that comes to their minds when they hear a candidate’s name. Since July 11, the words most commonly cited for Clinton are “email,” “lie,” “health,” “speech,” “scandal” and “foundation.” Trump, by contrast, brought to mind the words “speech,” “president,” “immigration,” “Mexico,” “convention,” “campaign” and “Obama.” As you can see, the Clinton words are loaded with negative judgment. Trump’s, not so much. Clinton has given prepared remarks on 22 occasions since the end of the Democratic convention. Some of these were standard stump speeches, while others were major policy addresses. She has dozens of positive ads running in media markets all over the country. But the only Clinton speech that garnered the full and interested attention of the press corps was her “alt-right” speech in Reno, Nevada, in late August. Almost all her speeches are covered the way the New York Times covered the disability speech on Wednesday: Clinton’s remarks are framed as a political ploy designed to evoke Trump’s ugly comments about a disabled reporter (which she did not discuss in the speech at all.) At the very end of the article, the reporter mentions that “some of [Clinton’s] most affecting moments on the campaign trail” come when she speaks with disabled people and their families, and that she often spontaneously brings up the subject in informal settings. There’s no reason to think she isn’t sincere about the issue, even if the campaign is subtly trying to highlight Trump’s cretinous attitudes by contrast. It’s an old truism that negative campaigning works, so it’s no surprise that Clinton’s campaign would try to leverage Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric against him. But there is plenty of positive material out there as well. It’s just the press isn’t interested, and there isn’t a lot of evidence that the voters are either. This doesn’t seem to be that kind of election. The armchair strategists who think a more positive, uplifting message is what Hillary Clinton needs to put this election away may be right. But the question is whether anyone could hear such a message above the din of cynicism and negativity that characterizes the coverage of this campaign.",REAL
+5085,The Democrats aren’t doomed: What I learned from Bernie delegates in Philadelphia,"Monday night was shaky. The Bernie delegates made sure their voices were heard. Most of them were amicable, some were aggressive. While uncomfortable at times, it never veered into chaos, and it wasn’t the orgy of Hillary hate some feared. But it was impossible to ignore the tension in the room.
+
+About an hour before the prime time speeches began, I walked the convention floor, hoping to engage a few of the Bernie delegates. What followed was a half-dozen conversations with Sanders supporters and several other brief interactions. I wanted to hear from the most fervent, the most disappointed. I wanted to know what they thought and why they thought it. What I heard was mostly encouraging and always illuminating.
+
+Edgar Deleon, a Nebraska delegate, was the only Bernie-or-buster I encountered. He told me he was “100 percent for Sanders” and that he refused to support Clinton in November. “Why?” I asked. “Bernie Sanders is one of the most sincere, authentic public servants I’ve seen in my lifetime,” he told me. “Hillary Clinton is a confirmed fraud…everything wrong and corrupt with our political system is what she stands for.” I asked him what he would do if reduced to a choice between Trump and Clinton, and he said “Picking the lesser of two evils is still evil. Come November, my ballot will say Bernie Sanders no matter what.”
+
+Mira Bowin, a young and insightful delegate from New York, was more measured. Asked if she planned to vote for Hillary in November, she said “It’s not November yet, and right now I’m supporting Bernie…but I have to say I’m not feeling very moved by her choice for VP or what they’ve done with TPP and the platform. I’m not feeling very courted and I have reservations.” She added that she’s “grateful to live in New York, which isn’t a swing state, so I feel free to support who I want.” To the question of Clinton or Trump, she answered resolutely: “Fascism is fascism, and fascism has to be stopped.” She may have “reservations” about Clinton’s record, but she’s aware of the dangers posed by Trump.
+
+Another New York delegate, who wished to remain anonymous, told me she was committed to writing-in Bernie. Like many, she’s suspicious of the process, particularly after the DNC emails were released by WikiLeaks. “I’m not comfortable with the way this entire process has unfolded. I’m seeing this machine take over…this has been forced on us by the elites.” I asked her if she considered herself a Democrat or an independent. “53 years I’ve been a Democrat,” she told me. “I don’t remember not voting for a Democratic presidential candidate.” She never admitted it, but my sense was that she’d vote for Clinton if she lived in battleground state.
+
+As I left the floor, I noticed a tall, exuberant man waving a Sanders sign near the press gallery. I approached him, confident he had something to say. “John Sasso,” he told me. “I’m from California.” One of several Sanders delegates, Sasso was here to support Sanders and no one else. “My biggest fear is that Hillary will lose in November,” he said. “Bernie brought this enthusiasm to the party, not Clinton…I think she’ll lose to Trump.” After sparring a bit over the latest polling data, I asked him if he had any loyalties to the Democratic Party. “I’m a lifelong Democrat. I’ve always voted for Democrats.” But this year felt…different. Although he wasn’t ready to say he’d vote for Clinton, he told me he “definitely wouldn’t vote for Trump.”
+
+And this was a common sentiment. There was no ambivalence on the Trump question. An odious quack, Trump is a living rejection of everything progressives stand for. Bernie voters are skeptical of Clinton for a hundred different reasons – her hawkish foreign policy, her centrist capitulations, her history of distortions, etc. But no one I met in that convention hall wants him to be president. If you cut through the caricatures and listen to the delegates, here’s what you learn: Most of them got a glimpse of what the Democratic Party could be, what it should be, and then they watched it slip away. They understand that Sanders won concessions on the platform. They realize he pulled Clinton – and the party – to the left. But the delegates I spoke with see most of this as cosmetic. There’s a bit of unreason here. What, after all, did they expect? A year ago, Sanders was an afterthought; his nomination was unfathomable. And yet he nearly defeated Clinton while putting his stamp on the Democratic Party in a way no one thought possible. He changed the conversation on the left. That’s an extraordinary contribution, one most of his supporters fail to appreciate. Besides, if we ask what’s possible, not what’s ideal, a Clinton administration is hardly a disaster for progressives. Given the systemic constraints, there are limits to what a president can do. Sanders supporters often glide past the reality of a recalcitrant Congress, and Sanders himself could not muster an intelligible reply to the critical question: “But how will you pass all of this?” For all her faults, Clinton knows how to navigate the legislative swamp. Will she fight for every plank of Bernie’s platform? No. But she and Sanders are aligned on most issues, and she’s competent enough to deliver. In other words, a Clinton presidency is not the end of the republic. Nor is it a death blow to the progressive movement. This is lost on many Sanders supporters. In the end, though, they’ll come around. Much of the festering frustration is just that – frustration. It will pass. Sanders is a uniquely honest politician. He spoke to issues progressives care about in a way no candidate in recent memory has. It’s tough to see him get so close and lose. But worry not, Democrats. Nearly every Bernie delegate I spoke to hinted that they’ll support Clinton in November, and those who said they won’t conceded that a Trump administration is a nightmare. Will there be some who abstain? Perhaps. But not enough to matter. And the majority of delegates vowing to write-in Sanders or vote for a third party candidate are doing so because they live in non-swing states. And that ought to comfort panicked Democrats.",REAL
+8195,The US Elections Do Matter But Not Necessary To Follow Them – Sheikh Imran Hosein,"By Rixon Stewart on September 12, 2006 
+Is television an entertainment media or instrument of control, a ‘control mechanism’? In ‘Eisenhower’s Death Camps': A U.S. Prison Guard’s Story By wmw_admin on May 4, 2007 
+In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets; many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. Holocaust, Hate Speech & Were the Germans so Stupid? – Updated By wmw_admin on March 23, 2011 
+The brilliant examination of the ‘Holocaust’ by Anthony Lawson has since been censored on the basis of a false Copyright infrigment. But as Lawson explains, this just another attempt to stiffle freedom of expression Did New York Orchestrate The Asian Tsunami? By wmw_admin on October 17, 2008 
+With Afghanistan and Iraq already lost, the Wall Street bankers were all desperately looking for other ways to control our world, when suddenly and very conveniently, the Sumatran Trench exploded. Trick or Treat? Joe Vialls investigates The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part II By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
+Former City of London insider reveals that the depopulation program would begin with a planned war between Israel and Iran. More importantly, he goes onto to describe how we can derail their plans for global dominance Letter from James Abourezk, former US Senator from South Dakota to Jeff Blankfort on the Israel Lobby By wmw_admin on December 8, 2006 
+More than being an insider’s confirmation of the power of the pro-Israel lobby over Congress, the former US Senator’s letter also calls into question Noam Chomsky’s increasingly suspect looking motives The Oklahoma City Bombing: 30 Unanswered Questions By wmw_admin on July 11, 2003 
+Timothy McVeigh may have been tried and executed, but there are still too many unanswered questions about the Oklahoma City Bombing",FAKE
+3524,Enrique Marquez: I got rifles for San Bernardino killer,"San Bernardino, California (CNN) As federal authorities attempt to piece together the circumstances surrounding last week's terrorist attack in San Bernardino , their far-flung investigation has taken them as far away as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
+
+But they have also returned, again and again, to a much closer source of clues: The house next door to the boyhood home of killer Syed Rizwan Farook
+
+Their efforts there are focused on a bespectacled former Walmart employee, Enrique Marquez, and his purchase of a pair of rifles used in the attack that claimed 14 lives
+
+Marquez has acknowledged that he bought the two AR-15s for Farook several years ago.He's also told investigators about a 2012 attack plot that he says he and Farook conceived but did not carry out , U.S. officials told CNN.
+
+Marquez told investigators that part of the reason the two abandoned their plans was that around that time, they were spooked by unrelated FBI arrests of four people charged with attempting to travel abroad to carry out jihad.
+
+Investigators are still trying to corroborate information provided by Marquez and haven't verified details of the alleged plot. Officials caution that Marquez's claim of a 2012 attack could turn out to be false and an attempt to deflect his role in helping buy weapons that Farook later used in the San Bernardino shootings last week.
+
+Marquez, 24, has not been charged with any crime and has told investigators he didn't know about the plans for the San Bernardino attack. Since the shootings, he has waived his Miranda rights, cooperated with investigators and provided information, according to the officials.
+
+Marquez could not be reached for comment. No attorney has come forward.
+
+Marquez's mother, Armida Chacon, told reporters outside her home Thursday she had no knowledge of her son's involvement in events leading up to the shooting. A sobbing Chacon said: ""He was a good person. How would I know? I didn't know,"" adding that she has not been interviewed by investigators.
+
+""He was a good young man. Whatever I asked him to do he would do. He watched over his brothers. He helped me a lot. He was my right hand around the house,"" she said after requesting that journalists turn off their cameras before she would speak.
+
+""I want to be left in peace. When I am ready, I will sit down and talk to you. My life changed since Wednesday,"" Chacon said. ""My son is a good person. A good person. The rest, I don't know how it happened. I want to see him.""
+
+FBI Assistant Director David Bowdich was tight-lipped when asked about his status in the investigation at a news conference earlier this week. ""I'm not prepared to discuss Mr. Marquez at this point,"" Bowdich said.
+
+According to county records, Marquez and Farook are related by marriage, and the address on his marriage license is the current address of Farook's father. Marquez was married last year with Farook's brother as a witness.
+
+He converted to Islam several years ago and attended the same mosque as other members of the Farook family.
+
+Marquez, who was a state licensed security guard until his license expired last year, checked himself into a mental health facility in the wake of the attacks, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
+
+According to officials, Marquez told investigators that he and Farook were on the path to radicalization as early as 2011. That same year, Marquez bought the first of two rifles for Farook.
+
+Marquez gave the rifles to Farook shortly after purchasing them but did not report the transfer of ownership, two law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
+
+Such transactions could be a violation of California law, the officials said.
+
+Heavily armed FBI agents descended on his home on Tomlinson Avenue in Riverside early Saturday to serve a search warrant, waking neighbors with a bullhorn announcement for the occupants to come to the door. Agents ultimately forced entry through the garage. They returned a day later for a consensual search to retrieve items not covered in the scope of the warrant, according to a law enforcement official.
+
+Agents also visited the Walmart store in Corona where Marquez worked. A spokesman for the retailer said Marquez has worked for Walmart since May, but ""the decision has been made to terminate him.""
+
+A co-worker who asked not to be named said she was twice interviewed by FBI agents earlier this week. They asked about Marquez's personality and interests, the co-worker said.
+
+In a brief interview with CNN, she said she told investigators she had no knowledge of Marquez using weapons or of having any link to the killers, whom she did not know. She did not associate with Marquez outside of work, she said.
+
+Neighbors of the Tomlinson Avenue homes where Marquez and Farook lived next door to one another recalled the two working on cars together but did not know whether their relationship extended beyond that shared interest.
+
+One neighbor, who asked not to be named, said Marquez seemed like a nice young man. ""He was a good guy,"" the neighbor said.
+
+Another neighbor, Freddy Escamilla, said he'd recently run into Marquez on the street and that he was typically subdued, nodding hello but not saying much.
+
+""He never really talked to anyone,"" Escamilla said, adding that he was ""really introverted. Very introverted.""
+
+Marquez converted to Islam and attended mosque sermons on and off for a couple years, said Azmi Hasan, who has served as facility manager of the Islamic Society of Corona-Norco since 2000.
+
+Hasan said Marquez acted goofy, describing one instance when he saw him outside the mosque laughing out loud to himself. When approached by Hasan about what was so funny, Marquez said he wasn't laughing.
+
+Hasan said Marquez attended sermons by himself but stopped coming about two years ago. He said he ran into Marquez, who he recalled as quiet and introverted, at a party and asked why he hadn't been coming to sermons more often.
+
+When questioned about why he wasn't coming to sermons, Marquez would say he was busy, according to Hasan. At one point, Hasan said, Marquez responded that Islam was not working for him.
+
+Hasan said Syed Rizwan Farook's sister and brother-in-law also attended the mosque but that he'd never seen Marquez in their company.",REAL
+6964,Project Veritas: Scott Foval Reveals Who Was Really Behind the Romney 47% Video,"Project Veritas: Scott Foval Reveals Who Was Really Behind the Romney 47% Video   Tweet 
+In this video, Scott Foval, the now former Field Director of Americans United For Change admits that the bartender who supposedly filmed Mitt Romney’s notorious 47% moment was not a bartender, but was a lawyer. “The lawyer took his phone and had the bartender walk around with it and set it up.”–Scott Foval",FAKE
+9376,Donald Trump Begs Hillary Clinton Early Voters to Change Their Votes,"As a new poll shows 28% of early Republican Florida voters casting their vote for Clinton, Donald Trump is getting desperate. 
+The Republican nominee begged Clinton voters to change their vote in 6 states where it’s not too late to do so. Trump wrote Wednesday morning, “So now that you can see Hillary was a big mistake, change your vote to MAKE AMERICAN GREAT AGAIN!” You can change your vote in six states. So, now that you see that Hillary was a big mistake, change your vote to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! 
+— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2016 
+Tuesday evening Trump made the case that due to the FBI’s announcement about Clinton’s emails voters might have buyers’ remorse , “A lot of things have happened over the last few days. This is a message for any Democratic voters who have already cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton and are having a bad case of buyers’ remorse — in other words you want to change your vote — Wisconsin is one of several states where you can change your early ballot if you think you’ve made a mistake.” 
+While it’s true that people in some states can change their votes, it’s not true that this rule was changed because of Hillary Clinton’s “emails” and yes, that’s a new Right wing “thing” apparently. Trump doesn’t suggest the law was changed because of Clinton, but he seems to think people will be rushing to change their mind about Clinton because of the non-surprise October “surprise!” the Republican FBI Director delivered , which was perceived to have benefited the Trump ticket. 
+Days ago, Snopes debunked the notion that changing early votes is being allowed because of the FBI’s bizarre announcement that they may or may not have more emails pertaining to Clinton. 
+Claim: After FBI Director Jim Comey announced that he was reviewing e-mails potentially linked to Hillary Clinton, several states announced that they were allowing people to change their early votes. mixture 
+WHAT’S TRUE: Some states allow early voters to change their votes before election day. 
+WHAT’S FALSE: No states changed their election laws in order to allow people who voted early for Hillary Clinton to change their votes. 
+And to make this even better, that false information was based on a Fox News report that wasn’t selling the false story about Clinton, but still got some of the information wrong. This is why the Right can’t have nice things. The Left should be vigilant against allowing itself to become too insular, because epistemic closure leads to losing. 
+Trump conveniently ignores his own history of email dumping, exhaustive list of lawsuits, bragging about sexual assault, dissing minorities and a Gold Star family, and national security experts investigating his ties and his campaign’s ties to Russia. 
+Only a desperate candidate runs on trying to get people to change their votes to him because someone found a Clinton aide’s emails when they don’t even know what they say or if they are duplicates yet. 
+While this race is far from over, if all Americans get off their butts and go vote, Donald Trump faces an uphill battle to the White House.",FAKE
+9767,Family of Armed Robbery Suspect Outraged Pizza Hut Employee Shot & Killed Their Son,"Following the shooting death of 28-year-old armed robbery suspect Michael Renard Grace Jr., surviving family members are now speaking out and demanding answers as to why a restaurant employee would have been allowed to carry a firearm at their place of business.
+As if the idea of a robbery victim fighting back in self defense were something completely unfathomable, the deceased suspect’s parents are calling his death undeserved and unjustified. 
+Predictably, Temia Hairston and Michael Grace Sr. told media outlet WBTV that even though their son walked into the Charlotte area Pizza Hut intent on robbing the business with two other armed men, was it just “an act of desperation ” and that they do not believe he would have hurt anyone.
+Image of Michael Grace Jr. via WISTV 
+“Why in the hell did this guy have a gun?” Hairston stated to WBTV… This is despite the fact that the most glaring and obvious possible answer to that question is that the employee carried a firearm for exactly this type of scenario. But I digress.
+Via WISTV 
+Police said Grace Jr and two other people tried to rob a Pizza Hut in the 3200 block of Freedom Drive. During the incident, an employee fired his own handgun and killed Grace Jr.
+“If there was to be a death, it was not the place of the employee at Pizza Hut. That is the place of law enforcement,” said Hairston.
+They said Grace Jr had fallen on hard times and resorted to crime to provide for his own child. They also said their son used to work at the same Pizza Hut restaurant where the robbery happened. They maintain he never would have physically hurt anyone during the robbery.
+She said her son was shot in the head, and she thinks the shooting may have even been personal…
+Sounds more like an individual with proper firearms training to me, but yeah, of course defending your own life is personal.
+The family said they want Pizza Hut to release more information about the situation and acknowledge that their son used to be a Pizza Hut employee.
+Hairston said she thinks the employee who shot her son needs to be in jail, and wants all parties involved in the situation to be honest about what happened.
+The employee involved has reportedly been placed on leave. Pizza Hut released the following statement:
+“The local Pizza Hut franchisee is fully cooperating with the Charlotte Police Department as they continue their investigation, but want to stress that the security of its staff is of utmost concern. They are providing support to the team members involved to ensure their health and well-being following this incident. The employee involved in the shooting has been placed on a leave of absence following further review.” 
+Thoughts on this? Let us know in the comment section below.
+",FAKE
+30,Abortion bill dropped amid concerns of female GOP lawmakers,"This item has been updated.
+
+House Republican leaders abruptly dropped plans late Wednesday to vote on an anti-abortion bill amid a revolt by female GOP lawmakers concerned that the legislation's restrictive language would once again spoil the party's chances of broadening its appeal to women and younger voters.
+
+In recent days, as many as two dozen Republicans had raised concerns with the ""Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act"" that would ban abortions after the 20th week of a pregnancy. Sponsors said that exceptions would be allowed for a woman who is raped, but she could only get the abortion after reporting the rape to law enforcement.
+
+A vote had been scheduled for Thursday to coincide with the annual March for Life, a gathering that brings hundreds of thousands of anti-abortion activists to Washington to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
+
+But Republican leaders dropped those plans after failing to win over a bloc of lawmakers, led by Reps. Rene Ellmers (R-N.C.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who had raised concerns.
+
+The House will vote instead Thursday on a bill prohibiting federal funding for abortions -- a more innocuous anti-abortion measure that the Republican-controlled chamber has passed before.
+
+A senior GOP aide said that concerns had been raised ""by men and women Members that still need to be worked out."" The aide, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the plans, said in an e-mail that Thursday's vote will help ""advance the pro-life cause"" and that GOP leaders ""remain committed to continue working through the process [on the Pain Capable bill] to make sure it too is successful.""
+
+Other aides said that leaders were eager to avoid political fallout from a large number of female Republicans voting against an abortion bill in the early stages of the new GOP-controlled Congress.
+
+The dispute erupted into the open in recent days and once again demonstrated the changing contours of the expanded House Republican caucus. The 246-member caucus is seeing rifts on issues where it once had more unity. That's because there are now more moderate Republicans from swing districts who could face tough reelections in 2016 when more Democratic and independent voters are expected to vote in the presidential election.
+
+Already this month, a large bloc of moderate Republicans voted against a spending bill that would repeal President Obama's changes to immigration policy enacted by executive action. More than two dozen Republicans from metropolitan areas with large immigrant populations also voted against an amendment to the bill that would end temporary legal protections to the children of illegal immigrants.
+
+The abortion bill pulled Wednesday night was strongly opposed by Democrats and women's rights groups. But a similar version of the bill easily passed the GOP-controlled House in 2013 and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had vowed to bring it up for a vote.
+
+Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), the bill’s lead sponsor, had predicted Wednesday that his proposal would easily pass because it ""has overwhelming support among the American people.""
+
+But Ellmers and Walorski had withdrawn their support and voiced concerns during meetings at the annual Republican policy retreat in Hershey, Pa. Ellmers did so again Wednesday at a closed-door House GOP meeting in the basement of the Capitol, according to several people who attended.
+
+Seeking to rebut growing criticism from conservatives, Ellmers said on Facebook Wednesday evening that she would vote for the bill: ""I have and will continue to be a strong defender of the prolife community,"" she wrote.
+
+But she had recently asked leaders to reconsider holding the vote, noting that Republicans had faced harsh criticism from Democrats in recent years for mounting a ""war on women"" by passing restrictive abortion legislation and other similar bills.
+
+""The first vote we take, or the second vote, or the fifth vote, shouldn't be on an issue where we know that millennials—social issues just aren't as important [to them],"" she said in an interview with National Journal.
+
+The opposition set off a scramble Wednesday among top GOP leaders concerned about how several ""no"" votes could be perceived by their party and the general public.
+
+With word of the opposition spreading, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) conferred nervously off the House floor after a midday vote. From there, Scalise headed to a meeting in his office suite with Ellmers, Walorski, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) -- a lead co-sponsor of the bill -- and several other women.
+
+In a caucus dominated by men, a meeting with top leaders requested and attended almost exclusively by women is a rare sight.
+
+One-by-one they exited the meeting and remained tight-lipped.
+
+Walorski said the dispute ""is no different"" than conversations that occur before votes on other legislation. When pressed to explain her specific concerns, she rushed off: ""I can't. I can't.""
+
+Others seen exiting included Reps. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.), Diane Black (R-Tenn.), Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), Susan Brooks (R-Ind.) and Ann Wagner (R-Mo.). Hartzler had already signaled her support for the bill to reporters. The other women declined to comment.
+
+The impasse prompted Tony Perkins, who leads the conservative Family Research Council, to visit the Capitol Wednesday to meet with Scalise.
+
+He cited ""a lot of misconceptions"" for causing last-minute disputes with the bill. ""We’re talking about a measure that would limit abortions after five months,"" he said. ""America is only one of four nations that allows abortions throughout the entire pregnancy.""
+
+Women's rights groups and Democrats have denounced the legislation as dangerous and unconstitutional. In a message to group members, the National Organization for Women cited federal statistics showing that just 35 percent of rape victims report the incident to police -- and said that the bill will do nothing to increase the rate of reporting.
+
+Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, cheered the decision of GOP leaders.
+
+""I never thought I would see the day that the Tea Party-led House of Representatives would wake up to the fact that their priorities — outright abortion bans — are way out of touch with the American people,"" she said in a statement. ""The GOP drafted a bill so extreme and so out of touch with the voters that even their own membership could not support.""
+
+The 22 women in the House GOP caucus are well aware that many of their male colleagues have earned the ire of Democrats and women's rights groups for talking about rape and women's rights.
+
+At the same closed-door retreat two years ago, Republican pollsters implored GOP lawmakers to stop discussing rape on the campaign trail and on Capitol Hill. The warnings came after several candidates faced heat in 2012 -- including former congressman Todd Akin (R-Mo.), who said a woman could terminate a pregnancy resulting from a “legitimate rape,"" and Richard Mourdock, a GOP candidate for an Indiana Senate seat, who said that babies resulting from rape were a ""gift from God.""
+
+Franks, who is an ardent antiabortion activist, has been known to take an aggressive stance on the issue in the past, often clashing with Democrats opposed to his proposals. But on Wednesday, he took a notably softer tone as he acknowledged the concerns of his colleagues.
+
+""I’ve maintained an open heart, because I realize that all of the people involved have sincere perspectives and have knowledge and experiences and information that I don’t have,"" he said. ""So my heart is open – my desire here is not a political victory, it is to try to somehow be part of catalyzing an awakening in America to where we finally see the humanity of these little victims and the inhumanity of what’s happening to them.""",REAL
+8655,'Racist and sexist’ complaints against Aussie lamb advert rejected,"'Racist and sexist’ complaints against Aussie lamb advert rejected   18:36 Get short URL The ad recieves complaints of being sexist and racist against white men. © We love our Lamb / YouTube The Advertising Standards Board of Australia (ASB) has rejected complaints that an advertisement for lamb is offensive to white males. Several complaints were lodged about the ad which producers say attempts to be all-inclusive with the people it features. 
+Produced by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), the ad titled “You Never Lamb Alone” features a white TV presenter quickly being switched with a Bengali-Australian actor Arka Das who introduces a range of ethnicities and sexual orientations as he moves towards a barbeque cooking lamb - “the meat that doesn’t discriminate”. 
+http://giphy.com/gifs/bJJo3n1aUke1G 
+Most of the complaints to the Advertising Standards Board of Australia centered on the opening switch of white TV presenter Luke Jacobz to Das, after Jacobz utters the line “I’m here to address concerns that too many perky white males are contributing to the lack of diversity on our screens.” 
+http://giphy.com/gifs/7nzEvHhZ1zI52 
+“This advertisement clearly states ‘too many WHITE people’ in its commercial which is highly offensive,” one complaint read, according to Bandt . “Pointing out someone’s race and gender in an advertisement and then denigrating such race or gender is both racist and sexist,” another read. To whoever wrote this lamb ad, thank you for all the tongue-in-cheek jokes about 'diversity' in Australia. https://t.co/E87jCXMFr3 — she stress@pax prep (@ChattyAnny) October 26, 2016 
+MLA explained that the line was “simply a nod to the common criticism that Australian television lacks diversity,” with the ASB rejecting the complaints on similar grounds. Well done MEAT & LIVESTOCK AUSTRALIA for “You’ll never lamb alone” winning the Marketing Communications: B2C and B2B award. #AMI #AMIAwards 
+“The Board considered that the advertisement did not portray or depict material in a way which discriminates against or vilifies a person or section of the community on account of race or gender,” they said. 
+Currently the video has more thumbs down than thumbs up on YouTube, with comments now disabled.",FAKE
+973,Outsider campaigns seek inside track,"(CNN) Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are confronting the same paradox: the fate of their insurgent campaigns built on scorn for the political establishment rests on how well they play the inside game.
+
+For Trump, the challenge is shifting from a strategy of piling up state primary wins to one that also takes into account states that award delegates in a more intricate fashion. Trump's organizational weakness in that type of contest was underscored Saturday when he was swept by Ted Cruz in the Colorado Republican convention.
+
+Sanders, meanwhile, has to win not only more pledged delegates but also more superdelegates -- party officials and other elites who can vote however they choose -- if he wants to take the Democratic battle for the White House to the convention floor.
+
+Trump is already making the case that the system is inherently unfair and is a symptom of the insider politics practiced by distant elites that disenfranchises grass-roots voters like those who have flocked to his campaign.
+
+""You see what's happening to me and Bernie Sanders,"" Trump said Sunday in Rochester, New York. ""It's a corrupt deal going on.""
+
+The 2016 campaign's shift from a simple hunt for primary wins is more than a sign that the electoral calendar is running out and routes to the nomination for both parties are beginning to narrow. It's proof that for all of its busted conventional wisdom and broken political rules, the wild presidential campaign is at a point where insurgent politics are no longer sufficient to win.
+
+""The nuts and bolts of presidential politics is an archaic language and very few people understand it. Outsiders need insiders to be successful,"" said Republican political strategist Ford O'Connell. ""If you want to crack the Da Vinci code, you need insiders.""
+
+Trump is doing just that. Last week, he hired Paul Manafort, a master of insider politics, to run his convention strategy.
+
+Still, Trump and Sanders start at a disadvantage in the inside game.
+
+Cruz, whose only real hope of heading the GOP ticket lies in a convention fight, is rolling out a delegate hunting operation years in the planning. Though he's built a political brand on being an outsider himself, Cruz has demonstrated a savvy understanding of the hidden ways of Washington and the mechanics of a presidential primary race.
+
+The Cruz campaign has recruited delegates in Arizona and sought delegates won in Louisiana by Sen. Marco Rubio -- prompting a bewildered Trump, who won the state, to threaten legal action. Cruz also secured all of the final 13 delegates who were selected in Colorado this weekend.
+
+The strategy is designed to prepare the way for multiple rounds of convention balloting when delegates awarded to Trump could be freed up to migrate to another candidate. It prompted more sniping between the campaigns on Sunday.
+
+Manafort accused the Cruz campaign of ""Gestapo tactics"" and ""not playing by the rules"" in its efforts to wrangle delegates.
+
+""I win a state in votes and then get non-representative delegates because they are offered all sorts of goodies by Cruz campaign. Bad system!""
+
+He followed up with another tweet later in the day.
+
+""How is it possible that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to vote in the Republican Primary?"" he wrote. ""Great anger - totally unfair!""
+
+""More sour grapes from Trump who continues to lash out in tantrums every time he loses. We are winning because we've put in the hard work to build a superior organization,"" she said in a statement.
+
+Trump's decision to hire Manafort, who helped quell the Ronald Reagan-inspired delegate uprising against President Gerald Ford at the 1976 convention, was a sign of evolution in his campaign.
+
+""This is an example of Donald Trump managing,"" Manafort said Friday on CNN's ""New Day."" ""Because the campaigns come in stages, he also understood that there comes a time when winning isn't enough. But it's how you win and how much you win. He recognized that this was the time.""
+
+It's unclear whether the move will be enough to help Trump secure the 1,237 delegates he'll need to win the nomination going into the GOP convention this summer. But the new direction is being praised as a smart move, even by Republicans strongly opposed to Trump.
+
+""Paul Manafort is a seasoned professional and he is a smart guy,"" Stuart Stevens, senior strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 GOP campaign, told CNN on Friday. ""This is make or break for Donald Trump. He has to get to 1,237. I think if he doesn't go to Cleveland with 1,237, it's doubtful that he will be able to come out of there as the nominee of the party.""
+
+Part of Manafort's job will be to forge links with local state party chiefs and officials influential in populating delegate slates, and to ensure that Trump is not outmaneuvered in the rules committee that will set out the parameters of the convention.
+
+""The challenge that the Trump campaign faces right now is that Ted Cruz has spent two years working every single one of those members, every single state party chair,"" said Republican strategist Doug Heye. ""The Trump campaign is just getting to know those people.""
+
+Trump's campaign confronts a challenge beyond Cruz's camp and the more long-shot possibility of facing down a convention coup from Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is positioning himself as an alternative should both his Republican rivals fail to corral a majority of delegates in a split party.
+
+Republican establishment insiders, who in some cases failed to thwart Trump on rival campaigns, are still trying to stop him, some with super PAC efforts targeting the billionaire with millions of dollars in advertising.
+
+These efforts are also now increasingly turning to influence delegate slates, said Tim Miller, a former senior Jeb Bush aide now working for the anti-Trump Our Principles PAC.
+
+""There is a role we can play, whether it is directly speaking or directly messaging to delegates or potential delegates in these states,"" Miller said.
+
+While the Republican primary campaign has claimed much of the media coverage so far this year, an insurgent versus establishment dynamic is playing out in the Democratic primary race.
+
+Sanders, the self described democratic socialist, has always been a political free spirit, caucusing with Democrats in the Senate as an independent but inhabiting ground to left of the mainstream party.
+
+That leaves him with few insider credentials with the party establishment, which could become a liability as he tries to lure superdelegates.
+
+His outsider campaign has posed a much stronger than expected challenge to one of the most powerful names in American politics.
+
+But he faces an uphill climb to the nomination -- he would need to win 77% of the remaining delegates at stake to win the nomination.
+
+Clinton is much further along than Trump and Sanders in the process of locking up delegate support — especially among Democratic superdelegates — many of whom have decades of stored up loyalty and connections with her family.
+
+Clinton lost in 2008 to Barack Obama's outsider campaign that toppled her insider machine. Her 2016 campaign team has learned from its mistakes, paying far more attention to delegate calculations and individual state electoral math than she did earlier.
+
+This has meant that even when she has lost to Sanders, she has minimized the deficit in delegates — as happened in Wisconsin last week when she lost by 13 points but only collected 10 fewer delegates than her rival. Sanders beat Clinton by more than 10 points in the Wyoming Democratic caucuses on Saturday but they both walked away with seven delegates.
+
+""The Clinton campaign infrastructure that is in place has done a phenomenal job of securing pledged superdelegates very early on in the process,"" said Tharon Johnson, a senior Democrat from Georgia, who was southern regional director for Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. ""They have a very full, comprehensive, ground organization in states that matter the most to close out the nomination.""
+
+Clinton currently enjoys a lead of 1,304 to 1,075 pledged delegates over Sanders. And she has also secured the endorsements of 486 super delegates compared to 38 who have declared for the Vermont Senator, according to CNN estimates.
+
+The Clinton campaign maintains that there is no realistic route for Sanders to win the nomination. To do so, he would have to claim almost every remaining nominating contest into June by large margins, in a way that would ensure that neither he nor Clinton would approach the 2,383 delegates needed to win the nomination.
+
+Then, Sanders would have to pull off an intricate inside game to persuade hundreds of superdelegates to desert Clinton and support him as the party's standard bearer.
+
+That's a tall order for Sanders even if he and his allies insist the senator is best positioned to be a Republican in the November general election.
+
+""This is what superdelegates have to grapple with, they want to win,"" Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said on CNN last week. ""We are going to an open convention. Everybody is talking about a Republican open convention (but) the Democrats are going to an open convention.""",REAL
+9230,Pentagon Seeks Another $6 Billion for Overseas Troop Deployments,"'Budget Amendment' for More Troops in Iraq, Afghanistan   
+The Pentagon has announced it will file a “budget amendment” seeking another $6 billion in funding for the current fiscal year to pay for additional overseas troop deployments above and beyond what was already in the budget for this year. 
+The $6 billion request comes as an “urgent” request from the Pentagon, and would pay for additional ground troops in Iraq, the additional troops left in Afghanistan by stalling the drawdown, and to pay for escalated airstrikes around the world. 
+Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord says the hope is to get the White House to approve submitting the request to Congress before next week’s election, with an eye at getting it added to the latest emergency spending bill, expected before early December. 
+These “emergency” funding bills are the main way to get around spending caps, with Congress deliberately funding the Pentagon only for a portion of the year with money that, by the cap’s reckoning, was the whole year’s budget, then slipping “emergency” bills in afterwards to pay for the rest of the year, while pretending the caps still exist.  ",FAKE
+10214,The Most Interesting Chart In The World – Part 2,"The Most Interesting Chart In The World - Part 2 By Lee Adler.   In Part 1 of this report you saw the rollercoaster shape of the European Central Bank balance sheet. The ECB’s assets grew massively under the long term loan program known as LTRO in 2011 and 2012. Then the central bank’s assets fell just as massively when the ECB allowed those loans to be repaid. You need to login to view this content. 
+David Stockman’s Contra Corner isn’t your typical financial tipsheet. Instead it’s an ongoing dialogue about what’s really happening in the markets… the economy… and governments… so you can understand the world around you and make better decisions for yourself. 
+David believes the world -- certainly the United States -- is at a great inflection point in human history. The massive credit inflation of the last three decades has reached its apogee and is now going to splatter spectacularly. 
+This will have lasting ramifications on how governments tax and regulate you… the type of work you and your family members will have available and what you get paid… the value of your nest egg… and all other areas comprising your quality of life. Login 
+David Stockman's Contra Corner is the only place where mainstream delusions and cant about the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance and Beltway Banditry are ripped, refuted and rebuked. Subscribe now to receive David Stockman’s latest posts by email each day as well as his model portfolio, Lee Adler’s Daily Data Dive and David’s personally curated insights and analysis from leading contrarian thinkers.",FAKE
+8275,"Spy Scandals, Globalism and the Betrayal of America","  *Articles of the Bound* / Spy Scandals, Globalism and the Betrayal of America Spy Scandals, Globalism and the Betrayal of America November 1, 2016, 10:28 am by Cliff Kincaid Leave a Comment 0 
+By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media 
+Our top educators like to think that worthwhile social movements only come from the left, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. But the movement backing Donald J. Trump for president rejects most of what the left is preaching. These people see America losing its greatness, unique identity and national sovereignty. Hillary Clinton uses the campaign slogan “Stronger Together,” which has a patriotic appeal. But she also termed half of Trump’s supporters “deplorable” and “irredeemable.” She prefers the artificial George Soros-funded “social movements” that back her campaign. 
+By any objective measure, it can be argued that the stench of globalism is starting to affect everything, even perceptions of our founding documents. It may also invite foreign penetration into the highest levels of our government. 
+Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia are surprised to learn that the site of the adoption of our Declaration of Independence is now a World Heritage Site designated by the United Nations. A big plaque with the designation faces you after you get a lecture from the U.S. Park Service and prepare to enter the historic building. Referring to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, the United Nations declares , “The universal principles of freedom and democracy set forth in these documents are of fundamental importance to American history and have also had a profound impact on law-makers around the world.” These are nice thoughts. But the U.N. is hardly a tribute to freedom and democracy. Ordinary patriotic Americans don’t like the idea of the corrupt United Nations claiming some form of jurisdiction over Independence Hall. 
+What’s more, visitors to the Liberty Bell see a big picture of Nelson Mandela raising a clenched fist salute. The Mandela quotation that the Liberty Bell is “a very significant symbol for the entire democratic world” is featured next to the photograph. These, too, are nice thoughts. But while Mandela presided over a democratic transition that turned the whites out of power in South Africa, revelations after his death proved that he was a secret member of the South African Communist Party. He had concealed his true motives and allegiances from those who elected him. South Africa is a member of the Russian orbit of nations, known as BRICS, and some of the remaining whites are fleeing. 
+The “Citizenship in the World” merit badge is now required for the highest rank in Scouting, Eagle Scout, with one of the requirements being, “Explain what citizenship in the world means to you and what you think it takes to be a good world citizen.” 
+What Hillary Clinton is trying to carry forward is something that her husband talked openly about in 2003. In his “Global Challenges” speech , former President Clinton outlined a form of world government. “We cannot continue to live in a world where we grow more and more and more interdependence, and we have no over-arching system to have the positive elements of interdependence outweigh the negative ones,” he said. He went on to say, “…I think the great mission of 21st Century world is to make it a genuine global community. To move from mere interdependence to integration, to a community that has three characteristics: shared responsibilities, shared benefits, and shared values.” 
+That “over-arching system” includes strengthening the United Nations, a process still underway, and currently using the alleged threat of “climate change” to build up the power of this world body and move toward a “genuine global community.” 
+As president, Clinton had sent a June 22, 1993 letter congratulating the members of the World Federalist Association for meeting to give Strobe Talbott the annual Norman Cousins Global Governance Award. “Norman Cousins worked for world peace and world government,” Clinton said. Talbott, a former Time magazine columnist and U.S. diplomat who served in Clinton’s administration, was a “voice for global harmony,” Clinton said. As a Time magazine writer, Talbott had written a column openly calling for world government. Now the head of the Brookings Institution, Talbott had direct but confidential contacts with Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, according to recent WikiLeaks disclosures. The book, Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War , documents questionable contacts between Talbott and the Russian intelligence service. Mrs. Clinton spoke to the same World Federalist group in 1999, congratulating former CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite upon his receipt of the Norman Cousins award. 
+Yet, Talbott’s continuing relationship with Hillary Clinton is not a subject that alarms the major media. 
+However, the disclosure that the FBI discovered some of Hillary Clinton’s emails on the Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner computer could also have national security implications. Were these emails shared with or hacked by our foreign adversaries? Tragically, the American people may not have the answer to this question by Election Day, November 8. But the carelessness of the arrangement is such that we have to suspect the worst, and that Hillary Clinton and her top aide, Huma Abedin, are at the very least, security risks. It could become the biggest spy scandal since Alger Hiss, the former State Department official who was exposed as a Soviet spy. He happened to be a founder of the United Nations. Cliff Kincaid 
+Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid . 0",FAKE
+6547,John Oliver’s Smear Tactics Exposed As Establishment Propaganda,John Oliver’s Smear Tactics Exposed As Establishment Propaganda  ,FAKE
+900,Can Sanders' millennials switch to Clinton?,"Dasha Burns is a writer and works as a strategist and creative content producer at Oliver Global, a consulting agency where she focuses on leveraging media and digital technology for global development. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+(CNN) Bernie's Brooklyn mourned Tuesday's New York primary results as Hillary Clinton solidified her lead over the shaggy, endearing ideologue. This may be the beginning of the end for Bernie Sanders, but that doesn't mean Clinton can coast. Far from it.
+
+But let's take a breath. I think we've all been wearing our primary goggles a little too long. The fact is that Clinton and Sanders agree on a majority of the issues when it comes to actual policy.
+
+Yet this is not resonating with millennials: Clinton cannot repeat her ritual misstep of assuming she will get their support when she hasn't fully earned it.
+
+To ensure a win for Democratic and progressive values in the general election, young people need to show up. And for this, Clinton needs to work harder to remind young voters that she, too, will fight on their behalf.
+
+Just as devoted patrons of the local organic-fair-trade-small-batch coffee shop won't suddenly wake up with a Starbucks skinny vanilla latte, avid, anti-establishment Sanders supporters won't suddenly start feeling the Bern for Clinton.
+
+So, I would urge the secretary to rethink her relationship to this demographic. Some suggestions:
+
+--You don't believe in the kind of revolution Bernie is talking about. Show young people that you've heard the cheers for his ideas and you understand why they matter to us, and tell us — without condescension — how you're going to do better. Then, show us what your revolution looks like. Because you ARE campaigning on a progressive platform, and you DO have goals — like the New College Compact and profit sharing -- that will change flawed and failing systems.
+
+--Don't tell young women to vote for you because we're women. But tell us to vote for you because you're going to close the wage gap. Because you'll make sure we have every opportunity afforded our male colleagues. Because with you as president our rights to our own bodies will be protected and expanded.
+
+--Don't try to adopt Bernie's swag; it's inimitable and everyone is surprised that it worked (including him, I bet). And don't try to do ""cool"" things you think young people do; you're a grown woman and we like the gravitas and dignity that brings. So do what YOU do but show young people you'll support what they do, too.
+
+--Policy matters, but for young voters, the intent and ideals behind those policies matter, too. If you're not going as far as Sanders on issues like education and the minimum wage, make sure we understand why and show us your goals are worth fighting for. Show us the heart behind your strategy and explain why it will work for us.
+
+--We know how experienced you are, and that you know how to ""get the job done."" But show that you're still willing to see different perspectives and to seriously consider criticisms and counterarguments.
+
+--Most of all, show that you're engaging with young voices. Show that you'll listen to those with few years but many ideas. Show that you're ultimately on the same side as your current opponent, because you will need his zealous support come November.
+
+It's true that even if Clinton does all these things, some millennials may angrily disengage from the political process if she is the nominee. But as a fellow member of the cohort, I hope and believe that most will be thoughtful in their decision.
+
+They'll see that the Republican candidate is the direct antithesis of everything that Clinton, Sanders and their collective supporters stand for.
+
+They'll see that both the Democratic candidates stand on platforms that will move our country forward, not backward.
+
+They'll recall that before the candidates went hoarse yelling over each other in the last debate, they spent most of the earlier debates so ""vigorously agreeing"" that a ""Glee""-style ""Don't Stop Believin'"" duet seemed almost imminent. From immigration to abortion to even campaign finance reform, rarely are the differences meaningful.
+
+Ahead of the upcoming primaries, Clinton will need to start removing her own primary goggles and making that case to her current opponent's supporters. Because if they turn their backs before the real battle begins, her presumptive primary victory could vanish before our eyes.",REAL
+1102,Bernie Sanders Has Strength Among White Men Pinched By The Economy,"Bernie Sanders Has Strength Among White Men Pinched By The Economy
+
+When Bernie Sanders won the primary in Michigan last week, it shook up the narrative of the Democratic race.
+
+Sanders did so with the help of white men. If he's able to pull off a victory in Ohio, the same demographic will likely be key.
+
+Take Jim, who describes himself, only half jokingly, as an angry white man.
+
+""We're pissed off,"" Jim said. (Jim's asked that his last name be withheld because his union, AFSCME, has endorsed Hillary Clinton, and he supports Sanders. He can't be quoted publicly going against his union.) ""We haven't gotten raises. Our pensions have been cut. Our healthcare's increased.""
+
+And, Jim added, Sanders speaks to that. ""Bernie, he speaks from the trenches,"" Jim said. ""We feel that he's fighting for us.""
+
+In Michigan, Sanders won with the support of 62 percent of white men, who were one-in-three voters, according to exit polls. In 2008, in the Democratic primary in Ohio, white men turned out in strikingly similar proportions to this year's Michigan contest.
+
+At the same time, black voters could make up a smaller proportion of the electorate and likely won't be enough to put Clinton over the top. In Michigan, Clinton won more than two-thirds of black voters and they were 21 percent of the electorate. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly 90 percent of black voters in Ohio; they were just 18 percent of the electorate; and Clinton won the state, ironically, with the support of white voters, including white men.
+
+Ryan, a member of a building trades union in Cleveland, who also asked NPR not to use his last name because his union has endorsed Clinton, feels the same way as Jim.
+
+""She's [Clinton] seen as the centrist candidate,"" Ryan said. ""And she's a big-money candidate. And big money and centrism hasn't been working for middle-class America for the past 30 years. Since Reagan.""
+
+When Ryan first saw Sanders speak a few months ago, something clicked. He said it was as if a politician was finally saying what Ryan had been thinking about the state of the country. Ryan was so swayed he even sent a small donation to Sanders campaign and later bought a T-shirt.
+
+'Like NASCAR, everyone wear their patch'
+
+At a union hall in Cleveland, both Jim and Ryan talked about rising health-care costs and trade deals that they believe have hurt much more than they helped.
+
+Sanders overwhelmingly won voters in Michigan who thought trade deals cost American jobs — 58 percent of voters said so there, and Sanders won them 2-to-1. (One-in-three Michigan voters said they lived in a household with a union member. Clinton and Sanders split them. Likely accounting for that were black union members who went for Clinton. Those numbers are not split out in exit polls.)
+
+Jim said he's only gotten one raise, really more like a cost-of-living adjustment, in eight years.
+
+""You look at the stock market,"" he said, ""it's gone up I don't know how many, a couple of hundred percent. You know, my wages have gone up 2-and-a-half percent. And who's speaking to that? Bernie is. And, yeah, I think maybe he's kind of like Don Quixote. But I mean that's part of the attraction. It really is. At least for me.""
+
+And Jim insists, this isn't about gender. He loves his congresswoman, who incidentally endorsed Sanders on Friday.
+
+There are elements of Clinton's stump speech designed to speak to working-class men including the parts where she talks about punishing companies that ship jobs overseas. But it's clear from these interviews that Sanders' attacks on Clinton's trade record, her superPAC, her big money speeches to Wall Street banks — they are breaking through.
+
+The money issue nags at Dave Passalacqua. He likes that Sanders gets his campaign cash from regular people.
+
+""There's that old saying is politicians should be like NASCAR, everyone wear their patch,"" Passalacqua said. ""You know, let's see what the patches are and [Sanders] doesn't need to wear a patch, because it's his own thing.""
+
+Passalacqua is executive vice president of the Communications Workers of America Local 4340 in Cleveland. His union has endorsed Sanders, but he's still undecided.
+
+Passalacqua agreed to meet at a Cleveland diner along with Jim Goggin, a fixture in the city's labor community. He's an organizer for the Delaware Valley Health Care Coalition.
+
+""It's pie in the sky,"" said Goggin, with an unmistakable Irish lilt. ""I mean, everything Bernie says, I think would be fantastic. But the fact of the matter is, that I am also a realist, and I know that you can't do that.""
+
+For Goggin, it is all about beating the Republicans in November.
+
+""And I wish to God that I thought he could win,"" Goggin said. ""But I don't unfortunately think he can win. Consequently, I'm with Hillary, because at least she's not going to throw us under the bus, the working people.""
+
+Passalacqua chimes in: ""And one good thing that Bernie's been doing, though, even with Hillary, is Bernie has moved Hillary's positions on things.""
+
+From the outside, it seems Passalacqua is having a classic voter's struggle between his head and his heart. He isn't convinced Sanders will be able to do what he's promising. Who will he vote for?
+
+""Whoever I think is going best for me and my family is the bottom line. Whoever is going to make — not to steal Donald's line, but — America great again,"" said Pasalaqua quoting Donald Trump's catch phrase. ""Because in order to make America great again we've got to make the middle class great again. So whoever's going to do that, I think's going to be the best person. And that's who I'll end up having to vote for.""
+
+No matter how Tuesday's vote turns out, and no matter who wins the nomination, all four men said they would support the Democratic nominee in November.",REAL
+6497,Standing Rock Indian Reservation: Thousands Of Wild Buffalo Appear Out Of Nowhere,"Share on Facebook Native Americans attempting to stop a pipeline from being built on their land and water just got assistance from a large herd of wild buffalo. Indigenous culture honors American bison (known as Tatanka Oyate, or Buffalo Nation) as a symbol of sacrifice, as the bison give their lives to provide food, shelter, and clothing through the use of their meat and their hides. Native Americans maintain a spiritual tradition with bison , believing that as long as buffalo — a gift from the Great Spirit — roam free and as long as the herds are bountiful, the sovereignty of indigenous people would remain strong. And in the midst of mass arrests, mace attacks, and beatings from batons, a stampede of bison suddenly appeared near the Standing Rock protest camp. A cry of joy reportedly erupted from the Standing Rock Sioux, as they had been praying for assistance from the Tatanka Oyate during their standoff with riot police and national guardsmen. As the police response to the Sioux's ongoing nonviolent civil disobedience escalates, tribal leaders are calling on state and federal governments to respect the constitutional rights of water protectors and stop the mistreatment of the indigenous community. “We call on the state of North Dakota to oversee the actions of local law enforcement to, first and foremost, ensure everyone's safety. The Department of Justice must send overseers immediately to ensure the protection of First Amendment rights and the safety of thousands here at Standing Rock,” wrote David Archambault II , chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. “DOJ can no longer ignore our requests.” Related:",FAKE
+8621,Western “Culture” is Wrecking Entire Continents,"Itinerant Philosopher and Journalist Y ou say “European cultural institutions”, and what should come immediately to mind are lavish concerts, avant-garde art exhibitions, high quality language courses and benevolent scholarships for talented cash-strapped local students. PHOTO : Mozart, Bach, Beethoven—some of the Giants that gave European civilization its right to claim supremacy over others. What would they think if they could understand the gravity of the cultural and social decomposition brought about by the embrace of essentially an immoral and downright criminal system of social organization? It is all so noble, so civilized! Or, is it really? Think twice! I wrote my short novel, “Aurora” , after studying the activities of various Western ‘cultural institutions’, in virtually all the continents of the Planet. I encountered their heads; I interacted with the ‘beneficiaries’ of various funding schemes, and I managed to get ‘behind the scenes’. What I discovered was shocking: these shiny ‘temples of culture’ in the middle of so many devastated and miserable cities worldwide (devastated by Western imperialism and by its closest allies – the shameless local elites), are actually extremely closely linked to Western intelligence organizations. They are directly involved in the neo-colonialist project, which is implemented virtually on all continents of the world, by North America, Europe and Japan. ‘Culture’ is used to re-educate and to indoctrinate mainly the children of the local elites. Funding and grants are put to work where threats and killing were applied before. How does it work? It is actually all quite simple: rebellious, socially-oriented and anti-imperialist local artists and thinkers are now shamelessly bought and corrupted. Their egos are played on with great skill. Trips abroad for ‘young and talented artists’ are arranged, funding dispersed, scholarships offered. Carrots are too tasty, most would say, ‘irresistible’. Seals of approval from the Empire are ready to stamp those blank pages of the lives of still young, unrecognized but angry and sharp young artists and intellectuals from those poor, colonized countries. It is so easy to betray! It is so easy to bend. Some, very few countries are almost incorruptible, like Cuba. But Cuba is a unique country. And it is intensively demonized by Western propaganda. “La Patria no se vende!” they say there, or in translation “One does not sell the Fatherland!” But one, unfortunately, does, almost everywhere else in the world: from Indonesia to Turkey, from Kenya to India. *** “ Aurora” opens in a small cafe in an ancient city in Indonesia (which is not called Indonesia). Hans, the German head of an unnamed cultural institute is talking to his local ‘disciples’. He loves his life here: all the respect he gets, those countless women he is sexually possessing and humiliating, the lavish lifestyle he is allowed to lead. A woman enters; a beautiful woman, a proud woman, an artist, a woman who was born here but who left, many years ago, for far away Venezuela. Her name is Aurora. Her husband is Orozco, a renowned revolutionary painter. Aurora’s sister was killed in this country, because she refused to give up her revolutionary art. She was kidnapped, tortured, raped, and then murdered. Hans, the head of a European cultural organization, was involved. Aurora confronts Hans, and in reality, the entire European culture of plunder and colonialism. And that night she is joined, she is supported, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or more precisely, by his merry ghost, who is thoroughly disgusted of being used as one of the symbols of the ‘culture’ which destroyed him personally, which destroyed the very essence of the arts, and which has been in fact destroying, for centuries, this entire Planet. *** When I recently shared the plot of “Aurora” with a local ‘independent’ filmmaker in Khartoum, Sudan, he first listened attentively, and then with horror, and in the end he made a hasty dash towards the door. He escaped, not even trying to hide his distress. Later I was told that he is fully funded by Western ‘cultural institutions’. After reading it, my African comrades, several leading anti-imperialist fighters, immediately endorsed the book, claiming that it addressed some of the essential problems their continent is facing. The cultural destruction the Empire is spreading is similar everywhere: in Africa, Asia and in Latin America. 
+I wrote “Aurora” as a work of art, as fiction. But I also wrote it as a J’accuse 1 – a detailed study of cultural imperialism. 
+My dream is that it would be read by millions of young thinkers and artists, on all continents, that it would help them to understand how the Empire operates, and how filthy and disgraceful betrayal is. 
+1 J’accuse is French for “I accuse,” and is generally used to mean an attack against social injustice. It references a 1898 newspaper article by Emile Zola who accused the French government of fabricating a charge of treason against a Jewish military officer, Alfred Dreyfus, because he was Jewish. Andre Vltchek Philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist, Andre Vltchek has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “ Exposing Lies Of The Empire ” and “ Fighting Against Western Imperialism ” . View his other books here . Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter .   PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP INSTALLATION Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience.   [email-subscribers namefield=”YES” desc=”” group=”Public”] Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation?",FAKE
+3454,"Scalia, Thomas & Alito have totally lost it: The complete and utter incoherence of the conservative Supreme Court justices","Regarding the dissenting justices: Um, what the hell? Aren’t hard-line paleo-conservatives supposed to be against frivolous lawsuits? Of course they are. And of course the King v Burwell case was absolutely a frivolous lawsuit. The entire law could have potentially collapsed over a lawsuit that disputed the existence of seven words in an otherwise massive piece of legislation. Those seven words: “through an exchange established by the state.” That was the basis of the whole thing. The plaintiffs argued that based on those words, the federal government could only provide subsidies for lower income Americans who purchased insurance through a state-run exchange.
+
+In other words, the lawsuit claimed that Obamacare insurance customers in all states that use the national Healthcare.gov marketplace shouldn’t get subsidies to help cover premium costs. What’s perfectly clear in the language, however, is that the governments of each state decides which exchange its citizens will have to use: either a state-run marketplace or the federal exchange. Case in point: Hawaii was the first state to form a state-based exchange: the Hawaii Health Connector. But just the other day, Democratic governor David Ige announced that the Health Connectors was financially unfeasible and opted to shut it down, transferring all customers to the Healthcare.gov. This is purely a state decision and therefore the subsidies ought to still apply.
+
+In Roberts’ majority opinion, the chief justice wrote that in the context of the law as a whole (many more than seven words in length), the claim against the word usage was “untenable.” Of course. To any sentient, thinking human, untenable is right.
+
+So, back to Scalia, Alito and Thomas. The fact that three Supreme Court justices sided with the plaintiff on Burwell proves how ideological and dumb those three justices truly are. To anyone with a basic grasp on reality, the language in the law is clear and incontrovertible. But in the far-right bubble, grasping desperately for anything that could undermine the law is de rigueur for the GOP, including nearly 60 votes so far to destroy the law in spite of the fact that President Obama would never in a million years sign such legislation. The flailing has become so pathetic that three justices in the highest court in the land sided in support of an hilariously frivolous lawsuit.
+
+I’m old enough to remember a time when the Republican Party actively campaigned in support of tort reform, especially in the healthcare field. Indeed, tort reform is still a plank in the GOP platform. But lately, the congressional Republicans have gone all gushy for frivolous lawsuits, going so far as to sue Obama on numerous occasions. Rather than doing its job and actually, you know, legislating, Republicans from Speaker Boehner on down the line have opted instead for silly lawsuits aimed at various actions by the White House. For example, before the Defense of Marriage Act was repealed, Boehner tried to sue Obama and his Justice Department for not enforcing the law. Elsewhere, tea party senator Ron Johnson tried to sue Obama over Congress’ alleged “exemption from Obamacare.” The latter suit was egregiously and offensively frivolous since Congress isn’t exempt from Obamacare at all. In fact, the law requires members of Congress and staffers who want employee-based coverage to get it through Healthcare.gov. Obama merely authorized a rule that was requested by, yes, Speaker Boehner to continue allowing the government to share the premium costs. So, Johnson was basically suing over a semantic trick — the patently false claim that Congress was exempt from Obamacare was intended to infuriate the base and make it seem as if Congress carved out a special loophole for itself, which Obama subsequently signed. The reality is that proud Republican Ron Johnson was merely exploiting the ignorance of the GOP base, assuming it’d go around believing that Congress was truly exempt, even though it’s not at all. Obamacare expert and Yale law professor Abbe Gluck told The Washington Post on Thursday, “[The decision] sends a strong signal to people who politically oppose the law that the court understands the law and is not going to tolerate more of this frivolous litigation that tries to destroy the statute by distorting it.” Here’s to hoping Gluck is right and the Burwell decision is the end of all this nonsense. Really, we’ve reached a point when Republicans who visit the White House will accidentally spill hot coffee in their laps just so they have an excuse to hire the nearest Jackie Chiles rent-an-attorney and stick it to Obama once and for all. (For another fantastic “Seinfeld” reference, see also Simon Maloy’s takedown of the Burwell case here.)",REAL
+9185,ISIS: Mortal Threat Or Paper Tiger?,"Written by Daniel McAdams Thursday November 3, 2016 If ISIS is such a mortal threat to the United States, why has US military action in Iraq and Syria been proceeding at such a leisurely pace? Is it possible that ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria are being used -- or even supported -- by the US and its allies as a ""regime change"" weapon against Syria's Assad government? The US pursued this policy before, when it used Saudi-trained radicals to fight a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. Those radicals became al-Qaeda... Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.",FAKE
+6012,Someone left a funny note asking the postman to move a spider,"Next Swipe left/right Someone left a funny note asking the postman to move a spider 
+If you have a fear of spiders, there’s nothing worse than seeing one between you and something you want: a cup of tea, the toilet, lifelong happiness … That’s what happened to the writer of this note, shared on Reddit by TheGrumpyNovelist . 
+The note says: 
+“Dear Mr Postman! Beholder of parcels, bringer of utility bills! I write to you on this day to ask a simple task of you. Living on the right side of my mail box is a spider, seemingly holding my mail hostage. If you could remove him for me, either by relocation or brutal murder, I would be forever in your debt. Signed, Resident” 
+They added a drawing of the spider for clarity. This prompted Reddit user taybon to add “A day in the life of said spider. The human is yet to collect these items. I must protect them from fingers and flies. The parcel deliverer is arriving before previous parcels have been emptied. Perhaps if I greet him and wave at him he will notice me and…..”",FAKE
+4430,"In rare foreign trip, Assad flies to Moscow to meet with Putin","Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ventured outside his beleaguered nation for the first time in more than four years Wednesday to meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin in a surprise visit to Kremlin patrons now backing Syria’s government with military might.
+
+The landmark trip is a powerful signal of Russia’s growing support for the embattled Syrian government as it fights an armed rebellion that includes factions backed by the West and many Middle East partners.
+
+Russian warplanes have struck Syrian rebel targets across the country in recent weeks, allowing Assad’s forces to go on the offensive and giving the Damascus government a critical lifeline after near-constant battles since 2011.
+
+Russia insists it is battling the Islamic State, which controls parts of Syria, but anti-government rebels and activists say few of the Russian strikes have hit the jihadists. Assad has painted his government’s military crackdown as a fight against terrorism.
+
+But the Russian intervention has deepened tensions with Washington, which is leading separate airstrikes against the Islamic State and rejects a long-term role for Assad in Syria’s future.
+
+[Obama’s challenge in three words: “Assad must go”]
+
+The Pentagon and NATO allies have expressed worry over possible inadvertent encounters between Russian and U.S.-led coalition aircraft in the skies over Syria. Neighboring Turkey has accused Russia of twice violating its airspace and shot down a Russian-made drone last week.
+
+On Friday, Secretary of State John F. Kerry is expected to meet with his counterparts from Russia and two main Assad foes — Turkey and Saudi Arabia — to discuss Syria, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
+
+Putin has made clear that Russia seeks to have a key role in any moves on Syria’s political future, apparently to ensure that Moscow does not lose its main foothold in the region.
+
+“We are ready to make our contribution not only in the course of military actions . . . but during the political process,” Putin said, according to a transcript released by the Kremlin.
+
+But few specific details emerged from the meetings with Assad.
+
+The extraordinary trip was announced after Assad had already returned to Damascus.
+
+Putin thanked Assad for visiting Moscow at Russia’s request, praised the Syrian people for fighting opponents for several years “practically on their own” and said that “serious results have been achieved in this battle,” according to the Kremlin transcript.
+
+“If it were not for your actions and decisions, the terrorism that is spreading through the region now would have made even greater gains, and spread to even wider territories,” Assad said to Putin, according to the transcript.
+
+Putin said that at least 4,000 Islamist militants from the former Soviet Union are now fighting in Syria, and he warned that they could not be allowed to foment instability in Russia.
+
+He also reiterated the eventual need for a political settlement to end the conflict. The West has demanded that Assad step down as part of any political transition, a condition Putin did not address in his remarks.
+
+In the meeting with Assad, Putin said his government believes that “positive results” in military operations will lay the foundation for long-term resolution to Syria’s conflict.
+
+“We would do this, of course, in close contact with the other global powers and with the countries in the region that want to see a peaceful settlement to this conflict,” he said.
+
+The Kremlin meetings unfolded a day after the Pentagon’s new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff held talks in Iraq, seeking to bolster U.S. support for Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State. Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. said Iraqi leaders gave assurances that Baghdad has not reached out to Russia to possibly expand its airstrikes.
+
+But a group of Iraqi political leaders and influential Shiite militias have urged Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to request Russian airstrikes on Islamic State militants, the Reuters news agency reported.
+
+[Did U.S. aid to Syrian rebels prompt Russian moves?]
+
+Photographs released by the Kremlin also showed Assad dining with Putin and other top Russian officials, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
+
+Russian warplanes have carried out dozens of strikes daily against targets in Syria since bombing began Sept. 30. Russia says it is focused on fighting the Islamic State in Syria, but many of the strikes have been directed against other Islamists and more moderate forces opposed to Assad. The West says that Russia’s main goal is to prop up Assad and allow his forces to go on the offensive, not fight the Islamic State.
+
+Russian and U.S. officials announced Tuesday that they had signed a “deconfliction” agreement to regulate aircraft and drone traffic over Syria. On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry released video of a Russian jet tailing what appeared to be an American Reaper drone over Syria. The ministry said the only aircraft legally in Syrian airspace are Russian.
+
+Reuters on Tuesday said three Russians were killed in an artillery strike in Syria, citing an intelligence source. The Defense Ministry denied that any Russian service members have been killed in Syria. Critics have said that Russia may send unofficial forces, or “volunteers,” as it has done in the Ukrainian conflict.
+
+There was no immediate comment from Washington on Assad’s trip. But in NATO member Turkey, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said he hoped Assad would stay in Russia.
+
+“If only he could stay in Moscow longer, to give the people of Syria some relief,” Davutoglu told reporters in Ankara.
+
+Little common ground between Moscow and Washington
+
+Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
+5212,Former ‘Apprentice’ contestant accuses Trump of groping her during job meeting,"A former contestant on the reality show “The Apprentice” on Friday accused Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump of aggressively kissing her and groping her breasts during a 2007 meeting to discuss a possible job at the Trump Organization.
+
+Summer Zervos, who appeared on the show in 2006 and now owns a California restaurant, spoke about the incident at a news conference alongside civil rights lawyer Gloria Allred.
+
+At times tearing up, Zervos said the incident occurred at Trump’s bungalow hotel suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which she visited after he suggested the two have dinner.
+
+Zervos said Trump greeted her with an “open-mouthed kiss” and then urged her to sit close to him on a love seat before kissing her again, groping her and trying to pull her into his bedroom. Zervos said she pushed Trump away and told him, “Come on, man, get real.”
+
+She said Trump responded by mimicking her words, “Get real,” and “thrusting his genitals” in her direction.
+
+Zervos’s accusations came as a number of other women have stepped forward in recent days to accuse Trump of groping them or kissing them inappropriately. Also Friday, The Washington Post published the account of Kristin Anderson, 46, who said Trump reached up her skirt and groped her during an encounter at a nightclub in the early 1990s.
+
+[Woman says Trump reached under her skirt and groped her in early 1990s]
+
+In a statement, Trump said he “vaguely” remembered Zervos as an “Apprentice” contestant but that he “never met her at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago.”
+
+“That is not what I am as a person, and it is not how I’ve conducted my life,” he said, adding that Zervos had emailed him in April asking that he visit her restaurant in California. Trump blasted the media, saying reporters are “throwing due diligence and fact-finding to the side in a rush to file their stories first,” a sign, he said that “we truly are living in a broken system.”
+
+Trump has categorically denied other accusations. At a rally in North Carolina, he called the women’s accounts “total fiction.” He called Jessica Leeds, who told the New York Times that Trump had groped her on an airplane in the 1980s, “that horrible woman” and suggested Leeds was not attractive enough to have drawn his interest. “Believe me, she would not be my first choice,” he said.
+
+Zervos, like the other women who have lodged allegations in recent days, said she was compelled to speak after watching a video of Trump bragging to “Access Hollywood” in 2005 that he was able to sexually assault women because he is a celebrity.
+
+Allred said Zervos is one of “many” women who have approached her in recent days to describe experiences with Trump. Allred said several friends and family members of Zervos could corroborate that she had told them of her experiences with Trump shortly after they allegedly occurred, but Allred did not release those statements Friday.
+
+Zervos read aloud from the email she said that she sent Trump in April 2016, which she said was an attempt to see whether the increasingly high-profile presidential candidate would consider apologizing for his behavior. She said she wrote to Trump, through an assistant, that his behavior toward her “blew my mind.”
+
+“I have been in­cred­ibly hurt by our previous interaction,” she said she wrote. She said she received no response.
+
+Unlike several other of Trump’s accusers, who either barely knew the business executive or did not know him at all, Zervos said she had considered Trump a mentor and role model, even after she was fired from the boardroom game show.
+
+She said she reached out to him a year after her “Apprentice” appearance when she was traveling to New York and asked to meet to discuss a possible job at the Trump Organization.
+
+In his Trump Tower office, she said Trump was complimentary and sounded eager to hire her. Then, she said, she became uncomfortable when, as she was leaving, he kissed her on the mouth.
+
+Zervos said she shared the experience at the time with a friend and her parents, who urged her to view the kiss as a form of greeting. Not long after, she said Trump called her to say he was visiting California and suggested the two have dinner to discuss the job.
+
+Zervos said Trump became physical soon after she arrived at his suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel.
+
+“He put me in an embrace, and I tried to push him away,” she said.
+
+After she rejected his advances, Zervos said, Trump grew cold. She said they proceeded with their planned dinner and that Trump ordered a club sandwich for the two to share.
+
+As they waited for dinner to arrive, Zervos recalled that Trump told her that “he did not think I had ever known love or had ever been in love.” Over dinner, he offered financial advice, suggesting that she should stop paying the mortgage on her home, leave the keys on a table and demand the bank make her a better deal, she said.
+
+Trump soon said he was tired and urged her to leave, Zervos said. He did not cut off discussions of a possible job. Instead he suggested they meet the next day at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf course, where she was given a tour by the general manager. Ultimately, she said she was offered a job that paid half of what she had discussed with Trump.
+
+Allred said Zervos has no plans to file a lawsuit and has no affiliation with any political campaign.
+
+“I want to be able to sleep at night when I’m 70,” Zervos said to explain her decision to come forward.",REAL
+8056,Hispanic Crowd Boos Marco Rubio off Stage,"Hispanic Crowd Boos Marco Rubio off Stage Rafael Bernal, The Hill, October 25, 2016 
+Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) took the stage in Orlando at Calle Orange, a Puerto Rican-themed festival, on Sunday when some in the crowd started booing, NPR reported . 
+The jeering got louder as the Cuban-American senator, seeking reelection after dropping his presidential bid earlier this year, was introduced. 
+And when the emcee asked for applause as Rubio took the same, boos drowned out any supporters in the crowd, NPR added. 
+“Thank you for having me today,” Rubio said in Spanish. “I want you to enjoy this day. We’re not going to talk about politics today. Thank God for this beautiful day, and for our freedom, our democracy, our vote, and our country. God bless you all, thank you very much.” 
+He left the stage to more boos from the crowd, according to the report. 
+{snip} 
+Rubio is running against Rep. Patrick Murphy (D), and the latest average of polls in the race shows Rubio ahead by about 3 points. 
+Murphy’s campaign seized on the Sunday incident and blasted out video it says shows the booing. It also noted that Murphy attended the festival “with a leader for Puerto Rican communities, Rep. Nydia Velazquez,” while “Marco Rubio was booed off the stage.” 
+Rubio’s campaign shared a video with The Hill Monday that it says counters what the Murphy campaign sent out and shows him being greeted enthusiastically as he moves through the crowd. 
+{snip} 
+Festival attendants said they disapproved of Rubio’s endorsement of Trump, who is deeply unpopular among Hispanics. 
+“When we have someone like Trump, who hits our Mexican brothers, our Latino brothers, then you jump on that bandwagon after all that stuff he says not only about you personally . . . as a Latino, you’re a freaking sellout. I would not vote for him if they paid me,” Calle Orange attendant Angel Marin told NPR about Rubio. 
+{snip}",FAKE
+10329,High Court Judges looking for a Truss to support them. More soon.,"Posted: Nov 6th, 2016 by MADJEZ   MADJEZ  ",FAKE
+50,"Trump's lean campaign machine relying mostly on donor cash, not his own","Donald Trump is running a relatively lean campaign machine and, despite pledges to self-fund, so far has been able to rely more on outside donations than his own deep pockets.
+
+Campaign finance filings this week offered a glimpse into how the billionaire businessman is running his breaking-the-mold campaign.
+
+The third quarter report showed that Trump raised $3.9 million over the period between June 30 through Sept. 30. Of that, $2.8 million came from individual donations of $200 or less. In addition, he's put up about $1.9 million of his own money, in loans and contributions, since officially launching his bid in mid-June.
+
+The totals show he's raised $5.8 million and spent $5.4 million to date -- which means he's spent more contributor money than his own money.
+
+Trump, though, repeatedly has said his campaign does not want to be beholden to big-money donors. So whether he will eventually have to dig deep into his personal fortune remains to be seen.
+
+“There is a general perception that he has all the money he needs,” however, “he’s spending less -- he hasn’t had to open his wallet – because of all the attention he’s received,” said Anthony Corrado, professor and campaign finance expert at Colby College in Maine. “His standing in the polls has allowed him to essentially ride this wave of support.”
+
+While Trump is not doing high-dollar fundraising events like other candidates, his website solicits donations all the way up to the individual limit of $2,700. Much of his financial support is coming in this way, and appears to be going a long way as Trump spends (and raises) far less than his competitors.
+
+The money mostly has been spent on travel, lodging, telemarketers, event staging, and campaign consultants in the early caucus and primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
+
+""The Trump Campaign will continue to accept small dollar donations as people across the country proudly invest in Mr. Trump's vision to Make America Great Again,"" the campaign said in a statement following the public filing of the FEC numbers Thursday.
+
+Corrado noted that this was “reminiscent of Ross Perot, who self-financed, but asked people to send in five dollars just to have skin in the game.”
+
+Texas billionaire Perot spent $63.5 million of his own money to wage a formidable third-party race for president in 1992.
+
+Trump told Fox News this week that he only spent “a couple of million” on his campaign so far, and “zero” on advertising due to all the free air time he has received. “I’ve spent the least money and I’ve got the best poll numbers. This is a tribute to business,” he said.
+
+Trump has been the poll front-runner in the GOP pack for weeks, despite spending less than his competitors.
+
+Republican candidate Sen. Ted Cruz took in $12.3 million in the third quarter, but also has spent nearly $18 million to date. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton took in $29 million and spent $25.7 million in the third quarter alone.
+
+As the campaign draws closer to the early 2016 primary contests, however, Trump will need to spend more money, Corrado said. “We will start to see this change in the fourth quarter,” he said, pointing to Trump’s announcement that he plans to spend upwards of $20 million in the next phase of his campaign on advertising.
+
+So far, ""his expenditures are revolving around his travel, spending the money to put on viable campaign events, gathering intelligence in the early primary states"" and promoting his brand, said Corrado. ""It reflects a grassroots approach to campaigning ... Therefore he has been able to conserve his resources to spend more as they get closer to the actual voting.""
+
+Trump will either have to raise more or keep dipping into his personal reserves, as, according to the FEC report, his campaign only had $255,000 cash on hand as of Sept. 30.
+
+He acknowledged as much when he told Fox News he would not be averse to taking outside money should he get the nomination. “I don’t mind spending the money. Once we get through that [primary], that’s when the party kicks in and then billions of dollars come in, everyone wants to support it and that’s a great thing.”",REAL
+16,P. Parenthood Chief Goes Toe-to-Toe with Attackers,"WASHINGTON -- Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards withstood nearly five hours of Republican attacks at a House hearing Tuesday.
+
+It wasn't just about those recent controversial tapes released by David Daledian's Center for Medical Progress showing possible wrongdoing. It was also about whether the abortion giant should keep receiving more federal taxpayer dollars.
+
+Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said definitely not – especially with the cuts in care Planned Parenthood has made in the last decade.
+
+""There's a 53 percent reduction in cancer screenings, 42 percent reduction in breast exams and breast care,"" Chaffetz noted.
+
+Republicans on the panel proposed moving those federal dollars to more worthy recipients.
+
+""We simply want to shift the money from an organization caught doing what they were caught doing and give it to the community health centers,"" Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said.
+
+""Shift it from the 700 Planned Parenthood clinics; give it to the 13,000 federally-approved community health centers,"" he continued. ""Take the money from the guys doing the bad things and give it to the ones who aren't.""
+
+But Richards begged to differ – not just about the abortion provider's worthiness to receive federal funds, but about the validity of the secretly recorded videotapes used against her organization.
+
+""The outrageous accusations leveled against Planned Parenthood based on heavily doctored videos are offensive and categorically untrue,"" Richards told the lawmakers.
+
+She went on to say, ""This isn't really an attack on Planned Parenthood.  This is an attack on 2.7 million patients who each year choose Planned Parenthood as their health care provider.""
+
+""The facts are on our side,"" she said. ""We're proud of the health care that we deliver every single year despite the animosity by some.""
+
+Richards suggested Planned Parenthood deserves federal funding because of the services it provides more than 2 million visitors a year.
+
+Live Action's Lila Rose responds to Cecile Richards' defense of Planned Parenthood at the Congressional hearing.
+
+But while Richards was arguing how valuable Planned Parenthood is, there was a news conference nearby completely contradicting that claim.
+
+A number of pro-life groups announced they're launching GetYourCare.org – a site showing Americans where they can easily find nearby low-cost health alternatives -- far more centers than Planned Parenthood offers.
+
+""On the website you'll see that for every one Planned Parenthood, there are 20 federally qualified health care centers,"" Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, said.
+
+Just like Richards, congressional defenders of Planned Parenthood in the undercover video scandal attacked the undercover video production.
+
+""This hearing today is promoted by a series of deceptively edited and purposely misleading videos,"" Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., charged.
+
+But at the same news conference where GetYourCare.org was launched, the Alliance Defending Freedom announced that a highly regarded forensics firm, Coalfire Systems, has studied Daledian's videos in-depth.
+
+""The videos are not edited; they're not manipulated,"" asserted Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer Casey Mattox, summing up the findings on the videos.
+
+""The full version of these videos is posted online,"" he said. ""And the only part that the world is being spared are moments like where David Daledian goes to the bathroom.""
+
+The committee holding the Tuesday hearing with Richards is one of four congressional panels scrutinizing Planned Parenthood and the more than $500 million it gets every year from the federal government.",REAL
+8208,New Poll: Americans Feel Less Safe After 15 Years Of War,"Written by Daniel McAdams   We were told that we had to attack Iraq because the Saddam Hussein government made us less safe. We were told we had to bomb and kill Gaddafi in Libya because his regime made us less safe. Ditto with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Assad in Syria. Now. 15 years after 9/11, Americans are seeing through the endless wars that have lasted through the Bush and Obama Administrations. Trillions spent, untold thousands killed, societies destroyed, people displaced. A new poll sponsored by the Center for the National Interest and the Charles Koch Institute has found that Americans feel less, not more safe after a decade and a half of war. We are reaching the critical mass where Americans begin to demand a change in our interventionist foreign policy. More on the encouraging poll in today's Liberty Report: Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.",FAKE
+7401,"If Clinton Campaign Believes WikiLeaks Emails Are Forged, Why Don’t They Prove It!?","Elections 2016 
+Top democrats have repeatedly waved off substantial questions arising from their hacked emails by falsely implying that some of them are forgeries created by Russian hackers. 
+The problem with that is that no one has found a single case of anything forged among the information released from hacks of either Clinton campaign or Democratic Party officials. 
+
+Clinton strategist Joel Benenson, asked about an email in which Clinton campaign staffers decide to accept foreign lobbyist money, used that line on MSNBC on Sunday. 
+“These emails, we have no idea whether they’re authentic or not,” he said. “Or whether they’ve been tampered with. I know I’ve seen things that aren’t authentic, that we know aren’t authentic, and it’s not surprising.” 
+Jennifer Granholm, a senior adviser to the pro-Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record, was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether the Clinton campaign should be responding to revelations revealed by Wikileaks. 
+“There are reports that these have been doctored,” she told Tapper on October 19. “And Newsweek had found that, in fact, that was happening.” 
+In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on October 18, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, was asked if the Russian government would impact the election by hacking voting systems. 
+“What worries me the most … is between now and the election the Russians dump information that is fabricated,” Schiff warned. “To get a last minute dump of emails that contain fabricated emails that are widely reported in the press, and there isn’t enough time to fact check and demonstrate the forgery, that is what really concerns me.” 
+CNN host Wolf Blitzer pushed back, “But have you confirmed that any of these emails released over the past two weeks, if you will, by Wikileaks are fabricated or doctored?” 
+“You know I’m not in a position to be able to do that,” Schiff demurred. 
+Everything considered, the conclusion has to be that Wikileaks emails are probably authentic and if they weren’t they would have been disproven a long, long time ago. The question is if are you willing to vote for a person that (we saw in the emails) is capable of doing very, bad, dirty stuff. And if the answer is yes then this country has a BIG, BIG PROBLEM. If Clinton Campaign Believes WikiLeaks Emails Are Forged, Why Don’t They Prove It!? Share this: ",FAKE
+4409,Justice Department Launches Civil Rights Probe Of Baltimore Police,"WASHINGTON, May 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department on Friday launched an investigation into the Baltimore police department's use of force and whether there are patterns of discriminatory policing.
+
+The probe, announced by U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, was requested by Baltimore's mayor in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who sustained fatal injuries while in police custody, and the outrage it sparked in Maryland's largest city.
+
+The Justice Department has conducted similar reviews of U.S. police departments. An investigation of police in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white officer shot dead an unarmed black teenager last year, concluded in March that the department routinely engaged in racially biased practices.
+
+Though the Justice Department is already investigating Gray's death and working with the Baltimore police on reform, Lynch said last week's protests pointed to the need for an investigation.
+
+""It was clear to a number of people looking at this situation that the community's rather frayed trust - to use an understatement - was even worse and has in effect been severed in terms of the relationship with the police department,"" Lynch said on Friday.
+
+The latest investigation will focus on allegations that Baltimore Police Department officers use excessive force, including deadly force, conduct unlawful searches, seizures and arrests, and engage in discriminatory policing, Lynch said.
+
+""If unconstitutional policies or practices are found, we will seek a court-enforceable agreement to address those issues,"" she said.
+
+Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings said he asked Lynch for the investigation to ""get to the bottom of the breakdown in trust between the police and the community.""
+
+Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said in a statement her goal was for the city's police to reform through an enforceable court order.
+
+Baltimore's chief prosecutor has brought criminal charges, including one murder charge, against six officers, three white and three black, involved in Gray's arrest.
+
+Lynch, who took office last week, traveled to the largely black city on Tuesday to meet with Gray's family as well as thank officers for their work during the protests.
+
+Any findings of the investigation would result in civil rather than criminal charges. Departments that have been found in violation of civil rights in the past have had to enter into court-ordered improvement plans, which can include an independent monitor, required reporting of arrest data and training for officers.",REAL
+10120,Obama Meets Boy After Deplorable Trump Fans Attack His Wheelchair When He’s Removed From Rally,"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+On Sunday, President Obama met with a 12-year-old boy who was attacked by Trump supporters while being removed from a rally. Yesterday, this young man was kicked out of a Trump rally. As he was leaving, people kicked at his wheelchair. Today, he met his President. pic.twitter.com/VI4g2tKANG 
+— Steve Schale (@steveschale) November 6, 2016 
+J.J. Holmes has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. He and his mother, Alison Holmes, attended a Trump rally on Saturday to protest the GOP nominee’s mockery of people with disabilities. As they were being removed from the rally by security, Trump’s supporters began pushing and kicking the child’s wheelchair. 
+“The crowd started chanting ‘U-S-A’ and pushing his wheelchair,” Alison said. “We were put out by security. Mr. Trump kept saying, ‘Get them out.’” 
+“I hate Donald Trump. I hate Donald Trump,” J.J. said through his vocalization device. 
+The next day, J.J. and his mom got to meet the President of the United States after a rally for Hillary Clinton in Kissimmee, Florida. The experience was the polar opposite of what they had experienced the day before. 
+If kicking a child’s wheelchair isn’t deplorable, I don’t know what the hell is. You can watch a video of the appalling incident below. Protestor pushing a child in a wheelchair appears to be kicked by Trump supporter. Happens :03 seconds in. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/LDr6E5NHvT 
+— Tom Llamas (@TomLlamasABC) November 5, 2016 
+Featured image via Twitter",FAKE
+10472,“Honor Our Immigrant Veterans” Replayed,"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. “Honor Our Immigrant Veterans” Replayed By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 8, 2016 Veterans By elizawhig 
+“Honor Our Immigrant Veterans” from VoteVets is a video on Youtube I tripped over recently, and have watched several times. It is that good. Another Kossack may have already posted it, but I would like to get it some play. Not because I think it will change any voter’s mind, but because it deserves to be seen to remind us of who we are as Americans. We are all immigrants or the children of immigrants, and we and our relatives and grandparents have had to make tough choices that deserve to be remembered. 
+I had an uncle (by marriage) who was Italian. In 1940 he was still not a US citizen, although I gather he had begun the process, so he was sent to an internment camp in Wyoming (or Montana?). While he waited for his citizenship application to be completed, he and his fellow detainees played a lot of poker. His papers were finally processed, he was made a US Citizen, then was promptly drafted into the US Army as a Sargent (Supply). And of course he was sent to…Italy. His division survived Anzio, then my uncle came into his glory. His father was someone of importance further north, so he had connections. He was able to secure excellent billets (in a castle) and good food and drink for his comrades. 
+Read the Full Article at www.dailykos.com >>>> 
+Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on November 8, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+4736,Laura Ingraham: The Trump betrayal by Republican elites won't soon be forgotten,"The vast majority of Republicans want Donald Trump to be president. They've repeatedly told the pollsters, they've turned out in huge numbers for the GOP nominee's rallies, they've given him a record-breaking number of small donations and they are trying to help him win. Some of them were for Rubio, some of them were for Kasich and a lot of them were for Cruz, but they have come together in an effort to save the country from Hillary Clinton.
+
+A small minority of Republicans do not want Donald Trump to be president. They prefer Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately for most of the Republican Party, this small group of angry dissenters includes many of the people at the top of the party -- officeholders, major donors, ""strategists,"" and ""conservative"" pundits. These people have been able to leverage their connections with the mainstream press to repeatedly attack Trump -- even though they refuse to say anything nice about Hillary.
+
+The Republican Party is led by people who have more in common with the Clintons than with the GOP base.
+
+Their fundamental problem is that they are closer to Hillary on most issues than they are to Republican voters. The honorable thing for them to do would be to leave the GOP altogether and work with the Democrats -- as some like Andrew Sullivan have.
+
+But they're unwilling to do that. Instead, they take Hillary's side on every issue while claiming to be pushing the ""conservative"" line. Furthermore, it gives them an incentive to talk about everything in personal terms -- as if they would have supported someone like, say, Huckabee, if the former Arkansas governor had been nominated, even though that's not true. So instead of having an honest discussion as to whether the GOP should be a globalist party or a nationalist party, everything dissolves into personal attacks.
+
+When this election is over, the vast majority of Republicans are going to remember that their supposed leaders -- the same officeholders, millionaires, and pundits who told them that they had to ""come together"" and support John McCain and Mitt Romney -- refused to do the same for Donald Trump. They will know that what they have long suspected is true -- the Republican Party is led by people who have more in common with the Clintons than with the GOP base. And that knowledge will affect the future of the GOP for years to come.
+
+Laura Ingraham joined FOX News Channel in 2007 and currently serves as a contributor, providing political analysis and commentary to FNC's daytime and primetime programming. She is the Editor-in-Chief of LifeZette.com.  In addition to her role as a contributor, Ingraham is a frequent substitute host on FNC's ""The O'Reilly Factor."" As the host of the radio program ""The Laura Ingraham Show,"" she is also the most listened-to woman in political talk radio in the United States, heard by hundreds of radio stations nationwide. Ingraham previously served as a litigator and Supreme Court law clerk.",REAL
+10365,Trump Supporter Jailed for Trying to Rig the Election By Committing Voter Fraud,"By Sarah Jones on Fri, Oct 28th, 2016 at 9:04 pm So Donald Trump's warnings about almost non-existent voter fraud were right after all. The only problem is that it was a Donald Trump supporter who committed voter fraud by voting twice. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+So Donald Trump’s warnings about almost non-existent voter fraud were right after all. 
+The only problem is that it was a Donald Trump supporter who committed voter fraud by voting twice. 
+Terri Lynn Rote, 55, was booked into jail Thursday on a felony charge of first-degree election misconduct after being arrested for suspicion of voting twice, according to the Des Moines Register . 
+Authorities say the registered Republican cast two electoral ballots in Polk County. She was held in jail on a $5,000 bond and released Friday. 
+Terri Rote caucused for Donald Trump: Terri Rote plans to caucus tonight for @realDonaldTrump down on the east side of Des Moines pic.twitter.com/dMdeH7sX0V 
+— Leigh Munsil (@leighmunsil) February 1, 2016 
+This does make it pretty awkward for Republicans, especially Trump supporters who’ve been told to “monitor” areas where liberals and Democrats vote, which is actually called voter intimidation and is also against the law. 
+In fact, Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that the election is rigged got the Republican Party sued for voter intimidation. And now one of Trump’s own supporters is arrested over voter fraud. 
+Makes sense.",FAKE
+4223,"Sanders wins in Wisconsin, keeping alive his improbable bid for the nomination","Bernie Sanders emerged from Wisconsin with a solid victory Tuesday, prolonging his dogged but improbable bid to catch Hillary Clinton in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.
+
+The senator from Vermont was leading the party’s front-runner in a state with a celebrated tradition of progressive activism — and a primary open to independent voters, a bedrock Sanders constituency.
+
+Now, despite Clinton’s still-overwhelming lead in delegates, Sanders can claim the momentum of winning in six of the past seven states holding nominating contests across the country.
+
+The victory was certain to energize Sanders’s supporters two weeks ahead of what will be a key showdown in delegate-rich New York, a state where Clinton hopes to put an end to Sanders’s embarrassing winning streak and reclaim control of the race against the self-described democratic socialist.
+
+Sanders held a boisterous rally Tuesday night in Wyoming, the site of Democratic caucuses Saturday. Screams erupted and the crowd broke into chants of “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” in an auditorium at the University of Wyoming in Laramie when Sanders shared the news that the networks had called Wisconsin for him.
+
+“If we wake up the American people, and working people and middle-class people and senior citizens and young people begin to stand up and fight back and come out and vote in large numbers, there is nothing that we cannot accomplish,” he said.
+
+Clinton had already turned her attention to New York before voting began in Wisconsin. She appeared Tuesday morning on ABC’s “The View,” held an event in Brooklyn focused on women’s issues and attended an evening fundraiser in the Bronx where attendees were asked to raise $10,000 for her campaign.
+
+In a tweet after the polls closed, Clinton congratulated Sanders on his victory. “To all the voters and volunteers who poured your hearts into this campaign: Forward!” she wrote.
+
+While catching Clinton in the delegate count remains a long shot, Sanders has chipped away at her onetime lead of more than 300 pledged delegates, which was down to 263 before Tuesday’s contest in Wisconsin, according to an Associated Press tally.
+
+Sanders invested significant time in Wisconsin, not leaving the Badger State in the final four days leading up to the primary and making an unadvertised campaign stop at a Milwaukee diner Tuesday morning.
+
+“If people come out to vote in large numbers, I think we’re going to do very, very well,” Sanders told reporters as he entered Blue’s Egg with Barbara Lawton, a former Wisconsin lieutenant governor.
+
+Sanders aggressively sought to highlight his more insular views on trade — an issue that he’s pressed in other Midwestern industrial states — as well as Clinton’s ties to Wall Street.
+
+Wisconsin was viewed as difficult terrain for Clinton. In 2008, the state’s Democratic electorate was 87 percent white — voters whom Sanders has consistently won in nominating contests this year. Its industrial landscape, large bloc of independent voters and substantial working class also were seen as fertile ground for Sanders’s message of rethinking U.S. trade policy.
+
+In 2008, Clinton lost the state by 17 points — to then-Sen. Barack Obama.
+
+This time, she campaigned lightly here, focusing strategically on cities in congressional districts that played to her strengths, including Milwaukee, where she is popular with a large African American electorate.
+
+She highlighted that she, unlike Sanders, has been a Democrat her “whole adult life.” She emphasized her commitment to supporting Democratic candidates at the state and local levels — a salient issue for a state party that has been waging fierce ideological battles against Gov. Scott Walker (R).
+
+“He’s won some, I’ve won some. But I have 2 million more votes than he does,” Clinton said on “The View” on Tuesday morning.
+
+Both candidates are now set for a showdown April 19 in New York, a state where Sanders grew up, where Clinton was elected twice to the U.S. Senate — and where 247 delegates will be at stake.
+
+Clinton plans to campaign aggressively there, in part to prevent an embarrassing upset in her adopted home state and in part to deliver a decisive victory that would further marginalize Sanders.
+
+The Brooklyn-born Sanders plans to make New York his home base over the coming two weeks as well. While he will make some campaign stops in other states with upcoming nominating contests, aides say he plans to return to New York City most nights, reflecting the hard-to-overstate consequences of the primary.
+
+His decision to campaign Tuesday in Wyoming was born of a desire to add to his momentum heading into New York by notching a win in the state’s caucuses Saturday, though only 14 delegates are in play.
+
+At this time in 2008, Obama’s pledged-delegate lead over Clinton fluctuated between 120 and 140 delegates — about half of the margin by which Clinton now leads Sanders. And that doesn’t include superdelegates, the elected officials and other party leaders who are not bound by their state’s results and who so far have broken heavily in Clinton’s favor.
+
+Sanders aims to catch Clinton in pledged delegates — those won in primary elections — once California votes June 7. Doing so would require lopsided wins in most of the remaining contests, including some in states that have demographics similar to places where he has struggled.
+
+If Sanders catches Clinton — or gets close — both candidates would enter the party’s convention in July without enough pledged delegates to claim the nomination. That would force the party’s superdelegates — who are automatically made convention delegates — to choose the nominee, a scenario Sanders’s campaign manager reiterated during an interview Tuesday on CNN.
+
+The Sanders campaign has started making the case to superdelegates that they should side with him because he is more electable than Clinton against Republican front-runner Donald Trump — a view the Clinton camp disputes.
+
+In a memo to supporters Monday, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, described the Sanders strategy as reliant on “overturning the will of the voters.”
+
+The results in Wisconsin continued many of the trends seen in previous contests.
+
+Independents, who were allowed to participate in the Democratic primary, favored Sanders over Clinton by a 40-point margin, according to preliminary exit polls. And as in prior contests, voters rated Sanders as far more trustworthy than Clinton. Nine in 10 Democratic voters said Sanders was “honest and trustworthy,” compared with to 6 in 10 who said the same of Clinton.
+
+Tuesday morning, as Sanders mingled with voters over breakfast at Blue’s Egg in Milwaukee, Dale Dulberger, 66, of Wauwatosa, Wis., came to greet the senator after casting his vote for him.
+
+“I think he’s really authentic,” Dulberger, who teaches at a county technical college, said of Sanders. “I think people believe what he’s saying. His proposals are idealistic, but that’s what a president is supposed to do.”
+
+Clinton, on the other hand, campaigned in New York City and did not mention Wisconsin’s election at either appearance.
+
+In a preview of what is expected to be a rough-and-tumble New York primary, the New York Daily News debuted Wednesday’s front-page story, which encapsulates the challenge that awaits Sanders in the Empire State. The paper lambasted the senator for his position opposing legal liability for gunmakers after the massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in 2012. The headline: “Bernie’s Sandy Hook shame.”",REAL
+3826,The unexpected and ingenious strategy of Obama's second term,"Presidents often turn more moderate to make gains in their final years. Think of Bill Clinton's 1997 budget deal, or George W. Bush's 2007 (failed) immigration reform effort, or Ronald Reagan's 1986 tax reforms. Second terms can feel like new presidencies.
+
+President Obama's increasingly successful second term has been the exception to that rule. It's been a concentrated, and arguably jaded, version of his first term. The candidate who was elected to bring the country together has found he can get more done if he acts alone — and if he lets Congress do the same.
+
+That has been the big, quiet surprise of Obama's second term. Congress has become, if anything, more productive. And that speaks to a broader lesson Obama has learned about polarization in Congress: Since he's part of the problem, ignoring Congress can be part of the solution.
+
+Obama's diplomatic breakthroughs with Cuba and Iran call back to a controversial promise Obama made in the 2008 primary but seemed to abandon once he won the White House: to negotiate with dictators with few or no preconditions. This was among the biggest fights of the Democratic primary and the most radical promises of Obama's campaign — but it seemed almost completely forgotten in the first years of his presidency.
+
+Obama's first-term foreign policy was largely defined by George W. Bush's wars. It's only been in Obama's second term that the foreign policy philosophy he previewed in the 2008 campaign has really been visible — and where Obama has shown himself to be to the left of many in the Democratic Party.
+
+Even some congressional Democrats have balked at his negotiations with Cuba and Iran. But not only is Congress largely irrelevant to these deals (at least unless the opposition can overturn a presidential veto, which they almost certainly can't) but Obama doesn't have much pressing legislation before Congress, which makes it safer for him to anger them. In that way, Obama's increasing distance from Congress has been a boon to his foreign policy efforts.
+
+The results will profoundly shape Obama's foreign policy legacy. As my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote, ""Obama has reestablished productive diplomacy as the central task of a progressive foreign policy, and as a viable alternative approach to dealing with countries the GOP foreign policy establishment would rather bomb. He established a viable alternative to the liberal hawks that dominated Democratic thinking during the Bush years, and held positions of influence on Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign. And he developed a cadre of aides who can carry on that legacy to future Democratic administrations, and keep a tradition of dovishness alive.""
+
+But it's not just foreign policy where Obama has swung left. When he ran for president in 2008, he opposed same-sex marriage. It wasn't until 2012 that he ""evolved"" on the issue. But by 2015, he was embracing marriage equality as part of his legacy. He even turned his home into a symbol of celebration:
+
+Similarly, Obama has sought to use executive action to achieve in his second term what Congress wouldn't permit in his first: sweeping action on both immigration and climate change.
+
+In some ways, the immigration action is the most telling of the two. Prior to his second term, Obama had repeatedly told immigration advocates that he simply didn't have the power to stop deportations on a significant scale. ""I am president,"" he told Univision in 2010, ""I am not king.""
+
+But Obama eventually decided that the president had more power than he initially thought. Similarly, he is pushing strong regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
+
+Both efforts show a basic reality of Obama's second term: Rather than working to find more compromise in Congress, which would necessitate choosing different issues and agreeing to much more modest solutions, Obama is sidestepping Congress with more aggressive, more polarizing actions. To put it another way, he's prioritizing the liberal policy outcomes he promised in the 2008 campaign above the compromise-oriented political approach he promised in the 2008 campaign.
+
+Given Obama's actions, you might expect Congress to have devolved into yet more partisan rancor and paralysis. But over the past year, the opposite has happened. Democrats and Republicans shocked everyone by coming up with a fix to Medicare's broken payments formula. The Senate agreed on a replacement to No Child Left Behind. There have been no government shutdowns or debt ceiling disasters. And Republicans have even been willing to make some common ground with Obama on trade authority.
+
+Evidence of Congress's relative productivity can be found elsewhere, too. The Bipartisan Policy Center keeps up a ""Healthy Congress Index"" that ""tracks key metrics like substantive days in session, amendments offered, and bills reported out of committee."" Of late, Congress is looking a whole lot healthier.
+
+Which, in a way, makes a twisted kind of sense. Obama is a polarizing figure, and his efforts to pass legislation were part of what was polarizing Congress. Obama eventually realized he couldn't solve a problem that was created by his very presence. And so he's more or less left Congress to do its own thing — particularly since Republicans won the Senate in 2014.
+
+Now that they've stopped arguing so much over Obama, both sides in Congress have more time and more inclination to work with each other — and, surprisingly, to work with Obama on the rare occasions when there's an obvious common ground, as proved true on trade authority. The result is that even as Obama's second term has become more liberal, the agenda he's actually pursuing with Congress has become more conservative — and more successful.",REAL
+8223,Help Blow Up the Globalists Plot to Steal the Presidency- Make This Go Viral,"
+ 
+The Benedict Arnold of the Republican Party, Paul “Rat” Ryan, your next President if the globalists get their way.
+People laughed at me when I said back in April, that Paul Ryan would be your next President. How could I be so sure, because he would not actively campaign and endorse anyone, in a meaningful way during the Republican Primary. He filed paperwork to run for President on January 30, 2016. And he is a Clintonista, a globalist, a traitor to the American people. He doesn’t carry the criminal baggage of Clinton, but he supports all free trade agreements, the elimination of all national borders, the weakening of our military. etc., etc.
+Paul Ryan represents the globalists and their Plan B since Hillary Clinton is going to be indicted AFTER the election.
+Please watch the following video and you will see the inescapable conclusion that Hillary Clinton is no longer useful to the globalists and Ryan’s lack of a criminal record , whose election will not spark rioting in the streets from 50% of Americans who do not know any better, and who will do what he is told by the Rothschild/Rockefeller cartel.
+All the documentation you need is on The Common Sense Show. 
+Please make this go viral. Awareness of this insidious plot designed to fool the American people can blow this plan up. Every American needs to see this evidence so that even the casual Clinton supporters will not cast their vote for her knowing she will never make it to Inauguration Day.
+ 
+
+ 
+ 
+P lease Donate to The Common Sense Show 
+ 
+PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US 
+
+ 
+
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.
+",FAKE
+10144,Biggest Election Fraud In History Discovered In The United States,"  by Jon Rappoport — Jon Rappoport’s blog Oct 31, 2016 Vote fraud expert Bev Harris exposes electronic voting machines Okay. She finally did it. On Monday, Bev Harris ( blackboxvoting.org ), the great investigator of vote fraud, appeared on the Alex Jones show and laid it all out . The GEMS vote-fraud system, “fraction magic,” the way the vote is being stolen. Not just in theory, but in fact. Listen to the whole interview and get the word out. Bev’s findings are staggering. Below the video is the original piece I did on this earlier this month. —- High Alert: the election can still be rigged Votes counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers …[A]mazingly, the vote-rigging system it describes has not gotten widespread attention. The system can be used across the entire US. As we know, there are a number of ways to rig an election. Bev Harris, at blackboxvoting.org , is exploring a specific “cheat sheet” that has vast implications for the Trump vs. Hillary contest. It’s a vote-counting system called GEMS. I urge you to dive into her multi-part series, Fraction Magic (Part-1 here ). Here are key Harris quotes. They’re all shockers: “Our testing [of GEMS] shows that one vote can be counted 25 times, another only one one-thousandth of a time, effectively converting some votes to zero.” “This report summarizes the results of our review of the GEMS election management system, which counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. The results of this study demonstrate that a fractional vote feature is embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly, yet radically, alter election outcomes by pre-setting desired vote percentages to redistribute votes. This tampering is not visible to election observers, even if they are standing in the room and watching the computer. Use of the decimalized vote feature is unlikely to be detected by auditing or canvass procedures, and can be applied across large jurisdictions in less than 60 seconds.” “GEMS vote-counting systems are and have been operated under five trade names: Global Election Systems, Diebold Election Systems, Premier Election Systems, Dominion Voting Systems, and Election Systems & Software, in addition to a number of private regional subcontractors. At the time of this writing, this system is used statewide in Alaska, Connecticut, Georgia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Utah and Vermont, and for counties in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. It is also used in Canada.” “Instead of ‘1’ the vote is allowed to be 1/2, or 1+7/8, or any other value that is not a whole number.” “Weighting a race [through the use of GEMS] removes the principle of ‘one person-one vote’ to allow some votes to be counted as less than one or more than one. Regardless of what the real votes are, candidates can receive a set percentage of votes. Results can be controlled. For example, Candidate A can be assigned 44% of the votes, Candidate B 51%, and Candidate C the rest.” “All evidence that [rigged] fractional values ever existed [in the GEMS system] can be removed instantly even from the underlying database using a setting in the GEMS data tables, in which case even instructing GEMS to show the [rigged] decimals will fail to reveal they were used.” “Source code: Instructions to treat votes as decimal values instead of whole numbers [i.e., rigging] are inserted multiple times in the GEMS source code itself; thus, this feature cannot have been created by accident.” A contact who, so far, apparently wishes to remain anonymous states the following about the history of the GEMS system: “The Fractional vote [rigging] portion traces directly to Jeffrey W. Dean , whose wife was primary stockholder of the company that developed GEMS. He ran the company but was prohibited from handling money or checks due to a criminal conviction for computer fraud, for which he spent 4 years in prison. Almost immediately after being released from prison he was granted intimate access to elections data and large government contracts for ballot printing and ballot processing.” I see no effort on the part of the federal government, state governments, or the mainstream press to investigate the GEMS system or respond to Bev Harris’ extensive analysis. It’s not as if media outlets are unaware of her. From shesource.org, here is an excerpt from her bio : “Harris has been referred to as ‘the godmother’ of the election reform movement. (Boston Globe). Vanity Fair magazine credits her with founding the movement to reform electronic voting. Time Magazine calls her book, Black Box Voting , ‘the bible’ of electronic voting… Harris’s investigations have led some to call her the ‘Erin Brockovich of elections.’ (Salon.com)… Harris has supervised five ‘hack demonstrations’ in the field, using real voting machines. These have been covered by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and in formal reports by the United States General Accounting Office…” So far, her analysis of GEMS seems to be labeled “too hot to handle.” Press outlets prefer to report the slinging of mud from both Presidential candidates’ camps. Meanwhile, the actual results of the coming elections—including Congressional races—appear to be up for grabs, depending on who controls GEMS. Update: From what I understand, each state government appoints a “consultant” to manage GEMS on election night. That person would be capable of rigging the vote. Jon Rappoport The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED , EXIT FROM THE MATRIX , and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX , Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29 th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here .",FAKE
+4247,South Carolina primary brings high stakes for Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush,"Just weeks ago, it did not seem that Marco Rubio needed to lose any sleep over Jeb Bush.
+
+After all, Rubio was seen as the darling presidential candidate of the GOP establishment because of a string of impressive debate performances and a strong Iowa caucus showing.
+
+But after a disastrous GOP debate where Chris Christie essentially left the normally cool and eloquent Rubio stammering, followed by a fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary, the South Carolina vote on Saturday has become critical for the Florida lawmaker.
+
+He must persuade people who had been ready to ditch Bush for Rubio after New Hampshire, but who got jittery after he did worse than expected, that he has recovered and is the best non-extreme Republican option for the nomination, according to the New York Times.
+
+A Rubio supporter said the senator entered the ill-fated debate with indications from Bush backers that they would be ready to switch loyalty after the New Hampshire primary, which had been expected to seal Rubio as the best bet for the GOP establishment.
+
+But after Christie successfully repeatedly attacked Rubio in the debate, the supporter told the Times, “those calls stopped.” Another unidentified supporter added: “Totally frozen.”
+
+Friends, advisers and backers of Rubio says if he should finish behind Bush, it would spell real trouble for the junior senator, according to the Times.
+
+To be sure, thus far South Carolina voter polls indicate that Donald Trump will win, perhaps with a double-digit margin over whoever comes in second place.
+
+Rubio’s campaign has taken the blame for the fallout after the debate that hurt their candidate, saying they had made a tactical error in advising him not to hit back hard at Christie because it wouldn’t pay off.
+
+A weaker-than-expected showing by Sen. Ted Cruz, who is pursuing conservative and evangelical voters, is seen as a potential boost to Rubio, a one-time Tea Party favorite who could pick up anti-Trump conservatives, many experts say.
+
+Basically, many believe Rubio cannot come in lower than third, certainly not behind Bush, who doggedly has been trying to wear the establishment mantle and at the start of the election cycle seemed like the inevitable moderate GOP front-runner.
+
+All told, the stakes are high in South Carolina, where about a third of voters remain undecided.
+
+“When you see what happens in South Carolina,” Tim Scott, a Republican senator in South Carolina told the Times, “it will carry momentum into Nevada, and then into Super Tuesday.”
+
+Like us on Facebook",REAL
+6178,Duterte Calls US Admin ‘Monkeys’ for Halting Arms Sales,"Duterte Calls US Admin ‘Monkeys’ for Halting Arms Sales November 02, 2016 Duterte Calls US Admin 'Monkeys' for Halting Arms Sales 
+(MANILA) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte chided the United States on Wednesday for halting the planned sale of 26,000 rifles to his country, calling those behind the decision ""fools"" and ""monkeys"" and indicating he might turn to Russia and China instead. Duterte's tirades against the former colonial power are routine during his speeches and he said on Wednesday he once believed in Washington, but had since lost respect for what is the Philippines' biggest ally. The U.S. State Department halted the sale of the assault rifles to the Philippine police after U.S. Senator Ben Cardin said he would oppose it, Senate aides told Reuters on Monday. Aides said Cardin, the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was reluctant for the United States to provide the weapons given concern about human rights violations in the Philippines during Duterte's bloody, four-month-old war on drugs. 
+""Look at these monkeys, the 26,000 firearms we wanted to buy, they don't want to sell,"" Dutertesaid during a televised speech. 
+""Son of a b***h, we have many home-made guns here. These American fools."" 
+More than 2,300 people have been killed in police operations or by suspected vigilantes as part of Duterte's anti-narcotics campaign, which was the lynchpin of his election campaign. 
+Duterte has vented his anger at the United States for raising concerns about the extra-judicial killings. 
+""That's why I was rude at them, because they were rude at me,"" he said. 
+According to procedures in Washington, the State Department informs Congress when international weapons sales are in the works. Aides said the State Department had been informed Cardin would oppose the deal during the prenotification process, thus halting the sale. 
+U.S. State Department officials did not comment. 
+The Philippine police chief, Ronald dela Rosa, on Tuesday expressed disappointment that police would not get the M4 rifles, which he said were reliable. 
+Duterte reiterated that Russia and China had shown willingness to sell arms to the Philippines, but he would wait to see if his military wanted to continue using U.S. weapons. 
+""Russia, they are inviting us. China also. China is open, anything you want, they sent me brochure saying we select there, we'll give you. 
+""But I am holding off because I was asking the military if they have any problem. Because if you have, if you want to stick to America, fine. 
+""But, look closely and balance the situation, they are rude to us."" Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+3322,"Slow start for program to reduce vets' waits at Veterans Affairs facilities, offer private medical care","Far fewer veterans than expected are taking advantage of a new law aimed at making it easier for them to get private health care and avoid the long waits that have plagued Department of Veterans Affairs facilities nationwide.
+
+Only 27,000 veterans have made appointments for private medical care since the VA started mailing out ""Choice Cards"" in November, the VA said in a report to Congress this month. The number is so small, compared to the 8.6 million cards that have been mailed out, that VA Secretary Robert McDonald wants authority to redirect some of the $10 billion Congress allocated for the program to boost care for veterans at the VA's 970 hospitals and clinics.
+
+Republicans and Democrats insist the problem is the department and that it needs to do a better job promoting the choice program. They also want to change a quirk in the law that makes it hard for some veterans in rural areas to prove they live at least 40 miles from a VA health site.
+
+The government measures the distance as the crow flies, rather than by driving miles, leaving thousands of veterans ineligible.
+
+""Veterans put their lives on the line to defend this country. The very least we can do is ensure they don't have to jump through hoops to receive the care they need and have earned,"" said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., whose vast state has just one VA hospital.
+
+The choice program was a key component of last year's sweeping law approved in response to reports that dozens of veterans died while waiting for appointments at a VA hospital in Phoenix, and that appointment records were manipulated to hide the delays. A series of government reports said workers throughout the country falsified wait lists while supervisors looked the other way, resulting in chronic delays for veterans seeking care and bonuses for managers who falsely appeared to meet on-time goals.
+
+The law, signed by President Barack Obama in August, allows veterans who have waited more than 30 days for an appointment to get VA-paid care from a local doctor. It also allows veterans who live at least 40 miles from a VA hospital or clinic to get private care and makes it easier to fire VA employees accused of wrongdoing.
+
+The choice program expands an existing program that allows veterans to get outside care for emergencies or procedures not available at the VA. Veterans have long complained about waiting months or even years to be reimbursed for private care, and many are skeptical the choice card will alleviate those problems, despite promises by the VA.
+
+""I don't believe any of us thought that there would be a wholesale rush to leave the VA system at all, but we are still early in the program,"" Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, told reporters during a recent tour of the VA.
+
+McDonald's bid to shift the money has met a bipartisan wall of opposition in Congress, where leaders said the landmark law they adopted last summer to overhaul VA has not been fully implemented. Taking money away from the choice program just three months after it was launched is premature, even irresponsible, lawmakers and veterans advocates said.
+
+Miller called the plan a complete nonstarter. His Senate counterpart, Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., called it unacceptable. And Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of the law's chief authors, said Congress not only would reject the idea ""but refuse to even consider"" it.
+
+Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the senior Democrat on the Senate veterans panel, said in an interview he would oppose any reallocation of funds ""so long as there are delays and issues with quality of care"" at VA.
+
+McDonald counters that the proposal, which has not been formally submitted to Congress, would help ensure that ""every veteran receives the care they have earned and deserve regardless of where they choose to get it from.""
+
+McDonald, who took over as VA secretary in July, said he never intended to ""gut the choice program or somehow eliminate"" it. Instead, he said, he simply seeks the kind of budget flexibility he enjoyed as Procter & Gamble CEO.
+
+""Imagine your household. You are hungry, but you can't move the money from the gasoline account to the food account. Well, that is the situation I face,"" he said at a Feb. 11 budget hearing before the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
+
+Louis Celli, director of veterans affairs and rehabilitation at The American Legion, the largest veterans service organization, called McDonald's explanation disingenuous.
+
+""Draining funds from the bill short-circuits the program and ultimately hurts vets,"" Celli said, noting that VA officials had pushed for the choice program as a short-term way to expand patient access to care.
+
+Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., said a veteran in his rural district drives 340 miles one-way for cardiology treatment at a VA hospital in Kansas City.
+
+""If the VA choice program can't provide something closer for him, then we need to relook at how we are implementing that,"" Huelskamp told McDonald at the Feb. 11 hearing.
+
+McDonald said VA officials are willing to look at the 40-mile rule to see if it needs to be changed. The VA is committed to doing all it can to ""make sure the program is robust,"" he said.",REAL
+8736,Malaysia to Buy Ships From China in Another Blow to US Regional Dominance,"US Keen to Keep South China Sea Nations Buying From Them, Not China by Jason Ditz, October 28, 2016 Share This 
+United States determination to keep its South China Sea territorial disputes with China going rests heavily on having nations with active claims in the sea as US client states, particularly those with claims that conflict with China’s. That used to be, with several nations having such claims. 
+But the US is struggling to keep those nations exclusively buying US arms. Today’s big loss was from Malaysia , which has announced they intend to buy littoral mission ships from China, instead of the United States. Details on the decision-making process are unclear, but the US problems with their own littoral combat ships breaking down, so that might’ve hurt their chances. 
+It’s a comparatively small deal, but part of a growing trend. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has been making headlines for weeks with his interest in ending long-standing reliance on the US. While this has grown into complaints about general US-Philippines relations, one of the early grievances was his not liking the US dictating arms sales, and expressing interest in buying from China and Russia instead. 
+If these countries start buying their arms from China, they’ll have a strong incentive to resolve maritime disputes with China diplomatically, which could severely limit their interest in having warships patrolling through the area to “confront” China. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+10310,Vladimir Putin Condemns Europe for Upholding Child Rape (Video) - Ricky Twisdale,"Bias bashers Vladimir Putin Condemns Europe for Upholding Child Rape (Video) 
+The Russian president voiced his disgust at a decayed and immoral culture which has overtaken the West Print ""A society that cannot defend its children today, has no tomorrow"" 
+Ah, Vienna. A city that conjures up many delightful images. The world's finest coffee and strudel. Cafes where the waiters still address you as ""Mein Herr"" and they haven't changed the decor since the 19th century. The world's greatest music: Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. A city of beauty and grandeur, echoes of an empire of a former age. 
+And today, a city where Muslim ""refugees"" are allowed to rape 10 year old boys in public toilets. 
+The Independent reports : 
+A man who raped a 10-year-old boy at a swimming pool in Austria has had his conviction overturned after judges found he may have believed the child consented. 
+Police said the 20-year-old Iraqi refugee, who has not been named, assaulted his victim in a toilet cubicle at the Theresienbad swimming pool in Vienna on 2 December last year. 
+The child reported the rape to a lifeguard and his attacker was arrested at the scene, reportedly telling officers in initial interviews that he was experiencing a “sexual emergency” after not having sex in four months. Theresienbad.jpg Vienna's historic pools are not safe anymore 
+The ""sexual emergency"" experienced by the rapefugee was apparently similar to the one experienced by 2,000 rapefugees in the German city of Cologne on New Year's Eve 2016, when they publicly raped 1,200 German women as emasculated German men and police stood by and watched. 
+Apparently some of the women were merely groped. The German government was appalled. That's why it decided to produce an illustrated manual teaching the refugees how to rape German women properly next time around. 
+Not to be outdone, Austria has now decided to join its German brethren in refusing to defend even children from homosexual rape - as long as the children ""consent"": 
+[O]n Thursday, Austria’s Supreme Court overturned the rape conviction and ordered a re-trial on the charge. 
+[...] Supreme Court judges ruled that the first court should have established whether the attacker thought his victim agreed to a sexual act and intended to act against the boy’s will. 
+We are in fact now witnessing the violent death of western civilization. It is bad enough that Europe is being inundated by hordes of invaders of a culture, religion, and ethnicity totally incompatible with the West, but most reprehensible of all is the total lack of any will to resist on the part of Europeans themselves, and especially their governments (with notable exceptions, such as the Hungarians). Far from it - they even take active steps to encourage and accommodate the invaders. 
+But we all know the real threat to Europe is not from millions of barbaric non-European rapefugees, it's from Russia and Vladimir Putin. Ask Poland. Or Lithuania. Russia is hell, and Putin is the devil. Here's what the devil himself had to say about this incident: 
+The Russian president said: 
+[...] I can't get through my head what they are thinking over there [in Europe]. This is a result of the dilution of national traditions and values. I can't even explain the rationale. Is it a sense of guilt towards the migrants?...A society that cannot defend its children today, has no tomorrow. It has no future. 
+Putin also noted that Russia as a state, has encompassed multiple ethnicities and cultures for over 1000 years, and that unlike Europe, it has a proven track record of managing inter-ethnic relations. 
+Despite the presence of a vocal liberal minority, the great majority of Russians agree with their leader that if these are the kind of ""European values"" the West has on offer, it is better to remain the ""backward"" conservative society that continually draws the unfettered ire of liberal paragons in Europe and America. 
+The only question is whether eastern European nations such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Poland - which are in their inherent culture and moral outlook far more similar to Russia than to the modern Germans, Americans, and French - will come to their senses in time to save themselves from the cultural rot devouring the core of the societies with which they are presently so enamored.",FAKE
+7666,Is This A New Escalation? BLACK Chemtrails Reported Around The World!,"Is This A New Escalation? BLACK Chemtrails Reported Around The World! Please scroll down for video 
+For many years there have been theories floating around about the potential dangers of chemtrails, the white stripes with a cloudlike appearance that can often be seen in the skies. Some have suggested that these chemtrails are not as innocent as most people tend to think and some people have even gone so far as to say that they may be biological and chemical agents. 
+This kind of theory has often been dismissed in the past as faulty reasoning and paranoid thinking. The phenomenon that believers identify as chemtrails are nothing more than the perfectly innocent condensation trials left behind by all kind of air vehicles. However, recent sightings of highly unusual chemtrails might well challenge this particular line of thinking. Black chemtrails in the sky stump sceptics 
+According to many witnesses from all across the world, the chemtrails or ‘condensation trials’ appearing in their local areas are not white anymore – they’re black. No scientific body or government has chosen to offer an explanation about the sudden change in the appearance of numerous trails in the sky, but many believe that it is irrefutable evidence that chemtrails are being utilised for chemical or biological testing on civilian populations . 
+Sceptics have suggested that these unusual black trails might be nothing more than a shadows of a typical white condensation trail left by a plane. However, this theory has been robustly dismissed by others who have pointed out that clouds leave no shadows in the sky and therefore it would be impossible for a condensation trail left by a plane to do the same thing. 
+Not all of the people who believe that chemtrails are a real phenomenon believe that they are used to covertly test chemical and biological weapons. Others have suggested that they are part of a weather modification technology, often referred to as HAARP. The chemtrails are being used to electrify portions of the sky so that they can be used for testing by scientists working in this field. 
+Whatever the truth of the matter is, one thing is for sure; these black chemtrails cannot be easily explained away. 
+This article (Is This A New Escalation? BLACK Chemtrails Reported Around The World!) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
+9698,BREAKING : Trump BEATING “Federal Investigation Hillary” by 4% in Michigan’s Absentee Voting – TruthFeed,"BREAKING : Trump BEATING “Federal Investigation Hillary” by 4% in Michigan’s Absentee Voting BREAKING : Trump BEATING “Federal Investigation Hillary” by 4% in Michigan’s Absentee Voting Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 29, 2016 
+Donald Trump is currently leading Crooked “Federal Investigation” Hillary by 4% in Michigan’s absentee voting. 
+From WestMiPolitics.com: 
+Donald Trump and the Republicans lead Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in early voting returns, Chad Livengood of the Detroit News reports . 
+190,000 Republicans have turned in ballots vs. only 170,000 Dems. Nearly 160,000 independent/unaffiliated voters have also cast ballots, a group Trump consistently leads with in nearly every poll. 
+Those numbers translate to: ",FAKE
+3410,Harry Reid: Obama to Name Scalia Replacement in 3 Weeks,"U.S. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said Thursday he believes President Barack Obama will nominate a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a little over three weeks.
+
+""I think it will be a little over three weeks,"" Reid said in an interview on MSNBC, adding that he spoke to Obama about the nomination on Thursday.",REAL
+5274,"Amid campaign troubles, Trump blasts Clinton as 'world-class liar'","NEW YORK — His campaign in turmoil, Donald Trump sought to get back on track Wednesday with a familiar tactic: attacking Hillary Clinton.
+
+Clinton is ""a world-class liar"" who has ""perfected the politics of personal profit and even theft,"" Trump said during a heavily promoted speech he delivered as members of the GOP continued to raise questions about his campaign organization and its ability to raise money.
+
+In a remarkably negative speech against a presidential rival, the presumptive Republican nominee said Clinton ""may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States,"" a line that drew that drew a standing ovation from supporters packed into a meeting room at a Trump hotel in Manhattan.
+
+Echoing attacks he has made throughout the campaign, Trump again claimed the former secretary of State has used her position to solicit contributions to the Clinton Foundation she sponsors along with former president Bill Clinton. Trump accused the foundation of accepting money from foreign governments that brutalize women and gays, and he said ""she ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund.""
+
+Reading his speech from a teleprompter, Trump also faulted Clinton over the economy, free trade and some of her campaign contributions. Citing a string of contributors across the world, he said donors ""totally own her.""
+
+While Trump tries to make the fall election about Clinton, the Democratic candidate seeks to do the reverse, casting Trump as wholly unqualified for the presidency. ""He is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability, and immense responsibility,"" Clinton said this week.
+
+As for Trump's attack speech, Clinton campaign spokesperson Glen Caplin said Trump offered only ""more hypocritical lies and nutty conspiracy theories,"" all in an effort to distract voters from his campaign problems. At a rally in Raleigh, N.C., following Trump's remarks, Clinton said, ""“He’s going after me personally because he has no answers on the substance.”
+
+The Clinton team also noted in a statement that independent fact-checking organizations have frequently given Trump's statements failing grades.
+
+Trump's speech in New York City came two days after he fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski,
+
+The nominee-in-waiting's anti-Clinton speech — initially scheduled for last week, but delayed so that Trump could respond to the Orlando terrorist attack — is part of an attempt by the real estate mogul to move on after bad reports about the state of his campaign.
+
+Hours after Lewandowski's dismissal, the Trump campaign filed a financial report showing it had only $1.3 million in the bank at the start of June; Clinton reported $42 million, one of the biggest financial advantages in the history of American politics.
+
+Republicans continued to voice anxiety about the state of Trump's campaign, citing what they described as its small size, reluctance to invest in micro-targeting and other get-out-the-vote techniques and lack of message discipline.
+
+Tom Rath, a Republican convention delegate from New Hampshire who is pledged to former Trump opponent John Kasich, said Trump's campaign trouble is not just a ""process story.""
+
+It ""guts his strongest argument — that he is an accomplished executive who makes large organizations work,"" Rath said.
+
+Republican consultant Bruce Haynes, founding partner of Washington-based Purple Strategies, said the Trump campaign seems to be realizing that it has a different job in the general election than it did during the primaries, and ""they have to make drastic changes fast.""
+
+Clinton on Tuesday delivered another speech describing Trump as temperamentally unfit for the presidency, focusing on economic polices that she said would lead to a recession.
+
+As she did in an earlier speech hitting the Republican candidate over foreign policy, Clinton said, “every day we see how reckless and careless Trump is. He’s proud of it.""
+
+David Brock, who heads a pro-Clinton political organization called Correct the Record, said in a memo to reporters that Trump's attacks on Clinton rely on ""right-wing books"" that have been discredited. He described Wednesday's speech as an attempt to divert attention from his own troubles.
+
+""Donald Trump's presidential campaign is melting down,"" Brock said.
+
+In his speech Wednesday, Trump said he has built a multi-billion-dollar business, and ""that's a talent our country desperately needs.""
+
+Attacking Clinton's stewardship of the State Department, Trump cited the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the deadly attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya, that killed a U.S. ambassador, and her use of private email that is currently the subject of investigation, and, he suggested, could have been hacked by the nation's enemies.
+
+The result has been ""one deadly foreign policy disaster after another,"" the Republican candidate said.
+
+Trump also cited a letter from a woman whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant, saying she wrote that Clinton ""needs to go to prison to pay for the crimes that she has already committed against our country.""
+
+Trump cast the fall campaign as one pitting ""the people"" against ""the politicians"" who have ""rigged"" the system in their favor, and are symbolized by both Clintons. He also mocked the Clinton campaign slogan ""I'm with her,"" saying instead, ""I'm with you, the American people.""
+
+Reciting his favorite campaign themes, Trump linked his opponent to open immigration refugee policies, bad trade deals, President Obama's health care plan, and the weakening of the military, and he pledged a new approach on all of those issues.
+
+Trump and associates have described Lewandowski's firing as part of an effort to re-orient his team toward the challenges of a fall campaign. They also downplayed the fundraising report, saying they have raised millions in June and that Trump can put in his own money if necessary.
+
+Republican critics said Trump's problems are self-inflicted, and they still hope to somehow head off his nomination at next month's convention in Cleveland.
+
+GOP strategist Liz Mair, who has headed up a ""Never Trump"" group, said ""convention delegates — and indeed Trump himself — ought to be looking for a way out of this, whether that means delegates throwing out the rule book, or Trump withdrawing and going back to running his business.""",REAL
+1167,"Mitt Romney: Donald Trump is a 'phony, a fraud'","(CNN) Mitt Romney delivered a sweeping broadside against Donald Trump on Thursday, laying into the Republican presidential front-runner with a sharper attack than any of the party's 2016 contenders have made against the billionaire business mogul.
+
+""Here's what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,"" Romney said. ""His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.""
+
+Romney said that ""dishonesty is Donald Trump's hallmark,"" pointing to his ""bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.""
+
+There's irony in Romney's speech: Just four years ago, he courted Trump's endorsement -- even after Trump had led the ""birther"" controversy against President Barack Obama, insisting that Obama release his birth certificate to prove he is an American citizen.
+
+""He was begging for my endorsement. I could have said, 'Mitt, drop to your knees' -- he would have dropped to his knees,"" he said.
+
+He said of 2012: ""That was a race, I have to say, folks, that should have been won ... I don't know what happened to him. He disappeared. He disappeared. And I wasn't happy about it, I'll be honest, because I am not a fan of Barack Obama, because I backed Mitt Romney -- I backed Mitt Romney. You can see how loyal he is.""
+
+He said Romney thought about running again in 2016, but ""chickened out.""
+
+Romney tweeted after his own speech but before Trump's that had the New York businessman made similar statements about the KKK and others in 2012, he would not have accepted the endorsement.
+
+""If Trump had said 4 years ago the things he says today about the KKK, Muslims, Mexicans, disabled, I would NOT have accepted his endorsement.""
+
+But now Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, is attempting to play the role of party elder during a speech at the University of Utah. He said any of the party's other candidates -- Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich -- would be suitable choices.
+
+He also amplified the stakes of the election, arguing that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be damaging, as well.
+
+The remarkable speech reflected the splintering of the Republican Party, as party leaders and statesmen increasingly rebuke their front-runner.
+
+Romney didn't endorse a candidate -- saying that, due to the party's delegate apportionment process, he'd vote for Rubio in Florida or Kasich in Ohio, if he lived in any of those states, when they vote on March 15.
+
+It was, in effect, an argument for a contested convention, which would come only if Trump couldn't win enough delegates to capture the nomination on the first ballot.
+
+""If the other candidates can find common ground, I believe we can nominate a person who can win the general election and who will represent the values and policies of conservatism,"" he said.
+
+Trump, meanwhile, is winning over working-class whites and evangelical voters who are angry with Washington's political class -- breaking turnout records in primaries along the way.
+
+Despite Romney's scathing speech, there are few signs it will dissuade Trump's loyal core of supporters who so far have greeted his most eyebrow-raising antics with swelling support.
+
+Nonetheless, Romney lambasted Trump on foreign policy, casting him as ""very, very not-smart"" in his comments about allowing ISIS to take out Syria's leadership and for proposing the slaughter of the families of terrorists.
+
+""Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less-than-noble purposes. He creates scapegoats in Muslims and Mexican immigrants. He calls for the use of torture. He calls for the killing of innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protestors,"" he said, adding that Trump would trample First Amendment protections.
+
+Romney also said Trump's remarks on CBS' ""60 Minutes"" on Syria and ISIS ""has to go down as the most ridiculous and dangerous idea of the campaign season: Let ISIS take out Assad, he said, and then we can pick up the remnants.""
+
+""Think about that: Let the most dangerous terror organization the world has ever known take over a country? This is recklessness in the extreme,"" Romney said.
+
+The business mogul, who himself has changed positions on abortion, continued hitting Romney and the Republican establishment Thursday morning in a series of tweets.
+
+""I have brought millions of people into the Republican Party, while the Dems are going down. Establishment wants to kill this movement!"" Trump tweeted.
+
+Romney also mocked Trump's failed business ventures, pointing to his airline, his casino bankruptcies and more, and attacked his sexual indiscretions, too.
+
+""There's a dark irony in his boasts of his sexual exploits during the Vietnam war, while at the same time, John McCain, who he has mocked, was in prison being tortured,"" he said
+
+As soon as Romney wrapped up, McCain, the Arizona senator who was the 2008 GOP nominee, said he agreed.
+
+""I share the concerns about Donald Trump that my friend and former Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, described in his speech today. I would also echo the many concerns about Mr. Trump's uninformed and indeed dangerous statements on national security issues that have been raised by 65 Republican defense and foreign policy leaders,"" McCain said in a statement.
+
+The extraordinary effort by Romney to take down the Republican front-runner comes amid a last-ditch rush among the party's donors and loyalists to stop Trump from capturing the nomination.
+
+After the remarks, Kasich tweeted, ""Well said, @MittRomney.""
+
+His attack on Trump was an amalgamation of all of the attacks that other candidates and party members have made in recent weeks.
+
+One of his top aides in the 2012 race, Katie Packer, is heading a super PAC that is launching attack ads against Trump. Another super PAC and the hardline conservative Club for Growth are also airing ads critical of Trump.
+
+It could be too late: Trump has already won 10 of the first 15 states to vote, and he has a clear lead nationally over Rubio and Cruz.
+
+Romney cast the coming months' elections as a crucial moment in history, citing Ronald Reagan and saying that this nominating contest is ""a time for choosing"" -- laying waste along the way to Reagan's fabled ""11th Commandment"" that Republicans not speak ill of other Republicans.
+
+Adding to the intrigue: Romney's 2012 vice presidential running mate House Speaker Paul Ryan had a private dinner with Romney in Salt Lake City Utah last weekend, CNN has learned.
+
+The dinner occurred while Ryan was on a trip out West to help campaign for House candidates, an aide said. But the aide maintained that the speaker only learned last night that Romney was planning to deliver a speech strongly criticizing Trump.
+
+At his weekly press conference that happened at the same time as Romney's blistering attack on Trump, Ryan was asked about any talks he's had with Romney and the 2012 GOP's nominee's message about Trump, but he said he hadn't ""seen the content of the speech.""
+
+""Mitt Romney is one of our party leaders, and he cares deeply about the future of the Republican party and the country,"" Ryan said, adding that ""Mitt and I are very close friends.""
+
+In his speech, Romney called Trump's policy proposals ""flimsy, at best,"" and said he'd trigger a trade war, drive up the deficit and lead the nation into a recession.
+
+""Even though Donald Trump has offered very few specific economic plans, what he has said is enough to know that he would be very bad for American workers and American families,"" he said.
+
+""Now I know you say, 'Isn't he a huge business success, and doesn't he know what he's talking about?' No he isn't, and no he doesn't. His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and their workers. He inherited his business; he didn't create it,"" Romney said.
+
+Romney also pointed to Trump's exchange about white supremacists with CNN's Jake Tapper last Sunday on ""State of the Union"" as a general election liability.
+
+""The video of the infamous Tapper-Trump exchange on the Ku Klux Klan will play 100,000 times on cable and who knows how many billion times on social media,"" he said.",REAL
+551,'We the People' is at risk: Why America needs civics education,"Most are familiar with the “Jaywalking” quizzes Jay Leno regularly did on the streets of Universal Studios. They often included American civics questions. The answers were often laughably pathetic.  Unfortunately, they are representative of the general citizenry’s knowledge.
+
+According to studies byAnnenberg Public Policy Center, only about a third (38 percent) of Americans can name the three branches of America’s government (executive, legislative and judicial), much less explain what each does.
+
+Also surprisingly, only 32 percent of Americans could correctly identify the U.S. Constitution as the supreme law of the land, according to the Xavier Center for the Study of the American Dream. According to this same study, only 32 percent of Americans knew how many U.S. Senators there were (100), and only 29 percent knew the length of a U.S. Senator’s term in office (six years).
+
+Voter turnout for the 2014 national election was the lowest it has been since World War II according to the United States Election Project. In a country that is supposed to be thegold standard for democracy this is simply unacceptable.
+
+Why is this happening? One reason is the lack of emphasis put on civics education in our educational curricula. Voters don’t vote because they don’t understand the process or the power that comes from their votes.
+
+These jarring facts are why I have been actively involved in Utah’s successful effort to pass the American Civics Education Initiative in Utah’s recently concluded legislative session.
+
+If you don’t know it takes four balls for a walk and three strikes for a strike out in baseball, it’s not likely you’re a baseball fan. If you don't know the basics in American civics, you’re not likely to be interested in voting.
+
+The American Civics Education Initiative is simple in concept: Students must pass a test from the 100 basic facts of U.S. history and civics taken from the same test all potential citizens must master before becoming American citizens.
+
+This legislation, now enacted in Utah, as well as Arizona, Idaho, North Dakota and South Dakota, allows students to take the test any time during their high school career and as many times as necessary to pass. By using this well-established test and the study materials that are already easily available online for free, this legislation has nearly no implementation costs.
+
+Some 91 percent of immigrants applying for citizenship pass the civics test on their first try. I recently attended a citizenship swearing-in ceremony at Liberty Park in Salt Lake City (an appropriately named place for this inspiring event). New citizens swore an oath of allegiance to our Republic dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I saw firsthand how excited these new citizens were to become Americans, as well as the sense of pride they had in having passed the test. They knewtheir stuff.
+
+Utah high school students will now be able to share in that satisfaction of accomplishment. As I travel around Utah to meet with students, I see how bright, enthusiastic and capable they are.  I hope that they are also inspired to participate in our democracy.
+
+When leaving Independence Hall at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”  The question is how do we keep it?
+
+Our republic depends on an informed, engaged citizenry. When so many of our fellow citizens don’t know how our government works — and even fewer vote — power becomes concentrated in the hands of the few. We put the bedrock concept of “We the People” at risk.
+
+If our students don’t know how our democracy works and who we are as a people, their participation ourgovernment will continue to wane. We can’t risk that. As Representative Steve Eliason, one of the sponsors of Utah’s law, aptly said during the legislative debate, “The American Civics Education Initiative is chicken soup for our ailing civic soul.”
+
+Utah has taken an important first step in helping bolster American civics education. Legislators across the country need to follow suit and pass similar American civics education legislation in their own states. Only then will the phrase “We the People” live up to its original intent.
+
+Jonathan Johnson is the chairman of Overstock.com, Inc. and the co-chairman of the Civics Education Initiative in Utah.",REAL
+9497,"‘Like Warsaw ghetto’: Attendees attacked, surrounded at Israeli speaker event at London university","Print 
+[Ed. – Videos are starting to come out, like the one here . Reportedly, it took 40 police officers to gain control of the situation.] 
+An Israeli speaker’s talk at a London college campus scheduled for this week was canceled on Wednesday. Why? Because, according to the cancelation notice sent by the student union, “there had been controversy” when he spoke at the campus two years prior, and the hosting organization failed to disclose that when the room was booked for the talk. 
+After cries of suppression of speech and vehement protests, the university stepped in and “un”canceled the talk. Hen Mazzig’s talk at University College, London, was reinstated. It would take place, as scheduled, on Thursday evening, Oct. 27. 
+The response by the anti-Israel mob was swift and the attack was vicious. A protest was called. Outside the room where Mazzig was scheduled to speak, livid demonstrators screamed for murder and the end of Israel. “Intifada, Intifada!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” They barred the entrance to the talk while pummeling the doors and windows, leering malevolently. Two thugs yanked open a window, hurling themselves into the room, launching several students inside into panic attacks. A woman inside kept repeating: “This is like the Warsaw Ghetto!”",FAKE
+10404,"Comment on St. Charles Borromeo, Patron Saint of Catechists and Seminarians by jose","Posted on November 4, 2013 by joandarc | 12 Comments 
+“ If we wish to make any progress in the service of God, we must begin every day of our life with new eagerness. We must keep ourselves in the presence of God as much as possible and have no other view or end in all our actions but the divine honor. ” 
+The profound and significant communication above is from St. Charles Borromeo, whose Feast Day we celebrate today, November 4th. Clearly, if we would simply use his life map as our every day goal, we would never be lost and we would always have joy, even in spite of suffering. 
+St. Charles Borromeo lead the universal Church in the Counter-Reformation in the troubled but dynamic 16th century, and therefore, is associated with reform. He sought the correction of abuses and evil, addressing the excuses made for the destructive and false reformation which was spreading and creating confusion in Europe. Indeed and in fact, he is one of the great Counter-Reformers, along with Pope St. Pius V, St. Philip Neri and St. Ignatius Loyola. 
+He was born on October 2, 1538 in a castle of Arona on Lake Maggiore, Italy, the second of two sons in a family of six. His father was Count Gilbert Borromeo and his mother was Margaret, a member of the Medici family. Even at the age of 12, he showed his serious and holy disposition, receiving the clerical tonsure, with another of his uncles resigning him to the Benedictine abbey of Sts. Gratinian and Felinus at Arona. At his young age, he reminded his father that the revenue, with the exception for what was spent on his necessary education for the service of the Church, was to be given to the poor and could not be applied to other more worldly uses. He learned Latin at Milan and thereafter attended the University of Pavia, and after the death of his parents, at the age of 22 he earned his doctor’s degree. 
+In 1559, his uncle was chosen as Pope Pius IV, wherein Charles used all of his influence to reopen the Council of Trent in 1562, since it had been suspended in 1552. He accomplished this reopening under most difficult ecclesiastical and political climates. 
+In 1563, Charles was ordained a priest and two months thereafter, was consecrated as a bishop. In this capacity, he drafted the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the reform of liturgical books and music. 
+Milan failed to have an in-house bishop for some eighty years. Accordingly, Charles arrived in Milan in April of 1566 and vigorously worked for the reformation of this diocese. He sold property in the amount of thirty thousand crowns and applied the entire amount to distressed families. Charles allotted most of his income to charity, forbade himself all luxury and imposed severe penances upon himself. During the horrible plague and famine of 1576, he tired to feed sixty to seventy thousand people daily, borrowing large sums of money that required years to repay. Civil authorities fled at the height of the plague, abandoning the populace; but Charles stayed in the city where he ministered to the sick and the dying. Charles assembled the superiors of the religious communities, wherein a number of religious right away volunteered to help the stricken victims of the plague, wherein he lodged these clerics in his house. The hospital of St. Gregory looked deplorable, bringing Charles to tears, overflowing with dead, dying, sick and others suspected of being struck by the plague. St. Charles literally exhausted all his resources in relief. Indeed, houses for the sick were formed as well as temporary shelters, and lay people were organized for the clergy and a score of altars set up in the streets so that the sick could assist at public worship from their windows. He personally ministered to the dying, waited on the sick and helped those in need. The plague lasted from 1576 through 1578. 
+Charles endured of all things, a speech impediment, a difficult handicap for his preaching. A friend of Charles, Achille Gagliardi, said, “I have often wondered how it was that, without any natural eloquence or anything attractive in his manner, he was able to work such changes in the hearts of his hearers. He spoke but little, gravely, and in a voice barely audible – but his words always had effect.” 
+St. Charles proclaimed that children should be properly instructed in Christian doctrine and therefore, established the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. These schools at that time numbered 740, with approximately 3,000 catechists and 40,000 pupils. And so, Charles originated “Sunday-schools.” 
+No love was lost in the religious order called, “Humiliati”, being reduced to few members, but still maintaining many monasteries and great possessions. They allegedly submitted to the reform, but this was done only in form, not in substance. They tried to have the pope annul the new regulations, but those attempts were refused and they failed. So, they hatched a plot to assassinate Charles. One of the priests agreed to do so for the sum of forty gold pieces (much like Judas Iscariot if you ask me). On October 26, 1569, this priest, Jerome Donati Farina, put himself at the door of the chapel in the archbishop’s house while Charles was at evening prayers with his household. While an anthem was being sung, Charles being on his knees before the altar, this cowardly assassin discharged a gun at him, wherein Farina escaped during the confusion, but the bullet struck Charles’ clothes in the back raising a bruise. Thus, they failed to murder him. 
+Nevertheless, Charles directed his energies to maintain a capable and virtuous clergy. On one occasion when an exemplary priest was sick and on death’s door, Archbishop Borromeo said, “Ah, you do not realize the worth of the life of one good priest .” Charles was indefatigable in parochial visitations 
+Charles worked so hard and in 1584, his health became poor. On October 24th, while on a retreat, he became very ill. On October 29th, he started off for Milan, his diocese, wherein he arrived there on All Souls Day, November 2nd, having celebrated Mass for the last time on the previous day at his birth place, Arona. He went to bed, asking for the final sacrament of the sick, with his last words being, “Behold, I come.” He died on the 4th of November, only 46 years of age. 
+Charles was formally canonized by Pope Paul V in 1610. 
+Charles lived the instruction of Our Lord Jesus Christ: “…I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.” (Mt 25:35-36) St. Charles saw Jesus in his neighbor and he was always able to recognize “Jesus in Disguise.” Let us follow his example. 
+Joan 
+One Hundred Saints , Bulfinch Press. 
+Saint of the Day , edited by Leonard Foley, O.F.M., revised by Pat McCloskey, O.F.M. Rate this:",FAKE
+2998,NSA program reportedly helped US gather evidence against North Korea in Sony hack,"A program implemented by the National Security Agency to help the U.S. and its allies track the computers and networks used by North Korean hackers was critical in gathering information that led Washington to conclude Pyongyang was behind last year's cyberattack on Sony Pictures.
+
+The New York Times first reported that the NSA began placing malware in North Korean systems in 2010. Originally, the purpose of the surveillance was to gain insight into North Korea's nuclear program, but the focus shifted after a large cyberattack on South Korean banks and media companies in 2013.
+
+Fox News has confirmed that investigators have since concluded that the hackers spent more than two months last fall mapping Sony's computer systems and planning how to attack it.
+
+In the case of the Sony Pictures hack, which knocked nearly the entire company's system offline, investigators believe that the North had stolen the ""credentials"" of a Sony systems administrator, which enabled them to familiarize themselves with Sony's network and plot how to destroy its files and systems.
+
+The office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would not speak directly to the report, but said in a statement on Monday:
+
+""The [US intelligence community] has been tracking North Korean intrusions and phishing attacks on a routine basis. While no two situations are the same, it is our shared goal is to prevent bad actors from exploiting, disrupting or damaging U.S. commercial networks and cyber infrastructure. When it becomes clear that cyber criminals have the ability and intent to do damage, we work cooperatively to defend networks.""
+
+The attacks themselves, which Sony first reported to the FBI Nov. 24, are widely considered to be in retaliation for the release of ""The Interview,"" a comedy that features an assassination attempt against Kim Jong-un. Pyongyang has repeatedly denied any involvement in the Sony hack.
+
+Skeptics have cast doubt on the official story that North Korea was behind the Sony hack, with many suggesting a disgruntled current or former Sony employee was responsible. Earlier this month, FBI director James Comey said U.S. investigators were able to trace emails and Internet posts sent by the Guardians of Peace, the group behind the attack, and link them to North Korea.
+
+Comey said most of the time, the group sent emails threatening Sony employees and made various other statements online using proxy servers to disguise where the messages were coming from. But on occasion, he said, they connected ""directly,"" enabling investigators to ""see that the IP addresses that were being used to post and to send the emails were coming from IPs that were exclusively used by the North Koreans.""
+
+A senior military official told The Times that the evidence against North Korea that was presented to President Obama was so compelling that he ""had no doubt"" the Communist regime was responsible. The White House has imposed new economic sanctions against North Korea as a response to the cyberattack.
+
+The Times report quotes a North Korean defector as saying that country's military first displayed interest in hacking in 1994, when it sent 15 people to a Chinese military academy to learn the practice. Two years later, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, Pyongyang's primary intelligence service, created Bureau 121, a hacking unit that has a substantial representation in the northeast Chinese city of Shenyang.
+
+South Korea's military claims that the North has a staff of 6,000 hackers dedicated to disrupting the South's military and government. That estimate is more than double an earlier projection made by that country's Defense Ministry.
+
+Click for more from The New York Times.",REAL
+1047,"Donald Trump triumphs in Michigan and Mississippi. Onward, reality show junkies","Donald Trump has absorbed more attacks in the last two weeks from his opponents, their super PACs and the Republican establishment than any candidate I've seen in my five decades around presidential politics.
+
+The ""shock and awe"" attack of unfriendly fire seems to have had minimum impact on his candidacy as he won two big victories Tuesday night in Mississippi and Michigan. Big Don is still standing and the establishment favorite, little Marco got routed -- finishing out of money in both contests.
+
+Ted Cruz, who came in second in both races in Michigan and Mississippi and won Idaho, keeps fighting to remain relevant. He is having a tough time reaching beyond the evangelical base which he splits with Trump. But the finals of this election cycle could come down to Trump versus Cruz.
+
+John Kasich came in a distant second to Trump in his neighboring state which may bode poorly for his showdown next week in Ohio, the state he governs.
+
+Rubio is on death watch and life support and can't survive if he doesn't win his home state of Florida. Tuesday night's poor showing is not going to encourage the money guys to bet more on him and he faces a real uphill battle to beat Trump in the billionaire’s adopted state of Florida.
+
+Trump’s battle cry ""I love Florida and they love me!"" will be tested in seven days in the first of the winner take all states. There will be no more second place finishes or silver medals. Win or lose is now the rule of the game.
+
+We have now seen the travelogue of the Trump properties and golf courses, suffered through a full display of all his products from vodka to steaks and the men's accessories made in China.
+
+Tuesday’s night’s Trump victory speech/press conference was like a lengthy sales pitch on Home Shopping Network.
+
+I've never before seen a press conference in which the press is hollering ""Stop, please stop! No mas, no mas!"" No more questions, please!!”
+
+Donald's hour long tirade and rambling speech was his revenge for the assault on him by the billionaires and their political consultants who have puffed and puffed but can't blow Donald's house down.
+
+Onward, reality show junkies. This show is a long way from being over!
+
+Maybe the only thing that can slow the Donald down is ""House of Cards"" Frank Underwood. Of course his presidency is in trouble, too. But this reality show is stranger than fiction!
+
+Edward J. Rollins is a Fox News contributor. He is a former assistant to President Reagan and he managed his reelection campaign. He is a senior presidential fellow at Hofstra University and a member of the Political Consultants Hall of Fame. He is a strategist for Great America PAC, an independant group that is supporting Donald Trump for president.",REAL
+998,"What happens to delegates won by Rubio, other ex-candidates?","With Marco Rubio dropping out of the Republican presidential race Tuesday, the Florida senator leaves a large cache of delegates behind. So what happens to them, and the delegates of other former candidates, at the convention in Cleveland?
+
+The short answer is: It varies from state to state, but the Republican Party leaves enough wiggle room that the delegates of former candidates could end up being a factor in July.
+
+""An unbound delegate is worth their weight in gold,"" Rick Wilson, a GOP strategist, told FoxNews.com. ""It's hard to speculate and there's a lot going on right now.""
+
+Rubio, in suspending his campaign after his home-state Florida loss, leaves 169 delegates behind. Ben Carson accrued eight delegates before he dropped out of the race, while Jeb Bush picked up four. Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul each picked up one in Iowa.
+
+And if either Ted Cruz or John Kasich drop out in the weeks ahead -- and Donald Trump still has not clinched the nomination with the necessary 1,237 delegates -- additional zombie delegates could be in play in Cleveland.
+
+And they could hold sway.
+
+That's because in most states, delegates become ""unbound"" and are free to support other contenders as soon as their candidate withdraws.
+
+They don't necessarily have to gravitate toward the front-runner at a contested convention, or, in the case of Rubio's delegates, the candidate the Florida senator may ultimately choose to endorse.
+
+They would become essentially free agents, prizes to be wooed by the candidates duking it out in Cleveland.
+
+However some states bind their delegates to the first ballot no matter what.
+
+In Tennessee, delegates are bound for two rounds of voting, while in Iowa, Texas, Virginia, Montana, Nevada, Puerto Rico and Washington, candidates are bound for at least one round of voting whether or not the candidate has withdrawn.
+
+In South Carolina, delegates are bound to the candidate for the first ballot. However, if the winner is not nominated, they are bound to the candidate who finished second or third in the state.
+
+The various state laws mean that while some of the delegates can already peel off to other candidates, many would have to wait until after a first ballot in order to be able to vote for another candidate still in the race.
+
+It remains unclear whether front-runner Trump might be able to reach 1,237 delegates before the convention and avoid this drama. He currently has 661; Ted Cruz has 406; and John Kasich has 142.
+
+Those, such as Kasich, who are banking on the prospect of a contested convention, where the delegates of ex-candidates and other factors could be in play, see a blueprint in past races dating back decades.
+
+Since 1880, there have been eight contested GOP conventions and in five of those, the eventual winner did not go into the convention with a plurality of delegates.
+
+In the 1976 Republican convention, it was the unbound delegates moving toward President Gerald Ford instead of Ronald Reagan that handed Ford the nomination that year. Ford held a slight lead going into the convention, but was shy of an outright majority.
+
+In part by using the power of the White House, with promises of visits and patronage to woo over delegates, Ford won the nomination on the first ballot, by a slim 60 votes.",REAL
+9512,Sniff your underarms and tell us if you stink...,Sniff your underarms and tell us if you stink... I'm ok. Your turn. Go! Anonymous Coward Report Copyright Violation Re: Sniff your underarms and tell us if you stink... Pretty rank these last few days. Wash day on Friday so not long till Im feeling fresh again. Have an itchy anus too. Anonymous Coward Re: Sniff your underarms and tell us if you stink... My underarms smell like the end of times Anonymous Coward ( OP ) Report Copyright Violation Re: Sniff your underarms and tell us if you stink... Pretty rank these last few days. Wash day on Friday so not long till Im feeling fresh again. Have an itchy anus too. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 73271021 You need to wash everyday. Why do you Europeans walk around stinking like that? You know better than that! Go hit the shower now!,FAKE
+9063,Must Watch: When People Laughed At Donald Trump And Anyone Who Said He Would Win,"Who’s laughing now?
+
+( Watch at Youtube )
+And for some good comedy from Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle On Saturday Night Live’s Election Nigh wrap-up:
+",FAKE
+3179,"Mired in third, Marco Rubio prepares for a long, drawn-out Republican race","At a Capitol Hill social club earlier this month, Marco Rubio’s top advisers huddled with supportive House members to deliver a sober update about the Florida senator’s chances.
+
+The aides, led by campaign manager Terry Sullivan, told the group that they were not expecting to win Iowa or New Hampshire, the first two states to vote. They said they were hopeful that things would turn their way by the next two — South Carolina and Nevada — but, realistically, Rubio’s path to victory would be a months-long grind.
+
+One attendee, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting, said the message was that “this is not going to be over in February or March as much as we would all like it to be.”
+
+The strategy outlined that day was notable because Rubio’s campaign has sought for months to temper expectations so that the senator from Florida could peak right before voting was set to begin. Now, his team is bracing supporters for a drawn-out Republican race that it says will ultimately reward Rubio’s versatility.
+
+With just more than a week until the Iowa caucuses, Rubio has stalled out, neither rising nor falling much from where he has been in the polls for months, either nationally or in any of the first four states. Even in his home state of Florida, which votes in mid-March, Rubio is mired in third place, well behind front-runner Donald Trump and a few points behind Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).
+
+Rubio’s position reflects a race that has been dominated by Trump and Cruz, two outsider candidates who largely speak to different sets of aggrieved voters. Rubio had sought to present himself as a counterweight — a sunny optimist whose age, 44, and Cuban American background represented the future of the Republican party. More recently, Rubio has shifted somewhat to try to match the mood, offering more dire warnings about terrorism and more blistering attacks against President Obama and Hillary Clinton.
+
+In recent weeks, Rubio has also been attacked from several sides as various rivals see him as a threat, running more than $22 million in negative ads against him. Right to Rise, a super PAC backing former Florida governor Jeb Bush, has been relentless in hitting Rubio. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has demeaned Rubio’s toughness and experience on the trail. And Cruz has cast him as weak on immigration.
+
+Despite his standing, Rubio’s donors remain confident that he will win, even if he may have to do it in a way different from what they initially expected.
+
+“I think Marco is doing fine,” said Anthony Gioia, a major GOP fundraiser in Buffalo. “He is a very good campaigner. I’m not troubled by the little short-term dips. He’s still the best candidate against the Democrats, and I think at the end of the day, that’s going to prevail.”
+
+Rubio’s fundraising team is gearing up for an expensive next phase of battle. Lobbyist and fundraiser Wayne Berman is organizing a National Finance Leadership Call Day in Washington on Friday. Meanwhile, billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer is promising donors who raise $10,800 in new primary money five VIP tickets to an Iowa rally and private reception with Rubio on Tuesday.
+
+Supporters who have heard directly from the Rubio campaign say their most immediate priority is to finish ahead of mainstream rivals Christie, Bush and John Kasich in Iowa and New Hampshire. That would position him for a final grouping with Trump and Cruz in which Rubio could be seen as the more electable choice.
+
+Even as Rubio fights off Christie and others, though, he and his allies are also going hard after Cruz. A pro-Rubio super PAC unleashed a tough attack ad campaign against Cruz this week casting him as a flip-flopper and calling attention to his birth in Canada.
+
+The early January meeting at the Capitol Hill Club, designed to be an update on strategy and expectations, also veered into a gripe session about Cruz, according to people in attendance.
+
+Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), for instance, explained how she felt betrayed by Cruz on a trade bill he persuaded her to back but later abandoned, those people said. Sullivan, struck by her story, told her she clearly did not need any talking points when it came to Cruz; she should just retell that one. Love did not respond to requests for comment.
+
+Rubio is also trying to play defense against Cruz, Bush and Christie. He is now talking about immigration — his most obvious weakness among conservatives — in a new way, as more of a national-security matter than a debate over the merits of legalizing undocumented immigrants.
+
+“We cannot ignore the fact that ISIS has proven to have a significant understanding of the immigration policies of other countries,” Rubio said at a moderated discussion here Thursday, using an acronym for the Islamic State. Rubio is taking heat from Cruz over his membership in the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that pushed comprehensive immigration reform in 2013.
+
+Here in New Hampshire, Rubio has railed against Christie, taking aim at his past support for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. A pro-Rubio super PAC recently aired anti-Christie ads on TV.
+
+On the campaign trail, Rubio is trying to reach voters with different priorities as part of his strategy to compete everywhere. He speaks at length about his hawkish national security view. Lately, he has been underscoring his Christian conservative values more. He tries to personalize the topics he raises by drawing from his experience.
+
+“I am passionate about many of the issues we face in America because I faced them in my own life,” he said at a town-hall meeting in Plymouth, N.H., this week.
+
+On the trail, Rubio has also taken to framing the competition as a long slog.
+
+“It’s an unusual and fun election cycle for you to cover,” he told reporters here Thursday. “But we’re going to continue to focus on winning votes, and in the end I’m very confident that when the votes are counted, I’ll have more delegates than anyone else and I’ll be our nominee.”
+
+One label Rubio resists is the one many have applied to him disparagingly: the choice of the establishment.
+
+“Every time I’ve ever run for office, whether it’s to the Senate or now as president, I’ve had to take on the Republican establishment. And we’re doing it again now,” Rubio said.
+
+Even so, many backers privately say that their confidence in Rubio is rooted at least in part in the recent history of the GOP slowly weeding out renegade contenders and nominating more orthodox candidates.
+
+Some supporters say that they just do not understand the appeal of someone like Trump, even though he has attracted large crowds, strong polls numbers and seemingly endless media attention, and has shown no signs of slowing down.
+
+Frank VanderSloot, a billionaire head of an Idaho nutritional-supplement company, said it took him a couple of months of asking around before he could find a Trump supporter, highlighting the disconnect between many in the donor class and those in the grass roots.
+
+“The two front-runners aren’t anywhere near the top of my list [or] on the top of any list of anyone I’ve talked to,” VanderSloot said.
+
+Matea Gold in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+10367,Comment on Facebook Daughter’s Day Hoax Is A Sign Of The Times by para kazanmak,"Subscribe My daughter and me 
+Yesterday was National Daughter’s Day! I know this because Facebook told me so; well, maybe not Mark Zuckerberg himself, but all my friends on Facebook were posting pictures of their daughters and celebrating National Daughter’s Day so it must be true, right? 
+Actually, I Googled it, and guess what??? September 24 is NOT National Daughter’s Day…According to Wikipedia , National Daughter’s Day is August 11th. This little snippet in Wikipedia also stated that National Daughter’s Day originated from the Bible. I have done some more digging, and honestly, I can’t find proof for either the day or the fact that the Bible calls for it. So it got me to thinking… 
+How did a day, which didn’t actually exist, go viral in just a few hours on Facebook? There has to be a need which something like this fills or else the entire Facebook population wouldn’t have jumped on it so quickly. 
+Then it hit me. We love our daughters! It really is that simple. We love our daughters so much that we felt we needed to tell them so publicly on Facebook. I saw some of the cutest baby pictures and some of the sweetest words of love scroll through my Facebook feed yesterday. Mothers and fathers discussing how sweet their little girls were and exclaiming pride in the women they had become. All ages were represented. It was really quite moving, and it was a wonderful change from the politics and hatred I normally see there. 
+My question is, why did we need to create a fictitious holiday to say these things. We all know our society is in desperate need of love, but yesterday also proved that our society is desperate to show love. It is OK to tell the world you love your daughter, or for that matter, your son, your wife, your husband, your life partner, your best friend, your ex, your mailman, your mother, your dog, or your local friendly hardware store worker. You don’t need a special occasion or an official day. We don’t have to all agree it is OK to do it on that particular day. 
+Just love. Show it openly. Tell the world and Facebook. Do it every day. It’s in your DNA. You need it. 
+I declare today National I Am Going To Post About Who I Love Day…every day. 
+By the way… My daughter, Mallory, is intelligent, beautiful, and compassionate, and I am blessed that she calls me Mom. Just thought I would throw that in since it is National I Am Going To Post About Who I Love Day! Now faith, hope, and love remain—these three things—and the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13 About Melanie Tubbs 
+Melanie Tubbs is a professor, pastor, mother, Mimi, and true Arkansas woman. She lives with six cats and two dogs on a quiet hill in a rural county where she pastors a church and teaches history at the local university. Her slightly addictive personality comes out in shameful Netflix binges and a massive collection of books. Vegetarian cooking, reading mountains of books for her seminary classes, and crocheting for the churches prayer shawl ministry take up most of her free time, and sharing the love of Christ forms the direction of her life. May the Peace of Christ be with You. Connect",FAKE
+7285,The Last Confirmation Bias Test of This Election,"Leave a reply 
+Scott Adams – Last year in this blog I told you that Trump would change more than politics. I said he would forever change how you view reality. I’ll prove that to you today with a fun experiment. 
+At the end of this post I will give you a link to a very short video clip showing Hillary Clinton getting off her jet and into her car. Trump supporters will say she looks like she is drunk, or unsteady for some other health-related reason. And they will say it is obvious . Now try showing the clip to a Clinton supporter and watch how they see nothing wrong with the way she is walking. 
+Who is right? 
+The answer is that you have no way to know. Personally, I can see it both ways, depending on what frame of mind I’m in. When people on Twitter say she looks drunk, and I look at the clip immediately after they prime me, she indeed looks drunk. When my Clinton-supporting friend says he sees nothing unusual about her walking, suddenly it looks fine to me too. 
+Most of my readers today are probably Trump supporters, so you are likely to see Clinton’s walk as unsteady. Send the clip to your Clinton-supporting friend and see how much your perceptions differ on this. You’ll be amazed. 
+There might be an objective reality in our world. But our brains didn’t evolve to be able to see it. Our brains only evolved to do the job of keeping us alive so we could procreate. That means the reality you see – the movie in your head – can be totally different from mine, and almost certainly is. Yet we can both get by in this world. 
+Last year, when many observers were saying Trump was a stupid, under-informed clown, I was saying he was a Master Persuader. Pundits said he ignored facts because he didn’t know them or because he was a liar. I said he ignored facts because facts are useless for persuasion. Trump could learn lots of facts if he wanted to do so. But he knew it was a waste of time. These are two totally different views of reality. And yet they did not conflict. Clinton supporters still see the stupid, under-informed clown and I still see the Master Persuader. We live in totally different movies and yet we can still interact with each other, still eat and drink, still procreate when necessary. 
+Reality isn’t what you thought it was a year ago. Your movie isn’t my movie. But the good news is that you have the power to rewrite the coming scenes of your movie. And those scenes can be anything that isn’t ruled out by your own observations. 
+Now watch this Clinton video and notice how Clinton’s walk matches your expectations, no matter what your expectations are. That’s confirmation bias . And it is the most important thing you will ever learn. SF Source The Burning Platform Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+702,Donald Trump v Bernie Sanders: confusion reigns over possible debate,"Confusion reigned on Thursday over a possible debate between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
+
+
+
+After kicking off a media frenzy by accepting an offer to debate Sanders, Trump changed his mind at least twice in the same day when pressed about whether he was serious about the prospect. 
+
+
+
+Addressing reporters on Thursday in his first press conference after crossing the threshold of delegates needed to become the Republican nominee, Trump reiterated his willingness to debate Sanders for charity to the tune of at least $10m.
+
+This came after Trump’s campaign said earlier in the day that the Republican was only joking when he first expressed his openness to debating Sanders during an appearance on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live on Wednesday.
+
+
+
+“I’d love to debate Bernie – he’s a dream,” Trump said at the press conference in Bismarck, North Dakota, on Thursday.
+
+“The problem with debating Bernie is he’s gonna lose [the Democratic race] … but I’d debate him anyway. We’ve already had a couple of calls from the networks, so we’ll see.”
+
+He added: “If I debated him, we would have such high ratings, and I think we should take that money and give it to some worthy charity.” Trump refused to take part in any further Republican debates after the Florida primary when the field winnowed down to three candidates.
+
+Trump’s comments echoed his remarks to Kimmel in an interview the night before, when he told the late-night talkshow host: “If I debated him [Sanders], we would have such high ratings, and I think we should take that money and give it to some worthy charity.”
+
+Sanders, the leftwing senator from Vermont who is lagging behind Clinton in the delegate race to clinch the Democratic nomination, responded immediately in a tweet, writing:
+
+Sanders’ campaign confirmed he was serious about the opportunity if Trump was, but an aide to Trump clarified on Thursday that the former reality TV star was joking and had no intention to actually debate Sanders. 
+
+
+
+A debate between candidates from both parties before the conclusion of the nominating process would have been highly unusual and a potential headache for Clinton, who turned down an invitation from Fox News to debate Sanders earlier this week – citing the need to shift gears toward the looming battle with Trump in November.
+
+“We believe that Hillary Clinton’s time is best spent campaigning and meeting directly with voters across California and preparing for a general election campaign that will ensure the White House remains in Democratic hands,” Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jen Palmieri said in a statement.
+
+A debate during the remainder of the primary season would indeed serve as more beneficial to Sanders, offering him another public platform to make his case in what has been a grueling contest against Clinton. The senator has often referred to poll numbers on the stump that show him faring better than Clinton in a hypothetical match-up against Trump, although Clinton has countered that she has spent more than two decades in the public eye whereas Sanders has yet to be vetted at the national level.
+
+Trump, although evidently unwilling to debate the senator, has made overtures toward Sanders’ supporters by echoing their complaints that the establishment is working in Clinton’s favor.
+
+“The system is rigged against him,” Trump told Kimmel, referring to Sanders. “I think it’s very unfair.”
+
+Sanders and Clinton last faced off on the debate stage on 9 March in Miami. Since then, Clinton has marched significantly closer to sealing the nomination but has still lost a series of contests to Sanders along the way.
+
+Sanders has routinely charged that the DNC, which remains officially neutral in the primary, is aiding Clinton by limiting debates and scheduling them on weekends when there would be less of an audience. 
+
+
+
+The senator’s disdain for party leaders escalated last week, when Sanders said he would not reappoint Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chair of the DNC if elected president and endorsed her primary opponent as she seeks re-election to Congress in south Florida.
+
+
+
+Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and founder of the center-left thinktank New Democrat Network, wrote in a column this week that the California debate should proceed as initially planned between Clinton and Sanders.
+
+“For the DNC to walk away from the debate now, given that Sanders has signaled his desire to proceed, will only confirm the worst suspicions of Sanders partisans,” Rosenberg wrote.",REAL
+5888,Unprecedented letter from Chair of Joint Chiefs suggests U.S. military does not want a President Hillary,"Posted on October 29, 2016 by Dr. Eowyn 
+Earlier this week, on October 24, 2016, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford sent a fascinating piece of communication, titled “ Upholding Our Oath ,” to every member of the U.S. Armed Services. 
+Note: General Joseph Dunford Jr. , 60, was the 36th Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Nominated by Obama, Dunford became the 19th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 1, 2015. 
+This is what Gen. Dunford wrote : 
+“As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff…as our country again prepares for a peaceful transfer of power to a new administration, I write to share my views regarding our mutual obligations as military professionals and rights as citizens during this election season. 
+Every service member swears “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” This oath is embedded in our professional culture and underpins the values that shape and define our all-volunteer force. Beginning with General George Washington resigning his military commission, our deliberate and disciplined commitment to upholding the principle of civilian control of the military underpins not only our warrior ethos but also the expectations of how we conduct ourselves while in uniform. 
+While we must always safeguard our professional integrity, extra vigilance is required during any political transition. Our individual and collective obligation during this election season is twofold. First, we must recognize that we have one Commander in Chief, and until authority is transferred on January 20, 2017, the Joint Force must remain clearly focused on and responsive to the existing National Command Authority. Second, the Joint Force must conduct itself in such a way that the new administration has confidence that it will be served by a professional, competent, and apolitical military. This is especially important in the context of delivering the best military advice. 
+Every member of the Joint Force has the right to exercise his or her civic duty, including learning and discussing — even debating — the policy issues driving the election cycle and voting for his or her candidate of choice. Provided that we follow the guidance and regulations governing individual political participation, we should be proud of our civic engagement. What we must collectively guard against is allowing our institution to become politicized , or even perceived as being politicized, by how we conduct ourselves during engagements with the media, the public, or in open or social forums. 
+We are living in the most volatile and complex security environment since World War II. Whether confronting violent extremist organizations seeking to destroy our way of life or dealing with state actors threatening international order, threats to our national security require a Joint Force that is ready, capable, and trusted. To that end, I have a duty to protect the integrity and political neutrality of our military profession. But this obligation is not mine alone. It belongs to every Soldier, Marine, Sailor, Airman, and Coastguardsman. Thank you for joining me in honoring our history, our traditions, and the institutions of the U.S. Armed Forces by upholding the principle of political neutrality .” 
+Even without reading between the lines, General Dunford clearly has concerns about politicization of the military and its obligation and commitment to political neutrality and noninterference in politics. That the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must remind members of the Armed Forces that they must “uphold” their oath both suggests and implies that the opposite is going on, i.e., the military is politicized and there are fears that it will intervene in civilian politics. 
+If this pic (below) of a young U.S. Marine is any indication, Gen. Dunford has good reasons to issue the “Upholding Our Oath” communication. 
+A year ago, a Rasmussen Reports national survey of active and retired military personnel found that only 15% had a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton, with just 3% who viewed her very favorably. A staggering 81% had an unfavorable opinion of her , including 69% who had a very unfavorable view of her. 
+A similar survey today is sure to find even higher unfavorable ratings for Hillary among those whom she would command as their Commander in Chief. 
+H/t GiGi and TruthFeedNews",FAKE
+5943,North Dakota Police Arrest Over 140 Pipeline Protesters,"  Carol Adl in News // 0 Comments 
+Hundreds of police in riot gear with heavy military equipment have evicted Dakota Access Pipeline protesters from their encampment on private land in the US state of North Dakota. Police have protesters more or less surrounded. #noDAPL pic.twitter.com/G4xGQuXpZM 
+— Jason Patinkin (@JasonPatinkin) October 27, 2016 
+The police reportedly arrested at least 141 Native Americans and other demonstrators who are seeking to halt construction of a controversial oil pipeline. 
+Press TV reports 
+At least 141 protesters were arrested on Thursday evening and Friday morning as officers attempt to clear a camp on private property in the path of the proposed $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. 
+Officers in riot helmets used pepper spray and shot beanbag rounds on some of the estimated 330 protesters as helicopters flew overhead. 
+Demonstrators also allegedly set a car and some tires on fire, giving the scene a war zone-like appearance. 
+The protesters have been demonstrating for several months, and dozens have been arrested. Police expect additional protests, and possibly more arrests, in the coming days. 
+Native American protesters had occupied the property that crosses the pipeline’s path since Monday in an effort to stop Energy Transfer Partners’ construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. 
+The pipeline has infuriated the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and environmental activists who say it threatens the region’s water supply and sacred tribal sites. The tribe’s reservation is close to the pipeline’s route. 
+North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple said police were successful in clearing the camp. “Private property is not the place to carry out a peaceful protest,” he said. 
+Demonstrators, however, say they aren’t trespassing on private property, citing an 1851 treaty with the US government that says the land belongs to Native American tribes. 
+The Native American-led protest has grown into a larger movement in the United States, drawing in other tribes, environmentalists and advocates for Native Americans. 
+The federal government has twice asked the pipeline operator to voluntarily pause construction near the tribe’s reservation while the authorities reconsider the project’s route. But courts have refused to compel a halt. 
+The chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe criticized law enforcement’s “militarized” response to the activists. “Militarized law enforcement agencies moved in on water protectors with tanks and riot gear today. We continue to pray for peace,” Dave Archambault II said in a statement Thursday evening.",FAKE
+2483,Paul: Christie embraces Obamacare,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+6398,Ooh Fuck,"Wednesday 9 November 2016 by Lucas Wilde Ooh Fuck 
+“Ooh Fuck”, according to reports. 
+Not much more is known regarding the statement, although some are speculating that it may have something to do with some kind of earthquake that happened in America last night. 
+It is unknown if the earthquake was literal or simply a clumsy metaphor from a lazy satirist. 
+“Ooh Fuck,” confirmed Democrat party spokesperson, Jay Cooper. 
+“That’s all I have to say on the matter. I think it’s fairly conclusive. 
+“You can direct any other questions to my secretary. I have several lines of coke to attend to.” 
+“Ooh fuck,” verified Cooper’s secretary, Elizabeth King. 
+“This is going to require a lot of alcohol and a fair few enquiries to the Canadian passport office- forgive me, I have said too much. Excuse me, I need to leave the room immediately.” 
+Americans nationwide were either weeping while exclaiming “Ooh Fuck” or, in some cases, whooping and hollering and high-fiving while cheerfully exclaiming “Ooh Fuck!” 
+A bleary-eyed Donald Trump reportedly awoke from his slumber this morning, remembered what happened last night and exclaimed “Ooh Fuck”; presumably having been hit with full magnitude of some kind of job that lay before him. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+6290,"The American Way: Socialism for the Rich, Free Enterprise for the Rest","Donate The American Way: Socialism for the Rich, Free Enterprise for the Rest 'It is political decisions, not invisible hands, that dictate the functioning of the market.' (Photo: Fed Up/Steve McFarland Photography) By Jake Johnson / commondreams.org 
+While it's not entirely clear who coined the phrase ""socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the rest,"" its ability to provoke — and, more importantly, to describe — is beyond question. 
+There are numerous variations on the saying , but each articulates a reality of which we are all, in some way, aware: The bankers who wrecked the economy, for instance, understood that they would be subjected to a different set of rules than those they were scamming with subprime mortgages . While the former have enjoyed the fruits of a bailout and an uneven recovery , those deeply harmed by the crash have struggled to regain anything resembling stability. 
+Matt Taibbi has termed this systemic disparity "" the divide ""— and as the divide between the rich and the poor, between the influential and the voiceless, expands, the economic order morphs to fit the resulting power dynamic. 
+Thanks to Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions that have vanquished the firewall that previously separated — however tenuously and ineffectively — corporations from the political process, the ""winners"" have been able to seamlessly convert their tremendous wealth into tremendous political influence. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, they usually get what they want. 
+To call this socialism for the rich is to say that those at the top of the income distribution accrue all of the benefits and sympathies of the state, including, of course, a robust welfare apparatus . Their relationship with the state, furthermore, is effectively democratic; the views of the wealthiest are reflected in public policy. 
+Those outside of this privileged class, meanwhile, are forced to endure the strictures of market discipline; when they face difficult circumstances, they are lectured , not assisted. Their views are not permitted to influence public policy; they suffer what they must. 
+What does such a state of affairs mean for the prospects of those struggling for a more egalitarian future ? The title, as well as the substance, of economist Dean Baker's latest book does much to diagnose the severity of the problems progressive and radical movements face, even if it doesn't fully answer the question. 
+In Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer , as in his other work, Baker doesn't tiptoe, nor does he resort to jargon when plain language will do. He comes right out with it: The rich have rigged the economy, and we're all paying for it. 
+In the age of Piketty — and, indeed, in the age of Bernie Sanders, whose presidential campaign brought the notion of a rigged economy to the national stage — this is not a particularly radical claim, but it has radical implications. It suggests, in short, what we already know: That far from advocating hands-off government, the rich simply want to have their own hands, and no one else's, on the rule-making apparatus. It appears that they have achieved this goal. 
+George Orwell once observed that ""economic laws do not operate in the same way as the law of gravity""; that is, in effect, the central point of Baker's study. There is nothing natural about the upward redistribution of wealth we have seen over the last several decades, nor is such redistribution the result of any mystical forces beyond our comprehension or control. 
+Rather, as Baker makes clear, the rules were written with this end in mind. 
+""The gainers in the top 1 percent,"" he writes, ""have structured the market over the last four decades in ways that increase their share of income."" 
+Systematically, Baker lays out the ways in which the wealthy are simultaneously shielded from the worst of globalization and lavished with the spoils. 
+Much of the professional class, he observes, has not faced the competition that has so ravaged blue-collar workers in the United States: American doctors, for instance, have not been forced to compete with the doctors of India or Western Europe, who earn far less . The result is ""bloated"" incomes for American doctors — and the same is true of lawyers, dentists, and, indeed, the very pundits who ""earn comfortable six-figure salaries"" while ""remarking on the narrow-mindedness and sense of entitlement of manufacturing workers."" Meanwhile, wages remain stagnant for everyone else . 
+That high-income professionals are protected from competition ""has nothing to do with the inherent dynamics of globalization: it is about the differences in the power of these groups."" 
+""Bloated,"" also, is the pay of CEOs , which is determined not by ""market forces"" or by performance , but by a board of directors who, Baker notes, have ""little incentive to hold down pay."" 
+""Directors are more closely tied to top management than to the shareholders they are supposed to represent,"" Baker adds, and they ""are almost never voted out by shareholders for their lack of attention to the job or for incompetence. The market discipline that holds down the pay of ordinary workers does not apply to CEOs, since their friends determine their pay."" 
+Baker points also to the ""government-granted monopolies""— patents and copyright protections — that ""impose substantial costs on the public."" As recent scandals have made clear, this is particularly the case in the pharmaceutical industry. 
+""In the case of prescription drugs alone the cost is in the neighborhood of $380 billion a year (equal to 2.0 percent of GDP),"" Baker observes. ""Washington is filled with politicians and organizations that hyperventilate about government debt and the burden it imposes on our children, but they ignore the burdens imposed by patent and copyright monopolies granted by the government."" 
+In short, it is political decisions, not invisible hands, that dictate the functioning of the market. And from trade policy designed for the benefit of capital and rich nations to the rapid deregulation and growth of the financial sector, these political decisions have disproportionately rewarded economic elites at everyone else's expense. 
+Baker's analysis provides much reason for pessimism: Wealth and political power are concentrated to such an extent that it will be difficult to force systemic change. It is unsurprising, then, that Baker qualifies his own proposals — from a move toward full employment to taxation of financial transactions — with the refrain, ""this is not likely to happen anytime soon,"" given the power of those who benefit from the maintenance of the status quo. 
+But implicit is also reason for hope: That such concentration of economic and political power is not a natural state of affairs means that it can be radically altered. 
+""Neither God nor nature hands us a worked-out set of rules determining the way property relations are defined, contracts are enforced, or macroeconomic policy is implemented,"" Baker writes. ""These matters are determined by policy choices. The elites have written these rules to redistribute income upward."" 
+The rules, in short, can be rewritten in such a way that promotes the spread of wealth and resources — obscene inequality can be overcome. But Baker is an economist, not a polemicist: Thus it is unsurprising that the words ""class struggle"" do not make an appearance in his study. 
+It is perfectly clear, however, that class struggle must be central to the fight for a fundamentally different set of rules: The rich have for decades waged unrelenting class war, and the consequences have been staggering. The mere extraction of concessions from above will not be enough to slacken the power the wealthiest have over the political process. 
+""If we are going to change directions,"" notes sociologist Beverly Silver, ""it's going to have to come from a mass political movement, rather than something coming out of capital itself."" 
+Thomas Ferguson , the Director of Research at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, largely agrees with this sentiment; systemic change will take an ""uprising on the scale of the New Deal at least,"" he told me in an email, ""combined with some fissures within business, as in that earlier period."" 
+Baker's analysis clearly interprets the economic context in which we find ourselves, and it is a context dictated by economic elites. ""Well, of course it's an oligarchy,"" Ferguson told me when I asked him about the popular characterization of the United States as a representative democracy, despite the torrent of corporate money that has for decades flooded the coffers of both major political parties.""The democratic element is vanishingly small at this point."" 
+But the point of economic analysis, to adopt Marx's famous saying , is not merely to interpret the world in which we live, but also to change it. To do so, the reasonable proposals offered by Baker must be accompanied by mass politics of the kind Sanders embraced and harnessed to great effect. It must be a politics devoid of the delusions fostered by what Matt Karp has called "" fortress liberalism "": The notion that change trickles down from benevolent leaders. 
+It's easy to be dismissive of mass movements, given the strength of the opposition: Far from diminishing under the weight of their own self-produced crises, major corporations continue to expand in both size and influence, making democratic action difficult. 
+""But let's not get too gloomy,"" Ferguson urged. ""If you told me two years ago that Bernie Sanders would get hundreds of thousands of votes in many states and win many caucuses against Hillary Clinton, I'd have said you were dreaming."" 
+This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License 
+Jake Johnson is an independent writer. Follow him on Twitter: @wordsofdissent 0.0 ·",FAKE
+8879,BREAKING: Trump Rushed Off Stage After Alleged Gunman Found in Rally Audience,"With Election Day only three days away, tensions between supporters of the two major party candidates are running high. However, things nearly turned violent for Republican candidate Donald Trump who... ",FAKE
+7864,"FBI Assistant Director Goes Rogue, Stabs Hillary in the Back on National TV","0 comments 
+Retired assistant FBI director James Kallstrom made history this week when he publicly endorsed Donald Trump for president. According to the Conservative Post , never before has an FBI director endorsed a presidential candidate. 
+“I’m endorsing Donald Trump,” Kallstrom said on Fox News. “I’ve known him 40 years. I’ve never endorsed a candidate. He’s a good human being. He’s a generous person. He’s got a big heart. He’s done hundreds and hundreds of things for people without fanfare.” 
+“He’s a good guy. He’s a patriot of this country and regardless of what he says, his acts show that he is not that person. He’s been in this Hollywood crowd that talks like that, a lot of people talk like that,” he continued, in reference to the leaked audio tape from 2005 in which Trump made lewd comments about women. 
+“He doesn’t do these things. He’s a good guy. I’ve known his family from the time they were kids. Look at his children. Could you find a better family than he brought up in this country? This country is absolutely going in the wrong direction.” 
+“Seventy percent of the people want change,” Kallstrom added, as reported by CP . “You’re not going to get change with Hillary Clinton. This is the woman that lied when she was on the Watergate staff. I mean, she’s a pathological liar.” 
+Watch:",FAKE
+10024,Photo of the day: Miss Russia at the international beauty contest in Tokyo,"Photo of the day: Miss Russia at the international beauty contest in Tokyo AFP/East News 
+Miss Russia Alisa Manenok shows off her souvenir of a stuffed cat while boarding a boat at the Lake Ashinoko in Hakone town, Kanagawa prefecture. Manenok, a Vladivostok native, entered the final Top-15 of the prestigious Miss International 2016 beauty contest held on Oct. 27 in Japan’s capital of Tokyo. However, the Russian beauty failed to make the Top-5, with Kylie Verzosa representing the Philippines winning the contest. Facebook",FAKE
+3317,Congressional auditors: VA health care is high-risk,"The Department of Veterans' Affairs vast health network — beset by a scandal last year over delayed care — has been listed as a high-risk federal program by congressional auditors for the first time.
+
+The report by the watchdog Government Accountability Office, which is issued every two years, includes a broad indictment of the $55.5 billion VA program, one of the nation's largest health care systems. USA TODAY obtained the VA section of the report, scheduled for release Wednesday.
+
+The number of aging or disabled veterans treated by the VA has grown to 8.9 million from 6.8 million in 2002, and Congress has increased funding by 85% during that time.
+
+Yet problems with poor health care, delayed doctor appointments and leadership accountability and oversight persist, according to the report. The GAO said it keeps issuing audits identifying problems — eight just last year — but more than 100 areas of mismanagement remain unresolved, according to the report.
+
+VA spokesman James Hutton, in a response, said the department is committed to becoming a ""model agency"" and example for other government programs to emulate.
+
+""In many ways, (the VA health care system) is on the cutting edge of the industry. In other areas, we realize we need to make significant improvements,"" Hutton said.
+
+Federal agencies or programs are chosen for the high-risk list by the GAO based on such factors as health or safety, delivery of services and incidents of injury or loss of life.
+
+""These risks to the timeliness, cost-effectiveness, quality and safety of veterans' health care, along with persistent weaknesses we have identified in recent years, raises serious concerns about VA's management and oversight of its health care system,"" the report said. ""VA health care is a high-risk area.""
+
+The VA became enveloped in scandal last year over allegations that veterans had died waiting for care at a hospital in Phoenix.
+
+The agency's Inspector General office, which launched a probe into the allegations, found that delays contributed to the deaths of VA patients. However, inspectors concluded that delays may have contributed to the deaths of some veterans and that the falsifying of appointment records by VA staffers to hide delays is a systemic problem within the VA health care system.
+
+Eric Shinseki, a retired general appointed by President Obama to lead the agency in 2009, resigned after claiming he had been misled about the extent of the VA problems.
+
+His replacement, Bob McDonald, has vowed to move aggressively to revamp the VA. He launched the MyVA initiative in September devoted to improving customer service for veterans. Yet McDonald has come under criticism for not firing those responsible for the scandal despite new rules passed by Congress making it easier to dismiss employees.
+
+The GAO report cites the falsified appointment records, and complains about a shoddy evaluation process for doctors who make mistakes, the reliance on data submitted by hospitals under review, handing out undeserved bonuses, chronically inadequate computer systems and poor training of staff.
+
+The report said major improvements for the VA could flow from new legislation signed by Obama last summer that improves access to care and pays for more staff.But the agency has to follow through on recommendations expected from an independent review group and a bipartisan commission created by the legislation.",REAL
+7595,"Leaked Email: ‘If She Wins, Hillary Will Own The Supreme Court for the Next 30 to 40 Years’","Leaked Email: ‘If She Wins, Hillary Will Own The Supreme Court for the Next 30 to 40 Years’   Tweet 
+This. Is. Horrifying. 
+In another Wikileaks email , this time from Chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council Marc Stanley to Hillary campaign chairman John Podesta dated February 11, 2016, Stanley lays out his best argument for why voters should choose Hillary over Bernie… 
+(click to enlarge) 
+He writes: 
+I tell the voter that I like Bernie and I like Hillary, but that’s not what matters. What matters to me is that there are 4 justices on the Supreme Court who will be in their 80’s and be replaced by the next president – and that President will appoint 40 year old Justices and they will serve for 30 or 40 years.",FAKE
+1437,"Iowa’s Des Moines Register endorses Clinton, Rubio","Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+6943,Economic Nationalism: Alternative To Globalism,"in: Corporate Takeover , Economy & Business , Globalism Ivory tower economists, corporate business analysts and financial experts routinely trash any discussion that America needs to institute a national economic policy that actually benefits our own country. The mantra of unchallenged doctrine that globalism is the only path for world commerce has been intensively pushed for well over the last half century. How well did the United States fare? An honest evaluation must acknowledge the diminishing middle class has paid the greatest penalty from the corporatist sedition that has destroyed internal independence and productive prosperity. Building viable enterprises that conduct useful economic activities produce needed and desirable goods and services. Good paying jobs grow when the velocity of money flows in the “real” domestic economy. International trade can and is often advantageous if it benefits all parties involved in prosperity from the transactions. However, in the un-free framework for maximizing the corporatism structure of above and beyond any particular country jurisdiction or trade policies, the globalists have set up the exact opposite from the much lauded “Free Trade” conduit. The next argument points out the inconsistency in Economic Nationalism in the Age of Globalism , and asks: “Is economic nationalism a reaction to global integration, which in essence means cooptation and domination of national markets by the strongest multinational corporations of the richest nations? Neoliberal insist on the forces of the free market operating without government interference to protect the national capitalist class and workers. Naturally, neoliberals advocating global integration have come out against the tide of economic nationalism in any form. However, the same advocates of neoliberalism have no problem supporting corporate welfare in their own countries, a system that is a form of economic nationalism. When governments use taxpayer money to bail banks and subsidize corporations that is a form of economic nationalism, just as when they lobby to have products and services of their industries marketed in countries competing with similar products and services.” Note the error in the assumption that multinational corporatists have a beneficial relationship to any country that flies their business flag. In a perverted business culture which is now based upon the ‘ Citizens United ’ court decision that confirms previous precedents that a corporation is a person, the United States has lost the leverage to reverse the international trade practices that has clearly been the vehicle for domestic economic decline. The alternative to the surrender of sovereignty and globalist blackmail can be found in paleo-conservative populism and the economic history that built America in the 19th century. Still relevant and sound as the day it was written, Pat Buchanan on Free Trade , provides the template for a rational and constructive national economic model. “Good for global business” isn’t necessarily good for US Global capitalists have become acolytes of global governance. They wish to see national sovereignty diminished and sanctions abolished. Where yesterday American businesses suffered damage to their good name for selling scrap iron to Japan before Pearl Harbor, today [war materiel is routinely exported] to potentially hostile nations. Once it was true that what was good the Fortune 500 was good for America. That is no longer true, and what is good for America must take precedence. (Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.349 , Oct 9, 1999) “Economic Nationalism”: trade only when it helps US Rather than making “global free trade” a golden calf which we all bow down to, and worship, all trade deals should be judged by whether: they maintain US sovereignty; they protect vital economic interests; and they ensure a rising standard of living for all our workers. We must stop sacrificing American jobs on the altars of transnational corporations whose sole loyalty is to the bottom line. “America First”: Tariffs; reciprocal trade; anti-dumping America’s workers are being sacrificed to the Global Economy, and our leaders seem deaf to their distress. Impose tariffs on cheap foreign imports Prioritize the American Economy before the Global Economy by withdrawing from international organizations that imperil our financial stability & economic independence Open foreign markets to American products by requiring reciprocal trade policies Protect vital industries by passing tough anti-dumping legislation. A policy of Rational Tariffs Lower Irrational Trade Deficits is a course for a rebirth in economic vigor. Tariffs Can Restore America’s Greatness sounds like the next topic for the Donald Trump campaign to take directly to the people. Economic Nationalism is a bipartisan issue that offers hope and practical employment for the displaced and discouraged. American companies have been punished for decades under the power elite and globalist betrayers. The Wall Street crowd despises the small investor and by inference the average hard working American. The plutocrats have built much of their ill-gotten gain on the outsourcing of an independent domestic economy. Globalism is on the precipice of a world-wide implosion. The danger is not just a planetary economic depression, but an intentional political crisis that will demand even more control and loss of access to meaningful commerce. The cries that international trade will stall to a halt will be used to economically enslave the populist further. Combat this devious strategy to stamp out the diminished vestiges of national ventures with a total rejection of the internationalist “Free Trade” prototype. Demand for real jobs exists now. In order to achieve the opportunity for earning a living with dignity can be accomplished under a transition to economic nationalism. The discontent of the electorate is distinctly observable at the Trump or Sanders rallies. The frustration is real and the outcry is becoming louder. Nevertheless, the road to a solution cannot rely upon a government nanny state mentality. The globalist juggernaut is formidable, as much as it is destructive. In order to implement the conversion into a merchant economy, the bulwark blockage of crony finance and fatal usury need to be broken. The start to this process begins with an awakening that globalism is the foremost enemy to America. The elites and the entire establishment are hell bent on maintaining a corrupt system. Is it not time to regain our own economic destiny? Submit your review",FAKE
+7354,Experts Just Uncovered The Top Secret Server Trump Uses To Talk To Russia,"Comments 
+A private group of technical experts has reviewed meta-data about the Trump Organization’s internet usage and just concluded that the Republican nominee is using a personal email server to surreptitiously communicate from the Trump-email.com domain with a controversial Moscow-based bank, Alfa Bank. 
+The timing of the Russian communications coincides perfectly with milestones throughout the election (see chart at bottom), and the very high level of secrecy deployed to hide them is going to be hard to explain away for the Trump campaign. 
+Adding fuel to the building controversy, when researchers contacted Alfa Bank for comment, the Trump Organization quickly shut down the server: 
+The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign—Lichtblau spoke with the campaign a week later—but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. 
+The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.” 
+But with their eyes watching, the Trump Organization casually re-connected with Alfa Bank only four days later, on a different server. All of this was captured in the Domain Name System (DNS), which is the internet’s internal directory system. DNS leaves log records all over saying how often website visits happen, and it’s the very same web services which was attacked last week , taking down Twitter, The New York Times and others. DNS is the system that routes our internet requests using names instead of numbers, and it keeps logs with IP address numbers and timestamps. 
+In this case, the meta-data practically screams to experts, because it shows that there is little other traffic of any other kind by design. As we learned from Edward Snowden, the meta-data of a situation is incomplete, but it can tell you a lot. 
+The new domain is owned by one of Trump’s hospitality marketing contract companies, which dispels Trump’s blown cover story that the private server is just used for marketing. 
+Domain registration information also confirmed that the same marketing team works on both Trump-email.com and the new client-contact.com email addresses being used. Furthermore, the world-renowned technical expert Paul Vixie revealed that the Trump Organization went to extra-ordinary lengths to shut out all traffic that isn’t from Alfa Bank. 
+There is a more sinister reason for creating a private email server that only participates in conversation with one specific party was identified by computing legend Paul Vixie: 
+Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie . In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive . This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” 
+Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance. 
+Ironically, the academics and others started looking for foreign interference in order to protect both campaigns from outside meddling. It appears as if only one of the two campaigns conspired to that end: 
+The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work. 
+When researchers contacted Alfa Bank for comment, suddenly the Trump Organization shut down their email domain quickly. 
+Four days later, the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank resumed communications – and it was the bank who contacted the Republican nominee’s company from Moscow, somehow knowing the new code to interact with the Trump private email server. 
+This new information shows that after Trump asked Putin to hack America’s election to prejudice them against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in late July, traffic between the campaign and the Russian bank spiked. 
+In the end, this is yet another matter that the FBI will surely have to investigate.. The question is: will they be fair and release the files from their inquiry in the kind of “act of radical transparency” that Director James Comey imposed on Hillary?",FAKE
+2889,White House looks to scientists to sell Iran deal,"Trump will also meet with retiring Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, former Georgia Gov. Sonny Purdue and Linda McMahon, a prolific Republican donor, two-time Senate...",REAL
+1499,GOP debate: 's Reality Check Team inspects claims,"(CNN) The Republican candidates for president gathered Thursday in North Charleston, South Carolina, for their sixth debate,, and CNN's Reality Check Team spent the night putting their statements and assertions to the test.
+
+The team of reporters, researchers and editors across CNN selected key statements and rated them: True; Mostly True; True, but Misleading; False; or It's Complicated.
+
+In discussing foreign challenges in the Middle East, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said, ""As it relates to Iran, we need to confront ambitions across the board, reimpose sanctions. They already violated sanctions after the agreement was signed by testing medium-range missiles.""
+
+The agreement Bush was referring to was the deal reached last year between Iran, the United States and five other countries that seeks to roll back Iran's ability to obtain a nuclear weapon.
+
+Since the signing of that agreement, Iran has indeed tested missile technology. The test violated sanctions not covered by the new deal but rather in contravention of existing U.N. Security Council resolutions. Last month, a panel at the United Nations said Iran violated existing resolutions when it tested a ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead in October.
+
+But under the terms of the agreement reached in Vienna last year over Iran's nuclear program, the missile tests, while violating existing resolutions, are actually not a violation of the new agreement because that accord is focused on restricting Iran's path to a nuclear weapon.
+
+In fact, the October ballistic missile test violation would not contravene the nuclear agreement brokered with Iran once it goes into effect, which the Obama administration believes will happen soon. Under the new nuclear deal, Iran will be able to conduct ballistic missile tests -- a concession to Iran included in the deal -- meaning Iran could have simply waited until after implementation of the deal to do the test.
+
+Verdict: True -- Iran violated the sanctions, but not the nuclear weapons agreement
+
+Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida claimed that Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas flipped on his support for ethanol, just one attack in a rapid-fire succession of them, but also the one that could matter the most in Iowa, which is a leading corn producer.
+
+Cruz has always opposed the Renewable Fuel Standard, the fuel mandate supported by the state's ethanol interests, calling it an example of corporate welfare pushed by ""lobbyists and Democrats."" It's an issue that Cruz has taken flak over all across Iowa, with voters frequently questioning him at town halls and retail stops concerned about his view.
+
+Cruz admits that he did co-sponsor a 2013 bill that would've ended the RFS immediately. But his current position, as outlined in a 2014 comprehensive energy bill he introduced in the Senate, is to phase it out over five years, with his policy as of now to end the RFS by 2022.
+
+The ethanol lobby sending negative mailers about Cruz's record says that he did flip, but Cruz denies that, pointing to his bill instead of the one he co-sponsored. Cruz's personal preference, however, has always been for a five-year phase-out.
+
+Rubio said that Obamacare is ""a certified job killer.""
+
+In fact, Obamacare is not a job killer, according to the 2015 Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research and Education Trust survey released in September 2015.
+
+The report showed that only 4% of employers with at least 50 employees said they shifted some staffers to part-time hours so they wouldn't qualify for health care, and another 4% said they were reducing the number of full-time employees they planned to hire because of the cost of health benefits. In fact, that study showed that 10% of employers reported that they were changing workers from part-time to full-time status to enable them to obtain coverage.
+
+One reason may be that the economy has been improving. Some companies interviewed by ADP said they may increase their part-timers' hours to retain talent and reduce training costs.
+
+As to whether employers are cutting jobs because of Obamacare, it's nearly impossible to determine from Labor Department data since the economy is recovering and adding jobs. The number of people who can only find part-time jobs has declined in recent years, signifying companies are hiring more full-time workers.
+
+Sen. Marco Rubio took a swipe at Chris Christie when he said the New Jersey governor backed President Barack Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court in 2009. Christie hastily denied the accusation.
+
+""While Judge Sotomayor would not have been my choice, President Obama has used his opportunity to fill a seat on the Supreme Court by choosing a nominee who has more than proven her capability, competence and ability,"" Christie said at the time. ""I support her appointment to the Supreme Court and urge the Senate to keep politics out of the process and confirm her nomination.""
+
+Verdict: Rubio's claim is true, and Christie's is false
+
+Rubio also accused Christie of donating to Planned Parenthood, a highly contentious allegation, especially considering the effort among conservatives to strip the organization of its federal funds.
+
+So it's true that Christie once said he donated to Planned Parenthood, and Rubio and his allies are holding that article up as proof. But Christie claims the quote was inaccurate. So given the ""he said, he said"" situation, it's difficult to know for sure where the truth lies.
+
+Reality Check: Trump says Paris has the ""strictest no-gun policy of any city anywhere in the world""
+
+Donald Trump said the terrorist attacks in Paris last year happened despite the city having ""the strictest no-gun policy of any city anywhere in the world.""
+
+However, in France, private gun ownership, while heavily regulated, is permitted.
+
+While French laws are restrictive, the gun laws in the UK are even more so. After a series of mass shootings in the 1980s and 1990s, the UK passed a law effectively banning the private ownership of all handguns.
+
+In defending his questioning of Sen. Ted Cruz's eligibility for the presidency, Donald Trump cited Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who Trump claimed is raising ""a serious question to whether or not Ted can do this.""
+
+Although Tribe has weighed in on Cruz's eligibility, he has not outright questioned whether Cruz -- who was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father -- would be considered a ""natural born citizen,"" the definition of which Tribe says is ""completely unsettled.""
+
+What Tribe has questioned is whether Cruz's own originalist judicial theories -- expressed when the senator was a student in his Harvard Law class, and again on the campaign trail when speaking about potential judicial nominations -- would render himself eligible for the White House.
+
+""Ironically, the kind of justices he says he wants are the ones that say he's not eligible to run for president,"" Tribe argued on CNN this week. ""This is important because the way this guy plays fast and loose with the Constitution, he's a fair-weather originalist.""
+
+""No real court is likely to keep Cruz off the ballot, much less remove him from the White House if he were to win -- Bush v. Gore isn't likely to get a return engagement over this issue,"" he wrote.
+
+But soon after the debate concluded, Tribe went further, telling CNN's Anderson Cooper that the issue is a ""serious cloud"" over Cruz and saying he can see a challenge going to the Supreme Court.
+
+""If some secretary of state refuses to put his name on the ballot if he's the nominee, there's no way out of it other than to have Cruz or the Republican National Committee sue the secretary of state. And that issue would then have to go all the way to the Supreme Court,"" Tribe said. ""But the fact is, you know, it's a serious cloud. It has to be taken seriously. It's not just a matter of coming up with great talking points or winning some debate. I think he does a disservice to the Constitution and the country when he thinks he can slide his way, slip slide his way around this serious constitutional issue,"" Tribe said.
+
+Verdict: True (Editor's note: We changed the verdict from false because Tribe's comments after the debate suggested a legal fight was much more likely.)
+
+Reality Check: Cruz on the U.S. sending $100 billion to Iran
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said, ""President Obama is preparing to send $100 billion or more to the Ayatollah Khomeini. I will tell you, it was heart-breaking ...""
+
+In 2011 and 2012, the United States and Europe imposed sanctions on Iran that included freezing some Iranian assets overseas. With the announcement of a deal in 2015, those same assets stand to be released, creating a pool of money that will be newly available to the Iranian government. The total amount of those assets is not known, but as a deal with Iran seemed imminent, some estimated that the number was as high as $150 billion.
+
+In late July, at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deal, House Speaker John Boehner, just as Cruz said, claimed that ""more than $100 billion"" in unfrozen assets would be available to Iran.
+
+Both the Treasury Department and the White House have disputed these estimates.
+
+In Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew's July testimony to the Senate, he estimated that, after sanctions relief, Iran will only be able to access ""about $50 billion"" in unfrozen assets. He noted that another large portion -- about $20 billion -- was tied up in projects with China, and ""tens of billions"" comprise nonperforming loans to Iranian energy and banking interests.
+
+The money already belongs to Iran but has been frozen, so the United States is not sending this money from its coffers to the Iranian government. Additionally, none of the parties with access to the assets have substantiated an estimate close to the figure that Cruz suggested.
+
+Asked whether America's economy is as strong as President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address, Sen. Ted Cruz said, ""We have the lowest percentage of Americans working today of any year since 1977.""
+
+Last month, 59.5% of Americans age 16 and older were employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's higher than it was in 1977, when it ranged from 57% to 58.7%.
+
+The share of Americans employed during Obama's terms has ranged from as low as 58.2% in mid-2011 to as high as 60.6% when Obama took office in January 2009.
+
+Since 1977, the highest share of Americans were employed in April 2000, when 64.7% had a job.
+
+However, the overall percentage of adults who are working isn't the best measure, since the number of retirees is growing as the nation ages. So let's look at the share of prime working age adults (age 25 to 54) who are employed. Some 77.4% of these Americans were employed in December, compared to between 71% and 72.8% in 1977.
+
+By no measure is the share of Americans employed at its lowest point since 1977.
+
+Reality Check: Cruz on Dianne Feinstein taking away all guns
+
+During a discussion of proposed reforms to gun laws in the wake of recent mass shootings, Cruz claimed, ""California senator, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said if she could say to Mr. America and Mrs. America give me your guns, I'm rounding them up, she would.""
+
+Feinstein did say something to that effect -- 21 years ago. And she was referring specifically to assault rifles, not all firearms.
+
+Cruz exhumed the comment from a 1995 episode of ""60 Minutes,"" during which Feinstein discussed the limitations of the assault weapons ban. She talked about loopholes in the law that allowed dealers to sell assault rifles weapons at gun shows.
+
+""If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, 'Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in,' I would have done it,"" Feinstein said. ""I could not do that. The votes weren't here.""
+
+Because Feinstein's comments were only about assault weapons and made 21 years ago, not as part of Obama's current initiative, we rate his claim true, but misleading.
+
+Cruz, explaining his attack on Donald Trump's ""New York values,"" asserted there are ""not a lot of conservatives coming out of Manhattan.""
+
+There's no doubt New York City's third-most-populous borough is known more for liberal urbanites than as a bastion of conservatism. But the island is not without its Republicans.
+
+Voter registration records indicate there are 83,970 active Republicans on the rolls in Manhattan -- only about 10% of the total number registered, but not an insignificant portion.
+
+Some of those Republicans carry outsized influence on the national political stage. The latest federal campaign finance filings show Manhattan donors contributed $2.9 million to Republican presidential candidates, the second-highest concentration of donations in the country behind Houston.
+
+Cruz himself has taken in $135,588 from Manhattan's ZIP codes this cycle, behind his rivals Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, but still more than many other Republicans in the race. While those numbers are far behind the campaign cash taken in by Democrats in Manhattan, the borough clearly remains a magnet for politicians of all stripes looking to raise funds.
+
+The federal filings also don't account for contributions to outside groups like super PACs, which raise enormous amounts of money from wealthy Manhattan donors. One of the most prolific conservative political donors, David Koch, is a resident of Park Avenue.
+
+Cruz's claim that ""not a lot of conservatives"" come out of Manhattan is, based on pure voter registration numbers, true. But the influence of the Republicans that do reside there extends well beyond the East and Hudson rivers.
+
+During the Fox Business Network undercard debate, Carly Fiorina claimed that ""this (Obama) administration has told us they don't even bother to check Facebook or Twitter to find out who's pledging allegiance to jihadists. We can do better than this, citizens. We need to take our country back.""
+
+On December 16, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that the department has, in fact, been examining social media when reviewing visa applications since early 2015.
+
+""Under my leadership as secretary, we, in fact, began to consult social media in connection with conferring various immigration benefits and we will be doing more of this,"" he added. ""Any reports or partial reports to the contrary are simply false.""
+
+Johnson did acknowledge that there were some restrictions on looking at an applicant's social media account before 2015, but said that there was no current policy prohibiting the check of an applicant's social media.
+
+""We had policies in place regarding consulting social media, which in my judgment, particularly in this current environment, were too restrictive,"" Johnson said.
+
+Many have criticized immigration officials for not checking the social media accounts of Tashfeen Malik, one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters, after there were reports that she advocated jihad in messages on social media. Her comments were made under a pseudonym and with strict privacy settings that did not allow people outside a small group of friends to see them, U.S. law enforcement officials told CNN.
+
+FBI Director James Comey said that neither Malik or her husband and fellow shooter posted publicly on social media about supporting jihad.
+
+However, they did show ""signs in their communication of their joint commitment to jihad and to martyrdom"" in private messages, according to Comey. The comments were private communications, both by phone and social media, and the U.S. government was not monitoring them because they had no reason to. The couple were not on any terrorist watch lists, and Malik made her comments under a fake name behind many privacy settings that would have required a warrant to access them.
+
+Even if immigration officials had looked at Malik's social media accounts, they would not have had access to her private communications.
+
+A U.S. official told CNN that the United States only recently began routinely reviewing the social media activity of visa applications from certain countries. The exact date that these types of reviews began is not clear, but it was after Malik's application was considered, the source said.
+
+While the policy changed only a year ago, Fiorina's claim that immigration officials don't bother looking at visa applicant's social media has been untrue for more a year.
+
+Reality Check: Fiorina on record numbers of men out of work
+
+""We have record numbers of men out of work, we have record numbers of women living in poverty, we have young people who no longer believe that that the American Dream applies to them,"" Fiorina said.
+
+There were 42.1 million men who were not working in December, just below the record 42.9 million set in October 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This includes men who were not in the labor force, as well as those who are unemployed. (To be included in the labor force, you have to be working or actively looking for a job.)
+
+While Fiorina's comment is true, it is misleading because the vast majority of men who are not in the labor force are not looking for work. They include students, retirees and those who've just given up trying to find a job.
+
+That said, there is an employment crisis among working-age men these days. The labor force participation rate -- which includes those who are working or have looked for a job in the past four weeks -- is near record lows. The share of men ages 25 to 54 in the labor force now hovers near a record low of 88%. It stood at nearly 97% in 1965.
+
+The Geneva Conventions are a series of treaties and rules that apply in times of armed conflict and also seek to protect people who are not or are no longer taking part in hostilities.
+
+In a briefing with reporters on Thursday, State Department spokesman John Kirby said, ""The Geneva Conventions apply for wartime; we're not at war with Iran. So, it's a moot question.""
+
+Legal experts with whom CNN spoke tend to agree with that assertion.
+
+""We don't have a state of declared war or actual armed conflict between the U.S. and Iran, therefore the application of the Geneva Conventions does not come into play,"" Allen Weiner, the director of Stanford's Program in International and Comparative Law, told CNN. ""Both sides have said it was an inadvertent crossing into territorial waters, where Iran is entitled to exercise criminal jurisdiction,"" Weiner added.
+
+Steven Vladeck, a professor at American University School of Law in Washington and a CNN contributor, told CNN that ""Common Article 2 of Geneva is clear on this,"" and only applies in a state of war or armed conflict.
+
+""There is a whole lot of daylight between animosity and armed conflict,"" Vladeck said, adding other legal mechanisms applying to international human rights law or governing the law of the sea, but the absence of direct armed conflict between the two countries negates the application of the Geneva Conventions in this case.
+
+But legal experts said there are relevant legal provisions that Iran could be in violation of based on what occurred.
+
+Some experts CNN spoke to did indicate that the Iranian actions may have violated customary maritime law. In a situation where a ship enters territory waters due to a technical problem or damage, a country ""would have the right to verify the problem"" but not use force to detain the sailors, according to Craig Allen, a professor of marine and environmental affairs at the University of Washington.
+
+Rick Santorum said that President Barack Obama's policies have hurt the manufacturing sector, creating dwindling employment opportunities for the ""74% of Americans who don't have a college degree between the age of 25 and 65.""
+
+The former senator, a Penn State alum who once called the President a snob for promoting higher education, needs to check his numbers again.
+
+According to 2014 census data, the most recent stats available, 67% of Americans between 25 and 64 have not graduated from college. The total number of people in that age bracket is 164.8 million, and 55.2 million of them have not attained a bachelor's degree or higher.
+
+Santorum wasn't a math major at Penn State so he can be forgiven for the miscalculation, but he should have stuck with his original estimate. For that reason, our verdict is false.",REAL
+5649,Travel: Conor McGregor’s Guide To New York,"AHEAD of his much anticipated title fight against Eddie Alvarez, Conor McGregor took some time out of his busy schedule to relax and give the readers of WWN his guide of New York. 
+Pound for pound the best city in the world. It’s box office baby. 
+The 9/11 memorial was sad, but not as sad as Alvarez will be when I crash land a jumbo left hook in the seemingly structurally sound facade of a face. He will come crashing down. It will be an inside job, because he prepares like a chump. 
+My focus remains on the battle ahead in Madison Square Gardens but I was thrown off my preparation when I learned there is no garden. It’s just a big fuck off arena forged out of metal for the fighting God. I would say Gods, but there is only one, me, Notorious. 
+I had anticipated doing my movement training with grass beneath my feet, so I headed to Central Park. It ain’t got a patch on Phoenix Park. I wouldn’t be the fighter I am today without Dublin’s back garden. Chasing the deer as a nipper helped me hone my quickness, my agility. 
+I studied the deer and the stag; their movements. So don’t be surprised if I enter the octagon with four hooves and antlers. I will do anything, all it takes to win. Anyway, back to the tour, I hear they filmed some Sex and the City shit in Central Park. 
+No Sex in the City for Alvarez, though. He couldn’t score in a brothel above Coppers with 20gs in his pocket. What I am saying is that my opponent is challenged in the face department. His head is like a melted lasagne left out in the sun for weeks. Not even Donald Trump would grab him by the pussy. 
+Speaking of that Fanta headed prick, I’m not in his weight class ‘cus I’m not obese, but I’ll knock him out all the same. I’ll be worth more than him by the end of 205 too. Where’s my Hollywood star, fuck it, I’ll take the whole Walk. 
+But, back to the tour – it would be interesting to note, the actors in Sex in the City are not as rich as me. Chumps. 
+When you tour around New York, be warned, people will ask you for endless selfies if you are famous as I am. I love the fans, but obviously when in camp, you’ve got to watch what you’re eating, it can make you a little tetchy, so while reducing my food intake ahead of the weigh in, I like to reduce my selfie intake too. Running from overweight Americans barely counts for cardio, but you’ve gotta take every chance to gain the edge over your opponent. 
+I was told to try the New York pizza, but can’t do that until after my victory, in the mean time I might use it to throw around at the pre-fight press conference. A scalding hot slice slapping Eddie in the face might improve his chances with the ladies. 
+Peace out. I’ve off to chuck a few euro off the top of the Empire State building to let off some steam.",FAKE
+2843,Lawmakers Who Have Forgotten Iraq Insist They're Right About Iran,"“There is a principle of communication which is very well known, and has been documented in a variety of different ways. But it comes down to, if you can make people afraid, you can make them do anything,” McDermott said. “And these warmongers are fearmongers, and they are creating as much fear in the American people as possible.”
+
+Like Thornberry and numerous other hawks, Graham and McCain are again expressing doubts about diplomacy. “Regardless of the outcome, Iran’s threat to regional security and stability endures,” they said in a joint statement about the administration’s framework for an agreement. “Any hope that a nuclear deal will lead Iran to abandon its decades-old pursuit of regional dominance through violence and terror is simply delusional. The Obama Administration’s failure to recognize and counter this threat has only served to expand Iranian influence.”
+
+McCain and Graham are hardly unique. Pick just about any lawmaker who voted for the war in 2002, and they are likely to be making arguments of a similar tenor now. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) argued strongly for a pre-emptive approach against Saddam, saying then that the risks of the more diplomatic strategy were “simply unacceptable.”
+
+This month, McConnell said in a statement: ""To the detriment of international security -- specifically regarding the security of the United States, Israel and other allies, as well as preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East -- the Obama administration has always approached the goal of these negotiations as reaching the best deal that is acceptable to Iran, rather than what should be our national goal: ending Iran's nuclear program.""
+
+One, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked in 2002, “How long can we leave Hussein alone before we need to act?” and predicted the war would be “somewhat easier than” the previous Gulf war. He has alarmed progressives by backing a bill that would require speedy congressional approval of any Iran agreement before any of the deal could go into effect. Critics of the bill say it hinders chances for a final deal, making military conflict more likely.
+
+Schumer had nothing positive to say about the framework, releasing only a short statement after it was announced that praised negotiators for working hard. “Their announcement deserves careful, rigorous and deliberate analysis. I’ll be giving the framework a very careful look,” he said, then later endorsed the review bill sponsored by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), which is expected to be debated Tuesday in his Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
+
+For Jim McDermott, who was pilloried when he was right, it’s a case of deja vu all over again, especially when he hears Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) suggest the United States could carry out a few days of bombing to take care of Iran, or when one of the lead architects of the Iraq War, former Vice President Dick Cheney, says the Iran talks convince him that Obama is “the worst president we ever had.”
+
+“That kind of hyperbole is just over the top,” McDermott added, referring to Cheney’s charges that Obama was handing nuclear weapons to “the premiere sponsor of state terrorism in the world,” as well as Cheney’s charge that “I can't think of a more terrible burden to leave the next president than what Obama is creating here.""
+
+“There’s just no basis for that kind of stuff at all, except in the minds of somebody who wants to create the image of fear lurking outside the back door,"" McDermott said. ""And if we don’t go out there and kill everybody in sight, well, then we’re going to have somebody break into our house.”
+
+“They said, 'We can’t oppose you. You’re going to attack us. We know that. We just know. We’ll have to survive the initial attack, but when you get on the ground, then you’ll find out who has what power,’” McDermott recalled. “Shock and awe -- that worked for about 60 days, and then we had 14 years of what we got now. Fourteen going on 30.""",REAL
+9005,"Kiev officials forced to declare incomes, Ukrainians threaten revolt","October 31, 2016 - Fort Russ -  Ruslan Ostashko, PolitRussia - translated by J. Arnoldski - 
+
+
+Once again, the Ukrainian electorate is being taken for a grand ride and being stirred up. Whether unfortunately or fortunately, our information field overlaps with the raging infofield of our neighbors, and we have the opportunity to observe in real time the nervous breakdown of particularly impressionable citizens in neighboring Ukraine.  
+Some Russian connoisseurs take pleasure in this spectacle, and this are understandable. The point is that Western advisors have forced Ukrainian politicians and officials to declare their income and assets and open up testaments of this information for public access. Due to the primitiveness of the Ukrainian political class, which loves to steal a lot openly and is also full of confidence that nothing will happen, the contents of their declarations of assets was simply extravagant. 
+Speaking plainly, reading the declarations of the leaders of the Maidan leaves its supporters in depression or rage. Some people particularly sensitive in nature are going mad and falling into depression at the same time. They can also be understood. It’s not pleasant for anyone to feel like a sucker and loser who has been let down in the most primitive way. 
+In this sense, Poroshenko’s declaration of assets is not so impressive, since his wealth is already widely known. Some Ukrainians are even proud that Poroshenko is richer than Putin and many American presidents. But the declarations of ordinary members of the Ukrainian political class are shocking. 
+For example, Verkhovna Rada deputy Demchak, the deputy chairman of the committee regulating banking operations, revealed a bank account with 2,000 UAH and 133 million UAH in cash. Besides obvious questions as to the origins of this wealth, there’s also the high trust which only a politician responsible for Ukrainian banks could have in the Ukrainian banking system.  
+133 million UAH in cash looks very patriotic because the rest of Ukrainian politicians also prefer cash, but dollars or euros, not gryvnia. 
+The declaration of Gontareva, the head of the National Bank of Ukraine, revealed $1.8 million and only 62,000 UAH. I think that all questions about the prospects of the Ukrainian currency’s course can be left aside, as the question as to how Gontareva has this money is what will continue to excite inquisitive Ukrainian citizens.  
+In general, Ukrainian officials’ declarations are reminiscent of fragments from the works of Ilf and Petrov about petty schemers who seized too much power. Formerly poor politicians suddenly find a collection of antique paintings, tons of cash money, antique books, jewelry, and large plots of land and shares in commercial companies.  
+The reactions to all of this on social networks are also fascinating. For example, social network users write that the declarations “destroyed faith in the country” or dismayed them for having been sent to the ATO for “the last 5 gryvnia” while deputies were earning millions. Other users expect a “short and merciless revolt” which, this time, is supposed to bring genuinely honest professionals to power. 
+Politicians and their paid trolls are calling disgruntled citizens “pinheads” and demanding that they rejoice that they’ve been allowed to see how the successful and hard-working leaders of the Maidan live, who have by leaps and bounds been leading Ukraine towards its bright European future. 
+I am especially touched by those who sincerely believe that the asset declarations are a kind of silver bullet with which the Americans are killing Ukrainian corruption. This is nonsense. As a kind of humanitarian assistance to the fraternal Ukrainian people, I’ll tell you why this happened and how it will end. 
+Let’s start with the most simple. No Maidan was needed to force deputies and officials to submit declarations. Seriously, not at all. In Russia, officials have long had to submit declarations and they are meticulously studied by relevant authorities and opposition activists. This is the first point. 
+Secondly, the Americans are forcing Ukrainian officials to submit declarations not because they care about ordinary Ukrainians, but because they are trying to improve the culture of the colonial administration, i.e., take out of the picture those politicians who are too stupid to organize theft even by South American standards. Roughly speaking, the declarations made it clear why Poroshenko is president. At least he knows how to use offshore companies and doesn’t stuff bags with cash. 
+Thirdly, those who think that the system of declaring assets is a guarantee that there will be no more corruption are very naive people. Similar systems exist in South America, Europe, Asia, and even Moldova. This system keeps complete idiots out of government, but makes little difference overall. 
+Fourthly, the only real benefit of this system is that those who are now offended over having received only 5 gryvnia can guess that these millions of euros and dollars in cash didn’t fall to deputies from the sky, but came from giving others only 5 gryvnia. Unfortunately, people haven’t realized this yet. Those who are outraged on social networks can’t even use logic to remember that the “vatniks” and “colorados”  of Donbass warned them about this before. 
+Fifthly, there will be no revolt. No one was smart enough to set aside money for this, and color revolutions don’t happen without money. Ukrainian politicians will continue to plunder their fellow citizens who, after the recent scandals, now believe that the fight against corruption is going at full speed… 
+
+Finally, judging by media reports, the Netherlands still haven't ratified the association agreement with Ukraine. There is the chance that studying the lists of Ukrainian politicians’ assets will distract Ukrainians from such sad thoughts. They will continue to believe that the Maidan was for the association agreement with the EU, not for the sake of Gontareva or Poroshenko’s millions. This means that they still have a lot of surprises awaiting them. As long as they do not admit that they made a foolish mistake, the situation will not change for the better.  
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
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+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
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+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+159,Congress and its 'outsiders': The critical struggle over who is really in charge,"Editor's note: The following column originally appeared in The Hill newspaper and on TheHill.com.
+
+And the winner of the 2015 award for top member of Congress is …
+
+Well, in keeping with the polarized politics on Capitol Hill, I have one winner for Republicans and a very different winner for Democrats.
+
+Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., perfectly embody the polarization that prevents Congress from getting anything done on the nation’s most pressing issues, from immigration to stopping gun massacres to fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
+
+This dysfunctional Congress deserves its dismal 13 percent approval rating from the American people. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate reached a new nadir in broken politics by inviting a foreign leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to use the Congress as a setting to disrespect the American president back in March. They acted without first consulting with the White House.
+
+And then there was the refusal to hold confirmation hearings on the president’s nominees for judicial posts or to the Foreign Service.
+
+Congressional Republicans have made it their everyday practice to obstruct initiatives from the twice-elected leader of the nation. That includes their recent undercutting of any efforts to deal with global warming, which are being negotiated by the president and more than a hundred other world leaders.
+
+The GOP antipathy toward President Obama is not new, however. The bigger change is the out-of-control elbowing inside the Republican tent that came to define the year on Capitol Hill.
+
+Republicans in the House successfully launched a coup earlier this year against then-Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), forcing out a man who is by any measure a strong conservative but still not conservative enough for the party’s far right. The same right wing then derailed Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) because they saw him as too close to Boehner.
+
+The eventual winner after several weeks of embarrassing party infighting was the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate and former Ways and Means committee chair, Ryan. But Ryan won without winning the official endorsement of the rebellious Freedom Caucus, who dictated Boehner’s departure.
+
+All this led the new Speaker, in his very first speech as the top Republican in the House, to stare failure in the face.
+
+“Let’s be frank: The House is broken,” said Speaker Ryan. “We are not solving problems. We are adding to them.”
+
+And that is from a loyal conservative.
+
+The real story on Ryan’s elevation is that he is by far the most conservative Speaker in recent times. His voting record is far to the right of Boehner and other GOP Speakers of the current era, from Newt Gingrich (Ga.) to Denny Hastert (Ill.).
+
+Don’t forget: Ryan rose to prominence as the defiant right-winger who proposed, as top Republican on the budget committee, to change Medicare from a guaranteed health care program for the elderly to a limited, untested voucher plan. He also backed massive tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations.
+
+In almost 17 years in Congress, Ryan has been a reliable opponent of abortion rights and gay rights, and he supported President George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security.
+
+Despite that very conservative record, the new Speaker had to deflect charges from the Freedom Caucus, conservative talk radio, websites and bloggers that he is just one more establishment Republican. That outrageous indictment fits with a Pew Research poll from May that found 75 percent of Republican voters want Congressional Republicans to obstruct, defy and challenge President Obama more frequently.
+
+The GOP’s deference to the far right has resulted in a backlash from liberal Democrats – around the nation and on Capitol Hill — that finds expression in the presidential bid of Sanders.
+
+Last year, my top member of Congress leapt to prominence on the power of the same backlash: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). She surfed a tide of populist anger among liberals over income inequality and the bailout of big banks and Wall Street.
+
+This year, the 74-year-old Sanders succeeded in channeling the same energy outside the halls of Congress. Democratic voters still strongly back former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the party’s 2016 nomination. But the unleashed, defiant roar of the party in 2015 can be heard at Sanders’s political rallies.
+
+He has been a political sensation, all year long, in every corner of the nation. He attracts energized, loud crowds by identifying the Republican majority in Congress as the tool of big business and extremely wealthy Americans including Charles and David Koch, and other plutocrats. Sanders’s anger at the power of big money is resonating among left-wingers looking to identify those responsible for rigging the economic and political system against workers, unions, students, immigrants and minorities.
+
+Sanders succeeded in forcing Clinton to do a flip-flop and become an opponent of Obama’s Asian trade deal. He lashed her for being slow to oppose the XL Pipeline. He critiqued her 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq.
+
+“He [Sanders] is where the heart – the economic heart and soul of the party is right now… And he’s got the outsider thing, which is so big this year,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said recently.
+
+Sanders and Ryan are the year’s political leaders in Congress because they captured that “outsider thing” for the left and the right.
+
+As the year ends both parties – and their leading men — are in a critical struggle over whether the “outsiders” are now in charge.
+
+Juan Williams is a co-host of FNC's ""The Five,"" where he is one of seven rotating Fox personalities.
+
+",REAL
+9111,"Walnuts Are Drugs, Says FDA","by MICHAEL TENNANT 
+Seen any walnuts in your medicine cabinet lately? According to the Food and Drug Administration, that is precisely where you should find them. Because Diamond Foods made truthful claims about the health benefits of consuming walnuts that the FDA didn’t approve, it sent the company a letter declaring, “Your walnut products are drugs” — and “new drugs” at that — and, therefore, “they may not legally be marketed … in the United States without an approved new drug application.” The agency even threatened Diamond with “seizure” if it failed to comply. 
+
+Diamond’s transgression was to make “financial investments to educate the public and supply them with walnuts,” as William Faloon of Life Extension magazine put it. On its website and packaging, the company stated that the omega-3 fatty acids found in walnuts have been shown to have certain health benefits, including reduced risk of heart disease and some types of cancer. These claims, Faloon notes, are well supported by scientific research: “ Life Extension has published 57 articles that describe the health benefits of walnuts”; and “The US National Library of Medicine database contains no fewer than 35 peer-reviewed published papers supporting a claim that ingesting walnuts improves vascular health and may reduce heart attack risk.” 
+
+This evidence was apparently not good enough for the FDA, which told Diamond that its walnuts were “misbranded” because the “product bears health claims that are not authorized by the FDA.” 
+
+The FDA’s letter continues: “We have determined that your walnut products are promoted for conditions that cause them to be drugs because these products are intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease.” Furthermore, the products are also “misbranded” because they “are offered for conditions that are not amenable to self-diagnosis and treatment by individuals who are not medical practitioners; therefore, adequate directions for use cannot be written so that a layperson can use these drugs safely for their intended purposes.” Who knew you had to have directions to eat walnuts? 
+
+“The FDA’s language,” Faloon writes, “resembles that of an out-of-control police state where tyranny [reigns] over rationality.” He adds: 
+
+This kind of bureaucratic tyranny sends a strong signal to the food industry not to innovate in a way that informs the public about foods that protect against disease. While consumers increasingly reach for healthier dietary choices, the federal government wants to deny food companies the ability to convey findings from scientific studies about their products. 
+
+Walnuts aren’t the only food whose health benefits the FDA has tried to suppress. Producers of pomegranate juice and green tea, among others, have felt the bureaucrats’ wrath whenever they have suggested that their products are good for people. 
+
+Meanwhile, Faloon points out, foods that have little to no redeeming value are advertised endlessly, often with dubious health claims attached. For example, Frito-Lay is permitted to make all kinds of claims about its fat-laden, fried products, including that Lay’s potato chips are “heart healthy.” Faloon concludes that “the FDA obviously does not want the public to discover that they can reduce their risk of age-related disease by consuming healthy foods. They prefer consumers only learn about mass-marketed garbage foods that shorten life span by increasing degenerative disease risk.” 
+
+Faloon thinks he knows why this is the case. First, by stifling competition from makers of more healthful alternatives, junk food manufacturers, who he says “heavily lobb[y]” the federal government for favorable treatment, will rake in ever greater profits. Second, by making it less likely that Americans will consume healthful foods, big pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers stand to gain by selling more “expensive cardiac drugs, stents, and coronary bypass procedures” to those made ill by their diets. 
+
+But people are starting to fight back against the FDA’s tactics. “The makers of pomegranate juice, for example, have sued the FTC for censoring their First Amendment right to communicate scientific information to the public,” Faloon reports. Congress is also getting into the act with a bill, the Free Speech About Science Act (H.R. 1364), that, Faloon writes, “protects basic free speech rights, ends censorship of science, and enables the natural health products community to share peer-reviewed scientific findings with the public.” 
+
+Of course, if the Constitution were being followed as intended, none of this would be necessary. The FDA would not exist; but if it did, as a creation of Congress it would have no power to censor any speech whatsoever. If companies are making false claims about their products, the market will quickly punish them for it, and genuine fraud can be handled through the courts. In the absence of a government agency supposedly guaranteeing the safety of their food and drugs and the truthfulness of producers’ claims, consumers would become more discerning, as indeed they already are becoming despite the FDA’s attempts to prevent the dissemination of scientific research. Besides, as Faloon observed, “If anyone still thinks that federal agencies like the FDA protect the public, this proclamation that healthy foods are illegal drugs exposes the government’s sordid charade.”",FAKE
+7294,Hotel CEO Caught Celebrating Using Government to Make Airbnb Illegal So They Can Price Gouge,"Home / Be The Change / Government Corruption / Hotel CEO Caught Celebrating Using Government to Make Airbnb Illegal So They Can Price Gouge Hotel CEO Caught Celebrating Using Government to Make Airbnb Illegal So They Can Price Gouge John Vibes October 27, 2016 Leave a comment 
+New York, NY – Since the days of mercantilism began many ages ago, established businesses have used the government to stomp out their up and coming competition. In today’s “sharing economy” this relationship between government and big business is more prevalent than ever. 
+In the case of rideshare services, Uber and Lyft, these new services have been vehemently opposed by Taxi companies, who offer a more expensive and less efficient service. Despite the fact that their service is sub-par, they are licensed and regulated by the government and thus are viewed as an accepted business by the establishment. 
+The same principle is at play in the proliferation of Airbnb, the service that allows people to rent out rooms to others in a cheaper and more efficient way than hotels. Hotel companies are obviously not very happy about the rise of Airbnb, and have been lobbying the government to shut down their competition ever since the sharing economy began to threaten their bottom line. 
+In New York, this lobbying has had success, and anti-Airbnb laws were passed that will force the service out of the city. 
+The recently signed law will impose a $7,500 fine onto anyone who lists their property on the site. 
+For anyone that did not think that the hotels in the city had a motive to force Airbnb out of the region, a Hotel executive was recently caught telling his shareholders that the passing of the new law will allow him to raise prices in his hotels. 
+In a call with shareholders last week , Mike Barnello, CEO of LaSalle Hotel Properties said that the new law “should be a big boost in the arm for the business, certainly in terms of the pricing.” 
+Barnello and other representatives at LaSalle declined to comment on the report, but Airbnb’s public affairs director, Nick Papas, pointed out the obvious in a recent interview. 
+“They say a gaffe is unintentionally saying what you really believe – and the latest gaffe from the hotel cartel makes it clear that the New York bill was all about protecting the hotel industry’s bottom line. Albany back-room dealing rewarded the price-gouging hotel industry and middle-class families will pay the price,” Papas said. 
+This is not an isolated incident either, hotel executives have actually been very open about their true motives for opposing Airbnb. In a similar call last year, Jon Bortz, CEO of Pebblebrook Hotel Trust said that Airbnb prevents him from being able to gouge customers. He literally used the word “gouge” according to the Wall Street Journal. 
+In the call, he said that Airbnb takes away his “ability to price at maybe what the customer would describe as sort of gouging rates. I’d say we’ve lost a lot of that ability at this point within the major markets where these events take place.” 
+The battle will be long and hard, and the government, along with these entrenched corporations, will lock up many innocent entrepreneurs. However, history has shown that innovation always wins out in the face of this type of government protectionism. After all, the record industry is now dwarfed by free streaming services, and we are lighting our homes with electric lights instead of candles. John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. John is currently battling cancer naturally , without any chemo or radiation, and will be working to help others through his experience, if you wish to contribute to his treatments please donate here . Share",FAKE
+899,Sanders: Democratic Party hasn't been fair to me,"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
+2012,"Bobby Jindal, raised Hindu, uses story of Christian conversion to woo evangelicals for potential 2016 bid","A dozen politically active pastors came here for a private dinner Friday night to hear a conversion story unique in the context of presidential politics: how Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal traveled from Hinduism to Protestant Christianity and, ultimately, became what he calls an “evangelical Catholic.”
+
+Over two hours, Jindal, 42, recalled talking with a girl in high school who wanted to “save my soul,” reading the Bible in a closet so his parents would not see him and feeling a stir while watching a movie during his senior year that depicted Jesus on the cross.
+
+“I was struck, and struck hard,” Jindal told the pastors. “This was the Son of God, and He had died for our sins.”
+
+Jindal’s session with the Christian clergy, who lead congregations in the early presidential battleground states of Iowa and South Carolina, was part of a behind-the-scenes effort by the Louisiana governor to find a political base that could help propel him into the top tier of Republican candidates seeking to run for the White House in 2016.
+
+Known in GOP circles mostly for his mastery of policy issues such as health care, Jindal, a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of the Ivy League’s Brown University, does not have an obvious pool of activist supporters to help drive excitement outside his home state. So he is harnessing his religious experience in a way that has begun to appeal to parts of the GOP’s influential core of religious conservatives, many of whom have yet to find a favorite among the Republicans eyeing the presidential race.
+
+Other potential 2016 GOP candidates are wooing the evangelical base, including Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
+
+But over the weekend in Lynchburg — a mecca of sorts for evangelicals as the home of Liberty University, founded in the 1970s by the Rev. Jerry Falwell — Jindal appeared to make progress.
+
+In addition to his dinner with the pastors, he delivered a well-received “call to action” address to 40,000 Christian conservatives gathered for Liberty’s commencement ceremony, talking again about his faith while assailing what he said was President Obama’s record of attacking religious liberty.
+
+The pastors who came to meet Jindal said his intimate descriptions of his experiences stood out.
+
+“He has the convictions, and he has what it takes to communicate them,” said Brad Sherman of Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville, Iowa. Sherman helped former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in his winning 2008 campaign for delegates in Iowa.
+
+Another Huckabee admirer, the Rev. C. Mitchell Brooks of Second Baptist Church in Belton, S.C., said Jindal’s commitment to Christian values and his compelling story put him “on a par” with Huckabee, who was a Baptist preacher before entering politics.
+
+The visiting pastors flew to Lynchburg over the weekend at the invitation of the American Renewal Project, a well-funded nonprofit group that encourages evangelical Christians to engage in the civic arena with voter guides, get-out-the-vote drives and programs to train pastors in grass-roots activism. The group’s founder, David Lane, has built a pastor network in politically important states such as Iowa, Missouri, Ohio and South Carolina and has led trips to Israel with Paul and others seeking to make inroads with evangelical activists.
+
+The group that Lane invited to Lynchburg included Donald Wild­mon, a retired minister and founder of the American Family Association, a prominent evangelical activist group that has influence through its network of more than 140 Christian radio stations.
+
+Most of the pastors that Lane’s organization brought to Lynchburg had not met Jindal. But they said he captured their interest recently when he stepped forward to defend Phil Robertson, patriarch of the “Duck Dynasty” television-show family, amid a controversy over disparaging remarks he made about gays in an interview with GQ magazine.
+
+Throughout his Lynchburg visit, Jindal presented himself as a willing culture warrior.
+
+During his commencement address Saturday, he took up the cause of twin brothers whose HGTV reality series about renovating and reselling houses, “Flip It Forward,” was canceled last week after a Web site revealed that they had protested against same-sex marriage at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.
+
+The siblings, Jason and David Benham, both Liberty graduates, attended the graduation and a private lunch with Jindal, who called the action against them “another demonstration of intolerance from the entertainment industry.”
+
+“If these guys had protested at the Republican Party convention, instead of canceling their show, HGTV would probably have given them a raise,” Jindal said as the Liberty crowd applauded.
+
+He cited the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, which faced a legal challenge after refusing to provide employees with insurance coverage for contraceptives as required under the Affordable Care Act. Members of the family that owns Hobby Lobby, who have become heroes to many religious conservatives, have said that they are morally opposed to the use of certain types of birth control and that they considered the requirement a violation of their First Amendment right to religious freedom.
+
+The family was “committed to honor the Lord by being generous employers, paying well above minimum wage and increasing salaries four years in a row even in the midst of the enduring recession,” Jindal told the Liberty graduates. “None of this matters to the Obama administration.”
+
+But for the pastors who came to see Jindal in action, the governor’s own story was the highlight of the weekend. And in many ways, he was unlike any other aspiring president these activists had met.
+
+Piyush Jindal was born in 1971, four months after his parents arrived in Baton Rouge, La., from their native India. He changed his name to Bobby as a young boy, adopting the name of a character on a favorite television show, “The Brady Bunch.”
+
+His decision to become a Christian, he told the pastors, did not come in one moment of lightning epiphany. Instead, he said, it happened in phases, growing from small seeds planted over time.
+
+Jindal recalled that his closest friend from grade school gave him a Bible with his name emblazoned in gold on the cover as a Christmas present. It struck him initially as an unimpressive gift, Jindal told the pastors.
+
+“Who in the world would spend good money for a Bible when everyone knows you can get one free in any hotel?” he recalled thinking at the time. “And the gold lettering meant I couldn’t give it away or return it.”
+
+His religious education reached a higher plane during his junior year in high school, he told his dinner audience. He wanted to ask a pretty girl on a date during a hallway conversation, and she started talking about her faith in God and her opposition to abortion. The girl invited him to visit her church.
+
+Jindal said he was skeptical and set out to “investigate all these fanciful claims” made by the girl and other friends. He started reading the Bible in his closet at home. “I was unsure how my parents would react,” he said.
+
+After the stirring moment when he saw Christ depicted on the cross during the religious movie, the Bible and his very existence suddenly seemed clearer to him, Jindal told the pastors.
+
+Jindal did not dwell on his subsequent conversion to Catholicism just a few years later in college, where he said he immersed himself in the traditions of the church.
+
+He touched on it briefly during the commencement address, noting in passing that “I am best described as an evangelical Catholic.” Mostly, he sought to showcase the ways in which he shares values with other Christian conservatives.
+
+“I read the words of Jesus Christ, and I realized that they were true,” Jindal told the graduates Saturday, offering a less detailed accounting of his conversion than he had done the night before with the pastors. “I used to think that I had found God, but I believe it is more accurate to say that He found me.”",REAL
+4281,Conservatives in a meltdown: National Review’s confused “Against Trump” issue is an amazing testament to the right’s implosion,"The big release of the latest National Review edition, with a cover declaring “Against Trump,” on Thursday night was above all other things a wonderful gift not just to liberals, but anyone who lives outside of the conservative tribe. Because it gives us a glimpse, however temporary, of what it feels like to be a Trump supporter. I defy readers to take one look at the cover and not feel an overwhelming surge of contempt for these establishment conservatives who love to pander to the camo-crowd when it suits them, but get fussy when the rubes rise up and start demanding real skin in the game. You want to rub their smug little faces right in Donald Trump’s ridiculous hair and ask how they like those apples.
+
+Any discerning reader knows that, on some level, you’re meant to root for the monster to turn on Dr. Frankenstein, for the Pied Piper to take the children away, for Satan to finally come for Dr. Faustus. And so it’s impossible not to take pleasure in watching the conservative base come extract its pound of Trump-shaped flesh out of the establishment.
+
+It’s no mystery why the National Review and their supporters hate Trump. He’s vulgar and embarrassing and he does an even better job of exploiting the right-wing rubes and their racism and their provincialism and their ridiculous sense of oppression than they do. They are, in other words, haters. And Trump dismissed them as the haters they are with ease during his press conference Thursday night where he called the National Review a “dead paper” that almost no one reads anymore.
+
+This impression is driven home by actually reading the issue. The editors can’t quite seem to decide what their exact objections to Trump are. Is it that he’s driving the right too far in the direction of fascism or that he’s a secret liberal in disguise? Both! Whatever you need to hear! The strategy is argument through overwhelming. They’ll throw everything they’ve got, even contradictory stuff, at the reader and hope the sheer volume of words impresses them enough to vote for Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush.
+
+The everything-and-the-kitchen-sink strategy produces some hilarious contradictions. The main anti-Trump editorial, written by the editors, darkly warns that Trump isn’t the racist that his followers think he is. “Trump says he will put a big door in his beautiful wall, an implicit endorsement of the dismayingly conventional view that current levels of legal immigration are fine,” they write, even trying to get the reader to believe that Trump’s mass deportation plan is “poorly disguised amnesty”.
+
+But then, in the writer round-up, we’re hearing a different story. “Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign,” David Boaz sniffs, adding that America “aspired to rise above such prejudices and guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone.”
+
+So which is it, guys? Is Trump offensive because he’s too nativist or because he’s not devoted enough to keeping the foreigners out? Whatever will make you not vote for him, I guess.
+
+A similar question emerges when it comes to the conservative obsession with masculinity, which they confuse with strength. The editors write that Trump “has an astonishing weakness for flattery, falling for Vladimir Putin after a few coquettish bats of the eyelashes from the Russian thug.”
+
+On the other hand, Ben Domenech worries that Trump is “a tyrannical monarch” who he believes is too eager to “impose [his] will on the nation”. Mona Charen chimes in agreement, saying “conservatism implies a certain modesty about government.” So which is it? Does a big ego make one weak or is the problem that it makes one too strong and authoritarian? Both, I guess! Depends on if you’re more of an anxious masculinity conservative or if you’re one who likes to delude yourself into believing you’re a libertarian sort. Either way, don’t vote Trump! The self-contradictions are particularly amusing, to me at least, on the issue of women. Charen denounces Trump for his need to “constantly to insult and belittle others including, or perhaps especially, women”. But she and many of the other writers also warn the reader about Trump’s pro-choice past, insinuating that he’s not on board with the anti-choice movement. A movement, may I remind you, that is passing mandatory ultrasound and waiting period laws and other medically unnecessary regulations, for the purpose of insulting and shaming women. This self-important National Review manifesto can’t even decide how to feel about the practice of insulting and belittling people. On one hand, as Charen writes, they believe it’s a sign of “a pitifully insecure person”. What then to make of the fact that much of the anti-Trump argument is rooted in cheap shots at the man, from the you’re-a-girl insult regarding his behavior around Putin to Mark Helprin’s swipe at Trump for having “hair like the tinsel on discarded Christmas trees”. I guess everyone at the National Review is a “pitifully insecure person”, so why is it only a crime when said insulter is Donald Trump? Is it because he’s better at it than you guys? It’s tough to say what the National Review expected out of this, besides selling more issues. And even that has a strong possibility of backfiring, as this attack gave Trump an opportunity to imply, with cause, that they are using his name to bolster their declining sales. If the idea was to pry base voters off Trump, good luck with that. All this does is confirm base voter suspicions that the conservative establishment sees them as a bunch of useful idiots who are to be slapped down the second they start thinking they have a real voice in the movement. If the idea was to take a stand and lay out a clear line between the bellicose base and the more refined party elite, well, that’s backfiring, too, as the RNC reacted to all this by disinviting the National Review to partner with them in the Republican debates. In his anti-Trump screed, Ben Domenech gets on his high horse about how ours is supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people,”  which he claims Trump is threatening. Keep telling yourself that, buddy. Because it looks a whole lot like Trump’s popularity is due to “the people” revolting against a system where the establishment calls all the shots. And National Review’s flailing shows that the establishment has no idea what to do with that.",REAL
+6389,"Reinventing Democracy in America Starts by Voting, Then Building an Accountability Movement","Reinventing Democracy in America Starts by Voting, Then Building an Accountability Movement Posted on Nov 2, 2016 ( The Prophet / CC BY-SA 2.0 ) 
+Voting is supposed to be a constitutional right in the United States. But the sad truth is that voting is a privilege . This reality has been made colder since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. 
+Steps have been taken to curtail the impact of that decision— Shelby County v. Holder —on the 2016 general election, but voter discrimination still exists. Some Americans have fewer rights than others. Compare minorities, the poor, immigrants, felons, ex-convicts and the elderly with well-off whites, the educated and so-called 1 percenters. Whose voices do you think are heard more? The current system has been designed to maintain the status quo and keep the disenfranchised from changing their status. Discriminatory voting laws compound the problem . 
+  
+According to the Brennan Center for Justice, new voting restrictions are in place in 14 states this year: “The new laws range from strict photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to registration restrictions. Those 14 states are: Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.” 
+Voter suppression is nothing new. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Caleb Crain provides a history lesson in “ The Case Against Democracy ”: 
+In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement had discredited them. 
+The article reviews a new book called “Against Democracy,” by Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown University who argues for “epistocracy,” a word (coined by another political philosopher, David Estlund of Brown) that means “government by the knowledgeable.” Brennan believes that uninformed voters do more damage than good, so decision-making should be left to the informed. In other words, voting should not be a duty for all. 
+That’s a radical idea. But in a way, such thinking aligns with how the Founding Fathers viewed the electorate, Crain acknowledges. He cites a warning from James Madison: “There are particular moments in public affairs, when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?” 
+Madison wrote those words (under the pseudonym Publius) for Federalist No. 63 —an essay that was part of The Federalist Papers—to explain the concept of the United States Senate. He went on to say: 
+The people can never willfully betray their own interests; but they may possibly be betrayed by the representatives of the people; and the danger will be evidently greater where the whole legislative trust is lodged in the hands of one body of men, than where the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies is required in every public act. 
+The difference most relied on, between the American and other republics, consists in the principle of representation; which is the pivot on which the former move, and which is supposed to have been unknown to the latter, or at least to the ancient part of them. ... 
+In the most pure democracies ... many of the executive functions were performed, not by the people themselves, but by officers elected by the people, and representing the people in their executive capacity. 
+... 
+Besides the conclusive evidence resulting from this assemblage of facts, that the federal Senate will never be able to transform itself, by gradual usurpations, into an independent and aristocratic body, we are warranted in believing, that if such a revolution should ever happen from causes which the foresight of man cannot guard against, the House of Representatives, with the people on their side, will at all times be able to bring back the Constitution to its primitive form and principles. Against the force of the immediate representatives of the people, nothing will be able to maintain even the constitutional authority of the Senate, but such a display of enlightened policy, and attachment to the public good, as will divide with that branch of the legislature the affections and support of the entire body of the people themselves. 
+Here’s another radical idea: Instead of having only a few informed people make decisions for everyone, how about we make everyone informed by providing the same, free educational opportunities for every U.S. citizen? 
+Over the 240 years of the American experiment, the nation has moved away from its early ideals. Democracy has been corrupted, becoming the perverted form of corporatocracy and plutocracy we now have. The only way we can fix the defects in our system is by voting in principled leaders, then insisting they follow through on what they promise. If they do not, we must vote them out and put people in power who do. 
+Start in your own community. It will require some sacrifice. 
+Lee Ellis knows about all about sacrifice . He spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He has written two books on honor, “ Engaging With Honor ” and “ Leading With Honor .” He has not lost faith in the United States and believes voting is a key to restoring honor to America. 
+“When you become indifferent and refuse to stand up for your ideas, you forfeit and must live by the ideas of others,” Ellis told Truthdig in a telephone interview. “You are making a choice to let someone else make your choice for you. And I think that is a terrible way to live. We cannot afford to be indifferent about these key decisions. Evaluate the risk of the candidates. There are no risk-free choices. We’re always taking a risk. Which is the most likely to pursue the principles that you feel are important?” 
+Apathy is no longer an option. It’s not too late for America, but we have to act fast. Now is no time to be timid. 
+Look at the water protectors in Standing Rock in North Dakota. They are putting their lives on the line for us, our planet, the fate of generations. If you are a responsible U.S. citizen who cares about the future of our world, you have a role in our survival. That starts by voting. To be a responsible voter requires being informed. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in political science or be the political equivalent of Ralph Nader . Anyone can know something . Everyone can do something . 
+Research the candidates. Read up on ballot initiatives. Learn about down-ticket races. Check your sources—make sure they are trustworthy. Share what you know (in a respectful way) with friends and family and on social media. Encourage others to do the same.",FAKE
+9227,PressTV-Huge blast kills 47 in Pakistan's Balochistan,"Pakistan People gather outside an emergency ward of a local hospital in Karachi after hearing the news of a bomb blast at Shah Noorani shrine Lasbella district, Balochistan province, Pakistan, November 12, 2016. (Photo by AP) 
+At least 47 people, including women and children, have been killed and over 110 others injured in a huge bomb explosion in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. 
+The blast hit Shah Noorani shrine in Lasbela district on Saturday evening, Balochistan's Home Minister Sarfaraz Bugti said. 
+The shrine is located about 100 kilometers north of the port city of Karachi. Staff members of a local hospital in Karachi wait for casualties of a bomb blast at Shah Noorani shrine in Balochistan province, Pakistan, November 12, 2016. (Photo by AP) 
+The injured, he added, would be taken to hospitals in Lasbela, Khuzdar or Civil Hospital in Karachi as there are no medical centers available in the area. 
+Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif denounced the bomb attack, calling on authorities to speed up the rescue operation. 
+Reports say some 500 people were in the shrine when the bomb went off. 
+""Every day, around sunset, there is a dhamaal (a Sufi ritual dance) here, and there are large numbers of people who come for this,"" said Nawaz Ali, the shrine's custodian. 
+The Daesh terror group has claimed responsibility for the deadly attack. 
+Pakistani security officials are saying the terrorist attack was in response to the killing of Jundullah chief by Pakistani police which took place in the early hours of Friday morning. 
+On October 24, Daesh also claimed responsibility for the killing of at least 60 people in an attack by its terrorists on a police college in Baluchistan’s provincial capital Quetta. It was one of the deadliest attacks on Pakistan's security forces in recent years. 
+In August, Daesh claimed responsibility for another attack on a gathering of mourners at a hospital in Quetta, where 70 people were killed. The attack was also claimed by Pakistani Taliban faction Jamaat-ul-Ahrar. 
+Pakistan’s restive and mineral-rich Balochistan province is rife with separatist, extremist and sectarian violence and has been the scene of several bomb and gun attacks over the past years. Loading ... ",FAKE
+9183,"What is an ""income"" tax and where did it come from? NOT the 16th Amendment!","License DMCA The financial system in America is a scam of world proportion. All of our lives, we've been taught, and often reminded, that the so-called ""income"" tax originated with the 16th Amendment in 1913, and authorized a tax on our earnings. The IRS repeatedly claims this as their authority to tax American's wages, but is this true? Have YOU ever looked into the evidence and history of this tax to see if you actually owe such a tax, or actually even receive ""income""? Most Americans will have to say, no they haven't. So, we simply plod on taking what we've been told as true and factual, and comply by voluntarily assessing ourselves every year without another thought... except that we hate having to do it unless it is to get back some or all of what should never have been taken in the first place. With the advent of the personal computer and the internet, things have changed. What once took many months or even years of research in law libraries and other sources of actual documents now takes days or weeks... perhaps months, and what is being discovered is not only revealing, it is shocking. Is it possible that we have been deceived for over 100 years on the topic of our financial system and ""income"" taxes? Let's start with in ""income"" tax. What does the 16th Amendment actually tell us? ""The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration."" The key words in this amendment are ""incomes"" and ""whatever source derived"". ""Income"" is the one which is grossly misunderstood. We will come back to what this amendment is actually speaking to further down in this article. First, we must realize how millions of people can be deceived... ""When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."" Dresden James. It's time we look carefully at the evidence of historical records and decide if this is the ravings of a lunatic, or simply a message based on actual evidence that has, at best, been misunderstood, or at worst, purposefully suppressed and manipulated for many decades. Reader beware: This will likely fundamentally change your outlook on things if you are willing to actually take the time to understand this fraud. It may seem boring and of little interest to you right here and now, but I can assure you, if you want truth, you most likely won't want to put this down until you've completed the series. Let's begin with the 16th Amendment's claimed source for the income tax. If you take a look at page iii of the preface to the 1939 Internal Revenue Code, ( click here ), you will see reference to the now standing tax laws being enacted as far back as July 1, 1862, and carried forward to today. - Advertisement - Huge portions of our modern body of lawful ""income"" tax law pre-dates the 16th Amendment. Congress published a comprehensive ""Derivation of Code Sections of the Internal Revenue Code of 1939 and 1954"" table ( click here ), dated January 21, 1992, which explicitly identifies the pre-16th origins of these still-current statutes. (Highlighted sections within pages 20-76). It must also be noted that the 1986 Internal Revenue Code is based on these enactments and is still in place today. Throughout the Derivation table, you will see that there are well over 300 examples of the pre-1913 16th Amendment throughout, proving that the ""income"" tax was not ""enacted"" through the 16th Amendment. So, we now have to ask a couple questions and look for the plain answers in the record. The first question is ""If there is substantial evidence that the income tax was not ""enacted"" in 1913, and no such tax on American's wages existed (at least for very long as it was declared unconstitutional) prior to the 16th Amendment, what law actually authorizes a tax on American's wages?"" The answer is, there is no actual law. Is there supporting evidence of this fact? Let the U.S. Supreme Court tell us the facts from those days; ""The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution has not enlarged the taxing power of Congress..."" This is brought out clearly by this court in Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., 240 U.S. 1, and Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co., 240 U.S. 103. ""We are of opinion, however, that the confusion is not inherent, but rather arises from the conclusion that the 16th Amendment provides for a hitherto unknown power of taxation; that is, a power to levy an income tax which, although direct, should not be subject to the regulations of apportionment applicable to all other direct taxes. And the far-reaching effect of this erroneous assumption will be made clear by generalizing the many contentions advanced in argument to support it."" Brushaber v. Union Pac. R.R. Co., 240 U.S. 1, 11, 12, 18 (1916); ""In the former case it was pointed out that the all-embracing power of taxation conferred upon Congress by the Constitution included two great classes, one indirect taxes or excises, and the other direct taxes, and that of apportionment with regard to direct taxes. It was held that the income tax in its nature is an excise; that is, it is a tax upon a person measured by his income . . . It was further held that the effect of the Sixteenth Amendment was not to change the nature of this tax or to take it out of the class of excises to which it belonged, but merely to make it impossible by any sort of reasoning thereafter to treat it as a direct tax because of the sources from which the income was derived."" ([14-15]; Peck & Co. v. Lowe, 247 U.S. 165 (1917). Brief for the Appellant at 11, 14-15; See also Stratton's Independence, LTD. v. Howbert, 231 US 399, 414 (1913)."" (Emphasis added - ""derived from"" discussed below). ""... It manifestly disregards the fact that by the previous ruling it was settled that the provisions of the 16th Amendment conferred no new power of taxation."" Evans vs. Gore, 253 US 245, 263 (1920). ""It was not the purpose or effect of that amendment to bring any new subject within the taxing power."" Bowers v. Kerbaugh-Empire Co., 271 U.S. 170; 46 S.Ct. 449 (1926). - Advertisement - ""... It manifestly disregards the fact that by the previous ruling it was settled that the provisions of the 16th Amendment conferred no new power of taxation."" Evans vs. Gore, 253 US 245, 263 (1920). ""It was not the purpose or effect of that amendment to bring any new subject within the taxing power."" Bowers v. Kerbaugh-Empire Co., 271 U.S. 170; 46 S.Ct. 449 (1926); So, if there was no ""new"" tax created by the 16th Amendment, as the Supreme Court has stated over and over again, how can the IRS make our wages ""income"", and how did this tax on our wages begin? The answer comes within the second question we must ask: ""What exactly is 'income?'"" Here is where the deceit so easily enters out lives. U.S. v. Ballard, 535, 575 F. 2D 400 (1976); (see also Oliver v. Halstead, 196 VA 992; 86 S.E. Rep. 2D 858); ""The general term 'income' is not defined in the Internal Revenue Code . . .",FAKE
+737,Will Latino loathing of Trump drive a voter movement to swing the election?,"Donald Trump’s rise is spurring a backlash from Latino communities across America that has the potential to prove a formidable barrier to the billionaire’s success in the November presidential election.
+
+From Florida to Nevada, Arizona to Iowa, and countless other states beyond, there is evidence that the sleeping giant of the Latino vote is stirring. Trump’s favorability ratings with Hispanic voters are running at historic lows, while he faces an increasingly well-organized nationwide campaign to oppose him.
+
+A Guardian exploration of three key swing states and survey of national Hispanic outreach groups has found that the presumptive Republican nominee faces an uphill struggle to repair the damage caused by his threats to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants and build a wall with Mexico.
+
+A poll of Hispanic Americans carried out by Latino Decisions and America’s Voice in April found some 87% of Latinos felt unfavorably towards him. Significantly, almost half said they felt more enthusiastic about voting in the presidential election than they did four years ago, and 41% of those said it was because they wanted to “stop Trump”.
+
+In Florida, groups report that new Hispanic voter registrations are running at 1,000 a week. (Some 2.6 million Hispanics are eligible to vote in Florida for this year’s general election, and about 800,000 of them have not yet registered.)
+
+That unprecedented number corresponds – not coincidentally, Latino organizers believe – with polls that show almost nine in 10 Latino Floridians view Trump unfavorably.
+
+
+
+In Iowa, the Latino community has been virtually silent until this year. In 2012 only 1,000 Latinos participated in the Iowa presidential caucuses; this year the number soared to 13,000 – about 25% of all registered Hispanic voters.
+
+“Clearly they were worried about the rhetoric, specifically of Trump. We could not have mobilized the community anything like as effectively without him,” said Joe Henry of the League of United Latin American Citizens.
+
+In Nevada, a state where almost one in five of the 1.9 million eligible voters are Latino, an aggressive push to mobilize the community has started to bear fruit among some 362,000 Latinos who are still unregistered for the November ballot.
+
+Even in Arizona, which has voted Democratic only once in a presidential race in the past 60 years, Hispanic activists hope to bring the state into play by registering up to 75,000 first-time voters. They have already expanded by 125,000 since 2010, to a total of 536,003 registered Hispanic voters (14.4% of the overall voter pool).
+
+“There is something new going on, something unique in the immigrant community,” said Luis Gutiérrez, a US Congress representative for parts of Chicago. “And it has something to do with the tenor and tone of the presidential race.”
+
+To what extent Hispanic Americans will be motivated to vote by Trump’s anti-immigrant remarks is one of the great unknowns of 2016. The Latino population continues to grow at a faster pace than any other demographic, from 19.5 million eligible Latino voters in 2008 to 23.3 million in 2012, with 27.3 million projected by November. That would amount to some 12% of the nation’s electorate in 2016.
+
+Yet the proportion who actually cast their ballot has remained stubbornly low. In 2012 it was only 48%, much lower than the figures for African Americans (66%) and whites (64%).
+
+“The Latino vote cannot be taken for granted, even with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee,” said Sylvia Manzano, a principal of the political consulting firm Latino Decisions. “Telling Latino voters that Trump is hostile to you is one thing – getting them to the polling stations another.”
+
+Against that backdrop of such unflexed political muscle, there are signs that 2016 may see a larger turnout. Mi Familia Vota, a not-for-profit group devoted to encouraging Hispanic participation, has reported a surge in interest in voter registration. In the first four months of this year it helped 18,450 Latinos to get on the voter rolls in six states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Texas.
+
+Three of those states, Florida, Colorado and Nevada, are likely to be among the handful of battlegrounds where the outcome of the fight for the White House will be decided. Small but increasingly well-organized Latino populations in North Carolina and Virginia could also prove significant.
+
+Outreach groups have been busily encouraging the 8.8 million Hispanic immigrants who are legal US residents to take up citizenship as the first step towards voting. Nationally, average requests for citizenship reached 65,000 every month in the five months up to January, with half the applicants being Latino. That’s a modest 15% increase on the same period in the previous year.
+
+Non-partisan groups working to increase Hispanic political participation hope to boost that number as the presidential election looms, largely on the back of Trump’s attacks. In a normal year, some 650,000 green card holders are granted citizenship; this year the groups’ goal is one million, although with the election now six months away it is not certain how many of those the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) would be able to process in time for them to secure a vote by November.
+
+Rocío Sáenz of the Service Employees International Union, which is part of a coalition that has helped 12,781 Latinos apply for citizenship in more than 300 “naturalization workshops” around the country, detects a new intensity: “There is a sense of urgency as a result of the hateful rhetoric about mass deportations, building walls, calling us criminals – this is personal for us.”
+
+Guardian reporters in three key states sought to answer the increasingly critical question: is 2016 the year the sleeping giant of the Hispanic vote wakes up?
+
+It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Florida: it has (officially at least) sided with the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1996. All of the contests have been close, with Obama taking the state in both his presidential runs by fewer than three percentage points.
+
+
+
+That paper-thin margin is vastly overshadowed by the potential of the Floridian Hispanic population – 24% of the total today, up from 17% in 2000. At the same time, the political affiliation of Latinos in the state has been drifting steadily towards the Democratic party, largely as a result of the influx of left-leaning Puerto Ricans to central Florida.
+
+When you add in the Trump effect, the billionaire’s prospects appear particularly bleak in Florida where recent polls indicate that close to 90% of Hispanic voters view him unfavorably.
+
+Latinos are registering to vote in “unprecedented” numbers to oppose him, advocacy groups say.
+
+“There’s a lot of Latinos who are very angry with Trump,” said Vivian Rodriguez, president of the Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Florida. “That’s created a wave of Latinos who want to get citizenship and get things going to vote in this election cycle.”
+
+The most recent figures from Florida’s division of elections showed that 1.8 million Hispanics registered to vote in February’s primaries, almost 150,000 more than the number who voted in the 2012 general election, when Obama carried the state with more than 60% of the Hispanic vote.
+
+With the number of Hispanics who registered for the Florida primary already so high, the figures suggest there may be an extraordinarily large turnout of Latinos for the general election in November. In 2012, the increase in registered Hispanic voters after the primary was 110,000. This year, the indications are it will be much greater.
+
+
+
+A record 2.6 million Hispanics are eligible to vote in Florida, an increase of half a million since 2012 boosted significantly by the mass influx of Puerto Rican US citizens, particularly around Kissimmee and Orlando, seeking to escape the worsening economic conditions in their homeland.
+
+
+
+That leaves about 800,000 eligible Hispanic voters who have not yet registered and if the feedback being received by the many outreach groups in the state is accurate – the National Council of La Raza alone told the Guardian it was signing up new Hispanic voters at a rate of about 1,000 a week – not many of them are going to be supporting Donald Trump.
+
+“Latinos are going to be voting in unprecedented numbers against the villains, the politicians who dehumanize immigrant families to score political points,” said Maria Rodriguez, executive director of FLIC Votes (Florida Immigrant Action Committee).
+
+“We’ve already been seeing the trend of a new generation of younger Cuban Americans registering as Democrats. There’s going to be an exodus from the Republican party; lots of Latino Republicans are going to switch to no party affiliation or the Democrats.”
+
+One of those is Luis-Carlos Fumero, a Miami-born Cuban who fits kitchens for his uncle’s condo renovation company and who fervently supported Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 2012 campaign. This time he says he will not vote.
+
+“I cannot support this man,” said Fumero, 25, of Trump. “This nonsense over the wall, not letting Muslims into America, what he says about Mexicans and about women, this man is loco.”
+
+The loss of support from Miami’s Cuban Americans could be a body blow to Trump’s hopes of carrying Florida in the general election. Historically a bulwark of Republican support, the influence of Florida’s Cuban voting bloc has already waned from 46% of the state’s eligible Hispanic voters in 1990 to barely 30% today, according to Pew research.
+
+Now there are clear signs that even that bloc might desert the Republican candidate, under the weight of Obama’s opening up of trade and travel with Cuba and with the rise of a younger generation of Cuban Americans who are less ideologically driven.
+
+In February’s primary, the heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade was the only county in Florida that Trump lost, and although he led Hillary Clinton 41-29 among Miami’s Cuban Americans in a Bendixen and Amandi poll this month, his support level is still far below the 64% Romney received from Cuban Americans statewide in 2012.
+
+Perhaps more worryingly for Trump, Miami’s influential Republican Cuban American political leaders continue to speak out against him. House representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Carlos Curbelo have said they cannot vote for him, and Tomás Regalado, the mayor of Miami and himself a Cuban exile, launched a searing attack on the presumptive nominee in the Miami Herald.
+
+“He mistreats people, speaks derisively of people,” Regalado said. “A president’s biggest asset is the bully pulpit. This guy is capable of creating national and international chaos.”
+
+Karina Ruiz de Diaz, president of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, takes the long view. “The Latino vote is still very young,” she told the Guardian. “We will reshape the state, it’s just going to take a little bit of time.”
+
+Arizona’s electorate is in the midst of rapid change. One in five eligible voters in the state are Hispanic, according to a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center. It estimates that 1.3 million Arizona Latinos will be eligible to vote in 2016, up from 796,000 in 2008.
+
+Young Latinos make up a large share of the Hispanic electorate. Nearly twice as many Hispanic voters in Arizona are millennials, compared with their white counterparts, according to 2014 Pew data.
+
+Arizona has historically been a conservative state. But the changing demographics and the prospective general election race between Trump and Clinton has activists and experts predicting that this will be the year Arizona Latinos realize their political force, and sweep Democrats in to power.
+
+“It’s exciting for us in Arizona because we keep getting talked about as a purple state, as possibly a swing state,” said Kate Gallego, the vice-mayor of Phoenix.
+
+That would be astonishing. Since the second world war, Arizona has only once voted for the Democratic presidential candidate: Bill Clinton in 1996. So could it happen?
+
+“Certainly John McCain thinks so,” Gallego said, referring to comments recorded at a private fundraiser in which the long-serving Arizona senator said Trump could threaten his chances of being re-elected. “If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30% of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life,” McCain is reported to have said.
+
+Yet even if record turnout were to turn the solidly red state blue, Arizona’s 11 electoral votes would probably be superfluous as the outcome is unlikely to shift the dynamics of the race.
+
+If Trump is to be the motivation that finally unleashes the electoral power of Arizona’s Latinos, the achievement will not be his alone. He will also have to credit the assistance of two of his most ardent supporters: Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, the self-styled “toughest sheriff in America”, and Jan Brewer, the former Arizona governor who signed into law one of the harshest state immigration measures in the country.
+
+In 2010, Arizona enacted Senate Bill 1070, a draconian law aimed at driving out the state’s undocumented immigrants that pushed the state to the forefront of an acrimonious debate over border security and comprehensive immigration reform.
+
+Yet instead of disappearing, the law drew many of the state’s undocumented immigrants out of the shadows. Latinos joined forces with business leaders, concerned about the economic impact of the law. Together, tens of thousands marched through the streets of downtown Phoenix in opposition.
+
+“We have seen many Trumps in Arizona,” said Ian Danley, a director with One Arizona, speaking after a meeting on voter suppression in Phoenix. “We were birthed out of SB 1070, which is a Trump-like policy. We weren’t prepared in 2010. We’re prepared now.”
+
+One Arizona, a non-partisan network of Hispanic and immigrant groups working to increase Latino voter turnout in the state, has registered between 110,000 and 125,000 new voters since 2010, and helped triple the number of Latinos enrolled in the state’s early voting system. Now the network has set itself the ambitious target of registering between 60,000 and 75,000 new voters by November.
+
+Because volunteers are restricted from telling registrants who to vote for and the group doesn’t track registrants’ party affiliation, it’s hard to assess “the Trump effect”. Anecdotally, several volunteers said it was not uncommon for registrants to ask which party Trump belonged to and then tick the opposite box.
+
+“People are paying a lot of attention,” said Raquel Terán, the state director for Mi Vota Familia, sipping vegan horchata at a coffee shop in downtown Phoenix.
+
+When Donald Trump came to Arizona in March, he held his rally in Fountain Hills, a predominantly white town in Maricopa County. He was joined by Brewer, the former governor, and introduced by Arpaio, the controversial sheriff who has cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in an ongoing racial profiling case that found his officers had targeted Latinos during raids and traffic stops.
+
+“We had a little problem. Some demonstrators were trying to disrupt,” Arpaio told the crowd, which began to boo and hiss. “If they think they’re going to intimidate you and the next president of the United States, it’s not going to happen – not in this town!”
+
+“I call that the hate and fear playbook,” said Petra Falcon, a long-time Arizona activist and director of the rights group Promise Arizona. “If you want to divide a country or a state, just take out that playbook and start talking about the harm immigrants do – they come here to take your jobs. They rob. He took that playbook from Arizona and is using it nationally.”
+
+The biggest challenge for Arizona’s Democrats remains voter turnout. There are approximately 170,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in the state, according to the latest data from the secretary of state’s office.
+
+In the primaries on 22 March, 55% of Republicans cast ballots, compared with 49% of Democrats. However, registered independents, who make up the largest share of Arizona voters but are not represented by a party, could not vote in either primary.
+
+At an outlet mall in Tempe, José Barboza and Francis Sullivan of Promise Arizona took turns approaching shoppers and sales associates with their clipboards.
+
+Jaritma Avilez told Barboza she was registered to vote and he moved on. But later Avilez admitted to the Guardian that even though she was registered, she didn’t plan on voting in November. “I don’t feel like politics really affects my life,” she shrugged.
+
+“In November, the Latino community is going to come out in large numbers,” Jocelyn Sida, a Nevada organizer for Mi Familia Vota, which works to increase Hispanic turnout, told the Guardian. “A lot of millennials like myself are getting involved in leadership roles to educate and engage the community, and it’s been very accepting. They’re not withdrawing, they’re not closing their doors to us. On the contrary they’re seeking us out to find ways to get involved.”
+
+With 17% of Nevada’s electorate being Hispanic, the Latino vote certainly has the potential to deny Trump victory through strong turnout. In 2012, 70% of Nevada Latinos voted for Obama, helping him to win the state by a comfortable six-point margin.
+
+“All the time Trump’s yelling about kicking people out the country. It’s horrible,” said Rodulfo Martinez, 60, a Las Vegas construction worker, expressing an anger felt by many. “The way he insults us isn’t right. Many of the things he says about the [border] wall and why Latinos come here don’t make sense.”
+
+A poll last month by Latino Decisions showed that immigration reform was the most pressing issue for Nevada Hispanics. The state has the country’s largest percentage of undocumented immigrants, many of whom count registered voters as friends and family.
+
+“Está loco,” said Vicky Legaspi, 36, echoing Fumero in Miami. A restaurant owner on Las Vegas’s working-class east side, Legaspi nearly choked on a spoon of ice cream when asked if she would vote for the celebrity businessman. “He just wants attention. He doesn’t care about this country.”
+
+Ana Hernandez, 34, a housekeeper, said Trump was “mean” and “has a bad heart” and that she intended to vote for Clinton because “first of all, she’s not a racist”, setting a somewhat low bar.
+
+Latino participation in Nevada’s 2016 Democratic caucus showed a 5% uptick over the 2008 contest, another encouraging sign for Clinton, who won the vote in both cycles. The primary season also saw Democrats build a 5% lead in voter registration in Nevada, while an ongoing “naturalization blitz” organized by progressive groups has brought thousands of new minority voters into the fray.
+
+At the start of this election season, Nevada had 362,000 potential new Latino voters, including 42,000 Hispanic youth who will come of voting age this cycle and 40,000 legal permanent residents eligible for citizenship, according to Mi Familia Vota.
+
+“It’s amazing to hear from people who never had a reason to vote, or speaking of the citizenship workshops, people who have never had a reason to become citizens until now,” said Laura Martin, associate director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (Plan), which promotes civic engagement. “We focus on low-income communities of color, so we meet lots of people at the bus station, the welfare office, or outside the dollar store. They used to not care, but now they see Donald Trump and that’s scary to them.”
+
+Additional reporting by Mona Chalabi in New York",REAL
+2680,Drudge goes all in for Trump,"Trump will also meet with retiring Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, former Georgia Gov. Sonny Purdue and Linda McMahon, a prolific Republican donor, two-time Senate...",REAL
+3059,New Study Shows Riots Make America Conservative,"The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon. “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox’s German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.” In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds to answer her own question in the negative.
+
+The direct costs of violent protests are fairly self-evident. People who may not have anything to do with the underlying grievances get injured or killed, their livelihoods are impaired, the communities in which the rioting takes place suffer property damage that can linger for decades, and the inevitable police response creates new dangers for innocent bystanders. The pro-rioting (or anti-anti-rioting) argument portrays this as the necessary price of worthwhile social change. Rioting can generate attention among people who might otherwise ignore the underlying conditions that give rise to it.
+
+
+
+It is surely the case that some positive social reforms have emerged in response to rioting. Lopez highlights the Kerner Commission and diversity efforts in the Los Angeles Police Department. But the question is not whether rioting ever yields a productive response, but whether it does so in general. Omar Wasow, an assistant professor at the department of politics at Princeton, has published a timely new paper studying this very question. And his answer is clear: Riots on the whole provoke a hostile right-wing response. They generate attention, all right, but the wrong kind.
+
+
+
+The 1960s saw two overlapping waves of protest: nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations, and urban rioting. The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson swept every region of the country except the South running a liberal, pro-civil-rights campaign; in 1968, Richard Nixon won a narrower victory on the basis of social backlash.
+
+Determining just what caused the change in public opinion is obviously tricky. Wasow approaches the problem in different ways. One method he uses is to compare the public’s concern for civil rights and its concern for “social control,” with violent and nonviolent protests. They match up pretty closely:
+
+Wasow has another even more persuasive method. He looks at county-by-county voting and compares it with violent and nonviolent protest activity:
+
+Examining county-level voting patterns, I find that black-led protests in which some violence occurs are associated with a statistically significant decline in Democratic vote-share in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. Black-led nonviolent protests, by contrast, exhibit a statistically significant positive relationship with county-level Democratic vote-share in the same period. Further, I find that in the 1968 presidential election exposure to violent protests caused a decline in Democratic vote-share. Examining counterfactual scenarios in the 1968 election, I estimate that fewer violent protests are associated with a substantially increased likelihood that the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would have beaten the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. As African Americans were strongly identified with the Democratic party in this time period, my results suggest that, in at least some contexts, political violence by a subordinate group may contribute to a backlash among segments of the dominant group and encourage outcomes directly at odds with the preferences of the protestors.
+
+Wasow finds that nonviolent civil-rights protests did not trigger a national backlash, but that violent protests and looting did. The physical damage inflicted upon poor urban neighborhoods by rioting does not have the compensating virtue of easing the way for more progressive policies; instead, it compounds the damage by promoting a regressive backlash.
+
+The Nixonian law and order backlash drove a wave of repressive criminal-justice policies that carried through for decades with such force that even Democrats like Bill Clinton felt the need to endorse them in order to win elections. That wave has finally receded and created space for sentencing reforms, demilitarization, an emphasis on community policing, and other initiatives that even have bipartisan support. If the violent protests in Ferguson and Baltimore supercede nonviolent protest, Wasow’s research implies that the liberal moment might give way to another reactionary era.",REAL
+3981,21 dead at Radison Blu hotel in Mali,"(CNN) Heavily armed gunmen on Friday fired indiscriminately at guests at a hotel hosting diplomats and others in Mali's capital, the maître d' told CNN.
+
+At least 21 people were killed in the attack in which an al Qaeda-affiliated group is taking partial responsibility.
+
+""These people started shooting. They were shooting at everybody without asking a single question. They were shooting at anything that moved,"" Tamba Couye said of the attack at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako.
+
+One man did yell ""Allahu akbar,"" said Couye, who was working in the restaurant where breakfast was underway. The attackers sounded like they were from northern Mali, he told ""Erin Burnett OutFront.""
+
+Couye said an attacker chased him from the hotel but he came back later to help because his instincts told him he needed to do so to save lives.
+
+Dozens of people were trapped in the building for hours, officials in the West African nation said, before Malian and U.N. security forces launched a counterattack and rushed guests away.
+
+Olivier Salgado, a spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali, put the death toll at 21.
+
+At least six people injured in the attack have been hospitalized, Health Minister Marie Madeleine Togo told state broadcaster ORTM.
+
+Al Mourabitoun, an Islamist militant group, claimed it was jointly responsible for the attack, according to Mauritanian news agency Al Akhbar. The group announced it carried out the attack with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the news agency reported.
+
+Al Mourabitoun said the attack was carried out in retaliation for government aggression in northern Mali, Al Akhbar reported. The group also demanded the release of prisoners in France.
+
+Algerian jihadist and the leader of the group, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, is ""probably"" behind the attack, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in an interview on France's TF1, but the French are not ""entirely sure.""
+
+Belmokhtar was the target of a June U.S. airstrike in Libya. Libyan officials said he had been killed but U.S. officials never confirmed his death publicly.
+
+The assault began about 7 a.m., when two or three attackers with AK-47 rifles exited at least one vehicle with diplomatic plates and entered the hotel with guns firing, Salgado said.
+
+The attack, Salgado said, came as the hotel hosted diplomatic delegations working on a peace process in the landlocked country, a former French colony that has been battling Islamist extremists with the help of U.N. and French forces.
+
+The Radisson chain said that as many as 170 people -- 140 guests and 30 employees -- had been there as the attack began.
+
+Malian soldiers and U.N. troops had the hotel surrounded, a journalist for ORTM told CNN from the scene. Two security personnel were injured, Security Minister Salif Traore said on ORTM.
+
+""We're still hearing erratic gunfire,"" journalist Katarina Hoije told CNN from near the scene Friday afternoon.
+
+No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
+
+The Radisson Blu Hotel is in an upscale neighborhood outside the center of Bamako, rising high above the dusty streets and surrounding houses. With 190 rooms and suites, it is known as a hub for international guests such as diplomats and businesspeople, and it is a 15-minute drive from Bamako-Senou International Airport.
+
+""I think this attack has been perpetrated by negative forces, terrorists, who do not want to see peace in Mali,"" Hamdi said.
+
+U.S. President Barack Obama said Saturday that the United States is still accounting for Americans who may have been inside the hotel.
+
+Speaking in Malaysia, Obama said that thanks to the swift action of Malian and other security forces, lives were saved. He said the victims were ""innocent people who had everything to live for.""
+
+The hotel attack, and the diplomats' meeting, came in a country that has struggled with Islamist extremists, especially since 2012.
+
+Taking advantage of a chaotic situation after a military coup in March 2012, Islamist extremists with links to al Qaeda carved out a large portion of northern Mali for themselves. When the militants tried to push into the south, France, at the Malian government's request, sent thousands of troops in 2013.
+
+The ground and air campaign sent Islamist fighters who had seized the northern region fleeing into the vast desert. The United Nations then established a peacekeeping mission in Mali that year, hoping to keep the government secure enough to continue a peace process.
+
+Though military pressure largely drove Islamist militants from cities, they have regrouped in the desert areas, said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Washington-based Atlantic Council.
+
+""Unfortunately, this (hotel) is a likely target"" because it is popular with international guests such as U.N. workers, Pham said.
+
+U.S. special operations forces were helping ""move civilians to secured locations as Malian forces clear the hotel of hostile gunmen,"" said Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command.
+
+Michael Skapoullis, who lives near the Radisson Blu, told CNN he was using the hotel's gym Friday morning when he noticed fellow exercisers leaving. He hadn't heard anything because he was listening to music, but he decided to follow.
+
+He walked to a door leading to the hotel lobby, and that's when he saw something was wrong.
+
+""When I opened the door, I saw, on the floor, bullets,"" Skapoullis said. ""So I gently closed the door, and ... I went back into the gym"" and eventually left the complex.
+
+Another man who'd been in the hotel told ORTM that he heard gunshots that he initially thought were fireworks.
+
+""Then we heard the hotel alarm. ... I walked out into the hallway, and I saw a lot of smoke,"" said the man, whom ORTM didn't name. ""Then I went back into my room to stay there.
+
+""Later, the Malian forces came to get us. ... Thank God we are now healthy and safe.""
+
+As news of the attack spread, media outlets and officials from a number of nations reported that some of their citizens were in the hotel or had been freed. A summary:
+
+• One U.S. citizen was killed, a senior State Department official told CNN. ""We express our deepest condolences to the family and friends of the deceased. ... Out of respect for the family, we have no further information at this time."" Of Anita Datar, her brother Sanjeev Datar, said. ""Everything she did in her life she did to help others -- as a mother, public health expert, daughter, sister and friend.""
+
+• ""About a dozen"" Americans were rescued, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said.
+
+• Geoffrey Dieudonne, an administrative counselor for Belgium's Parliament, died as a result of the attack, Parliament said. Details about his death weren't immediately clear; he was in Bamako as part of a three-day French-language convention.
+
+• Three Chinese nationals were killed, the political counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Bamako told media in his country. State-run CCTV reported that four other Chinese guests were rescued.
+
+• Seven Algerians, including six members of an Algerian diplomatic delegation, are safe after being trapped in the hotel, the state-run Algerie Presse Service reported. The Algerians were freed during a counterassault by U.N. and Malian forces.
+
+• Twenty Indian nationals, working for a Dubai-based company and staying at the hotel long-term, were safely evacuated, Vikas Swarup, a spokesman for India's Ministry of External Affairs, said on Twitter.
+
+• Twelve Air France crew members who were staying at the hotel were safely extracted, the airline tweeted. Air France has canceled all its flights to and from Bamako as a precaution, the airline said.
+
+• Turkish Airlines said at seven of its employees were staying at the hotel, and all had been freed by the afternoon.
+
+• Two German nationals were able to leave the hotel, Germany's Foreign Office said.
+
+The soldiers stormed the hotel to end a daylong siege that started when gunmen raided the hotel after attacking a military site nearby, witnesses said.
+
+At the time, the Malian army said the attackers were affiliated with the Macina Liberation Movement. Human Rights Watch has described the group as Islamists who commit ""serious abuses in the course of military operations against Mali's security forces.""",REAL
+5528,The Reopening Of The Clinton Email Investigation Is More GOP Hype Over Nothing,"The letter from FBI Director Comey announcing the reopening of the Clinton email investigation is already being blown up into more than it is. 
+Here is the letter via CNN’s Jake Tapper: FBI Dir Comey letter to congressional committee chairs re discovery of ""new emails…pertinent to the investigation"" pic.twitter.com/y4gvHiILLn 
+— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 28, 2016 
+As Republicans cheer because they think that they have been thrown an election lifeline, read the whole letter and look at what it says. The letter does not say that Hillary Clinton did anything wrong. The letter states that emails were found that were pertinent to the email investigation while looking into an unrelated matter. 
+The letter FBI Director Comey reads like what it is, an update on an investigation. The FBI is dotting the Is and crossing the Ts. Comey’s letter destroys the Republican claim that there was a conspiracy to cover up Clinton’s emails. Republicans, including Donald Trump, have spent months criticizing Comey’s investigation, but it turns out that they were wrong. 
+It would take something unprecedented and dramatic to change the FBI’s original findings. Director Comey made it clear that the agency’s work might not be completed before the election. 
+The email story that Republicans and the media love, but voters have never cared about is back in the news, but it remains an empty scandal. 
+The FBI’s reopened investigation does open the door for Republicans to continue their bogus witch hunt if Hillary Clinton wins the White House. Unless voters want two more years of conspiracy investigations instead of action, today’s developments have made voting for Democrats in House and Senate contests more vital than ever.",FAKE
+4509,"Anti-terrorism crackdowns may have spurred attackers, Belgian prosecutor says","The four men — two of them brothers — who turned ordinary morning commutes in Brussels into blood-soaked nightmares may have been spurred into action by fears that authorities were closing in on them, according to a note left by one of the attackers that was described by a prosecutor Wednesday.
+
+Days before the attacks on Tuesday, counter­terrorism police had raided their Brussels safe houses. An ally who took part in November’s Paris carnage was shot and captured by authorities. And Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, a 29-year-old Belgian with a thick rap sheet, wrote that he did not want to wind up in a prison cell, Belgian federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said Wednesday.
+
+The men — at least two of whom had direct ties to the Islamic State attacks in Paris — knew they had to act decisively. So they set out with explosives that ripped open a Brussels subway car and shattered the city’s main airport terminal, killing at least 31 people and injuring 300 in the bloodiest attack on Belgian soil since World War II.
+
+Bakraoui detonated a suitcase full of nails, screws and powerful explosives at the airport, killing himself in the process, Van Leeuw said. So did Islamic State bombmaker Najim Laachraoui, 24, who is also believed to have prepared explosives for the Paris attacks, according to an Arab intelligence official and a European intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
+
+An unidentified man who left an even larger suitcase of explosives at the airport is believed to still be at large, he said. That suitcase did not immediately detonate, sparing Belgium even more casualties.
+
+The country held a national minute of silence Wednesday led by Prime Minister Charles Michel, who laid a wreath at the Maelbeek metro station in honor of the victims. Thousands of Belgians gathered in a somber ceremony in front of an ornate 19th-century stock exchange building to light candles and lay flowers.
+
+The missive, contained in a computer that had been chucked into a garbage can near Bakraoui’s Brussels apartment, does not specifically cite recent raids across Belgium, including one that netted a key suspect in the Paris attacks. But its tone suggests a sense that the noose was tightening, Van Leeuw said.
+
+The computer message also gives apparent insight into the organization and motivation of militants who apparently turned their attention to Brussels after pulling off the Paris attacks that killed 130 people.
+
+In the note, Bakraoui described feeling pressure bearing down. He wrote that he was “in a hurry, no longer knowing what to do, being searched for everywhere, no longer secure,” according to Van Leeuw’s description of the message, which was not made public.
+
+Laachraoui’s involvement draws the boldest line yet between the Paris attacks and those in Brussels. His DNA was found on explosives in the Paris attacks, and authorities believe that he was versed in the Islamic State art of assembling powerful explosives from ingredients that are readily available. His participation in two attacks suggests that the Islamic State is increasingly able to strike on European soil — although his death may also mean that he feared imminent capture by European authorities.
+
+Terrorism experts regard bomb­makers, especially those trained in handling sensitive explosives, as among the most valuable and protected members of a terrorist organization. It is highly unusual for them to participate in suicide attacks themselves.
+
+[Why is Brussels under attack?]
+
+Laachraoui’s DNA was found in a Brussels apartment raided last week. The discovery of a militant cell there eventually led to the arrest of Salah Abdeslam on Friday. Abdeslam was the final at-large direct participant in the Paris attacks and is believed to have been the logistics mastermind.
+
+The computer file that prosecutors cited Wednesday does not mention Abdeslam by name, but it says the attackers feared that if they did not strike quickly, they risked winding up in prison alongside “him.”
+
+“If they drag on, they risk finishing next to him in a cell,” Van Leeuw said, paraphrasing the contents of the file.
+
+Van Leeuw described the file as a “will” discovered on a computer. He did not explain why authorities believed the computer belonged to Bakraoui.
+
+Bakraoui’s younger brother, Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27, is believed to have been the suicide bomber on a Brussels subway car that blew up as it sped out of a station underneath the heart of the European Union quarter of Brussels, an area packed with embassies and international organizations. That attack came 73 minutes after the one at the airport, meaning that commuters were already reading the news of the first explosions when the carnage reached them.
+
+Khalid el-Bakraoui appears to have been a kind of surreptitious real estate broker for the plotters, according to a European security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case. Using assumed names, he rented an apartment in the Forest area of Brussels where Abdeslam’s fingerprints were found and an apartment near Charleroi, Belgium, where Paris attack mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud stayed as he plotted the violence.
+
+Both Bakraoui brothers served prison time for violent crime, the European security official said. The announcement on Wednesday that two of the attackers were brothers highlighted another emerging tactic from the militant group: They would be the third pair of brothers involved in an Islamic State attack in Europe in the past 15 months.
+
+European security leaders planned to gather Thursday in Brussels to discuss whether to pursue new policies that would better pool information to counter terrorism.
+
+French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, visiting Brussels on Wednesday to extend his condolences, repeated past calls for sweeping new powers to be given to European intelligence agencies. “In the years to come, the [E.U.] member states will have to invest massively in their security systems,” he said.
+
+[Brussels terrorists probably used explosive nicknamed ‘the Mother of Satan’]
+
+Van Leeuw, the Belgian prosecutor, said the brothers had not previously been suspected of ties to terrorism.
+
+Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that Turkey had deported one of the attackers to Europe in July and warned European counter­terrorism officials that it believed the man was a militant, suggesting a serious lapse by Belgian authorities. Interpol had also issued a “red notice,” effectively an international arrest warrant, for one of the suspects at the request of Belgian authorities. It was not immediately clear when that notice had been issued.
+
+There were signs that an even bigger attack had been forestalled. Authorities found large stockpiles of bomb-building materials at Ibrahim el-Bakraoui’s apartment in the Schaerbeek area of Brussels, the prosecutor said: 33 pounds of TATP explosives, nearly 40 gallons of acetone, 8 gallons of hydrogen peroxide, detonators, and a suitcase full of nails and screws. Both acetone and hydrogen peroxide are easily obtainable; together they can be used to make potent explosives.
+
+It remained unclear Wednesday how many Americans had been killed in the blasts. In Washington, State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner said that “approximately a dozen” Americans were injured but that “a number” of U.S. citizens remained unaccounted for on Wednesday — without providing more specific figures. He said that U.S. diplomatic missions in Brussels were working to account for all of their own staff.
+
+Secretary of State John F. Kerry plans to visit Brussels on Friday on his return from a trip to Moscow.
+
+Griff Witte, Missy Ryan, James McAuley and Anthony Faiola in Brussels and Brian Murphy and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
+
+Live updates on the death toll, attack scenes and reactions around the world
+
+Why is Brussels under attack?
+
+At NATO headquarters, alert status raised just miles from attacks
+
+Five stories you should read to understand the Brussels attacks",REAL
+9261,"United States – reformation or fracture?, by Thierry Meyssan","United States – reformation or fracture? by Thierry Meyssan Observing the US presidential electoral campaign, Thierry Meyssan analyses the resurgence of an old and weighty conflict of civilisation. Hillary Clinton has just declared that this election is not about programmes, but about the question «Who are the Americans?». It was not for reasons of his political prgramme that the Republican leaders have withdrawn their support from their candidate, Donald Trump, but because of his personal behaviour. According to Thierry Meyssan, until now, the United States was composed of migrants from different horizons who accepted to submit to the ideology of a particular community . This is the model which is in the process of breaking down, at the risk of shattering the country itself.
+Voltaire Network | Damascus (Syria) | 26 October 2016 français Español italiano русский Deutsch Português ελληνικά Türkçe عربي During the year of the US electoral campaign that we have just weathered, the rhetoric has profoundly changed, and an unexpected rift has appeared between the two camps. If, in the beginning, the candidates spoke about subjects which were genuinely political (such as the sharing of wealth or national security), today they are mostly talking about sex and money. It is this dialogue, and not the political questions, which has caused the explosion of the Republican party – whose main leaders have withdrawn their support from their candidate - and which is recomposing the political chess-board, awakening an ancient cleavage of civilisation. On one side, Mrs. Clinton is working to appear politically correct, while on the other, «The Donald» is blowing the hypocrisy of the ex-«First Lady» to smithereens.
+On one side, Hillary Clinton promises male / female equality - although she has never hesitated to attack and defile the women who revealed that they had slept with her husband – and that she is presenting herself not for her personal qualities, but as the wife of an ex-President, and that she accuses Donald Trump of misogyny because he does not hide his appreciation of the female gender. On the other, Donald Trump denounces the privatisation of the State and the racketing of foreign personalities by the Clinton Foundation to obtain appointments with the State Department – the creation of ObamaCare not in the interest of citizens, but for the profit of medical insurance companies - and goes as far as to question the honesty of the electoral system.
+I am perfectly aware that the way in which Donald Trump expresses himself may encourage racism, but I do not believe for a second that this question is at the heart of the electoral debate, despite the hype from the pro-Clinton medias. It is not without interest that, during the Lewinsky affair, President Bill Clinton apologised to the Nation and convened a number of preachers to pray for his salvation. But when he was accused of similar misconduct by an audio recording, Donald Trump simply apologised to the people he had upset without making any appeal to members of the clergy. The currrent divide re-awakens the revolt of Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran values against those of the Calvinists, mainly represented in the USA by the Presbyterians, the Baptists and the Methodists.
+While the two candidates were raised in the Puritan tradition (Clinton as a Methodist and Trump as a Presbyterian), Mrs. Clinton has returned to the religion of her father, and participates today in a prayer group composed of the army chiefs of staff, The Family, while Mr. Trump practises a more interior form of spirituality and rarely goes to church. Of course, no-one is locked into the systems in which they were raised, but when people act without thinking, they unconsciously reproduce these systems. The question of the religious environment of the candidates may therefore be important.
+In order to understand the stakes of this game, we have to go back and look at 17th century England. Oliver Cromwell instigated a military coup d’etat which overthrew King Charles 1st. He wanted to install a Republic, purify the soul of the country, and ordered the decapitation of the ex-sovereign. He created a sectarian régime inspired by the ideas of Calvin, massacred thousands of Irish Papists, and imposed a Puritan way of life. He also created Zionism – he invited the Jews back to England, and was the first head of state in the world to demand the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This bloody episode is known by the name of the «First British Civil War».
+After the monarchy had been reinstated, Cromwell’s Puritans fled from England. They set up in Holland, from where some of them left for the Americas aboard the Mayflower (the «Pilgrim Fathers»), while others founded the Afrikaneer community in South Africa. During the War of Independence in the 18th century United States, we saw a resurgence of the struggle of the Calvinists against the British monarchy, so that in current manuals of British History, it is known as the «Second Civil War».
+In the 19th century, the American Civil War opposed the Southern States (mainly inhabited by Catholic colonists) to the North (mostly inhabited by Protestant colonists). The History of the winning side presents this confrontation as a fight for freedom in the face of slavery, which is pure propaganda. The Southern states abolished slavery during the war when they concluded an agreement with the British monarchy). As a result, we once again saw the revolt of the Puritans against the Brititsh throne, which is why some historians speak of the «Third British Civil War».
+During the 20th century, this interior confrontation of British civilisation seemed over and done with, apart from the re-appearance of the Puritans in the United Kingdom with the «non-conformist Christians» of Prime Minister David Lloyd George. It was they who divided Ireland and agreed to create the « Jewish national homeland» in Palestine.
+In any case, one of Richard Nixon’s advisors, Kevin Philipps, dedicated a voluminous thesis to these civil wars, in which he noted that none of the problems had been solved, and announced a fourth confrontation [ 1 ].
+The adepts of the Calvinist churches, who for the last 40 years have voted massively for the Republicans, now support the Democrats.
+I have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton will be the next President of the United States, or that if Mr. Trump were to be elected, he would be rapidly eliminated. But over the last few months, we have witnessed a large electoral redistribution within an irreversible demographic evolution. The Puritan-based churches now account for only a quarter of the population, and are swinging towards the Democrat camp. Their model looks like a historical accident. It disappeared in South Africa, and will not be able to survive much longer, either in the United States or in Israël. Beyond the Presidential election, US society will have to evolve rapidly or split once again. In a country where the youth massively rejects the influence of the Puritan preachers, it is no longer possible to displace the question of equality. The Puritans envisage a society where all men are equal, but not equivalent. Lord Cromwell wanted a Republic for the English, but only after he had massacred the Irish Papists. This is how it is at the moment in the United States – all citizens are equal before the law, but in the name of the same texts, black people are systematically condemned, while attenuating circumstances are found for white people who have committed equivalent crimes. And in the majority of states, a penal condemnation, even for a speeding ticket, is enough to cancel the right to vote. Consequently, white and black people are equal, but in most states, the majority of black people has been legally deprived of its right to vote. The paradigm of this thought, in terms of foreign policy, is the «two-state» solution in Palestine – equal, but above all, not equivalent.
+It is Puritan thinking that led the administrations of preacher Carter, Reagan, Bush (Sr. and Jr. are direct descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers), Clinton and Obama to support Wahhabism, in contradiction to the declared ideals of their countries, and today, to support Daesh.
+A long time ago, the Founding Fathers built communities in Plymouth and Boston which were idealised in the US collective memory. And yet the historians are formal – they claimed to be creating the «New Israël», and chose the «Law of Moses». They did not place the Cross in their temples, but the Tables of the Law. Although they are Christians, they attach more importance to the Jewish scriptures than the Gospel. They oblige their women to veil their faces and re-established corporaI punishment. Thierry Meyssan
+Thierry Meyssan Translation
+Pete Kimberley",FAKE
+9335,British PM Refuses To Withdraw Support For Saudi Arabia,"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Carol Adl in News // 0 Comments 
+The British Prime Minister has refused to withdraw her support for UK weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. 
+Theresa May also refused to withdraw support for Saudi Arabia’s place on the UN Human Rights Council despite the Kingdoms atrocities in Yemen. 
+During a debate at the House of Commons in Parliament on Wednesday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn confronted May over Saudi violations and called for an end to the weapons sales (see video below) 
+Press TV reports: 
+“The issues are being investigated… We are very clear that the only solution that is going to work for Yemen is actually to make sure that we have the political solution that will give stability in Yemen,” May told Corbyn and the parliamentarians. 
+Instead of answering the direct question, May spoke about the UK government’s contribution to the humanitarian aid provided to the crisis-torn country. 
+Corbyn also questioned May’s support for Saudi Arabia’s membership in the UN Human Rights Council. A crucial vote on the membership of Riyadh in the council will take place later this month. 
+London has repeatedly been blamed by human rights groups, including Oxfam and Amnesty International, for fueling the Yemeni war by supplying Saudi Arabia with weapons. 
+Since the conflict began last year, the British government has approved more than £3 billion ($3.7 billion) in arms sales to the Saudis and military contractors hope more deals are in the pipeline. 
+Yemen has been under almost daily airstrikes by Saudi Arabia since March 2015. International sources put the death toll from the aggression at almost 10,000. 
+Rights groups have also condemned the Kingdom’s crackdown on dissent and prosecution of pro-reform activists.",FAKE
+4451,Editorial: Presidential stakes are high for nuclear arsenal - The Boston Globe,"When President Truman approved the use of the world’s first atomic bomb, the weapon first had to be transported to the island of Tinian. Stowed in the hold of the USS Indianapolis in July 1945, the journey from San Francisco took 10 days. Flying time from the airfield to the city of Hiroshima clocked in at about six hours, and the bomb itself fell for 43 seconds before exploding.
+
+These hours, minutes, and seconds of history will be front and center this Friday, when Barack Obama becomes the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima. Yet aside from anniversaries, Americans don’t think much about nuclear weapons today. Perhaps it is the cultural hangover from the Cold War, which often seemed to test the limits of how much fear societies could endure. Perhaps with the bombing of Hiroshima passing from living memory, we’ve simply lost the vocabulary for talking about the mechanics of midnight, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists famously christened the end of the world.
+
+Instead, what is left is the absurdist shorthand: “the finger on the button.” What that cliched phrase means today is this: The US president could order a nuclear strike on, say Moscow, and the 12 million inhabitants there would be incinerated about 15 minutes later.
+
+The apparatus of calamity constructed over the past seven decades is more lethal now than it was in the summer of 1945, and it is far easier to use. Its future is worth considering, especially by those seeking the White House. Today, the United States has more than 7,000 nuclear weapons. Of those, 2,000 are deployed, which means they can be launched on a 15-minute alert on the authority of one human being.
+
+Nine months after Obama’s finger was first placed on the button, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in part for his stated goals of nuclear nonproliferation. The administration’s deal with Iran and its efforts to get more than a dozen nations to surrender bomb-grade material are important steps toward checking the spread of cataclysmic weapons.
+
+At the same time, however, the Obama administration oversaw the development of the B61 model 12, a new nuclear weapon that is small, accurate, and adaptable. In truth, this is what might be called a contradiction bomb: It is the most expensive nuclear weapon project in history, yet it is intentionally designed to get the least bang for the buck. It is a nuclear weapon that looks and feels and can be used like a conventional smart bomb. This ease — even plausibility — of use is what makes this weapon so dangerous.
+
+The Pentagon is also in the process of taking advantage of the already extreme accuracy of missile warheads by changing their fusing mechanisms so as to increase their ability to successfully destroy the hardest targets by a factor of three. This program will vastly increase the killing power of the entire missile arsenal and, in so doing, create the appearance that the United States is preparing to fight and win a nuclear war against Russia.
+
+Americans today have lots of pressing concerns — paying their bills, paying their debts, deciding whom to vote for. The Atomic Scientists even changed their clock in 2007 to reflect the threat posed by climate change rather than just nuclear annihilation.
+
+The country meanwhile spent its Cold War peace dividend on decades of forgetting the stakes, on trivializing the power of the presidency. After all, what really is an affair with an intern, a torture program, a terrorist attack on a remote embassy, when there’s an immediate and existential threat one push away?
+
+Which brings us to Peak Triviality — Donald Trump’s pursuit of the White House.
+
+Not only did Trump not know the basics of the US nuclear triad (the Pentagon’s land, sea, and air contingent of nuclear forces), he also rejects nonproliferation, a strategy fundamental to Western military thinking since Hiroshima. Conservative military thinker Max Boot calls Trump the country’s top national security threat, though surprisingly few Republicans publicly share that view.
+
+Lest drawing attention to this topic be perceived as fear-mongering, consider this interview Trump sat for in March with Chris Matthews:
+
+TRUMP: Look, nuclear should be off the table. But would there be a time when it could be used, possibly, possibly?
+
+MATTHEWS: OK. The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it. David Cameron in Britain heard it. The Japanese, where we bombed them in ’45, heard it. They’re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.
+
+TRUMP: Then why are we making them [nuclear weapons]? Why do we make them?
+
+Just because one political party feels that Trump is the most suitable soul to command the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal doesn’t mean the wider electorate should lose sight of the stakes.
+
+President Richard Nixon was famous for his “madman” theory of foreign policy, whereby his administration tried to convince leaders of enemy nations that he was mentally unstable and thus not to be antagonized. Should he win in November, Trump will have to go to extraordinary lengths to persuade friend and foe alike that he is both predictable and worthy of trust. The fate of nations may depend on it.",REAL
+5727,Proof God is on Duterte’s Side!,"Proof God is on Duterte’s Side! 
+Azzmador October 29, 2016 God gave this man three missions: Kill drug dealers – stop cussing – gas kikes! 
+These days it’s not very often a nation can say their leader has the approval of the Almighty God himself, but now, the Philippines can claim this distinction. 
+The Washington Post : 
+Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has made a solemn promise: no more swearing. 
+Duterte, who famously cursed the pope and used a slang term that translates as “ son of a whore ” while denouncing President Obama, said he was flying back from Japan late Thursday, looking at a vast expanse of sky, listening to his colleagues snore, when he heard a voice say, “If you don’t stop epithets, I will bring this plane down now.” 
+I know many of you may be skeptical of his claim, but not me. I’ve heard people claim they spoke to God many times in my life, and until now, there was always some personal agenda involved. When I was a kid, I had relatives tell me God wanted me to have a crew cut. Then there were the more famous situations like Oral Roberts saying that if his flock didn’t send him ten million dollars by a specified date, God would kill him, personally. 
+Then you had guys like Ted Haggard. I’m pretty sure God told him it wasn’t a good idea to be snorting meth off the units of male prostitutes while he was the pastor of an evangelical megachurch and spiritual advisor to the likes of George W. Bush, but if so, God’s words went unheeded. 
+Not so with the infamous Flip shitlord. 
+“And I said, ‘Who is this?’ So, of course, ‘it’s God,’” he told Filipino journalists late Thursday. 
+“So, I promise God,” he continued, “Not [to] express slang, cuss words and everything. So you guys hear me right always because [a] promise to God is a promise to the Filipino people.” God’s servant on Earth, Rodrigo Duterte, contemplating the sound of one hand killing all the drug lords. 
+Now there’s a man with his priorities straight. He identifies the speaker, and makes his promise, publicly, to God and his people, that he will obey. Of course, all fascists believe in a natural hierarchy, so his obedience just makes sense. 
+An important thing to note is, when God speaks, what he doesn’t say is just as important as what he said. He told Duterte, “stop cussing.” Nothing more. 
+Thank goodness he did not say “stop killing criminals.” I was pretty sure he wouldn’t, but you never know. What a relief… 
+Of course, not everyone is theologically adept, i.e. the author of the WaPo article. She took to Twitter to make some heretical and thoroughly unfair remarks. Err, to quote @astroehlein , ""Did God mention the death squads?"" https://t.co/QezjfCweEH 
+— Emily Rauhala (@emilyrauhala) October 28, 2016 
+No Emily, God did not mention the death squads, and any true believer knows this means he approves of them. 
+Where in the Holy Bible does it say you’re supposed to allow savage drug kingpins to wage war in your streets, killing innocents by the thousands, just so they can decide who gets to sell poison to your people and in what location? I’ve never read that part. 
+I cannot confirm whether or not Emily Rauhala is a Jew, but she’s WaPo’s “China Correspondent,” and her Twitter timeline reads like someone with a personal vendetta against the fantastic leader of The Philippines. 
+Whatever her problem is, she’d better get a handle on it, because in ten days we’re electing a Great Christian here as well!",FAKE
+9899,"Obama, Erdogan Discuss Need for Close Cooperation to Counter Daesh","Get short URL 0 6 0 0 US President Barack Obama spoke by phone with Turksih President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and noted the need for Washington and Ankara to coordinate efforts against the Daesh group in Syria, the White House said in a press release. 
+WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Erdogan is at odds with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi over Ankara's role in US-led coalition operation in Moshul after Abadi demanded Turkish troops withdrawal from the base in the northern city of Bashiqa. ""President Obama noted the need for close coordination between the United States and Turkey to build on these successes and to apply sustained pressure on ISIL [Daesh] in Syria to reduce threats to the United States, Turkey, and elsewhere,"" the release stated on Wednesday. ...",FAKE
+8196,Voter Dreading Being Sent Over To Visibly Stupid Poll Worker - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Trump Raises Concern Over Members Of Urban Communities Voting More Than Zero Times ATKINSON, NH—Warning supporters that the troubling practice could affect the outcome of the election, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump expressed strong concern Friday that members of urban communities were voting more than zero times, sources reported. Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Most Hotly Contested Down-Ballot Measures Of 2016 As Americans head to the polls, they will be presented with a number of issues to vote on besides choosing their representatives. The Onion gives voters an advance look at which measures will be included on the ballots in which states. New Heavy-Duty Voting Machine Allows Americans To Take Out Frustration On It Before Casting Ballot WASHINGTON—Saying the circumstances of this year’s presidential race made the upgrade necessary, election commissions throughout the country were reportedly working to install new heavy-duty voting machines this week that will allow Americans to physically take out their frustrations on the devices before casting their votes. Clinton Staff Readies EMP Launch To Disable All Nation’s Electronic Devices NEW YORK—In an effort to prepare for any new revelations that might emerge about her emails during her tenure as secretary of state, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reportedly told her staff Tuesday to ready the launch of several electromagnetic pulses to disable all of the nation’s electronic devices. End Of Section ",FAKE
+8391,North Korea Threatens ‘Sacred’ Nuclear War Against Israel if this country continue supporting ISIS,"Email 
+North Korea’s Foreign Ministry slammed the “shamelessness of Israel” on Friday, calling the Jewish State a “rogue group” that “poses a nuclear threat” and commits “terrorist attack[s]” against neighboring countries. On Friday the Korean Central News Agency released a statement attributed to North Korea’s Foreign Ministry that responded to comments Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made last week that were critical of the Hermit Kingdom. “This is an unpardonable insult and provocation to the dignity and social system in the DPRK and the choice made by its people,” the statement said of Netanyahu’s comments, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The statement then took issue with Israel’s foreign policy in the Middle East, stating: “Israel not only represents dictatorial forces for aggression that trample down the legitimate right of the Palestinian people and indiscriminately kill them but also is a rogue group that poses a nuclear threat and makes terrorist attack[s] on its neighboring countries with lots of nuclear weapons.” The statement was responding to comments Netanyahu made during a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last week, in which the Israeli leader repeatedly drew parallels between Iran and North Korea. “And, Prime Minister [Abe], we have something else in common,” Netanyahu began. “We are two peace loving democracies that face formidable threats from nearby rogue states.” “Both Iran and North Korea are governed by ruthless and extreme dictatorships, states that seek to bully and intimidate their neighbors, and in our case, to actually eradicate us from the face of the earth.” Noting that “Iran and North Korea have aggressive military nuclear programs,” Netanyahu repeated his plea to not allow Iran to use diplomacy to advance its nuclear program as he alleges North Korea did with the 1994 Agreed Framework. “Iran cannot be allowed to travel the road taken by North Korea.” It’s not the first time that North Korea has slammed Israel or even Netanyahu publicly. After Netanyahu criticized Pyongyang during a trip to Japan last year, the North Korean Foreign Ministry released a similar statement, which called Israel a ""cancer to peace in the Middle East.” It also accused Netanyahu of trying to use North Korea “to divert international criticism of Israel caused by its settlement activity and breakdown in the Middle East peace talks."" Similarly, in last week’s statement, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said, “Everybody knows about the shamelessness of Israel telling lies and making fabrications and pointing accusing fingers to others to justify its criminal acts and evade the censure and condemnation by the international community.” Besides trading public insults, Israel has long been concerned about North Korea’s support for Arab states that are hostile to Israel, as well as Iran. In fact, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War North Korea actually deployed a squadron of MiG-21s to Egypt, which engaged in a firefight with Israeli F-4s. Neither side sustained any damage. More recently, North Korea has been accused of proliferating ballistic missiles and nuclear technology to Syria and Iran. In 2007, Israel destroyed Syria's Al Kibar Nuclear Reactor that was reportedly built by North Korean engineers.",FAKE
+9009,Magnificent Jellyfish Gardens Purify The Water While Growing Food,"These Jellyfish Lodges are capable of purifying waterways, collecting discarded trash, and even growing nutritious food! By Amanda Froelich 
+Intriguing eco-friendly innovations are unveiled all the time, but the floating Jellyfish Lodge is probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. In addition to being aesthetically appealing, the lodges can purify the land, air, and water and grow nourishing food.
+Designer Janine Hung relays that the structures combine trash-collecting tentacles, aquaponic gardens, and a filtration system that all work to benefit the environment.
+
+The solar-powered lodges utilize aquaponic technology to grow fruits and vegetables while cleaning the air with an electrostatic system. Each structure features and interior garden that thrives by filtering polluted water. Additionally, long tentacle arms which appear similar to a jellyfish’s collect drifting trash without harming wildlife.
+Unfortunately, it’s not likely this design will be realized, as it only received an Honorable Mention award in this year’s Biodesign Competition , reports Inhabitat . However, it’s so neat we figured the concept needed to be shared.
+
+
+An intriguing feature of the lodge is that it can test water for toxicity and start the process of treating water through a unique microbial digestion chamber. Once the water is purified, it can be returned to the surrounding environment.
+If these structures are eventually created, they’d ideally be maintained by nearby residents who could utilize the foods in their holistic kitchens .
+
+Hung hopes that the Jellyfish Lodges are eventually constructed to serve as a solution to problems plaguing the world’s waterways, including acidification and pollution .
+Image Credit: Janine Hung 
+Source: True Activist 
+",FAKE
+2378,Here's why creating single-payer health care in America is so hard,"The Hillary Clinton campaign is taking some hard knocks from liberals over its maladroit attacks on Bernie Sanders’ single-payer proposal. In one sense, the knocks are well-deserved. Even if single-payer markedly lowers medical expenditures, proponents such as Larry Seidman estimate that a tax increase of at least 8 percent of GDP would likely be required to finance it. That’s a heavy political lift. It’s about as much as the entire federal income tax on individuals.
+
+Yet as proponents rightly observe, these taxes would replace many visible and invisible ways we now provide to support a health sector that consume more than 17 percent of our economy. The experience of peer industrial democracies suggests that a well-designed single-payer system would be more humane and markedly less expensive than what we have right now.
+
+Such a system would certainly be less convoluted and bureaucratically hidebound. Aggressively deploying government power to rein in prices, a well-designed single-payer system would be more fiscally disciplined, and would probably be more effective in targeting resources to best promote public health. Sanders deserves credit for noting the real virtues of a well-executed single-payer system.
+
+In another way, though, Clinton's critique raises uncomfortable questions that deserve greater attention. It’s commonplace (though true) to note that single-payer is beyond the current boundaries of American politics. But what if, by some miracle, liberal Democrats won comprehensive victories that created a window of opportunity in which single-payer becomes realistically possible?
+
+Imagine what would happen were President Bernie Sanders to sweep into office backed by a Democratic congressional majority similar to what President Obama enjoyed in 2008. Imagine further that President Sanders were sufficiently fortunate and skilled after that victory to enact a single-payer system. I wonder how different our policy dilemmas would really be from what we now face in implementing the Affordable Care Act.
+
+As I have written at length in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law (and draw upon here), an American single-payer system would be more complex and kludgy than many proponents have considered or admitted. The source of these problems resides in American politics rather than the technocratic or ideological premises of our health care system. A different system operating through the same political mechanisms would produce similar complexity and kludge.
+
+The pitch for single-payer is admirably simple: We cover every (legal) resident. We mail a Medicare card to everyone. Everyone is covered. That’s a lot easier to explain and market than it is to explain the convoluted structures of Medicaid and state marketplace plans.
+
+This is also a caricature of how such a single-payer plan would be passed and how it would touch the lives of millions of Americans. Single-payer would immediately raise myriad intricate and divisive transition issues. It would potentially uproot thousands of critical arrangements President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Sen. Reid struggled to leave intact.
+
+After all, ACA’s sales pitch to the healthy and insured was, ""If you like your insurance, you can keep it."" This pledge proved politically damaging when it could not be fully kept for several million people. Single-payer would be far more disruptive to even more people.
+
+It’s telling that no fully articulated single-payer bill was ever drafted as an alternative to the ACA. Such a bill would have been no less complicated, and would probably have been more encyclopedic than the ACA was. A huge reform that creates millions of winners creates millions of losers, too.
+
+As with ACA, the biggest winners would be relatively disorganized low-income people in greatest need of help. The potential losers would include some of the most powerful and organized constituencies in America: workers who now receive generous tax expenditures for good private coverage, and affluent people who would face large tax increases to finance a single-payer system. At least some of these constituencies would need to be accommodated in messy political bargaining to get single-payer enacted. And states would have a role to play, too, potentially replicating the messy patchwork we got with ACA reforms.
+
+Single-payer would require a serious rewrite of state and federal relations in Medicaid and in many other matters. It would radically revise the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which strongly influences the benefit practices of large employers. Single-payer would require intricate negotiation to navigate the transition from employer-based coverage. The House and Senate would be in charge of this tension, and at risk of the negotiations among key legislators and committees who hold sway.
+
+Single-payer would be openly or quietly opposed by virtually the entire supply side of the medical economy. We saw this dynamic during the political knife fight over ACA’s ""public option."" Early versions of the public option would have allowed consumers shopping in the state marketplaces to buy into some public insurance modeled on Medicare.
+
+Many stakeholders who supported other aspects of ACA noisily or quietly wanted to see the public option dead. Community hospitals, medical groups, pharmaceutical and medical device companies feared precisely the outcome liberals hoped to see: a viable public insurance product that gained broad acceptance and market share, and that used Medicare’s tremendous market power to discipline providers.
+
+These constituencies understood and dreaded the heavy hand of government across from them at the bargaining table. These constituencies helped to kill the public option. They would be a force to be reckoned with in any political process that seeks to implement a single-payer system.
+
+Given our polarized judiciary, there would be legal and constitutional challenges, too. Whatever fine print of the ACA found its way to the Supreme Court, the real fight concerned the propriety of an expansive federal government that seeks to regulate and humanize a national health care market. Constitutional conservatives reject this vision of American government. A single-payer system would engage even more contentious issues of federalism and the reach of national government.
+
+Some progressives hope that single-payer could provide an attractive replacement for the grubby, path-dependent logrolling that now dominates our $3 trillion health care political economy. No viable single-payer program will replace these grubby politics. That’s logically impossible, because such a program must be produced through that very same process. Barring a historically comprehensive defeat of Republicans at every level of American government, advocates for expanded health coverage will face this discomfiting reality.
+
+Passing a single-payer plan requires precisely the same interest group bargaining and logrolling required to pass the ACA. The resulting policies will thus replicate some of the very same scars, defects, and kludge that bedevil the ACA.
+
+Progressives should still push for basic reforms that improve our current system. I supported the public option in 2009. I still do. I hope it resurfaces in some form, particularly for older participants in the state marketplaces. It may open a pathway to a true single-payer. If it doesn’t — which I suspect it will not — it might still provide a valuable alternative and source of pricing discipline within our pathological health care market.
+
+Whatever policy one supports, we must actually consider how this imperfect and messy process will actually play out. There’s no immaculate conception in American politics.",REAL
+5032,Why Koch and Republican donor network won’t back Trump (+video),"Charles Koch and his network of conservative donors will not be supporting Donald Trump. They are concerned about his lack of support for free markets.
+
+Why Ring magazine named Ali 1966 Fighter of Year – 50 years after the fact
+
+Charles Koch, one of the nation's most prominent conservative donors, will not be financially supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump during the upcoming campaign.
+
+Billionaire Charles Koch and his network of political donors will not be supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump, instead re-directing their focus to supporting Republicans in competitive Senate races.
+
+Mr. Koch has raised concerns about Mr. Trump's stance on the free market. He and his network, which includes influential billionaires and millionaires, has evolved from a small group to a powerful political force with 1,600 staffers spread across 38 states. The group met this week for a weekend retreat near the Rocky Mountains.
+
+Despite not supporting Trump, Koch said the notion he he would support Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was ""a blood libel"", as the Associated Press reported.
+
+""At this point I can’t support either candidate, but I’m certainly not going to support Hillary,"" Koch said.
+
+The Koch network, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into politics, planned on pouring a lot of money into the 2016 presidential race. Instead, they will be investing in competitive Senate races, including in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
+
+To win the network's support, it is essential that a candidate ""believes in and will fight for free markets,"" Koch told donors behind closed doors, as energy entrepreneur Chris Wright told the Associated Press. The network's first priority should be ""to preserve the country’s financial future and to eliminate corporate welfare,"" Koch said.
+
+""Since it appears that neither presidential candidate is likely to support us in these efforts, we’re focused on maximizing the number of principled leaders in the House and Senate who will,"" he said.
+
+The libertarian-leaning Koch, and his brother David, disagree with Trump on a variety of issues, including immigration, trade, minimum wage, and criminal justice reform.
+
+Trump, who Politico reported tried to mend bridges with the Koch brothers, said July was his best fund-raising month to date and claimed it was he who rebuffed the Koch brothers.
+
+The group's main argument for not supporting Trump, as The Washington Post reported, is that supporting Trump would harm the network's credibility, making it more difficult for them to not support future Republican candidates who also differ sharply from the Koch brothers' positions on free trade and limited government.
+
+The weekend gathering featured donors who pledged to donate $100,000 every year to groups supported by the Kochs' small-government Freedom Partners network.
+
+A wide number of top Republican officials were also in attendance, including Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, among others. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will address the group on Monday.
+
+The Koch's decision received a mixed reaction from donors, with some saying they were unhappy with both main parties' presidential options.
+
+""Terrible and truly awful are the two choices,"" Mr. Wright told the AP. ""We’re not going to give any money to support Donald Trump.""
+
+Other donors, however, have expressed disappointment at the decision, saying they believe it is incredibly important to defeat Mrs. Clinton.
+
+""I told him that it was very important that Hillary Clinton not get elected,"" Minnesota media mogul Stanley Hubbard said, as the Washington Post reported.
+
+Koch stressed that spreading the values of limited government and free trade were more important than any political election, and that politics was just a piece of the puzzle in promoting those values.
+
+""To address the current political crisis, our first objective is to stop the worst federal policies, regardless of who is the next president,"" Koch said. ""And we’ve got to remember that Republican presidents advance a lot of bad policies, just like Democrats.""
+
+This report includes material from the Associated Press.",REAL
+3058,The Iran Deal and the Cost of Political Polarization | RealClearPolitics,"In just a week or two, Congress will consider (actually, “consider” may be too generous a term in this instance), the negotiated agreement between Iran and the “P5+1” (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany), curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The United States and its negotiating allies claim the agreement will prevent Iran from developing an atomic bomb. Opponents say that’s not so.
+
+But—and this may upset people on both sides—the arguments for and against the agreement are not what interest me most. In fact, I am most troubled by what the debate has revealed about the disintegration of our political institutions and traditions, and of the increasing inability of those institutions to function on behalf of the American people and their interests.
+
+Opposition to the Iran nuclear deal has been fomenting for years. Aroused and whipped by Israel’s hardline prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his troops in AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), congressional Republicans long ago decided to make this a “make or break” showdown with President Barack Obama. Forty-seven GOP senators, led by a young, freshman right-winger from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, even went so far as to write the leaders of Iran disavowing the deal before it was finalized. Few longtime students of the presidency or Congress can remember an affront of similar magnitude or possible consequence—short or long-term. The one that comes closest (even though we didn’t learn about it until decades later, and then only after all the key players were dead), was candidate Richard Nixon’s interference with the Paris Peace Talks (aimed at ending the war in Vietnam) in 1968.
+
+What strikes me, in particular, is that the Republicans’ behavior vis-à-vis the negotiations with Iran stands in sharp contrast to the debate and the votes on the two Panama Canal treaties in 1978.
+
+The Panama Canal issue in the 1970s was every bit as contentious as the situation with Iran is today. Negotiations of the treaties—one guaranteeing the neutral operation of the canal and the second ceding control of the canal to Panama (effective at midnight Dec. 31, 1999)—began in the Nixon administration, continued under President Ford, and were finalized by President Carter in August of 1977.
+
+The uproar from the far right to Carter’s decision was immediate and intense; after all, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan had used the issue to bludgeon Gerald Ford in their fight for the Republican nomination in 1976, and he damn near succeeded (Reagan won the North Carolina primary largely because of the Panama Canal issue, as his chief in-state backer, the late Sen. Jesse Helms, was leader of the opposition).
+
+Once Carter decided that he was going to agree to the treaties’ terms, Vice President Walter Mondale, congressional relations chief (and my boss at the time) Frank Moore, and the president himself divided up a call list of all 100 senators to let them know where things were headed, and to make a simple and singular request: That they not make any public statement, one way or another, until each senator had been briefed by officials from the administration—White House, State Department, Defense and the intelligence community—on the details and ramifications of either acceptance or rejection. Ninety-nine of the 100 agreed to and abided by the request; the only one who refused to do so was North Carolina’s Helms.
+
+The ensuing debate was as vigorous and heated as one might imagine, and it went on for many months. Carter’s chief aide, Hamilton Jordan, orchestrated the administration’s campaign on behalf of ratification. Leading citizens from states whose senators were on the fence or shaky were invited to the White House for briefings and were subsequently dispatched to Capitol Hill to lobby for ratification. Newspaper editors, columnists and commentators were briefed by the president himself. My colleagues on the White House Congressional Liaison staff worked non-stop advocating and counting. Former Presidents Nixon and Ford made calls to key Republican senators; even conservative icon and Hollywood star John Wayne weighed in with his support.
+
+On March 16, 1978, the first of two treaties (guaranteeing neutrality), was ratified by the Senate with only one vote to spare, 68 to 22; the second treaty (the one conveying the canal to Panama) was approved on April 18, 1978, by the exact same number. The vote breakdown is telling: 52 D/16 R “Aye” to 10 D/22 R “No.” Among the “yes” votes was that of Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.); Baker not only voted right, but he brought several of his Republican colleagues along with him.
+
+It is important to note, as well, that the administration’s strategy was to reach at least 68 votes, rather than the minimum 67 required, so that no single senator could be accused of being the one who “gave away the Panama Canal.” Even so, many Democrats lost in the 1978 midterm elections and also in 1980, at least in part because of the courageous stand they took on the treaties. It will be interesting to see how political courage plays out on the Iran nuclear agreement; so far at least two Democratic senators, Charles Schumer of New York and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, have failed the test.
+
+Were the votes on the Panama Canal treaties examples of “good old days” in American politics? Perhaps not. But they sure beat the hell out of what we are being subjected to today, and the price our representative democracy is paying as a result.",REAL
+7902,A Book Too Dangerous To Read,"A Book Too Dangerous To Read A Book Too Dangerous To Read? 
+by Jennifer Margulis   Library Journal , which librarians read to decide what books to buy for their collections, announced last week that libraries should not carry the new book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan : Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health, From Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Years , which I co-authored with Paul Thomas, M.D., a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician who has over 13,000 patients in his pediatric practice in Portland, Oregon. 
+“The author’s style is gentle and motivating,” the reviewer writes, “and he clearly cares for parents and children. Despite this, many parents will have a hard time following some of his suggestions (e.g. no manufactured baby food, no formula, no circumcision, avoid acetaminophen), as he advises parents to come to “well child visits with a signed vaccine refusal form” and specifically warns against hepatitis, chicken pox, flu, polio, and HPV vaccines, among others.” 
+The review goes on: 
+“VERDICT While Thomas does recommend a number of vaccines, his medical wisdom is too removed from both the AAP and the CDC (Centers   Prevention) guidelines to warrant a recommendation.” 
+Don’t make this book available to library patrons. 
+Don’t read this book. 
+Don’t even have a conversation about safety issues with childhood vaccines. 
+Instead, let’s just ignore the fact that the current rates of autism are at least 1 in 68, according to the CDC (possibly as high as 1 in 45 , also according to CDC data), that there’s a growing body of very disturbing scientific evidence showing that acetaminophen (the main ingredient in Tylenol) is triggering autism , and that American children today are plagued with allergies, asthma, and other chronic diseases (like Type 1 juvenile diabetes and leaky gut syndrome) than ever before. 
+But following Dr. Paul’s recommendations to feed a baby and small child a real food, whole foods diet, stop using Tylenol , and making judicious decisions about vaccination is too difficult? A neonatologist and an obstetrician from Panama excited to read Your Baby, Your Way and The Vaccine-Friendly Plan , even as the Library Journal warns librarians against buying The Vaccine-Friendly Plan . Photo by Jennifer Margulis. 
+Follow one-size-fits-all medicine as defined by the CDC and the AAP and watch your children spend the rest of their lives battling vaccine injury and chronic disease. 
+Follow Dr. Paul Thomas’ vaccine-friendly plan of avoiding toxins, eating real food, getting plenty of outdoor time and sunlight, and choosing to do judiciously spaced vaccines, one aluminum-containing shot at a time (or choosing no vaccines at all), and raise happy, healthy children. 
+You decide. 
+  
+About the Author 
+Jennifer Margulis , Ph.D., is an award-winning health journalist, co-author of The Vaccine-Friendly Plan (Ballantine, 2016), and author of Your Baby, Your Way: Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Parenting Decisions for a Happier, Healthier Family (Scribner 2015). She has worked on a child survival campaign in West Africa, appeared live on prime-time TV in France, and been awarded a Fulbright from the United States government. She has a B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A.   California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Emory. Learn more about her at www.JenniferMargulis.net  ",FAKE
+3380,Gowdy reveals subpoena Clinton claims she 'never had',"House Republicans investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on Wednesday released a March subpoena issued to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, one day after she said in a nationally televised interview that she ""never had a subpoena"" in the email controversy.
+
+Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the Benghazi panel, said he had ""no choice"" but to make the subpoena public ""in order to correct the inaccuracy"" of Clinton's claim.
+
+Clinton told CNN on Monday that she ""never had a subpoena,"" adding: ""Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation.""
+
+Gowdy said the committee issued the March 4 subpoena to Clinton personally after learning the full extent of her use of private emails while serving as secretary of state.
+
+Regardless of whether a subpoena was issued, ""Secretary Clinton had a statutory duty to preserve records from her entire time in office, and she had a legal duty to cooperate with and tell the truth to congressional investigators requesting her records going back to September of 2012,"" Gowdy said in a statement.
+
+The dispute over the subpoena is the latest flashpoint in an increasingly partisan investigation by the House panel, which was created to probe the September 2012 attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.
+
+Gowdy and other Republicans have complained that Clinton and the State Department have not been forthcoming with release of her emails and note that the State Department has said it cannot find in its records all or part of 15 work-related emails from Clinton's private server.
+
+The emails all pre-date the assault on the U.S. diplomatic facility and consist mainly of would-be intelligence reports passed to Clinton by longtime political confidant Sidney Blumenthal, officials said.
+
+Gowdy has said the missing emails raise ""serious questions"" about Clinton's decision to erase her personal server, especially before it could be analyzed by an independent third-party arbiter.
+
+A Clinton campaign spokesman has said she turned over 55,000 pages of materials to the State Department, ""including all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal.""",REAL
+491,"Walgreens to close 200 stores, boost cost cutting","Drugstore chain Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) announced plans to close about 200 U.S. stores as part of its first earnings report since it merged with European drug retailer Alliance Boots last year.
+
+Walgreens, the largest U.S. drugstore chain, said it will close the stores amid plans to boost its previously announced cost-cutting initiative by $500 million.
+
+Walgreens expects to reduce costs by a projected $1.5 billion by the end of fiscal 2017, the company said.
+
+""After a rigorous analysis, the company has identified additional opportunities for cost savings, primarily in its Retail Pharmacy USA division,"" the company said Thursday. ""Significant areas of focus include plans to close approximately 200 USA stores; reorganize corporate and field operations; drive operating efficiencies; and streamline information technology and other functions.""
+
+Walgreens' spokesman Philip Caruso said the company has not yet decided which stores it will close, but it is ""not focusing on any specific geographic area."" Caruso also said there is ""no hard timeline"" for when the stores will be closed during the period for cost cutting.
+
+The soon-to-be closed stores make up roughly 2% of the Walgreens' 8,232 drugstores in the United States, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Walgreens also said it opened 71 new drugstores in this region in the first half of fiscal 2015, including 25 relocations.
+
+Store closings aside, Walgreens wowed shareholders with strong earnings. Shares jumped $4.94, or 5.6%, to $92.62.
+
+Walgreens said adjusted second-quarter net earnings increased 33.2% to $1.2 billion. Second-quarter sales, meanwhile, increased 35.5% to $26.6 billion.
+
+The U.S. retail pharmacy division, which includes Walgreens and Duane Reade stores, posted sales in the second quarter of $21 billion, up 7.4% over the year-ago quarter. Total sales in stores open at least a year were up 6.9% over the same quarter a year ago.
+
+In December, Walgreens closed on a deal, valued at close to $16 billion, to purchase the remaining stake of European health and beauty retailer Alliance Boots that it didn't already own. The new company, which includes more than 12,800 stores in 11 countries, was renamed Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., and it took on ticker symbol WBA.",REAL
+7399,"This Will END Hillary’s Campaign, HILLARY CLINTON IS GOING DOWN","October 30, 2016 at 1:18 PM 
+Right now we are at a pivot point in this nation’s history as important as any time in the past. We have the choice over the next 9 days to elect a woman who has proven time and time again that she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, operate outside and above the law. Or we can elect a person who appears to represent values quite the opposite of Killer Clinton. 
+This Moonpie Mafia’s last venture into the Oval Office was filled with scandals from the very minute they entered the White House through their exit, carrying every bit of furniture and silverware they could load in their U-Haul trailer. Their body count runs to the millions when you take into account the destruction of other countries during their despotic reign And Bush was even worse. 
+Have we forgotten the nearly 80 men women and children (22)of the Branch Dividians, murdered by armed goons on the direct order of Janet Reno, Killer Clinton’s hired assassin and attorney General. 
+Did we forget that Madeline Albright, Killer’s Secretary of State, when she bragged about a 500,000 body count as an acceptable death toll in Central Europe, as Killer’s husband sent in his mercenaries to slaughter innocent civilians in Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia while supporting puppet regimes and war lords who murdered millions of their peoples through planned genocide. How about Rwanda with the death toll that was well in excess of 500,000. I recall Bill Clinton basically saying “Ooops. Sorry. I guess I kind of missed that one–hey Monica–how about another blow job. I really get off getting head while I shoot some cruise missiles at the people in Iraq and Afghanistan” It sure defines “Getting off” 
+I guess the memory hole is just that deep. Idiots and morons will elect Killer because they either know nothing of history, don’t care about the Clinton’s death toll or actually like the idea that this psychopathic murdering mutant bitch might actually be elected to the highest office in the land. Anyone who voted for Killer votes for death by the number and democide by the millions. 
+When it comes to Trump, I’m not a fan of his either. But when given the choice of Killer or Trump I am forced to chose between the lesser of two evils. BIG EVIL lives in the skin of Killer Clinton. Whatever lives in the skin of Trump is, I am convinced, is far less a danger to the Republic (in name only) than Killer Klinton and her Blood thirsty Killer Klown Klan",FAKE
+10429,"US Officials, FBI See No Link Between Trump and Russia","US Officials, FBI See No Link Between Trump and Russia But The Clinton Campaign Demands FBI Affirm Trump's Russia Ties. Be Sociable, Share! Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Sunrise, Fla. 
+With the 2016 election campaign winding down, the Clinton campaign is ratcheting up demands for the FBI to publicly confirm the campaign’s allegations that Republican nominee Donald Trump is secretly in league with Russia. Sen. Harry Reid (D – NV) went so far as to claim the FBI has secret “explosive” evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government that it is withholding. FBI officials familiar with their investigations into the allegations, which the Clinton campaign started publicizing around the Democratic National Convention, say they’ve turned up nothing to connect Trump and Russia , leading FBI Director James Comey to decide against making any statements to that effect. 
+The Clinton campaign has been making the allegations so long that they have taken to claiming “everyone knows” that they are true, and appears unsettled by the FBI’s refusal to sign off on the claims simply because they haven’t been able to find real evidence corroborating the story. 
+The Trump campaign has repeatedly denied ties to Russia, but that didn’t stop Clinton from calling Trump a “puppet” of Russian President Vladimir Putin during the final presidential debate. The calls have grown since Friday’s FBI report to Congress about further Clinton emails being sought. 
+With Clinton’s main campaign scandal growing in the waning weeks of the deal, some in her campaign have suggested that affirming Trump as secretly in league with the Russians would only be fair. Absent any evidence, however, it appears that won’t be happening. 
+This article originally appeared on Antiwar.com. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
+9529,‘They Don’t Speak For Me’ — Evangelical PhD SLAMS Religious Right Leaders Supporting Trump,"‘They Don’t Speak For Me’— Evangelical PhD SLAMS Religious Right Leaders Supporting Trump By Stephanie Kuklish   
+Evangelical Christians have been major players in the 2016 elections with their unrelenting support of Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, but Alan Noble, Ph.D., is putting his foot down and letting the Religious Right know what they are doing is wrong. 
+In a current op-ed for Vox , Noble takes to history, the Bible, and the way of the conservative to point out that somewhere in the recent past, Evangelicals have lost their sense of priority in the character of a man. When discussing the release of tapes where Trump was caught admitting to sexually assaulting women Noble stated: “Evangelicalism has been sharply divided over Trump, and so my hope was that this tape would finally persuade the remaining evangelical defenders of Trump to abandon him. But for the most part, that’s not what happened.” 
+Just as we have seen numerous times in the media, while many Trump supporters were running in the other direction, there were still an enormous amount of influential conservatives battening down the hatches and riding through this storm, still defending the man. 
+Men like Jerry Falwell Jr., Ben Carson, Tony Perkins, Mike Huckabee, and more , have either stayed steady with their support or have come back to the “Trump Side,” shortly after jumping ship, all taking the stance that America should focus less on character and more on policy. Noble discusses the Christian Conservative view this election season by saying : “Jalsevac makes explicit the logic of so many leaders on the religious right: Character is fundamentally private and only tangentially related the public work of policymaking and politics. Sin is still bad, but since we are all sinners, and since we are not electing a “pastor in chief,” what matters most is what kind of president the candidates would be. The real is the political. Everything else is just style.” 
+Here is the kicker, though, the pushing off of character and focusing on policy way of thinking for the Christian Conservative was the complete opposite when former President Bill Clinton confessed to his indiscretions while in office. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a “ Resolution on the Moral Characters of Public Officials ,” after Clinton’s incident stating: “WHEREAS, Some journalists report that many Americans are willing to excuse or overlook immoral or illegal conduct by unrepentant public officials so long as economic prosperity prevails; and WHEREAS, Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment (1 Kings 16:30; Isaiah 5:18-25); and … Therefore, be it RESOLVED, That we, the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting June 9-11, 1998, in Salt Lake City, Utah, affirm that moral character matters to God and should matter to all citizens, especially God’s people when choosing public leaders; and … Be it finally RESOLVED, That we urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity, and the highest character.” 
+Ultimately what this is saying is that if someone is placed in office with a severe lack of personal conviction, it can ultimately harm everyone involved; an entirely different viewpoint than the rhetoric they are putting forth about support for Donald Trump. And don’t be mistaken, this position was held and represented as late as 2015 when Mike Huckabee responded during an interview to the millennial viewpoint of Bill Clinton’s indiscretions by saying : “Probably not, for two reasons. One, they were infants when it all happened. And the second reason is that growing up in a moral climate in which people just don’t seem to care that much about other people’s lives. They don’t make the connection between personal character and public character. They don’t seem to think that there is a correlation. I think there is. I think if a person will lie to an individual, they will lie to a country. I think if a person is not honest with themselves, they’ll be dishonest with the voters. And so I do think character matters, I believe it always had. It doesn’t mean we elect perfect people. We don’t, we never have, we never will, but I do think that it matters that a person represents himself or herself with a level of authenticity and that doesn’t always happen Hugh, and I do think it’s one of the pitfalls of our current political environment.” Via Vox 
+So while public figures like James Dobson endorse Trump with the, “We are electing a commander-in-chief not a theologian-in-chief,” he was damning the idea of not holding Bill Clinton responsible for his moral character. In 1998, while President of Focus on the Family , Dobson wrote : “As it turns out, character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world! Nevertheless, our people continue to say that the President is doing a good job even if they don’t respect him personally. Those two positions are fundamentally incompatible. In the Book of James the question is posed, “Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring” (James 3:11 NIV). The answer is no.” 
+It seems to me the winds of the religious, political race have changed drastically and not to fit the idea that the Bible represents, but to satisfy lead religious bodies in their political views. As we are condemned for our lack of character in our everyday lives, Trump’s character is swept to the side as nothing more than a luxury for a political candidate. 
+Featured Image Via The Daily Beast About Stephanie Kuklish 
+I am a 30 something writer passionate about politics, the environment, human rights and pretty much everything that effects our everyday life. To stay on top of the topics I discuss, like and follow me at https://www.facebook.com/keeponwriting and https://facebook.com/progressivenomad . Connect",FAKE
+4157,Teacher sickout closes most Detroit schools Monday,"All but a handful of Detroit public schools were closed Monday as teachers — angry that the troubled district may not be able to pay them over the summer — staged a sickout.
+
+Ninety-four of the district’s approximately 100 schools were closed, according to an announcement on the district’s Facebook page. More than 40,000 students attend the city’s schools.
+
+Leaders of the Detroit Federation of Teachers learned over the weekend that the district would run out of emergency state funding at the end of June, according to the Detroit News.
+
+[Rats, roaches, mold: Poor conditions lead to teacher sickout, closure of most Detroit schools]
+
+That means that unless the state legislature passes a plan to rescue the system, Detroit Public Schools won’t be able to make payroll over the summer, leaving teachers unpaid for work they did during the school year.
+
+Union officials said that teachers who receive their annual salary in 26 installments risk not being paid for any work they do after April 28.
+
+“There’s a basic agreement in America: When you put in a day’s work, you’ll receive a day’s pay. DPS is breaking that deal,” Ivy Bailey, the union’s interim president, said in a statement. “Teachers want to be in the classroom giving children a chance to learn and reach their potential. Unfortunately, by refusing to guarantee that we will be paid for our work, DPS is effectively locking our members out of the classrooms.”
+
+Teachers rallied at the school system’s headquarters Detroit on Monday morning to “protest the news that Detroit educators will not be paid for their work,” according to a news release.
+
+On Monday evening, the union indicated that the sickout would extend for a second day on Tuesday. “We do not work for free and therefore we do not expect you to report to school tomorrow,” Bailey wrote to members.
+
+The school system has a $515 million operating debt and a total debt that exceeds $3 billion.
+
+Steven Rhodes, the system’s state-appointed emergency manager, warned state lawmakers in early March that the system would run out of cash April 8.
+
+Lawmakers responded with $48.7 million in emergency funding, enough to keep the system afloat until June 30. The Senate passed a longer-term $715 million fix; the House is now debating that plan.
+
+“I am confident that the Michigan Legislature understands the urgency of this situation and will act in a timely manner to ensure that operations of the school district continue uninterrupted,” Rhodes, a retired federal judge, said in a statement. “I am working everyday with policy makers in Lansing to move this legislation forward.”
+
+Rhodes said that it was “unfortunate” that the union had called for a sickout, saying it was “counterproductive and detrimental.”
+
+“I am on record as saying that I cannot in good conscience ask anyone to work without pay,” Rhodes said. “Wages that are owed to teachers should be paid. I understand the frustration and anger that our teachers feel. I am, however, confident that the legislature will support the request that will guarantee that teachers will receive the pay that is owed to them.”
+
+Under Michigan law, teachers may not strike, but Detroit teachers have staged multiple sickouts in recent months to protest the deplorable conditions of the city’s school buildings.",REAL
+8077,Anyone from the family who can understand what I speak will be appointed as UP CM: Mulayam Singh,"Tweet (Image via intoday.in) 
+In an announcement which has shocked workers and family members of the Samajwadi party, when their senior most leader Mulayam Singh Yadav said, “Anyone from the Yadav family, who can understand clearly each and every word that I speak will be unanimously appointed as the next UP Chief Minister.” 
+Mulayam Singh came to this decision after he realized that 90% of the party members nod blankly to his speeches and instructions without understanding a single word that he speaks. 
+“It all started when Netaji realized that he always gave the same instructions to Shivpal, Akhilesh and Ram Gopal Yadav but they were understood differently by each of them each time. However all three of them would nod as if they had understood the same thing,” said a senior party member close to Mulayam Singh. “Obviously I myself don’t get half of his sentences, but I have become good at reading his lip movements,” he added. 
+This is not the first time Mulayam Singh has been informed of it. As many as three decades ago, school teachers of Akhilesh Yadav had told Mulayam Singh that his son doesn’t listen to his father. While Mulayam mistook it for Akhilesh being a disobedient child, what the teachers actually meant was that Akhilesh hardly understands what his father speaks. 
+According to sources, Mulayam Singh is currently conducting a test among family members to determine who comes closest in understanding his speech in order to accordingly finalize party positions. 
+“To K!$@#$ Communal $Q#$ Q# %@bey @# #$$!@$ #$@#$@ Secular G#$#$%# @# UP, B bil #$Q$ $#$@#$$ Congrss P#!!$ #$@$ #$@ ByeP d#@# #$@$ erection,” said a family member when asked to repeat what Netaji said. 
+More than half of the family members couldn’t come even remotely close. It was only Akhilesh and Shivpal Yadav who could clearly identify some of the key words from the sentence, which were ‘communal’, ‘secular’, ‘election’, ‘UP’ and ‘Congress’. 
+Later, confusion turned to consternation when an outsider by name Amar Singh heard this family conversation and clearly recited what Netaji said, which was: “To keep Communal forces away and have a secular Government in UP, we will tie up with Congress party and not with BJP during next elections.” 
+While Mulayam lauded Amar for the translation, Akhilesh got seriously pissed by the fact that a family conversation was heard by an outsider surreptitiously and launched into an emotional speech to his supporters. 
+(The writer is the author of the book, ‘The Bogus Read’ ) Tweet About D-MAN 
+A jack of many trades who now wants to master some. Born wisecracker who makes every effort to get the maximum out of life. He facebooks here and tweets here .",FAKE
+6683,"Unsurprisingly, this Ku Klux Klan leaflet has a spelling mistake","Next Prev Swipe left/right Unsurprisingly, this Ku Klux Klan leaflet has a spelling mistake The Ku Klux Klan are apparently handing out these leaflets in Louisiana ahead of the US election next week – sadly they’re so consumed with xenophobia they confused “polls” and “poles”. The Ku Klux Klan is distributing these packets in Sabine Parish, LA. Thankfully, they're asking voters go to the poles, not the polls. pic.twitter.com/4sFvFIQ7lB 
+— Lamar White, Jr (@CenLamar) October 31, 2016",FAKE
+9957,"American Dream, Revisited","Will Trump pull a Brexit times ten? What would it take, beyond WikiLeaks, to bring the Clinton (cash) machine down? Will Hillary win and then declare WWIII against her Russia/Iran/Syria “axis of evil”? Will the Middle East totally explode? Will the pivot to Asia totally implode? Will China be ruling the world by 2025?
+Amidst so many frenetic fragments of geopolitical reality precariously shored against our ruins, the temptation is irresistible to hark back to the late, great, deconstructionist master Jean Baudrillard. During the post-mod 1980s it was hip to be Baudrillardian to the core; his America, originally published in France in 1986, should still be read today as the definitive metaphysical/geological/cultural Instagram of Exceptionalistan.
+By the late 1990s, at the end of the millennium, two years before 9/11 – that seminal “before and after” event – Baudrillard was already stressing how we live in a black market maze. Now, it’s a black market paroxysm.
+Global multitudes are subjected to a black market of work – as in the deregulation of the official market; a black market of unemployment; a black market of financial speculation; a black market of misery and poverty; a black market of sex (as in prostitution); a black market of information (as in espionage and shadow wars); a black market of weapons; and even a black market of thinking.
+Way beyond the late 20th century, in the 2010s what the West praises as “liberal democracy” – actually a neoliberal diktat – has virtually absorbed every ideological divergence, while leaving behind a heap of differences floating in some sort of trompe l’oeil effect. What’s left is a widespread, noxious condition; the pre-emptive prohibition of any critical thought, which has no way to express itself other than becoming clandestine (or finding the right internet niche).
+Baudrillard already knew that the concept of “alter” – killed by conviviality – does not exist in the official market. So an “alter” black market also sprung up, co-opted by traffickers; that’s, for instance, the realm of racism, nativism and other forms of exclusion. Baudrillard already identified how a “contraband alter”, expressed by sects and every form of nationalism (nowadays, think about the spectrum between jihadism and extreme-right wing political parties) was bound to become more virulent in a society that is desperately intolerant, obsessed with regimentation, and totally homogenized.
+There could be so much exhilaration inbuilt in life lived in a bewildering chimera cocktail of cultures, signs, differences and “values”; but then came the coupling of thinking with its exact IT replica – artificial intelligence, playing with the line of demarcation between human and non-human in the domain of thought.
+The result, previewed by Baudrillard, was the secretion of a parapolitical society – with a sort of mafia controlling this secret form of generalized corruption (think the financial Masters of the Universe). Power is unable to fight this mafia – and that would be, on top of it, hypocritical, because the mafia itself emanates from power.
+The end result is that what really matters today, anywhere, mostly tends to happen outside all official circuits; like in a social black market.
+Is there any information “truth”?
+Baudrillard showed how political economy is a massive machine, producing value, producing signs of wealth, but not wealth itself. The whole media/information system – still ruled by America – is a massive machine producing events as signs; exchangeable value in the universal market of ideology, the star system and catastrophism.
+This abstraction of information works as in the economy – disgorging a coded material, deciphered in advance, and negotiable in terms of models, as much as the economy disgorges products negotiable in terms of price and value.
+Since all merchandise, thanks to this abstraction of value, is exchangeable, then every event (or non-event) is also exchangeable, all replacing one another in the cultural market of information.
+And that takes us to where we live now; Trans-History, and Trans-Politics – where events have really not happened, as they get lost in the vacuum of information (as much as the economy gets lost in the vacuum of speculation).
+Thus this quintessential Baudrillard insight; if we consider History as a movie – and that’s what it is now – then the “truth” of information is no more than post-production synch, dubbing and subtitles.
+Still, as we all keep an intense desire for devouring events, there is immense disappointment as well, because the content of information is desperately inferior to the means of broadcasting them. Call it a pathetic, universal contagion; people don’t know what to do about their sadness or enthusiasm – in parallel to our societies becoming theaters of the absurd where nothing has consequences.
+No acts, deeds, crimes (the 2008 financial crisis), political events (the WikiLeaks emails showing virtually no distinction between the “nonprofit” Clinton cash machine, what’s private and what’s public, the obsessive pursuit of personal wealth, and the affairs of the state)
+seem to have real consequences.
+Immunity, impunity, corruption, speculation – we veer towards a state of zero responsibility (think Goldman Sachs). So, automatically, we yearn for an event of maximum consequence, a “fatal” event to repair that scandalous non-equivalence. Like a symbolic re-equilibrium of the scales of destiny.
+So we dream of an amazing event – Trump winning the election? Hillary declaring WWIII? – that would free us from the tyranny of meaning and the constraint of always searching for the equivalence between effects and causes.
+Shadowing the world
+Just like Baudrillard, I got to see “deep” America in the 1980s and 1990s by driving across America.
+So sooner or later one develops a metaphysical relationship with that ubiquitous warning, “Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear.”
+But what if they may also be further than they appear?
+The contemporary instant event/celebrity culture deluge of images upon us; does it get us closer to a so-called “real” world that is in fact very far away from us? Or does it in fact keep the world at a distance – creating an artificial depth of field that protects us from the imminence of objects and the virtual danger they represent?
+In parallel, we keep slouching towards a single future language – the language of algorithms, as designed across the Wall Street/Silicon Valley axis – that would represent a real anthropological catastrophe, just like the globalist/New World Order dream of One Thought and One Culture.
+Languages are multiple and singular – by definition. If there were a single language, words would become univocal, regulating themselves in an autopilot of meaning. There would be no interplay – as in artificial languages there’s no interplay. Language would be just the meek appendix of a unified reality – the negative destiny of a languidly unified human species.
+That’s where the American “dream” seems to be heading. It’s time to take the next exit ramp.
+This piece first appeared Strategic-Culture .
+ Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). His latest book is Empire of Chaos . He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com .",FAKE
+2650,Lynch's delayed confirmation vote,The last-ditch effort to stop Donald Trump is gaining momentum.,REAL
+5604,Benny Morris’s Untenable Denial of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,"References The Debate 
+It started when Daniel Blatman, an Israeli historian and head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, penned an op-ed for the Israeli daily Haaretz stating that ethnic cleansing “is exactly what happened in 1948.” To support this, Blatman cited Benny Morris: the Israeli historian, Blatman wrote, “determined that most of the Arabs in the country, over 400,000, were encouraged to leave or expelled in the first stage of the war—even before the Arab nations’ armies invaded.” [2] Benny Morris, October 30, 2007 ( Aude / CC BY-SA 2.0 ) 
+That prompted a response from Morris, who wrote an op-ed of his own titled “Israel Conducted No Ethnic Cleansing in 1948”. In it, he contends that Blatman “distorts history when he says the new State of Israel, a country facing invading armies, carried out a policy of expelling the local Arabs.” And Blatman “betrayed his profession”, Morris further charged, “when he attributed to me things I have never claimed and distorted the events of the 1948 war.” 
+Central to Morris’s argument is that “Blatman ignores the basic fact that the Palestinians were the ones who started the war when they rejected the UN compromise plan and embarked on hostile acts in which 1,800 Jews were killed between November 1947 and mid-May 1948.” Moreover, the neighboring Arab states had “threatened to invade even before the UN resolution was passed on November 29, 1947, and before a single Arab had been uprooted from his home.” Even prior to the adoption of General Assembly Resolution 181, which recommended partitioning Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, they Arab states had continuously declared their intent “to attack the Jewish state when the British left.” 
+He acknowledges that prior to the Zionists’ declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14, 1948, and the subsequent introduction of Arab states’ regular armies into the conflict, a few hundred thousand Arabs (though a number “apparently smaller” than the figure of 400,000 cited by Blatman) “were expelled from their homes and forced to flee”. 
+How can it be true that, on one hand, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and never allowed to return, yet also true, on the other, that there was no ethnic cleansing? 
+Morris attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction by arguing that “at no stage of the 1948 war was there a decision by the leadership of the Yishuv [the Jewish community] or the state to ‘expel the Arabs’”. In other words, it’s true that many Arabs were indeed expelled, but this was not the result of an official policy of the Zionist leadership. 
+“It’s true that in the 1930s and early ‘40s”, Morris further acknowledges, “David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann supported the transfer of Arabs from the area of the future Jewish state. But later they supported the UN decision, whose plan left more than 400,000 Arabs in place. 
+“It’s also true that from a certain point during the war, Ben-Gurion let his officers understand that it was preferable for as few Arabs as possible to remain in the new country, but he never gave them an order ‘to expel the Arabs.’” 
+And, true, there was an “atmosphere of transfer that prevailed in the country beginning in April 1948”, but this “was never translated into official policy—which is why there were officers who expelled Arabs and others who didn’t. Neither group was reprimanded or punished. 
+“In the end, in 1948 about 160,000 Arabs remained in Israeli territory—a fifth of the population.” 
+Furthermore, “on March 24, 1948, Israel Galili, Ben-Gurion’s deputy in the future Defense Ministry and the head of the Haganah, ordered all the Haganah brigades not to uproot Arabs from the territory of the designated Jewish state. Things did change in early April due to the Yishuv’s shaky condition and the impending Arab invasion. But there was no overall expulsion policy—here they expelled people, there they didn’t, and for the most part the Arabs simply fled.” 
+Morris acknowledges that the Zionist leadership in mid-1948 “adopted a policy of preventing the return of refugees”, but asserts this was “logical and just” on the grounds that these were the “same refugees who months and weeks earlier had tried to destroy the state in the making.” 
+What happened in 1948 does not fit the definition of “ethnic cleansing”, Morris concludes. The Arab states, on the other hand, “carried out ethnic cleansing and uprooted all the Jews, down to the last one, from any territory they captured in 1948”, while the Jews “left Arabs in place in Haifa and Jaffa”, among other places. [3] Arabs leaving Haifa as Jewish forces enter the city ( Public Domain ) 
+That wasn’t the end of the discussion. Blatman responded in turn with an op-ed titled “Yes, Benny Morris, Israel Did Perpetrate Ethnic Cleansing in 1948”. In it, he writes that, “On March 10, 1948, the national Haganah headquarters approved Plan Dalet, which discussed the intention of expelling as many Arabs as possible from the territory of the future Jewish state.” 
+With regard to Morris’s denial that what occurred fits the definition of “ethnic cleansing”, Blatman quotes the prosecutor in the trial of Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian-Serb leader convicted for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia: 
+In ethnic cleansing . . . you act in such a way that in a given territory, the members of a given ethnic group are eliminated. . . . You have massacres. Everybody is not massacred, but you have massacres in order to scare those populations. . . . Naturally, the other people are driven away. They are afraid . . . and, of course, in the end these people simply want to leave. . . . They are driven away either on their own initiative or they are deported. . . . Some women are raped and, furthermore, often times what you have is the destruction of the monuments which marked the presence of a given population . . . for instance, Catholic churches or mosques are destroyed. 
+In other words, contrary to Morris’s argument, it doesn’t follow that, since there is no document in which the Zionist leadership explicitly outlined a plan to expel all Arabs or in which military commanders were instructed to do so, therefore what occurred was not ethnic cleansing. What the prosecutor describes is exactly what happened in 1948, Blatman notes: “Implied instructions, silent understandings, sowing fear among the population whose flight is the objective; the destruction of the physical presence left behind.” 
+Blatman quotes from Morris’s book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 : 
+The attacks of the Haganah and the Israel Defense Forces, expulsion orders, the fear of attacks and acts of cruelty on the part of the Jews, the absence of assistance from the Arab world and the Arab Higher Committee, the sense of helplessness and abandonment, orders by Arab institutions and commanders to leave and evacuate, in most cases was the direct and decisive reason for the flight—an attack by the Haganah, Irgun, Lehi or the IDF, or the inhabitants’ fear of such an attack. 
+Blatman adds, “The expulsions were not war crimes, says Morris, because it was the Arabs who started the war. In other words, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who belong to the side that began the fighting have to be expelled. Maybe Morris would agree that the genocide carried out by the Germans against the Herero in 1904–1908 was justified since, after all, the Herero began the rebellion against German colonialism in Namibia.” [4] 
+Next to weigh in on the debate was Steven Klein, a Haaretz editor and adjunct professor at Tel Aviv University’s International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation. Klein notes how Morris himself, in a 1988 essay titled “The New Historiography”, had explained how under Plan D, the Zionist forces “cleared various areas completely of Arab villages”, and how “Jewish atrocities . . . and the drive to avenge past misdeeds also contributed significantly to the exodus.” A Palestinian woman and child (Source: Hanini.org / CC BY 3.0 ) 
+And in his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 , “Morris observed that Ben-Gurion’s views on ‘transfer as a legitimate solution to the Arab problem’ did not change after he publicly declared support for forced expulsions in the 1930s, but that ‘he was aware of the need, for tactical reasons, to be discreet.’ Thus, so it seemed, he explained how Ben-Gurion could be responsible for the expulsion of many of the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs without ever issuing an order to that effect.” 
+Then in a 2004 Haaretz interview with journalist Ari Shavit, Morris had said, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them.” 
+“Morris, of course, is welcome to change his political view”, Klein continues. “But he, like any other historian, must understand that he has left a paper trail that tells a substantially different narrative than the one he now advocates. The Benny Morris of 2016 seems to be doing what he once accused the ‘old historians’ of doing—interpreting history and downplaying Israeli misdeeds in order to defend Israel’s legitimacy.” [5] 
+Next to chime in on the debate was Ehud Ein-Gil, who points out in his own Haaretz op-ed that among the Arabs who were allowed to remain were “15,000 Druze who had allied with Israel, 34,000 Christians, whom Israel treated decently so as not to anger its Western allies, and some Bedouin Muslim villages, whose leaders had allied with Israel or with their Jewish neighbors. 
+“Of the 75,000 Muslims who remained (less than 15 percent of the prewar number), tens of thousands were internally displaced—people who had fled their villages or were expelled from them and have not been allowed to return to their homes to this day.” 
+“Morris is right”, Ein-Gil continues, “when he mentions the ‘atmosphere of transfer’ that gripped Israel from April 1948, but he errs when he claims that this atmosphere was never translated into official policy.” He quotes the orders given to commanders in Plan D to either destroy villages or encircle and then mount “search-and-control operations” within them and, in the event of resistance, to expel all inhabitants. [6] 
+Finally, Morris responded once more to his critics with a Haaretz article titled “‘Ethnic Cleansing’ and pro-Arab Propaganda”, in which he characterizes their articles as not reflecting “a serious way of writing history.” 
+His own “opinions about the history of 1948 haven’t changed at all”, Morris asserts. He maintains that “Some Palestinians were expelled (from Lod and Ramle, for example), some were ordered or encouraged by their leaders to flee (from Haifa, for example) and most fled for fear of the hostilities and apparently in the belief that they would return to their homes after the expected Arab victory. 
+“And indeed, beginning in June, the new Israeli government adopted a policy of preventing the return of refugees—those same Palestinians who fought the Yishuv, the prestate Jewish community, and tried to destroy it.” 
+Morris contends, “In 1947–1948 there was no a priori intention to expel the Arabs, and during the war there was no policy of expulsion. There are clearly Israel-hating ‘historians’ like Ilan Pappe and Walid Khalidi, and perhaps also Daniel Blatman, going by what he has said, who see the Haganah’s Plan Dalet of March 10, 1948, as a master plan for expelling the Palestinians. It isn’t.” 
+Rather, Plan D “was intended to craft strategy and tactics for the Haganah to maintain its hold on strategic roads in what was to become the Jewish state. It also sought to secure the borders in the run-up to the expected Arab invasion following the departure of the British. Blatman’s contention that Plan Dalet ‘discussed the intention of expelling as many Arabs as possible from the territory of the future Jewish state’ is a malicious falsification. These are the words of a pro-Arab propagandist, not of a historian.” 
+Furthermore, Plan D “explicitly states that the inhabitants of villages that fight the Jews should be expelled and the villages destroyed, while neutral or friendly villages should be left untouched (and have forces garrisoned there). 
+“As for Arab neighborhoods in mixed cities, the Haganah field commanders ordered that the Arabs of the outlying neighborhoods be transferred to the Arab centers of those cities, like Haifa, not expelled from the country.” 
+Morris contends that, “if there had been a master plan and a policy of ‘expelling the Arabs,’ we would have found indications of this in the various operational orders to the combat units, and in the reports to the command headquarters, like ‘We carried out the expulsion in accordance with the master plan’ or ‘with Plan Dalet.’ There are no such mentions.” 
+True, “there was an ‘atmosphere of transfer,’” but this was “understandable in light of the circumstances: constant attacks by Palestinian militias over four months and the expectation of an impending invasion by the Arab armies aimed at annihilating the Jewish state to be and perhaps the people as well.” 
+This “necessitated occupation and the expelling of villagers who ambushed, sniped at and killed Jews along the borders and the main roads.” Moreover, “the vast majority of Arabs fled, and the officers of the Haganah/IDF had no need to face the decision of whether to expel them.” [7] On the night of April 7-8, under the command of Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, Palestinian irregulars counterattacked the Haganah occupiers of Castel. The Palestinians are seen here moving to the counterattack. From Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora, page 334. ( Public Domain ) Points of Agreement 
+While there are a number of points on which Morris and his critics heatedly disagree, it’s imperative to begin by highlighting those facts that aren’t in dispute. 
+First and foremost, it’s completely uncontroversial that hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes by the Zionist forces during the 1948 war—about 700,000, according to Morris, by the time it was done. 
+Also uncontroversial is the fact that much of this flight and expulsion occurred well before the neighboring Arab states sent in their armies following the Zionists’ declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948. 
+In his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 , Morris estimates the number of Arabs made refugees prior to May 14 at somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000. In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine , Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, “There were in fact 350,000 if one adds all of the population from the 200 towns and villages that were destroyed by 15 May 1948.” [8] This is consistent with Morris’s remark that the number was “apparently smaller” than 400,000. 
+Another uncontroversial fact is that there was a prevailing “atmosphere of transfer” among the Zionist leadership—with “transfer” being a euphemism for the forced displacement of Arabs from their homes. As Morris notes in his book 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War , “an atmosphere of what would later be called ethnic cleansing prevailed”, and, to be sure, “much of the country had been ‘cleansed’ of Arabs” by the end of the war. [9] David Ben-Gurion issues the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl ( Rudi Weissenstein ) 
+Indeed, the idea that the Arabs would have to go was an assumption inherent in the ideology of political Zionism. The Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, who is considered the father of the movement, outlined the Zionist project in a pamphlet titled The Jewish State in 1896. [10] A year prior, he had expressed in his diary the need to rid the land of its Arab majority: “We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border, by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” [11] 
+In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed that Palestine be partitioned into separate Jewish and Arab states, but there was a problem: there would remain an estimated 225,000 Arabs in the area proposed for the Jewish state. “Sooner or later there should be a transfer of land and, as far as possible, an exchange of population”, the Commission concluded. It proceeded to draw attention to the “instructive precedent” of an agreement between the governments of Greece and Turkey in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War of 1922 that determined that “Greek nationals of the Orthodox religion living in Turkey should be compulsorily removed to Greece, and Turkish nationals of the Moslem religion living in Greece to Turkey.” 
+The Commission expressed its hope “that the Arab and the Jewish leaders might show the same high statesmanship as that of the Turks and the Greeks and make the same bold decision for the sake of peace.” [12] 
+Of course, the Commission was not unmindful of “the deeply-rooted aversion which all Arab peasants have shown in the past to leaving the lands which they have cultivated for many generations. They would, it is believed, strongly object to a compulsory transfer . . . .” [13] OBSTACLE TO PEACE The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Jeremy R. Hammond Order Now Learn More 
+As Morris notes in 1948 , “The fact that the Peel Commission in 1937 supported the transfer of Arabs out of the Jewish state-to-be without doubt consolidated the wide acceptance of the idea among the Zionist leaders.” [14] “Once the Peel Commission had given the idea its imprimatur, . . . the floodgates were opened. Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, Shertok, and others—a virtual consensus—went on record in support of transfer at meetings of the JAE [Jewish Agency Executive] at the Twentieth Zionist Congress (in August 1937, in Zurich) and in other forums.” [15] Chaim Weizmann, for example, in January 1941 told the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maiskii, “If half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place.” [16] 
+The Zionist leader who would become Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, after the Peel Commission had recommended the “compulsory transfer” of Arabs, expressed his acceptance of the partition plan as a pragmatic first step toward the ultimate goal of establishing a Jewish state over all of the territory of Palestine. On October 5, 1937, he wrote to his son (underlined emphasis in original): 
+Of course the partition of the country gives me no pleasure. But the country that they are partitioning is not in our actual possession; it is in the possession of the Arabs and the English. What is in our actual possession is a small portion, less than what they are proposing for a Jewish state. If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant. But in this proposed partition we will get more than what we already have, though of course much less than we merit and desire. . . . What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified. What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish . A unified Eretz Israeli [ sic ] would be no source of satisfaction for me—if it were Arab. 
+Acceptance of “a Jewish state on only part of the land”, Ben-Gurion continued, was “not the end but the beginning.” In time, the Jews would settle the rest of the land, “through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors, or through some other means ” (emphasis added). If the Arabs didn’t acquiesce to the establishment of a Jewish state in the place of Palestine, then the Jews would “have to talk to them in a different language” and might be “compelled to use force” to realize their goals. [17] 
+“My approach to the solution of the question of the Arabs in the Jewish state”, said Ben-Gurion in June 1938, “is their transfer to Arab countries.” The same year, he told the Jewish Agency Executive, “I am for compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.” [18] 
+The idea of partitioning Palestine was resurrected by the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which had drawn up the plan endorsed by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947. This plan, too, contained the inherent problem of a sizable population of Arabs who would remain within the boundaries of the proposed Jewish state. Benny Morris documents the attitude of the Zionist leadership with respect to this dilemma: 
+The Zionists feared that the Arab minority would prefer, rather than move to the Arab state, to accept the citizenship of the Jewish state. And “we are interested in less Arabs who will be citizens of the Jewish state,” said Golda Myerson (Meir), acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department. Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive and head of its Labor Department, thought that Arabs who remained in the Jewish state but were citizens of the Arab state would constitute “a permanent irredenta.” Ben-Gurion thought that the Arabs remaining in the Jewish state, whether citizens of the Arab or Jewish state, would constitute an irredenta—and in the event of war, they would become a “Fifth Column.” If they are citizens of the Arab state, argued Ben-Gurion, “[we] would be able to expel them,” but if they were citizens of the Jewish state, “we will be able only to jail them. And it is better to expel them than jail them.” So it was better not to facilitate their receipt of Jewish state citizenship. But Ben-Gurion feared that they would prefer this citizenship. Eli‘ezer Kaplan, the Jewish Agency’s treasurer, added: “Our young state will not be able to stand such a large number of strangers in its midst.” [19] 
+In sum, there was a consensus that such a sizable population of Arabs within the borders of their desired “Jewish state” was unacceptable. The events that followed must be analyzed within the context of this explicit understanding among the Zionist leadership that, one way or another, a large number of Arabs would have to go. Ruins of the former Arab village of Bayt Jibrin, in the West Bank west of Hebron. ( Public Domain ) Who Started the War? 
+One of Morris’s main arguments underscoring his denial of ethnic cleansing is that it was the Arabs, not the Jews, who started the war after having rejected the UN partition plan. He points to hostile actions by the Arabs between the end of November 1947 and May 1948, but, of course, there were also hostile actions by the Jews during this same period. So is there a particular incident Morris can point to as having marked the initiation of these hostilities? 
+In fact, in his book 1948 , he does point to a specific event. Early in the morning on November 30—the day after Resolution 181 was adopted in the UN General Assembly—an eight-man armed band from Jaffa ambushed a Jewish bus near Kfar Syrkin, killing five. Half an hour later, the gang attacked a second bus, killing two more. “These were the first dead of the 1948 War”, Morris writes. 
+Yet Morris also acknowledges that these attacks were almost certainly “not ordered or organized by” the Arab Palestinian leadership. And “the majority view” in the intelligence wing of the Haganah—the Zionists’ paramilitary organization that later became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—“was that the attackers were driven primarily by a desire to avenge” a raid by the Jewish terrorist group Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, on an Arab family ten days prior. Lehi “had selected five males of the Shubaki family and executed them in a nearby orange grove” as an act of revenge for the apparently mistaken belief that the Shubakis had informed the British authorities about a Lehi training session that prompted a British raid on the group in which five Jewish youths were killed. [20] 
+So why wasn’t the murder of five Arabs by the Jewish terrorist organization the initiating act of hostility marking the start of the 1948 war, in Morris’s account? 
+Clearly, to try to assess responsibility for the war by pinpointing this or that incident of tit-for-tat violence is an exercise in futility. Moreover, apart from overlooking the Zionists’ own acts of hostility, Morris’s claim that the Arabs started the war serves to remove the mutual hostilities that broke out in the wake of the General Assembly’s adoption of Resolution 181 from their larger context—and it is only within that larger context that a proper assessment of which side bore greater responsibility for the war can be made. 
+As in the above example, Morris tends to portray Jewish violence against Arabs as always being preceded by Arab violence against Jews—even though, as just illustrated, it was equally true that the Arab violence had, in turn, been preceded by Jewish violence. Elsewhere, in contrast to how he characterizes Arab violence, Morris describes unambiguous war crimes committed by the Zionist forces as merely “mistakes”. 
+Included among the Haganah’s “mistakes” was an attack on December 18, 1947, on the village of Khisas. Carried out with the approval of Yigal Allon, the commander of the Palmach (an elite unit within the Jewish army), Zionist forces invaded the village and indiscriminately murdered seven men, a woman, and four children. Morris describes this as a “reprisal” for the murder of a Jewish cart driver earlier that day, even though, as he superfluously notes, “None of the dead appear to have been involved in the death of the cart driver.” [21] 
+Another of the Haganah’s “mistakes” occurred on the night of January 5, 1948, when Zionist forces entered the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Katamon and bombed the Semiramis Hotel, killing twenty-six civilians, including a government official from Spain. “The explosion triggered the start of a ‘panic exodus’ from the prosperous Arab neighborhood.” The British were furious, and Ben-Gurion subsequently removed the officer responsible from command. [22] Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war (Source: Hanini.org / CC BY 3.0 ) 
+“But generally”, Morris continues, “Haganah retaliatory strikes during December 1947–March 1948 were accurately directed, either against perpetrators or against their home bases”—meaning the Arab villages where they lived. Thus, according to Morris’s own criteria, when the Haganah attacked an Arab village that happened to be home to one or more combatants and proceeded to go about “accurately” killing innocent civilians and destroying their homes, this was by no means a “mistake”. 
+Instructively, Morris quotes a document from the intelligence wing of the Haganah on the consequences of what he describes as the “Jewish reprisals” that occurred during those months: “The main effect of these operations was on the Arab civilian population ” (emphasis added), the Haganah noted, including “the destruction of their houses” and psychological trauma. Among other consequences, “The Jewish attacks forced the Arabs to tie down great forces in protecting themselves ” (emphasis added). [23] Thus Morris’s characterization of Arabs as the aggressors and the Haganah as being on the defensive throughout this period is contradicted by his own account, citing primary source evidence that precisely the opposite was true. 
+Indeed, Morris goes into considerable detail documenting how, in his own summation, “the Yishuv had organized for war. The Arabs hadn’t.” [24] 
+Morris’s characterization of the Arabs as always being the aggressors and the Jews as being on the defensive, despite occasional “mistakes” such as those just noted, extends well prior to the onset of the 1948 war. While Lehi’s murder of five members of the Shubaki family on November 20 seems to fit Morris’s criteria for a “mistake”, he could, in turn, also point to Arab attacks on Jews that had occurred well prior to that incident. 
+He writes, for example, that in the spring and summer of 1939 the Irgun Zvai Leumi, “which had been formed by activist breakaways from the Haganah, subjected the Arab towns to an unnerving campaign of retaliatory terrorism, with special Haganah units adding to the bloodshed through selective reprisals ” (emphasis added). [25] Once again we see that, while Morris doesn’t try to justify such acts of terrorism, he does characterize them as only occurring in retaliation for earlier acts of aggression by Arabs. 
+Indeed, Morris could go back a decade prior, within this exercise of trying to pinpoint responsibility for the initiation of such tit-for-tat violence, and point to the 1929 massacre of Jews in Hebron; or, further, to May 1921, when Arab mobs murdered Jews in Jaffa; or further still, to April 1920, when Arab rioters killed five Jews in Jerusalem. 
+There is no dispute that these earlier incidences of violence were initiated by Arabs. But the question remains of why they occurred. Did these murderous attacks reflect an inherent hatred of Jews among the Arab population? Or is there some other context that the debate Morris has had with his critics is still missing? The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Jeremy R. Hammond An overview of the crucial period from the rise of the Zionist movement until the creation of the state of Israel. Order Now Learn More 
+Those were questions the British occupiers asked themselves and conducted inquiries to try to answer. The inquiry into the outbreak of violence in 1921, the Haycraft Commission, determined that “there is no inherent anti-Semitism in the country, racial or religious. We are credibly assured by educated Arabs that they would welcome the arrival of well-to-do and able Jews who could help to develop the country to their advantage of all sections of the community.” [26] The outbreaks, rather, reflected the growing apprehension and resentment among the Arabs toward the Zionist project to reconstitute Palestine into a “Jewish state”—and in so doing to displace or otherwise disenfranchise and the land’s majority Arab population. 
+Nor were the Arabs’ fears unfounded; indeed, the Zionists were quite open about their intentions. When the acting Chairman of the Zionist Commission was interviewed, for example, “he was perfectly frank in expressing his view of the Zionist ideal. . . . In his opinion there can only be one National Home in Palestine, and that a Jewish one, and no equality in the partnership between Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish predominance as soon as the numbers of that race are sufficiently increased.” [27] 
+The Shaw Commission inquiring into the cause of the 1929 violence arrived at the same conclusion and further observed: 
+In less than ten years three serious attacks have been made by Arabs on Jews. For eighty years before the first of these attacks there is no recorded instance of any similar incidents. It is obvious then that the relations between the two races during the past decade must have differed in some material respect from those which previously obtained. Of this we found ample evidence. The reports of the Military Court and of the local Commission which, in 1920 and in 1921 respectively, enquired into the disturbances of those years, drew attention to the change in the attitude of the Arab population towards the Jews in Palestine. This was borne out by the evidence tendered during our enquiry when representatives of all parties told us that before the War the Jews and Arabs lived side by side if not in amity, at least with tolerance, a quality which to-day is almost unknown in Palestine. [28] 
+Morris likewise notes in 1948 that the attacks were chiefly motivated by “the fear and antagonism toward the Zionist enterprise”: “The bouts of violence of 1920, 1921, and 1929 were a prelude to the far wider, protracted eruption of 1936–1939, the (Palestine) Arab Revolt. Again, Zionist immigration and settlement—and the prospect of the Judaization of the country and possibly genuine fears of ultimate displacement—underlay the outbreak.” [29] 
+As Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion wrote to the director of the agency’s Political Department, Moshe Shertok, in 1937, “What Arab cannot do his math and understand that immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means a Jewish state in all of Palestine?” [30] 
+As Morris also documents, Ben-Gurion understood the Arab perspective perfectly well. With respect to the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, Ben-Gurion told his colleagues, “We must see the situation for what it is. On the security front, we are those attacked and who are on the defensive. But in the political field we are the attackers and the Arabs are those defending themselves. They are living in the country and own the land, the village. We live in the Diaspora and want only to immigrate [to Palestine] and gain possession of [ lirkosh ] the land from them.” [31] 
+Ben-Gurion told Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann years later, after the establishment of Israel, “Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?” [32] 
+Another aspect of Morris’s assessment that warrants emphasis is how he takes for granted that the UN partition plan was an equitable solution and that it was unreasonable of the Arabs to have rejected it. While accusing his critics of “pro-Arab propaganda”, this assumption reveals his own demonstrable prejudice toward the Palestinians. In truth, the UN partition plan was preposterously inequitable. Here, too, some additional historical background helps illuminate the context in which Resolution 181 was adopted, as well as the questions of why the 1948 war started and who bore greater responsibility for it. Lord Arthur Balfour in Tel Aviv, c. 1925 (from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress ) The Zionist Mandate for Palestine 
+During the First World War, the British came to occupy the territory of Palestine, having conquered it from the defeated Ottoman Empire. On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour sent a letter to financier and representative of the Zionist movement Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild that contained a declaration approved by the British Cabinet. The declaration read: 
+His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. 
+This statement, which became known as “The Balfour Declaration”, was cited by the Zionist leadership as having legitimized their aspirations, which had been reiterated by Lord Rothschild just a few months prior, on July 18, in a memorandum that expressed “the principle that Palestine should be re-constituted as the National Home for the Jewish People.” Any opinion the Arabs might have had about their homeland being so “re-constituted” was of no consideration. [33] 
+The purpose of the declaration was to secure Jewish support for the war effort. As Prime Minister Lloyd George noted, it was for “propaganda reasons”. The aforementioned 1937 British commission headed up by Lord William Peel explained that “it was believed that Jewish sympathy or the reverse would make a substantial difference one way or the other to the Allied cause. In particular Jewish sympathy would confirm the support of American Jewry . . . .” The Zionist leaders promised that, “if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause.” [34] 
+“The fact that the Balfour the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917 in order to enlist Jewish support for the Allies and the fact that this support was forthcoming”, the Peel Commission further remarked, “are not sufficiently appreciated in Palestine.” [35] 
+The wording “national home for the Jewish people” was chosen because it was not politically feasible for the British government to “commit itself to the establishment of a Jewish State” in the place of Palestine; the best it could do was to facilitate immigration and deny self-determination to the people of Palestine—the only one of the formerly mandated territories whose independence was not recognized—until such time as the Jews had managed to establish a majority. [36] 
+The problem with this plan was that the Arabs recognized that the goal of the Zionist project “would ultimately tend to their political and economic subjection. The Arabs were aware that this prospect was definitely envisaged not only by the Zionists of the ‘extremist’ kind, . . . but also by more responsible representatives of Zionism, such as Dr. Eder, the acting chairman of the Zionist Commission . . . .” [37] 
+The Peel Commission further acknowledged that “the forcible conversion of Palestine into a Jewish State against the will of the Arabs . . . would mean that national self-determination had been withheld when the Arabs were a majority in Palestine and only conceded when the Jews were a majority. It would mean that the Arabs had been denied the opportunity of standing by themselves: that they had, in fact, after an interval of conflict, been bartered about from Turkish sovereignty to Jewish sovereignty.” [38] 
+In an effort to allay Arab apprehension and garner their support, as well, for the war effort, Western governments promised the people of the region their independence. In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson outlined his “fourteen points”, promising respect for the right to self-determination and independence for the people living under Turkish rule: “The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” [39] 
+On November 7, 1918, the British and French governments issued a joint declaration stating that “The object aimed at by France and Great Britain in prosecuting in the East the war let loose by German ambition is the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks, and the establishment of National Governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations.” [40] 
+The British were not incognizant of the self-contradictory nature of its promises. In a memorandum to British Foreign Secretary George Curzon on August 11, 1919, Lord Balfour acknowledged the “flagrant” contradictions of British policy, but dismissed it as a matter of no concern: 
+For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country . . . . The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, and far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. 
+No declaration had been made by the British with regard to the inhabitants of Palestine, Balfour added, that “they have not always intended to violate”. [41] 
+As the Peel Commission later noted, “It was never doubted that the experiment”—meaning the Zionist project—“would have to be controlled by one of the Great Powers; and to that end it was agreed . . . that Palestine should have its place in the new Mandate System . . . .” [42] 
+The League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine was intended to give the color of law to Britain’s occupation and the policies enacted under its administration. It was not only favorable toward their goals, but was effectively written by the Zionists themselves. As the Peel Commission pointed out: 
+On the 3rd February the Zionist Organisation presented a draft resolution embodying its scheme for the execution of the Balfour Declaration. On the 27th of February its leaders appeared before the Supreme Council and explained the scheme. A more detailed plan, dated the 28th of March, was drafted by Mr. Felix Frankfurter, an eminent American Zionist. From these and other documents and records it is clear that the Zionist project had already in those early days assumed something like the shape of the Mandate as we know it. [43] 
+Not surprisingly, given the Zionists’ role in drafting the Mandate, it included the terms of the Balfour Declaration, charging the British with enacting policies to “secure the establishment of the Jewish national home”—including the facilitation of Jewish immigration—and requiring the British administration to consult and cooperate with the Jewish Agency toward that end. 
+It contained no provisions assuring the Arab majority that they would have a say in the administration of their homeland by the foreign occupying power and its European colonialist partners. [44] The Arab Legion attacking the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, May 1948 ( John Phillips/Life Magazine ) The Expropriation of the Land 
+As Theodor Herzl had envisioned, the Mandate facilitated the process of expropriation and removal of the poor Arab peasants by the Zionists, including by denying them employment. The Constitution of the Jewish Agency for Palestine signed in Zurich on August 14, 1920, stated: 
+Land is to be acquired as Jewish property and . . . the title to the lands acquired is to be taken in the name of the Jewish National Fund [JNF], to the end that the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people. . . . The Agency shall promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labour, and in all works or undertakings carried out or furthered by the Agency, it shall be deemed to be a matter of principle that Jewish labour shall be employed . . . . [45] 
+A 1930 report by Sir John Hope Simpson for the British government on immigration, land settlement, and development noted that, “Actually the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that the land has been extraterritorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land.” [46] 
+The prejudice underlying the JNF’s policy blinded the Zionist leadership to the harm it also caused to Jewish landowners. The 1921 British Haycraft Commission report cited an example: [T]he Zionist Commission put strong pressure upon a large Jewish landowner of Richon-le-Zion to employ Jewish labour in place of the Arabs who had been employed on his farm since he was a boy. The farmer, we were told, yielded to this pressure with reluctance, firstly, because the substitution of Jewish for Arab labour would alienate the Arabs, secondly, because the pay demanded by the Jewish labourers, and the short hours during which they would consent to work, would make it impossible for him to run his farm at a profit. [47] Learn Real History and Economics. Get FREE Books. 
+Join Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom today to get access to courses on how the economy really works and history the political establishment would prefer you didn’t know. Plus get 3 FREE books by award-winning journalist Jeremy R. Hammond. Learn More 
+Relations between Jews and Arabs in the JNF colonies were contrasted by relations in the settlements of the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association (PICA) funded by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The 1930 Hope Simpson Report observed: 
+In so far as the past policy of the P.I.C.A. is concerned, there can be no doubt that the Arab has profited largely by the installation of the colonies. Relations between the colonists and their Arab neighbours were excellent. In many cases, when land was bought by the P.I.C.A. for settlement, they combined with the development of the land for their own settlers similar development for the Arabs who previously occupied the land. All the cases which are now quoted by the Jewish authorities to establish the advantageous effect of Jewish colonization on the Arabs of the neighbourhood, and which have been brought to notice forcibly and frequently during the course of this enquiry, are cases relating to colonies established by the P.I.C.A., before the KerenHeyesod [JNF] came into existence. In fact, the policy of the P.I.C.A. was one of great friendship for the Arab. Not only did they develop the Arab lands simultaneously with their own, when founding their colonies, but they employed the Arab to tend their plantations, cultivate their fields, to pluck their grapes and their oranges. As a general rule the P.I.C.A. colonization was of unquestionable benefit to the Arabs of the vicinity. 
+It is also very noticeable, in travelling through the P.I.C.A. villages, to see the friendliness of the relations which exist between Jew and Arab. It is quite a common sight to see an Arab sitting in the verandah of a Jewish house. The position is entirely different in the Zionist colonies. [48] 
+Had the Jewish settlement in Palestine proceeded along the lines of the PICA colonies, history would undoubtedly have been very different. Alas, it was the policies of the JNF that came to characterize the nature of the colonization project. As the Hope Simpson Report noted: 
+At the moment this policy is confined to the Zionist colonies, but the General Federation of Jewish Labour is using every effort to ensure that it shall be extended to the colonies of the P.I.C.A., and this with some considerable success. . . . It will be a matter of great regret if the friendly spirt which characterized the relations between the Jewish employer in the P.I.C.A. villages and his Arab employees . . . were to disappear. Unless there is some change of spirit in the policy of the Zionist Organisation it seems inevitable that the General Federation of Jewish Labour, which dominates that policy, will succeed in extending its principles to all the Jewish colonies in Palestine. . . . The Arab population already regards the transfer of lands to Zionist hands with dismay and alarm. These cannot be dismissed as baseless in the light of the Zionist policy . . . . [49] 
+Another aspect of the Zionists’ land purchases was how it disenfranchised Arab inhabitants who had theretofore been living on and working the land. This was achieved by exploiting feudalistic Ottoman land laws. Under the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, the state effectively claimed ownership of the land and individuals were regarded as tenants. Subsequently, the law was amended so individuals could register for a title-deed to the land, but landholders often saw no need to do so unless they were interested in selling. Moreover, there were incentives not to register, including the desire to avoid granting legitimacy to the Ottoman government, to avoid paying registration fees and taxes, and to evade possible military conscription. Additionally, land lived on and cultivated by one individual or family was often registered in the name of another, such as local government magnates who registered large plots or even entire villages in their own names. [50] The British Shaw Commission report of 1929 described another common means by which the rightful owners of the land were legally disenfranchised: 
+Under the Turkish regime, especially in the latter half of the eighteenth century, persons of the peasant classes in some parts of the Ottoman Empire, including the territory now known as Palestine, found that by admitting the over-lordship of the Sultan or of some member of the Turkish aristocracy, they could obtain protection against extortion and other material benefits which counterbalanced the tribune demanded by their over-lord as a return for his protection. Accordingly many peasant cultivators at that time either willingly entered into an arrangement of this character or, finding that it was imposed upon them, submitted to it. By these means persons of importance and position in the Ottoman Empire acquired the legal title to large tracts of land which for generations and in some cases for centuries had been in the undisturbed and undisputed occupation of peasants who . . . had undoubtedly a strong moral claim to be allowed to continue in occupation of those lands. [51] 
+Much of the land acquired by the JNF was purchased from absentee landlords, with extreme prejudice toward the poor Arab inhabitants who by rights were its legitimate owners. [52] According to the Shaw Commission, no more than 10 percent of purchased land was acquired from peasants, the rest having been “acquired from the owners of large estates most of whom live outside Palestine”. [53] In the Vale of Esdraelon, for instance, “one of the most fertile parts of Palestine”, Jews purchased 200,000 dunams (more than 49,000 acres) from a wealthy family of Christian Arabs from Beirut (the Sursock family). Included in the purchase were 22 villages, “the tenants of which, with the exception of a single village, were displaced: 1,746 families or 8,730 people.” [54] As another example, in the Wadi el Hawareth area, the JNF purchased 30,826 dunams (more than 7,600 acres) and evicted a large proportion its 1,200 Arab inhabitants. [55] Suba Ruins of the Palestinian village of Suba, near Jerusalem, overlooking Kibbutz Zova, which was built on the village lands. ( Doron / CC BY-SA 3.0 ) Resolution 181 and the Early Phases of the 1948 War 
+Despite their best efforts, by the end of the Mandate, the Jewish settlers had managed to acquire only about 7 percent of the land in Palestine. Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district, including Jaffa, which included the largest Jewish population center, Tel Aviv. According to the UNSCOP report, “The Arab population, despite the strenuous efforts of Jews to acquire land in Palestine, at present remains in possession of approximately 85 percent of the land.” A subcommittee report further observed that “The bulk of the land in the Arab State, as well as in the proposed Jewish State , is owned and possessed by Arabs” (emphasis added). Furthermore, the Jewish population in the area of their proposed state was 498,000, while the number of Arabs was 407,000 plus an estimated 105,000 Bedouins. “In other words,” the subcommittee report noted, “at the outset, the Arabs will have a majority in the proposed Jewish State.” 
+UNSCOP nevertheless proposed that the Arab state be constituted from about 44 percent of the whole of Palestine, while the Jews would be awarded about 55 percent for their state, including the best agricultural lands. The committee was not incognizant of how this plan prejudiced the rights of the majority Arab population. In fact, in keeping with the prejudice inherent in the Mandate, the UNSCOP report explicitly rejected the right of the Arab Palestinians to self-determination. The “principle of self-determination” was “not applied to Palestine,” the report stated, “obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there. Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.” [56] 
+Given the proper historical context, we can now return to Benny Morris’s argument that “the Palestinians were the ones who started the war when they rejected the UN compromise plan and embarked on hostile acts”. This argument assumes that the Arabs’ rejection of the plan was somehow unreasonable. It was not . 
+Morris’s argument also assumes that Resolution 181 somehow lent legitimacy to the Zionists’ goal of establishing a “Jewish state” in Palestine within the area proposed under UNSCOP’s plan. It did not . While it is a popular myth that the UN created Israel, the partition plan was actually never implemented. Resolution 181 merely recommended that Palestine be partitioned and referred the matter to the Security Council, where it died . Needless to say, neither the General Assembly nor the Security Council had any authority to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants. 
+Although Resolution 181 was cited in Israel’s founding document as having granted legitimacy to the establishment of the “Jewish state”, in truth, the resolution neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948. [57] 
+When Morris says that the Arabs states had declared their intent “to attack the Jewish state when the British left”, what he really means, therefore, is that they declared their intent to take up arms to prevent the Zionists from unilaterally declaring for themselves sovereignty over lands they had no rights to and politically disenfranchising the majority population of Palestine. 
+Morris employs this same rhetorical device—a mainstay of Zionist propaganda—in his book 1948 to suggest that it was the Arabs who were the aggressors, while the Jews were simply defending themselves. For example, he emphasizes that “most of the fighting between November 1947 and mid-May 1948 occurred in the areas earmarked for Jewish statehood”—thus implying that most of the fighting occurred on land rightfully belonging to the Jews. However, the fact that most of the violence occurred within this area is completely irrelevant and tells us nothing about which side was guilty of aggression. After all, Arabs owned more land than Jews and much of this fighting took place in Arab villages and towns located within that same “earmarked” territory. 
+It is largely on the basis of his assumption that the land proposed for the Jewish state under the partition plan was indeed rightfully the Jews’ that he can sustain his narrative that, “From the end of November 1947 until the end of March 1948, the Arabs held the initiative and the Haganah was on the strategic defensive.” [58] “Going into the civil war, Haganah policy was purely defensive”, Morris repeats—although he grants that “the mainstream Zionist leaders, from the first, began to think of expanding the Jewish state beyond the 29 November partition resolution borders”; and its “defensive policy” during the early months of the war “was dictated in part by a lack of means” as it “was not yet ready for large-scale offensive operations”. [59] But the Arabs initiated the violence, in Morris’s account, and the Haganah acted in self-defense while “occasionally retaliating against Arab traffic, villages, and urban neighborhoods.” [60] 
+Ilan Pappé sheds some additional light on how the Haganah’s “defensive” operations were undertaken: 
+The first step was a well-orchestrated campaign of threats. Special units of the Hagana would enter villages looking for ‘infiltrators’ (read ‘Arab volunteers’) and distribute leaflets warning the local people against cooperating with the Arab Liberation Army. Any resistance to such an incursion usually ended with the Jewish troops firing at random and killing several villagers. The Hagana called these incursions ‘violent reconnaissance’ ( hasiyur ha-alim ). . . . In essence the idea was to enter a defenceless village close to midnight, stay there for a few hours, shoot at anyone who dared leave his or her house, and then depart. [61] 
+For example, on December 18, 1947, the Haganah attacked the village of Khisas at night, randomly blowing up houses with the occupants sleeping inside, killing fifteen, including five children. With a New York Times reporter having closely followed the events, Ben-Gurion issued a public apology and claimed the attack had been unauthorized; but “a few months later, in April, he included it in a list of successful operations.” [62] 
+“Much of the fighting in the first months of the war”, writes Morris, “took place in and on the edges of the main towns—Jerusalem, Tel Aviv–Jaffa, and Haifa. Most of the violence was initiated by the Arabs. Arab snipers continuously fired at Jewish houses, pedestrians, and traffic and planted bombs and mines along urban and rural paths and roads.” He describes “several days of sniping and Haganah responses in kind”—a typical example of how he characterizes the Haganah’s violence as occurring in self-defense or as retaliation for earlier Arab attacks he identifies as having initiated any given round of fighting. [63] 
+Pappé again offers some additional illumination that once again calls into question Morris’s assertion that it was the Arabs who were mostly responsible for initiating the violence. With respect to Haifa, Pappé writes: 
+From the morning after the UN Partition Resolution was adopted, the 75,000 Palestinians in the city were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly instigated by the Irgun and the Hagana. As they had only arrived in recent decades, the Jewish settlers had built their houses higher up the mountain. Thus, they lived topographically above the Arab neighbourhoods and could easily shell and snipe at them. They had started doing this frequently since early December. They used other methods of intimidation as well: the Jewish troops rolled barrels full of explosives, and huge steel balls, down into the Arab residential areas, and poured oil mixed with fuel down the roads, which they then ignited. The moment panic-stricken Palestinian residents came running out of their homes to try to extinguish these rivers of fire, they were sprayed with machine-gun fire. In areas where the two communities still interacted, the Hagana brought cars to Palestinian garages to be repaired, loaded with explosives and detonating devices, and so wreaked death and chaos. A special unit of the Hagana, Hashahar (‘Dawn’), made up of mistarvim —literally Hebrew for ‘becoming Arab’, that is Jews who disguised themselves as Palestinians—was behind this kind of assault. The mastermind of these operations was someone called Dani Agmon, who headed the ‘Dawn’ units. On its website, the official historian of the Palmach puts it as follows: ‘The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation.’ But worse was to come. [64] Haifa before the ethnic cleansing (Source: PalestineRemembered.com ) Plan D 
+Morris’s debate with his critics centers largely around “Plan D”, for “Dalet”, the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In contrast to what he describes as the Zionists’ “defensive” stage of the war, Plan D marked, by his own account, the beginning of their “war of conquest”. [65] 
+Morris is correct that Plan D did not explicitly call for “expelling as many Arabs as possible from the territory of the future Jewish state”, as Blatman suggests. But neither did it order that “neutral or friendly villages should be left untouched”, as Morris contends. 
+Under Plan D, brigade commanders were to use their own discretion in mounting operations against “enemy population centers”—meaning Arab towns and villages—by choosing between the following options: 
+—Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously. 
+—Mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be wiped out and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state. [66] 
+Thus, while Plan D allowed for Arab inhabitants to remain as long as they did not resist the takeover of their villages by the Zionist forces, it did not order Haganah commanders to permit them to stay under such circumstances—as Morris falsely suggests in the second of his responses in Haaretz . 
+Nor is Morris incognizant of the critical distinction. In 1948 , he explicitly notes that “brigade commanders were given the option ” of destroying Arab villages (emphasis added)—which would obviously necessitate expelling their inhabitants—regardless of whether any of the villagers offered any resistance. “The commanders were given discretion whether to evict the inhabitants of villages and urban neighborhoods sitting on vital access roads”, Morris writes (emphasis added). “The plan gave the brigades carte blanche to conquer the Arab villages and, in effect, to decide on each village’s fate (emphasis added)—destruction and expulsion or occupation. The plan explicitly called for the destruction of resisting Arab villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants.” [67] 
+As Ilan Pappé expounds, “Villages were to be expelled in their entirety either because they were located in strategic spots or because they were expected to put up some sort of resistance. These orders were issued when it was clear that occupation would always provoke some resistance and that therefore no village would be immune, either because of its location or because it would not allow itself to be occupied.” [68] By these means, by the time the war ended, the Zionist forces had expelled the inhabitants of and destroyed 531 villages and emptied eleven urban neighborhoods of their Arab residents. [69] 
+Pappé further notes how the facts on the ground at the time challenge Morris’s characterization of the Zionist’s operations as having been “defensive” prior to the implementation of Plan D: 
+The reality of the situation could not have been more different: the overall military, political and economic balance between the two communities was such that not only were the majority of Jews in no danger at all, but in addition, between the beginning of December 1947 and the end of March 1948, their army had been able to complete the first stage of the cleansing of Palestine, even before the master plan had been put into effect. If there were a turning point in April, it was the shift from sporadic attacks and counter-attacks on the Palestinian civilian population towards the systematic mega-operation of ethnic cleansing that now followed. [70] 
+In Haaretz , Morris adds that in the larger urban areas with mixed populations, under Plan D, the orders were for the Arabs “to be transferred to the Arab centers of those cities, like Haifa, not expelled from the country.” Morris also writes that the Zionists “left Arabs in place in Haifa”, and he cites it as an example of a place where Arabs “were ordered or encouraged by their leaders to flee”—as opposed to them being expelled by the Zionist forces. 
+But the details Morris provides in 1948 of what happened in Haifa tell an altogether different story. 
+By the end of March 1948, most of the wealthy and middle-class families had fled Haifa. Far from ordering this evacuation, the Arab leadership had blasted those who fled as “cowards” and tried to prevent them from leaving. [71] Among the reasons for the flight were terrorist attacks by the Irgun that had sowed panic in Haifa and other cities. On the morning of December 30, 1947, for example, the Irgun threw “three bombs from a passing van into a crowd of casual Arab laborers at a bus stop outside the Haifa Oil Refinery, killing eleven and wounding dozens.” [72] (Ilan Pappé notes that “Throwing bombs into Arab crowds was the specialty of the Irgun, who had already done so before 1947.” [73] And as Morris points out, Arab militias took note of the methods of the Irgun and Lehi and eventually started copying them: “The Arabs had noted the devastating effects of a few well-placed Jewish bombs in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa . . . .” [74] ) Arab laborers inside the plant responded by turning against their Jewish coworkers, killing thirty-nine and wounding fifty (several Arab employees did try to protect their Jewish co-workers). [75] 
+The Haganah retaliated by targeted a nearby village that was home to many of the refinery workers. The orders were to spare the women and children, but to kill the men. “The raiders moved from house to house, pulling out men and executing them. Sometimes they threw grenades into houses and sprayed the interiors with automatic fire. There were several dozen dead, including some women and children.” Ben-Gurion defended the attack by saying it was “impossible” to “discriminate” under the circumstances. “We’re at war. . . . There is an injustice in this, but otherwise we will not be able to hold out.” [76] 
+Marking “the start of the implementation of Plan D”, writes Morris, was Operation Nahshon in April 1948. [77] By this time, tens of thousands of Haifa’s seventy thousand Arabs had already fled. [78] The Haganah had been planning an operation in Haifa since mid-month, and when the British withdrew their troops from positions between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods on April 21, it provided the Haganah with the opportunity to put it into effect. [79] The Haganah fired mortars indiscriminately into the lower city, and by noon “smoke rose above gutted buildings and mangled bodies littered the streets and alleyways.” The mortar and machine gun fire “precipitated mass flight toward the British-held port area”, where Arab civilians trampled each other to get to boats, many of which were capsized in the mad rush. [80] 
+The British high commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, described the Haganah’s tactics: “Recent Jewish military successes (if indeed operations based on the mortaring of terrified women and children can be classed as such) have aroused extravagant reactions in the Jewish press and among the Jews themselves a spirit of arrogance which blinds them to future difficulties. . . . Jewish broadcasts both in content and in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany.” [81] An elderly man and a girl, refugees of the 1948 war (Source: Hanini.org / CC BY 3.0 ) 
+It was under these circumstances that the local Arab leaders sought to negotiate a truce, and in a British-mediated meeting in the afternoon on April 22, the Jewish forces proposed a surrender agreement that “assured the Arab population a future ‘as equal and free citizens of Haifa.’” [82] But the Arab notables, after taking some time to consult before reconvening, informed that they were in no position to sign the truce since they had no control over the Arab combatants in Haifa and that the population was intent on evacuating. Jewish and British officials at the meeting tried to persuade them to sign the agreement, to no avail. In the days that followed, nearly all of Haifa’s remaining inhabitants fled, with only about 5,000 remaining. 
+While in his Haaretz article, Morris attributed this flight solely to orders from the Arab leadership to leave the city, in 1948 , he notes that other factors included psychological trauma from the violence—especially the Haganah’s mortaring of the lower city—and despair at the thought of living now as a minority under a people who had just inflicted that collective punishment upon them. Furthermore, “The Jewish authorities almost immediately grasped that a city without a large (and actively or potentially hostile) Arab minority would be better for the emergent Jewish state, militarily and politically. Moreover, in the days after 22 April, Haganah units systematically swept the conquered neighborhoods for arms and irregulars; they often handled the population roughly; families were evicted temporarily from their homes; young males were arrested, some beaten. The Haganah troops broke into Arab shops and storage facilities and confiscated cars and food stocks. Looting was rife.” [83] 
+This, then, is the situation Morris is describing when he disingenuously writes in Haaretz that the Zionist forces “left Arabs in place in Haifa” and that Arabs fled Haifa because they were “ordered or encouraged by their leaders”. 
+We can also compare Morris’s account of how the village of Lifta came to be emptied of its Arab inhabitants with Ilan Pappé’s. 1984 contains only one mention of Lifta, a single sentence in which Morris characterizes it as another example of how Arabs fled upon the orders of their leadership: “For example, already on 3–4 December 1947 the inhabitants of Lifta, a village on the western edge of Jerusalem, were ordered to send away their women and children (partly in order to make room for incoming militiamen).” [84] 
+Pappé tells a remarkably different story, describing Lifta, with its population of 2,500, as “one of the very first to be ethnically cleansed”: 
+Social life in Lifta revolved around a small shipping centre, which included a club and two coffee houses. It attracted Jerusalemites as well, as no doubt it would today were it still there. One of the coffee houses was the target of the Hagana when it attacked on 28 December 1947. Armed with machine guns the Jews sprayed the coffee house, while members of the Stern Gang stopped a bus nearby and began firing into it randomly. This was the first Stern Gang operation in rural Palestine; prior to the attack, the gang had issued pamphlets to its activists: ‘Destroy Arab neighbourhoods and punish Arab villages.’ 
+The involvement of the Stern Gang in the attack on Lifta may have been outside the overall scheme of the Hagana in Jerusalem, according to the Consultancy [i.e., Ben-Gurion and his close advisors], but once it had occurred it was incorporated into the plan. In a pattern that would repeat itself, creating faits accomplis became part of the overall strategy. The Hagana High Command at first condemned the Stern Gang attack at the end of December, but when they realized that the assault had caused the villagers to flee, they ordered another operation against the same village on 11 January in order to complete the expulsion. The Hagana blew up most of the houses in the village and drove out all the people who were still there. [85] 
+The lesson learned was also applied in Jerusalem. On February 7, 1948, Ben-Gurion went to see Lifta for himself and that evening reported to a council of the Mapai party in Jerusalem: 
+When I come now to Jerusalem, I feel I am in a Jewish ( Ivrit ) city. This is a feeling I only had in Tel-Aviv or in an agricultural farm. It is true that not all of Jerusalem is Jewish, but it has in it already a huge Jewish bloc: when you enter the city through Lifta and Romema, through Mahaneh Yehuda, King George Street and Mea Shearim—there are no Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Ever since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans—the city was not as Jewish as it is now. In many Arab neighbourhoods in the West you do not see even one Arab. I do not suppose it will change. And what happened in Jerusalem and in Haifa—can happen in large parts of the country. If we persist it is quite possible that in the next six or eight months there will be considerable changes in the country, very considerable, and to our advantage. There will certainly be considerable changes in the demographic composition of the country. [86] 
+Note that all of this happened well before explicit orders were given to destroy villages and expel their inhabitants if anyone resisted occupation by the Zionist forces. From mid-March onward, in Morris’s own words, “In line with Plan D, Arab villages were henceforward to be leveled to prevent their reinvestment by Arab forces; the implication was that their inhabitants were to be expelled and prevented from returning.” [87] The Haganah “embarked on a campaign of clearing areas of Arab inhabitants and militia forces and conquering and leveling villages”. [88] Plan D implemented a “new policy, of permanently occupying and/or razing villages and of clearing whole areas of Arabs”. [89] 
+Morris’s contention that what happened wasn’t ethnic cleansing because most Palestinians fled, as opposed to being expelled by the Zionist forces, becomes a moot distinction in light of how, for example, a massacre that occurred in the Arab village of Deir Yassin in April was “amplified through radio broadcasts . . . to encourage a mass Arab exodus from the Jewish state-to-be.” [90] David Ben-Gurion (center) with Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon during the 1948 war ( Israel Defense Forces / CC BY-NC 2.0 ) 
+In the Galilee, “the Arab inhabitants of the towns of Beit Shean (Beisan) and Safad had to be ‘harassed’ into flight”, according to a planned series of operations conceived in April (“in line with Plan D”, Morris notes). In charge of these operations was the commander of the Palmach, Yigal Allon. [91] On May 1, two villages north of Safad were captured. Several dozen male prisoners were executed, and the Palmach “proceeded to blow up the two villages as Safad’s Arabs looked on. The bulk of the Third Battalion then moved into the town’s Jewish Quarter and mortared the Arab quarters”, prompting many of Safad’s Arab inhabitants to flee. [92] 
+After five days, the Arabs sought a truce, which Allon rejected. Even some of the local Jews “sought to negotiate a surrender and demanded that the Haganah leave town. But the Haganah commanders were unbending” and continued pounding Safad with mortars and its arsenal of 3-inch Davidka munitions. The first of the Davidka bombs, according to Arab sources cited by a Haganah intelligence document, killed 13 Arabs, mostly children, which triggered a panic and further flight. This, of course, was precisely what was “intended by the Palmah commanders when unleashing the mortars against the Arab neighborhoods”—which, “literally overnight, turned into a ‘ghost town’”. In the weeks that followed, “the few remaining Arabs, most of them old and infirm or Christians, were expelled to Lebanon or transferred to Haifa.” [93] 
+Yigal Allon summed up the purpose of the Palmach’s operations: “We regarded it as imperative to cleanse the interior of the Galilee and create Jewish territorial continuity in the whole of Upper Galilee.” He boasted of how he devised a plan to rid the Galilee of tens of thousands of Arabs without having to actually use force to drive them out. His strategy, which “worked wonderfully”, was to plant rumors that additional reinforcements had arrived “and were about to clean out the villages of the Hula [Valley]”. Local Jewish leaders with ties to the area’s villages were tasked with advising their Arab neighbors, “as friends, to flee while they could. And the rumor spread throughout the Hula that the time had come to flee. The flight encompassed tens of thousands.” [94] 
+Morris adds that, “To reinforce this ‘whispering,’ or psychological warfare, campaign, Allon’s men distributed fliers, advising those who wished to avoid harm to leave ‘with their women and children.’” [95] 
+Morris’s denial that these events he describes constituted ethnic cleansing seems difficult to reconcile with Allon’s statement that the goal of the Palmach’s operations in the Galilee was “to cleanse” the area of its Arab inhabitants. In his 2004 interview with Ari Shavit, Morris also noted with respect to the use of the verb “cleanse” to describe what happened throughout Palestine, “I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed.” 
+Indeed, Morris himself used the term repeatedly in his discussion with Shavit, in which Morris expressed his view that this “cleansing” of Palestine was morally justified: 
+Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here. . . . 
+There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands. . . . 
+There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing. . . . 
+That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. . . . 
+I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. . . . 
+But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered. . . . 
+If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. . . . 
+If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself. . . . 
+The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake. [96] 
+Morris’s recent denial that what occurred was ethnic cleansing is also difficult to reconcile with these earlier comments of his. Indeed, that would seem quite impossible, which is presumably why Morris made no attempt to do so after Steven Klein, in his contribution to the debate, had pointed out these words of Morris’s. Arab refugees crowding a British ship carrying them to Acre, April 1948 (Life Magazine. Source: PalestineRemembered.com ) The Fallacies of Morris’s Arguments 
+Now that the proper historical context has been established, let’s return to Morris’s arguments and address each in turn. 
+Morris denies that the Jewish leadership “carried out a policy of expelling the local Arabs”. This denial is untenable. Logically, the goal of establishing a demographically “Jewish state” would require the “compulsory transfer”—to borrow Ben-Gurion’s phrase for it, in turn borrowed from the Peel Commission—of a large number of Arabs. Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders had explicitly stated their desire to effect this “transfer”, and once war broke out there was a clear tacit understanding between the political leadership and the military commanders toward that end. As Morris himself has pointed out, there was an “atmosphere of transfer”, and commanders who carried out such expulsions were not punished. 
+Moreover, from mid-March onward, commanders were given explicit instructions for how this “compulsory transfer” was to be carried out. If the expulsion of Arab villagers prior to Plan D had received the tacit approval of the leadership, the expulsions thereafter received their explicit approval. Commanders like Yigal Allon understood their orders very well: it was “imperative” to “cleanse” their areas of operation of their Arab inhabitants. 
+After Blatman cited Morris to support his assertion that Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948, Morris accused Blatman of attributing things to him that he had never claimed. Yet Morris himself had previously described what happened during the war as “ethnic cleansing”—and expressed his view that Ben-Gurion’s error was not doing a thorough enough job of it. 
+Morris argues that Blatman’s assertion “ignores the basic fact that the Palestinians were the ones who started the war”. Even if we accept his assumptions that the Arabs’ rejection of the UN partition plan was unreasonable and that they were responsible for starting the war, it does not follow that no ethnic cleansing occurred. In keeping with his comments to Ari Shavit, what Morris really seems to be arguing here is not that it didn’t happen, but that it was justified; it’s not that Palestine wasn’t actually ethnically cleansed—clearly, by his own account, it was—just that, in his view, this wasn’t a crime. 
+And while legal scholars may debate whether such actions were prohibited under the laws of war at the time, there isn’t any ambiguity about the fact that they are recognized today as war crimes—and, regardless of what any international treaties had to say about it, just as immoral then as they would be today. 
+Moreover, Morris’s assumptions that the UN partition plan was an equitable solution and that Resolution 181 lent legitimacy to the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, are both categorically false . He bases his arguments that the Jews were acting defensively on the grounds that the Arab states had threatened “to attack the Jewish state” and then carried out that threat by “invading” Israel. But given the illegitimacy of the May 14 declaration and the inherent prejudice of the Zionist project toward the majority Arab population, this narrative crumbles. To characterize the Arabs as the “invaders” while Palestine’s Arab inhabitants were being systematically expelled or driven into flight and its Arab villages literally wiped off the map is simply to flip reality on its head. 
+Morris denies that there was ever a decision by the Jewish leadership “to ‘expel the Arabs’”. He repeats that Ben-Gurion “never gave [his officers] an order ‘to expel the Arabs.’” It might be true that no known documents, including Plan D, contained those exact words, but the leadership’s intent was clear. Indeed, in the very same sentence he says Ben-Gurion gave no such order, Morris notes that Ben-Gurion “let his officers understand that it was preferable for as few Arabs as possible to remain in the new country”. His implied logic is that without such an explicit order, it wasn’t ethnic cleansing. This is a non sequitur. No explicit order need have been given; it was enough that Haganah commanders understood the leaderships’ intention to have “as few Arabs as possible”, to quote Morris’s own words, in the “Jewish state” they were seeking to establish. Palestinian refugees fleeing their homes, October 30, 1948 (Source: PalestineRemembered.com ) 
+Moreover, Plan D did make explicit the operational orders to expel Arabs from their villages. Morris also suggests that since not all Arabs were expelled, therefore it wasn’t ethnic cleansing. But once again his logic is a non sequitur. It doesn’t follow that since there were Arabs who were allowed to remain in the territory that became Israel that therefore the expulsion of the majority of that territory’s Arab inhabitants didn’t constitute ethnic cleansing. Morris can opine that Ben-Gurion didn’t do a thorough enough job of it; but he can’t sustain the suggestion that the lack of thoroughness means it wasn’t ethnic cleansing. 
+The “atmosphere of transfer” is acknowledged by Morris; yet he asserts that Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, who “supported the transfer of Arabs” in the 1930s and early ‘40s, later “supported the UN decision, whose plan left more than 400,000 Arabs in place.” With this comment, he implies that Ben-Gurion and other leaders changed their minds and decided that a population of 400,000 Arabs within the area they desired for their “Jewish state” would be just fine. Once again, his argument is a non sequitur; their acceptance of the partition plan did not constitute a repudiation of their desire to rid the land of Arabs. On the contrary, it was seen as a pragmatic step toward achieving the ultimate goal of establishing a Jewish state with “less Arabs” (Golda Meir). 
+Indeed, he further acknowledges that the “atmosphere of transfer” still prevailed in April 1948, but, he argues, this “was never translated into official policy—which is why there were officers who expelled Arabs and others who didn’t.” But, once again, the fact that some Arabs—about 160,000, according to Morris—were permitted to remain does not mean that the rest weren’t victims of ethnic cleansing. Once again, explicit orders to expel Arabs needn’t have existed for us to recognize what occurred as ethnic cleansing; it was enough that a tacit understanding existed between the political leadership and the military commanders, which Morris acknowledges was in fact the case—including by pointing out that those commanders who expelled Arabs from their villages weren’t punished. Moreover, again, the “atmosphere of transfer” was translated into official policy with Plan D. 
+On March 24, 1948, Morris argues in Haaretz , Israel Galili “ordered all the Haganah brigades not to uproot Arabs from the territory of the designated Jewish state.” In 1948 , he specifies that “Galili instructed all Haganah units to abide by standing Zionist policy, which was to respect the ‘rights, needs and freedom,’ ‘without discrimination,’ of the Arabs living in the Jewish State areas.” [97] How does Morris reconcile this with the explicit orders under Plan D to collectively punish the civilian population by expelling them from their homes and destroying their villages? How does he reconcile it with the fact that, by his own account, commanders who expelled Arabs and destroyed villages weren’t punished for defying what Morris characterizes as a direct order? Instructively, he makes no attempt to. But he does note that “Things did change in early April”, meaning that this ostensible order to respect the rights of Palestinian civilians was rescinded. As he notes in 1948 , the policy outlined in April was “generally, to evict the Arabs living in the brigade’s area.” [98] 
+So how does Morris, in light of this admission, maintain that “there was no overall expulsion policy”? He notes that “here they expelled people, there they didn’t, and for the most part the Arabs simply fled.” But, again, neither the fact that some Arabs were allowed to remain nor that many fled out of fear is inconsistent with the recognition of what happened as ethnic cleansing. 
+Finally, Morris acknowledges that the Zionist leadership as a matter of policy prevented the Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes. Indeed, this was made largely impossible by the complete destruction of their villages. He makes no effort to reconcile this policy with his denial that ethnic cleansing occurred. Instead, he opines that this policy was “logical and just”. We see once again, thus, that Morris isn’t so much arguing that there was no ethnic cleansing as he is that the ethnic cleansing was justified. He is attempting to argue that the ethnic cleansing that did occur—which he has explicitly acknowledged did occur, and which he documents extensively in his own writings—was not a crime. 
+Benny Morris is entitled to his opinions. But to deny that the “Jewish state” of Israel was established by ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their homes in Palestine is simply a display of the very intellectual dishonesty he accuses his critics of. 
+The standard he applies is telling: he defends the ethnic cleansing on the grounds that all of the Arabs who were made refugees by the war and whom Israel refused to allow to return “had tried to destroy the state in the making.” Inasmuch as their very inhabitancy in the land the Zionist leadership desired for their “Jewish state” stood in the way of that project, he has a point. Their very existence in the land constituted a destruction of the Zionists’ ideal. Hence they had to go. In Morris’s own words, “A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them.” 
+Beyond that, Morris’s hypocrisy is glaring. He knows perfectly well that most of those expelled were civilians who had taken no part in hostilities. Hence what he is really saying here is that it was “logical and just” for the civilian Arab population to have been collectively punished for the crime some among them committed of putting up resistance to the Zionists’ operations to seize control of the territory they wanted for their “Jewish state”—precisely the collective punishment that Haganah commanders were ordered to carry out under Plan D, the blueprint, by Morris’s own account, for the Zionists’ “war of conquest”. 
+That Benny Morris applies such a hypocritical standard should not be too surprising. He is, after all, himself a Zionist. As a historian, he has contributed greatly to the literature on the subject, and in so doing, has helped move the discussion forward. By helping us to understand the origins of the conflict, he has empowered us with knowledge that brings clarity on how to achieve a peaceful resolution. It is unfortunate that he’s lately made such a concerted effort to move the discussion backward again. It is in the context of his own deeply held and scarcely concealed prejudice toward the Palestinians that his attempts now to deny the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must be understood. Haganah men patrolling the streets of Haifa, April 1948 (Life Magazine. Source: PalestineRemembered.com ) Conclusion 
+Was what happened in Palestine during the 1948 war “ethnic cleansing”? 
+Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, author of Ethnic Cleansing , writes that, while the term “defies easy definition”, it can be generally understood as “the expulsion of an ‘undesirable’ population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.” [99] 
+The US State Department, in a 1999 report titled Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo: An Accounting , described “the Milosevic regime’s brutal, premeditated, and systematic campaign to expel many Kosovar Albanians from their homeland.” [100] 
+In a February 2007 judgment, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) noted that the term “ethnic cleansing” was used in practice “to mean ‘rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area’”. [101] 
+By any of these definitions, ethnic cleansing is precisely what occurred in Palestine during the 1948 war. 
+As Ilan Pappé writes in the beginning of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine , “This book is written with the deep conviction that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must become rooted in our memory and consciousness as a crime against humanity and that it should be excluded from the list of alleged crimes.” [102] 
+Indeed, what happened in Palestine in 1948 was not an “alleged” ethnic cleansing, as Benny Morris would have us believe. It is regrettable that he seems to have decided that trying to justify Israel’s legitimacy as a “Jewish state” is more important than presenting the public with an honest historical representation of how Israel came into existence. But far from being “alleged”, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must today be recognized as an uncontroversial historical fact. That this ethnic cleansing occurred is indeed today very well documented—including in Benny Morris’s own important contributions to the literature on the subject. 
+It is also regrettable that the US mainstream media treat the matter as taboo. This silence must be broken. The means by which the “Jewish state” of Israel came into existence—via the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine—must be brought out of the darkness and into the light. Only by doing so will the prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians have any chance of coming to fruition. Jeremy R. Hammond 
+Jeremy R. Hammond is an award-winning independent political analyst and editor and publisher of Foreign Policy Journal . Described by Barron’s as “a writer of rare skill”, he is the author of Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2016), Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis (2012), and The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination: The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Israeli-Arab Conflict (2009). Find him on the web at JeremyRHammond.com .",FAKE
+492,Cloudy economy rains on Obama's parade,"According to a transition pool report, the media personalities are as follows: NBC News President Deborah Turness; CNN President Jeff Zucker and network...",REAL
+7760,GOOGLE head Eric Schmidt's secret strategic plan for election...,"Secondary verification by google.com DKIM key Fwd: 2016 thoughts From:cheryl.mills@gmail.com To: robbymook@gmail.com, john.podesta@gmail.com, daplouffe@icloud.com Date: 2014-04-15 17:16 Subject: Fwd: 2016 thoughts Forwarded message From: Eric Schmidt <eschmidt@google.com> Date: Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 1:56 PM Subject: 2016 thoughts To: Cheryl Mills <cheryl.mills@gmail.com> Cheryl, I have put together my thoughts on the campaign ideas and I have scheduled some meetings in the next few weeks for veterans of the campaign to tell me how to make these ideas better. This is simply a draft but do let me know if this is a helpful process for you all. Thanks !! Eric Notes for a 2016 Democratic Campaign Eric Schmidt April 2014 DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT Here are some comments and observations based on what we saw in the 2012 campaign. If we get started soon, we will be in a very strong position to execute well for 2016. 1. Size, Structure and Timing Lets assume a total budget of about $1.5Billion, with more than 5000 paid employees and million(s) of volunteers. The entire startup ceases operation four days after November 8, 2016. The structure includes a Chairman or Chairwoman who is the external face of the campaign and a President who is the executive in charge of objectives, measurements, systems and building and managing the organization. Every day matters as our end date does not change. An official campaign right after midterm elections and a preparatory team assembled now is best. 2. Location The campaign headquarters will have about a thousand people, mostly young and hardworking and enthusiastic. Its important to have a very large hiring pool (such as Chicago or NYC) from which to choose enthusiastic, smart and low paid permanent employees. DC is a poor choice as its full of distractions and interruptions. Moving the location from DC elsewhere guarantees visitors have taken the time to travel and to help. The key is a large population of talented people who are dying to work for you. Any outer borough of NYC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston are all good examples of a large, blue state city to base in. Employees will relocate to participate in the campaign, and will find low cost temporary housing or live with campaign supporters on a donated basis. This worked well in Chicago and can work elsewhere. The computers will be in the cloud and most likely on Amazon Web services (AWS). All the campaign needs are portable computers, tablets and smart phones along with credit card readers. 3. The pieces of a Campaign a) The Field Its important to have strong field leadership, with autonomy and empowerment. Operations talent needs to build the offices, set up the systems, hire the people, and administer what is about 5000 people. Initial modeling will show heavy hiring in the key battleground states. There is plenty of time to set these functions up and build the human systems. The field is about organizing people, voter contact, and get out the vote programs. For organizing tools, build a simple way to link people and activities as a workflow and let the field manage the system, all cloud based. Build a simple organizing tool with a functioning back-end. Avoid deep integration as the benefits are not worth it. Build on the cloud. Organizing is really about sharing and linking people, and this tool would measure and track all of it. There are many other crucial early investments needed in the field: determining the precise list of battleground states, doing early polling to confirm initial biases, and maintaining and extending voter protection programs at the state level. b) The Voter Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify, meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easily speak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get the voter videos and other answers to areas they care about (""the benefits of ACA to you"" etc.) The scenario includes a volunteer on a walk list, encountering a potential voter, updating the records real time and deepening contact with the voter and the information we have to offer. c) Digital A large group of campaign employees will use digital marketing methods to connect to voters, to offer information, to use social networks to spread good news, and to raise money. Partners like Blue State Digital will do much of the fund raising. A key point is to convert BSD and other partners to pure cloud service offerings to handle the expected crush and load. d) Media (paid), (earned) and (social), and polling New tools should be developed to measure reach and impact of paid, earned and social media. The impact of press coverage should be measurable in reach and impact, and TV effectiveness measured by attention and other surveys. Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme. Connect polling into this in some way. Find a way to do polling online and not on phones. e) Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resource optimization tools For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote. Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference. It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes. The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors. f) Core engineering, voter database and contact with voters online The database of voters (NGP Van) is a fine starting point for voter records and is maintained by the vendor (and needs to be converted to the cloud). The code developed for 2012 (Narwahl etc.) is unlikely to be used, and replaced by a model where the vendor data is kept in the Van database and intermediate databases are arranged with additional information for a voter. Quite a bit of software is to be developed to match digital identities with the actual voter file with high confidence. The key unit of the campaign is a ""voter"", and each and every record is viewable and updatable by volunteers in search of more accurate information. In the case where we can't identify the specific human, we can still have a partial digital voter id, for a person or ""probable-person"" with attributes that we can identify and use to target. As they respond we can eventually match to a registered voter in the main file. This digital key is eventually matched to a real person. The Rules Its important that all the player in the campaign work at cost and there be no special interests in the financing structure. This means that all vendors work at cost and there is a separate auditing function to ensure no one is profiting unfairly from the campaign. All investments and conflicts of interest would have to be publicly disclosed. The rules of the audit should include caps on individual salaries and no investor profits from the campaign function. (For example, this rule would apply to me.) The KEY things a) early build of an integrated development team and recognition that this is an entire system that has to be managed as such b) decisions to exclusively use cloud solutions for scalability, and choice of vendors and any software from 2012 that will be reused. c) the role of the smart phone in the hands of a volunteer. The smart phone manages the process, updates the database, informs the citizen, and allows fundraising and recruitment of volunteers (on android and iphone). d) early and continued focus of qualifying fundraising dollars to build the field, and build all the tools. Outside money will be plentiful and perfect for TV use. A smart media mix tool tells all we need to know about media placement, TV versus other media and digital media. Preview is disabled for emails bigger than 10KB. e-Highlighter",FAKE
+2419,"High school, middle school kids now use more e-cigs than tobacco: CDC","The number of middle and high school students using electronic cigarettes tripled between 2013 and 2014, according to government figures released Thursday, a startling increase that public health officials fear could reverse decades of efforts combating the scourge of smoking.
+
+The use of e-cigarettes among teenagers has eclipsed the use of traditional cigarettes and all other tobacco products, a development that Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called “alarming” and “shocking.”
+
+“What’s most surprising is how in­cred­ibly rapid the use of products other than cigarettes has increased,” Frieden said in an interview, adding that some e-cigarette smokers would undoubtedly go on to use traditional cigarettes. “It is subjecting another generation of our children to an addictive substance.”
+
+The results, based on an annual survey of 22,000 students around the country and published Thursday by the CDC, detail a quickly evolving landscape of tobacco products that appeal to teenagers.
+
+Anti-smoking advocates argue that the rise in the popularity of e-cigarettes stems in part from aggressive, largely unregulated marketing campaigns that Frieden said are “straight out of the playbook” of cigarette ads that targeted young people in earlier generations.
+
+“These are the same images, the same themes and the same role models that the cigarette industry used 50 years ago,” said Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “It’s the Marlboro Man reborn. It’s the Virginia Slims woman recreated, with the exact same effect. ... This is not an accident.”
+
+But advocates of e-cigarettes -- small devices that heat up flavored, nicotine-laced liquid into a vapor that is inhaled -- say the worries expressed by public health officials are premature and not backed up by data.
+
+Cynthia Cabrera, executive director of the Smoke-Free Alternatives Trade Association, an industry group, said her organization has long supported age restrictions and other measures to keep e-cigarettes out of the hands of minors. But at the same time, she said there’s no definitive evidence e-cigarettes are a “gateway” to using traditional cigarettes and other tobacco products. On the contrary, she said, many teens have tried e-cigarettes in the past already were smokers.
+
+“We need to not lose perspective about the potential these products have to eliminate harm from combusted tobacco,” she said. “I suspect teens experiment with a lot of things. And I suspect anytime someone is not smoking a cigarette, that’s a good thing.”
+
+“The CDC should really be jumping for joy at the fact that smoking rates are declining. This is a huge success,” added Michael Siegel, a professor and tobacco control specialist at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “Instead, they are using this as another opportunity to demonize e-cigarettes.”
+
+Siegel said he agrees that minors shouldn’t have access to any tobacco product. But he said the CDC numbers suggest that rather than serving as a gateway to cigarette smoking, e-cigarette use might be diverting teens from traditional cigarettes, which still kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. “That’s a good thing,” he said.
+
+While tobacco giants such as Lorillard and Altria have indeed purchased e-cigarette companies in recent years, Cabrera disputed that those marketing campaigns target underage smokers. And she said the bulk of e-cigarette marketing is still done by hundreds of small companies whose ads on the internet and other platforms target only adults.
+
+“If you’re thinking this is Big Tobacco redux, that’s the wrong thinking,"" she said.
+
+This much seems certain: Teens are experimenting as much as ever. Roughly a quarter of high school students and near 8 percent of middle school students still report using a tobacco product at least once during the past 30 days.
+
+But between 2013 and 2014, the findings show, e-cigarette use among high school students had increased from 4.5 percent to 13.4 percent. Usage also more than tripled among middle school students, according to the findings. Only  among black students was another tobacco product, cigars, more popular than e-cigarettes, the CDC said.
+
+During that same period, the use of hookahs — water pipes that are used to smoke specially made tobacco — roughly doubled for middle and high school students, also eclipsing the use of regular cigarettes.
+
+[Seven things to know about e-cigarettes]
+
+Meanwhile, use of conventional cigarettes sank to the lowest levels in years. According to the CDC, 9.2 percent of high school students and 2.5 percent of middle school students reported smoking a cigarette over the past month.
+
+On the surface, that might seems like good news, given the hundreds of thousands of Americans that still die from smoking each year. And it might be. “The drop in cigarette use is historic, with enormous public health significance,” Myers said. But, he was quick to add, “the explosion of e-cigarette use among kids means these products are being taken up in record numbers with totally unknown long-term consequences that could potentially undermine all the progress we’ve made.”
+
+Last April, the Food and Drug Administration announced that for the first time it would begin to regulate e-cigarettes, which has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States. The agency said its plan would force manufacturers to curb sales to minors, place health warning labels on their products and disclose the ingredients in e-cigarettes. The initial proposals stopped short of halting online sales of e-cigarettes, restricting television advertising or banning the use of candy and fruit flavorings that critics say are intended to appeal to young smokers.
+
+A year later, the FDA has not finalized any new regulations involving e-cigarettes, though its top tobacco officials said in a statement Thursday the agency still plans to oversee the burgeoning market.
+
+“In today’s rapidly evolving tobacco marketplace, the surge in youth use of novel products like e-cigarettes forces us to confront the reality that the progress we have made in reducing youth cigarette smoking rates is being threatened,” said Mitch Zeller, J.D., director of FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. “These staggering increases in such a short time underscore why FDA intends to regulate these additional products to protect public health.”
+
+Myers said such action can't come soon enough.
+
+""The failure of the FDA to move more quickly means we have an urgent crisis that needs to be addressed,"" he said. ""In the absence of strong governmental action, these numbers will only keep going up.""",REAL
+1705,"Sanders focuses on gun violence, immigration as 13,000 attend Arizona rally","TUCSON, Ariz. — Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders made a pair of spirited pitches here Friday night to address continuing gun violence and pass comprehensive immigration reform during a boisterous rally that drew an estimated 13,000 people to a city park.
+
+In a departure from his usual stump speech, which focuses heavily on economic inequality, the senator from Vermont began his remarks by zeroing in on two issues that have been prominent in Arizona — and on which his positions have not always been as liberal as most others.
+
+Sanders, who is heading into Tuesday’s first Democratic debate in a stronger position than most anyone anticipated, referenced two shootings Friday at campuses in Arizona and Texas. In Flagstaff, Ariz., a college freshman was taken into custody after he shot four people, killing one, near a residence hall at Northern Arizona University.
+
+[Bernie Sanders says he is pulling together a plan to address gun violence]
+
+Sanders offered his condolences and prayers, but then added: “We also know that we are tired of condolences, and we are tired of just prayers.”
+
+“The truth of the matter is … the issue of gun violence is not going to be solved easily,” Sanders said, but he said that is no excuse not to seek common-sense solutions and to move the current debate beyond “yelling and demeaning” one another.
+
+Sanders, who represents a state with a deep hunting tradition and little gun control, has a mixed record on the issue, including a vote in 1993 against the landmark Brady Bill. But he has pledged to develop a comprehensive package of reforms to stem violence, including stronger background checks for gun purchases and “a revolution” in the way the country treats mental illness.
+
+[Bernie Sanders to oppose Obama’s nominee to lead the FDA]
+
+On immigration, Sanders sought to connect with a racially mixed crowd in a state with a large Latino population by relaying the story of his father’s arrival in the United States from Poland at age 17 with little money and little ability to speak English.
+
+“My family’s story is a story very similar to many people who are here tonight, and that story is the story of America,” Sanders said, calling it “a story rooted in family and fueled by hope.”
+
+Sanders repeated calls he has made previously to provide legal protection for 11 million undocumented workers in the country and for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. And if elected president, he said would take executive actions aimed at keeping families together.
+
+“Our job is to bring families together, not tear them apart,” Sanders said.
+
+Despite his inclusive tone, Sanders has in the past found himself at odds with immigration advocates at times, including a 2007 vote against a comprehensive immigration bill and voicing concerns that “open borders” are a threat to American jobs.
+
+On Friday, he stressed his vote for a 2013 comprehensive immigration bill, and other aspects of his rally suggested a commitment to a path forward on the issue.
+
+Among the speakers who took the stage before Sanders were 10-year-old Bob de la Rosa, who relayed to the audience that his mother had been deported and remains in Mexico.
+
+“She tells me we are separated because she wants me to have a good education,” de la Rosa told a hushed crowd. “Kids like me need our families together.”
+
+A mariachi band entertained the crowd gathered in the city park before Sanders took the stage at an outdoor performance center. Several audience members who sat on the stage behind Sanders held signs that spelled out “VIVA BERNIE.”
+
+Sanders also picked up his first formal endorsement from a sitting member of Congress: Rep. Raul Grijalva, a liberal Democrat whose southern Arizona district that includes Tucson.
+
+Grijalva  is co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which Sanders helped co-found as a House member in 1991. Grijalva is also a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and in a position to help Sanders with outreach to Latino voters, one of the challenges confronting his campaign once the contest moves beyond Iowa and New Hampshire.
+
+Grijalva told the crowd he considers Sanders a friend and shares his values.
+
+“It’s way past time that we had a national campaign and a voice that speaks truth to power,” he said.
+
+While the endorsement was a boost to Sanders, it also served as reminder of a big advantage that Hillary Rodham Clinton maintains in the Democratic race even as Sanders has gained or surpassed her in early state polling: More than 100 members of Congress have already endorsed Clinton.
+
+In the nomination process, such party elites are more than just cheerleaders. Roughly one-fifth of the delegates who will pick the Democratic nominee are super delegates — elected officials and other party leaders who are not bound by voting in their states. And to this point, they’ve broken overwhelmingly in Clinton’s direction.",REAL
+1296,What happened to Carly Fiorina's presidential hopes? (+video),"Much about the 2016 campaign has bewildered pundits, but the rise and fall of Carly Fiorina fit a classic pattern.
+
+Will Trump's plan to register Muslims make it to The White House?
+
+Tesla under Trump: How will electric cars fare under the next president?
+
+Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina speaks at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa, last October. The former business executive announced Wednesday that she had dropped out of the 2016 White House race.
+
+Former tech executive Carly Fiorina quit the GOP presidential race on Wednesday following a disappointing showing in the New Hampshire primary, where she won only about 4 percent of the vote.
+
+“While I suspend my candidacy today, I will continue to travel this country and fight for those Americans who refuse to settle for the way things are and a status quo that no longer works for them,” Ms. Fiorina said in a statement on her Facebook page.
+
+What happened to her campaign? For a brief moment last fall Fiorina was a fast-rising star. Her crisp answers at the first undercard debate earned her a ticket to the main stage, where she shined.
+
+She rocked Donald Trump with a sharp answer to his criticisms of her personal appearance – “I think women all over the country heard what Mr. Trump said,” she said during the debate, when questioned about the incident.
+
+Briefly, she was a top tier candidate. In late September she was in third in polling averages, with around 12 percent of the vote.
+
+But Fiorina never seemed to articulate a vision or distinguish her proposed policies from her rivals. She inveighed against established political elites but released little more than a simple three-page tax plan. Meanwhile, Trump was ramping up the rhetoric on immigration and sucking up vast amounts of media attention.
+
+If Fiorina “had really come up with some interesting policy ideas based on her private sector experience she might have progressed as a candidate,” writes conservative Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin.
+
+Fiorina also found herself the target of concerted attacks from Planned Parenthood and some liberals after her description of undercover videos dealing with the organization’s handling of fetal tissues proved to be exaggerated.
+
+All these things took a toll and her time at the top of the polls proved brief. She dropped into the lower tier by the turn of the year and in the Iowa caucuses won only about 2 percent support.
+
+In the end she was a classic boom-and-bust candidate, who is briefly discovered by voters due to some event, zooms up, is subjected to more intense scrutiny, and then collapses. It’s a pattern followed by such 2012 hopefuls as Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain – and in 2016 by Ben Carson as well as Fiorina herself.",REAL
+912,"Cruz dominates, Trump falls short again as more states pick delegates","Ted Cruz dominated the race for delegate seats at weekend Republican meetings nationwide, further positioning the senator from Texas to wrest the GOP presidential nomination from Donald Trump if the contest is decided on later ballots at the Republican National Convention.
+
+In some instances, Cruz supporters won delegate seats in states that Trump won, meaning that in most cases they will be required to vote for the businessman on a first ballot. But if Trump fails to win the nomination in the first round, those Cruz supporters could switch to the senator on subsequent ballots.
+
+The Trump campaign has assured supporters that it would begin performing better in such settings, but it still seems more focused on winning most of the remaining 15 contests through June and securing the 1,237 delegates needed before the Cleveland convention.
+
+Trump still has a commanding lead in delegates — 845 compared with 559 for Cruz, according to the latest tally. That is likely to be padded on Tuesday, when Trump is poised to win primaries in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Given Cruz's struggles to find traction in ""Acela Primary"" states, he has shifted his focus to Indiana, which votes next month and is seen as the last best chance for the ""Stop Trump"" campaign to stop the front-runner.
+
+[Can Clinton and Trump ride to big victories in next week’s ‘Acela primary’?]
+
+Maine hosted the marquee weekend contest, in which Cruz won 19 of the 20 delegate seats up for grabs. The win sparked a feud with one of Trump's most senior Republican surrogates, Gov. Paul LePage.
+
+The governor claimed that Cruz reneged on an agreement that would have permitted supporters of the three presidential candidates to fill the delegate seats the contenders won in the March caucus. That would have meant 12 seats for Cruz, nine for Trump and two for Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
+
+But LePage said Cruz's team ""lied to us and broke the deal,"" adding that David Sawyer, a Cruz aide who was in the state helping the senator's supporters get elected, ""stabbed us in the back, reneged on the unity slate and betrayed the Maine people.""
+
+""As we have seen throughout the country, Cruz’s national campaign is run by greedy political hooligans,"" he added in a state posted on Facebook. ""These are the same operatives in the Republican Establishment who worked for Mitt Romney to disenfranchise Maine delegates in 2012. They are using sneaky and deceitful operators like Sawyer to try to subvert the democratic process and take all 23 delegates. I can't stand by and watch as Cruz and the Republican Establishment forcibly overrule the votes of Mainers who chose Trump and Kasich.""
+
+But Cruz aides said no agreement had been finalized.
+
+""The guys in the state that helped win the caucus made the decision not to back [LePage's proposal] and put together their own slate,"" said a senior aide to Cruz who was not authorized to speak publicly about the dispute. ""These are the people that represent the interests of Maine, and we're going to stand with the grass-roots activists before we stand with establishment politicians like Govenor LePage.""
+
+[Delegate tracker: The race to the Republican nomination]
+
+Trump deployed former neurosurgeon Ben Carson to woo Maine Republicans, while Cruz sent former businesswoman Carly Fiorina in his absence. A Trump supporter won a delegate slot, while LePage will be one of the state's three at-large delegates.
+
+Republicans also met Saturday at state conventions in Utah and Kentucky while party members met in congressional districts in Minnesota and South Carolina to pick their delegates.
+
+In Utah, another state Cruz won overwhelmingly, 36 of the 37 available delegate seats were won by his supporters. His slate includes Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Mia Love. Three more seats will be awarded to state party leaders. Cruz gets all 40 votes on the first ballot.
+
+Kentucky's GOP also formally selected 25 delegates, including Gov. Matt Bevin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul. There was less controversy at the convention in Lexington on Saturday, given that the state party controls the selection process. On the first ballot, the commonwealth's 46 delegates will go this way: Trump (17), Cruz (15), Kasich (seven) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has dropped out of the race but will also be awarded seven delegates. Delegates are free to vote as they choose on subsequent ballots.
+
+In Minnesota, Republicans in three congressional districts elected Cruz supporters for each of the nine seats up for grabs. The state concludes its selection process next month. Rubio won the state, meaning that he will get 17 of Minnesota's votes on the first ballot, while Cruz will get 13 and Trump eight.
+
+And Trump again failed to have his supporters win seats in South Carolina, a state he won overwhelmingly. Cruz grabbed a delegate in the 6th Congressional District, a mostly Democratic area. So did Kasich. The third position went to a publicly uncommitted delegate who privately supports Trump, according to Republicans familiar with the contest. Trump gets all 50 votes on the first ballot.
+
+The arcane process of picking Republican delegates continues next weekend in Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Delaware, Missouri and Virginia. The contests in Arizona and Virginia are expected to be most closely watched, given that Trump won the state but Cruz and other anti-Trump forces have recruited candidates to run for open seats.
+
+On policies, Ted Cruz shifts his stance to suit a fractured GOP",REAL
+74,"Racism is “America’s original sin”: Unless we tell the truth about our history, we’ll never find the way to reconciliation","Understanding our own stories about race, and talking about them to one another, is absolutely essential if we are to become part of the larger pilgrimage to defeat racism in America. It is also a biblical story, and now a global story in which we play a central role. We all start with our own stories about race, so I will begin with mine.
+
+Fifty years ago I was a teenager in Detroit. I took a job as a janitor at the Detroit Edison Company to earn money for college. There I met a young man named Butch who was also on the janitorial staff. But his money was going to support his family, because his father had died. We became friends. I was a young white man, and Butch was a young black man, and the more we talked, the more we wanted to keep talking.
+
+When the company’s elevator operators were off, Butch and I would often be the fill-ins. When you operated elevators, the law required you to take breaks in the morning and in the afternoon. On my breaks, I’d go into Butch’s elevator to ride up and down and talk with him. On his breaks, Butch came to ride and talk with me. Those conversations changed the way I saw Detroit, my country, and my life. Butch and I had both grown up in Detroit, but I began to realize that we had lived in two different countries—in the same city.
+
+When Butch invited me to come to his home one night for dinner and meet his family, I said yes without even thinking about it. In the 1960s, whites from the suburbs, like me, didn’t travel at night into the city, where the African Americans lived. I had to get directions from Butch. When I arrived, his younger siblings quickly jumped into my lap with big smiles on their faces, but the older ones hung back and looked at me more suspiciously. Later, I understood that the longer blacks lived in Detroit, the more negative experiences they had with white people.
+
+Butch was very political, and even becoming militant—he always carried a book he was reading, such as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, stuffed into the back pocket of his khaki janitor’s uniform—but his mom certainly wasn’t. She was much like my own mother, focused on her kids and worried that her son’s ideas would get him into trouble.
+
+As we talked through the evening about life in Detroit, Butch’s mom told me about the experiences all the men in her family—her father, her brothers, her husband, and her sons—had with the Detroit police. Then she said something I will never forget as long as I live. “So I tell all of my children,” she said, “if you are ever lost and can’t find your way back home, and you see a policeman, quickly duck behind a building or down a stairwell. When the policeman is gone, come out and find your own way back home.” As Butch’s mother said that to me, my own mother’s words rang in my head. My mom told all of her five kids, “If you are ever lost and can’t find your way home, look for a policeman. The policeman is your friend. He will take care of you and bring you safely home.” Butch and I were becoming friends. And I remember his mother’s advice to her children as vividly today as I heard those words fifty years ago.
+
+Five decades ago, revelations about race in my hometown turned my life upside down—and turned me in a different direction. Encounters with black Detroit set me on a new path, on which I am still walking. My own white church ignored and denied the problem of race. People there didn’t want to talk about the questions that were coming up in my head and heart—questions that suggested something very big was wrong about my city and my country.
+
+As a teenager, I was listening to my city, reading the newspapers, having conversations with people. I wondered why life in black Detroit seemed so different from life in the white Detroit suburbs. I didn’t know any hungry people or dads without jobs, and I didn’t have any family members who had ever been in jail. Why were all these things happening in the city? Weren’t there black churches in the city too? Why had we never visited them or had them come to visit us? Who was this minister in the south named King, and what was he up to? Nobody in my white world wanted to talk about it—any of it.
+
+All of this drew me into the city to find answers to questions that nobody wanted to talk about at home. When I got my driver’s license at age sixteen, I would drive into the city and just walk around, looking and learning. I took jobs in downtown Detroit, working side by side with black men, and I tried to listen to them. That’s how I met Butch and many young men like him who had grown up in an entirely different city from me—just a few miles away.
+
+In Detroit, I found the answers I was looking for, and I made new friends. I also met the black churches, which warmly took in a young white boy with so many questions and patiently explained the answers. When I came back to my white church with new ideas, new friends, and more questions, the response was painfully clear. An elder in my white church said to me one night, “Son, you’ve got to understand: Christianity has nothing to do with racism; that’s political, and our faith is personal.”
+
+That conversation had a dramatic effect on me; it was a real conversion experience, but one that took me out of the church. That was the night that I left the church I had been raised in and the faith that had raised me—left it in my head and my heart. And my church was glad to see me go.
+
+During my student years I joined the civil rights and antiwar movements of my generation and left faith behind. But that conversation with the church elder was indeed “converting,” because it led me to the people who would later bring me back to my Christian faith—“the least of these” whom Jesus talks about in Matthew 25, which would ultimately become my conversion text.
+
+How we treat the poorest and most vulnerable, Jesus instructs us in that Gospel passage, is how we treat him: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these . . . you did it to me” (v. 40). My white church had missed that fundamental gospel message and, in doing so, had missed where to find the Jesus it talked so much about. My church, like so many white churches, talked about Jesus all the time, but its isolated social and racial geography kept it from really knowing him.
+
+At the same time, black churches were leading our nation to a new place. Their more holistic vision of the gospel was transforming my understanding of faith, and my relationship to the churches was forever changed.
+
+I had to leave my white home church to finally discover Christ himself and come back to my faith. In doing so, I discovered something that has shaped the rest of my life: I have always learned the most about the world by going to places I was never supposed to be and being with people I was never supposed to meet. What I discovered by driving from the white suburbs to the city of Detroit every day, and going into neighborhoods and homes like Butch’s, were some truths about America that the majority culture didn’t want to talk about—truths that are always more clearly seen from the bottom of a society than from the top. This different perspective continues to change me, and Matthew 25 continues to be my conversion passage.
+
+As a teenager, I didn’t have the words to explain what happened to me that night with my church elder, but I found them later: God is always personal, but never private. Trying to understand the public meaning of faith has been my vocation ever since. How that personal and public gospel can overcome the remaining agendas of racism in America is the subject of this book.
+
+Much Has Changed, but Much Still Hasn’t
+
+A half century later, much has changed. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the black churches of America led a civil rights movement that changed the country and impacted the world. The historic Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Black elected officials moved into office around the country for the first time since Reconstruction. And Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States and reelected four years later. African Americans have achieved much in every area of American society, from law and medicine to business and labor, from education and civil service to entertainment, sports, and, always, religion and human rights. A new generation, of all races, is more ready for a diverse American society than any generation has ever been.
+
+But much still hasn’t changed. Too many African Americans have been left behind without good education, jobs, homes, and families—and these factors are all connected. Perhaps most visibly and dramatically, the treatment of black men by police and a still-racialized criminal justice system in America became a painful and controversial national issue over the last few years, making visible what has been true for decades. The cases of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri;
+
+Eric Garner in New York; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, along with countless other black men whose names didn’t receive national attention, have provoked a raw and angry racial debate in our nation. As I finish the final edits on this book, yet another story has drawn national attention, this time involving a young black woman named Sandra Bland, who was on her way to take a new job at Prairie View A&M University, her alma mater in Texas, until she was arrested in a routine traffic stop and died three days later in police custody.
+
+The facts in specific cases are often in great dispute. But the reality that young black men and women are treated differently than are young white men and women by our law enforcement system is beyond dispute. A half century after my relationship with my friend Butch’s family, there is still not equal treatment under the law for black and white Americans. And that is the great moral and religious failure we must now address.
+
+I feel a deep sadness at recent revelations that show how deep our racial divides still go. The stories of young black men, in particular, are still so different from the stories of my young white sons. As a dad who is also a person of faith, I believe that is an unacceptable wrong it is time to right.
+
+All the black parents I have ever spoken to have had “the talk” with their sons and daughters. “The talk” is a conversation about how to behave and not to behave with police—“Keep your hands open and out in front of you, don’t make any sudden movements, shut your mouth, be respectful, say ‘sir,’” as my friend and regular cab driver, Chester Spencer, said he told his son. “The talk” is about what to do and say (and what not to do and say) when you find yourself in the presence of a police officer with a gun.
+
+White parents don’t have to have this talk with their kids. That’s a radical difference between the experiences of black and white parents in America. Why do we continue to accept that? As a Little League baseball coach, I know that all the parents of the black kids I have coached have had the talk, while none of the white parents have had such conversations with their children. And most white parents don’t have a clue about those talks between their children’s black teammates and their parents.
+
+It’s important now that we white people begin to understand “the talk.” Even white couples who have adopted black sons and daughters have that same conversation with their kids. As a white dad, that is a talk I don’t need to have with my two white sons, Luke and Jack, who are now ages sixteen and twelve. The fact that most white parents don’t know that this talk is even occurring is a big problem. Not being able to trust the law enforcement in your community—especially in relationship to our own children—is a terrible burden to bear. The stark difference in the way young black men and women are treated by police and our criminal justice system compared to white children is a deeply personal and undeniable structural issue for every black family in American society. For many white Americans, the tragic deaths of young black men at the hands of white police officers are “unfortunate incidents” that can be explained away. But for most black families, they are indicative of systems they have lived with their entire lives. Therein lies the fundamental difference: a radical contrast in experience and, therefore, perspective. If the mistreatment of young black men by law enforcement officials is true, if black lives are worth less in our criminal justice system than white lives are, then this is a fundamental and unacceptable wrong that it is time to correct. I know it is true. The overwhelming evidence on the operations of our criminal justice system proves it is true, even beyond the individual facts of particular cases. Believing that black experience is different from white experience is the beginning of changing white attitudes and perspectives. How can we get to real justice if white people don’t hear, understand, and, finally, believe the real-life experience of black people? Families have to listen to other families. If white children were treated in the ways that black children are, it would not be acceptable to white parents; so the mistreatment of black children must also become unacceptable to those of us who are white dads and moms. The old talk is still necessary—and it’s time to start talking together. If we do, I believe we can change the underlying patterns of personal and social prejudice that hold up the larger structural injustices in our society. The best way to change that old talk that black parents have with their children is to start a new talk between white and black parents. These conversations will make people uncomfortable, and they should. White parents should ask their black friends who are parents whether they have had “the talk” with their children. What did they say? What did their children say? How did it feel for them to have that conversation with their children? What’s it like not to be able to trust law enforcement in your own community? Pay attention, read, listen. If you are white and have African American colleagues at work or friends at your church, ask them to talk with you about this, to tell you their stories—then listen. If you don’t have any black people or other people of color in your church, it’s time to ask why. Reach out, and ask your pastor to reach out, to black and Latino churches in your community. We must find safe and authentic ways to hear one another’s stories across the racial boundaries that insulate and separate us from others. Reach out sensitively to black parents at your children’s schools. Ask to hear their stories. Talk to the black parents of your children’s teammates if they play a sport. Or maybe it’s time to realize that not having children of color at your children’s school or on their teams is a big part of the problem. Parents talking to parents and hearing one another’s stories may be one of the most important ways of moving forward in the church and in the nation. But white Americans must also take responsibility for their self-education and preparation before these talks so as to not put the whole burden of their learning on their colleagues and friends of color. White people need to stop talking so much—stop defending the systems that protect and serve us and stop saying, “I’m not a racist.” If white people turn a blind eye to systems that are racially biased, we can’t be absolved from the sin of racism. Listen to the people the criminal justice system fails to serve and protect; try to see the world as they do. Loving our neighbors means identifying with their suffering, meeting them in it, and working together to change it. And, for those of us who are parents, loving our neighbors means loving other people’s kids as much as we love our own. To put this in a religious context: overcoming the divisions of race has been central to the church since its beginning, and the dynamic diversity of the body of Christ is one of the most powerful forces in the global church. Our Christian faith stands fundamentally opposed to racism in all its forms, which contradict the good news of the gospel. The ultimate answer to the question of race is our identity as children of God, which we so easily forget applies to all of us. And the political and economic problems of race are ultimately rooted in a theological problem. The churches have too often “baptized” us into our racial divisions, instead of understanding how our authentic baptism unites us above and beyond our racial identities. Do we believe what we say about the unity of “the body of Christ” or not? The New Testament speaks of the church as one body with many members. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. . . . For the body does not consist of one member but of many. . . . As it is, there are many parts, yet one body . . . that there may be no discord in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. (1 Cor. 12:12, 14, 20, 25–26 RSV) Another version of 1 Corinthians 12:26 reads, “If one part of the body suffers, all the other parts share its suffering” (GW). What would it mean to share in the suffering of our brothers and sisters of color who are subjected to a racialized criminal justice system? So let’s be honest. As I said in the introduction to this book, if white Christians in America were ready to act more Christian than white when it comes to race, black parents would be less fearful for their children. Racial healing is a commitment at the heart of the gospel. If we say we belong to Christ, that mission of reconciliation is ours too. What does racial healing and reconciliation mean in the face of America’s racial divide over policing and the criminal justice system? Churches, in particular, can offer leadership in navigating us through these difficult issues. The United States has the most racial diversity of any country in the world. This diversity is essential to our greatness, but it has also given us a history of tension and conflict. It has always been the resolving and, ultimately, the reconciling of those tensions that makes us “a more perfect union.” However, that cannot happen when we ignore, deny, or suppress our racial history and journey; it can occur only when we talk about it, engage it, embrace it, and be ready to be transformed by it. Ironically and tragically, American diversity began with acts of violent racial oppression that I am calling “America’s original sin”—the theft of land from Indigenous people who were either killed or removed and the enslavement of millions of Africans who became America’s greatest economic resource—in building a new nation. The theft of land and the violent exploitation of labor were embedded in America’s origins. Later immigration of other racial minorities was also driven—at least in part—by the need for more cheap labor. Therefore, our original racial diversity was a product of appalling human oppression based on greed. Many people have come to America, involuntarily in chains or voluntarily in the hope of a better life. And our great diversity is the key to our brightest and most transforming future. Indeed, it has already been one of America’s greatest contributions to the world. I believe that most police are good cops, but it would take more than a few “bad apples” to produce all the stories that almost every black person in America has about their experience with the police. Those stories are about a system, a culture, old structures and habits, and continuing racial prejudice, and how the universal but complex relationship between poverty and crime is made worse by racism. All of that can and must change with reforms that begin with better training and transparency and more independent prosecution in incidents of lethal police violence—and end with making police more relational and accountable to the diverse communities they serve. But underneath the flaws and injustices of the criminal justice system is our unfinished business of challenging and ending racism, an agenda that is not finished and never will be. We are not now, nor will we ever be, a “postracial” society. We are instead a society on a journey toward embracing our ever-greater and richer diversity, which is the American story. The path forward is the constant renewal of our nation’s ideal of the equality of all our citizens under the law—which makes the American promise so compelling, even though it is still so far from being fulfilled. Our highest and most inspirational points as a nation have been when we have overcome our racial prejudices; our lowest and ugliest points have been when we have succumbed to them. In 2013, Time magazine did a cover story on the fiftieth anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech. In it, Time rightly said that Martin Luther King Jr. is now understood to be a “father” of our nation because he helped shape its course as much as the founding fathers did. King and the movement he led opened a new door of opportunity for the future of America. But as we are becoming, for the first time, a country with no single racial majority—having been from our beginnings a white-majority nation—we stand at another door, which many white Americans are still very fearful of passing through. Race is woven throughout the American story and each of our own stories. All of our stories can help to change the racial story of America. I hope you will join me in this hard but critical—and ultimately transforming—conversation. Only by telling the truth about our history and genuinely repenting of its sins, which still linger, can we find the true road to justice and reconciliation. Excerpted from “America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America” by Jim Wallis. Copyright © 2016 by Jim Wallis. Excerpted by permission of Brazos Press.",REAL
+269,Kevin McCarthy is a total dope: This bumbling yahoo is about to be second in line to the presidency,"But then the sobering realization sets in: these are elected members of perhaps most prestigious governing body in the world.
+
+Let this sink in for a moment: each of these dolts is chosen by voters to be one of 535 elites who are tasked with authoring and voting on legislation that impacts the entire country and beyond. Think about that. Louie Gohmert, who once said the “wall of separation” between church and state is “a one way wall,” whatever the hell that means, gets to vote on laws that could potentially and irreversibly alter the course of your life.
+
+Our only possible defense against being utterly confounded and horrified by the power granted to men and women who have no business wielding such power, is to laugh at their flaming stupidity. Otherwise, it’d be way too easy lapse into inextricable despair and, in some cases, moron-induced alcoholism.
+
+In spite of the rapid dumbing-down of the GOP (see also Mr. Trump), they continue to churn out more dummies.
+
+Enter Kevin McCarthy. The Bakersfield, California Republican is the most likely conservative white-guy to ascend into John Boehner’s post as Speaker of the House. And he shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near Congress, much less a leadership post.
+
+By now, we’re all aware of McCarthy’s admission that the congressional select committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks is almost exclusively designed to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations.
+
+They say gaffes are merely the truths spoken out loud. This was certainly the case with McCarthy. By the way, we should underscore at this point how McCarthy isn’t just another ambitious member of Congress. He’s the House Majority Leader. So, yes, the House Majority Leader accidentally spilled the beans on one of the longest running scams in congressional history — one of the biggest wastes of taxpayer money since Ken Starr’s probe into President Clinton’s pants-parties.
+
+Either McCarthy is incapable of reading, or he has the worst speech-writing staff in the history of American politics — and that includes Sarah Palin’s self-authored Patriotic Mad Libs. Three days after Boehner announced his resignation from Congress, McCarthy was propped up for a foreign policy speech before the John Hay Initiative. The ostensible goal was to burnish McCarthy’s political heft, but the exact opposite happened and, frankly, even the dumbest Republicans ought to be embarrassed to caucus with this idiot.
+
+Here are some highlights:
+
+War of radical Islam? “On” or “against” makes more sense, of course. And shouldn’t it be “lives” and not “life?” Honestly, the rest of the quotes will make this passage seem comparatively Shakespearean.
+
+There’s no such phrase as “stem a flow.” There’s something called “stemflow.” One can also stem the flow of something, which is possibly what he meant. But “politically strategy” is just ridiculous.
+
+“We have isolated Israel, while bolding places like Iran.” “The absence of leadership over the past six years has had a horrific consequences all across the globe.” Was anyone fired for this? How the hell is he still a contender for Speaker? “In the past few years alone, I have visited Poland, Hungria, Estonia, Russia and Georgia…” Hungria. Which is north of Freedonia and adjacent to that fake island where Balki from “Perfect Strangers” came from. “It defies belief that the president would allow the ban on Iranian oil exports to be lifted. And also stand by while Russia blackmails an entire continent, all the while keeping the place of the band on America.” I have no idea what any of that means. Which continent? Let’s get real here: we should amend the Constitution so that when any elected politician mutilates the English language this badly, their desk chair turns into an ejector-seat that summarily launches them out of Congress. Let’s get on this now before it’s too late. “We don’t have the same as difficult decision that this White House is managing the decline and putting us in tough decisions for the future.” To be fair, gaffes are part of being a public figure. Spend enough time in front of a microphone and weird crap will inevitably fall out. However, a “stem a flow” of gaffes like this is inexcusable for a leader who’s stepping into an office that’s two heartbeats away from the presidency. Again, was it his speechwriter? Was he unable to read the prepared remarks? Why was he incapable of correcting the remarks on-the-fly? Was he having a stroke? Even the party of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin should, in a sane world, stand up and in a unified voice block this nincompoop from becoming Speaker. They won’t, of course, and Boehner will likely hand his gavel over to the guy who, with a straight face, said he visited a place called “Hungria.” The good news, on the other hand, is that we’ll all have another GOP doofus to kick around for a while. Silver linings, etc. Ever since Karl Rove and the Bush administration systematically altered the political landscape making it perfectly acceptable to be completely incompetent and still get re-elected by low-information voters who think politicians shouldn’t be any smarter than the people who elect them: we’ve mostly settled for idiots. Sadly, the demystification of the presidency and electoral politics has convinced us that anyone can hold these jobs and that leaders should be “just like us.” Sorry, but the guy you might want to have a beer with shouldn’t control the nuclear launch codes or the destiny of the free world. We should demand leaders who are devastatingly smart, engaged, disciplined, centered and intellectually curious. We should be gravitationally drawn to leaders with impeccable schooling and robust speaking skills. The salient question is this: Why don’t Republicans want the same? Why are they so willing to settle for feckless trolls like Donald Trump or marble-mouthed dilettantes like Kevin McCarthy? It might be somewhat acceptable if they actually took responsibility for putting us all in tough decisions for the future, but the party of personal responsibility will never do that. And it’s hurting America.",REAL
+6093,Kp Message 10-30-16… “A Few Things”,"[Kp note: started writing on 10-29, but posted on 10-30, so I changed the date in the title.] 
+Not sure what those “things” are yet, but I’m sure they’ll come. 
+There’s a lot of “something” going on today, at least within me. There was a period of time today when I felt I was walking around in another dimension… definitely not here , fully, at least, and more like in a “dream” or “transparent” type of shape. It actually felt very pleasant, and very much more “at home” than living upon/in this 3D-4D-whatever type physical “world” thing. 
+I have “stuff” to do, as I walk and move and BE upon this planet… even though I know I AM a BE ing of Light, yet I am here in the physical body, and I (apparently) have accepted that and know I have “physical type” areas in which to “work” (lots of quote marks in there). 
+This blog will very likely always be a secondary part of my expression here, however, as my DOing and BEing primarily centers on the “Energy work” I feel is mine to do. It is particularly significant that I am in Hawai’i, formerly known as Lemuria, and performing most of the “Energy missions” over here. Somehow the islands feel like fingers of my own hand… and that has been true ever since I first arrived. 
+I’m not trying to “teach” anything here. Just share the “sense” I have about all this stuff… from my viewpoint… no one else’s. 
+So why am I writing this particular post? Well, as always, I felt an urgent movement to do so. And I presume I’ll be following or listening to that “movement” for my entire experience here on this planet. 
+That is all for now. 
+Aloha, Kp",FAKE
+3339,Top Clinton aide Mills reportedly walks out of FBI interview about emails,"Senior Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and her lawyer walked out of a recent interview with the FBI about Clinton's private email system after an investigator asked a question Mills believed to be off limits, according to a published report.
+
+The Washington Post said that Mills and her lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, returned to the interview room after a brief absence. However, the Post reported that Mills and Wilkinson asked for breaks during the interview to confer more than once.
+
+According to the paper, the FBI investigator's questions that caused Mills and Wilkinson to walk out were related to the procedure used to produce emails for possible public release by the State Department. Mills ultimately did not answer questions about it because her attorney and Justice Department prosecutors deemed it confidential under attorney-client privilege.
+
+The FBI is currently investigating possible gross mishandling of classified information and Clinton's use of an unsecured personal account exclusively for government business. Investigators have already interviewed two of Clinton's top aides, Mills and Huma Abedin, and hope to be able to interview Clinton herself as they wrap up the case.
+
+Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination, told CBS' ""Face the Nation"" Sunday that she had not yet been contacted by the FBI to arrange an interview.
+
+On Tuesday, the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch said it had obtained emails showing that a top Clinton political aide pushed the State Department to hire Bryan Pagliano, who helped manage Clinton's personal email server.
+
+The emails show that State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, a key figure in the Benghazi investigation, was involved in Pagliano's hire. The emails also appear to show members of the State Department's IT division questioning why Pagliano, a political appointee who had worked on Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, would be assigned to that office.
+
+""[Kennedy] specifically said we didn't need to be [political appointees], but it sure sounds like we do,"" one email reads.
+
+In court documents made public Monday, the State Department said it could not find any emails sent to or received by Pagliano during Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, which lasted between 2009 and 2013.
+
+Click for more from The Washington Post.",REAL
+8830,'America Has Lost' in the Philippines as Duterte Calls for Alliance with Russia and China - Pepe Escobar,"Media skeptic 'America Has Lost' in the Philippines as Duterte Calls for Alliance with Russia and China 
+'Maybe I will also go to Russia and talk to Putin, and tell him there are three of us against the world - China, Philippines, and Russia'   Strategic Culture Foundation 
+«Your honors, in this venue I announce my separation from the United States… both in military and economics also». 
+Thus Philippines President Rodrigo «The Punisher» Duterte unleashed a geopolitical earthquake encompassing Eurasia and reverberating all across the Pacific Ocean. 
+And talk about choosing his venue with aplomb; right in the heart of the Rising Dragon, no less. 
+Capping his state visit to Beijing, Duterte then coined the mantra – pregnant with overtones - that will keep ringing all across the global South; «America has lost». 
+And if that was not enough, he announced a new alliance – Philippines, China and Russia – is about to emerge; «there are three of us against the world». 
+Predictably, the Beltway establishment in the «indispensable nation» went bananas, reacting as «puzzled» or in outright anger, dispersing the usual expletives on the «crude populist», «unhinged leader» . 
+The bottom line is that it takes a lot of balls for the leader of a poor, developing country, in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, to openly defy the hyperpower. Yet what Duterte is gaming at is pure realpolitik; if he prevails, he will be able to deftly play the US against China to the benefit of Filipino interests. 
+«The springtime of our relationship» 
+It did start with a bang; during Duterte’s China visit, Manila inked no less than $13 billion in deals with Beijing – from trade and investment to drug control, maritime security and infrastructure. 
+Beijing pulled out all stops to make Duterte feel welcomed. 
+President Xi Jinping suggested Manila and Beijing should «temporarily put aside» the intractable South China Sea disputes and learn from the «political wisdom» of history – as in give space to diplomatic talks. After all, the two peoples were «blood-linked brothers». 
+Duterte replied in kind; «Even as we arrive in Beijing close to winter, this is the springtime of our relationship,» he told Xi at the Great Hall of the People. 
+China is already the Philippines’ second-largest trade partner, behind Japan, the US and Singapore. Filipino exports to these three are at roughly 42.7 percent of the total, compared to 22.1 to China / Hong Kong. Imports from China are roughly 16.1 percent of the total. Even as trade with China is bound to rise, what really matters for Duterte is massive Chinese infrastructure investment. 
+What this will mean in practice is indeed ground-breaking; the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will definitely be involved in Philippine economic development; Manila will be more involved in promoting smooth China-ASEAN relations in all sorts of regional issues (it takes the rotating chair of ASEAN in 2017); and the Philippines will be more integrated in the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. One Belt, One Road (OBOR). 
+Three strikes; no wonder the US is out. And there’s even a fourth strike, embedded in Duterte’s promise that 
+he will soon end military cooperation with the US, despite the opposition of part of the Filipino armed forces. 
+Watch the First Island Chain 
+The build-up had already been dramatic enough. On the eve of his meeting with Xi, talking to members of the Filipino community in Beijing, Duterte said, «it’s time to say goodbye» to the US; «I will not ask but if they (the Chinese) offer and if they’ll ask me, do you need this aid? [I will say] Of course, we are very poor». 
+Then the clincher; «I will not go to America anymore … We will just be insulted there». 
+The US was the colonial power in the Philippines from 1899 to 1942. Hollywood permeates the collective unconscious. English is the lingua franca – side by side with tagalog. But the tentacles of Uncle Sam’s «protection» racket are not exactly welcomed. Two of the largest components of the US Empire of Bases were located for decades in the Philippines; Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. 
+Clark, occupying 230 square miles, with 15,000 people, was busy to death during the Vietnam War – the main hub for men and hardware in and out of Saigon. Then it turned into one of those Pentagon «forward operating» HQs. Subic, occupying 260 square miles, was as busy as Clark. It was the forward operating base for the US 7th Fleet. 
+Already in 1987, before the end of the Cold War, the RAND corporation was alarmed by the loss of both bases; that would be «devastating for regional security». Devastating» in the – mythical - sense of «defending the interests of ASEAN» and the «security of the sea-lanes». 
+Translation; the Pentagon and the US Navy would lose a key instrument of pressure over ASEAN, as protecting the «security of the sea-lanes» was always the key justification for those bases. 
+And lose they eventually did; Clark was closed down in November 1991, and Subic in November 199 
+It took years for China to sense an opening – and profit from it; after all during the 1990s and the early 2000s, the absolute priority was breakneck speed internal development. But then Beijing did the math; no more US bases opened untold vistas as far as the First Island Chain is concerned. 
+The First Island Chain is a product, over millennia, of the fabulous tectonic forces of the Ring of Fire; a chain of islands running from southern Japan in the north to Borneo in the south. For Beijing, they work as a sort of shield for the Chinese eastern seaboard; if this chain is secure, Asia is secure. 
+For all practical purposes, Beijing considers the First Island Chain as a non-negotiable Western Pacific demarcation zone – ideally with no foreign (as in US) interference. The South China Sea – which in parts is characterized by Manila as the Western Philippine Sea - is inside the First Island Chain. So to really secure the First Island Chain, the South China Sea must be free of foreign interference. 
+And here we are plunged at the heart of arguably the key 21st century hotspot in Asian geopolitics – the main reason for the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia. 
+The US Navy so far counted on the Philippines to oppose the proverbial, hyped up «Chinese aggression» in the South China and East China seas. The neocon/neoliberalcon industrial-military complex fury against «unhinged» Duterte’s game-changer is that containing China and ruling over the First Island Chain has been at the core of US naval strategy since the beginning of the Cold War. 
+Beijing, meanwhile, will have all the time needed to polish its strategic environment. This has nothing to do with «freedom of navigation» and protecting sea-lanes; everyone needs South China Sea cross-trade. It’s all about China - perhaps within the next ten years - being able to deny «access» to the US Navy in the South China Sea and inside the First Island Chain. 
+Duterte’s game-changing «America has lost» is just a new salvo in arguably the key 21st century geopolitical thriller. A Supreme Court justice in Manila, for instance, has warned Duterte that, were he to give up sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal, he could be impeached. That won’t happen; Duterte wants loads of Chinese trade and investment, not abdicate from sovereignty. He’d rather be ready to confront being demonized by the hyperpower as much as the late Hugo Chavez was in his heyday.",FAKE
+7998,California's Death Penalty: Mike Ramos v. Kevin Cooper and Proposition 62,"Mike Ramos and Kevin Cooper: Who tells the truth?(image by public domain) License DMCA San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos obtained the controversial capital conviction of Kevin Cooper, whose ""clemency"" petition to Governor Jerry Brown gravely puts at issue the integrity of Ramos' office. Already campaigning to be the state's Attorney General in 2018, Ramos speaks out for Proposition 66, which promises to accelerate the death penalty. Ramos attacks opponents of the death penalty as deceptive. However, recognizing that the main problem is the California Supreme Court's automatic appeal bottleneck, Ramos at best carelessly misrepresents that Proposition 66 redirects first appeals to the courts of appeal. 
+This article presents excerpts concerning Kevin Cooper's case from the first part of an in-progress two-part paper, California's Death Penalty: People v. Masters v. The California Supreme Court's Carefulness Con . Earlier excerpts are presented in my OEN article, California's Death Penalty: The California Supreme Court's Carefulness Con . A further article will provide an in-depth presentation of People v. Masters , 62 Cal.4 th 1019 (2016). 
+If California's death penalty is not repealed in November by Proposition 62, next up on California's ready-to-kill list (now comprising about 12 inmates) is Kevin Cooper . In 2009, by a vote of 16-11, an en banc Ninth Circuit panel let stand Cooper's death sentence. However, in a voluminous opinion , [1] beginning with the statement that ""[t]he State of California may be about to execute an innocent man,"" five of the dissenters passionately protested that the district court had not complied with the circuit's prior injunction to have a conclusive blood test performed. 
+To prove family-murdered-by-hatchet charges, the state introduced a T-shirt stained with Cooper's blood (plus other suspect evidence, such as mysteriously materialized cigarette butts). Cooper protested that the blood stain must have been added by the prosecution, using a sample kept in a test tube. When checked, the test tube was full, but had apparently been tampered with. Cooper claimed that the tube must have been topped up with someone else's blood. Sure enough, the blood of two people was found in the tube. In due course, the Ninth Circuit enjoined the federal district court to have the T-shirt stain tested for preservative, so as to conclusively determine whether it had come from the sample. The laboratory duly reported that the stain contained preservative. However, the district court then allowed the laboratory to reattribute its finding to likely laboratory contamination, without requiring a retest . [2] - Advertisement - 
+Besides such apparent fabrications, there were plain suppressions. Investigators paid no heed to witnesses who had seen three white people, at least one blood-stained, fleeing the scene in the primary victim's car. One of them had lost a T-shirt and a hatchet--his blood-stained pants were incinerated by the police. See From FBI Boss to Death Penalty Foe, Tom Parker's Quest to Free a Convicted Murderer , Santa Barbara Independent, Jul. 6, 2016: [H]aving put the Mafia behind bars, investigated dozens of homicides and sent two murderers to their deaths . . . during 45 years in law enforcement, Parker said he's seen too many corrupt homicide investigations to believe in the death penalty anymore. The worst of them, he said, is the Chino Hills murder case of 1983. . . ""Kevin was a car thief and a burglar, but he doesn't deserve to be where he is,"" Parker said. ""I'm convinced he was framed."" . . . The courts have called the evidence against Cooper ""overwhelming"" -- spots of Cooper's blood in the Ryens' hallway and on a tan T-shirt by the road; bloody prints of prison-issue Keds inside and outside the Ryens' house; Cooper's cigarette butts in the Ryens' station wagon; and a hatchet sheath and prison uniform button at Cooper's hideout next door. But Cooper claims this was false evidence, planted and manipulated by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department to convict him. He alleges that sheriff's deputies destroyed evidence and ignored leads pointing to three white men as the murderers -- including the initial statements of the Ryens' eight-year-old son, Josh, the sole survivor. 
+Victim relatives and friends, police, and prosecutors naturally insist that there is not even any lingering doubt as to guilt, [3] and they protest inordinate appellate delay. But to objective observers, Cooper's case raises deep concerns as to prosecutorial prejudice and California Supreme Court carelessness. The case is politically and racially highly charged, not only owing to the heinous nature of the purportedly black-on-white mass-murder, but also owing to the blind eye that police and prosecutor turned to the plain evidence of white culprits. 
+The incriminating evidence in Cooper is almost wholly physical, depending entirely on local police testimony for its foundation. Cooper would seem a sympathetic defendant, being a mere car-thief minimum security prison walk-out, lonely and homeward bound for the holidays. Cooper raises grave questions as to the police fabricating DNA and other physical evidence, while destroying, ignoring, or corrupting unfavorable DNA, other physical evidence, and witnesses. Cooper has raised the very highest level of international concern (continuing the above quote): - Advertisement - Last fall, the influential Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous organ of the Organization of American States, recommended that Cooper be granted a reprieve, pending a new investigation. Citing in part Parker's allegations of ""endemic tunnel vision,"" the commission concluded that the U.S. had violated Cooper's rights to a fair trial, due process and equality before the law. The U.S. is a signatory to the American Declaration, a treaty that guarantees those rights. 
+Cooper's last hope lies in an unorthodox ""clemency"" petition to Governor Brown, seeking not a pardon but an independent non-judicial investigation of the evidence, and a stay of execution pending its outcome. Commuting Cooper's sentence to life without parole does not seem a viable alternative, given that he has been tried twice, and Cal. Constitution, Art. 5, sec. 8 provides that ""[t]he Governor may not grant a pardon or commutation to a person twice convicted of a felony except on recommendation of the Supreme Court, 4 judges concurring."" Moreover, Cooper's incarceration for life would almost as loudly cry out for a conclusive finding as to whether the T-shirt blood stain was fabricated; and because Cooper's actual innocence is the underlying issue, a repeal of the state death penalty in November's election would not moot his petition, which the ABA extraordinarily supports: In a letter sent to Gov. Brown on March 14, the American Bar Association alleged Cooper's ""arrest, prosecution and conviction are marred by evidence of racial bias, police misconduct, evidence tampering, suppression of exculpatory information, lack of quality defense counsel and a hamstrung court system."" [4] 
+It seems a toss-up whether Brown will grant the petition, given that he previously gave absurd reasons for vetoing a simple bipartisan measure to mitigate a surfeit of prosecutorial misconduct. [5] To grant it would surely require that the T-shirt blood stain be retested for preservatives, and this would seem to risk scientifically confirming premeditated, deadly, and racial misconduct, implicating police and perhaps the crime laboratory and prosecutor's office.",FAKE
+3342,The quiet global crisis that scares the State Department,"A big new State Department assessment has identified a major threat to global security. It's not ISIS or Vladimir Putin. It's not a rickety global economy or climate change or the threat of global pandemics.
+
+Instead, the report argues, these individual problems are symptoms of a much bigger issue — namely, a slow breakdown in global governance. Many of the institutions that were created in the past century to deal with economic and security risks around the world, such as the UN and IMF, may no longer be adequate to the task.
+
+If the authors of the report are right, then the world's biggest problems are all really about this one big thing.
+
+The report, called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, was tasked with a broad review of State Department policies. The point was ""not looking at the crisis of the day,"" Tom Perriello, the State Department official tasked with leading the QDDR, said in a press briefing. Instead, the report is ""trying to connect the dots across the crises, and then saying what can we learn across the dynamics that we can see.""
+
+Much of what the report's authors saw was quite good. ""Seventy years ago, a bipartisan group of visionary Americans forged a system of modern international institutions, as well as economic and security arrangements, aimed at preventing another catastrophic world war and addressing acute human suffering,"" they write. ""This system enabled the peaceful end of the Cold War, a wave of democratization, and unprecedented improvement in the basic human condition around the globe.""
+
+That's all true. But the QDDR worries that these institutions — things like the UN and the IMF — aren't adequate for dealing with the specific kinds of problems we see today. The UN may help the big countries cooperate with each other, but it can't stop ISIS or Syria's civil war. Nor has it been able to lock in a big new international agreement on climate change.
+
+Together, these problems show that ""aspects of that post-World War II system are fraying."" Sometimes, it's because a hostile power is actively challenging them — Russia, for example, is actively trying to weaken the NATO-dominated regional order in Europe.
+
+Other times, it's that these institutions are having trouble developing good answers for particular kind of problems. It's not clear, for example, how global institutions can repair failed states and stop civil wars in places like Libya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
+
+Regardless, the basic point is the same: the institutions that have made the world the safest and most prosperous place it's ever been are becoming less capable of following through on their mission. The more they degrade, the argument goes, the more danger the United States — and the world — will be in.
+
+These arguments aren't new: academics have been making them for years. But what's interesting about their position in the QDDR is that they seem to represent the US government's actual view about the world's biggest problems.
+
+It's no accident that the QDDR's section on priorities begins with a quote from Obama's 2014 speech to the UN General Assembly — the address was framed around an almost identical diagnosis about the need to reform global institutions in light of new challenges. ""If we lift our eyes beyond our borders, if we think globally and act cooperatively,"" Obama said, ""we can shape the course of this century as our predecessors shaped the post–World War II age."" Sound familiar?
+
+But the QDDR goes beyond Obama's speech. It identifies four areas — preventing violent conflict and extremism, spreading democracy, promoting global economic growth, and climate change — in which the State Department needs to focus its efforts. ""Each of these priorities is based on the need for better governance across the world,"" Secretary of State John Kerry said at a presser. ""They're all linked.""
+
+The QDDR proposes a number of ways to improve its focus on these issues. For instance, it proposes a new investment on data-driven forecasting designed to predict conflicts and mass atrocities. If State Department diplomats have a better way of knowing countries are most at risk of serious violence, the theory goes, they can know where to invest resources in order to prevent those conflicts from getting worse.
+
+These solutions feel very small-bore compared with the scale of the problems identified by the QDDR. The report doesn't have a big plan for reforming the UN to deal with failed states, nor does it propose a groundbreaking strategy for breaking the global impasse on a climate change agreement.
+
+That's by design. The QDDR, as an exercise, is designed to improve the way the State Department works as an organization. About one-third of the report, for example, is focused on hiring and personnel management. The whole point of the exercise is to identify what the State Department can do better without radically transforming American foreign policy priorities or proposing pie-in-the-sky new budgets that Congress will never approve.
+
+And that's what makes the QDDR really interesting. A massive amount of government work involves identifying huge problems, like the breakdown of global governance, and then trying to implement a few small-bore strategies to chip away at the big problem. The QDDR is an unusually clear account of how that process actually works: of how small policy proposals and reforms fit into the bigger picture of American foreign policy.",REAL
+3769,Camden Yards briefly closed off as Freddie Gray protests intensify in Baltimore,"Protests in Baltimore on Saturday got intense and, on occasion, violent as demonstrators banded together to rally for answers and justice after Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died of a spinal injury after being arrested by Baltimore police.
+
+A day of largely peaceful protests was marred by occasional skirmishes between small groups of protesters and police and some destruction of property. As a result, police briefly closed off Camden Yards baseball stadium in Baltimore, where a Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox game was ongoing. People at the game were stuck inside the stadium until police gave the all-clear.
+
+Before Camden Yards was closed off, here's some of what was happening in Baltimore Saturday, according to some of the journalists on the scene:",REAL
+156,8 Things Congress Actually Did This Year,"8 Things Congress Actually Did This Year
+
+When Republicans took over both chambers of Congress in January, party leaders vowed they would prove to the country that Republicans could govern. They promised to stop with the self-made crises, such as government shutdowns, and rack up legislative accomplishments. So in the first year of a GOP-controlled Congress in nearly a decade, how well did Republicans prove they can govern?
+
+First, there were no government shutdowns or defaults on the national debt. Immediately after the midterm election in 2014, both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner promised there wouldn't be any shutdowns or defaults on their watch. Turns out they made good on that promise this year.
+
+But Democrats aren't exactly congratulating them for it. ""That's like saying, 'You know, they didn't blow the top off the Capitol, so clearly Republican leadership is in touch with America.' No, it takes more than that,"" said Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois.
+
+Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the widely held assumption Congress gets nothing done doesn't exactly fit this year. There was an uptick in bipartisan activity in this Republican-controlled Congress in 2015, but if you ask Democrats why that was, they'll say it's because they were a more cooperative minority than Republicans were when Democrats controlled the Senate — and that they cooperated on legislation that bolstered Democratic goals.
+
+Whether or not keeping the government open counts as an accomplishment, here are eight legislative matters Congress did address in 2015 — and some issues that remain unresolved:
+
+Trillion-Dollar Government Funding Bill: Right before they split for the holidays, lawmakers passed a trillion-dollar spending bill that will keep the government open until the end of next September. The measure also beefed up cybersecurity and renewed a health care program for Sept. 11 first responders. It also made changes to the visa waiver program so people who have traveled to Iraq, Iran, Syria and Sudan in the past five years will face greater scrutiny if they wish to enter the U.S.
+
+Tax Extenders: Paired with the government spending bill was a measure containing hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks. Year after year, Congress has had to extend dozens of tax breaks that expire. In this measure, lawmakers made permanent the most popular tax breaks, such as the $1,000 child tax credit, the earned income tax credit for low- and moderate-income workers, and the research and development tax credit.
+
+Two-Year Budget Agreement: Right before Boehner left office, he managed to reach a two-year budget deal with the White House and other congressional leaders. The agreement suspends the debt ceiling through March 2017 and increases spending by $80 billion over the next two years — an increase that's split evenly between defense and domestic programs.
+
+No Child Left Behind Rewrite: Congress easily passed legislation to rewrite the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. Federally mandated math and reading tests will continue, but the new law cedes greater authority to states, rather than the federal government, to figure out how to use the test results in evaluating schools.
+
+Five-Year Transportation Bill: Congress passed its first long-term bill in a decade to fund roads, bridges and mass transit systems. The measure does not raise the gas tax, currently at 18.4 cents per gallon, but found other sources of funding — such as changing customs fees and dipping into funds from the Federal Reserve.
+
+Ended The NSA's Bulk Surveillance Program: Lawmakers passed the USA Freedom Act, which ended the government's bulk collection of phone records. Passage of the measure came after Republican senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul of Kentucky forced a two-day shutdown of the bulk collection program.
+
+Trade Promotion Authority: Congress approved a measure to give the president expedited authority to enter a trade deal with 11 other Pacific Rim countries. Attention now turns to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which Congress is expected to consider next year — possibly after the election is over.
+
+Medicare Reform: Known as the ""Doc Fix"" bill, this measure permanently ended automatic Medicare payment cuts to physicians. Under a law from the late 1990s, Medicare payments to doctors would be cut to keep the program's budget in check. Since then, Congress had failed every year to figure out a long-term solution to the problem.
+
+Still, so many issues remain unresolved — not because lawmakers think they're unimportant but because partisan divisions on these ideological issues are so deep, they can't find common ground. Congress seems happy to take these issues to the voters in 2016.
+
+Guns: After a spate of gun-related tragedies in 2015, Democrats vowed to push for gun control legislation, such as measures to expand background checks and prohibit individuals whose names are on terrorist watch lists from purchasing firearms. Both measures failed in the Senate in 2015, as in past years.
+
+Immigration: The Senate managed to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul package in 2013, but attempts to move the legislation through the House failed. Efforts to resurrect immigration legislation have since languished.
+
+Tax Reform: After the midterm election, corporate tax reform was seen as a possible area Republicans and Democrats could work together on. But at his year-end news conference, McConnell expressed pessimism about getting any tax reform accomplished with a Democrat in the White House, saying that any tax changes need to be revenue-neutral and he doubted the president would go for that.",REAL
+9877,Olivia Newton John's Daughter Is Vocal About Plastic Surgery Addiction...Here Are the Family Photos She Doesn't Show - Independent Journal Review,"Share on Twitter 
+Chloe Lattanzi, actress and daughter of Grammy-winning singer and Hollywood actress, Olivia Newton-John, is talking openly about the body image struggles she had as a teenager—and the things she did to combat her poor self-image. Image Credit: Screenshot/ YouTube 
+Appearing on Wednesday's episode of “The Doctors,” Lattanzi revealed that she had implants and plastic surgery when she was younger because she suffered from body dysmorphia . 
+Body dysmorphia is a disorder which makes people obsess over parts of their body. 
+People with the disorder imagine their bodies to be severely flawed, to the point that it makes it difficult for them to function normally. 
+Lattanzi spoke about her particular experience with the disorder as a teenager, and the anorexia, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression that accompanied it: 
+“I went through this sort of chubby phase [as a kid]- I ate to comfort myself. I would see comments in magazines about how I was chubby. So around 16 I started to restrict food, exercise more.” Image Credit: Chris Weeks/Getty Images 
+Over one summer in particular, Lattanzi lost a lot of weight, but her new thinness brought with it problems, too. 
+She said she turned to plastic surgery and implants: 
+“When I was in the height of my body dysmorphia, I had a whole bunch of fillers. I’ve had that all removed from my face because I like the way I look naturally.” 
+Recently, Lattanzi saw some photographs of herself as a teenager and doesn't understand why she thought her appearance was so defective. Image Credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images 
+She says she's never shown the pictures to anyone before, but that they're a valuable tool for providing context to the mental illness from which she was suffering. 
+Now, having recovered from body dysmorphia and anorexia, the 30-year-old says she regrets making so many changes to her appearance: 
+“I look back at myself and I as a teenager and I’m like, 'What a beautiful young woman.' What was I thinking? Why was I so insecure?” Image Credit: Screenshot/ YouTube 
+Lattanzi feels that social media's focus on appearance is a major culprit when it comes to young women struggling with negative self-image: 
+“I think so many young girls are going through body dysmorphia — we’re constantly told how we’re supposed to look via Instagram and filters. There’s constant pressure for us to look perfect.” 
+Now, Lattanzi says she's “stable and in a loving relationship,” but she's still plagued by some anxiety. 
+She says the memory of her illness is a wound that may never completely heal. Image Credit: David Livingston/Getty Images 
+Body dysmorphia affects about 1.7% to 2.4% of the general population—or one in 50 people. 
+It is often accompanied by eating disorders, depression, and anxiety disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. 
+Surprisingly, according to some studies, cases of body dysmorphia are more often found in men than women.",FAKE
+9328,Cahill vs. Kalma Debut Album Out Now!,"We Are Change 
+
+The debut album by Cahill vs. Kalma is an extremely ambitious, experimental and emotionally powerful album recorded in NYC between 2013 thru 2016. The album has a wide array of musical styles including pop, hard rock, gypsy jazz, new wave & more. The concept album’s story focuses on dualism found in nature and the world, life vs. death, robots vs. humans, analog vs. digital, acoustic vs. electric, Cahill vs. Kalma.
+Cahill vs. Kalma now available on CD , iTunes , Google Play , Amazon and more. 
+
+Purchase a physical CD using your credit card or PayPal:
+Cahill vs. Kalma Produced by Dave Cahill & Brian Herman Engineered, Mixed & Mastered by Brian Herman Dave Cahill vocals, guitar, bass, synth & noise Brian Herman guitar, drums, bass, synth & noise Alex Radus backing vocals on tracks 1, 2, 6 & 8 Andy Janowiak drums on tracks 3, 5, 6, 8, & 10 Dallas Vietty accordion on track 3 Music written by Dave Cahill & Brian Herman Lyrics written by Dave Cahill Album artwork by Dennis Gatz Recorded sporadically between 2013 to 2016 SMT Studios NYC & Treefort Recording in Brooklyn ©2016 Dave Cahill & Brian Herman The post Cahill vs. Kalma Debut Album Out Now! appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+7907,Comment on FBI: No link between Trump and Russian government by Christian Zionist,"Posted on November 1, 2016 by Dr. Eowyn | 2 Comments 
+For Hillary Clinton and her accomplice and protector, the Obama administration, Russia is the new, all-purpose bogeyman. 
+They say the Russian government is the hacker of those revealing and embarrassing DNC, Hillary and Podesta emails that WikiLeaks has been releasing. 
+Hillary even accused Donald Trump of being in cahoots with Moscow. The latest accuser is longtime Democratic strategist James Carville. 
+As reported by Edund Kozak for PoliZette , in an appearance on MSNBC yesterday, Oct. 31, 2016, Carville attacked the FBI for reopening its criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, calling it part of a vast conspiracy to subvert American democracy. (See “ Weinered: FBI reopens investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails ”) 
+Carville raged: 
+“This is in effect an attempt to hijack an election. It’s unprecedented … the House Republicans and the KGB are trying to influence our democracy! [FBI Director James] Comey was acting in concert and coordination with the House Republicans. We also have the extraordinary case of the KGB being involved in this race and selectively leaking things from the Clinton campaign that they hacked.” 
+As noted by Kozak, “Apparently the fact that the Soviet security agency [KGB] was disbanded in 1991 does not preclude its involvement in this vast, anti-Clinton, FBI-organized conspiracy.” 
+Now, the New York Times reports (via ZeroHedge ) that in an investigation into Russia’s possible involvement in the 2016 presidential election, the FBI concludes that there’s no evidence that Trump is connected with the Russian government: 
+“For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank. 
+Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” 
+Hey, James Carville, you conniving POS. This message is for you! 
+~Eowyn",FAKE
+8438,"""Top Five Clinton Donors Are Jewish"" - How Anti-Semitic Is This Fact?","""Top Five Clinton Donors Are Jewish"" - How Anti-Semitic Is This Fact? Published: October 29, 2016 Source: Moon of Alabama 
+Top five Clinton donors Are Jewish, campaign tally shows. 
+Something is wrong with the above statement. Isn't it anti-semitic? Did Trump say that? Readers of that statement may assume, somewhat reasonably, that there is a club of rich Jewish people controlling the Clinton campaign and, maybe, Clinton herself. That sounds like it was taken from the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It clearly must be anti-semitic. 
+It is also true . 
+Facts have no bias. They can't be anti-semitic (or can they?). But while facts as such can not have a racial-religious bias, openly stating them surely can. Thus the above statement is anti-semitic. The fact itself isn't bad, reporting it publicly is bad, bad, bad. 
+Who but an alt-right rag would report such at all? And for what purpose if not for spreading anti-semitism? 
+Well - quot licet jovi, ... 
+Jewish papers are of course allowed to report such a fact. That isn't anti-semitic. It is solely to brag about Jewish powers. Within the club that is not only allowed, but welcome. Thus Haaretz writes (sourced to the the Jewish Telegraph Agency) under the identity defining headline at the top of this post: Haim Saban, George Soros and others stand at the head of a list of wealthy donors who contributed mainly via super PACs. 
+The Washington Post analysis, posted October 24, named the top donors, who are contributing $1 of every $17 of the over $1 billion amassed for the Democratic nominee’s presidential run. 
+They are Donald Sussman, a hedge fund manager; J.B. Pritzker, a venture capitalist, and his wife, M.K.; Haim Saban, the Israeli-American entertainment mogul, and his wife, Cheryl; George Soros, another hedge funder and a major backer of liberal causes, and Daniel Abraham, a backer of liberal pro-Israel causes and the founder of SlimFast. 
+Many of the big Clinton campaign donors also give to the Clinton Foundation which at times is a washing machine to put money into the Clinton's private accounts. It is kind of difficult to understand where Clinton Inc begins and where it ends. Campaign funds, Clinton foundation, speech fees, private accounts - does it even matter? Surely those who pay, to whatever Clinton entity, expect a service in return. Given the Clinton's occupations as Senator, Secretary of State and President the ask in return is unlikely to be commercial. It will be political. 
+And here is why it matters that the five top donors to Clinton's campaign are Jewish, and all big supporters of Israel. (Haim Saban: ""I'm a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel."") They surely will ask for political favors in the interest of the Zionist entity. This is also the reason why Haaretz, an Israeli paper, finds the strong racial-religious bias at the top Clinton campaign tally newsworthy. Big money paid to a Clinton entity can directly effect U.S. policies towards Israel. It buys its acquiescence to Israeli escapades even when those are not consistent U.S. interests. 
+Clinton's positions towards Syria, Iran and Russia (which limits Israel's freedom of action) are surely not independent of Israeli interests. 
+But that is of course, anti-semitic speculation ...",FAKE
+4115,Why Congress Doesn't Really Worry About What Most Americans Think,"Why Congress Doesn't Really Worry About What Most Americans Think
+
+With each week, we have come to expect another jarring outrage from the self-proclaimed Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, the new breed of terrorists that is redefining terror.
+
+News of the group's murder of nearly two dozen Egyptian Christians captured in Libya has topped even the horrors of the previous weeks, when the world watched a Jordanian fighter pilot burned alive in a cage and the tragedy of aid worker Kayla Mueller dying as an ISIS hostage. These events followed the videotaped beheadings of several other Western civilians in recent weeks amid a relentless campaign to recruit fresh blood from Muslim communities the world over.
+
+Described as apocalyptic, fanatic and medieval, the Islamic State has supplanted al-Qaida in the imagination of Islamist radicals and in the nightmares of the West. Small wonder, then, that President Obama is seeking specific authority to raise the stakes. Even this commander-in-chief, so widely known for his restraint and for downplaying dangers, is ready to follow in the footsteps of the two Presidents George Bush. Like them, he is asking Congress for a clear Authorization for Use of Military Force. It is hard to imagine a path from the past he would less like to tread.
+
+Remarkably, however, the otherwise war-weary American people seem to be on board. Even after more than a dozen years of combat in Afghanistan and a disheartening and drawn out struggle in Iraq, this country appears willing to return to the field for yet one more ""war on terror.""
+
+The latest CNN poll says 78 percent of Americans are in favor of authorizing further actions against the Islamic State. Such an authorization, or AUMF, would be the first since President George W. Bush got one (his second) in the fall of 2002 and used it to invade Iraq.
+
+Stunning as that number may be, it follows another sounding by CNN that showed more than 80 percent supporting the request. Another poll by NBC News and Marist College has just found that even when the Obama name is attached to the question, only 32 percent of respondents object. And an amazing two thirds of the respondents were ready to commit at least some ground troops to defeating the Islamic State.
+
+Yet there is one group of Americans that is having far more trouble deciding how it feels about granting the president an AUMF. And that group is Congress.
+
+Even with the latest atrocities reverberating in the media, the most common posture on the Hill has been standoffish. Many Republicans clearly favor stronger action than the president has taken to date, but they regard the current request as flawed and the president's leadership as lacking. They want him to ask, but they want him to ask for more.
+
+Then you have the Democrats who think the three-year time frame envisioned by Obama is hopelessly broad and who blanch at any thought of a ground combat commitment. That is why the White House has explicitly abjured ""enduring offensive ground combat operations,"" quite possibly a reference to George W. Bush's ""Operation Enduring Freedom"" in Afghanistan (now the longest military engagement in U.S. history).
+
+It may strike many as remarkable that, even with the enormities being witnessed in the Middle East, Congress can maintain its distance from the president. This is all the more stunning given the institutional interest Congress has in sharing the war power.
+
+After all, a large part of the current public support for an AUMF is a clear preference for some kind of process and orderly decision-making before the next wave of U.S. personnel is sent in harm's way. Hardly anyone is happy about this president or any other launching a thousand airstrikes on his own.
+
+In 2002, Congress held days of debate before authorizing what became the invasion of Iraq. In the fall of 2001, just days after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, Democrats in Congress still wanted to set some limits on the first phase of U.S. military response.
+
+And in 1991, when the first President Bush already had several hundred thousand troops poised to smite Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, both chambers held lengthy and dramatic debates in the first two weeks of January before giving their wary assent.
+
+In each of these cases, Congress showed a healthy awareness of the larger public debate going on around them. The individual member had to weigh his or her own conscience in the midst of that soul-searching exercise.
+
+Today, Congress seems quite different. The heightened partisanship cemented in Congressional district lines has created safe havens where most Republicans and Democrats no longer worry about pleasing anyone other than primary voters. If the primary voter goes with the incumbent, the incumbent is almost certain to go back to Washington.
+
+In the GOP, in particular, the risk now seems entirely in the intraparty struggle. Ask Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican who a year ago was expected to be the next Speaker of the House. His political career came to a sudden halt when his Richmond-area district decided he wasn't really Their Guy anymore.
+
+Primaries such as Cantor's throw a permanent chill into every member in both chambers, regardless of seniority or party standing. Republican districts are now more Republican than ever, and most Democratic districts are more Democratic than ever. As fewer and fewer members have ""swing districts,"" the necessity of constant partisan emphasis grows worse and worse. Even the notion of compromise becomes hazardous.
+
+For most members today, the kind of public opinion measured by CNN or Gallup or NBC News is just too broad and diverse and dispersed to matter. The audience that must be served is the far narrower one that cares about party and policy and issues — and works to elect candidates as devoted to their ideology and as hostile to the other party as they themselves are.",REAL
+9166,Russia And Syria Blamed For Idlib Bombing Hoax,"Speaking at the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi on Thursday, Putin said Russian patience has limits. “We(‘ve) show(n) restraint so far and (haven’t) respond(ed) to our partners (sic) in the same gauche manner, but everything has its limits. We can do it,” he explained. So what is he waiting for, given endless US provocations, refusing mutual cooperation on vital issues, rejecting normal relations, heading inevitably for war unless challenged and stopped. He’s not stupid or uninformed. Russia’s intelligence capability likely matches America’s, so he knows what it’s up to in Eastern Europe, Syria, elsewhere in the Middle East, along with virtually everywhere else. Pretending both countries are “partners” defies logic. Thinking mutual cooperation with Washington is possible one day is like waiting for Godot. And things may get exponentially worse once Hillary succeeds Obama, a virtual certainty at this point by fair or foul means – likely the latter, election theft a longstanding US tradition, showing democracy in America is pure fantasy. On Thursday, screaming deceptive Western headlines outrageously blamed Russia and Syria for bombing a Syrian school in Idlib province. It was a hoax. No bombing occurred. US-supported terrorists attacked the school, killing at least six children, injuring many others. An exclusive RT International investigation determined that “a gas canister and a mine landed in a classroom in Hadaiq al-Andalus” – projectiles launched from terrorist-controlled eastern Aleppo. Yet media scoundrels irresponsibly blamed Russia and Syria – while ignoring daily eastern Aleppo shelling, US supported terrorists killing and injuring civilians in government controlled parts of the city. Long before Internet access to important information from reliable independent sources, famed humorist/social commentator Will Rogers once said: “All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.” Reporting then was deplorable. Today it’s beyond the pale. It’s hard imagining why anyone wastes time and money on pure rubbish – or believes television news is credible. Media misinformation proliferates. Readers, viewers and listeners are systematically lied to. Daily fare isn’t fit to print or broadcast. Mainstream editors, reporters and commentators are a virtual Noah’s Ark of scam artists. On Thursday, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov called video footage of the Idlib incident shown on Western television fake – “more than ten edited fragments assembled together,” he explained. No Russian or Syrian warplanes were in the area when the attack occurred. No bomb craters existed. Damage to the school was inconsistent to a bombing. Only one wall was damaged, not the ceiling, desks or chairs. Had a bombing occurred, the blast would have destroyed or severely damaged the building. Furniture inside would have been “swept away.” “As one can see on a photo from the Russian drone, the roof of the school is not damaged and there are no bomb craters in the area adjacent to the school,” Konashenkov explained. A US drone in the area at the time of the attack has the same footage. Yet Washington concealed what should have been revealed straightaway to set the record straight. “UNICEF leadership fell…victim to a new deception of swindlers and (Al Qaeda-affiliated) White Helmets,” said Konashenkov. Washington perhaps orchestrated what happened, part of its sinister anti-Russia/anti-Syria agenda. Submit your review",FAKE
+6679,FBI Sources believe Clinton Foundation case is “likely moving toward an indictment”,"FBI Sources believe Clinton Foundation case is “likely moving toward an indictment” Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier reports the latest news about the Clinton Foundation investigation from two sources inside the FBI. He reveals five important new pieces of information: 1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year. 2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time. 3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature. 4. Sources within the FBI have told him that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department. 5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information had been taken from it.",FAKE
+4591,"Trump wins presidency, defeats Clinton in historic election upset","Donald Trump, defying the pundits and polls to the end, defeated Hillary Clinton in Tuesday’s presidential election and claimed an establishment-stunning victory that exposes the depth of voter dissatisfaction – and signals immense changes ahead for American policy at home and abroad.
+
+Seventeen months after the billionaire tycoon’s Trump Tower entrance into the race, the first-time candidate once dismissed by the political elite will become the 45th president, Fox News projects.
+
+Speaking to cheering supporters early Wednesday morning at his victory party in New York City, the Republican candidate and now president-elect said Clinton called to congratulate him, and Fox News confirms she has conceded. Despite their hard-fought campaign, Trump praised Clinton for her service and said “it is time for us to come together as one united people.”
+
+“I will be president for all Americans,” Trump vowed, after a brief introduction by running mate Mike Pence.
+
+TRUMP'S AGENDA: WHAT HIS ELECTION MEANS FOR AMERICA
+
+Sounding a call to “reclaim our country’s destiny,” Trump declared: “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. … America will no longer settle for anything less than the best.”
+
+Trump will be the oldest president in U.S. history, entering the Oval Office at age 70. With her defeat, Clinton falls short in her second bid to become the first female president of the United States.
+
+Though Clinton called Trump, her campaign initially did not concede defeat. Earlier, her campaign chairman John Podesta addressed supporters nearby in New York and said several states were “too close to call.”
+
+Clinton herself did not appear at the rally. Podesta had urged supporters to “head home” and said they would not have “anything more to say tonight.”
+
+Amid Trump’s victory, Republicans also were projected to hold onto their majority in the House and Senate, improving Trump’s chances of advancing his agenda in office.
+
+A surge of support in key battlegrounds – and especially surprise victories in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – helped propel Trump to victory. The GOP nominee built a commanding lead early on with wins in heavily contested North Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Iowa.
+
+Clinton won her share of battlegrounds, including Virginia and Nevada and Colorado, but could not make up for Trump’s strong performance in other states thought to favor the Democrat.
+
+The billionaire businessman’s victory marked a remarkable upset and turnaround, after he had been complaining amid a rough patch just weeks ago the vote could be “rigged” against him.
+
+Clinton was still thought to have the clear advantage in the electoral map going into Tuesday’s vote, yet the polls had been tightening in the race’s closing days.
+
+His victory could demonstrate just how much the dynamics were shifting in his favor – and perhaps how his true support was elusive all along to pollsters and others gauging the race.
+
+Without question, his bid was helped over the last two weeks by a burst of setbacks for his opponent.
+
+Eleven days before the election, FBI Director James Comey announced the bureau was revisiting the investigation into Clinton’s personal email server use while secretary of state, after discovering new messages on the laptop of disgraced ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide. He closed the case again on Sunday, but the political damage may have been done. And the WikiLeaks release of emails hacked from Podesta’s account became a constant distraction for the campaign, as the messages revealed infighting, internal concerns about the Clinton family’s foundation and even evidence that the now-head of the Democratic National Committee leaked town hall questions to Clinton during the primaries.
+
+This at times overshadowed the numerous allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Trump that came out in October (which he denies), following leaked footage from over a decade ago showing Trump making crude comments about women.
+
+Trump’s victory marks the second time Clinton was thwarted in her bid to become the first female U.S. president, having been defeated by President Obama in their 2008 primary race.
+
+But Trump has been able to defy expectations from the start. He defeated a deep field of 16 competitors during the Republican primaries – stitching together a motivated coalition of voters invigorated by his outsider, populist message; throwing his rivals off their talking points during a raucous marathon of debates; and commanding media attention throughout with his unpredictable, learn-as-he-goes campaign style.
+
+He also defied party orthodoxy, railing against free-trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership and staking out a sometimes-confusing set of positions on foreign policy that may yet evolve. Democrats have criticized him heavily for statements expressing admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and a desire to rebuild ties with Moscow.
+
+Trump was aided by the infrastructure of the GOP, but his campaign never came close to the juggernaut operation mounted by Clinton. While she entered the final stretch of the race with an army of high-powered surrogates, Trump’s campaign was driven mainly by him, an inner circle of family members and a rotating set of top campaign advisers. Surrogates like retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani advocated aggressively for the Republican nominee, but he remained at odds with many influential elected Republicans who in some cases – as with House Speaker Paul Ryan – endorsed him, but only reluctantly. His stances on trade as well as his hardline immigration proposals – including variations on a plan to suspend Muslim immigration from certain countries – also made party brass uncomfortable.
+
+The late emergence of a 2005 tape showing him making crude comments about women led some congressional Republicans to abandon him entirely. But even the biggest controversies seemed only to ding Trump, whose resilience in the polls could be credited to a movement of grassroots supporters who seemed to have little interest in the nominee’s tensions with the GOP establishment and saw him as the true change-maker in the election.",REAL
+3759,"On The Streets Of Baltimore, Trying To Understand The Anger","On The Streets Of Baltimore, Trying To Understand The Anger
+
+In the early morning, as the cold set in, Anaya Maze stood next to the charred remains of a CVS store.
+
+Holding a sign, she was the only protester left in front of a line of police officers dressed in riot gear. She is petite. Still, she faced the police officers, looking at them intently.
+
+A few steps away were the charred skeletons of two police vehicles, the victims of an unbridled anger that burned its way through the west side of Baltimore.
+
+Maze said she understands the anger. For far too long, she said, police have been killing black men. She says Baltimore had this coming. All the violence, she says, might finally change things.
+
+""I see no shame in being violent to be heard,"" she said. ""Because if you can't do it peacefully then what other option do you have?""
+
+Last night, after Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan had declared a state of emergency and ordered the National Guard into the city, rioters still roamed the streets; fires still burned and residents still stood on their stoops, on their sidewalks, trying to understand the anger that boiled over into riots.
+
+Pierre Thomas, 37, was hanging out at the perimeter set up by police.
+
+He said that yes, Baltimore has a history of inequality and yes the black community feels forgotten, but he didn't agree with setting properties on fire.
+
+""Everybody is angry,"" he said. ""But there is a right and a wrong way to do it. I understand why they're doing it but I don't support it. They're trashing their own place.""
+
+A few blocks down, Alex, who only wanted to be identified by his first name, was watching a small corner market burn down.
+
+He pointed at the fire trucks that were trying to make their way through the street. He pointed at the police officers. He said those flames were the only way to get them to come into this part of Baltimore.
+
+Nobody was calling for peace when Baltimore police officers were beating innocent black men, he said.
+
+""Where was the peace when we were getting shot? Where's the peace when we were getting laid out? Where is the peace when we are in the back of ambulances? Where is the peace then? They don't want to call for peace then. But you know when people really want peace? When the white people have to get out of bed, when cops have to wear riot gear, when the cops start talking about, oh we got broken arms. Then they want peace,"" he said. ""Peace? It's too late for peace.""
+
+The police helicopter hovered above and every once in a while, we heard the pops of tear gas. The flames from the fire got hotter, lapping over the roof of a second row house.
+
+A woman a few steps away was in tears. She was roused from sleep by the smoke. Her house is two doors down from the burning market. She didn't know if it would survive, if the flames would turn all her possessions into ashes.
+
+""They shouldn't be doing this, man. We live around here,"" she wailed. ""That was terrible.""
+
+Suddenly, as a flame shot into the sky, she covered her face and darted off before I could get her name.",REAL
+3042,Where’s the partisan polarization on abortion?,"The recent murders at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood center, and the political arguments that have followed, remind us once again of the connection between political polarization and terrorism.
+
+We are used to the idea that Democrats support legal abortion while Republicans oppose it, but this has not always been the case. This came up here a couple of years ago, but I think it’s worth returning to the topic now that it is in the news again.
+
+To start with, here’s the trend in public opinion from the National Election Study. For each election year we show the average opinion on abortion on 1-4 scale (where 1 = abortion should never be legal, and 4 = abortion should always be legal) among self-declared Democrats, Independents, and Republicans:
+
+I made the graph a few years ago, but I don’t think the polarization has gone away. Sample sizes are small in some years, so I wouldn’t recommend trying to interpret every jump in those lines, but the basic pattern is clear: no partisan polarization on abortion before 1992, lots since.
+
+Yair Ghitza and I then broke these data down by ethnicity to see where the polarization was happening. And here’s what we found:
+
+These lines show estimated regression coefficients predicting abortion attitude from partisanship (that is, predicting that response on the 1-to-4 scale from a party-identification variable that takes on the values -1, 0, 1 for Republicans, Independents, and Democrats), using a hierarchical model to get stable estimates for each year and for each of four ethnic groups.
+
+As you can see, almost all the polarization is occurring among whites. (Also some among the “other” category, but they represent only a small fraction of the electorate.)
+
+We then continued and broke down the whites by income and education:
+
+Polarization is concentrated among upper-income and well-educated whites.
+
+And now we can return to the news story about the killer:
+
+This is N=1, and of course non-college-educated people can perpetrate political violence as well. But I find the statistics helpful in understanding partisan polarization more generally.",REAL
+6915,Mike Pence Is Fine With Trump Sexual Assault But Offended By Voter Suppression,"By Sarah Jones on Fri, Oct 28th, 2016 at 12:08 pm Donald Trump's Republican running mate Mike Pence has finally found something he's offended by, but it's not Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault or insulting African Americans or Mexicans or women or a Gold Star family. Nope. Pence is offended by a news report he hasn't read about their voter suppression efforts. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+“That’s offensive to me, that kind of language. It’s not our operation,” Indiana Governor Mike Pence said Friday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe . 
+Yes, Donald Trump’s Republican running mate Mike Pence has finally found something he’s offended by, but it’s not Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault or insulting African Americans or Mexicans or women or a Gold Star family. 
+Nope. 
+Did Pence read the story? No. But he’s offended. So offended. Because that kind of language is offensive. Not the actual suppression of the votes, but the language, because it’s not “our operation.” 
+Watch here via MSNBC’s Morning Joe : 
+Twice saying he hasn’t read the article, Pence proceeded to launch into a diatribe about how offended he was by something he hadn’t read, “That’s offensive to me, that kind of language. It’s not our operation,” Pence denied. 
+“Donald Trump and I want every American who has the opportunity to vote to vote in this election. And that’s our message, is to tell the American people that this country really belongs to them. That we can have government as good as our people again, but it’s going to take all of us.” 
+“And you saw Donald Trump … say that people who haven’t traditionally voted Republican, we’ve got an agenda to bring our cities back…” 
+Pence is twice offended, so super offended: 
+“I’ve never heard anybody in this campaign talk that way. Frankly, you know, it was offensive to me to hear that being reported in the news because that’s just not the approach Donald Trump has taken to this campaign. It’s not the approach we’re taking. We’re reaching out to every American.” 
+Pence then claimed Independents and even Democrats are breaking for Trump. In fact Trump and Pence are even losing groups that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. Pence then belied his own confidence by trying to shame Republicans into voting for them by saying, “It’s time for Republicans to come home” because Trump won the primary. 
+Mike Pence laughed at the idea that the race is over and done, because “It’s just not what I see out there.” 
+Trump also loves to cite what he “sees” and reads, and often times those things turn out to not even exist – like videos he claims to have watched. 
+This explains why Mike Pence and Donald Trump ended up together. It turns out, they are not that different after all, in spite of the Republican establishment’s efforts to persuade the voters and themselves otherwise. Both Pence and Trump don’t care a whit about facts. This is more than typical campaign spin, it’s appalling in context. 
+The context is that Mike Pence is willingly standing next to a man who brags about grabbing a woman’s “p*ssy” without her permission, but he is publicly saying he’s offended by language used in a report about their voter suppression efforts. 
+Pence didn’t even bother to read the article, which suggests that he doesn’t care if their campaign is really suppressing voters. But why would he? 
+Pence didn’t care about any of the groups Donald Trump insulted – not enough to take a public stand, so why start now. But he took a public stand was when the insult was aimed at his own campaign. 
+Like Trump, Pence is also insulted by language calling out bad behavior instead of the bad behavior. 
+Image: Screencap via MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” 
+Mike Pence Is Fine With Trump Sexual Assault But Offended By Voter Suppression added by Sarah Jones on Fri, Oct 28th, 2016",FAKE
+6106,Learning Horrors of War from Vets,"Learning Horrors of War from Vets November 9, 2016 
+Americans shed some guilt for sending young soldiers to war by saying “thank you for your service” but it’d be better to ask vets about their war experiences, says ex-U.S. Army chaplain Chris J. Antal who served in Afghanistan. 
+By the Rev. Chris J. Antal 
+Veteran’s Day too often only serves to construct and maintain a public narrative that glorifies war and military service and excludes the actual experience of the veteran. This public narrative is characterized by core beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and the world that most citizens readily accept without examination. 
+The U.S. public narrative reconciles deep religiosity with a penchant for violence with an often unexamined American National Religion. The core beliefs of this religion include the unholy trinity of governmental theism (One Nation Under God, In God We Trust, etc.), global military supremacy, and capitalism as freedom. These core beliefs provide many U.S. citizens with a broad sense of meaning and imbue the public narrative with thematic coherence. U.S. Marines patrol street in Shah Karez in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Robert Storm) 
+War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning , as Christopher Hedges wrote. Yet this kind of coherence has a moral and psychological cost. The consequence of an unexamined faith in American National Religion is a moral dualism that exaggerates U.S. goodness and innocence and projects badness on an “other” who we then demonize as the enemy and kill. 
+Walter Wink described this moral dualism as a “theology of redemptive violence,” the erroneous belief that somehow good violence can save us from bad violence. 
+Veteran’s Day, in the context of American National Religion, enables selective remembering, self-deception, and projected valorization. In short, it serves to perpetuate lies in order to avoid facing uncomfortable truths about who U.S. citizens are and what kind of people we are becoming. 
+Imagine a Veteran’s Day where citizens gathered around veterans and asked, “what’s your story?” Citizens who risk this bold step begin to bridge the empathy gap between civilians and veterans and open up the path for adaptive change and post-traumatic growth. 
+I believe one citizen who approaches a veteran with the invitation, “what’s your story?” does more for the veteran than a thousand patriotic platitudes like “Thank you for your service” could ever do. 
+Only a First Step 
+Asking the question is only the first step. A citizen who wants to give back to veterans should cultivate narrative competence, the capacity to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories one hears or reads. The voice of veterans, if we open our ears to hear them, often provides an essential counter-narrative to the U.S. public narrative. Coffins of dead U.S. soldiers arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in 2006. (U.S. government photo) 
+Violent, sudden, or seemingly meaningless deaths, the kind of deaths often experienced by veterans, can make the world appear dangerous, unpredictable, or unjust. The experience of warfare can often undercut our sense of meaning and coherence and shatter assumptions. Because of this many veterans carry a depth of pain that is unimaginable to many citizens. 
+The voice of the veterans often reveals uncomfortable truths and invites collective examination of core beliefs and assumptions, especially those that form the bedrock of American National Religion. 
+Imagine a Veteran’s Day where communities join together for authentic dialogue between veterans and civilians. Such a gathering would empower veterans to share the kind of stories that would help the community face real problems. What new story might emerge in the process? How might we become a better people as a result? 
+The Reverend Chris Antal was a chaplain with the US Army in Kandahar, Afghanistan and later in the US Army Reserve. While in Afghanistan, he delivered a sermon that said, “We have sanitized killing and condoned extrajudicial assassinations…” He nearly lost his job. This past April, in an open letter to President Obama, he resigned his commission in protest over the use of drones, nuclear proliferation and our government’s claims of impunity to international law. He is minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rock Tavern, New York. More background here.)",FAKE
+9211,"Shiite militia says it is close to Tal Afar, which Turkey has warned is off limits","Trump rape accuser skips press conference, citing threats ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Shiite militia says it is close to Tal Afar, which Turkey has warned is off limits By GPD on November 4, 2016 By Rudaw ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The Shiite-led Hashd al-Shaabi militia said Thursday that its forces are 15 kilometers from Tal Afar, a Turkmen town that Turkey has warned the militia to stay clear of. “The Hashd al-Shaabi are continuously advancing and we are just 15 kilometers from Tal Afar” and nearing the Mosul-Raqqa road, Karim Nuri, spokesperson of the Hashd al-Shaabi, told Rudaw. He said he hoped that “in a few hours” his forces will be in control of the Mosul-Raqqa road, a critical supply line for the two ISIS strongholds in Iraq and Syria. Nuri said the Iranian-backed Hashd had not received any air support from the coalition, which had from the outset opposed any role for the militia in the Mosul offensive. Tal Afar, north of Mosul city, is a predominantly Turkmen town that was captured by ISIS two years ago when the group captured large swathes of land in the north. Turkey has warned Hashd forces from entering Tal Afar, for fear the Shiite militia would brutalize the town’s population, which is divided between Sunnis and Shiites. Earlier this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country opposed any Hashd presence in Tal Afar. “Tal Afar is a very sensitive issue for us. We definitely do not regard it [Hashd involvement] positively in Tal Afar and Sinjar. I already told this to officials clearly,” Erdogan said Saturday. “Tal Afar is a totally Turkmen city, with half Shiite and half Sunni Muslims. We do not judge people by their religious affiliation, we regard them as Muslims,” he added, “But if Hashd al-Shaabi terrorizes the region, our response would be different.” Related Posts: No Related Posts The   GPD   19 Reads Filed under World  ",FAKE
+6410,Some Early Voters: Changing their Minds,"Some Early Voters: Changing their Minds November 02, 2016 sample ballot is seen in a photo illustration, as early voting for the 2016 general elections began in North Carolina, in Chapel... 
+The FBI's move to reopen investigation into Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information has some early voters changing their minds. 
+Americans’ interest in changing their “early votes” has increased in recent days. The spike can be traced back to the day FBI Director James Comey announced that his agency would be probing more emails related to its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified emails. 
+Comey announced Friday that the FBI would be reopening its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. As reported by The Daily Caller, based on Google Trends data, that day and in the days following Google searches for “change early vote” have increased. The states that seem to show the increase in interest include Nevada, Louisiana, New Hampshire and Arkansas. 
+Other variations on the search such as “changing early vote” and “change my early vote” yielded similar results. 
+Original article by The Daily Caller / Analysis by TRUNEWS. 
+- Article by , Correspondent for TRUNEWS Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+9778,20 Foods That Naturally Unclog Arteries and Prevent Heart Attacks,"20 Foods That Naturally Unclog Arteries and Prevent Heart Attacks http://blogs.naturalnews.com/20-foods-naturally-unclog-arteries-prevent-heart-attacks/ 
+By Twain Yobra 
+Posted Tuesday, November 1, 2016 at 03:53pm EDT 
+Arteries play a vital role in the body. They transport nutrients and oxygen throughout the body. And they can cause heart attacks if they’re clogged. Well, you can unclog them naturally by eating foods rich in antioxidants, soluble fiber and healthy fats. 
+Here are 20 foods that will unclog your arteries and prevent heart attacks. 
+1. Pomegranate: Pomegranate is rich in antioxidants which prevents the arteries from being damaged. Research also shows that pomegranate improves heart health by reducing bad cholesterol. 
+2. Spirulina: Spirulina is regulates fat levels in the blood. And it’s rich in omega 3 fatty acids, which studies show prevents heart disease. 
+3. Asparagus: This vegetable is rich in vitamins and minerals that prevent blood clots and lower blood pressure. 
+4. Turmeric: Inflammation is one of the main causes of arteriosclerosis, and as you may know, turmeric fights inflammation. 
+5. Cranberries: The potassium in cranberries can lower blood pressure and reduce risk of heart disease by up to 40 percent. 
+6. Watermelon: One study found that L-citrulline (found in watermelon) can widen blood vessels and lower blood pressure. This can actually benefit men with mild erectile dysfunction. 
+7. Avocado: Research shows that eat avocados every day can clean your arteries, lower bad cholesterol and increase good cholesterol. 
+8. Broccoli: Broccoli contains vitamin K which prevents calcium from damaging the arteries. It’s also rich in soluble fiber which lowers cholesterol. 
+9. Cinnamon: This spice unclogs the arteries of plaque build-up. Its antioxidant properties also improve cardiovascular health. 
+10. Green tea: This powerful herb contains catechins which prevent absorption of cholesterol. This consequently prevents blockage of arteries. Drink 2-3 cups a day. 
+11. Coconut oil: Taking coconut oil regularly can unclog the arteries and even convert bad cholesterol to good. 
+12. Persimmon: Persimmon has antioxidants that reduce blood-lipid. It’s also rich in fiber which helps clean the arteries. 
+13. Coffee: Research shows that drinking 2 cups of coffee a day can lower risk of heart disease by 20 percent. But excess consumption can increase blood pressure and cause anxiety. 
+14. Cold-water fish: Eating these fish will fight inflammation and unclog your arteries. They include, mackerel, tuna, salmons, and sardines. 
+15. Olive oil: Studies show that olive oil can reduce risk of cardiovascular disease by 41 percent. This is attributed to its ability to reduce oxidative stress and cholesterol. 
+16. Spinach: This vegetable unclogs arteries because of its folate, potassium and fiber content. 
+17. Orange juice: Oranges are rich in vitamin C which cleans the arteries and prevents oxidation of blood. 
+18. Flaxseeds: Flaxseeds have been proven to fight inflammation, lower blood pressure and improve heart health. 
+19. Raw nuts: Nuts like almonds will reduce blood pressure and fight inflammation. Use them to keep hunger at bay. 
+20. Whole grains: Whole grains are rich in soluble fiber which lowers cholesterol and risk of high blood pressure. 
+For more information on eating healthy and staying fit, download your FREE 3 Weeks Flat Stomach Guide to help you improve your health and physique. And like our Facebook page . You might also like…",FAKE
+6813,Condell: America’s Moment Of Truth,"Truth Revolt October 26, 2016 
+As usual, Pat Condell nails it in this video commentary about the differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, about immigration, about Brexit, and more. 
+Check out the video above — probably the best 8 minutes you’ll spend today. Condell helpfully provides related links below: 
+Hillary Clinton embraces George Soros’ vision of an open border world",FAKE
+8398,SATAN 2: Russia unvelis an image of its terrifying new ‘SUPERNUKE’ – Western world takes notice,"The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2, will replace the SS-18 Flies at 4.3 miles (7km) per sec and with a range of 6,213 miles (10,000km) The weapons are perceived as part of an increasingly aggressive Russia It could deliver a warhead of 40 megatons – 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 By LIBBY PLUMMER and GARETH DAVIE S Russia has unveiled chilling pictures of its largest ever nuclear missile, capable of destroying an area the size of France. The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2 by Nato, has a top speed of 4.3 miles (7km) per second and has been designed to outfox anti-missile shield systems. The new Sarmat missile could deliver warheads of 40 megatons – 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Scroll down for video Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly planning to replace the country’s older SS-18 Satan weapons with the new missiles amid a string of recent disagreements with the West. The Kremlin has stepped up the rhetoric against the West and carried a series of manoeuvres that has infuriated politicians in the US and UK. The pictures were revealed online by chief designers from the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau. A message posted alongside the picture said: ‘In accordance with the Decree of the Russian Government ‘On the State Defense Order for 2010 and the planning period 2012-2013’, the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau was instructed to start design and development work on the Sarmat. ‘ The RS-28 Sarmat missile is said to contain 16 nuclear warheads and is capable of destroying an area the size of France or Texas, according to Russian news network Zvezda, which is owned by Russia’s ministry of defence. The weapon is also able to evade radar. It is expected to have a range of 6,213 miles (10,000 km), which would allow Moscow to attack London and 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+4554,Russia Calls Downing Of Its Plane A 'Planned Provocation',"One of two crew members survived the shooting down of a Russian warplane by Turkey on Tuesday, Russian officials say, and was rescued by a Syrian commando unit in an operation that ended early Wednesday.
+
+The news comes as international tensions continue to rise over the incident. As we reported Tuesday, Turkey says the Russian Su-24 fighter jet was in Turkish airspace when it was shot down by Turkish F-16s. Turkey says it warned the Russian warplane 10 times before taking action.
+
+Russia maintains the jet was flying over Syria at the time.
+
+Both Russian crew members appeared to eject from the jet and parachute to the ground, but one was reportedly found dead Tuesday by a Syrian rebel group.
+
+Russia now says the other crew member has been rescued. It was a costly mission for Russia, NPR's Corey Flintoff reports for our Newscast unit:
+
+""Russia's defense minister said the pilot was rescued in a 12-hour operation that ended in the early hours of the morning. ""Rebel fighters in the area claim they shot one of the Russian helicopters involved in the search yesterday and then used a missile to destroy it on the ground after it was forced to land. ""Russia says one of the helicopter crewmen was killed, but the rest were evacuated safely.""
+
+Meanwhile, Russia and Turkey continue to exchange angry rhetoric while at the same time calling for military restraint.
+
+Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Wednesday that Russia could not justify its attacks on ethnic Turks in Syria under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State, and reiterated statements by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Turkey will continue to defend its airspace.
+
+But, Davutoglu said, targeting Russia is ""out of the question,"" Reuters reports.
+
+Also on Wednesday, Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called the shooting of the plane a ""planned provocation"" that is prompting Moscow to ""reconsider relations with Ankara,"" The Associated Press reports. On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the shooting a ""stab in the back.""
+
+But Lavrov says Moscow has ""no intention to go to war with Turkey,"" the AP writes.
+
+Russia says it is deploying an advanced anti-aircraft system to its base in Syria. Corey says the missiles appear to be guarding against Turkish planes — or planes from other coalition members, such as the U.S. or France. ""As far as we know, ISIS and other jihadi groups in Syria have no aircraft that could threaten the Russian base,"" he reports.
+
+Moscow may be considering nonmilitary forms of retaliation against Turkey. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that ""important joint projects could be canceled and Turkish firms could lose Russian market share,"" the AP reports.
+
+The two countries' economies are closely linked by energy purchases, tourism and other business activity.",REAL
+2392,9th baby dies after heart surgery at a Florida hospital,"(CNN) A baby who had heart surgery at St. Mary's Medical Center in Florida died Tuesday, at least the ninth infant to pass away after such a procedure since the program opened at the end of 2011.
+
+A CNN investigation calculates that from 2011 to 2013, the program had a 12.5% mortality rate for open heart surgeries, which is more than three times the national average.
+
+""Why won't they stop?"" asked Nneka Campbell, whose baby daughter, Amelia, died after heart surgery at the hospital.
+
+The same day the latest baby died, St. Mary's CEO Davide Carbone wrote a letter to employees about the CNN investigation, which aired Monday night, expressing support for the program and its heart surgeon, Dr. Michael Black.
+
+""The patients we serve are afflicted with severe life-threatening conditions, and it is impossible to eliminate the risk of mortality,"" he wrote.
+
+The hospital, which is owned by Tenet Healthcare, says CNN did not get the mortality rate right, but won't say what the hospital believes the correct rate is.
+
+Last year in April, the Florida Department of Health sent a team of expert heart doctors to St. Mary's to review the children's heart surgery program. The head of the panel, Dr. Jeffrey Jacobs, a professor of cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins, suggested they stop doing heart surgeries on babies younger than 6 months.
+
+The baby who died Tuesday, Davi Ricardo Brandao, was only a few weeks old when he had surgery in March for a severe heart defect called truncus arteriosus, according to his mother, Pautilia Gomes. She said her son needed a second surgery later that month.
+
+In April, in response to an inquiry from CNN, St. Mary's spokeswoman Shelly Weiss said a patient with truncus arteriosus at St. Mary's was ""recovering well and the prognosis is good.""
+
+Davi never left the hospital and was not quite 2 months old when he died. Gomes posted a picture on her Facebook page of an eye filled with tears and the word ""LUTO,"" which is Portuguese for ""mourning.""
+
+According to St. Mary's, the hospital received the experts' final reviews last year in June. In his letter to employees, Carbone said that since that time, ""our mortality rate has been consistent with the national average, and does not significantly exceed the mortality rate of other programs as the CNN story alleges.""
+
+He did not say what the hospital's mortality rate was, or whether it included Davi's death. An email from CNN to Weiss went unanswered Wednesday.
+
+In his review last year, Jacobs, the Johns Hopkins surgeon, noted that St. Mary's was doing too few pediatric heart surgeries -- a very complex type of operation -- to get good at it. He noted that in 2013, the hospital did 23 procedures. The vast majority of hospitals in the United States that perform these surgeries do more than 100 a year, and anything less than that is considered low volume by the Society for Thoracic Surgeons.
+
+In response to CNN's investigation, Florida's Department of Health and the Agency for Health Care Administration issued a statement Wednesday saying, ""Florida does not regulate the number of procedures performed at pediatric cardiac programs"" and that the Agency for Health Care Administration ""continues to closely monitor St. Mary's to ensure that they are following the law.""",REAL
+7042,RI's YouTube Channel Tops 100 Thousand Subscribers and 60 Million Views - Damir Marinovich,"People over profits RI's YouTube Channel Tops 100 Thousand Subscribers and 60 Million Views 
+To be more precise, our YouTube channel has 65 million views and 113 thousand subscribers - and is still going strong! Donate! An important milestone 
+As RI's You Tube manager, I would like to give special thanks to Alexei Pankin, Olga Beskrovnova, Charles Bausman , Ricky Twisdale, Kristina Shumilova and David Curry as well as Elina Nigamatyanova, Riley Waggaman, Julia Rakhmetova, Mark Shumilov, Marko Marjanovic, Elina Nigamatyanova, Anna Lutskova de Bacci, Bogdan Polischuk and other contributors. 
+Your donations will help us to create more original content. And please remember to subscribe to the Russia Insider YouTube Channel and share our videos on social media. 
+If you have any ideas or suggestions about how to improve our channel — or if you are interested in volunteering — please send me an email . Thank you! 
+RI exclusive interviews: 
+The most popular videos on our channel: 
+Russia Insider in Media:",FAKE
+8546,Comment on Will Michelle Obama Be The Replacement Nominee If The FBI Email Investigation Ends Hillary Clinton’s Campaign? by marlene,"  Michael Snyder 
+I realize that this headline must sound extremely bizarre, but in this article I will explain why this could actually happen. We have just learned that the FBI has obtained a search warrant that will enable the agency to examine approximately 650,000 emails that are sitting on electronic devices owned by Huma Abedin and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner. Now that the FBI is going through these emails, it is unlikely but still possible that a decision about whether or not to charge Hillary Clinton with a crime could be made by November 8th. Of course the most likely scenario is that Hillary Clinton will not be indicted before election day and that Americans will be voting with this scandal hanging ominously over the Clinton campaign. But if the FBI does quickly take action, it is possible that Hillary Clinton could be forced from the race before election day, and that would require the Democrats to come up with a new candidate. 
+In fact, there are already calls in the mainstream media for Clinton to willingly remove herself from the race. For example, the following comes from a Chicago Tribune article entitled “ Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside “… 
+So what should the Democrats do now? 
+If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process: 
+They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place. 
+Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea. 
+But what the author of that article does not understand is that Tim Kaine would not automatically take her place if Clinton steps down before the election. In a previous article , I included a quote from a U.S. News & World Report article that explained what would happen if Hillary Clinton was removed from the Democratic ticket for some reason prior to November 8th… 
+If Clinton were to fall off the ticket, Democratic National Committee members would gather to vote on a replacement. DNC members acted as superdelegates during this year’s primary and overwhelmingly backed Clinton over boat-rocking socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. 
+DNC spokesman Mark Paustenbach says there currently are 445 committee members – a number that changes over time and is guided by the group’s bylaws, which give membership to specific officeholders and party leaders and hold 200 spots for selection by states, along with an optional 75 slots DNC members can choose to fill. 
+But the party rules for replacing a presidential nominee merely specify that a majority of members must be present at a special meeting called by the committee chairman. The meeting would follow procedures set by the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee and proxy voting would not be allowed. 
+So if this email scandal forced Hillary Clinton to exit the race at the last minute, a majority of the members of the Democratic National Committee would gather to select a new nominee. 
+Who would they choose? 
+Let’s take a look at the top five options… 
+#1 Tim Kaine 
+He would seem to be an obvious choice since he is Hillary Clinton’s running mate. But to win a national campaign you need to have name recognition, and most Americans outside of the state of Virginia have very little familiarity with him. 
+And at this point he has proven to have very little popularity on the campaign trail. In fact, attendance at many of his rallies in key swing states can be measured in the dozens. 
+So to me it seems unlikely that the DNC would select Kaine as the replacement nominee. 
+#2 Joe Biden 
+Vice-President Joe Biden has far more name recognition than Tim Kaine does, and in recent days he has been touting how he believes that he would have actually won the nomination if he would have decided to run … 
+Vice President Joe Biden said in a recent interview that he believed he could have beat former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination had he pursued it. 
+Biden was asked in an interview with CNN Saturday if news that the FBI was re-opening their criminal probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state made him second-guess his decision last year not to run. 
+But according to the vice president, the short answer is “no.” The only thing that kept him from running, Biden said, was the recent death of his son, Beau. 
+Unfortunately for Biden, he suffers from many of the same things that Kaine does. 
+Biden is boring, he is not very good on the campaign trail, and he doesn’t have the sort of charisma that would motivate people to go to the polls in large numbers. 
+Biden would probably represent the “safest” choice for the Democrats, but he might not be a winning choice. 
+#3 Bernie Sanders 
+Bernie Sanders would seem to be a logical choice since he was the runner-up to Hillary Clinton, but the truth is that there are a lot of things working against Bernie Sanders. 
+First of all, he does not have any real loyalty to the Democrats. He has previously operated as an independent, and he expressed a desire to return to independent status once the campaign was over. 
+Secondly, the Democratic establishment very much dislikes him, and that plays a huge role in decisions such as this. 
+Thirdly, Democratic insiders fear that he would be “another McGovern” and would get absolutely wiped out in a general election. 
+So even though he is very popular with the radical left, it appears that Sanders would be the least likely choice on this list. 
+#4 Elizabeth Warren 
+Elizabeth Warren would be very popular with the “Bernie Sanders” wing of the party, and she would enable the party to replace Hillary Clinton with another woman. 
+So she is definitely a possibility. 
+But she does lack name recognition, and just like Sanders there would be concern that the Republicans would frame her candidacy as “another McGovern” because of her far left policies. 
+#5 Michelle Obama 
+One recent survey found that 67 percent of all Democrats would rather have a third term for Obama than a first term for Hillary Clinton. 
+And these days Barack Obama’s approval rating is running anywhere from +9 to +11. 
+So the thought of another Obama in the White House is not as far-fetched as you might think. 
+Michelle Obama has better name recognition than anyone else on this list, and she is generally very well-liked by the American people. And she has received a tremendous amount of praise for her work on the campaign trail recently. For instance, her recent speech in New Hampshire was lauded as “the most influential speech of the 2016 campaign” in a recent MSN article entitled “ In this campaign, Michelle Obama became more than just another political voice “… 
+The speech, amplified by timing and met with an enthusiastic response, cemented Obama’s place as a star of the presidential race and put a defining stroke not just on how women view Trump, but also on herself as a voice of moral authority. Three months before leaving the White House, she already is among the ranks of public figures who transcend politics and title. 
+“When you rise to a level like that, you see how much weight your words carry,” said Anita McBride, former chief of staff to Laura Bush and executive in residence at the School of Public Affairs at American University. “We know she didn’t like politics. But she was impassioned by the language that was used, and she feels compelled to speak out. People listen to her.” 
+If I were the Democrats, Michelle Obama is the one that I would select if a replacement nominee was needed, because she would give them the very best chance of winning against Donald Trump. 
+Of course the Obamas are just as radical as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but the American people have become quite comfortable with them at this point. 
+And I certainly hope that Michelle Obama does not become the nominee if Hillary Clinton has to step aside, because Donald Trump would have an exceedingly difficult time defeating her. 
+In the final analysis, none of this is probably going to matter anyway because it is unlikely that the FBI will move quickly enough to force Hillary Clinton out before election day, but there is still a small chance that it could actually happen. 
+And if it does happen, it is going to turn politics in America completely upside down. 
+Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream . Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  ",FAKE
+5081,Dems open convention without Wasserman Schultz,"(CNN) The Democratic National Convention kicked off Monday without its outgoing Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, following a chaotic scene at a morning meeting where she was loudly jeered by Bernie Sanders supporters.
+
+""I have decided that in the interest of making sure that we can start the Democratic convention on a high note that I am not going to gavel in the convention,"" Wasserman Schultz told the Sun Sentinel newspaper in an interview.
+
+Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who is also the Democratic National Committee's secretary, handled the gaveling instead.
+
+""Delegates, alternatives, standing committee members and all of our honored Democrats and other guests here in Philadelphia and all of you who have joined us by television, radio and online, here in the United States and around the world,"" she said, ""I hereby call the 47th quadrennial Democratic National Convention to order.""
+
+Wasserman Schultz will also not speak tonight or throughout the duration of the convention, a Democrat close to her says. She will remain in Philadelphia until Friday when she formally steps down as leader of the committee.
+
+Wasserman Schultz changed her plans as the fallout deepened from leaked DNC emails that appeared to show the committee favoring presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over Sanders during the primary. It became clear Monday that the convention floor could erupt in anger if she gaveled the convention into session or sought to speak.
+
+And the Democratic National Committee issued an apology to Sanders moments after the convention opened, likely hoping to help soothe tensions heading into the week.
+
+""On behalf of everyone at the DNC, we want to offer a deep and sincere apology to Sen. Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party for the inexcusable remarks made over email,"" the statement said. ""These comments do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process. The DNC does not -- and will not -- tolerate disrespectful language exhibited toward our candidates. Individual staffers have also rightfully apologized for their comments, and the DNC is taking appropriate action to ensure it never happens again.""
+
+The morning Florida delegate meeting descended into chaos when Wasserman Schultz took the stage, with critics holding up signs with the word ""emails,"" and Sanders supporters booing the congresswoman loudly, even after she began speaking.
+
+""We have to make sure that we move forward together in a unified way,"" Wasserman Schultz said during brief remarks. ""We know that the voices in this room that are standing up and being disruptive, we know that is not the Florida that we know. The Florida that we know is going to make sure that we continue to make jobs.""
+
+The audience was roughly half supportive of Wasserman Schultz and half detractors, though the angry participants were louder than the other half. Those attendees began to chant, ""Shame! Shame! Shame!"" while Wasserman Schultz was speaking.
+
+Sanders tried to quell some of his dissatisfied supporters at a rally before his expected speech Monday.
+
+""We have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine,"" Sanders said, which prompted some attendees to shout him down.
+
+Wasserman Schultz announced Sunday she is stepping down as chairwoman of the DNC at the end of the party's convention. The drama reinforced concerns about Democratic party unity.
+
+Former Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver tried to show a unified Democratic Party on Monday, the morning after Wasserman Schultz announced her resignation.
+
+""This happened, we knew it happened then, now is the time to go forward,' Weaver told CNN's Chris Cuomo on ""New Day"" on Monday. ""Now is the time to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump.""
+
+Wasserman Schultz talked with both President Barack Obama and Clinton before making announcing her upcoming resignation, a Democratic source said.
+
+""Going forward, the best way for me to accomplish those goals [which include electing Clinton president] is to step down as Party Chair at the end of this convention,"" Wasserman Schultz said in the statement.
+
+""As party chair, this week I will open and close the Convention and I will address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans,"" she said.
+
+DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile will serve as interim chair through the election. She had been a CNN political commentator, but CNN and Brazile have mutually agreed to suspend their contract, effective immediately, although she will remain on air during the convention week in an unpaid capacity, CNN said. CNN will revisit the contract once Brazile concludes her role.
+
+Separately, a Democratic operative said Hispanic leaders close to Clinton and her high command were discussing Housing Secretary Julian Castro as a possible successor to Wasserman Schultz at the DNC helm, among a number of other candidates whose name are being mentioned.
+
+Chants of ""Debbie is done!"" and ""Debbie resigned!"" broke out at a pro-Sanders rally Sunday in Philadelphia after the news was announced.
+
+Party officials decided Saturday that Wasserman Schultz would not have a major speaking role or preside over daily convention proceedings this week. The DNC Rules Committee has named Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, as permanent chair of the convention, according to a DNC source. She will gavel each session to order and will gavel each session closed.
+
+""She's been quarantined,"" another top Democrat said of Wasserman Schultz, following a meeting Saturday night but before her announcement that she was leaving.
+
+Both sides of the aisle react
+
+Obama issued a statement, saying, ""For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful.""
+
+And Clinton thanked Wasserman Schultz for her leadership of the party.
+
+""I am grateful to Debbie for getting the Democratic Party to this year's historic convention in Philadelphia, and I know that this week's events will be a success thanks to her hard work and leadership,"" Clinton said.
+
+After slamming Wasserman Schultz as ""highly overrated,"" Trump, speaking at a rally in Roanoke, Virginia, knocked Clinton for being disloyal to the soon-to-be former DNC chair.
+
+""How about that for disloyalty in terms of Hillary Clinton. Because Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been so much for Hillary Clinton,"" Trump said. ""These politicians. There's no loyalty there. No loyalty. None whatsoever.""
+
+""It gets a little heat and they fire her,"" Trump said. ""Debbie was totally loyal to Hillary and Hillary threw her under a bus and it didn't take more than five minutes to make that decision.""
+
+Wasserman's Republican counterpart, Reince Priebus, said, ""I think the day's events show really the uphill climb Democrats face this week.""
+
+""The extreme left will not be satisfied by one person's resignation,"" the Republican party national chairman added.
+
+Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said Clinton should follow Wasserman Schultz out the door.
+
+""Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned over her failure to secure the DNC's email servers and the rigged system she set up with the Clinton campaign,"" he said in a statement. ""Now Hillary Clinton should follow Wasserman Schultz's lead and drop out over her failure to safeguard top secret, classified information both on her unauthorized home server and while traveling abroad.""
+
+""I think what the signal was today is that the voices of Bernie Sanders supporters have been heard,"" he said. ""And other people, frankly, in the party, Hillary Clinton supporters, who felt this was the last straw, that she had to go, and this shows they have been heard and gives us opportunity to move forward toward November -- united to deal with the problem of Donald Trump.""
+
+Wasserman Schultz's stewardship of the DNC has been under fire through most of the presidential primary process, but her removal from the convention stage comes following the release of nearly 20,000 emails.
+
+One email appears to show DNC staffers asking how they can reference Sanders' faith to weaken him in the eyes of Southern voters. Another seems to depict an attorney advising the committee on how to defend Clinton against an accusation by the Sanders campaign of not living up to a joint fundraising agreement.
+
+Before the announcement, Sanders on Sunday told Tapper the release of the DNC emails that show its staffers working against him underscores the position he's held for months: Wasserman Schultz needs to go.
+
+""I don't think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC, not only for these awful emails, which revealed the prejudice of the DNC, but also because we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people, and I don't think her leadership style is doing that,"" Sanders told Tapper on ""State of the Union,"" on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
+
+""I am not an atheist,"" he said. ""But aside from all of that, it is an outrage and sad that you would have people in important positions in the DNC trying to undermine my campaign. It goes without saying: The function of the DNC is to represent all of the candidates -- to be fair and even-minded.""
+
+He added: ""But again, we discussed this many, many months ago, on this show, so what is revealed now is not a shock to me.""",REAL
+8496,America at the Crossroads: Abrogation of Democracy,"Email 
+Election eve, one finds the nation itself to be more pathetically unaware than the leading candidates are evil (morally reprehensible, arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct), although the margin of difference is negligible. The crowds gathered to hear Clinton and Trump, t-shirts and hoodies decorated with campaign slogans, are two sides of the same mindless fascistic adoration of power, righteousness, indignation, a voluntary submission betraying the same ideological convictions of American exceptionalism and psychodynamics of gut hatred for and fear of difference from themselves and image of ethnocentric superiority. 
+Study the faces as the news cameras pan the waiting lines or audiences, smugness, occasional contorted features, feigned innocence disguising certitude. The emptiness of the American public, obediently laying down before billionaire wealth and militaristic narcissism (here self-love engendered through capitalism and assisted by compulsive attachment to the hegemonic purposes of the State). Each side, contemptuous of the other, in reality, brothers/sisters-in-arms, raises to leadership the perfect expression of their own, and hence similar if not identical, needs for recognition to cover their inner nakedness of spirit and purpose. 
+Trump, a bottomless pit of mammon-worship, Clinton, a sinkhole of war and aggression, express the fusion of capitalism and militarism, each in America vital to the presence and fruition of the other, that typifies the national mission of unilateral global domination. It was not always thus, although historical-institutional development pointed the direction for at least a century, when America outstripped its earlier foundations, the normalization of advanced industrial capitalism, to claim world moral-political pre-eminence based on spurious privileged association with God in carrying out His/Her divine mission of promised economic salvation. 
+The formula has been a surefire winner because scrupulously backed by the real or implied threat (and use) of force, a silent militarism when not engaged in war to announce global financial-and-market penetration presumed to be uncontested (or when contested, the mark of the adversary). Exceptionalism is the ideological battering ram to knock down all opposition, and for those standing in line for the political bread-and-circuses of the two major parties, a validation of their distorted hatreds brought on by their own subordination in the great chain of capitalist being. 
+If deep-down, though not consciously admitted, there is recognition of systemic rottenness in misshaping their yearnings and thwarting their present wellbeing and future prospects, this throws them, again both sides of the supposed political divide, into the arms of the Leadership Structure not unlike the authoritarian submission characterizing fascism in the transition from Weimar to Nazi Germany. (To be still in the transition phase and not to have as yet crossed the line, holds little promise of reversion to democratic government; too much has happened to suggest drawing back from the brink.) Collective ego-loss, seen in the faces of the ecstatic political faithful, the now-worshippers of power, goes a long way to explaining the candidates and their visions on offer. 
+A closed system awaits the body politic. There is little room for turning left or right, when the center subsumes an already hard-bitten right and the near-ejection of the left from the political spectrum. The vanished center, however fictitious, is kept alive for purposes of self-deception and authoritative indoctrination, a useful cloak for democratic pretentions, as meanwhile the society is placed, willingly so, on a permanent footing of structural hierarchy at home, incessant intervention abroad. The interests of capitalism must be guarded (and celebrated) at all times, lest an alternative way of life become visible, founded on humane standards of international peace and societal betterment. To break out of the present imprisonment in invidious class debasement, is more painful, given long-term ideological habituation, than risking a future of freedom (of system, of conscience, of social solidarity). 
+Thus, only days remain in the exercise of meaningless choice. After that, one can expect few impedances to the downward cast of policy, with increasing risks of war, class division, false consciousness to grease the rails of additional discontents as context for resentments and hatreds poisoning the atmosphere. More environmental spoliation, more gun violence, as tokens of the wayward path to fascism.",FAKE
+4116,"Upcoming proposal in Congress for military action must strike Goldilocks-esq, 'just right' tone","It’s hard to imagine a discussion on the barbarians who make up The Islamic State having anything to do with Goldilocks and the Three Bears. But if Congress is going to approve any formal authorization to sanction U.S. military action against the extremist group, it needs to engineer a resolution that’s not too hot, not too cold, but just right.
+
+And therein lies the challenge.
+
+How does Congress author a resolution that allows lawmakers to exercise their Constitutional authority about deploying U.S. military force -- yet doesn’t fully commit “boots on the ground?”
+
+Lawmakers are leery about the latter because the public long ago lost its appetite for a protracted conflict. Yet at the same time, how does Congress make sure the resolution is muscular enough to actually make a difference in fighting ISIS and not just a fig leaf?
+
+And if Congress doesn’t concoct something that is sufficiently stout, what are the consequences if ISIS hits the United States, keeps incinerating people in cages, lopping off heads or seriously threatens Israel and Jordan?
+
+What is the composition of a resolution that doesn’t hem in the president and the military -- yet gives them appropriate agility to react and respond and fight?
+
+And how about a time frame? How can one possibly say the U.S. is committed only to fighting this long? And if it’s open-ended, some lawmakers fret it’s not appropriate for the U.S. to wage perpetual conflicts that never seem to have exit strategies.
+
+Notice this “resolution” to combat ISIS isn’t even called a “Declaration of War.” It’s euphemistically called an “AUMF,” short for “Authorization for Use of Military Force.” The Constitution grants Congress “war powers. But Congress has officially declared “war” only five times. The most recent was in 1941 when the U.S. entered WWII. The U.S. is very worried about declaring “war” on ISIS, lest it be perceived it’s at “war with Islam” or Muslims. So an “AUMF for ISIS” will just have to do.
+
+Straightforward but curved. Structured but limber. A ceiling but no floor. A floor but no ceiling.
+
+It’s almost Zen-like. Or to Goldilocks, porridge. Not too hot. Not too cold. But just right.
+
+Chatter about crafting a resolution to manage the U.S. fight against ISIS ramped up this week. White House spokesman Eric Schultz indicated that a resolution would come “relatively soon.” Sources tell Fox News that the presentation of a draft resolution could land on Capitol Hill in a number of days.
+
+“It was clear that leaders on the Hill wanted to get this done. It was also clear this was a priority for the president and they wanted language from the White House. They also wanted to be consulted in advance of sending that language up,” said Schultz, who characterized the talks as “robust.”
+
+Some senior lawmakers indicated that the video of the live burning of a Jordanian pilot this week could be the impetus for increased discussions.
+
+“I don’t know how these two things are disconnected,” said one source who spoke on the condition they not be identified.
+
+However, other sources disagreed with that suggestion.
+
+“They’ve been talking about this since State of the Union,” said one source. “This isn’t new.”
+
+Still, another source said that the timing of the increased talk was natural because “they have to give us (a resolution) at some point.” The source noted that additional conversations about a resolution would intensify after President Obama presented his annual budget to Congress.
+
+Obama dropped off his budget on Capitol Hill on Monday. National Security Advisor Susan Rice discussed the finer points of the president’s national security on Friday at the Brookings Institution after the White House sent a copy of the blueprint to the Capitol earlier in the day.
+
+So the resolution appears to be coming together.
+
+“We’ve gotten our hopes up before,” said a source.
+
+House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has been resolute that such a request come from the White House and not be something engineered by Congress.
+
+Sources have pointed to two prominent proposals as a potential framework for the AUMF.
+
+One is plan crafted by California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. The other blueprint comes from Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine, Virginia, and Sen. Bob Menendez, New Jersey.
+
+Menendez is the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The panel authored such a resolution to combat ISIS late last year when Democrats still controlled the Senate. The panel approved the resolution but it never went to the Senate floor for a vote.
+
+There are similarities between the Schiff and Kaine-Menendez proposals. Schiff’s outline bans “boots on the ground,” and limits the geographic footprint to fight ISIS to Iraq and Syria. The Kaine-Menendez offering doesn’t restrict “boots on the ground” and has no geographic structure.
+
+The Schiff provision also would require Congress to re-evaluate the strategy after three years.
+
+The three-year window is designed as such to force the next Congress and president to reconsider the issue.
+
+“Boots on the ground” appears to be one of the most contentious issues in approving a resolution. One Republican lawmaker who asked for anonymity indicated they liked the Schiff plan, so long as they didn’t restrict the president from putting forces on the ground.
+
+Another issue to resolve is whether Congress sunsets the 2001 authorization to fight in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the global war on terror and the 2002 authorization which launched the 2003 war in Iraq. Some liberal lawmakers view the 2001 provision as “war without end.” Others maintain that particular authorization must be preserved. Still, some assert that the 2002 authorization specific to Iraq requires a sunset so it may be superseded by a new authorization.
+
+Writing an AUMF to fight ISIS is a dicey enterprise. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle want a new AUMF. And how will they find the votes to pass this though? Something on which most lawmakers can agree?
+
+“I have always believed that when it comes to fighting a war that Congress should not tie the president’s hands,” said Boehner this week. “It’s not going to be an easy lift.”
+
+“If we go in and rescue somebody, we have a troop on the ground. We have boots on the ground. So what is the language around ‘boots on the ground?’ ” asked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.  “I think it’s going to be a challenge.”
+
+Pelosi knows many of her members will argue for repealing the 2001 and 2002 authorizations, so the U.S. doesn’t find itself in a “boundless” war. And by the same token, some Republicans will look askance at the president’s request for Congress to grant him authority to fight ISIS. In an interview with Fox News, Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla.,  suggested Obama may try to use the document for “political cover.”
+
+“If it’s not successful, he wants the Congress to share the blame with him,” DeSantis predicted. “As the mission continues to be muddled and it doesn’t succeed, (the president will) says you guys didn’t authorize ground troops so there was nothing more I could do. My hands were tied.”
+
+And so that’s why the mission to find the right mix of votes is going to be demanding. To pass, the administration and lawmakers must forge a resolution that’s not too hot, not too cold but just right.",REAL
+3105,Pope brings message of brotherly love to Philadelphia,"PHILADELPHIA — The leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics brought his message of religious freedom and compassionate immigration to historic Independence Hall on Saturday, speaking in his native Spanish to a wildly receptive audience.
+
+More than 40,000 people gathered to hear Pope Francis speak at the site where colonists declared their freedom from British rule.
+
+""Society is weakened wherever and whenever injustice prevails,"" he told the crowd to applause. He said recent immigrants to the U.S. should not be discouraged by the challenges they face.
+
+""I ask you not to forget that like those who came before you, you bring many gifts to this great nation,"" he said. The pope concluded by leading the crowd, in English, in the Lord's Prayer.
+
+""God bless you all,"" he said before stepping away from the podium.
+
+Minutes before Francis spoke, he paused multiple times to bless several babies along Market Street. The crowd, which had gathered hours before the speech, was enthusiastic all day.
+
+Francis also blessed a ""cruz de los encuentros,"" a 5-foot-tall cross symbolizing the journey of faith of Latino Catholics. He spoke from the same lectern that was used by Abraham Lincoln to deliver the Gettysburg Address.
+
+Omar Navarro, 34, from Clifton, N.J., was excited to get a glimpse of the pope. Navarro said the pontiff's message sharply contrasts with much of the rhetoric coming from Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.
+
+""The pope with not too many words will touch so many people,"" said Navarro, who is Mexican. ""Donald Trump was trying to divide immigrants from the rest of the community, but the pope is going to put them together.""
+
+""I'm hopeful that people will listen to Pope Francis and hear what he has to say about the dignity of people, immigrant or not, and reflect on that,"" said Josefa Lopez, 63, an Argentinean immigrant who lives in West Orange, N.J. ""I think his words can change minds.""
+
+Earlier Saturday, Francis arrived at Philadelphia International Airport to musical selections ranging from Ode to Joy to the theme from the movie Rocky. Then, after some warm smiles, kisses and handshakes, his modest Fiat was off into a city anxiously anticipating his arrival.
+
+For many, the blockades and heavy police presence that locked down parts of the city were not a concern. Terri Desensi of Louisville, and her sister Pat Malouf of Greenwood, Miss., came with other church members, snatching a spot along the parade route seven hours ahead of the parade.
+
+""I loved him since the day he was elected pope,"" Malouf said. ""I wanted to come and show my appreciation.""
+
+Kammas Murphy, who teaches at a Catholic school in nearby Wilmington, Del., had a pope almost-sighting early Saturday. She was about a block away from a Mass the pope celebrated Saturday and watched the police cars and vans that escorted Francis
+
+“We couldn’t see him walk in, but the energy was there,” the 25-year-old Wilmington native said. “It was lively.”
+
+The Mass was at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, where he celebrated for a crowd of 1,600, most of them clergy.
+
+The 150-year-old masterpiece of a church sits on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which cuts a swath through the city's cultural center and is home to World Meeting of Families events taking place all weekend.
+
+The masons who built the church placed windows only in the basilica's uppermost story to protect worshipers from the anti-Catholic sentiment of the time. Francis invoked the basilica's history of ""high walls and windows"" as he urged church leaders in the United States to devote more energy to reaching out to young people and those on the periphery of society.
+
+In a nod to Pennsylvania's homegrown saint, St. Katharine Drexel, Francis recounted Pope Leo's words to her when she complained of the needs of the missions. Leo, whom the pontiff called ""a very wise pope,"" asked Drexel pointedly, ""What about you? What are you going to do?""
+
+""Those words changed Katharine's life, because they reminded her that, in the end, every Christian man and woman, by virtue of baptism, has received a mission,"" Francis said. ""Each one of us has to respond, as best we can, to the lord's call to build up his body, the church.""
+
+Outside the basilica, Susan Suzi, from Hershey, Pa., and Carmen and Ann Marie Zullo of New Jersey spent three hours on their feet, hoping to see the pope. The group stayed positive, even when their vantage point failed to yield a view when Francis left the church.
+
+The trio arrived in Philadelphia on Monday to attend the eighth World Meeting of Families, a gathering that brings together 20,000 Catholics for a week of events.
+
+""The excitement is palpable,"" Ann Marie Zullo said. ""We're part of something special here.""
+
+""Who thinks you are going to meet the pope, that you are going to be close enough to touch him?"" Bowes said. ""It's unbelievable.""
+
+The city was awash in barricades, law enforcement officers and smiling volunteers. Much of the downtown area was closed to traffic, and any cars left behind were towed away.
+
+The pope's day concluded with a ""Festival of Families"" event on the parkway, a broad boulevard expanse that runs from City Hall to the Art Museum and was fashioned, by Franklin himself, in the tradition of the iconic Avenue des Champs-Elysees in Paris. The event was hosted by actor Mark Wahlberg and featured musical performances by Aretha Franklin, Andrea Bocelli and others, as well as a parade of testimonials about the importance of family.
+
+Francis addressed the crowd, saying in Spanish, ""Let us look after family, let us protect the family, because it's in the family that our future is at play.""
+
+“Father, you speak like that because you're not married,"" Francis said, addressing those who might greet his message with skepticism. ""Families have difficulties. In families we quarrel. Sometimes, plates can fly. Children cause headaches. I won't speak of mother-in-laws.
+
+""But in families, there is always light,"" he said.
+
+On Sunday, Francis will meet with bishops at a local seminary, then visit with a group of inmates at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. The main event of the day, and perhaps the entire trip, will be a late afternoon Mass on the parkway expected to draw 1 million people.
+
+At the conclusion of Saturday's families event, Francis stood at a podium and told an adoring crowd, “We’ll see each other at Mass tomorrow."" Then he turned to aides and asked, ""What time is Mass?”
+
+The crowd laughed as an aide told him, ""Four o’clock.""
+
+Not all the events here are church-sanctioned. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics were holding gatherings, one of which champions gay parents and their children. Francis has pleaded for compassion in the case of same-sex marriage and other family issues, but for many the church has not moved far enough.
+
+Still, his themes of compassion, forgiveness and hope have resonated across a wide range of Catholics, lapsed Catholics, many who practice other faiths and those with no religious convictions at all.
+
+Father James Bretzky, a theology professor at Boston College, said that bishops, who Francis calls the voice of the church, are getting the message, particularly after a speech Wednesday where the pope stressed that ""harsh and divisive language does not befit the tongue of a pastor.""
+
+""It's a hard course change though for many of them,"" Bretzky said. ""If the bishops hadn't gotten the message before the meeting in D.C., they certainly can no longer deny that they've not heard the pope asking them to take a different tack.""",REAL
+851,Voters' dilemma: What happens if it's Hillary vs. Trump?,"Many voters aren't enthused about the prospect of a Clinton vs. Trump election. So, will they fall in line and back one – or not?
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Anna Reid peeks out of the voting booth as she waits for her mother to finish voting in the Pennsylvania primaries at the Cumberland Township Municipal Building in Gettysburg, Pa., Tuesday.
+
+Justin Schoville accomplished a rare feat for a protester at a Trump event: He managed to get himself thrown out – three times – just before Donald Trump’s maiden foreign policy address at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on Wednesday.
+
+“Trump is a fascist, we are a democracy!” he shouted, during his second forced exit from the hotel lobby.
+
+Just a day before, Mr. Schoville, a research analyst in Bethesda, voted for Bernie Sanders in the Maryland primary. But if the race comes down to Mr. Trump vs. Hillary Clinton, he says he would vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, even if it might help elect Trump.
+
+“I can’t in good conscience give my support to Hillary Clinton. She represents the establishment, the 1 percent, and her policies, I think, will only deepen the problems that have caused Donald Trump to rise in the first place, he says.
+
+In most typical presidential elections, voters like Schoville might already have sighed and reluctantly thrown their support behind Mrs. Clinton. Presidential primary races were all but over before the cherry trees blossomed along the Potomac.
+
+This year, however, the capital is deep into the azalea season and the passions among voters and activists backing the underdogs are still blazing.
+
+Even as Clinton and Trump have now gained enough momentum to claim to be the “presumptive nominees” for November, many voters are showing few signs of accepting that. Will they eventually rally around the presumptive leaders?
+
+It's an oft-repeated question every presidential campaign, but the peculiar dynamics of this race make the answer less certain.
+
+In the past, disgruntled primary voters have rallied to the eventual nominee. By one measure, the tea party insurgents who seemingly held their nose to vote for Mitt Romney in 2012 were actually among his most active supporters during the general election. There are indicators that the same thing could happen on the Democratic side this time.
+
+But Clinton and Trump are two of the three least popular presidential candidates of the past 24 years, according to Gallup. And the question for Republicans is reversed. If Mr. Trump wins, will the moderate and establishment conservatives rally to his cause? That answer appears less certain.
+
+For their part, Sanders voters aren't conceding yet.
+
+Their candidate delivered another rock-the-rafters town-hall meeting at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania last Friday, – just down the road from the site of Pickett’s charge that ended the Confederate advance north on Day 3 of the Battle of Gettysburg. But Clinton still swept four of five primaries this week, along with enough delegates to put the nomination virtually out of reach for the Vermont senator.
+
+But while  Sanders is already shifting gears away from winning the nomination to influencing the party’s platform, many of his supporters at the polling place on the Gettysburg campus are still feeling Bern – and disappointed at the mounting prospect that Clinton will be the nominee.
+
+Dana Suitte, who works for a printing company in Gettysburg, says she told her four sons to vote for Sanders. “I really like the fact that he wants to look at everything and change anything that’s not working,” while Clinton “comes off like a politician” and “is just running on her history with nothing original to say.”
+
+“I think that she thinks that because a lot of black people voted for her husband they will automatically vote for her, and that’s not true,” says Ms. Suitte, who is black.
+
+But her view could change if Clinton picked Sanders as a running mate, she says. “I would love a woman to be president, but I thought I wanted a little bit more from her.”
+
+“The only upside is Bill Clinton’s influence in the White House with her,” she adds. “Bill Clinton was a really good president. That would be my only confidence.”
+
+On the Republican side, it’s the antiestablishment side that triumphed, as Donald Trump ran the table with outsize wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Many Republicans now face what some see as an even tougher choice over whether to support Trump.
+
+A recent Gallup poll finds that 51 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of both Clinton and Sanders, but only 28 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of both the top two GOP candidates, Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
+
+Robin Williams-Beers, a retired glass engraver who describes herself as a Christian conservative, attended a rally for Ohio Gov. John Kasich on the eve of Tuesday’s primary vote in Rockville, Md.  She stakes out a front-row seat with her home-made signs, including: “Resist the rage. Research. Think. Vote Kasich.”
+
+In some respects, she might seem a natural supporter for Senator Cruz or even Trump, who has drawn strong support from Christian conservative voters in the South. But she says that she had health issues at the start of the primary season and used her time in bed to read up on the candidates, including Governor Kasich’s account of the impact that Bible study had on his life in his book, “Every Other Monday.” “I feel like he unifies people and our country desperately needs that right now,” she says.
+
+She showed up at the polls in Kingsville, Md., at 6:30 a.m. to post signs for Kasich, as a volunteer, and took down the signs at 9:30. While at the polling venue, “many people asked me who would be the best vote to stop Trump,” she said in a phone interview after the vote.
+
+Could she bring herself to vote for Trump? “That’s a very difficult thing to say in this point in time,” she says. “I’m waiting and praying. He does not have the magic number yet, and so much has happened in this election that I hope that something will stop him from becoming the nominee.”
+
+“When the time comes, I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she says.
+
+In an election that has so often defied expectations, polls may not get to the critical question of whether voters will be motivated to turn out to vote for the nominee.
+
+Research shows that people who are most active for candidates who fail to get the nomination do not withdraw from general election activity but often become the most active.
+
+“It’s a long way to November,” says Ronald Rapoport, a political scientist at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who has written extensively on Ross Perot voters and, most recently, tea party activists.
+
+His own research, working from a unique data set of surveys over time involving some 700,000 tea party supporters, found that those who were the most active for tea party candidates like Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain were also the most active for Mr. Romney in the general election.
+
+So, the good news for the Republican Party is that highly divisive primary contests between the tea party and establishment Republicans did not undermine support for the party’s nominee in the general election.  However, it did produce “significantly less positive ratings of the Republican Party,” he says – a factor clearly in evidence in the antiestablishment surge backing Trump.
+
+But whether that “carryover effect” works in the opposite direction, with establishment activists willing to work as hard for Trump, is not clear.
+
+Moreover, “Trump is scarier to people than Hillary,” a factor that could help disappointed Sanders activists get behind Clinton.
+
+But Sharon Wildberger, a graduate student at George Washington University, also protesting Trump outside the Mayflower Hotel, isn’t one of them. She says that she strongly opposes Trump but can’t support Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy, even in a general election.
+
+“Somebody has to beat him, but it doesn’t mean I have to vote for her,” she says.",REAL
+6285,Trump Gives 6 Reasons To Vote For Him,"Thursday, 3 November 2016 'VOTE FOR ME, WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO LOSE?"" 
+Donald Trump has given an amazing closing speech about why he should be elected President in 2016. It can be broken down into different parts about why he should be elected according to Mr. Trump: 
+1) ""People say I suffer from a pathological narcissistic disorder, am a megalomaniac, assault women, and am a sociopath. Well, suppose all of this is true. It mostly isn't true of Bill Clinton and Barak Obama and look where these lightweights have gotten us today! They are total losers who have destroyed the military and the middle class. Why not give a crazy person a chance? I'm bound to be better than they are. What have you got to lose?"" 
+2) I'm a great entertainer. Elect me and you'll never be bored. If I threaten some country or the other with nuclear annihilation you'll hold your breaths to see if I carry it out. It will be amazingly exciting. You'll have nothing to lose! 
+3) Previous Presidents, from what I've read about only 4 of them, because of my limited attention span, have been relatively honest. Not me! I've engaged in many fraudulent business practices even cheating widows and orphans! Why not try a deceitful swindler like me? Politics is just one big con anyway! What have you got to lose with a guy like me on your side? What have you got to lose? Bing bing bong bong bing bing bing. 
+4) The PC people say that Presidents should be well read and educated. And the lightweight loses who have been in the Oval office have mostly been that way. Even though I've forgotten everything I've learned, I did go to one of the best Ivy League Schools. And, remember this folks, reading is for low energy people who don't have the best brains; they are the opposite of me. Education and reading, believe me, are overrated. 
+5) Hatred, bigotry, racism, strong immigration restrictions, Nativism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, advocacy of violence against one's political opponents and misogyny are part of our American heritage. I embody all of these. I am the true voice of the American people. I ""tell it like it is,"" and say things millions of Americans are afraid to say. That is why hate groups support me. 
+6) People say I am a ""walking Id."" I say, so what? The id is very, very strong. It is the reptile in our brains. It's all about winning, being a celebrity and grabbing women's vaginas to show one's power. It's all about the strength and power that total losers don't have. I am an unbelievably strong winner just like my friend Putin. You need on your side. Vote for me. What have you got to lose? I truly am unbelievable."" 
+With apologies to Nicholas Krisof whose 11/3/16 NYT's column sparked this. Make Keith Shirey's  ",FAKE
+8523,NY Times: Trump Supporters are Threatening a ‘Violent Revolution’ if Hillary Wins,"The propaganda popsicle stand that is The New York Times is floating the idea that Trump supporters are calling for a new American Revolution if Hillary wins. 
+But beneath the cheering, a new emotion is taking hold among some Trump supporters as they grapple with reports predicting that he will lose the election: a dark fear about what will happen if their candidate is denied the White House. Some worry that they will be forgotten, along with their concerns and frustrations. Others believe the nation may be headed for violent conflict. 
+Jared Halbrook, 25, of Green Bay, Wis., said that if Mr. Trump lost to Hillary Clinton, which he worried would happen through a stolen election, it could lead to “another Revolutionary War.” 
+“People are going to march on the capitols,” said Mr. Halbrook, who works at a call center. “They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there.” 
+“If push comes to shove,” he added, and Mrs. Clinton “has to go by any means necessary, it will be done.” 
+What’s ominous about this level of programming is that we know the system is already gearing up for this possibility with an election military drill that could go live at any time until a month after the election, as previously reported: 
+According to an unnamed source – who has provided accurate intel in the past – an unannounced military drill is scheduled to take place during a period leading up to the election and throughout the month after. 
+It appears that the system is gearing up to handle outbreaks of violence, chaotic rallies and poll stations, and the possibility that the people of the United States may become very dissatisfied with the outcome by using military force and martial law. 
+The drill could, of course, go live at any time; Homeland Security and the military are prepared to contend with a period of unrest, and restore order to a divided and broken country – regardless of whether people like their new leader or not. 
+As you know, DHS is already monitoring this election and prepared to take over its ‘critical infrastructure’. The scope of this drill would, of course, take things much further: 
+Hi Guys, 
+I got some gouge from a former military colleague who is in contact with active duty personnel and he received an email about an upcoming drill. We need confirmation on this, but if we put it out there we might get a leaker to come forward and confirm: 
+Date: October 30th – 30 days after the election Suspected Region: Northeast, specifically New York 
+1st Phase: NROL (No Rule of Law) – drill involving combat arms in metro areas (active and reserve). Source says active duty and reserve service members are being vaccinated as if they are being deployed in theatre. 
+2nd Phase: LROL (Limited Rule of Law) – Military/FEMA consolidating resources, controlling water supply, handing out to public as needed. 
+3rd Phase: AROL (Authoritarian Rule of Law) – Possible new acronym or term for “Martial Law”. Curfew, restricted movements, basically martial law scenario. 
+Source said exercise involves FEMA/DHS/Military 
+If the Powers That Shouldn’t Be are planning to steal this election for Hillary as hard as it appears they are , then it makes sense they’d be planning to try and clean up their mess afterward. 
+Either way, the people have about reached their limit and are sick and tired of this level of corruption coming out of this government… and we know what happened the last time America finally got fed up with a tyrannical government. Piper writes for The Daily Sheeple . There’s a lot of B.S. out there. Someone has to write about it. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+9860,Five Filipino hostages freed by Somali pirates reunite with families,"More Filipino fisherman Arnel Balbero (R), who was held hostage for nearly five years by Somali pirates, cries as he meets his relatives after arriving at the Manila International Airport on October 28, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
+Five Filipino fishermen who were released after being held hostage by Somali pirates for nearly five years have reunited with their families. 
+The seafarers arrived at the airport in the Philippine capital Manila on Friday. 
+""I am so happy. This is what I had been praying for every night,"" said Arnel Balbero, 33, as he was embraced by his four siblings at the airport. 
+""Just to be with my family, even if we have nothing, even if we have only little to eat, I am already happy,"" he said. 
+His sister, Lilia, trembled at the sight of her brother. ""It's like a miracle. We never lost hope he would be freed,"" she said. 
+The Filipinos were among 26 freed hostages from Cambodia, China, Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam who were freed on October 22. The 26 hostages plus three others made up the crew of Naham 3, which was seized south of the Seychelles in March 2012. 
+The captain of their Omani-flagged but Taiwanese-owned vessel died during the hijacking and two other crew members succumbed to illness in captivity. 
+Recounting memories 
+Balbero's cousin and fellow ex-hostage, Elmer, said the Somali pirates had cared little about the health of their captives. 
+""We asked the pirates for medicine but they did not give us any. Instead they said, 'Where is your money?'"" said Elmer. 
+The captives also said they suffered beatings at the hands of the pirates. 
+""In our first week, they called it our introduction. They used bamboo to beat us,"" Arnel said. 
+To survive, the Filipinos did chores for their captors, washing their clothes and even their weapons. 
+""We took it as a chance to also wash. We couldn't take a bath often because they only gave us a liter of water each day,"" Arnel said. 
+Hugging his two teenage daughters, Elmer said it was thoughts of seeing his family again that kept him going during his captivity. 
+Taiwan's Foreign Ministry said the men were freed after a ransom was paid by the ship's owner as well as groups contracted to negotiate with the pirates, Taiwanese media reported. 
+John Steed, who works with the Hostage Support Partnership, said the local community and tribal elders were involved in the ""difficult situation."" 
+""These are poor fishermen. The ship had no value, they had no insurance, and of course governments don't want to be involved in these sort of negotiations either,"" he said. Sailors who had been held hostage by pirates for more than four years stand for a group photograph as they prepare to board an airplane after being released in Galkayo, Somalia, October 23, 2016. (Photo by AP) 
+The sailors are believed to be among the last remaining captives seized by Somali pirates during the surge in hostage-taking in the mid-2000s. 
+Piracy off the coast of Somalia has reduced significantly in recent years due to stronger international naval presence. Loading ...",FAKE
+8971,"Guy Fawkes, The Gun Powder Plot & How False Flags Have Shaped History","We Are Change 
+
+ 
+Remember, remember, the 5th of November, 
+Gunpowder, treason and plot. 
+I see no reason why the gunpowder treason 
+Should ever be forgot. 
+-Old English folk rhyme (anonymous)
+By Barrie Zwicker (Special thanks to Truth and Shadows )
+Today, November 5 th , is Guy Fawkes Day, also known as Gunpowder Day. In 2016 it’s the 411 th anniversary of The Gunpowder Plot or Gunpowder Treason, as it was first called.
+It also happens to be my 78 th birthday. So I’ve been more aware of Guy Fawkes Day than most. I’m especially happy about how ubiquitous the Guy Fawkes mask has become. 
+The mask was hugely popularized in the movie V for Vendetta . As stalwart 9/11Truther Kevin Barrett wrote, a year ago, in a piece entitled “ Unmasking Media Lies: Why BBC’s V-for-Vendetta Mask Piece is Fawked Up ”:
+“V for Vendetta may be the most revolutionary film ever made. Its obvious message is: Let’s get out there and visit some rough justice on the treasonous bastards who created the 9/11 and 7/7 media spectaculars, and destroyed the freedoms for which we’ve been fighting for centuries. 
+Watch (on YouTube) V for 9/11 Vendetta: Past, Present and Future 
+It is also possible to read the film from an interior, psychological perspective: Rather than just a call to action, it’s about the psychological process of coming to terms with the 9/11 and 7/7 inside jobs, by allowing oneself to feel the overwhelming anger that is the natural response. Once one has faced the facts, overcome fear, and come to terms with one’s own righteous anger, THEN it’s time for revolution. 
+The real message of the V mask is simple: We know you bastards blew up the Trade Center. We know you’re blowing up the economy. We know you’re lying to us 24/7/365. We know you’re trying to keep us poor and weak and fearful and impotent. Well, guess what? We’re not afraid of you. We’re not afraid to die. And we’re coming to get you. 
+No wonder the BBC is afraid to admit what the V mask really means.” 
+Yet for the first 71 years of my life I had entirely the wrong idea about the gunpowder plot: what happened, who was really behind it, and its impact on history. An impact that continues to this day. It was in 2005 that I read I read Webster Tarpley’s superb book 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA right after it came off the press. He introduced me to the historical element.
+True, the brazen events of 9/11 and the mind-boggling cover-up that followed opened my eyes to state-executed terror frauds and the power they deliver to the dark forces that order them. But I didn’t know from nuthin’ about the Gunpowder Plot.
+Nor at that time did I appreciate that it and 9/11 are but two examples from thousands of false flag operations that have changed history.
+False flag ops are the least-recognized, highest-impact category of human deceit. In terms of emotional wallop, even the most brilliant lies perpetrated by the most talented demagogues pale, in comparison to a big false flag op, for the power to manipulate the public. On this anniversary let’s look more closely at this particular false flag op for some lessons. As William Faulkner put it in his Requiem for a Nun : “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Then we will touch briefly on one of the most recent false flag ops – a leading edge digital one that perversely misappropriates the Fawkes name.
+… 
+On the Throne of England in 1605 sits James the First, a Protestant, the King who ordered the translation of the Christian Bible that bears his name.
+As midnight approaches on November the 4th – the eve of the traditional opening of Parliament – armed agents of the King raid a basement room of the Houses of Parliament. They discover and apprehend one Guy Fawkes. His age, 36, coincides with the number of barrels of gunpowder they find with him. They find a tunnel leading to the room. Fawkes is a known agitator for the rights of English Roman Catholics. In his possession are a pocket watch (a rarity in those days).
+Had he succeeded in detonating the gunpowder, the next morning King James and his queen would be mangled bodies, as would all the members of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Smoking rubble would be all that would remain of the Palace of Westminster complex, including historic Westminster Abbey.
+So goes the palace version of the events of the late evening of November the 4 th , 1605. The English public is stunned. It’s the equivalent of 9/11. “A cataclysm,” Adam Nicolson describes it in his book God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible . Upon his arrest, according to the official account, Fawkes admits his purpose was to destroy king and Parliament.
+That there was some kind of plot is not in doubt. By November the 8 th , on the rack, Fawkes names 12 co-conspirators. Those not killed where they are tracked down are found guilty of treason later in a trial lasting less than a day. They and Fawkes are hanged, drawn and quartered.
+The following Sunday, November the 10 th, the King James Version of the plot is broadcast from the leading pulpit of the Church of England, that of William Barlow, Bishop of Rochester. Barlow thunders that the enemy, meaning papists, is satanic in its wickedness. The King, their hoped-for victim, on the other hand is, Mr. Nicolson writes, characterized as an unqualifiedly good man . . . virtually a Christ-figure.
+Soon all the pulpits of England echo the official account. Between 1606 and 1859 the Fifth is remembered in an annual service of thanksgiving in every Anglican church, writes James Sharpe in Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day. Until 1959 , it was against the law in Britain not to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. Celebrate, because from the beginning the public was giving thanks that the realm was saved and the treasonous conspirators dispatched. For centuries effigies of Fawkes were burned.
+The palace version becomes historical truth for humankind including me – duped again! – for most of our lives.
+Mr. Nicolson and others now cast serious doubt on that version. Many anomalies concerning the events have surfaced.
+Fawkes was not apprehended in a basement room but rather a ground floor room, one remarkably easily rented by the plotters. There was, accordingly, no tunnel. The authorship of the letter by which the King learned of the plot is murky. It was turned over to the King by the Royal Chancellor, Sir Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury.
+Sir Cecil I would characterize as the Dick Cheney of his day. Because plots were common at that time Cecil had an efficient network of spies seeded among Roman Catholic dissidents. He kept tabs on all plots the spies discovered. This one featured a large cast of characters from several cities.
+Cecil kept the King in the dark about the plot except for the obscure letter. The gunpowder, it turned out, was of an inferior nature, unlikely to have achieved much result. This was odd, as Fawkes definitely knew a thing or two about gunpowder. He had developed expertise with it while serving with distinction in Spain’s army against Protestant rebels in the Netherlands. It’s conceivable the gunpowder could have been switched by someone; loads of it existed because of all the hostilities. Some handwriting on Fawkes’s confession differed from the rest.
+Ignored until recently is a book by Jesuit historian John Gerard, What Was the Gunpowder Plot: The Traditional Story Tested by Original Evidence . Gerard died in 1606 but his book was not published for almost three centuries, in1897, an interesting temporal fact in itself. While it’s true, as Sharpe writes, that accounts of the plot differ as per the biases of the authors, I find Gerard’s account pretty compelling. He writes:
+“When we examine into the details supplied to us as to the progress of the affair, we find that much of what the conspirators are said to have done is well-nigh incredible, while it is utterly impossible that if they really acted in the manner described, the public authorities should not have had full knowledge…”
+Exactly. The evidence points to a particular kind of false-flag operation. There are many variations. In some (9/11 being the leading example) an outrageous event is carried out by the perpetrators and blamed on the chosen enemy. In others (example, Gulf of Tonkin) nothing happens but a fiction blames the chosen enemy. The Gunpowder Plot is midway: a plot was underway but the precise intentions of the plotters can never be known. The main feature is that, with or without taking a hand in the plot, the Cecil elements manipulated events brilliantly.
+Cecil was heavily involved in an influential London group known as “the war party.” It wanted to push James into a confrontation with the Spanish Empire, from which the group’s members hoped, among other things, to extract great personal profit.
+The war party considered it politically vital to keep persecuting Roman Catholics. Sir Cecil set out, writes Tarpley, to sway James to adopt his policy by means of terrorism.
+It amounts to this: Either Cecil and the war party made the Gunpowder Plot happen or they let it happen –and made sure of a brilliantly timed “exposé.” And if they let it happen they made it happen.
+James himself had negotiated peace with Spain the previous year. His other advisors told him there was no chance of a general Catholic uprising and that no foreign Catholic powers were involved in the plot.
+The King knew, Sharpe writes, that “the reality of Catholicism in England around 1600 was very different from the image conjured up in government propaganda and contemporary Protestant myth.” Sharpe again: “…even in the face of … persecution it seems that most of England’s Catholics remained loyal to their monarch and wanted nothing more than to be allowed to practice their faith unmolested.” (The parallel with most Muslims living in the UK and Canada today springs to mind.)
+For his part, James downplayed the plot. “James and his ministers,” Sharpe writes, “showed more restraint than many modern regimes faced with similar problems.”
+Nevertheless, the power of the imagery of what might have happened burned itself into the public’s psyche, and was repeatedly fanned by the Protestant and war promoting establishments.
+The outcomes of this ongoing propaganda campaign are incontestable. Tolerance for English Roman Catholics is replaced by a period of terrible bloodletting for them. Numbers are killed. Catholics’ homes are burned. A string of laws is passed restricting their rights and liberties.
+The English become “fixated on homeland security,“ Nicolson writes. An inclusive, irenic idea of mutual benefit between Spain and England – trade between the two countries, because of the peace treaty, had been growing –“is replaced in England by a defensive/aggressive complex.” All Catholics, of all shades, never mind their enthusiasm or not for the planned attack, are identified as the enemy.
+Most significantly, war with Spain ensues. England’s course is set for a century of wars against the Spanish and Portuguese empires. England for various reasons comes out victorious and on these war victories the British Empire is founded in blood, deception and conquest.
+… 
+There’s no way of knowing whether the British Empire – and all the consequences of its rule from Capetown to Canada to Iraq to its American colonies — would have emerged anyway or in what form or at what pace, but we can see in retrospect that the Gunpowder Plot was pivotal in what did transpire.
+It would be a failure of imagination not to see the parallels with 9/11 and society in our day of blanket war propaganda, teeming with covert agents, ever-encroaching surveillance, ever decreasing civil rights and liberties, and either helpless or conniving leaders.
+Let’s look at false flag ops generically. It’s difficult in my opinion to over-estimate their terrible place in history, and their place in making history terrible. Think of the wars and millions of deaths that followed the Gunpowder Plot, the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbour in 1898 that kick-started the US Empire’s expansion to the Philippines and beyond, the sinking of the Lusitania that brought the USA into World War I, the torching of the German Reichstag that boosted Hitler to power and enabled his bloody grab for world domination, the assassination of John F. Kennedy that yanked U.S. foreign policy onto a warpath, the alleged attacks during LBJ’s presidency the next year by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin — attacks that simply did not take place but that provided the basis for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed 88-2 in the US Senate. That resolution constituted the “legal” basis for escalating the Vietnam War with an eventual death toll of more than 3-million. And 9/11. To name a few.
+Without false flag ops most wars would be harder to launch. Some would barely be possible. Think of the unprecedented millions of peace marchers who took to the streets prior to the invasion of Iraq. If the deceptions are used to justify such wars were exposed earlier by a skeptical, independent, ferociously investigative media, we all would be living in a different world. Millions of horrible deaths and all the accompanying grief could have been avoided. And the military would have to put on bake sales to raise funds.
+There always has been a yearning for peace among the normal everyday citizenry: finding meaningful work, marrying and raising a family, tilling the soil, writing poetry, inventing things, or — as Pierre Berton said was his favourite thing – “getting smashed with your friends.”
+There are exceptions, but the horrible norm is that for wars to be launched, maintained or expanded the people have to be fooled. And history proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the most surefire way to accomplish that is to lumber them with an iconic outrage allegedly perpetrated by the designated “enemy” of the day. And we go on sinking ever further into the mire of deaths – the deaths of innocents, the death of promise for a better future, the death of honest history, the death of coming to grips with reality – because each new false flag op draws power from the fictions planted about all the previous ones.
+And so the elites continue to hide their four aces in a rigged game. Their most closely guarded secret retains the potency of the first one. Remember, remember, the 5 th of November, the 11 th of September, Faulkner, and George Santayana’s comment that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
+But today we also have to remember the future. Added to the false flag ops, false flag agents and false flag organizations of old are false flag digital organisms, sent to infect particular publics. One of the most recent of which I’ve become aware is a rogue individual or group identified as ” This tricky entity “FawkesSecurity” on Monday, October 22, released via YouTube and Pastebin a bomb threat against an unidentified U.S. Government building.
+I for one smell digital gunpowder.
+“FawkesSecurity” claims to be associated with the Anonymous collective. The threat of violence, however, goes against everything Anonymous says it stands for. Sources at Anonymous are denouncing “FawkesSecurity” and its bomb threat.
+A report on this , from which I am quoting, can be found at Examiner.com
+Following is an excerpt from the message of “FawkesSecurity:”
+Dear citizens of the world, ? We are anonymous. As of today 200 kilograms of composite Nitroglycerin and commercial explosives have effectively been concealed in a government building, situated in the united states of America. on the 5th of November 2012 … ? we are anonymous ? we are legion ? we do not forget ? we do not forgive ? on the 5th of November, you will expect us. 
+As the Examiner report says, “the video displays many of the standard trappings of associated with Anonymous [and yet] the threat of violence is completely out of step with the ethos that guides Anonymous.” The Examiner report adds:
+“Multiple social media accounts have denounced FawkesSecurity and their bomb threat. Many speculate FawkesSecurity is a false flag operation conducted by government agents in an attempt to discredit Anonymous. Others speculate that FawkesSecurity is simply misguided, and unfamiliar with the bullet proof idea that is Anonymous.”
+Whatever the case, those who wrote the text above can’t punctuate or capitalize worth a damn.
+The digital and physical worlds are not separate. Agents of the state infest both. Although unlikely, if the threat by “FawkesSecurity” were to be carried out today, one outcome could be to seriously besmirch Anonymous. (The question of whether Anonymous itself might be a false flag op, or is, or could be infiltrated or otherwise manipulated, is one to be asked and answered further down the rabbit hole. Such is the ultra-elusive nature of “reality” today.)
+We’ve come a long way from 1605 technically, but the general scheme is the same: deception rides high, wide and ugly.
+Segments of this post were originally published in an op ed page piece the author had published on November 5 th , 2005 in The Globe and Mail; others come from notes for a talk given by the author in London, Ontario November 5 th , 2011. 
+The post Guy Fawkes, The Gun Powder Plot & How False Flags Have Shaped History appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+118,"I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing","On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.
+
+That's a theory from my friend K.L. Williams, who has trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force. Based on what I experienced as a black man serving in the St. Louis Police Department for five years, I agree with him. I worked with men and women who became cops for all the right reasons — they really wanted to help make their communities better. And I worked with people like the president of my police academy class, who sent out an email after President Obama won the 2008 election that included the statement, ""I can't believe I live in a country full of ni**er lovers!!!!!!!!"" He patrolled the streets in St. Louis in a number of black communities with the authority to act under the color of law.
+
+That remaining 70 percent of officers are highly susceptible to the culture in a given department. In the absence of any real effort to challenge department cultures, they become part of the problem. If their command ranks are racist or allow institutional racism to persist, or if a number of officers in their department are racist, they may end up doing terrible things.
+
+It is not only white officers who abuse their authority. The effect of institutional racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown. That is what is allowed.
+
+And no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty. Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo was acquitted of all charges against him in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both black and unarmed. Thirteen Cleveland police officers fired 137 shots at them. Brelo, having reloaded at some point during the shooting, fired 49 of the 137 shots. He took his final 15 shots at them after all the other officers stopped firing (122 shots at that point) and, ""fearing for his life,"" he jumped onto the hood of the car and shot 15 times through the windshield.
+
+Not only was this excessive, it was tactically asinine if Brelo believed they were armed and firing. But they weren't armed, and they weren't firing. Judge John O'Donnell acquitted Brelo under the rationale that because he couldn't determine which shots actually killed Russell and Williams, no one is guilty. Let's be clear: this is part of what the Department of Justice means when it describes a ""pattern of unconstitutional policing and excessive force.""
+
+Nevertheless, many Americans believe that police officers are generally good, noble heroes. A Gallup poll from 2014 asked Americans to rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in various fields: police officers ranked in the top five, just above members of the clergy. The profession — the endeavor — is noble. But this myth about the general goodness of cops obscures the truth of what needs to be done to fix the system. It makes it look like all we need to do is hire good people, rather than fix the entire system. Institutional racism runs throughout our criminal justice system. Its presence in police culture, though often flatly denied by the many police apologists that appear in the media now, has been central to the breakdown in police-community relationships for decades in spite of good people doing police work.
+
+Here's what I wish Americans understood about the men and women who serve in their police departments — and what needs to be done to make the system better for everyone.
+
+As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a call for an ""officer in need of aid."" I was partnered that day with a white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He'd been in a foot pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.
+
+The officer I was with asked him if he'd seen where the suspect went. The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He denied it. He said that this was his family's home and he was home alone.
+
+My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch. She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him, simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.
+
+I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out, several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers, who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said, ""That son of a bitch just assaulted me."" The black officer then went up to the young man and told him to ""get the fuck up, I'm taking you in for assaulting an officer."" The young man looked up at the officer and said, ""Man ... you see I can't go."" His crutches lay not far from him.
+
+The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, ""You see I can't go!"" The officer reached down and grabbed both the young man's ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then searched the house. No one was in it.
+
+These kinds of scenes play themselves out everyday all over our country in black and brown communities. Beyond the many unarmed blacks killed by police, including recently Freddie Gray in Baltimore, other police abuses that don't result in death foment resentment, distrust, and malice toward police in black and brown communities all over the country. Long before Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown last August, there was a poisonous relationship between the Ferguson, Missouri, department and the community it claimed to serve. For example, in 2009 Henry Davis was stopped unlawfully in Ferguson, taken to the police station, and brutally beaten while in handcuffs. He was then charged for bleeding on the officers' uniforms after they beat him.
+
+About that 15 percent of officers who regularly abuse their power: a major problem is they exert an outsize influence on department culture and find support for their actions from ranking officers and police unions. Chicago is a prime example of this: the city has created a reparations fund for the hundreds of victims who were tortured by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and officers under his command from the 1970s to the early ‘90s.
+
+The victims were electrically shocked, suffocated, and beaten into false confessions that resulted in many of them being convicted and serving time for crimes they didn't commit.  One man, Darrell Cannon, spent 24 years in prison for a crime he confessed to but didn't commit. He confessed when officers repeatedly appeared to load a shotgun and after doing so each time put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Other men received electric shocks until they confessed.
+
+The torture was systematic, and the culture that allowed for it is systemic. I call your attention to the words ""and officers under his command."" Police departments are generally a functioning closed community where people know who is doing what. How many officers  ""under the command"" of Commander Burge do you think didn't know what was being done to these men? How many do you think were uncomfortable with the knowledge? Ultimately, though, they were okay with it. And Burge got four years in prison, and now receives his full taxpayer-funded pension.
+
+This is critical to understanding why police-community relations in black and brown communities across the country are as bad as they are. In this interview with Fox News, former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir never acknowledges the lived experience of thousands and thousands of blacks in New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, or anywhere in the country. In fact, he seems to be completely unaware of it. This allows him to leave viewers with the impression that the recent protests against police brutality are baseless, and that allegations of racism are ""totally wrong — just not true."" The reality of police abuse is not limited to a number of ""very small incidents"" that have impacted black people nationwide, but generations of experienced and witnessed abuse.
+
+The media is complicit in this myth-making: notice that the interviewer does not challenge Safir. She doesn't point out, for example, the over $1 billion in settlements the NYPD has paid out over the last decade and a half for the misconduct of its officers. She doesn't reference the numerous accounts of actual black or Hispanic NYPD officers who have been profiled and even assaulted without cause when they were out of uniform by white NYPD officers.
+
+Instead she leads him with her questions to reference the heroism, selflessness, risk, and sacrifice that are a part of the endeavor that is law enforcement, but very clearly not always characteristic of police work in black and brown communities. The staging for this interview — US flag waving, somber-faced officers — is wash, rinse, and repeat with our national media.
+
+When you take a job as a police officer, you do so voluntarily. You understand the risks associated with the work. But because you signed on to do a dangerous job does not mean you are then allowed to violate the human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of the people you serve. It's the opposite. You should protect those rights, and when you don't you should be held accountable. That simple statement will be received by police apologists as ""anti-cop.""  It is not.
+
+When Walter Scott was killed by officer Michael Slager in South Carolina last year, the initial police report put Scott in the wrong. It stated that Scott had gone for Slager's Taser, and Slager was in fear for his life. If not for the video recording that later surfaced, the report would have likely been taken by many at face value. Instead we see that Slager shot Scott repeatedly and planted the Taser next to his body after the fact.
+
+Every officer in the country should be wearing a body camera that remains activated throughout any interaction they have with the public while on duty. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy for officers when they are on duty and in service to the public. Citizens must also have the right to record police officers as they carry out their public service, provided that they are at a safe distance, based on the circumstances, and not interfering. Witnessing an interaction does not by itself constitute interference.
+
+The National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice, Reform and Accountability is a new coalition of current and former law enforcement officers from around the nation. Its mission is to fight institutional racism in our criminal justice system and police culture, and to push for accountability for police officers that abuse their power.
+
+Many of its members are already well-established advocates for criminal justice reform in their communities. It's people like former Sergeant De Lacy Davis of New Jersey, who has worked to change police culture for years. It's people like former LAPD Captain John Mutz, who is white, and who is committed to working to build a system where everyone is equally valued. His colleagues from the LAPD —former Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, now a frequent CNN contributor (providing some much-needed perspective), and former officer Alex Salazar, who worked LAPD's Rampart unit — are a part of this effort. Several  NYPD  officers, many of whom are founding members of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, the gold standard for black municipal police organizations, are a part of this group. Vernon Wells, Noel Leader, Julian Harper, and Cliff Hollingsworth, to name a few, are serious men with a serious record of standing up for their communities against police abuse. There's also Rochelle Bilal, a former sergeant out of Philadelphia, Sam Costales out of New Mexico, former Federal Marshal Matthew Fogg, and many others.
+
+These men and women are ready to reach out to the thousands of officers around the country who have been looking for a national law enforcement organization that works to remake police culture. The first priority is accountability — punishment — for officers who willfully abuse the rights and bodies of those they are sworn to serve. Training means absolutely nothing if officers don't adhere to it and are not held accountable when they don't. It is key to any meaningful reform.
+
+Racism is woven into the fabric of our nation.  At no time in our history has there been a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life. We are rooted in racism in spite of the better efforts of Americans of all races to change that.
+
+Because of this legacy of racism, police abuse in black and brown communities is generations old. It is nothing new. It has become more visible to mainstream America largely because of the proliferation of personal recording devices, cellphone cameras, video recorders — they're everywhere. We need police officers.  We also need them to be held accountable to the communities they serve.",REAL
+3037,This astonishing chart shows how moderate Republicans are an endangered species,"Political scientists have known for years that political polarization is largely a one-sided phenomenon: in recent decades the Republican Party has moved to the right much faster than Democrats have moved to the left. As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution has described it, ""Republicans have become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition.""
+
+The data backing this claim up are pretty solid. The most widely-used measure of political polarization, a score of ideology based on voting developed by Kenneth Poole and Howard Rosenthal, has shown that the Republicans in the Senate and especially the House have drifted away from the center far more rapidly than Democrats. The chart below, taken from the most recent slice of their data released just last month, illustrate this pretty clearly:
+
+Right around 1975, the Republican party sharply turned away from the center line and hasn't looked back. The Democrats have been drifting away from the center too, but nowhere near as quickly.
+
+Every once in awhile an op-ed writer will come along and make a qualitative argument along the lines of ""no, really, it's the Democrats who are polarizing!"" Peter Wehner, a former official in three previous Republican presidential administrations, did just that in the pages of the New York Times last week. His argument amounts to the notion that since President Obama has pursued some policies that are more liberal than Bill Clinton's, ""the Democratic Party has moved substantially further to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right.""
+
+Well, no -- just look at the chart above! Here's another way of looking at it: How many moderates are in each party? Here's another interesting chart from the Poole-Rosenthal data, showing the number of House members in each party who are not centrists -- that is, whose ideological scores put them on the more extreme ends of the partisan scale.
+
+As you can see, in the most recent Congress nearly 90 percent of Republican House members are not politically moderate. By contrast, 90 percent of Democratic members are moderates. It's quite difficult to square a chart like this with a claim that Democrats are abandoning the center faster than Republicans. As the chart shows, there are plenty of centrist Democrats left in the House -- but hardly any centrist Republicans.
+
+It's worth pointing out that none of this is happening in a vacuum -- House Republicans are become more extreme because Republican voters are electing more extreme candidates. We see many of these same patterns playing out among the electorate as well, as a massive Pew Research Study demonstrated last year.",REAL
+1546,Ted Cruz tackles the Wall Street Journal,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+345,Cory Booker on how America's criminal justice system destroys the American dream,"German Lopez:You've called the war on drugs a failure. What did you mean by that?
+
+But we've compromised those values severely during this so-called drug war — so severely that we're actually inhibiting public safety. We're consuming gross amounts of taxpayer dollars. We are undermining human potential. And we're doing it all in a way that has a significant, if not savage, disparate impact on poor people and minorities.
+
+That, to me, is a failure. When we can get the same aims but also save taxpayer dollars, create greater safety than we're experiencing right now, elevate human life and human potential, and not further cement racial disparities in this country but alleviate them, then we should be going in a dramatically different direction with drug policy reform. Pilot programs for prison reentry, and entire states like Georgia — which is dramatically lowering its African-American prison population, saving taxpayer dollars, and driving down crime — are showing us that we could go a different way.
+
+Cory Booker:Overall, drug policy has gone seriously awry and is offending our value system. And marijuana is one of those drugs that's been almost pulled out of a category of other serious drugs, many of which are prescribed by doctors to deal with serious injuries — somehow this drug was pulled out, made a schedule 1 crime, and so vilified that it's created classes of criminals amid otherwise law-abiding citizens. For example, a mother who has a sick child with seizures — which we can show, medically, that marijuana, without even its intoxicating element, could severely reduce, and benefit that child — right now that person's behavior, if she's getting that life-affirming drug, is going to be called criminal. If she goes into another state that may have legalized it or legalized it medically and comes back into a state that doesn't, she's trafficking drugs across state lines — a federal offense. I'm one of those people who think our marijuana laws are way off the rails. We need to pull back and focus on things like legalizing medical marijuana; supporting states like Alaska or Colorado or Washington that want to be incubators of reform; and allowing scientists and medical researchers to test marijuana's impact on people. 
+
+
+
+What I'm comfortable doing now is just saying, ""Hey, federal government, play catch-up here. Get into the zone we already know most Americans are comfortable in."" And we're going to stop criminalizing large segments of the country, we're going to allow scientists to study it, and we're not going to take law-abiding citizens who sell marijuana through dispensaries in the states that have legalized it and make criminals out of them.
+
+You have drug laws that are so severely, disparately enforced against some groups. Let's take African Americans, for example: there's no difference between black and white marijuana usage or sales, in fact. You go to college campuses and you'll get white drug dealers. I know this from my own experience of growing up and going to college myself. Fraternity houses are not being raided by police at the level you see with communities in inner cities.
+
+So equal usage of this drug, equal sale of this drug, but blacks are about 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for it. African Americans are more likely to get mandatory minimums, more likely to get about 13 percent longer sentences. It's created these jagged disparities in incarceration. In my state, blacks are about 13 to 14 percent of the population, but they make up over 60 percent of the prison population.
+
+Remember: the majority of people we arrest in America are nonviolent offenders. Now you've got this disparity in arrests, but that creates disparities that painfully fall all along this system.
+
+For example, when you get arrested for possession with intent to sell, you can do it in some neighborhoods where there are no public schools and it's not as densely packed as an inner city. You do it in an inner city and now you're within a school zone, so you're facing even higher mandatory minimums. So when you face that and you get out from your longer term, now you're 19 years old with a felony conviction, possession with intent to sell in a school zone.
+
+But forget even all of that — if you just have a felony conviction for possession, what do you face now? Thousands of collateral consequences that will dog you for all of your life. You can't get a Pell Grant. You can't get a business license. You can't get a job. You're hungry? You can't get food stamps. You need some place to live? You can't even get public housing.
+
+What that does within our country, especially in these concentrated areas where we have massive numbers of men being incarcerated, is create a caste system in which people feel like there's no way out. And we're not doing anything as a society like we know we could do. There are tons of pilot programs that show if you help people coming back from a nonviolent offense lock into a job or opportunity, their recidivism rates go down dramatically. If you don't help them, what happens is that, left with limited options, many people make the decision to go back to that world of narcotic sales.
+
+What's more dangerous to society: someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of their own home, or someone going 30 miles over the speed limit, racing down a road in a community? And yet that teenager who makes a mistake — doing something the last three presidents admitted to doing — now he has a felony conviction, because it's more likely he's going to get caught. And for the rest of his life, when he's 29, 39, 49, 59, he's still paying for a mistake he made as a teenager.
+
+That's not the kind of society I believe in, nor is it fiscally responsible. It's undermining productivity. It's undermining people's ability to take care of their families. It's locking in generational problems in poverty, or even limiting opportunities.
+
+This is so wrong that those conversations I'm having with conservatives as well as with Democrats are resonating. When you have people like Sen. Rand Paul talking about racial disparities in incarceration, when you have people like Grover Norquist standing up and talking about disparate racial impact of this problem, this convergence in understanding of fiscal conservatives, of Christian conservatives, of libertarians shows me that this is a time of great hope for our country.
+
+So I'm not going to question people's motives. This is one of those issues, like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, where it should pull all Americans together to say enough is enough.
+
+I went through 15 years of my life where every single day I would encounter good Americans who were being overly punished in a disproportionate way for a nonviolent drug offense, whose lives were being destroyed, who had desperation, desire, hunger just to have a shot at the American dream — yet a nonviolent drug offense was undermining their potential to contribute, to raise their kids, to have a decent life.
+
+That's just wrong. So every day that I'm here, that echoes in my conscience and drives me forward.
+
+Let me even go a step further, because I alluded to this point but didn't make it clear enough: the violence in my community that's driven by men who believe — and I think they're wrong, but this is what they believe — that they have no fair shot in this country; they made a mistake and they've gone into a system that often turns them out worse than they went in, in terms of their proclivity for crime.
+
+When you take juveniles, like we do in this country, and put them in solitary confinement — other nations consider that torture — you hurt them and you scar them through your practices. You expose them for nonviolent crimes to often violent people. You expose them to gang activity.
+
+Then you throw them back on our streets. And you tell them, ""We're not going to help you get a job. You want a roof over your head? Forget it. In fact, if we catch you trespassing on public housing authority property, we're going to take action against you. You're going to get a Pell Grant, try to better yourself through education? Sorry, you're banned from getting a Pell Grant.""
+
+What do people do when they feel trapped and cornered by society? What I saw in my city was people getting more and more caught up in criminal activity. You can trace it way back to an early youthful offense that resulted not in us helping them, not in us intervening to empower them — but in taking children and abandoning them and saying, ""You made this mistake, and we're going to punish you, and, by the way, that punishment is going to continue every day of your life.""
+
+Think of the statistic when I was mayor. We found out that the murder victims in our city had an 85 percent chance of having been previously arrested an average of 10 times. Some people might take a statistic like that and say, ""Well, it shows these people are whatever."" No.
+
+If you want to judge a society, don't judge it by the kid like me who grew up in an affluent neighborhood and was given great schooling. Judge it by how we treat all of our children.
+
+What does it say about a society when a kid makes a mistake, and we don't surround him with opportunities that we know now work? But no, we have this slippery slope of punishing teenagers for nonviolent offenses — things kids in the neighborhood where I grew up, in an affluent town, did a lot. But when these kids get caught, they begin a slippery slope into a system that often closes off their options and points them more toward crime than toward redemption. That's unacceptable to me.
+
+So I've got a lot of missions here — to expand opportunity, empower people with education, make college more affordable — but dear god, I am driven every single day to end this nightmare that has made my nation singular in humanity for having more people behind bars for nonviolent offenses. And in terms of race and class, we now have a country that has more African Americans under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1850.
+
+This is haunting to me, especially because there's another way. I don't have to invent it; I'm not just asserting it. I know factually there's another way because I know many red states with Republican governors are showing there's a way to dramatically reduce the prison population. The governor of Georgia is bragging about a 20 percent reduction of African Americans in the criminal justice system. There are common-sense things we could be doing that we're not doing because of a lack of urgency — and that's unacceptable to me. I was taught as a kid, as Langston Hughes said so eloquently, ""There's a dream in this land with its back against the wall. To save the dream for one, we must save the dream for all.""
+
+But I'm the X Generation. We grew up after the Civil Rights Movement. And I know I'm here because of the outrageously righteous impatience of a whole lot of Americans from wildly different backgrounds — from religious folks to nonreligious folks, black folks to white folks, Christian folks to Muslim and Jewish folks, Latino folks, you name it. There was a wild sense of urgency to raise the consciousness of this country until this place couldn't stop the change. I mean, Sen. Strom Thurmond did a 24-hour filibuster trying to stop civil rights legislation. And the pressure in this country to end an outrageous injustice, a savage injustice, led to change.
+
+To me, this issue is no less urgent. In fact, in terms of affecting poor people and minorities and devastating communities, this is an urgent issue of that magnitude — to bring a legal system that is truly a justice system.
+
+We're all hurting for it. I don't care what your background is. You're hurting for it. You're hurting because the truth of our country — liberty and justice for all — is not being told. You're hurting for it because you're spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars from your annual taxpayer expenses to support an unjust system. We're hurting for it because there's a better way to go; and not doing anything is making streets less safe, and destroying and undermining our children that we desperately need in a competitive economic environment to be contributing and not costing.
+
+So I don't know what it's going to take, but I know one thing it's going to take is us and more people getting involved and seeing this as a cause for our country, not a cause for some people over there. This really does touch us all, and there's got to be a lot more pushing. You know the old saying — I've heard it a million times down here: ""Change doesn't come from Washington; it comes to Washington.""
+
+This interview has been edited for length and clarity.",REAL
+8995,Re: Rights? In The New America You Don’t Get Any Rights!,"Rights? In The New America You Don’t Get Any Rights! By Michael Snyder, on January 9th, 2012 
+One of the unique things about the Constitution of the United States was that it guaranteed certain rights for its citizens. Those rights provided the foundation for an era of freedom and prosperity that was pretty much unprecedented in human history and dozens of other nations eventually copied many of the ideas contained in our Constitution and Bill of Rights because they worked so well. Of course our system never functioned perfectly, but when you compare it to what has gone on for most of human history, it truly was a bright light in a sea of oppression and totalitarianism. Unfortunately, our rights are now being systematically taken away from us. In America today, the politicians have convinced most of us that in order to keep us all “safe” we must give up many of our rights and move toward becoming a totalitarian police state. In the “new America”, you don’t get any rights. They tell us that giving people rights is too dangerous. Instead, you get some limited “privileges” which can be revoked at any time by the authorities. Sadly, most Americans have become so dumbed-down that they don’t even realize what is happening. 
+How many Americans do you think have actually read the Constitution? 
+Personally, I went through high school, college and even law school without ever being required to read the Constitution of the United States. 
+Isn’t that amazing? 
+Most Americans don’t even understand that they have rights because they have never even read the documents that grant them those rights. 
+You can find the text of the U.S. Constitution right here . If you have never taken the time to read the whole thing, you really should. 
+According to the U.S. Constitution, the following are some of the rights that we are supposed to have…. 
+-Freedom of religion 
+-Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures 
+-The right to due process of law 
+-The right to a speedy and public trial 
+-Freedom from cruel and unusual punishments 
+Unfortunately, all of those rights are under attack in America today. 
+In most cases, a right is not taken away all at once. Instead, opponents of these rights take what is known as an “incremental approach”. 
+For example, we are told that there are certain limits on the freedom of speech. We are told that we cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theater and we accept that because it sounds reasonable. But then once everyone agrees that there are “limits” on that right, the control freaks that run things just keep trying to tighten those limits in thousands of different ways until our freedom of speech is whittled away to almost nothing. 
+It is imperative that we stand up for our liberties and freedoms. If we don’t defend them now, eventually they will be gone for good. 
+The following are some examples of how our rights are under attack in America today…. 
+The federal government has become absolutely obsessed with monitoring everything that Americans say. This chills free speech because it gives people the feeling that there is always somebody “watching”. 
+It has recently been revealed that the Department of Homeland Security plans to monitor social media outlets on the Internet. If you use the wrong “keywords” or if you are a key “influencer” on the Internet, there is no doubt that someone from the federal government will be keeping tabs on you. 
+The following comes from a recent RT article …. 
+Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that came out of DHS headquarters in November, Washington has the written permission to retain data on users of social media and online networking platforms. 
+Specifically, the DHS announced the NCO and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.” 
+In particular, the powers that be seem to have become absolutely fascinated with Facebook, Twitter and blogs. 
+As I have written about previously , the Federal Reserve has decided to start monitoring social media sites and blogs in order to keep track of what is being said about them. 
+And as a recent Fox News article detailed, the Department of Homeland Security is also developing such a system…. 
+Though still in development, DHS is looking to establish a system for monitoring “forums, blogs, public websites and message boards.” The idea is to gather and analyze publicly available information, and then use that information to help officials respond to disasters and other situations. 
+So why do they have to spend so much time, energy and money keeping track of what we are all saying on the Internet? 
+Why don’t they just let us be? 
+One would think that the federal government has bigger problems to deal with at this point. 
+Unfortunately, this trend toward endlessly snooping on American citizens is not likely to reverse any time soon. 
+So could what you say on the Internet get you labeled as a “trouble-maker” or as a “potential terrorist”? 
+Recently, Barack Obama signed a new law which allows the U.S. military to arrest “potential terrorists” on U.S. soil, hold them indefinitely without trial and even ship them off to Guantanamo Bay for endless “interrogation” sessions. 
+The insanity of this new law was detailed in a recent article by Henry Blodget …. 
+The reason this law is horrifying is not that terrorists deserve to be handled with kid gloves. They don’t. The reason it’s horrifying is that, without due process, it is too easy for the government to just declare someone a terrorist who isn’t actually a terrorist. It’s too easy, in other words, for government employees to do what everyone else does: Make mistakes. 
+If you don’t think it’s possible for the government to mistakenly assume that someone is a terrorist who isn’t, read this story by Lakhdar Boumediene , who was just held as a terrorist by the U.S. government in Guantanamo for 7 and a half years. At Guantanamo, Boumediene says he was tortured for not telling his U.S. captors what they wanted to hear–that he was a terrorist. He was only eventually freed after his case went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled that it might be a good idea to ask the government to present the evidence that led it to believe that Boumediene was a terrorist (the government didn’t present any). 
+Sadly, according to Obama this new law just reaffirms what he already had the power to do. In his signing statement, Obama stated that he already had the authority to arrest American citizens, hold them without trial and ship them off to prison camps. 
+Of course that would come as a complete shock to the original drafters of the U.S. Constitution, but very few Americans seem concerned with what the U.S. Constitution actually says these days. 
+Now there is a new bill before Congress that would even give the federal government the power to instantly strip individuals of citizenship if they are suspected of being “hostile” to the United States. 
+It is known as the Enemy Expatriation Act, and you can read this new bill for yourself right here . 
+According to the bill, you can be stripped of your U.S. citizenship for “engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.” 
+So what does it mean to “materially support” hostilities against the United States? 
+Does simply criticizing the government fall under that category? 
+Unfortunately, when you have a law that is really vague it gives authorities the leeway to do pretty much whatever they want. 
+At least we still have the Internet where we can communicate with one another and share all of this information, right? 
+Well, maybe not for long. 
+As I have written about previously, a new law under consideration by Congress would permanently change the Internet forever and could potentially silence thousands of important voices. That is why we must stop SOPA . It is a horrible law which could be used to brutally censor the Internet. 
+Some of the biggest names in the Internet community are speaking out against SOPA. For example, a recent CNN article contained some stunning quotes about SOPA from one of the co-founders of Google…. 
+Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has been outspoken against the efforts. 
+The bills “give the U.S. government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS (the Internet’s naming system) and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial),” Brin wrote last month on his Google+ page as Congress was considering the measures. “While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don’t believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.” 
+Everywhere you turn these days, our liberties and our freedoms are being attacked. There is a relentless assault on everything that it means to be an American. No matter how hard you try, it just seems like you can’t get away from it. 
+For example, many of us have been so disgusted with the TSA that we simply do not fly anymore. 
+Well, the TSA is not content to just monitor airports anymore. Now they are bringing their own special brand of “security” to thousands of other locations across the country as the Los Angeles Times recently detailed …. 
+The Transportation Security Administration isn’t just in airports anymore. TSA teams are increasingly conducting searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and other mass transit locations around the country. 
+“We are not the Airport Security Administration,” said Ray Dineen, the air marshal in charge of the TSA office in Charlotte. “We take that transportation part seriously.” 
+The TSA’s 25 “viper” teams — for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response — have run more than 9,300 unannounced checkpoints and other search operations in the last year. Department of Homeland Security officials have asked Congress for funding to add 12 more teams next year. 
+So even if you never fly again, there is still a good chance that you will get the “rubber glove treatment” from a TSA “viper team” at some point. 
+Without a doubt, this country is slowly becoming a giant prison . 
+And one group that gets targeted by the government almost more than anyone else is Christians. In America today, there is a war against Christianity. The Christian faith is being attacked in hundreds of different ways , and under the Obama administration this attack has only just intensified. 
+There seems to be an obsession with pushing Christianity out of every single shred of public life in this country. For example, family members were recently banned from bringing Bibles to wounded veterans at Walter Reed National Medical Center. The following is from a recent CNSNews article …. 
+In a Sept. 14 policy memorandum, Col. Chuck Callahan, chief of staff of Walter Reed National Medical Center, banned family members from bringing Bibles and other “religious items” when visiting wounded military personnel at the facility. 
+Thankfully, this policy was later reversed after a tremendous national outcry, but there are dozens and dozens of other “policies” like this that have not been reversed. 
+They say that we still have “freedom of religion” in this country, but there is a non-stop effort to push it into a box that is getting smaller and smaller with each passing day. 
+Our 2nd Amendment rights area also being brutally assaulted. 
+Restrictions on gun owners keep getting tighter and tighter and tighter. Things have gotten so bad that now even gun manufacturers don’t even know what is legal and what is not. 
+The following comes from a recent article in the Washington Times …. 
+Despite overseeing an industry that includes machine guns and other deadly weapons, ATF regulations for the manufacture of weapons are often unclear, leading to reliance on a secretive system by which firearms manufacturers can submit proposed weapons for testing and find out one at a time whether they comply with the law, critics say. 
+The ATF recommends that manufacturers voluntarily submit weapons for case-by-case determination. But those judgments are private and, it turns out, sometimes contradictory. Critics say nearly identical prototypes can be approved for one manufacturer but denied for another. 
+But it is not just the federal government that is becoming incredibly oppressive. We are seeing state and local governments all over the country also move in the direction of totalitarianism. 
+Here are just a couple of examples that have been brought to my attention in recent days…. 
+*Up in Massachusetts, police were recently sent to collect an overdue library book from a 5-year-old girl . 
+*In St. Louis, a proposed law would make it mandatory to spay or neuter all cats and dogs and would make it mandatory to microchip all cats and dogs. 
+When you step back and look at the bigger picture, a clear trend emerges. 
+As 2012 began, over 40,000 new laws went into effect all over America. Some of these new laws are good, but most of them are about restricting the liberties and freedoms of individual Americans. 
+We have become a nation of control freaks. 
+In the final analysis, we don’t have any absolute rights anymore. Instead, what we have are “privileges” that are being systematically stripped away. 
+But this is not how America was supposed to be. 
+We were supposed to be the freest nation on the face of the earth. 
+So what in the world happened to us? Mainstream Media Lies: 23 Things That Are Not What They Seem To Be On Television » A Dodgy Bloke 
+I hate to sound like a broken record but much of the deterioration of our rights has it’s genesis with George “He kept us safe” Bush, after 9/11. Now the chickens have come home to roost, add to that the start of financial repression, and dark hungry days are ahead. I have a thesis why this is happening Government has one duty to stay in power. The Powers that be know unstable times are coming if you have a stable of loosely written laws on the books you can lock up anybody when the SHTF who gets frisky. I know this falls into the “Alex Jones” FEMA camps the tin hat crowed. Personally I think civil war or revolution is a real possibility people revolt on thier knees not on thier backs. Also another FYI watch the retirement plans of state county and city workers. How do you think those cops in the last photo will react when they find out thier retirement went up in smoke. If you don’t know what I’m talking about go back to sleep. Kevin 
+A Dodgy Bloke 
+Your correct that the first job (and one can say by extension only job) of government is to protect government. 
+I think your incorrect regarding the pensions of the “security forces”. They will tax the rest of us to keep them financially secure for our “protection” of course. Kevin 
+A Doggy Bloke 
+Your correct with laws that are so written as to be used at will against whoever they want. In Jamaica marijuana is illegal yet you smell it everywhere. Count the minuets from the time you get through customs until your offered some to purchase and you won’t make an hour. It’s in essence rope that the masses collectively tie around their necks awaiting the government to rein in political opposition. 
+My name is Christina Ziegler I think you should start the revolt Gutter Economist 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 – allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 – allows the government to seize and control the communication media. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 – allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 – allows the government to seize all means of transportation, including personal cars, trucks or vehicles of any kind and total control over all highways, seaports, and waterways. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 10999 – allows the government to take over all food resources and farms. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 – allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 – allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 – designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 – allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 – allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 – allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 – specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921– allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has broad powers in every aspect of the nation. General Frank Salzedo, chief of FEMA’s Civil Security Division stated in a 1983 conference that he saw FEMA’s role as a “new frontier in the protection of individual and governmental leaders from assassination, and of civil and military installations from sabotage and/or attack, as well as prevention of dissident groups from gaining access to U.S. opinion, or a global audience in times of crisis.” FEMA’s powers were consolidated by President Carter to incorporate the… 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 – grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 – assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 12148 – created the Federal Emergency Management Agency to interface with the Department of Defense for civil defense planning and funding. An “emergency czar” was appointed. FEMA has only spent about 6 percent of its budget on national emergencies. The bulk of their funding has been used for the construction of secret underground facilities to assure continuity of government in case of a major emergency, foreign or domestic. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 12656 – appointed the National Security Council as the principal body that should consider emergency powers. This allows the government to increase domestic intelligence and surveillance of U.S. citizens and would restrict the freedom of movement within the United States and grant the government the right to isolate large groups of civilians. The National Guard could be federalized to seal all borders and take control of U.S. air space and all ports of entry. 
+EXECUTIVE ORDER 12919 – Collects EOs 10995, 10997, 10998, 10999, 11000, 11001, 11002, 11003, 11004, 11005 and 11051 together into one new Executive Order. 
+National Security Act of 1947 – allows for the strategic relocation of industries, services, government and other essential economic activities, and to rationalize the requirements for manpower, resources and production facilities. 
+1950 Defense Production Act – gives the President sweeping powers over all aspects of the economy. 
+Act of August 29, 1916 – authorizes the Secretary of the Army, in time of war, to take possession of any transportation system for transporting troops, material, or any other purpose related to the emergency. 
+International Emergency Economic Powers Act – enables the President to seize the property of a foreign country or national. These powers were transferred to FEMA in a sweeping consolidation in 1979. 
+For more information, goto http://www.infowars.com/deliberately-engineered-economic-collapse-in-usa-leading-to-martial-law/ Ameen 
+WOW!! DB200 
+“International Emergency Economic Powers Act – enables the President to seize the property of a foreign country or national.” 
+Does this mean that all gold stored in Fort Knox, belonging to foreign countries, can be seized legally by the USA? 
+Does this also mean that when China and the USA go to war with each other, China stands to lose quite a lot of investments? Observer 
+There is NO gold in Fort Knox! Ask any local resident, many of whom have military family members stationed there. They are guarding an empty coffer. Kevin 
+I thought they needed to pull this off before the conforming generations (born previous to 1946) were still a major voting block. While I see it before my eyes one would think the people that came of age in the 1960s would know better then to surrender rights to the government. 
+Apparently I was mistaken. thomas jefferson 
+“All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution, are null and void.” Chief Justice Marshall, Marbury v. Madison 
+i will NEVER submit to this TYRANNY! give me Liberty or give me death 
+and you can BET your sweet A** i WILL NOT go down without a fight 
+Freedom isnt Free- But damnit its worth dying for- especially for my children- they WILL NOT live under a totalitarian regime as long as i have a breath Joshua10 
+If you don’t know your rights…You Don’t Have Any! Tamara 
+Do not, in your frustration, deny ANY man or woman or child their rights! As frustrating as their ignorance is, they have been lied to and are as the weak in their ignorance. The good protects the weak from the wolves. 
+The wolves are gathering…. REED RICHARDS 
+Michael, 
+As Gutter Economist has outlined it, Rights? The masses have no rights! And they never did. But don’t worry. The masses could care less about freedom. And they never did. Evidence that the masses don’t care about freedom? Ron Paul is not the frontrunner by a very wide margin in the presidential race. He is the only candidate who is running to restore civil liberties, ending senseless, grinding people into hamburger wars, and restoring sanity to fiscal and monetaruy policy. Is that what the masses want? Of course not. But they will finally get a taste of the iron fist when the FEMA Camp roundups begin DB200 
+What is a FEMA Camp? Observer 
+FEMA was empowered to set up camps, mostly in highly unpopulated areas in the western US, where populations could be moved to ostensibly save them from extreme danger from such things as earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, other natural disasters, that threaten their homes & communities. Each camp can hold thousands of people. Knowing the propensity of our government to “protect” us from ourselves, these camps are also capable of holding all those rounded up who are in opposition to anything the government wants at any given time. They are the modern version of the Japanese internment camps employed during WWII. Citizens opposed to government policies and practices are prime targets for placement in these camps, especially now that the NDAA says that US citizens even simply suspected of ‘terrorist’ thoughts or activities (and who defines what a terrorist is? – the government, of course) can be indefinitely held, without charge or trial. Anyone who thinks ANY current administration is wrong can now be branded a terrorist, and 99% of the commenters here, if found, could also be sent to the FEMA camps. The powers that be are just waiting for the one major calamity it would take to execute the FEMA camp orders ~ and that calamity is most probably going to be an economic one, with natural disaster (with concomitant economic collapse) a close secondary excuse to round up We, The People, who need Big Brother’s ‘help.’ Only God can help those who believe in “Live Free or Die” ~ armed insurrection will be met with instant execution, so there’ll be no need for internment at FEMA camps. Once the believers in the 2nd Amendment are exterminated, the entire geography of the United States will comprise one extremely large FEMA camp. Igos 
+Do You People Know What Lies Out West??? Do You?!?! YELLOWSTONE SUPER VOLCANO! The Camps Are There So The Government Can Commit Massive Genocide. Unlike Hitler Whom Killed 6 Million The Camps Out West Will Hold Numbers So Massive It’ll Put Hitler To Shame….",FAKE
+8369,OPEC Fails to Agree as U.S. Energy Industry Ramps Up,"Email 
+After 12 hours of effort to hash out an agreement to cut oil production that can be presented formally to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (flag shown) in November, 14 oil ministers meeting in Vienna over the weekend gave birth to — a goose egg. Without an agreement, the November 30 gathering is likely to be irrelevant, just as the cartel itself is becoming. 
+Every cartel eventually blows up due to members unwilling to abide by agreements, cheating, creating side agreements, and in general seeking their own self interests. So it is with OPEC. At the Vienna meeting, Iran complained that it is really producing more than reported, while Iraq wanted a dispensation similar to Iran’s (which has allowed the country to expand its production back to pre-sanction levels), claiming that it has a war to fight and needs the revenues. 
+Venezuela, the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and Kuwait are each facing their own special problems — Venezuela in particular. President Nicolás Maduro made a personal trip to Vienna (some said in order to get away from the increasing unrest back home) to press the point: He needs more money to cover the increasing deficits his socialist policies are costing his government. 
+At the end of the day, several things were clear: First, there was no agreement, nor is one likely. If OPEC countries can’t agree, how could any non-OPEC oil producers (such as Russia) be persuaded to go along with any agreement to cut production to raise prices? 
+Second, any production cut (if there is one) would likely be borne primarily by OPEC’s largest producer, Saudi Arabia, which just completed its first (and perhaps last?) global bond offering for $18 billion initiated to slow the liquidation of its foreign reserves. Last year it liquidated nearly $100 billion of those reserves while playing the increasingly unsuccessful and costly game of chicken with U.S. producers. 
+In addition, U.S. energy producers are already announcing new capital expenditures while bringing on rigs that were temporarily idled during the downturn. Nick Cunningham, writing for OilPrice.com, noted another problem facing OPEC: In January there were 5,576 DUCs — drilled but uncompleted wells — just waiting for the right conditions for them to be completed. Since then more than 500 of them have been brought online, profitably, with most of the rest, according to observers, likely to be completed by the second quarter of 2017 — barely five months from now. What OPEC ultimately is facing is the vast and increasing disparity between what it costs them to bring a barrel of oil to the surface, and what it costs for American producers to complete a DUC. Since most of the up-front costs have already been expended, the marginal cost to bring a DUC well online is way below the current price of $50 a barrel. The math is persuasive, and U.S. oil producers are reacting accordingly. 
+In other words, OPEC is engaged in a game that it initiated and which it is now discovering that it cannot win and cannot quit. In the process, OPEC is becoming increasingly irrelevant while U.S. producers are pushing ahead, continuing to turn America into a country that is not only self-sufficient for its own energy needs but is also increasingly supplying the world. 
+The OPEC bickering is likely to intensify as the reality sinks in that the cartel has painted itself into a corner. Venezuela is facing existential questions, while most of the others are on an unsustainable path of decreasing revenues to fund socialist welfare programs that were never affordable and are now strangling the governments. 
+It’s likely that those revenues will continue to fall despite what OPEC may do (or more likely, not do) in November. Investors and producers are expecting oil prices to fall sharply, as measured by their “short” positions in the futures markets. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), there were more than 540,000 short positions (taken by those expecting oil prices to fall) as of October 11 — the most in nearly 10 years. Image: OPEC flag 
+An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .  ",FAKE
+1797,Trump’s audacious Southern spectacle is part of his strategy,"It was the most audacious Donald Trump spectacle yet in a summer full of them, as the Republican presidential front-runner, in his Boeing 757, thundered over a football stadium here Friday night and gave a raucous speech to one of the largest crowds of the 2016 campaign.
+
+But Trump’s flashy performance was about more than showmanship. His visit to Alabama was coolly strategic, touching down in the heart of red America and an increasingly important early battleground in the Republican nominating contest.
+
+The Manhattan developer, who strode onstage to “Sweet Home Alabama,” is trying to show that his candidacy has broad and lasting appeal across every region of the country — especially here in the South, where Alabama and seven other states are holding a clustered voting blitz March 1.
+
+The scene Friday night put an exclamation point on an extraordinary run in which the flamboyant mogul has thoroughly disrupted the presidential campaign and kindled a national discussion about not just politics but American culture itself.
+
+“We have politicians that don’t have a clue,” said Trump, wearing a red hat on which was printed “Make America Great Again,” his slogan. “They’re all talk, no action. What’s happening to this country is disgraceful.”
+
+He added: “We’re running on fumes. There’s nothing here. . . . We’re not going to have a country left. We need to have our borders. We need to make great deals.”
+
+The crowd — sprawling and boisterous, though filling perhaps half of the 40,000-seat stadium — was anything but silent. People pumped their fists in the air as the ruddy-faced man with an iconic corn-silk coif took one shot after another at former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) and Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.
+
+His speech focused heavily on illegal immigration — “We’re going to build a wall,” he declared to booming applause. And Trump basked in the early success of his campaign, noting all the states where he leads in the polls, including Bush’s Florida.
+
+“Has this been crazy? Man! I mean, it’s been wild,” he said while suggesting that the United States should have an expedited election as in some other countries. “I’d like to have the election tomorrow. I don’t want to wait.”
+
+Bush and his allies tried to fire back at Trump. Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise, paid for a small plane to fly above the stadium towing a banner that read, “TRUMP 4 HIGHER TAXES, JEB 4 PREZ.” Bush’s campaign, meanwhile, blasted an e-mail to Alabama supporters highlighting Trump’s past liberal positions and saying they are “deeply out-of-step with the Alabama way of life.”
+
+Trump fans came by the thousands, driving from the Florida panhandle, from Mississippi, from Tennessee and Texas. Traffic was backed up for more than a mile.
+
+On the street, Olaf Childress, a neo-Confederate activist, gave out copies of “The First Freedom” newspaper, which had headlines about “Black-on-white crime,” “occupied media” and “censored details of the Holocaust.”
+
+The most-enthusiastic Trump backers began arriving at the stadium at dawn, hoping to get a spot close to the stage. The first in line were Keith Quackenbush, 54, and Bill Hart, 46, co-workers at a retail giant in Pensacola, Fla.
+
+“I’m telling you, everyone who is a worker at our store, they’re excited about Trump,” Quackenbush said. “I don’t care what race or gender, whatever age — they love Trump. This is a movement.”
+
+The event — billed as a “pep rally” — had been scheduled for the Mobile Civic Center but was moved to Ladd-Peebles Stadium, home to the University of South Alabama Jaguars, as interest soared. Trump’s campaign claimed that more than 35,000 people had applied for tickets, but by the time his speech began, the stadium was full of empty patches of AstroTurf and grandstands.
+
+In the run-up, Trump made the rounds on Alabama radio stations, talking politics and college football — though, like any practiced pol, he wouldn’t take sides in the rivalry between the University of Alabama and Auburn University.
+
+As the crowd formed Friday morning, Trump tweeted from New York: “We are going to have a wild time in Alabama tonight! Finally, the silent majority is back!” He echoed Richard Nixon’s 1968 “silent majority” pitch that was aimed at attracting disaffected white Southerners.
+
+Like other Republican candidates, Trump is making a strategic play for the South, eyeing the states participating March 1 in the so-called SEC primary — named for the collegiate sports conference — soon after the traditional early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.
+
+Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said in an interview that Trump could “win significant support” in the South, buoyed by his hard-line views on trade and immigration as well as the GOP base’s restive appetite for an outsider. “We’re going to be strong in Iowa, New Hampshire and the other states that start it out,” ­Lewandowski said. “Then comes the South. That’s the path to the nomination.”
+
+In Mobile, campaign volunteers wearing Trump hats and carrying clipboards collected signatures to get Trump on the primary ballot and gathered names for a voter database. Next week, Trump is to hold events in Nashville and Greenville, S.C.
+
+Trump chose Mobile for his big rally in part because it is the hometown of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R), an immigration hard-liner who has been counseling Trump and helped him develop his immigration policy paper. Trump brought Sessions onstage. The senator put on a white “Make America Great Again” hat. (“These hats are hot as a pistol,” Trump quipped.)
+
+But there is plenty of resistance to Trump’s candidacy here. “My plea to my conservatives is, ‘Don’t get so far out in right field that we can’t talk to anyone but ourselves,’ ” said Jack Edwards, who represented the Mobile area in Congress for two decades.
+
+Trump is not the only contender who sees the South as a place where bids could rise or fall in the second lap of the 2016 race. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) recently made a 20-stop, seven-day road trip from South Carolina to Oklahoma that stretched nearly 2,000 miles.
+
+Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will appear Saturday at a Republican luncheon in Alabama, while Bush has scheduled private events in Birmingham next Wednesday. Ohio Gov. John Kasich was here earlier this week to pick up the endorsement of Alabama Gov. Robert J. Bentley. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has a passionate grass-roots following here; former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, whose evangelical background has made him a force, has made regular visits to the South.
+
+But none have put on a show like Trump. Friday night resembled something between a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and the Daytona 500. People came to see a celebrity, Trump, but also to hear his fiery call to revolutionize the nation’s politics. Many attendees said they had never attended a presidential campaign event.
+
+Cheryl Burns, 60, was on a road trip from California when she heard that Trump would be in Alabama. She turned her car around and got in line, warning people of what happened to states when liberals took them over.
+
+“There is no more California,” Burns said. “It’s now international, lawless territory. Everything is up for grabs. Illegal aliens are murdering people there. People are being raped. Trump isn’t lying about anything — the rest of the country just hasn’t found out yet.”
+
+As the sun began to set, the sweaty throngs in the stadium snapped their heads toward the sky as the roar of a jet engine pierced the air. Here it was, gliding toward them above the Friday night lights: a gleaming Boeing 757 with “T-R-U-M-P” stretched across its navy blue body, circling twice and dipping its wing toward the sloped stadium bleachers.
+
+The crowd roared its approval to Trump as his jet tilted away to land at a nearby airport. Minutes later, he was whisked in a caravan of SUVs past sleepy neighborhoods and the shipyard-lined coast of the Deep South to the surreal political festival.
+
+“This is history happening right before our eyes,” said Laura Teague of Mobile, one of the few black attendees at the rally. “I’m going to help Trump make history.”
+
+Philip Rucker in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+9633,WW3 Nuclear War Drills World War 3 To Start In Ukraine,"November 1, 2016 at 10:33 pm 
+You never see these debates in Parliament on the BBC news not one bit. Just shows you all the bullshit that doesn't really have anything to do with the people of this country. They have no good intentions for our people and are only concerned about the 1%",FAKE
+6608,Facebook user wastes two hours sharing things to impress his insurance company,"Wednesday 2 November 2016 Facebook user wastes two hours sharing things to impress his insurance company 
+Facebook user Simon Williams has admitted he only shares things on social media to impress other people, so trying to impress his insurance company seemed like a sensible thing to do. 
+Williams said Admiral Insurance’s decision to offer better insurance deals to people with Facebook profiles that looked ‘safer’ to their quotation algorithm had led to an afternoon of frantic social activity. 
+He explained, “Obviously, as a millennial social media user, I only ever share things that will impress my friends, future employers and potentially those women who happen across my Facebook profile from any of the number of dating apps I use. 
+“So sharing and posting things purely to make myself look better is nothing new to me. Tweaking that for an insurance company was pretty easy. 
+“I simply liked a number of Facebook pages about driver safety, signed a petition calling for lower speed limits on UK roads, added a couple of driving safety courses as Life Events, and even put a couple of posts on my historic timeline about how people are ‘driving way too fast past the school these days’. 
+“Also, Driving Miss Daisy is now my favourite film, by the way. 
+“It would definitely have got me cheaper car insurance. It was a flawless plan. 
+“Of course, Facebook has now put an end to that – the bastards. Two hours of my life I won’t get back. 
+A spokesperson for Facebook told us, “We simply can’t have a third party business exploiting the information our users share on the Facebook platform for commercial gain. 
+“That’s what our advertising business is for.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+6422,"250,000-year-old artifact: The ultimate evidence of ‘Ancient Astronaut’ technology?","The discovery of an ancient artifact, mainly composed out of aluminum is considered as compelling evidence of ‘ancient astronaut’ visitations to Earth over 250,000 years ago. Lab tests have confirmed the age of the artifact and its mysterious composition. The idea that humanity has been visited by beings not from Earth in the distant past has captured the interest of millions worldwide.
+Every once in a while, a strange discovery makes us reconsider whether or not history, as we have been told, is accurate.
+What if we are missing something, and what if, in the distant past, extremely advanced technology was present on Earth?
+READ: Everything We Have Been Taught About Our Origins Is A Lie 
+The mysterious artifact, composed mainly out of aluminum was found in Romania during the 1970’s when the nation was under communist rule, and information about it was released to the public at the time.
+Now, lab tests conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland, have revealed that the metal fragment is composed of 90 percent aluminum and the remaining 10 percent of 11 different metals.
+The artifact has an approximate age of 250,000 years, reports British newspaper the Sun .
+But is this artifact really compelling proof ancient astronauts visited Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago?
+As it turns out, Aluminum was not created by ‘modern civilization’ until 200 years ago. Aluminium was first isolated in 1825 by Danish physicist HC Oersted, so the discovery of the piece of metal with an age such as this has been considered extraordinary by researchers.
+
+The item was discovered in 1973 when constructors were working on the shorelines of the Mures River, in the vicinity of the town of Auid. At around 10 meters below the surface, workers were left surprised when they recovered three mysterious objects.
+All of them appeared, unlike anything they had seen, and seemed to be very old.
+Archaeologists were brought to the site and identified two of the objects as being fossil remains.
+However, the third piece left researchers surprised. IT appeared to be a man-made artifact, composed of an extremely lightweight metal. Researchers suspected at the time that it was the end of an axe.
+To confirm the theories, the objects were sent to analysis to Cluj, Romania.
+Experts determined that the fossils belonged to a large –extinct— mammal that died between 10,000 and 80,000 years ago.
+READ: We Are Being Lied To About Our History 
+However, the third object caused confusion among experts. Scientists determined that the object was composed of a lightweight metal and was most likely manufactured due to the concavities of the object.
+The Auid artifact is 20 meters long, 12.5 centimeters wide and has a thickness of 7 centimeters.
+
+The object resembled some kind of part belonging to a complex mechanical system. However, researchers were unable to determine to what it belonged.
+Deputy Director of the Romanian Ufologists Association, Gheorghe Cohal said: ‘Lab tests concluded it is an old UFO fragment given that the substances it comprises cannot be combined with technology available on Earth.’
+However, not everyone seems convinced. Local historian Mihai Wittenberger doesn’t believe the object belongs to a complex mechanical device left behind by ancient astronauts. In fact, Wittenberger
+believes the mysterious object may actually be a metal piece from a World War II German aircraft.
+More precisely, Wittenberger claims the alleged ‘alien artifact’ was actually part of the landing gear of a Messerschnmitt ME 262.
+But there’s one problem with that explanation. The mystery object is 250,000 years old.
+The mysteries surrounding the artifact have not been solved, and currently, the ‘out-of-place- artifact resides in the History Museum of Cluj-Napoca, next to a sign that reads: ‘origin still unknown’.
+Source: EWAO 
+Related: Everything We Have Been Taught About Our Origins Is A Lie We Are Being Lied To About Our History Ancient Egyptians had electricty and batteries thousands of years ago Forbidden History & OOPARTS: Out of Place Artifacts Ooparts: Alien electronic chip with age 450 million years found in stone near Labinsk city in Russia 17 Out-of-Place Artifacts Said to Suggest High-Tech Prehistoric Civilizations Existed The 500-Million-Year-Old Dorchester Pot Should Not Exist Have Humans devolved through history? Ancient Technology, the ultimate piece of evidence The mystery of the Swiss watch from the Ming Dynasty 30 million year old giant rings in the Bosnian mountains? 2-Billion-Year-Old Nuclear Mega-Reactor Discovered in Africa 500,000 Year-Old Spark Plug Found in Rock: The Coso Artifact Researchers in China discover a 300 million year old screw embedded into rock Forbidden History: Extraterrestrial Base Inside Bucegi Mountains ",FAKE
+2911,Expert: ISIL 'highly likely' to launch gas attack in London,"Islamic State militants returning to the United Kingdom could launch a chlorine gas attack on trains, the London Underground or at a football match, according to a chemical weapons expert.
+
+Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer at the Joint Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear Regiment, said the last two weeks in Syria and Iraq have seen the ""most concentrated and deadly use of chemical weapons"" since the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.
+
+""It is very evident that ISIL are putting much time and effort into training its jihadis in the use of chlorine as a terror weapon and in particular in IEDs (improvised explosive devices),"" he wrote on 2Paragraphs.
+
+""Virtually every foreign jihadi who returns to the U.S. or U.K. will have been exposed to training of this sort and will have a reasonable idea on how to use chlorine and other toxic chemicals as a terror weapon. In the U.K., up to 90 tons of chlorine can be purchased without any licenses,"" he wrote.
+
+After returning from advising security forces in Baghdad last week, de Bretton-Gordon told the Daily Mirrorthat he feared a chlorine gas attack was ""highly likely,"" adding: ""This could happen on a train or tube or even at a big football match.""
+
+De Bretton-Gordon examined the likelihood of such an atrocity on the 20-year anniversary of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, which killed 12 people and injured more than 1,000 more, causing chaos in the Japanese capital.
+
+The Aum Shinrikyo movement used packets of the nerve agent, which they punctured with umbrella tips on the Tokyo subway during morning rush hour.
+
+But de Bretton-Gordon said less complicated methods would be needed for a deadly chlorine attack.
+
+""The method of delivery of chlorine at the second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, 100 years ago, would be effective on the subway today,"" he wrote.
+
+""That is, take the top off a chlorine canister and let it 'vaporize' aka 'weaponize.'""
+
+The expert, who has recently worked with U.K.-based charity Syria Relief advising civilians on what to do in a chlorine gas attack, founded chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) defense firm SecureBio and is a director at gas mask manufacturers Avon Protection.
+
+His 23 years in the British Army included service as commanding officer of the U.K.'s CBRN Regiment and NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion.
+
+De Bretton-Gordon said that ISIL had planted ""hundreds"" of chlorine IEDs in the defense of Tikrit and detonated chemical bombs north of Mosul against the Kurdish Peshmerga.
+
+During the advance of the ISIL last year, militants gained control of a huge chlorine factory near Mosul as well as the Muthanna complex near Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein manufactured chemical weapons using mustard gas, sarin and VX.
+
+The United Nations said 2,500 remaining rockets filled with nerve agents were degraded and could not be used to make working chemical weapons.
+
+De Bretton-Gordon said that even if returning ISIL jihadists attempted to launch a chlorine attack in Britain, the effect ""should be minimal"" if security services are forewarned.
+
+""Chlorine is not very toxic and the green and yellow clouds are easy to see and avoid, and it is very non-persistent only lasting for a few minutes,"" he added.
+
+""Undoubtedly, and hopefully, the CIA, FBI, MI 5 and 6 etc. will be taking a very close look at returning jihadis and in particular anybody buying toxic chemicals.""
+
+Earlier this month, ISIL allegedly attacked Iraqi soldiers with roadside bombs containing chlorine gas as allied forces continued a huge assault against the group in Tikrit.
+
+Footage captured by an Iraqi bomb disposal team showed plumes of thick orange gas emerging from a detonated IED.
+
+Iraqi Kurds also claim to have evidence that ISIL used chemical weapons against their fighters in January this year.
+
+The use of chlorine, a choking agent that dates back to the First World War, is banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibits the use of toxic agents in warfare.
+
+Chlorine and other chemical weapons have been used ""systematically"" in the ongoing civil war in Syria, according to monitors, who accuse all parties of atrocities.
+
+Bashar al-Assad's forces allegedly used sarin in the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack that killed hundreds of Syrian civilians outside of Damascus and have reportedly dropped chlorine barrel bombs in recent weeks.
+
+Iraqi Kurds were victims of the deadliest chemical attack in recent history when Hussein's air force bombed the town of Halabja, where up to 5,000 people were gassed to death in 1988.
+
+The article originally appeared on the website of The Independent. Its content was created separately to USA TODAY.
+
+MORE FROM THE INDEPENDENT",REAL
+2133,Obama to Propose Protecting 1.4 Million Acres of Arctic Refuge,"President Barack Obama will propose blocking 1.4 million acres (556,000 hectares) of Arctic refuge from oil and gas drilling, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.
+
+The administration plans to propose designating the area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness, the highest level of federal protection that would ban oil and gas drilling, the newspaper reported, citing people briefed on the plan. 
+
+ 
+
+ The move is certain to spark yet another fight with Republicans, who have fought for 35 years over how to manage what is known as ANWR, or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The vast region has huge petroleum reserves but also provides critical habitat for caribou, millions of migrating birds, polar bears and other wildlife.
+
+ 
+
+ ""What’s coming is a stunning attack on our sovereignty and our ability to develop a strong economy that allows us, our children and our grandchildren to thrive,"" said the new Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairman, Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska,  in a statement to the Post.
+
+ 
+
+ ""It’s clear this administration does not care about us, and sees us as nothing but a territory. … I cannot understand why this administration is willing to negotiate with Iran, but not Alaska. But we will not be run over like this. We will fight back with every resource at our disposal.""
+
+ 
+
+ The state's Republican congressional delegation, along with the new governor, Bill Walker, sent out a joint news release Sunday morning calling the action ""an unprecedented assault on Alaska.""
+
+ 
+
+ Walker, an independent, said in a statement that he may be forced to accelerate oil and gas permitting on state lands to compensate for the new federal restrictions.
+
+ 
+
+ ""Having just given to Alaskans the State of the State and State of the Budget addresses, it’s clear that our fiscal challenges in both the short and long term would benefit significantly from increased oil production,"" Walker said. Roughly 40 billion barrels of the state’s untapped reserves are already in federal areas where oil and gas activity is blocked or restricted, he pointed out.
+
+ 
+
+ The announcement, which could come on Sunday, is likely the first in a series of decisions the administration will make in the coming week about Alaska's oil and gas production. The administration also plans to block part of the Arctic Ocean from drilling.",REAL
+6153,"SHOCK STATEMENT: Anthony Weiner SPEAKS, Drops LEGAL NUKE On Hillary","Did Anthony Weiner say these things as part a deal to save himself? Anthony Weiner has spoken! One year ago, we all that that Donald Trump was just being funny, just being Trump, when he said that Hillary Clinton was showing poor judgement in letting Huma Abedin, wife of “perf sleaze” Anthony Weiner have access to government information. Trump called the couple a security risk, but again, we thought he was just making fun of them. As it turns out, Donald Trump’s words were eerily prophetic. Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have heard by now that the FBI is reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email problems after finding evidence on devices at Anthony Weiner’s home. Earlier, we reported that FBI Director James Comey had tricked Obama’s Department of Justice and the Clintons in sending the investigation announcement letter to Congress. Some believe that Comey was attempting to force the DOJ to issue a warrant so that his agents can start reading the 10,000+ emails on Weiner’s device. 
+Here Is How FBI Director Comey BAMBOOZLED The DOJ, CONGRESS, And The CLINTONS All At Once 
+Now, Anthony Weiner has spoken and he may have made Comey’s job even easier, while completely bypassing the Department of Justice altogether. 
+According to reports, Weiner has given permission for the FBI to access all of the information on his electronic devices, including his wifi router. . @BretBaier emails Chris Wallace while he’s on air: Weiner has given FBI permission to search computer so no warrant needed. @FoxNewsSunday 
+— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) October 30, 2016 I emailed that 2 sources say Weiner is cooperating w/ FBI- & co-owned laptop. Also NY FBI had info 4 a few weeks- pressure was building https://t.co/AHbQVtvQzg 
+— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) October 30, 2016 
+In essence, Weiner is singing like a bird, and the FBI can conduct a thorough review of the emails in question. If there is criminality found on Weiner’s devices, they have a shot at it. 
+Is there anything that the Department of Justice or the Clintons can do? 
+Time will tell, but many believe that WikiLeaks and others are about to drop more incriminating evidence on Hillary later this week. 
+Comey may have saved himself. Weiner may be trying to cut a plea deal to save himself. 
+Hang on, as this ride is still picking up steam! Related Items",FAKE
+7643,Trump Tower Surrounded By Dump Trucks In Anticipation Of Violence,"Trump Tower Surrounded By Dump Trucks In Anticipation Of Violence 11/09/2016 
+DAILY CALLER 
+The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has surrounded the perimeter of Trump Tower with reinforced dump trucks in anticipation of Election Day violence. 
+The dump trucks flank the skyscraper on all sides, and are supplemented by guardrails and heavily armed police officers. This morning, the building was not open to the general public and traffic crawled through a narrow corridor of trucks and police. On the street, supporters and protesters stood for interviews with a burgeoning press corps camped across the street. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lives in a penthouse near the top of the building, which also serves as headquarters for his presidential campaign. (RELATED: Election Day Voting Has Begun – Who Is Winning?) 
+Police told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the dumping beds are filled with sand, which adds weight to each truck, in effect making it impossible to run the barrier. Police decided to circle the Tower with trucks as a hedge against car bombs, or some such similar incendiary munition delivered by car. The fleet of trucks will travel with Trump this evening to surround the New York Hilton Midtown Manhattan Hotel, where Trump is hosting his victory rally. The NYPD maintained a presence around the hotel for several days, which is also closed to the public. 
+Guests staying in the hotel on unrelated business must present their keycards at a security check-point before entering the premises. 
+Similar security measures will attend Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s headquarters at the Javits Convention Center in Hell’s Kitchen this evening.",FAKE
+10212,"AT&T-Time Warner Merger To Expand Corporate, State Control Of Media","World Socialist Web Site 
+AT&T, the telecommunications and cable TV colossus, announced Saturday that it has struck a deal to acquire the pay TV and entertainment giant Time Warner. The merger, if approved by the Justice Department and US regulatory agencies under the next administration, will create a corporate entity with unprecedented control over both the distribution and content of news and entertainment. It will also mark an even more direct integration of the media and the telecomm industry with the state. 
+AT&T, the largest US telecom group by market value, already controls huge segments of the telephone, pay-TV and wireless markets. Its $48.5 billion purchase of the satellite provider DirecTV last year made it the biggest pay-TV provider in the country, ahead of Comcast. It is the second-largest wireless provider, behind Verizon. 
+Time Warner is the parent company of such cable TV staples as HBO, Cinemax, CNN and the other Turner System channels: TBS, TNT and Turner Sports. It also owns the Warner Brothers film and TV studio. 
+The Washington Post on Sunday characterized the deal as a “seismic shift” in the “media and technology world,” one that “could turn the legacy carrier [AT&T] into a media titan the likes of which the United States has never seen.” The newspaper cited Craig Moffett, an industry analyst at Moffett-Nathanson, as saying there was no precedent for a telecom company the size of AT&T seeking to acquire a content company such as Time Warner. 
+“A [telecom company] owning content is something that was expressly prohibited for a century” by the government, Moffett told the Post . 
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, in keeping with his anti-establishment pose, said Saturday that the merger would lead to “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” and that, if elected, he would block it. 
+The Clinton campaign declined to comment on Saturday. Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine, speaking on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” on Sunday, said he had “concerns” about the merger, but he declined to take a clear position, saying he had not seen the details. 
+AT&T, like the other major telecom and Internet companies, has collaborated with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its blanket, illegal surveillance of telephone and electronic communications. NSA documents released last year by Edward Snowden show that AT&T has played a particularly reactionary role. 
+As the New York Times put it in an August 15, 2015 article reporting the Snowden leaks: “The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.” 
+The article went on to cite an NSA document describing the relationship between AT&T and the spy agency as “highly collaborative,” and quoted other documents praising the company’s “extreme willingness to help” and calling their mutual dealings “a partnership, not a contractual relationship.” 
+The Times noted that AT&T installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs based in the US, provided technical assistance enabling the NSA to wiretap all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a client of AT&T, and gave the NSA access to billions of emails. 
+If the merger goes through, this quasi-state entity will be in a position to directly control the content of much of the news and entertainment accessed by the public via television, the movies and smart phones. The announcement of the merger agreement is itself an intensification of a process of telecom and media convergence and consolidation that has been underway for years, and has accelerated under the Obama administration. 
+In 2009, the cable provider Comcast announced its acquisition for $30 billion of the entertainment conglomerate NBCUniversal, which owns both the National Broadcasting Company network and Universal Studios. The Obama Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission ultimately approved the merger. 
+Other recent mergers involving telecoms and content producers include, in addition to AT&T’s 2015 purchase of DirecTV: Verizon Communications’ acquisition of the Huffington Post , Yahoo and AOL; Lionsgate’s deal to buy the pay-TV channel Starz; Verizon’s agreement announced in the spring to buy DreamWorks Animation; and Charter Communications’ acquisition of the cable provider Time Warner Cable, approved this year. 
+The AT&T-Time Warner announcement will itself trigger a further restructuring and consolidation of the industry, as rival corporate giants scramble to compete within a changing environment that has seen the growth of digital and streaming companies such as Netflix and Hulu at the expense of the traditional cable and satellite providers. 
+The Financial Times wrote on Saturday that “the mooted deal could fire the starting gun on a round of media and technology consolidation.” Referring to a new series of mergers and acquisitions, the Wall Street Journal on Sunday quoted a “top media executive” as saying that an AT&T-Time Warner deal would “certainly kick off the dance.” 
+The scale of the buyout agreed unanimously by the boards of both companies is massive. AT&T is to pay Time Warner a reported $85.4 billion in cash and stocks, at a price of $107.50 per Time Warner share. This is significantly higher than the current market price of Time Warner shares, which rose 8 percent to more than $89 Friday on rumors of the merger deal. 
+In addition, AT&T is to take on Time Warner’s debt, pushing the actual cost of the deal to more than $107 billion. The merged company would have a total debt of $150 billion, making inevitable a campaign of cost-cutting and job reduction. 
+The unprecedented degree of monopolization of the telecom and media industries is the outcome of the policy of deregulation, launched in the late 1970s by the Democratic Carter administration and intensified by every administration, Republican or Democratic, since then. In 1982, the original AT&T, colloquially known as “Ma Bell,” was broken up into seven separate and competing regional “Baby Bell” companies. 
+This was sold to the public as a means of ending the tightly regulated AT&T monopoly over telephone service and unleashing the “competitive forces” of the market, where increased competition would supposedly lower consumer prices and improve service. What ensued was a protracted process of mergers and disinvestments involving the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs, which drove up stock prices at the expense of both employees and the consuming public. 
+Dallas-based Southwestern Bell was among the most aggressive of the “Baby Bells” in expanding by means of acquisitions and ruthless cost-cutting, eventually evolving into the new AT&T. Now, the outcome of deregulation has revealed itself to be a degree of monopolization and concentrated economic power beyond anything previously seen.",FAKE
+4425,Fox News has no shame: Easily duped wingnuts spout phony science and climate-change lies,"Back in 2013 these stooges were promoting the phony notion that “Arctic ice has grown to a record level!” It hadn’t. After that debacle, they claimed UN scientists had found their predictions of warming were off by 50 percent or more. They weren’t. More recently, they were pushing the false claim that the globe has been cooling ever since 1998. It hasn’t been. And, of course, when all else failed, they could always fall back on their old standby: weaning ourselves from dangerous fossil fuels won’t make any difference anyway because China would never do the same. But, of course, China is now doing so at a rate that should embarrass these jackasses. But it won’t. Because they are never embarrassed about being wrong.
+
+So, with 2014 recently clocking in as the hottest year for the planet on record, according to every major world agency that measures such things, and with 13 of the hottest years on record all falling within the past 15 years, these clowns are getting pretty desperate for something — anything — to use to keep the denialist scam going on behalf of the most profitable industry in the history of civilization.
+
+The latest such scam, helpfully propagated on several Fox “News” shows last week, is that the so-called “scientists” have been caught red-handed in the act of “lying” about raw temperature data! That’s right! They have been manipulating the data to exaggerate the extent of global warming!
+
+Except, of course, they haven’t, and they aren’t…
+
+During an episode of “Outnumbered” on Fox “News” last week, in which the hosts were outraged — outraged! — about an interview in which President Obama correctly asserted that more Americans are affected by climate change than by terrorism, Fox’s mononymously-named Kennedy interrupted the show’s guest, attorney Mark Eiglarsh, to nail him with the newest false claim of climate denialists.
+
+Eiglarsh asked: “Is there anything factually incorrect about the statement that more Americans…?”
+
+Eiglarsh ignored her and continued: “…More Americans are impacted by climate change [than by terrorism]?”
+
+“What about the Telegraph report that shows the original data versus the published data? The NASA published data!” Kennedy continued. “There was a great disparity because they lied about the actual data until someone went back to these weather stations in South America and Antarctica and thought, ‘Hmm, maybe something is amiss here?’ And they realized there is a scandalous discrepancy in what we have been sold!”
+
+Well, no, they didn’t. Setting aside Kennedy’s confusion between the Arctic and Antarctica — an easy enough mistake to make — her spirited “gotcha” assertion was still flat wrong.
+
+She was hardly the first stooge to be taken in by it.
+
+Days earlier, Rush Limbaugh announced: “We have documented that so much of what they say is untrue, one of the biggest is the hoax of global warming which the UK Telegraph, as a story yesterday exposes it, may be the biggest hoax in all of science ever!”
+
+Days earlier, daffy Christian Broadcast Network host Pat Robertson dutifully parroted the same inaccurate nonsense on his “700 Club” show: “A climate expert, ya know, has come out and said that they have actually manipulated the figures to try and prove global warming.”
+
+On the same day, on another Fox show, “The Five,” former White House Press Secretary turned Fox “News” host Dana Perino echoed the same false claim during another segment attempting to downplay concerns about global warming in favor of concerns about terrorism.
+
+Perino said the White House is “actually kind of lucky that we don’t cover climate change as much as we should. Because yesterday, it was reported that the temperature readings have been fabricated and it’s all blowing up in their faces.”
+
+Another host on the show declared that it was “fraud science!” Perino answered, “Yes, I agree.”
+
+So, just as in the past — as with the bullshit report about Arctic ice, or the bullshit revelations that scientists were off in their predictions by 50 percent, or the bullshit claims about a pause or reversal of warming since 1998, or the bullshit assertion that China is unwilling to do anything about its own carbon emissions — Rupert Murdoch’s Fox “News” and its bedfellows can once again be relied upon to endlessly echo the latest bullshit-that-seems-legit-but-is-in-fact-bullshit portending to expose the great “hoax” that is global warming.
+
+Politifact — which is not always a reliable source for news itself — decided to take a look at Perino’s version of the claim. In this case, they got it right and declared Perino’s assertion as a “Pants-on-Fire Lie.”
+
+So here’s how this latest scam came to be taken for gospel by the incurious wingnut dupes, along with the actual facts debunking the false claim.
+
+An opinion piece by Christopher Booker in the the Telegraph, a right-wing British newspaper, declared that “Fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever!” The column was a follow-up to another Booker piece two weeks earlier, headlined “How we are STILL being tricked by flawed data on global warming,” in which climate change-denying blogger Paul Homewood was cited for having busted scientists for faking temperature data at three weather stations in Paraguay.
+
+“In each instance,” Booker asserted, based on Homewood’s findings, “the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.”
+
+Booker reported that Homewood subsequently discovered other similar cases where temperature recordings had been adjusted in both South America and in some locations in the Arctic, to make the average daily temperatures appear to have warmed over the past 60 years, instead of cooled, which the deniers are claiming. “In nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded,” Booker writes, before going on to describe the data as a “wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record,” as part of the “most costly scare the world has known.”
+
+You’ll be stunned to learn that the claims by Booker, based on Homewood’s revelations — and dutifully repeated over and again by the wingnuts — are all, actually, bullshit. The “controversy” comes from adjustments made to the stream of raw data from thousands of land- and sea-based weather stations around the globe in order to keep them consistent, so that an apples-to-apples comparison of temperatures can be made over time, even as the location of weather stations — and the technology used since the mid-1800s to measure those temperatures — changes. “For instance,” Politifact explains, “local officials might move a station from a valley to a nearby hilltop. They might change the time of day when they record their measurements from sunrise to sunset. They might change the kind of thermometer they use. In the ocean, the practice once was to haul up a bucket of water. Later, the standard practice was to measure the temperature from the engine’s intake valve.” Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) must then make adjustments to some of those raw temps “to account for the human factors that would skew the data regardless of what happened with actual temperatures.” “The temperature records are based on weather station data. But people didn’t expect the data to be used for monitoring long-term climate change when they started collecting it,” the University of York’s Dr. Kevin Cowtan explained in a video debunking the first misleading Telegraph article on this a few weeks ago. “It was for recording the weather, hence the name weather station. As a result they weren’t always very careful about changes to the instruments or their usage. When we change an instrument we have to recalibrate to ensure the new instrument gives the same readings as the old one. The original weather station operators didn’t always do this. So NOAA have to do a retrospective calibration by comparing nearby weather stations.” So, yes, Homewood has “busted” NOAA scientists making adjustments to their raw data in a number of locations. The problem, however, is that when all such adjustments are examined, the changes actually lower global temperatures trends overall. The issue is perhaps best described in the Politifact piece by Zeke Hausfather, a data scientist with Berkley Earth, a group of researchers that have been funded in the past by the climate-denying Koch brothers (which is a point not noted by Politifact). Hausfather says the data cited by Homewood have been cherry-picked in order to seed doubt in climate change science [emphasis added]… “(They) look through all those thousands of stations, find a few that show big adjustments, and tell everyone that they are evidence of fraud,” Hausfather said. “You will rarely see them pick out stations likeReno, Paris, London, Tokyo, or many others where the adjustments dramatically lower the warming trend.” Hausfather and his colleagues traced how the adjustment methods changed the temperature data differently around the world since 1850. In the graph below, zero is the baseline. Above zero, temperatures have been adjusted upward, below it temperatures have been adjusted downward.   In the United States, with about 5 percent of Earth’s land area, the official data file raised temperatures compared to the original readings. But the same methods lowered the data records in Africa, and for all land-based readings taken together, the adjustments basically made no change at all (the black line). With ocean temperature trends, the efforts to compensate for the human factor lower the numbers dramatically. “The net effect of adjustments is to actually reduce the amount of global warming we’ve observed since 1880 by about 20 percent,” Hausfather said. “Folks skeptical of temperature adjustments are welcome not to use them if they’d like, but you end up with more global warming, not less.” Got that? Yes, some adjustments serve to increase the temperature trends. But, overall, the adjustments actually serve to lower the increase in temperatures across the globe over the last 150 years “by about 20 percent.” “It is important to keep in mind that the largest adjustment in the global surface temperature record occurs over the oceans,” NOAA told Media Matters in an email last week. “Adjustments to account for the transition in sea surface temperature observing methods actually lowers global temperature trends.” Want to do away with all of those adjustments, Fox “News”? OK. But if you do, the problem of human-caused global warming is even worse than climate scientists are now reporting it to be. And, by the way, though Politifact doesn’t mention it, most of the “experts” they consulted in their article disabusing the claims by Perino, Booker and Homewood all happen to be, like the Koch-funded Berkley group, noted climate change skeptics themselves. For his part, as Ars Technica’s John Timmer notes, Booker’s Wikipedia entry “shows that he has a lot of issues with science in general, claiming that things like asbestos and second-hand smoke are harmless, and arguing against evolution. So, this sort of immunity to well-established evidence seems to be a recurring theme in his writing.” None of that, naturally, disqualifies him from being a source for Fox and friends when it comes to “The Biggest Science Scandal Ever!” And it’s effective. The article earned the Telegraph a ton of traffic (there are 28,872 comments on the item, if that’s any indication) and the bulk of the chumps who clicked on the page bought the bullshit — a survey at the end asks readers if they believed global warming has “been exaggerated by scientists.” 91 percent of the 127,199 readers who answered the online poll believe it has been. Nonetheless, whether Big Carbon’s stooges have fallen for it or not, another climate change denier myth is quashed. Don’t worry though. This one will be repeated anyway, and then another will most assuredly rise up in its place soon enough. And there will be enough Fox “News” dupes — both viewers and “reporters” — willing to both buy and sell it. All meant to continue delaying necessary changes that might help stave off our planetary climate crisis, just so that the fossil fuel industry and its supporters can continue to make ever more profits for as long as possible, cause fuck all of you liberal lefty tree-hugging science-loving communists who have fallen for the great “hoax” that humanity should live on a livable planet.",REAL
+9495,Racist Sign Calls For Lynching Black People To Prevent Them From Getting Equal Rights,"on November 13, 2016 3:09 pm · 
+As predicted, Donald Trump’s victory on Election Day has emboldened racist conservatives to start harassing and attacking minorities. 
+And it’s even happening in the deep blue state of California, where a woman spotted a sign hanging on the side of a building in the town of Pittsburg and snapped a photo of it. 
+Twitter user James Thompson posted the image of the sign on the social media platform after his sister sent it to him. This picture was taken in Pittsburgh California. My sister texted this to me 10 minutes ago.Our democracy is being tested even in California pic.twitter.com/gDLKw54Lox 
+— James Thompson (@JETBallin) November 13, 2016 
+The sign clearly promotes lynching to prevent African-Americans from getting equal rights. 
+“You can hang a n****r from a tree / Equal rights he will never see!” it says. 
+The FBI has been notified and local police have filed a lawsuit in an effort to force the owners of the sign to remove it. 
+In the wake of Trump’s surprising and depressing victory there has been a rise in the number of racist incidents in this country. In fact, there have been 139 reports of people being bullied by Trump supporters since the election night results. 
+These incidents include the harassment of a Muslim teacher by a student in Georgia, and students designating water fountains “white” or “colored” at a Florida high school. 
+Frankly, there are so many incidents that it’s difficult to list them all. You can find a somewhat comprehensive tally here . 
+This is what Trump’s America looks like and it’s scary. And this has all happend in the course of a few days as Melania Trump continues to tell the media that her focus will be on ending bullying. What exactly does she mean by that? Is she going to call out all bullying, including the racist bullying being perpetrated by her husband’s own supporters? Or is she going to ignore those incidents and merely whine about people who criticize her husband. Because right now, she isn’t even First Lady yet and her “effort” has failed miserably. And she only has her husband to blame.",FAKE
+23,"House OKs bill blocking Planned Parenthood funds, amid shutdown worries","The House voted Friday to block federal funding to Planned Parenthood for a year and curb some abortion practices, in the chamber's first legislative response to videos showing the abortion provider's tissue harvesting practices.
+
+The Planned Parenthood ""de-fund"" bill passed 241-187, on a nearly party-line vote.
+
+Hanging over the debate, though, was the possibility of a government shutdown showdown. Republican leaders brought the legislation to the floor as they try to address lawmakers' outrage over the videos. Some conservatives originally wanted to demand Planned Parenthood be de-funded as part of a must-pass government budget bill; House leaders tried a different tack Friday with the two bills, which are not tied to the overall budget.
+
+The stand-alone measures, though, stand little chance of becoming law. The Senate has not yet acted on the issue. And the bills not only face opposition from most Democrats but veto threats from the White House.
+
+That means some conservatives could still want to tie the issue to the budget package, as a means of leverage. Congress has until the end of the month to pass a new budget, or else parts of the government could again start to shutter, as happened in 2013.
+
+On Friday, House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., downplayed the chances of such drama.
+
+""We will pass a bill that funds the government,"" he told Fox News.
+
+The bills approved Friday were a reaction to videos showing Planned Parenthood officials casually describing how they provide researchers with tissue from aborted fetuses. The anti-abortion activists who secretly recorded the videos say they show that Planned Parenthood is illegally profiting from organ sales. The organization says it's broken no laws and is being victimized by deceitfully edited recordings.
+
+""Anyone who watches those videos -- they are horrific,"" McCarthy told Fox News. ""Aborting live babies for profit -- why would anybody want to spend tax dollars for that?""
+
+The first bill would block Planned Parenthood's federal funds for a year. The other would impose criminal penalties on doctors who don't try saving infants born alive during abortions.
+
+But with the overall government funding issue not resolved, Democrats once again have taken to accusing Republicans of playing games with the economy. The White House, in a statement released Thursday evening, said Obama called the shutdown threat ""a game of chicken with our economy that we cannot accept.""
+
+It's a tricky situation for House Speaker John Boehner, who wants to avoid a partial government shutdown while preventing a rebellion in the ranks.
+
+""Our leaders wave the white flag every time there's a confrontation,"" said Rep. Mark Salmon, R-Ariz. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said Boehner wants to ""implement what the lobbyists want, not what the constituents of our district want.""
+
+At a closed meeting Thursday among House Republicans, leaders unveiled internal polling that attendees said showed most people would oppose a government shutdown -- even those who have seen the videos and oppose financing Planned Parenthood.
+
+Many Republicans argued that the polling showed a shutdown fight would be damaging and unwinnable, especially since Senate Democrats already derailed a bill erasing Planned Parenthood's funds.
+
+""Pounding on the table doesn't turn 54 into 60 in the Senate,"" said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., referring to the number of GOP senators and the number it would take to end Democratic filibusters.
+
+The bill by Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., would transfer Planned Parenthood's federal money to thousands of government-backed community health centers. Supporters say that would keep women's health care intact, but opponents say those centers are overwhelmed and often far from women who need them.
+
+Planned Parenthood gets around $450 million yearly in federal payments, mostly Medicaid reimbursements for handling low-income patients, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That's around one-third of the $1.3 billion yearly budget for the organization, which has nearly 700 clinics and provides sexual disease testing, contraceptives and abortions.
+
+Conservatives' determination to block Planned Parenthood's money has been partly fueled by the race for the GOP's presidential nomination. Several candidates used their Wednesday night debate to urge lawmakers to turn off that funding spigot.
+
+But spotlighting GOP divisions, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., wrote Thursday to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, one of the presidential hopefuls. Cruz wants Republicans to oppose financing the government unless Planned Parenthood's money is cut off, defending his effort during the debate by saying, ""I'm proud to stand for life.""
+
+Ayotte, who faces her own tough re-election fight next year, wrote that she opposed risking a partial shutdown ""given the challenges and threats we face at home and abroad"" and asked, ""What is your strategy to succeed in actually defunding Planned Parenthood?""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6911,Debate: NATO's eastward expansion,"The Debate NATO's eastward expansion 
+In this episode of The Debate, Press TV has conducted an interview with Center for Research on Globalization President Michel Chossudovsky from Montreal, and Ian Williams, a senior analyst with the Foreign Policy in Focus, from New York, to discuss NATO’s biggest military build-up in Eastern Europe near Russia’s borders since the Cold War. Loading ...",FAKE
+3812,State of the Union recap: Obama sells optimism to nervous nation,"Washington (CNN) Putting aside a sudden crisis with Iran, President Barack Obama on Tuesday urged Americans in his final State of the Union address to reject the politics of tribalism and fear that have rocked the campaign to find his successor and to build a ""clear-eyed, big-hearted"" and ""optimistic"" nation.
+
+Delivering his annual report to the nation, Obama did not name Republican 2016 candidates. But he took clear, implied shots at them nevertheless, particularly front-runner Donald Trump, as well as Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. America's destiny, the President said, was imperiled by a political system festering in malice, gridlock and in the grip of the rich and the powerful.
+
+Obama also took on critics who accuse him of weakening American power abroad and Republicans who say he is underplaying the threat from radical Islamist groups such as ISIS. He mocked the contention that fighters on ""on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages"" represented an existential threat to America.
+
+Rubio takes a selfie with Sen. Lisa Murkowski before the State of the Union.
+
+Rubio takes a selfie with Sen. Lisa Murkowski before the State of the Union.
+
+Kim Davis, center, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples, arrives before the speech.
+
+Kim Davis, center, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples, arrives before the speech.
+
+Tuesday's address before a packed House chamber marked the debut of new House Speaker Ryan -- a longtime Obama rival -- on the platform alongside Vice President Biden.
+
+Tuesday's address before a packed House chamber marked the debut of new House Speaker Ryan -- a longtime Obama rival -- on the platform alongside Vice President Biden.
+
+First lady Michelle Obama sits beside an empty chair as her husband speaks. The chair represents the victims of gun violence in America.
+
+First lady Michelle Obama sits beside an empty chair as her husband speaks. The chair represents the victims of gun violence in America.
+
+Obama gives copies of his speech to Biden and Ryan.
+
+Obama gives copies of his speech to Biden and Ryan.
+
+Biden points at Obama during the State of the Union.
+
+Biden points at Obama during the State of the Union.
+
+Obama reads from the text of his State of the Union address.
+
+Obama reads from the text of his State of the Union address.
+
+President Barack Obama delivers his final State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, January 12.
+
+President Barack Obama delivers his final State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, January 12.
+
+The President acknowledged that a torrent of change, technological advances and economic dislocation has left many Americans fearful of the future and anxious as social structures that have underpinned the life of the nation for decades fray. But he urged them not to fall prey to the periodic temptation that has emerged throughout history to alienate minorities and resist social change.
+
+""Each time, there have been those who told us to fear the future; who claimed we could slam the brakes on change, promising to restore past glory if we just got some group or idea that was threatening America under control,"" Obama said. ""And each time, we overcame those fears.""
+
+""We made change work for us, always extending America's promise outward, to the next frontier, to more and more people. And because we did -- because we saw opportunity where others saw only peril -- we emerged stronger and better than before.""
+
+Economic opportunity, security and a sustainable, peaceful planet are possible, he said, if the country could return to ""rational, constructive debates.""
+
+""It will only happen if we fix our politics,"" he said.
+
+In a way, Obama's seventh and last State of the Union address was a microcosm of his entire presidency: He invoked a chorus of hope and optimism about America's destiny and the transformative nature of change but was undercut by the poisoned political divides he has been unable to narrow -- and that have even grown during his presidency. Then he encountered fierce opposition from Republicans who believe he has transformed the nation by eroding its exceptional qualities and thwarting the Constitution.
+
+Meanwhile, a foreign policy crisis raging in the Middle East after Iran seized 10 U.S. sailors exemplified the struggles in which Obama has had to impose U.S. authority in an increasingly chaotic world that has challenged his core mission of ending costly American wars abroad.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN that the service members would be released ""very soon."" And Obama did not address the crisis in his speech but defended the legacy-building deal reached to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program.
+
+While Obama, in deference to his ebbing power as a lame-duck president, avoided the long list of legislative proposals that Congress has no intention of taking up, he strongly defended his domestic record, claiming credit for 14 million new jobs and a halving of the unemployment rate. He said those who claimed the economy was in decline are ""peddling fiction.""
+
+He rebuked politicians who draw congressional districts to protect safe seats and vowed to launch a national effort to secure voting rights, an issue particularly important to minority communities. And he named Vice President Joe Biden, who lost his beloved son Beau to cancer last year, to head ""Mission Control"" in a new ""moon shot"" to cure the disease. He told conservatives who deny climate change to ""have at it"" because they were defying the world.
+
+Obama also vowed -- once again -- to fight to close the war on terror camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, renewing one of the first promises of his presidency that has been thwarted by Congress. He called the facility a ""recruitment brochure for our enemies and was expensive and unnecessary.""
+
+The first African-American president also offered a detailed rebuttal of the kind of politics that alienates people rather than unites them. At times, Obama was almost pleading with his audience to embrace the vision of hope and change that swept him to power and then was sullied by the bitter realities of polarized politics over a darker vision of America's character.
+
+""What I am asking for his hard. It's easier to be cynical; to accept that change isn't possible, and politics is hopeless, and to believe that our voices and actions don't matter,"" Obama said.
+
+""But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future.""
+
+It seemed clear that the President had Trump in his thoughts.
+
+""As frustration grows, there will be voices urging us to fall back into tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don't look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background,"" Obama said, voicing a familiar critique of Democrats and some Republicans at the rhetoric of the billionaire real estate mogul whose populist campaign has taken American politics by storm.
+
+""We can't afford to go down that path. It won't deliver the economy we want, or the security we want, but most of all, it contradicts everything that makes us the envy of the world.""
+
+In the Republican response, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley also -- after criticizing Obama's policies -- offered a repudiation of Trump, decrying the ""siren call of the angriest voices.""
+
+Obama appeared to relish the chance to take on Republican critics who have lambasted his performance as commander in chief.
+
+""I told you earlier all the talk of America's economic decline is political hot air. Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It's not even close,"" Obama said.
+
+The man who burst on the political scene by rejecting the notion that there was a red America or a blue America also diagnosed a sick political system.
+
+""It doesn't work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic,"" Obama warned, and even accepted a share of the blame for not uniting warring political factions.
+
+""It's one of the few regrets of my presidency --  that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There's no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I'll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.
+
+And he slammed Republicans who have responded to the spread of ISIS across much of the Middle East and the group's apparent widening of its target list to Europe and the United States, by warning that its rise is a threat to America itself.
+
+""As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands,"" Obama said.
+
+""They do not threaten our national existence. That's the story ISIL wants to tell; that's the kind of propaganda they use to recruit,"" Obama said, warning against pushing away vital Americans allies in the Middle East by ""echoing the lie"" that the group represents Islam.
+
+""We just need to call them what they are  -- killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed,"" he said, warning that ""tough talk or calls to carpet bomb civilians"" may work as a soundbite but don't pass muster on the world stage. Obama's comments appeared aimed at Cruz, who has warned he would carpet bomb ISIS and Rubio, who says America is waging an existential fight against radical Islamic terrorism.
+
+The Iran incident complicated Obama's effort to counter claims by critics that the escalating chaos in the Middle East is the result of a deficit of U.S. leadership and emboldened attacks by GOP presidential candidates who contend his ""weak"" performance as commander in chief has opened vacuums exploited by U.S. enemies.
+
+Republican candidates and lawmakers immediately seized on the incident to charge that Obama has emboldened Iran's aggressive behavior in its neighborhood by offering sanctions relief in return for a halting of its nuclear weapons program.
+
+""This is the latest manifestation of the weakness of Barack Obama, that every bad actor ... views Obama as a laughingstock,"" Cruz said on WRKO radio.
+
+Rubio said Iran's provocations were the result of having a ""weak president"" in the Oval Office. ""Iran is testing the boundaries of this administration's resolve. And they know the boundaries are pretty wide and this administration is willing to let them get away with many things,"" said Rubio on Fox News.
+
+And Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner told CNN's Jake Tapper on ""The Lead"" that Obama should delay the start of his speech ""to talk about what has happened.""
+
+Republicans agree with Obama that his presidency has been transformational -- but in a bad way. They believe he has presided over anemic growth rates, wielded executive power on immigration, gun control and climate change to thwart the Constitution, is oblivious to the severity of Islamist terrorism and has engineered an era of declining American power in the world.
+
+Haley painted an unflattering picture of Obama's America and said the nation would soon have a chance to turn the page in remarks which also seemed to be a repudiation of Trump.
+
+""The President's record has often fallen far short of his soaring words,"" Haley said.
+
+""Many Americans are still feeling the squeeze of an economy too weak to raise income levels. We're feeling a crushing national debt, a health care plan that has made insurance less affordable and doctors less available, and chaotic unrest in many of our cities. Even worse, we are facing the most dangerous terrorist threat our nation has seen since September 11th, and this president appears either unwilling or unable to deal with it.""
+
+Haley took a shot at Obama's foreign policy record, saying a Republican president would ""make international agreements that were celebrated in Israel and protested in Iran, not the other way around.""
+
+The governor also highlighted her personal story as a daughter of Indian immigrants and draw a contrast with some of the rhetoric currently on display in the primary campaign.
+
+""Today, we live in a time of threats like few others in recent memory,"" she said. ""During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation. No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.""
+
+Tuesday's address before a packed House chamber also marked the debut of House Speaker Paul Ryan -- a longtime Obama rival -- on the platform alongside Biden.
+
+And as per tradition, one Cabinet member did not attend the speech. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was named as the ""designated survivor.""",REAL
+9663,Tony Blair suggests a second referendum to reverse Brexit,"Politics Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says UK voters ‘have to build the capability to mobilize and to organize’ against Brexit. 
+Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says Britain should keep its “options open” on whether or not to leave the European Union until after Brexit talks with the bloc are completed. 
+During an interview on Friday with BBC Radio 4's “Today” program, Blair described the EU referendum as “a catastrophe” and said UK voters should be given the option of a second EU referendum. 
+Britain should not withdraw from the EU until it becomes clearer how Brexit would impact UK’s economic, social and cultural future, Blair said. 
+""The bizarre thing about this referendum is that we took a decision but we still don't know the precise terms,” he said. “There’s got to be some way, either through parliament, or through an election, possibly through another referendum, that people express their view.” 
+The former premier, who was in office from 1997 until 2007, said it should be possible for the public to switch their verdict if it becomes clear the alternative negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May is going to be worse. 
+Blair’s argument contrasts sharply with that of May, who has repeatedly said that “Brexit means Brexit” and that she’ll respect the referendum result. Blair had argued that Britain should stay in the EU before the referendum. 
+Economic growth in the UK is expected to slow significantly next year, due to uncertainty over of the Brexit vote. 
+Experts have warned that leaving the EU will severely hurt London’s position as a financial hub, unless the UK decides to keep its access to the single EU market by loosening its stance on immigration. 
+If the UK loses its access to the EU’s single market, the resulting increase in the costs of doing business and exporting to the EU would hurt Britain’s competitive position in Europe. Loading ...",FAKE
+10318,Selected Not Elected: The Election Has Been Stolen,"
+
+As it stands now, the election has been stolen by George Soros and Hillary Clinton.
+Examples of voter fraud are pouring in from across the country. George Soros and Hillary Clinton have made a mockery of our election. America is quickly descending into Stalin’s Russia. The great democratic experiment is over and our overlords (i.e. George Soros) rule America from behind the scenes. If Clinton becomes president, Soros will be the de facto president.
+In the furtherance of this goal, voter fraud is rampant. Here is what is taking place in my home county. It is representative of what is happening across the country.
+ 
+On Saturday, I am interviewing a Texas elector, Ken Clark, from the electoral college. He told me that when Bush was opposed by Gore, that he received enormous pressure to change his vote in the days leading up to the electors vote including being contacted at his hotel prior to the vote. This is already happening with some of the Arizona electors. It is going to happen all across the country. Massive Voter Fraud in Arizona As I have reported, and it bears repeating, a very reliable political source in Arizona has reported to me that an elector has been offered an inducement (bribe) to vote for Clinton instead of Trump. Details are still emerging and I expect to get more in the immediate few days following the election. I can say now, that the inducements included payment to a phony shell corporation in an off shore account. It should also be noted that Arizona is on the list of 16 states to be using George Soros’ voting machines. The following is an example of this impropriety at work. I received this communication last week from a relative of an employee of the Maricopa County Clerk’s office that is in charge of local elections in the Phoenix area. Dear Dave, I have a relative who works in elections for the county. What they have told me is scary beyond belief. During the primary election as you will remember, people lined up for hours to vote because our illustrious leader Helen Purcell purposely limited the amount of voting locations. My relative was a witness to the manner in which early ballots were transferred for counting. They saw an individual by themself transfer the votes. The ballots were in a cardboard box and were open? Anyone could tamper with the vote. I am telling that the same thing is going on again right here in Maricopa County. This practice which is illegal will allow the Clinton to commit massive voter fraud against Donald Trump. Some of the new voting machines have been tested and they revert to a vote for Clinton when a Republic straight line ticket is entered. Ballots that were mixed between the parties but had Trump as the choice were tagged as unreadable and if the test was real, would have been thrown out based on user error. The top people here know what is going on and they are not reporting this as of October 17, 2016. At County elections there is a very intimidating feel. Everyone is afraid to speak out. And I almost forgot that Sheriff Joe’s trial run showed the same pattern as Trump. They want him out too. Well this unbelievable account got attention from Phoenix TV station, News Channel 3. On October 26, at 605 AM, the station ran a very close version of the story described above. I was stunned as I saw the report parallel the email I received (above). However, at the end of the report, they let a Democratic Party Official, who looked like a heroin addict claim that similar problems with the voting machines were also found for Hillary Clinton. Yet, not one example was offered of this Democratic claim on the TV report, just her word in an example of very shoddy journalism. Speaking of the massive fraud going on in Maricopa County, I want to reiterate what I reported on 10/26/2016. A postal employee told me that they had already processed 2.7 million votes from early balloting. There are only 3.4 million registered voters in all of Arizona. Are we supposed to believe that 80% of Arizona’s residents are voting? Are supposed to believe that this unbelievably high percentage of Arizona voters are voting by mail in ballot? These numbers defy logic. This is a clear case of ballot stuffing. Should we be surprised by the events in Arizona? The head of Maricopa County elections, Helen Purcell, oversaw a voting fiasco in the last election,the Republican primary election. Yet, she was re-elected by the must suspicious and narrowest of margins. Also in Maricopa County, County DA, Bill Montgomery has filed an election tampering charges against George Soros for his personal donation of millions of dollars that were used to support Democratic prosecutors. In other words, when the voter fraud is unveiled and exposed for all to see, Soros will see that nobody gets prosecuted for the bad acts being committed by the Democrats in the same manner in which Comey and Lynch let Hillary Clinton avoid the per walk. The Purpose of the Polls The polls conducted by mainstream media outlets are shoddy and the include small sample sizes and a disproportionate number of Democrats that are surveyed. The purpose is to create the perception that Trump cannot win and when the voter fraud kicks in, as it is now, nobody will question the fraud because they have been falsely conditioned that Trump will lose. Further, the polls are designed to discourage Trump supporters from voting and since their man cannot win, why not just stay home and have a beer? Here is a summary of a recent independent poll in which Trump was found to be leading 67%-19% over Clinton. 
+When the fraud is cover and Clinton has won, Americans will have to make a choice on how to respond.
+P lease Donate to The Common Sense Show 
+PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US 
+
+ 
+
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.
+
+
+ 
+",FAKE
+5233,"Clinton, Trump at First Debate: Was It All America Expected?","It was a showdown millions of Americans have been anticipating ever since Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton emerged as the Republican and Democratic nominees for the presidency.
+
+Debate moderator NBC's Lester Holt navigated the candidates through three main issues, including achieving prosperity, America's direction, and securing America.
+
+The debate fired off with questions about how each candidate plans on securing more jobs for Americans. Trump's strategy is to keep American companies from seeking cheaper work outside of America, while Clinton proposed taxing the wealthy to ""build an economy for everyone.""
+
+
+
+ Get the latest analysis and coverage
+
+ from your trusted CBN News political team.
+
+But the stage heated up when Holt questioned the candidates about their tax returns, specifically asking Trump why he has yet to release his to the public.
+
+""I will release my tax returns against my lawyer's wishes when she (Clinton) releases her 33,000 emails that have been deleted,"" Trump fired back, drawing audible cheers from the crowd.
+
+Clinton's emails have been a constant pressure point in her campaign, leading many Americans to question their trust for the Democratic nominee.
+
+""I made a mistake using a private email,"" Clinton responded. ""I take full responsibility for that.""
+
+Clinton skirted the issue and neither candidate addressed the email scandal again throughout the entirety of the debate.
+
+Another hot topic was the issue of race. The questions came under the shadow of several deadly police shootings of black men in recent weeks that has left America divided and frustrated.
+
+Both candidates agree they must work to restore trust between communities and the police, but they took very different stances on how to lower high crime rates in cities like Chicago.
+
+""The gun epidemic is the leading cause of death among African American men,"" Clinton argued, saying dangerous people should never be allowed to own guns.
+
+Although Trump agreed that there needs to be better vetting of gun ownership, he emphasized ""law and order"" and better policing.
+
+""We have to be very strong and we have to be very vigilant,"" he added.
+
+But Clinton believes Americans need to be more vigilant about how they interect with their Muslim communities and questioned Trump's own sentiments about Muslims.
+
+""Donald has consistently insulted Muslims abroad and Muslims at home when we need to be cooperating with Muslim nations,"" she said. ""We need to have close working cooperation with law enforcement agencies in these communities, not be alienated and pushed away as some of Donald's rhetoric unfortunately has led to""
+
+Both candidates agreed to be vigilant against terror threats abroad and at home.
+
+""We have to intensify our air strikes against ISIS,"" Clinton said, including taking out top ISIS commander Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
+
+But Trump questioned why in her more than 30 years of political experience she is just now considering this option.
+
+""You were there and you were secretary of state when it (ISIS) was a little infant, now it's in over 30 countries and you're going to stop them? I don't think so,"" Trump said.
+
+Clinton is known for using her decades of political experience as a leg up over political outsider Trump. But Trump believes it is her experience that is precisely the reason Clinton is unfit for the presidency.
+
+""Hillary has experience,"" Trump said. ""But it is bad experience,"" he said, citing the Iranian nuclear deal. He calls the deal ""one of the worst deals"" any country has ever made.
+
+Both of the candidates were eager to defend their turf right up the the last seconds of the debate, raising the anticipation many Americans have for the second round of debates next week.
+
+Earlier in the evening social media was swarming with talk of fact-checking Trump. The social talk continued after the debate with most people posting in favor of their candidate.
+
+CBN News Chief Political Correspondent David Brody tweeted a brief analysis of both, saying Clinton ""stayed calm"" with a solid performance but sounding scripted.
+
+He tweeted Trump ""started strong, then lost focus... but I'm sure his base loved fighting spirit.""
+
+While Americans are left to decide who won their vote, one thing is clear: the fight for the presidency is not over yet.",REAL
+3284,Harry Reid endorses Chuck Schumer to succeed him as Senate Democratic leader,"Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) has endorsed Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to succeed him after he retires at the end of 2016.
+
+""I think Schumer should be able to succeed me,"" Reid said in a Friday morning interview at his home in Washington's West End.
+
+Reid predicted that Schumer, the No. 3 Senate Democrat in leadership and a close friend, would win the Democratic leader post without opposition. He said that the other likely contender, Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), would stand down for Schumer.
+
+Reid and Durbin spoke by phone at about 11 a.m. Friday.
+
+Reid called Schumer ""extremely smart"" and noted the brash, energetic New Yorker would have a ""different style"" than his own soft talking demeanor.
+
+Seemingly comfortable with his decision to not run for re-election, Reid said the liberal wing of the Democratic Party should have faith in Schumer, whose ties to Wall Street fueled his fundraising prowess and helped Democrats win the majority in 2006 and expand it to a super-majority in 2009. Those ties have some liberals questioning whether Schumer should lead the party, but Reid said that Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would serve as the torch bearers for the populist wing and hold the caucus's feet to the fire.
+
+Of his own decision, Reid said he did not want to win another term and grow old in office, saying he wanted to be remembered for his ""first 34 years"" in Congress and not the last few years.
+
+A devout baseball fan, Reid said he never wanted to grow old and not be a real force in the Senate. ""I don't want to be a pinch hitter,"" he said.
+
+Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) released a video announcing he does not intend to run for reelection at the end of his term. Reid said his decision has nothing to do with the injuries he sustained on Jan. 1, 2015. (YouTube/Nevada Senator Harry Reid)",REAL
+3433,How Scalia's death could change Supreme Court and Election 2016,"Antonin Scalia was a conservative giant on the Supreme Court. His death will affect this Supreme Court term, the future balance of the court, and the 2016 election.
+
+Why Trump says he wants to ditch plans for new Air Force One
+
+An American flag flies at half-staff in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington Sunday morning in honor of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died this weekend.
+
+The passing of Justice Antonin Scalia substantially undercuts the ability of the United States Supreme Court to decide some of the most contentious national issues currently pending at the high court.
+
+In addition, it thrusts the nation’s highest court into a glaring spotlight in this year’s presidential election, and it sets the stage for a year-long confrontation between President Obama and Sentate Republicans over not just who should fill the vacant high court seat but how fast the nomination and confirmation process should proceed.
+
+On a human level, Justice Scalia’s sudden death Saturday while on a hunting trip in Texas casts a pall over the institution he loved and served for nearly three decades. He is being remembered by friends and colleagues as one of the most influential justices in a generation, and perhaps in high court history.
+
+They are praising his intellect, his wit, and a combative style from the bench that had a capacity to endear and enrage. He was a gifted writer and, at times, an uncompromising critic of judges and fellow justices with whom he disagreed.
+
+“His brilliance and wit not only lit up a pen; they lit up a room,” said Amy Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor and former Scalia law clerk, in a statement. “He was larger than life, and it is difficult to imagine life without him in it.”
+
+Scalia’s most enduring contribution to American jurisprudence may ultimately be his self-professed fidelity to originalism and his rejection of the concept that the US Constitution is a living document that should be liberally reinterpreted by the courts. Instead, Scalia preached the virtues of remaining faithful to the text – the actual words – in the Constitution or in a statute.
+
+To Scalia, and the growing number of conservative scholars and judges who follow his approach, originalism is a safeguard against judges using their lifetime appointments to amend the Constitution or statutes to reflect their personal policy preferences.
+
+He believed that it was for lawmakers to make laws and that it was for judges to confine themselves to giving no greater or lesser force to the resulting measure.
+
+In a statement to the nation on Saturday night, President Obama praised Scalia as a “brilliant legal mind with an energetic style, incisive wit, and colorful opinions.”
+
+Obama ordered flags across the country to be flown at half-staff in honor of Scalia.
+
+But the president also made clear that he planned to move forward with a nomination to fill the vacant seat at the high court. He called on the Senate to give his nominee a “fair hearing and a timely vote.”
+
+The vacant high court seat is significant because the Supreme Court had been divided with five justices nominated by Republican presidents and four nominated by Democratic presidents. Now, with Scalia’s passing, the divide is four to four.
+
+If Scalia’s seat is filled by a more liberal-leaning Democratic nominee it could substantially shift the balance of power on the high court in a liberal direction in the full range of hot button issues.
+
+It is for that reason that Democrats are already pushing hard for a relatively quick nomination by Obama and a Senate vote this year on that nominee.
+
+For the same reason, Republicans, who currently hold a majority of Senate seats, are insisting that the nomination and any vote be delayed until after the November presidential election.
+
+Senator Chuck Grassley, (R) of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that standard-practice for 80 years has been that Supreme Court nominations and confirmations should not proceed during a presidential election year.
+
+“Given the huge divide in the country, and the fact that this president, above all others, has made no bones about his goal to use the courts to circumvent Congress and push through his own agenda, it only makes sense that we defer to the American people who will elect a new president to select the next Supreme Court justice,” Senator Grassley said.
+
+As for the ongoing work at the Supreme Court itself, what had looked to become one of the most momentous Supreme Court terms in years suddenly looks a lot less so.
+
+In the next three months, the justices are set to hear cases examining abortion restrictions in Texas, the contraception mandate in Obamacare, and whether President Obama acted constitutionally in his executive action on immigration.
+
+Now, with one less vote in the court’s conservative wing, the court appears split four to four between liberals and conservatives.
+
+That doesn’t mean there won’t be significant decisions. For example, if Justice Anthony Kennedy joins his liberal colleagues in the Texas abortion case, as some analysts expect, that could lead to a 5-to-3 decision striking down all or part of the Texas abortion restrictions. That decision could be a landmark and Scalia’s absence would be felt only in the loss of what would likely be a fiery dissenting opinion.
+
+But in the contraceptive mandate case and the Obama immigration cases, the loss of Scalia’s vote could result in a 4-to-4 tie that would leave the lower court decisions in place. Such an outcome would resolve those cases, but set no national precedent.
+
+Legal experts note that decisions in cases that have already been heard in oral argument by the court but not yet publicly announced may change with the loss of Scalia’s vote. Those cases include a dispute testing whether unions representing public employees can require nonmembers to pay fair share fees to a union for collective bargaining. Analysts anticipated that the court might rule 5 to 4 against the unions. That outcome is now unlikely.
+
+In addition, the court was preparing a decision in a case raising a fundamental question about the meaning of “one person, one vote,” and how voting districts are drawn in Texas. The outcome of that case is now also in doubt.
+
+The high court is also considering a potential landmark case examining the use of race in an affirmative action plan at the University of Texas at Austin. But the loss of Scalia’s vote may not undercut a final decision in that case because Justice Elena Kagan is not participating in the dispute. So a 4-to-3 vote is possible.",REAL
+2492,What Trump Will Never Understand About Immigrants,"The teacher thought Feliz Diaz, like those other immigrants from the wrong side of the tracks, was weak and afraid. Someone learned a lesson that day.
+
+Felix Diaz grew up on the wrong side of the Union Pacific railroad tracks in the town of Victorville, California. Victorville is in the Mojave Desert, 100 miles or so from Los Angeles. His father—Porfirio—worked in the cement plant and Carmen, his mother, sewed the family’s clothes. Felix was the youngest of four brothers, and the smallest, the last in line. The shirts he wore to school were hand-me-downs made of cement sacks.
+
+The parents were in the U.S. illegally and every move they made, most of their adult lives, was weighed against the chance of being discovered and deported. The school was called Eva Dell Elementary and Felix’s third-grade teacher—Miss Appleberry—was 40 or so, but new to teaching, unsure of herself around kids, unsure of herself around Mexicans, and maybe because of that, or partly because of that, she yelled a lot. Maybe she was just a natural yeller. Here is how Felix remembers it:
+
+At work then, as now, is the prevalent idea that anyone who doesn’t speak fluent American is at least a little slow. This idea was part of Miss Appleberry’s thinking, even though most of the students in her class were growing up in homes where little English was spoken. Miss Appleberry, in turn, spoke no Spanish. Felix Diaz—who turns 82 this July—remembers this like last week.
+
+Not to make excuses, because there are none for this, but teaching kids who do not speak English requires patience—rope—and Miss Appleberry came to the end of hers early. Not far into the school year she brought out a paddle, and announced a spelling test. “I’m sick of you Mexicans not spelling properly,” she said.
+
+Like everybody else, Mr. Riles walked to work. He smoked two cigarettes on the way there, every afternoon. The first one he lighted as he left his house. He walked halfway to the plant, lit his second cigarette off the first one, and dropped the butt on the ground. Felix collected Mr. Riles’ butts and made cigarettes of his own. And it was from those cigarettes he got tuberculosis.
+
+The Mexicans—and the much smaller number of blacks in town—shared a single ward for TB patients. Felix Diaz remembers that just hours before a tubercular patient died the nurses would say, “He’s hemorrhaging,” and put up a screen to hide the spray of blood coming up out of the dying man’s mouth. That was the way Mr. Riles died and the way Felix expected to die, too. No one ever took the few minutes to explain to him what was going on, and when a doctor and a nurse came in one morning and told him they were all set to take out his tonsils that afternoon, Felix, who didn’t know what tonsils were, thought the operating room was where they took you to die.
+
+And so the morning we were talking about he sat at his desk as Miss Appleberry announced each student’s scores, and took them one at a time into the hallway, closed the door and hit them with her paddle. Boys and girls alike. Felix remembers the flooring in the hallway was all wood and the sounds of the paddle, followed by the sounds of the 7- or 8-year-olds crying out, echoed clearly in the room. Thirty-five kids, sitting in terror or pain.
+
+Felix shook his head no. Everyone else had gone with the teacher—and it is worth mentioning here that to this day teachers are held in higher regard in Latin cultures than they are in others. They are often called maestro or maestra—revered almost like priests.
+
+Miss Appleberry began to scream, and in seconds whatever sweet authoritarian revenge she was enjoying in the hallway disappeared. She grabbed him, trying to jerk him out of his desk. But the desks in those days were attached to the chairs, and the chairs were bolted to the floor, and Felix and his desk did not move. Miss Appleberry shook him, still screaming, her hard, narrow face balled up like a fist, but he would not let go. She had long fingernails and she scratched his arms and they bled. But he clung to the chair.
+
+And unlike the parking lot at a Trump rally, in the end there was a compromise. She let go of the paddle, he let go of the desk, and Miss Appleberry dragged him down the hall to the school principal, Mr. Mullen. Eva Dell Elementary did not have much money and the principal had to teach a class of his own, too. Miss Appleberry brought Felix into his classroom and announced he’d refused to take his punishment.
+
+It was not over, though. His arm was scabbing where it had bled and he knew his father would want to know what happened. He took his friend Leo along, knowing that his father would never take his word against a teacher’s. As mentioned, teachers were almost like priests.
+
+The principal recognized Felix’s father—maybe from the arrangements they’d made while Felix was in the hospital—and begged him to intercede with the crowd. To explain for him that he understood what happened and promised they would never see Miss Appleberry again. And good to his word, in the morning she was gone, and nobody at Eva Dell Elementary ever saw her again. Even Felix Diaz does not know what happened to her afterward.
+
+That was Southern California, 1942, and this is the repeating lesson of American history. Which is this: Dismissing people wholesale might give you free reign to bring out the paddle, but it doesn’t mean that some of those people won’t cling to the chair.",REAL
+3766,Baltimore protests: Crowds stand firm after curfew,"- 11:59 p.m. ET: Police arrested two people for looting and one for disorderly conduct, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said. But most of the 10 arrests made after the 10 p.m. curfew were for curfew violation.
+
+- 11:55 p.m. ET: Baltimore police have made 10 arrests since the 10 p.m. curfew went into effect Tuesday night, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said. But he said the curfew is working, and ""the city is stable.""
+
+- 11:33 p.m. ET: Police have the situation under control in West Baltimore, which includes one of the most violent intersections of the past 24 hours. ""Twenty-four hours ago, that intersection had a burned out car, we saw a tavern being looted, we saw a liquor store being looted,"" CNN's Brian Todd said. On Tuesday night, aside from officers in riot gear standing next to armored vehicles, ""there's not a soul in sight,"" Todd said.
+
+- 11:18 p.m. ET: Authorities with riot gear and heavy armored vehicles stood their ground in the neighborhood where Freddie Gray was arrested, but no clashes were underway more than an hour after Baltimore's city curfew went into effect. ""Everybody's kind of staring at everybody, seeing who blinks,"" CNN's Miguel Marquez said.
+
+- 10:53 p.m. ET: Baltimore police said credentialed members of the media may continue covering events in the city after curfew, the department tweeted Tuesday night. Earlier, authorities in a helicopter told the media to move or possibly face arrest.
+
+- The crowd has ""definitely lessened"" after police deployed pepper bullets and smoke canisters, CNN's Ryan Young said. But CNN's Chris Cuomo said some protesters have simply moved elsewhere.
+
+- Police said late Tuesday on Twitter they were making arrests at one location, where they said people threw bricks and rocks at officers.
+
+Defiant protesters squared off with police in some parts of Baltimore well after a citywide curfew went into effect Tuesday night.
+
+Many protesters didn't budge after 10 p.m. curfew. Police said they have a ""wide range of discretion"" with how they enforce it, Baltimore police Capt. Eric Kowalczyk said before the curfew took effect.
+
+""Officers are going to use common sense,"" he said.
+
+Authorities, city leaders and fellow residents appealed for calm a day after the city devolved into chaos.
+
+Some 2,000 National Guardsmen and more than 1,000 police officers from across Maryland and neighboring states were assigned to the streets of Baltimore on Tuesday night, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said.
+
+""This combined force will not tolerate violence or looting, which has led to the destruction of property and put innocent Marylanders at risk.""
+
+Laquicha Harper, a 33-year-old resident, called the violence embarrassing and heartbreaking. ""We owe it to ourselves to do better,"" she said.
+
+She was among those who responded to clean up the mess from Monday's violence.
+
+Cars and building were burned. Police were hospitalized, businesses were looted, and hundreds of people were arrested.
+
+""I understand that everybody is upset, I understand that tension is brewing ... I'm here, I get it,"" Harper said. ""But there are better ways that we can handle our frustration. And they can't hear us when we're behaving this way.""
+
+Fixing it will require more investment in cities, criminal justice reform, better funding for education and soul-searching for some police departments, he said.
+
+""If we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It's just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant. And that we don't just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns,"" the President said.
+
+Still, no angst can excuse what Obama called the behavior of ""criminals and thugs who tore up"" Baltimore.
+
+""When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they're not protesting. They're not making a statement. They're stealing,"" he said. ""When they burn down a building, they're committing arson. And they're destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities. That robs jobs and opportunity from people in that area.""
+
+No repeat of Monday night, governor says
+
+Protesters rallied and marched Tuesday. Baltimore Police Capt. Eric Kowalczyk described them as peaceful, which he said is ""what we're used to seeing in Baltimore."" That said, about a dozen people had been arrested, according to the police captain.
+
+Tuesday night, a group started attacking officers with rocks and bricks, and more arrests were made, police said.
+
+Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said at noon that he didn't know of additional instances of looting, damage or violence. But he was mindful that may not be true for long, and said he's especially concerned about Tuesday night.
+
+If there is another flare-up, Hogan said, authorities will be prepared with ""as much manpower and as many resources as we can (have).""
+
+""They are not going to be in danger, and ... their property will be protected,"" he said of Baltimore residents and business owners. ""We're not going to have another repeat of what happened last night. It's not going to happen tonight.""
+
+Hogan declared a state of emergency Monday evening -- after a request from Baltimore's mayor around 6 p.m. -- that, among other things, expedited the deployment of hundreds of National Guard members. Up to 5,000 of them are ready to answer the call to join Baltimore police and up to 5,000 law enforcement officers were requested from around the Mid-Atlantic region, said Col. William Pallozzi of the Maryland State Police.
+
+Wednesday's game between the Orioles and Chicago White Sox will be closed to the public, the Orioles announced. A source within Major League Baseball told CNN the league is not aware of any prior closed-door games in major league history.
+
+There was no public school Tuesday, nor were there classes at Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore City Public Schools will reopen on Wednesday.
+
+""Seeing my city like this breaks my heart. But, like so many Baltimoreans, my resolve is strong,"" the mayor tweeted. ""We will not let these deplorable and cowardly acts of violence ruin #OurCity.""
+
+Meanwhile, citizens young and old are stepping up. They include people who came out to clean up, like Harper and 15-year-old Sulaiman Abdul-Aziz, who said he saw some of the mayhem.
+
+""I felt disappointed,"" Abdul-Aziz said, ""because a lot of that could have been avoided if people would have started thinking before they would have done all that stuff.""
+
+""We're talking about years and decades of mistrust, of misfortune, of despair that it's just coming out in anger,"" Scott said. ""No, it is not right for them to burn down their own city. But that is what's coming out of these young people.""
+
+At least 20 officers were wounded in the unrest, according to Capt. Kowalczyk. One person is in critical condition as a result of a fire, he said.
+
+""It's clear that what we have to do is change the culture within the Baltimore Police Department,"" Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said Tuesday. The process has been underway for more than two years, but there is more to do, he said.
+
+Deray McKeeson, a community organizer who was active in Ferguson and is now in Baltimore, said that while he doesn't condone using destruction and violence, he understands it as a way some vent frustrations. ""Broken windows are not broken spines,"" he said.
+
+McKeeson said the Baltimore vandalism, even the injuries to some officers, doesn't compare to the lost lives of Gray and other blacks at the hands of police. That's why he said protesters will remain out in full force, rallying against what they see as systemic injustice.
+
+""Police have continued to kill people,"" the activist said. ""Tonight will be another night where people come out into the streets to confront a system that is corrupt.""
+
+There were many other secondary casualties -- people who saw their neighborhoods torn apart, their homes and vehicles damaged, their hopes for stability and progress thwarted by the mayhem.
+
+There were people like Cindy Oxendine, who took to the streets to sweep up rocks, glass and more despite her aching back.
+
+""It started off peaceful, and it ends up like this,"" Oxendine told CNN affiliate WBAL. ""I've seen stuff like this on the news in other cities, but I never thought I would see it in front of my doorstep. It's crazy.""
+
+In addition to the clashes with police came the flames, and investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are joining local authorities to look into arson, a federal law enforcement source said.
+
+The same source said that dozens of fires that erupted around Baltimore appear to be tied to the unrest. This includes one that consumed an affordable housing center for seniors that was just months away from opening.
+
+Pastor Donte Hickman of the Southern Baptist Church, which owns the facility, said 60 units of senior housing were lost.
+
+""What happened ... destroyed so much of the progress that the people who actually live here have been working for,"" said Mayor Rawlings-Blake, calling Monday ""a very dark day for our city.""
+
+But she found light in what she saw Tuesday.
+
+""Today, I think we saw a lot more of what Baltimore is about. We saw people coming together to reclaim our city, to clean our city, and to help heal our city. I think this can be our defining moment,"" the mayor said.",REAL
+6653,VIDEO COMPILATION: Pundits and Politicians Insist Donald Trump Cannot Win Election,"Posted 11/09/2016 5:13 am by PatriotRising with 0 comments VIDEO COMPILATION —- PUNDITS DECLARE DONALD TRUMP CANNOT WIN ELECTION… 
+Barack Obama… 
+Barack Obama 2: Donald Trump won’t be president. 
+Jorge Ramos: Donald Trump can’t win without Latinos. #JorgeRamos 
+Bob Schieffer: I can’t find any Republican who now thinks Trump will win (4 weeks ago) 
+Krauthammer: Trump can’t win in November without cooperation from Ryan Penny Nance on Why Trump can’t win over conservative women 
+Ted Cruz (in primary) Trump “cannot win a majority” 
+CNN says Trump can’t win. Do you enjoy reading Patriot Rising?",FAKE
+2047,"Santorum talks 2016, minimum wage increase","(CNN) - As he considers another run for the White House, Rick Santorum is reaching out to working-class voters, bucking the GOP on the minimum wage and touting his new book in hopes of rebranding the Republican Party.
+
+In an interview with CNN's Candy Crowley that aired Sunday on ""State of the Union,"" the former senator from Pennsylvania and 2012 Republican presidential candidate was candid on the possibility of launching another White House bid in 2016.
+
+2016: ""I'm looking at it""
+
+Santorum wouldn't throw his support behind a specific Republican on a list of possible 2016 White House contenders but admitted that he wrote his new book ""Blue-Collar Conservatives"" in part because he's considering launching another campaign.
+
+""I'm looking for candidates who connect with average voters,"" he said. ""Someone who has a heart and an understanding of those difficult times those voters are going through, and whether it's Rick Santorum or somebody else - it's someone who has that appeal and connection.
+
+""I put this book out there because I'm looking at it - whether other people join in; I hope they do. I've been talking to a lot of candidates across the country, saying, ‘you really need to look at this book and take the opportunity that's present right now to create a new image for this party. It doesn't have a very good one right now,’ "" Santorum added.
+
+One issue that could create conflict between Republicans and average Americans is their opposition to increasing the minimum wage.
+
+Dems seek to rally base over GOP's block of minimum wage bill
+
+The Senate voted last month on raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, but the bill failed to garner the 60 votes needed to pass. Only one Republican voted for the measure.
+
+Santorum joins 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty as Republicans who have come out in favor of some sort of increase.
+
+But Santorum, who long voted for minimum wage increases in his time in Congress, was quick to draw a distinction between his views on the issue and those of his former GOP presidential rival.
+
+""I think Romney came out in favor of President Obama's increase. I'm not in favor of President Obama's increase. When I was in the Senate and when I was in the House, I did vote for minimum wage increases that were incremental,"" he said.
+
+Asked by Crowley whether Republicans’ opposition to minimum wage increases will hurt the party's image among working-class voters, Santorum said it does and cautioned that lawmakers ""need to be reasonable about it and offer an alternative.""
+
+The most recent polls on the issue indicate that a strong majority of Americans supports raising the minimum wage, with Republicans mostly divided on the issue.
+
+Watch State of the Union with Candy Crowley Sundays at 9am ET. For the latest from State of the Union click here.",REAL
+10069,Kurds Worried Turkey Will Stab Them in the Back as They Fight ISIS,"Kurds Worried Turkey Will Stab Them in the Back as They Fight ISIS Turkey publicly opposes ISIS while supporting them behind the scenes Image Credits: Kurdish YPG fighters: Kurdishstruggle . 
+Two months after being purged from the border town of Jarablus in northern Syria by a Turkish-led force — and just days after being targeted by Turkish airstrikes near al-Bab — Syrian Kurds now fear a “stab in the back” from Turkey’s military as plans for a U.S.-led push to clear ISIS fighters from Raqqa are carried out. 
+“It is very important Raqqa is liberated,” a chief political leader of the main Syrian Kurdish party, the PYD, told Reuters . “But one point which is bothering us is that, if we go toward Raqqa, we will be stabbed from the back.” 
+At the end of August, Turkish forces took part in a U.S.-led operation to eject ISIS from the northern border of Syria. Once inside Syria, however, Turkish forces — leading Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels — took aim at Kurdish fighters in the town of Jarablus, which sent them scurrying across the Euphrates River in retreat. 
+The issue here is that the U.S. claims to find the Kurds useful in the fight against ISIS. The Kurds, in fact, make up a significant portion of one of the primary U.S.-supplied rebel forces in the region. As Reuters explains : 
+“Kurdish militia have played a big role in the past year in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed umbrella group, as it has seized large areas of territory from Islamic State, laying the ground for an assault on Raqqa. 
+“However, Turkey’s intervention in Syria in August in support of rebel groups fighting under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) banner has complicated that equation, leading to clashes between them and Kurdish groups allied to the SDF.” 
+The problem is one of trust. Turkey believes the Kurdish militants are aligned with the Kurdish PYD party, which the Turks believe is allied with Kurds within Turkey who’ve been waging a religious insurgency for over three decades. 
+So regardless of whether the U.S. finds the Kurds useful, Turkey has made it clear it intends to sleep with one eye open for the foreseeable future. In fact, it’s taking a much more proactive stance than that. 
+Last Thursday, in a campaign of airstrikes that were “the heaviest against the YPG since Turkey launched a military incursion into Syria,” Turkey targeted three Kurdish-controlled villages along the northern Syrian border. The Turkish military later confirmed it had carried out “26 strikes on areas recently taken by the Kurdish YPG militia” and “had killed between 160 and 200 combatants.” 
+Turkey’s major concern is that Kurdish-controlled enclaves will physically unite, “thereby creating a de facto Kurdish mini-state along the Turkish border.” As such, Turkey has warned Kurds to keep out of towns like Manjib, which is just northeast of the heaviest fighting in Aleppo. 
+This tangled web of strained alliances and old feuds will likely only grow more confusing as the U.S.-led operation to purge ISIS from Raqqa draws nearer. In any case, Turkish President Erdogan seems to have discovered a newfound independence , and the days of him obediently — even if somewhat grudgingly — bending to the U.S. will appear to be fading, as well. 
+“From now on we will now wait for problems to come knocking on our door, we will not wait until the blade is against our bone and skin, we will not wait for terrorist organizations to come and attack us,” Erdogan said from his palace last week. “Let them go wherever until we find and destroy them. I am saying this very clearly: they will not have a single place to find peace abroad.” NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+9216,"Vicar sacked over orgies, hookers & porn after wife exposes his double life","Vicar sacked over orgies, hookers & porn after wife exposes his double... Vicar sacked over orgies, hookers & porn after wife exposes his double life By 0 41 
+A sex addict Church of England vicar who took part in orgies, visited gay saunas and collected “perverted” pornography has been sacked after his estranged wife exposed his double life. 
+Reverend James Day’s actions amounted to “conduct unbecoming and inappropriate,” a Church of England tribunal found. It has banned him from ministry for life. 
+Read more 
+Speaking at the tribunal in London, Birte Day said she had collected evidence showing her husband had taken part in group sex, attempted to set up meetings with prostitutes and used a fake name to meet new partners. 
+She said her husband had stored “a substantial amount” of porn on his computer, which she collected on memory sticks presented to the tribunal, according to the Telegraph. 
+“There were about 50 short films of men and women in scenes of sexual pleasure and orgies, at least 100 sketches of naked women being tortured and burned, a scene of a gladiator being hit and tortured, many images of naked young men… and other sexually explicit material.” 
+She said her husband became increasingly open about his “sexual addiction,” adding: “He often said the two most important elements in his life were God and sex.” 
+“I think James wanted to hurt me with his sexual activities and was making me feel guilty as I was just ‘not good enough,’” she said. 
+Read more 
+The hearing was told the vicar had also been violent towards his wife – tightening a scarf around her neck so she couldn’t breathe, spanking her as punishment for wearing shorts in front of workmen, biting her hand and spitting in her face. 
+“I had to protect myself by gathering evidence to show that he was not normal, because to others outside the marriage he projected himself to be a successful and respectable person,” his wife said. 
+She also referenced an email she had found from Day – who is also a psychology professor – to his friend. He wrote: “You must never desist on account of my priesthood and all to do with vocation … Perhaps I should send you photos from a gangbang I participated in … to assuage your guilt.” 
+His wife also found business cards suggesting Day was visiting gay saunas in Brussels, New York and Italy. He had also created email addresses for himself under different names and identities. 
+The Bishop’s Disciplinary Tribunal for the Diocese of Europe concluded Day’s behavior was not criminal – but that standards for clergy “must be different.” 
+It said it was satisfied the assaults on his wife took place, adding the allegations made against the priest were proved in their entirety. 
+Day did not attend the tribunal but did not contest the proceedings. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+2796,I live in Iran. Here's how sanctions have shaped my life.,"It is 2007, and I am an undergraduate at the University of Tehran. I'm very particular. I take notes with Staedtler Triplus Fineliner pens, in purple and green, and on this particular day I've run through the stash I keep in my desk at home. There is a small office supply store next to the university cafeteria, I've bought my pens there before. Before lunch I go to pick up some more Fineliners.
+
+""We're out,"" says Farid, the young Kurdish boy who works in the store. ""The supplier says there won't be anymore at all.""
+
+""Why not?"" I ask.
+
+""They say because of sanctions, but I'm not sure,"" he says.
+
+""Sanctions? What the heck do pens have to do with sanctions?"" I ask, surprised.
+
+Eight years later, things are a little clearer. In 2007, we were just entering what would become a period of intense deprivation, brought on by ever-tightening UN Security Council sanctions. It would become the worst disruption of Iranian life since the Iran-Iraq War of my childhood.
+
+Now, what seems like a lifetime later, a nuclear agreement has been signed between Iran and the P5+1. We have been promised an end to the chokehold; a brighter future for Iran. We'll see.
+
+Those of us born after the revolution have lived our whole lives under sanctions. Following the November 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, the United States imposed its first round of sanctions against Iran. Except for a brief period from 1981 to 1984, they have never been lifted. In March 1995, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order significantly expanding the scale of the embargo, preventing US companies from doing business with Iran.
+
+But as difficult as these restrictions made the '90s, life was still far easier than in the decade before — the Iran of my childhood.
+
+When I was a child, long lines for basic goods were routine. Throughout the Iran-Iraq War (1980 to 1988), my parents bought everything, from bread to cheese to meat, using coupons. Even items like paper, erasers, or women's nylon socks were often difficult to come by. When my parents married and moved into their first home in the early 1980s, basic household appliances were virtually impossible to find, as the combination of sanctions and war had brought both imports and domestic production to a halt. To get a refrigerator, my parents submitted their marriage contract to the neighborhood mosque, which took these contracts and tried to find necessary household supplies for new couples living in the neighborhood. I was born a few years later.
+
+I was 4 years old before we had a phone. When I was 5 we finally bought furniture — a table and two chairs. Throughout the war we heard news of young boys perishing on the front lines, entire families wiped out by bombs. For a while, street bombings became frequent in our neighborhood, and when my father left home in the morning, my mother remained fearful till nightfall, uncertain if he would return.
+
+I was 4 years old before we had a phone. When I was 5 we finally bought furniture — a table and two chairs.
+
+But by the time I was a university student, the war was long over. Though sanctions persisted, Iranians had found loopholes and alternative means of getting what they needed. The worst of the deprivation was past. My classmates and I knew the hard life, we remembered it, but it had become a story, a tale for nights when we gathered around a dinner table we didn't struggle to find.
+
+I wouldn't realize it until years later, but 9/11 was the day that a decade-long Iranian upswing began to fall apart. Despite the absence of Iranian involvement in the attack, the West steadily ramped up our isolation. When a secret uranium enrichment plant was discovered in Natanz in 2002, the isolation intensified. We were placed on George W. Bush's ""Axis of Evil,"" and then surrounded as the United States invaded Afghanistan to our east and Iraq to our west. In 2005, the conservative ex-mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, defeated reformers in a presidential election, and the world's disdain came even harder.
+
+It was difficult enough to deal with the changes he wrought at home. The university security staff we had been accustomed to — many of them young boys from the provinces — were replaced by stern-looking guards we'd never met. The cafeteria, where we had always sat down together to eat, was gender-segregated by a long blue curtain. We heard of professors being forced into retirement, and unknowns close to the administration taking up positions they were not fit for academically.
+
+As students, it never felt as if Ahmadinejad represented us, but neither did we feel any affinity for the United States. It was Ahmadinejad who had brought a new security staff to our university. But it was America that had placed us under siege. We knew our nation's shortcomings, but in many years of cafeteria debates, my peers and I could never justify how we'd been singled out, why the world seemed to simply not like us. We began to think of ourselves as  ""the unpeopled,"" never seen by the outside world but living as we always had.
+
+If anything, it seemed to us at the time that Ahmadinejad and Bush were similar — both, in language and deed, seemed to damage the prestige of their people in the eyes of the world. Yet the American president's embarrassing behavior did not seal off his entire country from food and medicine. We paid Ahmadinejad no heed, but the international condemnation of Iran grew louder. At first we tried to focus on school, on grades, love, art, and life, but it was difficult. Some analysts claimed then and still claim now that the sanctions weakened Iranian support for the state, but that was never the whole story. It never felt true for my friends and me. If anything, we began to echo the state: Why the double standard for Iran?
+
+Then our lives came to a halt. In 2006, our government refused to continue implementing parts of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, significantly reducing the inspection rights of International Atomic Energy Agency personnel in Iran. In December of that year — then again in March 2007, October 2007, and March 2008 — the United Nations Security Council retaliated by intensifying sanctions.
+
+These new embargoes effectively closed the loopholes that had allowed Iranians to get by over the past 10 years. We were no longer able to purchase goods we could access easily before. Flights to Iran by international carriers were reduced or stopped entirely. Magazines that had survived against all odds were once again threatened by paper costs they could not afford. Iranian oil exports accounted for between 60 and 80 percent of the country's revenue — suddenly, both Europe and the United States refused to buy.
+
+The university security staff we had been accustomed to — many of them young boys from the provinces — were replaced by stern-looking guards we'd never met
+
+Within our borders, strange men with almost no credible administrative experience tightened their grip on all sectors: the economy, the cultural space, even the heritage organization, a government body responsible for preserving historical sites. The reactionary policies of the Ahmadinejad administration coupled with the new, severe sanctions began to cripple us.
+
+The impact of the sanctions on academia alone has been devastating. All manner of vital technical equipment became scarce, while universities across the country were not permitted to renew their subscriptions to search repositories — even in the fields of medicine and the humanities. Coursera, a platform that offers free, open online courses, has become inaccessible within our borders. Our previous ability to conduct research and contribute to world scholarship was brought to a painful standstill.
+
+While a portion of University of Tehran graduates typically remained in Iran to work, the new sanctions provoked a mass exodus: Almost no one chooses to stay after undergraduate studies. Doors seem to close all around us. Within months of my first disappointment in the stationery store, every writing and drawing tool I used disappeared off the market for good.
+
+The impact of sanctions outside my academic bubble is far worse. Vitamins have become hard to find. My mother's supplements disappeared off the market, as did tampons and foreign-made baby formulas. We went to drugstore after drugstore across the city but were told the same thing everywhere: The item you want is no longer being imported due to sanctions. My grandfather's German-made eye drops vanished. The Iranian ones hurt his eyes.
+
+More critically, vital cancer medication has become excessively difficult to get ahold of. Between 2011 and 2014, while visiting sick relatives, I met patient after patient in the hospital whose condition had become critical due to delayed treatment.
+
+""What, they expect me to sell my house to buy medication? And then what will the family be left with if I die anyway?"" asked a tall, silver-haired man I met one day. He had just started chemotherapy, months later than he should have. He died within weeks.
+
+Almost like a joke, cancer rates appear to have climbed, as well. Some doctors blame new, low-quality domestic gasoline. While Tehran has always suffered from air pollution, we've begun to witness unprecedented levels — sometimes, looking over the gray-green haze that covers the city, it becomes impossible to breathe.
+
+Iranian banks are cut off from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Telecommunications), effectively cutting off financial communication between Iran and other countries. The private sector has been hit badly. The textile and automobile industries have been especially affected, with many plants completely shutting down entirely. Across industries, obtaining spare parts or requesting maintenance for machines has become extremely expensive, in some cases impossible. Two of Iran's main non-petroleum exports, handmade carpets and pistachios, have started piling up in basements.
+
+All of this has sent the economy into free fall. The new sanctions led to unprecedented inflation, as high as 40 percent according to some estimates, which in turn caused a sudden spike in the price of basic commodities like milk and vegetable oil. Some crucial goods are available only on the black market, and there is no way — official or otherwise — to know how bad inflation has gotten there.
+
+Perhaps you can imagine the 2008 American financial crisis to get a sense of what it was like — people's financial holdings falling apart within days, years of careful savings wiped out. My parents spent the first decade of their marriage in a war zone and the next 15 years trying to build on lost time, making up for all those years of deprivation. Within the span of months, almost nothing remained of that effort. My mother's clients went out of business; my father's academic and industrial research has been severely disrupted.
+
+Perhaps you can imagine the 2008 American financial crisis to get a sense of what it was like — people's financial holdings falling apart within days
+
+Over dinner, we talk about wartime. What it was like to live on rations. How life was lived with so little. We remember fondly our capacity for contentment, how we were all in it together.
+
+This time it does not feel a group struggle. Under the sanctions, those who are savvy enough and amoral enough exploit others' deprivation for a profit. They function as middlemen and brokers, preying on the needs and envies of citizens. These men become wealthy, but at the cost of ordinary people turning against one another, moral and social life coming apart. During the war, I could never have told my father to get me the same doll my classmate had — each of us already had, or didn't have, the same things. But under sanctions, I have seen my uncles lambasted by their children because they didn't pay the brokers for some flashy new toy their classmate got.
+
+In 2013, President Hassan Rouhani was elected with a mandate to stop this vicious cycle, to bring sanity and sustenance back to Iran. Despite monumental obstacles inside and outside of Iran, he has so far managed to deliver.
+
+On July 14, 2015, a deal was announced between Iran and six world powers, including the United States. We were told that in exchange for a curtailment of our nuclear program and ongoing, rigorous inspections, the sanctions would finally be lifted.
+
+I saw my grandfather that night. He lived through the occupation of his province during World War II, through the revolution, the war, and the sanctions years. When we discussed the news, he smiled, looking out into the distance. He read a poem: ""We are but leaves dancing to a wind.""
+
+On the night of the agreement, I drive the streets of Tehran, trying to feel what the city felt. Valiasr is known as the longest street in the Middle East — it traverses the city from north to south. Long sycamore trees once ran the length of the road, but now they only grow in Northern Valiasr, one of Tehran's most affluent neighborhoods. This is where the crowds gather, the celebrations bringing traffic to a standstill. People are out of their cars, playing music, the sound of their whistles and applause rising above the trees in the dark.
+
+We see luxury cars everywhere, more in one place than I've ever witnessed in Tehran before: Lexus, Mercedes, BMWs. But between them are the motorcycles of young boys who have come up from the working class neighborhoods of southern Tehran. They are easy to spot among the crowd. They wear stained T-shirts, probably smudged from a long day at work, and fake Nike shoes. As we drive south, the yelling, screaming, and happy crowds give way to the dead of night.
+
+I have now lived three decades. I was born after a revolution, in the midst of a war. I have seen stability, I have seen chaos, I have seen bloodshed, I have seen calm, and all that lies between. Despite the agreement, we do not look forward to an uncomplicated era of plenty. Even if all goes according to plan, the legacy of sanctions cannot be erased. An economist I know from the University of Tehran put it this way: ""Sanctioning a country like this is similar to permanently disabling a human being. You might stop inflicting harm, but the damage is there forever.""
+
+I wonder if this is true. All that we are promised by this deal — more stability, a financial recovery, more open political and social space — we have had and lost before. Who can guarantee it won't be lost again? Those of us who have seen the sinusoidal pains and recoveries of these past three decades know that much depends on the whims of a world far from our jurisdiction or oversight. We cannot make it bend, but it will bend us. For many Iranians, the end of sanctions is nothing more than the end of another chapter in a colossal, uncertain novel, still in production. You write as you live. You read as you go.
+
+Pedestrian is a writer from Khuzestan, in southern Iran. Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs and Roads and Kingdoms.
+
+First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.",REAL
+5828,Make America Vote Again,"0 Add Comment 
+A GRASSROOTS movement which has distilled people’s myriad frustrations and anger into one simple, catch all phrase continues to gather pace on the ground in America this morning. 
+Providing a slogan to a loose affiliation of people’s desires, which often directly contradict or compromise the various factions involved, the populist movement is expanding at a worrying rate. 
+‘Make American Vote Again’, the name given to vast swathes of people who feel America really needs to vote again a second time to get it right, has seen large crowds gather at numerous rallies across the United States. 
+“Wrong” was the repeated phrase voiced by speakers at the rallies, as they cited the fact that America was headed in the wrong direction as evidence it needed a revolution in order to place it back on the right path. 
+Many media personnel in attendance sought to press rally goers on the finer points of their plan to make America vote again, but could only shout ‘make America vote again’ repeatedly. Followers of the movement also displayed an almost violent patriotic loyalty to the 1st Amendment of the Constitution, which they claim Donald Trump would dismantle once in power. 
+“It’s heartwarming to see such large crowds. But, where were you assholes yesterday,” shared one of the movement’s leaders Hillary Clinton. 
+Clinton, criticised for her populism which has seen her join the calls for another vote, is looking to tap into the sort of post-Brexit come down, which saw half of Britain ‘shit their pants’ and wish they could vote all over again. 
+The movement has drawn the attention of mainstream media which remains suspicious of Make America Vote Again, due to the face it is occurring online through social media channel outside the confines of the news media. 
+“It goes against our values, principles and ideals, it’s not something anyone likes to see,” confirmed Republican strategist Noren Hassleback. 
+“Having said that, despite the move being unconstitutional, many of the utterances bordering on being treasonous and discriminatory… they might be onto something”.",FAKE
+4562,Russia begins airstrikes in Syria; U.S. warns of new concerns in conflict,"Russian warplanes began airstrikes in Syria on Wednesday, adding an unpredictable new element to a four-year-old war that has already drawn in the United States and allies, fueled a refu­gee crisis and expanded the reach of the Islamic State.
+
+In Washington, the dramatic escalation of Russia’s military involvement was viewed as an affront just two days after President Obama and Russian President Vladi­mir Putin sat down to discuss means for negotiating the deep differences in their countries’ approaches to the conflict in Syria.
+
+The strikes sharply increase tensions with Russia as U.S. officials dispute Moscow’s claim that its aircraft targeted the Islamic State, the brutal extremist group that controls much of Syria and Iraq. Instead, U.S. officials said the strikes appeared to target opponents of Syria’s embattled President Bashar al-Assad, a key Russian ally. Those hit include U.S.-backed units that were trained and armed by the CIA, officials said.
+
+Accusing Russia of “pouring gasoline on the fire,” Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter vowed that U.S. pilots would continue their year-long bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria, despite Moscow’s warning to keep American planes away from its operations.
+
+“I think what they’re doing is going to backfire and is counterproductive,” Carter said.
+
+The introduction of Russian air power — which took place with scant notice to the U.S. government — threatens to upend U.S. strategy in Syria at a time when U.S. military officials say they are beginning to discern hints of progress against the Islamic State, a heavily armed al-Qaeda offshoot that is also known as ISIS and ISIL.
+
+It also raises the stakes over competing visions for Syria outlined this week at the United Nations, where Putin insisted that Syria’s embattled government is the key to stability after four years of bloodshed and Obama warned that the “status quo” cannot stand.
+
+[This is Russia’s air power in Syria]
+
+U.S. officials were particularly irked that they didn’t get much warning of the strikes, even as they make plans to resume military talks with Russia about Syria as early as next week. Discussions have been halted since last year over Russia’s support for separatists in Ukraine.
+
+Earlier Wednesday, a Russian general posted in Baghdad showed up at the U.S. Embassy there, officials said, and told the American defense attache that airstrikes would begin about an hour later.
+
+Russia’s Defense Ministry said Russian aircraft had conducted about 20 sorties targeting the Islamic State, according to the news agency Interfax.
+
+The Syrian state-run news agency reported that Russian planes had attacked “dens” of the Islamic State in Rastan, Talbiseh and other towns around Homs, the strategic city that Assad hopes to claim as he seeks to defend areas remaining under his control.
+
+But U.S. officials expressed doubts in the hours after the strikes about Russian claims that the sorties targeted the Islamic State. Areas around Homs, a former hotbed of the popular revolt that began against Assad in 2011, are not known as strongholds for the group, which controls a vast swath of territory across Syria and Iraq.
+
+Nidal Ezddin, a representative of Homs’s civil defense force, said a series of Russian strikes killed 36 people around Homs. “These bombings were not against ISIS,” he said. “They were for ISIS.”
+
+Civil defense officials and activists also reported that some of the Russian strikes were accompanied by barrel bomb attacks by Syrian air force helicopters.
+
+The strikes cap weeks of Russian military buildup in Syria, where Assad is battling both the Islamic State and rebel factions backed by the West. Assad’s forces­ are blamed for fueling the war that has forced more than 4 million people to flee the country, many of whom are joining a wave of asylum seekers and migrants flooding Europe.
+
+Forces loyal to Assad hope to lay claim to Homs province, a key link between the capital, Damascus, and government strongholds on the Mediterranean coast, including the key port city of Latakia. Russia has a naval facility at Tartus, about 50 miles south of Latakia.
+
+Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, said the strikes may be an attempt to weaken Assad’s principal adversary rather than the Islamic State.
+
+“Amid the regime’s major losses . . . Assad’s apparent request to Moscow for military assistance seems a last-gasp appeal for help from what was a dying regime,” he said. “How far Russia is willing to go to defend its proxy interests now remains to be seen, but certainly, the dynamics of the conflict have taken a huge shift today.”
+
+[Russia’s strategy in Syria could be work in progress]
+
+The strikes appeared to have also hit groups backed by the United States, including rebels who have been trained by the CIA. A U.S. official said there was “no reason to doubt reports from the region that coalition-backed forces from Hama were hit,” a reference to a rebel group known as Tajammu al-Aaza based in that western Syrian province.
+
+The leader of that group, Jamil al-Saleh, told the news organization AlSouria.net that the Russian strikes had pounded his organization’s base in Lataminah, a town roughly 30 miles north of Homs. Saleh was an officer in the Syrian army before defecting.
+
+The U.S.-backed group also posted a video that shows fighter jets streaking across the sky seconds before the base is rattled by explosions.
+
+[Graphic: Were Russian airstrikes really aimed at the Islamic State? ]
+
+The CIA has trained thousands of fighters at secret bases in Jordan in an effort to bolster moderate factions against the Assad government. A Russian strike on U.S.-backed units will only intensify pressure on the Obama administration to respond.
+
+Speaking at the United Nations, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said the United States would have “grave concerns” if Russian airstrikes hit moderate U.S.-backed opposition forces­ fighting Assad rather than the Islamic State.
+
+Also on Wednesday, Kerry told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that the strikes run counter to Russia’s stated intention to cooperate on “deconfliction,” or ensuring that mishaps do not happen in the air.
+
+Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov defended Russia’s actions after its parliament approved a resolution authorizing the use of force in Syria. “Russia will factually be the only country to carry out this operation on the legitimate basis of the request of the legitimate government of Syria,” he said.
+
+The resolution came without warning in the Federation Council, Russia’s higher body of parliament, where 162 senators voted unanimously in support after a closed-door discussion — similar to a vote last year to green-light Russian military force in Ukraine.
+
+Sergei Ivanov, the Kremlin chief of staff, said that the resolution was strictly limited to the use of Russian aviation in Syria and that ground troops would not be sent into battle.
+
+While Russia has supplied arms to Assad for years, direct intervention seemed unlikely until early this month when Russian aircraft, tanks and troops were spotted in Syria.
+
+Speaking in Moscow, Putin said he hoped Assad would be open to political compromise.
+
+“I know that President Assad understands that and is ready for such a process. We hope that he will be active and flexible and ready to compromise in the name of his country and his people,” Putin told reporters, according to the Reuters news agency.
+
+Critics say that the Kremlin is using the Syrian crisis to escape international isolation after its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, and to divert attention at home from the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
+
+The strikes also come as the Obama administration considers changes­ to its Syria strategy, including a possible expansion of military assistance to anti-Assad rebels and a new focus for a troubled effort to train an independent force to fight the Islamic State.
+
+Murphy and Ryan reported from Washington. Daniela Deane in London, Hugh Naylor in Beirut, Carol Morello and Karen DeYoung at the United Nations, and Greg Miller, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Dan Lamothe and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.
+
+Why Russia is in Syria
+
+Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
+3793,Tens of Thousands of Police Expected for Funeral of Slain Officer,"Wenjian Liu, 32, and his partner, Rafael Ramos, 40, were murdered on Dec. 20 as they sat in their squad car in Brooklyn after killer Ismaaiyl Brinsley had stated he was seeking vengeance for the deaths this summer of two unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers.
+
+Brinsley killed himself after ambushing the officers.
+
+With de Blasio expected to speak at Liu's funeral, police commissioner Bill Bratton told officers ahead of Saturday's wake to refrain from the ""act of disrespect"" seen at Ramos' funeral a week ago, when thousands of officers turned their backs on the mayor.
+
+""A hero's funeral is about grieving, not grievance,"" Bratton wrote in a memo to officers.
+
+De Blasio and Bratton entered the funeral home together for the wake as officers stood guard by the entrance, saluting both men as they went in.
+
+The murders frayed already strained relations between the police force and de Blasio, who sharply criticized the NYPD's ""stop-and-frisk"" tactics during his 2013 campaign.
+
+The liberal mayor also offered qualified support for the wave of protests triggered by the two black men's deaths in New York and Ferguson, Missouri, and has said he talked to his bi-racial son, Dante, about interacting with police.
+
+Immediately after Liu and Ramos were shot, Patrick Lynch, the head of the city's largest police union, expressed scorn for de Blasio, saying there was ""blood on many hands.""
+
+Ramos' funeral a week ago among the largest in NYPD history, with more than 20,000 officers from around the country on hand.
+
+When de Blasio began his eulogy there, many uniformed officers turned their backs in a gesture of disdain, which Bratton called inappropriate, saying it had stolen the ""valor, honor and attention"" that was rightfully due the slain officer.
+
+In his memo, Bratton said he understood emotions were running high among the rank and file, adding that his entreaty to the department was not a mandate and he was not threatening to discipline those who did not comply.
+
+""But,"" he said, ""I remind you that when you don the uniform of this department, you are bound by the tradition, honor and decency that go with it.""",REAL
+2660,Walker’s anti-union law has labor reeling in Wisconsin,"At the old union hall here on a recent afternoon, Terry Magnant sat at the head of a table surrounded by 18 empty chairs. A members meeting had been scheduled to start a half-hour earlier, but the small house, with its cracked walls and loose roof shingles, was lonely and desolate.
+
+“There used to be a lot more people coming,” said Magnant, a 51-year-old nursing assistant, sighing.
+
+The anti-union law passed here four years ago, which made Gov. Scott Walker a national Republican star and a possible presidential candidate, has turned out to be even more transformative than many had predicted.
+
+Walker had vowed that union power would shrink, workers would be judged on their merits, and local governments would save money. Unions had warned that workers would lose benefits and be forced to take on second jobs or find new careers.
+
+Many of those changes came to pass, but the once-thriving ­public-sector unions were not just shrunken — they were crippled.
+
+Unions representing teachers, professors, trash collectors and other government employees are struggling to stem plummeting membership rolls and retain relevance in the state where they got their start.
+
+Here in King, Magnant and her fellow AFSCME members, workers at a local veterans home, have been knocking on doors on weekends to persuade former members to rejoin. Community college professors in Moraine Park, home to a technical college, are reducing dues from $59 to $36 each month. And those in Milwaukee are planing a campaign using videos and posters to highlight union principles. The theme: ­“Remember.”
+
+[ Questions linger over Walker’s college exit as he mulls White House bid ]
+
+But recalling the benefits that union membership might have brought before the 2011 law stripped most public-sector unions of their collective-bargaining rights is difficult when workers consider the challenges of the present.
+
+“I don’t see the point of being in a union anymore,” said Dan Anliker, a 34-year-old technology teacher and father of two in Reedsburg, a tiny city about 60 miles northwest of Madison.
+
+The law required most public employees to pay more for health insurance and to pay more into retirement savings, resulting in an 8 to 10 percent drop in take-home pay. To help compensate for the loss, Anliker said he took an additional 10-hour-a-week job.
+
+“Everyone’s on their own island now,” he said. “If you do a good job, everything will take care of itself. The money I’d spend on dues is way more valuable to buy groceries for my family.”
+
+Sean Karsten, a 32-year-old middle and high school reading instructor in his first year of teaching in Reedsburg, said the unions are “just not something I concern myself with.”
+
+“I just look to keep improving my teaching in the best way I can and try to keep my nose out of the other stuff,” he said.
+
+Walker has pointed to the unions’ membership troubles as a victory — presenting himself as a conservative warrior unafraid of taking on big battles against liberal interests.
+
+Walker’s administration has said forcing public employees to contribute more to retirement plans and health insurance helped local governments save $3 billion. The governor also has credited the 2011 law with saving homeowners money on property taxes while giving school districts the ability to make reforms that increased third-grade reading levels and high school graduation rates. And the law has emboldened Republican state lawmakers to further challenge Wisconsin’s labor movement this year by pushing right-to-work legislation that would allow private-sector workers to opt out of paying union dues — a measure Walker has said he would sign.
+
+“We took the power away from the big-government special interests and put it firmly in the hands of the hard-working taxpayers,” Walker told Iowa Republicans recently. “That is what we need more of in this great country. The liberals don’t like that.”
+
+Union officials declined to release precise membership data but confirmed in interviews that enrollment is dramatically lower since the new law was signed in 2011.
+
+The state branch of the National Education Association, once 100,000 strong, has seen its membership drop by a third. The American Federation of Teachers, which organized in the college system, saw a 50 percent decline. The 70,000-person membership in the state employees union has fallen by 70 percent.
+
+The decline is politically significant in Wisconsin, a presidential battleground where the unions have played a central role in Democrats’ get-out-the-vote drives.
+
+John Ahlquist, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who specializes in labor movements, said Walker had “effectively dismantled the financial and organizing structure of unions in Wisconsin.”
+
+“Although it is too early to tell if unions are near the end of their political power here, they are in a very vulnerable position,” Ahlquist said.
+
+The mass protests that gripped the state Capitol have subsided, but anxiety remains high in union halls across Wisconsin.
+
+At Magnant’s meeting in King on a frigid February afternoon, union members finally began trickling in, one by one, filling a few of the empty seats.
+
+A groundskeeper at the veterans home complained that supervisors were no longer assigning overtime based on seniority because “there was no union.” Others complained that there were no longer enough nursing assistants on shifts, while management positions seemed to grow.
+
+“This is what we are trying to live with,” Magnant said. “But we can’t continue like this.”
+
+Dean Johnson burst through door with a big grin on his face. Johnson, 55, told the story of how he felt so bold at work that he yelled “Join the union!” in the middle of the veterans home. A stalwart union supporter, he vowed he’d do anything to keep the movement going.
+
+But Johnson said he could no longer do it as an employee. He told the group he was retiring — prompting a discussion about the new mantra for those choosing to leave union work: “Goodbye tension, hello pension.”
+
+While some union members have been energized by the fight, they say they notice a new, more vocal animosity toward them. It has been particularly pronounced in rural areas, where public-sector jobs were some of the most prized gigs in town.
+
+In King, population 1,700, Magnant said she couldn’t change a sign at the union hall without someone giving her the finger. Farther west, in Stanley, prison workers said they ditched their favorite pizza pub because the owner stood by while other customers called them “leeches.”
+
+In Reedsburg, that tension surprised Ginny Bourgeois, 52, who clerks at a local Kwik Trip. The community had always been divided, defined as much by the factories manufacturing car parts as it was by cornfields now blanketed in snow. Still, it was a place where the community got together for spaghetti and corn feeds and filled bleachers to watch the Reedsburg Beavers play. Now, she said, people were fighting over politics at gas stations.
+
+Still, she felt unions needed to sacrifice.
+
+“Everyone knows teachers’ insurance was some of the best you could get,” Bourgeois added.“They do fairly well around here, and they do a good job teaching. But everyone in this town has had to tighten their belts. They should too.”
+
+Judy Brey, a 58-year-old speech therapist who taught in the community for 22 years, said such sentiment hurt teachers’ morale. She said she grew up admiring her dad, who put six children through college on his union-supported job as a forester. “ ‘I don’t make a lot, but we’ll be okay with retirement,’ ” she said he told her. That, she was taught, was the reward for public service in Wisconsin.
+
+“Now I’m always nervous that everyone will think they’re moochers,” Brey said. “That I’m a moocher.”
+
+While some union members across the state knocked on doors to court members, Brey tried another strategy: finding more allies.
+
+A day before Magnant opened the doors for a meeting at the union house in King, Brey went to a local restaurant to call to order the meeting of the Reedsburg Area Concerned Citizens.
+
+On the top of Brey’s list was deciding guests for a planned panel discussion on the state of public education. Someone raised a hand.
+
+“Are we getting any interest from the schools in this?” one man asked. “I haven’t seen any of the teachers out here since we were marching with them on the streets four years ago.”
+
+At the meeting, the husband of the columnist called Walker “a pig” — which prompted the board supervisor to wonder why he was insulting pigs. They debated whether or not it’s worth it to invite Republicans to the education event, but Brey insisted it’s important to keep things balanced. Eventually, the group agreed.
+
+“We’re getting somewhere,” Brey said as a waitress handed out checks.
+
+But were the unions? Brey vowed not to give up on them. Two days later, she attended a union meeting that had been called to discuss possible changes in teacher retirement. Ten of the district’s 192 teachers had gathered at the meeting. They appreciated that the superintendent had previously met with union leaders even though he didn’t have to. Still, they grew agitated when discussing his proposal to reduce retirement benefits.
+
+Another teacher, Linda Zauner, 58, said she was working to build a case that teachers wanted to keep benefits the same, but she had struggled to get teachers to respond to a survey. She said she wanted to emphasize that teachers still thought of health care as a “bargained right.”
+
+“This is the closest thing we’re going to get to negotiations,” Zauner said.
+
+“You have to be mean,” she said. “We never got anything by being nice. We’ve had to walk out. We got things when we banged our fists on tables.”
+
+“Sometimes I think,” she stopped to collect the words delicately.
+
+“Sometimes, I think, . . . that’s . . . why they came after us, Jenny. Because they thought these teachers were too demanding.”
+
+“No, we have to fight,” Fish responded. “It’s for our students.”
+
+Brey nodded. As long as there were teachers, she said, she’d be fighting along with them.",REAL
+493,With a bullet: Oil prices headed to the basement,"Oil prices continued their fall Tuesday, as traders worried about a deal with Iran, which could increase supplies. In the meantime, U.S. oil production in 2014 was the highest since records began in 1900, according to the Energy Information Administration. West Texas light, sweet crude dropped 2.24% to $47.61 a barrel, says FactSet.
+
+Cablevision has bid $1 to buy the New York Daily News, archrival New York Post gleefully reports.
+
+Stymied by the Federal Aviation Authority, Amazon is testing drone delivery at a secret site in Canada, according to The Guardian.
+
+China will start deposit insurance on May 1, another step toward scrapping government controls on interest rates.
+
+The term “bubble” gets tossed around a lot, often improperly. In China, though, there may really be a stock bubble.
+
+Jay Z announced a streaming music company that will be owned by artists, who seem to feel they should be paid for their work.
+
+Do mutual fund managers who invest heavily in their own funds outperform? Why, yes.
+
+Losing a job is always terrible. For workers over 50, it’s worse.
+
+More than a third of Americans have no emergency savings.",REAL
+9118,WikiLeaks List Exposes At Least 65 Corporate ‘Presstitutes’ Who Colluded to Hide Clinton’s Crimes,"By Claire Bernish at thefreethoughtproject.com
+Revelations from the Wikileaks release of John Podesta’s emails yet again prove mainstream, corporate media serves as Hillary Clinton’s personal cheerleading squad — and is devoid of any iteration of journalistic integrity.
+Thanks to Wikileaks and the Intercept , in fact, we now have a list of no less than 65 mainstream “reporters” whose campaign coverage constitutes propaganda for the Clinton campaign — and no wonder, considering the obscenely lopsided drivel presented by their outlets.
+As (actual) journalists Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang reported on October 9, the Intercept exclusively received documents obtained by the source known as Guccifer 2.0 evidencing Clinton campaign tactics to court journalists portraying the former secretary of state in a positive light.
+“As these internal documents demonstrate,” the Intercept reported , “a central component of the Clinton campaign strategy is ensuring that journalists they believe are favorable to Clinton are tasked to report the stories the campaign wants circulated.
+“At times, Clinton’s campaign staff not only internally drafted the stories they wanted published but even specified what should be Quote: d ‘on background’ and what should be described as ‘on the record.’”
+One internal strategy document dated January 2015 — months before Clinton officially kicked off her campaign in April — with the curious heading “Earned Media/Next Steps” exposes how the campaign made an albeit infrequent practice of crafting supposed news pieces from beginning to completion.
+Under the — not-at-all oblique insult to the fundamentals of journalism — heading “ Placing a Story ,” the memo’s Quote: :
+“As we discussed on our call, we are all in agreement that the time is right [to] place a story with a friendly journalist in the coming days that positions us a little more transparently while achieving the above goals.”
+Specifically named as a suggested journalist plant is Maggie Haberman of Politico , whom they note will assist in doing “the most shaping” of the narrative they have in mind.",FAKE
+832,"Ted Cruz, the master strategist, was no match for Trump's cult of personality","Ted Cruz did everything right in his campaign for the White House. He built a happy campaign operation that achieved all of its ambitious goals. Cruz elbowed out candidate after candidate to consolidate support among social conservatives, Tea Partiers and libertarians in the Republican field. He raised considerable amounts of money to build a political apparatus unrivalled in the GOP field.
+
+There was only one problem. Every successful move, every stratagem that took Cruz – who dropped out of the presidential race on Tuesday night after a disastrous loss in Indiana – from an ambitious Ivy Leaguer to one of the final three Republican candidates for the presidency prevented him from attaining the ultimate goal.
+
+The Texas Republican was elected to the Senate in 2012 after winning a bitter primary as a Tea Party candidate. He was positioning himself for a White House bid almost from the get-go, travelling to Iowa for presidential cattle calls less than six months into taking office. In a legislative body that values tradition, Cruz’s undisguised ambition didn’t help him make friends. But what really alienated colleagues was his push to shut down the government in October 2013 in an attempt to defund Obamacare, the president’s signature healthcare reforms. The quixotic effort alienated almost all of his colleagues who were left calling him a “wacko bird” and viewed him as an amoral opportunist who would do anything for his own political gain.
+
+Cruz did nothing to alter his image when he became the first candidate for the White House in 2016 to announce his campaign, in an event at Liberty University in Virginia in March last year. He was then racing to beat competitors with stronger roots in Iowa – such as Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee – to be the first out of the starting gate.
+
+
+
+Cruz’s message that day was consistent with what the Texas senator would say every day on the campaign trail until the moment he withdrew from the race in Indianapolis on Tuesday. He told a crowd of college students: “I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America” and pledged to “reclaim the constitution”.
+
+In fact, Cruz’s campaign was remarkable for its consistency. There was only one key issue on which Cruz changed his message significantly in the course of the campaign – Donald J Trump.
+
+For months after Trump’s entry into the race, Cruz engaged in a virtual bear hug with the New York billionaire. Immediately after Trump said that Cruz’s Senate colleague John McCain, a former POW who was tortured in Vietnam, was not a hero, Cruz called him a friend.
+
+He told reporters in Iowa in July 2015: “I recognize that folks in the press love to see Republican on Republican violence. So you want me to say something bad about Donald Trump or bad about John McCain or bad about anybody else. I am not going to do it. John McCain is a friend of mine. I respect and admire him. He is an American hero. Donald Trump is a friend of mine.”
+
+In contrast, the then candidate Rick Perry immediately condemned Trump and called on him to drop out of the race.
+
+This pattern continued throughout 2015. As late as December, Cruz even tweeted that he thought Trump was terrific – long after other candidates had begun to condemn the frontrunner’s rhetoric.
+
+But eventually, after Cruz’s win in the Iowa caucuses, the two turned to focus on each other. Cruz targeted Trump as a “New York liberal” who was no more a conservative than Hillary Clinton. After Trump had endured months of attacks for failing to adhere to conservative orthodoxy, this had little impact.
+
+But Trump’s labelling of Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted” – based on the campaign rushing to inform Iowans that Ben Carson might drop out of the race after misconstruing a report on CNN just minutes before the caucuses were scheduled to begin – did have some effect.
+
+The result was that exit poll after exit poll showed that voters thought Cruz ran a dirtier campaign than Trump and the Texas senator’s favorability numbers dropped with Republicans.
+
+This happened even though the most personal attacks came from Trump, not Cruz. Trump tweeted an unflattering image of Cruz’s wife and threatened to “spill the beans on her” and, on the day of the Indiana primary, implied Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of John F Kennedy. A campaign surrogate even repeatedly referenced a totally unproven tabloid story about Cruz’s personal life at multiple Trump rallies
+
+In contrast, Cruz insisted that he was merely going after Trump’s record when he slammed the frontrunner’s past support for abortion rights and gun control and current support for allowing grown men “alone in bathrooms with little girls”, ie his contention that transgender people should use whichever bathroom they felt appropriate.
+
+Like other candidates in the race, Cruz had no way to cope with Trump’s strange political jujitsu. Even as Cruz out-organized Trump on the ground, it was to little avail. The Texas senator’s campaign concentrated on Illinois in the final days before the 15 March primary after poll numbers showed him solidly ahead in North Carolina and Missouri.
+
+However, the backlash among Republican voters after unrest at a canceled Trump rally in Chicago led to the frontrunner surging in the polls there, and Cruz was shut out in those crucial primaries as a result.
+
+Cruz’s only hope was to somehow unite the GOP behind him. As the last remaining opponent to Trump, he should have been the standard bearer for the Stop Trump forces, and indeed some longtime detractors like Lindsey Graham – who had joked about him being murdered on the Senate floor just a week earlier – begrudgingly endorsed him.
+
+As Jimmy Kimmel joked to Cruz in late March: “Yeah, what you did is you kind of held out until they found someone that they liked less than you.”
+
+Cruz responded by saying: “There you go. It is a powerful strategy.” The problem was the strategy didn’t work.
+
+The antagonism Cruz inspired among many mainstream Republicans made this a near impossible task. They sat on their hands and viewed Cruz as just as bad as Trump. The same factors that got him to the brink of the Republican nomination, his disdain for the “Washington cartel” and impatience with politics as usual, kept him from grasping the ring.
+
+After a campaign in which he appealed to conservatives who were tired of voting for the lesser of two evils, Cruz could never win over those establishment Republicans he had spent the past year calling the lesser evil. That became undeniable this Tuesday.",REAL
+9276,"Ashutosh attempts suicide at protest rally, rescued while proofreading suicide note","Ashutosh attempts suicide at protest rally, rescued while proofreading suicide note Posted on Tweet (Image via shiningindianews.com) 
+Delhi police has foiled a suicide attempt by Aam Aadmi Party spokesperson Ashutosh during a protest rally organized by his party. He was apprehended when he and his team were proofreading his suicide note before attempting suicide. 
+He was later sent to 14 days judicial custody where he is currently undergoing a refresher course in grammar and spelling. 
+The incident happened yesterday when AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal organized an impromptu protest rally at Jantar Mantar to expose Narendra Modi, but unfortunately no one from the media turned up for the event. Crestfallen, Mr. Kejriwal decided to go back on Twitter and continue his service for his constituency when an idea crossed his mind. He shared the idea with Ashutosh and urged him to commit suicide. 
+“But this is not what I was looking forward to when I joined AAP,” retorted Ashutosh. 
+“No, you are not going to die. You will just attempt a suicide. We will call media to cover the event. Just imagine, you will be making headlines, you will be trending on Twitter, everyone will be talking about you. It will be so cool!” 
+“Ok, you do it then if it’s so cool.” 
+“No, I need to oversee the whole event. See, there are two options for you, either do it or find another party.” 
+‘‘Which party will take me if I leave AAP?’ he pondered for a while and said, “Ok, let’s do it.” 
+“Cool, now write a suicide note and let’s get on with this.” 
+“Ok.” 
+AAP party workers gathered around Ashutosh as he typed the opening line on Microsoft Word that read, “I holed Modi resoncible for my deth…” 
+A crack team of 5 proof readers was formed immediately, who advised him about the correction the sentence demanded. 
+He grinned and typed, “ sorry responcible …not resoncible .. ” 
+“No, you can just delete the words and…” 
+Another 5 proof readers were hired urgently to strengthen the team as he continued to type the letter. 
+By the time he completed the letter, the language settings on MS Word had automatically turned into Spanish. 
+“Done,” Ashutosh pronounced with a satisfactory smile as he beheld his creation for a few seconds before calling police to inform them about his plan. 
+“Sir wait, we haven’t started proofreading yet,” implored one of the newly hired proofreaders. 
+“Do you want me to die for real or what?” 
+“No but at least the attempt should look genuine and not a hoax.” 
+“Don’t worry, I’ve informed Darya Ganj Police Station. By the time they beat the traffic to reach here, we will not only complete the proofreading but will also complete the suicide…attempt.” 
+3 proofreaders immediately started to decode the message in the letter in a separate document, another 3 changed the language settings of MS Word, and the rest started deleting the word ‘why’ which he had added at the end of every sentence. But it was too much of an ask for 10 mortals and they couldn’t even rewrite half of the letter when police arrived at the scene. 
+Kejriwal tried to cover up the whole mess and handed over the letter to the police inspector, saying, “See, what Modi has done to him! He was about to commit suicide.” 
+The inspector held the suicide note in front of him and mumbled, “Oh, Ashutosh. We would need some help here.” 
+Experts, including the ones who decoded Nostradamus’s predictions, were flown in from various parts of the world to decipher the message in the letter, however, they haven’t quite succeeded in their endeavor as reports last came in.",FAKE
+534,"Obama seeks to end sequester cuts, raise spending caps in budget plan","President Obama called for an end to ""mindless austerity"" on Thursday as he announced his desire to end ""sequester"" spending cuts in his budget for 2015.
+
+The across-the-board cuts, agreed to by both parties, have been in effect since 2013, after lawmakers were unable to produce a more strategic deficit-cutting plan. Members of both parties have problems with the cuts, which indiscriminately affect both domestic and defense programs.
+
+Obama's proposed $74 billion in added spending — about 7 percent — would be split about evenly between defense programs and the domestic side of the budget. Although he's sought before to reverse the sequester spending cuts, Obama's pitch in this year's budget comes with the added oomph of an improving economy and big recent declines in federal deficits.
+
+Taking a defiant tone, Obama vowed not to stand on the sidelines as he laid out his opening offer to Congress during remarks in Philadelphia, where House Democrats were gathered for their annual retreat.
+
+""We need to stand up and go on offensive and not be defensive about what we believe in,"" Obama said. Mocking Republicans for what he called their leaders' newfound interest in poverty and the middle class, he questioned whether they would back it up with substance when it mattered.
+
+Republicans promise to produce a balanced budget blueprint this spring even as they worry about Pentagon spending. The Senate's No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, dismissed the Obama proposals as ""happy talk."" And Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania chided the president for ""abandoning spending discipline.""
+
+GOP lawmakers are focused primarily on reversing restraints on military spending, while Democrats and Obama are seeking new domestic dollars for education, research, health care and infrastructure. Republicans argue that spending more in so many areas would undo the hard-fought reductions in the country's annual deficit.
+
+They also oppose many of the tax hikes Obama has proposed to pay for the increased spending.
+
+Neither party has tender feelings for the sequester, which cut bluntly across the entire federal budget and was originally designed more as a threat than as an actual spending plan. With the economy gaining steam while deficits decline, both parties have signaled they want to roll some of the cuts back. A bipartisan deal struck previously softened the blow by about a third for the 2014 and 2015 budget years.
+
+Both parties are generally inclined to boost spending for the military, which is wrestling with threats from terrorism and extremist groups and has been strained by budget limits and two long wars. ""At what point do we, the institution and our nation, lose our soldiers' trust?"" asked Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Army chief of staff, at a Senate hearing Wednesday.
+
+Yet among congressional Republicans, there's no unanimity about where more Pentagon funds should come from — a division within the GOP that Obama appeared eager to exploit.
+
+Some House Republicans want to cut domestic agency budgets to free money for the military — an approach that failed badly for Republicans two years ago. Some are eying cuts to so-called mandatory programs such as Social Security and Medicare, while others want to ignore the spending restraints altogether.
+
+""Whatever it takes within reason to get this problem fixed is what I'm willing to do,"" said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., adding that he would be willing to consider more tax revenue ""just to get the damn thing done.""
+
+The budget constraints stem from the hard-fought budget and debt bill of August 2011 that both parties negotiated and Obama signed into law. The threat of across-the-board cuts to virtually every federal agency was supposed to force Democrats and Republicans to compromise on smarter, less onerous spending cuts, but the measure kicked in when a supercommittee failed to reach an overall fiscal deal.
+
+The White House said Obama's budget would be ""fully paid for"" by cutting inefficient programs and closing tax loopholes — particularly a trust fund provision the White House has been eying. Spokesman Josh Earnest said that and a few other tax tweaks would not only pay for Obama's increased spending but also offset middle-class tax cuts the president wants to create or expand.
+
+At the same time, Earnest was quick to concede, ""No president has ever put forward a budget with the expectation that Congress is going to pass it in its current form.""
+
+Details of what Obama will ask for in his budget began to trickle out ahead of the budget's formal release Monday. The Interior Department announced Obama would seek $1 billion for Native American schools, while Vice President Joe Biden said the budget would call for another $1 billion in aid for Central American nations.
+
+At the Pentagon, Obama's increases would help pay for next-generation F-35 fighter jets, for ships and submarines and for long-range Air Force tankers. On the domestic side, Obama has proposed two free years of community college and new or expanded tax credits for child care and spouses who both work.
+
+In his meeting with House Democrats, Obama also insisted that Republicans must not be allowed to use a funding bill for the Homeland Security Department to try to quash his executive actions on immigration. The White House has called that approach a ""dangerous view"" that would risk national security.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2699,Rieder: Why Stephanopoulos flap matters,"The revolving door between politics and journalism and sometimes right back again has been spinning for a very long time.
+
+Journalism depends so much on credibility. The recent Brian Williams scandal reminds us that this is not simply an academic issue.
+
+Politicians and political operatives are all about the spin. Their mission isn't to get as close as they can to the truth. It's to win elections. Which means casting everything in a light most favorable to their prospects.
+
+Not the finest or most appropriate credential for truth-seeker.
+
+""One day they are calling journalists to spin them to write favorably about their prominent political patrons and the next minute they are sitting at the table with journalists and indistinguishable from the journalists,"" the late David Broder, an outstanding Washington Post political reporter who loathed that spinning door, once told American Journalism Review.
+
+Yet there are people who have overcome their substantial political baggage and made that transition in a most impressive way. None more than the late Tim Russert, a onetime aide to the late New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Russert became a sterling host of NBC's Meet the Press.
+
+Another political player who seemed to have successfully navigated those treacherous waters was George Stephanopoulos. I thought it was a truly bad idea when the former top aide to President Clinton, a hugely partisan figure, became a news analyst for ABC back in 1996. But Stephanopoulos, now ABC's chief anchor, host of its Sunday morning political talk show This Week with George Stephanopoulos and co-anchor of Good Morning America, turned out to be a pleasant surprise, shedding his political warrior past and showing journalism chops.
+
+The recent revelation that Stephanopoulos had donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation between 2012 and 2014 not only raises serious questions about his judgment. It also disqualifies him from having anything to do with covering the 2016 presidential race. He has already said he won't moderate ABC News' Republican primary debate in February, which is a start.
+
+So far ABC is standing firmly behind its embattled anchor. But it's early in the saga, and that could change quickly. Regardless, there is no way he should allow himself — or be allowed — to deal in any way with a contest in which Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to become the Democratic candidate for president.
+
+Exhibit A of why that is the case came on April 26, when Stephanopoulos aggressively grilled Peter Schweizer, author of the book Clinton Cash, which is critical of the Clinton Foundation. Stephanopoulos failed to disclose that he was a benefactor of said foundation. But even if he had, that would hardly have eliminated the problem. The issue is the donations themselves.
+
+Making them would be inappropriate for any political journalist. But it's particularly crucial for a former Clinton consigliere. Even though he had had a public break with the Clintons, Stephanopoulos of all people should not be giving money to anything having to do with them. What was he thinking?
+
+Sure, the foundation is a charitable enterprise. But all things Clinton tend to be closely intertwined. And there has been no shortage of suggestions that people have been ponying up to the foundation to curry favor with the Clintons, one of whom is a potential next president. There are lots of worthy causes out there with no links to Hillaryland.
+
+One key point: Stephanopoulos' role — and that of his network, for that matter — are very different from the jobs and the forum of the ex-candidates who have made Fox News a full employment act for failed GOP presidential aspirants. Fox is a political force. ABC News is not.
+
+Stephanopoulos' apologies have not been reassuring, certainly not the initial one. He first said he should have told his employer and his viewers about the donations, which are a matter of public record, not that he shouldn't have made them. He later conceded that the donations were problematic.
+
+For someone so politically and journalistically astute, this was a boneheaded — and totally tone deaf — error indeed.",REAL
+2616,Netanyahu Defeats Center-Left Rival In Israel's Parliamentary Election,"With nearly all votes counted in elections for the Knesset, Israel's parliament, Benjamin Netanyahu's center-right Likud party has won at least a five-seat victory over its principal rival, the center-left Zionist Union.
+
+Israeli media report Likud has 29 or 30 seats in the 120-member Knesset to the Zionist Union's 24 seats.
+
+Exit polls by Israel's three main television channels initially showed Likud and the Zionist Union more or less tied. Shortly after midnight in Israel the Zionist Union Chairman Yitzhak Herzog predicted a return to power of the center-left.
+
+But as the actual votes were counted the results were quite different.
+
+Netanyahu must assemble a coalition of parties totaling at least 61 seats to form a new government.
+
+If he succeeds in forming a coalition government, Netanyahu would begin a historic fourth term as prime minister of Israel.
+
+The Associated Press says Netanyahu's victory ""likely spells trouble for Mideast peace efforts and could further escalate tensions with the United States.
+
+""Netanyahu, who already has a testy relationship with President Barack Obama, took a sharp turn to the right in the final days of the campaign, staking out a series of hard-line positions that will put him at odds with the international community. ""In a dramatic policy reversal, he said he now opposes the creation of a Palestinian state — a key policy goal of the White House and the international community. He also promised to expand construction in Jewish areas of east Jerusalem, the section of the city claimed by the Palestinians as their capital. ""Netanyahu infuriated the White House early this month when he delivered a speech to the U.S. Congress criticizing an emerging nuclear deal with Iran. The speech was arranged with Republican leaders and not coordinated with the White House ahead of time.""",REAL
+6271,Why We Wait For The Future,"opednews.com - Advertisement - 
+I have suggested elsewhere that if we want a better future we will have to create it out of whole cloth and intend that it be 'for the highest and best good for all concerned and the planet'. 
+Most of us know that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. The time, space thing that is our planetary reality is occupied by dark, evil, powerful forces with no intention of moving aside to accommodate positive outcomes. 
+Carl Jung has noted that ""the opposite of love is not hate, it is power"". I get this. Love nourishes and empowers the object of its attention, power seeks dominion over what it notices, is destructive. We cannot confront this power and it would be karmically harmful to do so resulting in no change. 
+So, the existent power, in play for 300,000 years, must 'start' to break down before change is possible, to allow space for that change. If we want to be in control of that change we must be the dominate unified conscious intent during the breakdown of order and focus that positive intend toward a better future. 
+The breakdown of order is in play right now in front of our eyes .It is remarkable and noteworthy that the U.S., the evil empire has leveled most of the Middle East, used depleted uranium weaponry in Iraq causing severe genetic damage to newborns for generations, has driven millions of hapless refugees into Europe and I hear no loud, clear voice screaming for them,us, to stop. I have just described an 'end of times, type horror story the evil doers who run the U.S. are engaged in and plan to expand around the globe. They actually plan and promote the breakdown of order, the chaos out of which they expect to rise with an absolute grip on all power. They expect us to welcome this enslavement just to stop the pain and suffering they have caused us. Again, this madness is taking place right now in front of our eyes. 
+If the decent and responsible among us organize now to be that dominate unified intent, the dominate consciousness , we would control the aftermath of the planned breakdown of order. Our rulers do not imagine us capable of this since we have behaved like victims who always attract and suffer victimizers to their lives. - Advertisement - 
+So that's it. We need about ten percent of us to to lightly hold the intent to create the new paradigm of existence and hold this vision while chaos descends around us. If this is an effort by 'enough' of us we will prevail. The Law of Attraction, the first universal law will assist us and attract more positive energy than thought possible. The planet herself is considered a conscious being and would certainly direct all possible positive energy to our cause-her cause. As our energy grows the energy available to evil wanes. When they sense this their testicles will shrink! 
+Finally, no one need give their life to this cause rather a commitment to prevail not founded solely on self interest and a real sense of responsibility to humankind and the planet. 
+The breakdown of order has begun.... - Advertisement -",FAKE
+7636,U.S. militia girds for trouble as presidential election nears,"U.S. militia girds for trouble as presidential election nears 11/02/2016 
+REUTERS 
+Down a Georgia country road, camouflaged members of the Three Percent Security Force have mobilized for rifle practice, hand-to-hand combat training — and an impromptu campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. 
+“How many people are voting for Trump? Ooh-rah!” asks Chris Hill, a paralegal who goes by the code name “Bloodagent.” 
+“Ooh-rah!” shout a dozen militia members in response, as morning sunlight sifted through the trees last weekend. 
+As the most divisive presidential election in recent memory nears its conclusion, some armed militia groups are preparing for the possibility of a stolen election on Nov. 8 and civil unrest in the days following a victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton. 
+They say they won’t fire the first shot, but they’re not planning to leave their guns at home, either. 
+Trump’s populist campaign has energized militia members like Hill, who admire the Republican mogul’s promise to deport illegal immigrants, stop Muslims from entering the country and build a wall along the Mexico border. Trump has repeatedly warned that the election may be “rigged,” and has said he may not respect the results if he does not win. At least one paramilitary group, the Oath Keepers, has called on members to monitor voting sites for signs of fraud. 
+Armed paramilitary groups first gained prominence in the early 1990s, fueled by confrontations in Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas, culminating in a militia sympathizer’s 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. 
+Their numbers dwindled following that attack but have spiked in recent years, driven by fears that President Barack Obama will threaten gun ownership and erode the power of local government. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, estimates there were 276 active militias last year, up from 42 in 2008. 
+In recent years, armed groups have confronted federal authorities in a series of land-use disputes in the western United States. Federal officials fear more clashes could come after seven militants were acquitted on conspiracy charges for occupying a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon. 
+Many fear Clinton would push the county further to the left. 
+“This is the last chance to save America from ruin,” Hill said. “I’m surprised I was able to survive or suffer through eight years of Obama without literally going insane, but Hillary is going to be more of the same.” 
+
+EXTREMIST GROUPS EMBOLDENED 
+The Oath Keepers, a prominent anti-government force that sent gun-toting members to the 2014 race riots in Ferguson, Missouri, called on members last week to monitor voting sites on election day for any signs of fraud. 
+An hour south of Atlanta, the Three Percent Security Force started the day around the campfire, taking turns shooting automatic pistols and rifles at a makeshift target range. They whooped with approval when blasts from one member’s high-powered rifle knocked down a tree. 
+The group operates independently, but is affiliated with a national armed movement that calls for members to defend individual rights in the face of what they see as an overreaching federal government. The movement draws its name from the notion that no more than 3 percent of the American population fought in the Revolutionary War against Britain. 
+Amid the war games, Hill weighed plans for a possible armed march on Washington if Clinton wins. 
+He said he doesn’t want his members leading the way, but they will defend the protesters if need be. His group will not hesitate to act if a President Clinton tries to disarm gun owners, he said. 
+“I will be there to render assistance to my fellow countrymen, and prevent them from being disarmed, and I will fight and I will kill and I may die in the process,” said Hill, who founded the militia several years ago. 
+Trump’s candidacy has emboldened extremist groups to speak more openly about challenging the rule of law, said Ryan Lenz, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center. 
+“Prior to this campaign season, these ideas were relegated to sort of the political fringe of the American political landscape,” he said. “Now these ideas are legitimized.” 
+Over the past week, some prominent Trump supporters have hinted at violence. 
+“If Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket,” former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh wrote on Twitter last week. Conservative commentator Wayne Root fantasized about Clinton’s death while speaking at a Trump rally in Las Vegas on Sunday. 
+Back in Georgia, the Three Percent Security Force wrapped up rifle practice in the midday sun. They then headed further into the trees to tackle an obstacle course with loaded pistols at their sides, ready for whatever may come. 
+“We’ve building up for this, just like the Marines,” he said. “We are going to really train harder and try to increase our operational capabilities in the event that this is the day that we hoped would never come.” Share On:",FAKE
+8836,Continental Gold,"The Richest Man.., Considered, Invested In One U.S.-Based Company – CNL! CONTINENTAL GOLD (TSX: CNL; OTCQX: CGOOF) is a well-funded advanced-stage exploration and development company focused on becoming a leading gold producer in Colombia. The Company´s 100% owned flagship Buriticá project is a large and high-grade gold deposit located 75 km northwest from Medellín. Continental´s management team has proven experience in permitting, financing and building precious metal mines in Latin America. The Company is dedicated to maximizing shareholder value while working to the highest standards of community commitment and environmental defensiveness. Symbol CNL on the TSX and CGOOF in the United States. CONTACT THE COMPANY DIRECTLY t o get more information by calling ( 416) 583-5610 or email [email protected] . Continental Gold which has one of the highest grade gold deposits in the entire world. The company’s flagship high grade gold and silver project Buritica, has extremely high 97 and 95% recovery rates for gold and silver. Buritica has gold resources of 2.97 million ounces measured and indicated and 4.4 million ounces inferred with grades averaging nearly 10 grams per ton of gold equivalent, which includes high-grade silver resources. The company has high priority targets being drilled at Buritica and a portfolio of other potential high-grade exploration projects and all projects are 100% owned. Continental Gold has roughly $100 million of cash in the bank and management also owns roughly 16% of the company. Continental Gold, symbol CNL in Canada and CGOOF in the US. 
+Continental Gold (TSX:CNL; OTCQX:CGOOF) is an advanced-stage exploration and development company focused on maximizing shareholder value by becoming the leading gold producer in Colombia. 
+Why Continental Gold? 
+Continental Gold is an advanced-stage exploration and development company focused on maximizing shareholder value and committed to the highest standards of community and environmental responsibility. The Company´s 100%-owned flagship Buriticá project is a large high-grade gold deposit located 75 km northwest from Medellín, Colombia. On February 24, 2016, the Company announced the results of an independent Feasibility Study for the Buriticá project. Utilizing a gold price of $1,200/ounce, a silver price of $15/ounce and a US$:COP exchange rate of 1:2,850, the base case scenario resulted in an after-tax net present value at a 5% discount (NPV5) of $860 million, an internal rate of return (IRR) of 31.2% and payback of 2.3 years. 
+What Differentiates Continental Gold? 
+The Company´s 100%-owned flagship high-grade Buriticá project is a rare combination of size, grade, straightforward metallurgy, excellent infrastructure and growth potential. On February 24, 2016, the Company released the results of an independent Feasibility Study that indicates the Buriticá project will be a lowest quartile cost producer and an economically robust mine with modest initial capital expenditure. Once in production, Buriticá has the potential to approximately double the legal production of gold in Colombia and become the largest single gold mine in the country. 
+In association with various government entities in Colombia, the Company was the first in the country to formalize small-scale mining associations, paving the way for the implementation of legal and responsible small-scale mining operations at the Buriticá project. In addition, the Company has operated a 30 tpd small-scale operating mine at Buriticá since 1992 and is one of the largest employers in northwestern Antioquia, employing over 300 people. The Company focuses on providing a safe working environment and partnering with the local communities on key social projects. 
+ARI SUSSMAN – CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER – Ari Sussman has over 15 years of experience in both the natural resources and investment markets sectors. Having dedicated the majority of his career to the natural resources industry, Mr. Sussman has been instrumental in sourcing, funding and developing high-quality mineral assets. During his career, Mr. Sussman has built a strong network of business contacts throughout Latin America, and in the past decade has raised over $500 million for various resource companies Association. MATEO RESTREPO – PRESIDENT – Mr. Restrepo was Vice-President of Corporate Affairs at Prodeco Group (a Glencore subsidiary), Colombia’s third largest thermal coal producer, where he was responsible for managing the company’s key relationships with the Colombian government, non-government organizations, and national and local stakeholders proximal to its operations. He was also Director of the Colombian Office of Grupo Salinas – Banco Azteca of Mexico, where he played a pivotal role in the process of licensing and setting up operations in Colombia. Mr. Restrepo has held various positions with the Colombian Government, including Senior Counselor to the President of Colombia on Economic Recovery (2009-2010) and Advisor to the Presidency of Colombia (2005-2008). Born in Medellín, Colombia, Mr. Restrepo holds a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Business Administration from Berkeley College.",FAKE
+967,Political hatefest: Why the media—and the candidates—are dragging down the campaign,"We are now at the point in this political season where everyone is hating on everyone else.
+
+Think about it: When was the last time you saw a piece or watched a segment in which a candidate was portrayed positively?
+
+Presidential campaigns are a tough business where every contender gets roughed up as the price of admission. But the level of vitriol—the pundits against Donald Trump and his rivals, and the candidates sliming each other—has spiraled way out of control.
+
+It hasn’t been Morning in America for a long time. In fact, it’s pretty close to a dark and stormy midnight.
+
+And the hyperspeed news cycle has all this unfolding at a head-snapping pace, like an endless feed of Twitter taunts.
+
+In the deafening din of the media echo chamber, it sometimes seems like these are the sounds that break through:
+
+--Donald Trump is a fascist threat to our way of life, says racist things and loves to attack women over their looks.
+
+--Ted Cruz is the most unlikable man in Washington, maybe the world, and such a nutty right-winger he’d probably like to shut down the government forever.
+
+--John Kasich is a cranky spoiler impersonating a nice guy who is staying in the race out of pure ego.
+
+--Hillary Clinton is a deceitful woman who gets on everyone’s nerves, keeps lying about her email server and is lucky she’s not in jail.
+
+The “war over the wives” controversy is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the gutter campaign, with Trump blaming Cruz for the posting of a nude magazine photo of his wife, Cruz blaming Trump for unsubstantiated mistress allegations in the Enquirer, and the media breathlessly following each twist and tweet.
+
+It’s a chicken-and-egg game to assign blame for the campaign’s locker room tone to either the politicians or the journalists. Perhaps it reflects the crude and often mean-spirited tone of our culture.
+
+Here, among thousands of possible selections, is a sampling. Let’s start with Sunday’s New York Times op-ed page, where everyone gets whacked.
+
+Ross Douthat, a thoughtful conservative voice, says Ted Cruz looks like he’s faking it:
+
+“The fact that he seems so much like an actor hitting his marks fits with the story of how he became Mr. True Conservative Outsider in the first place. Basically, he spent years trying to make it in Washington on the insider’s track, and hit a wall because too many of the insiders didn’t like him — because his ambition was too naked, his climber’s zeal too palpable. So he deliberately switched factions, turning the establishment’s personal disdain into a political asset, and taking his Ivy League talents to the Tea Party instead.”
+
+On such issues as the government shutdown over ObamaCare, an exercise in “self-serving cynicism…Cruz has proceeded with several fingers in the wind; every time the conservative mood has shifted even a little, he’s shifted quickly too.” He accuses Cruz of first being obsequious toward Trump, but turning to self-righteousness now that “the name-calling and scandal-mongering have been turned against his reputation and his family.”
+
+After that, and with a parting shot that “his cynicism can be repellent,” Douthat allows that the hard-working Cruz has earned his standing in the primaries.
+
+On the liberal side, I have a lot of respect for Nick Kristof, but in his Times column he buys into an increasingly common myth. The headline is “My Shared Shame: The Media Helped Make Trump”:
+
+“Although many of us journalists have derided Trump, the truth is that he generally outsmarted us (with many exceptions, for there truly have been serious efforts to pin him down and to investigate Trump University and his various business failings). He manipulated television by offering outrageous statements that drew ever more cameras — without facing enough skeptical follow-up questions.
+
+“It’s not that we shouldn’t have covered Trump’s craziness, but that we should have aggressively provided context in the form of fact checks and robust examination of policy proposals.”
+
+While the press could always do a better job, I’d argue that there has been endless fact-checking and it hasn’t hurt Teflon Trump.
+
+The second “failure” is that “we wrongly treated Trump as a farce.” Not all of us, Nick, but that is especially true among the Huffington Post liberal crowd (though plenty of conservative pundits fell into this trap).
+
+But I strongly agree with Kristof’s last point: “We failed to take Trump seriously because of a third media failing: We were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn’t appreciate how much his message resonated….We inhabit a middle-class world and don’t adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to senators, not enough to the jobless.”
+
+Also on the op-ed page, Maureen Dowd looked at President Obama “tangoing into history”—that is, enjoying his trip to Argentina and Cuba and failing to reflect the public alarm over the Brussels bombings:
+
+“Barack Obama started off as a man self-consciously alone on stage and that’s how he is exiting. He is, for better and worse, too cool for school. His identity is defined by his desire to rise above the fray. Unfortunately, he is in politics, which is the fray…
+
+“The president has a bristling resistance to what he sees as cheap emotion. (See: flag pin, 2008.) That has led him, time after time, to respond belatedly or bloodlessly in moments when Americans are alarmed, wanting solace and solutions.”
+
+Well, how about John Kasich? He hasn’t offended too many people, right?
+
+National Review Editor Rich Lowry is in the #NeverKasich camp:
+
+“This truly is a year when the rules don’t apply. If they did, John Kasich would be back in Columbus trying to figure out whether he sells his soul to Donald Trump or endorses Ted Cruz.
+
+“Instead, the Ohio governor is still out on the trail running a delusional vanity project masquerading as a presidential campaign. There is no appetite for his pragmatic, ‘can’t we all get along’ campaign among Republican-primary voters, who have made that abundantly clear.”
+
+Oh, and the Times news section joins the fray by quoting Kasich associates who “recall a three-decade career in government punctuated by scolding confrontations, intemperate critiques and undiplomatic remarks.”
+
+I could go on and on. Slate says Trump “seeks to destroy people who stand in his way, especially women, even if he looks disgusting doing it.”
+
+New York magazine says that “unfortunately for Cruz, his logic backfires. Because if real men do not attack women, Cruz is fake as hell. In fact, he might be faker than Trump.”
+
+Maybe, on some level, we get the elections we deserve.
+
+This is a reality show campaign in which reality, perhaps in the form of terror attacks, sometimes intrudes. It is endlessly entertaining, but often feels like tragicomedy with no heroes.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+6780,Comment on A Chinese Boy With The Ability To See In Pitch Black Dark Baffles Scientists (Video) by Adpres Media - Adpres.net,"  Many humans are discovering they have unique abilities that science can’t explain, suggesting that we may have untapped potential beyond our wildest dreams. Since the majority of people have yet to realize this potential, there is a certain mysticism surrounding this phenomenon, which is why many perceive people with special capabilities as “superhumans.” One of the more recent superhumans to share his talent with the world is Nong Yousui , a young boy from Dahua, China.   Nong Yousui and His Superhuman Eyesight Like many babies, Nong Yousui was born with blue eyes; however, Nong’s eyes have a certain brightness that set him apart from other blue-eyed children. Later in life, he discovered that the colour of his eyes wasn’t his only unique attribute, as he claims to have perfect vision in complete darkness. Naturally, his father brought Nong to the hospital in search for answers. As his father explained , “They [doctors] told me he would grow out of it and that his eyes would stop glowing and turn black like most Chinese people but they never did.” Even though Nong can see clearly in the dark, he has difficulty seeing in sunlight and finds bright light uncomfortable. His teacher also claims that when light is shined directly into Nong’s eyes in the dark, they reflect a neon green tone. When Nong’s story first went public, a skeptical Chinese journalist decided to formally test his claim. The journalist created a set of questionnaires for the boy to complete in a controlled setting, a pitch black dark room. After completing the tests, his results clearly proved that the boy can see, read, and write perfectly in complete darkness. The World Record Academy , the organization that certifies world records, deemed Nong Yousui as the first person to be able to see in the dark and awarded him with a world record. Check out the following video about Nong Yousui and his ability to see in the dark: http://www.medicaldaily.com/chinese-boy-nong-yousui-can-see-pitch-dark-scientists-unconvinced-253207 The Scientific Debate Surrounding Nong’s Night Vision Nong’s story has generated a lot of publicity, mostly outside mainstream media (not surprisingly), though it has attracted attention from the scientific community as well. Many scientists remain skeptical of Nong’s unique eyesight because it doesn’t make sense according to human evolution. As James Reynolds , a pediatric ophthalmologist at State University of New York in Buffalo, explained, evolution is a slow process: “Evolutionarily, mutations can result in differences that allow for new environmental niche exploitation. But such mutations are modified over long periods. A functional tapetum in a human would be just as absurd as a human born with wings. It can’t happen.” Although evolution clearly occurred in nature, it is important to note that there are still many unanswered questions surrounding the theory of evolution and its relationship to modern-day humans. A University of Glasgow study performed in 2000 proved that modern man was not in fact descended from Neanderthals, a species believed to be our ancestors, disproving the out-of-Africa model of modern human evolution. I’m not suggesting that Darwin’s work was wrong whatsoever; I’m simply reiterating the fact that it is a theory that has been applied to humans and that specific parts of it have been disproven, including the hypothesis that we evolved from Neanderthals. With that, I think it’s presumptuous to state that the theory of human evolution negates the reality of Nong’s night vision, when we’re still searching for answers surrounding human evolution in general. Nong’s night vision seems more plausible when you consider all of the other species with similar capabilities. Numerous animals including cats and those that are nocturnal have incredible night vision due to a thin layer of cells that exists in their eyes called the tapetum lucidum (as mentioned above). When light shines directly into these animals’ eyes, their eyes appear to glow, similar to Nong’s. What We Can Learn From Nong’s Story This isn’t the first time we’ve observed incredible capabilities in human eyes. Many people have claimed to heal their eyesight naturally and there have been studies performed on humans that have successfully improved their night vision (read our article about it here ). Eyes have also been referred to as the gateway to the soul, which means they could be used as a tool to look beyond the physical world and into the spiritual. Like Nong, many other people have come forward to share their superhuman abilities with the public — abilities for which scientists have had no explanations. Many of these people are enlightened beings, such as monks who can generate heat and have supernormal mental capabilities. Another infamous ‘superhuman,’ Wim Hof , can submerge his body in ice for hours while meditating and his body temperature remains stable, an ability which still baffles scientists. Why should we automatically doubt a young boy’s uniqueness because science tells us to? It’s time we put our scientific egos aside, accept the fact that some things are inexplicable (for now), and recognize that what we deem impossible may sometimes be possible. To read more about other people with superhuman capabilities, check out our article:",FAKE
+3030,Three reasons political polarization is here to stay,"Jane Mansbridge is the Charles F. Adams professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. As president of the American Political Science Association from 2012 to 2013, she created the Task Force on Negotiating Agreement in Politics to respond to the crisis of polarization in the federal legislature.
+
+A suggestion on polarization: Get used to it. It’s not going away anytime soon.
+
+Americans have not, by and large, grown grumpier over the years. But members of the two major parties have stopped speaking to one another across the aisle. They don’t vote together, either.
+
+Three major structural changes — gradual party realignment, closer elections and inequality — largely explain the huge decline in the numbers of party members willing to vote for legislation that the other party has sponsored, and in particular the number of Republicans willing to vote for measures the Democratic Party has sponsored. None of these causes is likely to change.
+
+A massive transition began after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. As he told then-White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers the night of the signing, ”I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” He had set in motion a train of events that, over time, would slowly lead conservative White southerners to leave the Democratic Party and join the Republicans. As the Southern conservatives left the Democratic Party, they left behind a relatively liberal remnant (in significant part, African Americans).
+
+[America today is two different countries. They don’t get along.]
+
+Democrats outside the South did not become much more liberal in the ensuing years, but the change in the composition of the party in the South made the national party more liberal and receptive to people of color. As the conservative Southerners joined the Republican Party, they also changed its center of gravity. Their perspectives and demands empowered the right wing of the party that had long chafed under the moderate Republican establishment. Evangelicals rose in strength; businesspeople fell. The Republican Party began to look for support less in Maine and more in Georgia. Its members became more extremely conservative, while the members of the Democratic Party became only a little more liberal.
+
+With this shift, the parties in Congress became more electorally competitive. Southern conservatives leaving the Democratic Party gradually added their numbers to the Republican Party, which in 1980 won a majority of seats in the Senate (and in 1994 a majority in the House) for almost the first time since the New Deal.
+
+The period of bipartisanship in Washington, from 1940 to 1980, was actually a period of Democratic dominance. With the Democrats in more or less permanent power, it behooved individual Republicans to play nice in order to get their bridges and roads. But by 1980, the parties began a period of intense competition.
+
+As Frances Lee at the University of Maryland points out, when the minority party thinks it might win in the next election, it has a great incentive not to let the majority party have any “wins” that it might run on in that next election. She quotes then-House Chief Deputy Minority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from 2009: “If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority. We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill.”
+
+The now-famous U-curve of income inequality in the United States shows that after a period of relative equality from about 1940 to 1980, we have today become as unequal as we were in the last Gilded Age. That U-curve of income inequality tracks uncannily the U-curve of polarization, which in 1910 was almost as high as it is now, then fell precipitously — along with income inequality — until it bottomed out in the bipartisan era from 1940 to 1980. It rose again, in exact parallel with inequality, to its present heights. Why? Inequality seems to cause polarization and polarization to some extent causes inequality.
+
+Nolan McCarty and his colleagues at Princeton are beginning to tease out the mechanisms. In state politics, they find that states with increasing income inequality experience two polarizing effects. First, state Republican parties shift to the right overall. Second, state Democratic parties shift to the left because their moderates lose. Rich Republican donors could well be responsible for both outcomes if, as seems likely, they fund more extreme candidates in Republican districts and target the Democrats they have the best chance to dislodge, namely those in politically moderate districts.
+
+[Republicans created dysfunction. Now they’re paying for it.]
+
+The big picture is that the extraordinary growth in incomes at the top of the income distribution makes possible the discretionary money that can then be poured into politics, and those who contribute to politics are, on average, a good deal more extreme in their views than the average voter.
+
+The gradual party realignment after 1964, the closeness of elections since 1980, and the growth in income at the top of the distribution are the three deep causes of polarization. Gerrymandering is not the cause; the Senate is as polarized as the House. Primaries are not the cause; primary reforms have had relatively little effect. Changes in the rules of the House and Senate have had some effect, as have the increasing number of hours that legislators now have to spend fundraising and the increasing number of hours they now spend in their home districts with their constituents. But of the three deepest causes, at least party realignment and income inequality are likely to continue. Close elections may well continue, too. So polarization is here to stay — for the indefinite future.
+
+Polarization is not itself a design flaw in our constitutional system. Britain’s parliamentary system has polarization — two opposing parties and little, if any, negotiation between them. Yet our polarization is exacerbated by our Constitution’s extreme separation of powers, with its many veto points. If you combine those veto points with extreme and opposing positions, the result is deadlock. Deadlock was less of a problem in the early days of the republic, when today’s interdependence in commerce, law and order could not even have been imagined, and the national legislature did not have to pass many laws. Today that deadlock is a disaster.
+
+Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein: Republicans created dysfunction. Now they’re paying for it.
+
+Dana Nelson: The growth of executive power has turned politics into war
+
+Jim Marshall: Congress could reduce polarization. It has chosen not to.
+
+Thomas Petri: Our government is messy — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t working
+
+Alan I. Abramowitz: America today is two different countries. They don’t get along.",REAL
+8366,Badass Patriot Has MASSIVE Surprise For Thieves Who Stole His Trump Sign,"Badass Patriot Has MASSIVE Surprise For Thieves Who Stole His Trump Sign   Amanda Shea   Trump supporters 
+It’s become a trend for Hillary Clinton-supporters with far too much time on their hands to steal any Donald Trump sign they can get their grubby hands on. There’s no returning the “favor” by taking a Hillary sign since they are practically non-existent in almost all neighborhoods. So, one proud patriot took retaliation to new heights ensuring liberals stay away from his sign. 
+The unnamed owner of the Trump sign, who is believed to be in Arizona, is aware that his sign may not cost a lot but is worth much more than the plastic it’s printed on based on what it represents — a chance to take America back. Hillary-supporters are an odd group of people who seem to believe that the Constitutional right to free speech is only bestowed upon them, along with the power to take it from anyone who says something that they don’t like. 
+Perhaps this the driving purpose behind the nationwide rash of Trump sign theft, paired with the fact that they think that they’re “helping” by removing these visual statements of support from public view. Either way, where there is a Trump sign, there’s a liberal nearby waiting for their chance to make a stupid statement of their own in stealing it. 
+However, this sign owner beat them to the punch by putting it in a place that was not only impossible to reach but showed his support of the GOP candidate loud and proud. It sat up high in a tall tree, keeping it out of reach for thieving liberals. Taking Trump sign to new heights to prevent it from being stolen and make a bold message at the same time. 
+If liberals really want to show their support for Hillary, they’ll have to climb this massive tree and tear it down, but chances are, they’re not as tough as they think they are and prefer to stick to easy to steal signs. We commend the hero for Trump who showed his bravery in putting the sign up so high, knowing that no liberal would dare to go there since it’s so far out of their safe space and more work than they are willing to perform.",FAKE
+700,Can Libertarian nominees Gary Johnson and Bill Weld siphon votes from Trump?,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+3463,"The Supreme Court Case That Could Gut Obamacare, Explained In 2 Minutes","UPDATE: June 4 -- The health insurance enrollment figures cited in this video were derived from a report that counted enrollment as of Feb. 22, which the Department of Health and Human Services published on March 10. The department released new data on June 2, detailing enrollment as of March 31. According to the new report, 7.3 million people were covered by plans purchased via the federally operated health insurance exchanges in the 34 states subject to the Supreme Court ruling, and 6.4 million of them received subsidies. The new report includes additional information about each state, but does not update the calculation of average unsubsidized premiums.",REAL
+6277,FBI Officials: No Link Between Donald Trump and Putin…,"Now that washed up Democratic “Consultant” Carville is finding a “conspiracy” between Trump and the KGB…that was disbanded in 1991. 
+“Time Traveling KGB” they were labeled at RT article. 
+You know, maybe 2 years ago, I made a few comments about some Kevin Costner movies, where the plot was “Russians destroying our Dollar” in one of them, and another where he was a CIA operative “because someone has to do it” along with passages about the “Federal Reserve keeps our economy safe and sound” and a bunch of other obvious CIA-injected Narrative…everyone is aware that Hollywood has a CIA Liaison officer approving the scripts, and injecting lines in it, right? 
+Kevin “Hollywood Rose” Costner…a paid propagandist. Working against America. For the younger generation, I am referring to “Tokyo Rose” of WW II. 
+“When everything America believes is true, is a lie, I know we’ve done our job” A CIA Director William Colby a few days before he “drowned” in a canoeing accident. Too bad JFK wasn’t able to “break the CIA into a thousands pieces” and Eli-Min-ate it. Yes, that is where these words originated: in demonic/satanic behavior..and I am a confirmed atheist. 
+Illu of Sais-On….be aware patriots. Illusion and Programming take vigilance to battle.",FAKE
+1627,The Democratic Debate Clock: Which Issues Got The Most Time,"The Democratic Debate Clock: Which Issues Got The Most Time
+
+The three Democratic candidates for president met in Des Moines on Saturday night for their second debate. The CBS debate was originally going to focus on the economy but shifted gears after the attacks in Paris on Friday.
+
+Christopher Isham, CBS News vice president and Washington bureau chief said, ""Last night's attacks are a tragic example of the kinds of challenges American presidents face in today's world, and we intend to ask the candidates how they would confront the evolving threat of terrorism.""
+
+NPR tracked which issues got the most time during the debate. If the candidates veered off the question posed to them, we kept track of that too:
+
+What experience would you draw on in a crisis? 3:41",REAL
+4572,Protesters target Trump buildings in massive street rallies,"(CNN) For many Americans across the country, Donald Trump's victory is an outcome they simply refuse to accept.
+
+""Not my president,"" protesters chanted in rallies coast to coast.
+
+Tens of thousands filled the streets in at least 25 US cities overnight -- with demonstrations outside Trump's properties.
+
+While most protesters were peaceful, dozens were arrested. At least three officers were wounded. And about 40 fires were set in one California city.
+
+Here's a snapshot of the rallies across the nation:
+
+On Thursday afternoon, more than 200 anti-Trump protesters marched from the Union Square area to Washington Square Park in Manhattan.
+
+Some carried signs with messages such as, ""White men stop ruining everything."" They chanted, ""Trump and Pence make no sense.""
+
+Overnight, about 5,000 people protested the real estate mogul's victory outside Trump Tower, authorities estimated. They included pop star Lady Gaga, a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter.
+
+Their concerns ranged from policies, such as Trump's proposed plan to build a wall along the US-Mexican border, to the polarizing tenor of his campaign that they say stoked xenophobic fears.
+
+""I came out here to let go of a lot of fear that was sparked as soon as I saw the results,"" protester Nick Powers said in New York. He said he feared Trump will support stronger stop-and-frisk policies that would put many people in prison. Powers said he was also worried that Trump's victory would embolden sexist views.
+
+At least 15 protesters at Trump Tower were arrested Wednesday night for disorderly conduct, New York police said.
+
+About 7,000 demonstrators filled streets in Oakland on Wednesday night -- and some turned violent.
+
+Protesters hurled Molotov cocktails, rocks and fireworks at police. Three officers were injured, police spokeswoman Johnna Watson said.
+
+Trash fires smoldered on a highway, and a downtown business was set ablaze. By Thursday morning, emergency workers extinguished about 40 fires.
+
+""Throughout the evening, the large group splintered into smaller groups that began vandalizing numerous businesses in the downtown area,"" Oakland police said.
+
+At least 30 people were arrested and 11 citations were issued for vandalism, assaulting officers, unlawful assembly, failure to disperse and possession of a firearm.
+
+Three police cars from nearby Pleasanton were damaged, officials said.
+
+A few miles away at Berkeley High School, about 1,500 students walked out of classes Wednesday. In San Francisco, more than 1,000 students across the city walked out of the school and headed to the Civic Center to engage in a peaceful protest, according to a tweet from the San Francisco Unified School District.
+
+""People are furious, not just at the results of the election but the rhetoric of Donald Trump,"" said Ahmed Kanna, an organizer for Social Alternative at Berkeley.
+
+In Chicago, activists marched down Lake Shore Drive -- an eight-lane expressway along Lake Michigan -- toward the Windy City's Trump Tower.
+
+""I still can't believe I have to protest for civil rights,"" one sign read.
+
+CNN's Ryan Young, who saw a few thousand people there, said many chanted vulgarities toward the President-elect.
+
+""As a nation we thought we had come so far, but it seems like we're taking many steps back,"" one woman said. ""We want to come together to change that.""
+
+In Omaha, Nebraska, authorities deployed pepper balls on a crowd of more than 200 people protesting Trump's election after they defied police orders to stay out of the streets.
+
+Dozens of high school and college students staged rallies near the USC and UCLA campuses.
+
+Overnight, more than 1,000 protesters rallied outside Los Angeles City Hall, including many young Latinos.
+
+They chanted, ""I will not live in fear,"" ""Fight back, stand up"" and ""¡Si se puede!"" (Spanish for ""Yes, it can be done"").
+
+Protesters also set on fire a piñata depicting the head of the President-elect.
+
+Several protesters said they feared that family or friends might be deported once Trump takes office.
+
+Brooklyn White, an 18-year-old who voted for Clinton, held a sign that said, ""Hate won't win.""
+
+""We can't let it stop us,"" she said. ""If he's the president, then fine. But if Donald Trump is going to be it, then he has to listen.""
+
+As many as 3,000 people joined Wednesday's demonstrations in the city, and 28 people were arrested for running into the 101 Freeway, said Los Angeles police spokeswoman Liliana Preciado. There was some property damage, but it's too early to know the exact extent, she said.
+
+Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement, ""I understand that the results of Tuesday's election are painful for many of us, and this kind of engagement can be a meaningful part of the healing we need after such a long and divisive campaign.
+
+""But walking and throwing objects onto freeways is dangerous for pedestrians and drivers -- and it puts a heavy burden on people just trying make it home to their families or get to work safely.""
+
+Garcetti emphasized that the protests were largely peaceful, but said police would take quick action against those blocking traffic on interstates or vandalizing property, including news media vans.
+
+""There is no place for the destruction of property, for the dangerous stopping of traffic,"" he said at a press conference Thursday. ""Don't lose the message here. The message is that Los Angeles stands as the great hope.""
+
+Garcetti said 28 protesters have been arrested.
+
+Meanwhile, protesters in Washington chanted, ""No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA,"" as they marched downtown to the Trump International Hotel.
+
+Elsewhere in the nation's capital, an illuminated sign proclaimed that the US is ""Better Than Bigotry.""
+
+Trump supporters also rallied, showing their elation outside his current and future homes -- New York's Trump Tower and the White House.
+
+Nicholas Elliot, a Georgetown University student, compared Trump's victory to the United Kingdom's Brexit vote to leave the European Union.
+
+J.D. Vance, author of the book ""Hillbilly Elegy,"" said Trump supporters in middle America voted for him because so few people -- including Clinton or her supporters -- had paid attention to their plight.
+
+""They see Trump as an agent of change and (an) agent of protest against folks who they feel have really failed in government,"" Vance said.
+
+Now comes the hard part: finding middle ground, CNN's Marc Preston said.
+
+""All that anger that has been contained outside of Washington, D.C., and New York that we don't see in middle America ... everyone's starting to see it,"" Preston said. ""There is a lot of healing that has got to happen.""",REAL
+5895,Election 2016: Open Thread,"Orangutan. 
+Rigged. Worth trying but its not a fair game. Smartmatic style Diebold type machines and software will count the votes and the corporate controlled media will announce the results. No mention of Election Fraud or the problems of the past. Long live Mike Connell, Clint Curtis, Bev Harris, Brad Friedman, RFK Jr. and other whistleblowers who have tried to fight for our democracy. Will only get worse from here it seems. Always hopeful though. David S 
+Government will win as always. Freedom will lose as always. The ruling elite control most elected officials and hundreds of thousands of government bureaucrats legislate unconstitutionally from their offices. We sit upon $20 Trillion in real debt and another $250+Trillion in unfunded liabilities. Trump wishes to increase military spending and Hillary never met a war she didn’t support (on behalf of her puppetmasters of course). Our medical system is nearly completely destroyed by over a century of government micromanagement and collusion with the AMA. We have more people incarcerated than nearly every other country on earth – mostly for non-violent drug offenses – and neither candidate looks to have the courage or the desire to truly allow freedom in this area (though Trump shows the greatest hope). Our government/CIA/other black ops groups, etc. are working tirelessly to undermine governments around the world, incite violence, and provoke armed conflict – maybe even nuclear – all for the benefit of the arms cartel and banksters who profit from every war. The people of America clearly have NO interest in restoring freedom, liberty, private property rights, business rights, sound money, etc. anymore. This “rebellion” that has gotten behind Trump still needs to bear fruit with regards to demanding REAL change at the federal and state levels. What will come of the following months is to be seen, but I suspect, as with so many previous “rebellions,” these folks will go back to their televisions, iPads, and Playstations and will forget about the fundamental corruption and crony capitalism that is destroying this country so long as they get a few bones thrown their way to pacify them. Let us hope something far more profound comes of it all. Time for a drink. kimyo 
+fwiw: a screencap of ‘final’ results displayed on 11/2 (apparently by accident) by nbc station wrcb-tv shows: popular vote: clinton 41,765,317 / trump 40,124,438, electoral college: clinton 343 / trump 195. 
+although the early reporting showing trump with a commanding lead matches my take on american sentiment, my cynical side suspects that it is the msm’s way of getting out the later-voting clinton supporters 
+if anonymous were a real thing, today’s show would be have been completely different. real hackers don’t waste their precious time defacing websites. 
+ps: if trump does win, i picture zuesse as the dog, who, after years of chasing, has finally caught that darn UPS truck. growling, jowls full of brown bumper, but with a dawning comprehension on his brow, realizing ‘well, exactly what do i do now?’ Orangutan. 
+Continuity of Gov’t plans have been implemented and in place. Dept of Homeland Security is now running our elections. The results will not be publicly available for review anymore according to Bev Harris. Similar to the results in California where the primary was announced for Hillary but Bernie may have actually ended up winning there. Welcome to the 1984 style Continuity of Government plan and Department of Homeland Security run elections thanks to the public’s refusal to emotionally or intellectually acknowledge the truth about 9/11 or the false flag anthrax attacks that followed. TruthTime 
+Especially agree with the comment about the Anthrax attack. The criminals are still at large for that blatantly, obvious state-sponsored crime. I laughed when Obama’s Administration decided to shut down any investigation into it. 
+America is a Nation of subjects who are continually subjected to the lies and falsehoods of their elected leaders. We have state crimes going far back to the era of JFK. People that still think Corruption isn’t really that bad in Washington, that it’s all a “conspiracy theory.” Carl_Herman 
+Thank you for asking, GW. It’s not an “election” when it fails to meet that definition due to multiple methods for election fraud. It’s not for a “US president” therefore, but an appointed “leader.” And, it’s not reported by media, but the appointers’ propaganda minions. 
+Of course, if we continue this argument with ~100 other points centered in lie-started Wars of Aggression, bankster-looting, and lying about near everything important, we can’t even call it the US as defined by our Constitution. 
+So, where do we go from here? 
+Start with truth. Then see what develops. Charlie Primero 
+Carl, this vote shows that all the people you have been trying to “wake up” to the corruption and graft are waking up. 
+This is just the beginning. Be happy. MyWikiDisQus 
+It does not matter what we think or do or say anymore. The republic has been overthrown by the plutocrats who remain in power as long as the citizenry believe in the concocted and fraudulent electoral system they fabricated that selects the candidate who serves them, not the people. Participation of the masses is necessary to grant them the mandate to ensure the continuity of their reign that has continually impoverished the majority of the nation. 
+In the beginning representative government in America was a wonderful experiment that has since devolved, brick by brick, decade by decade into a shell of its former creation to become a bastion of despotism. The poor are still slaves, indentured to the government by onerous debt as Negros were to their 19 century plantations masters; only the title of ownership has changed. The middle class, once a foundation of prosperity has now become an economic ghost, relegated to the status of freemen of the peasant class. 
+The wealthy are richer in material possession, millionaires become billionaires and the government siphons off from the upper class to enrich itself by political favor, by statute and regulation, by ignoring the rule of equal justice under the law. 
+How long will the people tolerate this abomination of corrupt authority? What will be the future event that triggers the entire country to say, “Enough!”? Will it be a complete economic breakdown of society or the devastation of nuclear war on our soil? 
+“We the People” have the power, we have always possessed it. The time of reconciliation is upon us, we must balance the ledger of liberty back in our favor. The only way to peacefully do it is reject the system that oppresses us. Do not engage with them, do not obey them, tell them their lies carry no truth, we see through the veil of falsity and reject it and demand a new path to opportunity and happiness for all who are willing to work towards it. TruthTime 
+The U.S. is fucked. 
+But it needs to collapse now or within 100 years for people to totally realize they were duped. It is the only way to start anew. kimyo 
+according to zh, trump has ohio, florida and north carolina. 
+my top 3 questions: 1) will there be a thorough investigation of the clinton foundation? 2) what will he do if the next 9/11 happens on his watch? 3) will he kill cop21 and defund global warming research? diogenes 
+One thing is utterly clear: if Trump wins, the wholly Wall Street owned Democratic Party gave it to him by rigging primaries to put the Clinton criminal gang on the ballot. 
+Because Bernie would have won — won with the votes not only of millions of nominally “Democratic” voters who rightly can’t stomach Clinton and didn’t vote for her (whether we voted Green, or Libertarian or Trump or stayed home) — but also with the votes of millions who are voting Trump because he appears to at least not be part of the Wall Street criminal gang of hereditary oligarchs. Tim Chambers 
+Looks like Trump will be President and free to do as he pleases. The Repug’s bet on Scalia’s seat has been made good. The Democrats will now have to rethink identity politics and third way neoliberalism. I wonder if Obama will try to ram through the trade agreements and a few other monstrosities now during the lame duck session. 
+Bye, Bye, Hillary, bye bye. It’s the one silver lining to the overhanging clouds. What a disaster of a candidate! Such arrogant over-confidence. And what a comeuppance for the party and its big money backers! It is going to cost them a lot of money to into Trumps good graces. 
+All we need now is for Trump to sell out his working class supporters for the Democrats to return to a sincere class-based politics that brings back the independent voters. They should have given Bernie his rightful chance. 
+Unfortunately, what we are likely to see is another attempt by the Clintons 4 years from now against Warren. Two losses isn’t likely to dissuade that bitch in the least. 
+I told you back in April and again 2 weeks ago that Trump would win!! http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/10/donald-j-trump-will-win.html Tim Chambers 
+fuggetaboutit Evil Genius 
+Who knows the Clintons and Waltons better than Arkansas? My favorite part was Arkansas voted 2-1 against Clinton. Ha ha ha! 
+(BTW GW: There’s an error in Robert Parry’s bio…the word “broke” is missing (i.e., “broke stories”).) kimyo 
+imagine if tomorrow trump says ‘yes, absolutely, we’re going to build that wall, but while we’re waiting for the check from mexico why don’t we find 500 out-of-work engineers and architects and 5,000 out-of-work construction folk and send them to flint to fix the water system. (costs him nothing, delivers grand justice) 
+cnn had a bad day today, but they’d be totally f’d tomorrow. 
+trump should hire some guy (me!) whose only job is to make cnn miserable, each day worse than the last. 
+ps: arpaio gone is nice. cali cannabis is nice. why is this thread so inactive? Jack 
+It’s time to collapse this mess and start new. Charlie Primero",FAKE
+10233,FBI PANIC! Hillary LIES In First Press Conference While A LEAKED PHOTO From Her Airplane Reveals The Truth,"Videos Hillary Clinton FBI PANIC! Hillary LIES In First Press Conference While A LEAKED PHOTO From Her Airplane Reveals The Truth 
+0 comments Hillary is trying to present a strong front but the truth continues to emerge, in VIDEO and in PHOTOS! Hillary was traveling to Iowa when news broke of the FBI’s newly-reopened investigation of her email practices. Her plane sat on the tarmac for thirty minutes before she emerged, and, of course, the media was hungry for a statement. Last night, the press got their wish, as Hillary tried to appear strong in her first press conference following the bombshell news. Watch Hillary’s statement below: 
+Mostly, Hillary is echoing her Campaign Manager, John Podesta, who is calling for the release of more information from the FBI. 
+Right out of the gate, Hillary is already lying in an attempt to minimize the damage that this new investigation is causing. 
+She clearly states in the video above that the FBI sent the investigation announcement to Republicans in Congress. As a former Senator, Hillary knows this to be untrue, and she is trying to paint the issue as a partisan attack. Fact check: Contrary to what Clinton said, Comey sent letter to both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. @benyc 
+— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 28, 2016 
+Multiple media sources have reported that the FBI found new information while investigating the sexting scandal of former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner is married to Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin. When asked about the reports, Hillary responded: 
+“You know, we’ve heard these rumors. We don’t know what to believe and I’m sure there will be even more rumors that’s why it’s incumbent upon the FBI to tell us what they’re talking about because, right now, your guess is as good as mine and I don’t think that’s good enough.” 
+Hillary is trying to appear defiant and in control. But, speaking of Huma Abedin, take a look at this leaked photo from inside of Hillary’s airplane after the news had broken: Image surfaces of Huma Abedin crying on plane as Clinton Campaign finds out the FBI has re-opened the email investigation. #HillarysEmails pic.twitter.com/2yIUgiYOsV 
+We hate to see a lady crying, Huma, but when the company you keep includes Anthony Weiner, sometimes you have good reasons to cry. Perhaps Hillary’s Campaign is not so strong after all. Related Items",FAKE
+184,McConnell plan moves Senate closer to deal on Homeland Security funding,"The Senate moved closer Tuesday to a deal to avert a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, but the proposal faced an uncertain future in the House, where Republican leaders conspicuously refused to embrace it.
+
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters he was prepared to move swiftly to extend funding for DHS through the fiscal year in a bill that is not contingent on Republican demands to repeal President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.
+
+Under McConnell’s proposal, the Senate would vote first on the funding measure and then hold a separate vote on a bill to undo Obama’s new immigration initiatives. McConnell hopes to assuage conservatives who are determined to confront the president on what they see as abuse of his executive authority.
+
+“I don’t know what’s not to like about this,” McConnell said. “This is an approach that respects both points of view.” If successful, the proposal will break a two-month deadlock over funding for the agency that is responsible for border security, airport security checks and a range of other functions.
+
+But House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) did not immediately warm to the proposal, and it was not clear whether he could marshal enough backing in his chamber to complete the deal to keep DHS open beyond Friday, when its spending authority expires.
+
+House Republicans will huddle behind closed doors Wednesday morning. The unsettled DHS debate is expected to be the central focus of their discussion.
+
+The stalemate has tested Republicans’ ability to govern now that they are in full control of Congress. Senate Democrats have blocked four attempts by McConnell to move forward on a House bill that would fund the department but that ties that funding to a repeal of the president’s immigration actions, which would allow millions of undocumented immigrants a temporary reprieve from deportation.
+
+Again on the brink
+
+McConnell’s move represented a concession in a fight that has threatened to shut down the agency less than a year and a half after a budget standoff shuttered a broad swath of the federal government for more than two weeks in October 2013.
+
+Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said Democrats want assurances from Boehner that a “clean” funding bill will pass the House before they will support McConnell’s plan and allow the votes to move forward.
+
+“Now, all eyes are on Speaker Boehner,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).
+
+Asked about the emerging Senate plan, Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said by e-mail: “The speaker has been clear: The House has acted, and now Senate Democrats need to stop hiding. Will they continue to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security or not?”
+
+Exiting a House leadership meeting later on, House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) said he did not support approving McConnell’s plan. Instead, Sessions said, Congress should pass a temporary extension of funding for up to six weeks and convene a House-Senate conference to try to hammer out the differences between the two chambers.
+
+DHS is scheduled to begin furloughing nonessential workers if Congress does not extend its $40 billion budget by Friday.
+
+At the White House, Obama prepared to inject himself more forcefully into the debate with a town-hall-style forum planned for Wednesday in Miami, which has a heavily Latino population. The president is expected to address the funding standoff and his immigration plan. The administration has appealed a federal judge’s decision last week temporarily blocking the deferred deportations program, under which up to 5 million of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants would be eligible for renewable three-year deportation waivers. Many could receive work permits.
+
+As the president tries to rally the public, however, Obama and his aides have limited their dealings with Capitol Hill. White House and Democratic aides said there is little the president can do, because he will not undo his immigration actions. It is up to Republicans to decide whether they are willing to shut down DHS over the issue, the aides said.
+
+“This is not a battle with the White House. This is a battle taking place on Capitol Hill,” a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking. “Legislators on the Hill need to work on this. . . . What you’re going to see from the administration on DHS up until Friday is continuing to call attention publicly to the potential impact of shutting down DHS.”
+
+To that end, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and two predecessors from the George W. Bush administration — Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge — will attend a news conference scheduled for Wednesday to warn of problems that could occur if the agency is forced to begin furloughs.
+
+Essential personnel, as many as 200,000 employees, would continue to report to work without pay during a partial shutdown. Although Johnson and the White House have said that national security would not be jeopardized, they have warned that long-term planning could be affected. In an interview, Chertoff warned of morale problems in the agency and said he thinks a shutdown would “no doubt adversely affect the nation’s security.”
+
+“A couple days of delay [of pay] will not make a difference, but if it starts to mount up and there’s real uncertainty, people will start to feel demoralized, and that could have an impact over a long period,” Chertoff said. “You wouldn’t do this to [military] troops in the field, send them into combat but not get paid. They need to take this seriously.”
+
+Doubts on the right
+
+While McConnell’s plan to split off the immigration issue into a stand-alone measure opened the door to winning over Democrats, conservatives were skeptical.
+
+“Senators arguing fund DHS but vote a separate bill to defund executive amnesty. Have you heard of Obama veto? Think we were born yesterday?” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a staunch opponent of Obama’s immigration actions, wrote on Twitter.
+
+Meanwhile, the administration has struggled to explain how a partial shutdown would affect national security. White House press secretary Josh Earnest, asked repeatedly about it Monday, declined to say that the nation would be more at risk. Rather, he said, the situation would not improve the nation’s safety.
+
+“It’s hard to imagine a good time for Congress to be mucking around with the funding of the Department of Homeland Security,” Earnest said. “But now seems like a particularly bad one.”
+
+Politically, the standoff could help the White House and Democrats. Republicans drew the brunt of public anger over the 2013 shutdown, and administration aides believe the same will happen if DHS is affected at week’s end.
+
+It is not lost on White House allies that the president is traveling to Florida, a key swing state in presidential races, for the Wednesday event, co-hosted by MSNBC and Telemundo.
+
+“In our travels to the immigrant community, the faith community, the law enforcement community and the business community, they want someone in D.C. to do something,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “The president has done something. The political risk to the administration is only there if they stop doing something. Right now, it’s on Republicans to kind of meet the bar.”
+
+Senior administration officials are scheduled to appear at another immigration forum, hosted by Univision, on Sunday in Los Angeles, the city with the largest number of immigrants potentially eligible for deportation relief under Obama’s executive actions.
+
+“For the first time in a long time, the immigrant community and advocates are very aligned with the White House,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. “I think the fact that he’s coming to Miami to meet with immigrant community members and take questions directly from folks speaks volumes.”",REAL
+7952,Louis Farrakhan (Nation of Islam) agrees with Donald Trump about the need for extreme vetting of Muslim immigrants,"November 3, 2016 @ 3:07 am 
+Allowing any GdM to enter or remain here is suicidal. Vetting Muslims is like vetting rattlesnakes. 
+@DonSpilman That Jive ngr has not changed its spots. It blamed America first as it has always done. ‘Slime’s hatred is not a function of our foreign or domestic policy, it is a function of our not being GdM. Never lose sight of Wala wal Bara and Sidi’s explanation of the Barbary Pirates to Jeffersopn, Adams & Franklin. Always bear in mind Sahih Bukhari 4.53.386 and Hedaya 2.216. Liz November 3, 2016 @ 2:41 am 
+He makes it sound like muslims were totally peaceful until the big, bad west agitated them and created all this blowback. To claim that is to ignore islam’s 1400 year history of war, genocide, oppression, domination, terror, and tyrannical expansionism. Western leftist/liberal politicians merely kindled the flames of jihad that were already there.",FAKE
+10010,Michael Moore Owes Me $4.99,"  28, 2016 | Reviews   Michael Moore in New York City's Union Square Barnes & Noble to discuss his book Here Comes Trouble , September 13, 2011 ( David Shankbone / CC BY 3.0 ) Michael Moore’s “Trumpland” is a textbook illustration of how the mindset of voting for “the lesser evil” just results in self-delusion—and ever more evil. 
+M ichael Moore has made some terrific movies in the past, and Where to Invade Next may be the best of them, but I expected Trumpland to be (1) about Trump, (2) funny, (3) honest, (4) at least relatively free of jokes glorifying mass murder. I was wrong on all counts and would like my $4.99 back, Michael. 
+Moore’s new movie is a film of him doing a stand-up comedy show about how wonderfully awesome Hillary Clinton is—except that he mentions Trump a bit at the beginning and he’s dead serious about Clinton being wonderfully awesome. 
+This film is a text book illustration of why rational arguments for lesser evilist voting do not work. Lesser evilists become self-delusionists. They identify with their lesser evil candidate and delude themselves into adoring the person. Moore is not pushing the “Elect her and then hold her accountable” stuff. He says we have a responsibility to “support her” and “get behind her,” and that if after two years—yes, TWO YEARS—she hasn’t lived up to a platform he’s fantasized for her, well then, never fear, because he, Michael Moore, will run a joke presidential campaign against her for the next two years (this from a guy who backed restricting the length of election campaigns in one of his better works). 
+Moore maintains that virtually all criticism of Hillary Clinton is nonsense. What do we think, he asks, that she asks how many millions of dollars you’ve put into the Clinton Foundation and then she agrees to bomb Yemen for you? Bwahahaha! Pretty funny. Except that Saudi Arabia put over $10 million into the Clinton Foundation, and while she was Secretary of State Boeing put in another $900,000, upon which Hillary Clinton reportedly made it her mission to get the planes sold to Saudi Arabia, despite legal restrictions—the planes now dropping U.S.-made bombs on Yemen with U.S. guidance, U.S. refueling mid-air, U.S. protection at the United Nations, and U.S. cover in the form of pop-culture distraction and deception from entertainers like Michael Moore. 
+Standing before a giant Air Force missile and enormous photos of Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore claims that substantive criticism of Clinton can consist of only two things, which he dismisses in a flash: her vote for a war on Iraq and her coziness with Wall Street. He says nothing more about what that “coziness” consists of, and he claims that she’s more or less apologized and learned her lesson on Iraq. 
+What? It wasn’t one vote. It was numerous votes to start the war, fund it, and escalate it. It was the lies to get it going and keep it going. It’s all the other wars before and since. She says President Obama was wrong not to launch missile strikes on Syria in 2013. She pushed hard for the overthrow of Qadaffi in 2011. She supported the coup government in Honduras in 2009. She has backed escalation and prolongation of war in Afghanistan. She skillfully promoted the White House justification for the war on Iraq. She does not hesitate to back the use of drones for targeted killing. She has consistently backed the military initiatives of Israel. She was not ashamed to laugh at the killing of Qadaffi. She has not hesitated to warn that she could obliterate Iran. She is eager to antagonize Russia. She helped facilitate a military coup in Ukraine. She has the financial support of the arms makers and many of their foreign customers. She waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states wise enough to donate to the Clinton Foundation. She supported President Bill Clinton’s wars and the power of the president to make war without Congress. She has advocated for arming fighters in Syria and for a “No Fly” zone. She supported a surge in Iraq even before President Bush did. 
+That’s just her war problem. What about her banking problem, prison problem, fracking problem, corporate trade problem, corporate healthcare problem, climate change problem, labor problem, Social Security problem, etc.? 
+Moore parts company from substantive critique in order to lament unproven rightwing claims that Hillary Clinton has murdered various people. “I hope she did,” screams Moore. “That’s who I want as Commander in Chief!” Hee hee hee. 
+Then Moore shamelessly pushes the myth that Hillary tried to create single-payer, or at least “universal” healthcare (whatever that is) in the 1990s. In fact, as I heard Paul Wellstone tell it, single-payer easily won the support of Clinton’s focus group, but she buried it for her corporate pals and produced the phonebook-size monstrosity that was dead on arrival but reborn in another form years later as Obamacare. She killed single-payer then, has not supported it since, and does not propose it now. (Well, she does admit in private that it’s the only thing that works, as her husband essentially blurts out in public.) But Moore claims that because we didn’t create “universal” healthcare in the 1990s we all have the blood of millions on our hands, millions whom Hillary would have saved had we let her. 
+Moore openly fantasizes: what would it be like if Hillary Clinton is secretly progressive? Remember that Moore and many others did the exact same thing with Obama eight years ago. To prove Clinton’s progressiveness Moore plays an audio clip of her giving a speech at age 22 in which she does not hint at any position on any issue whatsoever. 
+Mostly, however, Moore informs us that Hillary Clinton is female. He anticipates “that glorious moment when the other gender has a chance to run this world and kick some righteous ass.” Now tell me please, dear world, if your ass is kicked by killers working for a female president will you feel better about it? How do you like Moore’s inclusive comments throughout his performance: “We’re all Americans, right?” 
+Moore’s fantasy is that Clinton will dash off a giant pile of executive orders, just writing Congress out of the government—executive orders doing things like releasing all nonviolent drug offenders from prison immediately (something the real Hillary Clinton would oppose in every way she could). 
+But when he runs for president, Moore says, he’ll give everybody free drugs. 
+I’ll tell you the Clinton ad I’d like to see. She’s standing over a stove holding an egg. “This is your brain,” she says solemnly, cracking it into the pan with a sizzle. “This is your brain on partisanship.” 
+ ",FAKE
+7395,Baking Soda & Coconut Oil Can Kill Cancer: Eye-Opening Evidence,"Humans Are Free Baking Soda & Coconut Oil Can Kill Cancer: Eye-Opening Evidence 
+A woman diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma skin cancer located on the crown on her head managed to cure it by applying baking soda paste directly on the affected area. 
+At first, when her daughter insisted, she refused, but then she decided to give it a try. After three major surgeries, the cancer returned and each time it was even worse, so she decided to trust nature and started using pure cold pressed organic coconut oil instead of water and baking soda . 
+Coconut oil has cellular regenerative powers, which is why she applied the thick paste directly onto the affected area. 
+Azizo, her daguhter, used only Polysporin Triple 3 Antibiotics, and she applied them only at night. 
+You are allowed to use other antibiotic ointment just as a precaution against bacterial infections within the sore area. For instance, you can use colloidal silver soaked cotton as well. 
+Once the wound is closed, you can stop using the ointment. Azizo continued applying the combination of baking soda and coconut oil, but she also applied cotton ball soaked in ACV and taped it to the skin. 
+As a result, this induced the penetraton of baking soda to the basal cell carcinoma roots beyond the skin’s surface. Yet another even better solution for this purpose is DMSO. 
+Azizo continued applying this remedy to her mother for 38 days, and finally, the woman was completely free from skin cancer and the wound healed in no time. 
+You can read their story and learn more about the method she used by following this link . 
+Even though this skin cancer is nor deadly as melanoma can be, it can still continue spreading on the skin if it’s not properly cured. 
+If you didn’t know, tumors only thrive in acidic environments, which makes baking soda an excellent solution since it provides only alkaline environment. 
+Dramatic Life and Death Story 
+Vernon Johnson, recently divorced and low on cash was diagnosed with stage III prostate cancer, which metastasized into the hip area and soon developed in stage IV. 
+He was supposed to be examined about the therapy he needed to undergo in several weeks, when his son suggested him to try several substances that could rapidly alkalize on a cellular level. 
+Even though he ordered cesium, it never arrived, so he used baking soda and blackstrap mollases, instead of maple syrup. 
+The Trojan Horse sugar should open cancer cells wide so that they could receive the highly alkaline influence of baking soda. This should eventually result in destruction of cancer cells. 
+After two weeks of using this natural solution, his bone scan showed that there is no spreading of the cancer. The PSA dropped from 22 to 5 to 1 over the course of his treatment and pharmaceutical prescriptions. 
+However, beside his treatment, Vernon started spending a lot of time on sunlight, switched to a healthier plant based diet and did breathing exercises on a regular basis in order to increase the oxygen delivery to the cancer affected area. 
+Moreover he wrote a book called “ Vernon’s Dance With Cancer: After the Jolt ”, where he shared his experience with cancer. 
+He wrote this book over five years after the original baking soda alkaline producing treatment. Five years later, he is cancer free and he gives lectures about the treatment. 
+It should be mentioned that there are certain foods that produce alkalinity in the body, while certain acidic foods such as lemon and limes become alkaline in the body right after their ingestion. Make sure to incorporate baking soda in your life since it is alkaline and produces alkalinity. 
+Dr. Mark Sircus is an Italian former physician who is now an alternative health practitioner. Based on his experience as an oncology surgeon, he injects baking soda solution into the blood vessels that feed tumors. 
+According to Dr. Simoncini , there is no pharmaceutical anti-fungal that is more effective and safe than baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate. 
+Moreover, he also claims that cancer thrives on fungal colonies which also create cancer. His claim resulted in removing of his physician certification in Italy. 
+As you can see, baking soda is extremely powerful natural ingredient which should receive more attention and examination, or at least is should be considered as a complementary treatment for severe ailments and a total approach for minor ailments.",FAKE
+5581,Comment on 65 US ‘journalists’ at a private dinner with Hillary Clinton’s team and John Podesta by Debbie Menon,"Abby Martin Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. 65 US ‘journalists’ at a private dinner with Hillary Clinton’s team and John Podesta By VNN on October 26, 2016 We wanted to make sure everyone on this email had the latest information on the two upcoming dinners with reporters. Both are off-the-record. 
+Hang The Bankers 
+Several top journalists and TV news anchors RSVPed “yes” to attend a private, off-the-record gathering at the New York home of Joel Benenson, the chief campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton, two days before she announced her candidacy in 2015, according to emails Wikileaks has published from John Podesta ’s purported accounts. 
+The guest list for an earlier event at the home of John Podesta was limited to reporters who were expected to cover Clinton on the campaign trail. 
+The email thread starts with Jesse Ferguson, the campaign’s Deputy National Press Secretary and Senior Spokesman, describing the venues and target audience of each gathering: 
+We wanted to make sure everyone on this email had the latest information on the two upcoming dinners with reporters. Both are off-the-record. 
+1) Thursday night, April 9th at 7:00p.m. Dinner at the Home of John Podesta… This will be with about 20 reporters who will closely cover the campaign (aka the bus). 
+2) Friday night, April 10th at 6:30p.m. Cocktails and Hors D’oeuvre at the Home of Joel Benenson… This is with a broader universe of New York reporters. 
+The “broader universe of New York reporters” includes several top news anchors for network and cable channels, many of whom are listed as a “yes” for the appearance: 
+From ABC: Cecilia Vega, David Muir, Diane Sawyer (who could only stay for 30 minutes), and George Stephanopoulos. 
+From CBS News: Norah O’Donnell. 
+From CNN: Brianna Keilar, Gloria Borger, John Berman, and Kate Bolduan. 
+From MSNBC: Alex Wagner and Rachel Maddow (“TRYING”). 
+From NBC: Savannah Guthrie. 
+“Yes” respondent George Stephanopoulos worked for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and was a Senior Adviser to the President during Clinton’s first White House term. Stephanopoulos does not disclose this fact when reporting on the 2016 Clinton campaign for ABC News. 
+The nascent Clinton campaign invited Jeff Zucker and Phil Griffin, the presidents of CNN and MSNBC, respectively. Zucker declined while Griffin RSVPed “yes.” CNBC’s John Harwood 
+Wikileaks’ release of emails from the Democratic National Committee showed then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz scheduled or attempted to schedule private meetings with both executives.Other “yes” RSVPs come from journalists who have been sighted in the Wikileaks Podesta emails, outing them as friendly or fawning towards Hillary’s campaign. 
+CNBC’s John Harwood, who was also a moderator for a 2015 presidential debate, emailed Podesta frequently , practically begging for approval and access . Politico’s Glenn Thrush 
+Politico’s Glenn Thrush also emailed Podesta periodically. On Monday, a newly-released email revealed a particularly humiliating incident where Thrush sent Podesta a passage from an upcoming article for his personal approval. 
+“Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u,” Thrush wrote. “Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this… Tell me if I fucked up anything.” 
+Sandra Sobieraj Westfall, Washington Bureau Chief at PEOPLE magazine, boasted two days after this confab that stories on Clinton’s campaign were generating “absolutely off the charts” traffic and asked for “color you can whisper on background” about what Hillary was up to. Joel Benenson – Clinton Chief Strategist 
+The full RSVP list for Benenson’s gathering is shown in an attachment on a separate email : 
+This is an off-the-record cocktails with the key national reporters, especially (though not exclusively) those that are based in New York. Much of the group includes influential reporters, anchors and editors. 
+The goals of the dinner include: (1) Give reporters their first thoughts from team HRC in advance of the announcement (2) Setting expectations for the announcement and launch period (3) Framing the HRC message and framing the race (4) Enjoy a Friday night drink before working more 
+TIME/DATE: As a reminder, this is called for 6:30 p.m. on Friday, April 10th . 
+There are several attendees – including Diane Sawyer – who will be there promptly at 6:30 p.m. but have to leave by 7 p.m. 
+… 
+FOOD: This will include cocktails and passed hours devours. 
+REPORTER RSVPs",FAKE
+7202,"OCTOBER GUN SALES SEE MASSIVE SPIKE, SET YET ANOTHER RECORD","Home › GUNS › OCTOBER GUN SALES SEE MASSIVE SPIKE, SET YET ANOTHER RECORD OCTOBER GUN SALES SEE MASSIVE SPIKE, SET YET ANOTHER RECORD 0 SHARES 
+[11/1/16] The FBI’s background check system for gun sales processed more than 2.3 million checks in October, setting an all-time record for the month. 
+There were 2,333,539 gun-related checks processed through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS, last month, according to FBI documents posted on Monday. That represents an increase of more than 350,000 checks over the previous October, itself a record. It’s also the 18th month in a row to set a record. 
+With two months to go, 2016 has already seen 22,206,233 NICS checks, making it the second highest year for checks in the history of NICS with only 2015 seeing more . 
+NICS checks are considered to be one of the most accurate indicators for gun sales because nearly all sales made through federally licensed firearm dealers require a check by law. The number of NICS checks in a month do not represent an exact count of gun sales for a number of reasons. For instance, many states require a NICS checks for those applying for gun carry permits, and many states do not require NICS checks for sales between private parties. 
+“These statistics represent the number of firearm background checks initiated through the NICS,” the FBI said. “They do not represent the number of firearms sold. Based on varying state laws and purchase scenarios, a one-to-one correlation cannot be made between a firearm background check and a firearm sale.” Post navigation",FAKE
+8098,BREAKING: White House Abandons TPP & TTIP,"BREAKING: White House Abandons TPP & TTIP Nov 11, 2016 5 0 
+In a major victory for several nations and millions of people around the world, the White House has announced moments ago that Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress has said that they won’t try to advance the Trans Pacific Partnership as they know a Trump administration will be completely opposed to it. This makes the TPP, a trade agreement that has been protested on a global scale, now effectively dead in the water. As the Wall Street Journal reports : 
+The failure to pass what is by far the biggest trade agreement in more than a decade is abitter defeat for Mr. Obama, whose belated but fervent support for freer trade divided his party and complicated the campaign of Mrs. Clinton. The TPP’s collapse also dents American prestige in the region at a time when China is flexing its economic and military muscle. Protesters in front of the White House. 
+Donald Trump has voiced his resistance to the TPP and laid out in his plan for his first 100 days in office to include saying no to trade deals like the TPP and TTIP. For many, it is believed such trade deals would strongly and negatively impact the workforce in America. 
+In addition to the TPP being dropped by the White House today, the TTIP suffered an effective defeat as well. 
+As reported by Bloomberg , European Union Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said that talks between the U.S. and EU would be put on “indefinite hold” because of Trump’s victory in the election. 
+“There will be a natural pause, of course, while we wait for the next administration; then, for quite some time TTIP will probably be in the freezer. Then what happens when it’s defrosted, I think we will need to wait and see. I don’t see the resumption of any TTIP negotiation in quite a long time. Whether it makes sense to have new rounds — well probably not.” 
+The U.S and EU have been working on the TTIP for three years which would have eliminated tariffs on goods, enlarged service markets and bolstered regulatory cooperation. Germany’s Angela Merkel and Barack Obama have both called the TTIP a “policy priority.” 
+As The Guardian has reported , both trade agreements have been clouded in secrecy and even the contents of such deals were not easily allowed to be revealed to Congress: 
+“Yet that doesn’t seem to be the position of the “most transparent administration ever”. While lobbyists are given a free hand to help write the deals, even members of legislative bodies have to jump through absurd hoops just to lay eyes on the document. Draconian restrictions were put on US members of Congress if they wanted to view TPP while it was in negotiation, so much so that they were even threatened with prosecution if they talked about it. And Time magazine just reported on what Katja Kipping, a member of German parliament, had to do to see the latest version of TTIP. This included agreeing to a restricted reading time of just two hours, having a guard breathing down her neck the entire time and not sharing the contents of the agreement with anyone.” 
+Though Donald Trump has voiced strong opposition to these deals, we will now wait and see if he makes good on his words. It appears though that the U.S. and EU have all but given up on the TPP and TTIP. Share the good news! 
+Lance Schuttler graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Health Science and does health coaching through his website Orgonlight Health . You can follow the Orgonlight Health facebook page or visit the website for more information and other inspiring articles.",FAKE
+5860,Soros Paid Al Gore MILLIONS to Push ‘Aggressive US Action’ on Global Warming,"Soros Paid Al Gore MILLIONS to Push ‘Aggressive US Action’ on Global Warming Liberal billionaire George Soros gave former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental group millions o... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/soros-paid-al-gore-millions-to-push.html Liberal billionaire George Soros gave former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental group millions of dollars over three years to create a “political space for aggressive U.S. action” on global warming, according to leaked documents. A document published by DC Leaks shows Soros, a Hungarian-born liberal financier, wanted his nonprofit Open Society Institute (OSI) to do more to support global warming policies in the U.S. That included budgeting $10 million in annual support to Gore’s climate group over three years.“U.S. Programs Global Warming Grants U.S. Programs became engaged on the global warming issue about four years ago, at George Soros’s suggestion,” reads a leaked OSI memo.“There has been a budget of $11 million for global warming grants in the U.S. Programs budget for the last several years,” the memo reads. “This budget item captures George Soros’s commitment of $10 million per year for three years to Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, which conducts public education on the climate issue in pursuit of creating political space for aggressive U.S. action in line with what scientists say is necessary to put our nation on a path to reducing its outsize carbon dioxide emissions.”It’s unclear what year the memo was sent, but the Gore co-founded Alliance for Climate Protection (ACP) was established in 2006 and lasted until it became The Climate Reality Project in July 2011. In 2008, the Alliance launched a $300 million campaign to encourage “Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” The Washington Post reported . Global Warming is NOT caused by humans: 10 Prominent Scientists Refuting 'Manmade Global Warming' with Solid Research ACP got $10 million from the Open Society Institute (OSI) in 2008, according to the nonprofit’s tax filings. OSI handed over another $5 million to ACP in 2009, according to tax filings. The investigative reporting group ProPublica keeps a database that has OSI tax returns from 2000 to 2013. TheDCNF could not find other years where OSI gave money to ACP.OSI is primarily a grant-making nonprofit that hands out millions of dollars every year to mostly left-wing causes. Now called the Open Society Foundations, Soros’s nonprofit has handed out more than $13 billion over the last three decades.OSI didn’t only plan to fund Gore’s climate group to promote global warming policies in the U.S., OSI also planned on giving millions of dollars to spur the “youth climate movement.” Greenpeace Founder: Humans Not to Blame for Global Warming “This budget item also allows for the renewal of U.S. Programs’ long-standing support of the Energy Action Coalition, which is the lead organizer of the youth climate movement in the U.S., the memo reads.“We are also including a placeholder for an additional $2 million, pending discussion about and development of OSI’s global warming agenda,” the memo reads. “There is a memo from Nancy Youman in the strategic plans binder that recommends pathways forward for OSI on the climate issue – in the U.S., as well as in other parts of the Open Society Network.” By Michael Bastasch  ",FAKE
+8554,Facebook Faces High Profile Lawsuit Regarding Facial Recognition Technology ‘DeepFace’,"at 3:02 pm Leave a comment 
+As the technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous and far more accurate, facial recognition and the lack of any laws or regulations around the practice is slowly starting to enter mainstream consciousness. It’s a very important issue that isn’t getting the attention it deserves. 
+For example, as I highlighted in the recent post, Half of American Adults Exist in a Government Accessible Facial Recognition Network : 
+Half of all American adults are already in some sort of facial recognition network accessible to law enforcement, according to a comprehensive new study. 
+Conducted over a year and relying in part on Freedom of Information and public record requests to 106 law enforcement agencies, the study , conducted by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, found American police use of facial recognition technology is a scattered, hodgepodge network of laws and regulations. 
+“Looking at the sum total of what we found, there have been no laws that comprehensively regulate face recognition technology, and there’s really no case law either,” Clare Garvie, an associate at the CPT, told Vocativ. “So we find ourselves having to rely on the agencies that are using that technology to rein it in. But what we found is that not every system — by a long shot — has a use policy.” 
+With that in mind, Bloomberg published an interesting article yesterday covering a couple of lawsuits against Facebook and Google regarding their facial recognition practices. 
+Here’s some of what we learned: 
+While millions of internet users embrace the tagging of family and friends in photos, others worried there’s something devious afoot are trying block Facebook as well as Google from amassing such data. 
+As advances in facial recognition technology give companies the potential to profit from biometric data, privacy advocates see a pattern in how the world’s largest social network and search engine have sold users’ viewing histories for advertising. The companies insist that gathering data on what you look like isn’t against the law, even without your permission. 
+If judges agree with Facebook and Google, they may be able to kill off lawsuits filed under a unique Illinois law that carries fines of $1,000 to $5,000 each time a person’s image is used without permission — big enough for a liability headache if claims on behalf of millions of consumers proceed as class actions. A loss by the companies could lead to new restrictions on using biometrics in the U.S., similar to those in Europe and Canada. 
+Facebook declined to comment on its court fight. Google declined to comment on pending litigation. 
+Facebook encourages users to “tag” people in photographs they upload in their personal posts and the social network stores the collected information. The company uses a program it calls DeepFace to match other photos of a person. Alphabet Inc.’s cloud-based Google Photos service uses similar technology. 
+The billions of images Facebook is thought to be collecting could be even more valuable to identity thieves than the names, addresses, and credit card numbers now targeted by hackers, according to privacy advocates and legal experts. 
+And just how good is Facebook’s technology? According to the company’s research, DeepFace recognizes faces with an accuracy rate of 97.35 percent compared with 97.5 percent for humans — including mothers. 
+Rotenberg said the privacy concerns are twofold: Facebook might sell the information to retailers or be forced to turn it over to law enforcement — in both cases without users knowing it. 
+Now here’s some history on Facebook and facial recognition. Facebook v. Privacy Law 
+December 2005 — Facebook introduces photo tagging 
+October 2008 — Illinois adopts Biometric Information Privacy Act 
+June 2012 — Facebook acquires Israeli facial recognition developer Face.com 
+September 2012 — Facebook ceases facial recognition in Europe 
+2015-2016 — Facebook, Google, Shutterfly and Snapchat sued under Illinois biometrics law. Shutterfly settles confidentially. 
+May 2016 — Illinois lawmaker proposes excluding photos from biometrics law, then shelves bill after privacy advocates complain 
+October 2016 — Facebook makes second attempt to get biometrics lawsuit thrown out 
+The Facebook case is In re Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litigation, 15-cv-03747, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco). The Google cases are Rivera v. Google, 16-cv-02714, and Weiss v. Google, 16-cv-02870, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois (Chicago). 
+For prior articles on the topic, see:",FAKE
+7377,Only 3 Countries Left Without a ROTHSCHILD Central Bank,"Only 3 Countries Left Without a ROTHSCHILD Central Bank The Rothschild family is slowly but surely having their Central banks established in every country ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/only-3-countries-left-without.html The Rothschild family is slowly but surely having their Central banks established in every country of this world, giving them incredible amount of wealth and power. In the year of 2000 there were seven countries without a Rothschild owned Central Bank: Afghanistan North Korea Iran It is not a coincidence that these country, which are listed above were and are still being under attack by the western media, since one of the main reasons these countries have been under attack in the first place is because they do not have a Rothschild owned Central Bank yet.The first step in having a Central Bank establish in a country is to get them to accept an outrageous loans, which puts the country in debt of the Central Bank and under the control of the Rothschilds. If the country does not accept the loan, the leader of this particular country will be assassinated and a Rothschild aligned leader will be put into the position , and if the assassination does not work, the country will be invaded and have a Central Bank established with force all under the name of terrorism. Rothschild-owned Central Bank Central banks are illegally created private banks that are owned by the Rothschild banking family . The family has been around for more than 230 years and has slithered its way into each country on this planet, threatened every world leader and their governments and cabinets with physical and economic death and destruction, and then emplaced their own people in these central banks to control and manage each country’s pocketbook. Worse, the Rothschilds also control the machinations of each government at the macro level , not concerning themselves with the daily vicissitudes of our individual personal lives. Except when we get too far out of line. The only countries left in 2003 without a Central Bank owned by the Rothschild Family were: Sudan",FAKE
+4529,Chattanooga shooting proves it's time to arm our Armed Forces,"It turns out that at least one of the two military facilities attacked in Chattanooga, Tennessee -- was a gun-free zone.
+
+If you looked closely crime scene photographs - you can see the sign -- plastered on the front of a bullet- riddled window.
+
+Click here to follow Todd on Facebook for conservative conversation.
+
+Four Marines were slaughtered -- a fifth wounded -- along with a Chattanooga police officer.
+
+Authorities say the gunman, identified as 24-year-old Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, was killed in a shoot-out.
+
+Abdulazeez is reportedly a Kuwaiti-native who attended high school in the Chattanooga area. The Times Free-Press posted his graduation photo – that included the phrase; “My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do?”
+
+The FBI says it’s too soon to speculate on the suspect’s motive – but I think we’ve all got a pretty clear understanding of what went down.
+
+As many as 50 shots were fired -- and all the survivors could do was barricade themselves inside.
+
+The brave men and women who staff these military recruiting stations are sitting ducks. Soft targets - is the terminology they use.
+
+The same thing happened at the Fort Hood massacre.
+
+In response to the shooting Homeland Security ordered enhanced security measures at federal buildings. Since they can’t carry weapons what are they going to do? How are they going to defend themselves against the next Muhammad Abdulazeez -- lock the doors, pull the shades?
+
+It's time to arm the Armed Forces. Now, I’m sure the experts will say there’s some sort of logical reason why military personnel should not have access to firearms – but I’m not convinced. Brave Marines gunned down in a Southern city -- and that is something we cannot abide. Our elected leaders must give them at least a fighting chance.
+
+It makes absolutely no sense that Marines and Airmen and Sailors and Soldiers who defend our nation are unable to defend themselves – on American soil.
+
+
+
+Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is ""God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values."" Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.
+
+",REAL
+3693,"Names of Oregon victims released, range in age from 18 to 67","Authorities Friday released the names of those killed in the mass murder at an Oregon community college, a collection of male and female victims ranging in age from 18 to 67 and including a professor as well as some of his students in an introductory writing class.
+
+At a late afternoon press conference, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin intoned the names as aides posted their pictures on a wall behind him.
+
+They were: Lucero Alcaraz, 19, Quinn Glen Cooper, 18, Kim Saltmarsh Dietz, 59, Lucas Eibel,18, Jason Dale Johnson, 33, Lawrence Levine, 67, Sarena Dawn Moore, 44, Treven Taylor Anspach, 20, and Rebecka Ann Carnes, 18.
+
+Statements were read from several families.
+
+""We have been trying to figure out how to tell everyone how amazing Lucas was, but that would take 18 years,"" the family of Lucas Eibel said in their statement.
+
+Eibel, who was studying chemistry, volunteered at a wildlife center and animal shelter.
+
+Quinn Glen Cooper's family said their son had just started college and loved dancing and voice acting.
+
+""I don't know how we are going to move forward with our lives without Quinn,"" the Coopers said. ""Our lives are shattered beyond repair.""
+
+Hanlin also said he was raising the number of those injured in the carnage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. from seven to nine.
+
+The announcement came shortly after investigators found at least 13 weapons linked to the gunman: six at the crime scene, including a rifle, and seven at his apartment.
+
+All of the weapons were purchased legally, seven of them by the gunman or a relative, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It reports that investigators recovered body armor including a flak jacket at the school, and additional ammunition in the apartment.
+
+In addition to the rifle, the shooter also carried five handguns, a law enforcement source tells Fox News.
+
+Details on the shooter's background are slowly emerging. The U.S. Army says the gunman, Christopher Harper Mercer, flunked out of basic training in 2008.
+
+Lt. Col. Ben Garrett, an Army spokesman, said Mercer was in service at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina, starting on November 5, 2008. But by December 11, 2008, he was discharged for failing to meet the minimum administrative standards.
+
+The Army spokesman did not say which standards Mercer failed to meet. Generally, the Army requires recruits to pass physical fitness tests and to be generally in good physical and mental health. Recruits also must score highly enough on a multiple-choice test covering science, math, reading comprehension and other topics.
+
+Authorities say Mercer killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg before he was killed in an exchange of gunfire with police. Witnesses said the gunman specifically targeted Christians.
+
+There didn't seem to be many recent connections on the social media sites linked to the gunman, with his MySpace page just showing two friends. He appeared to have at least one online dating profile.
+
+On a torrents streaming site and blog that appeared to belong to Mercer, posts referenced multiple shootings and downloads included several horror films and a documentary on a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
+
+A blog post urged readers to watch the online footage of Vester Flanagan shooting two former colleagues on live TV in Virginia, while another lamented materialism as preventing spiritual development.
+
+A MySpace page that appeared to belong to Mercer included several photos and graphics of the Irish Republican Army as well as a picture of Mercer holding a rifle.
+
+One law enforcement official described Mercer toThe New York Times as appearing to be ""an angry young man who was very filled with hate."" Another official said investigators were poring over what he described as ""hateful"" writings by Mercer.
+
+Mercer's father says he's as shocked as anybody else. Ian Mercer spoke to KABC-TV and several other media outlets gathered outside his house in Tarzana, California late Thursday night.
+
+He said it's been a ""devastating day"" for him and his family and said he has been talking to police and the FBI about the shooting.
+
+He refused to answer questions and asked that his family's privacy be respected.
+
+Mercer ""seemed really unfriendly"" and would ""sit by himself in the dark in the balcony with this little light,"" according to neighbor Bronte Harte, speaking to the Associated Press.
+
+The New York Post identified the dating site as SpiritualPassions.com and reported that Mercer used the screen name ""Ironcross45,"" a possible reference to a WWII decoration awarded to Nazi soldiers.
+
+The shooting sparked panic at the usually quiet college, more than 70 miles south of Eugene. Some students ran for their lives, while others crammed into buses taking them to safety.
+
+Two people remain in critical condition in the ICU at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Springfield, Oregon. Doctors there say one victim was shot in the head.
+
+One other victim is in critical condition at Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg, according to chief medical officer Dr. Jason Gray.He said his hospital initially received 10 patients.
+
+Twitter user @bodhilooney posted a statement on the social network claiming that her grandmother was inside the classroom.
+
+Hundreds went to a candlelight vigil Thursday night, with many raising candles as the hymn ""Amazing Grace"" was played.
+
+Former student Sam Sherman said Roseburg was a ""poor town, a mill town."" Oregon's timber industry went into a tailspin 25 years ago.
+
+""People don't generally aspire to greater things here,"" he said. ""So having a place you can go to do that is a big deal. For something that terrible to happen at such a small school is frustrating.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5610,"BUSTED! Pro-Trump PAC Rep Admits To Voter Suppression Campaign Targeting Blacks, Suburban Mothers","link originally posted by: theantediluvian It looks like everyone is releasing their October suprises in pieces, including the Telegraph . Now we have Jesse Benton admitting to voter suppression on a hidden camera. Here's the transcript: Benton: We're doing pretty well ahhh but we don't have anywhere near the funds that Hillary's groups do so we really have to be surgical Benton: So we have a voter suppression campaign — quite frankly — targeting African Americans , and uh, and sort of, suburban moms , just bad stuff about Hillary, just trying to take their taste for her away. Female Reporter: I see, so that they don't turn out. Benton: Yeah just keep them — just try to drop her turn out two or three points Basically if they put out enough negative adds about how she hasn't supported blacks and there causes they will make it less likely they will vote for her. Realistically speaking they aren't going to votell republican and they know that. So the best they can hope for is make them mad enough at her not to vote. But looking at early voting they may have switched more than they thought and instead of bit voting they are voting trump wI'll see as election. Gets cloaer.",FAKE
+4665,Debate fact-check: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's claims reviewed,"“We will have a second amendment that is a very small replica of what it is now” in a Clinton administration
+
+Trump is being reductive: Clinton has never called for abolishing the second amendment, the right to bear arms, though she does support gun control measures such as an assault weapons ban, increased background checks and greater liability for manufacturers.
+
+As moderator Chris Wallace noted, Clinton has said she disagrees with the supreme court’s 5-4 decision in 2008 to broadly affirm the personal right to gun ownership. Her campaign has said Clinton would prefer states have the right to enact as strict gun control laws as they see fit.
+
+“Chicago has the toughest gun laws and the most gun deaths”
+
+
+
+Chicago police have pushed back on the notion that the city’s gun laws have proven ineffective, noting that a huge number of gun seizures were of firearms purchased outside the city or outside Illinois, where laws are more lax. Trump is largely correct about Chicago’s homicide problem: the city is on pace to have more than 600 gun deaths in 2016.
+
+“If you go with what Hillary is saying in the ninth month you can rip the baby out of the womb of the mother … up to the last day.”
+
+Clinton does not support such an extreme view on abortion, nor have courts ever ruled such a late term operation legal, or suggested that they would. States vary on how late they allow abortions – in some states there have been attempts to introduce very short time limits, including in North Dakota where a proposal in 2013 for a ban six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period was ruled unconstitutional, but in most states the time limit is at the start of the third trimester or earlier. There are nine states without specific term prohibitions, but clinics do not abort at such late terms: only 1.2% of abortions occur after 21 weeks, according to the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute.
+
+Clinton does not want “open borders”: she supports reform to let people pass background checks and pay back taxes in order to stay in the US, and she supports Obama’s executive actions to shield some migrants, such as people who were brought to the US as children. Like Obama, she supports deportation for people with criminal records.
+
+Trump is correct: Barack Obama has deported more than 2.5 million people, more than any other recent president, but he has prioritized migrants with criminal records. “Millions and millions”, however, is an exaggeration, and Obama also supports shielding millions of undocumented immigrants without criminal records, and reform for citizenship.
+
+Obama “has thousands and thousands of people, they have no idea where they come from”
+
+
+
+Ten thousand Syrian refugees have come to the United States in 2016, but Trump makes it sound misleadingly large.
+
+He is patently wrong about the screening process. The US has among the most intensive screening process in the world for refugees: it requires they register and interview with the United Nations, which then must refer them to the US, refugees who pass this test then interview with state department contractors and have at least two background checks, then they have three fingerprint and photo screenings, then US immigration reviews the case, then Homeland Security interviews the refugee, then a doctor examines the refugee, and finally several security agencies perform one last check after the refugee has been matched with a resettlement agency.
+
+The process takes 18 months to two years. The US has a very clear idea about which refugees it allows into the country.
+
+“I don’t know Putin. He said nice things about me … He has no respect for our president.”
+
+It’s not clear whether Trump has ever spoken with the Russian president. Putin was invited to but did not attend a 2013 beauty pageant in Moscow, according to one of the oligarchs who helped organize the event. “Will he become my new best friend?” Trump wondered beforehand.
+
+The pair may have communicated through intermediaries. In 2014, Trump told a National Press Club luncheon: “I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success.” A year earlier, Trump told MSNBC: “I do have a relationship and I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today.”
+
+Last November, Trump claimed in a debate that he “got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes”. They appeared in separate, pre-taped segments and were not on set together.
+
+Trump has repeatedly tried to do business in Russia, and his refusal to release tax returns prevents him proving that he has no assets there.
+
+Putin has never called Trump “a genius”; he used the Russian word яркий, which means “colorful” or “flamboyant”. Trump likely heard the word translated as “bright” or “brilliant”, though its connotations are often more pejorative than not: bright in the sense of glaring and gaudy, brilliant in the sense of dazzling light. Putin also called him “talented, undoubtedly”.
+
+“It’s not our business to decide his merits; that’s for US voters,” Putin said earlier this year. He did say, however, that he would welcome the rapprochement in Russian-American relations that Trump has suggested. You can read more about Putin’s remarks here.
+
+“She has no idea whether it’s Russia, China or somebody else … Our country has no idea”
+
+US intelligence officials have formally accused Russia of hacking Democratic organizations, saying they have “high confidence” that the Kremlin is behind cyberattacks on the US government, Democratic organizations and polling centers. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on this claim, despite personal briefings with US intelligence officials.
+
+Even his running mate, Mike Pence, has accepted the briefings, and told NBC on Sunday: “I think there’s more and more evidence that implicates Russia.” Earlier Wednesday a Russian man suspected of involvement in the hacks was arrested in Prague.
+
+“The border patrol agents, 16,500 plus, ICE, endorsed me. First time they’ve ever endorsed a candidate”
+
+Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a government agency. It does not endorse political candidates. A union representing about 7,600 ICE officials endorsed Trump in September. A group representing 16,500 of 21,000 border patrol agents similarly endorsed Trump; this does not represent all the agents.
+
+Clinton is correct that Trump took the quote out of context: she was talking primarily about trade to Banco Itau, a Brazilian bank that eventually became Unibanco. Here’s what she said, according to a hacked email released by Wikileaks:
+
+Clinton has flip-flopped on free trade since 2013, most notably supporting and then rejecting the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
+
+“I’m a big fan of Nato but they have to pay up”
+
+Trump is not necessarily a big fan of Nato, which he has called “obsolete”, and he’s wrong that allies do not pay for US military bases, though they do not pay perhaps as much as some Nato commanders want.
+
+The US has urged its Nato allies to pay more for years, especially as eastern and central European allies have loudly warned about aggressive Russian action. The US currently pays about 22% of overall Nato spending, compared to Germany’s 15%, France’s 11%, the UK’s 10%, etc, and most Nato members fail to pay the 2% of GDP into defense as the alliance’s guidelines dictate. But the US does receive payments for military bases abroad from countries like Japan and South Korea, and takes profits from arms deals (sometimes to controversial clients, such as Saudi Arabia).
+
+The US also benefits strategically through foreign military bases, which have acted as foundations for American influence abroad.
+
+“I never said Japan should have nuclear weapons”
+
+
+
+Trump has suggested Japan and South Korea should develop their own nuclear weapons. He told the New York Times in March: “Well I think maybe it’s not so bad to have Japan – if Japan had that nuclear threat, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing for us.”
+
+Trump has the raw numbers just about right. When Obama took office on 20 January 2009, the federal debt was $10.63tn. As of 28 September 2016, it was $19.5tn. Trump omits, however, two key points: Congress controls the government’s wallet (ie Obama cannot spend or tax without approval from lawmakers), and Obama took office during the financial crisis, when Republicans, Democrats and most economists agreed that the US needed to spend in order to counteract the collapsing economy. Pence has the right numbers but imputes too much responsibility on the president.
+
+“When you ran the state department, $6bn was missing! Maybe it was stolen … nobody knows”
+
+This is not correct. Trump is alluding to a March 2014 alert, about contractor spending in the Middle East and Africa, by the state department’s inspector general, who was so perturbed by careless language around the $6bn figure that he wrote the Washington Post a letter that April. His alert did not conclude that the money was “missing” he told the Post, but rather that officials had failed “to adequately maintain contract files” that created “significant financial risk”. Files were missing or incomplete regarding several dozen contracts, not the money itself, and the state department agreed to his recommendations.
+
+Trump is right: Clinton has not been consistent on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and her language from 2010 through 2014 suggests she was broadly in support of Barack Obama’s trade deal, before eventually opposing it as a presidential candidate. As secretary of state in 2012, she said: “This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field. And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world’s total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment.”
+
+She continued to praise it while she worked for the Obama administration, variously calling it “high quality”, “cutting edge”, “groundbreaking” and “high standard”.
+
+The claim that Hillary Clinton “gave” the world Isis condenses and distorts a conservative view that, closer to its original form, says that that by withdrawing American forces from Iraq, Barack Obama created a power vacuum in which Isis could rise.
+
+This argument ignores that Isis’s first segments formed out of Iraq’s civil war, while George W Bush was president, that the group gained strength in Syria’s civil war, where the US did not intervene until 2014, that Obama withdrew American forces in 2011 under the timeline agreed on by Bush and Baghdad, and that both Bush and Obama failed to come to an agreement with Baghdad over troops – in large part over a disagreement about whether American troops could be prosecuted by Iraq.
+
+Trump supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and “surgical” intervention to remove Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, though he now claims otherwise. He also supported withdrawal from Iraq in 2007 and 2008.
+
+The sexual allegations against Trump have not been “debunked”, though they have not been proven, either. For context, Jill Harth sued Trump in 1997 for “attempted rape” and earlier this year told the Guardian he “me up against the wall” of a child’s bedroom “and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress”. Jessica Leeds and Rachel Cooks recounted to the New York Times that Trump had groped the former “like an octopus” and kissed the latter without consent.
+
+Reporter Natasha Stoynoff has said Trump cornered her in a room in 2005 and “within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat”. Mindy McGillivray told the Palm Beach Post a similar story, saying that Trump groped her 13 years ago, also at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida. Summer Zervos, a former Apprentice contestant, has alleged that he groped and kissed her without consent in 2007. Temple Taggart accused Trump of advances at rehearsal for the 1997 Miss USA pageant, photographer Kirsten Anderson said Trump groped her at a nightclub in the 1990s, and Cathy Heller said he grabbed and kissed her at a Mar-A-Lago brunch in 1997.
+
+The Trump campaign has denied the allegations. It has produced a self-professed witness, who has a history of making unproven claims, from the flight with Leeds, and a letter from the cousin of Zervos expressing doubt about her claim but not calling her a liar. “I can only imagine that Summer’s actions today are nothing more than an attempt to regain the spotlight at Mr Trump’s expense,” his letter said.
+
+“I did not say that [women were not unattractive enough for him to advance on]”
+
+Trump clearly suggested that he did not find at least one of his accusers attractive, saying “She would not be my first choice, believe me.”
+
+“They hired people [to incite violence at rallies], they gave them $1,500 … she caused the violence, it’s on tape!”
+
+Trump appears to be alluding to an edited video that suggests a few Democratic staffers had hired people to incite violence. One of those staffers has resigned, and said that “none of the schemes described in the conversations ever took place”. So far there is no proof that anyone was actually hired to cause violence.
+
+“Criminally, after getting a subpoena by the United States Congress, [Clinton deleted emails]. One lie.”
+
+Trump has the timeline correct, but not the criminality. He omits the FBI’s conclusion that there was no evidence of an intentional effort to conceal anything, and the FBI learned that a Clinton aide had asked for the emails unrelated to government work to be deleted in December 2014, months before the 4 March 2015 subpoena.
+
+The emails were deleted at the end of March, according to the FBI, when an employee had what he called an “oh shit” moment about his previous order from Mills. The state department first agreed to produce records in July 2014.
+
+“A four-star general who lied to the FB faces a worse deal than Clinton”
+
+Trump did not specify a general’s name but appears to have been referring to James Cartwright. He has in the past referred to both Cartwright and General David Petraeus in his argument that Clinton benefits from some kind of double standard.
+
+In 2015 Petraeus, a former CIA director and a four-star general, pled guilty to giving a large amount of classified information – including the identities of covert officers and war strategy – to his biographer, with whom he was having an affair. During the FBI investigation, Petraeus lied to agents, according to the plea deal. But the justice department only sentenced Petraeus to two years’ probation and a $100,000 fine, provoking accusations that this relatively lenient sentence was evidence of a double standard for the powerful. The justice department’s lenience toward Petraeus actually made it more difficult, in part, for prosecutors to recommend charges against Clinton.
+
+This week Cartwright pled guilty to lying to the FBI in an investigation into leaking classified information about operations against Iran to journalists. Like Petraeus, though, the FBI found actual intentional wrongdoing in Cartwright’s case. Cartwright’s punishment could range from a $500 fine to six months in prison or, if the judge sees fit, a higher sentence.
+
+
+
+There is no evidence that the Clinton Foundation is a “criminal enterprise”, or that its donors or the Clintons profit from the charity.
+
+Trump appears to be alluding a garment factory built after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake in the town of Caracol, while Bill Clinton was the UN’s special envoy to Haiti and co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), an organization that approved US government funded projects that added up to hundreds of millions of dollars. The IHRC approved a project between the US, Haiti’s government and Sae-A Trading, a South Korean clothing company, and it now provides 8,900 jobs to Haitians.
+
+An eventual review by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found “mixed results” with the project, including “unrealistic initial timeframes”, delays, incomplete information in the feasibility study, and funding problems. Earlier in October, labor organizers alleged that factory managers were mistreating workers there, but an ABC News investigation found no evidence that Clinton Foundation donors profited from the project, though some were involved in the project. The US committed funding but did not participate in building the industrial park; a labor group that reviewed the factory found it had adequate oversight and had dealt with concerns, though the factory remains within the range of the often grueling garment industry.
+
+He was correct, at least, that the Clinton Foundation has accepted millions from Middle East countries with records of repression of women and gay people. 
+
+
+
+“I don’t buy boats, I don’t buy planes [with money the Trump Foundation], we put up the American flag, and that’s it … We fought for the right in Palm Beach to put up the American flag”
+
+Trump is not being wholly honest about his charitable foundation, at least according to the Trump Foundation’s own documents, which show that he used its money to pay for legal settlements and even self-portraits, as Clinton said and the Washington Post has reported at length.
+
+Trump does not come from modest beginnings. In 1978 his father gave him a loan totaling almost $1m – about $3.7m today – and acted as guarantor for the young Trump’s early projects. A 1981 report by a New Jersey regulator also shows a $7.5m loan from the patriarch, and years later he bought $3.5m in gambling chips to help his son pay off the debts of a failing casino, a transaction found later found illegal. Trump also borrowed millions against his inheritance before his father’s death, a 2007 deposition shows.
+
+Trump has not proven that he is worth $10bn, though his tax returns, which he has refused to release, could provide a clearer picture of his worth. His financial filings suggest he has less than $250m in liquid assets, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Trump has a history of overstating his properties: he has, for instance, told the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that a New York golf club is worth $50m but also argued in court that it is worth only $1.4m.
+
+“These people have all left. The element of surprise … all she had to do was stay there”
+
+Isis has not left Mosul: several thousand fighters remain there and are fighting the coalition of Iraqi and Kurdish troops, backed by US airstrikes and special forces. Isis leaders have known for years that Baghdad would try to retake the city, if they have not known since they took the city.
+
+Trump did not support leaving a residual American force in Iraq, but actually called for a complete withdrawal from Iraq, despite the likelihood of civil war or an authoritarian coup. “You know how they get out? They get out. That’s how they get out. Declare victory and leave,” he told CNN in 2007. “This is a total catastrophe, and you might as well get out now because you’re just wasting time, and lives.”
+
+The argument that Isis rose out of the vacuum of post-withdrawal Iraq also ignores that its origins were in the country’s civil war, while George W Bush was in office, and that the terror group concentrated strength in Syria’s civil war before Barack Obama began a bombing and special forces campaign there.
+
+Trump, when told he was for the invasion of Iraq: “Wrong”
+
+This is a lie. In the months before the Iraq war began, Trump mildly endorsed invasion to radio host Howard Stern, who asked him whether US forces should attack. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump answered. A few weeks later he told Fox News that George W Bush was “doing a very good job”. Several weeks after the invasion, Trump told the Washington Post: “The war’s a mess.” In August 2004 he told Esquire: “Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over.”
+
+Even in an interview cited by the Trump campaign, Trump expressed impatience with Bush for not invading sooner. “Whatever happened to the days of the Douglas MacArthur? He would go and attack. He wouldn’t talk.”
+
+About 10.7 million people have gained jobs since Barack Obama took office in 2009 (not 15 million as the Clinton campaign sometimes claims). Growth is not stagnant, though it is not significant, and it requires context: the 2008 financial crisis that nearly collapsed the economy. According to a 2015 nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus may have increased GDP buy up to 0.2 percentage points. US growth in the second quarter of 2016 was 1.4%.
+
+“Their [the people of New Hampshire’s] single biggest problem is heroin that pours across our southern borders, just pouring and destroying their youth”
+
+Trump is correct that heroin deaths have increased dramatically since 2007, in part because of the abuse of painkillers and the growth of a number of powerful heroin-related drugs, such as fentanyl. According to the DEA, 10,574 Americans died from heroin-related overdoses in 2014, more than three times the number in 2010.
+
+“Next week [the healthcare premiums] are going to go up 100%”
+
+Trump and Clinton both accept the reality that healthcare premiums have increased since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, but Trump appears to be exaggerating wildly. On average, premiums have risen by about 5.8% a year since Obama took office, compared with 13.2% in the nine years before Obama, Politifact found earlier this year. Trump, however, is cherry-picking data from various states and providers where rates have had higher jumps. The most common healthcare plans will increase 9% on average, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
+
+“We take care of illegal immigrants … better than we take care of our vets”
+
+This claim flies in the face of evidence and logic. Like all US citizens, veterans enjoy the basic rights and benefits granted by US law (voting rights, social security, Medicaid, etc), while undocumented migrants (non-citizens) do not. Trump has in the past tried to justify this claim by saying the US spends more on undocumented people than on veterans, but has drawn a $113bn price tag from an explicitly anti-immigration foundation. He also inflated that number.
+
+The campaign has said the US spends $2.8bn on housing migrants in prisons, combining an estimate on prison costs and the 2016 budget for the care and processing of children who came to the US without adults. The Veterans Affairs administration has a 2016 budget of $69.7bn. Veterans and undocumented migrants alike have access to K-12 education, though few veterans would likely seek it, and veterans have access to the Affordable Care Act, military benefits and health benefits, while migrants do not.
+
+“Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store, you have no education, no jobs”
+
+Trump’s repeated claim that “African Americans, Hispanics, are living in hell” defies most of American history, from antebellum slavery through the Jim Crow decades, great depression and segregation. Even if Trump is only referring the past half century, he is still wrong by most metrics.
+
+Data on employment, education and health show empirical evidence for the persistent reality of discrimination against black Americans, but also show major gains in the last few decades. In 2015, black people earned just 75% as much as whites in median hourly earnings, whether full- or part-time, according to a Pew Research analysis. The black unemployment rate in August 2016 was 8.1%, compared with 4.4% for white people, but still lower than for most of the last 40 years. Black life expectancy has increased from the mid-30s around 1900 to the mid-70s in 2016, according to the CDC. Education rates have similarly increased in the last 40 years, according to the census.
+
+“We have 33,000 people a year who die from guns”
+
+Clinton is broadly correct. The Centers for Disease Control reported 33,636 firearm deaths in 2013, and similar figures in the years preceding it.
+
+Clinton is not quite right. A Trump contractor hired undocumented Polish workers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and in 1983 union members sued one of their organizers. Trump appeared in court in 1990 and blamed the contractor overseeing the project, which was for Trump Tower.
+
+“I will not add a penny to the debt”
+
+Estimates suggest Clinton is not wholly correct. Her proposed tax plan would add $191bn to the debt over the long term, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, a conservative thinktank. The Tax Policy Center, however, estimates that she would add $1.1tn in revenue in a decade, though much of that would be offset by increased spending. The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s plan would add $5.3tn to the debt.
+
+“We at the Clinton Foundation spend 90% [of what’s given] and have the highest rating from watchdogs”
+
+The Clinton Foundation does have high marks from charity watchdogs, which also show that the group does spend the vast majority of its donations on its own charitable programs.
+
+Clinton says Trump has called the election ‘rigged’, while Trump says he won’t necessarily accept the election results
+
+All available evidence shows that in-person voter fraud is exceedingly rare: you are more likely to be struck by lightning in the next year (a one in 1,042,000 chance, according to Noaa) than to find a case of voter fraud by impersonation (31 possible cases in more than a billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014, according to a study by Loyola Law School).
+
+Voter fraud would have to happen on an enormous scale to sway elections, because the electoral college system decentralizes authority: each of the 50 states has its own rules and local officials, not federal ones, run the polls and count the ballots. This complexity makes the notion of a “rigged” national election, at least in the US, logistically daunting to the point of practical impossibility. Thirty-one states have Republican governors, including the swing states of Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada and Ohio; Pennsylvania only elected a Democratic governor in 2015. Polls show Trump losing even in some states where governors have strongly supported him. In Maine, for instance, the Real Clear Politics average shows him down five points.
+
+About 75% of the ballots cast in federal elections have paper backups, and most electronic voting machines are not connected to the internet – though they have other flaws and may be vulnerable to tampering. But voter fraud to swing a major election, whether by tampering, buying votes or official wrongdoing, would quickly attract attention by its necessarily large scale.
+
+If Trump loses the presidential election, it will be because American voters do not want him in the White House, not because of a conspiracy involving Republicans and Democrats alike at state and city levels around the nation – a conspiracy for which Trump has provided no evidence.
+
+“Trump’s plan largely helps the wealthy and adds $20tn in debt”
+
+Clinton is correct that although Trump’s tax plan would cut taxes for everyone, it would disproportionately help the wealthiest Americans, saving them millions of dollars and adding $5.3tn to the national debt, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation, a conservative thinktank. She seems to be citing another analysis, by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, about the debt, and possibly overstates its estimated consequences.
+
+That center warned that without severe spending cuts, the plan would balloon national debt “by nearly 80% of gross domestic product by 2036, offsetting some or all of the incentive effects of the tax cuts”. According to that group, half of Trump’s tax cuts would go to the top 1% of earners, and most families below the top 20% of earners would have income gains of less than 1%.
+
+• This article was amended on 21 October 2016. An earlier version said incorrectly that North Dakota had banned abortion six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period and that the general referred to by Trump was David Petraeus. Two sections of the text have been corrected and clarified accordingly.",REAL
+4378,Kentucky Clerk's Office Issues Same-Sex Marriage License,"In what was an emotional and contentious scene at the Rowan County, Ky., Courthouse this morning, one dramatic legal standoff came to an end when a gay couple was issued a marriage license.
+
+James Yates and William Smith, who had tried this five times before, arrived at the courthouse just as the sun started peeking out from under the mountains on the horizon.
+
+They walked past protesters — some condemning them and some cheering them — and entered the clerk's office.
+
+Kim Davis, the county clerk who had stood in their way those five previous attempts, was in jail. She was held in contempt by a federal judge Thursday for refusing to hand out marriage licenses in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court. So early Friday, Yates and Smith walked up to Deputy Clerk Brian Mason.
+
+Mason was all business. He checked their licenses, asked them if they were related, took their $35 and, in about five minutes, handed them an envelope and said, ""Congratulations.""
+
+Yates and Smith had become the first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license from Rowan County.
+
+They exited to chants of ""Love has won. Love has won.""
+
+""I don't want her in jail,"" Yates said of Davis. ""No one wanted her in jail. We just wanted the licenses given out. This isn't a blessing. It's an official license.""
+
+""This means, at least for this area, civil rights are civil rights and they're not subject to beliefs.""
+
+Davis' husband, Joe Davis, was also outside the courthouse with a group of protesters who called this a moral fight.
+
+""We don't hate these people. That's the furthest thing from our hearts,"" he said. ""We don't hate nobody. We just want to have the same rights that they have. They're saying, 'Hey we're gonna make you accept us.' But they don't want to accept our beliefs. But they want us to accept theirs.""
+
+There is still some question about the legality of the marriage licenses handed out today, because they don't bear Davis' signature.",REAL
+775,The map is tough for any Republican. It’s completely daunting for Donald Trump.,"Every preliminary electoral-map forecast this spring paints a bleak picture for Donald Trump in his effort to win the presidency against Hillary Clinton. The consensus is that there is only a very narrow path to victory, and that will probably shape the opening phase of the general-election campaign.
+
+Among the earlier forecasts, the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato sees a Clinton romp in the making. A year ago, his forecast showed Democrats with an advantage in states adding up to 247 electoral votes, Republicans with an edge in states adding up to 206 and six states totaling 85 votes rated as toss-ups. Today, Sabato sees no states as toss-ups. Instead, he shows Clinton with 347 electoral votes and Trump with just 191.
+
+The Cook Political Report shows a similarly dire map for Trump: 304 electoral votes leaning or solid for Clinton, 190 leaning or solid for Trump and 44 up for grabs. The four states Cook rated as toss-ups include three carried by Obama in 2012 (Iowa, New Hampshire and Ohio) and one carried by Mitt Romney (North Carolina).
+
+The Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report offers a more conservative estimate, but one no less daunting for Trump and Republicans: 263 leaning or solid for the Democrats, 206 for the Republicans and the remaining as toss-ups. The toss-ups in this analysis are Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Virginia.
+
+These forecasts are the reason so many elected Republicans are worried about Trump at the top of their ticket. If he crashes, so too might their current majorities, particularly in the Senate. No wonder House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) remains a holdout in his willingness to fully embrace Trump and why Senate leaders expressed their concerns to the presumptive nominee when they met Thursday.
+
+To hold the Senate, Republicans must fend off a series of Democratic challenges in states that are traditional presidential battlegrounds or, worse, states that have been in the Democrats’ presidential column repeatedly.
+
+Cook’s Senate list shows six Republican-held seats as toss-up races. Three are in presidentially blue states: Mark Kirk in Illinois, Patrick J. Toomey in Pennsylvania and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Three others are in traditional battlegrounds: Rob Portman in Ohio, Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire and the seat being vacated by Marco Rubio in Florida. Only one Democratic seat is currently a toss-up, that of retiring Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
+
+If it becomes necessary, these embattled Republican incumbents will distance themselves from Trump in an instant to run their own campaigns — but will need to defy recent history to be successful. For some years now, voters increasingly have cast their votes for Senate in line with their presidential preference. This election could become a major test of whether that trend toward straight-ticket voting in recent years can be reversed.
+
+A counter to the electoral-map projections showing Trump a potentially sizable drag on other Republican candidates came last week, when Quinnipiac University released polls from Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. Clinton and Trump were neck and neck in Florida and Pennsylvania, and Trump led narrowly in Ohio.
+
+Critics of the surveys asserted that the samples understated the likely size of the nonwhite vote and overstated the percentage of Republicans. It’s also worth noting that all of the surveys had a relatively high percentage of undecided voters.
+
+More evidence is needed, and subsequent surveys will either ratify or contradict those numbers. But the three states in question are one path to the presidency for Trump. If he could hold all of the states that Romney won — by no means a certainty — and flip Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, he would become president.
+
+Many Democrats express the belief that there are traditional GOP states that may be in play in November, starting with Arizona. Clinton strategists are not assuming major changes in the geography of the battlegrounds. To that end, the key will be to prevent Trump from bringing out disaffected white, working-class voters while energizing the Obama coalition.
+
+The Washington Post’s Abby Phillip described one step that the Clinton campaign is planning to protect states that are must-wins this fall, which is by starting to organize as early and as robustly as possible in Midwestern states with white, working-class constituencies, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
+
+All three states have voted for the Democratic nominee six times in a row, although Obama won Pennsylvania, where there was no real campaign, by just more than five points in 2012. That five-point margin was almost identical to the margins by which he won the contested states of Colorado and New Hampshire and is a source of potential concern for Clinton’s team.
+
+[Nine House committee chairs endorse Trump, but not yet Speaker Ryan]
+
+The Clinton camp has been eager to get moving on its general-election operations for weeks, knowing that it takes time and resources to build the kind of organization they need to get all of their voters to the polls in November. The persistence of the challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont notwithstanding, the leadership of Clinton’s campaign in Brooklyn is now moving ahead on that front.
+
+Clinton’s other strategy will be to disqualify Trump to any possible persuadable voters, among them independent women, and to generate the biggest possible turnout among Latinos and African Americans.
+
+Clinton’s liabilities as a candidate make it more difficult for her simply to run a positive campaign to win over these voters, although she will need to do that. In addition, she and her outside allies will probably emulate the strategy followed by Obama against Romney four years ago by unloading soon.
+
+The barrage will come in the form of TV ads and other means of communication — through social media, surrogates and talking heads, all recounting the many controversial things Trump has said about women, about Mexicans, about Muslims and anything else that might be in the opposition research files.
+
+Trump should expect an all-out assault from the Democrats starting in early June. The goal will be to make it as difficult as possible for him to gain a foothold in the places where he will need it most. Whether Trump and the Republicans, who are all scrambling to try to unify as best as they can, will be ready to answer is a major question.
+
+Trump has proved to be largely impervious to attack in the primaries, but he’s now facing a much different electorate. If he isn’t ready for what is coming at him, the opening phase of the general election could prove decisive.",REAL
+3893,"White House makes formal veto threat against Keystone, ACA bills","The White House made formal veto threats Wednesday against House bills that would allow the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and change a key mandate under the Affordable Care Act, signaling a rocky start to the 114th Congress.
+
+While White House press secretary Josh Earnest had announced Tuesday that President Obama intends to veto the first bill headed to his desk under the GOP-controlled Congress, the new Statement of Administration Policy elaborates on the president's objection to the bill.
+
+The House version — which is identical to the one just introduced in the Senate on Tuesday by Sens. John Hoeven (N.D.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — ""conflicts with longstanding Executive branch procedures regarding the authority of the President and prevents the thorough consideration of complex issues that could bear on U.S. national interests (including serious security, safety, environmental, and other ramifications),"" reads the statement, which was released by the Office of Management and Budget.
+
+""If presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto this bill,"" it adds.
+
+The president also laid down the gauntlet when it comes to House Republicans' latest effort to chip away at his signature health-care law. Currently the Affordable Care Act requires employers to provide health insurance if they have at least 50 full-time workers, which is defined by anyone working 30 hours a week or more. The Save American Workers Act would change the definition of a full-time employee to someone working at least 40 hours a week.
+
+Obama will reject the measure ""because it would significantly increase the deficit, reduce the number of Americans with employer-based health insurance coverage, and create incentives for employers to shift their employees to part-time work – causing the problem it intends to solve.""
+
+""Rather than attempting once again to repeal or undermine the Affordable Care Act, which the House has tried to do over 50 times, it is time for the Congress to stop fighting old political battles and join the President in forwarding an agenda focused on providing greater economic opportunity and security for middle class families and all those working to be a part of the middle class,"" the Statement of Administration Policy adds.
+
+During his regular press briefing Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) questioned why the president was starting out the new session on such an adversarial note.
+
+""Too many Americans are out of work, too many are working harder just to keep pace in the face of rising costs and frankly, we’ve got an awful lot of work to do,"" Boehner said. ""Unfortunately, by threatening two of these bipartisan jobs bills, the president essentially is telling the American people he really doesn’t care what they think. Well, our commitment is to stand up for the American people and their priorities, and it’s a commitment we will not break.”
+
+Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), noted in an e-mail that 18 House Democrats voted for a similar health care bill last Congress. A companion bill in the Senate is sponsored by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.).
+
+Polls show a clear majority of Americans support approving the Keystone pipeline, with 60 percent in a November USA Today survey saying Obama and Congress should authorize the project; 25 percent said it should not and the rest were unsure. Separate polling finds most Republicans, independents, and moderate or conservative Democrats support the pipeline, liberal Democrats and those with the most education more opposed.
+
+Along with overall public support, Americans are bullish about the pipeline’s job-creation prospects. More than eight in 10 respondents in a Washington Post-ABC News poll said the pipeline would create a significant number of jobs, while just under half thought it would pose a significant risk to the environment.",REAL
+9588,Nonduality and the Consciousness of 'Things' - Thich Nhat Hanh,"Nonduality and the Consciousness of 'Things' - Thich Nhat Hanh Share on Facebook Tweet 
+Do animals and plants have consciousness? Are electrons alive? Thich Nhat Hanh in dialogue with University of Virginia Astrophysicist Dr. Trinh Xuan Thuan. [watch video below] Caitlin Moran's Posthumous Advice for Her Daughter Caitlin Moran · 19,039 views today · My daughter is about to turn 13 and I’ve been smoking a lot recently, and so – in the wee small hours, when my lungs feel like there’s a small mouse inside them, scratching to...",FAKE
+3046,Why do people on the other side seem so unreasonable?,"George W. Bush famously described himself as “a uniter, not a divider.” A few years into his presidency there was a survey that reported that 49 percent of Americans thought he was a “uniter” and 49 percent thought him a “divider” — a poignant reminder that Americans are so polarized, they’re even polarized about polarization.
+
+And of course the same goes for Obama who, like Bush, spent two terms as president trying, but failing, to be a bipartisan figure.
+
+A characteristic feature of polarization seems to be the impression that one’s own side is reasonable and that all the polarizing comes from the other side of the political aisle.
+
+I came across an amusing example of this today, ironically from a political scientist, Gerard Alexander, who, in an op-ed entitled, “Jon Stewart, Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness,” writes:
+
+This is just too perfect. It’s a beautiful paradox. If Alexander is right, then there is an important asymmetry in American politics, which is the thing that he’s saying conservatives don’t believe! If he’s wrong, then there is no asymmetry, which is what he’s saying conservatives believe in the first place. It’s like something out of Lewis Carroll.
+
+I’m reminded of economist Emily Oster’s quote that economists are different from almost everyone else in society in that they assume everybody is fundamentally alike.
+
+I also think it’s a bit odd for Alexander to describe liberals as “fixated” on Sarah Palin: it’s not liberals who nominated Palin for vice-president, or who put her on TV. Unless you want to describe William Kristol and Roger Ailes as liberals.
+
+Also this, from Alexander:
+
+My strongest memory of Mr. Stewart, like that of many other conservatives, is probably going to be his 2010 interview with the Berkeley law professor John Yoo. Mr. Yoo had served in Mr. Bush’s Justice Department and had drafted memos laying out what techniques could and couldn’t be used to interrogate Al Qaeda detainees. Mr. Stewart seemed to go into the interview expecting a menacing Clint Eastwood type, who was fully prepared to zap the genitals of some terrorist if that’s what it took to protect America’s women and children. Mr. Stewart was caught unaware by the quiet, reasonable Mr. Yoo, who explained that he had been asked to determine what legally constituted torture so the government could safely stay on this side of the line. The issue, in other words, wasn’t whether torture was justified but what constituted it and what didn’t.
+
+First off, let me say that this is a horrible thing to say about Clint Eastwood, who was never involved in this:
+
+It’s interesting to see what Alexander did there. First, he changed the question from “crushing the testicles of the person’s child” (which Yoo refused to say the government couldn’t do) “zap[ping] the genitals of some terrorist” (which is, presumably, also a treaty violation but doesn’t sound so bad). Second, Alexander didn’t even say “suspected terrorist,” he said “terrorist.” But of course one of the concerns with torture is that it’s not only done on terrorists, it’s also done on people who get picked up on suspicion of terrorism, or just people who somebody thinks might have some information. Alexander gets to characterize Yoo as “reasonable” only by shifting the ground of the debate. He also describes Yoo as “quiet,” which seems pretty irrelevant to me. Personally, I’d prefer someone who yells but opposes torture to someone who is soft-spoken and supports it. Then again, I don’t personally know anyone who’s been killed by a terrorist; maybe if I did, I’d feel differently.
+
+Anyway, the point is that Alexander demonstrates political polarization in his column, in the very way that he is castigating liberals for unreasonable for seeing themselves as more reasonable than conservatives. And, if you’d like, you could characterize this post as even more polarization, in that of all the things I could write about today, I’ve chosen this.
+
+My point, though, as a political scientist, is that along with our very reasonable concerns about difficulties of communication between the left and the right — an often disturbing lack of national unity — comes a corresponding split in perceptions. Alexander is correct to see a tendency among many liberals to think of themselves as more reasonable than conservatives. But his column, ironically, demonstrates the symmetric tendency of many conservatives to see themselves as the reasonable ones. So, instead of mere disagreements on policy, we get disputes about the legitimacy of each side’s concerns, as well as ahistorical views such as an attribution to liberals of Sarah Palin’s fame.
+
+None of this is new, but it has been getting worse in the past generation, and this particular column reminded me of it.
+
+Finally, it’s data time. This is the Monkey Cage, after all. Here are some graphs from my book Red State Blue State on partisan polarization during the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars.",REAL
+4188,The Republican Party ruined conservatism long before Trump: Why they still don’t get it,"This is true at both the national and state levels. Modern conservative mythology begins with Reagan, a man who tripled the federal budget deficit (which shot up to $3 trillion during his tenure) and raised taxes 11 times during the course of his presidency. Reagan didn’t shrink the size of government or grow the middle class. On the contrary, he made government more bloated, more defense-oriented, more corporatist. George W. Bush’s 8 years in office were similarly disastrous: more corporate welfare, more debt, more Utopian military campaigns, more disorder.
+
+Today Republican governors are plunging – or have plunged – their states into one abyss after another, all under the banner of conservatism. There are almost too many examples to cite: Sam Brownback in Kansas; Bobby Jindal in Louisiana; Rick Snyder in Michigan; Phil Bryant in Mississippi; Scott Walker in Wisconsin; Chris Christie in New Jersey; Paul LePage in Maine; Rick Scott in Florida. The list goes on and on and on.
+
+The point is obvious enough: The conservative brand is tainted.
+
+Now that Donald Trump has hijacked the Republican Party, the conservative intelligentsia is apoplectic. Trump isn’t a real conservative, they say. He’s ideologically incoherent, they say. The assumption is that Trump is an aberration, a chimera born of anti-establishment rage. Or that he’s a threat to the “conservative movement” rather than its natural outgrowth.
+
+Consider the latest Wall Street Journal op-ed by conservative columnist Bret Stephens. Stephens writes:
+
+There are two problems with this. First, there’s a disconnect between establishment Republicans and conservative voters. If you watch Fox News or listen to right-wing radio, it’s clear that the base isn’t animated by a coherent worldview. Many self-identify as conservative, but their conservatism is a vague stew of cultural resentment, religious certainty, and half-baked talking points. There is no consistent “conservative cause” to preserve. And if there is a genuine conservative coalition, the Know Nothings and the John Birchers are now central to it. Indeed, the GOP has cultivated these wings since its adoption of the “Southern Strategy” roughly 50 years ago.
+
+Second, to the extent that conservative ideas have been implemented in recent years, they haven’t worked. The “conservative cause” is already crippled. Neoliberal economics, which is what conservative elites support, has gutted the country and the working class. The trade deals, the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the privatization schemes – have redistributed wealth upwards at the expense of everyone else. “Conservatives,” Stephens writes, are “supposed to believe that it’s folly to put hope before experience,” but they’ve put ideological dogma over empirical reality for decades. “Trickle-down” economics didn’t work for Reagan (revenue decreased and unemployment spiked to 10.8 percent after his initial 1981 tax cuts, for example) and it didn’t work for the Bush administrations. And yet GOP presidential candidates speak as though the contrary were true, as though history doesn’t exist. One can argue that this isn’t classical conservatism; that real conservatism involves prudence, a pragmatic respect for existing institutions, and careful responsiveness to change. But that’s not what passes as conservatism. Today’s “conservatives” are hopelessly wedded to discredited abstractions. When elected, their ideas have failed. Now voters are revolting against the establishment and choosing instead to embrace the ethno-nationalism of Trump. Stephens writes that “A Trump presidency means losing the Republican Party.” I disagree. Trump’s nomination means the Republican Party is already lost. Or perhaps it was never found. The GOP has been ideologically fractured since at least the early ’80s, when it morphed into a quasi-religious movement. The Wall Street Journal editorial board cares about tax policy and capital gains, but the Republican base doesn’t. The people voting for Trump are losers in the new economy to be sure, but they’re animated by cultural angst and identity-based fears as much as anything else. Republicans have exploited their base in similar ways for years; Trump has just taken it to another level. I’m not sure what a Trump presidency really means. But it’s not the death knell for conservatism. The GOP ruined conservatism long before Trump. If people like Stephens want to save conservatism, they need a new party, not a new candidate.",REAL
+9966,Obamacare is Meant to Fail in Order to Usher in Government-Run Socialist Health Care,"link The oligarchy runs our society with Problem – Reaction – Solution. If anything, these leaks have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the two-party system is an illusion and the whole construct is one huge pay-for-play corporate sham. Obamacare was always meant to destroy the private health care system and usher in single-payer, government run socialist medicine. It was designed that way… and it’s “working”. Related: Link In this particular e-mail, we get to see just how fake and fraudulent our government is. Your health determines how valuable of an asset you are and it’s the main reason why we see “health tracking apparel” and “health scores,” designed by and for prominent health insurance companies in order to track your health data in-between doctor visits. Remember this quote by demon spawn Nancy Pelosi? “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” If that wasn’t telling you something at the time, maybe this will… Picture: Link In an email thread dated September 26, 2015 between Hillary and her senior policy adviser, Ann O’Leary, titled “Memo on Cadillac Tax for HRC,” Hillary wrote, “Given the politics now w bipartisan support including Schumer, I’ll support repeal w ‘sense of the Senate’ that revenues would have to be found. I’d be open to a range of options to do that. But we have to be careful that the R version passes which begins the unraveling of the ACA.” Do you still have any doubts? Sadly, there are those who have benefited from the ACA, but to a greater extent, many have seen the exact opposite of what was promised. Higher rates, less coverage, new doctors, etc… A Democrat supporting Republican legislation to destroy Obamacare on purpose. How many millions have they raked in on this deal and bilked the American people for in Obamacare penalties because they can’t afford the “affordable” health care? And the American people will look at this like a “victory” when it does unravel, even though it has been the plan all along. Which reminds me, when was the last time that the people had a victory? This just goes to show you that what is good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander. They knew that going in and only after the fact, can we realize this. They wanted the ganders’ money while the goose that benefits (through subsidiaries), cries to defend the ACA, making the rest of us look insensitive and unfair. Good plan… They’re all working together, folks. Obamacare was always meant to fail — on purpose — to bring in a single-payer, government-controlled socialist medicine system. Don’t believe me yet? Back in 2013, Senator Harry Reid had this to say about the ACA… Sen. Harry Reid: Obamacare 'Absolutely' A Step Toward A Single-Payer System When I speak to conservatives about health care policy, I’m often asked the question: “Do you think that Obamacare is secretly a step toward single-payer health care?” I always explain that, while progressives may want single-payer, I don’t think that Obamacare is deliberately designed to bring about that outcome. Well, yesterday on PBS’ Nevada Week In Review , Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) was asked whether his goal was to move Obamacare to a single-payer system. His answer? “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.” The plan to undermine your health and sufficiency is so diabolical and disgusting, that many would simply refuse to believe such a thing. Well, there it is folks. They don’t give a damn about you or your well-being and will do anything in their power to see that decisions about your health are made by them in the future. For me personally, the ACA has increased my premium by 300%, causing me to drop what was offered by my employer and settle with less coverage for more money using the ""marketplace."" Is this where I get to say... Thanks Obama?",FAKE
+718,"Megyn Kelly Special: Trump defends tone, says bid will be ‘complete waste’ if he doesn’t win","Donald Trump, in an extensive interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, responded to critics of his barbed campaign style by saying he never would have been successful in the primary race if he had acted “presidential” and held back on hitting his political rivals – while declaring that if he doesn’t win the election this fall, he’ll consider his campaign a “complete waste.”
+
+The presumptive Republican presidential nominee was blunt in describing the stakes of the 2016 race as he sees it. Without a victory in the fall, he said, he won’t be able to lower taxes, strengthen the military or “make America great.”
+
+“I will say this: If I don’t go all the way, and if I don’t win, I will consider it to be a total and complete waste of time, energy and money,” Trump said, in the interview that aired Tuesday night on Fox Broadcast Network affiliates.
+
+The candidate addressed a range of topics in his sit-down with Kelly, from his tone to the lead-off presidential debates to his past clashes with the Fox News host.
+
+Trump conceded that, in looking back, he “absolutely” has regrets, without going into detail. But he said if he hadn’t conducted himself in this way, he wouldn’t have come out on top.
+
+“If I were soft, if I were presidential … in a way it’s a bad word, because there’s nothing wrong with being presidential, but if I had not fought back in the way I fought back, I don’t think I would have been successful,” he told Kelly.
+
+Trump argued that he’s a “counter-puncher” who’s only responding to the attacks against him.
+
+“I respond pretty strongly, but in just about all cases, I’ve been responding to what they did to me,” Trump said. “It’s not a one-way street.”
+
+The interview was conducted on the heels of an April meeting between Kelly and the Republican candidate at Trump Tower in New York City.
+
+Before that meeting, the two had been at odds for months – dating back to a Fox News-hosted debate last August, when Trump accused “The Kelly File” host of asking him unfair questions.
+
+Today, Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, having vanquished 16 primary rivals and now turning his attention toward an expected general election battle against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state, while still trying to shake a primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, has sharpened her criticism of Trump as well in recent weeks, even saying Monday that he’s a “loose cannon” who would be dangerous for the country. And she said he’d return to “failed” economic policies.
+
+Speaking with Kelly, Trump suggested the August debate actually helped prepare him for the battle ahead.
+
+“In a certain way, what you did might have been a favor, because I felt so good about having gotten through -- I said, ‘If I could get through this debate, with those questions, you can get through anything,’” he said.
+
+Trump pointed to that debate when asked at what moment he realized he might actually win the race. “I think that first debate meant something,” Trump said, adding that he felt comfortable with the subject matter and the people he was competing against.
+
+At the same time, Trump tried to explain why he fired back at Kelly for confronting him about his past disparaging comments about women. “I thought it was unfair,” Trump said of the question, while noting it was the first question he’d ever been asked at a debate. “And I’m saying to myself, man, what a question.”
+
+He added, “I don’t really blame you because you’re doing your thing, but from my standpoint, I don’t have to like it.”
+
+As for his role in the presidential election in this year, Trump said: “I really view myself now as somewhat of a messenger… This is a massive thing that’s going on. These are millions and millions of people that have been disenfranchised from this country.”
+
+Trump for the last several weeks has been working to reach out to members of the so-called Republican establishment in Washington he’s spent much of his campaign railing against. He met last week with GOP congressional leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan – who has held back an endorsement for now. Trump and the lawmakers came away describing the meetings as positive.
+
+In the interview with Kelly, Trump briefly discussed his personal life, and how his older brother Fred died after a battle with alcoholism. “I have never had a glass of alcohol,” he said, calling his brother’s death the “hardest thing for me to take.”
+
+And while defending his tone on the campaign trail, Trump also said he takes “very seriously” the responsibility of the office he’s seeking.
+
+“I understand what's going on. And when I see the fervor, when I see 25,000 people that have seats, and not one person during an hour speech will sit down. I say, sit down, everybody, sit down.  And they don't sit down,"" he said. ""… I mean, that's a great compliment. But I do understand the power of the message. There's no question about it.”",REAL
+8632,"Donald Trump’s grandfather ran Canadian brothel during gold rush, author says","  Donald   says   Friedrich Trump amassed 'substantial nest-egg' from Yukon hotel before heading to New York Donald   says 
+Canadians amused by the improbable presidential run of Donald Trump might be surprised to learn the role their own country played in shaping his story. 
+Trump’s grandfather started the family fortune in an adventure that involved the Klondike gold rush, the Mounties, prostitution and twists of fate that pushed him to New York City. 
+Friedrich Trump had been in North America a few years when he set out for the Yukon, says an author who’s just completed a new edition of her multi-generational family biography. 
+That Canadian chapter proved pivotal for the entrepreneurial German immigrant, says Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations That Built An Empire. 
+“It allowed him to get together the nest egg he’d come to the United States for,” the author and Columbia University journalism professor said in an interview. 
+“Whether he could’ve accumulated that much money somewhere else, in that short a period of time, as a young man with no connections, and initially not even English, is certainly … unlikely.” 
+He’d left Europe in 1885 at age 16, a barber’s apprentice whose father died young. 
+Trump wanted a life outside the barber shop, far from the family-owned vineyards his ancestors had been working since they’d settled in Germany’s Kallstadt region in the 1600s carrying the soon-altered surname Drumpf. 
+He sailed in steerage to join his sister in New York. 
+Within five years he’d anglicized his name to Frederick; moved to the young timber town of Seattle; and amassed enough cash to buy tables and chairs for a restaurant. 
+His next big move was heralded by the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer of July 17, 1897, and its exclamatory headline: “Gold! Gold! Gold!” 
+It described a resplendent scene at the port involving mountains of yellow metal and men returning from the “New Eldorado” with fortunes as high as $100,000. 
+Trump sold everything and headed north. 
+The move to Canada spared him financial disaster. He not only sold off two Seattle eateries, but also land in nearby Monte Cristo, Wash. — right before floods and avalanches destroyed the nearby railroad and development plans for the town were scrapped. 
+Blair describes his perilous northward journey in early 1898. 
+After boarding a crowded ship to Alaska, Trump trekked over mountains, through Canadian customs, and to the Yukon River where he had to build a boat from scratch and transport a year’s worth of personal supplies. 
+The worst was a notorious mountain pass. The U.S. National Parks Service estimates 3,000 animals died on the White Pass, with many bones still visible today in its so-called Dead Horse Gulch. 
+“Owners whipped horses, donkeys, mules, oxen, and dogs until they dropped. The bodies were not buried or even moved,” Blair writes. 
+“Travellers … had no choice but to walk over the remains. As the months went by, the walls of the pass were stained dark red from the blood.” 
+Trump smelled opportunity. 
+He opened a canteen along the route, Blair says, where weary travellers likely stopped for a bite of Arctic roadkill. There are records for similar establishments along the route, Blair writes: “A frequent dish was fresh-slaughtered, quick-frozen horse.” 
+This established a pattern for Trump’s Canadian business model. 
+It’s summed up in one chapter title: “Mining the Miners.” 
+Unlike other gold-crazed migrants, Blair wrote, “[Trump] realized that the best way to get [rich] was to lay down his pick and shovel and pick up his accounting ledger.” 
+‘Liquor and sex’ 
+In his three years in Canada, Trump opened the Arctic Restaurant and Hotel in two locations with a partner — first on Bennett Lake in northern B.C., and then moving it to Whitehorse, Yukon. 
+Their two-storey wood-framed establishment gained a reputation as the finest eatery in the area, Blair said — offering salmon, duck, caribou, and oysters. 
+It offered more than food. 
+“The   sex,” Blair wrote. She cited newspaper ads referring obliquely to prostitution — mentioning private suites for ladies, and scales in the rooms so patrons could weigh gold if they preferred to pay for services that way. 
+One Yukon Sun writer moralized about the backroom goings-on: “For single men the Arctic has the best restaurant,” he wrote, “but I     sex.” 
+The Mounties initially tolerated the rowdiness. There were exceptions, according to the legendary Canadian writer Pierre Berton. People faced forced labour or banishment from town if they cheated at cards; made a public ruckus; or partied on the Lord’s Day. 
+“Saloons and dance halls, theatres and business houses were shut tight one minute before midnight on Saturday,” Berton wrote in “Klondike Fever.” 
+“Two minutes before twelve the lookout at the faro table would take his watch from his pocket and call out: ‘The last turn, boys!”‘ 
+‘I wouldn’t call him a pimp’ 
+Trump acted as cook, bouncer, waiter. 
+But Blair cautions: “I wouldn’t call him a pimp.” 
+She said backroom ribaldry was part of the restaurant package in those towns, and it’s not clear how the arrangement worked: “As somebody trying to attract business to his restaurant, of course he would have liquor. Of course he would arrange easy access to women. A pimp is, I think, a different business model.” 
+By early 1901, trouble was brewing. 
+The Mounties announced plans to banish prostitution, and curb gambling and liquor. Trump quarrelled with his partner. Gold strikes were getting scarcer. 
+“The boom was over, Frederick Trump realized,” Blair wrote. “He had made money; perhaps even more unusual in the Yukon, he had also kept it and departed with a substantial nest-egg.” 
+He returned to Germany with US$582,000 in today’s currency, and found a wife. But he was greeted as a draft-dodger for being away and becoming a U.S. citizen during his military years. 
+So he was deported from his own country. He boarded a ship for New York, his wife pregnant with Donald’s dad. 
+The elder Trump died of pneumonia in 1918, leaving behind some real estate. His son built the empire, his grandson the global brand. 
+Ironically, their heir is now running for president on a platform of mass-deportation. But Donald and grandpa share some traits — an entrepreneurial spirit, and formative youthful adventures in Canada. 
+Donald met his first wife, Ivana, at the Montreal Olympics. Related Posts:",FAKE
+3701,At least nine protesters arrested after St. Louis police shooting,"At least nine people were arrested Wednesday and St. Louis police used tear gas to clear a street of protesters after an armed man fleeing from officers was shot and killed when he pointed a gun at them.
+
+St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said at a press conference late Wednesday night that a group of protesters who had blocked an intersection threw glass bottles and bricks at officers and refused orders to clear the roadway. Inert gas was used and when that didn't have any effect on the crowd, police turned to tear gas to clear the intersection, Dotson said. Those arrested face charges of impeding the flow of traffic and resisting arrest, he said.
+
+In addition to the arrests, officers responded to reports of burglaries in the area and the fire department was called after a car was set ablaze, according to Dotson.
+
+The chief blamed the crimes on people seeking ""notoriety"" in a neighborhood ""plagued by violence."" Dotson added that police would release video showing that officers gave multiple orders to clear the street and repeatedly warned that the tear gas would be used.
+
+The latest shooting came with tensions already high in the area after violence erupted during several events earlier this month marking the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old fatally shot last year by a police officer in nearby Ferguson.
+
+Dotson said two police officers serving a search warrant Wednesday afternoon at a home in a crime-troubled section of the city's north side encountered two suspects, one of which was 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey. The suspects were fleeing the home as Ball-Bey, who was black, turned and pointed a handgun at the officers, who shot him, the chief said. Ball-Bey died at the scene.
+
+Both officers, who are white, were unharmed, according to a police report.
+
+Dotson said four guns, including the handgun wielded by Ball-Bey, and crack cocaine were recovered at or near the home, which last year yielded illegal guns during a police search. Police are searching for the second suspect, who they said is believed to be in his mid-to-late teens.
+
+A man and woman who were also inside the home were arrested, Dotson said.
+
+Police obtained the search warrant because they believed the home harbored suspects in other crimes, Dotson said. He didn't specify which crimes, but noted that a killing happened on the same street Monday and a nearby market just was riddled by bullets.
+
+That area also is near where a 93-year-old veteran who was part of the Tuskegee Airmen -- black World War II pilots -- was the victim of crimes twice within a few minutes Sunday, being robbed and then having his car stolen. The veteran was unhurt, and his car was found Tuesday blocks from where it was taken.
+
+Roughly 150 people gathered Wednesday afternoon near the scene of the shooting, questioning the use of deadly force. Some chanted ""Black Lives Matter,"" a mantra used after Brown's death. As police removed their yellow tape that cordoned off the scene, dozens of people converged on the home's front yard, many chanting insults and gesturing obscenely at officers. Several onlookers surrounded individual officers, yelling at them.
+
+""Another youth down by the hands of police,"" Dex Dockett, 42, who lives nearby, told a reporter. ""What could have been done different to de-escalate rather than escalate? They (police) come in with an us-against-them mentality. You've got to have the right kind of cops to engage in these types of neighborhoods.""
+
+Another neighborhood resident, Fred Price, said he was skeptical about Dotson's account that the suspect pointed a gun at officers before being mortally wounded.
+
+""They provoked the situation,"" Price, 33, said. ""Situations like this make us want to keep the police out of the neighborhood. They're shooting first, then asking questions.""
+
+Some of those who protested Ball-Bey's death had already spent the morning in downtown St. Louis, marching to mark the anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Kajieme Powell. He was fatally shot by two St. Louis officers after police said he approached them with a knife. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce is still reviewing the case to determine whether lethal force was justified.
+
+Protests have become a familiar scene across the St. Louis region since Brown, who was black and unarmed, was fatally shot by Ferguson officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, 2014. A St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Justice Department declined to charge Wilson, who resigned in November.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+3680,Workplace Violence or Terrorism? CA Massacre Probe Unfolds,"A day after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, authorities are trying to figure out why a couple would embark on a deadly killing spree.
+
+Was it workplace violence or Islamic-inspired terrorism or both that left 14 people dead and more than a dozen injured?
+
+Late Wednesday night, police announced that 28-year-old Syed Rizwan Farook and 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik were the two lone assailants in the mass shooting.
+
+The husband and wife team were clearly ready for a battle with police. An ATF spokesman said the couple was wearing military tactical-style clothing loaded with ammunition for a gunfight.
+
+So far, the FBI has not ruled out terrorism as a motive in these tragic shootings. CBN News Terrorism Analyst Erick Stakelbeck shares his perspective. Click play to watch.
+
+""We are pretty comfortable that the two shooters that we believe went into the building are the two shooters that are deceased up on San Bernardino Avenue,"" San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said.
+
+Farook, an American citizen, had been a San Bernardino County employee for five years. His father told the Daily News that ""he was very religious.""
+
+""He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He's a Muslim,"" Farook's father said.
+
+On Wednesday morning, Farook and his wife reportedly dropped off their 6-month-old daughter with grandparents. Farook then went to a Christmas party for employees of the Public Health Department at the Inland Regional Center.
+
+""He did leave the party early under some circumstances that were described as angry or something of that nature,"" Burguan said.
+
+Around 11 a.m. local time, Farook returned to the celebrations with his wife Malik dressed in matching assault-style military fatigues and body armor and started shooting.
+
+""Based upon what we have seen, and based upon how they were equipped, there had to be some degree of planning that went into this,"" Burguan speculated.
+
+""So I don't think they just ran home, put on these types of tactical clothes, grabbed guns and came back on a spur-of-the-moment thing,"" he said.
+
+Police Chief Burguan said the attack lasted ""only minutes."" But in that short period of time, the couple managed to kill 14 people and injured 17 others.
+
+Fox News says authorities found multiple pipe bombs and other explosive devices at various locations, including three devices at the scene of the attack.
+
+The couple was later killed by police in a shoot-out several hours after the incident.
+
+According to The Los Angeles Times, Farook reportedly took a trip to Saudi Arabia and returned with his new wife that he apparently met online.
+
+Speaking to reporters late Wednesday night, Farook's brother-in-law Farhan Khan expressed his grief over the tragedy.
+
+""I just cannot express how sad I am for what happened today. I mean, my condolences to the people that lost their lives,"" he said.
+
+Wednesday's attack was the deadliest mass shooting since Sandy Hook. President Barack Obama and some Democratic leaders immediately called for stricter gun controls.
+
+Meanwhile, the New York Daily News ran with the controversial title ""God Isn't Fixing This"" on their front page.
+
+The story criticized Republican presidential candidates for ""preaching about prayer"" while being silent about gun control. The paper's front page quickly became a hot item on Twitter. California already has strict gun control laws.
+
+Meanwhile, the search for a motive continues.",REAL
+1070,"I’m with Hillary in November: Listen up, fellow Bernie supporters — you must get behind Clinton to stop Donald Trump","I’ll be honest: I don’t like Hillary Clinton. Personally, there’s plenty to admire about the former secretary of state: She’s incredibly bright, broadly experienced, and undeniably competent. Politically, though, she represents a broken system, a system of capitulation and obfuscation. There’s no point in denying that.
+
+I don’t consider myself a Democrat, though I vote for Democats almost without exception. Gore Vidal once said that “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party – and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.” I tend to agree with that, now more than ever. And I suspect most people of the left do as well.
+
+I’ve felt the Bern for months, and I’ve felt it publicly. If you’ve read any of my pieces on Sanders and Clinton, you know exactly where I stand. Bernie is the most authentic politician I’ve encountered – at any level of government. I had no illusions about his prospects of winning this race; it was always a long shot. Nor was I confused about Sanders’ ability to change government if he was miraculously elected. Everything about our system is resistant to change.
+
+A Sanders administration would doubtless have been a disappointment for progressives, given the systemic constraints. But a Sanders presidency would have been an enormous achievement, a signal of sorts. His campaign, win or lose, is itself a muted miracle, and a reason for optimism. We now know a genuinely progressive movement is possible in this country.
+
+But here’s the truth: Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee. Primary voters should still express their will and vote for Bernie so long as they can, and Sanders should campaign until the convention, but this race is effectively over. The math is clear. Yes, Sanders is in a comparable position to Obama during the 2008 race, but this isn’t 2008, and he doesn’t have nearly the institutional support that Obama had. Progressives don’t want to hear that, and I get it – I really do. But it’s true nevertheless. To win, Sanders would need to secure roughly 72 percent of the remaining delegates, with paltry support among crucial demographics, demographics that catapulted Obama past Clinton in 2008. It’s not going to happen. And even when Sanders has won primaries or caucuses, he hasn’t won by large enough margins to alter the delegate math.
+
+That leaves us with a regrettable – but near-certain – choice in November: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
+
+If that’s how it unfolds, I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. This really isn’t a choice at all. Trump is a leering huckster, a first-rate con artist peddling hate to dunces. A Trump presidency would be a victory for every noxious and regressive force in our body politic. We also have no idea who he is or what he would do in office – that’s positively terrifying.
+
+Despite the hand-wringing among progressives, President Obama moved the country forward. His triumphs were slow-going and piecemeal, but that’s his way – and it worked. The unemployment rate is 4.9 percent; 13.7 million new jobs have been added over the last 69 months; more Americans have health insurance coverage than ever; same-sex marriage has been legalized; the American auto industry was rescued from oblivion; two liberal seats on the Supreme Court were protected; U.S.-Cuba relations have opened up; we have a peaceful nuclear deal with Iran; we’re gradually shifting away from our reliance on fossil fuels; and the country has enjoyed eight years of a dignified, scandal-free administration.
+
+Hillary Clinton, if nothing else, will preserve this progress. She isn’t leading a “revolution” and she’s not going to usurp Wall Street’s power – everyone understands that. But neither will Trump. Worse still, there’s no reason to suppose Trump can do the job. He has no experience, no platform, no ideas, and no respect for the office. He can’t be trusted on anything of import to progressives. When you consider what’s at stake, no one on the left should prefer Trump to Clinton – this a point that Sanders himself concedes, and it’s why he’ll surely endorse Clinton if she is in fact the nominee.
+
+A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll found that a third of Sanders’ supporters said they wouldn’t vote for Clinton if she becomes the Democratic nominee. I don’t believe that will hold, but consider for a second what might happen if it does. To begin with, it would likely hand the White House to Donald Trump. Even if you reject Clinton’s positions on foreign policy and a host of domestic issues, as I do, she is still preferable to Trump. And if you’re a progressive, the fact remains: Clinton reflects your values far more than Trump. If you care about the Supreme Court, which is a conservative judge or two away from denying women autonomy over their own bodies, the choice is obvious. If you care about raising the minimum wage or reforming the criminal justice system or addressing climate change or protecting voting rights, the choice is equally obvious. Our democracy, such as it is, can sustain a competent Clinton administration. Nothing much will change, but it won’t descend into chaos either. Progressives will have to wait for an Elizabeth Warren or some other candidate to emerge. In the meantime, though, we’re staring a potential Trump administration in the face. No one knows what the hell Trump is. He’s practically an abstraction. What we know is that he’s uncorked all the racial and cultural bile this country has to offer, and he’s threatening to dump it at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He must be stopped. Sanders has proven that Democratic voters – and the country more generally – will respond to a FDR-style populist, someone unafraid to say what we all know about our corporate oligarchy. Clinton isn’t that candidate, but she will hold the line far better than Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Sanders gave birth to a progressive revolt in this country, and he moved the Democratic Party to the left. It falls to his supporters to continue that movement beyond this campaign, to keep the pressure on Clinton and other elected officials. In November, however, there will be two names on that ballot, and one is infinitely better than the other. That’s the reality, unpleasant though it is. All the grumbling about voting against a candidate rather than for one, or about the dolefulness of choosing the lesser of two evils, is perfectly understandable – but it doesn’t change a thing. Politics is often about what’s possible, not what’s ideal, and this November is no different. Trump is a combustible menace; don’t think for one second that he can’t win a general election. He absolutely can win, and Sanders supporters staying home in protest will make it all the more likely. If that happens, our country becomes an international punch-line, the progressive movement dies in its infancy, and much of what Obama has accomplished will be put in jeopardy. And if none of that persuades you, recall what happened in 2000. Make no mistake: Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the presidency that year. Al Gore was a deeply flawed candidate, but imagine how different the world might look had he won that year. If the “Bernie or bust” crowd has its way in November, what might we say about Clinton 10 years from now? And how much damage – real and symbolic – will Donald Trump or Ted Cruz have done? Think about that before you surrender to your purism.",REAL
+8781,CodeSOD: The Wisdom of the Ancients,"  
+As Halloween descends upon us, mysterious emails start reaching our inbox. These plaintive missives are but the screams of the damned, encoded and sent over SMTP. 
+For example, someone known to us only as DBA Guy sent an email with this subject: “Silver bullet SQL scalar function built by the Ancient Ones”. 
+These ancient ones obviously did not come from the Euclidian plane we know so well, but obviously from a twisted, higher dimensional space where there exist no right angles. 
+The code itself, is simple: /* Name fnValueChanged Purpose: Returns a value based on the parameters passed in which will tell the user whether or not 2 values have changed Usage Select dbo.fnValueChanged(Parameter1,Parameter2,Parameter3,ParameterN...) Returns tinyint */ ALTER FUNCTION [dbo].[fnValueHasChanged] ( @pOldValue varchar(255), @pNewValue varchar(255), @pItemType varchar(40) -- to be used if we need to do date comparisions etc. ) RETURNS int AS Begin Declare @vHasChanged tinyint set @vHasChanged = ( Case When IsNull(@pNewValue, '') <> IsNull(@pOldValue, '') and @pNewValue Is Not Null Then 1 Else 0 End ) RETURN ( @vHasChanged ) End 
+Given an old value and a new value, determine if they’re different. It’s awkward and strange, with dead parameters coming to us from across the aeons, and an awkward Case statement when an If would probably be clearer and easier to understand. But how, praytell, is this code used ? CarPassword = ( Case When dbo.fnValueHasChanged(@LocPasswordOld, @LocPassword, NULL) = 1 then @LocPassword Else @LocPasswordOld End ) 
+The code which calls the function must be the same as the code within the function. Thus, we have a case within a case, a mystery within a mystery, and a function which has ben handed down to us from the ancient ones. [Advertisement] Release! is a light card game about software and the people who make it. Play with 2-5 people, or up to 10 with two copies - only $9.95 shipped!",FAKE
+2935,U.S. provides options for drawdown of forces in Afghanistan amid ISIS fears,"Washington (CNN) The top United States commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan told Congress he has provided his chain of command with options for the drawdown of troops this year that would give both U.S. and Afghan leaders flexibility as the security situation evolves on the ground.
+
+While the United States has close to 10,000 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan following the end of combat operations at the beginning of the year, the Obama administration has already announced plans to draw that number down to 5,500 by the end of this year.
+
+Gen. John Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday his recommendations deal with both the ""glide slope"" and ""locations"" for where to make withdrawals as the summer fighting season in Afghanistan gets underway.
+
+""I have provided options on adjusting our force posture through my chain of command,"" Campbell said, adding that he ""absolutely"" favored the options without elaborating on their specificity.
+
+""I think I provide some options both for [Afghan President Ashraf] Ghani and for my senior leadership here to take a look at what would allow us the flexibility to continue to get after the [Train, Advise and Assist] mission and the [Counterterrorism] mission"" in Afghanistan, he said.
+
+There are currently 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and an additional 3,000 from other NATO partner nations.
+
+Campbell told the committee he was ""concerned"" about the coming summer season, when fighting with the Taliban typically reaches its highest levels, because it will be the first fighting season for Afghan forces on their own without the assistance of coalition assistance.
+
+""We're doing everything right now in the winter campaign to get them ready to do that,"" he said, in reference to the ongoing training and advising mission.
+
+Many Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have voiced their concern over both the pace, and specific time frame, laid out by the Obama administration for the additional drawdown of U.S. troops. Some are drawing parallels to the quick removal of U.S. forces in Iraq at the end of 2011, and the deteriorating condition that followed.
+
+""A lack of presence creates a vacuum, and we've seen what fills that vacuum in Syria and Iraq,"" Sen. John McCain, chairman of the committee, said in his remarks. ""The ungoverned spaces will allow terrorists to foment the same disaster in Afghanistan as we have seen in Iraq -- growing instability, terrorist safe havens and direct threats to the United States.""
+
+And as the drawdown of the U.S. presence envisions an eventual consolidation of the U.S. footprint to Kabul, and the American embassy there, McCain says Afghan officials have also voiced concern over the strategy.
+
+""A group of us met with President Ghani over the weekend, and he was very strong and adamant that this current plan will put the nation in danger. And I hope that our leadership will pay attention to him,"" McCain said.
+
+Beyond Kabul and Bagram, where the American presence in Afghanistan is largest, the U.S. still maintains tactical advise and assist teams in Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Gamberi. When the U.S. draws down to the final numbers in the current plan, the presence will be restricted mostly to Kabul.
+
+""The Taliban don't have the D-30 howitzers, they don't have the unarmored Humvees, they don't have the MI-17s, they don't have the intel fusion,"" Campbell said, voicing confidence that with continued training and good leadership, the Afghan security forces would be able to keep the country stable.
+
+Senators also expressed concern about ISIS gaining ground in Afghanistan, especially following a U.S. drone strike earlier this week that killed a senior Taliban commander who has also expressed fealty to ISIS.
+
+""You do have some of the Taliban breaking off and claiming allegiance toward ISIS,"" Campbell said, attributing it partly to a feeling of disenfranchisement on the parts of some Taliban members who may be looking to use ISIS tactics as a way to exploit media attention.
+
+""It is a concern to President Ghani, therefore, a concern to me,"" he said. ""But we continue to work that with our Afghan partners and to make sure that we understand where this is going inside of Afghanistan and Pakistan.""
+
+Campbell called the ISIS presence in Afghanistan ""nascent"" but said their presence represents ""more of a rebranding of a few marginalized Taliban, but we're still taking this potential threat, with its dangerous rhetoric and ideology, very, very seriously.""",REAL
+6431,The Media Ignores the Good News On Climate Change,"By Rmuse on Thu, Oct 27th, 2016 at 10:36 am To avoid climate-ending global temperature rise, it is critical for the world to transition off fossil fuels and embrace renewable, clean energy sources. Share on Twitter Print This Post *The following is an opinion column by R Muse* 
+Over the past few months, there has been a dearth of good news, and if there did happen to be anything good to report it was overshadowed by the national clown show that is a typical American election. Where there has not been one iota of good news is on climate change. Even dismissing the horrible flooding, wildfires, droughts, sea level rise, melting ice caps, hurricanes and worldwide food shortages, there have only been dire reports on the level of CO2 permeating the atmosphere and the subsequent yearly record-setting rise in global temperatures. 
+This week, while most Americans were living, breathing and bleeding over Donald Trump and the tortuously-long presidential campaign, the International Energy Agency offered up some good news; for the climate, the Earth’s population, and even for America. 
+The good news for the planet came in the form of an announcement on Tuesday by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that stated according to new data, for the first time “Renewable energy sources have passed coal as the largest new source of electricity in the world.” 
+It may not seem like such fantastic news, but climate scientists the world over have warned that if human beings are going to avoid that climate-ending 2-degree C rise in global temperatures, it is critical for the world to transition off of carbon-producing fossil fuels and embrace renewable, clean energy generating sources. This is particularly true for getting off dirty coal-fired electrical generation plants that are responsible for a quarter of America’s C02 emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions are one of the main culprits contributing to climate change driven by global warming. 
+The IEA report revealed that solar and wind account for nearly two-thirds of current renewable energy growth and interestingly those increases are occurring in, and coming from, developing and industrialized nations alike. For a developing nation, it makes perfect sense to embrace cheaper renewable energy as opposed to any fossil fuel-generated power sources whether they are dirty coal-fired plants or not-quite-as-dirty natural gas-burning generating plants. 
+The IEA also revised its earlier projections for renewable energy’s continued expansion and growth and “ significantly increased” the amount of “ green energy ” it expects to “ come on line ” over the next five years. Renewable energy includes so-called “green” sources such as biomass, biogas, eligible biomass and small hydroelectric sources, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Both terms, “renewable and green energy,” include solar and wind generating sources and depending on the context they can be interchangeable. 
+In addition to pro-renewable policies (such as the Paris climate agreement and to a lesser extent the America-China deal to roll back coal-generated emissions, there has been a significant price decline that is helping drive the growth in renewables; particularly in solar. And, the IEA projected that the worldwide costs for solar-generated power will continue declining by an additional 25 percent over the next five years. Onshore wind generated electricity costs will drop by at least another 15 percent during that same five-year period. 
+Although the IEA report was incredibly good news for the entire planet, there was some extra good news in the report about America’s transition to renewable energy. According to the IEA’s Medium-Term Renewable Market Report, the United States is adding renewables at a faster rate than demand is growing. What that means for the climate is that renewables are not only covering the ever-increasing demand for electricity but are now supplanting some fossil fuel electricity. Still, America has a long way to go because wind and solar generating sources make up a small portion of America’s electricity. 
+In time and if the Koch brothers allow it, America may catch up to still-developing nations where renewable energy accounts for about half of new electric power sources. Industrialization is fueling a rapid increase in demand for electricity that is best generated with cheaper renewable energy. 
+Although there appears to be no down-side in this bit of good news, the growth of renewable energy does have economic implications. The dirty coal industry is facing some struggles in part due to the glut of oil and lower national gas prices, financial mismanagement, and new clean-air regulations, but the amount of CO2 driving climate change is a testament that they have had a good long reign in providing dirty fuel to generate electricity. It is noteworthy that as coal jobs may be declining the solar industry is growing and thriving to more than take up the slack in any lost coal jobs. 
+The IEA couldn’t pass up the chance to note one “sticking point” in their otherwise encouraging report; “ persistent challenges of heating and transportation energy ” that renewables are not affecting. However, since the IEA only monitored and tracked the world’s transistor from oil and gas to biofuels, they note that as electric and hybrid vehicles continue to increase around the world, they will be connected to the same electrical grid that is steadily getting a little greener, significantly cheaper, and one Hell of a lot more friendly for the climate and the people. 
+It is a mystery how Republicans beholden to the Koch brothers and dirty fossil fuel industry, particularly the dirty coal industry, will absorb this good news. In the past eight years, Republicans , the Kochs, their lobbyists at the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have made killing renewable energy one of their primary goals. It is likely that the IEA’s report will signal they are not winning the war on renewable energy and in the past that may have been worrisome. But now that more Americans are benefitting from renewable energy, particularly solar, Republicans will have a difficult time convincing them to stop getting free electricity from the Sun and saving the climate for their children’s future; something the IEA’s report never mentions. 
+image: J Pat Carter",FAKE
+3048,The NRA-ification of the Republican Party,"The National Rifle Association, the all-powerful guardian of Americans' gun rights and driving force of America's pro-gun policies, is arguably more influential than ever.
+
+It has largely dominated and pretty much won the modern-day gun-control war. It has wielded its dollars and political influence over lawmakers in both parties to ensure Congress doesn't pass even a limited (and polls show, popular) expansion of gun-control laws such as universal background checks. And it has withstood the charge even as the country deals with an average mass shooting a day in 2015.
+
+It's now safe to say the NRA is one of the most powerful lobbying organizations of all time. And according to the latest Pew Research poll, Republicans are overwhelming in favor of that.
+
+The survey taken July 14-20 on gun rights found that just 13 percent of Republicans think the NRA has too much influence.
+
+And that's actually down -- significantly -- from 2000, when 32 percent of Republicans (one in three!) thought the NRA had too much sway.
+
+As you can see from the chart above, Democrats disagree with Republicans on the NRA wholeheartedly. And they are moving in the other direction.
+
+That partisan split could provide a hint as to why Republicans are so united today behind the NRA. Some of America's biggest social-issue shifts have been driven by motives other than ideology; young people regardless of party have buoyed America's increasing tolerance of same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization, for example.
+
+Gun rights, by contrast, have magnetized Americans toward the political poles. So Republicans might be naturally lining up with the more conservative factions in their party on everything from gun rights to immigration.
+
+[The sad reality of how we feel about mass shootings, in 3 charts]
+
+But Republicans also have a fairly complex relationship with gun laws. And in fact, the shift described above might undersell it.
+
+Witness their changes over time on the idea of protecting gun ownership versus controlling it. Republicans' lines are much squigglier than Democrats. But the trend among Republicans since 2008 is clear as day: gun rights over gun control. What was an even split seven years ago is now a 3-to-1 edge in favor of gun rights.
+
+What's more, Republicans are arguably at odds with the NRA on several basic issues, such as whether to expand background checks (according to Pew, 79 percent of Republicans say yes; the NRA says no) and to expand laws keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill (79 percent of Republicans say yes; the NRA says we should focus on treating mental health issues instead).
+
+For a deeper explanation of Republicans' position on the NRA, we should go back to when the organization was last under attack: the Clinton years. Gun laws were a major issue for Bill Clinton, and at the time, Pew writes, his campaign to limit the NRA's influence had broad support.
+
+Clinton spent a lot of political capital to actually pass legislation limiting gun rights -- something no president has done since. In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Bill requiring federal background checks for purchases from federally licensed gun dealers. One year later, Clinton signed into law a crime bill that included a ban on assault weapons.
+
+Gun-control supporters paid a significant political price for his success. The NRA mobilized its members -- who studies have shown to be more politically active than gun-control-supporting proponents -- and in 1994 ousted many Congress members who voted for the two bills.
+
+It seems Republicans have been coalescing in greater numbers around the NRA ever since -- though particularly in the Obama years -- partly driven by our country's increased political polarization.
+
+As this latest survey on gun rights shows, in the gun debate, the NRA is still king.",REAL
+2697,"University of Missouri, please immediately fire employees who taunted media","To watch the video of photographer Tim Tai getting pushed around by a turf-protecting scrum of protesters at the University of Missouri is to experience constitutional angst.
+
+“You don’t have a right to take our photos,” said one protester at the university’s Mel Carnahan Quadrangle following the news that University system President Tim Wolfe and chancellor R. Bowen Loftin would resign amid an uproar about racial issues on campus.
+
+“I do have the right to take photos,” replied Tai, a 20-year-old senior at the university who was shooting the proceedings on Monday on assignment for ESPN.com. A former staff photographer for the Columbia Missourian, Tai was forced by circumstances to double-task as he attempted to take photographs and provide civics lessons.
+
+Following the announcement of the resignations, Tai chronicled a celebration including the protest group Concerned Student 1950. After 10 minutes or so of jubilation, said Tai in an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog, protesters decided that it was time to push the media away from an encampment of tents on the quad’s lawn. ” ‘Media, get off the grass,’ ” said the organizers, as Tai recalls.
+
+Yet he wasn’t backing up. He wanted some good shots of the tents, and that’s where the trouble started.
+
+“You’re an unethical reporter; you do not respect our space.”
+
+Those were just a few of the taunts that Tai received as he attempted to do his work. His references to a certain founding document persuaded precisely none of his opponents. “Ma’am, the First Amendment protects your right to be here and mine,” he said. At one point, Tai tangled with a protester about the absence of any law proscribing his presence on this disputed grass. “Forget a law — how about humanity?” protested the protester.
+
+So much for the ideal of the American collegiate quad as a locus of tolerance and free expression. Time to usher in a new ethic of intimidation, a twist that carries some irony at the Columbia, Mo., campus. Back in February 1987, 58 protesters seeking the university’s divestiture from companies that do business in South Africa were arrested for trespassing on the quad. They were dropped in all cases but one, who secured an acquittal on the grounds that the quad was a highly public space.
+
+“The people who were trying to impede the photographer, in effect, were trying to impede his rights to be there,” says Sandy Davidson, a curators’ teaching professor at the University of Missouri school of journalism. Nor was Tai intent on peering into the tents with his lenses. “I was not trying to get into the tents,” says Tai. “I wanted a picture of the tents, placing it in the quad … because that’s part of the story.” Regarding the restraint that the protesters were demanding, Tai felt this wasn’t the time. “I think … there are times when it’s best for photographers to put their camera down,” he says. However: “In this situation, this was national news, breaking news … at a public university and the students involved have become public figures.”
+
+Upon checking his photos, Tai realized that the obstruction worked. “They didn’t turn out well because all the hands were in the way, and you know …,” he says. Were he to be given a redo, he’d likely just move to another spot. “At the moment, I felt I had to stand up for being there,” he says.
+
+Tom Warhover, executive editor of the Columbia Missourian, said the Tai video aligns with recent events. “The protesters all week have asked people kind of to stay out of the tent area proper, if you will, and so we’ve had many confrontations because it is a public space and … other students have a right to be there,” says Warhover, who approves of how Tai carried himself: “I’m pretty proud of Tim’s actions, both standing up for himself and his job but doing it in a way that didn’t provoke.” Through his travels, Tai has learned that on one hand, the protesters “want to protect idea of privacy and protect a safe space where not they’re not overwhelmed with the attention. On the other hand, they want to control the narrative themselves because they feel the media has not treated minority or black stories accurately.”
+
+There’s no excuse for protesters to push a photographer in a public square; there’s no excuse for protesters to appeal for respect while failing to respect; there’s no excuse for protesters to dis the same rights that allow them to do their thing.
+
+And there’s even less excuse for faculty and staff members at the University of Missouri to engage in some of this very same behavior. In his chat with this blog, Tai cited the involvement of Richard J. “Chip” Callahan, professor and chair of religious studies at the university. In the opening moments of the video, Callahan faces off with Tai over whether the photographer can push to get any closer to the tents. “I’m not gonna push them,” says Tai.
+
+Moments later, the protesters resolve to throw up their hands (literally) to show Tai who owns this public roost. Callahan participates in this collective action. As Tai swivels his camera from place to place, Callahan shuffles to block the sight paths. Behold these screenshots:
+
+Callahan, after moving a bit to the left and holding up his hands.
+
+Callahan again, after moving to the right with hands aloft. The religious studies prof paired agility drills with his censorship.
+
+A source with access to Callahan’s tweets (they’re “protected“) passes along these screenshots to yield some insight on his views regarding the media and the protests at the university:
+
+Callahan didn’t respond to e-mails and phone calls. The university’s media office said it has no comment at this point on the staffers. Not only did Tai identify Callahan as the person at the start of the video, but so did Peter Legrand, a graduate who took courses from Callahan.
+
+At the 2:00 minute mark in the above video, Janna Basler, the university’s assistant director of Greek life and leadership, adds her own thuggish sensibilities to the mix: “Sir, I am sorry, these are people too. You need to back off. Back off, go!” In her showdown with Tai, Basler lays bare how little she knows about photography. As they tussle about a woman with whom Tai had just finished arguing, Basler says, “She gets to decide whether she’s going to talk to you or not.”
+
+Tai responds like someone who’s interested in securing images, not quotes: “I don’t want her to talk to me,” he says as Basler gets in his face. When Tai asks her whether she’s with the office of Greek life, Basler responds, “No, my name is Concerned Student of 1950.”
+
+And the video ends with assistant professor of communication Melissa Click essentially threatening a journalist: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”
+
+These three university employees had a chance to stick up for free expression on Monday. Instead, they stood up for coercion and darkness. They should lose their jobs as a result.
+
+UPDATE: The university’s journalism school dean has released a statement reading, in part, as follows:",REAL
+4748,Trump &amp; Clinton Were Very Convincing...on How Lousy the Other One Is,"Let's pretend for a moment that the biggest headlines out of Sunday night's presidential debate had nothing to do with sexual assault allegations, or non-handshakes, or threats to jail political opponents—but instead were about policy. In that bizarre alternative universe, what could we actually learn?
+
+That the two exhausted political parties have nothing much left to offer except critiques about how lousy the other one is.
+
+Hosted by Matt Welch; camera and editing by Jim Epstein.
+
+Like us on Facebook.
+
+Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.",REAL
+9264,"Meteor, space junk, rocket? Mysterious flash hits Siberia","Meteor, space junk, rocket? Mysterious flash hits Siberia 'It was as bright as day for 5 or 6 seconds! Sensation!' Published: 29 mins ago 
+(Russia Today) People in eastern Siberia have been left mystified by a flash that illuminated the sky with green light, resembling the famous Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013. The event has become a hot topic for discussion, with people suggesting the flash could have been anything from a meteor to space junk or even a rocket. 
+The phenomenon was observed by residents of Irkutsk Region and Buryatia Republic in eastern Siberia on Tuesday, local media reported. 
+According to local witnesses, the sky was illuminated by a green light, before an object resembling a comet fell from the sky. Some locals claimed that the object was moving towards Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth.",FAKE
+597,Democrats see map and math working to their advantage in 2016 Senate races,"The Senate map is the Democrats’ friend in the 2016 cycle. They are defending only 10 seats, while Republicans have two dozen to hold. But wait, it gets better. Seven of those 24 Republican seats are in states that President Obama won not once but twice: Florida, Illinois, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
+
+To win the majority, Democrats need to win five of those seven seats in November 2016. (If Hillary Clinton, or another Democrat, wins the White House in 2016, then Senate Democrats need to win only four of those seven.) That’s the exact path Republicans took to the Senate majority in 2014 when, needing a six-seat gain, they won all six of the Democratic-held seats — Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia — that Mitt Romney carried in 2012. (Republicans also won two states — Iowa and Colorado — that Obama carried twice, and one — North Carolina — that Obama won in 2008 and Romney won in 2012.)
+
+Of course, 2014 was a historically good year for Senate Republicans. The last time the party won more than nine seats in a midterm election was 1994, when it scored 10. Prior to 1994, you have to go back to 1946, when Republicans netted 12 seats.
+
+And while the map looks great for Democrats on paper, several of those seven races look less rosy in reality. Iowa is a tough Democratic pickup unless Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R) decides to retire, which he insists he isn’t going to do. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman (R) is a gifted politician and fundraiser, while the Democratic bench in the state is decidedly thin. The Democratic fields in New Hampshire, Florida and Illinois are still quite muddled. And neither Sens. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) nor Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) are political dead men walking.
+
+There are also two genuinely vulnerable Democrats — Sens. Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and Michael F. Bennet (Colo.) — on the ballot in 2016.
+
+Still, as the 2014 election revealed, the map and the math are huge factors in the battle for the Senate. Both are on Democrats’ side this time around.
+
+Below are the 10 most competitive Senate contests on the ballot in 2016. The No. 1­-ranked race is the most likely to switch parties in 2016.
+
+10. Kentucky (Republican-controlled). Sen. Rand Paul (R) is staffing, as expected, for a presidential run next year. Paul still has to figure out how he’s going to run for president and hold his Senate seat if that former race doesn’t work out. His opponent in that effort could be none other than 2014 Senate nominee Alison Lundergan Grimes, given her role as Kentucky’s chief elections officer.
+
+9. Ohio (R). This may be the swing state at the presidential level. But Portman isn’t seen as particularly vulnerable in 2016. A lot of that is because he banked $5.8 million by the end of 2014. Another big reason is that Democrats have a slim bench in Ohio. Among the names mentioned are Cincinnati Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld, former governor Ted Strickland, former congresswoman Betty Sutton and Rep. Tim Ryan.
+
+8. Florida (R). Whither Marco Rubio? The Florida senator could be the odd man out in the presidential race, with fellow Floridian Jeb Bush and other establishment-friendly candidates such as Mitt Romney and Chris Christie in the mix. Consider this: Rubio is just 43 years old, and he’s got his 2016 reelection campaign to worry about. Perhaps it’s better to focus on staying in the Senate and waiting for the next opportunity.
+
+7. New Hampshire (R). The question here is what Gov. Maggie Hassan (D) does. Democrats think there’s a decent chance she will run against Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R), but a New England College poll showed Ayotte leading that matchup by five points.
+
+6. Colorado (Democratic-controlled). No one thought Bennet would even be in the Senate in 2016. After being appointed as an unknown in 2009, he ran a perfect campaign in 2010 and benefited from the fact that his Republican opponent was, well, not very good. Given Colorado’s swinginess, Bennet will be a major Republican target again. But whom will Republicans put forward? Rep. Mike Coffman and newly elected state Attorney General Cynthia Coffman are mentioned — they’re married — as is Rep. Scott R. Tipton.
+
+5. North Carolina (R). Sen. Richard Burr (R) isn’t doing much to inspire confidence in Republicans about his future plans. His fundraising is weak — $720,000 on hand as of the end of September — and rumors continue to swirl about him not running again in 2016. (Burr has said he plans to run.) If Democrats can persuade former senator Kay Hagan (D) to run, this race moves up on our rankings. But even if they don’t, it’s hard to see this not being a very competitive race in a presidential year.
+
+4. Pennsylvania (R). Attorney General Kathleen Kane (D) was once the Democrats’ dream opponent for Toomey. She now faces potential criminal charges for allegedly violating the secrecy of a grand jury. The Democratic establishment does not want 2010 nominee and former congressman Joe Sestak as its nominee, but Sestak is pretty gung-ho about running again.
+
+3. Illinois (R). State Attorney General Lisa Madigan is the Democrats’ first choice to take on Sen. Mark Kirk (R). But she has passed up so many winnable races for higher office that it’s hard to see why she would run this time. If not Madigan, then Democrats will turn to Rep. Tammy Duckworth or Rep. Bill Foster. Kirk is an excellent fundraiser and knows the seriousness of the challenge he faces. Much depends on the top of the ticket; if the Democratic presidential nominee wins Illinois by 15 points (Obama carried it by 17 points), then it’s hard to see a path to victory for Kirk.
+
+2. Nevada (D). Reid got knocked down — hard — while working out at his home in Nevada. He got so banged up that he missed the first days of Congress and might not regain vision in his right eye. He said it won’t affect his reelection decision. The bigger question is what Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) does. Does he wait for Reid to decide whether to seek reelection? Force his hand? This is a big question in a race Republicans would love to win to stem possible losses elsewhere. Meanwhile, former lieutenant governor Brian Krolicki, who blames Reid for a 2008 indictment that Krolicki later beat, is considering running.
+
+1. Wisconsin (R). Johnson seems unaware that he won a Democratic-leaning (at the federal level) state in 2010. He had the ninth most conservative record in the Senate, according to National Journal’s 2013 vote ratings. Democrats are banking on former senator Russell Feingold, who lost to Johnson in 2010, running for his old seat. If Feingold does run, he’ll have to put forth a much better campaign than he did five years ago. If he doesn’t, expect Rep. Ron Kind, who has been itching to run statewide for as long as we can remember, to leap into the race.",REAL
+828,Hillary Clinton doesn't need to choose between a reassuring campaign and progressive policies,"There's a creeping anxiety in the halls of some American progressive groups — especially those aligned with labor unions and economic populism — that Donald Trump might be almost too weak a nominee, from their point of view. The worry is that he's so vulnerable that he'll tempt Hillary Clinton to run a campaign that is as anodyne as possible on policy, focused almost exclusively on Trump's personality and lack of qualifications, aiming for a landslide win that would carry no mandate.
+
+David Frum, writing in the Atlantic from the point of view of a center-right Republican dissident, offers the opposite worry. He says Clinton faces a ""danger that neither Johnson nor Nixon had to face"" in 1964 or 1972 — the danger of a divided party that will tempt her to hew to the left to keep Bernie Sanders's supporters on board.
+
+He cites LBJ's 1964 convention speech as an example of the kind of rhetoric Clinton should — but probably can't — offer:
+
+Tonight we offer ourselves—on our record and by our platform—as a party for all Americans, an all-American party for all Americans. This prosperous people, this land of reasonable men, has no place for petty partisanship or peevish prejudice. The needs of all can never be met by parties of the few. The needs of all cannot be met by a business party or a labor party, not by a war party or a peace party, not by a southern party or a northern party. Our deeds will meet our needs only if we are served by a party which serves all our people.
+
+The reality is that the 1964 election ought to carry the lesson that this is fundamentally a false choice. Johnson tried as hard as possible to run an anodyne campaign focused on the idea that Barry Goldwater was an unacceptable outlier whom even lifelong Republicans should reject.
+
+This ""Confessions of a Republican"" ad that the Democrats ran is a great example of what it looked like.
+
+But now ask yourself: What happened in 1965? Well, not only did Johnson win in a landslide but Democrats found themselves possessing historic majorities in the House and Senate. And they proceeded to enact a burst of progressive legislation in 1965-'66 that stands alongside 1933-'34 and 1861-'62 as the biggest legislative leaps forward in American history.
+
+It's no coincidence that these three Congresses produced the biggest spurts of legislation. At the beginning of Abraham Lincoln's term in office, Southern representatives and senators (overwhelmingly Democrats) had literally walked out in order to support a violent rebellion for the purpose of entrenching slavery.
+
+That left Republicans with giant majorities, and they used them to enact major legislation.
+
+The Depression bequeathed FDR enormous majorities in 1933-'34, and, again, he used them. In 1964, enormous majorities were built on the combination of an economic boom, the emotions around John F. Kennedy's assassination, and Goldwater's extremism. And Johnson used them.
+
+Another big burst of legislating happened in 2009-'10, where, again, Democrats had big majorities. Those early Obama years weren't quite as productive as the sheer numbers might have forecast because Mitch McConnell's determined use of the filibuster both reduced Democrats' effective margin in the Senate and generally slowed the pace of legislating. But a lot still got done.
+
+This is the basic reality of the 2016 election — the amount of progressive stuff Clinton gets done is going to be driven more by the shape of Congress than by the content of her platform.
+
+Clinton doesn't have a realistic chance of securing large Democratic majorities. The House districts are sufficiently tilted that even securing a narrow one would be a very steep uphill fight, and any Democratic majority would depend heavily on relatively moderate members holding Republican-leaning districts. But it's still the case that even a small Democratic majority reliant on moderate legislators would pass more progressive legislation — hiking the minimum wage, raising taxes, expanding Medicaid funding, etc. — than a Republican one.
+
+Whether or not Democrats are able to secure that kind of majority is going to be a bigger driver of policy outcomes than whatever liberal causes Clinton pays lip service to.
+
+And given the way House districts have been drawn, Democrats' hopes of securing such a majority depends on either swinging Republicans over to their side or else demoralizing Republicans and getting them to stay home altogether. Either way, it suggests that the basic LBJ pattern remains as valid in 2016 as it was in 1964: The choice between reassuring the center and laying the groundwork for policy on issues is a false one.",REAL
+2951,"Airstrikes Move To Syria, Target More Than Just ISIS","Airstrikes Move To Syria, Target More Than Just ISIS
+
+In a major escalation of the air campaign against Islamic extremist groups, the U.S. and its Arab allies jointly hit targets inside Syria for the first time.
+
+The New York Times says, ""The intensity of the attacks struck a fierce opening blow against the jihadists of the Islamic State, scattering its forces and damaging the network of facilities it has built in Syria that helped fuel its seizure of a large part of Iraq this year.""
+
+Besides the U.S., the Pentagon says that Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates ""participated in or supported"" operations against targets associated with the self-declared Islamic State.
+
+U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki confirmed that ""we informed the Syrian regime directly of our intent to take action through our Ambassador to the United Nations (Ambassador [Samantha] Power) to the Syrian Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
+
+At a morning Pentagon briefing, Lt. Gen. William Mayville, the Joint Chiefs director of operations, said there were three waves of attacks, and that coalition partners provided combat air patrols and conducted airstrikes as part of the final two waves.
+
+""We warned Syria not to engage U.S. aircraft. We did not request the regime's permission. We did not coordinate our actions with the Syrian government. We did not provide advance notification to the Syrians at a military level, or give any indication of our timing on specific targets. Secretary [of State John] Kerry did not send a letter to the Syrian regime,"" Psaki said.
+
+— The Islamic State in its Syrian headquarters of Raqqa.
+
+— The al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front, or Jabhat al-Nusra, in northwest Syria.
+
+— A shadowy group known as Khorasan that the U.S. says is planning an imminent attack against the United States and Western interests.
+
+NPR's Deborah Amos tells Morning Edition that militants with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, were a major focus of the attacks. The Pentagon said the strikes ""employed 47 [Tomahawk cruise missiles] launched from USS Arleigh Burke and USS Philippine Sea operating from international waters in the Red Sea and North Arabian Gulf, as well as U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps fighter, remotely piloted and bomber aircraft deployed to the U.S. Central Command area of operations.""
+
+According to Deborah: ""What is striking about this air campaign is that it was expanded to include the Nusra Front.
+
+NPR's Tom Bowman says not much is known about the Khorasan group: ""The Pentagon says they took this action to disrupt an imminent attack plotting against the United States by this group that's made up of seasoned al-Qaida veterans. There were eight strikes around Aleppo targeting this group. [The Pentagon says] it had training camps, explosives and munitions productions facility, communications building and also command and control facilities.""
+
+Gen. Mayville said that ""we've been watching"" Khorasan and that the group ""clearly is not focused"" on fighting the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad but instead had been ""putting down roots"" to work toward attacks on the U.S.
+
+Mayville said in the first strike, which began about midnight Syrian time and involved mainly Tomahawk cruise missiles, the U.S. unilaterally hit Khorasan command and control in the country's northeast. The second wave employed F-22 Raptors in their first combat roles, as well as F-15s, F-16s and B-1 bombers, he said. The third and final wave against Islamic State militants in the east employed F-18 Hornets from the USS George H.W. Bush as well as ground-based F-16s, he said.
+
+Mayville said the majority of support from Arab allies came in the third wave.
+
+He showed journalists ""before and after"" bomb-damage assessment photos and video of various structures that had been hit.
+
+An unnamed U.S. official tells The New York Times that the Khorasan group is led by ""Muhsin al-Fadhli, a senior Qaeda operative who, according to the State Department, was so close to [Osama] Bin Laden that he was among a small group of people who knew about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks before they were launched."" The Times says:
+
+The Wall Street Journal reports: ""So far, more than a dozen airstrikes have hit Islamic State military targets and administrative buildings in Aleppo and Raqqa provinces in the north as well as al Qaeda's official arm in the country, al Nusra Front in the northwestern city of Idlib, the opposition said.""
+
+What Are The Consequences?
+
+Reuters quotes a resident in Raqqa as saying there is an ""exodus"" from the city in the wake of the bombardment. ""It started in the early hours of the day after the strikes. People are fleeing toward the countryside,"" the resident tells Reuters.
+
+The participation of the partners ""gives the operation some legitimacy — more legitimacy in the region because Arab governments took part. There [are] political optics about this operation put together in Washington,"" NPR's Deborah Amos says, adding that the agreement to participate ""changes the stakes"" for the Arab partners.
+
+The BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner speculates that the Islamic State ""will be enraged by this — it has no effective military answers to US air power — so those Arab countries that supported or took part in the action may well now be bracing themselves for possible reprisals.""
+
+The Associated Press quotes Rami Abdurrahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, as saying, ""There is confirmed information that there are casualties among Islamic State group members.""
+
+Speaking on MSNBC, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby says the U.S. ""is still assessing the effectiveness of these strikes.""
+
+Later, Gen. Mayville said: ""Last night's strikes are the beginning of a credible and sustained campaign to destroy"" the Islamic State.",REAL
+416,Top US lawmakers strike deal to fast-track trade deals,"Top congressional Republicans and Democrats say they've reached a deal to allow President Obama to negotiate trade deals subject to an up-or-down vote from Congress.
+
+The ""fast-track"" legislation comes as Obama seeks a sweeping trade deal with 11 Pacific nations. It would renew presidential authority to present trade deals that Congress can endorse or reject, but not amend.
+
+The Trans-Pacific Partnership proposes a trade agreement involving the United States, Japan, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico and seven other Pacific-rim nations.
+
+Labor unions and others say the Pacific pact would hurt U.S. job growth and encourage other countries to abuse workers and the environment. The Obama administration rejects those claims, and says U.S. goods and services must have greater access to foreign buyers.
+
+",REAL
+5317,"Leftist Hypocrisy On “Peace, Love, And Equality” BRUTALLY Exposed","Pinterest 
+Robert Gehl reports that of all the videos and images to come out of the Milwaukee riots, there’s one that is particularly chilling. 
+The 2-minute video is apparently taken during the riots Saturday night following the shooting of a black, armed man who was reportedly a gang member. 
+Moments after the shooting occurred, hundreds of rioters took to the streets, setting cars on fire and burning about a half-dozen businesses. Chants of “Black Power!” could be heard sporadically as well. But in this video, it appears an entire gang of black youth are seeking out and targeting white people to assault.
+“Hey! We’re beating up every white person! Get every white person!” the cameraman says. 
+When he witnesses someone being assaulted, he asks “Who they beatin’ up? Who they beaten’ up?” 
+At one point, when they spot a “white person,” he screams “He white! Beat his shit! Beat!” 
+The thug pans around looking for white people to assault. You can hear the crowd reacting, trying to point out white people. Again, he cries: “Hey! They beating up every white person!” Apparently he spots a homeless man. “Look at the f***in’ white bum! Look at the white bum!”
+Throughout the rest of the video, there’s screams of white people as their racist hunt continues. 
+Toward the end, shots ring out in the distance, startling the cameraman. “Who the f*** is shooting? Stop shooting!” Moments later, shots are fired much closer and the video ends.” 
+This is the direct result of the Black Lives Matter racist, anti-police agenda and Barack Obama’s acceptance of their cause. 
+This is Obama’s “ post-racial America .” Welcome to it, folks .",FAKE
+2424,Future Obamacare Costs Keep Falling,"Nearly five years after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, federal budget scorekeepers have sharply revised down the projected costs of the signature bill. In the latest projection, published by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Monday, the major provisions of the law will cost the government 11% less than they forecast six weeks ago, or $142 billion over the coming decade.",REAL
+931,"Yes, Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat — and Hillary represents the very worst of the party","Clinton’s campaign did just that this week, condemning Sanders for “trying to convince the next generation of progressives that the Democratic Party is corrupt.”
+
+The notion that Sanders had to try to convince progressives of this in the first place is ludicrous. The warmongering, corporate-funded, pro-privatization Democratic Party leadership has long made it loud and clear that it is thoroughly corrupt and reactionary.
+
+Yet Clinton and her supporters happen to be correct about one thing; they are just right for the wrong reasons.
+
+Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. And this is a good thing.
+
+What the Clinton camp appears to be incapable of understanding is that the Democratic Party is less and less popular among progressive Americans.
+
+Since the rise of the Clintonian “New Democrat” almost three decades ago, the party has moved so far to the right it has little in common with the base it purports to represent.
+
+President Obama campaigned on the promise of change, but, in many ways, his presidency — particularly in the first term — was George W. Bush lite.
+
+The Obama administration barely even slapped the banks and financial elites responsible for the Great Recession on the wrist. Not a single Wall Street executive went to jail while, today, the very banks responsible pose just as much of a systemic risk as they did in 2008.
+
+The Obama administration killed thousands of people, including an unknown number of civilians, with its secretive drone war. It expanded the war in Afghanistan — twice — dragged its feet on Guantánamo, backed a right-wing military coup that overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected left-wing government and dropped 23,400 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries in 2015.
+
+The Obama administration waged a McCarthyite crackdown on whistleblowers, using the World War I-era Espionage Act to clampdown on more than all previous presidential administrations combined, while drastically expanding the surveillance state.
+
+This is the Democratic Party Americans have grown up with in the past nearly 30 years, since the rise of the Clintonism. And, in these same decades, wages have stagnated, poverty has increased and people have become more and more dissatisfied with the way things are.
+
+It is true that Sanders’ social democratic politics are similar to those of New Deal Democrats. He often jokes that many of his policies were supported by President Dwight Eisenhower — a Republican in the 1950s.
+
+Yet the Democratic Party of the mid-20th century is long gone.
+
+Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has drifted more and more to the right — and taken much of the international community with it. During the Cold War, Western capitalist countries had to at least pretend to be concerned with fighting inequality and systemic discrimination. Today they no longer have to compete with an alternative.
+
+As the Republican Party has shifted to the extreme, far-right, the Democratic Party moved along to the right with it. Instead of holding ground (shifting to the left was not even on the table), the Democratic Party embraced neoliberalism.
+
+The so-called “Third Way” paved by the Clintons is just another word for this process.
+
+Hillary Clinton, a figure greatly admired by neoconservatives (who are overwhelmingly backing her over Trump), represents a continuation of this status quo — a status quo millions upon millions of Americans have said they refuse to tolerate anymore.
+
+Americans are desperate for actual change, and Sanders has offered a new path. Clinton has flatly insisted that Americans cannot have basic things that much of the world takes for granted — single-payer health care, free public higher education, environmental policies that don’t rely on fossil fuel corporations that destroy the planet. Sanders says otherwise.
+
+The Democratic Party is a party of corporate influence and military power. It is chock-full of 1 percenters, with leaders like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — who shuts down public schools en masse and covers up police killings of unarmed black residents — or Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who is working to help loan sharks.
+
+Many of the things that have been called for by Donald Trump, a fascistic demagogue, have already been implemented by the Democratic Party.
+
+The Obama administration has deported more than 2.5 million people — more than any other president. It is sending Central American refugees fleeing violence back to where they are killed. The Obama administration is more and more heavily militarizing the border, a process that began with the Clinton administration’s passing of NAFTA. The Obama administration is discriminating against Muslims throughout society, with widespread police surveillance and entrapment, along with shadowy policies like the no-fly list. When Clinton’s campaign and her supporters implore Americans to oppose Sanders because he is not a Democrat, it is nothing more than a disingenuous appeal to authority. What they are really saying is loyalty to the Democratic Party is more important than loyalty to the left-wing ideals that it supposedly espouses. This is the textbook definition of rank opportunism. For them, being a loyal Democrat is more important than having left-wing politics. Under eight years of a Democratic presidential administration, life for the average working-class American, and particularly for the average working-class American of color, has not gotten better; it has gotten worse. The Clintons, the most powerful force in the Democratic Party, happen to embody everything that is wrong with it. It was under their leadership that the party took its most reactionary, and despicable, turn. Bill and Hillary gutted welfare and passed the anti-LGBTQ Defense of Marriage Act. Bill and Hillary advocated for neoliberal trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Bill and Hillary have made millions of dollars speaking for corporations and banks. Moreover, the Clintons are one of the most corrupt families in U.S. politics. The Clinton Foundation has been described by investigative journalist Ken Silverstein as a “so-called charitable enterprise [that] has served as a vehicle to launder money and to enrich family friends.” Unlike that of the Clintons, Sanders’ record is not just consistent; it is squeaky clean. And it is consistent and squeaky clean precisely because Sanders is not an opportunist. Sanders, a longtime independent, is not a party hack. He is a principled leftist who is only running on the Democratic ticket because he knows this, at the present political moment, is the only way he could have a chance of winning. When it comes to third parties, the U.S. is an incredibly undemocratic country. Most of the world’s democracies have some kind of space for non-hegemonic parties. And in much of Europe in particular, where governments are based on parliamentary systems, third parties can play at least a small role in the political system. This is not so in the U.S., where there are countless obstacles to democracy in U.S. elections — with limited debates, closed primaries, unelected superdelegates and of course the electoral college. Sanders’ popularity proves that Americans are hungry for real left-wing politics, for the kind of left-wing politics the Democratic Party has long abandoned. The fact that a 74-year-old, bald and frankly unattractive man, a Vermont senator with a Brooklyn accent whom most Americans had never heard of until this year, has been doing so incredibly well is a testament to just how popular — and one might even say correct — his socialist ideas are. An enormous grassroots movement has been built around Sanders. This movement has exploded in very little time. It is led by the youth, particularly by young women and people of color. What we are witnessing right now is the resurgence of a new left throughout the U.S. — and throughout the world. Sanders is part of this much larger international trend, with figures like Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., or Podemos in Spain. And Sanders is aware of this. When he says “Not me, us,” he is acknowledging that the social movements around him are much more important than he is as a mere individual. The fact that he has responded to pressure from Black Lives Matter and the Palestinian solidarity movement demonstrates this. Those like Hillary Clinton, who are desperate to cling on to the old vestiges of establishment power, are not part of this new left-wing resurgence; they are in fact impediments to it. Even if Sanders does not win the primary, one of his many important accomplishments will be helping to expose to millions upon millions of Americans just how reactionary and corrupt the Democratic Party is. He should be thanked for this, not condemned.",REAL
+3347,ISIS Genocide: Will US Back Up Its Tough Talk?,"WASHINGTON -- While the Obama administration's decision to designate ISIS's atrocities against Christians and other minorities as ""genocide"" is important, many warn that it's only the beginning of the process.
+
+""In my judgment Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in territory under its control,"" Kerry said, using the Arabic acronym for the jihadist army.
+
+It's a critical first step towards protecting Christians from ISIS and other Islamic radicals in Iraq and Syria.
+
+""Every jihadist in the Middle East believes they can kill, kidnap, enslave and otherwise torture Christians and other religious minorities and they believe they can do it without repercussions,"" said Johnnie Moore, author of the book Defying ISIS.
+
+In northern Iraq, Assyrian Christians are an ancient people descended from the first followers of Christ.
+
+""As Assyrians of the Middle East we are on the verge of extinction,"" warned Juliana Taimoorazy, founder and president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, an organization that raises awareness about the persecuted Church in Iraq.
+
+Taimoorazy recently visited Telskuf in the Nineveh Plains of Iraq, where 200,000 Christians have fled from ISIS.
+
+""The homes are destroyed when you walk inside,"" she said. ""Their closets are all broken, the beds are all overturned - the kitchens are destroyed.""
+
+Secretary Kerry's genocide designation helps keep the plight of these Christians near the front of U.S. foreign policy.
+
+Advocates wasted no time celebrating. They're already working with the State Department to ensure Christians are represented in Syrian peace talks and that property rights for those forced to flee their homes in Iraq are enforced.
+
+""There are going to be borders redrawn, constitutions redrafted,"" Nina Shea, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told CBN News.
+
+""It's absolutely essential that the Christians have a voice in this process or they will have no place in the new Syria or in the new Iraq,"" she warned.
+
+There's already an effort to create a safe haven in the Nineveh Plains so that Christians, Yazidis and other minorities can return home, govern themselves and rebuild their lives without fear of extermination.
+
+""If you care about the presence of Christianity, the Christian witness, in this very Gospel poor part of the world you will support the idea of a safe haven,"" Robert Nicholson, executive director of the Philos Project, told CBN News.
+
+In spite of the horrors they've experienced at the hands of ISIS, Christians in this part of the world are experiencing a revival of their faith.
+
+""They have told me repeatedly it's because of persecution that has been inflicted on them that they have grown closer to Christ that they find themselves praying more that they're thirsty for the Gospel more,"" Taimoorazy said.
+
+Now the same advocates who pushed for the genocide designation are moving to keep up the pressure, hoping to ensure the Obama administration not only talks, but acts to protect those persecuted Christians and other religious minorities.
+
+They hope to make real progress before the next administration moves into the White House.",REAL
+4779,Gary Johnson can’t name a single foreign leader. Can we stop pretending he’s a real alternative now?,"After watching Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, in Wednesday night’s town-hall meeting with Chris Matthews, I think maybe they should let Johnson in the debates so more of these voters could see exactly what they’re voting for. The risk is that while Johnson would reveal himself as a bizarre and ignorant man, he might just make Republican presidential nominee Trump look smart and competent by comparison.
+
+When Johnson was interviewed on “Morning Joe” in early September he made one of the more memorable gaffes in campaign history when his answer to “What would you do about Aleppo?” was “What is Aleppo?” He didn’t recognize it as the name of the second-largest city in Syria, which has been in the headlines for months as a battleground where the government is fighting rebel forces. On Wednesday, Johnson said he took responsibility for his Aleppo gaffe, but further explained that he doesn’t believe that just because “a politician can dot the I’s and cross the T’s on some geographic location or the name of some foreign dictator, now we should believe them when it comes to these interventions.”
+
+I’m not sure who believes that just because someone has educated herself about geography and foreign leadership that her ideas must automatically be followed. It’s just that most of us used to think that presidents should have some basic knowledge of facts before they propose policies. The campaign of 2016 has revealed that such qualifications are no longer considered a requirement for the job — at least not by the half of the electorate who claim to be voting for Trump or Johnson.
+
+And then Johnson did it again. Matthews asked him to name his favorite foreign leader, and Johnson again drew a blank, finally admitting, “I guess I’m having an Aleppo moment.” Unfortunately, the exchange went on and on, with Matthews pushing and Johnson floundering, until Weld finally stepped in to cite Chancellor Angela Merkel as his favorite and the whole thing mercifully came to an end.
+
+When asked by one of the fresh-faced young people in the crowd what he said to people who claim that a vote for Johnson is a wasted vote, the candidate told him, “A wasted vote is a vote for someone you don’t believe in.” Matthews came back with a quote from President Barack Obama from earlier in the day:
+
+Johnson’s bizarre nonresponse was to say that Clinton and Trump are doing nothing about Medicare and Medicaid and that “we’re headed to bankruptcy with the size and scope of government.”
+
+When asked about his views on climate change, Johnson rambled on about the coal industry going bankrupt and said he believes the free market is going to fix the problem. How would he make college more accessible to students, a matter central to the Democratic primary campaign and now integral to Hillary Clinton’s platform? Johnson said that the reason why college costs so much is that government-guaranteed student loans have “skewed supply and demand.” In other words, if fewer people go to college, tuition will go down.
+
+A young woman asked if a Johnson administration would cut Planned Parenthood funds, and Johnson said he plans to submit a balanced budget in the first 100 days that would require 20 percent trims across the board. Asked about money in politics, he said he believes there should be no restrictions on campaign contributions. A young man asked him if he would consider rethinking his support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and Johnson said absolutely not. He made it very clear that he intends to eliminate every trade barrier he can find. The theme that Johnson returned to over and over is that he believes in balanced budgets, cutting entitlements and reducing debt over everything else. Johnson did express the standard libertarian belief that he believes in civil liberties and gay rights, although he fudged his answer about abortion rights. He left out the fact that although he believes in a woman’s right to choose he also believes in a state’s right to take it away, with horrific consequences for women. He portrayed Hillary Clinton as a psycho who is going to start a nuclear war. When asked about it again later in the broadcast, Johnson said that would happen because Clinton refuses to be “seen as weak” and “she will shoot.” It was yet another absurd statement in a long line of them. There’s only one candidate who’s threatening to start a nuclear war and it isn’t Clinton. Many young people become attracted to libertarianism for a time after they read Ayn Rand’s novels and are exposed to the seductive lure of selfishness as a philosophy. Some stick with it for a while, or become standard Republicans as time goes on. But judging from the questions at Wednesday’s town hall event, this audience was not a bunch of Rand acolytes eager to talk about the moochers at Planned Parenthood or the parasites who want free college. With the exception of one or two questioners, most sounded like earnest progressives who may have voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders during the primary season. Johnson’s libertarianism is very, very different from  Sanders’ altruistic democratic socialism. Sanders believes that government has an affirmative duty to help people. Johnson believes that government is an impediment to the natural working of the free market. It’s overwhelmingly obvious that Clinton comes much closer to the Sanders philosophy than does Johnson. Given how close the election is in certain key states, a few protest votes could put Trump in the White House. As Sanders is telling anyone who will listen, “Before you cast a protest vote — because either Clinton or Trump will become president — think hard about it. This is not a governor’s race. It’s not a state legislative race. This is the presidency of the United States.” It’s also the future of the planet.",REAL
+7847,More Than 1 Million ‘Check In’ On Facebook To Support The Standing Rock Sioux,"Videos More Than 1 Million ‘Check In’ On Facebook To Support The Standing Rock Sioux Most of the ""visitors"" are not actually at the protest camp in North Dakota, where the tribe and its supporters are gathering to oppose the pipeline. The planned route crosses the Missouri River just upstream of the reservation, and the tribe says it could contaminate drinking water and harm sacred lands. | November 2, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! A protesters is arrested by police near the Dakota Access pipeline at a construction site in North Dakota, Oct. 22, 2016. (Photo: YouTube) 
+More than 1 million people have “checked in” on Facebook to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation page , in a show of support for the tribe that has been rallying against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. 
+Most of the “visitors” are not actually at the protest camp in North Dakota, where the tribe and its supporters are gathering to oppose the pipeline. The planned route crosses the Missouri River just upstream of the reservation, and the tribe says it could contaminate drinking water and harm sacred lands. Facebook allows people to check in to places even if they are not physically present. 
+A broadly circulated rumor on social media over the weekend suggested that local police were using Facebook check-ins to track activists protesting the pipeline. 
+Activists then called for supporters of the protest to check-in en masse, in a move designed to confuse police. 
+“Water Protectors are calling on EVERYONE to check-in at Standing Rock, ND to overwhelm and confuse them,” one widely shared post said, according to The Guardian . 
+It’s not clear who started the rumor, but the response was immediate. “The number of check-ins at the Standing Rock reservation page went from 140,000 to more than 870,000 by Monday afternoon,” the Guardian reports. Now, that number stands at more than 1.5 million. 
+However, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department said in a Facebook post Monday afternoon that it “does not follow Facebook check-ins for the protest camp or any location” and called the report “absolutely false.” 
+The demonstration of solidarity from these Facebook users comes days after “police and National Guard troops arrested more than 140 protesters near a construction site,” Inside Energy’s Amy Sisk reported on All Things Considered . On Friday, there were reports of police using pepper spray against protesters they removed from land owned by the pipeline company, as we reported . 
+Here’s more from our previous coverage: 
+“Members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and their supporters have been protesting the pipeline since it was approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the summer . They are specifically trying to block the portion that is slated to run under the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.” 
+“Earlier this month, the Standing Rock Sioux lost a bid in federal court to halt construction, paving the way for work on the $3.8 billion pipeline to continue, as we’ve reported . Almost immediately afterward, three U.S. agencies ‘announced a halt to work in one area significant to the tribe.'”",FAKE
+3389,"Clinton camp issues clarification on deleted emails, claims ‘every’ message was reviewed","Hillary Clinton’s camp late Sunday issued a significant clarification about the steps they say were taken to review thousands of personal emails before they were deleted, claiming her team individually read “every email” before discarding those deemed private.
+
+Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill made the clarification in a written statement to Fox News. This comes after the former secretary of state’s office revealed last week that while more than 30,000 “work-related” emails were turned over to the State Department, nearly 32,000 were deemed “private” and deleted.
+
+This admission raised questions over how her team decided to get rid of those messages. Merrill on Sunday clarified an earlier fact sheet that described some of those methods but did not say every email was read.
+
+“We simply took for granted that reading every single email came across as the most important, fundamental and exhaustive step that was performed.  The fact sheet should have been clearer in stating that every email was read,” Merrill said.
+
+Clinton, a likely Democratic presidential candidate, tried to tamp down the controversy over her exclusive use of personal email while secretary of state during a press conference last week. But the admission that she deleted thousands of messages, and her insistence that her personal server remain private, stirred the ire – and curiosity -- of lawmakers who want greater access to her communications as secretary and complain much of it may be gone forever.
+
+Whether the assurance that “every email” was read before being either deleted or turned over eases those concerns remains to be seen.
+
+“I have zero interest in looking at her personal emails,” South Carolina GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy said on “Fox News Sunday.” “But who gets to decide what’s personal and what’s public? And if it’s a mixed-use email, and lots of the emails we get in life are both personal and work, I just can’t trust her lawyers to make the determination that the public’s getting everything they’re entitled to.”",REAL
+8999,America's Trump supporters may be lured to Florida and walled in by US government to maintain peaceful transfer of power after election.,"Search  America's Trump supporters may be lured to Florida and walled in by US government to maintain peaceful transfer of power after election. Topics: Donald Trump , 2016 Presidential Election , presidential politics Wednesday, 26 October 2016 
+A leaked transcript of a White house meeting reveals plans to lure the country's Trump Voters to Florida on election day and wall them in to help ensure the peaceful transfer of power. 
+Voice #1: ""The traditional peaceful transfer of power after a presidential election, fundamental to our democracy, is in jeopardy. What happens if Trump somehow wins? Will Barrack and Hilary say they were just kidding about him being a truly dangerous unfit con artist and no hard feelings about that 5 year long race baiting Birther movement as US military leaders walk over to Trump with the nuclear codes?"" 
+Voice #2: ""Trump will probably lose. Still, that doesn't guarantee a peaceful transition. Trump's already convinced a majority of his supporters the election is illegitimate if he loses. He's recruiting voting station vigilantes. Trump supporter sheriff David Clarke from Milwaukee said its time for 'pitch forks and torches. How many of Trump's gun loving hard core base might do something violent?"" 
+Voice #1: ""I'm just thinking out loud, but what if we announce that to offset the rigged election, Trump negotiated a deal in which anyone that casts a Trump vote in Florida will have it counted as two votes from their home state. Then, we announce the greatest Trump rally of all time on election day in Florida; the largest NASCAR event; the largest Harley Davidson motorcycle convention, free assault rifles handed out as they cross the border..."" 
+Voice #2: ""Where are you going with this?"" 
+Voice #1: ""We lure hard core Trump voters in to Florida; get them packed in there; and then quickly unfurl a razor wire fence along the state's north border stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean. Then, we start construction of the real wall right next to it. That's a wall Mexico might be willing to pay for."" 
+Voice #2: ""What about the Hillary supporters in Florida?"" 
+Voice #1: ""We'd have to get them out somehow. Give them incentives to vote in South Carolina, or airlift them out of Florida after the election."" 
+Voice #2: ""If it worked, it would get crowded down there in Florida."" 
+Voice # 1: ""We could promise Trump supporters free housing."" 
+Voice #4: ""Yes. We can put them in tent cities modeled after Syrian refugee camps."" 
+Voice #1: ""I'm trying to be serious."" 
+Voice #4: ""The Red Cross might pay for that tent city; just tell them we're quarantining people to stop the spread of a resurgent xenophobe epidemic."" 
+Voice #2: ""What about after the election? It's not like we can just let them back in after the peaceful transfer of power. They're going to be upset for a while."" 
+Voice #4: ""We could let a few of them back in every year. They'd have to go through 'extreme vetting'. As immigrants re-entering the upper 49, we'd need assurances they'd developed American values like tolerance for different religions and ethnicities."" 
+Voice #1: ""We'll worry about what to do with them later. First we have to lure them down there."" 
+Voice #4: ""What about appealing to Trump voter anti-elitism? We could tell them Florida universities will be shut down and demolished."" 
+Voice #1: ""Not fair. A lot of Trump supporters want to send their kids to college."" 
+Voice #4: ""They can go to Trump University."" 
+Voice #2: ""Trump University doesn't have real academics."" 
+Voice #4: ""We'll create some. We'll appoint Trump surrogate Katrina Pierson as chair of the 'Revisionist History Department.' Scholarly emphasis will be on how Obama and then secretary of state Hilary got us in to Afghanistan and Iraq and founded ISIS. Scottie Nell Hughes will head up the 'Ethics in Media' department. Rudy Giuliani can head the 'Institute for study of Giuliani's heroic role after the 9/11 attacks."" 
+Voice #1: ""If you don't have anything practical to..."" 
+Voice #4: ""We could say Trump supporters wearing T-shirts saying ""Hillary sucks, but not as good as Monica"", or ""Trump that Bitch,"" will get preferential seating at the rally. If they also claim to hate Muslim societies because of how awful they treat their women, they also get to meet Trump backstage."" 
+Voice #2: ""One thing. If we actually do this, Marco Rubio is not getting out of Florida. And he thought that his little cowardly Trump endorsement video at the GOP convention wasn't going to haunt him."" 
+Voice #1: ""What about Healthcare in post-election day Florida? People with MD degrees are mostly Hilary supporters. There won't be many doctors down there."" 
+Voice #2: ""They'll have Ben Carson."" 
+Voice #4: ""We could also send in Harold Bornstein, that doctor who wrote the fake Trump medical statement in 5 minutes. Bornstein can claim that everyone's health in Florida is astonishingly excellent; the best he's ever seen'. That way, nobody has to get any treatments."" 
+Voice #1: ""Seriously, what about emergencies like gunshot wounds, heart attacks..."" 
+Voice #4: ""Dr. Oz could hang out in emergency rooms and sell DVDs of his show."" 
+Voice #2: ""How would post-election Florida be governed?"" 
+Voice #4: ""Offer Vladimir Putin a governorship. Tell him he can put a few short range nuclear missals in Cuba; like ones that could only reach Tallahassee; as long as Governor Putin agrees to act with stronger leadership than the weak soft president Obama. 
+And since Trump thinks the American media is so awful, Putin could help him reform Florida laws on journalists and free speech."" 
+Voice #2: ""Would Florida get any federal money?"" 
+Voice #4: ""Definitely would need some kind of Florida 'Trump tax'. This extra money would be used to offset the lack of taxes paid by Trump himself. The rest of the money would go to Trump's charity to fund any Trump purchases of autographed football helmets of evangelical athletes, or portraits of himself."" 
+Voice #2: ""We could lure Trump voters to Florida with promises of VA reforms."" 
+Voice #4: ""Yes. Then when they're walled in, we announce that POW military pensions will be cut in half because they let the country down by getting caught. We'll name it the 'Pathetic John McCain Endorsement of Trump VA Penalty."" 
+Voice #2: ""Stop. What kind of real changes would draw Trump voters to Florida?"" 
+Voice #1: ""We could tell them Florida will have the strictest bathroom laws; that correct gender will be checked by DNA analysis before anyone's allowed in a public bathroom."" 
+Voice #4: ""Then, once their walled in, we'll project holograms of naked transsexuals standing next to every urinal and toilet."" 
+Voice #1: ""We could lure them by saying how great the Florida beaches are."" 
+Voice #4: ""Yes. Then, when in there we mandate a statewide program; a photo of every woman who puts on a bathing suit will be posted online with a video of Trump critiquing her body."" 
+Voice #1: ""How do we get evangelical Trump supporters down there?"" 
+Voice #4: ""We could say we're converting all Florida planned parenthood operations in to 'defense of marriage clinics' where homosexuals can be sent for conversion therapy. Anyone caught performing or having an abortion would be subject to the death penalty. Then, on Sundays as families enter churches, we'll play a looped audio tape of Trump bragging he can grab any woman's pussy he wants. 
+Weigh stations will be set up at random pedestrian intersections. All females will be weighed. A database tracking weight gain will be publicly available. Biggest weekly gainers will be forced to exercise at a televised press conference as Trump mocks them while eating a McDonald's hamburger. 
+Any Trump tweets between the hours of 3 and 5 AM will set off warning alarms in every Florida cell phone. The tweet will then be read by the phones voice robot until the user takes the battery out. 
+On a 24 video channel, every Trump female voter in Florida cheated on by a male partner must explain why she enabled his infidelity. Then she must apologize to the women her partner cheated with, in case they were made to feel insulted or uncomfortable. 
+I don't think it would hurt to build some David Duke statues in Florida. 1. They might increase Trump white supremacist voter presence. 2. They might remind Trump who David Duke is; in case somebody on TV asks him if he would denounce David Duke or the KKK. Ben Carson and Pastor Mark Burns can unveil the David Duke statues. 
+On every female Florida drivers license, there will be a section filled in by Trump marked either 'yes' or 'no' indicating whether Trump thinks the woman is attractive enough to be groped sexually without consent. 
+A memorial will be built at the site of the Orlando nightclub massacre. We'll erect a large lit up plastic trump face smiling next to a sign that reads 'Thanks for all your congratulations on me predicting this mass shooting by Obama backed Islamic radicals..."" 
+Voice #1: ""I'm not sure if your kidding or not."" Make Keith Vosseller's  ",FAKE
+4691,There’s nothing suspicious about Trump’s accusers coming forward weeks before the election,"On Wednesday night, stories started pouring in from women accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault — groping them or kissing them against their will much like Trump bragged about doing in a leaked audio recording.
+
+But almost immediately, Trump surrogates and others started calling their stories into question because of the timing.
+
+“These allegations are decades old,” senior Trump adviser A.J. Delgado told Chris Hayes on MSNBC. “If somebody actually did that, Chris, any reasonable woman would have come forward and said something at the time.” Delgado added that she didn’t find the women who talked to the New York Times “credible” because they reportedly support Hillary Clinton.
+
+MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said he was “skeptical” about the “timing” of the allegations, even though he also insisted that he had “no reason to doubt” the stories.
+
+“Talk about an October surprise,"" Scarborough said. ""There have been a thousand triggering events that would've made sense. If I had been sexually harassed by this man, the Megyn Kelly story would've given me an opportunity.""
+
+But the timing of these reports really isn't suspicious at all. In fact, it's totally expected and even “reasonable,” to use Delgado’s words, when you understand how victims of sexual abuse respond to trauma and social stigma.
+
+The three women who spoke to journalists at the New York Times or the Palm Beach Post all said they were inspired to come forward after hearing Trump deny on national television that he had done the things he described on the leaked tapes.
+
+Natasha Stoynoff of People magazine also led off her story with the exchange from the second presidential debate, when Anderson Cooper asked Trump: “Just for the record, are you saying … that you did not actually kiss women without consent?”
+
+This wasn’t just a “triggering” event, as Scarborough put it (although the harassment of Megyn Kelly was indeed triggering for survivors of abuse). This was Trump explicitly denying that he had done exactly the kinds of things these women say he did to them.
+
+The New York Times reported that it was after the debate that one of the accusers, Rachel Crooks, emailed a reporter at the Times about her experience.
+
+The other accuser who talked to the Times, Jessica Leeds, said that she started telling her story to people she knew about a year and a half ago, when it became apparent that Trump was “actually running for president.”
+
+But as Leeds explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, watching the debate inspired her to write a letter to the editor to the New York Times to tell her story. That led staffers to contact her and reporters to interview her, which led to her story being vetted and published.
+
+And Crooks had reportedly been talking to Times staffers about her experience before the debate — but it wasn’t until afterward that she actually agreed to go on the record.
+
+There’s a tendency in our culture to automatically disbelieve victims of sexual abuse when they come forward. That’s especially true in high-profile cases against famous or powerful men, as we’ve seen just this year with Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes.
+
+When an accuser’s story is called into question, the typical narrative is that she’s just seeking attention or a big payout, or that she has some other ulterior motive.
+
+But if you’ve ever talked to actual victims of assault, or been one yourself, you know that coming forward is terrifying and intimidating on all kinds of levels, and that the costs often drastically outweigh the benefits.
+
+As a purely practical matter, pressing charges can mean putting your life on hold for an investigation or a trial, and losing a lot of time and money as a result.
+
+“It’s almost impossible for most women to respond effectively to sexual harassment,” said Patricia Barnes, an attorney and an expert on workplace discrimination, in an earlier interview with Vox. “Because to do so means they have to hire an attorney, they have to go through a complex legal proceeding that takes years, and it has an uncertain outcome at best and often fails.”
+
+The potential payout is rarely worth it. If you go the civil route, the median settlement for a sexual harassment suit is $30,000. If you’re pursuing a criminal case, most accused rapists never see jail time.
+
+Accusing a powerful man also means risking your career if he’s your boss, or even if he works in your industry. We heard stories along these lines from Roger Ailes’s alleged victims, one of whom said there was a “conspiracy of silence” around Ailes’s behavior because nobody wanted to “be personally and professionally destroyed” by Ailes.
+
+Then there are the personal and emotional costs. Victims risk being shunned by their community if they accuse someone who is well-liked. They risk having their personal life, and especially their sex life, ruthlessly scrutinized by people who want to find reasons not to believe them.
+
+Finally, sexual abuse causes trauma that may be too painful to relive in court, much less in public. It may take victims a long time to even admit to themselves that they were abused or victimized. Victims may simply want to “suppress” the experience, as Trump accuser Leeds put it, and move on with their lives. And victims often feel shame after their attack, even if they’ve done nothing wrong.
+
+So it’s no surprise that many victims never report the crimes against them in the first place. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that they may only decide to come forward years later — because it takes that long to process the trauma, or to muster up the courage to put yourself through the reporting process, or to find the time to put the rest of your life on hold to pursue justice.
+
+Leeds, who is 74 years old and says Trump assaulted her in the early 1980s on an airplane, explained that society’s attitudes at the time heavily discouraged victims from speaking out.
+
+“The culture had instilled in us that somehow it was our fault, the attention that we received from men,” Leeds said. “That we were responsible for their behavior. You didn’t complain to the authorities, you didn’t complain to your boss. If something happened to you, you just bucked up and you went on.”
+
+But despite the feminist advances of the intervening decades, this is still often true today.
+
+Crooks, who said Trump forcibly kissed her outside an elevator in 2005, told the Times that the incident made her “so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”
+
+But as Crooks’s then-boyfriend also told the Times: “I think that what was more upsetting than him kissing her was that she felt like she couldn’t do anything to him because of his position. ... I remember her saying, ‘I can’t do anything to this guy, because he’s Donald Trump.’”
+
+Power imbalances, shame and trauma, the fear of social stigma — all of these are reasons why it often takes something big to encourage women to come forward. It might take hearing someone else break her silence publicly first, which can make it feel safer and less lonely for you to do the same.
+
+It might take hearing that your attacker had other victims, which could make you feel morally obligated to help make sure he can’t do it again.
+
+Or it might take seeing the question of whether your attacker committed sexual assault suddenly become a presidential campaign issue.",REAL
+7091,Re: Vladimir Putin,"« Reply #328 on: August 24, 2015, 07:35:18 PM » Didn't really think Putin was falsely fagging.. Oh well. The Assassination of Russia - FSB false flag bombings of 1999 https://youtu.be/y9cRoXgawVA In the fall of 1999, a wave of bloody apartment bombings swept through Russian cities, killing 293 people and causing widespread panic. Although blamed on the Chechen terrorists that the Russians were fighting in the Second Chechen War, FSB agents were caught planting the exact same type of bombs as in the other blasts later that month. The government claimed that the bomb was part of a security exercise and Vladimir Putin came to power as the next Russian President on the back of the terror wave later that year. http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a092299ryazanbomb#a092299ryazanbomb On the evening of September 22, 1999, several residents of an apartment block in Ryazan, a city about a hundred miles south of Moscow, observe three strangers at the entrance of their building. The two young men and a woman are carrying large sacks into the basement. The residents notice that the car’s plate has been partially covered with paper, although they can still see a Moscow license plate number underneath. They decide to call the local police. After several bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow earlier in the month (see September 9, 1999 and September 13, 1999), their vigilance is understandable. When the police arrive, around 9:00 p.m., they uncover what appears to be huge bomb: three sacks of sugar filled with a granular powder, connected to a detonator and a timing device set for 5:30 a.m. The bomb squad uses a gas testing device to confirm that it is explosive material: it appears to be hexagen, the military explosive that is believed to have been used to blow up two Moscow blocks. The residents are evacuated. Then the bomb carted away and turned over to the FSB. (In an apparent oversight, the FSB fails to collect the detonator, which is photographed by the local police.) The following morning, September 23, the government announces that a terrorist attack has been averted. They praise the vigilance of the local people and the Ryazan police. Police comb the city and find the suspects’ car. A telephone operator for long-distance calls reports that she overheard a suspicious conversation: the caller said there were too many police to leave town undetected and was told, “Split up and each of you make your own way out.” To the police’s astonishment, the number called belongs to the FSB. Later this day, the massive manhunt succeeds: the suspects are arrested. But the police are again stunned when the suspects present FSB credentials. On Moscow’s orders, they are quietly released. On September 24, the government reverses itself and now says the bomb was a dummy and the whole operation an exercise to test local vigilance. The official announcement is met with disbelief and anger. Ryazan residents, thousands of whom have had to spend the previous night outdoors, are outraged; local authorities protest that they were not informed. However, the suspicion of a government provocation is not widely expressed and press coverage fades after a few days. It is only several months later that an investigation by the independent weekly Novaya Gazeta re-ignites the controversy (see February 20, 2000 and Fall 1999). The government’s explanations will fail to convince skeptics (see March 23, 2000). The Ryazan incident later becomes the main reason for suspecting the government of having orchestrated previous bombings. The controversy is then widely reported in the international press. [BBC, 9/24/1999; MOSCOW TIMES, 9/24/1999; CNN, 9/24/1999; BALTIMORE SUN, 1/14/2000; LOS ANGELES TIMES, 1/15/2000; MOSCOW TIMES, 1/18/2000; INDEPENDENT, 1/27/2000; OBSERVER, 3/12/2000; NEWSWEEK, 4/3/2000; INSIGHT, 4/17/2000; NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE, 4/30/2002; LE MONDE (PARIS), 11/17/2002; SATTER, 2003; MOSCOW TIMES, 9/24/2004]Entity Tags: Russian Federal Security Service, Novaya GazetaTimeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks, Complete 911 TimelineFebruary 20, 2000: Ryazan Bomb Was Real, Local Police Tell Independent NewspaperEdit event Yuri TkachenkoYuri Tkachenko [Source: Terror99.ru]In its February 14-20, 2000, issue, the Russian newsweekly Novaya Gazeta reports that Ryazan police officers insist that the bomb they uncovered and defused was real. On September 22, 1999, a bomb was discovered in the city of Ryazan, about 100 miles south of Moscow. After the chief bomb suspects were discovered to be FSB agents, the government claimed the bomb was a dummy and the incident was a training exercise (see September 22-24, 1999). But the bomb-squad officer, Yuri Tkachenko, is adamant that it was a professionally-prepared, military-style bomb. He defends the accuracy of his sophisticated gas-testing device which identified the explosives as hexogen. The article provokes much comment in Russia but is ignored by the government. [SATTER, 2003, PP. 29]Entity Tags: Novaya Gazeta, Yuri TkachenkoTimeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag AttacksMarch 23, 2000: Broadcast on Ryazan Incident Fails to End ControversyEdit event Alexander Zdanovich.Alexander Zdanovich. [Source: Terror99.ru]A team of FSB officials, led by Alexander Zdanovich, agrees to a televised meeting with angry and suspicious residents of Ryazan, hoping to put down rumors of a government provocation and shore up the credibility of the official account. In September 1999 a bomb was found in the basement of a building in Ryazan and the people arrested for planting the bomb were discovered to be FSB agents. The government then claimed the incident was merely a training exercise, but residents suspect the FSB wanted to bomb the building to create a fake terrorist incident (see September 22-24, 1999). Zdavonich apologizes for the inconvenience suffered by Ryazan inhabitants but then suggests the renewed interest in the event is a campaign ploy: “For months, there was no interest and there were no publications. The theme was activated on the eve of the presidential election with the most fantastic details in order to accuse the FSB of planning a real explosion with the death of people. This is actively used in the political struggle.” (The presidential election is only one week away.) A soldier named Alexei Pinyaev has claimed that he worked at a nearby base where hexogen was reportedly kept in sacks marked “sugar” (see Fall 1999). The commander of the base denies that there was any soldier named Pinyaev, but the Novaya Gazeta reporter who had found Pinyaev then shows pictures of him and plays a recording of his interview. The FSB will not let its three agents appear in public or allow journalists to interview them. The broadcast does not allow any discussion of a possible connection between the Ryazan incident and the apartment bombings in Moscow earlier that month (see September 9, 1999 and September 13, 1999). The FSB officials did not have good explanations for the fact that local authorities, including its own FSB office in Ryazan, were not informed of the supposed exercise, or for the lack of medical resources for the thousands of people forced to spend the night outdoors. According to David Satter, a long-time correspondent in Moscow for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times who believes the Ryazan incident was a failed provocation, the broadcast only serves to increase the public’s misgivings. [SATTER, 2003, PP. 30, 261-264]Entity Tags: Alexander Zdanovich, Russian Federal Security Service, Alexei PinyaevTimeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag AttacksMarch 6, 2002: Russian Billionaire Berezovsky Accuses FSB, Putin of Terror PlotEdit event Boris Berezovsky.Boris Berezovsky. [Source: BBC]At a well-publicized press conference in London, where he now lives in self-imposed exile, Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky accuses President Putin of involvement in an alleged FSB plot behing the 1999 apartment bombings (see September 22-24, 1999, September 9, 1999 and September 13, 1999). After an overview of many well-known facts about the bombings and the controversial Ryazan security exercise, as well as a documentary called “The Assassination of Russia”, Berezovsky introduces the testimony of Nikita Chekulin. According to Chekulin, an explosive expert who says he was recruited by the FSB, large quantities of hexogen were purchased through his research institute, the Russian Conversion Explosives Center (Rosconversvzryvtsenter), and shipped under false labels in 1999-2000 out of military bases to cover organizations linked to the FSB. Chekulin says the FSB suppressed a governmental investigation into the scheme. “I am sure the bombings were organized by the FSB,” Berezovsky declares. “The FSB thought that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would not be able to come to power through lawful democratic means.” [BBC, 3/6/2002; GUARDIAN, 3/6/2002; WASHINGTON POST, 3/6/2002; KOMMERSANT (MOSCOW), 3/6/2002; MONITOR (JAMESTOWN FOUNDATION), 3/6/2002; SBS, 5/21/2003]Entity Tags: Nikita Chekulin, Russian Federal Security Service, Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir PutinTimeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks Logged",FAKE
+6405,"FBI Found ""Tens Of Thousands Of Emails"" Belonging To Huma Abedin On Weiner's Laptop","FBI Found ""Tens Of Thousands Of Emails"" Belonging To Huma Abedin On Weiner's Laptop   Zero Hedge 
+With furious Democrats - and the Clinton Campaign - now openly blasting the FBI's reopened investigation (as Republicans take delight for once in having a government agency reinforce their side of events), the question turns to just what emails were found on Weiner's laptop, and how damaging their contents are for the FBI to take the unprecedented step of ""intervening"" in a major political event just days before the national election. 
+We first laid what was the most likely explanation yesterday , when we showed several examples of Huma Abedin emails being sent from her work email account to her personal account at , courtesy of a Judicial Watch FOIA release. Of the more than 160 emails in the latest Judicial Watch release, some 110 emails – two-thirds of the total – were forwarded by Abedin to two personal addresses she controlled. The Washington Times reported in August 2015 that the State Department had admitted to a federal judge that Abedin and Mills used personal email accounts to conduct government business in addition to Clinton’s private clintonemail.com to transact State Department business. 
+One email from May 15, 2009, was sent by Abedin from her State Department email to her personal email. Abedin was archiving in her personal email account an email Hillary Clinton sent her from Clinton’s private email server at . Abedin was asked to print out attachments to an email Mills sent via a private address the previous day to Clinton involving “timetables and deliverables” for her review via Alec Ross, a technology policy expert who then held the title of senior adviser for innovation to Secretary Clinton. 
+However, while forwarding Hillary's emails to her personal email server for ""convenience"" is one thing, what is more troubling is the amount of redaction involved in these emails which migrated to the open email account, which as we now know ended up in Anthony Weiner's computer: in the above example, the two pages of timetables and deliverables attached to the email were 100 percent redacted, with “PAGE DENIED” stamped across the first redacted page. 
+An argument can be made that the extensive redaction confirms confidential material was part of the transmission. 
+This is a nuanced point being pushed by Hillary Clinton supporters such as Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald, who in an article yesterday tried to make a case citing ""sources"" (even though the FBI said that nobody has seen the content of the Weiner/Abedin emails), that "" no emails being examined by FBI were to or from Clinton ."" No emails being examined by FBI were to or from Clinton. All of this has to do with procedures followed by an aide. https://t.co/mcsBi7j7XU 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 
+It remains to be seen just what is in the emails, although whether Hillary sent emails with confidential content herself, or directed, or simply allowed her closest aide, Huma Abedin to forward such emails to her outside unsecured email address (where they subsequently ended up on Anthony Weiner's notebook), is what this latest case will be all about and how it will be defended and prosecuted in the media, by the water coolers and perhaps, in court. 
+However, we do know one thing: according to the NYT , the number of Huma emails that made their way to Weiner's PC was staggering: 
+The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, sent to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case — one federal official said they numbered in the tens of thousand 
+Which brings up two more critical questions: i) when she was questioned by the FBI over the summer, did Huma reveal and admit the existence of these ""thousands"" of emails located on a personal, home computer, and ii) will the FBI be able to comb through everything in the next 10 days ahead of the election? If the answer to the second question is no, will the US presidential election really take place with one candidate currently under FBI investigation, one which could potentially lead to impeachment proceedings within weeks or days of her being elected president? 
+Still, the biggest irony in this latest debacle is that it was largely predicted by Donald Trump himself back in August of 2015. It came out that Huma Abedin knows all about Hillary’s private illegal emails. Huma’s PR husband, Anthony Weiner, will tell the world. 
+— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 3, 2015 Share This Article...",FAKE
+4789,Who won the debate?,"(CNN) CNN commentators and guest analysts offer their take on Monday night's presidential candidate debate. The opinions expressed in these commentaries are solely those of the authors.
+
+David Gergen: Clinton crushed Trump, but was that enough?
+
+Coming into the presidential debate, I thought that if Hillary Clinton won decisively, she would virtually lock up the election. Coming out, it was clear that she did win decisively but I suspect that the campaign will remain ferociously close.
+
+By all traditional standards of debate, Mrs. Clinton crushed. She carefully marshaled her arguments and facts and then sent them into battle with a smile. She rolled out a long list of indictments against Donald Trump, often damaging. By contrast, he came in unprepared, had nothing fresh to say, and increasingly gave way to rants. As the evening ended, the media buried him in criticisms.
+
+Even so, I doubt she has put him away. For one thing, Trump supporters aren't judging him by traditional standards. They have heard establishment politicians over-promise and under-deliver for so long that they crave something different. They were quick last night to see yet more signs of media bias. Trump was an angry figure, yes, but he is also giving voice to their anger. Those who are for him are likely to stick, despite his ineffectual performance.
+
+Equally to the point, Mrs. Clinton seemingly struggled in the debate to create closer emotional bonds with voters. She has been vexed with the issue of likeability throughout this campaign and in recent months her team has become concerned about her ability to mobilize millennials in the way that Barack Obama did so successfully. Her arguments last night should have made voters think, but I am not sure they will make them march.
+
+Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Hillary did lock up the race Monday night. Trump certainly blew it. But I imagine the race goes on, and the ultimate decision will be left where it should be: with the voters. Stay tuned for the vice presidential debate next Tuesday!
+
+S.E. Cupp: Trump (mostly) did the job
+
+I had two criteria upon which I would judge Monday night's debate. Not ""who looked more presidential,"" or ""who fact-checked whom the best."" Those aspects go to their bases, not the voters who will determine this election outcome: undecideds.
+
+Hillary Clinton had one job. She had to make Donald Trump look dumb. For undecideds, it will matter less that he's a bully or a liar. She has issues with trust, too. What will scare them is how unprepared he is. Every chance she gets to point this out has the potential to add points. Unfortunately for Clinton, she didn't take many of them. While she pointed out that his ""cavalier attitude"" toward nuclear weapons was dangerous, time and again, she punted at opportunities to point out how ill-informed and unprepared Trump is. Instead, she preferred to argue his vague platform on its merits. For her, this wasn't damaging, but it didn't move the needle in her favor.
+
+In contrast, Trump mostly did the job he had to do. To move undecideds, he had to hammer one point home: Clinton is a politician who doesn't get it. Over and over again, he attacked her as more of the same, out of touch, and a politician who hasn't gotten it right. He didn't go after her character or personal issues, for the most part -- which voters know well. She outmanned him on specifics and details. But his attacks were far more effective than hers.
+
+While Clinton was right to suggest the fact-checkers get busy on his statements -- many were misleading -- if I'm looking at who moved the needle tonight with voters, it was Trump, not Clinton. And, Robby Mook, I assure you, this anti-Trump conservative isn't grading him ""on a curve.""
+
+Hillary Clinton did her homework on Donald Trump in the week leading up to tonight's debate, and the prep work paid off, especially when it came to his business record.
+
+""It must be something really important, even terrible, that he's trying to hide,"" Clinton said of Trump's tax returns, turning the tables on allegations that she's hiding something in her deleted emails. ""It just seems to me that this is something the American people deserve to see.""
+
+Clinton even took a step further and pointed out that Trump didn't pay any income tax returns in certain years, a strategy designed to chip away at the blue-collar demographic that he's cultivated in the last few years. Trump, who's worked up a populist campaign saying that the government has stiffed the little guy, put his own foot in his mouth, butted in and said ""that makes me smart.""
+
+It was a tough attack to which Trump will need an answer in future debates.
+
+As a Clinton supporter, it pains me to say Trump won.
+
+Clinton was too restrained, too smart -- and as much as I hate to say it -- she was too presidential. And being presidential won't help her win the election. She spoke to the intellectuals tuning in; she did not speak to the average American.
+
+Her advisers told her to restrain from attacking Trump. She got the wrong counsel and it could cost her the election.
+
+Her rebuttal to Trump's incoherent rants was to chuckle and tell viewers to check in with the fact checkers. The fact checkers won't win the election for her.
+
+She needed to take him out at the knees. We know Clinton is smart, what we needed to see was a woman who is tough and won't take nonsense from anyone. She failed to do that tonight. Tonight, she was nice. Nice won't win the presidency.
+
+Donald spent the night sniffing constantly before he spoke. To paraphrase one tweeter: He's allergic to his own crap.
+
+He lost the 400-pound vote but he won the debate and unless Clinton changes tactics he's going to win the election.
+
+As a real estate mogul, Donald Trump is more than familiar with the expression ""location, location, location."" In presidential debates, it's temperament, temperament, temperament. History has not been kind to Dan Quayle's perceived weakness, George H. W. Bush's time check or Al Gore's sighs. And it won't be kind to Trump's undisciplined, defensive rants.
+
+Trump's debate performance was a combined rehash of the insolence of his primary debates, the rambling hyperbole of his rallies, with a sprinkle of detail to bolster his message of economic populism. Although Trump scored points on that issue, he whiffed badly when confronted about his failure to release his taxes and struck out on the issues of race, birtherism and foreign policy. It was, frankly, surprising how easily Trump took Hillary's bait.
+
+Coming into Monday night's debate, national polls were essentially tied and battleground states were tightening. With expectations set historically low, all Trump had to do was behave well enough to convince undecided voters he was in fact fit to hold the highest office in the land. In order to win the White House, Trump needs more moderates, minorities and women to support him. Yet he engaged in juvenile attacks on Hillary's looks and stamina instead of her failed record. Trump had an opportunity to put Hillary Clinton away and failed miserably. He is who is he is and continues to act unworthy of the office.
+
+Hillary Clinton was the closer. She pulled off a victory, but only after Trump looked as if he might run away with that victory in the first half of the debate. Clinton was clearly in command of the facts, but Trump was making the simpler -- if highly inaccurate -- case for defending American jobs. Substance aside, he initially came across as caring about those who have lost jobs to trade. But Trump's initial strength unraveled as the debate progressed.
+
+By the time it was over, Clinton unmasked Trump as a con man over his failure to release tax returns and penchant for not paying his workers. He all but acknowledged he doesn't pay taxes, saying ""they would be wasted,"" seeming more like an abusive one-percenter than a man of the people. His birther explanation made no sense, and his claim that Hillary has been ""fighting ISIS your entire life,"" was as ridiculous as his notion of stealing Iraq's oil. His denial of the well-established fact that he supported the Iraq war was a most awkward dance.
+
+That was probably the first and last debate in presidential history to include a discussion of Rosie O'Donnell's looks. As such, it was tremendous entertainment -- pure reality TV. But it was also very hard to pick a winner. Donald Trump won on the basis of spectacle. Hillary Clinton's strategy was to rise above the occasion and let him talk himself into losing. That actually allowed Trump to land one blow after another without Clinton fighting back. She wittily put him down a couple of times. But mostly she just smiled oddly at the camera. She was, to use a Trumpism, low energy. That was a mistake.
+
+Yes, Trump sunk to new lows when discussing the birther issue -- claiming that he helped put it to rest when he actually stirred it up. Yes, he was barely coherent on defense, taxes etc. There was a three-minute section when he detailed a phone call with Sean Hannity about Iraq. Yes, The Donald was low on specifics, too. But he did have clear themes that he rammed home. After 90 grueling minutes, I looked down at my pad and read back the key words that I'd jotted down. ""Law and order."" ""Country doing badly."" ""Bad experience."" ""Emails."" Clinton's policies on solar panels and equal pay did not cut through. It could not compete with his passion, his articulation of populist anger.
+
+So I give this a technical win to Trump because he understood the format, he blew it apart, and he dominated the evening. But that will alienate as many people as it will attract. Moreover, I'm not even sure it'll make that big a difference. Objectively deducing who won or lost is almost impossible when partisan tensions are this high. Most viewers either agree with him or with her. And a small minority watched it and thought, ""How the hell did things come to this?"" The debate will likely harden impressions, not soften hearts. The impression is that Trump has matured into an effective champion of the working class. But Clinton looks like a president-in-waiting.
+
+Timothy Stanley is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph. He is the author of ""Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between L.A. and D.C. Revolutionized American Politics.""
+
+Out of control. That's how I'd describe the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. What a train wreck for any voter who wanted to hear details about policy. Instead, we got Trump shouting insults and one-liners, interrupting Clinton, trying to take over the conversation. Shockingly, Trump admitting to the world: He was ""smart"" not to pay his federal income taxes; he supported a return of ""stop and frisk"" policing, even though it was ruled racial profiling and unconstitutional by the courts; and he defended his family's housing discrimination practices against blacks and Latinos, essentially saying it was just something everyone did back then.
+
+Clinton's sit-back-and-watch-him-implode strategy was frustrating at times but it worked. She could, however, show more passion when discussing her policies. On the issue of race, Clinton missed a perfect opportunity to talk more about her plan for law enforcement reforms and systematic racism in our justice system. Still for me, Trump lost the debate tonight. Talking loud and saying little shouldn't be a path to the White House.
+
+Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has worked as a producer and as a reporter at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She was named a 2010 Woman of the Year by Women in Sports and Events, is a co-author of ""Say It Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete,"" and CEO of the Push Marketing. She supports Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
+
+Julian Zelizer: Debate unlikely to have dramatic impact
+
+Overall, it is unclear that Monday night's debate will have a huge impact on the direction of the polls. The best moments for Donald Trump came in the first half hour, where he baited her into defending unpopular free trade deals.
+
+There were many reasons that Hillary Clinton supporters could be pleased with her performance. At several points, Trump was irritated and angry. He delved into some of his more controversial claims. He referred to Sean Hannity as evidence to support his claims about the Iraq War.
+
+Clinton consistently appeared poised and attacked with methodical precision. The most effective part of Clinton's attacks was to connect him to a kind of trickle-down economics and raise questions about his business record. Clinton's best moments came when she attacked him on birtherism. In the final half hour, Trump was mired deep in his Trumpian statements about women's looks and more.
+
+But Clinton's greatest advantage remains the dynamics of the Electoral College and the continued doubts about his capacity to be president. It is very hard for a single debate to change the game. And it is unclear that this debate had the kind of dramatic moment that will fundamentally reshape public opinion -- overwhelming all of the other factors that have caused her lead to shrink. The most unfavorable moments for Trump are not worse than anything he's done before -- and those moments have not undercut his campaign thus far.
+
+Haroon Moghul: Trump lost, but so did all of us
+
+Near the end of Monday night's debate, Hillary Clinton looked straight into the camera to address America's allies. She wanted our friends and partners in NATO, and allies like Japan, South Korea, and others to know that we meant to honor our obligations. In that moment, Donald Trump entirely disappeared, and Clinton no longer looked like a candidate for President. She sounded like she was already President.
+
+Trump? He managed to incorporate his very large portfolio into nearly every comment he made. Eventually I expected him to announce he knew best how to defeat ISIS because he built a hotel in Mosul. So, yes, Trump lost. But we lost, too. All of us, as Americans. It's a disaster for any democracy when there is only one responsible candidate running for office, let alone the highest in any land.
+
+Trump's language over the campaign has been racist and authoritarian; he has indulged anti-Semites and winked at white supremacists when he was not busy with plans for mass deportations or Islamophobic bans. It's not a good thing that 100 million people are watching these two candidates debate, because 100 million people shouldn't take a would-be fascist seriously enough to debate his case for the White House.
+
+One of my favorite new shows is Netflix's ""Stranger Things."" Unfortunately, we're the ones living in the upside down.
+
+Haroon Moghul is a senior fellow and director of development at the Center for Global Policy. His next book, ""How to be a Muslim,"" will be out in 2017.
+
+Civility went south fast in Monday's debate. Donald Trump lost his composure early, ranting, interrupting (over 20 times) and sniffing. (Under the weather, or out of his comfort zone?) Hillary Clinton started out soft, playing the grandmother card, but quickly escalated to tough talk and occasional sarcasm. It could hardly have gone otherwise. Clinton hit hard at Trump, bringing up his admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin, his ""long record of engaging in racist behavior,"" his denial at having supported the Iraq war, and his refusal to allow the American people to see his tax returns.
+
+In doing so, Clinton did Americans a big favor: she revealed Trump's limitations. He is simply unable to make those leaps of imagination and generosity necessary to transform from a businessperson to a national political leader. The candidate who claims to do everything big showed the smallness of his thinking tonight. With his off-key rejoinders, he demonstrated repeatedly how he sees everything -- people, properties, cities, and entire countries -- in terms of how they factor into his business and personal universe, which seem to be one and the same. I'll get to Pennsylvania Avenue one way or another, he said tonight, as though the White House and his new Trump hotel are entities of equal importance. Perhaps they really are, in his mind.
+
+Clinton alone demonstrated the composure, wisdom, and broad vision necessary for executive office. She won the debate hands down.
+
+Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, a specialist in 20th-century European history and a frequent contributor to CNN Opinion. Her latest book is ""Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema."" She supports Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
+
+The reality TV star and businessman who loves giving nicknames earned himself one tonight: ""Sniffles."" From the beginning through the end of the first debate Donald Trump seemed to have something going on with his sinuses. It seemed a fitting metaphor for a night on which the usual expert showman was seriously off his game. Besides the sniffles, Trump made faces and sighed. He scowled. He interrupted. He took innumerable drinks of water, something for which he used to mock Marco Rubio.
+
+In so doing, Trump lost this debate to a clearly up-to-the-task Hillary Clinton. Either Trump failed to prepare, or his prep sessions did not stick.
+
+This is a debate that will likely be studied in college communications, advertising, and gender courses for years to come. Without the benefit of a live audience cheering his one-liners, Trump seemed deflated and not on his best form at all. His constant interruptions of Clinton will do him no favors with women voters. His bragging, in effect, about forcing President Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate will not go over well with black voters. And his rambling answers at times descended into incoherence. In response to a question about cybersecurity, he mentioned that cyberattacks could be coming from ""someone sitting on their bed weighing 400 pounds."" Uh, what?
+
+Clinton did not let opportunities go by to score points with independents or moderate voters, reminding viewers that Trump once saw the mortgage crisis as a business opportunity, and she discussed race relations in thoughtful terms. Meanwhile, Trump made truly bizarre statements, such as she has been been fighting ISIS for 30 years! and ""African-Americans and Hispanics are living in hell, you walk down the streets, you get shot."" Note to Trump: Testiness is not a presidential look.
+
+The fact that at several points Trump was arguing with moderator Lester Holt showed that things were not going his way. In one of the most notable moments of the night, Trump's declaration that he had a much better temperament than Clinton earned spontaneous laughter from the audience at Hofstra University. As Trump might say: ""Sad.""
+
+Unusual omissions tonight: No mentions of Trump's feuds with everyone from a distinguished Mexican-American judge to a Gold Star family. More glaringly: no discussion of immigration.
+
+Whether viewers agree with Clinton's positions or not, she was able to articulate them in a reasonable and rational manner. She did well, and she knew it. She was obviously ready to discuss problematic issues like her emails. The grin on her face near the end of the debate was evidence that she was aware that she had had a great night. Once you've traveled the world, negotiated treaties, and testified before Congress for 11 hours, she said to Trump with a hint of mockery, then ""you can talk to me about stamina."" Mic drop. Game over. Tonight at least, Hillary Clinton won.
+
+This was a remarkable moment in American political history. Has there been a prior event in which a candidate has so completely and remarkably demonstrated his unfitness for the presidency, in character, temperament, preparation and aptitude?
+
+Donald Trump's now-familiar pattern of winning debates through sheer bluster and braggadocio was effective when he was facing a gaggle of opponents, all of whom had similar ideologies but less exaggerated stage personas. But faced with a single rival with clearly distinct ideas and experience and a staunchly unflappable attitude, he seemed rude, ignorant, volatile and churlish. Despite pundit assertions that Hillary Clinton had the burden of proof in this debate, the truth is that she simply needed to hold strong and let Hurricane Trump blow itself out. And she did.
+
+Sadly, moderator Lester Holt was a non-presence in the debate. But his inability to restrain Trump proved an asset to Clinton, who spent much of the time leaning back and smiling to herself, knowing that her opponent was weaving his own hanging rope.
+
+Jeff Yang is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal Online and contributes frequently to radio shows, including PRI's ""The Takeaway"" and WNYC's ""The Brian Lehrer Show."" He is the co-author of ""I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action.""
+
+Donald Trump's supporters like to refer to his movement as ""The Trump Train."" Well, tonight The Trump Train went off the rails. Big time.
+
+But for those who somehow thought, up until Monday night, that Donald Trump might somehow be qualified to be president, Monday's debate was a wakeup call. He seemed like a defensive, petulant bully who could only insult Hillary Clinton and America -- and couldn't offer a single solution, let alone details. He came across as not only dreadfully unprepared for the debate, but dreadfully unprepared to be president. Which is the truth. And it's high time all Americans know it.
+
+In moment after moment, Hillary Clinton presented a knowledgeable and clear-eyed vision for how to help working families and continue America on the path to security and prosperity. Donald Trump, in contrast, lied, and got defensive. He was petty and insulting, and then lied some more. Lies apparently can only get the Trump train so far. Eventually it runs out of steam.
+
+Hillary Clinton showed herself to be the kind of person you want in the White House. And Donald Trump showed himself to be the kind of kindergartner who should have his train taken away and instead given a timeout.
+
+The conventional wisdom going into the first debate was that Donald Trump would have to tone it down and appear more presidential. Trump definitely took a more staid and steadied approach, but it didn't work. His bravado and charm were largely absent from the stage. Trump the showman can dance around policy pitfalls and distract from some of his less than successful business dealings. Sedate Donald had far fewer tools at his disposal, and looked like he couldn't wait for the 90-minute snooze-fest to end.
+
+Hillary Clinton didn't give a memorable performance, but she didn't have to. Most Americans expect Madame Secretary to drone on, joylessly, about policy, and wave her curriculum vitae like a club against her enemies. She met expectations, which was enough, and during some of the actual policy exchanges clearly had the upper hand on knowledge and background.
+
+Trump had huge areas of vulnerability to exploit in his opponent, and he barely touched her on them -- from Benghazi to her emails to the allegations of Clinton Foundation corruption. He will need a much stronger showing in his next debate or this thing will be over long before November.
+
+Nayyera Haq: Trump looked more like Grumpy Cat than a leader
+
+Trump's glass jaw was exposed throughout Clinton's onslaught of policy laden counter-punches. Trump came into this debate attempting to appeal to a broader audience, so he needed to leave behind the showmanship and bravado that worked for him in the primary and instead carry himself with presidential composure. But his calm voice lasted only 20 minutes and his listening face made him look more like Grumpy Cat than a leader, showing that rehearsed moves just don't work for him.
+
+Trump had Clinton momentarily against the ropes early on about NAFTA and TPP, but then he allowed his emotion to take over and did not regain his own footing for the remainder of the debate. His heavy handed depictions of America's problems didn't hold up against Hillary's detailed, solution oriented answers. His snorting asides were countered with some surprising zingers from Hillary -- ""Donald criticized me for preparing for this debate. You know what else I prepared for? To be President.""
+
+Trump crumbled under Hillary's attacks on his business record, lack of transparency on taxes, and understanding of African-American communities. By the time it came around to national security, the contrast in experience was even more clear, with Clinton nimbly moving around the globe and Trump invoking his 10-year-old son--who, he told us, is good at computers -- in a discussion of cyber security. Trump's abrupt defensiveness, especially on the issue of his temperament, allowed Clinton to come across as the champion of those who have been taken taken advantage of by big business and systemic racism. Calling this fight for Hillary.",REAL
+101,Rachel Dolezal has a right to be black (Opinion),"On Monday, Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, resigned in shame because she had posed as a black woman even though she is biologically white.
+
+The outing of Dolezal seems ironic given the recent public embrace of Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender woman formerly known as Bruce Jenner. Jenner seems to have ushered in an era of greater tolerance about the constructed nature of identity. After all, when a transgender woman is elevated to the cover of Vanity Fair, it's as though we have reached a tipping point. We can accept the idea that one's social identity can be radically transformed if it doesn't match with what one feels in the heart.
+
+The stark difference in Dolezal's treatment forces us to ask what's the difference between claiming a gender identity versus a racial identity? Why is it that we celebrate Bruce Jenner's gender change and frown upon Rachel Dolezal's racial change?
+
+Dolezal is disturbing for many people because she marks a cultural fault line. Like it or not, we have entered into an era of elective race -- a time when people expect that one has a right and dignity to claim the identity of one's choice.
+
+The central issue that separates Jenner's and Dolezal's choices is deception. Jenner chose carefully how and when she would disclose herself as actually female. Dolezal's involuntary outing was staged by her angry parents who felt left behind as she chose a life associated with being a black person. The irony of the situation is certainly not lost on Dolezal's parents, who adopted several black children who became Dolezal's siblings, perhaps giving her the first taste of what it would be like to be in a black community. As much as critics try to characterize Dolezal's behavior as a fraudulent choice, sociologists and psychologists know that decisions about racial and ethnic identity are typically not merely expressive, strategic, or apolitical, but are driven by social conditions. Growing up in a family with black siblings exposed Dolezal to the reality of discrimination and made her more sensitive to its effects. It probably helped her understand the contrast between the reality of black lives and white privilege. Other similar experiences, such as marrying an African-American and having black children, also make white people more sensitive to racism. Dolezal likely became politically and socially conscious about these issues because of her experiences in an interracial family. In this sense, her parents must be proud of the child they raised. Should we indict Dolezal for her racial deceit? That depends on a number of factors. What accounts for her decision to ""become"" black instead of remaining white to advocate for racial justice? Did Dolezal feel that her white skin made her suspect as she engaged in political activism? Did she fear it would be a distraction as she attempted to gain credibility in racial justice efforts? Opinion: Passing for black? Now that's a twist Of course, she could have attained a leadership role in the NAACP as a white woman, but did the perception that she was black make people feel more objective about her performance rather than skeptical about her understanding and commitment to anti-racism? Was she aesthetically driven? Dolezal claims that she has been in love with black aesthetics since childhood. The decision to adopt a black female aesthetic for herself is a political act given that Americans in general assume black women are not aesthetically as desirable as white women. Yet, others reduce her aesthetic choices to mere cultural appropriation. People allow Caitlyn Jenner to change because she has some biological basis for believing she is female. But is this all identity is? Are we prepared to accept the implications of this view? What if Dolezal can identify one ""biologically"" black ancestor -- does this suddenly make her claim to blackness valid? If she cannot, does this failure render invalid her connections to blackness, and all of her efforts to make the world better for African Americans? In my view, hate the sin but love the sinner. Dolezal lied. She should not have lied, but she lied for reasons with which we can sympathize. I admire the way she chose to live her life as a black person. Advocating for anti-racism efforts is ethical and admirable if she wanted to claim blackness as a social identity. Those quick to throw stones well know that there are costs to living life as a black person, and once Dolezal made the switch she seems never to have looked back. I will not indict her for her choice to link herself to this community, and I would consider her claim no greater if she identified a long lost African ancestor. Dolezal's case forces us to examine our society, which made her feel that passing for a black woman was her best choice in her advocacy for African American issues. She forces us to consider whether our biology or our action is more important to identity, and should we act in ways that honor our chosen identity in meaningful ways. We should not have to be slaves to the biological definition of identity, and we should not use race or gender identities as weapons to punish one another.",REAL
+10128,Tennessee Children with Brittle Bones Suffer in State Care as Mom Charged with SBS,"Tennessee Children with Brittle Bones Suffer in State Care as Mom Charged with SBS Turner family at visitation. Photo source: Turner family. 
+by Health Impact News/MedicalKidnap.com Staff 
+Chris and Keshia Turner from East Tennessee are still waiting to bring their son Brayden home since he was removed from their custody on December 11, 2014. Keshia had rushed the baby to the emergency room when his leg that had been splinted in the NICU became tight and warm to the touch. While at the hospital, an x-ray revealed a broken bone and several rib fractures. 
+The following day, Keshia took Brayden to his pediatrician to follow-up on his care. There she found herself confronted with law enforcement and a Department of Children’s Services worker who demanded that she take Brayden to Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, nearly three hours away. 
+That evening, Vanderbilt Medical Center Child Abuse Specialist Dr. Deborah Lowen said that Brayden’s injuries could only be abuse, and investigators and doctors allegedly stopped looking for another explanation. 
+Dr. Lowen first said that it was a “classic case of Shaken Baby,” though most of the classic symptoms were not present. Later Dr. Lowen claimed that Keshia had crushed her three month old child with her hands and caused multiple rib fractures. 
+The Turner’s first story is here: Baby Found with Broken Bones – Parents Assumed Guilty of Abuse and Lose Custody Keshia’s Second Child Taken 
+In September of 2015, while her case was pending, Keshia delivered her second child, a baby boy named Carson, who was in perfect health. Sadly, he was removed from her custody four days after he was born because of the ongoing case involving Brayden. Both boys have been in a relative placement with their paternal grandparents. Chris and Keshia have had limited supervised contact with the children since their removal. 
+Recently, the boys were evaluated by Tennessee Early Intervention System, a voluntary educational program for children ages birth through age two with disabilities or developmental delays. The program is also associated with Vanderbilt Medical Center. Both children were diagnosed with significant developmental delays. Brayden with his baby brother Carson. Photo source: Turner family. 
+Brayden’s evaluation revealed that he is delayed 25% in cognitive development and 40% in adaptive, communication, social skills, and motor. He also exhibited “multiple red flags of autism.” Additionally, he has a 30 degree curvature in both feet and will require orthotics. 
+Carson’s evaluation showed that he is delayed 25% in communication and cognitive development, and 40% in adaptive and motor. It was also noted that his head was “really flat.” The family was told that when he begins to walk, there is a possibility that he will need to wear orthotics. 
+Additionally, both boys have low muscle tone. In light of the new developments, the family believes that this is, as Eugene Wilson at the Center for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Alliance says, “more than likely an underlying medical condition.” 
+Therapy has been recommended for both children. Difficult Day at Court 
+Because Keshia was the last one to care for Brayden before the emergency room visit, she is being accused of abuse in the dependency proceeding in juvenile court. 
+After several days of hearings, including the presentation of medical experts on behalf of the parents, on June 25, 2016 Judge Larry Warner found Keshia guilty of “severe child abuse.” The judge cleared Chris of any finding of abuse. Because of that, the couple was advised by the father’s attorney to file for divorce, in the hope that the court would award Chris custody. Although the couple’s divorce is still pending, Judge Warner ordered immediate reunification with Chris. However, the children are still in a relative placement, and the Department of Children’s Services has not done anything to establish their reunification. There is no plan in place to get the children home with their father. Bias and Lack of Understanding Impeding the Case 
+The judge’s ruling came despite the Turners having two medical experts who testified on their behalf, a radiologist and a pediatrician with experience teaching at a university as well as working in the emergency room. The two medical experts gave extensive medical testimony—comprehensive explanations of Brayden’s medical conditions— which both opined as osteopenia of prematurity. 
+Going in to court, the mother’s Attorney Connie Reguli was concerned that Vanderbilt’s Child Abuse Specialist Dr. Lowen’s deposition had been filed months before the trial by Department of Children’s Services. It appeared to Attorney Reguli that once the judge read it, he had made up his mind before coming to court, leaving no room for other medical explanations. Dr. Deborah Lowen. Source: Vanderbilt University . 
+Attorney Reguli points out that this is “an extremely complex” case. Because of that, the experts took painstaking measures to educate the judge about the “fragile bone state of a baby…who was premature and so small.” She says that after examining Brayden’s history, the pediatrician concluded that he had rickets of prematurity. The doctors explained in detail the medical evidence supporting their opinions, including the premature birth, the loss of amniotic fluid prior to birth, the low vitamin D levels, and the healing pattern of the bones. 
+The Turner family’s experts disputed Child Abuse Specialist Dr. Debra Lowen’s conclusion. Dr. Lowen said that Brayden’s injuries were non-accidental, and therefore, must be child abuse. Attorney Reguli says that Dr. Lowen’s conclusion was drawn without being challenged on the medical research upon which she relied. When Dr. Lowen was asked to submit medical research to support her conclusion, she submitted a mere nine articles and references, some of which contradicted her own conclusion. 
+In contrast, the experts called by the family provided a bibliography of over 50 articles which supported the rickets diagnosis. 
+Attorney Reguli is very concerned about the court’s apparent bias and lack of understanding about the intricacies of the medical evidence, which she believes are impeding this case. She says, “The complexity of presenting the evidence is a tremendous challenge.” Further, she points out that the medical community is not in agreement on this issue, and she is concerned that it might be too complex for a juvenile court judge to understand. The Environmental Epidemic of Vitamin D Deficiency in Infants 
+In August 2008, researchers Kathy A. Keller and Patrick D. Barnes published the article, “ Rickets vs. Abuse: A National and International Epidemic .” The article documents that, what was at first “believed to primarily affect the elderly and dark-skinned populations in the US,” was found “demonstrated in otherwise healthy young adults, children, and infants of all races.” 
+In “ Rickets or Abuse, or Both? ” Russell W. Chesney says, “We are in the midst of an epidemic of nutritional vitamin D deficiency rickets that has been termed ‘the third wave of rickets.'” The article goes on to say, “Inherent in each wave is that infants with rickets are born to mothers who are deficient or insufficient in vitamin D themselves.” 
+Dr. Teresa Hill points out in the Journal Advocate that vitamin D deficiency persists today. She says, “Vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy is considered epidemic.” 
+One reason that the medical profession is not in agreement on this issue is the lack of information about the role of vitamin D deficiency resulting in metabolic dysfunction in abuse cases. Dr. Mercola reports that Dr. Ayoub, after reviewing over 3,000 pieces of medical literature, concludes that “a great number of child abuse cases may, in fact, be instances of misdiagnosed metabolic dysfunction.” 
+Dr. Mercola, citing the work of Dr. Ayoub and others, says: 
+“Thousands of child abuse cases may, in fact, be misdiagnosed cases of rickets caused by either vitamin D deficiency or aluminum adjuvants in vaccines, or both.” He goes on to say, “Vitamin D deficiency is a hidden problem that can actually cause bones to appear as if they’ve been broken on an X-ray, which is a sure diagnosis of abuse to the inexperienced eye.” 
+Dr. Mercola says that Dr. Ayoub estimates that “there may be literally tens of thousands of misdiagnosed cases of child abuse around the country,” and that it is a “trend of misdiagnosis goes back at least 25 years or more.” 
+Dr. Mercola calls this “the other side of the child abuse drama,” and he believes that “it is critical for this information to become more widely known.” He goes on to say that being informed about “how infantile rickets mimics cases of child abuse” is the best way to prevent the “traumatic injustice to parents who really have done nothing wrong, besides listening to and trusting conventional medical advice, which still does not place sufficient weight on the importance of vitamin D.” 
+Dr. Ayoub asserts: 
+“Modern textbooks simply do not cover rickets as textbooks of the past did, and flawed research has been used as the basis to perpetuate the misdiagnosis of healing rickets as an inflicted injury.” 
+Further, he says that the current protocol for doctors does not include testing vitamin D levels in expectant mothers, who are considered “one of the most at-risk populations.” In his opinion, this is “reprehensible medical malpractice.” Apparent Conflict of Interest 
+The complexity of the underlying medical condition of the child is buttressed with the conflict of interest inherent in Child Abuse Specialists, whose only role is to determine and “diagnose” child abuse. Attorney Reguli says: 
+“Child Abuse Specialists aren’t doing true clinical rule-out evaluations.” 
+The hospital pediatricians who are certified as Child Abuse Specialists are considered by default “state expert witnesses.” However, they are not trained in all of the medical areas that they include in their opinions of abuse. 
+Further, Attorney Reguli says: 
+“Doctors like Lowen have a contract with the Department of Children’s Services and have a vested interest in maintaining their relationship with them.” Subsequently, she says, “The Department has to remove children from their homes to get the money they need to fund the agency itself in the current federal funding scheme.” 
+Ultimately, the children and their parents are the ones who pay the price. 
+See Also:",FAKE
+7564,Donald Trump May Have Broken The Law To Avoid Paying Federal Income Taxes,"By Sean Colarossi on Mon, Oct 31st, 2016 at 9:52 pm Trump used a “tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.” Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+While Donald Trump has repeatedly said he took advantage of loopholes that allowed him to legally pay nothing in federal income taxes for decades, the New York Times reported on Monday that Trump may have actually crossed a legal boundary to avoid paying his fair share. 
+According to the Times, the Republican nominee used a “tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.” 
+The report: 
+Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s. 
+Moreover, the tax experts said the maneuver trampled a core tenet of American tax policy by conferring enormous tax benefits to Mr. Trump for losing vast amounts of other people’s money — in this case, money investors and banks had entrusted to him to build a casino empire in Atlantic City. 
+The reason that Trump bent over backward – and potentially broke laws – to avoid paying these taxes is because he was scrambling to “stave off financial ruin.” 
+This is the same man who claims he would be a great president because of his “successful” business background. 
+Yet, he calls himself the “king of debt.” His businesses have declared bankruptcy six times. He has spent decades paying zero dollars in federal income taxes. He lost a billion dollars in a single year running a casino business. Reporting out tonight even suggests that he has direct financial ties to Russia. 
+All of this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his business background. 
+Even as all of this information is out there, American voters still know very little about Donald Trump’s finances because he has refused to be transparent about them. 
+And consider this: What Trump is hiding in his tax returns must be much worse than the already damning information that keeps coming out through good reporting. If it weren’t, he would have already released them. 
+The latest New York Times story is just the latest installment of Trump’s shady business background. The media should spend the remaining week of this campaign demanding more answers from a man who wants to be in charge of the country’s pocketbook.",FAKE
+5238,Who will Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment actually alienate?,"""To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables,'"" Hillary Clinton said at a New York fundraiser on Sept. 9. ""The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up."" (Video: The Washington Post / Photo: AP)
+
+Hillary Clinton's declaration Friday night at a New York fundraiser that ""half"" of Donald Trump's supporters fit into a ""basket of deplorables"" seems, in its tersest formation, like a stupid comment to make. The New York Times's Michael Barbaro sums up that sentiment.
+
+But my summary above is not a fair condensation what Clinton said — and the fuller context makes it clear what she was aiming at.
+
+""To just be grossly generalistic,"" Clinton said according to a transcript from BuzzFeed's Ruby Cramer, ""you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.""
+
+She talked a bit about how Trump has interacted with that racist element and then continued. ""But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here … but that other basket are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures — they're just desperate for change. … Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.""
+
+Trump's campaign — and Trump himself — quickly tried to make hay from the first part.
+
+But there are two ways in which this differs from something like President Obama's ""cling to guns and religion"" comments from another fundraiser in 2008.
+
+The first is that the ""clingers"" remark disparaged something that was positive: a person's religion or their cultural affinity for gun ownership and sportsmanship. It was a dismissal of things of which people were proud. Clinton, however, was saying that half of Trump's base was motivated by negative inclinations: racism, sexism. No one is going to say, ""Hey, how dare you disparage my family's history of being racist.""
+
+Trump's tweet said she insulted his supporters, but Clinton clearly delineated between two groups of supporters, and she offered words of understanding to the latter. So let's break the electorate out into four groups and consider how the comment will play.
+
+1. Clinton supporters. They support Clinton; it seems unlikely they'll be put out.
+
+2. Racist/sexist/xenophobic/Islamophobic Trump supporters. How big a group is this? It's hard to say. Clinton's spokesman Nick Merrill tried to defend his boss's use of ""half"" by saying on Twitter that the racist/xenophobic types ""appear to make up half of his crowd"" at events. (Update: Clinton issued a statement on Saturday apologizing for implying it was ""half"" of Trump supporters.) We do know that 7 percent of Trump supporters think the candidate is racist, suggesting that they themselves don't see racism as a dealbreaker. Regardless of the actual fraction of the Trump base this group constitutes, Clinton's not likely to change their minds away from their preferred candidate, either.
+
+3. Non-'deplorable' Trump supporters. This group will go one of two ways. They'll either a. see Clinton's remarks as insulting them as a whole, or b. be reminded that there are elements of Trump's base of support that makes them uncomfortable. That sense may spur them to be less enthusiastic to go vote for Trump in November.
+
+But notice: Either way, there's no loss for Clinton! If she spurs some Trump supporters to reconsider, the loss is to Trump.
+
+[Republicans think Hillary Clinton just made her own ’47 percent’ gaffe. Did she?]
+
+4. Undecided voters. They'll go one of two ways, too, it seems. Some may think Clinton was being rude and be less likely to support her. Some may similarly be reminded about elements of Trump's base that they don't like and be less likely to back him.
+
+This is a much smaller group than the number of Trump backers, mind you. In the current RealClearPolitics average, Trump backers are about 43 percent of the electorate and undecided voters are about 12 percent. If Clinton sways 5 percent of the (let's say) 90 percent of Trump backers who aren't ""deplorables"" to rethink their support, that's 2 percent of the overall electorate. If she loses 10 percent of the undecideds, that's 1.2 percent of the electorate.
+
+That's assuming the shorthand here doesn't collapse into ""Clinton insulted all Trump supporters."" This is the point that Barbaro was making. Clinton may have been trying, once again, to separate out non-racist/sexist/xenophobic Trump backers by pointing to those supporting Trump who do hold those objectively deplorable views. It's a tricky line to walk — but compared with ""clingers,"" for example, she's in a slightly better position.
+
+And then there's that other thing about Obama's ""clingers"" comment: He won anyway — twice.",REAL
+3994,U.S. officials: No known threat in wake of Paris attack,"U.S. authorities said Friday there is no known threat to the American homeland in the wake of the deadly terror attacks in Paris, but cities across the country were taking precautions while intelligence officials expressed alarm over the methodology and planning that was evident behind the terrorist acts.
+
+More than 120 people were killed when a series of apparently coordinated shootings and explosions rocked Paris, which officials said evoked memories of the deadly 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, India.
+
+""The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are closely monitoring events in Paris and we are in contact with our counterparts in the region,"" Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement. ""At this time, we know of no specific or credible threats of an attack on the U.S. homeland of the type that occurred in Paris tonight.""
+
+It is still unclear who was behind the attacks. One U.S. counterterrorism official told CNN that the attacks resemble tactics that have been used by a number of terror groups -- including al Qaeda's focus on mass casualty and visibility, and the small, tactical nature of attacks that are more the hallmark of ISIS and its acolytes.
+
+The official noted that Algerian terrorist groups have attacked in Paris in the past, though they don't have much capability to do what unfolded in Paris. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are still trying to determine if there are any U.S. connections with the terrorists or the victims and are working with their French counterparts to ensure there are no immediate threats to the U.S. Two additional U.S. counterterrorism officials told CNN that authorities across the U.S. have convened secure conference calls to try and gather information. And a federal law enforcement official said federal authorities are working with local police agencies around the country to task sources domestically and internationally for information about any individuals possibly associated with the attacks. They're also going back to look at whether there was any intelligence missed indicating these attacks were going to happen, the law enforcement official said, adding that the FBI is also putting additional personnel on standby to be deployed to France to offer any support such as bomb technicians and computer analysts. President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande, second from right, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo arrive at the Bataclan, site of one of the Paris terrorists attacks, to pay their respects to the victims after Obama arrived in town for the COP21 climate change conference early on Monday, November 30, in Paris. The Eiffel Tower in Paris is illuminated in the French national colors on Monday, November 16. Displays of support for the French people were evident at landmarks around the globe after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, November 13. People hold hands as they observe a minute of silence in Lyon, France, on November 16, three days after the Paris attacks. A minute of silence was observed throughout the country in memory of the victims of the country's deadliest violence since World War II. French President Francois Hollande, center, flanked by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, right, and French Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, center left, stands among students during a minute of silence in the courtyard of the Sorbonne University in Paris on November 16. A large crowd gathers to lay flowers and candles in front of the Carillon restaurant in Paris on Sunday, November 15. A man sits next to candles lit as homage to the victims of the deadly attacks in Paris at a square in Rio de Janeiro on November 15. People light candles in tribute to the Paris victims on November 15 in Budapest, Hungary. People gather outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on November 15 for a national service for the victims of the city's terror attacks. People write messages on the ground at Place de la Republique in Paris on November 15. People pray during a candlelight vigil for victims of the Paris attacks at a church in Islamabad, Pakistan, on November 15. French golfer Gregory Bourdy passes a peace symbol for the Paris victims during the BMW Shanghai Masters tournament November 15 in Shanghai, China. A man offers a prayer in memory of victims of the Paris attacks at the French Embassy in Tokyo on November 15. A woman holds a candle atop a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower during a candlelight vigil Saturday, November 14, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Front pages of Japanese newspapers in Tokyo show coverage and photos of the Paris attacks on November 14. An electronic billboard on a canal in Milan, Italy reads, in French, ""I'm Paris,"" on November 14. The Eiffel Tower stands dark as a mourning gesture on November 14, in Paris. More than 125 people were killed in a series of coordinated attacks in Paris on Friday. People around the world reacted in horror to the deadly terrorist assaults. Lithuanians hold a candlelight vigil in front of the French Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, on November 14. Thousands gather in London's Trafalgar Square for a candlelit vigil on November 14 to honor the victims of the Paris attacks. A woman lights candles at a memorial near the Bataclan theater in Paris on November 14. A man places a candle in front of Le Carillon cafe in Paris on November 14. A woman holds a French flag during a gathering in Stockholm, Sweden, on November 14. Nancy Acevedo prays for France during the opening prayer for the Sunshine Summit being held at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida on November 14. French soldiers of the United Nations' interim forces in Lebanon observe the national flag at half-staff at the contingent headquarters in the village of Deir Kifa on November 14. A couple surveys the signature sails of the Sydney Opera House lit in the colors of the French flag in Sydney on November 14. A woman places flowers in front of the French Consulate in St. Petersburg, Russia, on November 14. Candles are lit in Hong Kong on November 14 to remember the scores who died in France. A woman lights a candle outside the French Consulate in Barcelona, Spain, on November 14. Britain's Prince Charles expresses solidarity with France at a birthday barbecue in his honor near Perth, Australia, on November 14. The French national flag flutters at half-staff on November 14 at its embassy in Beijing. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte after a speech on November 14 in The Hague following the attacks. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe becomes emotional after his speech on the French attacks during the opening ceremony of a Japanese garden in Istanbul, Turkey, on November 14. A woman mourns outside Le Carillon bar in the 10th district of Paris on November 14. The attackers ruthlessly sought out soft targets where people were getting their weekends underway. People lay flowers outside the French Embassy in Moscow on November 14. Mourners gather outside Le Carillon bar in the 10th district of Paris on November 14. ""We were listening to music when we heard what we thought were the sounds of firecrackers,"" a doctor from a nearby hospital who was drinking in the bar with colleagues told Le Monde. ""A few moments later, it was a scene straight out of a war. Blood everywhere."" People attend a vigil outside the French Consulate in Montreal. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered ""all of Canada's support"" to France on Friday, November 13, in the wake of the attacks. Police show a heightened presence in Times Square in New York on November 13, following the terrorist attacks in Paris. People light candles at a vigil outside the French Consulate in Montreal on November 13. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, fans observe a moment of silence for the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris before a basketball game November 13. The house lights are shut off and scoreboard dark as Boston Celtics players pause for a moment of silence for the Paris victims before an NBA basketball game against the Atlanta Hawks in Boston on November 13. People light candles at a vigil outside the French Consulate in Montreal on November 13. One of the primary reasons for alarm among U.S. counterterrorism officials is the lack of relevant intelligence before the attacks began. Intelligence agencies are looking at communications intercepts for clues as to any advanced planning or coordination, a U.S. intelligence official said. The U.S. collects overseas communications in Europe and elsewhere, and in the past, such reviews have uncovered emails and other communications that show planning, the intelligence official added. Local police departments moved quickly to place units on extra alert. In Los Angeles, extra police were deployed at critical sites like airports. In Washington, enhanced patrols were sent near the Capitol. In New York City, the New York Police Department was giving special attention and increasing its presence at soft targets such as nightclubs, theaters and museums, along with locations tied to France, another federal law enforcement official said. Authorities are also scrutinizing known terror suspects in the U.S. and boosting surveillance of them, the law enforcement officials said. ""We will not hesitate to adjust our security posture, as appropriate, to protect the American people,"" an FBI spokesperson said in a statement. ""DHS and the FBI routinely share information with our state, local, federal and international law enforcement, intelligence and homeland security partners, and continually evaluate the level of protection we provide at federal facilities."" Sign up for CNN Politics' Nightcap newsletter, serving up today's best and tomorrow's essentials in politics.",REAL
+9594,Bad News For Jackson Family As Woman Leaks Star’s Sick $900k Sex Secret,"Share This 
+Despite being dead for over 7 years, it seems that Michael Jackson’s name has just been dragged back into the spotlight once again. Unfortunately for his family, it looks like bad news for the star’s estate as a woman leaked the $900,000 sex secret he had kept quiet for a whopping 30 years – and she has proof. 
+Most people are aware of Jackson’s depraved past involving children – specifically, little boys. However, the most recent person to come forward is actually a woman, who states that the deceased star had molested and sexually assaulted her about 3 decades prior. 
+According to LA Times , “The alleged abuse started in 1986 and occurred in such iconic locations as Neverland Ranch, the set of ‘Moonwalker,’ Jackson’s Encino mansion, and in the back of the singer’s limousine, according to papers filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.” Unfortunately for the family and Jackson’s estate, her word isn’t all the accuser was armed with . Stock image of Michael Jackson’s “Neverland” ranch 
+Among the court filings are scanned copies of checks purportedly paid to her from Jackson or his entertainment companies, which she says were issued to pay her off in exchange for her silence. In all, the checks totaled a whopping $900,000 – a damning number to say the least. 
+Furthermore, the largest sum, a check for $600,000, was dated in late 1993, which just so happens to be three months after Jackson found himself in yet another lawsuit, that time with a 13-year-old boy saying he had been molested by the King of Pop. Of course, the payment comes at a time where Jackson would have wanted to ensure that all of his other skeletons remained perfectly quiet in his closet. 
+Oddly enough, this is the only time a female victim has come forward to allege a Jackson sexual assault. In addition to that, the woman’s lawyer, Vince Finaldi, said the case offers the first evidence that Jackson and his production company — not an insurance carrier — made direct payments to an alleged abuse victim. Michael Jackson (Source: LA Times ) 
+The abuse allegedly lasted for over 3 years, beginning when the girl was merely 12 years old and ending just after her 15 th birthday. LA Times adds: 
+The woman alleges that for about three years, Jackson fondled her, forced her to orally copulate him, and attempted to have sexual intercourse with her, which caused her to bleed, the lawsuit states. 
+Jackson also supplied her with gifts and letters, and two of the notes were attached to the lawsuit. One of the letters ends, “I’m crazy about you. … All my love, Michael.” 
+Of course, the Jackson family lawyer is saying that the entire ordeal is a made-up claim meant to do nothing more than leech off of the star’s estate. As the woman – being a sex assault victim – and her identity are being kept quiet for the time being, it’s hard to say whether she’s looking for a payout or something more. 
+Although this man is dead and buried, and under most circumstances should be left to rest in peace, no sex assault victim should ever go without justice. Although money is a good way to buy silence, it certainly does not equate to anything near justice. In fact, it represents the exact opposite as it proves that if you have enough money, you can get away with anything – even sexually abusing a child. This woman deserves her day in court, and it certainly doesn’t look like the Jackson family is going to like the end result.",FAKE
+7761,FBI debunks Hillary's Conspiracy Theory: Trump is NOT a Russian Agent,"
+FBI officials say their investigation into links between US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Russia has been unable to uncover any so far, according to the New York Times.
+The bureau has been trying to find evidence showing that the Russian government is trying to influence the US presidential campaign since the beginning of summer. FBI agents have put advisers close to GOP candidate Donald Trump under close scrutiny, searching for financial connections that some have alleged exist between the nominee and Russian financial figures. They even followed up on a lead hinting that there had been a secret email correspondence between Trump’s Organization and Russia’s Alfa-bank. All the while, the bureau has been searching for the hackers that breached the computers of the Democratic camp and leaked emails that became the source of many scandals damaging to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
+Nonetheless, the FBI still cannot say that any of its investigations have uncovered direct links between Trump and Russian authorities, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing recent interviews and its own bureau sources.
+“No evidence has emerged that would link [Trump] or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations,” writes the NYT.
+Officials also anonymously told the NYT that whoever the hackers were, the attacks were aimed at disrupting the presidential race on the whole, and not boosting Trump’s chances of getting into the Oval Office, as the Western media and Democrats have been claiming.
+In explaining why Russia would want to interfere in the campaign, one senior official was cited as saying, “It isn’t about the election‌ It’s about a threat to democracy.”
+The FBI’s inquiries will continue, however. In interviews over the past several weeks, intelligence officials have signaled that they have opened a larger probe to look into suspicions over connections between Trump aides and Moscow.
+In the most recent lead, an anonymous computer scientist going by the name Tea Leaves found some 2,700 “look-up” messages that tied a server being used by one of Donald Trump’s companies to those of Russia’s Alfa Bank.
+Still, the FBI found that there was no two-way communication, and these messages could have been marketing emails or spam. Both the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank issued statements denying that they had been in communication.
+
+The FBI is also probing Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, whose foreign business and political dealings have come under scrutiny since reports surfaced claiming he was involved with a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, NBC reported, citing intelligence sources.
+‘Russia hacking’ vs Clinton emails 
+A separate report from CNBC citing a former FBI official claims that the bureau’s director, James Comey, was privately reluctant about naming Russia as the entity responsible for meddling in the US election campaign, reportedly saying it was too close to the November 8 Election Day.
+In the beginning of October, Comey allegedly concluded that “a foreign power was trying to undermine the election,” but arguing against putting it out before the election itself.
+He also allegedly made sure that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not mentioned in the document compiled by the US government on October 7, which officially accused Russia of “authorizing” the hacking of emails accounts of US officials and organizations, out of concern that the FBI would be seen as interfering with the election if it was included.
+However, last Friday, with the election mere days away, Comey announced that the bureau was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton because several hundred thousand new emails that may be related to the private server used by the Democratic nominee had allegedly been discovered.
+The announcement, which left many in the government puzzled, has already resulted in official complaints and attacks from the entire US political spectrum. On Monday, some 100 former federal prosecutors and senior Department of Justice officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, signed a letter expressing concern over Comey’s decision to reopen the case “on the eve of a major election,” as “the mere disclosure of information may impact the election’s outcome” at this stage.
+Clinton’s supporters have accused Comey of deliberately hiding “explosive” information about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, demanding that he discuss them publicly, just as he did with the new batch of Clinton-related emails.
+Hillary Clinton and her supporters have repeatedly criticized Trump for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin, while Trump has retorted that he has “nothing to do” with Russia and doesn’t know its leader personally.
+Putin on accusations of meddling: ‘rubbish’ 
+Russia, in turn, has denied having any links to the Trump camp on numerous occasions, while refuting accusations that it had been behind the hacking attacks on the Democrats, with Russian President Vladimir Putin calling them “rubbish” last week.
+“The image [that Russia supports a candidate in the US presidential election] was created by the media,” Putin said at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi last Thursday, stressing that this had been done deliberately.
+“This is complete and utter rubbish, and it is just a method of internal political struggle, as well as a way of manipulating the public consciousness ahead of the US presidential elections,” he added, while explaining that Russia does not prefer any particular candidate and is ready to work with either of them. Russia’s president also stressed that friendly words and intentions to normalize relations between the US and Russia are always welcome, “whoever expresses them.”
+Source 
+",FAKE
+8018,Megyn Kelly Finally Reveals The Details Of Ailes’ Sexual Harrassment,"Comments 
+FOX News star Megyn Kelly has finally revealed the disturbing details of the abuse and harrassment she endured at the right-wing propaganda factory. Serial sexual predator and fascist ideologue Roger Ailes lost his job as the CEO of FOX News a few months ago after anchor Gretchen Carlson publicly accused her old boss of sexually harassing her and using his position to try to extort sexual favors from her. 
+As the male stars of the network rushed to defend Ailes and over a dozen women came forward to share their own stories, Kelly stayed silent – for a time. Now, she’s adding material to her upcoming memoir detailing how Ailes harassed her and threatened her job : 
+“Roger began pushing the limits. There was a pattern to his behavior. I would be called into Roger’s office, he would shut the door, and over the next hour or two, he would engage in a kind of cat-and-mouse game with me—veering between obviously inappropriate sexually charged comments (e.g. about the ‘very sexy bras’ I must have and how he’d like to see me in them) and legitimate professional advice.” 
+Kelly also claims Ailes offered to promote her through the ranks “in exchange for sexual favors.” At one point, she writes, he “crossed a new line—trying to grab me repeatedly and kiss me on the lips.” Upon her rebuffing his advances, she recalls, “he asked me an ominous question: ‘When is your contract up?’ And then, for the third time, he tried to kiss me.” 
+After Ailes was fired (with a $40 million severance package!), he almost immediately joined the presidential campaign of fellow serial sexual predator Donald Trump. 
+The fall of Ailes and the backlash surrounding Donald Trump’s “hot mic” audio comments in which he admits to sexual assault have brought the issue of sexual harassment and the ways in which powerful white men abuse women in the workplace into the forefront of the public eye. 
+Men like Ailes and Trump have gotten away with their crimes for far too long; women have been forced to suffer in silence, forced to choose between their dignity and agency over their own bodies or their careers and financial well-being – a choice nobody should have to make. The more women that come forward to tell their stories, the more will follow – and hopefully we can someday geld the toxic patriarchy which silences women and allows predators to roam free.",FAKE
+8046,"‘Most wanted’ drug baron hands himself in, says life on the run ‘got too much’","‘Most wanted’ drug baron hands himself in, says life on the run... ‘Most wanted’ drug baron hands himself in, says life on the run ‘got too much’ By 0 157 
+A notorious British drug baron turned himself in to the cops because the “pressure” of life on the run became too much for him. 
+Robert Gerrard, of Liverpool, handed himself over to National Crime Agency (NCA) officers in Manchester after being named on a Most Wanted list of criminals. 
+The 53-year-old made the arrangements through his solicitor after complaining the “ pressure of being on the run had got too much for him .” 
+He was added to the UK’s Most Wanted list as part of Operation Return, a campaign to capture criminals on the lam. 
+He appeared in Manchester Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday, where he was charged with conspiracy to import cocaine in a £60 million (US$75 million) plot. 
+Gerrard is believed to have used Café de Ketel, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as a front for international drug trafficking. 
+NCA regional head of investigations Greg McKenna said: “ Robert Gerrard handing himself in shows the impact we are having with our Most Wanted campaigns. Three arrests in under a week is a tremendous result. 
+“ We don’t know at this stage how long Gerrard has been back in the UK for, but he told our officers that the pressure of being on the run had got too much for him . 
+“ The fugitives on our Most Wanted list really do have nowhere to hide. I would urge any of the remaining ones to take note – save yourself the trouble and hand yourself in because we will never stop hunting you and you will face justice, ” he added. 
+Crimestoppers director of operations Roger Critchell said: “ The fact Robert Gerrard handed himself in to police is again an indication that when the pressure mounts, hiding places become harder to find. 
+“ This is a great result as it follows two fugitive arrests in the last week from our sister campaign targeting those on the run in Spain. These campaigns really do work .” 
+His next hearing will be at Manchester Magistrates’ Court on November 23. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+6008,State Polls: Trump Gains DRAMATICALLY | Daily Wire,"— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 31, 2016 
+Remington Research's summary of the polling data asserted that the race has become ""increasingly competitive"": 
+Last week, we found a presidential race where Hillary Clinton held a clear advantage. This week, we find an increasingly competitive race with just eight days to go. Trump appears to be holding strong in his must-win states and Colorado remains within the margin of error. The data also show that Pennsylvania has moved into the margin of error category. 
+“The presidential race remains very competitive as we move into the final stretch. Hillary maintains an advantage leading in Colorado and Pennsylvania, but at this point anything can happen,” said Titus Bond, Director of Remington Research Group 
+Other state polling data came out on Sunday that also showed a close-race between Trump and Clinton, although the polls were surveyed before FBI director James Comey's announcement that they were re-opening their investigation against Clinton . Via RealClearPolitics : Florida: New York Times/Siena: Trump 46 percent, Clinton 42 percent. NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist: Clinton 45 percent, Trump 44 percent. Gravis: Clinton 48 percent, Trump 47 percent. Colorado: CBS News/YouGov: Clinton 42 percent, Trump 39 percent. Arizona: CBS/YouGov: Trump 44 percent, Clinton 42 percent. North Carolina: NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist: Clinton 47 percent, Trump 41 percent. Gravis: Clinton 49 percent, Trump 47 percent. CBS News/YouGov: Clinton 48 percent, Trump 45 percent. Pennsylvania: CBS News/YouGov: Clinton 48 percent, Trump 40 percent. 
+The fact that some of these polls were close even before the Comey announcement led to this observation from FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver: Both things can be true: 1) Comey impact overblown — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 31, 2016 
+Radio host Steve Deace writes at Conservative Review that while early voting has been overwhelmingly in favor of Clinton, the renewed FBI investigation could ""have a potentially huge impact"" on Election Day: 
+Trump was on defense on the election map as he had to defend states like Arizona, Georgia, Utah, Indiana, and Alaska that rarely go blue on Election Day. It’s quite conceivable that yet another reminder of the stench of corruption that has long surrounded the Clintons could sway the bulk of Republican-leaning undecideds Trump’s way. But that’s provided, of course, that he can withstand his compulsion to negatively influence a favorable news cycle as he’s been prone to do. Then there’s the matter of Trump’s emerging Evan McMullin headache in Utah. 
+If Trump can be disciplined this final week, his campaign may have the freedom to focus its efforts on Iowa, Nevada, Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. Those five states would get him within striking distance to 265 Electoral College votes, and then you hope you can pull an upset in Colorado, Pennsylvania, or New Mexico where Trump is visiting during the campaign’s final week. The hope is that there’s enough voters in those states wearier of Clinton’s corruption than worried about whether Trump’s fit for office. 
+FiveThirtyEight currently has Trump's odds of winning the presidency at 23.6 percent in their polls-plus forecast. This week will be crucial for Trump in increasing those odds, and maybe the FBI's re-opened investigation into Clinton will help improve those odds as it becomes closer to Election Day. Tags ",FAKE
+9043,Johnson & Johnson Loses Yet Another Multimillion Dollar Case Over Baby Powder,"By Brandon Turbeville In the latest development in the Johnson & Johnson talcum powder saga, a St. Louis jury has awarded a California woman over... ",FAKE
+7268,Former US Attorney for DC: New Hillary Email Probe Was Result of ‘Revolt’ Inside FBI,"Former United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova suggested Friday James Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails was the product of a “revolt” inside the FBI. 
+While speaking with WMAL’s Larry O’Connor , diGenova was asked what Comey meant by saying newly discovered Clinton emails from Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s devices “appear to be pertinent” to the FBI’s prior investigation. 
+“It tells me that the original investigation was not thorough, and that it was an incompetent investigation,” diGenova said, “otherwise they would have discovered this — and I’ll tell you why.” 
+“These were found on the phone that was used by Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin,” he said. “Why was that phone not looked at originally?” 
+“There could be one explanation: Huma Abedin may have denied that any other phone existed, and if she did, she committed a felony. She lied to the FBI just like General Cartwright, and if she did, she’s dead meat, and Comey knows it, and there’s nothing he can do about it.” 
+diGenova continued: “And why this letter was sent today was very simple: the agents came to Comey yesterday, they told him about the evidence, and he said oh ‘S’, and realized that his goose was cooked, that this would prove conclusively that his original investigation was incompetent, and he knew that the agents running the Weiner case would leak it if he did not send this letter to congress.” 
+“And I’ve also been told something very significant, it’s been reported that those laptops [belonging to Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson] were destroyed, they were not, and the reason is the FBI agents refused to do it.” 
+diGenova went on to say he believes “there is a quiet but serious revolt against the director right now.” 
+“He sent those letters today because he is in deep trouble inside the bureau,” he said. “Comey sent this letter today because he had to. He has no moral authority inside the agency right now, he’s a joke, he’s a laughingstock of the agency, and among former FBI agents, he has become an anathema.” 
+Listen to the full interview courtesy of WMAL: 
+Courtesy of Information Liberation Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+981,The Daily 202: Ted Cruz’s war with Matt Drudge could become a huge problem for his campaign,"The Drudge Report has aggressively portrayed Ted Cruz’s sweep of all the delegates from Colorado’s Republican convention as a corrupt power grab.
+
+The site named for Matt Drudge, who broke the story of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and still runs it, links to nine stories this morning with salacious headlines about the convention. Among them: “Savage: Cruz should disavow rigged Colorado election … Buchanan: Apparatchiks thieve delegates for Ted … 1 MILLION REPUBLICANS SIDELINED … Border Patrol Agents: Colorado Voters Disenfranchised.” Keep in mind that this is three days after the Colorado convention.
+
+Our analytics partners at Zignal Labs say the Drudge attacks are breaking through on social media in a significant way. This word cloud, which tracks all Cruz mentions since Saturday, shows the extent to which Drudge has shaped the conversation about Cruz’s win in Colorado. Note the prominence of the words “cheating” and “drudge”:
+
+This kind of squabbling will only get louder as the delegate wrestling and wrangling intensifies. And it has clearly gotten under Cruz’s skin.
+
+In a radio interview yesterday, the Texas senator ripped into Drudge as an arm of Donald Trump’s campaign. “In about the past month, the Drudge Report has basically become the attack site for the Trump campaign,” he told conservative host Mike Slater. “So every day they have the latest Trump attack. They’re directed at me. … Most days they have a six-month-old article that is some attack on me, and it’s whatever the Trump campaign is pushing that day will be the banner headline on Drudge.”
+
+“By the way, they no longer cover news,” Cruz added of Drudge. “When we win a state, suddenly the state doesn’t matter. You know Colorado — there was no red siren on Drudge when we won all 34 delegates in Colorado.”
+
+Drudge responded by posting a link to a January Fox News interview in which Cruz praised the conservative site for breaking the mainstream media’s “stranglehold.""
+
+It’s never good to pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel, as they say. Or whatever the 2016 version of that line is.
+
+If it was just Trump complaining about the “crooked” system, it would seem like sour grapes from a guy who got out-hustled. But The Donald’s allies in the right-wing media, including Drudge and Breitbart, are trying to make Cruz’s wins seem illegitimate in the eyes of the conservative base. If Cruz wins the nomination at a contested convention in Cleveland, he will need these grass-roots activists to rally around him. If regular Drudge readers believe he did not win fair and square, they will be less inclined to do so.
+
+Interestingly, the increasing scrutiny from Drudge comes as the Democratic National Committee begins to train more of its fire at Cruz. After focusing almost single-mindedly on Trump for months, the DNC held a press call yesterday to blast the Texan ahead of campaign stops in California. Ironically, they pushed a similar message as Drudge: “Cruz’s campaign is proving to be just as divisive for the Republican Party as his tenure in the Senate has been for our country,” said the DNC communications director. “That’s why there just isn’t a whole lot of excitement for Cruz being the Republican nominee.”
+
+– Donald Trump says he identifies with Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” He praised the novel and its protagonist in a broader interview with USA Today that posted yesterday. “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to ... everything,” the GOP front-runner told the paper. Columnist Kirsten Powers writes that she pointed out that “The Fountainhead” is “in a way about the tyranny of groupthink.” Trump reportedly sat up and told her, “That’s what is happening here.”
+
+For those who haven't read the book since high school, Roark is an architect who dynamites a housing project he designed because he is angry about changes that others made to his blueprints. He’s then put on trial for arson, but a jury acquits him after he delivers an eloquent speech about the need to always stay true to one’s self. Gary Cooper delivered the courtroom monologue in the 1949 film adaptation:
+
+Bottom line, Roark is a self-centered individualist who steadfastly refuses to submit to the will of others. “He is presented as the author's version of an ideal man — one who embodies the virtues of Rand's objectivist philosophy,” the CliffNotes character analysis explains. “Roark is an example of free will — the theory that an individual has the power, by virtue of the choices he makes, to control the outcome of his own life. A man's thinking and values are not controlled by God or the fates or society or any external factor — but solely by his own choice.”
+
+Is The Donald threatening to blow up the Republican Party if he’s spurned in Cleveland? He almost certainly has not thought through the implications of publicly identifying with Roark and embracing objectivism. But it’s nonetheless another revealing window into his psyche.
+
+It’s also a reflection of how Trump does not play by the same rules that normal politicians must. In 2012, Paul Ryan tried hard to distance himself from Rand, whose work he had often praised. “I adored her novels when I was young, and in many ways they gave me an interest in economics,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2014. “But as a devout, practicing Catholic, I completely reject the philosophy of objectivism.”
+
+WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
+
+-- Forty percent of former NFL players show signs of traumatic brain injuries, according to a groundbreaking study that will be presented at next week’s American Academy of Neurology. This is one of the largest studies performed on living NFL players, and it offers “the most conclusive evidence yet” of a definitive link between brain injury and playing football. Travis M. Andrews explains that the study is based on sensitive MRI scans called diffusion tensor imaging.
+
+MORE ON THE REPUBLICAN RACE:
+
+-- Phyllis Schlafly is facing backlash after endorsing Trump last month, including an attempt to oust her as the head of the Eagle Forum, the conservative group she founded 44 years ago to stop the Equal Rights Amendment. From David Weigel: ""Ed Martin, who Schlafly elevated to president of Eagle Forum in 2015, told [the Post] that Schlafly had not been ousted yet, but that it was clearly the plan of Eagle's board. In an interview with WorldNetDaily, which publishes her work, the 91-year-old Schafly speculated that her Trump endorsement and opposition to the idea of a National Convention of States had roiled her opponents.""
+
+-- John Kasich, speaking today in Manhattan, will call his candidacy the GOP's only way out of a “path to darkness.” “Without naming Cruz or Trump, Kasich plans to indict them both,” writes Weigel, who reviewed the planned remarks.
+
+-- Ben Carson continues to be the worst surrogate of the cycle. He admitted yesterday that his support for Trump is “purely pragmatic"" and said he'd probably oppose him “if the stakes weren’t so high.” (BuzzFeed)
+
+-- Trump told USA Today he could envision putting Marco Rubio in his cabinet. “Yes. I like Marco Rubio. Yeah. I could,” he said. “There are people I have in mind in terms of vice president. I just haven’t told anybody names. ... I do like Marco. I do like Kasich. … I like [Scott] Walker actually in a lot of ways. I hit him very hard. ... But I’ve always liked him. There are people I like, but I don’t think they like me because I have hit them hard.”
+
+-- MORE DELEGATE SETBACKS FOR TRUMP, in addition to the ones outlined in yesterday's 202. Per Ed O'Keefe, Trump also got outgunned last weekend in:
+
+MORE ON THE DEMOCRATIC RACE:
+
+-- THREE NEW YORK POLLS: With one week until the primary, Trump and Clinton are dominating:
+
+So much for home-field advantage: That Monmouth survey finds only 29 percent of voters consider Clinton -- who has lived in the state for 16 years and served as senator for eight years -- to be a “real New Yorker,” while 28 said the same for Sanders, who left the state after high school.
+
+-- Tensions continued to escalate in the battle for New York:
+
+Clinton devoted a Long Island campaign event entirely to gun control, all but blaming Sanders for crime in New York City. From Philip Rucker and Abby Phillip: “Clinton convened a round table-style discussion … where she, along with the local congressman, Rep. Steve Israel (D), and gun-safety advocates hammered Sanders.... 'Here’s what I want you to know: Most of the guns that are used in crimes and violence and killings in New York come from out of state. The state that has the highest per-capita number of those guns that end up committing crime in New York come from Vermont,’ Clinton said, eliciting gasps.… ‘So this is not, ‘Oh, no, I live in a rural state. We don’t have any of these problems.'""
+
+The Post's Fact Checker gives Clinton Three Pinocchios for this line of attack: ""Clinton has carefully crafted the talking point to find the particular government data that support her point, which gives a wildly different view than how trafficking flows are tracked,"" Michelle Ye Hee Lee writes. ""We do not find the per capita measure as a fair assessment of gun flows from Vermont into New York. The difference between this point using per capita calculation and the raw number (1 percent of crime guns with source states identified in 2014 came from Vermont) is so stark that it creates a significantly misleading impression to the public.""
+
+Sanders called for a national ban on fracking. The Vermont senator released a new ad to highlight his opposition, narrated by actress Susan Sarandon. ""Do Washington politicians side with polluters over families?"" asks Sarandon. ""They sure do, because Big Oil pumps millions into their campaigns. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate for president who opposes fracking everywhere.""
+
+-- Joe Biden said Sanders calling Clinton ""unqualified"" was not sexist but something said in the heat of a campaign. During an interview with Mic.com, the vice president was asked about Sanders’ comment and if he thought Hillary is held to a higher standard because she is a woman. “No, I don’t think she’s held to a higher standard,” he replied.
+
+“This country’s ready for a woman,” Biden elaborated. “There’s no problem. We’re going to be able to elect a woman in this country.”
+
+When the female interviewer asked Biden if he’d like to see a woman elected, a male aide to the VP interrupted from off camera and tried to end the interview. “That’s it,” he said. “I would like to see a woman elected,” Biden said. “I don’t mind,” he told the staffers standing off camera. “The president and I are not going to endorse because we both when we ran said, ‘let the party decide.’ But gosh almighty, they’re both qualified,” he added. “Hillary is overwhelmingly qualified to be president.”
+
+-- “Past cases suggest Hillary won’t be indicted,"" by Politico's Josh Gerstein: A review of dozens of recent federal investigations ""suggests that it’s highly unlikely, but not impossible. The examination … found some parallels to Clinton’s use of a private server for her emails, but, in nearly all instances that were prosecuted, aggravating circumstances [existed] that don’t appear to be present in Clinton’s case. The relatively few cases that drew prosecution almost always involved a deliberate intent to violate classification rules as well as some add-on element … a Boeing engineer who brought home 2000 classified documents and whose travel to Israel raised suspicions; a [NSA] official who removed boxes of classified documents and also lied on a job application form. And former prosecutors, investigators and defense attorneys generally agree that prosecution for classified information breaches is the exception rather than the rule.… 'They always involve some ‘plus’ factor,’ one former federal prosecutor said.”
+
+-- Bill de Blasio intimated in an interview with Katie Couric that his kids are supporting Sanders, even though he’s backing Clinton. “My kids will speak for themselves,” he told the Yahoo anchor, “but I’ll say this much, they’re the kind of young person that is going to fight for change, no matter what. And absolutely will support the Democratic nominee, whoever it is.” (Watch the full interview here.)
+
+-- “Denmark, a social welfare utopia, takes a nasty turn on refugees,” by Griff Witte: ""Lise Ramslog was out for a stroll in Denmark when she stumbled upon hundreds of exhausted asylum seekers. 70-year-old Ramslog instantly decided to help, transporting several refugees to Sweden. Many would consider Ramslog a good Samaritan. But the Danish government has a different term for her: convicted human smuggler. Denmark is celebrated as a social-welfare utopia. Ranking high in its pantheon of heroes are those who protected Jews during the Holocaust, or who helped oppressed during the Cold War. But when it comes to those fleeing 21st-century conflicts, Denmark has gone into overdrive to broadcast hostility … While Germany continues to welcome asylum seekers, and others held doors open for as long as they could, Denmark has taken a hard line almost from the beginning. Now ordinary Danes are getting caught up in the crackdown, punished for quintessentially good deeds. 'I’m proud of what I did and will never regret ... it,' said Ramslog, her eyes welling with tears. 'But I don’t want to be known as a criminal.'""
+
+-- Meet Trump’s “Beltway establishment guy” -- campaign lawyer and former FEC chairman Donald F. McGahn II. By Ben Terris: ""The night Trump notched his first presidential win, he took the stage and lit into special interests that he declared corrupted Washington. Over his shoulder, a ruddy-faced man licked his teeth. He appeared out of place and seemed to know it. McGahn is one of [the country’s] top election lawyers, a job so highly specialized that its practitioners are almost unavoidably ‘Washington insiders’ by definition.... For a while, McGahn's colleagues either didn't know the firm was representing Trump or didn't mind. That changed late last month when McGahn organized a meeting between the candidate and more than a dozen lawmakers at the firm [Jones Day].… Many current employees just about lost their minds.”
+
+Lesson learned: if you tweet to Ernest Moniz about his hair, he might tweet back:
+
+There was a cash bar at Cruz's event in Orange County:
+
+Looks like Shailene Woodley is for Sanders:
+
+The scaffolding keeps coming down around the Capitol dome:
+
+More than 400 arrests were made yesterday at the Capitol in connection with Democracy Spring demonstrations. (Martin Weil)
+
+Former senator Carl Levin now has a ship named after him:
+
+Cindy McCain hung out with Heidi Heitkamp and Cory Booker over the weekend:
+
+The old Washington Post building is almost gone:
+
+-- CBS, “Meet the ‘Trump Bros,’” by Jacqueline Alemany: ""Eighteen-year-old Jack Rowe sat in the front row of a Trump rally sandwiched between friends. Rowe had some thoughts on Trump's rhetorical treatment of women, which had been dominating headlines. 'Misogyny was an issue about maybe 60, 80 years ago,' said Rowe. 'You know, ISIS is chopping off heads … We’ve got bigger fish to fry.' Young men like Rowe are a common sight at Trump rallies: Mostly white, they travel in packs. They are dudes, jocks, preps … On the campaign trail, they’re known simply as 'Trump Bros.' David Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, said Trump's appeal to young men speaks to anxiety over creeping 'political correctness.' 'It's an F-U to society, who is telling us we are a bad guy because we like hooking up with girls on spring break,' he added. And they see Trump sticking up for that. Manas, a young entrepreneur … whose Twitter bio reads 'Bros do Bro Things' and who made a point of checking himself out in his iPhone camera in selfie mode before speaking with a reporter, piped in enthusiastically. 'I love women!' he said. Trump took the stage, and they screamed.""
+
+-- New York Times, “Trump and New York Tabloids Resume Their Elaborate Dance,” by Michael M. Grynbaum: “As newspaper assignments go, this was a delicate one. Fly to Florida. Walk into Trump’s hospital room. Witness the birth of his second daughter. Linda Stasi, a gossip columnist for The Daily News, did as she was told. ‘I called Donald, and he said, ‘You can’t come to the hospital!’’ she recalled 22 years later. ‘I said, I know, but I’m coming anyway.’ ‘O.K.,’ Trump replied. ‘Then come.’ As the presidential spotlight swings to New York … Trump is reuniting with the press corps he knows best, a boisterous tabloid culture that spawned and nurtured [his] outsize Trump personality. It is also the ink-stained caldron in which Trump, over decades, honed the method of media management, cajoling, combating, at times dissembling, that he has unleashed … in this year’s national campaign. Some Americans have been caught off guard by [Trump’s style] but New York’s media veterans detect the old playbook at work. ‘We’ve had that advantage throughout the whole campaign,’ said Daily News editor Jim Rich.”
+
+On the campaign trail: Everyone but Clinton is in New York. Here's the rundown:
+
+At the White House: President Obama speaks at the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument. In the evening, Vice President Biden speaks at the World FoodProgram USA McGovern-Dole Leadership Award at the Organization of American States.
+
+On Capitol Hill: The Senate meets at 10 a.m. to resume work on the FAA bill. The House meets at 2 p.m. for legislative business. Four suspension votes are expected at 6:30 p.m.
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+-- A damp and cloudy morning followed by sunshine through the rest of the week. “Scattered showers with a few heavier downpours are possible this morning, bringing our early starting temperatures in the 60s back down into the 50s,"" the Capital Weather Gang forecasts. ""Rainfall should be from a tenth to a quarter inch with locally heavier totals. Clouds are slow to depart and hence temperatures slower to warm back up vs. yesterday. We’ll aim for partly sunny skies by mid to late afternoon with afternoon highs in the low-middle 60s.”
+
+-- Police are seeking the killer of a 15-year-old boy who was stabbed to death yesterday at the Deanwood Metro stop in Northeast. No word yet on motive. (Clarence Williams and Peter Hermann)
+
+-- Maryland lawmakers eliminated mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, marking a major shift to dependency-based treatment and education as alternatives to incarceration. (Ovetta Wiggins, Josh Hicks and Fenit Nirappil)
+
+-- In the final hour of Maryland’s session, legislators passed a “Noah’s law.” The safe-driving bill was named after a slain Montgomery County police officer and expands the use of ignition locks for convicted drunk drivers. (Ovetta Wiggins and Josh Hicks)
+
+-- Terry McAuliffe has now vetoed more legislation than any Virginia governor since 1998, nixing bills from the Republican legislature on hot button issues like gay rights and women's access to health care. (Jenna Portnoy)
+
+-- The latest of those vetoes: McAuliffe blocked a bill that would require the use of the electric chair if Virginia could not obtain lethal injection drugs. The governor instead offered a “secrecy measure” that shields the identity of pharmacies who supplied the drugs. (Laura Vozzella and Mark Berman)
+
+-- A 35-year old Woodbridge woman was accused of stabbing a three-month-old baby with a kitchen knife. (Martin Weil)
+
+-- Police arrested a Metrobus rider in Silver Spring after he began assaulting other passengers and attempted to kick open the bus door. (Faiz Siddiqui)
+
+Excited about baseball season? Watch this kid bust a move on first base:
+
+A rare black rhino was euthanized in Zimbabwe after a poacher attack:
+
+Watch a baby wallaby peek out from his mom's pouch for the first time:
+
+Finally, check out SNL's Clinton impersonators through the years:",REAL
+1328,Why A Vote For An Establishment Candidate Could Be A Vote For Trump In N.H.,"Why A Vote For An Establishment Candidate Could Be A Vote For Trump In N.H.
+
+A lot of Republicans will head to the polls in New Hampshire on Tuesday, motivated to vote against Donald Trump.
+
+But because of a quirk in how the state party allocates delegates and how fractured the ""establishment"" field is, it could mean that an anti-Trump vote will actually be a vote for the New York billionaire.
+
+The state party awards delegates on a proportional basis to presidential candidates based on their vote statewide and by congressional district.
+
+But it also has a 10 percent threshold.
+
+What does that mean? It means that if a candidate does not get 10 percent of the vote, he gets no delegates. (And this is a hard threshold — no rounding.)
+
+What's more, not only do those underperforming candidates get no delegates, but whatever delegates they could have gotten based on their vote share go to the winner of the primary (!).
+
+And, right now, the favorite is Trump.
+
+Trump, after all, has been leading in the polls in New Hampshire by double digits for six straight months.
+
+Meanwhile, the so-called ""establishment"" candidates — the kind of mainstream Republicans that usually prevail in New Hampshire — are split. And after Saturday night's debate, with Marco Rubio's lackluster performance, that establishment vote could be fractured even further.
+
+There are 20 delegates at stake in New Hampshire on primary night. Here's a look at how the candidates are performing in the polls currently, what that could translate to delegate-wise and how the 10 percent threshold could affect things.
+
+According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, here's the order of the candidates (with a line inserted to represent the 10 percent cutoff):
+
+So let's do some math: Everyone below the 10 percent threshold — Bush, Christie, Fiorina and Carson — add up to 22 percent.
+
+So 22 percent of 20 is 4.4. Round down, and that means, roughly, another four delegates would be added to Trump's total.
+
+Instead of a 6-3 delegate win, Trump would get 10. Thought about another way: Some 40 percent of Trump's delegates could be coming from people who cast their votes explicitly in opposition to him — or at least for candidates running very different campaigns.
+
+And, by the way, those delegates are bound to vote for Trump at the Republican National Convention in July, because of changes to the Republican National Committee's rules — that all states that hold their nominating contests before March 15 must award their delegates on a proportional basis, and they must be bound to the candidates.",REAL
+3523,"U.S. is hitting Islamic State 'harder than ever,' Obama says","WASHINGTON — President Obama said Saturday that U.S. air strikes are hitting the Islamic State ""harder than ever"" amid a stepped-up U.S. campaign in Iraq and Syria.
+
+""We’re taking out more of their fighters and leaders, their weapons, their oil tankers,"" Obama said in his weekly radio address Saturday. ""Our special operations forces are on the ground, because we’re going to hunt down these terrorists wherever they try to hide. In recent weeks, our strikes have taken out the ISIL finance chief, a terrorist leader in Somalia and the ISIL leader in Libya.""
+
+Much of the recent effort has been directed at the oil smuggling that is the source of much of the Islamic State's revenue. The National Security Council says coalition airstrikes have destroyed 283 oil trucks, 120 oil storage tanks, and a ""significant amount of oil field infrastructure"" in eastern Syria since Nov. 17.
+
+The weekly radio address, which focused on terrorism for the second week in a row, was a more optimistic assessment of the war on terror than any Obama has given since the Islamic State-inspired Dec. 2 shooting in San Bernardino that killed 14 people. ""Our message to these killers is simple: we will find you, and justice will be done,"" he said.
+
+Obama did not directly address the debate over whether to block Muslims from entering the United States, but instead emphasized that most Americans are reaching out to their Muslim neighbors ""to let them know we’re here for each other.""
+
+""Political leaders across the spectrum — Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives — are standing up, forcefully, for freedom of religion,"" he said. ""That’s the message I hope every Muslim American hears — that we’re all part of the same American family.""
+
+In the Republican radio address, Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, said Congress was doing its part by voting to tighten the visa waiver program that allows people to travel to the United States from many European countries without advance approval.
+
+If we get the right information to the right people, we can keep terrorists on the run and off our shores,"" said Hurd, a former CIA agent.
+
+He said the Obama also has to do his part.
+
+""We can’t contain this threat. We have to defeat it. We need a plan and that’s why the House passed a bill that requires the president to come up with a real strategy to defeat ISIS,"" he said. ""We have to be in this for the long haul.""",REAL
+8244,House Republicans Plan Secret Meeting To Discuss Overthrowing Paul Ryan,"By Jason Easley on Tue, Nov 1st, 2016 at 9:38 pm The more things change, the more they stay the same. The House Freedom Caucus is planning a secret meeting, which in typical Republican fashion was leaked to the press, to discuss ousting Paul Ryan and demanding more ransom from GOP leadership. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+The more things change, the more they stay the same. The House Freedom Caucus is planning a secret meeting, which in typical Republican fashion was leaked to the press, to discuss ousting Paul Ryan and demanding more ransom from GOP leadership. 
+Politico reported , “One of the most pressing questions preoccupying Washington is what the group will do about Paul Ryan. The Wisconsin Republican has said he intends to seek another term as House speaker but has rankled members of the group of several dozen Republican lawmakers that drove John Boehner out of the Speakership last year. The Freedom Caucus is also weighing proposals meant to empower its members, some at the expense of GOP leadership’s authority.” 
+There have been early rumblings that Speaker Ryan may be open to making a few deals on policies like tax reform with Hillary Clinton if she wins the election. One of the reasons why these deals may never happen is because of the ability of far right Republicans to cause trouble. 
+If Ryan’s Republican majority shrinks, he will be an even bigger hostage to the far-right wing of his caucus. The dysfunctional dynamic in the House is going to continue even if Hillary Clinton wins the election. Ryan has run into the same hurdles that John Boehner faced. House Republicans are deeply divided and unable to agree on much of anything. 
+The fact that the Freedom Caucus is holding a secret meeting is a sign that nothing is going to change. If Paul Ryan doesn’t cave to their demands, they will force Ryan out of the Speaker position. 
+A group of House Republicans is plotting new ways to keep the House from working properly before a new president has even been elected. 
+This is a reminder that Washington is fine. It’s the Republican Party that’s broken.",FAKE
+2062,Inside the war on coal,"The war on coal is not just political rhetoric, or a paranoid fantasy concocted by rapacious polluters. It’s real and it’s relentless. Over the past five years, it has killed a coal-fired power plant every 10 days. It has quietly transformed the U.S. electric grid and the global climate debate.
+
+The industry and its supporters use “war on coal” as shorthand for a ferocious assault by a hostile White House, but the real war on coal is not primarily an Obama war, or even a Washington war. It’s a guerrilla war. The front lines are not at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Supreme Court. If you want to see how the fossil fuel that once powered most of the country is being battered by enemy forces, you have to watch state and local hearings where utility commissions and other obscure governing bodies debate individual coal plants. You probably won’t find much drama. You’ll definitely find lawyers from the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, the boots on the ground in the war on coal.
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+Beyond Coal is the most extensive, expensive and effective campaign in the Club’s 123-year history, and maybe the history of the environmental movement. It’s gone largely unnoticed amid the furor over the Keystone pipeline and President Barack Obama’s efforts to regulate carbon, but it’s helped retire more than one third of America’s coal plants since its launch in 2010, one dull hearing at a time. With a vast war chest donated by Michael Bloomberg, unlikely allies from the business world, and a strategy that relies more on economics than ecology, its team of nearly 200 litigators and organizers has won battles in the Midwestern and Appalachian coal belts, in the reddest of red states, in almost every state that burns coal.
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+“They’re sophisticated, they’re very active, and they’re better funded than we are,” says Mike Duncan, a former Republican National Committee chairman who now heads the industry-backed American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. “I don’t like what they’re doing; we’re losing a lot of coal in this country. But they do show up.”
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+Coal still helps keep our lights on, generating nearly 40 percent of U.S. power. But it generated more than 50 percent just over a decade ago, and the big question now is how rapidly its decline will continue. Almost every watt of new generating capacity is coming from natural gas, wind or solar; the coal industry now employs fewer workers than the solar industry, which barely existed in 2010. Utilities no longer even bother to propose new coal plants to replace the old ones they retire. Coal industry stocks are tanking, and analysts are predicting a new wave of coal bankruptcies.
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+This is a big deal, because coal is America’s top source of greenhouse gases, and coal retirements are the main reason U.S. carbon emissions have declined 10 percent in a decade. Coal is also America’s top source of mercury, sulfur dioxide and other toxic air pollutants, so fewer coal plants also means less asthma and lung disease—not to mention fewer coal-ash spills and coal-mining disasters. The shift toward cleaner-burning gas and zero-emissions renewables is the most important change in our electricity mix in decades, and while Obama has been an ally in the war on coal—not always as aggressive an ally as the industry claims—the Sierra Club is in the trenches. The U.S. had 523 coal-fired power plants when Beyond Coal began targeting them; just last week, it celebrated the 190th retirement of its campaign in Asheville, N.C., culminating a three-year fight that had been featured in the climate documentary “Years of Living Dangerously.” 
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+ Beyond Coal isn’t the stereotypical Sierra Club campaign, tree-huggers shouting save-the-Earth slogans. Yes, it sometimes deploys its 2.4 million-member, grass-roots army to shutter plants with traditional not-in-my-back-yard organizing and right-to-breathe agitating. But it usually wins by arguing that ditching coal will save ratepayers money.
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+Behind that argument lies a revolution in the economics of power, changes few Americans think about when they flick their switches. Coal used to be the cheapest form of electricity by far, but it’s gotten pricier as it’s been forced to clean up more of its mess, while the costs of gas, wind and solar have plunged in recent years. Now retrofitting old coal plants with the pollution controls needed to comply with Obama’s limits on soot, sulfur and mercury is becoming cost-prohibitive—and the EPA is finalizing its new carbon rules as well as tougher ozone restrictions that should add to the burden. That’s why the Sierra Club finds itself in foxholes with big-box stores, manufacturers and other business interests, fighting coal upgrades that would jack up electricity bills, pushing for cheaper renewables and energy efficiency instead. In a case I watched in Oklahoma City, every stakeholder supported Beyond Coal’s push for a utility to buy more low-cost wind power—including a coalition of industrial customers that reportedly included a Koch Industries-owned paper mill.
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+“They’re not burning bras. They’re fighting dollar to dollar,” says attorney Jim Roth, who represented a group of hospitals on Beyond Coal’s side in the Oklahoma case. “They’ve become masters at bringing financial arguments to environmental questions.”
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+As the affordability case for coal has lost traction, the industry’s defenders have portrayed the war on coal as a war on reliability, an assault on 24-hour “baseload” plants that provide juice when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. They ask how the Sierra Club expects America to run its refrigerators around the clock—since it also opposes nuclear power and has a separate Beyond Gas campaign. Duncan’s group started a Twitter meme warning that Americans could end up #ColdInTheDark, and even Bloomberg suggested to me in a recent interview that the Club’s leaders seem to want Americans to wear loincloths and live in caves.
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+In fact, neither the decline of coal, nor the boom in renewables has blacked out the grid, and Beyond Coal’s leaders are confident electricity markets can handle much more intermittent power. In any case, they see coal as the lowest-hanging fruit in the struggle to stabilize the climate, not only our dirtiest fossil fuel but the one with the cheapest alternatives. In the long run, combating global warming will depend on a multitude of factors, from electric vehicles to carbon releases from deforestation to methane releases from belching cows, but for the next decade, our climate progress depends mostly on reducing our reliance on the black stuff. Coal retirements have enabled Obama to pledge U.S. emissions cuts of up to 28 percent by 2025, which has, in turn, enabled him to strike a climate deal with China and pursue a global deal later this year in Paris.
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+“We’ve found the secret sauce to making progress in unlikely places,” says Bruce Nilles, who leads Beyond Coal from the Club’s San Francisco headquarters. “And every time we beat the coal boys, people say: ‘Whoa. It can be done.’”
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+ The Sierra Club can’t claim full credit for the coal bust. It didn’t ratchet down the prices of gas, wind and solar or enact the flurry of EPA rules ratcheting up the price of coal, although its lobbyists and lawyers have pushed hard for government support for renewables while fighting in court over just about every coal-related regulation. It didn’t produce the energy efficiency boom that has reined in electricity demand, either. Still, a Bloomberg Philanthropies analysis found that at least 40 percent of U.S. coal retirements could not have happened without Beyond Coal’s advocacy. The status quo wields a lot of power in the heavily regulated power sector, where economics and mathematics don’t always beat politics and inertia. The case for change keeps getting stronger, but someone has to make the case.
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+When Mary Anne Hitt, Beyond Coal’s national director, first visited Indianapolis to fight an inner-city plant, the headline in the Star was: “Beyond Coal’s Director Faces Tough Sell in Indiana.” But after two years of door-knocking, phone-banking and educating officials on the new realities of electricity, the Sierra Club and its local partners helped shut down the plant. Hitt has seen the same kind of miracle in Chicago, in Omaha, alongside a Paiute tribe reservation in Nevada, even in coal strongholds like Kentucky. It’s starting to feel more like a pattern than a miracle.
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+“David is fighting Goliath every day, and David keeps winning,” Hitt says.
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+Energy analysts have a way of making Goliath’s new underdog status seem inevitable. Then again, it wasn’t long ago that their burning question about the U.S. coal industry was not how fast it would go away, but how fast it would grow.
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+The story of coal is a rich vein in the American story, powering our industry, our railroads, our politics. For decades, the work of extracting coal after millions of years underground—so dangerous for some, so lucrative for others—was seen as God’s work. The alchemy of converting coal into valuable energy was seen as a fulfillment of America’s destiny to exploit nature for the benefit of mankind, even as the smog spewing out of coal smokestacks was seen as part of the dystopia of urban life.
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+These days, growing concerns about climate have heightened concerns about coal, which produces 75 percent of the power sector’s carbon, and more emissions than all our cars and trucks combined. But even at the dawn of the 21st century, the George W. Bush administration’s main concern about coal power and fossil energy in general was that the U.S. wasn’t producing enough of it. In 2001, an energy task force led by Dick Cheney, after a series of secret meetings with fossil-fuel executives, called for a new power-plant construction boom, warning that the alternative was a national reprise of the rolling blackouts that had just roiled California. Utilities quickly proposed about 200 new coal plants, and faced no organized national opposition. Coal plants have a useful lifespan of at least 40 years, so the U.S. was poised to lock in a new generation of dirty power. And all that new capacity was poised to destroy any incentive to develop clean wind or solar power.
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+That’s when the Sierra Club got into its first big coal fight over a proposed billion-dollar plant south of Chicago, a welcome-to-the-NFL episode. The Chicago area already had poor air quality—the coal plants around the Loop were known as the Ring of Fire—and local volunteers, led by an indefatigable German immigrant named Verena Owen, were desperate to block the project. Their cause seemed hopeless, but for Owen, who is now Beyond Coal’s lead volunteer, it was personal. Her best friend had struggled to breathe whenever the air was hazy and eventually died of lung disease, leaving behind a daughter in kindergarten. “I don’t know how many people we ended up saving, but I know one we didn’t,” Owen says.
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+The first time Nilles, at the time a lawyer for the Sierra Club’s Midwest office in Chicago, tried to attend a hearing about the plant, union members who supported the project came early and packed the hall while the Club was holding a news conference. Illinois regulators soon rubber-stamped the permit. Owen and Nilles can still recite the date and time of the news dump: Friday, Oct. 10, 2003, at 5:10 p.m., so the bureaucrats could ignore their calls and escape for the weekend. And the industry had an even easier time of it elsewhere. Nilles later reviewed the record for another billion-dollar plant that broke ground in Iowa about the same time, and discovered there hadn’t been a single public comment in opposition.
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+“Everything was going full speed in the wrong direction, and we had no capacity to fight,” he says. “We realized we needed a strategy. Fast.”
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+The strategy that Nilles devised was to fight every new plant from every conceivable environmental, economic and political angle. The Sierra Club began organizing boot camps to teach lawyers and volunteers around the region how to block coal permits. Demand for the seminars was so intense that, at one point, Nilles’ boss had to remind him that Texas was not part of the Midwest. But he figured Texans who breathed air and drank water had as much to lose from exposure to coal-fired pollutants as Midwesterners had. Some of the Club’s funders thought his fight-everything-everywhere approach was unrealistic during a national coal rush, but every proposed plant was in someone’s backyard, and the Club had members in every corner of the country. Nilles couldn’t imagine telling any of them their communities would have to be sacrificed for the greater tactical good.
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+Environmentalists have always been good at blocking stuff, and over the next few years, the kitchen-sink strategy produced some improbable victories. Nilles exploited threats to an endangered clover to delay the Chicago-area plant, and the utility eventually abandoned it. A local Sierra Club chapter stopped a massive plant in Kentucky coal country after a 63-day hearing, convincing regulators that the proposal had inadequate pollution controls, and that adequate controls would be exorbitant for ratepayers. These were shoestring crusades with expert witnesses crashing on the couches of volunteers, but the victories felt contagious, spreading hope to activists in other states who read about them on the Club’s coal listserv.
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+Meanwhile, the Sierra Club was canvassing its members to develop a new long-term strategic plan. To the surprise of then-Director Carl Pope, they overwhelmingly wanted climate and energy to be the top priority, a major shift for a group that had emphasized wilderness conservation since its creation by the legendary outdoorsman John Muir. At a meeting in Tucson in early 2006, the Club’s board voted to build the fledgling Midwestern anti-coal effort into a national campaign. Climate activists are often accused of wasting energy on symbolic movement-building efforts with relatively limited impact on emissions, like their crusades to stop Keystone and get universities to divest from fossil fuels. Beyond Coal’s leaders do oppose the pipeline and support the divestment movement, but the rationale for the campaign was all about hunting where the ducks are.
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+“It was existential necessity: Look how many coal plants they want to build. Look how much carbon they’d produce. Well, it’s game over if we don’t stop them,” Pope recalls. “If we were going to focus on climate, we had to focus on coal.”
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+In a bow to political realism, the initial goal was to make sure coal was “mined responsibly, burned cleanly and disposed of safely.” But the campaigners didn’t really believe coal could be burned cleanly. The original mouthful of a mission soon evolved to “Move Beyond Coal,” then just “Beyond Coal.” It was a much simpler message, helping to unite a variety of activists—working for specific neighborhoods, Indian tribes, mountains targeted by mining outfits, public health, environmental justice, clean energy, and the climate—against a common enemy. The Sierra Club would be the one constant presence in the war on coal, but it began partnering with more than 100 local, regional and national groups in its battles around the country.
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+The campaign was remarkably successful. Nilles and his team scoured every permit application for vulnerabilities and managed to block all but 30 of the 200 plants proposed in the Bush era. The nice thing about fighting new plants was that they didn’t exist yet, so it only took one deal breaker—too much smog in a high-smog area, too close to a national park, too expensive for ratepayers, whatever—to break a deal. Some of the plants that did get built still haunt Nilles, but those defeats did not doom the decarbonization of America. The game was not over.
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+By 2008, with the economy crashing and power demand slumping, utilities had stopped pushing new coal plants. That’s when Nilles began plotting to go after old ones—an even tougher challenge, but a vital one to avoid the game-over scenario. He had moved to the liberal college town of Madison, and he was amazed that an old coal plant a mile from his home still had no pollution controls; it was way dirtier than the new plants he was fighting around the country. The nation’s fleet of existing coal plants was still emitting nearly 2 billion tons of carbon and causing an estimated 13,000 premature deaths every year. It felt good to stop projects that would have increased those numbers, but Nilles wanted to use the Club’s newfound expertise to reduce them.
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+“It’s a lot easier to throw ourselves in front of bulldozers to stop something than it is to shut something down that’s already part of the community, paying taxes, generating power, providing jobs,” Nilles says. “But that’s where the emissions are.”
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+That was also the year Obama won the presidency, creating hope for stricter EPA regulation of sulfur, soot and ozone, plus the first-ever regulations of mercury, coal ash and carbon. As difficult as it would be to kill plants that had been operating for decades—two-thirds of the coal fleet predated the Clean Air Act of 1970—Nilles thought the combination of top-down rules from Washington and bottom-up pressure at state and local hearings could force utilities to confront investment decisions they had been delaying all those decades. Most utilities would need approval from their financial and environmental regulators before they could install expensive pollution controls. And while the utilities might be happy to charge their customers tens of millions of dollars for upgrades in order to comply with one new rule—plus a tidy profit they’re usually guaranteed for capital improvements—utility commissions might not let them start down that road if they faced hundreds of millions of dollars in additional compliance costs from rules still to come.
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+Once again, the campaign produced some inspiring early wins, including the retirement of that antiquated plant near Nilles in Madison. He also filed a lawsuit against his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, to get it off coal. The Club quickly found that when it could stop investor-owned utilities from getting a blank check to charge ratepayers for coal upgrades, they would usually shut down the plants rather than risk shareholder dollars. That was even true in coal country, where homeowners, businesses and regulators were just as allergic to pricey upgrades—and utilities were just as reluctant to foot the bill themselves. As Nilles’ new deputy, Hitt, a West Virginia activist who had spent years trying to stop mining companies from blowing up mountains in Appalachia, found she could do more to protect the mountains by shutting down the plants that used their coal.
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+Beyond Coal had grown from three staffers to a 15-state operation, but it still lacked the scale to fight 523 plants all over the country. It needed to get a lot bigger. That’s when the combative billionaire who has financed his own wars on guns, tobacco and Big Gulps took an interest in the war on coal.
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+Beyond Coal’s pivotal moment came at a meeting in Gracie Mansion about, of all things, education reform. Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street savant-turned media mogul-turned New York City mayor, was looking for a new outlet for his private philanthropy. It quickly became clear that education reform would not be that outlet.
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+“It was a terrible meeting in every way, and Mike was angry,” recalls his longtime adviser, Kevin Sheekey. “I said: ‘Look, if you don’t like this idea, that’s fine. We’ll bring you another.’ He said: ‘No, I want another now.’”
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+As it happened, Sheekey had just eaten lunch with Carl Pope, who was starting a $50 million fundraising drive to expand Beyond Coal’s staff to 45 states. The cap-and-trade plan that Obama supported to cut carbon emissions had stalled in Congress, and the carbon tax that Bloomberg supported was going nowhere as well. Washington was gridlocked. But Pope had explained to Sheekey that shutting down coal plants at the state and local level could do even more for the climate—and have a huge impact on public health issues close to his boss’s heart.
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+“That’s a good idea,” Bloomberg told Sheekey. “We’ll just give Carl a check for the $50 million. Tell him to stop fundraising and get to work.”
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+Bloomberg had never thought of himself as a Sierra Club kind of guy. But he saw coal as a killer, as well as the main threat to the climate, and the Club was in the field doing something about it. His only demand was a more analytical approach to the war on coal, with measurable deliverables, complex predictive models for vulnerable plants, and KPI—Key Performance Indicators, as Pope later learned.
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+“The Sierra Club had never heard of KPI,” Pope says. “We just had a gut instinct for what would work. The mayor said: ‘Oh, no, no. This will be data-driven.’”
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+On a sweltering day in July 2011, Bloomberg announced his gift to the Club on a boat he had chartered on the Potomac River, in front of a 63-year-old coal plant he had always noticed on flights into Washington. He saw it as a perfect illustration of the city’s inability to get anything done.
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+“You’d think the politicians would at least care about the air they breathe themselves!” Bloomberg marveled to me in a recent interview.
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+That plant on the Potomac is now closed. So is the Massachusetts plant that Mitt Romney once said “kills people,” a line Obama actually used against him in coal-state campaign ads in 2012. So are all of Chicago’s plants, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel boasted in his first campaign ad in 2015. Overall, the 190 plants that U.S. utilities have agreed to retire will eliminate about one fourth of America’s coal-fired capacity, a total of 79 gigawatts. And for every watt of coal capacity they’re taking out of commission, they’ve already installed a watt of wind or solar capacity. The Clean Air Task Force estimate of coal-fired premature deaths is down to about 7,500 a year, a decrease of 5,500 since Beyond Coal went national. And Bloomberg’s early support has helped attract more than $100 million from top foundations and wealthy individuals like the Silicon Valley billionaire Tom Steyer, the climate movement’s top political donor.
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+“It’s a reminder that you can do a lot with no help from Congress,” Bloomberg says. “I just wish we could point out the specific people who were saved.”
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+To coal backers, Beyond Coal is pure urban elitist lunacy, the kind of nightmare you get when a nanny-state mayor from New York hooks up with eco-radicals from San Francisco and a liberal president in Washington. Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma—chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, author of “The Greatest Hoax,” thrower of a Senate-floor snowball designed to highlight the folly of global-warming alarmism—told me it’s hard to believe some Americans actually want to keep our abundant energy resources in the ground.
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+“It’s a war on all fossil fuels, and coal is the No. 1 target,” Inhofe says. “You got a president who doesn’t care how many jobs it costs, and rich people who don’t care how much money they spend. They can do a lot of damage.”
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+I got to watch the war in Inhofe’s state, and the damage wasn’t getting done the way Inhofe imagined. The job creators were siding with the environmentalists. Economics was the most powerful weapon in the Sierra Club’s arsenal.
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+At a dry hearing in a drab courtroom in Oklahoma City, a methodical Beyond Coal attorney named Kristin Henry, whose bio identifies her as “one of the few environmentalists who would never be caught wearing Birkenstocks,” was pinning down an Oklahoma Gas & Electric executive with a barrage of wouldn’t-you-agrees, isn’t-it-trues, and would-it-be-fair-to-say’s. The power company was out of compliance with a federal air-quality rule called “regional haze,” so it was offering to convert one of its two coal plants into a natural gas plant. Henry knew she couldn’t stop that. But OG&E also wanted to install massive new scrubbers on the other plant so it could keep burning coal for decades to come. Henry was determined to stop that.
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+In the 90 minutes Henry spent cross-examining OG&E’s Joseph Rowlett in early March, she didn’t ask a single question about climate or public health. She focused exclusively on OG&E’s request for the largest rate increase in state history, a 15 percent hike to finance the utility’s $700 million compliance plan. Through her deadpan, leading questions, she portrayed OG&E as a company desperate to get its customers to foot the bill to prop up an inefficient plant, pursuing retrofits it would never consider if its own shareholders had to swallow the costs, operating in a dream world where regional haze was coal’s only challenge. At one point, she got Rowlett to admit his calculations assumed there would be no additional coal regulations for the next thirty years, even though the EPA intends to finalize at least four new coal regulations this year alone.
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+“Isn’t it true you’re assuming zero over the next 30 years?” Henry asked.
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+The Sierra Club, even though it didn’t sound much like the Sierra Club, was clearly in hostile political territory. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a conservative Republican who has spearheaded a national campaign to protect fossil fuels from legal challenges, had joined OG&E in fighting the EPA haze rule all the way to the Supreme Court. Now he was supposed to be representing consumers at the OG&E hearing before the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, but he hadn’t even filed a brief about the record rate hike. “That’s unheard of,” one commission official told me. Pruitt didn’t attend the hearing, either—the day it began, he was in Tulsa with Mike Huckabee raising money for his PAC—but one of his deputies who did attend occasionally raised objections when OG&E witnesses were asked uncomfortable questions.
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+But if the political deck seemed stacked against the Sierra Club, Henry held the economic cards. In Oklahoma, coal imported from Wyoming now costs more per kilowatt hour than the abundant gas under the ground or the wind that famously comes sweeping down the plain. In another recent haze case, the Sierra Club cut a deal requiring Oklahoma’s other major utility to phase out its only coal plant and buy 200 megawatts of wind—and the bids came in so low, the utility ended up buying 600 megawatts of wind. That’s why Wal-Mart, the hospital group and the coalition of industrial ratepayers all supported Beyond Coal’s push for more wind in the OG&E case. Cheap electricity has a way of scrambling political alliances.
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+Henry and the lawyers for OG&E’s corporate customers formed a kind of tag team, taking turns blasting the company for refusing to even study new wind power. They repeatedly pointed out that in-state competitors as well as Florida and New Mexico utilities were buying Oklahoma wind for just 2 cents per kilowatt hour, even cheaper than coal without pollution controls, while OG&E hadn’t purchased new wind in four years—even though its ads boasted about its commitment to wind. When its witnesses claimed their transmission lines were too congested to add new wind, Henry produced internal documents suggesting the congestion could be fixed for about 3 percent of the cost of the new coal scrubbers. As she pointed out, other Oklahoma utilities have much higher percentages of wind power on their systems.
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+Closing coal plants can sound radical, but Henry framed it for the Republican utility commissioners as the conservative response to EPA rules, avoiding the risk of “stranded” investments in outdated plants that might have to be shut down anyway. The most economical way to meet haze limits, she suggested, would be to stop burning the coal that causes the haze. Al Armendariz, who was Obama’s Dallas-based regional EPA administrator and is now Beyond Coal’s Austin-based regional representative, says the Club’s victories in states like Georgia, Mississippi and Kentucky have helped normalize the idea of abandoning coal in Oklahoma.
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+“We get respect because of our track record,” Armendariz says. “When we say a utility isn’t acting prudently, people can’t just dismiss us as ‘Oh, of course the Sierra Club says that.’ They see how we keep winning. They see these big industrial customers agreeing with us. Then they look at the numbers and see we’re right.”
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+Still, there’s no denying the war on coal is leading America into uncharted territory. The Sierra Club wants to eliminate all coal power by 2030, but what will replace it? Wind and solar, despite their rapid Obama-era growth, still make up just 5 percent of U.S. power capacity. And while technologies to store renewable energy (such as Tesla’s newly announced battery packs) are getting cheaper, they’re still a rounding error on the grid. Beyond Coal’s leaders are content to push cleaner power and let utilities figure out how to deliver it, but as OG&E Vice President Paul Renfrow told me: “That’s easy for them to say. We have to keep the lights on.”
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+Inhofe thinks the Sierra Club is simply obsessed with rooting out fossil fuels, citing “the guy who wants to crucify people” as an example of its extremism. He meant Armendariz, who left the EPA after he was caught on tape suggesting that harsh sanctions for law-breaking oil and gas companies could scare others into compliance, just as public crucifixions helped keep the peace in Roman times.
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+“The Sierra Club wants to stop coal now?” Inhofe asked. “You’ll see, they’ll be after gas next.”
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+Long-term, he’s right.  While the Club accepted some donations from natural gas interests under Pope, it is now formally committed to eliminating gas as well as coal by 2030, and it has helped block new gas plants in cities like Austin and Carlsbad, California. After its victory last week in Asheville, Beyond Coal vowed to keep fighting to overturn Duke Energy’s decision to build a new gas plant to replace its 50-year-old coal plant. Even Bloomberg thinks the Club’s opposition to the fracking boom that has helped replace so much domestic coal with domestic gas is silly.
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+That said, Beyond Coal’s leaders, including Armendariz, understand that Beyond Gas is more aspirational than practical for now. They deeply prefer renewables to gas, but they almost as deeply prefer gas to coal. In Oklahoma City, Henry grilled OG&E witnesses about why they wanted to spend $500 million on scrubbers for coal boilers that could be retrofitted to burn gas for just $70 million. She shredded the implausible assumptions OG&E had made in its economic models to make scrubbing coal look cheaper than converting to gas, forcing one witness to admit gas prices were already 25 percent lower than his low-cost scenario. I sat in on one friendly lunch the Club’s legal team had with lawyers for a Conoco Phillips front group; they all hoped to move OG&E beyond coal, and gas is clearly part of the short-term solution.
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+“We want to be principled but pragmatic,” says Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, who stopped the Club’s gas-industry gifts when he took over in 2010. “We’ve wrestled with this, and there’s a definite disagreement with Bloomberg. We don’t see gas as an environmental fix. But we acknowledge that we still need some gas.”
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+Coal is different. Bloomberg calls it “a dead man walking.” When he made his initial gift to the Sierra Club, the goal was to secure the retirements of one third of the coal fleet by 2015. The Club is only slightly behind schedule, and in April, Bloomberg came to Washington to announce another $30 million donation, with a new goal of retirement announcements for half of the fleet by 2017.  “We’re doubling down on an incredibly successful strategy,” Bloomberg said.
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+The campaign’s leaders believe coal has already passed a tipping point toward oblivion. Coal giants like Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal and Walter Energy are struggling to stay afloat. Just last week, in addition to the retirement announcement for the Asheville plant—as well as another for a Milwaukee plant that wasn’t official enough for Beyond Coal to count as #191—the insurance giant AXA announced that it will sell off more than $500 million worth of coal investments, the largest financial institution to flee the space to date, while the EPA announced it was closing a loophole that allowed virtually unlimited emissions from malfunctioning coal plants, a response to yet another Sierra Club lawsuit. And the more dirty plants get shut down, the more residents near other dirty plants are asking: Why not ours?
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+It’s hard to change the status quo, no matter how compelling the economic logic. Beyond Coal does not just deploy data. It organizes rallies and petitions and float-ins on kayaks; it shames utility executives on billboards and airplane banners; it mobilizes its members to show up at boring hearings where showing up can make a difference. If the Oklahoma City case displayed the war on coal as a numerical dispute, another hearing I watched south of Detroit was more like a street fight.
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+River Rouge is a depressed community at the city’s edge, a blightscape of boarded-up bungalows, overgrown lots and pawn shops. There’s no grocery store and virtually no medical services, but there is a nice little park where kids play at the playground and adults fish in the Detroit River. Unfortunately, the park smells like rotten eggs, thanks to sulfur dioxide from a DTE Energy coal plant overlooking the playground. Michigan health officials have called this area “the epicenter of the state’s asthma burden.” The fish aren’t safe to eat, either, though people eat them.
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+“It’s just an unhealthy situation,” says Alisha Winters, a local resident and mother of seven children, two with asthma. “They figure they can get away with dumping on us.”
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+The EPA has called out this area’s elevated sulfur dioxide levels, and last year Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s administration floated a compliance plan that would have required DTE to upgrade the coal-fired River Rouge Power Plant or (more likely) close it. But DTE proposed an alternative plan with no costly upgrades, and the state quietly accepted it. The Sierra Club has been mobilizing opposition ever since, drawing an unusual coalition of local whites, African-Americans, Latinos and Arab-Americans—as well as a busload of white liberals from Ann Arbor—for an environmental hearing in mid-March. The hearing had to be moved from City Hall to a school auditorium to accommodate the groundswell of protests, a far cry from that Chicago-area hearing over a decade ago where the Sierra Club got frozen out.
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+“We’re getting people to cross borders, physical and imaginary,” says Rhonda Anderson, a sharecropper’s daughter who is now an organizer for Beyond Coal.
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+If the Oklahoma City hearing was financial, the River Rouge hearing was political, a multiracial show of force in “I Love Clean Air” T-shirts. Every speaker opposed the DTE plan, including an Indian-American medical student, an Arab-American law student, an African-American asthma educator, a Latina anti-poverty activist and a white nun. Ebony Elmore, a child care provider who lives a block from the plant, talked about her four siblings and three nieces with asthma, as well as her two parents with pulmonary disease. I happened to ask Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell, who was watching the testimony from the side of the hall, why she was there, just as another resident started telling a story about an 11-year-old local girl who died because she couldn’t get to her inhaler in time.
+
+A few days later, Governor Snyder—whose top campaign supporters included one Michael Bloomberg—announced a new effort to cut Michigan’s reliance on coal. That would have been a huge political burden for Snyder if he had run for president in a GOP primary, where “anti-coal” will be an epithet like “anti-gun” or “anti-freedom,” but he decided not to run, and coal is becoming a huge economic burden for his industrial state.
+
+The already frenetic national pace of plant retirements will have to double for Beyond Coal to meet its 2017 goal, but utilities will face daunting investment decisions over the next two years. The EPA recently settled a sulfur lawsuit with the Sierra Club that could replicate the River Rouge dilemma across the nation. The agency has also imposed regional haze plans that already are replicating the Oklahoma dilemma in Arizona, Arkansas and Texas. Today, Beyond Coal has more than 100 legal cases pending over power supply. Meanwhile, it’s pursuing a new strategy on the power demand side, pushing blue states like Oregon to stop importing coal-fired electricity, which could shutter plants in red states like Montana. Even inside Texas, the Club has worked with relatively progressive cities like Austin, San Antonio and El Paso to replace their coal power with renewables.
+
+Beyond Coal is also continuing to lobby and litigate in Washington, pushing Obama to drop his “all-of-the-above” approach to energy and formally enlist in the war on coal. Obama has not been as maniacally anti-coal as the industry suggests, punting on ozone rules in his first term to avoid alienating voters in Ohio, issuing relatively weak restrictions on coal ash, taking a lenient approach to mining on public land, floating carbon rules with mild targets for the most coal-reliant states. Still, when you add up all he’s done and all he’s doing, you get a tremendously uncertain regulatory environment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky—whose wife, Elaine Chao, recently quit the Bloomberg Philanthropies board over coal—has urged states to defy the Clean Power Plan, but utilities with fiduciary responsibilities don’t engage in much civil disobedience. They have already shut down dozens of plants to comply with mercury rules the Supreme Court could still strike down, and they’re starting to think about carbon, too.
+
+Some coal advocates still hold out hope that the decline can be reversed if Republicans can win the presidency and keep Congress. “We’ve got a Congress that’s sympathetic, but we’ve still got a bureaucracy running amok,” says Mike Duncan, the RNC chairman-turned-coal advocate. “That will play in 2016. Obviously, anytime you elect a leader, it’s important to this industry.”
+
+If the EPA stands down under the next president, the pace of retirements could slow. But it probably won’t stop. The trends are too strong. Nilles recently met with leaders of the utility Southern Company, which has slashed its dependence on coal in half over the past five years. Its executives rejected his vision of a coal-free America by 2030, but some of them suggested 2050 could be realistic. In any case, the Sierra Club won a lot of coal fights during the pro-coal Bush administration, because they were ultimately local fights over local air.
+
+The fights also have a global context. The Earth is already getting hotter, and the death of American coal would not avert a climate catastrophe if the rest of the world did not follow our lead. But the decline of American coal emissions will help U.S. negotiators insist that other countries do their part in the global negotiations in Paris. And while critics of climate action often grumble that it would be foolish for the U.S. to make sacrifices when China is still building a new coal plant every week, that’s no longer true. China actually decreased its coal use last year, and is shuttering all four plants in smog-shrouded Beijing. The trends killing coal in America—cheap gas, wind and solar; more energy efficiency; stricter regulations—are trending abroad as well. Cash-strapped U.S. mining firms are desperate to solve their domestic problems by selling more coal in foreign markets, but the Sierra Club has helped lead the fight to block six proposed coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest, which will help keep even more coal in the ground.
+
+There will be no formal surrender in the war on coal, no battleship treaty to mark the end. But Beyond Coal’s leaders believe they can finish most of their work setting the U.S. electric sector on a greener path over the next five years. The next phase of the war on carbon would be to try to electrify everything else—cars and trains that use oil-derived gasoline and diesel, as well as homes and businesses that rely on natural gas and heating oil. Nilles hopes power companies like OG&E and DTE that Beyond Coal has spent the last decade fighting with—but then cutting deals with—can become allies in Phase Two. And allies will be vital, because if King Coal seems like a rich and powerful enemy, it’s a pushover compared to Big Oil.
+
+“Once we’ve taken out coal, we’ll need to take on oil, and who better to help than our new friends in the utility sector who can make money from electrification?” Nilles says with a grin. “It’s a long fight. This is how we win.”
+
+",REAL
+3115,Pope Francis delivers message of 'hope and healing' in address to Congress,"Pope Francis, in the first-ever papal address to a Joint Meeting of Congress, delivered a simple but passionate plea for humanity -- urging lawmakers to protect ""every human life"" and calling for a united response of ""hope and healing, of peace and justice"" for a world racked by violence and unrest.
+
+Speaking at the center of American power Thursday morning, the pontiff tackled urgent topics spanning immigration, family, the death penalty, climate change, extremism, religious freedom and the refugee crisis. Specifically, he joined American bishops in urging the abolition of capital punishment, and said Congress has a ""role to play"" in addressing global warming.
+
+But he also issued a broader and more fundamental appeal, saying lawmakers are tasked with pursuing the ""common good,"" and citing the ""Golden Rule"" as a starting point for how countries should respond to all these challenges.
+
+""The rule points us in a clear direction,"" he said, after receiving loud applause and a standing ovation.
+
+Francis cited the ""Golden Rule"" while discussing immigration and the refugee crisis and in making a reference to abortion, a subtle theme during the address.
+
+""The Golden Rule also reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development,"" he said, after earlier urging policymakers to use the law to protect ""the image and likeness fashioned by God on every human life."" Touching on the marriage debate, Francis also said he's concerned about ""the family,"" and said ""fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family.""
+
+Looking beyond social issues, though, the pope bluntly addressed religious violence and the refugee crisis that has resulted. While urging the world to safeguard religious freedom, he warned Thursday of rising ""fundamentalism"" of all kinds.
+
+""Our world is facing a refugee crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Second World War,"" the pope said, while referencing immigration to the U.S. as well. ""... We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation. To respond in a way which is always humane, just and fraternal. We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome.""
+
+After speaking in the House chamber, Francis visited the Capitol's Statuary Hall and its statue of Father Junipero Serra, the 18th-century missionary whom Francis elevated to sainthood Wednesday in the first canonization on U.S. soil. He then briefly stepped out onto a Capitol balcony to address the cheering crowds on the West Front.
+
+""Thank you very much, and God bless America,"" he said in English to the crowd, and waved.
+
+Even in a chamber accustomed to receiving foreign dignitaries, the pontiff's historic address stirred an energy and enthusiasm rarely seen at the Capitol, with huge crowds showing up outside to catch a glimpse of him and some lawmakers inside showing up early for a good spot -- despite a warning from leaders to refrain from trying to shake the pope's hand.
+
+Several lawmakers, including House Speaker John Boehner, were visibly emotional during the pope's visit and address. Boehner also met briefly with the pope before he took the podium. The House chamber was packed with Supreme Court justices, Cabinet officials, diplomats, lawmakers and their guests.
+
+During his address, the pope said, ""Our efforts must aim at restoring hope, righting wrongs, maintaining commitments, and thus promoting the well-being of individuals and of peoples.""
+
+Francis also declared during the address that he sides with U.S. bishops calling for the abolition of the death penalty, saying he believes in ""rehabilitation."" The pontiff who has been outspoken on the issue of climate change also said the ""environmental challenge we are undergoing and its human roots concern and affect us all."" He said the U.S. and Congress ""have an important role to play.""
+
+Some of his strongest remarks, toward the end of his address, concerned the arms trade. ""Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering?"" he asked. ""Sadly, the answer ... is simply for money, money that is drenched in blood."" He said ""it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.""
+
+The address was one of the pope's last engagements in Washington before leaving for New York on his three-city visit to America that also includes Philadelphia.
+
+He spoke at the dais where the president delivers the annual State of the Union address and monarchs and heads of state have addressed Congress. Behind sat Vice President Joe Biden and Boehner, R-Ohio, the first and second in line to the presidency, both Catholics.
+
+Ahead of Francis' remarks lawmakers of both parties busily sought political advantage from his stances, with Democrats in particular delighting in his support for action to overhaul immigration laws and combat global warming and income inequality. One House Republican back-bencher announced plans to boycott the speech over Francis' activist position on climate change, which the pontiff renewed alongside President Obama on Wednesday.
+
+But Boehner, a former altar boy who invited Francis to speak after trying unsuccessfully to bring his two immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, to the Capitol, has dismissed concerns that the politically engaged Francis would stir the controversies of the day.
+
+""The pope transcends all of this,"" Boehner said.
+
+For Congress and Boehner, the pope arrives at a moment of particular turmoil, with a partial government shutdown looming next week unless lawmakers can resolve a dispute over funding for Planned Parenthood related to the group's practice of providing fetal tissue for research. For members of Congress, his visit may prove little more than a brief respite from their partisan warfare, offering moments of unusual solemnity, uplift and pomp, but without fundamentally shifting the intractable gears of the U.S. political system.
+
+After visiting St. Patrick's Catholic Church and the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, the pope will depart later Thursday for New York for more prayer services and a speech to the United Nations.
+
+Separately, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is battling cancer, said he received a blessing from the pope Thursday. The blessing reportedly was given during the event at the Catholic Charities of Washington.
+
+""It was an incredible honor to meet His Holiness Pope Francis today in Washington and receive his blessings on behalf of all cancer patients,"" Hogan wrote on Facebook. ""My faith, like the faith of countless other patients like me, gives me strength to defeat this disease, and continue to be the best public steward I can be for the people of this great state.""
+
+Fox News' Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6558,Scientists Claim That “Most Cancer Research Is Largely A Fraud”,"Share on Facebook “Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organisations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.” The above quote comes from Linus Pauling, Ph.D, and two time Nobel Prize winner in chemistry (1901-1994). He is considered one of the most important scientists in history. He is one of the founders of quantum chemistry and molecular biology, who was also a well known peace activist. He was invited to be in charge of the Chemistry division of the Manhattan Project, but refused. He has also done a lot of work on military applications, and has pretty much done and seen it all when it comes to the world of science. A quick Google search will suffice if you'd like to learn more about him. This man has been around the block, and obviously knows a thing or two about this subject. And he's not the only expert from around the world expressing similar beliefs and voicing his opinion. Here is another great example of a hard hitting quote when it comes to scientific fraud and manipulation. It comes from Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and long time Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), which is considered to be one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. I apologize if you have seen it before in my articles, but it is quite the statement. “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine” ( source ) The list goes on and on. Dr. John Bailer, who spent 20 years on the staff of the National Cancer Institute and is also a former editor of its journal, publicly stated in a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that: “My overall assessment is that the national cancer program must be judged a qualified failure. Our whole cancer research in the past 20 years has been a total failure.” ( source ) He also alluded to the fact that cancer treatment, in general, has been a complete failure. Another interesting point is the fact that most of the money donated to cancer research is spent on animal research, which has been considered completely useless by many. For example, in 1981 Dr. Irwin Bross, the former director of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Institute (largest cancer research institute in the world), said that: “The uselessness of most of the animal model studies is less well known. For example, the discovery of chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of human cancer is widely-heralded as a triumph due to use of animal model systems. However, here again, these exaggerated claims are coming from or are endorsed by the same people who get the federal dollars for animal research. There is little, if any, factual evidence that would support these claims. Practically all of the chemotherapeutic agents which are of value in the treatment of human cancer were found in a clinical context rather than in animal studies.” ( source ) Today, treating illness and disease has a corporate side. It is an enormously profitable industry, but only when geared towards treatment, not preventative measures or cures, and that's an important point to consider. Another quote that relates to my point above was made by Dr. Dean Burk, an American biochemist and a senior chemist for the National Cancer Institute. His paper, “The Determination of Enzyme Dissociation Constants ( source ),” published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1934, is one of the most frequently cited papers in the history of biochemistry. “When you have power you don't have to tell the truth. That's a rule that;s been working in this world for generations. And there are a great many people who don't tell the truth when they are in power in administrative positions.” ( source ) He also stated that: “Fluoride causes more human cancer deaths than any other chemical. It is some of the most conclusive scientific and biological evidence that I have come across in my 50 years in the field of cancer research.” ( source ) In the April 15th, 2015 edition of Lancet, the UK's leading medical journal, editor in chief Richard Horton stated: “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Science has taken a turn toward darkness.” ( source ) n 2005 Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis , currently a professor in disease prevention at Stanford University, published the most widely accessed article in the history of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False . In the report, he stated: “There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false.” In 2009, the University of Michigan's comprehensive cancer center published an analysis that revealed popular cancer studies are false, and that there were fabricated results arising due to conflicts of interest. They suggested that the fabricated results were a result of what would work best for drug companies. After all, a large portion of cancer research is funded directly by them. You can read more about that story here . There is so much information out there, and so much of it is coming from people who have been directly involved in these proceedings. There is really no shortage of credible sources willing to state that we live in a world of scientific fraud and manipulation. All of this can be attributed to the “corporatocracy” we live in today, where giant corporations owned by a select group of “elite” people have basically taken control over the planet and all of its resources. This is precisely why so many people are flocking towards alternative treatment, as well as focusing on cancer prevention. Much of what we surround ourselves with on a daily basis has been linked to cancer. Everything from pesticides, GMOs, multiple cosmetic products, certain “foods,” smoking, and much much more. This is something that is never really emphasized, we always seem to just assume that donating money to charities will make the problem go away, despite the fact that their business practices are highly questionable. That being said, so many people have had success with alternative treatments like cannabis oil – combined with a raw diet or even incorporated into their chemotherapy regimen – that we should not feel as though there is no hope for the future. The official stance on cannabis is a great example of the very practice of misinformation that I'm talking about. Its anti-tumoral properties have been demonstrated for decades, yet no clinical trials are taking place. I am going to leave you with this video, as I have done in previous articles. It provides a little food for thought. Ignorance is not the answer, although this information can be scary to consider, it’s nothing to turn a blind eye towards. Related:",FAKE
+141,Stop poisoning the race debate: How “respectability politics” rears its ugly head — again,"Indeed this movement has its fair share of skeptics, including Black folks quick to declare the movement dead on arrival. When I listen to these people, I can never quite detect whether they are being descriptive or prescriptive, but frequently I’m convinced it’s the latter.
+
+There is also a more insidious kind of participant in the movement, the moderate Black folks, the Respectables, I call them, who still believe that our energies should be spent demonstrating to white people that Black people can be self-critical. One such person is Jonathan Capehart. In a recent column for the Washington Post, Capehart argues, on the heels of the release of the official Department of Justice report on the shooting of Michael Brown, that Brown is an “inappropriate symbol” for this new, burgeoning movement. The DOJ report does ultimately back Wilson’s recounting of events, that Brown reached into his car, punched him, tried to take his gun, ran after being shot, and then turned around and came forward. Thus Capehart concludes that:
+
+I get Capehart’s play. He ostensibly believes in the rightness of the Black Lives Matter movement, and he hopes that if as a Black person, he acknowledges that “we” were wrong in our assumptions about Mike Brown’s innocence, then he, and by extension “we,” will retain the moral high ground upon which the movement is built. Our claims will be more credible to “reasonable” white people, who want to believe us, but can’t because of their innate disposition toward believing that nothing is racist, unless the N-word is used.
+
+Moderate Black people – Barack Obama included – continue to believe that the way to bring white people into the anti-racist fold is by conceding some ground in order to gain more ground. It’s an old debate tactic, but it only works if everyone plays fair. There are two problems with this. First, those with racial privilege generally don’t play fair in racial discussions.  More than that, they play downright dirty, denying the persistence of racism, trotting out erroneous statistics, blaming Black behavior for white racism. The Ferguson Police Department, for example, has conceded nothing even after being found guilty of decades of egregious, consistent and systematic violations of the rights of Ferguson’s Black citizens. Second, Capehart implicitly concedes that it is Black people who must prove that incidents are racially inflected, rather than white people who must prove that they are not. Since we now know for a fact that Darren Wilson policed in a racially hostile city and police department, and since Ferguson residents – Michael Brown included – knew that long before a Justice Department report merely affirmed their experience, it is perfectly reasonable for Black folks to view Ferguson police and police around the country with suspicion. And it is reasonable for Black folks to want clear evidence that this incident was not racial. The DOJ’s own report foregoes such conclusions.
+
+Moreover, though I am absolutely fatigued in my relitigation of the events of Aug. 9, I do want to point to two statements in the DOJ report on the killing of Brown, that Capehart glosses over in his attempt to be undeservedly magnanimous to Darren Wilson. First, the report states that though Wilson, knowing of the incident with the Cigarillos at the convenience store, suspected Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson of the petty crime, when he initially saw them, he told them to “walk on the sidewalk.”
+
+They refused. Having visited Canfield Drive, and seeing the narrowness of the street, I can attest that such a request would have seemed ridiculous and unnecessarily harassing. Coupled with the generally hostile context in which the FPD polices, the resistance from the two teen boys makes sense. Wilson did not approach them and say he wanted to question them about a crime at a convenience store. He approached them and told them to “walk on the sidewalk,” according to the DOJ, or “get the fuck up on the sidewalk,” according to Michael Brown’s friend.
+
+Then the report says that Wilson parked his car at an angle to keep the two young men from walking any further. “Wilson attempted to open the driver’s door of the SUV to exit his vehicle, but as he swung it open, the door came into contact with Brown’s body and either rebounded closed or Brown pushed it closed.”
+
+Then the altercation where Brown allegedly reached into Wilson’s vehicle happened. Now let us lay that aside for a moment, to consider that during this entire time, Wilson has not let these young men know what his business is with them. He rolled up on them and demanded that they get on the sidewalk in a small apartment complex. Beyond that point, the report remains inconclusive on the question of the door making initial contact with Brown’s body. His friend said the officer slammed the door into Brown’s body, while Wilson says the door either rebounded closed or Brown pushed the door closed.
+
+This is not insignificant. If these boys perceived this officer as harassing them about the sidewalk and then slamming a door into Brown’s body, then certainly Brown may have reacted aggressively. I do not know, and won’t further speculate. I will say, however, that Wilson receives the benefit of the doubt even though he works for a corrupt police department with a hostile relationship to the community. Are police always worthy of the benefit of the doubt? Are young Black men ever deemed worthy of the benefit of the doubt? Moreover, there are the pure shenanigans that took place in the grand jury in which the prosecutor used an out-of-date and unconstitutional statute about an officer’s right to shoot a fleeing suspect in his statements to the grand jury. One of those grand jurors later sued because of blatant irregularities in the legal procedure. But none of this matters in determining Mike Brown’s appropriateness for movement work. First, Brown doesn’t have to be a perfect victim to be deserving of a place in movement history. The Department of Justice would never have investigated the Ferguson Police without Brown being killed and the people rising up in protest. Second, even if, for the sake of argument, I concede that Brown did everything Wilson said he did (and I’m not conceding any of this, mind you), we must ask why we are outraged at these two young men for not respecting the rule of law in a city where a corrupt police force has exploited and abused its Black residents for decades. Those who take an oath to uphold the law and protect citizens surely are held to a higher standard than two teen boys engaged in youthful mischief. Three, there is no scenario in which a teenager or any other person should be dead for stealing cigarillos and not walking on the sidewalk. Period. The Black Lives Matter movement is asking us at base level to reject many of the assumptions that undergird our current thinking about how policing takes place in Black and Brown communities. Why are the police trained to shoot-to-kill rather than to shoot to disarm? Why do police use authority and weapons to escalate situations rather than deescalate them? And why, then, are Black men the most frequent casualties of these severe police tactics? These are not the kinds of questions that can be asked when the victim is a perfect victim. What, then, is to be gained by arguing that Wilson was justified for shooting a kid who allegedly took some cigarillos? To me, this killing is evidence at best of a piss-poor policing structure. Moreover, while some witnesses may have been mistaken, all of them were not. Just because Brown had no bullet wounds in his back, does not mean Wilson did not shoot at him as he ran away. The bullet wounds in his forearms very easily could have entered his body while he was running away. The report remains inconclusive on this point, and it is a major point. The report is also inconclusive about whether Brown was in fact charging Wilson. It concludes only that Brown was “coming towards Wilson.” Michael Brown remains an appropriate symbol of this movement. For one, his acts of resistance and refusal – and I do see them as such – pointed us to a city that balances its budget on the backs of poor Black residents. The police merely act as thuggish enforcers for the racket that constitutes city government. Beyond that, this movement, before it is all said and done, will force all of us to grow up and stop believing in the myth of our own purity. We must stop believing that our lives only have value, that they are only worthy of protection, when we’ve done everything right. Even though I am no believer in capital punishment, we do have an understanding in this country that capital punishment is reserved for capital crimes. If Michael and Dorian were two white teenagers, it would be easier for us to look at the adult and the person with more power in this situation – Darren Wilson – and hold him responsible for escalating a conflict and devastating a community over a pack of cigarettes. In his desire to placate white folks and appear reasonable, Jonathan Capehart lets Wilson off the hook. The implication of Capehart’s argument is that Michael Brown is an acceptable, justifiable casualty in this decades-long police war on a small Midwestern community. But if you believe that All Black lives matter, that is an unconscionable conclusion, one that “offends my sense of right and wrong.” As “respectable” Blacks are wont to do, the Capeharts of the world need to believe that if Black people would just “act right” and “do right,” we would be all right. But in a system of white supremacy, there isn’t that much act right in the world. Jonathan, surely you know a suit and tie won’t protect you. So we’re going to keep on marching, as you said. And we will keep holding aloft the banner of Michael Brown. We will do so, because Black folks have already tested out your theory of respectability. We’ve been trying to save our lives by dressing right, talking right and never, ever fucking up since about 1877. That shit has not worked. In an ideal world of crime and punishment, the officer would have had the legal leeway and good sense to pick these boys up, take them back down to the convenience store, make them apologize and work out an arrangement to work off the cigarillos they stole. That is one example of restorative justice and of the world we are fighting for. We are trying to get free, and that means we bring everybody with us, whether your suit is tailored or your pants sag. When the revolution comes, we will leave no one behind.",REAL
+6973,NATO calls for more troops for face-off against Putin,"WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS NATO calls for more troops for face-off against Putin Largest military build-up on Russia's borders since Cold War Published: 11 mins ago 
+(Haaretz) NATO will press allies on Wednesday to contribute to its biggest military build-up on Russia’s borders since the Cold War as the alliance prepares for a protracted quarrel with Moscow. 
+With Russia’s aircraft carrier heading to Syria in a show of force along Europe’s shores, alliance defense ministers aim to make good on a July promise by NATO leaders to send forces to the Baltic states and eastern Poland from early next year. 
+The United States hopes for binding commitments from Europe to fill four battle groups of some 4,000 troops, part of NATO’s response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and concern it could try a similar tactic in Europe’s ex-Soviet states.",FAKE
+6729,"Sorry, Piers, but Joe Walsh just laid claim to the ‘Musket’ nickname with his post-election call to arms","Sorry, Piers, but Joe Walsh just laid claim to the ‘Musket’ nickname with his post-election call to arms Posted at 5:26 pm on October 26, 2016 by Brett T. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
+Some are interpreting radio host Joe Walsh’s Wednesday afternoon tweet as a literal call to violence following the election, while it seems the majority are electing to point and laugh instead. At least gun control crusader Piers Morgan should be OK with it, seeing as Walsh’s weapon of choice is a musket, just as the founders envisioned when they drew up the Bill of Rights. On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump. 
+On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. 
+You in? 
+— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom what exactly does that mean? 
+— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 26, 2016 
+Good question. There’s no need to alert the authorities, as plenty of people have already; it’ll be up to the powers that be to determine if “grabbing my musket” constitutes a threat, or if it’s meant symbolically. (The odds that Twitter will suspend Walsh’s account look pretty good.) @WalshFreedom Didn't you get in trouble for this once before? 
+— Meredith D. (@YankeeBeatCheck) October 26, 2016 
+At least once before. Grab your musket and meet me in North Carolina. 
+Time to fight the Feds. 
+— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) May 9, 2016 I'M GRABBING MY MUSKET is the perfect thing to scream into an old fashioned phone that isn't plugged in It's not a great thing to tweet 
+— Erin Gloria Ryan (@morninggloria) October 26, 2016 
+In the meantime, plenty of people aren’t exactly quivering at the image of Walsh wielding a musket — or, as the cable networks would likely call it, an assault musket. @WalshFreedom Bless your heart. 
+— Swami Buttload (@MetricButtload) October 26, 2016 ""When you're an ex-congressman, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the musket. You can do anything."" https://t.co/qlNApg4Ypi 
+— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom Looks like .0002% of your followers are ""in"". Awkward. 
+— Robert Bingaman (@robertjosiah) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom girl, you don't have a musket. 
+— Christoph Fitzgerald (@kifferfitz) October 26, 2016 . @WalshFreedom Good thinking, you'll go far with a smoothbore black-powder muzzleloader 
+— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom and what are you going to do with said musket? Really? A musket? Not a carbine? You really are out of touch 🙂 
+— Dan Braxton (@BraxtonMedia) October 26, 2016 Actually, a musket would be an outdated and ineffective weapon for armed insurrection against a modern—*falls into manhole* 
+— Alex Brown (@AlexBrownNJ) October 26, 2016 . @WalshFreedom you'd get droned before you could even load it 
+— Matt Provenzano (@mattprov94) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom You gonna old yeller your candidate? seems a bit harsh.",FAKE
+8084,Biden Explains Why Hillary Set Up Her Email Server (This Doesn’t Help Her),"You are here: Home / US / Biden Explains Why Hillary Set Up Her Email Server (This Doesn’t Help Her) Biden Explains Why Hillary Set Up Her Email Server (This Doesn’t Help Her) October 28, 2016 Pinterest 
+Crazy Uncle Joe is at it again. Vice President Joe Biden, and potentially secretary of state should Hillary Clinton be elected (let that sink in for a minute), claimed that Clinton didn’t understand “the gravity” of using private servers to send and receive classified information as secretary of state. 
+Social media users pointed out the obviously ridiculous nature of this defense, as many have throughout the whole email debacle. Clinton is either pathetically inept of dangerously corrupt — I’d argue that there’s a lot of both in the equation. Both options mean that she should be behind bars and not running for president. Interviewed by @jdickerson for @FaceTheNation , @VP says @HillaryClinton didnt understand ""the gravity"" of setting up own e-mail system. pic.twitter.com/abIZ1f0kvO 
+— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) October 28, 2016 So to quote Dave Chapelle: “I’m sorry officer I … didn’t know I couldn’t do that."" https://t.co/a1mLeOv0KL 
+— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) October 28, 2016 
+Ben Howe of Red State quoted comedian Dave Chapelle: “I’m sorry officer I … didn’t know I couldn’t do that.” Ummm, she did it specifically to evade FOIA. I'm quite certain she ""understood the gravity"" https://t.co/nZK9EBQp27 
+— The H2 (@TheH2) October 28, 2016 
+Twitter user “The H2” pointed out that Clinton very likely understood the gravity just fine; it’s probably why she set up the servers in the first place. The H2 tweeted: “Ummm, she did it specifically to evade FOIA. I’m quite certain she “understood the gravity.” 
+Absolutely. Clinton almost certainly set up the servers to “evade FOIA,” and the inevitable failures/corruption (such as the pay-to-play operation) she would need to cover up as secretary of state. 
+The thousands of emails deleted from Clinton’s servers weren’t just yoga schedules and wedding planning — the State Department admitted there were Benghazi-related emails in there. 
+Clinton is responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, and it is almost a certainty that emails pointing to her involvement were scrubbed — in addition to what we already know that points to her responsibility. She understood ""the gravity"" she just thought she could ""get away with it"" #Corruption #draintheswamp #newsisback https://t.co/TrN0xUSbaX 
+— Jesse Eaton (@landho69) October 28, 2016 
+Jesse Eaton tweeted: “She understood ‘the gravity’ she just thought she could ‘get away with it.'” 
+That about covers it. She knew what she was doing, but since she also knows where all the bodies are buried she gets to play by a different set of rules. 
+We found out that President Obama, using a pseudonym, communicated with Clinton via her private email server — not her state.gov address — even though he claimed not to know about the servers until the scandal came out in the press. Why would he do that if he thought things were on the up and up and didn’t know a thing about the private server? 
+That might have been part of Clinton’s insurance here as well. She may have figured that if she goes down, so does Obama. That would be pretty stupid considering Clinton found out where she sat on the totem pole in 2008, but no one ever said the woman was a genius. 
+The FBI announced on Friday that it reopened the investigation of Clinton’s email scandal, and hopefully Clinton will finally be brought to justice. Not likely, but who knows?",FAKE
+9620,Trump Victory Necessary to Get US Into World War?,"By Kevin Boyle on October 29, 2016 henrymakow.com — Oct 28, 2016 I predicted Trump will win and asked my readers what the Illuminati’s game plan is. While most readers favor Trump, Kevin Boyle and others suspect his real role is to lead Americans into WW3. Americans would never follow Hillary into battle. by Kevin Boyle — (henrymakow.com) Thanks for the article on Trump . I have been thinking about trying to write such an article on my own blog for a while. The key danger seems to me to be as follows: Trump is on a project to “take back America”. From whom? Well, quite obviously … Jewish bankers. When he is elected he is in a perfect position to play the anti-banker-establishment game whilst a major war is engineered in which he will be a more than willing participant … backed by the heartfelt support of an adoring and grateful public (very much in the Hitler fashion). The international banksters will get their war and they can even publicly oppose it so that they will get everything we know they want while taking NONE OF THE BLAME. It would be incredibly dangerous for them to try to use the hated Hillary to perform this duty in the current post-Brexit, Trumpist, Euro-Revolting anti-Banking world. Such a game plan is probably looking to these people, our traditional (but increasingly hated) masters as just PERFECT. They get their war, while “anti-banker” stooges and dolts can be ascribed blame and (as usual) actually take the blame for a situation that they, THE USUAL SUSPECTS, have artfully engineered. This looks like a highly possible, even probable, narrative for future events. On the other hand it is just possible that he means what he says and that Trump really intends, like Vladamir Putin, to make his country’s culture overtly Christian again, to reduce the power and influence of the international banking cartel and set an admirable template of self-sufficiency, self-reliance and freedom for communities that other countries will rush to copy. Just possible. Highly unlikely but you never know. Here’s hoping and praying. HITLER TEMPLATE",FAKE
+5385,"When Nobody Returns: Palestinians Show They are People, Too","Email 
+I was in London last weekend to view a play, ‘When Nobody Returns’ . The play, written by British writer Brian Woolland and jointly produced by Border Crossings , Ramallah-based Ashtar Theatre and Central School of Speech and Drama , tells the Greek myth known to many of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. 
+A mixed cast of Palestinian and British actors delivered a riveting performance of poise and emotion. The classic text rings clear, intermingled with language we all hear every day and sets that those who know the story of the Palestinians and other downtrodden people will recognise. The inspired use of a variety of sets at differing levels and positions in the theatre in Acklam Village brings the audience right in to the heart of the drama and to the edge of their seats. The analogues nature of the occupation of Ithaka, at the heart of the play, to the story of Palestinians is clear throughout the play yet not overwrought. 
+I have been a supporter of the Palestinian cause since I became politically aware in my mid-teens. This political awakening took place during the post 9-11 atmosphere in the west. As US troops draped the star spangled banner upon and tore down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square in Baghdad, the Second Intifada raged across the Palestinian territories and Israel. As Bob Dylan once sung, we live in a political world. As I have learnt more about the history and present occupation of Palestinian land, I have always felt that the drive to free the Palestinians of their daily humiliation at the hands of the Israeli state should be led by Palestinians. 
+Productions such as ‘When Nobody Returns’ provide agency to Palestinians, those Palestinians who still grind out an existence on the West Bank and Gaza and those in exile, to tell their fundamental story of loss, betrayal, despair and ultimately strength. You can see and feel this strength in the performances of the actors. Iman Aoun, who plays Penelope Odysseus’s wife, exudes the granite and dignified exterior of a war widow who refuses to be beaten by the occupier. 
+If you are a supporter of Palestinian human rights and enjoy theatre of the highest quality I encourage you to plan a visit to see ‘When Nobody Returns’ and the prequel ‘This Flesh is Mine’ (drawn from Homer’s The Iliad).",FAKE
+5171,The Trump Recession: He’s linked himself to potential economic calamity with Brexit stance,"Back in March, some of the financial sector’s leading analysts bumped the chances of a global economic recession from 20 percent to 30 percent. The chances are still minuscule, but the danger always looms. And given the tragic consequences of the Great Recession, any new indicators leading to another potential recession ought to be met with, at the very least, a tone of seriousness. Today, with the Brexit referendum passing in favor of leaving the European Union, and the subsequent decline in the British pound and, specifically, worsening indicators leading toward a British recession, there’s renewed fears of the Brexit shockfront crushing neighboring economies as well.
+
+In the United States, meanwhile, the Republican position on Brexit seems to be based upon everything except the economic repercussions. Instead, the GOP’s posture appears to be simply blurting the opposite of whatever President Obama and the Democrats have to say about it. Indeed, the standard for any GOP argument since 2008 has been, simply put, Opposite Day. If Obama’s for it, they’re against it — even if Obama’s position was once a GOP position (the individual mandate, NSA metadata collection, predator drones, immigration reform, cap-and-trade, and the list goes on). While the GOP never really supported Brexit, they should have, especially knowing that the E.U. was one of the U.S.’s signature achievements after World War II, further assuring there aren’t continued world wars as the atomic age began. Beyond that, the possibility of a Brexit-induced recession should’ve frightened them away. However, we’re assuming the GOP is driven by rational policy choices in 2016. It’s not.
+
+Donald Trump, for his part, isn’t interested in the justifications for, or the post-war history of Europe. He’s only really interested in taking a position because, as with his party, it’s the opposite of Obama’s and Hillary’s. Had he been less driven to blurt a reaction to a potentially cataclysmic event — an event that he was totally unfamiliar with just a month ago, and if he had thought through a strategy that was a slightly more detailed than the 140 character limit on Twitter, he would’ve picked up on a golden opportunity to link Hillary and the Obama administration to a forthcoming recession, regardless of whether it was precipitated by Brexit.
+
+This week, while appearing on stage with Elizabeth Warren for the first time, Hillary Clinton accurately observed that the Wall Street fallout from Brexit cost Americans around $100 billion, all of which vanished when the markets reacted to the Trump-supported Brexit vote:
+
+Average Americans weren’t the only people impacted by Trump’s beloved Brexit vote. Around 400 of his fellow billionaires (if you believe what he says about his net worth) worldwide lost $196.2 billion due to the “leave” vote. This is what Trump supports? Weird. At the very least, experts at Goldman-Sachs are foreseeing a decline in the U.S. economy from around 2.25 percent growth to two-percent straight up. Britain itself appears to be poised for a recession late this year or in early 2017. Nevertheless, Trump missed a fantastic opportunity to sidestep the Brexit vote and, therefore, to fully blame a would-be recession on Hillary Clinton and her allies in the Obama administration. Instead, if Brexit continues to disrupt the world economy, he’ll absolutely remain on-record as having supported the spark that touched off the decline. Simultaneously and moving forward, Hillary can easily marry Trump to Brexit and brand the downturn as the “Trump Recession.” Conversely, had Trump kept his self-defeating mouth shut and, perhaps, continued to mock disabled people — you know, because he has “the best words” — he could’ve solely linked Hillary and Obama to the recession, without even mentioning Brexit as an inciting incident. But, once again, Trump stepped into the pitch and, for no real political gain, took a fastball to the side of his clown-wigged noggin. Sure, Trump is politically astute enough to realize that playing Opposite Day politics plays well with his brainwashed cult-like base. They’re with him no matter what, so, in the near-term it shouldn’t matter. After all, another feature of modern GOP strategy is political expedience over long-term gains. Trump’s got a lock on around 30 percent of American voters, but he’s clearly underestimating the number of Republicans, like George Will, Glenn Beck or Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who are easily capable of sidestepping a vote for Trump and supporting someone — anyone — else, not to mention the scores of moderate undecided voters. The question moving forward is whether Trump is capable of making any winnable political choices, given how he’s vowed to “have so much winning, you may get tired of winning.” Instead of positioning himself to immediately link Hillary to a sputtering economy, he’s linked himself to it. He’s, in effect, dropped the ball on two issue areas that are normally owned by the GOP: the economy and national security. According to the new ABC News / Washington Post poll, Obama’s approval on the economy is hovering around 55 percent, while Hillary has been seen more favorably than Trump on her reaction to Orlando. If Trump can’t win on these issues, he might as well give up. And I’m not sure he hasn’t.",REAL
+6974,"Tesla, ‘World’s Safest Car,’ Explodes Like a Bomb","Tesla, ‘World’s Safest Car,’ Explodes Like a Bomb By DailyBellStaff - November 05, 2016 
+
+Fiery Tesla Crash Sends Flaming Batteries Shooting Like Projectiles, Killing Two In World’s Safest Car … When a Tesla Model S collided with a tree in downtown Indianapolis Thursday, an inferno erupted. The crash, which killed the driver and her one passenger, sent battery cells “firing off almost like projectiles around rescuers,” fire department officials told local NBC affiliate WTHR. “It hit that tree and it bounced around and all of a sudden it just exploded,” Al Finnell, an eyewitness, told the station. -IBD 
+The world’s safest car just blew up like a bomb but that message seems to be getting lost amidst the larger coverage about Tesla. 
+For years and years, Tesla has never made a nickel despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars. But the company is beloved by the predictable monetary elites that seek more and more control over the rest of us. 
+Founder Elon Musk offers that potential control. Every day, he works as hard as he can to ensure that sooner or later government will take away your ability to drive where you want when you want. 
+Here at DB, we’ve written several articles about Tesla ( here and here , most recently). We don’t like the car and much more than that, we don’t like the implications behind it. 
+Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, is fairly clear about his goals. He wants to create an electric, self-driving car. And he has Tesla fans throughout the US and the world. 
+Extend the logic and you come the inevitable conclusion that larger entities will have to support Tesla’s vision. These entities will surely be linked to some sort of government control. 
+Don’t pay your ticket? Have a confrontation of some sort outside of the home? Or simply fall afoul of one of a plethora of rules and regulations that increasingly hem-in behavior … and you will pay the consequences in terms of your driving life. 
+You will get up in the morning and your car won’t start because someone has flagged your behavior. If you do manage to get your car started, it won’t go anywhere because its driving mechanisms have been disabled. 
+You’ll have to go to court. You’ll have to pay a fine. Then you’ll be able to drive again. Or maybe not. Think driving is a “privilege”? Just wait. 
+We could extend this logic beyond government. It’s perfectly possible that large private entities could have relationships with government that generate similar consequences. 
+Why Musk has managed to attract fans for his cars given the inevitable results of his technology is a mystery to us. His ability to continue to fund his endless automotive depredations are a mystery as well. 
+It is most probable that his access to funds has a lot to do with the maturation of his technology and the increasing governmental control it offers. 
+We live in a time when technology is being celebrated as an enabler of freedom but it the kinds of technology that Musk is perfecting has little to do with freedom. No doubt it could, but not in the current climate. 
+There are other issues as well. Musk is running a vast corporation with other people’s money. But if you look elsewhere you will see other titanic entities are throwing their resources behind the development of technology, especially robots. 
+It would be one thing if these technological innovations were being developed by entrepreneurs. But one of the biggest developer of robot technology – deadly technology at that – is the Pentagon. 
+Since we’ve already seen movies about deadly robots, we’re not shocked by the idea of what the Pentagon is doing. But that doesn’t make it much better. 
+How many people wake up in the morning and decide they’re going to build a robot that will kill people automatically? 
+But that’s what is going on. This technology is being developed by huge corporations with virtually unlimited funds. These corporations wouldn’t exist without monopoly central banking and a variety of rules and regulations to support them and ensure they have little or no competition. 
+The world today is technocratic and fascist. It is run by gigantic corporations that would not exist without laws and judicial decisions that guarantee their viability no matter how incompetently they operate. 
+These corporations work hand-in-glove with governments around the world. Both the corporations and governments are run secretly by the same banking cabal that runs central banking via the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland. 
+In other words, the technological progress that we are supposed to celebrate is actually being organized for nefarious purposes. It wouldn’t exist in the form it does without vast entities that have turned their energies toward perfecting technology that is intended to create additional control, not freedom. 
+A normal entrepreneurial society in which individuals and groups applied technology with an eye toward marketplace acceptance might end up with completely different kinds of technology. 
+Many people might reject self-driving cars and killer robots – at least without proper safeguards. 
+But we don’t have normal societies in the world, for the most part. Instead we have people like Elon Musk who builds “the world’s safest car,” albeit one that explodes like a bomb at high impact. 
+More: 
+The impact knocked the wheels off of the car before the batteries caught fire and exploded. Speckman died at the scene while her passenger, 44-year-old Kevin McCarthy, died at the hospital. 
+What else do we learn? “’Lithium-ion battery cell fires are tough to put out,’ Indiana Fire Trucks Battalion Chief Kevin Jones said.” 
+The Tesla Model S is “known” for being fabulously safe. As the article informs us, it achieved the highest National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rating of any car ever tested. 
+Conclusion: Except when it explodes.",FAKE
+9210,Read the Open Letter By Former Federal Prosecutors Criticizing James Comey,"Read the Open Letter By Former Federal Prosecutors Criticizing James Comey Posted on Oct 31, 2016 FBI Director James Comey. ( Flickr / CC 2.0 ) 
+Editor’s note: This open letter was published on Hillary Clinton’s website Sunday night in response to FBI Director James Comey’s recent announcement regarding the agency’s email review . See the full list of signatories on her website here . 
+Sunday, as reported by the Associated Press , a group of nearly 100 former federal prosecutors and high-ranking [Department of Justice] officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations, including former [Attorney General] Eric Holder and former Deputy AG Larry Thompson, issued the following joint letter expressing serious concerns over FBI Director Comey’s departure from long-standing department protocols: 
+As former federal prosecutors and high-ranking officials of the U.S. Department of Justice, we know that the impartiality and nonpartisanship of the United States justice system makes it exceptional throughout the world. To maintain fairness and neutrality, federal law enforcement officials must exercise discipline whenever they make public statements in connection with an ongoing investigation. Often, evidence uncovered during the course of an investigative inquiry is incomplete, misleading or even incorrect, and releasing such information before all of the facts are known and tested in a court of law can unfairly prejudice individuals and undermine the public’s faith in the integrity of our legal process. 
+For this reason, Justice Department officials are instructed to refrain from commenting publicly on the existence, let alone the substance, of pending investigative matters, except in exceptional circumstances and with explicit approval from the Department of Justice officials responsible for ultimate supervision of the matter. They are also instructed to exercise heightened restraint near the time of a primary or general election because, as official guidance from the Department instructs, public comment on a pending investigative matter may affect the electoral process and create the appearance of political interference in the fair administration of justice. 
+It is out of our respect for such settled tenets of the United States Department of Justice that we are moved to express our concern with the recent letter issued by FBI Director James Comey to eight Congressional Committees. Many of us have worked with Director Comey; all of us respect him. But his unprecedented decision to publicly comment on evidence in what may be an ongoing inquiry just eleven days before a presidential election leaves us both astonished and perplexed. We cannot recall a prior instance where a senior Justice Department official—Republican or Democrat—has, on the eve of a major election, issued a public statement where the mere disclosure of information may impact the election’s outcome, yet the official acknowledges the information to be examined may not be significant or new. 
+Director Comey’s letter is inconsistent with prevailing Department policy, and it breaks with longstanding practices followed by officials of both parties during past elections. Moreover, setting aside whether Director Comey’s original statements in July were warranted, by failing to responsibly supplement the public record with any substantive, explanatory information, his letter begs the question that further commentary was necessary. For example, the letter provides no details regarding the content, source or recipient of the material; whether the newly-discovered evidence contains any classified or confidential information; whether the information duplicates material previously reviewed by the FBI; or even “whether or not [the] material may be significant.” 
+Perhaps most troubling to us is the precedent set by this departure from the Department’s widely-respected, non-partisan traditions. The admonitions that warn officials against making public statements during election periods have helped to maintain the independence and integrity of both the Department’s important work and public confidence in the hardworking men and women who conduct themselves in a nonpartisan manner. 
+We believe that adherence to longstanding Justice Department guidelines is the best practice when considering public statements on investigative matters. We do not question Director Comey’s motives. However, the fact remains that the Director’s disclosure has invited considerable, uninformed public speculation about the significance of newly-discovered material just days before a national election. For this reason, we believe the American people deserve all the facts, and fairness dictates releasing information that provides a full and complete picture regarding the material at issue.",FAKE
+5656,Do you think there will be as many doom sayers if trump should get in office ?,Report Copyright Violation Do you think there will be as many doom sayers if trump should get in office ? I notice here at GLP the amount of doom sayers seems to go down when a republican is in office (Bush). But when the left get in office the doomsaying increases. Now i am sure the effect is opposite. If trump gets in office i am sure the doomsaying will increase on the left side of the political spectrum. Page 1,FAKE
+3575,Al Shabaab calls for attack on Mall of America in new video,"A new video from Al Shabaab purportedly shows the terror group calling for an attack on Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minn.
+
+According to Fox 9, the mall is one of three similar targets the terror group specifically names, including West Edmonton Mall in Canada and the Oxford Street shopping area in London.
+
+The video purportedly shows 6 minutes of graphic images and the terrorists celebrating the 2013 Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya, that killed more than 60 people.
+
+The narrator, his face wrapped in a black-and-white kaffiyeh-type scarf and wearing a camouflage jacket, spoke with a British accent and appeared to be of Somali origin. He accused Kenyan troops in Somalia of committing abuses against Somali Muslims.
+
+He ended the video by calling on Muslim men to attack other shopping malls in Western countries.
+
+An image of the Mall of America is shown in the video, alongside its GPS coordinates. The mall says it is ramping up its security in response.
+
+
+
+ U.S. authorities said there was ""no credible"" evidence suggesting a U.S. mall attack was in the works.
+
+""We will continue to monitor events with the help of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies,"" Mall of America said in a statement. ""As always, we take any potential threat seriously and respond appropriately. Mall of America has implemented extra security precautions, some may be noticeable to guests, and others won't be. We will continue to follow the situation, along with law enforcement, and will remain vigilant as we always do in similar situations.""
+
+Jim Kallstrom, the former assistant director of the FBI’s New York office, said the FBI has a “huge job in front of them.
+
+“You look at the Mall of America, you look at all the malls then you start to backtrack and say you know it would be nice if we knew what comes and goes into the country,” Kallstrom told Fox News on Sunday. “We don’t have a clue.”
+
+The Department of Homeland Security and FBI issued a joint statement Sunday saying that both agencies were aware of the video.
+
+""In recent months, the FBI and DHS have worked closely with our state and local public safety counterparts and members of the private sector, to include mall owners and operators, to prevent and mitigate these types of threats,"" the statement read.
+
+Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said on NBC's Meet The Press that “there needs to be an awareness.
+
+""We're in a new phase now, and I'm afraid that this most recent video release reflects that,"" Joshnson said during an appearance on ABC's This Week.
+
+Al Shabaab, Somalia's Islamic extremist rebels, claimed responsibility for a Friday attack on a hotel in Somalia's capital that killed 25 people and wounded 40, the country's government said Saturday.
+
+One Islamic extremist rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into the gate of the Central Hotel, and another went in and blew himself up, a statement from Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke's office said.
+
+Government officials were meeting at the Central Hotel at the time, and the statement said Mogadishu's deputy mayor and two legislators were among the dead. It was unclear whether the government's report of 25 dead included the two bombers.
+
+Despite the loss of key strongholds in Somalia, Al Shabaab, which is linked to Al Qaeda, continues to stage attacks in the capital, Mogadishu, and elsewhere.
+
+The group, designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department in 2008, has close ties to Al Qaeda through its senior leaders. It has attracted several radical volunteers from Minneapolis and Americans began traveling to Somalia in 2007 to join the group.
+
+Somalia's president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, condemned the Friday attack and said it would not derail efforts by his government to restore peace to Somalia, which is recovering from decades of war.
+
+This is the second attack on a hotel in Mogadishu in less than a month. On Jan. 22, three Somali nationals were killed when a suicide car bomber blew himself up at the gate of a hotel housing the advance party of the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who visited the country days later.
+
+Al Shabaab controlled much of Mogadishu during the years 2007 to 2011, but was pushed out of Somalia's capital and other major cities by African Union forces.
+
+In Kenya, the government dismissed the Al Shabaab video.
+
+""They're using propaganda to legitimize what cannot be legitimized. When you lead a group to go and attack a shopping mall and kill innocent shoppers that cannot be legitimized, those were not soldiers,"" Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said.
+
+""Muslims also died in the Westgate attack. It's in our interest to ensure Somalia is stabilized because the instability affects us. The video is cheap propaganda trying to re-write history and to get more support from those support them.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from MyFoxTwinCities.com.",REAL
+7905,"‘Beyonce, Jay Z, Hillary Clinton – You Don’t Represent All Blacks, Women’","
+21st Century Wire says… 
+One of the great myths being spun by the establishment media was that Donald Trump had no support from women, latinos and blacks in the US. As it turned out, this was a lie propagated in a failed attempt to margnalize Republican voters and give a false impression of a liberal Democratic mandate in America. In the end Trump gathered 29% of Latinos, 9% of African Americans and 49% of college educated white women. For months, mainstream media pundits and polls insisted that all of these demographics were exclusively for Hillary Clinton. How could they have got it so wrong? 
+Psychologist and intenet radio personality Kiki Green explains how blacks were conned into voting for Hillary Clinton by the partnership between the Democratic Party, Hollywood and the Clinton campaign – by cynically using celebrities like Beyonce, Jay Z and Katie Perry… 
+WARNING: ADULT LANGUAGE please be advised: 
+. READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Files 
+SUPPORT 21WIRE – SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV ",FAKE
+3189,The Wild Ideas You Missed While Donald Trump Was Talking,"After five Republican debates, most Americans know about Donald Trump’s provocative beliefs, like his desires to end birthright citizenship, stop Muslim immigration and kill families of suspected terrorists. Much less attention has been paid to Carly Fiorina’s conclusion that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, Mike Huckabee’s pledge to defy Supreme Court rulings he deems incompatible with God’s law, Rick Santorum’s claim that Islam is not protected by the First Amendment or Chris Christie’s threat to shoot down Russian planes and launch cyberattacks on Chinese leaders.
+
+Those provocative beliefs, believe it or not, were also expressed during the five Republican debates. They were just overshadowed by the furor over Trump. It might be natural for an opposition party to sound bombastic during primary season, especially when its front-runner is blessed with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bombast, but the debate transcripts read like a Democratic opposition researcher’s dream.
+
+The good news for Republicans, arguably, is that their rhetoric has been so consistently over-the-top that it has started to sound routine; academics call this “shifting the Overton window,” the range of what’s considered politically acceptable. I’ve watched all the debates as well as the undercards live, but when I reviewed the transcripts, I was amazed how many radical statements had slipped under my radar. Ted Cruz called for putting the United States back on the gold standard. Marco Rubio accused President Barack Obama of destroying the U.S. military. Huckabee said Bernie Madoff’s rip-offs weren’t as bad as what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare. Lindsey Graham said his administration would monitor all “Islamic websites,” not just jihadist ones. I had even forgotten Trump’s claim that vaccines caused autism in a 2-year-old girl he knew.
+
+Vaccines do not cause autism. Goldbuggery is crackpot economics. The U.S. military is still by far the strongest in the world. And what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare is give them pensions and health care. But none of those statements drew any pushback from the other Republican candidates, or, for that matter, the media moderators. Neither did Ben Carson’s assertion that if the United States had set a goal of oil independence within a decade, moderate Arab states would have “turned over Osama bin Laden and anybody else you wanted on a silver platter within two weeks,” which is wackadoodle on multiple levels.
+
+After the first Trump-obsessed debate in August, I wrote about how the Republicans were racing to the right to try to attract the scraps of attention that weren’t going to Trump. My favorite example that night was Bobby Jindal’s promise to sic the IRS and the Justice Department on Planned Parenthood on his first day as president—basically, an impeachable crime. But that didn’t turn out to be an isolated incident. In fact, Cruz made the same promise in a later debate, except for the IRS part, presumably because he also vowed to abolish the IRS.
+
+The Democratic candidates have also appealed to their party’s ideologically committed base during their primary debates, which, perhaps for that reason, have been scheduled at odd times when few Americans have been watching. But with occasional exceptions from socialist Bernie Sanders, who suggested that he wouldn’t mind 90 percent tax rates on the rich, they haven’t said much that felt particularly surprising or politically damaging. Debt-free college may or may not be a good idea, but it’s hard to imagine Republicans turning it into an attack line.
+
+By contrast, the GOP debates have felt like madcap purity contests, with the candidates competing to demonstrate their commitment to supply-side tax cuts and foreign-policy belligerence, as well as their fierce opposition to illegal immigration and every imaginable government regulation. Rubio, supposedly the establishment alternative to Trump, vowed to repeal Wall Street reform in its entirety and oppose abortion without any exceptions. John Kasich, supposedly the moderate in the GOP race, vowed to “punch Russia in the nose.” Wild accusations by non-Trump candidates—that the independent Federal Reserve has kept interest rates low to prop up Obama, that Obama shows more respect to Iran’s ayatollah than Israel’s prime minister, that 300,000 veterans died last year while waiting for health care, that Obama is trying to strip away the sovereignty of the United States, that David Petraeus was prosecuted for sharing classified information with his girlfriend because Obama didn’t like him—have provoked no reaction whatsoever during the debates.
+
+Democratic leaders have expressed glee about these nationally televised festivals of right-wing me-too-ism, but another way of thinking about them is as highly rated, mostly unrebutted advertisements for the notion that Obama is a disaster and America is in peril. So far, the Republicans have had more than 20 hours to tell the public that “the idea of America is slipping away,” that “we’re on a path to socialism,” that “America has been betrayed.” Nobody on the debate stage disagreed when, for example, Christie declared that Obama doesn’t respect the military or the police, or that Americans believed in a more prosperous future in January 2009 (when the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month) until Obama “stole” that belief. You might not take Christie at his word that Obama is a “feckless weakling,” but when you hear it over and over, you might assume he must be missing at least some feck.
+
+At times, a few of the Republican contenders have dared to challenge the magical thinking that has dominated the debates. Rand Paul has been a consistent voice against regime change as a cure for what ails the Middle East. Kasich has mocked the “fantasy” that massive high-end tax cuts would create balanced budgets. And Trump has bucked GOP conventional wisdom on foreign and domestic issues, denouncing the Iraq War as a waste of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars that could have shored up American infrastructure instead, while defending progressive taxation as a logical approach to raising revenue from those who can afford it.
+
+When I slogged through the transcripts, I also noticed a few interesting ideas buried amid the can-you-top-this rhetoric. When he wasn’t accusing Obama of criminalizing Christianity while exalting the faith of Guantánamo detainees, Huckabee was often calling for more focus on chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer that cause so much pain and cost so much money. When she wasn’t telling whoppers about Planned Parenthood videos and Obama firing a general who never served in his administration, Fiorina kept pushing for “zero-based budgeting,” the idea that every program and agency should have to justify every dollar every year. When he wasn’t complaining that Obama cares more about anti-Muslim sentiment than anti-Semitism, Santorum suggested that veterans should get most of their care from private hospitals, and that the Veterans Administration should become a specialized center of excellence for military-focused health issues like prosthetics and PTSD.
+
+But policy entrepreneurialism was not the gist of the Republican debates. The gist was that the survival of the United States is at risk; that Obama has been weak on ISIL and Assad and Russia and China and Iran and Hezbollah and every other distasteful figure on the world stage; that calling radical Islam by its name and “targeting the bad guys” and “taking the fight to the enemy” will solve all the problems in the Middle East. On domestic issues, the gist was that the United States in the Obama era has become a dystopia of rampant unemployment, high taxes, runaway deficits, porous borders and job-killing regulation—and that undoing what Obama did would make America great again.
+
+These are presumably winning messages in a Republican primary. It’s not clear whether they would be in a general election. The reality of the Obama era, for all its warts, is that unemployment has dropped to 5 percent, the deficit has shrunk by two thirds, illegal immigration has plateaued, far fewer U.S. soldiers are dying abroad and Americans are more likely to be killed by lightning than by terrorists at home. The question is whether the run-for-your-lives talking points will crash into statistical reality, or whether they will gradually help create a new political reality.
+
+The Democrats would say the GOP is simply defying reality—on climate, on economics, on the ease with which muscular foreign policies can fix the world, on just about everything. Then again, the GOP isn’t the party that’s hiding its debates on weekend nights. Its views may be extreme, but it’s airing its views for all to see. It’s acting like a confident party—perhaps an overconfident party—while the Democrats are acting like they’ve lost their feck.
+
+",REAL
+2949,Saudi Arabia says farewell to King Abdullah,"(CNN) Thousands gathered in Riyadh on Friday to say farewell to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a cautious reformer who succeeded in securing broader freedoms in the conservative kingdom, but fell short in gaining greater independence for women.
+
+Abdullah died early Friday, several weeks after the state-run Saudi Press Agency said he was suffering from pneumonia and had been admitted to a hospital . The royal court didn't release an exact cause of death. He was 90.
+
+To ensure a smooth transition, the kingdom quickly appointed his 79-year-old half-brother, Salman bin Abdulaziz, to the throne. His half-brother Prince Muqrin, a decade younger, is the new crown prince.
+
+After Friday afternoon prayers at Riyadh's Imam Turki Bin Abdullah Grand Mosque, the body of Abdullah, wrapped in a pale shroud, was carried from the mosque toward a cemetery, followed by a solemn procession of Saudi men in traditional dress.
+
+He was later laid to rest after a simple, swift ceremony. Those present at the graveside -- the royals closest to the late king -- were then to move on to a royal palace, where they were to pay their respects to the new monarch.
+
+The ceremony of ""al Bayaah,"" or pledging of allegiance to the new king, followed the funeral.
+
+Condolences and remembrances poured in from all corners of the globe.
+
+""To God we belong and indeed to him we shall return,"" said the homepage of the English-language Saudi newspaper Arab News.
+
+Bahrain, Jordan and the Palestinian territories, among others, declared days of mourning. The U.N. secretary-general praised Abdullah for his Arab Peace Initiative to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said he would lead a delegation ""in the coming days"" to pay respects.
+
+""King Abdullah's life spanned from before the birth of modern Saudi Arabia through its emergence as a critical force within the global economy and a leader among Arab and Islamic nations,"" U.S. President Barack Obama said in a statement.
+
+Speaking to CNN's Richard Quest in Davos, Switzerland, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he expects no changes in his government's relations with Saudi Arabia.
+
+""I don't anticipate anything based on the conversation we have had, no,"" he said.
+
+In an address to the nation -- his first televised appearance since becoming king -- Salman offered his condolences to the Saudi people.
+
+""We will, with God's will and power, adhere to the straight path this country followed since its establishment by King Abdulaziz and his sons after him, and will not deviate at all from it, since our constitution is the book of Allah (Quran) and the teachings of Prophet Mohammed,"" he said.
+
+He also spoke of the ""desperate need"" for unity and solidarity among the followers of Islam, saying Saudi Arabia would continue to promote that.
+
+He had already issued six royal decrees Friday, the Saudi Press Agency reported, including appointing Prince Mohammed bin Naif bin Abdulaziz as the deputy crown prince.
+
+Salman, who has 1.33 million followers on Twitter but follows no one, changed his Twitter handle to @KingSalman.
+
+In the context of the kingdom's conservative circles, Abdullah was seen as a reformer and often came up against more hardline clerics.
+
+After ascending to the throne, Abdullah took steps toward broader freedoms and invested some of the country's vast oil wealth in large-scale education and infrastructure projects.
+
+""He was really quite (an) extraordinary figure. He was probably the most progressive and liberal-minded king of Saudi Arabia since King Faisal, which is a long time ago, in the early 1970s,"" CNN's Fareed Zakaria said about Abdullah, whom he described as ""much loved.""
+
+""I had the opportunity to meet with him once, and what you got a sense of was somebody who really was determined to move his country forward,"" Zakaria said. ""It's a conservative country and a conservative society -- and he kept emphasizing that to me -- but he was very clear in the direction he wanted to go.""
+
+However, resistance from conservative factions hindered some of his efforts, leaving many women, in particular, disappointed by a lack of progress toward greater independence.
+
+Under Abdullah's leadership, the country slowly squashed al Qaeda, capturing or killing its leaders in the kingdom, forcing the remnants underground and sidelining radical preachers.
+
+It also took a more prominent role in international affairs.
+
+""Remember, the last time the price of oil fell like this, the Soviet Union collapsed,"" said Zakaria. ""That said, the successor is a very competent man.""
+
+He added: ""I don't expect any major shift, but it marks a big change, and we'll have to see what the new king is like.""",REAL
+2260,Supreme Court rules gay couples nationwide have a right to marry,"A deeply divided Supreme Court on Friday delivered a historic victory for gay rights, ruling 5 to 4 that the Constitution requires that same-sex couples be allowed to marry no matter where they live.
+
+The court’s action rewarded years of legal work by same-sex marriage advocates and marked the culmination of an unprecedented upheaval in public opinion and the nation’s jurisprudence.
+
+Marriages began Friday in states that had previously thwarted the efforts of same-sex couples to wed, while some states continued to resist what they said was a judicial order that changed the traditional definition of marriage and sent the country into uncharted territory. As of the court’s decision Friday morning, there were 14 states where same-sex couples were not allowed to marry.
+
+Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who has written all of the court’s decisions recognizing and expanding gay rights, said the decision was based on the fundamental right to marry and the equality that must be afforded gay Americans.
+
+“Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right,” Kennedy wrote. He was joined in the ruling by the court’s liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
+
+All four of the court’s most conservative members — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — dissented, and each wrote a separate opinion.
+
+The common theme in their dissents was that judicial activism on the part of five members of the court had usurped a power that belongs to the people.
+
+“If you are among the many Americans — of whatever sexual orientation — who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision,” wrote Roberts, who for the first time in his tenure marked his disagreement with a decision by reading part of his dissent from the bench.
+
+“Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it,” he wrote.
+
+Scalia called the decision a “threat to American democracy,” saying it robs citizens of “the freedom to govern themselves.”
+
+[It’s the first time Roberts has had such a bold statement from the bench]
+
+In a statement in the White House Rose Garden, President Obama hailed the decision: “This ruling is a victory for America. This decision affirms what millions of Americans already believe in their hearts. When all Americans are truly treated as equal, we are more free.”
+
+It wasn’t until 2012 that Obama declared that same-sex couples should be able to marry, and it was only last year that he said he thought the Constitution provided such a right. But by Friday evening, the rainbow colors that gay rights activists have adopted were projected onto the north face of the White House. With the Supreme Court’s ruling, Obama said, “Today we can say in no uncertain terms that we have made our union a little more perfect.”
+
+There were wild scenes of celebrations on the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court. Same-sex marriage supporters had arrived early, armed with signs and rainbow flags. They cheered at the announcement of a constitutional right for gay marriage, which did not legally exist anywhere in the world until the turn of this century. The first legally recognized same-sex marriages in the United States took place just 11 years ago, the result of a Massachusetts state supreme court decision.
+
+Jim Obergefell, who became the face of the case, Obergefell v. Hodges, when he sought to put his name on his husband’s Ohio death certificate as the surviving spouse, said, “Today’s ruling from the Supreme Court affirms what millions across the country already know to be true in our hearts: that our love is equal.”
+
+“It is my hope that the term gay marriage will soon be a thing of the past, that from this day forward it will be, simply, marriage,” he said.
+
+But Austin R. Nimocks, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a group that supports traditional marriage, said: “Today, five lawyers took away the voices of more than 300 million Americans to continue to debate the most important social institution in the history of the world. . . . Nobody has the right to say that a mom or a woman or a dad or a man is irrelevant. There are differences that should be celebrated.”
+
+[Opponents of gay marriage are divided on whether to resist the ruling]
+
+The Supreme Court used cases from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, where restrictions against same-sex marriage were upheld by an appeals court last year, to find that the Constitution does not allow such prohibitions.
+
+Kennedy over the past 20 years has written the Supreme Court’s most important gay rights cases: overturning criminal laws on homosexual conduct, protecting gays from discrimination and declaring that the federal government could not refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed where they were legal.
+
+He often employs a lofty, ­writing-for-history tone, and Friday’s decision was no different.
+
+Referring to the couples who brought the cases before the court, Kennedy wrote: “It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions.”
+
+Kennedy did not respond directly to the court’s dissenters, but he addressed the argument that the court was creating a constitutional right. The right to marriage is fundamental, he said. The difference is society’s evolving view of gay people and their rights, he said.
+
+“The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest,” he wrote. “With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.”
+
+As in previous decisions, Kennedy did not spell out how courts should scrutinize laws that treated gays differently. But Mary Bonauto, who argued the case for gay plaintiffs at the Supreme Court, said that message from Kennedy’s combined opinions “is one of inclusion: Stop making rules for gay people.”
+
+Scalia was a sharp critic of Kennedy’s style, saying it was “as pretentious as its content is egotistic.”
+
+“The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie,” Scalia wrote.
+
+Roberts wrote a lengthy dissent that was a point-by-point takedown of the majority opinion. Gay activists had wondered whether the 60-year-old justice might take note of the increasing public support for same-sex marriage and find a way to join the majority on what they called the “right side of history.”
+
+But he and the other dissenters said the question was not whether same-sex marriage was a good idea, but who should decide.
+
+“The court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the states and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs,” Roberts wrote. “Just who do we think we are?”
+
+Roberts rejected a comparison to Loving v. Virginia, in which the court struck down bans on interracial marriage. That did not change the age-old definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, he said. He raised concerns that the decision could lead to polygamous marriages — he mentioned a married threesome of lesbians called a “throuple.”
+
+He noted that voters and legislators in only 11 states had authorized same-sex marriages, and said it was better for gay marriage to be adopted through the democratic process than by judicial order. He said religious leaders could take little comfort from the majority opinion that their beliefs would be respected.
+
+That theme was picked up by Alito in his dissent. He said there could be “bitter and lasting wounds” from the decision and warned that the decision will be “exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”
+
+The questions raised in the cases decided Friday were left unanswered in 2013, when the justices last confronted the issue of same-sex marriage. A slim majority of the court said at the time that a key portion of the Defense of Marriage Act — withholding the federal government’s recognition of same-sex marriages — was unconstitutional. In a separate case that year, the court said procedural issues kept it from answering the constitutional question in a case from California but allowed same-sex marriages to resume in that state.
+
+Since then, courts across the nation — with the notable exception of the Cincinnati-based federal appeals court that left intact the restrictions in the four states at issue — have struck down a string of state prohibitions on same-sex marriage, many of them passed by voters in referendums.
+
+Jerry Markon, David Nakamura and Sandhya Somashekhar contributed to this report.",REAL
+1636,"Insiders: Rubio wins, Kasich bombs","Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+9617,CONFIRMED: Russia deploys Kuznetsov aircraft carrier to defend Syrian coast,"ALEXANDER MERCOURIS | THE DURAN R ussia’s use of its aircraft carrier in the Syrian conflict is principally intended to learn lessons for the design of more potent such warships in the future, rather than to change the situation in Syria itself. The Russian navy’s deployment of   aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean has provoked a very confused response in the Western media. 
+On the one hand it is described as a major escalation, as if   was a US style super carrier. On the other hand there has been a great of deal of derision , with the ship called an obsolete rust bucket dangerous mainly to its crew. Where does the truth lie? The Admiral Kuznetsov is the first and only Russian aircraft carrier capable of launching fighter aircraft conventionally. The preceding Kiev class carriers were smaller ships, which could only launch a small number of aircraft vertically. Contrary to what reports say, Admiral Kuznetsov is by the standards of navy carriers a relatively new ship. She was launched in 1985, commissioned in the then Soviet navy in 1990, but only became operational after prolonged trials in 1995. The US navy currently operates 10 Nimitz class supercarriers. If the age of a ship is determined by its date of launch; then three of the US navy’s Nimitz class supercarriers are older than Kuznetsov; if by date of commission, then five are; if by entry into service then six are. The Russian navy had no previous experience of operating carriers, so the lengthy time scale of her sea trials between commission and entry into service is not surprising. In addition what undoubtedly extended this period before her full entry into service was the political and economic crisis Russia experienced during the 1990s. Given the severity of this crisis, it is a wonder a ship as large and complicated as Kuznetsov was brought into service at all. Either way talk of Kuznetsov as some sort of archaic ship from a bygone era is exaggerated, whilst jokes about Kuznetsov being “….practically old enough to have been deployed in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war….” are simply silly. The Admiral Kuznetsov is expected to deploy off Syria, carrying 15 warplanes, including new MiG-29K/KUB fighters and the Su-33a, shown here. Aircraft carriers as it happens tend to be long-lived ships. Coral Sea, a US Medway class carrier, served in the US Navy from 1947 to 1990. By the standards of aircraft carriers Kuznetsov is not an old ship. What is true about Kuznetsov is that because she was the first of a type of ship of which the Russians had no previous experience, and because of the fraught period during which she was commissioned and brought into service – which made it impossible to sort out her teething problems properly – Kuznetsov suffers by comparison with US navy carriers from design flaws and from engine problems. The ship’s engines are unreliable, because they are insufficiently powerful for a ship of this size. The Russians when they built Kuznetsov lacked suitable nuclear reactors for this type of ship (they were designed for the intended follow-on Ulyanovsk carrier, which because of the 1990s crisis was however never built). They also lacked conventional engines large enough for a ship of this size, which was roughly twice as heavy as the largest other ship the Russian or Soviet navy had commissioned before. The Russians accordingly came up with a complicated solution of using multiple steam turbines and turbo-pressurised boilers to make up for the lack of power of the individual engines. Like all complicated arrangements, this arrangement is unreliable and prone to breakdown, with the engines experiencing stress especially in heavy seas. To compound the trouble with the engines, they were built by a plant in what is now independent Ukraine. As political relations between Russia and Ukraine deteriorated, servicing of the engines by this plant became increasingly erratic, and has now stopped completely. It is these problems with the engines that account for the practice of accompanying Kuznetsov on long range deployments with a tug. The tug in question – the Nikolai Chiker – is the most powerful tug in the world. This same tug played a key role in successfully hauling Kuznetsov’s uncompleted sister ship Varyag from Ukraine to China in 2005, where she has now become the Chinese carrier Liaoning. The fact Kuznetsov is accompanied by a tug on long range deployments has provoked some derision. However it is common practice in any navy to accompany large surface warships with service ships, and accompanying Kuznetsov with a tug ensures in Kuznetsov’s case that the carrier will get to where the Russian naval staff are sending it. The engine problems will not affect Kuznetsov’s Mediterranean deployment when the carrier finally reaches its position. Kuznetsov suffers from other problems, which are unsurprising given that Kuznetsov is so much bigger and so different to any other ship the Russian navy has ever previously commissioned, and the unhappy times when it was launched. The arduous deployment of the Russian flotilla. Everything is harder for the Russians. (BBC) There are for example known to be problems with Kuznetsov’s water pipes, which have a history of breakdowns and of freezing up in Arctic weather. These problems too however will not affect Kuznetsov’s capabilities as a warship when the carrier finally reaches the eastern Mediterranean, and the close proximity of Russian bases in Sevastopol and Tartus means they can be dealt with quickly if they arise. Once this deployment is ended Kuznetsov will go through a lengthy refit, which unlike previous refits is intended to be practically a rebuild. With Russia developing a new range of much larger and more powerful engines, Kuznetsov’s current unsatisfactory engines will finally be replaced, and the other teething problems like the problem with the water pipes will finally be addressed. Ultimately this is a potent warship, bigger than any other carrier other than those operated by the US navy, and once the refit is done it will be a powerful asset. In the meantime the ship already provides the Russian fleet with a carrier capability matched by no other navy apart from that of the US. 
+The Russian carrier passing through the English Channel. In saying this it is important to stress however that the US navy carrier force – with its 10 nuclear powered supercarriers – dwarfs the capability of any other navy, including Russia’s, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Neither the Kuznetsov, nor any other carrier the Russians might build, nor any other navy, can match or rival it. A more pertinent criticism of Kuznetsov is that though Kuznetsov is a large ship (at 55,000 tonnes standard weight and with a 305 metre length Kuznetsov is midway between a US Medway class carrier and a US Forrestal class supercarrier) the air group it carries at 40-50 aircraft is relatively small (by comparison a smaller US Medway class carrier carried an air group of 75-80 aircraft in the 1980s). This suggests that Kuznetsov is inefficient in its use of its spaces, a fact which again reflects Russian inexperience designing this sort of ship when Kuznetsov was built. However it also partly reflects differences in Kuznetsov’s intended role. At the time Kuznetsov was built the Russians did not envisage using their carriers for the sort of long range carrier type operations carried out by the US navy. Unlike US navy supercarriers Kuznetsov prioritises air defence of the fleet rather than long range strikes. That explains why Kuznetsov’s fighter aircraft take off from the carrier using a ski jump rather than steam catapults. Ski jump takeoffs put less stress on the pilots and shorten takeoff times, enabling more aircraft to take off from the carrier more quickly, which can be important in an air defence situation. The penalty is that aircraft are limited in the loads they can carry by comparison with aircraft launched by steam catapults. For air defence – the purpose for which Kuznetsov was designed – this is unimportant since fighter aircraft carrying out air defence missions only carry light air to air missiles rather than heavy air to ground missiles and bombs. However it does significantly reduce the air group’s capability to carry out long range strikes. Combined with the relatively small size of the air group, this means that Kuznetsov’s ability to carry out long range ground strikes is fractional compared to that of a US navy supercarrier. If Kuznetsov is not really designed to carry out long range ground strikes, why are the Russians deploying Kuznetsov off the coast of Syria? The plan to deploy Kuznetsov to the eastern Mediterranean was made many months ago, long before the recent collapse in relations with the US over Syria. The decision therefore can have nothing to do with deterring the US from declaring a no fly zone over Syria, as some people are suggesting. Most likely the intention is to gain experience operating aircraft against ground targets from an offshore carrier. This is not something the Russians have ever done before. Even if Kuznetsov’s capability to do it by comparison with a US navy supercarrier is marginal, the fighting in Syria does at least give the Russians an opportunity to try it out to find out how it is done and what it involves. That way they can learn lessons that will help them with the design of the far more powerful ships that are to come (see here and here ). In other words the deployment of the Kuznetsov to the eastern Mediterranean is essentially a training exercise. It does not merit either the derision or the hype that has been created around it.",FAKE
+6048,"Media blackout as hundreds of black teens attack Temple U. students, police, a horse","Print 
+In a story that predictably did not make the mainstream media, and with video surveillance very difficult to find, a massive mob of black teens viciously attacked white Temple University students, police officers and even a police horse in Philadelphia on Friday night. 
+[…] 
+In the limited local coverage this story did receive, the race aspect was generally avoided. It is way past time to take back the media, and fill it with truth-tellers, not apologists. 
+“More than 150 teens, spread out in groups of 20 or 30, descended upon the campus at around 8:30 p.m. Friday — wreaking havoc for nearly two hours before eventually dispersing,” according to NBC 10 …. 
+But there is a reason for all of this horror, according to Solomon Jones of Philly.com . It evidently boils down to the progressive canard “white privilege.” 
+The black teens are feeling excluded because evil white “others” have come into their neighborhood and built rental properties for college students, raising the property values of their neighborhoods in a way that evidently excludes the angry teens, who were used to having their blighted turf unmolested.",FAKE
+2060,The 6 most important parts of Donald Trump's energy policy,"When it comes to energy policy, the 2016 presidential election really isn't all that complicated.
+
+Hillary Clinton plans to continue President Obama's strategy of pushing down carbon dioxide emissions via regulations. That means using less coal and oil and more wind and solar. Donald Trump, by contrast, doesn't much care about global warming and plans to greatly expand US oil drilling and coal mining — largely by repealing various environmental rules.
+
+On May 26, Trump fleshed out his vision in a speech at an oil industry conference in Bismarck, North Dakota. There were no real surprises. Trump's energy policy sounds nearly identical to Mitt Romney's energy policy in 2012, only with more exclamation points. (At one point Trump actually used the phrase ""very, very pure, sweet, beautiful oil."") He's happily adopted the standard GOP playbook: fewer regulations, more domestic fossil fuel production, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and ""cancel"" the Paris climate deal. The crowd loved it.
+
+Here were six big takeaways:
+
+Before the speech, many reporters were wondering if Trump might finally clarify his views on global warming. This is a guy, after all, who once tweeted, ""The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."" Surely he'd like to elaborate?
+
+Instead, Trump mostly ... ignored the issue. He talked about guns in his energy speech. He talked about rising crime in cities. He even reiterated his pledge to build a wall on the border with Mexico — evidently a hit at North Dakota oil gatherings. But he barely discussed climate change.
+
+He did promise that upon taking office, he'd ""rescind all job-destroying Obama executive actions ... including the Climate Action Plan."" Here he's referring to a series of regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency has enacted over the past eight years to cut US carbon dioxide emissions. Trump would presumably try to scrap Obama's Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce CO2 from power plants.
+
+I've written about how Trump might go about dismantling Obama's climate policies here. Suffice to say, this would be easier to do if a GOP-controlled Congress could pass a law taking away the EPA's authority over carbon dioxide. It'd be harder (but not impossible) for Trump to do via executive action alone.
+
+Trump also pledged to ""cancel the Paris climate agreement"" — the deal reached last December in which every country on Earth pledged to restrain emissions and address global warming. While Trump couldn't just scuttle a global deal by himself, he could certainly undermine it by abandoning America's efforts to cut emissions.
+
+Trump also seemed perplexed about how the Paris agreement even works, claiming it ""gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use."" This isn't true at all. Under the deal, every country submits its own (voluntary) plan for curbing emissions.
+
+The United States is currently the largest producer of petroleum and natural gas in the world, thanks in part to the massive fracking boom that's been taking place around the country since the 2000s:
+
+But to hear Trump tell it, we're barely producing anything at all. He wants more — much more. On his first day in office, ""American energy dominance will be declared a strategic, economic, and foreign policy goal of the United States,"" he said. ""It's about time!""
+
+Trump dropped a few hints about how he'd try to expand oil and gas drilling. He criticized the Obama administration for keeping certain federal lands and waters off limits from drilling — including parts of Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf. (Romney proposed opening up these areas in 2012; you could likely get more production by doing so, though the impacts are often exaggerated.) Trump also attacked Clinton's proposals to regulate fracking; like Obama, she has backed rules to restrict methane leaks from natural gas operations.
+
+At times, Trump didn't seem to appreciate that energy production is frequently outside the president's control. For instance, he blamed Obama for the fact that the number of active drilling rigs in the United States has fallen to its lowest level in nearly a decade. The rig count has indeed plummeted. But that's primarily due to the fact that the recent US oil boom has created a glut of oil worldwide, causing crude prices to crash and giving companies less incentive to drill.
+
+""Under my administration,"" Trump promised, ""we'll accomplish complete American energy independence. Complete. Imagine a world in which our foes, and the oil cartels, can no longer use energy as a weapon. It will happen. We're going to win.""
+
+Presidents have been promising ""energy independence"" since forever and a day, but it doesn't really make much sense. The US currently produces enough crude oil to supply about 74 percent of its needs. In theory, with vastly expanded production we could bump that up to 100 percent. But we still wouldn't be shielded from foreign oil cartels.
+
+Oil is traded on the world market, and if tensions in the Middle East cause prices to spike, everyone is affected, regardless of where they get their crude. The easiest way to observe this is to look at Canada. Canada is a net oil exporter, a bona fide oil-independent nation. But gasoline prices in Canada still rise and fall in accordance with world events, just as they do in the United States or Japan or Europe.
+
+There are perfectly sound reasons to boost domestic energy production — as Trump says, it can create jobs and economic activity. But ""energy independence"" is a misguided notion.
+
+Coal production in the US has fallen off a cliff in recent years. Back in 2008, the country produced a record 1.2 billion short tons of coal. By 2015, that had fallen 25 percent. Coal mining employment has also plummeted as a result — a real blow to various communities in places like West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.
+
+There are a couple of reasons for coal's recent fall: The fracking boom has led to a flood of cheap natural gas, propelling many utilities to switch from coal to gas. But Obama's EPA has also enacted a number of strict air pollution regulations — on mercury and sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide from coal-burning plants — that have accelerated this shift to gas. (Falling Chinese steel production has also weakened demand for metallurgic coal.)
+
+Donald Trump wants to bring back coal mining by repealing those EPA regulations. ""We're going to save the coal industry,"" Trump promised. But utilities wouldn't necessarily rush back to coal once that happened, because natural gas would still have a cost advantage. (And remember, Trump wants to expand natural gas production.) It's extremely unlikely that the coal industry would rebound to its former levels.
+
+Indeed, even coal industry execs who support Trump are skeptical that he can bring back all those lost jobs. ""I don't think it will be a thriving industry ever again,"" coal mining CEO Robert Murray recently told Taylor Kuykendall of SNL. ""It will be an extremely competitive industry and it will be half size. … The coal mines cannot come back to where they were or anywhere near it.""
+
+In his speech, Trump said that his energy strategy ""does include nuclear, wind, and solar."" But, he added, he wouldn't support them ""to the exclusion of other forms of energy"" — referring to fossil fuels — ""that right now are working much better.""
+
+In his press conference with reporters before the speech, Trump elaborated: ""I know a lot about solar,"" he said. ""The problem with solar is it's very expensive."" He made no mention of the fact that solar prices have been dropping precipitously.
+
+He also criticized wind turbines for killing birds in California. ""Wind is killing hundreds and hundreds of eagles, one of the most beautiful, one of the most treasured birds,"" he said. ""So wind is a problem."" (While this is technically true, wind turbines kill orders of magnitude fewer birds than power lines or windows or cats. And many wind developers are currently experimenting with ways to reduce bird deaths.)
+
+""A Trump administration will focus on real environmental challenges, not the phony ones,"" Trump said. ""We'll solve for environmental problems, like the need for clean and safe drinking water."" Later he elaborated: ""My priorities are simple: clean air and clean water.""
+
+But he gave no indication of how he'd actually do that. In the past, the EPA has been a major driver of cleaning up America's air pollution. As the chart below shows, the six most common air pollutants in the US have all fallen 72 percent since 1970 — due, in large part, to rules imposed under the Clean Air Act.
+
+Trump made clear he's not a fan of the EPA. So he'd push for clean air and water ... how? He didn't say.
+
+Read more: How the next president could expand Obama's climate policies — or dismantle them",REAL
+8851,"Area Liberal No Longer Recognizes Fanciful, Wildly Inaccurate Mental Picture Of Country He Lives In - The Onion - America's Finest News Source","Man Wearing ‘Jewmerica’ T-Shirt Never Dreamed He’d See This Day SAND SPRINGS, OK—Feeling a mixture of intense pride and abject disbelief after news networks called the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, local man Terry Williams, who is currently wearing a T-shirt adorned with the word “Jewmerica,” told reporters late Tuesday night that he never dreamed he’d see this day during his lifetime. Nation Throws Off Tyrannical Yoke Of Moderate Respect For Women WASHINGTON—Political experts are hailing Donald Trump’s historic presidential victory early Wednesday as a resounding declaration that the nation is finally ready to cast off the tyrannical yoke of moderate respect for women that has suffocated the citizens of this country for generations. Nation Elects First Black-Hearted President WASHINGTON—Shattering a barrier long thought unbreakable in the United States, Donald Trump, the 70-year-old billionaire real estate mogul from New York, became the first black-hearted man in history to win the American presidency, in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Nation’s Optimists Need To Shut The Fuck Up Right Now WASHINGTON—Saying their rosy attitude about the state of the election was not helping anything given what is currently transpiring, sources confirmed Tuesday night that the nation’s optimists need to seriously shut the fuck up as soon as humanly fucking possible. Anderson Cooper Informs Viewers CNN Just Minutes Away From First Significant Piece Of Information Of Day NEW YORK—Roughly two hours into the network’s live nine-hour-long “Election Night In America” programming block, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper informed viewers Tuesday evening he is only moments away from delivering the first piece of genuinely significant information of the day. ",FAKE
+6279,When Charlottesville Was Nuked,"A 23 kiloton tower shot called BADGER, fired on April 18, 1953 at the Nevada Test Site, as part of the Operation Upshot-Knothole nuclear test series.",FAKE
+6479,Comment on Seattle council member proposes a MASSIVE fee hike for pot shops by Steven Broiles,"Posted on November 4, 2016 by DCG | 1 Comment 
+Seattle proggies love to push businesses out of their city. 
+From MyNorthwest.com : Seattle City Councilmember Tim Burgess proposed a 241 percent business license fee hike for pot shops, citing inspection and enforcement costs associated with regulating the two-year-old retail marijuana industry. 
+The proposed increase, introduced at Wednesday’s budget meeting, would raise the annual licensing cost within Seattle to $3,450 from the existing $1,000 . Cannabis retailers — and one council member — immediately questioned the proposal, saying that the math doesn’t make much sense. 
+“So what justified the increase other than the fact that we can do it?” asked District 2 Councilmember Bruce Harrell, citing Mayor Ed Murray’s more modest proposal for a $500 increase. “We’ve done a cost analysis that actually reflects (the increase)? It seems like we’ve exceeded it quite significantly.” 
+The city’s Finance and Administrative Services department defended the cost, saying that even with the mayor’s proposed increase, the licensing fee falls $430,000 short of the city’s cost to regulate pot. The finance department projected that pot retailers will cost the city more than $700,000 next year. 
+Pot growers and retailers wondered why this industry, from a license fee standpoint, must pay for its regulation in a way that other businesses, such as pawn shops and strip clubs, do not. Moreover, the city finance estimate misses a key point, said KC Franks, owner of Stash pot shops. “What about the $2 million in new sales taxes to the city?” Franks asked. “Why doesn’t their math reflect that?” Seattle Council Tax-Raising-Advocate Tim Burgess 
+Burgess, who said he has no independent confirmation of the sales tax figures, conceded that the pot retailers have, “raised some legitimate objections, so I’m sure we are going to look at all of that.” 
+But, he added, the pot issue speaks to a larger policy discussion about how cities pay for the cost of regulating local businesses. Typically, he said, a city uses a blend of licensing fees and taxes to get the money for necessary inspections and enforcement. Pot, he said, costs Seattle about $1 million a year to regulate, an amount which he characterized as a big burden. “This proposal was made to try to offset some of those costs,” he said 
+Burgess said the licensing fee likely will go up, but he is not sure if the full council will support his proposed increase. The measure, as it is or modified, could come to a vote next week. 
+Franks and other marijuana retailers characterized the proposal as a simple cash grab directed at an industry without much political clout – or as much money as people seem to think. Philip Dawdy, of the Have a Heart pot shop, wondered why an industry that is a net contributor to city coffers doesn’t have more council support? 
+When the city raised business license fees to help pay for more police, he said, they consulted retail business organizations first. The pot fee, he said, was a complete blindside. “We are actually helping to balance the city’s budget thanks to sales taxes,” he said. “Why are we not someone’s priority?” 
+DCG",FAKE
+8479,‘We The People’ Against Tyranny: Seven Principles For Free Government,"Videos ‘We The People’ Against Tyranny: Seven Principles For Free Government “As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid.”— Former presidential adviser Bertram Gross | November 7, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! Dozens of protestors demonstrating against the expansion of the Dakota Access Pipeline wade in cold creek waters confronting local police, as remnants of pepper spray waft over the crowd near Cannon Ball, N.D., Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016. 
+As history teaches us, if the people have little or no knowledge of the basics of government and their rights, those who wield governmental power inevitably wield it excessively. After all, a citizenry can only hold its government accountable if it knows when the government oversteps its bounds. 
+Precisely because Americans are easily distracted—because, as study after study shows, they are clueless about their rights—because their elected officials no longer represent them—because Americans have been brainwashed into believing that their only duty as citizens is to vote—because the citizenry has failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the Constitution—because young people are no longer being taught the fundamentals of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, resulting in citizens who don’t even know they have rights—and because Americans continue to place their trust in politics to fix what’s wrong with this country—the American governmental scheme is sliding ever closer towards a pervasive authoritarianism. 
+This steady slide towards tyranny, meted out by militarized local and federal police and legalistic bureaucrats, has been carried forward by each successive president over the past fifty years regardless of their political affiliation. 
+Big government has grown bigger and the rights of the citizenry have grown smaller. 
+However, there are certain principles—principles that every American should know—which undergird the American system of government and form the basis for the freedoms our forefathers fought and died for. 
+The following seven principles are a good starting point for understanding what free government is really all about. 
+First, the maxim that power corrupts is an absolute truth. Realizing this, those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights held one principle sacrosanct: a distrust of all who hold governmental power. As James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights, proclaimed, “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.” Moreover, in questions of power, Thomas Jefferson warned, “Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” As such, those who drafted our founding documents would see today’s government as an out-of-control, unmanageable beast. 
+The second principle is that governments primarily exist to secure rights, an idea that is central to constitutionalism. In appointing the government as the guardian of the people’s rights, the people give it only certain, enumerated powers, which are laid out in a written constitution. The idea of a written constitution actualizes the two great themes of the Declaration of Independence: consent and protection of equal rights. Thus, the purpose of constitutionalism is to limit governmental power and ensure that the government performs its basic function: to preserve and protect our rights, especially our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the government today has discarded this principle and now sees itself as our master, not our servant. The obvious next step, unless we act soon, is tyranny. 
+The third principle revolves around the belief that no one is above the law, not even those who make the law. This is termed rule of law. Richard Nixon’s statement, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” would have been an anathema to the Framers of the Constitution. If all people possess equal rights, the people who live under the laws must be allowed to participate in making those laws. By that same token, those who make the laws must live under the laws they make. However, today government officials at all levels often act as if they are royalty with salaries and perks that none of the rest of us are afforded. This is an egregious affront to the citizenry. 
+Fourth, separation of powers ensures that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government. People are not perfect, whether they are in government or out of it. As history makes clear, those in power tend to abuse it. The government is thus divided into three co-equal branches: legislative, executive and judicial. Placing all three powers in the same branch of government was considered the very definition of tyranny. The fact that the president today has dictatorial powers would have been considered a curse by the Framers. 
+Fifth, a system of checks and balances, essential if a constitutional government is to succeed, strengthens the separation of powers and prevents legislative despotism. Such checks and balances include dividing Congress into two houses, with different constituencies, term lengths, sizes and functions; granting the president a limited veto power over congressional legislation; and appointing an independent judiciary capable of reviewing ordinary legislation in light of the written Constitution, which is referred to as “judicial review.” The Framers feared that Congress could abuse its powers and potentially emerge as the tyrannous branch because it had the power to tax. But they did not anticipate the emergence of presidential powers as they have come to dominate modern government or the inordinate influence of corporate powers on governmental decision-making. Indeed, as recent academic studies now indicate, we are now ruled by a monied oligarchy that serves itself and not “we the people.” 
+Sixth, representation allows the people to have a voice in government by sending elected representatives to do their bidding while avoiding the need of each and every citizen to vote on every issue considered by government. In a country as large as the United States, it is not feasible to have direct participation in governmental affairs. Hence, we have a representative government. If the people don’t agree with how their representatives are conducting themselves, they can and should vote them out. However, as the citizenry has grown lazy and been distracted by the entertainment spectacles of modern society, government bureaucrats churn out numerous laws each year resulting in average citizens being rendered lawbreakers and jailed for what used to be considered normal behavior. Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it. Without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it has not got the spirit of liberty. 
+Unfortunately, we are now governed by top-heavy government emanating from Washington DC that has no respect for local institutions or traditions. 
+These seven vital principles have been largely forgotten in recent years, obscured by the haze of a centralized government, a citizenry that no longer thinks analytically, and schools that don’t adequately teach our young people about their history and their rights. 
+Yet here’s the rub: while Americans wander about in their brainwashed states, their “government of the people, by the people and for the people” has largely been taken away from them. 
+The answer: get un-brainwashed. 
+Stand up for the founding principles. 
+Make your voice and your vote count for more than just political posturing. 
+Never cease to vociferously protest the erosion of your freedoms at the local and national level. 
+Most of all, do these things today. 
+If we wait until the votes have all been counted or hang our hopes on our particular candidate to win and fix what’s wrong with the country, “we the people” will continue to lose. 
+Whether we ever realize it not, the enemy is not across party lines, as they would have us believe. It has us surrounded on all sides. 
+Even so, we’re not yet defeated. 
+We could still overcome our oppressors if we cared enough to join forces and launch a militant nonviolent revolution—a people’s revolution that starts locally and trickles upwards—but that will take some doing. 
+It will mean turning our backs on the political jousting contests taking place at all levels of government and rejecting their appointed jesters as false prophets. It will mean not allowing ourselves to be corralled like cattle and branded with political labels that have no meaning anymore. It will mean recognizing that all the evils that surround us today—endless wars, drone strikes, invasive surveillance, militarized police, poverty, asset forfeiture schemes, overcriminalization, etc.—are not of our making but came about as a way to control and profit from us. 
+It will mean “ voting with our feet ” through sustained, mass civil disobedience. 
+As journalist Chris Hedges points out, “There were once radicals in America, people who held fast to moral imperatives. They fought for the oppressed because it was right , not because it was easy or practical. They were willing to accept the state persecution that comes with open defiance. They had the courage of their convictions. They were not afraid.” 
+Ultimately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , it will mean refusing to be divided, one against each other, by politics and instead uniting behind the only distinction that has ever mattered: “we the people” against tyranny. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News editorial policy. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
+6001,Republican Mark Kirk Just Lost His Race Against Tammy Duckworth With A Single Racist Comment (VIDEO),"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+Republican Mark Kirk’s political career imploded tonight live on a debate stage in Illinois. RIP Mark Kirk’s political career. Thoughts and prayers. 
+In what may be the biggest foot in mouth moment of any political campaign since Todd ‘Legitimate Rape’ Akin’s self-immolation, Kirk, who is running for U.S. Senate against the very popular Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D) to represent Illinois, decided to use the senate debate stage to go completely and profoundly racist. 
+It started when Duckworth told voters about her families long military tradition, one that dates back all the way to the Revolutionary War. Her point was a good one. Her family has sacrificed for the country for generations and far too many politicians flippantly go to war without thinking about who they will put in harms way. 
+“My family has served this nation in uniform going back to the revolution. I am a daughter of the American Revolution. I’ve bled for this nation. But I still want to be there in the Senate when the drums of war sound because people are quick to sound the drums of war and I want to be there to say this is what it costs and this is what you’re asking us to do. And if that’s the case, I’ll go. It’s families like mine that bleed first. But let’s make sure that the American people understand what we are engaging in and let’s hold our allies accountable because we can’t do it all.” 
+Kirk interjected by saying a line that will haunt him for the rest of his very short career. 
+“I had forgotten your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.” 
+A problem: Duckworth’s family did fight in the Revolutionary War. Kirk assumed because she was of mixed heritage that they couldn’t have. Mark Kirk is not a smart man. She's an active DAR member. And Sen. @MarkKirk –who lied about his own military record–is questioning her family's military service. 
+— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) October 28, 2016 
+The stunned silence both from the moderator and from Sen. Duckworth kind of say it all. 
+So long, Mark Kirk. Have a good retirement! 
+Featured image via YouTube",FAKE
+6769,Russophobia: War Party Propaganda    : Information," Russophobia: War Party Propaganda
+The world’s most reactionary regime, the head-chopping, terror-sponsoring Saudi Arabian kleptocracy, was awarded the chair of the UN Human Rights Council, while Russia has been kicked out. The travesty was engineered by the Superpower of Lies to punish Moscow for resisting the U.S.-led war of sectarian massacre and regime change in Syria. The War Party is on the march, to the cheers of corporate media – and Hillary hasn’t even been elected yet.
+By Margaret Kimberley “All attempts to stop the fighting were rejected by the U.S. and NATO and sealed the fate of the Syrian people.”
+November 06, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" BAR "" - Did Russia invade Iraq and kill one million people? Does Russia have a greater percentage of its population behind bars than any other country in the world? Did Russia occupy Haiti after kidnapping its president? Are Russian police allowed to shoot children to death without fear of repercussion? Is Russia entering its 20th year of a terror war against the people of Somalia? All of these crimes take place in or at the direction of the United States. Yet the full force of propaganda and influence on world opinion is directed against Russia, which whatever its shortcomings cannot hold a candle to America in violating human rights.
+The dangers presented by a Hillary Clinton presidency cannot be overstated. She and the war party have been steadily working towards a goal that defies logic and risks all life on earth. Regime change is once again their modus operandi and they hope to make it a reality against Russia.
+Nearly every claim of Russian evil doing is a lie, a ruse meant to put Americans in a fighting mood and lose their fear of nuclear conflagration. It isn’t clear if Clinton and the rest of the would-be warriors actually realize they are risking mushroom clouds. Perhaps they believe that Vladimir Putin will be easily pushed around when all evidence points to the contrary.
+The unproven allegations of interference in the presidential election and casting blame on Russia as the sole cause of suffering in Syria are meant to desensitize the public. It is an age old ploy which makes war not just acceptable but deemed a necessity. The usual suspects are helping out eagerly. The corporate media, led by newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post , are front and center in pushing tales of Russian villainy. Human Rights Watch and other organizations who care nothing about abuses committed by the United States and its allies are also playing their usual role of choosing the next regime change victim.
+Russia lost its seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council in part because of American pressure and public relations assistance from the human rights industrial complex. The UNHRC is now chaired by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that funds the jihadist terrorist groups who caused 500,000 Syrian deaths. The Saudis are causing dislocation, death and starvation in Yemen, too, but they are American allies, so there is little opposition to their misdeeds.
+The openly bigoted Donald Trump has been the perfect foil for Hillary Clinton. That is why she and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership preferred him as their rival. He made the case for the discredited lesser evilism argument and his sensible statements about avoiding enmity with Russia made him even more useful.
+The United States and its allies are the cause of Syria’s destruction. Their effort to overthrow president Assad created a humanitarian disaster complete with ISIS and al Nusra fighters who love to chop off heads for entertainment. Far from being the cause of the catastrophe Russia left its ally to fight alone for four years. They even made overtures to negotiate Assad’s fate with the United States. All attempts to stop the fighting were rejected by the U.S. and NATO and sealed the fate of the Syrian people. The people of east Aleppo are being shelled by American allies but one wouldn’t know that by reading what passes for journalism in newspapers and on television. The American role in the slaughter is barely mentioned or is excused as an effort to protect the civilian population. The bloodshed was made in the U.S. and could end if this government wanted it to.
+The anti-Russian propaganda effort has worked to perfection. NATO is massing troops on Russia’s borders in a clear provocation yet Putin is labeled the bad guy. He is said to be menacing the countries that join in threatening his nation. The United States makes phony claims of Russian war crimes despite having blood on its hands. The latest Human Rights Watch canards about prosecuting Assad come straight from the White House and State Department and have nothing to do with concern for Syrians living in their fifth year of hell.
+There is no lesser evil between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. She is fully supported by the war party in her desire for a more “muscular” foreign policy. That bizarre term means death and starvation for millions more people if Clinton wins in a landslide. She must be denied a victory of that magnitude and any opportunity to claim a mandate. Peace loving people must give their votes to the Green Party ticket of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. They are alone in rejecting the premise of an imperialist country and its endless wars.
+The United States is the most dangerous country in the world. If it has a reckless and war loving president the threat becomes existential. That is the prospect we face with a Hillary Clinton presidency. If the role of villain is cast on the world stage she is the star of the show.
+Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
+‘Russia kills civilians, US promotes democracy ’ – Washington’s mantra for domestic consumption",FAKE
+9702,A collection of thoughts about American foreign policy,"A collection of thoughts about American foreign policy By William Blum   William Blum 
+Louis XVI needed a revolution; Napoleon needed two historic military defeats; the Spanish Empire in the New World needed multiple revolutions; the Russian Czar needed a communist revolution; the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire needed World War I; Nazi Germany needed World War II; Imperial Japan needed two atomic bombs; the Portuguese Empire in Africa needed a military coup at home; the Soviet Empire needed Mikhail Gorbachev . . . What will the American Empire need? 
+“I don’t believe anyone will consciously launch World War III. The situation now is more like the eve of World War I, when great powers were armed and ready to go when an incident set things off. Ever since Gorbachev naively ended the Cold War, the hugely over-armed United States has been actively surrounding Russia with weapons systems, aggressive military exercises, NATO expansion. At the same time, in recent years the demonization of Vladimir Putin has reached war propaganda levels. Russians have every reason to believe that the United States is preparing for war against them, and are certain to take defensive measures. This mixture of excessive military preparations and propaganda against an “evil enemy” make it very easy for some trivial incident to blow it all up.”— Diana Johnstone, author of “Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton” 
+In September 2013 President Obama stood before the United Nations General Assembly and declared, “I believe America is exceptional.” The following year at the UN, the president classified Russia as one of the three threats to the world along with the Islamic State and the ebola virus. On March 9, 2015 President Barack Obama declared Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” 
+Vladimir Putin, speaking at the UN in 2015, addressing the United States re its foreign policy: “Do you realize what you have done?” 
+Since the end of World W Attempted to overthrow Dropped bombs Attempted to assassinate Attempted to suppress 
+“The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.” 
+Two flew over the cuckoo’s nest: “We are, as a matter of empirical fact and undeniable history, the greatest force for good the world has ever known. . . . security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America’s military , economic, political, and diplomatic might.”— 
+“War with Russia will be nuclear. Washington has prepared for it. Washington has abandoned the ABM treaty, created what it thinks is an ABM shield, and changed its war doctrine to permit US nuclear first strike. All of this is obviously directed at Russia, and the Russian government knows it. How long will Russia sit there waiting for Washington’s first strike?”— 
+Iran signed the nuclear accords with the United States earlier this year by agreeing to stop what it never was doing. Any Iranian nuclear a 
+US General Barry McCaffrey, April 2015: “Because so far NATO’s reaction to Putin’s aggression has been to send a handful of forces to the Baltics to demonstrate ‘resolve,’ which has only convinced Putin that the alliance is either unable or unwilling to fight. So we had better change his calculus pretty soon, and contest Putin’s stated doctrine that he is willing to intervene militarily in other countries to ‘protect’ Russia-speaking people. For God’s sake, the last time we heard that was just before Hitler invaded the Sudetenland.” No, my dear general, we heard that repeatedly in 1983 when the United States invaded the tiny nation of Grenada to protect and rescue hundreds of Americans who supposedly were in danger from the new leftist government. It was all a fraud, no more than an excuse to overthrow a government that that didn’t believe that the American Empire was God’s gift to humanity. 
+Since 1980, the United States has intervened in the affairs of fourteen Muslim countries, at worst invading or bombing them. They are (in chronological order) Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan, and now Syria. 
+How our never-ending Mideast horror began: Radio Address of George W. Bush, September 28, 2002: “The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.” Yet . . . just six weeks before 9/11, Condoleezza Rice told CNN: “Let’s remember that his [Saddam’s] country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.” 
+The fact is that there is more participation by the Cuban population in the running of their country than there is by the American population in the running of theirs. One important reason is the absence of the numerous private corporations which, in the United States, exert great influence over all aspects of life. 
+“The U.S. is frantically surrounding China with military weapons, advanced aircraft, naval fleets and a multitude of military bases from Japan, South Korea and the Philippines through several nearby smaller Pacific islands to its new and enlarged base in Australia . . . The U.S. naval fleet, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines patrol China’s nearby waters. Warplanes, surveillance planes, drones and spying satellites cover the skies, creating a symbolic darkness at noon.” (Jack A. Smith, “Hegemony Games: USA vs. PRC,” CounterPunch) 
+SR’s leader Nikita Khrushchev, a native of the region, had donated Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Crimeans were always strongly opposed to that change and voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia after the US-induced Ukrainian coup in 2014. Russian President Vladimir Putin refers to the Ukrainian army as “NATO’s foreign legion,” which does not pursue Ukraine’s national interests. The United States, however, insists on labeling the Russian action in Crimea as an invasion. 
+Putin re Crimea/Ukraine: “Our western partners created the ‘Kosovo precedent’ with their own hands. In a situation absolutely the same as the one in Crimea they recognized Kosovo’s secession from Serbia legitimate while arguing that no permission from a country’s central authority for a unilateral declaration of independence is necessary . . . And the UN International Court of Justice agreed with those arguments. That’s what they said; that’s what they trumpeted all over the world and coerced everyone to accept—and now they are complaining about Crimea. Why is that?” 
+Paul Craig Roberts: “The absurdity of it all! Even a moron knows that if Russia is going to put tanks and troops into Ukraine, Russia will put in enough to do the job. The war would be over in a few days if not in a few hours. As Putin himself said some months ago, if the Russian military enters Ukraine, the news will not be the fate of Donetsk or Mauriupol, but the fall of Kiev and Lviv.” 
+In a major examination of US policy vis-à-vis China, published in March 2015, the authoritative Council on Foreign Relations bluntly declared that “there is no real prospect of building fundamental trust, ‘peaceful coexistence,’ ‘mutual understanding,’ a strategic partnership, or a ‘new type of major country relations’ between the United States and China.” The United States, the report declares, must, therefore, develop “the political will” and military capabilities “to deal with China to protect vital U.S. interests.” 
+military from ‘hemispheric defense’—an outdated relic of World War II—to ‘internal security,’ which means war against the domestic population.”— Noam Chomsky 
+Cuban baseball players who are paid a million dollars to play for an American team are not “defectors,” a word which has a clear political connotation. 
+Boris Yeltsin was acceptable to American and Europeans because he was seen as a weak, pliable figure that allowed Western capital free rein in the newly opened Russian territory following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin’s era was also a time of rampant corruption by Russian oligarchs who were closely associated with Western capital. That corrosive culture came to a halt with the election of Vladimir Putin twice as president between 2000–2008, and again in 2012. 
+Many ISIS leaders were former Iraqi military officers who were imprisoned by American troops. The fight isn’t against ISIS, it’s against Assad; at the next level it isn’t against Assad, it’s against Putin; then, at the next level, it isn’t against Putin, it’s against the country most likely to stand in the way of US world domination, Russia. And it’s forever. 
+Connecting to the US-based Internet would mean channeling all of Cuba’s communications directly to the NSA. 
+George W. Bush has been living a comparatively quiet life in Texas, with a focus on his paintings. “I’m trying to leave something behind,” he said a couple of years ago. Yeah, right, George. We can stand up some of the paintings against the large piles of Iraqi dead bodies. 
+Seymour Hirsch: “America would be much better off, if, 30 years ago, we had let Russia continue its war in Afghanistan . . . The mistake was made by the Carter administration which was trying to stop the Russians from their invasion of Afghanistan. We’d be better off had we let the Russians beat the Taliban.” ( Deutsche Welle , April 2, 2014 interview) We’d be even better off if we hadn’t overthrown the progressive, secular Afghan government, giving rise to the Taliban in the first place and inciting the Russians to intervene on their border lest the Soviet Islamic population was stirred up. 
+The former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in an interview in 1998 summed up exactly what the US thinks of the UN: “The UN plays a very important role. But if we don’t like it, we always have the option of following our own national security interests, which I assure you we will do if we don’t like what’s going on.” She is now a foreign-policy advisor to Hillary Clinton. 
+“A leader taking his (or her) nation to war is as dysfunctional in the family of humankind as an abusive parent is in an individual family.”— Suzy Kane 
+“It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy . . . The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States.”— Boutros Boutros-Ghali , Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1992 to December 1996 
+“Interventions are not against dictators but against those who try to distribute: not against Jiménez in Venezuela but Chávez, not against Somoza in Nicaragua but the Sandinistas, not against Batista in Cuba but Castro, not against Pinochet in Chile but Allende, not against Guatemala dictators but Arbenz, not against the shah in Iran but Mossadegh, etc.”— Johan Galtung, Norwegian, principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies 
+“No mention was made that Iraq’s Christians had been safe and sound under President Saddam Hussein—even privileged—until President George Bush invaded and destroyed Iraq. We can expect the same fate for Syria’s Christians if the protection of the Assad regime is torn away by the US-engineered uprising. We will then shed crocodile tears for Syria’s Christians.”— Eric Margolis, 2014 
+the debate on Jewish Power.”— Gilad Atzmon 
+“We need a trial to judge all those who bear significant responsibility for the past century—the most murderous and ecologically destructive in human history. We could call it the war, air and fiscal crimes tribunal and we could put politicians and CEOs and major media owners in the dock with earphones like Eichmann and make them listen to the evidence of how they killed millions of people and almost murdered the planet and made most of us far more miserable than we needed to be. Of course, we wouldn’t have time to go after them one by one. We’d have to lump Wall Street investment bankers in one trial, the Council on Foreign Relations in another, and any remaining Harvard Business School or Yale Law graduates in a third. We don’t need this for retribution, only for edification. So there would be no capital punishment, but rather banishment to an overseas Nike factory with a vow of perpetual silence.”— Sam Smith 
+“I have come to think of the export of ‘democracy’ as the contemporary equivalent of what missionaries have always done in the interest of conquering and occupying the ‘uncivilized’ world on behalf of the powers that be. I have said that the ‘church’ invented the concept of conversion by any means, including torture and killing of course, as doing the victims a big favor, since it was in the interest of ‘saving’ their immortal souls. It is now called, ‘democratization.’”— Rita Corriel 
+“It is more or less impossible to commemorate the war dead without glorifying them, and it is impossible to glorify them without glorifying their wars.”— Paul Craig Roberts",FAKE
+3415,Scalia lies in repose at Supreme Court,"Washington (CNN) The body of late Justice Antonin Scalia is lying in repose Friday inside the Supreme Court building where he built a legacy as a conservative legal icon.
+
+More than 6,000 mourners -- including members of Congress -- began streaming by to view Scalia's casket as the court opened its doors to the public at 10:30 a.m.
+
+Earlier Friday, all the current Supreme Court justices attended a private ceremony led by Scalia's son, Father Paul Scalia, in the Great Hall.
+
+In the afternoon, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama visited the court to honor Scalia. They were greeted by Chief Justice John Roberts and then met with members of Scalia's family, including Army Lt. Col. Matthew Scalia, the late justice's son, and his wife, Michelle, in the Solicitor General's office.
+
+The President and first lady stayed for roughly 25 minutes.
+
+Sri Srinivasan and Patricia Millett, two members of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and potential nominees for Obama to pick to replace Scalia, were seen in the line of those paying their respects along with other judges on the DC circuit.
+
+The casket was placed on the Lincoln Catafalque, which was loaned to the court by Congress for the ceremony, and a 2007 portrait of Scalia by Nelson Shanks is on display. Supreme Court police officers served as pallbearers while Scalia's law clerks served as honorary pallbearers.
+
+""As is the tradition, Justice Scalia's law clerks will stand vigil by his side at the Court all day tomorrow and through the night,"" tweeted Kannon Shanmugam, who clerked for Scalia.
+
+Outside the court, mourners left flowers and jars of applesauce -- a nod to Scalia's dissent in the Supreme Court's 2015 decision to uphold Obamacare, in which he wrote that the majority's opinion was ""pure applesauce.""
+
+Scalia's funeral service is Saturday at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The justice's son will also deliver Mass for his father. Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to attend.
+
+Other justices who have laid in repose in the Supreme Court include former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, former Justice Harry Blackmun, former Justice William J Brennan Jr., former Justice Thurgood Marshall and former Chief Justice Earl Warren.
+
+One close family friend -- Brian Donato, 75, of Earlysville, Virginia, and the godfather of Paul Scalia -- was shaken up as he left the morning's private ceremony.
+
+He said he studied law under Scalia at the University of Virginia, and called the justice a tough professor who'd harshly critique his logic.
+
+Donato recalled leaving the U.S. Navy in 1967 to attend law school, and said his moving truck crashed, spilling his goods and possessions across the road. When neither the Navy, which had hired the movers, nor the moving company itself offered any financial help after the crash, he looked at the university for a lawyer to help him after that crash and found Scalia -- who won the case but wouldn't accept any legal fees.
+
+""When I asked him what the fee was after the case, he said, 'Dinner at your house and I'm bringing my wife,'"" Donato said.
+
+He attended Thursday's wake for Scalia, saying he saw his friend ""lying in his casket, and he looked like a guy who was just the warm loving guy he always was.""
+
+Students on a field trip from St. Mary's High School, an Episcopal school in Raleigh, North Carolina, were among the crowd of about 200 on hand as Scalia's casket arrived.
+
+""It's definitely a big loss for our country he was definitely a very influential figures and I don't necessarily agree with him on everything but I have a lot of respect for him as a justice,"" said Emily Weatherspoon, 17.
+
+Larry Cirignano, an anti-abortion rights activist, said that Scalia's loss will be felt on the court. His group, 40 Days for Life, has been outside of the Supreme Court every day since Ash Wednesday.
+
+""I'm from New Jersey originally, so he's great -- and Italian-American -- so all the way around,"" he said of Scalia. ""I was here for his swearing in. And we're sorry to see him go.""
+
+As Scalia is remembered Friday, talk is likely to also focus across the street, to the Capitol, where the question hovers over whether Senate Republicans will successfully block Obama from winning a third appointment to the High Court.",REAL
+4692,For the Record's week in review: Trump's list of accusers grows,"In early August, Donald Trump suffered a drop in the polls in the wake of an especially bad week, which included him feuding with a Muslim Gold Star family whose son died fighting for the U.S. Army in Iraq. For the Record’s week in review summarized that week as “Trump hit rock bottom and then basically tried to dig to China.”
+
+We didn’t think things could get much worse. Boy, were we wrong! This week, Trump hit rock bottom, dug to China and then set the hole on fire.
+
+On Friday, more women came out with accusations against Trump for sexual misconduct. Kristin Anderson told The Washington Post that Trump had groped her under her skirt in the early 90s while she was sitting next to him at a nightclub. Later Friday, a former Apprentice contestant said Trump kissed her and groped her during a meeting about a potential job. They were just two of multiple women to come forward this week with accusations against the Republican presidential nominee.
+
+Trump and his campaign have vehemently denied the accusations. During a rally Friday, Trump called the accusations ""totally and completely fabricated"" and said the women were just making things up to become famous. He also seemed to insult the appearance of one of his accusers, a woman who said he groped her on an airplane three decades ago, when he said ""believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.""
+
+Trump has threatened to sue at least The New York Times, to which the newspaper’s lawyer basically replied “bring it.” And his wife, Melania, demanded People magazine publish a retraction and apologize for a story that alleged Trump assaulted a People reporter who was writing a story about the couple. But Melania's demand had nothing to do with the assault allegations. Melania was just unhappy about a section of the piece that said the reporter ran into her on the street and the two had a pleasant conversation.
+
+""The two are not friends and were never friends or even friendly,"" the letter demanding the retraction stated.
+
+Last Friday, a 2005 Access Hollywood video was released that included Trump saying that women would let him do anything, including grabbing their genitals, because he was a star. Trump apologized for the remarks but maintains it was just “locker room banter.” The release of the tape sent his campaign scrambling and forced even those backing him to denounce his comments.
+
+The USA TODAY Network conducted a survey of the Republican governors, senators and House members and found that 26% of them are not endorsing Trump. While some of them were ""Never Trumpers"" all along, many pulled their support for Trump following the release of the video.
+
+On Monday, Ryan announced he wouldn’t defend or campaign for Trump ahead of the election, although Ryan didn't officially withdraw his endorsement of Trump.
+
+Trump was not thrilled at the rebuke. On Tuesday, he unleashed his wrath on Ryan and other members of his party who he felt had spurned him. At one point he tweeted: “Our very weak and ineffective leader, Paul Ryan, had a bad conference call where his members went wild at his disloyalty.”
+
+Trump spun the denunciations by Congress members as a good thing, declaring that he could finally do what he wanted with the election now that the “shackles” were off.
+
+Trump has sucked up a lot of the oxygen this week, but a steady stream of hacked emails from Wikileaks has sent reporters digging through the Clinton team’s dirty laundry as well. Every day this week, emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta have been released. The Clinton campaign has neither confirmed nor denied whether the emails are real, but they have accused Russia of doing the hacking in an effort to help Trump.
+
+So far, there haven’t been any major bombshells in the emails, but there are definitely some cringe-worthy moments.
+
+One email by Clinton campaign aides mocked some Catholics and evangelical Christians. Another raised questions about the impartiality of then a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee Donna Brazile during the Democratic primary. Brazile forwarded a question to be used in a town hall to the Clinton campaign. (It also was strange that Brazile had the question ahead of time in the first place.) One email categorized two high-profile Latino politicians who Clinton was trying to get an endorsement from as “needy Latinos.” And another email had a campaign staffer discussing conversations he had with Department of Justice officials as the DOJ dealt with the timing of their public release of Clinton's State Department emails.
+
+Here are some more details of some of the juicier emails.
+
+•           Michelle Obama on Trump comments: They’ve “shaken me to my core” (USA TODAY)
+
+Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and former GOP primary competitor of Trump’s, often appears on TV in support of his former rival. On Friday, he did so to discuss the allegations of sexual misconduct against the Republican nominee. In a heated interview on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ Carson repeatedly asked for BBC News reporter Katty Kay’s microphone to be turned off when she asked him if he thought the women making accusations against Trump were lying. He finally responded: ""It doesn’t matter whether they’re lying or not.""",REAL
+5235,What history tells us about the health of presidents and candidates,"Hillary Clinton's recent pneumonia diagnosis raises questions about how previous presidents dealt with health crises, and why Mrs. Clinton's health has become a flashpoint issue during this campaign.
+
+During an event commemorating Sept. 11, 2001 on Sunday, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton excused herself early after becoming ""overheated."" Mrs. Clinton's physician, Lisa Bardack, revealed that the candidate was dealing with pneumonia, which had been diagnosed on Friday.
+
+Politically, the timing was not ideal. The revelation came as the Clinton campaign has been hit by a wave of conspiracy theories elevated by the Donald Trump campaign and his supporters about the candidate's health over the past few weeks, with many online theorists questioning whether Clinton was well enough to be president.
+
+Is Clinton being held to a double standard because she is a woman?
+
+For most presidential candidates throughout history, presidential health concerns have not seemed to concerned the public nearly as much as this election, raising questions about what makes this campaign different.
+
+A recent report from NBC News on Clinton's health posed the question of why Clinton's diagnosis was hidden until hours after her Sunday near-collapse and wondered if Clinton would ""accept the obligation to inform the public about her health."" But for much of history, such an obligation did not exist.
+
+According to Gallup, many presidents have maintained silence on their respective health problems. Woodrow Wilson had a stroke in office, Ronald Reagan underwent secret surgeries, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously went to great lengths to give the public the impression that he was fully mobile after his battle with polio even though he spent much of his life in a wheelchair. Grover Cleveland once disappeared from the White house for a full four days so that he could have a tumor removed on a yacht, away from prying reporters, according to NPR. John F. Kennedy ""suffered from more ailments, was in far greater pain and was taking many more medications than the public knew at the time or biographers have since described,"" the New York Times reported in 2002.
+
+And that's only to name a few.
+
+These presidents all kept their physical ailments secret in order to project an image of strength and reliability to the public, a standard that was maintained through much of the history of the office until relatively recently. As candidates' lives have become increasingly open to scrutiny on the internet and various taboos in media about candidates' personal lives have been broken, it has become much more difficult for a candidate to hide an illness.
+
+In response to increasing transparency, presidential candidates have begun to come forward with health problems early on in their campaigns, including Dick Cheney's heart issues and John Kerry's successful battle with prostate cancer before his campaign began, according to Gallup. At the time of the Mr. Kerry campaign, 92 percent of voters, both Republican and Democrat, said that they were not concerned about his ability to serve as president.
+
+In contrast, Clinton's health has become an increasingly important issue for voters during this election. A Rasmussen Report survey from before Sept. 8 shows that 86 percent of likely voters say a candidate's health is important to their vote, with 43 percent who characterize candidate health as  ""Very Important."" Some 17 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of GOP and unaffiliated voters said that Clinton's health was a legitimate concern for them. Those numbers could rise after news of Clinton's diagnosis.
+
+While Clinton's desire to keep her health issues quiet is nothing new on the presidential front, the response from her opponents has proven intense. As a female candidate, she has proven more susceptible to accusations of ""weakness"" from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his supporters, in contrast to Mr. Trump's ""strongman"" image. The Trump campaign has had a great deal of success in presenting the Republican candidate as a traditionally masculine figure that fights rather than compromises, representing his opponents as weaker and incapable of making the tough decisions necessary to run the country.
+
+In contrast, Clinton's transparency about her health opens herself up to rhetorical attacks along this line.
+
+Even before her diagnosis became public, however, Clinton was already under attack for similar reasons, with many fringe conservative sites sharing fake medical records as ""proof"" that she does not have the physical strength to effectively lead the country, according to USA Today.
+
+While Trump stands to benefit from Clinton's diagnosis, neither candidate has released a complete medical report to the public.",REAL
+6333,Solar-powered Pipe desalinates 1.5 billion gallons of drinking water a year for California,"Solar-powered Pipe desalinates 1.5 billion gallons of drinking water a year for California Nov 7, 2016 25 1 
+Solar power and water desalination are two of the most important things to lock down in the modern age. Produces an endless source of drinking water and electricity is what we need to guide us through the unknowns of a changing climate . 
+This is why an incredible project like The Pipe needs global attention. 
+The machine can generate 10,000 MWh each year and additionally turn 4.5 billion liters (or 1.5 billion gallons) of salt water into drinking water in that time. 
+It was unveiled at the Land Art Generator Initiative in Santa Monica, California. 
+“LAGI 2016 comes to Southern California at an important time,” write Rob Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian, co-founders of the Land Art Generator Initiative . “The sustainable infrastructure that is required to meet California’s development goals and growing population will have a profound influence on the landscape. The Paris Climate Accord from COP 21 has united the world around a goal of 1.5–2° C, which will require a massive investment in clean energy infrastructure.” 
+It’s an immense and beautiful structure. 
+“Above, solar panels provide power to pump seawater through an electromagnetic filtration process below the pool deck, quietly providing the salt bath with its healing water and the city with clean drinking water,” the design team writes in their brief. “The Pipe represents a change in the future of water.” 
+“What results are two products: pure drinkable water that is directed into the city’s primary water piping grid, and clear water with twelve percent salinity. The drinking water is piped to shore, while the salt water supplies the thermal baths before it is redirected back to the ocean through a smart release system, mitigating most of the usual problems associated with returning brine water to the sea.”",FAKE
+6499,"PHARRELL WILLIAMS BEGS WOMEN TO VOTE HILLARY: SHE’S DISHONEST, BUT SO ARE YOU","Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › PHARRELL WILLIAMS BEGS WOMEN TO VOTE HILLARY: SHE’S DISHONEST, BUT SO ARE YOU PHARRELL WILLIAMS BEGS WOMEN TO VOTE HILLARY: SHE’S DISHONEST, BUT SO ARE YOU 0 SHARES 
+[11/3/16] Music producer and singer Pharrell Williams bashed Donald Trump at an industry conference on Tuesday and said his defeat in the upcoming presidential election would be “easy” if every woman in America voted to elect Hillary Clinton. 
+“If all the women in this nation decided to vote and support the first female candidate, there’d be nothing to worry about,” Williams said in an interview at Variety ‘s Inclusion summit at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills. “It’s that easy.” 
+“Has she been dishonest about things? Sure. Have you?” Williams said of Clinton, before insisting that “she don’t lie no more than any other politician does.” 
+The Happy singer endorsed Clinton in March 2014, telling GQ magazine: “We’re about to have a female president. Hillary’s gonna win.” 
+Asked about increasing polarization during the presidential campaign, the Grammy-winner paused and then pleaded with women to “save the nation” by not electing another “destructive” male president. 
+“That silence in this room right now is often what I feel when you see some of the things that are being said, not just about my culture, but about women,” Williams said . “I’m praying that women come together and save this nation. You think about the destructive things that have come from mankind, it’s mostly men.” Post navigation",FAKE
+9610,NBA Team Cancels Anthem Singer After She Tries Wearing Controversial Race Shirt Onto Court,"“I was never given any kind of dress code. I was never asked beforehand to show my wardrobe.” Streeter (left) and the 76ers home court at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia 
+“I also felt it was important to express the ongoing challenges and ongoing injustice we face as a black community within the United States of America — that’s very important to me,” Streeter said. “Yes, we live in the greatest country in the world but there are issues that we cannot ignore. This can’t be ignored.” Advertisement - story continues below 
+“I was angry, extremely, extremely angry and disappointed and honestly brought to tears by all of it. It broke my heart,” she said. “Honestly, I was very excited about being able to perform the national anthem. I was really looking forward to that.” 
+Firstly, pro tip: The more times you say “honestly” about something, the more it becomes exponentially less likely to the listener that they will believe you’re being honest. In this case, I believe Streeter honestly wanted to make a point, not sing the national anthem, which is the matter of contention here. 
+The national anthem is sung to honor the heroes who have served (and died) for our country before major events. It isn’t time to make a point or “have a discussion” (a discussion, may I add, that usually takes the form of a monologue from whatever social justice warrior is giving it — who usually acts surprised and disappointed when people have a real discussion and push back against their disrespect of the flag). 
+If you’re singing the national anthem, it isn’t about your opinions. It isn’t about your talent. It isn’t about what you’ve done. Advertisement - story continues below",FAKE
+7769,Comment on Canadian Air Force Pilot Snaps A Pic Of A UFO During Flight by Is This What You Think They Would Look Like? Supposed Pictures of Real Extraterrestrials – Collective Evolution,"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter “If it does indeed turn out that there is relevant physical evidence, if this evidence is carefully collected and analyzed, and if this analysis leads to the identification of several facts concerning the UFO phenomenon, then will be the time for scientists to step back and ask, what are these facts trying to tell us? If those facts are strong enough to lead to a firm conclusion, then will be the time to confront the more bizarre questions. If, for instance, it turns out that all physical evidence is consistent with a mundane interpretation of the causes of UFO reports, there will be little reason to continue to speculate about the role of extraterrestrial beings. If, on the other hand, the analysis of physical evidence turns up very strong evidence that objects related with UFO reports were manufactured outside the solar system, then one must obviously consider very seriously that the phenomenon involves not only extraterrestrial vehicles but probably also extraterrestrial beings.” ( source )   The quote above comes from Peter Andrew Sturrock , a British Scientist, and an Emeritus Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University. Sturrock and a number of other notable scientists around the world came together during the 1990’s in order to examine the physical evidence that is commonly associated with the UFO phenomenon. One example used by Sturrock in his analysis, was a photo taken by two Royal Canadian Air Force pilots on August 27th, 1956, in McCleod, Alberta, Canada. ( “Physical Evidence Related To UFO Reports”– The Sturrock Panel Report – Electromagnetic Effects ) ( source ) ( source ) The pilots were flying in a formation of four F86 Sabre jet aircraft. One of the pilots described the phenomenon as a “bright light which was sharply defined as disk-shaped,” that looked like “a shiny silver dollar sitting horizontal.” Another pilot managed to photograph the object, as you can see above. The sighting lasted for a couple of minutes, and this specific case was analyzed by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who estimated (from available data) that the luminosity of the object (the power output within the spectral range of the film) to be many megawatts. The Sturrock Panel also found it to be the case that a strong magnetic field surrounding the phenomenon or object was a common occurrence. Maccabee published his analysis in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (“Optical Power Output of an Unidentified High Altitude Light Source,” published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 13, #2, 1999). He also published one in 1994 titled “Strong Magnetic Field Detected Following a Sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object,” in the same journal (8, #3, 347) Dr. Jacques Vallee, notable for co-developing the first computerized mapping of Mars for NASA, and for his work at SRI International on the network information center for ARPANET , a precursor to the modern Internet, also published a paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration titled “Estimates of Optical Power Output in Six Cases Of Unexplained Ariel Objects With Defined Luminosity Characteristics.” ( source )( source )   This particular case is also referenced in this paper. One thing is for certain, it’s one of multiple strange phenomena that has and continues to interest a large portion of the scientific community. Here is a video of former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer speaking about the fields around these objects, and what some of them were doing to military planes. Let’s just be clear, these objects are commonly seen, tracked on air radar, and tracked on ground radar simultaneously. This is something that has happened hundreds, if not thousands of times. This is information that’s been made public over the past few years. For example, a declassified Defence Intelligence Agency document shows one (out of thousands) great example. It details how two F-4 interceptor pilots reported seeing an object visually, it was also tracked on their airborne radar. Both planes experienced critical instrumentation and electronics going offline at a distance of twenty-five miles from the object. Here is an excerpt from the report: “As the F-4 approached a range of 25 nautical miles it lost all instrumentation and communications. When the F-4 turned away from the object and apparently was no longer a threat to it, the aircraft regained all instrumentation and communications. Another brightly lighted object came out of the original object. The second object headed straight toward the F4. ” (source) The report also described how a smaller object detached from the bigger object, turned inside the arc of the F-4 itself, and then rejoined the original object. This incident lasted for several hours. I decided to use this example because it has a number of declassified supporting national security documents, which goes to show how seriously this event was taken. “Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Former head of the CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source, NY Times) It’s only now that more people are starting to become aware of this information. Here is a quote from Senator Barry Goldwater before the de-classification of all of these files: “This thing has gotten so highly-classified… it is just impossible to get anything on it. I have no idea who controls the flow of need-to-know because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it to be my business since. I have been interested in this subject for a long time and I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified.” – Senator Barry Goldwater , Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (source) Below is a great clip from author and researcher Richard Dolan , taken from The Citizens Hearing On Disclosure summing it all up in one short speech. 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+6244,NBC's Baghdad Bob: There Is No FBI Investigation of Hillary | Frontpage Mag,"NBC's Baghdad Bob: There Is No FBI Investigation of Hillary November 4, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
+Remember when Hillary Clinton was insisting that there was no FBI investigation of her, just a security review, even when the FBI rejected that claim? 
+Well Andrea Mitchell, NBC's own Baghdad Bob, isn't giving up that claim so easily. Even while the rest of the Clinton clique is screeching against the FBI for investigating Hillary like bats from the nether regions of left-wing hell, Mitchell is sticking to the old spin. There is no FBI investigation of Hillary . Close your eyes and say it three times. The FBI is not investigating Hillary. It's not. It's not. 
+In a complete state of denial on Thursday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell interrupted live coverage of Donald Trump speaking at a Florida campaign rally to supposedly “fact-check” the candidate for citing a bombshell report that the FBI was conducting an extensive investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail and charitable foundation scandals. 
+Mitchell refused to accept reality: “Just a lot of fact-checking to do. She's not under criminal investigation. In fact, it's not an investigation. It's just a review of the e-mails. She did not lie to the FBI, according to James Comey. There was no grounds to prosecute her. So there are no lies, there’s no criminality.” She fretted: “I don't know even where to start....but I mean, we have to put it in some context.” 
+The context is that defending Hillary Clinton has become a mental illness. 
+But as I wrote earlier this week, fact checking has become a media term for insisting on the primacy of its alternate reality even when it flies in the face of actual reality. There is no FBI investigation of Hillary. Anyone who believes that is probably some sort of right-winger who listens to what the FBI actually says, rather than what NBC says that the FBI says. ",FAKE
+4837,"Sorry, America, but Trump Can Actually Win","A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a mostly facetious article about six events that could occur to flip the polls in favor of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, and then I assessed how much each would matter. No single occurrence, apart from the preposterously unlikely event of Barack Obama endorsing Trump, seemed to have a ton of power on its own. Non-silly scenarios included the release of new and questionable Clinton e-mails, a month of passable behavior from Trump, and a serious health setback for Clinton. What the column failed to consider, however, was the power of a few of these incidents occurring at the same time. We’ve now seen new unfavorable e-mail stories (this was inevitable), two weeks of moderately controlled behavior from Trump (the previous record had been about two days), and a genuine health issue for Clinton (a near-collapse during a 9/11 ceremony). We also saw a small but foolish gaffe from the Democratic nominee on Friday night, when she dismissed fully half of Trump’s supporters as part of a “basket of deplorables,” which she defined as “the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” At a time when Trump should have been further on the defensive, contending with almost comically devastating revelations about his approach to charity (more on that in a bit), he is instead pulling even with his rival. Rumors of Clinton’s failing health—which had been easy to write off because they were so obviously orchestrated—have become legitimate concerns. There’s no use in discussing Clinton’s e-mails here, at least for now. It’s not just that there are plenty of other outlets that will further beat that horse—so much so that the Washington Post editorial page has hollered ’nuff. It’s that nothing we’ve learned is likely to move anyone’s opinion. The general narrative out there, whether that’s fair or not, is that Clinton is untrustworthy. The bottom line, in horse-race terms, is this: the drumbeat persists. There’s only slightly more use in dwelling on Trump’s streak of good behavior. Yes, he has kept his impulses under control for a couple of weeks, a near-miracle, especially given the rise to power of campaign chief Steve Bannon, widely viewed as the high priest of full-freak Trumping. (While Trump has said plenty of recent things to appall the sober-minded, like resurrecting a promise to steal the oil of any place we bother to invade, he has said them calmly, rather than in a way that makes news.) So this is an important development, especially if Trump starts to notice how big a friend he has in silence. But one ludicrous outburst changes that, and those used to come at about one per cockcrow, so we’ll have to see if he can keep the lull going. Unfortunately, the near-collapse of Clinton on Sunday from feeling “overheated”—now diagnosed as pneumonia—does call for some sentences. (Clinton’s line about the “basket of deplorables” might have caused a blip, but it has now been overshadowed.) The video of her seeming to buckle is terrible and heartrending, and it feels almost indecent to witness. But now the rumors of Clinton’s failing health—which had been easy to write off because they were so obviously orchestrated, with help from Rudy Giuliani, no less—have become legitimate concerns. It’s easy to dismiss symptoms like extended coughing, especially with a candidate who must endure countless hours and speeches on the campaign trail. It’s impossible to dismiss being overcome at a commemoration for 9/11, the sort of event during which every political bone in your body is telling you, “Do not make news. Do not make news. Do not make news.”
+
+The setting for Clinton’s overheating was especially unfortunate. You could argue (and I have) that Clinton’s health doesn’t matter that much, politically, because not many of those who favor her over Trump—a split viewed by many of Clinton’s supporters as akin in severity to God versus Satan—will suddenly prefer him instead. But voters do think a lot about national security, and, if you believe Scott Adams, “When a would-be commander-in-chief withers—literally—in front of our most emotional reminder of an attack on the homeland, we feel unsafe.” Is Adams right? He might be—or at least right enough that two out of a hundred voters could change their minds, which is all that it takes. Clinton’s health problems are just the latest example of how fortune so often works in favor of Trump. They hit just after the publication of a remarkable piece of reporting by *The Washington Post’*s David A. Fahrenthold, who revealed that the candidate’s record of philanthropy seems to be close to nonexistent. Apparently, Trump is so pathologically stingy that even organizations to which he claimed to donate had received no money. Worse, his own family foundation took in nothing from Trump himself after 2008, relying instead on funds from outside donors. Even worse: Trump illegally redirected $25,000 of the money toward the fund-raising committee of Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who was deciding on whether to pursue a lawsuit against Trump University. Even worse than that: Donald Trump spent $20,000 of his charity’s money to purchase a six-foot-tall painting of—maybe you guessed it?—Donald Trump. That would all be poor optics, as they say, except that news of Clinton’s health came in and dwarfed everything. But let’s suppose that investigations of Trump’s charity come back to the fore, as they probably will. They will still have close to zero effect on most Trump supporters. Those who still believe Trump is a benevolent fellow have already had to process several container ships full of cognitive dissonance and don’t mind a few tons more. Those who believe Trump is a non-benevolent fellow—and this includes many, probably most, of his supporters, to judge by what they write and say—already know he’s a rascal. They accept that. The thing is, he’s their rascal. For those who find such loyalty hard to understand or accept, recall that Trump, in the eyes of many voters, is the only candidate who has bucked the bipartisan globalist consensus and seemed to mean it. Just imagine if you were on the left but, among both Democrats and Republicans running for office, nearly everyone in political life had long expressed indifference to climate change and had views on abortion that ranged from strongly pro-life to weakly pro-life. Then along came one candidate who loudly insisted on combatting global warming and fighting for a woman’s right to chose. On the minus side, he also said nasty things about coal miners and fetuses, repelling everyone. Would you be tempted to forgive him?
+
+This brings us, finally, to a much-discussed recent essay in the Claremont Review of Books called “The Flight 93 Election,” written by one “Publius Decius Mus.” Decius—who writes as if he were born in 1850, meaning he was probably born well after 1980—is one of those intellectuals who, because of Trump’s positions on immigration, trade, and war, forgive Trump for his many sins. The use of Flight 93 is an allusion, of dubious taste, to the hijacked plane in which passengers heroically charged the cockpit on 9/11—the point being that Trump versus Clinton is possible death versus guaranteed death. “Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect,” Decius writes. “So what? We can lament until we choke the lack of a great statesman to address the fundamental issues of our time.” Decius has not been alone in his mind-set. Trump supporters know he’s a uniquely risky candidate, but they make the case for gambling on him all the same—no matter the poor track record of huge political rolls of the dice (our recent wars come to mind). They feel things are very bad, and many Americans agree. This is why Trump is again pulling even with Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, we understand one another less and less across this divide. One side says, “I know how bad you think things are out there, but you have no idea how bad Trump is.” The other side says, “I know how bad you think Trump is, but you have no idea how bad things are out there.” It’s a conversation designed to fail, leaving only hardened factions. All that remains, at this point, is to wait and count up. The polls, while technically within the margin of error, still favor Clinton. Yet the energy, on balance, seems to favor Trump. Even when John McCain briefly led Obama in 2008, he never attracted swooning and feverish supporters, at least not when he wasn’t addressing a hospital. Obama did, and Trump does. Many Americans seem to want an excuse to vote for him, and the rise of Bannon seems, ironically, to be leading to a more controlled candidate. If he keeps cool and collected during the debates, even if he calls for plundering the globe’s energy supplies, he probably comes out ahead. So no one can relax anymore. On the plus side, we’ll enjoy the extra oil. Full ScreenPhotos: The Art of the Donald: Alison Jackson Pictures Trump’s “Me Time” The torch will be passed, and a new leader must be capable of gripping it securely. Will he prove equal to the challenge? As commander in chief, would the candidate use military force responsibly—and tastefully? Above all, success in the Oval Office requires an ability to sit still for long hours of exacting prep work. America needs a leader who won’t flinch under fire, whether literal, metaphoric, or tonsorial. There is not a black America or a white America or a Creamsicle-hued America (waterproof and evenly applied). There is only a United States of America. When the candidate looks in the mirror, a president should stare back. With newfound confidence, he is now ready to fill Lincoln’s mittens.",REAL
+5289,President al-Assad: United States and its Western allies are to blame for failure of latest ceasefire,"President al-Assad: United States and its Western allies are to blame for failure of latest ceasefire 
+November 3rd, 2016 
+Damascus, SANA – President Bashar al-Assad asserted that the United States and its Western allies are to blame for the failure of latest ceasefire, because terrorism and terrorists are for them a card they want to play on the Syrian arena. 
+In an interview given to the Serbian newspaper Politika , President al-Assad said that Russia is very serious and very determined to continue fighting the terrorists, while the Americans base their politics on a different value as they use the terrorists as a card to play the political game to serve their own interests at the expense of the interests of other countries in the world. 
+President al-Assad pointed out that Western countries wanted to use the humanitarian mask in order to have an excuse to intervene more in Syria, either militarily or by supporting the terrorists. 
+Following is the full text of the interview: 
+Question 1: Mr. President, why has the latest Syria ceasefire failed? Who is to blame for that? 
+President Assad: Actually, the West, mainly the United States, has made that pressure regarding the ceasefire, and they always ask for ceasefire only when the terrorists are in a bad situation, not for the civilians. And they try to use those ceasefires in order to support the terrorists, bring them logistic support, armament, money, everything, in order to re-attack and to become stronger again. When it didn’t work, they ask the terrorists to make it fail or to start attacking again. So, who’s to blame? It’s the United States and its allies, the Western countries, because for them, terrorists and terrorism are a card they want to play on the Syrian arena, it’s not a value, they’re not against terrorists. For them, supporting the terrorists is a war of attrition against Syria, against Iran, against Russia, that’s how they look at it. That’s why not only this ceasefire; every attempt regarding ceasefire or political moving or political initiative, every failure of these things, the United States was to be blamed. 
+Question 2: But which country is supporting terrorism? Saudi Arabia? Qatar? 
+President Assad: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey… 
+Journalist: Turkey? 
+President Assad: Because they came through Turkey with the support of the government, direct support from the government. 
+Journalist: Directly? 
+President Assad: Direct support from the government, of course. 
+Journalist: With money or with armament? 
+President Assad: Let’s say, the endorsement, the greenlight, first. Second, the American coalition, which is called “international coalition,” which is an American. They could see ISIS using our oil fields and carrying the oil through the barrel trucks to Turkey under their drones… 
+Journalist: This is the Syrian oil? 
+President Assad: In Syria, from Syria to Turkey, under the supervision of their satellites and drones, without doing anything, till the Russians intervened and started attacking ISIS convoys and ISIS positions and strongholds. This is where ISIS started to shrink. So, the West gave the greenlight to those countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and actually those countries, those governments are puppets; puppets to the West, puppets to the United States, they work as puppets, and the terrorists in Syria are their proxy, the proxy of those countries and proxy of the West and the United States. 
+Question 3: But money for marketing this oil, who has the money? Turkey? 
+President Assad: In partnership between ISIS and Turkey. Part of the money goes to ISIS because this is how they can make recruitment and pay salaries to their fighters. That’s why ISIS was growing before the Russian intervention, it was expanding in Syria and in Iraq. And part of the money is going to the Turkish government officials, mainly Erdogan himself and his family. 
+Journalist: Erdogan himself? 
+President Assad: Of course, of course. They were directly involved in this trade with ISIS. 
+Question 4: Mr. President, do you believe the Russians and Americans can ever agree over Syria? Can Russia and the USA be partners in the war against terrorists in Syria? 
+President Assad: We hope, but in reality, no, for a simple reason: because the Russians based their politics on values, beside their interest. The values are that they adopt the international law, they fight terrorism, and the interest that if you have terrorists prevailing in our region, that will affect not only our region but Europe, Russia, and the rest of the world. So, the Russians are very serious and very determined to continue fighting the terrorists, while the Americans based their politics on a different value, completely different value, their value is that “we can use the terrorists.” I mean the Americans, they wanted to use the terrorists as a card to play the political game to serve their own interests at the expense of the interests of other countries in the world. 
+Question 5: The situation about bombing the Syrian Army near the airport in Deir Ezzor… How did the American air attack on the Syrian Army happen? Was it a coincidence or not? 
+President Assad: It was premeditated attack by the American forces, because ISIS was shrinking because of the Syrian and Russian and Iranian cooperation against ISIS, and because al-Nusra which is Al Qaeda-affiliated group had been defeated in many areas in Syria, so the Americans wanted to undermine the position of the Syrian Army; they attacked our army in Deir Ezzor. It wasn’t by coincidence because the raid continued more than one hour, and they came many times. 
+Journalist: One hour? 
+President Assad: More than one hour. There were many raids by the Americans and their allies against the Syrian position. At the same time, they attacked a very big area; they didn’t attack a building to say “we made a mistake.” They attacked three big hills, not other groups neighboring these hills, and only ISIS existed in Deir Ezzor. There is no… what they called it “moderate opposition.” So, it was a premeditated attack in order to allow ISIS to take that position, and ISIS attacked those hills, and took those hills right away in less than one hour after the attack. 
+Journalist: ISIS attacking Syrian position after American…? 
+President Assad: Less than one hour, in less than one hour, ISIS attacked those hills. It means that ISIS gathered their forces to attack those hills. How did ISIS know that the Americans would attack that Syrian position? It means they were ready, they were prepared. This is an explicit and stark proof that the Americans are supporting ISIS and using it as a card to change the balance according to their political agenda. 
+Journalist: And after that, America said sorry, huh? 
+President Assad: They said they regret, they didn’t say sorry. [laughs] 
+Question 6: Mr. President, who is responsible for the attack on the Red Cross convoy near Aleppo, and what weapons were used for the destruction of the Red Cross convoy? 
+President Assad: Definitely the terrorist groups in Aleppo, because those are the ones who had an interest. When we announced the truce in Aleppo, they refused it. They said “no, we don’t want a truce.” They refused to have any convoys coming to eastern Aleppo, and that was public, it’s not our propaganda, it’s not our announcement, they announced it. And there was a demonstration by those militants to refuse that convoy. So, they have interest in attacking that convoy, we don’t have. It wasn’t in an area where you have Syrian troops, and at the same time there were no Syrian or Russian airplanes flying in that area anyway. But it was used as part of the propaganda, as part of the narrative against Syria in the West; that we attacked this humanitarian convoy, because the whole war now in Syria, according to the Western propaganda, is taking the shape of humanitarian war. This is the Western mask now; they wanted to use the humanitarian mask in order to have an excuse to intervene more in Syria, and when I say intervene it means militarily or by supporting the terrorists. 
+Journalist: This is like the situation in former Yugoslavia, in the war in Yugoslavia, also in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the war in Kosovo, humanitarian problems. 
+President Assad: It’s a different era, maybe, a different shape, but the same core, what happened in your country, and what’s happening now in our country. 
+Question 7: And the Western propaganda spoke about the problem of using the chemical weapons and the barrel bombs. 
+President Assad: The same, to show that you have a black-and-white picture; very very bad guy against very very good guy. It’s like the narrative of George W. Bush during the war on Iraq and on Afghanistan. So, they wanted to use those headlines or those terms in their narrative in order to provoke the emotions of the public opinion in their countries. This is where the public opinion would support them if they wanted to interfere, either directly through military attacks, or through supporting their proxies that are the terrorists in our region. 
+Question 8: I see the news in the last days, the Amnesty International condemned a terrorist group for using the chlorine, the chemical weapons in Aleppo. 
+President Assad: In Aleppo, exactly, that happened a few days ago, and actually, regardless of these chemical attacks, we announced yesterday that the terrorists killed during the last three days more than 80 innocent civilians in Aleppo, and wounded more than 300. You don’t read anything about them in the Western mainstream media. You don’t see it, you don’t hear about it, there’s nothing about them. They only single out some pictures and some incidents in the area under the control of the terrorists just to use them for their political agenda in order to condemn and to blame the Syrian government, not because they are worried about the Syrians; they don’t care about our children, or about innocents, and about civilization, about infrastructure. They don’t care about it; they are destroying it. But actually, they only care about using everything that would serve their vested interests. 
+Question 9: And now, your army… you are the supreme commander of Syrian military forces. Your army now has not any chemical weapons? 
+President Assad: No, we don’t. Since 2013, we gave up our arsenals. Now, no we don’t have. But before that, we have never used it. I mean, when you talk about chemical weapons used by the government, it means you are talking about thousands of casualties in one place in a very short time. We never had this kind of incidents; just allegations in the Western media. 
+Question 10: Mr. President, when do you think the Syrian war will end? 
+President Assad: When? I always say less than one year is enough for you to solve your internal problem, because it is not very complicated internally. It’s becoming more complex only when you have more interfering by foreign powers. When those foreign powers leave Syria alone, we can solve it as Syrians in a few months, in less than one year. That’s very simple, we can, but providing that there’s no outside interference. Of course, that looks not realistic, because everybody knows that the United States wanted to undermine the position of Russia as a great power in the world, including in Syria. Saudi Arabia has been looking how to destroy Iran for years now, and Syria could be one of the places where they can achieve that, according to their way of thinking. But if we say that we could achieve that situation where all those foreign powers leave Syria alone, we don’t have a problem in solving our problem. 
+How? First of all, by stopping the support of the terrorists by external countries like the regional ones like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and by the West, of course, mainly the United States. When you stop supporting terrorists in Syria, it won’t be difficult at all to solve our problem. 
+Question 11: Mr. President, is it true that Syria is the last socialistic country in the Arab world? 
+President Assad: Today, yes. I don’t know about the future, how is it going to be. We are socialist, but of course not the closed type. 
+Journalist: Humane socialism, because your government is supporting the education with the subvention, like the Swedish-type socialism. 
+President Assad: I don’t know a lot about the Swedish-type, but let’s say that in Syria, we have an open economy, but at the same time we have a strong public sector, and that public sector played a very important role in the resilience of the Syrian society and the government during the war. Without that public sector, the situation would have been much more difficult. So, we’re still socialist, and I think the war proved that the socialism system is very important for any country, taking into consideration that I’m talking about the open socialism, that could allow the freedom of the public sector to play a vital role in building the country. 
+Question 12: And your big companies… this is the state companies or private companies? 
+President Assad: We have both. But usually in such a situation, the public sector always plays the most important part. As you know, the private sector could feel the danger more and could suffer more and in some areas could quit the whole arena, the economic arena, because of the insecurity. So, that’s why you have to depend in such a situation more on the public sector, but still the private sector in Syria plays a very important part beside the public. 
+Question 13: And you have very very tolerance atmosphere with other churches, Christians, Muslims, and… 
+President Assad: It’s not tolerance, actually; they are part of this society. Without all different colors of the society – Christians, Muslims, and the different sects and ethnicities – you won’t have Syria. So, every Syrian citizen should feel fully free in practicing his rituals, his traditions, his beliefs. He should be free in order to have a stable country. Otherwise you won’t have Syria as a stable country. But I wouldn’t call it tolerance. Tolerance means like we accept something against our will; no, Muslims and Christians lived together for centuries in Syria, and they integrate in their life on daily basis, they don’t live in ghettos. 
+Question 14: No separate schools for Muslims, for Christians, young people, no? 
+President Assad: No, no. You have some schools that belong to the church, but they are full of Muslims and vice versa. So, you don’t have, no. We don’t allow any segregation of religions and ethnicities in Syria, that would be very dangerous, but naturally, without the interference of the government, people would like to live with each other in every school, in every place, in every NGO, in the government, that is the natural… That’s why Syria is secular by nature, not by the government. The Syrian society has been secular throughout history. 
+Question 15: And, Mr. President, it’s been one year since Russian air forces took part in the Syrian war, how much has Russia helped you? 
+President Assad: Let’s talk about the reality. Before the Russian interference, ISIS was expanding, as I said. When they started interfering, ISIS and al-Nusra and the other Al Qaeda affiliated groups started shrinking. So, this is the reality. Why? Of course, because it’s a great power and they have great army and they have great firepower that could support the Syrian Army in its war. The other side of the same story is that when a great country, a great power, like Russia, intervene against the terrorists, in coordination with the troops on the ground, and in our case, it’s the Syrian Army, of course you’re going to achieve concrete results, while if you talk about the American alliance, which is not serious anyway, but at the same time they don’t have allies on the ground, they cannot achieve anything. So, the Russian power was very important beside their political weight on the international arena, in both ways they could change the situation, and they were very important for Syria in defeating the terrorists in different areas on the Syrian arena or battlefield. 
+Question 16: Is the Syrian society divided by the war today? 
+President Assad: Actually, it’s more homogenous than before the war. That could be surprising for many observers because the war is a very deep and important lesson for every Syrian. Many Syrians before the war didn’t tell the difference between being fanatic and being extremist, between being extremist and being terrorist. Those borders weren’t clear for many, because of the war, because of the destruction, because of the heavy price that affected every Syrian, many Syrians learned the lesson and now they know that the only way to protect the country and to preserve the country is to be homogenous, to live with each other, to integrate, to accept, to love each other. That’s why I think the effect of the war, in spite of all the bad aspects of any war like this war, but this aspect was positive for the Syrian society. So, I’m not worried about the structure of the Syrian society after the war. I think it’s going to be healthier. 
+Question 17: And a question about the American presidential elections; who would you like to win in USA presidential elections, Trump or Hillary? 
+President Assad: I think in most of the world, the debate about this election is who’s better, Clinton is better or Trump. In Syria, the discussion is who’s worse, not who’s better. So, no one of them, I think, would be good for us, let’s say, this is first. Second, from our experience with the American officials and politicians in general, don’t take them at their word, they’re not honest. Whatever they say, don’t believe them. If they say good word or bad word, if they were very aggressive or very peaceful, don’t believe them. It depends on the lobbies, on the influence of different political movements in their country, after the election that’s what is going to define their policy at that time. So, we don’t have to waste our time listening to their rhetoric now. It’s just rubbish. Wait for their policies and see, but we don’t see any good signs that the United States is going to change dramatically its policy toward what’s happening in the world, let’s say, to be fair, or to obey the international law, or to care about the United Nation’s Charter. There’s no sign that we are going to see that in the near future. So, it’s not about who’s going to be President; the difference will be very minimal, each one of them is going to be allowed to leave his own fingerprint, just personal fingerprint, but doesn’t mean change of policies. That’s why we don’t pin our hopes, we don’t waste our time with it. 
+Question 18: Mr. President, the last question: The relation between Serbia and Syria, do you have any message for people in Serbia? 
+President Assad: I think we didn’t do what we have to do on both sides in order to make this relation in a better position, before the war. Of course, the war will leave its effects on the relation between every two countries, that would be understandable, but we have to plan for the next time because your country suffered from external aggression that led to the division of Yugoslavia and I think the people are still paying the price of that war. Second, the war in your country has been portrayed in the same way; as a humanitarian war where the West wanted to intervene in order to protect a certain community against the aggressors form the other community. So, many people in the world believe that story, the same in Syria; they use the same mask, the humanitarian mask. 
+Actually, the West doesn’t care about your people, they don’t care about our people, they don’t care about anyone in this world, they only care about their own vested interest. So, I think we have the same lessons, may be a different area, we are talking about two decades’ difference, maybe different headlines, but actually the content is the same. That’s why I think we need to build more relations in every aspect; cultural, economy, politics, in order to strengthen our position, each country in his region. 
+Question 19: But Syrian government, you and Syria’s state, supporting Serbia in the problem of the Kosovo? 
+President Assad: We did, we did, although the Turks wanted to use their influence for Kosovo, in Kosovo’s favor, but we refused. That was before the war, that was seven or eight years ago, and we refused, in spite of the good relation with Turkey at that time. We supported Serbia. 
+Journalist: Mr. President, thank you for the interview, thank you for your time. 
+President Assad: Not at all. Thank you for coming to Damascus. 
+The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95",FAKE
+8345,Astronomers Think They Have Just Discovered Messages Sent from Aliens,"The Daily Sheeple 
+by Jake Anderson 
+Anomalous signals from deep space often evoke a quick pulse of gossip and speculation about aliens that dies off soon thereafter, when scientists are able to explain it. Usually, the explanation involves a natural cosmic process — an asteroid, space detritus, or frequencies from an exploded star. 
+Sometimes, however, the signals are too mysterious to explain. There’s a reason why you may have seen a sustained social media buzz regarding aliens this past week. A few days ago, two scientists from Laval University in Quebec released a paper arguing they may have just received our first communication from extraterrestrials. 
+First, a bit of context. This has been an exciting decade for those of us who stargaze in awe, wondering how many sentient beings live in this incomprehensibly enormous universe of ours. First, the search for exoplanets accelerated dramatically, aided by the Kepler telescope, which has identified over 1,000 planets outside of our solar system. 
+While scientists have long known that our Milky Way galaxy alone probably contains several hundred billion planets , the ability to study them had eluded us until fairly recently (this ability will be exponentially augmented when the James Webb telescope allows us to analyze exoplanets’ atmospheres and search for traces of industrial gasses). Additionally, the discovery of Earth-like exoplanets — some of which are conceivably close enough to visit in a few decades — has tantalizing ramifications for our near future human race. 
+Earlier this year, scientists announced the incredible observation of a series of inexplicable brightness frequencies from the star KIC 8462852, which led many to speculate the signals could have been originating from a Dyson sphere , a theoretical megastructure by which an advanced alien race (a Kardschez type 2 civilization ) could harness the power of its sun. The newest discovery from this star has made it even more unlikely that the signals are from natural causes. 
+The newest strange signals hail from a gaggle of some 234 stars identified by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which analyzed the spectra of 2.5 million stars. E.F. Borra and E. Trottier, the two astronomers who discovered the anomalies, discussed them in their paper , which was originally titled “Signals probably from Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” 
+“We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis,” they wrote. 
+“The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis.” 
+Of course, it is far from certain that these are actual alien messages. In an interview with none other than Snopes.com , Borra claimed he never actually used the word ‘probably’ and that further confirmation was needed. 
+The director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute , Andrew Siemion, issued an admonishing response: 
+“You can’t make such definitive statements about detections unless you’ve exhausted every possible means of follow-up.” 
+So why is everyone so excited? The discovery appears to match a prediction Borra made in 2012 when he claimed aliens could very well use intermittent bursts of laser as a means of communication. 
+For his part, Siemion plans to use his Breakthrough Listen Initiative to more closely assess several stars from the 234 sample. Meanwhile, Borra andTrottier, Borra’s graduate student, will continue observing the mysterious signals. 
+It’s an exciting decade for space research. With plans for a mission to Mars in the hopper, as well as an exploratory probe that will be sent to the moon Europa, we may be witnessing the rebirth of the Space Race. What better incentive could there be to venture further into space than the call of an alien species? 
+Let’s hope that by the time we meet them, our own species will have transcended its addiction to war and unsustainable resource allocation. We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by The Anti-Media of theantimedia.org . 
+The “Anti” in our name does not mean we are against the media, we are simply against the current mainstream paradigm. The current media, influenced by the industrial complex, is a top-down authoritarian system of distribution—the opposite of what Anti-Media aims to be. At Anti-Media, we want to offer a new paradigm—a bottom-up approach for real and diverse reporting. We seek to establish a space where the people are the journalists and a venue where independent journalism moves forward on a larger and more truthful scale. 
+Share: Rate:",FAKE
+5280,Att’y General Loretta Lynch Pleads The 5th When Asked Questions About Obama’s Iran Ransom Payment,"NTEB Ads Privacy Policy Att’y General Loretta Lynch Pleads The 5th When Asked Questions About Obama’s Iran Ransom Payment “Every Obama administration official and department involved in the Iran Deal appear to be running for cover,” the source said. “Like we feared, the Iran deal is turning out to be a disaster and Iran is emboldened in its aggression. Evidently Attorney General Lynch and the Department of Justice have decided ‘refusal to cooperate’ is their best strategy. by Geoffrey Grider October 28, 2016 Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments 
+Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) initially presented Lynch in October with a series of questions about how the cash payment to Iran was approved and delivered. 
+In an Oct. 24 response , Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded on Lynch’s behalf, refusing to answer the questions and informing the lawmakers that they are barred from publicly disclosing any details about the cash payment, which was bound up in a ransom deal aimed at freeing several American hostages from Iran . Loretta Lynch Pleads the Fifth To Protect Obama In Iran $1.7 Billion Hostage Money 
+The response from the attorney general’s office is “unacceptable” and provides evidence that Lynch has chosen to “essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries regarding [her] role in providing cash to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio and Pompeo wrote on Friday in a follow-up letter to Lynch, according to a copy obtained by the Free Beacon . 
+The inquiry launched by the lawmakers is just one of several concurrent ongoing congressional probes aimed at unearthing a full accounting of the administration’s secret negotiations with Iran. 
+“It is frankly unacceptable that your department refuses to answer straightforward questions from the people’s elected representatives in Congress about an important national security issue,” the lawmakers wrote. “Your staff failed to address any of our questions, and instead provided a copy of public testimony and a lecture about the sensitivity of information associated with this issue.” Obama on Iran payment: ‘We do not pay ransom’ 
+“As the United States’ chief law enforcement officer, it is outrageous that you would essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries,” they stated. “The actions of your department come at time when Iran continues to hold Americans hostage and unjustly sentence them to prison.” The lawmakers included a copy of their previous 13 questions and are requesting that Lynch provide answers by Nov. 4. 
+When asked about Lynch’s efforts to avoid answering questions about the cash payment, Pompeo told the Free Beacon that the Obama administration has blocked Congress at every turn as lawmakers attempt to investigate the payments to Iran. 
+“Who knew that simple questions regarding Attorney General Lynch’s approval of billions of dollars in payments to Iran could be so controversial that she would refuse to answer them?” Pompeo said. “This has become the Obama administration’s coping mechanism for anything related to the Islamic Republic of Iran—hide information, obfuscate details, and deny answers to Congress and the American people.” Obama Administration Finally Admits $400M To Iran Was Ransom For Hostages 
+“They know this isn’t a sustainable strategy, however, and I trust they will start to take their professional, and moral, obligations seriously,” the lawmaker added. 
+In the Oct. 24 letter to Rubio and Pompeo, Assistant Attorney General Kadzik warned the lawmakers against disclosing to the public any information about the cash payment. 
+Details about the deal are unclassified, but are being kept under lock and key in a secure facility on Capitol Hill, the Free Beacon first disclosed . Lawmakers and staffers who have clearance to view the documents are forced to relinquish their cellular devices and are barred from taking any notes about what they see. 
+“Please note that these documents contain sensitive information that is not appropriate for public release,” Kadzik wrote to the lawmakers. “Disclosure of this information beyond members of the House and Senate and staff who are able to view them could adversely affect the diplomatic relations of the United States, including with key allies, as well as the State Department’s ability to defend [legal] claims against the United States [by Iran] that are still being litigated at the Hague Tribunal.” 
+“The public release of any portion of these documents, or the information contained therein, is not authorized by the transmittal of these documents or by this communication,” Kadzik wrote. Congressional sources have told the Free Beacon that this is another part of the effort to hide details about these secret negotiations with Iran from the American public. 
+One senior congressional source familiar with both the secret documents and the inquiry into them told the Free Beacon that the details of the negotiations are so damning that the administration’s best strategy is to ignore lawmakers’ requests for more information. 
+“Every Obama administration official and department involved in the Iran Deal appear to be running for cover,” the source said. “Like we feared, the Iran deal is turning out to be a disaster and Iran is emboldened in its aggression. Evidently Attorney General Lynch and the Department of Justice have decided ‘refusal to cooperate’ is their best strategy. But this is dangerous and ultimately won’t protect them from anything.” source SHARE THIS ARTICLE Geoffrey Grider NTEB is run by end times author and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Grider. Geoffrey runs a successful web design company, and is a full-time minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to running NOW THE END BEGINS, he has a dynamic street preaching outreach and tract ministry team in Saint Augustine, FL. NTEB #TRENDING",FAKE
+690,Trump University 'playbooks' offer glimpse of ruthless business practices,"A federal judge has given the world an unprecedented glimpse into the ruthless business practices Donald Trump used to build his business empire.
+
+
+
+US district court judge Gonzalo Curiel on Tuesday made public more than 400 pages of Trump University “playbooks” describing how Trump staff should target prospective students’ weaknesses to encourage them to sign up for a $34,995 Gold Elite three-day package.
+
+Trump University staff were instructed to get people to pile on credit card debt and to target their financial weaknesses in an attempt to sell them the high-priced real estate courses.
+
+The documents contained an undated “personal message” from Trump to new enrollees at the school: “Only doers get rich. I know that in these three packed days, you will learn everything to make a million dollars within the next 12 months.”
+
+The courses are now subject to legal proceedings from unhappy clients.
+
+
+
+Judge Curiel released the documents, which are central to a class-action lawsuit against Trump University in California, despite sustaining repeated public attacks from Trump, who had fought to keep the details secret.
+
+Curiel ruled that the documents were in the public interest now that Trump is “the front-runner in the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential race, and has placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue”.
+
+Trump hit back calling Curiel a “hater”, a “total disgrace” and “biased”. “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump. A hater. He’s a hater,” Trump said at a rally near the courthouse in San Diego. “His name is Gonzalo Curiel. And he is not doing the right thing ... [He] happens to be, we believe, Mexican.”
+
+Curiel, who is Hispanic, is American and was born in Indiana.
+
+Trump went on to attack Curiel further on Twitter on Monday and at a press conference in New York on Monday.
+
+The playbook contains long sections telling Trump U team members how to identify buyers and push them to sign up for the most expensive package, and to put the cost on their credit cards.
+
+“If they can afford the gold elite don’t allow them to think about doing anything besides the gold elite,” the document states.
+
+If potential students hesitate, teachers are told to read this script.
+
+As one of your mentors for the last three days, it’s time for me to push you out of your comfort zone. It’s time for you to be 100% honest with yourself. You’ve had your entire adult life to accomplish your financial goals. I’m looking at your profile and you’re not even close to where you need to be, much less where you want to be. It’s time you fix your broken plan, bring in Mr. Trump’s top instructors and certified millionaire mentors and allow us to put you and keep you on the right track. Your plan is BROKEN and WE WILL help you fix it. Remember you have to be 100% honest with yourself!
+
+Trump University staff are instructed in how to persuade students to put the cost of the course on their credit cards, even if they have just battled to pay off debts.
+
+Trump staff are told to spend lunch breaks in sign-up seminars “planting seeds” in potential students minds about how their lives won’t improve unless they join the programme. They are also told to ask students personal questions to discover weaknesses that could be exploited to help seal the deal.
+
+New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who has also sued Trump University, renewed his attacks on Trump on Tuesday. “You are not allowed to protect the trade secrets of a three-card Monte game,” Schneiderman said ahead of the document’s release. “If you look at the facts of this case, this shows someone who was absolutely shameless in his willingness to lie to people, to say whatever it took to induce them into his phony seminars,” Schneiderman said.",REAL
+397,Syria casts shadows on 2016 Dems,"** Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here. **
+
+Buzz Cut:
+
+ • Syria casts shadows on 2016 Dems
+
+ • Kerry claims U.S. could still strike
+
+ • Congress not waiting on Obama
+
+ • President tries to pacify unions on ObamaCare
+
+ • What a bunch of clowns
+
+SYRIA CASTS SHADOWS ON 2016 DEMS - As Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton crisscross the nation and the globe raising their public profiles (and padding their donor lists) ahead of potential 2016 presidential bids, the Obama administration’s stumbles on Syria are posing serious problems. The Democratic base is in an uproar over the proposed strikes, but neither Biden nor Clinton can politely distance themselves from the president’s policies. They own them. But they can begin a long, slow march away from their president.
+
+Biden could face grilling at steak fry - Vice President Joe Biden heads to Iowa Sunday for Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry. The Des Moines Register reports that President Obama’s friction with Harkin and other liberal lawmakers about Obama’s now-shelved request for congressional backing for strikes against Syria could complicate what is usually a casting call for presidential contenders in the home state for the first-in-the-nation nominating caucus.
+
+Job chat in South Carolina - The White House announced Vice President Joe Biden will discuss jobs and infrastructure at the Port of Charleston in South Carolina Monday. South Carolina traditionally hosts the second presidential primary.
+
+At least he warned us! - Vice President Joe Biden called House Republicans “Neanderthals” for resisting Democrats’ ultimately successful effort this year to add men in same-sex couples to the Violence against Women Act. Biden, speaking at a celebration of the act’s 19th anniversary at his official residence, prefaced his “Neanderthal” claim thusly: “I'm going to say something outrageous.” He also touted his legislative expertise: “I think I understand the Senate better than any man or women who’s ever served in there.”
+
+WILL HILLARY ADDRESS SYRIA ON WORLD STAGE? - Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Scotland today to speak to the graduating class at St. Andrew’s University. With Britain already backed out of a U.S. coalition for Syria strikes and strong public sentiment there against joining the conflict, what will America’s former top diplomat say? In speeches earlier this week, Clinton voiced general support for President Obama’s Syria policy, but steered clear of his call for airstrikes, preferring to speak of “a strong response” led by the U.N.
+
+Kerry crunch - With her successor stranded in Geneva trying to win weapons talks with his Russian counterpart, a little help from Clinton would surely be appreciated. But will Clinton be willing to sidle up to the unpopular war plan?
+
+Huma rushes back to Hillary - Following her husband Anthony Weiner’s crushing defeat in the New York mayoral election on Tuesday, Huma Abedin, the longtime right-hand woman to Hillary Clinton, is back. Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines, told TPM on Thursday that Abedin has returned to her position as director of the former secretary of State’s team.
+
+Hillary staffs up - The departure of President Obama’s top economic adviser, Gene Sperling, first reported by Fox Business, provides some more manpower for Hillary Clinton’s policy team.  From the NYT: “If Hillary Rodham Clinton runs for president in 2016, Mr. Sperling, 54, is expected to join her team, a quarter-century after he played a prominent role in her husband’s first presidential campaign.” Sperling will be replaced by Obama’s former budget boss, Jeffrey Zients.
+
+Corruption probe touches Hillary - WaPo reports federal investigators are probing a senior campaign adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, Minyon Moore, as they seek to build a case against D.C. businessman Jeffrey Thompson for his role in launching a shadow campaign to elect D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray.
+
+Trickles down to Virginia governor race - WaPo also reports Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, the longtime top fundraiser for the Clintons, will not return a donation to his 2009 governor campaign from Thompson.
+
+[WSJ’s Kimberly Strassel: “These questions stretch beyond shady money funneling to Gray and Clinton campaigns. Mr. Thompson had reason to have friends in high places, since his accounting firm served as a significant government contractor.”]
+
+With your second cup of coffee... Liberal pundit Peter Beinart looks at the generation gap that could trap Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for the Daily Beast in The Rise of the New New Left : “If the Millennials challenge Reaganite orthodoxy, they will likely challenge Clintonian orthodoxy, too.”
+
+KERRY SAYS ATTACKS STILL POSSIBLE - After the first day of weapons talks, Secretary of State John Kerry maintained that the U.S. is still poised for a unilateral military strike against Syria, despite a political impasse in Washington and President Obama’s tabling of his request for congressional approval. Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov continue their discussions today in Geneva over a Russian offer to help secure Syria’s chemical weapons.
+
+[Watch Fox: Richard Grenell, former State Department spokesman, appears in the 10 a.m. ET hour]
+
+Not a game - “Expectations are high. They are high for the United States, perhaps even more so for Russia to deliver on the promise of this moment. This is not a game, and I said that to my friend Sergey when we talked about it initially.” – Secretary of State John Kerry at a press briefing.
+
+Obama to reprise Syria stance - President Obama will sit down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos for Sunday’s installment of “This Week.”
+
+Dr. K weighs in – From Charles Krauthammer’s syndicated column, The fruits of epic incompetence: “Assad, far from receiving punishment of any kind, goes from monster to peace partner. Putin bestrides the world stage, playing dealmaker. He’s welcomed by America as a constructive partner. Now a world statesman, he takes to the New York Times to blame American interventionist arrogance — a.k.a. ‘American exceptionalism’…”
+
+Some donuts, though, ARE exceptional - Krispy Kreme opened its first store in Moscow on Thursday. WaPo reports nearly 200 people eagerly waited for the store to flip on the famous “hot now” sign.
+
+[WSJ: “Russian President Vladimir Putin may be crude, but he knows how to exploit weakness. And he's sure acting like he has spotted an easy mark in President Obama.”]
+
+FOX NEWS SUNDAY PREVIEW - John Roberts, sitting in for Chris Wallace, hosts Reps. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Michael McCaul, R-Texas, to discuss the challenges of securing chemical weapons in civil war-torn Syria, and the potential pitfalls of relying on Russia.
+
+CONGRESS NOT WAITING ON OBAMA - Campaign Carl Cameron - “Could the rare, bipartisan emergency meeting of the nation’s top four congressional leaders Thursday signal that Hill leaders have given up hope of real help from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue on solving looming fiscal crises?
+
+Congress has learned to expect little from President Obama where budget matters are concerned. And the president's zig-zagging struggle for a coherent Syria policy has led many to conclude that the president is no longer becoming a lame duck. He is one.
+
+House Speaker John Boehner, along with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, sat down with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi to discuss the possibility of a government shutdown at the end of this month, raising the $16 trillion federal debt limit debt in the next five weeks and dealing with the next round of ‘sequestration’ spending caps.
+
+Democrats and Republicans are light years apart on how best to deal with these fiscal issues.  Most will be handled with a series of delaying tactics that will keep the government operating but ignore the hard choices needed for lasting solutions.
+
+Those fights will be fierce and could take the government to the brink, or over it. But the one politician in the mix who no longer worries about future elections is, of course, President Obama. On the Hill, friends and foes alike are already seeing signs that he is now thinking and acting that way.” – Carl Cameron
+
+Boehner in a bind - Conservativemembers of House Speaker John Boehner's caucus are demanding a vote on a measure to defund ObamaCare as part of ongoing budget talks. Conservative lawmakers rejected a compromise plan from leadership earlier this week. Boehner told reporters: “I'm well aware of the deadlines… I think there's a way to get there… There are a million options that are being discussed by a lot of people.”
+
+Baier Tracks: Don’t blame the messenger… “As the Obama administration is having horrible problems trying to contain the Syria crisis, House Speaker John Boehner appears to be having real problems controlling his Republican caucus.
+
+Some Republicans say it’s being trumped up by the media with headlines like this in the NYT: “Boehner Seeking Democrats’ Help on Fiscal Talks.”
+
+The problem: It is all true. This could be a bumpy road to Sept. 30 and a continuing resolution to fund the government, and an even bumpier ride to raise the debt ceiling by mid-October.” – Bret Baier
+
+The last time there was a shutdown - Glen Bolger of top GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies reviews how the public blamed Republicans for the 1995 -1996 government shutdowns and how the party’s standing quickly diminished. Then-President Bill Clinton’s approval level bounced to 60 percent while a plurality (48 percent) of respondents blamed Republicans for the shutdown. The same share of voters approved of how Clinton handled the budget negotiations, with only 22 percent approving of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s approach.
+
+[“The anarchists are winning...” --Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. in a press briefing Thursday ,following a meeting with top congressional leaders to discuss avoiding a government shutdown]
+
+OBAMA, BIDEN TRY TO SOOTHE UNION OBAMACARE ANXIETY - President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will meet with labor leaders at the White House this afternoon after the nation’s largest union, the AFL-CIO, issued a scathing resolution against ObamaCare. Republicans, meanwhile, are trying to head off an expected carve-out for unions getting socked by new ObamaCare regulations.
+
+[Ed. note: Labor leaders are likely to ask a common question in Washington these days: If big business, big insurance and Congress have all gotten special exemptions from the burdens of the law, why not them?]
+
+Mopping up after ObamaCare - Breitbart: “Indiana University is firing 50 maintenance and custodial workers and shifting them to a temp agency to avoid incurring Obamacare costs.”
+
+[Defending Medicare Part D - Former Congressional Budget Office boss Douglas Holtz-Eakin offers his new study for the American Action Forum on how Medicare Part D has beat cost estimates by 48 percent and how the CBO has reduced its cost projection by $100 billion]
+
+NEW EVIDENCE IN IRS SCANDAL - Daily Caller: “House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Dave Camp vowed that ‘there will be consequences’ after revealing secret emails that… IRS official Lois Lerner sent to her colleagues suggesting collusion between the IRS and Democratic operatives… ‘Tea Party Matter very dangerous… Counsel and Judy Kindell need to be in on this one… Cincy should probably NOT have these cases,’ Lerner said in a February 2011 e-mail…”
+
+DEMS BLOCK CRUZ ON BENGHAZI - Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, offered legislation to create a joint select committee to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. Cruz sought unanimous consent to pass the resolution Thursday. Senate Democrats refused.
+
+‘STAND YOUR GROUND’ HEADS TO HILL - Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin, will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week on “stand your ground” laws.
+
+Got a TIP from the RIGHT or LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+BELTWAY SPELLING BATTLE - Members of Congress will battle reporters in the centennial installment of the National Press Club’s spelling bee on Wednesday. Congressional contenders in the benefit for the club’s Journalism Institute include Sens. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Tim Kaine, D-Va. Fox News Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry will be among those going to bat for the media team.
+
+YOU’D THINK THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE INJURIES…
+
+ AP - “Pennsylvania police said a minivan with two clowns inside crashed outside the York Fair… The minivan was also pulling a trailer with a clown car. Police said the driver, 83-year-old James Billingsley of York, also known as ‘Dimples the Clown,’ suffered a minor bump on the head. His passenger clown, 77-year-old Norman Clouser of York, was unhurt. Police said ‘Dimples’ was wearing clown shoes but the oversized footwear apparently didn't play a role in the crash.”
+
+AND NOW, A WORD FROM CHARLES…“A month ago, [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] was a war criminal and [Russian President Vladimir Putin] was a pariah for covering in the U.N. on the poison gas attack. And because of how flummoxed our president is, Putin is now a statesman, a partner in peace, and he's in a position where he can lecture the United States of America.”  – Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier” Watch here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here. To catch Chris live online daily at 11:30 a.m. ET, click here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+9190,It’s Going to Change RADICALLY With Silver – HUGE Demand Coming | Cliff High,"Tweet Home » Silver » Silver News » It’s Going to Change RADICALLY With Silver – HUGE Demand Coming | Cliff High 
+Data mining expert Cliff High says the economy is much worse than most people think, and that bubble is going to pop after Election Day. Inflation is also coming, and that will be very positive for precious metals . High contends, “ Gold and silver are going to rise relative to the falling currencies. Gold and silver in actual purchasing power will also rise. They won’t be saying an ounce of gold bought a good suit 100 years ago and an ounce of gold will buy a good suit now. That’s going to change, and it’s also going to change radically with silver . Also, in our data sets between 2019 and 2024 , silver becomes the metal to have… You need to have silver . 
+2017 Gold Pandas and 2017 Silver Pandas Are Now Available! Secure Your 2017 Panda Coins Today at SD Bullion!",FAKE
+1012,Wisconsin primary: 5 things to watch,"Watch CNN and NY1's Democratic debate, moderated by Wolf Blitzer, Thursday, April 14 at 9 p.m. ET.
+
+Milwaukee (CNN) Two candidates vying to take down their parties' front-runners could get big boosts if they win Tuesday in Wisconsin .
+
+Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is leading Donald Trump in the Badger State's polls. And a Bernie Sanders win would mark his sixth victory over Hillary Clinton in the last seven states to vote.
+
+It's the last big test until April 19, and each candidate has a lot to win — or lose.
+
+Here are five things to watch Tuesday:
+
+Wisconsin is the first electoral test of whether he's paying a price.
+
+But the polls show Cruz with a 10-point lead in Wisconsin -- and if that margin grows Tuesday, it'd be a sign that the controversies swirling around Trump's campaign are taking their toll.
+
+Still, Trump was inflating expectations Monday in La Crosse.
+
+""I really believe tomorrow were going to have a very, very big victory. Very very big,"" he said. ""You know, I've been up here a lot. And I love it, and the people I love.""
+
+""His team doesn't understand how these processes work so any time they lose they scream, 'The election's been stolen from us,'"" Cruz said Monday on WISN radio in Wisconsin. ""It's just silliness.""
+
+A loss would dent Trump. But it would crush Cruz, who has retail politicked his way across the Badger State as if it were Iowa in recent weeks.
+
+He'll try to pick up 42 more in Wisconsin: 18 that go to the statewide winner, plus 24 more chosen three apiece by the state's eight congressional districts.
+
+Part of Wisconsin's importance to Cruz is that the calendar soon shifts to shakier ground for him. He's favored in the winner-take-all South Dakota, Montana and Nebraska contests, but could lose big in the next contest on the calendar, New York on April 19, and then Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware the following week.
+
+""Just a couple of weeks ago, all of the media commentators were saying Wisconsin was a state that I could not compete and do well,"" Cruz said Monday in Kenosha. ""They were saying it was a state that was a natural state for Donald Trump. The state historically has been a purple or even a blue state at times. It's a state that is, that is very heavily based on manufacturing, that has a lot of union members and working class members. Supposedly, it was Donald Trump's sweet spot, and yet I think the people of Wisconsin, they're looking at the records of the candidates, and they realize that Donald screams and yells a lot, but he has no solutions.""
+
+He was swept in the South, and bloodied in the Rust Belt. But when the race shifted West, Bernie Sanders won five out of six states, regaining his footing and bolstering his argument to take the race all the way through the last contests on June 7.
+
+A win in Wisconsin would give him a significant boost just as the race heads to New York -- the state where he was born, and which Clinton represented in the Senate. It would also give him victories in six out of the seven states in the month leading up to it -- helping to fuel the passion and small-dollar donations driving his candidacy.
+
+At a rowdy Monday evening rally in Milwaukee, Sanders talked repeatedly about ""momentum"" -- touting poll results, his growth from 2015 and a string of recent victories.
+
+""Tomorrow, if there is a good turnout here in Wisconsin, if there is a record-breaking turnout here in Wisconsin, we are going to win here as well,"" he said.
+
+How problematic is a loss for Clinton?
+
+Clinton's campaign has downplayed the Wisconsin primary for weeks, arguing that the state's results won't tip the delegate count significantly in either direction. The former secretary of state wasn't even in Wisconsin on Monday -- instead campaigning in New York, where she faces a closer-than-expected contest in two weeks.
+
+For more than a month, Clinton has tried to shift her attention to Republicans and the general election. Yet much like Clinton against then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008, Sanders' persistent presence won't allow it.
+
+Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook is telling supporters not to worry.
+
+In a memo posted on Medium Monday evening, Mook wrote: ""Sanders has to win the four remaining delegate-rich primaries -- New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey -- with roughly 60% of the vote. To put that in perspective: Sanders has thus far won only two primaries with that margin: Vermont and New Hampshire.""
+
+He calls the campaign's delegate lead ""nearly insurmountable.""
+
+Rubio, in fact, still has more delegates than Kasich.
+
+""He's just a stubborn guy,"" Trump said of Kasich. ""He's stubborn. He doesn't want to leave.""
+
+Wisconsin, just like Michigan and Illinois before it, is the sort of state where Kasich ought to have a strong showing. Public polls have showed him within striking distance of Trump for second place -- and finishing ahead of Trump would be a major boost.",REAL
+1133,Trump is closer to what most Republicans believe than the ‘establishment’ candidates are,"On Super Tuesday, Donald Trump continued his surprise series of wins, gaining seven out of the 11 states in play that day. In response, many are asking: Why have establishment candidates had such a hard time in this year’s Republican nomination contest?
+
+Some suggest that Republicans who bother to vote in the primaries are farther to the right than the Republicans as a whole – and are unimpressed with the  somewhat more moderate establishment candidates. Others suggest that  less-educated citizens who don’t usually vote are turning out just to vote for Trump.
+
+These may be part of the answer. But we offer a different suggestion to explain Trump’s meteoric rise: The GOP establishment is out of touch with its base. Trump actually represents Republicans better if you examine beliefs issue by issue.
+
+[How political science helps explain the rise of Trump: Most voters aren’t ideologues]
+
+To investigate, we have teamed up with Pollfish, a start-up survey platform, to track American public opinion on 11 key campaign issues weekly during the election season. Pollfish’s survey platform delivers online surveys to almost 200 million potential respondents. We specifically target smartphone owners in the United States. Our sampling technique is best described as randomly targeting people of a sample of adults in the U.S. with smartphones. Using highly technical statistical techniques to adjust for non-response (a legitimate concern in all surveys) coupled with demographic breakdowns of the voting population derived from Big Data on all registered voters in the U.S., we monitor public opinion on these issues broken down by the general population and by party, and compare it to leading political figures in the 2016 primary season.
+
+Let’s look here at opinion on three highly divisive and partisan issues:
+
+On all three issues, most Democratic politicians (including both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders) agree very strongly or strongly. The “establishment” Republican candidates (including both Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) disagree very strongly or strongly.
+
+But where do Republican voters stand? Let’s compare them to the general population to see.
+
+[How political science helps explain the rise of Trump: the role of white identity and grievances]
+
+If you look at the figure below, you can see that only 20 percent of the general population supports a complete abortion ban, even in cases of rape and incest – and only 25 percent of Republican voters do. Cruz and  Rubio advocate this position. Trump breaks with the GOP establishment – and agrees with the nearly 60 percent of Republicans who support the right to abortion in these circumstances.
+
+[Donald Trump may be showing us the future of U.S. rightwing politics]
+
+Less than 35 percent of the general population would oppose any additional gun regulation or control. More than 50 percent support at least some increased gun regulation.
+
+On both abortion and guns, less than 15 percent of the general population holds the neutral position; 75  percent hold strong or very strong views. On guns, the Republican voters agree with their elites; all Democratic candidates favor increased gun control while all of Republican candidates favor no additional gun control.
+
+[Okay, so what would a Trump presidency be like?]
+
+We find that 35 percent of the general population strongly support government action to reduce differences in income inequality; 20 percent strongly oppose; and 45 percent hold positions that are either neutral or soft. However, there is a partisan divide. Most Democratic voters do strongly support such measures. Sanders strongly advocates this position; we have defined Clinton as neutral on the issue, both in her rhetoric and her policy proposals, although this may change in coming months.
+
+Republican voters are less clearly aligned – and are certainly not as cleanly aligned with the Republican elite. Trump, Cruz, and Rubio’s tax plans would massively redistribute after-tax income to the highest earners, although that’s not what their rhetoric says. Despite proposing the largest tax cuts, Trump calls CEO pay “a joke and disgraceful,” but offers no policy solutions, and has specifically advocated for the end of the hedge fund carried interest loophole.
+
+We asked a total of eight questions, all framed to measure whether people hold strong or moderate positions on hot-button issues. We consistently found that people were more likely to hold strong opinions on one side or the other than they were to be neutral or mildly opinionated. In other words, public opinion was very polarized. This indicates that elite polarization (i.e., the distance between the policy positions of Republican and Democratic lawmakers) has certainly rubbed off on the general population, at least to a small extent.
+
+But here’s something interesting. Across these three representative issues, 60 percent of the Democratic electorate supports Democratic candidates’ policies strongly (or more so). But only 35 percent of the Republican electorate supports their candidates’ positions.
+
+Does this misrepresentation matter to the voters? It’s hard to know. In 2012, 92 percent of self-identified Democrats voted for Barack Obama, while 93 percent of self-identified Republicans voted for Mitt Romney. Only 6 and 7 percent, respectively, crossed over to vote for the “other” party’s candidate.
+
+If Trump secures the Republican nomination, a greater proportion of Republican voters may cross over, or the Republican Party may splinter on policy, losing pro-immigration business leaders.
+
+But the Democratic candidates are further from the Republican base than Trump is. And Trump’s breaks with Republican orthodoxy may actually be closer to the beliefs of the Republican base. He breaks left to match Republican voters’ beliefs on abortion – and he breaks even further right to match those voters in his extreme positions on on opposing immigration and any pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
+
+In other words, Trump’s apparent hodgepodge of moderate and conservative positions may actually make him a more representative Republican presidential candidate than the establishment candidates we’ve seen in the past eight years.
+
+It’s certainly possible that Trump’s candidacy will pull the Republican Party back towards the views of Republican voters.
+
+Notes on methodology: We sampled about 1,000 American smartphone users once a week for five weeks between Jan. 11 and Feb. 12, 2016. The total respondents is 4,209. We then model each question using a Bayesian hierarchical regression with age, race, gender, education, race, and party identification. We then weight the obtained probability estimates based on total counts of likely voters derived from the TargetSmart voter file.
+
+Tobias Konitzer is a Ph.D. candidate in communication at Stanford University.
+
+David Rothschild is an economist at Microsoft Research. Find him on Twitter @DavMicRot and PredictWise.com",REAL
+8631,The Worst Takes Of 2016 Election: An Unforgiving Retrospective,"At Shadowproof, we believe part of what made the 2016 Presidential Election so agonizing was the endless stream of punditry we were inundated with on a daily basis. Sometimes it masqueraded as valuable analysis and critical journalism. Most often, these pieces were clearly, as author Aldous Huxley might say, excruciating orgasms of self-assertion.
+Shadowproof’s staff collaborated on this collection of the worst punditry written during the campaign. Many of these individuals deserve the label of hack. They should be forever remembered for compounding the trauma of this election.
+Additionally, we know we probably missed some gems that deserve recognition. We would like our readers to submit what they consider to be the worst of the worst, and on Thursday, November 10, we will publish a collection nominated by our readers. Share your picks in the comment section below or send us an email .
+DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY Jonathan Chait —”Reminder: Liberalism Is Working, And Marxism Has Always Failed” We won’t see a red tide sweep the United States any time soon, but that hasn’t kept liberal writers from trying, and failing, to malign leftists. The most energized pundit was Jonathan Chait, writer for New York Magazine. In this piece championing liberalism , Chait took part in what’s become a formulaic liberal undertaking: warning of the specter of Marxism or any leftist ideology imbued with even the faintest hint of red.
+Arguing liberalism “works” not only means ignoring its past and present failures, but it also speaks to a deep-seated fear among the liberal commentariat. They are afraid a genuine leftist ideology is enticing to the young and disillusioned. Even Bernie Sanders, as benign and unthreatening as he was, faced a torrent of diatribes for advocating some of the most genial socialist policies, including the right to a “living wage.” Someday, there will be an independent socialist movement, and it will be truly vindicating. (Roqayah Chamseddine)
+Further Reading: “ Oh, Good, It’s 2016 And We’re Arguing Whether Marxism Works “ 
+Courtney Enlow —”An All-Caps Explosion of Feelings Regarding the Liberal Backlash Against Hillary Clinton” Bourgeois feminists invested in the Clinton brand inundated readers with banal fan-fiction dressed up as politics. One of the most superficial justifications for a Hillary Clinton presidency came from one Courtney Enlow who penned an “all-caps explosion of feelings” for the former Secretary of State. Enlow spends the entire body of her article yelling because “Hillary cannot yell”, so on her behalf she etches out a stream of incoherent complaints in all caps.
+“Fuck everything, I’m with her,” Enlow concluded. It might as well be the mantra of every liberal supporter of Clinton. Her article not only neglects to address a single policy issue but it also—intentionally or otherwise—paints all detractors as misogynists, unwilling to pass the torch to a woman, and white, thereby erasing countless people of color who condemned Clinton for actions she’s taken, and the policies she’s supported throughout her political career. This shallow examination of Clinton as a beer buddy instead of a politician with a direct hand in the material consequences, which impacted innumerable communities, is now normal. This is the way so many dissect political candidates and a preview of what is in store for Americans after Clinton’s inauguration. (Roqayah Chamseddine)
+Further Reading: “ Hillary Clinton vs. Herself ” by Rebecca Traister 
+Max Fisher — “Is Hillary Clinton really the foreign policy super-hawk she is portrayed to be?” Clinton has a reputation as a hawk. It won her praise during the 2016 election from neoconservatives, who ardently supported President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. She supports a no-fly zone in Syria. She was a fierce advocate for regime change against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya after meeting with Westernized Libyan exiles and played a key role in pushing the U.S. government to war. She is a big believer in targeted assassinations with drones. She voted for the Iraq War when she was a senator. Nevertheless, Fisher wrote a piece during the primary intended to undermine all the scrutiny of her foreign policy record.
+It was a response to the New York Times profile by Mark Landler on how she became a hawk. Fisher made several distinctions without a difference, suggesting she is “hawkish on failed states, civil wars, and humanitarian crises; dovish toward adversarial or hostile states.” He penned this marvelous sentence after summarizing her record supporting interventions in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria: “That is just a large number of wars or military interventions, and it’s easy to see why Clinton has been judged as hawkish as a result,” as if the wars just happened to Clinton like bad bouts of the flu and there’s nothing much she could do about it. Then, Fisher reasoned it is hard to know what a president will do in terms of foreign policy because it is beyond American control. Except, what Fisher does not get is that America is a massive empire, and the U.S. most certainly has the ability to determine whether pouring gasoline on the fire is the right thing to do. (Kevin Gosztola)
+Paul Krugman – “Plutocrats and Prejudice” Casting Sanders as myopic and money-obsessed was a convenient way for pundits to water down his actual platform, which included demands for universal healthcare and an end to mass incarceration. However, Krugman’s argument went beyond that. It joined the trend of weaponizing identity politics and cast Clinton as the candidate, who understood minority communities better even though she once called black people “super predators.”
+Krugman claimed Sanders believes “money is the root of all evil,” while Clinton believes “money is the root of some evil, maybe a lot of evil, but it isn’t the whole story. Instead, racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice are powerful forces in their own right.“ It helped to deflect conversation about Clinton’s relationships with Wall Street elites or her support for welfare reform that ravaged communities of color. It also enabled Clinton to respond to critiques of President Barack Obama with suggestions that an angry old white man was trying to hijack the Democratic Party. (Brian Sonenstein)
+Further Reading: “ The Pastrami Principle “ 
+Amanda Marcotte – “Let’s storm the Sander’s he-man women-haters club: Hillary plays the gender card, while Bernie fans rage” It is possible no one put in as much effort to simplify the Democratic Primary contest as a battle of the sexes as Salon’s Marcotte . In the early months of the primary, she painted Sanders supporters as an all white and male obstacle to history, and Sanders himself as their belligerent leader intent on denying American women their dream of a potent symbol in the White House.
+Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record relished the kind of work Marcotte did because it effectively erased the thousands of young women who had legitimate policy disagreements with Clinton. In this particular piece, she put forth “evidence” of the gender dynamic by publishing two photos she took of a rally in Iowa. One showed a crowd full of hopeful women of all ages she said were united by their love of Katy Perry and adorned with “Glitter, unicorns, and Disney princess memorabilia.” Another showed the scraggly crowd of “cantankerous young men” Sanders attracted. Again, identity politics cleverly distracted from a necessary conversation on the issues and records of the two presidential candidates. (Brian Sonenstein)
+Further Reading: “ Why I’m supporting Clinton over Sanders: Liberals don’t need a savior but someone who can actually get things done in Washington “ 
+Joy Reid – “Come on, Bernie, Time to Level With Your Dreamers” Like many careerist grifters, Reid supported Hillary Clinton in the primary and tried to undermine any populist progressive movement in the Democratic Party. This particular column was so trollish it needed to be read by gaslight.
+Claiming Sanders supporters were part of an “angry movement” and out of their senses, Reid told Sanders in May, before many primaries occurred, he needed to concede the race and tell his supporters to stop living in an “alternate reality.” And she further distinguished herself by trying to manipulate Sanders voters into believing their concerns were products of racism and sexism, even though Sanders typically won all younger voters, regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender. (Dan Wright)
+Michael Tomasky – “Get Of My Lawn, Bernie Kids! Why I’m Voting for Hillary Clinton” In the film, “Gran Torino,” Clint Eastwood shouts at kids to get off his lawn because he struggles with diversity and America as a more inclusive society. For Tomasky, the “threat” to his “lawn” was different. It is millennials, who possess an ambitious vision for a better and just world that goes beyond the confines of establishment politics; you know, young people who seek to unravel the messes created and amplified by the failures of Tomasky’s generation.
+For this column, Tomasky, a 56 year-old white man with a very nice home in suburban Washington, D.C., that could be found on Zillow, haplessly wielded the politics of privilege. It was written in first person and teemed with the kind of self-absorbed narcissism, which was a hallmark of the vote scolding genre of writing so many of us were subjected to during the election. After he was challenged by Sanders supporters, Tomasky copped out and declared, “I haven’t the slightest idea. But none of you Sanders supporters has the slightest idea of what the future holds either.” He went on to mock supporters for being assertive, even though it was his performance that provoked thousands of supporters into understandable outrage. (Kevin Gosztola)
+Further Reading: “ An Ode To My Berniebro Trolls “ 
+GENERAL ELECTION Jonathan Chait — “Jill Stein Explains Her Plan To Stop Trump By Electing Him President” A small percentage of U.S. citizens, who voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, had their votes counted as, can you guess? Votes for Jill Stein. However, there is a genre of liberal punditry that goes back more than a decade. It lectures and berates every citizen, who would dare to vote for a third-party candidate. It says they help Republicans and seeks to blame them for wars, poverty, famine, armageddon—just about anything bad that occurred after voters dared to support another choice than one of the two candidates the capitalist system foisted upon them.
+Chait is magnificent at writing these types of asinine columns. Through spectacular misdirection, he maintained Stein believed Clinton will lead to fascism. He ignored the kernel of Stein’s remarks that sparked this spittle; in particular, how failure to improve the material conditions of lower and working class Americans fuels right-wing extremism. If anyone needs to demonstrate why our choices get progressively worse each election, they can point to columnists like Chait, who foster this kind of half-baked discourse. (Kevin Gosztola)
+Further Reading: “ Ralph Nader Still Refuses To Admit He Elected Bush ” 
+Jamie Kirchick – “Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left” Few screeds backfired on their authors as marvelously as this piece. None of the individuals smeared in the piece actually ever expressed support for Trump. In fact, each of them had records, where they denounced him before Kirchick accused them of being Trump Lovers. Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent reacted , “Area man willfully confuses refusal to unthinkingly parrot all criticism of Trump with ‘admiration’ of him.” On top of that, it brought further controversy to The Daily Beast after it published a story by a straight writer who was outing Olympians as gay. (That egregious piece was removed.)
+Kirchick’s piece was one of the earlier articulations of the argument that the Kremlin wants Trump to be U.S. president, which now saturates media. He reasoned leftists critical of Clinton “validated” Trump and so, therefore, they were feeding into the agenda of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. It seems rather boring and uninspired at this point. He and other neoconservatives had it rough during the election because they were no longer relevant, and in order to be relevant, they had to openly identify with the Clinton campaign. Maybe, there’s a role for Kirchick in the pundit class under a Clinton presidency. He regularly contributed to the Los Angeles Times over the past months. Or maybe this cretinous drool monger now carries too much of a risk of damaging a media organization’s reputation that editors will steer clear of him. (Kevin Gosztola)
+Further Reading: “ If Trump wins, a coup isn’t impossible here in the U.S. “ 
+Eli Lake – “Now Clinton Knows How Scooter Libby Felt” The failed presidency of George W. Bush left many neoconservatives scrambling to hold onto power and relevance, but neocons like Lake believe they have found the sunny-side up around the Clinton campaign. With Clinton and friends celebrating the support of Iraq war cheerleaders Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and David Frum, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to beat the yoke of the old regime off former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney and convicted felon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
+In his piece, Lake celebrated Libby’s reinstatement to the D.C. Bar and feebly tries to compare Clinton’s alleged mistreatment by the FBI with Libby’s, noting a tangential connection to FBI Director James Comey. Lake claimed Libby was “tried and convicted in the press before the trial” (and also convicted after the trial). It amounted to a preview of how we can expect neocon pundits to behave under a Clinton presidency. (Dan Wright)
+Matt Yglesias — “Against Transparency” There are hundreds of journalists against transparency, some who are in the closet and some who are very public about their views. Concerned about how the Clinton campaign struggled with coverage of the former secretary of state’s emails, Yglesias fully outed himself and advocated for increased restriction on the types of government records that can be released to journalists and the public. He argued emails and other electronic records produced with “conversational” communication tools should not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
+Yglesias displayed a severe misunderstanding of FOIA and neglected to mention the existence of key privacy exemptions and “deliberative process privilege.” These are supposed to protect officials so they can have frank conversations that will most likely remain secret. Beyond that, Yglesias’s column represented the growing disdain against information that exists among liberal pundits, who seem to believe if these things are secret the right-wing echo chamber will not be able to make Clinton’s life miserable. Yet, of course, organizations in this echo chamber will always find something to spin against Clinton. Yglesias knows this, and that made his call to restrict a major tool for government accountability even more dumb. (Kevin Gosztola)
+Further Reading: “ The lesson of Hillary’s secret speeches is she’s exactly who we already knew she was ” 
+The post The Worst Takes Of 2016 Election: An Unforgiving Retrospective appeared first on Shadowproof .
+",FAKE
+7199,Afraid of What? The Woman Who Accused Trump of Raping Her at 13 Just Dropped Her Lawsuit,"Israeli official secretly visits Dubai: Report ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Afraid of What? The Woman Who Accused Trump of Raping Her at 13 Just Dropped Her Lawsuit By GPD on November 4, 2016 Bloom said earlier this week that Doe/Johnson didn’t appear at a planned press conference because she had received death threats and was in fear for her life. Illustration by Jim Cooke 
+A woman who accused Donald Trump of raping her at a party when she was just 13 years old has voluntarily dismissed her lawsuit, according to court records. The woman, who has gone by the pseudonyms Jane Doe and Katie Johnson, was a no-show at a much hyped press conference earlier this week with celebrity attorney Lisa Bloom. Jezebel previously detailed the bizarre backstory behind two lawsuits Johnson filed against Trump and celebrity sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who she said also raped her at a party in 1994. A group of men worked for a year to push the rape allegations into the news, while preventing access to Johnson. No journalist has ever been able to speak to her directly in person or confirm her existence. However, her attorney, Thomas Francis Meagher of New Jersey, has told Jezebel he’s met with his client on several occasions and has gotten to know her “quite well.” 
+According to court records, Johnson/Doe voluntarily dismissed the suit on the afternoon of November 4. No other information is provided in the filing. 
+Read more here",FAKE
+8373,WW3 averted? Putin congratulates Trump! [Video],"
+November 10th, 2016 - Fort Russ News - 
+RT- Translated by  Inessa Sinchougova 
+
+
+
+Putin took a minute to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory, during a reception of foreign delegates in the Kremlin.  
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
+                                                   
+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+5064,Clinton takes the fight to Trump,"PHILADELPHIA — Charging that Donald Trump “wants us to fear the future and fear each other,” Hillary Clinton took him on with the most powerful line in her party’s tradition.
+
+“Well, a great Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than eighty years ago, during a much more perilous time: ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.'”
+
+Clad in white, the color of the women’s suffrage movement, she noted her special role: that this convention marked “the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president.” It was, she said, happy news “for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between.”
+
+But she spoke first of her hopes for the country and how her vision and approach to governing contrasted so sharply with her opponent’s divisive, angry and self-centered campaign.
+
+“Don’t believe anyone who says: ‘I alone can fix it.’ Those were actually Donald Trump’s words in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us.”
+
+She made clear that she had no intention of ceding economically discontented  voters to Trump.
+
+“Democrats,” she declared, “are the party of working people.”
+
+“My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages, right here in the United States,” she said. “From my first day in office to my last. Especially in places that for too long have been left out and left behind.”
+
+This was a convention in which the word “we” was invoked by speaker after speaker, from President Obama to the Rev. William Barber as a talisman and a commitment. In the hour before Clinton spoke, Barber gave a stirring stem-winder of a sermon that ended with the whole convention shouting “Alleluia!”
+
+Clinton embraced the communitarian theme, signaling that her “Stronger Together” slogan would remain at the heart of her campaign.
+
+“Every generation of Americans has come together to make our country freer, fairer and stronger,” she declared. “None of us can do it alone. That’s why we are stronger together.”
+
+And she underscored the other side of that catchphrase by warning that Trump would divide the nation.
+
+“Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart,” she said. “Bonds of trust and respect are fraying. And just as with our founders, there are no guarantees. It’s truly is up to us. We have to decide whether we’re going to work together so we can all rise together.”
+
+As she often has in the past, Clinton cited as her guiding principle a favorite teaching from her Methodist faith: “Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.”
+
+She included a lengthy tribute to Bernie Sanders, whom she praised for having “put economic and social justice issues front and center, where they belong.”
+
+And she pledged to live up to the hopes that inspired their engagement. “Your cause,” she said, “is our cause.”
+
+She struck populist themes that should resonate with Sanders’s backers. “Wall Street can never ever be allowed to wreck Main Street again,” Clinton said. She attacked big money in politics and promised fairer trade deals, a higher minimum wage and an expansion of Social Security benefits. It was a speech that ratified the progressive thrust of the party’s platform and its move in a more progressive direction.
+
+Her speech capped a star-studded, thematically coherent and methodically organized convention that contrasted sharply with a shambolic Trump gathering in Cleveland that most leading Republicans shunned.
+
+She faced the challenge of following a passionately persuasive address on her behalf by Obama, much as Obama had to follow a similarly successful speech by Bill Clinton four years ago.
+
+Her style was very different from Obama’s. She spoke quietly, deliberately and often affectingly, particularly when discussing her mother, who was abandoned by her parents and “was saved by the kindness of others.” It was a powerful speech in which she combined the personal with policy, a vigorous defense of the Obama record with an insistence that she would tackle the problems left unsolved and the injustices that still needed righting.
+
+ Again and again, she came back to Trump’s shortcomings and hypocrisies. She charged he was “in the pocket of the gun lobby” and displayed that her party is no longer fearful of the gun issue.
+
+Sounding a theme her campaign has signaled it will drive home, she highlighted Trump’s failure to pay many who had worked for him — “People who did the work and needed the money, and didn’t get it – not because he couldn’t pay them, but because he wouldn’t pay them.”
+
+And she noted Trump’s statement: “I know more about ISIS than the generals do . . .”  She clearly enjoyed reciting the next line: “No, Donald, you don’t.”
+
+In the primaries, Trump’s opponents were fearful of attacking him until it was too late. Clinton showed she would be a happy warrior with no compunction about taking him on.
+
+Democrats have often criticized themselves as putting too much faith in policy. She embraced her persona as someone who proudly sweated policy details. And she promised a campaign rooted in a moral challenge to her opponent: “Yes, the world is watching what we do.”",REAL
+6607,"Re: Former Congressman Joe Walsh: “If Trump Loses, I’m Grabbing My Musket”","Print 
+This election remains more heated than any other in modern history – and for many, it has become a call to arms, even if only metaphorically. 
+Despite the fact that DNC operatives have been exposed as the ones inciting violence at rallies – Robert Creamer and Scott Foval for example – and working overtime to bus in illegal voters and rig the vote – the media is going out of its way to paint Trump supporters and grassroots Americans as the ones plotting violence. 
+Most recently, they are latching onto comments made by former congressman Joe Walsh, now a conservative radio host, who suggested he would ‘pick up a musket’ if Trump loses the election. On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump. 
+On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. 
+You in? 
+— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
+Did Walsh mean to imply violence? That is certainly how the media is portraying it, as his comments spark controversy and fuel fire to the debate over the nearing election. 
+The irony that his commentary drew from the imagery of founding-era patriots who stood up to tyranny was deeply lost on the left, who see opponents to Hillary in black and white terms – racist, xenophobic, utterly deplorable and inherently violent. 
+CNN followed up, asking Walsh what he meant by statement. 
+via CNN : 
+Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president. 
+[…] 
+Walsh … did respond to CNN’s Jake Tapper via Twitter when he asked: “What exactly does that mean?” 
+“It means protesting. Participating in acts of civil disobedience. Doing what it takes to get our country back,” he responded to Tapper. https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/791382994783133696 https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/791382994783133696 
+His heated rhetoric is a response to the endless episodes of fraud, dirty trick and foul play by the Hillary campaign, as it seems that she will stop at nothing to become the first female POTUS – just the sort of abuse of power that the founders warned about. 
+1775-76 erupted in response to a long train of abuses – acts of oppression and hostility listed in the Declaration of Independence that is being largely repeated in modern day America. 
+Could Hillary’s reported election victory – or Donald Trump’s defeat – signal civil unrest and a new wave of resistance, particularly if the results are widely viewed as fraudulent or “rigged”? Trump, for one, has certainly been talking up the possibility of a stolen election. 
+The scenario is plausible enough that the Pentagon and Homeland Security have been carrying out secret drills in the lead up to the election to prepare for the possibility of a martial law response to violence or civil unrest. 
+As SHTF detailed in an exclusive report, a whistleblower has come forward on the ominous contingency plan to keep and/or restore order if the populace revolt against the establishment’s “selection” for president: 
+If there is any truth to it, the 2016 election could be a kick-off for total tyranny. 
+According to an unnamed source – who has provided accurate intel in the past – an unannounced military drill is scheduled to take place during a period leading up to the election and throughout the month after. 
+Date: October 30th – 30 days after the election Suspected Region: Northeast, specifically New York 
+1st Phase: NROL (No Rule of Law) – drill involving combat arms in metro areas (active and reserve). Source says active duty and reserve service members are being vaccinated as if they are being deployed in theatre. 
+2nd Phase: LROL (Limited Rule of Law) – Military/FEMA consolidating resources, controlling water supply, handing out to public as needed. 
+3rd Phase: AROL (Authoritarian Rule of Law) – Possible new acronym or term for “Martial Law”. Curfew, restricted movements, basically martial law scenario. 
+Source said exercise involves FEMA/DHS/Military 
+At this point, no one can say for certain what will happen in the aftermath of November 8, but it is clear that millions and millions of Americans are dissatisfied with the status quo, troubled about the economic realities perpetuated by the Fed and angry that Hillary may be put in the Oval Office rather than a jail cell, despite a trail of corruption with virtually no end. 
+How far will things go? 
+And will things ever be reset without a new American Revolution? 
+Article posted with permission from SHTFPlan shares",FAKE
+929,An open letter to Donald Trump from Ari Fleischer: Five things you need to do now,"Based on the possibility that you will become the nominee of the Republican Party, and perhaps the  president of the United States, I offer you the following thoughts on what you need to do as this unusual primary season approaches its homestretch.
+
+I do this out of dedication to my country and Party.  I want Republicans to win the presidency and I am worried about the harm that will be done if Secretary Hillary Clinton becomes president.
+
+Your loss in Wisconsin on Tuesday is a sign that your style of campaigning is catching up to you.
+
+You have done a powerful job of energizing some 35 to 40 percent of Republican primary voters and you have made the Republican Party more attractive to lower-income, working Americans who typically question whether the GOP cares about them.  But getting to 50 percent is your problem and many of your recent statements and tweets are driving away the people you need to close the deal.
+
+If you want to close the gap and win a majority of the Party, you need to:
+
+1. Stop fighting with everyone and don’t be so nasty.  When you tweet unflattering pictures of Senator Cruz’s wife and threaten to “spill the beans” about her, question Ben Carson’s faith, offer to pay the legal bills of those who engage in violence, fault POWs, or accuse President Bush of being a liar, you push away voters you need to get to 50 percent.  If you keep acting like this, you will keep your 40 percent -- they love it – but you’ll never hit 50 percent.  It’s too hot, too much, too often.  Pick smarter fights and do so in a less belittling and pejorative manner.  You can make provocative points and be true to yourself if you would only be smarter about how and when you fight.
+
+2. Get your facts right.  Think about how much stronger you would be if you supported your statements with accurate facts or anecdotes.  If you had said “a small group” of Muslims cheered from rooftops in New Jersey on September 11th, no one could have faulted you.  Same thing when you say we “send nothing” to Japan, or when you misstate the trade deficit with China. You often fudge up your poll numbers too.  You regularly show that facts are malleable to you, and that raises doubts about your substantive knowledge on all sorts of matters.
+
+3. Learn more policy.  Your comments about abortion were a double-edged disaster.  You alienated everyone.  They showed you are not familiar with the background of an important emotional issue.  Anyone aware of Right to Life’s thinking knows, mothers are not criminals.  You need to take the time to learn a variety of issues. You might think everyone in Washington is stupid, but there are a lot of smart people in that town who actually care about issues and you should find the ones you trust and listen to them. No one expects you to memorize arcane policy points.  But it will be harder for you to reach 50 percent if voters think you can’t demonstrate sufficient knowledge to sit in the Oval Office.
+
+4. Make policy announcements.  You’re an outsider with business experience and people want to hear what you would do if elected, beyond building a wall.  On energy policy, corporate welfare, agriculture policy and dozens of other matters, you would surprise people and grow your support if you gave a small number of actual policy addresses.  The point will be less what you say about each specific matter (so long as you demonstrate some level of fluency and expertise) and more that you’re capable of doing it.  Some one-third of the Party supports you because they think you’re tough.  You would make inroads with other voters if they thought you were thoughtful.
+
+5. Stop citing polls.  Politicians who talk about polls do so to show the election is all about them.  But elections are not about politicians.  Elections are about the hopes and dreams of the voters and especially now, voters want someone who can lift up our country, defend us, and grow the economy.  I get that you talk about the polls to show you’re a winner.  But if and when you start losing more contests, the polls will define you as a loser. What will you talk about then?  It’s better to knock it off now.  And of course, all the recent polls show you are losing to Hillary.
+
+You got yourself to where you are today by demonstrating an uncanny, powerful, outsider’s bravado.  But the gap between 40 percent and 50 percent support is immense.  The higher hanging fruit is tough to get, and you won’t likely earn that support if you stay on your current path.
+
+The Super Tuesday news conference you held at Mar-A-Lago and your policy speech (on a TelePrompter) to AIPAC were your two best moments demonstrating there is more to you than bravado.
+
+Whatever you do, just remember, you can’t win if you can’t earn a majority.
+
+Former White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer was the primary spokesperson for President George W. Bush. He served as spokesman during the historic presidential recount, September 11th, two wars and the anthrax attack. His best-selling book, ""Taking Heat,"" details his years in the White House. Since leaving the White House, Ari has worked extensively in the world of sports. He has helped Major League Baseball deal with its controversies, as well as its opportunities, and he has worked for the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association. He also helps advise several major corporations about their communications issues through his company, Ari Fleischer Sports Communications.",REAL
+5614,BREAKING : Wikileaks Reveals More Clinton “Quid Pro Quo” – Bill Meets With Saudi Prince in D.C.,"BREAKING : Wikileaks Reveals More Clinton “Quid Pro Quo”– Bill Meets With Saudi Prince in D.C. BREAKING : Wikileaks Reveals More Clinton “Quid Pro Quo”– Bill Meets With Saudi Prince in D.C. Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 29, 2016 
+As we all know by now, the Clinton Foundation is one GIANT SCAM designed to fill the pockets of the Clintons, and they’re rich bastard pals. 
+Thanks to Wikileaks there’s no longer “doubt” over the crooked dealings at that corrupt and disgusting foundation. 
+We also have learned how the Clintons make their hundreds of millions. 
+Quid pro quo – or PAY TO PLAY. 
+During Hillary’s time at the State Department, she would sell favors and access. 
+After she had left, he and Bill kept it up, using their political power and influence to help foreign countries like Morrocco and Saudi Arabia. 
+Two Islamic countries that ABUSE, IMPRISON, and EXECUTE WOMEN AND GAYS. 
+In a leaked email recently released from Wikileaks we see that Bill Clinton was meeting with the Saudi Prince as recently as September of last year. #PodestaEmails22 : This is it: Quid pro quo 
+— MicroSpookyLeaks™ (@WDFx2EU7) October 29, 2016 
+The Clintons are the most corrupt, greedy, and repugnant political family of our lifetime. 
+Neither one of the blood-sucking leeches should be allowed within 500 feet of the White House ever again. This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter.",FAKE
+6031,"Comment on Hillary Clinton failed to disclose $400,000 in pricey presents, private jets and vacations gifted to Bill by Hillary Clinton failed to disclose $400,000 in pricey presents, private jets and vacations gifted to Bill — Fellowship of the Minds | kommonsentsjane","  DCG | 2 Comments 
+Rules are for little people. 
+From Daily Mail : Hillary Clinton did not disclose ‘expensive gifts,’ free vacations, and complimentary private jet travel her family received from business interests while she was at the State Department, according to leaked emails and federal disclosure records reviewed by the DailyMail.com. 
+Long-time Clinton aide Doug Band claimed in a confidential 2011 memo published by Wikileaks this week that he helped obtain free vacations and personal travel for Bill Clinton and his family as part of his duties. 
+During Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, she did not report any gifts or travel reimbursements for herself or her spouse in her financial disclosure filings. 
+‘In support of the President’s for-profit activity, we also have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the President and his family – for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like,’ wrote Band in the Nov. 16, 2011 memo to attorneys conducting an internal review of the Clinton Foundation. 
+He added that his job involved ‘supporting [Bill Clinton’s] family/personal needs (e.g., securing in-kind private airplane travel, in-kind vacation stays, and supporting family business and personal needs).’ 
+The memo did not say whether Hillary Clinton was one of Bill Clinton’s family members who received vacations, gifts, or personal travel. Band did not respond to request for comment. 
+In November 2011, according to the memo, the telecommunications company Ericsson agreed to give Bill Clinton $400,000 in private plane travel. The company also paid the former president an additional $750,000 to speak at its conference that month in Hong Kong. 
+It was the largest speaking fee Bill Clinton had received up until that point, and with the added plane fare, the payment reached well over $1 million. 
+Although Hillary Clinton reported in her disclosure filings that her husband received a $750,000 honorarium for the speech, she did not disclose the additional $400,000 in private plane expenses from Ericsson in the spousal income or gifts and reimbursements sections . 
+In another Nov. 17, 2011 email, Band complained that Bill Clinton was not required to submit an internal conflict-of-interest disclosure form – unlike other top officials at the Clinton Global Initiative – despite the fact that the former president received ‘expensive gifts’ for his home from CGI sponsors . Bill Clinton and Doug Band 
+Bill Clinton ‘does not have to sign such a document even though he is personally paid by 3 CGI sponsors, gets many expensive gifts from them, some that are at home etc,’ wrote Band. 
+Hillary Clinton did not disclose any gift or travel expenses that she or her husband received while at the State Department. The federal disclosure form requires officials to report gifts to themselves or a spouse totalling more than $350 from a single source, such as ‘tangible items, transportation, lodging, food, or entertainment’ and ‘travel-related cash reimbursements.’ 
+However, a federal official does not have to disclose gifts to a spouse that are ‘totally independent of their relationship’ – for example, business-related benefits that a spouse receives from his employer. While many of the companies involved in CGI and Bill Clinton’s for-profit business had interests before the State Department, government ethics experts said it can be difficult to determine whether a gift to a public official’s spouse is connected to their relationship . 
+It is also unclear whether Hillary Clinton travelled on any of these ‘personal trips’ and ‘in-kind vacations,’ which Band wrote were given to Bill Clinton’s ‘family.’ The Clintons have a 36-year-old daughter, Chelsea, who is also involved in the Clinton Foundation. 
+A spokesperson for Clinton’s campaign did not respond to request for comment. 
+According to the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group, failure to report certain gifts in a financial disclosure form could violate the Ethics in Government Act or the Federal False Statements Act. 
+Federal laws ‘require full disclosure of such expensive gifts and reimbursements when special interests use a spouse to target a government official,’ said Ken Boehm, chairman of the NLPC. 
+‘The just-disclosed emails of Clinton associate Doug Band that Bill Clinton and his family members benefitted from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free travel and gifts from special interests while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State raises substantial ethical and legal issues because the Financial Disclosure reports filed by Secretary Clinton does not show these expensive gifts and reimbursements,’ said Boehm. 
+DCG",FAKE
+7084,GAY TRUMP SUPPORTERS getting death threats from gay people who support a candidate who receives multi-million dollar contributions from countries that execute gays,"October 27, 2016 @ 11:59 am 
+I’m voting for him – but will be very quiet about it. 
+I believe there Are many out there who are doing the same. Islam is not gay-friendly. It’s the leftist idiot who would believe that it is despite a mountain of evidence showing the truth about Islam. 
+However – too many follow the company line. It is getting very demanding these days, and frankly very strange. But doesn’t the left always do that? Whatever problem there is within the right – at least there is enough room, and more than the case now with the left. Well – at least for this ‘cis’ white male. AndyT October 27, 2016 @ 11:39 am 
+As a gay man I despair of my fellow gays. Here in the UK most have this “poor refugee” mentality. By time the penny finally drops it will be too late BareNakedIslam October 27, 2016 @ 12:34 pm 
+Andy, while the majority still have that “poor refugee” mentality, I have seen a number of gay people commenting here and/or emailing me who know the truth. They’re just afraid of the ridicule they will get by talking about it in within their liberal circles. Manual Paleologos October 27, 2016 @ 10:56 am 
+The irony is that the LGBTQWERTY community is almost uniformly liberal. They support the people who are stoning them, throwing them from buildings, and hanging them. They have ceded any influence with the political Right, as no matter what the Right does, they will not get any meaningful Gay support. That means that just or unjust, there is absolutely no upside to supporting Gay issues. There is a small upside from the Christian Right, to pissing on them. 
+Meanwhile, although we disagree on some major issues, we are probably their best friends. We are the people who would die to protect them.",FAKE
+5170,The math is with Hillary: She’s surging in the polls — and many Republicans are in denial,"Silver’s model gives Trump a 19 percent chance of winning the election. Right now he has Clinton taking the popular vote by seven points and absolutely crushing Trump in the Electoral College, 353 to 184. Considering that the polarized electorate means each candidate is starting out with a floor of probably 50 million or so votes, these numbers indicate Trump is performing no better against Clinton than a rock covered in orange spray paint would. The GOP’s only chance might be to toss him overboard at the convention and nominate an inanimate carbon rod.
+
+If nothing else, the reduction of this election to the numbers for each candidate reminds us that, for all the sturm und drang up to this point, this election is, like every other presidential election, a fight between two candidates and two competing visions. (As much as Trump can be said to have any vision anyway.) For anyone exhausted by the screaming and unpleasantness of this Democratic primary campaign, it is nice to now catch our breath beneath the solid foundation of math before the conventions and the official general election kick-off sprays us all with its stink. Because Trump’s ego isn’t going to take losing very well. And if the NRA’s new anti-Clinton ad is any indication, neither are the lunatics who have thrown their support behind him.
+
+But if the poll numbers aren’t enough for you, there is the reaction to them by Trump dead-enders, who at this point are the equivalent of flight attendants passing out peanuts and ginger ale while oxygen masks are dropping from the ceiling, the pilot is openly sobbing over the intercom and both wings are on fire.
+
+For example, Roy Edroso points us to this post over at the conservative blog Powerline, which contains this gem of a paragraph:
+
+It is a bit early to be pulling out the “Our candidate would have this election in the bag if we just allowed only white people to vote” line. Mitt Romney at least had the decency to wait until after he lost the 2012 election to take that data point for a walk in public. Or take this one, from National Review’s Rich Lowry, who finds it “remarkable” Trump is competitive in battleground states considering that he is not running a real campaign. For one thing, this is not true. Polls show Trump getting crushed in battleground states. For another, Lowry’s evidence for Trump’s “remarkable” effort is that Clinton has spent $140 million on ads in battleground states while Trump has spent – wait for it – nothing. Literally, he has spent less on ads in battleground states than I spent on lunch on Wednesday. What Lowry misses is that the $140 million is mostly “reserved time” in the future. Clinton spent $26 million running battleground state ads in June. The remaining $114 million has been spent on airtime for ads that will run in the future. In other words, Trump’s numbers are already sinking and the Clinton campaign has yet to unleash a good 80 percent of its ad buy to date. Of course, Silver has been wrong before, mostly because he didn’t want to believe his own polling model. This time he is actually accepting what the polls are telling him. And there is plenty of evidence to back him up. National polls consistently give Clinton the lead and show Trump’s support cratering. All of that said, of course, there are always unknown or unforeseen events that could throw everything into chaos. But at the end of the day, this is still a choice between two people, one of whom is wildly unpopular, terrifying and embarrassing to the majority of voters. For all the easily panicked liberals who worry about not taking Trump seriously, right now the signs point to a comfortable Clinton win. That’s not wishful thinking. It’s math. Everyone take a deep breath. There may be four months and lots of ugliness to get through, and it is imperative that the electorate still goes out and demolishes not just Trump but the toxic brew of nativism and xenophobia that is Trumpism. But the end of this whole mishigas of an election is almost in sight.",REAL
+7860,Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader Recently Had Their First Public Conversation (Video),"Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader Recently Had Their First Public Conversation (Video) Posted on Oct 26, 2016 
+The renowned activists have an important discussion about America’s current “electoral extravaganza,” climate change, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as several other topics in an nearly hour-long interview.",FAKE
+3918,The Week That Hillary Clinton 2016 Speculation Moved From Trickle To Stream,"And it looks like that time is nigh. Clinton is starting to deliver public orations again, as consultants start to eye the chessboard and grassroots activists start to gin up support and raise ducats for a campaign-in-waiting. There's no doubt that we're still several steps short of a critical mass -- let alone an announcement from the former secretary of state and presidential aspirant herself. But whatever dam had been previously holding back the flood has started to show some signs of cracking, and the discussion has begun anew.
+
+We must pause here at the outset and offer praise to Clinton for doing everything in her power -- by which I mean, nothing at all -- to delay the sort of advance-hype for the 2016 election cycle that we might otherwise be in up to our waist. See, as long as Clinton says nothing definitive about whether she's running, she effectively ""freezes the field."" Other Democratic contenders can't start contending. Republican rivals who lack real game have to keep their mouths shut as well. We're not drowning in stories, speculating about when Andrew Cuomo is going to visit Des Moines (though I'm sure Des Moines can't wait), and no one is getting tumescent over the tricksy consultants Martin O'Malley is hiring.
+
+And that's great for America! Most people can't wait to keep right on waiting to spend their every waking hour reading about the 2016 election. I don't know if there is some large group of non-partisan, single-issue voters whose primary desire is to be allowed to not have to contemplate elections four years before they happen, but if such a voting bloc exists, they all owe Hillary Clinton their support, for being a force for good in this area. They should also stop reading now, because I'm going to cave in, and try to highlight what's interesting about these recent developments.
+
+Despite Clinton's best field-freezing efforts, we were never destined to live in a world where hot speculation over her presidential prospects were restrained. The biggest news that came out of Clinton's appearance on ""60 Minutes"" alongside President Barack Obama was Obama playfully calling interlocutor Steve Kroft ""incorrigible"" for asking whether he was endorsing Clinton for president. Days later, people went nuts over a Public Policy Polling poll that found that the state of Texas was ""in play"" for Clinton. And grousing from political speculators over Clinton's coyness began to manifest itself. Chris Cillizza wrote a post insisting in one breath that ""Clinton likely won't have as much time to luxuriate in not working -- and not thinking about whether she wants to run in 2016 -- as she might want,"" and admitting in the next, ""It's hard to pinpoint a particular date but it's hard to imagine her being able to wait much beyond the 2014 midterm elections.""
+
+If I'm not mistaken, Bill Clinton also launched an ""office of Bill Clinton"" website after his term ended, so if you wanted to hew to safe assumptions, you would probably just contend that Hillary Clinton is following the same practice. But CNN continued in an altogether different vein, contending that the photo was ""attention-grabbing,"" that there was special meaning in the way her old website sent visitors to the new one that was a de facto reason to speculate on her presidential ambitions, and that there was a special mystery in the way that the ""site was purchased through a service allowing the purchaser to remain anonymous.""
+
+It's not uncommon, of course, for political luminaries to find themselves the beneficiaries of supporters who want to build a ""campaign-in-waiting."" Back in 2008, Ed Rollins tried to do much the same for Mike Huckabee. Similar efforts were made on behalf of Jon Huntsman and Mitch Daniels. The efforts didn't amount to much. Huntsman was the only one of the three who ran, and he didn't get much out of the odd surreal motorcycle ads that were created ahead of the launch beyond low-single digits in most national polls. Rollins, failing to earn Huckabee's assent, migrated to the campaign of Michele Bachmann. It was a strange arrangement, and it did not end well.
+
+But what Clinton supporters may have brewing could end up being a thing apart. For starters, this undertaking is going to move real money. My colleague Michael McAuliff offers a game prediction: when the next round of campaign filings are perused, you're going to see donations in the amount of $20.16 moving in Clinton's direction. With Carville's imprimatur, Ready For Hillary PAC is going to catch some of that scratch for its coffers. That means the unannounced Clinton ""campaign"" is going to have a double-freeze on the field -- money will be piling up in her corner from the grassroots, and big institutional donors will remain leery of backing someone else's horse until an official decision from Clinton makes it okay to mull backing an O'Malley or a Cuomo.
+
+More importantly, these supporters aren't taking a flier on an unknown. If you recall the draft effort to bring Gen. Wesley Clark into the 2004 campaign, in the apparent belief that his military background would be a compelling ""x-factor"" in the Democratic field, this isn't it. DraftWesleyClark did a respectable job -- in the opening two-week stretch of Clark's campaign, they raised over $3.5 million. But Clark ran from an underdog position, never manifested much facility for communicating on the stump, badly miscalculated by avoiding the Iowa caucuses (where the entire campaign storyline shifted in John Kerry's favor), and ended up as one of the field's semi-respectable also-rans -- not a guy who'd proved worthy of being ""next in line.""
+
+Pareene suggests that the ""rebranding"" efforts the GOP is currently embarked upon might serve as a vital check against the possibility of a return to the paranoid style of Clinton bashing. But between now and 2016, there's going to be a midterm election. The vagaries of redistricting makes the GOP's retention of a House majority a rather easy hang. In the Senate, they have a puncher's chance at returning Harry Reid to minority status, and even if they don't, their filibustering super-minority is working out just fine. By the time the dust has settled on Election Night 2014, the GOP may well declare their ""rebranding"" to have been a success.",REAL
+305,Boehner's big week,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+6816,Top Clinton Ally Caught Accepting $20k Foreign Donation,"Top Clinton Ally Caught Accepting $20k Foreign Donation AUFC president Brad Woodhouse knowingly accepts money from bank in ""Belize"" Infowars.com - October 26, 2016 Comments 
+Project Vertias has released a fourth video in its latest series uncovering corruption connected to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. 
+“In the effort to prove the credibility of the undercover donor featured in the videos and to keep the investigation going, Project Veritas Action made the decision to donate twenty thousand dollars to Robert Creamer’s effort,” the video reports . “Project Veritas Action had determined that the benefit of this investigation outweighed the cost. And it did.” 
+Soon after the transfer was made, “the ‘donors’‘niece’– another Project Veritas Action journalist – was offered an internship with Creamer.” 
+“The more money that was promised to Creamer, the more access Project Veritas Action journalists seemed to get,” it continues. 
+Nearly a month after providing AUFC with the “foreign donation,” AUFC president Brad Woodhouse discovered Project Veritas project and mysteriously returned the donation. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP  ",FAKE
+9724,What is going on with WikiLeaks?,"What is going on with WikiLeaks? 28/10/2016 tweet WikiLeaks director and founder of the Centre for Investigative Journalism Gavin MacFadyen has died at age 76. The cause of death is yet unknown. His ‘fellows in arms’ have flocked online to post their farewells, including WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. 
+“ We are extremely sad to announce the death of Gavin MacFadyen, CIJ’s Founder, Director and its leading light ,” the Centre for Investigative Journalism team wrote on its Twitter. We are extremely sad to announce the death of Gavin MacFadyen, the CIJ’s Founder, Director and its leading light. http:// tcij.org/gavin-macfadyen 
+— CIJ (@cijournalism) 10:59 PM – 22 Oct 2016 
+MacFadyen was a pioneering investigative journalist and filmmaker, who back in 2003 founded the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ), an organization that helped break several major stories and has trained a number of prominent journalists. Gavin Macfadyen was mentor to Assange (and his closest friend in London), to WikiLeaks’ Sarah Harrison, Joseph Farrell and many others. 
+— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 4:03 AM – 23 Oct 2016 
+He was a mentor and friend to famous whistleblower and co-founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange, as well as the director of the publication. Paying tribute to their head, WikiLeaks published a post on the group’s Twitter account saying MacFadyen “ now takes his fists and his fight to battle God .” Gavin Macfadyen, beloved director of WikiLeaks, now takes his fists and his fight to battle God. Sock it to him, forever, Gavin. -JA pic.twitter.com/7zyzs1Qxxk 
+— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 3:33 AM – 23 Oct 2016 
+The post is signed “ JA ,” indicating that the phrase belongs directly to Julian Assange, with WikiLeaks claiming that, despite the whistleblower being deprived of internet access in his suite in the Ecuadorian embassy for a week now, he has been able to contact them and is “ still in full command. ” 
+The CIJ team also published an address from MacFadyen’s wife and member of Julian Assange’s Defense Fund, Susan Benn, who described her husband as a “ larger-than-life person, ” with gratitude and respect. 
+“ He was the model of what a journalist should be… He spearheaded the creation of a journalistic landscape which has irrevocably lifted the bar for ethical and hard-hitting reporting. Gavin worked tirelessly to hold power to account. 
+“His life and how he lived it were completely in sync with the principles that he held dear and practiced as a journalist and educator – to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, ” Benn wrote . 
+Recounting her husband’s achievements, she said he had produced and directed more than 50 investigative documentaries covering diverse and multiple countries and problems. She also noted that he had been banned from apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union for his investigative work, and was also attacked by British Neo-Nazis. 
+In his professional career, MacFadyen shed light on topics like child labor, pollution, the torture of political prisoners, neo-Nazis in Britain, UK industrial accidents, Contra murders in Nicaragua, the CIA, maritime piracy, election fraud in South America, South African mines, as well as many others. He worked on investigative television programs for PBS’s Frontline, Granada Television’s World in Action, the BBC’s Fine Cut, Panorama, The Money Programme, and 24 Hours, as well as Channel 4’s Dispatches. 
+The cause of MacFadyen’s death has not yet been made public. In the original post from his wife Susan, she wrote that he had died from “ a short illness, ” but that line has now been removed. Did you know: Gavin Macfadyen was arrested with Bernie Sanders, was a body double for Nick Nolte & was banned from South Africa & the USSR? 
+— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 
+Twitter has been full of tributes from his colleagues and like-minded people. Even the hacktivist organization Anonymous has spoken out. Our deepest condolences Gavin MacFadyen, we’ll never forget your investigative journalism https:// twitter.com/wikileaks/stat us/789878110816702464 … 
+— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) RIP, Gavin Macfadyen. You were larger than life, truly one of a kind. https:// twitter.com/gijn/status/78 9925620784439296 … 
+— Sheila Coronel (@SheilaCoronel) Gavin MacFadyen, purest and bravest human I’ve ever met. The countless people that love you are with you now, sending u our love and thanks! pic.twitter.com/ypPSn0jrwR 
+— Matt Kennard (@KennardMatt) We send our loving thoughts to Gavin MacFadyen and his family at this very difficult time. pic.twitter.com/hZKiIlujaA 
+— The Whistler (@Whistler_News) Gavin MacFadyen, always kind & supportive of young journalists & filmmakers. Can never forget your booming laugh. Thank you my friend. — Kevin Pina (@AcrossMediums)",FAKE
+6674,Solar Storm Alert,"October 27, 2016 Solar winds triggered a giant geomagnetic storm this week, raising fears that they could cripple power supplies. The charged particles are coming from a coronal hole on the sun that is currently facing Earth. If Earth’s magnetic field was hit by charged particles the effects could also include radar and satellite interference, causing problems phone and internet networks and navigation services. Power grid operators in the US were put on alert yesterday following concerning space weather forecasts. But the impact could be felt all over the world. Warnings were issued by the operator of the biggest power grid in the US, PJM Interconnection LLC, as well as by Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which manages high-voltage power lines across North America, reports Bloomberg . These were the result of US Space Weather Prediction Center raising a ‘serious’ G3 level storm alert, though the alert was later downgraded to a less severe G2 storm. ‘Voltage corrections may be required, false alarms triggered on some protection devices’, said the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center. ‘Drag may increase on low-Earth-orbit satellites, and corrections may be needed for orientation problems’. The ‘moderate’ G2 warning remains in affect today. The solar storms could potentially affect telecommunications and power infrastructures all over the globe. The UK’s Met Office space weather forecast for today said: ‘Elevated solar winds are expected throughout the period, with G1-G2 minor to moderate geomagnetic storms forecast.’",FAKE
+10284,The Circus of Liars - America's Three Rings of Evil Clowns,"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 18:19 UTC © Jen Psaki President Obama holds news conference at the White House. As an American, someone raised to believe truth and justice will prevail, I am appalled at the foreign and domestic policies of my country's government. The level and scope of the deceit with which the Obama administration has laid out onto the world stage is embarrassing. For the first time in my 61 years I realize why some figures in our history were ashamed of being known as American. Our leaders have shamed us, done irreparable damage to our heritage and our legacy as a people, and still most of my countrymen sit idle. America today reminds me of a traveling circus, three rings of evil clowns entertaining a peanut gallery of onlookers. Or are we participant clowns? For over the better part of Barack Obama's presidency we've witnessed the most respected nation transformed, step-by-step, into one of the most dreaded empires the world has ever known. 300 million people, all their ancestors, and their future generations will pay the overwhelming cost of Obama's mistakes and malfeasance in office. While I do not personally believe this man is evil, I am sure the people behind him are. The lies, the impact, the unbelievable devastation these people have unwrapped, it spells the end of a perfect dream for humanity. I wonder as I type this, how many people reading it will realize how true my words are. John Kirby, the spokesperson for the US Department of State is a prototype for all that is wrong with our nation. He is a mirror reflection of Secretary of State John Kerry, who is in turn a further reflection of Barack Obama and the people who stand behind. They lie, cheat, steal, kill, maim, or at best coerce in order to achieve goals their constituency (the people) have no inkling of. All of us knew politicians have always been liars and crooked, but the degree to which we can be betrayed is unheard of today. This press conference on the alleged bombing of Aleppo hospitals by Russia, it is damning, damnable evidence of what I am saying. This is, of course, if one watches intently and then reasons. Compare what Kirby says, with what you have seen or read from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Measure the tone and content of this unique message. Bear with me, and I'll help you convict these warmongers of their crimes. The Circus of Liars I must point out that Barack Obama has had more State Department spokespersons than any president in history. First there was Sean McCormack, from 2005 to 2009, a leftover from the Bush administration. After McCormack's tour of administration liar in chief, he joined Boeing in 2009 and serves as the as vice president of Communications in Government Operations. McCormack left the Obama administration to more or less help Hillary Clinton and the ""clique"" extend the growth of companies like Boeing. This Washington Post piece (amazingly) condemns both Hillary Clinton and McCormack for their apparent collusion to morph policy into business with, guess who? Why Mother Russia, of course. Philip J. ""P.J."" Crowley made his ""deal with the devil"" from 2009 to 2011. The 2011-2012 recipient of the General Omar N. Bradley Chair in Strategic Leadership (? The Military ties to State) is a War College bred and reared Pentagon puppet. The fact most recent State Department liars are former military begs the question; ""Why is our foreign policy institution lined with CIA, spooks, War College graduates and command grade military officers?"" Crowley is an interesting example of how our foreign service is infested with war hawks and military industrial minions. To Crowley's credit, his candidness in the wake of the mistreatment of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and his subsequent resignation redeemed this old soldier by comparison to his colleagues. He is emblematic of a system that uses good soldiers in order to mislead the people, and to misdirect our policies toward the wrong goals. Crowley is pretty much off the radar now, but somehow still semi-loyal to the Obama-Clinton team. His tweets on Twitter hum the Democratic Party line. He's now a Fellow at The George Washington University Institute for Public Diplomacy, which means he's been let out to pasture. Next we come to Victoria Jane Nuland, the pin-up girl of soulless and reprehensible US bureaucrats. From my perspective, as someone who has covered the Ukraine civil war extensively, Nuland in Kiev reminds me of the worst parts of the rise of Nazi Germany. I cannot possibly be bombastic enough in characterizing this Hillary Clinton spawn. It is not my nature to be unkind, or less than a gentleman, but this woman is no lady. Her hacked conversation, with fellow psychopath, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, lives in infamy amidst volumes of horrid US intentions. ""Fuck the EU"", along with the clear regime change the Obama White House was behind, should have spelled resignation for this demonic Washington witch. She, and her colleague Pyatt, are complicit in the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children in the Donbass. Nuland, who most agree will be Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State should she reach office, is the most deadly psychopath the American people could possibly put in charge of our foreign service. For the Russians who still have to deal with her, I am sure 20 minutes looking at her is unbearable. This is America fiddling, while our reputation abroad burns. She is the queen of regime change, she and her husband children of the ideology America needs to forcefully alter world governments. This is the ""WOW"" persona, the caricature of disastrous Washington policy. Don't take my word, research Nuland starting here , and see where it leads. Jen Psaki lied so well, and stuck up her nose to the dissenting press so expertly, she graduated the US State Department right up to the White House. Those of us who winced at her nonchalant misrepresentation of facts, also understand she is part of the clique that now inhabits the halls of power in Washington. Psaki is part of a country club that runs it all. If the Democrats win in November's presidential election, people like Psaki will become monsters, an empowered American politburo kin to the worst fascists in history. Psaki is the official cheerleader now, of a White House campaign to create a legacy for the worst president in American history. Catch her Twitter feed, and figure out why in the world Barack Obama would want to be a Wired Magazine editor for a day. Despite her pallid and docile appearance, make no mistake, this Obama minion is as deadly as Nuland, maybe even more so. I recall Psaki launched a social media attack on Russia that was nearly universally ridiculed as ""hash tag diplomacy."" Her ""hot mic"" comment on her own points on Egypt at a press conference as being ""ridiculous"", they remind me of Obama being caught promising then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev he'd ""fix"" the ABM missiles issue if he won in 2012. What makes this spokesperson so dangerous is her forward enthusiasm, and her seeming happy-go-lucky satisfaction with being part of the biggest lie ever perpetrated. Lying is transfigured into truth, a job well worth doing. Good God. Finally we come to John Kirby, Naval War College trained mouthpiece for Emperor Caligula (look him up and compare to our presidents) and whichever Nero we elect next. A Public Affairs Officer (PAO) at the command level in the US Navy, he's what many former military people would refer to as a first class boot licker. I'm a squid myself, so I am familiar with the type. Kirby would climb a tree to tell a lie, if ordered to do so, and show righteousness in doing so. Kirby, Kerry, the whole Obama administration is utterly absurd. This recent press conference reveals just how out of bounds US policy is. Furthermore, Kirby's contention the Syrian war cannot end without airpower being grounded is likewise idiotic. The State Department's stance on Russia's hammering of jihadists only makes sense, if the overthrow of Assad and his legitimate government is a goal. John Kirby: Syrian War Won't End Without Grounding Aircraft - this is the headline that calls our attention to the fact Assad is about to wreck Washington's plan. Regime change has become such a common term now, that media consumers are immune to what it really means. Since the first Bush took office, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more governments have been turned upside down than at any time since World War II. And the ""Kirbys"" of the world are accomplices to massive world chaos. Kirby's ""Russians in body bags"" threat has pushed the Kremlin's panic button now. We have descended into crisis policy, an all or nothing lunacy that can only end in war. Three Rings of Evil Clowns These people are all deplorable. But compared to the linchpins of war they speak for, each is insignificant by comparison. This message for instance, the New York Times headline ""U.S. Officials Say Russia Probably Attacked U.N. Humanitarian Convoy"", it did not originate with them. Our new ""probably"" dogma is a function of a failing freedom, the complete takeover of a free press by western oligarchs that make Russian mafia types seem impotent. Watching this evil circus reminds me of a twisted horror movie, a guttural glimpse at wicked clowns betraying the children they are supposed to love and entertain. The Soros and Rockefeller types, those Rothschilds and the Goldman Sachs sharks, Silicon Valley fakers and Wall Street urchins the Clintons take money off of, the whole mess in our nation's capital stinks to high heavens. Just how my countrymen stomach it leaves me breathless and clueless at times. America is taking part in a wider broadcast of the movie The Truman Show these days. Raised up to believe in freedom of the press and the merits of democracy, my countrymen have been conditioned to rely on their media, their leaders, and the seeming implausibility that one group can take over the world. Well, a group has taken over half of it, and with the proper time and funding, this can be proven. Since I or some other researcher has no such investigative grant, the case against these evil clowns goes untried. The Nation , Slate, Global Research, RT, and myriad independent media attempt to dissent. But trillions of dollars flow back and forth fueling the paranoiac message - Russia is the enemy again! The first ring of circus clowns wield more power than Xerxes, the Bilderbergs probably even believe their own cause - perpetuating the elite order is, after all, a noble genetic cause. In the second ring business types and the oh-so aggressive and ambitious, they will literally do anything to succeed. The Clintons, Bushs, and Obamas out there are the master puppets. Their mission is pretty clear, pay the devil his due and cash in. It's really as simple as all that. Today's Washington is a bit like Chicago during Capone's time. Once the ""Man"" has you, he's got you but good. La Cosa Nostra hasn't got anything on the numbers games along the Potomac. The little crime bosses, grown up from their internships and grant designations, they pepper every institution in America. As they graduate, God knows what goals the Kirbys of the world set out to achieve. In the wider center ring, it's easy to see the Clinton Foundation workers really do drink Bill and Hillary's Kool Aid. Mind washed into believing in the ultimate bullshit, naïve middle intellectuals become squirming opportunists, oblivious to the fact they sold out. The ""Man"" has got them, and early on. Meanwhile, the whole mess is cloaked in the guise of democracy, and hidden underneath people's fear they'll be called conspiracy theorists. George Orwell's 1984 seems to have been written to exclude the possibility complete control could be achieved. But isn't that how complete control is ultimately achieved? Above the center ring, high up on the flying trapeze, liberty defies death. The people are doing a high wire act without a net. We are the third ring of clowns, only we are hesitant to see our role as sellouts too. America is life under the big top, with our favorite pop stars handing out peanuts. I don't know how you feel about it, but I feel utterly betrayed.",FAKE
+728,Bernie's not-so-secret-weapon,But he still takes some time out for Twitter feuds.,REAL
+3508,Belgian police mount raids; prosecutors acknowledge missed opportunities,"Belgian authorities missed a chance to press a key terrorism suspect for intelligence in the days ahead of the suicide bombings that struck the capital, prosecutors said Friday, acknowledging a significant security lapse that may have allowed his allies to attack unimpeded.
+
+Even as the men involved in Tuesday’s attacks were racing to strike, fearful that authorities were closing in on them, investigators did not ask the attackers’ jailed ally, Salah Abdeslam, about his knowledge of future plots, Belgian federal prosecutors said Friday.
+
+Abdeslam, believed to be the logistics chief of the Islamic State’s November attacks in Paris, was apprehended March 18, apparently spurring one of the Brussels attackers to write that he feared capture by the police. But after Abdeslam’s arrest, investigators concentrated solely on the Paris attacks. Abdeslam was questioned for two hours last Saturday, the day after he was captured in a raid at a Brussels safe house — and then no other discussions were held until after Tuesday’s attacks, when he refused to speak further, prosecutors said.
+
+The failure to push Abdeslam for concrete intelligence — even as close associates were known to be on the loose — adds to an emerging picture of intelligence agencies, police forces­ and criminal investigators that repeatedly failed to take advantage of opportunities to avert the attacks on Tuesday, the worst single day of violence in Belgium since World War II.
+
+“We cannot exclude that, if everybody had been perfect, this could have gone differently,” Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens told a special session of Parliament convened Friday to question top security officials about the lapses.
+
+The acknowledgment from the prosecutors came as authorities conducted raids across Brussels and in France and Germany, an indication that they were still hotly pursuing terrorist plots and that the network may spread across a wide stretch of Europe.
+
+Two Belgian Islamic State fighters threatened that “this is just the beginning of your nightmare,” in a video released Friday. “Know we have other targets and we are determined,” said a man identified as Abu Abdullah al-Beljiki, according to a translation by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist propaganda.
+
+Belgian commandos and bomb-disposal units on Friday swept through a district at the heart of the Brussels attack probe. The raids followed police operations in France and Germany that displayed the expanding crackdowns that increasingly connect the last two terrorist blows in Europe: November’s bloodshed across Paris and Tuesday’s twin-site suicide bombings in Brussels that killed at least 31 people — including at least two Americans.
+
+Among those arrested in the latest roundups was a French suspect who officials believe was directing a plot for an impending attack in France. The investigation touched off a series of related police raids in Belgium on Friday.
+
+The police actions came as Secretary of State John F. Kerry touched down in Brussels to discuss strategies about how to combat the Islamic State with top European leaders. Kerry met with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel before joining a Europe-wide security meeting to examine ways to counter militant reach into the continent. Officials have raised alarms about potential threats from citizens returning after fighting with the Islamic State and other groups.
+
+Speaking to reporters after a meeting with Michel, Kerry defended Belgium’s security efforts. He said that it appeared to him at first glance that the Brussels attackers were moved to act because they feared being apprehended by authorities.
+
+“That tells you the dragnet is closing in. It tells you law enforcement is in fact having an impact,” Kerry said. “It may not have worked out as everyone might have wished here, but if that is true . . . it tells you a lot about what’s beginning to become effective.”
+
+But even Abdeslam’s attorney has suggested that his client may possess knowledge that could avert future terrorist attacks on European soil, further highlighting the lapse by Belgian investigators not to press Abdeslam for intelligence ahead of the Brussels attacks. The prosecutors said that they were slowed by the doctors’ treatment of the gunshot wound to the leg that Abdeslam suffered in the raid before his capture.
+
+Abdeslam was not “up to date” about the Brussels attacks, his attorney, Sven Mary, told the Europe 1 radio network on Thursday.
+
+But, Mary said, “I would not want him to stop talking for lots of reasons. To stop talking could face us again with other Zaventems and other Bataclans, and I would perhaps like to avoid that.”
+
+He was referring to Brussels Airport in Zaventem, where two suicide bombers struck on Tuesday, and the Bataclan nightclub in Paris that was a target of the November attacks.
+
+In raids across Brussels on Friday, police detained three people, including in a large operation in the Schaerbeek area, which has become a focal point of investigations into Tuesday’s attacks. Dozens of black-clad security officers swarmed a wide avenue to detain one person, setting off fears in a city still on edge from the recent violence.
+
+Belgian TV aired amateur footage of the detention that appeared to show a man who had been shot in the leg being dragged away from a tram stop by counterterrorism police while a bomb-disposal robot waited nearby. Belgian prosecutors said the man was arrested in connection with a French raid a day earlier.
+
+In Germany, authorities held a man who was deported from Turkey in July alongside Brussels suicide attacker Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 29, over suspicions of trying to fight in Syria. A German official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was not immediately clear whether the man detained Thursday had direct ties to Bakraoui.
+
+[Families still in desperate wait for news after attacks]
+
+Both Bakraoui and his 27-year-old brother, Khalid el-Bakraoui, who also blew himself up on Tuesday, were on a U.S. terrorism watch list ahead of the attack, according to a U.S. official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
+
+It was not clear whether they had been on the U.S. “no-fly” list.
+
+Neighbors said Friday that the Bakraoui family appeared unexceptional in the diverse Laeken area of Brussels. The brothers’ father was a butcher and their mother is a housewife. As for the siblings themselves, “they seemed very nice people, never the thugs with the caps who make people scared. Absolutely not,” said Fatima, 31, a family friend and neighbor who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used.
+
+Belgium’s federal prosecutor said Friday that the suspect detained in a raid the previous night in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil is believed to have connections to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the deceased ringleader of the November attacks that left 130 dead.
+
+Reda Kriket, a 34-year-old French citizen, had been convicted in a Belgian court in July of participating in the activities of a terrorist group, the prosecutor said. French authorities said that he had been planning an imminent attack on their country.
+
+Meanwhile, the list of the Brussels victims became clearer.
+
+At least two Americans were killed, a U.S. official said Friday, but their names were not disclosed.
+
+Also among the dead from the airport bombings: a Dutch brother and sister who lived in the United States. They were Alexander Pinczowski, 29, and Sascha Pinczowski, 26, said a representative for their family, James Cain.
+
+Cain, the father of Alexander Pinczowski’s fiancee and a former U.S. ambassador to Denmark, said the siblings had hoped to become U.S. citizens.
+
+The Belgian Foreign Ministry announced that André Adam, a former ambassador to the United States, died in the attacks.
+
+Britain, China and France also confirmed at least one citizen each among the fatalities, while the Netherlands confirmed one citizen in addition to the Pinczowskis.
+
+James McAuley, Missy Ryan, Annabell Van den Berghe and Souad Mekhennet in Brussels and Adam Goldman, Lindsey Bever and Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.
+
+In Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State is in retreat on multiple fronts
+
+Anti-terrorism crackdowns may have spurred attackers, Belgian prosecutor says
+
+The many missing pieces in the Brussels attacks investigation",REAL
+3315,VA secretary apologizes for misstating military service to homeless veteran,"Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald apologized Monday for misstating that he served in the military's special forces while speaking to a homeless veteran during a segment that aired last month on 'CBS Evening News.'
+
+Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, before the House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing on the Department of Veterans Affairs budget, Feb. 11, 2015. McDonald apologized Monday, Feb. 23, 2015, for misstating that he served in the military's special forces. McDonald made the erroneous claim while speaking to a homeless veteran during a segment that aired last month on 'CBS Evening News.'
+
+Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald apologized Monday for misstating that he served in the military's special forces.
+
+McDonald made the erroneous claim while speaking to a homeless veteran during a segment that aired last month on ""CBS Evening News.""
+
+In a statement released Monday by the VA, McDonald said: ""While I was in Los Angeles, engaging a homeless individual to determine his veteran status, I asked the man where he had served in the military. He responded that he had served in special forces. I incorrectly stated that I had been in special forces. That was inaccurate and I apologize to anyone that was offended by my misstatement.""
+
+The VA website says McDonald is an Army veteran who served with the 82nd Airborne Division. The Huffington Post website, which first reported on McDonald's mistake, noted Monday that the 82nd is not considered part of special forces.
+
+McDonald said he remains committed ""to the ongoing effort to reform VA.""
+
+The White House issued a statement Monday saying, ""We take him at his word and expect that this will not impact the important work he's doing to promote the health and well-being of our nation's veterans.""
+
+President Barack Obama chose the former Procter & Gamble CEO to take over the scandal-plagued VA last year, and McDonald took office last July. The questions about McDonald's service come as TV newsmen Brian Williams and Bill O'Reilly have had their claims about covering foreign wars called into question.",REAL
+5383,Ron Paul to Trump: Don't Listen to Neocons!,"Written by Adam Dick Friday November 11, 2016 Ron Paul, known for his promotion of the United States following a noninterventionist foreign policy, presented Thursday his take on the prospects of Donald Trump’s foreign policy as president. Paul set out his analysis in an extensive interview with host Peter Lavelle at RT. Paul started off the interview saying that he is keeping his “fingers crossed” regarding Trump’s potential foreign policy actions. Paul says he views favorably Trump’s comments in the presidential election about “being less confrontational with Russia” and criticizing some of the US wars in the Middle East. Paul, though, notes that Trump has presented “vague” foreign policy positions overall. Paul also comments that a good indication of how Trump will act on foreign policy issues will be provided by looking at who Trump appoints to positions in the executive branch and from whom Trump receives advice. Regarding Trump’s foreign policy advisors and potential appointees, Paul expresses in the interview reason for concern. Paul states: “Unfortunately, there have been several neoconservatives that are getting closer to Trump, and, if he gets his advice from them, then I don’t think that is a good sign.” Even if Trump wants to pursue a significantly more noninterventionist course than his recent predecessors in the presidency, Paul warns that the entrenched “deep state” that favors foreign intervention and war, special interests that have “sinister motivation for these wars,” and media propaganda that “builds up the war fever” can provide significant headwinds against Trump pursuing such an objective. Watch Paul’s interview here: Related",FAKE
+4959,Trump campaign shake-up,"(CNN) Donald Trump's campaign is undergoing a major staff shake-up with less than three months to Election Day, adding two officials to top posts overseeing his struggling campaign and signaling a shift toward campaigning as a scorched earth outsider in order to win.
+
+Trump has named Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News and a former investment banker, to the post of chief executive and promoted Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster to his campaign, to the position of campaign manager, Conway confirmed to CNN early Wednesday morning.
+
+The addition of Bannon -- known for his brass-knuckled demeanor and his website's sharp tone -- came hours after reports surfaced that Roger Ailes, the recently ousted head of Fox News, will begin to advise Trump as he prepares for the presidential debates. The influence of both men lays the groundwork for unleashing Trump this fall from the more traditional presidential candidate framework, which Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort's leadership was brought on to create.
+
+Manafort, the campaign's chief strategist, will stay on in his campaign chairman role, Conway said.
+
+""I look at it as an expansion of the team. Paul remains as chairman,"" Conway told CNN.
+
+Manafort himself said it was an ""exciting day for Team Trump"" in an emailed memo to the campaign staff that was provided to CNN by a campaign source. He added that he will provide the ""big picture, long-range campaign vision"" that will guide the campaign to victory in November.
+
+But sources close to the campaign told CNN that while Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates will remain on staff, they will return to their Washington, D.C. base largely sidelined.
+
+Instead of Manafort's attempts to make Trump a more traditional candidate, Bannon will take over as Trump's top adviser, giving Trump free rein to run as the outsider candidate who won the Republican primaries.
+
+Bannon's ascension solidifies an informal, mutually beneficial relationship between Breitbart, which has unapologetically championed Trump, and the campaign. The website, which Bannon has been closely involved with since its launch in 2007, has also been a center for conspiracy theories about Clinton's health as well as stories about Bill Clinton's alleged treatment of women.
+
+The campaign's changes came as tensions mounted inside Trump's campaign in recent weeks and as Trump's relationship with Manafort soured to the point that several people close to the campaign warned that a major staff shake-up might be imminent, sources close to the campaign told CNN.
+
+The staffing shake-up follows several weeks of negative headlines and alarming polls for Trump who is trailing Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, in nearly every key battleground state and lagging in the latest national polls.
+
+Trump decided on the changes this weekend after speaking with campaign donors at a fundraiser in The Hamptons, including Rebekah Mercer, a high-profile GOP donor with longstanding ties to Conway, who shared her concerns with Trump about the direction of the campaign, a source told CNN.
+
+Trump then called Conway on Sunday from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, to express his displeasure with the direction of his struggling campaign, sources close to the campaign said.
+
+Notably, he made the decision without input from his adult children who were off traveling during the weekend, sources close to the campaign said.
+
+Donald, Jr., Eric and Ivanka Trump have been influential advisers in the campaign and key mediators between Trump and Manafort, often also guiding their father to mollify his rhetoric and run a more conventional campaign.
+
+Trump's call to Conway came the same day Trump also met with Ailes at the same golf club.
+
+Returning from an overseas vacation, Trump' son-in-law Jared Kushner, a top campaign official, convened a meeting at Trump Tower with Manafort, Gates, Bannon and Conway on Trump's orders to announce the shift in roles, sources said.
+
+The Trump campaign denied that Ailes would be taking on any role with the campaign and campaign aides also received a memo Tuesday slapping down those reports, according to a source close to the campaign.
+
+In a statement from the campaign Wednesday morning outlining the changes, Trump said he was willing to do ""whatever it takes to win this election.""
+
+""I have known Steve and Kellyanne both for many years. They are extremely capable, highly qualified people who love to win and know how to win,"" Trump said in the statement. ""I believe we're adding some of the best talents in politics, with the experience and expertise needed to defeat Hillary Clinton in November and continue to share my message and vision to Make America Great Again.""
+
+Second major shake-up of the summer
+
+The shake-up marks the second major change in the top rungs of the billionaire's campaign.
+
+Trump just two months ago fired his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski after weeks of internal fighting between Lewandowski and Manafort, who was initially brought on to oversee Trump's efforts to stave off the possibility of a contested convention.
+
+As the campaign shake-up neared, campaign aides pointed fingers at each other, the campaign's pollsters quarreled over strategy and the friction between Trump and Manafort became apparent.
+
+Both Trump and Manafort discussed the friction in their relationship with friends in recent days, and a close associate described Trump as frustrated at the state of the race, leveling complaints that he has been the victim of bad advice from his political team.
+
+""Mr. Trump doesn't trust him anymore. That's it. Pure and simple,"" a source familiar with the tensions told CNN, adding that Trump's gaffes and controversial statements in recent weeks have been fueled in part by his ""exasperation"" with the campaign's management.
+
+""When Mr. Trump doesn't feel comfortable with the way things are managed or the way things are, he has a tendency to try to do everything, thus his exasperation becomes apparent. It manifests itself,"" the source said.
+
+Several people in touch with Trump or his top political advisers in recent days said they had heard a shake-up was possible. But some cautioned that such chatter was predictable and inevitable when any campaign faces tough times.
+
+Trump's decision to overhaul his campaign's leadership came as recent polls showed Clinton thrashing Trump in the key battleground states and even gaining a lead in several states that typically lean Republican, such as Georgia.
+
+And the decision also follows a slew of self-inflicted wounds since the Democratic National Convention wrapped, with Trump exchanging barbs with the parents of a slain US soldier, reigniting intra-party tensions by initially declining to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan in his reelection bid and ultimately suggesting that ""Second Amendment people"" could act to keep Clinton from appointing liberal Supreme Court justices should she become president.
+
+Trump's campaign advisers have sought to refocus him, including through a pair of scripted policy speeches on the economy and terrorism that offered a stark contrast to Trump's freewheeling style.
+
+But Trump has repeatedly said he is resistant to change and reiterated that Tuesday in an interview with a local news station in Wisconsin.
+
+""I am who I am. It's me. I don't want to change. Everyone talks about, 'Oh are you going to pivot?' I don't want to pivot. You have to be you. If you start pivoting you are not being honest with people,"" Trump told WKDT.
+
+Lewandowski, who is now a CNN political commentator, has continued to informally advise Trump, according to sources familiar with their ongoing conversations.
+
+Lewandowski said Tuesday evening on CNN that while Trump may try to be ""more inclusive,"" Trump ""knows who he is internally.""
+
+""What he's going to do is remain true to himself, which is what this campaign has been about,"" Lewandowski said.
+
+Internal finger pointing abounded in recent days as recent media accounts have portrayed a campaign in disarray and at-times feuding with frustrated GOP leaders. Differences between the Trump campaign's pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Conway, who was promoted to campaign manager, were also the source of recent tensions.
+
+The source noted that Lewandowski had issued a similar campaign memo when Manafort was hired in a volunteer capacity with the campaign.",REAL
+5123,"Republican convention speakers: Ivanka, Newt","The roster of speakers at the convention to officially nominate Donald Trump is a colorful mix of political leaders, entertainers, personalities and the candidate's family members -- in keeping with his campaign's unorthodox style. The presumptive GOP nominee's wife, Melania Trump, will speak on Monday, the convention's opening night. Daughter Tiffany Trump and son Donald Trump Jr. will address the convention Tuesday evening. Trump's younger son, Eric, will speak on Wednesday. Thursday's program includes a speech by daughter Ivanka Trump -- a key figure in her father's inner circle -- followed by the billionaire businessman's speech Thursday night accepting the GOP nomination. Newly-minted Trump running mate Mike Pence will speak on Wednesday evening.
+
+""I wake up this morning to find out that I'm speaking at the Republican National Convention,"" Tebow said. ""It's amazing how fast rumors fly and that's exactly what it is -- a rumor.""
+
+Each night of the four-night gathering in Cleveland will center on a different theme, such as security, immigration and the economy.
+
+The first night's focus will be on security and immigration, with discussions of the Benghazi attack and the U.S. border. Speakers include Jamiel Shaw, whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant, and Cotton. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa -- the first female combat veteran elected to the Senate -- will also speak, as will Rep. Ryan Zinke, a former Navy Seal. Benghazi attack survivors Mark Geist and John Tiegen will also speak at the convention Monday night. A late Monday speaking addition is Pastor Mark Burns, a prominent African American evangelical leader, Bloomberg reported Sunday. On the second night, speakers will emphasize the economy. Presenters include Dana White, the UFC president, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whose name appeared on some VP shortlists, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia will also, as will Ben Carson, a Republican primary rival-turned-Trump supporter. The third night will feature Indiana Gov. Pence, as he's officially nominated for vice president. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- running mate finalist through the end of last week -- is also slated that evening. So is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Ted Cruz, the GOP primary runner-up to Trump, who has yet to endorse the nominee-to-be. Also speaking Wednesday night will be Eileen Collins, a pioneering woman astronaut, and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was thrust into the national spotlight following the Orlando terror attacks. An additional prominent Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio, will speak on Wednesday night. After a bruising primary fight against Trump, including a bevy of attacks questioning the front-runner's physical attributes, Rubio later decided to seek re-election to his Senate seat. It was unclear until late this weekend whether Rubio would be on the convention speaker's list. Tennis balls bounced from Cleveland ""event zone"" — but not guns Trump himself will speak on the fourth and final night. RNC Chair Reince Priebus will speak that night, as will business leaders such as Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, who caused a stir in May when he revealed that he financed several lawsuits, including the one brought by Hulk Hogan, against Gawker. While much of the journalism community bemoaned the thought of a billionaire suing a news outlet into oblivion -- Gawker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June and will be sold in an auction next month -- others celebrated Thiel's secret legal battle, which he described as ""specific deterrence."" It appears Trump may support Thiel's efforts. The GOP nominee said earlier this year that he intends to ""open up"" libel laws, making it easier to sue news organizations. But after a Florida jury awarded Hogan $140.1 million in his case against Gawker, Trump signaled that such reform might not be necessary. ""I might not have to, based on Gawker. Right?"" he said. A number of other Republican lawmakers, business leaders, and celebrities are also slated to appear. That includes actor and director Scott Baio, best known for his roles on ""Happy Days"" and ""Charles in Charge""; Willie Robertson, star of ""Duck Dynasty""; and former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, among others. a list that includes former President Bush 41 and 43, former GOP presidential nominees Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, and several current GOP lawmakers. a list that includes former President Bush 41 and 43, former GOP presidential nominees Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, and several current GOP lawmakers. Notably, many Republican leaders have also said they will skip the convention, a list that includes former President Bush 41 and 43, former GOP presidential nominees Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, and several current GOP lawmakers.",REAL
+216,Congress clears $1.8 trillion tax and spending bills,"“You can’t be in a rush to do the wrong thing, either,” she said. “This is serious stuff.”",REAL
+1644,5 things to watch in tonight’s debate,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+3156,Romney tears into GOP for not criticizing Trump,"Romney's condemnation, made here at the Stein Eriksen Lodge before hundreds of his donors and business partners, highlighted the ill will between the last two GOP nominees for president.
+
+The former Massachusetts governor harshly criticized Republican candidates such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, as well as super PACs such as Jeb Bush's well-funded Right to Rise group, for not stopping Trump in the primary. The two candidates largely avoided attacking Trump for much of their campaigns. He made the comments before many of the individuals who had helped fund those very candidates.
+
+""Ted Cruz was basically praising Donald Trump through the whole process until the very end,"" Romney told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, who was hosting the discussion. As for Kasich, ""he was in well after the time there was no possible pathway to becoming the nominee.""
+
+Romney's broadsides were warmly received by many of his allies, earning a 21-second round of applause when he wondered aloud about the future of the GOP.
+
+""I find this so troubling, and I know a lot of folks are saying, 'Mitt just get off your high horse on this and get behind the guy.' But these things are personal. I love this country. I love the founders. I love what this country is built upon and its values and seeing this is breaking my heart,"" Romney said. The 2012 nominee was visibly emotional and appeared to tear up when making the remarks. Yet Romney still preached tolerance. He declined to criticize previous speakers, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who pitched Trump to the well-heeled crowd this weekend, and said he would not try and sway the GOP elites assembled here to abandon their nominee. And he recognized as legitimate the notion that some Republicans may choose to back Trump solely to prevent Hillary Clinton from appointing Supreme Court nominees, calling it a ""darn good reason."" The day before, Romney had told Blitzer in an interview that he worried about the moral fraying of society should Trump become the nominee: ""I don't want to see trickle-down racism,"" he said. Donald Trump: Mitt Romney 'let us down' Donald Trump: Mitt Romney 'let us down' And before the crowd here on Saturday, Romney used another former president as an example of how society is shaped by his example. ""Bill Clinton's dalliances in the White House affected the sexual inclinations and practices of a generation, and probably beyond,"" he said. But Romney was also challenged by some questioners who were trying to whip up support for Trump. Romney has pledged to never support Trump, and many of his fund-raisers feel similarly. ""We've got to get behind him,"" one man implored the crowd. ""These are the cards we've been dealt."" Romney was also pressed as to why he accepted the endorsement of Trump during his 2012 presidential run given Trump's zest for ""birtherism,"" or the idea that President Barack Obama was not born into the United States and is thus ineligible to be president. Romney said he saw Trump's comments as ""nutty"" but not disqualifying. Now, the pair are using one another as political foils, with Trump blasting his GOP predecessor. On Saturday in Tampa, Florida, he called Romney someone who ""let us down"" and writing on Twitter that Romney ""choked like a dog."" The former Massachusetts governor brushed off the attacks. ""I have dogs. I don't know dogs choking,"" Romney said to laughs. ""That's an insult that somehow doesn't work."" Romney did, though, express some regret over his failed 2012 campaign, saying that he, like Bush, had failed to connect his economic vision with average, middle-class voters. But for now, Romney said he was trying to remain focused on the future, though he has now ruled out serving in the next White House. ""Had there been a President Bush or a President (Marco) Rubio or a President (Scott) Walker, I might've been happy to be a part of their administration,"" Romney said.",REAL
+4416,How presidents manipulate the media and the public,"When Theodore Roosevelt was president of the New York City police board, he discovered that reporters made remarkably effective assistants. Roosevelt would invite the correspondents on his midnight rambles through the seedy sections of the city, where he sought out corrupt patrolmen. He understood the bitterly competitive nature of the newspaper business in New York in the 1890s, and he recognized the pressure the papers felt to deliver headlines that would arrest readers’ attention. “A Baghdad Night,” shouted the Commercial Advertiser after a typical trawl. “Roosevelt in the Role of Haroun Alraschid. Police Caught Napping.”
+
+The board president took pains to cut a dashing figure. “Sing, heavenly Muse, the sad dejection of our poor policemen,” the World lyricized. “We have a real Police Commissioner. His name is Theodore Roosevelt. His teeth are big and white, his eyes are small and piercing, his voice is rasping. He makes our policemen feel as the little froggies did when the stork came out to rule them.” The papers didn’t uniformly like Roosevelt — the mockery in the World’s tone was evident — but they couldn’t resist the stories he gave them.
+
+David Greenberg rightly begins “Republic of Spin,” his history of spin and the American presidency, with TR. Roosevelt won the New York governorship on the strength of “Rough Riders,” a shamelessly self-promoting account of his exploits in the Spanish-American War; from there he vaulted into the vice presidency and, upon the murder of William McKinley, the presidency. Roosevelt employed the publicity tools that had won him office to work the levers of power. He made himself a story no Washington reporter could pass up, gathering around him a coterie of correspondents whose inside access required strict adherence to ground rules he set. They could quote him only with his express permission. A French writer whom Roosevelt wanted to impress was included in one of the “seances,” as the gatherings were called, and emerged with a notebook of revealing remarks from the American chief executive. The gist shortly appeared in the press. Roosevelt denied having said anything of the sort or even having spoken to the man. He later explained his apparent duplicity: “Of course I said it, but I said it as Theodore Roosevelt and not as the President of the United States!”
+
+What worked for one president became institutionalized, as successful practices do. And the institutionalization of presidential spin paralleled the permeation of spin throughout American life. Greenberg neatly weaves a history of public relations into his political tale; we see the emergence of PR as an accepted and eventually respected industry during the 1920s and after. Equally crucial was the evolution of technology. To get his message to millions, Roosevelt had to work through the press; his fifth cousin, nephew by marriage and progressive protege Franklin Roosevelt exploited the capacity of radio. The new broadcast medium’s apparent absence of spin made its spin all the more powerful. FDR’s radio addresses were cast as fireside chats, with the president speaking simply to his fellow Americans as though they were all sitting around a communal hearth. The first chat set the tone. At a moment when the banking system was paralyzed, when millions of Americans had no idea whether they would ever again see their hard-earned deposits, when the chill of the Great Depression clutched at hearts all across America, Roosevelt’s calm voice came into living rooms and bedrooms like that of a reassuring father and told Americans that everything was going to be all right. They believed him. And their belief became the crucial last link in Roosevelt’s rescue of the banks.
+
+The success of the spin didn’t prevent Americans from realizing they were being spun, and Greenberg devotes another theme of his story to critiques of the whole business. From H.L. Mencken to Hannah Arendt and Garry Trudeau, nearly everyone who has commented on modern politics, modern communications or simply modern life has weighed in on the struggle to shape the terms of debate of democracy. The critiques themselves, meanwhile, contributed to another part of Greenberg’s story: the evolution of what amounted to anti-spin defense systems on the part of the media. Responsible journalists had always sought to counter presidential claims with sources of their own, but during the decades of World War II and the early Cold War, a certain symbiosis developed between big government and big media. Citing national security, presidential administrations would warn the media against peering too closely into the black box of policy, and the media obliged.
+
+But when the Vietnam War went badly, and the Pentagon Papers revealed that administrations had been lying about the war for years, and when Watergate, which grew out of the Pentagon Papers, showed that the deceit went far beyond anything touching national security, the cozy compact was blasted to bits. The media went into full opposition mode. Almost everything every administration official uttered or published was presumed to be dangerously misleading; the radar of the anti-spin systems tracked the enemy missiles from launch and sent interceptors to destroy them.
+
+It didn’t help the government side in its contest with the media that its high ground was soon seized by conservatives who claimed that government was not the solution to America’s problems but the problem itself. Yet, as Greenberg notes, even the anti-government government forces had their spin specialists, with Ronald Reagan being one of the best. How else to explain the Gipper’s ability to walk away from the train wreck of Iran-contra with barely a scratch?
+
+Which leads to the most basic question of all: Does any of this matter? Greenberg guides the reader through six ages of efforts to manage the news (“Age of Publicity,” “Age of Ballyhoo,” etc.), culminating in today’s comprehensive “Age of Spin.” Yet even in our present advanced era, Greenberg declines to grant the spin machines decisive credit. The Reagan revolution, he says, was marked by shrewd management of the media, but it succeeded on its merits. “The idea that Reagan and his team used their media proficiency to fool the public into buying a conservative agenda belonged to the tradition of frustrated protests of antagonists unwilling to credit a rival’s successes. By and large Americans knew what they were getting with Reagan.” Nor is the resistance President Obama has encountered from the Republicans on health care and other issues due to a failure of his spin skills. “You know, I can make some really good arguments defending the Democratic position, and there are going to be some people who just don’t agree with me,” Obama told “60 Minutes,” with Greenberg nodding silently.
+
+Perhaps the spinners offset one another, the way the twin rotors of large helicopters do. Perhaps the American people have become inured to decades of message-massaging. Greenberg’s title suggests disdain for its subject: “Spin” is a label usually reserved for what one’s opponents do. Yet Greenberg is far from categorically critical. “If spin is used for misleading, it is also used for leading,” he writes. “Throughout history, presidents, using the machinery of spin, have contributed to wartime hysteria and baleful complacency, resentment and fear. But they have also given us the golden flares of inspiration that moved the public, in their own times and for decades after.”
+
+Which shows that historians can do it, too.",REAL
+7622,Fact Check: Trump Is Right that Clinton Might Cause WW3,"Artwork by Anthony Freda, AnthonyFreda.com 
+
+Trump claims that Clinton’s policy on Syria would lead to World War 3. 
+Let’s fact check … 
+The Washington Post points out that a vote for Clinton is a vote for escalating military confrontation in Syria and elsewhere: 
+In the rarefied world of the Washington foreign policy establishment, President Obama’s departure from the White House — and the possible return of a more conventional and hawkish Hillary Clinton — is being met with quiet relief. 
+The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork for a more assertive American foreign policy, via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House . 
+*** 
+The studies, which reflect Clinton’s stated views, break most forcefully with Obama on Syria …. call[ing] for stepped-up military action to deter President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Russian forces in ­Syria. 
+*** 
+Most of the studies propose limited American airstrikes with cruise missiles to punish Assad …. 
+*** 
+Last year, Obama dismissed calls for a no-fly zone in northwestern Syria — a position advocated by Clinton — as “ half-baked .” 
+*** 
+Even pinprick cruise-missile strikes designed to hobble the ­Syrian air force or punish Assad would risk a direct confrontation with Russian forces, which are scattered throughout the key ­Syrian military bases that would be targeted. 
+“You can’t pretend you can go to war against Assad and not go to war against the Russians,” said a senior administration official who is involved in Middle East policy and was granted anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations. 
+The most liberal presidential candidate still running – Green Party candidate Jill Stein – says: ""It should clear to everyone that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war."" — @ajamubaraka Watch live: https://t.co/0B6NJLNY5j 
+— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) October 13, 2016 Under Hillary Clinton, we could very quickly slide into nuclear war with her declared policy in Syria. I call for a #PeaceOffensive . 
+She explains : 
+Hillary Clinton wants to start an air war with Russia. Let’s be clear: That’s what a no-fly zone means. It is tantamount to a declaration of war against Russia. 
+*** 
+Clearly the Democrats are incredibly embarrassed about the nature of these [email] revelations, and they’ve created a smokescreen here to try and distract from that. But that smokescreen is pushing us to the brink of warfare with Russia now, where you have the U.S. head of defense, Ashton Carter, talking about nuclear war. We just did a dry run dropping fake nuclear bombs over Nevada. This is really dangerous stuff; this is not pretend. So we need to take a deep breath here, we need to step back and stop beating the war drums. In this context, Hillary Clinton is talking about starting an air war with Russia. Which could slide—you know, we’re on the verge of nuclear war right now. 
+*** 
+The most likely nuclear threat right now is with Russia. There’s no doubt about that. When you have Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the prime minister of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, saying that the threat of nuclear war is hotter now than it has ever been in all of history, you’ve got to take that pretty seriously. And when you have Hillary Clinton then beating the war drums against Russia, and essentially saying that if she’s elected that we will declare war on Russia—because that’s what a no-fly zone over Syria amounts to. Shooting down Russian warplanes. 
+*** 
+Hillary Clinton is a disastrous nuclear threat right now in a context where we’re already off-the-charts in the risk of nuclear war. She has stated in this context that she’s essentially opening up a battlefront with Russia. So to my mind, this emerges as the clearest and most present danger. 
+Prominent liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs writes in the Huffington Post, in an essay bannered “ Hillary Is the Candidate of the War Machine “: 
+It is often believed that the Republicans are the neocons and the Democrats act as restraints on the warmongering. This is not correct. Both parties are divided between neocon hawks and cautious realists who don’t want the US in unending war. Hillary is a staunch neocon whose record of favoring American war adventures explains much of our current security danger. 
+Just as the last Clinton presidency set the stage for financial collapse, it also set the stage for unending war. On October 31, 1998 President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act that made it official US policy to support “regime change” in Iraq. 
+It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime. 
+Thus were laid the foundations for the Iraq War in 2003. 
+Of course, by 2003, Hillary was a Senator and a staunch supporter of the Iraq War, which has cost the US trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and done more to create ISIS and Middle East instability than any other single decision of modern foreign policy. In defending her vote, Hillary parroted the phony propaganda of the CIA: 
+“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members… “ 
+After the Iraq Liberation Act came the 1999 Kosovo War, in which Bill Clinton called in NATO to bomb Belgrade, in the heart of Europe, and unleashing another decade of unrest in the Balkans. Hillary, traveling in Africa, called Bill: “I urged him to bomb,” she told reporter Lucinda Frank. 
+Hillary’s record as Secretary of State is among the most militaristic, and disastrous, of modern US history . Some experience. Hilary was a staunch defender of the military-industrial-intelligence complex at every turn, helping to spread the Iraq mayhem over a swath of violence that now stretches from Mali to Afghanistan. Two disasters loom largest: Libya and Syria. 
+Hillary has been much attacked for the deaths of US diplomats in Benghazi, but her tireless promotion of the overthrow Muammar Qaddafi by NATO bombing is the far graver disaster. Hillary strongly promoted NATO-led regime change in Libya, not only in violation of international law but counter to the most basic good judgment. After the NATO bombing, Libya descended into civil war while the paramilitaries and unsecured arms stashes in Libya quickly spread west across the African Sahel and east to Syria. The Libyan disaster has spawned war in Mali, fed weapons to Boko Haram in Nigeria, and fueled ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In the meantime, Hillary found it hilarious to declare of Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.” 
+Perhaps the crowning disaster of this long list of disasters has been Hillary’s relentless promotion of CIA-led regime change in Syria. Once again Hillary bought into the CIA propaganda that regime change to remove Bashir al-Assad would be quick, costless, and surely successful. In August 2011, Hillary led the US into disaster with her declaration Assad must “get out of the way,” backed by secret CIA operations. 
+Five years later, no place on the planet is more ravaged by unending war, and no place poses a great threat to US security. More than 10 million Syrians are displaced, and the refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean or undermining the political stability of Greece, Turkey, and the European Union. Into the chaos created by the secret CIA-Saudi operations to overthrow Assad, ISIS has filled the vacuum, and has used Syria as the base for worldwide terrorist attacks. 
+The list of her incompetence and warmongering goes on. Hillary’s support at every turn for NATO expansion, including even into Ukraine and Georgia against all common sense, was a trip wire that violated the post-Cold War settlement in Europe in 1991 and that led to Russia’s violent counter-reactions in both Georgia and Ukraine. As Senator in 2008, Hilary co-sponsored 2008-SR439 , to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. As Secretary of State, she then presided over the restart of the Cold War with Russia. 
+It is hard to know the roots of this record of disaster. Is it chronically bad judgment? Is it her preternatural faith in the lying machine of the CIA? Is it a repeated attempt to show that as a Democrat she would be more hawkish than the Republicans? Is it to satisfy her hardline campaign financiers? Who knows? Maybe it’s all of the above. But whatever the reasons, hers is a record of disaster. Perhaps more than any other person, Hillary can lay claim to having stoked the violence that stretches from West Africa to Central Asia and that threatens US security . 
+Jakob Augstein notes in Der Spiegel: 
+Trump would probably be the better choice in the question of war and peace than Clinton. 
+Clinton has expressly expressed the wish to establish a flight ban on Syria, or parts of it. *** In truth, it would be an act of war. The risks are unpredictable. Above all, the risk of a military conflict with Russia. 
+*** 
+The highest soldier of the United States of America, General Joseph Dunford, President of the United States General Staff of the United States Forces, is certain. To control the entire airspace over Syria would mean war with Syria and Russia. Dunford’s predecessor in office estimated a few years ago that an effective flight ban over Syria would involve the use of 70,000 soldiers and a monthly cost of $ 1 billion. 
+But the bottom line is Clinton’s proven historical track record … she’s at least partly responsible for war after catastrophic war and coup after disastrous coup in Libya, Syria, Kosovo, Haiti, Honduras and other countries around the world. 
+And it’s interesting, indeed, that the Neocons who got us into the Iraq war have endorsed Clinton instead of Trump . 
+Trump might speak in a crude, knee-jerk manner … but Clinton is probably more likely to actually get us into war .",FAKE
+2953,The White House insists it has a plan to fight Islamic State and that it’s working,"To its critics, President Obama’s strategy to combat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is weak and incoherent. Even some of the staunchest U.S. allies and partners in the fight worry that the time for what they see as the administration’s incremental approach has long since passed.
+
+The White House maintains that its strategy is comprehensive and that it’s working. Sharp increases in airstrikes and Obama’s recent decision to deploy Special Operations troops, officials say, are part of a fundamental change in the military’s mission developed this fall, along with a new diplomatic push to end the distraction of Syria’s civil war.
+
+In his Sunday-night address to the nation following last week’s San Bernardino, Calif., shooting, Obama outlined the elements of the strategy, assuring Americans that there is a viable plan underway to decimate the Islamic State where it lives. “We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us,” he said, using an alternative name for the militants.
+
+But the White House is clearly frustrated by its failure to communicate the elements of that plan and what it believes has been accomplished.
+
+“Yes, there is a strategy,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry snapped in a speech Saturday. “I know the criticism. We all hear them. . . . But that doesn’t mean it’s wisdom.”
+
+The administration’s insistence that its prudence and patience will pay off — vs. charges of too little, too late — have been the two opposing narratives of the 18-month battle against the Islamic State and the four-year Syrian war it has now overshadowed.
+
+An examination of the recent course of events on the military and diplomatic fronts and interviews with a broad range of stakeholders and experts provide fuel for both arguments.
+
+For more than a year after the Islamic State blitzkrieg swept across Syria and through Iraq to the Baghdad suburbs in the early summer of 2014, U.S. military operations, including airstrikes and training of local ground troops, were in what a coalition spokesman, Col. Steve Warren, called “crisis mode, just trying to keep the barbarians off the gate.”
+
+The Iraqi army had fallen apart. In Syria, as civil war raged in the west, the militants consolidated their control over the north-central and eastern areas of the country, with virtually free access to Syria’s border with Turkey to infiltrate tens of thousands of foreign fighters and equipment.
+
+Airstrikes begun by the United States and its coalition partners — Europeans in Iraq and Arab states in Syria — were tactical, focused on targets of opportunity and the need to prevent collapse. While domestic critics and allies in the region called for more strikes, more support for Syrian rebels, more U.S. boots on the ground and no-fly zones, the administration demurred.
+
+In a broad assessment in August, the Pentagon determined it had succeeded in its initial goals of stopping further Islamic State expansion and reestablishing the foundations of a viable Iraqi military. Amid repeated failures in Syria to organize and arm a rebel force to fight against the militants in Syria, it found hope in the establishment of a Syrian Kurdish and Arab force that has driven the militants from much of the Turkish border.
+
+Adoption of what the military says is its first real operational strategy, following the chaos of the initial year, was marked by September’s change of command of the Baghdad-based headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State. “You have done what was necessary,” U.S. Central Command Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III told departing Lt. Gen. James L. Terry.
+
+The new commander, Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, was charged with “operationalizing” the mission, Warren said.
+
+“We always wanted to get into a position where we could apply multiple points of pressure at once, across the whole battle space,” said a senior administration official. “We’re now in position to actually do it. It’s not going to be perfect, it’s not going to be linear, it’s going to be extremely hard.”
+
+Military and administration officials, most speaking on the condition of anonymity about internal decision-making, listed the elements of the comprehensive offensive against “core ISIL” on the ground in both Syria and Iraq.
+
+In Iraq, the focus has been on cutting Islamic State supply lines into Mosul, the militant bastion in the northwest, in preparation for an eventual ground assault, and applying simultaneous pressure along militant front lines stretching south to the city of Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad. “These are not blitzkrieg gains,” Warren said, “but painstaking, incremental work against a dug-in enemy” now made more effective with the ability to integrate airstrikes with a more organized and robust ground force.
+
+Obama has authorized a new, Iraq-based Special Operations task force to conduct ground raids against Islamic State leadership targets in both Iraq and Syria. Administration officials have described a snowballing cycle in which more raids will take more leaders off the battlefield and provide more intelligence to plan still more raids. But it is unclear when the force, initially to number about 100, will be deployed.
+
+Syria, with its separate wars against the Islamic State and between forces of President Bashar al-Assad and rebels seeking to unseat him, is far more complicated.
+
+Regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, who once flew strike missions along with U.S. warplanes, have largely dropped out, an absence the United States hopes to make up with new agreements with France and Britain.
+
+The “whole battle space” concept includes simultaneous airstrikes along the eastern border with Iraq to further cut militant supply lines, on Islamic State-controlled oil fields, and in the north-central area, where Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces who have captured a wide swath of territory along the border from the militants are organizing to attack the de facto militant capital of Raqqa.
+
+Obama has authorized the deployment of 50 Special Operations troops, the first official U.S. boots on the ground in Syria, to join those forces to assess their readiness and help develop tactical plans, although the Americans are not expected to arrive for several months, defense officials said.
+
+In southern Syria, anti-Assad rebels have met with significant success against government forces, but the Islamic State, sensing an opening, has begun moving into the area. The United States is sending more money and equipment, including heavy, long-range artillery, to Jordan, both to protect its own border and to engage militant targets inside Syria.
+
+But given the new threat to the homeland, the administration’s claims of incremental success have left scornful critics asking why it does not do more. Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday what he hoped to hear in Obama’s speech, presidential hopeful Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) replied: “That he’s going to change his strategy and come up with a regional army to go in destroy the caliphate in Raqqa. . . . The president doesn’t have a strategy.”
+
+Mutual frustration has also been ongoing between the United States, as coalition leader, and regional allies, with some calling for a more aggressive U.S. policy. The United Arab Emirates said last week that it was willing to send ground forces into Syria — something Obama has consistently refused — if others would do the same as part of an international force.
+
+But the region’s governments, including Turkey, are also deeply divided among themselves, leaving the administration as both whipping boy for their complaints and mediator for their disagreements as it tries to implement a broad strategy. In recent weeks, as Kerry has launched a diplomatic effort to bring the civil war to an end in order to shift attention to the counterterrorism fight, Obama himself has intervened in a series of conversations with regional leaders, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi King Salman.
+
+Nowhere is the dissention more acute than in northwest Syria, where rebel groups separately backed by the United States and Europe, the Persian Gulf Arab states and Turkey are locked in a melange of battles, often beside forces of al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, against Assad’s military.
+
+The entry of Russian warplanes and Iranian troops on Assad’s side in western Syria has further complicated the situation, increasing the conundrum of how to take back the nearby, remaining 60-mile strip of the Syria-Turkey border in Islamic State hands.
+
+The coalition has said it is ready to launch an all-out air offensive to drive the militants out of the area, located north of Aleppo, Syria’s most-populous city, but not until there are opposition forces on the ground ready to occupy the terrain. And the more the rebels are engaged in the Russian-aided fight against Assad, the less willing they are to switch their attention to the border.
+
+U.S. officials say that a small force of opposition fighters in the area, including about 130 Syrians trained by the Americans in Jordan who are in direct communication with U.S. forces, have had some success. But their operations are still rudimentary. To delineate their lines from those of the Islamic State and avoid their own casualties from coalition airstrikes, they light tires on fire and warn pilots to avoid the smoke.",REAL
+7137,"Profits & Profiteers – Big Banks, Price Fixing, Profiteering – 30% Price Hike -Poor Farmers – 1940s","Posted on October 28, 2016 by Andrew Midkiff 
+Published on Oct 27, 2016 by Historia – Bel99TV The Great Swindle –‘Big business has no shame”– 1940s rationing & monopoly bank control of U.S. economy made farmers over-produce causing large stockpiles of food, and the prices plummeted, farmers became depressed and financially squeezed. “Sales Dollar Arguments”– history repeats… Share this:",FAKE
+7007,Hillary’s “Big Tent” is Obama’s “Grand Bargain” on Steroids,"B y BAR executive editor Glen Ford B arack Obama tried to woo Republicans into a “Grand Bargain” that would have gutted Social Security. Bill Clinton let loose the banks. But Donald Trump’s destruction of the Republican Party will allow Hillary Clinton to “gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle.” The rich are about to get their best deal yet. “The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class.” When Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to the Republican Party he provided the unexpected catalyst for completion of the corporate project begun by Bill Clinton, Al Gore and other white Democrats in the 1980s, with the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). To counter relentless attrition of whites to the GOP in their home states, these beleaguered, mostly southern Democrats sought national corporate funding to turn their party decisively to the right. They reckoned, correctly, that a steady stream of corporate capital would allow them to control the new wave of Black voters and politicians that had been mobilized by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns, while strengthening the hand of the South in national Democratic Party calculations. Bill Clinton became the first DLC president in 1992, and moved swiftly and methodically to narrow the ideological differences between the duopoly parties. He completed much of Ronald Reagan’s agenda, claiming it as his own; destroyed welfare “as we knew it”; vastly expanded the mass Black Incarceration regime; pushed NAFTA through Congress over the objections of majorities in his own party; engineered the corporate monopolization of broadcast media; and removed the last safety straps from Wall Street banks. “Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo.” In foreign affairs, Clinton initiated what was to become the doctrine of “humanitarian” military intervention, dismantling and partially occupying the socialist nation of Yugoslavia. In the process, Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo, thus keeping operational the network created by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the previous decade in Afghanistan. In Africa, Clinton conspired with Uganda and exiled Tutsi rebels to overthrow the Hutu majority government in Rwanda, setting off a bloodbath in 1994, followed two years later by an invasion of Congo that has killed more than six million people — and still counting. Barack Obama was the second DLC president (although he lies [3] about his membership). He, too, moved with unseemly haste to reach a “Grand Bargain” with the GOP — not of necessity, since he had won a huge electoral mandate with the overwhelming financial backing of Wall Street, but as a matter of ideological principle. In January of 2009, before even taking the oath of office, Obama told the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post that all “entitlements,” including Medicare and Social Security, would be “ on the table [4] ” for cutting in his administration. Obama’s first project, now considered the centerpiece of his legacy, was to resurrect the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s corporate health insurance scheme, adopted by Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996, and made into state law by Republican Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in 2006. Obama’s Affordable Care Act was, literally, written by lobbyists for the insurance and drug industries, and is now collapsing like a poorly constructed house at the end of its mortgage. “For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his ‘Grand Bargain.’” With the Democratic majority in Congress in no mood to tamper with Social Security and Medicare, Obama tried to maneuver the targeted entitlements into a financial crisis trap. He named two dependable reactionaries, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, as co-chairmen of his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, also called the Commission on Deficit Reduction. They dutifully recommended $4 trillion in budget cuts, mostly to social programs, including cuts to Social Security. Although the full commission did not endorse the chairs’ recommendations, and the Congress failed to pass bills modeled on the document, Obama used the Simpson-Bowles formula as a basis for negotiating what he hoped would be a “bipartisan” (GOP plus Obama and a minority of Democrats) massacre of entitlements. For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his “Grand Bargain.” Congressional Black Caucus chairman Emanuel Cleaver, of Kansas City, called the deal a “ Satan’s Sandwich [5] ,” but Obama continued to pursue a political marriage made in hell until the 2012 reelection campaign clock called a halt to the spectacle. “A de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie.” The quest for a Grand Bargain was Barack Obama’s failed attempt to best Bill Clinton in erasing the distinctions between the two major parties – to create a de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie. It was the Republicans who ran away from the altar. And the Democrats did eat much of the Satan’s Sandwich, through sequestration and austerity that ravaged social programs by other means. Why did the Republicans reject the deal? Although both halves of the duopoly ultimately answer to Wall Street, the Republicans, like any other party, have an institutional interest in winning office. It is true that Obama had crafted a deal that any Republican would love, but it was still his deal, and he planned to run for reelection as an historical dealmaker. Probably just as importantly, the Republican Party is the White Man’s party, meaning, white supremacy is its organizing principle, central to its identity among much of the masses. To embrace Obama, no matter how advantageous to their big business patrons, was a hug too far for the GOP. Racism doomed the Grand Bargain – Hallelujah! A New, Bigger Bargain Recently released Wikileaks emails reveal Hillary Clinton speaking to bankers at Morgan Stanley in 2013, a year after the debacle. “The Simpson-Bowles framework and the big elements of it were right,” she said. Thanks to Donald Trump’s demolition of the Republican Party, the conditions have been created for Hillary Clinton, as DLC President #3, to achieve what #1 and #2 could not: gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle. With most of the ruling class and its attendants having vacated the building, the Republican Party has been reduced to Donald Trump and his “deplorables,” as Hillary calls them. Trump’s opposition to corporate trade deals violated the Holy Grail against prohibiting capitalists from moving money and jobs around the world as they see fit, and his reluctance to support regime change as an inherent right of American exceptionalism has frightened and outraged the military industrial complex, the national security establishment, and all sectors dependent on the maintenance of empire. “An inherently unstable arrangement.” Clinton’s Big Tent is not a temporary, election season dwelling. It is how she plans to govern. The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class, while at the same time the party nominally represents most of the folks who are abused and misused by that ruling class. It is an inherently unstable arrangement, and will soon be wracked by splits, as a post-Trump GOP attempts to lure its fat cats back and the darker and poorer constituencies consigned to the latrine area of Hillary’s high class tent break to the Left for air. But in the interim, Clinton will have a unique opportunity to cut grand austerity deals with all the “big elements” of Simpson-Bowles, to renege on her corporate trade promises, and to wage war with great gusto in the name of a “united” country. Ever since the Democratic National Convention it has been clear that the Clintonites are encouraged to consider everyone outside of their grand circle to be suspect, subversive, or depraved. Their inclusive rhetoric is really an invocation of a ruling class consensus, now that Trump has supposedly brought the ruling class together under one banner. In Hillary’s tent, the boardrooms are always in session. Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/hillary_big_tent_grand_bargain",FAKE
+2994,John McCain: NSA Phone Surveillance Program Is Necessary,"At the Pentagon, ""we have duplicated staff, and we have staffs that are four and five times larger than they were during the Vietnam War,"" said McCain. ""We have to get rid of the duplicate ways in the Pentagon and get rid of sequestration because it is destroying our ability to fund the nation.""",REAL
+3626,Charlie Hebdo attack: Three terrorists killed in raids,"(CNN) A pair of dramatic raids Friday in France led to the killing of three terrorists -- one suspected in the fatal shooting of a policewoman and four hostages, the other two in the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine -- and to the freeing of more than a dozen people being held hostage.
+
+The French government's work is not over. There's still a lot of healing to do, a lot of questions to answer about how to prevent future attacks, and the pursuit of a woman wanted in the policewoman's shooting.
+
+Hollande: We are proud of our police
+
+Hollande: We are proud of our police 01:04
+
+Hollande: We are proud of our police
+
+Still, as Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said, ""The nation is relieved tonight.""
+
+•The wife of suspect Cherif Kouachi and the girlfriend of hostage taker Amedy Coulibaly-- Hayat Boumedienne -- exchanged 500 phone calls in 2014, according to Paris prosecutor Francois Molin. The wife told investigators that Cherif and Coulibaly knew each well.
+
+• Cherif Kouachi, a suspect in the Charlie Hebdo slaughter, visited Yemen in 2011 and French authorities were aware of his contacts with terrorist organizations in Yemen and Syria, Molins said at a press conference.
+
+• The government of Yemen has launched an investigation into a possible al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula link to the Charlie Hebdo magazine attack, Mohammed Albasha, Yemen's spokesman in Washington, tweeted Friday.
+
+• Four hostages were killed and 15 survived in the standoff between an armed terrorist and police at a Paris kosher grocery store on Friday, according to Israeli government sources who characterized a phone conversation between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and French President François Hollande.
+
+• U.S. President Barack Obama said he wants the people of France to know that the United States ""stands with you today, stands with you tomorrow"" after this week's terror. He told a crowd in Tennessee that ""we stand for freedom and hope and dignity of all human beings, (and) that's what Paris stands for.""
+
+• The FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to law enforcement across the United States discussing the Paris terrorist attack this week and the sophistication of the tactics, a U.S. law enforcement source told CNN. The bulletin says the attacks demonstrated ""a degree of sophistication and training traditionally not seen in recent small armed attacks,"" the official said.
+
+A salesman, who identified himself only as Didier, told France Info radio that he shook one of the gunman's hands at about 8:30 a.m. as they arrived at the business. Didier said he first thought the man, who was dressed in black and heavily armed, was a police officer.
+
+As he left, the armed man said, ""Go, we don't kill civilians."" Didier said, ""It wasn't normal. I did not know what was going on.""
+
+The gunmen told police that they wanted to die as martyrs, Yves Albarello, who is in France's Parliament, said on channel iTele. The area, meanwhile, was locked down -- with children stuck in schools, roads closed and shops shuttered.
+
+Shortly before 5 p.m., gunshots and at least three large explosions pierced the relative silence. .
+
+Soon after, men could be seen on the roof of the building where the brothers had holed up. Four helicopters landed nearby.
+
+Word came that the brothers were dead and that a man who had been hiding in the building was safe, said Bernard Corneille, the mayor of nearby Othis.
+
+At the same time, in a different setting near Paris's Porte de Vincennes about 40 kilometers (25 miles) away, a similar crisis played out at a kosher store.
+
+Like Cherif Kouachi, a man claiming to be Coulibaly called BFMTV on Friday. At the scene, witnesses heard Coulibaly demand freedom for the Kouachi brothers, according to police union spokesman Pascal Disand.
+
+Law enforcement swarmed the area. Dozens of schools went on lockdown.
+
+A resolution came a few minutes after the Dammartin-en-Goele climax, in the form of explosions and gunfire. Up to 20 heavily armed police officers moved into the store. They came out with a number of civilians.
+
+Not everyone made it. Hollande said four people were killed. Israeli government sources told CNN that Hollande told Netanyahu that four hostages were killed and 15 were rescued. Molins said four hostages were killed by the gunman before police stormed the market.
+
+In a speech Friday night, Hollande called the Porte de Vincennes deaths an ""anti-Semitic"" act.
+
+He urged his countrymen not to respond with violence against Muslims, saying, ""Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with the Muslim religion.""
+
+""Unity"" he said, ""is our best weapon.""
+
+That kind of military language is apt when you're talking about two deadly attacks and violent standoffs in a few days.
+
+It's something that a man, who asked to be called simply Teddy, understands. He was outside Henri Dunant elementary school in Dammartin-en-Goele on Friday, hoping to pick up his young son.
+
+And, eventually, the students did leave the school -- accompanied by police officers who held their hands and, in some cases, lifted them onto an awaiting bus that would take them to safety.
+
+""It's like a war,"" Teddy said. ""I don't know how I will explain this to my 5-year-old son.""
+
+This ""war"" erupted two days ago, when a pair of heavily armed men -- hooded and dressed in black -- entered the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine known for its provocative, often profane, take on religion, politics and most anything else.
+
+They burst into a meeting, called out individuals, and then executed them. The dead included editor and cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier and four other well-known cartoonists known by the pen names: Cabu, Wolinski, Honore and Tignous.
+
+Authorities followed a lead Thursday morning from a gas station attendant near Villers-Cotterets, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Dammartin-en-Goele, whom Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34, reportedly threatened as they stole food and gas. Police think the brothers may have later fled on foot into nearby woods.
+
+As the suspects moved, the French government -- including more than 80,000 police deployed across the country -- also didn't stand still.
+
+Some of them tried to prevent more bloodshed, which might have something to do with nine people detained after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Investigators also dug to learn about the attackers.
+
+Both men had ties to Islamist extremists.
+
+Said, the elder of the Kouachi brothers, spent several months in Yemen in 2011, receiving weapons training and working with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to U.S. officials.
+
+His younger brother, Cherif, has a long history of jihad and anti-Semitism, according to documents obtained by CNN. In a 400-page court record, he is described as wanting to go to Iraq through Syria ""to go and combat the Americans.""
+
+""I was ready to go and die in battle,"" he said in a deposition. ""... I got this idea when I saw the injustices shown by television. ... I am speaking about the torture that the Americans have inflicted on the Iraqis.""
+
+A man claiming to be Cherif told CNN affiliate BFMTV in a phone call before he was shot and killed Friday that he was sent to carry out the massacre by al Qaeda in Yemen and that the late Anwar al-Awlaki financed his trip. CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the recording.
+
+Al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim scholar and cleric who acted as a spokesperson for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed in 2011 by a CIA drone strike.
+
+Cherif and Coulibaly were involved in a 2010 attempt to free an Algerian incarcerated for a 1995 subway bombing. Coulibaly was arrested with 240 rounds of ammunition for a Kalashnikov rifle and a photo of Djamel Beghal, a French Algerian once known as al Qaeda's premier European recruiter.
+
+The Western intelligence source said that Coulibaly lived with Boumeddiene, his alleged accomplice in the police shooting, and that the two traveled to Malaysia together.
+
+Charlie Hebdo columnist: 'They didn't want us to be quiet'
+
+A unity rally will be held Sunday ""celebrating the values behind"" Charlie Hebdo, said British Prime Minister David Cameron, who will travel to Paris to attend.
+
+And the magazine itself -- whose former offices were firebombed in 2011, on the day it was to publish an issue poking fun at Islamic law and after it published a cartoon of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed -- will go on as well, even without its leader and most talented staffers. It's set to publish thousands of copies of its latest edition next Wednesday.
+
+Patrick Pelloux, a columnist for the magazine, told CNN that ""I don't know if I'm afraid anymore, because I've seen fear. I was scared for my friends, and they are dead.""
+
+He and many others are defiant.
+
+""I know that they didn't want us to be quiet,"" Pelloux said of the slain Charlie Hebdo staffers.""They would be assassinated twice, if we remained silent.""",REAL
+9114,"PayPal Founder Blasts ""Corrupt Media, Intolerant Left"", Defends Trump","
+
+Billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal founder, Peter Thiel spoke at the National Press Club today on his support for Donald Trump.
+Most of the media ignored the groundbreaking presser today.
+They don’t want Americans to know about this pro-Trump gay conservative from Silicon Valley.
+FOX Business Network carried much of the speech live.
+Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel took his pro-Trump message to the heart of the media establishment in a major speech at the National Press Club this morning.
+“We’re voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of this country to have failed,” Thiel said to an audience of about 150 members of the press.
+“The insiders have been getting it wrong for a long time,” he added. Establishment politicians “are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
+During the Q&A session, the moderator inquired about “social blowback” Thiel has received for supporting Trump and dwelled heavily on Thiel’s funding of the Hulk Hogan case that brought down Gawker.
+Thiel justified funding the lawsuit against a Gawker that he described as a “singular, sociopathic bully.” Defending illegal revenge porn under the guise of the First Amendment “is an insult to journalists,” he noted.
+That comment aroused a scowl in the reporter sitting next to me, who walked out shortly after.
+The room was full of about 150 journalists, mostly from mainstream publications. There was a row of cameras filming the event, but only two reporters appeared to be streaming it live through Periscope and Facebook Live. National Press Club Executive Director William C. McCarren treated several members of the press brusquely as they tried to enter the event.
+The event highlighted the growing gulf between the establishment and the rest of the country, the mainstream press versus the independent press, and the truth of what’s seen from direct sources and how mainstream reporters often spin it.
+At one point during the speech, Thiel directly pointed out the hoaxing and bias within the media. “The Advocate, a magazine which once praised me as a ‘gay innovator,’ published an article saying that as of now I am, and I quote, ‘not a gay man,’ because I don’t agree with their politics.”
+When a high-profile, highly intelligent figure like Thiel supports Trump, who cares about the truth?
+
+Source 
+",FAKE
+7746,Donald Trump and the Disabled Reporter: The whole truth and not the spin put on by the media.,a reply to: windword Shall I post videos of Hillary laughing at death and mayhem? They are both terrible people. Period end of story. A vote for either one is a vote for idiocy. Hillary was heard calling mentally challenged children 'f*g ree-tards' and caught on record blurting out the terms 'stupid k*e and 'f*ing Jew b*d'. Your hypocrisy is showing again. edit on 26-10-2016 by thesungod because: (no reason given),FAKE
+46,Campaign finance laws may be making political polarization worse by encouraging ‘purist’ donors.,"Many Americans have become increasingly concerned over the role of money in politics, and back more populist approaches to reducing political donations. Raymond J. La Raja and Brian F. Schaffner, authors of Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail, argue that populist approaches such as imposing low contribution limits on parties, distort the campaign finance system in ways that benefit a small group of partisan purists at the expense of the broader electorate. This in turn pushes candidates towards ideological extremes. They write that reformers should consider a more party-centered campaign finance system which would channel money to candidates through highly transparent and broadly accountable party organizations, which would then lead to less polarization.
+
+Since the 2010 Citizens United decision, there has been increasing concern over the role of money in politics. However, our new research indicates that populist approaches to curtailing money in US politics might actually be contributing to contemporary problems in the political system, including the bitter partisan stand-offs and apparent insensitivity of elected officials to the concerns of ordinary Americans.  Populist approaches to campaign finance reform tend to focus on eliminating the potential for corruption by setting relatively low contributions limits to candidates and parties.   But such limits rarely stop the flow of money into politics. Instead they affect the channels through which that money travels into politicians’ accounts. And increasingly, that flow pours in from highly ideological donors who tend to pull party candidates toward the extremes.
+
+Our main argument in our new book, Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail, is that constraints on party organizations have forced candidates to rely heavily on ideological sources of funds.  While party organizations tend to be highly pragmatic, preferring to support moderate candidates who reflect the views of the broader electorate, other kinds of donors – both large and small – favor highly ideological candidates. The demise of party funding relative to other sources (due to restrictive campaign finance laws and judicial decisions) has contributed to the decrease in moderate officeholders in statehouses.
+
+Our view of party organizations runs counter to recent party “network” theorists who discount the importance of the formal party organizations. They claim instead that the party is really made up of the partisan network of allied interest groups, donors and activists who coordinate to help party candidates.  While we embrace this view of the party coalition, we think organizational forms matter a great deal. The professionals who work in party organizations seek chiefly to win elections. As a by-product of this motive, they support moderate candidates who have the broadest possible appeal to voters, particularly in competitive districts.  The wider partisan network, in contrast, is dominated by “purist” donors who want to elect people who agree with them on narrowly-based issue areas.  Laws that restrict party organizations ineluctably shift power to the purists who seek ideological policy goals, sometimes at the expense of winning elections. Hence the subtitle of our new book: “When Purists Prevail.”
+
+A main thrust of our argument is that party-friendly campaign finance laws should help decrease the ideological gap between the major political parties in the states and in the US Congress.  Our findings bear this out.
+
+Ideological Donors and their Impact on Legislatures
+
+One key finding shows that different types of donors allocate their funds differently across incumbents from different ideological backgrounds.  In each of the plots in Figure 1 below, the line indicates the proportion of funds from that source being contributed to incumbents at each point across the ideological spectrum. Note how party organizations concentrate their funds on moderates rather than those at the extremes. This type of distribution is unique among the actors we looked at. Issue groups give more to ideologues, particularly on the right side of the spectrum, while labor unions give overwhelmingly to liberal candidates. Individual donors and business groups tend to give across the spectrum but with a decided tilt toward conservatives (and they certainly do not favor moderates).
+
+Figure 1 – Donations to incumbents across the ideological spectrum
+
+What are the consequences of these patterns? We ultimately show how campaign finance laws, which affect the flow of money, shape the ideological make-up of state legislatures.  Figure 2 below shows the ideological distribution of legislators for states with contribution or fundraising limits on parties (top) and for states without either of those limits. Legislatures in unlimited states show considerably less polarization. The disparity between the two sets of states is like going from one competitive legislature that experienced considerable bipartisanship such as Indiana (which is less polarized than Congress) to another that is as polarized as Oregon (which is even more polarized than Congress). Our book illustrates other ways of assessing polarization with similar results.  We conclude that states that grant parties freer access to financing tend to have less polarized legislatures.  The potential implication is that such states provide more opportunities for bipartisan compromise and effective governing.
+
+Figure 2 – Ideological distribution of legislators in states with and without campaign finance laws
+
+Based on our results, we ultimately provide some insights for how we might approach campaign finance reform in a different way.  Specifically, we argue that reformers should consider a “party-centered” campaign finance system that boosts the influence of the pragmatist wing of the party.  To accomplish this strategy, reformers would have to give up on long-held assumptions about the value of imposing relatively low contribution limits on parties as a way to thwart corruption. Low contribution limits on parties distort the campaign finance system in ways that tend to benefit partisan purists at the expense of the broader electorate.   These purists have the means and motive to finance candidate campaigns by mobilizing passionate factions of like-mined donors throughout the nation, and through “Super PACs”, which are financed by mega-donors giving millions.
+
+For this reason we encourage reforms that build canals to channel the flow of money through highly transparent and broadly accountable party organizations. The strategy of erecting dams through contribution limits to hold back money does not work, and favors a relatively small group of purists.  To be sure, our position may not be popular because party organizations have a tainted legacy of machine politics in the minds of many. But a vast body of research on democratic politics indicates that parties play several vital roles, including aggregating interests, guiding voter choices, and holding politicians accountable with meaningful partisan labels.  It may be time for reformers to help facilitate this role for parties, rather than have the party organizations be increasingly overshadowed by other actors in the political system.
+
+This article is based on the new book, Campaign Finance and Political Polarization by Raymond J. La Raja and Brian F. Schaffner.
+
+Please read our comments policy before commenting.
+
+Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.
+
+About the author
+
+ Ray La Raja – University of Massachusetts Amherst
+
+ Ray La Raja is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and associate director of the UMass Poll. He is author of Small Change: Money, Political Parties and Campaign Finance Reform (U. Michigan Press 2008) and editor of New Directions in American Politics (Routledge, 2013). He is founding editor of The Forum, an electronic journal of applied research in American politics.
+
+Brian Schaffner – University of Massachusetts, Amherst
+
+ Brian Schaffner is a Professor in the political science department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a faculty associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on public opinion, campaigns and elections, political parties, and legislative politics. He is co-editor of the book Winning with Words: The Origins & Impact of Political Framing, co-author of Understanding Political Science Research Methods: The Challenge of Inference, author of Politics, Parties and Elections in America (7th edition). His research has appeared in over two-dozen refereed journal articles, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, Political Research Quarterly, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Social Science Quarterly.",REAL
+5680,"Terrorism Threat: Trump is Right — Profile, Profile, Profile","Terrorism Threat: Trump is Right — Profile, Profile, Profile Written by Selwyn Duke Email 
+You do it. I do it. He does it. She does it. The guy down the block does it. Everyone engages in profiling — continually. 
+For example, if you see a bunch of rough-hewn young men walking down the block and you move to the other side; if you patronize the deli with the clean-cut guy behind the counter and not the one with the tattooed, body-pierced, greasy-haired Greenwich Village retread; or prefer a 50-year-old school bus driver for your child to a 22-year-old one, you’ve engaged in profiling. How about when a mother would choose a 17-year-old girl to babysit her child but definitely not a 17-year-old boy because most child molestation is committed by males? Is that fair? After all, just as most Muslims don’t engage in terrorism, most young men don’t molest children. But life’s not fair. And anyone who thinks a profile is invalidated simply because most members of the group in question don’t conform to it, doesn’t understand profiling. 
+As Dr. Walter Williams has put it, profiling is a method by which we can make decisions based on scant information when the cost of obtaining more information would be too high. For example, since you can’t spend a month living with a prospective babysitter, getting to know him personally, we have to use “an observable or known physical attribute as a proxy or estimator of some other unobservable or unknown attribute,” as Williams has put it . It’s the same with airport security, where thousands of people must be screened within a short time. And doctors profile, too; to use some examples Williams has cited, black men have a prostate cancer rate twice that of white men, physicians check women and not men for breast cancer even though men occasionally develop it, and recommend prostate exams for men over 40 but not for 25-year-olds. When a doctor does this, is he guilty of “racism,” “sexism” and “ageism”? 
+What all this reflects is simply the reality of “diversity.” And given that criminality isn’t the one area of life where differences among groups suddenly cease to exist, it’s not surprising that authorities, instead of checking their brain at the door, also use profiling. In their realm, the practice is used to determine the probability that a given individual has committed a crime or has criminal intent. And a profile can include many factors. For example, I’m a member of perhaps the most profiled group in the nation — men — who police view more suspiciously than women because men commit an inordinate portion of the crime. Young people are also viewed more suspiciously for the same reason. 
+Aside from sex and age, other factors in a criminal profile can pertain to dress, behavior, the car being driven, whether a person is out of place in a given neighborhood and many other things — including race, ethnicity and religion. And this is where we have to be careful not to descend into prejudice and unjust discrimination. 
+Of course, we have to know what that would be. Here’s a good example: if you bat not an eye at profiling men or young people but then complain about profiling Muslims or blacks, you’re prejudiced. If you insist that considering racial factors is “racism” but don’t call the profiling of men and the young “sexism” and “ageism,” you’re prejudiced. And if after having been made aware of this double standard, you persist in it, you are, practically speaking, a bad person. 
+This point cannot be made often enough. There are only two kinds of profiling: Good profiling and bad profiling. Good profiling considers all relevant factors, in accordance with legitimate criminological science; bad profiling does not. Yet propagandists, and the genuinely misguided, have convinced people that the truth is precisely the opposite of what it is: that not cherry-picking — refusing to exclude certain relevant racial factors from a profile — is so-called “racial profiling” and is wrong. (They descend into further inanity in claiming that profiling Muslims is “racial profiling” even though “Islam” is not a race.) 
+I wrote “certain relevant racial factors” because the anti-profiling crew has no problem profiling whites. For example, we often hear that mass shooters are inordinately white; the kicker here is that this is untrue . As I demonstrated in 2014 by analyzing data provided by left-wing site Mother Jones , whites commit mass shootings in accordance with their overall percentage of the population (interestingly, the only group overrepresented in this category was Americans of Asian descent). This brings us to another point: leftists engage in profiling no less than anyone else. 
+They just do it all wrong. 
+Consider: immediately following the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, MSNBC suggested it might have been perpetrated by pro-lifers (profile: “white Christians”). CNN opined that it could have been the handiwork of militia types (profile: “white Christians”). Of course, probability dictated the culprits were precisely who they turned out to be: Muslims. This brings us to the last point: the Left engages in projection when it complains that comprehensive profiling reflects prejudice and unjust discrimination. 
+In reality, the Left’s profiling is all about prejudice and unjust discrimination. 
+As Dictionary.com informs , a prejudice is “an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.” The assumption that the San Bernardino terrorists were Muslim wasn’t a prejudice, but simply a reflection of criminological knowledge. Likewise, that 87 percent of those targeted by the NYC police’s stop-and-frisk program were black or Hispanic didn’t reflect prejudice, but the reality that 96 percent of all crimes in NYC are committed by blacks and Hispanics. 
+In contrast, the Left’s profiling is not about scientific correctness but political correctness, not about what a group does but what it is . Can a group be profiled? Christians, yes; Muslims, no. Whites, yes; blacks, no. Men, yes; women, no. Heterosexuals, yes; homosexuals, no. It is all prejudice, all of the time. 
+Unfortunately, none of the arguments above, no matter how well or how often stated, will do anything to purge this leftist prejudice. To paraphrase satirist Jonathan Swift, “You cannot reason a man out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.” Leftists are divorced from Truth and operate based on feelings, and a misbegotten emotional attachment cannot be remedied with an intellectual approach. Instead, political correctness must die. Until exhibiting such means what speaking the Truth does now — scorn, ostracism and career destruction — until it is rooted out from the culture-shaping media, academia and entertainment, we’ll be left with the Left’s profiling and not the right profiling. 
+How could this be accomplished? By counteracting the social code of political correctness and its attendant social pressure with social pressure designed to deny posturing leftists their illusory high ground; turn a source of moral preening into a source of shame. To oppose proper profiling is to harm our society. To support unjust double standards in profiling is to be prejudiced. And doing this even after hearing the truth, is to be a bad person. 
+
+, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
+Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
+No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language. 
+No product advertisements. 
+Please post comments in English. 
+Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
+5639,Why Are Some More Altruistic Than Others? Woman Who Nearly Lost Life In Car Crash Attempts To Find Out,"Abigail Marsh almost lost her life in a car accident. She was avoiding a dog in the middle of the street, and suddenly found her own life in danger. But a complete stranger stopped, got out of his car, helped her to safety, and then drove off, never even telling her his name.
+Why did he do it though? That was the biggest question Marsh found herself asking, and it changed the course of her life. She has since made a career out of understanding the human capacity to care for others; where it comes from; how it develops. Marsh wondered why people do selfless things, and resolved to find out. She soon realized very little work had been done on this topic.
+Altruism is a voluntary, costly behaviour that benefits only the other. And Marsh wanted to know what made some people more altruistic than others:
+The actions of the man who rescued me meet the most stringent definition of altruism, which is a voluntary, costly behaviour motivated by the desire to help another individual. So it’s a selfless act intended to benefit only the other. What could possibly explain an action like that? One answer is compassion, obviously, which is a key driver of altruism. But then the question becomes, why do some people seem to have more of it than others? And the answer may be that the brains of highly altruistic people are different in fundamental ways. 
+To really figure it out, she did the opposite of what one might expect, however. She started on the opposite end by analyzing psychopaths. People with this disorder are missing the desire to help other people. They are often cold, uncaring, and antisocial individuals. But they’re not typically insensitive to other people’s emotions, just to the signs that other people are distressed:
+The part of the brain that’s the most important for recognizing fearful expressions is called the amygdala. There are very rare cases of people who lack amygdalas completely, and they’re profoundly impaired in recognizing fearful expressions. And whereas healthy adults and children usually show big spikes in amygdala activity when they look at fearful expressions, psychopaths’ amygdalas are underreactive to these expressions. Sometimes they don’t react at all, which may be why they have trouble detecting these cues. Finally, psychopaths’ amygdalas are smaller than average by about 18 or 20 percent. 
+But in her Ted Talk, Marsh brings us back to altruism. She says that her main interest isn’t about why people don’t care for others, but why they do. “ So the real question is, could extraordinary altruism, which is the opposite of psychopathy in terms of compassion and the desire to help other people, emerge from a brain that is also the opposite of psychopathy?” she asks. 
+Extraordinary altruists have done things like give a healthy kidney to a complete stranger. But why?
+“T he brains of these extraordinary altruists have certain special characteristics,” she says. “ They are better at recognizing other people’s fear. They’re literally better at detecting when somebody else is in distress. This may be in part because their amygdala is more reactive to these expressions. And remember, this is the same part of the brain that we found was underreactive in people who are psychopathic.” 
+“And finally, their amygdalas are larger than average as well, by about eight percent,” she adds. 
+What’s intriguing is that, when people were asked why they gave their kidney to a complete stranger, they didn’t know how to answer. They didn’t consider themselves unique or special, but normal, just like everyone else. They just did it, because that’s who they are. Even more intriguing is that the people the donors were giving their kidneys to weren’t in a close circle that somehow already connected them through other loved ones. They were totally removed human beings. And that’s pretty extraordinary:
+I think the best description for this amazing lack of self-centeredness is humility, which is that quality that in the words of St. Augustine makes men as angels. And why is that? It’s because if there’s no center of your circle, there can be no inner rings or outer rings, nobody who is more or less worthy of your care and compassion than anybody else. And I think that this is what really distinguishes extraordinary altruists from the average person. 
+But the main lesson of Marsh’t talk is even more fundamental than all of this. “ I also think that this is a view of the world that’s attainable by many and maybe even most people. And I think this because at the societal level, expansions of altruism and compassion are already happening everywhere,” she explains. 
+Marsh believes that we all have the ability to take ourselves out of the center of the circle and extend the circle of compassion outward, so it brings in even total strangers. It looks like a globe outlined with people from all over the world holding hands in unity, in support, in love.
+Watch Marsh’s full Ted Talk below:
+
+ 
+",FAKE
+4322,Sources: Hillary Clinton to launch presidential campaign on Sunday,"Hillary Clinton plans to kick off her long-expected 2016 presidential campaign on Sunday, two Democratic sources told Fox News.
+
+The sources said the former secretary of state is expected to first reveal her decision to voters via social media. The sources added that, as has been widely expected, Clinton will then head to key early voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire next week.
+
+Clinton would be the first Democratic candidate to confirm a run for the White House, and she is considered the clear frontrunner to win the party’s nomination. If she were to win in 2016, she would be the first female U.S. president.
+
+Sources say, in advance of her announcement, Clinton has been holed up in recent days behind closed doors in policy meetings. The meetings have covered a range of subjects, including national security as well as domestic topics like the economy.
+
+Clinton would join the race after two Republicans -- Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky -- already declared. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also is expected to announce his plans next week. Despite not being an official candidate, Clinton has faced immense scrutiny from the media, and Republicans, over her use of personal email while secretary of state and her family foundation's acceptance of foreign donations. On Friday, Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus said Clinton ""has left a trail of secrecy, scandal and failed liberal policies that no image consultant can erase.""
+
+The specific timing of Clinton's announcement is unclear, though one source told The Guardian she will declare her candidacy through Twitter at noon Sunday. The tweet reportedly would be followed by a video and email announcement, and then a series of conference calls announcing her tour, which starts in Iowa.
+
+On Friday, two Democrats who are weighing whether to challenge Clinton also appeared to needle her looming candidacy.
+
+""I think history is full of examples where the inevitable front-runners are inevitable right up until they are no longer inevitable,"" former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley told Fox News. ""What I've heard all around the country is that people want new leaders, they want to hear the voices of new leaders and they want to start a robust debate about the issues our country faces.""
+
+Former Democratic Virginia Sen. Jim Webb also told Fox News ""people are looking for leadership that they can trust"" and leaders who say what they believe ""rather than massaging issues to try to get to ... one political safety zone or another, who will really take the risk of leadership.""
+
+Asked whether Clinton has done that in her career, Webb said: ""You'll have to ask her.""
+
+On Monday, Clinton’s political team – from senior advisers to state operatives – was put on alert for a presidential campaign announcement.
+
+A Democratic official earlier told Fox News that Clinton’s approach in next year’s election will illustrate that as a presidential candidate “she fights for every vote and takes nothing for granted"". This would be in sharp contrast to her failed 2008 run, when she was considered the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee but failed to see the burgeoning rival campaign of now-President Obama.
+
+The plan in 2016 is to have Clinton try to “connect with real people” better than she did eight years ago, according to a Democratic official with knowledge the announcement plans and strategy.
+
+Clinton started the campaign clock ticking last week when her team signed a lease for a massive new campaign headquarters at Pierrepont Plaza in Brooklyn, New York that occupies at least two floors. The campaign has at least 35 staffers in New York City alone.
+
+That action by Team Clinton means that by FEC rules, she has 15 days since the signing of the lease to file the paperwork officially for a 2016 presidential run because her expenditure on the lease was purportedly over $5,000.
+
+Sources said the bulk of Clinton staffers who have been hired already started moving into the campaign headquarters in Brooklyn this past Wednesday -- another sign the announcement is imminent.
+
+The Clinton campaign continues to scoop up key campaign operatives, with both Karen Finney and Oren Shur recently joining her VIP team. Finney will work as strategic communications adviser, and Shur as director of paid media, according to a Clinton spokesperson.
+
+Fox News’ Ed Henry and Serafin Gomez and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9165,Will Hillary Clinton Get America Back on Track?,"Will Hillary Clinton Get America Back on Track? Posted on Oct 31, 2016 U.S. Embassy London / CC BY-ND 2.0 
+The parallels are striking. In the last decades of the nineteenth century – the so-called “Gilded Age”— America experienced inequality on a scale it had never before seen, combining wild opulence and searing poverty. 
+American industry consolidated into a few giant monopolies, or trusts, headed by “robber barons” who wielded enough power to drive out competitors. A few Wall Street titans like J.P. Morgan controlled the nation’s finances. 
+These men used their huge wealth to rig the system. Their lackeys literally deposited stacks of money on the desks of pliant legislators, prompting the great jurist Louis Brandeis to tell America it a choice: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.“ 
+We face a similar choice today. 
+Advertisement Square, Site wide 
+Then, America chose democracy. President Theodore Roosevelt, railing against the “ malefactors of great wealth ,” broke up the trusts. And he pushed Congress to end the most blatant forms of corruption. 
+His fifth cousin, FDR, went further – enacting social insurance for the elderly, the unemployed, and the disabled; a minimum wage and forty-hour workweek; the right to unionize; compensation for workers injured on the job; and strict limits on Wall Street. 
+In other words, between 1870 and 1900, American capitalism got off track. Between 1901 and 1937 (the effective end of the New Deal), America put capitalism back on track. 
+We’re now in the Second Gilded Age, and American capitalism is again off track. It takes about three generations for Americans to forget how our system, unattended, goes wrong. And then to right it. 
+Inequality is now nearly at the same level it was in the late nineteenth century. Half of all families are poorer today than they were a decade-and-a-half ago, the pay of CEOs and Wall Street bankers is in the stratosphere, and child poverty is on the rise. 
+Meanwhile, American industry is once again consolidating – this time into oligopolies dominated by three or four major players . You can see it in pharmaceuticals, high tech, airlines, food, Internet service, communications, health insurance, and finance. 
+The biggest Wall Street banks, having brought the nation to the brink of destruction a few years ago, are once again exercising vast economic power. And big money has taken over American politics. 
+Will we put capitalism back on track, as we did before? 
+The vile election of 2016 doesn’t seem to offer much hope. But future historians looking back on the tumult might see the start of another era of fundamental reform. 
+Today’s uprising against the established order echoes the outrage average Americans felt in the late nineteenth century when they pushed Congress to enact the Sherman Antitrust Act, and when Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan fulminated against big business and finance. 
+One hundred twenty years later, Bernie Sanders – the unlikeliest of presidential candidates – won 22 states and 46 percent of the pledged delegates in the Democratic primaries, and pushed Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to adopt many of his proposals. 
+At the same time, Donald Trump – a faux populist – has laid bare the deep discontents of America’s white working class, which both parties have long neglected. Not incidentally, Trump has also jeopardized the social fabric of America and nearly destroyed the Republican Party. 
+Hopefully some of America’s current elite will conclude, as it did at the turn of the last century, that they’d do better with a smaller share of a growing economy fueled by a flourishing middle class, in a society whose members feel the system is basically fair, than in one riven by social and political strife. 
+History has proven the early generation of reformers correct. While other nations opted for communism or fascism, Americans chose to make capitalism work for the many rather than the few. 
+If Donald Trump is elected next week, all bets are off. 
+But if Hillary Clinton assumes the presidency, could she become another Teddy or Franklin D. Roosevelt? 
+You may think her too much of an establishment figure, too close to the moneyed interests, too cautious. But no one expected dramatic reform when each of the Roosevelts took the reins. They were wealthy patricians, in many respects establishment figures. Yet each rose to the occasion. 
+Perhaps she will, too. The timing is right, and the need is surely as great as it was over a century ago. 
+As Mark Twain is reputed to have quipped, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”",FAKE
+351,"Defense Bill Would Put 100,000 Untraceable Guns On Streets","That may soon be possible thanks to a provision tacked onto this year's National Defense Authorization Act, which the House of Representatives is set to pass this week.
+
+The provision was added as an amendment during a late-night session at the end of last month during which the legislation authorizing the nation's military activities for 2016 was drafted.
+
+According to a white paper prepared for Congress by the Army opposing the amendment, the measure would allow the unregulated distribution of up to 100,000 Colt .45s, more formally known as .45-caliber semiautomatic M1911 handguns.
+
+The provision, added by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), changes parts of federal rules that were meant to boost rifle skills in the country under a program dating back to Teddy Roosevelt. Under existing law, which was updated in 1996, the Department of Defense makes surplus military rifles available to the public through something known as the Civilian Marksmanship Program, which has a regional headquarters in Rogers' state.
+
+Rogers' amendment would change language in the law that specifies certain rifles allowed in the program to include the much broader category of ""firearms.""
+
+Although the marksmanship program aims to educate youth about safety and shooting, according to the military's white paper, ""There is a significant risk of approximately 100K semi-automatic handguns that are virtually untraceable, being released into commerce.""
+
+That's because although the amendment specifies that the weapons cannot be sold to people who are barred by law from having guns, the CMP sells guns over the Internet, and has no mechanism to verify who is making purchases. By law, the CMP ""can sell ... only to members of CMP affiliated clubs who are also U.S. citizens, over 18 years of age and who are legally eligible to purchase a firearm,"" according to eligibility requirements posted on its website. On top of that, although the CMP is allowed by law to sell guns across state lines, it is not covered by the Gun Control Act, and is not required to keep records tracking purchasers.
+
+The Army noted in its opposition that the Department of Justice has tracked an average of nearly 1,800 Colt .45s being used in crimes every year over the last decade, including a significant but unspecified number of those guns that were originally military surplus.
+
+A spokesman for Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said his boss agreed with the Army and would try to strip the amendment.
+
+""This provision, which the Army has said it does not want or need, could potentially put nearly 100,000 untraceable .45-caliber military-grade handguns on our streets,"" the spokesman, Michael Amato, said in an email. ""This provision is an unnecessary risk.""",REAL
+7994,The Quasi-Legal Coup-Hillary Clinton Information Operations In Election 2016,"Posted on November 7, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 
+By George Eliason, an American journalist living in Ukraine. 
+“The purpose of ” Inform and Influence Operations” is not to provide a perspective, opinion, or lay out a policy. It is defined as the ability to make audiences “think and act” in a manner favorable to the mission objectives. This is done through applying perception management techniques which target the audiences emotions, motives, and reasoning. 
+These techniques are not geared for debate. It is to overwhelm and change the target psyche. 
+Using these techniques information sources can be manipulated and those that write, speak, or think counter to the objective are relegated as propaganda, ill-informed, or irrelevant.” 
+What if the strife, rumor, and clamor were part and parcel of an Inform and Influence Operation against Americans to determine the election outcome? Bear with me for a moment as I lay out the proofs. The quote above is from an early 2015 article with the practitioner showing what it could look like in the civilian world. 
+” What would we do? Disrupt, deny, degrade, deceive, corrupt, usurp or destroy the information. The information, please don’t forget, is the ultimate objective of cyber. That will directly impact the decision-making process of the adversary’s leader who is the ultimate target.” – Joel Harding 
+IO or IIO (Inform and Influence Operations) as defined by the US Army includes the fields of psychological operations and military deception. All of this is used in the civilian world the same way by private contractors. 
+In this election, private contractors were hired to focus their capacity to influence the American population. This is proven and you deserve a step by step look at it if you are voting. 
+What Project Veritas shows is damning evidence of what I have been documenting in the emigre series articles since spring 2016. 
+By using mainstream media, they started an integrated approach which includes influencing their political opponent’s decision making. Media is given messages that follow the same themes and fill the entire information space by using an across the board effort. The effort drowns out any other message. 
+According to the Observer, this has been happening throughout the election cycle to benefit Hillary Clinton. “ Rather than informing voters to enrich democracy , the mainstream media has developed a feedback loop between support for particular candidates and the political agenda they intend to support. The freedom of the press is necessary for a democracy to function.” The article further points out that it was the media that helped rig the primaries against Bernie Sanders. 
+Wikileaks has clearly shown the interplay between mainstream media and the Clinton campaign. And they have shown clearly that most of the mainstream media are working to influence the election . This goes beyond partisan electioneering. All of this follows the exact pattern, a well planned Information Operation against the American public . 
+As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was also the Ex-Officio Board Member of the BBG . The BBG (Broadcasting Board of Governors) run RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty). Most of the 8-member board, appointed by the President of the United States, are the who’s who of powerful media moguls in film, news, print, and radio. Appointment to the BBG is like being awarded an ambassador position for the media industry. It’s also why big media carries the same line or themes. 
+The 7th member of the board of directors which runs RFE/RL is Mathew Armstrong . He is a longtime friend and mentor to retired Brigadier general Joel Harding. He provides Harding a lot of access and influence in media. Armstrong’s background is public relations. He is an expert in IO and IIO operations. His bio: Author, lecturer, and strategist on public diplomacy and international media . He has worked on traditional and emerging security issues with both civilian and military government agencies, news organizations, think tanks, and academia across several continents. 
+In what appears to be a conflict of interest, at least two BBG board members are working actively for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. 
+Karen Kornbluh is helping refine and to get Hillary Clinton’s message out. ” All of them are names to watch if Clinton wins — and key jobs at the FCC and other federal agencies are up for grabs.” 
+According to her bio : Karen founded the New America Foundation’s Work and Family Program and is a senior fellow for Digital Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Karen has written extensively about technology policy, women, and family policy for The Atlantic , The New York Times and The Washington Post . New York Times columnist David Brooks cited her Democracy article “Families Valued,” focused on “juggler families” as one of the best magazine articles of 2006. 
+Michael Kempner is the founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of MWW Group, a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter, and may get a greater role if she is elected . Kempner is a member of the Public Relations Hall of Fame. Michael Kempner hired Anthony Weiner after the sexting scandal broke in 2011. 
+Jeff Shell, chairman of the BBG and Universal Filmed Entertainment is supporting a secondary role by being an honor roll donor to the Atlantic Council . While the BBG is supposed to be neutral it has continuously helped increase tensions in Eastern Europe. While giving to the Atlantic Council may not be illegal while in his position, currently, the Atlantic Council’s main effort is to ignite a war with Russia. This may set up a major conflict of interest. 
+According to journalist Robert Parry “The people that will be taking senior positions and especially in foreign policy believe “This consensus is driven by a broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East.” 
+Parry goes on to say that at the forefront of this is the Atlantic Council, a think tank associated with NATO. Their main goal is a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. 
+The Atlantic Council is the think tank for the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition) which is associated with NATO. The CEEC has only one goal. The question to candidates that mattered is “Are you willing to go to war with Russia?” Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support throughout the campaign. 
+The Central and Eastern European Coalition represent the various Central and Eastern European countries to the US government. What makes them special in an election is that they control a 20 million person strong bloc vote in key states across the country and sway elections by themselves. The price of a Clinton win is war with Russia. 
+While the rest of the BBG board support Clinton’s proposed policy of closing Syrian airspace, the CEEC wants it because it will mean direct conflict with Russia. Hillary Clinton’s first foray into Islamic politics led to genocide and made the way for ISIS setting up training camps in Kosovo. Hillary Clinton has been friendly with jihadists for as long as she has had a national political career. According to US Special Forces on the ground in Syria training the moderates, there are NO moderates to train . 
+Green Berets are forced to train jihadis that they know will eventually attack us. Support our troops? Give them good, honorable missions. They deserve better, don’t they? 
+As you go through the above links, the information is staggering. Shown are large groups of people strategically located in swing states that will do anything to get her elected. The question is why? 
+Politically, we have a two party system. If you say you are Republican, people have at least a general idea of what you mean. For Democrats, it’s no different. There are different kinds of politics that fit easily under each umbrella. But the point is they are recognizable and we know where they stand on issues. 
+Tell me, what are OUNb beliefs? OUNb is a political party and set of beliefs just like Republican or Democrat. The reason I am asking is that you can’t tell me. The odds are you haven’t heard about it before. When the Atlantic Council or The Project for the New American Century takes all the senior positions in the Clinton White House, it will be filled with OUNb and similar political partisans for the first time without dissenting voices. 
+“Unity to act when required has been the diaspora’s mantra – this cannot be disputed . 
+As time moves on, we see that things take a natural course. We see that two wings of the OUN – (OUNb)Banderivtsi and (OUNm)Melnykivtsi – are working actively on the international level, working in partnership and currently are in strong negotiations about becoming a single entity again.” 
+The OUNb political party started under Stepan Bandera and their political beliefs are quite literally Nazi. In the 1930’s they swore undying loyalty to Adolf Hitler and the Diaspora was directing Waffen SS battalions from America secretly even as other Ukrainian emigres were fighting them. The UCCA is the head of OUNb thought in America and now they want America to celebrate their totalitarian beliefs with them. If you disagree with totalitarian politics, you are the enemy. After a brief description of what kind of beliefs the people have from the Atlantic Council that are taking up cabinet positions, the proof it is happening now follows. 
+The OUNb were the SS that manned the concentration camps during the Holocaust. They successfully murdered 3 million war prisoners by starving them to death. The OUNb killed over 250,000 Jews, 500,000 Ukrainians, and committed the first Holocaust at Babi Yar. Today the UCCA is funding and running the volunteer battalions raping and killing in Donbass the same way. 
+They and the other emigre group leaders are also behind buying the media headlines and reach, damage control, and the Information Operation against Americans today. If you want to know what American politics will look like within a few years, look at Ukraine. 
+There are people who live abroad, who do not feel fully accepted as a minority, and here there is a phenomenon which I call long-distance nationalism. . .The members of the diaspora create for themselves an image of the home land, which is a stronger emotional investment than the country in which they live…One negative consequence of the diaspora experience is the emergence of what Ander-son calls non-responsible politics: diaspora participation in the politics in the country with which they identify can often be toxic, and their impact can be felt through the funding of particular political figures, nationalist propaganda, and even weapons…- Multiculturalism, memory, and ritualization: Ukrainian nationalist monuments in Edmonton, Alberta – Pers Anders Rudling 
+With the field day the Emigres and paid media had with Donald Trump over David Duke, they forgot to tell you that Ukrainian emigres supporting Hillary Clinton hired Duke in Ukraine as a professor of history and sent their American kids to learn there. Almost all Ukrainian politicians have been through this fascist education system known as MAUP . The Ukrainian American and other likeminded ethnics are the people that will fill the senior foreign and domestic cabinet positions. 
+“ OUNb leader Ivan Kobasa also took responsibility of making sure the Ukrainian-Americans received the proper secondary education at Ukrainian nationalist schools(MAUP) in Ukraine. From the mid-2000’s enrollment in this educational system has skyrocketed into the hundreds of thousands. Today almost all members of the current Ukrainian government are graduates of this ideological system that was taught to them by moderates like David Duke who is also a graduate of the MAUP system.” 
+“I do care about social and economic issues affecting every American, but given the war in Ukraine, there is only one issue that we as Ukrainian Americans must focus on: Ukraine . 
+The Ukrainian issue “trumps” all other personal issues! 
+A vote for Trump is a vote against Ukraine! 
+When it comes to U.S. elections, Ukrainian Americans are a statistically minor, divided, unorganized voting group. The Central and East European Coalition is a coalition of U.S.-based organizations that represent their countries of heritage, a voting group of over 20 million people. The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and the Ukrainian National Association are member organizations of the CEEC. Americans of East and Central European heritage can make a significant difference and influence the election result if their attention is focused.” Ukraine Weekly The Presidential Election: Can We Make A Difference 
+Hillary Clinton’s response is she will defend Ukraine’s borders! Even though it has no eastern or northern border to defend. She has guaranteed to start a war with Russia if she is elected. 
+Not only is Clinton buying the media through these second parties, but they are hiring professional, former military psyops professionals to deny pertinent information from voters and disrupt her political opponents message. At the same time, they are paying an across the board mainstream media to simultaneously publish articles and video that lift her campaign up, disrupt, destroy, and drown out alternate messages. 
+Wikileaks noted this when it exposed the Clinton campaign’s program to incite violence and obfuscate the point. The Huffington Post example of this is” Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar , rampant xenophobe , racist , misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S”. 
+“ We understand the Clinton camp has hired beaucoup and Zwanzig (a lot) of trolls, we also understand the Kremlin has done the same. We just do not know if Trump has followed suit. From a counterintelligence perspective, this is confusing as heck. 
+One of the really neat things about this election is seeing all my information operations and information warfare friends on social media, contributing and commenting, looking darned intelligent! Theirs is normally the voice of reason, maturity, and intelligence.” Joel Harding 
+By systematically and continually attacking the voter’s psyche, Americans are being treated in the same way our government treats countries they overthrow . The right to make an informed vote has been denied to support any particular candidate. 
+What does an Inform and Influence Operation entail against the American public? Read the following carefully. The term “anti-western” refers to anyone that disagrees with whom he is working for. In this case, he works for the Ukrainian Emigres. This also covers Syria. Every media outlet or journalist writing about these subjects that aren’t carrying the line he lays out is the enemy. These are the tactics being used today during the election. 
+“I am building a database of planners , operators, logisticians, hackers, and anyone wanting to be involved with special activities I will call ‘inform and influence activities’. I have received a few different suggestions to help organize operations – of all sorts – against anti-Western elements. No government approval, assistance or funding. This skirts legalities. This is not explicitly illegal and it may not even be legal, at this point. That grey area extends a long way. I am only trying to assess the availability of people willing to participate in such efforts. Technology, equipment and facility offers are also appreciated. If you would like to be included in my database, please send a tailored resume to joel_harding@” 
+If you don’t think this is possible , this has been going on around you for a long time. look at the credentials of retired Brigadier General Joel Harding and decide for yourself. But first look at what he promises he can do for you when you hire him. 
+“ Information operations and warfare, also known as influence operations, includes the collection of tactical, operational and strategic information about a competitor as well as the dissemination of information and propaganda in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an competitor or adversary in the corporate, government or military realm. 
+It is our job to maximize your advantages over your competitor while minimizing your competitor. We work on the national level down to the individual level. We seek to give you every advantage possible in order to advance your position, increase your reputation, and maximize your standing in your field.” 
+“ Bio- Joel Harding spent 26 years in the Army ; his first nine years were spent as an enlisted soldier, mostly in Special Forces, as an SF qualified communicator and medic, on an A-Team. After completing his degree, Joel then received his commission as an Infantry Officer and after four years transitioned to the Military Intelligence Corps. 
+In the mid 1990s, Joel was working in the Joint Staff J2 in support of special operations, where he began working in the new field called Information Operations. Eligible Receiver 1997 was his trial by fire, after that he became the Joint Staff J2 liaison for IO to the CIA, DIA, NSA, DISA and other assorted agencies in the Washington DC area, working as the intelligence lead on the Joint Staff IO Response Cell for Solar Sunrise and Moonlight Maze . Joel followed this by a tour at SOCCENT and then INSCOM, working in both IO and intelligence. 
+Specializing in Russian Information Warfare for the past 30+ months. Consultant, advisor and subject matter expert on Information Operations, Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy with more than 19 years practical, policy in IO, SC and PD. 35 years experience in broader defense and national security matters. I have lectured all over the world about Information Warfare and Cyberwar and have spoken at numerous conferences. I am currently focusing on the Ukraine/Russia information war with a simultaneous heavy emphasis on the accompanying hybrid war. I currently teach classes about Russian Information Warfare and a second class on Propaganda/Agitprop. Specialties: Information Operations/Information Warfare, Public Diplomacy, Strategic Communication, Counter-Disinformation, Electronic Warfare, Deception, Operational Security, Cyberwar, Intelligence, Special Forces and Special Operations. Primary author Ukraine National Strategy for Information Policy, submitted in 2015 and again in 2016.” 
+With his resume, no guess work is needed to understand how effective his friends are. Before going further, ask yourself if this is what elections are supposed to be? 
+As a litmus test take Hillary’s name out and put down what is known just through Wikileaks in a list. Put McCain’s name, Kucinich, Paul, Bush, and ask yourself would this be an acceptable candidate? Add what’s been shown here. Is there an acceptable candidate? 
+If any of them would be acceptable, sorry like many others you drank the kool-aid already. 
+“ I’ve seen how our heroes, activists , journalists, and celebrities have completely sold their souls to support something no person with an iota of morality would do. I’ve seen them say and do things to derail candidates who would have been a million times better for those less fortunate around us. It’s unfortunate most pretend to fight the establishment, to act like they love the people more than they love the struggle and the relevance that it brings them. I am not one of those and I won’t continue to be until the good Lord takes me.” Cesar Vargas 
+Hillary Clinton is not a Nazi. But every position of relevance will be filled with people that really are political Nazis. They are technically integral nationalists. They look down on democracy in any form. At least now you know what kind of government you are voting for. 
+Regardless of who wins, there are 2000 tanks, artillery, and rockets pointed my way, waiting for this election to be over. I am an American that lives in Donbass, and wrote many of the early breaking stories and much of the background about the conflict in Ukraine. 
+If you cannot objectively look and see a more sophisticated version of what happened here through 2014 is going on, I can’t help you. Soon the OUNb will order the volunteer battalions to start killing civilians on a large scale again. I will go back to reporting on the war. 
+If all these things weren’t being done, I would keep it simply about policy. Russia is not an enemy of the United States. Instead, I believe I am witnessing a quiet coup that demands legality in America. 
+If this Information Operation is allowed to win the 2016 presidency, then elections are fruitless. Every other election will be based on the same strategy. They will have to be for any candidate to win. 
+Your voice, your views, your informed choice will no longer matter. The IIO practitioner kills dissent. That’s their job. They’re only doing their job.",FAKE
+6997,HAPPENING: FBI Reopens Case Against Aggro Granny After New Emails Discovered!,"Emails discovered during investigation of Jew Anthony Wiener sending dick pics to jailbait! 
+HA! 
+New York Times : 
+Newly discovered emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server were found after the F.B.I. seized electronic devices once shared by Anthony D. Weiner and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, federal law enforcement officials said Friday. 
+The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, sent to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case — one federal official said they numbered in the thousands — potentially reigniting an issue that has weighed on the presidential campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less than two weeks before the election. 
+In a letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, and that they “appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” 
+… 
+“Director Comey’s letter refers to emails that have come to light in an unrelated case, but we have no idea what those emails are and the director himself notes they may not even be significant,” said John D. Podesta, chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. 
+He added: “It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election.” 
+Mrs. Clinton, arriving Friday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, waved at members of the media gathered on the tarmac but ignored shouted questions. 
+HA! 
+She won’t even take questions! 
+There was no damage control plan again – just like when she collapsed on 911! 
+I’m not really sure how it makes sense that Weiner would have these on his phone, or why the FBI would seize the phone of his wife because he was sending dick pics to jailbait (unless he was using her phone to send them, lel) – but I’ve always said, Weiner is a funny Jew! 
+I never thought he would turn-out to be this funny! 
+Original article follows. tfw you just lost the game 
+OH YES YOU READ THAT HEADLINE RIGHT, SIR. 
+YESSIREE DOG. 
+I knew James Comey was a pretty cool guy when a Negro in Congress asked him to investigate me and he was like “Yeah, dat nigga hot as a muffuggah. Watchoo want ah invesegate how much azz he be kickin in dem toobs? Get the fug outta here with that shit, dawg.” 
+And now: total bro confirmed. 
+RT : 
+The FBI has learned of more emails involving Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she headed the State Department, FBI Director James Comey told several members of Congress, telling them he is reopening the investigation. 
+“ In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of email that appear to be pertinent ” to Clinton’s investigation, Comey wrote to the chairs of several relevant congressional committees, adding that he was briefed about the messages on Thursday. “ I agree that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation. ” 
+The FBI director cautioned, however, that the bureau has yet to assess the importance of the material, and that he doesn’t know how long that will take. 
+Stocks fell after Comey’s announcement, CNBC reported. 
+More like the sky just fell. 
+And underneath it we see Jesus Christ himself wearing a MAGA hat, smiling like a smug Pepe and whispering “lock her up.” Yo dawg, we heard you like America. So we sent Jesus Christ himself to make sure Donald Trump gets elected. 
+Seriously, people. Even if you don’t necessarily believe in Christianity, you have to admit that this is some kind of divine miracle that just happened here. 
+Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, praised the decision to reopen the case. 
+“Now that the FBI has reopened the matter, it must conduct the investigation with impartiality and thoroughness,” he said in a statement. “The American people deserve no less and no one should be above the law.” 
+Almost 15,000 new Clinton emails were discovered in September. 
+In mid-October, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, promised at least “four new hearings” after Congress returns from recess in November based on the new emails, which lawmakers received but have not been made public. 
+“This is a flashing red light of potential criminality,” Chaffetz said. 
+The new evidence points to a “quid pro quo” arrangement between the FBI and the State Department, he noted. 
+Welp. 
+That’s it. 
+It’s over. 
+There is just no way with an open investigation hanging over her head, and the FBI openly stating that it is so severe they have to act immediately, that she can possibly be elected. 
+I do understand that there is no evidence that Hillary’s own people care if she is a criminal or not when it comes to polling, but this seriously demoralizes them, making them much less likely to vote. At the same time, it is a massive morale boost to the Republicans who aren’t necessarily on the Trump Train but hate Hillary, ensuring that they’ll go out and vote. 
+Seriously guys. I did have my doubts. But this clears them up. We are 11 days away from the election. 
+And this drops. 
+And I guarantee Team Trump has something to drop next week. The Russian conspiracy might even be memed into reality and Putin might drop the hidden server. Assange still has something big. 
+We won, guys. 
+Honestly, I’ve got tears in my eyes right now. 
+God Bless America.",FAKE
+4582,"Protesting Donald Trump’s Election, Not Wars, Surveillance, or Deportations","Protests and vigils have erupted in major cities and smaller towns across the United States in response to Donald Trump's election as the 45th president last night. Students in California also participated in a walk-out, and there were protests at some college campuses. It turns out it's important for everyone to vote, but also to vote in the correct way.
+
+Protesters chanted various anti-Trump slogans, with some calling attention to Hillary Clinton's apparent victory in the popular vote. The protest in New York City was organized by Socialist Alternative NYC, which blamed the Democratic Party for failing to stop Trump, insisting the party should have nominated Bernie Sanders instead of Clinton. Based on the results, where Trump performed at about the level of the last two Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, while Clinton received millions of votes fewer than Barack Obama did, any other Democratic nominee would have done better.
+
+Some protesters burned American flags, but there were no immediate reports of violence at the demonstrations—protests in the Bay Area last night over Trump's victory did descend into violence, and may do so again. Anti-Trump protests are not a new thing this election cycle, nor is violence, although these are the first after the democratically-held election on Tuesday. In Mid-October, video released by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas showed a Democratic operative bragging about hiring protesters to incite violence at Trump rallies. In March, Trump, then in the midst of his run of primary wins, said protests like the ones that occurred in Chicago outside the Trump Tower had ""energized"" his supporters. Those protests also did not have specific messages on policy. In June, I wrote that attacks by anti-Trump protesters on Trump supporters because of the danger he posed as an imperial president was an exercise in blame-shifting. ""Those so concerned about what Trump might do to the country that they feel called to stalk and attack Trump supporters should take a long look in the mirror instead,"" I wrote. ""It'll have the added benefit of not building more support for Trump, as violence against his supporters certainly will."" The tactics and the attitudes underlying them continued, and probably helped Trump pull off one of the biggest upsets in modern presidential history.
+
+Outside of demonstrations surrounding specific police shootings, and the anti-Trump protests, there seem to have been few major protests in the U.S. in the last eight years over the kinds of policies—like U.S. wars overseas and even immigration policy—that purportedly animated protests during the Bush years. Certainly, the candidate produced by the party that claims to be concerned about these issues did not reflect an electorate that voted based on those issues. Clinton was the architect of a number of U.S. interventionists and an advocate of policies like the drug war that contributed to the refugee crisis at the southern border. The Obama administration ramped up deportations, and has continued to rip families apart into its last year.
+
+Trump's election has already re-ignited concern about these issues. The left has rediscovered the usefulness of limited government power, as Robby Soave noted Tuesday night. Although Republicans retained control of Congress in the elections, a number of Republican members did not endorse Trump. While failed presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is a pro-interventionist fan of executive power, others, such as Kentucky's Sen. Rand Paul, could become important advocates of limited executive and government power and non-interventionism. Arizona's Sen. Jeff Flake, another Republican who didn't endorse Trump, meanwhile, is likely to press Trump and Republicans on immigration. Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan tweeted a picture of himself, Kentucky's Rep. Tom Massie, and Rand Paul, with the the caption ""We're putting the band back together #teamliberty"".
+
+On one level, the protests are a neat demonstration of the First Amendment, and would be so if the roles were reversed, although I'm skeptical if tonight's protesters would feel the same way. A progressive friend suggested Trump supporters would have gotten violent if Clinton won—not an uncommon belief. Clinton called the idea that Trump might not accept the outcome of the election, as protesters appear to be doing, ""horrific."" The protesters are also risking the salience of the message against policies there is now an opportunity to try to push a new president in a better direction on, and avoid the bipartisan continuity of the war on terror and related policies from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.
+
+Donald Trump may personify the problem of unchecked executive power, but the problem is with how the system has developed into that position. Many Obama voters believed they were voting for ""change,"" but President Obama brought a lot of Bush policies along with him. Guantanamo Bay is still open, the U.S. is engaged in military operations in at least half a dozen countries, the post-9/11 security apparatus remains in place. Obama did not personify the solution to unchecked executive power or violent U.S. foreign policy. The solutions have to be codified (and, woah, actually are, in the Constitution), with a rollback of the decades-long project of accumulated executive power and a restoration of co-equal branches of a Constitutional government. If the debates are again made about personalities, the opportunity for positive change could be lost, yet again.",REAL
+7658,"Teacher To 11 yr Old: 'I Can't Wait Until Trump Is Elected,He's Going To Deport All You Muslims'","0 427 
+“That’s going to be you,” the Academy of Excellence teacher allegedly warned a 12-year-old Muslim student after showing the class a movie about the 9/11 attacks. And if that sounds outrageous, brace yourself because it gets a lot worse. 
+No wonder the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Arizona are siccing the U.S. Dept. of Justice and the U.S. Dept. of Education on this travesty of a public charter school and this shameful example of an educator’s sorry a**. Heather Weaver from the ACLU’s national office reports they’ve filed formal complaints on behalf of the Muslim student and his family. 
+Asli Noor and her five children are refugees who settled in Phoenix, Arizona after fleeing Somalia. Like most parents, she wants opportunities and a good education for her children. And for many families — especially those living in low-income neighborhoods — that means a public charter school like the sadly misnamed “Excellence Academy.” 
+The boy and his eight-year-old sister (referred to in the complaint as A.A. and F.A.) had started the 2015-2016 school year when the family’s new set of troubles began. 
+According to the complaints, an “Academy of Excellence” teacher named Faye Myles began “singling out” the then 11-year-old, sixth grade Muslim student as the 2015-16 school year began for “disfavorable treatment because of his faith and nationality.” 
+‘Another time, when A.A. raised his hand to answer a question, his teacher snapped at him — “All you Muslims think you are so smart” — in front of the entire class.’ 
+Oh, and then the boy recalls the math and science teacher for grades 5-8 digressing into a special kind of lesson in civics and current events. 
+‘I can’t wait until Trump is elected. He’s going to deport all you Muslims. Muslims shouldn’t be given visas. They’ll probably take away your visa and deport you. You’re going to be the next terrorist, I bet.’ 
+Faye Myles also allegedly found other ways to wound her young Muslim student with her bigotry. She repeatedly denied him the right to pray during recess, which is hard to imagine ever happening to a Christian student. The child also claims his “Academy of Excellence” teacher would also would tell him to “shut up” and punish him during class “downtime” when the other students were allowed to talk with each other. 
+The bus rides home added to the child’s misery as his classmates began to follow the teacher’s example and pile on the insults. 
+‘On the bus ride home, A.A.’s classmates took up his teacher’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant crusade, taunting him about the fact that his visa would be revoked because he is a Muslim, calling him a “terrorist,” and accusing him of planning to blow up the bus.’ 
+The child, of course, started feeling anxious and physically ill “with a stomach ache” and had no desire to return to the “Academy of Excellence.” 
+In January, Asli Noor met with school officials to complain about these incidents. Three days later, the school asked her to pick her son up early because he had supposedly tried to open the school bus’ emergency window. Noor demanded they verify these accusations with footage from the security camera but school officials refused. 
+And then Brenda Nelson, an “Academy of Excellence” board member, printed out two “voluntary” withdrawal forms for A.A. and his younger sister F.A. She then allegedly ordered Ms. Noor to sign them, saying: 
+‘Get your kids out of here. I don’t want them here.’ 
+When Asri Noor begged for time to find another school for her children, Brenda Nelson callously refused. 
+Unfortunately, these incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry in publicly-funded schools are happening more frequently. Think Progress reports that even in schools where teachers try to fight it, Trump-inspired bullying is a serious issue. 
+‘In spite of some teachers’ valiant efforts to teach students about Trump, it would appear that schoolchildren already invoke the candidate’s name to scare their Latino and Muslim classmates, referencing the candidate’s harsh claims of Latino criminals and Muslim terrorists.’ 
+And, sadly, it’s not just the kids. 
+‘A predominantly Latino elementary school in California was graffiti-tagged with the words “Build the wall higher” last week, alluding to Trump’s policy plan to build a southern U.S. border wall to keep out undocumented immigrants.’ 
+And in case you assume the “Academy of Excellence” teacher is one of those mean white Trump supporters, you’re wrong. Apparently, she’s a mean black Trump supporter. @KhaledBeydoun The teacher works at Academy of Excellence & her name is Faye Myles per the article. She should be called out. pic.twitter.com/BbL3YdzEG8 
+— John Q Archibald (@JohnQarchibald) October 30, 2016 
+Featured image: Lynn Koenig via Getty Images . Share this Article! ",FAKE
+4999,Trump on Clinton: 'She took a short-circuit in the brain',"Windham, New Hampshire (CNN) Donald Trump pumped up his attacks on Hillary Clinton's character Saturday night by suggesting that the former secretary of state is not mentally fit to be president.
+
+""She took a short-circuit in the brain. She's got problems,"" Trump said, seizing on Clinton's explanation that she ""short-circuited"" a recent answer about her truthfulness in discussing her email server.
+
+""Honestly, I don't think she's all there,"" he added.
+
+The attacks flowed from the Republican nominee as he once again tore into Clinton as ""unstable,"" ""unbalanced"" and ""totally unhinged.""
+
+Trump's stepped-up attacks on Clinton come as he has been falling in a slew of recent battleground states and national polls and as top Republicans have fretted about Trump repeatedly knocking himself off message by engaging in controversies rather than focusing on Clinton.
+
+While Trump in the last week escalated a feud with the parents of a fallen U.S. soldier and opened a party rift by saying he was not yet ready to endorse the Republican speaker of the House, Trump on Friday launched into a lengthy and focused attack on Clinton during his rallies, and built on those attacks on Saturday.
+
+""She's a liar. She is a horrible, horrible human being,"" Trump told a crowd of supporters gathered in a sweltering New Hampshire high school gym. ""She's incompetent and I don't' think that you can even think of allowing this woman to become president of the United States.""
+
+But before taking the stage in New Hampshire, Trump previewed the ""short-circuit"" line of attack online, tweeting earlier Saturday that ""anybody whose mind 'SHORT CIRCUITS' is not fit to be our president! Look up the word 'BRAINWASHED.'""
+
+And in a video posted on his Facebook page earlier Saturday, Trump's campaign suggested Clinton was ""melting down,"" calling her ""robot Hillary.""
+
+Clinton's use of the term ""short-circuited"" came as she answered a question Friday at a gathering of black and Hispanic journalists about her recent assertion in a Fox News interview that FBI Director James Comey said she had been ""truthful"" in discussing her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state. Clinton's claim in that interview has been widely debunked as false.
+
+""I was pointing out in both of those instances, that Director Comey had said that my answers in my FBI interview were truthful. That really is the bottom line here,"" she said. ""What I told the FBI, which he said was truthful, is consistent with what I have said publicly. I may have short-circuited, and for that, I will try to clarify.""
+
+Stumping Saturday night, Trump also alleged that the terrorist group ISIS is dreaming of a Clinton presidency.
+
+""Remember, remember, remember ISIS is looking, folks. They dream of Hillary Clinton,"" Trump said. ""They look at her and they say this can't be happening to us. How great is this.""
+
+Trump's latest barrage of attacks against Clinton -- while not a departure from his brand of personal and aggressive attacks against his opponents -- did mark an escalation in his attacks, just as Clinton and her allies are stepping up their attacks against Trump.
+
+Clinton has accused Trump of being ""temperamentally unfit"" to be president and a slew of top former government officials have raised questions about Trump's character and his fitness to become the next commander-in-chief.
+
+""The character traits he has exhibited during the primary season suggest he would be a poor, even dangerous, commander in chief,"" Morell wrote, pointing to Trump's ""obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights"" and ""his routine carelessness with the facts.""
+
+Trump also pushed back on those attacks on Saturday.
+
+""I get a kick out of these dopey, dopey, dopey people. These stupid foolish people when they talk about, ""Can we trust Donald Trump with nuclear? Can we trust him?"" Trump said. ""You know, it's a whole little narrative. They'll spend a billion dollars on this but the people aren't buying it.""",REAL
+8572,Obama’s Definition of “High Integrity”,"Thomas DiLorenzo https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/obamas-definition-high-integrity/ 
+When Obama’s press secretary was asked today what he thought of Dirty Donna Brazile’s rigging of the Democratic debates by giving Hitlery the questions (from CNN, where she worked but has now been fired) in advance, he responded by praising her as “a person of the highest integrity.” 
+To the lunatic left fringe their ends always justify any means. 6:41 pm on October 31, 2016",FAKE
+9776,Tonopah Test Range Google Earth imagery 7/22/2016,"Tonopah Test Range Google Earth imagery 7/22/2016 page: 1 37.785314° -116.765487° lots of cars 37.788909° -116.756991° buildings removed 37.761840° -116.760566° new building 37.723731° -116.730658° new radar berm Happy hunting. Note they cut this really close to the north edge of the runway, as if someone ordered this imagery and Google poached it. Tonopah is the Area 51 site. These look like the White Sand targets I've fired at. (above) edit on 26-10-2016 by thesungod because: (no reason given) edit on 26-10-2016 by thesungod because: (no reason given) The only things missing are the ""commercial gravel pits."" That is how the mining tailings are covered up. Posted a thread on this here Looks like something (maybe F-117 or something else) being moved into a hangar 37.798244, -116.774809 The only things missing are the ""commercial gravel pits."" That is how the mining tailings are covered up. I would presume since available imagery would show large amounts of ""Muck"" which is the technical term for the rock left over (Tailings are actually something else) they would eat the cost associated with trucking it elsewhere or using previously excavated areas on site. Rumors persist that the proposed underground, mobile, MX system was mocked up and extensive tunnels were dug in and around the NTS and Nellis etc. which could also be used for storing the muck. Otherwise a giant pile of the stuff would be a dead giveaway new topics",FAKE
+9826,Australia to hunt down anti-vax nurses and prosecute them for disobeying the medical police state,"Australia to hunt down anti-vax nurses and prosecute them for disobeying the medical police state 
+  Vicki Batts Tags: vaccination , Australia , medical police state (NaturalNews) Is there some sort of race to see which country can eliminate the rights of its people first? It is certainly beginning to feel like there must be something going on, since government overreach looks like it is reaching an all-time high across the world.While countries like Australia demonize other nations for their lack of progressiveness, recent developments suggest that its government is taking away people's freedom to think for themselves, slowly but surely chipping away at those who have dissenting opinions. The evidence? The newly released vaccination standards provided by The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia in response to what the organization described as, ""a small number of nurses and midwives promoting anti-vaccination via social media.""In their statement, they wrote that the board was merely taking the time to make its expectations in regards to vaccination and vaccination advice very clear to registered nurses, enrolled nurses and midwives. ""The board expects all registered nurses, enrolled nurses and midwives to use the best available evidence in making practice decisions.""This sentiment might have been acceptable, if it wasn't coupled with the organization also prompting people to tattle on each other. You see, the board is also urging members of the public to come forward and report nurses and midwives who may be expounding anti-vaccination beliefs. Surely anyone who goes against the grain deserves to be punished?If the medical industry was as strictly regulated as it purports itself to be, perhaps so many people wouldn't be dying each year from medical errors. An estimated 18,000 to 54,000 people in Australia lose their lives to medical mistakes each year – but the industry continues to insist that its those pesky thoughts that are really putting people in jeopardy. How dare anyone want to help people and think for themselves at the same time?In their statement, the board noted that any reports will not be taken lightly. ""The board will consider whether the nurse or midwife has breached their professional obligations and will treat these matters seriously.""To make matters worse, not only will these brave nurses and midwives be reported by people who may once have been their friends or colleagues, but the promotion of what the government deems ""misleading or deceptive information"" is a serious offense.And boy, will they take it seriously. Under national law, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency is able to prosecute anyone who commits such an act. While we all know that the true deception lies in the promotion of vaccines as a public health necessity, we also know that mainstream medicine will do anything to protect their precious immunizations.Dr. Hannah Dahlen, a professor of midwifery at the University of Western Sydney and the spokeswoman for the Australian College of Midwives, told The Guardian that nurses and midwives are respected individuals who play an important role in society, and that she believes that people take their advice quite seriously. She went on to say, ""I agree that they have a very serious obligation to provide the best available evidence, and it is of course concerning that some are taking to social media in order to express a position not backed by science.""But are concerns about what's in vaccines really not backed by science? Many people might say that continuing to ignore the evidence that there are horrible toxins like glyphosate and mercury in vaccines is what goes against science .In a rather ironic statement, Dahlen declared, ""The worry is the confirmation bias that can occur, because people might say: 'There you go, this is proof that you can't even have an alternative opinion.' It might in fact just give people more fuel for their belief systems.""Legislating dissenting opinions into extinction, and persecuting those who are raising awareness about a very real problem is proof that alternative opinions are not allowed. That's really all there is to it; it's biased, unjust and frankly, more befitting of the very governments Australia speaks out against. Sources:",FAKE
+7054,Mavs Fans Got Mad At Mark Cuban For Bashing Trump. His Response Is Perfect,"Comments 
+Mark Cuban has been vocally outspoken about the 2016 election after learning the dark truth about Republican nominee Donald Trump. Initially, Cuban actually supported Trump’s candidacy as someone independent from politics as usual, but as he (and we all) learned more about the dark past of The Donald’s dirty dealings , sexual predations and more, the Dallas Mavericks basketball team owner threw himself wholeheartedly into the political arena, culminating with front row seats to the last presidential debate. 
+Cuban sat down with local radio broadcasters to discuss rumors that his anti-Trump stance might cost him ticket sales for his NBA franchise. Mark Cuban probably, literally dropped the mic after this response: 
+“You know what, when it’s all said and done, I’d rather lose every penny than have Trump as president because I care more about the future of my family, my children than I do about my pocketbook. And so if it means we play to empty arenas, I’m down with that.” 
+“Maybe I pick up some fans. Maybe I lose some fans. I don’t know,. I’ve heard it from both. I’ve had people say ‘there’s no way I can support you. I can’t go to another Mavs game.’ And I’ve had people say ‘you know what? We’re buying Mavs tickets.’ What I’ve heard more often than anything is, ‘are you gonna be this way once the election’s over?’ And the answer is no. You’ve known me forever Newy and I’ve been apolitical my entire adult life and only because I know Donald and I know my feelings about what he would be like as president have I gotten this involved but come November 9, it’s all Mavs all the time.” 
+Mark Cuban is a shining example of how any American should approach the political arena, which he does by placing integrity over ideology and the good of the country in his viewpoints above the simple view of his bank account’s short term health. Luckily, Cuban is a franchisee in the NBA, which is far and away America’s most progressive major sports league, which doesn’t guarantee ongoing success, but does mean that the typical NBA fan values tolerance and diversity over racial segregation and hatred.",FAKE
+4767,"AP: Pence 'Beside Himself,' Wife Enraged Over Trump Remarks","Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence suddenly canceled a campaign appearance on behalf of embattled Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump Saturday -- a growing sign of dissension in Republican ranks as calls mounted for Trump to step down after a sex tape emerged Friday.
+
+CNN reported that Pence was canceling the even with House Speaker Paul Ryan. Trump had been scheduled to appear but he also canceled Friday after the tape emerged.
+
+A top Pence advisor says Pence was not disinvited but decided not to go of his own accord.
+
+Influential Republicans have been reaching out to Pence about what role he might be willing to play in the event that Trump drops out, said two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. They didn’t identify those gauging Pence’s interest privately.
+
+Caught on tape making shockingly crude comments about a married woman he tried to seduce, Donald Trump declared in a midnight video, ""I was wrong and I apologize."" Yet even as he did so, he claimed the astonishing recording was ""nothing more than a distraction"" and argued his words were not nearly as egregious as former President Bill Clinton's marital affairs.
+
+""I've said some foolish things,"" the Republican presidential nominee said in a taped apology posted on his Facebook page early Saturday morning. ""But there's a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women.""
+
+Turning to his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, Trump accused her of having ""bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated"" her husband's ""victims.""
+
+Trump's 90-second statement capped a jarring day that threatened to sink his presidential campaign and sent Republicans into a panic with early voting well underway in several states and a little more than a month until Election Day.
+
+On Friday afternoon, The Washington Post and NBC News released a 2005 video on which Trump describes trying to have sex with a married woman. He also brags about women letting him kiss and grab them because he is famous.
+
+""When you're a star they let you do it,"" Trump says. ""You can do anything.""
+
+He adds seconds later, ""Grab them by the p----. You can do anything.""
+
+Within hours, the shock of the video led to widespread condemnation from inside Trump's own party. House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was sickened by Trump's comments, while a one-sentence response from GOP's chairman was devastating.
+
+""No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever,"" said Reince Priebus, who had stood by Trump through his past provocative comments.
+
+Ryan added tartly that Trump was ""no longer attending"" a joint campaign appearance set for Saturday in Wisconsin. Trump himself later said in a statement that he would be preparing for Sunday night's debate instead.
+
+Other Republicans, painfully aware of Trump's possible impact on their own political fates, were quick to chime in. New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who is locked in a close race, called his comments ""totally inappropriate and offensive.""
+
+By the time Trump posted his video apology, three Republican members of Congress had called on Trump to abandon the race. Among them was Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who called Trump's words ""some of the most abhorrent and offensive comments that you can possibly imagine.""
+
+Pence was ""beside himself"" and his wife was furious, according to a person familiar with their thinking. That person spoke on the condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to share the private discussion.
+
+On the tape, Trump is caught on a live microphone while talking with Billy Bush of ""Access Hollywood."" The candidate is heard saying ""I did try and f--- her. She was married."" He also uses graphic terms to describe the woman's body and says he frequently tries to kiss beautiful women.
+
+""Access Hollywood"" said a recent Associated Press story about Trump's lewd behind-the-scenes comments as star of ""The Apprentice"" led it to dig through its archives and turn up the previously unaired tape. It was recorded during a bus ride while Trump was on his way to appear in an episode of the soap opera ""Days of Our Lives.""
+
+Trump offered a half-hearted apology shortly after the video was released, saying he was sorry ""if anyone was offended."" Only hours later, after the scope of the damage became clear, did he release the video statement.
+
+Trump appears alone in the video and appears to be reading off a script. He closes the video by suggesting he'll raise Bill Clinton's affairs again in the coming days.
+
+""See you at the debate,"" he says.
+
+Hillary Clinton seized on Trump's quotes from the 2005 video, calling them ""horrific."" She said in a Twitter message: ""We cannot allow this man to become president.""
+
+But she had her own problems Friday with sudden revelations.
+
+The WikiLeaks organization posted what it said were thousands of emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, including some with excerpts from speeches she gave to Wall Street executives and others — speeches she has declined to release despite demands from Trump.
+
+The excerpts include Clinton seeming to put herself in the free trade camp, a position she has retreated from. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her dream was ""a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.""
+
+Trump strongly opposes current U.S. trade deals and insists Clinton is too cozy with Wall Street to reform it.
+
+Friday's developments came two days before Trump and Clinton are to meet in the second presidential debate, with the Republican urgently in need of a strong performance. After his uneven showing in the first contest, public opinion polls have showed Clinton pulling ahead in nearly all battleground states, some of which are already in the midst of early voting.
+
+There were plenty of other problems for Trump on what surely was one of the worst days of his two-year drive for the White House.
+
+His advisers planned for him to spend a quiet Friday preparing for the debate and meeting with border security officials. But the day was quickly consumed by a series of controversies, including Trump's unsubstantiated claim about immigrants in the U.S. illegally voting in the election and his questioning the innocence of five black teenagers exonerated in a 1989 rape case.
+
+Then, there were new signs of unusual links between Trump and Russia. For the first time, the U.S. publicly blamed the Russian government for hacking the Democratic National Committee and accused Moscow of trying to interfere with the American election. Diplomats also told the AP that Russia had lodged a formal complaint with the United Nations over a U.N. official's condemnations of Trump.
+
+Also in the mix Friday: New questions about the Trump campaign's finances. With roughly a month until Election Day, the campaign has yet to schedule the $100 million in television advertising that his campaign boasted about just two weeks ago.
+
+The campaign has just half that amount scheduled, and late this week shifted ad money around rather than increasing its overall investment, suggesting a bit of penny-pinching even as the clock winds down.",REAL
+6510,The Yale Record Just Published The BEST Non-Endorsement Of A Candidate EVER!,"The Yale Record Just Published The BEST Non-Endorsement Of A Candidate EVER! By Marty Townsend on October 27, 2016 Subscribe 
+The Yale Record , America’s Oldest College Humor Magazine, has NOT endorsed Hillary Clinton – in a most spectacular way. 
+The Yale Record is based in the college town of New Haven, Connecticut and was founded by Edward Anthony Bradford , James Heartt VanBuren , Samuel J. Elder , E.H. Lemis , and Henry Ward Beecher Howard in 1872, publishing their first weekly issue on September 11, 1872. They gleefully point readers to their lengthy Wikipedia page to prove their validity, claim the invention of the word “hot dog,” and ponder whether the face of the New Yorker would look different if they hadn’t been doing what they’re doing. 
+The Record adopted “Old Owl” as their mascot over a century ago, but the actual date of acquisition wasn’t recorded anywhere. The mascot , described as a connoisseur of Cutty Sark , is: “… a congenial, largely nocturnal, 360-degree-head-turning, cigar-smoking bird who tries to steer the staff towards a light-hearted appreciation of life and the finer things in it.” 
+From Wikimedia Commons available under a CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. 
+With such an illustrious past, how could anything they produce not be spectacular? Let’s see what Old Owl had to say. 
+The non-endorsement begins with a simple explanation of why they aren’t endorsing any candidate: “In its 144-year history, The Yale Record has never endorsed a Democratic candidate for president. In fact, we have never endorsed any candidate for president. This is, in part, due to our strong commitment to being a tax-exempt 501(c)3 organization, which mandates that we are ‘absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.'” 
+And: “The Yale Record believes both candidates to be equally un-endorsable, due to our faithful compliance with the tax code.” 
+With that explained, one would ordinarily assume they were done. But no, they had a bit more to say : “In particular, we do not endorse Hillary Clinton’s exemplary leadership during her 30 years in the public eye. We do not support her impressive commitment to serving and improving this country—a commitment to which she has dedicated her entire professional career. Because of unambiguous tax law, we do not encourage you to support the most qualified presidential candidate in modern American history, nor do we encourage all citizens to shatter the glass ceiling once and for all by electing Secretary Clinton on November 8. “The Yale Record has no opinion whatsoever on Dr. Jill Stein.” 
+So there it is… absolutely the best non-endorsement EVER. 
+
+Featured image courtesy of Heat Street . About Marty Townsend 
+Active in Michigan with several groups and organizations, including the National Action Network (NAN), Occupy Detroit, Save Michigan Public Schools, Dearborn PTA Council, Michigan Petitioners, and several other small groups working together to make Michigan a better place. Concentrates on educational issues, but also covers human interest, liberal politics, Michigan, environmental issues and Detroit, including the fight against Emergency Managers, the Education Achievement Authority, and fighting the corporate take-over of Michigan and the United States. Buy me a <a href="" cup of coffee Connect",FAKE
+1453,Is GOP establishment learning to like Donald Trump? (+video),"There's evidence that when weighing Donald Trump versus rival Ted Cruz, many Republican leaders have become more concerned about Senator Cruz.
+
+Donald Trump speaks to a crowd on Jan. 4, 2016, in Lowell, Mass. Thousands attended the rally in packed Paul E. Tsongas Center Arena at the Lowell campus of the University of Massachusetts.
+
+Is the Republican establishment – or at least some of it – coming to terms with the possibility that Donald Trump will be the GOP presidential nominee?
+
+A number of signs in recent days indicate that’s the case. Or, to be more specific, there’s evidence that when weighing Mr. Trump versus rival Ted Cruz, many Republican leaders think Senator Cruz the greater danger. That’s an implicit admission that they’re beginning to think Trump might not be, you know, so bad.
+
+Let’s go to the list: Earlier this month, right-leaning New York Times columnist David Brooks unloaded on Cruz, saying the Texas senator’s speeches are full of a sort of “pagan brutalism.” Since then, two former Republican Senate majority leaders, Trent Lott and Bob Dole, have indicated they think a Cruz nomination would be cataclysmic for the GOP and lead to widespread losses down the ticket.
+
+Then this week, the Republican governor of Iowa, Terry Branstad, said flatly that he hopes anyone but Cruz wins his state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. True, Governor Branstad cited Cruz’s opposition to ethanol subsidies, crucial to Iowa’s economy, as the reason for his opposition. But the open and vehement nature of the anti-endorsement indicated a high level of political enmity.
+
+“It is no surprise that the establishment is in full panic mode,” Cruz told reporters after hearing of this news.
+
+Why does this imply anything about Trump? Well, the Iowa caucuses are now less than two weeks away. The New Hampshire primary is within three. The primary season moves quickly through South Carolina and other states after that. If the Republican Party as an entity is to exert influence on the nominating process, now is the time.
+
+Many have expected Republican leaders to band together against Trump, given that some party figures see him as an existential threat to the GOP in its current form. That doesn’t seem to be occurring.
+
+“The sort of GOP effort against Trump that many anticipated is happening instead vs. Cruz,” tweeted Sunlight Foundation political analyst Richard Skinner on Thursday.
+
+Yes, this description of the state of play is a bit simplistic. The Republican establishment is not a cohesive entity chaired by the ghost of Nelson Rockefeller. Many GOP journalists and public intellectuals continue to worry that Trump, with his belligerent populism, will push the party so far from its small-government roots that it will become unrecognizable.
+
+“What we’re seeing is the attempt at the normalization of Trump on the right, and defining conservatism down. Can be resisted and defeated,” tweeted right-leaning Weekly Standard editor William Kristol earlier this week.
+
+But the fact remains that the legislative, Washington wing of the party now seems inclined to cut Trump slack. Mr. Dole, the party’s nominee in 1996, said in a New York Times interview that Trump could probably work with Congress, because “he’s got the right personality and he’s kind of a dealmaker.”
+
+It may be as simple as that. Trump, for all his insults, is the kind of person members of Congress understand. He’s a businessman who knows that deals aren’t all one-sided, and a political neophyte who would be willing to defer to their judgment. That’s the theory, anyway.
+
+Cruz? He’s proved that the only legislative opinion he listens to is his own, in the view of the establishment. Many in the GOP believe he pushed them into the 2013 government shutdown and then blamed their lack of courage for the shutdown’s inevitable collapse.
+
+Consider this: Back in the 2008 campaign, questions arose about whether nominee John McCain was a “natural born citizen,” and thus eligible for the presidency under the Constitution, because he was born in the Canal Zone. The Senate quickly moved to pass a nonbinding resolution affirming Senator McCain’s citizenship. When Cruz became embroiled in the same question, because of his Canadian birth, that did not happen.
+
+“I just don’t think the Senate ought to get into the middle of this,” said majority leader Mitch McConnell of the issue on ABC News’s “This Week” earlier this month.
+
+Does the GOP establishment think it can block Cruz, then turn to oppose Trump and boost someone else? Maybe, but it’s getting late to pull off that kind of maneuver. Trump may rocket through the first primaries, and then, who could head him off? Jeb Bush? (Hey, he’s at 10 percent in some New Hampshire polls!)
+
+Are GOP figures counting on influencing someone who’s not that easy to push around? Sure, Trump knows little about the day-to-day operation of government. That doesn’t mean he’ll be Silly Putty in Senator McConnell’s hands. He’s a billionaire with little vested interest in the party per se.
+
+“He might well completely ignore Congress’s wishes and just do whatever feels right to him on any given day. Trump’s primary goal over the past several decades has been to enhance the Trump name. What policies that translates into is anyone’s guess,” writes Seth Masket at Vox.
+
+Or does the party leadership still think that somehow or other, without its involvement, Trump is just going to lose?",REAL
+2883,John Kerry Says It's Unclear Whether Iran Deal Is Within Reach,"SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt, March 14 (Reuters) - On the eve of fresh talks with Iran, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said it was unclear whether an interim agreement over its nuclear power program was within reach.
+
+""I can't tell you whether or not we can get a deal, whether we are close,"" Kerry told a news conference on Saturday in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik, where he attended an Egyptian investment summit.
+
+""The purpose of these negotiations is not just to get a deal, it is to get the right deal,"" he added.
+
+The United States and five other major powers -- Britain, Germany, France, China and Russia -- will resume negotiations with Iran in Lausanne, Switzerland, from Sunday. They hope to clinch a framework agreement by the end of the month.
+
+The two sides would then seek to negotiate by June 30 a final agreement to would curb Iran's most sensitive nuclear activities for at least 10 years. In exchange, sanctions on the Islamic Republic would gradually end.
+
+Kerry expressed concern again that a letter to Iran last week from Republican senators may have undermined the talks. The letter warned Iran that any deal made by President Barack Obama might last only as long as he remained in office -- a highly unusual intervention in U.S. foreign policy-making.
+
+Kerry said he would assure Iranian negotiators and Europeans allies during the upcoming talks that Congress did not have the authority to change the deal.
+
+""As far as we're concerned, Congress has no ability to change an executive agreement,"" Kerry said, adding that ""important gaps"" still remained between the sides.
+
+The letter followed a speech to Congress earlier this month by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned that Obama was negotiating a ""bad deal"" with Iran. Republicans invited Netanyahu to speak about Iran without consulting the White House or Democrats.
+
+With Israel preparing to elect a new government next week, Kerry said the United States hoped that whatever the outcome it would help push forward the peace process with Palestinians.
+
+""President Obama remains committed to a two-state solution,"" Kerry said, adding ""he remains hopeful that whatever choice that people of Israel make, that there will be an ability to be able to move forward on those efforts.""
+
+He declined to elaborate on the prospects of resuming the talks, with an election just days away.
+
+Peace talks broke down in April 2014 after nine months of negotiations led by Kerry, with the long-standing goal of a two-state solution no closer.
+
+Abbas has steered clear of taking a position on the Israeli election, saying only that he was ready to work with who wins. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Larry King)",REAL
+10252,Black Activist Blasts Hillary Clinton Over Wikileaks Revelation,"Black Activist Blasts Hillary Clinton Over Wikileaks Revelation Eric Garner's daughter speaks out against Clinton campaign for using her father's death Infowars Nightly News - October 28, 2016 Comments 
+Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, blasts Hillary Clinton campaign over discussions staffers had about her father’s death, as revealed in WikiLeaks emails. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . The Most Offensive Halloween EVER! - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force",FAKE
+6950,"At DAPL, Confiscating Cameras as Evidence of Journalism","Reprinted from fair.org by Janine Jackson Militarily Armed Police License DMCA 
+While elite media wait for the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline to go away so they can return to presenting their own chin-stroking as what it means to take climate change seriously , independent media continue to fill the void with actual coverage. 
+One place you can go to find reporting is The Intercept ( 10/25/16 ), where journalist Jihan Hafiz filed a video report from North Dakota, where the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies continue their stand against the sacred site--trampling, water supply--threatening project. 
+Hafiz reports that after a morning of prayer, Standing Rock activists 
+were attacked by police forces who used pepper spray and beat protesters with batons"". Dozens of officers, backed by military trucks, police vans, machine guns and nonlethal weapons, violently approached the group without warning. 
+As the demonstrators attempted to leave, the police began beating and detaining them. Several Native American women leading the march were targeted, dragged out of the crowd and arrested. One man was body-slammed to the ground, while another woman broke her ankle running from the police. The military and police trucks followed the protesters, as nearly a hundred officers corralled them into a circle. Among the arrested were journalists--including Hafiz--a pregnant 17-year-old and a 78-year-old woman. - Advertisement - 
+Once jailed, Hafiz and others were refused phone calls and received no food or water for eight hours. Women were strip-searched, two women fainted from low blood sugar and another had her medication taken away. 
+On her release, Hafiz was told, ""Your camera is being held as evidence in a crime."" 
+That crime, of course, would be journalism . And it's hard to believe law enforcement would feel so cavalier about treating it that way if more reporters were actually committing it. Protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline License DMCA - Advertisement - 
+Since the last time FAIR checked on how much coverage corporate media were giving the Dakota Access struggle ( FAIR.org , 9/22/16 ), ABC and NBC have ended their blackout, airing one story apiece on their national news shows: NBC 's Today show (10/11/16) had 71 words about the arrest of actor Shailene Woodley at the site, and ABC 's Good Morning America (10/23/16) ran 70 words on how ""a protest over construction of an oil pipeline turned violent."" 
+For news from Standing Rock, people would do better to follow #NODAPL on Twitter , and check out resources like SacredStoneCamp.org and Indian Country Today . View Ratings | Rate It http://fair.org 
+FAIR , the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. We work to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media ( more... )",FAKE
+2785,Syria's war: How did we get here?,"(CNN) It began with the arrests of a handful of children in 2011. Since then, it's exploded into the biggest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.
+
+It all starts with graffiti
+
+A sandstorm blows over damaged buildings in the rebel-held area of Douma, east of Damascus, on September 7, 2015.
+
+A sandstorm blows over damaged buildings in the rebel-held area of Douma, east of Damascus, on September 7, 2015.
+
+A man's body lies in the back of van as people search for the injured after airstrikes allegedly by the Syrian government on a market in a rebel-held Eastern Ghouta town on August 31, 2015.
+
+A man's body lies in the back of van as people search for the injured after airstrikes allegedly by the Syrian government on a market in a rebel-held Eastern Ghouta town on August 31, 2015.
+
+A refugee carries mattresses as he re-enters Syria from Turkey on June 22, 2015, after Kurdish People's Protection Units regained control of the area around Tal Abyad, Syria, from ISIS.
+
+A refugee carries mattresses as he re-enters Syria from Turkey on June 22, 2015, after Kurdish People's Protection Units regained control of the area around Tal Abyad, Syria, from ISIS.
+
+A Syrian child fleeing the war gets lifted over fences to enter Turkish territory illegally near a border crossing at Akcakale, Turkey, on June 14, 2015.
+
+A Syrian child fleeing the war gets lifted over fences to enter Turkish territory illegally near a border crossing at Akcakale, Turkey, on June 14, 2015.
+
+A Syrian boy receives treatment at a local hospital following an alleged chlorine gas attack in the Idlib suburb of Jabal al-Zawia on April 27, 2015.
+
+A Syrian boy receives treatment at a local hospital following an alleged chlorine gas attack in the Idlib suburb of Jabal al-Zawia on April 27, 2015.
+
+Nusra Front fighters inspect a helicopter belonging to pro-government forces after it crashed in the rebel-held Idlib countryside on March 22, 2015.
+
+Nusra Front fighters inspect a helicopter belonging to pro-government forces after it crashed in the rebel-held Idlib countryside on March 22, 2015.
+
+Rebel fighters dig caves in the mountains for bomb shelters in the northern countryside of Hama on March 9, 2015.
+
+Rebel fighters dig caves in the mountains for bomb shelters in the northern countryside of Hama on March 9, 2015.
+
+A man gives medical assistance as two wounded children wait nearby at a field hospital in Douma on February 2, 2015.
+
+A man gives medical assistance as two wounded children wait nearby at a field hospital in Douma on February 2, 2015.
+
+A long-exposure photograph shows a rocket being launched in Aleppo on October 5, 2014.
+
+A long-exposure photograph shows a rocket being launched in Aleppo on October 5, 2014.
+
+Medics tend to a man's injuries at a field hospital in Douma after airstrikes on September 20, 2014.
+
+Medics tend to a man's injuries at a field hospital in Douma after airstrikes on September 20, 2014.
+
+Volunteers remove a dead body from under debris after shelling in Aleppo on August 29, 2014. According to the Syrian Civil Defense, barrel bombs are now the greatest killer of civilians in many parts of Syria. The White Helmets are a humanitarian organization that tries to save lives and offer relief.
+
+Photographs of victims of the Assad regime are displayed as a Syrian army defector known as ""Caesar,"" center, appears in disguise to speak before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington. The July 31, 2014, briefing was called ""Assad's Killing Machine Exposed: Implications for U.S. Policy."" Caesar, apparently a witness to the regime's brutality, has smuggled more than 50,000 photographs depicting the torture and execution of more than 10,000 dissidents. CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the photos, documents and testimony referenced in the report.
+
+Rebel fighters execute two men on July 25, 2014, in Binnish, Syria. The men were reportedly charged by an Islamic religious court with detonating several car bombs.
+
+Rebel fighters execute two men on July 25, 2014, in Binnish, Syria. The men were reportedly charged by an Islamic religious court with detonating several car bombs.
+
+A giant poster of al-Assad is seen in Damascus on May 31, 2014, ahead of the country's presidential elections. He received 88.7% of the vote in the country's first election after the civil war broke out.
+
+A giant poster of al-Assad is seen in Damascus on May 31, 2014, ahead of the country's presidential elections. He received 88.7% of the vote in the country's first election after the civil war broke out.
+
+A Free Syrian Army fighter fires a rocket-propelled grenade during heavy clashes in Aleppo on April 27, 2014.
+
+A Free Syrian Army fighter fires a rocket-propelled grenade during heavy clashes in Aleppo on April 27, 2014.
+
+A U.S. ship staff member wears personal protective equipment at a naval airbase in Rota, Spain, on April 10, 2014. A former container vessel was fitted out with at least $10 million of gear to let it take on about 560 metric tons of Syria's most dangerous chemical agents and sail them out to sea, officials said.
+
+A U.S. ship staff member wears personal protective equipment at a naval airbase in Rota, Spain, on April 10, 2014. A former container vessel was fitted out with at least $10 million of gear to let it take on about 560 metric tons of Syria's most dangerous chemical agents and sail them out to sea, officials said.
+
+A man holds a baby who was rescued from rubble after an airstrike in Aleppo on February 14, 2014.
+
+A man holds a baby who was rescued from rubble after an airstrike in Aleppo on February 14, 2014.
+
+Residents wait to receive food aid distributed by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency at the besieged al-Yarmouk camp, south of Damascus, on January 31, 2014.
+
+Residents wait to receive food aid distributed by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency at the besieged al-Yarmouk camp, south of Damascus, on January 31, 2014.
+
+An injured man is helped following an airstrike in Aleppo's Maadi neighborhood on December 17, 2013.
+
+An injured man is helped following an airstrike in Aleppo's Maadi neighborhood on December 17, 2013.
+
+Syrian children wait as doctors perform medical checkups at a refugee center in Sofia, Bulgaria, on October 26, 2013.
+
+Syrian children wait as doctors perform medical checkups at a refugee center in Sofia, Bulgaria, on October 26, 2013.
+
+Residents run from a fire at a gasoline and oil shop in Aleppo's Bustan Al-Qasr neighborhood on October 20, 2013. Witnesses said the fire was caused by a bullet from a pro-government sniper.
+
+Residents run from a fire at a gasoline and oil shop in Aleppo's Bustan Al-Qasr neighborhood on October 20, 2013. Witnesses said the fire was caused by a bullet from a pro-government sniper.
+
+The U.N. Security Council passes a resolution September 27, 2013, requiring Syria to eliminate its arsenal of chemical weapons. Al-Assad said he would abide by the resolution.
+
+The U.N. Security Council passes a resolution September 27, 2013, requiring Syria to eliminate its arsenal of chemical weapons. Al-Assad said he would abide by the resolution.
+
+A handout image released by the Syrian opposition's Shaam News Network shows people inspecting bodies of children and adults who rebels claim were killed in a toxic gas attack by pro-government forces on August 21, 2013. A week later, U.S Secretary of State John Kerry said U.S. intelligence information found that 1,429 people were killed in the chemical weapons attack, including more than 400 children. Al-Assad's government claimed that jihadists fighting with the rebels carried out the chemical weapons attacks to turn global sentiments against it.
+
+An aerial view shows the Zaatari refugee camp near the Jordanian city of Mafraq on July 18, 2013.
+
+An aerial view shows the Zaatari refugee camp near the Jordanian city of Mafraq on July 18, 2013.
+
+Rebels launch a missile near the Abu Baker brigade in Al-Bab, Syria, on January 16, 2013.
+
+Rebels launch a missile near the Abu Baker brigade in Al-Bab, Syria, on January 16, 2013.
+
+Syrians look for survivors amid the rubble of a building targeted by a missile in the al-Mashhad neighborhood of Aleppo on January 7, 2013.
+
+Syrians look for survivors amid the rubble of a building targeted by a missile in the al-Mashhad neighborhood of Aleppo on January 7, 2013.
+
+A rebel fighter prepares the wires of a car-mounted camera used to spy on Syrian government forces while his comrade smokes a cigarette in Aleppo's Bab al-Nasr district on January 7, 2013.
+
+A rebel fighter prepares the wires of a car-mounted camera used to spy on Syrian government forces while his comrade smokes a cigarette in Aleppo's Bab al-Nasr district on January 7, 2013.
+
+A father reacts after the deaths of two of his children in Aleppo on January 3, 2013.
+
+A father reacts after the deaths of two of his children in Aleppo on January 3, 2013.
+
+The bodies of three children are laid out for identification by family members at a makeshift hospital in Aleppo on December 2, 2012. The children were allegedly killed in a mortar shell attack that landed close to a bakery in the city.
+
+The bodies of three children are laid out for identification by family members at a makeshift hospital in Aleppo on December 2, 2012. The children were allegedly killed in a mortar shell attack that landed close to a bakery in the city.
+
+Smoke rises in the Hanano and Bustan al-Basha districts in Aleppo as fighting continues through the night on December 1, 2012.
+
+Smoke rises in the Hanano and Bustan al-Basha districts in Aleppo as fighting continues through the night on December 1, 2012.
+
+Rebels celebrate next to the remains of a Syrian government fighter jet that was shot down at Daret Ezza, on the border of the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, on November 28, 2012.
+
+Rebels celebrate next to the remains of a Syrian government fighter jet that was shot down at Daret Ezza, on the border of the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, on November 28, 2012.
+
+An Israeli tank crew sits on the Golan Heights overlooking the Syrian village of Breqa on November 6, 2012. Israel fired warning shots toward Syria after a mortar shell hit an Israeli military post. It was the first time Israel fired on Syria across the Golan Heights since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
+
+An Israeli tank crew sits on the Golan Heights overlooking the Syrian village of Breqa on November 6, 2012. Israel fired warning shots toward Syria after a mortar shell hit an Israeli military post. It was the first time Israel fired on Syria across the Golan Heights since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
+
+Relatives of Syrian detainees who were arrested for participating in anti-government protests wait in front of a police building in Damascus on October 24, 2012. The Syrian government said it released 290 prisoners.
+
+Relatives of Syrian detainees who were arrested for participating in anti-government protests wait in front of a police building in Damascus on October 24, 2012. The Syrian government said it released 290 prisoners.
+
+A Syrian rebel walks inside a burnt section of the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo hours before the Syrian army retook control of the complex on October 14, 2012.
+
+A Syrian rebel walks inside a burnt section of the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo hours before the Syrian army retook control of the complex on October 14, 2012.
+
+Smoke rises over the streets after a mortar bomb from Syria landed in the Turkish border village of Akcakale on October 3, 2012. Five people were killed. In response, Turkey fired on Syrian targets and its parliament authorized a resolution giving the government permission to deploy soldiers to foreign countries.
+
+Free Syrian Army fighters are reflected in a mirror they use to see a Syrian Army post only 50 meters away in Aleppo on September 16, 2012.
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+Free Syrian Army fighters are reflected in a mirror they use to see a Syrian Army post only 50 meters away in Aleppo on September 16, 2012.
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+A Syrian man carrying grocery bags dodges sniper fire in Aleppo as he runs through an alley near a checkpoint manned by the Free Syrian Army on September 14, 2012.
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+A Syrian man carrying grocery bags dodges sniper fire in Aleppo as he runs through an alley near a checkpoint manned by the Free Syrian Army on September 14, 2012.
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+Family members mourn the deaths of their relatives in front of a field hospital in Aleppo on August 21, 2012.
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+Family members mourn the deaths of their relatives in front of a field hospital in Aleppo on August 21, 2012.
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+A Free Syrian Army fighter runs for cover as a Syrian Army tank shell hits a building across the street during clashes in the Salaheddine neighborhood of central Aleppo on August 17, 2012.
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+A Free Syrian Army fighter runs for cover as a Syrian Army tank shell hits a building across the street during clashes in the Salaheddine neighborhood of central Aleppo on August 17, 2012.
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+Rebel fighters with the Free Syrian Army capture a police officer in Aleppo, Syria, who they believed to be pro-regime militiaman on July 31, 2012. Dozens of officers were reportedly killed as rebels seized police stations in the city.
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+Rebel fighters with the Free Syrian Army capture a police officer in Aleppo, Syria, who they believed to be pro-regime militiaman on July 31, 2012. Dozens of officers were reportedly killed as rebels seized police stations in the city.
+
+People gather on May 26, 2012, at a mass burial for victims reportedly killed by Syrian forces in Syria's Houla region. U.N. officials confirmed that more than 100 Syrian civilians were killed , including nearly 50 children. Syria's government denied its troops were behind the bloodbath.
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+An injured man gets treated in a Damascus neighborhood on April 3, 2012.
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+An injured man gets treated in a Damascus neighborhood on April 3, 2012.
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+Syrian refugees walk across a field in Syria before crossing into Turkey on March 14, 2012.
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+Syrian refugees walk across a field in Syria before crossing into Turkey on March 14, 2012.
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+Supporters of al-Assad celebrate during a referendum vote in Damascus on February 26, 2012. Opposition activists reported at least 55 deaths across the country as Syrians headed to the polls. Analysts and protesters widely described the constitutional referendum as a farce. ""Essentially, what (al-Assad's) done here is put a piece of paper that he controls to a vote that he controls so that he can try and maintain control,"" a U.S. State Department spokeswoman said.
+
+Suicide bombs hit two security service bases in Damascus on December 23, 2011, killing at least 44 people and wounding 166.
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+Jamal al-Wadi of Daraa speaks in Istanbul on September 15, 2011, after an alignment of Syrian opposition leaders announced the creation of a Syrian National Council -- their bid to present a united front against al-Assad's regime and establish a democratic system.
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+Jamal al-Wadi of Daraa speaks in Istanbul on September 15, 2011, after an alignment of Syrian opposition leaders announced the creation of a Syrian National Council -- their bid to present a united front against al-Assad's regime and establish a democratic system.
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+Syrian children walk over bricks stored for road repairs during a spontaneous protest June 15, 2011, at a refugee camp near the Syrian border in Yayladagi, Turkey.
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+Syrian children walk over bricks stored for road repairs during a spontaneous protest June 15, 2011, at a refugee camp near the Syrian border in Yayladagi, Turkey.
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+Anti-government protesters demonstrate in Daraa on March 23, 2011. In response to continuing protests, the Syrian government announced several plans to appease citizens.
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+Anti-government protesters demonstrate in Daraa on March 23, 2011. In response to continuing protests, the Syrian government announced several plans to appease citizens.
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+An injured man lying in the back of a vehicle is rushed to a hospital in Daraa, south of Damascus, on March 23, 2011. Violence flared in Daraa after a group of teens and children were arrested for writing political graffiti. Dozens of people were killed when security forces cracked down on demonstrations.
+
+An injured man lying in the back of a vehicle is rushed to a hospital in Daraa, south of Damascus, on March 23, 2011. Violence flared in Daraa after a group of teens and children were arrested for writing political graffiti. Dozens of people were killed when security forces cracked down on demonstrations.
+
+Pro-government protesters hold pictures of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his late father, Hafez al-Assad, during a rally in Damascus, Syria, on March 18, 2011. Bashar al-Assad has ruled Syria since 2000, when his father passed away following 30 years in charge. An anti-regime uprising that started in March 2011 has spiraled into civil war. The United Nations estimates more than 220,000 people have been killed.
+
+Pro-government protesters hold pictures of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his late father, Hafez al-Assad, during a rally in Damascus, Syria, on March 18, 2011. Bashar al-Assad has ruled Syria since 2000, when his father passed away following 30 years in charge. An anti-regime uprising that started in March 2011 has spiraled into civil war. The United Nations estimates more than 220,000 people have been killed.
+
+As Arab Spring demonstrations overthrow governments across the Middle East, a group of children in Daraa, southern Syria, are arrested and allegedly tortured for scrawling graffiti on a school reading ""the people want to topple the regime.""
+
+Outrage over the arrests turns into protests and a brutal crackdown
+
+Protesters clash with Syrian security forces on the streets of Daraa in March 2011.
+
+As the bloodshed gets worse, the opposition gets organized
+
+The West calls for Assad to quit, but Russia and China have other ideas
+
+Meanwhile, the influence of Islamist groups grows in rebel ranks
+
+The U.N. brokers a ceasefire that falls apart almost immediately
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+As refugees flee, the U.N. accuses Syria of crimes against humanity
+
+Barack Obama announces his 'red line' in Syria for the first (but not last) time
+
+Two years in, 60,000 are dead, and the U.S. says it will send aid to rebels
+
+February 2013: The U.S. The U.S. promises to send food and medical supplies -- but not weapons -- to Syrian rebels. It's the first such move since the conflict began two years before, in an effort to hem in the radical Islamist groups vying for influence in Syria. More than 60,000 people are now dead and nearly a million have fled the country.
+
+European nations join the list of countries sending weapons into Syria
+
+Syria crosses Obama's 'red line,' and the U.S. prepares to attack
+
+John Kerry goes off script, and the Russians pounce
+
+140,000 are dead in Syria as peace talks go nowhere fast
+
+ISIS declares an independent state in Iraq and Syria
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+The U.S. launches airstrikes on ISIS in Syria
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+Kurdish forces, backed by U.S. strikes, take back Kobani from ISIS
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+ISIS seizes Palmyra and blows up its priceless ruins
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+Donors pledge more than $10 billion to Syria
+
+February 11, 2016: Diplomats from more than a dozen countries, including the United States and Russia, Diplomats from more than a dozen countries, including the United States and Russia, agree in Munich, Germany, to a ""cessation of hostilities"" -- a temporary halt in fighting that commonly happens at the start of a peace process -- and to the delivery of aid. Terrorist groups, including ISIS and al-Nusra, are not included in the deal. The partial truce does not take hold a week later as originally hoped, but there are renewed efforts to implement the deal the following Friday",REAL
+7559,STATE OF GEORGIA FIRES PASTOR BECAUSE OF HIS FAITH; GOVERNMENT DIDN’T “APPROVE” BIBLICAL SERMONS,"Home › SOCIETY | US NEWS › STATE OF GEORGIA FIRES PASTOR BECAUSE OF HIS FAITH; GOVERNMENT DIDN’T “APPROVE” BIBLICAL SERMONS STATE OF GEORGIA FIRES PASTOR BECAUSE OF HIS FAITH; GOVERNMENT DIDN’T “APPROVE” BIBLICAL SERMONS 0 SHARES [10/27/16] In the latest turn of events in the United States Government’s war against Christianity, a Pastor is now being required by a Federal court to turn over the transcripts and notes of all of the sermons he has ever conducted. A minister who was hired by the Georgia Department of Public Health was recently fired because of his faith, and sermon contents. Dr. Eric Walsh, a Seventh-day Adventist lay minister, is suing the State of Georgia Department of Public Health for religious discrimination. 
+A very simple question should cross your mind as you read this report, should my pastor’s sermons be approved by the Government or God? 
+The state of Georgia inquired that the pastor relinquish his sermons to the government, according to federal court documents. 
+“Please produce a copy of your sermon notes and/or transcripts,” Attorney General Samuel Olens wrote to attorneys representing Dr. Eric Walsh. 
+Dr. Walsh refuses to comply with the request because in May 2014, when Walsh was hired by the District Health Director; another government official asked him to submit copies of his sermons for review. He complied, and two days later he was fired. 
+His attorneys said the government was curious about sermons Dr. Walsh delivered on health, marriage, sexuality, world religions, science, and creationism. He also preached on what the Bible says regarding homosexuality. 
+Since the event, Dr. Walsh has filed a federal lawsuit charging state officials with engaging in religious discrimination. 
+“He was fired for something he said in a sermon,” attorney Jeremy Dys told me. “If the government is allowed to fire someone over what he said in his sermons, they can come after any of us for our beliefs on anything.” 
+Dr. Walsh has assembled a powerhouse legal team comprised of Parks, Chesin & Walbert along with First Liberty Institute, one of the nation’s most prominent religious liberty law firms. Post navigation",FAKE
+698,Shady accounting underpins Trump’s wealth,"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
+7175,Two More Hollywood Films For Men That Leave Today’s SJW Movies In The Dust,"  Two More Hollywood Films For Men That Leave Today’s SJW Movies In The Dust Two More Hollywood Films For Men That Leave Today’s SJW Movies In The Dust Bob Smith 
+Bob Smith is a man in search of the truth. His favorite quotes are, ""We're all fools on this earth, and I can be no different""; ""I know it's true, I read it at the LIE-brary""; and ""The truth is not misogynistic, it's just the truth"". November 11, 2016 Culture 
+Today we are going to take a quick look at two epic Clint Eastwood films, one of which is a well-known, Western classic ( The Outlaw Josey Wales ). The other one is a little-known, under-the-radar gem, which showcases the psychotic insanity of the deranged Western female ( Play Misty for Me ). 
+Both of these superb RPO films will leave any red-pill male feeling wholly satisfied, shortly after viewing them, and, well, that’s what these movie reviews of your old Uncle Bob’s are all about, are they not…helping you find the bona fide gold nuggets amid the endlessly steaming piles of SJW Hollywood crap? Yes indeed. 
+So let’s get crackin’. 1. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976 – Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Bill McKinney, John Vernon) 
+Clint Eastwood directed and starred in this sweeping, extremely well-crafted, post-Civil War epic film, and the cinematography and direction are undeniably excellent. But Eastwood’s portrayal of the Southern-sympathizer, Josey Wales, who has a major score to settle after Union troops burn his house down and murder his wife and children, is in itself a major cinematic achievement. 
+Out for blood and taking no prisoners, Eastwood’s merciless Josey Wales thunders across the plains and prairies of the American West, blowing scores of Northern soldiers away in the process, as he makes a desperate dash towards Mexico, and what he hopes will be sanctuary. But Wales gets sidetracked along the way, collecting a stray dog and a few stray human beings as well, which proves that the only thing a man can truly count on in this life is change. 
+There’s a great scene early on in the film, involving Josey Wales’ partner in crime, Jaimie (played by Sam Bottoms), where he starts babbling incoherently, while faking a state of fever-induced delirium from underneath a blanket, as the two outlaws are confronted by a pair of backwoods yahoos who are looking to collect the bounty that has recently been placed on Wales’ head. 
+Here, we clearly see the behavior of the typical, frightened, woefully outmanned beta male, as character actor Len Lesser (who portrays the overmatched bounty hunter Abe) starts yapping and barking in a very loud voice, while jerking around excitedly, shortly after getting the drop on Eastwood’s alpha-male killing-machine. 
+If you’re an alpha male and you’re in good shape, you’ve undoubtedly seen similar beta-male behavior. Probably at a bar, when some paunchy beta asswit, who’s sitting with his cucked crew, has had one too many beers and starts cutting you down in a passive-aggressive manner, from your periphery, as he barks and yaps in an excited voice about how tough he used to be, or how he doesn’t need to lift weights to be a man, or how he doesn’t think it’s cool to wear tight shorts (a hostile barb born of envy, uttered because he feels his package is inadequate). Yup, you know the routine. 
+In the film’s wow-we-almost-had-a-gangbang scene, featuring a somewhat-turned-on Sondra Locke (see above photo; Locke portrays Kansas-born settler, Laura Lee), as she’s confronted in the back of a covered wagon and dragged outside by a group of lusty Comancheros, which was obviously a blatant exaggeration, because, as we already know, all rapes are committed by totally unattractive, deranged, horribly evil, light-skinned men who smell badly and have absolutely zero neck tattoos—“ E , ” etc.—Clint’s character comes riding to the rescue out of the hills and guns the would-be rapists down, which probably made SJWs and feminists at the time scream with unbridled outrage at the theater screen, “She was giving her consent ! Didn’t you see it ? It was in her eyes ! It’s her right to express herself sexually, with however many men she might choose ! Murderer! Creeper! Pussy-blocker !” 
+Unfortunately, just like today, there were feminists and SJWs aplenty back in 1976. Their numbers have been growing with a vengeance since roughly the mid-1960s, and after more than 50 years in the saddle, they still keep going round and round in circles, yelling preprogrammed buzzwords and catch-phrases, while unknowingly speeding up the destruction of freedom of speech, but hey, Uncle Bob, tell us something we don’t already know, and yeah, I’ll get back to the film review now. 
+My favorite scene in the movie occurs when Josey Wales (who, now that I think about it, is a bit of a white knight, hmm…), rescues a Native American woman who is about to be double-teamed against her will by a pair of drunken white trappers. 
+Eastwood’s mad-dog character ultimately gets the drop on the would-be bounty-collectors, and he blows them straight to hell in an impressive hail of gunfire, which, I’ll have to admit, is pretty darned cool in itself. I mean, that’s why we watch films like this, isn’t it – for the violence, and the babes, and the red-pill messages? Well, there are plenty of those to be had in this no-holds-barred, epic Western film. 
+Maybe I’m going to have to rethink this movie in terms of it being perceived as a wholly red-pill film. Clint’s character stepped up and stopped a potential gangbang, as well as a three-way, and nobody asked him to do it. So this might have been a sly, Hollywood warm-up for the series of blatant white knight films we see today, but I don’t really want to think that way about Clint, so I won’t. I’ll just gulp down a quick blue pill right now—ah, much better. 
+I mean, Clint played Dirty Harry Callahan, for chrissakes, in a film that I will hopefully be reviewing at a later date, if I don’t get hit by a truck driven by an illegal alien who’s sporting 20 arrests for murder while having no driver’s license; or lynched by a swarm of rabid SJWs who are on the hunt for any white male who isn’t a media CEO or a billionaire. 
+The film bogs down a bit after about the two-thirds mark, in my opinion, but it still gets high marks across the board in every other critical category. If you haven’t seen it, rectify that soon. You can’t miss by watching this top-drawer, RPO film for men. 2. Play Misty for Me (1971 – Clint Eastwood, Jessica Walter, Donna Mills) 
+Unless they are over-the-top, laughingly ridiculous, obviously fictional slasher films, red-pill movies like this one just don’t get made in Hollywood any longer. 
+When you think of Clint Eastwood, you usually think of Dirty Harry , or The Outlaw Josey Wales , or Unforgiven , or Gran Torino, but Clint made a few obscure films that were both solidly red pill, and truly excellent movies, although they’ve been swept under the rug and locked away in the film vaults by today’s liberal-leaning film-hiders. 
+In this well-directed, highly suspenseful thriller, Carmel-by-the-sea disk jockey, Dave Carver (Clint Eastwood) lives a freewheeling, alpha male lifestyle, regularly banging out an assortment of hot women who listen to his live jazz broadcasts on a nightly basis. Carver is living the dream, pounding most of the available hot babes, and thoroughly enjoying his rightfully appointed alpha male privilege (or is that white male privilege?…er…SJW moment there, sorry). 
+That is, until Jessica Walter’s psycho-stalker character, Evelyn, walks into his life. 
+Now, you may have encountered a few of these yourself. Or maybe it’s just me. Sometimes I think I have an invisible sign on my forehead that only the initiated can read, which proclaims, “If you’re hot and insane—I’m your guy.” But Clint Eastwood shows us exactly what it’s like to be pursed by an attractive, psycho, female stalker. From writing creepy notes to him in lipstick on his mirror, to cutting up his clothing, to attacking his cleaning lady in a fit of jealous rage, Clint’s disk-jockey character quickly begins to realize that he bit off a hell of a lot more than just pussy when he started banging actress Jessica Walter’s batshit-crazy Evelyn. 
+I’ve always had a feeling that actresses who were really good in these psycho roles, were just being themselves. But I could be wrong about that. (I was wrong once before—it was in the third grade and she didn’t really love me.) Be that as it may, Jessica Walters really brings her A-game in the role of the totally unhinged Evelyn. If you’ve ever had a relationship with a woman like this one, watching the film will send chills down your spine, and result in some serious flashback imagery. 
+(Have you ever done this—what Clint is doing in the above photo—namely, hold and comfort a crazy woman who somehow managed to weasel her way into your life, by skillfully turning you into both an enabler and a caretaker…if so, I definitely feel your pain. And I’ll bet Clint has experienced it a time or three himself, or he probably wouldn’t have done this film.) 
+Play Misty for Me is absolutely worth watching for myriad reasons; but the most important reason of all, I wholeheartedly believe, is because it will clearly demonstrate to you, in no uncertain terms, the subtle and overt signs that a man absolutely has to be able to recognize, in order to avoid being blindsided by a psychotic, unhinged female. And for that reason alone, it’s a must-see classic, no doubt about it; when Clint’s character ultimately gets revenge on his tormentor, at the very end of this excellent RPO film, you’ll feel all warm and fuzzy inside, too—and in a weird, viscerally satisfying way—which makes the whole experience just that much more gratifying. 
+By boycotting all modern SJW Hollywood cinema, you are sending a message to the power structure that is loud and clear—you are not being fooled by their deliberate attempts to poison people’s minds and socially engineer them to be pussified, dumbed-down, blue-pill-sucking robots. 
+Always research the plot lines of any films for which you are seriously considering buying a ticket, or renting on DVD. And if you smell an SJW rat, don’t spend your money. It’s that simple. In the end, it’s just like investigating a potential LTR candidate. You have to conduct your due diligence. Otherwise, you might just get taken for a ride.",FAKE
+9461,"Legend Art Cashin On A Trump Presidency, The New World Order, Gold, Brexit, The Great Depression And Why We Will See Panic","56 Views November 14, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+As the bond market continues to melt down, interest rates rise and the Dollar Index surges above 100, legend Art Cashin gave one of his most important interviews ever to King World News about a Trump presidency, the New World Order, gold, Brexit, the Great Depression, and why we will see panic before the end of the year. 
+Eric King: “In Trump’s acceptance speech he said that we are going to have massive infrastructure spending. Is that bearish for gold? I don’t think so.” 
+Gold Market Hit As Druckenmiller Sells Art Cashin: “No. That on the face of it would not be a reason to sell gold. One of the things that may have concerned Druckenmiller was not so much your scenario of fiscal spending and building roads and highways, but the fact that despite what the Fed has been doing, the money supply has not been showing any velocity. That’s a topic you and I have discussed time and time again and it’s one of the holdups to gold because if it gets no velocity that’s deflationary. 
+In fact, the largest growth in money stock is in cash — green pictures of dead presidents — and that is deflationary because that does not have a lending factor that money in a bank would have. So those are two deflationary trends in money and that tends to weigh a little bit on gold and doesn’t allow it to fulfill its promise that you would expect in a somewhat inflationary period.” 
+Eric King: “Victor Sperandeo, a former associate of George Sorors, said to me this will be ‘pure money printing.’ That we are going to print trillions of dollars and build infrastructure — talk about how you view that. Obviously there are going to be jobs created and it will be great for infrastructure, so it will juice the economy, but what are the longer-term ramifications?” 
+Art Cashin: “On the face of it, it looks good. As you said, there will be jobs created and there will be improvements in roads and airports and so on. However, the other shoe to fall is that Mr. Trump is also committed to revamping the tax code. And those two things should lead to a massive increase in the deficit. And we are already deeply in debt, so people like Rosenberg and others feel like it will have virtually no impact. 
+On the face of it the stimulus program should be great for the economy, but because you are in such a high level of debt it might not work out that way. He and others point out that if fiscal stimulus were the answer then Japan would be the king of the world with all of those bridges to nowhere that they built. Japan spent a lot of money, built up their deficit, and their economy never really turned around.” 
+Eric King: “Going back even further than that and looking at the Great Depression, the United States was struggling and then FDR devalued the dollar by revaluing the price of gold higher. Those public works projects then got underway, the massive public works projects that built so much of the infrastructure here in the United States, Art. And that did turn the stock market around. It turned many things around — commodities, etc — but then it rolled over by 1937-1938 and then the war came. Is this infrastructure spending program something that can look good for a little while and then it will just roll over like we saw in 1937-1938?” 
+Art Cashin: “It can. And the problem (during the Great Depression) was that the thing didn’t click, as it were. It didn’t lead to the next step. You hire people, you do the road projects, you do whatever, and then you want to see them go out and spend and business begin to borrow and banks to lend. And in ’37 and ’38 that never fully kicked in. U.S. Experiences Second Stock Market Collapse From 1937 To 1938 
+You had high government officials, in frustration, go to Congress and testify: “We couldn’t get it started. We just couldn’t get it started.” 
+For all of the deficit spending, for all of the government programs, it never fully worked. That’s the fear. Again, if you go back to Japan, clearly they spent trillions of Japanese yen in massive building projects and it never kicked in, it never took over. The people continued to worry and hold onto their money. 
+A Worried Public Is Hoarding Cash As I’ve told you before, this whole thing about helicopter money and whatnot, if Bernanke flew over your house and dropped a million dollars in brand new money, and you were so worried that you got up and hid it in the garage until you figured out what the economy was going to do…And that is virtually what has happened to us for the past seven years. 
+They have tried all kinds of increases in money supply but it has never kicked in and people are so terrified that they are not spending, and basically, as I said, the large amount of growth was in cash. So they are putting it in the mattress, not even in the bank.” 
+Eric King: “Art, for so many years on King World News you have been talking about this lending and spending not kicking in, and you have used that Bernanke analogy over and over again. It’s not normal for you to beat up on a point as much as you have. But earlier you brought up Japan, and then when we covered the Great Depression you discussed 1937-1938, and the the testimonies before Congress from people saying, ‘We just couldn’t get it started.’ Did you know all along that it was going to unfold this way to some degree with the lack of lending and spending? Did you know that from history?” 
+Art Cashin: “I had a fear of it and it became pretty evident after some of the first things they (central planners) did. It is not a very difficult game. Every week the Federal Reserve reports the Money Supply and the Federal Reserve of St. Louis reports the Monetary Stock, which is the amount of raw money that the Fed adds in. “We Just Couldn’t Get It Started” – Monetary Stock Plunging 
+“That Shouldn’t Be” For a year now, despite all the things you have heard, despite all the programs and ‘pump-priming’ and Yellen and all the doves, the Monetary Stock has not increased all year. That shouldn’t be. 60-Year Velocity Of Money Stock Hitting New Lows 
+If money has velocity, then you can see the economy begin to move up. If it gets too much velocity, then you get to see inflation. But so far we are not getting a high dose of either. Although, if you ask somebody standing in the supermarket if they have inflation they might give you a bit of an argument. But by government standards it’s not quite there yet.” 
+Eric King: “Along those same lines, Art, you’ve warned repeatedly about Weimar Germany and the experience of the 1920s. This idea that there can be no inflation and then suddenly it just kicks in and then all hell breaks loose. You’ve warned so many time about that. Is that what’s in front of us?” 
+Art Cashin: “You will begin to know it. Everybody talks about the Weimar Republic where they actually printed cash money and flooded the system. It wasn’t just the bank reserves — they actually flooded the system with paper money. And amazingly, amazingly, it was a while before that actually kicked in in an inflationary manner. And as you alluded to, I’ve said this time and time again, it’s one of those things like spontaneous combustion — it’s there and it’s there and it’s there and suddenly it bursts into flames. And when it bursts into flames it consumes everything about it. And that’s when you can have a runaway inflation. 
+But so far it has not burst into flames. And that is why to even some degree the Fed is frustrated, hoping to get inflation up above 2 percent. And they may be in a position where, be careful what you wish for. Because if they get 2 percent and above it could suddenly combust and things could begin to move rather rapidly.” 
+Eric King: “Art, let me ask you this about the Trump presidency. It seems like for those people out there who, as he said, felt lost, the lost Americans, and for those out there who really felt like they were having globalism shoved down their throats in Europe and in the United States, this seemed to be a moment in time where there was going to be some backtracking. The borders were going to be closed, there would be some protectionism — we all know the plusses and minuses of that — but how did you view this Trump election and him becoming president, the idea that the elite got sand kicked in their face and that this New World Order would be slowed down, if only for a moment?” 
+Donald Trump’s Shocker And Why Brexit Is Nowhere Near Over Art Cashin: “I view it as yet one more extension of what looks to be a populist revolt that is sweeping the world. You saw the beginning of it with Brexit, and you have too many pundits on TV saying, ‘Well, that ended quickly in reverse.’ Brexit is nowhere near over. But the reason that markets didn’t continue to spiral (downward) is that they realized that Brexit has basically been postponed. They haven’t gone in and declared Article 50. Once they start the process in motion, the consequences of Brexit are going to be there and they are going to be drastic. 
+Now, if you take Trump’s election as the second leg of populism, the next thing you look for is the December 4th referendum in Italy. And there’s a good chance that will cause the government to fail and Italy will be right back in the middle of a major European crisis, and we’ll be right back where we were with Greece (only much larger in scale). So this game is far from over and we could see further panic as we head into the end of the year.” 
+Eric King: “Ahead of what’s going to happen in Italy, because I think that will unfold as you just predicted, Art, a Trump America going forward and this idea that the elites have been pushing globalism down everybody’s throats with NAFTA and so many things that have happened around the world. The globalism and the push to eliminate national boundaries, we’ve seen that in Europe and of course they had talked about combining Canada, the United States and Mexico into one regional unit. This idea that globalism has taken a huge blow here, is that true? Or did it just slow it down? What will a Trump presidency mean in that sense?” 
+“You’re Fired!” Art Cashin: “We’ve got a lot of things to see. Over the next week or two you are going to see whom he appoints to the cabinet and who holds him under their sway. It would appear, however, because of the size of his commitment, he’s got to address globalization and global trade. He’s got to go back and revisit even NAFTA. 
+I think some of his early attempts will be reasonably good. He will do some fiscal stimulus, some building and repairing, hopefully getting the tax structure in better order. But that will not be the end of it. He can pivot a bit but he can’t completely abandon it (his campaign promises). People will have to watch what he does. 
+Now, he may cleverly hire some people and put burdens on their shoulders. If after six months things don’t work out, he can revert to his TV personality and say, ‘You’re fired,’ to show the American people that he’s staying on top. But for now…KWN encourages everyone around the world to listen to one of legendary Art Cashin’s greatest audio interviews ever discussing the gold market at length, including the recent takedown in gold and what to make of Druckenmiller selling, what to surprises to expect in key markets as Trump becomes president, and what impact massive public works projects will have on the United States, inflation, gold, bonds, and much more, by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+***KWN has now released the extraordinary KWN audio interview with whistleblower Andrew Maguire, where he discusses the gold and silver smash, at what price the large sovereign wholesale bids are located, and much more, and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+***ALSO JUST RELEASED: Greyerz – Historic Shocker, A Difficult Road And A Major Short Squeeze About To Unfold CLICK HERE. 
+© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
+9310,Dr. David Duke and Prof. Kevin MacDonald on Duke’s overwhelming victory in the debate,"Dr. David Duke and Prof. Kevin MacDonald on Duke’s overwhelming victory in the debate November 3, 2016 at 10:24 am 
+Dr. David Duke and Prof. Kevin MacDonald on Duke’s overwhelming victory in the debate 
+Today Dr. Duke talked about his senatorial debate last night, including the attempt by Black Lives Matter activists to attack him and his police escort and the so-called moderator debating with him. Despite him being the target of attacks from all sides, Dr. Duke was judged the winner by 95% of the respondents to the NBC on-line poll. 
+Professor Kevin MacDonald then joined the show and talked about the significance of the debate and the election. This is an amazing show that you don’t want to miss. 
+
+Our show is aired live at 11 am replayed at ET 4pm Eastern and 4am Eastern. 
+Click on Image to Donate! 
+And please spread this message to others.",FAKE
+240,What's really behind Clinton's Benghazi grilling?,"Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review and a former CNN producer and correspondent. Follow her @FridaGhitis . The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.
+
+(CNN) The unmistakable smell of hypocrisy permeating the latest congressional hearings on Benghazi is so pungent that few people believe the claims from the panel's leaders that they are only searching for the truth. Almost three-quarters of Americans now believe the investigation is motivated by a quest for political gain rather than by a genuine wish to get at the facts.
+
+It's no wonder. Other national tragedies, other terrorist attacks, other major failings of U.S. operations overseas have received limited attention -- sometimes none at all -- from congressional investigators. A comparison of the way Congress responded to other U.S. security disasters that deserved close scrutiny strongly suggests all you need to know about the partisan, electoral politics at play in Washington today.
+
+To be sure, the events of Sept. 11, 2012 , in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens , and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi constituted a calamitous failure and most certainly warranted a congressional investigation.
+
+But that investigation already happened, over and over and over. What we see now is clearly political theater, a maneuver by the Republican majority aimed at eroding support for the likely Democratic presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Vast majorities of Democrats and independents see it that way, and almost half of all Republicans agree.
+
+While Benghazi has been the subject of seven congressional investigations, in addition to one by an accountability review board, there are countless cases where Congress spent little time and money examining what went wrong.
+
+For example, Congress does not appear particularly interested in looking at what caused the disaster a few weeks ago, when the U.S. bombed a hospital operated by the charity Doctors Without Borders, in Kunduz, Afghanistan, even though the mistake cost nearly two dozen lives and harmed America's efforts in the area.
+
+But that tempered interest is hardly a fluke. In fact, the enthusiasm with which Congress has jumped to investigate the Benghazi debacle is unprecedented.
+
+In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a Joint Inquiry in Congress looked at five previous major terrorist attacks or attempted attacks against the U.S. to see where intelligence had failed. The incidents included the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 1999 ""Millennium"" plot, and the strike on the USS Cole in 2000.
+
+These were not minor or inconsequential terrorist operations. They were deadly and they foreshadowed what came later. The embassy bombings, two simultaneous explosions in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, killed more than 200 people and left more than 4,000 injured.
+
+Congress held a handful of hearings, but no formal investigation. The investigation was conducted by the FBI and ultimately resulted in the indictment of several men, including one Osama Bin Laden.
+
+Not one of these five terrorist plots against the U.S. produced a level of congressional interest even remotely approaching what we see now on Benghazi and on Hillary Clinton. No investigation took as long. Even that joint congressional investigation was completed in 10 months.
+
+If congressional leaders believe concern for the safety of diplomatic personnel warrants the magnitude and duration of their efforts, it's curious that Congress spent so little time reviewing the Africa embassy bombings, or any of the many other attacks on American diplomats who have died in the line of duty over the years; people like 33-year-old John Granville, a diplomat working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, shot to death in Khartoum, Sudan in 2008, or David Foy, 51, killed in a massive blast outside the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan in 2006.
+
+If the issue is the failures of security, of intelligence, or of judgment that have cost the lives of U.S. citizens on dangerous assignments, it's curious that the events of an awful day in late 2009 at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan did not merit this kind of scrutiny. That was when seven Americans working for the CIA were killed when a man who was supposed to be an informant, invited by American agents to be the base, turned out to be a radical jihadi, a suicide bomber who blew himself up. The dead included Jennifer Matthews, 45, one of the CIA's top al Qaeda experts. That incident was investigated by the CIA, not Congress.
+
+If it's terrorism that justifies the obsessive attention to Benghazi, it's interesting that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the worst terrorist attack before 9/11, was not the target of a slew of congressional panels the way Benghazi is. The only report from Congress on the Oklahoma bombing was privately released by Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who was searching for an elusive ""foreign connection."" The attack, which killed 168 people, was investigated by the FBI.
+
+Yes, all of those happened years ago. But what about the Boston bombings of April 2013? They did warrant an investigation by the Homeland Security Committee, which produced a couple of reports. That's a minuscule investigation compared with the Benghazi work by congressional committees including, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Senate Committee On Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and others, each of which has already conducted its own investigation and issued its own report.
+
+What happened in Benghazi back in 2012 was horrific and it is crucial that the U.S. learns from its mistakes. Investigating what exactly went wrong is an imperative. But what is unfolding in Washington is not about that. History proves it. That's the whiff so many people detect. We know what it is.",REAL
+8472,Hillary Is The Perfection of a Corrupt System,"Posted on November 3, 2016 by Charles Hugh Smith 
+Let’s set aside Hillary Clinton as an individual and consider her as the perfection of a corrupt political system. As I noted yesterday, Politics As Usual Is Dead , and Hillary Clinton is the ultimate product of the political system that is disintegrating before our eyes. 
+The corruption of pay-to-play and the commingling of public and private influence is not the failing of an individual–it is the logical conclusion of a thoroughly corrupt political system. 
+Given the incentives built into politics as usual , public/private pay-to-play doesn’t just make sense–it is the only possible maximization of the political system . 
+Cobble together a multi-million dollar private foundation, millions of dollars in speaking fees from big-money contributors, conflicts of interest, the secrecy of private email servers, pay-to-play schemes and corrupted loyalists planted in the Department of Justice, and the inevitable result is a politics as usual money-harvesting machine that lays waste to the nation, supporters and critics alike. 
+All the Clintons did is assemble the parts more effectively than anyone else. Now that the machine has scooped up hundreds of millions of dollars in “contributions” and other loot, vested interests and corrupted loyalists within the federal government will do anything to protect the machine and its vast flow of funds. 
+The nation’s political system needs a thorough cleaning from top to bottom. Exposing the Clintons’ perfection of politics as usual won’t change the conditions and incentives that created the Clintons’ harvester of corruption. 
+That will require rooting out the incentives that made the Clintons’ perfection of corruption both logical and inevitable.",FAKE
+7829,"Saudi Arabia Re-Elected, Russia Loses UN Human Rights Council Place","  Carol Adl in News , World // 0 Comments 
+Russia has failed to win re-election to the United Nations Human Rights Council. 
+President Putin was beaten by Hungary and Croatia in a vote by the 193-member U.N. General Assembly on Friday. 
+For the first time since its inception in 2006, Russia will not be a member of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) after being narrowly beaten by Croatia in a vote. 
+More than 80 human rights and aid organizations had urged UN member-states to vote Russia off the council because of its military support to President Bashar al-Assad during the crisis in Syria. 
+Saudi Arabia on the other hand was successfully re-elected despite criticism from human rights organizations. 
+RT reports: 
+Saudi Arabia sailed through the Asian ballot with 152 votes, and will represent the region on the UNHRC alongside China, Japan and Iraq for the next three years. 
+South Africa, Rwanda, Egypt and Tunisia were chosen from the African group, Cuba and Brazil from Latin America and the Caribbean, and the US and the UK will represent the Western bloc, which comprises Western Europe and North America. 
+Over the next term, which will last between 2017 and 2019, the 14 chosen members will be tasked with formulating the UN’s official position on conflicts occurring around the world, as well as the domestic policies of member states. 
+The elections took place against a backdrop of criticism from non-governmental human rights organizations, who say that the body has been hijacked by oppressive regimes looking to deflect criticism and drive their own agendas. 
+Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International produced a joint statement earlier this year condemning Riyadh for “an appalling record of violations” in Yemen, where it has conducted a bombing campaign against Houthi rebels since 2015, which has resulted in the deaths of up to 4,000 civilians. The two organizations called for Saudi Arabia, a member of the UNHRC since it was created in 2006, to be suspended – to no avail. 
+Saudi Arabia used its power in the council to block an outside inquiry into the campaign last month, while leading a successful resolution that placed the responsibility of investigating human rights abuses in the hands of its allies, the exiled Yemeni government. 
+Saudi Arabia carried out 157 executions domestically last year – the highest number in two decades, and is on pace to match the number this year. Critics of the regime have often faced detention, while women do not enjoy autonomy and equal status before the law.",FAKE
+9080,The Hatred that Trump’s Lies will Leave Behind,"[White might burning courtesy Informed Content .] =By= Juan Cole W hether Trump wins or loses (and in my view there isn’t much chance he can win), he will leave behind a toxic legacy of increased racial and religious hatred, which he has deliberately stirred up in order to take the focus off his policies– policies that will hurt workers and will throw even more money at the super-wealthy. This use of racism to divide the working class and whip up support for the business classes is as old as American capitalism.
+Trump has whipped up sentiment against Latinos and immigrants (a minority of Americans of Latino ancestry is first-generation immigrants) by loudly proclaiming that they are guilty of all kinds of crimes. In fact, violent has fallen 48% in the US since the early 1990s, yet in the past 25 years immigration has soared. Research shows that immigrants commit less crime than the native-born. It isn’t hard to figure out why. First, those who don’t yet have citizenship are afraid of being deported, so they keep their noses clean. But more importantly, and contrary to what Trump alleges, immigrants are go-getters who have taken the big step of leaving home to accomplish something. They are highly motivated to succeed and often bring with them a great deal of human capital. As for jobs, immigrants aren’t stealing them from the native born. They are doing different jobs than locals with the same educational attainments. That’s because they often don’t have as good English skills or can’t afford to turn down menial jobs. The hatred against immigrants Trump has fostered is based on a set of lies, lies that are easily shown to be falsehoods. But it is a little unlikely that this hatred of foreigners will subside Wednesday , whatever happens. 
+Trump has given aid and comfort to the American far right. With his racist dog whistles (and often just unadorned racism) he has emboldened the Ku Klux Klan, Alt-right and other disgusting organizations. David Duke of Louisiana has been encouraged to run for the senate and is pledging to be Trump’s biggest supporter. This genie will be hard to put back into its lamp. 
+Trump has encouraged hatred for Muslims in the US on an unprecedented scale. Hatred for Muslims has already been adopted as a latent platform by the Republican Party, but they are usually at least a little more subtle about it. If Trump can succeed in discriminating against Muslim-Americans, he can then proceed to discriminate against the rest of us on one pretext or another. Muslim-Americans are only 1% of our population. There isn’t actually any danger of them taking over the country or imposing their religious law, and most terrorism comes from the far right or from overseas, not from native-born Muslim-Americans. Trump supporters have already burned down a mosque in Florida, have assaulted Muslims (and Sikhs, whose men wear turbans) all over the country, and some Trumpists have plotted terrorism against Muslims. 
+Trump has left a legacy of contempt for women and a resurgent patriarchy. He has juvenilized women and hurled slurs at them. He accused Megyn Kelly of being on her period when she asked him sharp questions. He boasted about grabbing strangers by the genitals. His message is that women should be judged not by their intelligence, hard work, or character but by their breast size and figure and the symmetry of their faces. 
+Trump has taken optimistic trend lines and pulled them down into Sheol with him. He has diminished our country, traumatized our children, and made us laughingstocks in the urbane capitals of the world. He leaves us a large bequest, tied up with a bow, of hatred and prejudice, smelling like the piece of dog shit that is Donald Trump 
+Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation?",FAKE
+3947,South Korean naval vessel fires warning shots near North Korean patrol amid high tension,"A South Korean naval vessel fired five shots as a warning to a North Korean patrol boat that briefly moved south of the countries' disputed boundary line in the Yellow Sea, Seoul's defense ministry said Monday.
+
+A South Korean military official told the Yonhap news agency that the North Korean vessel retreated northward after the warning shots were fired into the water. However, the incident underscores the heightened hostilities between the two Koreas.
+
+The brief encounter came hours after the United Nations Security Council condemned North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket that world leaders described as a banned test of ballistic missile technology and South Korea's president called another ""intolerable provocation.""
+
+North Korean leader Kim Jong Un went ahead with the launch just two hours after an eight-day window opened early Sunday, and a month after the country's fourth nuclear test. He ignored an appeal from China, its neighbor and important ally, not to proceed, and, in another slap to Beijing, he chose to launch the rocket on the eve of Chinese New Year, the country's most important holiday.
+
+China and the United States have been negotiating the text of a new Security Council sanctions resolution since Pyongyang's Jan. 6 nuclear test, which it claimed was a hydrogen bomb. That claim has been met with outside skepticism.
+
+The U.S., backed by Japan and South Korea, wants tough U.N. sanctions reflecting Kim's defiance of the Security Council. But diplomats say China, the North's key protector in the council, is reluctant to impose economic measures that could cause North Korea's economy to collapse — and a flight of North Koreans into China across their shared border.
+
+The 15-member Security Council strongly condemned the launch and pledged to ""expeditiously"" adopt a new resolution with ""further significant measures"" — U.N. code for sanctions. The word ""robust"" referring to the measures was in an initial draft, but was dropped in the final statement.
+
+U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power told reporters that ""it cannot be business as usual"" after two successive North Korean acts that are ""hostile and illegal.""
+
+""What's important is that the Security Council unites,"" Power said. ""China is a critical player. ... We are hopeful that China, like all council members, will see the grave threat to regional and international peace and security, see the importance of adopting tough, unprecedented measures, breaking new ground here, exceeding the expectations of Kim Jong Un.""
+
+He said a new resolution should ""do the work of reducing tension, of working toward denuclearization (of the Korean peninsula), of maintaining peace and stability, and of encouraging a negotiated solution.""
+
+""I believe the council needs to work together for a new resolution,"" Liu added, indicating that China may want negotiations with the United States to be widened.
+
+Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, whose country is also a North Korean ally, said: ""It has to be a weighty resolution, but it also has to be a reasonable resolution"" that doesn't lead to North Korea's economic or humanitarian collapse, or further heighten tensions.
+
+Russia's goal is to see six-party talks aimed at denuclearization resume, he said, but in the current atmosphere that's unlikely because the North Koreans ""have been very unreasonable"" and are challenging the entire international community.
+
+""We think this is wrong for their national interests ... for the Korean Peninsula ... for the region,"" Churkin said.
+
+North Korea, which calls its launches part of a peaceful space program, said it had successfully put a new Earth observation satellite, the Kwangmyongsong 4, or Shining Star 4, into orbit less than 10 minutes after liftoff, and vowed more such launches. A U.S. official said it might take days to assess whether the launch was a success.
+
+But in Pyongyang, North Koreans celebrated the launch with an official fireworks display Monday night, state broadcaster KCTV reported, according to CNN.
+
+Japan's U.N. ambassador, Motohide Yoshikawa, told reporters the missile, which went over Japan and landed near the Philippines, was ""a clear threat to the lives of many people.""
+
+The Security Council underscored that launches using ballistic missile technology, ""even if characterized as a satellite launch or space launch vehicle"" contribute to North Korea's development of systems to deliver nuclear weapons and violate four Security Council resolutions dating back to the North's first nuclear test in 2006.
+
+North Korea under Kim Jong Un has pledged to bolster its nuclear arsenal unless Washington scraps what Pyongyang calls a hostile policy meant to collapse Kim's government.
+
+In a development that will worry both Pyongyang and Beijing, a senior South Korean Defense Ministry official, Yoo Jeh Seung, told reporters that Seoul and Washington have agreed to begin talks on a possible deployment of the THAAD missile-defense system in South Korea. North Korea has long decried the 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, and Beijing would see a South Korean deployment of THAAD, which is one of the world's most advanced missile-defense systems, as a threat to its interests in the region.
+
+In a statement, North Korea's National Aerospace Development Administration, in typical propaganda-laden language, praised ""the fascinating vapor of Juche satellite trailing in the clear and blue sky in spring of February on the threshold of the Day of the Shining Star.""
+
+Juche is a North Korean philosophy focusing on self-reliance; the Day of the Shining Star refers to the Feb. 16 birthday of Kim Jong Un's father, former dictator Kim Jong Il. North Korea has previously staged rocket launches to mark important anniversaries.
+
+Fox News' Jonathan Wachtel and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+7774,Coping With Extreme Weather If You’re Stranded Outside,By Lizzie Bennett I wrote a few days ago about vehicle preparedness in winter. I want to follow on from that today with things you should be thinking of if you find yourself caught outside in... ,FAKE
+5522,Iraqis in Mosul Find US Missiles at Captured Islamic State Base,"[Photo: US missiles found in ISIS stronghold in Mosul, Iraq.] =By= Kurt Nimmo Editor's Note Reports continue of active U.S. support of ISIS while at the same time the U.S. serves a support role with Iraqi forces in their efforts to retake ISIS controlled areas in Iraq. Also reported by the Pentagon is that what is learned in the Iraqi actions will be applied in Syria. When the US has a jockey on every horse in the race, it does mean that U.S. interests are likely to be served no matter who crosses the finish line. T he Iraqis found missiles at an Islamic State base in Mosul stamped with USA and DOD.
+The discovery did not warrant a headline on CNN or The New York Times. 
+“Several US-made missiles were found in al-Shoura region to the South of Mosul,” reports Iran’s al-Alam News Network , citing a local source. 
+“The ISIL terrorists have sent US-made TOW anti-tank missiles to Tal Afar and it is quite evident that they are preparing for a long-term war,” an Iraqi security official told an Arabic-language media outlet. 
+In early 2015 Qasim al-Araji, the head of the Badr Organization in Iraq, told parliament he had evidence the US armed the Islamic State, according to a report carried by the Arabic language Almasalah . 
+Iranian media and other sources claim US military aircraft dropped weapons in areas held by the Islamic State. 
+“The Iraqi intelligence sources reiterated that the US military planes have airdropped several aid cargoes for ISIL terrorists to help them resist the siege laid by the Iraqi army, security and popular forces,” Iraqi intelligence claimed in December, 2014. 
+“What is important is that the US sends these weapons to only those that cooperate with the Pentagon and this indicates that the US plays a role in arming the ISIL.” 
+In January 2015 Iraqi MP Majid al-Ghraoui said American aircraft delivered weapons and equipment to ISIS southeast of Tikrit, located in Salahuddin province. 
+“The Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee has access to the photos of both planes that are British and have crashed while they were carrying weapons for the ISIL,” the leader of the committee Hakem al-Zameli said, according to the Arabic-language information center of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. 
+Last February Iran’s FAR News Agency reported the Iraq Army shot down two British planes delivering weapons to the Islamic State. 
+Both the Islamic State and al-Nusra are in possession of US-made BGM 71E TOW anti-tank missiles. 
+The London-based organization Conflict Armament Research (CAR) previously reported that ISIS fighters are using “significant quantities” of arms including M16 assault rifles marked “property of the US government.” 
+CAR has documented a CIA-Saudi program begun in 2012 that has provided thousands of tons of weaponry to “insurgents” (jihadi mercenaries) in Syria. The weapons are shared with the Islamic State. 
+“Conflict Armament Research was able to trace the serial numbers of weapons recovered by Kurds battling ISIS in Eastern Syria back directly to the CIA-Saudi weapons airlift program,” notes Brad Hoff for Levant Report. 
+If Hillary Clinton is elected next week the restocking of the Islamic State’s arsenal and the war in Syria will continue. 
+“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states that had donated to the Clinton Foundation. Saudi Arabia had chipped in at least $10 million, and Boeing added another $900,000 as Secretary Clinton made it her mission to get Saudi Arabia the planes with which it would attack Yemen,” writes David Swanson . 
+Clinton is well aware the Gulf Emirates arm and provide logistical assistance to the Islamic State. 
+“While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region,” Clinton wrote in an email to John Podesta . 
+Clinton did not mention Obama’s secret authorization in 2013 that armed jihadis fighting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The deal allowed the Saudis to arm jihadis with US weapons. It also permitted the CIA to train the mercenaries on how to use the weapons, including anti-tank missiles, The New York Times reported. 
+
+Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation?",FAKE
+8049,The Story of How the DOJ Tried to Thwart an FBI Investigation Into the Clinton Foundation,"Trending Articles: Trending Articles: The Story of How the DOJ Tried to Thwart an FBI Investigation Into the Clinton Foundation   Source: Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg 
+
+Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a fascinating and troubling article detailing how aggressively the Department of Injustice moved to stymie efforts of FBI agents who wanted to investigate pay-to-play criminality with regard to the Clinton Foundation. Of course, none of this should come as a surprise. The Justice Department under President Obama never met a powerful person it cared to prosecute. Indeed, under Eric Holder’s crony reign (same now with Loretta Lynch), it’s been apparent for a very long time that senior leadership at the DOJ see the institution’s primary role to be the coddling and protection of oligarch criminals, especially those in the financial sector (see: Must Watch Video –“The Veneer of Justice in a Kingdom of Crime” ). 
+The death of the rule of law in America, otherwise known as the two-tier justice system, has been a key topic of mine since the very beginning. In fact, I think it is the number one cancer plaguing our society at this time. As I warned in the 2014 post, New Report – The United States’ Sharp Drop in Economic Freedom Since 2000 Driven by “Decline in Rule of Law” : 
+In my opinion, the U.S. is living on borrowed time. The entrepreneurial spirit is still very much alive, and a lot of innovative things are happening in the tech area, but other than that, the U.S. economy looks very much like a third word oligarchy. From my perspective, we need to reinstate the rule of law at once. The bad actors amongst the rich and powerful will continue to feast relentlessly on the productive parts of the economy so long as they they are never held accountable for their crimes. Simply put: The rule of law must be restored immediately. 
+When it comes to the restoration of the rule of law, there is simply no time to waste. 
+The rule of law has not been restored, a realization that is consistently reenforced by the lengths to which the Department of Justice goes to protect the powerful. Yesterday’s WSJ article gives us an additional glimpse into how that happens behind the scenes. 
+Here are a few excerpts from the article, FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe : 
+The surprise disclosure that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are taking a new look at Hillary Clinton’s email use lays bare, just days before the election, tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee. 
+The new investigative effort, disclosed by FBI Director James Comey on Friday, shows a bureau at times in sharp internal disagreement over matters related to the Clintons, and how to handle those matters fairly and carefully in the middle of a national election campaign. Even as the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up, according to people familiar with the matter. 
+New details show that senior law-enforcement officials repeatedly voiced skepticism of the strength of the evidence in a bureau investigation of the Clinton Foundation, sought to condense what was at times a sprawling cross-country effort, and, according to some people familiar with the matter, told agents to limit their pursuit of the case. The probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity. 
+Some investigators grew frustrated, viewing FBI leadership as uninterested in probing the charity, these people said. Others involved disagreed sharply, defending FBI bosses and saying Mr. McCabe in particular was caught between an increasingly acrimonious fight for control between the Justice Department and FBI agents pursuing the Clinton Foundation case. 
+Early this year, four FBI field offices—New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark.—were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling, according to people familiar with the matter. 
+Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public-corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation, these people said. 
+The Washington field office was probing financial relationships involving Mr. McAuliffe before he became a Clinton Foundation board member, these people said. Mr. McAuliffe has denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyer has said the probe is focused on whether he failed to register as an agent of a foreign entity. 
+In February, FBI officials made a presentation to the Justice Department, according to these people. By all accounts, the meeting didn’t go well. 
+Some said that is because the FBI didn’t present compelling evidence to justify more aggressive pursuit of the Clinton Foundation, and that the career anticorruption prosecutors in the room simply believed it wasn’t a very strong case. Others said that from the start, the Justice Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive of the case. 
+“That was one of the weirdest meetings I’ve ever been to,” one participant told others afterward, according to people familiar with the matter. 
+Anticorruption prosecutors at the Justice Department told the FBI at the meeting they wouldn’t authorize more aggressive investigative techniques, such as subpoenas, formal witness interviews, or grand-jury activity. But the FBI officials believed they were well within their authority to pursue the leads and methods already under way, these people said. 
+According to a person familiar with the probes, on Aug. 12, a senior Justice Department official called Mr. McCabe to voice his displeasure at finding that New York FBI agents were still openly pursuing the Clinton Foundation probe during the election season. Mr. McCabe said agents still had the authority to pursue the issue as long as they didn’t use overt methods requiring Justice Department approvals. 
+The Justice Department official was “very pissed off,”according to one person close to Mr. McCabe, and pressed him to explain why the FBI was still chasing a matter the department considered dormant. Others said the Justice Department was simply trying to make sure FBI agents were following longstanding policy not to make overt investigative moves that could be seen as trying to influence an election. Those rules discourage investigators from making any such moves before a primary or general election, and, at a minimum, checking with anticorruption prosecutors before doing so. 
+“Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” Mr. McCabe asked, according to people familiar with the conversation. After a pause, the official replied, “Of course not,” these people said. 
+For Mr. McCabe’s defenders, the exchange showed how he was stuck between an FBI office eager to pour more resources into a case and Justice Department prosecutors who didn’t think much of the case, one person said. Those people said that following the call, Mr. McCabe reiterated past instructions to FBI agents that they were to keep pursuing the work within the authority they had. 
+Others further down the FBI chain of command, however, said agents were given a much starker instruction on the case: “Stand down.” When agents questioned why they weren’t allowed to take more aggressive steps, they said they were told the order had come from the deputy director—Mr. McCabe. 
+Others familiar with the matter deny Mr. McCabe or any other senior FBI official gave such a stand-down instruction. 
+In September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information. 
+Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. McCabe, these people said, told them no and added that they couldn’t “go prosecutor-shopping.” 
+The above revelations, in conjunction with the email server probe being reopened by the FBI, is why I now think Donald Trump has a very good chance of winning the Presidency. As I noted in Friday’s post, Another Black Swan Hits the U.S. Presidential Election : 
+The problems with Hillary Clinton will never go away. They will always resurface or new problems will emerge, and it has nothing to do with a “vast rightwing conspiracy” (or Putin). It has to do with her. It has to do with the fact that her and her husband are career crooks, warmongers, and shameless looters of the American public. This re-opening of the FBI investigation just hammers all of that home for everyone. We know what 4 years of Hillary will look like. It’ll be Obama cronyism on steroids, plus endless investigations with a side of World War 3. I don’t think people want that, and so more Americans than the pundits realize will take a gamble on Trump. 
+It’s not just me saying it though. Even longtime Clinton supporter Doug Schoen is revisiting whether he can continue to support Clinton. As he wrote in an Op-ed published at The Hill : There will be no goodwill or honeymoon period for Clinton. Her first 100-days agenda will take a backseat to partisan divisions and polarization with little chance of constructive legislative action occurring. We have seen that a hyper-partisan, gridlocked Washington is bad for the country. There is no reason to believe that Clinton’s tenure will be anything but more of the same in this way and, most likely, a lot worse. Further, Russian President Vladimir Putin said (tongue-in-cheek) that we are not a banana republic.‎ I greatly fear we could become one if Secretary Clinton is elected president. Our national security will continue to be jeopardized by ongoing investigations by the FBI, and potentially the Justice Department and Congress, putting us at immediate risk of more assertive actions in Europe, Middle East and Asia by the Russians and Chinese. Moreover, we simply cannot face a situation where the president elect may need or want a pardon from the president to govern. Or worse yet, need to pardon herself after she takes office. As of now, I have no confidence that either of those questions will be answered by Election Day or that we will have full clarity on an investigation into what could be as many as 650,000 emails that found their way to Weiner and Abedin’s computer. However, in good conscience, and as a Democrat, I am actively doubting whether I can vote for the Secretary of State. I also want to make clear that I cannot vote for Donald Trump as his world view and mine are very different. For more on the Clinton Foundation, see:",FAKE
+4337,OnPolitics | 's politics blog,"Who has Trump picked for his Cabinet so far?
+
+Donald Trump is filling put his White House team with Cabinet picks and other top aides.",REAL
+6561,"Food mixology: When eaten together, these foods can boost health","Food mixology: When eaten together, these foods can boost health 
+  Isabelle Z. Tags: nutrients , food pairings , turmeric (NaturalNews) If you are making a conscious effort to eat nutritious food, you are already stacking the odds in your favor when it comes to your health and well-being. However, eating all the organic fruits and vegetables in the world is not going to do much for you if your body is not prepared to absorb the nutrients they contain.To be clear, eating a diet that is rich in organic produce, whole grains, and a reasonable amount of healthy fats is always preferable to a diet full of fried food, sugar and processed foods. However, if you want to maximize the benefits of your smart eating choices, you should try some of these food pairings to enhance nutrient absorption and give your health a boost. Milk and honey Your grandmother might have offered you a glass of warm milk with honey when you struggled to fall asleep as a child, and this tried-and-true combination has stood the test of time for good reason: it is a very effective pairing for your health. An amino acid found in milk known as tryptophan is used by the brain to make melatonin and serotonin, while the carbohydrates in honey can help with the uptake of tryptophan. Turmeric and black pepper The active ingredient in turmeric, curcumin, has anti-inflammatory properties, but it tends to be poorly absorbed by the body. Interestingly, the piperine found in black pepper can help boost its absorption significantly, which is why many supplements contain both ingredients. Try cooking a dish that contains generous amounts of turmeric , like curry, and add a sprinkling of black pepper. A tiny pinch of pepper can enhance your absorption of curcumin by more than 2,000 percent! Green tea and lemon If you are drinking green tea for its extraordinary antioxidant content, you might want to start adding some organic lemon juice to your cup. That's because Purdue University researchers have discovered that mixing green tea with lemon juice can significantly boost the amount of antioxidants that are available for your body to absorb. The catechins in green tea can help protect your body against cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer's disease. Olive oil and tomatoes These two Mediterranean diet staples go hand in hand, and it's easy to see why. Tomatoes contain antioxidants that can protect your body from disease, and adding a small amount of healthy fat to carotenoid-rich foods like tomatoes can increase its absorption. Try making a simple salad of chopped tomatoes drizzled in extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar to reap the benefits. The lycopene in tomatoes is also better absorbed when they are heated first, so take this one step further and make a tomato sauce or pizza sauce by cooking tomatoes and adding olive oil and www.herbs.news ""="""" target=""_blank"">www.herbs.news"">fresh herbs like oregano. Beans and cauliflower People who follow plant-based diets often rely on beans to get iron, but this type of iron is not as easily absorbed by the human body as iron that comes from meat sources. You can increase your body's absorption of the iron from beans by consuming a food that is rich in vitamin C at the same time, and cauliflower fits the bill quite nicely. Pair cauliflower with green beans or garbanzos to give your body an iron boost. You can also try other iron and vitamin C pairings , like strawberries with oatmeal.While all of these foods are quite healthy on their own, if you are looking to increase your intake of certain nutrients, make sure you are opting for food pairings and preparation methods that will boost absorption so you can reap the most benefits. Sources:",FAKE
+7445,The Deteriorating Situation in Ethiopia,"Tweet Widget by Yohannes Woldemariam 
+The minority ethnic regime in Ethiopia now faces multiple rebellions. The regime’s foreign friends are part of the problem. “Faced with increased intrusion into their lands by so-called international investors, by displacement and by the breakdown of their social fabric, Ethiopians are mobilizing to resist.” The once formidable government coalition “is beginning to unravel.” The Deteriorating Situation in Ethiopia by Yohannes Woldemariam 
+This article previously appeared in Pambazuka News . 
+“ The revolts are widespread and they appear beyond the power of the state to control and put down.” 
+The revolts in Ethiopia have the potential for creating radical, beneficial changes in the political order or instigating complete chaos that crosses its borders and destabilizes the entire fragile Horn of Africa region, for the outcomes of such uprisings have varied considerably from country to country. These protests can be the catalyst for building a new and democratic Ethiopia or end up in tears and disillusionment, as in Libya, South Sudan and many other places in the world. Countries emerging from dictatorships are particularly vulnerable and Ethiopia is certainly under a vicious dictatorship. 
+The events in Ethiopia are being described as “Intifada,” “Ethiopian Spring” or as something akin to the Color Revolutions in the Ukraine and Georgia and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China. During the uprising in 2005 protesting the rigged election, the late chief of the Tigrean Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) and Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, did say that there would not be any more Color Revolutions in Ethiopia. That uprising was put down with hundreds dead and thousands in concentration camps. 
+This time, however, the revolts are widespread and they appear beyond the power of the state to control and put down. Apparently, Mr. Zenawi spoke prematurely. Technological innovation is a very important part of this current political mass mobilization, which is why the government has moved with cutting Ethiopia off from the internet and dismantling satellite dishes from the homes of ordinary citizens. Drawing on satellite television, mobile phones and the Internet, the revolts are spreading. Within seconds, activists send their messages against the tyranny. Unsurprisingly, the TPLF oligarchy is extremely fearful of social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and the diaspora media. 
+In this piece, I want to reflect on three points: 
+1. The celebrity factor: Feyisa Lilesa versus Prime Minister Halemariam Desalegn 
+2. Mr. Abay Tsehaye’s reference to Rwanda 
+3. The newly declared State of Emergency 
+The celebrity factor: Feyisa Lilesa versus Prime Minister Halemariam Desalegn 
+In the wake of the Rio Olympics, the profile of the Ethiopian uprising got a boost from Feyisa Lilesa , with his heroic act of crossing his arms on winning the silver medal for marathon, a signature symbol of solidarity of the oppressed Oromo nation to which Feyisa belongs. The influence of the celebrity athlete for social change is formidable, and Feyisa has emerged as a powerful voice for the struggle of his Oromo people, causing nervous shivers in the beleaguered regime. What the death and imprisonment of thousands of Oromos couldn’t accomplish in Ethiopia was achieved by his symbolic act at the finish line. Now the whole world is clued into the terrible conditions in Ethiopia and beginning to learn about the plight of the Oromo people. 
+Other Ethiopian athletes have since used their successes to follow suit. Ebsa Ejigu, Tamiru Demissie and Hirut Guangul have used their international successes to publicize the plight of their country’s men and women to an international audience. This trend is likely to continue now as other athletes and celebrities are losing their fear of retaliation and becoming more and more willing to participate in what has become a growing national movement. Yes, these athletes will pay a price. Lilesa is now separated from his wife and children and beckoning an unknown fate. Life in exile will not be easy even for famous athletes. But compared to those losing lives and limbs to bullets in Ethiopia, it is a small price to pay. They are heroes, and their names are already inscribed in history books. 
+“These athletes will pay a price.” 
+The TPLF reaction to Lilesa’s heroic act can be gleaned from statements given by PM Hailemariam Desalegn. Although the PM is from the Wolayta ethnic group, which was traditionally relegated to the periphery of the Ethiopian mainstream, he has become a willing accomplice and spokesman for the TPLF. Most people regard him as an accidental PM who happened to be in the right place and at the right time when his powerful boss, PM Meles Zenawi, passed away in the summer of 2012. He was handpicked as Zenawi’s deputy because he wasn’t a threat and, as a non-Tigrean, served as a convenient cover and a token representing “diversity” for the TPLF. He is so loyal to the late PM, he still refers to the Meles “vision” in his public pronouncements. Most Ethiopians know that he is just a figurehead with no real power. Yet, in an interview conducted with the online Foreign Policy.com, he is quoted as saying: 
+“It’s me who sent [Lilesa] to Rio for the Olympics, and we expected him to come back after winning the medal. . . . [T]his is not the capacity of the man himself. It’s something which has been orchestrated by someone else from outside.” 
+It is remarkable that the PM has the audacity to say he sent Feyisa Lilesa to the Olympics, as if Feyisa needed his charitable permission. It is crystal clear that Feyisa earned his place in the Olympics. 
+One can readily concede that he may have acquiesced to nepotism by sending to the Olympics the unqualified son of the head of the sports federation, Robel Kiros Habte , who made Ethiopia a laughing stock with his hopeless performance in a swimming race. But no one can doubt that Feyisa went to the Olympics because he was Ethiopia’s best hope for the marathon. And he delivered in no unmistakable terms by winning a silver medal competing with the best and the elites in the world. It is hard to believe that Desalegn referring to Feyisa actually said: “This is not the capacity of the man himself” – thus exposing his own pomposity, shallowness and contempt for the Oromo hero. Clearly, Desalegn has sold his soul to the TPLF devil. To suggest that Feyisa cannot think for himself and act on his own is inexcusably ignorant and arrogant and unbecoming of a prime minster. 
+“Desalegn is a sellout with little dignity, reading and parroting whatever script is given to him by the TPLF.” 
+Feyisa is not only a fine athlete; he is also a dignified, proud, principled and articulate Oromo and Ethiopian, as he amply demonstrated during the press conference in the Washington D.C. rally where Congressman Chris Smith also spoke. Also, in a direct reply to the PM’s insult, Feyisa quipped: 
+“I was not surprised by his comments because individuals who are always controlled by others tend to assume everyone is that way as well. . . . Unlike the prime minister, I make my own decisions and speak for myself.” 
+Indeed, Desalegn is a sellout with little dignity, reading and parroting whatever script is given to him by the TPLF. The pretentious PM has replaced the real world with a make-believe virtual world. It is for this reason that he is unable to see realities on the ground; he is temporarily sheltered behind a wall whose mortar is sychophantic servitude and a wicked willingness to say and do anything to appease his TPLF benefactors. 
+It is beyond regrettable that Desalegn is unable to see the rapid downside toward further chaos and civil war in Ethiopia that is due to the abject misery and oppression suffered by the people who are subjected to the policies of those he is serving and to whom he has sold his soul. He calls himself a born-again Christian with a straight face. How would Jesus himself, who stood up to the hypocritical Pharisees and threw the money-changers out of the temple in Jerusalem, have regarded a man like Desalegn, who is in bed with the TPLF elites who are the modern day equivalent of the Pharisees in Ethiopia and whose words and actions rarely match? The human suffering that is the result of the violent and continuous repression cannot be seen from inside their ideological castles resting on the thin air of empty rhetoric and shameless self-promotion. 
+Desalegn would be well advised to keep his mouth closed to spare himself more disgrace. He has already sunk into the deep end of an abyss. It is depressing to see a human being selling out his people and becoming a slave of oppressors. 
+Invoking the specter of Rwanda 
+The TPLF ideologue and one of the real powers behind the throne, Mr. Abay Tsehaye, in an interview with the pro-government Radio Fana, compared the situation of Rwanda in the early 90s to the current situation in Ethiopia. He correctly stated that Rwanda was comprised of only two ethnic groups (the Hutu and the Tutsi), really not much of a country, and was on the verge of disintegration. He went on to say that reconciliation occurred and the country recovered. In Ethiopia with over eighty ethnic groups, if the situation goes “out of control,” he concluded, Ethiopia will cease to exist as a country. Every thoughtful person worries about this. However, one can reasonably surmise from his analysis that Ethiopia under the control of his Tigray-dominated government, who make up only six percent of the Ethiopian population, is his guarantee for holding the country together. Mr. Tsehaye fails to recognize the draconian hegemonic policies of his regime as the very reasons for the grim state of affairs in the country. As the Ethiopian uprising makes clear, the various ethnicities are no longer buying TPLF shenanigans and see the TPLF itself as the main cause of Ethiopia’s predicament, as the country descends into possible civil war. 
+For anyone willing to see the truth, Ethiopia is in a state of turmoil due to the exploitation of the long-suffering people of Oromia, Ogaden, Gambella and other ethnic groups by the TPLF elite in partnership with international enablers such as China and the United States, the principal rivals in Africa and the Horn region. The TPLF exploitation, in which valuable resources and political roles are dominated by a minority elite that has transformed itself into an oligarchy, has created highly rebellious resentment by the victims while reinforcing a sense of ethnic identity and consciousness. Faced with increased intrusion into their lands by so-called international investors, by the displacement and stunted developments they experience and by the breakdown of their social fabric, Ethiopians are mobilizing to resist. 
+“The various see the TPLF itself as the main cause of Ethiopia’s predicament, as the country descends into possible civil war.” 
+The government’s state-driven development projects financed by international investors and partners bypass the rural peasants and pastoralists, alienating the people and reinforcing the politics of deep ethnic hierarchy. Recent events have made it clear that TPLF’s “constitutional federalism” has more to do with its divide-and-rule strategy and its elitist allocation of national resources, comparable to actions of the former Soviet Communist Party, which retained tight control over its regions through local parties. The TPLF set up People’s Democratic Organizations, local versions of the ruling party, which squeezed out traditional authority. 
+The co-opted ethnic leaders from these regions have either completely lost credibility, are sitting on the fence, or are jumping ship to support the resistance. Key former government figures like Junedin Sado are breaking their silence and speaking out with scathing attacks on the regime. He has apologized to the Ethiopian people for the time that he served under the regime. The so- called coalition that the TPLF built is beginning to unravel. Some Amhara and some Oromo are coming together against the TPLF, overcoming but not necessarily forgetting, the legacy of the historic oppression by Amhara elites which began with Menelik II. 
+Abay Tsehaye and TPLF leaders will need to face reality — if they have it in them to be truly concerned about Ethiopian unity. Oromo historical grievances are not myths, as some revisionist history asserts. Oromo land is the most fertile and lush in Ethiopia, in contrast to the northern Ethiopian highlands with its rugged mountains and thin soils contributing relatively little to national economic production, but the Oromo have been alienated from control over their land throughout the 20th century first by the Amhara and now by the new TPLF overlords. 
+Acutely divided societies in which no single faction can impose its view might find an ability to arrive at political compromises in a constitutional form. But in Ethiopia, the hegemonic Amhara and now the Tigreans have excluded others from real power-sharing making true constitutionalism elusive. The leaders see the state as a prize to be won, a basis for private accumulation and patronage. But there is not enough patronage to go around, and those excluded from it mobilize their co-religionists and ethnic groups in an increasingly unmanageable opposition. 
+The State of Emergency 
+In response, the TPLF is relying on intensified repression by security forces, ethnic loyalists and the army. And for the first time in twenty-five years, the regime has declared a State of Emergency , clearly showing how rattled it is by the rebellion in the country. The Prime Minster announced : 
+“The cause of this (state of emergency) is that anti-peace forces in collaboration with foreign enemies of the country are making organized attempts to destabilize our country, to disrupt its peace and also to undermine the existence and security of its peoples.” 
+This response undoubtedly means more sticks and further erosion of civil liberties in the country but is unlikely to quell the unrest. One of the targets of the State of Emergency is the Internet and Social Media. PM Desalegn did make it a point to rant against diaspora media and the Internet during his appearance in September at the United Nations General Assembly: 
+“In fact, we are seeing how misinformation could easily go viral via social media and mislead many people, especially the youth…Social media has certainly empowered populists and other extremists to exploit people’s genuine concerns and spread their message of hate and bigotry without any inhibition...it is critical to underline one matter which is usually given short shrift, both by the media and others. It is simply hypocritical to deny that some of our countries have been targets for destabilization activities carried out with no accountability by people and groups who have been given shelters by States with whom we have absolutely no problems.” 
+The regime that Desalegn serves is responsible for suffocating the Ethiopian people by denying them any alternative media. The Ethiopian government is one of the top jailers and harassers of anyone daring to publish or practice independent journalism within the country. Now, Desalegn is shedding his crocodile tears about his inability to control and suppress social media and broadcasting emanating from the diaspora. While he has a point about the inherent potential for the abuse of social media, the regime is responsible for bringing criticisms on itself. In the absence of media freedom in the country, social media and broadcasting from the diaspora acquired enormous significance for Ethiopians hungry for information. It is clear that Ethiopians no longer trust the regime and have little confidence in official government news, which in reality is mostly propaganda. 
+“The Ethiopian government is one of the top jailers and harassers of anyone daring to publish or practice independent journalism.” 
+Authoritarian regimes adopt various forms of censorship to depoliticize the population and prevent the questioning of their legitimacy. By definition, authoritarian regimes demand strict submission by the media to their political authority. They do so by publishing or broadcasting deceptions in order to maintain their power structures. For example, the regime’s media censored Feyisa’s symbolic gesture in Rio while proclaiming that Feyisa is a national hero and welcome to return home, without any consequences. 
+The advent of the Internet has somewhat leveled the playing field by empowering regular Internet users to become content producers by utilizing decentralized and distributed networks such as social media. These uses of media pose a great danger to dictatorial regimes, which are moving to subvert, block social media and limit internet use, as in Ethiopia today. 
+China is the leading culprit in creating the technology to enable censorship, which it is sharing with the Ethiopian government. This suppression of the media will not succeed. Freedom-loving people find ways to circumvent these barriers and make determined efforts to stay informed – and, in turn, to inform the whole world. Yohannes Woldemariam is an educator and author. This article previously appeared on the Huffington Post’s Contributor platform. [2]",FAKE
+735,New Poll Finds Donald Trump Almost Caught Up with Hillary Clinton,"Republicans have rallied behind Donald Trump in recent weeks, as the businessman and reality-TV star cleared an all but assured path to the party’s presidential nomination. Trump has narrowed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s lead to 3 percentage points, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The margin of error for the poll is plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.
+
+Clinton leads trump 46 percent to 43 percent, marking a significantly smaller margin between the two likely nominees and the first time Clinton has not led Trump by double digits since December. In April, Clinton led Trump by 11 percentage points, 50 percent to 39 percent, according to a NBC News/WSJ poll.
+
+Insofar as individual polls mean anything, the swell of support for Trump could suggest that Republican voters are accepting their presumptive nominee after his win in the Indiana primary earlier this month, and after Senator Ted Cruz, Trump’s final primary opponent, dropped out.
+
+The poll comes out amid new bitterness in the Democratic primary battle. NBC points out just 66 percent of Democratic voters who prefer Sanders will support Clinton in a matchup against Trump, underscoring the challenge she faces in winning over necessary votes in the general election.
+
+According to the poll, Clinton and Trump have one thing in common: both are currently the two most unpopular likely presidential nominees, with 54 percent of registered voters who have a negative opinion of Clinton and 58 percent having a negative opinion of Trump. If nominated at such rates, they would also be the most unpopular candidates since the poll began in 1984.",REAL
+3325,Clinton emails on trade deal held until after election - Video,Clinton emails on trade deal held until after election,REAL
+277,How Republicans will choose the next speaker,"Reps. Kevin McCarthy, R-California, Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Daniel Webster, R-Florida, are the three candidates vying for the post, and the winner becomes the favorite to become second in line to succeed the President of the United States.
+
+But Thursday's vote inside the House GOP conference is just the first step. The candidate who gets the Republican party's internal nod still has to be approved by the full House of Representatives on October 29. And that's where things can get tricky.
+
+If the Republican nominee can't garner 218 votes on the House floor, then Boehner will remain the speaker. And the potential for multiple rounds of votes on the House floor could open up the election to other candidates beyond the three that are in the race now. It would also prolong the deeply divisive and public process for House Republicans, who are hoping to chart a new path forward and prove they can make the dysfunctional Capitol work.
+
+The three candidates will make their pitch to GOP colleagues at a ""candidate forum"" on Thursday morning in a conference room in the basement of the Capitol. Each gets three minutes to make a speech before answering questions from members. At noon, the 247 members of the House Republican conference gather in the ornate Ways and Means Committee room to vote. Under the House GOP conference rules, the three candidates are not allowed to make their own speeches. Instead each can designate one supporter to make a three-minute address nominating them for the post. Then up to two additional supporters can speak for another minute each on the candidate's behalf. To win the GOP nomination, a candidate needs a simple majority of all House Republicans -- or 125 votes. (That number could change if any House Republicans are absent or opts not to vote in the election.) Boehner plans to vote for McCarthy before heading to New York to tape an appearance on ""The Tonight Show,"" according to a spokesman. The delegate from American Samoa, Amata Radewagen, who doesn't get a vote on the House floor, does get to cast a vote for speaker inside the conference meeting. RELATED: John Boehner to appear on 'The Tonight Show' Three members serve as ""tally clerks"" and collect the ballots and count how many votes each candidate receives. Once all the ballots are counted, a representative of the conference will announce the results, along with the vote totals. If no candidate gets a majority of the conference on the first vote, a second ballot circulates with the names of the top two vote-getters, and a winner is announced after those ballots are counted. The new speaker can't take the gavel from Boehner until the full House of Representatives votes. Unlike the private contest on Thursday, the floor vote is covered live by C-SPAN's television cameras inside the House chamber. Each member of Congress is called on in alphabetical order to stand and announce their choice for speaker. The winner must win the votes of a majority -- 218, if everyone in the House is present -- in order to win. The vast majority of House Democrats are expected for to vote for former Speaker and current Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. House Republican conference rules require that GOP members support their party's nominee on the floor, but many conservatives have ignored that rule in recent elections. That's where any drama will occur. If the GOP nominee fails to get a majority, the contest on the House floor could go to multiple ballots. Boehner will remain the speaker until a majority of the House votes to elect a new candidate. The last time it took more than one ballot to elect a speaker was in 1923 when it took nine ballots over the course of three days. And you don't need to be in the House to get the job. The Constitution does not require that the speaker be someone currently serving in Congress, but all who have been elected to the post have been House members. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Jeff Sessions received votes in the January 2015 election . And two years earlier, David Walker, the former head of the General Accounting Office, received one vote",REAL
+7984,Nerve Disrupting Frequencies Radiating from “Smart” Meters – Information and Perspective,By Warren Woodward Everyone knows that wireless “smart” meters communicate via microwaves. What was unknown until now is that additional frequencies are transmitted in the 2 to 50... ,FAKE
+5924,Comment on Grinnell College warns against ‘deplorable and problematic’ costumes by Joe,"Posted on October 27, 2016 by DCG | 7 Comments 
+From Campus Reform : Grinnell College (a private liberal arts college in Iowa) is promoting a guide to help students avoid “cultural appropriation” this Halloween , warning that some costumes could be considered “deplorable and problematic.” (Gee, wonder where they got the idea for the word “deplorable?”) 
+The guide provides several examples of costumes that might fit the definition of “cultural appropriation,” defining the term as “the act of displaying people’s cultures in a disrespectful or condescending manner.” 
+The guide, called “My Identity, Not Your Costume,” goes on to list several examples of “offensive” Halloween costumes, featuring pictures of Grinnell students holding photos of costumes that would be considered disrespectful towards their culture. 
+In one instance, the guide shows a picture of a burly white man dressed in lingerie with a sash proclaiming “Call me Caitlyn,” referring to Caitlyn Jenner. The photo is held by a Grinnell student wearing a “National Coming Out Day” pin, and includes a caption stating, “the misrepresentation of my identity bothers me because people categorize me by my looks and may not understand my culture.” You just don’t understand this culture… 
+Another example of culturally appropriated Halloween costumes, according to the guide, is “using other cultures as accessories to appear more hip/interesting without adequate understanding or permission ,” one example of which is a picture of someone dressed as a Hindu deity being held by an Indian student and the message that such costumes are “deplorable and problematic.” 
+It then warns students that if their costumes take “defining characteristics of another culture” without “permission , or understanding of the historical background behind the said culture,” then these costumes might be too offensive to wear. 
+The guide then concludes with two questions the school thinks students should consider before selecting a Halloween costume, asking, “Does your costume perpetuate stereotypes or inaccurately portray my culture as a joke?” as well as “Why would I find your ‘Halloween costume’ to be offensive?” 
+Campus Reform reached out to Grinnell for a comment on the matter but did not receive a response in time for publication. 
+To donate to Campus Reform , go here . 
+DCG",FAKE
+9038,Whose Side Is Russia On In Syria?,"in: War Propaganda , World News (image credit: ALEXEY DRUZHININ / RIA NOVOSTI / Kremlin pool / AFP) In September 2015, at the behest of its legitimate government, Russia began aerial operations to combat ISIS and al-Nusra terrorists in Syria. Numerous other likeminded groups are involved, just as cutthroat, just as ruthless, just as extremist, masquerading as “moderate rebels” when none exist – supported by Washington, NATO , Saudi Arabia, Qatar, other Gulf States, Jordan, Israel and Turkey. They’re massacring civilians, killing government soldiers defending them, using chemical and other banned weapons, committing gruesome atrocities. Why does it pretend “moderate” fighters are involved when none exist? Why does it insist on separating nonexistent “moderates” from terrorist groups it’s combating when all anti-government forces are the same? Why isn’t it targeting all armed groups wanting Assad toppled and Syrian sovereign independence destroyed? It’s the only way to free the country from the scourge its facing – supported by Washington and its rogue allies, NATO and regional ones. Why did it halt its aerial operations to liberate eastern Aleppo, declaring a unilateral ceasefire, a so-called humanitarian pause – a major blunder, accomplishing nothing? Ongoing since October 18, it’s letting US-supported terrorists infesting the city replenish their ranks, regroup and mobilize for heavy attacks, largely harming civilians Moscow says it wants protected. Last Saturday evening, Russia ended its humanitarian pause because US-supported terrorists in eastern Aleppo prevent civilians from leaving, holding thousands hostage as human shields, including the sick and wounded. Yet it ceased aerial attacks, yielding the advantage to dark forces it’s sworn to eliminate. What kind of strategy gives them the upper hand? It gets worse. On October 26, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov issued the following statement: “The Russian Aerospace Forces and the Syrian Air Force have been sticking to a moratorium on air strikes for the past eight days. They are staying out of a 10-km (six-mile) zone around Aleppo.” “Six humanitarian corridors, field kitchens and first aid stations are open for civilians leaving eastern Aleppo 24 hours a day.” “Russia and the Syrian government are ready to resume ‘humanitarian pauses’ in Aleppo if they receive guarantees from international organizations confirming readiness to evacuate the sick and the wounded as well as civilian population from the rebel-held areas.” Fact: Maintaining an airstrike moratorium aids Washington, its rogue allies and terrorists in eastern Aleppo they support. Fact: What good are humanitarian corridors if eastern Aleppo residents are prevented from using them, risking death or serious injury if they try. Fact: International organizations have no control over terrorists in eastern Aleppo – or anywhere else in the country. So what good are their “guarantees” if made? Fact: As long as Russia continues making the same mistakes repeatedly, the struggle to liberate Syria will likely go on interminably without resolution – a forever war, while countless thousands more civilians will die, be seriously injured and endure hardships people in Western societies can’t imagine, victims of US imperial ruthlessness. A handful of eastern Aleppo civilians alone escaped via a humanitarian corridor. According to one now free, their relatives were seized, imprisoned and tortured. The only way to liberate thousands of others is by relentlessly smashing their terrorist captors, eliminating them – not giving them breathing room to mobilize for greater attacks. Washington is delighted with Moscow’s ceasefire and humanitarian pause, serving US imperial interests, State Department spokesman admiral John Kirby saying: “We welcome the stated intention to extend this pause, and we hope that this extension will be more successful…than it has been thus far” – meaning the longer it continues, the greater the benefit to US-led dark forces, the worse off trapped Syrians in eastern Aleppo will be, the longer the struggle to liberate Syria will go on. Submit your review",FAKE
+3019,"Obama: For All The Things Republicans Blame Me For, Getting Blamed For Rise Of Donald Trump Is ""Novel""","Speaking at a joint press conference Thursday morning at the White House with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Obama makes extended comments regarding the 2016 election, and its unprecedented political polarization. 
+
+ 
+
+ ""I have been blamed by the Republicans for a lot of things,"" the president said. ""But to be blamed for their primaries and who they are selecting is... novel.""
+
+ 
+
+ ""I’m not going to validate some notion that the Republican crackup that’s been taking place is a consequence of actions that I’ve taken,"" he said. 
+
+ 
+
+ ""I don’t think I was the one to prompt questions about my birth certificate, for example,"" he said. ""I don’t recall saying, 'Hey, why don’t you ask me about that.'""
+
+ 
+
+ ""It's not as if there's a massive difference between Mr. Trump's position on immigration and Mr. Cruz's. Mr. Trump may be more provocative in terms of how he sighs, but says them, but they're not that different.""
+
+ 
+
+",REAL
+8004,"World Proud Of Its Calm, Measured Response To Trump Victory","0 Add Comment 
+IN THE immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s shock win in the US presidential election, there were fears many people would become lost in grief, voicing their anger and sadness in all directions in a bid to vent their sense of profound fear and apprehension now that a person who has repeatedly uttered reprehensible beliefs occupies the most powerful position in the world. 
+However, this proved not to be the case as WWN found out when it talked with numerous people in America and around the world, who exemplified the pride the human race now had in itself after being able to greet the horrific news in a calm and measured way. 
+“It is when we’re faced with adversity, when hate shows it now owns the map, that we must forge a new path together to the brighter future we all want, but that future will be after a nuclear winter obviously,” a sobbing wreck of a man and a proud American, Philip Henry shared with WWN, as he polished his shotgun and thought about taking a walk alone to his shed out back. 
+“The election clearly divided people, but it is time for the people to come together. Love trumps hate. A rising tide lifts all boats,” New Yorker Sarah Klein shared as she boarded a small sail boat, unsure of where she was going, “I have no idea how to sail but I’ll live like Kevin Costner in Waterworld if I have to,” she added. 
+Many people echoed the sentiments of Hillary Clinton’s concession speech in which the Democrat urged everyone to work with Donald Trump and give the man who called Mexicans rapists and murderers and called for a ban on Muslims the benefit of the doubt. 
+“Trump Tower doesn’t look all that structurally sound, we’re talking what? A few sticks of dynamite and the whole thing comes down. Just asking for a friend, obviously,” shared another New Yorker we spoke to. 
+It is believed the number of people placing their children in pods and launching them into space in the hope they reach a more tranquil planet with a brighter future elsewhere are still in the minority. 
+The rational and reasoned response was also experienced outside of America where, although people acknowledged the fact they’ve heard every word uttered from the president elect, they suspect everything will be fine. 
+“Sure, what difference does it make, be grand I’m sure,” shared Dubliner Rebecca Kelly, fresh from pulling out all of her hair in a panic, and disconnecting her TV, radio and internet for at least four years. 
+“Never felt better,” offered a hooded figure holding a flaming torch in one hand and a rope in the other.",FAKE
+8817,PressTV-US troops could be prosecuted for war crimes,"Military An American soldier talks with Saudi troops. (File photo by the US Army) 
+A US congressman has warned that American troops could be prosecuted for providing military support to the Saudi war on Yemen. 
+Ted Lieu made the warning in a letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, saying the US government’s denial of target selection for Saudi airstrikes in Yemen does not excuse Washington from legal responsibilities. 
+“I find it deeply troubling that the US apparently has no advanced knowledge of what targets will be struck by jets that are refueled by US personnel with US tankers,” Lieu said in his letter. 
+“The US would appear to be violating LOAC [laws of armed conflict] and international standards by engaging in such direct military operations if US personnel are not aware if targets are civilian or military, if the loss of life and property are disproportional, or if the operation is even militarily necessary,” he noted. A Yemeni boy walks past a mural depicting a US drone and reading: ""Why did you kill my family."" (Photo by AFP) 
+Pointing to the 18-month involvement of the US in Saudi war on the Yemeni people, the Democratic congressman stressed that Washington had knowledge of a bombardment campaign hitting civilian targets, including schools and hospitals, multiple times. 
+“US personnel are now at legal risk of being investigated and potentially prosecuted for committing war crimes. Under international law, a person can be found guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes. Under US law, a person can be found guilty for conspiring to commit war crimes,” Lieu wrote. 
+The Pentagon has been providing logistic and surveillance support to Saudi Arabia in its military aggression against Yemen, the kingdom’s impoverished southern neighbor, which has killed more than 10,000 Yemenis since its onset in March 2015. 
+The unprovoked war started by a coalition of Saudi-allies in an attempt to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstate former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of the Riyadh regime. 
+Washington has on several occasions criticized the Saudi regime for its crimes against humanity in Yemen, but has shown no sign of ending its support for Riyadh. US Representative Ted Lieu of California addresses delegates on the fourth and final day of the Democratic National Convention at Wells Fargo Center on July 28, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by AFP) 
+In August, the US State Department approved the sale of more than 130 Abrams tanks, 20 armored recovery vehicles and other equipment worth about $1.15 billion to Saudi Arabia. 
+Saudi-led bombardments have struck hospitals, markets and other places where civilians gather. 
+In September, Amnesty International reported that a US manufactured bomb had been used in a Saudi strike against a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Yemen’s northwestern province of Hajjah which claimed the lives of 19 people. 
+In October, more than 140 people lost their lives and over 525 others sustained injuries after Saudi military aircraft struck a hall in the Yemeni capital of Sana'a, where rows of people were attending a funeral. Yemeni rescue workers pull out a victim from amid the rubble following a Saudi airstrike against a packed funeral site in the capital, Sana’a, on October 8, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
+UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen Jamie McGoldrick said last month that the death toll from the Saudi military aggression could rise even further as some areas had no medical facilities, and that people were often buried without any official record being made. Loading ... ",FAKE
+3341,The real reason the State Dept is Twitter fighting with the NY Times about Iran,"Twitter brings out the best in nobody, and this week that includes two of the most prominent people in Washington's national security establishment: New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger and State Department senior adviser Marie Harf.
+
+Their Twitter fighting is ostensibly over a technical issue in the Iran negotiations; Sanger had published a story reporting Iran had developed new nuclear fuel, which he suggested was a major embarrassment for the administration and bad for the Iran nuclear deal.
+
+Harf basically argued that Sanger had misunderstood and misinterpreted the latest nuclear development. And, on balance, Harf's criticisms are correct, and Sanger's story elided some technical issues that make it clear this is nowhere near as big of a deal as he claims. But like so many arguments in Washington over Iran, it's about much more than that.
+
+On Monday, Sanger reported in the Times, based on a new study, that ""Tehran's stockpile of nuclear fuel increased about 20 percent over the last 18 months of negotiations."" Sanger framed this as embarrassing for the Obama administration and a step back in the Iran nuclear negotiations. The development ""poses a major diplomatic and political challenge for President Obama,"" Sanger wrote, ""partially undercutting the Obama administration's contention that the Iranian program had been 'frozen.'""
+
+Harf, who is currently acting as State Department spokesperson, said later she was ""perplexed"" by the story's contentions, pointing out that Iran had not violated any agreements and arguing that Sanger had overblown a minor development into a major issue. ""The notion that this is some big issue of concern of negotiation is more manufacturing a controversy than actual reality,"" she said.
+
+What was interesting, watching this unfold, is that it prompted two entirely separate conversations. One, among mostly conservative national security writers and think tankers, expressed dismay at the Obama administration's defensiveness and its apparent refusal to acknowledge the cold, hard facts spelled out in the study. The other, among arms control experts, actually dug into those facts and ultimately ended up siding with Harf.
+
+The first issue, as a number of people pointed out, is that Sanger had used the phrase ""nuclear fuel"" to describe the growth in Iran's nuclear program, which is both true and misleading. Iran has produced a specific category of nuclear fuel called low-enriched uranium (LEU), which is used for power plants or other peaceful purposes, not for nuclear warheads.
+
+Sanger implies that this goes against the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), Iran's 2013 temporary nuclear agreement with the US, meant as bridge until final negotiations are concluded this summer. In fact, Iran's development of more LEU is within the agreement, so for Sanger to write that it ""undercuts"" anything is incorrect.
+
+Once the final nuclear deal with Iran comes into effect, based on the framework of that deal that was agreed upon in April, Iran will still be allowed to produce LEU — but it will only be allowed to keep a small stockpile on hand. The idea here is that LEU in itself is not terribly dangerous, and that both the production and the stockpile will be under close international monitoring to make sure Iran doesn't try to turn the LEU into highly enriched uranium (HEU), which is dangerous. However, the deal will limit how much LEU Iran is allowed to have on hand at any given time; the country will be required to ship it out or else convert it to, for example, fuel rods.
+
+This gets to the heart of Sanger's argument: he is correct that Iran is building up a much larger stockpile of LEU than it will be allowed to have if the final deal comes into effect. To be clear, this activity does not violate any agreements currently in force. However, if the deal comes into effect, and if Iran wants to comply with that deal, then it will have to convert almost all of that LEU into some other form, such as fuel rods, or ship it out of the country. There is nothing preventing Iran from doing all of this in a way that complies with the deal.
+
+A representative tweet from the arms control community, which seemed to collectively roll its eyes at Sanger's story:
+
+""Iran's LEU is up somewhat, yes, but contrary to headline, it doesn't 'complicate' talks. IranDeal will cut [the size of Iran's LEU stockpile] to 300kg,"" Arms Control Association director Daryl Kimball wrote, calling Sanger's story ""a superficial analysis.""
+
+It's also important to point out that Iran is developing this new LEU under the view of the international community in its officially declared facilities. If the Iranians really wanted to cheat, they would almost certainly construct a secret facility somewhere — as they've done in the past — and do it there.
+
+That does not mean that it's great news that Iran is enriching more LEU. Certainly, everyone's lives would be easier if Iran unilaterally surrendered its entire nuclear program or at least took no more steps toward nuclear development. But Iran is continuing to conduct the sorts of nuclear activities that it is allowed under the JPOA (a deal that even Sen. Lindsey Graham, an Iran super-hawk, now supports), which should not be particularly surprising. It is a real stretch to argue, as Sanger does, that this enrichment ""poses a major political and diplomatic challenge"" to the Iran deal.
+
+This is, in many ways, a repeat of the same argument that Washington has been having since 2013, when the JPOA was signed and the US and Iran began down the road to a nuclear deal. Supporters of the deal, joined since April's framework agreement by a chorus of arms control experts, say the deal is about the best feasible option we have for limiting Iran's nuclear enrichment.
+
+Iran hawks argue that this is all based on a false premise that the Iran nuclear program is actually the core problem. Rather, they believe, the real problem is inherent to the Iranian regime itself, and that because the nuclear deal will not force regime change, it elides and thus perpetuates that problem.
+
+This is why you see so much arguing between these two sides over every little technical blip along the way. For Iran hawks, episodes like this one just prove there is no such thing as a ""good"" nuclear deal because Iran is so inherently evil that it will find a way to exploit any deal to its advantage. Deal supporters and arms control experts, meanwhile, see that the deal will dramatically limit Iran's nuclear development, as well as make it much harder for the country to cheat, and thus go a long way to prevent both a nuclear bomb and the need for a disastrous war with Iran.
+
+This is why you get lots of arguments over questions like ""Is Iran violating the JPOA in spirit, if not in letter?"" because for Iran hawks everything Iran does violates the spirit of the agreement because Tehran can only ever be dishonest and warlike.
+
+It's why people on both sides spend lots of time debating the degree to which Iran is ""rational."" If Iran is rational, the incentives of the deal are much more likely to lead it to comply. But that word ""rational"" ends up becoming very hard to define and clear standards very hard to set. Was the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 rational? If it wasn't, does that mean America is incapable of rationally responding to incentives, and must be destroyed for the sake of world peace?
+
+You can see how these debates almost immediately veer away from the factual into the theoretical and the indefinable. They are also, by the way, only tangentially related to technical issues such as whether Iran's latest LEU enrichment violates the JPOA. These debates are maddeningly unanswerable and unending. Most people in Washington who work on this issue, having long ago exhausted their arguments on this many times over, try to avoid rehearsing the debate. But that is not always the case on Twitter, even if you're David Sanger or Marie Harf.",REAL
+971,Cruz's Methodical Delegate Strategy Narrows Trump's Path To GOP Nomination,"On the way into the Colorado Republican Party's state convention in Colorado Springs Saturday morning, a Ted Cruz supporter waved a big broom with the letters ""CRUZ"" fastened to the top.
+
+The convention took place in a hockey arena, and the prop is probably familiar to most sports fans. The Cruz supporter was looking for a sweep, and a sweep was what he got.
+
+Cruz picked up all 34 Republican National Convention delegates that Colorado Republicans awarded this week. Delegates backing Cruz won all three spots in each of the state's seven congressional districts, as well as 13 statewide slots.
+
+The Colorado win follows a similar outcome in North Dakota, where Republicans elected a mostly Cruz-approved slate of delegates at a state convention last week. Those two delegate hauls, along with more complex delegate maneuvering in states like Louisiana that had already held their primaries and caucuses, highlight a growing organizational gap between Cruz's campaign and frontrunner Donald Trump's.
+
+As recently as last month, the Cruz campaign insisted that he was fighting to win 1,237 delegates and clinch the GOP nomination outright, though Cruz told the Denver Post on Saturday that a contested convention is a ""very significant possibility."" Cruz also expressed confidence that he would win in such a scenario.
+
+The Texas senator has become the candidate of choice for many Republicans simply trying to stop Trump. Cruz's organizational successes offer hope to them that he will succeed in blocking Trump's path. Though many of them stop short of saying they'd like Cruz to be the eventual nominee.
+
+Most political observers didn't figure Colorado would play a role in the Republican primary, after the state declined to hold a binding primary or caucus. Still, Congressman Ken Buck, who chairs Cruz's Colorado campaign, said, ""dozens of volunteers have been working since December"" in Colorado to vet delegate candidates and organize at local caucuses and regional meetings.
+
+On Saturday morning, Cruz volunteers wearing bright orange shirts swept through the arena, handing out glossy sheets listing the campaign's preferred delegate candidates. The campaign also blasted out text messages to convention attendees, listing their delegate choices.
+
+""We put 15 delegate [candidates] forward,"" said Buck, who won a spot as a delegate himself. ""We looked at people that had run and won in the past. We looked at people who had been supporting Cruz for a long time. We looked at elected officials who knew how to run campaigns.""
+
+That organizational effort was a stark contrast to Trump's campaign, which only had a handful of volunteers distributing delegate candidate lists. The Trump slate was riddled with errors.
+
+According to NBC News, the Trump campaign failed to put forward a candidate slate in some of the earlier district-level contests. In another congressional district, two of the candidates they urged voters to back did not, in fact, make it onto the ballot.
+
+""What this says for the Trump campaign is, you need to get your stuff in gear,"" said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. ""Because you're about to get your clock cleaned on the easy stuff. A lot of folks look at, we just won the primary. The isn't about just winning the primary. It's about winning delegates. You get your delegates wherever and however you can.""
+
+Indeed, the Trump campaign has made changes in recent days, bringing in longtime Washington operative Paul Manafort to play a role in convention preparation, as well as broader campaign strategy.
+
+Manafort was asked about the result in Colorado on NBC's Meet The Press on Sunday and responded, ""I acknowledge that we weren't playing in Colorado and they did.""
+
+He went on to criticize the pro-Cruz efforts as too aggressive, making an accusation of ""Gestapo tactics"" in various local party conventions.
+
+Steele praised the Cruz campaign's organizational efforts, but cautioned against reading too much into the Colorado and North Dakota convention victories when looking forward to a possible Cleveland floor fight.
+
+""Going into a state and grabbing unbound delegates and getting commitments and all that is not the same as going into a convention hall where overlaying everything is the RNC rules,"" he said.
+
+Having a political and legal staff that understands the party's regulations and guidelines are key, he said, giving the Cruz campaign the advantage on that front.
+
+But Steele argued that another important factor is, ""having delegates on the floor and relevant committees,"" Steele said, primarily the Rules Committee, which will shape the convention proceedings.
+
+""The Trump team is going to be competitive on that front, because they've got a lot of delegates, and the ability to put their people on that committee and have weight on that committee,"" said Steele.
+
+Both campaigns will spend the next two months gearing up for a historic floor fight. That's because while Trump may still secure the delegates he needs to avoid one, there's no chance he can do so until June 7, the very last day of the primary calendar.
+
+Clarification: This post has been updated to reflect Cruz's recent comments entertaining the notion of a contested convention. An earlier version stated only that Cruz was insisting he would win enough delegates to clinch the GOP nomination before the party's convention in July.",REAL
+10076,Hillary Finally Concedes: “This Is Painful and It Will Be for a Long Time”,"
+After what appeared to be a refusal to concede late last night (via John Podesta), followed by Trump’s victory speech, in which he referred to a concession call by his opponent, Hillary Clinton finally issued her concession speech at around 11:30 AM Eastern time.
+The tone was clearly bitter, though it was cloaked in the hopeful language of continued efforts.
+After questions about whether or not Donald Trump would have the wherewithal to admit defeat and accept election results, it turned out to be Hillary who had apparent difficulty in giving up.
+SEE: Is Something Wrong With Hillary? Will NOT Concede Tonight – Refuses To Speak To Crowd – Health Episode? 
+But reality set in, and she went on stage, albeit more than an hour after she was scheduled to do so, to admit her loss.
+She played to what might have been her largest and most enthusiastic crowd to date on the 2016 campaign trail.
+
+Partial transcript: 
+Thank you so very much for being here. I love you all, too. Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. 
+I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for, and I’m sorry we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country. 
+But I feel pride and gratitude for this wonderful campaign that we built together. This vast diverse creative unruly energized campaign. You represent the best of America and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life. 
+I know how disappointed you feel because I feel it, too. And so do tens of millions of Americans who invested their hopes and dreams in this effort. This is painful, and it will be for a long time. But I want you to remember this. 
+Our campaign was never about one person, or even one election. It was about the country we love and building an America that is hopeful, inclusive, and big-hearted. We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. 
+[…] 
+To anyone that sent contributions, even as small as $5, that kept us going, thank you. To all of us, and to the young people in particular, I hope you will hear this — I have, as Tim said, I have spent my entire life fighting for what I believe in. 
+I’ve had successes and setbacks and sometimes painful ones. Many of you are at the beginning of your professional, public, and political careers — you will have successes and setbacks too. 
+This loss hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it. 
+[…] 
+And so we need — we need you to keep up these fights now and for the rest of your lives. And to all the women, and especially the young women, who put their faith in this campaign and in me: I want you to know that nothing has made me prouder than to be your champion. 
+Now, I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday someone will — and hopefully sooner than we might think right now. [Cheers and applause] 
+And to all of the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams. [Cheers and applause] 
+",FAKE
+9278,Trump Allows 3 Million People To Escape US,"0 Add Comment 
+President-elect Donald Trump is giving a lucky 3 million people the unique chance to escape the United States before it resembles the sequel to Mad Max Fury Road, WWN can reveal. 
+Speaking to CBS, Trump confirmed his intention to deport over 3 million illegal immigrants who have a criminal record when he assumes office in January, prompting many American citizens to curse illegal immigrants’ good fortune. 
+“Many desperate people who are currently living in fear will not be as lucky as these deportees,” confirmed political expert Conor Franken, outlining just how fortunate some illegal immigrants are. 
+The fallout from the announcement has already been met with widespread derision coming from Trump’s political opponents as he revealed the figure of 3 million was plucked directly from his arse. However, signs are emerging that many people have welcomed the news. 
+“How do I get deported?” querzied US citizen and LA native Max Schulmann, “Do you think I’ll be one of the lucky ones if I just rip up my passport, get a parking fine and start speaking Spanish?” 
+Large queues of people seeking to win big with deportation have already begun forming at the Mexican and Canadian borders. Sadly, many have been turned away for not meeting the minimum requirement Trump has placed on qualifying for deportation which requires people to be a murderring rapist drug dealer from Mexico who bleeds the economy dry by signing up to Obamacare. 
+In the wide ranging interview with CBS, Trump also took the time to row back on over 200 elections pledges he made including stances on a border wall, Hillary Clinton and Obamacare. 
+“The days of politicians lying and cheating the American people are over, it’s now Donald’s turn,” Trump said, concluding the interview.",FAKE
+3860,Obama To Limit Police Acquisition Of Some Military-Style Equipment,"Obama To Limit Police Acquisition Of Some Military-Style Equipment
+
+President Obama said military-style equipment used by police departments ""can alienate and intimidate local residents and send the wrong message,"" as he ended federal transfers of such weapons to local law enforcement.
+
+Obama's remarks, made in Camden, N.J., are an attempt to ease tensions between police and minority communities in the wake of several high-profile police-involved shootings.
+
+Under new recommendations, police forces will be banned from acquiring some types of military-style equipment from federal agencies. The proposal was one of several made by a White House task force that Obama is putting into place using an executive order on Monday.
+
+According to a report issued by the White House, the task force recommended banning the sale of some equipment — such as tracked armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft and high-caliber weapons and ammunition — after weighing their utility to local police and the ""the potential negative impact on the community if the equipment was used arbitrarily or inappropriately.""
+
+Local police departments can still buy this equipment on their own. They just can't buy them from the feds or buy them using federal money.
+
+""Obama's visit to one of New Jersey's poorest cities comes as he seeks to ramp up federal funding for community policing initiatives in the wake of a series of high-profile incidents that have frayed trust between officers and residents in Ferguson, Mo., New York and Baltimore, among other cities. ""Camden has long been among New Jersey's most crime-ridden cities, but reforms over the past two years have led to falling crime statistics and an increased number of officers in the community.""
+
+Based on a fact sheet distributed by the White House, here are a few other initiatives Obama will highlight Monday:
+
+— Police Data Initiative will help police departments across the country track things like use of force and police stops. Data scientists will help some police departments polish an early warning system, using data to flag problems.
+
+— Twenty-one jurisdictions will also release big data sets that will help ""communities gain visibility into key information on police/citizen encounters.""
+
+— The White House will release a body-cam tool kit that will help police plan and implement body-cam programs.
+
+— The Department of Justice ""will begin taking applications for grants designed to advance the practice of community policing in law enforcement agencies through hiring, training and technical assistance, the development of innovative community policing strategies, applied research, guidebooks, and best practices that are national in scope.""",REAL
+7080,Collusion Between Facebook and Hillary’s Campaign Revealed in Clinton Emails,"Email 
+Who would have thought right? Hillary’s campaign establishing what appears to be some very close ties with the largest social media company (Facebook) on the Internet, right in the midst of her presidential campaign? It’s not enough that Hillary has Google hiding various stories from Clinton search queries, but it looks like she had to go and get Facebook on board to help her cheat as well. But should Trump supporters take any issue with that? 
+Sure, there’s been issues in the past with Facebook banning conservatives for merely looking at their monitors the wrong way, but all that changed this week right? If you recall, earlier this week we learned that despite donating huge amounts of money to Hillary’s campaign, allegedly Mark Zuckerberg betrayed Hillary Clinton, and actually jumped on board the Trump Train … or is there more to this? In the video below I dig a bit deeper into both these stories… 
+Emails Show Connection Between Facebook Executive, Clinton Campaign 
+… kept the interactions with Clinton private … 
+A new WikiLeaks email dump shows Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg eager and willing to be involved in helping Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
+Sandberg’s role in helping the research-driven Clinton campaign was revealed in a WikiLeaks email from Clinton aide Cheryl Mills. 
+“I have arranged for Sheryl Sandberg and her researcher to be available on 5 March at 10 am to step through the research on gender and leadership by women,” Mills wrote in a February 2015 email. 
+Two months after that meeting, Sandberg offered to do more for the campaign in response to an email from campaign chairman John Podesta expressing sympathy for the death of her husband. 
+“I still want HRC to win badly ,” Sandberg wrote in May 2015. “I am still here to help as I can. She came over and was magical with my kids.” 
+Facebook has said that Sandberg was acting in a private capacity in sharing research with the Clinton campaign. Sandberg kept the interactions with Clinton private, and did not formally, publicly endorse Clinton until early 2016. 
+However, she kept in touch with the campaign. In August 2015, she emailed Podesta offering to put him in touch with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , a staunch opponent of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump . 
+“Mark is meeting with people to learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action and it’s hard to imagine someone better placed or more experienced than you to help him,” she wrote. 
+“He’s begun to think about whether/how he might want to shape advocacy efforts to support his philanthropic priorities and is particularly interested in meeting people who could help him understand how to move the needle on the specific public policy issues he cares most about,” she added. 
+“He wants to meet folks who can inform his understanding about effective political operations to advance public policy goals on social oriented objectives (like immigration, education or basic scientific research),” she wrote. 
+The WikiLeaks emails from Podesta’s account imply a meeting was arranged later that month. 
+SOCIAL MEDIA GIANTS ARE ACTUALLY GOVERNMENT CREATIONS: 
+If you doubt that the CIA made Google, and Google made the NSA, but you don’t read the following: save your worthless drivel for someone who cares. If you don't have the facts presented, how can you presume to dispute then? Conversely, if you dispute the facts presented with evidence stacked higher than Mt. Everest, by all means… let’s hear it, but support your opinions with FACTS, not platitudes.",FAKE
+7754,Sanders calls Trump 'political coward' over voter suppression report,"Politics US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton listens as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during an event at University of New Hampshire September 28, 2016 in Durham, New Hampshire. (Photo by AFP) 
+Former US Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders has denounced Republican nominee Donald Trump as a “political coward” over a voter suppression report. 
+Sanders condemned Trump after a report that the Republican's presidential campaign has three ""voter suppression"" drives intended to lower turnout for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, and to help Trump winning the White House. 
+""Anybody who is suppressing the vote because they know that those people will vote against them is a political coward,"" the Vermont senator tweeted. 
+“If you don’t have the guts to run for office on your ideas @ realDonaldTrump , then you shouldn’t run for office at all,” he said in another tweet. 
+A senior adviser to Trump acknowledged in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that the Republican team has ""three major voter suppression operations underway."" 
+Sanders – a former primary rival of Clinton – suspended his campaign in July and endorsed the former secretary of state, despite leaked emails that showed top officials at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) privately planned to undermine Sanders’s presidential campaign. 
+Sanders had earlier said that he would not endorse Clinton for president until they meet and he could measure her commitment to combating wealth inequality, and other issues that powered his presidential campaign. 
+Sanders’ emphasis on US income inequality and the influence of corporate money on elections and the government helped him attract millions of voters to his campaign. Loading ...",FAKE
+5664,Now Live: View Full Text of Job Postings | Economy,"(Before It's News)
+As advanced as our Job Posting Analytics have become—including the ability to filter by keyword search, employer, region, title, skill, or certification—there’s something that no filter or datapoint can replace: viewing the actual job posting.
+Now within Job Posting Analytics reports in Analyst and Developer , users can view the full text of the most relevant and recent job postings tailored to their search.
+Not only will the viewable postings be filtered by the selected variables, but the keyword searched will also be highlighted in the full posting text. This extra detail makes it even easier to analyze how employers are asking for certain credentials.
+With the quick addition of new filters, the postings displayed can be narrowed from all in New York, to all in New York that mention “javascript,” to all in New York that mention “javascript” from Oracle Corporation.
+The real power of this new functionality is in the context it provides. Now, users can step into the shoes of the employer and understand exactly what kind of talent they’re seeking in prospective candidates. We’re thrilled to see how this new functionality will empower users to better align programs with employer needs, identify emerging skills and occupations, and more.
+Over the next few weeks, our development team will be working to increase the number of viewable postings from five to at least 50.
+The post Now Live: View Full Text of Job Postings appeared first on Emsi .",FAKE
+9064,"Life: If You Love Enamel Pins, You’ll Love This Etsy Shop, And If You Don’t Care About Enamel Pins, You’ll Explode Over This Picture Of A Bulldog Puppy, And If That Doesn’t Do It For You, You’ll Lose Your Shit Over This Amazing-Looking Pizza, And If You Don’t, We’ll Find Something For You","Email If you can’t get enough enamel pins, then it’s time to start freaking out, because this Etsy shop is all about them. With hundreds of unique designs for you to mix and match, it’s easy to get lost in this enamel fan’s wonderland. Check it out: Or maybe enamel isn’t for you. Not a problem. Forget about the pins, in that case, and get ready to explode the moment you see this little guy: A ! He’s a bulldog puppy, he’s 2 months old—oh, and did we mention he has the most adorable face anyone has ever seen? Bulldog isn’t doing the trick? Hey, that’s totally okay! Let’s move on. Here’s an incredible pizza. And here’s a grilled cheese you need in your belly ASAP. We have collected it for you. It is here to annihilate your mind. How’s that? Are you now slobbering uncontrollably from the food? Has the food melted you to a quivering puddle of yes? If not, keep scrolling, because we’re just getting started. We will find just the thing. What about this diabolical optical illusion that is going to destroy your mind. Total brain collapse in three…two…one… Did that work? Surely you have lost it and you can’t even handle it and you love it so much it is so you. No? Fine…What else…Perhaps this is the thing that will wreck you at last: a badass vintage car. Go ahead and flip out: Still nothing? You are not yet blowing up with joy? Okay. Don’t worry. The GIF of the dog who is trapped in the toilet will now transform your body into rubble: Jesus. Let’s go back to the enamel store for a sec, maybe we scooted off it too quickly. It really is a great store. Hard enamel. Soft enamel. Lapel pins. Regular old pin-pins. If you like enamel AT ALL then it should only take one look at this set of OMG-worthy pins and you’ll be out of control with joy: What?? What do you want from us? What do you need? We will collect it here. You crave Bill Murray in public? Here is Bill Murray in public: Beautiful pic of biggest waterfall? There. It is done. Look. Look at these things. There must be",FAKE
+5802,Alert News : Putins Army Is Coming For World War3 Against Obama year 2016 New Video!!!, ,FAKE
+8695,Coconut: The Earth’s Most Widespread Medicinal Fruit Plant,"Kidney Protective Liver protective The table below reveals in detail what parts of the coconut palm are responsible for producing these aforementioned biological effects. Click to view the fully enlarged versions of the table here . In support of these findings, the GreenMedInfo.com database presently contains research on the coconut palm’s potential therapeutic value in preventing and/or treating over 50 different conditions , and expressing 16 different beneficial biological effects. You can view the supporting studies on our coconut research page . The new study, titled “ Cocos nucifera (L.) (Arecaceae): A phytochemical and pharmacological review ,” also reviewed the toxicity literature on the coconut palm’s various constituents and found there was no evidence of acute toxicity, and only low toxicity associated with chronic exposure. The study summarized the story of the coconut palm’s fascinating spread around the world as follows: The plant is originally from Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and the islands between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. From that region, the fruit of the coconut palm is believed to have been brought to India and then to East Africa. After the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, this plant was introduced into West Africa and, from there, dispersed to the American continent and to other tropical regions of the globe.” The review also summarized the traditional healing applications of the coconut palm. This is an important, complementary data set, because though many of the traditional uses have not yet been tested and validated by science, they may actually work exceptionally well for these conditions in actual practice. The traditional uses were also summarized in the following paragraph: In Brazil, extract from the husk fiber of C. nucifera is used to treat diarrhea (7). In Papua New Guinea, the leaves and roots of young plants are chewed as treatment for diarrhea and stomachaches (8,9). In Fiji, coconut oil is used to prevent hair loss and coconut water is used to treat renal disease (10). In Ghana, people use coconut milk to treat diarrhea (11). In Guatemala, the husk fiber extract is used as an antipyretic, to reduce renal inflammation, and as a topic ointment for dermatitis, abscesses, and injuries (12). In Haiti, a decoction of the dry pericarp is used for oral treatment of amenorrhea, and the oil is applied as an ointment to burns (13); an aqueous extract from the husk fiber is also used for oral asthma treatment (14). In India, infusions made with the coconut inflorescence are used for the oral treatment of menstrual cycle disorders (15). In Indonesia, the oil is used as a wound ointment, the coconut milk is used as an oral contraceptive, and fever and diarrhea are treated with the root extract (16–18). In Jamaica, the husk fiber extract is used to treat diabetes (19,20). In Mozambique, the fruit is consumed by men as an aphrodisiac (21). Peruvians use the aqueous extract of the fresh coconut fiber orally for asthma, as a diuretic, and for gonorrhea (22). In Trinidad, bark extract is used orally for amenorrhea and dysmenorrhea, and bark tea is used to treat venereal diseases (23). In Mexico, coconut is used to treat various disorders associated with urogenital tract infection by Trichomonas vaginalis (24). A decoction of the white flesh of the fruit is used in rural Malaysia to treat fever and malaria (25). In Kenya, the fruit is used to relieve skin rash caused by HIV infection (26). The study concluded, Cocos nucifera is a widely dispersed plant that has important pharmacological effects with low toxicity. Furthermore, medicinal use of C. nucifera has an environmental appeal, since this plant is widely used in the food industry and use of discarded plant parts will reduce waste and pollution. The pharmacological effects of the plant differ according to the part of the plant or fruit used. Antioxidant activity predominated in the constituents of the endocarp and coconut water. In addition, the fiber showed antibacterial, antiparasitic, and anti-inflammatory activities. Only the ethanolic extract of the root had depressant and anticonvulsant action on the central nervous system. Coconut water seems to have protective effects, e.g., on the kidney and heart, and antioxidant activity, as well as a hypoglycemic effect. For more information on the amazing properties of coconut, read the following popular articles on the topic:",FAKE
+9494,Venezuela crisis enters dangerous phase as Maduro foes go militant,"October 28, 2016 Venezuela crisis enters dangerous phase as Maduro foes go militant In a curious convergence of events on the same day last week, four Venezuelan provincial courts issued identical rulings, state governors quickly hit Twitter to celebrate, then the election board emailed a short but bombshell statement. Opposition hopes for a referendum to recall President Nicolas Maduro were dashed, on grounds of fraud in an initial signature drive. The vote was off. For many in the opposition, that settled a years-old debate about the nature of Venezuela’s socialist government, uniting them in conviction they are now fighting a dictatorship. Their new militancy heightens the risk of unrest as the South American OPEC member of 30 million people grapples with a dangerous economic and political crisis. “Can anyone in the world now really doubt that Venezuela is living in tyranny?” said housewife Mabel Pinate, 62, dressed in white among thousands of protesters who took to the streets against Maduro on Wednesday. “We are sick of this. It’s time to toughen up and do what we must to save Venezuela,” added Pinate, whose husband was fired from state oil company PDVSA by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez and whose two children have gone abroad.",FAKE
+2725,"Cable news is in trouble, and it’s more about the news than the cable","Cable news is in trouble. The Pew Research Center reports that the median daily audience for Fox, CNN, and MSNBC is down about 11 percent since 2008.
+
+The Washington Post's Paul Farhi sees a grim future for the industry. He argues that cable news outlets are pretty much where newspapers were a decade ago: their audience is aging, their medium is being disrupted by new technologies, and the next generation of viewers is developing habits and preferences that they're poorly placed to serve. (This is probably a good moment to note that I'm a contributor to MSNBC.)
+
+The networks may still be making money — in 2014, Fox News managed $1.2 billion in profits, while CNN cleared $300 million and MSNBC made a bit more than $200 million — but Farhi suggests ""the cable news networks will face bankruptcy the same way Ernest Hemingway once described a character’s financial demise: 'Gradually and then suddenly.'""
+
+Perhaps that's right. But while Farhi's account of cable news outlets' woes focuses mainly on the cable part of the equation, it's also worth considering the problems all three networks are having with the news itself.
+
+The rise of the three major cable news networks were all driven by stories they dominated. CNN was made by the 1991 Gulf War. It wasn't just the first time it passed the networks in ratings; it was the first time CNN showed that it could beat the networks in coverage. You can still feel the surprise in this New York Times article from 1991:
+
+The shooting in the Persian Gulf began tonight with the three broadcast networks committed to covering the war on a 24-hour basis, although their image as news leaders was damaged by the Cable News Network's early dominance of the coverage ... he networks' image was certainly not helped when Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said he was following the attacks on Baghdad on CNN. At least one network station, an NBC station in Detroit, decided to quit its network's coverage to run CNN's. And NBC finally was compelled to interview CNN reporters on the air to get information out of Baghdad.
+
+Fox News, for its part, saw basically exponential growth around 9/11, and then again around the 2008 campaign and Obama's election. MSNBC's rise was driven by the backlash to the Bush administration, and particularly to the Iraq War:
+
+The network held those gains in the first half of the Obama era, as liberals went from terrified to triumphant. But as liberals have gone from triumphant to a bit depressed and checked out, viewership has begun to decline.
+
+The recent rise of cable news — particularly Fox and MSNBC — came in a period when the news — particularly political news — was unusually interesting.
+
+Between 2000 and 2012, we saw a contested US presidential election, the largest terrorist attack ever on US soil, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, repeated wave elections, a global financial crisis, the first black president, the rise of the Tea Party, the fight over Obamacare, and the first states to legalize gay marriage and marijuana — and much more. It's been a weirdly interesting, consequential period in American politics. And so the cable news networks, which could devote 24 hours a day to covering these stories, benefited.
+
+But now it's an unusually dull period in American politics. Congress is gridlocked, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. The US, thankfully, isn't reeling from a terrorist attack or a financial crisis. We haven't invaded Iran, at least not yet. And it's not just cable news that's losing viewers because of it. Turnout in the 2014 election was the lowest it's been in 70 years.
+
+You see this, I think, in the specific fortunes of the cable networks. Farhi reports that MSNBC lost 14 percent of its audience in 2014, and Fox lost 2 percent. But CNN prime time — which swung away from politics toward covering plane crashes and airing documentaries — is up 10 percent in 2015.
+
+Which is all to say that Farhi may be right about the long-term decline of cable news — over some extended period of time, both network and cable channels are going to be diminished by whatever it is the internet creates in their place.
+
+But year to year, a lot of the ups and downs might just be the appeal of what's actually in the news. If President Scott Walker goes to war with Iran, MSNBC's ratings are going to go up. If President Hillary Clinton takes away everyone's guns, Fox is going to boom. But for now, relative peace and stability are bad news for cable news.",REAL
+224,Ryan flexes muscles in Ways and Means showdown,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+6715,Ho’oponopono: Healing For Ourselves & Our World,"Ho'oponopono: Healing For Ourselves & Our World Nov 14, 2016 0 0 
+We live in a world that is guided by the universal law of cause and effect. What we as individuals, groups of people, communities, societies and countries put out into the world through our thoughts, manifests. What we put into our collective consciousness has an effect. The cause being the thought. Everything is energy. All things have an energetic effect. We are all responsible for the shape of our lives and our world. We are all connected and bound together through this principle. When we hurt one another, whether intentionally or not, it is truly important for us to find forgiveness and healing. “I am sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.” 
+This is Ho’oponopono. These four sentences. It is a healing tool we can utilize for forgiveness. At this time, we may offer it to our newly elected world leaders, friends, family or a situation such as the turbulent US presidential election. For those of us unfamiliar with Ho’oponopono, these four sentences offered to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as an example, may feel like an instant trigger of built up internal emotions as many people have been going through anger, fear, hurt, confusion, and sadness both during and after this election. This healing modality can help take us from those feelings to feelings of deep forgiveness, acceptance, love and peace. 
+“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” – Paul Boese 
+If there is a need to heal hurtful differences you have had with others around the issue of this election, then you are in right the place right now by reading this piece. What is Ho’oponopono? 
+Ho’oponopono is the Hawaiian ritual of forgiveness, and it belongs to an ancient system of teachings called Huna (Hu=Knowledge, na=represents Wisdom). The Hawaiian islands also go by ‘The Land of Aloha’, the land of love. It is in this essence and spirit of Aloha that we find Ho’oponopono. 
+We all share a common path. Along that path, there is only one great universal power that accompanies us, and that is the power of unconditional love. It is the essence of God, and the place where compassion and unity spring forth. Ho’oponopono also means “compassion in action”. It helps us move past the duality behind good and evil, which is where we become separate from one another through judgment and condemnation. Through 4 simple sentences, Ho’oponopono can bring us to inner peace, harmony and unity. It offers us a solution to solving a problem while returning us to our divine plan. 
+A paradigm shift: “I am sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.” 
+“Ho’oponopono is a spiritual-soul method of purification that cleanses us from fears and worries, destructive relationship patterns, and any religious dogmas and paradigms that oppose our personal and spiritual development. It cleans out the blockages in our thoughts and cell structure, for our thoughts are made manifest in our body. This is the paradigm change.” 
+When we notice disturbances in our harmony and thought process because of a person, event or situation, then we can take this conflict and make a Ho’oponopono: I’m sorry (add the person’s name). We come to a stillness, and connect within our being. We contemplate, recognize and accept the problem, and ask for support through courage and peace. Please forgive me. We view the problem and all of its nuances, and we go within our own heart to seek out any part we may share in the problem. We take on 100% responsibility for the existence of the problem within us, another and our world. (100% responsibility=100% power). This could, for example, be in the form of a past experience where we have been hurt, and we are thus intensifying the current situation with the past. Perhaps we ourselves have made a judgement that has contributed to the conflict. These are all examples of things that require healing from within. I love you. Forgiveness takes place unconditionally, and we pardon ourselves and others. Thank you. With these words we express our faith and trust, and we let go. A prayer of gratitude may be offered to end. 
+“If we can accept that we are the sum total of all past thoughts, emotions, words, deeds and actions and that our present lives and choices are colored or shaded by this memory bank of the past, then we begin to see how a process of correcting or setting aright can change lives, our families and our society.” – Morrnah Nalamaku Simeona 
+It has been through Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, who took over the leadership of the Foundation of I Institute, that Ho’oponopono became known throughout the world. 
+He spent 4 years working in the psychiatric department of the state prison in Hawaii, which had conditions described as “the hell”. Thirty prisoners were confined there. There was a chronic shortage of security and staff. Many employees put in their notice as soon as possible after beginning employment, and even handcuffed prisoners were known to inflict violence upon staff. 
+While Dr. Hew Len worked there, he never met with a single prisoner. Instead, he spent his days in his office reading their case reports several times daily. With each prisoner’s report, he looked inward, and asked himself what darkness, negativity, power and hatefulness could possibly be within him that it too could be in another, and thus exist in his world. When he found something within himself, he did a Ho’oponopono. 
+After 1.5 years, the atmosphere and mood of the prison hospital had completely altered. After 18 months, none of the prisoners needed to wear handcuffs, and they walked freely. People came happily to work, and the illnesses declined. Therapeutic conversations could then be held with the inmates, and after 4 years all of the inmates, except for 2, were completely cured. The institution closed. 
+How was this possible? Through Ho’oponopono, Dr. Hew Len worked to continually cleanse his own heart, and take 100% responsibility for the existence of the prisoners in his life. 
+This study has been well documented, and Ho’oponopono is now an acknowledged therapy in the USA. There are also more than 50 studies for forgiveness at the diplomatic level. 
+“You are today where your thoughts have brought you, and tomorrow you will be where your thoughts will bring you.” – James Allen 
+Another form to do the Ho’oponopono is to begin with I love you for unification at the beginning: “Before the sun goes down, forgive.”– Hawaiian Proverb 
+Please, take the time to say it aloud. Some people have reported that it has had a miraculous effect when they even whispered it. Looking into your own eyes in a mirror while saying those 4 healing sentences can also be quite a testament to it’s extraordinary effect. 
+“Forgiveness is not a one-time thing, forgiveness is a lifestyle.” – Dr. Martin Luther King 
+If we all practice Ho’oponopono, look within, forgive, heal and love, then perhaps we can begin to see a shift in our lives as well as in our governments. Through cleansing what we have witnessed during this election season, there is hope for a deep shift within and without. It’s time to love ourselves and each other more. We all need more love. Let’s open ourselves to Ho’oponopono as a way to heal our inner and outer world. 
+Deepest love and appreciation to Ulrich E. Dupree for writing the book, ” Ho’oponopono: The Hawaiian Forgiveness Ritual As The Key To Your Life’s Fulfillment”. This little book has been with me for 2 years now. Thus, a lot of the information I have shared in this article has come from it. I am grateful for the balance, peace and healing that it continues to bring into my life. 
+This is the website of Dr. Ihaleakalal Hew Len. 
+To read testimonials of peoples’ experiences during and after Ho’oponopono, click here . 
+Finally, Aloha International has a wonderful list of books and resources (some free) to help understand more about the Huna healing art of Hawaii and Hawaiian Shamanism. 
+If you have other resources or references that may help people heal through Ho’oponopono and Huna, please leave a link in the comment section for us to all access and, thus, from which we can continue to heal and grow. 
+Peace begins with me. I am a part of the Universe. When I change, the world changes too. Peace begins with each and every one of us. 
+“There is only one corner of the Universe you can be sure of improving, and that’s your own self.” – Aldous Huxley 
+Aloha, ‘I see the divine in you, and I see the divine in myself.’ May we all find the healing we need, and may we all treat ourselves and others with respect, dignity, compassion, acceptance and love. When we heal ourselves, we heal the world. Peace be with me, and peace be with you. 
+Ulonda Faye is a certified wellness practitioner, holistic esthetician, and Rejuv Miracles Practitioner. Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she offers online and in-person education in holistic skincare, self-love, beauty rituals, and life coaching.",FAKE
+2583,Immigration Bill Slow to Stir Foes' Passion,"Grass-roots activists were instrumental in derailing the previous attempt by Congress to overhaul immigration laws, in 2007. This time, they have yet to ignite a similar fire.
+
+Coordinated rallies last week to oppose the current bipartisan immigration legislation drew sparse crowds, with fewer than 10 people showing up for a protest in Dover, Del. The number of phone calls to lawmakers' offices opposing the bill has been a fraction of what it was six years ago. As a discussion topic on conservative talk radio in recent...",REAL
+8190,Kim Kardashian The Queen Of Selfies Retires Her Booty From Breaking The Internet,"Tuesday, 1 November 2016 Kim Kardashian: The Queen Of Selfies 
+The world wide web has been crashing, due to suffering from withdrawals of Kim Kardashian's daily selfies. Kim was the queen of breaking the internet with her big booty, and it wasn't always from her sitting on it! Once upon a time, Kardashian fans felt so empowered by her nakedness, they would to bow to her tweets 1000 times a day, masterbate to her on Instagram 400 times a day, and drool at her snapchat videos 2000 times a day hoping they could see more selfies. 
+Things changed inside a Paris Hotel when 5 super villains robbed Kim of her biggest selfie moment. Fans were outraged and began rioting around the world when they learned the robbers didn't post any photos online showing Kim's booty & her boobs all tied up. 
+In a press conference, the Kardashian family let the world know that the online trolls are real and keep haunting them in person like the boogie man. Kris Kardashian says the trolls have not stopped the family from living their normal reality TV life in the limelight because she hired more super heroes as body guards that are ready to take on the villains! Meanwhile, Kanye is still loving himself publicly, Kylie continues eating pizza filled with love letters from her number one stalker fan, and the rest of the family is estatic that the focus is back on them for a minute. 
+Kim Kardashian has been offline for a month, yet fans refuse to believe this is the end of her booty selfies online. The world wide web hasn't stopped praying for Kim, they desperately await her selfie comeback so they can have meaning in their lives and feel empowered once again. Make DeniseVasquez's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
+2126,Obama vetoes Keystone XL pipeline bill,"President Obama on Tuesday followed through on his vow to veto bipartisan-backed legislation authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline, marking his first veto of the Republican-led Congress and only the third of his presidency.
+
+The president, in a brief statement, claimed the bill would ""circumvent"" the existing process for reviewing the pipeline, which would extend from Canada to Texas.
+
+""The Presidential power to veto legislation is one I take seriously,"" Obama said. ""But I also take seriously my responsibility to the American people. And because this act of Congress conflicts with established executive branch procedures and cuts short thorough consideration of issues that could bear on our national interest -- including our security, safety, and environment -- it has earned my veto.""
+
+The decision, while expected, was met with tough criticism from Republicans -- and tees up another showdown with Congress in the coming days as GOP leaders try to override.
+
+""It's extremely disappointing that President Obama vetoed a bipartisan bill that would support thousands of good jobs and pump billions of dollars into the economy,"" Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement. ""Even though the President has yielded to powerful special interests, this veto doesn't end the debate.""
+
+McConnell's office said the Senate plans to vote on overriding sometime before March 3.
+
+But so far, congressional leaders have not demonstrated they have the votes to override, which takes a two-thirds majority in both chambers.
+
+The Keystone bill garnered 62 yeas in the Senate, but they would need 67 to override. In the House, the bill got 270 votes -- but they would need 281 to override.
+
+It remains unclear whether moderate lawmakers could be swayed to switch in the coming weeks.
+
+While Tuesday's veto marked only the third of Obama's presidency -- fewer than any U.S. president since the 19th century -- his sparing use of the presidential tool is likely to change. With Republicans now in control of Congress, their efforts to chip away at the president's health care law and other legislative accomplishments are just as likely to be met with Obama's veto pen.
+
+To date, Obama rarely has used the veto in part because Democrats for six years controlled at least one chamber in Congress -- acting as a buffer to prevent unwanted bills from ever reaching the president's desk. That buffer is now gone.
+
+A look back at past presidencies, especially where control of the White House and Congress was split during at least one point, shows far more liberal use of that presidential power.
+
+In the Clinton presidency, the president issued 37 vetoes in his two terms. President Ronald Reagan issued 78. President George W. Bush issued 12. His father issued 44.
+
+Not since the Warren G. Harding administration has the number of vetoes been in the single digits; Harding issued six.
+
+The Keystone bill is as contentious an issue as any for Obama to fire his first veto shot of the new Congress.
+
+First proposed in 2008, the Keystone pipeline would connect Canada's tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries.
+
+The White House has said repeatedly it would wait to make its decision about whether to let the project go forward until after a State Department review. It regards the legislation as circumventing that process.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8085,Will Obama recognize Palestinian state?,"November 2, 2016 Will Obama recognize Palestinian state? 
+US President Barack Obama will be stepping down from eight years in office in January, but not before at least one more last ditch effort to save a foreign policy legacy marred by failure. 
+
+According to Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Vice President Jonathan Schanzer, the White House try one more last ditch effort to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, making moves ranging from sanctioning US citizens who do business with Israeli settlements all the way to possibly recognizing a Palestinian state. 
+
+Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Schanzer said that the Obama administration’s first course of action might be to adopt a UN Security Council Resolution condemning the settlements. 
+Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,",FAKE
+8171,VIDEO: Proof Hillary’s Frail Health is Becoming an Issue,"Pinterest 
+Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is clearly not in good health, and for a couple of campaign events she actually managed to do, we have more video of her failing health which the liberal mainstream media tries to sweep under the rug . 
+On Thursday, Clinton struggled to climb the steps of her campaign plane on her way to a rally in Winston Salem, North Carolina. 
+The rainy day had Clinton holding an umbrella as she labored her way up the stairs. Live Satellite News posted the video and noted that Clinton appeared to be “mumbling to herself.” 
+Clinton almost missed a stair, and as The American Mirror pointed out, from the time she left her motorcade all the way up the plane stairs, Clinton seemed “wobbly and unsteady.” 
+Watch the video below yourself where Clinton appeared to be pained as she climbed the campaign plane stairs: 
+The American Mirror posted another video, this time from The Last Stand, in which Clinton couldn’t tackle an approximately 18-inch step without assistance. The title of the video referenced Clinton’s “Stronger Together” campaign slogan — one that she apparently has taken literally thanks to her clearly failing health. 
+As you can see in the second video, the man who assisted Clinton didn’t just happen to be there and thought it would be nice to extend a hand to the elderly woman. No, he bounded over to Clinton when she neared the step. He stood nearby in what looked like an effort to be ready to help her descend the single step or steady her on the platform. 
+Now, some who haven’t followed the campaign closely may think that this is nit-picky, but it isn’t. It’s a little odd on its own, but when you add it to the mountain of evidence over the years of Clinton’s failing health, it says a great deal. 
+Can you imagine the media uproar if Donald Trump exhibited a tenth of the issues Clinton has on the campaign trail? You don’t have to — just this week Trump took 90 minutes “off” of the campaign trail to open his new Washington hotel, Washington Trump International, and CNN’s Dana Bash managed to ask a question that served as a dig. 
+“For people who say you’re taking time out of swing states to go do this,” Bash asked. Trump, with his hectic schedule that more than puts Clinton to shame, wasn’t having it: “For you to ask me that question is actually very insulting, because Hillary Clinton does one stop and then goes home and sleeps. Yet you’ll ask me that question.” 
+He’s right. There have been numerous examples of Clinton’s failing health that have barely gained media attention aside from her collapse at a Sept. 11 memorial this year that forced the biased media to reluctantly cover it. 
+The media is in the bag for Clinton, there’s no doubt about it . They may not note her clear health issues that she refuses to disclose the public, but we will.",FAKE
+2784,Iraq says it bombed Islamic State leader's convoy,"The Iraqi Air Force has bombed the convoy of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq's western Anbar province, the Iraqi military said Sunday.
+
+The condition and location of al-Baghdadi were not known, the military said. It did not say when the strike occurred.
+
+The military statement said al-Baghdadi, 44, had been heading to Karabla, near the Syrian border, to attend a meeting with ISIL commanders, Al Arabiya and other media outlets reported.
+
+""The location of the meeting was also bombed and many of the group's leaders were killed and wounded,"" the statement said.
+
+Iran's Fars news agency said several Arabic-language media outlets in Iraq have quoted ""informed military sources"" as saying al-Baghdadi had been killed and that no one in the convoy survived the attack. Reuters, however, cited hospital officials and Karabla residents as saying al-Baghdadi was not among the dead.
+
+Also Sunday, the Combined Joint Task Force that coordinates the international effort against the Islamic State said it had staged 24 airstrikes on ISIL in Syria and Iraq on Saturday. The strikes conducted as part of Operation Inherent Resolve ""further limits the group's ability to project terror and conduct operations,"" the task force said in a statement.
+
+The Islamic State has taken control of a large swath of Iraq and Syria in brutal fighting. Dominated by Sunni Arabs from Syria and Iraq, the group claims religious, political and military authority over Muslims worldwide as it attempts to build a state ruled by strict Sharia law.
+
+The U.S. designated Baghdadi a terrorist four years ago, authorizing a $10 million reward for information leading to his death or capture.  There have been reports in the past that al-Baghdadi had been attacked or even killed, including last November, but he reportedly retains his iron grip on ISIL. The Islamic State's No. 2 leader, Ahmad al-Hayali, reportedly was killed by a U.S. airstrike in August, U.S. officials have said. Al-Hayali, also known as Hajji Mutazz, was killed in Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city.
+
+The National Security Council said Mutazz, al-Baghdadi's deputy, ""was a primary coordinator for moving large amounts of weapons, explosives, vehicles and people between Iraq and Syria.""
+
+Al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed ""caliph"" of the Islamic State, made news in the U.S. in August when the family of  Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker who died in February while being held by the Islamic State, claimed their daughter had been repeatedly raped by the ISIL leader.
+
+Mueller, 26, from Prescott, Ariz., was taken captive in Syria in August 2013 while leaving a Spanish Doctors without Borders hospital in Aleppo.
+
+Al-Baghdadi brought her to live at the home of Abu Sayyaf, a Tunisian in charge of oil and gas revenue for the group, counterterrorism officials said. The details of Mueller's treatment were initially reported by several Yazidi girls who were held at the house, including a 14-year-old and her sister who managed to escape in August 2014. The sisters' version has been corroborated by U.S. officials.
+
+According to the accounts by the Yazidi girls, many Yazidi women passed through the Sayyaf house on the way to being given as ""presents"" to Islamic State fighters. They said rape was a ""reward"" for military victories. The Yazidis are an ancient religious sect, based mostly in Iraq, that has faced savage treatment from ISIL.",REAL
+604,Koch Groups To Spend Nearly $1 Billion On 2016,"WASHINGTON, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Conservative political advocacy groups supported by the billionaire Koch brothers plan to spend $889 million in the 2016 U.S. elections, more than double what they raised in 2012, the Washington Post reported on Monday.
+
+The newspaper said the goal was announced to donors at a weekend meeting in Rancho Mirage, California, hosted by Freedom Partners, a business lobby at the center of the Koch brothers' political operation. The Post cited a person who attended the gathering.
+
+The money will be doled out by a network of 17 organizations funded by industrialists Charles and David Koch, who have become a major force in conservative politics in recent years, and other wealthy donors. The network raised $407 million for the 2012 campaign.
+
+During the 2012 election cycle, the national Republican Party collectively spent about $675 million, according to election data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
+
+The Post said the $889 million would be spent on field operations, technology, policy study and other expenses.
+
+The Freedom Partners network spent almost $300 million on November's congressional elections, in which Republicans won control of the Senate and retained their majority in the House of Representatives.
+
+The potential field for the Republican presidential nomination is fairly crowded and the Post said the Koch group was still considering whether it would support candidates in the Republican primaries, which could dramatically shape the campaign and possible lead to intraparty conflict.
+
+Senators Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, all of whom are mentioned as possible presidential candidates, took part in the Rancho Mirage meeting, the Post said.
+
+The newspaper said the Freedom Partners network included Americans for Prosperity and funded groups such as Concerned Veterans for America, the Libre Initiative and Generation Opportunity. (Writing by Bill Trott; Editing by Peter Cooney)",REAL
+2351,"If Guns Make Us Safer, Why Not Let Them Into the U.S. Capitol?","It’s a curious feature of American life that when four innocents are killed by a gunman in Chattanooga, or when a young white supremacist opens fire inside a historic AME Church in Charleston, we talk about loosening gun safety laws.
+
+In the aftermath of this week’s murders, Donald Trump managed the near-impossible—sounding like a mainstream Republican politician—when he argued, “Get rid of gun free zones. The four great marines who were just shot never had a chance.” He is hardly alone in proposing this solution to the epidemic of gun violence. “These terrible tragedies seem to occur in gun-free zones,” said Rand Paul in January. “The Second Amendment “serves as a fundamental check on government tyranny,” Ted Cruz has said.
+
+But if these Second Amendment-purists really think that guns make places safer, if they really think that guns are an important check on government and safeguard of liberty, then why do so many of them keep their workplace—the U.S. Capitol—free of firearms?
+
+For almost two centuries and until very recently, ordinary citizens had free run of the Capitol. Ironically, as Congress has become less hospitable to gun safety laws, and as conservative Republican legislators have grown more strident in their desire to see citizens carry open and concealed weapons everywhere—in churches and schools, on college campuses, at bars and restaurants—the one venue that has grown more gun-free, more secure and more restrictive is the building they work in.
+
+Until 1983, there were no metal detectors at the entryways to the Capitol. No staff and member identification badges. No requirement that American taxpayers reserve advance tickets, queue up in a subterranean visitors’ center and be guided through a select few rooms of the complex. The only areas truly off limits to non-credentialed individuals were the Senate and House floors, though in extraordinary times, even these rooms became public space.
+
+When Union soldiers converged on Washington in the spring of 1861, the Sixth Massachusetts took refuge in the new House and Senate chambers. John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s young staff secretary, ventured over to inspect the “novel” scene. “The contrast was very painful between the grey haired dignity that filled the Senate Chamber when I saw it last and the present throng of bright-looking Yankee boys,” he observed..” Hay reclined on a leather sofa toward the rear of the chamber and gazed at the “wide-spreading skylights over arching the vast hall like heaven blushed and blazed with gold.” He thought it a fitting place to quarter the troops.
+
+It took extraordinary circumstances for armed militiamen, citizens and congressmen to mingle freely on the House floor. But the stark contrast between now and then raises a poignant issue: Why should Congress be the only gun-free zone in America?
+
+At exactly 2:32 on the afternoon of March 1, 1954, gunfire emanating from multiple points in the gallery interrupted legislative business on the crowded House floor, where 240 members of Congress were debating an immigration reform bill. The assailants—four Puerto Rican nationalists armed with German Lugers—created instant bedlam. Bullets “crashed through the table of the majority leader and chairs around it,” reported the New York Times, “and struck near the table of the Minority Leader and beyond.” At first, many House members mistook the gunfire for firecrackers. When they realized the gravity of their situation—they were sitting ducks, easy targets for unidentified gunmen who enjoyed a direct line of site—members dove behind their seats and crawled their way to the cloakrooms.
+
+Capitol Police officers, with the aide of several spectators and one congressman, worked to subdue the attackers, while teenaged House pages dodged bullets to carry Rep. Alvin Bentley, a 35-year-old Republican from Michigan who had been gravely wounded, off the floor. Against odds, Bentley survived his injuries.
+
+Remarkably, the attack in 1954 spurred no fundamental changes to Capitol security. The same cultural traditions that made the Capitol a natural dormitory for Civil War soldiers made it unthinkable that Congress would bar citizens from freely accessing and wandering its halls. The democratization of American politics from the 1830s onward reinforced a widely held conviction that, no matter how unrepresentative the makeup of the House and Senate might be of society at large, the national legislature was a people’s body, and its buildings belonged to everyone.
+
+That began to change amid the turbulence of the late sixties. In 1967, with civil rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations assuming an increasingly strident tone—including several disruptive protests from the House and Senate galleries—Congress passed a new measure stipulating, among other provisions, that it be made a criminal offense, punishable by up to five years in prison, to carry or discharge a firearm in the Capitol. Still, even after the Weather Underground detonated a bomb in the Senate wing in the early morning hours of March 1, 1971, ostensibly to protest U.S. military operations in Laos, Congress took few precautions. As late as 1983, visitors were required to pass through metal detectors at the doors to the Senate and House galleries, but not upon entering the building itself, where they remained free to walk most corridors and inevitably happened across dozens if not hundreds of congressmen on days when either chamber was in session. At most, they were asked to open their handbags and purses for a manual inspection.
+
+The status quo changed on the evening of November 7, 1983, when a bomb tore through the walls of the Senate Republican cloakroom and also badly damaged the office of Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd. Fortunately, no lives were lost.
+
+In response to the attack, Congress finally tightened Capitol security in a significant way. Whereas visitors had been able to access the building through 10 doors, now the Capitol Police only allowed the general public to use four, each outfitted with a metal detector. In later years, x-ray machines were added. Furthermore, staff members were now required to wear official badges that would allow them access to newly restricted areas. Reporters, accustomed to enjoying free run of the building, found themselves limited in their movement.
+
+“There were a lot of older staff people and members around who thought it was just terrible to have metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs around,” recalled former House Clerk Donnald K. Anderson in an official oral history.
+
+Indeed, even in the immediate aftermath of the bombing in 1983, many members balked at the idea of restricting access and tightening security, particularly where representatives of media outlets were concerned. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, warned that “to cut off access—free, spontaneous, adventitious and often calamitous—between senators and the accredited members of the press gallery would be to change our institution. It would begin to cut us off from the people who send us here.”
+
+“It’s a sad day for the American government when any constituent has to go through a security guard to see a Congressman,” said Robert H. Michel, the House Republican leader.",REAL
+9332,"Is Halloween Evil? Why Witches, Occultists And Satanists Celebrate Halloween And Why You Should Not","in: Faith , US News On October 31st, most people will simply ignore the dark side of Halloween. The vast majority of the population will dress up in costumes, go to parties and eat candy without ever even considering where the holiday came from or what certain people are doing behind closed doors. But the truth is that Halloween night is one of the biggest nights of the year for witches, occultists and Satanists. All over America, those that are deep into the dark arts will be contacting the dead, casting spells and conducting blood sacrifices. As you will see below, there is a reason why animal shelters across the country ban the adoption of black cats this time of the year. But even our “innocent” Halloween traditions such as dressing up in costumes, “trick or treating” and carving jack-o’-lanterns all have their roots in ancient pagan practices . And every year the costumes for our young girls become even more sexually suggestive, the horror movies become even more demonic, and the public’s fascination with the occult just continues to grow. It truly is a festival of death, but most people don’t seem to care. In fact, experts are telling us that Halloween has now become America’s second biggest holiday. According to the National Retail Federation , nearly 70 percent of all Americans plan to celebrate Halloween this year, and spending is expected to shatter the all-time record… According to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, total spending for Halloween is expected to reach $8.4 billion, an all-time high in the survey’s 11-year history. U.S. consumers are expected to spend an average of $82.93, up from last year’s $74.34, with more than 171 million Americans planning to partake in Halloween festivities this year. To give you some context, total Halloween spending for 2009 came in at just 4.7 billion dollars. So to say that the celebration of Halloween is growing would be a tremendous understatement. Sadly, most people have no idea where this holiday originally came from. The truth is that a long time ago Catholicism attempted to “Christianize” an ancient pagan holiday known as Samhain … The origins of Halloween are Celtic in tradition and have to do with observing the end of summer sacrifices to gods in Druidic tradition. In what is now Britain and France, it was the beginning of the Celtic year, and they believed Samhain, the lord of death, sent evil spirits abroad to attack humans, who could escape only by assuming disguises and looking like evil spirits themselves. The waning of the sun and the approach of dark winter made the evil spirits rejoice and play nasty tricks. Believe it or not, most of our Halloween practices can be traced back to these old pagan rites and superstitions . On the Wiccan calendar, Samhain is one of the most important points on “the wheel of the year”. Wiccans believe that it is the day when “the god dies”, and subsequently they celebrate his rebirth at Yule. It is also a time when they believe that the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest, and so it is an opportune time for them to contact the dead. The following is much more on what Wiccans believe about Samhain from wicca.com … Samhain, (pronounced SOW-in, SAH-vin, or SAM-hayne) means “End of Summer”, and is the third and final Harvest. The dark winter half of the year commences on this Sabbat. It is generally celebrated on October 31st, but some traditions prefer November 1st. It is one of the two “spirit-nights” each year, the other being Beltane. It is a magical interval when the mundane laws of time and space are temporarily suspended, and the Thin Veil between the worlds is lifted. Communicating with ancestors and departed loved ones is easy at this time, for they journey through this world on their way to the Summerlands. It is a time to study the Dark Mysteries and honor the Dark Mother and the Dark Father, symbolized by the Crone and her aged Consort. Originally the “Feast of the Dead” was celebrated in Celtic countries by leaving food offerings on altars and doorsteps for the “wandering dead”. Today a lot of practitioners still carry out that tradition. Single candles were lit and left in a window to help guide the spirits of ancestors and loved ones home. Extra chairs were set to the table and around the hearth for the unseen guest. Apples were buried along roadsides and paths for spirits who were lost or had no descendants to provide for them. Turnips were hollowed out and carved to look like protective spirits, for this was a night of magic and chaos. The Wee Folke became very active, pulling pranks on unsuspecting humans. Traveling after dark was was not advised. People dressed in white (like ghosts), wore disguises made of straw, or dressed as the opposite gender in order to fool the Nature spirits. The ancient practices described in those paragraphs sound very similar to what we do today in many ways, but without a doubt some of the traditions have evolved. For example, instead of carving turnips, those that celebrate Halloween carve pumpkins today. You may not realize this, but Wicca is actually one of the fastest growing religions in America. And on October 31st, Wiccans all over the nation will get together to conduct rituals and cast spells. Here is a blurb from Wikipedia about the Wiccan belief in “magic”… During ritual practices, which are often staged in a sacred circle , Wiccans cast spells or “workings” intended to bring about real changes in the physical world. Common Wiccan spells include those used for healing , for protection, fertility, or to banish negative influences. [63] Many early Wiccans, such as Alex Sanders , Sybil Leek and Alex Winfield , referred to their own magic as “ white magic “, which contrasted with “ black magic “, which they associated with evil and Satanism . Sanders also used the similar terminology of “ left hand path ” to describe malevolent magic, and “ right hand path ” to describe magic performed with good intentions; [64] terminology that had originated with the occultist Helena Blavatsky in the 19th century. Some modern Wiccans however have stopped using the white-black magic and left-right hand path dichotomies, arguing for instance that the colour black should not necessarily have any associations with evil. [65] If you are not familiar with these things, you may scoff at such practices. But the cold, hard reality of the matter is that they are very real. The dark side has power too, and those that have come out of witchcraft can tell you some stories that will stand your hair on end. Wiccans think of themselves as “good”, and so they tend to reject blood sacrifices and things of that nature. But for those that are deeper into the occult, blood sacrifice is an essential part of Halloween. As I mentioned above, many animal shelters all over the nation ban the adoption of black cats this time of the year … It’s the week of Halloween, and maybe you don’t know this, but if you suddenly wanted to adopt a black cat, you would probably have a hard time. That’s because thanks to their association with witchcraft, accepted wisdom holds that Halloween is a time when people ritualistically mutilate black cats. To test if this really was still accepted wisdom, I contacted some animal shelters near to our Los Angeles office, and they all told me they wouldn’t let me adopt a black cat. One, The Lange Foundation—the type of animal rescue that takes in cats from city shelters before they can be euthanized—was willing to talk to me on the phone and explain: If someone were to call and ask specifically for a black cat, that would trigger the policy. “I would say ‘not today!’” said one of the foundation’s board members, Diana Nelson. You may not want to believe it, but animals will be killed and little children will be abused on Halloween night. The following is what one ex-witch has shared regarding her experiences… My parents told me before we went around the neighborhood we were going to go by the church (Mormon Church) to get some candy there. The church was very close to my grandmother’s house, and I knew so from going often. We went to the church and what happened next made my blood curdle. I was given candy, but that was just a preclude to the sexual abuse that would happen in a satanic ritual. On Halloween Satanists use young children, such as myself, as sexual idols to worship. Other children receive a far worse fate. Death. I know for some this is more than you can even think to believe, but it is true. I can barely write these words because the pain of the truth is almost more than I can bear. If it wasn’t for the grace and love of Jesus Christ, I would not even be here writing this at all. You may say “it doesn’t mean that to me”, but you are just fooling yourself. Could you take a Satanic Black Mass and turn it into a celebration of Jesus? Of course not. And yet so many Christians fully embrace Halloween and pretend that there is nothing wrong with it. For the record, Satanists absolutely love Halloween. The following comes from the official Church of Satan website … Satanists embrace what this holiday has become, and do not feel the need to be tied to ancient practices. This night, we smile at the amateur explorers of their own inner darkness, for we know that they enjoy their brief dip into the pool of the “shadow world.” We encourage their tenebrous fantasies, the candied indulgence, and the wide-ranging evocation of our aesthetics (while tolerating some of the chintzy versions), even if it is but once a year. For the rest of the time, when those not of our meta-tribe shake their heads in wonder at us, we can point out that they may find some understanding by examining their own All Hallows Eve doings, but we generally find it simpler to just say: “Think of the Addams Family and you’ll begin to see what we’re about.” Satanists consider Halloween to be one of the most important “holidays” of the year. On page 96 of the Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey wrote the following… 
+“After one’s own birthday, the two major Satanic holidays are Walpurgisnacht (May 1st) and Halloween.” Isn’t that lovely? Despite all of this, most Christians in America will happily celebrate Halloween on October 31st. In fact, one recent survey found that just 8 percent of all Christian pastors want their congregations to skip the holiday altogether. Instead, most of them want their members to invite people to a “Christian version of Halloween” at their churches. The following comes from Charisma … Two-thirds (67 percent) encourage church members to invite friends and neighbors to a fall festival, trunk-or-treat or judgment house. Pastors at bigger churches (those with 250 or more in attendance) are most likely to ask church members to invite their neighbors (86 percent) to an event at the church. Those from small churches (50 or less in attendance) are least likely (48 percent). If the gospel is preached, I am all for people going to church on October 31st. But all too often these “alternative celebrations” are nothing more than repackaged versions of the same Satanic holiday that the world is celebrating. I like how Pastor Jamie Morgan described what our approach to this day should be… Setting aside a day to celebrate evil, darkness, witchcraft, fear, death and the demonic brings disdain to God. Period. A Christian celebrating Halloween would be like a Satan worshiper putting up a nativity scene at Christmas while singing, “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” The two just don’t go together. Jesus has nothing in common with Satan (2 Cor. 6:14), and neither should we. And the truth is that God has wanted us to have nothing to do with occult practices from the very beginning. The following is what Deuteronomy 18:9-13 says in the Modern English version … 9 When you enter into the land which the Lord your God gives you, you must not learn to practice the abominations of those nations . 10 There must not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or who uses divination , or uses witchcraft , or an interpreter of omens, or a sorcerer , 11 or one who casts spells , or a spiritualist , or an occultist , or a necromancer . 12 For all that do these things are an abomination to the Lord , and because of these abominations the Lord your God will drive them out from before you. 13 You must be blameless before the Lord your God. There will be many people that will read this article and will continue to celebrate Halloween just as they normally do. If that is you, then you need to understand that engaging in dark practices can open up doors to spiritual darkness for yourself and your entire family. If you do that, then that is your choice, but as for me and my house we will serve the Lord. Submit your review",FAKE
+8821,FBI Investigates Saudi Wife-Abusing Clinton Foundation Donor in Straw Donor Scheme,"FBI Investigates Saudi Wife-Abusing Clinton Foundation Donor in Straw Donor Scheme November 2, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
+It's midnight in America. And the Clintons and the Democratic Party keep finding ways to cover themselves in glory. I'm sure the line on this will be that the FBI is acting ""inappropriately"" by investigating this. Investigating political corrupt ion interferes with corrupt politicians being elected. 
+The FBI is investigating an alleged illegal donation scheme involving a wealthy Saudi family that supports Democratic Florida Senate candidate Patrick Murphy. 
+Murphy, who has covered himself in glory so often already, is denying everything. And I mean absolutely everything. 
+The Murphy campaign declined to say whether the candidate is aware of the FBI probe 
+What's your name? I decline to answer that question. 
+Murphy, 33, is running against Rubio, the incumbent Republican, in a race that could help decide which party controls the Senate in 2017. Rubio currently leads Murphy by an average of 5.6 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics. 
+The FBI investigation, however, relates to Murphy’s first run for the House in the 2012 campaign cycle. 
+The allegation — originally submitted by a Republican super PAC run by a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — is that Murphy’s high school friend and major political donor, Ibrahim Al-Rashid, coordinated a “straw donor” scheme to boost Murphy. 
+Murphy knows nothing! 
+Murphy’s campaign declined to say whether Murphy’s attorneys had discussed the FBI investigation with Al-Rashid’s attorney. 
+Uh-huh 
+Al-Rashid is the son of a powerful and politically connected Saudi billionaire. He’s been a major financial benefactor of Murphy’s, giving almost $400,000 to his campaigns and to outside groups supporting the Florida congressman. 
+Here's how some of these donations worked. 
+One example within the alleged scheme: A woman who describes herself in federal donation reports as the “owner” and “property manager” of a Texas-based company, Limestone Property Management, gave Murphy’s campaign $300. 
+But she is neither the property manager nor the owner of the Texas-based company. In fact, she doesn’t work there. 
+She lived in Miami at the time and was Ibrahim Al-Rashid’s “cleaning lady,” according to a Miami-Dade Police Department report filed in 2012 over a home burglary at Al-Rashid’s property. 
+Texas property manager vs Saudi's cleaning lady. That's quite a difference. 
+Murphy has been forced to return Al-Rashid's donations before for purely Islamophobic reasons. 
+Al-Rashid’s three sons have followed in their father’s political footsteps, contributing large sums to top Democrats, including Rep. Patrick Murphy (D., Fla.), whose Senate race could help decide which party controls the Senate in 2017. 
+Murphy has already returned a portion of al-Rashid’s donations due to his involvement in a domestic assault incident. 
+Ibrahim al-Rashid allegedly forced his way into his estranged wife’s Pennsylvania home, where al-Rashid allegedly “grabbed her by the wrist, struck her about the head and face with a closed fist then threw her to the ground,” according to a copy of the police report viewed by the Free Beacon. 
+Following the 2014 incident, al-Rashid allegedly sent his wife a text message stating, “I am not sorry this time I hope you die in hell,” according to the police report. 
+Murphy, a longtime friend of al-Rashid, was recently forced to donate around $16,000 in campaign funds to domestic violence groups after the assault charge became a public liability for the campaign. Murphy also returned all of the donations made by al-Rashid during the last three political cycles. 
+Is the Clinton Foundation involved in this? Do the Clintons do their business in golden and marble toilets? 
+Nasser al-Rashid, one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest figures and an adviser to the country’s royal family, has donated somewhere between $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, putting him in an elite category of prominent donors. 
+The Clintons. If there's dirt anywhere, you'll find it on them.",FAKE
+6066,Colorado Cannabis Industry Contributes More to Economy Than All Other Industries: Report,"By Justin Gardner The Colorado cannabis industry has quickly gone from bud to full flower, as indicated by a new in-depth data analysis by the... ",FAKE
+3089,5 facts about consistent conservatives,"The annual Conservative Political Action Conference begins this week, a three-day event hosted by the American Conservative Union where activists, officeholders, campaign consultants and others will hear from a dozen or so potential Republican presidential candidates – among them Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Ted Cruz.
+
+Last year’s series of Pew Research Center reports on political polarization used a 10-item scale of ideological consistency to place Americans into five categories: consistently conservative or liberal, mostly conservative or liberal, and mixed. By that metric, 9% of the public overall is consistently conservative, including 20% of Republicans and Republican leaners; most of the remaining Republicans and leaners were “mostly conservative” (33%) or had a mixture of liberal and conservative views (37%).
+
+Here are five facts drawn from our package of reports about consistent conservatives:
+
+Consistent conservatives participate in politics at higher rates than most other ideological groups. Political engagement tends to be highest among the most consistent conservatives and liberals, the Pew Research survey found. Half of consistent conservatives, for example, said they had contacted an elected official within the past two years – the highest level of any of our five groups. (The corresponding figure for all Americans, by the way, was 28%.) Consistent conservatives also ranked high on other measurements of political engagement, such as donating money (26%), attending campaign events (24%) and volunteering on a campaign (12%).
+
+Conservatives had outsize influence in the November midterm elections. Although consistent conservatives make up only about 9% of the total adult population, they vote at higher rates than people elsewhere on the ideological spectrum: 78% said they always vote, compared with 49% of the general public. Consequently, a report we published a few weeks before the 2014 midterms estimated that consistent conservatives would make up 17% of the November 2014 electorate.
+
+Conservatives would rather live in small towns or rural areas than anywhere else. Our research found an overwhelming preference among the most conservative Americans for nonurban lifestyles: 41% of consistent conservatives said they would live in a rural area if they could live anywhere in the U.S., and 35% picked a small town; just 4% said they’d prefer a city.
+
+Similarly, three-quarters of consistent conservatives said they’d rather live in a place where “the houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away,” and just 22% said they’d choose to live where “the houses are smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores and restaurants are within walking distance.”
+
+When it comes to raising children, conservatives prioritize responsibility, faith and hard work. When we asked our American Trends Panel about the three most important traits to teach children, 61% of consistent conservatives cited “being responsible,” and about as many (59%) identified religious faith as particularly important; hard work was chosen by 44%. While responsibility led among all five ideological groups, and hard work was among the top three for all but consistent liberals, religious faith was chosen by significantly more consistent conservatives than all other groups.
+
+Conservatives gravitate toward Fox News. A separate Pew Research report on polarization and media habits found that 47% of consistent conservatives (and 31% of people with mostly conservative views) cited Fox News as their main source for news about government and politics; no other news source came close. And 88% of consistent conservatives said they trusted Fox News – by far the highest level of trust by any ideological group of any single news source among the 36 we asked about.",REAL
+5854,"Professor Shares Insights on Paranormal, Cannibalism and Vampires.","Professor Shares Insights on Paranormal, Cannibalism and Vampires. # Edward777 0 
+Durham University lecturer Richard Sugg deals with history and analysis of esoteric themes as well as corpse medicine in European history, vampirism in ancient and modern Europe, ghosts and poltergeists. He deals with how society sees these subjects, some explanations, some items that have no scientific explanations, and even the psychological basis for these topics. Some of these you may have heard about, most of his research is probably new to listeners. Tags",FAKE
+10507,Hillary Admits In Leaked Email That Clinton Donors Are Funding ISIS,"posted by Eddie In an email between Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, the former first lady and secretary of state cites “ Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region ” to accuse Qatar and Saudi Arabia of “ providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [or ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region .” Citing the need to “ use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets ,” the candidate told Podesta the current developments in the Middle East were “ important to the U.S. for reasons that often differ from country to country .” In the same email, Clinton seemed to claim Turkey needed to be reassured of America’s willingness to “ take serious actions, ” an effort that “ [could] be sustained to protect our national interests ” in the region. In another piece of correspondence from 2012, the Director of Foreign Policy at the Clinton Foundation, Amitabh Desai , claimed the Ambassador from Qatar would “ like to see [Bill Clinton] ‘for five minutes’ in NYC, to present $1 million check that Qatar promised for [his] birthday in 2011 ,” adding that the small but rich nation occupying the Qatar Peninsula would “ welcome [the Clinton Foundation’s] suggestions for investments in Haiti — particularly on education and health .” Desai added that while Qatar had already “ allocated most of their $20 million … [they were] happy to consider projects we suggest .” Al Jazeera , a Qatar-based, state-funded news organization, recently ran a list of “ revealing, juicy and quirky emails ” leaked by WikiLeaks. In its list, the news organization went over the “pay-for-play” scheme involving the Clinton Foundation, going so far as to mention an email confirming the king of Morocco offered $12m “for the endowment” — as long as Clinton was willing to take part in a meeting. Nevertheless, the state-funded broadcaster failed to bring up the Qatar connection. Unfortunately for the organization, Wikileaks promptly noticed the omission. In a post on Facebook , the WikiLeaks official page said, “ Al Jazeera’s list of juiciest Wikileaks forgets to mention the revelation that Qatar funds both ISIS & Bill Clinton. ” On Twitter, the convenient lapse wasn’t forgiven. Promptly after WikiLeaks pointed out the omission, users began pressuring Al Jazeera to explain why the publication failed to link Qatar to ISIS and Clinton. Despite the public outrage, few, if any, news organizations reported on Al Jazeera ’s bias. In a period of America’s history in which news organizations parrot what one of the most powerful political dynasties in the country keeps on repeating to exhaustion — accusing foreign governments of “rigging” the U.S. election without offering any proof to back their claims — it’s interesting to observe that the mainstream media failed to pick up on this story. Is it that Qatar’s and Saudi Arabia’s involvement with ISIS — while backing their favorite candidate — is a difficult issue to report on? Or is the media’s refusal to cover this topic rooted in fear that thoroughly addressing it will help her lose the presidential election? Only time will tell.",FAKE
+8886,Billionaire: “Single Digit Millionaires” Are Too Poor to Get Justice In America,"Two Systems of Justice In America: One for the Ultra-Wealthy … Another For Everyone Else 
+Billionaire Peter Thiel said yesterday: 
+If you’re a single-digit millionaire … you have no effective access to our legal system. 
+Thiel is saying even plain vanilla millionaires can’t afford justice in America. 
+Fordham Law School professor and criminal justice expert John Pfaff notes that – using 2007 numbers – many states’ entire budgets for legal defense for people who can’t afford a lawyer is in the single-digit millions: 1. As of 2007, four states’ ENTIRE INDIGENT DEFENSE BUDGET were “single-digit millionaires.” 
+Maine: $9.6M",FAKE
+5323,Planned Parenthood: Abortion pill usage now rivals surgery,"Planned Parenthood: Abortion pill usage now rivals surgery October 31, 2016 The Planned Parenthood logo is pictured outside a clinic in Boston, Massachusetts, June 27, 2014. REUTERS/Dominick Reuter 
+Abortion pill usage has almost overtaken surgical alternatives as legalization of infanticide faces a major chance of repeal. in election 2016. Two medications used to induce abortion won US approval in 2000, but Pro-Life activists successfully implemented legislative restrictions. In 2014: Abortion medication was used in 43 percent of pregnancy terminations at Planned Parenthood clinics. in 2010: Up from 35 percent according to previously unreported figures by Planned Parenthood. In Ohio, Texas and North Dakota: Demand for medication abortions tripled in the last several months to as much as 30 percent of all procedures in some clinics. States with no restrictions: Up to 55 percent in Michigan, 64 percent in Iowa. Studies: Drug induced abortions kill the child up to 95 percent of the time. The abortion pill was approved in France in 1988. Guttmacher Institute: Pill used in 91 percent of abortions in Finland, 80 percent in Scotland. 1 million of the more than 2.75 million U.S. women who have used the abortion pill received it from Planned Parenthood. Federal data: Overall U.S. abortion rates have dropped to a low of 16.9 terminations per 1,000 women aged15-44 in 2011, down from 19.4 per 1,000 in 2008. U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows abortion pills to be used as far as 10 weeks into pregnancies. Planned Parenthood said both types of abortion typically cost from $300 to $1,000. 
+(NEW YORK CITY) American women are ending pregnancies with medication almost as often as with surgery, marking a turning point for abortion in the United States, data reviewed by Reuters shows. 
+The watershed comes amid an overall decline in abortion, a choice that remains politically charged in the United States, sparking a fiery exchange in the final debate between presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. 
+When the two medications used to induce abortion won U.S. approval 16 years ago, the method was expected to quickly overtake the surgical option, as it has in much of Europe. But U.S. abortion opponents persuaded lawmakers in many states to put restrictions on their use. 
+Although many limitations remain, innovative dispensing efforts in some states, restricted access to surgical abortions in others and greater awareness boosted medication abortions to 43 percent of pregnancy terminations at Planned Parenthood clinics, the nation's single largest provider, in 2014, up from 35 percent in 2010, according to previously unreported figures from the nonprofit. 
+The national rate is likely even higher now because of new federal prescribing guidelines that took effect in March. In three states most impacted by that change - Ohio, Texas and North Dakota - demand for medication abortions tripled in the last several months to as much as 30 percent of all procedures in some clinics, according to data gathered by Reuters from clinics, state health departments and Planned Parenthood affiliates.",FAKE
+8960,"NeverTrump Radio Host Does 180, Makes BRILLIANT Case for Voting Trump","BREAKING: Obama ATF Accused of Covering Up Political Element in Firebombing of GOP HQ 
+“I am not of the mindset that any vote not for Trump is a vote for Hillary, but a vote for Trump is a vote against Hillary. And I need to vote against Hillary. I need to vote against the media.” 
+Hunter noted the extreme bias exhibited by the media who refused to fact-check Clinton at the last debate, and what he sees as the difference between what a Trump and a Clinton presidency would look like: 
+“A Trump administration at least will include people I trust in positions that matter. I don’t know if they will be able to hold him completely in check, but I know a Clinton administration will include people who have been her co-conspirators in corruption, and there won’t even be a media to hold her accountable.   
+Although Hunter didn’t want to tell NeverTrumpers how they should vote, he asked them to think about how important it is to keep Clinton out of office: 
+“I’m not saying you should support him, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the importance of opposing her. If, or when, Hillary Clinton takes the oath of office, she needs to have as little support as possible. Frankly, she needs to be damaged. The mainstream media won’t do it; they’re in on it.” 
+“A simple protest vote for a third party or a write-in of my favorite comic book character might feel good for a moment. It might even give me a sense of moral superiority that lasts until her first executive order damaging something I hold dear — or her first Supreme Court nominee. But the sting that will follow will far outlive that temporary satisfaction. “ 
+“I oppose much of what Donald Trump has said, but I oppose everything Hillary Clinton has done and wants to do. And what someone says, no matter how objectionable, is less important than what someone does, especially when it’s so objectionable. A personal moral victory won’t suffice when the stakes are so high. As such, I am compelled to vote against Hillary by voting for the only candidate with any chance whatsoever of beating her — Donald Trump.”  ",FAKE
+8235,Saudi’s threaten OPEC oil freeze over Iran row,"Saudi’s threaten OPEC oil freeze over Iran row November 04, 2016 A gas flame is seen in the desert near the Khurais oilfield, Saudi Arabia June 23, 2008. REUTERS/Ali Jarekji/File Photo 
+Saudi Arabia has threatened to cancel the scheduled OPEC oil freeze by raising output over row with Iran. OPEC sources: Saudi Arabia threatened to raise oil output steeply to bring prices down if Iran refuses to limit its supply. According to four OPEC sources: Clash occurred at last weeks experts meeting designed to work out details before official Nov. 30 gathering. OPEC source: ""The Saudis have threatened to raise their production to 11 million barrels per day and even 12 million bpd, bringing oil prices down, and to withdraw from the meeting.” OPEC Source: The Saudi threat followed objections by Iran, which said it was unwilling to freeze its output. OPEC Source: Saudi threat to raise output came as a surprise even to Riyadh's Gulf OPEC allies. Non-Iranian OPEC Source: ""We felt as if they (the Saudis) wanted the meeting to fail.” Saudi Arabia has increased output since 2014 to record highs of around 10.5 million-10.7 million barrels per day. In September: OPEC agreed at a meeting in Algeria on modest preliminary oil output cuts in the first such deal since 2008. Iran has reported its output at 3.85 million bpd in Sep., and said they will only cap output at 12.7 percent of OPEC's total ceiling - or 4.2 million bpd. Ali Kardor, managing director of NIOC: ""Working in oil industry is like operating at war fronts and we have to preserve our trenches by raising our production capacity as much as we can.” Kardor: “The next OPEC meeting is near and we will never cease to recapture our quota in the organization.” OPEC Secretary-General Mohammed Barkindo: I am ”optimistic"" a final agreement will be reached. OPEC delegate: ""People can look at it from different angles. The fact that discussions are still going on is a positive one. They are going to work on it, close to the ministers’ meeting.” 
+(DUBAI/LONDON) Old disputes between Saudi Arabia and rival Iran resurfaced at a meeting of OPEC experts last week, with Riyadh threatening to raise oil output steeply to bring prices down if Tehran refuses to limit its supply, OPEC sources say. 
+Clashes between the two OPEC heavyweights, which are fighting proxy wars in Syria and Yemen, have become frequent in recent years. 
+Tensions subsided, however, in recent months after Saudi Arabia agreed to support a global oil supply limiting pact, thus raising the prospect that OPEC would take steps to boost oil prices. 
+But a meeting of OPEC experts last week, designed to work out details of cuts for the next OPEC ministerial gathering on Nov. 30, saw Saudis and Iranian clashing again, according to four OPEC sources who were present at the meeting and spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity. 
+""The Saudis have threatened to raise their production to 11 million barrels per day and even 12 million bpd, bringing oil prices down, and to withdraw from the meeting,"" one OPEC source who attended the meeting told Reuters. 
+OPEC headquarters declined to comment on discussions during the closed-door meetings last week. Saudi and Iranian OPEC delegates also declined official comments.",FAKE
+7079,Tsunami Hits New Zealand After Massive 7.8 Earthquake Strikes,"  
+New Zealand’s   country’s entire east coast and urged residents in low-lying areas to evacuate and seek higher ground. 
+Waves of up to two meters (6 feet) could be possible for up to two hours, it said. 
+Anna   
+“That’s reasonably significant so people should take this seriously,” she told Radio New Zealand. 
+New Zealand’s Geonet revised up its estimated magnitude of the quake to 7.5, from 6.6 earlier. 
+USGS   Zealand’s South Island. 
+A 6.3 quake there in February 2011 killed 185 people and caused widespread damage. 
+The   
+“The whole house rolled like a serpent and some things smashed, the power went out,”   
+Chris Hill, a fire officer in Cheviot, a coastal town near the quake’s epicenter, said officials had gone door to door evacuating residents. 
+Learn More:",FAKE
+9296,"Is the US a banana republic? - Putin [Valdai, Part 1 of 1]","
+October 29th, 2016 - Fort Russ News - 
+RT- Translated by  Inessa Sinchougova 
+
+
+
+
+Vladimir Putin's annual address at the Valdai Discussion Club, held in Sochi, Russian Federation. This year hosted by the Professor of Russian Studies, Timothy Colton, at Harvard University. Most leading journalists as well as scholars, both Russian and international, are invited to attend - whether they do is another matter.  
+This is of course not the first time Mr Putin attempts to wake the sleeping - in fact, Putin has been saying similar things for many years. 
+Check out these historical Valdai clips to spot the similarities, and gain a sense of Putin's patience! 
+""Who created ISIS?"" - Putin, Valdai 2014 (7 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbZDyr2LkdI 
+""How safe do you feel living in the world of today?"" - Putin, Valdai 2014 (3 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhPlWH69jQ8 
+""Putin on the Global Elite"" - Valdai, 2014 (5 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6aC-TDQMlc 
+""Putin's urgent message to the West"" - Valdai 2014 (41 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpvzKlqZoF0 
+
+
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                                                                      
+       Follow us on Twitter!                                
+             Donate! ",FAKE
+8356,WATCH As Chris Cuomo Tells Rudy Giuliani: You Live In Fact-Free ‘Trumpland’,"WATCH As Chris Cuomo Tells Rudy Giuliani: You Live In Fact-Free ‘Trumpland’ By Andrew Bradford   
+There was a battle royale this morning on CNN, and when it was over with, host Chris Cuomo made sure Rudy Giuliani was reduced to rubble. 
+The interview began with Cuomo telling the former New York City mayor that he didn’t smile very much at last week’s Al Smith charity dinner when Hillary Clinton took a few comedic jabs at him: “You looked like Grumpy Cat.” 
+Sullen and sour, Giuliani said Clinton should be in prison and wearing an orange jumpsuit. But when Rudy began trying to filibuster, Cuomo interrupted him and said he while he might not agree with the decision the FBI made to not charge Clinton with any wrongdoing when it came to her email server, Giuliani wasn’t entitled to make things up: 
+Next, Giuliani began ranting about some “bribe” that predated the email controversy, and that was when Cuomo shut him down with one line : “My entire life because you’re so accurate and all of a sudden, you’re in Trumpland and the facts are all over the place.” 
+As if he hadn’t been embarrassed enough, Giuliani then attempted to start talking about the recent announcement that Obamacare premiums will rise by as much as 25 percent in 2017: “As a result, because the Democrats forced this down the Republicans’ throat, the ACA, they decided to punish them. And they won’t work with the Democrats to fix any of the problems that they could fix.” 
+Cuomo was ready for that line, too, and again lit into his guest : “Oh, that’s a bunch of nonsense. They created it themselves. They cut out bipartisan support.” 
+When it was over with, you could tell by the look on Rudy’s face that he knew he had just been bested. Maybe Trump should rethink letting the unhinged Giuliani be one of his main surrogates. He really stinks at it. 
+Here’s both parts of the interview: 
+Featured Image Via YouTube Screengrab About Andrew Bradford 
+Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect",FAKE
+2081,Would Earth Day’s creator have celebrated this Earth Day?,"This post has been updated.
+
+Soledad O’Brien, former CNN news anchor extraordinaire, was met with a puzzling situation last Saturday. She was co-hosting a massive Earth Day extravaganza on the Mall. She was standing in front of a crowd she estimated at 250,000 people. She had a microphone. But she was talking and nobody was listening.
+
+“The event’s hosts, newscaster Soledad O’Brien and Black Eyed Peas bandleader Will.I.Am, appeared to have a rough time of it,” The Washington Post’s Chris Richards wrote. “O’Brien, either frustrated by glitchy teleprompters or perhaps not clear on how a concert works, actually shushed the crowd at one point.”
+
+O’Brien’s problem reflected what some see as a problem with Earth Days of recent vintage. Even as companies, celebrities and the likes of My Morning Jacket and No Doubt stand by to do what they can for the planet, what they’re doing doesn’t seem to amount to much.
+
+“Launched in 1970 as a protest against corporate environmental misconduct, Earth Day has become a planet-hugging marketing frenzy for companies themselves,” the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2008. “Makers of everything from snack chips to sport-utility vehicles now use April 22 to boast about their efforts to help save the planet.”
+
+‘Twas not always so. When Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson (Wis.) saw the waters off Santa Barbara, Calif., turn black in 1969 after what was then the worst U.S. oil spill, organizing a rock concert was not on his mind. Faced with ghastly images of oil-covered birds and meager attempts to soak up oil slicks with straw, he wanted to build a coalition across political parties — across country and city.
+
+“Gaylord’s unique contribution is that he was the first person to see the political importance of conservation, that it could be used to mobilize people,” Denis Hayes, one of the organizers of the first Earth Day, said after Nelson’s death in 2005. “He recognized the partnership between traditional conservation issues and the new emerging urban and industrial issues. Largely forgotten is that he was the first and most important to help us build bridges between environmental concerns and organized labor.”
+
+It worked. Twenty million people came out on April 22, 1970, to rally, raise hell and clean up.
+
+“The reason Earth Day worked is that it organized itself,” Nelson said. “The idea was out there and everybody grabbed it. I wanted a demonstration by so many people that politicians would say, ‘Holy cow, people care about this.'”
+
+Perhaps not coincidentally, the Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970, the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973. In a country where Ohio’s Cuyahoga River had caught fire less than a decade before, a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, signed executive orders and legislation that would begin the process of cleaning up the nation.
+
+Then, even as the Earth kept warming up, a long, cold winter set in.
+
+“Ten years later, it has become popular in some circles to write the obituary of the environmental movement, to refer to the passing of the ‘golden era’ for environmentalism,” Nelson wrote in 1980. “It is asserted that public interest has waned, that new worries have captured attention, that inflation, the energy crisis, and international conflict have superseded if not wiped out public concern over environmentalism.”
+
+But the “golden era” really was a golden era. Nelson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, but momentum had stalled.
+
+“One could argue that there has been no major environmental legislation since 1990, when President George H.W. Bush signed a bill aimed at reducing acid rain,” the New Yorker wrote in 2013 after the Senate tabled what would have been a landmark bill on carbon emissions. “Today’s environmental movement is vastly bigger, richer, and better connected than it was in 1970. It’s also vastly less successful.”
+
+Nelson had envisioned Earth Day as a “teach-in.” When Earth Day returned in 1990, it “sought to ‘enlist’ people in a well-defined movement, not to enable them to work out their own vision of how they might make a difference,” as Adam Rome, who wrote a book about the celebration, told the New Yorker.
+
+So, the United States still hasn’t ratified the Kyoto Protocol. The messaging of the day may be lost amid promotional products and greenwashing. But we do have Earth Day T-shirts and hoodies.
+
+As Hal Harvey, environment-program director for a funder of prominent environmental groups, told the Wall Street Journal: “The danger is we let ourselves be happy with gestures rather than substance.”",REAL
+5648,"To Survive, Evolve - Russia News Now","This post was originally published on this site 
+The concept of evolution should not be limited to the scientific assertions around Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but ought to include the more general idea that people and processes constantly evolve in response to the forces that surround them. We evolve from childhood into adulthood, and, ideally, from self-centeredness toward the good of larger entities like our community or nation (and now, faced with climate change, the good of our planet). Political arrangements have evolved from the divine right of kings into still–evolving democratic systems. 
+A Supreme Court justice’s orientation toward evolution in this basic sense determines whether he or she is a strict originalist (a nicer word for fundamentalist), or sees the Constitution as a living document that must be responsive to changing conditions. No founding father composing the second amendment could have foreseen the surfeit of guns decimating our country today. 
+Such evolutionary processes are alive, dynamic, an unstoppable juggernaut pervading every aspect of reality. Against them, even the determination not to evolve has evolutionary effects, as we have seen in the bizarre presidential process of the past year. A Neanderthal candidate has helped awaken a generation of young women, and ideally young men also, to evolve beyond being victims of crude chauvinist stereotypes. 
+The whole cosmos has been evolving for 13.8 billion years, from energy to matter to, here on earth, life and self-conscious life. Evolution is the context of our reality, the story all humans share. This story is beginning to seep into collective consciousness in a way that may yet render obsolete divisions such as those between Shia and Sunni, let alone between “radical Islamic fundamentalism” and the “post-Enlightenment West.” We all evolved from the same mysterious source. Every differentiation in that largest context, by race, tribe, religion, ethnicity, feels arbitrary and abstract. 
+It is not surprising that fundamentalism in whatever form has often found the evolutionary paradigm threatening, because it implies a challenging dynamic of change that feels insecure. For many believers, to generalize unfairly, religion provides behavioral rules that can be a source of security and comfort even as they are used as excuses to remain exclusive and resist evolving. 
+Within each world religion, there are minority enclaves (the Sufis in Islam, Zen practitioners of Buddhism, Catholic mystics like Teilhard de Chardin) who understand that their spiritual discipline is an opportunity to evolve toward inclusivity, toward looking within at fears and projections rather than looking outward for enemies, and toward expanding our identifications and responsibilities beyond the national to the planetary. 
+Far from being a benign, feel-good process, evolution is often painful, one step forward, two back. Take the tortured but necessary demise of the American coal industry. No one wants to see the debilitating effects of unemployment on real people with real families, but so far the technology of coal burning hasn’t evolved a way not to accelerate global warming. 
+We humans are supposedly not built to respond effectively to long-term threats like changes in climate, but, late in the game as it is, we do seem to be collectively learning what is at stake and evolving locally and globally. Entrepreneurs are rapidly bringing to market solar, wind, and other cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. 
+Unfortunately, negative and harmful processes can also become subject to an evolutionary juggernaut. Since 1945 weapons systems have evolved (more accurately, we have evolved them) to a level of complexity and destructive power that we are already powerless to control. The Pentagon is reported to be spending its usual vast sums on research into computer-controlled robotic drones capable of making their own autonomous decisions about who is an enemy. The defense establishments of other great nations are presumably up to the same mischief, or soon will be, because the arms race never stops evolving. Or won’t until we embrace a new way of thinking: that we must evolve to survive. 
+We, we the nations, are hopelessly complacent in our present reliance upon deterrence as a workable security system. As the fellow falling from the hundredth floor said as he passed the sixtieth: so far so good. The system, an emperor with no clothes solemnly worshipped by legions of self-confident experts, is too complex not to be subject to breakdown at any moment, perhaps by accident, perhaps where NATO and Russia push up against each other in Eastern Europe, perhaps in Kashmir. 
+The threat of nuclear extinction provides a new context for the obsolete parochialism of the world’s major religions. If this threat isn’t enough to accelerate the ecumenical impulse, what is? As people of diverse spiritual worldviews acknowledge that they have in common the possibility of annihilation, our shared anxiety can energize evolution toward inclusivity and nonviolent solutions to conflict. The world is in a race between fundamentalists and arms manufacturers on the one hand, and evolutionaries who see clearly both the futile dead-end of the arms race and the possibility of a security built upon the truth of interdependence, which appears in similar form in all the religions as the Golden Rule. We will live together or die together. As we treat others, so we will be treated. Whether they each understand this or not, this is the hidden-in-plain-sight background behind the Trump-Clinton mud-wrestle. 
+Will the arms manufacturers and the politicians in league with them evolve in the face of the nuclear threat in a way similar to our positive responses to the challenge of climate instability? I live in Maine, where the state’s largest private employer is the Bath Iron Works. They are building three of a new kind of guided missile destroyer that is contoured to hide from radar. Each one costs 4 billion dollars. Recently I had a conversation with an Iron Works employee. I made the assumption that, given his job, he would be hawkishly supportive of a robust military. Not at all. His exact parting words were “I’d be much happier building solar panels.” Related ",FAKE
+4571,"Behind anti-Trump protests, worries that America's promise has dimmed (+video)","For many Americans who have long felt threatened, the election of Donald Trump raises deep-seated fears that they could again become targets of hatred and prejudice.
+
+Demonstrators protest against President-elect Donald Trump in front of the Trump International Hotel in Washington Thursday.
+
+A Muslim mother of four, Nadia has for the most part escaped overt racism in her tiny hometown about an hour outside New York.
+
+But lately, her 8-year-old daughter has been having nightmares. Amid calls during the presidential campaign to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States, it feels like something has changed in the atmosphere, says Nadia, who asks that her last name not be used.
+
+At a parent-teacher conference last week, a student, 8 or 9 years old, came up to her and said, “When Donald Trump gets elected, you’re going to get deported,” she says.
+
+There was no question to her where the behavior came from, and on Tuesday night, it felt like voters sent her an inescapable message: That behavior was an acceptable part of the new America.
+
+“We have these no-bullying initiatives, and then we are showing kids that bullies can win,” Nadia says. “I don’t know how we can reconcile that in the future.”
+
+On Wednesday night and again Thursday, shock, sadness, anger, and fear spilled across the nation in protests against the election of Mr. Trump.
+
+Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched, lighted fires, and chanted anti-Trump slogans. The boldest and brashest talked of secession on social media. But for many, like Nadia, acceptance has come in waves of bitter disbelief.
+
+To them, the election of Trump directly contradicts the values they cherish and associate with America. Interviews with women, people of color, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community across the country reveal deep-seated fears that Trump’s words and behavior have too often embodied what they have spent their lives opposing: racism, sexism, homophobia, and a white patriarchy that for centuries has shared its power only reluctantly.
+
+In the wake of Tuesday’s election, these voters – particularly in liberal cities and states – are struggling to come to grips with a nation they say they hardly recognize. America’s promise to embrace all, before so bright, now seems perceptibly dimmer.
+
+“There was a staggering amount of shock,” says Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Edmund G. Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University Los Angeles. “This was an extraordinarily intense campaign, and we’re seeing a lot of angst and concern, especially in communities that were talked about in a negative way.”
+
+As a woman of mixed black and Persian parentage, Shirin Shoai identified deeply with President Obama in both 2008 and 2012. This year, she had connected as a woman with Hillary Clinton – and been appalled by Trump’s offhand remarks about sexual assault.
+
+On Wednesday morning, she couldn’t believe what she saw when she woke up.
+
+The notion that millions of her fellow citizens could support Trump was frightening for what it said about the depth of the divide within America, she says. As a psychotherapist in Berkeley, Calif., her job is to forge connections between people. She wonders now if the nation is capable of it.
+
+“I think it’s going to take a lot of work to get us together as a country,” Ms. Shoai says. “It requires a kind of empathy and availability to that other person that I don’t know on a national scale that we have.”
+
+For Jessie Earl, the concern stems from the discrimination she has faced as a transgender woman. In many ways, she has been fortunate, she says. Even in the small, conservative town in New York State where she grew up, she was often surrounded by supportive friends and family. Still, the sting of bigotry is familiar.
+
+Last week, she went into a bathroom in a building close to the Los Angeles office where she works as a digital editor. A woman, upon seeing her, said loudly that it seemed a man had made his way into the ladies’ room. A supervisor was called in, who defused the situation, Ms. Earl says.
+
+“But that was terrifying to me,” she says. “I wanted to hide.”
+
+Earl worries that Trump, through his words and actions, would legitimize that sort of discrimination.
+
+“It’ll tell people that that behavior is acceptable,” she says. And while she lives in Southern California, where such incidents are less likely to take place, she knows that others are not so fortunate.
+
+“I have friends in North Carolina who are transgender,” she says. “I don’t want them to live in a society that says it’s OK to ostracize them.”
+
+Among immigrants and the Hispanic community, the fear of what a Trump administration might mean is perhaps even more palpable.
+
+Two years ago, US-born Paola Hernandez married Emmanuel Ramirez, and now the Tucson, Ariz., couple has an 18-month-old daughter. But Mr. Ramirez is here illegally, having sneaked across the US-Mexico border 14 years ago.
+
+He can apply for legal status through his wife. But he hasn’t begun the process because he can’t afford to hire an attorney, which can cost $8,000. Ramirez, a native of Mexico, has worked for years as a dishwasher and cook.
+
+Trump “said he would do raids, and there are so many families that would be affected because we’re here illegally,” says Ramirez.
+
+The risk of estrangement is more emotional than physical for Debbie Yen.
+
+The millennial daughter of Chinese-American immigrants in California’s Orange County, Ms. Yen says her parents shaped who she has become – teaching her to value integrity, to stay calm in the face of adversity, and to take the high road.
+
+But they voted for a man that, to her, embodies the opposite of all those things.
+
+“I can’t help but feel disappointed in them,” says Yen, a freelancer who works in production. “Everything that I’ve been raised up to this point to be is the exact opposite of what Trump has done and said and been throughout his campaign.”
+
+Amid the disillusionment, however, most of those interviewed said they wanted to learn from the loss, keep fighting for progress, and – perhaps most importantly – reach out to the other side.
+
+“I understand the anger, the feeling of betrayal,” says Earl in Los Angeles. “But it doesn’t help if you just yell at someone. That just adds to the environment of not listening” that led the country to where it is in the first place.
+
+Her new goal, she says, is to engage more with people who view the world differently than she does. She doesn't believe everyone who voted for Trump is a bad person; but she does want to better understand where they’re coming from.
+
+“We don’t expose ourselves to other people’s ideas. So we’re not seeing each other as people,” she says.
+
+Shoai, the Berkeley therapist, plans to start working with a group called “Sidewalk Talk,” which invites people on the street to stop and share their feelings for about 10 minutes. She laughs sheepishly as she explains the concept.
+
+“Things like that that sound really ‘woo-hoo,’ soft,” Shoai says. “But we just need to be more vocal about that stuff. If half of the country is feeling really left behind, there’s something going on that we need to know about.”
+
+“That’s sort of my sadness and my hope.”
+
+Nadia also urges action. “We’ve been sitting on the sidelines for too long,” she says. “If we’re going to turn this around, we have get out there.”
+
+To make her own small mark, she intends to run in her town’s next school board elections. And she hopes others across the country – especially the millions of people who voted with a vision of a united America – will take similar steps.
+
+“We are Americans,” she adds. “We define what America will be.”
+
+Lourdes Medrano contributed to this report from Tucson, Ariz.",REAL
+576,The College Loan Bombshell Hidden in the Budget,"In obscure data tables buried deep in its 2016 budget proposal, the Obama administration revealed this week that its student loan program had a $21.8 billion shortfall last year, apparently the largest ever recorded for any government credit program.
+
+The main cause of the shortfall was President Barack Obama’s recent efforts to provide relief for borrowers drowning in student debt, reforms that have already begun to reduce loan payments to the government. For more than two decades, budget analysts have recalculated the projected costs of about 120 credit programs every year, but they have never lowered their expectations of repayments this dramatically. The $21.8 billion revision—larger than the annual budget for NASA, or the Interior Department and EPA combined—will be tacked onto the federal deficit.
+
+“Wow,” marveled Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Whether or not it’s good policy to help borrowers with their payments, it’s obviously costly for taxpayers.”
+
+The 40 million Americans with student loans are now saddled with more than $1.2 trillion in outstanding debt. And with higher education costs rising much faster than inflation, the already massive program has been growing at a spectacular clip; direct government loans alone increased 44 percent over the last two years despite an aura of austerity in Washington. The Obama administration has tried to ease the burden for some borrowers by reducing their payments to 10 percent of their income and forgiving their loans after 20 years; this year, the Education Department plans to make all borrowers eligible for that “pay-as-you-earn” relief.
+
+Student loan defaults increased somewhat last year, but the department says the primary drivers of the unprecedented “re-estimate”—budget-wonk jargon for the update of expected loan costs—were Obama’s policy changes, the recent ones as well as the upcoming ones. And because of a quirk in the budget process for credit programs, the department can add the $21.8 billion to the deficit automatically, without seeking appropriations or even approval from Congress.
+
+That’s a big quasi-bailout, increasing the deficit nearly 5 percent. The White House budget office was unaware of any larger re-estimates since the current scoring rules for credit programs went into effect in 1992. As a January Politico Magazine feature on the government’s unusual credit portfolio reported, the Federal Housing Administration has stuck more than $75 billion worth of similar re-estimates onto Uncle Sam’s tab over the last two decades, most of them after the recent housing bust led to a cascade of FHA-backed mortgage defaults. But it’s never had a one-year shortfall quite as drastic as this.
+
+It’s not yet clear whether this will be a hefty one-time revision, or a harbinger of oceans of red ink as millions more borrowers get relief on their payments to the government. Several reports by Barclays Capital have warned that Obama’s generosity to borrowers could leave the student loan program as much as $250 billion in the hole over the next decade. And behind closed doors, officials in the White House budget office and the Treasury Department have criticized the Education Department’s loan models as overly optimistic, with some officials pushing internally for third-party audits.
+
+But administration officials said there’s no reason to think this year’s shortfall will recur. They believe that their budgets going forward will accurately reflect their new efforts to help borrowers limit their payments, that pay-as-you-earn will be “baked into the cake.” Historically, re-estimates for the better and for the worse have tended to cancel each other out across the government. In fact, this year, the government’s credit portfolio increased to $3.3 trillion, larger than any U.S. bank’s, but the re-estimates for all the programs besides student loans netted out to less than $1 billion.
+
+The administration argues that even the $21.8 billion student loan shortfall is a relative pittance for the Education Department’s $740 billion book of direct loans, the second-largest government credit portfolio after FHA mortgage guarantees.
+
+“Any re-estimate should be considered in this context,” says White House Office of Management and Budget spokeswoman Emily Cain.",REAL
+5006,Trump Vows to Never Change: 'I Am Who I Am',"On Saturday, Donald Trump threatened to revoke the credentials of The New York Times after the newspaper published a report detailing the ""failing"" effort by Republican Party operatives to ""save Mr. Trump from himself.""
+
+On Sunday, the Republican presidential candidate doubled down, slamming the Times on Twitter and vowing to never change.
+
+""The newspaper's going to hell,"" Trump told a rally Saturday at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. ""They've got a couple of reporters in that newspaper who are so bad — I mean lack of talent. But it's going to hell.
+
+ 
+
+ ""So, I think maybe what we'll do, maybe we'll start thinking about taking their press credentials away from them,"" the Republican nominee added, drawing cheers from the crowd.
+
+ 
+
+ ""Maybe we'll do that. I think so. I think so.
+
+ 
+
+ ""When they write dishonest stories, we should be a little bit tough, don't we agree?""
+
+ 
+
+ Many in the audience yelled ""yeah.""
+
+ 
+
+ The Times report, by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, detailed efforts by staffers to keep Trump on script, focus more on policy and tone down his inflammatory rhetoric and combative style.
+
+ 
+
+ It was based on interviews with 20 Republicans, many of whom insisted on anonymity to avoid clashing with him,"" according to the Times.
+
+ 
+
+ The article also described a meeting Trump had with GOP political consultant Karl Rove and casino magnate Steve Wynn during the primaries — from which Rove emerged ""stunned"" that the nominee knew little about campaign basics.
+
+ 
+
+ Trump slammed the Times for using anonymous sources, saying ""I don’t think they have any names.""
+
+ 
+
+ In an overall attack on the press, Trump said that it was his biggest competitor in this campaign, not Hillary Clinton.
+
+ 
+
+ ""I'm not running against crooked Hillary,"" he said. ""I’m running against the crooked media.
+
+ 
+
+ ""That’s what I’m running against, I’m not running against crooked Hillary.""
+
+Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman, also pushed back against the media during an appearance Sunday on CNN.
+
+""Contrary to the New York Times's nameless sources story, the campaign is moving forward and very strong,"" he said. ""We raised over $132 million in the last two months.""
+
+He noted that Trump had visited key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida repeatedly and was ""starting to get traction in those states.""
+
+However, recent polls have shown Trump's numbers sagging badly in those battleground states, notably hurt by his critical comments about the Muslim parents of a fallen US soldier, and what some saw as his suggestion that ""Second Amendment groups"" -- gun lovers -- take their dislike for Clinton into their own hands.
+
+Manafort repeated the Trump claim that his Second Amendment remark was meant purely as an exhortation to vote.
+
+But even one of Trump's top advisers, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, conceded Sunday that the candidate needed to communicate ""more effectively.""
+
+""He's got to wrestle in his own heart, how does he communicate who he is, what he believes, the change he thinks he can bring to America,"" he said on ABC.
+
+""He does need to communicate -- and I think he can -- more effectively.""
+
+The CNN interviewer also asked Manafort about mounting pressure on Trump to release his tax returns after Clinton released hers on Friday.
+
+The channel broadcast video of Trump urging Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate in 2012, to release his returns at the time, saying, ""If you didn't see the tax returns, you would think there is almost, like, something wrong.""
+
+Manafort repeated Trump's explanation that he is under audit by the Internal Revenue Service.
+
+""When that's completed, he'll release the returns,"" Manafort said, adding that Clinton's returns showed income coming from ""people who benefited from her State Department term as well,"" referring to her time as secretary of State.
+
+""I haven't seen stories on that yet.""
+
+Trump has revoked the press credentials of several media outlets, including Politico, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post. 
+
+ 
+
+ ""I'm no fan of the Washington Post, although they have been much nicer lately, I must say,"" Trump said Saturday. ""Maybe I'll let them back in. they’ve been much better.""
+
+ 
+
+ He also ripped CNN for its coverage of him saying that President Barack Obama was the ""founder"" of the Islamic State — a remark he later said was sarcastic, ""but not that sarcastic.""
+
+ 
+
+ ""CNN is so disgusting,"" Trump said. ""Their ratings are going down big league.
+
+ 
+
+ ""You know why? Because I refuse to be interviewed. And I get high ratings, what can I say?
+
+ 
+
+ ""These people are so dishonest.""
+
+ 
+
+ He later praised an article from The New York Post, which detailed his contributions as a developer to New York City.
+
+Material from AFP was used in this story.",REAL
+7699,GUEST POST: Why I’m Exceptional & Indispensable – by Hillary Clinton - Rob Slane,"Originally appeared at The Blog Mire 
+Following on from her recent piece for Time magazine , in which she so eloquently explained why America is indispensable and exceptional, TheBlogMire brings you an exclusive piece in which Mrs Clinton explains why an indispensable and exceptional nation must have an indispensable and exceptional leader. 
+(Warning: May contain traces of satire) 
+If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of my career in public service, it’s this: I am an exceptional woman. A great, unselfish, compassionate woman, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy. And when you add up all my advantages, it’s clear I’m indispensable too – someone all others can look to for leadership. 
+And what I’m really excited about is not just that I’m indispensable, but that I’m about to become President of the indispensable nation. An indispensable nation needs an indispensable woman. An indispensable woman needs an indispensable nation. It’s a match made in heaven, which is why I am asking you to help me break the glass ceiling on November 8th – so that together we can become even more exceptional than we already are. 
+So what makes me so indispensable? 
+I’m indispensable in part because of my love for our armed forces. Our military is the greatest in history, with the best troops, training and technology, and I believe it is a travesty that we are not using it to its full potential. It’s essential we do everything we can to support our men and women in uniform, and I intend to do just that by sending our brave soldiers on important missions around the globe from day one of my presidency. 
+I’m indispensable because of my commitment to the truth. Throughout my career, I’ve always sought to stay close to the truth. I know that there’s a lot of folks out there who say I’m corrupt. But those who know me closest will tell you that this isn’t the real Hillary. Ask those who know me best. Ask my husband Bill. He’ll tell you. Ask my campaign chairman John Podesta. He’ll tell you. Ask Lloyd Blankfein, CEO at Goldman Sachs. He’ll tell you. Ask some of our closest allies in places like Saudi Arabia. They’ll tell you. They will all tell you about the real Hillary, and that my commitment to honesty and fighting corruption is second to none. It may even be my most exceptional quality. Alongside humility. 
+I’m also indispensable because of my network of alliances and supporters. You only have to look at who they are. Has there ever been a candidate in the entire history of our exceptional nation that has managed to get the backing of the entire media and corporate America? I don’t think so. But it does tell you something, doesn’t it? I humbly submit that it speaks volumes that some of the most important people in our exceptional country are prepared to place their trust in me. 
+I’m indispensable because, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t need to rely on the help of people like Vladimir Putin and countries like Russia to help get me elected. Can you imagine me having to rely on Putin and Russia to get elected? Of course I’ve had to bring Putin and Russia up in this campaign from time to time, not because I want to keep bringing Putin and Russia into it. In fact, the only reason I’ve occasionally mentioned Putin and Russia is not because I want to keep talking about Putin and Russia, but because I have to keep taking about Putin and Russia because Trump is depending on Putin and Russia to get him elected and so I have to draw attention to Putin and Russia. But trust me, if I had my way I wouldn’t bring Putin and Russia up at all. 
+I’m indispensable because of my commitment to helping countries get rid of their dictators, and establishing democracy and peace. Like Libya, for example. We came. We saw. He died. And the Libyans got their liberty. 
+Most of all, I’m ­indispensable — and exceptional — because of my values. 
+Take my commitment to human rights, which I have shown by being one of the most vocal supporters of a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, right up to a few seconds before the thing inside her becomes a human. 
+Take my commitment to raising money, which my husband and I have shown through our tireless work with the Clinton Foundation, and in making hundreds of speeches for various organisations. 
+Take my commitment to making the world a better place, which I’ve shown time and time again by saying things like “love trumps hate”. Which it does, doesn’t it? I’m proud of that expression. 
+But with all of these advantages comes ­responsibility – I need to lead the world. You need me to lead the world. Because if I fail to lead, I will leave a vacuum that lets extremists, Putin and Russia, haters, bigots, the intolerant, Putin and Russia, the severely backwards , the Julian Assange’s of this world,Putin and Russia – Baskets of Deplorables – take root everywhere. 
+Of course, being exceptional doesn’t mean that other people don’t also have something to offer — maybe they do. But I have an unparalleled ability to be a force for peace, progress and prosperity around the world, which I intend to demonstrate on day one of my presidency, by standing up to Putin and Russia and showing Putin and Russia who’s boss. 
+I’ll never stop doing good. Never. That’s what makes me great. I’m good because I’m great, and I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll never stop. 
+That’s why I’m indispensable. 
+Let’s keep me exceptional. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount 
+If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire",FAKE
+4913,"Trump Campaign Bombs in Virginia, Again","Empty bleachers and a hostile student body greeted Trump vice presidential nominee Mike Pence in Virginia on Saturday at one of the most religiously conservative schools in the country.
+
+Trump’s VP nominee railed against Hillary Clinton in Northern Virginia on Saturday afternoon—but he chose to do it at an evangelical Christian college with a history of anti-Trump sentiment. Students protested outside, while inside students stood in silent protest until they were ejected mid-speech.
+
+The protests and poor attendance at the speech at Patrick Henry College illustrate the challenges that Trump has appealing to evangelical Christians, especially younger ones, who are turned off by his tone, his campaign ideas and his personal history—and are not at all assauged by his choice of Pence for his running mate.
+
+“The PHC student body as a whole is very anti-Trump. A lot of them say, ‘I don’t like him but I’m going to turn up my nose and vote for him because I like Hillary even less.’ But overall there is a severe disgust with Trump,” said Sebastian Lopez, a junior studying political theory at the school who was protesting the speech, holding a sign for hours outside in the blazing mid-day sun.
+
+“I don’t think that Mike Pence is a bad person, but I think he has made an alliance with someone who is completely unacceptable from a libertarian, conservative or progressive standpoint,” added Christian McGuire, a junior at Patrick Henry College studying American politics who was also demonstrating against Pence.
+
+Pence’s visit is not the first misstep by the Trump campaign in Virginia. Donald Trump flubbed his speech in Northern Virginia earlier this month when he lectured the affluent locals in the audience as if they were the Rust Belt—“You’re doing lousy over here,” he remarked—and then listed factory closures in far-flung areas of the state that were hours away, as well as a plant that closed in North Carolina.
+
+Patrick Henry College is located in Loudoun County, the affluent swing district an hour from Washington, D.C., that voted for Bush twice, and then Obama twice. It’s as close to a must-win county as it gets.
+
+But locals weren’t interested in hearing what he had to say. When Marco Rubio visited in February during the Republican primaries, students and local residents crammed into the room, filling the bleachers, the gymnasium floor and the balconies above to get a glimpse of the presidential candidate. The road outside the college was jam-packed. Parking was a nightmare.
+
+“There are certainly students who support Trump, though most are not enthusiastic. He was rarely the first choice in such a crowded primary field,” said Tim Kocher, a spokesman for the Patrick Henry College Republicans. “I believe Trump has a solid base of support around 15-20%, but many students simply have not made up their minds as far as the presidential race goes.”
+
+When Pence visited Saturday, the room was half-empty—a whole set of retractable bleachers sat empty and discarded near the stage; no admiring crowds leaned over the balcony to get a better look at the politician; parking was a breeze. This lackluster turnout took place at a school which in fall 2015 registered just 294 students, yet had about as many White House interns during the Bush administration as Georgetown University, with its nearly 18,000 students.
+
+“I’m a B-list Republican celebrity,” Pence said self-deprecatingly, as he thanked attendees for showing up on a beautiful, cloudless Saturday afternoon. It was funny because it was kind of sad, and it was sad because it was kind of true.
+
+Pence also spoke as if he did not quite understand whose ticket he was on. “We believe in free trade,” he said, as if Trump had not run a campaign slamming international trade. The governor also slammed Hillary Clinton’s plan to tax the rich, as if the Republican nominee had not taken aim at Wall Street during his populist run for the White House. Americans are “tired of politicians who divide our country to unite their support,” he said, as if Trump had not run a campaign that regularly disparaged Muslims, foreigners and women.
+
+As if to bolster this point, a group of protesters critical of Trump’s rhetoric on Islam revealed their T-shirts during Pence’s speech, engaging in a silent protest of the Republican ticket as they were slowly escorted out.
+
+Even the students who supported the Trump-Pence ticket seemed to be doing so with an air of resignation, buoyed only by the threat they believe Hillary Clinton poses to the country.",REAL
+6648,Trumpocalypse & 5 Ridiculously Outdated Assumptions Every Statist Makes,"Waking Times 
+“If the matrix gives you Trumpocalypse, then use secret alchemical means to create matrix-shifting Trumpocalyptic lemonade.” ~ Rob Brezsny 
+When people asked Carl Jung, who actually met Hitler, how he manipulated the psyche of the German people, Jung replied, “Hitler didn’t manipulate the psyche of the German people, he was the psyche of the German people.” 
+If, as Mark Twain said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” and you’re still wondering how this racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, climate-science-denying, misogynistic, “grab-them-by-the-pussy” candidate somehow made his way into the presidency, then look no further than a mirror. For far too long you have given into the idea that an authority will save you. You were under the delusion that you needed someone to rule over you. That delusion has led to someone who just so happens to want to rule over you. Are you really that surprised? 
+If you’re not careful your own Stockholm syndrome will have you thinking the state is moral and just and wants to empower you to be free. It doesn’t. It’s the complete opposite, in fact. It wants you to remain blindly subservient to its outdated laws and its chain of obedience which leads right up the immoral-laden ladder to the president who holds the violent monopoly on power. 
+This isn’t about who won the presidency. This is not about bipartisan fuckery. This is about the illegitimacy of any presidency, ever . This is about the illegitimacy of authority and the immoral nature of entrenched power. The state is unhealthy, unsustainable, immoral, and violent, and who ever rules over it is thereby illegitimate; whether it’s the orange-headed, spoon-fed baby of a man, FrankenTrump, vomiting hate and racism through narcissistic, ignorant, misogynistic, and bigoted bully tactics, or the status quo queen, Killary Clinton, spewing Military Industrial Complex rhetoric from her plutocratic pulpit backed by greedy corporations from Wall Street calling themselves “persons” backed by even greedier corrupt banksters with their vampire-tentacles in every country’s pie. As Larken Rose said, “The only “us versus them” that matters is not about race, religion, nationality, or income level; it is about aggressors and their victims.” 1.) They Sheepishly Assume They Need Someone to Rule Over Them 
+“A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.” ~ Lysander Spooner 
+It’s not your fault, really. You were born and raised in a culture that conditioned and brainwashed you into believing that you must answer to someone. From your authoritarian upbringing to your indoctrinated school years, you were propagandized and persuaded into thinking people are inherently bad so they must be led by people who are… somehow not bad? Huh?! 
+Here’s the thing: people are, for the most part, a product of their environment. We’ve all been programmed to be kowtowing statists by an extremely unhealthy, unsustainable, immoral, and violent state. To break the cycle, we must break our addiction to being ruled over by such a state. We must reprogram our programming. Unlearn what we have learned. Recondition the precondition. It’s time to rise up and become an author of self (self-authority). 
+This is your life; not your parent’s life, not your peer’s life, not your state’s life. As Eliezer Yudkowsky said, “You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.” It begins by admitting that you need neither masters no rulers, neither president nor queen, to rule over you. It begins by empowering yourself and taking responsibility for your own power. 2.) They Falsely Assume Leadership Means Rulership 
+“I find it extremely liberating to see that I was the cause of all my problems. With this realization, I have also learned I am my own solution. This is the great big gift of personal accountability. When we stop blaming external forces and own up to our responsibility we become the ultimate creators of our destiny.” ~Jenna Galbut 
+Contrary to popular statist dogma, it is possible to have rules (cosmic law; Golden Rule; non-aggression principle) without the need for rulers and masters. Through bottom-up leadership as opposed to top-down leadership. It begins by not being an ignorant statist who gives his/her power to a tyrannical state. It begins by speaking your own truth to power, and then becoming a leader of your own. It begins by being proactive with the power you’ve wrestled back from the state and then leading by example. It begins by realizing that nobody –no president, no king, not even God– can give you permission to be free. In fact, every single president from Washington to Trump only had power because people believed it. Without that petty belief, they were nothing more than charismatic, fallible men. 
+You, and you alone, must become a freedom unto yourself. And that may require a little revolt. Especially if you discover that you’re not so well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. As Niels Bohr said, “Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.” 3.) They Ignorantly Assume Voting and Taxation are Moral and Just 
+“If taxation without consent is robbery, the United States government has never had, has not now, and is never likely to have, a single honest dollar in its treasury. If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.” ~Lysander Spooner 
+Taxation without consent is immoral. There is no way to wriggle out of this profound truth. It’s especially immoral in a state where violence is threatened if you do not consent. Most naïve statists assume they must pay taxes in order to live freely. When, really, it’s the exact opposite of that. You’re only free if you’re able to choose to pay taxes or not without the threat of violence or imprisonment hanging over your head. Otherwise it’s just soft slavery. Deep down, we’re all anarchists. We know, inherently and instinctively, that all transactions should be voluntary. We’ve just been programmed to make an exception for the state. 
+Voting is indirectly violent, as the result directly forces majority rule on the minority who did not consent. Voting is a profound futility, an egregious gamble. As Robert Rorschach said, “If the outcome of a vote is unknown, then voting is tantamount to gambling. If the outcome of a vote is known, then voting is futile.” Most naïve statists have been conditioned to believe that voting is the only way to change things, that one must do it from the inside. Nothing could be further from the truth. Real change only occurs outside the doing-things-over-and-over-again-and-expecting-different-results ballot box. No matter what, you’re only ever going to get a puppet popping out. Trump just happens to be the latest jack-in-the-box, albeit orange, ugly, and dumb. 4.) They Blindly Assume Their Nation State is the Greatest Nation State 
+“Don’t believe yourself, and don’t believe anyone else. If you don’t believe, what is not true will dissolve in front of your eyes. Only what is true will remain, because what is true doesn’t need anyone to believe it” ~ Don Miguel Ruiz 
+Men never act so contentedly (and conveniently) evil as when they do so from a patriotic conviction. With hyper-nationalized perspectives whipping their brains into xenophobic scrambled eggs, and border-worshipping divisiveness cutting them off from any authentic engagement with the rest of the world, statists are the new dogmatists. They are brainwashed extremists, worshiping law and order, power and violence, and grossly outdated notions of how to be a flourishing human in an ever-changing world. They assume waiving a flag is an honorable thing. When flags are nothing more than propagandized “bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead ( Arundhati Roy) .” 
+“Flags don’t unite us” as Belfast surmised; “they only reinforce our false sense of entitlement to lands we were born into by sheer chance.” And yet the inured statist myopically moos, ignorantly sneering at other nations from a platform of convictions gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from “authorities” who have had their own convictions spoon-fed to them by parochial forefathers who themselves didn’t have the courage to question the legitimacy of authority. As Mark Twain cryptically stated, “To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.” Indeed. Avoid the tautology (and the Trumpocalypse). Progressively evolve. Liberate yourself from the outdated ill-reasoning that you ever needed a chain of obedience, let alone a president. 5.) They Tragically Assume Violence is the Answer 
+“Like all great ideas, anarchism is pretty simple when you get down to it –human beings are at their best when they are living free of authority, deciding things among themselves rather than being ordered about.” ~Clifford Harper 
+This is by far the worst of the five outdated assumptions. The fact that people still think that peace comes from waging war is mind-boggling to those of us who have freed ourselves from the state and discovered empathy and compassion from our interdependence with each other as free human beings in solidarity with leaving a healthy world for our children. 
+It’s simple, really. To become a better human all you need is a simplified perspective: Your birth place –Earth, your race –Human, your politics –Freedom, your spirituality –Love. It’s so easy it’s stupid. All it requires is a shedding of your statist skin, and a transformation into a free human being who seeks to free others from the sickness of statism. 
+The only way all of us win is through horizontal democracy that’s void of centralized government. In other words: no masters, no rulers. In short: democratic anarchy. The Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples did it through the Iroquois Confederacy, living in authentic democracy for hundreds of years before the tyranny of the state ruined everything. So it’s not some far-fetched utopian dream. If they did it, so can we. Democratic anarchy, combined with the non-violent non-aggression principle , has the potential to usher in an age of peace, and a progressively sustainable evolution for our species. Read more articles by Gary ‘Z’ McGee . About the Author 
+Gary ‘Z’ McGee , a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man . His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world. Like Waking Times on Facebook . Follow Waking Times on Twitter . This article ( Trumpocalypse & 5 Ridiculously Outdated Assumptions Every Statist Makes ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary ‘Z’ McGee and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright. 
+~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
+654,This Is What Making History Looks Like,"But the numbers were a boring datapoint in an otherwise historical, emotional night . Well before the first state was called, the Clinton campaign changed her Twitter profile picture to read “ History made ” and released a video that spotlighted the barrier she had broken. Her crowd was packed with cheering women and fathers who had brought their daughters to witness the celebratory event in Brooklyn .
+
+Hillary Clinton officially became the presumptive Democratic nominee on Monday night. But it was sealed with pomp and circumstance on Tuesday. Victories in New Jersey and New Mexico, and early results from California , gave her enough pledged delegates to claim a majority. That, combined with her substantial lead among superdelegates, gave her enough to informally claim the nomination.
+
+Forty-four presidents have been elected in the United States over the past 228 years. Not once have voters had the option to choose a female candidate in a major party. Until this cycle.
+
+To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want—even president. Tonight is for you. -H pic.twitter.com/jq7fKlfwGV
+
+""It may be hard to see tonight, but we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now. But don’t worry, we’re not smashing this one. Thanks to you, we’ve reached a milestone,"" Clinton said. ""It’s the first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major party’s nominee.""
+
+She noted that her mother was born on the day that Congress passed the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. She remarked that the first convention dedicated to women’s rights happened in the state where she stood that evening: New York, at Seneca Falls in 1848 -- “when a small but determined group of women and men came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights.""
+
+“We all owe so much to those who came before, and tonight belongs to all of you,"" Clinton said.
+
+Gender wasn't an undertone; it was the backbone of the evening, and it gave the strongest indication to date that Clinton won't be shying away from the topic as she pivots to the general election.
+
+The question is, how will it work?
+
+In an interview last week, Clinton's top adviser, Joel Benenson, argued that trepidation over having the first major female candidate on the ticket -- to the extent it exists -- was unwarranted.
+
+""There were a whole lot of people who said, 'Oh there is no way the country is ready for an African-American president.' Not only was it ready for him. He is one of only six or seven presidents to be elected and re-elected with 50 percent of the vote or more and with two electoral colleges landslides,"" he said.
+
+Other top strategists predicted on Tuesday that Clinton's gender, on the whole, would be a net plus -- invigorating voters in ways that they, and political observers, couldn't adequately anticipate. Anita Dunn, a longtime Democratic operative, recalled the cover of the Chicago Tribune the night that Barack Obama clinched the nomination eight years ago: “Obama Makes History."" Anticipating the history you're about to make doesn't prepare you for the moment you actually make it, she noted.
+
+""There is a difference between thinking hypothetically about the first woman President and Hillary Clinton actually becoming the first female nominee of a major party, and I think for many women they will find themselves unexpectedly emotional about this,"" Dunn said via email. ""There is also the reality that Donald Trump was sent by central casting to be the male foil in this not-buddy movie!""
+
+Clinton, as Dunn sees it, couldn't ask for a better opponent than the one she's getting: a braggadocios businessman with a lengthy history of misogynistic comments. And it helps that Donald Trump has had an objectively abysmal start to his general election, rattled and criticized over a series of racist remarks he's made about an American judge of Mexican heritage who is overseeing a case involving his for-profit university.
+
+Indeed, Trump's stumbles have been profound enough to spark a reassessment of strategy among Democrats. As the general election gets underway, some now see deftness in Clinton getting out of her opponent's way. ""If the past couple of weeks are any indication, Donald Trump is his own worst nightmare, and they should not get in the way of him screwing himself up. Let Trump do Trump,"" said Mo Elleithee, the Democratic National Committee’s former communications director who served as a senior spokesman for Clinton during her 2008 campaign.
+
+Elleithee wasn't calling for Clinton to ignore her opponent entirely, just to make the affirmative case against his candidacy and let the other wounds be self-inflicted. Other top Democrats said they'd continue to prod Trump in order to disqualify him further with voters. ""Trump has proven himself very thin-skinned, so poking him and focusing on his intemperance and intolerance can draw new eruptions and produce unexpected rewards,"" said David Axelrod, Obama's longtime advisor.
+
+On Tuesday night, Clinton seemed to side with Axelrod's theory of the case, pivoting quickly to her opponent and echoing the themes of her withering speech last week, when she painted Trump as equal parts unstable and unqualified.
+
+""Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president and commander in chief. And he is not just trying to build a wall between America and Mexico, he is trying to wall off Americans from each other,"" she said at one point. ""When he says, ‘Let’s make America great again,' that is code for, ‘Let’s take America backwards.’”",REAL
+9116,"TRUTH: No Apartheid in Israel, Says Black South African Politician","TRUTH: No Apartheid in Israel, Says Black South African Politician Oct 28, 2016 Previous post Any black South African who claims there is apartheid in Israel is either uninformed or blatantly dishonest, says a member of parliament in Pretoria. 
+According to Kenneth Meshoe, chairman of the African Christian Democratic Party faction, any attempt to compare Palestinians’ experience in Israel with the former racist regime is offensive to individuals who suffered under the system of racial separation. 
+Whatever challenges the Arab minority in Israel faces, the reality of life here cannot be compared to his experiences growing up, he insists. 
+“There is freedom of movement in this country that we never had in South Africa,” Meshoe told Tazpit Press Service (TPS) during a visit to Jerusalem last week. “Benches and bathrooms said ‘whites only.’ We could never take ‘white’ transportation. Most white doctors would not treat black patients, only white ones. And those who were willing to treat black patients out of compassion – many of them would ask the patients to enter their clinics through the back door so they wouldn’t be seen by the white patients in the lobby. I don’t know if it was illegal for white doctors to treat black patients, but the reality was that very few did.” ‘Perpetuating Propaganda’ 
+According to Meshoe, “Some South Africans who say there’s apartheid in Israel are only repeating things they’ve heard from other people, not because they’ve actually seen it themselves. They are just perpetuating propaganda. 
+“Other people – politicians – are only thinking about their needs, and the statements that will serve their needs. They ask ‘what do I gain [by claiming there is or is not apartheid in Israel] and then make a decision. So they are perpetuating something that that they know very well is a lie.” 
+Meshoe said he first visited Israel several years after Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994. He joined a church delegation to the Holy Land and used the opportunity both for a religious pilgrimage and a political education, but the latter came as a surprise. 
+“On that trip, I deliberately looked for anything that looked like apartheid. I took a bus to the center of Jerusalem, but blacks, Jews, Arabs and 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+3218,The full Ackbar: Right warns Obama war plan is a trap,"Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up .
+
+ Buzz Cut:
+
+ • The Full Ackbar: Right warns Obama war plan is a trap
+
+ • More votes set on amnesty plan
+
+ • GOP confidence grows while Dems get jitters
+
+ • Biden: ‘Run on what we have done’
+
+ • When you care enough to steal $10,000 worth of underpants
+
+THE FULL ACKBAR: RIGHT WARNS OBAMA WAR PLAN IS A TRAP
+
+ In a blistering column, influential conservative columnist Matthew Continetti calls President Obama’s request for congressional authorization for the ongoing war in Iraq and Syria a “trap” and says he would “happily” vote it down. “If the threat of ISIS is as dire as the president says it is in the preamble of his resolution,” Continetti writes, “then not only does the president already have the authority to strike granted to him by Article II of the Constitution and the 2001 and 2002 war resolutions, he also should not cavil or hesitate in unleashing every means at his disposal to confront and defeat the enemy.” Continetti goes on to say, “I also cannot help thinking that the presidential request is little more than a trap, a bone thrown in the direction of the cloakroom to distract from the collapse of America’s position in the Middle East and the approaching deadline for nuclear talks with Iran. How better to provoke infighting among both Republicans and Democrats, to switch the debate from sanctions against Iran to ‘Rand Paul versus Marco Rubio for the soul of the GOP,’ than to start a debate over presidential war powers as the war is going on.”
+
+ISIS grabs ground - Fox News: “Islamic State fighters reportedly seized most of a western Iraqi town on Thursday, in fighting taking place mere miles from an air base where hundreds of U.S. Marines are training Iraqis. Reuters, quoting local officials, reported Thursday that ISIS militants had overrun much of the town of al-Baghdadi. One local Iraqi official told Reuters that, ""Ninety percent of al-Baghdadi district has fallen under the control of the insurgents.""
+
+Not even a little ‘hasty’? - “Well first it wasn't hasty. Just because I didn't know what the plans were, didn't mean the plans weren't in place for weeks. We have been planning for weeks a range of contingency options…We always have a range of options we can take when we're talking about a high threat post."".”– State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki on “The Kelly File” discussing the weapons and equipment abandoned in Yemen by U.S. forces.  Watch here.
+
+A question of selfie control - Buzzfeed released a video Thursday showing the commander in chief using a selfie stick and smiling at himself in the mirror to help promote ObamaCare. It delighted many in the media. The Washington Post called it, “cute” and “catchy,” while People Magazine gets in on the action suggesting, “judging by the president's expert selfie stick form, it seems like his meeting with Kim Kardashian last year really paid off.” Not mentioned in the stories: the video was reportedly shot on the same day the world learned ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller was dead.
+
+“Evil is real. There is no light grey. Murdering innocent people to move a political point of view has been, is and always will be evil.” – Former President George W. Bush in a lecture at University of Mary Hardin-Baylor on Wednesday.
+
+ELIE WIESEL WILL ATTEND NETANYAHU SPEECH
+
+ “[W]riter, political activist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, will attend Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu’s] congressional speech regarding Iran on March 3,” reports the Observer. “A full-page advertisement declaring Mr. Wiesel’s intention to attend the controversial speech will appear in The New York Times on February 14th to be followed by The Washington Post.”
+
+[WSJ: “Senate Republicans on Thursday moved to officially welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S. ahead of his planned speech to Congress next month, the latest development in a saga that has roiled politics in both countries.”]
+
+MORE VOTES TO COME ON AMNESTY PLAN
+
+ The Hill: “The Senate is going to vote again on a procedural motion to consider a bill reversing President Obama’s executive actions on immigration and fund the Department of Homeland Security. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell [R-Ky.] filed a motion to hold additional votes to end a Democratic filibuster of the bill, setting up as many as three more attempts. The votes are expected to take place the last week of February, as Congress will be out of town next week for a recess…Funding will lapse after Feb. 27.”
+
+Cost, logistics of Obama immigration plan raise concerns - Fox News: “Though forecasting turn-out of applicants is largely a guessing game, DHS predicts as many as 1.3 million people may apply in the first six months alone…There's also the cost of the plan, officially known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, estimated at $324 million to $484 million over the next few years, according to DHS documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.”
+
+Power Play: Fight over funding - Democratic strategist Penny Lee and former Republican Senate staffer John Hart join Power Play host Chris Stirewalt to discuss the $40 billion Homeland Security bill that would stop the president’s executive action on immigration. Are Republicans picking the right bill for a fight? And can Congress come to an agreement? Watch here.
+
+DeMint seeks peace with old rival McConnell - Politico: “Jim DeMint paid a personal visit Thursday to an old rival: Mitch McConnell. DeMint, a former South Carolina senator and now president of The Heritage Foundation, met one-on-one with McConnell in the GOP leader’s Capitol suite as DeMint pitched Heritage’s ‘opportunity’ agenda. Things appeared to go over more smoothly with McConnell than they did last month with the House, where DeMint was confronted over his sister organization’s strict ratings of lawmakers’ conservatism…”
+
+WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE...
+
+ Relatively little is known about the history of the peoples of the British Isles prior to the arrival of Roman legions in the 1st Century, A.D. But one durable belief is that the more placid peoples of the south who would live under Roman rule were a breed apart from the wild, savage tribes to the north, known to the Romans as Picts. But a new book from Benjamin Hudson, a professor of history and medieval studies at Penn State, is turning that discussion around. While Roman history focuses on the Picts as uncivilized enemies as the Romans began to try to expand the empire’s boundaries into northern England, Hudson’s book argues that “they weren't different, they were merely Britons that the Romans didn't conquer.” While Hudson’s research shows a glimpse of life and culture without the Roman influence, it also makes the case that the bias of Roman historians created a false delineation between residents of the south and residents of the north prior to their arrival.
+
+Got a TIP from the RIGHT or LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+GOP CONFIDENCE GROWS WHILE DEMS GET JITTERS
+
+ Fox News polling guru Dana Blanton writes: “…by a 10-point margin, more Republicans are looking forward to the 2016 campaign than dreading it. That’s the opposite of how they felt about the start of the 2012 campaign in 2011. At that time, they were more likely to say they were dreading the race by 10 points. The poll finds the same reversal of sentiment among Democrats. They were looking forward to the 2012 campaign by 8 points, while now they say they are dreading the start of the 2016 campaign by 5 points. Republicans might be looking forward to 2016 because they are more confident about their party’s chances. Fully 78 percent of Republicans think the GOP candidate is going to win the next presidential election, while just 63 percent of Democrats feel that way about their party’s candidate. The results are almost the same when the hypothetical race is between a generic Republican and Democrat Hillary Clinton: 76 percent of Republicans say their candidate will win, while 67 percent of Democrats think Clinton will prevail.”
+
+Walker and Carson at the head of the class - In the latest Fox News poll, voters got to rank the 2016 contenders with letter grades. Among Republican voters, Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis., gets the highest marks of the bunch with a B, followed by Dr. Ben Carson and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who both earned B-, all remaining contenders earn C+ or below. Among all voters, Dr. Ben Carson, Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis., and Hillary Clinton all earn C+, which is still better than President Obama who earns a C.]
+
+“Listen I’m a big Scott Walker supporter, and he hasn’t announced anything, but you know I’ll be supporting Scott Walker.” -- Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., to CQ Roll Call
+
+Rand looks to move up Kentucky presidential pick - Lexington Herald-Leader: “Requesting help to avoid a ‘costly and time-consuming legal challenge,’ U.S. Sen. Rand Paul is asking members of the Republican Party of Kentucky to create a presidential caucus in 2016 that would happen well ahead of the May primary election. In a letter dated Feb. 9, Paul told GOP leaders that an earlier presidential preference vote would give Kentuckians ‘more leverage to be relevant’ in the wide-open competition for the Republican presidential nomination…The letter went out to hundreds of Kentucky Republicans ahead of the party's 54-member executive committee meeting March 7 in Bowling Green, where Paul will pitch the caucus idea to members for a vote…‘If I choose to also seek the presidency, I will do so to serve the people of Kentucky and the ideas that I ran on and have worked for,’ he wrote. ‘I believe I can keep helping the people of Kentucky as senator, but I think there is no doubt I could help them even more as president.’”
+
+[Paul will be spending the weekend in Florida giving speeches at the Orange County Lincoln Day Dinner today and the Republican Party of Sarasota rally Saturday.]
+
+Club for Growth to host Florida cattle call - WaPo: “Six potential 2016 candidates have accepted invitations to speak at the private gathering Feb. 26-28 at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, according to a knowledgeable official who shared the information with The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity. They are Former Florida governor Jeb Bush; Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas; Indiana Gov. Mike Pence; and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.”
+
+Rubio nabs Perry’s top money man - US News: “When former Texas Gov. Rick Perry released a list of 80 donors last week who would serve on the advisory board of his political action committee, there was one glaring omission: The Republican moneyman who helped steer his finance effort in his last run for president. George Seay, the Dallas-based investor and well-connected grandson of former Texas Gov. William Clements, felt he had a duty to support Perry’s late entry into the 2012 White House campaign and without hesitation signed on as his Texas finance chairman. Not this round. Seay has already pledged to help Florida Sen. Marco Rubio if the freshman GOP lawmaker decides to turn the ignition on a 2016 presidential bid, a prospect that looks increasingly likely.”
+
+[Rubio kicks off his national book tour today with an appearance in West Des Moines Iowa. Other stops include South Carolina, Nevada and New Hampshire.]
+
+Perry wraps up New Hampshire trip - Dallas Morning News: “Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Thursday that voters have had enough of a ‘young, attractive’ and inexperienced president and will be looking for a proven leader in 2016. Perry, who is considering a second run for president, wrapped up a two-day trip to New Hampshire with a speech at the Strafford County Republican Committee’s Lincoln Day Dinner.
+
+Kasich calling out GOP’s old guard - Cleveland Plain Dealer : “Gov. John Kasich's presidential deliberations are accelerating, as evidenced not only by an upcoming trip to South Carolina announced this week but also by the prominent Republican advisers entering his political orbit. Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, met recently with Team Kasich, according to GOP sources in Columbus plugged into Kasich's network. One Republican said a separate dinner meeting included former U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, the first primary state. Richard Allen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who served as national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan, also attended the dinner….”
+
+[Gillespie remaining neutral - In a Facebook post, former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie offered a clarification: “Just saw a news report about John Kasich seeking my thoughts on the presidency. I was happy to share some with him (we've known one another more than two decades!), as i've done with others, but I'm going to remain neutral in the nominating process. The article didn't really make that clear.”]
+
+[Watch Fox: Rick Santorum sits down for the latest 2016 contender interview on “Special Report with Bret Baier” tonight at 6 p.m. ET.]
+
+Shalom, y’all - Former Gov. Mike Huckabee departs this weekend for a trip to Israel.
+
+Carson grabs leader of Gingrich’s winning S.C. team - Dr. Ben Carson has named Ruth Sherlock, a former Newt Gingrich operative, as his South Carolina state director.
+
+POWER PLAY: TROUBLE AT CAMP HILLARY
+
+ Keeping tabs on Team Hillary, news of a disagreement within the campaign provide fodder for strategists. Democratic strategist Penny Lee and former Republican Senate staffer John Hart join Power Play host Chris Stirewalt to discuss the struggle among Clinton’s courtiers. WATCH HERE.
+
+[In the latest Fox News poll, among Democratic voters Hillary gets a B+ and Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren tie at B-.]
+
+BIDEN: ‘RUN ON WHAT WE HAVE DONE’
+
+ The Hill: “The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee should embrace the notion of a third term of the Obama presidency, Vice President [Joe Biden] said Thursday, during a speech at Drake University in Iowa. ‘I call it sticking with what works,’ Biden declared. The address was billed as a chance for Biden to explain some of the ideas introduced in President Obama's recent State of the Union address, but the vice president repeatedly returned to a discussion of how he saw the contours of the presidential race…The vice president said the election would be ‘all about’ either continuing the Obama economic policies or shifting to Republicans' ‘top-down’ vision. ‘Run on what we have done. Own what we have done. Stand for what we have done. Acknowledge what we have done,’ Biden said.”
+
+[Would you like to watch the video again of when Biden used the archaic term for an inseparable friend, “butt buddy,” to refer to a former congressman? Of course you would.]
+
+Come out come out, wherever you are - Des Moines Register: “National GOP operatives [posted] a mobile billboard at the vice president's events Thursday that tries to push the idea that Hillary Clinton's absence from the 2016 presidential campaign trail means she's ‘hiding from voters.’ ‘As her poll numbers show, when Hillary is campaigning, she's much less popular. What's the only way not to seem like she's campaigning? Go into hiding,’ Republican National Committee communications director Sean Spicer wrote in a news release Tuesday.”
+
+[#HillaryCandyHearts - The inveterate Hillary hazers of America Rising is getting into the holiday spirit with not-so-sweet virtual conversation hearts about Hillary on Twitter.]
+
+‘90s Nostalgia - In a NYT op-ed with former Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Clinton calls for the Children’s Health Insurance Program to be extended.
+
+#MEDIABUZZ: MEDIA MAYHAM
+
+ This week Howard Kurtz welcomes former CNN anchor Piers Morgan and former ABC News President David Westin to discuss Jon Stewart stepping down, Brian Williams being suspended, the death of Bob Simon, and President Obama saying the media overhype the threat of terrorism. Watch “#mediabuzz” Sunday at 11 a.m. ET, with a second airing at 5 p.m.
+
+ 
+
+ WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO STEAL $10,000 WORTH OF UNDERPANTS
+
+ Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Atlanta police are searching for a shoplifter who appears to have Valentine’s Day sales in mind. A woman pilfered 785 pairs of panties at the Victoria’s Secret at Lenox Square Mall on Saturday, Officer Ralph Woolfolk said Thursday. The suspected thief put the panties in three shopping bags in a raid on the store lasting two hours and absconded, Woolfolk said. Retail for the panties was estimated at more than $10,000.”
+
+AND NOW, A WORD FROM CHARLES…
+
+ “The government doesn't make money, it takes it, and it takes it from enterprises that are successful. [President Obama] simply will not recognize, although I'm sure he's been told since he's never been in the private sector, that when you write a law with specific details, people are going to work within those details to try to minimize expenses. It's rather elementary, but he still doesn't get it.” —Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier” Watch here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News.  Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+3673,Attacks on abortion providers have increased since the Planned Parenthood videos,"A white male gunman killed three people, including one police officer, and injured nine others Friday at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs. The gunman has been identified as Robert Lewis Dear. It's still not clear what the shooter's motive was, but it's clear that he started his shooting spree at Planned Parenthood and stayed there.
+
+It's also clear that threats, vandalism, and violence against abortion providers and clinics have escalated since this summer, when anti-abortion activists released deceptively edited videos that accused Planned Parenthood of ""selling baby parts.""
+
+Back in September, CBS reported that the FBI had noticed an uptick in attacks on reproductive health care facilities since the first video was released by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress (CMP). There were nine criminal or suspicious incidents (including cyber attacks, threats, and arsons) from July, when the videos first came out, through mid-September.
+
+An FBI Intelligence Assessment at the time found these attacks were ""consistent with the actions of lone offenders using tactics of arsons and threats all of which are typical of the pro-life extremist movement."" Moreover, the report said it was ""likely criminal or suspicious incidents will continue to be directed against reproductive health care providers, their staff and facilities.""
+
+Less than two weeks after CBS reported that, another abortion clinic was firebombed in California. It was the fourth arson at a Planned Parenthood location in as many months.
+
+""The toxic rhetoric directed at Planned Parenthood has dangerous consequences,"" said Sen. Dianne Feinstein in a press release at the time. ""It sends a signal that using violence to close clinics and intimidate healthcare professionals and women is 'OK.' It is not.""
+
+Since 1977, according to NAF, there have been eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 42 bombings, and 186 arsons against abortion clinics and providers.
+
+Abortion providers have seen ""an unprecedented increase in hate speech and threats"" since the CMP videos came out, Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, said in a statement Friday. Incidents of harassment at Planned Parenthood facilities increased ninefold in July, when the videos came out, over June, according to a motion for preliminary injunction that NAF filed this month against CMP and its founder David Daleiden.
+
+""We have been quite worried that this increase in threats would lead to a violent attack like we saw today,"" Saporta said.
+
+In an October feature at Broadly, Callie Beusman interviewed Saporta and representatives from other reproductive health groups. They all blamed the videos for an increase in violent rhetoric and action.
+
+Sasha Bruce, senior vice president of campaigns and strategy at NARAL, told Beusman that while hateful and intimidating rhetoric against abortion providers is nothing new, the ""intensity and the level"" is notable of late. ""It is not common that you hear about three arsons in a row; it is not common that you hear about this level of vandalism,"" Bruce said.
+
+Notably, the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood health center where the shooting happened is operated by Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains — one of the targets of CMP's videos. One of the doctors featured in those videos was harassed by anti-abortion activists at her home, according to NAF's motion against CMP:
+
+Major pro-life groups have condemned the shooting, including National Right to Life Committee, Americans United for Life, Operation Rescue, and Christian Defense Coalition. David Daleiden of CMP, the architect of the anti-Planned Parenthood videos, also condemned the shootings.
+
+To some pro-choice advocates, it's ironic to hear these condemnations from Daleiden and from Operation Rescue in particular. Operation Rescue's senior vice president, Cheryl Sullenger, was once jailed for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic. The group has a history of extremist rhetoric against abortion providers; for years the group protested Dr. George Tiller, who was shot and killed in 2009, and called him ""Tiller the Killer."" The man who murdered Tiller, Scott Roeder, was active on Operation Rescue message boards. And Operation Rescue president Troy Newman, who was recently detained and denied entry into Australia for his extremist writings, is on the board of Daleiden's Center for Medical Progress.
+
+Shootings at abortion clinics are rare, but attacks on clinics like vandalism and arson are common. Incidents of harassment that don't rise to the level of criminal activity are so common as to be routine, according to volunteers who escort women's health patients past anti-abortion clinic protesters. And, they argue, these minor incidents can escalate — after all, Scott Roeder vandalized an abortion clinic shortly before he killed George Tiller.
+
+""Although anti-abortion groups may condemn this type of violence when it happens, the way that they target and demonize providers contributes to a culture where some feel it is justifiable to murder doctors simply because they provide women with the abortion care they need,"" said Saporta of NAF in her Friday statement.
+
+Vicki Cowart, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, cautioned on Friday that we still don't know the motive for the shooting. But she also said that PPRM shares ""the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country.""",REAL
+9473,Hillary Clinton Responds To New FBI Investigation,"Speaking at a brief news conference in Des Moines, Iowa, after news broke of the FBI looking into Anthony Weiner’s emails, Hillary Clinton insisted that the FB  ",FAKE
+5991,"AMAZING VIDEO : Hispanics for Trump in Miami Storm the Polls, HORNS BLASTING, Shouting “USA! TRUMP!” – TruthFeed","AMAZING VIDEO : Hispanics for Trump in Miami Storm the Polls, HORNS BLASTING, Shouting “USA! TRUMP!” AMAZING VIDEO : Hispanics for Trump in Miami Storm the Polls, HORNS BLASTING, Shouting “USA! TRUMP!” Videos By Amy Moreno November 2, 2016 
+Don’t listen to the LYING North Korea style media, who say minorities do not support Trump. 
+The truth is, Donald Trump has AMAZING minority support. 
+And his Hispanic support in Florida is outstanding! 
+At one Miami precinct, voters began a parade-like storm, shouting “USA” and “Make America Great Again” as they arrived at the polls to vote for America First! 
+Watch the video: @realDonaldTrump latinos storming precinct 10 sw Miami to vote for our one and only president Trump!! pic.twitter.com/liu4LDey4z 
+— El Galope Finca (@ElGalopeFinca) October 31, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+2932,Battle against Islamic State expands as Egypt bombs Libyan affiliate,"Egypt's airstrikes came in response to the mass beheadings of 21 Egyptian Christians by IS militants in Libya. The Libyan government has called for the US-led coalition in Syria and Iraq to turn its attentions to Libya.
+
+Did Pluto's icy heart sink into that depression all by itself?
+
+A man is comforted by others as he mourns over Egyptian Coptic Christians who were captured in Libya and killed by militants affiliated with the Islamic State group, in the village of el-Aour, near Minya, 220 kilometers (135 miles) south of Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Feb. 16, 2015. Egyptian warplanes struck Islamic State targets in Libya on Monday in swift retribution for the extremists' beheading of a group of Egyptian Christian hostages on a beach, shown in a grisly online video released hours earlier.
+
+Egypt claims to have launched airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Libya, in retaliation for the gruesome execution of 21 Egyptian Christians shown in a video released Sunday. The mass murder threatens to open a new front in the greater battle against the self-declared Islamic State, potentially drawing Western powers once more into military intervention in Libya.
+
+Egyptian state television declared that government warplanes struck targets in the eastern Libyan city of Darna, a militant stronghold on the coast about 150 miles from the Egyptian border. The BBC reports that the strikes, made in coordination with the military of the recognized Libyan government based in Tobruk, targeted ""camps, training sites and weapons storage areas"" of the IS affiliate in Libya. According to a Libyan air-force commander, 40 to 50 militants were killed in the strike, Reuters reports.
+
+The Associated Press reports that a second airstrike is underway.
+
+The strikes were made in response to an IS video released Sunday showing the execution of 21 Egyptians, all Coptic Christians, at the hands of masked IS supporters. The Christian Science Monitor's Dan Murphy writes that the video, shot in IS signature style, shows that the group's Libyan branch has ""the numbers, the wherewithal, and the operational security to hold 21 captives for weeks and then carry out a highly-produced murder show in a beach without fear of intervention from Egypt or anyone else.""
+
+But Mr. Murphy also notes that Egypt's ability to respond is limited.
+
+[Egypt's] military is mostly trained for domestic control and running the expansive business empires of its senior officers. What Egypt will actually be able to do about the group in Libya - rather than its hundreds of followers in the Egyptian Sinai peninsula - remains to be seen. However, the days of ignoring IS in Libya will be over. Unlike in Iraq, where there's a central government to work with, or in Syria, where there's both a strong national army and outside support for Bashar al-Assad's side of the fight against Syria, Libya barely has any functioning institutions anymore. The country could prove richer pickings for the group long term - than its two current struggles to the east.
+
+Already the recognized Libyan government in Tobruk has called for the US-led coalition attacking IS forces in Syria and Iraq to turn its attentions to Libya. Libyan Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni, speaking to Reuters, asked for Western military intervention against IS and Al Qaeda members he says are present in his country.
+
+Reuters notes that the Islamist rival government in Tripoli, a group called Libyan Dawn, says it has no affiliation with either IS or Al Qaeda. The New York Times adds that at least three groups among the multitude fighting in Libya's civil war have declared loyalty to IS, ""one in each of the country’s component regions: Barqa in the east, Fezzan in the desert south, and Tripolitania in the west, around the capital.""
+
+In a commentary published in the Daily Telegraph, Shashank Joshi warns that ""it’s important to separate [the IS] role in Libya from the broader civil war there. Not every Libyan opposition faction is jihadist, and acting as if it were, by taking firm sides, is a recipe for disaster.""",REAL
+1831,Fiorina rejects idea of 'affirmative action' in CNN debate change,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+4408,Israel votes: Netanyahu's last-ditch vow to his base – a dead peace process (+video),"Politicians make many campaign promises they don't intend to deliver on. But Netanyahu's promise Monday to never agree to a Palestinian state fits his record.
+
+Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks as he visits a construction site in Har Homa, east Jerusalem, Monday March 16, 2015, a day ahead of legislative elections. Netanyahu is seeking his fourth term as prime minister.
+
+With Israel's final pre-election polls pointing to a difficult road for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stay in power, he spent his final days on the campaign trail throwing red meat to his base.
+
+Pro-Likud robocalls warned Israeli voters that only Mr. Netanyahu has the strength to stand up to ""Hussein Obama."" Campaign ads compared Israeli dock workers and regulators to Hamas militants and called his opponents tools of shadowy foreign financiers (a strange charge given his own close ties to US casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson).
+
+But on Monday the prime minister delivered his show stopper: Vote for me and I'll kill what's left of the peace process stone dead.
+
+Though not his precise words, that was their meaning. And this is one campaign promise that voters could probably take to the bank. If that promise helps tip the electoral balance in his favor, it would mean the road to a Palestinian state that was at the heart of the Oslo Accords signed over 20 years ago has come to a dead end.
+
+""I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory, gives territory away to radical Islamic attacks against Israel,"" he told NRG, a pro-settler news website owned by Mr. Adelson.
+
+He warned in the interview that if the more dovish Zionist Union headed by Isaac Herzog won, the new government would ""do the bidding"" of the international community. That was code for freezing settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and focusing on a Palestinian peace deal drawn on the borders that prevailed before 1967's Arab-Israeli war – all leading to the creation of a ""Hamastan"" in Jerusalem.
+
+Without a Palestinian state and Israel's evacuation of at least some of the settlements it has built on land captured in 1967, what's left of the so-called peace process becomes a farce. There simply isn't that much more to talk about.
+
+To be sure, it's a somewhat academic question at this point. There has been no process to speak of for years, US Secretary of State John Kerry's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. When it was announced that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was stepping down from his role as the so-called Quartet's special envoy on Middle East peace – after 8 years on the job – it was the first he'd been heard from on the issue in quite some time.
+
+While spending most of his tenure talking about ""transformational change"" for Palestinians through investment promotion, Mr. Blair was also tending to his growing consulting empire, whose clients include companies like JPMorgan Chase and governments like Kazakhstan and Abu Dhabi. Middle East peace, particularly the creation of the Palestinian state that the ""Quartet"" – the UN, EU, US and Russia – says is key, steadily receded from view.
+
+But at least lip service was paid to that ultimate goal by all concerned – including Netanyahu. In 2009, in a speech following President Barack Obama's Cairo address, in which the then-new US leader spoke of a new chapter for the Palestinians, Netanyahu said as long as there were strong US security guarantees for Israel and a recognition of the Jewish state by the Palestinian Authority that ""we will be ready ... to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside a Jewish state.""
+
+Almost six years on, he has repudiated that position.
+
+It was no mistake that one of his last campaign stops Monday was in Har Homa, a Jewish settlement of 20,000 people wedged between Jerusalem and the ancient Palestinian town of Bethlehem. Netanyahu approved construction work on Har Homa during his first term as prime minister, in 1997. On Monday he confirmed what has long been suspected – that settlements like Har Homa were established to make any Palestinian claims on parts of Jerusalem impossible.
+
+""We will preserve Jerusalem's unity in all its parts,"" he told voters. ""We will continue to build and fortify Jerusalem so that its division won't be possible and it will stay united forever.""
+
+The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas views East Jerusalem as its future capital, and that portion of the city is considered occupied by Israel under international law.
+
+Since the late 1990s a network of concrete walls, checkpoints, Israeli-only roads, and settlements in the West Bank has hemmed in and divided Palestinian population centers, effectively chopping into pieces the territory that was meant to be the heartland of a Palestinian state. Integrating them into something resembling a working economic and political whole would require settlement concessions. And Netanyahu has now promised he will never make those concessions.
+
+Turnout in voting Tuesday has been brisk. Haaretz reports that about 14 percent of eligible Israelis had voted by 10 AM local time, a clip 20 percent faster than in the country's two previous elections. The final polls projected Likud slipping. Israel's Channel 2 had Likud down to 20 seats in its final poll on Friday, with the Zionist Union projected at 24.
+
+Yet even if Herzog's party wins more seats, Netanyahu will still have a path to power. Smaller right-wing and religious parties could pull enough seats to form a governing coalition – with Netanyahu once again at the head of the table.
+
+A likely partner for Netanyahu is Naftali Bennett, head of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party. Indeed, Netanyahu said his first call – after the election results are in – would be to Mr. Bennett. His party favors formal annexation of the major settlement blocks in the West Bank's ""Area C"" and has compared the creation of a Palestinian state to ""suicide"" for Israel. Area C covers about 60 percent of the West Bank, and intersperses the Palestinian towns and cities.",REAL
+6743,26 WikiLeaks bombshells on Hillary you need to know,"26 WikiLeaks bombshells on Hillary you need to know Most explosive revelations that could keep Clinton out of White House Published: 5 mins ago Leo Hohmann About | | Archive Leo Hohmann is a news editor for WND. He has been a reporter and editor at several suburban newspapers in the Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, areas and also served as managing editor of Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North Carolina. Print Hillary Clinton with top aide Huma Abedin. 
+WikiLeaks has provided a treasure trove of inside information on what Hillary Clinton really thinks about important issues such as trade and immigration, but Clinton herself has chosen not to answer questions about the revelations. 
+She has focused instead on criticizing the Russians as the source of the hacks, despite the fact there is no proof of Russian involvement. 
+The emails also shed light on how the Clinton campaign interacts with Wall Street banks, with friendly media, and how it worked to undermine the candidacy of Democratic rival Bernie Sanders with the help of the DNC. 
+WikiLeaks says it has about 50,000 emails from the private Gmail account of John Podesta, a senior Democratic Party official who has served as White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and a senior adviser to President Obama. He was the author of Obama’s climate change policy. John Podesta 
+In February Podesta moved seamlessly from the White House to become chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. 
+Here are some of the most explosive revelations from the WikiLeaks email dumps featuring Podesta’s account and others. 
+Preference for Muslim Americans In 2008, when Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, Michael Froman, a former Citibank executive, sent Podesta a “list of African American, Latino and Asian American candidates, broken down by Cabinet/Deputy and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level, plus a list of Native American, Arab/Muslim American and Disabled American candidates.” The Arab American list came with a special note to exclude Arab Christians – they had to be both Arab and Muslim.As New Republic reports, Obama’s eventual cabinet appointments ended up almost entirely as Froman recommended.Froman ultimately became the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis. 
+Shielding Obama In a March 4, 2015, email to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s eventual campaign chairman Podesta asks if they should withhold email exchanges between Clinton and President Obama that were sent over Clinton’s private server.The day before Podesta sent his email to Mills, the House Benghazi Committee privately told Clinton to preserve and hand over all her emails.The email from Podesta to Mills says: “Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That’s the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I(t) seems like they will.” An email exchange between Podesta, Paul Begala, and Clinton pollster GQRR shows the Clinton campaign was pushing the Muslim Obama narrative back in January 2008. Included was a survey of Obama “negative facts” such as this one: “Obama (owe-BAHM-uh)’s father was a Muslim and Obama grew up among Muslims in the world’s most populous Islamic country.” The pollster writes “we have reworked the Obama message into the survey, as requested.” 
+Secret speeches to Wall Street Hillary Clinton was so enraged that Bill Clinton was forced to cancel a paid speech at Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley in 2015 that she “needed a cool down period.” The email chain, on March 11, 2015, before she formally launched her campaign, includes top aides to both Hillary Clinton and former President Clinton, and reveals that Hillary’s future campaign aides were concerned about the political impact of Bill giving a speech to a Wall Street bank. “Morgan Stanley is coming down,” wrote Robby Mook in an email to top Clinton aides.Top aide Huma Abedin explained that Hillary would not be happy about it, writing: “HRC very strongly did not want him to cancel that particular speech. I will have to tell her that [Bill] chose to cancel it, not that we asked.” Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other financial firms, a point of contention during this year’s primary, were the subject of an email to Podesta. Excerpts from some of the speeches had been flagged by Clinton’s research team, including the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on issues. It was just part of “making sausage” in the political arena, she said, that certain positions on issues needed to be kept hidden from the public. Some “flags” in Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches were noted in a Jan. 25 email from campaign research director Tony Carrk to top Clinton advisers, including Clinton’s declaration that “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” Countless establishment media outlets parlaying themselves as “fact checkers” tried to downplay this email by saying it was “mostly about trade,” not immigration, as if the words “open borders” were never mentioned. But the email exchange also shows how Hillary’s about-face on the TPP trade deal was mere pandering to Bernie Sanders’ voters and had no basis in reality in terms of how she really feels about trade deals. In a speech at Goldman-Black Rock on Feb. 4, 2014, Carrk pointed out, Clinton admitted she’s “Kind Of Far Removed” from middle-class struggles due to “The Economic, You Know, Fortunes That My Husband And I Now Enjoy.” Clinton, in other speeches, boasted of her ties to Wall Street, an issue primary opponent Bernie Sanders continually raised. Clinton still has refused to release transcripts of her paid speeches while blasting Donald Trump for not releasing his tax returns. 
+Working in tandem with ‘friendly’ media WND reported Tuesday emails showing reporters, editors and contributors not just advocating for Hillary Clinton but apparently colluding with the campaign. Univision Chairman Haim Saban urged the Clinton campaign to hit Donald Trump harder over immigration. The Boston Globe tried to time a Clinton opinion piece to do the most good in New Hampshire. CNBC’s John Harwood urged Clinton campaign chairman Podesta to watch out for then-GOP candidate Dr. Ben Carson. Democratic National Committee official and CNN contributor Donna Brazile apparently tipped off the Clinton campaign to a potentially difficult CNN town-hall question on capital punishment during the Democratic Party primary season. Brazile adamantly denies it . In a July 2015 email, New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich appeared to ask permission from Hillary Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, to use certain quotes of the presidential candidate in an article. Palmieri replied, suggesting he remove a reference Clinton made to Sarah Palin and delete Clinton’s statement, “And gay rights has moved much faster than women’s rights or civil rights, which is an interesting phenomenon.” CNBC correspondent John Harwood, who was widely criticized for posing biased questions to Donald Trump as a primary debate moderator, effectively served as an adviser to the Clinton campaign, emailing Podesta with the subject line “Watch out.” The warning was regarding GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson, who “could give you real trouble in a general (election).” Maggie Haberman, a former Politico reporter who now works for the New York Times, was described in a January 2015 memo as having “a very good relationship” with the Clinton campaign. “We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed,” the memo said. 
+Demeaning Catholics Podesta discussed fomenting “revolution” in the Catholic Church with a progressive activist while Hillary’s now-communications director Jennifer Palmieri mocked Catholics who speak out against the liberal social causes of the Democratic Party. “There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church,” Sandy Newman, president and founder of the nonprofit Voices for Progress, wrote Podesta in February 2012 . The email, among the third batch released by WikiLeaks, was titled “opening for a Catholic Spring? just musing.” Podesta tells Newman of progressive organizations he and his colleagues created to recruit members of the church who can lead a revolution when the time is right.“We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this,” the Clinton campaign chairman writes. “But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up.” Clinton, who has accused Trump of praising Putin, called the Russian leader in a 2014 speech “engaging” and “a very interesting conversationalist.” Excerpts from Clinton’s speeches were contained in a document emailed to Podesta to point out quotes that could harm the campaign. 
+Collusion with DOJ Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon alerted staffers that the Justice Department was proposing to publish Clinton’s work-related emails, contending it showed collusion between the Obama administration and Clinton’s campaign. Fallon wrote that “DOJ folks” told him a court hearing in the case had been planned. The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, Podesta met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, a top official at the Justice Department. Lawyers also told the Clinton campaign in emails that Hillary’s private email scandal “ smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc .” 
+Entanglements with foreign governments King Muhammad IV of Morocco made a $12 million pledge to fund the Clinton Global Initiative conference, but only if the likely presidential candidate attended the event as a speaker. Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin, wrote in a January 2015 email that “if HRC was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter.” Then she warned: “She created this mess and she knows it.” Hillary ended up not attending but her husband Bill did. An email from Hillary Clinton’s account to Podesta on Aug. 17, 2014, said Saudi Arabia and Qatar were “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to [ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” Critics have pointed out that the Clinton Foundation has received considerable funding from the two Middle East nations. In a leaked 2013 paid speech to the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago, Hillary said Jordan and Turkey “can’t possibly vet all those refugees so they don’t know if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees.” Two years later she called for a 550 percent increase in the number of Syrian refugees coming to the U.S. largely from United Nations refugee camps in Jordan. 
+Insider’s insider had sway over DNC A WikiLeaks email dump on July 22 revealed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz used her position as head of the DNC to work in concert with the Clinton campaign to undermine the candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt. Schultz was forced to resign over the emails. Issues used to undermine Sanders’ campaign included his faith, or lack thereof. The Clinton campaign tried to reschedule the Illinois presidential primary to lower the chances a moderate Republican would get a boost following the Super Tuesday primaries. “The Clintons won’t forget what their friends have done for them,” wrote Robby Mook, who later became Clinton’s campaign manager, in the November 2014 email to Podesta.",FAKE
+9839,The struggle continues for a binding treaty to #StopCorporateAbuse,"The struggle continues for a binding treaty to #StopCorporateAbuse By Adam Parsons Posted on November 9, 2016 by Adam Parsons 
+In the last week of October, civil society came another step closer to achieving a legally binding instrument on transnational corporations (TNCs) and other business enterprises with respect to human rights. Delegates from many large social movements and networks met alongside state representatives at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, to further proceedings for an open-ended intergovernmental working group set up two years ago. Despite considerable opposition from Western powers to a binding treaty in any form (particularly the United States, United Kingdom and other countries of the European Union), activist groups are now ramping up the struggle as part of a Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples’ Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity . 
+The fact that this process is now an official part of the UN agenda is itself remarkable. Since the 1970s, there have been a long series of failed attempts to develop binding international systems to regulate corporations for their human rights violations. The abortive efforts to create a code of conduct for TNCs through the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) were completely thwarted by the early 1990s, until fresh proceedings were launched in 1998 under a subordinate body of the then-Human Rights Commission. In 2003, the Sub-Commission approved a ‘non-voluntary’ set of norms that could hold TNCs accountable, although these were rigidly opposed by the business sector, and ultimately declared to have ‘no legal standing’ by the Human Rights Commission. 
+As an alternative, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed a Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, Professor John Ruggie, who became renowned for pursuing a less ambitious or ‘partnership’ approach to corporate regulation. His UN Guiding Principles, when eventually released in 2011, were accepted by all governments but remain voluntary and non-binding, only calling on corporations to act with due diligence. Civil society organisations wholly decried the inadequacy of the proposed follow-up mechanisms, which they stated even risked undermining efforts to strengthen corporate responsibility and accountability for human rights. 
+Against this background, it was therefore a huge step forward in 2013 when a grouping of countries, predominantly from the Global South, called for a renewal of efforts towards a legally binding framework to regulate the activities of TNCs and to provide appropriate protection, justice and remedy to the victims of human rights abuses. An historic resolution was adopted by a majority of States (again mostly from the Global South, including Russia and China) at the Human Rights Council in June 2014, establishing an intergovernmental working group with the mandate of drafting a legally binding instrument. It is the first time in almost 25 years that a UN intergovernmental body is dedicating itself to the regulation of corporations, which is set to be an intensive process with considerable hurdles if a genuine legal regime for TNCs is to be eventually agreed and implemented. 
+‘Damage to life’ 
+The case for holding TNCs to account for their activities could not be tighter, considering the gap that exists in the international legal architecture which means they cannot be prosecuted directly for human rights abuses. Yet the harm that TNCs are wreaking is well-documented, referred to by the Global Campaign as ‘damage to life’; for example, through repressing social struggles and resistance, causing pollution in the extractivist industries, displacing indigenous peoples from their land, exploiting workers through poor labour conditions, and so on. Over several years, a Permanent People’s Tribunal has given representatives from affected communities the opportunity to testify on the socio-environmental impacts of harmful corporate activities, and to highlight the numerable cases that demonstrate how TNCs are able to act with effective impunity. Indeed it is the consistent work of many human rights defenders that has brought the issue of corporate impunity to the agenda of the Human Rights Council, leading to demands for the rights of affected persons to be central to a binding treaty, both in terms of regulation and remedy. 
+Campaigners talk of an entire ‘architecture of impunity’ that has protected the operations of TNCs for decades, and placed the rights of corporations above the rights of people through the privatisation of legal norms and institutions. Some of the largest TNCs have greater economic power than many nation states, while their tremendous political power is reinforced and protected on a legal level by a multitude of norms, treaties and agreements. Often described as a new global corporate law, or the lex mercatoria , it is made up of mechanisms such as the Investor to State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions and arbitration tribunals that are enshrined in bilateral trade agreements; or the International Monetary Fund’s imposed structural adjustment programs (now replicated in Europe under the so-called Competitiveness Pact policies); or the World Trade Organisation’s dispute-settlement system. While the rights of TNCs are shielded by this complex global legal framework based on trade and investment rules, there are no adequate counterweights or enforceable mechanisms to control the social, cultural, environmental or labour impacts of their operations. The result is a normative asymmetry between the binding norms that protect investor interests, and the soft law that reduces TNCs obligation to respect human rights to mere voluntary measures. 
+A binding treaty to regulate the activities of TNCs could therefore provide a vital counterpoint to the controversial free trade and investment agreements that are being continually negotiated in secret, without any democratic legitimacy. As the UN’s Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, Alfred de Zayas, has forcefully argued , these ongoing agreements—such as the TTIP, TPP, CETA and TISA—are all prepared without the inclusion of key stakeholders or parliaments, and are thus in direct violation of international human rights law. They also enable international investors to override the national sovereignty of democratic States, and seek to impose their own system of ‘arbitration’ that isn’t required to adhere to any nation’s law and constitution. Inequality and asymmetry are built into the legal foundations of the current trade and investment regime, which is solely intended to serve the immediate profits of investors, speculators and transnational enterprises, at the wider expense of social and economic progress. 
+Inverting the normative pyramid 
+In this context, the implications of mainstreaming human rights into trade agreements and WTO practice through a legally binding instrument are potentially radical and transformative. The basic intent of civil society proposals is to invert the international normative pyramid to place the rights of social majorities at the top, hence the repeated calls for a final treaty to obligate States to introduce a binding human rights supremacy clause into all trade and investment agreements they sign, in conformity with the principles of the UN Charter. The repeated calls for States to comply with their extraterritorial obligations in the area of economic, social and cultural rights—as set down in the Maastrict Principles —is also central for ensuring that human rights can assume their rightful role as the legal basis for regulating global trade and finance. 
+As a result of invoking the pre-eminence of these hierarchically superior norms, it could require renegotiating all existing trade and investment agreements, and could certainly overturn the investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) regime, as well as the secretive corporate arbitration system in its entirety. Indeed if States and TNCs were truly compelled to respect and comply with the conventions, recommendations and declarations that are the established basis of international human rights law, then it could lead to an exhaustive list of necessary reforms to the global economic system: strict regulations on financial transactions and speculation, the closure of tax havens, the cancellation of illegitimate public and sovereign debt, the reversal of privatisations on public goods and services to ensure the right to food and health, and so much more. 
+This greater vision is upheld by a joint civil society proposal to elaborate an International People’s Treaty , which aims to go much further than articulating the need for control mechanisms to halt human rights violations committed by TNCs. The growing demand for access to justice is also linked to the ideal of creating international law “from below,” and establishing “peoples’ sovereignty over the commons” by opposing the expansion of TNCs into sectors that should be controlled by communities and citizens. As part of a work-in-progress, the current base document for global consultation has a lengthy section on alternatives to the dominant socioeconomic paradigm, emerging from the experiences and proposals of the many social movements, scholars, activists and affected communities who are resisting the growing power of TNCs in their diverse spheres. 
+A radical alternative proposal 
+At the centre of these proposals is the need to promote effective mechanisms for the realisation of fundamental human rights as governments formulate a new international political, economic and legal order, based upon an equitable distribution of wealth and respect for nature. The principle of sharing is therefore recognised as the basis of all transitional measures that promote cooperation and solidarity, as emphasised in the section of the People’s Treaty on envisioning new economies: 
+“To address the basic needs of more than half of the world’s population and end the disruption of the vital cycles of the Earth system, global and national economies have to redistribute wealth to reduce asymmetries under the limits of nature. Some sectors and countries still need to improve their wellbeing while others need to reduce their overconsumption and waste. Well-being for all will only be sustainable when we share what is possible and available. The real challenge is not only to eliminate poverty but, more importantly, to eliminate the concentration of wealth and power and achieve economic and social justice based on rights.” 
+No doubt many will dismiss this broader vision of global equity and justice as politically unrealistic, in light of the growing number of corporate abuse scandals across the world, and the continuing disregard for basic labour and human rights standards in many developing countries. Campaigning groups are still trying to resist corporate capture of the process for a binding treaty through the Human Rights Council, and are calling on all States to at least participate in good faith, considering the overt antagonism of the European Union during the first session held in 2015. The prospect of achieving a concrete draft proposal next year in line with progressive civil society demands is currently less than optimistic, even with the staunch support of countries like Ecuador, Cuba and Bolivia. Without massive, continual and unending support from ordinary citizens for securing the basic socioeconomic rights of all—as envisioned in STWR’s flagship publication , Heralding Article 25 —the balance of power will remain firmly in the hands of transnational capital and its servile political representatives. 
+Nevertheless, the treaty process remains an important opportunity for interlinking popular resistance struggles, building counterpower, and slowly cracking the immense wall of corporate impunity. It is a process that should concern not only human rights activists, but everyone who campaigns for a more democratic, sustainable and egalitarian world that places people and nature ahead of transnational corporate interests. 
+Adam Parsons is the editor at Share The World’s Resources . This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
+3927,"Clinton, Dems embrace Arquette's equal pay comment","The movie star created a stir during her Best Supporting Actress Academy Award acceptance speech at Sunday night's Oscars, when she said: ""To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else's equal rights. It's our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.""
+
+The comment was a hit in the moment, with Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez effusing their support.
+
+Now, likely 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Labor Secretary Tom Perez and other Democrats are using those comments as a way to raise an issue that's been central to their party's economic message in recent years.
+
+""I think we all cheered at Patricia Arquette's speech at the Oscars -- because she's right,"" Clinton told an audience of women working in Silicon Valley's technology industry in California on Tuesday.
+
+Other Democrats praised Arquette's comments, too. Among them were House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, Perez, the Labor secretary, and Valerie Jarrett, one of President Barack Obama's top White House aides. Amen! ""It's our time to have wage equality once and for all in the United States of America."" - Patricia Arquette #Oscars #WomenSucceed — Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) February 23, 2015 I agree w/ what @PattyArquette said at the #Oscars: All people should get #EqualPay for equal work. When women succeed, America succeeds! — Tom Perez (@LaborSec) February 23, 2015 Congrats @PattyArquette! Thx for using your speech to advocate for #EqualPay and for understanding that when women succeed, America succeeds — Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) February 23, 2015 Democrats have pushed a bill intended to close the pay gap between men and women by offering new legal protections to women who complain that they're being underpaid relative to their male peers, and by having the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission collect gender and racial pay data. The bill failed to clear the 60-vote procedural threshold in the Senate last year -- and it's all but certain not to advance now that Republicans control both the House and the Senate, leaving Democrats to raise the issue on the presidential campaign trail instead. Republicans argue there are already enough protections on the books to ensure women have the right to equal wages. Clinton's comments come as The New York Times reports she plans to make her gender -- and potential to break the ""glass ceiling"" and become America's first female president -- a central theme in her widely expected 2016 campaign. During her speech Tuesday, Clinton recalled being pregnant while working in an Arkansas law firm that had no maternity leave policy. She also called the tech industry the ""wild west,"" and said it needs to be more welcoming to women. ""As women, let's do more to help all women lead on and succeed,"" she said. ""You don't have to run for office,"" Clinton said. ""Although if you do, more power to you.""",REAL
+7339,"Iran, Finland sign 4 MoUs in Tehran","Iran, Finland sign 4 MoUs in Tehran Wed Oct 26, 2016 10:15PM Iranian President Hassan Rouhani meeting with the President of Finland Sauli Niinisto at the presidential palace in Tehran. © AFP 
+Yusef Jalali Press TV, Tehran 
+Finland’s president has paid an official visit to Iran to boost mutual ties. During the visit, the 2 countries signed documents on cooperation in such areas as energy, ICT and environment. Loading ...",FAKE
+4625,White House Defends FBI Director Comey’s Integrity,"White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said he would “neither defend nor criticize” Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s decision to announce the new developments in the Hillary Clinton email saga, a neutral stance that contrasts with the criticism coming from the Clinton campaign and other Democrats. Mr. Comey had revealed Friday that the […]",REAL
+4650,TRUMP CALLED IT MONTHS AGO: Anthony Weiner threatens national security,"The FBI announced Friday it had uncovered news emails related to its investigation of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton‘s handling of classified information while conducting a separate investigation into the pervy sexting habits of former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner of course is the estranged husband of Hillary’s closest aide, Huma Abedin who herself figures prominently in Clinton’s email scandals.
+
+The FBI announced Friday it had uncovered news emails related to its investigation of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton‘s handling of classified information while conducting a separate investigation into the pervy sexting habits of former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner of course is the estranged husband of Hillary’s closest aide, Huma Abedin who herself figures prominently in Clinton’s email scandals.
+
+Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump saw this coming from a mile away, fingering Weiner as a potential national security threat all the way back in August of 2015. “It came out that Huma Abedin knows all about Hillary’s private illegal emails,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Huma’s PR husband, Anthony Weiner, will tell the world.”
+
+Abedin recently announced the couple’s separation after Weiner became embroiled in a new series of embarrassing online sexting scandals, including one allegedly involving an underage girl that prompted the FBI to investigate.
+
+One month earlier, Trump said he didn’t like the thought of “Huma going home at night and telling Anthony Weiner all of these secrets.”
+
+Trump was sounding the alarm about Weiner as early September 2013, when he wrote that Huma should “dump the sicko Weiner” because he was “a calamity who is bringing her down with him.”
+
+Click to read more from Heat Street.",REAL
+4565,US military commander: Russian military ‘far more capable’ than Soviet Union’s,"A top U.S. military commander warned that Russia’s modern military is now “far more capable” than that of the Soviet Union, saying Moscow is “messaging” the United States that “they’re a global power.”
+
+The warning over Russia’s military might from Adm. William Gortney, head of U.S. Northern Command, is the second in as many months.
+
+Gortney disclosed to Congress in March that Russian heavy bombers flew more ""out-of-area patrols"" last year than in any year ""since the Cold War."" On Tuesday, he affirmed that Russia’s “long-range” flights are rising – and occurring in places they haven’t before, like near Canada, Alaska and the English Channel.
+
+He also confirmed there are two Russian Navy ships off the shores of the United States, reportedly near Cuba and Venezuela.
+
+The comments are the latest sign of military and other tensions rising between the U.S. and Russia, which is accused of stoking the fighting in eastern Ukraine despite international sanctions and condemnation.
+
+Gortney described Russia’s intervention in Ukraine as part of a “new doctrine,” which they’re employing.
+
+“The Russians have developed a far more capable military than the quantitative, very large military that the Soviet Union had,” he said.
+
+In sheer numbers, the Soviet Union’s military was still much bigger than Russia’s today. According to statistics published in The Washington Post, the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s had more than 5 million in its armed forces, and even more in its reserves. Today, its armed forces number fewer than 1 million, with its reserves at 2 million – roughly comparable to the total forces of the U.S., but smaller than the total NATO force.
+
+“We watch very carefully what they're doing,” Gortney said, while noting that Russian aircraft are “adhering to international standards that are required by all airplanes that are out there.”
+
+CNN also reported Tuesday that Russian hackers were able to breach a White House computer system after a successful cyber-attack on the State Department. The White House has not publicly confirmed this.
+
+Meanwhile, Gortney revealed Tuesday that China has three ballistic missile submarines capable of hitting the U.S.
+
+On the bright side, he said: “China does have a no-first-use policy, which gives me a little bit of a good news picture there.”",REAL
+1901,Don't underestimate Bernie Sanders,"Jay Parini , a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. His newest book is "" Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal,"" which is forthcoming in October.
+
+(CNN) Bernie Sanders, my Vermont senator and, indeed, a friend of many years, is now running for president . He noted at his announcement (with a familiar note of wise irony): ""People should not underestimate me.""
+
+To most Americans, of course, Sen. Bernie Sanders is only a name, if that. He is barely known to the general public, which makes him a very long shot indeed to win election to the highest office in the nation.
+
+Those who follow politics a little more closely will possibly think of him as some left-wing kook that only the most liberal state in the union would ever dream of electing to the Senate, as we did in 2006. Let me add this, as someone who has followed him closely (and with admiration) for a long time: When people stop to listen to Bernie, they realize that -- whether or not they agree with his ideas -- he is, without a question, an authentic voice who speaks without fear.
+
+And nobody should underestimate him.
+
+I remember when Bernie was mayor of Burlington; it is the largest city in Vermont (which isn't saying much). I met him then, and his voice struck me as something not quite heard before. He spoke with a throaty Brooklyn accent, and he was Jewish -- not your typical Vermonter.
+
+He served as mayor of this progressive town on the shores of Lake Champlain with remarkable energy for many years, listening closely to what people had to say, learning about politics at the local level, making a real difference in the daily lives of hard-working people.
+
+He was never a Democrat -- and isn't yet. He's a progressive, holding his seat in the U.S. Senate as an independent, although he votes with the Democrats on major issues.
+
+When Bernie decided to run for Jim Jeffords' seat in the House of Representatives in 1988, many considered him a long shot. I remember hosting a fundraising event at my farmhouse, where Bernie held the floor for almost two hours, answering questions with a forthrightness that stunned those who had never encountered in person his fierce, funny, entertaining, passionate voice. Bernie won that seat, again and again.
+
+Make no mistake about this: Vermont isn't just a rainbow-colored state full of ex-hippies and leftists in berets. It's an agricultural economy, and Bernie has understood this well. He has thoughtfully supported Vermont's dairy-farming community over many years. He has also been a strong supporter of Vermont's hunting culture -- much to the annoyance of many on the left, who wonder why the NRA doesn't attack him.
+
+I was never prouder of Bernie than during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. He was a singular and somewhat lonely voice in the House, strongly opposing the 2003 invasion. He saw vividly that this was the worst foreign policy move in American history, one with endless repercussions.
+
+He was especially outraged by the outing of former CIA spy Valerie Plame in 2006 by an official from the Pentagon, and he suggested in several fiery speeches that is was time for a serious investigation of how we got into the Iraq War in the first place.
+
+This was typical of Bernie: The clear voice in the midst of the crowd, the man who says no when somebody needs to say it loudly.
+
+So what would it look like if, by some bizarre chance, Bernie caught fire and became President?
+
+He would certainly work hard for universal health care, which has been a passion of his. I've heard him rail against the efforts of insurance and drug companies to undermine a system -- the single-payer system -- that has worked well throughout Europe for decades, reducing the costs of health care and actually improving it as well.
+
+He would not be Wall Street's best friend. Indeed, he didn't support President George W. Bush in his efforts to bail out the bankers, and wrote an open letter to Henry Paulson, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, protesting that bailout. Famously, on December 10, 2010, he gave an eight and a half hour speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate opposing the reinstatement of Bush-era tax cuts, a vivid piece of rhetoric worth looking at closely by anyone who wants to understand Bernie's views.
+
+He is a socialist, of course. How many American politicians have ever said this aloud? And what does he really mean by that term?
+
+Bernie knows what he's doing. By proclaiming himself a socialist, he is drawing attention to the fact that large corporations and banks, many with international bases, have controlled American public policy for a very long time, usually to the detriment of working people.
+
+And it's working people who seem mostly to interest Bernie Sanders. He has been one of only a few voices in the Senate in the past decade who has consistently pointed out that extreme right-wing factions funded by ""millionaires and billionaires"" (one of Bernie's favorite mantras) have held sway over American politics for as long as anyone can recall.
+
+And this sway has usually operated to the detriment of people who actually repair roads, serve meals, deliver the mail, drive trucks and teach in schools.
+
+But does he actually have the slightest chance of winning the Democratic nomination? And if he won it, could he defeat a Republican candidate with billionaires at his or her disposal?
+
+He's not crazy. In fact, he's probably the sanest person in the presidential sweepstakes. But he can't win, and he knows that. What he will do, however, is move Hillary Clinton on matters of importance to progressives: The restraining of Wall Street and large corporations, the scandal of how America allows its political campaigns to be funded and the welfare of working class Americans, who seems pathetically easy to persuade -- again and again -- to vote against their own economic interests.
+
+A steep climb looms before him. But I applaud Bernie Sanders. I hope he soars and that his brave and commonsensical voice is heard.",REAL
+3634,The Latest On Paris Attack: Manhunt Continues; Brothers Were On No-Fly List,"The Latest On Paris Attack: Manhunt Continues; Brothers Were On No-Fly List
+
+French authorities are still on the hunt for two brothers suspected in an attack against the headquarters of a satirical magazine in Paris that left 12 people dead.
+
+The two chief suspects, named as Said and Chérif Kouachi, 34 and 32, remain at large. Investigators believe Said Kouachi traveled to Yemen in 2011 to receive weapons training with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports, citing U.S. officials who've been briefed on the case.
+
+Both of the brothers have been on the U.S. no-fly list for years, U.S. officials tell NPR.
+
+NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports that the French capital is on its highest alert level, and 800 soldiers and riot police have been called on to guard the city. Schoolchildren, Eleanor said, are being kept inside for recess.
+
+To add to the tension, there was a shooting on Paris' southern edge that killed a police officer and wounded a street sweeper. Bernard Cazeneuve, France's Interior Minister, said those shootings had not been linked to the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
+
+Overnight, one of the three suspects, identified by French media as 18-year-old Mourad Hamyd, was reported to have turned himself in.
+
+Cazeneuve said nine people had been detained in connection to the attack.
+
+Local officials say mosques were targeted across the country late Wednesday and early today. There were no reports of injuries, and it's unclear if they are linked to the attack on Charlie Hebdo. But Cazeneuve said the country would not tolerate any attacks on places of worship.
+
+This is a breaking news story. As often happens in situations like these, some information reported early may turn out to be inaccurate. We'll move quickly to correct the record and we'll only point to the best information we have at the time. Refresh this page for the latest.
+
+Update at 5:55 p.m. ET. Suspects Were On U.S. No-Fly List
+
+NPR has confirmed that both Cherif and Said Kouachi have been on the U.S. no-fly list for years. They're also in the central U.S. database of people who pose a known or potential terrorist threat, worldwide: the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment.
+
+Update at 3:15 p.m. ET. Eiffel Tower Goes Dark
+
+In honor of the victims of Wednesday's attack, the Eiffel Tower turned off its lights. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, tweeted a series of images showing the famous landmark going dark.
+
+Update at 1:03 p.m. ET. No Link:
+
+Bernard Cazeneuve, France's Interior Minister, said authorities had not found a link between today's shootings and the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
+
+— Police found Said Kouachi's ID in a car used by the men to get away. As soon as they learned that name, police launched a manhunt and searched the home of the Kouachi brothers.
+
+— Nine people are presently in custody in connection with the attack.
+
+— Two people who looked like suspects were seen in Villers-Cotterêts, where police launched an intense search near a gas station.
+
+— Police have heard from more than 90 witnesses and are reviewing Internet use and surveillance to try to find the two men.
+
+— Cazeneuve said Said Kouachi had never been accused or convicted of a crime like his brother but had surfaced at the ""periphery of some investigations.""
+
+Update at 12:36 p.m. ET. Dusk In Paris:
+
+The sun has now set in Paris, reporter Lauren Frayer tells our Newscast unit.
+
+She's at the Place de la République, where she says for the second night in a row people are streaming in for an impromptu vigil.
+
+Lauren reports that the city only came to a halt at noon today for a moment of silence. But even though there is man hunt ongoing, Parisians have gone about their business: shops and restaurants are open and the metro is running.
+
+Asteris Masouras, a freelance journalist in Paris, has been tweeting from the scene — pictures of demonstrators carrying posters that read Je Suis Charlie and others leaving candles at the foot of the statue in the center of the square.
+
+Masouras also tweeted a video that shows the crowd whispering La Marseillaise, France's national anthem.
+
+France's Interior Ministry says that more than 88,000 personnel have deployed across France to help with security after the attacks.
+
+In the Paris district alone, 9,650 personnel were deployed, including more than 1,000 military personnel.
+
+Update at 10:16 a.m. ET. The Younger Suspect's Name:
+
+There is some variance in the way the name of the third suspect in this case is being reported. For now, based on reporting by the AFP and other French outlets who have spoken to classmates, we will call the suspect Mourad Hamyd.
+
+Earlier, we had named him as Hamyd Mourad.
+
+Update at 9:44 a.m. ET. 'Stupidity Will Not Win':
+
+Update at 7:19 a.m. ET. Not Linking Suspects To Terrorist Groups:
+
+Counterterrorism officials have been careful not to link the two main suspects to terrorist groups, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston tells our Newscast Unit.
+
+One of the men, Chérif Kouachi, was convicted on terrorism charges in 2008. He served 18 months for helping to funnel fighters from France to Iraq.
+
+What's unclear, said Dina, is what happened to Kouachi after that. It's unclear whether he has ever traveled to Syria and it's unclear whether he has developed links to terrorist groups — including the Islamic State — since 2008.
+
+Judging by the shot patterns left on a police cruiser yesterday, what is clear is that the two suspects were very comfortable using high-powered weapons. It's likely, Dina said, that they received some military training. The question is where.
+
+Update at 6:44 a.m. ET. Roads Shut Down:
+
+NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports that police have shut down all roads in and out of Paris.",REAL
+2356,Clinton calls for 'common-sense' gun control after Charleston terrorist attack,"Hillary Clinton also spoke forcefully about the 'deep fault line' of racism, noting that 'millions of people of color still experience racism in their everyday lives.'
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is applauded by the president of the US Conference of Mayors, Sacramento. Mayor Kevin Johnson (l.) and the conference vice President, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Saturday June 20, 2015, at the U.S. Conference of Mayors 83rd Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
+
+Hillary Rodham Clinton issued an emotional plea Saturday following the South Carolina church shooting, calling for ""common-sense"" gun control reforms and a national reckoning with the persistent problem of ""institutional racism.""
+
+Three days after nine black church members were gunned down in Charleston, the Democratic presidential contender said the country must take steps to keep guns from criminals and the mentally ill.
+
+Regulations, she said, can be passed while still respecting the Second Amendment and ""respecting responsible gun owners."" The US Constitution's Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms.
+
+""The politics on this issue have been poisoned, but we can't give up,"" Ms. Clinton told the US Conference of Mayors meeting in San Francisco on Saturday. ""The stakes are too high. The costs are too dear.""
+
+In 2013 Congress rejected legislation that would have expanded background checks on firearms sales and banned some semi-automatic weapons.
+
+While public opinion is sharply divided on the issue of gun rights vs. gun control, the scientists who research it are not, as Christian Science Monitor's Alexander LaCasse reported in April:
+
+Does owning a gun make your home more dangerous? Most professionals who research the effects of gun ownership say yes.  This is what David Hemenway, a professor at Harvard's School of Public Health saw when he began sending out monthly surveys almost a year ago to scientists engaged in research in public health, criminology, or other social sciences. A clear majority found that a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide, makes women more likely to be victims of homicide, and make homes more dangerous. In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, titled, "" There's scientific consensus on guns – and the NRA won't like it,"" Hemenway writes:  ""Scientific consensus isn't always right, but it's our best guide to understanding the world. Can reporters please stop pretending that scientists, like politicians, are evenly divided on guns? We're not."" [Among the general public, support] for gun ownership was  most pronounced among whites who believed that crime rates in the United States are on the rise. This belief runs counter to crime statistics, which in particular have found that the  gun homicide rate has plunged by 49 percent since its peak in 1993.
+
+President Barack Obama has blamed the continued national political inaction on the issue on the influence of the National Rifle Association, the leading gun rights lobbying group.
+
+While Clinton did not propose any specific legislation in her address, she's previously supported limits on gun sales and extending the assault weapons ban.
+
+On Friday, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, who's challenging Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination, called for an assault weapons ban, stricter background checks and tougher requirements to buy a gun.
+
+""I'm pissed,"" he wrote in an email to supporters. ""It's time we called this what it is: a national crisis.""
+
+As the Christian Science Monitor's Brad Knickerbocker noted on Friday, advocates on both sides promptly staked out their now-familiar positions after the shooting:
+
+National Rifle Association board member Charles Cotton wrote, “Eight of [Pinckney’s] church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.” Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence,  said in a statement: “[E]very day, 88 lives are lost in shootings across our nation. Most of these tragedies are preventable through sensible solutions that just keep guns out of the wrong hands: solutions like expanding Brady background checks on all gun sales, and shutting down the small number of ‘bad apple’ gun dealers that supply almost all crime guns.”
+
+Clinton's remarks also marked a forceful entry into the heated topic of race relations, an issue that's become a major theme of her campaign. Clinton called race a ""deep fault line"" in America, noting that ""millions of people of color still experience racism in their everyday lives.""
+
+The problem of racism was not limited to ""kooks and Klansmen,"" she said, but included the off-hand, off-color jokes, as well as whites not speaking up against poverty and discrimination.
+
+In previous appearances, Clinton has taken up a number of issues that are important to African-Americans, calling for changes to the criminal justice system, voting laws and assistance for minority small business owners. Her campaign is trying to motivate the coalition of minority, young, and liberal voters that twice elected Obama to the White House.
+
+""We can't hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America,"" she said. ""We have to name them and then own them and then change them.""",REAL
+9555,Comment on WikiLeaks Shocker: Clinton Camp Considering Paul Ryan Relative as Supreme Court Nominee by Richard Johnson,"Posted on October 28, 2016 by Paul Joseph Watson Another reason as to why Ryan tried to sabotage Trump’s campaign? Hillary Clinton’s campaign circulated the name of one of Paul Ryan’s relatives as a potential Supreme Court pick, suggesting a conflict of interest that could feed in to the Republican Speaker of the House’s dislike for Donald Trump. An email released in part 19 of the Wikileaks Podesta dump features an article sent by Hillary advisor Sara Solow to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and Hillary’s foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan on February 29, 2016. The piece draws attention to Ketanji Brown Jackson, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “She was confirmed by without any Republican opposition in the Senate not once, but *twice*. She was confirmed to her current position in 2013 by unanimous consent – that is, without any stated opposition. She was also previously confirmed unanimously to a seat on the U.S. Sentencing Commission (where she became vice chair),” reads the email. “Her family is impressive. She is married to a surgeon and has two young daughters. Her father is a retired lawyer and her mother a retired school principal. Her brother was a police officer (in the unit that was the basis for the television show *The Wire*) and is now a law student, and she is related by marriage to Congressman (and Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan.” Earlier this month, Ryan said that he would no longer defend or campaign for Donald Trump. A poll released this week found that nearly two thirds of Republicans trust Donald Trump more than Ryan to lead the GOP. Many Trump supporters speculated that Ryan was involved in the leaking of the infamous Billy Bush tape, in which Trump made lewd comments about women, as part of a plot to sabotage the Republican nominee’s campaign. Could the fact that one of his relatives is being touted as a likely Clinton Supreme Court pick be another reason as to why Ryan – who has been accused by many of being in bed with the Washington establishment – has abandoned his support for Donald Trump?",FAKE
+2270,Ireland's historic vote for marriage equality prompts amazing Twitter celebration,"Although only a fifth of constituencies have returned their official results thus far, the referendum looks set to pass by an overwhelming margin. According to the Guardian, current estimates suggest that close to 65 percent of voters voted to legalize same-sex marriage.
+
+Opposition leader David Quinn, the director of the Iona Institute, has already conceded the vote, tweeting, ""Congratulations to the yes side. Well done."" The Iona Institute also issued a statement congratulating the yes supporters on their win.
+
+Turnout was bolstered by the #hometovote campaign, which encouraged Irish citizens living abroad to return home to cast their ballots in the referendum.
+
+As it became increasingly clear that the referendum was going to pass, jubilant Irish people took to Twitter to celebrate. Pictures purporting to show actual rainbows over Irish cities as the vote went on were particularly popular:
+
+But people also had all sorts of other ways of celebrating. Like this one, from Ireland's Minister of State for Equality:",REAL
+7878,Hilarious Cartoon Reveals 2016 Political Version of The “Walking Dead”,"Pinterest 
+C.E. Dyer writes that the disaster that is Obamacare is about to get worse for many people enrolled in the health insurance marketplace. On Monday, the Obama administration confirmed that premiums will skyrocket for many people next year, according to the Associated Press . 
+The AP reported: 
+Before taxpayer-provided subsidies, premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services. Some states will see much bigger jumps, others less. 
+Moreover, about 1 in 5 consumers will only have plans from a single insurer to pick from, after major national carriers such as UnitedHealth Group, Humana and Aetna scaled back their roles. 
+In some states, the premium increases are striking. In Arizona, unsubsidized premiums for a hypothetical 27-year-old buying a benchmark “second-lowest cost silver plan” will jump by 116 percent, from $196 to $422, according to the administration report. 
+But HHS said if that hypothetical consumer has a fairly modest income, making $25,000 a year, the subsidies would cover $280 of the new premium, and the consumer would pay $142. Caveat: if the consumer is making $30,000 or $40,000 his or her subsidy would be significantly lower. 
+Larry Levitt, who follows the health care law for the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, said of the increases: “Consumers will be faced this year with not only big premium increases but also with a declining number of insurers participating, and that will lead to a tumultuous open enrollment period.” 
+Donald Trump’s campaign spokesman, Jason Miller, said in a statement on Monday: “This shows why the entire program must be repealed and replaced.” Miller added, “While (Hillary) Clinton wants to expand the failed program known as Obamacare, Mr. Trump knows the only way to fix our nation’s failing health care system is complete and total reform.” 
+Reports have warned that this was coming down the pike for some time; however, HHS’s confirmation ahead of open enrollment beginning Nov. 1 — one week before the election — is likely to cause major headaches for many people. 
+This debacle is not unexpected either — it’s exactly what President Obama and Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton wanted to happen. 
+Obamacare was never the end goal. Rather, it was a stepping stone toward single-payer, government-run healthcare. That is a big reason why Obama wants Clinton to become president — his legacy is at stake. 
+Obama’s legacy is largely wrapped up in Obamacare and what it leads to. Clinton tried to push this first step during her time as first lady and failed, but the conditions will be ripe for her to go even further should she be elected. 
+If Clinton becomes president, there’s no doubt that her next step will be to move to single-payer healthcare. Obamacare is bad, there’s no doubt about it, but single-payer government healthcare would be even worse.",FAKE
+5208,James O’Keefe releases another Project Veritas video claiming Hillary Clinton campaign is “bird dogging”,"In several surreptitiously recorded video conversations, Scott Foval, the former national field director at Americans United for Change, admits to “bird dogging” — planting agitators at — Donald Trump’s rallies to draw negative media attention.
+
+Foval describes colluding with Bob Creamer, co-founder of consulting group Democracy Partners, to “put people in the line, at the front . . . to get in front at the rally, so that when Trump comes down the rope line, they’re the ones asking him the question in front of the reporter, because they’re pre-placed there.”
+
+“To funnel that kind of operation, you have to start back with people two weeks ahead of time and train them how to ask questions,” Foval explains. “You have to train them to bird dog.”
+
+Among Foval’s trainees, he says, are “mentally ill people, that we pay to do shit.”
+
+“Over the last 20 years, I’ve paid off a few homeless guys to do some crazy stuff, and I’ve also taken them for dinner, and I’ve also made sure they had a hotel, and a shower.  And I put them in a program,” he brags. “Like, I’ve done that.”
+
+Americans United for Change subsequently cut ties with Foval, according to a statement from the group’s head, Brad Woodhouse.
+
+O’Keefe and Project Veritas have been criticized in the past, however, for strategically editing footage to make false accusations.
+
+In 2013, O’Keefe settled a suit for $100,000 after editing a recording with an ACORN employee who subsequently lost his job. Similarly, after O’Keefe and an associate posed as donors affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in a sting operation at NPR, The Blaze examined the edited video against the raw footage and found manipulative editing.
+
+And contrary to former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s hunch, political trickery (real or alleged) isn’t exclusive to either party. In August, Politico reported that Steven Wessel, a convicted con man unaffiliated with Donald Trump’s campaign, “catfished” the Republican presidential nominee’s opponents to gather information “about the operatives and their intentions regarding Trump.” Assuming a variety of fake online identities, including that of a female solicitor in England, Wessel gushed in emails, phone calls and Twitter messages about (made-up) extramarital affairs with the likes of the late Lee Atwater, showered marks with gift cards to the swanky Mandarin Oriental, and invited them to go pheasant-hunting in Scotland — all in an apparent attempt to glean more about the operatives and their intentions regarding Trump. Among Wessel’s targets: Republicans Rick Wilson and Cheri Jacobus, and libertarian consultant Liz Mair. According to the report, “The targets of the scheme do not believe that Wessel, described by his own lawyer as mentally ill, was acting alone.” “The questions were of such a degree of granularity and specificity and political acumen that unless [Wessel] had political experience it would be hard for him to come up with them,” said Wilson, head of a pro-Sen. Marco Rubio super PAC during the primaries. Wilson “suggested the possible involvement” of the defunct Make America Great Again PAC. The second installment of undercover videos is scheduled to drop Tuesday.",REAL
+94,Unrelenting Ferguson protests pushed year of national change,"FERGUSON, Mo. — Unrelenting protests over the death of an unarmed black teen here last summer thrust this St. Louis suburb and its 21,000 residents into an international spotlight and ushered in a year of national changes.
+
+Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson, who is white, fatally shot Michael Brown Jr., a black 18-year-old, on Aug. 9, 2014. The encounter lasted just two minutes, but the shooting led to months of massive and, at times, violent protests. The world watched as crowds hurled bottles and looted liquor stores, while police in military gear threw tear gas and clashed with those on the streets.
+
+Under the slogan #BlackLivesMatter, Ferguson protesters kicked off a movement around alleged incidents of police misconduct leading to rallies in several cities with such cases. Although a grand jury did not indict Wilson and the Justice Department declined to bring criminal charges against the officer, Brown's violent death prompted a national look at alleged racial profiling, police brutality and the relationship between police officers and communities of color.
+
+""A year later, all I can say is that Mike Brown, his death, his murder, have given me a new sense of purpose in life and that is to always be a truth teller and to stay true to why I came out on Aug. 9,"" says Johnetta Elzie, 26, who emerged as leader in the Black Lives Matter movement as the protests developed. ""I didn't come because there was an organization that asked me to come. I came because I was tired of seeing black people dead in the street by the hands of police officers.""
+
+#BlackLivesMatter coalesced into a partnership of leaders and organizations. Last month, in Cleveland, hundreds of protests came together for the inaugural Movement for Black Lives Convening. Elzie and others regularly fly to cities where a fatal police encounter has occurred to support local protesters.
+
+Brown's death and the protests that followed also turned the spotlight on other controversial deaths, including Tamir Rice, 12, shot while playing with a toy gun on Nov. 22 by a Cleveland police officer; Walter Scott, 50, shot on April 4 by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer while allegedly running away; and most recently, Samuel DuBose, 43, shot on July 19 during a traffic stop by a University of Cincinnati police officer.
+
+""Hearing statistics of police brutality incidents can be jarring, but seeing new cases every few days forces you to acknowledge the pervasiveness of police brutality,"" said Keisha Bentley-Edwards, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin who studies race, adolescence and academic and social development.
+
+""Seeing the impact on an actual person, their families and their communities personalizes these incidents beyond numbers,"" she said.
+
+In Ferguson, the police chief, a local judge and a city manager, who are all white, resigned after a Justice Department review found that the Ferguson Police Department engaged in a broad pattern of racially biased enforcement that permeated the city's justice system, including the use of unreasonable force against black suspects. Two of the city's new leaders, interim Police Chief Andre Anderson, who began work July 22, and Interim City Manager Ed Beasley, who was hired June 9, are black. Ferguson's population is 67% black.
+
+Police departments elsewhere sought to buy body cameras, while other departments added training on diversity, community engagement, bias and how to de-escalate tense encounters.
+
+At the national level, President Obama created a Task Force on 21st Century Policing and banned the sale of some kinds of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies.
+
+""Policing has taken a hard look at itself,"" said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. ""There has been a renewed emphasis on looking at how we hire, how we train, how we investigate, how we release information to the public. All of these aspects have had a seismic impact on policing.""
+
+Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs, said police departments are studying the findings of President Obama's task force and looking at ways to implement its recommendations.
+
+""It's safe to say police officers are a little bit more cautious about what they are doing and how they approach their work today,"" Stephens said.
+
+Yet police are also frustrated, he said. Police budgets have remained flat, making it impossible for some departments to modernize equipment, boost training and increase salaries to retain and recruit the best people, he said.
+
+Some police officers have grown weary of constant comparison to those police officers who abuse their power. Fear of provoking the next Ferguson has made some officers unwilling to be aggressive at their jobs, said James Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. Pasco credits aggressive policing tactics for making communities much safer and lowering crime rates over the past 20 years.
+
+""(Darren Wilson) will be forever scarred and forever affected by this and so will every other officer every time they think of the event,"" Pasco said. ""It's going to have a chilling effect on their willingness to undertake that kind of appropriately aggressive policing.""
+
+For Elzie, one of the Black Lives Matter organizers, the changes have yet to go far enough. This year, she will work toward legislation passed to hold police accountable for any misconduct.
+
+""I hate that it keeps happening and we have to keep paying attention to these deaths,"" Elzie said. ""That is depressing.""",REAL
+10516,Crushing Hillary: Trump’s Landslide by the Numbers | EndingFed News Network,"( New York Times Results by County) The media won’t tell you this but Donald Trump CRUSHED Hillary Clinton in the recent election in three key areas: For one, the above results by county show that he picked up a significant amount of the counties in the US. The picture is clear that most counties in America voted for Trump . Secondly, the media is also hiding from you that Trump CRUSHED Hillary in the Electoral College (EC). As of today, most if not all media outlets show that Trump won the election with only 279 EC votes. But the truth is Trump also won Michigan with 16 EC votes and Arizona with 11 EC votes for a total of 306 EC votes. Hillary only won 228 EC votes but it looks like she barely won New Hampshire which should put her at 232 EC votes. As a result, Trump won 57% of all EC votes. HIllary turned in the Democratic Party’s worst Electoral College performance in 28 years. With only New Hampshire left to be called, Clinton has turned in the Democratic Party's worst Electoral College performance in 28 years pic.twitter.com/APU85Ty50q 
+— Dan O'Donnell (@DanODradio) November 9, 2016 Thirdly, in total states it was a landslide. Trump won 31 states to 19 states won by Hillary or 62% of the states. The mainstream will argue that Hillary beat Trump in the popular vote which appears accurate. According to the NYT she won 59,923,027 to Trump’s 59,692,974 for a difference of only 230,053 or 0.4%. But in California and New York Hillary beat Trump by a combined 4 million votes. If not for these two huge liberal states, Hillary would have gotten shellacked in the popular voting as well. The mainstream media will not tell you but Trump won BIGLY! 
+If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
+4909,Bill Clinton suggests Trump slogan racist – but he used the same one,"Former President Bill Clinton might want to keep the racism accusations to himself from now on -- after ripping Donald Trump for a slogan he's used repeatedly since his 'Comeback Kid' days.
+
+The 42nd president on Wednesday, while stumping in Orlando for Hillary Clinton, suggested Trump’s campaign rallying cry, “Make America Great Again,” is racist code.
+
+“I’m actually old enough to remember the good old days, and they weren’t all that good in many ways,” Clinton said. “That message where ‘I’ll give you America great again’ is if you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, don’t you?”
+
+The crowd roared as Clinton continued. “What it means is ‘I’ll give you an economy you had 50 years ago, and I’ll move you back up on the social totem pole and other people down,’” he said.
+
+The problem is, Clinton himself has used the same phrase several times in the past.
+
+He used it repeatedly while running for president in 1991 and 1992, declaring at one Little Rock, Ark., event, ""Together, we can make America great again.""
+
+And in a campaign ad for his wife in 2008, Bill Clinton said, ""It's time for another comeback, time to make America great again.""
+
+Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway pointed to the inconvenient footage in calling the former president's allegations about Trump's slogan a ""disgrace."" 
+
+
+
+“That performance is really something,” she said Friday on “Fox & Friends.” “Bill Clinton is known as a very strong campaigner, a great voice in politics -- but not this cycle.”",REAL
+5696,Google Violence at Temple U Popular Across the Country,"Migrant Crisis Disclaimer 
+We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable. 
+Anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned, permanently. Daily Stormer Presents: Dr. David Duke Š Copyright Daily Stormer 2016, All Rights Reserved",FAKE
+6833,"Strong 5.4 Magnitude Quake Hits Central Italy, Rattles Rome","Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
+Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
+Privacy Policy 
+By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
+Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
+5476,Robin Roberts Says While She Was Dying from Cancer a ‘Familiar Voice’ Came From Her Nurse and Brought Her Back,"Share on Twitter 
+For Robin Roberts, losing her mother while she was in the midst of her own fight for her life was an especially hard blow. Roberts's mother had always been there for her through every illness and injury. 
+When she needed her mom the most, however, Roberts swears that she could hear her voice, encouraging her not to give up on life. Image Credit: Mireya Acierto/Getty Images 
+As PopSugar reports, on a recent episode of “ Harry ,” the “Good Morning America” co-host tearfully recounted the days she spent in the hospital after a bone marrow transplant. Famously open about her battles with breast cancer and a rare bone marrow disease, Roberts tells host Harry Connick Jr. that she had reached the point where the fight was too much for her: 
+“There was a time when I sent everybody away, and I was in my room, and I just felt like I'm slipping away. I just couldn't.” 
+One of the things that had made Roberts feel like giving up was the fact that her mother was no longer there by her side. However, she was soon to find that her mom was closer than she realized. She tells Harry: 
+“I kept hearing this voice, 'Robin! Robin! Robin!' And suddenly, I open my eyes, and it's ... my nurse Jenny. She's looking at me. That was my mother's voice. I am convinced, when I was hearing that, even though it was Jenny, it was my mother's voice I was hearing.” 
+Roberts believes that at her point of “ greatest isolation ,” her mother used Jenny to call her back, to remind her to keep fighting. 
+Jenny, Roberts says, was “invaluable” during this time. Acknowledging the bond between Roberts and her nurse, Harry surprised Roberts by reuniting her with nurse Jenny and another nurse who had cared for her. An emotional Roberts was able to thank them for not only everything they had done for her, but for what they have done for countless others: 
+“Thank you for being our lifeline. Thank you for being there— not only for us, but for our caregivers ... for our loved ones.” ",FAKE
+6478,Brain Concussions in Children and Adults: What to Know About Vaccine Damage,"By Catherine J Frompovich When I was in private practice as a consulting natural nutritionist, often I had moms ask my opinion about their young boys playing football. That was long before “sports... ",FAKE
+8215,Pakistan: Long arm of ISI needs unsheathing,"By Brig Asif H. Raja on November 1, 2016 
+Asif Haroon Raja 
+The ISI had developed its long arm capability during the tenures of Gen Akhtar Abdur Rehman, Lt Gen Hamid Gul (VT editor) and Lt Gen Javed Nasir as DG ISI. It was owing to this capability of hitting the chosen target outside the frontiers of Pakistan that the ISI earned the reputation of a dreaded outfit and the best in Asia. The long arm began to shrivel when Benazir Bhutto was PM from 1988 to 1990 and Gen Waheed Kakar was COAS and Lt Gen Javed Ashraf Qazi had replaced Gen Javed Nasir. This change in posture was a result of pressure of the US and the West, pressing Pakistan to refrain from meddling in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) and in India, or else it will be declared a terrorist state. Pressure was mounted at the behest of India which had become strategic partner of USA and Israel in 1991/1992 and darling of the West. 
+After the occupation of Afghanistan by 1, 50,000 Soviet forces in December 1979, Pakistan under Gen Ziaul Haq had decided to provide refuge to about 5 million Afghan refugees and to support the Afghan Mujahideen in their resistance. The US came forward with a package of $ 3.5 billion in June 1981 after making a measured assessment that Pakistan had the will and capability to fight the proxy war. The offer was accepted only when it was conveyed that the ISI will coordinate and conduct the entire war without the aid of CIA and that the US and others would restrict their support to provision of funds and weapons/equipment only. As a Frontline State, Pakistan suffered a great deal throughout the Afghan war at the hands of KGB-KHAD-RAW-AlZulfiqar nexus and Afghan armed forces, but achieved the miracle by defeating and pushing out Soviet forces in February 1989. After achieving its objective without employing a single soldier, the US abandoned Pakistan as well as the Mujahideen who had sacrificed 1.5 million people and had helped the US in becoming a sole super power. 
+Once Pakistan fell from the grace of USA and it was put under sanctions on account of its covert nuclear program suspected to be geared towards making an Islamic bomb, it came under the shadow of black star. Pakistan’s nuclear program became an eyesore for India, Israel and USA. It faced the whole brunt of fallout effects of ten-year Afghan war that had been fully supported by the US led free world. USSR that had shrunk to Russian Federation was highly bitter, while India was perpetually hostile. Iran was not so friendly owing to its reservations over the developments in Afghanistan. Explosive situation in Afghanistan due to civil war and power tussle among the seven Mujahideen groups impacted the security of Pakistan. 
+Start of armed insurgency in IOK in late 1989 and India pumping in over 700,000 troops into the Valley had its effects on Pakistan’s security dynamics. In 1990/91, both sides had come close to war. Internally, the society had become militarized due to the Afghan war and sectarianism fomented by Iran and Saudi Arabia had created serious law and order situation in Punjab. PPP and PML-N acrimoniously tussled with each other for power because of which no govt could complete its mandatory 5 years tenure. 
+Fragmentation of USSR and demise of communism on account of its military defeat in Afghanistan and increase of influence of Pakistan and India decreasing its influence in Afghanistan had vexed India. It feared that Pakistan may exploit the situation in IOK and liberate it with the help of over 60 Jihadi groups and take its revenge of the humiliation it had suffered in East Pakistan in 1971. It dreaded that Pakistan may replicate its model of supporting the Mukti Bahini. Sensing the gravity of the situation, India started propagating that Pakistan is behind the insurgency in IOK and that the ISI is funding, training and launching terrorists from Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK). It urged the UN and world powers to rein in Pakistan and restrain ISI from conducting cross LoC terrorism. 
+The US, both Republicans and Democrats, had been constantly wooing India to join its camp since early 1950s, but India preferred the Soviet camp, although it professed to be non-aligned. It was elated when India feeling orphaned after the collapse of USSR fell like a ripe apple into the waiting arms of USA and both became bedfellows in 1991. Once its newfound love sought help from her paramour, the latter stood behind her and sternly cautioned Pakistan to lay its hands off IOK. Change in circumstances compelled Pakistan to restrict its support to the Kashmiris in distress to moral, political and diplomatic levels only. The Kashmir oriented Jihadi groups based in AJK and in Southern Punjab however continued to extend support to the Kashmiris seeking right of self-determination as provided for in the UN resolutions. Indian security forces equipped with draconian laws and license to kill without any fear of accountability or censure by the UN and world powers carried out inhuman torture, employed massive force, and used rape as a weapon to break the will of the freedom fighters. The UN and international community turned a deaf ear to the cries of Kashmiris. 
+Despite the fact that IOK had become the most militarized region of the world (one soldier for 17 civilians), and Kashmiris had suffered over 100,000 fatalities, 10,000 rapes, detention of thousands in secret dens and destruction of their property, the freedom fighters kept the torch of liberty aglow. The heroics of Kashmiris against heavy odds had a telling effect on the morale of Indian Army and paramilitary forces in IOK. Soldiers suffered from demoralization and homesickness; cases of suicides, desertions, killing of seniors and comrades by soldiers, and indiscipline jumped up at an alarming rate. Officers and men dreaded posting to Kashmir, while rate of compassionate cases wanting posting out from Kashmir shot up. A stage came when recruitment in Army dropped to rock bottom levels. The then Indian Army chief had to appear on the TV and run an ad campaign to appeal to the youth to join the Army on better pay scale and perks. Kashmir had become a perforated wound for India and economic cost was becoming unbearable. It was becoming difficult for India to hide its massive human rights violations and barbarities of Indian security forces. 
+Here I may add that the Indian Army had suffered humiliation at Dras-Kargil in 1999 at the hands of handful of Mujahideen and irregulars of Northern Light Infantry. It was eventually bailed out by the US led G-8 by exerting immense pressure on Pakistan to immediately vacate the captured territories. The Indian armed forces went through another embarrassment in 2002 when it had to sheepishly withdraw from its western border after a ten-month standoff during which it had constantly huffed and puffed but couldn’t pick up courage to cross the border. Aggressive response of Pak armed forces had taken the steam out of their chauvinism. 
+Unfortunately, all that was gained on the Kashmir front and on the military front was wasted away after Gen Musharraf wilted under the US pressure in 2003 and decided to take steps to please USA and India. Reining in Kashmir focused Jihadi groups, allowing India to fence the LoC and signing peace treaty with India in January 2004 changed the perspective. It helped Indian military to suppress Kashmir freedom movement. Earlier on, Musharraf had submitted to all the 7 demands of Washington in September 2001. Free hand given to CIA and FBI had enabled the two to establish their network in FATA and gain control over airports and seaport in Pakistan. Intelligence acquisition in FATA was taken over by CIA and ISI pushed on the back seat. 
+Indo-Pak peace treaty in 2004 enabled RAW to ignite FATA, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Baluchistan and Karachi. While RAW assisted by CIA, NDS, MI-6 and Mossad made full use of its long arm to bleed Pakistan with the help of proxies, Pak security forces and ISI remained handicapped. The so-called friends pushed Pakistan to fight terrorism but secretly backed the terrorists. The US kept twisting the arm of Pakistan that if ISI meddled into India or Afghanistan it will be declared a rogue outfit. Perforce, the ISI undertook protective measures only, but its defensive actions were more often breached because the so-called allies stabbed Pakistan in the back. As a consequence, RAW and its strategic partners carried out one-sided covert war while the ISI at best tried to ward off the attacks. In spite of defensive policy of the govt and ISI, and Pakistan suffering much more human casualties than any other country in the war on terror, ISI was blamed to be in collusion with Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Haqqani Network, Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). These were termed as strategic assets of military establishment to overcome conventional inferiority against arch enemy India. The lost intelligence space In FATA/KP was gradually recovered when Lt Gen Shuja Pasha took over as DG ISI and Gen Ashfaq Kayani as COAS in 2008. 
+All the terror attacks that took place in India between 2001 and 2008 were pinned on JeM and LeT and their connection was made with ISI. Since Pakistan made no effort to disprove Indian contention even after it was revealed by Indian investigative agencies and Home Ministry officials that Hindu terror groups and Indian military intelligence officers were involved in the attacks, it became easier for India to further strengthen its narrative of portraying Pakistan as a terror abetting state and a nursery of terrorism. India’s narrative was boosted up by its strategic allies. The US dubbed Pakistan as the most dangerous county in the world. Pakistan’s overall defensive policy and apologetic stance emboldened its detractors to keep whipping and bleeding it without fear of tit for tat response from ISI. 
+Other than the salvos fired by the Indo-Afghan-US-Israel nexus on Pak Army and ISI, Pakistan political leadership of major political parties also view the two premier institutions with distrust. Both PPP and PML-N in line with their 2006 Charter of Democracy made efforts to enfeeble ISI and keep Army under their thumb. First attempt was made by Benazir Bhutto when she replaced Lt Gen Hamid Gul with retired Lt Gen Kallue in 1989 and next tasked Air Marshal Zulfiqar to cut ISI to size under the garb of reforms. PM Yusaf Raza Gilani tried to civilianize ISI in August 2008 by placing it under Ministry of Interior. Kerry Lugar Bill in 2009 and Memo scandal in 2011 were other attempts to curtail military’s power. Nawaz Sharif has a history of locking horns with every Army chief and has still not got out of the hangover of Gen Musharraf. Although he didn’t clash with Gen Raheel but at times civil-military relations became tense. 
+It has now been conclusively established that RAW and NDS in unison and backed by other agencies are deeply involved in proxy war in Pakistan since 2003 and have inflicted tens of thousands of cuts on the body of Pakistan and its people. Series of conspiracies have been hatched and launched to destabilize and fragment Pakistan. RAW-NDS nexus backed by CIA is continuing to use Afghanistan as a launching pad for terror attacks in Pakistan. In order to scuttle CPEC, focus of attacks is on Baluchistan and KP. India is keeping the LoC on fire. So far it has violated 2003 ceasefire agreement 178 times and killed 19 civilians and injured 80. 
+The anti-Pakistan foreign agencies are making full use of TTP, Jamaat Ahrar, Lashkar Jhangvi, BLA, BRA, BLF and MQM as proxies. London is a safe haven for MQM leadership and Baloch rebel leaders, while Afghanistan has provided sanctuaries to TTP runaway leaders in Kunar, Nuristan and Nangarhar. Besides these strategic assets, the detractors are also making use of NGOs, human rights activists and segment of media to make Pakistan a compliant state of India. Since HN, JeM, and LeT are not playing the game of foreign agencies, they are dubbed as terrorist groups and strategic assets of Pak Army/ISI. They want Pakistan to take strict action against them or else face isolation and sanctions. 
+It was in the backdrop of this concern of US and India that the Dawn News published a story on October 6. The planted story was allegedly furnished by someone from within the PM House where a national security conference presided by the PM and attended by Foreign Secretary, Punjab Chief Minister, COAS, DG ISI and National Security Adviser was held. The invented story written by Cyril Almeida gave an impression of serious rift between civil and military leadership and that while the govt wanted to proceed against the defunct militant groups, the ISI didn’t. Probable motive of concocted story was to demean the Army/ISI and to reinforce Indo-US stance that Pak Army and ISI were in league with terror groups. The types of Hussain Haqqani, Ayesha Sadiqa, Farzana Bari and several other liberal journalists assembled in London two days ago to play up this story. MQM (Altaf) hosted them. To ascertain the truth, a high powered committee comprising members from three intelligence agencies will carry out inquest. 
+Having collected tons of evidence, yet Pakistan takes the barbs and whips without a whimper and doesn’t pick up courage to strike back. The long arm of ISI remains sheathed for reasons best known to the policy makers. It implies our leaders have decided to give a free hand to our enemies to continue bleeding Pakistan without any fear of retaliation or even protest. Going by the well-established concept that ‘offence is the best defence’, until and unless the ISI pay back the RAW and NDS in the same coin, one sided bleeding of Pakistanis will continue. Long arm must be unsheathed. 
+The writer is retired Brig, war veteran, defence analyst, columnist, author of 5 books, Vice Chairman Thinkers Forum Pakistan, DG Measac Research Centre, and Member Executive Council PESS. Related Posts:",FAKE
+2518,Court rejects Obama immigration plan. Executive abuse of power?,"Obama's immigration initiative could protect some 5 million people from deportation. But a court ruled against the plan, with critics saying Obama overstepped his executive authority.
+
+Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?
+
+Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?
+
+In Nov. 2014, President Obama speaks about immigration at Del Sol High School in Las Vegas. Obama's plan to protect from deportation an estimated 5 million people living in the United States illegally suffered another setback Monday, Nov. 9, 2015, in a ruling from a New Orleans-based federal appeals court. In a 2-1 ruling, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Texas-based federal judge's injunction blocking the administration's immigration initiative.
+
+President Obama wants to protect from deportation an estimated 5 million people living in the United States illegally but a federal appeals court said no.
+
+The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Mr. Obama Monday in a 2-1 decision that upheld a Texas-based federal judge’s injunction blocking the immigration plan.
+
+Obama's plan would defer deportation for some 5 million illegal immigrants, including children brought to the US illegally, parents of American children, and those with long-standing ties to the country.
+
+Obama’s initiative has faced sharp criticism since it was announced in November 2014. Republican leaders have accused the president of overstepping his authority by taking executive action. Instead, they say, the president should be working with Congress and enforcing the immigration laws already in place.
+
+""President Obama should abandon his lawless executive amnesty program and start enforcing the law today,"" Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a news release. Gov. Abbott has been at the forefront of the opposition to Obama’s immigration plan, even leading a charge in suing the president to block the initiative.
+
+At the heart of the issue is an overwhelming number of illegal immigrants. With an estimated 11 million people in the United States illegally, the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t have enough resources to deport them all.
+
+As Judge Carolyn Dineen King wrote in a 53-page dissent to Monday’s decision, ""Although there are approximately 11.3 million removable aliens in this country today, for the last several years Congress has provided the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with only enough resources to remove approximately 400,000 of those aliens per year.”
+
+As such, she said, Obama’s action to defer deportations is ""quintessential exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”
+
+The basic concept of “prosecutorial discretion” is that there aren’t enough officers to enforce every law against every law breaker, so officials must set priorities. As such, Obama is “merely moving them to the back of a very long line of potential deportees,” not granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, The Christian Science Monitor’s Warren Richey wrote in November 2014.
+
+""We strongly disagree with the 5th Circuit's decision,"" a White House official, who requested anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly about a legal matter still underway, told the Associated Press. ""The Supreme Court and Congress have made clear that the federal government can set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws.""
+
+Now, the Obama administration can request a re-hearing. But an advocacy group, National Immigration Law Center, is pushing for a Supreme Court appeal. Any chance at implementing Obama’s plan before he leaves office in 2017 could be slipping away.
+
+Twenty-six states have challenged Obama’s immigration initiative in court. The coalition asserted in December 2014 that Obama overstepped his presidential authority. At the time, Mr. Abbott said the president’s job is to “execute the law, not de facto make law.”
+
+“The president’s independent executive action tramples the U.S. Constitution and federal law,” Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning said in a news release then. “The president is ignoring his responsibility to enforce laws passed by Congress and attempting to rewrite immigration laws, which he has no authority to do.”
+
+This isn’t the first time Obama has been accused of abusing executive power. While many of the high-profile accusations have centered around the Affordable Care Act, others include Obama’s recess appointments in 2012 and his denouncement of the Defense of Marriage Act.
+
+This report includes material from the Associated Press.",REAL
+9153,"Why Everyone on Facebook Is Checking into Standing Rock, North Dakota","Pin 1 
+( ANTIMEDIA ) When it comes to brute force, law enforcement and private security currently have the upper hand on the ground in Standing Rock, North Dakota. They’re employing armored vehicles, riot gear, tasers, rubber bullets, pepper spray, sound cannons, and other shows of force against peaceful opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. 
+But unlike most of the corporate media, the Internet is taking note of the struggle at Standing Rock and is trying to do its part to contribute to the protests. Over the weekend, unconfirmed reports emerged that police were using Facebook check-ins at Standing Rock to track individuals who arrived at the location to join water protectors. 
+As word spread of the apparent news, the Internet stepped up to neutralize the power of the police-surveillance state. 
+Shortly after, Facebook users from around the country and world began checking into Standing Rock, which registers as Cannon Ball, North Dakota, in an effort to confuse police. According to a statement many posters are copying and pasting: 
+“ The Morton County Sheriff’s Department has been using Facebook check-ins to find out who is at Standing Rock in order to target them in attempts to disrupt the prayer camps. SO Water Protectors are calling on EVERYONE to check-in at Standing Rock, ND to overwhelm and confuse them. This is concrete action that can protect people putting their bodies and well-beings on the line that we can do without leaving our homes. “ 
+Others merely checked in while still others added their own commentary. “ If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor ,” wrote Patrick Quinn below his check-in. 
+“ Messing with fascists ,” Luba Petrusha commented. 
+While the troll effort is exciting, it’s unclear whether the efforts are having an effect. According to Snopes, a self-described fact-checking blog whose conclusions are generally reliable , police claim they are not using Facebook to track protesters. Snopes reported “ [a Morton County] officer explained not only that they were not using Facebook check-ins as a gauge of anything, but that the metric presented no intelligence value to them. The rumor suggested that protesters cited Facebook check-ins as a manner in which police could target them, but check-ins were voluntary — and if police were using geolocation tools based on mobile devices, remote check-ins would not confuse or overwhelm them.” Sign up for the free Anti-Media newsletter the establishment doesn't want you to receive 
+Snopes also claimed it spoke to protesters within a large camp at Standing Rock who said they did not issue a call to Internet users to check in. Nevertheless, they reportedly said they appreciated the show of solidarity. 
+Regardless of whether or not the online check-ins have any effect, the Internet has played a decisive role in the developing events in North Dakota. Livestreams have documented serious violations of free speech and the right to protest, and Facebook was accused of blocking such footage on at least one occasion. Amid the ongoing lack of mainstream coverage , the independent media has successfully drawn attention to the Standing Rock protests. 
+Considering the establishment has come out in full force in North Dakota, from their use of surveillance to their haphazard employment of heavily armed police, the increasing number of check-ins at Standing Rock shows just how much technology empowers people. 
+Even if police aren’t scouring social media and the check-ins fail to produce any tangible result, the rapid mobilization of efforts highlights a growing sense of opposition to unjust and exploitative power — and thanks to the Internet, the world is watching. 
+This article ( Here’s Why Everyone on Facebook Is Checking into Standing Rock, North Dakota ) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Carey Wedler and theAntiMedia.org . Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to . ",FAKE
+7971,"Hillary cancels public appearance due to a large crowd of people chanting ""Lock Her Up!""","Memes Breaking: Hillary cancels public appearance due to a large crowd of people chanting ""Lock Her Up!"" The New York Times featured a photo of Hillary Clinton being welcomed to an early voting site in Pompano Beach, Florida on Sunday. Apparently, she didn't stay too long at her rally location at the Pompano Beach Amphitheater. Clinton almost melted at the sight of Trump signs surrounding her and people yelling ""Lock Her Up!"". A police escort shared what happened: Share on Facebook Posted Tuesday, November 01, 2016 Suggested Videos",FAKE
+1042,The big question about Hillary Clinton: What if the FBI is onto her?,"What if Hillary Clinton is in legal hot water and she knows it but won’t admit it? What if she has decided to go on the offensive and make her case that she did nothing unlawful with her emails that contained state secrets?
+
+What if the essence of her defense is that other secretaries of state used non-secure email devices and thus it was lawful for her to do so, as well as the point that none of her emails was “marked classified” at the time she sent or received them? What if these defenses do not hold up to even cursory examination?
+
+What if the other secretaries of state to whom she refers are Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice? What if neither of them diverted all of their emails to a private server? What if neither of them sent or received state secrets -- secrets that under the law of the land are marked “confidential,” “secret” or “top secret,” not “classified” -- using a non-secure email account?
+
+What if neither of them hired an information technology expert and paid him to divert both a standard State Department email stream and a secret State Department email stream to a private server in one of their homes?
+
+What if neither Powell nor Rice is currently running for president? What if neither Powell nor Rice has had his or her behavior as secretary of state referred to the FBI for a criminal investigation by the inspector general of the State Department?
+
+What if the law of the land is that a document or email contains state secrets by virtue of the information or data in the document or email and not by virtue of any warning label? What if the legal definition of a ""state secret"" in the U.S. is ""information the revelation of which could cause harm to the security of the United States""?
+
+What if it is the law of the land that people in the government to whom state secrets are entrusted are required to recognize the secrets when they see them and protect them from intentional or inadvertent revelation?
+
+What if it is the law of the land that everyone in the government to whom state secrets are entrusted receives a multi-hour tutorial from the FBI on how to protect state secrets? What if the successful completion of that tutorial is a legal prerequisite to the receipt of a national security clearance and thus the receipt of state secrets?
+
+What if that tutorial reminds the people to whom secrets are being reposed that it is their legal obligation to recognize and accept and understand the law before they can receive any state secrets? What if, in order to confirm that understanding, all people who receive the tutorial are required to sign an oath at the end of the tutorial recognizing, accepting and understanding the law and agreeing to be bound by it? What if Clinton signed just such an oath?
+
+What if Clinton had no intention of complying with the oath she signed at the time she signed it? What if we know that because we know she hired the information technologist to divert her emails the same week she received the FBI tutorial? What if she never told the FBI that she planned to divert all her emails -- including those that would contain state secrets -- to a private non-secure email server in her home?
+
+What if it is the law of the land that the failure to secure state secrets is a felony, known as espionage? What if it is the law of the land that espionage can be committed by a person who intends to expose state secrets or by a person who doesn’t care if she exposes state secrets? What if the FBI explained to Clinton in her first day as secretary of state that the grossly negligent exposure of state secrets constitutes espionage?
+
+What if before Clinton was secretary of state, she was a U.S. senator from New York for eight years? What if during that time, she was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee? What if during her time in the Senate, she was exposed to hundreds of military-related state secrets?
+
+What if Clinton is smart enough and shrewd enough and experienced enough to recognize a state secret when she sees one?
+
+What if the FBI has seen emails in which Clinton ordered subordinates deliberately to avoid State Department secure channels of communications and to send state secrets to her through channels she knew were not secure? What if Clinton passed on state secrets to others who had no security clearances? What if she did so knowing she was sending state secrets from her non-secure server to other non-secure servers?
+
+What if Clinton sent or received more than 2,000 emails that contained state secrets? What if she authored more than 100 of them herself? What if some of the 2,000 emails were so secret that the FBI agents investigating her lack the security clearances to view those emails?
+
+What if Clinton did all this so that she could keep her behavior as secretary of state secret and away from all officials in the State Department outside her inner circle, away from the president and away from the American people? What if she orchestrated and carried out a conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act?
+
+What if the FBI is onto her? What if the Democrats are not?
+
+Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.",REAL
+772,John Boehner thanks God Cruz didn't win,"""Donald Trump is the nominee, whether people like it or not,"" the former House speaker, during a question-and-answer session at a hedge fund conference in Las Vegas, told attendees Thursday. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, made clear he would support the nominee.
+
+But that doesn¹t mean Boehner supports what Trump is pitching on the campaign trail. Asked, rapid fire, whether he supported Trump's proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S., his proposal to build a wall on the border of Mexico and the New York billionaire¹s plan to aggressively use tariffs to attack foreign trade competitors, Boehner repeatedly answered with one word: ""No.""
+
+He also said Trump¹s foreign policy stance, laid out in a speech two weeks ago, didn't align with his views. Still, Boehner said, ""Anybody who doesn't think Donald Trump can win, just watch.""
+
+Boehner¹s comments come two weeks after saying, during a question-and-answer session at Stanford University, that he and Trump were ""texting buddies."" It was at that same event that he called then-GOP presidential candidate and regular Boehner tormenter Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, ""Lucifer in the flesh."" Cruz has since suspended his campaign, clearing the way for Trump to secure the title of ""presumptive nominee"" for the party. Boehner, in an unsolicited comment, couldn't hide his feelings on that front. ""Thank God the guy from Texas didn't win,"" he said. As all eyes in Washington were on Trump¹s meetings with top GOP lawmakers, Boehner weighed in on the decision by his replacement as speaker -- the lawmaker Boehner pushed, lobbied and cajoled to take the job, Paul Ryan -- not to immediately endorse Trump. ""I think Paul was just being cautious,"" Boehner said, adding that he ""doesn't have any doubt"" things will ""get smoothed over."" He also made clear he had no regrets about his decision to leave Congress. ""Every day I read the news, I¹m reminded of how happy I am that I¹m not in the chaos,"" Boehner said with a chuckle.",REAL
+4220,Why Trump's foreign policy resonates with Americans – to a point,"Important aspects of Trump's foreign policy play on America's weariness as global cop. It's his extreme prescriptions that worry voters.
+
+As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?
+
+In recent weeks Donald Trump has offered one provocative foreign-policy pronouncement after another, reflecting his view that America can no longer afford to pay for the world’s security and prosperity.
+
+The United States, he says, should leave a NATO alliance where wealthy Europeans are mooching off a “poor” US for their national defense needs. Asian partners also need to prepare for an era of American retrenchment – to the extent that allies Japan and South Korea might want to acquire their own nuclear weapons, he suggests.
+
+And then, of course, there’s the matter of his envisioned southern border wall – which he says Mexico must either pay for or face a cutoff of the billions of dollars that Mexicans working in the US send back home each year.
+
+Such proposals may leave most of Washington’s foreign-policy elite gasping for breath, but they resonate with a significant slice of the American public for a couple of key reasons, national security and opinion experts say.
+
+For one thing, many in the US have tired of America’s role of superpower and sympathize with the idea that playing the world’s policeman has gotten too expensive and offers diminishing returns. Then there’s the fact that much of Mr. Trump’s more extreme thinking on US relations with the world has been around in milder forms for years – and has even picked up steam under President Obama.
+
+For instance, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates caused a stir when he used his farewell tour of Europe in 2011 to castigate European allies for not paying their fair share of the alliance defense bill. And Mr. Obama, elected as a kind of antidote to the interventionist George W. Bush, has as president espoused a more domestically focused America. He recently lamented to The Atlantic magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg about the “free riders” who can afford to pay more than they do now but rely on the US for their security.
+
+From there, it’s not much of a leap to nod and cheer at Trump’s take on an overburdened America, experts say.
+
+“Trump is effectively speaking to a widespread feeling in the American public of frustration with aspects of being the global hegemon, the big man on the world stage,” says Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies. “He speaks to a deep-seated feeling, and he gets a response.”
+
+Americans have a “gut reaction” when they hear Trump say, as he told The New York Times, that for too long the US has been the world’s “big stupid bully” being “systematically ripped off by everybody,” says Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow specializing in defense spending at the Center for American Progress in Washington.
+
+“People off the top of their head say, ‘Yeah, that’s right!’ when they hear someone saying we’re too much of the world’s policeman or that others aren’t paying their fair share,” Mr. Korb says.
+
+One reason Americans can relate to Trump’s worldview is that they have already been exposed to the broader thinking that lies beneath his more extreme specifics – through Obama, Korb adds.
+
+“In a lot of what Trump says, there’s a ring that’s familiar to people,” he says, and part of that “familiarity” comes from the Obama presidency.
+
+“Obama has delivered a kind of retrenchment that was a reaction to Bush, who was viewed as overly interventionist,” he says. “So when Trump talks about America paying for the world when it needs to pull back and fix things up at home, people think they’ve heard it before and it has a grain of truth for them.”
+
+Korb notes that all of Obama’s past Defense secretaries have upbraided European allies for not paying their fair share into NATO.
+
+“If you go back and take a look at what [Robert] Gates and [Leon] Panetta and [Chuck] Hagel said, they all carried the message that ‘You guys have to do more,’ ” he says. “People may be fuzzy on the specifics,” he adds, “but they remember the general idea that our allies in Europe and Asia aren’t stepping up to the plate the way even the president thinks they should.”
+
+As long as Trump is talking in terms of greater burden-sharing among allies, the public is broadly with him. Most Americans feel the US is less respected on the world stage but at the same time favor a greater degree of shared leadership in global affairs, recent surveys from the Pew Research Center in Washington suggest.
+
+And according to a Pew survey taken a year ago, only about half of Americans have a favorable view of NATO – with the alliance’s detractors higher among Republicans.
+
+But Americans appear to part ways with the Trump foreign policy vision when general feelings confront specifics.
+
+Any misgivings over NATO do no translate into support for abandoning the alliance, says Dr. Kull of the University of Maryland, citing his own research. Similarly, views that Asian allies should take on more of their own defense do not translate to support for Japan and South Korea acquiring nuclear weapons.
+
+“Yes, there is pretty strong thinking that our allies for too long have been relying on our generosity, but does that mean the public thinks we should pull out of NATO? No,” Kull says, “about two-thirds don’t think so.”
+
+That number was among the findings of a study his group recently did for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
+
+While Americans may approve when Trump the businessman talks about the US needing a “better deal” with the world, that does not mean they are looking for a revolution in world affairs, Kull adds.
+
+“There was support for NATO [in the Chicago Council survey] and there is support for the basic international order” of security alliances and trade relations, he says – “and that’s where Trump departs from the general public.”
+
+Of course, for dealmaker-in-chief Trump, threats to abandon NATO or Asian allies could simply be starting-points for negotiation. But Kull points to surveys showing Trump’s unusually high negatives for a presidential candidate, and he suggests that misgivings about how a President Trump would conduct relations with the world are part of that.
+
+“People may be unhappy about things, but they aren’t looking for a president to turn global affairs upside down or put the world order at risk,” he says. “They’re not ready to say that’s how presidents act, or that that’s how America acts in the world.”",REAL
+9564,"An LDS Reader Takes A Look At Trump Accuser Jessica Drake, Concludes His Leaders Are “Latter-Day Sissies", ,FAKE
+10456,Comment on Wikileaks: Bill Clinton BOASTS of Hillary’s ‘Working Relationship’ with Muslim Brotherhood by toddyo1935,"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Pamela Geller 
+The bombshells about this criminal are now breaking daily. It’s not a question of Trump, it is an imperative that Hillary be defeated. If the people choose Hillary, then they must and will be punished. “Wikileaks: Bill Clinton Boasts of Hillary’s ‘Working Relationship’ with Muslim Brotherhood,” By John Hayward, Breitbart , October 26, 2016: 
+In a speech Bill Clinton gave at the home of Mehul and Hema Sanghani in October 2015, revealed to the public for the first time by WikiLeaks, former President Bill Clinton touted Hillary Clinton’s “working relationship” with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in Egypt as an example of her diplomatic skills.President Clinton also gave his wife a lot of credit for negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, in a passage that began with the standard Democrat “stuff happens” shrugging defense for foreign policy failures: 
+Finally, we live in a world, as I said, that’s full of good news and bad news. The United States cannot control it all, but we need a president who’s most likely to make as many good things happen as possible, and most likely to prevent big, bad things from happening. You can’t keep every bad thing from happening; who’s most likely to be able to get people involved in a positive way. Even the people who don’t like the Iran nuclear agreement concede it never would have happened if it hadn’t been for the sanctions. Hillary negotiated those sanctions and got China and Russia to sign off – something I thought she’d never be able to do. I confess. I’m never surprised by anything she does, but that surprised me. I didn’t think she could do it. The Chinese and the Russians to see past their short-term self-interest to their long-term interest and not sparking another nuclear arms race. 
+And when the Muslim Brotherhood took over in Egypt, in spite of the fact that we were (inaudible), she developed a working relationship with the then-president and went there and brokered a ceasefire to stop a full-scale shooting war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which on top of what was going on in Syria and the (inaudible) Jordan would have been a calamity for the world. 
+And when we were trying to reset our relations with Russia under President Medvedev, she and her team negotiated a New START Treaty, which limits warheads and missiles. And she lobbied it through the Senate. She had to get 67 votes, which means a lot of these Republicans who say that they don’t like her now are just kidding for election season. They trusted her, and she got it passed. You can’t get 67 votes in the Senate without a lot of Republican support. And I don’t know about you, but with all this tension and Mr. Putin trying to affect the outcome of the conflict in Syria, I think it’s a very good thing that we’re in a lower risk of any kind of accidental nuclear conflict with the Russians. She did that. 
+You’ll rarely find a more tortured political framing of the Iran debacle than Bill Clinton boasting that the sanctions Barack Obama lifted were super-awesome, as even those who don’t think those sanctions should have been lifted agree. 
+Mr. Clinton’s version of the Iran sanctions leaves out a few details , such as Russia’s keen financial interest in keeping Iranian energy out of the European market, and China’s desire to use Iran sanctions as a geopolitical bargaining chip. 
+But the part about the Muslim Brotherhood is most interesting. If anything, he is selling Hillary Clinton’s “working relationship” with Egyptian Islamists short, because she used American diplomatic leverage for Morsi’s benefit even before he got elected, warning Egyptians about “backtracking” to a military regime at a key moment of the post-Mubarak campaign, when Morsi was running against a former member of Hosni Mubarak’s military. There have long been rumors that more subtle forms of U.S. “ pressure ” were used to secure Morsi’s office, as well. 
+Then again, in public pronouncements, Clinton called Hosni Mubarak’s tottering regime “stable” and cautioned her Obama Administration colleagues against “pushing a longtime partner out the door.” 
+A few days ago, declassified State Department documents revealed Clinton’s talking points for a 2012 meeting with Morsi hailed his election as a “milestone in Egypt’s transition to democracy,” and stated that she was to offer the Muslim Brotherhood leader “technical expertise and assistance from both the U.S. government and private sector to support his economic and social programs.” 
+Clinton was also supposed to privately offer Morsi assistance with his police and security forces, which would be conducted “quite discreetly.” 
+After Morsi was gone, she declared herself exasperated with Egyptian political culture and declared herself a cynical “realist.” That is pretty much the opposite of what everyone in the Obama Administration was saying while the “Arab Spring” was in the midst of springing its little surprises on autocratic but America-aligned (or at least America-fearing) regimes, which we were all supposed to feel guilty about selfishly supporting for so long. 
+As for Clinton’s superb working relationship with Morsi, that eventually ended with Morsi’s wife railing against Clinton for supposedly dismissing him as “a simpleton who was unfit for the presidency,” and threatening to publish letters from Clinton to Morsi that would damage the former U.S. Secretary of State. Meanwhile, Mohammed Morsi is developing a solid working relationship with the Egyptian penitentiary system . 
+Egypt has one of those icky military governments again, and while it won’t have fond memories of Hillary Clinton’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood regime, it will most likely work with whoever wins the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Therefore, a prospective President Hillary Clinton probably won’t suffer too much from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s appalling lapses in judgment. 
+Courtesy of Pamela Geller Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+6091,Your premier federal government employee and veteran shopping program,"Russian experts collecting evidence of anti-govt chemical attack in Aleppo – Defense Ministry ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Your premier federal government employee and veteran shopping program By GPD on November 2, 2016 Interest-free shopping starts here CLICK IMAGE TO START SHOPPING >>>>> 
+Veterans can skip unnecessary credit card fees by using the convenient federal government shopping program powered by PayCheck Direct ® . It is designed to extend the reach of one’s wallet by allowing veterans to buy what they want and need today and make interest-free payments over 12 months. 
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+With the VTN member shopping program powered by PayCheck Direct , federal government employees and veterans can enjoy: Paying no interest Low, convenient payments over 12 months Paying no fees † No credit checks Thousands of name-brand products 
+This shopping program provides convenient and affordable buying assistance for both planned and unexpected purchases. From the fun of a new laptop or living room set to the comfort and convenience of a new bed, all the necessities are available up to each person’s purchase limit. Purchase limits are based on individual federal government employee or veteran income, so budgets stay on target. 
+Shop online 24/7 at www.mypaycheckdirect.com/gov or place orders by calling PayCheck Direct Customer Service at 866-441-9160, Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. CT. Each time an order is placed, the PayCheck Direct systems automatically confirm that the purchaser meets all eligibility requirements (age, income, tenure and employment status) as well as purchase limit. 
+Start shopping the PayCheck Direct program today. It’s easy, affordable and interest free. 
+To learn more about purchase limits, payments, our return policy and other important details about the program, go to your shopping website and click on Customer Service or see your installment agreement generated during the checkout process. PayCheck Direct ® is operated by Bluestem Enterprises, Inc. 
+†See details on installment agreement generated during the checkout process. Related Posts:",FAKE
+5214,Memo To Trump And Clinton: Use Tough Love To Win The Millennials,"The Millennial Vote is being treated like a Magical Unicorn in the 2016 election. It is seen as something valuable and mysterious. As Dan Schwabel, at Quartz, in a piece modestly entitled The complete guide to winning the millennial vote this election recently noted:
+
+As we head into November’s US elections, all candidates are vying for the millennial vote—and for good reason. Millennials are ... a critical bloc for any campaign. 69.2 million are now eligible to vote, which is more than double compared to the past decade. When added together with Gen-X voters, 2016 represents the first time young people have displaced the Baby Boomer vote. At the same time, millennials are historically less likely to vote than their older peers, with only around half having voted in the last presidential election. Knowing this, there’s no question that all political parties will be pushing hard to get them to the voting booths this fall.
+
+I, too, covet the kids' allegiance. Yet I – an aging Boomer – confess to finding the Millennials mystifying. I am the father and co-owner of three of them (plus one Gen Xer). I know more than a few others. They're Everywhere, and deeply enigmatic.
+
+Yet I have a theory that could provide the key to resolving their riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. They have not yet found, but absolutely must conceive and declare, their own Narrative.
+
+Let the candidates take note. Making this strong demand of them would be an act of tough love. It could pay huge dividends.
+
+A quick glance at the new generation gap. Betraying just how old a fogey I am, let me recount a bit of conversation from a few years ago with a lovely Young Fogey Millennial, discussing a column of mine in the long lost ParcBench.com. It was about how the Beatles, the Who, and the Rolling Stones (through, respectively, Revolution, Won’t Get Fooled Again, and Sympathy for the Devil) stopped an impending communist takeover of America and the West. Let's add Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth.
+
+The Young Fogey’s response stopped me cold: “That’s really interesting. I’ve heard of the Beatles.” So who am I to judge? And yet….
+
+The sociologists and pollsters obsessively study these magical unicorns with something like the ardor of an anthropologist encountering a newly discovered tribe in the Amazon basin. Their earnest scholasticism is interesting but does not resolve the enigma. Schwabel summarizes some of the pollsters’ observations:
+
+The World Economic Forum’s annual Global Shapers survey found the top five most concerning world issues for young people are climate change, large-scale conflicts, religious conflicts, poverty, and government accountability. … Socioeconomic wellbeing is also important, as 20% of millennials are living in poverty, many whom are unemployed, underemployed, or have even given up on finding a job. These young voters want politicians to close the poverty gap and regulate student loans so that they aren’t poor and in debt. The same Harvard poll found that millennials feel the division between rich and poor is worse than before they were born. Finally, they want the government to be more transparent and less corrupt. After the recession and the following bailouts, they became more suspicious of politicians, and they have to work harder to earn their trust back. A mere one in every four millennials says they can trust the government always or most of the time.
+
+Sounds true. Yet as Winston Churchill purportedly once demanded of a waiter, “Take away this pudding, it has no theme.” The poll results similarly do not reveal a theme.
+
+Every generation needs to write its own story. We Boomers were great at generating drama, manufacturing meaning for our lives, and achieving glory. Time for the Millennials to step up and top us.
+
+A few years ago, a group of collegiate Millennials came to interview me. They had the usual surly attitude toward us Boomers. We had, they seemed to believe, Ruined Everything. I told them point blank, to their astonishment, that they were dead wrong about us. We Boomers have a great track record and are weary and waiting for them to step up, wrest power from us, and use it for Good. They were astounded.",REAL
+6539,Incredible Discovery: This Fruit Extract Killed Cancer in 48 Hours!,"A study conducted at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Queensland, Australia has recently shed new light on what could become the next big cancer treatment: the blushwood berry. 
+Via AlternativeNews 
+
+This naturally occurring fruit contains compounds that began killing off cancer cells almost immediately when studied in the laboratory. The Guardian Reports Scientists have managed to destroy cancerous tumors by using an experimental drug derived from the seeds of a fruit found in north Queensland rainforests.
+The drug, called EBC-46, was produced by extracting a compound from the berry of the blushwood tree, a plant only found in specific areas of the Atherton Tablelands. A single injection of the drug directly into melanoma models in the laboratory, as well as into cancers of the head, neck and colon in animals, destroyed the tumours long-term in more than 70% of cases, the study’s lead author, Dr Glen Boyle, said.
+“In preclinical trials we injected it into our models and within five minutes, you see a purpling of the area that looks like a bruise,” Boyle, from the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute said.
+“About 24 hours later, the tumour area goes black, a couple of days later you see a scab, and at around the 1.5 week mark, the scab falls off, leaving clean skin with no tumour there. The speed certainly surprised me.”
+Researchers believe the drug triggers a cellular response which cuts off the blood supply to the tumor by opening it up. That’s why we see a bruise-like situation forming in the tumour,” Boyle said. “This seems to lead to an activation of the body’s own immune system which then comes in and cleans up the mess.”
+It has been used by veterinarians in about 300 cases of cancer in companion animals including dogs, cats and horses. There was no evidence EBC-46 would be effective to treat cancers that had spread to other parts of the body, known as metastatic cancers, Boyle said.
+The drug is being developed as a human and veterinary pharmaceutical through QBiotics, a subsidiary of the company which discovered the drug, called EcoBiotics. The company is also examining the potential for a blushwood plantation. Ethical approval was recently granted for phase 1 human clinical trials, but even if those proved successful, it was unlikely the drug would replace conventional chemotherapy treatment, Boyle said.
+“Chemotherapy is still used because it is very effective for a lot of people,” he said. “But EBC-46 could perhaps be used in people who, for some reason, chemotherapy doesn’t work [for], or for elderly patients whose body can’t sustain another round of chemotherapy treatment.” The preclinical trial was funded by QIMR Berghofer and the National Health and Medical Research Council and the results were published in the journal PLOS One.
+Healthy & Natural World Reports :
+Blushwood Berries – Where they Come From Blushwood berries are the fruit of the blushwood tree, which is known to grow in only one region of the world: the rainforests of Far North Queensland, Australia. These tropical trees are not found anywhere else on the globe, but grow in abundance near Australia’s northeastern tip.
+These particular trees need very niche conditions to thrive—conditions which can only be found in specific portions of Far North Queensland, Australia. Considering their usefulness as proven by the latest cancer research published in PLOS One , some are wondering if they could be grown in a greenhouse environment, so that people all over the world could benefit from their cancer-killing properties.
+Blushwood Berries – What kind of Cancer they Eradicate The researchers at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, headed by Dr. Glen Boyle, used an experimental drug produced from the seeds of blushwood berries called EBC-46. They used this drug to treat spots of melanoma (the most deadly form of skin cancer) on dogs, cats and horses.
+The subjects were diagnosed by veterinarians and given a poor prognosis, most being considered candidates for euthanasia prior to participating in the study. Amazingly, these animals that had been on death’s door prior to the study had their melanoma tumors disappear after treatment in the lab by Dr. Boyle and his team of scientists.
+Tumors were Gone within 48 Hours When the EBC-46 was injected into the cancerous cells on the subjects, the tumors reacted by turning a dark color, then falling off. The derivative from the blushwood berry is thought to cut off oxygen supply to the cancer cells, allowing for the removal of tumors without the need for surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
+The researchers reported that most of the subjects’ tumors—previously considered a lost cause by veterinarians—were gone within 48 hours of being injected with EBC-46. Under the microscope, the individual cancer cells began shriveling up and dying within mere moments of coming into contact with the EBC-46.
+",FAKE
+783,How well-meaning political reformers are helping to elect President Trump,"Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about polarization in politics. Need a primer? Catch up here.
+
+David Broockman is an assistant professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
+
+Academic hand-wringing rarely changes political institutions. But political science researchers’ recent obsession with political polarization seems to be having some impact. These researchers argue that polarization has “put the nation at risk” and are championing reforms meant to stem it.
+
+The remedies proposed are many — from reforming campaign finance to changing the primary system — and all share a common theme: By shifting more political power to everyday people, academics believe that extreme politicians would be encouraged to heed the public’s centrist demands.
+
+The widespread view that citizens are more centrist than politicians seems obvious, but it’s actually misleading at best. And worse, it’s endangering our democracy.
+
+Voters Are Not All Centrists
+
+Most voters support some liberal policies and some conservative policies. Academics have long taken this as evidence of voters’ underlying centrism.
+
+But just because voters are ideologically mixed does not mean they are centrists at heart. Many voters support a mix of extreme liberal policies (like taxing the rich at 90 percent) and extreme conservative policies (like deporting all undocumented immigrants). These voters only appear “centrist” on the whole by averaging their extreme views together into a single point on a liberal-conservative spectrum.
+
+This makes those who celebrate voter centrism rather like the fabled statistician who drowned in a river that was 2 feet deep on average. Even if voters are centrist on average, they can be quite extreme on many particular issues.
+
+The result? Reforms that empower voters may not push politicians further to the center — instead, they may encourage politicians to pander to extreme views popular among voters. Indeed, where they have been enacted, many changes that reformers favor — like public funding of elections and top-two primaries — have resulted in politicians doing just this. By seeking to further empower voters in the name of reducing polarization, well-meaning reformers may actually be encouraging dangerous extremism.
+
+Political scientists and pundits alike argue that it would improve governance to devolve political power from the political elites who know the most about politics and policy to the voters who know the least. Polarization scholars hold these uninformed voters in the highest esteem because they look the most centrist on a left-right spectrum. They are also Donald Trump’s base.
+
+Yes, you read that right. Political scientists have long exalted the centrist wisdom of those who now constitute some of Trump’s strongest supporters — the poorly educated authoritarian xenophobes who are attracted to a platform suffused with white supremacy, indulge in unapologetic nationalism and use violence to silence opponents. As commentator Jacob Weisberg has written, these extreme voters’ views are a mix of “wacko left and wacko right” — the key credential one needs to qualify as centrist by scholars’ most popular definition.
+
+Trump’s popularity among these voters should have been no surprise. Their penchant for extremism on many issues has been visible in public polling for years. Indeed, it has been visible for decades: Modern public opinion research itself was founded scholars who had just witnessed World War II and had good reason to be fearful of mass publics’ extremist tendencies.
+
+Yet despite our own country’s populist past, many scholars today resist acknowledging public extremism is even possible. (Reviewers of my research, for example, dismissed as simply too “doubtful” the idea that voters might have some views more extreme than those of elected officials.) A simple conceptual error has blinded them to the true character of the Trump coalition.
+
+Dismissing the public’s susceptibility to extremism is not only naive — it is dangerous. With anti-majoritarian institutions like six-year terms for senators, the Founding Fathers empowered elites to serve as a check on unwise popular passions.
+
+Reformers may find the Founding Fathers’ ideas outmoded. After all, if the public is a homogenous centrist mass, why be afraid of unchecked popular control?
+
+Trump’s rise brings the founders’ wisdom into sharp focus. However, reformers have by now already eliminated nearly every institutional safeguard that would once have stood in Trump’s way to the Oval Office. In previous eras, party elites would be able to more easily foil his nomination at the Republican convention; financial contributions to his competitors would be less limited; and state legislators could have refused to pledge their state’s electoral votes to him. As with insurance plans canceled right before a catastrophe, the upside of these safeguards is only fully apparent when a demagogue like Trump is already doing damage.
+
+This is not to say that elites always have innocent or correct intentions. Outright oligarchy is no better than outright direct democracy, and conservative elites may even have inadvertently abetted Trump’s rise. The point is that the Founding Fathers were right to allow elites and voters to serve as checks and balances on each other. Today’s reformers have altogether forgotten the merits of one side of this equation.
+
+One reason scholars play down the benefits of allowing elites to serve the function the Founding Fathers envisioned is that they characterize today’s political elites as highly extreme. The empirical evidence for this view is also much flimsier than many realize. Today’s politicians strategically exaggerate their disagreements, but on many issues these disagreements are substantively small by historical standards. Indeed, where yawning disagreements existed 50 years ago around issues of trade, regulation, race, taxation, redistribution and foreign policy, there is now a Washington consensus on such matters to which both parties largely subscribe.
+
+Today’s elites certainly take some extreme positions. But the prospect of President Trump does put the allegedly wholesale extremism of today’s elites in perspective. Trump seeks to shatter countless tenets of the Washington consensus in the name of shameless nationalism and overt xenophobia. If he gets his way, the United States would be plunged into a deep recession and millions of lives would be thrown into disarray. That is real extremism.
+
+Students of polarization and pundits alike bemoan a “disconnect” between extreme elites and centrist voters, arguing that voters must urgently be empowered to resolve it. But what if voters would actually like to see today’s politicians become more extreme on many issues? What if many voters actually do, at the end of the day, agree with Trump? In that case, reforms that empower voters may have less appealing effects than supporters argue.
+
+Advocates of reforms would be wise to consider this possibility as they upend centuries-old institutions in the name of democracy. Faithful representation of public opinion is scarcely the sole standard to which representative democracy aspires.
+
+Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein: Republicans created dysfunction. Now they’re paying for it.
+
+Dana Nelson: The growth of executive power has turned politics into war
+
+Jim Marshall: Congress could reduce polarization. It has chosen not to.
+
+Thomas Petri: Our government is messy — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t working
+
+Alan I. Abramowitz: America today is two different countries. They don’t get along.
+
+Jane Mansbridge: Three reasons political polarization is here to stay",REAL
+45,Hillary Clinton shatters $100M fundraising goal,"Clinton's campaign, which started raising money for the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties this quarter through the Hillary Victory Fund, also raised $18 million in the joint fundraising effort, meaning the campaign raised a total of $55 million for the quarter.
+
+In all, the Clinton campaign has raised $112 million for the primary since launching in April. Heading into 2016, the campaign has roughly $38 million cash on hand, according to aides.
+
+The haul, which is larger than even some Clinton aides expected, puts a big number on the board that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders -- her main primary challenger -- is unlikely to top.
+
+""Thanks to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have joined together and powered this historic campaign, we are now heading into Iowa and New Hampshire with the resources we need to be successful,"" Robby Mook, Clinton's campaign manager, said in a statement on Friday.
+
+""Helping Democratic candidates win up and down the ticket is a top priority for Hillary Clinton which is why she's also proud to be doing her part to ensure Democrats have the resources we need to win."" CNN reported earlier this week that Clinton raised at least $21 million at fundraisers she personally headlined in the fourth quarter of 2015, a number that almost guaranteed she would break the $100 million goal. The Democratic front-runner headlined a total of 58 fundraisers in the fourth quarter, a pace identical to the 58 events she headlined in the second and third quarters of 2015. The labor-intensive process, which required Clinton to criss-cross the country on both the campaign and fundraising trail, saw the former secretary of state headline fundraisers in 20 states and Washington, D.C. Thirteen events were in New York, the most of any state, and six were in California. The fourth quarter also saw Clinton get more help than usual on the fundraising trail. Former President Bill Clinton headlined dozens of fundraisers in 14 states and Washington, D.C., including events in Texas, Wisconsin and Ohio, during the fourth quarter. While it will be difficult for Sanders to turn in a bigger haul than Clinton, the Vermont senator is expected to bring in a sizable haul, largely buoyed by his strong online contributions. Since launching his campaign, Sanders has solicited over 2.3 million donations and raised over $40 million -- including a sizable $26 million in the third quarter. Aides have said that the campaign is focused on surpassing 1 million donors by the end of the year. Like Clinton, Sanders also signed a joint fundraising effort with the DNC this quarter, starting to raise money for the national party in November. Clinton aides boasted on Friday that 94% of their donations were in increments of $100 or less and more than 60% of donations were from women. Sign up for CNN Politics' Nightcap newsletter, serving up today's best and tomorrow's essentials in politics.",REAL
+4286,The detente between Trump and Cruz is definitely over,"The mutually beneficial campaign detente between Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) came to an end on the debate stage here Thursday.
+
+The two Republican presidential candidates, locked in a tight race to win the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, argued over whether Cruz meets the constitutional requirements to serve as president and whether Trump is a trustworthy conservative or is tainted by what Cruz called “New York values.”
+
+Theirs was far from the only battle that broke out in the sixth GOP debate of the 2016 campaign season. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) had intensely personal clashes with both Cruz and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Rubio and Christie are both hoping to emerge from the crowded Republican field as the establishment’s champion against the forces of insurgency that Trump and Cruz represent.
+
+Until recently, it was in both Trump’s and Cruz’s interest to avoid a direct confrontation. Cruz was leery of alienating Trump’s supporters — who might come to him, if the incendiary billionaire were to self-destruct. Trump, for his part, did not consider Cruz much of a threat.
+
+On Thursday, they went so far as to question each other’s fitness to govern.
+
+Trump contended that Cruz’s birth to a U.S. citizen in Canada might disqualify him from becoming president because the Constitution decrees that only a “natural born citizen” may hold the office.
+
+“There’s a big question mark on your head. And you can’t do that to the party. You really can’t,” Trump told Cruz.
+
+The senator from Texas retorted that Trump was motivated more by his political prospects than any constitutional concern.
+
+“I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa,” Cruz said. “But the facts and the law here are really quite clear. Under long-standing U.S. law, the child of a U.S. citizen born abroad is a natural-born citizen.”
+
+Then it was Cruz’s turn to go on offense.
+
+Repeating something he first said in a radio interview, Cruz charged that Trump had “New York values” — invoking that city’s reputation, particularly in red-state America, as the bastion of the liberal elite.
+
+“I can frame it another way,” Cruz said. “Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan. I’m just saying.”
+
+Trump responded with indignation, saying New York City is home to “loving people, wonderful people.” He recalled the fall of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, noting the “smell of death” that pervaded the city for months.
+
+“I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York,” Trump said. He added, “That was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”
+
+As Trump and Cruz argued over the latter’s constitutional qualifications to be president, the other candidates struggled to get a word in. Rubio drew applause when he interjected, “I hate to interrupt this episode of Court TV, but I think we have to get back to what this election ought to be about.”
+
+However, when Rubio and Cruz got their chance to go at it, theirs turned out to be an esoteric back-and-forth over the consistency of their Senate votes, particularly on immigration.
+
+After Rubio ticked through votes that he described as flip-flops and political opportunism on Cruz’s part, the Texan said: “He had no fewer than 11 attacks there. I appreciate you dumping your oppo research folder on the debate stage.”
+
+At that point, former Florida governor Jeb Bush interjected: “This latest back-and-forth between two backbench senators, it explains why we have the mess in Washington, D.C.”
+
+Christie, who has often dismissed the Senate as nothing more than a debating society, interrupted another argument between Cruz and Rubio over taxes, saying: “You’ve already had your chance, Marco. You blew it.”
+
+The disputes that broke out during the debate, which was sponsored by Fox Business Network and included the GOP’s seven leading presidential hopefuls, have been simmering on the campaign trail in recent days. The event gave the candidates a chance to confront one another face to face, rather than through their stump speeches, surrogates and allied super PACs.
+
+Among the Republicans, several battles are going on at once. Where Trump and Cruz are each looking to win the caucuses by claiming to be the one who can slay the old order, the field also includes a host of current and former governors and senators.
+
+Nearly as important as which candidate comes in first place is the question of which will emerge from what is being called the “establishment lane.”
+
+Rubio repeated his charge that Christie, the governor of a heavily Democratic state, has a record too liberal for a conservative party. He noted that Christie once supported Common Core educational standards, backed some gun-control legislation and supported Obama’s nomination of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
+
+“Our next president has to be someone that undoes the damage Barack Obama has done to this country,” Rubio said. “It cannot be someone that agrees with his agenda. . . . Unfortunately, Governor Christie has endorsed many of the ideas that Barack Obama supports.”
+
+Turning to face Rubio, Christie accused the senator of being loose with his facts and manufacturing indignation because Christie has emerged as a political threat. He reminded Rubio that he had once called him “a conservative reformer that New Jersey needed,” but that “he’s changed his tune.”
+
+Christie recalled October’s debate, when Rubio responded to an attack from Bush by saying someone had convinced him that Bush had to hit his onetime protege. “It appears that the same someone who has been whispering in old Marco’s ear, too,” Christie said.
+
+As the leading candidates feuded, Ben Carson — the mild-mannered retired neurosurgeon who briefly topped the polls — urged civility. “We have to stop this because, you know, if we manage to damage ourselves and we lose the next election and a progressive gets in there and they get two or three Supreme Court picks, this nation is over as we know it,” he said.
+
+The call did not stop Bush from going after Trump, describing his rival as “unhinged” for his policies on immigration and Muslims and misguided in his plans for high tariffs on Chinese imports.
+
+“This would be devastating for our economy. We need somebody with a steady hand being president of the United States,” Bush said.
+
+Trump responded with an attack on Bush’s personality.
+
+“We don’t need a weak person being president of the United States,” Trump said, returning to an old insult that Bush is ­“low-energy.” “We don’t need that. We don’t need that.”
+
+Trump brushed off criticism of his demeanor, saying, “I will gladly accept the mantle of anger.”
+
+“Our military is a disaster,” he said. “Our health care is a horror show. Obamacare, we’re going to repeal it and replace it. We have no borders. Our vets are being treated horribly. Illegal immigration is beyond belief. Our country is being run by incompetent people. And yes, I am angry.”
+
+The debate came just 48 hours after President Obama delivered the final State of the Union address of his presidency, which included sharp condemnation of the angry GOP rhetoric over Muslims, immigration and other issues. At the debate, the candidates flung zinger after zinger in an attempt to outdo one another in delivering the most visceral condemnation of both Obama and Clinton, his first-term secretary of state and the leading Democratic presidential candidate.
+
+Christie called Obama “a petulant child” and likened his State of the Union to “storytime” because it painted, in Christie’s view, too rosy a picture of the country.
+
+“We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House come this fall,” Christie said of Obama.
+
+The language was just as strident in discussing Clinton. Bush suggested that she “might be going back and forth between the White House and the courthouse” because she is under FBI investigation for her email practices. Then Rubio stepped up the rhetoric and charged that Clinton was “disqualified from being commander in chief.”
+
+When co-moderator Maria Bartiromo asked Cruz about a New York Times report Wednesday that he failed to properly disclose loans from Goldman Sachs and CitiBank during his 2012 Senate campaign, Cruz used the moment to slam “the mainstream media.”
+
+“Yes, I made a paperwork error disclosing it on one piece of paper instead of the other,” Cruz said. “But if that’s the best the New York Times has got, they better go back to the well.”
+
+Although Ohio Gov. John Kasich did not figure in the more contentious exchanges, he sought to appeal directly to frustrated middle- and working-class families.
+
+“People are upset,” he said. “You’re 50 or 51 years old and some kid walks in and tells you you’re out of work and you don’t know where to go and where to turn. Do we have an answer for that? We do.”
+
+David A. Fahrenthold in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+1776,Inside the Trump-Bush melodrama: Decades of tension and discomfort,"Donald Trump spent a day in January 2014 hobnobbing with politicians at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla. The billionaire mogul touted legalizing gambling with state Rep. Steve Crisafulli, speaker of the Florida House, and two other wired Florida Republicans, plugging his properties as potential sites for casinos.
+
+But as they tapped putts on the manicured greens, something else was on Trump’s mind: Jeb Bush.
+
+“He was trashing Jeb and, quite honestly, I don’t think he’s ever held Jeb in high regard,” said Crisafulli, a Bush supporter who said he was “uncomfortable” with the conversation and defended the former Florida governor to Trump. “I’ve met with Mr. Trump on several occasions, and he’s constantly had things to say about Jeb. . . . He’s always had a negative connotation about Jeb.”
+
+Trump’s jeering that day was a harbinger of the taunts and derision that the 2016 GOP front-runner has directed at Bush on the campaign trail this summer.
+
+The feud between the leading Republicans, which has escalated in recent days, is shaping up as a defining dynamic at this early stage of the race. And considering Trump’s dominant status in polls and Bush’s fundraising ability, the tensions between the two are likely to be a factor for weeks or months to come as each candidate attempts to topple the other on his way to the nomination.
+
+The 2016 campaign is only the latest manifestation of decades of discord between Trump and the Bush family. Since the gilded 1980s, when Trump and George H.W. Bush rose as forces in their respective spheres, the relationship between Trump and the Bushes has been a melodrama — veering between displays of public affection and acerbic insults.
+
+At the core, there are clashes of style, manner and class between the Bushes — a patrician clan of presidents, governors and financiers who have pulled the levers of power for generations — and Trump, a hustling New York City deal-maker who turned his father’s outer-borough real estate portfolio into a gold-plated empire.
+
+“The Bushes were never Trump’s cup of tea,” said Roger Stone, a longtime confidant and former adviser to Trump. Asked why the Bushes often have kept Trump at arm’s length, he said: “He’s not from old, WASP money. The Trumps didn’t come on the Mayflower.”
+
+‘He’s not up to snuff’
+
+Trump shrugs off the suggestion that his rivalry with the Bushes is rooted in pedigree, although he is open about his animosity toward them; he characterizes his relationship with former president Bill Clinton, for instance, as far closer.
+
+He lashed out at former president George W. Bush over the war in Iraq during his tenure. He turned on Bush’s father when he raised taxes during his term as president, despite pledging not to do so.
+
+But Trump reserves particular, personal ire for Jeb Bush, whose first name he commonly mocks by drawing it out in a slight drawl. One Trump associate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly, said of Trump: “He’s very smart, he’s driven and he has two goals: one, to be elected president, and two, to have Jeb not be president.”
+
+In a 35-minute interview this week with The Washington Post tracing his history with the Bushes, Trump unleashed a hailstorm of scorn. He found 33 ways to skewer the family — about one put-down per minute.
+
+On Jeb Bush: “I mean, this guy. I don’t think he has a clue.”
+
+On George H.W. Bush: “I really liked the father — really like him as a person. But I hated his ‘read my lips, no more taxes,’ and then he raised taxes monstrously.”
+
+On George W. Bush: “He didn’t seem smart. I’d watch him in interviews and I’d look at people and ask, ‘Do you think he understands the question?’ ”
+
+And back to Jeb: “He’s not up to snuff. . . . Jeb is never going to bring us to the promised land. He can’t.”
+
+Trump was especially accusatory when he talked about Jeb Bush’s work in investment banking. After leaving the governor’s office in 2007, Bush was an adviser to Lehman Brothers and, later, Barclays, making between $1.3 million and $2 million a year. Trump called Bush’s role at Lehman a “no-show job” and suggested it was a reward for helping direct Florida state funds to the firm, whose collapse in 2008 helped kick off the Great Recession.
+
+“That’s a Hillary Clinton kind of situation,” Trump said, referring to the Democratic front-
+
+runner. “This is huge. Let me ask you: Why would you pay a man $1.3 million a year for a no-show job at Lehman Brothers — which, when it failed, almost took the world with it?”
+
+Asked whether he thought Bush was ready to steer the nation’s economy, Trump said, “Steer it? He can’t steer himself.”
+
+Tim Miller, a Bush spokesman, said Trump “is trafficking in false conspiracy theories” about Lehman.
+
+Responding to Trump’s broader criticisms, Miller highlighted the developer’s past ties to Democrats and liberal causes.
+
+“While Trump was attending New York liberal cocktail parties and trashing conservatives and Republican presidents any chance he got, Jeb was the most conservative governor in the country, cutting taxes, reining in the size of government and protecting life,” Miller said.
+
+In Florida, Bush’s associates have been flummoxed by the pace and intensity of Trump’s assaults. Former governor Bob Martinez, a Bush friend and supporter, asked, “Is this the way he acts when he’s negotiating with somebody?”
+
+“Some find it entertaining, some find it odd,” Martinez said. “This is not the normal fare you get, certainly.”
+
+Bush has begun firing back on the stump, though not with Trump’s vigor and mostly without naming his opponent. “There are some people running, they’re really talented about filling space — about saying big things,” he said Wednesday in Pensacola, Fla. “They think that volume in their language is a kind of a version of leadership. Talking is not leadership. Doing is leadership.”
+
+Al Cardenas, another Bush friend, suggested Trump’s motivation is pure politics: “He wants to win this thing, he sees Jeb as the big gorilla with the big super-PAC money and someone who would eventually be the one facing him in the homestretch.”
+
+Cardenas also surmised that Trump had been a non-factor in Bush’s mind.
+
+“In a thousand conversations I’ve ever had with Jeb, I’ve never heard Donald Trump mentioned once until last year,” Cardenas said. “He was just not a part of ‘Jeb world’ in any way that I recall.”
+
+Trump fondly remembers one of his first encounters with the Bush family patriarch. It was 1988, and he hosted George H.W. Bush for a presidential campaign fundraiser at the Plaza Hotel, the palatial New York property Trump owned at the time.
+
+“I remember Don King was there,” Trump said in the interview. “Big Don King. . . . He’s shaking Bush’s hand and saying, ‘Only in America!’ And, you know Don King’s voice. It’s like Pavarotti, right?”
+
+Trump soured on Bush when he increased taxes, but they eventually made amends. In 1997, Trump said, Bush asked him to host a fundraiser for his son, Jeb, who was running for Florida governor. Trump agreed. The event was in his apartment at Trump Tower.
+
+It was not merely a political favor. Trump had been trying to persuade Florida lawmakers to allow his company to manage casinos on tribal land.
+
+“I had a fundraiser and raised about $1 million, which in those days was a lot of money,” Trump said. “In fact, I remember [Jeb Bush] saying, ‘It was the most successful fundraiser I’ve ever had.’ ”
+
+Trump said George H.W. Bush wrote him “a beautiful note thanking me for helping with his son.”
+
+Nevertheless, Trump’s swipes at the elder Bush continued and extended onto the pages of his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve.” In it, he said the 41st president “failed to comprehend that he was in the bubble created by the American presidency and simply lost touch.”
+
+In that same book, Trump praised Jeb Bush as a “good man” who is “exactly the kind of political leader this country needs now and will very much need in the future. . . . I believe we could get another president from the Bushes.”
+
+Trump’s unpredictable commentary led most Bush insiders to keep their distance. Nicholas F. Brady, a family intimate and former treasury secretary, said in an interview that the Bush circle has rarely overlapped with Trump, politically and socially.
+
+As for the pot shots at Jeb these days, Brady said, “He must understand that Donald’s way of expressing himself is different. He tends to short-hop problems and that’s his style. We can’t do much about that.”
+
+Former ambassador Mel Sembler, a Bush family friend and fundraiser, said he attended the 1997 event at Trump Tower and suggested that the current animus must be “newfound.”
+
+“You don’t have animosity toward somebody and then put on a fundraiser in your home,” Sembler said. “I would never put on a fundraiser — and I put on an awful lot of them — unless it was somebody I really felt like would be a great political leader.”
+
+‘I have never tried to click’
+
+In 1999, as then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was consolidating the Republican establishment behind his 2000 presidential candidacy, Trump explored a run of his own in the Reform Party, which grew out of the 1992 independent run of Ross Perot that many Republicans were convinced cost Bush’s father his reelection.
+
+Trump went on CNN’s “Larry King Live” and said Bush had not been forthcoming enough about his problems with alcohol. Later that fall, Trump made a splashy visit to Miami, Jeb Bush’s adopted home town. Rallying Cuban Americans in Little Havana, Trump knocked George W. Bush and then-Vice President Al Gore by saying that his wealth made him more qualified to be president than the two descendants of politicians because they were, as he put it, “anointed.”
+
+In the end, Trump did not run. But by George W. Bush’s second term in the Oval Office, Trump had become a thorn in the president’s side. In the run-up to Bush’s 2004 reelection, Trump criticized his management of the Iraq war. By 2007, he declared that Bush was “a horrible president — possibly the worst in the history of this country.”
+
+Trump said in the Post interview that he blames Bush for the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group, which has seized parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria.
+
+“I was very much opposed to the war in Iraq,” he said. “The brother went in and destabilized the entire region. If [Jeb’s] brother didn’t do that with Iraq, I don’t think you’d have a destabilized Middle East right now.”
+
+During Jeb Bush’s two terms as governor, even as his business interests expanded in South Florida, Trump shunned him.
+
+“I’ve never tried to click,” he said. “If I devoted time to being friendly with them, don’t you think I’d be friendly with them?”
+
+Instead, Trump cultivated ties to Bush allies in Tallahassee, inviting them to play golf or to dine with him in Manhattan or South Florida.
+
+Recounting one outing with former state House speaker Will Weatherford (R), Trump said: “I think they were more impressed with my golf game than anything else, if you want to know the truth. . . . I shot 72.”
+
+Weatherford said this week that he did not remember Trump shooting 72.
+
+“Mr. Trump seems to always have an optimistic view of his abilities,” Weatherford wrote in an e-mail. “I respect him and his candidacy, but I am a Jeb Bush supporter like most current and former public officials in Florida.”
+
+Ed O’Keefe in Pensacola, Fla., contributed to this report.",REAL
+3240,Rand Paul Supporters Walk Out Of Jeb Bush Speech,"A few dozen Paul backers -- many of whom donned red ""Stand With Rand"" T-shirts -- quietly made their way down the middle aisle and out the door during Bush's speech. Once outside the main ballroom at the Gaylord National Convention Center, where Bush was speaking, they rowdily gathered and denounced the man many see as the Republican Party's leading candidate for president in 2016.
+
+""We're here at CPAC, and I almost think it's a joke having Jeb Bush here because he doesn't stand for conservative principles,"" said Timothy Simons, 21, the Connecticut chairman of Young Americans for Liberty and one of the Paul supporters who walked out.
+
+""I was part of the walkout, and I'll tell you why,"" said Allen Skillicorn, vice chairman of the Kane County Republican Party in Illinois. ""If Jeb Bush is nominated, Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. ... How is he any different?""
+
+""I barely know any Jeb Bush supporters that are our age,"" said Charlton, who was decked out in Paul gear. ""No one our age is getting out there and saying, 'Jeb Bush is the one who will help us bring freedom back to America.'""
+
+Ben Levitt, 23, said he came to Washington all the way from Canada just to check out CPAC. He said he may live an hour from the U.S. border, but he has plenty of views about Jeb Bush and why he's no different than his brother and father.
+
+""More wars, more debt, more government,"" Levitt said of what the Bushes are about. ""I mean, a fiscal conservative can't really say, 'Oh, I really love George W. Bush.' You just can't. I loved it for eight years. I loved the Iraq war and all that. I finally saw the light, so to speak, and got really into Ron Paul and that message.""
+
+Inside the auditorium, Bush was well aware that many young conservatives were hostile to him, a fact that was underscored by the tough questions he got from moderator Sean Hannity. Bush refused to cede potential voters, however, saying of those who were booing, “I’m marking them down as neutral. I want to be your second choice.""
+
+His session was dedicated almost entirely to domestic policy, a departure from many of the other speeches by would-be 2016 presidential candidates at CPAC. Bush touted Florida's economic growth under his leadership from 1999-2007, and gave examples of policies he had enacted that would please conservatives.
+
+On immigration, Bush stressed the importance of securing the U.S. border, and he emphasized that immigration policy should be focused on ""economic-driven immigrants"" who bring specialized skills. He also spoke frankly about the need to create a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. ""The simple fact is that there is no plan to deport 11 million people,"" Bush said. ""We should give them a path to legal status where they work … and contribute to our society.” Some in the crowd cheered, but there were plenty of boos, too.",REAL
+779,Ryan on meeting with Trump: 'It’s important we don’t fake unifying',"The Republican party was struggling to heal its deep wounds on Thursday, as House speaker Paul Ryan claimed he was “very encouraged” by his meeting with Donald Trump but again declined to endorse him.
+
+
+
+In a series of eagerly watched meetings on Capitol Hill that drew placard-waving protesters and hundreds of reporters, the presumptive Republican nominee held peace talks with GOP leaders in a bid to unify around something more than hostility toward Hillary Clinton.
+
+Ryan and Trump issued a joint statement that hailed “a very positive step toward unification”, adding: “We will be having additional discussions, but remain confident there’s a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall, and we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal.”
+
+Ryan admitted last week that he was not ready to throw his weight behind Trump, becoming the highest-ranking Republican to withhold his endorsement after a primary election plagued by extraordinary rancour. Despite growing pressure from his own ranks, he declined again on Thursday.
+
+“I think we had a very encouraging meeting,” he told reporters afterwards. “Look, it’s no secret that Donald Trump and I have had our differences. We talked about those differences today. That’s common knowledge.
+
+“The question is, what is it we need to do to unify the Republican party and all strains of conservative wings in the party? We had a very good and encouraging conversation on just how to do that.”
+
+It was important to discuss “core principles” that tie Republicans together, added Ryan, who was running mate to Mitt Romney four years ago and is seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2020.
+
+These included the constitution, separation of powers and supreme court.
+
+“I was very encouraged with what I heard from Donald Trump today,” Ryan said. “I do believe that we are now planting the seeds to get ourselves unified and bridge the gaps and differences, and so from here we’re going to go deeper into the policy areas to see where that common ground is and see how we can operate from those same core principles.”
+
+But he admitted: “This is a process. It takes a little time. You don’t put it together in 45 minutes.”
+
+Asked specifically whether he was endorsing Trump and what was holding him back, the speaker sidestepped by replying: “The process of unifying the Republican party, which just finished a primary about a week ago – perhaps one of the most divisive primaries in memory – takes some time.”
+
+
+
+He added: “It’s very important that we don’t fake unifying, we don’t pretend unification, that we truly and actually unify so we are full strength in the fall. I don’t want us to have a fake unification process here. I want to make sure that we really, truly understand each other.”
+
+Trump’s insurgent campaign has put him at odds with the Republican establishment and won him almost 11m votes, giving him a strong hand in the negotiations. An increasing number of Republicans in Congress have called on Ryan to accept the popular will, despite his objections to Trump on both substance and tone, including his call for a temporary ban on Muslims.
+
+Ryan acknowledged: “It’s really kind of unparalleled, I think. He has gotten more votes than any Republican primary nominee in the history of our country and this isn’t even over yet … It’s really a remarkable achievement.”
+
+The challenge is to keep adding voters without subtracting any through a positive vision based on core principles, he added. “Here’s what we agree on: a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a disaster for this country. It’s effectively a third Obama term.”
+
+Ryan met Trump behind closed doors for 45 minutes at the Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters in Washington along with chair Reince Priebus.
+
+Although he declined to offer specifics on the issues discussed, Priebus described the meeting as a “positive step towards unification” in an interview with MSNBC shortly after its conclusion.
+
+“It was a positive mood, it was a mood of cooperation and a feeling of, it’s time to unify the party. And I think both parties wanted to do that,” he said.
+
+The RNC chair also sought to downplay Ryan’s reluctance to endorse Trump, saying the expectation had been that the primary would continue for another month or two.
+
+“I think everyone was caught a little off guard by how quick it all ended. I think we all were surprised,” Priebus said.
+
+Trump and Ryan were then joined for a second meeting with other members of the House Republican leadership team: majority leader Kevin McCarthy, majority whip Steve Scalise, conference chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers and deputy majority whip Patrick McHenry.
+
+McMorris-Rodgers, like Ryan, has yet to back Trump as the party standard-bearer, while McCarthy and Scalise have said they will support the nominee.
+
+Trump then met with the Senate Republican leadership at the headquarters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
+
+Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was characteristically mum when returning to the Capitol after his sit-down with Trump, offering only that it was “a very good, constructive meeting”.
+
+John Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, used similar words to describe the meeting in a tweet that showed him posing alongside Trump.
+
+Cornyn later told reporters on Capitol Hill that he expected the party to ultimately unite behind Trump.
+
+Among the issues discussed was immigration, Cornyn added, including Trump’s broader tone on the subject.
+
+“There is a way to talk about these issues that isn’t offensive to people,” he said.
+
+A handful of Republican senators joined Trump’s meeting with the leadership: Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Rob Portman of Ohio and Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
+
+Sessions, one of Trump’s chief surrogates, has criticized Ryan’s reluctance to endorse Trump.
+
+
+
+“I think he made a mistake on that. I’m not sure what was in his mind,” Sessions told reporters on Capitol Hill this week. “But I think that can be repaired.”
+
+
+
+Although Senate Republican leaders have been more willing to rally behind Trump, their members find themselves in a decidedly precarious position. Twenty-four Senate Republicans are up for re-election in November, with many facing tough races in key battleground states.
+
+Wicker, who chairs the NRSC, the organization tasked with keeping the Senate in Republicans’ control, has already committed to backing Trump. Following the meeting, the senator reiterated his support for the nominee while adding Trump and GOP leaders had “a very positive and productive conversation today aimed at unifying the party for victory this fall”.
+
+
+
+As the lawmakers huddled with Trump for what is expected to be the first of many meetings, protesters gathered outside to show their disdain for the former reality TV star. Professional organisers from Code Pink held up signs stating “Stop hatred against immigrants”, “Islamophobia is unAmerican” and “Trump is a racist”. Other protesters included so-called Dreamers, immigrants brought to the US as children, from the advocacy group United We Dream. A giant Trump mask and a cardboard coffin were displayed.
+
+Hundreds of journalists flocked to the scene of the meeting, even as the Republicans in attendance declined to address the cameras. A handful of lawmakers who did not participate in the meeting did, however, offer their perspective on what to expect as Trump presses forward with his charm offensive on Capitol Hill.
+
+Chris Collins, a representative from New York who is backing Trump, said he was “baffled” at the assertion by some of his colleagues that they would not vote for Trump in November. But he was confident about Trump’s ability to win over those still on the fence through one-on-one meetings.
+
+“People will see the Donald Trump I know, not necessarily the one you see in the rallies,” Collins said.
+
+Trump’s overtures while in Washington extended even to his fiercest critics. South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who exited the race in December and has openly declared that Trump would destroy the Republican party, told reporters on Thursday that the two had a “cordial, pleasant” phone conversation.
+
+Graham said the 15-minute call centered predominantly on national security, and he provided Trump with his assessment of the nuclear accord with Iran and the war against Isis.
+
+Steps away from the chaos, Democrats at the US Capitol used the opportunity to portray Republicans as belonging to the “Party of Trump”.
+
+The Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, said the meetings served as “the latest sign that the Republican leaders in both houses are marching lockstep with Donald Trump”.
+
+The Nevada senator aimed his fire in particular at McConnell, who threw his support behind Trump last week when it became all but certain that the real estate mogul had clinched the nomination.
+
+“Donald Trump is everything that the Republican leader and his party could ever want in a nominee. His policy positions are identical to the Republican party platform,” Reid said in remarks on the Senate floor.
+
+He then proceeded to tie the GOP to Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric toward immigrants and women, pointing out that Republicans in Congress have blocked action on immigration reform and policies such as equal pay for women and paid family leave.
+
+“Trump owes his candidacy to the Republican leader and to the policies that he’s led,” Reid said. “It was an obstructionist, anti-woman, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, anti-middle class, anti-environment, and anti-Obama and anti-everything Republican party of the last eight years that made Donald Trump a reality.”
+
+Reid’s counterpart in the House of Representatives, minority leader Nancy Pelosi, took a similar approach in tying congressional Republicans to Trump.
+
+“Since when have the House Republicans been so concerned about intolerant statements and discriminatory ideas?” Pelosi said at her weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill.
+
+Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said he read Ryan and Trump’s joint statement “with amusement” and commented: “I don’t know anybody here who’s going to lose any sleep over the meeting.”
+
+Earnest told reporters: “Speaker Ryan has described his view that the entire Republican party, including the presumptive nominee, should rally behind the agenda that Speaker Ryan has put forward. I think the reason he may be encountering some difficulty is he’s the speaker of the House. He should be implementing that agenda already.”
+
+He accused the Republicans of inaction over releasing funds to combat the Zika virus, the Puerto Rico financial crisis and the opioid abuse epidemic.
+
+“Unfortunately the Republicans seem much more focused on the elections than they do on embracing the results of the last elections that gave them a majority in Congress.
+
+“If Republicans had much conviction about their agenda, they’d be trying to implement it now” rather than trying to convince Trump and their own members, Earnest added. “I think that’s why there might be skepticism both inside and outside about whether Republicans actually do have a governing agenda.”",REAL
+189,Republicans' fear: 2 more years of gridlock,"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
+8838,Romania Points Out Flaws With U.S. Election To Encourage Citizens To Vote,"Tomorrow, the U.S. election will take place, and for most Americans, the day couldn’t come soon enough. People aren’t anticipating the 2016 election because they’re looking forward to seeing either... ",FAKE
+4923,The Worst Case for Republicans: Trump Wins,"Republicans enter the fall campaign in moods ranging from grim foreboding to howling despair. They fear that Donald Trump will not only lose but lose so big he will take hordes of other candidates down with him, costing the GOP control of the U.S. Senate and even the House. This election could be the party's worst debacle since 1964.
+
+Republicans don't seem to have prepared for an even bigger catastrophe that could occur Nov. 8: a Trump victory. In that case, they wouldn't be stuck with him for the next two months. They would be stuck with him for the duration of his presidency, and they would have to answer for him forever.
+
+They are in the position of a bride who, on the eve of her wedding day, knows she's making a mistake. If she backs out, she'll bring a mess down on her head. But if she doesn't, she'll be caught in a snare that will be painful and hard to escape, with consequences she will have years to regret.
+
+The first harm from Trump is that he would be the new identity of the party. Forget the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Never mind what Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan propose. He would be the one defining the national agenda. If President Trump wanted to intern Muslims, launch drones against Mexico or put David Duke up in the Lincoln Bedroom, his fellow Republicans would wear the stain.
+
+One of the miseries they have suffered in recent months is waking up each day anxiously wondering what new folly their candidate is about to commit. It's bad enough having to put up with his insulting of a gold star mother, not knowing that Russia has invaded Ukraine, accusing Barack Obama of founding the Islamic State, and retweeting white supremacists.
+
+But all this amounts to an ignorant egomaniac running his mouth. In the White House, Trump would be acting, not just talking. He would possess powers that can be wielded in all sorts of destructive ways. As Republicans have learned from Obama's use of executive authority, it's hard to stop a determined president from doing whatever he damn well pleases.
+
+Scrap NAFTA? Carry out indiscriminate bombing of the Islamic State? Refuse to come to the aid of a NATO ally attacked by Russia? Bring back torture, using methods that would make Dick Cheney weep?
+
+Turn over decisions to advisers who couldn't find their way out of an elevator if you gave them a map and a compass? Dump Melania and start dating? The question is not whether Trump would make bad choices in the White House—only which ones and when.
+
+Since he wrapped up the nomination, Republicans have been hoping Trump would change his reckless style, listen to people who know more than he does, avoid pointless fights and generally behave like a responsible adult. Their hopes have been in vain. He either can't change or sees no reason to.
+
+Winning the election would turbocharge Trump's worst impulses. He would have new grounds to ignore GOP leaders and indulge his every whim. If that approach gets him elected, why would he behave any differently as president?
+
+Maybe Trump would drag the country through four years of chaos and stagnation, trailing broken promises and aborted schemes. Or maybe he would handle the job so irresponsibly that he would provoke his impeachment and removal—an eminently plausible scenario.
+
+The latter outcome would have some special downsides for Republicans. One is that it would saddle them with the herculean chore of defending him at his worst. Another is that it would derail any policy ideas they hope to advance. Then there's the political cost in the next election.
+
+Compared with these nightmares, a Hillary Clinton presidency would have all sorts of advantages. It would give Republicans a unifying focus, mobilize them to block liberal policies, open the way for new conservative leaders to emerge and offer the party a chance to rebound at the polls in 2018. If she were to be embroiled in a White House scandal brought on by her own disregard for the rules, even better for the GOP.
+
+Republicans might remember British statesman Benjamin Disraeli's explanation of the difference between a misfortune and a calamity. For his chief rival to fall into the river, he said, would be a misfortune. The calamity would be if someone pulled him out.",REAL
+7160,Sniveling Cowards and NeverTrumpers Mitt Romney and John Kasich Reach out to Trump – TruthFeed,"Sniveling Cowards and NeverTrumpers Mitt Romney and John Kasich Reach out to Trump Sniveling Cowards and NeverTrumpers Mitt Romney and John Kasich Reach out to Trump Politics By Amy Moreno November 9, 2016 
+Donald Trump won the 2016 election in an epic and historic victory. 
+He cleaned Hillary’s clock. 
+This is what Trump’s electoral map looks like. 
+This looks like a country UNITED. 
+Trump’s victory was a thrashing of the political and media elite – the American people rallied against global stooges like Mitt Romney and John Kasich, two morons who unsuccessfully attempted to STOP Trump every step of the way. 
+Kasich did not vote for Trump, opting instead to help Hillary by writing-in John McCain’s name. 
+Now, however, these twp clowns have changed their tune and tweeted out war congratulations to Donald Trump. 
+Screw them. Best wishes for our duly elected president: May his victory speech be his guide and preserving the Republic his aim. 
+— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) November 9, 2016 The American people have spoken and it’s time to come together. Congratulations President-elect @realDonaldTrump . 
+— John Kasich (@JohnKasich) November 9, 2016 Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+2122,How America is quietly becoming a climate change leader,"Actions by the Obama administration and several states have given the United States momentum in addressing climate change.
+
+Smoke rises from the Colstrip Steam Electric Station, a coal burning power plant in Colstrip, Mont., in this 2013 file photo.
+
+When it comes to the fight against climate change, the United States is often cast as a laggard – if not an outright pariah.
+
+But that portrait is quietly changing.
+
+On one hand, the fundamentals of America’s conflict over the human role in climate change remain unchanged. A cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon emissions remains a nonstarter in Congress, and 41 percent of Americans say global warming has more to do with natural causes than human activity, according to Gallup.
+
+But executive actions by the Obama administration, combined with a host of new laws in key states, mean that the United States is actually already taking significant action against climate change. Not only are these actions making an appreciable dent in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, they are beginning to change how other countries see America’s leadership on the issue.
+
+""The fact that the US is taking these issues more seriously than we were doing five years ago, that means other countries are going to take it seriously as well,"" says Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University Law School.
+
+President Obama has made climate change a focus of his second term agenda and a cornerstone of his legacy as a whole. But facing opposition in Congress, he has turned to executive action and regulation, principally through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
+
+Mr. Obama's stated emissions pledge – made in partnership with China last winter – is to cut carbon emissions to 26 to 28 percent of 2005 levels within the next decade. The pledge is tied to the Clean Power Plan (CPP) – a suite of new EPA regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants. It is expected to go into effect later this summer.
+
+But what makes the CPP feasible, experts say, is what states have already been doing.
+
+“States have been leading the way for a long time in terms of clean energy,” says Elizabeth Ouzts, a spokeswoman for Environment America, an environmental advocacy group.
+
+Seven states have adopted broad caps on emissions, and 28 states have introduced renewable energy requirements, according to a recent report from Environment America. According to the report, state and federal policies currently in action or about to go into action – including the CPP – can hit the targets laid out in the China deal.
+
+""The path has been paved with state-level success and ambition, and the Clean Power Plan directly rose from the success we’ve seen at the state level,"" says Anna Aurilio, director of the Global Warming Solutions program at Environment America.
+
+She says incidents of extreme weather, such as hurricane Sandy and the ongoing drought in California, have served as wakeup calls.
+
+""People are starting to connect the dots between extreme weather events and the need to act on climate change,"" she says.
+
+The first of several deadlines to comply with the CPP standards is 2020, and most states are already two-thirds of the way toward compliance, says Kenneth Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. [Editor's note: The original version of this story misspelled Mr. Kimmell's name.]
+
+""Most states will exceed that 2020 timeline just based on what they’ve already done,"" he adds. ""We do think states are poised to cost-effectively and successfully comply with the Clean Power Plan.""
+
+That means that American negotiators should be able to walk into the United Nations climate change conference in Paris this December with some momentum.
+
+""We always believed that when the US took action domestically it could lead the rest of the world, and that’s in fact what we’re seeing,"" says Ms. Aurilio of Environment America.
+
+The agreement between China and the US ­– the world's No. 1 and 2 polluters, respectively – helped give America more credibility on the world stage. And the CPP helped give America credibility with China.
+
+""We wouldn’t have gotten the commitment from China if hadn’t looked like we were about to implement Clean Power Plan,"" says Mr. Kimmell of the Union of Concerned Scientists. ""I think our seriousness will result in positive action by other countries.""
+
+He adds that he was in Sweden and Denmark recently, talking with people involved in international climate negotiations.
+
+""There's a recognition that it's real,"" he says, referring to US action on reducing carbon emissions.
+
+Many challenges remain, however. On Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled that the EPA improperly streamlined the regulation process when it established new standards for emissions of mercury and other toxic substances.
+
+The EPA says the ruling “does not affect the Clean Power Plan.” But others say it throws the EPA’s entire regulatory regime into question. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R), who comes from the coal-producing state of Kentucky, said the ruling affirmed his advice to state governors to ignore the new power plant regulations.
+
+Regardless of the varying interpretations of Monday's ruling, the CPP is likely to face both legal and legislative challenges. And the US can’t think that the CPP is enough, says Aurillo.
+
+To keep global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius – the consensus scientific target for preventing the worst consequences of global warming – the US must cut its carbon emissions at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by mid-century.
+
+""We should’ve got started with all these steps 20 years ago; the fact we’re taking them on now means we’re going to have to work harder,"" she says.
+
+But she sees reason to hope.
+
+""We’ve seen countries like China, that have never before constructively engaged, come to the table,"" she adds. ""This is a very hopeful time in what has otherwise been a pretty long period of very little action and progress on the global front, so this is huge.”",REAL
+10211,In Consideration of the Supreme Importance of Love,"By Les Visible on November 4, 2016 Visible Origami — Nov 4, 2016 Dog Poet Transmitting……. Welcome to Origami my dear friends. This is the number 779 posting at this blog. I don’t know what that means but it’s a lot of posts. We hope that some of them will have been of value to you. We like to talk about Love a great deal here. We spent decades studying in the Hermetic and Occult Sciences where abstruse concepts and complex schematics are the general nature of the various systems that exist in these areas of inquiry. I used to have some facility with them. I could talk about them in a knowledgeable way. Whether I actually had any real and useful knowledge is another thing. At least I could talk about these subjects as if I knew what I was talking about. Time went by and it became more and more apparent to me that knowing a great deal about certain subjects did not necessarily convey a power of operation in them. I studied palmistry for some time. I knew what all the lines and mounts, digits and bracelets and sundry meant. I knew which hand meant whatever it meant in relation to the other hand but… what I did not have was the single most important element. I did not have the intuitive feed. I studied the Tarot and esoteric astrology and various systems of mind control that hearkened back to earlier times. I studied a lot of things because I had a real thirst for arcane information but I lacked the intuitive feel in all of them except esoteric astrology and in the matter of the Tarot I did have some amount of facility in the areas where fortune telling was not a consideration. I always felt that using the Tarot for fortune telling was unfortunate behavior. Not only did it make you dependent on a method that, except in very rare circumstances, proved to be both deceptive and inefficient but… why seek to read the future when you could change the future? Meditation on the Tarot archetypes will transform your mental state and the very construction of it. This meditation will awaken the archetypes in you so that they resonate in your being with the world external to you. This doesn’t mean difficult conditions will not come upon you. What it means is that you will be on a shorter and faster track to illumination of some kind; we won’t be going into that today. I studied and I studied and I studied and I learned to parse and debate and state, within the parameters of the science and even in a comparative sense with other sciences but I didn’t know anything of value in the sense that I could apply what I had learned to real time accomplishments and achievements in the manifest in a supernatural manner. Sure, this kind of thing happens on a regular basis in my life but not because I have anything to do with it. All of this takes me back to the words of The Preacher in Ecclesiastes; “vanity, all is vanity,” and “there is nothing new under the sun.” It has taken me more years than I wish it had, to learn that only Love is worth the pursuit of it and the Love of the Ineffable is the greatest Love of all. Nothing that I have learned in all of the mystery sciences is the equal of this understanding, nor do any of them have anywhere near the value of it. Here is what I have learned, Love God. I am not speaking in a religions sense because in these times you can’t swing a dead cat in a condo closet without hitting a false prophet. False prophets come in all sizes. They are not all the equal of the Anti-Christ, whoever that might be, like The Pasto and the Anti-Pasto. A false prophet is anyone who manipulates the emotional and mental bodies of their fellows for personal gain, even if that gain is only influence, influence of this kind usually transforms into personal profit on some level. It might be material gain. It might be sexual favors. It might be psychopathic gratification of some kind and it can take place in a small country church just as easily as in a mega church or a massive television ministry. The Aquarian Age is upon us and as a result, all of the long entrenched and much- changed over time- religions are on their way out. The collective faith of humanity is being shaken to its roots and the old ways are passing away. This does not mean that the true teachings of the true teachers will pass away but they will be presented in a new light that is relative to the needs of a new age. The Aquarian Age is supposed to be The Age of Brotherhood and that tells me that the avatar will appear in the collective human heart, where a place has been prepared for it. It will not appear where the false self is occupying the space necessary for the indwelling divine to reside. One does not need to be a follower or practitioner of any particular dogma or form of ritual. One needs only to Love the divine who is one’s own higher self and the reason for this is that that higher self will draw our true self up into its aura of influence, or rather reveal itself to is as our true self. We are all divinity in the process of discovery and unfoldment and Love is the means and the mechanism that can accomplish this. As we reject and expel all of what is false and extraneous in ourselves, we make room for the indwelling divine. Once we have driven all of it out of ourselves, the divine will come forth in our hearts and reign over all things from the throne room within. I have no further use or need for occult information. I am not in the market for anything that is on the market. I can be very glib about some of these things because of a very good memory and an analytic mind that has not lost its objectivity and which doesn’t play favorites in terms of what I want people to think, that is their area of authority and has nothing to do with me but… all the glibness and capacity for articulation in the world is not going to serve the deeper needs of humanity. It might gain you followers and it might get you on some talk circuit and book signing tours and you can lecture to your heart’s content at New Age conventions and seminars and you’ll just be one more Tom Fool among all the rest of the Gleem smiling androids, who pander to the gullible the world over. It will, guaranteed, also get you in the kind of trouble for which I will run long distances to avoid. Put yourself on a pedestal or allow others to do it for you and you might as well paint a target on your back at the same time. The divine and his angels and emissaries see all of this. They see every montebank and charlatan. They see into every sincere and corrupt heart and judgments are passed concerning what phases and states you will be taken through to wake you the Hell up. I would prefer to sidestep the hard massage of Karma upon my being. Love the ineffable and everything else will take care of itself. Love the ineffable with all the intensity that you can muster and your intensity will grow and grow; “success is speedy for the energetic.” God is watching. We need to get into a fluid and continuous mindset of certitude concerning this. We need to remind ourselves through every day that God is watching. God is looking at the world through our very own eyes. We may have convinced ourselves that we alone are seeing and that we alone have access to our mind and heart but this is assuredly not the case. God is everywhere, after one fashion or another. When one has brought their heart and mind to the assurance of the endless presence of God in our being and all around us and yet magically and mystically apart as well, then we will begin to resonate with that ubiquitous presence and it will move through us in an active expression of itself. There was a saint, named St Denis , who is the patron saint of Paris. They cut off his head and he picked it up and put it under his arm and walked off with it. Do I believe this happened in the exact details given? I don’t know. What I do know is that there have been many similar stories. One similar is to be found in Autobiography of a Yogi. Look into the tales that are recorded concerning Appolonius of Tyana (the links will take you to a fuller study of his life) and many, many another unusual character, who has walked among us here over the ages. Some of them had a vast reservoir of occult knowledge and some of them were in possession of divine Love. Some had both. I would prefer to be one of those who carries the love of God in my heart and I want for nothing more. I don’t need to know all of these complexities and these complexities go on and on forever. There are just so many of them. If you have ever looked into Tantra then you have some idea of how intricate the complexities can be. I am not equal to the possession of such information. As fine a mind as I have I am a simple fellow and I can get into trouble very quickly when I get out of my depth and I have no desire to test those waters. So I say to you all, seek the source of all knowledge worth having. Seek the reservoir of immeasurable Love. Seek the source of every good and righteous thing and Love it with all the force that is possible for you and anything you do need to know will be given to you at the time you need it. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all else will be added unto you.” End Transmission…….",FAKE
+4401,Immigration Standoff May End With Another Congressional Punt,"Republicans professed they remained resolved not to fund the Department of Homeland Security without provisions reversing President Barack Obama's expansion of deferred action immigration programs that would allow up to 4.7 million potential recipients to stay and receive work authorization. Democrats, meanwhile, showed no willingness to soften their insistence on ""clean"" DHS funding, arguing that Republicans could now pursue their case against Obama in court instead of in Congress.
+
+With just 10 days before DHS funding runs out, the likelihood of a mini-shutdown seemed high on Tuesday. The congressional recalcitrance wasn't abating, and most lawmakers were home in their districts. Monday night's decision by a U.S. district judge in Texas appeared not to have altered the odds. Behind the public pronouncements, however, talk was turning to another way.
+
+U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen's preliminary injunction preventing DHS from moving forward on Obama's executive action sparked a bit of chatter Tuesday about a short-term funding bill for DHS. Such a bill would last months (as opposed to the end of September), would be clean of any policy riders, and would allow the lawsuit filed by 26 states against Obama's immigration actions to play out in court before Congress fully weighs in.
+
+Aides on both sides of the aisle were reluctant to discuss such a deal for short-term DHS funding, saying it had not come up in any serious way during party gatherings. One Republican aide, who like others would only talk on condition of anonymity, said such an option would only be negotiated toward the end of the funding deadline, if no other solutions are available. Even then, the aide added, it was unclear if the GOP would go for it.
+
+""Right now, for many members, this is about setting a precedent for how things operate for the next two years,"" another GOP aide said. Outside groups on the conservative pole said they agreed.
+
+""I think there is going to be a lot of skepticism about moving a clean, short-term"" funding resolution for DHS, said Dan Holler, communications director for Heritage Action for America. ""There is always a promise there will be a fight on something and there is always an excuse to delay that fight. We are in the middle of it right now. ... To lose that momentum and punt for 30 days doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.""
+
+Congress has a rich history of kicking cans down the road. That's what representatives have already done with DHS funding, separating the agency' budget from the rest of the government in negotiations last year to allow for the current debate over Obama's executive action. To do it again would be a remarkable example of indecision.
+
+But Hanen's ruling and a shortened funding bill may just be the type of off-ramp that some Republicans have been seeking to get the DHS issue behind them without incurring the wrath of their conservative base. As Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), a staunch opponent of Obama's executive actions, said last week: ""My objection to the DHS funding is I don't want to do anything that gives the president the ability to fund the executive amnesty. If a court issues an injunction then I think it would be appropriate for us to consider the possibility of funding appropriations during the pendency of the injunction.""
+
+Any short-term DHS funding bill would inevitably have to win the backing of some Democrats, considering how many Republicans would remain in opposition. But Democratic aides said on Tuesday that they, too, weren't particularly interested in seeing a standoff extended for a matter of months.
+
+Partially, it's because the legal case over deferred action will last far longer than that, making it unlikely that clearer answers will come in the spring. Marshall Fitz, vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, said the administration's appeal of Hanen's ruling may be decided in several weeks. An appeal on whether states have standing to sue the administration, however, could take up to a half-year. Then there will be separate court proceedings over the legal merits of the executive action, provided standing is proven.
+
+""The fight on DHS is not just about executive action on immigration,"" said a Senate Democratic aide. ""It is do we think Republicans should extract policy concessions for keeping all or part of the government open. Our side says absolutely not.""
+
+The third actor in this saga, the White House, has so far stayed away from the congressional wrangling over DHS funding, except to offer support for Democratic demands for a clean bill. Asked about a stopgap option, a senior administration official told The Huffington Post that the Hill should pass a bill without riders that funds DHS for the full year.
+
+Anything less would go against the public warnings of DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who has been emphatic that short-term funding prevents the department from carrying out border security plans, hiring more Secret Service agents and funding new grants for state and local law enforcement.",REAL
+6703,LIVE: Hillary Clinton Addresses Nation for First Time Following Presidential Race,"Choose a topic Choose a topic All information, data, and material contained, presented, or provided on REALfarmacy.com is for educational purposes only. It is not to be construed or intended as providing medical or legal advice. Decisions you make about your family's healthcare are important and should be made in consultation with a competent medical professional. We are not physicians and do not claim to be. Any views expressed here-in are not necessarily those held by REALfarmacy.com © 2016 REALfarmacy.com",FAKE
+5210,Donald Trump is failing at basically everything right now. This poll proves it.,"Donald Trump has had a very tough three weeks on the campaign trail, from a bad first debate to the “Access Hollywood” video to the recent flood of allegations that he groped and made unwanted sexual advances toward several women.
+
+And yet Trump trails Hillary Clinton by just four points in the new Washington Post-ABC News poll — a number that is pretty par for the course for the 2016 election.
+
+But the Post-ABC poll also makes this clear about what Trump is up to these days: He's doing almost everything wrong, and he's doing nothing to grow his support and actually put himself in a position to win.
+
+Trump has spent the better part of the past week arguing that his comments on tape were just “locker room talk,” attempting to cast doubt on the accusations made against him by an increasing number of women and pressing the case that the Clintons' misdeeds are worse than the ones he's alleged to have committed.
+
+The problem is that a majority of voters are buying none of it.
+
+So why hasn't he lost much ground — at least in this poll (other polls last week showed him losing much more and down double digits)? Part of it is rank partisanship. About 4 in 10 likely voters appear willing to give him a pass on most of the things described above.
+
+Those who appear unconcerned are largely GOP-leaning voters already supporting Trump. And that's probably why he remains at 43 percent in a four-way matchup with Hillary Clinton, Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party's Jill Stein.
+
+But that brings us back to the problem that has plagued Trump since the GOP primary: his inability to grow his support among the general electorate. Trump is doing basically nothing in response to his problems these past few weeks that is being met with broad support.
+
+He has long run, and continues to run, a campaign that is very much focused on the Republican Party base, and that base doesn't seem to have deserted him at this point. But that base alone is also insufficient to win an election in the United States.
+
+Trump remains in this race almost completely despite himself and with an assist from Clinton's own popularity problems. Those are problems, we would note, that are largely due to things she did before this campaign — in contrast to Trump. He'll probably see the head-to-head number from this poll showing him down only four points and think he's doing just fine and could still win.
+
+If so, he will be missing the point entirely.",REAL
+10116,"Trump Tells GOP Rally In Jerusalem He’ll ‘Make Israel, U.S. Safe Again’","Breitbart – by Deborah Danan 
+TEL AVIV – Donald Trump told a Republican rally in Jerusalem on Wednesday that he loves Judaism and will work to make “America and Israel safe again.” 
+“I love Israel and honor and respect the Jewish tradition and it’s important we have a president who feels the same way,” Trump said in a video message via satellite to several hundred Israelis and Americans who had gathered for the event. 
+“My administration will stand side-by-side with the Jewish people and Israel’s leaders to continue strengthening the bridges that connect not only Jewish-Americans and Israelis, but also all Americans and Israelis,” Trump said. 
+“Together we will stand up to enemies, like Iran, bent on destroying Israel and her people, together we will make America and Israel safe again,” he added. 
+The event, organized by Republicans Overseas Israel on the rooftop of a restaurant overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, was titled “Jerusalem Forever,” in protest of the recent UNESCO resolutions that erased Jewish and Christian connections to the holy city. 
+Last week, Trump slammed the resolution as a “one-sided attempt to ignore Israel’s 3,000-year bond to its capital city” and “further evidence of the enormous anti-Israel bias” at the United Nations. 
+Trump’s running mate Mike Pence also addressed the event via video, saying that Jerusalem is “the eternal undivided capital of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.” 
+“Donald Trump and I stand with Israel because Israel’s fight is our fight, because Israel’s cause is our cause,” he said. “Israel is our most cherished ally.” Pence added that he and Trump “understand that Israel is not hated by her enemies for what she does wrong but rather for what she does right.” 
+“Like the U.S., Israel is hated by terrorists and the failed states that support them. She is hated by too many progressives, because she is successful and her people are free,” he said. 
+Pence also said Israel’s military defends the Jewish state with “decency, humanity and restraint.” 
+Trump’s adviser on Israel affairs, David Friedman, came to Israel for the event. He promised the crowd that if Trump were elected he would treat Israel very differently than the Obama administration. 
+He added that Trump would make good on his promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. 
+“Under a Trump administration there is going to be no daylight between the U.S. and the State of Israel,” he said. “If there are disagreements they will be handled in private as is done between close friends.” 
+According to Friedman, some 80 percent of registered U.S. voters in Israel are expected to vote for Trump. 
+Many of the Trump supporters at the rally were sporting red “Make America Great Again” hats and said they believed he was the most pro-Israel candidate to lead America. 
+“I’m here today to show support for Donald Trump as he is standing with us, supporting us here in Israel,” the Times of Israel quoted Reuven Ashenberg saying. Ashenberg, originally from Teaneck, New Jersey, now runs the Republican party’s campaign in Beit Shemesh. 
+“He’s the only candidate that’s pro-Israel and we need to show him our support as we’re rallying around the right choice, to help ‘Make America Great Again,’ and thereby helping Israel become great again as well,” Ashenberg said. 
+Abe Marks, who hails from New York and now lives in Jerusalem, said his biggest concern about Hillary Clinton would be who she appoints to the Supreme Court. Her choices “will be destructive to American freedoms and the American way of life.” 
+Marks admitted that while he was not completely “enamored” by Trump, he likes that “he’s not part of the big boys’ club.” Clinton, Marks said, was “under the thumb of the New World Order” and as such he’s “very, very scared of her.” 
+Marks added that, most crucially, Trump will fulfill his campaign pledge to relocate the American embassy to Jerusalem. 
+“They all promise it, but he will actually do it. He has nothing holding him back,” he said.",FAKE
+705,"Pro-Trump, anti-Trump groups clash in San Diego","After issuing orders to the crowd of roughly 1,000 to disperse, police began forcefully and aggressively pushing protesters, checking them with their batons. At least 35 people were arrested, police said.
+
+Even as there was no room to move, police officers continued to push protesters and reporters, with some toppling over in the fray. Police pepper-sprayed several protesters.
+
+In a message to the San Diego Police Department, Trump applauded the officers' response to the protesters.
+
+""Fantastic job on handling the thugs who tried to disrupt our very peaceful and well attended rally,"" Trump tweeted. ""Greatly appreciated.""
+
+Some protesters sitting in a public square refused to move as police officers in riot gear moved in, leading to several arrests. The clashes began after Trump supporters flooded into the streets following the event at the San Diego Convention Center. As bottles fly between protesters & Trump supporters, police move in forcefully, pushing people back with batons pic.twitter.com/o9djxKAHAh — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) May 28, 2016 A few altercations broke out between supporters of the presumptive Republican nominee and protesters opposed to his campaign, particularly Trump's views on immigration. Supporters & protesters now throwing bottles & other objects at each other pic.twitter.com/HOpZvZc5Yr — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) May 27, 2016 Scores of police officers, clad in riot gear and clutching batons, separated the two groups. As protesters and supporters lingered in the streets, some individuals on both sides began throwing eggs, bottles and other objects at each other. As the situation intensified at moments, with several volleys of bottles being tossed between the sides, police officers moved in, forcefully and at times aggressively pushing back Trump supporters, protesters and media caught in the scrum with their batons. But while some violent altercations did break out, the two sides mostly shouted and chanted at each other. Protesters, some of whom waved Mexican flags, shouted ""F--- Trump"" and immigration-focused slogans. Trump supporters countered with chants of ""USA, USA"" and ""Build that wall,"" prompting responses of ""F--- your wall."" This guy with the Free Hugs sign keeps trying to separate protesters & supporters to prevent fights pic.twitter.com/tyQvbXCfio — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) May 27, 2016 One man, wearing a ""Free Hugs"" shirt, repeatedly stepped between the two sides, seeking to prevent physical altercations.",REAL
+7061,Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Just Warned Trump Could Be Assassinated,"40 Views November 09, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+Today former U.S. Treasury Secretary just warned that Trump could be assassinated. 
+(King World News) Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The US presidential election is historic, because the American people were able to defeat the oligarchs. Hillary Clinton, an agent for the Oligarchy, was defeated despite the vicious media campaign against Donald Trump. This shows that the media and the political establishments of the political parties no longer have credibility with the American people… SPEAKING OF GOLD… To find out which company is set to become one of the highest grade producing gold mines on the planet and is one of the greatest precious metals investment opportunities in the world CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored 
+Dr. Paul Craig Roberts continues: It remains to be seen whether Trump can select and appoint a government that will serve him and his goals to restore American jobs and to establish friendly and respectful relations with Russia, China, Syria, and Iran. 
+Will The Elite Make A Move Against Trump? It also remains to be seen how the Oligarchy will respond to Trump’s victory. Wall Street and the Federal Reserve can cause an economic crisis in order to put Trump on the defensive, and they can use the crisis to force Trump to appoint one of their own as Secretary of the Treasury. Rogue agents in the CIA and Pentagon can cause a false flag attack that would disrupt friendly relations with Russia. Trump could make a mistake and retain neoconservatives in his government. 
+With Trump there is at least hope. Unless Trump is obstructed by bad judgment in his appointments and by obstacles put in his way, we should expect an end to Washington’s orchestrated conflict with Russia, the removal of the US missiles on Russia’s border with Poland and Romania, the end of the conflict in Ukraine, and the end of Washington’s effort to overthrow the Syrian government. However, achievements such as these imply the defeat of the US Oligarchy. Although Trump defeated Hillary, the Oligarchy still exists and is still powerful. 
+Trump said that he no longer sees the point of NATO 25 years after the Soviet collapse. If he sticks to his view, it means a big political change in Washington’s EU vassals. The hostility toward Russia of the current EU and NATO officials would have to cease. German Chancellor Merkel would have to change her spots or be replaced. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg would have to be dismissed. 
+We do not know who Trump will select to serve in his government. It is likely that Trump is unfamiliar with the various possibilities and their positions on issues. It really depends on who is advising Trump and what advice they give him. Once we see his government, we will know whether we can be hopeful for the changes that now have a chance. 
+Trump Could Be Assassinated If the oligarchy is unable to control Trump and he is actually successful in curbing the power and budget of the military/security complex and in holding the financial sector politically accountable, Trump could be assassinated. 
+Trump said that he will put Hillary in prison. He should first put her on trial for treason and war crimes along with all of the neoconservatives. That would clear the decks for peace with the other two major nuclear powers over whom the neoconservatives seek hegemony. Although the neoconservatives would still have contacts in the hidden deep state, it would make it difficult for the vermin to organize false flag operations or an assassination. Rogue elements in the military/security complex could still bring off an assassination, but without neocons in the government a coverup would be more difficult. 
+Trump has more understanding and insight than his opponents realize. For a man such as Trump to risk acquiring so many powerful enemies and to risk his wealth and reputation, he had to have known that the people’s dissatisfaction with the ruling establishment meant he could be elected president. 
+We won’t know what to expect until we see who are the Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries. If it is the usual crowd, we will know Trump has been captured. 
+The Discredited Mainstream Media A happy lasting result of the election is the complete discrediting of the US media. The media predicted an easy Hillary victory and even Democratic Party control of the US Senate. Even more important to the media’s loss of influence and credibility, despite the vicious media attack on Trump throughout the presidential primaries and presidential campaign, the media had no effect outside the Northeast and West coasts, the stomping grounds of the One Percent. The rest of the country ignored the media. 
+I did not think the Oligarchy would allow Trump to win. However, it seems that the oligarchs were deceived by their own media propaganda. Assured that Hillary was the sure winner, they were unprepared to put into effect plans to steal the election. 
+Hillary is down, but not the Oligarchs. If Trump is advised to be conciliatory, to hold out his hand, and to take the establishment into his government, the American people will again be disappointed. In a country whose institutions have been so completely corrupted by the Oligarchy, it is difficult to achieve real change without bloodshed. ***ALSO JUST RELEASED: After Trump Shocker, One Market Is In Freefall! And What Is Happening In The Gold Market Is Unbelievable! CLICK HERE. 
+***KWN has now released the extraordinary audio interview with Egon von Greyerz, where he gives KWN listeners a look what is really happening behind the scenes globally and in the gold market, and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
+6315,New French Law Makes It Illegal To Contact Employees After Work Hours,"By Amanda Froelich at trueactivist.com
+The new “right to disconnect” law mandates that a company with 50 employees or more cannot email an employee after typical work hours.
+If you’ve ever been with friends or family members over the weekend then received an urgent email from work, you’re aware of the dread that fills your stomach and causes your mood to dip. Being unable to fully disconnect from work can have mental and physical health implications, which is why unwarranted contact by the workplace is soon to become illegal in France.
+Credit: Wall Street Journal
+Already, the country gives its employees 30 days off a year and 16 weeks of full-paid family leave; this latest initiative is only making France more popular. According to BBC News , the new “right to disconnect” law will mandate that a company with 50 employees or more cannot email an employee after typical work hours. The amendment is largely a result of studies showing that people have an increasingly difficult time distancing themselves from the workplace.
+Good relays that the law seeks to make sure the French citizens are able to fully enjoy their time off. Said Benoit Hamon of the French National Assembly:",FAKE
+365,"Liberal pundits blame Debbie Wasserman Schultz, not Bernie Sanders, for Democrats’ division","Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz says Bernie Sanders added fuel to the fire that raged at last weekend’s chaotic Democratic convention in Nevada, criticizing him for choosing to denounce party leaders before condemning violence in a written statement.
+
+“She says that Bernie’s adding fuel to the fire? She just added fuel to the fire,” Jones said Tuesday, shortly after Wasserman Schultz said in an interview that Sanders’s response to reports of a scuffle and threatening behavior by some of his supporters was “anything but acceptable.”
+
+The problem that we have right now is that there has been this concern on the part of Bernie’s people that the DNC has been on Hillary’s side. ... First of all, Bernie did say, in his statement, that he’s against the violence. Also, if you want to talk about violence, only one person’s been arrested — it was a Hillary Clinton supporter, Wendell Pierce, arrested for assaulting a Sanders supporter. So, if you’re going to come out and you’re going to talk about violence and you’re the DNC chair, you have to be fair about it. I don’t think she was fair. I think she actually made it worse now. We have to pull these people together. That did not happen.
+
+MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski went farther than Jones on Wednesday, calling for Wasserman Schultz to resign.
+
+“This has been very poorly handled from the start,” Brzezinski said. “It has been unfair, and they haven’t taken him seriously, and it starts, quite frankly, with the person that we just heard speaking [Wasserman Schultz]. It just does. ... She should step down. She should step down.”
+
+Fellow MSNBC host Chris Hayes, meanwhile, said Tuesday that it’s clear that Wasserman Schultz’s fingers are on the scale.
+
+“It is clearly the case that when given truth serum, Debbie Wasserman Schultz vastly prefers Hillary Clinton to be the nominee, obviously, and to the extent that there are things that can be done institutionally and marginally to facilitate that outcome, they are being done,” Hayes said.
+
+As the Democratic presidential nominating contest drags on — with the Republican race already over — left-leaning pundits are increasingly pinning the blame for disunity on the party boss, instead of the underdog candidate who refuses to drop out. Sanders might be stubborn, but Wasserman Schultz drove him to it by favoring Clinton from the start. Or so the argument goes. And the situation in Nevada seems to have turned up the heat on some long-simmering tensions.
+
+Top complaints include briefly suspending the Sanders campaign’s access to a voter database and scheduling half as many primary debates (six) as the Republicans did — and putting half of those events on weekend nights, allegedly to minimize exposure and insulate the front-runner.
+
+The database suspension was a penalty imposed after Sanders acknowledged that a staffer improperly exploited a software glitch that allowed him to view confidential voter information held by the Clinton campaign. The DNC eventually sanctioned four additional debates, though only three have been held and there is no date for the fourth.
+
+The left side of the media has been criticizing Wasserman Schultz’s handling of the primary process for a while. “Fire Debbie Wasserman Schultz,” blared a to-the-point headline on the Huffington Post in December. On the same day, Slate declared that “Debbie Wasserman Schultz is acting just like the villain Bernie Sanders says she is.""”
+
+More recently, Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce called for Wasserman Schultz’s ouster in March (though for reasons unrelated to the 2016 primary),
+
+The liberal press isn't alone in its frustration. As The Fix’s Janell Ross wrote in January, “Wasserman Schultz’s list of enemies just keeps growing” — a list that includes some fellow Democrats and progressive advocacy groups. The consternation dates to at least 2014, when Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote a lengthy piece about unhappiness with her performance.
+
+As of Thursday morning, a MoveOn.org petition calling for Wasserman Schultz to resign had 76,146 digital signatures. A similar petition at Change.org had 60,525. Another on CREDO Action’s website had 86,291.
+
+It’s clear that Wasserman Schultz is in a difficult spot — one she almost certainly didn’t anticipate at the beginning of the election season. Sanders made the Democratic race far more competitive than anyone imagined. But as he delays the inevitable, Wasserman Schultz finds that she, too, is being cast as a divisive figure by the media.
+
+On top of it all, the perception could be virtually impossible to shake. While Sanders will ultimately be judged by the extent to which he rallies supporters to Clinton in the general election, Wasserman Schultz is already being judged by moves she made early in the primary season that can’t be reversed. Sanders backers might always believe their candidate didn’t get a fair shake, and those accusations will probably be part of Wasserman Schultz’s media narrative for a long time to come.",REAL
+5876,"“Wikileaks is the Mossad, Stupid, Not the Russians, We are playing them like a fiddle…” Assange (sort of)","Russian experts collecting evidence of anti-govt chemical attack in Aleppo – Defense Ministry ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board “Wikileaks is the Mossad, Stupid, Not the Russians, We are playing them like a fiddle…” Assange (sort of) By GPD on November 3, 2016 
+[Editor’s note: John Pilger was identified long ago as an Israel operative by author Jeff Gates. Wikileaks by VT and Zbigniew Brzezinski. RT was identified some time ago as “penetrated.” Both RT and Sputnik News have been used and, to some extent, “turned” to seem propaganda-like, more than usual and to make them an easy target. This is huge damage to Russia. g] 
+In a John Pilger Special, to be exclusively broadcast by RT on Saturday courtesy of Dartmouth Films, whistleblower Julian Assange categorically denied that the troves of US Democratic Party and Clinton work and staff emails released this year have come from the Russian government. 
+“The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source,” Assange told the veteran Australian broadcaster as part of a 25-minute John Pilger Special, courtesy of Dartmouth Films. 
+Assange, who spoke with Pilger at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been for four years, also accused the US presidential candidate of being a pawn of behind-the-scenes interests, and voiced doubts about her physical fitness to take charge of the White House. Assange claims ‘crazed’ Clinton campaign tried to hack WikiLeaks 
+“Hillary Clinton is just one person. I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person, because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick – for example faint – as a result of going on, and going with their ambitions. But she represents a whole network of people, and a whole network of relationships with particular states.” 
+Over the past nine months, WikiLeaks uploaded over 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, while she was Secretary of State. This was followed by nearly 20,000 emails sent to and by members of the US Democratic National Committee, exposing the party leadership’s dismissive attitude to Bernie Sanders, and his outsider primaries campaign. 
+Finally, last month, WikiLeaks posted over 50,000 emails connected to John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and a close associate of the current presidential frontrunner. 
+The Homeland Security Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted a joint statement in October, claiming they were “confident” that the Russian government “directed” this year’s leaks. 
+Moscow has rejected the accusation, with presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov calling the claims “nonsense,” while Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the “public bickering with Russia” before the US election is probably a “smokescreen” to draw the voters’ attention away from serious domestic issues. Related Posts:",FAKE
+9758,BREAKING: Obama Now Considering Martial Law Because Of Mass Riots | EndingFed News Network,"Email Print In every competition out there, there will be a winner and a loser. It’s just the way that competitions work. Literally everywhere you go there are competitions going on and there are always winners and losers. When we are children, we are always taught to be gracious losers. Yes sometimes losing a tough competition hurts, but if you accept it graciously, people will always praise your character. The problem with today’s young generation is that they have forgotten how to lose graciously. Since the announcement that Donald Trump has won the presidential election, liberals have been protesting this victory. They’re literally ignoring everything that has been taught to them since we were children. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like the result; Trump won the election and that is a fact. But these protests continue and there is one person that seems to be the mastermind behind it. That would be the ultra liberal billionaire George Soros. He was also responsible for financing some of the protest groups that was designed to have violence at the Trump rallies. During the election season, it was discovered that Soros was behind some of the protestor’s actions. He was paying them to create a scene and cause violence that would have the media talking about the Trump rallies. Now this shouldn’t have been happening in the first place but it was. And now that Trump has been elected president of the United States, there are people that are out on the streets protesting his victory. It’s a little ironic considering that liberals were the ones that were complaining about how Trump wouldn’t accept the election results if fraud was detected. Here is the issue though. There are people out on the streets that are protesting a presidential election. These are the same people that were the ones inciting violence at the Trump rallies. And those people were paid by Soros to start, so it’s likely that he is the one that is paying them to start civil unrest now. And there is a specific reason that Soros wants to have violence at the protests. That would mean that President Obama would have to declare Martial Law. This is how it works. It’s literally a domino effect. There are people out protesting the election results. But when they start having mass amounts of violence at the protests then the entire country is going to start noticing. If that happens then there is going to be pressure on the president to solve it. President Obama would then declare Martial Law. Martial Law is when the president has to suspend transfer of power due to the fact that there is a “National Emergency.” Therefore if that would happen then Trump wouldn’t be able to see the White House because Obama would still be the president of the United States. There is a good chance that this has been the back up plan for some liberals all along. And there is proof out there that the protests are staged. There are protests going on all over the United States and in one part of the nation, Austin, Texas, they found the buses that were used to bring the people in. Again these are planned in order to create civil unrest. And there is more proof. The signs that the people brought to the protests were all created and printed by groups related to the Soros cause. You can’t just print thousands of signs on a whim. These events have to be planned and thought out. And that is exactly what was happening. Finally the last bit of proof was that the Democrats and Soros have paid people to protest and create a disturbance at Trump events before. Since they have done it in the past, they are definitely going to do it now. And the Democrats are willing to pay them to create this disturbance. But the scariest part about all this is the fact that people are actually volunteering to protest the election just because Trump won. Again we are taught from a young age to accept defeat with graciousness. Right now they are acting like a bunch of spoiled kids because they didn’t get their way. And now there is a possibility that Obama is going to declare Martial Law because of these protestors. They couldn’t accept the fact that the country spoke and they wanted Trump in charge. But now they are actively interfering with a Democratic election because they want to complain about the choice. Again this is all most likely due to Soros. And he has had a hand in it before. He wants to see a globalized country and that means that he will do whatever he can to make it happen. That includes ordering an attack on Trump Tower in Chicago . That was where some of the protests in the country were happening. But he also had a hand in trying to fix the election. In 16 States they were using voting machines that were being produced by Soros controlled companies . Of course that meant that he was going to do what he could to rig the election. It most likely wouldn’t have mattered if you voted Trump; the machines were going to submit for Clinton. Share this article to show people that Soros has a plan for all of these protests. He wants to make sure that they create enough of a civil disturbance that Obama will declare Martial Law and stop the transfer of power from him to Trump. That way the globalist agenda could still happen. H/T: Conservative Daily Post However the best option is to not engage with the people that are out there. It’s like handling a two-year-old child that is throwing a temper tantrum. If you just ignore them they will settle down. Therefore just ignore the protestors and don’t engage with them. 
+If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
+1640,Sanders draws early support for White House bid from long-time union allies,"Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is getting support from unions members across the county that includes a mix of long-time political backers and potential voters apparently wary of party frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Wall Street and Big Business.
+
+Sanders has already gotten support from one of the country’s most influential labor leaders, Larry Cohen, the outgoing president of the roughly 700,000-member Communications Workers of American.
+
+Cohen cited Clinton’s failure to publicly oppose giving President Obama so-called “fast-track” approval on trade deals under the pending Trans Pacific Partnership legislation, which unions argue, if approved, would send manufacturing jobs overseas.
+
+He also told The Huffington Post that organized labor is not a rubber stamp for the Democratic Party “and certainly not for corporate Democrats.""
+
+And the grassroots group Labor for Bernie 2016 has already pulled support from hundreds of union members with similar concerns.
+
+“While we come from different unions and backgrounds, our goal is a government that carries out the will of the people, not prop up the profits of the 1 percent at the expense of the rest of us,” reads a letter on the group’s website that already has 1,109 signatures.
+
+Some AFL-CIO chapters have also expressed support for Sanders, including ones in South Carolina and Vermont, which has resulted in group President Richard Trumka reminding state and local divisions of the labor federation that only national leadership can announce an endorsement, as reported first by Politico.
+
+Though Trumka was in fact citing existing bylaws, the announcement was seen by some as an attempt to quell the Sanders uprising, considering Clinton and her well established campaign, right now, have a much better shot at beating Republicans in the 2016 White House race.
+
+Democratic-leaning strategist Kelly Grace Gibson told FoxNews.com this week that Clinton and Sanders each have a grassroots following, though perhaps not composed of exactly the same people or groups. And she argued that a unified endorsement like the one the AFL-CIO gave President Obama late in his 2008  primary race against Clinton has a bigger impact.
+
+“The purpose of the whip-cracking is … Trumka is trying to maintain the importance and weight of the endorsement,” she said.
+
+Republican leaning strategist and lobbyist Matt Keelen say that ""at the grassroots level, most Democrats, at least those being talked about in the news anyway, are not particularly thrilled with (Clinton’s) corporatist, crony capitalist, Democratic strategy.”
+
+Clinton, Sanders and fellow Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley, a former Maryland governor, reportedly have been invited to meet privately and separately with the members of the AFL-CIO’s executive council when they gather in late July in suburban Washington.
+
+Meanwhile, Sanders, a progressive, continues to draw large crowds at campaign events, including 10,000 recently in Madison, Wis., more than 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa and 7,500 this week in Portland, Maine.
+
+Sanders also has significantly cut into Clinton’s lead, according to a recent CNN/WMUR New Hampshire primary poll.
+
+The poll shows Sanders has cut the lead from 38 percent to 8 percent in roughly the past two months, 43-to-55- percent, compared to 51-to-13 percent in May.
+
+That Sanders is now getting union support and financial backing is no surprise, considering he has been a long-time champion for organized labor.
+
+The top-5 campaign committees and leadership PACs for Sanders since 2009 are Sheet Metal Workers ($27,500); Communications Workers of America ($23,000); American Postal Workers ($20,000) Unite Here ($20,000) and Machinists/ Aerospace Workers Union ($20,000), according to OpenSecrets.org.
+
+The group LaborUnionReport.com also conducted an informal survey recently in which respondents favored Sanders over Clinton 76 percent to 11 percent and reportedly cited such factors as Clinton's silence on the trade pact, her having worked for the Rose law firm, which helped employers fight unions and her having been a member of the Walmart board of directors.
+
+Still, Sanders, a self-described socialist, will have a difficult path to victory even if he wins the union endorsement, considered essential for any Democratic presidential candidate.
+
+Beyond Clinton’s much larger war chest, she also has a far bigger and more-organized campaign operation and Capitol Hill endorsements.
+
+The Hill reports Clinton has endorsements from at least 26 of the 69 Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
+
+“I think it’s clear to say that Clinton is the candidate for most members of Congress and the Democratic establishment,” Sanders told the newspaper.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4958,Why Trump’s warning of ‘rigged election’ isn’t credible,"Donald Trump keeps saying that voter fraud could cost him the election, a charge that threatens confidence in US elections. But there's no evidence the type of fraud he alleges is rampant.
+
+Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wait for his arrival at a campaign rally at the University of North Carolina Wilmington on Aug. 9. The GOP presidential nominee claimed Clinton supporters could vote 15 times without a voter ID law.
+
+Donald Trump has been claiming, of late, that if he loses in November, it will be because the election was “rigged.” After all, he says, look at the big, enthusiastic crowds he attracts at his events.
+
+Of course, massive crowds do not necessarily foretell victory. Often they are more a sign of passion and devotion, or the entertainment value of a candidate, and don’t guarantee success – as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders saw in his losing battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.
+
+Mr. Trump, it appears, is preparing the groundwork to lose, as his poll numbers in key electoral battlegrounds sink. In the meantime, he’s calling on his supporters to register online as volunteer election observers, and in the process is also gathering voter contact information and asking for contributions. So in a way, the “rigged election” cries are just another avenue for voter engagement.
+
+But more ominously, Trump threatens to delegitimize the outcome in November, if he loses and convinces his supporters that Hillary Clinton stole the election. That could undermine the very fabric of American democracy.
+
+“Something like this is unprecedented, as far as I know – where a major presidential contender openly raises doubts about the legitimacy of an election before the vote, and without any evidence,” says Matthew Kerbel, political science chairman at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.
+
+What’s more, it would be “extraordinarily difficult” to rig a presidential election in the way Trump suggests, Professor Kerbel says. “You’re talking about rigging an election in the Electoral College, where you would have to rig a combination of states.""
+
+Perhaps the biggest protection to US elections is their decentralized nature. The US Constitution and federal law give states broad leeway in how they run elections, resulting in a multitude of voting systems, even within states. So to rig the results of a national election at the ballot box or with absentee ballots, a vast conspiracy would be required.
+
+Trump has centered his allegations of planned cheating in a handful of key states. In Pennsylvania, he has bemoaned the fact that the commonwealth does not require a voter to present photo identification to cast a ballot.
+
+“We don't want to see people voting five times, folks,” Trump said last Friday in Altoona, Pa. “I don’t even know, maybe you should go down and volunteer or do something. But without voter ID, there's no way you're going to be able to check it properly.”
+
+Earlier in the week, in Wilmington, N.C., Trump suggested that Clinton supporters could now vote “15 times” for her, given the federal appeals court ruling last month rejecting the state’s voter ID law. The law, which also ended same-day registration and shortened the state’s early-voting period, had a racially “discriminatory intent,” the ruling said.
+
+Trump has also raised the prospect of voter fraud in Ohio, another critical battleground state.
+
+But the kind of cheating Trump envisions on a mass scale is virtually impossible to pull off – including in states that don’t require the showing of a photo ID. Even in such states, to vote 10 or 15 times, one would have to go to 10 or 15 different polling places and provide the names and addresses of people who live in those precincts and had not yet voted.
+
+The call for “Trump Election Observers” creates the appearance that in-person voter fraud is common. But election experts call the rate of such fraud vanishingly small. In 2014, an investigation by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, found only 31 credible incidents of voter impersonation out of 1 billion votes cast in the US between 2000 and 2014.
+
+To put that number in perspective, someone is more than three times more likely to win the jackpot in Pennsylvania's Cash 5 lottery as they are to have impersonated another voter.
+
+What’s more, Professor Levitt points out, people in states with voter ID laws did not have greater confidence in the integrity of their elections than voters in states without such laws.
+
+“The factor that really influences whether people think the elections are fair? Whether their preferred candidates win,” Levitt writes.
+
+Another issue for the Trump campaign is the matter of a 1982 court order that limits the Republican National Committee’s ability to challenge the eligibility of voters at polling places. The order bars the RNC “and its agents” from engaging in voter intimidation, especially in areas with large minority populations. The Trump campaign could plausibly be judged “an agent” of the RNC, says election law expert Rick Hasen of the University of California at Irvine, and thus the Trump observers’ activities could risk violating the order. And that, he says, could extend the order beyond its Dec. 1, 2017, expiration.
+
+Trump’s warnings of a rigged election could have another offshoot: suppressing his own vote. One recent poll shows a decline in the likelihood that Trump supporters will turn out, a trend that election data guru Nate Silver suggests may be linked to Trump’s message about fraud.
+
+In addition, a recent experiment by two academics suggested that the message of a “rigged election” was less effective at mobilizing voters than a more positive message, “registering is quick, easy, and free.”
+
+Trump voters already appear primed to believe that if he loses in November, it will be because the election was rigged. A Bloomberg poll released last week found that 34 percent of all voters, and 56 percent of Trump voters, believe the election results will be rigged.
+
+In a poll of North Carolina voters last week by the Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, fully 69 percent of Trump supporters said they believed that if Clinton wins the election, it will be because the election was rigged.
+
+Of course, American history is replete with examples of election hanky-panky over the years, including ballots being cast by dead people.
+
+The contested presidential election of 2000, which boiled down to a 537-vote margin in Florida and ultimately a ruling by the Supreme Court, remains a hotly debated episode. In 2004, some Democrats were convinced that their nominee, John Kerry, was the victim of voter fraud in Ohio – a state that, had he won, would have handed him the election.
+
+What’s different now is that Trump’s charges are being leveled well before Election Day. And he’s not even focused on what could pose a real threat to the integrity of American elections: hackers.
+
+“There’s vital interest in our election process,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said at a Monitor breakfast Aug. 3. ""We’re actively thinking about the election and cybersecurity right now.""
+
+In a phone call Monday, Secretary Johnson offered federal assistance to state officials in managing the risk to voting systems.
+
+For Trump, the claim that fraud could swing the election is losing its salience, as his poll numbers head south. Irregularities matter only in a close election, and as of now, it’s not looking close. But no one is calling the election over, and the “rigged election” argument isn't going away.",REAL
+10161,"Insider Leaks Bill’s 2-Word Nickname For Hillary, Exposes Dirty Sex Habits","Insider Leaks Bill’s 2-Word Nickname For Hillary, Exposes Dirty Sex Habits Posted on October 26, 2016 by Robert Rich in Politics Share This 
+Bill and Hillary Clinton just can’t stay out of the spotlight these days, and the most recent leak about them could be the most damaging yet. As it turns out, someone once close to the duo just came forward to share Bill’s revealing nickname for his wife — but the worse comes as their dirty bedroom habits were exposed. Bill and Hillary Clinton (left), Photoshopped image of Hillary (right) 
+It’s no mystery that Bill Clinton is a sexual deviant, but the most recent account given by the woman who had a 3-decade affair with the man is damning, to say the least. According to an exclusive interview given to Mail Online , Dolly Kyle was behind the scene’s long enough to not only know the two’s darkest secrets but even their dirty sexual habits – and now, she’s telling everyone. 
+The connection between Dolly and Bill began when she was just 11-years-old. He was about 13-years-old at the time, but Dolly states that there was an immediate attraction, even then. As the years progressed, the two became romantically involved and stayed that way through several of their marriages over the next 30 years. Dolly Kyle (Source: Mail Online ) 
+The real affair began in 1974 just after Dolly divorced her first husband, and although Bill wasn’t married yet, he would be within the year. Although she was never interested in sharing the intimate details of the relationship, she states that she snapped when she heard Hillary recently say that all sexual assault victims have the “right to be believed.” 
+Knowing full well just what Hillary had done – between the threats and the lies – to the many women who either had an affair with or were sexually assaulted by her husband Bill, Dolly knew she had to do something about it. Unfortunately for Hillary, Dolly is now coming forward with the dirty 2-word nickname Bill husband once called Hillary, among other things. 
+According to Mail Online , Bill approached Dolly at their high school’s 35-year reunion to talk about “ the warden ” – a.k.a. Hillary. Saying he was unhappy with his life and marriage, this was the least significant account Dolly had to share. A very unhappy Bill and “the warden” Hillary Clinton (Source: Mail Online ) 
+In fact, Dolly recalls that Bill mentioned something about having a baby to her. Although she thought he was saying he wanted to have one with her, he was actually talking about Hillary. He wanted to put to bed the rumors that Hillary was a lesbian, even though everyone in their hometown already knew it to be true. 
+Dolly states that the worst came when she met Hillary for the first time. “In that moment I noticed that the woman emitted an overpowering [body] odor of perspiration and greasy hair. I hoped that I wouldn’t gag when she got in my car,” she said. “The sandal-shod woman with lank, smelly hair stood off to the side and glared at everyone.” Bill and Hillary Clinton (Source: Mail Online ) 
+No wonder Bill went elsewhere to fulfill his “sexual addiction,” as Dolly referred to it. After all, what else can you do when you’re married to a stinky woman who doesn’t shower and isn’t attracted to men anyways? Although an affair is never justified, it’s easy to sympathize with Bill on this one. But, I digress. 
+The bigger point here is what the two are willing to do in order to remain in power. Most people know that you can’t trust Hillary as far as you can throw her – which isn’t very far – so the fact that she has any supporters is beyond baffling at this point. This woman is corrupt and fake to the core. Let’s just hope all of America wakes up to this reality before it’s too late and she can do any more damage than she already has.",FAKE
+9577,TRUMPED! LIBERAL NEWS OUTLET BLOOMBERG POLL CONCEDES TRUMP BEATING CROOKED HILLARY IN FLORIDA,"TRUMPED! LIBERAL NEWS OUTLET BLOOMBERG POLL CONCEDES TRUMP BEATING CROOKED HILLARY IN FLORIDA by IWB · October 27, 2016 
+by Geoffrey Grider DONALD TRUMP HAS A SLIM ADVANTAGE IN FLORIDA AS CRITICAL INDEPENDENT VOTERS NARROWLY BREAK HIS WAY IN THE MUST-WIN BATTLEGROUND STATE, A BLOOMBERG POLITICS POLL SHOWS. I can’t speak for south Florida , but as a longtime resident of north Florida I can promise you that there is a near frenzy of support for Donald Trump here. Over the past year I have seen endless amounts of Trump signs, stickers and banners. I saw a fair amount of pro-Bernie stuff as well. But pro-Hillary advertising? It’s practically non-existent, I haven’t even seen half a dozen stickers and absolutely zero lawn signs. So I find it astonishing when I turn on the “news” and hear the libs talking about Hillary’s double-digit lead over Trump. It’s not true, don’t believe it. Donald Trump is doing great and is on track to win the White House in just under two weeks. The Republican presidential nominee has 45 percent to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 43 percent among likely voters when third-party candidates are included, the poll found . In a hypothetical two-way race, Trump has 46 percent to Clinton’s 45 percent. DONALD TRUMP RALLY IN SAINT AUGUSTINE DRAWS TENS OF THOUSANDS: 
+With over 4,000 people already inside the Saint Augustine Amphitheater, I took 60 seconds to do a walk-thru of just a fraction of the thousands of people in the overflow section who stood there for hours waiting to see Donald Trump. This is the type of support Trump has here in Florida. Among independents , Trump gets 43 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent in a head-to-head contest. When third-party candidates are included, Trump picks up 1 point with independents while Clinton drops to 37 percent, with Libertarian Gary Johnson taking 9 percent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein getting 5 percent. “This race may come down to the independent vote,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who oversaw the survey. “ Right now, they tilt for Trump . By a narrow margin, they opted for Obama over Romney in 2012.” Trump’s showing in this poll is stronger than in other recent surveys in the state. Trump is also surging ahead of HIllary in Ohio and and is rapidly closing the gap in Pennsylvania. CNN ANCHOR’S STUNNED WHEN FACT CHECKER CONFIRMS HILLARY’S CORRUPTION:",FAKE
+5440,Trump and all the other far right leaders are Zionist stooges,"  Ian Greenhalgh is a photographer and historian with a particular interest in military history and the real causes of conflicts. His studies in history and background in the media industry have given him a keen insight into the use of mass media as a creator of conflict in the modern world. His favored areas of study include state sponsored terrorism, media manufactured reality and the role of intelligence services in manipulation of populations and the perception of events. Trump and all the other far right leaders are Zionist stooges By Ian Greenhalgh on October 27, 2016 Naming Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain and Marine Le Pen in France, the UN accused them of employing ""fear"" tactics similar to those of the Islamic State group. [Editor’s note: U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein has really hit the nail on the head here. Not only has he correctly pointed out that Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine LePen, Geert Wilders and the rest of the far-right leaders employ the tactics of fear and bigotry but he also correctly identifies their agenda as being the promotion of hatred with the eventual result that ‘colossal violence’ will ensue. However, he does not go far enough in exposing these scumbags, most likely because he knows he would be placing himself in the crosshairs of the Zionists who stand behind these puppets. What went unsaid is that all of these people are stooges for the Zionists and Israel, they are tasked with creating horrible divisions in our societies, turning white against brown and black, Christian against Muslim, indigenous against migrant. This is the Zionist agenda to weaken and enslave via the strategy of divide and conquer, as laid out in the Protocols of Zion. They want to destroy our nations by promoting inter-racial hatred and violence; they want to see the nation states of the west burn down in a wave of racially motivated violence; that is why Trump spouts such hateful and disgusting rhetoric against Mexicans, blacks and Muslims, it is to promote a race war that would devastate America. Ian]",FAKE
+9347,CONTROVERSIAL NEW ‘ANTI-FAMINE’ GMO POTATO STRAINS APPROVED,"Home › HEALTH | US NEWS › CONTROVERSIAL NEW ‘ANTI-FAMINE’ GMO POTATO STRAINS APPROVED CONTROVERSIAL NEW ‘ANTI-FAMINE’ GMO POTATO STRAINS APPROVED 0 SHARES [11/3/16] The US Department of Agriculture has given its seal of approval to two new strains of genetically engineered potatoes. By using double stranded RNA, the potatoes have been engineered to resist the pathogen responsible for the Irish potato famine. 
+There could be two new potatoes hitting the soil next spring after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) signed off on two more genetically modified potatoes from Simplot, an agribusiness based in Idaho, on Monday. 
+The only obstacle for the new potatoes becoming available on the market is a voluntary review process from the FDA, much to the chagrin of GMO skeptics. 
+Jeffrey Smith, founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology, expressed concern for not only the FDA’s voluntary testing program but for the genetic modifying process the potatoes have undergone, in an interview with RT. 
+“ It makes sense on paper, ” he said of the potatoes that are purported to be resistant to blight – the pathogen responsible for the Great Famine. However, one of the issues is that the effects of modified these genomes are largely unknown. 
+“ When we tamper with the genome in the way that they’ve been doing with genetic engineering in our food supply, you end up increasing allergens, toxins, new diseases or other problems – causes massive collateral damage in the DNA” he said. 
+But blocking the blight is not the only selling point of these scientific spuds. In addition, they are meant to be engineered to prevent bruising and black spots, have a reduction of a chemical that creates carcinogens when cooked at high temperatures and also ship better. 
+However, all of these benefits could be a curse in disguise. The method used for engineering these potatoes is called double stranded (ds) RNA, meaning the genes of an organism have been reprogrammed or silenced. Post navigation",FAKE
+8136,TRIGGERED: JOURNALIST SNOWFLAKES SCARED TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE ‘TURNING ON THE MEDIA’,"Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › TRIGGERED: JOURNALIST SNOWFLAKES SCARED TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE ‘TURNING ON THE MEDIA’ TRIGGERED: JOURNALIST SNOWFLAKES SCARED TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE ‘TURNING ON THE MEDIA’ 0 SHARES 
+[10/28/16] Triggered journalists from across the nation are bemoaning the treatment members of the press are receiving at Trump campaign rallies from the Trump supporters the media routinely misrepresents as ignorant racists, fascist Nazis, or disenchanted working whites. 
+With increasing regularity, these journalist snowflakes are “reporting” their victimization at the hands Trump supporters who chant mean things like, “CNN sucks” and call them names like “presstitutes.” 
+For members of the media elite, the occasional taunts and jeers signal a dangerous threat to the free press. During an interview with Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer breathlessly asked Trump’s campaign manager to ask Trump to stop calling out the press at his rallies because he is scared “there could be an ugly incident” between Trump supporters and the “hardworking young journalists” who cover his rallies. 
+A quick review of media stories over the last two weeks reveals more than a dozen articles in major publications with the same “journalists victimized by Trump supporters at rallies” narrative. Trump supporters endure long waits, messy parking, and often obstructed view seating to rally for their candidate. The press, on the other hand, is given their own entrance, sectioned off seating, and protection from event security and the Secret Service. 
+After an exhaustive search, this Breitbart reporter could find exactly zero incidences of members of the media being physically attacked or assaulted at Trump rallies. None of this has stopped the misleading characterization of Trump supporters creating a “menacing” and “dangerous” environment for these special snowflakes. 
+The narrative sprung up briefly in August when NBC ‘s Katy Tur wrote a long piece in Marie Claire in which she gives her account of her confrontational relationship with Trump and the backlash his “insults” on her reporting created with his supporters. Here is a small piece from her “no-holds-barred” account: 
+I was six months into covering the Trump campaign for MSNBC and NBC News, and there I was, in the belly of a World War II battleship, in a press pen made out of bicycle racks, surrounded by thousands of whipped-up Trump supporters. 
+… 
+Trump decided to go further in Mount Pleasant, pointing his finger squarely at me and launching a personal attack as millions of Americans watched at home. 
+“What a lie it was,” Trump said, referring to the claim that he had left the stage abruptly. “What a lie. Katy Tur. What a lie it was. Third. Rate. Reporter. Remember that.” The crowd’s boos ricocheted off the iron hull of the USS Yorktown. 
+Just a few days after the Tur piece was published, two other NBC press employees — Frank Thorp and Ali Vitali — tweeted out pictures and videos of Trump supporters showing insufficient deference to the press. It was so very traumatic that it inspired several stories, including this one in Real Clear Politics . Post navigation",FAKE
+6180,"The Clinton Syndrome, Part 2: Can Hillary Escape This Time?","Financial Markets , Market Manipulation , U.S. Economy Clinton Foundation , FBI warrant , investigation of Hillary , James Comey FBI , Weiner laptop admin 
+Stewart Dougherty presents the 2nd part of his disembowelment of the Clinton crime machine. The Weiner email bomb dropped in the middle of this. As it turns out, the Weiner lap-top mishap appears to a “Black Swan” of sorts that eluded Hillary’s tentacles of control. In the piece below, Stewart presents useful background knowledge and intellectual tools with which to help you analyze and interpret the next sequence of events before and after the election (assuming the election is not postponed). 
+The information that emerges from the Weiner laptop is going to blow people’s minds – John Titus, Best Evidence Productions, in an upcoming Shadow of Truth 
+Author’s Preface: We are far more interested in markets than politics. To us, free markets represent liberty in motion. But today, politics, and particularly the most corrupt political institution on earth, the Federal Reserve, have markets in a hammer-lock. At this point, we have to understand what is happening in politics in order to understand what is likely to happen in markets. We write a great deal about politics at this critical juncture in order to help you understand markets and achieve the financial freedom you desire and deserve. 
+Regarding the breaking Clinton-scandal developments, we believe that in addition to the 650,000 emails retrieved from the Abedin / Weiner computer which are going to show a level of corruption in this nation never before even imagined let alone proved, the FBI’s decision to re-open the investigation was related to the Bundy acquittals on October 27, 2016. We believe that government officials are looking up the barrel of a full-blown American revolution. Not the shooting kind, but rather something much worse for them: complete moral rejection of government and Establishment corruption by the PRODUCTIVE CLASS in America, which threatens to rapidly spread into and cripple the American economy just ahead of the holiday selling season. 
+The National Retail Federation has just reported that 25% of shoppers are waiting for the election outcome prior to deciding how much they are going to spend during the holidays, something the NRF has never seen before. If principled, productive people feel that this election was stolen from them by Clinton and Establishment corruption, they are going to shut down. They are going to WITHDRAW THEIR FINANCIAL CONSENT from a rigged, dirty system that is looting them and destroying their futures. While the government can effectively deal with many kinds of protest, it cannot even begin to deal with a general economic boycott by the productive class, even if it is just at the margin. (All profits are at the margin.) The consequences of such a boycott upon general business activity; tax receipts at all levels from municipal to federal; the stock and bond markets; and the national mood, with its extraordinarily complex and critical interconnections and ramifications would be monumental, and perhaps beyond all American precedent. 
+Despite a multi-million dollar, taxpayer-funded Federal legal onslaught in the case against the Bundy’s and their co-defendants, the jurors re-confirmed something communicated throughout history. Namely, that while there are a very few things that universally disgust human beings, one of them is bullies. The people are not pleased, and the Establishment knows it is in trouble. Now on to our article.] 
+The Clinton Syndrome Curse: A Clinton – Obama Co-Presidency. (The Clinton Syndrome: Part 2) 
+In Part 1, we defined the Clinton Syndrome as a psychological condition in which voters develop a favorable attitude toward a political predator who deceives, disdains, swindles and abuses them. It is a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome, but much larger in scope and scale, as demonstrated by the fact that tens of millions of American voters currently exhibit the pathological condition. This Syndrome was identified by Inferential Analytics (IA), an accurate and reliable forecasting method we have developed and use. You can read a detailed explanation of the syndrome in our first article on the subject: “The Clinton Syndrome: The Establishment’s Weapon for National Conquest (Part 1)” LINK 
+In this article, Part 2, we delve deeper into what the 2016 presidential election is really all about, and outline the consequences that will occur should the Clinton Syndrome prevail on November 8 th . The Clinton Syndrome has resulted in a potentially deadly national disease which will wreak havoc if it spreads out of control at this time. 
+We regard as an existential threat to the United States the fact that tens of millions of American voters have no idea how deeply fraudulent the entire 2016 presidential campaign has been, from the very beginning. If Donald Trump had not appeared out of nowhere, this would never have been an election at all, but rather an orchestrated, planned enablement of the Clintons and their Establishment handlers to engage in unprecedented corruption, regime change and outright plunder. 
+If successful, this still-active effort to fraudulently inject the Clintons into the power seat will become a multi-trillion dollar gift to the Establishment elite who know exactly how to profit from Clinton graft and corruption; will destroy what is left of the American economy, which simply cannot sustain four more years of intense looting and fraud; and will result in the outright overthrow of the American form of governance by a deadly new political system that we call “crony communism (outlined in our article: Crony Communism: Hillary Clinton’s Game Plan for America. LINK 
+The people have been so confused and deceived by the multi-billion dollar avalanche of deliberately concocted lies and propaganda about this election that they don’t even know who is running for President on the Democrat ticket. 
+Hillary Clinton has both a co-presidential and a vice presidential running mate, neither of which is Tim Kaine, a corrupt political suck-up and hack who was selected precisely because he will do exactly what he is told, not matter how criminal or immoral. 
+Clinton’s co-presidential running mate is Barack Hussein Obama; her vice-presidential candidate is the United Nations. This is the Establishment’s Dream Team, cooked up to make the fastest possible progress toward their crony-communist and globalist overthrow of the United States. The Establishment realizes that the people are waking up fast to what is being done to them and their country. Therefore, they have put their corrupt machinations into high gear in order to beat the clock, which is ticking loudly. 
+When people say that a vote for Clinton means four more years of Obama, they have their arithmetic wrong. A Clinton victory means eight more years of Obama in the next four, and a total knock-out for the nation. 
+The Mainstream Media’s (MSM) deliberately false narrative is that Obama has been campaigning non-stop for Clinton because he wants to protect his “legacy,” and believes that Clinton will do this for him. 
+This is yet another of the “Big Lie” mind bombs that have been dropped onto the American people’s heads during this colossally fraudulent, dishonest and propagandistic Establishment onslaught to get Clinton elected. 
+This narrative is meant to suggest that Barrack Obama wants to retire, and then ride out the rest of his life looking upon his “legacy.” 
+There are two problems with this story. First, Obama’s legacy is already blowing up in his and the entire nation’s face, so there is nothing Clinton will be able to do to salvage it. Obamacare and the Iran Deal are just two examples among dozens of the collapse of Obama’s so-called legacy, which would much better be called a national damnation. 
+The second problem is that Obama is only 55 years old and has not given even ONE indication our model can detect that he actually wants or intends to retire. (Soros, one of his champions, is 86 years old and still wreaking havoc worldwide. These people never stop until the Reaper drops in.) In fact, what we see in Obama is the exact opposite: he demonstrates a strong desire not only to remain on the political stage, but to assume a larger presence upon it. 
+Speaking at a rally in Philadelphia on September 13, 2016 (while Hillary was at home recovering from “pneumonia”), Obama said, “It’s good to be back on the campaign trail.” He then said, “I really, really, REALLY want to elect Hillary Clinton.” (Please carefully consider that sentence, because it is a textbook example (although just one of hundreds over the years) of Obama’s pathological Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). He did not say, “I really, really, REALLY want YOU [the people to whom he was speaking] to elect Hillary Clinton,” but rather, “I really, really, REALLY want to elect Hillary Clinton,” making the people’s national election all about himself. Comments such as this are extraordinarily important to our analysis, and their significance has been borne out time and again over our 15+ years of doing this work. Paradoxically, the smallest factors often have the greatest implications. 
+Later in the same speech, Obama boasted (our comments added within brackets): “More Americans are working [in part time, minimum wage jobs], more have [100% subsidized] health care, incomes are rising [for the establishment elite], poverty is falling [according to false, politically doctored numbers] and gas is $2.00 a gallon. Thanks, Obama!!!” In Obama’s narcissistically crippled mind, the entire United States economy is a function of one thing and one thing only: him. Narcissists in positions of power are extremely destructive (e.g. Obamacare), because they are completely out of touch with what is happening in the real, as opposed their self-flattering fantasy world. In any event, this kind of campaign bragging, swagger and grandiosity is not indicative of someone who plans to retire from politics in the next few weeks. 
+Obama’s clear desire to remain in the game makes him valuable to Clinton, while also making Clinton valuable to him. Intersecting motives are where deals get done. And a Clinton – Obama collaboration would be ideal for the Establishment. Obama has been the gift that keeps on giving to the elite, as they have raked in trillions from his presidency. They want as much of Obama as they can get, because he is a money machine. (For example, witness Obama’s continuing efforts to ram the TPP, an Establishment fraud against the people, down the nation’s throat. Obama does whatever the Establishment tells him to do, in the full knowledge his “Library” Slush Fund will be richly rewarded for his efforts, just as the Clinton Slush Fund has been enriched by more than $1.8 billion, with a “b,” for the Clinton sell-out of people to the elite.) 
+Obama is the most internationally-traveled president in the nation’s history, having made 51 international trips to 56 different countries during his two terms in office. It is as if he has been running for international office, and now we can see that he has been. His globetrotting has required strength, stamina and energy, the exact physical attributes that Clinton, who has been pictured requiring assistance to climb a short set of stairs, lacks. Given her health issues, Clinton cannot possibly perform on a global stage going forward; she will be lucky to successfully navigate the White House. 
+This presents a problem. For the Establishment agenda to be fully executed, Clinton needs international support, and ideally, that international mandates be imposed upon the United States. But she will not be capable of traveling internationally to seal the deals that must get done. 
+This is where Obama comes in. While he would never step “backwards” into a role such as, for example, Secretary of State (an ego-wounding demotion), his passion for continued political involvement would find an excellent home at the United Nations. 
+In this Inferential Analytics scenario, Hillary Clinton will get Obama placed in a high level United Nations position. The United States pays for roughly 25% of total United Nations annual budget, far more than any other nation, and still has clout even though more and more countries are turning their backs on America. 
+Other nations would support the idea of a senior role for Obama if it were made clear to them that his mission would be to continue the “fundamental transformation” of the United States that he promised during his 2008 campaign and has been conducting ever since. This “transformation” has done extreme damage to the United States, and while it has been a disaster for America, it has been good for the rest of the world. Finally, they see a means by which to bring the United States to heel. The idea of the further weakening of the United States will sound to them like a very good deal. The one assurance they will seek is that in exchange for giving Obama an important role at the U.N., Obama will get Clinton to agree not to incinerate the northern hemisphere in a nuclear war, at least not until they have finalized their preparations for it. 
+A Clinton – Obama co-presidency will be a double body-blow to the nation, with Clinton turning it into a corrupt, crony-communist Establishment lootocracy from within, and Obama destroying it from without. 
+Leveraging the United Nations, Clinton and Obama can effect two personal agendas they have long sought: gun control, and a multi-million person “open borders” invasion of America. The first agenda will disarm the people, which has been Job #1 in every communist takeover in history; the second will ensure that the “Last American Presidential Election” occurs on November 8, 2016. In the future, presidents and all other politicians and government agency heads will be appointed by the Establishment, exactly as happens in communist regimes. While there might be “show elections,” the outcomes will have been pre-determined at every level far in advance. 
+A Clinton – Obama co-presidency will also ensure that other Establishment objectives are met. These include the institution of carbon taxes (an enormous and unprecedented new revenue source and looting opportunity); the passage of the TPP (an Establishment bonanza); and the maximum-possible imposition of the New World Order regime change agenda upon the nations and their people. 
+While Obama could advance the Establishment’s aims in virtually any high level position at the U.N., a role that would make him particularly deadly at the outset would be Co-chair of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), joining current head Filippo Grandhi. 
+Obama could make his appointment a matter of smooth sailing by stating his belief that the United States is a large, wealthy, relatively under-populated nation that could rapidly absorb a large number of immigrants. By promising to tap into the country’s private wealth, Obama could warrant that all new immigrants would be fully covered by the country’s comprehensive welfare system upon arrival, which is exactly what happens today. This idea would be intoxicating to the new Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, who was the former head of the UNHCR and is an avowed socialist. 
+The United Nations currently reports the existence of more than 60,000,000 displaced persons and refugees in the world. If the United States pledged to take in, say, 5,000,000 of them, senior U.N. officials would be delighted. What would they have to lose? Dealing with the integration and cost issues would be America’s problem, not theirs. The U.N. could pass a resolution, written by Obama in such a way as to make it convertible into an Executive Order by Clinton, mandating the acceptance of these refugees by the United States. Clinton would put up her hands and say, “I didn’t do it. The U.N. did it, and we must do our “fair share,” while also complying with international law and being decent and responsible international citizens.” 
+As we have pointed out in the past, the United States government is irredeemably bankrupt by any accounting definition one wishes to use. With $20,000,000,000,000.00 in on-the-books debt, another $10,000,000,000,000.00 in debt projected to be added over the next decade (it will be far greater than this, given current trends), and at the very minimum another $120,000,000,000,000.00 in unfunded debt and contingent liabilities, there is absolutely no way the government can ever pay its obligations. So you might wonder, how could the government possibly pay for an immigrant invasion of this magnitude? 
+The answer is, the government won’t pay for it; the people will. This is what crony communism is all about. It is estimated that today, there is roughly $70 trillion in private wealth in America. Assuming that half of it, or $35 trillion belongs to the cronies and is off-limits, this leaves $35 trillion that is available for expropriation and looting. While this is certainly not enough to fix America’s fiscal problems, not even close, it could fund 4 years’ worth of radical fiscal adventurism as well as crony communism regime change. 
+As Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said during this campaign, “We are going to go where the money is,” and if you don’t take that statement seriously, we believe you are making a very big mistake. She and top colleagues such as Sanders and Warren have said in plain English, at a high decibel level that they are coming for your money, and they are, because in their minds, you don’t deserve to have any. Just as Obama once famously said, in a rare, honest, off-script, non-tele-prompted moment, “If you have a business, you didn’t build that,” he and his fellow crony communists also believe, “If you have saved some after-tax money, you don’t deserve to have that.” To them, any savings you possess represent funds the government should have gotten its hands in the first tax cycle, but didn’t. They intend to rectify that error going forward. 
+We have outlined this theme to demonstrate that this election is about an agenda that very few people understand, because it has deliberately been withheld from them. In actuality, the voters have no idea what Clinton truly stands for, or what the Establishment agenda, which she fully believes in and will implement, really is. The stakes in this election are therefore greater than those of any other election in our nation’s history, in our view. This is why the Establishment has spent billions of dollars rigging it. They intend to collect trillions in plunder on the other side, but they can only do so if it goes their way. As we have already seen, they will stop at nothing to get what they want. 
+Some Implications of a Clinton – Obama Co-presidency: 
+Here is a snapshot of the forecast generated by IA in the event of a Clinton – Obama victory: The Clinton – Obama Co-presidential regime will be the most secretive and non-transparent presidency in U.S. history. Clinton will become invisible, just as she often has during the campaign, not just for health reasons, but because she will turn her back on everyday citizens, whom she disdains, once she gets the prize she has sought her entire life. Obama will make secret deals all over the world (think of the secret Iran cash payments and deal, and his behind-the-scenes agitating for TPP, but on a much larger scale, as illustrations). Every one of these deals will be a dagger in the nation’s back. The American people will never again know the truth about what actually goes on behind government doors, or about the corruption that infects the entire political and establishment system. The political class will never again allow itself to suffer Wikileaks-like exposure. Politics will shift to a CIA-like “need to know” model, where information is doled out selectively and in piece-parts. Only a very few at the top will know the overall agenda, and the full set of tactics being employed to achieve it. Anyone who compromises or exposes the system will simply be executed. (Seth Rich comes to mind.) Going forward, the people will know absolutely nothing about what is really happening in Washington, D.C., or about the D.C. / Wall Street and Establishment initiatives. Orwell’s prophecy, “1984,” which is already quite real, will become even more so. The United States will experience an accelerating Brain Drain. Forward-thinking people will realize that America’s slide into predatory crony-communism can and will never be reversed, and that it will be impossible for them and their loved ones to get ahead in such a corrupt, suffocating environment. (Imagine being scolded, lectured, insulted and talked down to on a regular basis by people like Clinton, Obama and Warren, because that is exactly what will happen.) Progressive countries will put out the welcome mat for hard-working, principled, skilled, entrepreneurial Americans. No one will want America’s whining, lazy, non-productive, “entitled” mooches. That’s just a fact. Virtually every nation anyone would actually want to move to for a better opportunity grades potential immigrants according to age, education, language proficiency, skills and likelihood to be productive. Prospects are disqualified if they do not earn a sufficient score. No sensible nation on earth wants to bring in do-nothings whose only capability is to leech off its producers. Productive Americans who remain in the country for their own reasons will quietly adopt a John Galt mindset, sidestepping the corruption and crony communist expropriation by shutting down, dropping out and fading off the radar screen. This will result in an immediate slow-down of business activity, which will ultimately lead to economic collapse. Given that all profits are at the margin, relatively small percentage declines in sales can entirely wipe out income. The John Galt effect will result in the collapse of the nation’s many Ponzi schemes, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pensions (government and private) and the biggest one of all, Government Debt. These schemes simply cannot be maintained in a dramatically slowing business environment, no matter how much private wealth is looted. Government will take draconian steps to shut down all non-government-sanctioned news and information outlets. Their prime target will be the Alternative Media, which will only be further empowered, and embraced by the people. A powerful Resistance movement will spread like wildfire. Nonetheless, people should fill their minds with as much truth as they possibly can right now, because it will become much harder and more expensive to find in the future. Today’s Alternative Media is the greatest gift any people in history have ever received, and people should leverage it as best they can while they can. A steady retreat by government officials and establishment elitists to their multi-trillions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded bunkers will occur, as they seek to hide from the American people, who will be waking up by the additional tens of thousands every day. A Federal Reserve December rate hike has a 0% chance of happening if Clinton is elected; there is a 100% chance of a rate hike if Trump is elected. The Fed is a totally political organization, and they will do everything they can to punish the voters and scorch the economic earth if the people choose Trump over the Establishment agenda the Fed has been 100% behind. If Clinton wins, people will IMMEDIATELY be bombarded with MSM reports about the implications of the 2016 election upon the 2018 mid-term and 2020 general elections. This will be part of a full-scale effort to inject mass quantities of Hopium into the Trump supporters’ brains, and get them to focus not upon the rigged election of 2016, but on the “next” election where, they will falsely be told, their vote will “really count!” In the meantime, the Establishment will be doing everything necessary to ensure that the 2018 and 2020 “elections” are completely rigged, fraudulent and meaningless. A massive move into real money will begin, and this will be the subject of our next article. There are developments in this sphere that you must know about, and one of the most important Inferential Analytics themes we have ever examined was triggered on October 27, 2016. We will have a full description in the next week or so. 
+In conclusion, the 2016 election is an existential event for the United States. W believe that the situation is becoming so unstable that you have little time to do everything you can to prepare, and get your personal houses in order. We are writing to help as best we can, while we can. 
+Stewart Dougherty 
+Stewart Dougherty is the creator of Inferential Analytics, a forecasting method that applies to events proprietary, time-tested principles of human instinct, desire and action. In his view, forecasting methods not fundamentally based upon principles of human action are unlikely to be reliable over time. He is a graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Business School and has developed IA over a period of 15+ years. 
+October 31, 2016",FAKE
+9156,"Re: Ha! FBI reopening Hillary email case means THIS might happen again soon (Hint: Bill, fire up the jet!)","Now that FBI’s reopened Hillary investigation, can THIS be far behind? (Hint: Bill, fire up the jet!) Posted at 2:15 pm on October 28, 2016 by Doug P. 
+As we’ve reported, FBI Director James Comey said he would be reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and private server in light of new information: WHOA! FBI director tells Congress Hillary investigation reopening ‘due to recent developments’ (here’s the letter) https://t.co/SfcQhxBWzI 
+— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) October 28, 2016 
+Can “total coincidence” number two be far behind? I think it's time for another Lynch/Clinton tarmac meeting https://t.co/IzD7715mA7 
+— Kelly Riddell (@KellyRiddell) October 28, 2016 
+We wouldn’t put it past them … again . Trending",FAKE
+6573,"FBI Wants you to Believe It Examined 650,000 Emails in 691,000 Seconds",". FBI Wants you to Believe It Examined 650,000 Emails in 691,000 Seconds In no surprise to anyone paying even marginal attention, the FBI’s clearing Hillary Clinton of wrong... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/fbi-wants-you-to-believe-it-examined.html In no surprise to anyone paying even marginal attention, the FBI’s clearing Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing in its briefly reopened investigation — however, the time the agency took to reach this conclusion is not only bereft of logic and reason, it constitutes the most hubristic of insults to the public’s intelligence. In just 691,000 seconds from announcement to conclusion, FBI Director James Comey wants you to believe agents thoroughly examined over 650,000 emails newly ‘discovered’ on Anthony Weiner’s computer — including any threads resulting, as well as all attachments — before deciding Clinton innocent of wrongdoing.We, the people of this planet, are just not that stupid — nor are we even mildly amused by this farcical bullshit passed off as a credible investigation.Seriously.Indeed, the lightning pace of this putative second investigation not only boggles the mind, it forces uneasy questions concerning the true motivation and apparent exceeding necessity to ensure Hillary Clinton walks away scot-free amid rapidly mushrooming evidence of flagrant corruption and mendacious collusion.Just a cursory comparison of two investigations shows such marked differences it would be impossible not to question legitimacy of the FBI’s findings.In the summer of 2015, the FBI commenced its first probe into the former secretary of state’s use of a private email server during her tenure in office, after John Giacalone — then Director of the National Security Branch — met with Comey to voice concerns emanating from the Intelligence community about classified information possibly handled carelessly.For nearly a full year — 365 days, or 31,536,000 seconds — a sizable task force of FBI agents pored over an enormous cache , first comprised of 30,000 emails, but later totaling 44,900 after additional documents not originally handed over by the Clinton camp to the State Department were discovered. This means — rounding off the rough estimate of one year — the bureau combed an average of just over 123 documents every day. While that might seem to be manageable with a slew of investigators on the job, a basic comparison of the two probes proves the literal inanity of the reopened investigation.Later in the day on October 28, Comey announced the commencement of the secondary probe — albeit to the consternation of current and former officials who felt his telling Congress broke a number of investigatory guidelines, including possibly influencing the outcome of the presidential race.According to Comey, an additional 650,000 documents located on the computer of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s now-disgraced and estranged husband Anthony Weiner deserved careful scrutiny for pertinence and relevance to the original investigation of the Democratic nominee.Public and official speculation predicted a months- or years-long investigation, even with substantial manpower dedicated to the task.But on Sunday, November 6, in yet another shocker of an announcement from the FBI director, Comey inexplicably declared nothing of relevance to the Clinton investigation —“ no new conclusions ”— had been revealed in its secondary probe. This means — again rounding for brevity to eight days the total length of the investigation — FBI agents inspected some 81,250 documents each day. Granted, both estimates have been averaged and roughened, but only for comparison’s sake — and that contrast doesn’t survive the scantiest litmus test of believability.Not at all.Before the nay-sayers jump in with a there’s no comparison deflection, consider the following points.Although an algorithm or program combing those documents might indeed retrieve subjects of interest to investigators — keywords, germane subjects, accordant people’s names, and the like — in no way would such technological gatekeepers reveal subtle nuance as has been displayed in emails published by Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton, campaign chair John Podesta , and the Democratic National Committee.Such fine gradations of meaning, naturally found in the English language but also purposefully employed to throw off investigators and interlopers, could not possibly be revealed by artificial means — at least not that quickly and particularly not with currently-available technologies.Still not convinced?Consider that if such technology did indeed exist to that discerning level of scrutiny in our heightened and overarching surveillance and police states, no criminal would ever roam free.Law enforcement departments and the National Security Agency together have amassed astonishingly voluminous data sets on every person in this country, including through emails and online activities. A technology advanced enough to comb for subtleties in language would hone in on criminal behavior and activity with incredible frequency.And while NSA programs have been revealed to hunt for keywords, there are limits to its effectiveness — no terrorist plot has yet been halted in progress because the intelligence to discover it hasn’t yet solidified to that point.Technology experts immediately weighed in claiming such technology does indeed exist, is frequently employed, and can do the job perfectly in a mere eight days — no worries.But, as Wikileaks rebutted in a number of tweets, it isn’t quite so simple.Emails between Clinton, her campaign staff, the DNC, and other insiders have proven to be a literal trove of revealing details — including Hillary’s use of the name of aide Huma Abedin as a deflection, and President Obama’s use of a pseudonym to communicate on the private server in an attempt to thwart future investigators.Programs and algorithms would have to be fed such information, but not all of those pseudonyms were known — and that represents only one such complication. Even working around the clock, as Comey alleged the FBI did in its second probe, 82,000 documents daily isn’t even worth comparing to the 123 averaged each day in the initial investigation. So, what are we to believe about the clearing of Hillary Clinton for a second time?That’s up to you — to each of us — to draw a conclusion.But to characterize that second investigation as anything other than a charade to placate an irate public would be criminal willful denial of conspicuous evidence — criminal willful denial that the utter bullshit the FBI just brazenly served the American people doesn’t somehow stink. By Claire Bernish Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+3567,Jihadi John: The bourgeois terrorist,"Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and a vice president at New America . He is the author of "" Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad. "" This is an updated version of an article originally published February 19.
+
+(CNN) This is how top national security reporters Souad Mekhennet and Adam Goldman of the Washington Post, who broke the story that Mohammed Emwazi has been identified as the notorious ISIS terrorist known as ""Jihadi John,"" describe him : ""a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming.""
+
+They go on to say that Emwazi ""was raised in a middle-class neighborhood in London"" and attended the University of Westminster, which is a university in London that was founded in the early 19th century.
+
+Emwazi poses something of a problem for the Obama administration's narrative about who becomes a terrorist and why. Last week, the administration hosted a three-day conference on ""Countering Violent Extremism,"" which is a government euphemism for how best to deal with Islamist terrorism.
+
+We heard from Obama administration officials and even the President himself that terrorism has something to do with lack of opportunities and poverty. Obama said that ""we have to address grievances terrorists exploit, including economic grievances.""
+
+He said, ""when millions of people -- especially youth -- are impoverished and have no hope for the future, when corruption inflicts daily humiliations on people, when there are no outlets by which people can express their concerns, resentments fester. The risk of instability and extremism grow. Where young people have no education, they are more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and radical ideas...""
+
+The President did acknowledge that terrorists can be rich like Osama bin Laden, who was the son of a Saudi construction magnate and attended the top high school and the best university in Saudi Arabia. It's hard to imagine someone with more opportunities. Think the Trump family Saudi-style, minus the bling, and throw in a deep admiration for the Taliban.
+
+But, in fact, Osama bin Laden is more the rule than the exception. Take not only Emwazi/Jihadi John, but also the notorious British terrorist, Omar Sheikh, who attended the London School of Economics and who kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.
+
+Nearer to home we can also point to the Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan, who was not only an officer in the U.S. Army and a psychiatrist, but is also from a comfortably middle-class family in Virginia.
+
+These are not the dispossessed. They are the empowered.
+
+""Who becomes a terrorist?"" turns out, in many cases, to be much like asking, ""Who owns a Volvo?""
+
+We found that more than half of the terrorists had attended college, making them as well-educated as the average American. Two of our sample had doctoral degrees, and two others had begun working toward their doctorates.
+
+None of them had attended a madrassa.
+
+Of course, large-scale insurgent groups such as ISIS and the Taliban recruit foot soldiers who join the cause to get a paycheck. But the people running these organizations are in it for ideological reasons.
+
+The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.
+
+Kepel researched the 300 Islamist militants who were tried in the wake of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Around one in five were professionals such as engineers, a quarter worked as government employees, just under half were artisans or merchants, one in 10 were in the military or police, and only one in 10 were farmers or were unemployed. Of those who were students, around a third were studying in the elite fields of medicine and engineering.
+
+There are, of course any number of exceptions to the prototypical middle-class terrorist. The terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris last month and the Copenhagen café that was hosting the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks earlier this month were from the margins of society.
+
+But for every example of poverty or lack of opportunities as a purported rationale for terrorism, it's easy to supply important counterexamples. The ""underwear bomber"" Umar Abdulmuttalab, who tried to set off a bomb on a U.S. passenger jet flying over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, is the son of one of the richest men in Africa and attended University College London, which routinely rates among the best universities in the world.
+
+Anwar al-Awlaki, the late leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who tasked the underwear bomber to blow up an American plane over an American city, was studying for his Ph.D. at George Washington University before he took up arms with al Qaeda. Awlaki's father was a Cabinet minister in Yemen.
+
+So if it's clearly not deprivation that is driving much Islamist terrorism, what is?
+
+For that we must turn to ideology, specifically religious ideology. And this is where the Obama administration has to perform some pretzel logic. It is careful to explain that the war on ISIS is not a war on Islam and that ISIS' ideology is a perversion of the religion. Fair enough. But the administration seems uncomfortable with making the connection between Islamist terrorism and ultra-fundamentalist forms of Islam that are intolerant of other religions and of other Muslims who don't share their views to the letter.
+
+The Taliban and other Islamist terrorist groups are not, of course, secular organizations. To treat them as if they were springs from some combination of wishful thinking, PC gone crazy and a failure to accept, in an increasingly secularized era, that some will kill in the name of their god, an all-too-common phenomenon across human history.
+
+Indeed, while ISIS and like-minded groups and their fellow travelers are not representative of the vast majority of the world's Muslims, their ideology is rooted in Salafist ultra-fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, and indeed they can point to verses in the Quran that can be interpreted to support their worldview.
+
+A well-known verse in the Quran commands Muslims to ""fight and slay the nonbelievers wherever you find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem [of war]."" When bin Laden made a formal declaration of war against ""the Jews and the Crusaders"" in 1998, he cited this Quranic verse at the beginning of his declaration.
+
+ISIS' distinctive black flags are a reference to a supposed saying of the Prophet Mohammed that ""If you see the black banners coming from the direction of Khorasan then go to them, even if you have to crawl, because among them will be Allah's Caliph the Mahdi.""
+
+In other words, coming out of Khorasan, an area that now encompasses Afghanistan, will come an army that includes the Mahdi, the Islamic savior of the world. The parent organization of ISIS was al Qaeda, which, of course, was headquartered in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
+
+Last year, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named himself caliph, which means that in his own mind and in the eyes of his followers he is not only the leader of ISIS but the overall leader of Muslims everywhere.
+
+These beliefs may seem like a crazy delusion to most of us, but it's important to understand that they are theological in nature, and this theology is rooted in ultra-fundamentalist Islam.
+
+ISIS sees itself as the vanguard army that is bringing back true Islam to the world. This project is of such cosmic importance that they will break any number of eggs to make this omelet, which accounts for their murderous campaign against every ethnic group, religious group and nationality that they perceive as standing in their way. ISIS recruits also believe that we are in the end times, and they are best understood as members of an Islamist apocalyptic death cult.
+
+What does that mean for policy makers? It means that the only truly effective challenges to this reasoning must come from Islamic leaders and scholars who can make the theological case that ISIS is an aberration. This, too, is an Islamic project; it is not a jobs project.",REAL
+1463,Don’t underestimate the power of Trump’s rage-fueled rise,"For Democrats who might be rooting for Donald Trump, thinking he would be easy to beat in November, I have some advice: Be careful what you wish for.
+
+In his campaign, or rampage, Trump has done more than take a sledgehammer to the Republican Party. He almost seems to be reinventing politics in a way that makes both major parties seem hidebound, sluggish and concerned mostly with self-perpetuation — which, in fact, they are.
+
+When he announced his candidacy, no one outside of Trump’s household dreamed he would be dominating the Republican field with three weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses. Given the way he has set the agenda for the campaign, it’s tempting to call him a master strategist — except I don’t believe he has a strategy. Or needs one.
+
+Instead, Trump is guided by instinct. The whole campaign has been like his stream-of-consciousness Twitter feed or his improvisational jazz-riff campaign speeches. He tests a new theme and gauges the response. If it’s working, he pushes harder; if not, he moves on. Kick out the illegal immigrants and build a wall on the border. Bar Muslims from entry because they might be terrorists. Abolish gun-free zones, even in schools.
+
+Many of Trump’s positions are abhorrent. Many are inconsistent with traditional American values, Republican Party dogma, various articles of the Constitution and Trump’s own views in the past. But substance is, in a way, less important than style. Trump couldn’t possibly do half of what he promises, and probably doesn’t really want to do much of the rest.
+
+The important thing is that Trump, by being transgressive in the way he speaks, gives listeners the license to be transgressive in the way they think. When he rails against “political correctness,” he’s talking about the manners and courtesies that many of us would call being “civil.” But his in-your-face bullying strikes a chord with the large segment of the Republican electorate that is tired of being polite: lower-middle-class, non-college-educated white voters who have not prospered over the past two decades and see demographic change as a threat.
+
+Trump was quick to understand how angry the Republican base is with the party establishment. Vote for us, GOP leaders said, and we’ll stop illegal immigration, repeal the Affordable Care Act, slash spending to the bone, reduce the long-term federal debt and basically stop everything President Obama is trying to do. They failed to deliver — and now someone is calling them on it.
+
+For Trump, saying outrageous things that would end any other politician’s campaign or career is no risk. On the contrary, it’s a necessity. His appeal to primary voters involves a bald-faced appeal to racial and ethnic animus; he gives his supporters permission to bemoan the fact that “they” — Mexicans and Muslims, primarily, but also African Americans and uppity women — are changing the nation.
+
+Trump’s arena-size rallies have become set pieces in which big, boisterous crowds get to act out their “Make America Great Again” fantasies. If protesters didn’t show up to advocate the Black Lives Matter movement or tolerance toward Muslims, Trump would have to hire actors to play those parts. Antagonists are necessary for the moments of catharsis when interlopers are identified, scorned and physically ejected. It is theater, not politics, a symbolic enactment of the grand purification Trump promises.
+
+The other candidate touching a nerve with the cultural and economic left-behinds — minus the racism — is Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, who is also kind of an un-politician. This is a bad year to rule anything out, so maybe Sanders will win both Iowa and New Hampshire and go on to seriously challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. But if he falls short, the eventual GOP nominee will face a formidable and experienced politician who cannot possibly run as anti-establishment.
+
+If the Republican nominee is Trump, do you believe for a minute he would consider himself bound by the things he said during the primaries? I don’t.
+
+Trump can hardly back away from his categorical pledge on immigration — to expel 11 million undocumented migrants and build a wall along the border with Mexico — so maybe that would energize Latino voters in support of Clinton. But he would do everything possible to lower passions among other loyal Democrats — while stoking them among the new “take back the country” voters he hopes to turn out.
+
+How disgusted is the country with traditional politics and politicians? Democrats had better explore that question — or be surprised by the answer.
+
+Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.",REAL
+394,DNC Chair won't run for Senate in 2016,"Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she plans to run for reelection for her House seat and serve out her full term as DNC chair.
+
+She is slated to wrap up her term as DNC chair in January 2017 and speculation has swirled around a possible run by the congresswoman.
+
+Wasserman Schultz said she has ""gotten tremendous encouragement from constituents"" in her district, Floridians and donors, but ultimately decided against a Senate run.
+
+Former Gov. Charlie Crist, another Florida Democrat, also said this week that he would not seek the seat currently held by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who is up for reelection in 2016.
+
+Rubio is eying a presidential run and has said he would not campaign to keep his Senate seat if he decides to run for president. Wasserman Schultz's announcement opens a wider path for two of her Democratic colleagues in Florida's congressional delegation who are considering a Senate run: Reps. Patrick Murphy and Alan Grayson. Wasserman Schultz insisted that Democrats would have a strong field of potential hopefuls to retake the Republican-held seat. ""Whether it's against Marco Rubio or in an open seat there is a real opportunity to make sure that we have the leadership that Floridians can count on,"" she said.",REAL
+9798,Comment on She’s fit to be President! Hillary had to be helped up *one* step by youknowwho.,"February 4, 2016, in Charleston, SC. 
+And this? April 16, 2016 at Southwest College, Los Angeles. 
+And this, less than two months ago on Sept. 11, 2016? 
+On Thursday, October 26, 2016, Hillary was in Lake Worth, Florida for a rally. 
+She walks up to the cheering crowd, as a bearded guy in sunglasses hurries to her side. 
+He extends his left hand to Hillary; she clutches it tightly. The man then helps her to make a step up onto the platform. 
+Just one step. 
+Here’s the video: 
+Later that day, Hillary leaves Florida for another rally in Winston Salem, North Carolina. 
+Walking up a flight of 15 steps to board her campaign plane, while holding an umbrella in her left hand and clutching the handrail with her right, and “mumbling to herself” (according to Live Satellite News ), Hillary appears to be wobbly and unsteady. Halfway up the steps, she stumbles, tilting her umbrella down (0:17 mark). 
+Hillary turned 69 two days ago on October 26, but moves like a disabled old woman.",FAKE
+5417,"Remember Those Rumors Megyn Kelly is Leaving Fox News? Well, Her Contract Just Went Public","Getty - Jemall Countess/Stringer The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
+Megyn Kelly is a bit of a hot commodity nowadays, though one might not be able to tell that from the ire she is drawing from Trump fans. 
+The Week, and other publications, kicked up a media frenzy this summer by speculating that Megyn Kelly was leaving Fox News, much to the delight of her Trump-supporting detractors: 
+Megyn Kelly's contract at Fox News will expire after the election, and the star anchor has publicly confessed that she doesn't know what's going to happen after that. “I've had a great 12 years here, and I really like working for Roger Ailes. I really like my show, and I love my team. But, you know, there's a lot of brain damage that comes from the job,” she told Variety this spring. Image Credit: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for People.com 
+In an “exclusive” report from Breitbart, the bigwigs at the network were purportedly forming an alliance to “block” her, and in an eye-opening bit of potential foreshadowing for TrumpTV , the website wrote: 
+At least one top talent inside Fox News has confirmed to Breitbart News that a major talent meeting among various different hosts is scheduled, and they are considering leaving with Roger Ailes to form a new network to compete with Fox. 
+“Everyone here hates Gretchen and Megyn,” the anonymous source reportedly told the website. Gretchen Carlson would later leave Fox News . 
+Of course, Roger Ailes was to be forced out after he was blitzed by sexual harassment accusations from a number of female employees, including a claim by Megyn Kelly. New York Magazine reported : 
+According to two sources briefed on parent company 21st Century Fox’s outside probe of the Fox News executive, led by New York–based law firm Paul, Weiss, Kelly has told investigators that Ailes made unwanted sexual advances toward her about ten years ago when she was a young correspondent at Fox. Kelly, according to the sources, has described her harassment by Ailes in detail. Image Credit: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images 
+Ailes would find safe harbor with the Trump campaign , whose presidential nominee Donald Trump later found himself under siege from sexual assault accusations . Recently, Vanity Fair published a story that the two media potentates had a “ falling out .” 
+In August, Fox News appointed two executives to attempt filling Ailes' shoes: Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy, who were named as co-presidents. Due to a colossal media merger of AT&T and Time Warner, CNN executive Jeff Zucker is believed by some to have the inside track on taking over at Fox News. The Hollywood Reporter writes : 
+CNN’s Jeff Zucker who, having worked for GE when he ran NBC, might be considered a more logical bridge to AT&T and, if rebuffed, might likely be open to the Murdoch sons' interest in having him come to run Fox News. 
+The Murdoch brothers are not believed to share their father's conservative sensibilities, and thus there are concerns that the two would reshape the network into a much less conservative one. Image Credit: Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images 
+With Sean Hannity riding high as a conservative pundit on the strength of his vocal Trump support, his ratings have even eclipsed Kelly's... at least for now. There is a strong belief by many that the host's unwavering support is an audition for TrumpTV, should The Donald lose the election. 
+It's in this tumultuous environment — filled with intrigue at the network and turmoil across the media landscape — that Megyn Kelly's future has become uncertain. A leaked discussion of her contract negotiations sheds more light. 
+As reported by Politico: 
+Contract negotiations between Megyn Kelly and Fox News Channel have spilled into the media, with Fox News interim CEO Rupert Murdoch talking on the record to The Wall Street Journal (which he also owns via his other company, News Corp.) about the matter. 
+According to the Journal's Joe Flint, “Mr. Murdoch said in an interview that she is important to the network and he hopes to get a contract signed 'very soon,' but noted, 'it’s up to her.'” 
+Then Murdoch hinted, not unsubtly, “We have a deep bench of talent, many of whom would give their right arm for her spot.” 
+As noted by the publication, Kelly is shopping around her talents as well, booking an expected appearance as co-host of ABC's “Live with Kelly!” Image Credit: Paul Morigi/Getty Images 
+Megyn Kelly is also seeking a more lucrative contract: 
+Flint reports that Kelly, who will make around $15 million this year, is aiming to get north of $20 million per year with her new contract. He also said he wants to keep Bill O'Reilly on as the channel's 8 PM host. O'Reilly's contract is also up next year. 
+Murdoch also attempted to put rumors of a less conservative Fox News outlet to rest in the Wall Street Journal interview: 
+“We’re not changing direction…that would be business suicide.” 
+If TrumpTV indeed becomes a reality, the winds of change may shift again. Fox News will have a very different look — with or without Megyn Kelly — as a feud looms over who is the real “conservative” leader in cable news. ",FAKE
+1245,Donald Trump wasn’t so anti-Iraq war after all. Quelle surprise.,"Donald Trump has a go-to response whenever someone asks whether the angry impulsiveness he displays on the campaign trail befits a U.S. president — whether voters should trust him with his “finger on the trigger,” as the question is often phrased.
+
+He opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
+
+That’s always his answer. And it proves, according to Trump, that behind the bluster is a man of sober judgment who won’t rush the country into a war it will come to regret.
+
+The problem with Trump’s logic is that, in 2002 — before the invasion — he actually said he favored going into Iraq. We learned this Thursday night when BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski dug up an old interview Trump gave to shock jock Howard Stern, of all people.
+
+In the interview, which took place on Sept. 11, 2002, Stern asked Trump directly if he was for invading Iraq.
+
+“Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”
+
+This is a good get. It shows that, once again, Trump is selling revisionist history to his backers.
+
+But it’s also probably unlikely to change the minds of many people. The GOP front-runner has said that he was against the invasion so many times over the course of months that it is cemented as truth for those who support him. Until Thursday night, there hadn't been much reason to doubt Trump's version of events, because there had been scant evidence to contradict him.
+
+And even now, it's likely Trump backers will look at this comment and think, He was put on the spot and didn't give a strong answer; maybe he hadn't thought it through yet and maybe he came to oppose it later.
+
+This what Trump does. He strategically picks claims that are difficult to fact-check. In this case, it took months for someone to find the interview with Stern, which — having been conducted outside the mainstream news media — was tucked away in a place that journalists wouldn’t immediately think to look.
+
+BuzzFeed appears to have been on the case for a while. In September, after Trump said during a debate that he was the “only person up here that fought against going into Iraq,” Kaczynski wrote that “there’s no record of Donald Trump being against the Iraq War before it started.”
+
+True enough. But finding “no record” isn’t the same as finding proof to the contrary, which BuzzFeed didn’t turn up until Thursday. Others have tried to fact-check Trump’s Iraq invasion opposition, too, but they always seemed to be groping around for a way to prove a negative — that the Manhattan billionaire didn’t state his anti-war position as “loud and clear” as he claims today.
+
+Proving a negative is always difficult and often unconvincing. There’s always a chance that you’ll miss something.
+
+That’s what happened in November when the media tried to debunk Trump’s assertion that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11. The media was left to prove that something Trump says happened didn’t happen. Reporters did their best, but all Trump needed to vindicate himself among supporters was to turn up a few clips talking about small groups of celebrating Muslims.
+
+It didn’t matter then that Trump’s original claim about 9/11 was a wild exaggeration. And it almost surely won’t matter now that his supposed opposition to the Iraq invasion appears to be revisionist history.",REAL
+5109,The Daily 202: Why Trump sounded more like a strongman than a movement conservative,"CLEVELAND—You could be forgiven for wanting to pop a valium at the end of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last night. The Republican nominee painted a stark picture of a Hobbesian America that is nasty, brutish and short.
+
+Trump essentially used the most important speech of his campaign – and perhaps political career – to yell fire in a crowded theatre. He warned that we are in “a moment of crisis” and made the case that these desperate times call for desperate measures.
+
+While the message seem tailored to the same disaffected and angry working-class voters who fueled his primary victories, he clearly wanted to convince a national audience that things are so bad right now that they should swallow whatever doubts they have to take a chance on him.
+
+“Beginning on January 20th of 2017, safety will be restored,” he declared.
+
+Trump is the crisis candidate. If voters feel safe, confident and hopeful in November, his team knows he will lose. To win, he does not just need to convince Americans that the country is on the wrong track – they already believe this – but that we are in the midst of an existential crisis.
+
+“The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” he said, repeatedly touting himself as “the law and order candidate.”
+
+He spoke of a violent crime wave, murderous illegal immigrants “roaming free,” innocent children “sacrificed on the altar of open borders,” and an America “shocked to its core.” He described the current environment as “more dangerous … than, frankly, I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen.”
+
+Then he suggested that elites are covering up how bad things have gotten. “I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper,” he declared.
+
+Trump also spoke of “growing threats from outside” the country. “After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before,” he said. “This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism and weakness.”
+
+The newly-minted nominee grasped for the mantle of change agent without offering many specifics. “A change in leadership is required to produce a change in outcomes,” he said.
+
+-- Clocking in at 76 minutes, it was the longest acceptance speech at any major party convention since 1972 – drawing comparisons to Fidel Castro. Yet Trump never tried to be uplifting or inspiring.
+
+When he’s not reading from a teleprompter, he can be charming and magnetic. He can also be somewhat self-deprecating, which supporters find ingratiating. But he did not try to be in this setting.
+
+“In a remarkable departure from past GOP conventions, Trump made no mention of God, religion or his faith,” Philip Rucker and David Fahrenthold note.
+
+-- “ Making America Afraid Again” is how David Maraniss sums up the week.
+
+-- The Post’s Editorial Board calls Trump “the candidate of the apocalypse”: “No doubt, for many of his listeners, his words expressed a deeply felt emotional reality. There is real fear in the land; real pain. But it will take real leadership, not the wishful, demagogic brand Mr. Trump embodied Thursday night, to address this.”
+
+-- Many of the claims don’t hold up under scrutiny. Our in-house Fact Checkers challenge the accuracy of 25 different assertions Trump made last night. “The dark portrait of America … is a compendium of doomsday stats that fall apart upon close scrutiny,” Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee write. “Numbers are taken out of context, data is manipulated, and sometimes the facts are wrong. When facts are inconveniently positive — such as rising incomes and an unemployment rate under 5 percent — Trump simply declines to mention them. He describes an exceedingly violent nation, flooded with murders, when in reality, the violent-crime rate has been cut in half since the crack cocaine epidemic hit its peak in 1991.” (Max Ehrenfreund has more on why Trump’s crime stats were cherry picked and misleading; read an annotated version of the full transcript here.)
+
+“If reality does not conform to what Trump needs reality to be to support his case, he will invent a new reality,” E.J. Dionne writes.
+
+-- An array of key Republican thought leaders expressed angst and alarm about the tenor of Trump’s speech. Here’s a sampling of the reaction:
+
+A conservative blogger in the Never Trump camp:
+
+The editor-in-chief of the conservative Richochet.com:
+
+A GOP pollster who specializes in outreach to young people:
+
+The conservative columnist at the NYT:
+
+The mainstream media was also taken aback by the gloom—
+
+The Financial Times’s U.S. columnist:
+
+A culture reporter for the New York Times:
+
+-- Trump really does want to be the New Nixon.
+
+As promised earlier this week, his speech heavily drew on and echoed Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech at the 1968 convention.
+
+“I am your voice,” Trump said, saying that he will fight tirelessly for millions who have been “forgotten.""
+
+Like Nixon, Trump is clearly motivated by profound grievance and a yearning to be shown respect by elites who have never taken him seriously. He bragged at both the beginning and the end of his speech about how many votes he received in the primaries and how he proved the pundits wrong. ""Oh, we love defeating those people, don’t we?” he asked the crowd. “I am with you. I will fight for you. And I will win for you.”
+
+“I wonder what my dad would think of my tremendous success,” Trump said late in the speech. But he did not sketch out autobiographical details that could have made him more relatable. In Nixon’s 1968 RNC speech, for instance, he spoke poignantly about being a poor boy in California listening to the train go by at night and dreaming of a better future. We got nothing like that from Trump, perhaps because the billionaire does not have those kinds of stories to tell…
+
+-- A textbook cult of personality: Trump did, however, present himself as a white knight who is singularly capable of restoring order.
+
+“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” he insisted.
+
+“I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police,” he said at another point. “When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country. Believe me. Believe me.”
+
+Wonkblog’s Jim Tankersley compares the text of Trump’s speech last night to Reagan’s speech at the GOP convention in Detroit in 1980: “Most strikingly, Reagan warned voters to place their faith in free people, not powerful leaders. ‘'Trust me' government asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what's best for us,’ he said. ‘My view of government places trust not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties. The trust is where it belongs -- in the people.’”
+
+In this vein, Post opinion blogger Alexandra Petri describes the final night of Trump’s convention as a “creepy, fascist infomercial”: “Donald Trump is selling America a miracle juicer. The juicer is Donald Trump. It is orange and it will never let you down. If you order now, Donald Trump will send you another one free.”
+
+-- More broadly, Trump clearly believes in his heart that government is the solution to our problems. This is, of course, should be anathema to intellectually honest movement conservatives and is totally at odds with 36 years of orthodoxy.
+
+The political editor at BuzzFeed, who previously wrote for the conservative Free Beacon:
+
+-- Trump rejected other core tents of modern conservatism, as well. “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” he said.
+
+-- But Trump now owns the Republican Party – at least until November. The audience cheered and applauded for a lot of lines that conservatives in the not distant past would have booed a Democrat for saying. He sounded protectionist and isolationist themes. Sure, not everyone was applauding. And perhaps some in the audience didn’t understand what exactly he was referring to. But the crowd was with him.
+
+-- Trump’s alarmism makes it imperative for Democrats to offer a counter-narrative next week.
+
+Most Democrats are still far too dismissive of Trump’s chances. They discount him at their own peril. Just ask Jeb, wherever he’s hiding out this week.
+
+Remember Bill Clinton’s speech at the Charlotte convention in 2012? He effectively laid out the case that the economy had improved dramatically compared to what Obama had inherited when he took office in Jan. 2009.
+
+Obama himself speaks next week in Philadelphia, and you can bet he’ll try to rebut the picture that Trump painted of the economy and the country.
+
+-- It’s all over but the SHOUTING. My ears are still ringing a little bit after Trump basically yelled his entire speech. A lot of male pundits have taken heat for saying Clinton shouts when she talks; these guys ought to call out Trump for doing so last night.
+
+A ton of online buzz was about the yelling—
+
+-- To his credit, Trump again showed he can be self-disciplined when he wants to be – for a night. Normally he ad-libs in response to a chanting crowd, but he mostly kept chugging along and sticking to the script. As the crowd chanted “lock her up” – a mantra of this convention – Trump didn’t take the bait. “Let’s defeat her in November,” he replied.
+
+A few minute later, a protestor to his left disrupted his speech and held up a sign that said “Build bridges, not walls.” Trump stood patiently, if a little perturbed looking, as the crowd drowned her out with chants of “USA.” At a normal rally, he’d rile up the audience into a frenzy by yelling, “Get ‘em out of here!” But last night, he took a dramatic pause before bellowing, “How great are our police?” The crowd loved it.
+
+-- Looking to the next 100 days, many Republican experts believe Trump did little to expand his appeal beyond the base. “It may be that this speech was so unusual–relentlessly negative and high decibel–that it will punch through more the analysts realize,” National Review Editor Rich Lowry writes. “But it’s hard to believe it’s going to widen his appeal. He didn’t even seem interested in trying to show voters that he has more range than he is shown over the last year. This was a Trump rally dressed up with fancy trappings and a ballon drop afterwards. Surely, Trump’s attitude is that this approach got him this far so why change? And that is the gamble of his entire campaign.”
+
+The former communications director for the NRSC:
+
+-- A coming out party for the GOP:
+
+Another notable moments from last night that will be remembered was when billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel told the convention, “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.” It was the first declaration of its kind, and most of the delegates stood and cheered.
+
+Then, in his speech, Trump referred to the massacre of “49 wonderful Americans” at a gay nightclub in Orlando and promised to “protect our LGBTQ citizens.” The crowd cheered.
+
+Trump paused. “As a Republican, I have to say, it is so nice to hear you cheering,” he said.
+
+What a sea change. The official party platform, ratified earlier this week, continues to oppose gay marriage. But the times, they are a changin’.
+
+Even the running-mate Trump picked to appeal to social conservatives got in on it:
+
+WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
+
+WE MAY FIND OUT HILLARY'S V.P. CHOICE THIS AFTERNOON, even though she is not expected to formally announce her choice until tomorrow:
+
+-- The headline in The New York Times is “Tim Kaine Seems Likely for Hillary.” The Wall Street Journal says “Kaine Seen as Clinton’s VP Pick.” The AP’s Ken Thomas and Matthew Barakat write that “Kaine, 58, has been a favorite … since the start.”
+
+-- The timing: Kaine has a series of fundraisers scheduled in Massachusetts on Friday and Saturday. “If the Virginia senator cancels, that’s a strong indication he’s been picked,” the Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey reports. “Kaine’s first fundraiser is set for noon Friday at the University of Massachusetts Club in Boston. On Saturday Kaine is scheduled to be on Nantucket at the Chanticleer Garden for a 5:30 pm reception.""
+
+“Text messages could go out from the campaign announcing the pick as soon as Friday after an event she’s holding here in Orlando,” Linskey adds. “Clinton is appearing at the site of the Pulse nightclub shooting this morning, making it unlikely that a selection would be announced before then.”
+
+-- Elizabeth Warren does not think it’s her: ""I think if it was me, I'd know it by now,"" the Massachusetts senator told Stephen Colbert last night.
+
+-- Some Democrats caution against discounting Tom Vilsack, per John Wagner and Anne Gearan.
+
+-- There’s a push among some lefties to prevent HRC from picking Kaine or Vilsack. They grumble that the Virginian is too close to the financial services industry and the Ag secretary is too close to “corporate agri-business.”
+
+-- Kaine signed a bipartisan letter just this Monday urging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to “carefully tailor its rulemaking” regarding community banks and credit unions so as not to ‘unduly burden’ these institutions with regulations aimed at commercial banks, Anne Gearan reports. “At issue are compliance rules under Dodd-Frank.” Kaine also signed a second letter on behalf of regional banks seeking relief from liquidity reporting requirements. Critics say both requests help banks of many sizes avoid oversight.
+
+-- Kaine brushed the criticisms aside: “People are going to say whatever they want, but I’m strongly for the regulation of the financial industry,” he told reporters in Northern Virginia. “If you spend a lot of time over regulating credit unions and community banks, you are basically letting a lot of the big guys off easily.”
+
+-- Kaine also said he’s undecided on TPP and still open to voting for it. “I see much in it to like,” he told The Intercept, calling the deal an “upgrade” of labor standards, environmental standards and intellectual property protections. But he also voiced concerns about the “dispute resolution mechanisms.”
+
+-- Teasing reporters, Clinton tweeted pictures of Cory Booker from her official account:
+
+THE OLYMPICS ARE SHAPING UP TO BE A DEBACLE:
+
+-- Waterways surrounding Rio’s Olympic Park are so sewage-infested and filthy that they “bubble with sulfur and methane gases,” while dead fish float atop the surface. There are public health concerns for athletes and visitors. (Dom Phillips)
+
+-- Ten people suspected of planning terrorist attacks during the games were arrested. Members of the gang had declared loyalty to ISIS and were in negotiations to buy an assault rifle over the internet. (Dom Phillips)
+
+-- Researchers found traces of Zika occurring in the common “Culex” species of mosquito in Brazil, a potentially alarming discovery that could portend wider transmission of the virus. (Dom Phillips)
+
+-- Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan both publicly disagreed with Trump for saying the U.S. would not necessarily come to the aid of a NATO ally if it is invaded by Russia. The Senate Majority leader called NATO “the most successful military alliance in the history of the world” in a Facebook chat with The New York Times. “The speaker believes the U.S. should defend our NATO allies,” a Ryan spokeswoman said. “My hope is that if Donald is elected president, we can convince him to change his mind on it,” said Marco Rubio. “I’m 100 percent certain how Russian President (Vladimir) Putin feels,” said Lindsey Graham. “He’s a very happy man.” (AP)
+
+-- “The ‘alt right’ finds a home inside the Republican convention,” by David Weigel: Geert Wilders strolled toward Quicken Loans Arena, drawing the usual amount of double takes. “‘He heads the Freedom Party in the Netherlands,’ [Rep. Steve King] explained to a delegate who was wondering about the fuss. … In another year the far-right Wilders would not have made it past the perimeter. He has proposed moratoriums on new Muslim immigration to his country and a similar halt on mosque construction. But the rise and nomination of [Trump] had inspired Wilders — and expanded his American fan base. He was just one of many people who might have been labeled extremists, and whose views are rejected by the old elite of the Republican Party, but who attended the convention and related events with a sense that their politics were finally winning.”
+
+Many members of “racially conscious” and anti-immigrant alt-right movement came to Cleveland to celebrate Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP. ""They held meetings, co-hosted parties and happily met the news media. Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute, held a cheeky sign encouraging journalists to “interview a ‘racist.’”
+
+-- As Ted Cruz continued to dig in on his refusal to endorse Trump, the nominee said the crowd booing the Texas senator is evidence that the GOP has coalesced behind him. From Sean Sullivan and Philip Rucker: Addressing donors at a closed-door lunch, Trump said that he, Reince Priebus and campaign chairman Paul Manafort knew what they were doing when they let Cruz speak. ""I am not going to call him Lyin' Ted anymore, but he did sign the pledge and it was pretty definitive. He isn't a team player,” Trump said, people in the room told Sean Sullivan and Phil Rucker report. “At the Thursday lunch, Trump also called criticized Jeb Bush and John Kasich, who skipped the convention and are not backing Trump. ‘If I got beaten as bad as Kasich got beaten by me I wouldn’t support him either,’ Trump said of Kasich … Trump praised Marco Rubio and Rick Perry, who voiced support for Trump during their convention remarks. Rubio delivered brief remarks in a pre-recorded video and did not attend. Trump also took a dig at Mitt Romney.”
+
+-- Cruz manager Jeff Roe, responding to Chris Christie criticism of his boss’s speech, said the New Jersey governor ""turned over his political testicles long ago."" (The Chris Stigall Show)
+
+-- Donald Trump Jr. said they can win without Cruz’s endorsement: “We knew what was coming. We let him do it. We were the bigger men,” he told NBC.
+
+-- Trump ally Roger Stone suggested that The Donald could back a primary challenger to the Texas senator when he’s up for reelection in 2018. (Huffington Post)
+
+-- A lip reader told “Inside Edition” that, as Cruz walked off stage, Trump can be seen on video asking his daughter, “Do you think I made a mistake?”
+
+-- Ross Douthat praises Cruz in his NYT column: “The future is (unknown) — but you can make sure that when the history of the present year is written, your place won’t be with those timid and temporizing souls who surrendered both their party and their dignity to Trump. That’s what Cruz earned himself last night: not a better chance at the presidency, but a profile in political courage that will be remembered no matter what happens to his political ambitions henceforth. And it’s yet another irony of this most ironic year that it would be the most overtly Machiavellian of Republican politicians who would keep his honor, and pass a test that so many politicians of more conspicuous high-mindedness have failed.”
+
+-- Though Mike Pence’s Cleveland introduction speech was overshadowed by Cruz, many conservatives were nonetheless impressed -- and see him as a tame, straight-laced figure to help balance Trump. Support for the Indiana governor has grown since Trump's prolonged and awkward roll-out of his running-mate.
+
+-- “Pence’s role: Be to the GOP what Trump cannot,” by Ed O'Keefe: “Indiana Republican Craig Dunn said that his state’s governor ... ‘is going to be a firefighter’ — extinguishing political blazes caused by Trump. Pence is widely expected to carry out the key duty of defending Trump among Republicans still skeptical of his candidacy. He is likely to be called on to clarify Trump’s ever-shifting views on policy ... In the coming weeks, Pence plans to play an active role as one of the main conduits between the Trump operation and the GOP donor class.""
+
+-- Trump settles on a preferred Super PAC. There have been half a dozen entities jockeying to be the main pro-Trump vehicle, which has confused donors and hampered fundraising, Matea Gold reports. There’s also been confusion since the nominee spent the primary season trashing Super PACs. “Trump and his running mate have both expressed willingness to headline fundraisers for Rebuilding America Now, according to Ken McKay, the group's chief strategist (formerly Chris Christie’s campaign manager). Such appearances are permitted by the Federal Election Commission, as long as the candidates do not solicit more than $5,000. Pence offered an explicit statement of support for the group that was shared during a presentation to several dozen donors at the Ritz-Carlton Wednesday.” The group aims to raise $100 million.
+
+-- The Trump campaign said it raised $3.5 million in a 24-hour period that included Pence’s acceptance speech. While impressive, that’s still less than half the $6.4 million Bernie Sanders raised in a 24-hour period after winning the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Matea notes.
+
+--  Bloomberg got ahold of the guest lists for six of the suites in Cleveland: “Some names were predictable, like Sheldon Adelson … Others are more surprising, like Todd Ricketts, whose family spent millions of dollars bankrolling an anti-Trump campaign during the Republican primary. Ricketts, whose family owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team, attended the convention as an Illinois delegate and was invited to a suite because of his longtime support for the party, despite not having contributed to Trump … Two other prominent anti-Trump donors, Paul Singer of New York and Richard Uihlein of Wisconsin, were also represented. While Singer skipped the convention, his staffers were in town and made the guest list of a suite for convention donors.” See the six-page list here.
+
+-- “FEC Dems trolling for violations at GOP convention t-shirt stands,” from the Washington Examiner: “Democrats on the Federal Election Commission are trolling through the Republican National Convention looking for violations of elections laws, even at the t-shirt stands. Commissioners Ann Ravel and Ellen Weintraub are here looking into what vendors are offering and if they are following the rules. They are paying attention to groups also looking for violators at the convention. Weintraub even took a picture, posted on Twitter, of one vendor's stand and wrote, ‘We're on it — RNC vendors appear to be compliant!’ She was reacting to a tweet from a staffer for the Sunshine Foundation who is also here searching for violations big and small.”
+
+-- Trump’s Muslim ban continues to evolve: “We must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism,” he said, “until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place.” He did not specify what that means. Hasn’t France been “compromised by terrorism,” for instance? But the line played well with the crowd.
+
+— ZIGNAL VISUAL: Zignal Labs tracked more than 6.4 million cross-media mentions of the Republican convention. On social media, at least, Melania Trump's plagiarism was the hottest story of the convention. That was followed by Cruz's snub of the nominee. Thursday tied Tuesday for most convention-related mentions, at 1.7 million.
+
+Among the ""undercard"" speakers, Peter Theil received the most online reaction:
+
+Here's some of how Clinton's campaign responded:
+
+Ivanka Trump, the candidate’s oldest daughter, tried to present her dad as a champion for working moms. “I do not consider myself categorically Republican or Democrat,” the 34-year-old said. “More than party affiliation, I vote based on what I believe is right for my family and my country.”
+
+Oh boy -- this gif of Trump touching his daughter awkwardly... (click to watch):
+
+-- In case you were wondering,  Sanders plans on being ""a unifying force"" in Philadelphia. A spokesman said he has “no plans” to channel Cruz and snub Clinton. “He’s not Ted Cruz, in so many ways,” said Michael Briggs. He'll host a pre-Philadelphia meeting with many of the 1,900 delegates representing him to talk about what ""he’s accomplished in the past year and where we go from here,"" per John Wagner.
+
+Here's video of the Code Pink protester who made it into the arena (click to watch):
+
+In response to online chatter that she made a Nazi salute while speaking at the convention, Laura Ingraham posted this:
+
+The RNC's chief strategist agreed -- live on television -- with a congressman that Cruz is an ""a--hole"":
+
+Neocons are falling away from the GOP because of Trump and his comments about NATO:
+
+Estonia's president, whose country's very survival Trump threatened with his flip comment, responded as well:
+
+Another scene from Cleveland, via the Washington Examiner:
+
+Outside of Cleveland, Michele Bachmann posted this about Black Lives Matter:
+
+On the campaign trail: Clinton is in Orlando and Tampa, Fla.
+
+At the White House: Obama holds a bilateral meeting with Mexico President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, followed by a joint press conference.
+
+On Capitol Hill: The Senate and House are out.
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+-- Expect SCALDING hot temps to usher us into the weekend, per the Capital Weather Gang’s Friday morning forecast. “Ready to rumble in the heat dome? Mid-to-upper 90s for afternoon high temperatures feel closer to 100+ (even by lunch hour!) thanks to nearly-oppressive dew points near 70 degrees. Any early clouds dissipate quickly, but we could have another batch of clouds during the afternoon give us some natural shade at times. Isolated thunderstorms, especially north of town, can’t be ruled out completely.”
+
+-- The Nationals lost to the Dodgers 6-3.
+
+-- A transit union is suing Metro on behalf of Seyoum Haile, a Metro mechanic who was fired after last year’s deadly L’Enfant Plaza smoke incident. Union officials are seeking reinstatement for Haile, saying his actions should have only resulted in a temporary suspension. (Martine Powers)
+
+-- George Washington University said it is bringing in outside counsel to assist in investigating allegations against men’s basketball coach Mike Lonergan, after players complained about “verbal and emotional abuse” and player mistreatment by the six-year-coach. (Des Bieler)
+
+-- A 68-year-old man was pumping gas in Southeast D.C. yesterday morning when a robber walked up and shot him. Then he hopped into his car and sped off in broad daylight. Police are calling it “senseless murder.” (LaVendrick Smith and Lynh Bui)
+
+Michelle Obama did carpool karaoke with James Corden and Missy Elliott:
+
+The Saturday Night Live cast put together a bunch of sketches from the convention:
+
+Go inside the convention in 360 degrees with The Post's video team:
+
+In this pro-Clinton video, a Trump impersonator tweets instead of picking up the red phone:
+
+""Young Turks"" host Cenk Uygur went off on Alex Jones after Jones crashed his livestream at the convention:
+
+Watch video footage of the moments before an unarmed therapist Charles Kinsey was shot by North Miami police:
+
+Kinsey spoke about the shooting from the hospital:
+
+This six-year-old stole the show at the convention with her rendition of ""America the Beautiful"":",REAL
+906,Delegates face death threats from Trump supporters,"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
+5098,Hillary Clinton poised to reveal VP pick,"Miami (CNN) Hillary Clinton is poised to reveal her vice presidential candidate Friday in a message to supporters, people close to the search say, and is planning to make her first appearance with her running mate at a campaign rally in Miami on Saturday.
+
+Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia has emerged as a leading contender after a methodical search, several Democrats close to the campaign say, receiving spirited backing from President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton.
+
+In selecting the battleground of Florida to make her public announcement, Clinton is hoping to seize the spotlight from Republicans after their convention in Cleveland. She is set to visit Orlando and Tampa on Friday, but her new partner is not expected to join her until Saturday at a rally here at Florida International University, where the student body is more than half Hispanic.
+
+Kaine speaks fluent Spanish, and last week, Clinton beamed at a Virginia rally as he declared: ""Estamos listos para Hillary!"" or ""We are ready for Hillary!""
+
+Clinton has yet to reveal her choice beyond her tight inner circle, fearful of it leaking before a well-orchestrated weekend rollout is set into motion. Her campaign, looking to build their email and text list, has offered supporters the chance to be the ""first to know"" their vice presidential pick, much like Barack Obama did in 2008.
+
+The focus of her search in the final days also centers on Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, according to several Democrats close to the process, confident either Kaine or Vilsack would fit her chief criteria of being a strong governing partner and ready for the presidency.
+
+""She's not going to be waffling at the 11th hour like (Donald) Trump,"" one Democrat close to the process said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding the selection. ""By now, she knows who she wants and will be confident in her choice.""
+
+She also was considering Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who would be the first Hispanic candidate on the party's ticket, or Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who would be the first African-American vice presidential nominee. Democrats close to the process said Perez and Booker had considerable strengths, far beyond their diversity, but their limited experience in national security and government made them less likely to be selected.
+
+The consensus, even among several Democrats close to other finalists, is that Kaine will be tapped as Clinton's vice presidential candidate. Yet others close to Clinton still cautioned against counting out Vilsack, who has the most state and federal governing experience and the longest personal relationship with Clinton.
+
+For Clinton, the selection of a running mate opens a new and important chapter in her political life.
+
+Her first presidential campaign ended long before any serious consideration of a running mate began, so this phase of her campaign is uncharted terrain, a moment where she can choose her own partner.
+
+She was deeply involved in the selection of Al Gore to be her husband's running mate in 1992, but this choice is hers. Her husband favors Kaine, people close to him say, but one added this week: ""He gets a say, but doesn't have a vote on this.""
+
+The weekend debut of the Democratic ticket is designed to build anticipation for the party's convention starting Monday in Philadelphia. After they are formally nominated, Clinton and her new running mate are expected to embark on a bus tour to key campaign battlegrounds, similar to the ""First 1,000 Miles"" caravan in 1992 that took the Clintons and Gores to eight states on their way to winning the White House in November.
+
+For her part, Clinton has intentionally not informed anyone who has gone through the vetting process of her final decision, Democrats close to the process said, in hopes of keeping her choice a secret until the last possible moment.
+
+Booker, who often fires up audiences for Clinton, appeared with other Democrats in Cleveland on Thursday to push back against Trump and Republicans, who have spent the week assailing her character.
+
+""I don't know who the nominee is,"" Booker told CNN's Jake Tapper Thursday. ""The good thing about it is she has tremendous choices.""
+
+But two Democrats close to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and one close to Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, both of whom were on Clinton's list of contenders, said Thursday they were all but certain they had not been selected.
+
+Warren told Stephen Colbert on CBS' ""Late Show"" that she thought ""if it were me, I would know it by now.""
+
+All the finalists have met with Clinton at different times, Democrats close to the process say, including Perez, Booker and Warren during one-on-one meetings last Friday at Clinton's home in Washington. But this week, the Clinton campaign had a meeting with top Warren aides, trying to work out a surrogate schedule for her for the rest of the summer and fall, leading Warren's team to believe she had not been chosen.
+
+The selection of either Brown, Warren or Booker would influence the balance of power in the Senate. Their replacement would be named, at least initially, by a Republican governor in their state, and Clinton is intent on trying to win a Democratic majority in the Senate.
+
+Clinton started this process before her primary fight with Bernie Sanders ended with what aides described as a ""fluid"" list, including several potential running mates. Several were eliminated, including Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro and James Stravidis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO and a retired four-star Navy admiral.",REAL
+5965,Police Turn In Badges Rather Than Incite Violence Against Standing Rock Protesters: Report,By Amanda Froelich It should be evident if you’re following news concerning the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota that tension continues to escalate between... ,FAKE
+9589,Comment on 21 Things We’ve Learned About Hillary Clinton from Wikileaks That the MSM Won’t Share…But YOU Can! by Lakshmima,"Posted on October 28, 2016 by Daisy Luther 
+Let’s talk about Wikileaks . 
+First of all, the organization was founded by Julian Assange back in 2006. Their website explains what they are all about: 
+“WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying, and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses.” 
+In the 11 years that they’ve been publishing documents, they have not been disproven a single time. Their record for authentication is perfect. (Learn more here and here .) 
+So this means that a person would be pretty silly to disregard anything in the reams of information about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, the Clinton Foundation, and the political shenanigans that would put the Machiavellis to shame. 
+Here are 21 of the most important things that have come out about Hillary Clinton, that unfortunately, no one is reporting on in the mainstream. In the interest of brevity, each topic has a link to an article that goes deeper into the leak. (In no particular order.) John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign had a nice cozy dinner with Peter Kadzik, one of the top officials in the Department of Justice…the day after the Benghazi hearing . Kadzik’s son also asked for a job on the Clinton campaign, and, the icing on the corruption cupcake? Kadzik led the effort to nominate Loretta Lynch, who famously met with Bill Clinton on her private plane right before Hillary’s interrogation about Emailgate. ( source ) We all knew that the Clinton Foundation was just a way for the Clinton family to launder money, and now there’s proof. Zero Hedge writes, “…today’s Wikileaks dump included that memo which reveals, for the first time, the precise financial flows between the Clinton Foundation, Band’s firm Teneo Consulting, and the Clinton family’s private business endeavors.” A pundit called this leak “The Rosetta Stone of the Clinton Foundation,” meaning that with this document, all of their shady financial dealings could be unraveled and translated. ( source ) Clinton is unable to speak for very long without a podium to lean on . Numerous leaked emails reference how certain interviews have to be kept short because she’d be without one. And this article references a very interesting reason why this may be the case – surprisingly it isn’t related to her health. ( source ) The leaks also show that Clinton intends to do her best to restrict the Second Amendment. Brian Fallon, the national press secretary for the Clinton campaign, wrote, “ Circling back around on guns as a follow up to the Friday morning discussion: the Today show has indicated they definitely plan to ask bout guns, and so to have the discussion be more of a news event than her previous times discussing guns, we are going to background reporters tonight on a few of the specific proposals she would support as President – universal background checks of course, but also closing the gun show loophole by executive order and imposing manufacturer liability .” According to an analysis on The Daily Sheeple, “Imposing manufacturer liability means that after Sandy Hook, Bushmaster and Remington Arms would have been prosecuted for having a hand in the murder of children and school staff members for firearms that were legally sold.” ( source ) The campaign was concerned that the sexual escapades of Bill Clinton could be likened to those of another disgraced celebrity, Bill Cosby . Political operative Ron Klain sent an urgent email saying that Hillary should anticipate the following questions, ” How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did? Is his conduct relevant to your campaign? You said every woman should be believed. Why not the women who accused him? Will you apologize to the women who were wrongly smeared by your husband and his allies?” ( source ) Clinton’s campaign deliberately leaked an embarrassing photo of a swimsuit-clad Bernie Sanders to the press, ironically insinuating that it was proof he was bought off by Wall Street. Perez Hilton wrote, “ Bernie Sanders lounges at elite Martha’s Vineyard pool, summer 2015 after helping raise money from Wall Street lobbyists .” ( source ) Clinton admitted she is out of touch with the middle class in a speech to Goldman-Black Rock in 2014. “And I am not taking a position on any policy, but I do think there is a growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged. And I never had that feeling when I was growing up. Never. I mean, were there really rich people, of course there were. My father loved to complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had accessible health care. We had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, didn’t believe in mortgages. So I lived that. And now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy , but I haven’t forgotten it.” ( source ) She made this rather NWO remark at a 2013 paid speech to Brazilian bank Banco Itau: “ My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders , some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” ( source ) In a leak of yet another paid speech, this time to the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago in 2013, Clinton said that Jordan and Turkey “ can’t possibly vet all those refugees so they don’t know if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees.” Meanwhile, if Clinton has her way , we will be warmly welcoming 65,000 refugees a year, which makes Obama’s 10,000 a year look like small potatoes. ( source ) Clinton blackmailed the Chinese by telling them that the US would base missiles in the region if they didn’t exert some control over North Korean aggression. “ So China, come on. You either control them or we’re going to have to defend against them ,” she purportedly told the audience at a Goldman Sachs conference in June 2013. ( source ) In May 2015, Clinton was no longer Secretary of State but was ready to announce she was running for President when she was invited to attend a summit in Morrocco. The implication from the leaked emails was that a $12 million “donation” from the king of Morocco was dependent on Clinton attending the summit. Human Abedin, usually loyal to her boss, had concerns . “ If HRC was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter. She created this mess and she knows it. Her presence was a condition for the Moroccans to proceed so there is no going back on this,” Abedin wrote to Robbie Mook in a November 2014 email. Incidentally, Clinton didn’t attend. Bill and Chelsea went instead and the $12 million donation was not forthcoming. (source ) Podesta attacked Clinton’s primary election rival Bernie Sanders for criticizing the Paris climate change agreement. “ Can you believe that doofus Bernie attacked it? ” said Podesta. ( source ) Clinton told a Goldman Sachs conference she would like to intervene secretly in Syria . “ My view was you intervene as covertly as is possible for Americans to intervene,” she told employees of the bank in South Carolina, which had paid her about $225,000 to give a speech. “We used to be much better at this than we are now. Now, you know, everybody can’t help themselves. They have to go out and tell their friendly reporters and somebody else: Look what we’re doing and I want credit for it. ” (source ) There is indeed a definite link between the Clinton campaign and what MSM is allowed to say. The campaign has colluded directly with media spokespersons that read like a Who’s Who in American Media : Dan Merica from CNN, Haim Saban of Univision, John Harwood of CNBC and the NY Times, Rebecca Quick of CNBC, Maggie Haberman of NY Times and Politico, John Harris of Politico, Donna Brazile formerly of CNN, Roland Martin of TV-One, Marjorie Pritchard of The Boston Globe, and Louise Mensch of Heat Street. ( source ) As everyone knows, the DNC deliberately screwed Bernie Sanders out of the nomination ( Bonus: Wikileaks also released some of the DNC’s voicemails on the topic ). There are emails that prove who is actually pulling HRC’s puppet strings and that puppeteer is George Soros . The shadow government is not just a conspiracy theory – it really exists and Hillary’s job is to keep George Soros happy. ( source ) Excerpts from her speeches to Wall Street read like a guide to two-faced treachery. In them, she clearly points out that sometimes you “need” to lie. “If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.” ( source ) Wikileaks emails show that back when she still worked for CNN and before she became an employee of the Clinton campaign, Donna Brazile gave Hillary the questions in advance for her “impromptu” CNN Town Hall questions. ( source ) The campaign got to “approve” articles in influential publications like NY Times, HuffPo, CNN, NBC, CBS, NYT, MSNBC, and Politico, showing a massive collusion with the mainstream media, who has hounded Trump relentlessly in an effort to distract from HRC’s abysmal candidacy. ( source ) Through the treasure trove of Wikileaks emails, we can gain an accurate picture of how Hillary really feels about us all (spoiler: basket of deplorables, basement dwellers and right wing conspirators) ( source ) President Obama knew the whole time that her emails were not coming from the secure State Department server. Cheryl Mills wrote to John Podesta, “ W e need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov .” You see, Obama’s emails all have to be from”whitelisted”addresses. So someone, somewhere, added her nonsecure email to his whitelist. ( source ) 
+And finally, here’s the real reason that treacherous shrew is involved in politics. And let me tell you, it isn’t because she yearns to make things better for anyone but herself. (emphasis mine.) 
+At the Goldman Sachs Builders and Innovators Summit, Clinton responded to a question from chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, who quipped that you “go to Washington” to “make a small fortune.” Clinton agreed with the comment and complained about ethics rules that require officials to divest from certain assets before entering government. “ There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives, ” Clinton said. ( source ) Together, we cannot be ignored. I am on a mission between now and the Presidential Election on November 8th and I hope that you will join me. I am going to work day and night to provide the coverage that the mainstream media is not. It isn’t until we combine all of our voices that we can make people listen to the scandals, the rigging, and the corruption, not only in this election but in the system in general. Please join your voice with mine by liking, sharing, and spreading the word. Together, we cannot be ignored. Together, we are an army. Courtesy of Daisy Luther Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+4995,"As His Campaign Crumbles, Trump Is Spending His Day Fighting With MSNBC's Joe Scarborough","Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is literally losing red states by the day, so what is the Republican presidential nominee doing? He is sending angry tweets to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.
+
+Instead of dealing with the fact that his campaign is literally burning to the ground, Donald Trump is once again planted in front of his TV obsessing over his media coverage.
+
+In case anybody thought that Trump’s tweet at Scarborough was one-off today, the Republican nominee also attacked CNN’s Don Lemon:
+
+A day after threatening the life of his Democratic opponent, Donald Trump isn’t trying to fix his campaign. Instead, Trump is whining about the media and his coverage.
+
+Trump exists in his own universe. The presidential campaign is a distant second in his mind to his endless cravings for positive attention and publicity. Hillary Clinton is making a play for the deep red state of Utah, while Donald Trump is busy angry tweeting at Joe Scarborough and Don Lemon.
+
+The Republican Party might have been better off with no nominee at all because they are being run into the ground by fraudulent businessman Donald J. Trump.",REAL
+8794,Poland Establishing New Territorial Defense Force to Fight ‘Russian Threat’,"Politics Poland Establishing New Territorial Defense Force to Fight ‘Russian Threat’ 
+Poland's right-wing government is creating a new military arm to counter the supposed Russian threat, as well as planning to double the size of Poland's armed forces Originally appeared at Sputnik 
+The Polish government has given a final go-ahead to the planned creation of a territorial defense force, which local media were quick to call the “personal army” of Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz. Sputnik Poland discussed the issue with Polish politician and commentator Mariusz Olszewski. 
+“ Macierewicz is a very efficient politician and defense minister and his ability to place [the territorial defense force] under his personal command, rather that the president’s is nothing short of a political masterpiece, ” Mariusz Olszewski told Sputnik Poland. 
+He added that the new force was obviously meant for use inside the country against the so-called “death squads” trying to destabilize the political situation in the country. 
+“If this is really what is happening, then the government’s fears are fully justified,” Olszewski chuckled. 
+In the event of an armed conflict the territorial defense units will be called up to secure their designated areas, stamp out attempts to stoke up ethnic and religious conflicts and attempts to destabilize the country. 
+When asked whether it means that the Territorial Defense Force (TDF) would serve as a kind of “personal police” for the ruling Law and Justice party, Mariusz Olszewski said that it would rather serve the national security minister. 
+“The very list of threats the TDF is supposed to deal with looks a bit strange though as we have no internal threats, neither have we any regional or ethnic minorities here,” Olszewski said, adding that the real threat to the powers-that-be came from people who “use Western money to destabilize the country through media ‘death squads’ and challenge the constitutional order in Poland.” 
+“I am also worried by Ukrainian media saying that it could take the Polish army just five days to reach the border of the Second Polish Republic [prior to 1939 — Ed.]. This is exactly the kind of misinformation Western propaganda was spreading about Russian troops needing just 24 hours to reach Warsaw. Someone is trying to pit Eastern European countries against each other, to make people believe that war is imminent,” Mariusz Olszewski warned. 
+While admitting that security was something no country should ignore, he added that a country the size of Poland might need a territorial defense force, but only as a backup to the regular forces, “not as the mainstay of national defense as our defense ministry wants us to believe. This is either someone’s mistake or just a PR stunt.” 
+“Poland needs ground forces, an Air Force and, to a lesser extent, a Navy. As for territorial defense, it is just a smokescreen meant to hide what is really happening in our army,” Mariusz Olszewski emphasized . 
+The Territorial Defense Force (TDF) is a planned military reserve component of the Polish armed forces which is currently being formed. 
+Plans call for the force, once fully active, to consist of 35,000 part-time volunteers. Poland plans to deploy the new territorial defense units on its eastern border and to transfer the acting brigades there with an eye to becoming one of the largest NATO armies in Europe. 
+Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz said that the deployment was aimed against Russia, describing it as a ""measured, proportionate"" response to ""the prospect of aggressive Russian action."" 
+He also supports the idea of significantly boosting the Polish armed forces, from the current 80,000 servicemen to some 150,000.  ",FAKE
+4871,How Hillary Clinton could win,"This is the second of a two-part series looking at the path to victory for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Click here for the first story: How Donald Trump could win
+
+(CNN) Hillary Clinton has advantages heading into the final stretch of the campaign that any presidential candidate would envy: a fleet of popular surrogates, a mountain of cash and an opponent who is often sidetracked by self-inflicted wounds.
+
+Yet the Democratic nominee enters this home stretch in a dead heat against Donald Trump, according to a CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday.
+
+The close contest heading into the fall underscores Clinton's vulnerabilities on trust and honesty -- and her need to summon a relentless and efficient ground game, even if many of her voters are fueled more by revulsion toward Trump than excitement about her.
+
+But in many ways, the nation's changing demographics make this Clinton's race to lose.
+
+""In a sense, Trump can't win this election,"" said veteran pollster Neil Newhouse. ""But Hillary can lose it.""
+
+In order to succeed where 17 Republican candidates failed to beat Trump, Clinton must maintain an incessant focus on her unpredictable rival and persuade voters that he lacks the temperament, character and knowledge required of a potential commander-in-chief.
+
+Clinton has already adopted an aggressive approach this week. She's held briefings for reporters on her new campaign jet two days in a row. She slammed Trump's character and failure to release his tax returns. And she blasted his business career, which is at the center of his campaign as full of ""scams"" and ""frauds.""
+
+That is one way of trying to keep the conversation away from the private email server and accusations about the Clinton Foundation that appear to have hurt her standing in recent weeks.
+
+""I don't really pay attention to polls,"" she told reporters on her plane Tuesday. ""When they are good for me, and there have been a lot of them that have been good for me recently, I don't pay attention. When they are not so good, I don't pay attention. We are on a course that we are sticking with.""
+
+A senior Clinton campaign official predicted single-digit battles across the swing states that will decide the election. But ultimately her campaign stresses it expected a close race and single digit battles in swing states, but believes it has multiple routes to 270 electoral votes and that Trump has a much narrower path
+
+Some Clinton critics have, however, warned that her approach in August -- spending much of the month fundraising away from TV cameras after the Democrats' successful convention in Philadelphia -- lacked the go-for-broke energy of her rival.
+
+""Trump is running a high-risk campaign right now. They have to, because they are behind and have eight weeks to go,"" Newhouse, who was a pollster for 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, said before Clinton upped the pace after Labor Day.
+
+""I don't think her campaign has shown any real guts or faith in their candidate. They're not bold. They are setting themselves up for a potential loss by a thousand cuts.""
+
+It is without dispute that the hurdles for Trump are enormous. With assistance from teleprompters, he has becomed more disciplined as a candidate, but he has yet to convince voters in swing states, where Clinton leads most polls, that he is fit to be president.
+
+For Clinton, the demographics of the electorate work in her favor, and she appears to be reassembling the Obama coalition that was decisive in the 2008 and 2012 elections. She leads Trump among voters under the age of 45 by 54% to 29% and among non-whites 71% to 18%, according to the CNN/ORC poll.
+
+Democratic strategist and pollster Celinda Lake noted that Trump has consistently trailed by about 12 points where Romney was among married women in 2012. Romney also ran strong among white women -- and led President Barack Obama in exit polls among white women 56% to 42%.
+
+Trump's campaign has yet to show any real effort to improve his image among women, beyond his attempt to appear more moderate with his minority outreach to African-Americans.
+
+Trump is also some 20 points behind his Democratic opponent among college-educated women, Lake said, compared to Romney and 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain, who were about 5 and 8 points behind, respectively.
+
+Beyond that, the demographic where Trump runs strongest -- non college-educated white men -- is dropping as a share of the electorate each year.
+
+""So he is relying on an ever-diminishing pool of votes, where she is relying on an ever-expanding portion of votes,"" Lake said. To win, she said, ""He would need to win the first debate; he would need to have a collapse of Democratic turnout; and he would really need to close the race with independents and women.""
+
+The likelihood of those factors falling into place is slim. But the one way to put the race in reach for Trump, she said, ""is to assume that it's out of reach.""
+
+So the key for Clinton will be getting those vital constituencies out to vote. That's where her high-powered roster of surrogates comes in.
+
+Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and her primary foe Bernie Sanders remain highly popular among key sectors of the Democratic coalition.
+
+They will be vital to driving up swing-state turnout in Democratic strongholds like Cleveland, Philadelphia, Northern Virginia, Richmond, Virginia, and parts of Florida that could decide the election.
+
+Clinton is certain to seize on any foreign policy or temperamental missteps by Trump to bolster her argument that her foe is a ""loose cannon"" who can't be trusted with America's nuclear arsenal.
+
+His efforts to reach out to minorities in recent weeks have managed, in some cases, to further alienate them. His campaign has yet to demonstrate it can string together, not just a couple of good days, but a good two months, given his disadvantages on the electoral map.
+
+And beyond just having a good first debate later this month, Trump must force Clinton into making some mistakes to have a chance of winning, strategists said.
+
+The two candidates face similar hurdles in the sense that both may find it almost impossible to change voters' opinions about them at this point. After all, Clinton and Trump are the most unpopular nominees of any major party in memory.
+
+Both Clinton and Trump are widely distrusted. In the CNN/ORC survey, only 42% had a favorable impression of the former secretary of state while the real estate mogul was barely better with 45%.
+
+Clinton clearly has work to do on the trust issue, though. Fifty percent of voters said Trump was more honest and trustworthy. Only 35% chose Clinton.
+
+""People just don't trust Hillary Clinton, and they don't trust her -- not on the basis of one single thing -- but on the basis of whole collections of things going back over 20 to 30 years,"" said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, noting that voters cite an array of her controversies from Whitewater to her email server.
+
+The trust factor -- as well as the sense among many voters that they can't relate to Clinton or understand her as person -- loom as challenges for the former secretary of state, because there is no one thing she can do in the next two months to fix those issues.
+
+Because of the depth of distrust, voters are unlikely to give her the benefit of the doubt if something goes wrong, or she faces a new set of revelations, Hart said.
+
+""They're locked in terms of who she is on the issue of integrity,"" Hart said. ""There is not an individual issue that she can address and that has a tremendous negative effect. All of this is baked in.... It doesn't mean that she's going to lose the election. It's like driving your car on the shoulder: that's fine, unless a car nudges you over and then you've got nothing going for you.""
+
+The trust factor -- as well as the sense among many voters that they can't relate to Clinton or understand her as person -- loom as challenges for the former secretary of state, because she has been trying to do that throughout the campaign, but has only a short time before voters begin casting absentee ballots.
+
+A month ago, when she led Trump by double digits in the polls, Clinton's odds of victory looked good. Historically the candidate who led in the polls two weeks after the conventions went on to win the election.
+
+But this campaign has defied patterns of history before. Clinton's campaign warned against overconfidence, in part to keep Democratic voters engaged.
+
+Though Obama's numbers are above 50% -- no small achievement for a late-second-term president, Clinton always faced a historically difficult feat as a candidate seeking the third successive term for the Democratic Party.
+
+Moreover, her three decades in politics made her a particularly ill-suited choice for an electorate whose chief desire is change. She's effectively an incumbent with dynastic baggage facing an outsider candidate in Trump who built a campaign on voter mistrust of establishment politicians.
+
+But Clinton allies argue that her dual-pronged message has been more succinct this time than it was in 2008.
+
+While many swing-state voters say in interviews they have no idea what her message is, her strategists say it is piercing through in local markets where she is advertising: the idea that she will put families first while Trump would put himself first; and that Americans are ""stronger together"" while Trump would be a divisive force.
+
+Mo Elleithee, a former Democratic strategist who is now executive director of the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service, pointed to one ad that Clinton ran just before the Nevada caucuses that he said was a perfect distillation of that message. It was one featuring a little girl who was afraid that her parents would get deported. Clinton told the girl to let her worry about it.
+
+""It's incredibly hard for any positive message to break through"" in this toxic political climate, Elleithee said. ""If she can make this: 'I've got your back' argument compelling enough, she can chip away"" at voter distrust.
+
+That work is important not only to help her win but also to help her govern, he said. ""She needs to address that issue now and continue until after the election.... She could win this race comfortably with no positive message, but they should not mistake a comfortable win for a mandate.""",REAL
+10087,Teachers Strike Allowing Children To Sample The Kind Of Free Time They’ll Have On The Dole,"0 Add Comment 
+WITH 400 schools shut and 200,000 students not attending lessons, striking teachers have provided children with an insight into what their life will be like on the dole after they leave school. 
+“It obviously wasn’t the ASTI’s intention, but it’s an interesting lesson for my three lads, sitting around on the couch, bored out of their holes thinking ‘is this it? Is this all I can do?’ That’s basically the dole like. Things being largely out of your control. Good to get training in early,” shared concerned parent Olwyn Nelligan. 
+As youth unemployment remains worryingly high in Ireland at over 15%, teachers striking for better pay have inadvertently given their students a window into what life will be like post-second level education for many of them as despite being keen to learn and further themselves all they have is free time on their hands. 
+“Teachers are striking for better pay, and if they were granted it, it would could serve as a way for the government to show it cares about education standards in Ireland and those who provide it,” explained one teacher on strike, pleading with the government to show the education sector the respect it deserves. 
+A government spokesman did respond when we put the teacher’s concerns to them earlier today. 
+“We. Don’t. Care. I thought that was pretty obvious. Have you not being paying attention to our policies for the last few years at all?” the spokesman responded. 
+“Having said that teachers are the rock bed of the foundation of the first steps of a child’s life, blah, blah, blah,” the spokesman added. 
+The government refused to comment on ongoing funding concerns with several IT colleges, or lengthy waiting lists for third level students wishing to access counselling services. 
+Some 99% of the country was backing the ASTI’s bid to be paid for supervision work until they learned it may require an increase in their taxes in order to fund it.",FAKE
+7157,Life: 10 Steps To Rolling The Perfect Joint,"10 Steps To Rolling The Perfect Joint Posted today Looking to enjoy a little bit of “relaxation”? You’ll probably want to practice the lost art of joint rolling. With just 10 easy steps, anyone can roll the perfect joint… but enjoy responsibly! Step 1: Fill the tub. Step 2: Get the weed—the dark fruit, the bush that grows in the shadow of the valley of the shadow of weed, the jester’s hiccup, the liquid daydream fresh from the ice-cube tray, the wisdom tooth of the vegetables ogre, Israeli nightshade, the Arizona iced tea of drugs, the dad baffler, the sweet teen poison, the sickly crop of the wind farm, the flower the devil dares not pick—out of your fridge. Set it aside. Step 3: A filter keeps fire from squirming into your throat and laying its eggs in your brainstem. Build the filter by pouring a mixture of egg whites and ground hen bones into a filter mold, and leave it at your parents’ house over a long weekend to set. Step 4: Get your rolling paper by stripping a few inches of skin off the Paper Wretch with a hot carrot peeler. It may take a few tries to get a good swath! Step 5: To break up the weed, place it on an active fault line in a bowl full of gravel. Step 6: Once a major tectonic event has ground your weed, pound it into a paste using a book about a curious incident. Step 7: Wrap your index finger in paper and feed the weed paste into your port. A chilly sensation means your body has accepted the paste and will pass it on. A prickling sensation means your body has rejected the paste and will hopefully pee it out someday. Step 8: Seal the joint by licking your papered-up finger like a naughty little thing. You’re filthy, aren’t you? Step 9: Remove finger, twist paper, and voilà! The perfect joint for any mouth. Step 10: Dunk the joint in the tub so you aren’t tempted to smoke it and become insane. Start over at step one! 
+Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get it right on the first try. Like all things in life, practice makes perfect!",FAKE
+3961,"Turkey, Russia Headed for a Military Face-Off?","JERUSALEM, Israel -- The confrontation between Russia and Turkey entered its second day after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet on its border Tuesday.
+
+Turkey's president said he didn't want to escalate the situation, but he needed to protect Turkey's borders and defend its allies inside Syria.
+
+Russia's Ministry of Defense condemned the attack and announced three steps it would take after the incident: bombing attacks would be escorted by fighter jets, air defenses would be increased, and military contacts with Turkey would be suspended.
+
+After the attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin used exceptionally strong language. He called the incident a ""stab in the back"" and promised ""significant consequences"" to Turkey.
+
+He said Russia would not tolerate such atrocities. Russia's foreign minister cancelled his upcoming trip to Turkey.
+
+As tensions rise over Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane, CBN's Erick Stakelbeck discusses how President Vladimir Putin's unpredictability may reverberate across Europe. Watch our Q&A to understand the geopolitical dynamics of a region fraught with chaos:
+
+Putin also accused Turkey of collusion with ISIS.
+
+""We stated many times the fact that a large amount of oil and oil products are being transferred to the territory of Turkey from the territories seized by ISIS,"" Putin said. ""That is how these gangsters are receiving their financial support.""
+
+""Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its airspace,"" Obama said. ""I think it is very important right now for us to make sure that the Russians and the Turks are talking to each other, find out exactly what happened, and take measures to discourage any kind of escalation.""
+
+Turkey -- a NATO member -- asked NATO for an emergency meeting. It was the first time in 50 years a NATO member's plane shot down a Russian plane.
+
+""I have previously expressed my concerns about the implications of the military actions of the Russian federation close to NATO borders,"" NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said. ""This highlights the importance of having and respecting arrangements to avoid such incidents in the future. As we have repeatedly made clear, we stand in solidarity with Turkey and support the territorial integrity of our NATO ally Turkey.""
+
+It remains to be seen if NATO will invoke Article 5, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
+
+Turkey and Russia both produced evidence they said proved their version of events.
+
+Turkey said the Russian plane violated its airspace after 10 separate warnings. Russia said its plane was targeted over Syrian territory.
+
+After the plane was shot down, Syrian rebel forces aired a video showing them destroying one of the Russian helicopters sent to rescue the pilots. It appears the pilot of the fighter jet died and the co-pilot was rescued.
+
+Russia and Turkey have a long history of tense relations and the incident exposes two competing alliances seeking to dominate the region: Russia and Shi'ite Iran on the one hand and Sunni Turkey on the other.
+
+When Putin brought Russia into the Syrian civil war, retired U.S. General Jay Garner told CBN News he introduced a new danger to the region.
+
+""In the air, it will be a big problem if he puts fighter aircraft in there and they begin to put in airstrikes against rebel forces while we're putting in airstrikes against Assad forces,"" Garner said. ""How do you 'de-conflict' all that? It's a tinderbox.""
+
+Russia moved in to fill the power vacuum the United States filled for decades in the Middle East. Incidents like this one can ignite a spark that sets the tinderbox aflame.",REAL
+368,Democrats weigh how to nudge Sanders out,"Washington (CNN) Democrats in Washington have begun discussing how to encourage Sen. Bernie Sanders to end his campaign without alienating his legions of supporters, as party leaders grow eager to unite the party behind Hillary Clinton and provide a more robust defense for her candidacy.
+
+In private conversations on Capitol Hill, senior Democrats are weighing how to persuade Sanders to step aside without appearing as if they are trying to strong-arm him out of the race. In a phone call last month, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid made the case to Sanders why it would make sense for him to leave the race after New Jersey and California vote on June 7, according to sources familiar with the conversation.
+
+The widespread view, according to interviews with senators, House members and senior party officials, is that Sanders needs to see the writing on the wall himself: That he has no mathematical possibility to win the race and would be better-served to see his agenda enacted if he urged his backers to support Clinton.
+
+""We will walk out of our convention with a nominee,"" Rep. Xavier Becerra, a California Democrat and active Clinton surrogate, told CNN. ""We should be able to walk into the convention in a consolidating mode.""
+
+Some top Democrats privately say Clinton should consider the ultimate way to bring the progressive firebrand's supporters into the fold: Choose Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as her vice presidential pick.
+
+Senators and aides say they've felt reassured after recent discussions with Sanders and his advisers that he won't be a destructive force once voting concludes in mid-June. But Sanders has publicly vowed to take his fight to Philadelphia, something that could deprive the party of a critical month of healing and has spawned fears of unrest at the July nominating convention.
+
+If he doesn't drop out, the options on how to persuade him to quit boil down to this: Propose potential process reforms, including gutting the role of superdelegates in choosing the next nominee, give him a prime speaking slot at the Democratic Convention and even dump the head of the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a controversial figure among Sanders' supporters.
+
+So far, Sanders has not suggested publicly that his fight could be over after California, a state he has barnstormed in recent days as he tries to pull off an upset against Clinton.
+
+""Our campaign has been dismissed and written off more times than I can count,"" Sanders said Wednesday in Palo Alto, California. ""We're going to leave California with enormous momentum going into the convention. And I believe we've got a real shot to come out of that convention with the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.""
+
+Behind the scenes, discussions between the Warren and Clinton camps have been markedly increasing, especially as the freshman senator has begun to a play a more prominent role attacking Donald Trump, according to a source close to Warren.
+
+And that has only spawned increased chatter that Clinton could pick Warren, who has not endorsed either candidate and is the only female Senate Democrat not to back Clinton.
+
+Reid has spoken out publicly against Clinton choosing a senator as a running mate whose state has a Republican governor -- like Massachusetts -- fearing the vacancy would allow a Republican to be appointed and pad the GOP's majority.
+
+But sources familiar with the situation tell CNN that Reid is open to the possibility of Warren as Clinton's running mate, in no small part because it would help unite the party after a long primary season.
+
+""She can take away (Bernie's) power by showing there's no division within the party,"" said one Democratic source who is advocating Warren's selection.
+
+It's uncertain when Warren would endorse Clinton, but the senator's allies believe she doesn't want to appear as if she's pushing Sanders to quit before he's ready to leave the race. Yet she also takes her role as a party uniter ""seriously,"" according to the Warren source.
+
+Much of how the party reacts after Tuesday's primaries will be dictated by Sanders' own actions, officials say. If he stays in the race, softens his rhetoric against Clinton and begins the process of healing the party, there will be less consternation. But if he blasts what he considers a rigged system, berates Clinton for her corporate donations and paid speeches to big banks on Wall Street and calls for a revolution at the convention, Democrats are bound to push back.
+
+Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Clinton backer, said his ""preference"" would be for Sanders to ""take a hard look"" after Tuesday and conclude he has no viable path to the nomination. He said he had no problem with Sanders continuing his campaign until July because he's confident that the party would be able to unite against Trump.
+
+""One thing I'm slightly worried about is the tone and tenor of the convention,"" Murphy added. ""We're going to need a very positive unified convention. He's going to have send very clear signals to his delegates that he wants them to be vocal and loud in support of Hillary in our convention.""
+
+Even if Sanders were to win California, where polls show the race with Clinton in a dead-heat, the math looks grim for him to win the 2,383 delegates to become the nominee. He would need 67% of the remaining pledged delegates to take the lead over Clinton in pledged delegates alone after the District of Columbia votes on June 14. Clinton's lead in superdelegates, however, means she is the only candidate who can secure enough delegates to win the nomination before the convention.
+
+Reid, in an interview with the Associated Press Wednesday, made his strongest comments yet about Sanders' bleak chances, saying the ""math is the math"" and that ""sometimes you just have to give up.""
+
+""I think he better do a little mathing,"" Reid said.
+
+The comments are significant because Reid -- who backs Clinton -- has avoided criticizing Sanders through the course of the campaign. Reid is perhaps Sanders' closest friend in the Senate; the two had an emotional call when Reid informed Sanders he was backing Clinton in February. And Sanders' wife, Jane, hugged Reid and thanked him for staying neutral before the Nevada caucuses as well.
+
+But Reid and Democrats know they need the support of Sanders to help bring his dedicated backers behind Clinton. After the Nevada convention last month spawned angry protests from Sanders' supporters, many argue that the senator has to play a major role to unite the party -- or risk electing Trump. Reid has made the case repeatedly to Sanders, and others have publicly as well.
+
+""My sense is if he believes as passionately about the issues he's been talking about on the campaign trail,"" Becerra said, ""then, after June 7, there's a passionate need for him to be advocating for someone in the White House who will make much of what he is talking about a reality.""
+
+Murphy also was optimistic that Sanders would exit gracefully.
+
+""He's going to be an incredibly impactful spokesman for Hillary,"" Murphy said. ""Once the president and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie get behind Hillary, that's going to be impactful. I'm not wringing my hands on whether it happens next week or next month.""",REAL
+9950,Cardinal Vincent Nichols says: “Britons could learn a lot from the ‘vibrant’ faith of Muslim migrants”,"Cardinal Vincent Nichols says: “Britons could learn a lot from the ‘vibrant’ faith of Muslim migrants” British people have much to learn from the “vibrancy of the Muslim faith” of new immigrants including refugees, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has said. UK Telegraph Cardinal Vincent Nichols said immigrants had been enduring a worsening “atmosphere of fear” in the months since the EU referendum with the members of the public casually voicing hatred in a “self-indulgent” way. (Self-indulgent? I wonder what this French priest would have to say about that?) H e accused politicians of “trading in fear” and said media stories constantly portraying immigration in a negative light were proving “corrosive of our best nature”. In an interview with the BBC , he insisted that increasingly secular British society could learn much from the faith of new arrivals whether Muslims or followers of other religions. “Of course what we have to learn too is from the vibrancy of the Muslim faith that comes here. H e added: “I think the immigration crisis is real and it needs concerted effort to address it,” he said. “It needs to be addressed realistically with resources and proper legislation, but it’s almost impossible to do that in an atmosphere in which fear and hatred are the dominant features. “It does nobody any good, this somewhat self-indulgent way in which people have begun to express themselves and their distaste and their hatred of people who they see as different. “And that is creating a culture of fear among people who have been welcomed here.”",FAKE
+7102,Did Democrats really stuff ballot? Here's their answer,"Print Fairfax County, Virginia, voter Jena Jones told WND and Radio America she found this Democrat insert included with her absentee ballot, among others 
+Democratic Party officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, are categorically denying that pro-Democrat campaign materials were included in the same envelope as a voter’s absentee ballot, arguing that pamphlets were sent in a separate mailing to absentee voters from the Fairfax County Democratic Committee, or FCDC. 
+Earlier this week, Jena and David Jones shared their story of finding more than they expected in the envelope that contained her ballot. (See images of the materials Jena and David say they found at the end of this article. Also included are two images from Democrats showing what they say is confusion on the part of the voters.) 
+“I found a letter from the governor of Virginia asking me to please vote Democrat and ‘help keep Virginia blue’ this year,” Jena explained. “Then I got a letter from the Fairfax County Democratic Committee, giving me a step-by-step, yes-and-no what I should vote for as far as the meal tax and all those other things on the ballot.” 
+In recent days, at least two more people contend they received the same materials in the envelope with their absentee ballots. 
+After the report was first published, and shared on Facebook by David Jones, Fairfax County Democratic Committee Executive Director Frank Anderson replied to David’s post to dispute their account of what the ballot envelope contained. 
+“These materials were NOT sent in the same envelope as the ballot. The ballot is mailed separately by the Office of Elections. Political parties are free to mail items to voters who request absentee ballots. The two envelopes arrived at the same time,” commented Anderson. 
+That triggered a quick back-and-forth between David Jones and Anderson. 
+“I hate to tell you but you’re wrong. All items came in one envelope,” Jones said. 
+Like the reporting you see here? Sign up for free news alerts from WND.com, America’s independent news network. 
+“Impossible. That letter came out of my office. We never have access to other people’s ballots,” replied Anderson. 
+“Then it seems those that sent the ballots have access to YOUR letters,” said Jones. “Who should I believe? You or my lying eyes?” 
+Anderson then stated that political parties are informed when anyone requests an absentee ballot, and mailings are sent to those voters to promote Democratic Party candidates and positions on ballot initiatives. 
+“I am literally sitting down the hall from the place where those envelopes are stuffed. We are a political office and have no business handling anyone’s ballots. You can believe what you want to believe,” concluded Anderson. 
+The Virginia Department of Elections did not respond to repeated attempts for a response. But after seeing reports from WND and Radio America, Anderson protested the premise of the story. 
+“Please stop spreading these absurd allegations that are just hearsay from a misinformed voter who cannot verify his claim,” stated Anderson in an email in which he also explained why he believed the Jones account could not be accurate. 
+He shared a photo sent by State Sen. Scott Surovell, showing his absentee ballot envelope next to a separate envelope containing Democratic Party advocacy. 
+In a formal interview, FCDC Communications Adviser Bruce Neilson told WND and Radio America the Jones version of what the ballot envelope contained cannot be true. 
+“It’s not possible,” said Neilson, who then explained how absentee voters are approached by the local Democrats. 
+“Voting is a sacred privilege and a right of every citizen,” he said. “The activity of voting is also a public record. The Fairfax County Democratic Committee receives a notice of everyone who has requested an absentee ballot. We get that information as public information on the day the ballot is mailed. 
+“The same day the ballot is mailed, our volunteers prepare materials to advise voters what the Fairfax (County) Democratic Committee knows to be Democratic positions on the ballot,” said Neilson, noting the materials include fliers on candidates and ballot proposals like the meals tax. 
+Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Bruce Neilson: 
+However, he insists those materials are never sent with the ballot itself. 
+“That material is mailed in a separate envelope, labeled with our initials – FCDC – and our return address in Fairfax, Virginia, and would be received either the same day, perhaps the day before or the day after she received her official absentee ballot from the government,” Neilson said. 
+“It’s a separate mailing. It’s a separate stamp. It’s a separate envelope. It’s very easy to confuse where they came from if you have all those materials on the table at the same time while you’re filling in your votes,” he said. 
+Jones is standing by her story 100 percent, as is her husband. David says it’s a very clear memory. 
+“Jena opened the envelope that contained her ballot, the green sample ballot, the two-sided letter from the governor and card with kids on it saying ‘go vote’ or something of that nature. There was also the return envelope, which I signed,” David said. 
+The coverage of Jena’s story has also elicited similar stories from two other Fairfax County voters. Both of them commented on Reddit. 
+“I can confirm this. I live in Herndon, VA (Fairfax County) and also received these materials in my absentee ballot. I thought it was fishy at the time but didn’t look into it,” stated a comment by a reader using the handle thisisaterriblename. 
+Get the hottest, most important news stories on the Internet – delivered FREE to your inbox as soon as they break! Take just 30 seconds and sign up for WND’s Email News Alerts! 
+Another, under the Reddit handle Nightingale-Nights, said the same thing happened to them and posted similar photos to the ones David and Jena shared last week. 
+Neilson said there is no way the county government, which sends out the ballots, could be including partisan materials in the envelope containing the ballot. 
+“They don’t have our materials,” he said. “Our materials are printed for us, by our printer, and we have complete control over our materials in our office, and they come from our office in our mailing. They don’t go anywhere else. 
+“It’s not possible that the county government is distributing partisan Democratic materials. It’s never happened before. I’m not aware of it happening now. And I don’t think that it would happen anywhere in the future,” Neilson said. 
+There are only a few known complaints of stuffed ballot envelopes in Fairfax County, leading David Jones to believe an individual in the government is responsible. He accepts the explanation that the Fairfax County Democratic Committee is not responsible for what he and Jena discovered with her ballot. 
+“I understand Frank’s comments about his office has nothing to do with the ballots. I believe that,” Jones said. “I think what we are seeing here is a person that actually stuffs and mails the ballots is taking it upon themselves to add in extra material. I don’t see how Frank’s office could be held accountable for what’s in the ballot envelope. But it does seem odd that others are now reporting similar issues.” 
+Neilson said there is zero chance of that scenario being true. 
+“I just can’t imagine that happening because of the internal controls that we have on the literature that we mail,” Neilson said. 
+He also said the internal controls at the county government are air tight. 
+“I am an election official. On Election Day, I serve in a non-partisan capacity for our county election office,” Nielson said. “I can assure you, you have Democrats and Republicans working in the office. You have plenty of oversight of the voting process, and there’s no way that a partisan political piece was mailed with her ballot. There is no way that happened.” 
+The following are three images of the Democratic Party materials Jena and David Jones say they found stuffed inside the absentee ballot: 
+The following are two images from Democrats who say the voters must be confused:",FAKE
+5125,Trump's VP search enters frenzied phase,"(CNN) Donald Trump's vice presidential search turned into a head-spinning melodrama Wednesday as candidates vying for the spot hopped on planes and phones to perform frenzied, last-minute try-outs.
+
+For much of the day, Indiana was the unlikely center of the political world -- all thanks to a flat tire.
+
+Trump's plane hit something when it landed Tuesday night, resulting in a popped tire, according to a source familiar with the process. That kept Trump in the state longer than he expected after campaigning with Gov. Mike Pence, setting off a last-minute scramble of high-profile travelers to the Hoosier State as the clock ticked down on his VP decision.
+
+Concerned Trump was unsure and torn about his choice and maybe leaning in a direction they didn't like, his children -- Eric, Don Jr. and Ivanka -- hopped on a plane early in the morning to reach him. Trump and his children wound up having breakfast with Pence at the governor's mansion.
+
+The plane malfunction set off a domino effect with others: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich flew to Indianapolis to meet with Trump on a private jet provided by Fox News host Sean Hannity, two sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN. He was later seen leaving a hotel in the same motorcade as Trump's children.
+
+Trump spoke to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie over the phone for a conversation that included talk about the vice presidency.
+
+And Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions arrived in Indianapolis to meet with Trump to serve as another adviser as the presumptive GOP nominee makes his final decision on a running mate.
+
+Earlier in the day, a Trump spokesperson said the meetings were held in Indiana to allow Trump more time with Pence.
+
+The process of choosing a vice presidential partner is a crucial one that often provides early insight into how a nominee might approach the presidency. Most presumptive nominees operate their vice presidential search under intense secrecy with potential candidates sneaking to cloak-and-dagger meetings to avoid the press and maintain the element of surprise ahead of the final announcement. But not Trump, whose search has been remarkably public over the past week.
+
+Trump's search is entering its final phase. Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman, told CNN Wednesday evening that Trump will make his announcement Friday in New York.
+
+Trump later tweeted: ""I will be making the announcement of my Vice Presidential pick on Friday at 11am in Manhattan. Details to follow.""
+
+The presumptive nominee has not yet made a final decision. But he said in an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier that he was trimming his short-list.
+
+""I'm narrowing it down. I mean I'm at three, potentially four. But in my own mind, I probably am thinking about two,"" he said.
+
+Trump has spend the past several days publicly giving potential running mates a trial run on the campaign trail. And the feverish endgame of his search suggests a penchant for intrigue, an unpredictable streak and -- above all -- a desire to make a splash as the comings and goings Wednesday triggered a media circus.
+
+The lobby of the Conrad Hotel in Indianapolis suddenly became the epicenter of the 2016 campaign -- with reporters and passersby straining for a sighting of Trump or any of his possible running mates, speculation running rife about the former reality star's intentions.
+
+Next door, at The Capital Grille, local politicians and lobbyists buzzed about what the future held in store for homeboy Pence, who rocketed up the list of possible vice presidential nominees after spending significant face time with Trump in the last few days.
+
+Donald Trump Jr. summed up the whirlwind developments with a tweet: ""Amazing trip to Indiana today. Fast but very productive.""
+
+With Trump's mind not yet made up, the intrigue focused attention on exactly what kind of qualities the GOP presumptive nominee is looking for in a running mate.
+
+One of the biggest questions is whether he will opt for someone with a reputation as a partisan scrapper who could defend him in the media and lambast Democrat Hillary Clinton, or if he will choose someone viewed as a safer political partner who could bring more sobriety to his volatile campaign.
+
+One source said Trump wants a ""fighter"" and Christie -- the tough talking former prosecutor -- fits the bill.
+
+""I'm getting attacked from all sides,"" Trump told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday. Though he was not in Indianapolis on Wednesday, Christie, one of the first major politicians to back Trump before he captured the nomination, is still very much under consideration, multiple sources told CNN.
+
+""Trump's gut is Christie,"" one source said. The New Jersey governor spent the day in back-to-back meetings in Washington as he leads Trump's transition team.
+
+Trump spoke of his kinship with Christie, with whom several sources said he talks every day.
+
+""I tell you, Chris Christie is somebody I've liked a long time; he's a total professional. He's a good guy, by the way, a lot of people don't understand that,"" he said on Fox News.
+
+But on Wednesday, Trump told Fox: ""I just want to pick up somebody that's solid, who's smart. I'm not looking for an attack dog. Frankly, I'm looking for somebody that really understands what we're talking about.""
+
+And if Trump wants someone more conventional, he could turn to Pence. The Indiana governor has credibility with social conservatives who are among the most suspicious of Republican Party constituencies towards Trump.
+
+Trump and Pence met privately before a fundraiser in Indianapolis on Tuesday evening, and then Pence got a try-out at a rally in nearby Westfield. The Trumps and Pences dined together at the Capital Grille in Indianapolis, staying past midnight.
+
+A source close to Pence told CNN's MJ Lee that when asked about the vice presidential race it ""sure feels like Pence."" But noting the sheer unpredictability of dealing with the man making the decision, they emphasized: ""This is Trump we are talking about.""
+
+When CNN asked how the breakfast with Pence went on Wednesday, Trump gave a thumbs-up. An adviser said the encounter was ""cordial"" but added that the billionaire had yet to finalize his decision on a running mate.
+
+At Tuesday's rally, Pence slammed Clinton, saying that ""to paraphrase the director of the FBI, I think it would be 'extremely careless' to elect Hillary Clinton as president.""
+
+On Wednesday afternoon, Pence said he was ""humbled to be a part"" of the process.
+
+""Trump's giving it very careful consideration,"" he told reporters in Fort Wayne, Indiana. ""I'm just honored to be on that list.""
+
+Even potential rival Gingrich offered extensive praise for the Indiana governor on Wednesday night.
+
+""A lot of people who are a little jittery about Donald Trump would feel reassured talking with Pence,"" Gingrich told Fox News. ""My strength is totally different: I'm an outsider.""
+
+A Trump adviser, however, disputed conventional wisdom that Pence could steady or moderate the voluble Republican presumptive nominee on the stump. In fact, this person said, having him as a more temperate running mate could prompt Trump to become even more unconventional.
+
+""Mike is not going to go and defend Trump the way he needs it -- the way a Newt or a Christie would, or even the way a Sessions has,"" the adviser said.
+
+Some donors are pressuring Trump to pick Gingrich as his vice president.
+
+A source close to Sheldon Adelson told CNN that the casino magnate spoke to Trump and said that ""he liked Newt.""
+
+Marking the unpredictability of the state of affairs, Trump was still making calls to people in recent days.
+
+Trump even reached out again to Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state under former President George W. Bush, after a donor encouraged him to make the call over the weekend. Rice, though, doesn't want the job, according to a separate source familiar with the process.
+
+At a fundraiser in the Hamptons last weekend, The New York Times reported: ""When an attendee suggested Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, Mr. Trump said they had irreconcilable differences over the Iraq War.""",REAL
+5995,Taking Care of Your Eye Health the Natural Way,"Taking Care of Your Eye Health the Natural Way Ad 728×90 – HBS Account – 2149237058061490 http://blogs.naturalnews.com/taking-care-eye-health-natural-way/ 
+By Jade Rich 
+Posted Monday, October 31, 2016 at 12:09pm EDT 
+Keywords: best foods for eye health , beta-carotene , Cataracts , eye health , foods that contain antioxidants , Free Radicals , lutein , macular degeneration , maintaining healthy eyes , meso-zeaxanthin , natural vision training , naturally occurring antioxidants , ocular migraines , optic nerve damage , protect your eyes , vitamin C , Vitamin E , zeaxanthin 
+When most people think about their eye health , the first thing that comes to mind is whether or not they need to wear glasses. Although your vision is a major part of your overall eye health, there are actually many more things that you need to be concerned about. For example, there are a staggering 56 common disorders that can plague your eyes. These issues range from cataracts to ocular migraines. Fortunately, there are many natural methods you can utilize to help keep your eyes healthy. 
+Nutrients Your Eyes Need 
+There are three nutrients that are known to be critical for maintaining healthy eyes: Lutein, zeaxanthin and meso-zeaxanthin. Each of these nutrients serves as an antioxidant that helps protect your eyes from the damaging effects of free radicals. As Natural News has pointed out before, free radicals are the main basis of all injuries, illnesses and deaths. 
+Antioxidants are the only way to fight free radicals, so it’s a good thing that these three nutrients are found naturally in the human eye. But what happens when something interrupts this process? Sadly, you can end up with a long list of eye health problems that may even lead to blindness. 
+Instead of merely sitting back and allowing this to happen, you can be proactive and start taking supplements. The good news is that lutein and zeaxanthin supplements are easy to find. Research has discovered that most of these supplements also contain meso-zeaxanthin, although this isn’t usually disclosed on the label. In fact, it sounds likely that this recently discovered eye nutrient is a natural byproduct of lutein and zeaxanthin. 
+Of course, this doesn’t absolve the supplement companies of their duty to report whether or not meso-zeaxanthin is present in their products. However, their negligence also doesn’t reduce the natural reliance that your eyes have on all three of these nutrients. In addition to stocking up on these supplements, it is also wise to increase your intake of other naturally occurring antioxidants, including Vitamin E, Vitamin C and beta carotene. 
+Food Sources 
+There are many foods that contain antioxidants . Carrots are perhaps the most well-known resource for eye health because they are so rich in beta carotene. It would be a mistake to think of carrots as the prime resource, though. You can also turn to oranges, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and dark berries for a mixture of necessary vitamins. These are some of the best foods for eye health. Even better, you can derive lutein and zeaxanthin directly from food sources such as eggs, pistachios, corn, peppers and kale. With enough of these food items in your diet, you can avoid the cost of supplements while still keeping your eyes extremely healthy. 
+Additional Eye Health Tips 
+If you are a smoker who is also concerned about eye health, now is a good time to carefully consider quitting. Unfortunately, people who smoke have an increased risk of developing macular degeneration, optic nerve damage and cataracts. If you begin abstaining from tobacco products now, though, your odds of ending up with one of these eye health complications will begin to decline. 
+Other easy steps you can take to protect your eyes include always wearing sunglasses during sunny days and steering clear of computer screens as much as possible. If you use a computer for work, take a 20 second vision break every 20 minutes. 
+Ultimately, combining the proper nutrients with easy tips such as wearing sunglasses will help keep your eyes healthy throughout your life. If you’re currently dealing with issues such as light sensitivity and vision loss, you may also be able to naturally regain control of your eye health by using natural vision training and other eye exercises. This is definitely a better option than undergoing a surgery that has an extensive list of serious risks and usually leaves patients still needing eyeglasses. As usual, the natural way is better! 
+About the author: 
+Jade Rich is an LPN and Director at an Inpatient Rehabilitation Center. As a mother of three children, she is always looking for natural ways to keep her kid’s eyes healthy. She knows from experience that another way to do this is by scheduling them for routine eye exams. This helps with early detection and prevention. It’s best to schedule this during the back-to-school season. During the visit, their pediatrician examines their eye alignment and gives a test for visual acuity. 
+Sources:",FAKE
+4855,Clinton Says She Was Wrong to Call Half of Trump Supporters ‘Deplorables’,"Hillary Clinton expressed regret Saturday for calling half of Donald Trump’s supporters “deplorables,” but she stood by her sharp criticism of her Republican rival. Mrs. Clinton said she was “grossly generalistic” when she took aim at Mr. Trump’s backers at a Friday fundraiser in New York, characterizing many as racist, sexist and homophobic. “That’s never a good idea,” she said […]",REAL
+5608,Fighting Ghost Fascists While Aiding Real Ones,"2016 presidential campaign by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
+An architect of regime-change, coups, no-fly zones, rule of the rich and mass incarceration is about to become Commander-in-Chief, yet the bulk of what passes for the Left is “engaged in a 1930s-style ‘united front’ against a ‘fascism’ that was never a threat in 21 st century America.” Donald Trump, the orange menace, didn’t have a chance of becoming president. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a 21 st century fascist and threat to life on Earth. Fighting Ghost Fascists While Aiding Real Ones by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
+“Trump’s anti-“free trade” stance and opposition to regime change and military confrontation with Russia and China drove most of the Republican-allied section of the ruling class straight into Hillary Clinton’s imperial Big Tent.” 
+Hillary Clinton’s impending -- and totally predictable -- landslide victory on November 8 will prove only that there never was any danger of a “fascist” white nationalist takeover of the U.S. executive branch of government in 2016. That was always a red (or “orange”) herring, a phony “barbarians at the gate” threat that -- as Wikileaks documents confirmed -- John Podesta and Hillary’s other handlers fervently hoped would convey “lesser evil” status to their manifestly unpopular candidate. 
+There was nothing particularly devious or out of the ordinary in the Hillary camp’s favoring Donald Trump or, alternatively, Ted Cruz. It is standard Democratic Party practice to position themselves just to the left of the Republicans. In a duopoly electoral system, victory lies in where the cake is cut. By hugging close to the GOP’s flanks, national Democratic candidates can lay claim to a “center-left” spectrum of political space that encompasses a clear majority of U.S. public opinion on most issues. By this calculus, Democrats are supposed to win, unless they are tripped up on the closely related issues of race (failure to “stand up” to the Blacks) and foreign policy (failure to “stand up” to whoever is the designated foreign enemy). 
+Race is the trickiest part of the equation, since white supremacy is embedded in the American political conversation, hiding just beneath the surface of most discourse on social and economic policy. 
+“His overt racism probably weakened his appeal to whites.” 
+Trump thought he could win by combining an overt white racist appeal with an anti-corporate message that laid the blame on Wall Street for (white) American job losses and falling living standards. He also calculated -- correctly, it turns out -- that in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown, many white Americans were more upset about their own economic and social status than they were angry at Russians; that they wanted regime change at home more than abroad. 
+Both of Trump’s central policies backfired, dooming his campaign. His overt racism probably weakened his appeal to whites, who have given majorities to national Republicans since 1968 but whose self-image is that they are not, as individuals, racist. (Certainly, white women found further reason to reject his candidacy.) Much more spectacularly, Trump’s anti-“free trade” stance and opposition to regime change and military confrontation with Russia and China drove most of the Republican-allied section of the ruling class straight into Hillary Clinton’s imperial Big Tent. 
+At the national level, the duopoly system, as we had known it, virtually ceased to exist – a fact dramatically driven home by the near-universal corporate media rejection of Donald Trump, the candidacy they had done so much to create. The near-collapse of the duopoly system was the great fracture of the 2016 election, a potential historic opening to a far wider space of progressive political struggle, including on the moribund electoral level. With the ruling class gathered in one Big Tent, and the overt racists occupying the imploded shell of the GOP, the system itself was in disarray. What was once two vibrant parties of the ruling class, with a virtual monopoly on the totality of the electorate, had become one ruling class party plus a hollowed-out husk, at least temporarily occupied by white nationalists under the leadership of a narcissistic and incoherent billionaire, yet without enough funds to mount a competitive general election campaign. 
+“The near-collapse of the duopoly system was the great fracture of the 2016 election.” 
+In these pages, we had been saying since last year that Donald Trump could not win; that Bernie Sanders’ fate would be sealed in the southern primaries; and that, although ruling class money would insure Clinton an election by landslide, it could not buy her legitimacy among a significant section of the Democratic “base,” who would now be pushed to the latrine area of her Big Tent. As we wrote on May 18 of this year: 
+“Outsized fear of Trump is hysteria. These days, the ‘brown shirts’ wear blue. Hillary is the candidate of Wall Street, War and Austerity – not Trump, the racist America Firster. And, he can’t win, anyway – not with tens of millions of ‘moderate’ Republicans and most of the party’s funders rushing into Hillary’s welcoming embrace.” 
+But sadly, hysteria does reign in most of the “left” precincts of America. Those who did not hesitate to kick Hillary when she appeared to be “down” -- in those heady days when they imagined it was possible she could lose to Sanders -- are terrified to kick her when she is “up” and primed to take the helm of the hyper-power. They are engaged in a 1930s-style “united front” against a “fascism” that was never a threat in 21 st century America, where a different kind of dictatorship of the rich (but also a fascism) has made brown-shirts (and Klansmen) utterly superfluous. These trembling leftists refuse to oppose the modern manifestation of fascism, which is now firmly entrenched in power with Hillary as its champion, in favor of a crusade against an “orange” menace that did not have a ghost of a chance of seizing national power. They have made themselves perfectly irrelevant and useless -- except, of course, to the fascists-in-charge. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected] .",FAKE
+4176,"In campaign chaos, Donald Trump shows his management style","For the past two months, Donald Trump has presided over a political team riddled with turf wars, staff reshuffling and dueling power centers.
+
+But the tensions are more than typical campaign chaos: They illustrate how Trump likes to run an organization, whether it’s a real estate venture or his presidential bid. Interviews with current and former Trump associates reveal an executive who is fond of promoting rivalries among subordinates, wary of delegating major decisions, scornful of convention and fiercely insistent on a culture of loyalty around him.
+
+Whether the drama of recent weeks has been cathartic or calamitous is an open question — and one that is increasingly important as the general election phase of the campaign unfolds. The tumult has often dominated news coverage, stepping on Trump’s own campaign message and averting the spotlight from missteps by leading Democratic contender Hillary Clinton.
+
+“It is definitely dysfunctional compared to, say, Ace Hardware Store,” said David Carney, a veteran Republican political strategist. But, he added, “it is not fatal in and of itself.”
+
+Honed over decades in business and now suddenly under the glare of a national contest, Trump’s style offers a glimpse of the polarizing management techniques he would carry into the White House. In fashioning his campaign after his real estate and entertainment projects, the mogul has inspired supporters and alarmed critics with his brazen moves.
+
+[Trump once revealed his income tax returns. They showed he didn’t pay a cent.]
+
+“He’s always the man in charge,” said Edward Rollins, the veteran Republican strategist who is working for a pro-Trump super PAC. “From his people, he gets what he needs. He makes them compete. Sometimes it gets the juices flowing, sometimes it spurs conflict. If he needs to, he steps in to settle it.”
+
+Rollins pointed to the relationship between Trump’s 42-year-old campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and his 67-year-old campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, as a prime example of how Trump handles people. While they have worked just steps from each other in recent weeks at Trump Tower in New York, the pair — contrasts in age, experience and personality — have a simmering rivalry over stature and responsibilities within the candidate’s orbit. And Trump doesn’t seem to mind.
+
+“One day, Manafort goes up and Corey gets set back. The next day, Corey can move up to the forefront. Trump is at the center, watching it all and seeing it all,” Rollins said.
+
+Trump’s firing last week of Rick Wiley as his national political director is a case study in how being close to Trump is usually the best way to influence him. A mantra for Trump’s campaign advisers has long been, “If you aren’t close to the principal, you aren’t anywhere,” according to one person on staff.
+
+The abrupt dismissal was typical Trump — reminiscent of his NBC television show, “The Apprentice,” which spawned the catchphrase “You’re fired!”
+
+[Trump’s bad bet: How too much debt drove his biggest casino aground]
+
+Wiley, who joined the Trump campaign in April with a headstrong persona and establishment pedigree, did not endear himself to many of the grass-roots activists and Trump allies who had been working for the campaign for months, including Karen Giorno, who started as Trump’s Florida director and is now in charge of 10 Southeastern states.
+
+According to multiple people familiar with the situation, Giorno grew unhappy with Wiley throughout May, telling friends that he was unresponsive to her and, in her view, too forceful in asserting his strategy.
+
+Eventually, Giorno voiced her complaints directly to Trump. It worked. Wiley’s exit was announced Wednesday. In a statement, the campaign said Wiley was “hired on a short-term basis.” Wiley did not respond to a request for comment.
+
+Giorno said Trump’s loyalty “goes beyond anything I’ve experienced in politics.” She also described Trump as a boss constantly testing his employees and turning the tables on them.
+
+“He’ll ask questions — and if you don’t know the answer, you can tell that he’s disappointed that you don’t know it,” she said. “But then, he’ll brief you.”
+
+On Florida matters, Trump has always been “extraordinarily curious — tell me more about what’s going on in Florida; give me the snapshot,” Giorno said. “As I am telling him information, he’s actually feeding me more information.”
+
+From his 26th-floor office in New York, Trump — who through a spokeswoman declined to be interviewed for this article — is attempting to bend the nature and norms of a presidential campaign to his unpredictable and outsize personality, eschewing the top-down, consultant-heavy mode used by most candidates.
+
+[Trump’s businesses boom as he runs for president, financial disclosure show]
+
+Rather, Trump functions simultaneously as his own big-picture strategist and micro-managing chief executive. He has gotten involved in intramural skirmishing that has engulfed his campaign, both stoking and calming tensions depending on the circumstances.
+
+“His style can be what I call ‘hands off, hands on.’ He gives people space to think and work and doesn’t get involved in everything each day, but he is the kind of person who can swoop in in a second and change everything,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide who was let go from the campaign last year following disagreements with Lewandowski and controversy over past racially charged posts on Facebook. “He monitors it all and he comes to check in on things when you don’t expect him.”
+
+Trump’s fondness for stirring internal competition was on display during his Atlantic City heyday, when he pitted his casinos against one another — much to the dismay of some of the executives who ran them. He encouraged the Trump Castle to compete for customers against the Trump Plaza hotel and casino and, later, his third casino, the Trump Taj Mahal.
+
+Trump liked the sparring while others worried about cannibalizing customers; in the end, for a variety of reasons, the three casinos went through corporate bankruptcies.
+
+Trump’s method contrasts sharply with that of Clinton, who operates her corporate-style campaign from a sprawling headquarters in Brooklyn with legions of professional aides. Unlike Trump, her aides say, Clinton does not offer daily input on personnel or brewing internal debates.
+
+“He takes in information from people around him,” Lewandowski said. “We look at that as surround-sound advocacy that gives him the totality of an issue. Then he is decisive. People shouldn’t be surprised he’s involved. Of course he’s involved. It’s his campaign and his money.”
+
+Carl Paladino, a businessman and political operative from Buffalo, N.Y. who is the co-chairman of Trump’s New York campaign, recalled when Trump called him months ago ahead of the New York primary and asked him to take the position.
+
+“He said: ‘Carl, let’s do it. Let’s go.’ He didn’t have to say anything else. He trusted me to do what he needed me to do,” Paladino said. “He knows that . . . if you get in my way, I’m going to knock you down.”
+
+Such general directives demonstrate the level of trust Trump regularly places with many of his closest supporters. He continues to have faith in them when they collide, as has been the case with Manafort and Lewandowski.
+
+Manafort, who declined to comment for this article, was brought into Trump’s circle in March when Trump started to fret that he might be headed for a contested Republican convention and would need someone who could navigate that thicket. This month, he was given the title of campaign chairman and chief strategist.
+
+Manafort calls Trump “Donald,” unlike Lewandowski, who calls the candidate “Mr. Trump.” He also does more freelancing than Lewandowski in terms of building relationships and arranging his own media appearances.
+
+Trump at times seem to play the two off of each other. Manafort appears to relish being a strategist and chairman more than the manager Lewandowski. Lewandowski, who prides himself on having been at Trump’s side since the campaign’s start, regularly takes the lead on overseeing events, operations and Trump’s travels.
+
+Even as Manafort and Lewandowski seek to exhibit and expand their influence on the campaign, there is no doubt within the campaign that Trump is the ultimate arbiter.
+
+Sometimes that means drawing conclusions on topics that more traditional campaigns would outsource to aides. Other times, it means his counsel comes from just one person: himself.
+
+“Trump is micromanager on the most important things but not all things,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York and a Trump ally who has known and observed Trump for decades. “On the most important things, he realizes you have to be a micromanager. He’ll delegate to a point. He has in his head what he wants to do and his issues, and he’ll hold onto them instead of sharing those big decisions.”",REAL
+433,A harsh blow to small businesses: Opposing view,"Under new overtime rules, employees will be injured as well.
+
+The Labor Department’s change to the overtime rule is a harsh blow to millions of small businesses and their employees. According to NFIB research, approximately 44% of small businesses would be affected. The department claims that 4.2 million workers could potentially benefit from the change. That’s not consistent with the department’s own analysis.
+
+In fact, buried within the regulation, the department projects that many workers won’t receive any additional pay and that others will lose pay. According to Labor, 60% of the newly eligible employees don’t work overtime right now. The department also estimates that the average hourly pay rate will decline in 2017. The talking points say this is a raise for workers, but the economic analysis says something completely different.
+
+Most small businesses have razor-thin margins, and they cannot simply raise prices to cover higher costs without losing customers. Moreover, the median personal income for small business owners is roughly $68,000 annually, according to NFIB research. Big corporations can trim shareholder dividends, cut CEO pay or move production facilities out of the country. Those aren’t options for most small firms.
+
+Employees will be injured as well. Managers who haven’t punched a clock in years will have to go back to filling out a time sheet. They will even have to take into account work from home such as checking email or fielding a phone call. Essentially, they’ll be demoted from their management positions to hourly jobs.
+
+The overtime rule is another government mandate that makes it costlier and more difficult to run a business and create jobs. NFIB surveys its members every month to identify their top concerns. Government regulations consistently rank at the top.
+
+Every minute that business owners must devote to keeping records, filling out paperwork and dealing with government inspectors is a minute they don’t have to run their businesses. Every dollar it costs to comply with all of those rules is a dollar they cannot reinvest in new jobs, better equipment or customer service.
+
+Juanita Duggan is president and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Business.",REAL
+1301,Sarah Palin endorses Donald Trump's presidential bid,"Former vice-presidential nominee and governor of Alaska Sarah Palin made her first foray into the 2016 presidential race Tuesday by announcing she is endorsing Donald Trump.
+
+""I am proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for President of the United States of America,"" Palin said in a statement from the Trump campaign announcing the endorsement.
+
+She later appeared alongside Trump at a campaign event at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa
+
+“You’re putting relationships on the line for this country because you’re willing to make America great again,” she said at the rally. “I am here because like you, I know it’s now or never.”
+
+“I’m in it to win it because we believe in America,” she added.
+
+Trump told supporters he was “greatly honored” to receive Palin’s support.
+
+“She’s the woman that from day one I said I needed to get her support,” he said.
+
+Palin, who became a symbol of the Tea Party movement following the 2008 presidential election, is the highest-profile backer for a Republican contender so far in the race.
+
+In her endorsement speech, Palin praised Trump for bringing up controversial issues to create “a good, heated primary,” while taking aim at what she called “establishment candidates” in the race.
+
+“They’ve been wearing political correctness kind of like a suicide vest,” she said.
+
+The endorsement comes less than two weeks ahead of the critical lead-off Iowa caucus, where Trump is locked in a dead heat with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
+
+In the statement announcing the endorsement, Trump's campaign described Palin as a conservative who ""helped launch the careers of several key future leaders of the Republican Party and conservative movement."" The statement also quoted Cruz as once saying he ""would not be in the United States Senate were it not for Gov. Sarah Palin...She can pick winners.""
+
+Campaigning in New Hampshire, Tuesday, Cruz responded to Palin's endorsement of Trump, saying ""regardless of what Sarah intends to do in 2016, I will remain a big, big fan of Sarah Palin.""
+
+Trump's national political director Michael Glassner previously worked with Palin, who was a virtual newcomer to the national political arena when McCain named her as his running mate.
+
+Palin is expected to join Trump on Wednesday for campaign events in Norwalk, Iowa and Tulsa, Okla.
+
+“Even with a record number of candidates and internal calls to become more inclusive as a party, Donald Trump and Sarah Palin remain two of the GOP’s most influential leaders,"" Mark Paustenbach, Democratic National Committee Press secretary, said in a statement responding to the endorsement.
+
+""Their divisive rhetoric is now peddled by everyone from Ted Cruz to Marco Rubio.  Americans deserve better than what Trump and Palin have to offer, but it seems like the other Republican candidates would rather follow in their footsteps,” the statement continued.
+
+Palin's endorsement was not the only one Trump received Tuesday. While campaigning at Iowa's John Wayne Birthplace Museum, he received an endorsement from the western film actor’s daughter, Aissa Wayne.
+
+Wayne said the country needs a strong and courageous leader like her father, and that he would be offering his endorsement if he were still alive.
+
+Trump said he was a big fan of Wayne and that the actor represented strength and power — which, he said, the American people are looking for.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+1464,‘He’s Cuban. I’m Mexican.’: Can Rubio and Cruz connect with Latino voters?,"Maria Herrera, a 62-year-old retired casino housekeeper, feels no affinity for Marco Rubio even as he aims to make history as the first Hispanic president of the United States. As she explained: “He’s Cuban. I’m Mexican.”
+
+“Rubio says things that are not good for Mexicans,” Herrera said, adding that she supports Hillary Clinton. “I would never vote for him just because he’s Latino.”
+
+Rubio, whose parents are from Cuba, and Ted Cruz, whose father was born in Cuba, are competing to be the first Hispanic in the White House — and casting unprecedented attention on the nation’s growing Hispanic vote.
+
+But in several key swing states — Nevada, Colorado, Florida and Virginia — most Latinos are not Cuban. Most lean Democratic — and identify more with their country of origin than with the broader terms, Hispanic or Latino, for those from Spanish-speaking countries. Most also oppose both Rubio’s and Cruz’s positions on immigration reform. All of that, in addition to long-standing tensions between Cuban and Mexican immigrants, could dash the GOP’s hopes that Cruz or Rubio could do what few Republicans have been able to do in a presidential election: attract significant Hispanic support.
+
+[Rubio’s cousin, a Democrat, says Marco has his love but not his vote]
+
+Mexicans account for nearly two-thirds of the Latinos in the United States — about 35 million people. Cubans are the third-largest group, after Puerto Ricans, with just 2 million people, or only 3.7 percent of the Latino vote, according to the Pew Research Center.
+
+In interviews in wedding chapels and casinos, all around this city of stretch limos, slot machines and neon signs, Mexicans who make up so much of the workforce said it would be far more meaningful to elect the first Mexican American president than the first Latino. Many said they would vote for a non-Latino over a Cuban American.
+
+In two days of interviews, not a single Mexican said he or she supported Rubio or Cruz, and even some Cubans said they don’t plan to support either Cuban American candidate.
+
+Part of the friction between Mexicans and Cubans comes from the starkly different reception they get when they arrive in the United States. Cubans who reach U.S. shores are almost automatically granted residency and eligibility for food stamps and other welfare benefits because of a special policy for those coming from the communist island — many arriving through Mexico. Mexicans who enter without legal papers live under the threat of deportation.
+
+There are cultural distinctions, too. They speak with different accents, celebrate different customs and eat different foods. Mexico is soccer-obsessed, while Cuba loves baseball.
+
+“Except for the fact that they both speak Spanish, everything else is totally different,” said Carlos Artiles, 50, a bartender at the Florida Café Cuban Bar & Grill, where the eggs come with stuffed potatoes and fried plaintains. Artiles, a Cuban, quickly became a citizen, but he sees firsthand how Mexicans, including his wife, try unsuccessfully for years and “pay thousands of dollars to attorneys to help. It’s completely unfair.”
+
+“No way” will Mexicans rally around presidential candidates just because they are Cuban, he said.
+
+“Like oil and water” is how Alejandro Carrillo, a Mexican salesman, describes Mexicans and Cubans. He said he believes that Cubans have it easier in the United States and often act as though they are better than Mexicans. As he shopped in Moda Latina, looking at cowboy boots and hats, Carrillo said the differences between Cubans and Mexicans extend right down to how they dress: “I never once saw a Cuban who wore boots.”
+
+About 30 percent of Nevada’s population and 20 percent of its electorate is Latino. Mexicans far outnumber any Latino group here, but Cubans command an outsize influence.
+
+Cuba had a thriving casino business when Fidel Castro seized control in 1959, and many Cuban casino workers fled the island and moved to this gambling mecca. For decades, Cubans have been influential in business, Spanish-language media and politics — just as they are in South Florida, home to the greatest concentration of Cubans.
+
+Otto Merida, a prominent Cuban here who ran the Latin Chamber of Commerce for 40 years, said, “It would be a dream to have a Cuban American in the White House,” and he likes Rubio.
+
+But early on, Merida signed up to support former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. “If he could catch fire,” Bush would do very well with Mexican Americans because he is married to a woman born in Mexico, he said.
+
+Andres Ramirez, a Democratic strategist in Nevada, said that despite differences, many Cubans and Mexicans get along. Some Hispanics — no matter the nationality — will vote for a candidate “just because they’re a Latino, just like some people will vote for a woman because she is woman — but that is not the majority.”
+
+“Surnames can matter, but people vote on policy and platforms,” Ramirez said.
+
+Rubio, whose wife is the daughter of immigrants from Colombia, has shown more ability to win over non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida than Cruz has in Texas, when they ran their Senate races, according to exit polls. Rubio campaigns, in both English and fluent Spanish, about being the son of immigrants who came to America for a better life for their children.
+
+But Fernand Amandi, managing partner of Bendixen & Amandi International, which frequently surveys the Hispanic community, said that in a presidential election, Rubio will face much more intense opposition because Democrats will highlight the fact that he yanked his support for comprehensive immigration reform. Cruz unequivocally — “today, tomorrow, forever” — opposes giving citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants, a great number of whom are Mexican.
+
+Not all Mexicans interviewed were in the country legally, and some have legal status but not citizenship, and so they are not eligible to vote. But those Mexicans who are citizens, such as Herrera, who was washing her clothes in a laundromat, said they plan to vote for Clinton. The Republicans and Democrats are holding caucuses in Nevada next month, in the first primary-season voting in the West, right after Iowa and New Hampshire.
+
+Herrera said she was more interested in having the first female president than the first Latino president. What Clinton says is more appealing to her than what she hears from Rubio or Cruz, she said.
+
+Many Cubans lavished praise on Rubio, who lived in Las Vegas as a child while his father worked as a hotel bartender and his mother as a maid. A few said they like Cruz but not enough to consider voting for him.
+
+And several Cubans said they support Trump, the candidate most despised by Mexicans. Trump has referred to some Mexicans as “rapists” and promised to build a gigantic wall on the border to keep Mexicans out.
+
+“Trump says what others won’t. He fears nothing,” said Elizabeth Abad, 46, who left Cuba a decade ago, became a U.S. citizen and works at the Florida Café. “I like his toughness.”
+
+Sergio Perez, 47, owner of the Florida Café and the Havana Grill, where Rubio recently held a big rally, also thinks Trump is the best candidate “in these difficult times.” Perez said people are anxious and cannot afford the same life — not even the same amount of groceries — they once had. “Nobody felt good this Christmas,” he said, adding that Trump, a businessman, knows how to build things and put people to work.
+
+“It’s a dream to have a Cuban guy as president,” he said about Rubio, whom he called “a beautiful guy, smart, charming. He could be a great vice president.”
+
+But don’t expect Mexicans to vote for him because, Perez said, “Eighty percent of the Mexicans don’t like the Cuban people.”",REAL
+985,Cruz Crushes Trump in Wyoming Republican Caucus,"Republican White House hopeful Ted Cruz easily defeated frontrunner Donald Trump in the race to be the party nominee for the 2016 presidential election in the Saturday caucus in Wyoming.
+
+With all votes counted, Texas Senator Cruz won 66.3 percent of the ballots in the western state, far ahead of his nearest rival, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who earned 19.5 percent of the vote, US media reported.
+
+The Texas senator unanimously won Hot Springs, Goshen, Uinta and Campbell counties, as well as Sweetwater, Sheridan, Laramie, Converse and Fremont counties. Donald Trump won Teton County and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio won Albany County.
+
+ 
+
+ One county — Crook — didn’t commit to any of the candidates.
+
+ 
+
+ Cruz is “the only principled and unwavering conservative” in the race, Dick Shanor said before being chosen to represent Laramie County at the national GOP convention.
+
+ 
+
+ “Ted has proven he is not subject to the influence of D.C. insiders. Nor is he a mainstream, status-quo type of guy,” Shanor said. “He is truly a virtuous man.”
+
+ 
+
+ More than 200 people took part in the Laramie County convention at a community center in Cheyenne. They wrote their preferred candidates on blue notecards and deposited them in a cardboard box at the front of the room as their names were called.
+
+ 
+
+ Rubio finished second for the day, narrowly losing in Converse and Teton counties. In Laramie County, Khale Lenhart tried unsuccessfully to get fellow Republicans to send him to the national convention as a Rubio supporter.
+
+ 
+
+ “One candidate stands out for his ability to bring his message of conservatism to people who haven’t heard it before,” Lenhart said of Rubio. “He is the best opportunity for our party to build something larger that lasts.”
+
+ 
+
+ Trump’s over-the-top persona played poorly in Wyoming except for Teton County, where he edged Rubio.
+
+ 
+
+ “Anybody but Mr. Trump,” said John Wheeler, a Laramie County participant. “He thinks he can win the election because he’s a billionaire.”
+
+ 
+
+ Cruz can claim he has momentum from Wyoming headed into next week’s big primaries in Florida, Ohio, Missouri and elsewhere. He hasn’t won Wyoming yet, however. More than half of the state’s available GOP delegates remain unallocated.
+
+ 
+
+ Republicans will choose another 14 delegates at their state convention in Casper in mid-April. The other three are the state GOP chairman, national committeeman and national committeewoman.
+
+ 
+
+ Wyoming will send a total of 29 delegates to the national convention, more than any state of similar size because of its strong Republican leanings.
+
+ 
+
+ Cruz is the only active GOP candidate to have campaigned in Wyoming. He pledged at a rally near Cheyenne last year to reverse federal regulations affecting the coal industry.
+
+ 
+
+ Many in Wyoming are disillusioned with President Barack Obama’s policies. Market forces have caused a downturn in the state’s fossil fuel-reliant economy. Republicans also blame federal regulation for impeding oil, gas and coal extraction.
+
+ 
+
+ Sen. Marco Rubio won a Republican primary in Washington DC. Nineteen delegates are at stake.
+
+The biggest prizes will be on Tuesday, when primaries are held in five delegate-rich states -- Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio.",REAL
+6891,World War 3 Begins! Trump Elected,I Dont Actualy Like Trump thoif yu like him then your an idiot,FAKE
+10546,Hillary Clintons election fraud finally exposed. California stolen from Bernie Sanders!,"Hillary Clinton's election fraud finally exposed. California stolen from Bernie Sanders! page: 1 link With all the talk from MSM of Russians interfering with US elections. Rumors of Soros owning new computer voting machines that can easily be programed to steal election. If you don't think that the DNC won't steal an election if they can. Think again. a reply to: Doctor Smith Intuitively, we all know that Hillary is capable of attempting to steal an election. Your video, combined with the many e-mails provided by WikiLeaks, confirms that she does indeed have an army of cronies out there breaking federal and state election laws, to not only cheat Bernie Sanders, but to get her into the White House again too. Hillary is indeed a Nasty Woman, just as Elizabeth Warren confirmed this past Monday. link This is the stuff that needs a independent investigation launched pronto. If it is found out 100% it is a fix, what then? I guess there could be a sweeping write in movement for Bernie..or just vote for Stein a reply to: Doctor Smith Now the million dollar question is what are ""we"" the people going to do about it ? originally posted by: SaturnFX This is the stuff that needs a independent investigation launched pronto. If it is found out 100% it is a fix, what then? I guess there could be a sweeping write in movement for Bernie..or just vote for Stein Vote for Pee Wee Herman if you want. Just don't vote those Clinton criminals in again. But if you really want to stop her, you have to vote for Trump. Compared to Hillary, Trump is Honest Abraham Lincoln. new topics",FAKE
+4966,"William Weld: Never Mind Libertarianism, He's Running as Himself","Boston magazine has a long take on William Weld, former Massachusetts governor, currently Libertarian vice presidential candidate.
+
+The main takeaway, after some of the usual slightly sneery scene-setting about weirdo libertarians (reported from July's FreedomFest in Las Vegas) and the lovely color detail of the patrician Weld being amazed he's staying in a New York hotel whose price is three digits beginning with ""one""?
+
+That while Weld totally thinks of himself as libertarian and has for a long time, he's also a guy who just likes to do strange and challenging things as a lark, like writing novels, and hates being bored and likes being in the political mix.
+
+An unnamed former adviser says ""There's nothing more he would like than to be flying around the country on somebody else's dime, flying first class, and talking to political reporters all day."" Another unnamed former staffer says of Weld ""He is old money, white, and fucking brilliant...Everybody tries to distance himself from those traits when running for office, and he always embraced them and made them his own.""
+
+Reason has written quite a bit on some conflicts between Weld and libertarianism as most define it, despite Weld's long-time affection for that self-identification, and this profile is decent on explaining that aspect of the Weld/Libertarian story.
+
+The profile by Simon van Zuylen-Wood sums up that conflict:
+
+Weld's strategy isn't to try to defend libertarian ideas. Instead he articulates the ones he thinks disaffected centrists want to hear. When Johnson suggests abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, Weld raises an eyebrow and clarifies that he wouldn't go that far. When asked about gun control, Weld suggests the formation—cue a million Libertarians choking on their dinner—of a massive new FBI task force.... .... I ask him, at random, about climate change. He advocates pragmatic, mainstream, and essentially unlibertarian ideas about the urgent need for governing bodies to prevent the rise of global temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius. These aren't ideas his free-market brethren take kindly to. He smiles. He doesn't care: ""I'm running as myself.""
+
+Weld to Reason TV in May on why Libertarians can trust him:",REAL
+4170,"Clinton makes history, declares win in Democratic race","Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this story misstated who Bernie Sanders would be meeting with Thursday at the White House. He is scheduled to meet with President Obama.
+
+BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Hillary Clinton marked her place in American history Tuesday night, declaring victory in the Democratic presidential race.
+
+“Thanks to you, we’ve reached a milestone,” she told cheering supporters in Brooklyn, saying for the “first time in our nation’s history” a woman would lead a major-party ticket.
+
+Clinton hit the magic number of 2,383 delegates needed to clinch the nomination on Monday night, as news organizations called the race for her based on support from superdelegates — party leaders and elected officials who have a vote at the convention and pledged to back her over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
+
+Clinton waited until six states held a final round of contests Tuesday to declare victory, which will solidify her lead in pledged delegates earned through primaries and caucuses as well as her advantage in the overall popular vote.
+
+Clinton picked up an easy win in New Jersey and also claimed victories in New Mexico and South Dakota. Sanders, meanwhile, won the North Dakota caucuses and the Montana primary.  The AP, CNN and NBC all called California for Clinton early Wednesday.
+
+Clinton celebrated with supporters at Brooklyn Navy Yard and highlighted the historic nature of her win.
+
+“Tonight’s victory is not about one person,” said Clinton, who was framed by American flags draping the walls and in a row behind her. “It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible.”
+
+A video that played prior to her speech spliced images of pivotal moments in the fight for women’s equality in the U.S. — from the suffragettes and the women’s liberation movement — with shots of her climbing stairs to address supporters.
+
+The White House released a statement late Tuesday night saying that President Obama called both Clinton and Sanders, congratulating them ""for running inspiring campaigns"" and Clinton for hitting the magic number of delegates needed to secure the Democratic nod. The statement also said Obama and Sanders would meet at the White House on Thursday.
+
+An endorsement of Clinton by the president is expected as early as this week.
+
+Sanders has vowed to fight all the way to the nominating convention in Philadelphia, yet he is already coming under pressure from party officials to concede — the way Clinton did in her campaign against then-senator Barack Obama in June 2008 — with Clinton’s lead over Sanders more than double the advantage Obama had at the same time.
+
+In her speech Tuesday night, Clinton made a direct appeal to the working-class voters who’ve been supporting Sanders and Trump. “So many of you feel like you’re out there on your own, that no one has your back — well I do.”
+
+“Let there be no mistake: Sen. Sanders, his campaign and the vigorous debate about how to raise incomes, reduce inequality, increase upward mobility have been very good for the Democratic Party and for America,” she said. “It never feels good to put your heart into a cause and a candidate you believe in and to come up short,” she said. “I know that feeling well,” Clinton said to laughter.
+
+Speaking in Santa Monica, Calif., late Tuesday night, Sanders thanked supporters for being ""part of the political revolution.""
+
+""Our vision will be the future of America,"" he said, adding later that he would ""continue the fight"" to the final primary a week later in Washington, D.C. He acknowledged the odds against him were ""steep,"" but again vowed to press on to the July convention.
+
+Clinton's win in the Democratic race marks a historic moment in American politics.
+
+From India’s Indira Gandhi to Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and Germany’s Angela Merkel, many other nations have elevated women to their highest office. Yet the United States has been slow to do the same, with Clinton’s presumptive nomination coming exactly 100 years after the first woman, Jeannette Rankin, was elected to Congress.
+
+“The U.S. has fallen far behind other countries in women’s political engagement in particular,” said Terry O’Neill, the head of the National Organization for Women, the nation’s largest organization of feminist activists. “We have huge barriers to women achieving these positions in the United States,” with only 20% female representation in the U.S. Congress, she said.
+
+Polls suggest a matchup with Trump could be close, with Clinton ahead by just 2 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, though Democrats are hoping the former secretary of State can increase her margin as the party unites behind a single candidate. That could depend on the tone that Sanders takes and whether his passionate, but disappointed, supporters begin to view the election as a referendum on Trump.
+
+Clinton took Trump on with the same message she’s been delivering in stump speeches. “When he says, ‘Let’s make America great again,' that’s code for let’s take American backwards.""
+
+The former first lady wrapped up her speech by paying tribute to her mother, who “taught me to never back down from a bully,"" which she said ended up being “pretty good advice.”
+
+""I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic Party's nominee,"" said Clinton.
+
+House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made an appeal to Sanders after announcing her support for Clinton on Tuesday morning.
+
+“Bernie knows better than anyone what’s on the line in the election and that we at some point have to unify as we go forward,” Pelosi said on ABC’s Good Morning America.
+
+In Sacramento, one Sanders supporter's view of Trump suggested Clinton's best hope of unifying the party may be the New York billionaire.
+
+Aileen McDuff, 25, said she voted for the Vermont senator but will support Clinton if necessary. She's frightened, she said, of what a Trump presidency would be like.
+
+""Everything he says is frightening,"" she said.",REAL
+858,Cruz confronts pro-Trump protesters in Indiana: ‘He’s taking advantage of you’,"MARION, Ind. — What started as a handful of Donald Trump supporters heckling Ted Cruz from across the street outside a campaign stop here Monday afternoon turned into a contentious debate between the Republican presidential hopeful and at least one of them on the eve of the Indiana primary.
+
+The Trump backers yelled jeers like ""Lyin' Ted!"" and ""Hey Cruz, do the math!"" — a reference to Cruz's delegate deficit in the GOP race.
+
+Some Cruz supporters tried to drown out the men out with pro-Cruz chants and counter-insults. Then, when it looked like Cruz was about to leave and things would simmer down, the senator strolled over to engage the men, who were smoking and holding up Trump signs.
+
+In a back-and-forth with one of the men, who afterward repeatedly refused to provide his name to reporters and said he was from Ohio, Cruz said of Trump: ""This man is lying to you and he's taking advantage of you.""
+
+He added: ""If I were Donald Trump I wouldn't have come over and talked to you. ... I would have told the folks over there go over and punch those guys in the face.""
+
+The man accused Cruz of lying on that point. Cruz said it was beyond dispute.
+
+""You'll find out tomorrow. Indiana don't want you,"" the man told him at one point. He also repeatedly interrupted Cruz and tried to mock him.
+
+""Sir, America is a better country — "" said Cruz.
+
+""Without you,"" the man quipped.
+
+""A question everyone here should ask — "" the senator later said.
+
+""Are you Canadian?"" another man said. ""Are you Canadian?"" the man Cruz was speaking to repeated.
+
+The question Cruz was actually trying to raise: ""Do you want your kids repeating the words of Donald Trump?""
+
+The man also took aim at Cruz over his remark that he would ""carpet bomb"" Islamic State militants.
+
+""Those are your words. Carpet bomb. I added the women and children because that's what you're going to be doing when you carpet bomb somewhere.""
+
+Cruz shot back: ""It's interesting that you added women and children because your candidate, Donald Trump, came out and said he would order our military to kill the women and children, the wives and children, of terrorists, which is a war crime.""
+
+Polls show Trump is leading Cruz in Indiana. A loss would be a devastating blow to Cruz's already struggling campaign. Trump is also campaigning in the state Monday.",REAL
+5901,BREAKING: Donald Trump Says He’s Going to Deport Up To 3 Million Immigrants Immediately,"President-elect Donald Trump has said he plans to deport two to three million undocumented immigrants with criminal records from the country immediately – and has insisted that he will build his wall. 
+Via AlternativeNews 
+
+In his first extensive interview since he won the White House, Trump is reassuring his supporters that he will deport or incarcerate up to three million ‘gang members’ and ‘drug dealers.’
+In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that airs on Sunday evening – his first since winning the election – Trump insisted that he will build the wall along the US-Mexico border that was a vital part of his presidential campaign.
+“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably two million – it could be even three million – we are getting them out of the country or we are going to incarcerate,” Mr Trump told 60 Minutes. “Be we’re getting them out of the country, they’re here illegally.”
+He explained that once the border is “secure”, then the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will assess the status of the remaining undocumented immigrants in the country.
+“After the border is secure and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that they’re talking about who are terrific people, they’re terrific people but we are gonna make a determination at that,” he said. “But before we make that determination… it’s very important, we are going to secure our border.” When asked if he actually intends to build the wall along the southern border, Mr Trump simply replied, “Yes.” However, Mr Trump explained that the wall along the 1,900 mile border would probably not be as grandiose as he promised – describing an iteration of the boundary between the two countries that essentially already exists. “There could be some fencing,” he said. “For certain areas I would [accept a fence], but certain areas, a wall is more appropriate. I’m very good at this, it’s called construction.”
+The President-elect’s comments about mass deportations stand at odds with a statement made by Paul Ryan, the highest ranking Republican, on Sunday morning. “We are not planning on erecting a deportation force. Donald Trump’s not planning on that,” Mr Ryan told CNN. “I think we should put people’s minds at ease: That is not what our focus is. That is not what we’re focused on. We’re focused on securing the border,” he added. “We think that’s first and foremost, before we get into any other immigration issue, we’ve got to know who’s coming and going into the country – we’ve got to secure the border.”
+Mr Ryan’s remarks seemed to indicate yet another U-turn in policy proposals for the President-elect. On Friday, he told the Wall Street Journal that he would more than likely keep some parts of the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as “Obamacare”, rather than completely repealing it.
+“Either Obamacare will be amended, or repealed and replaced,” Mr Trump told the newspaper following his 90-minute meeting with President Barack Obama. “I told him I will look at his suggestions and, out of respect, I will do that.” While Mr Obama said he felt “encouraged” by the Thursday meeting, a signifcant number of Americans believe Mr Trump’s election will mark a dark, new phase for the United States, as he intends to dismantle much of the sitting President’s legacy.
+Millions of protesters took to the streets after election night to protest over Mr Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton. While the New York businessman did win enough electoral votes to make it to the White House, Ms Clinton took the popular vote – more than any US president in history, with the exception of Mr Obama.
+Protests filled roads in major cities, like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, and echoed with chants of “not my president” and “dump Trump”. Dissenters are using the protests to rebuke the racism and bigotry promoted by the Trump campaign, as manifested through policy proposals like building a wall along the border, mass deportations, and the blockade of Muslim immigrants.
+Mr Trump’s victory has galvanised white supremacists across the country, as a wave of reported hate crimesreaches new highs. Neo-Nazi and Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin exalted Mr Trump as a “God Emperor” following Tuesday night’s election results.
+“Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn’t have been possible,” he wrote. “[T]he White race is back in the game. And if we’re playing, no one can beat us. The winning is not going to stop.” The Ku Klux Klan also announced a victory parade for the beginning of December in North Carolina.
+Civil rights organisations are preparing themselves for the incoming Trump administration. The American Civil Liberties Union published a full-page ad in the New York Times with an open letter threatening to sue Mr Trump. “if you do not reverse course and endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality,” the ACLU wrote, “you will have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at your every step.”
+Source : (Independent UK) 
+",FAKE
+6211,"In hats and t-shirts, Trump fans rally in Jerusalem’s Old City","Reuters 
+On a rooftop overlooking the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, around 200 American-Israeli fans of Donald Trump gathered to proclaim their support for the Republican candidate, convinced he will be Israel’s best friend if elected. 
+Wearing “Make America Great Again” baseball caps, the small crowd, ranging from Holocaust survivors in their 80s to grinning teenagers in Trump t-shirts, said they didn’t care about the sexual assault allegations against the candidate or the online anti-Semitism of some of his supporters. 
+“Trump will let Israel be itself and make its own decisions, that’s what I like,” David Weissman, a 35-year-old from Queens, New York, who moved to Israel three years ago, said at the event late on Wednesday. 
+“He’s not a saint, but look at his achievements. He’s not afraid to identify the enemy as radical Islam, and he’s not going to support the two-state solution,” he said, referring to long-standing efforts to forge peace with the Palestinians. 
+Trump has said that the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct fabricated their stories to damage his campaign. 
+Others at the rally said they liked the fact that Trump was promising to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, officially recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and would not berate Israel for building Jewish settlements in occupied territory. 
+“It’s very important that he becomes president,” said Connie Gordner, 82, who moved to Israel from Jacksonville, Florida, 21 years ago. “If Hillary Clinton becomes president, we’re dead.” 
+The rally was organized by Republicans Overseas Israel, which estimates that there are 300,000 U.S. citizens living in Israel or in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians seek for their own state. 
+Even if only a third of those cast absentee ballots, organizers believe it could have an impact in some swing states, come Nov. 8. Marc Zell, co-chairman of the non-profit group, believes around three-quarters of American-Israelis support the Republican party and its candidate. 
+In an impassioned speech to the small crowd, David Friedman, Trump’s adviser on Israel, heaped criticism on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton for her decisions as secretary of state and said Trump was Israel’s greatest hope. 
+“Under Trump, the United States will never pressure Israel into accepting a two-state solution or any other solution that is against the wishes of the Israeli people,” he said, to whoops, cheers and a few shouts of “Crooked Hillary”. 
+While the motley crowd was unabashed in its Trumpian fervor, polls indicate that most Jewish Israelis favor Clinton over Trump, by 40 percent to 31 percent. 
+The critical element is American-Israelis who retain the right to vote in U.S. elections. Some estimates suggest more than a quarter of them live in settlements, which tend to have a more conservative, national-religious outlook. Trump’s messages have been designed to appeal to their sentiments. 
+On Wednesday, he delivered a minute-long video to the rally, playing up his connections to Judaism through his daughter’s marriage, saying it enhanced his respect for the faith. 
+“My administration will stand side-by-side with the Jewish people and Israel’s leaders to continue strengthening the bridges that connect not only Jewish Americans and Israelis but also all Americans and Israelis,” he said. 
+“Together we will make America and Israel safe again.”",FAKE
+7810,Anxiety grows among GOP congressional staffers,"Anxiety grows among GOP congressional staffers By Wayne Madsen Posted on October 28, 2016 by Wayne Madsen 
+With their bosses away campaigning, some for their political lives, a number of Republican staffers in Congress are growing anxious over their future employment. With the Senate now favored to be transferred to Democratic control, GOP staffers for members up for re-election on November 8, as well as Republican staffers assigned to various Senate committees and subcommittees, are shopping around their resumes. 
+Although more senior staff can always expect to find employment with Washington’s many lobbying firms and policy-wonkish institutes and foundations, that is not necessarily the case with younger staffers who may find their future options being limited to Starbuck’s baristas and Uber drivers. 
+On the House of Representatives side, Republicans are expected to lose a number of seats in a Democratic wave but GOP control of the House, barring a dramatic shift, is expected to remain in Republican hands. However, staffers for GOP members who are in close races or facing certain defeat are also scurrying around Washington looking for future employment. 
+In what could be termed poetic justice, many Republican staffers who helped push their bosses’ memes against government “entitlement” programs, including unemployment benefits, may be among the first in line at District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland state unemployment offices come December. Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report . Copyright © 2016 WayneMadenReport.com 
+Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required) . This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
+9164,Pentagon Retreats on Enlistment Bonus Collection Efforts,"Pentagon Retreats on Enlistment Bonus Collection Efforts October 26, 2016 Pentagon Retreats on Enlistment Bonus Collection Efforts 
+Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Wednesday ordered a suspension in efforts to seek repayment of thousands of enlistment bonuses and tuition assistance mistakenly paid to members of the California National Guard. 
+""While some soldiers knew or should have known they were ineligible for benefits they were claiming, many others did not,"" Carter, who is in Europe meeting with U.S. allies, said in a statement. 
+""This process has dragged on too long, for too many service members,"" he said. ""Too many cases have languished without action. That's unfair to service members and to taxpayers."" 
+Last week the Los Angeles Times reported that about 10,000 California National Guard troops had been ordered to repay enlistment bonuses - some of more than $15,000 - that were improperly given to them. The newspaper said audits revealed the California Guard had overpaid troops in order to entice them to join and meet enlistment targets more than a decade ago. 
+Senior Defense Department officials have been told to assess the bonus situation and establish a ""streamlined, centralized process"" by the start of next year, Carter said in the statement. 
+""The objective will be to complete the decision-making process on all cases as soon as possible - and no later than July 1,"" he said. 
+The issue has caused outrage in Congress. Members from both parties have called on the Pentagon to drop efforts to reclaim the bonuses. 
+House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News on Tuesday that if the Pentagon did not drop the effort to reclaim re-enlistment bonuses, lawmakers would move legislation on the issue. Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE!  ",FAKE
+413,U.S. officials optimistic they will close giant trade deal,"“We obviously spoke about my passion and his passion, which [is] veterans and veterans issues,” he said.",REAL
+5206,Hillary Clinton Attacks Donald Trump for Threatening to Sue Accusers,"PITTSBURGH—Hillary Clinton on Saturday drew a contrast between how she and Republican rival would conduct their first 100 days in office, zeroing in on his contention that he would sue the women who have accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. Speaking to reporters on her campaign plane Saturday night, Mrs. Clinton and her running […]",REAL
+2632,"Cleveland police are out of control, say the feds. Now they're making a deal to change.","The consent decree between Cleveland and the Justice Department emphasizes community policing, an approach that involves law enforcement closely working with the local community to guide best practices. In particular, the city vowed to establish a commission that will act as a link between the Cleveland police department and community groups. ""We will have community policing as part of our DNA,"" Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson said.
+
+The agreement also promises new guidelines, improved training, and more oversight for use of force. As part of these changes, the Cleveland police department will reform and strengthen existing watchdog agencies. The mayor will also appoint an inspector general that will watch over the police department, and a civilian will be in charge of the police force's internal affairs unit.
+
+Among the reforms, police officers will be required to stop pistol whipping people in the head, and document each time they unholster their guns.
+
+An independent monitor will oversee all of these changes. The city will only be relieved of federal oversight once a federal judge agrees that the police department has met a specific set of standards for reform detailed in the agreement.
+
+A brutal Justice Department report in December found Cleveland police officers used excessive deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons; unnecessary, excessive, and retaliatory force, including Tasers, chemical sprays, and their fists; and excessive force against people with mental illness or in crisis, including one situation in which officers were called exclusively to check up on someone's well-being.
+
+In one case, a police officer shot at an unarmed man wearing only boxer shorts as he was fleeing from armed assailants:
+
+An incident from 2013 in which a sergeant shot at a victim as he ran from a house where he was being held against his will is just one illustration of this problem. ""Anthony"" was being held against his will inside a house by armed assailants. When officers arrived on scene, they had information that two armed assailants were holding several people inside the home. After officers surrounded the house, Anthony escaped from his captors and ran from the house, wearing only boxer shorts. An officer ordered Anthony to stop, but Anthony continued to run toward the officers. One sergeant fired two shots at him, missing. According to the sergeant, when Anthony escaped from the house, the sergeant believed Anthony had a weapon because he elevated his arm and pointed his hand toward the sergeant. No other officers at the scene reported seeing Anthony point anything at the sergeant. The sergeant's use of deadly force was unreasonable. It is only by fortune that he did not kill the crime victim in this incident. The sergeant had no reasonable belief that Anthony posed an immediate danger. The man fleeing the home was wearing only boxer shorts, making it extremely unlikely that he was one of the hostage takers. In a situation where people are being held against their will in a home, a reasonable police officer ought to expect that someone fleeing the home may be a victim. Police also ought to expect that a scared, fleeing victim may run towards the police and, in his confusion and fear, not immediately respond to officer commands. A reasonable officer in these circumstances should not have shot at Anthony.
+
+This is just one of many examples of police officers using ""poor and dangerous tactics"" that often put them ""in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk,"" according to the report.
+
+The Justice Department attributed many of these problems to inadequate training and supervision. ""Supervisors tolerate this behavior and, in some cases, endorse it,"" the report said. ""Officers report that they receive little supervision, guidance, and support from the Division, essentially leaving them to determine for themselves how to perform their difficult and dangerous jobs.""
+
+Former US Attorney General Eric Holder, who headed the Justice Department at the time of the investigation, argued that fixing these issues is crucial for both the general public and police. ""Accountability and legitimacy are essential for communities to trust their police departments, and for there to be genuine collaboration between police and the citizens they serve,"" he said.
+
+For Cleveland, settling with the Justice Department to reform its police force averts a costly court battle. But it also could help alleviate tensions with a community that has long seen its police department as overly aggressive and even abusive.",REAL
+1707,"Donald Trump stands by Jeb Bush, George W. Bush 9/11 comments","Washington (CNN) Donald Trump on Monday stood by his comments that former President George W. Bush did not keep the country safe since he was president during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
+
+Trump insisted he isn't ""blaming anybody,"" but repeatedly reminded Fox News viewers that the ""worst attack in the history of our country"" occurred on Bush's watch and suggested that the attacks could have been prevented.
+
+""The fact is we had the worst attack in the history of our country during his reign. Jeb (Bush) said we were safe during his reign. That wasn't true,"" Trump said. ""And I'm not blaming anybody and I'm not blaming George Bush, although if you look at his three primary agencies, they hated each other, they weren't talking ... And a good leader would've made sure that they would get along and talk and lots of other things happen.""
+
+Trump walks on stage with his family after he was declared the election winner on November 9. ""Ours was not a campaign, but rather, an incredible and great movement,"" he told his supporters in New York.
+
+Trump walks on stage with his family after he was declared the election winner on November 9. ""Ours was not a campaign, but rather, an incredible and great movement,"" he told his supporters in New York.
+
+Trump apologizes in a video, posted to his Twitter account in October, for vulgar and sexually aggressive remarks he made a decade ago regarding women. ""I said it, I was wrong and I apologize,"" Trump said, referring to lewd comments he made during a previously unaired taping of ""Access Hollywood."" Multiple Republican leaders rescinded their endorsements of Trump after the footage was released.
+
+Trump faces Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the first presidential debate, which took place in Hempstead, New York, in September.
+
+Trump delivers a speech at the Republican National Convention in July, accepting the party's nomination for President. ""I have had a truly great life in business,"" he said. ""But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country -- to go to work for you. It's time to deliver a victory for the American people.""
+
+Trump delivers a speech at the Republican National Convention in July, accepting the party's nomination for President. ""I have had a truly great life in business,"" he said. ""But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country -- to go to work for you. It's time to deliver a victory for the American people.""
+
+Trump speaks during a campaign event in Evansville, Indiana, on April 28. After Trump won the Indiana primary, his last two competitors dropped out of the GOP race.
+
+Trump speaks during a campaign event in Evansville, Indiana, on April 28. After Trump won the Indiana primary, his last two competitors dropped out of the GOP race.
+
+Trump -- flanked by U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio, left, and Ted Cruz -- speaks during a CNN debate in Miami on March 10. Trump dominated the GOP primaries and emerged as the presumptive nominee in May.
+
+Trump -- flanked by U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio, left, and Ted Cruz -- speaks during a CNN debate in Miami on March 10. Trump dominated the GOP primaries and emerged as the presumptive nominee in May.
+
+In June 2015, during a speech from Trump Tower, Trump announced that he was running for President. He said he would give up ""The Apprentice"" to run.
+
+Trump speaks in Sarasota, Florida, after accepting the Statesman of the Year Award at the Sarasota GOP dinner in August 2012. It was shortly before the Republican National Convention in nearby Tampa.
+
+Trump speaks in Sarasota, Florida, after accepting the Statesman of the Year Award at the Sarasota GOP dinner in August 2012. It was shortly before the Republican National Convention in nearby Tampa.
+
+Trump poses with Miss Universe contestants in 2011. Trump had been executive producer of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants since 1996.
+
+Trump poses with Miss Universe contestants in 2011. Trump had been executive producer of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants since 1996.
+
+Trump appears on the set of ""The Celebrity Apprentice"" with two of his children -- Donald Jr. and Ivanka -- in 2009.
+
+Trump appears on the set of ""The Celebrity Apprentice"" with two of his children -- Donald Jr. and Ivanka -- in 2009.
+
+For ""The Apprentice,"" Trump was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 2007.
+
+For ""The Apprentice,"" Trump was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 2007.
+
+Trump wrestles with ""Stone Cold"" Steve Austin at WrestleMania in 2007. Trump has close ties with the WWE and its CEO, Vince McMahon.
+
+Trump wrestles with ""Stone Cold"" Steve Austin at WrestleMania in 2007. Trump has close ties with the WWE and its CEO, Vince McMahon.
+
+Trump attends the U.S. Open tennis tournament with his third wife, Melania Knauss-Trump, and their son, Barron, in 2006. Trump and Knauss married in 2005.
+
+Trump attends the U.S. Open tennis tournament with his third wife, Melania Knauss-Trump, and their son, Barron, in 2006. Trump and Knauss married in 2005.
+
+Trump attends a news conference in 2005 that announced the establishment of Trump University. From 2005 until it closed in 2010, Trump University had about 10,000 people sign up for a program that promised success in real estate. Three separate lawsuits -- two class-action suits filed in California and one filed by New York's attorney general -- argued that the program was mired in fraud and deception. Trump's camp rejected the suits' claims as ""baseless."" And Trump has charged that the New York case against him is politically motivated.
+
+A 12-inch talking Trump doll is on display at a toy store in New York in September 2004.
+
+A 12-inch talking Trump doll is on display at a toy store in New York in September 2004.
+
+An advertisement for the television show ""The Apprentice"" hangs at Trump Tower in 2004. The show launched in January of that year. In January 2008, the show returned as ""Celebrity Apprentice.""
+
+An advertisement for the television show ""The Apprentice"" hangs at Trump Tower in 2004. The show launched in January of that year. In January 2008, the show returned as ""Celebrity Apprentice.""
+
+Trump dips his second wife, Marla Maples, after the couple married in a private ceremony in New York in December 1993. The couple divorced in 1999 and had one daughter together, Tiffany.
+
+Trump dips his second wife, Marla Maples, after the couple married in a private ceremony in New York in December 1993. The couple divorced in 1999 and had one daughter together, Tiffany.
+
+Trump and singer Michael Jackson pose for a photo before traveling to visit Ryan White, a young child with AIDS, in 1990.
+
+Trump and singer Michael Jackson pose for a photo before traveling to visit Ryan White, a young child with AIDS, in 1990.
+
+Trump signs his second book, ""Trump: Surviving at the Top,"" in 1990. Trump has published at least 16 other books, including ""The Art of the Deal"" and ""The America We Deserve.""
+
+Trump attends the opening of his new Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, in 1989.
+
+Trump attends the opening of his new Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, in 1989.
+
+Trump uses his personal helicopter to get around New York in 1987.
+
+Trump uses his personal helicopter to get around New York in 1987.
+
+Trump was married to Ivana Zelnicek Trump from 1977 to 1990, when they divorced. They had three children together: Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.
+
+Trump was married to Ivana Zelnicek Trump from 1977 to 1990, when they divorced. They had three children together: Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.
+
+Trump attends an event to mark the start of construction of the New York Convention Center in 1979.
+
+Trump attends an event to mark the start of construction of the New York Convention Center in 1979.
+
+Trump stands with Alfred Eisenpreis, New York's economic development administrator, in 1976 while they look at a sketch of a new 1,400-room renovation project of the Commodore Hotel. After graduating college in 1968, Trump worked with his father on developments in Queens and Brooklyn before purchasing or building multiple properties in New York and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Those properties included Trump Tower in New York and Trump Plaza and multiple casinos in Atlantic City.
+
+Trump stands with Alfred Eisenpreis, New York's economic development administrator, in 1976 while they look at a sketch of a new 1,400-room renovation project of the Commodore Hotel. After graduating college in 1968, Trump worked with his father on developments in Queens and Brooklyn before purchasing or building multiple properties in New York and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Those properties included Trump Tower in New York and Trump Plaza and multiple casinos in Atlantic City.
+
+Trump, center, wears a baseball uniform at the New York Military Academy in 1964. After he graduated from the boarding school, he went to college. He started at Fordham University before transferring and later graduating from the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania's business school.
+
+Trump, center, wears a baseball uniform at the New York Military Academy in 1964. After he graduated from the boarding school, he went to college. He started at Fordham University before transferring and later graduating from the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania's business school.
+
+Trump, center, stands at attention during his senior year at the New York Military Academy in 1964.
+
+Trump, center, stands at attention during his senior year at the New York Military Academy in 1964.
+
+Trump, left, in a family photo. He was the second-youngest of five children.
+
+Trump, left, in a family photo. He was the second-youngest of five children.
+
+Trump at age 4. He was born in 1946 to Fred and Mary Trump in New York City. His father was a real estate developer.
+
+Trump at age 4. He was born in 1946 to Fred and Mary Trump in New York City. His father was a real estate developer.
+
+President-elect Donald Trump has been in the spotlight for years. From developing real estate and producing and starring in TV shows, he became a celebrity long before winning the White House.
+
+President-elect Donald Trump has been in the spotlight for years. From developing real estate and producing and starring in TV shows, he became a celebrity long before winning the White House.
+
+Trump was referencing how in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks top law enforcement and intelligence agencies including the CIA and the FBI weren't coordinating as closely as they do now.
+
+Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of Trump's rivals for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, said during the last Republican debate that his brother, the former president, ""kept us safe."" Trump on Friday reopened that feud and challenged that assertion.
+
+""How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe,"" he tweeted.
+
+Trump even suggested Monday that the Bush administration ""knew in advance"" the U.S. would be attacked.
+
+""CIA Director George Tenet knew in advance that there was going to be an attack,"" Trump said.""He knew in advance that there was going to be an attack.""
+
+While Tenet did go to the White House two months before 9/11 with intelligence reports suggesting al-Qaeda was plotting a terrorist attack on the U.S., Tenet did not know when or how those attacks would unfold and he did not know how reliable the intercepted chatter was.
+
+Former Trump political aide Roger Stone, who is also a well-known conspiracy theorist, pushed a similar line hours before Trump called into Fox News, tweeting that Tenet ""admitted he had 60 day advance warning of attack on America-and did nothing.""
+
+Stone also tweeted two days before that "".@realDonaldTrump is right - Bush Admin knew of attack on America 60 days in advance- did nothing.""
+
+Trump also said Monday that tougher immigration policies like the ones he would implement if he became president would have thwarted the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Those hijackers entered the U.S. legally, but Trump said he would have implemented tougher visa standards to prevent their entry into the country in the first place. It's unclear what those standards would have been.
+
+Trump also said he would have had a ""massive whistleblower system"" to gain advance knowledge of the attacks. He did not explain how such a system would work.
+
+The latest sparring between Trump and Jeb Bush is just the latest in a series of feuds that have marked the two contenders' relationship through the primary.
+
+Trump has repeatedly knocked Bush over his last name -- suggesting there should be no more Bushes and Clintons in the White House -- and claimed that the former Florida governor is too ""low-energy"" to take on the job of commander-in-chief.
+
+After first resisting to engage the brash billionaire, Bush has in recent months taken Trump on directly and forcefully, this weekend explaining on CNN's ""State of the Union"" that he has ""grave doubts"" about Trump's preparedness to handle the responsibilities of president of the United States. Bush also linked Trump's candidacy to the antics of Trump's reality show, ""The Apprentice.""
+
+But Trump's criticism of the two Bushes is doing more than just dragging the former Florida governor and one-time establishment favorite for the nomination into a mud fight. It's also provoking Jeb Bush into repeated impassioned defenses of his brother's tenure as president, which remains contentious.
+
+Jeb Bush struggled early in the campaign to call his brother's decision to invade Iraq a ""mistake"" -- a judgment that today has broad consensus -- as he almost reflexively defended his brother.
+
+And Jeb Bush did it again this weekend, in the face of Trump's latest attack over 9/11:
+
+""My brother responded to a crisis, and he did it as you would hope a president would do. He united the country, he organized our country and he kept us safe. And there's no denying that. The great majority of Americans believe that,"" Bush said.",REAL
+8343,Lower Yields and Agropoisons: What is the Point of GM Mustard in India?,"Email 
+The decision whether to allow the commercialisation of the first genetically modified (GM) food crop (mustard) in India rumbles on. As I have previously discussed here, the bottom line is government collusion over GM crop technology (that is not wanted and not needed) with transnational agribusiness, which is trying to hide in the background. 
+The real story behind GM mustard in India is that it presents the opportunity to make various herbicide tolerant (HT) mustard hybrids using India’s best germ plasm, which would be an irresistible money spinner for the developers and chemical manufacturers (Bayer-Monsanto). GM mustard is both a Trojan horse and based on a hoax. 
+Various high-level reports (listed here) have advised against introducing GM food crops to India. Allowing for not one but three GMOs (which is what the GM mustard in question constitutes, when we include its two crucial GM parental lines) is according to campaigner Aruna Rodrigues a serious case of regulatory ‘sleight-of-hand’, permissible due to diluted rules to ensure easy compliance. 
+If allowed to go through, India will be forced to accept a highly toxic and unsustainable technology suited to monocropping. HT GM crops would be particularly unsuitable for its agriculture given the large number of small farms growing a diverse range of crops alongside mustard that contribute towards agricultural biodiversity and, in turn, diverse, healthy diets. 
+The processes being used to push through GM mustard are, according to this writ by Rodrigues, based on fraud and unremitting regulatory delinquency. She argues that the whole system is in addition being protected by a subterranean process of regulation that has also broken India’s constitutional safeguards by keeping the biosafety data hidden from the nation. 
+Rodrigues says, “These matters require criminal prosecution.” 
+New development 
+The government has now told the Supreme Court (SC) that it won’t release GM mustard without the court’s say so. At the same time, however, it strongly opposes the writ filed by Rodrigues. 
+In an affidavit response to Aruna Rodrigues’ writ, however, the Union of India revealed something that merited a press release from the civil organisation Navdanya and Aruna Rodrigues (presented in full below this article). 
+According to the press statement, the government’s response contained an admission by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) itself that no claim had been made in any documents submitted to it that HT Mustard DMH 11 out-performs non-GMO hybrids. 
+So then, what is the point of GM mustard? And what were all the claims being made in media about GM mustard outperforming non-GMO hybrids by 25-30% in yield? 
+According to the press statement, that claim was also made by the developers (Dr Pental and his team at Delhi University) and is clearly recorded by the media. It also notes that the claim of superior yield was implied in the Supreme Court (SC) during a ‘hearing’ (24 October) on India’s import bill for edible oil. 
+The press statement says: 
+“It is now clear, by the GEAC’s own admission, that DMH 11 does not out-yield India’s best non-GMO cultivars and this includes hybrids against which this mustard was not tested.” 
+Navdanya and Aruna Rodrigues ask: 
+“Therefore, what is the Union of India’s point? Is this HT mustard being introduced because of its ability to just make hybrids? Given that it does not outperform our non-GMO hybrids, the argument collapses on its essential lack of science and reasoned thinking.” 
+They conclude that this HT Mustard DMH 11 is not needed – which is in fact the first step of a risk assessment protocol for GM crops! 
+HT mustard DMH 11 will make no impact on the domestic production of mustard oil, which was a major reason why it was being pushed in the first place. The argument was that GM mustard would increase productivity and this would help reduce imports of edible oils. Implicit in this was that India’s farmers were unproductive and GM would help overcome this. 
+While it is clear that India’s imports of edible oils have indeed increased, this is not as a result of an underperforming home-grown sector. India essentially became a dumping ground for palm oil. Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Then import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with. 
+This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill, which helped write international trade rules to secure access to the Indian market on its terms. It therefore came as little surprise that in 2013 India’s then Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar accused US companies of derailing the nation’s oil seeds production programme. 
+Supporters of GM twisted this situation to call for the introduction of GM mustard to increase productivity. 
+Now their arguments on virtually each and every count have been shown to be erroneous and constitute little more than a cynical ruse to facilitate Bayer-Monsanto GM food crops and associated agropoisons entry into India. 
+PRESS RELEASE 
+UNION OF INDIA REPLY AFFIDAVIT 20/21 OCT 2016 
+GEAC STATES: “NO CLAIM MADE THAT DMH 11 OUTPERFORMS NON-GMO HYBRIDS” 
+“No such claim has been made in any of the submitted documents that DMH 11 out-performs Non-GMO hybrids. The comparison has only been made between hybrid DMH 11, NC (national Check) Varuna and the appropriate zonal checks — MSY of 2670 Kg/ha has been recorded over three years of BRL trials which is 28% and 37% more than the NC & ZC respectively”. (Ref. U of India Reply Pg 55 point 86-88) 
+Petitioner Comment: 
+With this statement, the Union of India effectively buries its own ‘raison d’être’ for its HT Mustard DMH 11. The following points may be noted: 
+(a) The claim of a 25-30% increase in yield may not have technically been made in the SC. This adherence to a technicality is mischievous to the extreme, but much more moot is that the Regulators by this argument cut the grass from under their own feet. 
+The above yield is indeed the claim by the Developers, clearly recorded by the Media and strangely in the SC by implication, by bringing in the issue of our import bill for edible oil in the ‘Hearing’ of the 24th. The claim is: 
+· That the superior yield of this HT mustard DMH 11, (that despite there being NO TRAIT for YIELD in the Barnase-Barstar system with the Bar gene glufosinate), through its HYBRID-MAKING capability is superior to Non-GMO cultivars in the Country. 
+(b) The Petitioners’ have proven without doubt based on RTI data that DMH 11 field trials were fraudulent, and specifically on the question of DELIBERATELY poor-yielding Comparators used in the field testing of HT Mustard DMH 11 in the BRL I & II field trials . 
+NOTE: By this statement the Government concedes the argument that DMH 11 does not out-yield India’s best NON-GMO cultivars and this includes HYBRIDS against which this mustard was not tested in BRL I &II trials (2010-11 onwards). Therefore, what is the Union-of India’s point? Is this HT mustard being introduced because of its ability to JUST make HYBRIDS? Given that it does not outperform our Non-GMO hybrids, the argument collapses on its essential lack of science and reasoned thinking. 
+CONCLUSION 
+· This HT Mustard DMH 11 is NOT NEEDED (the first step of a risk assessment protocol for GM crops ) 
+AND 
+· This HT mustard DMH 11 will make no impact on DOMESTIC production of Mustard Oil leave alone the import oil bill of which mustard and Rape together are less than 2% of the total oil import (of 14.3 million Metric Tonnes in 2015-16) 
+Aruna Rodrigues: Petitioner GMO PIL Mo: 098263 96033 
+Indra Shekhar Singh, Media Spokesperson, Navdanya",FAKE
+5084,"Obama passes baton to Clinton, stirs up '3rd term' charges","President Obama invoked his “Yes we can” 2008 campaign slogan Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, leaving little doubt that his declaration that Hillary Clinton was “fit” and “ready” to be commander-in-chief was a baton-passing of his eight years in office — a legacy that Republican nominee Donald Trump immediately attacked as “Owning the 3rd Term.”
+
+Capping another night of Trump bashing — briefly interrupted by the official nomination of Tim Kaine to be Clinton’s vice presidential running mate — Obama declared, “There has never been a man or a woman – not me, not Bill, nobody – more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America,” at the same time accusing Trump of peddling ""fear"" and a pessimistic vision of the country.
+
+‎Republicans immediately fired back, with party Chairman Reince Priebus issuing a statement saying, “Tonight reinforced that the Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine ticket is nothing more than two career DC insiders who want nothing more than to continue the failed Democrat status quo.”
+
+He pointed to what he called the president’s “failed legacy in the Middle East” and said, “Our country cannot afford four more years like the last eight, which have left us less prosperous, less safe, and less free.”
+
+Without question, the sitting president depends on his former secretary of state to help preserve his legacy, and fend off recurring Republican attempts to repeal ObamaCare, upend environmental regulations and more. But Republicans point to the other side of the picture – a debt nearing $20 trillion, tensions growing in America’s cities and an Islamic State threat that even top security officials suggest is growing in its reach and unpredictability.
+
+“Our country does not feel 'great already' to the millions of wonderful people living in poverty, violence and despair,” Trump tweeted Wednesday night.
+
+Obama, though, tried to frame the election as a choice between pessimism and optimism, as he set the stage for Clinton to accept the nomination Thursday night.
+
+“America is already great. America is already strong,” Obama said. “And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump.”
+
+Clinton surprised the crowd by showing up onstage with Obama at the end of his speech, the two of them hugging and waving to delegates who were holding up ""thank you"" signs.
+
+Obama’s address was delivered shortly after delegates finalized the party’s 2016 ticket. In an overwhelming voice vote, they nominated Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine for vice president.
+
+Kaine himself, after starting off talking family and faith, shifted gears in the second half and shelved his nice-guy persona to deliver a broadside against Trump, as he accepted the VP nomination from his party.
+
+“Hillary has a passion for kids and families. … Donald Trump has a passion too: It's himself,” Kaine said. The senator was merciless after that. He went on to mock Trump, imitating his Queens accent when he says, “Believe me.”
+
+“We're gonna destroy ISIS so fast -- believe me! There's nothing suspicious in my tax returns -- believe me!” Kaine bellowed, as the crowd roared with laughter. “Here's the thing. Most people, when they run for president, they don't just say ‘believe me.’ They respect you enough to tell you how they will get things done. … You cannot believe one word that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth.”
+
+While he was speaking, the Trump campaign was firing out press releases ripping Kaine as a “job killer” and part of the Washington establishment.
+
+Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had considered an independent presidential run before ruling it out, made a late appearance Wednesday – with an endorsement that could help Clinton reach out to vital independents whom Trump also is courting, and a bagful of zingers aimed squarely at his fellow billionaire.
+
+“Trump says he wants to run the nation like he’s run his business. God help us!” Bloomberg said, calling him a “dangerous demagogue” and claiming it’s “imperative” to elect Clinton.
+
+The focus of the third convention night was heavy on gun control, global warming and even national security, an issue largely absent from the first two nights.
+
+Together, the speakers Wednesday set the stage for Clinton to deliver her nomination acceptance speech and close out the convention Thursday night, after becoming Tuesday the first woman in U.S. history nominated for president by a major party.",REAL
+507,Housing In 2015: Four Reasons For Optimism (And One For Worry),"Housing In 2015: Four Reasons For Optimism (And One For Worry)
+
+Six years ago, homebuilders and Realtors were facing brutal business conditions: millions of Americans were losing their jobs and homes.
+
+As 2015 begins, hiring is strong and economic indicators are pointing up. Could this be the year when the housing market finally breaks out of its tepid recovery and takes off?
+
+Economists see several reasons why 2015 might be a banner year for homebuying — and not just in San Francisco and Miami.
+
+They also see One Big Factor that potentially could block a buying binge.
+
+Before considering that possible downer, let's first look at the upside:
+
+When companies are hiring, would-be homebuyers feel more confident about taking on mortgage debt.
+
+During the recession, companies kept slashing positions, sending the unemployment rate soaring to 10 percent and frightening potential homebuyers. But job growth has been strong lately, with employers adding 321,000 jobs in November. The unemployment rate has tumbled to 5.8 percent.
+
+As that good news sinks in, optimism is rising. The Conference Board's latest Consumer Confidence Index shows confidence is running 19.5 percent higher than a year ago.
+
+Home prices just took a breather, which helps.
+
+From January to October, home prices rose 4.5 percent nationally, according to the latest S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Index. That gain was subdued compared with October 2013, when home prices jumped 11 percent higher than the previous year.
+
+But slower price appreciation in 2014 may have set the stage for a buying surge in 2015. That's because buyers need the right combination of steady income, decent savings, low interest rates and reasonable home prices to jump into the market.
+
+The Labor Department's latest jobs report showed an uptick in wages, and the surging stock market has been boosting savings. Mortgages have been holding below 4 percent for 30-year fixed rates.
+
+And now the decelerating growth in home prices may be creating an affordability opportunity that will attract buyers in early 2015.
+
+When millions of Americans were losing their homes in the recession, many started moving into apartments. That shift caused rents to soar.
+
+""With rents now rising at a seven-year high, historically low [interest] rates and moderating [home] price growth are likely to entice more buyers to enter the market in upcoming months,"" Lawrence Yun, the National Association of Realtors' chief economist, said in a release.
+
+The Census Bureau says just 36 percent of Americans under age 35 own a home. In 2007, that figure was 42 percent.
+
+Some young people enjoy renting, but a recent survey by Fannie Mae showed 9 in 10 would prefer to own. They have been held back by tight lending standards that have made it tough to get around their heavy student debts and light savings.
+
+But in December, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac announced programs that would allow first-time buyers to get homes with down payments of just 3 percent, instead of 5 percent.
+
+That lower amount would allow creditworthy but cash-strapped young buyers to qualify for mortgages. ""If access to credit improves, we could see substantially larger numbers of young buyers in the market,"" Jonathan Smoke, chief economist for Realtor.com, said in his 2015 outlook.
+
+But there's one reason for pessimism.
+
+For years, many economists have been saying mortgage interest rates would rise. In 2015, they finally may be right.
+
+That's because the Federal Reserve, which has held down both short- and long-term interest rates since 2008, has been signaling a coming change. The Fed is expected to allow rates to drift up, probably starting this summer.
+
+Industry economists generally expect mortgage rates to reach 5 percent by year's end. That would still be quite low by historical standards, but after having such cheap mortgages for so long, even a modest rate increase could scare off buyers, according to Lindsey Piegza, chief economist for Sterne Agee.
+
+""A rising monthly payment — thanks to rising interest rates — could cause an unwelcome sticker shock for many potential homebuyers,"" she said.",REAL
+9660,The Intercept Outs Neocon Democrat’s Smear Against Trump as ‘Putin’s Puppet’,"shorty Dispatches from Eric Zuesse 
+O n November 1st, The Intercept headlined “HERE’S THE PROBLEM WITH THE STORY CONNECTING RUSSIA TO DONALD TRUMP’S EMAIL SERVER” , and the reporting team of Sam Biddle, Lee Fang, Micah Lee, and Morgan Marquis-Boire, revealed that: “Slate’s Franklin Foer published a story that’s been circulating through the dark web and various newsrooms since summertime, an enormous, eyebrow-raising claim that Donald Trump uses a secret server to communicate with Russia. That claim resulted in an explosive night of Twitter confusion and misinformation. The gist of the Slate article is dramatic — incredible, even: Cybersecurity researchers found that the Trump Organization used a secret box configured to communicate exclusively with Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest commercial bank. This is a story that any reporter in our election cycle would drool over, and drool Foer did.” 
+The Intercept team concluded their detailed analysis of the evidence by saying: Franklin Foer is an American warmonger and p.r. agent, a Democrat, and former editor of The [scurrilous Neocon] New Republic. Foer was a 2012 Bernard L. Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. “Could it be that Donald Trump used one of his shoddy empire’s spam marketing machines, one with his last name built right into the domain name, to secretly collaborate with a Moscow bank? Sure. At this moment, there’s literally no way to disprove that. But there’s also literally no way to prove it, and such a grand claim carries a high burden of proof. Without more evidence it would be safer (and saner) to assume that this is exactly what it looks like: A company that Trump has used since 2007 to outsource his hotel spam is doing exactly that. Otherwise, we’re all making the exact same speculation about the unknown that’s caused untold millions of voters to believe Hillary’s deleted emails might have contained Benghazi cover-up PDFs. Given equal evidence for both, go with the less wacky story.” 
+However, they failed to dig deeper to explain what could have motivated this smear of Trump: was it just sloppiness on the part of Slate, and of Foer? Hardly — it was anything but unintentional: A core part of the Democratic Party’s campaign for Hillary Clinton consists of her claim that Donald Trump is secretly a Russian agent. This is an updated version of the Republican Joseph R. McCarthy’s campaign to “root communists out of the federal government,” and of the John Birch Society’s accusation even against the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower that, “With regard to … Eisenhower, it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason.” 
+Neoconservatives — in both Parties — are the heirs of the Republican Party’s hard-right, which now, even decades after the 1991 end of communism and the Soviet Union, hate Russia above all of their other passions. Neoconservatism has emerged as today’s Republican Party’s Establishment, and (like with the Democratic Party’s original neocon, U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the “Senator from Boeing”) they’ve always viewed Russia to be America’s chief enemy, and they have favored the overthrow of any nation’s leader who is friendly toward Russia, such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Yanukovych, and Bashar al-Assad. Hatred and demonization of Russia is the common core of neoconservatism — the post-Cold-War extension of Joseph R. McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Neoconservatives — in both Parties — are the heirs of the Republican Party’s hard-right, which now, even decades after the 1991 end of communism and the Soviet Union, hate Russia above all of their other passions. 
+Both Slate and especially Foer have long pedigrees as Democratic Party neoconservatives — champions of U.S. invasions, otherwise called PR agents (‘journalists’) promoting the products and services that a few giant and exclusive military corporations such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Dyncorp, and the Carlyle Group, offer to the U.S. federal government. I’ll deal here only with Foer, not with his latest employer (in a string, all of which are neocon Democratic ‘news’ media). Foer wrote in The New York Times , on 10 October 2004, against ‘isolationist’ Republicans, who regretted having supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and he headlined about them there, “Once Again, America First” , equating non -neoconservative Republicans with, essentially, the pro-fascist isolationists of the 1930s. He concluded that they would come to regret their regret: “Conservatives could soon find themselves retracing Buckley’s steps, wrestling all over again with their isolationist instincts.” That’s how far-right Franklin Foer is: he’s to the right of those Republicans. .. On 7 June 2004, Foer, in a tediously long, badly written and argued, article in New York Magazine , “The Source of the Trouble” , described the downfall of The New York Times’s leading stenographer for George W. Bush’s lies to invade Iraq, their reporter Judith Miller. He closed by concluding that “the source of the trouble” was that Miller was simply too earnest and tried too hard — not that she was a stenographer to power: .. “People like Miller, with her outsize journalistic temperament of ambition, obsession, and competitive fervor, relying on people like Ahmad Chalabi, with his smooth, affable exterior retailing false information for his own motives, for the benefit of people reading a newspaper, trying to get at the truth of what’s what. ” .. (She was anything but “trying to get at the truth of what’s what.” She was the opposite: a mere stenographer to George W. Bush and to the Administration’s chosen mouthpieces, such as the anti-Saddam exiled Iraqi Ahmad Chalaby.) O n 20 December 2004, when the question of whether to bomb Iran was being debated by neoconservatives, Foer, who then was the Editor of the leading Democratic Party neoconservative magazine, The New Republic , headlined in his magazine, “Identity Crisis: Neocon v. Neocon on Iran” , and he introduced a supposed non-neocon from the supposedly non-neocon Brookings Institution, Kenneth Pollack, to comment upon the conflict among ( the other Party’s ) neocons: “In part, the lack of neocon consensus [on whether to, as John McCain was to so poetically put it, ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’ ] can be attributed to the nature of the problem. Nobody — not the Council on Foreign Relations, not John Kerry’s brain trust — has designed a plausible policy to walk Iran back from the nuclear brink. Or, as Kenneth M. Pollack concludes in his new book, The Persian Puzzle, this is a ‘problem from Hell’ with no good solution.” But, actually, both Pollack and Brookings are Democratic Party neocons themselves; and among the leading proponents of invading Iraq had been not only Pollack but Brookings’s Michael O’Hanlon . Brookings had no prominent opponent of invading Iraq. (Brookings has a long history of neoconservatism , and routinely leads the Democratic Party’s contingent of neocon thinking, even urging a Democratic administration to have its stooge-regimes violate international laws .) The real reason why neocons (being the heirs of the far-right extremists’ Cold-War demonization of Russia, even after communism is gone) wanted to conquer both Iraq and Iran, was that both countries’ leaders were friendly towards Russia, and were opposed by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, which family quietly worked not only with the U.S. government but with Israel’s government, against both Iraq and Iran, as well as against Syria — those three nations (Iraq, Iran, and Syria) all being friendly toward Russia, which both the Saudi aristocracy, and not only the U.S. aristocracy, hate. It’s not just the conservative ‘news’ media that are neoconservative now. The so-called ‘liberal’ media are so neoconservative that, for example, Salon can condemn Donald Trump for his having condemned Hillary and Obama’s bombing of Libya. Salon condemned Trump’s having said “We would be so much better off if Qaddafi were in charge right now” — as if Trump weren’t correct, and as if what happened after our overthrow and killing of Qaddafi weren’t far worse for both Libyans and the world than what now exists in Libya. (But, of course, for Lockheed Martin etc., it is far better). CBS News and Mother Jones condemned the Trilateralist Joseph Nye for having veered temporarily away from his normal neoconservatism. Then, Nye wrote in the neocon Huffington Post saying that David Corn of Mother Jones and Franklin Foer of The New Republic had misrepresented what he had said, and that he was actually a good neocon after all. Nye closed: “In any case, I have never supported Gaddafi and am on record wishing him gone, and also on record supporting Obama’s actions in recent weeks. We now know that Gaddafi’s departure is the only change that will work in Libya.” Sure, it did. Oh, really? It’s Trump who is crazy here? More recently, Foer headlined at Slate, “Putin’s Puppet: If the Russian president could design a candidate to undermine American interests — and advance his own — he’d look a lot like Donald Trump.” Foer proceeded to present the view of Trump that subsequently became parroted by the Hillary Clinton campaign (that Trump=traitor). Wikipedia has a 450-person ”List of Republicans opposing Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016″ , and it’s almost entirely comprised of well-known neoconservatives — the farthest-right of all Republicans, the people closest to Joseph R. McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Foer cited many neoconservative sources that are not commonly thought of as Republican, such as Buzzfeed; and he even had the gall to blame the Russian government for having made public its best evidence behind its charge (which was true ) that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 was no authentic ‘democratic revolution’ such as the U.S. government and its ‘news’ media said, but was instead a very bloody U.S. coup d’etat in Ukraine , which was organized from the U.S. Embassy there, starting by no later than 1 March 2013 , a year beforehand. Foer wrote: “The Russians have made an art of publicizing the material they have filched to injure their adversaries. The locus classicus of this method was a recording of a blunt call between State Department official Toria [that’s actually ‘Victoria’] Nuland [a close friend of both Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney] and the American ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. The Russians allegedly planted the recording on YouTube and then tweeted a link to it — and from there it became international news. Though they never claimed credit for the leak, few doubted the White House’s contention that Russia was the source.” To a neoconservative, even defensive measures (such as Russia’s there exposing the lies that America uses to ‘justify’ economic sanctions and other hostile acts against Russia) — indeed, anything that Russia does against America’s aggressions against Russia, and against Russia’s allies (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych) — anything that Russia does, is somehow evil and blameworthy. And, of course, America’s aggressions are not. The U.S. government and its neocon propagandists are outraged that some people are trying to expose — instead of to spread — their lies. The American government isn’t yet neocon enough, in the view of such liars. About the author =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS Print this post if you want. Share This:",FAKE
+9234,Hillary’s Aide Vanishes After WikiLeak Corruption Scandal Huma Life in Danger,"posted by Eddie Has Hillary threatened her BFF & Aide? 10,000 new emails on Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner’s computer. They were in a file marked ‘Life Insurance’. Huma had the goods on Hillary and is now running for her life?! With the scandal/criminal/clincher emails now available to the authorities that were on Humas server, Huma’s days a numbered. The plot continues to thicken, and there seems to be no end to Hillarys corruption. From The Next News Network The plot thickens in the Hillary Clinton criminal FBI investigation as leaked information aledges Huma Abedin kept the thousands of newly discovered emails in a folder labeled ‘life insurance’ on her home computer. Some are calling it Huma’s own ‘Deadman Switch’ to be activated if Hillary ordered her death. Meanwhile Huma hasn’t been seen on the campaign trail, at Hillary’s side, all weekend. 
+BREAKING: WARRANT JUST ISSUED FOR HILLARY CLINTON’S TOP AIDE HUMA ABEDIN’S EMAILS 
+A warrant was just issued for Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin’s email after the Justice Department stonewalled initial requests by the FBI. Hillary’s days are numbered… And so are Huma’s. source:",FAKE
+9781,Aristocracy’s Immunity From Prosecution Disturbs TARP’s I.G.,"Posted on October 26, 2016 by Eric Zuesse. Eric Zuesse For the very first time, on October 25th, a high federal official, the “SIGTARP” or Special Inspector General for the TARP program that bailed out the largest financial institutions and their top investors after the 2008 economic crash, is now making a specific proposal to hold the top-level crooks accountable for the incentive-systems they had put into place motivating their employees to pump-and-dump ‘investments’ during the growth-phase of the ‘free market’ Ponzi game that existed since 2000 when the end of the FDR-era Glass-Steagall Act and the start of totally unregulated financial marketeering went wild after 2005 and came crashing down in 2008. Despite the deregulation that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (and both political parties in Congress) instituted, there still remained on the books some laws that high financial executives were breaking, but the SIGTARP has now come to an impasse in trying to obtain the evidence that will enable investigations to proceed against the top executives, and so she is coming out to urge cooperation of the rest of the government in order to enable it to happen. The SIGTARP, Christy Goldsmith Romero, urges : A PROPOSAL TO BRING ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE “INSULATED CEO” I propose that Congress remove the insulation around Wall Street CEOs and other high-level officials by requiring the CEO, CFO and certain other senior executives to sign an annual certification that they have conducted due diligence within their organization and can certify that that there is no criminal conduct or civil fraud in their organization. According to a Reuters report from Patrick Rucker, titled “Wall St. Rescue Fund Watchdog Says U.S. Bank Heads Too Insulated” , “Wall Street executives are too shielded from prosecution and should answer for misdeeds committed by underlings, the watchdog for a multibillion-dollar [federal-government] bailout [of the mega-banks] said on Wednesday.” This article, dated Wednesday October 25th, continued: “Senior banking officials should attest each year that their companies are free of criminal fraud and civil abuse, said Christy Goldsmith Romero, special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. ‘Every executive should be able to conduct due diligence,’ she told Reuters in an interview. ‘If they are too big to do that, then they are too big, period.’” That policy, if honestly placed into practice, would likely result in lengthy prison terms for many of the people who are the big-dollar political donors; and so it can’t possibly happen. But the very fact that someone in a federal-government capacity has finally said publicly that it needs to happen is shocking enough. The article continues: “U.S. taxpayers have invested more than $400 billion since the crisis, mostly in large Wall Street banks. Goldsmith Romero leads a staff of roughly 140 investigators examining possible abuse of the TARP program.” Romero on Wednesday sent to Congress her agency’s 550-page investigative report (not linked-to by Reuters but here ) on that subject, and Rucker continued: “Goldsmith Romero said the report also described cases where executives are complicit in fraud but the highest-ranking officials are walled off. ‘The knowledge stops,’ she said. ‘It resides at lower levels and stops there. And in many cases, I think that’s by intentional design.’” The reporter, Mr. Rucker, makes clear how grave this situation really is: “Goldsmith Romero has never before suggested a reform of the financial system. She said that she felt compelled to speak up this time after facing so many cases where senior executives seemed out of reach from prosecutions.” So: although the aristocrats’ immunity will not be removed, a federal official has now had the courage to state that it must be removed. Elizabeth Warren, a U.S. Senator who held off from making any endorsement during the Presidential primaries, is now campaigning for Hillary Clinton to become President — the same candidate that Wall Street executives are overwhelmingly funding to win the Presidency — but Warren is already verbally supportive of what Romero is urging. On September 15th, David Dayen at The Intercept bannered, “Elizabeth Warren Asks Newly Chatty FBI Director to Explain Why DOJ Didn’t Prosecute Banksters” , and he reported that on that day: “Warren released two highly provocative letters demanding some explanations. One is to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, requesting a review of how federal law enforcement managed to whiff on all 11 substantive criminal referrals submitted by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), a panel set up to examine the causes of the 2008 meltdown. The other is to FBI Director James Comey, asking him to release all FBI investigations and deliberations related to those referrals.” Warren’s campaigning for Clinton, who has always been against accountability at the top in the U.S., is drastically inconsistent with this public display of supporting such accountability, and is therefore untrustworthy. I (who until now had always voted only for Democrats) earlier reported the fundamental dishonesty of the Democratic Party’s elite about precisely this matter: — Privately, Obama had told Wall Street executives that he would protect them. On 27 March 2009, Obama assembled the top executives of the bailed-out financial firms in a secret meeting at the White House and he assured them that he would cover their backs; he promised “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks” . It’s not on the White House website; it was leaked out, which is one of the reasons Obama hates leakers (including such heroes as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange). What the DOJ’s IG indicated was, in effect, that Obama had kept his secret promise to them. Here is the context in which Obama said that (from page 234 of Ron Suskind’s 2011 book, Confidence Men ): The CEOs went into their traditional stance. “It’s almost impossible to set caps [to their bonuses]; it’s never worked, and you lose your best people,” said one. “We’re competing for talent on an international market,” said another. Obama cut them off. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that,” he said. “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” It was an attention grabber, no doubt, especially that carefully chosen last word. But then Obama’s flat tone turned to one of support, even sympathy. “You guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem,” he said. “And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices.” According to one of the participants, he then said, “I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you. But if I’m going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation.” No suggestions were forthcoming from the bankers on what they might offer, and the president didn’t seem to be championing any specific proposals. He had none: neither Geithner nor Summers believed compensation controls had any merit. After a moment, the tension in the room seemed to lift: the bankers realized he was talking about voluntary limits on compensation until the storm of public anger passed. It would be for show. He had been lying to the public, all along. Not only would he not prosecute the banksters, but he would treat them as if all they had was “an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem.” And he thought that the people who wanted them prosecuted were like the KKK who had chased Blacks with pitchforks before lynching. According to the DOJ , their Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force (FFETF) was “established by President Barack Obama in November 2009 to wage an aggressive, coordinated and proactive effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes.” But, according to the Department’s IG , it was all a fraud: a fraud that according to the DOJ itself had been going on since at least November 2009. — If this matter that Romero is raising will be coming up during a Hillary Clinton Administration, the lying about it will simply continue, that’s all. Barack Obama is no less vicious a liar than Hillary Clinton is, but she’s not nearly as skillful a deceiver as he is, but that’s the only real difference between them. She’ll get the job done for the political megadonors, just the same, like she always has. However, if Donald Trump is to be President, then no one can intelligently say what his policy on accountability would be — other than that he’ll work with Congress to get an independent prosecutor to investigate the criminal allegations against Hillary Clinton, including the ones that the untrustworthy FBI alleges that it has already investigated in an impartial manner. Regarding the specific issue that Romero is implicitly also urging, the reinstatement of the FDR-era Glass-Steagall Act, which Bill Clinton and the Republicans terminated in 2000 and which had limited bank-size, Trump is on record as demanding that it be done . (That’s one of the reasons why he has been receiving far less from Wall Street than Hillary Clinton has been. Wall Street loathes Trump. Almost everything in this ‘election’ is nearly the opposite of what is commonly presumed.) For the first time in recent memory, there really is an important difference between the two major-Party Presidential candidates. The last time it happened was 2000, when the far-right candidate, George W. Bush ‘won’. This time around, it seems likely to be repeated (and maybe this time by a landslide): the far-right candidate Hillary Clinton will probably win — same result, just different nominal parties this time around. In an important sense, this year’s George W. Bush is Hillary Clinton. (He demanded regime-change in Iraq; she demands regime-change in Russia.) This year’s Al Gore is Donald Trump. Except that this time the big issue isn’t global warming, but instead nuclear war against Russia. Of course, GW Bush was bad on both issues (denying climate-change, and demanding “regime-change in Iraq” where the Moscow-friendly dictator Saddam Hussein ruled). But so too is Hillary (who followed up her ardent advocacy for regime-change in Iraq, by regime-change in Moscow-friendly Libya, and regime-change in Moscow-friendly Ukraine, and regime-change in Moscow-allied Syria; and who is now pushing for regime-change in Russia itself, and thus unchallenged U.S.-aristocracy control over every other nation’s aristocracy). All of this election-year, the supposedly big issue was bigotry, but the thing that’s actually destroying this country and the entire world is class — rich versus poor; the super-rich crushing everyone else — and the ‘news’ media are controlled not by the many poor but by the very few super-rich. And this is why Romero’s call for justice is, sadly, just a cry into the wind. Regarding politics, one has no reason to trust what one hears from the politicians, reads in the newspapers and magazines, or hears or sees on radio and TV. The elite scams are overwhelming from all of the Establishment sides. But finally, an obscure federal official, Ms. Romero, the SIGTARP, has spoken her conscience, despite knowing that she’ll only be punished for it once she’s out of office. Unlike the Democratic Party politicians, she’s not grandstanding. She’s instead truly heroic, speaking truth to power, and really meaning it — and ready to face the consequences for having done it. It’s remarkable. It’s Quixotic, in a really heroic way: pathbreaking, even if that path leads only to a brick wall. At least it will expose to the public the extent to which the system itself is their enemy. Not Mexicans. Not Blacks. Not Whites. Not Muslims. Not Christians. Not Jews. Not Russians. Not men. Not women. Not even (though bigots are dangerous fools) bigots against any such group. The system, right here in the U.S., needs to be changed. Nothing can authentically be blamed on any “not us” target — either for invasion, or otherwise. Romero wants to cancel the immunity of aristocrats — the people who control this country .",FAKE
+9818,Hillary Ally Offers Strategy On How To Make New York Times Write Positive Coverage,"Trump To Host Facebook Live Nightly Show Until Election Day 
+But her opinion of Sulzberger wasn’t very high: “But Arthur is a pretty big wuss so he’s not going to do a lot more than that. Hillary would have to be the one to call.” 
+Tanden believed that Clinton also needed to get more minority and women reporters in her corner to keep her campaign afloat. Advertisement - story continues below 
+“He also thinks the brown and women pundits can shame the times and others on social media,” she concluded. “So cultivating Joan Walsh, Yglesias, Allen, perry bacon, Greg Sargent, to defend her is helpful. They can be emboldened. Fwiw – I pushed pir to do this a yr ago.” 
+I’m not positive it’s acceptable to refer to pundits (or anyone) as “brown” anymore. 
+But maybe it worked. After all, schulzburger the wuss did endorse Clinton last month.",FAKE
+2746,"White House, NYT leave Bushes out of lead photos from Selma march","The decision by The New York Times to run a front-page image on Sunday of President Obama -- and family -- leading a march to mark the 50th anniversary of the Selma civil rights clashes, while leaving out of the image former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura, apparently was mirrored in the ""official White House photo"" of the event.
+
+The official White House blog's Sunday entry on the Alabama march led with a similar image, focusing on Obama and his family, as well as civil rights figures, but leaving out the Bushes.
+
+Both images show Obama walking alongside Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis, and even Al Sharpton, as they led thousands across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
+
+The White House blog does acknowledge in the caption that the Bushes were there, and the photo at the bottom of the page includes them off to the side.
+
+Part of the problem may have been the staging of the event itself.
+
+Basil Smikle Jr., a Democratic strategist and former advance team member for the Clinton White House, noted that the Bushes were not standing directly next to the Obamas. He told Fox News he would have liked to see both presidents together, at least in the New York Times photo.
+
+""Both presidents should have been close together,"" he said.
+
+Regardless, the Bushes were standing but a few feet away from the first family and were included in other photos.
+
+A spokeswoman for the Times told FoxNews.com that the newspaper did not crop the Bush family out of the original image for the front-page display.
+
+Still, the decision not to run a photo that did include them drew criticism on Monday.
+
+""This is a stunning example of media bias,"" said Deneen Borelli, a Fox News contributor and outreach director for the conservative FreedomWorks.
+
+The Associated Press also ran a variety of photos after they crossed the bridge, some of which show the Bushes and some of which do not. However, it appears the AP did not run photos showing the Bushes before they marched across the bridge.
+
+The Times' article on the event did mention the Bushes' attendance, after the jump. The article notes that in 2006, he signed the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.",REAL
+3136,Emotional Service Held At Charleston Church Days After Shootings,"The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., today is holding its first Sunday service following a horrific shooting that killed nine members of a Bible study group there.
+
+Dylann Roof, 21 — who has apparently expressed strong racist and white supremacist views — is charged in the Wednesday night killings, in which nine members of a Bible study group at the historic black church were shot dead. Emanuel AME's pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pickney, was among those killed.
+
+As parishioners and visitors fanned themselves against the heat of the first day of summer, the service opened at 9:30 a.m. EDT to filled pews. Hundreds more gathered outside the church.
+
+The service opened with the hymns ""Praise God, From Whom All Blessings Flow"" and ""Blessed Assurance.""
+
+The Rev. Norvel Goff said: ""we still believe prayer changes things. ... prayer not only changes things, it changes us.""
+
+""Many hearts are broken and tears being shed,"" he said. ""Through it all we are reminded that we serve a God who still cares.""
+
+Delivering the sermon later, he acknowledged ""it has been tough. It has been rough. Some of us have been downright angry.""
+
+But, he said, ""We have shown the world how we as a group of people can come together and pray and work out things that need to be worked out, to make a better state and place to live.""
+
+He thanked Gov. Nikki Haley for making sure ""the perpetrator that committed that heinous act was pursued and captured and brought back to South Carolina.""
+
+He also thanked Charleston Mayor Joseph Ripley and law enforcement.
+
+""I have no problem with doing it,"" he said to loud applause.
+
+""We have difficulties ahead, but the only way evil can triumph is for good folks to sit down and do nothing,"" he said.
+
+Earlier, the Rev. John H. Gillison prayed that ""in life there are ups and downs. There are dark days, but there are also bright days.""
+
+He called on God to ""guide and strengthen those families who were victimized,"" and referring to Wednesday's tragedy said ""the devil tried to take charge.""
+
+""But the devil cannot take control of your people and cannot take control of your church,"" Gillison said.
+
+NPR's Debbie Elliott, reporting from the church, says: ""It's a very emotional day for the city of Charleston. People are gathering, bringing flowers, weeping, praying, and preparing for this very difficult morning.""
+
+Debbie adds: ""This is all happening at the same time that police officers and their dogs are doing searches of the parking lot and preparing the church to be a safe place for people to come and remember this morning.""
+
+The Rev. Randolph Miller, pastor of Nichols Chapel AME Church in Charleston, tells CNN: ""We must continue to preach [forgiveness] and drive it home. It won't happen overnight, but we must not stop preaching forgiveness.""
+
+""Hopefully one day it will sink in and bring a change,"" he said.",REAL
+5416,Why Time Magazine’s Joe Klein Is So Wrong About Hillary Clinton,"Why Time Magazine’s Joe Klein Is So Wrong About Hillary Clinton Rebutting the absurd claims of my namesake. November 4, 2016 Joseph Klein 
+Time Magazine’s Joe Klein has just penned an article entitled “Why Hillary Clinton Is the Only Choice to Keep America Great.” I feel duty bound to respond to at least the most absurd of the comments made by namesake and author of Primary Colors, the novel based on about Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign in 1992. 
+The other Joe Klein laments that Hillary has been so “severely damaged in the course of the 30-year battering she’s received at the hands of extremists and the media.” Sorry, but Hillary’s wounds are self-inflicted. Her lies, greed and corruption go back decades and have now reached a crescendo with the dual scandals of her use of a private server for State Department business while she was Secretary of State and of the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation. 
+“There is one part of Trump that is indisputably real: his ego,” the other Joe Klein wrote, as if Hillary were the epitome of humility and grace. 
+“Those who would put Clinton’s failings in the same league as Trump’s depravities are delusional,” declared Klein. I agree with his statement, but for precisely the opposite reason that he advances. Trump did not abuse a public office for personal gain. He did not “hand pick” (Hillary’s word) an ambassador to serve in one of the most dangerous countries in the world and then never respond to his multiple requests for enhanced security, let alone pick up the phone and contact Ambassador Chris Stevens directly. ""The government was not able to save four lives, to keep four lives safe. How can you keep a country safe?"" asked Stevens’ former fiancé in a rhetorical question that Hillary would be unable to answer. Trump did not lie to the families of those slain in Benghazi, as Hillary did. Trump did not put national security at risk by using a private server for government e-mails in order to evade the Freedom of Information Act, as Hillary did. 
+In short, anyone who thinks that Hillary’s proven record of recklessness, mendacity, and indifference is not more troubling by several orders of magnitude than Trump’s “depravities” is “delusional.” 
+The other Joe Klein complains that Trump deals in “stereotypes” - “the blacks,” “the Hispanics,” “the Muslims,” “the women” and, yes, even “the veterans.” Yet much of Hillary’s pitch is gender-based. Elect her because she is a woman. And she attacks millions of people who support her opponent with vile epithets – “deplorable,” “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “xenophobic,” “Islamaphobic,” and – for good measure - “irredeemable.” 
+The other Joe Klein charges that Trump is “about all that has gone wrong in our society, and nothing of what has gone right.” To paraphrase Bill Clinton, that would depend on what your definitions of “wrong” and “right” are. Is Hillary Clinton really right when she parrots Black Lives Matter’s stereotypical attacks on what she herself has characterized as white “privilege” and “systemic racism” in this country? Is she right when she leaps to conclusions about police “brutality” aimed against African-Americans before the evidence in specific cases is carefully examined? I don’t think so. 
+Hillary also represents the political correctness and anti-religious bigotry of the secular left elite that many Americans believe are what truly have gone wrong in our society. At the Women in the World Summit last year, for example, Hillary said that in order to fully secure the reproductive rights of women, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Hillary demeaned the sincerely held religious belief in the sanctity of life held by millions of Americans, reminiscent of President Obama’s contemptuous ‘clinging to religion’ quote back in 2008. 
+Hillary’s key supporters and top aides have targeted the Catholic Church in particular for their notion of progressive reform. “There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church,” wrote Sandy Newman, president of Voices for Progress, in an e-mail to Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. In response, Podesta picked up on the “spring” theme. He wrote, “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up.” 
+When Time Magazine’s Joe Klein talks about what is right or wrong in American society, he should get out of his Washington D.C. bubble more often and actually speak with the American people about their day-to-day concerns. Even if Hillary Clinton ends up winning the election, the country will remain divided and she will have no mandate whatsoever to advance her progressive agenda.",FAKE
+3100,5 amazing ways Pope Francis made Republicans squirm yesterday,"Despite all the talk that Pope Francis’ address to Congress wouldn’t be political or partisan, it turns out it was both. And, as I predicted here in Salon, it definitely leaned to one side of the aisle. In fact, if you were a conservative Republican, Thursday morning in the Congress was not your finest moment, as Pope Francis laid bare all the ways that the Republican agenda counters Catholic social teaching, from its harsh treatment of immigrants to its fossil fuel-burning disdain for the natural world.
+
+And Francis’ call for politicians to work for the common good was an implicit rebuke to the do-nothing, obstructionist GOP agenda that’s in service to their corporatist, Chamber of Commerce overlords. “Your own responsibility as members of Congress is to enable this country, by your legislative activity, to grow as a nation. …You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics,” he said.
+
+Here are the five key moments in Francis’ speech that made conservatives squirm more than any others:
+
+The shout-out to Dorothy Day. Francis commended four Americans in particular, whom he held up as examples of pursuing the common good: Abraham Lincoln, for his pursuit of liberty; Martin Luther King Jr., for his commitment to nonviolence and pluralism; Trappist monk Thomas Merton, for his commitment to dialogue and peace; and Dorothy Day, for her “social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed.”
+
+None of them are exactly conservative, but Day in particular is noted as a radical social activist. She founded the Catholic Worker Movement, which took root during the Great Depression, and urged Catholics to form small, autonomous communities to lead simple lives devoted to the gospel and serving the poor. In addition to being a socialist, Day was outspoken in her support of pacifism and labor rights. “I think it was extraordinary that he cited her as one of the most important people in recent American history. This would be one of the very, very few times that somebody as radical as Dorothy Day was mentioned,” Sen. Bernie Sander told the Washington Post.
+
+The abortion switcheroo. In defiance of the specific guidance not to try to score political points by clapping at partisan applause lines in Francis’ speech, congressional conservatives leapt to their feet the moment Francis delivered the Vatican’s standard coded language about abortion, mentioning “our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development.” Imagine their shock when he immediately followed that with, “This conviction had led me, from the beginning of my ministry, to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty.” Psych.
+
+Catholic social teaching has long put opposition to the death penalty on the same plane as opposition to abortion, most famously with Chicago Archbishop Joseph Bernardin’s “seamless garment” doctrine, which held sway in the mid-1980s as progressive bishops reminded Catholics that opposition to the death penalty and nuclear war was just as important as abortion
+
+Calling arms deals “money drenched in blood.” Speaking of death, what about all those arms deals the Republicans are so fond of? Francis wanted to know who is selling the bad guys all these weapons and why: “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?” The answer, according to the pontiff, is “money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.” I’m sure the GOP and all the defense contractors who give them money will get right on that. Reminding the GOP we’re all foreigners. As in his speech at the White House on Tuesday, Francis felt the need to once again remind those who are making intolerance toward immigrants their political stock-in-trade that they, like him, are likely the descendants of immigrant families. “[M]illions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom,” he said, adding, “We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants.” Catholic social teaching reminds Catholics of their duty to “welcome the stranger.” In one of the most moving passages of his speech, Francis said, “Let us seek for others the same possibilities which we seek for ourselves. Let us help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves. In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities.” Confronting the climate naysayers. Francis made it clear that combating climate change, development and technology can coexist. He explicitly rebuked many conservative critics of his climate change encyclical “Laudato si,” who claim that he is anti-commerce and wants to stifle development or reduce the world to subsistence-level farming to stop climate change. “The right use of natural resources, the proper application of technology and the harnessing of the spirit of enterprise are essential elements of an economy which seeks to be modern, inclusive and sustainable,” he said, adding, “In this regard, I am confident that America’s outstanding academic and research institutions can make a vital contribution in the years ahead.” On the plus for conservatives side, Francis did talk about the need for “the voice of faith to continue to be heard,” but in the case of this particular voice, conservatives probably wish he would just be quiet. Patricia Miller is the author of “Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church.” Her work on politics, sex and religion has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, Huffington Post, and Ms. Magazine.",REAL
+4462,Charlie Hebdo: The French magazine's long history of polarization (+video),"Three masked gunmen killed 12 people, including two police officers, and wounded 10 when they opened fire Wednesday in Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices – a dramatic escalation from previous threats and attacks on the satirical magazine.
+
+While Charlie Hebdo’s provocative, no-holds-barred satire has provoked violent backlashes before, nothing in its history compares to Wednesday's deadly attack.
+
+French authorities are hunting three masked gunmen believed to have killed 12 people, including two police officers, and wounded 10 when they opened fire in the magazine's offices in central Paris.
+
+How Charlie Hebdo responds to Wednesday’s attack remains to be seen. But if the past is any indication, the magazine will stick to its mission of skewering a wide range of targets: from French politicians and police to religious leaders and historical figures. Charlie Hebdo prides itself on upholding France’s venerable tradition of unfettered mockery in the name of free speech and expression. It also considers itself in opposition to religious backwardness of all faiths.
+
+“We’re a newspaper against religions as soon as they enter into the political and public realm,” Editor-in-Chief Gérard Biard told The New York Times in 2012, adding that religious leaders, and Islamic leaders in particular, have manipulated their followers for political purposes.
+
+Charlie Hebdo was founded in 1970 by journalists from Hara-Kiri, a satirical publication that was banned that year for mocking the death of former President Charles de Gaulle. The magazine takes its name from the Charlie Brown cartoons originally re-printed in its pages. It has a reputation of for “garish front-page cartoons and incendiary headlines,” The BBC reports. ""Drawing on France's strong tradition of bandes dessinees [comic strips], cartoons and caricatures are Charlie Hebdo's defining feature.""
+
+That includes violent or sexually explicit drawings of the pope, nuns, or the police that are guaranteed to offend the public. ""Anything to make a point,"" The BBC writes.
+
+Charlie Hebdo’s brand of satire has made it a lightening rod in French society. The magazine angered many Muslims in 2006 when it reprinted cartoons of Muhammad that had originally appeared in Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper. As The Christian Science Monitor reported at the time:
+
+The reprinted cartoons prompted a lawsuit by two French Muslim groups, which accused Charlie Hebdo of slander. The magazine was later acquitted.
+
+The magazine’s offices were firebombed in November 2011 after it published a cartoon of Muhammad with the title “Charia Hebdo” and a cover that promised “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing,” The Guardian reports.
+
+And in 2012, the French government condemned Charlie Hebdo for again publishing several crude caricatures of Muhammad, some of which depicted him naked. The government condemned the decision to publish them as “irresponsible at a time of violence and unrest across the Islamic world” and urged the magazine to reconsider. When the magazine refused, the French government closed embassies, consulates, cultural centers, and schools in about 20 countries and increased security at the magazine’s offices.
+
+With a weekly circulation of about 30,000, Charlie Hebdo has never been a top seller. It stopped publication from 1981 to 1992 for lack of resources and has recently issued appeals on its website for financial support. It may now find that its current plight taps a wider vein of sympathy.",REAL
+1847,Martin O’Malley is running for president — and on Elizabeth Warren's platform,"For months, if not years now, various activists and journalists have been dreaming of an Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign.
+
+Ideological media bias is greatly overstated by partisans, but bias in favor of interesting stories and against dull outcomes is massive and quite real. Barack Obama's 2007-2008 upset of Hillary Clinton was one of the best political stories of my lifetime, while Clinton's utter domination of the 2014-2015 invisible primary is one of the least fascinating. What's more, as Vox's Ezra Klein has argued, a Clinton-Warren race would give Democrats an interesting clash of ideas around the role of finance in the 21st century economy.
+
+Unfortunately for the click-counters and cable news ratings, the Clinton-Warren race isn't going to happen. But if it's the ideas you're interested in, it's worth paying attention to former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley who is officially launching his campaign today and actually running on the issues people want to hear about from Warren.
+
+In a March 20 op-ed for the Des Moines Register, O'Malley outlined an aggressive plan for financial reform that would go well beyond the provisions of the existing Dodd-Frank legislation.
+
+These ideas would, if implemented, radically alter the role of finance in American society. Large financial institutions would have to act in an extremely risk-averse (and not-so-lucrative) manner and likely become substantially smaller besides. The Obama administration — and mostly likely Clinton — would argue that this is unnecessary for financial stability and risky for the economy as a whole.
+
+But to populists, that's precisely the point. These ideas would move beyond a narrow focus on the stability of the financial system to a broader attack on finance's role as one of the commanding heights of the American economy.
+
+In my experience, it is a lot easier to get people to click on articles about bank regulation if you can put Elizabeth Warren in the headline. O'Malley is not the same kind of draw.
+
+If there's anything worth talking about regarding the 2016 Democratic nomination, O'Malley's critique of the Clinton-Obama-Clinton record on financial regulation is the thing to talk about. In an era of more polarized politics and more unified parties, this is the biggest cleavage in Democratic Party politics. The establishment view is that banks should be regulated for stability, and bankers should be taxed for redistributive purposes. But many activists and intellectuals want a further-reaching attack on the ""financialization"" of the economy and the political system — an attack that could be pursued in part through new legislation, but largely through more vigorous use of the existing regulatory and prosecutorial channels.
+
+It would be more convenient for many of us if Warren were serving as standard-bearer for this alternative view. But the fact is that she isn't running, and O'Malley is. Covering the actual controversy makes more sense than pining for Warren.",REAL
+1054,What Hillary Clinton Needs to Tell Voters Who Don’t Want to Have a Beer With Her,"We’re not electing a drinking buddy, we’re electing a president. Likeability is a smoke screen. And yes, it’s sexist besides.
+
+With her latest primary wins, Hillary Clinton is all but guaranteed the Democratic nomination. But exit polls in some of the states where she has been victorious indicate that she is far from guaranteed the presidency. More pointedly, polls make it clear that if Hillary wants to win she may have to find the courage to admit something most women are afraid to.
+
+While a majority of recent Democratic voters deemed Clinton trustworthy, Democrats who ranked honesty as the most important quality in their decision chose Bernie Sanders. Additionally more than half of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion of her. Clinton’s favorability numbers are still better than Donald Trump’s. But the question is not really whether a majority of American voters will choose Donald Trump. They won’t. The question is whether enough voters opposing his candidacy will turn out—on Election Day and as volunteers beforehand— for Hillary Clinton to win.
+
+The even larger question, however, is why so many voters have such strong negative reactions to Hillary Clinton in the first place. After all, many of the same voters who disdain her for being “dishonest” will cheer for her husband. You know the one who actually did lie to all of us. Remember “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”?
+
+Of course for many the distinction between how the two Clintons are viewed is clear. He’s a man and she’s a woman. We’ve all heard it said before, “A woman is called ‘difficult’ for behavior that gets a man hailed as ‘assertive.’” Bill Clinton is not seen as a liar, but simply as a mischievously rakish leader who was economical with the truth. Hillary, on the other hand, is a lying harpy.
+
+I’m sure that sexism has played a role in how Hillary Clinton is perceived and critiqued by some. Because no woman in the public eye as much as she is or as long as she has been is immune to sexist critiques. (I get them regularly.) But the reality is that the real difference between Bill and Hillary Clinton is a difference all of us have faced in life, whether in junior high, or the office. Bill is simply more likable.
+
+In the same way George W. Bush was seen as more fun and friendly than his more intellectually accomplished and responsible brother Jeb, Bill is preferred by most people with a pulse over his more responsible wife. Every election we hear about the importance of the so-called “beer test,” as in “who do voters want to have a beer with?” Hillary Clinton screams a lot of things, but person you want to chill with in your free time is not one of them. (Which is why President Obama’s backhanded compliment of Clinton as “likable enough” landed like the diss that it was.)
+
+But I believe the real problem for Hillary Clinton is not that her husband is more likable than she is, but that it is obvious that she cares so much—like a lot of women do. I remember a conversation I had with a female friend just before an important meeting I was supposed to have with a prominent media person. I was nervous because for a variety of reasons I suspected the person I was meeting with might not be a personal fan of mine. When I finished laying out my concerns my friend—who is significantly more successful said: “This is the difference between men and women. Why do you care if he likes you or not? You got the meeting because his boss’s boss thinks you’re qualified, and if they tell him to work with you, he will.”
+
+This may sound like a fairly unimportant anecdote in the context of a presidential campaign but for some of the women I’ve shared it with over the years it is revelatory. The reason: because women are taught early on to spend much of our time, energy and social capital pleasing others. Boys are taught to be smart. Girls are taught to be smart—but not at the expense of being popular, and certainly not at the expense of being pretty. Because after all, accomplishments ultimately mean very little in the big scheme of things if when it’s all said and done you’re a woman who is perceived as unattractive, unlovable and unlikable.
+
+Hillary Clinton, the candidate voters don’t trust, was deemed the most trustworthy presidential candidate on terror following the recent Brussels attack. But of course that’s not quite the same as being loved or liked, but it does seem to indicate that plenty of Americans know that the job of president is far too serious to be decided the same way we decide who we want to sit with in the cafeteria in high school.
+
+Instead of trying desperately to generate laughs on “Saturday Night Live” or “Broad City” or some other outlets her team of advisors have convinced her are essential to making her likable enough to win, she should finally do something most of us would never have the courage to do but wish that we did, which is to say this: “I know I’m not what you’d call likable and that you may not like me or think of me as a fun beer date. But I’m really qualified, and for a job this serious I think that’s what should matter. After all, do you care whether your heart surgeon is likable?”",REAL
+2717,Rush Limbaugh is cooked: The stunning fall of the right’s angriest bloviator,"Which bulletin was worse, though? The news in April that he was being dropped by WIBC in Indianapolis, a booming talk powerhouse that played home to Limbaugh’s radio show for more than two decades, or the news this week that the talker’s new address on the Indianapolis dial is going to be WNDE, a ratings doormat AM sports station that has so few listeners it trails the commercial-free classical music outlet in town?
+
+The humbling, red-state tumble is just the latest setback for the conservative talker who has seen his once-golden career suffer a steady series of losses recently.
+
+Divorced from successful, longtime affiliates in places like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Indianapolis, Limbaugh’s professional trajectory is heading downward. That’s confirmed by the second and third-tier stations he now calls home in those important media markets, and the fact that when his show became available, general managers up and down the dial passed on it. Apparently turned off by the show’s hefty price tag, sagging ratings, and disappearing advertisers, Limbaugh continues to be a very hard sell.
+
+It’s a precipitous fall from the glory days when the host posted huge ratings numbers, had affiliates clamoring to join his network, and dictated Republican politics. All of that seems increasingly distant now. With his comically inflated, $50 million-a-year syndication deal set to expire next year, Limbaugh’s future seems uncertain. “Who would even want someone whose audience is aging and is considered toxic to many advertisers,” askedRadioInsight last month.
+
+For Limbaugh, the troubles were marked by key events from 2012 and 2013. The first came in the form of Limbaugh’s Sandra Fluke implosion, where he castigated and insulted for days the graduate student who testified before Congress about health care and access to contraception, calling her a “slut” and suggesting she post videos of herself having sex on the Internet. The astonishing monologues sparked an unprecedented advertiser exodus.
+
+The following year, as the host struggled to hang on to fleeing sponsors, radio industry giant Cumulus Media decided to negotiate its Limbaugh contract in public, making it clear through the press that the company was willing to cut ties with the pricey host in major cities where Cumulus owned talk radio stations. In the end, Limbaugh stayed with Cumulus stations, but the company sent a clear signal to the industry: Limbaugh was no longer an untouchable and general managers weren’t clamoring to hire him. Since then, the talker’s fortunes have only faded.
+
+Another looming problem? Conservative talk radio is a “format fewer advertisers are interested in buying because of its aging audience,” noted radio consultant and self-identified Republican Darryl Parks. Limbaugh himself recently conceded a generational disconnect: “Now that I’ve outgrown the 25-54 demographic, I’m no longer confident that the way I see the world is the way everybody else does.”
+
+That disconnect may be fueling Limbaugh’s waning political influence. Once a mighty player whose ring wasconstantly kissed by Republicans, this campaign season seems to be unfolding with Limbaugh on the sidelines, his clout and his ability to drive the conversation seemingly surpassed by other conservative mediaplayers.
+
+Here’s a perfect example. In April, Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin conducted an awkward interview with Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz, asking the Hispanic candidate about Cuban food and if he’d answer at least one question in Spanish. Limbaugh immediately castigated Halperin’s Q&A on his show, but nobody seemed to pay much attention to his complaints.
+
+Fast-forward one week and syndicated conservative columnist Ruben Navarrette lodged similar complaints about the interview. (i.e. “This was bad journalism, bad form, and bad manners.”) Except this time the complaint went viral and Helperin was quickly forced to apologize. At BuzzFeed, a writer marveled at how Halperin’s controversial interview had gone unnoticed for nine days. But it hadn’t gone unnoticed. Limbaugh highlighted the interview right away. It’s just that nobody cared about the talker’s critique at the time. Limbaugh’s unfolding major-market woes will do little to boost his faltering influence. Last year he was bounced off a high-profile station in Los Angeles, shipped down the dial, and deposited on a has-been outlet (KEIB) that today has trouble securing a 1.0 rating, according to Nielsen ratings. Note that his forced farewell from WIBC in Indianapolis was likely painful. The station hosted the talker for 22 years before announcing in April it was time for him to go. Especially embarrassing for Limbaugh was the fact that WIBC is sticking with its conservative talk radio lineup, it just no longer wanted Limbaugh to be a part of it. Then, after WIBC announced it was dropping Rush, no stations in the market stepped forward to pick him up, which meant Limbaugh then had to be bailed out by iHeartMedia. Formerly known as Clear Channel, iHeartMedia owns the syndication company that produces and sells Limbaugh’s radio show, Premiere Radio Networks, and iHeartMedia owns hundreds of radio stations. So with no Indianapolis takers in sight, iHeartMedia was forced to shoe-horn Limbaugh onto its own, lowly rated all-sports channel in the market. (The station will soon be simulcast via a new iHeartMedia FM translator signal in the Indianapolis market.) “There’s no way iHeartMedia would’ve placed Limbaugh on an owned Sports station if the company had any other affiliation options in the market,” noted RadioInsight when the news broke on Tuesday. “But when everyone one else says no and you need to save face, options become limited.” That same desperate scenario is playing out in Boston, where Premier hasn’t been able to find a new home for Limbaugh. This, after WRKO announced it was dropping the show. One station owner recently told the Boston Globe that Premiere had offered the Limbaugh show four times, and four times the station turned it down. Fact: Years ago station owners lined up for the chance to pick up Limbaugh’s powerhouse program. Now, rumors are still swirling in Chicago that talk radio powerhouse WLS is poised to drop Limbaugh. The move was first reported in March and quickly denied by WLS’s owner, Cumulus Media. But Limbaugh’s ratings are clearly down in the Windy Cindy. According to a March report in the Chicago Tribune, Limbaugh’s WLS show ranks 24th in the market, drawing 121,000 listeners in a metropolitan area of roughly 10 million people. “The Chicago rumors come as no surprise to me,” wrote consultant Parks, “as three different Cumulus executives have told me on different occasions they wish they could get rid of Limbaugh’s show and they can’t sell it.” Ratings and revenue. That’s what the radio business has always revolved around. These days, Limbaugh’s having trouble delivering either.",REAL
+4164,America’s looming freak show: How GOP control in 2015 will terrorize a nation – with no political repercussion,"Bill Scher made the argument from the left as well as anyone could, while this piece by the Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib, coming from the center-right, was more predictable and vexing. (Paul Waldman took a shot at it back in August, here.) The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump followed and endorsed Seib’s argument. But those takes rely at least in part on the notion that if Republicans gain the Senate, they’ll either have an incentive to help “govern” – or they’ll shame themselves in the eyes of the American public if they don’t. Unfortunately, neither premise is true.
+
+In fact, I’m concerned that worsening political dysfunction perpetuates itself by convincing more Americans that politics is futile. The Obama coalition in particular – younger, less white, less well off than even prior coalitions of Democrats – has gotten so little that’s tangible from its history-making turnout in 2012 (and yes I’ve read that Krugman piece and I mostly agree.) The prospect of its coalescing to become a permanent force in American politics has been at least postponed, if not thwarted entirely, by the deliberate GOP sabotage of the political process.
+
+For me, the backdrop to this depressing midterm election is not merely ISIS and Ebola, but continued unrest in Ferguson, Mo., where it seems unlikely Officer Darren Wilson will face consequences for shooting Michael Brown. From New York to Los Angeles, the issue of police violence just gets worse. There’s increasing activism on the issue, which is great to see – the crowds that turned out for “Ferguson October” over the weekend, and into Monday, were inspiring.
+
+Yet little of the activism is tied to voting, at least partly because the electoral system has done so little to solve the problem, even in cities with liberal mayors. New York alone has paid a half billion out to the victims of police abuse just since 2009. I’m excited by the new young leadership on police issues even as I’m worried about this election – and maybe that combination makes me uniquely unable to deal with the notion that Democrats losing the Senate next month could have a silver lining.
+
+Bill Scher reprised his Politico argument on MSNBC’s “Up with Steve” on Saturday, continuing to press the case that Republicans will suffer politically “if they look like a completely dysfunctional party incapable of governing.” (Scher, unlike Seib, holds out no false hope that the GOP will get its act together and compromise with Obama if it wins back the Senate.)
+
+But Republicans already look like a completely dysfunctional party incapable of governing, and they’re on the verge of another great midterm win. A year after the government shutdown, it’s shocking even to me how little it ultimately cost the party politically. Everyone knew that October 2013 polls weren’t as important as October 2014, and that the GOP would have a year to recover – but even I didn’t believe that they would, so completely.
+
+The shutdown cost the economy $24 billion in growth. It showed the nation the incompetence of House GOP leadership. It exposed the civil war in the Senate. The country saw that the party was craven, dysfunctional, agenda-free and not merely incapable of governing, but uninterested in it. After the shutdown, the share of voters identifying themselves as Republican dropped to 25 percent in Gallup polling, the lowest level in 25 years, and polls showed Democrats might have a shot at taking back the House.
+
+But a year later, Republicans are in no danger of losing the House and have a better than even chance to take back the Senate. Even at the time, it was clear that a feckless, frenetic media — which immediately went on to treat Obamacare web site glitches as just as catastrophic as the GOP’s shutdown debacle — would let the party off the hook. Yet so have voters. The Republican base is more than content to have its leaders do nothing but block and sabotage Obama. And the Democratic base still disproportionately sits out the midterms, which lets the obstructionists dominate the agenda. Seib holds out hope that a GOP Senate might be able to deliver on immigration reform. Continued Beltway optimism about that prospect is delusional. Given that the Senate already passed a (slightly bipartisan) bill, GOP control won’t change anything. Sadly, even the president fell for the fiction that the House would eventually take up the issue for far too long, postponing executive action on deferring deportations so that he couldn’t do it before the midterms – and now there’s worry about depressed Latino 2014 turnout as a result. Let’s hope nobody in the White House falls for that again. Scher takes special comfort from the fact that 2016 looms, giving the GOP “the opportunity to work out its dysfunctional family issues under the white-hot spotlight of a presidential campaign.” There’s no doubt 2016 will be much better for Democrats. The base turns out for presidential elections, and the Senate map that year will be as tough on Republicans as it is in 2014 on Democrats, forcing the GOP to defend more seats and offering their rivals more pickups. All of that is a given. But even a 2016 rout is unlikely to force Republicans to focus on a policy agenda and commit to governing again. All they have to do is thwart the plans of President Hillary Clinton, or whomever, and reap the rewards two years later. Until the Democrats’ structural disadvantage in voter turnout is corrected, American politics is an endless feedback loop of futility: little or no policy change leads to a discouraged electorate, which ensures little or no policy change, which guarantees more voter apathy. Democrats may yet keep the Senate, and if they do it will come down to greater grassroots and national emphasis on turning out unmarried women voters (more on that later this week). But if they don’t, there will be no silver lining. Sure, it will be entertaining to watch de facto House Speaker Ted Cruz make life even more miserable for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It’s a given that the 2016 Republican primary race will be as big a freak show as 2012 (and maybe even with Mitt Romney again too!) But this optimist no longer believes the GOP will pay any lasting price for more cartoonish dysfunction. But the rest of us will, for a long time.",REAL
+7408,Swansea City ‘will win Premier League at a canter’ confirm pollsters,"Thursday 10 November 2016 by Matt Ward Swansea City ‘will win Premier League at a canter’ confirm pollsters 
+Swansea City are nailed on favourites to be crowned Premier League champions in 2017, it has emerged. 
+Polling companies predict the Welsh outfit will have the league sewn up by mid-March at the latest, powered by nearly 300 goals from former Wrexham full back, Neil Taylor. 
+“Public opinion tells us The Swans finish firmly in top spot, with Crystal Palace, Brentford and MK Dons securing the Champions League places,” said lead researcher, Simon Williams. 
+“Taylor’s goal tally will obviously be a major factor and we predict around 30 of them will come in a 41-0 rout of Liverpool at Anfield in January. 
+“That might surprise some people, but there’s a complex research formula behind all of this and the margin of error is so small only a complete lunatic would bet against it – we’ve spoken to nearly 40 people. 
+“Yep – the smart money’s on Swansea.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+6216,What is going on with WikiLeaks?,"What is going on with WikiLeaks?   Defend Democracy 
+WikiLeaks director and founder of the Centre for Investigative Journalism Gavin MacFadyen has died at age 76. The cause of death is yet unknown. His ‘fellows in arms’ have flocked online to post their farewells, including WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. 
+“ We are extremely sad to announce the death of Gavin MacFadyen, CIJ’s Founder, Director and its leading light ,” the Centre for Investigative Journalism team wrote on its Twitter. 
+MacFadyen was a pioneering investigative journalist and filmmaker, who back in 2003 founded the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ), an organization that helped break several major stories and has trained a number of prominent journalists. 
+Gavin Macfadyen was mentor to Assange (and his closest friend in London), to WikiLeaks’ Sarah Harrison, Joseph Farrell and many others. 
+— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 4:03 AM – 23 Oct 2016 
+He was a mentor and friend to famous whistleblower and co-founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange, as well as the director of the publication. Paying tribute to their head, WikiLeaks published a post on the group’s Twitter account saying MacFadyen “ now takes his fists and his fight to battle God .” 
+The post is signed “ JA ,” indicating that the phrase belongs directly to Julian Assange, with WikiLeaks claiming that, despite the whistleblower being deprived of internet access in his suite in the Ecuadorian embassy for a week now, he has been able to contact them and is “ still in full command. ” 
+The CIJ team also published an address from MacFadyen’s wife and member of Julian Assange’s Defense Fund, Susan Benn, who described her husband as a “ larger-than-life person, ” with gratitude and respect. 
+“ He was the model of what a journalist should be… He spearheaded the creation of a journalistic landscape which has irrevocably lifted the bar for ethical and hard-hitting reporting. Gavin worked tirelessly to hold power to account. 
+“His life and how he lived it were completely in sync with the principles that he held dear and practiced as a journalist and educator – to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, ” Benn wrote . 
+Recounting her husband’s achievements, she said he had produced and directed more than 50 investigative documentaries covering diverse and multiple countries and problems. She also noted that he had been banned from apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union for his investigative work, and was also attacked by British Neo-Nazis. 
+In his professional career, MacFadyen shed light on topics like child labor, pollution, the torture of political prisoners, neo-Nazis in Britain, UK industrial accidents, Contra murders in Nicaragua, the CIA, maritime piracy, election fraud in South America, South African mines, as well as many others. He worked on investigative television programs for PBS’s Frontline, Granada Television’s World in Action, the BBC’s Fine Cut, Panorama, The Money Programme, and 24 Hours, as well as Channel 4’s Dispatches. 
+The cause of MacFadyen’s death has not yet been made public. In the original post from his wife Susan, she wrote that he had died from “ a short illness, ” but that line has now been removed. 
+Did you know: Gavin Macfadyen was arrested with Bernie Sanders, was a body double for Nick Nolte & was banned from South Africa & the USSR? 
+— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 4:20 AM – 23 Oct 2016 
+Twitter has been full of tributes from his colleagues and like-minded people. Even the hacktivist organization Anonymous has spoken out. Gavin MacFadyen, always kind & supportive of young journalists & filmmakers. Can never forget your booming laugh. Thank you my friend. 
+Earlier this year, MacFadyen gave an interview to RT’s Going Underground program to talk about the publication of leaks related to US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the most recent of which have been emails from the account of her aid, John Podesta. The barrage of sometimes shocking revelations has proven to be a bit of a thorn in the side for Clinton’s election campaign. In the interview, he said that the documents released so far are merely a drop in the ocean of the information WikiLeaks is receiving, and was hopeful that while “ there’s only one known Snowden, ” there may be other whistleblowers who will keep shedding light on injustice and other major global pain points.",FAKE
+5448,Re: Did America Really Pass The Test? – Hillary Clinton Is Going To Win The Popular Vote By A Wide Margin,"Archives Michael’s Latest Video Did America Really Pass The Test? – Hillary Clinton Is Going To Win The Popular Vote By A Wide Margin By Michael Snyder, on November 9th, 2016 
+The 2016 election was a test, and it would be easy to assume that since Donald Trump won the election that America passed the test. Unfortunately, it may not be that simple. A closer look at the numbers reveals a very sobering reality. Yes, Donald Trump won far more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton did, and that means that he is on track to become our next president . But Hillary Clinton is going to win the popular vote, and it is likely to be by a very wide margin once all the votes are counted. 
+As I write this article, Hillary Clinton has a lead of 218,000 in the popular vote, but most of the votes that have not been counted are on the west coast. 
+In California, Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump by a 5,482,166 to 2,966,654 margin, and only 68 percent of the vote has been counted so far. So assuming that the ratio stays about the same the rest of the way, Clinton is going to add at least a million more votes to her lead just from the state of California. 
+Up in Washington state, Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump by more than 370,000 votes, and only 60 percent of the vote has been counted there so far. So she could easily pick up another 200,000 votes in that state. 
+When everything is all said and done, it seems very likely that Hillary Clinton will have received well over a million more votes than Donald Trump did in this election. 
+So the truth is that the American people chose Hillary Clinton, but because of some electoral college magic Donald Trump is the winner of the election. 
+And I am certainly very, very happy that Hillary Clinton is not going to be our next president. Four years under her “leadership” would have likely been the final nail in the coffin for our nation. My hope is that she will now disappear from national politics for good. 
+But just because she is not going to be our next president does not mean that we passed the test. 
+In this election, the American people were faced with a very stark choice. Hillary Clinton is the most wicked politician that our country has ever seen, and over the past three decades the American people have gotten to know exactly who she is and what she stands for. 
+And despite knowing exactly what they would be getting, more Americans voted for her than voted for Donald Trump. 
+If every vote counted equally, she would be our next president. 
+I certainly don’t mean to rain on the Trump parade. Christians, conservatives and patriots are right to celebrate this victory by Donald Trump. But the truth is that I don’t believe that we did actually pass the test that we were faced with. 
+As a nation, we willingly chose Hillary Clinton by a pretty substantial margin. 
+And don’t think that the radical left is going to forget that Trump lost the popular vote. Already, violence and protests have erupted all over the nation. 
+Shortly after Trump declared victory, riots broke out in Berkeley, San Jose and Oakland … 
+“Not my president! Not my president!” chanted anti-Trump rioters in Berkley, California as they light flares and storm the streets. 
+Riots erupted in Berkley, San Jose and Oakland shortly after the announcement of Donald Trump as president-elect. Rioters are breaking into stores, vandalizing cars and shooting flares. 
+One woman in Oakland was hit by a car on Highway 24 just after midnight and has suffered serious injuries after. When she pulled over to the right shoulder, she was surrounded by anti-Trump rioters, who vandalized her car and broke the back window, according to CHP officers. 
+There were reports of protesters burning American flags in some areas of the country, and there were even brawls outside of the White House . 
+And once the sun set on Wednesday night, the protests started again. According to USA Today , “thousands of demonstrators” have hit the streets in New York City… 
+In New York, thousands of demonstrators blocked off streets around Trump Tower near the busy intersection of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, chanting “hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go” and “p—y grabs back,” a reference to tape of a Trump conversation from years back in which he One woman protester was topless while another climbed on top of a tree to see the activity. Taxis, city buses and passenger vehicles stood at a standstill. 
+In Boston, radical leftists were organizing a giant protest against Trump … 
+Far-left organizers are planning a mass protest in Boston against President-elect Donald Trump, citing the need to “immediately start fighting against him.” 
+Approximately 2,300 people have indicated they will gather outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston tonight for a “Boston Against Trump Rally.” According to the Facebook event page, another 5,000 people say they may be interested in attending. 
+“Donald Trump is the next President of the United States. We need to immediately start fighting against him. We need to build a movement to fight racism, sexism, and Islamophobia,” the event description says. 
+Sadly, this could be the beginning of a new era of protests, rioting and civil unrest. 
+Instead of coming together behind the new president, the radical left seems ready to go to war. 
+So even though Trump won the election, the truth is that our troubles may only just be starting. More than half the country didn’t want Trump, our nation was already more divided than it has been in decades before he won, and it won’t take much for many of our big cities to descend into utter chaos. 
+Without a doubt, we should be very excited that Donald Trump won the election, but an election victory is not going to magically make our problems go away. 
+When faced with the most monumental election in any of our lifetimes, Hillary Clinton received the most votes from the American people, and the consequences for that decision may be far more severe than most people are now anticipating. 
+About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.",FAKE
+5466,Neeraj Pandey announces film on 500/1000 ban: “A Wednesday Re-MODIfied”,"Tweet 
+Neeraj Pandey is all set to release the sequel to his 2008 thriller drama A Wedenesday. The movie is titled A Wednesday: Re-Modified , and is centered on PM Modi’s masterstroke to abolish Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. 
+The protagonist is an old chai wallah who is frustrated after serving chais from morning to evening to affluent people. The poor chai wallah is highly irritated when people emerge from luxurious cars offer notes of 500 and 1000 to him and ask “Chacha Chuttey kar do”. He sees it as a mockery to his honest profession at the hands of people who have no worth of Gandhi’s ideals or his currency notes. 
+Tired of large currency notes and the people who flaunt them he climbs to the roof top of an under construction building and calls the RBI Governor to share his ‘Man ki Baat’. He asks the governor to ban 500 and 1000 currency notes from Wednesday onwards. If not, he would detonate bombs kept in Chaipatti dabbas delivered as a Diwali gift by him to all banks in the city. The conversation that ensues is as below: 
+(Disclaimer: This conversation is in Hindi) 
+Chai Wallah (CW) : Aapke ghar me cockroach aata hai to aap kya karte hai Governor saab.Aap unko paalte nahi maartey hain. Ye dono note kaala dhan ban kar mere ghar ko ganda kar rhae the aur aaj main apna ghar saaf karna chahta hoon. 
+Gov: Tum ho kaun? 
+CW: Main wo hu jo apne pocket me itna chiller le kar rakhta hai ki kbhi usse koi 500 ka kbhi 1000 ka chutta karwa leta hai. Main wo hun jo month end hone pe ye sochta hai ki is baar savings account me minimum balance maintain hoga ya nahi, ya is baar IT walo ne kitna tax kaata hoga. Main wo hoon jo mahiney ki aakhri taarikh pe office jata hai to uski biwi har do ghante baad phone kar k puchti hai ki chai pee ki nahi, khana khaya ki nahi. Dar asal wo ye jaan na chahti hai ki salary mili ki nahi. 
+Main wo bhi hu jo kabhi Credit Card k line me fasta hai, kbhi Aadhar card k. Main wo bhi hoon jo saal me do baar SALE season ka wait krta hai. .Main wo hu jo jab shaan se apne imaandari k two wheeler pe nikalta hai to kbhi Mercedes ko side deta hai, kbhi Fortuner ko. Gaadi koi bhi brand ki ho bewajah side hota mai hi hoon. Bheed to dekhi hogi na aapne. Bheed me se koi bhi working class ko dekh lijiye main wo hoon. I am just a stupid Chai Wallah, sorry common man wanting to equalise everyone’s debts. 
+Gov: Aaj Achanak Ye Stupid Comman Man Kaise Jag Gaya, wo Bhi 100 kilo chai patti k saath. 
+CW: Kyun, Jag gaya to taklif ho rahi hai ?? Jindgi bhar ghut – ghut ke marte rahna chahiye tha mujhe…Dusro ko apne saamne amir hote dekhte rehna chahiye tha mujhe .. aur ye achanak nahi hua hai Governor sahab, Yu kahiye ki time nahi mila , fijul k media k uljhano me aur Videsh se kala dhan laane k chakkar me ye kaam jara neglect ho gaya, Lekin der aaye durast aaye.. Wo dono notes aaj hi ban honge… 
+Gov: Lekin ye do hi kyun? Aur bhi to hain 100 aur 50 k notes? 
+CW: Bas 100 aur 50 hi to hai humare paas saab inko ban kiya to khayega kya common man. 
+Gov: Tumhara koi apna kareebi kya tumse jyada rich hai ya jyada badi gaadi hai uske paas jisne tumahre Chai wala hone ka majak udaya? 
+CW: Kyun..mujhe us din ka wait krna chahiye jab koi apna, mere se jyada paise kama kar mujhe beijjat kar k chala jaaye. Jaan na hi hai to suniye. Ek marwadi tha jo roj mere dukaan pe aata aur 7 rupaye ki ek cutting chai pi k chal jaata. Naam nahi jaanta tha uska bas Udhaar khaatey me uska phone number rakha tha maine aur naam rakha tha Udhaari. Ek din wo ek kaali mercedes me aya aur 1000 ke dus note de kar bola “Chacha udhaar utaar dena aur KEEP THE CHANGE”. 
+Gov: To tum ye us last k english sentence k badle me kar rhe ho? 
+CW: Nahi nahi nahi…English me itna weak bhi nahi hoon. I always knew what CHANGE is. After all we brought the CHANGE in 2014. par ye acceptable nahi hai saab..ki koi bhi meri chai dukaan k saamne apne kaale dhan ki kaali gaadi me, kaale suit me aakar, apne kaale dhan k 1000 k note ko futkar kara le. Unhe fakra hai apne badi gaadiyon pe, 1000 aur 500 ki gaddiyon pe, Hawala transactions pe…mujhe fakra hai khud pe..ki main aise logon k 1000 aur 500 ke notes ko ban karwa raha hoon. 
+Gov: Tum saabit kya karna chahte ho? 
+CW: Main saabit kuch nahi krna chahta . Governor saab main bas aapko yaad dilana chahta hoon ki people live in poverty by force and not by choice. Aapko kya lagta hai ki jo log kaala dhan rakhte hain wo system se jyada inteligent hai? Arey internet pe ‘how to hide money in India’ search kar k dekhiye, teen sau baawan sites milengi ki kaala dhan kaise chupaye. 
+Gov: Tumhari ye home made add salt to toothpaste wali philosophy galat hai ..ye sahi tarika nahi hai. ? logon ko time to do. 
+CW: Haan..lekin aaj main tarikey k baarey me nahi! Natijey k baarey me soch raha hoon. Aap log saksham hai aise logon se niptaara paaney k liye. Par nahi..Why are you not nipping them in the bud. Mujhe yakin hai ki jo us din wo Udhaari apne black money ka note de kar Keep the change bola tha..wo ek bahut bada sawaal tha. Ki hum to aise hi black money hoard kar k amir ban jaayenge…ki tumse1000 aur 500 k futkar maangenge..Tum kya kar loge. Yes! They asked us this question… on a Monday, mocked us on a Tuesday… I am just replying on A Wednesday! 
+(Reported by Citizen Satirist Aayush . Originally published here .)",FAKE
+3949,Russia plays down idea of coalition with West to strike ISIS in Syria,"The Kremlin on Friday played down the possibility of a grand coalition with the West to strike the Islamic State in Syria, despite personal visits by French President François Hollande to both Washington and Moscow following a spate of horrific terrorist attacks tied to the militant group.
+
+“At the moment, unfortunately, our partners are not ready to work as one coalition,” Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s personal spokesman, told reporters during a conference call on Friday.
+
+Peskov’s comments came less than 24 hours after Putin sounded hopeful notes at a meeting with Hollande in the Kremlin, where he said Russia “was ready to cooperate with the coalition which is led by the United States.”
+
+[Putin says Russia ready to coordinate with West]
+
+But Russia has sought cooperation on its terms, providing diplomatic and now military shelter to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and attacking rebel groups that include the Islamic State but also more moderate opponents of Assad backed by Western countries. President Obama and other Western leaders have sought to bring Putin into a U.S.-led coalition instead, a force that Putin has called illegal because it is launching airstrikes in Syria without Assad’s permission.
+
+French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius raised the prospect Friday that Assad’s troops could be used against the Islamic State, but only in the context of a political transition in Syria that would remove Assad from power, French news media reported. The Islamic State, a heavily armed al-Qaeda offshoot also known as ISIS and ISIL, has declared a caliphate in tracts of Iraq and Syria under its control and has claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks against Russia and the West.
+
+The opposing goals of Russia and Assad’s opponents burst into conflict Tuesday when Turkey shot down a Russian warplane that was allegedly in its airspace. Russian and Turkish political analysts have said the plane was more likely targeted because Russia had been bombing Turkish-trained Turkmen rebels in Syria’s north.
+
+One pilot of the Su-24 attack aircraft was killed after parachuting from the stricken plane. Another was rescued, but a Russian marine was killed in the operation.
+
+Putin called the shootdown a “stab in the back” and has refused to take phone calls from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since.
+
+“There have been requests from Erdogan of a telephone conversation in the past two days,” Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters Friday, the Interfax news agency reported.
+
+When asked why Putin had not taken those calls, he said: “We see Turkey’s non-readiness to bring elementary apologies over the aircraft incident.”
+
+Erdogan has also formally asked for a meeting with Putin when the two join other world leaders in Paris on Monday for the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Peskov said Putin has been informed of the request but has not said whether he would meet with Erdogan.
+
+Russia is introducing widespread sanctions against the Turkish government because of the shootdown. The Russian government took aim at deep tourism ties between the two countries on Friday, as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Russia would cancel a free-visa regime with Turkey, a move that would likely be reciprocated by the Turkish government.
+
+Putin’s two-month-old intervention in the Syrian civil war was seen as a way for Russia to break out of international isolation after the West imposed sanctions over Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and its backing of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
+
+Peskov said Putin and Hollande on Thursday did not discuss the possibility of repealing the European Union’s financial and individual sanctions against Russia.",REAL
+4657,Trump cuts off fundraising events for Republican Party,"Donald Trump's campaign has ended fundraising events meant to support the Republican Party's get-out-the-vote efforts in next month's elections.
+
+Aides to the Republican nominee told Fox News on Tuesday that Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee for the GOP and the campaign, held its most recent fundraiser on Oct. 19 and no more such events were scheduled.
+
+The move, which was first reported by The Washington Post, cuts off a key money source for Republicans hoping to keep hold of both houses of Congress.
+
+""We’ve kind of wound down,"" Trump national finance chairman Steven Mnuchin told the Post. ""But the online fundraising continues to be strong.""
+
+By contrast, the Post reported that Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign has scheduled 41 fundraising events between now and Nov. 4. The former secretary of state was scheduled to make her last personal fundraising appearance Tuesday in Miami.
+
+Mnuchin told the paper that the real estate mogul was focusing on making his final pitch to the voters at a campaign events rather than raising money in the final two weeks of the race.
+
+""We have minimized his fundraising schedule over the last month to emphasize his focus on political [events],"" Mnuchin said of the candidate. ""Unlike Hillary, who has been fundraising and not out and about, he has constantly been out and about.""
+
+According to the Post, the Republican National Committee had collected $40 million through Trump Victory as of Sept. 30.
+
+RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said the organization ""[continues] to fundraise for the entire GOP ticket.""
+
+Meanwhile, Politico reported Tuesday that the Senate Leadership Fund, a Super PAC with ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was putting $25 million into seven Senate races deemed crucial in determining the balance of power on Capitol hill.
+
+Click for more from The Washington Post.",REAL
+2811,Afghan intelligence officials confirm death of Taliban leader Mullah Omar,"DEVELOPING: Afghan's main intelligence agency has confirmed that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the mysterious one-eyed leader of the Taliban who has had a $10 million price on his head since 9/11, is dead, a development that could signal a power struggle within the group.
+
+Abdul Hassib Seddiqi, the spokesman for Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, said Wednesday that Mullah Omar died in a hospital in the Pakistani city of Karachi in April 2013.
+
+""We confirm officially that he is dead,"" he told The Associated Press.
+
+The White House said the reports of Omar’s death “are credible,” and a senior U.S. official told Fox News that Omar has been dead since April 2013, likely due to a liver or kidney issue.
+
+The Office of President Ashraf Ghani also released a statement confirming Omar's death.
+
+""The government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, based on credible information, confirms that Mullah Mohammad Omar, leader of the Taliban died in April 2013 in Pakistan,"" the statement said. ""The government of Afghanistan believes that grounds for the Afghan peace talks are more paved now than before, and thus calls on all armed opposition groups to seize the opportunity and join the peace process.""
+
+Afghan government sources told the BBC early Wednesday morning that Omar, who went into hiding after U.S. forces drove the Taliban from Kabul for harboring Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden while his forces plotted and executed the attacks on the World Trade Center, may have been been dead for as long as three years. Rumors of his death have surfaced previously, but this is the first time they have been addressed by top government sources.
+
+There was no immediate comment from Washington, where a long-standing reward of $10 million had been offered by the State Department for information leading to Omar's capture.
+
+Earlier, Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi rebuffed Wednesday's reports of Omar's death, according to Sky News.
+
+""According to my information Mullah Omar is still alive and leading the movement,"" Ahmadi said.
+
+The cause of Omar's death was not known. A report in the Express Tribune newspaper of Karachi, Pakistan, quoted a member of the Taliban's central leadership council who said Omar had died of tuberculosis in early 2013 and had been buried somewhere in Afghanistan. The paper, citing Taliban sources, reported that a new leader of the Islamist group would be elected before July 31.
+
+Nasir Shansab, a former Afghan industrialist who has advised many groups in the region, said Wednesday's report of Omar's demise ""certainly"" seemed more credible than past rumors. Shansab said, however, that Omar's fate was largely irrelevant.
+
+""Whether Mullah Omar lives or died years ago is in my view fairly marginal,"" he said. ""Whatever the Taliban does is really Pakistan. Pakistan makes the decisions and Pakistan is in total control of what the Taliban do.""
+
+The reclusive Omar, of whom only a few photos are known to exist, has not been seen publicly since his fall from power in 2001, leading to several reports of his demise.
+
+Earlier this month, a message purporting to be from Omar was released backing peace talks with the Kabul government. The statement said the talks were necessary to ""bring an end to the [foreign] occupation and to establish an independent Islamic system in [Afghanistan]."" However, that message was in the form of a text statement published on a Taliban website rather than an audio or video recording, fueling rumors that Omar was dead or otherwise incapacitated.
+
+In recent years, the Taliban had become increasingly divided among rival factions, with some insurgents opting to pledge their allegiance to ISIS. However, Omar still enjoyed the loyalty of many local figures.
+
+The Taliban's succession process could become complicated.
+
+Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a top Omar deputy, was reportedly next in line to head the Taliban. He was freed from a Pakistani prison in September 2013, though it’s unclear if he’s been able to rejoin the terror group’s leadership, according to the Express Tribune.
+
+Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor was reportedly named a top deputy to Baradar in 2010, and Mansoor has since become the Afghan Taliban’s acting chief.
+
+Mansoor is now reportedly vying for the Afghan Taliban top post, a rise opposed by Mullah Omar’s eldest son, Mullah Mohammad Yaqoub, who is also trying to become the group's leader, according to Pakistan’s The News.
+
+Mansoor has had his Taliban reputation “widely damaged for spreading news of Mullah Omar’s death,” according to the Express Tribune.
+
+In the wake of the departure of NATO combat forces at the end of last year, the Taliban have stepped up attacks on Afghan troops, which are now in charge of security in the country.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+10266,Standing Rock Protests: Police Turn In Badges Rather Than Incite Violence,"Share on Facebook It should be evident if you’re following news concerning the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota that tension continues to escalate between protestors supporting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and riot police. The big deal? A four-state Dakota Access Pipeline which threatens to uproot sacred burial ground, poison the Missouri river, and make null an 1881 treaty ensuring the property belongs to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. In addition to being maced and beaten with batons, activists have been tased and even shot with rubber bullets . Despite the violence taking place, tribal leaders continue to ask all “water protectors” to maintain peaceful relations and rely on prayer as the only weapon used to halt construction of the DAPL. After watching videos of the mass arrests and beating that have taken place , many have asked how those employed by the State can continue to terrorize weaponless protestors. Surely, some form of cognitive dissonance must be taking place? For some, most likely, and that's undoubtedly what inspired at least two officers to turn in their badges today. According to an activist named Redhawk, there have been reports of at least two officers turning in their badges after acknowledging that the battle against the American people is not what they signed up for. On Facebook, the activist wrote : “You can see it in some of them, that they do not support the police actions. We must keep reminding them they are welcome to put down their weapons and badge and take a stand against this pipeline as well. The comments on the ordeal have been quite positive. Charlotte Holywater Vincent wrote, “Brave to stand up for what is right ! To hand over years of training and service in a little metal badge and then stand on the side of humanity.” Ron Hemming, who reportedly is a retired deputy in Washington, shared his thoughts: “As a retired deputy in Washington state, I would have refused to go on a detail such as this. As I am also part native blood, I stand with my relatives on the front line protecting the water from the black snake. Be safe, stay strong.” Related:",FAKE
+6472,SPECTRE Is Real: Federal Shadow Government,"SPECTRE Is Real: Federal Shadow Government # www.youtube.com 225 
+The shadow government has fully come into the light. The Rothschild central banking system has been defined as the 'octopus' aka devilfish that ""feeds on nothing but gold."" 
+Today we go one step further and unveil the dark spiritual entity behind the shadow government. This entity is encoded within the Papal regalia of Vatican City which controls all countries under the law of the seas (Maritime Law) discretely. 
+This video exposes the HEAD of the shadow government. For the COMPLETE breakdown of the Papal Regalia please visit theJonathankleck via YouTube. Tags",FAKE
+3461,Supreme Court throws out conviction for violent Facebook postings,"The Supreme Court on Monday made it harder for prosecutors to convict those who make violent statements on Facebook and other social media, saying it is not enough that an ordinary person would find the rants threatening.
+
+In its first examination of the murky rules regarding conduct on the Internet, the court moved cautiously while throwing out the conviction of a Pennsylvania man whose postings, delivered in rap-lyric style, suggested killing his estranged wife, federal law enforcement officials and even a kindergarten class.
+
+Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., noting that Anthony Douglas Elonis had said he intended his postings to be fictitious and even therapeutic, said a defendant’s state of mind had to be considered.
+
+But the opinion offered little in the way of specifics about what must be proved for a conviction, and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. criticized the opinion as more confusing than enlightening.
+
+“This failure to decide throws everyone from appellate judges to everyday Facebook users into a state of uncertainty,” Thomas wrote in dissent.
+
+The narrow opinion said it was not necessary to address whether the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech protected Elonis’s Facebook statements. The opinion also declined to take a position on whether it would be enough for a conviction to show that a defendant had been reckless in making inflammatory statements, as Alito proposed.
+
+For the justices, it was sufficient for now, Roberts wrote, to correct a misinterpretation by most lower courts that the poster’s intent is immaterial and what matters only is how the message is received.
+
+Roberts defended the majority’s go-slow approach. “Such prudence is nothing new,” he wrote.
+
+Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the law “for centuries required the government to prove criminal intent before putting someone in jail. That principle is especially important when a prosecution is based on a defendant’s words.”
+
+He added, “The Internet does not change this long-standing rule.”
+
+Groups battling domestic violence and advocating for victims said they worried the ruling would make it harder to convict those who make threats and said the ease and accessibility of social media have made the problem worse.
+
+“The Internet is the crime scene of the 21st century. The laws governing social media require swift interpretation to keep pace with the ever-advancing criminal activity in this space,” said Mai Fernandez, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime. She said the justices had left victims in jeopardy.
+
+“Threats play a central role in domestic abuse and is a core tactic that many abusers employ,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, adding that threats cause devastating harm “regardless of whether the abuser intended to threaten or only intended to vent or to make a joke.”
+
+Writing about his estranged wife, Tara, Elonis had posted: “There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts.”
+
+At oral argument six months ago, justices seemed to agree there was a need for more than the “reasonable person” standard — which says that a reasonable person would consider a particular statement to be a threat — but there was no consensus on exactly what that standard should be. The limited ruling issued Monday and the length of time required to produce it indicated that no such agreement on a different standard had emerged.
+
+Roberts said there is “no dispute” that the state-of-mind requirement is satisfied “if the defendant transmits a communication for the purpose of issuing a threat, or with knowledge that the communication will be viewed as a threat.”
+
+But Alito, who agreed the case should be sent back to lower courts, said the decision left too many unanswered questions.
+
+“The court refuses to explain what type of intent was necessary,” Alito complained. “Did the jury need to find that Elonis had the purpose of conveying a true threat? Was it enough if he knew that his words conveyed such a threat? Would recklessness suffice? . . . Attorneys and judges are left to guess.”
+
+[Supreme Court case tests the limits of free speech on Facebook and other social media]
+
+Paraphrasing the famous holding from Marbury v. Madison that it is the court’s prerogative to say what the law is, Alito said the court was announcing, “It is emphatically the prerogative of this court to say only what the law is not.”
+
+The justices were considering a federal law that makes it a crime to communicate “any threat to injure the person of another.”
+
+Prosecutors said there was no doubt Elonis was doing that on his Facebook feed during a two-month period in 2010. His wife had left with their two children, and Elonis, then 27 and working at an Allentown amusement park, grew increasingly despondent and angry.
+
+He was fired and responded with a post about being a nuclear bomb about to explode. He pondered making a name for himself by shooting up an elementary school.
+
+That brought a visit from an FBI agent, and the prolific Elonis later posted a fantasy about slitting the agent’s throat and turning her into a “ghost.”
+
+Elonis was convicted after a judge told jurors that the government needed to prove only that Elonis made the statements and that a reasonable person would foresee that the words would be interpreted as “a serious expression of an intention to inflict bodily injury or take the life of an individual.”
+
+Elonis served three years of a 44-month sentence before being released from prison.
+
+The Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit upheld the conviction, saying Elonis’s subjective intent in writing his postings did not matter.
+
+The Morning Call reported in April that Elonis had been arrested by police in Freemansburg, Pa., on charges of hitting his girlfriend’s mother with a pot.
+
+The cases is Elonis v. U.S.",REAL
+3830,Obama oval office speech aims to reassure nation over terror threats,"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama will try to reassure a nervous nation on Sunday that he has a plan to defeat the fast-evolving threat of terrorism, as fears multiply of ISIS attacks on the homeland and public trust in his handling of the threat has dipped to record lows.
+
+Obama's rare 8 p.m. ET Oval Office address reflects growing anxiety that the global showdown with the extremist group has now spread to U.S. soil following a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California , that authorities are treating as terrorism.
+
+His appearance comes at a time of public disquiet over terrorism and a political debate over the threat, now consuming the 2016 campaign , raging at levels not seen since the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001 . Obama has also struggled to convince critics he has a viable strategy for destroying ISIS in the Middle East and has been accused of downplaying the threat from the group for political reasons.
+
+Obama will use Sunday night's address to pledge to use of every available tool to keep American people safe and destroy ISIS, senior administration official says.
+
+The gravity of the occasion is underscored by Obama's decision to use the symbolic power of the Oval Office for only the third time in his presidency, following addresses on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the end of the Iraq war in 2010.
+
+In a new CNN/ORC poll released on Sunday, 60% of Americans disapproved of Obama's handling of terrorism -- up nine points since May. Two thirds of those polled, meanwhile, said they disapproved of the president's handling of ISIS.
+
+The poll was conducted before the attacks in San Bernardino and also showed a shift in public opinion on how to tackle the group -- with a majority -- 53% -- for the first time saying the U.S. should send ground troops to fight ISIS. And 68% said the American response to the group's rise had not been sufficiently aggressive.
+
+Those figures reflect Obama's struggle so far to convince critics he has a viable strategy for destroying ISIS in its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria and after he has been accused of downplaying the threat from the group for political reasons.
+
+The figures tracked with a a Washington Post/ABC News poll last month, after an ISIS rampage in Paris but also before the California attack, that found that a record low of 40% of Americans approved of Obama's handling of terrorism and only 35%
+
+""He will reiterate his firm conviction that ISIL will be destroyed and that the United States will draw upon our values -- our unwavering commitment to justice, equality and freedom -- to prevail over terrorist groups that use violence to advance a destructive ideology,"" said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
+
+Sunday's address also seems to be an implicit acknowledgment that Obama has failed to convince Americans that he is prepared to take on the ISIS threat, amid widespread criticism of his strategy and rhetoric on the issue that keeps being overtaken by events.
+
+Republicans have redoubled attacks following the California killings to fire up a hawkish party base ahead of early nominating contests and to suggest that Obama's policy isn't working and that the president does not understand the threat.
+
+""Why on earth did the Obama administration not know this ahead of time and stop them before they carried out this terror attack?"" Cruz said of the California shooting.
+
+""Moving forward, this is not going to be the last attempt to attack the homeland,"" Rubio said.
+
+""People are dead. A lot of people are dead right now,"" Trump said on CBS ""Face the Nation"" on Sunday.. ""So everybody wants to be politically correct, and that's part of the problem that we have with our country.""
+
+The real estate mogul also said he would ""live tweet"" the President's address.
+
+Other candidates have warned the United States is in a war of civilizations with radical Islam and that a new ""world war"" has reached U.S. soil.
+
+Such political fury complicates Obama's effort to ease public fears of terrorism and to build support to confront two critical problems -- the expanding battle against ISIS and its evolving tactics and his own political vulnerabilities on the issue.
+
+His speech comes at an alarming moment.
+
+Terrorism experts are warning that the San Bernardino attack could be the harbinger of a much more acute threat to U.S. soil.
+
+'More of what we can expect'
+
+""Unfortunately I think it is more of what we can expect in the future -- whether it is copy cats or whether you have, again, either ISIS-aligned or inspired or ISIS-directed individuals,"" said Dean Alexander, director of the Homeland Security Research Program at Western Illinois University. ""It might instigate ISIS to take a more proactive approach to send individuals here to the U.S. or to try to recruit.""
+
+Such a ""self radicalization"" scenario by Muslims on U.S. soil has long been feared by anti-terrorism experts who say such attacks are nearly impossible for the administration to detect and stop.
+
+But critics say he has consistently underplayed the threat from ISIS because its rise conflicts with his assurances that he has severely degraded the threat from global terror -- a key legacy issue as he nears the end of his second term.
+
+""Instead of being contained, they're conducting or inspiring spectacular terrorist operations on multiple continents -- including now in the United States. ISIS affiliates are spreading across the Middle East and south Asia.""
+
+Under increasing pressure to toughen his rhetoric, Obama is also likely to use his address to counter claims the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.
+
+""They can't beat us on the battlefield, so they try to terrorize us into being afraid, and changing our patterns of behavior, and panicking, and abandoning our allies and partners, and retreating from the world,"" Obama said at a press conference in Malaysia last month.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie rejected the idea that Muslims would be offended by the use of specific terminology to describe the threat.
+
+""Now when you say radical Islamic jihadist, they understand, the rest of the Muslim community understands,"" Christie said on ""Face the Nation.""
+
+But Clinton said on ABC News ""This Week"" that throwing around such terms actually helped the extremists.
+
+""It helps to create this clash of civilizations that is actually a recruiting tool for ISIS and other radical jihadists who use this as a way of saying, 'We are in a war against the West -- you must join us,'"" she said.
+
+""We must never accept the premise that they put forward because it is a lie,"" Obama said in February.
+
+""Nor should we grant these terrorists the religious legitimacy that they seek. They are not religious leaders. They are terrorists.""",REAL
+14,How Planned Parenthood hoax avoids the truth,"Errol Louis is the host of ""Inside City Hall,"" a nightly political show on NY1, a New York all-news channel. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+(CNN) Years ago, when I hosted a daily talk-radio show, one of the cardinal rules laid down by my program director was to avoid booking guests or taking phone calls from listeners who wanted to debate abortion, gay marriage or the death penalty. All three issues -- and especially abortion -- were considered a conversational dead-end, on which nearly all intelligent adults have already made up their minds.
+
+Any sort of abortion ""debate"" would inevitably turn into a shoutfest yielding circular arguments, bad feelings and bored listeners.
+
+I thought about that rule of thumb as I read about the elaborate media hoax ginned up by the Center for Medical Progress, a right-wing group trying to discredit and defund Planned Parenthood.
+
+Taking a page from the falsehoods and selectively-edited videos that brought about the defunding and bankruptcy of the left-wing advocacy group ACORN, the Center for Medical Progress strategy is to create a narrative, claim that its videos constitute damning evidence, and repeat that story enough times to give politicians the ""proof"" they need to attack Planned Parenthood.
+
+That plan appears to have fizzled already, with the failure of a Senate vote this week to defund Planned Parenthood. But that won't stop the anti-abortion advocates, who will always see themselves as just one more rally, prayer vigil or media hoax away from ultimate victory.
+
+Despite the extensive preparation and deceit that went into the plan, the hoax won't shift the country's decades-long stalemate over abortion by so much as a millimeter. As it says in the book of Ecclesiastes: ""What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.""
+
+By law, women getting abortions can voluntarily donate the tissue from that procedure to medical research, and by law the abortion provider can request nominal reimbursement $30 to $100 in most cases -- for saving, packing and shipping the tissue to a research firm.
+
+The details of the process are enough to trouble anyone: non-medical people don't talk about the price of requesting, removing and shipping organs and pieces of flesh from place to place. Most of us would freak out if we listened to professionals in the local hospita l, funeral home or medical examiner's office discuss details of how a dying person's request to have their body parts donated for transplants or scientific research actually gets carried out.
+
+It turns out that cadavers, livers, kidneys, eyes and other organs don't walk themselves over to the local hospital or medical school for free.
+
+So let's acknowledge up front that some startling, even grisly conversations will inevitably follow when women getting an abortion agree to donate the stem cells and other tissue to scientific research. But that doesn't equate to selling body parts.
+
+Transcripts of the videos created by the Center for Medical Progress show instances of the hoaxers posing as medical middlemen, trying to lure Planned Parenthood staffers into talking about how money gets paid to abortion providers who take nominal reimbursements for moving body tissue from clinics to research facilities.
+
+And in case after case, what emerges is medical professionals highly aware and cognizant of their duty to be careful and ethical about their words and actions.
+
+""Really their bottom line is, they want to break even. Every penny they save is just pennies they give to another patient. To provide a service the patient wouldn't get,"" says Dr. Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood Federation.
+
+Later in the same conversation she says: ""we're not looking to make money from this. Our goal is to keep access available. And if we do something that makes a target, that just removes access for everybody.""
+
+And later: ""Our goal, like I said, is to give patients the option without impacting our bottom line. The messaging is this should not be seen as a new revenue stream, because that's not what it is.""
+
+On and on it goes, in each of these supposedly ""bombshell"" videos, forming what could be called an inkblot conversation, similar to the Rorschach tests in which the viewer looks at an inkblot and describes what picture they see.
+
+To those already convinced that abortions should be safe, legal and rare, it looks like Planned Parenthood is responsibly doing exactly what a medical provider should. People who already want to ban all abortions everywhere will see the conversations as some nefarious trade in baby parts.
+
+In other words, the videos are less an investigative expose than a mirror in which a divided nation can look at its view on abortion.",REAL
+7517,Comment on Clintons Addicted to Privilege: Financial Whistleblower Explains What’s About to Happen to the Economy by marlene,"Posted on October 29, 2016 by Isaac Davis 
+“How is the government going to get people to pay their taxes if the government is not viewed as legitimate?” ~ Catherine Austin Fitts 
+The world economy is designed to fail through the mechanism of a banking system that requires all users of money to pay usury every time a transaction takes place. In this way, the financial systems of the world can be manipulated into a managed collapse, thereby causing global chaos so that the world’s nations and citizens can be tricked into demanding a global currency managed by a global elite. 
+Problem, reaction, solution. Economic hit man John Perkins wrote about this strategy as it was used in the 20th century to bring developing nations under the control of the international monetary fund and transnational profiteers, and at present this scheme is being globalized. 
+“If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money—and another country is added to our global empire.” ~John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man 
+For decades now, the dollar has been in a slow burn style of collapse, and while many journalists, primarily outside of the mainstream, have been warning the world about how and why this is happening, we’re quickly approaching a turning point, where the slow burn moves into something more severe. While at first glance this seems like a frightening potentiality, the truth is that an economic collapse may very well be our best chance at freeing ourselves from the rule of the Gods of Money . A Whistleblower Warns Us and Gives Us Hope 
+Speaking to Greg Hunter of USA Watchdog news , former Wall Street banker and former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration , Catherine Austin Fitts explains why the slow burn is about to come to an end. 
+“The system has the capacity with monetary policy in one sense to keep going forever if the force and military capacity is there to do it, but at some point, you burn through the fat, you burn through the muscle and then you have to change institutions.” ~ Catherine Austin Fitts 
+During the financial crisis of 2008, the government was able to prevent an uncontrolled firestorm collapse of the system by colluding with the chiefs of the financial sector, giving them bailouts of extraordinary magnitude , then inflating the dollar by the Federal Reserve’s introduction of quantitative easing . Eight years later, this tactic has reached its limit, however it has given the public significant reason and time to understand why our economy functions the way it does, and people are losing faith in our leadership. 
+“It’s going to be extremely difficult to get people to continue to pay their taxes when they’re highly confident the money’s not being spent legally and it’s going to the advantage of small parties or things that they don’t understand. And so you can’t move further without institutional overhaul.” ~Catherine Austin Fitts 
+The thing that frightens her most is the fact that groups within the U.S., such as ALEC , are already calling for changes in the law and even a new constitutional convention to overhaul these institutions. The financial sector has already been operating outside of the law and beyond the constitution for some twenty plus years, and if we haven’t been using the constitution, she notes, then why do they wish to change it? 
+“If you want to enforce the Constitution or fix things, that’s what you do. The reason you get a Constitutional Convention is you want to tear it up because you’re worried, now that people realize the extent of the corruption, that they’re going to try and enforce.” ~Catherine Austin Fitts 
+Her warning is that as people continue to wake up to the corruption of our government and financial rulers, the entrenched elites who are fully invested in destroying the middle class will fight tooth and nail to prevent us from holding them accountable, by means of bringing more Draconian laws into place to protect themselves. 
+In this light, the economic war that is brewing isn’t completely technical, it is social as well, quickly becoming class warfare. The world’s financial elite are in grave danger of being held to the fire for their crimes, and surely they know they how quickly things can change in favor of the populous, as historical events like the French Revolution have shown. Prepare Now 
+As individuals stuck in the debt-slave matrix , there is very little we can do to challenge this sort of massive global scheme as it’s happening, however, preparing now for collapse is our best chance of chucking our burden of debt to these people, if they are even human , and of creating a future without such obvious criminal financial tyranny holding us back. 
+Working now to expose these criminals is imperative so that when the ball drops, ordinary people understand why, how and who is truly to blame, thereby making resisting to the takeover possible. Taking care of personal emergency preparations by gathering healthy storable foods , networking in your community, and having plans in place to survive are absolutely necessary at this stage, and once this is done, efforts to awaken others are critical. 
+View the full interview here : Read more articles by Isaac Davis . 
+Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here . This article ( Financial Whistleblower Explains What’s About to Happen to the Economy ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Isaac Davis and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+7783,"Go Ahead, Sue the Government","Trump’s Gettysburg Address against the New World Order ‹ › Professor and Attorney Rahul Manchanda worked for one of the largest law firms in Manhattan where he focused on asbestos litigation. At the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (“UNCITRAL”) in Vienna, Austria, Mr. Manchanda was exposed to international trade law, arbitration, alternative dispute resolution, and comparisons of the American common law with European civil law. He later worked for one of the largest multi-national law firms in Paris France, Coudert Frères, where he focused primarily on international arbitration, arbitration agreements, the enforcement of foreign arbitration awards against multinational parent corporations, piercing the corporate veil, arbitration venue choice, and foreign policy. In Paris, Mr. Manchanda analyzed and compared the American legal system with its British, French, Russian, German, and Chinese counterparts. Mr. Manchanda also has extensive technical experience in Federal Patent Prosecution and Intellectual Property issues working for Milde Hoffberg & Macklin LLP and Moses & Singer LLP, and has contributed to the issuing of patents in the areas of biotechnology, organic chemistry, biopharmaceuticals, electrical and mechanical engineering, computer software and technology, and internet business methods. He was recently the Keynote Address Speaker for Hamline University School of International Law on the 60th Anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, as well as a Chief Speaker for the Civil Rights Litigation Update Seminar on Balancing Inalienable Civil Rights and National Security in the Post-911 Era. Professor Manchanda is also a Faculty Member for LawLine.com, an online Continuing Legal Education (“CLE”) program designed to educate Attorneys all across the country on cutting edge issues of Immigration Law and Deportation and Removal Defense Litigation as well as a second CLE on the Foundations of International Law, as well as 5 different Immigration Law/Deportation Defense Seminars for Rossdale CLE. Click here to watch a portion of his 2 hour lecture on Immigration and Deportation and Removal Defense Litigation or The Foundations of International Law. You can also watch some of his many appearances on FoxNews, CNN, CourtTV, NBC, and other major media networks on some of the most notable cases in global history, here. He has also given multiple lectures as one of the first pioneering immigration law practitioners who merged Criminal Defense Law and Immigration/Deportation Defense Law in such lectures with other immigration law luminaries in LexisNexis Presents a Complimentary Webinar: Criminal Law and Immigration Intersection 101 and Immigration Reform and the Workplace: An Overview of Legal and Legislative Developments. At Boston University, Mr. Manchanda received a Bachelors degree in Biology, where he distinguished himself in the chemical and biological sciences, doing extensive research in organic chemistry, in both field and laboratory work relating to organic synthesis and isolation, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, structure determination, and production of synthetic bio-active natural products. At BU, Mr. Manchanda also was on the BU Shotokan Karate Team as well as a Lead Tenor with the Marsh Chapel Choir, also finding time to be a Teaching Fellow in Molecular Cell Biology, Organic Chemistry, and a private tutor in Calculus based Physics and Organic Chemistry. He also attended Yale University where he studied Molecular Cell and Evolutionary Biology. He served on the Pace University School of Law’s Mentor Program where he received his Juris Doctor degree. Attorney Manchanda graduated from the Wooster Prep School in Danbury Connecticut where he was a Varsity Letterman in Soccer, Wrestling, Tennis, and Lacrosse, as well as Lead in the Drama Program. For more than 14 years, his internationally recognized law firm has a formidable presence in Federal and State Criminal, Civil, International, and Immigration Courts throughout the United States pertaining to Master, Individual, and Final Hearings, Naturalization Interviews, Writs of Habeas Corpus, Writs of Corum Nobis, Marriage Cases, U.S. Embassy and Consular Processing, American Citizen Services, United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Department of State liaison, 440 Motions to Vacate, Amend, or Expunge Criminal Convictions, Aggravated Felonies, Drug Smuggling Cases, Stokes Hearings, Political Asylum, Taxation, Hardship, Removal of Condition Hearings, National Security, and Adjustment of Status Interviews. He served as an American Immigration Lawyer Association (“AILA“) Committee Member for the Congressional/Advocacy Committee, the Department of Labor (“DOL“) Committee, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (“EOIR“)/District Counsel/Political Asylum Committee. Attorney Manchanda also proudly served on the New York State Bar Association Empire State Counsel Program, which is a small group of Attorneys who serve the poor without charge, helping people who otherwise could not afford legal counsel to achieve justice. Attorney Manchanda also proudly serves as a Member of the American Bar Association Advisory Panel, a group of Attorneys that informs the ABA’s priorities and decisions by providing opinions about the direction of the ABA and issues facing the profession. Attorney Rahul Manchanda of Manchanda Law Office PLLC has also traveled extensively throughout the world where he has fought for peace and mutual understanding by and between the United States and different countries overseas. His work, observations, and travels have been published and been received to make foreign policy decisions by the International Atomic Energy Agency (“IAEA”), the US RAHUL MANCHANDA IN TEHRAN IRANCongress, US Senate, US Executive Branch, as well as countless other think-tanks, foreign and domestic governmental agencies, NGOs, foreign and domestic policy institutions, such as can be found here. Attorney Rahul Manchanda’s ceaseless and tireless work advocating peace, universal human and civil rights, and the avoidance of war and conflict has truly transformed the world, perhaps even helping to stop World War 3, for which he has been viciously attacked online and personally by warmongers, enemies of global peace, and religious extremists. In addition to Mr. Manchanda’s extensive international litigation practice in Federal and State Criminal Defense Law, Immigration Law, Deportation and Removal Defense Litigation, Family Law, International Law, and Civil Litigation, he has advised on, been consulted on, prepared, and filed tens of thousands of Arraignments, Trials, Hearings, Non-Immigrant and Immigrant Visa Petitions including, but not limited to: H-1B1, B, C, D, E, L, O, P, H-3, J, K, M, R, S, T, and U Visas, as well as I-130 and I-140 Immigrant Petitions with accompanying Adjustment of Status (I-485), Extraordinary Ability Petitions, EB-1, EB-2, EB-3, EB-5, Investment Based Visas, PERM, RIR, and Regular Labor Certification Applications with the Department of Labor, Political Asylum, Marriage Cases, Stokes Interviews, Naturalization/Citizenship, Agricultural, 245(I), CSS/Lulac/Zambrano, LIFE Act, Removal of Conditions, Criminal and Overstay Waivers, and Aggravated Felony and CMT Defense. Attorney Manchanda has succeeded for his Clients in Deportation and Removal Proceedings, Asylum, Employment Based Visa Petitions including PERM/Labor Certification, Business Immigration Visas, and Family Based Immigration Petitions, for tens of thousands of people, for more than 14 years. He taught Immigration Law at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the City University of New York located in Manhattan New York. He has also successfully advised on and appeared in Criminal Court throughout New York for many different types of State and Federal Criminal Defense Matters. He was sworn in and admitted to practice in the highest courts in New York State as well as in the Federal United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Federal United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the Federal United States District Court for the Northern District of New York, the United States District Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the United States District Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and the United States District Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He has been an active member of the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, the New York County Lawyers Association, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Phi Alpha Delta International, the Global Interdependence Center (“GIC”), the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, Network 20/20, and the Asia Society. He regularly participated in conferences with the House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, Capitol Hill, the Center For Strategic and International Studies (“CSIS”), and the Council on Foreign Relations (“CFR”) in Washington, D.C. pertaining to counter-terrorism and foreign policy in South Asia, as well as completing counter-terrorism training with Security Solutions International (“SSI”). He served on a New York Committee on State Regulation of Immigration Law in front of the New York State Senate. He served on the Board of Directors and Sponsor of the US-India Institute (“USINI”), a non-partisan foreign policy advisory board and think tank located in Washington, D.C. focusing on critical geo-strategic issues of national security, defense and economic relations between the U.S. and India, informing and educating key policy makers in the U.S. and India on issues of common interest, and advocating the importance of achieving and maintaining peace through Rahul Manchanda Attorneystrength and economic freedom. He served as the U.S.-India Political Action Committee (“USINPAC“) Co-Chairman for New York where he impacted U.S. Foreign Policy on issues of concern to the Indian American community in the United States, providing bipartisan support to candidates for Federal, State and Local office who supported the issues that were important to the Indian American community, including research, support, and advocacy towards the successful passage of the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act, signed into law on October 8, 2008 after more than three years of contentious bi-partisan and bi-lateral negotiations. Recently Attorney Manchanda was awarded the prestigious Hind Rattan Award for his outstanding services, achievements, and contributions in his field for “keeping the flag of India high” as an NRI/PIO by the NRI Welfare Society of India, an award bestowed on only 30 “eminent” NRIs/PIOs around the globe every year, and for making contributions in strengthening India’s economy. Attorney Manchanda was also Knighted by the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Justice of London England, given the appellation and nobility of Sir Rahul Manchanda. Attorney Manchanda also served on the Paris Conference Presidential Desk of the European Association of Lawyers (“AEA“), a highly selective network of international law firms with a presence in most of the world’s countries. He is also a member of the Indian American Lawyers Association of Manhattan New York as well as the Manhattan Committee on Foreign Relations, which is a private organization that promotes foreign policy and international affairs dialogue between policy makers, researchers, and other high level analysts and the Committee’s membership. Attorney Manchanda is also on the Advisory Council for the Republican National Lawyers Association. Attorney Rahul Manchanda is also a Member of the Queens District Attorney’s Office Defense Attorney Database for new cases assigned to Assistant District Attorneys and a Member of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. Additionally Rahul Manchanda is the founder of the India Anti-Defamation Committee Ltd which is a premier civil rights organization dedicated to fighting and eradicating racism, discrimination, and hatred directed towards people from the Indian subcontinent. Rahul Manchanda is also a Freemason. Mr. Manchanda has appeared as International Law Expert regularly on major media television program channels such as Fox News, CNN, Court TV, and NBC on such television programs as Dayside, Studio B with Shephard Smith, Fox and Friends, Heartland with John Kasich, Live from CNN with Kyra Phillips, the Live Desk with Martha McCallum, Anderson Cooper 360°, the O’Reilly Factor, Nancy Grace, Banfield & Ford Courtside, Best Defense with Jami Floyd, Justice with Jeanine Pirro, and the Catherine Crier Show on the most publicized and globally newsworthy of international legal issues and cases. You can watch many of these appearances here. He is also featured in Newsweek Magazine‘s Top Attorneys in the United States of America in 2013, and Top Immigration Lawyers in the United States of America in 2012 Showcases. His in depth expertise in International Affairs, State and Federal Criminal Defense Litigation, Consular Processing Issues, Immigration Law, Foreign Affairs, Customs Law, and High-Level Scientific Training has enabled Attorney Manchanda to secure solutions for his Clients in a quick, efficient, and accurate manner for more than 13 years. Mr. Manchanda is fluent in French, English, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. He has also studied Russian, Latin, and Hebrew. His hobbies include Politics, International Affairs, and Soccer. In his spare time, he enjoys Chess and Classical Music.",FAKE
+9120,Principal institutes ban after students wear Confederate flag to school,"October 28, 2016 at 10:00 am 
+OMG, a Confederate Flag at school! Minds have been warped forever! “We can’t have that, the truth being spewed out in public like that, people might think they actually have rights!” 
+“What will you do without freedom” (William Wallace) I don’t know about how others feel, but, in my mind, we’re quite far from true freedom. You need to dispose rubbish? Better have your permit. Need to take a shit, better get your permit. Birth and Death certificates log you in and out and you’re property. 
+The dehumanizing of the species is well underway. Your number is 8675309.21 Like rats in a cage, we eat, shit, and breathe. Our cage is our own minds, manipulated beyond measure by unscrupulous bastards with a greed that can never be quenched. It’s unfortunate that there are those that exist with a superiority complex and think their shit don’t stink. That superiority complex leads to wars. We’re the most advanced, civilized monkeys on the planet, but you steal my bananas, we’re goin’ to war. 
+A Confederate Flag? They get their undies in a bundy over a Confederate Flag? 
+Yep, we must lie to our children and not tell them our true history. We must protect them from the psychological trauma of the truth! “Yes Jimmy, everything’s lollypops and rainbows!”“Here, take some more Ritalin and STFU!” 
+Pharmacy regulars, it seems most parents on some damned drug too. “Well, I gotta get the kids pills, I may as well get some for me, as long as I’m there.” Hey Dr. Feelgood, what’s up? 
+“Mother’s Little Helpers” told the story decades ago. Now, snoop in anyones “Medicine Chest” and you’ll discover an array of concoctions, herbals, stimulants, downers, mood enhancers, sleeping pills, wake up pills, stay awake pills, two in the morning, two at noon, two at bedtime, repeat every day until your dead. 
+You want to live forever? I don’t. I suspect bigger and better things await my arrival, at least, I hope so.",FAKE
+984,Strong organization helps Cruz dominate Colorado delegate hunt,"Colorado Springs, Colorado (CNN) Ted Cruz on Saturday clinched the support of every pledged delegate in Colorado, capturing all of the final 13 delegates who will go to the national convention in July and demonstrating his organizational strength in the all-important delegate race.
+
+Even though voters didn't head to the polls Saturday, Cruz's strength here could help deny Donald Trump the 1,237 delegates that he needs to clinch the nomination.
+
+Cruz's victory Saturday, combined with delegates he had already earned, hands him 30 of the 37 delegates across the state who are legally bound to support him on the first ballot at the convention, along with four other delegates who gave him verbal commitments of support.
+
+""Today was another resounding victory for conservatives, Republicans, and Americans who care about the future of our country,"" the Cruz campaign said a statement. ""Utah, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and tonight's incredible results in Colorado have proven this: Republicans are uniting behind our campaign because they want a leader with real solutions who will bring back jobs, freedom, and security.""
+
+Earlier in the afternoon, Cruz had urged state Republicans here at the Broadmoor Arena to help him defeat Trump.
+
+""If we continue to stand united, we are going to win this Republican nomination. We are going to win the general election. We are going to win the state of Colorado and we are going to turn this country around,"" Cruz said to huge cheers from the arena floor.
+
+In yet another sign of his airtight ground game, Cruz spoke before a huge screen displaying his slate of delegates for the final 13 spots, and he noted that his slate was also printed on the bright orange T-shirts that his many volunteers were wearing on the state convention floor.
+
+Trump's campaign, by contrast, initially distributed fliers listing the campaign's national delegate candidates that were riddled with errors. The flier displaying the Trump slate is supposed to be the tip sheet that party members use to fill out their ballot. But on the first slate that the Trump campaign was giving out, more than a half dozen of their delegate candidates were listed with the wrong delegate number. At least one of the delegate numbers corresponded to a delegate supporting Cruz.
+
+The Trump campaign reprinted the flier, but the second flier also included several errors.
+
+Before the voting began, Trump campaign adviser Patrick Davis said in an interview that the team had been given ""incomplete"" information by the Colorado Republican Party about delegate numbers.
+
+Later in the evening, as the votes were being counted, senior Trump adviser Alan Cobb said several supporters had told the campaign that their ballot number had changed numerous times or that their name did not appear on the party's official list of national delegate candidates even though they had filled out the proper paperwork.
+
+Alan Cobb, the senior adviser to Trump, said the campaign was looking into the reports of balloting problems and was not ruling out a challenge to seating the Colorado delegation at the national convention in July.
+
+A spokesman for the state party said it was looking into the reports but had no immediate comment.
+
+It was unclear how much confusion that caused, but the Trump campaign has acknowledged that it did not expect to win any delegates in Colorado.
+
+While there was fervent enthusiasm for Cruz, former New Hampshire Sen. John E. Sununu, who was Ohio Gov. John Kasich's surrogate at the gathering, was greeted with polite applause.
+
+""We've got to unify behind that candidate who will win,"" Sununu told the crowd, pointing to Kasich's strength in general election polling matchups with Hillary Clinton. Kasich, however, had not won any delegates as of Saturday afternoon.
+
+Trump campaign surrogate Stephen Miller, a policy adviser to the real estate magnate, drew a warmer response by opening his speech with a focus on the issue that helped carry Trump to the top of the Republican field: Immigration.
+
+""Do you think the United States of America needs to secure its border?"" Miller asked the crowd, which shouted ""Yes"" in response. Before even mentioning Trump's candidacy, Miller went on to read letters from parents who he said had lost their children to ""illegal immigrant violence.""
+
+""These Americans deserve a voice and I am going to give it to them today,"" Miller said. ""It's the powerless who are standing up behind Mr. Trump.""
+
+Cruz dominated the intricate delegate selection process of the Colorado Republican Party, and in this pivotal swing state, a strong campaign organization has often made the difference between defeat and victory in the race to the White House.
+
+In this first round for the GOP, Team Cruz once again proved its mettle -- far outpacing the efforts of Trump and Kasich in the scramble for delegates at each of the congressional district gatherings this week.
+
+By late Friday, Cruz had swept all the available delegates in the state's seven congressional districts.
+
+In the final rounds of a messy and chaotic process Friday, candidates vying to be one of Colorado's delegates lined up along the walls of the ballroom at a Doubletree hotel here waiting their turn to deliver campaign speeches. ""You have 10 seconds. Go!"" a party official barked as the first candidate stepped to the microphone Friday morning.
+
+Cruz volunteers seemed to be everywhere, working the hallways where party members were crammed shoulder to shoulder among vendors peddling Cruz infinity scarves and Trump-style ""Make America Great Again"" hats. In one corner, a hot pink handwritten sign lured the undecided over to talk to ""Cruz Persuasion Teams.""
+
+The ballroom floor was littered Cruz campaign slates (the tip sheets indicating which delegates are endorsed by the campaign). Scattered across the room were glossy copies of the ""Donald Trump Voter Guide,"" which is actually an anti-Trump pamphlet distributed by one of the super PACs that is trying to defeat him.
+
+Amid all the jostling, shouting and chaos throughout the day Friday, delegates aligned with Cruz won again and again.
+
+Trump still maintains a wide lead over Cruz in the delegate count as the two candidates attempt to win the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the Republican nomination.
+
+But at a time when a contested convention looks increasingly likely, there was palpable disdain for Trump's candidacy among the GOP faithful here. His string of unforced errors, nasty tweets and controversial policy statements in recent weeks have clearly taken a toll.
+
+""The momentum against Trump at the activist level is just frothing,"" said Josh Penry, a former state senator who was Marco Rubio's state chairman in Colorado. ""There was a time when Trump could have competed in Colorado. That time has long since passed. ... Among the activists, the tide has turned against him dramatically.""
+
+Trump canceled a planned rally in Colorado this week as he focused his efforts on New York, which holds its critical primary on April 19.
+
+While Trump had some fervent supporters here at the state convention, it was clear from the speeches delivered by delegate candidates that his appeal has worn thin for many Republicans -- a testament to how much work the real estate magnate would have to do to unite the party if he becomes the nominee.
+
+At Thursday night's gathering for Colorado's 7th Congressional District, 19-year-old student Angel Merlos urged the crowd to elect him as a Cruz delegate to the convention, because he said the nation's values and morals were at stake if Trump were to become the Republican nominee.
+
+""Morality is about how you act, how you speak, and how you carry yourself,"" Merlos said in interview after his brief speech in Arvada. ""I believe Trump has no morals because he lies about many things. ... He contradicts himself on everything.""
+
+""He thinks he knows what will help the immigration problem, but he doesn't,"" Merlos continued. ""He talks about a wall -- that may do something. I don't know exactly what it will do. But he uses immigrants to help him build his buildings, and yet he's so cruel and harsh"" when he talks about them, Merlos said.
+
+Delegate candidate David Head ran as an ""unpledged"" delegate in the hope of serving as a voice against Trump on the floor of Republican convention in July.
+
+""I think he would be a disaster for both the Republican Party and the country,"" said Head, who owns an insurance business in Westminster, Colorado, with his son.
+
+""He confuses intimidation and bluster with straight talk and honesty. I think he is anti-woman. I think he is saying whatever he thinks will sell to get him a vote, and I think he's playing on the fears and prejudices of a lot of people to intimidate people into voting for him.""
+
+Libby Szabo, a Jefferson County Commissioner who won a slot as a Cruz delegate to the national convention, said as a conservative, she was troubled by Trump's recent comments about punishing women who have illegal abortions. (Trump backed off that position after an uproar from opposite sides of the political spectrum.)
+
+""I like that he has started a dialogue in our party that we need to have. I just don't see him as being consistent,"" Szabo said. ""One week he says one thing, the next week he says another thing.""
+
+Trump campaign looks to step up operation
+
+Beyond the simmering anti-Trump sentiment here, Cruz's strength in the delegate chase in Colorado (as well as states like North Dakota, Louisiana and Tennessee) has once again exposed the deficiencies of Trump's organizing operation, which is scrambling to catch up.
+
+Trump's allies insist there is still time to streamline their delegate wrangling operation and time to persuade even those who are resistant to his brand of politics at this moment.
+
+One Trump adviser said they entered the Colorado GOP contests with the expectation of winning ""zero delegates"" -- and were pleased at the end of the day Friday that they had won two alternate delegates pledged to Trump in Congressional District 4.
+
+""This is just the beginning of a four-month process to convince the unpledged delegates and alternates in Colorado that Donald Trump means what he says, he's going to make America great again,"" said Davis, a Colorado-based political consultant who joined the Trump team this week after Trump's campaign manager fired their Colorado state director.
+
+In conversations with Cruz supporters, Davis brushed off questions about Trump's poor standing in general election match-ups with Hillary Clinton, arguing that ""polls taken today, six months away from November, are garbage, and will not be predictive on election day.""
+
+As for Cruz's clear organizational advantage, Davis said Trump's team remains undaunted.
+
+""This is an insider's game,"" Davis said, as he waited for the final votes of the day to be tabulated. ""Nowhere in America, including Colorado, are insiders the heart and soul of the Trump campaign.""
+
+But the question is whether Trump can get geared up in time to win that insider's game.
+
+His campaign announced an expanded role this week for veteran GOP operative Paul Manafort, who is managing convention activities for Trump -- just as he did for the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole.
+
+Becky Mizel, a Trump volunteer who was the former chair of the Pueblo County Republican Party in Colorado, said she wasn't discouraged by Trump's poor showing in the state.
+
+""Cruz has a very strong organization here,"" she said when asked about the obstacles her candidate had faced. One of Cruz's most powerful allies, she noted, was the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, which circulated ubiquitous blue fliers touting Cruz delegates at every voting location this week.
+
+Mizel credited the head of the group, Dudley Brown (who she counts as a friend), with ""organizing the Cruz machine with the legislators who have decided to go and block Mr. Trump.""
+
+""The average person on the street is working or raising their kids -- they aren't political junkies like the caucus attendees are -- and those are the people that are attracted to Mr. Trump,"" she said.
+
+At the same time, Mizel said she was relieved that the Trump campaign now seems to grasp the gravity of the task before them as they prepare for the possibility of a contested convention.",REAL
+9333,Mourning in America—A “Patriot Spring” In Europe?,"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name => Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin isn't happy. Credit: VDare.com. 
+St Thomas Aquinas told us that one of the pleasures enjoyed by the blessed in Heaven was to contemplate the sufferings of the damned in Hell. Apparently if you get to Heaven there is a sort of balcony you have access to where you can stand and watch the sinners down below being prodded, scorched, and flayed. 
+Far be it from me to bandy theology with the Angelic Doctor, but I’ve always thought that divine justice should have a bit more charity in it than that. Whatever: Down here in the terrestrial sphere, there’s no doubt that one of the pleasures of winning an election is seeing the torments of the losers. 
+One of the first losers out of the gate, on Wednesday morning, was the curiously named Steven Thrasher [ ] of BuzzFeed. It’s not the “Steven” that excites my curiosity, it’s the “Thrasher.” Mr. Thrasher is a homosexual ; indeed, he basks in the glory of having received the 2012 Journalist of the Year award from the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. I know it’s Neanderthal of me, but I can’t help wondering whether “Thrasher” is an assumed name, meant to signal something to those in the know…but that’s idle speculation on my part. 
+So here was Mr. Thrasher on Wednesday morning: 
+This is a terrifying moment for America. Hold your loved ones close. 
+People of color, women, Muslims, queer people, the sick, immigrants: all are threatened by Donald Trump. They need your love, your warmth, your support Hold tight to the ones you love, America. Hold tight to the ones you love living in black and brown and yellow and native skin. Hold tight to us, because we will have to face white people who think we are rapists. We will have to face a nation that wants to stop-and-frisk us. Hold tight to us, because mass incarceration is actually going to get worse, and more of our brothers and sisters are going to be disappeared … This is a terrifying moment for America. Hold your loved ones close, Guardian , November 9, 2016 
+It goes on—or thrashes on—for another six hundred words in the same vein. 
+Homosexualists were very much to the fore in this kind of hysteria , although I can’t recall anything Donald Trump has said on the subject, and I doubt on a priori grounds that homosex bothers him in any way. 
+For another example, here was lesbian writer Cathy Renna [ ]at Huffington Post, November 10th. Get yer hankies out: 
+This election was a hate crime. Not physical but psychological, and one that may well lead to legal and physical manifestations that would very much be categorized as hate crimes. 
+I saw and heard about such pain and fear on social media and personally as we realized Trump would take the election. And it has not let up. I checked on several people who were expressing a level of fear that seem like it could lead to self-harm. 
+A Vote For Trump Was A Hate Crime , November 11, 2016 
+That one also continues for over 600 words. 
+Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is not homosexual, although he does have eccentric tastes: According to Wikipedia, he once dated Maureen Dowd. I’m afraid that brings to my mind a limerick the late Robert Conquest wrote about Ms. Dowd’s approximate U.K. equivalent, Brigid Brophy. The limerick is much too vulgar for a family website, so I’ll leave you to look it up for yourselves. 
+Mr. Sorkin unbosomed his feelings about the Trump victory in the form of a letter to his 15-year-old daughter: 
+The Trumpsters want to see people like us (Jewish, “coastal elites,” educated, socially progressive, Hollywood …) sobbing and wailing and talking about moving to Canada. I won’t give them that and neither will you. 
+Read the Letter Aaron Sorkin Wrote His Daughter After Donald Trump Was Elected President ,Vanity Fair, November 9, 2016 
+Ms. Sorkin can of course make up her own mind about moving to Canada. It’s not actually an option for her Dad, though. He’s a convicted drug felon. [ Aaron Sorkin Says He Used Drugs , AP, August 3, 2001] And Canada doesn’t give settlement visas to felons. 
+Casting around for targets on which to vent their spleen, the CultMarx crowd didn’t even spare the celebrity fluff magazines. Here’s a gal named L.V. Anderson, an associate editor at Slate previously known as an expert on Ziploc bags , breaking a butterfly on the wheel, the actual butterfly in this case being People magazine . [ Amoral PEOPLE Magazine Is Already Fawning Over How “Cute” Trump’s Family Is .[November 9, 2016] ORDER IT NOW 
+“Amoral”! People , you see, has done what they habitually do when someone gets elected President: they’ve posted pictures of Trump’s family—actually of his daughter Ivanka Kushner and her kids—whom the magazine describes as “cute.” 22 photos of Ivanka Trump and her family that are way too cute https://t.co/AZdq7b2Gwa pic.twitter.com/e6cSxQAft1 
+— People Magazine (@people) November 9, 2016 
+That has Ms. Anderson sputtering: 
+Trump and Kushner both played key roles in the most hate-filled presidential campaign in modern history. They worked tirelessly to elect a demagogue … 
+Trump and Kushner, more than anyone else, normalized Donald’s patent unfitness for the presidency. 
+And now, People is normalizing their moral bankruptcy by pretending that they are just average celebrities, as harmless as the Kardashians. 
+End sputter. Are the Kardashians really harmless , though? Discuss among yourselves. 
+And then of course there was the Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitler brigade. British Lefty historian Simon Schama on BBC Radio November 8th, quote: “Democracy often brings fascists to power. It did so to Germany in the 1930s. And so in my view it has done this evening.” [ Fury at BBC Radio 4 as Simon Schama compares Donald Trump election win to rise of HITLER , By Cyrus Engineer, Express.co.uk, November 9, 2016] 
+It’s all been wonderfully delicious to watch. In a simile that I like very much, one of my email correspondents, who lives in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, told me that, quote: 
+There are few in my zip code with whom I could share the joy of this moment. I can report that the apparatchiks are all walking around dazed and despondent, like Japanese schoolkids who have just heard the emperor announce the capitulation on the radio . 
+Added to the pleasure of hearing such wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Left is the spectacle of establishment Republicans like Paul Ryan falling into line behind The Donald. The English language has the idiom “rats deserting a sinking ship.” I can’t think of a phrase that expresses the reverse thing, rats scampering to get back on the ship as she hoists sail and starts to pick up speed, but there really ought to be one. 
+If St Thomas Aquinas got it right, and Heaven is half as much fun as this, I’m going to be very good indeed from now on in hopes of getting there at last. 
+If you go before me, save me a space on that balcony. 
+To take set this in a global perspective: VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow remarked to me the other day that an American election is the Greatest Show On Earth. 
+He’s right of course, and that’s hopeful for the human race at large. 
+Our election will surely have been an encouragement. In many European nations, just as here, a smug, entrenched political elite has been pushing a sentimental globalist ideology whose benefits to their own people have long since passed the point of diminishing returns. 
+We see this in the great crisis of illegal immigration from Africa and the Middle East. We’ve been chronicling the crisis on VDARE.com: the great floods of illegals into Germany, France, Greece, and most lately Italy. [ Italy Becomes A Leading Destination For Migrants, Matching Greece , NPR, November 6, 2016]We’ve told you about the sneaky euphemisms: “refugees,” “asylum seekers,” “migrants,” and so on. 
+No doubt some small proportion of the numbers are genuinely fleeing from something. The great majority, though, it’s plain from the news pictures, are middle-class young men from sub-Saharan Africa and reasonably stable places like Pakistan, looking for a Western lifestyle. 
+It’s overwhelmingly a problem of illegal immigration. And rising numbers of Europeans are mad as hell that their governments, far from doing anything to stop it, are actively encouraging it. 
+There you see the commonality with Trumpism in the U.S.A. Illegal immigration has been a signature Trump issue. Trump’s success in the election this week has given heart to Europeans fighting for the sovereignty of their own countries and the integrity of their borders. 
+Here’s a relevant quote from one of those Europeans: 
+[Ronald] Reagan spoke of “Poland’s struggle to be Poland.” And today, three decades later, history is about to repeat itself in the United States and in several West European countries. Of course, I am not comparing our current political elite with the Communist dictatorships with their prison cells for dissidents, but the fight of a nation to be itself, remain itself and defend its identity, that fight is also being waged today. 
+We are witnessing America’s struggle to be America, and the struggle of several European nations, among them the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany and many others to preserve their identity and liberty, to remain the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany. Everywhere, patriots are on the march. We are living the Patriot Spring. 
+Geert Wilders: The Patriot Spring – Breitbart , January 26, 2016 
+That was Dutch dissident Geert Wilders. He is the leader of a political party over there, the fifth-largest in the Dutch parliament, with twelve seats in the House and nine in the Senate. That hasn’t stopped the Establishment bringing Wilders to trial for “hate speech” after he promised an election rally that there would be fewer North Africans in Holland under a government run by his party. [ Europe’s Show Trials Are Where America’s Anti-Speech Regime Is Going, By Alex Grass, The Federalist, November 6, 2016] Wilders’ trial is ongoing. ORDER IT NOW 
+Patriots in European nations—the counterparts to those of us who write and broadcast on websites like this one—live under real threat. It’s not just the threat of show trials, either. Wilders has 24-hour police protection and sleeps at undisclosed locations. 
+That’s the fate of honest patriots in societies under the soft totalitarianism of Political Correctness. This week’s election in the U.S.A. has given them new hope. Here’s Geert Wilders’ stirring statement on his hopes for the President Elect: 
+My hope—and expectation—is that Donald Trump will follow in Reagan’s footsteps, that he will stand firm, speak the truth, concede nothing and, in doing so, inspire Western Europe to protect its freedoms against Islamization. 
+America has just liberated itself from Political Correctness. The American people expressed their desire to remain a free and democratic people. Now it is time for Europe. We can and will do the same! 
+Geert Wilders For Breitbart: The Second American Revolution Has Come, by Geert Wilders, November 9, 2016 
+The key takeaway here: Wilders’ phrase “the Patriot Spring.” I don’t know if he coined that himself or borrowed it, but it’s something to watch out for across the pond in coming months. 
+There are elections all over in Europe next year: Germany in February and September, the Netherlands itself in March, France in April, May, and June, Hungary in May, Norway in September, Czechia in October. 
+It could be that we’re looking at not just a Patriot Spring over there—but a Patriot Year. 
+If that comes to pass, it will have been partly under the inspiration of Donald Trump and our country, the U.S.A.— “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.” 
+John Derbyshire [ ] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books . He’s had t w o books published by VDARE.com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT ( also available in Kindle ) and From the Dissident Right II: Essays 2013 . His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com . (Reprinted from VDare.com  ",FAKE
+5396,BREAKING: AP Finds Proof Melania Trump Illegally Worked In U.S. PRIOR To Getting Work Visa,"  
+In what may be the last bombshell to drop prior to Election Day, the Associated Press is now reporting that they have found the smoking gun that proves Melania Trump worked illegally in the United States prior to obtaining a work visa. 
+This means: For all intents and purposes, Melania was the sort of “illegal” immigrant that her husband now labels as criminals and morally-bankrupt. The Trump family lied about this fact and conspired to cover it up for the duration of the election. This comes at a supremely bad time for Trump, who recently made Melania a campaign centerpiece – including a much publicized speech on… you guessed it… immigration. 
+Here’s what the AP found : 
+The documents obtained by the AP show she was paid for 10 modeling assignments between Sept. 10 and Oct. 15, during a time when her visa allowed her generally to be in the U.S. and look for work but not perform paid work in the country. The documents examined by the AP indicate that the modeling assignments would have been outside the bounds of her visa. 
+It is highly unlikely that the discovery will affect the citizenship status of Mrs. Trump. The government can seek to revoke the U.S. citizenship of immigrants after the fact in cases when it determines a person willfully misrepresented or concealed facts relevant to his naturalization. But the government effectively does this in only the most egregious cases, such as instances involving terrorism or war crimes. 
+According to the documents, Melania made roughly $20,000 illegally before getting her visa – only slightly less money in seven weeks than the average undocumented worker Trump disparages as “moochers” make in a year . 
+While existing standards mean Melania would likely remain a U.S. citizen despite her previous violations, her husband’s plans to crack down on illegal immigration might be working against her. Trump has long held that people who “cheated” to get into the United States illegally should be moved to the “back of the line.” Would he include his wife in that sweeping category? 
+Of course, Melania Trump should not be deported over a technicality in her early immigration status. However, her husband might want to think about that fact when he screams at rallies about rounding up families of Hispanic immigrants and shipping them out of the country. Melania is living proof that the immigration issue in this country isn’t exactly cut-and-dry. Not that Trump is known for any semblance of nuance. 
+Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+962,Donald Trump rages against the machine,"(CNN) Donald Trump is issuing a dire warning to his supporters: You're getting ripped off.
+
+""The system, folks, is rigged,"" Trump told supporters at a rally Monday night in Albany, New York. ""It's a rigged, disgusting, dirty system.""
+
+Trump is coming to grips with the creeping possibility that he could narrowly lose the Republican nomination at a contested GOP convention despite landing in Cleveland with the most delegates. And his latest comments follow a series of victories by Ted Cruz's well-oiled delegate wrangling machine at state and county Republican conventions, most recently this weekend when the Texas senator swept the Colorado Republican convention -- wins that are fueling Cruz in the event neither of the two men capture the 1,237 delegates needed to avoid a brokered convention.
+
+And with party elites continuing to rally around efforts to derail and delegitimize his candidacy, Trump is feeling the heat -- and using it to sow new outrage with his backers.
+
+""I say this to the RNC and I say it to the Republican Party. You're going to have a big problem folks because there are people that don't like what's going on,"" Trump said at a Rochester, New York, rally on Sunday during which he referred to the party's nominating process as ""crooked"" or ""corrupt"" seven times during his speech.
+
+He also called attention eight times during that speech to the ""millions"" of votes he has pulled during the primary -- nearly 2 million more than Cruz.
+
+RNC chairman Reince Priebus said the rules that Trump is criticizing are ""nothing new.""
+
+At a rally in San Diego, Cruz told Trump: You lost, fair and square.
+
+""Donald, it ain't stealing when the voters vote against you. It is the voters reclaiming this country,"" Cruz said Monday. ""65,000 people voted in the state of Colorado. They just didn't vote for you. They voted for our campaign.""
+
+But voters at Trump rallies are already sharing the front-runner's outrage.
+
+""Here is the Republican Party, instead of listening to its constituents -- to the majority of America -- who are saying this is what we want, they're not backing him up. Instead they're rallying against him, which in turn, they're rallying against us,"" said the 37-year-old from Saratoga, New York.
+
+Amy Almy, a 48-year-old hairdresser who also attended Trump's rally Monday, said she now feels ""naïve"" for not realizing that ""everything was so fixed.""
+
+""You see what's happening to me and Bernie Sanders,"" Trump said Sunday in Rochester, New York. ""It's a corrupt deal going on.""
+
+Six in 10 Republican voters said in a recent CNN/ORC poll that if no major candidate earns a majority of the delegates headed into the convention, those delegates should nominate the candidate who entered with the largest pool of delegates. That candidate would most almost certainly be Trump.
+
+Trump's opponents, meanwhile, are shaking off accusations of foul play and saying Trump is failing to follow the rules.
+
+""So what? So what? That's not how it works,"" Black said. ""If he can't get a majority of the delegates, somebody else will and that's the person that won it fair and square.""
+
+""It's about the delegates, it's not about his ego,"" Black added of Trump, who has benefited from winner-take-all primary rules in several states to earn a larger share of delegates than he has votes.
+
+Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner on Monday night took to Twitter -- one of Trump's favorite stomping grounds -- to troll Trump.
+
+""How on earth are you going to defeat ISIS if you can't figure out the @cologop convention?"" Gardner tweeted, one of several in a string from his account.
+
+Black downplayed the potential of a fractured Republican Party should Trump fail to cinch the nomination at a brokered convention, but Trump's allies are painting a disastrous picture.
+
+""If there are shenanigans, it's not straightforward, all of those millions of people that Donald Trump has brought into the arena are not going to stay there, and the Republicans are going to lose,"" former presidential contender turned Trump supporter Ben Carson said late last month on Fox News. ""It's going to be absolute destruction.""
+
+Jesse Benton, the chief strategist to a pro-Trump super PAC, described an equally grim outcome.
+
+""It would be such a suicidal move for the party to nominate anybody besides Donald Trump,"" Benton said. ""If they decide to push millions of people out of the process, it's going to be devastating.""
+
+But while Trump and his supporters are warning of an establishment effort to subvert the popular outcome, the billionaire is also beginning to look for ways to outgun his opponents within the confines of the system.
+
+His hire came after Trump only recently came to the realization that he could very well win more delegates than his opponents and yet still leave the Cleveland convention without the crown he has been seeking.
+
+Trump placed a call to his longtime and now informal political adviser Roger Stone on March 25 and asked if party elites could truly ""screw"" him out of the nomination at a brokered convention, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation.
+
+Stone recommended Trump hire Manafort and by the end of the weekend, Manafort was on board.
+
+But while those gears quietly churn with his blessing, Trump's outrage is only growing louder.
+
+""We've got a corrupt system. It's not right,"" Trump said on Sunday. ""And we've got to do something about it.""",REAL
+9679,JUDICIAL WATCH: MORE CLINTON-ABEDIN EMAIL EXCHANGES OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION ON UNSECURE SERVER,"Sent: Sun Oct 25 [11:49:45] 2009 
+Subject: Re: Honduras 
+Sounds good. 
+There will be those who take a hard line on the elections, but perhaps some fence-sitting countries could be persuaded on conditional recognition. I’ll flag it for Tom and Craig. 
+From: H 
+Sent: Mon Oct 26 07:27:12 2009 
+Subject: Fw: Honduras 
+All of this did not print last night, It stopped after Fourth! [Redacted due to information “kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy;” “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources”] 
+From: Huma Abedin [Huma@clintonemail.com] 
+Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 8:06:12 AM 
+To: humaabedin [Redacted] 
+Subject: Fw: Honduras 
+The emails also include an exchange between Abedin, Clinton personal assistant Lauren Jiloty, and Iris Anaya, the assistant to sugar magnate and Clinton Foundation donor Alfonso Fanjul concerning a request for special access to Clinton. On October 13, 2009, Anaya emailed Abedin seeking to arrange a meeting between Fanjul, the CEO of Florida Crystals, and Clinton. Jiloty responded the next day, asking that Anaya talk with Clinton scheduler Lona Valmoro about “setting up a meeting.” Fanjul donated more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation and was a Bill Clinton co-chairman in Florida. 
+In an October 26, 2009, email exchange, power attorney and Hillary Clinton financial supporter, Charlie Ann Syprett, contacted Doug Band, apparently seeking help in getting around U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) restrictions on U.S. citizens’ ability to travel to Cuba. Syprett ostensibly wanted a waiver from the restrictions to enable people from her organization, SYC Charitable Foundation, to travel to Cuba, noting “we are not asking for something out of the ordinary.” 
+The emails also show that Valmoro sent Clinton’s government schedule to the unsecure email addresses of numerous members of the Clinton Foundation staff on October 16, 2009, again on October 18, 2009, and on October 25, 2009. The emails also include discussions of personnel matters and appointments on Clinton’s unsecure account, which may run afoul of federal privacy law. 
+This is the thirteenth set of records produced for Judicial Watch by the State Department from the non-state.gov email accounts of Huma Abedin. The documents were produced under a court order in a May 5, 2015, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department requiring the agency to produce “all emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013, using a ‘non-state’.gov email address” ( Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)). Previous records releases documented special Clinton State Department consideration for Clinton Foundation supporters (see here , here , and here .) 
+“We’ve once again uncovered classified information in Hillary Clinton’s and Huma Abedin’s emails,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It is frankly remarkable that the FBI and Justice Department are only now investigating Abedin’s connection to Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.” Post navigation",FAKE
+5752,America’s Senator Jeff Sessions Warns of Worsening Pre-Election Border Anarchy, ,FAKE
+6673,The illuminati card ‘Enough Is Enough’ a harbinger of things to come?,"The illuminati card ‘Enough Is Enough’ a harbinger of things to come? 
+
+For more than two decades the infamous Illuminati Card Game, created in 1994 by Steve Jackson, has been proven to be a remarkably accurate when it comes to the prediction for future events.
+
+Already several worldwide events had their own card prior to the evening happening.
+
+Now The US elections are behind us and Donald Trump has been elected as the next US President, once again there are two cards which really stand out.
+
+Both cards bear a striking resemblance to Donald Trump.
+
+The first card ‘Charismatic Leader’ shows a man speaking to a fanatic crowd with the following text:
+
+The increased power takes immediately effect. 
+
+
+The second card ‘Enough is Enough’ shows the likeness to Donald Trump with a bullet whizzing by his head with the following text: 
+At any time, our snipers lay you in every place. Have a nice day. 
+
+
+Now that Donald Trump has come so far to become the 45th president, the people in power want him stopped before he causes any more upset to their status quo. It means that he will become a target.
+
+Some of their methods to stop Donald Trump: Sabotage, economic crisis, civil unrest, false flag operations, cyber attacks and if they have no success to stop him then it is quite possible that they play their last card: Assassination.
+
+Very disturbing is also the warning of Baba Vanga, a Bulgarian-born prophet - who died in 1996 aged 85, and who had an alleged prediction success rate of 85 per cent.
+
+She correctly predicted that the 44th President of the United States would be an African-American and this black President (Obama) would be the last US President.
+
+Obama technically remains President until Donald Trump is sworn in on January 20, 2017 but if Baba Vanga’s prediction would be correct again then something will happen with Donald Trump before January 20, 2017 and Barack Obama will serve a third term with all its consequences.
+
+Baba Vanga’s prediction and especially the second card could be a warning for an upcoming assassination attempt against Donald Trump? 
+
+
+UFO Sighting Hotspot 
+SOURCE ",FAKE
+4526,Delta State shooting: Shannon Lamb kills himself,"When officers finally caught up to him late Monday, he made good on his threat, police said: He pulled out a gun and killed himself.
+
+Lamb was the suspect in two killings: that of Ethan Schmidt, who was shot in the head in his office on the campus of Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, and of Amy Prentiss, who was found shot to death at a home in Gautier, a coastal city about 300 miles away from the university.
+
+A candlelight vigil is scheduled Tuesday evening at Delta State to remember Schmidt.
+
+The hunt for Lamb brought together campus police and city police, as well as the Mississippi Highway Patrol, Bolivar County Sheriff's Department and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. At some point, Lamb spoke with police and told them ""he wasn't going to jail,"" Gautier Police Chief Dante Elben said. Late Monday, officers spotted Lamb pull over his car near Greenville and run into the woods. Soon afterward, they heard a single gunshot and found Lamb's body. Lamb taught at Delta State with Schmidt. He lived with Prentiss, 41. But beyond that connection, authorities have not disclosed a motive. ""We're not going to speculate on a motive until we have facts in hand,"" Cleveland Police Chief Charles Bingham said. posted a copy of the letter that read: ""I am so very sorry. I wish I could take it back. I loved Amy and she is the only person who ever loved me."" posted a copy of the letter that read: ""I am so very sorry. I wish I could take it back. I loved Amy and she is the only person who ever loved me."" CNN affiliate WLOX posted a copy of the letter that read: ""I am so very sorry. I wish I could take it back. I loved Amy and she is the only person who ever loved me."" At a midnight news conference, Delta State University President William LaForge said that Lamb had taught at the school for a while and had been teaching online geography courses. He recently asked to take a reduced load of classes for medical reasons, said LaForge, who did not elaborate about Lamb's supposed medical issues. Lamb's death ended a surreal day for students and staffers at Delta State, about 115 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. The school was locked down throughout the day, its buildings cleared. Only 250 of the 1,150 students remained on campus, confined to their dormitories. Classes are canceled for Tuesday but counselors are on hand to meet with anyone who needs help, said LaForge. ""It was probably the scariest thing I have been through in a while,"" said Dean Arnold, a student who had Schmidt as a professor. A photo on the Delta State University website shows Ethan Schmidt, left, and Shannon Lamb at a holiday party. Schmidt and Lamb taught together at Delta State. A photo on the school's website shows them standing side by side, smiling at a 2013 holiday party. That same year, Schmidt thanked Lamb in the acknowledgments of his book says he received his Ph.D. from Delta State in 2014, and has taught geography and social sciences education courses there. says he received his Ph.D. from Delta State in 2014, and has taught geography and social sciences education courses there. A biography of Lamb posted on the school's website says he received his Ph.D. from Delta State in 2014, and has taught geography and social sciences education courses there. Lamb, he said, was a talented musician who played guitar and harmonica. ""You know, you would have never have thought that something like this would happen. You'd want to be like him and play guitar,"" he said. Schmidt's Delta State biography says that he taught undergraduate courses in American history, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 2007. Schmidt had written several books and scholarly papers and had expertise in Native American history. ""It's going to be shocking because I have Mr. Schmidt three out of five days,"" Arnold said. ""It's going to be a lot different without him."" Before working at Delta State, Schmidt taught for six years at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, where he received the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2011. ""We lost one of our beloved professors today,"" Michelle Roberts, vice president of university relations at Delta State, told reporters. ""We are grieving on this campus.""",REAL
+9155,Sean Hannity Loses His Cool on Air and Goes Completely Nuclear on 'Never Trump' Movement,"Getty - Saul Loeb/AFP The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
+Sean Hannity took to the radio on Wednesday and was upfront about how he really feels about conservatives who refuse to vote for Trump. 
+He kicked off his explosive rant by telling his listeners that he's “pissed,” and said: 
+""In 13 freaking days, we are either going to make a decision to keep screwing the country up or we are going to try and fix it. That's what's at stake here. 
+You want to get 95 million Americans back to work, you want to get the economy going, you want a president that has the courage to say 'radical Islam.' 
+You want to not bring in refugees from countries that have laws that are the antithesis of our constitutional values. 
+You want to control the borders, you want become energy independent, you want to eliminate Obamacare, you want to fix are dilapidated piece of crap educational system, this is your chance."" 
+Then, he went nuclear on the “Never Trump” movement. 
+You can listen to Hannity's full rant, below : ",FAKE
+7520,How Secure is Your Cellphone ??,"posted by Eddie Ever wonder how cellphones went from being a point of wealth to household commodity? Well, there’s reason to believe that the accessibility of cellphones isn’t purely coincidental. The thought originated with metadata and the possibilities made possible through the documentation of information that cellphones provide, through both backdoor access and the location data each phone provides. FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is an incredibly secret court that answers to no one and, has autonomy in not only their proceeding and rulings, but, is also highly-classified. Through this system, President’s George Bush and Barrack Obama have enabled their own domestic surveillance practices. Although, The NSA is heavily involved as well. In doing so, the government has created programs and jobs that are specific to collecting and translating meta-data. The government would have you believe that meta-data is not as invasive as specific data, but, let’s consider it this way. Imagine your coordinates being reported by the second, from the time you wake in the morning, during your commute to work, and whichever plans you have afterwards. This data system gives insight into each particular location, phone call, and the duration of said phone calls to these data collectors. Imagine being able to see each and every step your better half or child has throughout the day, and you notice they stops at location that seem unusual or speak/communicate with numbers/people unfamiliar to you while having access to the duration of those calls. Although, this leaves an opportunity for misconception, but, it also brings us to an objective truth, how revealing metadata can be. Edward Snowden, a former NSA employer who specialized in technology in the cyber division, released classified documents involving both government programs that enacted policies, and, FISA court rulings on said programs. These revelations brought his need to flee for asylum in China, and then and currently, Russia. Snowden’s attempt of transparency let Americans learn just how much census data has changed and the contracts deployed between the government and the major communications companies, such as AT&T. These companies have made millions by granting backdoor access and data to the government. Yet, this isn’t all bad. Local officials have occasionally solicited access, through communication companies, to find criminals and perpetrators of crime. For example, in 2013 California officials used the data and cellphone accessibility to find the murderer that slaughtered a man, his wife, and their two children. Until the solicitation, the local officials weren’t close to right suspect. After collaboration, the local officials were able to find, through metadata collection, analysis, and cellphone GPS, the exact location of the murderer. So, you tell me, do you think your phone is as private as you think? Written by Anthony A Fabrikant. From Around the Web Founder of WorldTruth.Tv and WomansVibe.com Eddie ( 8889 Posts ) 
+Eddie L. is the founder and owner of WorldTruth.TV. and Womansvibe.com. Both website are dedicated to educating and informing people with articles on powerful and concealed information from around the world. I have spent the last 36+ years researching Bible, History, Alternative Health, Secret Societies, Symbolism and many other topics that are not reported by mainstream media.",FAKE
+3288,Reid Won't Seek Re-Election,"Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will not seek re-election, he said in an interview with The New York Times published Friday. Reid has led the Senate Democrats since 2005.
+
+In a video posted Friday morning, Reid thanked his constituents for allowing him to serve the state of Nevada. (Watch the video above.)
+
+My life’s work has been to make Nevada and our nation better. Thank you for giving me that wonderful opportunity. https://t.co/dwy2rDWYhO
+
+In the video, Reid said he will work to help the Democrats take control of the Senate again, noting he felt it was ""inappropriate"" to ""soak up all those resources on me, when I can be devoting those resources to the caucus."" Reid also warned Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) he'd be working hard until the end of his current term.
+
+""My friend Sen. McConnell, don't be too elated,"" Reid said. ""I'm going to be here for 22 months, and you know what I'm going to be doing? The same thing I've done since I first came to the Senate.""
+
+McConnell released a statement Friday on Reid's announcement, saying he looks forward to working with Reid until his time in office is over.
+
+“Nothing has ever come easily to this son of Searchlight,"" McConnell said. ""Underestimated often, his distinctive grit and determined focus nevertheless saw him through many challenges. They continue to make him a formidable opponent today.""
+
+Reid, who broke some ribs and bones in his face after an accident that occurred while he was exercising at home in January, said his recent injuries were not the reason he decided to retire.
+
+Reid has served in the U.S. Senate since 1987, and acted as senate majority leader from 2007 to 2015. Before working in the Senate, Reid was a congressman representing Nevada in the 1980s, and before that served as the lieutenant governor of Nevada.
+
+When I was a boy, I dreamed of being an athlete. I listened to those baseball games on the radio, and I envisioned myself as a man out in center field at Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park in Boston. But the joy I’ve gotten with the work that I’ve done for the people of the state of Nevada has been just as fulfilling as if I had played center field at Yankee Stadium.
+
+The job of Minority Leader of the United States Senate is just as important as being the Majority Leader. It gives you so much opportunity to do good things for this country. And that’s what I am focused on.
+
+But this accident has caused Landra and me to have a little down time. I have had time to ponder and to think. We’ve got to be more concerned about the country, the Senate, the state of Nevada than about ourselves. And as a result of that I’m not going to run for re-election.
+
+I am going to be here for another 22 months, and you know what I’m going to be doing? The same thing I’ve done since I first came to the Senate.
+
+We have to make sure that the Democrats take control of the Senate again. And I feel it is inappropriate for me to soak up all those resources on me when I could be devoting those resources to the caucus, and that’s what I intend to do.
+
+Someone with my background, my upbringing, to have the experiences I’ve had is really a miracle. And I want you to know that I am so grateful for your invaluable support. I have done my best. I haven’t been perfect, but I’ve really tried my hardest to represent the people of the state of Nevada.",REAL
+9262,8 Terrifying Plants You Didn’t Know About,"As Halloween approaches, here are some terrifying plants and fungus you never want to run into. 
+
+Plants are not usually thought of as particularly scary. Here are 10 plants and fungus that will leave you with goosebumps on your skin. 
+
+Bleeding Tooth Fungus 
+This fungus is inedible (though not toxic), and can be found in North America, Europe, Iran, and Korea. 
+
+Young, moist fruit bodies can ‘bleed’ a bright red fluid that contains pigment known to have anticoagulant properties similar to heparin. 
+
+If you find yourself exploring the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, or North Carolina, you may run into this bloody fungus. Try not to scream. 
+
+Red Tide 
+The red tide of ‘algal bloom’ is a phenomenon that occurs in areas of the ocean that contain high concentrations of algae. The water turns red and red tides are considered to be the inspiration behind the Biblical blood ocean. 
+
+Algal blooms happen all over the world and the algae differs from body of water to body of water. The effect of the red tide can be fatal to sea creatures and humans who consume seafood contaminated with the toxin. 
+
+Although not all red tides are poisonous, their decomposing process can deplete the water of its oxygen, forcing animals to relocate or die. 
+
+Venus Flytrap 
+The venus flytrap is probably one of the most popular creepy plants. It is known for its predatory behavior towards small flying insects. Its trapping mechanism is made of what looks like a ‘mouth’, or two leaves whose hairs sense prey and toothlike cilia that keep the prey from escaping. 
+
+The venus flytrap can even tell the difference between live prey and non-prey like raindrops. The flytrap will let small prey that wouldn’t be worth the energy of digestion go. 
+
+Nonetheless, these creepy little plants are inspiration for many horror film monsters and would be a nightmare if they were human sized. 
+
+Brain Cactus 
+Varieties of mammillaria elongata, native to Mexico, grow in many different shapes and sized. The most distinctive of all is the ‘brain cactus’. 
+
+As the brain cactus matures, it looks more and more like a human brain. Imagine stumbling upon this prickly organ in the middle of the desert on a dark night! 
+
+Gympie Gympie Tree 
+The gympie gympie tree has a reputation as the most painful tree to exist. Its stinging hairs deliver a very potent neurotoxin and severe stinging. The effects of rubbing against this mean tree can even be fatal to humans. 
+
+To be affected, all you have to do is slightly touch the plant and you will feel the effects of the toxins, which can include aching joints, swelling under the armpits, and a burning sensation. 
+
+If you are unfortunate enough to be stung by this tree, be sure to remove the hairs or they will continue to release the poison into your body. 
+
+Doll’s Eye is a plant that is native to Northeast America. 
+
+It’s highly poisonous berries resemble eyeballs are ripen in the summer, staying until the frost. Just in time for Halloween! 
+
+Corpse Flower 
+This flower actually smells like rotting flesh in order to attract pollinators like beetles and flies. 
+
+The plant can grow up to 10 feet tall, and although it is called “the world’s largest flower”, it is actually made up of thousands of small flowers. 
+
+Octopus Stinkhorn 
+These mushrooms start out looking like traditional Mario-style mushrooms but mature and erupt their red tentacles to attract flies. These tentacles smell horrible and attract the flies so they can transport their “gleba” to another location for reproduction. 
+
+ ",FAKE
+8081,Why Hillary Won't Unleash World War III - Pepe Escobar,"  RT 
+The record shows Hillary “We Came, We Saw, He Died” Clinton is the ‘Queen of War’. 
+She is fully supported by virtually the whole US establishment; a bipartisan, neocon/neoliberalcon, regime change/”humanitarian” imperialist axis. 
+On the opposite side, for all his personal pathology problems and incoherent twitter-mouth ramblings, Donald Trump seemed to be on the money when he said that if elected, Hillary would use Syria to unleash WWIII. 
+To check out if that holds, let’s start with an essential backup. 
+The ‘Queen of War’, at the final US presidential debate in Las Vegas: ""A no-fly zone [in Syria] can save lives and hasten the end of the conflict."" 
+The ‘Queen of War’, in one of her 2013 speeches to Goldman Sachs, published by WikiLeaks: a no-fly zone would ""kill a lot of Syrians.” 
+The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: a no-fly zone in Syria “would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia."" why_hillary_won_t_unleash_wwiii_-_rt_op_edge.png 
+Predictably, the Clinton (cash) machine has been relentless promoting Hillary’s no-fly zone. Whenever cornered, the machine switches the narrative to Russian hacking of the DNC. Edward Snowden, who knows a thing or two about cyberwarfare, stresses there is no solid proof Russian intel hacked the Democratic/Clinton machine. And if they actually did it, the NSA would know. The fact the NSA is mum reveals this is no more than information war. 
+Pass the missile launchers, please 
+Trump seems to have been more on the money when he insisted how Hillary will be outsmarted – as she already was in the past – when dealing with President Putin, who she has demonized as Hitler. 
+I have shown how Hillary will be prevented from launching WWIII because her no-fly zone is already implemented in Syria by Russia. And the Pentagon – reflecting Dunford’s comments - knows it, no matter how emphatically soon-to-be-unemployed Pentagon head Ash Carter threatens “consequences.” 
+The Pentagon ranks Russia and China as the number one and two “existential threats” to US national security, in that order. And the US government reserves for itself the privilege of a nuclear “first-strike”– which Hillary supports (but not Trump); this is part of the 2002 Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. 
+The relentless hysteria now crystallized as Cold War 2.0 has led scores of analysts to game the actual – terrifying - possibility of a US-Russia hot war. As much as the Cold War MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine may now lie in the dust – exactly because Washington refuses to back down from “first-strike”– only armchair Dr. Strangeloves get their kicks with the possibility of fighting a nuclear power. Dunford does not seem to be one of them. 
+What Hillary Clinton will certainly do is to double down on proxy wars, Vietnam/Afghanistan-style. So expect a President Clinton to authorize full weaponization of those Beltway-loved “moderate” Al-Qaeda-in-Syria rebels with plenty of shoulder-held missile launchers. This could easily get out of control – with lethal, yet not nuclear, consequences. 
+That’s exactly the point made by Mikhail Rostovsky in Moscow daily Moskovsky Komsomolets; if Hillary ratchets up tensions, “things could get out of hand.” 
+Also expect not so proxy ratcheting up of tension in the South China Sea; after all it was Hillary who claimed ‘mothership’ of the pivot to Asia; and it was Hillary who steered intra-South East Asian maritime disputes into the boiling cauldron of wider US-China competition. 
+And if that was not hard boiled enough, US frustration will be at an all-time high after Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s own pivot to China. 
+Say hello to my new Sarmat 
+A case can be made that official Moscow is carefully getting ready to work with a Clinton – as in Obama III – presidency, with Hillary, a devil they know well when she was Secretary of State, to be dealt with as a pragmatist, unwilling and unable to plunge US-Russia relations into total incandescence. 
+A Clinton presidency for its part should know better than overestimate Russia’s financial “weakness.” 
+The national debt of Russia is only 17.7 percent of GDP; for the US it is a whopping 104.17 percent of GDP, or $19.2 trillion. Russia in 2015 had a trade surplus of $150 billion, while the US had a trade deficit of $531.5 billion. The current account surplus of Russia was 5.1 percent of GDP, or 65.8 billion, while the US ran a current account deficit of 484.1 billion, or 2.7 percent of GDP. 
+Besides, Russia has all the natural resources it needs; unlike the US government, which believes it needs an empire of bases overseas and ten aircraft carrier task forces to secure the resources it lacks. 
+Moreover, as much as the Pentagon may continue to be infested by neocon cells, sound generals are also able to identify key Russian signals – such as the unveiling of the RS-28 Sarmat nuclear missile, which NATO calls Satan 2. The Sarmat delivers monster warheads of 40 megatons; boasts a top speed of seven kilometers per second; and is able to outfox any anti-missile shield system anywhere.",FAKE
+7869,"After Terrorizing America With Zika Scaremongering, MSM Admits Zika Doesn't Cause Brain Deformities","After Terrorizing America With Zika Scaremongering, MSM Admits Zika Doesn't Cause Brain Deformities The entire leftist media is not merely dishonest and corrupt, their science writers are unbelievably... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/after-terrorizing-america-with-zika.html The entire leftist media is not merely dishonest and corrupt, their science writers are unbelievably stupid and ill-informed about nearly everything in the natural world. Today, after months of printing fear-inducing ""Zika terrorism"" stories that scared America half to death while convincing the government to funnel billions of dollars into Zika vaccine research for Big Pharma, the Washington Post now admits it had no idea what it was talking about . But rather than admitting its own science writers were scientifically illiterate propagandists pushing quack narratives as news, the paper now blames other scientists for the gross error by publishing a headline that's once again dishonest and deceptive: ""Scientists are bewildered by Zika's path across Latin America,"" it proclaims.Bewildered about ""Zika's path?"" The story headline should actually read, "" Zika HOAX revealed... it doesn't cause brain damage after all ."" (You can read it here ). Washington Post has been shamelessly pushing the Zika HOAX for months... with no apology to readers In the story, writers Dom Phillips and Nick Miroff essentially reveal that what the Washington Post has been writing about the Zika virus has been based entirely in government propaganda and pandemic lies pushed by the CDC, which of course has close ties to the criminal vaccine industry: Nearly nine months after Zika was declared a global health emergency, the virus has infected at least 650,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean, including tens of thousands of expectant mothers. But to the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil. Yes, the Washington Post now says the scientists are ""bewildered"" that their apocalyptic scare stories that caused female athletes to skip out on the Rio Olympics and scared tens of millions of Americans into poisoning themselves with DEET (a neurotoxic chemical) turned out to be total hogwash. DEET, by the way, combines with carbamate class pesticides to cause neurological dysfunction in humans , which coincidentally increases the number of people who watch CNN or read the Washington Post. For the record, no one who reads Natural News or alternative media websites is surprised by this revelations that has left mainstream scientists ""bewildered."" It's not bewildering to me. I called Zika a total hoax from day one, pointing out that the brain deformities were caused by larvacide chemicals dumped into the water supply , not by Zika. If anyone from the Washington Post bothered to read Natural News and learn about real science, they would have learned that Zika has infected tens of millions of people throughout South America for decades , with absolutely no measurable increase in neurological deformations. (But facts be damned, the WashPost had a panic to push!) Nation after nation records tens of thousands of infections with ZERO birth defects... Despite the factual reality of the situation, the state-controlled propagandists writing for rags like the Washington Post — a bogus newspaper that has lost all credibility in the minds of intelligent people — continued to pummel home their kooky science theories that claimed much of the U.S. South would be overrun by brain damaging mosquitoes, turning Southerners into shrunken-brained mutants while pregnant women fled northward to survive the airborne insect onslaught. Instead, nothing happened . No explosion in shrunken-headed babies. No wave of birth defects across Florida, even as city officials desperately bombarded their own cities with brain-damaging insecticides. No national emergency declared by Obama to bring back DDT and eradicate baby-murdering mosquitoes by dousing our open streets with thick clouds of organophosphate neurotoxins. Instead, the rate of neurological birth defects in most countries approached zero. Via the Washington Post's own graphic (partial list): Venezuela: 60,791 Zika infections... ZERO birth defects Honduras: 31,933 Zika infections... ONE birth defect Guadalupe: 30,969 Zika infections... ZERO birth defects Puerto Rico: 29,084 Zika infections... TWO birth defects Mexico: 4,837 Zika infections... ZERO birth defects From the WashPost article: Brazilian officials were bracing for a flood of fetal deformities as Zika spread this year to other regions of the country, Marinho said. However, “we are not seeing a big increase.” Gee, really? The vast majority of the brain defects, it turns out, came from just one small region of Brazil. A total of 2,033 children are so far recorded with neurological defects there, even while most other countries throughout the region had ZERO birth defects (or near zero). So what gives? Zika mosquitoes apparently carry geopolitical maps so they can solely target Brazil You don't have to be a genius to figure out that the stupid science theories of the mainstream media are total hokum and bunk . If Zika really did cause brain defects, it would have spread all across South America by now. It would have spread into Florida, California, Mississippi and Louisiana. It would have devastated the American South, Cuba, Haiti, Curacao and all the other island nations across the Caribbean. Yet the neurological defects were limited almost exclusively to Brazil. Somehow, if we believe the illiterate Washington Post science writers — who may in fact be the only brain damage victims of Zika in North America — mosquitoes carry MAPS to make sure they only activate their brain damage voodoo in Brazil . ""...[A]lthough the outbreak has spread this year to more than 50 nations and territories across the Western Hemisphere, U.N. data shows just 142 cases of congenital birth defects linked to Zika so far outside Brazil,"" says WashPost. Yes, my friends: GPA-carrying Zika mosquitoes are very careful to limit their pandemic voodoo to just one region of Brazil. By sheer coincidence, that's the same region where larvacide chemicals were dumped into the public water supply. Apparently, there isn't a single ""official"" scientist in the entire global government who has thought to test the water. Just freaking WOW... Let's throw these morons out of power in every election, okay? They don't deserve any positions of authority over anyone else. They're all so incredibly stupid, they couldn't survive at all unless they functioned as parasites on the taxpayers. They aren't giving up hope just yet... science writers desperately hope for more brain damaged babies to prove them right Enthusiasm for more brain damaged babies runs high at the Washington Post, which explains why they are all in for Hillary Clinton, the candidate of choice for brain damaged adults. Writing with a sense of real enthusiasm, the Washington Post can't wait for more brain damaged babies to appear: Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are closely watching Puerto Rico, which has reported more than 26,800 cases of Zika. More than 7,000 pregnant women could be infected by the end of the year, according to the CDC. (Yippee?) And now, the loony tunes quack science of the Zika ""scientists"" goes apoplectic, grasping for silly metaphors to try to obscure the fact that they are all stupid beyond belief. Via the WashPost: “Now we’ve settled on Zika as the smoking gun, but we don’t know who pulled the trigger,” said Marques, speaking from Recife, where he is working with government researchers. Huh? Wha? The metaphor doesn't even make any sense. Maybe the problem is too much fornicating. Seriously, this is now part of their idiotic theory: “Sexual habits and hygiene may also play a role,” he said, explaining that researchers are looking at whether sexual transmission can infect the uterus and placenta with the virus, potentially exposing the fetus to elevated risk. “We suspect the villain has an accomplice, but we don’t know who it is,” Marques said. Huh? Do they seriously think that people only have sex in Brazil but not other South American countries? Where does the Washington Post find these morons? I'm a real scientist saying all this As you read all this, remember that I have rapidly become one of the world's leading research scientists on the quantitation of cannabinoids in hemp extracts using mass spec instrumentation. I led the team that developed the most pioneering (and accurate) CBD mass spec analysis method in existence today. You can read about it at this link . I also routinely test water, food and environmental samples for heavy metals, pesticides and a multitude of chemical contaminants. When I say these Zika scientists are complete morons, that's the educated opinion of an accomplished scientist correctly pointing out the lunacy of Zika scaremongering. I could have solved this entire problem in the first few days by analyzing and detecting brain-damaging larvacide chemicals in the public water supply in Eastern Brazil. The entire project would have taken just a few days and cost almost nothing. Instead, Obama handed $1.8 billion to the vaccine companies in the midst of the Zika panic pushed by laughable rags like the Washington Post. It's all a racket, of course, just like their coverage of elections and political candidates. Everything you read at the Washington Post is a deception of one kind or another . The paper exists solely to promote the propaganda of the state so that the population can be manipulated and controlled. The Washington Post exists to terrorize the citizens with fascist propaganda parading as science As you've also learned by now, the corrupt leftist establishment of junk science, criminal politicians and idiotic journalists isn't interested in legitimate scientific solutions . They all function as extensions of a fascist state that must routinely terrorize its citizens with pandemic boogeyman scare stories in order to demand absolute obedience to the vaccine mandates that actually do damage the brains of children. Thus, SCIENCE be damned. They've got an agenda to push, and it doesn't matter to them whether that agenda is based on a single shred of real science. Zika is dangerous because they told you so, in exactly the same way they told you Hillary Clinton is totally honest, Obamacare would make health care more affordable, there's no such thing as voter fraud in America, and GMOs and vaccines are really, really good for you. So you can put down the DEET and stop poisoning your skin like an obedient idiot. Yes, it was all a scam. Yes, the official ""science"" was totally rigged. Yes, the media lied to you yet again. Yes, the CDC is a criminal racket. Yes, all the health ""officials"" were completely full of s**t. And no, Zika is not going to cause your babies to be born with shrunken heads. VACCINES, on the other hand, will most definitely cause brain damage, as they still contain mercury, a potent neurotoxin the Washington Post ridiculously insists becomes magically neutralized when you inject it into the body of a child. By Mike Adams Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+4798,4 Things To Watch At The First Presidential Debate,"4 Things To Watch At The First Presidential Debate
+
+The first presidential debate tonight is shaping up to be one of the most-watched political events ever, with a potentially Super Bowl-size audience.
+
+Here are four things to watch for as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump take the stage at Hofstra University on Long Island.
+
+Donald Trump ""won"" the primary debates by dominating his opponents, often by name-calling and bluster. This one will be different.
+
+Instead of facing multiple opponents, he will be doing something he's never done before — face off against just one opponent (and in this case an experienced one) on a debate stage.
+
+Trump's goal is to present himself as a plausible president, someone voters can imagine as commander in chief. And he has work to do, since majorities of voters say he doesn't have the judgment or qualifications to be president. So Trump needs to show a basic command of policy — and in particular, his own policies. He has made so many contradictory statements about his plans for Syria, ISIS, tax reform and crime fighting that he will have a real thicket to untangle.
+
+Trump wants to reach those voters who won't want to vote for Clinton but are worried about his temperament. Does that mean the new ""teleprompter Trump"" will show up tonight? He has proven that he can maintain a little more discipline in a set-piece speech, but there are no teleprompters in a 90-minute debate.
+
+And although Trump benefits from low expectations, his team isn't even trying to make him out to be the underdog. On Sunday morning, Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, called him ""the Babe Ruth of debating.""
+
+Clinton has the much tougher task tonight. She has the burden of high expectations.
+
+The former senator and secretary of state, who has now been through two presidential campaigns, is an experienced debater who knows policy inside and out.
+
+But her job is very hard — Clinton has to convince voters who don't want to vote for Trump but haven't warmed up to her that she is likeable, honest and trustworthy. And she has to press her case that Trump is unqualified to be president without being overly aggressive or ""harsh.""
+
+Gender communications research shows that debaters who are on offense win, and those that are on defense lose. But being on offense for a woman is tricky. Male debaters who are aggressive are perceived positively; female politicians who are aggressive in debates are perceived negatively.
+
+So Clinton has to stay on offense without being angry. All of that advice about ""smiling"" that drives Clinton's supporters nuts? It's unfair, but that's just the way it is, says Brett O'Donnell, a veteran Republican debate coach: ""People like to see a happy warrior. Clinton has to look like she's enjoying herself even if she's not.""
+
+Both campaigns have been working the refs hard. Trump has said the debate system is ""rigged"" against him, and he falsely accused NBC's Lester Holt, the moderator for tonight's debate, of being a registered Democrat. Holt is an experienced journalist who happens to be a registered Republican.
+
+The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, has complained about a double-standard. It says the media creates a ""false equivalence"" between Trump's falsehoods and Clinton's, even though numerous fact checks have shown that Trump prevaricates many more times than Clinton does.
+
+In the recent NBC commander-in-chief forum, Clinton's top aides said moderator Matt Lauer grilled Clinton a lot more intensely than Trump. And they say that for tonight's debate the moderator and the TV networks — with the crawl at the bottom of the screen — have a responsibility to fact-check Trump in real time.
+
+There are three phases to a debate:
+
+First, the pregame expectations-setting and referee-massaging, which has been going on at a furious pace over the past week.
+
+Second, the debate itself.
+
+And third, the post-debate spin.
+
+Debates are not forums to score policy points. They are tests of character and demeanor. And they are often judged not in their totality, but by ""moments"" — the zingers and put-downs that the candidates prepare in advance. Those moments — ""Where's the beef?"" ""You're no Jack Kennedy,"" ""There you go again"" — help determine who voters think won or lost the debate.
+
+But there are many debates that were ""won"" in the hours after the candidates left the stage by the campaign that was more adept at getting its narrative into the media.
+
+Follow along with the NPR Politics team's coverage of tonight's debate, which starts at 9 p.m. ET, at npr.org and on many NPR member stations.",REAL
+9175,"Ancient Sumerian Writings Reveal The Earth Was Ruled By Eight Immortal Kings For 241,200 Years","Ancient Sumerian Writings Reveal The Earth Was Ruled By Eight Immortal Kings For 241,200 Years Please scroll down for video 
+More than a dozen copies of a mysterious text referred to as the Sumerian King Lists have been uncovered over the years by archaeologists in regions as disparate as ancient Babylon, Susa, and Assyria. They are all believed to be copies of a single original manuscript which is thought to have been written during the Third Dynasty of Ur by most historians, although some believe it might have been written even earlier. The best-preserved example of this ancient text is called the Weld-Blundell Prism and is on public display in the Ashmolean Museum. An ancient text tells of alien rulers of ancient Earth 
+The Sumerian King Lists have baffled historians ever since they were uncovered by modern human beings. The text describes a fascinating period in history when beings referred to as gods ruled over humankind of tens of thousands of years. The manuscript makes reference to eight kings who ‘descended from heaven’ who ruled for an astonishingly long period of 241,200 years. Each of these deified kings met their end during the Great Flood which devastated the population of the world. After the flood, the text claims that another ‘kingship was lowered from heaven’ and that these beings took up control of the people of Earth once again . 
+For a long time, it has been believed that the stories of these incredibly long-lived kings, their eventual demise, and their replacement were simply the mythology of the ancient civilization who compiled the Sumerian King List. However, some have speculated that the text might not be mythology at all. The fact that the kings are said to have descended from heaven has led a few people to suggest that they might have been of an otherworldly origin. This would mean that their incredibly long reigns over the cities might be literal rather than metaphorical as these alien beings might have had much longer lifespans than human beings. They may have even been immortal. 
+This article (Ancient Sumerian Writings Reveal The Earth Was Ruled By Eight Immortal Kings For 241,200 Years) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
+8307,Losing Trump Tries to Fool Voters with Last Ditch Media Propaganda Scam,"What to do when the October surprise aimed at your opponent flops and your polls are bad, so bad, really bad? 
+How about more propaganda! 
+The losing Trump campaign’s latest Hail Mary is to try to fool voters with a last ditch media propaganda push by recruiting volunteers to blitz talk radio with “talking points” and “monitor” discussions and callers. 
+Shared by Talk Show host and Editor-in-chief of Right Wisconsin.com Charlie Sykes: Welp. Trump campaign planning ""talk radio blitz."" Recruiting volunteers to call shows with talking points. https://t.co/eWR5qLKRjR 
+— Real Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) October 31, 2016 
+From the Trump campaign’s call to action: 
+Trump Talk Radio Blitz 2016 Help get Donald Trump elected! Please sign up below to volunteer to call into talk radio over the final days of this Presidential campaign and tell Wisconsin’s voters why you support Donald Trump. We are looking for volunteers to sign up as a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Call Captain and/or a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Caller. 
+Thank you for your willingness to help elect Donald Trump and Mike Pence this very important election year! 
+What will these call captains do? Oh, “monitor” other the show and discussions, give talking points — you know, propaganda: 
+I am willing to help! (check all the apply) I am willing to serve as a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Call Captain, taking responsibility to monitor and recruit other callers for one or more talk radio programs between now and election day 
+I am willing to be a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Caller and select one or more 15 minute segments for local talk radio shows to call into and promote Donald Trump’s campaign 
+Call “Captains” will be in charge of entire shows to make sure the Trump message gets out and “monitor” discussions lest anyone bring any facts to the air: 
+Call Captains will sign up to be responsible for an entire talk radio program or programs between now and the election to 1) help recruit callers to call in and promote Donald Trump’s campaign throughout the program for that day, 2) remind Trump Talk Radio Blitz Callers who have sign up of their commitment to call into the show, 3) help ensure your Trump Talk Radio Blitz Callers are prepared to discuss the show’s topics, 4) monitor the show and the discussions, and 5) report your successes back to the campaign. 
+Paid for by the Trump campaign: 
+I mean, it’s working so well for the Trump spokespeople, especially those propaganda artists embedded on a certain cable network. Why not organize non-professionals to give the same talking points and disseminate them in a way that appears “organic”. LOL, I kid. If you’ve run into these people in a comment section or forums you know they have the campaign message down so exactly as to be a screaming siren of talking points. 
+So when you hear screaming tinfoil about fake polls and accusations that Hillary Clinton committed treason even though she was actually cleared, you needn’t worry that your entire country has gone insane. 
+This is the last gasp of a sinking campaign trying to fool the voters with media propaganda dished out by “volunteers”.",FAKE
+2154,"New snowstorm, new target: South under siege","The latest winter storm to rattle the Eastern USA was poised Monday to deal battered Boston only a glancing blow while blasting several states in the South and East.
+
+Despite bitterly cold temperatures, Boston was happy for a respite from snow after a weekend storm dumped 16.5 inches on the city, pushing the winter total to 8 feet — and counting.
+
+Boston's forecast called for a few more inches Tuesday, far short of what was rolling toward less well-equipped areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and Maryland.
+
+Washington, D.C., not known for its prowess in handling big storms, was bracing for between 4 and 8 inches of snow, most of it falling early Tuesday and tapering off during the morning commute. With up to a foot forecast farther south, in Roanoke and Richmond, Va., Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a statewide emergency.
+
+Non-essential travel was discouraged, and thousands of students throughout the region will get another day off Tuesday, courtesy of Winter Storm Octavia.
+
+Bitter cold temperatures were adding to the region's woes. Washington's high temperature was forecast to reach 25 degrees — about 20 degrees below average for the date.
+
+Frigid temperatures plagued New England on Monday. Mount Washington, N.H., recorded a low of -34 degrees with a wind-chill factor of -87. A New York City hiker who activated her emergency personal locator beacon in the state's Presidential Range amid minus-30 temperatures and 100-mph winds was found dead Monday.
+
+In Kentucky, a section of Interstate 71 near Louisville closed Monday shortly after the snow started. Parts of the state could see more than a foot of snow, the National Weather Service said.
+
+""For Louisville, it could be one of the worst (snowstorms) in 10 years,"" said meteorologist Joe Sullivan.
+
+In Nashville, homeless shelter volunteer coordinator Robb McCluskey said he was worried that a few inches of slush, ice and snow would keep drivers from bringing people to the shelter and keep church congregations from delivering dinner.
+
+""That's the big issue,"" McCluskey said, ""seeing how others are going to survive it.""
+
+Jacksboro, Tenn., reported a midday total of a half inch of ice on the ground.
+
+The Weather Channel reported that ""snow, sleet and freezing rain will make travel difficult, and winter storm warnings have already been posted for almost 47 million people.""
+
+That could translate to 4 inches of nasty ice and snow as far south as northern Georgia.
+
+Atlanta forecasters cautioned about possible black ice for the morning commute after a day of cold rain and overnight temperatures dipping below freezing.
+
+Frigid temperatures were reported all across the northeastern USA Monday morning: Erie, Pa., dropped to minus-18 degrees, tying the city's all-time record low temperature, according to the National Weather Service. Cleveland's minus-8 degree reading broke a daily record low previously set in 1904.
+
+Daily record lows were also tied or broken in Detroit, Baltimore, Syracuse, Toledo, Trenton, N.J., and Wilmington, Del., the Weather Channel reported.
+
+Boston fell to minus-3 degrees, its coldest reading since January 2004, while Philadelphia bottomed out at 3 degrees, its coldest since January 2005, meteorologist Matt Lanza reported.
+
+Airlines took notice of the cold and snow, canceling more than 1,000 flights nationwide Monday and more than 300 for Tuesday. Monday's cancellations were scattered across airports from New England to the Deep South as lingering disruptions from the weekend's blizzard mixed with the latest winter storm.
+
+Still, no region has faced more winter difficulties than eastern Massachusetts. In Boston, the 58.5 inches of snow so far this month makes February 2015 the city's snowiest month on record, the National Weather Service reported. That's 10 times what the city typically receives in February.
+
+The city's 2014-15 winter is the third-snowiest on record, with more than 95 inches recorded so far. The city is only 12 inches away from its snowiest winter ever — based on records dating to the 1870s.
+
+""It's certainly not a record that we want,"" Mayor Marty Walsh told the Boston Herald. ""It looks like a record we can get.""
+
+Contributing: Doyle Rice, Ben Mutzabaugh, Michael Winter and Melanie Eversley, USA TODAY; Matthew Glowicki, The (Louisville) Courier-Journal; Stacey Barchenger, The (Nashville) Tennessean, Associated Press.",REAL
+8895,"FBI FOUND ""TENS OF THOUSANDS OF EMAILS"" BELONGING TO HUMA ABEDIN ON WEINER'S LAPTOP","Home › POLITICS › FBI FOUND “TENS OF THOUSANDS OF EMAILS” BELONGING TO HUMA ABEDIN ON WEINER’S LAPTOP FBI FOUND “TENS OF THOUSANDS OF EMAILS” BELONGING TO HUMA ABEDIN ON WEINER’S LAPTOP 5 SHARES 
+[10/29/16] With furious Democrats – and the Clinton Campaign – now openly blasting the FBI’s reopened investigation (as Republicans take delight for once in having a government agency reinforce their side of events), the question turns to just what emails were found on Weiner’s laptop, and how damaging their contents are for the FBI to take the unprecedented step of “intervening” in a major political event just days before the national election. 
+We first laid what was the most likely explanation yesterday , when we showed several examples of Huma Abedin emails being sent from her work email account to her personal account at , courtesy of a Judicial Watch FOIA release. Of the more than 160 emails in the latest Judicial Watch release, some 110 emails – two-thirds of the total – were forwarded by Abedin to two personal addresses she controlled. The Washington Times reported in August 2015 that the State Department had admitted to a federal judge that Abedin and Mills used personal email accounts to conduct government business in addition to Clinton’s private clintonemail.com to transact State Department business. 
+One email from May 15, 2009, was sent by Abedin from her State Department email to her personal email. Abedin was archiving in her personal email account an email Hillary Clinton sent her from Clinton’s private email server at . Abedin was asked to print out attachments to an email Mills sent via a private address the previous day to Clinton involving “timetables and deliverables” for her review via Alec Ross, a technology policy expert who then held the title of senior adviser for innovation to Secretary Clinton. However, while forwarding Hillary’s emails to her personal email server for “convenience” is one thing, what is more troubling is the amount of redaction involved in these emails which migrated to the open email account, which as we now know ended up in Anthony Weiner’s computer: in the above example, the two pages of timetables and deliverables attached to the email were 100 percent redacted, with “PAGE DENIED” stamped across the first redacted page. 
+An argument can be made that the extensive redaction confirms confidential material was part of the transmission. 
+This is a nuanced point being pushed by Hillary Clinton supporters such as Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, who in an article yesterday tried to make a case citing “sources” (even though the FBI said that nobody has seen the content of the Weiner/Abedin emails), that “ no emails being examined by FBI were to or from Clinton .” Post navigation",FAKE
+4315,Donald Trump: 'I will be a great unifier',"(CNN) Donald Trump believes he would ""absolutely"" be a force for bipartisanship, but in an interview this weekend neither Republicans nor Democrats escaped a barrage of attacks from the GOP presidential candidate.
+
+Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates.""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey.""
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23.""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant.""
+
+Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House.""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement.
+
+Trump flung criticism at politicians spanning the spectrum from presidential primary opponents Jeb Bush and Ben Carson to the Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and the man he hopes to succeed, President Barack Obama, in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper that aired Sunday on ""State of the Union.""
+
+And he lamented the House Select Committee on Benghazi's questioning of Clinton , a hearing he called ""very partisan"" that ""hurts both parties"" and ""hurts the country.""
+
+""The level of hatred between Republicans and Democrats was unbelievable. The level of -- I've never seen anything like it,"" Trump said. ""I'm going to unify. This country is totally divided. Barack Obama has divided this country unbelievably. And it's all, it's all hatred, what can I tell you. I've never seen anything like it...I've gotten along with Democrats and I've gotten along with Republicans. And I said, that's a good thing.""
+
+Tapper asked Trump if his presidency would result in an era of bipartisanship.
+
+""I absolutely think so,"" he said, adding, ""I will be a great unifier for our country.""
+
+Still, for all the talk of bipartisanship and unity, Trump did not pull punches as he vigorously took on his opponents.
+
+Trump hit Bush, the former governor of Florida, and Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, with the same line of attack -- one he has frequently used against Bush, but has only just begun using against Carson, whose reserved and calm tone strongly contrasts with Trump's brash appeal.
+
+""(Bush is) a low-energy person. By the way, Ben Carson is a very low-energy person. We need high-energy people,"" Trump told Tapper. ""I think Ben Carson is a very low-energy person. Actually, I think Ben Carson is lower energy than Jeb, if you want to know the truth. We need strong energy.""
+
+Trump also knocked both Bush and Carson for the support they receive from super PACs, groups that can take in unlimited amounts of money.
+
+The developer dinged super PACs as a ""big fat scam"" and a ""disaster"" in the ""State of the Union"" interview, a line of criticism that he brought out more arduously than ever this weekend, just days after the super PAC backing his candidacy shuttered its operation after the group's ties to the campaign drew scrutiny last week.
+
+But Trump suggested that he may turn his sights away from Bush and toward Carson.
+
+That's because Carson is now the man to beat in Iowa, stealing first place from Trump (who was relegated to second place) in two polls released Thursday and Friday.
+
+""The thing with Ben is he's got a very good PAC, and he's got people running his PAC, and in my opinion, he's got people all over Iowa from his PAC, and they are running -- Ben doesn't even go to Iowa that much. And he's doing well in Iowa?"" Trump said. ""I did talk about Jeb because I thought Jeb was going to be the front-runner. Obviously, he's no longer the front-runner. I probably won't talk about him so much anymore.""
+
+Trump tied in his ""low-energy"" attacks with what he dubbed the ""medieval times"" that the world is currently living in -- saying that as ISIS beheads people, the U.S. needs a strong leader.
+
+But as to whether he would approve a special forces operation to rescue hostages being held by ISIS -- similar to the one that resulted in the death of an American soldier this week-- Trump demurred.
+
+""I think I might, but I'd have to look at the situation,"" Trump said.
+
+Pushed further to explain what the Trump doctrine would be in such situations, Trump explained that it ""is very simple.""
+
+""It's strength. It's strength. Nobody is going to mess with us. Our military is going to be made much stronger,"" Trump said.",REAL
+9680,Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Survey Finds That Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence,"Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Survey Finds That Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence By Michael Snyder, on October 26th, 2016 
+Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th? Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country. 
+At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day… 
+A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that. 
+More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square. 
+But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax… 
+Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first. 
+And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June … 
+This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day. 
+We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika. 
+There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece… 
+On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?” 
+Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt. 
+On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope. 
+There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating. 
+Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge. 
+For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election… 
+Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president. 
+Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” 
+And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today … 
+“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election. 
+Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another. 
+Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 . 
+If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then. 
+And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month … 
+As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be. 
+But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome . 
+Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House. 
+Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it.",FAKE
+6654,Everyone getting hammered tonight for bad reasons,"Everyone getting hammered tonight for bad reasons 11-11-16 
+BRITAIN is to get hammered as usual tonight but for bad reasons, not celebratory, end-of-the-week ones. 
+Alcohol is selling briskly across the UK as adults prepare to get blackout drunk not because the weekend is here but because the weekend is here and Donald Trump is president and Leonard Cohen is dead. 
+Nikki Hollis, from Peterborough, said: “Normally I’m skipping merrily into the land of drunkenness, a carefree sense that none of it matters, but tonight I’ll be lurching there. 
+“I wouldn’t be surprised if I haven’t killed two bottles of wine by 10pm in my despair, as opposed to last week when I polished off two bottles before News at Ten out of sheer joie de vivre. ” 
+She added: “And tomorrow’s hangover will be a black cloud of gloom clearly revealing that everything in the world is shit. While last week it just seemed like that.” 
+Pub landlord Bill McKay said: “We’re expecting a fairly dark atmosphere in here tonight. We probably won’t do the quiz.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+6662,Colin Powell (Pronounced “Colon Pao”) Endorses Hillary Clinton,"Migrant Crisis Disclaimer 
+We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable. 
+Anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned, permanently. Daily Stormer Presents: Dr. David Duke © Copyright Daily Stormer 2016, All Rights Reserved",FAKE
+9132,SECRET RECORDINGS FUELED FBI FEUD IN CLINTON PROBE,"Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › SECRET RECORDINGS FUELED FBI FEUD IN CLINTON PROBE SECRET RECORDINGS FUELED FBI FEUD IN CLINTON PROBE 0 SHARES [11/3/16] Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said. 
+Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said. 
+The account of the case and resulting dispute comes from interviews with officials at multiple agencies. 
+Starting in February and continuing today, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and public-corruption prosecutors became increasingly frustrated with each other, as often happens within and between departments. At the center of the tension stood the U.S. attorney for Brooklyn, Robert Capers, who some at the FBI came to view as exacerbating the problems by telling each side what it wanted to hear, these people said. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Capers declined to comment. 
+The roots of the dispute lie in a disagreement over the strength of the case, these people said, which broadly centered on whether Clinton Foundation contributors received favorable treatment from the State Department under Hillary Clinton. 
+Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said. 
+These details on the probe are emerging amid the continuing furor surrounding FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure to Congress that new emails had emerged that could be relevant to a separate, previously closed FBI investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement while she was secretary of state. 
+On Wednesday, President Barack Obama took the unusual step of criticizing the FBI when asked about Mr. Comey’s disclosure of the emails. 
+Amid the internal finger-pointing on the Clinton Foundation matter, some have blamed the FBI’s No. 2 official, deputy director Andrew McCabe, claiming he sought to stop agents from pursuing the case this summer. His defenders deny that, and say it was the Justice Department that kept pushing back on the investigation. 
+At times, people on both sides of the dispute thought Mr. Capers agreed with them. Defenders of Mr. Capers said he was straightforward and always told people he thought the case wasn’t strong. Post navigation Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 RESOURCES",FAKE
+10248,A perfect mashup of “Stranger Things” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas”,"Next Prev Swipe left/right A perfect mashup of “Stranger Things” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” Will Byers needs cheering up when he gets back from the Upside Down, in this wonderful animated mashup of Stranger Things and the classic festive special A Charlie Brown Christmas .",FAKE
+3208,GOP to Trump: You crossed the line,"(CNN) The Republican establishment is making the most of the chance it had long sought to finally say this to Donald Trump: You crossed the line.
+
+Ever since announcing his presidential run last month, the brash, unfiltered billionaire businessman has created headaches for the party. Particularly, his comments equating some Mexican immigrants to rapists and criminals left GOP leaders struggling to appease those Trump had offended without alienating conservative voters attracted to his views on combating illegal immigration.
+
+But on Saturday, Trump seemed to hand party bosses and the pack of 2016 Republican presidential candidates a golden chance to take him down at almost no political cost -- while making themselves look magnanimous. The spark for the latest political firestorm came when the New York real estate billionaire questioned on Saturday whether Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Vietnam War veteran who languished in a prisoner of war camp for more than five years, was a genuine ""war hero because he was captured.""
+
+""I like people that weren't captured, OK?"" Trump said, drawing gasps and ""boos"" from a conservative crowd in Iowa.
+
+What transpired within minutes of those inflammatory comments was telling. The GOP pile-on was swift and outspoken. McCain might be a controversial figure with plenty of enemies in Washington but he's universally regarded as a rare example of pure heroism.
+
+The Republican National Committee, which stays neutral in the GOP primary and rarely weighs in on political debates, made the unusual move of publicly condemning Trump's remarks.
+
+'No place in our party'
+
+""There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably,"" RNC spokesman Sean Spicer said on Twitter.
+
+While the GOP was shy in responding to Trump's tirade against Mexico, it became clear on Monday that the party's hierachy was not going to be bitten by the Donald again.
+
+""Right now what you are seeing is the party taking a dramatic shift this weekend -- taking Donald Trump head on,"" Mitt Romney's former senior political advisor and CNN contributor Kevin Madden told Wolf Blitzer. ""This is their chance to really draw some stark contrasts about the direction of the party. This is an opportunity for a lot of these candidates.""
+
+One after another, Trump's fellow GOP presidential candidates were quick to go after the former host of the reality TV show, ""The Apprentice.""
+
+""Enough with the slanderous attacks,"" former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tweeted. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close friend of McCain's, said Trump had ""crossed a line today that will offend most every one that I know,"" and predicted that American voters would only have this message to Trump: ""You're fired.""
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said that Trump's shot against a man who refused to take early release from the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison because his comrades could not come too disqualifed the billionaire as a potential commander in chief.
+
+Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, an Air Force veteran -- who is languishing in the polls and needs every headline he can get -- upped the ante -- calling on Trump to ""immediately withdraw"" from the 2016 race altogether.
+
+Trump, by alienating sectors of the GOP electorate, is already breaking all the normal political rules, so it's not surprising he didn't choose to return to the high ground. True to form, he decided to intensify the row rather than walk away, or simply apologize, penning an opinion piece in USA Today, that was scathing of the media, the ""establishment"" and McCain.
+
+""The reality is that John McCain the politician has made America less safe, sent our brave soldiers into wrong-headed foreign adventures, covered up for President Obama with the VA scandal and has spent most of his time in the Senate pushing amnesty. He would rather protect the Iraqi border than Arizona's,"" Trump wrote.
+
+One Republican candidate chose not to join the torrent of criticism of Trump. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was effusive in praise of McCain, who once called him a ""wacko bird"" but trod carefully on Trump, possibly hoping to appeal to the billionaire's supporters should he eventually exit the race.
+
+""I recognize that folks in the press love to see Republican-on-Republican violence, and so you want me to say something bad about Donald Trump, or bad about John McCain or bad about anyone else,"" he said. ""I'm not going to do it.""
+
+Hillary Clinton, enjoying a rare moment out of the political spotlight, also took a chance to have a shot at the ""hate (Trump) is spewing"" towards Mexicans and stood up for her old Senate buddy McCain.
+
+Even the Obama White House, no friend of McCain, pounced on the opportunity to fan the flames of a controversy that Democrats hope will damage the Republican political brand. Spokesman Josh Earnest praised McCain's ""remarkable"" service.
+
+The GOP's swift and nearly unanimous criticism of Trump's remarks about McCain was particularly striking in light of how the party dealt with an earlier political row set off by his highly controversial comments -- even if it marked an easy political choice.
+
+In his presidential announcement speech last month, Trump said that some people entering the United States from Mexico were ""rapists,"" ""criminals"" and ""drug dealers."" The comments flew in the face of the GOP's desperate need to improve its standing with the increasingly influential demographic of Hispanic voters which are vital in general election swing states like Florida, Nevada and Colorado.
+
+The episode suggests that though candidates like Bush and Rubio know very well the perils of estrangement from the community, they are not yet at ease with the base of their own party, which remains vociferously opposed to any immigration reform that would bring millions of illegal immigrants -- eventually -- into the U.S. fold.
+
+More immediately, there is increasing speculation on whether Trump's broadside against McCain would turn out to be the moment when the billionaire's political bubble bursts -- in a way that would offer some relief to the GOP leadership.
+
+A new ABC/Washington Post National poll on Monday had Trump leading the Republican field on 24% but his number dropped into the single digits in samples taken on Sunday following his McCain comments, albeit in a small sample size.
+
+Madden predicted that Trump's bombast would indeed sooner or later begin to take a toll on his poll numbers.
+
+""It's the beginning of the end -- part of the process. This information is going to start to get to voters,"" he said. ""They are going to see a revelation in his character right now as well as his temperament that is going to lead them to look at other candidates.""
+
+While it could be the case that Trump's remarks could narrow what many analysts already think is a virtually non-existent path towards the GOP nomination, that doesn't necessarily equate to an early exit for the reality show star.
+
+For now, the McCain clash seems to leave Trump where he most likes to be -- in the middle of a raging storm of publicity generated by himself about himself, while taking shots at the media and the Republican political establishment. It's the kind of behavior that gave his presidential run a fast start among a certain sector of the Republican electorate in the first place.",REAL
+7544,World's Oldest Person Had Smoked For 76 Years,"Report Copyright Violation World's Oldest Person Had Smoked For 76 Years actually, i think i remember a few of these people over the years who had hit significant milestones had had at least some 'bad' habits, such as smoking or drinking (but probably not to excess). Guess it depends on the person.World's oldest person turns 115Aug. 22, 2006. 05:30 AMASSOCIATED PRESSISABELA, Puerto Rico — The world's oldest person celebrated his 115th birthday Monday, offering advice on healthy living at a party where he was serenaded by a well-known Puerto Rican singer.Emiliano Mercado del Toro, who was a boy when the United States seized Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, attributed his long life to a healthy diet and avoiding alcohol.""I never damaged my body with liquor,"" said Mercado, who quit a 76-year smoking habit when he was 90.Mercado was declared the world's oldest person by the Guinness Book of Records last year.""I never thought I would last so long,"" he said.An ambulance carried him to an outdoor plaza where family, friends and the mayor gathered for the party. His favourite performer, Iris Chacon, crooned a birthday tune set to mariachi music.""I feel happy,"" said the wheelchair-bound Mercado, who has difficulty hearing and has been blind for four years. He lives with a niece in the northwestern coastal town of Isabela.Mercado was recruited into the U.S. army in 1918, during the last months of the First World War. He was still in training when the war ended in November of that year.As a young man, Mercado said he worked for 50 cents US a day driving animals loaded with sugar cane to processing centres.The mayor of Isabela, Charlie Delgado, said a residence for the elderly would be named for Mercado in honour of a man who ""ate healthy, had no major vices and who has put this island on the world stage.""Guinness had recognized another Puerto Rican as being the world's oldest person. Ramona Trinidad Iglesias Jordan died May 29, 2004, after a bout with pneumonia. She was 114.Get great home delivery subscription deals here! Anonymous Coward ( OP )",FAKE
+5619,"World War 3, Information War, and the End of Pax Americana: Exclusive Interview with Eduard Popov","November 5, 2016 - Fort Russ Exclusive -  Interview and translation by Jafe Arnold (J. Arnoldski) -  
+
+
+
+Eduard Popov, born in 1973 in Konstantinovka, Donetsk region, is a Rostov State University graduate with a PhD in history and philosophy. In 2008, he founded the Center for Ukrainian Studies of the Southern Federal University of Russia in Rostov-on-Don. From 2009-2013, he was the founding head of the Black Sea-Caspian Center of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, an analytical institute of the Presidential Administration of Russia. In June 2014, Popov headed the establishment of the Representative Office of the Donetsk People's Republic in Rostov-on-Don. He has actively participated in humanitarian aid efforts in Donbass and has been a guest contributor to various Donbass media, such as the Lugansk-based  Cossack Media Group.  Popov has actively contributed to Fort Russ since June, 2016. 
+*** 
+Fort Russ Special Editor Jafe Arnold: Dr. Popov, for nearly half a year already, you have regularly submitted your commentary on global events to Fort Russ. You’ve covered a number of topics ranging from European politics and the war in Donbass to the possibility of a Third World War breaking out over Syria and the future of Ukraine and Ukrainian nationalism. Before we begin discussing a number of related questions, what would you like to say to your readers at Fort Russ?  
+Dr. Eduard Popov:    I consider the rare and somewhat unexpected honor to address you, dear readers of the wonderful analytical site Fort Russ, to be some kind of reward for my future contributions. I see this not as a right, but as a sacred duty of the author before his readers. 
+
+We live in different countries, speak different languages, and share different (ranging from more or less similar to diametrically opposite) worldviews and political opinions. Nevertheless, to some extent, we are all like-minded. The common denominator for all of us is the strong belief that the world is multifaceted and cannot be reduced to only one correct doctrine.  
+The history of mankind has seen and will probably still see more than a few attempts at organizing an ideological and political monopoly. The ideology of the American New World Order that claims universality and all-inclusiveness is nothing original and not even clever. As a historian of political ideologies, revolutionary communism in its Trotskyite and Khrushchevite variants also immediately comes to mind, which also claimed for itself the role of ending world history.  
+But the era of American domination over the world awaits its finale and is maybe more imminent than many of us expect. I see my own personal mission as an author at Fort Russ to help prepare this finale, which depends on the efforts of every one of us.  
+Restoring the violated principle of national sovereignty instead of the idea of one nation’s global domination, restoring the ‘blooming complexity’ of the world’s cultures instead of an imposed and dull liberal “post-culture”, and affirming solid moral principles instead of immoral promiscuity - this is a sample program which is shared by the majority of humanity. Most of humanity is opposed to the dominant quasi-religion of American neoliberalism or, rather, the ideology of Pax Americana is opposed to the majority of humanity.  
+The events in the former Ukraine and Donbass have become some of the reference points determining each of our’s moral position. People from different countries and with opposing political views, from ultra-right to ultra-left, have expressed support for the people of Donbass. And I am very grateful to Fort Russ for constantly striving to present the truth of these events. I’ve had the opportunity to personally observe the astonishing events in Donbass, and I can say that Donbass’ fate is still far from sealed. Together, we are contributing to a more just alternative not only for Donbass, but for all of humanity.  
+    Eduard Popov (left), DPR representative in Rostov-on-Don, with Moscow DPR representatives 
+Arnold: In this context, how do you assess the state of the ongoing global information war? Are resources like Fort Russ helping to turn the tide against the Atlanticist narrative or “Pax Americana”? Is bringing together such “like-minded people” the main goal of this information war?   
+Popov: It’s difficult for me to assess the state of the whole front of the information war - I don’t possess complete information and don’t consider myself a specialist in this sphere. I’m simply a political analyst and historian specializing in some topics that are relevant in today’s world.  
+Nevertheless, I have no doubt as to the benefit that “new media” brings to the resistance movement. Let me explain these terms. New media means independent publications that do not legally fall under the category of media, but fulfill the same function. This applies to different websites and groups on social media. The “resistance movement” (I don’t think the origin of the term needs to be explained) is a synonym for anti-globalism or, as has become fashionable to say now, the anti-mainstream.   
+If De Gaulle’s movement fought against the Nazi occupation of France with weapons in hand, then today’s fighters of the resistance fight mainly with information against an occupant operating not so much with direct physical violence as with distanced coercion, i.e., informational, psychological, economic, and political force, etc.  
+Can it be said that the fight against this new occupation is more difficult? As a historian by education and a philosopher (my doctoral dissertation was on the political philosophy of conservatism), I believe that the world has now arrived at the complete breaking point of one historical epoch and the beginning of another. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so wrong to compare the current era with the era of the collapse of the Roman Empire, first and foremost because ahead of us is most likely a dark ages comparable to the early Middle Ages, and a new Great Migration of peoples. Of course, not everything is the same, but I won’t focus on this now. I’ll just say that there are not too many reasons for historical optimism.  
+Resources such as Fort Russ have taken on the extremely important mission of speaking the truth in an epoch of great lies. “Big” official publications in Europe are filled with lies. And this is not only my opinion. All the thinking, honest europeans with whom I’ve discussed the situation of the press in ‘united Europe’ also think so. Hence why, as my friends in European countries have noted, independent media has a growing circle of readership. In my opinion, this trend is a long-term one.  
+As for what I believe is necessary to concentrate efforts on, the first step has already been done. The minimum social anti-mainstream has been formed in Europe. This has been done primarily thanks to the efforts of the independent press. But in my opinion, the task fulfilled at this first stage has goals primarily centered around negation, i.e., proving what is wrong and dangerous in globalism.  
+The anti-mainstream wields an unusually rich diversity of worldviews and ideological shades ranging from Marxism to certain currents of fascism to even clerical monarchism. Why not use this methodological richness for forming a united, anti-globalist intellectual front? Then we can proceed to solve constructive tasks, such as discussing the foundations of a future, more just world order.  
+In no case should the resistance movement identify as marginals - this is precisely how the “Ministry of Truth” tries to present it. If a number of new media take on the mission of creating platforms for intellectual discussions with others, then this will undoubtedly become one of the main tasks of the information war. Even the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, spoke of a newspaper as a center not only of publications, but as a center for party work. I don’t know if the creators of new media have read Lenin, but they are acting according to his methodological precepts.  
+
+Arnold:  A t the present moment, o ne of the centers of attention of the information war and what you called the “resistance” is the threat of a Third World War being unleashed by the US. Russian experts have different opinions on how realistic such a turn is. Considering that you say there is little reason to be historically optimistic, what do you think?   
+Popov: The topic of WW3 is really actively being discussed in Russian expert circles, yet all the while has the status of some kind of fantasy. But as I said earlier, we are now witnessing the breaking point of not only a historical period (what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the American Century century lasting since 1945), but a change in historical epochs.  
+This can be compared with the collapse of the Roman Empire or the collapse of the Middle Ages and the onset of the Modern Age. The Russian philosophers of the emigration in the 1920’s foresaw this shift of epochs and called it the New Middle Ages. Perhaps this was also an anticipation of fascism, which lasted a comparatively brief historical period.  
+In my opinion, this also anticipates the New Middle Ages, but with only one necessary correction: this will be a new early Middle Ages, not the High Middle Ages of great Romano-Germanic culture which the Russian philosopher Konstantin Leontyev considered to be the highest achievement of humanity, but the “dark ages” that preceded it - barbarism, the plague, the collapse of the great ancient cultures, and the mass migration of peoples. A very vivid impression of these centuries is offered by the German epics (the genesis of the historical basis of the Nibelungenlied dates back to the dark ages and the invasion of Attila the Hun) and Scandinavian mythology, especially the tale of the death of the gods.  
+This change of epochs is primarily being prepared on mental grounds. I believe that the conditions are ripe for this: the Western world has finally turned into a post-Christian and partially anti-Christian entity. It’s difficult for me to say whether Europe has enough life left in it to oppose the new onslaught of the Caliphate - I have in mind Muslim migration to the European continent and the expansion of Salafist networks. The answer is more likely no than yes.  
+America is also going through very difficult times, although its difficulties are of an entirely different nature. Wallerstein long ago said that the age of American domination is coming to an end and will end with a grandiose crash. This conclusion is in a certain measure shared by the ideologist of Pax Americana, Brzezinski, who called to negotiate, not to prevent, but to slow down the collapse of the American Empire. 
+The Americans have a very high level of strategic thought. Both times that America entered a world war on the European continent, it achieved grand strategic successes with very little blood shed (compared to the European Allies and Axis). There are many works that, substantiated by references to historical sources, show that the US stood behind the scenes of WW2 and pushed European rivals to war. The US entered the war as the most powerful economy on the planet and came out with the status of a superpower, the successor to the British Empire. The US’ GDP increased 10 times in only a few years. 
+We can also see outstanding, though not as tremendous achievements of American geopolitics in WW1. Europe was gushing blood, but the United States profited from and became stronger because of the war between European competitors, even the British. Now that the age of the USA is coming to an end, they are faced with the threat of having to drastically reduce their appetites, busy themselves with overhauling renovations at home, and turn from the lord of the world into a first among equals.  
+I am almost sure that the US will not go down the path of isolationism for psychological (the inertia of imperial power is very strong) and economic reasons. This means they will continue down the path of foreign expansion. 
+Russia and China are becoming all the more stronger and independent rivals of the US. Russia is increasing its military power, while China is increasing its economic power, even though it should be noted that China and the US are vitally needed by each other as economic partners at the present stage. Meanwhile, Europe does not wield geopolitical subjectivity and remains the US’ junior partner, but this is threatening its overall economic and productive capacity which is surpassing the US.  
+I’ll suggest an opinion and perhaps re-invent the wheel: the “Arab Spring” was sponsored by the Americans in order to organize a new great migration of peoples to Europe. In the long and even medium term, the Islamic World is not an ally of the US, but in the short term such an alliance is possible. American strategists are using the mixing of peoples and languages to greatly weaken their European competitors.  
+Other tools are being used against China and Russia, and this toolbox is quite large. The Americans have attempted to wage a cheap war against Russia by creating a powerful protest movement against President Putin. Perhaps we can already say that this venture failed. The Russian people and other peoples of the Russian Federation, unlike their Ukrainian neighbors, wield historical and state wisdom and are ready to endure hardships in the face of an external enemy. This makes war almost inevitable. Time is working against the US and for Russia. 
+By 2020 or 2025, the program of rearming the Armed Forces of Russia should be completed, and the economy is not in the best condition, but can still cope with crises. Therefore, I’ll repeat, war is an inevitable way out of the impasse.  
+Will this be a real Third World War? In my opinion, this is unlikely. In one of my articles , I’ve already employed the notion of a “flank war.” The Americans are largely fighting by proxies - Polish, Ukrainian, and Muslim-Salafist ones, etc. The almost inevitable (in my opinion) victory of Hillary Clinton will add psychological motives to this war. What is entailed in this scenario? Two things: (1) the Russians and Americans will fight without the use of strategic nuclear weapons and on fronts far away from US shores - otherwise, the cure for the American Empire, war, would be worse than the disease; (2) I am sure that the American hegemon will be defeated in this war. And this offers the opportunity to begin to liberate Europe, and for Russia this means the opportunity to finally throw off the burdensome shackles of American tutelage.  
+
+
+To be continued… 
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
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+       Follow us on Twitter! 
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+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+932,This election is an unpopularity contest for the ages,"The 2016 presidential election is shaping up as an unpopularity contest of unprecedented proportions.
+
+Assuming, as now appears most likely, that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination and that either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz becomes the Republican nominee, the general-election ballot is set to feature a choice between two candidates more negatively viewed than any major-party nominee in the history of polling.
+
+Trump is, by far, the furthest underwater: The latest Wall Street Journal-NBC poll puts his net favorability rating at minus-41. A breathtaking 65 percent of registered voters see him negatively, versus 24 percent with a positive view, making him the most unpopular major party presidential candidate ever recorded. Cruz is at minus-23, with 49 percent viewing him negatively, 26 percent in a positive light.
+
+To underscore the challenge facing the GOP, neither candidate has been viewed more positively than negatively by voters since the start of the campaign.
+
+Clinton, by contrast, has a healthier (and more volatile) history with voters. Polls showed her favorables slightly ahead of her negatives when she formally launched her campaign last April. But her trajectory is unnerving. The new WSJ-NBC numbers have Clinton minus-24 (with 56 percent viewing her unfavorably and 32 percent favorably), almost double the gap just one month earlier.
+
+“This is unprecedented,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “It will be the first time in the history of polling that we’ll have both major party candidates disliked by a majority of the American people going into the election.”
+
+Pause to let that sink in, to compare this dyspeptic situation with previous elections — and consider the implications for governing.
+
+Some historical perspective: All three candidates are more unpopular than the losing presidential candidate at any point during the past five election cycles, according to Gallup data.
+
+If the nominees are Trump and Clinton, said Republican pollster David Winston, “You’re probably looking somewhere in the neighborhood of three out of 10 Americans having a negative view of both. You could have a very frustrated electorate by the time we get to Election Day.”
+
+It sounds oxymoronic, but voters could elect a president that a majority of them view unfavorably. Assuming Clinton has the advantage over Trump, said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, “she is going to be elected, if she wins, in minus territory, which is something we’ve never had before.”
+
+Voters’ assessments of candidates between April and Election Day tend to stay stable; the notable exceptions were Bill Clinton in 1992, who moved from minus-11 to plus-7 in the WSJ-NBC poll, and Barack Obama in 2008, who rose from plus-7 to plus-21. Hillary Clinton, given the roller-coaster nature of her ratings, may have the capacity to rise again.
+
+Still, the unpopularity of the leading candidates reflects both their unique characteristics as polarizing personalities and the broader political sorting of the American electorate. As voters assemble themselves into reliably and increasingly intense red and blue blocs, their assessments of the opposing side harden.
+
+Which raises questions about the potentially grim aftermath.
+
+“Electing either Clinton or Trump with these type of unfavorable numbers immediately means a weakened president without the power to persuade from the day she or he [is] sworn into office,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff.
+
+History teaches that a new president’s approval rating rises between Election Day and the inauguration. Americans become more charitably disposed to their new leader once the campaign has concluded, if only briefly.
+
+Given these bargain basement favorability numbers, will the 45th president enjoy that luxury? Does presidential popularity even matter in an era of congressional gridlock?
+
+Some political scientists think not, citing a shift in the locus of presidential authority away from legislating. “Presidential power is no longer the power to persuade,” said Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg. “Popularity at one time was a major factor in a president’s ability to govern, but we are in the era of the institutional president, where presidents rely on their administrative powers and the powers of the office, and less on public opinion.”
+
+If Clinton is elected, said Middlebury College political scientist Matthew Dickinson, “the fact that she may be one of the most unfavorably viewed presidents is not going to make a huge difference, because she’s likely going to be running into a House controlled by Republicans and the Senate’s going to be close either way. That’s what really eats into your ability to govern, rather than your favorability ratings.”
+
+Perhaps. But the unfolding unpopularity contest cannot be a healthy sign for our democracy, nor a good omen for the presidency to come.
+
+Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.",REAL
+465,"As gas prices drops, states under increased pressure to hike taxes to replenish transportation funds","Governors and legislatures across the country are considering increasing their state tax on gasoline, amid a combination of falling pump prices and depleted transportation-construction funds.
+
+At least eight states have proposed increasing their gas tax, as Washington also looks for ways to find money for highway and transit projects.
+
+Recently falling gas prices have made the situation more urgent. But state and federal coffers that pay for such projects have been moving deeper into the red for years as Americans drive less, vehicles are more fuel efficient and construction costs have increased.
+
+Still, motorists appear resistant to a tax hike, despite gas prices at a roughly six-year low and state taxes on gasoline in some cases having not been increased in the past 20 years.
+
+The situation also presents a dilemma for elected officials.
+
+They are responsible for keeping roads and bridges safe and fulfilling pressing needs to build more transportation infrastructure but must make the politically unpopular request for higher taxes to help meet those demands.
+
+In New Jersey, for example, a poll released this week by Farleigh Dickenson University’s Public Mind found respondents opposed increasing gas taxes by a more than two-to-one margin, 68-to-24 percent.
+
+The pollsters said residents see the need for road repairs but want policymakers to look beyond “overtaxed wallets” to find the revenue.
+
+“It’s a calculation not without risk,” New Jersey Assemblyman John Wisniewski said on Wednesday. “But we are flirting with disaster by not investing in infrastructure.”
+
+Wisniewski, a Democrat, has a plan to increase the state gas tax by 25 cents a gallon with amendments to ensure the money goes toward its intended purpose, instead of becoming slush fund revenue.
+
+He told FoxNews.com that his argument before constituents would in part focus on the state’s urgent need for more rail tunnels underneath the Hudson River, to get commuters to work in New York, and the bridges across the state that are in desperate need of repair, including a county-owned one closed last week by the state because it was “structurally deficient.”
+
+Gov. Chris Christie -- a potential 2016 White House candidate and one of several Republican governors in at least eight states considering a tax increase -- mentioned neither the gas tax nor transportation-funding issues last week in his State of the State address.
+
+In addition to New Jersey, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah are considering increasing their state gas tax to bail out under-funded transportation budgets.
+
+Louisiana transportation officials say they have a $12 billion backlog in road repairs, which has prompted lawmakers to consider several options to increase revenue, which includes replacing the gas tax with a sales tax on all fuels.
+
+Republican governors in Iowa and Michigan have taken different approaches -- letting voters decide.
+
+In Iowa, Gov. Terry Branstad says improving roads is a 2015 priority and is asking state lawmakers to help him craft a bipartisan solution. He has expressed openness to a plan in which each county holds a referendum to increase the sales tax on gas and diesel fuel by 1 percent.
+
+“Without action, Iowa's roads and bridges face an uncertain future,” he said recently.
+
+The existing 22-cents-a- gallon tax has remained unchanged since 1989.
+
+In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder has agreed to spend an additional $1.3 billion a year for roads and other transportation program, if residents in a May 5 referendum vote to increase the sales tax from 6 to 7 percent, according to USA Today.
+
+In Washington, D.C., the average price of gas was $2.50 a gallon when the new, Republican-controlled Congress convened earlier this month, which sparked talks about increasing the federal tax on gas and diesel fuel for the first time in more than 20 years.
+
+But GOP leaders are tamping down expectations, leaving no clear solution to the funding problem.
+
+""I don't know of any support for a gas tax increase in Congress,"" Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Senate GOP leader, recently said.
+
+The federal tax on gas is 18.4 cents a gallon and 24.4 cents a gallon on diesel fuel. They were last increased in 1993.
+
+Fuel taxes bring in about $34 billion a year to the federal Highway Trust Fund, but the government spends about $50 billion a year. The trust fund has been the main source of federal transportation aid to states for more than 60 years.
+
+Congress has kept transportation programs teetering on the edge of insolvency since 2008 by repeatedly transferring just enough funds from the general treasury -- and making corresponding spending cuts elsewhere in the federal budget -- to meet obligations for a few more months or, in one case, as long as two years.
+
+But finding acceptable spending cuts to offset the transfers gets more difficult each time.
+
+Even President Obama has rejected the notion of a gas-tax increase, while calling on Congress to pursue other bipartisan measures to fund infrastructure.
+
+Obama mentioned infrastructure five times in his State of the Union address on Tuesday and renewed his call to instead fund projects with revenue from eliminating tax “loopholes” for U.S. companies with overseas holdings.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+1172,"Christie, Fiorina suspend 2016 campaigns","New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suspended his Republican presidential bid Wednesday afternoon, joining former HP executive Carly Fiorina in exiting the 2016 race after a disappointing finish in the New Hampshire primary.
+
+Sources say Christie met with staff in person Wednesday in Morristown, N.J., and also held a conference call to announce his decision to his campaign team.
+
+The announcement was widely expected, after the two-term governor returned home after his loss Tuesday night to weigh his options.
+
+Christie had finished sixth in the primary contest, while Fiorina finished seventh.
+
+In a statement on Facebook, Christie said, ""I ran for president to say that the government needs to once again work for the people, not the people work for the government. And while running for president I tried to reinforce what I have always believed - that speaking your mind matters, that experience matters, that competence matters and that it will always matter in leading our nation…. And so today, I leave the race without an ounce of regret.""
+
+The decision to drop out immediately kicks off the race in the rest of the still-crowded GOP field to scoop up their support. And it marks the end of the 2016 road for two candidates who showed political promise earlier in the race – only to watch their support fade as the elections themselves neared.
+
+Christie was banking on a solid performance in the New Hampshire contest, seen as more friendly territory for the Northeast governor who did poorly in Iowa. But even as he touted his executive experience, the other current and former governors in the race outflanked him Tuesday night.
+
+While the tough-talking Christie received widespread attention for his aggressive criticism of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio at Saturday’s debate, that spat seemed to hurt Rubio more than it helped Christie. Rubio finished fifth, but Christie ended up well behind the freshman senator, pulling just 7 percent in the state.
+
+His exit from the race completes a drastic turnaround in the governor’s political fortunes. In 2012, he delivered the keynote address at the Republican National Convention, after having gained national political fame for taking on the state’s public employee unions and his no-nonsense approach to governing. His periodic confrontations with hecklers captured on film also made him somewhat a YouTube star.
+
+But he was politically damaged by the scandal in his administration over subordinates blocking traffic on the George Washington Bridge, in a seeming act of political retribution against a local mayor. Christie has denied knowledge of the decision, but has struggled ever since to get out from under the cloud of controversy.
+
+His persona as the “telling it like it is” candidate also seemed to take a backseat last year to Donald Trump, who if anything was more brash, more unscripted, more confrontational than Christie. In the crowded field, he struggled to break through.
+
+For a time in late 2015, Christie looked like he could be in contention for second place in New Hampshire. He was devoting time and resources to the state, and gaining attention for his impassioned and personal remarks on drug addiction – in a state where heroin addiction and treatment is a major election issue.
+
+But in the end, voters gravitated more toward Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who finished second Tuesday. Trump easily won the Republican contest, while Texas Sen. Ted Cruz finished third.
+
+Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Rubio finished fourth and fifth, respectively, followed by Christie.
+
+Meanwhile, Fiorina, who was the only female GOP candidate in the 2016 running, called it quits Wednesday after failing to crack the top five in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night.
+
+“While I suspend my candidacy today, I will continue to travel this country and fight for those Americans who refuse to settle for the way things are and a status quo that no longer works for them,” Fiorina said in a written statement.
+
+She added, “I will continue to serve in order to restore citizen government to this great nation so that together we may fulfill our potential.”
+
+Fiorina entered the tumultuous Republican primary in April. She promoted herself as an outsider with business experience and argued that as the lone woman in the GOP field she was best positioned to oppose likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. After a standout performance in the first undercard debate, Fiorina rose to the mainstage and soared in the polls in the fall. But her momentum quickly stalled and by the end of the year she had dropped back down.
+
+Fiorina's first major foray in to politics was in 2010, when she ran for Senate in California and lost to incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer by 10 points.
+
+Throughout her presidential bid, Fiorina emphasized her meteoric rise in the business world. A Stanford University graduate, she started her career as a secretary, earned an MBA and worked her way up at AT&T to become a senior executive at the telecom giant.
+
+But she was also dogged by questions about her record at Hewlett-Packard, where she was hired as CEO in 1999. She was fired six years later, after leading a major merger with Compaq and laying off 30,000 workers.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6183,"For The Small Price Of $2.3 Million, You Could Own This Beautiful, Self-Sufficient Island","For The Small Price Of $2.3 Million, You Could Own This Beautiful, Self-Sufficient Island Posted on Subscribe to our mailing list and get interesting stuff and updates to your email inbox. Thank you for subscribing. We respect your privacy and take protecting it seriously x 
+By Brianna Acuesta This island costs less than most celebrity homes. 
+A Scottish island by the name of Tanera Mor is for sale, as its permanent residents recently moved out and put the island, along with its cafe, post office, schoolhouse, and 9 homes, on the market. 
+The island boasts stunning views, traditional houses that have been recently restored, and self-sufficiency that is unmatched on other islands. 
+The 760-acre isle is powered by wind turbines and generators and has a freshwater treatment plant. It’s part of a group of other islands called the Summer Isles and has an established tourism business that brings in a bit of revenue. 
+This particular island is the biggest in the isles and is located just 1.5 miles away from the Scottish coast. 
+The scenery itself is reason enough to buy this island, or any of the three lots that are being offered separately. It’s got 7 miles of cliffs, coves, and beaches to meander and relax on and you can walk across the whole island easily because it’s only 1.6 miles long. 
+Over 164,000 native trees were recently planted to combat severe winds, giving the island a more natural feel. Despite the winds, the surrounding waters are said to be ideal for aquatic hobbies such as sailing, fishing, and diving; there’s even a historic pier to utilize for some of these activities. Also listed on the website for this property is that it’s common to look out and see porpoises, dolphins, basking sharks, and otters close by. 
+Included in the sale are four neighboring small islands that are completely uninhabited but contain tidal pools and other treasures. Considering a nice apartment in a big city like Manhattan costs just as much and has considerably less space, this deal may seem like a steal. While you might be giving up that city vibe, you’d be replacing it with amazing views and a relaxing life. 
+Would you consider buying this island? Please share, like, and comment on this article! 
+Featured Image Credit: Tim Winterburn 
+This article ( For The Small Price Of $2.3 Million, You Could Own This Beautiful, Self-Sufficient Island ) via NB is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com Tags:",FAKE
+7615,Economic Racial Disparity in North Carolina,"Email 
+While the recent police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott has led to increased scrutiny on police activities in North Carolina, police-community relations are not the only reason racial tensions are flaring. While encounters with police officers can radically differ depending on the race of those involved, access to economic resources tend to follow a similar pattern. Although racial gaps regarding wealth, incomes, and healthcare are nationwide issues, observing them from a statewide perspective can help understand why specific communities feel maltreated. 
+A UNC Chapel Hill study found that the income and wealth disparities between African Americans and whites in North Carolina are far worse than the national average. It states that: 
+…black households, at the median, claim only about 13 percent of the wealth and, stunningly, about 4 percent of the net worth of white households. The corresponding figures for the nation are bleak: 15 and 13 percent respectively. Median wealth for white households is roughly seven times that of black households…Nationally, black households have about half the home equity of whites. In North Carolina, it’s about a third. 
+The study goes on to state that half of all black households in North Carolina have under $100 in savings. At the median, black heads of household aged between 50 and 65 own $17,000 in assets compared to white households’ median of $143,000, which seriously hampers older, black workers from retiring comfortably. This data paints a picture of a state that fails to allow black communities from advancing economically and obtaining some semblance of equality. 
+The issue is further exasperated by lack of access to health insurance. A North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services study found that 13% of North Carolina whites have no health insurance as compared to 22% of blacks. 16% of whites were reported to be in “fair or poor” health as compared to 23.2% of blacks. The Kaiser Family Foundation research shows that the majority of non-elderly uninsured North Carolinians were minorities: 30% Hispanic and 14% black, while 10% were white. This is especially concerning considering minorities experience disease at a higher rate than American whites, and visit the doctor at much lower rates. The result: communities most in need of medical assistance are least likely to attain it. 
+This imbalance is in part due to the state government’s failure to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, something which would have significantly reduced the coverage gap between those receiving Medicaid and those obtaining income-based subsidies. The North Carolina Justice Center finds that, had the expansion gone through, 500,000 low-income North Carolinians would have health insurance who currently don’t have it, and over 1,000 unnecessary deaths would have been prevented. 
+While the protests in Charlotte appeared to be a backlash against apparent police brutality, underlying economic factors also come into play. A breaking point will eventually be reached by those living in undesirable economic situations which they view as consequential of a racist and unfair system. The case of North Carolina is a particularly negative one, but the principles outlined in this research are not unique to North Carolina. Americans cannot expect race relations to cool until access to income, wealth, and healthcare are equalized and structured in a fair, equitable manner.",FAKE
+8948,The Matrix of Four of The Medicine Wheel,"Sacred Medicine Wheel of Four Brothers(image by open) DMCA ""The elders knew peace would not come on the Earth until the circle of humanity is complete; until all four colors sat in the circle and shared their teachings."" The sacred medicine wheel of the four directions is for all extents and purposes a mandala, a visual depiction of the universe, our Earth and our inner universe . It's symbolism is simple and primal, and through these qualities it is powerful and meaningful. Representing the intersection of duality and polarity , four is recognized as symbol for completion. In nature this symbolism is illustrated in the cycle of four seasons -- spring, summer, winter and fall -- derived from the flow of cycles between two solstices and two equinoxes of our orbit, as well as the elements of nature: air, fire, water and earth. Four is also reflected in the four aspects of the self: the mental, physical, spiritual and emotional. Mathematically, the symbolism of four it is represented in the four forms of arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) while philosophically, comprehensive human thinking encompasses four dimensions: the thesis (is it so?), antithesis (is it not so?), synthesis (are both so?) and nullesis (are neither so?) Correspondingly, this matrix of four is presented in the beginning of practically every creation story, from Genesis to the Popol Vuh (the Mayan creation story). Nearly all creation stories start with the polarities of Heaven and Earth, and male and female. In this respect, this matrix of four is the basis of most creation stories as well as being depicted in every cross-like symbol shared by so many religions (the Christian cross, the Hindu swastika, the Egyptian ankh etc.) The four Vedas (Sanskrit for ""knowledge"") are the foundational scriptures in Hindu theology, while the cross symbol adopted by Christianity, Judaism and Islam, its presence in the creation story, and its basis in the four worlds of the Kabbalah reflect its major significance to those teachings. Indeed, all peoples share traditions that include the symbolism of four directly (or subtlety) as part of their core belief systems -- as I explore in detail in the article, The Common Origin of Religions and Theology . And it is this universality of the cross symbol and the unanimous celebration of the matrix of four, symbolically and philosophically, in Hindu, Taoist, Native American, Egyptian, Celtic and Judeo-Christian theology and symbolism that most clearly illustrates its commonality to human spirituality and understanding of our world. - Advertisement - But perhaps no group has lived so completely in unity and reverence to the seasonal cycles of Earth Mother and the universal system, as the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, now known as North America. Most significantly, the Hopi believe we are living in the fourth world. Hopi tradition states the first world was Endless Space, the second was Dark Midnight, the third was the Age of Animals and the fourth is the World Complete. Four migrations were written upon four sacred tablets which man was supposed to undertake once in this fourth world -- to separate into smaller tribes, divided by color, and began to migrate in four different directions, settling in new lands. The Medicine Wheel Prophecy: The Polarity of Institutions vs. Individuals 
+""At the beginning of this cycle of time, long ago, the Great Spirit made an appearance and gathered the peoples of this Earth together, and said to the human beings, ""I'm going to send you to four directions, and over time I'm going to change you to four colors, but I'm going to give you some teachings, and you will call these the Original Teachings; when you come back together with each other, you will share these so that you can live and have peace on Earth, and a great civilization will come about"" 
+""And so He gave each of us a responsibility, and we call that the Guardianship. To the Indian people, the Red people, He gave the Guardianship of the Earth"" To the South, He gave the yellow race of people Guardianship of the Wind"" To the West, He gave the black race of people Guardianship of the Water"" To the North, He gave the white race of people Guardianship of the Fire"" Each of the four races went to their directions and learned their teachings"" [but] some of the brothers and sisters had forgotten the sacredness of all things, and all the human beings were going to suffer for this"" The elders knew peace would not come on the Earth until the circle of humanity is complete; until all the four colors sat in the circle and shared their teachings -- then peace would come on Earth."" 
+~ Source : A Cherokee Legend by Lee Brown, Cherokee 
+I have watched with dismay and horror over the last few years especially, and my lifetime in total, as the powers that be, every institution of each type -- religious, government, corporate and media -- have interjected and overwhelmed the discourse of the collective conversation, stifling the development of the discussion and thus the development of our thinking and being. This happens concerning practically every subject -- topics are reduced to a consideration of limited polarities. This reinforces polarity in the human mind, which is trained from birth to look for opposites: Good/Evil, Right/Wrong, Left/Right, Thesis/Antithesis. - Advertisement - 
+The very inquiry into the origins of human thinking and being is posed through the duality of polarity, and yet it is most often considered a singular polarity. Why are we the way we are? Is it the result of nature, or nurture? The debate of nature versus nurture is posed in a single distinct polarization, yet the best question itself supersedes the mindset of the singular polarity. Traditionally, the question is viewed philosophically as a trinity of options -- the thesis (nature), antithesis (nurture) and synthesis (both) of one and the other. And yet, in its natural state, this mode of thinking is more comprehensively a matrix of four: thesis, antithesis, synthesis (both) or neither -- the mindset of infinite alternative potential. 
+Such comprehensive thinking is uncommon today, as the institutions of the status quo have worked to maintain limited, polarizing collective narratives (particularly through the corporate media) so as to keep control of the way we think, and therefore, behave. But, when we understand how duality and polarity can be used against us, we soon come to see there are many holes in the institutional faรƒยงade. Sometimes it is their actions that expose them, but quite often it is what they say and how they say it -- or what they don't say -- that provides clarity into their real motivation: domination. Four Types of Institutional Lies 
+There are four basic types of institutional/political lies, which directly correlate to the four basic forms of arithmetic. Like all effective lies, each type involves some nugget of truth. The first type of lie is the addition of information: Sometimes the addition of a small bit of (generally false) information can change the story entirely. The second type of lie is the subtraction of information: The removal of small key components can result in entirely different meaning. The third type of lie is the multiplication of information: Exaggerations of situations and related information are included in its presentation, to dilute or emphasize. The fourth type of lie is the division of information: The facts are interlaced with 'disconnects' which separate or underplay the significance of information. 
+This approach is often used to cover institutional prejudices and bias; to maintain the appearance of objectivity among institutional leaders. The four main categories of human prejudice are racial, religious, institutional/national and cultural heritage/history. Often prejudice is simply based on the pigment of one's skin, or other inherited features, but sometimes it is much more nuanced and complicated than that, particularly where a history of conflict exists. And while human prejudice is typically based on these four distinctions, the specifics of each are near limitless.",FAKE
+6464,SHAMEFUL: Weather Channel Using Children In New Video To Promote Climate Change Hoax,"NTEB Ads Privacy Policy SHAMEFUL: Weather Channel Using Children In New Video To Promote Climate Change Hoax The Weather Channel released a climate change video featuring young children attempting to convince their parents of the seriousness of the issue. The video, entitled ‘When Kids are Talking Climate – Maybe it’s Time to Listen!’ was released on November 1, 2016. by Geoffrey Grider November 3, 2016 There are lots of people who don’t agree with man-made climate change. Weather Channel founder John Coleman is one of those people. 
+“Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.” Job 38:3,4 (KJV) 
+Listen to what he thinks of his former channel’s use of indoctrinating children to promote Climate Change propaganda: 
+“Right or wrong, using children to promote a point of view borders on immoral. Even knowing that climate change is not happening, it is far beneath my values to use children to promote this truth,” Coleman told Climate Depot. “I know without a doubt that there is no significant threat to the future climate of Earth from the industrialized civilization we have created and the drastic climate changes predicted by the Al Gore clan and the UN’s IPCC are not occurring and are based on an invalid theory. But I will not stoop to the use children to promote my position.” Weather Channel using children to promote Climate Change hoax: 
+The Weather Channel released a climate change video featuring young children attempting to convince their parents of the seriousness of the issue. The video, entitled ‘When Kids are Talking Climate – Maybe it’s Time to Listen!’ was released on November 1, 2016. 
+Kids : ‘Dear Mom and Dad: ‘The science is clear’",FAKE
+2868,Old rivals Obama and McCain tussle over Iran,"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama had some blunt words for Sen. John McCain for questioning the honesty of Secretary of State John Kerry -- telling his former campaign rival to, in essence, back off.
+
+""When I hear some, like Sen. McCain recently, suggest that our secretary of state, John Kerry, who served in the United States Senate, a Vietnam veteran, who's provided exemplary service to this nation, is somehow less trustworthy in the interpretation of what's in a political agreement than the Supreme Leader of Iran -- that's an indication of the degree to which partisanship has crossed all boundaries,"" Obama said Saturday evening at a press conference in Panama City, Panama.
+
+The President's critique of the Arizona Republican, who is also a Vietnam War veteran, came after McCain suggested Kerry is purposely misinterpreting the framework of the nuclear deal in order to gain domestic support as negotiators work towards a final agreement.
+
+""John Kerry is delusional,"" McCain said Thursday on the radio program ""The Hugh Hewitt Show."" ""I think you're going to find out that they had never agreed to the things that John Kerry claimed that they had.""
+
+The sniping between the two stems out of the two competing interpretations of what's actually in the framework nuclear agreement struck in Switzerland between the United States, its allies and Iran.
+
+The Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamanei, has suggested that Iran will not agree to inspections of their military facilities and demanding that sanctions will need to be lifted on Day 1, the day the deal is signed. U.S. officials have indicated the deal agreed to says otherwise, that it includes intense inspections and calls for sanctions to be lifted gradually.
+
+McCain's remarks seemed to touch a nerve with Obama, who went after the senator without being specifically asked about his comments suggesting that seemed McCain was almost backwards in giving the Supreme Leader of the Iran the benefit of the doubt over a U.S. secretary of state.
+
+""When you start getting to the point where you are actively communicating that the United States government and our secretary of state is somehow spinning presentations in a negotiation with a foreign power, particularly one that you say is your enemy, that's a problem,"" the President said. ""It needs to stop.""
+
+McCain wasted no time responding directly to the President on Saturday evening.
+
+""These widely divergent explanations of the nuclear deal must be fully explained and reconciled if we are to give serious consideration to this agreement,"" he said in a statement.
+
+McCain followed up more pointedly in a tweet, writing, ""So Pres Obama goes to #Panama, meets with Castro and attacks me - I'm sure Raúl is pleased.""
+
+Kerry, appearing on ABC's ""This Week"" on Sunday morning, defended his sales job of the deal, saying he stands by ""every fact"" of the agreement that he has laid out.
+
+This tees up what had already promised to be a testy week ahead between Obama and Congress.
+
+On Monday, lawmakers will return from a two-week spring recess for its first session since the announcement of the framework agreement. On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will start moving on a bill which would attempt to give Congress a vote to kill the deal.
+
+The White House has repeatedly called for the legislation, spearheaded by Republican Sen. Bob Corker, to be changed so that it would not be binding. It has warned that it could undercut the administration's hand at the negotiating table with Iran -- a sentiment the president echoed from Panama on Saturday before returning to Washington.
+
+""What I'm concerned about is making sure that we don't prejudge it, or those who are opposed to any deal whatsoever try to use a procedural argument essentially to screw up the possibility of a deal,"" Obama said. ""I don't understand why it is that everybody is working so hard to anticipate failure. ""
+
+This is not the first battle between the 2008 rivals for the presidency. McCain has harshly criticized the Obama administration over its handling of several foreign policy issues, such as the American role in Iraq.",REAL
+198,Congress in slow lane on auto safety,"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
+8816,Paris Migrant Campers Increase after Calais Is Shut, ,FAKE
+6341,New Moon In Scorpio: Making A Calculated Effort,"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter We are having a New Moon in Scorpio on October 30th in most places around the world, and during the early hours of October 31st in Australia and New Zealand. It will occur at 5:38pm Universal Time ( click here for your time zone). advertisement - learn more New Moons bring in a new wave of energy for the upcoming month. It is the beginning of the first half of the lunar cycle, which is when the Moon is waxing (gaining light), while the Full Moon is the transition into the second half, when the Moon is waning (losing light). Therefore, the energy of the New Moon serves as more of a guidepost for those first 10-14 days of the cycle. Scorpio: Powerful, Deep, Intense, and Passionate Scorpio is a primal and passionate sign about desires, fears, and intensity. As a ‘fixed sign’ ruled by Mars and Pluto, it holds a high concentration of power that can be used to control or to transform. It likes and seeks what is real and refrains from anything that is lacking substance. The deep merging of two individuals or parties, whether it be sexually, financially, or resourcefully, is Scorpio territory. This sign seeks loyalty, yet it must be earned after a period of being under scrutiny. It wants to know what is hidden beneath the surface to decide on how much trust is to be earned. Scorpio is about willing to look at and even embrace the deepest, darkest, and scariest aspects of others, oneself, and the world around us. It is the sign of death and rebirth, love and hate, as it is the sign of extremes. An example of all of this is how we have Halloween followed by ‘All Saints Day’, and then followed by ‘All Souls Day’ back to back during Scorpio season. The shadow side of Scorpio is that it can be manipulative and controlling in a very calculated way. While the scrutinizing of others is to gain trust, it can also be about getting some sort of advantage to have more control over a person or situation. Although Scorpio seeks hidden aspects of others, it can be very guarded about one’s own secrets. advertisement - learn more New Moon Conjunct Mercury and Trine Neptune Mercury is also in Scorpio moving away from a conjunction with the Sun that was exact 3 days before on October 27th. In the days leading up to this New Moon, many people could have experienced important communications, ideas, deep thoughts, or some sort of mental efforts towards joint resources/efforts, money, sexuality, and/or some sort of strategy. Whatever it is, think of it as something that has been ‘gathered’ or ‘set-up’ to be implemented or expanded on in this moon cycle and in the coming months. The New Moon (with Mercury separating) is also in a trine with Neptune, which could assist us with our imagination, creativity, intuition, dreams, visions, and spiritual connection. Due to the nodes also being involved, there may also be a connection with how our past can help our future. For some lovers, it can be a time of feeling like soulmates. This energy is strong until November 2nd. Venus Conjunct Saturn, Mars In Capricorn Square Uranus The day before the New Moon, Venus made a conjunction with Saturn, which initiated a new 14 month cycle between the two. Venus is about fun, love, relationships, beauty, and pleasure while Saturn is serious and more concerned with responsibilities, structure, discipline, and commitments. Therefore, many of us will experience some sort of merging of these themes both in either favourable or unfavourable ways. Occurring in Sagittarius, it can be related to our beliefs, visions, travel, education, publishing, or marketing. Mars, a ruler of Scorpio, has been in the ambitious sign of Capricorn since September 27th. This has been an excellent time to really make things happen in terms of reaching our goals, and it will last until November 8th/9th. During this New Moon, Mars is separating from a square with Uranus which was stronger in the 2 days prior. At worst, their could have been sudden change, separation, instability, and the need to take some sort of action as a result. For some people, it could have of been rebellion or wanting to break free from a controlling situation. In other cases it could of positively brought innovation towards our ambitions. These are just some examples of how it could be manifested, but whatever it is for each of us, it has created the landscape for some new beginnings. Mercury and Sun Sextile Pluto, Venus Trine Uranus During the first week of the Moon cycle, Mercury (followed by the Sun) will be in a harmonious aspect with Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto, being the modern ruler of Scorpio, indicates that this is an excellent time to expand on what was initiated during the previous week when Mercury was conjunct the Sun. Powerful thoughts, communication, or deep research to assist us in our careers, managing or earning resources/money, or implementing some sort of structure or strategy to help gain some of sort of success and fulfill a goal. Venus is trine Uranus and will be strongest on November 4th-5th. This can be a fun and exciting time, and luckily it will fall on the weekend. This is a great time to connect with people, attend social events, especially since Venus is in Sagittarius, it is a good time to explore and try new things that can bring you enjoyment. This can be a great time for lovers as well with potential breakthroughs. Things To Consider And Making Intentions For This New Moon Look at everything that has played out for you in the last week prior to this New Moon. The next 10 days following it is a significant time to make a great effort to expand on what has been initiated, and take steps to move beyond anything challenging that has occurred. Your intentions for this Lunar Month should be related to improving on and/or facilitating the positive qualities of Scorpio energy into your life. This includes (but not limited to) improving your ability to earn or manage money/resources, tapping into and harnessing your inner power and sexual energy better, facing your fears, trying to understand complex things, seeing beyond fakeness or deceit, and becoming more in touch with what is real. The best time to make your intentions for the Moon cycle is during the first 24 hours following the New Moon but it could even be done within the first 3 days. The closer to the New Moon, the better. The exact time will be at 5:38pm Universal Time, but you can click here to find out what it will be in your time zone. — Have you ever had a personal astrology reading? For a limited time, Carmen is offering a 33% discount on personalized readings/consultations based on your exact birth date, time, and location. Click here for more information. 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+9320,SHOCKER!!! Left Wing MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews has just endorsed Donald Trump for president,"SHOCKER!!! Left Wing MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews has just endorsed Donald Trump for president In the meantime, Hillary Clinton has just ordered a fireworks display to celebrate her winning the election on Nov. 8th. But this could blow up in her face! Hillary Clinton may have lit the fuse for her victory celebration a little too soon — by planning an Election Night explosion of fireworks over the Hudson River in New York City. NY Post NYC Cops and firefighters were blown away by Clinton’s hubris in planning the fireworks display, which would eclipse the shower of blazing sparkles that preceded the balloon drop at July’s Democratic National Convention. Somebody asked “If she loses, will she take the displsy over to the East Side and sell it to Trump for half-price?”",FAKE
+1134,"Pressure Is On Trump, Sanders In Crucial Contests Tuesday","Pressure Is On Trump, Sanders In Crucial Contests Tuesday
+
+Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton currently lead the delegate counts for the presidential nomination. But because of the difference in how both parties award their delegates, Clinton's is the more commanding lead.
+
+Tuesday's Democratic contest in Michigan, the biggest prize of the day, is key for Bernie Sanders to show he can turn things around. His campaign has argued that Clinton has ballooned her lead because of black voters in the South.
+
+Now, many of those Southern contests are over (though there is another Tuesday in Mississippi).
+
+But the question remains: Can the Vermont independent senator appeal to Northern black voters? They make up roughly a quarter of Michigan's Democratic electorate. He believes his economic message can resonate with them and working-class whites hurt by trade. Polls, though, have shown the former secretary of state with double-digit leads going into Tuesday.
+
+Sanders is facing a difficult problem: This past weekend, he won three of four contests, but, because his wins were in smaller caucuses, and Clinton won by a huge margin in the primary in Louisiana, Sanders only wound up winning three more pledged delegates than Clinton. (Pledged delegates are derived from the margins candidates win in voting in various state primaries and caucuses.)
+
+Maintaining that kind of pace will not help Sanders catch Clinton, who is 195 delegates ahead. Sanders needs 53 percent of all remaining delegates to win a majority of pledged delegates. And with each passing contest, that hill becomes even steeper. With superdelegates, those unpledged party leaders and elected officials, factored in, Sanders needs a whopping 60 percent of all remaining delegates. That's a very difficult aircraft carrier to turn around, given the Democrats' proportional system of allocating delegates.
+
+Yes, superdelegates can change their votes, and it's true they have never not gone with who won the pledged majority, but even in 2008, when Barack Obama defeated Clinton, and won more superdelegates, not all that many superdelegates peeled off from Clinton. What's more, Clinton has a far bigger lead with them now than she ever did in 2008. Clinton already has nearly two-thirds of all superdelegates publicly in her corner. (And, by the way, they were created in the 1980s for precisely this purpose — to give party leaders a lever to prevent the nomination of what they view as an unelectable candidate after Democrats were soundly defeated in 1984.)
+
+All that said, the pledged-delegate margin remains the most important number to watch. Clinton would prefer to win the nomination outright based on voting — and not because party leaders put her over the top. There's lots of talk of the GOP civil war, but if there was an outcome in which one candidate won the delegates from actual voters and the other won the nomination because of party insiders, you can bet there would be an equally ugly Democratic convention in Philadelphia this summer.
+
+But unless Sanders starts winning soon and big, that's all theoretical and moot. The Democratic race, at this point, doesn't look close to heading toward anything like that.
+
+For Republicans, though, Trump is ahead, his lead is less dominant because it's a four-person race — and the candidates keep splitting the vote.
+
+On Tuesday, Michigan has the most delegates in play with 59, far less than on the Democratic side, in part because Republicans have far fewer delegates overall, but also because of the state's history of voting Democratic.
+
+Trump has been leading the polls there by double digits, and he needs another big win. The other contests of the day, though — in Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii — hold far more delegates combined (91) than Michigan. There hasn't been any good polling in Mississippi, but Trump hopes to pull off a win there like he did in neighboring Louisiana over the weekend. If Louisiana is an indicator, though, Cruz could give Trump a run for his money.
+
+If Cruz pulled that off, it would be yet another example that he could use to say he's the principal alternative to Trump — and not Marco Rubio. This past weekend, Cruz, who trails Trump by 84 delegates, made a strong case for that. He won the biggest share of the delegates out of a handful of contests with wins in Kansas and Maine — and he nearly picked off Trump in Louisiana and Kentucky.
+
+Rubio finished third everywhere on Saturday, except in Maine, where he finished fourth. He made up for it some in Puerto Rico on Sunday, winning there by such a big margin that he took all of the territory's 23 delegates.
+
+The GOP political establishment couldn't think of a worse possible choice than having to pick between Trump and Cruz, who might be the least liked person in Congress among his colleagues.
+
+And then there's John Kasich. The Ohio governor is hoping to surprise the field in Michigan. He should do well there. He's a Midwesterner. But he's polling double digits behind Trump, and some polls have had Cruz either in second or a close third. If Kasich is far behind in Michigan or even finishes third behind Cruz, it's hard for him to make a case that he has a real chance at the nomination.
+
+He'll likely stay in for the winner-take-all March 15 contest in his home state of Ohio, but what's his sell for staying in after that — aside from maybe trying to keep Trump below a majority heading into the convention by picking off votes and delegates where he can in more moderate places?
+
+Because of the crowded field, unlike the two-person race on the Democratic side, Trump currently still needs 53 percent of all remaining delegates to win the nomination. But he has only won the majority of delegates in five of 20 states so far.
+
+That's not to say anyone else on the GOP side has a better chance of winning a majority — Cruz needs 59 percent of all remaining delegates, Rubio 68 percent and Kasich 75 percent.
+
+The candidates hope to start racking up more lopsided wins, as the contest rules change on March 15. That's when states can pick however they want to award delegates. Some states, like Florida, Ohio, Arizona and New Jersey, are winner take all; others are more hybrid. All of that is to say there could be some funky results, spikes and dips ahead that could sway the race in a potentially unknown direction.
+
+But clearly, at this point, Trump is in the driver's seat. He has solid support with his hardened base that will get him a lot of delegates before June when the contests are eventually over. The question that still remains for him is: Will he grow his support?
+
+Through 20 contests, he has averaged 35 percent of the vote. He's cracked 40 percent in five states so far and 50 percent in just one (New Hampshire). That's why he's been publicly calling for candidates, like Rubio, to get out of the race.
+
+The theory of the establishment coalescing behind a single candidate to beat Trump might not hold true, but what might be true is Trump needs the field to shrink to get a majority before the convention.
+
+How many states vote? Four: Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan and Mississippi. (All four vote on the GOP side, but just Michigan and Mississippi vote on the Democratic side.)
+
+When do polls close? 8 p.m. ET (Mississippi), 9 p.m. ET (Michigan — most polls close at 8 p.m. ET, but some counties are in Central), 11 p.m. ET (Idaho), 1 a.m. ET (Hawaii).
+
+How many delegates are at stake? 316 combined (338 if 22 Democratic superdelegates are included):
+
+Remind me what happened on Super Tuesday? Trump won big, picking up victories in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia. Cruz won his home state of Texas and also Oklahoma and Alaska. Marco Rubio eked out his first victory — in the Minnesota caucuses. That was enough to guarantee that both senators would be in the race until at least March 15, when more states become winner-take-all, including Rubio's must-win home state of Florida.
+
+For the Democrats, Clinton won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Sanders won Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma and his home state of Vermont.
+
+Did anything happen after Super Tuesday? Yes. On the Democratic side, Sanders won the caucuses in Maine, Kansas and Nebraska. Clinton won by a huge margin in the Louisiana primary.
+
+On the GOP side, Cruz won the most delegates out of this past weekend with wins in Kansas and Maine on Saturday. Trump pulled off narrow victories in Louisiana and Kentucky. Rubio won the Republican primary in Puerto Rico on Sunday by more than 50 percent of the vote, giving him all 23 delegates (which, by the way, is as many delegates as in New Hampshire).
+
+What is the current delegate count? On the GOP side, Trump has 384 delegates. In second place is Cruz with 300. Rubio has 151 and Kasich 37. Remember, the Republicans need 1,237 delegates to get the nomination.
+
+On the Democratic side, Clinton leads with pledged delegates 672 to 477 for Sanders. With superdelegates factored in (458 for Clinton), her total balloons to 1,130 to Sanders' 499 (with just 22 superdelegates).",REAL
+5944,Comment on “Isolated Incident” Every Police Dept in America Failed to Meet Minimum Standard for Use of Force by Isaid Dilligaf,"Home / Badge Abuse / “Isolated Incident” Every Police Dept in America Failed to Meet Minimum Standard for Use of Force “Isolated Incident” Every Police Dept in America Failed to Meet Minimum Standard for Use of Force Jay Syrmopoulos June 19, 2015 1 Comment 
+(TFTP) — In a blistering rebuke of the current state of policing in the United States, a report issued by Amnesty International USA stated that all 50 U.S. states failed to meet international standards on use of deadly force by law enforcement officers. 
+The stunning report lays bare the fact that U.S. police are killing without any formal obligation to respect or preserve human life. 
+In an interview with The Guardian , Amnesty USA executive director Steven Hawkins said the report’s findings revealed a “shocking lack of fundamental respect for the sanctity of human life.” 
+“While law enforcement in the United States is given the authority to use lethal force, there is no equal obligation to respect and preserve human life. It’s shocking that while we give law enforcement this extraordinary power, so many states either have no regulation on their books or nothing that complies with international standards,” Hawkins said. 
+With recent protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, over police killings, there has been an ever-growing spotlight being shined on the culture of policing. 
+Amnesty analyzed each of the 50 U.S state’s statutes regarding use of lethal force. They then compared them against the United Nations accepted principles of only using lethal force “in order to protect life” in “unavoidable” instances after first attempting to utilize “less extreme means.” 
+UN guidelines go on to state that officers should identify themselves and give a clear warning of the intent to use deadly force. 
+The report found that none of the 50 states met these international standards for using lethal force, stating: 
+“None of the laws establish the requirement that lethal force may only be used as a last resort with non-violent means and less harmful means to be tried first. The vast majority of laws do not require officers to give a warning of their intent to use firearms.” 
+The U.S. constitutional standard is less stringent, as set by a 1985 Supreme Court case Tennesse v Garner. The court held that an officer may use deadly force to prevent a suspect from escaping if “the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” 
+Even so, 13 U.S. states failed to meet that constitutional standard, instead choosing to use extremely vague language in their statutes, which can be manipulated to allow for force use well beyond accepted standards. For example, North Dakota allows for deadly force against “an individual who has committed or attempted to commit a felony involving violence,” without ever defining what level of violence would warrant lethal force. 
+Nine states have absolutely no statutes on the books regarding officer use of lethal force– Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming – as well as Washington D.C., meaning that inevitably police investigate themselves based on some arbitrary standard. 
+The analysis found that only eight states had a requirement of a verbal warning before engaging in the use of deadly force. And in nine states, police can legally use lethal force during a time of rioting. In Pennsylvania, for example, a statute on use of force declares use of lethal force legitimate if “necessary to suppress a riot or mutiny after the rioters or mutineers have been ordered to disperse.” 
+Amnesty’s report states that in following international standards, all fatal incidents should be mandatorily reported and impartially investigated. The U.S. does no such thing, as the FBI runs a completely voluntary database. 
+According The Guardian: 
+The report also suggests taking action at all levels of government, making recommendations to the president, Congress and the US justice department, along with state legislatures and individual law enforcement departments. Amnesty suggests that laws be brought into compliance with international standards at every level, and that the justice department oversee a national commission “to examine and produce recommendations on policing issues, including a nationwide review of police use of lethal force laws … as well as a thorough review and reform of oversight and accountability mechanisms”. 
+Hawkins went on to say that he expects pushback from the police and their unions, but stated, “with so much attention on law enforcement and its use of lethal force within the US, in the next legislative session this report will produce some energy for change.” 
+The push for police accountability is now reaching a fever pitch in the U.S., as the current policing paradigm is unsustainable. With so many great ideas for systemic reform on the table, and so many great minds pushing for accountability, it seems only a matter of time before the current “good ole boy” power structure comes crumbling down. 
+Jay Syrmopoulos is an investigative journalist, free thinker, researcher, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs. Jay’s work has previously been published on BenSwann.com and WeAreChange.org. You can follow him on Twitter @sirmetropolis, on Facebook at Sir Metropolis and now on tsu . Share Google + Isaid Dilligaf 
+Defund these assholes and take their toys away…NOv is coming Police…YOU are about to be outnumbered and outgunned for the first time in your pussy lives, you are going to really earn your money….America is about to grind you up and spit your filthy ass out for all your abuses against us…Time to pay the piper cowards… Social",FAKE
+7919,"Report: Russian, U.S. Jets Have Close Encounter Over Syria","By wmw_admin on October 29, 2016 Morgan Chalfant — Washington Free Beacon Oct 28, 2016 
+U.S. and Russian military jets reportedly had a close encounter in Syrian airspace several days ago. 
+AFP, citing U.S. officials, reported Friday morning that a Russian fighter jet flew dangerously close to a U.S. jet in airspace over eastern Syria on Oct. 17, nearly two weeks prior. 
+A Russian jet escorting a larger spy aircraft flew into the vicinity of the U.S. warplane, moving to “inside half a mile” from the American plane, according to Air Force Lieutenant General Jeff Harrigian. #BREAKING Russian, US jets had near miss over Syria: US officials 
+— AFP news agency (@AFP) October 28, 2016 
+“I would attribute it to not having the necessary situational awareness given all those platforms operating together,” Harrigian further stated, according to AFP. 
+An unnamed defense official said that the Russian aircraft “was close enough you could feel the jet wash of the plane passing by.” 
+The U.S. and Russia have set up a line of communication to avoid clashes in airspace over Syria. In this incident, the American pilot reportedly attempted to communicate with the Russian warplane but was unsuccessful. 
+Harrigian also reported an increase in close encounters between American and Russian military jets in the region in the past six weeks. He said that Russian jets have intentionally flown close to U.S. warplanes about once every 10 days. 
+Tensions between the United States and Russia have been exacerbated over the situation in Syria in recent weeks, following a failed ceasefire deal and suspension of communications between the two countries. 
+Russian and Syrian jets have bombed civilians and U.S.-backed rebels in Aleppo, drawing ire from America. Moscow has threatened to shoot down coalition jets that target Bashar al-Assad’s forces with air strikes in Syria, after reports indicated that the Obama administration would consider targeting Syrian government forces with strikes.",FAKE
+7073,You Will Soon Be Obsolete: “Plan Your Future Before THEY Plan It For You”,"The world is about to change drastically . Will you be ready for it? 
+The Future Doesn’t Need Us… Or So We’ve Been Told. 
+With the rise of technology and the real-time pressures of an online, global economy, humans will have to be very clever – and very careful – not to be left behind by the future. 
+From the perspective of those in charge, human labor is losing its value, and people are becoming a liability. 
+This documentary reveals the real motivation behind the secretive effort to reduce the population and bring resource use into strict, centralized control. 
+Could it be that the biggest threat we face isn’t just automation and robots destroying jobs, but the larger sense that humans could become obsolete altogether?",FAKE
+7494,After 3 Years of Suffering 19 Year Old Girl Dies from Gardasil Vaccine Injuries,"Print This Post After 3 Years of Suffering 19 Year Old Girl Dies from Gardasil Vaccine Injuries Kate was very tall for her age and a very accomplished athlete before receiving the Gardasil vaccine. She died at the age of 19 after suffering for years. 
+Health Impact News 
+The film VAXXED continues to be shown in new cities across the U.S., with the film crew also traveling to these cities to sponsor Q&A sessions after the filming. Producer Del Bigtree states that the story of the CDC whistleblower and cover-up told in the film is “ Bigger than Watergate. ” 
+The film crew also films parents of vaccine damaged or vaccine killed children who turn out to view the film and tell their own stories. Each city they go to reveals incredible stories of families who have suffered from vaccines, and wish they had known more about the risks before agreeing with doctors who seldom, if ever, discuss the side effects and risks. 
+In the video below, a tearful mother tells the story of the biggest decision she ever made and will regret the rest of her life, when she allowed her teen-aged daughter Kate, a tall and accomplished student athlete at the time, to receive the Gardasil HPV vaccine. 
+Her health began to decline, and the last 3 years of her life she suffered in terrible pain and had to be on a feeding tube. She tragically died at the age of 19. 
+Comment on this article at VaccineImpact.com. Young women whose lives were destroyed by Gardasil. More information about Gardasil Leaving a lucrative career as a nephrologist (kidney doctor), Dr. Suzanne Humphries is now free to actually help cure people. In this autobiography she explains why good doctors are constrained within the current corrupt medical system from practicing real, ethical medicine. FREE Shipping Available! Order here . Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced? eBook – Available for immediate download. 
+One of the biggest myths being propagated in the compliant mainstream media today is that doctors are either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and that the anti-vaccine doctors are all “quacks.” 
+However, nothing could be further from the truth in the vaccine debate. Doctors are not unified at all on their positions regarding “the science” of vaccines, nor are they unified in the position of removing informed consent to a medical procedure like vaccines. 
+The two most extreme positions are those doctors who are 100% against vaccines and do not administer them at all, and those doctors that believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective for ALL people, ALL the time, by force if necessary. 
+Very few doctors fall into either of these two extremist positions, and yet it is the extreme pro-vaccine position that is presented by the U.S. Government and mainstream media as being the dominant position of the medical field. 
+In between these two extreme views, however, is where the vast majority of doctors practicing today would probably categorize their position. Many doctors who consider themselves “pro-vaccine,” for example, do not believe that every single vaccine is appropriate for every single individual. 
+Many doctors recommend a “delayed” vaccine schedule for some patients, and not always the recommended one-size-fits-all CDC childhood schedule. Other doctors choose to recommend vaccines based on the actual science and merit of each vaccine, recommending some, while determining that others are not worth the risk for children, such as the suspect seasonal flu shot. 
+These doctors who do not hold extreme positions would be opposed to government-mandated vaccinations and the removal of all parental exemptions. 
+In this eBook, I am going to summarize the many doctors today who do not take the most extremist pro-vaccine position, which is probably not held by very many doctors at all, in spite of what the pharmaceutical industry, the federal government, and the mainstream media would like the public to believe. Read : Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced? on your mobile device!",FAKE
+8149,Britain looking forward to bonfire night because it can’t afford to put the heating on,"Britain looking forward to bonfire night because it can’t afford to put the heating on 05-11-16 
+BRITAIN’S enthusiasm for firework displays is really about avoiding extortionate heating bills, it has been confirmed. 
+Researchers discovered that, rather than being excited about synchronised explosions, most attendees are actually looking forward to getting the feeling back in their extremities without laying awake worrying about money. 
+Zero-hours courier Sarah Smith, 33, said: “It’s not just the bonfire, there’s the body heat from the crowd too. What a treat.” 
+Nurse Tom Logan, 27, added: “I couldn’t give a shit about fireworks. 
+“I’d rather be at home watching Luther , but it’s so cold that I have to wear gloves and a hat inside. If getting warm means standing in the mud, in the dark, listening to people go ‘ooh’, that’s a small price to pay – and much better value than EDF.” 
+Both said that they would be leaving before the finale, however, as it would inevitably be soundtracked by Katy Perry’s Firework , like every display since 2010. 
+Share:",FAKE
+5291,‘That’s the CRAP young people pay attention to.’ Team Hillary trashes millennials #PodestaEmails21,"‘That’s the CRAP young people pay attention to.’ Team Hillary trashes millennials #PodestaEmails21 Posted at 1:24 pm   Sam J. 
+Sorry millennials, Team Hillary doesn’t think much of you or your taste in pop culture. 
+In fact in this particular email, “Michael” calls you trivial and the the things you like, “crap.” 
+Because nothing inspires millennials like calling them young and dumb. How do we get dumb young people to support Hillary? We get morons like @MileyCyrus & @katyperry to knock on doors! https://t.co/RbJl04WZuG pic.twitter.com/ude7XFherP 
+— Derek Hunter (@derekahunter) October 28, 2016 
+Enter Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and a horde of other “pop culture” icons who appeal to the young and dumb. @derekahunter @benshapiro Combine that with BJs from Madonna and the youth outreach is complete! How did we lose to this? #rhetorical 
+Oh yeah! Totally forgot about Madonna’s promise … oddly enough Hillary didn’t really climb all that much in the polls after that. @derekahunter @MileyCyrus @katyperry For a good laugh give both of them a civics test. 😂 
+— Dale Mitchell (@thurzday60) October 28, 2016 
+THAT would be hilarious.",FAKE
+1164,Does Bernie Sanders really want to win? Three Democratic debate takeaways,"To understand what ails Hillary Clinton, let’s rewind past Iowa and New Hampshire – two years back, in fact, to a speech in New Orleans before the National Auto Dealers Association and these words:
+
+“The last time I actually drove a car myself was 1996. I remember it very well. Unfortunately, so does the Secret Service, which is why I haven't driven since then.”
+
+That one passage underscores three of Clinton’s present-day woes: she’s lived in a cocoon for well over two decades; she’s not all that entertaining; there may be no limit to what she and her husband will do for a quick buck (that one appearance earned Hillary a $325,000 honorarium).
+
+Speaking of Clinton’s motoring skills, there’s a fourth problem: rather than turn into the skid caused by alarming droves of young and women voters jilting her for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, she’s overcorrected – trying too hard to pawn herself off as a feverish progressive; leaning too hard on “Lean In” adherents to stay true to the sisterhood.
+
+It’s one way to parse Thursday’s Democratic debate in Milwaukee: would Clinton continue her February fishtailing, or find a smarter way to pull out of the skid?
+
+Here are three observations.
+
+1. Did Hillary Alter Her Message? Yes – and it began with her opening statement.
+
+Clinton noted voters’ anger toward the economy (isn’t it more like frustration?), singling out “young people” as those most furious, and sounded Bernie-lite in calling for “unaccountable money” to be taken out of the system and claiming that America’s economy is rigged “for those at the top” (but certainly not those industrious souls giving six-figure speeches).
+
+Credit Clinton with waking up to 2016 reality. Which didn’t come easy – not until New Hampshire’s gobsmacking.
+
+In 1992, Bill Clinton had the luxury of running in a pre-digital time when the Democratic hard left, beaten down after three presidential meltdowns, offered little in the way of resistance. In 2008, having voted for the Iraq war, Hillary was too late to wake up to liberal Sturm und Drang.
+
+In 2016, Clinton understands the kooky old guy to the right of her on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee stage (physically, not philosophically) is on to something – and she wants in on his act.
+
+And so it’s official: Hillary Feels the Bern . . . until Bernie’s out of the race.
+
+2.  Is Bernie Serious About Winning This? We can quibble over the small stuff – like the batch of spending ideas doubling the national debt. Or how he’d win a single vote in Congress.
+
+Not unlike Donald Trump, Sanders is an implausibly electable candidate who’s cornered the market on “you’re being ripped off” simplicity: “The American people are tired of establishment politics, tired of establishment economics. . .”
+
+The problem: preaching the (Democratic) socialist gospel isn’t a blueprint for victory beyond the most lilywhite of Democratic electorates. Sanders needs to call out Clinton in more glaring terms. Otherwise, he’s gum on her shoe – a protest vote that won’t win many states and, as we’ve already seen post-New Hampshire, will get rolled in the contest that counts most: the delegate count.
+
+Take the issue of illegal immigration as an example of how Sanders falls short. In trying to clarify his 2007 Senate vote against a Senate reform plan, he opted to get all prickly about children’s lives rather than prick holes in Clinton’s record – beginning with not being consistent on immigration.
+
+It wasn’t the only opening he missed.
+
+Sanders could have asked how Clinton could credibly bemoan the state of Black America, having watched her husband sign welfare reform and federal sentencing laws, or why she now espouses gay rights having opposed same-sex marriage in 2008.
+
+Sanders’ trump card – and Hillary’s Achilles heel – is authenticity; he believes what he says; she says what she believes will win the moment.
+
+If Sanders wants to prevail beyond a random few states, he has to drive home that argument. Waiting until the debate’s closing minutes to remind Democrats that she ran against Obama, not him, doesn’t cut it.
+
+3.   On, Wisconsin . . . To Nevada and South Carolina. The drinking game only a fool would have accepted: imbibing whenever Clinton tossed a line to those voters she most immediately needs (well, that and Bernie saying “billionaires” or “Wall Street”).
+
+For a Nevada that’s almost 28 percent Latino (50 percent above the national average) and votes on the Democratic side a week from Saturday: “[H]ard-working immigrant families, living in fear, who should be brought out of the shadows so they and their children can have a better future”.
+
+For a South Carolina that’s almost 28 percent black (compared to 1% in New Hampshire) and holds its Democratic primary the following Saturday: “African-Americans who face discrimination in the job market, education, housing and the criminal justice system”.
+
+Toss in a shout-out here or there to women (equal pay for equal work) and Hillary was the grizzliest of pander bears. Her jacket may have been acid-yellow; her intentions were transparently black and brown.
+
+Milwaukee lays claim to several innovations – the first steel automobile frame and outboard gasoline engine (the latter courtesy of a local named Ole Evinrude), not to mention the ice-cream sundae.
+
+The city’s also home to “sewer socialism” and the idea that the natural counter to the Industrial Revolution was to spruce up society with new sanitation systems, municipally-owned utilities, and better schools and parks.
+
+Hillary Clinton’s challenge moving forward: convincing her party that Bernie’s socialism is a losing proposition for her party, even with the “Democratic” modifier.
+
+And if that doesn’t work in Nevada and South Carolina?
+
+This race will wind up in the sewer.
+
+Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
+1937,Rubio nabs key former Romney aide,"Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is adding a veteran New Hampshire political operative to his team as he continues mulling a possible 2016 presidential bid, the latest sign that he is seriously preparing to launch a campaign later this year.
+
+Jim Merrill, who worked for former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and ran his 2008 and 2012 New Hampshire primary campaigns, joined Rubio’s fledgling campaign on Monday, aides to the senator said.
+
+Merrill will be joining Rubio’s Reclaim America PAC to focus on Rubio’s New Hampshire and broader Northeast political operations.
+
+""Marco has always been well received in New Hampshire, and should he run for president, he would be very competitive there,"" Terry Sullivan, who runs Reclaim America, said in a statement. ""Jim certainly knows how to win in New Hampshire and in the Northeast, and will be a great addition to our team at Reclaim America.”
+
+News of Merrill’s hire was first reported by The New York Times.",REAL
+4516,ISIS claim responsibility for shooting at Texas Muhammad cartoon contest,"The Islamic State terror group (ISIS) Tuesday issued a claim of responsibility for Sunday's attack on a Texas cartoon contest featuring images of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
+
+The claim was made in an audio message on the group's Al Bayan radio station, based in the Syria city of Raqqa, which ISIS has proclaimed to be the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate. It is the first time ISIS has taken credit for an attack on U.S. soil, though it was not immediately clear whether the group's claim was an opportunistic co-opting of a so-called ""lone wolf"" attack as its own.
+
+The message described the shooting suspects as ""two soldiers of the caliphate"" and added ""We tell America that what is coming is more bitter and harder and you will see from the soldiers of the Caliphate what harms you.""
+
+The message also said the contest, which was being put on by a group known for controversial rhetoric about Islam, ""was portraying negative images of the Prophet Muhammad.""
+
+House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, told Fox News Tuesday that the attack was terrorism and at the very least inspired by ISIS.
+
+McCaul also said in the days leading up to the attack, a joint FBI and Homeland Security bulletin was circulated and security for the event had been ramped up as a result, in Garland understanding that it was a target.
+
+An investigation following the attack revealed a striking connection between at least one of the gunmen and a Twitter account based overseas, suggesting that ISIS operatives had knowledge of the attack beforehand and that the same fighters encouraged the shooters, a counterterrorism source told Fox News.
+
+One British-based jihadi in Syria who does not tweet on a regular basis sent out a message within an hour of the attack, praising both men.
+
+Another established ISIS Twitter account suggested he had been in contact with one of the gunmen just prior to the attack, using messages such as he tried to reach him but just missed him. The source said the social media appeared to show encouragement and mentoring.
+
+The contest had been expected to draw outrage from the Muslim community. According to mainstream Islamic tradition, any physical depiction of Muhammad — even a respectful one — is considered blasphemous, and drawings similar to those featured at the Texas event have sparked violence around the world.
+
+Authorities say the suspects, identified as Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, drove up to the building where the contest was being held in the Dallas suburb of Garland and opened fire. An unarmed school district security guard was wounded before a Garland police officer returned fire and killed both men.
+
+Soofi had a long standing hatred of police and had studied overseas in Islamabad, Pakistan, according to a Facebook account that has since been disabled.
+
+He once owned a pizza and hot wings restaurant in Phoenix called Cleopatra, but sold it years ago as it was struggling, the New York Times reports.
+
+Public records showed that Soofi and Simpson were living in the same apartment complex in Phoenix, but it was not clear if they lived together, according to the newspaper.
+
+Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement Monday that law enforcement authorities are investigating the men's motives and all circumstances surrounding the attack.
+
+Court documents show that Simpson had first been noticed by the FBI in 2006 due to his ties to a a former U.S. Navy sailor who had been arrested in Phoenix and was ultimately convicted of terrorism-related charges. In 2010, Simpson was arrested one day before he was scheduled to fly to South Africa to undertake what he claimed were religious studies at a madrassa. Recordings played at Simpson's trial indicated that he was using his studies as an excuse to travel to Somalia to link up with militant fighters there.
+
+Despite the more than 1,500 hours of recorded conversations, including Simpson's discussions about fighting nonbelievers for Allah, whom he referred to as ""kuffars"" the government prosecuted him on only one minor charge — lying to a federal agent. He faced three years of probation and $600 in fines and court fees.
+
+There have been numerous attacks in Western countries believed related in some way to the group, which holds roughly a third of Iraq and Syria.
+
+In October, Canada was hit by two terror attacks by so-called ""lone wolves"" believed to have been inspired by the Islamic State group. In Ottawa, a gunman shot and killed a soldier at Canada's National War Memorial and then stormed Parliament before being gunned down. Two days earlier, a man ran over two soldiers in a parking lot in Quebec, killing one and injuring the other before being shot to death by police.
+
+Fox News Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9918,Comment on AG Lynch told FBI Director Comey NOT to go public with the new Clinton email investigation by Ann Tenna,"  Daisy Luther 
+According to a report in the New Yorker, James Comey , Big Kahuna of the FBI, went full-on cowboy in releasing details of the new Clinton email inquiry. Apparently, the Department of Justice advised him not to release the information just days before the presidential election. 
+Gosh. I wonder if the same advice would have been given if it was Donald Trump who was being investigated by the FBI. 
+Comey explained his decision in a letter to FBI employees : 
+“We don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.” 
+The DoJ – and by DoJ I mean Attorney General Loretta Lynch , who famously had a secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Bill Clinton to talk about her non-existent grandchildren – is implying that Comey is not playing fair and that the move is inconsistent with the rules which have been designed to make it seem like they are not interfering in an election. 
+Here’s Comey’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee: 
+Really? 
+The DoJ thinks that the public shouldn’t know that the person they may be voting for is being investigated by the FBI? 
+That’s the most absurd thing I have heard for quite some time, and considering this election, that’s really saying something. 
+This is from the New Yorker report, emphasis mine. 
+On Friday, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch , sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e-mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey’s decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department’s longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election, but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise . 
+Comey’s decision is a striking break with the policies of the Department of Justice, according to current and former federal legal officials. Comey, who is a Republican appointee of President Obama, has a reputation for integrity and independence, but his latest action is stirring an extraordinary level of concern among legal authorities, who see it as potentially affecting the outcome of the Presidential and congressional elections. ( source ) Is this investigation the iceberg to HRC’s Titanic campaign? 
+Hillary Clinton has said she finds the development “unprecedented and deeply troubling.” (source ) 
+Oh, I’ll bet she does. 
+I’ll bet if Trump had been the target of the investigation she would have been up on the stage, gripping the podium to stay upright , saying how wonderful it was that Comey decided to break the news so that voters could be aware that they might be voting for someone who was suspected of having broken federal laws. I’ll bet she’d be saying that the public has a right to know if a candidate was under investigation. I’ll bet she’d take the high road and say that those elected to the office of President of the United States have to be above and beyond reproach. 
+Of course, when it’s her, things are a little different, aren’t they? 
+We do have a right to know. We absolutely have a right to know that a person who could be elected to know all of the secrets was careless when she only knew some of the secrets. It seems like a no-brainer that the public should know that a candidate is being investigated for a second time for being criminally negligent with information entrusted to her. 
+And the fact that we know has severely damaged Clinton’s campaign. Although previous polls were incredibly skewed to the point of being outright fake , it looks like the mainstream is now trying to save face with a new batch of polls. A poll from ABC news and the Washington Post , both hotbeds of liberal voters, has shown that her lead has dropped to within a single point over Donald Trump due to the Clinton email scandal. 
+“About a third of likely voters say they’re less likely to support Clinton given FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure Friday that the bureau is investigating more emails related to its probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. “ 
+Finally, some people are actually paying attention to the character of Hillary Clinton. 
+But it may not be enough. There was one finding that was astonishing to me, even though it probably shouldn’t be: 
+“Given other considerations, 63 percent say it makes no difference.” 
+Meanwhile, on social media, the FBI emails are somehow not a trending topic. It certainly appears that Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Buzzfeed are blacking out the topic. My biggest question is this: Why now? 
+Why did James Comey, who has probably committed career suicide, along with a potential actual “suicide” via a shot to the back of his own head like others who have run afoul of the Clintons, feel the need to break the news, particularly after giving her a pass during the last investigation? 
+Opponents will jump on the fact that he’s a Republican and will say that he did it for political reasons. 
+They won’t admit that perhaps he felt guilty for being complicit in letting her off the hook in the first investigation into the Clinton email negligence. 
+They will never, ever admit that maybe his integrity and belief in the office he holds made it impossible for him to keep quiet until after the election and that, perhaps, when he was given a chance to right a previous wrong, he took it. Clinton isn’t taking it gracefully. 
+Clinton’s complaints, which have appeared in the press around the world, make her look even worse than she did before. 
+This is from The Telegraph , a UK publication: 
+Hillary Clinton was furiously fighting to keep her Presidential bid on track on Saturday night as her lead in the polls narrowed, after the FBI’s bombshell announcement that it had reopened its investigation into her emails. 
+James Comey announced on Friday afternoon that fresh evidence had emerged for his investigation into whether Mrs Clinton was criminally negligent in her handling of classified material. 
+On Saturday, the latest poll of polls by tracker site RealClearPolitics put Clinton 3.9 percentage points ahead of the Republican nationwide, down from 7.1 points just 10 days previously. 
+But wait – it gets better: 
+The Clinton campaign has responded with what amounts to a declaration of open warfare against Mr Comey, alleging that his actions are backed by a political motive. And Mrs Clinton herself called the decision “unprecedented” and “deeply troubling”. 
+“It’s pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election,” she complained, addressing cheering supporters at a rally in the must-win state of Florida. 
+Democrats questioned the timing of the agency’s decision, which comes as polls showed Mrs Clinton’s lead falling just 10 days before the presidential election. 
+“This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the worst possible time,” said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. 
+“The campaign is trying to cut through the noise as best it can. 
+“We don’t want it to knock us off our game. But on the second-to-last weekend of the race, we find ourselves having to tell voters, ‘Keep your focus, keep your eyes on the prize.’” 
+Hillary’s campaign manager sounds pretty desperate to me. As for the complaints from HRC, they just make her sound like the out-of-touch, money-grabbing, power-hungry, deceitful",FAKE
+6718,"George Soros begins his color revolution in America, as MoveOn “activists” march against Trump","Share on Facebook 
+MoveOn.org is a George Soros NGO…and George Soros NGOs have nothing to do with charity or justice, and everything to do with political leverage, and in extreme cases government insurrection. 
+We have seen Soros begin destructive movements to remove those he deems unsuitable to govern in a variety of countries, most recently in Ukraine, with the Soros sponsored Maidan coup. 
+Now it looks like Soros may be setting his sights on sabotaging the forthcoming Trump presidency. 
+We do know, thanks to Wikileaks, that George Soros was a huge supporter of Hillary Clinton, as Hillary Clinton was always looking out of George Soros’ best interests. 
+We are certain Trump’s victory is a bitter pill for globalist Soros to swallow. Between Putin and Trump, Soros may finally be starting to feel his power on the world stage falter. 
+We will see if MoveOn.org’s call to protest has legs, or if it will gradually fizzle and fade, in much the same way we can only hope Soros will eventually do. 
+NBC’s Katy Tur said… 
+“It’s surreal in NYC. People are walking around like zombies with thousand yard stares.” 
+Zerohedge reports … 
+Seemingly unwilling to accept the results of the democratic selection of the nation’s leader for the next four years, hundreds of grieving Hillary Clinton supporters – egged on by George Soros’ MoveOn.org – are laying siege to Trump Tower in New York City. Screaming “Fuck Donald Trump”, yelling “Not My President”, chanting “Pussy Grabs Back”, and burning the American flag, it appears these young millennials are just the kind of deplorables this country should be proud of… 
+MoveOn.org released this press release on Wednesday, calling on people to take to the streets: 
+Americans to Come Together in Hundreds Peaceful Gatherings of Solidarity, Resistance, and Resolve Following Election Results 
+Hundreds of Americans, dozens of organizations to gather peacefully outside the White House and in cities and towns nationwide to take a continued stand against misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. 
+Tonight, thousands of Americans will come together at hundreds of peaceful gatherings in cities and towns across the nation, including outside the White House, following the results of Tuesday’s presidential election. 
+The gatherings – organized by MoveOn.org and allies – will affirm a continued rejection of Donald Trump’s bigotry, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and misogyny and demonstrate our resolve to fight together for the America we still believe is possible. 
+Within two hours of the call-to-action, MoveOn members had created more than 200 gatherings nationwide, with the number continuing to grow on Wednesday afternoon. 
+WHAT: Hundreds of peaceful gatherings of solidarity, resistance, and resolve nationwide 
+WHEN / WHERE: Find local gatherings here . Major gatherings include in New York City’s Columbus Circle and outside the White House in Washington, DC . 
+RSVP: Please email press@moveon.org to confirm attendance. 
+“This is a disaster. We fought our hearts out to avert this reality. But now it’s here,” MoveOn.org staff wrote to members on Wednesday. “The new president-elect and many of his most prominent supporters have targeted, demeaned, and threatened millions of us—and millions of our friends, family, and loved ones. Both chambers of Congress remain in Republican hands. We are entering an era of profound and unprecedented challenge, a time of danger for our communities and our country. In this moment, we have to take care of ourselves, our families, and our friends—especially those of us who are on the front lines facing hate, including Latinos, women, immigrants, refugees, Black people, Muslims, LGBT Americans, and so many others. And we need to make it clear that we will continue to stand together.”",FAKE
+83,#BlackLivesMatter: Why movement is its own worst enemy,"Editor's note: The following column appeared in The Hill newspaper and on TheHill.com.
+
+#BlackLivesMatter is fast becoming its own worst enemy.
+
+It lacks an agenda, it is antagonizing the black community’s top white political allies, including Democrats running for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination, and it is not finding common ground with any of the Republican majority in Congress.
+
+The catalyst for the movement was outrage over the deaths of young black men like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police officers who arguably used excessive, even deadly force. But where is the list of solutions to the injustices it so often decries?
+
+The movement’s failure to get its collective act together carries real danger for the political clout of the African-American community in the 2016 elections and beyond.
+
+With the movement potentially discouraging black American trust in Democrats, #BlackLivesMatter is increasing the odds of a sharp drop in black voter turnout in 2016. Already Democrats privately worry that without President Obama on the ballot, the black vote will decrease the turnout needed to keep the White House and win back the Senate.
+
+That is more likely to happen if black voters get caught up in the anger that the BlackLives movement has directed at the political structure. The potential absence of black voters who have become discouraged — about a quarter of the nation’s Democrats — would be more devastating than any Republican plan to require voter identification, reduce the number of polling places in black neighborhoods or cut back on early voting.
+
+When BlackLives activists denounce the Democratic National Committee for issuing a resolution in support of police reform, they are hurting themselves with party officials. When they say that all political parties try to “control or contain” black liberation, they are also damaging faith in the political system, especially among young people.
+
+When they interrupt Democrats running for the presidential nomination, such as Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, they are alienating longtime political allies and their supporters. When they videotape Hillary Clinton after she generously agrees to meet with them privately — in an apparent attempt to embarrass her — they are distancing themselves from the likely Democratic nominee. And imagine how local and state officials will react now to any request for a meeting with the group.
+
+Meanwhile, they are not finding common cause with Latinos, even as immigrants are being attacked by the Republican candidates for the presidential election. Have you seen BlackLives interrupting Donald Trump’s events? Where is the outreach to Republicans?
+
+Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is one the most outspoken leaders in either political party on the racial inequities of prison reform. “I see an America where criminal justice is applied equally and any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed,” he said in his announcement speech. If change is the goal, where is the alliance with the senator?
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor, has declared on the campaign trail that “the war on drugs has been a failure.” He told an audience last month “everyone makes mistakes” and that society needs to “reach out” and “embrace those people and say, ‘If you’re not a violent offender, if you’re not dealing drugs to our children, we need to get you treatment rather than prison.’ ”
+
+Earlier this year, the Brennan Center for Law and Justice published a collection of essays highlighting the bipartisan consensus among national politicians that there is a need for sentencing reform, called Solutions: American Leaders speak out on Criminal Justice. Clinton, O’Malley, Paul, Christie and fellow presidential candidates Jim Webb, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio each penned essays for the Brennan Center on the need for reform.
+
+And it’s not just those running for the Oval Office — leading congressional Republicans like Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Tea Party favorite Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) have all endorsed proposals to relax the federal sentencing laws. Grassley has said he wants to move on a bill this year to do just that.
+
+A bipartisan bill, the Safe, Accountable, Fair, and Effective (SAFE) Justice Act authored by Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin and Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, has about three-dozen bipartisan co-sponsors in the House already. If #BlackLivesMatter protesters were chanting “Pass the SAFE Justice Act now!” they could find themselves in position to make significant change. Somehow they are blind to the opportunity.
+
+It has been said that politicians see the light once they feel the heat. If only the energy and passion of #BlackLivesMatter protesters could be harnessed in something constructive rather than destructive.
+
+Lobby Congress, hold voter registration drives, quiz candidates on their plan for sentencing reform, but don’t heckle the candidates and incite violence by calling for cop-killing. The movement could be critical to securing and mobilizing black support for criminal justice reform that actually would improve black lives.
+
+I am reminded of something my father, who trained boxers, once told me.
+
+He said even the best fighters know fear is like fire. It can cook your food and light your home. It can also burn your house down and kill you. The key to controlling fear or fire is turning it to a constructive purpose.
+
+Now if only #BlackLivesMatter will harness its own fire into the urgent cause of criminal justice reform.
+
+Juan Williams is a co-host of FNC's ""The Five,"" where he is one of seven rotating Fox personalities.
+
+",REAL
+7962,Comments of the Week: Here Comes Trouble,"Comments of the Week: Here Comes Trouble Posted on Oct 26, 2016 torbakhopper / CC BY-ND 2.0 
+As is to be expected, if not applauded, the closer we get to the Nov. 8 election, the more debates and divisions have appeared in discussions about the headlines of the moment. 
+During the week that ranged from Oct. 16-23, those headlines included additional revelations from WikiLeaks’ trove of Pedesta emails regarding Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as well as various writers’ takes on how to vote this time around, and news of the ongoing Dakota Access pipeline protest. 
+As for the how-to-vote issue, Jonathan Mitchell posted a short and direct comment under this story about Clinton’s famous hawkishness when it comes to envisioning and enacting American foreign policy on the world stage: 
+
+Reader Helen Hanna, like many others who took in Robert Reich’s piece titled “The Incalculable Damage of Doing Whatever It Takes to Win,” noticed and remarked upon Reich’s gloss-over of Democratic Party leaders’, and in particular Hillary and Bill Clinton’s, proclivity for doing damage in the interest of maintaining power: 
+
+That said, it’s not as though commenters were about to give Donald Trump a pass, either. Take Ignatius J. Reilly’s rejoinder to Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway’s “5-point plan to defeat Islam,” as Trump and his team conceived of it (and Juan Cole wrote of it): 
+
+Touché. 
+Another point of contention on the comment boards last week had to do with how to evaluate WikiLeaks’, and by extension Julian Assange’s, latest release of documents in the Pedesta emails. Though some commentators like Naomi Klein and Glenn Greenwald have spoken up about particular aspects of WikiLeaks’ current m.o., in the thread under Alexander Reed Kelly’s Truthdigger of the Week column on Assange , reader JJG noted how, like him or not, Assange and his organization are providing a public service that professionals working in the mainstream press (who are supposed to be skilled in curating and redacting sensitive material) are not generally delivering on these days: 
+
+We’ll give Opa Westphal the last word this time, ending on an up note (in terms of the shout-out to other commenters) and a cautionary note at the same time. This one was posted under Chris Hedges’ latest column , “How Power Works”:",FAKE
+8470,The Amish In America Commit Their Vote To Donald Trump; Mathematically Guaranteeing Him A Presidential Victory - ABC News,"18 SHARE The Amish in America have committed their vote to Donald Trump guaranteeing him the Presidency. (AP Photo / Dennis System) 
+COLUMBUS, OH (AP) — History was made today in Columbus, Ohio when more than 3 million Amish poured into the city to see the American Amish Brotherhood (AAB), an organization which acts as an informal governing body for the Amish community, endorse Donald Trump for president. That number represents a significant portion of the total Amish population, which the United States Census Bureau says numbers more than 20 million men and women nationwide all pledging their vote to Trump for President. With the full force of the Amish community behind him, Donald Trump is now mathematically guaranteed to win the presidency in November. 
+The organization typically meets once a year and the meetings usually consist of about 300 Amish leaders who meet to discuss the challenges, such as urban sprawl, that face the community. This year, however, the organization wanted as many people in attendance as possible so they can effectively instruct all Amish men and women of legal voting age to cast their vote for the flamboyant Republican nominee. 
+The Amish, who are direct descendants of the protestant reformation sect known as the Anabaptists, have typically stayed out of politics in the past. As a general rule, they don’t vote, serve in the military, or engage in any other displays of patriotism. This year, however, the AAB has said that it is imperative that they get involved in the democratic process. 
+“Over the past eight years, the Democratic Party has launched a systematic assault on biblical virtues,” said AAB chairman Menno Simons. “We have seen more and more Christians being persecuted for their faith; we have seen the state defile the institution of marriage. Now, they want to put a woman in the nation’s highest leadership role in direct violation of 1 Timothy 2:12. We need to stop this assault and take a stand for biblical principles. Donald Trump has shown in both action and deed that he is committed to restoring this country to the Lord’s way.” 
+According to statistician Nate Silver of the website fivethirtyeight.com, there are no possible scenarios in which Hillary Clinton can win with Donald Trump carrying the Amish vote. 
+“The Amish have their highest numbers in perennial swing states like Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa,” Silver noted. “They also have strong numbers in reliably Democratic states like Michigan, Illinois, and New York, meaning that Hillary will lose those states as well. There is also a sizeable community in Florida which, while not as large as it is in the Midwest, is still large enough to turn Florida for Trump. Over the next two weeks, you can expect Hillary to enter into a state of freefall in all of my predictive models.” 
+The Clinton campaign issued a written statement to the AAB asking them to reconsider their decision. 
+“I don’t believe that Donald Trump is the person who best represents your interests,” Clinton wrote to the AAB. “As a career real estate developer, he represents a clear threat to your simple way of life. As former first lady of Arkansas, I understand the concerns of rural Americans more than any candidate in this election. I implore you to consider all of the facts before voting for my opponent.” 
+Most pundits believe that Mrs. Clinton’s plea is too little too late. 
+During a press conference in Manhattan, Trump thanked the AAB for their support and promised to put the Amish to work maintaining government buildings, which he said would save taxpayers millions because “the Amish do great work for a very low price.” 
+Though Clinton has pledged to stay in the race until the very end, many of her campaign workers have already resigned. According to the Associated Press, it is expected that the Clinton campaign will lose 50% of its staff over the next two weeks. There is a general mood of hopelessness and despair in the Clinton camp, and many simply want to cut their losses. 
+“It looked like she was going to win this election easily,” said Paul Horner, a campaign worker in Ohio, “But this is what happens when you wake a sleeping giant. Cleary, Mrs. Clinton took far too much for granted in this race, and we are all now paying the price. It’s really sad to see the campaign end this way.” 
+If you are interested in learning more about the Amish community and the AAB, you can contact the Pennsylvania Amish Heritage Museum at (785) 273-0325. TAGS ",FAKE
+1849,Clinton is banking on the Obama coalition to win,"Hillary Rodham Clinton is running as the most liberal Democratic presidential front-runner in decades, with positions on issues from gay marriage to immigration that would, in past elections, have put her at her party’s precarious left edge.
+
+The moves are part of a strategic conclusion by Clinton’s emerging campaign: that it can harness the same kind of young and diverse coalition as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012, bolstered by even stronger appeal among women.
+
+Her approach — outlined in interviews with aides and advisers — is a bet that social and demographic shifts mean that no left-leaning position Clinton takes now would be likely to hurt her in making her case to moderate and independent voters in the general election next year.
+
+The strategy relies on calculations about the 2016 landscape, including that up to 31 percent of the electorate will be Americans of color — a projection that may be overly optimistic for her campaign. It factors in that a majority of independent voters already support same-sex marriage and the pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants that Clinton endorsed this month.
+
+The game plan also hinges on a conclusion by Clinton strategists that the broad appeal of issues such as paid family leave, a higher minimum wage and more affordable college will help outweigh any concerns about costs. And while the early liberal tilt focuses on domestic issues more likely to drive voters this cycle, Clinton will also have to win over liberal voters still skeptical of her hawkish reputation on foreign policy.
+
+The campaign’s overall calculus relies on a mix of polling — including both internal and public surveys — internal focus groups and what advisers described as gut feelings about the national mood. It also reflects what Clinton backers say are her firmly held personal convictions and her pragmatism.
+
+“Her approach to this really is not trying to take a ruler out and measure where she wants to be on some ideological scale,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said. “It’s to dive deeply into the problems facing the American people and American families. She’s a proud wonk, and she looks at policy from that perspective.”
+
+[How Hillary Clinton is running against parts of her husband’s legacy]
+
+Clinton’s full embrace of same-sex marriage in the first days of her campaign was followed by clear statements in favor of scrapping get-tough immigration and incarceration policies — many of which took root during her husband’s administration. She has also weighed in with liberal takes on climate change, abortion rights and disparities in income and opportunity between rich and poor.
+
+All are issues that have been divisive in the past for both Democrats and Republicans. But none are now judged to be radioactive for Democrats, which gives Clinton more elbow room.
+
+By taking such positions, aides and advisers hope Clinton will not only inoculate herself against a serious challenge from the left in the primaries, but that she also will be able to push on through the general election. Her campaign believes American public opinion has moved left not only since Bill Clinton won election in 1992 on a centrist platform, but also since Barack Obama won on a more liberal one.
+
+Republicans — as part of a broader critique of her trustworthiness — accuse Clinton of flip-flopping on some positions and hiding on others, such as free trade, to cater to the liberal base.
+
+“Clinton’s already moved her position leftward on numerous hot button issues to the base, including immigration, gay marriage, Wall Street and criminal justice reforms,” conservative America Rising PAC director Colin Reed wrote in a position paper Friday.
+
+“Clinton’s moves reinforce all her worst attributes as a candidate and hurt her image among voters of all stripes,” Reed said. “Progressive voters know that she’s not truly one of them,” while swing voters “see a desperate politician staking out far-left positions that are outside of the mainstream of most Americans.”
+
+Many political strategists also say Clinton will be hard-pressed to re-create Obama’s winning coalition and that the 30 percent to 31 percent non-white turnout that some of her outside backers are projecting may be out of reach. Exit polls show non-white turnout was 28 percent in 2012 and 26 percent in 2008. Clinton will have to expand Hispanic support, increase turnout among independent women and still hold on to a large share of black voters who were drawn to the first African American major-party nominee.
+
+The bold stance on immigration is widely seen as one way to jump-start the expansion of Hispanic support Clinton will need, although advisers say she had already made up her mind about citizenship and there was no reason to put off an announcement. When outlining her position in Nevada, where 1 in 4 residents is Hispanic, she made a point of saying that no Republican would go as far — and alleged that the GOP wanted immigrants to have “second-class status.”
+
+“People often talk about the electorate moving left,” said Clinton senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan. “I think it’s more that the electorate is just getting more practical. For Hillary Clinton, that matches her evidence-based approach. The arguments that persuade her are evidence-based and progressive.”
+
+He cited the growing consensus that mass incarceration is expensive and unworkable, and that the country is never going to deport all of the more than 11 million people who are here illegally.
+
+[Clinton campaign’s dilemma: What to do with Bill?]
+
+Advisers do not dispute that Clinton has a finger to the wind of the national mood, but they insist the timing and substance of her positions are not driven by polling. The still-cautious candidate has declined to make clear her position on two key proposals that many liberals oppose: the Keystone XL pipeline and Obama’s free-trade deal.
+
+Sullivan also noted that some of Clinton’s early proposals “cut against the grain” of political liberalism, such as her emphasis on improving the playing field for American small businesses.
+
+Clinton will debut policy proposals to ease lending bottlenecks for small businesses on campaign trips to Iowa and New Hampshire this week. The impetus came largely from conversations Clinton had in the run-up to the campaign and a six-month policy review led by Sullivan that looked at how Clinton might address a variety of national concerns.
+
+“The thing she is most interested in is not what position is most popular, it’s what do people worry about,” Sullivan said.
+
+Clinton’s 2008 campaign was so focused on polling data and the consequences of saying the wrong thing that it sometimes appeared paralyzed. Some of that campaign’s infamous staff battles focused on the advice from senior adviser Mark Penn, a pollster, to avoid more liberal positions in the primary that year for fear they would hurt her in a general election contest.
+
+This time is different, backers say. “The strategic advantage the Democrats have is that the distance between our base and the middle is shorter than for Republicans,” said Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress and a longtime Clinton confidant.
+
+In other words, Clinton’s strategists say, she does not face the same whiplash as Republican candidates who seek to dial back hard-right positions on issues such as abortion or immigration adopted during a competitive primary.
+
+Senior campaign officials acknowledged that trade is a divisive and fraught issue for Democrats and for her. Clinton’s past support for the Pacific free-trade pact makes her current silence awkward at best, but her advisers are gambling that the issue won’t leave an enduring rift within the party.
+
+Clinton campaign leaders and outside loyalists also bridle at the perception that she is less of a progressive politician than, say, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). They point to Clinton’s early career as a crusading lawyer in Arkansas and lifelong professional commitments to improving women’s lives.
+
+[The making of Hillary 5.0: Re-imagining the Clinton brand]
+
+Warren has said she isn’t running but has declined so far to endorse Clinton. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is running a strongly populist challenge to Clinton, and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley — who has suggested Clinton is too hesitant and poll-driven — is expected to enter the race this month.
+
+“If Clinton and other candidates are not seen as standing with Warren on the [Trans-Pacific Partnership] trade deal and a number of other economic issues critical to working families, it could create an even greater sense of urgency” to get Warren into the race, said Gary Ritterstein, an adviser to the support group Ready for Warren.
+
+The clearest shift in national attitudes, and Clinton’s own, has come on same-sex marriage. She moved from saying she considered marriage to be between a man and a woman when she was first lady to backing civil unions as an alternative to marriage in 2008 to full support of gay and lesbian marriage now.
+
+Public opinion polling suggests she is on safe ground, despite ongoing legal fights in several states. The firmest opposition to gay marriage is centered in red states and among Republican voters unlikely to consider voting for Clinton.
+
+Pew Research polling shows that in August 2008 — when Clinton endorsed Obama as the Democratic nominee — 52 percent of Americans opposed legal same-sex marriage and 39 percent supported it. The same poll now shows 54 percent support for such marriages while 39 percent are opposed.
+
+Shifts on criminal justice issues are less dramatic, but there are bipartisan efforts now to repeal some of the harshest and least flexible laws on the books for two decades. Outrage and revulsion over police killings of black men over the past year made the issue more urgent for many young, African American and socially liberal voters.
+
+Last month, Clinton gave an address calling for dramatic changes in policing and prosecution to lessen the rate of incarceration. The remarks echo calls among both Democrats and some Republicans, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
+
+“Two or three years ago,” said Clinton policy adviser Ann O’Leary, “that speech might have been seen as a very left-leaning speech.”",REAL
+10400,Is Brexit never gonna happen? 'Leaked' audio recording reveals Theresa May's 'true' fears about Brexit,"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 18:08 UTC © Peter Nicholls / Reuters Downing Street insists that the government will ""make a success"" of Brexit, despite a leaked audio recording of UK Prime Minister Theresa May predicting companies could abandon Britain if it leaves the EU. Speaking to a group of Goldman Sachs bankers on May 26 before the EU referendum, then-Home Secretary May said the economic arguments for remaining in the bloc were "" clear. "" In a leaked audio recording of the talk, published by the Guardian, May also claims membership in the EU makes Britain ""more safe."" ""Being part of a 500-million trading bloc is significant for us. I think, as I was saying to you a little earlier, that one of the issues is that a lot of people will invest here in the UK because it is the UK in Europe. ""If we were not in Europe, I think there would be firms and companies who would be looking to say, do they need to develop a mainland Europe presence rather than a UK presence? So I think there are definite benefits for us in economic terms."" May went on to say Britain was more secure inside the EU. ""There are definitely things we can do as members of the European Union that I think keep us more safe,"" she said. A Downing Street spokesman did not comment directly on the recording, but insisted Brexit is in the UK's best interests. ""Britain made a clear choice to vote to leave the EU and this Government is determined to make a success of the fresh opportunities it presents,"" he said. ""David Davis made very clear in the House of Commons last week the importance the Government places on financial services across the UK in the negotiation to come, as has the Chancellor in recent weeks. ""We want a smooth and orderly exit from the European Union, which would be in the interests of both Britain and the EU."" Labour politicians accused May of deceiving the British public over the impact of leaving the EU's single market and called on her to be ""honest."" Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer tweeted: Andrew Gwynne, shadow minister without portfolio, said: ""As if we needed it, this recording is cast-iron evidence of how Theresa May and other senior Tories have been saying one thing in private about the economic impact of Brexit and another in the comfort of Tory conference halls. ""It's plain that she recognises what a disaster it would be for Britain to lose access to the single market, so why doesn't she be honest with the British people and say how she plans to retain it?"" Comment: When it comes to leaks in the UK, where the press is very tightly controlled, it's a sure bet that the govt wanted the public to hear this. The 'long goodbye' continues.",FAKE
+3644,"Mike Brown anniversary: Arrests, state of emergency","Ferguson, Missouri (CNN) A day of civil disobedience that saw several arrests ended Monday with rowdy protesters throwing rocks and bottles at police.
+
+The St. Louis County police said frozen water bottles were thrown at officers, prompting them to order the crowd to disperse or face arrest.
+
+""Safety, our top priority, is now compromised. This is no longer a peaceful protest. Participants are now unlawfully assembled,"" the department tweeted
+
+(1/2) Safety, our top priority, is now compromised. This is no longer a peaceful protest. Participants are now unlawfully assembled.
+
+Earlier, a top St. Louis County official declared a state of emergency, saying violence had marred demonstrations marking the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown's death
+
+""The recent acts of violence will not be tolerated in a community that has worked so tirelessly over the last year to rebuild and become stronger,"" St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger said in a statement.
+
+The executive order put St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar in charge of police operations in Ferguson and the surrounding areas, Stenger said.
+
+During the day Monday, roughly 200 demonstrators marched from Christ Church Cathedral to the Thomas F. Eagleton United States Courthouse in St. Louis. The protesters carried signs, chanted and prayed and demanded the Justice Department take action.
+
+At the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis, protesters hung a banner from two balloons. It read, ""Racism still lives here #fightback.""
+
+One of those protesters, Johnetta Elzie, who has been a mainstay of the demonstrations and goes by Netta, tweeted minutes before her arrest, ""If I'm arrested today please know I'm not suicidal. I have plenty to live for. I did not resist, I'm just black.""
+
+Later Monday, another group of protesters blocked part of Interstate 70 in Earth City, Missouri. Some of them held yellow signs that said, ""Ferguson is everywhere.""
+
+Protesters held hands and formed a line across the highway. About 20 minutes later, troopers cleared the roadway, walking with protesters toward the shoulder and apparently arresting some of them in a nearby parking lot.
+
+Monday's acts of civil disobedience came after a night of violence that left Ferguson on edge.
+
+Peaceful marches in the St. Louis suburb planned by day on Sunday were shattered that same night when gunfire broke out, sending protesters and police scattering to safety.
+
+The alleged gunman, 18-year-old Tyrone Harris of St. Louis, is hospitalized in critical condition and in police custody. The St. Louis County Police Department said officers shot the teenager after he unleashed a ""remarkable amount of gunfire"" at police -- a characterization the man's aunt contends is not true.
+
+Prosecutors have charged Harris with four counts of first-degree assault on law enforcement, five counts of armed criminal action and one count of discharging a firearm at a motor vehicle, St. Louis County Police Department spokesman Sgt. Brian Schellman said.
+
+Belmar said earlier that Harris used a stolen handgun to fire at officers.
+
+Harris is being held on a $250,000 bond, Schellman said.
+
+Harris' aunt, Karen Harris, said her nephew attended the protests because he was friends with Brown. Recounting what other family members who were with Tyrone Harris described, the aunt said Tyrone Harris wasn't carrying a gun and never fired at police.
+
+He was ""running for his life"" just like everyone else, she said, when the gunshots were fired.
+
+The anniversary observations of Brown's shooting death by a white Ferguson police officer started off peacefully Sunday.
+
+Vigils honored him throughout the day. Attendees observed four and a half minutes of silence to signify the four and a half hours Brown's body lay on the street after the unarmed black teen was shot last year.
+
+But the new gunfire shifted the focus Sunday night.
+
+When officers first saw the suspect, he was running away after exchanging gunfire with an unknown person, police said.
+
+Some gunfire rang out as reporters were talking to Ferguson's acting police chief, Andre Anderson. A startled Anderson continued speaking with a steady burst of gunfire in the background. Crowds scattered.
+
+Detectives in an unmarked SUV turned on its emergency lights and pursued the suspect, only to be shot at, according to Belmar. The bullets hit the vehicle's hood and windshield several times, Belmar said.
+
+As the detectives got out of the car, the suspect allegedly turned around and fired again.
+
+Then he ran toward a fenced area, where he continued firing -- until officers struck him multiple times, Belmar said.
+
+The four plainclothes officers involved in the shooting have between six to 12 years of experience, he said. They have been placed on administrative leave.
+
+""We cannot continue, we cannot talk about the good things that we have been talking about, if we are prevented from moving forward with this kind of violence,"" Belmar said, adding that those resorting to violence are not protesters.
+
+""Protesters are people who are out there to effect change,"" he said. There were ""several people shooting, several rounds shot.""
+
+By Sunday night, police presence had turned heavy, and rumors about the shooting flew.
+
+Police and protesters faced off in a tense standoff on West Florissant Avenue, not far from Canfield Drive, where Brown was shot.
+
+Several objects were thrown at police and some businesses damaged, the St. Louis County Police Department said. A journalist was attacked and robbed in a parking lot. Three St. Louis County police officers were injured: One was struck in the face by a brick, while two others were pepper-sprayed.
+
+Police, with helmets and shields, pushed crowds back and called in tactical units.
+
+""We're ready for what? We're ready for war,"" some in the crowd chanted.
+
+In a separate incident early Monday, a man wearing a red hooded sweatshirt shot two teens, 17 and 19, in the chest, the St. Louis County Police Department said.
+
+Both were hospitalized with injuries not considered life-threatening, authorities said.
+
+The teens were walking on a sidewalk near where Brown was killed a year ago.
+
+Amid the chaos, some appealed for calm.
+
+""Please pray for peace in Ferguson tonight and forever,"" Danny Takhar tweeted. ""And the police department really needs to look at what they did last year and today.""
+
+Others posted a video of what they described as a shooting victim in Ferguson lying on the streets bleeding.
+
+""Please get him some help! He's bleeding out,"" a voice said off camera.
+
+""This kind of behavior from those who want to cause disruption and destroy the progress from this past year will not be tolerated,"" the city's mayor and City Council said. ""We are asking for our citizens and businesses to be diligent and to be watchful for those who want to cause harm to our community.""
+
+The details of what happened on August 9, 2014, and the days of protest that followed have become a polarizing topic in Ferguson and America as a whole.
+
+Brown's killing by Officer Darren Wilson sparked outrage and protests nationwide against what some described as racial bias by the police.
+
+A grand jury didn't indict Wilson, and the U.S. Justice Department also declined to bring criminal charges, but the feds did issue a report that found the Ferguson Police Department and the city's municipal court had engaged in a ""pattern and practice"" of discrimination against African-Americans, targeting them disproportionately for traffic stops, use of force and jail sentences.
+
+Brown's killing sparked weeks of protests that at times intensified into street fires and looting of businesses. Police fired tear gas in response, sparking more tensions.
+
+But protesters -- many of whom are skeptical of the local and federal inquiries into the case -- point to examples of police misconduct exposed in the wake of Brown's death. The case also led to new policing strategies, including the introduction of police body cameras.",REAL
+8684,WHO Cancer Agency Under Fire for withholding ‘carcinogenic glyphosate’ Documents,"WHO Cancer Agency Under Fire for withholding ‘carcinogenic glyphosate’ Documents   RT 
+The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), facing criticism over its classification of carcinogens, has reportedly been advising its scientific experts not to publish internal research data on its 2015 report on “probably carcinogenic” glyphosate. 
+The IARC urged its scientists not to publish research documents on its 2015 weedkiller glyphosate review, according to Reuters. The agency told Reuters on Tuesday that it tried to protect the study from “external interference,” as well as protect its intellectual rights, since it was “the sole owner of such materials.” 
+The scientists had been asked earlier to release all the documentation on the 2015 report under US freedom of information laws. 
+The groundbreaking review, published in March 2015 by the IARC – a semi-autonomous agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) – labeled the glyphosate herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Glyphosate is a key ingredient of Monsanto’s flagship weedkiller well-known under the trade name ‘Roundup.’ It is one of the most heavily used herbicides in the world and is designed to go along with genetically-modified “Roundup Ready” crops, also produced by Monsanto. 
+The IARC’s report caused problems for both the notorious agrochemical giant and the agency itself. 
+The report sparked a heated debate around the use of Roundup, and caused several EU countries – including France, Sweden, and the Netherlands – to object to the renewal of the glyphosate’s EU license. The vote on prolonging the glyphosate license for 15 years failed several times in June 2016, but the license was temporarily extended for 18 months during last hours before its expiration. 
+The controversial report has seemingly made the IARC a target for attacks from multiple directions, and raised scientific, legal, and financial questions. 
+Various critics, including those in the chemical industry, said the IARC’s evaluations are fuel for “unnecessary health scares,” since the IARC allegedly studies the potentially harmful substance itself, and not a “typical human” exposure to it. It remained unclear whether the critics urged a WHO body to test the potentially carcinogenic chemical on humans. 
+The critics also brought up other controversial statements from the IARC, over whether such things as mobile phones, coffee, red meat, and processed meat could cause cancer. 
+The agency defended its methods as scientifically sound and “widely respected for their scientific rigor, standardized and transparent process and…freedom from conflicts of interest.” Numerous freedom of information requests by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), a US conservative advocacy group, have since been turned down with this reasoning. 
+E&E Legal told Reuters that it is pushing a legal challenge over whether the documents in question belong to the IARC or to the US federal and state institutions where some of the experts work. Basically, it’s being decided whether the IARC, as part of the WHO, is truly independent and free from “conflicts of interest.” 
+According to Reuters, officials from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be questioned by a congressional committee about why American taxpayers fund the cancer agency, which faces much criticism over its allegedly faulty classification of carcinogens. 
+“IARC’s standards and determinations for classifying substances as carcinogenic, and therefore cancer-causing, appear inconsistent with other scientific research, and have generated much controversy and alarm,” a letter from US Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz to NIH director Francis Collins states, as quoted by Reuters. 
+The Oversight Committee demanded a full disclosure of NIH funding of the IARC, and even money spent in relation to the cancer agency’s activities. 
+IARC opponents from scientific circles vowed to provide their data on the matter. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which believes glyphosate is “unlikely pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans,” promised to release its raw data on the subject as part of its “commitment to open risk assessment.” The food safety watchdog made this statement in late September, and still has to deliver the promised information. Share This Article...",FAKE
+6420,Anti-War Movement Anticipates More War Under A Clinton Presidency,"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, December 5, 2012.
+NEW YORK — As the bizarre 2016 presidential election nears its end, activists in the United States are considering the prospects for war and peace under the next administration.
+And with Hillary Clinton leading comfortably in most polls, the Democratic nominee’s militaristic record, as well as her promises to expand the use of force, are sparking concern.
+“Clinton is one of the biggest war-mongers the country has,” Joe Lombardo, co-coordinator of the United National Antiwar Coalition , told MintPress News.
+“She pushed for the bombing of Libya and the regime change in that country. She has supported a no-fly zone in Syria, which can put the U.S. in direct conflict with Russia.”
+On the campaign trail, Clinton has repeatedly advocated a “no-fly zone” in Syria, an aggressive move necessarily accompanied by a widespread bombing campaign, similar to those in Iraq and Libya, which were followed by expanded interventions to impose regime change.
+Senior U.S. military pilots have warned that the proposal could plunge the United States into direct conflict with Russia, whose air force is currently deployed over Syria.
+In September, Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate that the prospect “requires us to go to war against Syria and Russia.”
+‘Kill a lot of Syrians’ “It is critical that we not be confused about what Clinton’s promise of a no-fly zone will mean,” Meredith Aby of the Minneapolis-based Anti-War Committee told MintPress.
+“It is an escalation of U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war and it will mean an increase in casualties.”
+In 2013, Clinton herself admitted in a paid speech to Goldman Sachs, obtained and released by WikiLeaks in September, that her proposal would “kill a lot of Syrians.”
+“To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas,” she said.
+Beyond Syria, Clinton has also threatened to attack and “totally obliterate” Iran , and she has repeatedly promised to take the United States’ ties with Israel “to the next level.”
+In August, after accusing Russia and China of hacking U.S. computer systems, she warned : “We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses.”
+‘A voice for war since 2002’ US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, left, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talk in Jerusalem, Israel, Monday, July 16, 2012.
+These statements, along with Clinton’s long, unbroken record of supporting military interventions, have anti-war activists eying the future warily.
+“Many in the anti-war movement understand the dangers of a Clinton presidency,” Aby said.
+“From her resume it is fairly obvious she will be a hawk, more so than President Obama and President Clinton. She has been a voice for war since 2002 when she voted for war in Iraq.”
+Beyond Clinton’s explicit threats of wars, her administration may also seek to expand the use of “soft power,” ranging from diplomatic assistance and military aid to subversion and coups, in pursuit of its foreign policy goals.
+“She has called for boosting U.S. support for Israeli missile defense systems and supports helping Israel with technology to fight in Gaza,” Aby said, adding:
+“On the campaign trail, she has denounced the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as a threat to Israel. And while she hasn’t campaigned on it, she is no friend of Latin America. Her own emails show the role she played in helping provide support for the coup in Honduras.”
+Lombardo also noted that regions further removed from the headlines than flashpoints like Syria could face similar threats from a Hillary Clinton administration.
+“The Philippines is heating up and Clinton has a history in Latin America, where there are many places that the U.S. would like to see regime change,” he said.
+‘A very unpopular president from day one’ In the waning months of the campaign, both Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, have emerged as historically unpopular candidates , more so than others in the era of scientific polling.
+Indeed, while Trump’s aggression has kept his popularity below Clinton’s, she recently surpassed the bellicose billionaire as the least-liked candidate in history.
+A poll released by ABC News and the Washington Post on Tuesday showed Clinton’s unpopularity had reached a record-breaking 60 percent, while Trump’s stood at 58 percent.
+Despite her jingoism and promises to expand U.S. military efforts far beyond those of Barack Obama, organizers hope this public disdain may give them room to maneuver.
+“Although Clinton will win the presidency, she will be a very unpopular president from day one, which will give us the political space to organize opposition to her foreign policy,” Aby said.
+Lombardo agreed. “Clinton is very unpopular, and while the election of Obama put a damper on the anti-war movement, I believe we will see that turn around under Clinton.”
+He also noted the growth of domestic social movements, like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, that could herald a resurgence in mobilization.
+“There is a downturn in the economy, distrust of the government and the system as a whole,” Lombardo said. “The connections with the wars abroad and the wars at home is clear to more and more people. I think a movement against increased war can be explosive and powerful during a Clinton administration.”
+But he added that there was much work to be done. “Although anti-war sentiment in the U.S. is high, the anti-war movement in weak compared to where it was in the past.”
+‘No optimism, only apprehension’ A woman with the words “hands off” painted on her face takes part in a protest organized by the Stop the War coalition calling for no military attack on Syria from the U.S., Britain or France, across the road from the entrance of Downing Street in London, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013.
+As the clock ticks down to the election, numerous organizations have launched new efforts they hope will preempt the war drive expected to start soon after Jan. 20.
+Along with other groups and individual supporters, the United National Antiwar Coalition launched a “Hands Off Syria Coalition” and accompanying statement against further U.S. intervention in the war-torn country.
+The effort “is getting a tremendous response,” Lombardo said.
+Other organizations, including the ANSWER Coalition and International Action Center , have called for protests against the inauguration in Washington.
+“There’s no optimism, only apprehension,” International Action Center co-director Sara Flounders told MintPress. “People know in their bones that a larger war is coming. From the first day of a new administration, we need to send an angry warning.”
+But with the United States fatigued from a grueling election season that has left few residents with positive impressions of either candidate, widespread distrust of the political system may deny the new president the mandate he or she would need to embark on new military adventures.
+“I think people are less naive now then they were eight years ago,” Aby said. “People understand that foreign policy is not an issue that truly separates the two major party candidates.”",FAKE
+3827,"Obama Touts 2015 Successes, Sets 2016 Goals","WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama pledged to press an aggressive policy agenda during his final year in office, while also acknowledging the recent rise in terrorism threats to the U.S. will present a new challenge for his administration.
+
+Mr. Obama, in a news conference Friday, made the case that he has shown over the past year he is far from a lame duck, pointing to the restoration of U.S. ties with Cuba, the Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, and the Iran nuclear deal. He vowed to make similar...",REAL
+10510,Al Gore Made Nearly $200 Million from the Global Warming Scam — Likely to Become the World's First 'Carbon Billionaire',"Documentaries . Al Gore Made Nearly $200 Million from the Global Warming Scam — Likely to Become the World's First 'Carbon Billionaire' Ten years after the release of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, none of the film's dire climate... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/al-gore-made-nearly-200-million-from.html Ten years after the release of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, none of the film's dire climate change predictions have come to pass. However, in the decade since the documentary was produced, its creator has raked in millions of dollars from the entire ""global warming"" scam, and is now poised to become "" our first carbon billionaire .""In the 2006 film, Gore made a number of wild claims regarding what we could expect to see happening over the next few years due to global warming, but virtually all of his alarmist prognostications have turned out to be false. Arctic didn't melt, polar bears are thriving For instance, the film predicted that that the Arctic could become ice-free within the next decades, and that polar bears would begin drowning. Both claims were untrue.As reported by Investor's Business Daily:""In the mid- to late-2000s, Gore repeatedly predicted that an ice-free Arctic Ocean was coming soon.""But as usual, his fortune-telling was wrong. By 2014, Arctic ice had grown thicker and covered a greater area than it did when he made his prediction.""And the polar bears?The Daily Caller reports:""A new study by Canadian scientists once again debunks the notion polar bears are currently being harmed by global warming. Researchers with Canada's Lakehead University found 'no evidence' polar bears are currently threatened by warming ."" Kilimanjaro's snow hasn't disappeared Another prediction made in the film was that Mt. Kilimanjaro would be snow-free ""within the decade."" But in fact:""In 2014, ecologists actually monitoring Kilimanjaro's snowpack found it was not even close to being gone. It may have shrunk a little, but ecologists were confident it would be around for the foreseeable future."" Extreme weather has failed to materialize In Inconvenient Truth, Gore also forecasted that storms would begin occurring more often and at higher intensities.Wrong again, Al:""Gore's claim is more hype than actual science, since storms aren't more extreme since 2006. In fact, not even findings from the United Nations's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) support Gore's claim.""The IPCC found in 2013 there 'is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century.' ""The IPCC also found 'no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century' and '[n]o robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.'""Gore should probably take these findings seriously since he shared the Nobel Prize in 2007 with the IPCC for its work on global warming."" Despite false claims, Gore grows richer from climate change myth Although Gore's claims have been thoroughly debunked by a number of experts, he has been quietly amassing a huge fortune based on the climate change scam.Mad World News reports:""Gore's wealth went from $700,000 in 2000 to an estimated net worth of $172.5 million by 2015 thanks to his environmentalist activism. Gore and the former chief of Goldman Sachs Asset Management made nearly $218 million in profits between 2008 and 2011 from a carbon trading company they co-founded. By 2008, Gore was able to put a whopping $35 million into hedge funds and other investments."" Science Fights Back:",FAKE
+3741,Prisoner in van heard “banging against walls.”,"A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.
+
+The prisoner was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety. But the prisoner, Donta Allen, 22, later spoke to the media, including The Post, and allowed himself to be identified.
+
+In a phone interview, Allen said he had been in the van with Gray and told police he heard “light banging.” He said the police report incorrectly characterized his statements to authorities and that he “never ever said to police that [Gray] was hurting himself.”
+
+Allen, who is on probation for an armed robbery conviction, declined to comment further.
+
+The document, written by a Baltimore police investigator, offers the first glimpse of what might have happened inside the van. It is not clear whether any additional evidence backs up the prisoner’s version, which is just one piece of a much larger probe.
+
+Prosecutors on May 1 announced they had charged six officers in connection with Gray’s death. One officer faces a second-degree murder charge, three others are charged with manslaughter. The remaining two face charges including second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
+
+[Gray’s life is a study in the sad effects of lead paint on poor blacks]
+
+Gray was found unconscious in the wagon when it arrived at a police station on April 12. The 25-year-old had suffered a spinal injury and died a week later, touching off waves of protests across Baltimore, capped by a riot Monday in which hundreds of angry residents torched buildings, looted stores and pelted police officers with rocks.
+
+Police have said they do not know whether Gray was injured during the arrest or during his 30-minute ride in the van. Local police and the U.S. Justice Department both have launched investigations of Gray’s death.
+
+Jason Downs, one of the attorneys for the Gray family, said the family had not been told of the prisoner’s comments to investigators.
+
+“We disagree with any implication that Freddie Gray severed his own spinal cord,” Downs said. “We question the accuracy of the police reports we’ve seen thus far, including the police report that says Mr. Gray was arrested without force or incident.”
+
+Capt. Eric Kowalczyk, chief spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department, declined to comment on the affidavit, citing the ongoing investigation. The person who provided the document did so on condition of anonymity.
+
+The affidavit is part of a search warrant seeking the seizure of the uniform worn by one of the officers involved in Gray’s arrest or transport. It does not say how many officers were in the van, whether any reported that they heard banging or whether they would have been able to help Gray if he was seeking to injure himself. Police have mentioned only two prisoners in the van.
+
+Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts has admitted flaws in the way officers handled Gray after they chased him through a West Baltimore housing project and arrested him. They said they later found a switchblade clipped to the inside of his pants. Batts has said officers repeatedly ignored Gray’s pleas for medical help and failed to secure him with a safety belt or harness in the back of the transport van.
+
+Video shot by several bystanders has fueled the rage in West Baltimore. It shows two officers on top of Gray, putting their knees in his back, then dragging his seemingly limp body to the van as he cries out.
+
+Batts has said Gray stood on one leg and climbed into the van on his own.
+
+The van driver stopped three times while transporting Gray to a booking center, the first to put him in leg irons. Batts said the officer driving the van described Gray as “irate.” The search warrant application says Gray “continued to be combative in the police wagon.”
+
+The driver made a second stop, five minutes later, and asked an officer to help check on Gray. At that stop, police have said the van driver found Gray on the floor of the van and put him back on the seat, still without restraints. Police said Gray asked for medical help at that point.
+
+The third stop was to put the other prisoner into the van. The van was then driven six blocks to the Western District station. Gray was taken from there to a hospital, where he died April 19.
+
+Batts has said officers violated policy by failing to properly restrain Gray. But the president of the Baltimore police union noted that the policy mandating seat belts took effect April 3 and was e-mailed to officers as part of a package of five policy changes on April 9, three days before Gray was arrested.
+
+Gene Ryan, the police union president, said many officers aren’t reading the new policies — updated to meet new national standards — because they think they’re the same rules they already know, with cosmetic changes. The updates are supposed to be read out during pre-shift meetings.
+
+The previous policy was written in 1997, when the department used smaller, boxier wagons that officers called “ice cream trucks.” They originally had a metal bar that prisoners had to hold during the ride. Seat belts were added later, but the policy made their use discretionary.
+
+Ryan said that until all facts become clear, he “urged everyone not to rush to judgment. The facts as presented will speak for themselves. I just wish everyone would take a step back and a deep breath, and let the investigation unfold.”
+
+The search warrant application says that detectives at the time did not know where the officer’s uniform was located and that they wanted his department-issued long-sleeve shirts, pants and black boots or shoes. The document says investigators think that Gray’s DNA might be found on the officer’s clothes.",REAL
+8917,Hillary Clinton Has Brain Damage Confirmed by Abedin and Podesta,"
+According to new Wikileaks emails recently released, Huma Abedin, who is Hillary’s main right hand and John Podesta her campaign manager, both confirmed that Hillary Clinton still has brain damage!!
+It seems there’s still cause for concerns about Hillary’s health. Her concussion was cause for talk about her head and whether she was functioning normally.
+In an email from April 2015 with the Wikileaks ID 29549 , her aide Huma Abedin said:
+“She’s going to stick to notes a little closer this am. Still not perfect in her head. ”
+See below:
+Then there’s also another Wikileaks ID 27111 from John Podesta in September 2015 where he says:
+“ How bad is her head? ”
+Even if we ignore all the pay to play and other corruption scandals, though why would anyone ignore that? Are you people sure that this person is even psychically and physically fit to be the president?
+Just yesterday while in Lake Worth Florida, Hillary Clinton needed HELP from her aide guy to climb a SINGLE STEP! She stopped in front of the step, raised her hand, turned her head over to see if the guy is there and waited to grab his hand. He immediately rushed towards her and helped her out. See for yourself:
+
+Also, remember this scene from last month at 9/11 in New York where she completely collapsed? She was all frozen up, like a peace of wood, a plank or something. They just dragged her like a corpse:
+
+Hundreds of top doctors came out and confirmed that she has brain damage and is not fit for office. Some were working for the leftist media and when they acknowledged her problems, they had their shows canceled.
+",FAKE
+3217,Carly Fiorina announces presidential bid,"Watch Erin Burnett's live interview with Carly Fiorina on ""Erin Burnett Outfront"" on Tuesday at 7 p.m. EDT on CNN.
+
+(CNN) Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina announced her candidacy for president on Monday, becoming the first declared female candidate to seek the Republican Party's nomination.
+
+""Yes, I am running,"" Fiorina said on ABC's ""Good Morning America."" ""I think I'm the best person for the job because I understand how the economy actually works. I understand the world; who's in it.""
+
+The ex-Silicon Valley executive and long-shot White House contender has never held public office. In 2010, she unsuccessfully ran for Senate in California, losing to Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.
+
+She is now one of only a few women ever to seek the Republican Party's nomination for president -- among them, former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who was a candidate in 2012, and former North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who made a brief run in the 2000 cycle.
+
+Fiorina has been laying the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign over the past few months, traveling to early states like Iowa and New Hampshire and meeting with activists and donors.
+
+Casting herself as an outside-the-beltway candidate with years of private sector experience, she has been particularly critical of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her work in government.
+
+On Monday, Fiorina said Clinton ""clearly is not trustworthy.""
+
+""She has not been transparent about a whole set of things that matter,"" Fiorina said on ABC, ticking off Benghazi, Clinton's use of personal emails at the State Department as well as foreign donations that the Clinton Foundation has received.
+
+""If you're tired of the sound bites, the vitriol, the pettiness, the egos, the corruption; if you believe that it's time to declare the end of identity politics; if you believe that it's time to declare the end of lowered expectations; if you believe that it's time for citizens to stand up to the political class and say enough, then join us,"" Fiorina says.
+
+Fiorina also announced the news of her campaign on various social media outlets including Twitter. She is set to participate in an online town hall with supporters Monday afternoon, then travel to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina later in the week. Her new book, ""Rising to the Challenge,"" is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.
+
+Standing out in what is expected to be a crowded Republican field that includes far better-known candidates like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, will be a significant challenge for Fiorina.
+
+But political strategists say Fiorina, an articulate communicator and energetic retail politician, could very well have a moment in the race, particularly as she makes an appeal to voters who are drawn to a non-establishment candidate.
+
+Fiorina could also be a galvanizing force in an election where on the other side of the political aisle, Clinton -- the widely presumed Democratic frontrunner -- has indicated that she plans to make gender issues one of the central themes of her campaign.
+
+Marty Wilson, an executive vice president at the California Chamber of Commerce who managed Fiorina's 2010 Senate campaign, said one potential obstacle for Fiorina will be building up a national donor base when she hasn't had to raise money for a political campaign since 2010.
+
+""She's a very talented candidate and connects well with voters,"" Wilson said. ""The problem is after 2010, she was no longer a candidate. So mail lists and email lists tend to atrophy when they're not in use.""
+
+Fiorina has recruited veteran political strategists to help run her campaign.
+
+In February, Fiorina supporters announced the establishment of Carly For America, a super PAC to support her eventually potential presidential campaign. Fiorina has enlisted Steve DeMaura, the former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, to be the super PAC's executive director.
+
+Fiorina is best known for her time at HP, a company she led from 1999 to 2005. Her controversial tenure at the firm gave Boxer plenty of political ammunition in the 2010 race, and the issue could once again emerge a vulnerability for Fiorina in her campaign for president.
+
+As CEO, Fiorina spearheaded a divisive merger with Compaq as she sought to rebrand the firm and boost its relevance in the tech world. Some HP employees were unhappy with Fiorina's leadership style and what they said was a lack of engagement with colleagues, and members of the Hewlett and Packard families have been openly critical of her role at the company
+
+But Fiorina continues to defend her time at HP. As CEO of a major corporation, she says, she gained critical executive skills that would serve her well in the White House.
+
+""HP requires executive decision-making, and the presidency is all about executive decision-making,"" Fiorina told CNN in February.",REAL
+2897,Parents Of American Woman Held By ISIS Say They Have Been Notified Of Her Death,"The parents of an American woman held by the Islamic State group said in a statement on Tuesday that they have been notified of her death.
+
+The White House said Kayla Jean Mueller's family received a message from her captors over the weekend, which was authenticated by the U.S. intelligence community, the Associated Press reports.
+
+ 
+
+ On Friday, the Islamic State group released a statement claiming Mueller had been killed in a Jordanian airstrike in Raqqa, Syria. The Jordanian government said later that it was ""highly skeptical"" about the extremists' statement.
+
+Mueller, who is from Prescott, Arizona, was captured by militants in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo in August 2013. U.S. officials acknowledged last year that a 26-year-old American woman was being held by the group, but did not identify her out of fears for her safety.
+
+Mueller's family honored her dedication to humanitarian work in their statement on Tuesday, according to The Arizona Republic. ""We are so proud of the person Kayla was and the work that she did while she was here with us. She lived with purpose, and we will work every day to honor her legacy,"" the statement read.
+
+""Our hearts are breaking for our only daughter, but we will continue on in peace, dignity, and love for her,"" the family said.
+
+The family also released a letter that Mueller wrote while in captivity in 2014, BuzzFeed notes. ""I know you would want me to remain strong. That is exactly what I'm doing,"" Mueller wrote. ""[I] have learned that even in prison, one can be free. I am grateful. I have come to see there is good in every situation, sometimes we just have to look for it.""
+
+""In how she lived her life, she epitomized all that is good in our world,"" he said. ""No matter how long it takes, the United States will find and bring to justice the terrorists who are responsible for Kayla’s captivity and death.""
+
+Mueller had been working in Turkey assisting Syrian refugees, according to a 2013 article in The Daily Courier, her hometown newspaper. She told the paper that she was drawn to help with the situation in Syria.
+
+""For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal,"" she said. ""It's important to stop and realize what we have, why we have it and how privileged we are. And from that place, start caring and get a lot done.""
+
+A 2007 article about Mueller from the same newspaper said she was a student at Northern Arizona University and was active in the Save Darfur Coalition. A statement from the office of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Mueller graduated in 2009 and had worked to help people in need in India, Israel, the Palestinian territories and in Arizona.
+
+Mueller is the fourth American to die while being held by Islamic State militants. Three other Americans - journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and aid worker Peter Kassig - were beheaded by the group.
+
+Journalist Austin Tice, of Houston, Texas, disappeared in August 2012 while covering Syria's civil war. It's not clear what entity is holding him, but it is not believed to be the Islamic State group or the Syrian government, his family has said.
+
+""We are heartbroken to share that we've received confirmation that Kayla Jean Mueller, has lost her life. ""Kayla was a compassionate and devoted humanitarian. She dedicated the whole of her young life to helping those in need of freedom, justice, and peace. In a letter to her father on his birthday in 2011, Kayla wrote: 'I find God in the suffering eyes reflected in mine. If this is how you are revealed to me, this is how I will forever seek you.' 'I will always seek God. Some people find God in church. Some people find God in nature. Some people find God in love; I find God in suffering. I've known for some time what my life's work is, using my hands as tools to relieve suffering.' ""Kayla was drawn to help those displaced by the Syrian civil war. She first traveled to Turkey in December, 2012 to provide humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees. She told us of the great joy she took in helping Syrian children and their families. ""We are so proud of the person Kayla was and the work that she did while she was here with us. She lived with purpose, and we will work every day to honor her legacy. ""Our hearts are breaking for our only daughter, but we will continue on in peace, dignity, and love for her. ""We remain heartbroken, also, for the families of the other captives who did not make it home safely and who remain in our thoughts and prayers. We pray for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Syria.""",REAL
+7503,5 Key Revelations for Free Thinkers to Consider After Election 2016,"Waking Times 
+The political system we have today is not the democratic republic it pretends to be. National elections are orchestrated public relations events, engineered to serve the complex interests of the plutocracy and shadow government . The perception of differences between major party candidates is limited to within a narrow spectrum of mainstream ideology, and voting has become a tool used by the oligarchy to routinely refresh the illusions of choice and consent. 
+Indoctrinated to believe this system is mandatory for human prosperity and security, consideration of alternatives is practically unthinkable to the citizenry. Most have their entire lives and fortunes invested in this game, and as such, a truth this heavy is simply too much to process and too painful to accept. Obedience and compliance to state and culture have their sleepy, comfortable perks, but the natural inclination of the human spirit is to gravitate towards truth and freedom. When this is ignored or denied, inner peace is impossible, and outer chaos inevitable. 
+For this, the free-thinker will always emerge as the winner in a contest against the statist, for, it is the soul who needs no illusions and carries no attachments which can look upon the ashes of ruin and give them credit for being the first signs of new bloom. 
+Now that the unbelievable spectacle of election 2016 is complete, here are some critical things that free-thinkers can take away from this rather insane and revelatory experience. 
+1.) The mainstream, corporate media is unashamedly here to convince and distract you, not to inform or empower you. Most media outlets, including many alternative outlets, have fully exposed themselves as partisan organizations with no commitment to objectivity or logic. We are at last free from the chokehold of this organized form of propaganda and ideological occupation. 
+2.) People still do not yet understand the true nature of government as an organization which derives its power and authority from the superior application of violence. They don’t yet fully understand that in order for government to offer a solution to a problem, it must first create that very problem. Many are still unready to admit that we are ruled by a plutocratic, oligarchical, corporate state that does not take orders from elected politicians. 
+Because of this, there are now plenty of opportunities to inspire and awaken people with serious information. 
+3.) Social chaos and mindless incivility has been properly revealed as a reflection of inner chaos, fear and disharmony. It’s clear now that many have been trained to choose team loyalty over personal independence. To choose destructiveness instead of creativity, to build echo chambers instead of round tables, to relish conflict over curiosity, and to seek the comfort of group-think over the uncertainty of individuality. 
+These programs are socially engineered diseases and their chief symptoms are violence in word and deed. This is out in the open now, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. 
+“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” ~ Pogo 
+4.) There is no place on planet earth where free-thinking people can enjoy voluntary community and peaceful coexistence without interference by the state and its sympathizers. Sad, but true. The entire world is colonized by statist ideology and there is no where to run or hide from this mindset. Yet, there is sufficient living freedom in this revelation alone, because from anywhere now, we can openly engage in any one of a million simple acts of revolution and independence , and they will be witnessed and absorbed by those most in need. 
+5.) At long last, some of the darkest, ugliest and most difficult to look at issues are bubbling up into mainstream consciousness. The long and well-documented history of occultism , pedophilia, human-trafficking, human sacrifice, Satan worship and dark ritual among the world’s ruling elite can finally be openly discussed without instant mindless backlash. The proverbial black cat is out of the bag now, and there has never been a better time to participate in the work of waking people up to the high crimes of the elite. Final Thoughts 
+In 2016 your personal awakening counts more than your vote , for the only thing that can turn the tide on endless war, unstoppable surveillance, the strategy of tension, weaponized stress , environmental ruin, and unchecked debt-slavery, is a large enough and spiritied enough class of fearless, righteous individuals. Until free humanity emerges victorious from the mental slavery of the state, we will get the president that we deserve. 
+Enjoy this excellent elucidation of this point by Carey Wedler: Read more articles by Dylan Charles . About the Author 
+Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com , the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com , a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. He may be contacted at . This article ( 5 Key Revelations for Free Thinkers to Consider After Election 2016 ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. 
+~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
+2221,Obama's long-view foreign policy: why he thinks the US can bend the arc of history,"In President Obama's interview with Matt Yglesias on foreign policy, he did something interesting when pressed on how he squares support for human rights with a foreign policy that has included a number of alliances with dictators. Obama said that the US could only do so much, and that sometimes he has to ""recognize the world as it is"" and make practical tradeoffs. And, he said, ""The trajectory of this planet overall is one toward less violence, more tolerance, less strife, less poverty.""
+
+On the surface, it seemed like a dodge, an argument that the US doesn't have to worry too much about promoting democracy and human rights, which will arise naturally. But Obama returned to this point at the very end of the interview, and said something that's crucial to understanding his worldview and the role he sees American foreign policy playing in the world:
+
+Obama's point here is that the arc of history bends naturally toward democracy and human rights, and that the best thing the US can do is not to solve every crisis individually — which can sometimes make things worse — but rather to help bend that arc in the right direction globally.
+
+The world is, in the long view, getting much better for human beings: people are healthier, freer, and safer than they've ever been, and those trends are holding. The best thing the United States can do for the world, Obama thinks, is strengthen the forces that drive this progress.
+
+In this long view of foreign policy, the best weapon in the war for human rights and democracy isn't the US military or economic sanctions; it's the forces of human progress themselves.
+
+That the world is getting much better is, at this point, an undeniable fact. People live longer and healthier lives than they ever have. Deaths from war are at an all-time low. After the Cold War ended, democracy spread rapidly, and is now the dominant form of government worldwide.
+
+But Obama also has a theory of why humanity has gotten better. Modern creations like the global economy, a US-led global network of alliances, and international institutions like the UN, in this thinking, all work together to, in the aggregate, reduce suffering and promote freedom.
+
+Obama lays this out in one paragraph, right at the beginning of the interview. It's the golden ticket to understanding everything he says later on:
+
+I think it is realistic for us to want to use diplomacy for setting up a rules-based system wherever we can, understanding that it's not always going to work. If we have arms treaties in place, it doesn't mean that you don't have a stray like North Korea that may try to do its own thing. But you've reduced the number of problems that you have and the security and defense challenges that you face if you can create those norms. And one of the great things about American foreign policy in the post-World War II era was that we did a pretty good job with that. It wasn't perfect, but the UN, the IMF, and a whole host of treaties and rules and norms that were established really helped to stabilize the world in ways that it wouldn't otherwise be.
+
+There are two things to understand how boring-sounding international institutions can help accelerate the forces of history like this. First, institutions provide material things — medicine, financial assistance, economic growth — that make people's lives longer and richer. Second, they deter and co-opt bad actors, and encourage what you might call good international behavior.
+
+The American-led alliance system, for example, deters aggression in Europe and East Asia; Russia's bad behavior in eastern Europe likely would have been a lot worse if NATO didn't exist to deter it, for example, or if the EU didn't exist to organize sanctions. More broadly, the ever-expanding webs of international trade ties and political organizations such as the EU make war costly and cooperation with the global community more desirable. By making wars more costly, institutions help protect the spread of democracy, which in turn further reduces the likelihood of war because democracies tend not to fight each other.
+
+The United States is far from the only player in these international institutions by their very nature, but as the single most powerful and most important member, the US has been crucial to bringing other countries on board, and helping to enforce and maintain that liberal international system.
+
+Of course, you can't credit international institutions alone for the spread of prosperity and democracy: these are huge, complicated historical phenomena with lots of causes. But Obama is quite right to say that the design of the post-World War II international order, and its expansion after the end of the Cold War, have helped protect and encourage the long-term historical trends.
+
+That's fine for the long view, but Obama also has to manage foreign policy now, day-to-day. And, on that view, it can look like he's significantly less active on global human rights. Obama hasn't seriously challenged Chinese authoritarianism or Saudi theocracy. Iran and Russia pose major threats to stability in Europe and the Middle East. And North Korea is still North Korea.
+
+In the Vox interview, Obama's direct response to this line of criticism is pretty weak: the Internet will fix it. ""I am a firm believer that particularly in this modern internet age, the capacity of the old-style authoritarian government to sustain itself and to thrive just is going to continue to weaken,"" he said.
+
+Still, his longer-view, implicit argument is a great deal stronger: the best way to deal with authoritarianism in the long run is to build up the global institutions that have accelerated positive trends worldwide — and to prevent other countries from weakening those institutions and trends.
+
+China is a good example of this. As a rising power that has been at times hostile to Western power, it was widely expected to challenge the US-dominated global order — potentially catastrophically — and in some cases it has. But, since 2008, the country has generally worked within and even endorsed that international system. This was mostly out of self-interest, but the Obama administration has worked to make sure that China's self-interest and that of the international system lined up. The result has been China buying into those positive trends of the status quo, rather than overturning them.
+
+For example, China helped the United States and global economic institutions rescue the global economy after 2008 by refraining from turning to trade protectionism. According to Tufts Fletcher School Professor Dan Drezner, that's evidence that ""China is not proposing a serious challenge to what the liberal international order looks like."" China benefits from a fairly open international trading regime and would suffer if security competition with the United States ramped up.
+
+Roping China into these systems demonstrates Obama's strategy in action. Throughout the interview, he mentions the need to get China on board with helping maintain global institutions: ""you've got to step up and help us underwrite these global rules that in fact help to facilitate your rise,"" he says, addressing China's leaders.
+
+Obama has attempted to integrate other bad actors into the global system to make them less likely to cause trouble. The opening to Cuba is the clearest example, but so too are his overtures to Iran on nukes and the original (if ill-fated) Russia reset. ""We can't guarantee that [Iran makes] a rational decision [on nukes] any more than we can guarantee Russia and Mr. Putin make rational decisions about something like Ukraine,"" he said. ""But we've also got to see whether things like diplomacy, things like economic sanctions, things like international pressure and international norms, will in fact make a difference.""
+
+And while these bad actors are co-opted or contained, by sanctions or international isolation, the rest of the world will continue to improve, bringing more states into the global system and depriving its enemies of potential allies. That'll make it harder for these states to sustain aggressive foreign policies — and even brutal repression at home — in the face of long-run international pressure.
+
+This long-run vision is, in many wells, quite compelling. But it doesn't do a whole lot for protestors in Hong Kong, Saudi women demanding the right to drive, or Ukrainians gunned down by Russian troops in Donbas. What about abuses that are happening now?
+
+That's where Obama's recognition of America's policy limits kick in. Yglesias calls this Obama's Undoctrine: avoid costly and counterproductive mistakes, particularly military ones. In the area of human rights, that means avoiding ostentatious pressure that might backfire.
+
+For instance, Obama avoided openly embracing Iran's green protest movement in 2009, and he's kept support for the Syrian rebels to a relative minimum. That's because, in a lot of these cases, Obama thinks high-profile American statements or actions can backfire.
+
+Instead, Obama argues, we have to take human rights wins where can get them. Not every issue is amenable to American pressure or direct action. ""Our successes will happen in fits and starts, and sometimes there's going to be a breakthrough and sometimes you'll just modestly make things a little better,"" he says.
+
+This may not always be a satisfying approach to spreading human rights — long-views rarely are — but it has the virtue of being a smart one.",REAL
+7736,"Doesn’t Matter WHO Hacked Podesta, If Emails are TRUE","It only takes a few moments to share an article, but the person on the other end who reads it might have his life changed forever Today's Top Stories",FAKE
+8067,Religion & Politics: A Bad Mix,"October Sky, Good Harbor Beach MA(image by Richard Turcotte) License DMCA Religion is what gives people hope in a world torn apart by religion - Jon Stewart Our Constitution granted each and every one of us the freedom to believe or not believe as we decide. That protection applies to all of us, and when one group has decreed by some spiritual osmosis that their version of the unverifiable and occasionally insane has been decreed as the new Law, then it is up to the rest of us to put that crazy back where it belongs: away from public influence. It's done enough damage as it is. Mankind offers a long history of reliance on others by religious believers with the former being no more intelligent or enlightened than the average man/woman on the street (often far less, if history--or current events--is our guide). Personal thought and introspection have accordingly been relinquished--then, and certainly now. Those presumably more enlightened individuals [bear with me] in turn define and explain their versions of truths, beliefs, and obligations--all in the context of a judging, to-be-feared-and-obeyed, person-like Entity. No small measure of self-interest factors in to their assessments. Keeping ardent followers sufficiently agitated about some loving Deity's wrath [an oxymoron on a grand scale!] allows those professing a direct phone line to the One and Only all the time and opportunity they need to preserve their political and economic advantages without so much as a peep from those loyal supplicants. Hell of a racket.... The current crop of Its spokespeople earn kudos for the ways in which they have fashioned very creative takes on what they claim to be The One and Only Word. Perhaps it's time that we all recognize and simply accept [assuming we accept any kind of theology to begin with] that one religious conviction is in fact no more rational--or irrational--than another. With so many contradictory beliefs, either there is some other unifying and overarching principle, or we will continue to sabotage ourselves and the future of generations to follow by fighting to assert we're right and everyone else is wrong. We own that choice. By its very nature the Source of our Universe is unfathomable. We simply do not have the means or capabilities to define with certainty that great mystery--try as we do. So instead, a great many among us have fashioned a notion that some human-like-but-slightly-better-and-bigger-person-like God/Allah/Whatever created all. Furthermore--apparently--only some know just what It wants from us. That is so convenient, isn't it! - Advertisement - That also frees up some thinking time on the part of those same loyal followers. Why think if someone else is willing to do all of that hard work for us, Right? Aside from that perk, this ceding of rational contemplation is a problem. Always has been. It will continue to be. For all of us, that must change. Acquiescence--or silence--each carry consequences. Were they limited to those followers disinclined to ponder their marching orders, we would certainly have at least one less set of concerns on our plates. If only.... Any honest reading of American history does not suggest a Christian nation that has had secularism forced on it in recent years by liberal forces, but the opposite. Ours is a country that has always been basically secular but has always had to contend with a loud-mouthed minority of theocrats who periodically succeed at using government to push religion until the forces of secularism beat them back again. It's obvious why conservative Christians would like to believe otherwise. Believing they're an oppressed group being denied their birthright is a lot more fun than accepting that they are an oppressive group trying to steal basic freedoms from everyone else. Ignorance, narrow-mindedness, self-serving behaviors, paranoia, fears, and the full range of irrational, fact-challenged nonsense do not manifest themselves inside a protective bubble. The more we collectively permit the subtle infiltration of curiously hypocritical mandates into policy-making, the more certain we can be that outcomes will benefit only very few. Basic math skills tell us that when only a few ""win,"" most lose. That's not a good place for us to be. - Advertisement - Adapted from a blog post of mine View Ratings | Rate It http://richardturcotte.com/ 
+Looking Left and Right: Inspiring Different Ideas, Envisioning Better Tomorrows Rich Turcotte is a retired attorney, former financial advisor, and now a writer. The mission: informing others about the significance and impact of Peak ( more... )",FAKE
+1817,Jill's dilemma,The president refuses to say he’d hold to the tradition of avoiding public comment or political attacks on the successor.,REAL
+6094,"Hillary Clinton’s Elections 2016 concession speech from New York (FULL, streamed live)","19 mins ago 3 Views 0 Comments 0 Likes It's fair to say, Europe's been shocked by Trump's   Europe's   Trump's   RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air      ",FAKE
+10230,Koala gets so excited it runs head-first into a tree,"Next Swipe left/right Koala gets so excited it runs head-first into a tree Mason, a baby Koala at the Port Stephens Koala sanctuary in Australia, gets so excited he runs head-first into a tree.",FAKE
+8041,"According to this college prof, canoes are symbol of cultural appropriation","Print 
+You know, canoes? Those boats that you powered around the lake when you went to summer camp? Betcha didn’t know they were the epitome of evil — of white privilege, genocide, and a whole host more of crimes against social justice. 
+So saieth Misao Dean, professor of English at the University of Victoria in Canada, who shared her views on CBC Radio , which reveals in its intro that Dean wrote the book on the evils of canoe appropriation. Its title is “Inheriting a Canoe Paddle: The Canoe in Discourses of English-Canadian Nationalism.” 
+You can listen to the interview here , or if you have something more important to do (what could be more important?), be advised that Heat Street provides portions of the enlightening Q & A. For example, when asked whether we should look at the canoe as a non-controversial symbol or as a symbol of colonialism, Dean responds: 
+Absolutely a symbol of colonialism. It seems to me that this narrative we tell ourselves about the canoe about how canoeing makes us in touch with nature, how canoeing makes us in some way guiltless of the terrible things that the Canadian government and Canadians in general did to First Nations people. 
+If you prefer the dissenting view, scroll down to the comments section of the CBC Radio page, where reader Patrick Saunders opines, “Academia has become a sit-com. A not really funny, sad-in-a-car-crash-sorta-way sit-com.” Then there’s this from Kawartha Cottager: 
+As soon as the ice is out of the lake I am going to head to the cottage and burn down my boat house so myself and my family will no longer be tortured by those symbols of colonialism like my canoes, kayaks and worst of all my Laser sailboat, that other symbol of colonialism. Those Euros arrived on sailboats back in the 15th century after all. Once I am done that, I will head back up the hill behind the cottage and torch my outhouse so I can destroy that ultimate symbol of colonialism…..the toilet seat. 
+Well, garsh —if no one’s going to take this seriously, what’s a social justice warrior to do?",FAKE
+8810,Facebook says users can't stop it from using biometric data,"Facebook says users can't stop it from using biometric data   Bloomberg 
+Facebook Inc.'s software knows your face almost as well as your mother does. And like mom, it isn't asking your permission to do what it wants with old photos. 
+While millions of internet users embrace the tagging of family and friends in photos, others worried there's something devious afoot are trying to block Facebook as well as Google from amassing such data. 
+As advances in facial recognition technology give companies the potential to profit from biometric data, privacy advocates see a pattern in how the world's largest social network and search engine have sold users' viewing histories for advertising. The companies insist that gathering data on what you look like isn't against the law, even without your permission. 
+If judges agree with Facebook and Google, they may be able to kill off lawsuits filed under a unique Illinois law that carries fines of $1,000 to $5,000 each time a person's image is used without permission -- big enough for a liability headache if claims on behalf of millions of consumers proceed as class actions. A loss by the companies could lead to new restrictions on using biometrics in the U.S., similar to those in Europe and Canada.",FAKE
+1490,Why California's drought hasn't sent food prices soaring,"California plays an outsized role in American agriculture. The state grows one-third of the country's vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts. That includes 99 percent of almonds, 95 percent of broccoli, 90 percent of tomatoes, and 74 percent of lettuce.
+
+So you'd think that the California's four-year drought and severe water crisis would have a devastating impact on our produce.
+
+But that hasn't really happened — certainly not yet. Recently, the US Department of Agriculture reported that US supermarket prices rose just 2.9 percent in 2014, and were only expected to increase 2 to 3 percent in 2015. Those numbers are basically in line with average annual increases over the past 20 years.
+
+What's more, the USDA currently projects that overall fruit and vegetable prices will barely budge in 2015 — despite the severe and ongoing drought in California. So what's going on?
+
+Over at the Los Angeles Times, Russ Parsons lists several factors at play here. A key one is that the cost of growing produce only makes up around 10 percent of the retail price you actually see at the supermarket. There's also transportation, packaging, and distribution, plus various mark-ups.
+
+The prices of many foods ""are driven more by market demand than drought""
+
+That means that difficult conditions for farmers won't necessarily send food prices at the grocery store skyrocketing. There could also be countervailing factors at play. For example, oil prices have been falling around the world since last June, which, as the USDA notes, can help cut down on food transportation costs.
+
+In a similar vein, a 2014 study from the University of California, Davis on California's drought pointed out that grocery store prices for nuts, wine grapes, and dairy food ""are driven more by market demand than by the drought."" As such, that study concluded that California's water crisis wouldn't greatly affect consumer prices across the nation.
+
+Parsons also points out that California's farmers aren't all being equally devastated by the drought. Some agricultural regions of the state, particularly on the coast, have been less affected than areas like the Central Valley. What's more, some farmers facing water shortages have also experienced favorable temperatures and growing conditions — strawberry farmers are one example — which has blunted the impact.
+
+Add it all up, and you get a mixed picture. Carrot prices have risen 48 percent in the last year — but strawberry prices have fallen 8 percent. Asparagus has fallen 7 percent. The vast majority of those fruits and vegetables all come from California. There's no single drought story here.
+
+There's also another important angle here. Many of California's farmers have found ways to adapt to water shortages, albeit in ways that could have long-term ramifications.
+
+Groundwater pumping has replaced up to 75% of lost surface water
+
+The one that's gotten a lot of attention is groundwater pumping. The federal government has been cutting back on the amount of water delivered to farmers in the Central Valley, due to lower-than-expected snowfall and runoff from the Sierra Nevada mountains. To compensate, many farmers are pumping the water out of underground aquifers that have accumulated over hundreds of years.
+
+That has helped stave off short-term disaster. The UC Davis study found that, in the Central Valley, groundwater pumping has helped farmers replace about 75 percent of the water they've lost due to cutbacks from reservoirs.
+
+The problem is that those underground aquifers are getting depleted rapidly — and, since they built up over a long period of time, they don't recharge easily. A 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences found that the Central Valley's aquifers don't refill completely even during California's ""wet"" periods (because pumping doesn't totally stop). What's more, in a few areas, groundwater pumping causes the ground to sink permanently, which means they can hold less water in the future.
+
+That means farmers are losing a crucial buffer against both this drought — if it persists — and severe droughts to come. Agriculture is thriving for now. But what about the future? (For its part, the state of California has begun regulating groundwater withdrawals, but rules on sustainability will only be slowly phased in between 2020 and 2040.)
+
+Of course, just because supermarket prices are staying steady doesn't mean the drought has been completely painless. As that UC Davis study mentioned above noted, farmers have suffered heavy impacts.
+
+That study, which came out in June 2014, estimated that farmers faced direct costs of about $1.5 billion last year — including $1 billion in revenue losses (about 3 percent of the state's agricultural value) and $500 million in additional groundwater pumping costs. There was also a loss of about 17,100 jobs. The costs were particularly high in the Central Valley.
+
+This year, the costs could be even higher. A recent survey by the California Farm Water Coalition estimates that roughly 41 percent of irrigated farmland will lose delivery of at least some surface water in the spring and summer. All told, some 620,000 acres of farmland will likely go fallow, with potential losses to farmers reaching $3 billion or more.
+
+Could things get so bad that eventually consumers at the grocery store notice? It's tough to say. The USDA keeps warning that, at some point, ""the ongoing drought in California could have large and lasting effects on fruit, vegetable, dairy, and egg prices."" But that hasn't happened yet. For now, it's been a lot more painful for farmers than for food shoppers.
+
+-- A guide to California's water crisis — and why it's so hard to fix",REAL
+1168,Super Tuesday Brings Harsh Light And Heartaches On The Morning After,"Super Tuesday Brings Harsh Light And Heartaches On The Morning After
+
+The results of the biggest voting day in the presidential contest thus far may not have been everything that front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had hoped, but they were enough to set the course for the remainder of the nominating season.
+
+And they were surely enough to intensify the pressure on their respective rivals.
+
+For believers in Bernie Sanders' promise of a ""political revolution,"" Super Tuesday may have seemed like the end of a dream.
+
+And for Republican office-holders and party officials anxious about having Donald Trump as their presidential nominee, Super Tuesday must have been a nightmare.
+
+Sanders went down in seven of the 11 states holding Democratic events, winning in only four where the Democratic vote was relatively small. These included his home state of Vermont, where he won with 86 percent amid turnout lower than it had been in 2008.
+
+Worse yet for Sanders' crusade, Clinton dominated in the competition for pledged delegates to the nominating convention. Because her victory margins were so large in several populous Southern states, including 2-1 in Texas, her share of the delegates far exceeded her rival's. She also won in Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas and Massachusetts.
+
+Having begun the night with a modest lead in pledged delegates, Clinton wound up with 544 to Sanders' 349. And when you include the so-called superdelegates (who go to the convention by virtue of their elected or party office), Clinton's lead expands to 1,001-371. As big-state contests loom in Michigan, Ohio and Florida over the next two weeks, Clinton needs only to break even in delegate allocations to maintain her formidable advantage.
+
+Small wonder, then, that Clinton once again spoke generously of Sanders in her victory speech, turning her guns instead on a likely upcoming foe.
+
+""I congratulate Sen. Sanders on his strong showing and campaigning,"" she said, before offering this implicit salute to Sanders' populism: ""Because this country belongs to all of us, not just those at the top.""
+
+Soon enough, she was pivoting to her preferred targets across the aisle.
+
+""The stakes in this election have never been higher,"" said Clinton, ""and the rhetoric we're hearing on the other side has never been lower. Trying to divide America between us and them is wrong, and we're not going to let it work.""
+
+Sanders had spoken early in the evening, right after Vermont was called in his column.
+
+""This campaign is not just about electing a president,"" he said, ""it's about transforming America. We are not going to allow billionaires and the superPACs to destroy American democracy.""
+
+By the time the evening was over, Sanders had added wins in Oklahoma, Colorado and Minnesota. But the contests in Colorado and Minnesota were caucuses, with relatively few participants. Taken together, his vote total in the four states he won was about 430,000. Clinton won 530,000 in Georgia alone, and larger totals still in Massachusetts and Texas.
+
+Losing in Massachusetts had to be the hardest blow for the Sanders forces to bear. The state borders Vermont, but Sanders was not able to replicate his smashing win in neighboring New Hampshire from Feb. 9. He did win the counties nearest his own state, and most of the counties outside the Boston metropolitan area. But it wasn't enough. Clinton edged him by fewer than 2 percentage points, taking 45 delegates to Sanders' 43.
+
+But if there was disappointment in the Sanders camp last night, there was panic in the ranks of establishment Republicans at the thought of Trump as their party champion.
+
+After his string of victories on Super Tuesday, his chances of capturing winner-take-all states down the road are all the greater, making his nomination in July no worse than an even bet.
+
+In fact, given his growing lead in delegates, Trump's main obstacle now may be not another candidate but the prospect of an open convention where neither he nor anyone else has the votes for a first-ballot victory.
+
+After Trump scored big February wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, party officers and congressional leaders began taking him on in public and in private. House Speaker Paul Ryan called him out for his apparent reluctance to denounce former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. There was talk in the media of Republican candidates detaching themselves from the party's nominee in the fall.
+
+Yet on Super Tuesday there seemed little sign of this same unease within the Republican primary electorate. Trump won seven of the states holding primaries, including Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Arkansas in the South. At the same time, unlike other Republicans who in the past have run the table in Dixie, Trump wrapped up two more states in New England: Massachusetts and Vermont.
+
+Noting that Republican turnout had been up again, across the board, while Democratic turnout fell shy of 2008, Trump added this:
+
+""I think we're going to be more inclusive ... more unified, and I think we're going to be a much bigger party. [The GOP] has become more dynamic. It's become more diverse. We're taking from the Democrats.""
+
+Trump did yield the biggest prize of the day to rival Sen. Ted Cruz, who won his home state of Texas along with the adjoining state of Oklahoma.
+
+""Thank God for the Lone Star State,"" crooned Cruz as he thanked his supporters in Stafford, Texas. Cruz made much of having beaten Trump in three states, claiming this made him the best alternative to the New York business mogul. (Hours later Cruz increased his total to four states, after the Alaska caucuses went his way.) Cruz also said the other candidates — who would be Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson — should ""prayerfully consider"" abandoning their own campaigns to unite behind him.
+
+It was immediately apparent that none intended to do so. Rubio, who had hoped to establish himself as the last bright hope of the anti-Trump forces, settled for a first-place finish in Minnesota's caucuses (his first win of the year) and two second-place showings in Georgia and Virginia.
+
+Rubio had high hopes for both of those states. The former borders his home state of Florida, and the latter had high concentrations of suburban Republicans, to whom he had directly appealed. Rubio did come within a few percentage points of Trump in Virginia, but still fell short. He had a strong finish in Minnesota, but the caucus was lightly attended and his vote total was barely over 41,000.
+
+But with his flair for seeing the bright side, Rubio noted that Trump's vote totals on Super Tuesday had not matched Trump's poll numbers ""in state after state."" Rubio saw that as a sign of his own success in challenging the front-runner. Rubio had begun bearding Trump in the Feb. 25 debate and traded insults with him throughout the weekend, repeatedly calling him ""a con artist,"" among other things.
+
+Kasich, for his part, came within a whisker of eclipsing Trump in Vermont and added another, more distant second-place finish in Massachusetts. He made it clear he would be in the race at least through Michigan (March 8) and Ohio, his home state, a week later. Kasich has been widely regarded as campaigning for a vice-presidential offer at this point, although he continues to suggest he could be the unity candidate against Trump.
+
+Carson once again indicated he was ""not going anywhere,"" blaming his single-digit shares of the vote to the system he was fighting, calling it a ""complex web.""
+
+In the end, of course, all this persistence on the part of his rivals may make it easier for Trump to divide and conquer. The more rivals remain, the more the anti-Trump vote is diluted, making it easier for him to prevail with a plurality of the vote, state by state, all the way to the convention.",REAL
+2205,Where do strained U.S.-Israeli relations go after Netanyahu’s victory?,"President Obama told the U.N. General Assembly 18 months ago that he would seek “real breakthroughs on these two issues — Iran’s nuclear program and ­Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
+
+But Benjamin Netanyahu’s triumph in Tuesday’s parliamentary elections keeps in place an Israeli prime minister who has declared his intention to resist Obama on both of these fronts, guaranteeing two more years of difficult diplomacy between leaders who barely conceal their personal distaste for each other.
+
+The Israeli election results also suggest that most voters there support Netanyahu’s tough stance on U.S.-led negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program and his vow on Monday that there would be no independent Palestinian state as long as he is prime minister.
+
+“On the way to his election victory, Netanyahu broke a lot of crockery in the relationship,” said Martin Indyk, executive vice president of the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. ambassador to Israel. “It can’t be repaired unless both sides have an interest and desire to do so.”
+
+Aside from Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, few foreign leaders so brazenly stand up to Obama and even fewer among longtime allies.
+
+In the past, Israeli leaders who risked damaging the country’s most important relationship, that with Washington, tended to pay a price. In 1991, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir opposed the Madrid peace talks, President George H.W. Bush held back loan guarantees to help absorb immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Shamir gave in, but his government soon collapsed.
+
+But this time, Netanyahu was not hurt by his personal and substantive conflicts with the U.S. president.
+
+“While the United States is loved and beloved in Israel, President Obama is not,” said Robert M. Danin, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “So the perceived enmity didn’t hurt the way it did with Shamir when he ran afoul of Bush in ’91.”
+
+Where do U.S.-Israeli relations go from here?
+
+In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s elections, tensions between the two sides continued to run hot. The Obama administration’s first comments on the Israeli election came with a tough warning about some of the pre-election rhetoric from Netanyahu’s Likud party, which tried to rally right-wing support by saying that Arab Israeli voters were “coming out in droves.”
+
+“The United States and this administration is deeply concerned about rhetoric that seeks to marginalize Arab Israeli citizens,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One. “It undermines the values and democratic ideals that have been important to our democracy and an important part of what binds the United States and Israel together.”
+
+Earnest added that Netan­yahu’s election-eve disavowal of a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians would force the administration to reconsider its approach to peace in the region.
+
+Over the longer term, a number of analysts say that Obama and Netan­yahu will seek to play down the friction between them and point to areas of continuing cooperation on military and economic issues.
+
+“Both sides are going to want to turn down the rhetoric,” Danin said. “But it is also a structural problem. They have six years of accumulated history. That’s going to put limits on how far they can go together.”
+
+The first substantive test could come as early as this month, when the United States hopes that it can finish hammering out the framework of an agreement with Iran.
+
+Netanyahu strongly warned against making a “bad deal” during his March 3 address to a joint meeting of Congress, an appearance arranged by Republican congressional leaders and criticized by the Obama administration for making U.S.-Israeli relations partisan on both sides so close to the Israeli election.
+
+If a deal is reached and does not pass muster with Netanyahu, he is likely to work with congressional Republicans to try to scuttle the accord.
+
+“The Republicans have said they will do what they can to block a deal, and the prime minister has already made clear that he will work with the Republicans against the president,” Indyk said. “That’s where a clash could come, and it’s coming very quickly.”
+
+The second test — talks with Palestinians — could be even more difficult. In his September 2013 address to the United Nations, Obama hailed signs of hope.
+
+“Already, Israeli and Palestinian leaders have demonstrated a willingness to take significant political risks,” Obama said in his speech. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “has put aside efforts to shortcut the pursuit of peace and come to the negotiating table. Prime Minister Netanyahu has released Palestinian prisoners and reaffirmed his commitment to a Palestinian state.”
+
+Today, the signals could not differ more. The Palestinian Authority has said that after it joins the International Criminal Court at The Hague on April 1, it will press war crimes charges against Israel for the bloody Gaza conflict during the summer. Israel, which controls tax receipts, has pledged to punish the Palestinian Authority by freezing its tax revenue.
+
+The United States, which gives hundreds of millions of dollars of economic aid to the Palestinian Authority, would be caught in the middle. It has been trying to persuade both sides to stand down, but Netanyahu’s declaration that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch makes that more difficult.
+
+“Now it’s hard to see what could persuade the Palestinians” to hold up on their ICC plans, Indyk said. “That has nothing to do with negotiations, but if both sides can’t be persuaded to back down, then they will be on a trajectory that could lead to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority because it can’t pay wages anymore.
+
+“That could be an issue forced onto the agenda about the same time as a potential nuclear deal.”",REAL
+1153,How Donald Trump blindsided the GOP: Inside the uprising the establishment never imagined — and didn’t see coming,"Why has Donald Trump’s appeal come to be so different than that of the Republican Party and its longer-term leaders? The complex answer rests on the paucity of ideas and leadership skills on the part of the rest of the dwindling field of Republican presidential candidates—but it also includes a failure on the part of party leaders and pundits to understand the people they thought they were leading. They have equated past electoral support with philosophical alignment. We are seeing, through Trump, that the connection between the two, always tenuous, is easily severed.
+
+One of the reasons the Republican elite has dealt so ineffectively with Trump is that it has never understood that they don’t control the masses who have voted for them, believing that its “dog whistles” could always bring the straying back into line. The forces that they have ridden to power, however, are much stronger than they imagined—and quite different from what they thought they were so deftly manipulating.
+
+Their lack of understanding of their “base” can be seen in Charles Murray’s 2012 book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” Clueless to the extent that cultural background influences people and, like so many of today’s elite, believing in an American meritocracy, Murray asserts that the “trends I describe exist independently of ethnic heritage.” This points to a major blind spot of the soon-to-be former leaders of the Republican Party. The irony is that they use ethnic division to attract votes though they have long believed, with Murray (and with contradiction notwithstanding), that the successful in America rise through their individual worth, not their backgrounds. Everyone, the elite believe (at least the Republican elite), wants to join them. They even believe that one’s cultural orientation (ethnic, class and more) has become a personal choice.
+
+So obtuse are they that it is no wonder that “The Rise of Trump”™ blindsided them.
+
+Murray applauds what he describes as a new class structure in America led by “a small subset: the people who run the nation’s economic, political, and cultural institutions.” This imagined pyramid of power unintentionally outlines the difference in theory and practice for the Republican elite—and explains just why they have been paralyzed by the presence of an actor within their ranks who comes from the top but does not share the illusions of the elite. Theirs is, as a result, an example of paralyzing cognitive dissonance.
+
+By claiming that people are successful by their own merits, the Republicans have elided “above the line” consideration of why certain groups of people are not as successful as others … and so, of necessity, have also ignored the fact that not everyone can “make it.” Safe in their imagined meritocracy, they ignore the role luck has played in their climbs to the top, leaving their less fortunate followers searching for someone or something to blame for their own lack of elite status. Teachers are blamed for the failures of their students, immigrants are responsible for unemployment among the native-born, and welfare cheats are keeping taxes high. Someone else is always getting the break, the less fortunate come to believe. Deserved legacies of success are being stolen away.
+
+As most anyone from any cultural background knows, the isolation of the very rich from everyone except others of their economic status and the people who serve them has a very long tradition in America as elsewhere in the world. Walled estates and patrolled neighborhoods have been standard for eons. Yet, as if the situation of today’s meritocracy were something new or different, Murray writes that
+
+Actually, this is a problem both ways. When the truck driver does not also understand the priorities of Yale professors, a dialogue between the two can never be established. Murray has unwittingly bought into one of the reasons for the resentments of “red state” conservatives toward the “East Coast elite,” that the elite need knowledge while the rest do not. This is the problem liberals such as John Dewey were trying to address through creation of a system of education based on the concept of the citizen as informed decision maker and that conservatives such as Walter Lippmann resisted, believing the population best served by an informed elite crafting choices for the population as a whole. That the divide between the professor and the teamster has been in existence since the early years of English colonization of America should be apparent to anyone who has made even the briefest study of the history of American culture. Murray does try to base his vision of the “new lower class” in history, but it is a history that takes as truth the myth of “industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity” as the basic aspects of American culture. This has not really been the case at all. Murray taps into other long-term myths, claiming that early “Americans may not have been genteel, but, as a people, they met the requirements of virtue.” This sort of self-congratulatory vision of history is common to the myths within any culture or ethnic group. Unfortunately, it also can lead to resentments, to feelings that virtues unrewarded are actually cases of rewards stolen by the undeserving. It also can lead to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and destruction of an elite in the Republican Party that neither understands—nor is understood by—its supporters. By the time of the 2012 Republican National Convention with its catchphrase of “We Built It,” the myth of an American individualism that led to a meritorious elite of “builders” had become the basis for a successful cult that could now explicitly show its political muscle. The “Tea Party,” the major manifestation of this new cult of individualism, however, is much more than a simple political movement. It is a reflection of that cultural belief that “outside” forces have conspired to dampen individual initiative, that if people could only be left alone, they could work miracles for themselves. Its attitudes are those behind the mania for guns that grew so strong over the first decade of the 21st century, stronger than it had ever been in American history. Guns, it is imagined, can keep at bay those who would keep one down. And there is a belief, a cultural conspiracy theory, if you will, that there are such enemies. Trump plays on this more directly than do the Republican leaders he is on the verge of superseding. They, in order to keep up their imaginary view of their own worth, hid their pandering to the worst instincts of Americans. Trump, with no such illusions, does not. Without any sort of real philosophical underpinning, the new individualism reflects the sort of inchoate yearning that crosses political boundaries and that Donald Trump, of course, has tapped into so well. His followers aren’t conservatives, not as the Republican elite define the term (supporting lower taxes for the rich, smaller government, etc.), but are people who believe their legacy has been stolen, that their failure to also make it into the elite is the fault of forces well outside of their own lives. They aren’t even Republicans, except by convenience. This article is adapted from passages in Chapter Six of Aaron Barlow’s book “The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth” (Praeger, 2013).",REAL
+9384,Is This Why Comey Broke: A Stack Of Resignation Letters From Furious FBI Agents,"Is This Why Comey Broke: A Stack Of Resignation Letters From Furious FBI Agents   Source: Zero Hedge 
+Conspiracy theories have swirled in recent days as to why FBI Director James Comey reopened Hillary's email investigation after just closing it back in July concluding that, although Hillary had demonstrated gross negligence in her establishment of a private email server, that ""no reasonable prosecutor"" would bring a case against her. Democrats, after lavishing Comey with praise for months on concluding his investigation in an ""impartial"" way, have since lashed out at him for seeking to influence the 2016 election cycle with Hillary herself describing his recent actions as ""deeply troubling"". Republicans, on the other hand, have praised Comey's recent efforts as an attempt to correct a corrupt investigation that seemingly ignored critical evidence while granting numerous immunity agreements to Clinton staffers. 
+According to the Daily Mail , and a source close to James Comey, the decision, at least in part, came after he ""could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI"" who ""felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist."" 
+James Comey's decision to revive the investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server and her handling of classified material came after he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI , including some of his top deputies, according to a source close to the embattled FBI director. 
+'The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn't recommend an indictment against Hillary,' said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week. 
+'Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,' said the source. 'They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.' 
+According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice. 
+He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom. 
+'The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,' the source continued. 'And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state. 
+Though we're sure there are many facets behind Comey's decision making process, we can all be quite certain, at this point, that he's not motivated by a desire to make friends having now alienated just about everyone in Washington, both in law enforcement and in both political parties. In fact, after Tim Kaine just last week praised Comey as a ""wonderful"" career public servant with the ""highest standards of integrity"" .... 
+...everything has now been turned on it's head with Hillary calling his latest moves ""unprecedented and deeply troubling""...seemingly implying an attempt, on the part of Comey, to ""rig"" the election from Trump . 
+Meanwhile, President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch are apparently also ""furious"" with Comey over his recent decision. 
+His announcement about the revived investigation, which came just 11 days before the presidential election, was greeted with shock and dismay by Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the prosecutors at the Justice Department. 
+'Jim told me that Lynch and Obama are furious with him,' the source said. 
+'Lynch and Obama haven't contacted Jim directly,' said the source, 'but they've made it crystal clear through third parties that they disapprove of his effort to save face.' 
+And while the decision to reopen the case may appease FBI agents and republicans, in the short-term, we suspect it does very little to restore overall faith in his competence. As such, we continue to question just how long Comey can hold out before being forced to resign his post. At a bare minimum, in light of his continued questionable judgement and serious doubts raised about the integrity of the first investigation, we fail to understand how an independent investigation into Hillary's email server isn't warranted. 
+OOOOh! The remorse! The GUILT ! I can almost feel it from here! 
+Get off it, ....you jabbering, fast talking, asshole. 
+Statements? ... 'Reopening investigations' (Is that a maybe you wiil have a couple of interns fiddle with Emails a little longer?) and then having legal promptly announce they will take MONTHS and MONTHS to complete the case? .... We Have AN ELECTION LOOKING AT US! ..We need to know who the bad guys are. But, then we already know, don't we? 
+No, a resignation is in order. .. Declare a 'conflict of interest' and turn states evidence would be more like it. .... You - Are - A - Crook Dir Comey. 
+I know ZHers are getting tired of seeing this but for the benefit of any little clueless FBI junior G-Men out there that can still read English:",FAKE
+10054,The Source of our Rage: The Ruling Elite Is Protected from the Consequences of its Dominance,"  Charles Hugh Smith 
+There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance. 
+We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape. 
+If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the Ruling Elite and the non-elites, it is this chart of wages as a share of the nation’s output (GDP): 46 years of relentless decline, interrupted by gushing fountains of credit and asset bubbles that enriched the few while leaving the economic landscape of the many in ruins. 
+The Ruling Elite once had an obligation to uphold the social contract as a responsibility that came with their vast privilege, power and wealth (i.e. noblesse oblige ). 
+America’s Ruling Elite has transmogrified into an incestuous self-serving few unapologetically plundering the many. In their hubris-soaked arrogance, their right to rule is unquestioningly based on their moral and intellectual superiority to “the little people” they loot with abandon. 
+Rather than feel a responsibility to the nation, America’s Elite views the status quo as a free pass to self-aggrandizement. 
+Much has changed in America in the past 46 years. Not only have wages and salaries declined as a share of “economic growth,” but the wealth that has been generated has flowed to the top of the wealth/power pyramid (see chart below). 
+Social mobility has also declined drastically: Restoring America’s Economic Mobility , as has trust in government and key institutions. 
+As Frank Buckley, the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America observed: 
+“In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center.” 
+The top .01% has seen its share of the household wealth triple from 7% to 22% in the past four decades, while the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the bottom 90% has plummeted from 36% to 23%. 
+As I described in America’s Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired and Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending…. , the economy is rapidly undergoing structural changes that tend to reward the top 5% class of technocrats and managers and the top .1% with millions in mobile capital, while leaving the bottom 95% in the dust. 
+Rather than address this rising inequality directly and honestly, the Ruling Elite has parroted propaganda and policies that protect their gains while obfuscating the reality that most American households have been losing ground for decades, a decline that has been masked by replacing real income with rising debt. 
+The ceaseless parroting of the Ruling Elite and the Mainstream Media that prosperity has been rising for everyone is nothing less than the destruction of truth. This propaganda has one purpose: to mask the inequality and injustice built into the American status quo. 
+The rapid concentration of wealth has also concentrated political power in the hands of a few who seamlessly combine public and private modes of power. 
+This wealth and power protects the Ruling Elite from the perverse consequences of their dominance. Their precious offspring rarely serve at the point of the American military’s spear, they never lose their jobs or income when corporations shift production (and R&D, etc.) overseas, and they are never replaced with illegal immigrants paid under the table. 
+Rather, the Ruling Elite is pleased to pay immigrants a pittance to care for their children, clean their luxe homes, walk their dogs, etc. 
+This is why we’re enraged: we bear the consequences of the Ruling Elite’s dominance. The system is rigged to benefit the few, who use their wealth and power to protect themselves from the destructive consequences of their self-serving dominance. 
+This rage is as yet inchoate, sensed but not yet understood as the inevitable result of a broken system and a predatory Elite that exploits the system to maximize their private gain by any means available . 
+ELECTION NOTE: As I write this Tuesday evening, it appears Donald Trump may win the presidency. For those who cannot understand how anyone could possibly vote for Trump, please read the above essay again and ponder what people were voting against by voting for Trump . 
+They may well have been voting against the corrupt, self-serving status quo rather than voting for the individual Donald Trump. 
+There are very few opportunities for powerless non-elites to register their disapproval of the nation’s Ruling Elite and the corrupt status quo. Voting for an outsider in a national election is one such rare opportunity. 
+As I noted in October, The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed (October 20, 2016). 
+If you still don’t understand how Trump could win, please read the above essay as many times as is necessary for you to get it: the status quo of corrupt self-serving insiders generates injustice and inequality as its only possible output.",FAKE
+1095,Inside Marco’s Hollow Campaign,"Three days before Florida’s climactic primary, Marco Rubio sank deep into a black leather armchair on his campaign bus. He had just spent 25 minutes smiling wide for supporters at a high-end boutique selling $150 candles. “Don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!” he shouted from the third step of a wood-paneled staircase. Now, on his parked bus, the afternoon sunlight shut out by drawn blinds, the smile was gone. The candidate knew it was already over.
+
+“There will be a reckoning,” he warned.
+
+“There will be a reckoning in the mainstream media, where all these networks and cable networks are going to have to ask themselves why did they give so much coverage for the sake of ratings,” he said. “There will be a reckoning in the conservative movement, where a lot of people who for a long time have espoused conservative principles seem to not care about those anymore in rallying around Donald Trump because they like his attitude.
+
+“I think there are a lot of people in the conservative movement who are going to spend years and years explaining to people how they fell into this and how they allowed this to happen.”
+
+For now, though, it is Rubio’s reckoning that’s at hand. And not just because of Trump or cable television networks.
+
+Rubio’s strategy was always an inside straight—overly reliant on a candidate’s ability to dominate free national media in order to outperform, outwit and eventually outlast a wide field of rivals. It was sketched out by an inner circle of advisers who believed they could eschew the very fundamentals of presidential campaigning because they had a candidate who transcended.
+
+That's exactly what happened in 2016; it just turned out Rubio wasn’t the one transcending.
+
+Even before his picturesque launch at symbolic Freedom Tower in Miami last spring, Rubio’s aides were hardly the only ones who saw in Rubio an answer to the Republican Party’s prayers: a young, charismatic and Hispanic conservative, the son of a bartender and a maid with remarkably broad appeal across a GOP spectrum riven by ideological and stylistic divisions. He’d been plastered on the cover of Time as “The Republican Savior.” Rubio was the kind of rare talent who could win a primary and then articulate a conservative message that resonated in a fast-changing country in the general.
+
+And he scared the daylights out of the Democrats.
+
+So while other campaigns touted “shock and awe” fundraising networks and precise, psychographic analytics and voter targeting operations, Rubio’s tight-knit group of mostly 40-something bros believed wholeheartedly that they didn’t need a specific early-state win. They didn't need a particular political base. They didn’t need to talk process. They didn't need a ground game. They didn’t need to be the immediate front-runner.
+
+All they needed was Marco.
+
+Their confidence bordered on arrogance. Sure, his closest advisers—campaign manager Terry Sullivan and media strategists Todd Harris and Heath Thompson—were right that their candidate was likable. He began the race as the second choice of many Republican primary voters. They just never figured out how to make voters embrace him as their first.
+
+Trump was drawing away the cameras they had banked on lifting their rising star, sucking up all the media attention as he dominated media cycle after media cycle, setting the parameters of the 2016 debate, day after day. Suddenly, their telegenic candidate couldn’t get on TV.
+
+And when Rubio stumbled, as all candidates do, there was no infrastructure to catch him, no field program to lift his support, no base to fall back upon.
+
+All they had was Marco.
+
+As Jeb Bush was quickly beset by leaks, backbiting and inflated expectations, Rubio’s campaign more closely resembled the Barack Obama model of 2008 from the start. It was a close-knit group, led by Sullivan, Thompson and Harris, with Alex Conant, Rubio’s communications director since 2011, Rich Beeson, the deputy campaign manager, pollster Whit Ayers and a few others in the innermost circle.
+
+They held conference calls three times a week to stay on the same page, and based their headquarters only a few blocks from Capitol Hill to better coordinate with Rubio when the Senate was in session. Sullivan ran a tight ship. In the early months of the campaign, he insisted on personally signing off on every expense above $500. The limit was later relaxed but symbolic of a campaign that knew it had to scrimp to compete with Bush, whose super PAC hauled in $100 million in the first half of 2015.
+
+The campaign spared no expense in setting up events to be television-friendly. There were invariably press risers, tidy backdrops and television lighting to portray Rubio, quite literally, in the best imaginable light.
+
+But one of the things Sullivan seemed least interested in was field offices. The campaign would force volunteers and supporters to pay for their own yard signs, posters and bumper stickers.
+
+Rubio seemed to agree. In August, he was due to open his Iowa state headquarters the morning after flipping pork chops at the state fair, but he bailed at the last minute. The reason: heading back to Florida for his children’s start of school. The grand opening would be delayed for 10 days, and it would occur without Rubio. He wouldn’t announce a state director to run operations in the crucial caucuses for another month.
+
+It was a fitting episode for a campaign that had bragged about how staff could work just as well out of a Starbucks with a laptop. The campaign wouldn’t announce supporters in Iowa’s various regions until January 2016, and only then under intensifying pressure from allies. And when campaign officials announced their “field offices,” they wouldn’t say exactly where they actually were, making it all but impossible for volunteers to volunteer.
+
+It’s not that Rubio’s team didn’t know the data science that powered Obama’s two campaigns or that studies showed that door knocks and personal phone calls are among the most effective means to get out the vote. It’s that they’re expensive and time-consuming. And Rubio’s team thought they had figured out a better way: targeting exactly their voters with pinpoint precision online, on TV and in the mail.
+
+“It’s almost like they wanted to prove they could win without doing some of the stuff people have to do to win,” said one Rubio supporter very familiar with the campaign’s planning. “Were they just fucking lazy or arrogant?”
+
+In fact, they had designed a campaign to fit neatly with Rubio’s own conception of himself as master political communicator.
+
+“Marco is convinced, and perhaps rightly so, that he has the skills to convince anyone,” said Dan Gelber, who served for eight years in the Florida Legislature with Rubio, including two as the Democratic counterpart when Rubio was GOP speaker. “He really believes that if you give him an audience, he can turn them to his way of thinking.”
+
+Donors were unnerved by it, though. So Terry Sullivan outlined the plans to some of Rubio’s supporters at a closed-door strategy session at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas in October.
+
+The campaign’s goal, Sullivan explained, was simply to put Rubio “in front of as many voters as possible as often as possible,” according to an attendee. And that meant getting free media coverage and buying paid television ads. So the campaign had locked in ad rates early—paying as little as 10 cents for every dollar spent by Bush’s super PAC. At times, they’d spend far less than Bush’s allies and still out-advertise them.
+
+The team wanted Marco to sell himself on TV, not rely on second-rate surrogates or volunteers. And that meant less focus on door-knocking or volunteer phone-calling.
+
+Donors and early-state supporters who had grown accustomed to presidential-level coddling and attention pushed back. And by December, Optimus, the firm paid nearly $900,000 to run Rubio’s analytics operation, prepared a public memo to quiet the critics. The memo described a hypothetical Midwestern state with 150,000 likely voters (roughly the expected Iowa turnout at the time) and one candidate at 20 percent, trailing another at 30 percent.
+
+It was clear to everyone it was about Rubio and Iowa.
+
+In it, Optimus made the case that running a ground game “missed the elephant in the room” as it nudged support up less than 1 percentage point. “You’ve got a 10 point gap you need to close,” the memo read.
+
+“All this is not to say that door knocking doesn’t work. We know it does,” the memo concluded.
+
+Sullivan put it most succinctly to the New York Times in December: “More people in Iowa see Marco on ‘Fox and Friends’ than see Marco when he is in Iowa.”
+
+The ground-free strategy surprised Democrats and even some of Rubio’s rivals.
+
+“This isn’t even a question in the mind of anyone who’s worked on presidential campaigns,” Dan Pfieffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, told POLITICO earlier this year. “You have to build an extensive and aggressive ground operation to win.”
+
+Ted Cruz had invested more in ground operations than any other Republican, and his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, told POLITICO he was surprised how few ground troops any of his opponents were mobilizing.
+
+""It’s a huge investment; it’s a huge investment of resources when a lot of people might not know how many resources they have, so I understand why they don’t do it,” Roe said. But there’s an advantage: ""The ground game just never goes away.""
+
+",REAL
+2401,Obamacare Enrollees Anxiously Await Supreme Court Decision That Threatens Their Coverage,"“I’ve got my six-month, regular cancer checkup in June, and so I’m saying I hope they don’t come out with any kind of decision, just in case it’s bad news, until after,” Hines said. “You always get nervous, usually a day before or day of, going for a checkup. But I think I started a little more on the worrying ahead of time.”
+
+Hines, 59, has been relying on health insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces to help cover the costs of those checkups. But she has the misfortune of residing in a state, Virginia, where the federal government is operating that marketplace. Because of that, she could end up losing her tax subsidy to help purchase coverage right at the time her health takes a dive for the worse.
+
+The Supreme Court will issue a ruling this month on a lawsuit engineered by conservative activists alleging that a brief phrase in the law -- “exchange established by the state” -- means subsidies can only be provided to individuals residing in states that set up their own health insurance exchanges. Should the justices side with Obamacare's critics, Hines would be one of an estimated 6.4 million people in 34 states whose subsidies will disappear. Many will be forced to drop their health insurance because of heightened cost.
+
+For someone like Hines, who has had breast cancer three times, most recently in 2009, this presents a Hobson's choice. She considers health care coverage essential and must get screenings twice a year to ensure her cancer doesn't come back. But she has little money to afford insurance on her own. A former public relations professional, she’s devoted her life to caring for her ailing, octogenarian mother, and currently works part-time as an educator at the aquarium near her home in Virginia Beach. Her low income qualifies Hines for a subsidy that cuts the price she pays by about half, to $200 a month.
+
+“I could probably manage another year,” Hines said when asked if she could afford the coverage without the subsidy. She would have to draw down more of her retirement savings to pay for health care. But doesn’t have enough money to hold on to health insurance until she turns 65 and becomes eligible for Medicare, she said.
+
+Hines was one of six people the Huffington Post featured in a report this March on the case surrounding Obamacare's subsidies. At the time, the Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments on the case and the prospect of those subsidies potentially disappearing was becoming less abstract for those in states with federally run exchanges. The clock is ticking even louder now. And so, we decided to catch up with those we interviewed to see how their circumstances, health and mental well-being has changed.
+
+Lucas had an aortic aneurysm in 2010, so he has to keep monitoring his heart condition. Even though his most recent tests came up clean in May, Lucas knows the computed tomography (CT) scan he needs as part of his checkup every two years would cost him $11,000 without insurance, instead of $50 now. He also knows his prescriptions would run to $2,600 every three months rather than $65 with insurance. Lucas, who is self-employed, earns $25,000 to $30,000 a year, he said.
+
+Lucas might be shielded from the ramifications of a ruling against the subsidy if Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) persuades the GOP-majority state legislature to go along with his proposal to set up a state-run exchange. But as Lucas takes stock of the court decision to come, he's struck by what he sees as dramatically misplaced priorities among lawmakers in Washington.
+
+“Billions of dollars in corporate welfare to oil companies and whatnot, you know, and that’s not a problem for them, but I’m a person who gets $2,400 a year in subsidies to help pay for my insurance -- and I pay almost three times that much in taxes, so it’s not like I’m taking them on the negative side,” Lucas said.
+
+Blitz turns 33 on Monday. Since birth, he has dealt with aortic valve stenosis, meaning he has a heart valve that is too narrow. He recently received good news from his cardiologist that he can delay an expensive major operation he thought he’d need this year. But he will have to undergo a less serious procedure at a later date.
+
+All this would be difficult to handle on its own. But it's compounded by the problems Blitz has had in navigating the health care law. He ended up with a plan he doesn't recall picking. He lost his subsidy of $30 a month even though his income level should qualify him for some tax credit. And he assumed that his home state would get rid of all Obamacare exchanges entirely if the court ruled against the subsidies (in fact, state Republicans have passed a bill saying that Arizona won't set up a state exchange. The federal one will remain regardless).
+
+Were he to ultimately lose the subsidy, Blitz would figure out a way to pay for his insurance. He calls himself ""fortunate"" in that regard, compared to those who don't have savings to dip into or expenses to cut or friends to rely on. But Blitz's fortune -- if you want to call it that -- comes at a cost, and it underscores how the damage from a Supreme Court ruling for the plaintiffs extends beyond those who currently receive tax credits.
+
+Without the subsidies, most of the low- and moderate-income people using the health insurance exchanges will exit the exchanges, leaving those with the greatest health care needs -- people like Blitz with medical conditions -- as an increasing share of the market. Because people with greater medical needs generate more medical bills, that would increase expenses for insurance companies, forcing them to increase premiums. Those higher premiums, in turn, would lead more people to drop coverage. In the industry, they call this a “death spiral.”",REAL
+8576,Guy On Pills Has 5 Hour Chat With Hand After Girl Told Him “Talk To The Hand” – Wundergroundmusic.com,"Comments 
+A man who was believed to be on ecstasy has reportedly had a five hour chat with a hand after a girl he was trying to chat up told him to “talk to the hand ‘cause the face ain’t listening”. 
+Simon Webber, a twenty six year old used car salesman from Worcester, England, claims to have had a “really good chat” with “the hand” and hopes they can “grab a coffee” some time in the future. 
+“The hand was totally peng mate,” claimed Mr Webber during a catch up with Wunderground earlier today. “The girl who owned the hand was well fit so I tried to talk to her but she actually turned out to be a bit of a dick and told me to talk to her hand. I’m really glad now because I instantly hit it off with the hand.” 
+“I’ve not connected with anything like that since the time I took acid while I was camping in the Lake District and met a goat named Boris in the forest,” continued Mr Webber. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve got more in common with things than people, it’s like I can’t have a good conversation with something unless they’re not able to answer me back.” 
+“Me and the hand talked about all kinds of stuff,” revealed a reminiscent Mr Webber. “Brexit, the U.S. elections, diseases that have been eradicated, the potential dangers of genetically modifying food, chemtrail and all sorts of other really interesting things. She’s a great listener, I didn’t get her number but I’m sure I’ll see her around. Hopefully we can hang out again, I don’t want to be getting ahead of myself but I think she could be the one.” 
+According to Stacey Poole, the owner of the hand, she had her Saturday night ruined by “some little creature” who was following her around the club all night. 
+“I was just trying to have a good night but that little cretin wouldn’t leave me alone,” complained Stacey. “He tried to talk to me but he was off his nut so I gave him the old ‘talk to the hand’ line and put my hand in his face. The daft twat took it literally and started talking to my hand, at first it was kind of funny but I couldn’t get rid of him, he was following me everywhere, eventually I just had to leave. He ruined my night.” ",FAKE
+1279,"Trump and Sanders win: We are witnessing a full scale revolt, America","They came close in Iowa, but just fell short of claiming victory. Tuesday night in New Hampshire was a different story.
+
+The political outsiders have taken control of this election.
+
+Donald Trump won Tuesday night’s Republican primary in New Hampshire. By a margin of 34 percent to 16 percent for John Kasich, Trump proved that his slogan of “Make America Great Again” resonates with voters – in a big way.
+
+On the Democratic side, self proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders edged Hillary Clinton out by 20 percentage points. His message railing against the rigged economy, special interests that control Washington and pledging to give Americans universal healthcare and free college tuition brought together a larger coalition of young voters than the one Barack Obama built in 2008.
+
+To my mind, Tuesday night’s results show that there are finally politicians who understand how marginalized, disenfranchised and betrayed a majority of Americans feel. It’s both Republicans and Democrats, including the 42 percent of Americans who now identify as independent because they think the two parties don’t represent their values and positions.
+
+We are seeing a full scale rejection of the political establishment. This is a threat that we did not take seriously enough over the past few years, as evidenced by the fact that most rejected Trump as a clown and a joke. His ideas on illegal immigration and placing a temporary ban on Muslims ruffled our national feathers even though a majority of Republican primary voters agreed with him. That’s how out of touch our political class has become.
+
+Indeed, 46 percent of GOP voters say they feel betrayed by Republican politicians. Trump won 32 percent of that group.
+
+We did the same thing to Bernie Sanders who began this race upwards of 50 points behind Hillary Clinton. We said a socialist could never win. And he may not be able to win a national election, but we are seeing an electorate so starved for an honest and trustworthy politician that they will make allowances for ideologies that they may not have considered before.
+
+Sanders has argued about oligarchy and money in politics and has been his whole career. He doesn’t flip flop or evolve on his advocacy for the average American.
+
+Sanders is just Bernie Sanders. And Donald Trump is just Donald Trump.
+
+We are living in a time when trust in Americans institutions has collapsed. A recent Pew survey shows that less than 20 percent of Americans trust the government always or most of the time. And a CNN poll showed that 60 percent think the American Dream is unachievable today.
+
+Against this backdrop, it’s no surprise that America is in revolt. Honesty and trustworthiness matters more than whether a candidate has experience or can win in November according to voters. And the establishment isn’t delivering anything resembling what the American populace desires in their political leaders.
+
+I see a clearer path to the nomination for Trump than for Sanders, but there is no doubt that Americans have spoken and they’re done with business as usual.
+
+Douglas E. Schoen has served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton. He has more than 30 years experience as a pollster and political consultant. He is also a Fox News contributor and co-host of ""Fox News Insiders"" Sundays on Fox News Channel at 7 pm ET. He is the author of 12 books. His latest is ""The Nixon Effect: How Richard Nixon’s Presidency Fundamentally Changed American Politics"" (Encounter Books, February 2016). Follow Doug on Twitter @DouglasESchoen.",REAL
+6196,BREAKING! — Hillary Clinton looks like a goner!,"Wikileaks Just Released Her Full Isis Donor List With Names! 
+WikiLeaks just finished the job that started few months ago! Hillary just got killed! She is not going to survive this! It’s too much! Pure treason! 
+According to Conservative Daily Post: Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton are the founders of ISIS. We have proven that through emails and documents leaked from WikiLeaks, but liberal media outlets still refuse to cover it. 
+After all, they are still more focused on what Trump said eleven years ago than what Hillary has actually done. 
+Because of brave patriots like Julian Assange, we have been given more evidence that Hillary Clinton is more connected to ISIS than we originally believed. 
+An email was leaked between Clinton and John Podesta indicating that: “Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region” to accuse Qatar and Saudi Arabia of “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [or ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” 
+Citing the need to “use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets,” said Hillary to Podesta while arguing the current developments in the Middle East were “important to the U.S. for reasons that often differ from country to country.” 
+Odd that Clinton argues Saudi Arabia and Qatar are helping fund ISIS when Hillary’s largest donations come from those two countries. 
+In another correspondence from 2012, the Director of Foreign Policy at the Clinton Foundation, Amitabh Desai, set up a meeting with Bill Clinton for five minutes in exchange for a $1,000,000 “birthday check.” 
+The email adds that the small but rich nation occupying the Qatar Peninsula would “welcome the Clinton Foundation’s suggestions for investments in Haiti — particularly on education and health.” Desai added that while Qatar had already “allocated most of their $20 million … they were happy to consider projects we suggest.” Like this? Share it now.",FAKE
+9799,WORLD WAR 3 Hillary Clinton Foundation Holocaust ISIS Saudi Weapons of Mass Destruction YEMEN,source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments,FAKE
+5542,Russia stops shipping Soyuz space rockets to France,"Russia stops shipping Soyuz space rockets to France 28.10.2016 | Source: AP photo French newspaper Les Echos reported that Russia's state-run corporation Roscosmos will would not deliver Soyuz rockets to Arianespace of France. First off, Russia demands the receipt of the funds blocked in connection with the Yukos case. A statement from Roscosmos says that the Russian company will not work for free. ""No money - no products,"" Les Echos quoted a message from the corporation. It goes about 300 million euros, which Arianespace was supposed to pay to Roscosmos, but the funds were frozen by the Court of Arbitration in The Hague in the case of former Yukos shareholders . Previously, Roscosmos had won a case in France about the arrest of accounts of the state corporation in the Yukos case. ""They acknowledged that our arguments were correct, but we will continue defending our interests,"" director of communications at Roscosmos, Igor Burenkov said. On April 11, France arrested $700 million of Roskosmos and Space Communications money in connection with a judicial decision on the case of Yukos. Interestingly, NASA plans to purchase seats for its astronauts on board the Soyuz spaceship as Boeing and SpaceX seem to be unable to prepare their spaceships on time. US-based commercial companies Boeing and SpaceX are developing their own manned spacecraft - Starliner and Dragon. The deadline is near, so Houston has decided to consider a possibility to buy extra seats on board Russia's Soyuz. NASA hopes that at least one of the private spaceships will be able to perform operational tasks by the end of 2017 or early 2018. For the time being, one of the six necessary seats on the Soyuz spaceship costs the US nearly $82 million. By 2019, the price will increase. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+2825,Does Kerry want an Iran deal too much?,The online comment fits closely with his campaign platform.,REAL
+7227,French-Japanese Flawed Steel InReactors Dooms The Nuclear Industry,"GET VISIBLE! Advertise Here. Find Out More Reactors Dooms The Nuclear Industry By Yoichi Shimatsu 9-17-16 A murky web of international supply chains is being exposed in the flawed-steel parts scandal rocking the French and Japanese nuclear industries. “Serious anomalies” have been discovered in key steel components for the European Pressurized Water Reactor (E-PWR) being constructed at Flamanville, France, on the English Channel. The recent exposure of brittle steel has led to a sullen admission by nuclear-tech supplier AREVA of metallurgical defects in at least 400 different types of reactor parts produced by its subsidiary Le Creusot Forge since 1964. Oddly, nearly identical inconsistencies in steel alloys were found in parts imported from Japan for the Flamanville project. Dozens of steel items, which have also been supplied to nuclear plants worldwide, were produced by the Japan Casting and Forging Company (JCFC), a joint venture of three of that nation’s biggest defense contractors, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metals. Its industrial base in Kitakyushu on the southern island of Kyushu was a major hub of weapons production by Yawata, the forerunner of Nippon Steel, which supplied the Imperial Navy, including the armor for the super-battleship Yamato, and Mitsubishi Aircraft, which built the Zero attack plane. The list of defective steel parts reveals how the allied French and Japanese nuclear industries are now joined at the hip like mutant twins. Mitsubishi and AREVA are partnered in the ATMEA third-generation PWR design program. AREVA is a shareholder in Japan Steel Works, based in northern Hokkaido, a producer of 6-ton single-cast reactor vessels. TEPCO has been allied with AREVA for the decommissioning of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. These interlocking relationships hidden under global marketing campaigns make it difficult to tell where key components are actually sourced. How did Le Creusot Forge evade detection of its defective components for more than two decades? What accounts for the chronic failure of the French and European nuclear-regulatory agencies, along with the UN watchdog IAEA, to properly inspect key parts for the world’s biggest nuclear reactors? Did defective steel have a role in innumerable accidents and leaks at nuclear plants in Japan, Britain, France and the United States? Is endemic bribery of high-ranking politicians and state bureaucrats by the energy industry at the root of a blanket cover-up of radioactive releases and equipment breakdowns at nuclear stations worldwide? While the quick answers are obvious to anyone who’s not a nuclear apologist on the secret payroll, further exposure of the ugly details is important toward breaking the code of silence that grips the nuclear sector and large utility companies along with their political flunkies, who together comprise a nuclear mafia that operates exactly like an organized crime family. Meltdowns in the Works It’s important to remember that AREVA and Mitsubishi represent the “creme de la creme” of the global nuclear industry as producers of third-generation PWRS and advanced pressurized water reactors (APWRs). Other major players are still stuck with antiquated systems such as boiling water reactors (BWRs), including Hitachi-GE, Toshiba-Westinghouse, and their Russian and Chinese competitors. These nuclear players, beset with the wreckage at Fukushima, still try to redeem their horrid performance record with slick graphics and fast talk, as if those meltdowns in Japan never happened. If the undisputed technology leaders are covering up hundreds of defective components, then the rest of the pack must be over their heads in production problems and technical failures. The global scale of Areva and Mitsubishi’s debacle is just one indicator of a grossly inefficient and incompetent global nuclear technology industry. Among the nuclear facilities stuck with shoddy components from Creusot, JCFC and Mitsubishi: Reactor vessel cover heads (RVCH, sealing below and on top of the cylindrical reactor vessel): - 15 reactor closure units in the United States; - 3 units in Sweden - 1 in Brazil - in planning, Hinkley Point in Britain, the Sinop plant in Turkey, a project in Jordan, proposed plant in Indonesia, and 10 planned reactors in Vietnam. Steam Generators (SG), a high-pressure chamber that powers the electricity turbines: - 15 units in France; - 10 units in Belgium, now under guard due to terrorist threats; - 6 units in Mexico JCFC channel heads, which move coolant water into the steam-pressure unit: - 18 reactor vessels at 9 nuclear plants in France; - 13 reactor vesselss at 6 nuclear plants in Japan, including two restarted Mitsubishi reactors at Kyushu Electric’s restarted and operational Satsuma-Sendai plant, located near several faults. JCFC also produces 5-ton reactor vessels, which are cast as single block and not welded as in the more vulnerable Chinese and Russian designs. The durability of these PWR vessels, which operate under high temperature and pressure, has been fundamentally challenged by the rapid breech of the much heavier and thicker-walled boiling waters reactors at Fukushima. Mitsubishi had planned to install neutron reflectors to raise efficiency while limiting high-speed particle damage to APWR reactor vessels, but has so far failed to admit how these reflectors can act like beryllium mirrors that intensify chain reactions inside nuclear bombs. Notably, the U.S. Department of Energy withdrew its participation in Mitsubishi APWR development immediately after the Fukushima reactor meltdowns, which proved that nuclear reactors are bombs waiting to be detonated. Zones of Weakness Suspecting quality-control problems at the Flamandville project, l’Autorite de Surete Nucleaire (ASN), or French nuclear safety authority, in 2014 ordered AREVA to conduct material tests on its steel components. That occurred seven years after the E-PWR project was started at the existing nuclear plant site in view of Jersey and Guernsey islands and located on the same peninsula as Calais. In April 2015, the ASN announced: “The results of these tests revealed the presence of a zone in which there was a high carbon concentration, leading to lower than expected mechanical toughness values. Initial measurements confirmed the presence of this anomaly in the reactor vessel head and reactor vessel bottom head of the Flamanville European Pressurized Reactor (EPR).” That is bad news indeed, since it was the top head that got blown off at the Fukushima Dai-ichi No.3 reactor on March 15, 2011, sending a mushroom cloud into the jet stream moving toward North America while showering cascades of metallic micro-pellets containing radioactive isotopes over northern Japan. The bottom head plates of all three melted-down reactors at Fukushima were breached, allowing molten uranium and plutonium to flow like lava into the soil below the plant and subsequently releasing an unstoppable stream of radioactive isotopes into the Pacific Ocean to cause the greatest extinction event in human history. Even though nuclear engineers predict most criticality “events” in civilian reactors to be less damaging than the Fukushima catastrophe,, the vulnerability of the vessel heads is a serious threat that can wipe out all of France’s agricultural and livestock production overnight, as well as pose a lasting threat to public health across Europe. Chernobyl is proof of that. Not Quite Carbon Copies The mechanical lab tests on the Creusot heads showed 0.22 percent of carbon content in the steel alloy, significantly higher than the 0.16 limit. While a variance of 0.06 percent may not seem like much, it could mean the difference between a near-accident and a reactor breach that ends in a total meltdown. Carbon is the prevalent alloy in the steel-making process. A higher carbon content forms stronger bonds with steel atoms by creating a cubic cage-like structure. As shown in carbon-steel knives, however, an increasing amount of carbon makes hardened steel more brittle. In contrast, low carbon steel is softer but also more ductile. Malleability or “toughness” (as in resilience) is desirable in pots, kettles and nuclear reactors, since these vessels must expand when heated and shrink while cooled, without breakage or fracturing after repeated use. Pressurized water reactors operate at temperatures of more than 300 Celsius and internal pressures of about one metric ton per square inch. In event of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction, however, both temperature and pressure can rise rapidly. There can also be an additional threat from the Wigner effect of neutron bombardment, which blows apart iron atoms in the crystal matrix of steel. Inside pockmarked steel, radioactive releases hasten a reactor breach. Under sufficient heat and cooling, steel anneals, or rebuilds its crystal structure. But that will not happen during a meltdown due to rising internal temperatures, as shown at Fukushima, ad water-cooling becomes a futile gesture once a reactor is holed. A folk saying often wrongly attributed to King Richard III goes: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost. for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider was lost” . . . and so on to the loss of a kingdom. The global nuclear industry is now suffering an avalanche of losses due to a minuscule surplus of 0.06 percent of carbon in steel, sparking a change of events that threatens the future of nuclear power. Complicated Traceability The only publicly stated recommendation from the French nuclear authority was to install a mechanical analysis laboratory inside the Creusot Forge facility in the Saone-et-Loire district. A modern engineering facility like Creusot already has equipment with computer controls and monitoring systems, which have failed to solve the carbon anomalies. Technology may have reached the limits of materials science, and the brittleness program may not be fixable. Omitted from the ASN safety review, AREVA, Le Creusot Forge, JCFC or Mitsubishi is any mention of the underlying cause of the potentially dangerous “anomaly” in the carbon content of steel components. Exactly where and when in the production process does the metallurgical ratio structure of steel become inconsistent? For people unfamiliar with steel-making, a basic perception problem is rooted in the assumption that steel is impermeable. At the nano-level, however, the lattice of iron is a sponge-like material, which allows passage of gases like oxygen (the cause of rust) and carbon monoxide (which depletes rust). Despite its limitations, no other metal can match the strength and cost-effectiveness of steel. In the steel-making process, carbon is released inside a blast furnace by burning coke, a porous form of coal after its impurities have been removed by intense heat. The burning coke melts the pellets of ion ore. Carbon monoxide gas from coke combustion is reductive(removes oxygen) and restores iron oxide (rust) back into pig iron. Then oxygen is introduced to bond with the carbon monoxide to form carbon dioxide, which is then removed from the blast furnace. In the next phase, oxygen lowers carbon levels inside the steel, emitting more carbon dioxide, leaving the end product of low-carbon steel with fairly uniform consistency. It is not possible to maintain uniformity of carbon content through many rounds of reheating. The steel block is repeatedly heated for hot forging, which involves heavy-duty hammering of the metal after it becomes ductile in a gas-fired oven. The forging required for curved reactor vessel covers and channel heads likely puts sufficient stress on the steel to displace carbon atoms. The final results can be affected by the uneven contours of the object and differing densities of the metal, especially where it has been heavily forged, potentially causing displacement of carbon into denser clusters. That at least is a plausible explanation for the carbon anomalies as opposed to the closed-mouth silence from the nuclear industry, which has been totally unable to explain why it produces hundreds of types of products with metallurgical flaws. There are possible industrial design solutions to this morass of failed production techniques, but that’s none of my business. Then again, there may be no solution to the fundamental problem of carbon drift in steel-making, at least nothing that is within reasonable cost to a nuclear industry already beset by 300-percent contact overruns at Flamanville. Qualifications at Question Who am I to impudently challenge the entire nuclear establishment over issues of quality-control that are heading toward another Fukushima-scale disaster? One does not have to be a genius to figure out what’s wrong with the nuclear industry. My blue-collar competence comes from being a former licensed welder and a millwright (an equipment fixer) at U.S. Steel Southworks in Chicago and also in the seamless tube mill at Republic Steel in Gary, Indiana, where products of large dimension on a massive scale were produced from molten steel to build oil tankers and the Alaska pipeline. Working in the industry can inspire cynicism about corporate assurances of product quality. Once on the midnight shift at the 92-inch plate mill, I witnessed an entire train of defective inch-thick steel clanking back to the steelworks. Instead of lining a super-tanker, the vast stacks of brittle metal was left to rust in a huge pile of scrap. Inspection reports were routinely fudged or completely faked to placate the corporate bosses, who’d do anything to fill an order to earn revenues for the near-bankrupt facility. On the other hand, there were outstanding moral examples of otherwise unheralded team leaders and champions of workers’ rights, but that’s another story, which the latecomer to Southside Chicago named Barack Obama knows nothing about. The nearly century-old mill, a vast maze of wreckage on the shore of Lake Michigan where long ore ships from open-pit mines in Minnesota docked, was littered with giant ingots glowing red as they set to cool, the only trustworthy source of heat against the icy winter gusts. Despite the constant risks of injuries and accidental death, metalwork was still practiced as an art by older workers at the fire-spewing ovens, as they judged the readiness of steel in its stages by noticing subtle changes in its glowing hue, faint differences in the smell of its fumes, and the onset of scintillating sparks. My knowledge of steel actually began before then as a weekend blacksmith during university days, when I helped my welding instructor set up forges in an old barn near the rocky site of the fateful war dance of The Prophet Tenskwatawa who emboldened Chief Tecumsah’s Shawnee warriors against the encroaching 4th U.S. Infantry in the Indiana territory during the year prior to the War of 1812. Blood and steel on the land that was once the world’s greatest stand of hardwood forest, since decimated down to flat fields of gene-modified corn and soybeans. Although a power hammer was installed in the beamed barn with hard effort, the dull mechanical beast was rarely used since nothing could match the ring of a hammer dropping in rhythmic cadence onto red-hot metal over an anvil. At the forge, my hand turned the rotary bellows to raise blue flames out of the self-made coke, while my eyes stared into that fiery cradle of every civilization that has ever risen and fallen since the start of the Iron Age, from the Hittites and the Mycenaeans of Homer, the Aryan realm of Zoroaster to the Mauryan Empire of the Buddhist king Asoka, to ancient China, Rome, the Arab world and Europe, and culminating in the Industrial Revolution, on down to that very hour when B-52s were mercilessly pummeling Vietnam with tons of ordnance. Steel holds the power over life and death, crafted into swords or ploughshares, and therefore must be imbued with virtue and justice, as pledged by every master swordmaker and authentic gunsmith. Only in our time has a crazed pseudo-scientific priesthood willfully and foolishly violated the sacred union of fire and metal, so that their abominable faith in atom-splitting can be “proven” in a false cosmology disguised as scientific theory, while bringing devastation upon humanity, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Chernobyl and Fukushima, and on until their abuse of technology ends with the total extinction of life on this planet. The demented cult of nuclear believers have since thrown their support behind Shinzo Abe, a minion of the apocalyptic guru of the Aum Shinrikyo cult and his predecessor, the founder of Sukyo Mahikari, Yoshikazu Okada. In an exhortation that resonates in today’s defect-ridden global nuclear industry, the militarist Okada urged his followers to “plant nuclear bombs everywhere, and to occasionally detonate an atomic explosion” to keep lesser peoples in fear and servitude. Every reactor is a time bomb ticking down to zero hour. That heinous injunction, which explains the murderous secrecy of Japan’s nuclear industry, and for that matter of the entire global nuclear sector, is the only explanation for the installation of defective reactors in more and more countries. Intentional or not, their common endgame is mass death through the spread of radioactivity, sending a plague of cancer everywhere and afterthe Fukushima meltdowns the start of a global extinction event. Theirs is the mad vision of the Final War preached by Shoko Asahara, now apparently pardoned of the death penalty for his role in the gassing 20,000 subway commuters at the morning rush hour in Tokyo, that opening act in this last harvest of souls. Against grotesque lies of the deceivers, along with public indifference and mental servitude, rusted metal must be purged with fire. After iron is refined in smoke and purified in flames to become steel, and metal rod is hammered into blade, then as a thin blue wave ripples toward the tapered edge, ready for quenching with a thrust into cold water, the sword is tempered. Honest men will rise and step forward to their calling so that life might triumph over evil.",FAKE
+2304,Russia May Deny LGBT Driver's Licenses,"A new decree by the Russian government would refuse driver's licenses to transgender people, as well as other several other groups. The Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights reports Decision 1604 made on Jan. 6 adds new classifications to a list of “medical conditions and medication restrictions to driving.” The list includes “all transgender people, bigender, asexuals, transvestites, crossdressers, people who need in a sex reassignment.” These restrictions, in the association’s estimation, could ensnare women with underdeveloped breasts, a man with a thin beard, or anyone interested in BDSM. Amputees and people under 4’11” could also be prevented from driving.",REAL
+1231,"Cruz, Trump and Rubio win in Iowa. And now we know who the losers are, too...","It is always interesting to watch democracy in action and Iowa is ground zero.
+
+Many political pundits and media analysts complain about the attention Iowa receives from candidates and the media because it goes first. But it also is a state filled with people who are willing to pay attention, to go to small events and forums (more than 1,500 have been held) and to show up at a caucus on a cold, often snowy night to participate in a ritual few states duplicate.
+
+Millions of dollars are spent on TV commercials (over 60,000) and organization that Monday night produced a record turnout.
+
+Iowa doesn't always produce the eventual winners but it does eliminate the losers. With 17 Republican candidates starting this process, there are really only three or four real candidates now with voter support and sufficient monies to go on to the remaining contests.
+
+With a record voter turnout in Iowa, the winner, Ted Cruz goes on with his extraordinary organization and conservative supporters with a big upset.
+
+Marco Rubio, the best debater, came on strong and gained real momentum. He came very close to coming in second. Certainly he has to be viewed as a very serious candidate and the best bet to become the establishment candidate.
+
+Trump is Trump and his special appeal to new voters and the angry anti-Washington element will go on, too, but with unpredictable results. He also paid a price for missing the last debate and fighting Fox News.
+
+Ben Carson held his 10 percent base, but his candidacy is short lived and beyond Iowa has minimal support.
+
+The biggest losers are Bush, Christie and Huckabee. Bush spent the most money and dropped like a rock.
+
+Christie's bluster, unlike Trump’s, didn't sell. He has no money and no future in this race.
+
+And Huckabee, who won this race eight years, and thought he could be a serious challenger against Romney in 2012, was a bottom dweller getting less than 2 percent of the vote. He raised no money and has no appeal and barely has enough money left to buy a bus ticket back to Arkansas. He quickly waved the flag of surrender and wisely quit the race.
+
+One more may make the cut after Iowa, but this is the field now and it will be fascinating to watch.
+
+Monday night’s win is a giant victory for Cruz and his team. He won in spite of a greater turnout than in years past and benefited from the dramatic increase in new voters. And now on to New Hampshire!
+
+
+
+Edward J. Rollins is a Fox News contributor. He is a former assistant to President Reagan and he managed his reelection campaign. He is a senior presidential fellow at Hofstra University and a member of the Political Consultants Hall of Fame. He is a strategist for Great America PAC, an independant group that is supporting Donald Trump for president.",REAL
+3715,Black faith is under attack: How to make sense of white supremacy’s Charleston crimes,"When I woke up on Thursday morning, the world was different (again). While I slept, nine people were murdered attending Wednesday night Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Rev. Daniel L. Simmons, Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor, and Susie Jackson lost their lives during a midweek service in which they welcomed a newcomer, Dylann Storm Roof, who would later turn a gun on them, careful to leave a living witness to recount the details of what happened. It does not escape me that it was witnessing — a term used to refer to an act of Christian discipleship where one shares their faith with nonbelievers — that likely resulted in Roof’s invitation to join the weekly gathering, and it was the need for an (eye)witness that led him to intentionally spare the life of one of the victims.
+
+The racist and terrorist act was premeditated and deemed a hate crime, even though some media pundits insisted that it was motivated by antagonism towards Christianity, not black people. I believe it was both. The shooting was not only an assault on black humanity, it was an attack on black faith, which is one of the few things black folk have left in the face of so much loss, despair and ongoing oppression. For generations, black folk have turned to their religious faith and to the church for comfort during times of social injustice (as evidenced in the rich and storied history of Emanuel Church).
+
+Now, one of the few safe spaces that black folk can seek out for refuge has been turned into a crime scene.
+
+Roof’s targeting of a place of worship is an attempt to compromise the safety and sanctity of the black church. Before Wednesday night, the black church seemed to be one of the few places left where black folk could assemble in public and feel seen, recognized, heard, loved and welcome. (We know from the not-so-distant past that those spaces are not the private communities in which we live, not store parking lots, not Walmart stores, not public parks, not street corners, not swimming pools, not even our homes.)
+
+And, truth be told, while traditional black churches are safe spaces from white supremacy, they have long been unsafe spaces for folk who are gender non-conforming, same-gender loving, or women. It is important, as we hold up the black church as a whole after this tragedy, that we also hold it up to scrutiny, so that as we do the work of making church spaces safe again, we make sure that they are safe for all of us, all of the time.
+
+I believe this moment is an opportunity for the black church to re-establish itself through the proven resiliency of black faith, and become a safe and welcome space for all believers. This is a moment to understand that in order to fight and resist white supremacy we must also dismantle and fight its co-conspirators: homophobia, transphobia, and sexism. Many times churchfolk and skinfolk are afraid of the wrong things. It is white supremacy, not nonheterosexuality, that threatens the lives and legacies of black folk in this country. It is white supremacy, not premarital sex or babies born out of wedlock, that jeopardizes our survival. It was white supremacy, not insanity, that caused Dylann Roof to walk into a black church intending to walk out with blood on his hands. We need healing that is corporate, collective, consistent and accountable.
+
+The victims of the shooting should not have to be martyrs, hashtags, or statistics to show, once again, that our country continues to fail at holding white supremacy accountable for the death it perpetuates. This is a moment of love but also of accountability. We can hold well-meaning white allies accountable for being speechless while we are being senselessly murdered, and being sensitive and offended when we express our outrage. We can hold our policymakers accountable, insisting that the Confederate flag, a symbol of anti-black hate, be removed from government spaces (to make them safe for people of color). We can hold our churches and places of worship accountable, requiring inclusivity over conservatism, and demonstrating agape love out in the open.  We can hold ourselves and our loved ones accountable, in all the ways we need and all the ways we know, because, as Audre Lorde taught us, our silence will not protect us. We are living in a moment where being black is equally commodified and criminalized, where black people are fighting for dignity, security, humanity and the very right to blackness. This moment is a reminder that in a so-called post racially progressive world, being black remains simultaneously the most marketable, profitable, co-optable and dangerous identity marker one can hold. To be black is to be vulnerable no matter where you are and no matter where you go. To be black is to carry a marker on your skin that racists will use to identify you and in some cases kill you. Despite claims of colorblindness, or so-called transracialism, the black victims in church on Wednesday night could not claim whiteness to save themselves. It was, in fact, the pervasive lie of whiteness that cost them their life. If ever there was a place where black folk believe themselves to be free, it is within the walls of the church. There we dance, cry, pray, praise, shout, sing and testify. The doors are always open. Despite the personal challenges I have with the church, it has remained a beacon of hope, a place of healing and possibility, a refuge in times of trouble, and a safe space for lost souls and people in need, regardless of race. As a non-church-attending black woman who identifies as a Christian, I refuse to relinquish my faith to this tragedy. I refuse to allow Roof’s hate to be the end of the story. I refuse to concede that we cannot, as a people, carve out spaces for each other and make room for one another (including difference) within and without the four walls of the church. This is for white girls who pretend to be black girls when white supremacy isn’t enough. This is for black Christians who believe respectability will save our lives in the face of perpetual anti-black hetero-patriachal white supremacy, when evidence to the contrary is consistently given. This is for those of us seeking hope and holding on to faith but lacking patience. This is not enough, but it is a beginning.",REAL
+9682,[WATCH] Hillary Appears Belligerently Drunk in Troubling New Video,"0 comments 
+Hillary Clinton’s trouble staying sober has been just one of the many scandals she has faced this election season, and a newly-surfaced video isn’t going to help her reputation for being a complete lush. 
+The footage was captured and shared by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker ahead of a June 1st rally in Newark, New Jersey, where Clinton appeared with rock musician Jon Bon Jovi. 
+In the short clip, the Democratic nominee appears unusually jovial, singing and dancing for no apparent reason, as if she had just had a few drinks in the middle of the day. 
+See it for yourself: 
+— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) June 1, 2016 
+As The Political Insider points out, it might be okay for your average American to toss a few back in the middle of the day, but it isn’t fine when an alcoholic wants to be leader of the free world. 
+Do you think Hillary has a drinking problem? Leave your opinion in the comments section!",FAKE
+2835,Bashar al-Assad is losing ground in Syria,"For most of the past two years, it looked like Bashar al-Assad's campaign to hold on in Syria was working. Syria's weak, uncoordinated, and increasingly Islamist rebels were being gradually pushed back. And while ISIS had seized vast parts of the country, it and Assad appeared to tolerate one another in a sort of tacit non-aggression pact designed to crush the Syrian rebels. It seemed that Syria, and the world, would be stuck with Assad's murderous dictatorship for the foreseeable future.
+
+But in the past few weeks, things appear to have changed — potentially dramatically. The rebels have won a string of significant victories in the country's north. Assad's troop reserves are wearing thin, and it's becoming harder for him to replace his losses.
+
+A rebel victory, to be clear, is far from imminent or even likely. At this point, it's too early to say for sure what this means for the course of the Syrian war. But the rebels have found a new momentum against Assad just as his military strength could be weakening, which could be a significant change in the trajectory of a war that has been ongoing for years.
+
+Bashar al-Assad's forces are losing ground against the rebels, for example in northern Idlib province, where two recent rebel victories show how strong the rebels have gotten. First, in late March, Assad's forces were pushed out of Idlib City, the region's capital. Second, in late April, rebels took Jisr al-Shughour, a strategically valuable town that lies on the Assad regime's supply line in the area and near its important coastal holdings.
+
+""Jisr al-Shughour is a good example of how the regime is, indeed, losing ground,"" Noah Bonsey, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told me. ""Most observers were surprised at how quickly it fell, given that it is a town of some strategic importance.""
+
+While rebels' most dramatic victories are in Idlib, they're advancing elsewhere as well. They've seized towns in the south and have repelled Assad offensives around the country.
+
+""Losses in Idlib and the southern governorate of Deraa have placed great pressure on Assad,"" Charles Lister, a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, writes. ""Frustration, disaffection and even incidences of protest are rising across Assad’s most ardent areas of support on Syria’s coast — some of which are now under direct attack.""
+
+Bonsey concurs. ""Rebels have seized momentum in recent weeks and months,"" he says. ""The regime is clearly weakening to an extent that was not widely reflected in the English-language narrative surrounding the conflict.""
+
+Recent regime defeats reflect growing unity among the rebels as well as fundamental weaknesses on the regime's side.
+
+The Idlib advance, in particular, was led by Jaish al-Fatah, a new rebel coalition led by several different Islamist groups. While the coalition includes Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise, the jihadis don't appear to dominate the group.
+
+""The operations also displayed a far improved level of coordination between rival factions,"" Lister writes, ""spanning from U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigades, to moderate and conservative Syrian Islamists, to al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and several independent jihadist factions.""
+
+Rebel coordination is nothing new in Syria. But this coalition stands out for its size and breadth.
+
+""The number of fighters mobilized for the initial Idlib city campaign has been significant, and that's been just as true in subsequent operations in the north,"" Bonsey says. ""The level of coordination we've seen over several weeks, on multiple fronts, is something that we have rarely, if ever, seen from rebels in the north.""
+
+And as the rebels have gotten more united, the regime has gotten weaker. The basic problem is attrition: Assad is losing a lot of soldiers in this war, and his regime — a sectarian Shia government in an overwhelmingly Sunni country — can't train replacements quickly enough.
+
+Bonsey calls this an ""unsolvable manpower problem."" As a result, he says, Assad is becoming increasingly dependent on his foreign allies — Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah specifically — to lead the ground campaign.
+
+But Iran has shown limited willingness to commit heavily to areas like Idlib, and rather is concentrating principally on defending the regime's core holdings around Damascus and the coast. According to Bonsey, ""it's a matter of priorities,"" which is to say that their resources aren't unlimited, and they've (so far) preferred to concentrate them in the most critical areas.
+
+Iran's involvement in conflicts in Iraq and Yemen on top of Syria has left it ""really overstretched,"" according to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The cumulative resource investment has ""certainly had an impact on Assad losing territory in Syria,"" he concludes.
+
+""For the regime, the status quo militarily is not sustainable,"" Bonsey says, and ""Iran's strategy in Syria does not appear sustainable. The costs to Iran of propping up Assad's rule in Syria are only going to rise with time, substantially. And what's happened with Idlib in recent weeks is only the latest indication of that.""
+
+Bonsey, like most Syria experts, does not believe Assad is on the road to inevitable defeat.
+
+""While much of the subsequent commentary [to the Idlib offensive] proclaimed this as the beginning of the end for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, we are still a long way from that,"" Lister writes.
+
+For one thing, Iran sees the survival of the Assad regime as a critical strategic priority, as it allows Iran to supply Hezbollah and maintain a close ally in the Levant. Any post-Assad government is likely to be Sunni-dominated,and quite hostile to Iran. Tehran is probably willing to go to some lengths to keep that from happening, and Iranian intervention in the war has been a significant force.
+
+""In strict military terms, there isn't yet a direct threat on the strategically essential territory that the regime and its backers continue to control,"" Bonsey says, ""and there isn't yet a reason to think the rebels are capable of threatening"" such a region.
+
+Since Assad can't crush the rebels in their strongholds, then, the conflict is looking a lot like a stalemate — which it already was before this rebel offensive began.
+
+Moreover, the unity of this new rebel coalition could collapse. The broad alliance we've seen in Idlib is held together by victory: the more they push back Assad, the more willing they are to cooperate. But if Assad's forces start beating them, the ideological and political fault lines in the coalition could cause rebel groups to turn on one another. It's happened — many times — before.
+
+The ""big question now,"" according to Bonsey, is ""how the regime and its backers choose to respond to these defeats."" A major decider, in other words, is Iran. But as long as they see protecting the Assad regime as vital, they are likely to do what it takes to keep his core territory intact.",REAL
+7525,Putins Army is coming for World war 3 against Obama year 2016!!! New Video!!! Kopya, ,FAKE
+7086,The Passion Behind Standing Rock Protest,"The Passion Behind Standing Rock Protest October 29, 2016 
+Police arrested more than 140 Native American and environmental protesters challenging an oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, a project touching the raw nerves of water and global warming, reports Dennis J Bernstein. 
+By Dennis J Bernstein 
+The months-long struggle to stop the Dakota Pipeline near the territory of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota has raised passions among Native American activists and environmentalists who have clashed with police trying to sweep the protesters aside. 
+To explain the intensity of the resistance, I interviewed Bill Means, co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and chairman of the International Indian Treaty Council, which has supported the North Dakota pipeline protests. 
+In late August, the Treaty Council joined forces with the local tribes of The Standing Rock Sioux and appealed to the United Nations to intercede and take formal action in support of the their fight against the construction of the Dakota pipeline over sacred Indian lands. Native American activist Bill Means 
+“We specifically request that the United States Government impose an immediate moratorium on all pipeline construction until the Treaty Rights and Human Rights of the Standing Rock Tribe can be ensured and their free, prior and informed consent is obtained,” stated Standing Rock Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault, and the Treaty Council, in their joint appeal to U.N. human rights officials. They requested actions by four U.N. human rights Special Rapporteurs citing “ongoing threats and violations to the human rights of the Tribe, its members and its future generations.” 
+The interview preceded this week’s latest round of arrests. 
+Dennis Bernstein: Bill Means, your work with the American Indian Movement as a co-founder and your knowledge of the treaties, and how many times are broken, and how they’re broken by the United States government, has always been enlightening and important. I know you are monitoring Standing Rock, and have taken an active stand, as a current board member of the International Indian Treaty Council. 
+Why don’t you just say first what it signifies at this point, in the struggle. And then some of the things that come to mind in terms of what you’ve been observing about it. 
+Bill Means: Well, first of all the overall struggle against global warming is really the backdrop to Standing Rock. And that’s the reason why I think so many people around the world, and the tribes all over America, are beginning to find affinity and support and solidarity with the people at Standing Rock, because it represents this world-wide struggle for sacred Mother Earth. So having that backdrop we’ve got various types of good news, and some sad news. 
+Of course, the very good and healthy news is we had the first baby born on the base of the Missouri River, at the Sacred Stone Camp at Standing Rock, which was beautiful. Born with the midwives there, and all the attention and support of the community. The women came forward and brought this new life here into this world at Standing Rock. So we hope that this young child will have a Mother Earth that she can be proud of, that she can grow up in that’s clean, and has clean water, and so that represents the future. 
+Also developing was the fact that our good friend and colleague, Miss Amy Goodman, had her case thrown out … by a federal judge in Bismarck, North Dakota. Where he said that she’s a journalist, doing her job, and she shouldn’t have been charged with these type [of] charges in the first place, and completely threw the charges out. So that’s a good development, as well as several other people she was arrested with. So I think that’s a beginning to turn the table on the illegal use and manipulation of the law to prevent legal, shall we say, dissent, to prevent people that are protesting legally and peacefully from their acts of courage. So that was good news, on that front. 
+And then, of course, we have the ongoing problem that people have recorded …, massive trucks, semis carrying pipe. And so they are anxiously and quickly trying to get as much pipe laid towards the Missouri River as humanly possible, before there’s any type of interruptions of specific places they can’t go, which we know right now is being held up from crossing under the Missouri River. And we’re hoping that this extends itself out to other areas. The #NoDAPL water Protectors took non-violent direct action by locking themselves to construction equipment. This is “Happy” American Horse from the Sicangu Nation, hailing from Rosebud. August 31, 2016 (Desiree Kane, Wikipedia) 
+And so right now the company, the DAPL, Dakota Access Pipeline people are, where they can, they’re still building as fast as they can without any regard to the restraining orders or any regard to the federal authorities that asked them to quit and to cease and desist from building until the tribe, and other proper authorities have been, shall we say, counseled with, have been involved in some type of negotiation on [these] whole various issues of treaty rights, water rights, environmental issues. And so there’s plenty of law that needs to be settled but yet the Dakota Access pipeline continues to be built. 
+So we have in the face of these positive developments, we have yet to see the company cease and desist in the other areas. 
+DB: Bill, let me ask you to … step into that role for a moment and talk about the stand that the council has taken and the significance in history in terms of this stand, and this place, that we’re talking about in North Dakota. 
+BM: Well, first of all to give you a larger picture, the Missouri River, as you know, covers about four states, and bisects the state of South Dakota from north to south, I should say north-west to south-west. Also, including North Dakota, and Montana, and Iowa, and a little bit of Nebraska. So, having said that, you get that picture in your mind, they built at least four dams on the Missouri River that are directly built on Indian treaty land. 
+See, in our treaty of 1868 and 1851, those two treaties significantly for time immemorial set the borders of the Great Sioux Nation on the east bank of the Missouri River. And the 1851 treaty was even past east of the Missouri River. So you see those treaties being violated from the beginning of building all these dams. Because the dams are built on federal reservations and flood, primarily, federal Indian land. 
+So there’s many communities, including Standing Rock, which was flooded by the Oahe Dam, built in Pierre, South Dakota, in that region, which flooded not only Standing Rock but Cheyenne River Reservation. And then you have Yankton Reservation flooded twice, once by the Gavins Point Dam, and another time by the Fort Randall Dam. […] There’s a famous act known as the Pick-Sloan Act of federal government that was passed back in the ’40’s that allows these dams to be built. 
+And so we have a situation where [there is] the continued violation of treaty rights and water rights. The water, by treaty, belongs to Indian people. Now, Indian people have the philosophy that the water belongs to everyone. But we have to maintain these treaty rights and these water rights. And there’s a famous case in the water rights that says, “All the water necessary for the survival of Indian people should be granted in any kind of negotiation, should be under the jurisdiction of the Indian tribes.” And that was a famous case up on the Milk River in Montana. And so it’s called the Winters Doctrine of Federal Indian Water Law. So that’s kind of a doctrine that’s been there for many, many years. 
+Now, in spite of that, the government began to develop these dams on the Missouri River, and […] the Missouri River was never litigated, that is, the water was never divided up like it is, say, on the Colorado River over further west. And so, since their water rights have never been litigated, the water has not been quantified like who owns what drop of water, who owns this bank, who owns that bank, has not been decided. 
+And so, in our mind, in the federal law’s mind, we still have authority over the Missouri River, not only by treaty but by federal Indian water rights. So that’s the idea and the legal fight for Indian people. And that’s how Standing Rock got involved because of all these dams being built on the Missouri. 
+And there’s also the issue not only of the environmental issues, in which the federal government is required by law to do what they call environmental impacts statements, environmental impact study, which is supposed to give warning. [But] they’re supposed to give the impact of these massive development projects on the people. Not only Indian people, but non-Indian people. 
+So a lot of these rules and regulations are either being trampled on by the corporate entities or ignored by the federal government, or given some kind of a lip service to state government, or what they call the Public Utilities Commission. So this is kind of the backdrop, where we have state and federal authorities negligent throughout this process, historically, and even today, in protecting the rights of not only American Indians, but American citizens. So this is why we fight. Activists carry the American Indian Movement flag at a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. (Flickr John Duffy) 
+DB: We saw their struggle at Wounded Knee, many of their struggles, but a big one at Wounded Knee. Bill also is on the Board of the International Treaty Council, and they’re working with the local tribes in this struggle. And, Bill, can I ask you to just talk a little bit about the stand that the Treaty Council has taken and how you’ve been working with the local tribes legally, if you will? 
+BM: Ah, yeah, we’ve been working in two areas. [First] helping them to organize through the National Lawyers Guild– legal defense for those water protectors that are being charged with various crimes as they do their legal, and peaceful, protests to the pipeline. So that’s one area that’s very important. And we want to give kudos and strength to the National Lawyers Guild for lending that support, and other lawyers both that work for the tribe and others. 
+Another area that’s significant is that the International Indian Treaty Council along with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe filed [a] human rights complaint with the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, as part of the United Nations under the Human Rights Laws and Protocol that the United States has agreed to as being part of the United Nations. 
+Here we’ve presented the evidence of which I’ve talked about–federal/state regulations, treaty rights, water rights that are facts in law–and presented those human rights as human rights violations in the struggle of Indian people to maintain clean water, and access to clean water, and drinking water. So we presented to specific, what they call, repertoires. These are people that study the issues, internationally in the Human Rights Commission. And those special repertoires, or the issues they’re studying, of course, is the special repertoire on water, the special repertoire on indigenous peoples, the special repertoire of sacred places. 
+As you know, in Syria and in other wars around the world, these armies, these militants, these people have destroyed many, many graves, artifacts, in an attempt to promote their way of life. And so this has become an international issue. […] The DAPL pipeline in particular has destroyed graves already. And so all these issues, whether it’s water, whether it’s the rights of Indigenous people, are now being studied by the United Nations. And the United States has to answer these questions as party to these human rights treaties that they signed. 
+So, we have pressure being exerted internationally by the United Nation’s human rights system. While all these other issues are going on both locally, in the courts from the water resisters, as well as the water protectors, as well as the tribe itself in federal court. So we have a court case going against various federal agencies, and now some negotiations are taking place with the Department of the Army which handles Corps of Engineers, which governs the river ways and waterways of America. Also, we have involved the Department of Interior and the Department of Justice. So we can tell from those various words that they have significant interests in these issues. 
+The Bureau of Indian Affairs is totally within the Department of Interior. And, of course, the Department of Justice is supposed to be protecting us, the Indian people, the American people from these corporate carpetbaggers, and these corporate interests that continue to ignore the laws of the United States and treaty laws. 
+So, here we have three agencies now involved in trying to carry out negotiations and what they call “consultations” with the tribes and the local communities of non-Indians who are also protesting. 
+DB: There’s a couple things in terms of the terminology I want you to expand on, but first of all, in terms of the graves… you say that sacred grave sites, burial sites have already been destroyed. Who would have been in those graves? 
+BM: Well, these ancient sites, some of our ancestors were buried along the river, as you know, we have a saying in our language which goes “water is life.” So in respect for the life, many times historically our people were buried overlooking the river, overlooking the water. And that attachment goes back centuries, in our culture the role of water [is] as the first medicine to our people. And the role that water plays in humanity, and its need for purity. Its need to allow our people to grow, to live. 
+And so, this is one of the areas that historically our people were buried and then, as this pipeline goes, there’s even a federal act for that called American Indian Graves and Historical Preservation Act. And in that federal law, federal entities and companies are supposed to consult and they’re supposed to work with Indian tribes when they come across these ancient burial grounds. Activists protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. (Flickr John Duffy) 
+And so, these go back for many centuries, some of these burial grounds, as well as fairly modern day areas. So rather than consult, they generally just go through and destroy them. Or when they do consult, their way of consulting is they call the local state university, have the anthros come out, dig up the bones that are left and haul them off to the university, in total disrespect for our culture, for humanity, for our way of life. 
+And so, this is a problem that has [been] seen time and again with these pipelines, these development projects, in and around the Missouri River, especially because water being life, there’s a lot of, shall we say, generations that have grown up around that river, and continue to live in those areas. So that’s why it’s important. It would be akin, I guess, like if we went in and started digging up maybe some famous cemetery. You know, what if we went to say the National Military Cemetery, in Washington, D.C. and started digging them up. 
+DB: …over there at Arlington, where they have the ceremonies every year. 
+BM: Yeah, if we went there and started digging them up, or maybe to the Cathedral of Saint John, in New York. And where they have their burial ground, outside there in New York, we go there and start digging up and say we want to look for the size of the heads, or we want to study the white man, in these Indian universities and Indian colleges. People would be outraged. But, yet, when it’s Indian people calling for justice for destroying our culture, and our historical artifacts, and our graves, somehow we get ignored. Somehow we get a dual standard of justice when it comes to Indian people. 
+And so, we have to make this resistance in order to send a message to America that, “We’re still here as Indigenous people.” Not only here in America but wherever the minerals, wherever the clean water still exists, that’s where Indigenous people are today, all over the world. 
+DB: And, to put this in the political context, obviously there’s a presidential election going on. Have any of these candidates expressed any sympathy for the Indigenous community for this case against destroying sacred burial grounds and digging up graves, so that universities can study the bones? Has anybody stepped forward? Have you been impressed by any of the politicians? 
+BM: Ah, no not at all. As a matter of fact, Donald Trump said there’s a war on coal, and that he’s going to stop that war. Now, coal is probably the most devastating form of energy production that we have in America, or in the world. So that gives you an idea about his concern about Mother Earth. Hillary, on the other hand, has only paid lip service to Indian issues. We haven’t heard her come out on the DAPL pipeline, or any other pipeline. She did say that she changed her position on the XL pipeline, which President Obama stopped, along with some white ranchers in Nebraska, and Indian people that worked together–what they called the CIA, Cowboy and Indian Alliance, which is getting stronger by the day, where white people and Indian people have come together–to protect their land. 
+And so, the candidates, they haven’t even voiced a public statement, for sure. And it only comes out when asked maybe in a local rally or something, then they give basically lip service, and talk about window dressing on the issue. 
+DB: Before we let you go, and this is something I’ve really been wanting to speak with you about. I think one of the most powerful parts of this movement is that the Indigenous community is really taking the lead. They’ve really come together and opened the door in a way that white people and all people can sort of come in and be a part of it. But the fact is, that… and the power is, we now refer to the protestors as water protectors, or water resistors, this is through the Indigenous communities vision of life which is really a vision in the context of global warming, it’s the only vision that can save us. People gather in Seattle to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, September 2016. (Flickr John Duffy) 
+BM: Exactly right. I think that what Indigenous people have to offer the world is the fact that we have to build our policies and our governments around the future of Mother Earth. And so whether you’re left or right, we all have to live on the Earth. Whether you’re left or right, you have to drink water, water that is pure. 
+And, so these basic issues of human life are what Indigenous people have been calling for respect, all these years. It’s only when we protest that it brings this issue into the forefront of the rest of the world, where they decide hey, maybe this global warming does have an impact on Indigenous people, because it’s impacting us. Whether that’s in Europe, whether that’s in the United States, Latin America. The pollution has gotten so bad that it’s beginning to affect our daily lives. And so, until you respect Earth itself, and the power of Mother Earth, then you will never respect the future of our future generations, and those who come after us. 
+The Indian philosophy of life is that we have to look seven generations ahead when we make these decisions about development, about exploitation of natural resources, about all these extractive industries. What harm does that do to our Mother, the Earth? And what is the impact on the future generations? So that’s the philosophy that’s beginning to come out in terms of political variations in government policy around the world, is that we really have to, no matter what form of government you have, you have to be able if you look at Mother Earth as the leading policy, as the primary very function of government – just protect the Earth, not corporations. And so, until we can do that then I think we’re in a losing battle. 
+And we hope that these types of struggles, which we have no intention of changing because it’s going on all where Indigenous people are around the world, which is now 400 million Indigenous people who still speak their language, still have their traditional government, still have their culture and language. These are the people who are protecting the Earth. And we hope to enlarge that Earth protective family, to include each and every American, each and every citizen living on Mother Earth. Native American activist Leonard Peltier’s FBI headshot (Wikipedia) 
+DB: Bill, it’s almost a tradition with us in terms of remembering Leonard Peltier. Now, last we spoke you gave President Obama an F for keeping his promises in terms of really making a difference in the Indigenous communities of North America. Do you think, and what would you say, do you think he could raise his grade from and F to a D or a C, if he decided to take a courageous action and finally, finally free Leonard Peltier? 
+BM: Yes, I think he really could because Leonard Peltier represents the treatment the United States government has given to Indian people throughout the history of this great country. And so until we can deal with the basic issues of human rights and justice, then I think Indian people will always be on the bottom rung of the ladder of social justice. And so I think it’s up to President Obama, before he leaves to try to take this one act of clemency, in which everyone will be able to sit down at the table and say, “Leonard Peltier is finally free. He’s going home. He’s going to see his children, for the first time in 41 years.” And we hope and we pray that that happens before the president goes out of office. 
+Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom . You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net .",FAKE
+7430,Armstrong: Stop Trying to Make Temple Attacks About Race,"Jenice Armstrong, Philly, October 26, 2016 
+The Temple attacks were about troublemaking teens–not race. 
+The youngsters who jumped those college students as they walked to campus Friday night are delinquents who need to be put in check before it’s too late. 
+They were nothing but miscreants who took out their aggression and misdirected rage on random passersby. Why? Because they felt like wilding out that night. They were out to create chaos, so they did. 
+So, don’t talk to me about gentrification in North Philly. 
+Don’t talk to me about poverty. 
+Don’t talk to me about race relations. 
+Those are whole other conversations and not what these attacks were about. 
+No one was safe from these teens that night. Not the six Temple students who were injured. Not the Temple police officer knocked from her bicycle by a 15-year-old. Not even a police horse. Anyone could have gotten caught up in that madness. 
+According to news reports, a crowd of 150 youngsters started gathering after an Instagram advertised an 8 p.m. meet-up at the AMC North Broad Street 7 (formerly the Pearl Theater at Avenue North), on Broad Street near Oxford at the southern end of the campus. 
+{snip} 
+Most of the high schoolers who responded to the online posting were good kids looking to socialize. But then the delinquents did what they often do and ruined it for everybody. 
+According to police, a group of 20 to 30 boys and girls in their early to late teens randomly attacked Temple students as they returned from a football game at Lincoln Financial Field. 
+{snip} 
+People keep trying to make this a racial thing because at least two of the victims were white and all of the assailants were African American. They make that assumption even though we don’t know the race of the other injured students. (Lots of African Americans go to Temple.) Nor do we know the race of the injured officers. 
+Street violence is street violence. It knows no skin color. {snip} 
+{snip} 
+Another student, a junior environmental science major who didn’t give her name, told a website called theTab.com, “My boyfriend ran and got away but the second I tried to run, they grabbed me by my hair and started beating my head and back. 
+“I remember shoes coming for my face and after that I heard other kids from the group saying, ‘Yo chill, yo chill, it’s just a girl,’ and they pulled my attackers off me.” 
+{snip} 
+Temple has promised increased security, but when it comes to random street violence, anything can happen to anyone–black or white.",FAKE
+5467,Re: Liberals Claim Acquittal of Bundys is “Weaponized White Privilege”,"Email 
+The liberal internet sites and some in social media actually believe that the acquittal on all charges brought against the Bundys and five others last week for their peaceful protest and occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon was a sign of white privilege . One outlet, even allowed a black columnist to write that white privilege was now ""weaponized."" 
+Consider the moronic claim of Chauncey Devega at Salon , ""Just consider: An all-white jury acquitted militant religious fundamentalists whose avowed aim is hurting the U.S."" 
+Excuse me? Hurting the US? How so Mr. Devega? 
+Well, according to Mr. Devega, ""Despite the overwhelming evidence against the Bundy militants, on Thursday a federal jury in Portland acquitted them of federal weapons and conspiracy charges. This shocked many observers. It should not have."" 
+""Black Americans and other people of color often talk about how there is one legal system for 'them' and another for 'us,'"" he added. 
+What is this evidence of which he speaks? Well, he doesn't quite tell us. He never mentions any laws that were broken. It's not against the law to keep and bear arms . It's not against the law to go and occupy an area that is supposed to be under the people's control per the Constitution. Technically, per the Constitution, the land does not belong to the central government. It's not against the law to hold a press conference there. It's not against the law to address your government for grievances. 
+In fact, all those things are a part of the law! 
+Oh, and what does Mr. Devega have to say about this photo with a black man standing with LaVoy Finicum and Pete Santilli ? 
+Does that look like white privilege to you? Did LaVoy Finicum receive white privilege Chauncey? I don't think so. The tyranny you are supporting murdered him in cold blood and now a jury has determined that they were doing nothing wrong that should have warranted their arrest nor his murder. 
+How about the months these men sat in jail in Oregon while being denied bail? Was that white privilege? What about the fact they are facing similar trumped up charges in Nevada from something that took place two years ago, and are still sitting in jail? Is that white privilege Chauncey? 
+He then went on to ask if Muslims did this would it be terrorism. I can answer that, yes. However, the reason why I can affirm that is because they would have created violence, just as they are taught to do in the Koran as they follow in the footsteps of their founder, Muhammad. They usually do. The only violence at Bundy Ranch or in Oregon was the result of the Oregon State Police , the FBI , and the Bureau of Land Management . Those were the people with guns pointed at citizens, despite Devega's claims otherwise. 
+If that was not enough, Devega forgot that a Native American woman, Sheila M. Warren, testified on behalf of… the defense! Was that your white privilege Mr. Devega? 
+""As the social-media hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite signals, there is a dual system of justice in the United States of America One exists for white people — especially white conservatives and other members of the right wing — and a separate one for people of color and Muslims,"" added Devega. ""This is white privilege weaponized through the law."" 
+Devega is not the only one to put forth this nonsense. 
+New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof also claimed this acquittal may have been racially motivated. 
+Other people on social media chimed in making the same ridiculous claims without ever once citing any law that was broken. Terrorism is legal when ur white https://t.co/ewFsaRpJVJ",FAKE
+3933,Q&A: key questions about EgyptAir flight MS804,"The aircraft carrying 66 people was about 175 miles from the Egyptian coast when it disappeared, travelling at an altitude of 11,000 metres (37,000ft).
+
+
+
+The plane had left Paris at 11.09pm on Wednesday (21.09 GMT/07.09am Thursday AEST) and disappeared at 2.30am Paris time, about 45 minutes before it was scheduled to land, and only 40 seconds after it left Greek airspace and entered Egyptian space over the Mediterranean.
+
+The Greek defence minister, Panos Kammenos, said on Thursday that after entering Egyptian airspace the plane fell 6,706 metres (22,000ft) and swerved sharply before it disappeared from radar screens.
+
+On Friday he said debris from the plane, including a “body part”, two seats and suitcases, had been found by Egyptian vessels in the Mediterranean sea. Egypt’s military said it had found personal belongings and parts of the wreckage 180 miles north of the coastal city of Alexandria.
+
+The plane was carrying 56 passengers and 10 crew: two cockpit crew, five cabin crew and three security personnel. The airline said two babies and one child were on board.
+
+The nationalities of the passengers were as follows: 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis and one person each from Britain, Belgium, Sudan, Chad, Canada, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Portugal and Algeria.
+
+An Airbus A320, which is considered a safe and reliable plane. Nonetheless, the model has been involved in safety incidents in the recent past, including the Germanwings tragedy in March 2015 that claimed 150 lives. It was also the aircraft Chesley Sullenberger landed on the Hudson river in 2009.
+
+EgyptAir said the captain had 6,275 flying hours, including 2,101 on the A320; the co-pilot had 2,766 flying hours. The plane was manufactured in 2003.
+
+Airbus said it was aware of the report about the plane but otherwise made no comment.
+
+Egypt’s aviation minister, Sherif Fathy, has said the Airbus A320’s sudden disappearance was more likely caused by a terrorist attack than technical failure. But the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said on Friday that there was “absolutely no indication” of why the flight came down.
+
+The aircraft passed through airports in Tunisia and Eritrea in the four journeys it made on Wednesday before the Paris-Cairo flight, but no warning flags were raised. EgyptAir’s vice-chairman, Ahmed Abdel, said there were “no reported snags” from the crew in Cairo or Paris, nor was there any special cargo or notification of dangerous goods on board.
+
+
+
+The area of the Mediterranean where the plane went down is heavily trafficked and much monitored, within reach of British listening posts in Cyprus, close to Israel and near to the US Sixth Fleet.
+
+An Egyptian army spokesman says searches are continuing in the area where the debris was found. The location is the centre of a major international air and sea operation to find the aircraft’s two black box flight recorders, which might hold the key to what happened.
+
+The water in that section of the Mediterranean can be 2,000 metres (6,500ft) deep. The equipment involved in the search for MH370 is able to search depths of at least 6,000 metres.
+
+
+
+If the EgyptAir A320 is the same as the Germanwings model that crashed last year, it will have two recording components: a cockpit voice recorder, which tapes what the pilots say, and a flight data recorder, which stores some of the 2,500 technical measurements in a modern aircraft.
+
+Both are stored at the back of the aircraft and wrapped in titanium or stainless steel, to best survive a crash. They are able to withstand one hour of 1,100C heat and weight of up to 227kg. The boxes can take years to be found – two years in the case of Air France flight 447, which disappeared in 2009 in the Atlantic.
+
+Greece’s lead air accident investigator, Athanasios Binis, said: “The most important thing is that the plane’s two black boxes are found. If the cockpit flight recorder and flight data recorder are found, along with wreckage, then a real investigation can begin.
+
+“There are three reasons for a plane [to go down]. Meteorological, technical and human. The first has now been ruled out because the weather was quite good. Whether a technical factor or human factor, either inside or outside the plane, is to blame remains to be seen. All possibilities are open.”
+
+François Hollande, the French president, said: “We have a duty to know everything about the cause and what has happened. No theory is ruled out and none is certain right now.
+
+
+
+“When we have the truth we will draw our conclusions; whether this was an accident or something else, perhaps terrorist. We will have the truth.”
+
+Panos Kammenos, the Greek defence minister, said: “The plane carried out a 90-degree turn to the left and a 360-degree turn to the right, falling from 37,000 to 15,000ft and the signal was lost at around 10,000ft.”
+
+
+
+The Egyptian prime minister, Sherif Ismail, said it was too early to rule out any explanation for the incident, including terrorism: “We cannot exclude anything at this time or confirm anything. All the search operations must be concluded so we can know the cause.”
+
+
+
+Serafeim Petrou, the head of Greece’s air traffic controllers board, said: “The plane did not give any vocal or electronic signal before it disappeared,” adding that “nothing can be excluded” on causes: “An explosion could be a possibility but, then, so could damage to the fuselage. I think at this point we are talking about wreckage, wreckage at the bottom of the sea and tracing the cause is going to take time.”
+
+Jean-Paul Troadec, the ex-president of the French air accident investigation bureau, said “we have to remain very careful” about possible causes. “We can make certain hypotheses … there’s a strong possibility of an explosion on board from a bomb or a suicide bomber. The idea of a technical accident, when weather conditions were good, seems also possible but not that likely. We could also consider a missile … If the crew didn’t send an alert signal, it’s because what happened was very sudden. A problem with an engine or a technical fault would not produce an immediate accident. In this case, the crew did not react, which makes us think of a bomb.”
+
+The director of Greece’s Civil Aviation Authority, Konstantinos Lintzerakos, said air traffic controllers were in contact with the pilot as the plane passed through Greek airspace, and that he did not report any problems. Controllers tried to make contact again with the pilot 10 miles before the flight exited the Greek flight information range, Lintzerakos added, but the pilot did not respond.",REAL
+10089,BARBARIANS AT THE GATE: Muslims from Morocco keep breaking into Spain,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. PLEASE DONATE TO KEEP BARE NAKED ISLAM UP AND RUNNING. Choose DONATE for one-time donation or SUBSCRIBE for monthly donations Payment Options GET ALL NEW BNI POSTS/LINKS ON TWITTER Subscribe to Blog via Email 
+Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address CONTACT: barenakedislam@gmail.com Top Posts",FAKE
+4144,"To grow the economy, grow small businesses: Bloomberg & Buffett","Meeting small business capital, technology and labor needs and relieving their regulatory burden could drive new boom.
+
+The economy has experienced 75 straight months — more than six years — of private sector job growth. Yet some areas still have not recovered all the jobs lost during the recession, and nationally, under-employment exceeds pre-recession levels. How can we increase the speed of job creation?
+
+A critical part of the answer lies with America’s small businesses, which create over 60% of net new private-sector jobs and employ nearly half of America’s workforce. Helping them expand — to get their ideas off the ground — is one of the best ways to support economic growth and needs the continued focus of both elected officials and the private sector.
+
+Political debates on economic growth tend to focus on taxes. But taxes are just one big issue facing small businesses. A report released by Babson College — “The State of Small Business in America”  — underscores that fact. It provides a window into small businesses’ most pressing needs, and it can serve as a blueprint for addressing them.
+
+As we’ve seen through Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, entrepreneurs across the country are facing barriers to growth. Based on a survey of over 1,800 small businesses, the report pinpoints four major challenges that cut across industries: the need for better access to capital, less burdensome regulations, more qualified workers and ability to better assimilate information technology. Let’s consider each.
+
+Capital. Securing financing remains a major barrier to growth. The net result is that, across all sources, while the median funding request is $100,000, businesses typically secure just $40,500. Small business owners overwhelmingly rely on banks for funding, but banks face more stringent regulatory requirements that have restricted lending and made loans harder to obtain. Closing the gap between what businesses seek and receive would lead to more hiring, investment, and growth. It would also reduce the common practice of credit card borrowing, where high interest rates can lead to financial difficulties. Business owners suggest a reconsideration of terms, loan size and paperwork, and more than one in four call for increased transparency in the borrowing process. Policy discussions around credit access must recognize the need to balance the needs for both regulatory protection and economic growth.
+
+Regulation. Nearly 60% of respondents have difficulty understanding and managing government regulations and laws. Companies spend about 200 hours annually on compliance. Governments should lessen this burden without compromising consumer and environmental protections. Streamlining agencies’ approval processes, for instance, can help small businesses open their doors sooner and expand more rapidly. In addition, simplifying the tax code would be a boon to small businesses, allowing them to spend less time and money on compliance.
+
+Skills. Overwhelmingly, a major hiring challenge was finding employees with the right skillsets — a challenge even greater than salary requirements and competition for candidates. Small businesses are increasingly looking for tech-savvy workers who also have the required licenses and certifications. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey identifies 5.8 million openings — the second-highest level on record — reflecting a mismatch between company needs and applicants’ skills.
+
+More collaboration between state and local workforce development programs and the private sector can help address this skills gap, and community colleges have an important role to play, too. Programs and curriculum need to align with job needs in growing industries to ensure that graduates leave with the skills necessary to get hired. Some governments have begun subsidizing internships, recognizing there is no substitute for on-the-job training. Cooperative programs among small businesses in each industry can also share in the costs of professional development.
+
+Technology. Small businesses recognize technology as essential to productivity and success. But accessing modern technology is perceived as costly and requires skills that many businesses lack. Better technology is also urgently needed to protect against the increasing threat of cybercrime, which 40% of respondents are not prepared to handle. In fact, one in five have been victims of cybercrimes, part of a disturbing global trend in which businesses are becoming hackers' preferred target. Given advances in the affordability of technology, technological literacy can be improved through increased access to resources, enhanced training and clearer government cyber-security standards.
+
+Small businesses face other challenges, but progress in these four areas would provide a significant boost to local hiring — and to national economic growth. More than six years into a sluggish recovery, we must do more to help small businesses drive a new generation of growth — and put the next generation of Americans to work.
+
+Lloyd Blankfein is chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs. Michael Bloomberg, a former New York City mayor, is founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Warren Buffett is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Michael E. Porter is a professor at Harvard Business School.
+
+In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns, go to the Opinion front page, follow us on Twitter @USATOpinion and sign up for our dailyOpinion newsletter.",REAL
+5464,"Hillary Clinton Hits Unfavorability High of 60%, Higher Than Trump","Hillary Clinton Hits Unfavorability High of 60%, Higher Than Trump October 31,   
+Remember last week when Hillary Clinton was shopping around for White House drapes and the ""popular"" wisdom was that she was inevitable? That was fun. Wasn't it. Now she hit an unfavorability rating high of 60 percent. That's higher than Trump. 
+It also means that the candidate who claims she's going to bring Americans together is disliked by most of the country . 
+Clinton is seen unfavorably by 60 percent of likely voters in the latest results, a new high. Trump is seen unfavorably by essentially as many -- 58 percent. Marking the depth of these views, 49 percent see Clinton ""strongly"" unfavorably, and 48 percent say the same about Trump –- unusual levels of strong sentiment. 
+The extent of partisan antipathy in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, is remarkable: Ninety-seven percent of Trump supporters see Clinton unfavorably; 90 percent, strongly so. Ninety-five percent of Clinton supporters see Trump unfavorably -– again, 90 percent strongly so. 
+But remember Hillary is ""inevitable"". 
+Now the Clinton campaign has decided to go after the FBI under the assumption that people like Hillary more than the FBI. That may be a slight misjudgment. And by slight, I mean huge. Because not only is the FBI more popular than Hillary, so are major landfills, UFO cattle mutilations and a number of international war criminals.",FAKE
+9143,Israel: Ancient Papyrus Proves Jerusalem Belongs to Israel,"Fragment of Old Tax Bill Meant to Undercut Muslims' Claim to Important Mosque by Jason Ditz, October 26, 2016 Share This 
+While the UNESCO resolution which recognized the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem as a “Muslim holy site of worship” was barely reported around the world, and considered fairly non-controversial, Israeli officials have been expressing fury over the matter for two solid weeks. 
+And the Muslims may have a huge, ancient mosque that has been a key part of Islam for 1,300 years, but Israel has a small strip of papyrus they found in a cave, which they’re pretty sure is a far more conclusive document, since it mentioned the word Jerusalem and was written in Hebrew. 
+Israeli officials have claimed that the UNESCO resolution, in recognizing the mosque as important to Islam, was tantamount to denying Israel’s absolute and eternal control over the entire city of Jerusalem. Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev said the papyrus strip proved Jerusalem “was and will remain the eternal capital of the Jewish people.” 
+The al-Aqsa mosque was built on a site which is believed to have previously housed an important Jewish temple, and some Israelis advocate the eventual destruction of the mosque and the construction of a new temple, though the details of such a construction would be hugely religiously complicated, and since the destruction of the mosque would undoubtedly start a massive war, it is considered unlikely. Still, the far-right government wants to ensure that they have some international precedent for their claim to the territory. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+4038,Turkey expands anti-Islamic State campaign,"Turkey and the United States have agreed on a military plan to push Islamic State militants from a strip of territory along the Turkish-Syrian border in what represents a major expansion of Turkey’s role in the conflict, according to a senior U.S. official.
+
+The agreement capitalizes on successes that Kurdish forces have had in pushing Islamic State fighters out of the region but stops short of creating a formal no-fly zone that the Turks have long requested, said the official, who did not want to be named because he is not authorized to discuss the agreement publicly.
+
+The move follows Turkey's  announcement last week that it will allow U.S. aircraft striking Islamic State targets in Syria to use the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, something the U.S. has long sought because the base is close to the militants' movements. Turkey said its aircraft would join the air campaign against the Islamic State in Syria.
+
+Turkey, a member of NATO, also called for ""consultations"" with the alliance after militant attacks on border posts in Turkey. NATO said it will hold the talks Tuesday.
+
+Turkey's moves come as a boost to the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State. The country had been reluctant to participate in the coalition because of the risk of direct clashes with forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose ouster is a top Turkish priority.
+
+The United States views extermination of the Islamic State as the focus of the coalition air campaign in Syria, and has avoided conflicts with Assad’s forces, who are fighting the Islamic State among many rebel groups.
+
+Ege Seckin, an analyst at IHS Country Risk, said the U.S. is reluctant to establish a no-fly zone along the Turkish-Syrian border because it would require an extensive military effort to counter Syrian air defenses and risks bringing the U.S. into direct conflict with the Assad regime.
+
+In a speech on Sunday, Assad expressed confidence that his government would prevail over rebel forces, but acknowledged his military faced manpower shortages and had lost terrain to rebels during a civil war that is now in its fifth year.
+
+Turkey's newly active role also complicates its relationship with the Kurds, who have fought for an independent state inside Turkey's borders for years. Kurds in Syria are among the most effective ground fighters against Islamic State militants, and an expansion of Turkey’s role in Syria could pose a threat to those Kurdish forces.
+
+Over the weekend Turkish aircraft struck a Kurdish camp in northern Iraq that Turkey considers home to a Kurdish terrorist group. The attack could end a long truce between the government and those Kurdish forces.
+
+Turkey's fear is that Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq may unite to press anew for an independent state.",REAL
+4608,How the swing voter went extinct,"This is a story about the swing voter. The voter who, days before the election, doesn’t know if she wants to vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton — or, hell, maybe Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.
+
+You're going to hear a lot about these mythical middle-ground people in the runup to the election. You can just search ""swing voter"" to see how common this narrative is:
+
+This is because many pundits think swing voters decide elections. They think swing voters — or ""floating voters"" — are large in number and just sitting in the middle, waiting to be convinced by one party or the other to vote for them. So this is the picture in their heads:
+
+But increasingly, this picture is wrong. As the parties polarize, it’s becoming much easier to for Americans to choose sides, even if they don’t identify as Republican or Democrat. So when they go to vote, they act like partisans.
+
+Back when there were more voters who might change their minds, campaigns were based on persuasion, and persuasion pulls you toward the middle. But when everyone’s mind is already made up, that means the way to win an election is to rile up people on your own team.
+
+A few years ago, Smidt, who works at Michigan State University, was trying to reconcile two things.
+
+One was that there were more and more people identifying as independents, rather than Democrats or Republicans.
+
+That should've meant that there were a huge number of people who were willing to change their minds, since they weren't partisan.
+
+But Smidt also noticed that over this time period, the presidential election maps didn't change much. It was “much more rigid.""
+
+One way to reconcile these two things was to believe that independents were no longer participating, which means there were fewer nonpartisan voters.
+
+But Smidt had another question: Are these self-labeled nonpartisans actually willing to vote for Republicans one election and Democrats in another?
+
+So he decided to study historical surveys that asks Americans about how they voted. He came up with four groups for the respondents:
+
+He did this for every year going back 50 years.
+
+What he found was simple, though shocking: Even though more and more people don’t align with a party, they still consistently behave like reliable partisans and repeatedly vote for the same party.
+
+In other words, swing voters are dying.
+
+Most voters look at where the parties stand on the issues, and then they pick one that best reflects their own views. But if you don’t pay enough attention to tell the parties apart, then you won’t know which party you agree with. That makes you more likely to swing between parties.
+
+So if we redraw the picture at the top, it would look like this. Notice how similar the two sides look to her:
+
+And it used to be common for people with less political knowledge to switch the party they supported from election to election — whether or not they voted.
+
+But over time, this party switching has become far less common:
+
+This is because now even low-information voters can tell the two parties apart:
+
+In 1960, both partisans and nonpartisans were much less likely to say there was a big difference between Republicans and Democrats.
+
+Now almost all strong partisans would say yes — and even half of nonpartisans would say yes.
+
+In short, voters are more confident that they know exactly what they’re voting for when they look at the “D” or the “R” next to a candidate’s name — no matter how partisan they are.
+
+And it's not just about partisanship.
+
+A modern-day person with low political awareness can tell the parties apart just as well as someone who had high awareness in 1968:
+
+It's not that the people have changed. Rather, it's the parties.
+
+Let's go back to the drawing at the top of the story. Here's where we were in the 1950s, where a low-information voter would look at the parties and not be able to tell the difference.
+
+But over the past 50 years, the two parties have evolved very distinct platforms.
+
+In the 1968 election, neither Republican Richard Nixon nor Democrat Hubert Humphrey articulated clear views on what he would in Vietnam. ""This ambivalence and deliberate obfuscating can create opportunity to win voters over,"" Smidt said.
+
+Before Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party didn't have an anti-abortion position.
+
+At the 1996 State of the Union, Bill Clinton said, ""The era of big government is over.""
+
+It was a lot harder to pin down each party to specific issues, especially for those who weren't paying close attention. But now the party lines are clear on abortion, taxes, climate change, health care, same-sex marriage — the list goes on. That's why when we look at how much Republicans and Democrats agree in the House and Senate, we see more and more polarization:
+
+You could argue that voters clearly knowing which side they’re on is a good thing. But in the 1954 study ""Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign,"" political scientists argued that what we need from an electorate is diversity — in other words, we can't just have rigid voters with ideal views, but also detached voters with rational views. Those are the people who allow our political system to more efficiently get things done.
+
+As Smidt writes, ""Even the 'least admirable' voters enrich our democratic political system by providing it with the flexibility and indifference that it needs.""
+
+If more and more voters are either on your side or the opponent’s side, that means winning elections is simple: You have to get your people more excited, and get the other side less excited.
+
+This means that candidates have little incentive to talk to people in the middle — people who don't make consistent partisan decisions in the voting booth.
+
+Just think about the 2016 election in this framework: Voters in Utah, who are traditionally Republican, don't like Donald Trump. But because the party positions are so polarized, it's too far a jump for them to support a Democrat like Hillary Clinton. So as Smidt points out, many would rather jump to a third party candidate.
+
+Trump was supposed to be the most nontraditional candidate in modern American politics — someone who was shaking up the electorate. But on November 8, when you look at the election map, it'll probably look a lot like past election maps. Maybe a few states will switch over, but most of America will likely have voted the same way.
+
+The president-elect will have won on the backs of riled up partisans, and people would be swing voters — except they’re not because they picked a side long ago.
+
+Clarification: I initially called Smidt’s research an experiment, but it’s more so a study of historical data, which I’ve clarified in the piece.",REAL
+9126,American And Saudi Weapons Recoverd From ISIS Positions In Mosul,"Videos American And Saudi Weapons Recoverd From ISIS Positions In Mosul An anonymous Iraqi official recently stated that front line troops “always see US helicopters flying over the ISIL-controlled areas and dropping weapons and urgent aids for them.” | November 8, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! This Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2015 photo shows, photos of gunsmith Bahktiyar Sadr-Aldeen as a child, center, and his father, right, hung on a wall at his shop, in northern Iraq. Sadr-Aldeen, has seen his business shoot up by 50 percent since ISIS took over the Iraqi city of Mosul. 
+Mosul, Iraq — Since the beginning of Operation: Inherent Resolve, the Islamic State has shown itself to be a very shadowy force. Many people assume they know where the group originates, with some admitting to it’s connection to US foreign policy decisions and regional allies. Others ignore this, and even the curious will only go so far. Now, as the group’s stronghold in Mosul is surrounded, Iraqi forces find yet more IS stockpiles of Saudi and American weapons and supply. 
+Mosul has been under assault by Iraqi forces for around a month now, as they clash with IS. The offensive followed a surge in US troops to Iraq , the majority being special forces and accompanying marines. Exactly what those forces will be doing is unclear. Shortly after the battle’s activation, a US Navy SEAL was reported KIA (Killed In Action) by an IED blast . Officials were careful not to directly connect the operatives death with the Mosul battle. 
+Five other Americans– three marines , a Delta Force operative and another Navy SEAL –and a Canadian special forces soldier have died since 2014. This is only that we know of, since the statuses of thousands of military contractors and other forces are unknown. 
+Iraqi militia commander Uday al-Khaddran reported the weapons after capturing former Islamic State positions. According to GeoPolitics Alert , the weapons are of Saudi origin, and are by no means an isolated incident. Iraqi forces have reported Saudi and even American supplied ISIS weaponry and food shipments since the war began. Militiamen believe the weapons are, in part, being transported by the Turkish government. 
+US manufactured missiles were also allegedly retrieved from the cleared IS area’s. In this case, according to Reports Afrique , Iraqi commanders believe the weapons were dropped to ISIS by coalition planes . Such claims, once again, have circulated throughout the war. 
+An anonymous Iraqi official recently stated that front line troops “ always see US helicopters flying over the ISIL-controlled areas and dropping weapons and urgent aids for them.” The commander went onto claim ISIS fighters are even transported by US aircraft to medical facilities in Syria and countries friendly to the group. 
+In 2015, Iraqi commanders reported they’d begun shooting down coalition craft seen aiding the group. Iraq’s parliament disclosed that year that two British planes seen aiding the enemy were shot down, with wreckage photographed . The government of Iraq called on western leaders to claim the crash, but no response ever came. 
+Commander Al-Khaddran also accuses the Turks of sending advisors to aid in IS artillery, and other operations. Since these kinds of reports first surfaced nearly two years ago, they’ve been largely disregarded. It’s only recently, with Hillary Clinton’s email leaks allegedly confirming Saudi Arabia funds ISIS, that the mainstream can re-examine these reports. 
+Turkish special forces operatives have been stationed outside Mosul for months now without Iraq’s approval. Turkey’s prime minister was brazen in telling Iraqi’s leadership to “know your place” when asked to pull troops out. American officials, who also train Syrian rebels in Turkey–the majority of which are linked to jihadist groups–approve of the forces in northern Iraq. All of these operations, from rebel training to Turkish troop deployments, have coincided with a brutal government crackdown on Turkish media . 
+Clinton was emailing her campaign chairman in 2014, advocated for pressure on Saudi Arabia because they “are providing clandestine financial and logistical support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” Saudi government officials, Daily Caller reports , has donated over $25 million to the Clinton Foundation.",FAKE
+3501,How come the US keeps killing ISIS No. 2s?,"On Friday morning, a US airstrike killed Abu Alaa al-Afri, a senior leader in ISIS, whom the US says it considers the organization's second-ranked leader.
+
+This isn't the first time al-Afri has been reported dead — though the US government has allegedly verified his death.
+
+But if (as seems likely) al-Afri is dead, this will be yet another instance in which ISIS's No. 2 official has been killed. In August of last year, for example, a US airstrike killed Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali, then identified as the group's No. 2.
+
+This continues a trend that news consumers may recognize from counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda, in which the group seemed to lose one third-in-command (after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri) after another.
+
+As some Twitter wags noted, this all harks back to a 2006 Onion article, ""Eighty Percent Of Al-Qaeda No. 2s Now Dead.""
+
+But what's actually going on here? Why is the US killing so many ISIS deputies while somehow failing to hit leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? And does it even matter when you kill top-level ISIS officials?
+
+Analysts have developed a few theories as to why the US keeps hitting second-in-commands but not the leader. One of the most plausible is that Baghdadi is a much harder target, whereas the nature of the No. 2 job involves exposing oneself to greater risk of being targeted.
+
+As a leader, Baghdadi serves as ISIS's chief executive and ideological head. He doesn't have to move around all that much or actually go out in the field; his job mostly involves issuing orders and, on occasion, making propaganda tapes.
+
+That means he can sit wherever he's hiding out, avoiding the kind of contact with the outside world that makes it easier for US intelligence agencies to find you.
+
+However, not every ISIS leader has the luxury of doing that. Baghdadi's top subordinates, the ones he gives orders to, have to go out in the field and run ISIS operations. If you command a major combat theater in Iraq, for example, you actually have to be in that part of Iraq. If you run ISIS finances, you need to make sure the extortion and oil operations are running smoothly.
+
+When you're out actually doing the work — managing ISIS outposts, talking to people lower down on the food chain — you can't hide away like Baghdadi does. That makes it easier for US electronic, satellite, or human intelligence assets to find you — and serve up targeting data for an airstrike.
+
+This difference in responsibilities probably explains why the US, despite targeting Baghdadi multiple times, hasn't managed to kill him — and yet has successfully taken out many of his deputies.
+
+""That would be my guess,"" Will McCants, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me.
+
+While the US government is understandably trumpeting its alleged strike on al-Afri, there's reason to suspect that killing the group's No. 2 isn't actually all that consequential.
+
+Groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda are bureaucratic by design, so they are often able to deal with drone-struck senior officers by rapidly promoting new people to replace them.
+
+This theory got some quantitative support in a 2014 study by the University of Georgia's Jenna Jordan, who found that so-called ""decapitation"" strikes — in which the US killed a senior leader of a terrorist group — had little effect on reducing violence from that group.
+
+In the paper, Jordan argues that this is because al-Qaeda is a bureaucratic organization: It has something like a formal command structure, division of labor, clear assignment of responsibilities, and the like. This allows lower-level leaders to take over after one is killed.
+
+And this would likely apply to ISIS as well.
+
+""Each individual decapitation doesn't cripple the organization,"" Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me.
+
+So al-Afri's killing probably will not, in itself, be that consequential for ISIS's future.
+
+That said, Gartenstein-Ross pointed out that al-Afri had ""strong connections within the al-Qaeda network."" ISIS and al-Qaeda are at war in Syria, which distracts and thus weakens both of them, and there is little reason to believe that this is changing.
+
+But Gartenstein-Ross points out that the possibility of rapprochement, while already quite low, may have just gotten a little lower with al-Afri's killing.
+
+""Given his connections, [there was] a danger that he could be involved in rapprochement between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State,"" he said.
+
+However, the ideological and personal gaps between the two groups will likely remain too wide to bridge anytime in the near future. That would have been true even if al-Afri had lived. So his death is probably not a substantial change for ISIS's prospects.",REAL
+4544,Loretta Lynch becomes first African-American woman AG.,"Washington (CNN) Loretta Lynch was sworn in as the new U.S. attorney general on Monday, replacing Eric Holder. Lynch, the country's first African-American woman to serve in the role, had her nomination held up more than five months over politicking in the Senate.
+
+""Ladies and gentlemen, it's about time,"" said Vice President Joe Biden at the swearing in ceremony.
+
+The highly politicized five-month battle to choose Obama's next attorney general came to a close Thursday when the Senate finally voted 56-43 to confirm Lynch
+
+But the delay of her nomination neared record-breaking proportions. Republicans leading the Senate refused to bring her nomination up for a vote until Democrats cut a deal on abortion language in an unrelated bill. That legislation passed Wednesday, setting up Thursday's vote and ending the latest partisan Washington standoff.
+
+Ten Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined Democrats. Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz was the only senator not to vote.
+
+Obama tapped Lynch to replace Attorney General Eric Holder in November and her nomination cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. Still, she waited longer than the seven most recent U.S. attorneys general combined for a vote on the Senate floor, after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisted on first finishing work on an unrelated bill.
+
+Loretta Lynch's father, Lorenzo A. Lynch, was in the Senate gallery watching when the historic vote took place confirming her daughter as the first African American female attorney general.
+
+""The good guys won. That's what has happened in this country all along,"" Lorenzo Lynch told reporters. ""Even during slavery. Levi Coffin was a founder of the Underground Railroad. Even during slavery. A white man fought against slavery. So all over this land good folks have stood in the right lane, in the right path.""
+
+A two-time U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Lynch takes on the high-profile job at time when America faces a series of challenges, from dealing with strained relations and deep distrust in some cities between the police and the communities they serve, to criminal justice reform, to confronting the ongoing threat of terrorism.
+
+Lynch, 55, has earned a reputation as a highly qualified, but low-profile prosecutor who has a good relationship with law enforcement and a history of handling tough cases well.
+
+She is a good listener and a skilled consensus builder, qualities that will help her succeed at Justice, said Tim Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia who served under Lynch on the Attorney General's Advisory Committee, a group that meets regularly to advise the Justice department on policy matters.
+
+""In that [attorney general] job you are at the center of so many of the emerging, significant, pressing issues not only in this country but around the world. There's probably no job in government as diverse and challenging as being attorney general of the United States,"" Heaphy said. He added that building support for initiatives both within and outside the department is an important part of the job.
+
+""She will be good at getting people to work well together. I think that's a strength of hers. I saw that on the committee,"" Heaphy said.
+
+Lynch's portfolio will include addressing voting rights, white-collar crime and policy reviews, as well as public corruption, an area in which she has vast experience.
+
+In a statement, Obama said America will be better off with Lynch leading the Department of Jusice.
+
+""Loretta's confirmation ensures that we are better positioned to keep our communities safe, keep our nation secure, and ensure that every American experiences justice under the law,"" Obama said in a statement shortly after the vote.
+
+Lynch's experience on civil rights case, like helping win the convictions of New York City police officers who sexually assaulted Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, will be important as her office tackles closely watched investigations in recent police conduct cases, including the still unexplained death of a 25-year-old Baltimore man while in police custody.
+
+""She's seen and understands the injustices that have taken place in the past and so therefore she's uniquely also equipped to deal with what's going on and do the kinds of investigations that will restore faith to Americans in their justice system,"" said Rep. Greg Meeks, D-New York.
+
+Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, Lynch grew up 60 miles to the east in Durham, North Carolina. Her father was a fourth-generation Baptist minister; her mother, an English teacher and school librarian. As a child, Lynch rode on her father's shoulders to his church, which served a meeting place for students organizing anti-segregation boycotts in the early 1960s, she told the Judiciary panel at her January confirmation hearing. Lynch eventually graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
+
+Speaking at her nomination announcement in November, Lynch highlighted the fact that the Justice Department is named for an ideal.
+
+""This is actually appropriate, because our work is both aspirational, and grounded in gritty reality,"" she said. ""Today, I stand before you so thrilled, and, frankly, so humbled to have the opportunity to lead this group of wonderful people who work all day and well into the night to make that ideal a manifest reality.""
+
+At a conference meeting with all the nation's U.S. attorneys a few years ago, Heaphy was put in charge of organizing a presentation showing the attorneys as they were 20 years before. Lynch shared a picture of herself with her college cheerleading squad.
+
+""Loretta sent me a picture of her as a Harvard cheerleader in a pyramid,"" he said. ""She was comfortable sharing this with Eric Holder and other department leaders. She laughed at herself.""
+
+""I don't think she's just tough, there's a humanity, there's a human touch that she has that will also serve her well,"" he said. ""Nobody is going to mistake that she's in charge, but her humility and sense of humor will come through.""",REAL
+7161,Complete the Sentence: an Exploration of Orin Langelle’s “If Voting Changed Things…”,"Email 
+To view photojournalist Orin Langelle’s new online photography exhibit If Voting Changed Things is to accept a challenge. Don’t expect a passive viewing of simple, aesthetically pleasing photography or a mindless stroll through apolitical eye candy. The challenge should be apparent from the title of the exhibit: It is a riddle, a fragment, an incomplete sentence awaiting your contribution. To view his display is to realize that there is no single way to finish the statement. Langelle invites you to see the complexity of the world through his lens, but to draw your own conclusions about the meaning of the images. 
+If Voting Changed Things… people would vote. They don’t. Only 58% of eligible voters did in the last presidential election. Recent polls indicate that the majority of Americans feel disenfranchised by the 2016 presidential election process and candidates. They aren’t proud or hopeful about the outcome, and half of Americans feel helpless. There is no emphasis on issues that matter to them. Election discussion centers around voting for the least worst candidate, which makes civic duty seem like an exercise in self-denial and a concession that our aspirations are not achievable. 
+Of course, the counter is that if you don’t vote, you’re giving someone else the power to make decisions for you. But that perspective ignores the range of opportunities for civic engagement and citizen action: Protesting, demonstrating, picketing, civil disobedience, rallies, striking, tax resistance, boycotting, sit-ins, sabotage, hacking and DDoS, tree-sitting, resistance, law-breaking, insurrection, rebellion, revolution. Langelle’s images of protest activity outside of national conventions in 1972 and 2004 raise the question of whether voting, and the electoral circus that accompanies it, is about citizen empowerment or an explicit and ceremonial abdication of power by citizens to a status quo elite. Which leads to the observation that… 
+If Voting Changed Things… they wouldn’t let us do it. Chomsky wrote that “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate.” Photographs from 1972 and 2004 capture moments outside of the system, beyond the framing of the acceptable discourse. Protesters explicitly reject governmental authority through symbols, slogans, caricatures, and artwork. The elephant pulling a coffin through Miami’s city streets conveys a belief that political parties are leading us to death and destruction. The black hoods and orange jump suits communicate that protesters in Boston, relegated to a “Free Speech Zone,” have become the equivalent of Guantanamo Bay detained terrorist suspects. It is not accidental that the media ignores or minimalizes these displays of collective action. In 2016 delegates—the people who were there (never mind viewers at home)—at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions remarked that they were unaware that protests were occurring outside throughout. Langelle deftly illustrates that this is because authorities have increasingly managed and marginalized protest behavior. Which demonstrates that… 
+If Voting Changed Things … this exhibit wouldn’t be necessary. For many, Langelle’s work will be shocking because it lays bare the evolution of policing and the criminalization of dissent. Photos of the 1972 demonstrations include arson, sabotage, gratuitous nudity, and graffiti that challenges, “Amerika—Love it or Destroy it,” and yet not a single police officer is identifiable among the activists. The activists are in the streets, climbing in trees, occupying fields and grassy lawns, neighborhoods and parks. Contrast this with images of Boston Police in 2004, appearing ready for war in riot gear; armed with Tasers, guns, clubs; a menacing and ubiquitous presence atop scaffolding towers. Because of new draconian laws, protesters have been herded into holding pens of chain link fences and razor wire, surrounded by surveillance cameras, concrete, and girders. The photos depict a world that has changed drastically in thirty years, and which has militarized against, marginalized, and narrowly framed the acceptable boundaries of citizen dissent. Moreover… 
+If Voting Changed Things … it wouldn’t contrast so distinctly with other forms of citizen action. There is a humor and a vibrancy to “the people” that Langelle juxtaposes brilliantly against the sterile and colorless state apparatus. There is a diversity of skin color, age, gender among the protesters. Their slogans are racy, their clothing is colorful and fun. They wield musical instruments, engage in “guerilla theatre” and share poetry. They engage in property destruction with irony—wearing clogs as they break windows and asking through their graffitti with (gallows) humor if the protest restraint area represents the “Land of the Free?” Their defiance comes in the form of patches, to be worn on the derriere, sold by a young girl in a flowered dress. They paint their faces and wear straw hats. 
+The stark reality of the state is helmeted, with dark gray protective gear and weapons to enforce compliance. The only colors are the red, white, and blue banners and flags that appear more as a hypocritical challenge to the popular movements than a patriotic display. It is evident that Langelle sees a dour system that is oppressive and lifeless. Voting is a part of that system, a reinforcement of its values and an affirmation of the status quo. 
+If Voting Changed Things… marginalized groups wouldn’t be in the streets. The electoral process in America has produced and validated a government that has produced institutional racism, militarization within and from our society, mass incarceration, crippling debt, perpetual war, homelessness, a failed health care system, eroding and ineffective education, and environmental exploitation. If Voting Changed Things… we wouldn’t have a 1%. We wouldn’t allow the .01%, 16,000 Americans , to hold as much wealth ($9 trillion) as 80 percent of the nation’s population – some 256,000,000 people – and as much as 75 percent of the entire world’s population. We wouldn’t allow the five largest white landowners in America to own more agricultural land than all of black America. If Voting Changed Things… demographics wouldn’t be used as a basis for electoral strategies. We would vote away the cleavages that exist across generations, racial and cultural groups, religious affiliations. But we don’t, because we can’t. 
+If Voting Changed Things… would we be where we are? The work of Orin Langelle may offer you a lens from which to answer that question. Or to find your own conclusion to the sentence. 
+If Voting Changed Things can be viewed online at: If Voting Changed Things: Exhibit Online . It is also on display at the ¡Buen Vivir! Gallery for Contemporary Art in Buffalo, NY until December 2 nd . 
+Dave Reilly is professor and chair of political science and director of international studies at Niagara University in Lewiston, New York, where he serves as president of the faculty union and moderator for the Black Student Union.",FAKE
+671,"Clinton is close, but Sanders not ready to give up","Los Angeles (CNN) Hillary Clinton is on the cusp of declaring victory as the Democratic nominee after a long and protracted battle with Bernie Sanders. But she has one very serious problem: The Vermont senator isn't giving up.
+
+Clinton and her husband have barnstormed across California at a furious pace in recent days -- seeking to avoid yet another humiliating defeat by Sanders on the same night she should easily win the delegates needed to go past the 2,383 mark and clinch the nomination.
+
+""I'm very proud of the campaign we're running here, and I believe, on Tuesday, I will have decisively won the popular vote and I will have decisively won the pledged delegate majority,"" Clinton said on CNN's ""State of the Union.""
+
+By all objective measures, she and her allies argue that the race is over. The delegate math, the money, the millions of votes in her column -- all point to her inevitability as the nominee.
+
+Sanders, however, shows no sign that he is preparing to exit the stage.
+
+Facing a strong possibility that he could carry in California, he vowed, in no uncertain terms this weekend, to lead his ""movement"" on to the convention in Philadelphia.
+
+At a news conference in L.A.'s Little Tokyo Saturday, he railed against the press and the news networks for counting superdelegates in their tallies.
+
+""It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night,"" Sanders said. ""At the end of the nominating process, no candidate will have enough pledged delegates to call the campaign a victory. That will be dependent upon superdelegates. In other words, the Democratic National Convention will be a contested convention.""
+
+The first female presidential nominee of a major political party could find herself shadowed by Sanders' intensive campaign to sway hundreds of superdelegates despite winning fewer contests and votes.
+
+Some Democrats worry that would put the Democratic Party at a disadvantage by making it harder for Clinton to unify the party and turn her full attention to Donald Trump.
+
+From a pure mathematical perspective, the Democratic Primary in Puerto Rico Sunday leaves Clinton on the verge of becoming the nominee, 29 delegates shy of the magic number, according to CNN estimates. On Tuesday, 694 delegates will be at stake in the Democratic contests -- including 475 in California alone, but Clinton is likely to win many of them.
+
+While the math is not on his side, Sanders showed defiance and determination as he swept through California all weekend, charging Trump with trying to divide the country, and Clinton with advocating for ""small, incremental changes"" when ""We want to transform this nation.""
+
+A robust showing Tuesday could give Sanders a strong closing argument in his pitch to superdelegates.
+
+Speaking for more than an hour Saturday night outside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as the flame of the Olympic torch flickered brightly above him, he urged his followers to dismiss those who claim his path is impossible.
+
+""If we can win, and win big here in California and in the other states, and in Washington D.C., we are going to go into the Democratic convention with enormous momentum,"" Sanders told thousands of young supporters, many of whom were wearing ""Bernie or Bust"" buttons. ""With your help, I believe, we will come out with the nomination.""
+
+For Sanders, the long Democratic primary is coming to an end amid feelings of astonishment and regret. When he launched his presidential bid a year ago, advisers say, winning wasn't his chief goal. He wanted to make sure Clinton had a competitive race. And that, he has done in spades.
+
+While advisers say he is serious about taking the primary fight to the Democratic convention, he also is mindful of keeping his pledge to keep Trump from winning the presidency. He has yet to reconcile those competing forces, aides say, but that rests at the heart of what he decides to do next.
+
+Sanders refuses to say what his goal would be if he does not win the nomination. He will not even engage on those kinds of questions at this point in the process.
+
+Advisers say he is intent on trying to change the Democratic nominating process, particularly the superdelegate system and the series of closed primaries in states across the country. But that could be a tall order, considering he just joined the party to run for president.
+
+While this week will almost certainly decide the race, Sanders' supporters insist that it will result in nothing more than a mathematical muddle. Whatever the networks decide to do in terms of calling the race, Sanders adviser Tad Devine said, ""I don't think that's going to affect things.""
+
+""The networks or the press can characterize what happens in any way they like -- you guys have a right to do that -- and so do we,"" he said.
+
+Sanders' argument for continuing on, Devine said, ""is pretty straightforward that the delegates that have been elected by voters -- no one has enough of them to claim the nomination of the party.""
+
+""So if you're going to win the nomination of the party you're going to win it with superdelegates, and even the Democratic National Committee -- officially, their spokesperson -- is out on the record saying that superdelegate's votes should not officially be counted until the convention itself,"" Devine said.
+
+Sanders' advisers also note that regardless of the results on Tuesday night—when voters go to the polls in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota—the Vermont senator intends to compete in Washington D.C. on June 14 when it holds the final contest of the primary season.
+
+They believe they have a strong case to make to superdelegates that Sanders has gained strength over the course of the primary process while Clinton's candidacy has weakened.
+
+They note that while Clinton, for example, dominated in large states with diverse populations early in the process, polls show Sanders leading Clinton among young minority voters in California by a wide margin. Beyond that, Sanders has continued to pound the argument that potential general election matchups show that he would be a stronger candidate against Trump.
+
+""If the Democratic leadership wants a campaign that will not only retain the White House and regain the Senate and win governor's chairs all over this country, we are that campaign,"" Sanders said at a rally in San Diego Sunday night.
+
+Clinton has pointed out that in 2008, she was in Sanders' position: in second place after a hard-fought campaign against Barack Obama.
+
+""By some standards, I actually led a little bit in the popular vote, but I fell a little short in the pledged delegates,"" she said on ""State of the Union."" ""So I had a decision to make. A lot of my supporters said, hey, let's keep going, let's make sure that we go to the convention. I said, no. I ran to become president because I have deep values and beliefs about what should be done in our country.""
+
+While Sanders' next moves are difficult to predict, the bigger obstacle for Clinton may be the fervency of his supporters, particularly those who constitute the contingent who call themselves ""Bernie or Bust.""
+
+A Quinnipiac poll earlier this month found that a quarter of Sanders' supporters nationally said they would not support Clinton in a general election against Trump, while 75% said they would.
+
+The Clinton-resistant contingent of Sanders supporters was even higher in California in the recent USC Dornsife/LA Times poll. In that survey -- which may have prompted Clinton to ramp up her campaign schedule here—Sanders led Clinton 44 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. (The Vermont senator led her by double digits among voters who decline to state a party).
+
+Among voters who are supporting Sanders in the primary, only 65% said they would support Clinton in November.
+
+Those die-hard Sanders fans were out in force at his events in Los Angeles this weekend. In interviews, many said they either planned to either write in Sanders in November or vote for the Green Party ticket.
+
+""I've been watching the Clintons for a very long time and I think there are some serious integrity issues and some character flaws, I'll say to be nice—which Bernie doesn't have. He's been consistent for 40 years and that's something I have to respect,"" said Danny Garcia, a 36-year-old business consultant, who said he has been a Libertarian-Republican for most of his life before supporting Sanders.
+
+""I'm Bernie or Bust, there's no Hillary on my agenda,"" said Garcia, who was signing up volunteers to go to Philadelphia during Sanders' rally Saturday night. ""She's using her usual tactics, which are to manipulate the populace, discourage voters, stop people from getting out, and trying to control the media narrative, which she's been pretty good at.""
+
+Courtney Wold, a 25-year-old filmmaker from Los Angeles, said though she likes and respects Clinton, she plans to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in November if Sanders does not clinch the nomination.
+
+""The first rally he had me in tears, along with everyone that was around us. We were all collectively crying about how profound the message was,"" Wold said, as she waited for Sanders to speak at the Coliseum this weekend. ""My generation -- not speaking for the generation entirely, but for me specifically -- I feel sort of disenfranchised. I went to school; I got a college degree and then I left with a huge amount of debt.""
+
+""I've sort of come to terms with the fact that I'll never own a home,"" Wold said. ""But I don't want that for my children -- and Bernie's the only one who truly spoke to that.... We like Hillary. We think she's done a lot for women -- and I think that's great -- but I'm not voting based on my gender, I'm voting based on a platform.""
+
+Many Sanders backers recoil at the notion that he should bow out Tuesday once Clinton has mathematically clinched the nomination with a combination of pledged delegates and superdelegates. They will be with him, they say, all the way through Philadelphia and beyond.
+
+""Absolutely he should stay and fight,"" said Gary Frazier, a leader of the group called 'Black Men for Bernie.' ""Whether he will or not, that remains to be seen. But you cannot start a political revolution that exposes the corruption in the political system and then expect us to get behind that same political system.""",REAL
+5121,Picking Mike Pence Really Was A Grand Slam For Donald Trump,"Mike Pence? Full disclosure: I served as head of the Super PAC seeking to draft Pence into the 2012 presidential race. Having long been persuaded of Pence’s superior leadership qualities, I’m even less objective than usual.
+
+We called Pence “The Conservative Champion” and for good reason. Then, in 2012, Pence made the right decision: to run for governor of Indiana. That was an opportunity for distinguished public service. As it happened, it was also a perfect boot camp for the vice presidency.
+
+The Honorable David McIntosh, now president of the powerful Club For Growth, was the one who encouraged Pence to come back into electoral politics. McIntosh later served as the guru of the Draft Pence For President Super PAC. In my recent exclusive interview McIntosh recalled:
+
+When I was vacating my Congressional seat to pursue an ultimately unsuccessful gubernatorial run, in 2000, I wanted my seat to be occupied by a true conservative and someone of high integrity and commitment to public service.  I turned to Mike Pence. He had run unsuccessfully in 1988 and 1990 and by 2000 had achieved considerable success, and affluence, as a syndicated talk radio host. Mike replied that he no longer aspired to public office but would, together with his wife Karen, pray on my request and determine whether they sensed a calling. Several months later I encountered Mike at the Indiana State Fair. I asked him about whether he had reached a conclusion. He replied that he and Karen recognized that he could not shirk the duty. Pence went on to run, and win, and serve America with distinction in the Congress and then to serve splendidly as governor of Indiana. If elected to the vice presidency he will again serve America magnificently.
+
+One of the reasons that Pence showed himself extraordinary may have faded from general memory. It has not faded from mine. Nor has it been forgotten, or forgiven, by the left, who are now highlighting this, much to my delight. In 2010 Pence gave a major speech at the Detroit Economic Club. As the center-left ThinkProgress.org then reported:
+
+The first item of Pence’s five-point for the economy is a “sound monetary policy.” Pence elaborated that he believes a return to the gold standard could create such a policy: PENCE: Before I move on, I’d like to note, in the midst of all that’s happened recently — massive borrowing and spending, QE2 — a debate has started anew over an anchor to our global monetary system. My dear friend, the late Jack Kemp, probably would have urged me to adopt the gold standard, right here and now in Detroit. Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, encouraged that we rethink the international currency system including the role of gold, and I agree. I think the time has come to have a debate over gold, and the proper role it should play in our nations monetary affairs. A pro-growth agenda begins with sound monetary policy.  (Emphasis supplied by ThinkProgress.)
+
+The elitist left is misguidedly neurotic about the gold standard. Properly designed the gold standard favors labor and debtors slightly over capital and creditors and hence carries majority rank and file support among the labor and ethnic left. Timothy B. Lee wrote at the elite left Vox on July 15th, Trump should ignore his running mate’s bad ideas about monetary policy, with reference to the same speech:
+
+It is perverse how the left has reviled Friedman when he was, as he most often was, right, while being deferential to him when he was demonstrably wrong. The international gold standard had ceased operations in 1914. In 1922, it was replaced, in the immortal words of the great French economist Jacques Rueff, by a “grotesque caricature.”
+
+The Economist described that system, quite correctly, as “a mess.” It called itself a gold standard without playing by the rules of the gold standard. The Interwar so-called ""gold standard"" was a hybrid between Jabberwocky and Calvinball. The true gold standard was  but a dim memory by the onset of the Great Depression for which it was framed. The misguided fixation of “many economists” – deluded by the Eichengreen Fallacy -- on the role of “the” gold standard in worsening the Great Depression is contradicted by history.
+
+Conservative apostate David Frum, writing in The Wall Street Journal, also stubbornly continues to misunderstand the gold standard. Frum does however astutely observe some similarities between William Jennings Bryan and Donald Trump:
+
+This is a similarity previously noted by David Klinghard in US News and World Report and by Tim Reuter at Forbes.com. It is apt in some ways but not in others.  Bryan, by prescribing depreciation through ""free coinage of silver,"" lost three presidential races. Trump provides a counsel of general prosperity and has thus far gone from victory to victory and is on track to astound the Frums of this world in the general election.
+
+It is disappointing that the erudite but curiously tone-deaf Frum fails to note that the ravaging of small farmers was caused by the post-Civil War restoration of the gold standard at pre-war parity. This forced a painful secular deflation. We are back in the jaws of deflation, this time Fed-induced. Trump twice has stated his appreciation for the gold standard, the very platform on which McKinley soundly beat Bryan. And the gold standard, properly done, is not an instrument of deflation.
+
+Paul Krugman and his ""plovers"" will rave on against the gold standard. Let them. To adapt a tweet by Neo-Keynesian economist Austan Goolsbee: Roses are red. Violets are pink. Don’t listen to aurophobes. No one cares what they think. To wit:",REAL
+60,Republicans Very Troubled By Clinton Donors See No Conflict With Their Own Dark Money,"WASHINGTON -- For four months, the Republican Party and its many presidential hopefuls have laid into likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over donations to a family foundation. That these attacks contradict the GOP's broader stand on campaign finance -- and call into question their own weighty burden of donor conflicts -- hasn't troubled them at all.
+
+Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called contributions to the nonprofit Clinton Foundation “thinly veiled bribes.” The nation can’t afford the “drama” represented by those donations, according to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina asked Clinton to explain why contributions to the foundation “don’t represent a conflict of interest.” And the Republican National Committee has made the donations a central part of its campaign against Clinton.
+
+In embracing this critique of the Clinton Foundation, Republicans are investing in a view of money in politics that they have otherwise rejected in recent years: that spending money to gain influence over or access to elected or appointed officials represents a conflict of interest or an appearance of corruption or could even lead to outright corruption.
+
+Since 2010, the conservative Supreme Court majority has rejected this argument as a reason to regulate campaign finance in their Citizens United, McCutcheon and Williams-Yulee decisions. Most leading Republican federal officeholders now take the view that spending of any sort on campaigns should not be impeded by legal restrictions as fears of corruption are overblown.
+
+So the critical piling on Clinton Foundation donations creates a problem for Republicans, especially those running for president. If contributions to the foundation, a 501(c)(3) entity not involved in political campaigns, create a valid source of corruption concern, then what are we to make of the hundreds of millions of dollars in undisclosed donations to 501(c)(4) nonprofits that have worked to elect Republicans over the past three elections?
+
+Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the door for unlimited corporate, union and, ultimately, individual spending on elections, Republicans have maneuvered to use so-called dark money nonprofits to fund large portions of their electoral efforts. Dark money spending on federal races exceeded $400 million in the 2012 presidential election and $200 million in the 2014 midterms with the vast majority of those dollars going to aid Republican candidates, according to previous analysis by The Huffington Post.
+
+The public is not privy, however, to the sources of funds fueling a large part of the Republican electoral apparatus and a smaller part of Democratic efforts. Party leaders and wealthy donors have increasingly worked through nonprofits that are not required to disclose their funding sources.
+
+Republicans, including those now running for president, defend dark money groups as a means to protect what they argue is the First Amendment right of donors to engage in political activity without ""retaliation."" Perhaps, that retaliation would come in the form of stories informing the public about how those donors are seeking to influence public policy.
+
+The very limited record on dark money shows that those funding these groups -- just like those funding super PACs, which must identify their donors -- include many high-powered corporate and individual interests with well-connected lobbyists in search of favors. HuffPost reports have found that dark money groups tightly connected to congressional and party leadership, both Democratic and Republican, have received large sums from pharmaceutical, insurance, banking and online payday lenders seeking specific policy changes while retaining lobbyists previously employed by those very leaders.
+
+Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has his Right to Rise Policy Solutions, which is playing an increasingly important role in his not-yet-declared, super-PAC-centered presidential campaign. Rubio's advisers run the Conservative Policy Solutions group in collaboration with an affiliated super PAC. And potential candidates like former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal are all running around the country fueled by funding from undisclosed nonprofit groups.
+
+In 2012, Walker faced a recall election after labor unions in his state rebelled over legislation gutting public employee union rights. His recall campaign coordinated with a band of nonprofit political groups, led by the Wisconsin Club for Growth, to promote Walker and his policies in a positive light. Walker aides worked closely with the outside groups, and the governor directly raised undisclosed contributions for the effort.
+
+John Menard Jr., considered the wealthiest man in Wisconsin, was another big donor to the save-Walker effort. The billionaire owner of the chain store Menards gave $1.5 million to the Wisconsin Club for Growth, according to a report by Yahoo News. During Walker’s term in office, Menard’s company received $1.8 million in tax credits from an economic development corporation led by the governor. He also received help in his battle with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources as Walker defanged the watchdog agency.
+
+The same failure to see their own conflicts applies to candidates elected since the Citizens United decision precipitated the dramatic rise in dark money. Both Paul and Rubio were elected to the Senate in 2010 with $2.3 million and $2.7 million, respectively, in allied spending by groups that do not disclose their donors, including the Karl Rove-founded Crossroads GPS and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
+
+Thanks to its bankruptcy filings, it is known that for-profit Corinthian Colleges made contributions to Crossroads GPS. While the dates and amounts of those donations are still hidden, Rubio’s strong support for Corinthian is well-established. In 2014, he pleaded with the Department of Education for leniency for the company as it faced a fraud investigation.
+
+No one doubts that huge sums of dark money will again be spent supporting presidential candidates in the 2016 election. While the public will be able to consider whether the corporations, billionaires and foreign governments that contributed to the Clinton Foundation would hold undue sway over a Clinton White House, they will not even know the identities of those pouring in the secret donations.",REAL
+7348,Comment on 7 Effective Ways To Balance Hormones Naturally by Eat Your Way to Balanced Hormones! - NeilMD.com,"Poor gut health and food allergies: More research is linking gut health to hormone regulation . Obesity Inflammation as a result of poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle Genetic susceptibility Toxicity in the form of exposure to pesticides, toxins, viruses, cigarettes, excessive alcohol, and harmful chemicals Excessive amounts of stress, as well as a lack of rest Natural Treatments For Hormonal Imbalances 1. Consume Healthy Fats Your body requires different types of fats — including saturated fat and cholesterol — to create hormones that help keep inflammation levels low, boost metabolism, and promote weight loss. Coconut oil and avocado are great sources. 2. Incorporate Healing Herbs Adaptogen herbs are a class of healing plants that work to promote hormone balance and fight off various diseases. Research has found that various adapotogens can improve thyroid function , reduce anxiety and depression , support adrenal gland functions , and more. Keep Evolving Your Consciousness Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. 3. Improve Your Gut Health Taking care of the gut is becoming of increasing concern, especially since it’s been found to cause autoimmune reactions, including arthritis and thyroid disorders . Many things contribute to an unhealthy gut, including: Antibiotics and medications like birth control Diets high in refined carbohydrates, sugar, and processed foods Diets low in fermentable fibers Dietary toxins such as industrial seed oils Chronic stress Chronic infections 4. Avoid Conventional Body Care Products Many commercial products are laden with potentially-harmful chemicals including: DEA, parabens, propylene glycol, and sodium lauryl sulfate. Instead, do your research and find natural products made with essential oils, coconut oil, shea butter, and castor oil. 5. Exercise Regularly (Especially Interval Training) High intensity interval training (HIIT) has been popularized in recent years for its ability to quickly and efficiently get and keep the body in shape, but the University of Notre Dame Medical School in Sydney also discovered that : “HIT is associated with increased patient compliance and improved cardiovascular and metabolic outcomes and is suitable for implementation in both healthy and ‘at risk’ populations.” 6 . Sleep More, Stress Less Seems easier said than done, right? But not getting enough sleep can mess with your hormone schedule. Cortisol, for example, is the primary stress hormone, and is regulated at midnight. If people go to bed late, they never find relief from their sympathetic flight/fight stress response. One report published in the Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism found that : “Stress can lead to changes in the serum level of many hormones including glucocorticoids, catecholamines, growth hormone and prolactin.” 7. Limit Your Caffeine And Alcohol Consumption Caffeine can stay in your system for up to six hours, and the chemical can affect the central nervous system, raising your heart rate, increasing alertness, and altering the way your brain produces hormones. We’ve come to accept synthetic treatments as our first step toward bettering our health, but what’s even more important is understanding your condition, what causes it, and taking holistic approaches before succumbing to anything else. 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+5587,Insurers use California’s assisted-suicide law to deny treatment for terminal patients,"Legal Insurrection – by Leslie Eastman 
+About one-year ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s assisted-suicide bill into law. It fully went into effect this June, with the opening of the first clinic . While there is no data on the number of California assisted-suicides, Oregon recorded over 130 last year as part of their legalized physician-assisted death program. 
+Now, one young mother says her insurance company denied her coverage for chemotherapy treatment after originally agreeing to provide the fiscal support for it, but indicated it would be willing to pay for assisted suicide instead. 
+Stephanie Packer, a wife and mother of four who was diagnosed with a terminal form of scleroderma, said her insurance company initially indicated it would pay for her to switch to a different chemotherapy drug at the recommendation of her doctors. 
+…But shortly after California’s End of Life Option Act, which authorizes physicians to diagnose a life-ending dose of medication to patients with a prognosis of six months or less to live, went into effect, Ms. Packer’s insurance company had a change of heart. 
+“And when the law was passed, it was a week later I received a letter in the mail saying they were going to deny coverage for the chemotherapy that we were asking for,” Ms. Packer said. 
+She said she called her insurance company to find out why her coverage had been denied. On the call, she also asked whether suicide pills were covered under her plan. 
+“And she says, ‘Yes, we do provide that to our patients, and you would only have to pay $1.20 for the medication,’” Ms. Packer said. 
+Packer attends meetings with others suffering from terminal illnesses. She indicates that the tone of those meetings have changed since the California assisted-suicide law was enacted. 
+“As soon as this law was passed – and you see it everywhere, when these laws are passed – patients fighting for a longer life end up getting denied treatment, because this will always be the cheapest option.” 
+Packer attends a support group for terminally ill patients. She said legally sanctioned suicide has changed the tone of the meetings, which used to be “positive and encouraging.” With patients under new societal pressure to kill themselves, she said meetings “became negative, and it started consuming people. And then they said, ‘You know what? I wish I could just end it.’” 
+Concerned about the enormous potential for abuse, a the national organization, Patients Rights Action Fund, has created a website for patients like Packer. The online resource offers a place for patients, family members, concerned friends to report possible coercion, failure to identify depression or other patient mental health concerns, and complications that arise from the overdose prescription or other aspects of the assisted-suicide process. Were you or someone you know pressured to use assisted suicide, misleadingly known as ‘death with dignity’ or ‘aid in dying’? Did you or a loved one have a chronic, life-threatening illness and personal circumstances where you/they felt like suicide or assisted suicide was your only option? Did a doctor advise you or someone you know of a prognosis of 6 months or less that was wrong by months, years, or even decades? Were you or a loved one denied coverage for a life-sustaining treatment or medication by your HMO or insurance company? 
+During his Gettysburg Address describing the first 100 days in office if he is elected President, Donald Trump indicated he would work to replace Obamcare with health savings accounts, remove barriers to purchasing health insurance across state lines, allow states to manage Medicaid funds and speed up drug approval inside the Food and Drug Administration. 
+However, his election would be too late help many terminally-ill Californians who are now experiencing the unintended, but quite predictable, consequence of yet another feel good progressive policy.",FAKE
+10205,Comment on “I’m the Law Today N**ga” — Cop Fired After Using Social Media to Declare Her Racism by Albert Wesker,"I am a rock n roll nigger https://youtu.be/G8SoVfTVLrk Daniel W. McCullar 
+As a mix blood American, any time I hear someone in the black community use the N word in any way or form, I hear and see ignorance. When I hear someone outside the black community use it, I see nothing less than a disease spreading. It is a term that should be nothing less than unacceptable. No other racial group uses derogatory terminology to describe themselves. Using the excuse that you are taking control of it is a Bullshit Juvenile excuse. Jay 
+Thanks for the comment my nigga Guy 
+Although I am not hispanic, I understand the slang pretty well and have employed many over the years ! 
+You would be surprised at the what comes out of there mouths about, blacks and whites, including thouse who come from other Countries in South America, as well there feelings and attitudes of anyone they consider different in appearance ! 
+We as the white race, don’t have anywhere near the market cornered, as to racial predigest and racism in general. Just ask the Jews or Palestinians about that ! 
+We just understand it more from our own little perspective of the world around us, but it is prevalent all over no matter where you happen to be at or from ! Mr.864 
+She said the in N word on Facebook bet she don’t have the guts to say it in person further more for every white racist that call blacks N word that don’t offend us you wanna know y u don’t have to be black to be call a N word we as black people use it to insult our ancestors then we think it’s cool for whites to say it truth be told white people are Niggas also u wanna know why well look the word up and u will see we are not niggas we are negros nigga or niggas is jus another word for stupid dumb and ignorance so look at u now who the nigga now um damn shame for a fucked up world Guy 
+So what do you consider a white Honkey or Cracker to be ? Considering I was one who watched the original Archie Bunker and Gladys shows and thought they were great. I never liked Gov Wallace and thought what the cops did in Selma Alabama and Little Rock was just wrong ! I have always believed Mr King was right, while thinking that Sharpton and Jackson are in it just for the Money and political opportunities and believe the the BLM has done some good, but has been hijacked by out side influence, that sees political gain to be won, on the behalf of Hillary, who I think will absolutely destroy the intercity’s, by keeping herself and her kind in power, over the backs of African Americans and others, she deems deporables ! Mr.864 
+I’m not racist I’m jus stating facts why whites get mad when they came out with BLACK LIVES MATTERS . Then they say they are thugs an terrorist how so when whites rally up and sit at the store and everywhere else with a bunch of bikers but they tell the blacks oh they in a bike club shitting me half of them KKK if not all police is the biggest gang of America they get mad cause we sale drugs truth be told the police the one putting drugs on the streets we don’t own boats plans for that matter to go get drugs at the end of the day the world is jus fucked up period Mr.864 
+Further more fuck Jessie Jackson I’m from Greenville to he ain’t did shit for that community beside rebuild his old apt complex and added his name on where was he when the police killed my friend in fountain inn SC an took him back to the jail after the fact he was dam near dead then tried to say he hung himself where the justice for that Guy 
+Mr.864. Just about every Black Man, Woman and Child in N.& S. Carolina knows that, Justice lives in the bottom of every toilet in every jail, in just about every Southern State, in the South, that the white cracker shits in and calls it truth ! 
+Now we as the whites, have learned to refine the obvous racism that still exist, to the point of having a Black President to make it look legit for the world to see ! 
+What do you suppose President Putin see’s when he shakes hands with Obama, just a man or a black man ? 
+Personally I belive that racism is part of the our genetic make up, considering man has been making slaves for many thousands of years, out of all races, including white and black ! 
+I just don’t act upon my inherited prejudice, nor choose to pass it on to my children. 
+I think that is what makes the difference. Realizing it’s there, but choosing not to act on the difference, is what separates me from the others. Who, just make lip service to there ingrained predigest, while knowing full well, they don’t believe a word that comes out of there mouths ! 
+When I see you, I see a black man, who is just as frail or strong as i am, wanting the same as I do in life and just asking for the chance to work for it ! 
+If on the other hand, if you are a white or black thug or punk gang banger, it dosen’t matter, you will be treated as such ! Mr.864 
+You right I never said u was wrong one time we both are human we both have and opinion at the end u see things your way I see things my way I know u not racist u know I’m not racist but at the end of the day can u say u can live in a black community with u jus being the only white people in the neighborhood check this my home paid for own my land also tell me y a police sit by my yard asking me ? Bout the white guy in my yard and then start to as random? Do u think it’s right with out the proper cause Guy 
+No, I don’t think I want to live were you do, considering I am too damn old and set in my way’s to want to, besides I don’t think my wife is going to want to move quite yet ! My oldest son moved to Alaska a few years ago with his wife and dogs and they enjoy it a lot, both got good jobs and doing well, even bought a house on a acre of land, for about half of what you would pay for one around one here, in the San Francisco Bay Area. 
+Brentwood was once know as a red necked farming town of about 1100 people, when I was a kid growing up here. My family have been farming for generations. The hispanics were our hired labors living in labor camps, and the blacks were shown the City limit lines by the police ! 
+My Mom was considered progressive and we had a black nanny named Pearly, live with us for many years durring the summers, while Mom ran the ranch. I loved her much, she was a good woman, as wide as she was tall, would read to me and my sister, and made incredible apple pies. I first meet her when I was 2 living in Richmond CA, to when we moved here in the mid 50’s, into the house my Mom built, that I still live in today. Pearly’s children came to my sisters wedding. 
+Now, Brentwood is a City of 50.000, I don’t recognise it any longer, but it’s core is still farming. There are black families living on my street, in houses built where there were once orchards, and going to the schools I did. I have a family I would consider white trailer trash, living in the house next door, that once had garden tour buses come to see the yard and have tea parties ! 
+My attitude is, people are people. I really don’t give a damn who you are, be respectful of me and keep up your home and property to show your pride in ownership and you should expect the same from me ! We can be friends and neighbors, sharing a beer at a barbecue I throw on July 4th and at Christmas, and go fishing once in a while in my bass boat ! 
+As to the other thing you mentioned, I think about Cops being randomly nosey, asking about me because I was the white guy sitting in your yard in a all black neighborhood ? What fucking business is it of his ? If he asked me, I would politely tell him to go F off and then shut the hell up !f he pushed it, there would be complaints filed against him the next day and perhaps speeking to his Chief and maybe the City Counsel as well, depending on the situation ! It’s not a good idea to piss me off, cause I not only get mad, I get even too ! Mr.864 
+Get mad about what that’s childish to get mad cause we voice our opinion my dad married to a white women my uncle married to a white women Im white a women an u know what we bout to get married my neighbor are not bad I don’t stay in a violent neighborhood everyone stay on my road is family members at the end of the day I ask do u think the police was right for asking me ? In my yard I’m 33 I know right from wrong also Guy 
+I am a little confused, which is not hard to do. 
+I think you are asking me, if it was okay that, the cop’s who had stopped outside of your yard, ask you over, and question you about some white guy, who was in your yard, visiting with you ? Correct ? 
+If that is right ? then my answer is NO ! HELL NO !! Unless the guy is a known gangster with a rap sheet a mile long ! And even then, there are way’s and means for the Cop’s to go about there business to conduct there investigations, with out asking people about there’s. That’s why the Detectives make the big bucks, to covertly investigate, with out shooting off the alarm bells ! 
+For some local flat foot to come up to you on your own property, and start pumping you for information, with out any justifiable cause is against your Constatutional rights, illegal, immoral and he can go take a flying leap off a short bridge ! 
+I know it’s done all the time, and cops seem to have every excuse in the book to want to try it. 
+But my point is simply to smile at him, tell him to have a nice day and walk away, you don’t ow him a thing. If he still wants to push it, then tell him you don’t have to talk to him, unless your lawyer is present ! That will usually set them running ! 
+I see too many stories about people getting into all sorts of trouble, because they start flapping there gums, thinking they are cool, and just digging an even deeper hole for themselves to fall in. 
+Cop’s know from training, how to push our buttons, and rely on our own stupidity to sink our boat as the results ! Mr.864 
+Yes he did I was asking u do u think he was in the right Guy 
+Damn Dude ! I was afraid you were going to tell me that this actually happened to you !? 
+It totally freaks me, that it could and would, but dosen’t really surprise me anymore that it does, considering that many City’s had “Stop & Frisk” on the books untill only recently ! But supposedly it has been done away with, according to the Court’s recent rulings. Fat chance of that really happening. Cops will just come up with a new way of doing there thing of harassing people, for there :Fishing For A Crime” scene. 
+I am sorry that it has, and wish I could do something to stop it ! Knowing that, because of the color of my skin, is probably the only reason why it doesn’t or hasn’t to me ! Except when I was a kid living in Berkeley CA, then I got hassled by the cops quite a bit, because of the hair down to my butt, they all thought I was a drugged out hippy, which a lot of the time, was true. I got slammed around by them quite a bit, shot at and gassed a few times, then arrested and served time in jail and probation, for things that now are not considered a crime anymore ! For some of the crap I use to do and the people I ran with, I am lucky to be still breathing. 
+Unfortunately that is the times we all live in, and certainly it is unfair to you to be victimised because of it. I hope you filed a complant against this ass hole to seek retrabutin !! Mr.864 
+I understand that I’ve did things in my life I’m not happy bout can’t sleep at nite the nightmare i have I jus take it one day at a time and think God I’m still breathing truth be told I almost lost my life 5 times before I was 20 and the only thing slowed me down from the streets is my first son he’s 13 now my middle son 11 and my baby boy is 6 and I have a lil girl that jus turned 1 so I thank God a lot cause I have something to live for haven’t been to a club in 15yrs it feels good to be out the streets and doing some good for a change only thing I have did to make my life complete is going back to church but I’ll go when I’m ready but I do read the Bible so there for I don’t forget where I come from I respect u and don’t know u it’s actually good we had this chat everything u told me I took that inconsideration truly I thank u I don’t know everything but I don’t mind listen Mr.864 
+I stop dealing drugs a few yrs ago actually until I find a job that pays 14 a hr when my ma first found out she had cancer I use to make sure I would not go home unless I had 5000 a week in my pocket to help my ma with her medical bills and medicine she fought that cancer for 10yrs right before she died 6 yrs ago I promise her I wouldn’t sale anymore and that was a promise I keep 20,000 at the end of the month I had to put in a lot of blood and tears for what I did and my ma was not proud of the blood money I was bringing into the home but when she seen what I was actually doing with my money I think she respect me to a certain degree and i accepted that sometimes she would accept nothing from me I’ve been locked up 8 times and started dealing weed,coke,guns,pills at the age of 12 honestly my ma use to beat me when she found out but I never stopped I caught my first charge at 21 by the time I was 25 I had did everything I could possibly do I think I had a good run in life I never had my father after the fact he was a big time drug dealer and him and ma got a divorce and he got on his on product and lost everything he been sober for 18 yrs he doing good but I never hated him for what he did in life actually it made me stronger I had a step dad but only he was good for is taking me fishing far talking to bout men things he did cause he didn’t know how to cause he had 6 girls but at the end of the day he raised me from the time I was 6 until he passed he was good man in his own ways and till this day I thank God for each parent I had in my life with No regrets I jus wish the world become a better place Guy 
+Hey ! At least you are still alive, and hopefully clean and sober, with a family that loves you ! That, is a lot more than some of the people you knew when, you were running the streets, i’ll bet. Consider yourself Mr.864 to be blessed ! 
+Never a father figure in my life, just a strong willed, old fashioned, no nonsense Mom, who drove her father into Oakland from Brentwood everyday at the age of 13 in 1924. She introduced me to the YMCA in Oakland when I was 13. Took a lot of backpacking trips with them, to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, to visit the Havasupai Indians that lived there, hiked all over California Montana, Yellowstone, Yosemite and Europe. Backpacking and hiking, should be a mandatory class in H.S., especially to inter-city kids, who never get out and see the real world, except concrete pavement and maybe a city park ! 
+I understand why you did, what you did, you will receive no condemnation from me for it ! Some of the people I ran with were totally vicious animals to the point of, wondering if they were at all human or not ! Hell’s Angels, and there bud’s, were some I knew and partied with, in the late 60’s while living on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley, even ran into some original Black Panthers along the way, now thouse guys were freaky and strange, always talking about revolution and wanting to blow white people up ! 
+What saved me was, getting the hell out of there, moving to a small town in the mountains, finishing my college education there, later meeting a good woman, who put up with my Bs and marrying her, we have been together 43 years, produced two fine son’s, that are a joy to us. I became a small business man as owner, operator of a landscape contracting company for 35 years, first working for retail and wholesale nurseries and other landscape companies to gain experience. Never went into farming with the family, my brother was the one who did that with my Mom, my sister has her life with her husband 40 years. But to say, I was born with dirt under my fingernails and will probably die that way, is close to the truth, sometimes I rather talk to plants than people, because it’s easer that way, and they don’t give me grief like people do. 
+Hey ! If you want to shoot me an email sometime, I am not against it. I can be reached at [email protected] After all, this is a open and public forum, and maybe you are not all that comfortable as the result. Suit yourself. Mr.864 
+I’m still alive cause god showed me away.where I didn’t have to hold people for ransom or in a drug trade shoot out all the time he made me realize I was only making memories in the streets.but I’ll never think I’ll live to tell a lot of people who didn’t know me my life style jus feel like before some of the White’s judge us blacks they should actually look at the community we lived in if we lived in a drug neighborhood it wasn’t by choice that’s for damn sure we adapted to the fine cars clothes and everything that came with it only thing about it a small price came with also Guy 
+Good to hear. Now what are you doing ? Mr.864 
+Doing father dutys Guy 
+So what ‘s that for you ? What line of work are you in, how many rug rats you got running around, your wife work or is she a stay at home mom ? What’s the town or City like you live in ! Got any hobbies, or are you sports nut’s 
+Just curious, is all, sure it’s none of my busies and mean no offence or none taken, if you don’t want to talk. Guy 
+I hope your education dose not reflect the way you write. But if it dose, god help us all, because you are the next generation and inheritors of what has been left, to you, so you can build onto it for the, betterment of the future generations ( your children and there children’s children ) to come ! Mr.864 
+As long as I graduated from high school I’m happy long as my job allow me to bring him 15 to 1600 every two weeks I’m happy my education ain’t got nothing to with how I shorten my word like everyone else in life I be willing to bet I go to a interview and talk jus like the white people and come out with a job didn’t know education had to do with the problems thats going on in the world all my kids straight A students what about your kids are they me speaking my thoughts and opinions don’t have nothing do with how I write I’m not in school anymore I feel I shouldn’t have to prove shit to no one but my self and my kids Guy 
+Of course you are a proud father and well you should be. Don’t we all as parents, want and expect our children to be better than we were ? I think that is only natural. 
+My son’s both graduated from Collage and are set in there lives, both in there early 30’s, one married and living in Alaska working as a City Planner and the other is still here at home, finishing up his education. Cheaper that way. 
+There mother and I din’t get past a two year community collage degree, with me going into business as a landscape contractor 35 years. 
+You are right, your education has nothing to do with any of the crap that occurring. You don’t have anything to prove to me and your thoughts and opinions are just that, Your’s alone, and who the hell am I to criticise !? 
+Mr.864. You talk the way you want and feel comfortable in, and i will just listen and offer commentary once in awhile, if it’s okay with you. Mr.864 
+I like listening to older people it makes me more wiser an not dumb like some American u only have wisdom from being wise Hugh Culliton 
+Call me pre-millennial, but I find it baffling that anyone, regardless of where they think it’ll go, would lack the judgement to realize that creating a permanent record of such potentially personally damaging actions IS A TERRIBLY STUPID THING TO DO? 
+In addition to unprofessional conduct, she should also have been fired for such criminal idiocy. Guy 
+I don’t agree at all ! Or, perhaps it comes from your firm belief that, you have never done something dumb, rash or saying something that would be considered even remotely offencive, by someone else ? Hmmm ! Hugh Culliton 
+On the contrary – it’s precisely BECAUSE I know that I’ve done and said dumb things, and that the recording of such things makes them vulnerable to being hacked, that I find it baffling that one would want such personal – and completely normal – incidents of lack of judgement permanently recorded on-line. 
+We live in the world of total on-line, or even on-networked-computer collection of data. As a high school teacher, I deal with this every time I teach teens internet safety. That’s why I see it as being a generational trend by people who’ve grown up with their entire lives on line. Such an environment means that, while on the up-side, we can out trolls, racist LEOs and nasty pedophiles, it also means that everyone need to be very, very careful with all data and information they store on-line. 
+However, in this case we have someone – not acting as a private citizen – but as a uniformed representative of the state – in a time of very tense relations between law enforcement and the public, taking personal images of a highly offensive nature. Mistake or not – it’s out there, and this action still betrays a serious lack of the judgement expected from a law enforcement officer. Guy 
+She, and everyone else who speaks in public ! 
+Trump has been made keenly aware of that fact, as the results of what he said 20 yrs ago, is now coming back to bite him, as well Clinton ! 
+Thank’s for taking the time to further explain your point, and now that you have. I tend to agree with you, although I still believe that the treatment to this young and naive lady, was harsh ! 
+But considering she works in a public tax supported office, it’s to be expected. To bad she din’t have the common sense to see it ! Hill Billy",FAKE
+3500,"Suicide Blast at Park Leaves More Than 50 Dead in Lahore, Pakistan","Not even a week after coordinated attacks in Brussels, Belgium, killed 31 civilians, and barely 24 hours after an ISIS attack in Iraq that killed 25, another tragedy: a blast in Lahore, Pakistan, has taken the lives of at least 56 adults and children, with the approximate death toll still rising.
+
+A single suicide bomber’s explosion rocked Gulshan-e-Iqbal park in Lahore on Sunday. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Punjab province health advisor Khawaja Salman Rafique provided a statement estimating that approximately 200 more were injured in the blast, many of them families enjoying a peaceful day at the park in the heart of the city. According to local police chief Haider Ashraf, the bomber detonated near the section of the park containing children’s amusement park rides. Pakistani prime minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif has already expressed his deepest remorse for the victims and those affected, firmly condemning those responsible for the attack.
+
+In a statement, the White House decried “this cowardly act in what has long been a scenic and placid park,” and pledged to “continue working with our partners in Pakistan and across the region, as together we will be unyielding in our efforts to root out the scourge of terrorism.”
+
+Narendra Modi, the prime minister of neighboring India, also condemned the attack.
+
+The second-largest city in Pakistan, Lahore has long been considered the cultural capital of the turbulent nation. The placement of this attack, especially considering the environment of family fun and repose that the park afforded, sends a clear message of terror.
+
+This is a breaking news story. We’ll be adding new information as it becomes available.",REAL
+6993,Uncollected Pallet Wondering What It Did Wrong,"0 Add Comment 
+A NEGLECTED wooden pallet is said to be suffering from severe self esteem issues after it failed to be selected for a nearby bonfire by local youths, WWN understands. 
+The pallet, left unattended for weeks behind a Lidl was not one of 70 pallets chosen to form part of a structurally suspect bonfire pile on a field in the Waterford area of Europe, prompting the pallet to spiral into an existential spiral which saw it question its own self worth. 
+“I don’t know what I did wrong, but… I’m obviously hideous,” the pallet shared, which until last month had a family of 400 cans of Polish beer living on top of it. 
+“You see the lads coming, pulling shapes and you think finally, I’ll feel special, feel wanted, but they never chose me. I just wanted to be doused in petrol and consumed by a raging hot fire, like any other of my kind,” added the pallet, who admitted at least a third of him was moderately soggy after being discarded in a puddle. 
+“Ugh, what’s the point anymore, it’s going to rain so much between now and next Halloween, I’ll be rotten and unlovable by then,” the pallet concluded, full of anguish. 
+There is some hope for the pallet, however, as a local hipster restaurant which has just opened in the city needs something to serve its food on that isn’t a plate.",FAKE
+6489,Starbucks ‘Unity’ Cup Draws Criticism - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Cleveland Indians Worried Team Cursed After Building Franchise On Old Native American Stereotype CLEVELAND—Having watched in horror as their team crumbled after a 3-1 World Series lead, members of the Cleveland Indians expressed concern Thursday that the organization has been cursed for building their franchise on an incredibly old Native American stereotype. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Nurse Reminds Elderly Man She’s Just Down The Hall If He Starts To Die DES PLAINES, IL—Assuring him that she’d be at his side in a jiffy, local nurse Wendy Kaufman reminded an elderly resident at the Briarwood Assisted Living Community that she was just down the hall if he started to die, sources reported Tuesday. ",FAKE
+1892,Why Carly Fiorina is on a media blitz,"Washington (CNN) A central theme of Carly Fiorina's nascent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is that she is uniquely positioned to neutralize the historic potential of Hillary Clinton's 2016 bid.
+
+But first, she has to introduce herself to voters, who in large part don't know who she is.
+
+On the day she announced her candidacy, Fiorina sat for two interviews with ABC's ""Good Morning America"" in New York. Then she hopped on a phone for a mid-morning press call with 65 journalists. After lunch, she was off to Yahoo News' studio for a live sit-down with anchor Katie Couric, followed by a question-and-answer session using the live-streaming app Periscope. That evening, she joined Megyn Kelly on Fox News.
+
+The next day was no different: Fiorina navigated eight interviews, including Glenn Beck's radio show, CNN and ""The Late Show with Seth Meyers."" Seven more interviews were scheduled Wednesday, followed by five press availabilities over the weekend in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
+
+Fiorina's exhaustive schedule is emblematic of candidates who enter the race without a lick of national name ID. For a candidate whose name barely registers in CNN/ORC polls conducted regularly since November , Fiorina — and upstart candidates like her -- must rely on the media's megaphone to get her name heard. Even better-known contenders like Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida, did a media blitz after announcing their presidential bids.
+
+""Candidates with lower name identification must jump at virtually every opportunity to garner media coverage,"" said Republican political consultant Ellen Carmichael, who managed press outreach for Herman Cain's presidential campaign in 2011, a candidate who started out virtually unknown. ""For some, this means creating their own news by saying things the media deems controversial. For others, it means answering every media inquiry and agreeing to every interview that comes your way. More established candidates, however, have the luxury of passing on requests.""
+
+That's one luxury that Clinton is enjoying.
+
+Since her presidential campaign announcement on April 12, Clinton has not held a formal press conference. While on the campaign trail, she has responded — reluctantly at times -- to roughly eight questions from journalists.
+
+Even that count is a charitable one, given that some responses have been little more than short exclamations, such as, ""I'm having a great time, can't look forward any more than I am,"" which she said in response to a question about her strategy in Iowa. When a reporter in New Hampshire asked about her next stop on the campaign trail, she merely said, ""Oh, onward.""
+
+Clinton has been so reclusive in the first weeks of her candidacy that the New York Times started publishing questions their reporters would have asked her that day on the campaign trail if they had had the chance.
+
+At this early stage in the race, Clinton doesn't need to rely on the media to reach her core supporters. She has a Twitter feed with 3.47 million followers and a new Facebook page that has grown to 800,000 online supporters since her announcement in April. This week her campaign launched a web series called, "" The Briefing ,"" which it intends to use to combat what they consider unfriendly media coverage.
+
+It would be hard to see how any other candidate could take such a brazen go-it-alone approach.
+
+Of course, Clinton's absence from media interviews does not come without consequence.
+
+This is one of the few instances in which die-hard liberal Sanders and conservative Fiorina are in the same boat: The CNN/ORC poll in April found that just 5% of Democratic voters would consider supporting Sanders, compared to 69% for Clinton.
+
+As the campaign progresses, Clinton will become more available for press questions, Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson told CNN. But as the frontrunner 19 months until the general election, her campaign strategists know that journalists will still continue to cover her regardless of whether she answers questions.
+
+Her lesser-known opponents—on both sides of the aisle—don't have that benefit.",REAL
+405,Top Democratic economists don't think much of Bernienomics. He doesn’t care.,"Four former top economists in Democratic administrations signed a letter taking Bernie Sanders's campaign to task for touting a document by University of Massachusetts economist Gerald Friedman that purports to show that Sanders's policies would boost the American growth rate to more than 5 percent.
+
+Alan Krueger, Austan Goolsbee, Christina Romer, and Laura D'Andrea Tyson all served at one time or another as chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers under either Barack Obama or Bill Clinton; their letter isn't signed by three other CEA chairs from Clinton's tenure: Janet Yellen (who's busy running the Fed), Joseph Stiglitz (who's well to the left of this group), and Martin Baily (who tells me he didn't know anything about it).
+
+The letter cites Friedman's assumption that the economy would grow by 5.3 percent under Sanders, and comments, ""No credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes."" Further, the economists argue that making this kind of claim undermines ""our party’s best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic.""
+
+Somewhat ironically, this group of empirically minded wonks doesn't actually offer an empirical critique of the study they are worried about — relying simply on their authority as Democratic Party luminaries to bat it down.
+
+This controversy is, on one level, almost totally meaningless. No president in any era operating under any set of circumstances has managed to pass a complete legislative agenda, and the combination of partisan polarization, an entrenched House GOP majority, and the extremely ambitious nature of Sanders's agenda makes it totally inconceivable that a Sanders administration would pass all of its policy proposals.
+
+Asking what would happen if the entire Sanders agenda is enacted is a little like asking what would happen if Sanders brought his mid-range game to the Golden State Warriors. To the extent that anyone is backing Sanders because they have read Friedman's paper, the fact that none of this is going to happen is a bigger problem than any questions about Friedman's forecasts.
+
+However, on another level, the Friedman paper and the attacks on it from Democratic Party wonks are an interesting window into how the primary is playing out behind the scenes. Clinton has achieved such overwhelming party insider support that the Sanders campaign is largely cut off from access to the kind of para-party policy wonk universe that would allow Sanders to release campaign proposals that pass muster by the traditional rules of the game.
+
+But he's managed to make a virtue out of this weakness and harness it to the larger significance of the Sanders project — an effort to turn the Democratic Party into a more ideological party that operates more like a progressive mirror image of the conservative Republican Party and less of a broad coalition of interest groups mediated by technocrats.
+
+The headline conclusion of Friedman's paper is that under Bernienomics, ""the growth rate of the real gross domestic product will rise from 2.1% per annum to 5.3% so that real GDP per capita will be over $20,000 higher in 2026 than is projected under the current policy.""
+
+That is a very high rate of growth.
+
+When Jeb Bush promised 4 percent growth, centrist-to-liberal economists were derisive, and even the most Jeb-friendly economists wouldn't quite endorse the claim. Friedman is promising even more than that, and the CEA letter reflects a similar level of skepticism.
+
+I asked Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, one of the more left-wing and Sanders-friendly economists in the Washington policy world, what he thought of the 5.3 percent target. He, in the nicest possible way, suggested it is unrealistic:
+
+Obviously opinions differ considerably about the merits of various aspects of Sanders's agenda. But it's on these questions of slack, full employment, and labor force growth where Friedman departs most clearly from the economic consensus.
+
+Consider this chart, laying out Friedman's view of how Bernienomics will impact the employment rate, or the share of the adult population that has a job:
+
+Reasonable people can (and will) disagree about how Sanders's plans would impact the labor market. But virtually every expert I've ever discussed this with believes that one reason the employment rate has declined since 1999 is that old people are a larger share of the population today than they were 17 years ago. The main reason the CBO expects the employment rate to fall in the future is that this aging process is set to continue. This means the ""full employment"" level of employment is simply lower than it was in the past.
+
+Friedman, by contrast, appears to believe that the full employment level is right where it was in the waning days of the Clinton administration, and that with good policy we can get back there.
+
+Friedman does not, however, discuss the demographic change issue at all in his paper. Instead, in a footnote he argues that ""women’s employment will be encouraged by the Paycheck Fairness Act, which will raise the wages of women, encouraging more to seek paid employment."" No empirical evidence is offered that such a modest piece of legislation will have an impact this large, nor is much made of the fact that a large share of the growth benefit of the Sanders agenda is being attributed to this consensus Democratic policy, rather than to his more unusual positions.
+
+Conversely, some of Sanders's more distinctive signature ideas would almost certainly depress labor force participation even in a sympathetic view.
+
+For example, if you made college free, some young people who would otherwise work full time would instead go to school and work part time. Some students who currently work part time would reduce their hours or cut back to zero. A proponent of free college would likely describe these as benefits of the free college universe — and certainly foreign countries where college is much cheaper than the United States see fewer school-age people in the labor force.
+
+By the same token, Sanders's ""Medicare for all"" and expanded Social Security plans would almost certainly increase the number of people who retire early. Free health care would make it easier to be retired for a year or five before Social Security benefits kick in, more generous Social Security would reduce the amount of intact savings people need once the benefits do kick in, and the higher taxes to finance the Medicare-for-all plan would make working slightly less lucrative.
+
+None of that is necessarily a bad thing — reducing old people's need to toil is a very nice idea — but, like free college, it tends to cut against Friedman's view that Bernienomics will create a surge of employment.
+
+It's noteworthy that the former CEA chairs criticizing Friedman didn't bother to run through a detailed explanation of their problems with the paper. To them, the 5.3 percent figure was simply absurd on its face, and it was good enough for them to say so, relying on their authority to generate media coverage.
+
+And to an extent, mission accomplished. The coverage has been generated. But for better or for worse, the entire premise of the Sanders campaign is that the existing Democratic Party establishment needs to be overthrown, so imperious dismissals by establishment figures don't really hurt Sanders. His policy director, Warren Gunnels, told Danielle Kurtzleben that the economists in question are ""the establishment of the establishment"" and claimed to be unbothered by the criticisms.
+
+""That does not bother us at all,"" he told her. ""What bothers us is the fact that the U.S. has more kids living in poverty than nearly any major country on earth.""
+
+Bernie sympathizers like the Week's Ryan Cooper and veteran left-wing political operative Jeff Hauser simply view the letter signers as non-credible, referring to an old Goolsbee column and to Tyson's service on corporate boards.
+
+To Sanders skeptics, this style of response is itself worrying. Paul Krugman, for example, wrote about the letter and said, ""If your response to these concerns is that they’re all corrupt, all looking for jobs with Hillary, you are very much part of the problem.""
+
+The dismissals of the critiques of Friedman's praise for Sanders's plan are, in a way, more telling and informative than either the Friedman paper or the critiques of it. Sanders and his core constituency simply don't care.
+
+Sanders is running a style of campaign that's very unusual for a prominent Democrat but extremely common for a Republican. Marco Rubio, for example, has proposed a large tax cut, a balanced budget amendment, an increase in defense spending, and to prevent any cuts in Social Security or Medicare for people currently at or near retirement.
+
+This is, obviously, not possible, but it hasn't been a problem for Rubio in the GOP primary because the 2016 GOP primary — like the 2012, 2008, 2000, 1996, and 1988 primaries — haven't been about who has the best policy plans. It is about how conservative ideology should be defined and — among those who share a similar definition — who is its most effective champion. The 1980 and 1976 GOP primaries were about whether the Republican Party should be a vehicle of the conservative movement or whether it should continue in the Eisenhower/Nixon/Ford model of right-leaning interest group brokerage — with the conservatives winning in 1980 and never letting go.
+
+Democrats for almost all of this time have not defined themselves as a mirror image of the conservative GOP. Instead, they are a left-leaning coalition of interest groups looking for group wins that tends to downplay ideology. This is why, historically, evaluating ""plans"" has been a very important part of Democratic politics.
+
+Sanders's campaign against Hillary Clinton is more like Ronald Reagan's battle with Gerald Ford than like the Obama-Clinton primary of 2008. As part of his political revolution, Sanders wants to change the Democratic Party (which he historically was not even a member of) into a much more ideological political party. Consequently, for Sanders the point of taking policy positions is much more about showing where he stands and who his friends and enemies are than it is about the details of policymaking. What he would actually do as president, after all, is going to be constrained by political realities and his ability to mobilize the public
+
+To Sanders's critics, of course, this is just gross irresponsibility that neglects the best traditions of the Democratic Party and raises serious questions about Sanders's ability to do serious policy analysis when the time comes to make choices. But to his fans, fetishizing wonky details is just a way of circumscribing policy proposals to what can be uncontroversially modeled in a world where obtaining and deploying concrete political power — not drawing up more and better white papers — is the crucial task for progressive politics.",REAL
+7252,How To Repair Strained Or Broken Relationships,"A subject not often discussed is the topic of how to repair strained or broken relationships. It is one that comes up in everyone’s life, so it will be useful to make a few suggestions about it here. We will talk about relationships from friends, family, and lovers.
+Relationships among friends we will treat first. The first step in this process is to make an evaluation to determine whether the relationship is worth saving or rehabilitating. It is a simple fact of life that some relationships have an expiration date; when two people no longer have anything in common, or their paths take them in divergent directions, it may be difficult to find common ground. In this situation, it is always better to let the relationship die a natural death slowly, rather than rapidly. Abrupt terminations may leave the other party with negative feelings, and this should be avoided if at all possible.
+There are some instances where repair is not possible. When someone has committed a fundamental violation of trust or respect, this is a warning sign that the person was never a friend in the first place. Another point to keep in mind is that repair of a broken relationship requires—no, demands—the participation of both parties. If the other person is unwilling to participate in the process, then your efforts will be futile, and will come to nothing.
+
+Once we have determined that the friendship is worth repairing or sustaining, the next step is to decide how to make the first approach to the other party. In this we must try to evaluate the reasons for the problems in the first place. We should make an honest assessment about how things got to where they are. Did someone say or do something that caused hard feelings on the other side? Was there some intervening cause that made the two parties diverge in plans and activities? These types of questions must be honestly and repeatedly asked. We have a tendency to minimize our own hurtful actions and exaggerate those of others, and this must be kept in mind.
+The key rule at this point is to try to put ourselves in the shoes of the other party. We must try to see things from our friend’s perspective. For many people this can be difficult, as it involves getting past our own feelings of hurt or rejection and into the shoes of the other person. And yet it is essential. Very frequently the reasons for strained or broken friendships lies in the fact that there is some problem going on in the other person’s life. Only by being a perceptive student of human nature can we divine the cause. Sometimes the only thing that caused the strained relationship was some misunderstanding that was easily curable.
+Keep in mind that we must try—at least in our own minds—to discover the source of the other person’s problem. This is not always possible, as human beings are not always rational. But we can at least make the effort. I remember in the film Hoffa that there was a great line from Jack Nicholson. He told one of his men, “Real problems, real grievances can be resolved. They can be negotiated. But imaginary grievances? That man is going to hate you for life.” I have no idea if Jimmy Hoffa every actually said this, but it sounds like something he would have said. He meant that we should avoid hurting the pride of our friends. We should be acutely aware how it is sometimes the intangible slights that can most rankle with a man.
+When you have decided to make the first step, it is always better to initiate contact directly. Do not wait for the other person to do it. Depending on the circumstances, this should be done discreetly and without too much in the way of overpowering insistence. There is a certain type of finesse that a man should have at critical times, and this is one of them. The approach should be direct, but neither insistent nor demanding. A fish is best hooked with a lure gently laid.
+Of vital importance here is that the approach be sincere. One should genuinely want to contact the other party. Sincerity is the glue that binds friendships together and permits their longevity. There should be no hypocrisy or falsity in any of our dealings with friends. This kind of thing is immediately apparent and, once detected, its whiff surrounds the offending party like a permanent cloud. If the other party is receptive to the approach, we can then gradually feel our way forward, taking care to avoid the reasons why the friendship became strained in the first place. Things may never quite go back to what they were, but at least we can find solid ground for a new frame of reference.
+Two examples will suffice here. The historian William Shirer worked closely with famed correspondent Edward R. Murrow when the two were in Germany in the 1930s. Yet after the war was over, the two grew apart. Shirer’s account of the estrangement suggests that he was repelled by Murrow’s enthusiastic adoption of the anticommunist hysteria of the time. Shirer found himself gradually blackballed from most major news networks before being forced out completely. He broke with Murrow over these events. Many decades later, he approached Murrow; all venom spent, the two were able to find common ground again.
+
+Another example makes the same point. Theodore Roosevelt was a strong-willed, insistent man, to say the least. He was in a position to choose his successor as president, and to this end he selected a man very different from him, the affable and rotund William Howard Taft. Taft eventually began to find Roosevelt an overbearing and unwelcome presence in his life. The two men eventually broke completely, a result of their personality differences and different conceptions of leadership. To his credit, Roosevelt eventually approached his old friend privately to patch things up. They were never the same, of course, but at least some cordiality was restored.
+Relationships with family are of a fundamentally different sort. Because we are linked by bonds of blood (or perhaps marriage), it will be more difficult to disentangle ourselves from those with whom we have become estranged. On the other hand, it may be easier to repair such grievances, or at least find common ground, since there may be more shared experiences with the other party that act in our favor. The key here is not to expect too much. Although shared history and common blood may work in our favor, they can be counterbalanced to some extent by the fact that irrational family antagonisms can run deeper than those from strained friendships. Patience and persistence are most important here, perhaps more so than friendships with those unrelated to us.
+
+Repairing strained relationships with lovers is perhaps the most difficult. When a man and woman have been united in the past through the coital act, an entirely different set of emotions and motivations come into play. Relationships between lovers can fail or become strained for an infinite number of reasons, and it would be impossible to discuss all of them here. It is enough for me to state my opinion that it is nearly impossible to bring an intimate sexual relationship back to what it was after it has been broken.
+Strained is one thing; broken is quite another. My own experience leads me to believe that once a sexual relationship is done, it is done. One cannot really go back to what it was before. Amicable dealings are certainly possible, and happen all the time; but I would not call this friendship. I would call it an uneasy equilibrium. Love’s inflammatory presence scorches all it leaves in its wake.
+Read More : 5 Proven Ways To Stop Obsessive Thoughts 
+",FAKE
+6404,#BREAKING: SECOND Assassination Attempt On Trump In NV; Suspect Detained (LIVE BLOG),"We Are Change 
+Donald Trump on Saturday was quickly ushered off the stage by Secret Service agents in the middle of a campaign speech in Nevada after an incident in the crowd near the front of the stage.
+Secret Service rushes Trump off stage at Reno rally https://t.co/n82d9jXopX 
+— Chrissy (@omgitsmechrissy) November 6, 2016 
+Video shows that Trump was in the middle of his speech when the incident occurred. He was looking into the crowd, his hand over his eyes to block the glare from the stage lights, when Secret Service agents grabbed him and escorted him off the stage. Trump ducked his head as he left the stage. The crowd panicked with frightened looks on their faces, as the Secret Service and police tactical units rushed in to quickly arrest the man. Video on twitter shows the moment that the Secret Service and law enforcement took down the man. Got footage of man who was detained by police and Secret Service after @realDonaldTrump was rushed off stage by USSS agents pic.twitter.com/FVEieSYj5w 
+— Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) November 6, 2016 
+Early unconfirmed reports suggest a man was armed in the crowd according to some witnesses. One witness said that they were in the crowd when an unknown guy creeped toward the stage staring at Trump. The witness then proceeded to get the attention of four bigger guys surrounding them and confronted the man. The man then freaked out and reached into his pocket to grab what looked like a gun.” According to the witness the man was mumbling about “the delegates.” “ I was in the crowd, me and my dad saw a guy creeping toward the stage staring at trump. i got the attention of 4 big guys around me and we confronted him and when we did he spurged out and reached into his pocket to grab what looked like a gun. when we tackled him to the ground and between punches he kept saying something about “the delegates”? he must have the delegates. sorry i’m pretty shaken up right now. “ With one person in the crowd shouting “he’s got a gun.” The man was then detained by police officers, Secret Service agents and SWAT armed with assault rifles and taken to a side room for questioning. The suspect is seen below. Trump returned to the stage minutes later and proceeded to continue his speech before thanking the Secret Service and police. “Nobody said it was going to be easy for us, but we will never be stopped. We will never be stopped. I want to thank the Secret Service. These guys are fantastic.” 
+~Donald Trump, said.
+Luke breaks down the details in the video below of the attempted assassination of the anti-establishment candidate Donald Trump.
+It’s worth noting that the last Trump assassination attempt also occurred in Nevada when Michael Sandford a British citizen attempted to grab a police officer’s gun and shoot Donald Trump a few weeks ago.
+Julian Assange was right when he said earlier today to John Pilger that “anti-establishment Trump Wouldn’t Be Allowed To Win.” Although Julian just missed how he would be stopped.
+(THIS IS A DEVELOPING STORY AND WILL BE UPDATED AS NEW DETAILS BECOME AVAILABLE.) The post #BREAKING: SECOND Assassination Attempt On Trump In NV; Suspect Detained (LIVE BLOG) appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+2214,"If Congress rejects nuclear deal, would US be the pariah? (+video)","After 9/11, George W. Bush favored isolation and military action over diplomacy – an approach that didn't win over other countries. Now, the US could again find itself on the outs with others if it rejects the Iran nuclear deal.
+
+Chairman Sen. Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee (r.) listens as Secretary of State John Kerry (l. foreground) testifies at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Thursday, July 23, 2015, to review the Iran nuclear agreement.
+
+After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush played down diplomacy in favor of isolation and military action – unilateral American action if necessary – for dealing with rogue states like Iraq and Iran.
+
+The approach never won the broad support of global powers, instead leaving the United States essentially isolated and criticized, rather than supported, as it sought to address the regime of Saddam Hussein. When Mr. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, America was left to largely go it alone.
+
+More than a decade later, the US could once again find itself on the outs with the rest of the world if, after years of painstaking negotiations with other world powers, it ends up rejecting the Iran nuclear deal, some foreign policy experts say.
+
+“After the invasion of Iraq, the United States became the issue in international relations,” says Robert Litwak, director of international security studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “If the US rejects this agreement – after its acceptance elsewhere as a fair deal – the US, not Iran, will become the issue again.”
+
+The potential for America to find itself isolated again over a crucial international security issue could have a deep impact among the US public. Americans’ dislike for being the odd man out in international affairs is seen in polls consistently showing a preference for US-led diplomacy over go-it-alone military intervention. That may help explain why opponents of the Iran deal emphasize that they want “a better deal” with Iran, not no deal at all.
+
+Obama administration officials have seized on the isolation argument, backed by signs that the other powers involved in the negotiations – three European powers, Russia, and China – are already moving forward with Iran based on an assumption that the nuclear deal is done and sanctions on Iran will start to be lifted by the fall. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was in Tehran last week, and European businesses are flooding into Iran to secure a slice of the anticipated boom as the government starts spending in big-ticket projects again.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry has been quick to issue warnings about the threat of America’s isolation, arguing within days of the deal’s signing in Vienna July 14 that if Congress were to vote down the deal, “Our friends in this effort will desert us.”
+
+The rest of the international community would blame the deal’s failure on the US, Secretary Kerry says. Other powers would lift their sanctions, and Iran, freed from both sanctions and constraints on its nuclear program, would ramp up its uranium enrichment – raising again the specter of military action to halt Iran’s nuclear progress.
+
+“We will be viewed as having killed the opportunity to stop [the Iranians] from having weapons,” Kerry said in remarks aired on CBS’s “Face the Nation” July 19. Iran, he added, “will begin to enrich again, and the greater likelihood is what [President Obama] said the other day – you will have a war.”
+
+It is this argument – that either Congress approves the deal or it condemns the US to fighting on its own a war with Iran – that has irked some in Congress.
+
+“You have turned Iran from being a pariah into now Congress, Congress being a pariah,” Sen. Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Kerry when he appeared before the committee last Thursday.
+
+Senator Corker noted in particular his dissatisfaction with what he said was the administration’s portrayal of a stark choice for Congress between the deal negotiated and a go-it-alone military intervention.
+
+“With every detail of the deal that was laid out [in classified briefings by senior administration officials to members of Congress], our witnesses successfully batted them away with the hyperbole that it’s either this deal or war,” he said.
+
+Some Middle East experts worry that rejection of the deal would leave the US and Israel isolated, both in the region and internationally. That is especially true as Gulf Arab states appear to be coming to a consensus of support for the deal – especially in light of the reinforced US strategic support that the Obama administration has been pledging to help counter a deal-emboldened Iran.
+
+America’s isolation in the wake of congressional rejection of the deal would be all the stronger, says Mr. Litwak of the Wilson Center, because it would appear to the rest of the world that the US was turning back to a post-9/11 faith in “regime change” as the only way to deal with rogue states.
+
+The prevailing thinking after 9/11 “was that behavior modification wouldn’t get you there – so you had to deal with [rogue states] through regime change,” he says.
+
+Mr. Obama shelved the “rogue state” concept for dealing with countries like Iran and instead framed it as an “outlier on international law,” Litwak says – an approach more to the liking of the international community.
+
+But critics of the deal say it is actually Obama who is exposing his belief in “regime change” – by promoting a deal that counts on the Iranian government’s transformation over the coming decade.
+
+“You can’t understand the nuclear deal with Iran without believing that in the decade ahead, there will be regime change in Tehran – although they [the deal’s proponents] call it regime transformation,” says Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.
+
+The “irony” that Mr. Dubowitz sees a decade after Bush’s “axis of evil” is that once again, it is “regime change” that the US would deploy to deal with Iran – although, he says, it’s in a form more palatable to the world.
+
+“It’s regime change, but in a sense it’s being flipped on its head,” Dubowitz says.
+
+“In the place of the right advocating force and coercion, you have the left saying, ‘Don’t worry about the details of this deal, because in 10 years’ time when some of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program are gone, it won’t matter,’ ” he says. “They really believe the deal will have set in motion a chain of events that will change the nature and behavior of this regime.”",REAL
+6490,Crushed: Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Smashed With Sledgehammer (VIDEO),"0 88 0 1 After running one of the most divisive presidential campaigns in US history, the Trump brand has taken a hit -- literally. 
+In 2007, Donald Trump was granted a coveted spot on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work on his reality show, “The Apprentice.” With limited real estate, the decision to enshrine reality stars on the sidewalk has always been controversial. 
+Trump’s star has become especially unwelcome. — MEFeater Magazine (@mefeater) October 26, 2016 
+In the early hours of Wednesday morning, a man dressed as a city worker used a sledgehammer and pickaxe to deface the presidential hopeful’s star, removing the brass star and scraping his name from the sidewalk. — Ol' QWERTY Bastard (@TheDiLLon1) October 26, 2016 
+According to Deadline , the vandal has been identified as Jamie Otis, who said he intended to remove the entire section of sidewalk in order to sell it at auction. Proceeds, he said, would go toward supporting the multiple women who have accused Trump of sexual assault. 
+The stars are maintained by the Hollywood Historic Trust, and the group has already said that the individual responsible will be prosecuted ""to the full extent of the law,"" and repairs are already underway. — Adelle Nazarian (@AdelleNaz) October 26, 2016 
+""The Hollywood Walk of Fame is an institution celebrating the positive contributions of the inductees,"" said Leron Gubler, head of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, according to Deadline. ""When people are unhappy with one of our honorees, we would hope that they would project their anger in more positive ways than to vandalize a California State landmark."" 
+If found guilty, the individual responsible could face up to three years in jail and a fine of $10,000. 
+The Trump star has been vandalized on a number of occasions since he began his presidential campaign. In January, a vandal spray-painted a reverse swastika over the star. — afterglow (@afterglow2046) October 26, 2016 
+Two similar incidents occurred over the summer. In June, a mute sign was spray-painted over the spot. One month later, a street artist erected a miniaturized wall around the star, a reference to the Republican candidate’s proposal to construct a barrier along the US-Mexico border. 
+Of course, given that his divisive rhetoric on the campaign trail appears to be affecting his brand, Trump may soon start defacing his own properties. Amid rumors that the billionaire is removing the Trump name from his hotels, the Trump organization has announced plans to launch a new brand under the less identifiable name ""Scion."" ...",FAKE
+5019,Trump Reboot? Business Mogul Vows to 'Jumpstart' US Economy,"Hillary Clinton is firing back at Donald Trump after he announced his new tax plan Monday and promised that the United States would reach amazing new heights under his presidency.
+
+The GOP nominee was on his best behavior during his latest campaign stop, managing to stay on topic and never lose his cool despite interruptions by protesters.
+
+Speaking at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump laid out his plans for America's economy.
+
+""We will make America grow again. I want to jump-start America and it can be done and it won't even be that hard,"" he vowed.
+
+Among his ideas were the following proposals:
+
+Trump also took some time to slam Clinton's economic plans, saying she punished Americans for working and doing business in the United States.
+
+Clinton wasted no time firing back, calling Trump's plans a re-packaging of old Republican ideas.
+
+""Today in Detroit he's got, I don't know, a dozen or so economic advisers he just named. Hedge fund guys, billionaire guys, six guys named Steve,"" Clinton told supporters at a campaign rally in Kissimmee, Florida. ""They wrote him a speech and he delivered it in Detroit. They tried to make his old, tired ideas sound new.""
+
+She said that, unlike Trump, she would be a ""small business president"" and create jobs.
+
+""If Trump were able to implement what he's proposing, heaven forbid, it would cost three and a half million jobs. He would actually reduce jobs,"" she warned.
+
+Meanwhile, the latest round of national polls show Clinton leading her GOP rival by double digits.
+
+But Trump's hour-long speech on a key issue - the economy - could be another sign that the Republican candidate is ready to begin working with the GOP to get his campaign back on track.",REAL
+3576,Top Iranian nuke negotiator ordered to stop screaming at Kerry,"Iran's foreign minister and lead negotiator in nuclear talks with the United States has been ordered by the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader to stop shouting and yelling at Secretary of State John Kerry during negotiating sessions.
+
+Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told his country's state controlled media in a recent interview that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has instructed him to stop yelling at Kerry and other top U.S. officials during the talks.
+
+Reports about Zarif's temper first emerged in the Iranian press last November, when the United States and Iran agreed to extend talks through June of this year.
+
+Zarif is said to ""frequently shout at Western diplomats"" with such force that bodyguards have been forced to enter the negotiation room.
+
+During one incident described by Iranian officials to the press, European Union Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton, a chief western negotiator, admitted that Zarif had been shouting, and she had gotten used to it.
+
+Abbas Araqchi, an Iranian diplomat who is also a member of the negotiating team, is reported to have said in an interview that during past negotiations in Geneva, Zarif ""shouted"" at Kerry and spoke to him in a manner ""unprecedented"" in the history of U.S. diplomacy.
+
+Zarif appeared to cop to this behavior during a recent interview with the state-controlled Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), according to an independent translation of the report provided to the Washington Free Beacon.
+
+Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon.",REAL
+3762,Calm Envelopes Baltimore as Curfew Begins,"Baltimore leaders say the first night of the city's seven-day curfew effectively worked to calm the violence that erupted only 24 hours earlier.
+
+     
+
+They're now hoping it's a sign of things returning to normal as schools in the city re-open their doors. But they admit there is still much work to be done to repair buildings ruined in the riots -- and to fix people's heartbreak.      
+
+     
+
+On Tuesday, Baltimore residents locked arms to join forces with more than a thousand police officers and 2,000 National Guardsmen to enact the first night of the city's 10 p.m. curfew. 
+
+    
+
+Some defiant demonstrators refused to leave. But that resistance lasted only about 30 minutes, until officers fired flash bangs and tossed smoke canisters.
+
+""I think the biggest thing is that citizens are safe; the city is stable,"" Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said. ""We hope to maintain it that way.""
+
+Tuesday night was a far cry from Monday when rioters torched cars, tossed debris at police, and tore apart businesses.
+
+Officers only arrested 10 people Tuesday, compared to more than 200 on Monday.
+
+It's an image many Baltimore residents and church leaders spent their Tuesday trying to erase. They hit the streets to work together and clean.
+
+""We're all frustrated. We just need to find a better way to deal with this,"" Baltimore resident Alfonzo Timmons said.
+
+In the midst of Monday's chaos, one overwrought Baltimore mother was hailed a hero.
+
+     
+
+When Toya Graham spotted her teenage son on live television throwing rocks at police, the single mom marched down to the street and fought to drag him home -- giving him a severe talking to on the way.
+
+     
+
+She told reporters she didn't want to see her son lost to violence -- or police brutality -- like Freddy Gray, the young man whose death in police custody first sparked the protests only a week ago.
+
+    
+
+But some pointed out that Baltimore's problems are much older and deeper than that one death.    
+
+  
+
+""This has been going on a long time. This is not new and we should not pretend that it's new,"" President Barack Obama said.
+
+Repairing relations between people and police is going take time in this city. They now also have to find ways to rebuild businesses.
+
+""It breaks my heart because those of us who are from Baltimore know how hard we fought for those stores,"" Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.
+
+    
+
+Meanwhile, the Baltimore Orioles are playing an afternoon home game at Camden Yards.
+
+     
+
+But there is a twist. 
+
+     
+
+The game will be closed to the public. Only the players and the press will be allowed in the stadium, not fans.",REAL
+861,Protesters take to streets after Trump rally in California,"The crowd gathered in the streets outside the OC Fair & Event Center as Trump addressed several thousand supporters at the Center's amphitheater. At least one police car was damaged and several scuffles broke out amid the hectic scene.
+
+Protesters blocked a main intersection, impeding traffic, and officers with the Orange County Sheriff's Department and Costa Mesa Police Department worked to disperse the crowd, ordering protesters out of the streets.
+
+About 20 people were arrested, the Orange County Sheriff's Department tweeted late Thursday night after the protests had cleared.
+
+Lt. Mark Stichter, the Sheriff's Department's public information officer, could not provide an official estimate on the number of protesters, but demonstrators could be seen filling the intersection of Fairview Road and Fair Drive.
+
+Several scuffles broke out between Trump supporters who were leaving the rally and people in the streets who accused them of being racists. One Trump supporter was visibly bloodied after being punched in the face. A @realDonaldTrump supporter just got punched in the face as a scuffle broke out in the street: pic.twitter.com/3h3Fllm3V3 — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) April 29, 2016 Several people damaged a police car, smashing its back window before jumping on it and kicking its doors. As a crowd formed around the car, police officers in tactical and riot gear moved into action, forming a perimeter around the crowd before forcing the demonstrators to move down the road. People jumping on police car outside @realDonaldTrump rally. Window smashed few minutes earlier pic.twitter.com/SOsFarQEVr — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) April 29, 2016 While some demonstrators shouted insults and slurs at police officers, others focused on delivering a message of protest against the Republican front-runner's rhetoric. Several protesters told CNN they were demonstrating against Trump's rhetoric on illegal immigration. Some were seen carrying Mexican flags as they marched in the street. Other demonstrators shouted insults and slurs at police officers. ""I'm against Trump's nativist and nationalistic agenda, which divides people and is very hateful of the other,"" he said. While Banuelos simply marched through the streets, he called the property damage and anger some demonstrators expressed Friday night ""the symptom of hate speech"" and said he did not believe any individuals were taking advantage of the protest. ""I think people are tired of these messages of hate,"" she said.",REAL
+5282,"It’s Not Broken, So Let’s Break It–“California Set To Let Public Schools Teach Primarily In Spanish”","- < It’s Not Broken, So Let’s Break It–“California Set To Let Public Schools Teach Primarily In Spanish” > November 8, 2016, 10:21 am A+ | a-   
+From The Daily Caller : 
+Reporter 
+6:10 PM 11/06/2016 
+California isn’t even close to a swing state in the 2016 presidential election, but that doesn’t mean nothing is at stake for voters in the nation’s largest state. 
+After Tuesday’s vote, hundreds of thousands of California schoolchildren may start attending classes primarily en español, thanks to a voter referendum that would repeal the requirement that schools teach primarily in English. 
+California’s Proposition 58 would repeal Proposition 227, a measure that easily passed nearly two decades ago, in 1998. Proposition 227 required all public schools in the state teach “overwhelmingly” in English, with limited-English proficiency (LEP) students transitioning to fully English classes as quickly as possible. 
+When passed, Proposition 227 overthrew the previous norm of bilingual education. … 
+But now, with California’s immigrant population higher than ever, the state is poised to reverse course. 
+Polls indicate the Proposition 58 is likely to pass. Ironically, supporters of the measure place an emphasis on English rather than foreign tongues. They argue that the bill will allow for “dual immersion” programs, where both native English and native Spanish speakers can learn in a bilingual environment. In the long run, they argue, this will increase multilingualism and provide the state with a competitive advantage. 
+Dual immersion is legal already, it just requires parents’ consent. What these disputes are about is which is the default: English or Spanish? 
+Supporters also claim that returning to bilingual education will improve students’ English acquisition; favorable ads emphasize that Proposition 58 will ensure that “all students learn English.” 
+But the primary thrust of the proposition is clear: Students from non-English homes will find it far easier to have their children be primarily taught in their native tongue, while spending far less time learning English.",FAKE
+6934,America’s Streets Will Run With Blood- Mike Adams,"America’s Streets Will Run With Blood- Mike Adams 
+VIOLENCE IN AMERICA-AMERICA’S STREETS WILL RUN RED WITH BLOOD 
+Hillary is going down. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it is over! As Mike Adams says in the following video. It does not matter who wins, the streets will run red with blood. 
+Listen to what Mike Adams has to say in the following video. If this video does not convince you to prepare to be on your own, then nothing will.",FAKE
+43,Trump’s campaign just got support from one of the Republican Party’s biggest donors,"Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate and billionaire Republican donor, has made up his mind: He's supporting Donald Trump, and other Republicans need to fall in line.
+
+Adelson's endorsement, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, matters because he's very wealthy and very willing to spend his wealth to elect Republicans. He spent as much as $150 million trying to defeat President Obama in 2012. His pro-Trump argument boils down to three points: Any Republican is better than a Democrat, Hillary Clinton in particular would be worse, and Trump's CEO experience has to count for something.
+
+As Republicans, we know that getting a person in the White House with an ""R"" behind his name is the only way things will get better. That opportunity still exists. We must not cut off our noses to spite our faces.
+
+Adelson almost certainly won't be the last prominent Republican to rationalize supporting Trump like this. Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan seem to be working toward a rapprochement. Senate Republicans up for reelection are still dancing around outright endorsing Trump but are refusing to publicly denounce him either.
+
+And if anyone had reasons to be skeptical about Trump, it's Adelson, a hard-liner on Israeli security. Trump promised to be ""neutral"" on Israel-Palestine — although he later backed away from that stance — and to enforce the Iran deal. Adelson has been telegraphing for months that Trump might be acceptable to him. His rationale — ""The alternative to Trump being sworn in as the nation’s 45th president is frightening,"" he wrote — is likely to show up in other Republicans' statements between now and November.",REAL
+7432,Watch Hillary Clinton’s Concession Speech," Watch Hillary Clinton’s Concession Speech Video
+“Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a president for all of our country...
+“I’m sorry that we did not win this election for the values we all share...
+“You represent the best of America, and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life. I know how disappointed you feel, because I feel it too.... Donald Trump's Victory Speech ",FAKE
+3871,Obama to Try to Allay Gulf Nation Leaders' Fears about Iran,"Leaders of Gulf nations unnerved by Washington's nuclear talks with Iran and Tehran's meddling across the Mideast look to President Barack Obama to promise more than words and weapons at Thursday's Camp David summit.
+
+They want commitments from Obama that the United States has their backs at a time when the region is under siege from Islamic extremists, Syria continues to unravel, Iraq is volatile and Yemen is in chaos.
+
+""I think we are looking for some form of security guarantee, given the behavior of Iran in the region, given the rise of the extremist threat. We definitely want a stronger relationship,"" said Yousef Al Qtaiba, the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to the United States.
+
+""In the past, we have survived with a gentleman's agreement with the United States about security. I think today, we need something in writing. We need something institutionalized.""
+
+What are the expectations for Obama's meetings with Gulf Cooperation Council countries — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman?
+
+Weapons sales. A renewed call for a coordinated missile defense system. More joint military exercises. Better cooperation on cybersecurity, as well as maritime or border security. Making the countries' defense systems work in concert.
+
+""I don't believe there's a single GCC country that doesn't think a defense shield for the region is a bad idea. I think everyone's on board,"" Qtaiba said. ""The challenge is how do you turn on a regional defense system when different countries are purchasing different equipment and at different paces? How do you link it? How do you get the radars to talk to each other?""
+
+A high-level Saudi official told The Associated Press in Riyadh that his country wants a defense system and military cooperation similar to what the U.S. affords Israel. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to disclose details of the Saudis' wish list at the summit, said they also want access to high-tech military equipment, missiles, planes and satellites, as well as more technology and training cooperation with the U.S.
+
+The U.S. and five other nations are working to finalize a deal intended to stop Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons in exchange for easing penalties that are choking the Iranian economy. The White House says the Gulf countries would be better off with an agreement that blocks Iran's path to an atomic weapon.
+
+But the nuclear deal is not the only source of unease.
+
+Arab allies feel threatened by Iran's rising influence and they fear a nuclear pact will embolden Tehran. They worry that the deal would unlock billions of dollars that Iran might decide to use to further intrude in countries or support terrorist proxies.
+
+Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Obama will have to work hard to convince the Arab allies that they do not need to fear fallout from any nuclear deal.
+
+""Right now they feel that they have no support from this administration so he has a steep hill to climb,"" said McCain, pointing to Saudi Arabia's decision to act unilaterally in Yemen.
+
+McCain, R-Ariz., said that's why the Saudis gave Gen. Lloyd Austin, head of the U.S. Central Command, only ""an hour's notice they were going to strike Yemen."" Saudi Arabia has led airstrikes against Iranian-backed rebels who have toppled the Yemeni government.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry is optimistic, but declines to say exactly what kind of reassurances Obama is prepared to offer at Camp David.
+
+""I can just tell you in general terms that they have to do with the intensifying and strengthening of the security-military relationship between the United States of America and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, as well as dealing with new challenges that we face in the region, foremost of which is the Iranian interference in the affairs of the countries of the region,"" Kerry said Friday in Paris.
+
+He said U.S. officials were fleshing out a series of commitments that will create a ""new security understanding, a new set of security initiatives,""
+
+Standing by his side, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said he expected the summit would lead to ways that ""joint action will be more effective and more expansive in all areas, whether it relates to cybersecurity or defense against ballistic missiles or military training or equipping.""
+
+Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate panel overseeing foreign aid, warns against the U.S. offering a massive arms package in exchange for Gulf nations' support of a nuclear deal. Graham, R-S.C., said he isn't opposed to upgrading the military capabilities of Arab allies, but ""if it has a hint of being connected to the Iran deal, I will do everything I can to make sure they never get one bullet or one plane.""
+
+Jon Alterman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wonders if there is anything the United States can do that would reassure the Gulf states when it comes to Iranian expansionism in the region.
+
+""It seems to me that where they most want reassurance is where the U.S. is both least able and most unwilling to provide it,"" he said. ""My guess is that the summit is going to leave everybody feeling a little bit unsatisfied.""",REAL
+7955,29 of Hillary's scandals: The early years,"For those who are too young or too unwilling to remember, a trip down memory lane. 
+1969 – Debut: Hillary speaks at Wellesley graduation, insults Edward Brooke, Senate’s lone black member. 
+1973 – Watergate committee: Says Chief Counsel Jerry Zeifman of Hillary’s performance, “She was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.” 
+1978-79 – Cattlegate: as wife of Arkansas governor, she invests $1,000 in cattle futures, makes $100,000. 
+1978 – Whitewater: Clintons borrow money to launch Whitewater Development Corporations. Several people go to prison over it. Clintons don’t. 
+1992 – Bimbo eruptions: Bill and Hillary swear to Steve Kroft on “60 minutes” Bill had nothing to do with Gennifer Flowers. 
+1992 – Private investigators: “We reached out to them,” Hillary tells CBS’ Steve Kroft of Bill’s women. “I met with two of them to reassure them they were friends of ours.” They also hire PIs to bribe and/or threaten as many as two-dozen of them. 
+1993 – Health care reform: Hillary heads secret health-care task force, sued successfully for violating open meeting laws. Subsequent plan killed by Democratic-controlled House. 
+1993 – Waco: Hillary’s DOJ authorizes armed assault against religious community in Waco, 80 dead, many of them children, more than half racial minorities. 
+1993 – Travelgate: Hillary orchestrates firing of travel office employees, replaces them with her own people. Independent Counsel Robert Ray calls her sworn testimony “factually false” but can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt it was ”knowingly false.” 
+1993 – Vince Foster: White House counsel and reputed Hillary lover is found dead in Fort Marcy Park. The DOJ opens a separate investigation of possible obstruction of justice by Hillary and her cohorts for blocking search of Foster office. 
+1994 – Chinagate: Hillary meets with disgraced fixer Webb Hubbell. A week later Clinton Indonesian money man James Riady gives Hubbell $100,000 “job.” Hubbell never talks. Reads the NYT headline, “Payment to an Ex-Clinton Aide Is Linked to Big Chinese Project.” 
+1994 – Filegate: Hillary henchman Craig Livingstone improperly requests and receives FBI background reports on several hundred individuals. Multiple investigations follow. 
+1994 – November elections: Due in no small part to health-care fiasco, Dems lose Senate and House for first time in nearly 50 years. 
+1995 – Chinagate: Hillary convenes secret meeting with Bill and Dick Morris. They launch what Thompson Committee calls “the most corrupt political campaign in modern history.” 
+Sign the precedent-setting petition supporting Trump’s call for an independent prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton! 
+1995 – Pay to play: The $100,000 donation to travel with the Clintons on trade missions morphs from a discreet expectation into the price of admission. Independent counsel investigates. 
+1995-96 – Thompson Committee: The Clintons “pulled down all the barriers that would normally be in place to keep out illegal contributions, pressured policy makers, and left themselves open to strong suspicion that they were selling not only access to high-ranking officials, but policy as well.” 
+1996 – Blizzard of lies: Hillary dodges imaginary “sniper fire” in Bosnia’s Tuzla airport. 
+1996 – Ron Brown death: Nine days later embattled Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who hates being “Hillary Clinton’s being mother-f—ing tour guide,” leaves Tuzla on final, fatal flight to Croatia. 
+1996 – Enron connection: Brown goes to Croatia to broker a sweetheart deal between the neo-fascists who run the country and the Enron Corporation. Despite his death, the deal goes through, ends very badly. 
+1996 – Ron Brown cover-up: Pathologists find an apparent bullet hole in Brown’s head. He is buried without autopsy. Head X-rays are lost. Three pathologists and photographer have careers wrecked for going public. 
+1995-96 – Thompson Committee: “Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions, much of it from foreign sources.” 
+1996 – TWA Flight 800: Hillary is in family quarters with Bill and Sandy Berger when plans are launched to cover up real cause of the destruction of the aircraft. 
+1996 – Blizzard of Lies: In a New York Times op-ed titled “Blizzard of Lies,” the usually restrained William Safire famously calls Hillary “a congenital liar.” 
+1997 – Pay to play: Johnny Chung tells Thompson Committee he funneled $100,000 from the Chinese military to the DNC. “The White House is like a subway. You have to put in coins to open the gates.” 
+1998 – Monica: “There isn’t any fire,” Hillary tells Matt Lauer about the “smoke” surrounding Monica Lewinsky accusations. ”The great story here is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband.” 
+1999 – FALN: Clinton pardons 16 lethal Puerto Rican terrorists to boost Hillary’s chance to win N.Y. Senate seat. She supports move until outrage mounts. 
+1999 – Christopher Hitchens: “Like him, [Hillary] is not just a liar but a lie; a phony construct of shreds and patches and hysterical, self-pitying demagogic improvisations.” 
+2001 – Pardongate: Clinton pardons 140 people on final day of office, including cocaine dealer, drug-dealing brother, Whitewater pal and billionaire fugitive Marc Rich. Hillary’s brothers Hugh and Tony both implicated during subsequent investigation. James Comey investigates, finds no illegality. 
+2001 – Furnituregate: The Clintons leave the White House with $134,000 worth of items that they, once the story breaks, have to return or pay for. 
+Please share with your Republican friends who seem comfortable with this woman returning to the White House. Unless, they get a royalty every time the suffix “gate” is applied to a word, they are in for a rough four years. 
+Media wishing to interview Jack Cashill, please contact . Receive Jack Cashill's commentaries in your email BONUS: By signing up for Jack Cashill's alerts, you will also be signed up for news and special offers from WND via email. Name *",FAKE
+5808,Vote Vote Vote,"link originally posted by: JinMI Lots of discussion over the past months. Who we're for or who we're against and platitudes of statements...some not so much. Whomever you decide to give your vote to honestly does not concern me nor should mine concern you. The debates, arguments and discussions are fun and generally informative. Vote for who you would, even if it takes a few hours. I've seen quite a bit of conversation of folks not wanting to vote at all. What does this prove? What is this standing (sitting) against? Your disapproval of the two party system or maybe you think the whole thing a charade? My opinion would leave me to believe that if your going to attempt to rebel against the system it would be a secure third party vote or a vote for the future so to speak. We as Americans need to take back our power over Government. There is more than just the Presidency at stake and to me I would think that not voting at all is a contribution to the apathy that has us in the situation we are in. Whether it be Trump or Drumf or Hillary or Shillary or Stein or Johnson or Joe Blow, I would urge you to vote! If you are not voting at all, would you please elaborate as to why? I'm trying to imagine the next president of the USA being Joe Blow. Well now President Blow, what do you think of the Cannabis trade with Mexico? Anything to declare?",FAKE
+7697,10 Last Minute Preps When A Disruptive Event Is Brewing,"in: News Articles , Preparedness\Survival Back in the early days, before writing about any one aspect of prepping, I had to do a lot of research. Online resources were meager so there was a lot of trial and error involved as I formulated my own preparedness strategy. Sadly, as I look back, there was considerable error. Who knew? The good news is that the school of hard prepping knocks has taught me a thing or two. This is especially true when it comes to last minute preps. Now that I am lot smarter, I thought it might be fun to put on my thinking cap and come up with a list of ten last minute preps that could be put into place if I had a modicum of warning that a storm or other disruptive event was brewing. There are two parts to this list, things to do and things to buy. Things To Do 1. Top Off Vehicles with Fuel I never let our two cars go under half a tank but even so, 100% full is always a better option than 50%. Hopefully I will get wind of the pending event soon enough to beat the crowds. 2. Do the Laundry It is not that I hate doing laundry but rather I get lazy about it. It is not unusual to have to do six loads at a time, simply due to procrastination. Given a brewing storm, you can bet the laundry will get done and while I am at it, the bedding will also get changed. 3. Inventory Prescription Drugs With my Ammo Can First Aid Kit already stocked and set aside, I will want to do a quick check on prescription meds and if necessary, get them refilled. 4. Charge All Electronic Devices Compared to six years ago, my home is overrun by electronic devices. Three Kindles, three iPads of varying ages, and four laptop computers, and two iPhones make up a motely crew of electronic devices that hold a wealth of both reference material and amusements. All can be charged using portable solar devices (which are pretty darn cheap these days), but if I am stuck indoors for any length of tine, solar is not going to help. 5. Set Out Spare Lanterns, Flashlights, and Batteries Why wait until the power is out before digging out your emergency light sources? As I say this, I am confident in the knowledge that I already have a flashlight in every room of the house as well as a portable lantern. Still, this would be a good time to check to ensure their batteries are fully charged. 6. Gather Fresh Biomass Rather than use up my back stock of charcoal and wood, I would prefer to burn the odd branches, twigs, leaves I find on the ground. They work perfectly in both my Solo Stove and EcoZoom rocket stoves . Plus, biomass is free for the taking. Things to Buy 7. Fresh Fruit and Vegetables As an experienced prepper I have a good supply of freeze-dried fruits and vegetables. But once a #10 can or pouch is opened, the 25 year shelf life is reduced to one or two years. For that reason, if a short term disruptive event is predicted, I will want to pick up fresh vegetables and fruits that require no refrigeration and can be eaten raw. The nice thing about fresh fruit and vegetables is that most last-minute disaster shoppers will be hitting the packaged and canned goods aisle. Let them. I am already well-stock with canned goods and want as much fresh stuff as I can get. 8. Wine and Spirits Not everyone consumes alcoholic beverages but here in my household, we do enjoy a nightly glass of wine or a cocktail . That said, I do not stockpile spirits to any great extent due to space considerations. My pre-event checklist would definitely include bottled beverages of the alcoholic type. 9. Paper Plates and Disposable Cups and Eating Utensils Water may be at a premium and where as I will want to use stored water for drinking and hygiene, using it for cleanup is not high on my list of priorities, Instead, I am going to want disposables. It might be a good idea to pick up extra trash bags as well. The goal is not to have to dig into long term emergency preps unless absolutely necessary, 10. Dark Chocolate You are going to be stressed so accept that. Get yourself some chocolate – okay a lot of chocolate – and ride things out while indulging in your favorite chocolate treat. If chocolate is not your thing, then perhaps some cookies or graham crackers or just this once, some seriously unhealthy packaged caramel corn. The Final Word Some of my selections may have surprised you but that’s okay. They were meant to inspire you to come up with your own last minute prepping strategy. Why not sit down right now and make up your own list and share it with the rest of us.? Just don’t forget to include the chocolate! Enjoy your next adventure through common sense and thoughtful preparation! Submit your review",FAKE
+2171,"Barack Obama, President Oh-bummer","The two presidents stood in the East Room on Tuesday afternoon, united in their goal of defeating the Islamic State but separated by a stylistic gulf as vast as the Atlantic.
+
+On the left, facing the cameras, was François Hollande, war president. He spoke of “cowardly murderers” who “dishonor humanity,” of a “relentless determination to fight terrorism everywhere and anywhere,” of “an implacable joint response,” of “hunting down their leaders” and “taking back the land.”
+
+On the right stood Barack Obama, President Oh-bummer.
+
+“That’s going to be a process that involves hard, methodical work. It’s not going to be something that happens just because suddenly we take a few more airstrikes.”
+
+“It’s going to be hard. And we should not be under any illusions.”
+
+Could the Paris attacks have been prevented?
+
+Obama, in Turkey last week, responded to those who believe he isn’t tough enough on the Islamic State. “Some of them seem to think that if I was just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference,” he said.
+
+Tough talk won’t defeat terrorists — but it will rally a nation. It’s no mere coincidence that the unpopular Hollande’s support has increased during his forceful response to the attacks, while Obama’s poll numbers are down.
+
+The importance of language was very clear at the White House on Tuesday, even in translation.
+
+There was little difference in their strategies for fighting the Islamic State, but Hollande was upbeat and can-do, while Obama was discouraging and lawyerly. It was as if the smoke-’em-out spirit of George W. Bush had been transplanted into the body of a short, pudgy, bespectacled French socialist with wrinkled suit-pants.
+
+From my fourth-row perspective, Obama was still and contained, while Hollande’s sweeping gestures kept setting off bursts of camera-shutter clicks. The Frenchman brought Mediterranean heat (“dismantle and destroy”), while the American was Lake Michigan-cool (“There is a potential convergence of interests between the various parties”).
+
+It’s not as if Obama lacks emotion (he rubbed his face and appeared to blink back tears as Hollande spoke of the young American woman killed in the Paris attacks) or passion (he spoke movingly about the need to admit Syrian refugees). But when he spoke of war and terrorism, it was to play down and reassure. “My fellow Americans, let’s remember we faced greater threats to our way of life before,” he said.
+
+Obama had moments of loft in his lengthy opening statement. He spoke of the “murderous” Islamic State and the “madness” of terrorism as a “scourge that threatens us all.” It “must be destroyed,” he said. But he turned defensive when he reminded everybody that a 65-nation coalition has been fighting the Islamic State “for more than a year,” and he recited its “progress.” Later, Obama said the task was to “accelerate” the “success” already seen. Rather than a new approach, Obama said the United States and allies “must do even more.”
+
+Hollande — whose capital, after all, is the one that was just attacked — had a greater sense of urgency. “The Paris attacks generated a lot of emotion, but that’s not enough,” he said. “We must act. And for a number of days now, I have been trying to convince, convincing all the countries that can act, to do so. . . . Today I am here with Barack so that we can act with greater intensity and coherence as well.”
+
+Asked about Turkey shooting down a Russian military plane, the two men had the same response — to avoid escalation — but voiced it in very different ways. The cerebral Obama said “this underscores the importance of us making sure that we move this political track forward.” The visceral Hollande said, “The only purpose is to fight against terrorism” and the Islamic State.
+
+When Laura Haim of France’s Canal+ TV network asked if there was a deadline for ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, both men had the same policy: no timetable. But what they said after that highlighted their different styles.
+
+Hollande spoke of a new era. “There is a new mind-set now,” Hollande said. “And those who believed that we could wait” now realize “the risk is everywhere . . . . We, therefore, must act.”
+
+“Syria has broken down,” he said. “And it is going to be a difficult, long, methodical process to bring back together various factions within Syria to maintain a Syrian state.”
+
+Maybe you can motivate people when you sound so discouraging. But it’s hard.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+6044,High-fat Ketogenic Diet for Weight Loss,"High-fat Ketogenic Diet for Weight Loss 
+by Paul Fassa Health Impact News 
+Ever since the inception of the high-carb low-fat diet for heart health promoted in the U.S. since the 1960s, obesity has continued to climb exponentially. For over a half century, health “authorities” have claimed that consuming saturated fats would make you fat. 
+It’s not true. 
+Despite national compliance to the lipid theory for heart disease dogma from media, medicine, and government, obesity rates among the low and no-fat consumers have climbed exponentially, even among young children, and heart disease has remained the number one cause of death from disease. Fat Dogma Diminishing Slowly as Processed Carbs and Oils Truth is Revealed 
+Though still not popularly embraced by the public, mainstream media, and most dieticians, more and more recent evidence points to added sugars in processed low-nutrient high-calorie carbohydrate foods created with toxic phony fats as sources of arterial inflammation. Inflammation is the source of most disease, including cardiovascular and heart disease. 
+So, the saturated fat or lipid theory for obesity and heart disease is without scientific merit. And the synthetic fats offered as substitutes for unprocessed whole natural animal and plant fats and used in high-carb processed foods have been the source of every ailment or health disorder saturated fats were blamed for, and more. 
+Independent medical researchers and practitioners have recently, over the last decade or so, determined refined or processed carbs, such as table sugar and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), as major causes of obesity, metabolic disorder syndrome (aka pre-diabetes), and ultimately diabetes 2. Those two items are ubiquitous in beverages and processed foods, even the ones that don’t taste sweet, which are constantly advertised on TV. 
+The processed food industry has exploited fat phobia to produce most of the refined carbohydrate foods, usually prepared with partially hydrogenated trans-fatty acid oils, which have become popular among consumers since the low or no-fat dietary dogma was proclaimed. 
+Fully hydrogenated oils constitute margarine products. Both types of synthetically derived processed vegetable oils shower your cells with trans-fatty acids. And trans-fatty acids are considered unusual toxins by your body’s cells. Using a Ketogenic Dietary Approach for Reversing Ill Effects of Lipid Theory Misinformation 
+The term “ketogenic” is derived from attaching the suffix “-genic” to the word “ketone.” Ketones are produced in the liver from fat. As ketones are produced more, a state of ketosis is created. Ketosis allows fat to be converted into energy instead of storing it as fat. Ketosis even promotes reducing existing excess body fat by converting it into energy. 
+A ketogenic diet produces ketones in lieu of glucose for cellular energy, or if insulin is not being utilized, as is the case with insulin resistance or diabetes 2, to provide fuel for cellular energy. It’s a process produced by the liver. It’s a clean enough process to avoid fatty liver, which has also become epidemic lately. Ketosis reduces the need for insulin to metabolize glucose from carbohydrates. 
+Consuming smaller amounts of organic whole carbohydrates is healthy. But the processed carbohydrate foods that comprise the majority of SAD (Standard American Diet) consumers are nutritionally void and filled with toxic strangers to our cells and are stored as fat to isolate their toxicity. Eventually, the stored toxins are secreted from those fats, creating autoimmune illnesses. 
+One of the most efficient saturated fats for ketosis is virgin coconut oil. Instead of long chain triglycerides that most other healthy fats contain, coconut oil is comprised of medium chain triglycerides, which are most easily converted into ketones. 
+So consuming healthy fats, not trans-fat substitutes, and cutting back considerably on processed or refined carbohydrates is proving to increase health and reduce obesity and all the problems associated with it, including diabetes and heart disease. 
+Most of us have mistakenly assumed the ketogenic diet for weight loss is a spinoff of the Atkins Diet for weight loss – lots of meat, nothing else. The popularized Paleo diet over this last decade has also been associated with ketogenic dieting. 
+But factually, the ketogenic diet is high fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate diet. The ketogenic diet is the original diet which was started in the 1920s at Johns Hopkins Hospital to cure children of epileptic seizures where drugs were not effective. Most modern-day versions of a low-carb diet, such as Atkins, Paleo, etc., are some version of this original ketogenic diet. 
+The low carbohydrate aspect of the ketogenic diet should include only unrefined carbohydrate foods, unprocessed and fully intact with their nutrients. The standard American diet (SAD) is overwhelmed with refined flours and sugars and toxic factory farm meats. 
+Swedish diet doctor Andreas Eenfeldt, M.D., explains that consuming too much whole protein animal foods, especially meat, can lead to excess protein. This excess protein easily converts into more glucose in the body and raises your insulin levels. This compromises optimal ketosis. 
+Most vegetarians assume that a ketogenic diet is not for them. They fail to recognize that nuts, avocados, cold pressed avocado and olive oil, and coconut oil are plant based. Fudging with non-meat animal products such as real butter from grass fed cows or eggs from truly free range chickens is another route toward ketosis. Fat doesn’t have to be from bacon, though many low-carb dieters lean that way. Recent Science Contradicts Bogus Science of Fat Consumption Creating Obesity 
+This past year (2016), two studies have confirmed what Health Impact News has known for well over a decade: Eating whole healthy fats, even saturated fats, is healthy and reduces body fat, eliminating the precursor to diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. (Source) 
+One study dealt with obese subjects divided into two groups, both were put on very low calorie ketogenic (VLCK) diets. The researchers purpose was to determine what effects supplementing the test group with DHA omega 3 to determine the effects of omega-3 fatty acids. 
+Keep in mind that omega-3 fatty acids are derived directly from fish fats and other animal sources as well as indirectly from flax and chia seeds. It’s a healthy type of fat. 
+They discovered that after six months, both groups lost almost the same amount of weight, averaging around 20 kg (44 lbs), and both groups demonstrated similar changed “biological parameters,” such as stable insulin levels, lower triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, C-reactive protein, and increased leptin among other more esoterically labeled markers. What they were looking for in the DHA omega-3 group was discovered by concluding the DHA omega-3 group had better anti-inflammatory markings. 
+But the ketogenic diet alone produced the same effect without the improvement of anti-inflammatory markers from DHA omega-3 fatty acid supplementing. Combining a ketogenic diet with omega-3 supplementing seems like a great idea. (Source) 
+Another 2016 study that focused on whether weight loss from a ketogenic diet was mostly from fat mass and not muscle mass had similar weight reductions of 20 kg (44 lbs) in less time, four months. Amazing! 
+The researchers concluded: “The VLCK (very low calorie ketogenic) diet-induced weight loss was mainly at the expense of FM [fat mass] and visceral mass [fat surrounding organs], preserving muscle mass and strength (emphasis added).” (Source) 
+So there you have it, a summary of the apparent paradox of high-fat dieting to lose body fat, prevent diabetes, and protect heart health. There’s much more available at Health Impact News . Time to wake up from that low-fat diet dogma that has ruined the health of millions of its adherents. 
+Comment on this article at CoconutOil.com. 
+Sources:",FAKE
+2795,Obama's Iran deal is now near certain to survive Congress,"As Congress's vote on a resolution to disapprove the administration's nuclear deal draws ever nearer, the math for President Obama is looking better and better.
+
+The magic number of Senate supporters the president needs to ensure that the deal stands is 34. Currently, he has 30. So he needs to pick up just four more to preserve the agreement — and there are still 14 remaining undecided Democrats in the chamber, several of whom have already made positive comments about the deal. So Obama has a lot of options.
+
+And tellingly, after a month of intense criticism of the deal from the right and from pro-Israel groups, only two Senate Democrats have been swayed to oppose the deal so far: Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Bob Menendez of New Jersey. They'll be joined by, it appears, every single Senate Republican.
+
+But that wouldn't be enough to sink the deal. If opponents want to block the sanctions relief that's crucial to the agreement, they need to assemble a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate that can override a promised veto from Obama. And that's impossible to reach without a lot of Democratic votes, as I wrote in July:
+
+Deal opponents once hoped that the agreement would become politically toxic, leading to many Democratic defections. But that hasn't happened. Instead, the key swing votes — including some of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, like Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly — have been won over by the administration.
+
+The state of play in the House is tougher for outsiders to gauge, but opponents appear to be well short of the 44 Democratic opponents they need there — just 14 Democrats have said they'll vote to kill the deal, according to the Hill. Again, the deal's opponents would need a veto-proof majority in both the Senate and the House to keep the sanctions in place.
+
+According to a Friday report from Eli Lake and Josh Rogin of Bloomberg View, deal opponents have already resigned themselves to losing the vote eventually. Furthermore, they write, ""Many Republicans now acknowledge in private that they were handed both a political and a policy defeat on the nuclear deal.""
+
+Now that the deal looks so likely to be upheld, the new question is whether Democrats can save President Obama from having to veto it in the first place.
+
+There wouldn't be any policy stakes here — achieving this would simply save the president from the embarrassment of Congress passing a resolution condemning his administration's foreign policy.
+
+For that to happen, 41 Senate Democrats would have to vote to filibuster the GOP's planned disapproval resolution — meaning Obama would need to win over 11 of the remaining 14 undecided Democrats in the chamber. That's a tall order, but given that only two Democratic senators have opposed the deal so far, it doesn't seem completely out of the question.
+
+The vote will likely take place in mid-September. But if you want to keep track yourself beforehand, here are the remaining undecided Democratic senators. Again, the administration needs to win four of their votes to uphold the deal, and 11 for a filibuster that would make a veto unnecessary:",REAL
+3911,"Biden says Ukrainians 'have a right to defend themselves,' mum on US sending weapons","Vice President Joe Biden, in Germany this weekend to help reach a diplomatic solution to Russian aggression in Ukraine, said Ukrainians “have a right to defend themselves"" but did not address the possibility of the United States sending weapons to them.
+
+Biden is in Munich with Secretary of State John Kerry to back the German-French diplomatic effort, which he says is ""very much worth the attempt.""
+
+Biden said he and other U.S. leaders think they should “attempt an honorable peace"" but that they also believe the Ukrainian people ""have a right to defend themselves.""
+
+He suggested that the impact of economic sanctions imposed on Russia for its actions will get worse if leaders refuses to accept a peaceful resolution and continue to escalate the conflict, the White House said Saturday.
+
+Russian military forces started taking control of parts of eastern Ukraine in late-February 2014, after protesters and other Ukrainian residents helped oust Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovych. And within weeks, Russian began its ultimately successful effort to annex the eastern Ukraine region of Crimea.
+
+In response to recent calls in Washington and Kiev for the U.S. to give the outgunned Ukrainians such lethal weapons as anti-tank and anti-mortar systems to fight Russian-backed separatists, Moscow said earlier this week that such a move would be a threat to its national security.
+
+While in Munich, Biden also met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to discuss the diplomatic efforts and to pledge U.S. support for the Ukraine economy as it pursues reforms, according to the White House.
+
+Still, Biden remains skeptical about whether Russian officials will comply with a diplomatic solution, saying they will be judged by their actions on the ground, ""not by the paper they sign.""
+
+German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande traveled to Kiev on Thursday and Moscow on Friday.
+
+They are trying to secure a peaceful resolution to the conflict based on the Sept. 24, 2014, Minsk agreements.
+
+Poroshenko is pushing for a quick cease-fire and insists that the conflict must be resolved, not frozen.
+
+""There is no temporary solution,” he said at the Munich Security Conference, amid the flurry of international diplomacy to calm the Ukraine conflict.
+
+Poroshenko also renewed Kiev's call to be provided with defensive weapons, something that's opposed by European countries.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9937,Obama Administration Smacks Down Enlistment Bonus Repayments After Republican Congress Does Nothing,"  
+For those of us too ensnared in the Trumpster fire to pay attention to anything substantive, a majorly screwed up thing was happening to our fighting men and women. The LA Times broke the story that the Department of Defense has been ordering almost 10,000 one-time National Guardsmen from California to pay back enlistment bonuses due to an error over a decade ago. Horror stories began pouring in of soldiers being notified that they MUST pay back the money or face wage garnishments, tax liens and interest charges. 
+This, of course, prompted the Obama administration to take immediate action while our do-nothing Republican Congress focuses on such important issues as defunding Obamacare. 
+Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced today that the Pentagon will suspend efforts to recoup bonuses overpaid to troops more than a decade ago. “There is no more important responsibility for the Department of Defense than keeping faith with our people. That means treating them fairly and equitably, honoring their service and sacrifice, and keeping our word,” Carter added. 
+Of course, Republicans love to wear the biggest flag pins they can find and feign love for the troops come reelection time, but really put their words into action. This might explain why they did NOTHING to stop this. 
+It seems the California National Guard told the state’s members of Congress two years ago that the Pentagon was making every effort at taking back its promised re-enlistment bonuses from thousands of soldiers. In fact, the California National Guard went so far as to develop a plan to assuage the problem. However, being the greedy do-nothing leaches that they are, the Republican-led Congress didn’t lift a finger. 
+Once again, the Obama Administration is forced to step in and help the very people Republicans claim to love so much. 
+Featured image via Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+6660,"Police Violence Escalates As Provocateurs Infiltrate Standing Rock, #NoDAPL Protests","Videos Police Violence Escalates As Provocateurs Infiltrate Standing Rock, #NoDAPL Protests While reporting from the Dakota Access pipeline protests, MintPress News reporter Derrick Broze witnessed the actions of destructive forces which have infiltrated the peaceful Native-led movement and provoked increasingly violent responses from law enforcement. | November 6, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! The remnants of a vehicle burned on North Dakota Highway 1806 on the night of Oct. 27. Non-peaceful forces embedded on the side of the water protectors were seen burning the vehicle and two armored vehicles over the protests of water protectors. (Derrick Broze for MintPress) 
+
+STANDING ROCK SIOUX RESERVATION, North Dakota — Police violence has escalated and destructive forces have entered the fray in recent weeks as “water protectors” in North Dakota have continued their fight against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. 
+On Nov. 2, police targeted water protectors from the Sacred Stone, Oceti Sakowin, and Red Warrior camps with pepper spray and rubber bullets in response to their peaceful efforts to stop the destruction of the gravesites Alma Parkin and Matilda Galpin, Indigenous women who once owned the nearby Cannonball Ranch. 
+“Water protectors building a makeshift bridge across the Cannonball River were met by riot police firing less-than-lethal munitions at point blank range and indiscriminately blasting OC Spray on peaceful unarmed people,” the Camp of the Sacred Stones reported on Nov. 3. 
+The Native communities who oppose the pipeline prefer to call themselves water protectors as a way to signify that their fight is one in defense of the health of the water in the pipeline’s path, specifically the Missouri River. 
+“The bridge was torn down per the orders received by Morton County from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers . Morton County police then unleashed pepper spray and tear gas on water protectors standing in the river with their hands in the air.” 
+More than 100 people were injured in the violence which came just one day after President Barack Obama told Now This News that he was monitoring the situation closely and exploring possible ways to “reroute” the pipeline. 
+“We’re going to let it play out for several more weeks and determine whether or not this can be resolved in a way that I think is properly attentive to the traditions of First Americans,” Obama said. 
+Watch “President Obama says they’re examining ways to ‘reroute’ the Dakota Access Pipeline” from 2016 NowThis Election: 
+Police and protesters turn violent 
+The week preceding Obama’s statement took a violent turn, as law enforcement raided camps and destructive forces positioned on the side of the water protectors made themselves known. 
+Militarized riot police raided two frontline camps on Oct. 27, making 107 arrests as they deployed pepper spray, stun guns, and physical force in response to a crowd of unarmed water protectors who were blocking the path of pipeline construction. The water protectors attempted to keep police and pipeline workers from accessing the construction site by setting fires to barricades, but police were able to eventually remove everyone from the frontline camps and reclaim the land where the pipeline is slated to be built. Water protectors face off with a police line off North Dakota Highway 1806. Law enforcement wear riot gear as they prepare to remove the frontline camp. Oct. 27, 2016 (Derrick Broze for MintPress) 
+Later that night, a bridge on North Dakota Highway 1806, just north of the Red Warrior and Oceti Sakowin camps in Mandan, was the scene of another standoff between law enforcement and citizens opposed to the pipeline. 
+Although stationed on the water protectors’ side of the bridge, a small group of individuals did not seem to hold the same values or practice the same tactics as the larger, Native-led movement against the pipeline. 
+Watch “Water Protectors face off with police #NoDAPL” from MintPress News: 
+In stark contrast to the water protectors’ many actions of peaceful prayer and ceremony, the atmosphere at the bridge the night of Oct. 27 was more reminiscent of an outdoor rave. The protesters on the bridge set fire to an SUV, and threw rocks and other objects at a row of armored vehicles operated by law enforcement. This small faction of non-peaceful protesters and officers briefly tossed smoke bombs back and forth. 
+Officers eventually lit two smoke bombs on the north side of the bridge before parking two armored vehicles at the exit to the bridge, preventing water protectors and protestors from evacuating in that direction. All law enforcement vehicles were gone within a matter of minutes, and protesters climbed aboard the armored vehicles before setting fire to them. 
+When several water protectors came to the bridge, they told those setting the fires and instigating violence that this isn’t what they want for the movement. 
+“If you feel uncomfortable, if you don’t like this action, go back to camp,” one of the men shouted back at the water protectors. 
+Saying prayer had failed, the small group of non-peaceful protesters said they were now fighting “by any means necessary.” 
+The fires they set burned throughout the night, as neither law enforcement nor fire department personnel ever arrived at the scene to extinguish the flames. Gabriella Scarlett, a water protector from Canada, signals for peace as a fire barricade burns off County Road 134. Behind her, water protectors establish a fire barricade to hold police back from the site of construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. Oct. 27, 2016 (Derrick Broze for MintPress) 
+Agitators make their presence known 
+On Oct. 28, water protectors and elders arrived on the scene to retake the bridge from the agitating faction in all-black clothing, a tactic for protests and marches known as “black bloc.” There were no more than 20 of these provocateurs, and they all traveled together in five older pick-up trucks. Several fights broke out on the bridge as the agitators clashed with those calling strictly for prayer and ceremony, and the agitators were run off the bridge and back to the camps within an hour. 
+Siouxz, the head of security on the frontline camp off North Dakota Highway 1806, said those who started the fires were not with the water protector movement. 
+“ Seven Council has came and they are very ashamed of the behavior of some of the non-traditional people here who can’t respect our ways and how we want to make this prayerful,” Siouxz told MintPress News. 
+“We’re here to protect the water, not initiate a riot or some violent protest, which is the image that the whole world is getting right now. Our elders have come together to condemn all of these wrongful actions like catching things on fire.” 
+Apparently intent on forcing their tactics upon the movement, these outside forces appeared uninterested in listening to the Standing Rock Sioux or other Native water protectors. 
+Although the black bloc tactic has been used as a legitimate way for protesters to shield their identities from law enforcement, it has also been exploited by law enforcement. Police masquerading as black bloc activists have been exposed at the 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy , and at protests in 2007 in Quebec , and police posed as activists to infiltrate the Occupy movement. A water protector stares down police along County Road 134, in Mandan, North Dakota, north of Red Warrior Camp. Law enforcement wear riot gear as they prepare to remove the frontline camp. Oct. 27, 2016 (Derrick Broze for MintPress) 
+“Solidarity becomes the hijacking or destruction of competing movements, which is exactly what the Black Bloc contingents are attempting to do with the Occupy movement,” Chris Hedges, a progressive independent journalist and activist, wrote in a scathing criticism of the black bloc’s presence during the Occupy movement. 
+Law enforcement isn’t the only institution going undercover to infiltrate activist groups. Corporate entities also have a history of attempting to spy on peaceful, law-abiding activists . A 2013 report by the Center for Corporate Policy found that a large number of corporations are hiring former law enforcement, CIA, NSA, FBI, and military employees to act as spies. 
+In the report, titled “ Spooky Business ,” Gary Ruskin wrote: 
+“Many of the world’s largest corporations and their trade associations — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Walmart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, BAE, Sasol, Brown & Williamson and E.ON — have been linked to espionage or planned espionage against nonprofit organizations, activists and whistleblowers.” 
+Considering what is known about corporate agitation, it is possible that the provocateurs were hired by Energy Transfer Partners , the company behind the pipeline, the banks financing the pipeline, or, really, any company that benefits from the pipeline in any way. 
+Ultimately, though, whether the agitators were police, corporate lackeys, or activists practicing a failed strategy, their actions do not represent the whole of the water protector movement and should not be used to discredit or delegitimize it. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
+6618,TRUNEWS 10/26/16 Jeremy Wiles | Sing A Little Louder,"TRUNEWS 10/26/16 Jeremy Wiles |   October 26, 2016 Will Deutsche Bank’s derivatives be the spark which ignites the Western financial system? Today on TRUNEWS, Rick Wiles raises the alarm about Germany’s biggest bank bracing for a potentially catastrophic earnings report Thursday, and NATO redeploying forces to Russia’s doorstep. Rick also speaks with Jeremy Wiles, the CEO of KingdomWorks Studios, about his harrowing new film “ ”, which details the apathy German Christians displayed toward the Holocaust during World War 2, and the warning American evangelicals MUST heed everyday while the lives of the unborn are slaughtered domestically. 
+Today’s Audio Streamcast. Click the audio bar to listen: <span itemprop=""name"" content=""TRUNEWS 10/26/16 Jeremy Wiles |  ""></span> <span itemprop=""description"" content=""""></span> <span itemprop=""duration"" content=""4490""></span> <span itemprop=""thumbnail"" content=""http://static.panda-os.com/p/1305/sp/130500/thumbnail/entry_id/0_jgdktlmn/version/1 /acv/62""></span> <span itemprop=""width"" content=""350""></span> <span itemprop=""height"" content=""25""></span> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/products/video-platform-features"">Video Platform</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Products/Features/Video-Management"">Video Management</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Video-Solutions"">Video Solutions</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Products/Features/Video-Player"">Video Player</a> 
+Right-click to download today’s show to your local device in mp3 format: Streamcast MP3 
+Email: | Twitter: @EdwardSzall | Facebook: Ed Szall DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP on Apple and Google Play !   How To Listen To TRUNEWS 
+Here on our show pages, there are two ways to listen to TRUNEWS. The first is to use the embedded player on the page. It is the black bar that you see above. Just click the arrow on the player for today’s broadcast. If you prefer to save the program to listen to it later on your PC or mobile device, just click the ‘DOWNLOAD MP3’ link above to archive that particular streamcast. Streamcast Archives",FAKE
+291,John Boehner and the failure to live up to conservative principles,"The announcement by House Speaker John Boehner that he is retiring at the end of October stunned Washington where life is all about grabbing power and holding on to it, often until death they do part.
+
+At a meeting with reporters, Boehner said, “My first job as speaker is to protect the institution.”
+
+Really? Is that why Ohio voters sent him to Washington in 16 elections and his Republican colleagues elected and re-elected him speaker? Did he take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the institution of the House or the Constitution, which, if followed, offers protection enough?
+
+In 2010, I interviewed Boehner when he was minority leader and I asked him to cite the most important lesson he learned when Republicans lost their hard-won House majority in 2006. He replied, “Our team failed to live up to our own principles.”
+
+Failing to live up to GOP principles, indeed, failing to articulate what those principles are, was largely the reason for the increase in conservative members who then demanded either action or the speaker’s head. They got his head. Whether that means his successor will do a better job is open to question.
+
+On July 28, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) expressed the frustration of many conservatives by filing a “motion to vacate the chair,” for the purpose of ousting Boehner from the speakership. Meadows’ resolution charged Boehner with using “the power of the office to punish Members who vote according to their conscience instead of the will of the speaker,” providing for “voice votes on consequential and controversial legislation to be taken without notice and with few Members present,” using “the legislative calendar to create crises for the American People, in order to compel Members to vote for legislation” and failing to comply with “the spirit of the rules of the House of Representatives, which provide that Members shall have three days to review legislation before voting.” That last one had been a promise made by Republicans, should voters return them to a congressional majority.
+
+Most conservatives understand that with a Democrat in the White House and an insufficient GOP congressional majority to override presidential vetoes they can’t always, or maybe even mostly, have their way. But they would like to see Republicans at least employ some of the tactics Democrats shamelessly use when they hold the majority, such as the “nuclear option” employed in the Senate in 2013, which allowed a majority vote instead of a “supermajority” to advance confirmation votes on judicial nominees and executive branch appointments.
+
+At a minimum, conservative members want to see their convictions articulated by the leadership and to fight the left with conviction in hopes that getting their positions heard will influence voters. Instead, in too many instances, conservatives have seen their views ignored and the Republican leadership in both houses knuckle under to Democrats out of fear of being called names or getting blamed for a government shutdown.
+
+Former Speaker Newt Gingrich notes that previous government shutdowns over matters of principle worked in Republicans’ favor, notwithstanding how they were portrayed by the media. In an email to me, he writes: “We closed the government twice in 1995 and ’96 and became the first re-elected House Republican majority since 1928. Our supporters realized we were serious and rewarded us for the effort. The Republicans closed the government in 2013 and won a big election in 2014.”
+
+In my 2010 interview, Boehner bemoaned the size and cost of big government, saying, “I came here for a smaller, less costly and more accountable government and that has not been what’s happening. We don’t need any more programs; we need to undo a lot of programs.”
+
+On Boehner’s watch, the debt has increased nearly $4 trillion, according to figures published by the U.S. Treasury.
+
+It is one of many reasons conservative voters are increasingly fed-up with Congress and for the rise of “outside” presidential candidates. The frustration cuts both ways and it is also a major reason Boehner has decided now is the time to hang it up before Meadows’ resolution can be put to a vote.
+
+Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated op-ed columnist. He joined Fox News Channel in 1997 as a political contributor. His latest book is ""What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America"" is available in bookstores now. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.",REAL
+5592,Trump Bollywood Ad Meant To Sway Indian American Voters Is An Hilarious Fail (VIDEO),"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+Add another group to the list of people who won’t be voting for Donald Trump. Oh, a few of them might but after they see this ad for Trump, I’m betting the majority will laugh and vote for Hillary Clinton. 
+Earlier in the month, Trump attended a Bollywood concert for charity. It was organized by the Republican Hindu Coalition, a group that was founded by a rich Indian-American named Shalli Kumar, who is looking to be the Hindu Sheldon Adelson. The Indian community is heavily Democratic so good luck with that. 
+Trump came to the event, lit the Diya — it’s doubtful that he had any idea what it was — and then spoke. He pandered told the attendees that “the Indian and Hindu community will have a true friend in the White House,” promising they will “defeat radical Islamic terrorism.” 
+This inspired Kumar to make an ad which will be playing 20 times a day on Indian-American channels. He refused to say how much it cost the campaign to buy that much time but we can guess that Mr. Kumar is helping foot the bill. He previously has given almost $1 million to a fundraising committee which benefited both Trump and the RNC. 
+There is a lot to laugh about in the ad, bt Trump’s inability to pronounce Hindi words takes teh cake. It is such an obvious bit of pandering, even for him. 
+The ad starts with a wish for a Happy Diwali , a holiday I am certain Trump is ignorant of. The cut to Trump’s orange face is a bit jarring after the pretty lights and flowers. 
+Kumar wanted to draw a similarity between Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The PM’s campaign had used a clever catchphrase which loosely translates to “This time a Modi government.” Kumar wanted Trump to replace Modi’s name with his own. In Hindi, that is “Ab ki baar Trump sarkar.” Don’t get ahead of me, now. 
+In the ad, which uses footage of Trumps speech at the charity concert, a 2008 photo of the hotel which was attacked by Islamic militants in Mumbai gives way to a picture of PM Modi. Then back to Trump who tries to speak the short Hindi phrase. It’s something one must see to believe. 
+Make sure you aren’t drinking anything as you may endanger your computer. 
+“Approved by Donald Trump?” Well, I guess so. This ad is not just pandering, it is awful. I hope the Indian American community laugh this off and then go vote against this man who only shows interest in their culture when it might get him votes. 
+Oh, and Happy Diwali! May the light burn away any bad times and welcome the good. 
+Featured Image by Kena Betancur/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+8676,Tory Councillor Say Homeless People Should Be ‘Eliminated’,"  Carol Adl in News , UK // 0 Comments 
+A Tory councillor believes that homeless people in Bradford city centre should be ‘grabbed by scruff of the neck’ and ‘dealt with’. 
+The comments by David Heseltine, a Conservative Party Councillor in Bradford caused outrage during a meeting of the Council’s regeneration overview and scrutiny committee. He said : 
+“The tramps and drunks sleeping in doorways. What we need to do is get them by the scruff of the neck and deal with them. People have said they’d go into Bradford if they were eliminated.” 
+He claimed that while plans to redevelop the city centre were all well and good, the investment had been ruined by the homeless. 
+So what exactly does Mr Heseltine envisage when he suggests grabbing the homeless “by the scruff of the neck” and eliminating them? 
+EvolvePolitics reports: 
+Why Councillor Heseltine believes that perpetrating an assault on the homeless would rectify the problem is a mystery. He would be better advised to encourage his colleagues to work towards providing people with homes, opportunities for employment, improving mental health services and providing interventions for alcohol and drug addiction. 
+The ‘Nasty Party’ Councillor said that he had spoken to people who claimed that they would not visit Bradford city centre due to the number of drinkers and beggars. 
+Heseltine is correct in his assertion that Bradford council – like many other councils – places the town centre aesthetic above the needs of those that live in and around them. However, his suggestions for dealing with the problem of homelessness are utterly reprehensible. These are people, not dogs or vermin to be disposed of to make your town look just a little better. 
+Most people are never more than three paychecks away from being homeless. Our elected representatives would be well advised to remember that.",FAKE
+10107,Comment on Cop’s Attempt to Abuse His Authority During Fit of Road Rage is Shutdown by Informed Citizen by Jynxster,"Home / Badge Abuse / Cop’s Attempt to Abuse His Authority During Fit of Road Rage is Shutdown by Informed Citizen Cop’s Attempt to Abuse His Authority During Fit of Road Rage is Shutdown by Informed Citizen Matt Agorist June 14, 2016 9 Comments 
+Baldwin, AL — Jonathon Hinote was out with a friend enjoying a boat ride this weekend when he was stopped, harassed and promised a citation for legally practicing his freedom of speech. 
+The incident began as Hinote was attempting to pull out into traffic. According to Hinote, he was trying to merge onto the highway, when Pritchard police officer Lopez pulled behind him. Lopez, according to Hinote, became impatient and laid on his horn. 
+“I gave him the finger for beeping at me to pull out into oncoming traffic when I had a 20 ft trailer behind my truck,” recalls Hinote. 
+After Hinote had expressed his feelings about being honked at, the officer became enraged and proceeded to abuse his power. 
+Flipping the bird has been ruled to be free speech many times over. In fact, in a 14-page opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit addressed the specific action of flipping off cops when it ruled that the “ancient gesture of insult is not the basis for a reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation or impending criminal activity.” 
+However, we’ve seen citizens pepper-sprayed, assaulted, and arrested for this act of free speech. And, as the video below shows, police could not care less about protecting your free speech if it’s something they don’t like. 
+“What gives you the right to flip me off at the intersection?” asks the officer, apparently oblivious to the Bill of Rights. 
+Hinote attempts to explain that the officer was honking at him which sparked the hand gesture. 
+“If somebody comes up to you and flips you off, what would you do?” asks the clearly oblivious officer. 
+Well officer, if someone flips off those of us in the citizen class, we can’t do anything about it, because it is an act of free speech and being offended gives you no legal right to initiate violence or attempt to detain that person at all. 
+However, because this officer has a badge and a gun, he is able to detain otherwise entirely innocent people for his own personal vendetta. 
+Hinote then proceeds to explain to Lopez that the Supreme Court has, in fact, ruled that flipping the bird is 100 percent protected — even when it’s aimed at police officers. 
+When the officer is schooled on the law, he does what many other officers do and tries to turn freedom of speech into ‘disorderly conduct.’ But he’s dealing with someone who clearly knows his rights. 
+“Am I being detained?” asks Hinote. 
+“Yes, see those blue lights? You are being detained,” replies officer Lopez. 
+Hinote knows he did nothing wrong, so he stands his ground. Eventually, the officer realizes he has no legal basis for the stop and backs down, but not before threatening an act of extortion through the mail. 
+Below is an example of how police can and will act out their rage with impunity — for the simple fact they have a badge and a gun. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist Share",FAKE
+3309,Republicans face challenge in holding on to Senate majority in 2016,"Congratulations, Republicans! You won the Senate majority! Now, can you hold on to it for more than two years?
+
+Looking at the 2016 Senate map, there’s reason for doubt. Republicans will have to defend 24 seats, compared with 10 for Democrats. And the raw numbers don’t even tell the whole story. Seven seats held by Republicans — Florida, Illinois, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — were carried by President Obama in 2008 and 2012. And there is chatter about potential Republican retirements in Arizona and Iowa. If either John McCain or Chuck Grassley decided to call it a career, each of those races would be major Democratic targets.
+
+On the other side of the coin, Republican takeover opportunities are few and far between. By far, the most endangered Democrat is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who survived in 2010 but could face Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R), who won a second term Tuesday with more than 70 percent of the vote. Reid has said he will run again, although his demotion from majority leader to minority leader might make him rethink those plans. The only other Democrat who starts the 2016 cycle in serious jeopardy is freshman Michael Bennet (Colo.), who, like Reid, was a surprise winner in 2010. The convincing win by Cory Gardner (R) over Sen. Mark Udall (D) on Tuesday in the Rocky Mountain State will undoubtedly energize Republicans, though it’s less clear what the GOP bench looks like in a race against Bennet.
+
+Outside of those two seats, there’s almost no vulnerability on the Democratic side. Even if Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.) or Barbara Mikulski (Md.) decide not to run again, both sit in very, very Democratic states — particularly at the federal level.
+
+To win back the Senate majority in two years, Democrats will probably need to net four (if they hold the White House in 2016) or five (if they don’t) seats. Republicans control 52 Senate seats in the 114th Congress, but Sen. Mark Begich (D) is behind by 8,000 votes in Alaska and is likely to lose, and chances for Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) don’t look great in Louisiana’s Dec. 6 runoff.
+
+Gaining five seats is not out of the question for Democrats — though it might be a bit of a stretch — given the Senate map of 2016. Of the 10 most vulnerable seats listed below, Republicans hold eight. The No. 1 race is the most likely to flip party control in 2016.
+
+10. Kentucky (Republican-controlled): As Tuesday’s election showed, Kentucky isn’t exactly fertile ground for Democrats. But something interesting happened even as Mitch McConnell walloped Alison Lundergan Grimes: Democrats held on to their majority in the state House. That means Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) can’t count on changing state law to be able to run for president and Senate at the same time. Hence, a possible open seat.
+
+9. Florida (R): Sen. Marco Rubio (R) has suggested that he won’t run for both president and reelection to the Senate in 2016. If he pursues the former and isn’t on the Senate ballot, this becomes an open-seat race in a true swing state in a presidential year — in other words, a good opportunity for Democrats. If Rubio passes on a White House bid or drops out with enough time to mount a Senate bid, Republicans would probably feel better about holding this seat.
+
+8. Ohio (R): Sen. Rob Portman is one of several Republican members of Congress who have been mentioned (or mentioned themselves) as possible White House contenders. So, this could end up being an open seat. If Portman decides to run for reelection, his deep connections to donors through his work as National Republican Senatorial Committee vice chairman should ensure that he will be a financial behemoth. Portman is not terribly polarizing, and there is no obvious Democratic recruit waiting in the wings.
+
+7. New Hampshire (R): The Granite State was one of the few bright spots for Democrats nationally as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D) beat back a challenge from Scott Brown. It could be a Senate battleground again in two years if Gov. Maggie Hassan (D), who won reelection Tuesday with 53 percent of the vote, decides to take on freshman Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R). There is also considerable chatter among conservative activists about a primary challenge to Ayotte, though it remains to be seen whether a serious one might materialize. And, just to make things more complicated, Ayotte is likely to be in the vice presidential mix no matter who wins the Republican presidential nomination.
+
+6. North Carolina (R): The GOP picked off a seat here Tuesday. It’s safe to assume, however, that if the environment wasn’t so good for the GOP, Kay Hagan would still be a senator come January. Her colleague, Sen. Richard Burr (R) is up for reelection in 2016, and even if he doesn’t retire — he has raised very little money the past two years, which is usually a precursor to retirement — he is likely to find himself targeted.
+
+5. Colorado (Democrat ic-controlled): Bennet probably doesn’t want to think about 2016 yet. He just finished a stint as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, during which his party lost the Senate majority and he became the first chairman in more than four decades to lose a home-state colleague in the process. But Bennet won by the narrowest of margins in 2010 and probably would have lost had Ken Buck, the Republican candidate, not said some unhelpful things.
+
+4. Pennsylvania (R): 2010 was about as good a year as a Republican could hope for in Pennsylvania. And Sen. Pat Toomey (R) still won with only 51 percent of the vote. In a presidential year, Toomey’s challenge will be even more serious. Republicans haven’t carried the Keystone State at the presidential level since 1988. One thing working in Toomey’s favor: a relatively weak Democratic bench. State Attorney General Kathleen Kane apparently has no interest in running for the Senate. The only person actively looking at a bid is former congressman Joe Sestak, who lost to Toomey in 2010.
+
+3. Illinois (R): The first big question that needs to get answered in this race is whether Sen. Mark Kirk (R) will run again. Kirk, who suffered a severe stroke in early 2012, has insisted that he plans to seek a second term, but even some Republicans are taking a wait-and-see approach. Democratic speculation — matter what Kirk does — will center on state Attorney General Lisa Madigan, but she seems a much more likely 2018 challenger to Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner (R). Assuming Madigan is a no-go, look for Rep. Tammy Duckworth to be at the top of Democratic wish lists.
+
+2. Nevada (D): Reid will soon no longer be majority leader. The question is whether he wants to be minority leader and whether he sticks around. He’s got bad approval numbers and is staring at a potential matchup with Sandoval. Tuesday’s election was actually pretty big here. Not only did Sandoval cruise to reelection with 71 percent of the vote — 71 percent! — the GOP also cruised in the lieutenant governor’s race, a huge proxy war that Reid badly wanted to win. That means Sandoval can run in 2016 without worrying about the governor’s seat going to a Democrat.
+
+1. Wisconsin (R): Sen. Ron Johnson starts the 2016 election cycle as the most vulnerable senator on the map. He’s undefined in the eyes of many, and he’s running in a state that has gone Democratic in seven straight presidential elections. To boot, there are rumors that Democrat Russ Feingold, whom Johnson unseated in 2010, may run.",REAL
+1972,5 Reasons Cruz Announced His Candidacy Early,"Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has apparently had enough of the fig leaf most presidential candidates wear as their unofficial spring costume the year before the election actually happens.
+
+That is a bold stroke, but entirely in keeping with the go-for-broke style the junior senator from Texas has exhibited since first challenging the Republican establishment's candidate for the Senate in 2012.
+
+Cruz, who officially announced his candidacy for president in a midnight Monday tweet and video, has not been the buzz candidate so far in the party's 2016 discussions — nor the media's. In fact, he has seemed at times a bit of a faded rose, a skyrocket that spent much of its sparkle. There was the debacle over his brinkmanship in the 2013 government shutdown. That was followed by countless run-ins with Republican colleagues in the Senate.
+
+But Cruz is still a barnburner on the hustings and a potential game changer in the presidential contest. While he is not among the leaders in national polls of Republicans, he has an undeniable appeal to the base voters, who dominate in primaries — especially in red states. And polls at this stage are largely meaningless.
+
+So it makes sense for him to step out early and go big doing it. In fact, there are at least five good reasons for him to make his move as the first major full-fledged candidate.
+
+1. Cruz needs to cut through the noise and confusion created by the expanding GOP field. Given all the talk on the right about finding a fresh face, why not give the media one relatively fresh face to focus on right now? In recent days, the campaign theme on the Republican side has been, ""The more the merrier."" That may be great grist for the media's mill — as we love to do candidate profiles and lists that look like brackets for the NCAA basketball tournament. But that's not helping Cruz. As static about countless prospective candidacies has grown, Cruz has struggled to get his signal through. Cruz had hoped his status as the enfant terrible of the Senate's backbench would make him newsworthy in early 2015. But right now that distinction has been commandeered by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who is seven years younger than Cruz (and has been in the Senate less than three months).
+
+2. Getting in first should help Cruz raise money. The biggest challenge facing Cruz at the moment is money. And the fastest way to raise real money is to get out there with a real campaign and ask for it. His home state is one of the top sources of political money, of course, as it has been for decades. But Cruz is competing for Texas donors with former Gov. Rick Perry, who has been aggressive about locking down oil money and other wealthy politicos in the Lone Star state, much as he did in his first campaign four years ago. Rand Paul also has a claim on many Texas dollars, having grown up in the state his father served in Congress. The Paul name is still highly revered by many Texas conservatives. Jeb Bush and other candidates will also find adherents here, so Cruz needs to defend his home court aggressively.
+
+3. Skipping the ""exploratory committee"" phase cuts through the usual persiflage that surrounds nascent candidacies. If you're running and you know it, why not say so? Real men needn't horse around with exploratory committees. Aren't average news consumers confused by the dance of seven veils that all those coy candidates perform every four years? More serious students of the process may appreciate the nuances and legal uses of shadow campaigns, but even they often find them to be annoying ploys to prompt multiple ""announcement"" stories. So dispensing with this business serves not only to elevate the seriousness of the Cruz bid, but also to reinforce his image as a straight shooter, a regular guy who calls things by their right names. The Cruz campaign manifesto, just now hitting the stores, is titled A Time for Truth.
+
+4. The early declaration bolsters Cruz's bid to be the standard-bearer for the party's conservative activists. There are many wannabes who'd like to run in this lane. Indeed, only a few are going the other way and appealing to the straight-up establishment side of the party (Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio). So, to hold off the legion of competitors on the right, Cruz needs to break the tape and stand apart from the mere prospects, such as Rick Santorum, Mike Pence, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal and others who would be his natural rivals on the right, if they decide to run. Getting in early may discourage some of this crowd — and also serve to eclipse some of the boutique candidates such as Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina.
+
+5. The sooner Cruz gets in, the longer his long-shot candidacy will last. Even if he is washed up after the first four voting events, he will have had 10 months of formal candidacy now that he's in. That should be enough not only to test the market but to maximize his media exposure. Not all his media attention will be positive, of course, but Cruz thrives on attacks and uses them to enhance his credentials as a crusader for the cause. It might well serve Cruz to battle through the first few primaries, bow out relatively early and return as a ticket-balancer at convention time. The most overlooked element of the presidential nominating game is that it has two winners: the presidential nominee and the running mate. The candidates always deny interest in it, but scarcely anyone ever turns down the VP spot when it's offered. There is no better springboard to the top of the national ticket than the lower half of that ticket.",REAL
+6101,“Beware of the Shadow Government”: Ron Paul Advises President-Elect,"
+This article was written and originally published at The Daily Sheeple . 
+Editor’s Comment: There are powers bigger than just the president, and Trump is under a lot of pressure right now to take advice from people who represent the deepest and darkest interests at work in foreign policy. America will be undergo a tremendous test in the next term, as terrorism, war, a divided population and the global economy all threaten to explode on his watch, leaving the situation open to exploit by the advisors and appointees of the Deep State, and the secret societies that create and steer world affairs. 
+After decades as a billionaire businessman, Trump is finally playing ball in the big leagues, and that means some very serious characters at work in and around his office of power. 
+If Trump thinks he’s now the big boss, he’d better be very careful and watch is back. History has a lot to say about JFK’s assassination – because it concerns his attempt to oust the shadow powers from his administration. 
+Ron Paul on Trump’s Election: Beware of the Shadow Government 
+by The Daily Sheeple
+Former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul appeared on RT to talk about the election of Donald Trump as president, and he voiced major skepticism on whether Trump will actually follow through on many of his campaign promises.
+
+Paul referenced Trump’s independence as being a political outsider and that this possibly could have a more favorable outcome than we might have seen with Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office. However, he notes that we cannot determine what plans for Trump’s presidency the shadow government might have. Speaking of this secret power structure, he said:
+You know, we look at the president, we look at what he said, we look at what he might do, and we look at his advisors, but quite frankly, there is an outside source, which we refer to as a deep state or a shadow government. There is a lot of influence by people that are actually more powerful than our government itself, our president and on up. I mean, you take for instance how our government gets involved in elections around the world, whether it’s in the Middle East or Ukraine. 
+Paul is not particularly pleased with the war-driven neoconservatives who are beginning to surround Trump. “Unfortunately, there has been several neoconservatives that are getting closer to Trump. And if he gets his advice from them then I do not think that is a good sign,” he said. “During the campaign, he did talk a little bit about backing off and being less confrontational to Russia and I like that. He criticized some of the wars in the Middle East at the same time. He believes we should accelerate the war against ISIS and terrorism.”
+Paul thinks that the Wikileaks release of the nearly 60,000 hacked Podesta emails is what ultimately secured Trump to the presidency, but he thinks that the hidden power structure is brewing something in the background to maintain their dominion over the US presidency. “Yes, Trump is his own guy, more so than most of those who have ever been in before. We hope he can maintain an independence and go in the right direction. But I fear the fact that there is so much that can be done secretly, out of control of our apparent government and out of the view of so many citizens,” he cautioned.
+Paul does not have high hopes that Trump will follow through on his campaign promise to disengage from the NATO alliance. He expects that Trump’s intentions as president will become clear once we see who he appoints to his cabinet.
+This article was written and originally published at The Daily Sheeple . 
+",FAKE
+1756,The GOP farce plods along: Why last night’s interminable debate was an affront to the party’s patron saint,"Of course, all the contenders genuflected at the memory of Reagan while trashing President Obama’s Iran deal — yet nobody mentioned Reagan’s role in bolstering the Iranian hardliners by violating an embargo to sell them arms in exchange for help to the Nicaraguan contras and a possible hostage release.
+
+We learned as well that when it comes to Donald Trump vs. the right wing media, it’s Trump 2, conservative media personalities 0. Just like Trump got Fox to bow to him after he savaged Megyn Kelly following the last debate, he humiliated radio host Hugh Hewitt – unbelievably, a “panelist” at this CNN debate — by getting Hewitt to say that it wasn’t Trump’s fault that he confused the Kurds with the Quds force. “It was my fault,” Hewitt told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and he seconded that Thursday night.
+
+Hewitt also lobbed a softball question to Trump (which he actually kind of flubbed) giving him a chance to blast President Obama’s Syria policy, and some of his 2016 rivals for not supporting military intervention in 2013. It looked as if Trump’s campaign against Hewitt as a “third-rate” radio host asking “gotcha” questions – backed by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter – actually worked.
+
+Oh, if you’re waiting for me to tell you definitively who “won” the debate, and who might begin to rise or fall in the polls as a result? I’m sorry, I really have no idea. Dr. Ben Carson looked like he confused his One-A-Day vitamin with Lunesta; he was barely able to keep his eyes open and talked in sleepy non-sequiturs. But I thought Carson blew the last debate, and he rose in the polls. So what do I know?
+
+Jeb Bush clearly had another mediocre night, which he can’t afford. He came out kind of peppy – even Trump praised his “energy” – and accused Trump of exactly the kind of special interest lobbying he rails against, saying the real estate mogul gave him money back when he ran for governor, and then unsuccessfully lobbied to place casinos in Florida. But Trump denied it and loudly talked over Bush; there was brief confusion about whether the former governor was telling the truth (PolitiFact later confirmed it); and the moment faded.
+
+Likewise, Bush was later given a chance by CNN’s Jake Tapper to call Trump out on a Twitter insult to Bush’s Mexican-born wife Columba. Bush started strong, demanding an apology, but then faded again as Trump filibustered.
+
+But Bush’s worst moment was when Hewitt asked him – in another kindness to Trump – about the fact that a lot of his foreign policy advisors worked for his brother, the last GOP president, who got us into disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump then jabbed Bush – “Your brother, and your brother’s administration, gave us Barack Obama” – which led Bush to retort, “My brother kept us safe.” As if he didn’t remember his brother was president during the Sept. 11 attacks. It was that kind of night for Jeb!
+
+Trump didn’t have a great night either, but he has one thing in common with Reagan – so far he’s seemed to share an impermeable outer political coating with the Teflon president. He engaged in a juvenile spat with Rand Paul early on that ended in his insulting Paul’s looks, and looking kind of silly. Carly Fiorina absolutely owned him when she was asked about the episode when Trump clearly insulted her appearance —  ‘Look at that face!’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘Would anyone vote for that?” — then insisted he was actually talking about her “persona.”
+
+“Women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” Fiorina shot back. “I think she’s got a beautiful face and I think she’s a beautiful woman,” Trump countered, with characteristic sexism, but looking uncharacteristically sheepish. This was an establishment crowd, heavy on donors, and they were tougher on Trump than the Fox audience was. Perhaps most damaging, Trump himself seemed relatively “low-energy” – his constant jibe against Bush. He told reporters later that it was his attempt at looking presidential, but whatever: he was much less a factor than in the last GOP go-round. Still, pundits have predicted Trump’s decline before, including after his boorish performance in the last debate, and they’ve been wrong. Trump himself crowed about a Drudge Report poll showing him the winner of the debate, again. That poll was right last time, so who knows. Once again, lots of the punditocracy claimed Sen. Marco Rubio was one of the debate winners, but that’s crazy. The young Florida senator fell flat on his face with an early joke about the California drought: “I brought my own water!” he said with a big dumb smile. That was a twofer: He made fun of a local tragedy on a day when the death toll of the state’s drought-fueled wildfires continued to mount, and he reminded everyone of his humiliating big-gulp moment when he got to reply to Obama’s State of the Union address two years ago. When Trump dinged Rubio – accurately — for having the worst absentee record in the Senate, Rubio essentially defended it by saying Congress isn’t getting anything done. So he stopped doing his job because it was frustrating? In the real world, he’d get fired. Score one for Trump. Anyway, lots of smart-ish folks thought Rubio did well in the last debate to0, but he went nowhere in the polls. Fiorina probably had the best night — if you don’t fact check anything she said. She flat out lied about what the doctored, bogus Planned Parenthood videos showed, claiming they featured a still living intact aborted fetus, killed for its organs, when they did no such thing. When she insisted she’d call Iran’s Supreme Leader to call off the recent nuclear deal on her first day as president, the CNN moderators missed a chance to ask her why, as CEO of Hewlett Packard, she skirted anti-Iran sanctions — rather like the night’s patron saint, Ronald Reagan — and sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment to the anti-U.S. regime. She was allowed to misrepresent her awful HP record, and inaccurately trash Hillary Clinton on Benghazi and her controversial email practices. Still, she’s a poised, practiced debater, and she may get another small bump in the polls. I don’t think any of the rest, including the occasionally statesmanlike John Kasich, did enough last night to significantly change their campaign standing. Gov. Scott Walker was a bit more energetic but probably didn’t make enough of an impression to reverse his sinking fortunes. Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. Mike Huckabee continued stridently narrow-casting to the far-right evangelical community, which might matter if Trump suddenly left the field. But the twice divorced libertine billionaire and born-again Republican is leading among that group, too. Whoops, I haven’t mentioned the pumped up, inauthentic “It’s not about me, guys” flailing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Oh well. Now I have. At any rate, the seemingly interminable three-hour debate – I accidentally typed “three-month debate,” because that’s how it felt – worked against anyone who had a good moment or two. Still, remember that most post-debate predictions were wrong last time. Once again, we learned that the GOP has moved far to the right of Ronald Reagan – but little else.",REAL
+4120,"Fuming over Ryan, some conservative voices turn on the Freedom Caucus","Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) has been able to count on his Facebook page for stalwart support during his long-running battle with the House Republican leadership, including a successful effort to oust House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).
+
+“Keep up the great work,” read a comment posted last week. “We the people thank you for ridding us of John Boehner!”
+
+But in recent days, the tone of the comments on Meadows’s page, and those of the other members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, have changed significantly.
+
+“You truly should be ashamed,” one commenter wrote Thursday. “The people in the caucus will be held responsible come election day.”
+
+“You should all be replaced,” a critic told Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.). Another called Rep. Raúl R. Labrador (R-Idaho), one of the most persistent thorns in Boehner’s side, “a RINO establishment lap dog” and “another go-along to get along phony who will GLADLY step on the throats of the Conservative electorate.”
+
+Things may never be the same for the Freedom Caucus after most of its members moved last week to support Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as the next House speaker. Suddenly, they may not be conservative enough for some in the party.
+
+The groundswell of support from hard-core conservative voters that emboldened the group as it battled Boehner and the GOP establishment seemed to subside for the first time in months. That has put its members in the unfamiliar position of defending their right flank.
+
+“Look, I imagine that there’s theoretically a chance that [we] all went from being radical extremist crazies to Washington sellouts in 12 hours,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), a Freedom Caucus leader. “But maybe a more likely narrative is that we really think that this is a good step for the conservative movement. And it’s up to us to try to explain that to people, and that’s what we’ve been doing.”
+
+They would seem to have a lot of explaining to do.
+
+The anger over Ryan’s ascent has been fueled by voices across the conservative media landscape. On the Internet, sites such as Breitbart.com and the Drudge Report have pumped out a steady stream of anti-Ryan stories casting doubt on his record, while such prominent commentators as Erick Erickson, Ann Coulter and Mickey Kaus have sharpened their teeth and urged conservatives to contact lawmakers and tell them to spurn Ryan.
+
+Particularly brutal have been the syndicated talk-radio hosts who have helped foment the anti-establishment outrage that has kept Donald Trump atop the GOP presidential race and forced Jeb Bush, a well-financed mainstream conservative, to undertake a campaign shake-up.
+
+Laura Ingraham last week called Ryan “basically John Boehner with better abs” and featured segment after segment attacking Ryan’s positions on trade and immigration. She also mocked his desire to spend his weekends with his family.
+
+Another influential host, Mark Levin, lambasted Ryan as a creature of the establishment elite. “I think it’s time, ladies and gentlemen, to choose a speaker from outside the House of Representatives,” he told his audience Wednesday. “This is the best the Republican establishment can do; it’s just not good enough.”
+
+And the biggest conservative talker of them all, Rush Limbaugh, on Thursday called Ryan a favorite of the Republican “donor class” and “the new Cantor” — a reference to former House majority leader Eric Cantor, who was ousted last year in a GOP primary.
+
+Meanwhile, the man who did the ousting — Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.) — counts himself among the roughly 70 percent of Freedom Caucus members who say they are willing to support Ryan.
+
+“When they make decisions, it’s not in haste,” Brat said of the caucus. “And so I would ask the American people: Hold your fire. Wait till you see exactly what our group is doing, and I think you’ll see that it’s coherent, it makes sense.”
+
+One problem for Brat and his Freedom Caucus colleagues is that Ryan has remained mum for the most part on his intentions. When he spoke to the House Republican Conference on Tuesday, Ryan set out conditions for agreeing to serve as speaker, including an end to the House rule allowing a speaker to be ousted by a simple majority.
+
+Ryan appeared to soften on that point in meetings with lawmakers later in the week, and Freedom Caucus members say Ryan privately discussed other concessions, including a restructuring of the House Republican steering committee and adherence to the “Hastert rule” requiring a majority of Republicans to support any measure put on the floor.
+
+But Ryan mentioned none of those items in the letter he sent to colleagues Thursday agreeing to serve. He opted instead for gauzy generalities: “We can make the House a more open and inclusive body — one where every member can contribute to the legislative process. We can rally House Republicans around a bold agenda that will tackle the country’s problems head on. And we can show the country what a common-sense conservative agenda looks like.”
+
+That has left a cadre of tea party insurgents, most elected no more than five years ago, in the position of defending their willingness to trust implicitly a 17-year incumbent with a long record of negotiating spending deals with Democrats and backing immigration reform measures that are deeply unpopular on the right.
+
+The latter has proved to be especially toxic for Ryan in conservative circles, to the point that his chief partner in pushing reform legislation, Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), said he “had Republican members who are friends of mine saying: ‘Don’t say anything good about Paul Ryan! Don’t say anything at all about Paul Ryan!’ ”
+
+“There’s a small group that wields an inordinate influence and power over the group,” Gutierrez added. “They are slaves and captives to Laura Ingraham.”
+
+Meadows said Thursday that he and like-minded members were more concerned that Ryan might have made contradictory pledges to different groups while courting support last week. And he suggested that Ryan might be at risk of fraying the House GOP anew if he didn’t make a clearer statement before Thursday’s speaker vote.
+
+“It’s important that a down payment be made in order to keep that supermajority intact,” he said.
+
+A handful of House hard-liners, perhaps 10 to 15, remain proudly outside the pro-Ryan camp; most continue to back Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), a backbencher who has emphasized procedural reforms.
+
+“I don’t know what they’re thinking, really,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a Webster backer, said of the Freedom Caucus.
+
+“If you’ve got problems with a man today, and the man tells you, ‘Tomorrow, I’ll be a different person’ — it doesn’t happen,” said Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), who said he has received more than 100 calls over two days from constituents opposing Ryan.
+
+But others say they are willing to take the heat from the base. Commentators and activists might be exercised about Ryan’s immigration positions, they say, but lawmakers are more focused on how he’ll run the House.
+
+Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) noted that Webster, whom the Freedom Caucus had previously endorsed for speaker, is not considered to be particularly conservative.
+
+“It never was about the most perfect guy with the most perfect voting record; it’s about the person that’s willing to govern in a way that allows conservative ideas to at least come to the forefront, which he has said he is willing to do,” Salmon said. “I think conservatives all over the country ought to be doing cartwheels. . . . We’ve been dealing with eating crumbs off the table. Now we’ve got an opportunity to sit at the table and actually partake in the meal.”
+
+Some simply say they are confident that their constituents will trust them to make the right decision. Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said calls to his office were running 2 to 1 against Ryan, but he said passions were at “a much lower level” than after he voted for Boehner in January.
+
+Asked Thursday if he expects pitchforks back home, Buck said he did not: “I’m the guy with the pitchfork.”",REAL
+3951,Germany's Merkel backs tighter refugee rules amid sex assault protests,"As demonstrations erupted in Cologne on Saturday over New Year's Eve sexual assaults and robberies blamed largely on foreigners, Chancellor Angela Merkel called for stricter laws regulating asylum seekers.
+
+Merkel, who has been particularly outspoken in welcoming refugees to Germany, told a two-day meeting of the Christian Democrats in Mainz that tighter restrictions would be ""in the interest of citizens, but also in the interests of the great majority of the refugees who are here,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported.
+
+""When crimes are committed, and people place themselves outside the law ... there must be consequences,"" she told reporters after the meeting, the BBC reported.
+
+Party leaders agreed on a proposal to strengthen the ability of police to conduct checks of identity papers, and also to exclude foreigners from being granted asylum who had been convicted of crimes and sentenced to terms even as light as probation. The measures would require approval by parliament.
+
+The sharper tone follows reports in Cologne that some 1,000 men — many intoxicated — robbed, sexually assaulted and in some cases raped women during celebrations on New Year's Eve.
+
+""Refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, foreigners, friendly or evil, new or long-time residents: It doesn't matter,"" the newsmagazine Der Spiegel said in an editorial. ""It seems as though the time has come for a broad debate over Germany's future — and Merkel's mantra 'We can do it,' is no longer enough to suppress it.""
+
+Police initially identified the suspects as up to 1,000 men ""of Middle Eastern origin,” but later backtracked as public officials cautioned there was little information on whether those involved were migrants. Of the 32 suspects identified by police in Cologne, 22 are asylum seekers, the German Interior Ministry said.
+
+One suspect was carrying a document with Arabic-German translations of sexist phrases and threats, which mass-circulation tabloid Bild published on Saturday.
+
+As the uproar over the assaults gathered strength, thousands of demonstrators, from the left and right, turned out in Cologne for a day of protests Saturday.
+
+The protesters included the anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement and the right-wing extremist Pro Cologne party. At one point, police fired tear gas and used water cannon to break up a PEGIDA rally after protesters threw firecrackers and bottles at officers, Agence France-Presse reported.
+
+One group carried signs saying, ""No violence against women."" Another banner read, ""Migrants out.""
+
+Demonstrators from the political left chanted, ""Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here,"" Buzzfeed reported.
+
+Some 1,700 police, many in riot gear, were on hand to control the crowds, the DPA news agency reported.",REAL
+343,Human remains found as search continues for 11 service members involved in helicopter crash,"Human remains washed ashore Wednesday, as officials continued their search for seven Marines and four soldiers in waters off the Florida Panhandle, where a military helicopter had crashed during a training exercise.
+
+“We have confirmed that we have had some human remains wash ashore in the area where our search and rescue team have begun a larger scale operation,” Andrew Bourland, a spokesman for the Eglin Air Force Base, told The Washington Post.
+
+Bourland also said that debris from the aircraft had been located.
+
+The Army UH-60 Black Hawk is believed to have gone down in the water and foggy conditions were reported in the area at the time of the crash, though it is too soon to say what might have caused the mishap.
+
+At a Wednesday afternoon news conference, Maj. Gen. Glenn H. Curtis, the Adjutant General for the Louisiana National Guard, said the Black Hawk pilots had thousands of hours of flight experience and were “instructor pilots,” which indicates that they were experienced and qualified enough to train other pilots.
+
+According to Curtis, it is one of the highest designations pilots in the Army can receive.
+
+A second Black Hawk that participated in the exercise returned to base after take-off due to the weather conditions, Curtis said.  That helicopter landed safely and all personnel on board were accounted for.
+
+“One of them started to take off and realized that the weather was a condition then turned around and came back,” said Curtis, who spoke from Hammond, La.
+
+According to a Pentagon official who spoke anonymously to the Associated Press nearly 12 hours after the craft was reported missing, all 11 service members are presumed dead.
+
+Foggy conditions in the search area have made the operation more difficult, Bourland told The Post. But with the break of dawn, efforts ramped up.
+
+“We’ve got some daylight, but it is overcast and quite foggy,” Bourland said earlier on Wednesday. “It is having an impact on getting the full-scale rescue moving now.”
+
+Local authorities, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the Coast Guard were involved in the search efforts, according to a news release.
+
+The helicopter carrying highly trained Marines in a special operations unit, was on a night training mission outside the base, which is near Valparaiso, Fla. Crews were dispatched after the Eighth Coast Guard District Command Center got a report of a downed military aircraft late Tuesday evening, the release stated. A “debris field consistent with a military aircraft” was located at around 1:30 a.m. CST on Wednesday,  according to the Coast Guard release.
+
+The helicopter does contain a flight data recorder, the Army said on Wednesday, that can be recovered as investigators try to determine what caused the accident.
+
+“Our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and family of the members involved in this incident,” Layne Carter, search and rescue mission coordinator, said in the release. “We are aggressively searching for possible survivors involved in the crash.”
+
+The Marines are part of a Camp Lejeune-based special operations group and the soldiers are from an Army National Guard unit based out of Hammond, La.
+
+“Our thoughts and prayers are with the Marines, soldiers and family members of those involved in this mishap. We are working closely with all parties involved to locate our Marines and the Army aircrew as soon as possible,” Maj. Gen. Joseph Osterman, commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Special Operations Command said in a statement.
+
+Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Wednesday told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the crash reinforces the fact that military personnel are “at risk whether in training or in combat.”
+
+“Our thoughts and prayers with them,” Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said, while speaking on Capitol Hill.
+
+The names of the aircrew and Marines are being withheld while the search and rescue mission is ongoing.
+
+“Today, as you can imagine, is a tough day for the Louisiana National Guard and the Marine Corps,” Curtis said. “At this hour, our priorities are search and rescue for our soldiers and Marines. And secondly to take care of our families. This will remain a search and rescue operation.”
+
+[This post has been updated multiple times.]",REAL
+5948,Russia or the Neocons: Who endangers American democracy? | OffGuardian,"by Vladimir Golstein, via The Duran 
+Political discourse of American mass media is inundated with another wave of Russophobia and fear mongering. Besides the obvious military threat (Russia’s nuclear arsenal), or the challenges to the US foreign policy (the conflicts in Ukraine or Syria), a new fear has been introduced into the news: the US political system is endangered by Russia’s computer hacking, informational warfare, and its support of Donald Trump. 
+The newspaper titles sound like a commercial for the upcoming Invasion of the Body Snatchers sequel. The Washingon Post announces: “Russia Is Now a Threat. The US Should Treat It Like One.” Time magazine raises the stakes: “Russia Wants to Undermine Faith in the U.S. Election.” 
+The Atlantic warns of the “The Dangers of the Putin-Trump relationship,” articulating the already familiar litany of complaints: “Russia is directly interfering in the US elections … it is a dangerous escalation that threatens the integrity of the US electoral process.” While US Today allows notorious neocon named Max Boot to discover not just the threat, but an actual war. His “Time to Get Real About Russia Cyber War,” is rather blunt: “Our democracy is under attack by Russia, but almost no one is treating the situation with the gravity it deserves.” 
+Well, nobody treats the situation with the gravity it deserves because they are treating it with much greater gravity. In fact, some of the commentators are so grave, that they are ready to give in already. Zack Beauchamp concludes his tirades against Russian hacking in the following manner: “Russia’s strategy is even more dangerous that it appears. Not only does it undermine democracy using the press but it actually gets the press to undermine itself. And there’s not much we can reasonably do about it, either.” 
+Reading all this, one might think that the former Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal , has been resurrected along with his 1949 battle-cry: “The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming. They’re right around. I’ve seen Russian soldiers.” 
+What is behind this Russophobia? A real Russian threat? A smokescreen intended to cover failed policies of recent administration? The meeting between the Russophobic minds of a particular candidate (Hillary Clinton) and a particular group of voters (neocons)? 
+I believe that these Joe McCarthy type accusations against both Russia and Trump seem to pursue only one goal: to give the veneer of respectability to the neocons’ and other Republican luminaries’ desertion of their own party. Thus, endless “confessions” of reformed Republicans and hardcore neocons , expressing their born-again zeal for the Democratic Candidate, Hillary Clinton. 
+The neocons are not switching parties because they’ve seen the light. They are enamored with Hillary Clinton’s record of foreign policy and her willingness to embrace the US globalist claims. As reported by Rania Khalek in Intercept , Robert Kagan, one of the leading neocons, the co-founder of the notorious PNAC (Project for the New American Century, the blueprint of the recent policies of aggression and regime change intended to cement US hegemony in world affairs), has been on the record for quite some time: “I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” Kagan told …at a “ foreign policy professionals for Hillary ” fundraiser… –I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.” 
+The neocons are very public about their desertion, and bear it as a badge of honor. Dubious honor, since in their pursuit of an ideal candidate for their agenda, neocons do not just betray their former party, but the very foundations of American democracy: the two party system. 
+Their desertion reveals that American political system has finally internalized Francis Fukuyama proud words about the end of history. We’ve reached the consensus; there is no need to argue or challenge, history has ended, the truths are revealed and they are now the property of the elites united into one globalist Imperial party bent on equating American prosperity with the American hegemony over world affairs. 
+To any objective observer it is clear that is not Russia that endangers US democracy but the political corruption, the rule of 1% oligarchy, and mad pursuit of PNAC policies. Even greater danger to democracy lies in the neocons’ desertion to the Hillary camp. 
+Unsavory as the corporate rule and globalism might be, one can argue for and pursue these goals, provided they leave the room for the alternative vision. It is this neocons’ dismissal of the alternatives that betrays the very foundations of democracy, at least, in the way, a political philosopher Karl Popper formulated them in his celebrated 1945 treatise, Open Society and Its Enemies . 
+The list of neocons and other prominent Republicans rushing toward one party system has been compiled by Eleanor Clift in Daily Beast at the end of June, and had obviously grown since then. Some of them, Max Boot in particular, are pretty explicit about the reasons for his desertion: in his May 8, 2016, article in LA Times , Boot announces simply that, “The Republican Party is Dead.” 
+Why? Because it is no longer led by the likes of McCain, Rubio and Romney, for whom Boot served as foreign policy advisor, but by Donald Trump, “the ignorant demagogue” intending to break up “the most successful alliance in history — NATO.” Furthermore, Trump has “kind words for tyrants such as Vladimir Putin.” Indeed, how can anyone in the US political establishment have kind words for Putin? We keep our kind words only for “our SOBs.” 
+The simplicity if not poverty of this argumentation makes it difficult to distinguish it from exaggerations, simplification, or ignorance, for which neocons consistently fault Trump. But neocons were never friends of irony; otherwise, they would not make statements about NATO’s spectacular success with a straight face. 
+The alliance that followed every whim of its paranoid members, such as Baltic Republics or Poland, and which intended to drag Ukraine into NATO pushing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation? If this is success, how does one define failure? And talking about exaggerations: “The risk of Trump winning, however remote, represents the biggest national security threat that the United States faces today.” 
+As if being “dead” is not bad enough, Boot feels the need to drive a stake into the heart of the Republican Party: the party is stupid . Writing for NYT , the publication that never misses a chance to print something nasty about Republicans, Boot bemoans Republican complicity with Donald Trump phenomenon: “How the Stupid Party’ Created Donald Trump.” 
+Why can’t there be an alternative to the neocons’ doctrines of world domination in the form of a populist, nationalist movement that wants Americans to take care of Americans first, before overextending the country’s economic and military reach? And should this alternative be immediately called stupid? 
+Yet, for many neocons, it is Hillary or bust. James Kirchik goes out of his way trying to convince his fellow conservatives that it is Clinton who is a true conservative, and therefore, the last American hope: “It’s come to this: Hillary Clinton is the one person standing between America and the abyss.” 
+Referring to a profound conservative thinker, Michael Oakeshott, Kirchik observed that Oakeshott “defines the conservative disposition as one that ‘prefers small and limited innovations to large and indefinite’ ones and ‘favors a slow rather than a rapid pace, and pauses to observe current consequences and make appropriate adjustments.’ … Clinton is the candidate of the status quo, something that conservatives, by definition, are supposed to uphold.” 
+Kirchick fails to mention, however, that it is Clintons’ and Obama’s implementation of neocons’ policies which is nothing short of revolutionary. Military adventures, drastic regime changes, alliance redrawing, the willingness to sacrifice American lives and money in their pursuit, all these misguided policies that meet no political resistance –that’s what revolutionary. 
+Trump’s realism and pragmatic approach to politics appears as revolutionary only to the ideologues who refuse to pause in their drive to reshape the modern world according to their childish dreams. 
+This radical reworking of democratic and conservative process of slow incremental improvements into the hegemony of corporate sponsored elites is indeed revolutionary: a modern day version of Lenin’s hegemony of proletariat and its avant-garde, the elite party, all over again. 
+Hillary Clinton is as conservative as Brezhnev, who, in his failure to modify or change the radical agenda set up by the party of Lenin and Stalin, was indeed, a conservative. Only an intellectual of Kirchick’s magnitude can see something Oakeshottian in this embrace of one party system. 
+As someone who lived under one party rule in the former Soviet Union, I fully appreciate Popper’s rather minimalistic, but fundamental view of democracy, as the society that boasts a two party system and which guarantees the ease of deposing a ruling party in case of its failures. 
+Karl Popper insisted on the necessity and practical usefulness of the two-party system, so that the loss of power would lead to self-scrutiny and therefore improvement. While the two parties and their loyal press try to police each other, they keep each other busy, allowing the rest of the citizens to live in peace and pursue their goals without too much interference or control. 
+Obviously, all this goes down the drain with the one party system of globalists and the elites, the party that mocks and dismisses as ridiculous or deplorable anyone who happens to challenge it. 
+In his The Open Society and its Enemies Popper proposes a rather paradoxical, yet extremely sensible theory of a democratic society. What is important for Popper, is not the discovery of a perfect government, but a much more mundane and pragmatic question: how to avoid the blatantly bad ones. And democracy does it better than any other system. Insisting on this pragmatism, Popper highlights the following syllogism: 
+And we do not base our choice on the goodness of democracy, which may be doubtful, but solely on the evilness of a dictatorship, which is certain. Not only because the dictator is bound to make bad use of his power, but because a dictator, even if he were benevolent, would rob all others of their responsibility, and thus of their human rights and duties. This is a sufficient basis for deciding in favor of democracy—that is, a rule of law that enables us to get rid of the government. No majority, however large, ought to be qualified to abandon this rule of law.” 
+Popper wrote this elucidation for The Economist ; where he explains his paradoxical thought in the following manner: 
+In ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’ I suggested that an entirely new problem should be recognized as the fundamental problem of a rational political theory… how can we best avoid situations in which a bad ruler causes too much harm? 
+When we say that the best solution known to us is a constitution that allows a majority vote to dismiss the government, then we do not say the majority vote will always be right. We do not even say that it will usually be right.” 
+For Popper, the two-party system is a requirement not because any of these parties possesses the truth, but because they can lose, be removed from power, and thus given a chance to think things through and improve. Consequently, it is the very possibility of losing, and therefore improving, that makes democracies dynamic and progressive: 
+From the point of view of the new theory, Election day ought to be a Day of Judgment. As Pericles of Athens said in about 430 BC, ‘although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.’ Of course, we may misjudge it; in fact, we often do. But if we have lived through a party’s period of power and have felt its repercussions, we have at least some qualifications for judgment…In order to make a majority government probable, we need something approaching a two-party system…. for such a system encourages a continual process of self-criticism by the two parties.” 
+For Popper, the two –party system is preferable since “an inclination to self-criticism after an electoral defeat is far more pronounced in countries with a two-party system than in those where there are several parties.” It is this self-criticism of a losing party; this desire to reform and modernize that provides healthy development for democracies. 
+The rule of the last two decades did not improve the economic life of the majority of Americans; in fact, it resulted in the drastic redistribution of wealth. It didn’t bring peace to the world stage. In fact, we are standing on the threshold of nuclear confrontation. 
+Yet, in the manner of the Germany in 1930s, we are rapidly overstepping democratic principles for the sake of one party and its global ambitions, of the consensus formulated by the PNAC, Council of Foreign Affairs, Atlantic Council, and other think tanks, along with the State Department, and the press, all of whom argue for the same policies all over again. Even now, weeks before the elections, we are reading about the same bureaucrats in Pentagon, CIA, or State Department, haggling for the place in the future Hillary cabinet. 
+It is those rascals that can be sent home, who are worthy of being voted in. And conversely, it is those rascals, who want to stay in power no matter how wrongheaded, dangerous, or unpopular their policies are that should be thrown out. 
+There is no absolute truth in politics, there is no end of history, and there is no one size fits all. Popper understood it much better than Fukuyama. History never ends: parties should continue to lose, and thus given a chance to come up with better policies for the next election. Only when Democratic Party is forced to take a back seat, it will contemplate on how it can improve, and offer new policies for the country. 
+Propping up Hillary as the best embodiment of the failed policies, allowing the same bankers, diplomats, and generals to metastasize into next election and hold the same key positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, CIA or Treasury, is ultimately, the embrace of one party system; it provides a profound disservice to the United States and its democratic tradition. 
+At the last presidential debate this electoral season, Hillary Clinton pretended to be appalled by Trump’s hypothetical refusal to accept the results of the November elections. Mass media echo chambers went into the override mode bemoaning Trump’s disrespect for the venerable political tradition of peaceful transition of power. Trump was never in power, however. 
+What is truly appalling is the real, not the hypothetical threat of turning US into a one party system, the system which is so entrenched that it can only mock, dismiss, and conspire to denigrate its opponents. Maybe Mr. Forrestal was right after all. Russians, or rather Soviets, are here, but they do not hack the emails, they write them. Rate this: ",FAKE
+170,Warring Senate and House Republicans see peacemaker in Ryan,"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
+685,"Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton battle for California","San Diego (CNN) Hillary Clinton is back in the Golden State. Bernie Sanders, seemingly, has been living here.
+
+The former secretary of state begins a five-day swing through California on Thursday that she hopes will result in a victory that convinces Sanders and his supporters that it's time to unite against Donald Trump.
+
+But Sanders shows no signs of going away. The Vermont senator, who has used a bus to traverse the state, headlined over 27 rallies and forums last month, and is expected to have a jam packed schedule the week before Tuesday's primary.
+
+Clinton had planned to campaign this week in New Jersey ahead of that state's Tuesday primary, but the campaign decided instead to fly to San Diego for a speech on foreign policy that will also go directly after Trump, as well as tout her own experience as secretary of state.
+
+Clinton will argue that the choice in 2016 ""goes beyond partisanship"" because Trump is ""unlike any presidential nominee we've seen in modern times and he is fundamentally unfit for the job,"" Jake Sullivan, Clinton's senior policy adviser, said in a statement.
+
+The speech shows the predicament Clinton is currently in: She is committing five days to battle Sanders in California, a solidly Democratic general election state, while also trying to focus on the presumptive GOP nominee.
+
+""I wonder why Secretary Clinton and her husband Bill are back in California,"" Sanders sarcastically told reporters Wednesday in Spreckels, California. ""I thought we had lost it. It was all over but I guess Secretary Clinton maybe is looking at some polling would suggest otherwise.""
+
+The non-stop campaigning -- coupled with a small ad buy, dozens of surrogate events and targeted get out the vote efforts -- is more than Clinton's senior aides expected to commit to California months ago.
+
+Aides acknowledge Clinton could lose the state, despite polls showing her up narrowly. Internal polling has Clinton up double digits in New Jersey, aides said, and their thinking is that it ""doesn't make sense"" to be in the Garden State while the race in California is still ""tight.""
+
+""Clearly California is a big state and I am going to do everything I can to meet as many voters as possible,"" Clinton told CNN on Tuesday. ""I was proud today to be endorsed by Gov. Jerry Brown and we are going to keep working as diligently and tirelessly as we can to get as much voters to turn out and vote for me next Tuesday.""
+
+""I will tell you that in every state that we have gone into, we have taken on the entire Democratic establishment,"" Sanders said in response to a question about Brown's endorsement. ""It's not surprising to me that, you know, we will have the Democratic establishment supporting Hillary Clinton.""
+
+At the same time, the former secretary of state doesn't need to win California — or even come that close — to win the nomination on Tuesday.
+
+Clinton currently needs 70 delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination, according to CNN's estimate, a number she is likely to win from the New Jersey primary. Because results from New Jersey will come in hours before California, top aides assume that most news networks will call the Democratic Primary on Tuesday before results come in from the West Coast. And since delegates are awarded proportionally — this isn't winner-take-all as some of the big GOP contests were -- a Sanders win in California wouldn't make a much of a dent in her lead.
+
+But Clinton aides said they were aware that losing California to Sanders would be embarrassing for her campaign and could hand the Vermont senator the needed momentum to justify staying in the race through Democratic convention in July.
+
+Sanders has continued to rail on the superdelegate system throughout California, blasting the ""Democratic establishment"" for allowing Democratic elected officials and party insiders to have a vote in who the party nominates.
+
+""It is a pretty dumb system,"" Sanders said in Monterey, California on Tuesday about the fact so many party insiders are behind Clinton. ""It's an unfair system, it's a dumb system, and it's a system we will change.""
+
+But Sanders, with a win in California, hopes he will be able to turn the system to his advantage. Sanders and his aides have argued for weeks that a win in California will help the Vermont senator convince super delegates currently backing Clinton to support him instead.
+
+So far, though, the effort has been largely fruitless: Clinton has maintained a sizeable superdelegate lead and Sanders has only been able to flip one delegate.
+
+In an attempt to lower the stakes in California, the Clinton campaign has instructed surrogates to say that they ""expect"" California to be a close contest, but to downplay its importance in picking the eventual nominee.
+
+""Even if Senator Sanders wins each of the remaining contests by 32 points, Hillary Clinton will still have earned the majority of pledged delegates and popular vote,"" read talking points distributed to supporters on Tuesday.
+
+Clinton will continue to largely ignore Sanders in California, aides said, a tactic Clinton employed in late May during a string of events in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.
+
+Her speech Thursday will begin drawing from her record as secretary of state, defending what some Republicans have said will be a liability for her in a race against Trump.
+
+""She will reflect on her experience making the tough calls and doing the hard work of protecting our country,"" Sullivan said. ""She'll reaffirm her conviction that strong, principled American leadership makes both the United States and the world more secure.""
+
+Sullivan added: ""And you will hear in her speech a confidence in America and our capacity to overcome the challenges we face while staying true to our values -- a strong contrast to Donald Trump's incessant trash-talking of America.""
+
+Sanders, however, is expected to continue to draw contrast with Clinton as primary day in California gets closer. He spent Wednesday hitting Clinton for opposing an outright ban on hydraulic fracturing, a controversial drilling tactic.
+
+""Sec. Clinton does not support a ban on fracking,"" Sanders tweeted on Wednesday. ""Instead, she would simply impose a few more regulations on it. Not good enough.""",REAL
+7674,Comment on How about a trip to Paris this fall? Sure looks lovely this time of year… by Miss Marple,"  DCG | 7 Comments 
+From Daily Mirror : Rows of tatty tents line the pavements of Paris as refugees exiled from Calais find a new place to set up camp. 
+The number of UK-bound migrants sleeping in illegal camps in Paris has increased by a third since the destruction of the Calais Jungle , it has emerged. 
+It raises the prospect of the French capital turning into the new hub for thousands of asylum seekers seeking a new life in Britain. 
+Paris’s first official refugee camp is due to open within the next few days, and it is expected to become a magnet for even more refugees. The new facility will be men only, and only take 400 migrants at a time. Even then, they will only be able to stay for a maximum of ten weeks at a time. It will open close to the Gare du Nord Eurostar hub, from where high speed trains travel to and from London. 
+A total of 5,596 people have been evacuated since the operation to raze the Jungle shantytown in Calais began on Monday morning. While most have been bused to some 450 resettlement centres around France, up to 5,000 more are thought to have travelled away independently . 
+Heloise Mary, a member of France’s office for the welcome and accompaniment of migrants , said numbers in Paris had shot up. Referring to a camp close to the Stalingrad Metro in the north of Paris, she told the BFM news channel: “We’ve gone from two thousand to three thousand in two days with the closure of Calais.” 
+DCG",FAKE
+1975,Who's Winning The 2016 Race — On Facebook And Twitter?,"Who's Winning The 2016 Race — On Facebook And Twitter?
+
+While the 2016 presidential hopefuls are hitting the road in places like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the race is also taking off on social media.
+
+Let's start with Twitter: With nearly 3 million Twitter followers, Hillary Clinton is way ahead of the other potential candidates:
+
+Clinton only started tweeting in June 2013, and she tweets sparingly — though she seems to be ramping up this week. It's a calculated mix of her opinions on political news, photos from her travels and work to empower women and girls as well as family photos.
+
+It was on Twitter that she finally posted a long-anticipated response to her recent email debacle on March 4: ""I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible."" That tweet received more than 10,000 favorites. This week she got more political, weighing in on the House Republicans' budget, and expressing frustration that the Senate is stuck on a bill that would create a fund for human trafficking victims and is continuing to block Loretta Lynch's confirmation as attorney general.
+
+Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is taking the lead on Facebook. Paul's politician page has 1.9 million likes and 228,537 people were ""talking"" about him as of Tuesday:
+
+In his Facebook posts, he can be seen behind podiums and on political trips. He also links to articles and video clips he's featured in and infographics that express his views on topics from legalizing marijuana to Loretta Lynch. He also denounces his (potential future) competition.
+
+But it seems Clinton isn't even in the game on Facebook. She doesn't have a verified Facebook page, just a topic page with more than 400,000 likes. That's still more than Jeb Bush's 163,000, even though he appears to be doing all the right things — using hashtags, tagging friends like Benjamin Netanyahu, and posting selfies, baby pictures and vintage photos of his mom, Barbara Bush, and his wife, Columba:
+
+While verified public pages could not be found for some — Vice President Joe Biden, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley or former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum — many had more than one verified account. For example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (who has said she will not run) has two Twitter handles: @senwarren and @elizabethforma; one is her official Twitter account as senator of Massachusetts and the other is her official personal account, in which she describes herself as senator. In one photo, she wears a pink blazer and in the other a blue blazer. The difference in looks is subtle, but she divides the content — on one account she tweets politics and on the other she cheers on the Patriots.
+
+All the numbers so far pale in comparison to accounts that are making big waves on Facebook or Twitter (see Katy Perry's 66 million or President Obama's 56 million followers). But the 2016 race is still, technically, anybody's game — so the next great social candidate might just be one good tweet or selfie away.",REAL
+8776,The path to total Dictatorship: America’s Shadow Government and its silent coup,"The path to total Dictatorship: America’s Shadow Government and its silent coup Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law By John W. Whitehead - October 27, 2016 “Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people . Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state…. The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government…. This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.”— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech 
+Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law. 
+Say hello to America’s shadow government. 
+A corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country, this shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry. 
+No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government— also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group” —may well have played a part in who will win the White House this year. 
+To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments. 
+The first shadow government, referred to as COG or Continuity of Government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.” COG is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law. 
+Yet it is the second shadow government —also referred to as the Deep State—that poses the greater threat to freedom right now. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government is the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our government. 
+The Deep State, which “ operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power ,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government. 
+So who or what is the Deep State? 
+It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal   in order to establish themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice. It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.” It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “ a hybrid of national security and   ”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees. 
+It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics. 
+These are the key players that drive the shadow government. 
+This is the hidden face of the American police state that will continue long past Election Day. 
+Just consider some of the key programs and policies advanced by the shadow government that will continue no matter who occupies the Oval Office. 
+Domestic surveillance. No matter who wins the presidential popularity contest, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8 billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. Thus, on any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. Local police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. 
+Global spying. The NSA’s massive surveillance network, what the Washington Post refers to as a $500 billion “ espionage empire ,” will continue to span the globe and target every single person on the planet who uses a phone or a computer. The NSA’s Echelon program intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. In addition to carrying out domestic surveillance on peaceful political groups such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and several religious groups, Echelon has also been a keystone in the government’s attempts at political and corporate espionage . 
+Roving TSA searches. The American taxpayer will continue to get ripped off by government agencies in the dubious name of national security. One of the greatest culprits when it comes to swindling taxpayers has been the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with its questionable deployment of and complete mismanagement of millions of dollars’ worth of airport full-body X-ray scanners, punitive patdowns by TSA agents and thefts of travelers’ valuables. Considered essential to national security, TSA programs will continue in airports and at transportation hubs around the country. 
+USA Patriot Act, NDAA. America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, will continue to chip away at our freedoms, unravel our Constitution and transform our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws completely circumvent the rule of law and the rights of American citizens. In so doing, they re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the U.S. Constitution, is the map by which we navigate life in the United States. These laws will continue to be enforced no matter who gets elected. 
+Militarized police state. Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local   without charge, police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, will continue to keep the masses corralled, controlled, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens. 
+SWAT team raids. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by local police for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties will continue to rise. Nationwide, SWAT teams will continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. 
+Domestic drones. The domestic use of drones will continue unabated. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000 drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020, all part of an industry that could be worth as much as $30 billion per year. These machines, which will be equipped with weapons, will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat sensors and radar. An Inspector General report revealed that the Dept. of Justice has already spent nearly $4 million on drones domestically, largely for use by the FBI , with grants for another $1.26 million so police departments and nonprofits can acquire their own drones. 
+School-to-prison pipeline. The paradigm of abject compliance to the state will continue to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. School districts will continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. 
+Overcriminalization. The government bureaucracy will continue to churn out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, rendering the rest of us petty criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to this overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal. Consequently, small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community will continue to have their farms raided. 
+Privatized Prisons. States will continue to outsource prisons to private corporations, resulting in a cash cow whereby mega-corporations imprison Americans in private prisons in order to make a profit. In exchange for corporations buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years. 
+Endless wars. America’s expanding military empire will continue to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense. 
+Are you getting the message yet? 
+The next president, much like the current president and his predecessors, will be little more than a figurehead, a puppet to entertain and distract the populace from what’s really going on. 
+As Lofgren reveals, this state within a state, “concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue ,” is a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.” 
+The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley. 
+This is fascism in its most covert form, hiding behind public agencies and private companies to carry out its dirty deeds. 
+It is a marriage between government bureaucrats and corporate fat cats. 
+As Lofgren concludes: 
+[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change … If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda. 
+In other words, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , as long as government officials—elected and unelected alike—are allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution, the courts and the citizenry, the threat to our freedoms remains undiminished. 
+So the next time you find yourselves despondent over the 2016 presidential candidates, remember that it’s just a puppet show intended to distract you from the silent coup being carried out by America’s shadow government.",FAKE
+10476,Purchasing Loyalty with Foreign Aid," Purchasing Loyalty with Foreign Aid By Jacob G. Hornberger
+ FFF "" - A dispute that is taking place between Saudi Arabia and Egypt indirectly demonstrates the nature of U.S. foreign aid. After dumping a walloping $25 billion in foreign aid to help the Egyptian military dictatorship’s economic woes, the Saudis are hopping mad.
+Why?
+Because last month in the United Nations, contrary to Saudi Arabia’s wishes, Egypt voted in favor of a Russian resolution on Syria.
+In the world of foreign aid, that’s a super no-no. When a regime has received $25 billion from another regime, it is expected to vote the way its benefactor wants it to vote.
+In a remarkable admission regarding foreign aid, at least in this particular case, the New York Times , in an article on the matter, wrote, “The Saudis may have thought they were buying loyalty .” The Times article pointed out that to punish the Egyptians for their independence, “The state-owned Saudi oil company, Aramco, postponed a promised shipment of 700,000 tons of discounted oil in October, and the spokesman for Egypt’s oil ministry said the fate of November’s shipment remains unknown.”
+Although the New York Times would probably be reluctant to describe U.S. foreign aid in the same way, that’s precisely what it is — a way to purchase “loyalty” from foreign regimes, including dictatorships. The U.S. government loves to put foreign regimes on the federal dole because once that happens, U.S. officials know that they have bought them, lock, stock, and barrel. Once a regime is on the dole, it inevitably becomes dependent on it.
+The racket works like this: The IRS collects money from hard-pressed U.S. taxpayers, which U.S. officials use to send millions of dollars in foreign aid to foreign regimes.
+The foreign regimes then use the money to buy weaponry to fortify their hold on power or to just to line the pockets of government officials.
+It doesn’t matter to U.S. officials what the tyrants do to people within their country. They can abuse them, incarcerate them, torture them, or kill them. None of that matters to U.S. officials.
+What matters to U.S. officials is the international arena. Like votes in the UN. Or public support for U.S. invasions, coups, interventions, assassinations, kidnappings, and the like. Or joining coalitions of the willing. That’s when U.S. officials expect “loyalty,” in the form of blind support, which was what Saudi Arabia was expecting from the Egyptian tyrants.
+And heaven help any nation that takes the “wrong” position. The U.S. will respond in the same way the Saudis have responded to the Egyptians. It will threaten to do very bad things to the nation that opposes a U.S invasion, coup, or resolution within the UN. When a nation is on the U.S. dole, U.S. officials expect “loyalty.”
+Americans can’t do anything about foreign aid by the Saudi government. But they can do something about U.S. foreign aid. What they should do is demand that it be ended, immediately.
+Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.",FAKE
+510,Morning Plum: Will GOP pay any political price for budgetary hocus-pocus?,"Congressional Republicans face a major test this week as they seek to pass a budget that makes both fiscal and defense “hawks” happy, and the big story right now is that Republicans may not resolve the impasse between the warring camps. But they very well might — and at that point, a bruising political battle with Democrats will unfold as Republicans move towards a Congressional vote on repealing Obamacare (a key pillar of the GOP fiscal blueprint) and a possible presidential veto looms.
+
+Gearing up for the fight to come, the Senate Democratic caucus will release a report this morning that previews how they will prosecute the political case.
+
+First, though, Republicans have to find a way to unify. Politico and Roll Call report this morning that the House GOP leadership will try a new strategy to resolve their internal divisions.
+
+Here’s how it will work: The House will hold votes on both a budget that the fiscal “hawks” want (which would balance the budget in 10 years with no new revenues and less defense spending) and on a budget that the defense “hawks” want (which would balance the budget in 10 years with no new revenues and more defense spending, while not counting it as spending that busts the sequester caps conservatives want to keep in place). Such are the parameters of responsible GOP budgeting in this Congress.
+
+Whichever gets more votes will be the winner, whereupon the effort will begin to reconcile that budget with the Senate GOP version (presuming one passes). If Republicans fail to unify, there will be countless stories about their failure to govern, and it will raise the possibility of a lot more chaos ahead. But if they do agree on a budget, a whole new chapter begins.
+
+Thus, the forthcoming report from the Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Center will argue that the spending cuts that are detailed in the GOP blueprints — such as the repeal of Obamacare (while keeping its savings) and the block-granting of Medicaid to states — would “take affordable health coverage away from millions of Americans.” And it will argue that, to get to its goal of balance within 10 years with no new revenues, the House and Senate GOP fiscal blueprints go to extraordinary lengths to conceal the real impact of the spending cuts that would be required to accomplish that goal:
+
+Says Senator Chuck Schumer: “Fuzzy math, sleight of hand, and arithmetic acrobatics can disguise but not change the fact that the Republican budgets would devastate programs that the middle class relies upon.” Meanwhile, the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that 69 percent of the cuts in the GOP budgets would have to fall on programs helping people with lower incomes.
+
+But will Republicans pay any political price for any of this? One key thing to watch will be how GOP Senators up for reelection in states carried by Obama handle the politics of it. Meanwhile, most House Republicans are cossetted away in safe districts where GOP voters are presumably happy to be told that it’s perfectly possible to balance the budget in 10 years with no new taxes while hiking defense spending, with the vast bulk of any cuts (to the degree that they’re detailed at all) falling on people with low incomes, even as relatively few of the cuts hit programs that serve older Americans.
+
+* ISRAEL SPIED ON IRAN TALKS: The Wall Street Journal reports that senior White House officials learned soon after negotiations began over Iran’s nuclear program began that Israel was spying on the talks, as part of a broader effort to undermine the possibility of a deal:
+
+This could conceivably give some skittish Congressional Democrats the cover they need to side with Obama on any eventual nuclear deal with Iran. On the other hand, the Benjamin Netanyahu speech arranged by Congressional Republicans was supposed to accomplish that, too, but it’s still unclear whether it will.
+
+* ISRAELI AMBASSADOR LOBBIES HOUSE DEMS: Meanwhile, Politico reports that Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer held a dinner last night with a number of House Democrats. According to one of them
+
+This is yet another reminder that, if there is a deal with Iran, many Democrats may find themselves forced to choose between the Israeli government and the Obama-led one.
+
+* VOTE ON LORETTA LYNCH DELAYED UNTIL MID-APRIL? Bloomberg News reports that Senate Republicans may not put up Loretta Lynch’s nomination as attorney general for a vote until at least mid-April, because of a partisan dispute over a human trafficking bill. Democrats are filibustering it due to an anti-abortion provision; Republicans are saying Lynch won’t move until that dispute is resolved.
+
+That would mean the vote on Lynch could come five months after she was first nominated. While Lynch would be the first female African American attorney general, the delay could also make history in another way, one that doesn’t reflect particularly well on Republicans.
+
+* CAMP HILLARY IS PSYCHED ABOUT CRUZ PRESIDENTIAL RUN: Hillary advisers think Ted Cruz’s presidential announcement is very much in her interests:
+
+Well, okay. It’s not clear to me that the lack of any serious challenge to Clinton will end up benefiting her, but we’ll see.
+
+* THE NEXT CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON JEB BUSH: Byron York previews it: Conservative activists are complaining that Jeb Bush, turning his years in business after his tenure as Florida governor, was not vocal enough in publicly joining the Republicans’ “desperate attempt to stop Obamacare.”
+
+Ted Cruz launched his presidential run on the premise that only he possesses the heroism and perseverance required to fully vanquish Obama’s efforts to destroy America. Watch for the “where were you while there was still a chance to defeat Obamacare BEFORE it began enslaving millions?” line to emerge as a key attack.
+
+* AND OBAMACARE IS A DISASTER, PART 973: The Associated Press reports:
+
+Better get the Supreme Court to do something about this right quick!",REAL
+5188,Trump’s starting to panic: Corey Lewandowsi fired as campaign manager amid huge staff shakeup,"With the average of polls showing rival Hillary Clinton ahead six percentage points less than a month before the GOP convention in Cleveland, embattled Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has been fired.
+
+“The Donald J. Trump Campaign for President, which has set a historic record in the Republican Primary having received almost 14 million votes, has today announced that Corey Lewandowski will no longer be working with the campaign,” the campaign spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, said in a statement, according to the New York Times. “The campaign is grateful to Corey for his hard work and dedication and we wish him the best in the future.”
+
+According to NBC News, Trump called Lewandowski this morning to inform him of his firing after an emergency meeting with family members and top advisers to right the ship, and to plot a more serious campaign strategy.
+
+The announcement comes hours after an explosive GQ profile of Hicks revealed disturbing incidents of alleged abuse directed at the 27-year-old national press secretary from Lewandowski.
+
+“You made a big f***ing mistake; you’re f***ing dead to me,” Lewandowski allegedly told Hicks after she expressed interest in leaving the campaign recently, bringing her to tears, according to former Trump operative Sam Nunberg. While Lewandowski denied GQ’s reporting, the hotheaded campaign manager, of course, first grabbed the spotlight away from his boss when he was arrested for yanking a female Breitbart writer, an act he denied happened but was caught on camera. While the charges were eventually dropped, Trump remained loyal and committed to Lewandowski even as reports emerged that Lewandowski had a history of making abusive, sexist, and sexual remarks to his female coworkers. According to reaction from at least one “senior adviser” to the Trump campaign, Lewandowski’s ouster was welcome news:",REAL
+7255,Russia WW3 Weapon: Nikola Tesla’s Death Ray In Vladimir Putin’s Possession?,"New details are emerging about Nikola Tesla’s rumored “Death Ray” technology being in the possession of Russia. Declassified FBI documents reveal that the technology actually exists and was hidden from the public after his death. 
+Via UsualRoutine 
+
+Published after 73 years of being kept from the public, the declassified documents vindicate conspiracy theorists. They claim that many of Tesla’s innovations were far ahead of his time but were suppressed by the mainstream scientists.
+According to Sputnik News, Russia has developed a unique radio-electronic weapon to disable enemy drones. The device will soon enter service with the Russian Armed Forces. This is according to a United Instrument Corporation (UIC) spokesman.
+Natsionalnaya Oborona (National Defense) journal editor-on-chief Igor Korotchenko revealed that the test unit uses ultrahigh frequency impulses to disable aircraft electronics. Similar to the effects of an EMP burst, it renders them useless in a combat environment.
+Russia Unveils New Weapon, Based On Nikola Tesla’s Death Ray? “With its effective range apparently not exceeding one kilometer, this weapon may be used against UAVs flying right above the battlefield,” Korotchenko also added that similar weapons were currently being developed not just in Russia but also in the US and other countries.
+Alexander Perendzhiyev, a military political analyst said that the weapon can be used not just against aircraft but against all systems with microelectronic elements. The new weapon is especially effective when used against devices with hi-tech microelectronic systems frying their circuits.
+According to Your News Wire, there are currently no details suggesting that Nikola Tesla’s death ray was the basis of the new Russian weapon. There are many who believe that the famous inventor created weapons of mass destruction. However the majority of Tesla’s work involved those for domestic use. Most notable these is the Alternating Current or AC.
+For now, the declassified FBI documents reveal nothing except that the death ray is in fact real and not just a figment of imagination. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry Wallace, mentioned in the declassified FBI records as having advisers discuss “its effects.” One these includes those dealing with the wireless transmission of electrical energy.
+",FAKE
+9367,NATO Considers Russian Warships Sailing in Mediterranean 'Acceptable',"Get short URL 0 9 0 0 NATO is tracking the movement of the Russian Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea, considering its presence in the international waters close to the alliance's member states acceptable, Germany’s Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday. 
+BERLIN/BRUSSELS (Sputnik) — On October 15, the Russian Northern Fleet’s press service said that a group of warships headed by the aircraft-carrying cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov and accompanied by the Pyotr Veliky battle cruiser, the Severomorsk and the Admiral Kulakov anti-submarine destroyers, and support vessels was sent to the Mediterranean to hold drills and strengthen capabilities. 
+NATO officials have expressed concerns that the group could be used to support Damascus in the ongoing Syrian civil war. ""It is acceptable that the Russian aircraft carrier operates in the international waters, though considering the current situation we will keep a close eye on it,"" she said. ...",FAKE
+3017,This Is What the Future of American Politics Looks Like,"For political observers, 2016 feels like an earthquake — a once-in-a-generation event that will remake American politics. The Republican party is fracturing around support for Donald Trump. An avowed socialist has made an insurgent challenge for the Democratic Party’s nomination. On left and right, it feels as though a new era is beginning.
+
+And a new era is beginning, but not in the way most people think. Though this election feels like the beginning of a partisan realignment, it’s actually the end of one. The partisan coalitions that defined the Democratic and Republican parties for decades in the middle of the twentieth century broke apart long ago; over the past half century, their component voting blocs — ideological, demographic, economic, geographic, cultural — have reshuffled. The reassembling of new Democratic and Republican coalitions is nearly finished.
+
+What we’re seeing this year is the beginning of a policy realignment, when those new partisan coalitions decide which ideas and beliefs they stand for — when, in essence, the party platforms catch up to the shift in party voters that has already happened. The type of conservatism long championed by the Republican Party was destined to fall as soon as a candidate came along who could rally its voters without being beholden to its donors, experts and pundits. The future is being built before our eyes, with far-reaching consequences for every facet of American politics.
+
+The 2016 race is a sign that American politics is changing in profound and lasting ways; by the 2020s and 2030s, partisan platforms will have changed drastically. You may find yourself voting for a party you could never imagine supporting right now. What will that political future look like?
+
+Today’s Republican Party is predominantly a Midwestern, white, working-class party with its geographic epicenter in the South and interior West. Today’s Democratic Party is a coalition of relatively upscale whites with racial and ethnic minorities, concentrated in an archipelago of densely populated blue cities.
+
+In both parties, there’s a gap between the inherited orthodoxy of a decade or two ago and the real interests of today’s electoral coalition. And in both parties, that gap between voters and policies is being closed in favor of the voters — a slight transition in the case of Hillary Clinton, but a dramatic one in the case of Donald Trump.
+
+During the Democratic primary, pundits who focused on the clash between Clinton and Sanders missed a story that illuminated this shift: The failure of Jim Webb’s brief campaign for the presidential nomination. Webb was the only candidate who represented the old-style Democratic Party of the mid-20th century — the party whose central appeal was among white Southerners and Northern white “ethnics.” Even during the “New Democrat” era of Bill Clinton, white working-class remnants of that coalition were still important in the party. But by 2016, Webb lacked a constituency, and he was out of place among the politicians seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, which included one lifelong socialist (Bernie Sanders) and two candidates who had been raised as Republicans (Hillary Clinton and, briefly, Lincoln Chafee).
+
+On the Republican side, the exemplary living fossil was Jeb Bush. Like his brother, Jeb pushed a neo-Reaganite synthesis of support for a hawkish foreign policy, social conservatism, and cuts in middle-class entitlements to finance further tax cuts for the rich. From the Reagan era until recently, the GOP’s economic policies have been formulated by libertarians, whose views are at odds with those of most Republican voters. In March of this year, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 68 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters opposed future reductions in Social Security benefits — almost the same amount of support found among Democrats and Dem-leaning voters (73 percent). Republicans who supported Trump were even more opposed to Social Security benefit cuts, at 73 percent. And even among those who supported Kasich, 62 percent opposed cuts in Social Security benefits — even though Kasich, himself, is in favor of cutting entitlements.
+
+As country-and-western Republicans have gradually replaced country-club Republicans, the gap between the party’s economic orthodoxy and the economic interests of white working-class voters in the GOP base has increased. House Republicans repeatedly have passed versions of Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which is based on cutting Social Security and replacing Medicare with vouchers.
+
+Except for Trump, all of the leading Republican candidates—Cruz, Bush, Rubio, Kasich—favored some version of the Ryan agenda. By contrast, Trump was the only leading GOP candidate who expressed the actual preference of most Republican voters, declaring his “absolute intention to leave Social Security the way it is. Not increase the age and leave it as is.” Trump is now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
+
+If Trump is defeated, what is left of the GOP establishment might try to effect a restoration of the old economic dogma of free trade, mass immigration and entitlement cuts. But sooner or later, a Republican Party platform with policies that most of the party’s core voters reject will be revised or abandoned—over the objections of libertarian Republican party donors and allied think tanks and magazines, if necessary.
+
+Why is this all happening now? Because the decades-long “culture war” between religious conservatives and secular liberals is largely over.
+
+Most culture-war conflicts involve sexuality, gender, or reproduction (for example, abortion, contraception, LGBT rights, and same-sex marriage). The centrality of culture-war issues in national politics from the 1960s to the present allowed both major parties to contain factions with incompatible economic views. For a generation, the Democratic Party has included both free traders and protectionists — but support for abortion rights and, more recently, gay rights have been litmus tests for Democratic politicians with national ambitions. Conversely, Republicans have been allowed to disagree about trade and immigration, but all Republican presidential candidates have had to pay lip service to repealing Roe v. Wade and outlawing abortion.
+
+Social issues spurred a partisan realignment by changing who considered themselves Democrats and Republicans. Over decades, socially conservative working-class whites migrated from the Democratic Party to join the Republican Party, especially in the South. Socially moderate Republicans, especially on the East Coast, shifted to the Democratic coalition. Now, there’s little disagreement within each party on social issues. Liberal Republicans are as rare as Reagan Democrats.
+
+Like an ebb tide that reveals a reshaped coastline, the culture war remade the parties’ membership and is now receding. In its absence, we are able to see a transformed political landscape.
+
+The culture war and partisan realignment are over; the policy realignment and “border war” — a clash between nationalists, mostly on the right, and multicultural globalists, mostly on the left — have just begun.
+
+For the nationalists, the most important dividing line is that between American citizens and everyone else—symbolized by Trump’s proposal for a Mexican border wall. On the right, American nationalism is tainted by strains of white racial and religious nationalism and nativism, reinforced by Trump’s incendiary language about Mexicans and his proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S.
+
+But while there is overlap between nationalists and racists, the two are not the same thing. The most extreme white nationalists don’t advocate nationalism as a governing philosophy in our multiracial country; they hope to withdraw from American life and create a white homeland within the nation-state. Nationalism is different than white nationalism, and a populist American nationalism untainted by vestiges of racial bigotry might have transracial appeal, like versions of national populism in Latin America.
+
+The rise of populist nationalism on the right is paralleled by the rise of multicultural globalism on the center-left.
+
+For multicultural globalists, national boundaries are increasingly obsolete and perhaps even immoral. According to the emerging progressive orthodoxy, the identities that count are subnational (race, gender, orientation) and supranational (citizenship of the world). While not necessarily representative of Democratic voters, progressive pundits and journalists increasingly speak a dialect of ethical cosmopolitanism or globalism — the idea that it is unjust to discriminate in favor of one’s fellow nationals against citizens of foreign countries.
+
+This difference in worldviews maps neatly into differences in policy. Nationalists support immigration and trade deals only if they improve the living standards of citizens of the nation. For the new, globally minded progressives, the mere well-being of American workers is not a good enough reason to oppose immigration or trade liberalization. It’s an argument that today’s progressive globalists have borrowed from libertarians: immigration or trade that depresses the wages of Americans is still justified if it makes immigrants or foreign workers better off.
+
+The disagreements within both parties on trade is a living example of the inchoate policy realignment. Every major Republican presidential candidate supported free-trade agreements — with the sole and major exception of Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee, who routinely slams free-trade deals and has called for the reintroduction of certain tariffs on foreign goods.
+
+Likewise, the current opposition of many Democratic politicians to free-trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership reflects the residual influence of declining manufacturing unions within the party According to a March 2016 study by the Pew Research Center, by a margin of 56 percent to 38 percent, Democratic voters believe that free-trade agreements have been good for the U.S. Among Republicans, those numbers are almost reversed: by a 53 percent to 38 percent margin, a majority of Republicans believe free-trade has been a bad thing. Among younger Americans, who tend to prefer Democrats to Republicans, support for free trade is high: 67 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds say trade agreements are good for the country. Even progressives who campaign against trade deals feel obliged by the logic of ethical cosmopolitanism to justify their opposition in the name of the labor rights of foreign workers or the good of the global environment.
+
+For the next decade or longer, as the parties’ stances adjust, this “border war” that has succeeded the “culture war” will define and remake American politics.
+
+The outlines of the two-party system of the 2020s and 2030s are dimly visible. The Republicans will be a party of mostly working-class whites, based in the South and West and suburbs and exurbs everywhere. They will favor universal, contributory social insurance systems that benefit them and their families and reward work effort—programs like Social Security and Medicare. But they will tend to oppose means-tested programs for the poor whose benefits they and their families cannot enjoy.
+
+They will oppose increases in both legal and illegal immigration, in some cases because of ethnic prejudice; in other cases, for fear of economic competition. The instinctive economic nationalism of tomorrow’s Republicans could be invoked to justify strategic trade as well as crude protectionism. They are likely to share Trump’s view of unproductive finance: “The hedge-fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”
+
+The Democrats of the next generation will be even more of an alliance of upscale, progressive whites with blacks and Latinos, based in large and diverse cities. They will think of the U.S. as a version of their multicultural coalition of distinct racial and ethnic identity groups writ large. Many younger progressives will take it for granted that moral people are citizens of the world, equating nationalism and patriotism with racism and fascism.
+
+The withering-away of industrial unions, thanks to automation as well as offshoring, will liberate the Democrats to embrace free trade along with mass immigration wholeheartedly. The emerging progressive ideology of post-national cosmopolitanism will fit nicely with urban economies which depend on finance, tech and other industries of global scope, and which benefit from a constant stream of immigrants, both skilled and unskilled.
+
+While tomorrow’s Republican policymakers will embrace FDR-to-LBJ universal entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, future Democrats may prefer means-tested programs for the poor only. In the expensive, hierarchical cities in which Democrats will be clustered, universal social insurance will make no sense. Payroll taxes on urban workers will be too low to fund universal social insurance, while universal social benefits will be too low to matter to the urban rich. So the well-to-do in expensive, unequal Democratic cities will agree to moderately redistributive taxes which pay for means-tested benefits—perhaps even a guaranteed basic income—for the disproportionately poor and foreign-born urban workforce. As populist labor liberalism declines within the Democratic party, employer-friendly and finance-friendly libertarianism will grow. The Democrats of 2030 may be more pro-market than the Republicans.
+
+Of the two coalitions, which is likely to prevail most of the time?
+
+While progressives claim that nonwhite Americans will become a majority, this is misleading for two reasons. To begin with, according to the Census Bureau, from this point until 2060, there will be only limited growth in the African-American population (a rise from 13.2 percent to 14.3 percent) and the Asian-American population (5.4 percent to 9.3 percent) as shares of the whole. The growth of the nonwhite category by 2060 is driven overwhelmingly by the increasing Latino share of the population, from 17.4 percent to 28.6 percent.
+
+Second, Latino Americans increasingly identify themselves as white. Between the 2000 Census and the 2010 Census, about 7 percent of Hispanics changed their self-description from “some other race” to “white.” At the same time, according to the Census Bureau, three-fourths of “white population growth” in 21st-century America has been driven by individuals who declared themselves white and of Hispanic origin. If increasing numbers of Hispanics identify as white and their descendants are defined as “white” in government statistics, there may be a white majority in the U.S. throughout the 21st century.
+
+More important than unscientific Census classifications will be how the growing Latino population votes. Trump’s unpopularity among Latino voters is likely to help the Democrats in the short run. But Democrats cannot assume they’ll have a solid Latino voting bloc in the future. In Texas, in particular, Republicans have been successful in winning many Latino voters, all the way back to Senator John Tower and Governor George W. Bush. In Texas’ 2014 elections, Republican gubernatorial nominee Greg Abbott won 44 percent of Latino Texans. Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn did even better, with 48 percent.
+
+In the coming decades, it is possible that Latinos will be reliable Democratic voters and condemn the Republican Party to minority status at the presidential level, if not everywhere. But it is also possible that as Latinos assimilate and intermarry, they will move from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, following a trail blazed in the past by many “white ethnic” voters of European descent, including Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans.
+
+The policy realignment of the present and near future will complete the partisan realignment of the past few decades. And though it’s impossible to know exactly how it will end, one thing is clear: In 2016, the old political system is crumbling, and a new American political order is being born.",REAL
+8663,Senate Democrats To FBI: Put Up Or Shut Up About Emails (TWEETS),"Senate Democrats To FBI: Put Up Or Shut Up About Emails (TWEETS) By Darrell Lucus on October 30, 2016 Subscribe 
+If there was any doubt that FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that the FBI was reviewing potential evidence in the Hillary Clinton email affair backfired spectacularly, it was erased on Saturday night. Four top Senate Democrats gave Comey an ultimatum –give us a full accounting of what you know about this, and do so by Monday. 
+Senators Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Tom Carper, and Ben Cardin fired off a “what the hell is going on here?” letter to Comey and his nominal boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, demanding answers about Comey’s “vaguely worded” letter on Friday afternoon. They are the ranking members of the Senate committees that were most involved in the email server investigation–Intelligence (Feinstein), Judiciary (Leahy), Homeland Security (Carper), and Foreign Relations (Cardin). 
+Read the full letter here, courtesy Cardin’s Twitter feed. 
+— Senator Ben Cardin (@SenatorCardin) October 30, 2016 
+In a colossal understatement, they pointed out that the letter didn’t answer any questions, but in fact left a lot of them unanswered. For one thing, Comey’s letter didn’t clarify whether the FBI even had the emails in its custody, let alone had a chance to review them. Comey also didn’t say whether Hillary sent the emails, or if they even had anything to do with the investigation. Additionally, it represented a radical departure from FBI and Justice Department policy against doing anything that could potentially influence an election. 
+The Senators also noted that Comey had told his own troops that he didn’t know just how significant those emails were, and that there was a possibility that his letter would be “misunderstood.” In light of the fact that this letter has already been misunderstood, Feinstein, Carper, Leahy, and Cardin want Comey and Lynch–in truth, Comey–to give the Senate “detailed information” about the FBI’s actions no later than the close of business on Monday. To not do so, they add, “would be irresponsible and a disservice to the American people.” 
+There were already a number of reasons why Comey should be very afraid. For one thing, at the time, the FBI had not even obtained a warrant for the emails it discovered on the laptop of longtime Hillary aide Huma Abedin while investigating her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, for inappropriate texts with a teenager. So Comey felt the need to alert the House and Senate about these emails, when his people hadn’t even asked a court to review them. 
+We also know that Comey’s rumored excuse–that the emails were likely to be leaked unless he told Congress about them first–doesn’t wash. Judge Jeanine Pirro , no fan of Hillary, thinks Comey could have easily solved that problem by privately notifying the committee chairmen and putting them on notice that he would know who was behind any leaks. 
+But on Sunday afternoon, The Washington Post reported that the FBI hadn’t gotten a warrant for those emails despite knowing for at least a month that those messages were potentially relevant to the email server case. It finally obtained a warrant on Sunday night. How is Comey going to explain that to the Senate, especially since he knew how explosive this could have been? 
+It’s no wonder that Comey’s own troops are steaming mad at him, according to Newsweek and Vanity Fair’s Kurt Eichenwald. Here’s what Eichenwald has learned, by way of review. Word from inside @FBI . FURIOUS at Comey, think he's mishandled public revelations from get go. ""Outrageous incompetence"" one agent told me. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 …his original decision to lay out info on clinton case, then opine on what it meant outside of criminal findings, infuriated these folks.. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 Re: anger within @FBI at Comey. I am getting this at the Special Agent, ASAC and SAC level. Those are the troops. (Most of em GOPrs)…. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 …for Comey to have so angered ppl at the field office level is really, really bad. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 If Comey's improper comment on ongoing investigation changes polls, @FBI reputation as apolitical will never recover cause of his screwup. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 
+While Feinstein, Leahy, Carper, and Cardin played good cop, their boss, Minority Leader Harry Reid, played bad cop, accusing Comey of breaking the Hatch Act . I wouldn’t quite go that far. But when the best-case scenario is that Comey was grossly incompetent, that isn’t good. 
+Comey’s actions may not have risen to the level of criminal conduct. However, it is clear beyond any doubt that he cannot lead. Eichenwald has talked to a number of DOJ officials from both parties who feel the same way. Every current/former Dept. of Justice official I speak 2, GOP or Dem, says Comey must resign/be fired 4 election interference. All outraged. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 30, 2016 
+Unless Comey has a very good explanation for this–and frankly, I doubt there is one–we need to hear only two things from him after he briefs the Senate. He needs to apologize to the American people, and he needs to resign. 
+( featured image courtesy FBI Flickr feed, part of public domain) About Darrell Lucus 
+Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC . Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook . Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello. Connect",FAKE
+5773,"Trump Supporters Lose Control, Violently Harass Reporters At Rally (VIDEO)","0 407 
+An unidentified supporter of Republican presidential candidate and alleged unregistered sex offender Donald Trump took to violently harassing members of the media at a Saturday night rally held in Phoenix, Arizona. 
+The man, wearing a “Hillary for Prison” t-shirt, screamed into the press area, “You’re going down! You’re the enemy! You’re the ones working for the devil!,” before adapting the crowd’s “USA” chant into “Jew-s-a,” all the while continuing to scream at the members of the media in the press pen. 
+Candace Smith, of ABC, was one of the reporters to capture the man’s disturbing behavior on tape. She posted video of the disturbing press area encounter to Twitter, a video which is featured below. This is the man who started chanting “JEW-S-A” at the media pen. Does anyone know what those hands signs mean? pic.twitter.com/64yseZFSVZ 
+— Candace Smith (@CandaceSmith_) October 29, 2016 
+Smith included in the text accompanying her video post a question, saying in reference to seemingly intentional hand gestures on the part of the Trump supporter, “Does anyone know what those hand signs mean?” 
+Smith got at least a couple noteworthy and credible responses. 
+Clayton Swisher, whose Twitter bio reads that he is an “investigative reporter and author,” suggested that the Trump supporter’s hand gestures are a variation of the “88” hand sign used by white supremacists and described by the Anti-Defamation League as follows: 
+‘One of the most popular white supremacist symbols is the numeric symbol 88, which stands for “Heil Hitler” (substituting letters for numbers, 88 means HH, i.e., “Heil Hitler”). It is thus not surprising that white supremacists occasionally attempt to display 88 as a hand sign.’ 
+— Clayton Swisher (@claytonswisher) October 30, 2016 
+A Twitter user identified as Marisel Morales suggested that the hand gestures were the “Scwhurhand,” which is a German salute used in court. @CandaceSmith_ It's a German salute known as Schwurhand 
+— Marisel Morales (@57MCM) October 29, 2016 
+A Twitter user with the username “@puppymnkey” countered, however, that the Trump supporter’s hand gestures didn’t quite match the Schwurhand, and instead pointed to a hand gesture version of the number “666” employed by conspiracy theorists, a group almost certainly the man at the Trump rally. @57MCM @CandaceSmith_ nope. That salute is with pinky and index finger touching. It could be this given he's Infowars idiot pic.twitter.com/u953UYor2K 
+— Boycott Trump SCION (@puppymnkey) October 30, 2016 
+Nick Corasaniti of The New York Times was another member of the press to capture the man’s disturbing behavior on film. 
+His video, which runs a bit after Smith’s video concludes, is featured below. 
+In this second video, the man can be heard saying that “We’re run by the Jews, okay?” Guy chants “Jew-S-A” in front of press pen pic.twitter.com/2yqgA6dD4k 
+— Nick Corasaniti (@NYTnickc) October 29, 2016 
+At the same rally, Politico’s Ben Schrekinger captured an image of a man he said “had been staring at the press for some time” and was “holding an object.” 
+Security, Schrekinger says, was notified of the man’s behavior. Bearded man's been staring at press for some time. Television reporter said he is holding object + notified security pic.twitter.com/phDvXFGgGw 
+— Ben Schreckinger (@SchreckReports) October 29, 2016 
+Trump has long targeted the press in his incitement antics, as put on full display in his campaign rallies. He claims that the media has collaborated to “rig” the election against him by supposedly dishonest coverage of his campaign on their part. ",FAKE
+10143,Poll: 41 percent of voters say election could be ‘stolen’,"Email 
+The Politico/Morning Consult Poll finds that 41 percent of voters think widespread voter fraud could cause the GOP nominee to lose the election. Amid Trump's increased warnings about a ""rigged election,"" 73 percent of Republicans think the election could be stolen from him, compared to 17 percent of Democrats. 
+Over the past week, Trump has cast doubt on the American electoral system, saying he believes the results will be ""rigged"" at many polling places. 
+""The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary — but also at many polling places — SAD,"" Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday. 
+Trump has also encouraged supporters to keep an eye on voting locations to prevent fraud, which some say is a ploy to intimidate voters. 
+Trump is trailing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the polls following sexual assault and harassment allegations from multiple women. 
+The Politico/Morning Consult poll showed Clinton leading Trump by 5 points, 46 to 41 percent. 
+In a RealClearPolitics polling average, Clinton leads Trump by 5.5 points, 47.7 to 42.2 percent. 
+While Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and even Trump's running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, have tried to reassure the electorate about the reliability of the election system, the poll released Monday found 60 percent of Americans think it is necessary to question the accuracy of the election results. 
+The poll was conducted among 1,999 registered voters Oct. 13–15 and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.",FAKE
+276,Kevin McCarthy drops out of House speaker race,"Washington (CNN) House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy dropped out of the race to succeed Speaker John Boehner on Thursday, a shocking move that throws the House into chaos.
+
+Boehner, R-Ohio, holds a copy of the Constitution on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 7, 1992, as Sen. Don Nickles, D-Oklahoma, looks on. Both men proclaimed it was a historic day when the Michigan House ratified the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, which would require that any Congressional pay raises not go into effect until after the next election.
+
+Boehner, R-Ohio, holds a copy of the Constitution on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 7, 1992, as Sen. Don Nickles, D-Oklahoma, looks on. Both men proclaimed it was a historic day when the Michigan House ratified the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, which would require that any Congressional pay raises not go into effect until after the next election.
+
+Boehner at a Capitol Hill news conference on February 6, 1995. He has had a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1990. Before that he was a member of the Ohio State House of Representatives for six years.
+
+Boehner at a Capitol Hill news conference on February 6, 1995. He has had a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1990. Before that he was a member of the Ohio State House of Representatives for six years.
+
+Boehner dumps out coal, which he called a Christmas gift to President Clinton, during a news conference about the federal budget on December 21, 1995. Many government services and agencies were closed at the end of 1995 and beginning of 1996 as a Republican-led Congress battled Clinton over spending levels.
+
+Boehner dumps out coal, which he called a Christmas gift to President Clinton, during a news conference about the federal budget on December 21, 1995. Many government services and agencies were closed at the end of 1995 and beginning of 1996 as a Republican-led Congress battled Clinton over spending levels.
+
+President George W. Bush signs into law the federal education bill No Child Left Behind at a high school in Hamilton, Ohio, in 2002. The law offered the promise of improved schools for the nation's poor and minority children and better-prepared students in a competitive world. Boehner, second from right, backed the bill.
+
+President George W. Bush signs into law the federal education bill No Child Left Behind at a high school in Hamilton, Ohio, in 2002. The law offered the promise of improved schools for the nation's poor and minority children and better-prepared students in a competitive world. Boehner, second from right, backed the bill.
+
+Boehner, center, and fellow Republican House members sing Boehner's birthday song during a news conference on Capitol Hill on November 17, 2006. Boehner served as the House Minority Leader from 2007 to 2011.
+
+Boehner, center, and fellow Republican House members sing Boehner's birthday song during a news conference on Capitol Hill on November 17, 2006. Boehner served as the House Minority Leader from 2007 to 2011.
+
+Boehner, center, looks on as President Barack Obama speaks with then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in the East Room of the White House on February 23, 2009. Boehner and Obama have butted heads over the years.
+
+Boehner, center, looks on as President Barack Obama speaks with then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in the East Room of the White House on February 23, 2009. Boehner and Obama have butted heads over the years.
+
+Boehner, an avid golfer, talks with Tiger Woods while golfing at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2009.
+
+Boehner, an avid golfer, talks with Tiger Woods while golfing at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2009.
+
+Boehner voices his concerns about the health care reform bill championed by Obama during a news conference in Washington on October 29, 2009.
+
+Boehner voices his concerns about the health care reform bill championed by Obama during a news conference in Washington on October 29, 2009.
+
+Boehner hugs his wife, Debbie, after addressing the crowd at the NRCC Election Night watch party on November 2, 2010, when Republicans took back control of the House of Representatives. Boehner met his wife in college, and they have been married since 1973.
+
+Boehner hugs his wife, Debbie, after addressing the crowd at the NRCC Election Night watch party on November 2, 2010, when Republicans took back control of the House of Representatives. Boehner met his wife in college, and they have been married since 1973.
+
+On January 5, 2011, Boehner wipes away tears as he waits to receive the gavel from outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, during the first session of the 112th Congress.
+
+On January 5, 2011, Boehner wipes away tears as he waits to receive the gavel from outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, during the first session of the 112th Congress.
+
+Boehner presents golfing legend Arnold Palmer with the Congressional Gold Medal at a special ceremony in the Rotunda of the Capitol in September 2012.
+
+Boehner presents golfing legend Arnold Palmer with the Congressional Gold Medal at a special ceremony in the Rotunda of the Capitol in September 2012.
+
+Boehner is sworn in as the speaker of the House after his re-election in January 2013.
+
+Boehner is sworn in as the speaker of the House after his re-election in January 2013.
+
+Boehner speaks to the media after a meeting with President Obama at the White House in October 2013, the second day of the federal government's recent shutdown. The White House squared off with Republican rivals in Congress over how to fund federal agencies, many of which were forced to close, leaving a fragile economy at risk.
+
+Boehner speaks to the media after a meeting with President Obama at the White House in October 2013, the second day of the federal government's recent shutdown. The White House squared off with Republican rivals in Congress over how to fund federal agencies, many of which were forced to close, leaving a fragile economy at risk.
+
+Reporters question Boehner as he arrives at the U.S. Capitol as the government stalemate continued in October 2013. President Obama signed a bill on October 17 that ended the 16-day shutdown and raised the debt ceiling.
+
+Reporters question Boehner as he arrives at the U.S. Capitol as the government stalemate continued in October 2013. President Obama signed a bill on October 17 that ended the 16-day shutdown and raised the debt ceiling.
+
+Boehner blasts conservative groups during a press conference in December 2013 after passing a compromise budget deal aimed at removing the threat of another government shutdown. Fed up with criticism from conservative advocates, Boehner said they were ""misleading their followers."" He followed up with: ""Frankly, I just think that they've lost all credibility.""
+
+Boehner blasts conservative groups during a press conference in December 2013 after passing a compromise budget deal aimed at removing the threat of another government shutdown. Fed up with criticism from conservative advocates, Boehner said they were ""misleading their followers."" He followed up with: ""Frankly, I just think that they've lost all credibility.""
+
+The image of the Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) is displayed in a monitor of a camera as he talks with reporters in his office in the Capitol in November 2014 in Washington.
+
+The image of the Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) is displayed in a monitor of a camera as he talks with reporters in his office in the Capitol in November 2014 in Washington.
+
+U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House John Boehner await the arrival of President Barack Obama for the State of The Union address on January 20 in the House Chamber of the Capitol.
+
+U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House John Boehner await the arrival of President Barack Obama for the State of The Union address on January 20 in the House Chamber of the Capitol.
+
+U.S. President Barack Obama walks with Speaker of the House John Boehner as they depart the annual Friend's of Ireland luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 17.
+
+U.S. President Barack Obama walks with Speaker of the House John Boehner as they depart the annual Friend's of Ireland luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 17.
+
+Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani (right) expresses his country's gratitude for America's fiscal commitment and military sacrifices during an address to a joint meeting of the United States Congress with Vice President Joe Biden (left) and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol March 25 in Washington.
+
+Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani (right) expresses his country's gratitude for America's fiscal commitment and military sacrifices during an address to a joint meeting of the United States Congress with Vice President Joe Biden (left) and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol March 25 in Washington.
+
+Pope Francis walks with Speaker Boehner and Vice President Joe Biden after delivering a speech to Congress in Washington on September 24.
+
+Pope Francis walks with Speaker Boehner and Vice President Joe Biden after delivering a speech to Congress in Washington on September 24.
+
+John Boehner has been the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2011, making him second in line for the presidency, behind the vice president. On September 25, Boehner told colleagues he's stepping down as speaker and will leave Congress at the end of October. Look back at his career in politics so far.
+
+John Boehner has been the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2011, making him second in line for the presidency, behind the vice president. On September 25, Boehner told colleagues he's stepping down as speaker and will leave Congress at the end of October. Look back at his career in politics so far.
+
+The move came without warning as House Republicans were in a closed-door meeting to select their nominee for speaker, with McCarthy's wife and kids in the room. Boehner subsequently postponed the vote.
+
+""I think I shocked some of you, huh?"" McCarthy told reporters following the decision.
+
+""If we're going to unite and be strong, we need a new face to do that,"" McCarthy said, adding that he did not want to win the race on the House floor with only enough votes to squeak by.
+
+A source close to McCarthy told CNN the decision to drop out came down to ""numbers, pure and simple,"" adding that ""he had the votes to win the conference vote, but there just wasn't a path to 218"" -- the number of votes needed to lock down the speakership on the House floor.
+
+The uncertain future of House GOP leadership comes less than a month before Congress must take action to raise the debt ceiling to keep the U.S. from defaulting on its debt obligations -- a critical vote conservatives have in the past sought to stall in order to pull concessions from Democrats.
+
+Asked if that affected his decision, McCarthy acknowledged: ""Well, that wasn't helpful.""
+
+Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, described McCarthy's move as ""courageous,"" saying this is ""exciting"" for the party because there is now a ""wide open"" race for speaker.
+
+""Because of his verbal blunder last week there were some of us that were very apprehensive and this going to create great unity among Republicans,"" Rohrabacher said.
+
+Meanwhile, not one to miss an opportunity, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested he was partly responsible for McCarthy's failed bid, days after he suggested McCarthy wasn't tough enough for the job.
+
+""They're giving me a lot of credit for that because I said you really need someone very, very, tough and very smart. Ya know smart goes with tough, I know tough people that aren't smart that's the worst. We need smart, we need tough, we need the whole package,"" Trump said at a campaign stop Thursday in Las Vegas.
+
+The announcement immediately set off a round of speculation about who could win the job. Perennial candidates floated included Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy — both of whom ruled it out explicitly. Several House Republicans said Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland was considering it, and others suggested Oregon Rep. Greg Walden, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
+
+""I would consider it,"" Walden said when asked by CNN about members floating his name for speaker. But he said he's not actively campaigning and noted that some are pushing the idea of an interim speaker. Several candidates have suggested a senior or retiring member should serve as speaker for the next 14 months and pledge to not run again. Rohrabacher suggested Texas Rep. Joe Barton or Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers.
+
+Boehner said in a statement he will remain in his post until a new speaker is elected, though he has yet to announce the date for the new vote.
+
+""I'm confident we will elect a new speaker in the coming weeks. Our conference will work together to ensure we have the strongest team possible as we continue to focus on the American people's priorities,"" he said in a written statement.
+
+Boehner also canceled a scheduled appearance Thursday night on ""The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon,"" an NBC spokeswoman said.
+
+Republican Study Committee Chairman Bill Flores twice dodged reporters' questions about whether he would rule out his own run, but also spoke against the idea of a caretaker.
+
+""An interim will not give us the opportunity to cast that big bold vision that we need. Interims are caretakers, caretakers tend to do safe things,"" Flores said. ""The electorate put us here in November of 2014 to take big steps, and we need to find the leader that will help us take those big steps. ... The other thing that happens with interim is you have people trying to run for the permanent position, and so you have all the distractions we've gone through the last two weeks. We don't need that.""
+
+Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who late last week jumped into the speaker's race, called an impromptu news conference less than an hour after Republicans began pouring out of the GOP conference meeting. The Utah Republican said he was also ""absolutely stunned, surprised and shocked.""
+
+Chaffetz said he would continue to campaign for the top House post and said ""we need to find somebody that our whole body can unite behind and do what were elected to do.""
+
+""I do believe it is time for a fresh start. That was the whole genesis for my campaign, but we need to have a lot more family discussion,"" he said. ""I think we have a lot of internal fracturing that's happening. And we need to figure out a way to unite the party.""
+
+Westmoreland joked said he is thinking about it, joking that, ""I'd like to talk to my wife first.""
+
+Asked why he thought he could get 218 votes he said, ""I don't know that I can, but all I can say is I'm willing to try.""
+
+Ryan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and someone who had been viewed as a contender for the job, immediately said he is not interested.
+
+""While I am grateful for the encouragement I've received, I will not be a candidate. I continue to believe I can best serve the country and this conference as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee,"" Ryan said in a statement.
+
+With conservatives again floating his name, Gowdy said he will not run for speaker. Asked if he would reconsider and join the race if his GOP colleagues urged him to get in, he replied, ""No.""
+
+Rep. Tim Huelskamp, a Kansas Republican and member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus that opposed McCarthy's bid, said the decision creates a ""brand new race for speaker.""
+
+""I am not the one,"" McCarthy told the stunned Republicans in the meeting, according to Huelskamp.
+
+Huelskamp also took shots at McCarthy, saying the majority leader was campaigning for the top post until ""three hours ago"" and said the lack of ""advance notice"" was characteristic of the ""stunts"" that have defined Boehner's leadership as speaker -- including his surprise resignation the day after Pope Francis addressed a joint meeting of Congress.
+
+And just as McCarthy got a brief heads up moments before that announcement, McCarthy also gave Boehner notice shortly before Thursday's conference meeting, a Boehner aide told CNN.
+
+Members had no indication the move was coming. ""Totally stunned,"" Rep. Peter King, R-New York, said on CNN.
+
+Westmoreland met with McCarthy in his office this afternoon and said he didn't expect him to endorse anyone.
+
+""What Kevin has done is extremely selfless, and I think he's done a brave and courageous thing,"" said Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas. ""He was close to being right there and he chose to unite the conference rather than waging battles. ""
+
+Speaking on CNN, Rep. Walter Jones said the current unrest reminds him of the late 1990s. Newt Gingrich stepped down as speaker and Rep. Bob Livingston was selected to take over but quickly removed himself from consideration after it was revealed he had an extramarital affair.
+
+Jones told CNN that he was looking out for the institution and not pointing fingers at anyone in particular.
+
+""I think when a person has been a member of the Congress — which is a very sacred duty, quite frankly, in my opinion — and they are elevated to become a leader of a party -- could be either party, Republican or Democrat -- that those in leadership must be above reproach,"" Jones said.
+
+""And all I was doing, not trying to single anybody out, but was to say in this makeup of office — the majority office and the speakers office -- all the members should be made to say I have nothing in my background that could be of embarrassment to the Republican conference, the House of Representatives or the American people,"" he added. ""That's all this was about.""",REAL
+7908,The man who spoke softly but carried a big stick,"The man who spoke softly but carried a big stick Bill Federer remembers military philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt Published: 1 min ago Print Theodore Roosevelt 
+Theodore Roosevelt was born Oct. 27, 1858. His wife and mother died on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 1884. He wrote in his diary “The light has gone out in my life.” Depressed, he left to ranch in the Dakotas. 
+Returning to New York, he entered politics and rose to assistant secretary of the Navy. He resigned during the Spanish-American War, organized the first Volunteer Cavalry, “the Rough Riders,” and captured Cuba’s San Juan Hill. Elected Vice-President under William McKinley, he became America’s youngest president in 1901. 
+Republican Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to invite an African-American, Booker T. Washington, to dine in the White House on Oct. 16, 1901. A Southern Democrat newspapers condemned him it, as printed in the Memphis Scimitar: “The most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he invited a n- to dine with him at the White House. It would not be worth more than a passing notice if Theodore Roosevelt had sat down to dinner in his own home with a Pullman car porter, but Roosevelt the individual and Roosevelt the president are not to be viewed in the same light.” 
+In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt warned: “The thought of modern industry in the hands of Christian charity is a dream worth dreaming. The thought of industry in the hands of paganism is a nightmare beyond imagining. The choice between the two is upon us.” 
+In 1917, the New York Bible Society had Theodore Roosevelt write a message which was inscribed in a pocket New Testament & Book of Psalms given to World War I soldiers: “The teachings of the New Testament are foreshadowed in Micah’s verse (Micah vi. 8): ‘What more does the Lord require of thee than to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’ Do justice; and therefore fight valiantly against the armies of Germany and Turkey, for these nations in this crisis stand for the reign of Moloch and Beelzebub on this earth. Love mercy; treat prisoners well, succor the wounded, treat every woman as if she was your sister, care for the little children, and be tender to the old and helpless. Walk humbly; You will do so if you study the life and teachings of the Saviour. May the God of justice and mercy have you in His keeping. – (signed) Theodore Roosevelt.” 
+Discover more of Bill Federer’s eye-opening books and videos in the WND Superstore! 
+Theodore Roosevelt, in his book “Fear God and Take Your Own Part” (NY: George H. Doran Co., 1916), wrote: 
+Armenians … for some centuries have sedulously avoided militarism and war … are so suffering precisely and exactly because they have been pacifists whereas their neighbors, the Turks, have not been pacifists but militarists. (T. Roosevelt, Fear God, p. 61, 64) 
+Armenians, have been subjected to wrongs far greater than any that have been committed since the close of the Napoleonic Wars…the wars of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in Asia. Yet this government has not raised its hand to do anything to help the people who were wronged. … This course of national infamy … began when the last Administration surrendered to the peace at-any-price people, and started the negotiation of its foolish and wicked all inclusive arbitration treaties. Individuals and nations who preach the doctrine of milk-and-water invariably have in them a softness of fiber which means that they fear to antagonize those who preach and practice the doctrine of blood-and-iron. (T. Roosevelt, Fear God, p. 111) 
+American eye-witness of the fearful atrocities, Mr. Arthur H. Gleason (New York Tribune, Nov. 25, 1915)… Serbia is at this moment passing under the harrow of torture and mortal anguish. Now, the Armenians have been butchered under circumstances of murder and torture and rape that would have appealed to an old-time Apache Indian. … 
+Even to nerves dulled and jaded by the heaped-up horrors of the past year and a half, the news of the terrible fate that has befallen the Armenians must give a fresh shock of sympathy and indignation. Let me emphatically point out that the sympathy is useless unless it is accompanied with indignation, and that the indignation is useless if it exhausts itself in words instead of taking shape in deeds. … If this people through its government had not shirked its duty … we would now be able to take effective action on behalf of Armenia. 
+Mass meetings on behalf of the Armenians amount to nothing whatever if they are mere methods of giving a sentimental but ineffective and safe outlet to the emotion of those engaged in them. … The principles of the peace-at-any-price men, of the professional pacifists … will be as absolutely ineffective for international righteousness. … This crowning iniquity of the wholesale slaughter of the Armenians … must be shared by the neutral powers headed by the United States for their failure to protest when this initial wrong was committed. … The devastation of Poland and Serbia has been awful beyond description and has been associated with infamies surpassing those of the dreadful religious and racial wars of the seventeenth-century Europe. … 
+Weak and timid milk-and-water policy of the professional pacifists is just as responsible as the blood-and-iron policy of the ruthless and unscrupulous militarist for the terrible recrudescence of evil on a gigantic scale in the civilized world. The crowning outrage has been committed by the Turks on the Armenians. They have suffered atrocities so hideous that it is difficult to name them, atrocities such as those inflicted upon conquered nations by the followers of Attila and of Genghis Khan. 
+It is dreadful to think that these things can be done and that this nation nevertheless remarks ‘neutral not only in deed but in thought,’ between right and the most hideous wrong, neutral between despairing and hunted people, people whose little children are murdered and their women raped, and the victorious and evil wrong-doers. … 
+I trust that all Americans worthy of the name feel their deepest indignation and keenest sympathy aroused by the dreadful Armenian atrocities. I trust that they feel … that a peace obtained without … righting the wrongs of the Armenians would be worse than any war. … 
+Wrongdoing will only be stopped by men who are brave as well as just, who put honor above safety, who are true to a lofty ideal of duty, who prepare in advance to make their strength effective, and who shrink from no hazard, not even the final hazard of war, if necessary in order to serve the great cause of righteousness. When our people take this stand, we shall also be able effectively to take a stand in international matters which shall prevent such cataclysms of wrong as have been witnesses…on an even greater scale in Armenia. (T. Roosevelt, Fear God, pp. 377-383) 
+In his book “Fear God and Take Your Part,” 1916, Theodore Roosevelt wrote: 
+Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. 
+If the peoples of Europe in the 7th and 8th centuries, and on up to and including the 17th century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated. 
+A contemporary of Theodore Roosevelt was the English author G.K. Chesterton, who wrote of Western Christian civilization (“The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: Volume XX,” Introduction and Notes by James V. Schall, Ignatius Press): “They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris.” 
+Theodore Roosevelt continued in “Fear God and Take Your Part,” 1916: “Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Jan Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.” 
+Brought to you by AmericanMinute.com . 
+Discover more of Bill Federer’s eye-opening books and videos in the WND Superstore! Receive Bill Federer's American Minutes in your email BONUS: By signing up for these alerts, you will also be signed up for news and special offers from WND via email. Name *",FAKE
+3880,U.S. drone strike accidentally killed 2 hostages,"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama announced Thursday that a U.S. counterterrorism operation targeting an al Qaeda compound in January accidentally killed two innocent hostages, including one American.
+
+Multiple U.S. officials told CNN the hostages, Warren Weinstein , an American, and Italian national Giovanni Lo Porto , were killed by a U.S. military drone that targeted the al Qaeda compound.
+
+""As president and as commander in chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations including the one that inadvertently took the lives of Warren and Giovanni,"" Obama said Thursday morning in the White House briefing room, where he apologized on behalf of the U.S. government.
+
+The White House also disclosed Thursday that two Americans, both al Qaeda operatives, were also killed in U.S. counterterrorism operations in the same region.
+
+Earnest said at a press briefing Thursday that Obama did not specifically approve the operations that killed the Americans, but that the strikes were within the bounds of policy guidance.
+
+Earnest said Thursday that the families of the hostages will be financially compensated by the U.S. government. He would not disclose the details of that compensation.
+
+American officials at the time had ""no reason to believe either hostage was present"" when the operation was launched on a compound in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. U.S. officials also did not know that Farouq or Gadahn were present at the targeted sites and ""neither was specifically targeted,"" Earnest said in a statement.
+
+Earnest said during the briefing Thursday that U.S. officials believed with ""near certainty"" there were no hostages at the target site and that the strike was carried out after ""hundreds of hours of surveillance"" on the al Qaeda compound and ""near continuous surveillance in the days leading up to the operation.""
+
+""Unfortunately that (assessment) was not correct and the operation led to this tragic, unintended consequence,"" Earnest said.
+
+""Analysis of all available information has led the Intelligence Community to judge with high confidence that the operation accidentally killed both hostages,"" Earnest said in a statement. ""No words can fully express our regret over this terrible tragedy.""
+
+Obama directly apologized during his televised address to the families of the two hostages who were killed in the drone strike and said he spoke Wednesday with Weinstein's wife and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Obama did not refer to the operation as a drone strike and Earnest would not confirm that the operation was carried out by drone strike.
+
+""As a husband and as a father, I cannot begin to imagine the anguish that the Weinstein and Lo Porto families are enduring today. I realize that there are no words that can ever equal their loss. I know that there is nothing that I can ever say or do to ease their heartache,"" Obama said Thursday.
+
+Officials are conducting thorough independent investigation of the operation to ensure this type of incident is never repeated. Earnest said the Office of the Inspector General was conducting an investigation.
+
+A senior administration official told CNN that the review began in January after the drone strike occurred, but said the review so far suggests the operation ""was by the book until we realized these people (the hostages) were in there.""
+
+""The concern is not about anything other than this is a colossal tragedy,"" the official said. ""This doesn't seem to be raising any process flags ... But everyone is still going through this, and no one is resisting that.""
+
+And Earnest told reporters the death of the hostages ""raises legitimate questions about whether additional changes need to be made"" to the protocol for launching counterterrorism operations.
+
+""To put it more bluntly,"" Earnest said. ""We have national security professionals who diligently followed those national security protocols...and yet it still resulted in this unintended but very tragic consequence and that's why the President has directed his team to conduct a review to see if there are lessons learned, reforms that we can implement to this process.""
+
+The death of an American hostage
+
+Weinstein was an American USAID contractor whose work focused on helping Pakistani families, Obama said, and was captured by al Qaeda in August 2011. The other hostage, Lo Porto, was an Italian aid worker and had been held by al Qaeda since 2012.
+
+Weinstein's wife, Elaine Weinstein, said Thursday in a statement that she and her family ""are devastated by this news,"" but said Weinstein's captors are ultimately responsible for his death.
+
+""We were so hopeful that those in the U.S. and Pakistani governments with the power to take action and secure his release would have done everything possible to do so and there are no words to do justice to the disappointment and heartbreak we are going through,"" she said.
+
+She added that her family does not yet ""fully understand all the facts surrounding"" her husband's death, but said the family looks forward to the results of the investigation Obama said was underway.
+
+The U.S. never recovered Weinstein's body and did not conduct a DNA test to determine his death, several sources told CNN, adding that multiple intelligence sources confirmed their deaths based on circumstantial evidence and a CIA assessment.
+
+Renzi, the Italian prime minister, expressed his condolences on behalf of his country to the families of Weinstein and Lo Porto.
+
+""I express my deepest sorry for the death of an Italian, who has dedicated his life to the service of others,"" Renzi said in a statement. ""My condolences also go the family of Warren Weinstein.""
+
+The decision to go public
+
+The information on the killings had been classified until Obama directed officials to declassify the information and share it Thursday.
+
+Obama said he decided to release the information because ""the Weinstein and Lo Porto families deserve to know the truth"" and because the U.S. ""is a democracy committed to openness in good times and bad.""
+
+Earnest emphasized that the counterterrorism operation that killed the hostages was ""lawful and conducted consistent with our counterterrorism policies"" in a statement earlier Thursday and Obama said an ""initial assessment indicates that this operation was fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts in the region.""
+
+But Obama still stood by U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region, which have been criticized for their heavy reliance on drone strikes and resulting civilian casualties.
+
+""Since 9/11, our counterterrorism efforts have prevented terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives, both here in America and around the world. And that determination to protect innocent life only makes the loss of these two men especially painful for all of us,"" Obama said Thursday.
+
+The White House said the strike occurred in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, a haven for the Taliban and al Qaeda, but did not specify in which country the strike occurred.
+
+Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday declined to comment on the news of the strikes.
+
+Elaine Weinstein, who resides in Maryland, specifically thanked their senators, Ben Cardin and Barbara Mikulski, and congressman, Rep. John Delaney, for ""their relentless efforts to free my husband.""
+
+Cardin, Mikulski Delaney expressed their sorrow at Weinstein's death in statements Thursday morning and recalled their efforts to try and secure their constituent's release.
+
+""I have tracked Warren Weinstein's status since he was first taken hostage in 2011. The United States government, including members of my staff, worked tirelessly to bring him home safely,"" said Cardin, who recently became the top Democrat on the foreign relations committee.
+
+He added that he received a ""preliminary briefing"" from CIA Director John Brennan and said he requested ""a full account of the events that led to"" the hostages' deaths.
+
+Delaney called Weinstein's killing ""a sobering national security and government failure"" and said he was ""saddened, disappointed and outraged that our government was not able to bring Warren home.""
+
+""The loss of Warren is devastating, a tragic event that we must never forget,"" Delaney said. ""As Warren's representative, I feel like his country failed him in his greatest time of need. I'm determined to ensure that Warren's story is not forgotten, that we get to the bottom of why Warren wasn't found and how he was killed.""
+
+He also called for a broader effort to reassess the U.S. government's policies and procedures for securing the release of American hostages held abroad and called for the need for a top U.S. official focused specifically on the location and release of American hostages — ""someone who wakes up every morning"" focused on freeing hostages.
+
+""A much broader analysis needs to be launched and we're going to push it really hard to make sure that we're really pursuing this really hard as a top priority for the united states of America,"" he said on CNN.
+
+Mikulski in a statement said she has ""many questions about how this tragedy occurred"" and said she was ""truly heartbroken"" to learn the news of Weinstein's death.
+
+""Dr. Weinstein dedicated his life to improving the conditions of others all around the world and his legacy is truly immeasurable. His humanitarian service, and that of Mr. Lo Porto, stands in stark and shining contrast to the depravity of their captors,"" Mikulski said.
+
+House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also shared their condolences Thursday and lauded Obama's decision to launch an independent investigation into the drone strike that killed the hostages.
+
+""As President Obama indicated, this is not a time for excuses,"" Boehner said at a news conference. ""We need all the facts for the families, and so that we can make sure that nothing like this ever happens again in our efforts to keep Americans safe.""
+
+Pelosi said she was ""so saddened by the deaths of the two hostages"" and called Obama's remarks on the deaths ""very moving.""
+
+""He took full responsibility as commander in chief; apologized to the family for the tragedy. And I look forward to what he called for, the declassification of all the information related to the strike, so that the families will know the facts and so will the public,"" Pelosi said Thursday morning.
+
+Lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees said they would be investigating the operation that killed the two hostages.
+
+Vice chairwoman of the Senate committee Dianne Feinstein said the committee ""has already been reviewing the specific January operation that led to these deaths"" and said she will now review that operation ""in greater detail.""
+
+And Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking member of the House committee, said his committee would look into the operation.
+
+""In the weeks ahead, we will be examining this operation to make sure that the high standards that have been set were, in fact, met, and whether there are any other steps that can be taken to further reduce the risk of loss of innocent life,"" Schiff said in a statement.",REAL
+2625,Iran calls for assassination of Netanyahu's children,"Iran is encouraging its terror allies to pursue the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s children by publishing personal information about them, including photographs of the kids lined up in crosshairs, and declaring, “We must await the hunt of Hezbollah.”
+
+The publication of the personal information and biographies of Netanyahu’s children follows an Israeli airstrike last week that killed several key Hezbollah leaders and an Iranian commander affiliated with the country’s hardline Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
+
+Iranian military leaders affiliated with the IRGC threatened in recent days harsh retaliation for the strike and promised to amp up support for Hezbollah as well as Palestinian terrorist organizations.
+
+The information was originally published in Farsi by an Iranian website affiliated with the IRGC and quickly republished by Iran’s state-controlled Fars News Agency.
+
+In addition to biographical details and pictures of Netanyahu’s children, the Iranians provided details about the families of former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon.
+
+Click for more from the Washington Free Beacon.",REAL
+3487,Marco Rubio unveils comprehensive tax plan,"Just weeks before he's expected to launch a presidential campaign, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) teamed up on Wednesday with GOP colleague Mike Lee (R-Utah) to unveil a comprehensive set of proposals to overhaul the tax code.
+
+""Our hope here isn't to pick winners and losers. Our hope here is to trigger economic growth,"" Rubio told reporters. He added that he believes ""the vast majority of Americans"" would see tax cuts if the plan was implemented.
+
+Under the Lee-Rubio plan, the seven current tax brackets would be condensed to just two -- 15 percent for people earning up to $75,000 or married couples earning up to $150,000, and 35 percent for higher-income earners. Corporations would pay a top tax rate of 25 percent, a drop from 35 percent. The plan also would eliminate taxes on capital gains and dividends, create a new $2,500 child tax credit, and eliminate most deductions, except for mortgage interest and charitable giving.
+
+Rubio said the plan would serve as his economic and tax blueprint should be announce plans to run for president, as expected, or if he opts instead to run for reelection in 2016. But in his remarks he again declined to signal which race he's leaning toward for 2016. He defended his decision to unveil a comprehensive, specific plan that might open him up to attacks by would-be GOP opponents or Democrats.
+
+""I've tried to govern myself in my entire time in public service by being specific about ideas,"" he said. He reminded reporters about his 100-point reform plan when he was speaker of the Florida House.
+
+""I think people should expect more of their candidates -- no matter what they're running for,"" he added. ""And if in fact we've reached a point in our republic where being detailed about what you would do is a hindrance to winning an election, we're in bad shape, because what are you supposed to then vote on?""
+
+Rubio is expected to formally launch a presidential bid next month and is planning to hold more fundraisers next week as he ramps up his operations, according to aides familiar with his planning. On Monday night, the senator dined in Washington with Sheldon Adelson, the casino executive who spent nearly $100 million helping GOP candidates during the 2012 presidential cycle.
+
+Lee, a first-term senator who is also up for reelection in 2016, didn't answer a question about whether his appearance with Rubio signaled he's supporting his Florida colleague for president.
+
+But Rubio quickly jumped in and joked: ""I hope so.""",REAL
+3771,Arrest Made In Connection To Ferguson Police Shooting,"St. Louis County Police announced on Sunday that they had made an arrest related to the two officers who were shot during a protest on Thursday in Ferguson, Missouri.
+
+St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced that authorities had brought charges, including assault in the first degree, against 20-year-old Jeffrey Williams. Williams is from the St. Louis area and had been on probation for receiving stolen property.
+
+Williams had been involved in protests on the evening that the shooting occurred and had ""acknowledged"" firing shots, according to McCulloch. McCulloch said that Williams, who is African-American, may have been firing at someone other than the police.
+
+""We don't know him,"" said Tony Rice, the founder of Ground Level Support, who has been protesting since August
+
+After naming three young male protesters who were regularly at the demonstrations, Rice told HuffPost, ""I don't think there is a male 20-years-old that regularly protest outside of them.""
+
+""I think I can speak for the protester community in saying we don't know him,"" said Rice.
+
+After the press conference, press swarmed Alicia Street when she helped source the first picture of Williams. Street, 29, has been actively involved in protest since August as well and says she was unfamiliar with Williams as well.
+
+""I have never seen him at a protest. I cannot recall that I even seen him that night. We know a lot of people out there, we really do. I even showed pictures to other regular protesters and they said they didn't know him,"" Street told HuffPost.
+
+The shooting came during protests after Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson announced that he would resign. One of the officers was shot in the face and the other was shot in the shoulder, but both survived the attack.
+
+Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement on Sunday that the arrest was a testament to good collaboration between federal and local authorities.
+
+“This arrest sends a clear message that acts of violence against our law enforcement personnel will never be tolerated. The swiftness of this action is a credit to the significant cooperation between federal authorities and the St. Louis County Police Department,"" Holder said. ""The ATF’s ballistic imaging technology has played a critical role in the ongoing investigation. I commend both the ATF and St. Louis police for their tremendous work in identifying this suspect.""
+
+President Barack Obama condemned the shooting on Thursday, posting on Twitter that ""violence against police is unacceptable."" Holder also called the shooter a ""damn punk"" last week.
+
+Read the full complaint against Williams below:",REAL
+7062,MASSIVE Global Bond Write-Down Coming on Back of Financial Reset — Jim Willie,"A massive global debt write-down of sovereign bond is coming, on the back end of the Global Financial RESET. Think paradigm shift of the most disruptive type while power shifts eastward. By Jim Willie
+The Western central bank franchise system is totally broken, totally insolvent, and totally corrupt. It invites the Gold Standard return. The entire financial system is built upon a debt-based monetary system. The debt saturation process has run its full course. The central bank heads have been covering the sovereign debt for the last five years, having rendered their balance sheets as ruined.
+Debt is at obscene levels, like $19.7 trillion for the USGovt. No debt limits are in place anymore, a signal that most likely it has already defaulted. A hidden game is underway, with control lost to the creditors, even as they attempt to salvage their debt holdings. The major central banks continue to manage badly the great game, where money is fake phony and a farce.
+A titanic battle is underway, where the Eastern nations are discarding their USTreasury Bonds, and doing so in tremendous volume while they set up the many platforms and pieces to the Gold Standard. 
+The US Federal Reserve monetary policy of hyper-inflation has failed to revive the USEconomy, failed to legitimize the debt securities, failed to halt the financial corruption, and failed to stem capital destruction. The official monetary policy has only succeeded in preventing the failures of almost all big Western banks.
+They are all insolvent, mostly supported by narco money laundering in the hundreds of $billions. The Eastern super-powers are leading a campaign to put aside the US$-based financial system, isolate it to the sidelines, while arranging a new system. The Gold-based system will be complete with its currency, sovereign debt securities, transfer systems, global offices, and debt rating agencies, maybe even debit cards. The East strives to install the Gold Standard as the remedy to the ongoing global financial crisis. The West has made exactly no movement toward solution, remedy, or enforcement against bond.
+Four graphs display the broken unfixable bizarre situation: Graph 1 – BALANCE SHEET DESTRUCTION Central bank balance sheets could take decades to normalize, so the conventional thinking goes. Their balance sheets will never return to normal. Most assets of toxic paper are far more worthless than junk bonds. A normalization process would require at least 50 years of more financial repression and deep corruption.
+A massive global debt write-down of sovereign bond is coming, on the back end of the Global Financial RESET. Think paradigm shift of the most disruptive type while power shifts eastward. The risk of war rises. 
+
+The big Western banks find themselves in an impossible Catch-22 situation. The markets are addicted to QE and its destructive money hyper inflation. Federal Reserve policymakers have acknowledged that their $4 trillion balance sheet will not shrink any time soon. Also, Bank of England officials talk of crisis fighting tools as semi-permanent fixtures. In Asia, the Bank of Japan has developed a new monetary policy framework that features admitted infinite QE. The financial crisis the balance sheet volume to GDP ratios for the Bank of England and USFed have peaked at around 25%, the highest level ever recorded. Uncharted territory has been entered.
+The USFed balance sheet ratio to GDP previously reached 23% in 1940 during World War II. The Bank of England ratio approached 20% in the 1730s during the South Sea Bubble scheme, 1816/17 during the Great Re-coinage, the 1830s/1840s following other wars, and in the immediate aftermath of WW2. In every scenario above, the central banks managed to unwind their balance sheets. But then the great unwinding took decades, up to 60 years in some cases. This time is different. No economic growth is anywhere remotely on the current horizon, nothing sufficient to unwind the tremendous debt burden.
+This is where the conventional analyst turns stupid, even locked in fantasy. They assume the GDP growth has been around 3% in recent years, when it has been closer to minus 4% or minus 5% each year since 2008 in a fierce recession with strong feedback loops. We are not on the verge of economic expansion, which can relieve the balance sheet toxicity, but rather a financial reform to sweep away the USDollar and to render its USTreasury Bonds as near worthless paper. The next chapter will be centered upon the Gold Standard, first in trade payment, next in bank reserves, finally in currencies. 
+The installation of the Gold Standard will render almost all US$-based debt securities as toxic paper, much like African Govt Bonds. QE might have bought time for the big US banks, but it guaranteed the kill of the USEconomy as host, and the default of the USGovt debt. No semblance of return to normalcy can come. This is why war is being vigorously pursued, to retain power.
+Graph 2 – CONCENTRATION OF CENTRAL BANK ASSETS Big Central Bank assets have jumped the fastest in five years to $21 trillion. The toxic sovereign bond bubble is the largest bubble in history. Four major central banks control 75% of all central bank assets. Any currency reform must come from a major nation and its lead. The majority of the world’s central bank assets are controlled by four sites: China, the United States, Japan, and the European Union. The next six each account for an average of 2.5%, namely the central banks of Brazil, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, India, and Russia. The major nations control toxic vats of deeply impaired debt paper which nobody wants.
+
+The big four central banks are often called the major central banks. They are from the so-called industrialized nations, when in fact they are from former industrial states with a strong leaning toward New Third World status. They control the global financial structure and rig markets in order to keep it stable. If any changes are to come to the USDollar and the King Dollar reign of terror, the reform will be done by a major central banks with support from an alliance of other nations. Do not expect reform. Instead expect a revolution from the East, as it installs the Gold Standard in certain key spots. The best one can expect is a dual financial universe, where the USDollar is gradually phased out.
+Graph 3 – Dumping of USTreasury Bonds in Worldwide Trend A truly massive international dumping of USDollars has entered a second powerful phase. The Saudis and China recently dumped huge blocks of USTreasury Bonds. Foreign central banks liquidated a record $346 billion in USGovt debt securities in the last 12 months, the trend having accelerated. Numerous factors contribute to the dumping, which manifests the fading global confidence in the USDollar. Amplified Quantitative Easing (QE) volume soaks up the large volumes dumped on the bond market, further eroding the faith in fiat currency.
+One month ago, a troublesome sharp decline was seen in the USTreasurys held in custody, which is the formal way to describe central bank holdings kept at the USFed computer banks. The amount fell by over $27.5 billion in a single week, the biggest weekly drop since January 2015. One month later the trend continues with powerful force, enough to capture global attention. The custody volume fell sharply again by another $22.3 billion in the past week, pushing the total amount to $2.805 trillion, another fresh post-2012 low. 
+The foreign central banks have continued their relentless liquidation of US debt securities held in the USFed’s official custody account. History is being made, as global sentiment and conditions are changing in fierce mode. The King Dollar throne is having its legs removed, kicked out, and cut off. Most financial analysts refuse to put the factors in such stark terms, but the Jackass does so naturally and without hesitation. Three dynamics can be identified as the principal proximal factors, detailed in the Hat Trick Letter for the October edition in the reports.
+
+A month ago was observed a massive $343 billion in USTreasury sales by foreign central banks in the period July 1st 2015 to July 1st 2016, something truly unprecedented in size. Fast forward to the latest monthly update, which was posted as July data. All have gone worse. The running latest 12 months (LTM) in foreign central bank sales shot up to a new all time high $346.4 billion. Thus over one third of a $trillion in USTreasurys were sold in the past 12 months. Recall that in three months late in 2015, the Chinese sold $250 billion in USTBonds, which forced the IMF inclusion of the RMB into their formal basket of currencies. The dumping has been global, massive, and without precedent. China is the major seller, while the Saudis are the newest sellers. The broken Outhouse of Saud requires the funds to offset the collapse of the Petro-Dollar, and to backstop the country’s soaring budget deficit made worse by the obscene Yemen War.
+The official story is told that private investors, both foreign and domestic, are soaking up hundreds of $billions in central bank holdings being sold on the bond market. The other dubious story is that bond yields are rising slightly, given the newfound concerns the USFed, the Bank of Japan, and maybe even the EuroCB will soon taper their purchases.
+The bigger factor (surely not private investors) is the USFed ramping up hidden QE volume in a huge way, buying the massive bond dumpings, all kept secret and quiet so as not to disturb the pristine AAA rating of the USTBond toxic paper. Expect continued debt monetization of theUSGovt deficit, of which perhaps 75% is supported by the African style printing press. The USEconomy cannot grow its way out of the debt. They will monetize it until it default on the global stage.
+The QE process cannot take in all the dumped USTBonds without psychological damage. The USDollar confidence is eroding globally. Faith in the USDollar is eroding very quickly. The nation is moving along in the US isolation process, identified as rogue nation on the financial front, terrorism front, laced vaccine front, and war front. Just the Jackass opinion.
+Graph 4 – Evidence of USTBond Bubble (versus Diamonds) The USTreasury Bond bubble is the second biggest asset bubble is history, behind the residential real estate bubble in the last decade. The USTBonds are a massive sanctioned Ponzi Scheme, signifying the default of the USGovt debt and failure of its sovereign bond. The Elite controllers talk of a flight to safe haven, when in reality it is a leap into a black hole and toxic vat. Motive is to keep USGovt borrowing costs to minimal levels while the debt soars toward the $20 trillion mark. The gigantic black hole attracts legitimate capital from around the world. All will be subject to heavy losses. The USTreasury Bond asset bubble is supported by three major forces: the USFed monetary hyper inflation , the Interest Rate Swap derivative contract , the bond carry trade managed by Wall Street banks . More details are provided in the Hat Trick Letter for October.
+
+The relation between top tier assets should remain stable, such as diamonds, special gemstones, classic art works & sculptures, special jewelry items, icon properties, and more. However, the bond price for USGovt debt has gone haywire, rising far beyond anything reasonable. Check out an unusual chart above, for the bond value versus the standard benchmark diamond price. This is a clear visible nasty bond bubble, which will burst just like the US housing market bubble that nobody in the mainstream moronic arenas expected. The Jackass correctly forecasted the housing market bust one year before it occurred. No longer are diamonds a girl’s best friend. It is USTBonds.
+GOLD TRADE NOTE INTRODUCTION The Gold Trade Notes for trade payment might be coming into view, initially with commodity transfers, later swap contracts, and finally gold-backed short-term notes which supplant the USTBill. One might think of used newspapers on the floor, or of the dodo bird.
+The trade might be made in exchange for either goods delivered or USTBills held. Detect a growing connection to finished goods being withheld from delivery. This is probably another sign of refusal of USTBills as payment.
+As footnote, be sure to know that the preliminary steps to the Global Currency RESET will not be laid out in full disclosure for public benefit. It represents a tremendous investment opportunity for the elite, which they never tend to share. 
+In fact, the RESET might be well along before it is even recognized. End to EuroRaj main thoughts and open analysis, for which much gratitude is given. The Jackass believes a few critical elements to the RESET are in place. More details on DIP Financing feature is included in the September Hat Trick Letter report.
+***A major hitch obstacle can be inferred. Payment in USD terms might be the clot in the artery. Demands might be for hard asset swaps, and the contract security from large scale commitment of commodities, facilities, and property. The swap trade is coming into view, a presage of the Gold Trade Note.*** 
+The Jackass concludes the USD rejection could be lifting its head within a gathering storm, without clear identification. It is indeed difficult to identify all the elements when hidden deals at the highest level are underway, and friction is omnipresent. The Bobcat Corp rejection of USTBills at Pacific ports is a clear story. For every one story recounted, there are 10 to 20 not yet heard.
+My firm belief is that in Asian banking systems, they do not want the USTBills anymore. The banks in Asia are trying to dump them in heavy volume, not accumulate more worthless toilet paper. Finally the sharp blowback from printing QE money has hit. The USFed monetary policy saves the big insolvent banks, but kills capital. The result has finally seen manifested in USD global rejection, or at least hints toward the same. Asian banks still hold vast sums of USTBonds. They are not going to announce the rejection, but instead fight behind the walls for better terms of payment, even as they pursue the Gold Trade Note for payment at ports. It is coming, like daybreak follows the long night.
+NEW SCHEISS DOLLAR & GOLD TRADE STANDARD In time, expect an eventual refusal by Eastern producing nations to accept USTreasury Bills in payment for trade. The IMF reversal decision assures this USTBill blockade in time, and might accelerate the timetable. The United States Govt cannot continue on five glaring fronts of gross negligence and major violations. These violations have prompted the BRICS & Alliance nations to hasten their development of diverse non-USD platforms toward the goal of displacing the USDollar while at the same time take steps toward the return of the Gold Standard.
+The New Scheiss Dollar will arrive in order to assure continued import supply to the USEconomy. It will be given a 30% devaluation out of the gate, then many more devaluations of similar variety. The New Dollar will fail all foreign and Eastern scrutiny. The USGovt will be forced to react to USTBill rejection at the ports. 
+The US must accommodate with the New Scheiss Dollar in order to assure import supply, and to alleviate the many stalemates to come. The United States finds itself on the slippery slope that leads to the Third World, a Jackass forecast that has been presented since Lehman fell (better described as killed by JPM and GSax).
+The only apparent alternative is for the United States Govt to lease a large amount of gold bullion (like 10,000 tons) from China in order to properly launch a gold-backed currency. Doing so would open the gates for a generation of commercial colonization, but actual progress in returning capitalism to the United States. The cost would be supply shortages to the USEconomy, a result of enormous export increases to China.
+The colonization has already begun, with secret deals galore. It is very unclear what deals are being struck in order to arrange for the USGovt to have a proper gold reserve hoard, for backing a new legitimate USDollar. Meetings at very high level are in progress, with little if any popular representation, only elite members present. Failure to produce a legitimate bonafide gold-backed currency would mean the United States must proceed with the New Scheiss Dollar, an illegitimate fake phony farce of a currency. 
+It would be subjected to a series of devaluations. The result would be heavy powerful painful price inflation from the import front. The effect would be to reverse a generation of exported inflation by the United States. The entire USEconomy would go into a downward spiral with higher prices, supply shortages, and social disorder. However, the rising prices would come from the currency crisis, and not so much from the hyper monetary inflation. That flood of $trillions has been effectively firewalled off. 
+Source: Jim Willie — Golden Jackass 
+Via: Silver Doctors 
+",FAKE
+628,Trump's terror response has Republicans fretting anew,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+3429,Worst job in Washington: Obama's SCOTUS pick,"Washington (CNN) It might be the best job in town -- at the worst possible time.
+
+President Barack Obama is suddenly searching for a new Supreme Court justice after the death of conservative icon Antonin Scalia left a rare vacancy at the pinnacle of U.S. jurisprudence.
+
+Normally, an open spot on the exalted bench -- complete with a lifetime tenure and a boatload of benefits -- would have those who labor in the law's dusty obscurity salivating at the chance to crown their careers in the black robes of the nation's highest court. And candidates with political inclinations have extra incentive to covet this particular seat, as it comes with a chance to tilt the ideological balance of the court and shape the nation's future for decades.
+
+Scalia speaks at the University of Minnesota as part of the law school's Stein Lecture series on October 20, 2015, in Minneapolis.
+
+Scalia speaks at the University of Minnesota as part of the law school's Stein Lecture series on October 20, 2015, in Minneapolis.
+
+U.S. President Barack Obama greets Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor, Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts at Obama's inauguration for his second term of office.
+
+U.S. President Barack Obama greets Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor, Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts at Obama's inauguration for his second term of office.
+
+Scalia conducts a naturalization ceremony for 16 new U.S. citizens during the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's historic Gettysburg Address on November 19, 2013, at Gettysburg National Military Park in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
+
+Scalia conducts a naturalization ceremony for 16 new U.S. citizens during the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's historic Gettysburg Address on November 19, 2013, at Gettysburg National Military Park in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
+
+Scalia and his wife, Maureen, arrive for a state dinner in honor of British Prime Minister David Cameron at the White House on March 14, 2012, in Washington.
+
+Scalia and his wife, Maureen, arrive for a state dinner in honor of British Prime Minister David Cameron at the White House on March 14, 2012, in Washington.
+
+Scalia testifies during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 5, 2011. The justice testified on ""Considering the Role of Judges Under the Constitution of the United States.""
+
+Scalia testifies during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 5, 2011. The justice testified on ""Considering the Role of Judges Under the Constitution of the United States.""
+
+Scalia listens as U.S. President George W. Bush speaks at the the Federalist Society's 25th Anniversary Gala Dinner at Union Station in Washington, on November 15, 2007.
+
+Scalia listens as U.S. President George W. Bush speaks at the the Federalist Society's 25th Anniversary Gala Dinner at Union Station in Washington, on November 15, 2007.
+
+Heather Myklegard, Scalia, Dirk Kempthorne and U.S. President George W. Bush walk through the Rose Garden before Kempthorne is sworn in as the new interior secretary at White House on June 7, 2006, in Washington.
+
+Heather Myklegard, Scalia, Dirk Kempthorne and U.S. President George W. Bush walk through the Rose Garden before Kempthorne is sworn in as the new interior secretary at White House on June 7, 2006, in Washington.
+
+Scalia calls on people during a question-and-answer period at the American Enterprise Institute on February 21, 2006, in Washington. Scalia delivered the keynote address about foreign law and the debate about how it is used in American Law during the seminar called ""Outsourcing Of American Law.""
+
+Scalia calls on people during a question-and-answer period at the American Enterprise Institute on February 21, 2006, in Washington. Scalia delivered the keynote address about foreign law and the debate about how it is used in American Law during the seminar called ""Outsourcing Of American Law.""
+
+Surrounded by security, Scalia walks in the annual Columbus Day Parade on October 10, 2005, in New York City.
+
+Surrounded by security, Scalia walks in the annual Columbus Day Parade on October 10, 2005, in New York City.
+
+Members of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice David Souter, Justice William Kennedy, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice John Paul Stevens file out of the U.S. Supreme Court Building to attend funeral services for Chief Justice William Rehnquist on September 7, 2005, in Washington.
+
+Members of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice David Souter, Justice William Kennedy, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice John Paul Stevens file out of the U.S. Supreme Court Building to attend funeral services for Chief Justice William Rehnquist on September 7, 2005, in Washington.
+
+The casket of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist lies in the Great Hall of the U.S. Supreme Court as Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor, left, walk past on September 6, 2005, in Washington.
+
+The casket of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist lies in the Great Hall of the U.S. Supreme Court as Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor, left, walk past on September 6, 2005, in Washington.
+
+Scalia shakes hands with U.S. Marines Corps Maj. Gen. Robert C. Dickerson, commanding general, upon Scalia's arrival at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for an official visit on March 12, 2004.
+
+Scalia shakes hands with U.S. Marines Corps Maj. Gen. Robert C. Dickerson, commanding general, upon Scalia's arrival at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for an official visit on March 12, 2004.
+
+Scalia speaks to a crowd gathered at the Religious Freedom Monument in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to celebrate Religious Freedom Day on January 12, 2003. Scalia complained that courts have gone overboard in keeping God out of government.
+
+Scalia speaks to a crowd gathered at the Religious Freedom Monument in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to celebrate Religious Freedom Day on January 12, 2003. Scalia complained that courts have gone overboard in keeping God out of government.
+
+U.S. Supreme Court justices pay their respects in front of the casket of former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger during a prayer ceremony in the Great Hall at the Supreme Court Building in Washington on June 28, 1995.
+
+U.S. Supreme Court justices pay their respects in front of the casket of former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger during a prayer ceremony in the Great Hall at the Supreme Court Building in Washington on June 28, 1995.
+
+Retiring Chief Justice Warren Burger, right, administers the oath to Scalia, as Scalia's wife, Maureen, holds the Bible on September 26, 1986. Scalia was the 103rd person to sit on the court.
+
+Retiring Chief Justice Warren Burger, right, administers the oath to Scalia, as Scalia's wife, Maureen, holds the Bible on September 26, 1986. Scalia was the 103rd person to sit on the court.
+
+Scalia, seen in a 1986 photo, was the first justice of Italian-American heritage and passed through confirmation with a unanimous vote.
+
+Scalia, seen in a 1986 photo, was the first justice of Italian-American heritage and passed through confirmation with a unanimous vote.
+
+Scalia appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings in Washington on August 6, 1986.
+
+Scalia appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings in Washington on August 6, 1986.
+
+Scalia works in his office in Washington on July 28, 1986. Scalia, who was appointed in 1986, was the longest-serving justice on the Supreme Court.
+
+Scalia works in his office in Washington on July 28, 1986. Scalia, who was appointed in 1986, was the longest-serving justice on the Supreme Court.
+
+President Ronald Reagan announces the nomination of Scalia to the Supreme Court on June 17, 1986, as a result of Chief Justice Warren E. Burger's retirement.
+
+President Ronald Reagan announces the nomination of Scalia to the Supreme Court on June 17, 1986, as a result of Chief Justice Warren E. Burger's retirement.
+
+U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was found dead on Saturday, February 13, was one of the most influential conservative justices in history. He was 79.
+
+U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was found dead on Saturday, February 13, was one of the most influential conservative justices in history. He was 79.
+
+But this time, things are different.
+
+Whoever accepts Obama's nomination will walk into a wall of political fire. A pitched battle is already raging over Scalia's seat, embroiling the White House, Congress and presidential candidates eager to whip up grass-roots activists.
+
+White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz insisted Monday that Obama will nominate a successor to Scalia.
+
+But for all their troubles, whoever is chosen could very well not end up with the job.
+
+Senate Republicans are warning that they may not even grant Obama's nominee a hearing, saying it should be up to the next president to fill the vacancy.
+
+A nominee could be left hanging in limbo for a year with no guarantee that, even if a Democrat wins in November, they'll end up on the court. Of course, if a Republican wins the White House, they can forget it.
+
+At worst, if the GOP relents and holds confirmation hearings, the nominee could emerge so damaged by the political tumult that their reputation could be shredded along with their hopes of one day reaching the Supreme Court.
+
+For Obama's next nominee, the ordeal will be many times worse. And there doesn't seem any obvious way for Obama to shield his pick.
+
+""It is possible that he could bend this like Beckham and get it through,"" Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University told CNN's Jim Scuitto. ""But I wouldn't bet on it it. The fact is, you are replacing a conservative icon. Any moderate nominee is going to move this needle to the left on the court and it is going to be a battle royale.""
+
+The sudden opening on the court is emerging as a top issue in an already vicious White House campaign, and threatens to expose the eventual nominee to the full fury of the conservative political, legal and media machine.
+
+So it would be no wonder if a candidate might choose to take a pass on the partisan anger that surrounded the likes of Clarence Thomas, who did make it to the court. Ronald Reagan's nominee, Robert Bork, and Harriet Miers, George W. Bush's White House counsel and Supreme Court pick, did not make it through the acrimonious process.
+
+It would be difficult to see, for instance, why one often-mentioned potential presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, the California Attorney General who is running for a Senate seat, would instead opt for a Supreme Court spot that might be a mirage.
+
+There might also be a case for the President to take on a pass on someone like Sri Srinivasan, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who many see as a Supreme Court justice in waiting.
+
+Srinivasan, who has historic potential as the first Indian-American on the high court, was confirmed unanimously by the Senate for his current post. But his supporters might see a nomination now as a waste, given the risk that he could be burned by a bitter confirmation process and left too stigmatized to be viable in future.
+
+So what type of nominee might be willing to take on such a poisoned chalice?
+
+For sure, whoever is picked would have to be a rare glutton for punishment. But some legal experts believe the White House will still have no trouble drawing up a list.
+
+""Number One -- most judges, if they are not sitting on the Supreme Court, toil in relative anonymity,"" said Professor David Ryden of Hope College, Michigan, whose research focuses on the how the Supreme Court influences the electoral process. ""They are human beings. There is the lure of the limelight and there is the honor of being named.""
+
+Daniel Franklin, a Georgia State University political science professor and author of the book ""Pitiful Giants: Presidents In Their Final Term,"" said that for lawyers, the Supreme Court is the equivalent of the big leagues. That could mean that even a nomination as challenged as this one is special.
+
+""If you say, you have a remote chance of playing center fielder for the Dodgers, I would take it,"" he said. ""It is still a pretty big deal.""
+
+There are some potential ways out of the imbroglio for Obama that involve finding an unorthodox candidate who might be flattered by a nomination.
+
+Since the effort to replace Scalia comes in the twilight of his presidency, Obama has much less leverage than when he picked Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in his first term.
+
+That means he may have no choice but to settle on someone less palatable to liberals but who might increase his minimal chances of winning a confirmation.
+
+""The president is on the ideological spectrum at one point and the Senate is on the ideological spectrum on another,"" said Franklin. ""Even in a normal circumstance, the President has to meet the Senate somewhere in the middle with his preference while getting someone as close to his preference as possible.""
+
+Franklin added: ""Now, he has to move that point closer and closer to the Senate's point of preference.""
+
+If Obama's priority is to get a justice confirmed at all costs, he could call Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's bluff and name a moderate, establishment Republican who GOP senators would feel forced to support -- perhaps someone like GOP Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah or Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi as the nominee, Franklin said.
+
+But that approach -- effectively installing a pro-life nominee with big abortion cases looming -- would enrage Obama's liberal backers.
+
+Still, it would move the court incrementally left on some issues from where it stood when Scalia was alive. And since Hatch and Cochran are 81 and 78 respectively, they would unlikely be a choice that would haunt the President for decades.
+
+Such a scenario, however, seems remote given the political ire of the times. Obama seems more likely to take a more nakedly political route.
+
+He could pick someone he knows is unlikely to be confirmed, but who would be willing to do a service for their party and become a cause celebre throughout election season.
+
+A politician already locked in the heat of partisan battle might work in this case -- that's why the names of Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Cory Booker of New Jersey have been floated. Neither have re-election races in 2016 and both are rumored to have presidential ambitions that might benefit from a spell in the national partisan spotlight.
+
+And if for some reason their colleagues found it impossible to block them in the Senate's clubby atmosphere, there are worst places to end up than on the Supreme Court.
+
+Another approach would be to choose a candidate who is a woman or a minority -- perhaps someone from the Hispanic community -- who could be crucial in driving up Democratic turnout in November.
+
+Stalwart Republican opposition to such a nominee would enable Democrats to paint the GOP as prejudiced and motivated by considerations other than legal reservations -- and perhaps might embarrass some swing-state Senate Republicans up for re-election.
+
+And even some judges already on lower courts might be willing to serve as a political placeholders for such a strategy, said Ryden of Hope College.
+
+""Judges have their own political preferences and agendas and there are many on the federal court bench ... who would fit that label and be happy to collaborate on a strategy with the White House -- even if they weren't the ones who would immediately benefit from it,"" he said.",REAL
+5344,Al-Qaeda's Assault on Aleppo Continues Despite Lack of Progress,"Al-Qaeda's Assault on Aleppo Continues Despite Lack of Progress 
+Rebels are doing a lot of dying but not taking much ground so far Print Originally appeared at The Moon of Alabama 
+For four days now al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al Nusra aka Fatah al-Sham) and assorted other ""rebel"" groups have tried to attack Aleppo from the west to break the siege on al-Qaeda associated groups in east-Aleppo. The New York Times in now openly admitting that CIA supported groups are acting under al-Qaeda's operational command. The piece though, which belonged on page one, was in the back of the paper. There is no public outcry over this disturbing fact. 
+The attack on west-Aleppo had been talked about for over two weeks and the defenders are well prepared. waleppoattack.jpg 
+
+As can be seen on the map above the areas al-Qaeda and its allies managed to capture so far are only small rural outskirts. Every attempt to attack actual city estate under roof was repelled by the defenders. Small infiltrations like shown in the map were immediately cleaned up. The marked area is back in the hands of the Syrian army. It is estimated that the several thousand attackers have so far lost more than 500 men. A 1,000 more are likely injured. Every attack has to be carried over mostly open land and is received by heavy artillery fire. Air attacks ravage their supply and preparation ares. 
+The attackers launched over 20 suicide-vehicle bombs so far but only a few reached their targets and their damage was limited. Yesterday one suicide vehicle bomb, ready to be launched for a new attack, was hit by a missile from a Syrian helicopter and exploded at its preparation and launching position. Over 60 ""rebels"" were killed by it and their attack had to be call off. 
+The good news is that the defense is holding. The bad news is that the al-Qaeda ""rebels"" received huge amounts of artillery missiles and launchers from their ""western"" and Gulf sponsors. Several hundred have been launched at the densely populated areas of west-Aleppo. More than a 100 civilians have been killed by them and several hundred civilians were wounded. Some of the missiles contained gas and people had to be taken to hospital with extreme breathing difficulties. The UN envoy condemned these attacks as ""possible war crimes"". 
+The whole attack operation was launched under the direct supervision of al-Qaeda in Syria leader Abu Muhammad al-Golani. He was shown in pictures at the ""rebel"" headquarter of the attack discussing further operations. 
+Despite any progress on their part the al-Qaeda forces seem far from giving up. More attacks to break the siege are expected. We can be sure that some of their surprises are still in store. But the defenders are ready and the Syrian army is said to prepare for a large counter operation which may include a serious effort to liberate east-Aleppo of the al-Qaeda occupation. 
+Other fronts in Syria are relatively quiet. The Turks have been told by Russia to stop all air attacks within Syria. The message has been received. The Turkish plan to occupy Al Bab east of Aleppo is unlikely to happen as it would be out of range of the Turkey based artillery and have no air support. The U.S. would like to go to Raqqa but has no proxy ground force to do that. Some Obama officials are now arguing for more U.S. boots on the ground in Syria. Will Obama agree to that mission creep?",FAKE
+7024,43-Year-Old Can’t Get Over The Amount Of Kids In Local Night Club,"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] 43-Year-Old Can’t Get Over The Amount Of Kids In Local Night Club October 26, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS , LIFESTYLE Share 0 Add Comment 
+A COUNTY Waterford man is currently undergoing psychiatric treatment today after he was unable to get over the amount of ‘kids’ in a local night club last night. 
+Michael Roache, 43, is said to be suffering from a rare form of temporary psychosis, which forces him to repeat himself continually for its duration. 
+“It started after he arrived home last night,” wife Deirdre Roache recalls, “I thought nothing of it until this morning, when I found him staring at the ceiling in bed, murmuring the same thing over and over again: ‘I can’t get over the amount of kids in here'”. 
+Worried, the mother of children immediately called her local care doctor, who in turn referred him to a psychiatric unit for further testing. 
+It is understood the self-employed man was overwhelmed when he entered the popular nightclub in the city centre, triggering something in his head and sending him into a loop. 
+“He kept saying over and over again that he couldn’t get over the amount of kids in the place,” friend Dermot Ryan told WWN, who is also way too old for night clubs, “We just went in for a late drink because we were working late. It’ll be the last time I go into that fucking place. I felt so old”. 
+Mr. Roache is currently being treated for verbal looping at the psychiatric unit, and doctors have suggested temporarily moving him to an old folks home in a bid to ‘snap him out of it’. 
+“This kind of thing is common in the over 35’s,” Dr. Kevin Maher explained, “Hopefully an hour or two in the old folks home will neutralize his psychosis. He should have known better going to a nightclub at his age, though”.",FAKE
+506,"Gas prices aren't forever, Obama tells Americans","That was President Barack Obama's message to American consumers on Tuesday as he discussed near six year-low gas prices in an interview with The Detroit News ahead of a visit to Michigan on Wednesday to tout the recovery of the auto industry and the growth of American manufacturing.
+
+""I would strongly advise American consumers to continue to think about how you save money at the pump because it is good for the environment, it's good for family pocketbooks and if you go back to old habits and suddenly gas is back at $3.50, you are going to not be real happy,"" Obama said.
+
+But instead of returning to ""old habits,"" Obama advised Americans to save their money, ""or better yet"" use the savings to buy a new car, for example.
+
+He said Americans should ""not believe that"" gas prices won't rise again, explaining that demand for oil in booming countries like China and India will continue to rise, kicking costs back up. Oil prices have dropped more than 50% in recent months, falling below $50 a barrel for the first time since 2009 on Monday. Many members of Congress are counting on gas prices to remain low, however, as they hope to use the low prices as an opportunity to increase the gas tax for the first time in more than two decades. As he touts the results of his bailout of the auto industry on Wednesday, Obama will also promote fuel efficiency at the Ford plant he is set to visit, which produces alternative fuel vehicles and small cars, The News reported. Obama gave the newspaper a preview of his speech Wednesday, in which he is expected to tout the resurgence of the auto industry and the boom of American manufacturing -- two key points of his plan for economic recovery, and elements he hopes will become a part of his legacy as president. ""The auto industry has led a resurgence of manufacturing in America,"" Obama said. ""The quality of the cars has gotten so much better that we are competitive — not just in SUVs — but up and down the line. The branding of American cars is back to where it should be. Michigan's unemployment rate has fallen faster than the overall employment rate.""",REAL
+9458,Three Quarters Of Americans Oppose Gun Control,"Record numbers say no to proposed handgun ban 
+Steve   
+A new poll released by Gallup has found that a record amount of Americans are opposed to gun control measures . 
+The survey found that 76 percent of respondents, over three quarters, believe that a ban on civilian ownership of handguns should not be made law. 
+The findings represent a four-point increase on the same survey from last year, in addition to an all-time high for the past three decades. 
+The poll also found that almost two thirds, 61 percent, are “against” a ban on semi-automatic rifles, or “assault weapons”as the corporate media refers to them. 
+That figure represents a full ten-point increase on previous findings, and is an all time record high since polling began on the issue 20 years ago. 
+Just 27 percent, less than a third, say they support a ban on handgun ownership, while only 36 percent, support a semi-automatic ban. an eight-point decline on previous findings. 
+In addition, gun sales have been hitting record highs for months on end. 
+In a summary of the new poll, Gallup seemed surprised, by the findings, describing waning support for a gun ban as a “paradox”: 
+Perhaps paradoxically, opposition toward a ban has increased against a backdrop of multiple mass shootings and terrorist attacks in which the perpetrators used assault rifles. These guns were used in high-profile incidents, including the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando, and the mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut. 
+The findings reveal just how out of step Hillary Clinton’s position on gun control is with the majority of Americans. 
+Hillary is a staunch gun control proponent. Wikileaks releases have revealed that Hillary plans to implement strict gun control measures by executive order. 
+Clinton purportedly plans to open gun manufacturers to lawsuits by crime victims, a move that critics say would do nothing to reduce crime, but would bankrupt–and eventually end–gun manufacturing in the United States. This article was posted: Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 10:30 am Share this article",FAKE
+6192,Revealed: Several Ku Klux Klan Units Active in Germany,"Get short URL 0 8 0 0 A parliamentary inquiry reports that there are four Ku Klux Klan-affiliated groups currently operating in Germany. © AP Photo/ Markus Schreiber Strangers in Their Homeland: Germans Leaving Germany En Masse Due to Migrants While the groups have very low membership, they are suspected of committing at least 68 crimes in Germany since 2001. Their members also include at least two police officers, though it remains unclear whether they are still on the force.
+“The low membership numbers cannot discount the danger that emanates from such organizations,” Left Party politician Monika Renner told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. 
+Germany is currently seeing a surge in hate crimes following the acceptance of an estimated one million refugees last year. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), Germany’s intelligence agency, recorded 990 hate crimes in 2014, and 1,408 in 2015. 
+The BfV also recorded 75 arson attacks on refugee centers in 2015. There were just five such attacks in 2014. © AFP 2016/ Sven Hoppe “One thing is clear – a state under the rule of law can never accept racist violence. We need to do everything we can to quickly catch the perpetrators and rigorously punish them,” German Justice Minister Heiko Maas stated.
+Amnesty International has stated that their researchers observed an 87 percent increase in hate crimes between 2013-2015. “With hate crimes on the rise in Germany, long-standing and well-documented shortcomings in the response of law enforcement agencies to racist violence must be addressed,” Marco Perolini, Amnesty International’s European Union researcher, stated . “There are many factors that point to the existence of institutional racism with German law enforcement agencies. This question needs to asked, and it needs to be answered… This is not a time for complacency, but for law enforcement agencies to take a long, hard look in the mirror.” 
+The nation has also seen a rise in sexual assault, theft, and rape, especially by people with refugee status. There has been a noticeable uptick since the mass attacks on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. ...",FAKE
+5856,Dakota Access pipeline protesters occupy Hillary Clinton campaign HQ,"Dakota Access pipeline protesters occupy Hillary Clinton campaign HQ Dakota Access pipeline protesters occupy Hillary Clinton campaign HQ By 0 65 
+The campaign headquarters of Hillary Clinton in Brooklyn, New York, was taken over Thursday by protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline being constructed in North Dakota and three other states. They’re demanding the candidate declare where she stands. 
+READ MORE: Arrests as North Dakota cops remove pipeline protesters from private land (PHOTOS, VIDEO) 
+Surrounding a drum circle and teepee in the middle of Clinton’s presidential campaign headquarters in Brooklyn was a coalition of Bernie Sanders supporters, environmentalists and members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, all demonstrating against the planned 1,172-mile, $3.78 billion pipeline known as the Dakota Access. 
+The activists who call themselves “protectors, not protesters” are demanding Clinton openly take a position on the Dakota Access pipeline, or DAPL. 
+The main protests are ongoing in North Dakota, where police ordered evacuations of activists demonstrating on private land reserved for the crude oil project. Other demonstrations have been held in the other states where the pipeline is scheduled to cross into, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. 
+Other Clinton campaign offices were also targeted in solidarity on Thursday, including the one in Seattle, Washington. 
+ ",FAKE
+6790,"Comment on Leaked Email: ‘If She Wins, Hillary Will Own The Supreme Court for the Next 30 to 40 Years’ by mildred.kraus","Posted on October 27, 2016 by Melissa Dykes 
+This. Is. Horrifying. 
+In another Wikileaks email , this time from Chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council Marc Stanley to Hillary campaign chairman John Podesta dated February 11, 2016, Stanley lays out his best argument for why voters should choose Hillary over Bernie… 
+(click to enlarge) 
+He writes: 
+I tell the voter that I like Bernie and I like Hillary, but that’s not what matters. What matters to me is that there are 4 justices on the Supreme Court who will be in their 80’s and be replaced by the next president – and that President will appoint 40 year old Justices and they will serve for 30 or 40 years. 
+He goes on to say that voters shouldn’t want Republicans making decisions about issues like Obamacare, Citizens United, voter rights, etc. and that Bernie is “a 20-1 horse” versus Hillary as a “1-1 or even 2-1 horse”. 
+Can you imagine it? Hillary being able to personally nominate four out of nine Supreme Court justices for life ? 
+Hillary will own half the Supreme Court and for long after she’s gone. 
+That’s seven out of nine… or the entire Supreme Court, basically. 
+Think about that for a second. Just let it sink in. Melissa Dykes is a writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple and a co-creator of Truthstream Media with Aaron Dykes, a site that offers teleprompter-free, unscripted analysis of The Matrix we find ourselves living in. Melissa and Aaron also recently launched Revolution of the Method and Informed Dissent . Wake the flock up! Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+964,Billionaires fund anti-Trump delegate push,"232 photos, 131 quotes and 43 numbers that tell the story of America's craziest election.",REAL
+8691,The Loosening Grip of DC,"By Fred Reed October 28, 2016 
+Oh good. The world reaches a crossroads, or probably a road off a cliff, just when I want to relax and watch gratuitous violence on the tube. To judge by the rapid drift of events aboard our planetary asylum, the talons of Washington and New York on the world’s throat are fast being pried a-loose. The Global American Imperium is dying. Or so it sure looks anyway. 
+I say talons of “New York and Washington” because America’s foreign policy, forged in those two cities, belongs entirely to them. Americans have no influence on it. Further, none of what the Empire does abroad is of any benefit to Americans. Do you care at all what happens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, or the South China Sea? Do you want to pay for it? America has been hijacked. 
+And the Empire prospereth not. It prospereth very not. Consider the recent record of the world’s hyperpower: 
+Washington does not have control of Afghanistan, and obviously is not going to. 
+Washington does not have control of Iraq, and appears unlikely to. 
+Washington did not back Iran down, and isn’t going to. 
+Washington did not back Russia down in Ukraine and Crimea, and isn’t going to. 
+Washington did not back China down in the South China Sea and, while this is perhaps not over, the Empire seems to be losing. 
+Washington has not backed North Korea down and is not going to. 
+In the Philippines, President Duterte has told Obama to “go to hell” as being “the son of a whore,” which may be taken to indicate latent hostility. He is vigorously seeking rapprochement with China. While Washington may have him murdered, it seems to be losing control of the Little Vassals of ASEAN. 
+Turkey seems to be cuddling up to Russia–that is, looking East like Duterte. Maybe Washington can turn this around temporarily, but there-s a whole lot of wavering going on. 
+Meanwhile Washington thrashes around impotently as per usual in Syria, and, though the jury remains out on this one, looks to have poor prospects. If Washington–AKA New York–loses here, after doing so in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan, the Empire will beyond redemption be on the downward slope. 
+The United States is not in danger. The Empire is. This is not good. Empires, the Soviet Union notwithstanding, seldom go quietly. Either Washington gambles on war of some sort against Russia, or Russia and China, in the desperate hope of reversing things, or the Empire gets slowly eaten. Or not so slowly. Once one country pries itself loose, many may rush for the door. 
+New York may go for calculated war against Russia–say, cyberwar expected not to turn into shooting war, shooting war in Syria not expected to turn into global shooting war, global shooting war not expected to turn into nuclear war. This will be a crapshoot. Note that America has badly misguessed the outcomes of every war since Korea. 
+This is why the American election actually matters, unusual in Presidential contests. It is Blowhard against Corruption, a swell choice, but Trump is firmly against war with Russia, and Hillary for. Her military understanding is that of a fried egg. 
+The woman is both a fool and a knave but, it seems, Trump has talked trash, and therefore she will likely be President. Weirdly, the future of the world depends on how an excited electorate of political middle-schoolers responds to one candidate’s dirty talk. From a curmudgeon’s point of view, it is pretty funny. It is funnier if one lives outside of the radiation footprint. 
+But back to business. The seaboard Axis of Evil needs a war because almost every tide runs against it. Proximately, the Axis has pushed China, Russia, and Iran together against the Empire. (First rule of empire: Do not let the dissidents unite.) Many signs suggest that the world, or much of it, is beginning to see China as its future. The BRICS, the SCO, the NDB, the AAIB–all exclude the US. China becomes the major trading partner of country after country. The twilight deepens. 
+Not all goes wrong for the Empire–not yet, but things are getting spooky. On the European Peninsula of Asia, countries remain docile, especially England and, much more importantly, Germany. Yet even among Washington’s European harem, there seem to be faint stirrings of a forgotten independence. As I understand it, Germany’s businessmen would very much like to end Washington’s sanctions on Russia and improve trade with China, which would be greatly to the benefit of the Peninsula. Washington won’t let them. It can’t. If the Europeans did what would be good for themselves, and looked to Eurasia, then the fat lady, already warming up, would burst into full bellow. 
+Which, methinks, raises the likelihood that Washington will in desperation do something phenomenally stupid. At this writing Hillary’s camp seems to be prepping the public for war with Russia. The telescreen tells us day after day that Putin is Hitler, that Russia is expanding, that the Russkies are hacking the election, that they cause indigestion and falling hair. Is this just Hillary waggling her codpiece in the expectation that Moscow will demurely back down, as God intended? Or will she again send other people’s children to fight for her in somebody else’s country? 
+The larger picture, assuredly obvious to New York, is truly grim–for New York, not for Americans. China has a huge population of a billion Han Chinese, versus two hundred million Caucasian Americans–these being the scientific, technological and entrepreneurial brains of the Empire. One must not notice this, but you can bet that New York and Beijing do. Economically China is growing hugely, advancing technologically at a high rate, building rail lines that now extend from the Chinese Pacific coast to Madrid. It will increasingly dwarf the Empire no matter what happens–short of a world war. 
+The curtain falls in ways unnoticed. China recently launched a communications satellite, the world’s first employing quantum cryptographic links, which cannot be intercepted. The intention of this, as well of the QC link from Beijing to Shanghai, is to keep the NSA off China’s back. A small thing, perhaps. Yet if successful and adopted en masse by other countries weary of Washington’s meddling, the result will be a loosening of the Empire’s grip on everybody’s communications. 
+For the Empire it is, as Elvis sang, “now or never.” Lenin spoke of “useful idiots.” Ours aren’t even useful, but they call the shots. The Best of Fred Reed Tags:",FAKE
+4486,"Memorial Day provides respite from VA controversies, even as new issue brews","Memorial Day is a time to remember those who gave their lives to protect this country.
+
+It is a day when the focus on those sacrifices will be through commemorations with bugle calls and wreath layings instead of the controversies that have dogged the Department of Veterans Affairs. Yet, even as the ceremonies get underway, another debate involving the federal hiring preference for veterans is brewing.
+
+President Obama focused on their sacrifice Friday with a Prayer for Peace proclamation:
+
+“Since America’s earliest days, proud patriots have forged a safer, more secure Nation, and though battlefields have changed and technology has evolved, the selflessness of our service members has remained steadfast. They have stepped forward when our country was locked in revolution and civil war; fought threats of fascism and terrorism; and led the way in securing peace and stability around the globe. They have sacrificed more than most of us could ever imagine — not for glory or gratitude, but for causes greater than themselves.”
+
+He called on Americans to observe a National Moment of Remembrance beginning at 3 p.m. local time and requested “the flag be flown at half-staff until noon on this Memorial Day on all buildings, grounds, and naval vessels throughout the United States and in all areas under its jurisdiction and control.”
+
+There will be ceremonies at cemeteries across the nation, including at Arlington National Cemetery at 11 a.m.
+
+“Whether at Gettysburg, one of our country’s first national cemeteries, or at Cape Canaveral, our most recent dedication, each VA national cemetery is a sacred place of honor befitting the great deeds and sacrifices of the fallen,” said VA Secretary Robert McDonald.
+
+Memorial Day brings some relief from a double-barrel shot of controversy last week. Last Monday, McDonald drew strong criticism from Republicans for comparing lines at Disney amusement parks to the long wait times veterans have experienced at VA hospitals. A couple of days later, Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) revealed that more than 4,200 veterans were mistakenly declared dead by VA from 2011 to 2015.
+
+Now another issue is emerging.
+
+The Senate Armed Services Committee has advanced legislation that would limit the federal hiring preference provided to veterans and certain close relatives. The bill still would give them preference points or preferential listing when first hired, but not for each new federal job after that, as is now the case.
+
+That broader, long-standing preference won’t go down without a fight.
+
+A statement from the American Federation of Government Employees said it “has long been an advocate for veterans preference and the principles it stands for. We strongly oppose this provision.”
+
+The American Legion supports the larger National Defense Authorization Act that includes the preference limiting provision. But Ian de Planque, legislative director of the veterans service organization, said it will work to keep the preference in its current form.
+
+“It’s worked for a long time,” he said. “It’s been a good thing.”
+
+Vet, one of 4,200 mistakenly declared dead by VA, feels ‘resurrected’
+
+Senators call for VA chief to resign over Disney remark",REAL
+3324,Hillary Clinton apologizes for e-mail system: ‘I take responsibility’,"This post has been updated.
+
+A day after again declining to apologize for her use of a private e-mail system while she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton told an interviewer Tuesday that the arrangement was a mistake and that she is ""sorry"" for it.
+
+“As I look back at it now, even though it was allowed, I should have used two accounts. That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility,” Clinton said in an interview with ABC News.
+
+The statement was the furthest Clinton has gone in showing remorse for the arrangement, which mingled her work and personal communications and kept them outside the regular State Department e-mail system. The FBI is investigating whether the system, maintained on a privately owned computer server at Clinton's New York home, jeopardized classified information.
+
+In interviews Friday with NBC and Monday with the Associated Press, Clinton had declined to apologize, even as she said the arrangement was a poor choice that she regrets. She told NBC interviewer Andrea Mitchell that she is sorry the issue is confusing for people, but insisted that she had done nothing wrong.
+
+She would not apologize, she told the AP, because “what I did was allowed.”
+
+Republican critics had begun to use the question of an apology against her, undermining the campaign's plan to address the complex e-mail issue more directly and with greater humility. Questions about the private system have contributed to Clinton's slide in the polls, with more people saying they do not trust her.
+
+A Washington Post/ABC News poll this month found that 53 percent of Americans now see Clinton unfavorably. That rating rose by 8 percentage points since earlier in the summer, tipping the balance to a majority of Americans now seeing her in an unfavorable light.
+
+Clinton turned over copies of roughly 30,000 e-mails at the State Department's request late last year, nearly two years after she left office. At the same time she directed that a slightly larger number of e-mails stored on the server be destroyed because she deemed them personal and not part of her government business. Initially she refused to turn over the server, but did so in August.
+
+Clinton told ABC that she did not send or receive classified material on the account and said she is “trying to be as transparent as I possibly can.”
+
+Late Tuesday, the campaign sent a message to supporters in Clinton's name reiterating the apology. Donors and activists have been complaining to the campaign headquarters for weeks that the e-mail issue was being mishandled, and it largely is their concern and disappointment Clinton is trying to head off.
+
+""I wanted you to hear this directly from me,"" this e-mailed statement to supporters said. ""Yes, I should have used two email addresses, one for personal matters and one for my work at the State Department. Not doing so was a mistake. I'm sorry about it, and I take full responsibility.""
+
+Clinton went on to stress, as she regularly does, that her personal account was ""aboveboard,"" and that ""nothing I ever sent or received was marked classified at the time. ""
+
+Despite the campaign’s effort to more directly confront its problems stemming from the e-mail saga, Clinton’s own reckoning with it still seemed grudging.
+
+In March, she insisted that she had done everything by the State Department book and had nothing for which to answer; last month she said that she “gets it” that voters have questions. That was a significant shift — as was the decision to stop insisting the controversy was a manufactured Republican hit job.
+
+But until now, Clinton had always said that although she would make a different choice today, there was nothing inherently wrong with setting up the system as she did.
+
+Clinton’s reversal on making an apology echoed the protracted 2008 campaign discussion of whether she would say she was wrong or sorry about her Senate vote in support of the Iraq war.
+
+In both cases, Clinton adopted a narrow and somewhat lawyerly stance at first, then came to a more direct show of remorse.",REAL
+3572,The real reasons Iran is so committed to its nuclear program,"As the deadlines near for Iran and world powers to reach an agreement on the country's nuclear program — the first, on March 31, for a basic political framework — negotiations are focusing on what kind of program Iran can have. How much uranium and plutonium can it have? How many centrifuges can it use to develop more fuel? How long will restrictions be in place?
+
+There's one fact, though, that is taken as assumed: Iran very badly wants a nuclear program. So badly that it has been willing to press ahead with the program, secretly as well as overtly, despite Western and UN sanctions that have crippled its economy, and despite repeated US warnings of possible military action.
+
+Iran claims its program is entirely peaceful, but there are major reasons to doubt this, and it is generally taken as a given by analysts that the country has at least taken just-in-case steps partway toward building a bomb. Some facilities seem to serve little plausible function beyond nuclear weapons capability, though a point that Western intelligence agencies have made in the past is that building the capacity for making a bomb is not the same as deciding to make a bomb.
+
+Whatever Iran's intentions, though, the country's dedication to nuclear enrichment even at such enormous costs can seem bizarrely counterproductive. So why is Iran so set on its nuclear program? There is no one dominant answer, but rather a few plausible explanations, some of which go against the most common Western perceptions and misperceptions of how Iran works. There is probably some truth to all of them.
+
+Consider Tehran's view for a moment: Israeli and American leaders have been talking for years about bombing Iran or invading it outright. The Bush administration named Iran part of its ""axis of evil,"" alongside Iraq, which it invaded months later. For much of the last decade, the US has had thousands of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, both Iran's neighbors.
+
+Iranian leaders appear to sincerely believe that the United States is bent on their government's destruction. For example, the United States helped Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in his brutal, years-long war against Iran, in which he killed thousands of Iranians, including with chemical weapons. It is difficult to overstate how traumatic the years-long war was for Iranians, how badly they want to prevent another such war. And nothing deters chemical weapon attacks like a nuclear weapon.
+
+You will hear Iranians frequently mention Iran Air flight 655, a civilian airliner that the US military accidentally shot down in 1988, killing 290 civilians. In Iran, this is still frequently viewed as deliberate. Imagine you're an Iranian leader seeing all this. You might want a nuclear deterrent.
+
+Also consider the timing of the program. When the ayatollahs came to power in the 1979 Islamic revolution, they at first cancelled the country's nuclear program, but then re-started it after Saddam invaded in 1980.
+
+""Tehran wanted to guard against a future surprise analogous to Iraq's repeated use of chemical weapons,"" writes Shahram Chubin of the Carnegie Endowment. More recently, Iran has been embroiled in low-level proxy conflicts with Israel and Saudi Arabia, and with what it sees as a defensive conflict against the hostile West.
+
+It's important to remember that Iran sees itself as isolated in the world, despite intimations of occasional Russian or Chinese support. Save for proxies such as Hezbollah and the Syrian government, it sees the Middle East as largely aligned against it. It is also important to remember that its leaders, in power only since 1979, feel weak and isolated. Current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in particular has never been very confident in power.
+
+That sense of insecurity feeds into a rational desire for deterrence against external threats, but it also creates a less rational belief in anti-Iran conspiracies or an impending American invasion. When the US threatens to bomb Iran to stop a nuclear program, Iranian leaders can misread this as a desire to destroy the Iranian state itself, which would make them more likely to want a nuclear deterrent, which only makes the US threaten more strenuously.
+
+Iran's national pride runs deep, and with good reason: It has been an active center of cultural, scientific, religious and political thought for many centuries. It's also still upset, again with reason, about decades of Western interference during the 19th and 20th centuries.
+
+The nuclear program is a way in which Iran affirms, to itself and to the world, that it is an advanced and sovereign nation. It's a way of saying: we are not inferior to the world powers, even though you treat us that way, but are in fact equals.
+
+It's also a way of defying what Iran sees as continued Western efforts to control, exploit or weaken Iran. The more that the world tells Iran it cannot have a nuclear program, the more important building such a program becomes for the cause of Iranian nationalism.
+
+This is part of why Iranian leaders so often state that they want world powers to affirm Iran's right to enrich uranium and to respect Iran's ""dignity"" — a word that top officials use frequently. This isn't posturing — they really mean it.
+
+In November 2013, as nuclear talks got underway, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif released a video articulating Iran's position. He spent very little time talking about actual nuclear policies — the meat and potatoes of the negotiations — and lots of time saying things like, ""We expect and demand respect for our dignity."" He frequently mentioned phrases such as ""equal footing"" and ""mutual respect."" The video was taken as bizarre and inexplicable by Americans, because they could not see that this demand for respect was not a side issue — it was central for Iran.
+
+There was a brief moment, after the US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 (both Iran's neighbors) where Tehran seemed eager to strike a deal with the West over its nuclear program. There are many reasons that fell apart — Dick Cheney personally worked to torpedo any communications, for example — but a crucial one was Iranian politics.
+
+Iran's anti-US hard-liners took the parliament in 2004, and the presidency in 2005 with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The hard-liners turned the nuclear program into something of a partisan wedge issue, using it to weaken reformers and moderates who wanted to compromise the program to soften relations with the West.
+
+""Both Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei used the nuclear issue to stigmatize reformists, depicting them as defeatists willing to negotiate away Iran's interests,"" Chubin writes. ""Their use of the nuclear issue as an instrument of partisan politics ended the phase when the nuclear program was supposed to be a national issue. And debate was actively discouraged.""
+
+This was great politics for Ahmadinejad and other hard-liners. But it made it much more difficult for him or other Iranian leaders to compromise on the program. They were too invested in the program, politically, to back down — even if backing down would have been in Iran's national interests.
+
+""By 2010,"" Chubin writes, ""the divide over Iran's nuclear program had more to do with domestic politics-and very little to do with what many of the key players actually wanted to see happen.""
+
+Ahmadinejad is out of power, but the hard-liners are still powerful. They have particular influence over Khamenei, who as supreme leader is the ultimate decision-maker. Because of the way Khamenei came to power — his religious credentials are weak, and his political credibility never as strong as predecessor and national founder Ruhollah Khomeini — he's long caved to hard-liners, who he fears could turn against him.
+
+Since Iran become the Islamic Republic in the 1979 revolution, it has seen the Middle East as a battleground for its influence. This is meant as both defensive and offensive; ever since Saddam invaded, Iranian leaders have feared that hostile, Western-backed Arab leaders could do them terrible harm. And Tehran sees pro-American Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia as inherently hostile.
+
+But Iran is also expansive and aggressive in the region, supporting proxy terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah both as a deterrent against American or Israeli threats and as a way to project its power. In the context of this regional struggle for power, a nuclear weapon starts to make a lot more sense. Not as something that Tehran would want to actually use, but as a way to get away with other sorts of trouble-making.
+
+Clifton W. Sherrill of Troy University explained in a 2012 issue of Nonproliferation Review how Iran could use a nuclear weapon as not just a deterrent but a way to give itself cover for bullying its neighbors and generally projecting more power in the region, where competition for influence is already high, and the stakes are enormous.
+
+""The regime believes nuclear weapons would deter foreign military strikes targeting the Iranian homeland, making the Iranian use of conventional military force abroad less risky,"" Sherrill writes. ""At a minimum, possession of nuclear arms would allow Iran greater policy flexibility in the Middle East.""
+
+That likely means using proxy groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, even more aggressively to threaten and bully other countries in the region. That also means pushing harder to support pro-Iran militant groups in countries such as Syria and Yemen where Iran sees itself as competing for influence. The idea is that Iran can be more brazen and aggressive with these non-nuclear threats because its nuclear weapon would scare other countries out of retaliating.
+
+That bullying could also have implications for energy politics; Iran might feel it could force ""demands in the Persian Gulf regarding disputed islands or natural gas fields"" or ""desires regarding production quotas"" within OPEC, Sherrill warns. And he points to nuclear-armed Pakistan as an example of how this all can happen:
+
+Despite widespread misconceptions to the contrary in the US — often pushed by politicians who wish to play up the Iranian threat for political gain — there is no reason to believe that Iran wants to launch an offensive nuclear strike against the US, Israel, or any other country.
+
+The well-established logic of nukes would make any war against other nuclear powers a loser for Iran. This is because powers such as the US and Israel have what is called second-strike capability, meaning that even if Iran got off a nuclear strike, the country would still be destroyed by the retaliation. There is no cost-benefit calculation by which an offensive strike would make sense for Iran.
+
+As Sherrill explained, ""It is highly unlikely that the Islamist regime plans to actually detonate a nuclear weapon in an offensive attack. Both of the obvious targets, the United States and Israel, have a second-strike nuclear arsenal capable of threatening the Islamist regime's survival.""
+
+Some argue that Iran's leaders are inherently irrational because of their religion and would be willing to launch a suicidal war against the US or Israel. As Newt Gingrich once put it, for example, ""It's impossible to deter them. What are you going to threaten?""
+
+The seemingly sole piece of evidence that Iran's leaders have spent the last 36 years secretly plotting a suicidal war is the idea that their interpretation of Shia Islam foretells of a messiah who will return on the apocalypse. While Ahmadinejad did reference this idea many times, he was alone in this, as Matt Duss of the Foundation for Middle East Peace explains, and was widely rebuked by Shia scholars and his own country's political and clerical establishments.
+
+Actual readings of Iran's official Shia theology by actual religious scholars, Duss finds, reach the opposite conclusion that Newt Gingrich did: Iranian leaders see it as their religious duty to preserve their system, not destroy it in a fiery war with Israel. As scholar Mehdi Khalaji told Duss, ""As the theory of the guardianship of the jurist requires, the most significant task of the Supreme Leader is to safeguard the regime, even by overruling Islamic law.""
+
+Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that Iranian leaders are just as rationally invested in self-preservation as anyone else. You can't hold up a political system as complex and besieged as Iran's without being shrewdly self-interested. If Iran's Islamic regime were really looking for a suicidal war in which to martyr itself, the eight-year war with Iraq offered many such opportunities, none of which they took.
+
+There are a number of reasons that Iran wants a nuclear program and has taken steps toward a nuclear bomb. Some of those reasons are rational and others are not. But a desire to launch an offensive strike against another country is not one of them.",REAL
+9396,The announcement for Wales’ first female bishop attracted quite a crowd,"Next Prev Swipe left/right The announcement for Wales’ first female bishop attracted quite a crowd The Church in Wales has elected its first female bishop, and the historic announcement drew the most underwhelming crowd* you could possibly imagine. Church in Wales gets first female bishop. Do watch 30-sec clip of Archbishop's historic announcement, if only for crowd shot at the end… pic.twitter.com/tJZZO5xQdv 
+— Kaya Burgess (@kayaburgess) November 2, 2016 
+*nine and half people",FAKE
+367,"Democratic challengers launch attacks against Clinton, party leadership","Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to cement her standing as the rightful leader of the Democratic Party here Friday, but two of her challengers launched a fierce counterattack against her and a party establishment they see as trying to hand her the 2016 presidential nomination.
+
+What began as a routine forum of candidate speeches evolved into a surprisingly dramatic day at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley issued thinly veiled attacks on Clinton and the party leadership.
+
+Speaking from the dais, with DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz sitting a few feet away, O’Malley blasted the party’s limited number of sanctioned debates as a process “rigged” in favor of the front-runner. The DNC is holding six debates, only four before February’s first caucuses in Iowa, which O’Malley argued is a disadvantage for all the candidates and a disservice to Democrats generally.
+
+“This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before,” said O’Malley, who has struggled to gain traction in the polls. He added: “We are the Democratic Party, not the undemocratic party.”
+
+Sanders — who later told reporters he agreed with O’Malley — lamented low Democratic turnout in last year’s midterm elections and said the party must grow beyond “politics as usual” if it hopes to produce the level of voter enthusiasm required to retain the White House in 2016.
+
+“We need a movement which takes on the economic and political establishment, not one which is part of that establishment,” said Sanders, who is an independent but caucuses with Democrats in the Senate.
+
+Asked later whether he was speaking specifically about Clinton, he told reporters, “I’ll let you use your imagination on that.”
+
+The barbs from Sanders and O’Malley came as Clinton and her campaign flexed their organizational muscle here. The front-
+
+runner and her top aides worked aggressively behind the scenes this week to secure commitments from party leaders pledging to be delegates for her in next summer’s nominating convention in Philadelphia.
+
+Clinton’s organizational push sent a clear signal to Vice President Biden, who has been weighing a late entry into the 2016 campaign, that he would begin far behind her.
+
+In her address to a ballroom full of DNC members, Clinton sought to position herself as the undisputed Democratic standard-
+
+bearer. She fired up the party faithful with a call to arms against Republicans as dangerously out of touch and peppered her remarks with gibes at current GOP front-runner Donald Trump — including a suggestion that his hair, although natural, is dyed like her own.
+
+“The party of Lincoln has become the party of Trump,” Clinton said. She mocked Trump for suggesting that she did not understand women’s health issues and that he would be a better advocate. “Now that’s a general election debate that’s going to be a lot of fun,” she said.
+
+Clinton said that Trump is getting most of the media attention this summer but that the other Republican candidates are making statements that ought to scare mainstream voters. “They’re Trump without the pizazz and the hair,” she said.
+
+Clinton made no reference in her speech to the controversy surrounding her use of a private ­e-mail server while secretary of state. When asked about it later in a news conference, Clinton said: “I have said repeatedly that I did not send nor receive classified material, and I’m very confident when this entire process plays out, that will be understood by everyone. It will prove what I have been saying.”
+
+Former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee raised eyebrows when he touted himself as ­scandal-free in his remarks. He later said this was not “a direct swipe at anybody.” But pressed on how Clinton has handled the ­e-mail issue, Chafee said: “The rules are the rules, and we all have to adhere to them, and when you don’t, you suffer the consequences. Unfortunately this is self-
+
+inflicted.”
+
+The fifth declared candidate, former senator Jim Webb of Virginia, did not attend because he was taking his daughter to college.
+
+O’Malley used his time onstage to highlight his dissatisfaction with the DNC’s management of the debates. He argued forcefully that as Trump and other Republican candidates dominate news coverage with inflammatory rhetoric, Democrats would be wise to hold more, not fewer, nationally televised debates to highlight the differences between the parties.
+
+“Will we let the circus run unchallenged on every channel while we cower in shadows under a decree of silence in the ranks? Or will we demand equal time to showcase our ideas?” O’Malley asked.
+
+He slammed what he called a “cynical move” to limit the debates to six and to hold the only New Hampshire debate on a Saturday night in mid-December, the peak of the holiday shopping season.
+
+“Whose decree is this exactly?” he asked provocatively. “Where did it come from? To what end or purpose?”
+
+Wasserman Schultz, who was visibly miffed by O’Malley’s speech, said in an interview Thursday that she had consulted widely with past DNC chairs, as well as with the campaigns, before setting the debate schedule.
+
+“We felt like this structure for actual debates was really the best one that could give maximum exposure that voters need to make a decision but that also would be manageable and give the candidates the opportunity and the time to go out and campaign in a retail way,” she said.",REAL
+9171,Fox News Poll: Clinton leads Trump by three points,"FoxNews.com October 27, 2016 
+With less than two weeks to go, the race for the White House has narrowed as Hillary Clinton now has a three-point advantage over Donald Trump. 
+That’s within the margin of error of the national Fox News Poll of likely voters. 
+Clinton is ahead of Trump by 44-41 percent. Another one-in-ten back a third-party candidate and four percent are undecided. Last week she was up by six points (45-39 percent) and before that by seven (45-38 percent). 
+The poll, released Wednesday, finds Clinton leads 49-44 percent in the head-to-head matchup. That 5-point advantage is at the edge of the error margin. She was up 7 a week ago (49-42 percent). This article was posted: Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 6:33 am Share this article",FAKE
+10524,Moveable Feast Cafe 2016/11/04 … Open Thread,"1591 Views November 04, 2016 60 Comments Moveable Feast Herb Swanson 
+2016/11/04 02:30:02Welcome to the ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’. The ‘Moveable Feast’ is an open thread where readers can post wide ranging observations, articles, rants, off topic and have animate discussions of the issues of the day. 
+The ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’ will have two new open threads each week. 
+The Saker stated moderation policy will apply eg ‘no caps’, no obscenity … etc to all post. 
+The Cafe is now open for business … come on in and have a good time. 
+Saker Webmaster The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95",FAKE
+8633,Trump's Victory Proves US Political Class Out of Touch With Electorate: Ron Paul,"
+Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Executive Director Daniel McAdams stated that Donald Trump’s victory has proven the entire political class in Washington and especially the mainstream media that does their bidding to be completely out of touch with the American people.
+The victory of Republican Party candidate Donald Trump in the US presidential elections proves that Washington’s political class and the mainstream US media are completely detached from the actual US electorate, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Executive Director Daniel McAdams told Sputnik.
+“More than anything else, Donald Trump’s victory has proven the entire political class in Washington and especially the mainstream media that does their bidding to be completely out of touch with the American people,” McAdams said.
+According to McAdams, over the course of the election, the mainstream media has proven not to be independent resources seeking out inconvenient truths, but rather “a lapdog to the power elite.”
+Earlier in the day, Trump won the US presidential elections despite most of the analysts and opinion polls predicting his defeat to Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+154,"After nearly five years, Boehner could never land the ‘big deal’ he wanted","John A. Boehner never landed the really big deal he craved. Not the $4 trillion tax-and-entitlement deal he reached for in 2011, not the repackaged version a year later and not the immigration overhaul he sought in 2014.
+
+He most clearly learned the limits of his power midway through his nearly five-year tenure as House speaker when he scaled down his ambitions for “Plan B” — a tactical gambit aimed at forcing Democrats to preserve Republican tax cuts. Conservatives rebelled because those making more than $1 million would have faced tax increases, and Boehner (Ohio) was left reading the “Serenity Prayer” to his Republican colleagues.
+
+“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” the speaker said.
+
+That utter defeat left him unable to “go big,” as he liked to say, his effort to find a legacy-defining piece of legislation coming largely to a close. In the three years since, he mostly has been treading water.
+
+This month, Boehner found himself in much the same position as before. But conservatives weren’t revolting over tax cuts or a farm bill or health-care legislation. This time, they were after his job.
+
+On Friday, he decided to spare his party another fight, particularly one that was all about him. In the same basement room where he abandoned “Plan B,” he announced his resignation, ending a run as speaker that came to be defined by internal revolts and missed opportunities.
+
+[What John Boehner told me the night before he was quitting]
+
+On Sept. 17, Republicans swore in their 247th member, giving them their largest House majority since 1930. Yet Boehner could never please his most conservative members. Fiscal deals negotiated with President Obama produced more than $2 trillion in savings and made the GOP’s tax cuts permanent for 99 percent of workers, but the far right painted both deals as sellouts.
+
+Despite his early years as an agitator, Boehner never overcame the image that the conservatives saw: a country club Republican who loved to play 18 holes of golf and drink merlot afterward while cutting deals. In an era of shouting and confrontation, on talk radio or cable TV, Boehner’s easygoing style did not fit.
+
+“John was fighting the 21st-century battles with 1990s tools, and you can’t just do that with a president of either party who is willing to push the envelopes of executive power,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), one of the lead rebels, said after Boehner’s surprise announcement Friday morning.
+
+Aside from a Quixotic effort to cajole support for immigration legislation, Boehner has been stuck with a caucus bitterly divided between those willing to accept incremental progress toward conservative goals and those, like Mulvaney, willing to blow up the normal courtesies and practices in Washington.
+
+“It’s like the Marine Corps: You spend 90 percent of your time on 10 percent of your guys,” Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), an Iraq war veteran who still serves in the Marine Corps Reserve, said Friday. “I think that’s what ended up happening with Boehner toward the end, the last year or two. There was so much time dealing with fractious stuff inside the conference that it took a lot of time away from doing other things.”
+
+Boehner decided to retire, effective Oct. 30, after his emotional reaction to Pope Francis’s visit on Thursday to the Capitol. The speaker spent the night at an Italian restaurant on Barracks Row with close friends and then Friday morning at his regular diner two blocks from the Capitol, where he affirmed his decision.
+
+It was a long fall from September 2010, when Boehner and his leadership team introduced the “Pledge to America,” their governing document touted in the final days of the midterm election campaign that delivered a Republican House majority.
+
+[How speakers of the House became an endangered species]
+
+That 2010 class — 87 Republicans strong — ushered Boehner into the speaker’s chair but brought with it dozens of lawmakers from deeply conservative districts that distrusted all of Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike. Dozens of the freshmen became loyal foot soldiers to leadership, but they also feared that their biggest political risk would come in a Republican primary, not from a Democrat in a general election.
+
+That meant that when the most conservative members aligned themselves with outside conservative groups pushing for a harder line, these more moderate Republicans sometimes bucked Boehner out of fear.
+
+The first warning sign for the new speaker came within weeks of him taking over, when Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the fiscal expert for the caucus, presented a proposal for cutting about $40 billion from the 2012 federal agency budgets. The freshmen revolted, citing the “Pledge to America” and its call for $100 billion in cuts. Never mind that the fiscal year was half over; they wanted deeper reductions.
+
+Boehner gave in, sending his troops back to draw up greater cuts to appease the right flank.
+
+That scenario played out repeatedly throughout his term, most dramatically in the summer of 2011 when Boehner and Obama — after a much-hyped round of golf at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland — entered into negotiations aimed at a $4 trillion fiscal package of spending cuts and entitlement reforms.
+
+Some called it the “grand bargain,” but Boehner called it the “big deal.” During one bargaining session in the White House Cabinet Room, he grew frustrated about the inability to reach an agreement, as Obama sat to his left and his deputy, then-Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), was on his right.
+
+“I didn’t want this job to have a big title. I want to do big things,” Boehner told the group, according to a Democrat in the room.
+
+[The Fix: John Boehner just sacrificed his career for the good of the GOP]
+
+But as the talks grew close, Boehner balked at a demand from Obama for more than $1 trillion in tax increases.
+
+The two leaders traded blame in dueling news conferences. As often happened, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell (Ky.), stepped into the breach to reach a compromise that left conservatives griping.
+
+The pattern repeated with more negotiations and retreats later that year and, after another McConnell-brokered compromise passed in late 2012, the new Congress was sworn in. A ragtag group of Republicans moved to deny Boehner the speaker’s gavel for a second term — the first of what would become effectively three coup attempts against him.
+
+With Democrats voting for their leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), the conservatives tried to get enough Republicans to deny Boehner the majority. They had no alternative, no real plan, and it fell apart after several members prayed on whether to spare Boehner.
+
+“Gone are the days when the leaders decide what the conference is going to do,” Rep. Lynn Jenkins (Kan.), who has been a low-level member of GOP leadership, said in the spring of 2013.
+
+Boehner thought of retiring at the end of 2014, but Cantor lost in a stunning upset to a conservative who has linked arms with others against Boehner. With no heir apparent, he soldiered on through another coup attempt during a speaker vote in January and, as he said Friday, he had decided privately to retire at the end of this year.
+
+But those botched coup attempts also sowed the seeds of an idea that would haunt him: that if they ever got enough rebels together, they could force a vote to deny him a majority from the Republican side of the aisle.
+
+No speaker had ever lost his gavel under such a scenario, and his friends said that Boehner never wanted to rely on Democratic votes to keep the job. As a fight unfolded over the past two months about federal funding for Planned Parenthood, it became clear that 30 or more Republicans may have been willing to oust him if he extended government funding without a fight over the group.
+
+The institution would endure a grueling ballot, and members he liked would have to take tough votes on Boehner’s behalf. So on Friday morning, a day after ­Francis’s address to a joint meeting of Congress, in the same room where his other fights ended, Boehner turned to the “Prayer of Saint Francis” to announce his retirement.
+
+“For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life,” he said.",REAL
+4854,Black Millennials: Don’t Help Donald Trump,"OK, in the ’90s, the Clintons backed some bad things. But they backed some good things. Whatever. The ’90s aren’t what matters. The future is.
+
+With the election less than two months away, there still remains plenty of cause for concern regarding the black vote and Hillary Clinton. Clinton and the Democrats inevitably were going to win the lion’s share of the black vote, but that has never been enough. Clinton needs to win a share of the black vote similar to Barack Obama’s to ensure that the Democrats retain the White House. And black voters need to flex their electoral might to show that 2008 and 2012 were not flukes buoyed by America’s first black president. Presently, neither seem foregone conclusions, and the majority of the uncertainty resides with young black voters.
+
+As a young black voter myself I’ve heard countless reasons why black millennials may not want to vote for Clinton this year. While each argument may consist of some valid points, on average they display a myopic naïveté that undermines the progress they intend to forge and projects some of the less desirable narratives attributed to millennials.
+
+I’ve spoken to older African Americans too, and many remain perplexed by the willful disenfranchisement expressed by this younger generation. Also, this generation’s fixation on the Clintons of the 1990s—with an emphasis on their faults and not their successes—instead of the Clintons of today remains baffling to the older generation.
+
+African Americans do not condone Hillary’s “super predators” comment from 1996; nor do they embrace Bill’s tough on crime policies, which were an extension of the policing measures of the two previous presidential administrations. Yet America was far less racially progressive in the 1990s than it is today.
+
+And besides, the Clintons’ policies on racial questions didn’t begin and end with crime. They actively sought the black vote, welcomed the opinions of African Americans, and hired African Americans for administration and cabinet positions at rates that were previously unheard of. He defended and saved affirmative action at a moment when it was on death row. It’s disingenuous of people to forget all these good things.
+
+Additionally, older African Americans remember how Bill Clinton won traditionally Republican states such as Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky on his way to the White House in 1992. The Clintons dismantled Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which hinged on stoking the racial animus of white Americans to win Southern states and secure the presidency for Republicans. That’s a big part of why the GOP became hell bent on destroying the Clintons.
+
+And while they failed at that, they succeeded at defeating Al Gore, his chosen successor, and facilitating racial divisions. The parallels between unprecedented Republican attacks on Bill Clinton’s and Obama’s presidencies due to their ability to create radical electoral shifts by engaging and enfranchising African Americans should be obvious for anyone who reexamines the 1990s.
+
+Yet irrationally, some young black voters have instead chosen to fixate on the mistakes of the Clintons, and parrot the disparaging conservative rhetoric of the 1990s regarding them. And in doing so, black millennials may be contributing to creating another improbable window for a divisive Republican candidate to claim the presidency.
+
+In addition to a bizarre mis-recollection of the 1990s, these black millennials also exude a desire for perfection and a reluctance to settling. Since neither candidate is perfect in their eyes, they say they are now forced to chosen between the lesser of two evils, and they argue that there is an inherent injustice in being forced into this situation. Plenty of young white millennials who supported Bernie Sanders expressed similar sentiments.
+
+But this amounts to willful disenfranchisement. Willfully disengaging or voting for a third party candidate who more closely embodies their idea of perfection seems an adequate recourse for some young black voters instead of settling for one of the two major candidates. Yet the collective impact of this action will only result in stunting the progress black millennials hope to achieve.
+
+The increased weight of black voices in American society does not stem from a national, progressive moral epiphany or even the presence of the Obamas in the White House. Our louder voice exists now because African Americans voted at unprecedented rates for two consecutive presidential elections, and our enhanced electoral voice forced America to listen to us. In 2012, 66 percent of eligible African American voters voted, surpassing the percentage of white voters—for the first time in history—by 2 percent. In 2008, 65 percent voted.
+
+The young black voters who remain reluctant to vote for Clinton assume that our societal influence has become the new norm. They have remained focused on striving to improve American society and simultaneously oblivious to the profound threat posed by a Trump presidency for African Americans and other minorities. This is a privileged perspective that older African Americans struggle to comprehend.",REAL
+5364,DIY: Learn to Make the Most Powerful Natural Antibiotic Ever – Kills Any Infection In The Body,"As seasons change, nasty sicknesses can begin to spread. Keeping up with health during these times is of utmost importance. Making this amazingly healthy tonic could save your life. 
+
+Have you ever heard of the Master Tonic, otherwise known as Fire Cider? If you haven’t, now is a good time to learn! 
+
+Making your own Fire Cider is quick and easy, but first it is important to understand why it works so well. 
+Fire Cider is powerful because of its ingredients. It is designed to stimulate blood circulation, helping to detox the bloodstream. 
+It is a natural remedy for many health bugs including the common cold. It is naturally antiviral, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-parasitic. This tonic is said to have the ability to cure chronic conditions, stubborn diseases, and antibiotic-resistant infections. Many people swear by it! 
+Ingredients: 
+Organic raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar has many amazing properties and is a natural antiseptic and anti-fungal. It is also great for digestion, detoxifying, and much, much more. 
+
+Onions contain diuretic, antibiotic, and anti-inflammatory properties. Studies show that onions are an effective expectorant which makes them useful for infections like the common cold, flu, and persistent coughs. Onions also contain quercetin, which can help prevent heart disease by stopping cholesterol from attaching to arterial walls and blood platelets from sticking together and forming clots. 
+
+Horseradish is naturally antibacterial and anti-parasitic. It can also stimulate the immune system. Horseradish has warming properties and acts as an expectorant as well. It can also help open up sinus passages and increase circulation. 
+
+Ginger can boost your immune system, and help with chills, colds, and fever. It is also great for upset stomachs. 
+
+Garlic has the ability to destroy gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. This is important in an age where antibiotics kill all bacteria in the body, both good and bad. Garlic has the ability to only kill bad bacteria while allowing healthy bacteria to live and take care of the immune system. Garlic is also a powerful antiviral that can target colds, the flu, and upper respiratory infections. It is also an anti-fungal. 
+
+Hot Peppers can help boost your immune system and can act as a natural decongestant and have warming properties. This makes them pain-relievers.",FAKE
+7861,Live Blog: Voting Fraud Exposed Nationwide,"We Are Change 
+We will being keeping track of all election anomalies, poll rigging, blocking of the polls, and other shady voting fraud tricks throughout the day that may be used to rig the election this will be updated periodically all day so check back for new information. To make this easy to read and to inform you the voter we will break this down into sections by state in alphabetical order just like I did in August, for the Democratic primary . We really hope that we won’t have fill up this whole list and that many remain blank oh yeah and oh good friend James O`Keefe and crew are out there want to become famous? Go ahead rig the election we dare you..
+If you're committing #VoterFraud , we're going to find you. #VeritasIsEverywhere #ElectionDay pic.twitter.com/qHULNMuEQ4 
+— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) November 8, 2016 
+
+If you have a tip regarding any type of electioneering you may email me at An0nKn0wledge@protonmail.ch or Andrew@wearechange.org.
+Edward Snowden shows how easy it is to HACK into a US voting machine with a £24 memory card ALABAMA: 
+ALASKA: 
+ARIZONA: 
+ARKANSAS: 
+CALIFORNIA: 
+COLORADO: 
+CONNECTICUT: 
+DELAWARE: 
+Washington District of Columbia: 
+FLORIDA: 
+GEORGIA: 
+HAWAII: 
+IDAHO: 
+ILLINOIS: 
+INDIANA: 
+IOWA: 
+KANSAS: 
+KENTUCKY: 
+LOUISIANA: 
+MAINE: 
+MARYLAND: 
+MASSACHUSETTS: 
+MICHIGAN: 
+MINNESOTA: 
+MISSISSIPPI: 
+MISSOURI: 
+MONTANA: 
+NEBRASKA: 
+NEVADA: 
+Clinton’s Campaign Just Got Busted Impersonating Union Nurses in Nevada 
+NEW HAMPSHIRE: 
+NEW JERSEY: 
+NEW MEXICO: 
+NEW YORK: 
+Misleading NYC Election Mailer Could Be Bad News for Trump, Sanders 
+NORTH CAROLINA: 
+NORTH DAKOTA: 
+OHIO: 
+VOTER FRAUD! Before The OH Primary, Voters Noticed Something STRANGE On The Ballot… Do You See It? 
+OKLAHOMA: 
+OREGON: PENNSYLVANIA: 
+View post on imgur.com ""My name is Brittany Foreman… and today I witnessed Voter Fraud."" #VoterFraud ILLEGAL. Please SHARE pic.twitter.com/5Plk8FszuT 
+— Philly GOP (@PhillyGOP) November 8, 2016 
+In Philadelphia tailing a pastor's bus that's bussing people to the polls. #VeritasIsEverywhere & we will catch your #VoterFraud . @PhillyGOP pic.twitter.com/FY9UPOQolp 
+— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) November 8, 2016 
+
+Puerto Rico: 
+RHODE ISLAND: 
+SOUTH CAROLINA: 
+SOUTH DAKOTA: 
+TENNESSEE: 
+TEXAS: 
+UTAH: 
+VERMONT: 
+VIRGINIA: 
+Virgin Islands: 
+WASHINGTON: 
+WEST VIRGINIA: 
+WISCONSIN: 
+WYOMING: 
+ 
+The post Live Blog: Voting Fraud Exposed Nationwide appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+2510,The myth of the ‘anchor baby’ deportation defense,"Donald Trump said it; Jeb Bush said it, too.
+
+Frankly, a whole range of people have used the term ""anchor baby"" this week in public discussions about Trump's immigration-related policy ideas -- ideas that include an end to the nearly 150-year-old practice of granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
+
+It's the former, known as ""birthright citizenship,"" which is delineated in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. And as all sorts of public figures have discussed the future of the 14th Amendment this week, the more colloquial -- many say pejorative -- term ""anchor baby"" has come up over and over again.
+
+But the anchor baby, while potent politically, is a largely mythical idea.
+
+Here's the basic concept: People, namely women, come to the United States illegally and give birth to children, generally for the specific purpose of bolstering legal attempts of the child's parents remain in the United States or even become citizens themselves.
+
+Looser definitions suggest ""anchor babies"" can simply be intended to help illegal-immigrant parents access taxpayer-financed public education and/or social services through their citizen children -- another political hot button, to be sure. (Even here, the law limits those benefits to the children themselves.)
+
+But usually the debate has been about the residency of the parents, who after all are supposed to be using the child as their ""anchor.""
+
+This is the definition that has little legal underpinning. For illegal immigrant parents, being the parent of a U.S. citizen child almost never forms the core of a successful defense in an immigration court. In short, if the undocumented parent of a U.S.-born child is caught in the United States, he or she legally faces the very same risk of deportation as any other immigrant.
+
+The only thing that a so-called anchor baby can do to assist either of their undocumented parents involves such a long game that it's not a practical immigration strategy, said Greg Chen, an immigration law expert and director of The American Immigration Lawyers Association, a trade group that also advocates for immigrant-friendly reforms. That long game is this: If and when a U.S. citizen reaches the age of 21, he or she can then apply for a parent to obtain a visa and green card and eventually enter the United States legally.
+
+In order to apply for such an option, the parent of a so-called anchor baby would need to do all of the following.
+
+If a person has lived in the United States unlawfully for a period of more than 180 days but less than one year, there is an automatic three-year bar on that person ever reentering the United States -- and that's before any wait time for a visa. So that's a minimum of 21 years for the child to mature, plus the three-year wait.
+
+And, for the vast majority of these parents, a longer wait also applies. If a person has lived in the United States illegally for a year or more, there is a 10-year ban on that person reentering the United States. So, in that case, there would be the 21-year wait for the child to mature to adulthood, plus the 10-year wait.
+
+All told, the parents of the so-called anchor baby face a 24-to-31-year wait to even enter the United States, much less obtain a visa and green card or become a citizen.
+
+Want proof? See Sections 212(a)(9)(i) and 212 (a)(9)(ii) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) -- or spend an afternoon in your nearest, severely backlogged immigration court.
+
+[Immigration Court backlog grows to more than 450,000 cases]
+
+Immigration courts routinely reject claims that an undocumented parent must remain in the United States to care for a U.S. citizen child. The main but rare legal exceptions are for children who are so seriously ill or profoundly disabled that one parent must care for them full-time, or for a child in need of medical care unavailable in their parents' home country.
+
+These parents are given something called ""humanitarian parole,"" Chen explained. And this is very rarely applied to people already living in the United States illegally. It is more often given to the parents of, say, an Afghan war burn victim who want to accompany their child to the United States for medical care. And, even then, humanitarian parole is generally granted for limited period of time.
+
+Alternatively, these parents can apply for something even more rare: an extreme hardship exception, according to Deborah Anker, a clinical professor of law and director of the Harvard University Law School’s immigration and refugee clinical program. Very rarely they can apply for a waiver that may allow them to reenter the United States sooner, Anker said. But if that request is denied, there is no form of appeal available. Decisions are final.
+
+Yes, it is true that some undocumented immigrants come to the United States and have children with or perhaps even because of the mistaken belief that this will strengthen a legal bid to remain in the United States. Mistaken beliefs have spurred previous surges in illegal immigration -- including last year's.
+
+And it is true that some people -- such as breast-feeding mothers, children brought to the United States illegally as children and others -- have benefited from the immigration system equivalent of proprietorial discretion, known as ""deferred action.""
+
+But with the exception of an Obama administration program known as DACA (limited to an estimated 1.2 million young adults brought to the United States illegally as children) and a second program currently blocked by a federal court that would have granted deferred action to another 300,000 people (mostly the parents of those eligible for DACA), deferred actions typically come with a short and limited timeline. They also do not include a pathway to a visa or legal work in the United States. And these programs did not exist when the concept of an ""anchor baby"" was politically popularized, so it becomes harder to accept the idea that having an ""anchor baby"" was the express goal of many people immigrating illegally.
+
+It's also important to note that, as of August 2014, only about 550,000 DACA applications had been approved, according to a Pew research Center analysis of federal data. And even these applicants must wait until their 21st birthday to begin the lengthy process described above to attempt to help an undocumented parent. And ""attempt"" is the key word here.
+
+And if you're still skeptical, here's the real proof that having a baby in the United States does little to help an undocumented parent remain in the United States, there's this:
+
+In 2011, there were at least 5,000 children in state custody or foster care because an undocumented parent or parents has been deported, according to a study released by the Applied Research Center, a New York-based think tank that focuses on racial and social justice issues. Some estimates put that figure even higher today. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent mandatory reports to the Senate that among other things revealed that during 2013, the agency deported 72,410 people who told federal authorities they have one or more U.S. citizen children.
+
+Each of these children and their parents certainly know the ""anchor baby"" is not real.",REAL
+1936,Ranking the 2016 Republican field,"A prominent Republican consultant — who isn’t working for any of the 2016 presidential candidates and has been right more times than I can count — said something that shocked me when we had lunch recently. He said that Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) had about the same odds of becoming the Republican presidential nominee as former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
+
+Jaw-dropper, right? After all, the conventional wisdom is that Bush, the son and brother of presidents, is the Republican standard-bearer, while Cruz, a conservative’s conservative, is a factor, sure, but not someone who could actually win the nomination.
+
+How, I asked the consultant, could he say such a thing? He explained it this way.
+
+Think of the Republican field as a series of lanes. In this race, there are four of them: establishment, tea party, social conservative and libertarian. The four lanes are not of equal size: Establishment is the biggest, followed by tea party, social conservative and then libertarian.
+
+Obviously, the fight for the top spot in the establishment lane is crowded, with Bush and possibly Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker leading at the moment. Ditto the social-conservative lane, with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson and Rick Santorum pushing hard there. The libertarian lane is all Sen. Rand Paul’s, but, as I noted above, it’s still not that big.
+
+This leaves the tea party lane, which is both relatively large and entirely Cruz’s. While Paul looked as though he might try to fight Cruz for supremacy in that lane at one time, it’s clear from his recent moves that the senator from Kentucky is trying to become a player in a bunch of lanes, including social conservative and establishment. So, Cruz is, without question, the dominant figure in the tea party lane.
+
+What that means — particularly in the early stages of the primary process in places such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — is that he will probably be able to win, place or show repeatedly, racking up enough strong-ish performances to keep going even as the establishment and social-conservative lanes thin out. (Cruz’s ability to raise money, which remains a question, is less important for him than it is for other candidates — especially those in the establishment lane. His people are going to be for him no matter how much — or little — communicating he does with them.)
+
+The trick for Cruz, the consultant said, is to hang around long enough to be the preeminent figure not only in the tea party lane but also in the social-conservative lane. (Cruz is decidedly conservative on social issues and talks regularly on the campaign trail about his faith. ) The complicating figure in that consolidation effort is Huckabee, who is (a) likely to run, (b) an ordained Southern Baptist minister and (c) likely to be able to stay in the race for an extended period because of the number of early Southern primaries.
+
+But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Cruz is able to outlast Huckabee (as well as Carson and Santorum). If you combine the tea party and social-conservative lanes, that’s a pretty wide berth for any candidate hoping to be the GOP nominee. Is it as wide as a consolidated establishment lane behind Bush or Walker or Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.)? No one knows just yet, but it’s probably pretty close.
+
+So watch Cruz. The combination of his running room as the race’s one true tea party candidate, his debating and oratorical skills, and his willingness to always, on every issue, stake out the most conservative position make him a real threat.
+
+The 10 candidates with the best chance of being the Republican candidate in 2016 are ranked below. The No. 1 candidate has the best shot as of today.
+
+10. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. Pence hasn’t ruled out a run, though he’s probably got to choose between running for president and reelection in 2016. One recent development: Pence expanded Medicaid in Indiana after negotiating some concessions from the Obama administration — though we’re not sure whether this would help or hurt him in 2016.
+
+9. Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor is giving every indication he is running. If he does, he will be a factor because of his strong following among social conservatives. An NBC-Marist poll released Sunday showed him on top of the field in Iowa.
+
+8. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Jindal is the résumé candidate in the GOP field. He’s shown us little besides that, though, apart from occasionally tossing some red meat to the conservative base. The latest example: not backing down from his comments on “no-go zones” for non-Muslims in Europe.
+
+6. (tie) Cruz. See above. Remember that although he is roundly derided by his colleagues — Democrats and Republicans — in the Senate, he may be closer to how the GOP base feels on most issues than anyone else running.
+
+6. (tie) Ohio Gov. John Kasich. After lying dormant for a few months after his convincing 2014 reelection victory, Kasich will spend two days this week in South Carolina. That trip will spark some buzz about whether he will run, but Kasich may have waited too long — Walker, another Midwestern governor from a swing state, is on the rise.
+
+5. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Increasingly, it’s looking as if Christie missed his window for running for president in 2012. A new Rutgers-Eagleton poll shows that his favorable rating in New Jersey has dropped to 37 percent — after topping out at nearly 70 percent. And it’s not just his home state. Polls of likely GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire show that he is the most unliked Republican not named Donald Trump.
+
+4. Paul. Speaking of people whose stock is dropping, the senator’s vaccine comments continue to baffle us — especially because he continues to play the victim card. Yes, there is a segment of the GOP that probably likes the idea that Paul is taking on the “liberal media.” But there’s also a much bigger portion of the party that will look at his vaccine flap and see Ron Paul 2.0.
+
+3. Rubio. Yes, his path to the nomination is complicated by Bush’s all-but-announced candidacy. But if Republican voters are looking for a fresh face who could, theoretically, expand the party’s appeal, then Rubio could be the dark horse in the race.
+
+2. Walker. The Wisconsin governor is clearly ascendant right now, thanks in large part to his strong speech at an Iowa confab a few weekends ago. His ham-handed handling of an evolution question, however, and his decision not to answer questions in London during a trade mission are not good signs.
+
+1. Bush. The former Florida governor remains the top dog , and he got a big break when Mitt Romney opted not to run. Bush probably would have remained No. 1 even if Romney had got in, but the 2012 nominee’s exit makes Bush the obvious choice for GOP establishment types — read: big donors — to rally around.",REAL
+887,A shutout for Donald Trump - The Boston Globe,"Say what you will about Donald Trump, but the man is winner. Trump didn’t just wallop his opponents Tuesday — he crushed them. Up 41 percent in Delaware, 40 percent in Rhode Island, 37 percent in Pennsylvania, 33 percent in Maryland, 30 percent in Connecticut, he’s estimated to have won 110 delegates, versus five for Kasich and three for Cruz.
+
+If the race for the GOP nomination were a Little League game, the mercy rule would be imposed.
+
+Here’s where we stand today. Ted Cruz is mathematically eliminated from winning the Republican nomination before the convention in Cleveland. John Kasich has now won a single state — Ohio — where he is governor. If ever there were a series of states that would at least theoretically be fertile territory for him, it would be the Northeast, home of the last vestiges of Republican moderates. Yet, he didn’t crack 30 percent anywhere. Republicans can talk all they want about Never Trump and trying to stop him at the RNC in Cleveland. They can talk about changing the rules and holding out hope that a white knight candidate will emerge. It isn’t going to happen. Either Trump is the nominee or he’ll burn the whole thing to the ground. If you’re a gambler, go all in on the former.
+
+It is worth stepping back, however, and noting that Trump’s hammerlock over the party — and his ascendancy within the GOP — is astounding. He’s a political amateur who never held elected office; he’s a xenophobe, a bully, and a misogynist and he has run directly against the leadership of the party he hopes to lead. Yet, today he stands on the cusp of winning the nomination of the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. I know we’ve all become inured to Trump’s insults, his know-nothingness, and his crudeness, but it can’t be said enough — truly we are living in a political moment unlike anything that any of us has seen before.
+
+Here’s what might be even more amazing: Trump’s position as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party is not the most remarkable political event this year. Rather, it’s that the Democratic Party is poised to nominate the first woman to be a major party candidate for president. Somehow this constantly seems to be forgotten; and whether you like Hillary Clinton or despise her, that America is poised to nominate a woman for president is a big deal.
+
+Tuesday night, Clinton racked up four more primary wins, including the delegate-rich states of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Only in Rhode Island did Bernie Sanders thwart her. Early on in the evening, before all the races had been called, he gave a “victory” speech in West Virginia that not only left unmentioned the evening’s results, but plowed forward with confidence about the road ahead. It’s a fitting metaphor for the Sanders campaign, which increasingly seems to operate in a realm completely divorced from reality. Sanders cannot and will not win the Democratic nomination. Period.
+
+Indeed, in her victory speech, Clinton — as she has increasingly done — simply ignored Sanders. Instead she aimed her daggers at her real target, Donald Trump. The Democratic race will continue, but for all intents and purposes, it is over. Clinton can now begin her pivot to the general election, and Sanders can play out the string.
+
+What we now with some certainty is that we’re only a few months away from an historic, unprecedented presidential campaign — and no matter which candidate wins on Election Day, history will be made.",REAL
+2971,Ex-military intel officer says White House delaying announcement of Bergdahl desertion charge,"A former military intelligence officer claimed Tuesday that the White House was delaying the announcement of its decision to file desertion charges against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was released by Taliban-aligned militants last year in exchange for five Guantanamo prisoners.
+
+In defending claims he originally made Monday on ""The O'Reilly Factor"" that Bergdahl would be charged, retired Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Bill O'Reilly that there was ""no doubt"" the White House was dragging out its decision.
+
+His original accusation had resulted in a strong denial from the Pentagon earlier in the day.
+
+""They said there's no time limit on this decision. (Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John) Kirby even said there's no pressure ... Of course, the moment you say that, there's pressure,"" said Shaffer, who works at the London Center for Policy Research. ""What they didn't say was more compelling than their denial.""
+
+Shaffer, who believes the White House's alleged decision to delay its announcement is politically motivated, added that he stands by ""all of those facts,"" referring to his report on Monday that Bergdahl's lawyer has been given a statement of charges.
+
+Kirby, meanwhile, on Wednesday stood by his claim that no charges have been filed. Asked whether there was political pressure to delay the charges, he said, ""that is the most ludicrous claim I've heard in the last few days.""
+
+Maj. Gen. Ronald F. Lewis, the Army's chief of public affairs, put out a statement Tuesday afternoon calling the reports, including a similar one by NBC News, ""patently false.""
+
+""To be clear there have been no actions or decisions on the Sgt. Bergdahl investigation,"" he said. ""The investigation is still with the commanding general of U.S. Army Forces Command who will determine appropriate action -- which ranges from no further action to convening a court martial.""
+
+Kirby earlier said Bergdahl ""has not been charged,"" and no charges have been referred. ""No decision has been made with respect to the case of Sgt. Bergdahl, none,"" he said. ""And there is no timeline to make that decision."" He said he would not ""speculate"" about what might happen in the future.
+
+Eugene Fidell, Bergdahl's lawyer, did not comment when reached by Fox News earlier Tuesday.
+
+Shaffer said Monday that Bergdahl's attorney has been given a ""charge sheet"" outlining the section of the military justice code Bergdahl allegedly violated.
+
+""As a corporate entity, the Army has decided that they want to pursue Bergdahl for this violation,"" Shaffer said.
+
+Shaffer said there's a ""huge battle"" going on inside the Obama administration, as some try to ""suppress"" this development. ""This is shaping up to be a titanic struggle behind the scenes,"" he said.
+
+Shaffer said the Army ""wants to do the right thing,"" but the White House ""wants this to go away.""
+
+He said: ""The White House, because of the political narrative, President Obama cozying up to the parents and because of he, President Obama, releasing the five Taliban ... The narrative is what the White House does not want to have come out.""
+
+Bergdahl was held for five years before his release was secured in 2014.
+
+But while the president joined with Bergdahl's parents in the Rose Garden at the time in celebrating his return home, the prisoner swap swiftly became a matter of severe controversy. Fellow soldiers accused Bergdahl of deserting his post on a base in Afghanistan in 2009. And the trade itself, of his freedom for five Guantanamo prisoners, drew criticism in Congress from lawmakers who said it sent a troubling signal.
+
+On Monday, former diplomat Richard Grenell claimed the administration has ""sent the message"" that the U.S. will negotiate on such matters. He cited an alleged offer, made around the same time as Bergdahl's release, by the Qatari government to trade two Americans held in Qatar for an Al Qaeda agent held in a U.S. federal prison. The Obama administration denies there was any deal. Those prisoners were ultimately released over the past two months.",REAL
+260,"Under speaker pressure, signs pointing to a reluctant Paul Ryan","As soon as Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) shocked his fellow Republicans by withdrawing from the race for House speaker, Paul Ryan knew what was coming.
+
+“I will not be a candidate,” the Wisconsin Republican said in a release issued less than 20 minutes after McCarthy’s stunning Thursday announcement, in an immediate bid to cut off any pressure for him to do a job he has repeatedly said he does not want.
+
+But this time, it didn’t take. By mid-afternoon, outgoing speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) had spoken to Ryan at least twice, trying to convince the reluctant congressman that he was the only man who could save House Republicans from their self-created chaos.
+
+By day’s end, after hunkering down for two hours in his ceremonial office a few steps from the House floor, after listening to pleas from friends to take the reins of the bitterly divided Republican caucus, he emerged, declining to explicitly state his plans.
+
+“I’ve got no news for you guys,” Ryan told reporters, exiting the Capitol. “I’ve got nothing to add right now. . . . This is not the time or place, guys.”
+
+Boehner and several other prominent Republicans are turning to their party’s 2012 vice-presidential nominee out of desperation, believing that he is the only member of the House with the stature to be speaker. Two other members, Reps. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), have announced their candidacies, but they are widely seen as too inexperienced or underwhelming to handle the job.
+
+Although Ryan has the standing and experience — at 45, he has already been in office 17 years — it is not clear that he is suited to the role, either. He has never held an elected leadership position, never had to spend hours listening to every complaint possible from rank-and-file lawmakers. A self-styled policy wonk, Ryan prefers to spend time in a committee room cobbling together legislation than working the fundraising circuit in New York and Florida — a modern-day requirement of any House speaker.
+
+Even if Ryan does win the job, some supporters question whether the most respected member of the House Republican Conference would be able to tame the divisions to push a unified agenda: The same 30 to 40 conservatives who have helped usher Boehner toward the door, and who appeared ready to deny McCarthy the job, plan to be just as hard on whoever the next speaker is when it comes to showdowns with President Obama and Democrats.
+
+“He’s still going to have to deal with the same dynamic,” said Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), a leader of the small moderate wing and a backer of Ryan’s ascension. “That may be part of the reason why he’s denying this so far — he knows the dynamic.”
+
+Yet by 6:15 p.m. Thursday, as McCarthy increased the pressure on Ryan to run for the job and the Capitol press corps camped outside his office, Ryan’s spokesman resorted to Twitter.
+
+But everything has changed, according to his colleagues.
+
+As they voted on the House floor late Thursday, Ryan was besieged by his GOP colleagues. As the lawmakers huddled, Ryan aides canceled his fundraising and political events for the next
+
+48 hours, a move interpreted by his friends as a signal that he had gone from a hard “no” to undecided after speaking with Boehner.
+
+His party’s elder statesmen, long enamored with Ryan’s policy inclinations since his days as a disciple of Jack Kemp, said he needed to answer the call. But that doesn’t mean the door is shut.
+
+“Knowing him, if it becomes clear to him, as it is to so many others, that he’s first among peers, he may do it,” William J. Bennett, an education secretary in the Reagan administration and a close friend of Ryan, said in an interview Thursday.
+
+The situation is more dire than the one Ryan confronted two weeks ago when Boehner, under intense pressure from the right flank, shocked the House Republican Conference by announcing his plan to resign Oct. 30, setting
+
+Oct. 29 as the original date for a full vote of the House on his successor.
+
+Walking out of that Sept. 25 meeting, Ryan said then — and has consistently repeated — that he did not want the job and that it would be a terrible one for a man with three school-age children living in Janesville, Wis., 75 miles southwest of Milwaukee.
+
+His long game, according to those close to him, is not rising up in the House. He has been touted as a potential treasury secretary in a GOP administration. He declined to run for president this time, but he still has a couple of decades ahead of him.
+
+That future could crumble if he listens to his colleagues. Not since Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) left as speaker in 1986 has anyone retired from that job in good standing. Today’s House is more rife with pitfalls than it was even a decade ago.
+
+Many of his colleagues, such Rep. Bill Flores (R-Tex.), head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, were calling on him Thursday to gamble his future to meet the present need.
+
+“I would say, unequivocally, if I could choose the perfect person to be speaker, today, for this conference, it would be Paul Ryan,” Flores said.
+
+Karoun Demirjian, Kelsey Snell and David Weigel contributed to this report.",REAL
+7454,Donald Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star destroyed by vandals,"Print 
+Donald Trump’s star took a beating Wednesday morning — literally. 
+The reality TV host’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star was destroyed by a vandal rendering the fixture completely unreadable, according to Deadline Hollywood . 
+The vandal was dressed in a city construction worker, taking his sledgehammer to the five-point brass star at approximately 5:45 am. 
+The man reportedly said he wanted to remove the souvenir so that it could be auctioned off, with the proceeds set to go toward helping the women who have come forward in recent weeks to accuse Trump of sexual assault. 
+The allegations all came out after a 2005 recording surfaced of Trump claiming that his “star” status allows him to grope and kiss women whenever he wants. 
+While this is the first time a star has been completely defaced, Trump’s has been vandalized at least twice since he announced his presidential run a year and a half ago.",FAKE
+3521,Beyond Syria and Iraq: ISIS is losing ground around the world,"Libyan fighters are celebrating a major victory on Tuesday: They've driven ISIS out of parts of Benghazi, eastern Libya's largest city, building on advances in and around the city on Sunday.
+
+ISIS isn't just losing in Benghazi. In its home base in Syria and Iraq, it's lost up to 30 percent of its territory from its peak in August 2014. And it's tried expanding abroad, officially declaring a wilayat — which literally means ""province"" and refers to ISIS's foreign franchises — in roughly a dozen countries.
+
+These ISIS franchises showed some initial successes, for example in Libya, but since mid-2015 they have been struggling. Many of ISIS's wilayat have stopped growing and begun shrinking. Some ISIS affiliates have been wiped out altogether.
+
+""The Islamic State has encountered one serious obstacle after another as it has tried to expand its presence beyond Syria and Iraq,"" Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and CEO of the consulting firm Valens Global, writes with threat analyst Nathaniel Barr in War on the Rocks on Tuesday. ""These stumbles have gone largely unnoticed by the international media.""
+
+Gartenstein-Ross and Barr examined seven ISIS expansion attempts and found that each had serious problems. In every case, the ISIS franchise they looked at has either suffered a major battlefield defeat, had members targeted and killed in significant numbers by rival jihadist groups, or was defeated outright.
+
+""Overall, [ISIS] is having significant troubles expanding. Joining ISIL can be a fatal decision,"" Gartenstein-Ross told me, using another name for ISIS.
+
+The first example he pointed to was a group called the Islamic Movement in Uzbekistan (IMU). IMU is a decades-old jihadist group with ties to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In August, it formally pledged itself to ISIS, working with the already-established Afghanistan-based ISIS franchise.
+
+Over the course of the next several months, the Taliban, once IMU's ally, sought out and killed IMU fighters in a targeted campaign aimed at destroying the group. This culminated in a November purge, wherein the Taliban killed 100 IMU fighters and allegedly captured its leader, wiping out the group entirely.
+
+""What America and its agents could not do in 14 years, the Taliban did in 24 hours,"" one IMU supporter tweeted at the time.
+
+ISIS's troubles in Algeria are, if anything, more dramatic. The group officially recognized a wilayat there, largely made up of former al-Qaeda fighters, in 2014. In October 2014, ISIS's Algerian branch captured a French mountain climber and beheaded him on tape.
+
+The beheading attracted the attention of Algerian security forces, which shortly thereafter killed the group's leader. Later, in May 2015, Algerian forces killed five ISIS commanders and the overwhelming majority of its ground fighters in two days of fighting. Today, Gartenstein-Ross says, ISIS in Algeria is a ""paper wilayat,"" with only six or seven fighters to its name.
+
+ISIS's Yemen wilayat is in even worse shape.
+
+You'd think Yemen would be the perfect opportunity for ISIS: It has no functional government and is in the midst of a civil war with major sectarian overtones. But the group has been riven by public infighting; Gartenstein-Ross and Barr documented roughly 100 defections in the past several months — out of a force estimated to be at most 1,000, and possibly much less.
+
+""This outfit in Yemen is not very strong,"" Will McCants, director of the Project on US Relations With the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution, tells me. ""They're, at the moment, a pretty bit player in that conflict.""
+
+Even relatively powerful ISIS franchises are having problems. The Libya branch lost its hold on the Libyan city of Derna in December, pushed out by a coalition of rival militant groups. Today, it controls only one major population center — the town of Sirte — and about 173 miles of coastal territory.
+
+""In Libya, where they're strongest, they only control a thin strip along the coast,"" McCants says. ""It's not nothing, but it's not nearly as impressive as what they control in Syrian and Iraq.""
+
+These cases, according to Gartenstein-Ross and Barr, are representative of ISIS's struggles to expand beyond Iraq and Syria.
+
+""The group has stumbled or even fallen flat in almost every country where it has tried to establish a new wilayat,"" Gartenstein-Ross and Barr write. ""The group’s failures as it tries to expand beyond Syria and Iraq could cast doubt on its entire global caliphate project.""
+
+ISIS's struggles to expand reveal some major weaknesses inherent in the group's ""DNA,"" as Gartenstein-Ross puts it, that limit its efforts to expand.
+
+First, the group makes enemies out of other jihadist groups. Its ideological and strategic model depends on its claim to be the prophesied Islamic caliphate and its ability to prove that claim by holding territory. Other militant groups, in ISIS's mind, must submit to ISIS and hand over their territory — or be destroyed.
+
+""That's a constant — they don't play well [with others],"" McCants says. This leads to conflict with other jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which perceive ISIS as a threat and so move to crush new franchises as they're forming.
+
+This is particularly problematic for ISIS because it thrives most in civil wars with sectarian elements — places where other jihadist groups already operate.
+
+""Derna was always gonna be a tough nut to crack, because that's jihadist central in Libya,"" McCants says. ""AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] has long roots in Yemen, and has been more successful in exploiting the chaos.""
+
+Second, ISIS's showiness — the penchant for ghoulish murders and slick social media — can attract the attention of enemies before ISIS is really ready to take them on.
+
+""That's one of the things that got them into trouble in Algeria,"" Gartenstein-Ross says. ""The ostentatious beheading of [the French mountain climber] drew counterinsurgent resources down on them in a way that they weren't ready for.""
+
+Finally, ISIS is, weirdly enough, too top-down and bureaucratic. It isn't very good at selecting leaders who work well with locals or mediating internal, local disputes in its franchises.
+
+""Despite their rebellious nature, they're a very rigid organization internally,"" Gartenstein-Ross explains. ""In Yemen, the central leadership ended up contributing to that branch falling apart under the weight of a leader that the ISIL members don't agree with.""
+
+Despite ISIS's defeats in the Libyan cities of Benghazi and Derna, the group is still deeply entrenched in Sirte — and getting a number of new recruits. Its Egypt branch has withstood repeated assaults from the Egyptian government and has managed to pull off a number of high-profile terrorist attacks. And that's to say nothing of Boko Haram, which pledged itself to ISIS last year and is now recognized as Wilayat Nigeria.
+
+""Around January 2015, when I finished the first draft of [my ISIS] book, it was laughable,"" McCants says of the franchises. ""Then when I had to go back and revise four months later, I had to completely change the section. In that short time, they had made such a rapid advance. They've gotten stronger since then.""
+
+So the point is not to dismiss the franchises entirely. Rather, it's to recognize that they are not, as is often portrayed in the media, a sign of ISIS sweeping across the globe. It's an attempt by a terrorist group with very serious problems to try to create some breathing room outside of its troubled core holdings.
+
+ISIS thrives on a narrative of victory. Now that the group's defeats in Iraq and Syria are too numerous and prominent for anyone to reasonably deny, the group has increasingly turned to the franchises to continue selling its narrative of constant territorial growth.
+
+""They have this narrative of momentum; it's clearly very important to drawing people to the group, drawing organizations to ISIS,"" Gartenstein-Ross says. ""This is an area of great vulnerability if [the truth] were widely known.""
+
+ISIS's affiliates help ""maintain the fiction that this is an empire on the march,"" McCants says.
+
+No matter how you judge the success of the franchises — and here, McCants is less optimistic than Gartenstein-Ross — both agree that any victories abroad don't come close to outweighing the losses the group has taken in Iraq and Syria.",REAL
+5097,Clinton’s challenge will be to balance a hopeful tone with an argument for change,"After Donald Trump presented a dark picture of the country at his convention in Cleveland last week, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats plan to project a more optimistic and inclusive vision of the future when they convene here starting Monday.
+
+But the challenge for Clinton and her newly minted running mate, Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (Va.), will be to avoid becoming cheerleaders for the status quo and instead infuse that hopeful tone into an argument for change that could galvanize a frustrated and divided electorate.
+
+Democrats promise four nights of speeches and entertainment that will highlight the core theme of Clinton’s campaign: “Stronger together.” The program will alternate among political heavyweights led by President Obama and former president Bill Clinton, celebrities such as Katy Perry and Lena Dunham, and everyday Americans whose aim will be to make Clinton appear more appealing and approachable.
+
+Clinton’s advisers are confident that the Philadelphia festivities will present a far more united Democratic Party than Republicans were able to display at their convention, which was repeatedly marred by outbursts of dissent and division.
+
+Central to that mission is the Monday night speech by Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who is charged with trying to rally his fervent supporters behind Clinton’s banner after a bruising primary battle, although there is lingering resistance to Clinton among some of his loyalists.
+
+The harsh tone of Trump’s convention — symbolized by the anti-Clinton chants of “Lock her up!” — gives the Democratic nominee-in-waiting and her allies an opportunity to expand her appeal to disaffected voters who are hungry for change but perhaps reluctant to embrace Trump and the brand of politics he enunciated in Cleveland. At the same time, the Democrats similarly risk overreach in their denunciations of Trump.
+
+Another danger is that if protests outside the arena turn violent, it could mar the party’s effort to provide a united and relatively peaceful contrast to the Republican event.
+
+“The Republicans painted a black canvas with maybe a little stripe of red, which would be Donald Trump’s tie,” Democratic pollster Peter Hart said. “Unexpectedly, the Democrats end up with a white canvas and a chance to paint it in any direction that they wish.”
+
+[In his most important speech ever, Donald Trump echoes Richard Nixon]
+
+All year, Clinton has struggled to find a message that both energizes the Democratic faithful and reaches to a different part of the general electorate disenchanted with politics as usual. This will be her challenge on Thursday night, when she becomes the first woman to accept the presidential nomination of a major party.
+
+“If she is so concerned about the progressive revolt that days one, two, three and four [of the convention] are saying, ‘I’m Bernie Sanders Lite with pantsuits,’ then this whole group turned off by Trump has nowhere to go,” said Henry Olsen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
+
+But Housing Secretary Julián Castro, who was in the competition to become Clinton’s running mate, noted the importance of energizing the coalition that helped Obama win two elections.
+
+“We need an infusion of motivation and energy to remind folks that we can’t take this election for granted,” he said. “The nature of modern presidential elections, given the country’s partisanship, is that these are close elections. It’s probably not going to be a blowout, and people need to understand how important their individual vote is.”
+
+Four days of programming at the Wells Fargo Center will showcase the Democratic Party’s diversity and progressivism, designed to help as many voters as possible identify with Clinton and the rest of the ticket. The speakers will be white, black, Latino and Asian; Christian, Jewish and Muslim; old and young; gay and straight; male and female. There is expected to be a heavy focus on issues such as immigration, gay rights and gun control.
+
+Having watched the Republicans fight among themselves in Cleveland, Democrats will arrive in Philadelphia full of confidence. But some in the party suggest that, like much about Trump over the past year, what looks to be a problem for him does not always become one.
+
+“We need to be agnostic on just how negative its consequences will be or indeed whether they’ll be negative at all,” said William Galston, domestic policy adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
+
+Galston added, “The idea that Donald Trump’s convention speech allows Democrats to put any product they want on the shelf and expect the consumers to buy it is an optimistic proposition that I can’t embrace, and I hope the Clinton campaign won’t either.”
+
+Democratic leaders have no doubt that their convention will contrast sharply with that of the Republicans.
+
+“We just saw four days of some of the angriest people possibly in the United States of America — chaos, vitriol, confusion, plagiarism, mismanagement of a convention the likes of which we’ve not seen in either party in modern times,” said former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter (D).
+
+Clinton enters her convention with a majority of Americans questioning her honesty. She has an opportunity to speak to a huge audience beyond the delegates assembled at the Wells Fargo Center, but many of those voters will be looking on skeptically.
+
+Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, noted that the underlying mood in the country puts Clinton at some risk as she campaigns to extend the Democrats’ hold on the White House to a third consecutive term.
+
+“What Clinton cannot do is get herself in the position of defending the status quo, and that’s going to be a challenge, because she is the essence of the status quo,” Ayres said. “If she lets this [election] get defined as change versus status quo, where Trump’s change and she is not, that’s one way she can lose this thing.”
+
+Trump’s coalition potentially cuts across traditional party lines, and as a political outsider, he has shown a particular ability to attract support from what he called “forgotten” Americans, many of them white and working class. “People who work hard but no longer have a voice: I am your voice,” Trump said in Cleveland.
+
+[Donald Trump positions himself as the voice for ‘the forgotten’]
+
+Olsen suggested that Clinton could peel away some of that support with the right message aimed at the right segment of Trump’s base — such as white, working-class women. He said Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, set him up to talk to these women with her introductory speech but that the candidate failed to do so.
+
+On Friday in Tampa, Clinton previewed how she would rebut Trump’s declarations, including his suggestion that he alone could fix what ails the country. “I can’t really imagine him on a white horse,” she quipped.
+
+Clinton said: “We will offer a very different vision. It’s about building bridges, not walls, between people. It’s about making the economy work for everyone, not just those at the top. It’s about embracing our diversity that does make our country great.”
+
+The convention’s nightly themes focus on unity. Opening night, Monday, will be “United together: Putting families first” and feature addresses by first lady Michelle Obama and Sanders, as well as Astrid Silva from Nevada, a “dreamer” brought to the United States as a child by parents who are illegal immigrants.
+
+Tuesday’s theme is “A lifetime of fighting for children and families” and will be headlined by Bill Clinton and “the mothers of the movement,” whose sons and daughters were killed in police and other shootings.
+
+Wednesday night, “Working together,” will star Kaine, President Obama and Vice President Biden. Many Democrats expect that Obama will reprise the role Bill Clinton played at the 2012 convention in Charlotte by delivering not only a full-throated endorsement of onetime rival Hillary Clinton, but also a point-by-point defense of his record and the economic gains under Democratic leadership.
+
+On Friday, Obama gave a taste of how he would respond to Trump’s dark portrayal of the state of the country. “This idea that America is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn’t really jibe with the experience of most people,” he said. “I hope people, the next morning, walked outside, and birds were chirping, and the sun was out.”
+
+The convention will reach its crescendo on Thursday night with the theme “Stronger together,” when Clinton will give her acceptance speech and be introduced by her daughter, Chelsea.
+
+Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin said: “This convention will crystallize the fight that she’s already fought and what she will do going forward for American families as president. Hillary Clinton and Democrats will effectively make the case over these four days for an America that’s at its best when we work together to solve our problems.”
+
+Democrats thought the Republican convention focused too much on Trump’s personality and offered generalities but few policy proposals to back them up — especially on the economy and jobs.
+
+In Philadelphia, Democrats are expected to remind voters that the economy was roaring during Bill Clinton’s presidency and has improved considerably during Obama’s. Yet they also will acknowledge that there is more to do.
+
+“There is an opening for someone who can create some hope that she knows how to make things better with some specific ideas,” said Ayres, the Republican pollster.
+
+Striking the right tone on the state of the country, and the proper balance between a celebration of the Democratic base and an appeal for broader unity, remain the biggest tests for Clinton.
+
+“I don’t think the American public desires to have ‘Happy days are here again,’ ” Democratic pollster Hart said. “The ability to condense the Clinton message into something which is both hopeful and realistic would make a huge difference.”",REAL
+10031,"Don’t Root, Root, Root for the Racist, Red-Face Team from Cleveland","Don’t Root, Root, Root for the Racist, Red-Face Team from Cleveland Paul Thornton, Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2016 
+How I wish it were the Dodgers who took the field Tuesday night in Cleveland. Yes, we’re all sad in Los Angeles that our team is now one year closer to celebrating the 30th anniversary of its last World Series appearance, but this goes beyond provincialism and wounded civil pride. 
+The Dodgers deserved the chance to humiliate a Cleveland baseball team that not only persists in identifying itself as the “Indians,” but also resurrected the laughably racist, red-faced mascot Chief Wahoo just in time for the playoffs. 
+For those who haven’t kept up with the baseball drama, here’s a summary: The Cleveland team drew the curtain on its regular-season minstrel show in the spring, having replaced Chief Wahoo on its caps with a vintage red “C.” It never officially retired the offending mascot, but Wahoo remained confined only to uniform sleeves throughout the regular season, leading reasonable people to believe that the team ownership had finally seen the light where other franchises such as the NFL’s Washington Redskins remained defiantly in the dark, and was easing its fans into the post-“Indians” era. 
+Or so we thought. Chief Wahoo reappeared when the Cleveland team began its impressive playoff run against the Boston Red Sox, and he hasn’t left. He remained stitched on hats and held aloft by adoring Cleveland fans as the team convincingly defeated the Toronto Blue Jays, even surviving a legal attack by advocates of Canada’s indigenous peoples that threatened to forbid even so much as the use of the term “Indians” while the team was on Canadian soil. 
+{snip} 
+It’s tempting to look past all this and take pity on a city that’s had it as rough as Cleveland. The Cubs’ championship drought has famously lasted for 107 baseball seasons, but the Cleveland team boasts a pitiable 67 years without a World Series title. Beyond sports, Cleveland’s decline as an important American metropolis is arguably unmatched, having tumbled from a population peak of 900,000-plus in 1950 to less than 400,000 today. {snip} 
+But Cleveland? Hey, I know some generous, wonderfully caring people from that part of Ohio, which makes wishing for their team’s brutal defeat personally difficult. But being on the right side of a moral dispute isn’t supposed to be easy, especially when the team in question isn’t the evil Washington Redskins and its infernal owner, Daniel Snyder. Cleveland’s municipal misery doesn’t excuse the disgraceful exalting of Chief Wahoo any more than white men’s economic hardship makes Donald Trump’s popularity OK. 
+{snip}",FAKE
+6663,"Latest Posts WikiLeaks Documents Coming From US Intelligence Not Russia, MSM & Democrat Party Dying","Leave a reply 
+Greg Hunter – There are numerous reports on the alternative media of documents being given to WikiLeaks to counter the corruption and lawlessness of the Obamas and Clintons. AG Loretta Lynch has been reportedly blocking an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation that many say is a “global charity fraud” and a “huge criminal conspiracy.” 
+The leaked emails and documents show corruption between the Justice Department and Hillary Clinton. These documents and emails also show a grand cover-up of the true treason that has taken place in the highest offices of the U.S. government. 
+The mainstream media (MSM) have been committing fraud on shareholders and the public by holding themselves out as “news organizations” when, in fact, they are functioning as propaganda for the Clinton campaign. It’s no surprise that the nation’s biggest newspaper, USA Today (GCI), has had its share price cut in half in the last a year. Reuters is laying off 2,000 people, and quarterly profits at the New York Times have fallen by 95%. The public is not buying the lies and propaganda the MSM is selling for the Democrats and the Clinton Campaign. 
+Internet researcher Clif High says both the MSM and the Democrat Party are dying. He says by 2020, the Democrat party will not exist, and the MSM will be well on its way to its death. 
+Join Greg Hunter as he talks about these stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up. SF Source USA Watchdog Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+3954,Putin Says Will Not Abandon Russians in Ukraine to Nationalists,"Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would not abandon Russians living in southeast Ukraine to Ukrainian nationalists, RIA news agency quoted him as saying in a documentary due to be broadcast later on Sunday.
+
+More than 9,000 people have been killed in fighting in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops since April 2014. Moscow says Ukrainian nationalists pose a threat to ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the region.
+
+According to RIA, Putin also said Russia would continue to improve its nuclear arsenal, but added that it would not wield the ""nuclear big stick.""",REAL
+7233,Hillary Clinton Cancels Public Events And Vanishes Amid Media Blackout,"Hillary Clinton has cancelled all upcoming campaign events following the FBI’s announcement that they are reopening their email server investigation. 
+Via YourNewsWire 
+The reopening of the case has sent the Clinton campaign into complete chaos, according to reports . According to “Citizens for Trump” Special Projects Director Jack Posobiec, Hillary is looking to get out of the media spotlight for a while.
+Hillary has cancelled all campaign events in FL, OH, and NC
+— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) October 29, 2016 
+
+In a tweet, he stated: “Hillary has cancelled all campaign events in FL, OH, and NC.” The Clinton campaign want to focus on states that Hillary lost serious ground in – like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Michigan.
+Has the latest email scandal finally brought Hillary to her knees? Will there even be an election on November 8th, or will we be watching Hillary Clinton go on trial? It seems like anything is possible right now.
+",FAKE
+9158,The Truth About the #Syrianboy Viral Photo. Its really a story of two boys. #OmranDaqneesh,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 15 + 14 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
+3760,Report: Freddie Gray may have intentionally tried to injure self in police van,"Freddie Gray, whose death triggered Monday’s rioting in Baltimore, may have intentionally tried to injure himself in a police van, according to another prisoner in the vehicle, the Washington Post reported late Wednesday night.
+
+The Post said the unidentified prisoner, who was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him, reportedly said he heard Gray “banging himself against the walls” and believed he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.
+
+The prisoner’s statements were contained in an investigative document obtained by the paper, which said it was unclear if there was any additional information to support the theory.
+
+Gray, who is black, was arrested April 12 after he ran from police. Officers held him down, handcuffed him and loaded him into the police van. While inside, he became irate and leg cuffs were put on him, police had said. At some point, he suffered a severe spinal injury and was unconscious when the van arrived at a police station.
+
+Authorities have not explained how or when Gray’s spine was injured. He died April 19.
+
+The death of Gray sparked riots earlier this week in Baltimore as protests turned violent resulting into major property damage throughout the city and around 200 arrests
+
+Tuesday, the city started to enforce a curfew starting at 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. More than 3,000 National Guardsmen and law enforcement officers were called into the city to make sure no more violence took place in the city. Baltimore stayed quiet throughout the night Wednesday as well.
+
+Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has also come under fire after a senior law enforcement told Fox News Wednesday that she ordered police to stand down.
+
+The source, who is involved in the enforcement efforts, confirmed to Fox News there was a direct order from the mayor to her police chief Monday night, effectively tying the hands of officers as they were pelted with rocks and bottles.
+
+The claim follows criticism of the mayor for, over the weekend, saying they were giving space to those who ""wished to destroy.""
+
+Rawlings-Blake has defended her handling of the unrest, which grew out of protests over the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.
+
+The mayor, in an interview with Fox News' Bill Hemmer on Tuesday, denied any order was issued to hold back on Monday.
+
+""You have to understand, it is not holding back. It is responding appropriately,"" she said, saying there was no stand-down directive.
+
+She said her critics have a right to their opinion.
+
+Baltimore police are expected to finish their investigation Friday and turn the results over to the city’s state’s attorney office, which will decide whether to seek indictment. Six police officers, including a lieutenant and a sergeant, have been suspended.
+
+Fox News' Leland Vittert and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+7898,"WIKI: Clinton out of touch, cronyistic, didn't drive car in 35 years, flew all over world but accomplished nothing...","How to contact WikiLeaks? What is Tor? Tips for Sources After Submitting 
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AhqQTpgHAX0nZ2SpxfLr/LDN24kXCmnFipqgtE6tstKNiKwAZdQBzJJlyYVpSk93 6HrYTZiBDJk4jDBh6jAx+IZCiv0rLXBM6QxQWBzbc2AxDDBqNbea2toBSww8HvHf hQV/G86Zis/rDOSqLT7e794ezD9RYPv55525zeCk3IKauaW5+WqbKlwosAPIMW2S kFODIRd5oMI51eof+ElmB5V5T9lw0CHdltSM/hmYmp/5YotSyHUmk91GDFgkOFUc J3x7gtxUMkTadELqwY6hrU8= =BLTH",FAKE
+9568,WATCH: Louis CK’s EPIC Answer on Trump vs. Hillary,"Comments 
+Conan O’Brien asked comedian Louis CK who he’s choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in this years election, his answer was amazing! He said: 
+“I’m going to vote for Hillary because… I think she’s great! It’s not a lesser of two evils. I think she’s great, she’s really talented and I think she’s super smart, I would take her over anybody else that would do it. To me it’s really exciting to have the first mother in the White House, it’s not just about the first woman, it’s about the first mom. Because a mother she’s got it! A mother just does IT. She feeds you, and teaches you, she protects you. She takes care of shit.” 
+“We’ve had 240 years of fathers. Father after father. Bald Father. Fat Father. Every kind of Father. Fathers are ok. I’m a dad, you’re a dad. A GREAT father can give his kids about 40% of their needs. Any mother, even a not even trying mother can give 200%!” 
+Watch the rest here, because the ending is truly the best part:",FAKE
+370,When Did the Democratic Party Become Such a Nervous Wreck?,"The party apparatus exploits and exacerbates these fraidy-’crat jitters. Whenever something major looms—an election, a State of the Union address, a major Senate vote, a gravitational ripple—my e-mail box turns into a Wailing Wall of Democratic fund-raising messages bearing subject lines such as “Worried,” “Be Afraid,” “Why Haven’t We Heard from You?,” “All Hope Is Lost,” and “DOOMED,” which isn’t how General Patton would have fired up the troops. The heebie-jeebie-ing is even worse on social media during the election cycle; social media make everything worse if you open up the sluices, turning even stoics into headless chickens. A few years ago such Aunt Pittypat palpitations inspired a viral poster that showed President Obama making a bold gesture with the message EVERYONE CHILL THE FUCK OUT, I GOT THIS! And yet, after nearly two terms of Obama’s unruffled, unrattled mastery of the long game, his confidence doesn’t seem to have energized Democrats en masse with a “Forward march!” spirit. When Democrats contemplate their navel, they still see a panic button.
+
+‘Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus” goes an adage much beloved by pundits always looking for a convenient platitude to rest their elbows on. (Or chins.) Caricatured another way, Republicans are cast as the Daddy Party (jaw-jutting, decisive, disciplinarian, financially prudent, militarily assertive: meat), Democrats are the Mommy Party (huggy, permissive, socially concerned, globally cooperative: veggies). Such gender stereotypes may have outlived whatever hinky usefulness they ever had, as stereotypes are wont to do, but beneath the sexual cosplay of Republican executive blue suits versus Democratic mom jeans (which President Obama was accused of fancying by no less a fashion arbiter than Sarah Palin) is a forked dynamic deeper than any policy differences or identity politics. Republicans are driven by anger; Democrats, riven by anxiety. Anger stokes Republicans to lash out, their grievances, real and imaginary, kept at a raging boil by Fox News, Matt Drudge , radio talk-show hosts, and similar mayhem artists. Anxiety pincushions Democrats into a defensive crouch waiting for the ceiling to cave, their blood pressure spiking with every alarming headline in The New York Times, of which there is never a shortage.
+
+Not all Democrats, naturally, otherwise the party would have gone the way of the Pony Express, political architect Karl Rove’s vision of a permanent Republican majority having come to pass. Yet there does seem to be an intestinal queasiness in the institutional identity that’s chronic and unworthy of its ancestors. When I was a stripling in the never dull 60s, Democrats didn’t quaver as if a wagon-train attack lurked around every bend. Activated by adversity, they appeared outgoing, future-striding, and firm-resolved: dashing John F. Kennedy, happy warrior Hubert H. Humphrey, steer-wrangling Lyndon Baines Johnson, and, radiating in the background, the chromo image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—the greatest president, and perhaps the greatest figure, of the 20th century. The Republican adults in charge came across as somberly dour (Richard Nixon) or apocalyptically dire (Barry Goldwater). The bloody morass of Vietnam, the urban riots and campus upheavals, the assassinations of J.F.K., his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King Jr., and the druggy saturnalia of the decade eroded the faith in liberal progress and took the bright shine off social engineering. When Nixon swept the board in his re-election victory of 1972 over George McGovern, winning 49 states, it was as if a dark visor had been lowered over the future for liberal Democrats, nothing ahead but charred landscape. Undone by hubris and thirsty vengeance, Nixon did the country a favor by befouling himself over Watergate, opening a respite of hope for Democrats (the improbable success of Jimmy Carter in time for the bicentennial), only to have it smushed beneath the golden hammer of Ronald Reagan, with whose two-term presidency the Democrats are still reckoning.
+
+It wasn’t only that Reagan was popular, racking up a second-term victory that equaled Nixon’s 49-state total and scored the highest electoral-college vote in history (525 out of a possible 538), leaving liberals thunderstruck. It wasn’t only that he was the first pontiff of the unfettered free-market capitalism that has become the economic dogma of our time (even if the actual record of his administration wouldn’t pass Ayn Rand’s inspection). Reagan’s dandiest trick was inverting the personae of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, turning the character roles inside out. Optimistic, affable, rhetorically broad-gestured and bold-colored, a mega-dose of vitamin D, the former movie star opened a picture window on the majestic vista of “Morning in America,” where the skies were big and blue and the hills alive with the sound of jingle-jangle spurs. In political, media, and public awareness, perceptions turned topsy-turvy, placing Republicans high in the saddle and challenging the horizon while nit-picking, nay-saying Democrats clung to the status quo as if it were the schoolmarm’s apron strings. A gross caricature, but gross caricatures are what the Beltway press eats for brunch, and, apart from a leonine few, Democrats became gun-shy of proposing any F.D.R./L.B.J.-scaled domestic programs or making anything resembling dovish cries. The party lost labor muscle—Reagan’s crackdown on the air-traffic controllers’ union in 1981, when his threat to fire more than 11,000 striking controllers carried the day, was a crippling defeat from which unions never recovered—and shifted attention to knowledge workers, who didn’t have the same organizational strength and loyalty in the non-unionized, neoliberal economy. “Though [Michael Dukakis] lost the [1988] election after being defamed in the infamous Willie Horton ad … , his platform won him a following among white-collar professionals in the metropolitan areas of the Sunbelt, West, and Northeast,” historian and political analyst Lily Geismer wrote in the winter 2016 issue of Jacobin magazine. “Four years later, the [Democratic Leadership Council]’s golden boy, Bill Clinton, placed high-tech growth and suburban professionals at the forefront of his policy vision in his own presidential bid.” The “triangulation” strategy and small-ball initiatives (school uniforms, etc.) practiced and proposed by Clinton once he was in office weren’t just wily poker tricks but a recognition of the political realities of the post-Reagan era. Expansive, ebullient, and popular, Clinton was finely tuned to the public’s mood, sensed just how far to push. Fat lot of good it did him. Oh, sure, he made mistakes, some of them beauts—such is the frailty of man, especially one with a hearty appetite—but the telenovela that unfolded was an orchestrated takedown that nearly succeeded. Whitewater, the Monica Lewinsky uproar, the Starr Report, the nightly kangaroo courts of cable-news panels, the impeachment debate and vote—all were a preview of coming distractions. The rabid harrying of Clinton was a dress rehearsal for the Swift Boating swarm-attack mode that would be mounted against even the most mainstream, dry-cleaned, neatly pressed Democratic candidate, often with the sneering assistance of putative liberals giving their class snobbery some exercise. When we consider the barrage of racism, paranoia (rumors of FEMA camps), derangement (the “birther” conspiracies, the rise of Glenn Beck), and unprecedented insults delivered by the Republican-held Congress that Barack Obama has Jedi-deflected, we will look back on his presidency as a marvel of levitation as so much of the country seemed intent on plunging into the mire. If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, as looks likely, the Swift Boating will return in armada force and be crewed by insane clown posses. Factor into that the fear of an “enthusiasm gap” (the Republicans have so far pulled far more people to their caucuses and primaries than have Democrats); the tasty prospect of Bill Clinton, feeling a little frisky or blabby, upstaging and embarrassing the Hillary campaign; the as yet unplumbed depths of the political and popular culture’s misogyny, especially against older women, doubtless reviving the Mommy Party business with a vengeance; and television’s slavish royal-carpet lay-down for Donald Trump (assuming he’s the nominee, with ideally Marco Rubio as his Howdy Doody running mate). It’s been a helluva arc from Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt to this.",REAL
+102,"Moms march to demand end to police brutality, racial injustice","Mothers whose children have been killed by police officers marched in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to call attention to police brutality and racial injustice.
+
+The Million Moms March was sponsored by Mothers for Justice United, an organization of mothers whose children have been killed by police officers and others, and the Coalition for Justice. The march moved from the U.S. Capitol to the U.S. Department of Justice, where demonstrators demanded changes in police practices.
+
+Maria Hamilton founded Mothers for Justice United and helped organize the march of mothers and their supporters. Hamilton's 31-year-old son, Dontre Hamilton, was shot 14 times and killed by a former Milwaukee police officer.
+
+""This is a call for everybody to wake up,"" Hamilton said as the march began Saturday afternoon. ""We are here on behalf of our babies to tell the United States government that we aren't going anywhere. We aren't going to continue to keep burying our babies. Do something and do it now.""
+
+Hamilton said as moms walked through the streets they aimed to honor ""stolen lives"" in solidarity. ""We will continue to lift our babies up,"" she said. ""They live through each and every one of us. They are gone physically but we have our own personal angels now.""
+
+As demonstrators moved through the streets Saturday, some in the crowd shouted, ""No justice. No compromise,"" and ""Black lives matter.""
+
+Many of the mothers and other protesters held photos of young men and women killed by law enforcement officers. Others clutched bright yellow balloons, flowers and held hands.
+
+Mothers for Justice United, which also includes family members, clergy and concerned citizens, is focused on halting the killing of unarmed people of color by police and vigilantes through direct action, legislation and community building, the group says.
+
+Marion Gray-Hopkins, whose 19-year-old son Gary was killed by a police officer in Maryland in 1999, told NBC News she planned to participate.
+
+""Enough is enough,"" Gray-Hopkins told the network. ""We need to put about some changes in laws and practices that will stop the senseless killing of our unarmed children.""",REAL
+4340,Can Huckabee Overcome The 'New Car Smell' Of Other Candidates?,"Can Huckabee Overcome The 'New Car Smell' Of Other Candidates?
+
+This post was updated at 11:40 a.m. ET.
+
+That's the message the GOP presidential hopeful is already conveying as he makes another bid for the presidency.
+
+""We need the kind of change that really could get America from Hope to higher ground,"" he said, officially launching his campaign Tuesday in Hope, Ark.
+
+To recapture the magic that propelled him to second place in 2008, he needs to re-embrace his roots and downplay the political celebrity he has created in the past eight years.
+
+""What he's got to do is draw a contrast that shows, 'I'm not just a talk show host and I'm not just a Baptist minister, but I governed for over a decade and we achieved results in a very Democratic environment,' "" said Iowa conservative activist Bob Vander Plaats, who chaired Huckabee's winning 2008 campaign in the first caucus state. He is so far undecided this go-around.
+
+That message was also evidenced in the video that Huckabee rolled out last week.
+
+The video was vintage Huckabee, harking back to how he took on the Clinton machine of the 1990s in what was then a very Democratic state. That's a valuable weapon he has now that he didn't eight years ago, with other Republican candidates now arguing they're best equipped to take on Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee.
+
+Huckabee boasted of his populist record, touting his work raising family income and cutting taxes during his decade-long tenure as governor.
+
+There were no clips of his eponymous talk show or his 2008 stump speeches except for the address he made to the GOP convention that year.
+
+""I'm not a Republican because I grew up rich,"" he declared at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. ""I'm a Republican because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life poor, waiting for the government to rescue me.""
+
+His runner-up slot enabled him to dig out of his humble beginnings. A Fox News contract and radio show soon followed, and Huckabee and his wife were able to build a 8,224 square-foot Florida beachfront home worth $3 million.
+
+""Janet and I, neither of us grew up thinking we'd see salt water in person,"" Huckabee told the Northwest Florida Daily News last year of the mansion he and his wife called home. ""We both grew up dirt poor in Southern Arkansas ... For us, growing up, the thought that we would ever put our feet in salt water, no that would never happen.""
+
+The newfound financial freedom was reportedly one reason Huckabee passed on a 2012 bid, despite his rumored disdain for the eventual nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. In order to do so, he would have had to sever his media ties, which were his main source of income.
+
+That's why it surprised many when he announced, without much warning, in January of this year that he would be stepping down from his Fox News Saturday evening show, Huckabee. But it was also a clear signal to those skeptical he would leave the lucrative private sector to re-enter the political arena that he was serious this time.
+
+Huckabee was underestimated early on in 2008 in Iowa, too. He didn't even begin registering in polling there until the summer of 2007 and never surged into the lead until December of that year. He ended up winning the caucuses by 9 points.
+
+He starts off the 2016 cycle not having to go from Pizza Ranch to Pizza Ranch praying supporters will show up, as Vander Plaats once recalled their team had to do, but with a sure buzz and a reservoir of good feelings once he heads to the state this week. He still trails Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the latest surveys, but there's no clear front-runner yet.
+
+That's both good and bad news for Huckabee. There are higher expectations this time around, both on fundraising and the crowds he will draw and the poll numbers he can expect as he becomes a candidate yet again.
+
+""While people still genuinely like Gov. Huckabee and they trust Gov. Huckabee,"" Vander Plaats said, ""there's still a certain flirtation with the new car smell of new candidates.""",REAL
+3786,Body parts found in suitcase left on sidewalk,"The San Francisco medical examiner's office determined the parts were human remains and the body had been dismembered, Officer Grace Gatpandan said.
+
+""We do have people of interest that homicide investigators are speaking to,"" she said. Detectives are also reviewing surveillance camera footage and officers are looking for a suspect. She declined to identify the suspect.
+
+The suitcase was found Wednesday afternoon on 11th Street in the Mission District. Police closed four blocks while they investigated.
+
+The Los Angeles Times reported that remains were also found at three locations within a three-block radius. Asked about the reporting, a police spokeswoman told CNN there are no updates.
+
+There were other items around the suitcase, Gatpandan said. The gender and age of the person were unclear, she said.",REAL
+606,Kentucky election could blot an Obamacare bright spot,The move would make it easier for the Trump administration to demolish the exchanges.,REAL
+4471,This Republican senator visited a mosque to repudiate Donald Trump,"Donald Trump’s call on Monday to bar all Muslims from entering the United States provoked a variety of reactions from Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, ranging from silence to gentle disapproval to full-throated condemnation. But only one, so far, has visited a mosque this week to speak up for religious tolerance and American unity.
+
+Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) attended a Friday afternoon prayer service at the Islamic Center of the North East Valley in Scottsdale, with his wife, Cheryl, and two of his four sons. In remarks there, he did not mention Trump by name but offered a stout rebuke of Trumpism following what he called “a difficult week in Washington.”
+
+“It wasn’t so much the legislative calendar as it was the rhetoric that came forth, mostly from the presidential campaign,” Flake said. “That is not in keeping with the values and ideals that have made this country the shining city on the hill that it is. We are a better country than has been on display this week.”
+
+Flake delivered his remarks from the perspective of one of 16 Mormons in Congress. He is a descendant of some of the original Mormon settlers of the West, and he compared the tribulations that adherents of his own religion have faced to those Muslims have faced and are facing today.
+
+And, he said, Mormons and Muslims aren’t so different, really:
+
+There is, as I mentioned, much that separates Mormons and Muslims, but we do collaborate on a number of things — in helping to bring relief after natural disasters. We cooperate, our two faiths, on the translation of ancient texts, and there is much in the history and the tradition and even some doctrine that is common between us. As Mormons and Muslims, we trace our lineage to father Abraham. While we may not agree on the divinity or the prophetic calling of Jesus and Mohamed, we all revere them as inspired teachers and leaders. Early persecution drove Mohamed from Mecca to Medina. Early Mormon persecution drove the Mormons from Illinois to Utah. I have ancestors buried along that trail. The principle of the fast is embraced and practiced by both of our religions. My two boys there — a couple of years ago, I took them to an island in the middle of the Pacific to test our survival skills. They got more of a fast than they wanted to. But we both practice the fast in different ways, as well as the responsibility and the obligation to care for the sick and the needy. That is something that is central to both of our faiths.‎ Muslims make the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. The Mormon hajj is to our holy temple. Because like Muslims, Mormons do not drink alcohol, our trip to the temple is usually followed by a stop at Dairy Queen. Ice cream is about all we Mormons have; I’m not sure if there’s a corollary for Muslims.
+
+Flake closed his remarks with an appreciation for the Muslim soldiers who have fought in Americas wars, the Muslim first responders who have put themselves in harm’s way — including in San Bernardino, Calif., this month — and for Muslims who give generously to charity.
+
+“There can be no religious test for those who serve in public office; we do not tolerate religious discrimination in the workplace, or in the neighborhood,” Flake said. “The slogan on the Statue of Liberty — ‘give us your poor, your tired, and your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ — contemplates no religious test for those who reach our shores. … My hope and prayer today is that the isolated voices calling for division are overwhelmed by the chorus of voices like those in this room today calling for acceptance, for tolerance and inclusion.”",REAL
+1450,GOP candidates fight for spotlight ahead of Milwaukee debate,"The leading Republican presidential candidates are fighting for the spotlight as they charge into Tuesday night's primary debate, with Marco Rubio releasing a biting new ad ripping his former political mentor and Donald Trump suggesting he's arrested Ben Carson's rise in the polls.
+
+Carson, for his part, has spent the last several days sparring with the media and his rivals over reports questioning his personal story, which is the crux of his campaign.
+
+""I am trying to move on,"" Carson told Fox News. But his campaign manager also says Carson will punch back if an opponent challenges him on stage Tuesday night -- suggesting a departure for Carson from past debates, where he mostly avoided the fray.
+
+The prime-time debate, hosted by Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal, will be held at 9 p.m. ET, from Milwaukee, preceded by an earlier 7 p.m. ET debate with lower-polling candidates.
+
+This is the first time that just eight candidates will be on the main stage, a change that could give the contenders more time to explain their positions and engage each other.
+
+Florida Sen. Rubio, in the hours before the debate, launched a striking ad against GOP rival Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor. The ad plays clips of Bush, before the 2016 campaign, praising Rubio.
+
+""I'm a huge Marco fan,"" Bush says in one clip. In another, he says, ""He's probably the most articulate conservative on the scene today.""
+
+The text of the ad blares: ""Jeb Bush before his phony attacks.""
+
+Bush, the former front-runner, has struggled in every debate so far, and Rubio is no doubt angling for the edge against him in Tuesday's showdown. At the last debate, Rubio deftly parried a critique by Bush of his Senate absences.
+
+Rubio is currently third in most national polls, followed closely by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who by many accounts had the stand-out moment in the last debate by slamming the CNBC moderators for allegedly unfair and off-topic questions. Speaking with Fox News on Monday, Rubio said the polls have been ""up and down,"" but ""what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on the message of my campaign.""
+
+Still tangling for the lead are Carson and Trump.
+
+Speaking with Fox News, Trump pointed to the most recent polling in saying he's back on top.
+
+""I'm No. 1 in the polls, as you know, in every single -- I think I'm No. 1 in every single state. I'm now No. 1 again in Iowa. I had lost Iowa for a period of time, and I didn't quite understand it,"" Trump said.
+
+Trump has shown no hesitation about going after Carson, for everything from his past writings about having anger issues growing up, to stories questioning elements of his personal narrative, to Carson's statement that Egypt's pyramids were built by the biblical Joseph to store grain.
+
+""He's having a hard time. The pyramids are solid structures. You can't put grain in the pyramids because they're solid structures,"" Trump said.
+
+Trump, who hosted ""Saturday Night Live"" over the weekend, also made headlines overnight by suggesting a ""boycott"" against Starbucks over its holiday cups that are missing winter or Christmas scenes. But then Trump added, ""Seriously, I don't care.""
+
+In a reminder of one of the key issues he's running on, though, Trump released a new policy paper Tuesday focusing on U.S.-China relations.
+
+His campaign claims that under a ""Trump administration trade will flourish. However, for free trade to bring prosperity to America, it must also be fair trade.""",REAL
+8230,Official Online National Donald Trump Polls Updated in Real-time,"Report Copyright Violation OFFICIAL ONLINE NATIONAL DONALD TRUMP POLLS UPDATED IN REAL-TIME Traditional media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX and ALL major newspapers nationwide have been proven to be 100% corrupt. The masses have ‘caught on’ and have turned to social media as the new, dominant news source.All polling records shown on this website are 100% accurate and reveal the true national polling numbers, which are completely our of sync with the fraudulent MSM results shown nightly. [ link to www.donaldjtrumppolls.com ] Go Vote!! The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Thomas Jefferson",FAKE
+2072,DR. MANNY: Water crisis in Flint is just the tip of the iceberg,"The water crisis in Flint, Mich., is just the tip of the iceberg – and if you think that it can’t happen in your community, you’re sadly mistaken. The aging water infrastructure in this country is deeply flawed. Many of the 150,000 public water systems that serve more than 300 million people are based on rusting, leaky pipes and decades-old plans that— if not corrected and replaced— will have devastating and long-lasting effects on our communities.
+
+The disaster in Flint, which began in 2014 when the city switched its water supply from Detroit’s system to the Flint River in a cost-saving measure, is likely brewing in many other communities. It is inconceivable to me that in the most developed nation on the planet, we have exposed families and young children to the poisonous effects of lead. And it is almost criminal to me that water supply officials were unaware that the water pumping through a large American city was endangering the community. That level of negligence is beyond comprehension.
+
+The dangerous, detrimental effects that lead can have on a developing brain and body are well-documented. In 1978, a largely successful campaign to remove lead from home paint products resulted in a new law, after it was found that small children could mistakenly eat paint chips and be exposed to lead poisoning. When it comes to levels of lead in water, no true amount is safe. However, in 1991 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established an action level for lead in public drinking water at 15 micrograms per liter, and required water supplies to routinely test household tap water to check lead levels.
+
+These laws and others were established to protect our citizens from both indirect and direct exposure to the harmful compound. A person can be directly exposed to lead by drinking contaminated water with unsafe levels, while indirect exposure can occur when a person inhales contaminated water particles through steam or vapors.
+
+Once lead enters the human body, the heavy metal attaches itself to cells that can begin to build up in bones or major organs like the liver or kidneys. It disrupts the normal cellular biology of the organ and can lead to chronic diseases. However, the most dangerous damage lead poisoning can inflict is on the brain, especially in young or unborn children. If lead is deposited in a developing fetal brain, it can disrupt the normal function and cause irreversible damage. The same can happen in young children whose brains are still maturing.
+
+The consequences can result in low IQ, severe delays in cognitive function, significant disruption in the memory center of the brain, learning disabilities and other neurological deficits. The devastating part of this diagnosis is that it is, for the most part, irreversible. Patients exposed to acute lead poisoning can be treated through chelation, which is a method used to filter out the lead. However, for children chronically exposed over a period of time, the damage cannot be undone.
+
+This makes the preventable crisis in Flint all the more devastating.
+
+I read that the Obama administration is planning to pick Dr. Nicole Lurie to act as a “czar” and fix the crisis in Flint, but I urge her to look further than just Michigan. Lurie and others must start to seriously evaluate other areas of America where the people are most susceptible to a disaster such as this. The government failed the city of Flint, it must act now to protect the rest of us.
+
+
+
+Dr. Manny Alvarez serves as Fox News Channel's senior managing health editor. He also serves as chairman of the department of obstetrics/gynecology and reproductive science at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. Click here for more information on Dr. Manny's work with Hackensack University Medical Center. Visit AskDrManny.com for more.
+
+",REAL
+8331,"Florida Voters Approve Medical Marijuana, Reject Federal Prohibition","By Mike Maharrey Voters in Florida have approved a ballot measure legalizing medical marijuana, taking a big step toward nullifying the unconstitutional federal prohibition of... ",FAKE
+1672,OnPolitics | 's politics blog,"Who has Trump appointed to his cabinet so far?
+
+Donald Trump added three new men to his list of cabinet picks Friday. Get to know them.",REAL
+6820,Should America Pardon the National Security State?,"Written by Jacob G. Hornberger Thursday October 27, 2016 Several weeks ago, contemporaneously with the release of Oliver Stone’s excellent movie Snowden, friends and admirers of Edward Snowden launched a campaign to have President Obama pardon him for disclosing the NSA’s super-secret illegal surveillance scheme to the American people and the world. The reasons for the pardon request were excellently summarized in an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times entitled “ Pardon Edward Snowden ” by Kenneth Roth and Salil Shetty. Not surprisingly, the US national-security establishment and its assets within the mainstream press oppose a pardon for Snowden because, they say, he endangered “national security” with his disclosure of the NSA’s top-secret illegal surveillance programs. But notice something important: Every time someone discloses “national security” state secrets, the east coast doesn’t fall into the ocean, California isn’t hit by earthquakes, and the federal government isn’t taken over by communists, terrorists, Muslims, illegal immigrants, or drug dealers. Nothing ever happens! That’s because, as I point out in my ebook “ The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State , ever since the federal government was converted into a national security state in the 1940s, the term “national security” has been nothing more than a way to shield criminal wrongdoing on the part of the national-security establishment. Remember MKULTRA? It was a highly classified operation on the part of the CIA. It involved drug experimentation on unsuspecting Americans. It was enveloped within the concept of “national security.” It was also a criminal operation. Once it came to light, the CIA ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records so that the American people would never discover all the dark and sordid details of this Nazi-like program. The United States remained standing notwithstanding the revelation of the CIA’s national-security state secret. Consider the CIA’s assassination attempts, in partnership with the Mafia, against Cuba’s president Fidel Castro during the 1960s. Those assassination attempts were national-security state secrets. They were also criminal in nature. In fact, they were no different, in a criminal sense, from the assassination of Orlando Letelier by Chile’s DINA, the Chilean CIA-NSA type organization with which the US partnered in the aftermath of the US national-security state’s coup that brought military strongman Augusto Pinochet into power in 1973. Did the United States collapse when the CIA’s assassination plots were revealed to the world? No more so than Chile collapsed when DINA’s assassination plots were revealed to the world. Speaking of DINA, for years the US national-security establishment kept its role in orchestrating the coup in Chile secret from the American people. CIA Director Richard Helms even knowingly lied to Congress when asked about the CIA’s activities in orchestrating the coup. Why did Helms intentionally lie to Congress? To protect “national security,” of course. The CIA’s position was that if people were to discover the role that the US government played in orchestrating the Chilean coup, “national-security” would be threatened. But when the US role in the coup was ultimately disclosed, what happened? Nothing! Well, except for the fact that Helms got convicted for lying to Congress. He was lucky though. They let him off the hook with a misdemeanor plea and probation. When he returned to the CIA, he was hailed by his subordinates for his heroic effort to protect “national security.” Of course, he wasn’t as lucky as DNI Chief James Clapper, who didn’t get prosecuted at all for lying to Congress about the existence of the NSA’s illegal surveillance scheme. Why did Clapper lie to Congress? To protect “national security,” of course. But when the super-secret illegal scheme ultimately came to light, what happened to the United States? Nothing! Another false and fraudulent use of the meaningless term “national security.” It was no different with respect to the CIA’s kidnapping-murder of Rene Schneider, the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. The CIA felt that it needed to keep its plot against Schneider secret on grounds of “national security,” including its smuggling high-power guns into the country and later its paying off the killers to keep them silent. Once again, they maintained, “national security” dictated secrecy. But when the CIA’s role in Schneider’s kidnapping-murder was ultimately discovered, nothing happened. The United States continued standing. Interestingly, not one single US official was ever charged in the felony-murder of Rene Schneider, whose only “crime” was standing in the way of the US national security establishment’s illegal and unconstitutional (in both Chile and the United States) plot to replace a democratically elected president with a brutal unelected US-supported military general whose forces proceeded to round up, incarcerate, torture, rape, execute, or assassinate tens of thousands of innocent people — that is, people whose only crime was believing in socialism. It was the same with the murder during the coup of two American men, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, a murder in which US national-security state officials were complicit. Of course, they kept their involvement in the murder secret under the principle of “national security.” Horman’s “crime” was that he had learned of US complicity in the coup and planned to disclose it to the world. In the eyes of Chilean and US national-security state officials, that obviously constituted a threat to “national security.” Teruggi’s “crime” was that he was a socialist who had opposed the US government’s war in Vietnam. Despite the fact that a top-secret US State Department investigation revealed that US intelligence had played a role in their murder, not one single US official has ever been indicted, much less summoned to appear before Congress to explain why they murdered two innocent American citizens. In a moral sense, it’s not Snowden who needs a pardon. It is the US national-security state that needs a pardon from him … and from the American people for converting our nation into a charnel house of secret, dark, illegal, nefarious actions under the guise of the sham term “national security.” Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation . Related",FAKE
+643,Trump and the judge: Our view,"Is anyone qualified to judge The Donald?
+
+Donald Trump’s insistence that he couldn't get a fair hearing from a “Mexican” judge in the case over alleged fraud at Trump University makes you wonder who could fairly judge Trump, presuming he had the veto power over judges he seems to think he deserves. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has offended so many different people and groups that it could be difficult to find anyone suitable.
+
+It couldn’t be the Indiana-born son of Mexican immigrants because Trump said Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn't possibly judge someone who has proposed to put a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump also ruled out Muslim judges because he has proposed to bar foreign Muslims from entering the country.
+
+And that’s just the beginning. No Asians? Trump mocked their accents when he described negotiating trade deals. No disabled judges? He cruelly imitated a handicapped journalist. No one from Iowa? He called Iowans “stupid” when they supported rival candidate Ben Carson. And, given the way Trump has derided certain women as “disgusting animals” and “dogs,” no female judges — unless, as late-night host Stephen Colbert suggested this week, they’re a 10 on Trump’s beauty scale?
+
+This twisted Trumpian logic — only a bigot is qualified to judge a bigot — might be amusing if it weren’t so sad and disturbing. The nation is on the verge of having a major party presidential candidate so reflexively venomous that news organizations keep lists of all the people he has gone out of his way to insult, one of which contains 224 recipients of Trump invective. Among any president’s most important tools is the power to persuade, and it’s hard to persuade people you’ve called stupid and ugly. Not to mention that a president should help, not undercut, the ability of parents to teach their children to respect authority figures.
+
+Most troubling, of course, is Trump’s apparent cluelessness about the independence of judges, the rule of law, and the system of checks and balances. The famously litigious businessman seems to regard the court system as a tool for settling scores rather than as a means for achieving justice.
+
+Based on no evidence but his own irritation at rulings he deems insufficiently deferential, Trump has accused Curiel of bias, called for him to be investigated and vaguely suggested he’d come back after being elected president and get even.
+
+If Trump really believes the judge is biased, his legal team could make a formal legal request for recusal. It hasn't, because it has no grounds for doing so. Instead, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has resorted to innuendo and threats, which makes you wonder how a President Trump would react to Supreme Court decisions he didn't like.
+
+If Trump had the least bit of curiosity or sense of history, he’d know the battle over whether judges must recuse themselves over identity politics has long been settled. Yes, black judges can rule on civil rights cases and gay judges on same-sex marriage. Luckily for Trump, all judges are required to handle even the most obnoxious defendants fairly and decide cases on the legal merits.
+
+Trump isn’t the first presidential candidate to attack judges. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich did it even more toxically in 2011, saying if he were president he’d ignore Supreme Court rulings he disagreed with and have judges hauled before Congress to be interrogated. It’s a little disorienting now to hear the mercurial Gingrich, said to be on Trump’s list of possible vice presidential choices, call Trump’s disparaging of Curiel’s Mexican heritage “inexcusable,” even as Gingrich says Trump’s complaint about “politicized justice” is valid.
+
+It’s not. Republican leaders have it right when they say Trump’s attack on Curiel, suggesting that the judge can't do his job because of his ethnicity, is “the textbook definition of racism,” as House Speaker Paul Ryan put it.
+
+After Ryan's rebuke, Trump toned down his rhetoric and said he had been ""misconstrued."" But once you've rolled in racist muck, it's hard to wash away the stench.
+
+USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.
+
+To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter.",REAL
+7738,#NoDAPL Spills Over: Musicians Boycott Dakota Access Pipeline CEO’s Record Label & Festival,"Videos #NoDAPL Spills Over: Musicians Boycott Dakota Access Pipeline CEO’s Record Label & Festival ‘I do not play for oil interests. I do not play for companies who defile nature, or companies who attack demonstrators with trained attack dogs and pepper spray,’ declared singer-songwriter Jackson Browne. Be Sociable, Share! A water protector stares down police off highway 134, October 27. (Photo: Derrick Broze) 
+AUSTIN, Texas — When it comes to the Dakota Access pipeline, musicians want to stop the music. 
+Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation building the controversial $3.8 billion pipeline, also owns Music Road Records, a small record label which presents the annual Cherokee Creek Music Festival in Austin, Texas. 
+The Indigo Girls announced in September that they would not be playing at the next festival, slated for May 2017. 
+Reaffirming their support for “ Standing Rock, the Standing Rock Sioux, their friends and allies in protecting their sacred land and water by stopping the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and all pipelines that carry dirty oil and threaten massive ecosystems, ” the folk rock duo also encouraged other musicians to cancel their plans to perform at the festival. 
+Emily Saliers, one half of the Indigo Girls, recently explained that she hadn’t realized Warren was responsible for both the pipeline and the music festival until a fan alerted her to the connection via Facebook. 
+“Once we found out, we immediately started talking about what can we do to rectify the situation and our presence in something that is completely the antithesis of what we stand for as artists and as allies for Native communities,” Saliers told Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman on Thursday. 
+In addition to playing at the festival twice, Saliers and her musical partner, Amy Ray, also contributed a song to a tribute album published by Music Road to honor the legacy of singer-songwriter Jackson Browne. Saliers and Ray said they reached out to Browne and the other musicians on the album, then contacted Warren to inform him of the growing boycott. VIDEO: Emily Saliers of the @Indigo_Girls reads letter to #DAPL CEO Kelcy Warren, urging him to halt construction on Dakota Access pipeline pic.twitter.com/gD98Uu7rdY 
+— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) November 4, 2016 
+Ray read from the letter to Warren on Democracy Now!: “Sadly, we realized that the bucolic setting of your festival and the image it projects is in direct conflict with the proposed Dakota Access pipeline, a project your company, Energy Transfer Partners, is responsible for spearheading. This pipeline violates the Standing Rock Sioux nation’s treaty rights, endangers the vital Missouri River, and continues the trajectory of genocide against Native peoples.” 
+In a statement published by Indian Country Today Media Network , Browne vowed to donate all the profits from the Music Road tribute album to the Standing Rock “ water protectors .” Like Saliers and Ray, Browne said he’d been unaware of Warren’s involvement in the pipeline when he met him and agreed to have Music Road produce the album. He continued: “I do not play for oil interests. I do not play for companies who defile nature, or companies who attack demonstrators with trained attack dogs and pepper spray. The list of companies I have denied the use of my music is long. I certainly would not have allowed my songs to be recorded by a record company whose owner’s other business does what Energy Transfer Partners is allegedly doing — threatening the water supply and the sacred sites of indigenous people.” 
+Amy Goodman noted in a Nov. 3 editorial co-written with Denis Moynihan that, “Kelcy Warren is a Texas oil billionaire several times over, and might not be easily deterred by a threatened boycott.” 
+The notion that Warren may not be moved by a boycott isn’t stopping music fans from taking up the cause. A group of activists and fans from Denton, Texas, are asking musician Hal Ketchum to end his association with Music Road, and they’re planning to protest his concert there on Wednesday night. 
+In addition to dabbling in the music industry, Warren and Energy Transfer Partners also spend millions influencing U.S. elections . Energy Transfer Partners PAC spent over $869,000 in the 2014 and 2016 federal election cycles, according to OpenSecrets , a project of the Center for Responsive Politics. 
+Andrew Wheat, research director at Texans for Public Justice , an Austin-based nonprofit that tracks the influence of money and corporate power, told MintPress News that Warren, himself, has spent far more influencing elections on the state level. He was awarded a position on the board of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, likely due to his largesse.",FAKE
+1663,Jeb sides with brother on invading Iraq: Was he ducking the question?,"Jeb Bush had some cleanup work to do yesterday.
+
+The former Florida governor showed a keen grasp of policy during a 20-minute interview with Megyn Kelly that aired Monday night, appearing relaxed as he defended positions that don’t sit well with much of the Republican base.
+
+But then there was Iraq.
+
+It’s a politically explosive topic for Jeb for two big reasons. The war became a quagmire, and it's so closely associated with his brother.
+
+Megyn’s question was quite explicit: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?”
+
+Bush answered as if it was 2003.
+
+“I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got,” Bush said.
+
+But that’s an answer framed around our state of knowledge 12 years ago, in the face of a massive campaign by his brother’s administration to convince the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
+
+So Bush either misheard the question, as he now says, or answered the way he did because it’s easier to frame an explanation that ropes in the prominent Democrats who supported the invasion in that post-9/11 period.
+
+Bush tried to clarify things by calling into Sean Hannity's radio show with this admission: ""I interpreted the question wrong, I guess.""
+
+So would he have sent troops to Iraq, knowing what we know now?
+
+""I don't know what the decision would have been--that's a hypothetical,"" said Jeb.
+
+Obviously, Jeb Bush doesn’t want to get painted into a corner where he says he would not have invaded Iraq based on what we know today, that Saddam didn’t have illegal weapons. If he uttered those words, there would be thousands of stories about how he’s renouncing his brother’s legacy, trying to prove his independence, and on and on.
+
+What bothers me, though, is the way the media are clobbering Bush not for the substance of his answer, but on linguistic grounds. What happens next—you know the pattern—is that the noise gets so loud that everyone—left, right and center—has to deal with it. So rather than having a debate about Iraq and foreign policy and where Bush stands today, we’re having a shoutfest about semantics. It's the media as parsing police.
+
+So let’s return to the substance:
+
+When Megyn followed up by asking if the decision was a mistake, Jeb talked about faulty intelligence and the lack of early focus on security in Iraq: “By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush.”
+
+No daylight, nothing to see here.
+
+The first indication that Jeb felt the need to clarify came on CNN’s “New Day,” where conservative commentator Ana Navarro, a surrogate for Bush, said she’d been in touch with him by email. “I said hey, I am a little confused by this answer, so I am wondering did you mishear the question, and he said yes,” Navarro explained. She also opined that “people are salivating to see Jeb throw his brother under the bus.”
+
+A less generous interpretation came from Laura Ingraham, the Fox News contributor, on her radio show: “You can’t still think that going into Iraq, now, as a sane human being, was the right thing to do. If you do, there has to be something wrong with you,"" she said.
+
+And it leads to mockery, such as this Roger Simon column in Politico on how Jeb is supposed to be the smart one in the family. The headline: “Was Jeb dropped on head as a child?”
+
+It’s safe to say this issue will not quietly fade away. It’s a version of  the larger problem Jeb faces, however unfairly, because of his last name: Is the country ready to hand the White House to a third member of the Bush family in a quarter century? And Iraq becomes a kind of shorthand for that, the most controversial and consequential decision of George W.’s presidency, whose aftershocks are still being felt today.
+
+What was also fascinating, as Jeb defended his stance on a path to legalization for immigrants who broke the law, was this comment: “Do you want people to just bend with the wind, to mirror people's sentiment? Whoever is in front of you? 'Oh, yes, I used to be for that but now I'm for this.' Is that the way we want to elect presidents?”
+
+That’s his way of saying he’s going to run the campaign he wants and he’s not going to unduly pander to the right wing, that voters who don’t agree with him on Common Core or immigration can look elsewhere.
+
+At the same time, Bush doesn’t speak in punchy sound bites, which could hurt him, and he tends toward the low key, which can translate as a lack of passion.
+
+But he did throw down the gauntlet here: “I've had 20 press gaggles. I don't have, you know, I don't do town hall meetings. Don't screen the questions. Don't have a protective bubble like Mrs. Clinton does. Don't have town hall meetings or roundtable discussions where I pick who gets to come and I screen the questions and the press has to behave a certain way.”
+
+Jeb, who hasn’t officially declared, had not given an interview in two months until he sat down with Megyn Kelly. If he does a few more, does that put pressure on the woman who also carries some baggage because of her last name?
+
+Click for more from Media Buzz
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+3051,Political polarization is what paralyzes us - The Boston Globe,"Neil Gabler has discounted political polarization as the cause of congressional inaction (“Is America too old to be bold?”). In fact, both parties have discovered that driving their bases to the poles is key to winning elections. Party strategists have discovered that it is much easier and cheaper to motivate the base than it is to convince centrists and the undecided.
+
+This electoral strategy leads to extreme rhetoric and constant attacks on the other party in a concerted effort to produce outrage among committed believers.
+
+It is no surprise that it has also produced political gridlock.",REAL
+7694,Vertical Pools Help Heal Wounded Combat Veterans Seeks Positive Doers To Help Make It Happen,"A combat veteran with PTSD wasn’t allowed to fly with her service dog. So she sued. ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Vertical Pools Help Heal Wounded Combat Veterans Seeks Positive Doers To Help Make It Happen By VNN on October 31, 2016 The Vertical Pool was inspired by the anticipated need of the returning wounded, and veterans of all past conflicts, who have limited options for recovery and healing at home. Even if they’re within an hour of a VA hospital, it can be a challenge to get there without assistance. A heated, sanitized, filtered, compact pool in the back yard, house, garage, means convenient, private, daily immersions for exercise, traction, rehabilitation, and recovery. These pools should be available to veterans without convoluted forms and wait times. Simply a doctor’s prescription should put them on a list for immediate consideration. VetPools.org (an effort to raise funds to donate these pools to vets) was formed with the specific objective of helping improve upon the methods and manners by which America receives and treats her returning wounded. The most formidable military force in the world deserves a commensurate comprehensive recovery, reintegration program focused on body, mind, and spirit for those who require assistance. The purpose of this message is to inform interested and connected parties of the desire to hand this product and mission off to veterans who would then become The Vertical Pool LLC and VetPools.org . They could be instrumental in healing themselves and their fellow veterans, as well as civilian America from the physically challenged to the physically fit. Interestingly, while initially intended for veterans, the retail market has turned out to be women. As only one person, innovator/owner of The Vertical Pool and founder/director of VetPools.org , I cannot fulfill this objective alone. The R&D, pool product, and non-profit are all paid for in full, no debt or encumbrances. This “on-demand” pool can be manufactured as needed without excessive, costly inventory and/or storage space. I do not advertise this product because one person cannot build, deliver, and install more than 5 pools in two months. Career options with this DME device and non-profit include owning, manufacturing, marketing, selling, donating, fund-raising, case managing, delivering, installing, and teaching The Vertical Pool’s diverse functions and benefits. This pool is efficient in energy, water, and space; critical qualities in this, the 21st century. A group or collective of 3 to 7 individuals might be prudent to start the program. I would remain teacher, mentor, and guide for years to come while others slip into the ownership of this product and its sister non-profit organization. Please share this idea with any and all contacts who might have the connections to give some veterans a lead to a worthy endeavor and career. To get involved contact; Director, Peter G. Hold",FAKE
+2980,Loretta Lynch joins Obama in prodding Senate over NSA,"Lynch warned that inaction from the Senate would cause ""a serious lapse"" in the government's ability to protect Americans.
+
+A day earlier, Obama urged Congress ""to work through this recess and identify a way to get this done.""
+
+""This needs to get done,"" he said during an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
+
+The National Security Agency's bulk metadata collection program, which has allowed the NSA to collect and store phone data on millions of Americans, will sunset on Monday unless Congress passes legislation by midnight on Sunday.
+
+Obama and Lynch have endorsed the USA Freedom Act, the bill to make changes to the Patriot Act that overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives but came three votes shy of passage in the Senate this weekend. Obama said Tuesday that bill ""strikes an appropriate balance; our intelligence communities are confident that they can work with the authorities that are provided in that act."" Under that plan, phone companies would store their customers' metadata and the NSA would need to obtain a specific, targeted warrant to get a customer's data. His comments came after the Senate failed in a rare overnight session this weekend to pass the USA Freedom Act or a short-term extension of the Patriot Act's expiring provisions as reform opponents and the staunchest anti-surveillance advocates stood firm on their positions. The Senate now stands in recess until next Sunday, though Senate dealmakers are working this week to find a way to keep the programs from lapsing. Obama pressed the Senate to work through the recess to find ""a way to get this done."" ""The House of Representatives did its work,"" Obama said. ""The Senate did not act.""",REAL
+7596,Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied,"Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied   Source: Wall street on parade 
+Disgraced Former Congressman Anthony Weiner and His Wife, Longtime Hillary Clinton Aide, Huma Abedin 
+Current and former FBI officials have launched a media counter-offensive to engage head to head with the Clinton media machine and to throw off the shackles the Loretta Lynch Justice Department has used to stymie their multiple investigations into the Clinton pay-to-play network. 
+Over the past weekend, former FBI Assistant Director and current CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Tom Fuentes told viewers that “the FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation.” He said he had received this information from “senior officials” at the FBI, “several of them, in and out of the Bureau.” (See video clip from CNN below.) 
+That information was further supported by an in-depth article last evening in the Wall Street Journal by Devlin Barrett. According to Barrett, the “probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity.” Barrett’s article suggests that the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, has attempted to circumvent the investigation. The new revelations lead to the appearance of wrongdoing on the part of U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch for secretly meeting with Bill Clinton on her plane on the tarmac of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on the evening of June 28 of this year. Not only was Bill Clinton’s wife under an FBI investigation at the time over her use of a private email server in the basement of her New York home over which Top Secret material was transmitted while she was Secretary of State but his own charitable foundation was also under investigation, a fact that was unknown at the time to the public and the media. 
+The reports leaking out of the FBI over the weekend came on the heels of FBI Director James Comey sending a letter to members of Congress on Friday acknowledging that the investigation into the Hillary Clinton email server was not closed as he had previously testified to Congress, but had been reopened as a result of “pertinent” emails turning up. According to multiple media sources, those emails were found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide, Huma Abedin. 
+Weiner was forced to resign from Congress in 2011 over a sexting scandal with more sexting scandals to follow . Early this month, on October 3, the FBI raided Weiner’s apartment in New York with a search warrant in hand and seized multiple electronic devices. At least one of those devices had been used by both Weiner and Abedin to send email messages. The search warrant had been obtained following a detailed report that had appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper in the U.K. in September, showing sordid, sexual emails that Weiner had allegedly sent to a 15-year old girl in North Carolina. According to the content of the published emails, Weiner was aware that the girl was underage.",FAKE
+10079,Comment on Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside by Toby,"  Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside By VNN on October 31, 2016 The newly opened FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server marks ""a potential Constitutional crisis"" for the country. 
+Chicago Tribune 
+Has America become so numb by the decades of lies and cynicism oozing from Clinton Inc. that it could elect Hillary Clinton as president, even after Friday’s FBI announcement that it had reopened an investigation of her emails while secretary of state? 
+We’ll find out soon enough. 
+It’s obvious the American political system is breaking down. It’s been crumbling for some time now, and the establishment elite know it and they’re properly frightened. Donald Trump , the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect. 
+FBI director James Comey ‘s announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious. 
+This can’t be about pervert Anthony Weiner and his reported desire for a teenage girl. But it can be about the laptop of Weiner’s wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin , and emails between her and Hillary. It comes after the FBI investigation in which Comey concluded Clinton had lied and been “reckless” with national secrets, but said he could not recommend prosecution. 
+So what should the Democrats do now? 
+
+If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process: 
+They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place. 
+Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea. 
+Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign boss John Podesta . Now WikiLeaks, no longer a neutral player but an active anti-Clinton agency, plans to release another 15,000 emails. 
+What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands. 
+The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton’s political action committee — should begin demanding it. 
+But what will Hillary do? 
+She’ll stick and ride this out and turn her anger toward Comey. For Hillary and Bill Clinton, it has always been about power, about the Clinton Restoration and protecting fortunes already made by selling nothing but political influence. 
+She’ll remind the nation that she’s a woman and that Donald Trump said terrible things about women. If there is another notorious Trump video to be leaked, the Clintons should probably leak it now. Then her allies in media can talk about misogyny and sexual politics and the headlines can be all about Trump as the boor he is and Hillary as champion of female victims, which she has never been. 
+Remember that Bill Clinton leveraged the “Year of the Woman.” Then he preyed on women in the White House and Hillary protected him. But the political left — most particularly the women of the left — defended him because he promised to protect abortion rights and their other agendas. 
+If you take a step back from tribal politics, you’ll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She’d never be hired. 
+As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to the American people. She couldn’t remember details dozens of times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said they talked about was golf and the grandkids. 
+And there was no prosecution of Hillary. 
+That isn’t merely wrong and unethical. It is poisonous. 
+And during this presidential campaign, Americans were confronted with a two-tiered system of federal justice: one for standards for the Clintons and one for the peasants. 
+I’ve always figured that, as secretary of state, Clinton kept her home-brew email server — from which foreign intelligence agencies could hack top secret information — so she could shield the influence peddling that helped make the Clintons several fortunes. 
+The Clintons weren’t skilled merchants. They weren’t traders or manufacturers. The Clintons never produced anything tangible. They had no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions of dollars. FBI’s Comey acted out of ‘obligation’ to lawmakers, fear of leak to media 
+All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used our federal government to leverage it. 
+If a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about the candidates, then we’ll learn plenty about ourselves in the coming days, won’t we? 
+Listen to the Chicago Way podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin. Guests are Tribune cartoonist Scott Stantis and former White House Chief of Staff William Daley: www.chicagotribune.com/kasspod",FAKE
+8689,Hezbollah’s Candidate Becomes Lebanese President After Sunni Compromise,"Hezbollah’s Candidate Becomes Lebanese President After Sunni Compromise Posted on Nov 1, 2016 
+By Juan Cole / Informed Comment 
+Lebanon finally has a president, Michel Aoun . In accordance with the country’s national pact, he is a Maronite Christian (a Catholic uniate church), and happens to be a former general. The US and Israel won’t be pleased that he is a strong ally of the Shiite Hizbullah party-militia and a backer of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. (Most Levantine Christians are either neutral or pro-Assad; virtually none support the Syrian rebels, now mainly fundamentalists). 
+Well, Americans who are eager for their own presidential election to be over with should imagine what it would be like for the contest to go on another 2.5 years before it was resolved. That’s what Lebanese have had to put up with. Of course, it has a parliamentary form of government, so most power is anyway in the hands of the prime minister and the cabinet. But still and all, not being able to elect a president has been a black mark on the parliament. The parliament, which hasn’t been able to supply the Lebanese with water, electricity or garbage collection, and which has twice extended its term of service since 2013, so that it is well past its sell-by date, could hardly take more black marks. 
+Lebanon has been deeply polarized since 2004, when it was occupied by thousands of Syrian troops who had originally come during the civil war of 1975-1989. Syria liked the then president, and wanted to see his term extended for three years without a new election, which contravened the constitution. Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri angrily resigned over this Syrian pressure, and then, it is likely, the Syrian secret police or a Lebanese client of same, blew Hariri up on 14 February 2005. 
+Maronite Christians and Sunni Arabs (Hariri was Sunni) then mobilized in vast crowds to demand that Syria withdraw from Lebanon beginning March 14 (which became their name). They were countered by the Shiite Hizbullah, which had demonstrated in favor of Syria on March 8. But in the end Syria couldn’t stay, and withdrew its troops. 
+In a great irony, one of the demands of March 14 was that Gen. Michel Aoun be allowed to return to Lebanon, which he did. But after a while he left the coalition and allied instead with Hizbullah and Syria. 
+Advertisement Square, Site wide 
+Politics in Lebanon is kaleidoscopic. 
+In the past nearly two and a half years, Hizbullah has been trying to get Aoun elected. But the election of the president is by parliament and it needs a 2/3s majority to prevail. Anti-Hizbullah forces just stayed away from scheduled votes and denied the chamber a quorum. There are 128 members of parliament ordinarily, but one resigned last year and so there are only 127 (since no new parliamentary elections have been held since 2013). On Monday, Aoun fell short of the required 86 votes for a 2/3s majority on the first ballot. After that, the candidate could be elected with a simple majority. The next two votes were voided because they turned up 128 ballots, meaning someone voted twice. On the fourth ballot the box was brought in the center of the parliamentary chamber and a close eye was kept on it, so only 127 votes were cast. Aoun received well over the required majority at that point, with 83 votes. Another 36 protest votes were case blank, and 7 were voided because of unspecified irregularities. 
+Aoun succeeded because he was not boycotted by the Future Bloc of Saudi-backed Sunni politician Saad Hariri (son of the slain former PM). Hariri had had his own candidate, Sleiman Frangieh, who, however, is just as pro-Syrian as Aoun. 
+Hariri used to be fabulously wealthy (his father had worked in Saudi Arabia and built the family fortune there), but the rumors are that his wealth is largely gone. He has had trouble paying his employees, from all accounts. Saudi Arabia considers Lebanon to be too pro-Iranian, and cut it off from a $3 bn grant, and Hariri had depended deeply on Saudi backing. He faces opposition in his own party. So some analysts (see the al-Jazeera clip below) think that Hariri has been so weakened that he finally agreed to let Aoun become president. 
+Aoun’s platform is strengthening the Lebanese army to fight ISIL and al-Qaeda and doing something about the burden of 1.5 million Syrian refugees (Lebanon is only a country of 4 million). 
+His election is a win for Hizbullah, his long-time ally, but since Hariri joined in backing him, it isn’t really a loss for the Sunni Arabs of Lebanon, who may be making their peace with the likelihood that the al-Assad regime will survive in some form. Lebanon’s Sunnis had strongly supported the Syrian revolution of 2011 and after, and tend to be favorable toward the remnants of the Free Syrian Army. But many of them have to be concerned about the influence among the rebels of an al-Qaeda-linked group, the Levantine Conquest Front, and the continued challenge of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). Both al-Qaeda and Daesh had footholds in Syrian villages along the Lebanese border. 
+Aoun says his first order of business is to have parliament change the country’s unwieldy electoral law, which distributes seats on a sectarian basis (and on the basis of an outdated set of statistics going back in some cases to the 1930 census). 
+Lebanon held successful municipal elections last spring. But most Lebanese are not holding their breath that governmental gridlock will end any time soon. And with Depression-style unemployment, the country has other problems than the political ones. TAGS:",FAKE
+9590,Cher Finally Cracks Time Travel,"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] Cher Finally Cracks Time Travel October 28, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS Share 0 Add Comment 
+AFTER over 27 years of research into quantum mechanics and temporal displacement technology, pop icon Cher has finally found a way to turn back time, WWN can exclusively reveal. 
+Cher, mostly aged 70, made the stunning announcement at a press conference held outside her particle physics collider facility in Miami, while on break from her busy schedule of Las Vegas residency shows and Einstein-Rosen bridge construction. 
+The legendary singer announced that as of 3:47am eastern time, the barrier separating humankind from the ability to journey backwards through the clouds of time, to meddle with the past and perhaps find a way to take back terrible things said to a loved one in a moment of anger, undoing any pain and hurt caused in the process. 
+“It’s time travel, baby, please listen,” said Cher, surrounded by a complex network of computers and shit. 
+“I’m going to be the first, baby, to travel through time, baby, please listen. Ever since the late 80s, baby, I’ve been wanting to turn back the clock, and after all these years, baby, you have to listen, I’ve found the key to stepping into a vortex travelling at greater than the speed of light, vanishing in front of your eyes but reappearing instantaneously at a pre-determined point in the pa-ah-ast”. 
+The singer gave a quick rendition of the Shoop Shoop Song and then dematerialised.",FAKE
+6721,"What Are The Bulges Under Your Green Pantsuit, Hillary?","What the heck are those bulges underneath that bright green pant suit you are wearing Hillary? You know the one you wore when you couldn’t walk up the steps without assistance back in February? The suit that is in the viral photo that adds to the speculation that not all is well with your health? 
+Via TruthAndAction 
+
+A private fundraiser was held at the house of Lisa and Joseph Rice in Charleston, SC. A picture of Hillary needing strong-armed assistance to walk up several steps has given more visual evidence that something is seriously wrong with Hillary.
+Scroll Down For Video Evidence Below! Her health appears to be a very real issue, with brain glitches that result in confused speech and disconnected thoughts, the inability to walk unassisted at times, and her chronic cough. However, Hillary will become president, even if it kills her, and it appears with her health issues becoming less easy to hide from the public, it will kill her.
+Though her doctor, Dr. Bardack, gave her a clean bill of health back on July 28, 2015 in a letter stating she was fit to run for president, her behavior suggests otherwise. A neurologist, viewing the recent health issues displayed by Hillary, such as her exceptionally long bathroom break during the debate, suggests that Clinton is demonstrating signs of post-concussion syndrome. This disorder can “severely impact her cognitive abilities”
+Check out the video that shows the bulges on her back under that bright green pantsuit on the next page. Some suggest that it is a life saving vest. What do you think? Is Hillary wearing a flack jacket under her pantsuit or is there something else that she hiding from the world? As more evidence accumulates, from brain glitches to extraordinarily long bathroom breaks, the DNC will eventually have to address her health issues one would think.
+Now there is the mystery of the bulge under the green jacket she was wearing when she was unable to walk up the steps at a North Carolina fundraiser. As a reminder, Hillary suffered from blood clots in 2012. Could this bulge under her jacket be a LifeVest Wearable Defibrillator?
+In 2012, Hillary suffered from a “transverse sinus thrombosis [blood clot] is a rare condition of a clot forming in the venous sinus cavities surrounding the brain,” Kassicieh told Breitbart, that resulted after Hillary’s fall.
+These venous sinuses drain blood out of the brain. The [injury] incidence is only about 3 per 1,000,000 adults. The transverse sinus is less commonly affected than the main sagittal venous sinus. The cause of transverse sinus clots is not well understood although trauma and dehydration have been described as risk factors. Mrs. Clinton suffered from both.
+If her seizure like episodes are tied to an impaired heart, than the bulges could be the LifeVest.
+Here’s a video of the fundraiser event in the Rices’ home. Pay special attention to Hillary’s back in the beginning of the video: 
+Did you notice those strange bulges on her upper back, although she was wearing a roomy coat-jacket?
+Here’s a screenshot from the video, with painted red arrows pointing to the bulges:
+
+Below are more (cropped) screenshots I took from the video. I highlighted the bulges with yellow arrows and circles:
+
+Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit thinks Hillary’s bulges are from a defibrillator vest.
+From the website Zoll.LifeVest :
+What Is the LifeVest Wearable Defibrillator?
+The LifeVest wearable defibrillator is a treatment option for sudden cardiac arrest that offers patients advanced protection and monitoring as well as improved quality of life.
+The LifeVest is the first wearable defibrillator . Unlike an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), the LifeVest is worn outside the body rather than implanted in the chest. This device continuously monitors the patient’s heart with dry, non-adhesive sensing electrodes to detect life-threatening abnormal heart rhythms. If a life-threatening rhythm is detected, the device alerts the patient prior to delivering a treatment shock, and thus allows a conscious patient to delay the treatment shock. If the patient becomes unconscious, the device releases a Blue™ gel over the therapy electrodes and delivers an electrical shock to restore normal rhythm.
+Those strange bulges on her back add to the many indicators of Hillary Clinton’s ill health (see links below) which the mainstream media continue to dismiss . Presidential candidates are required by law to release their medical records. It is high time for Hillary to do so.
+Pause the video at 13 seconds and check out the bulge.
+",FAKE
+6295,"Like a good little sharia-compliant female, Prince Charles’ wife Camilla removes her shoes to enter a mosque in Abu Dhabi, but the Prince of Wales keeps his shoes on","BNI Store Nov 6 2016 Like a good little sharia-compliant female, Prince Charles’ wife Camilla removes her shoes to enter a mosque in Abu Dhabi, but the Prince of Wales keeps his shoes on The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall have visited the spectacular Sheikh Zaved Grand Mosque to promote religious tolerance. ( HAH! ) UK Daily Mail Charles was dressed in a linen suit and striped tie, while Camilla wore a blue headscarf, long jacket and trousers. Visitors to the mosque must remove their footwear, BUT Charles walked round in black shoes while his wife went barefoot with her head covered. The mosque was established in 2008 and sits at the entrance to Abu Dhabi City Island. It aims to work with research centres and religious, educational and cultural institutions within the United Arab Emirates and across the world.",FAKE
+4881,The phantom earpiece phenomenon: Why presidential candidates are consistently accused of cheating during debates,"The banner headline on the Drudge Report the morning after Wednesday’s presidential forum screamed “HILLARY AND THE EAR PEARL.” The story it linked to was from Infowars.com, the website of radio host Alex Jones, a crazy person who believes the government has a special tornado weapon and used it to attack Oklahoma in 2013. Citing a tweet from actor and right-wing troll James Woods, Infowars wondered if Clinton had been “wearing an earpiece during last night’s presidential forum,” as indicated by pictures that “appeared to show Hillary with some kind of flesh-colored device embedded inside her ear.”
+
+So was it a flesh-colored earpiece as Infowars insisted? Or was it a pearl-colored earpiece as Drudge claimed? No one can say, but the ad hoc investigative group of conspiracy theorists and crackpot celebrities seems pretty convinced that Hillary Clinton had someone secretly feeding answers into her ear during the forum. The “evidence” was convincing enough that Donald Trump’s son — the elephant-butchering one, not the off-Broadway “American Psycho” one — tweeted out a link to the Infowars story.
+
+So congratulations, everyone: we’ve officially reached the “Presidential Candidate Cheats Via Secret Radio Technology” stage of the 2016 election. It’s arrived a bit early this year, but this conspiratorial story line has become a recurring fixture of presidential campaigns thanks to the internet’s inexhaustible capacity to prey on gullibility and partisan reflexes.
+
+The “secret earpiece” story made its first big splash in the latter stages of the 2004 presidential election, when blogger Joseph Cannon noticed an odd bulge in the back of George W. Bush’s suit jacket during an early October debate. “Bush seemed to have a wire, or an odd protrusion of some sort, running down his back,” Cannon wrote. “Apparently, Fearless Leader used an earpiece during the confrontation.”
+
+The speculative accusation might have remained confined to the liberal blogosphere had it not been for the efforts of the website you’re reading at this moment, Salon.com, which published half-skeptical write-ups of the circumstantial evidence surrounding the Bush “wire” and contacted NASA scientists for image analysis of the “Bush bulge.” From Salon, the story jumped to The Washington Post and The New York Times, which managed to obtain derisive denials from Bush campaign staffers. The “bulge” even became the centerpiece of a David Letterman riff. Fervent speculation aside, no direct evidence was ever produced indicating that Bush was wired during his debate with John Kerry. After Bush won re-election a month later, the issue receded back into the shaded corners of the internet.
+
+Almost exactly four years later, as a young Democratic senator from Illinois took to the debate stage, it was the conservative blogosphere that found itself on secret earpiece patrol. During the Oct. 7, 2008, presidential debate, blogger Ann Althouse wrote that she had “noticed that Obama was wearing an earpiece” and posted a photo of the alleged device in Barack Obama’s ear. She quickly reconsidered her analysis and recognized that she was looking at light reflecting off Obama’s ear but left open the possibility that a secret earpiece might still exist: “Just because the thing I saw wasn’t there doesn’t mean there wasn’t something there that I didn’t see.”
+
+The 2012 election was largely free of any prominent earpiece speculation, though some chain emails bounced around, accusing Obama of wearing an earpiece and having a suspicious Bush-like suit bulge. That cycle’s primary example of overwrought “he’s a cheater” attacks were directed at Republican contender Mitt Romney, whom liberal bloggers accused of consulting crib notes during the first debate with Obama (Romney was actually holding a handkerchief). The relative lack of earpiece mania in 2012 has been more than compensated for in 2016, with this ridiculous story about Hillary Clinton’s clandestine listening device featured prominently on one of the world’s most heavily trafficked political websites and endorsed by the son of the Republican nominee. Other Clinton-related conspiracies have proved to be remarkably persistent this cycle (her allegedly failing health being the most prominent among them). So there’s an excellent chance that this one will stick around, too. The question that arises from all this is why the “earpiece” phenomenon keeps popping up election after election, in defiance of consistent debunking and a lack of evidence to support the allegations. “These sorts of beliefs are dependent on if you have a conspiracy worldview, and then on your partisanship,” said Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science at the University of Miami who’s written extensively about political conspiracy theories. “People point fingers at the other side.” Basically, if you’re already predisposed to believe that a candidate from the other party is going to cheat, then you’re more likely to take at face value an allegation that he or she cheated during a debate. When someone presents you with grainy screen captures of George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton and claims that they show telecommunications equipment hidden on their bodies, your partisanship enables you to bridge the sizable gap between the poor evidence and the firm conclusion that someone offstage was whispering into the candidate’s ear. These cheating allegations tend to take the form of a secret earpiece simply because that’s really the only way someone participating in a nationally televised presidential debate could conceivably cheat. “It’s just like when Hillary Clinton goes on [“Jimmy Kimmel Live”] and opens the pickle jar,” Uscinski explained, referring to a humorous feat of strength that Clinton performed to mock questions about her health and that conspiratorial conservatives claimed was rigged. “The only way she could have cheated in that test . . .  was to have a preopened pickle jar. It’s sort of obvious that if people are going to be predisposed to thinking that cheating was taking place, that would be the method in which it would be done.” I don’t know whether Matt Drudge and Donald Trump Jr. actually believe that Clinton was wired up during this week’s president forum, but they’re nonetheless legitimizing that idea in the minds of people who are already apt to believe it.",REAL
+7461,At least Tesco are giving shoppers a bit of warning this year,"Next Swipe left/right At least Tesco are giving shoppers a bit of warning this year It’s November, which can mean only one thing – incessant Christmas reminders for the next two months. At least Tesco are giving shoppers a bit of a heads up this time…",FAKE
+4590,"Trump Gives Victory Speech, Liberals Rediscover Appeal of Limited Government","President-Elect Donald Trump preached national unity and vowed to ""reclaim our country's destiny,"" in his victory speech, which was delivered around 3:00 a.m. in New York City. Rival candidate Hillary Clinton had already called Trump to concede, he told the crowd.
+
+""She fought very hard,"" he said. ""Hillary has worked very long and hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely.""
+
+Trump then turned to the business of healing the vast political divide. He promised to be a president for all Americans.
+
+""For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I'm reaching out to you for your guidance and your help, so that we can work together and unify our great country,"" he said.
+
+The president-elect claimed to have a ""great"" economic plan, though he offered no details. He closed by thanking his most vocal supporters—his family, Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Jeff Sessions, Ben Carson, and others—and assuring the American people that ""you'll be so proud of your president"" by the time his reign comes to an end.
+
+Trump's election has sent shockwaves: the markets are in free-fall, Democratic voters are petrified, and the media has no idea what just happened.
+
+Libertarians should be girding themselves for four years of the federal government trampling their freedoms—but of course, we've come to expect that regardless. As I wrote on Facebook earlier tonight, it's perhaps moments like this where the case for the libertarian vision of a constrained government is most powerful:
+
+I'm watching MSNBC as I write this, and I just heard Lawrence O'Donnell say the following:
+
+That didn't take long: the left is interested in limited government again. Would have been nice to have them with us during Obama's eight years in office, but we'll take what we can get, I guess.",REAL
+2405,Senate GOP prepared to replace Obamacare subsidies,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+5103,No Brotherly Love in Philly: Email Scandal Threatens to Mar DNC,"The Democratic National Committee is offering its ""deep and sincere apology"" to Bernie Sanders, his supporters and the entire party for what it calls ""the inexcusable remarks made over email.""
+
+Incoming interim party leader Donna Brazile and six other officials said the emails ""do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process.""
+
+It wasn't signed by the outgoing DNC head, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who announced Monday that she will not gavel in her party's national convention.
+
+""I have decided that in the interest of making sure that we can start the Democratic convention on a high note that I am not going to gavel in the convention,"" Wasserman Schultz told the Sun Sentinel of Ft. Lauderdale, according to The Associated Press.
+
+In the wake of an email scandal, Wasserman Schultz said Sunday that she will resign her post as chairwoman of the DNC after the Democratic National Convention. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, said it was ""her decision"" to step down.
+
+Clinton is all set to accept the Democratic Party's nomination for president. She will be the first woman ever to rise to such a position.
+
+But that story is taking a backseat to the controversy brewing inside the Democratic Party.
+
+Thousands of leaked emails show a supposedly impartial DNC working to secure the nomination for Clinton, even trying to paint the Jewish Bernie Sanders as an atheist to voters in the South.
+
+The scandal comes as no surprise to Sanders' supporters who see Clinton as too establishment and cozy with Wall Street.
+
+""I think the Clinton people stole it. The corruption has become more well-known with the WikiLeaks and such,"" claimed one Sanders supporter.
+
+Meanwhile, Clinton has hired Wasserman Schultz to be a part of her campaign, according to Townhall.com. The Democratic presidential candidate sent an email to supporters, announcing Wasserman Schultz would become the ""honorary chair"" of the 50-state program to make sure Democrats win at the polls across the country.
+
+Opponents of the Florida congresswoman heckled her at a breakfast of state delegates Monday, shouting, ""Shame!"" and ""You're ruining our democracy!""
+
+Supporters of Sanders displayed paper signs that said ""E-mails"" on one side and ""Thanks for the 'help' Debbie,"" on the other.
+
+Wasserman Schultz told the crowd during the uproar that ""we have to make sure that we move together in a unified way.""
+
+The Hill.com reports that ""allies"" of Clinton believe Wasserman Schultz should not even stay on as DNC chairwoman during the convention. The news outlet says one ally referred to what happened at the Florida breakfast as a reason.
+
+""It's causing the distraction no one wanted at the convention,"" one Clinton ally said, according to The Hill.
+
+Wasserman Schultz's resignation after the convention, however, doesn't mean the end of the disunity problems. Liberals unhappy with Clinton's vice presidential pick, Sen. Tim Kaine, are looking to cause a stir.
+
+""There's talk about walking out of the vice presidential or presidential acceptance speech. There's talk about total silence, remaining seated, turning backs,"" Normon Solomon, with the Bernie Delegates Network, said.
+
+Even with this drama, the reality is Clinton will be the nominee. She then faces the challenge of reaching out to disgruntled progressives, while striking a more moderate tone for the General Election.
+
+""It has been the Democratic Party's history that once the nominee is established and we know who that's going to be and we rally the troops and folks tend to come inside the tent. Of course, there are those who are not coming in the tent and they were never coming in the tent and that's okay,"" Leah Daughtry, CEO of the DNC, said.
+
+All eyes will be on Sanders to see what he says to delegates Monday evening.
+
+Meanwhile, Kaine will be facing the biggest speech of his career.
+
+Liberals aren't happy he's the vice presidential choice and conservatives think he's too liberal, which leads many Democrats to believe he's just right.
+
+The reality about Kaine is that once people know him, they tend to like him - even if they disagree with him.  And he's never lost an election.
+
+""I am so excited. I've known Tim Kaine for many years and so I know his heart. I know his heart and his commitment,"" reflected Alexis Herman, former secretary of labor.
+
+Coming off one of the biggest days of his life Sen. Kaine walked through his Richmond neighborhood with his wife Anne to Saint Elizabeth Catholic Church. It's where the couple has worshipped for three decades.
+
+Inside, Kaine got emotional at times and even sang a solo in the choir. Although he has worked to reduce abortions, he's come under fire for his support of pro-choice policies.
+
+But at the DNC his position is just right.
+
+""He's a committed Catholic, a social justice Catholic. He takes that very seriously. His work in politics is his outreach,"" Daughtry said.
+
+Several hundred Democrats followed Kaine's example by gathering in Philadelphia at an interfaith service Sunday.
+
+Rev. James Forbes of the Riverside Church says this week Americans will see a vastly different vision for the future.
+
+""I would wish that the world gets a chance to see two major options - an option that they remember from people who are angry, who are afraid -- versus a group that's willing to risk possibilities that could probably do it together, but that the prospect of our working together is even brighter,"" Forbes told CBN News.
+
+So far, it's been a mixed bag but the week is young.",REAL
+3409,Conservatives: SCOTUS Pick More Important Than Senate Majority,"Obama faces a Republican leadership that appears united in opposing his decision to fill the seat as well as a crop of Republicans facing re-election who have lined up behind their leaders.
+
+Those vulnerable GOP senators are crucial to any White House strategy for filling the seat held by the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Democrats would need 14 defections from GOP ranks to break a filibuster and confirm a nominee. So far, no GOP senator has indicated he or she is ready to vote for an Obama nominee.
+
+The White House said Friday that Obama will move ahead. Obama on Thursday called key Senate leaders, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, part of the customary consultation once considered essential to laying the groundwork for a warm reception for an eventual nominee.
+
+But the president did not appear to make much headway with the GOP leaders. Hours after the call, an op-ed penned by McConnell and Grassley was published in The Washington Post restating their case for why Obama should leave the job of naming a nominee to the next president.
+
+""It is today the American people, rather than a lame-duck president whose priorities and policies they just rejected in the most-recent national election, who should be afforded the opportunity to replace Justice Scalia,"" McConnell and Grassley wrote.
+
+Grassley's name on the piece signaled the Iowa chairman is now firmly in line with leadership. Earlier in the week, the chairman had suggested he might be open to holding hearings on an Obama nominee, a statement that buoyed Obama and his allies and confused the GOP message.
+
+If Obama has any hope of winning, he'll need more than a muddled message.
+
+Obama's hopes rest first on persuading Grassley to hold hearings in his committee. Then McConnell would have to agree to a vote by the full Senate, where the president would need 60 votes to break a filibuster.
+
+The Hill notes vulnerable GOP senators in competitive re-election races are feeling the heat over the issue, including New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, whom the Concord Monitor took to task for her ""knee-jerk fashion” call for post-election confirmation hearings.
+
+ 
+
+ ""Certainly there’s nervousness on the part of Republicans about what an absolute refusal to hold any hearings might do to GOP candidates in swing states,"" John Ullyot, a GOP aide and former senior Senate aide, tells The Hill.
+
+ 
+
+ ""If Republicans hold hearings, that takes a lot of the pressure off their candidates in swing states who are in some cases in tough races.""
+
+ 
+
+ The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+ 
+
+ Related Stories:",REAL
+5335,Michael Moore Owes Me $4.99,"(128 fans) - Advertisement - 
+Michael Moore has made some terrific movies in the past, and Where to Invade Next may be the best of them, but I expected Trumpland to be (1) about Trump, (2) funny, (3) honest, (4) at least relatively free of jokes glorifying mass murder. I was wrong on all counts and would like my $4.99 back, Michael. 
+Moore's new movie is a film of him doing a stand-up comedy show about how wonderfully awesome Hillary Clinton is -- except that he mentions Trump a bit at the beginning and he's dead serious about Clinton being wonderfully awesome. 
+This film is a text book illustration of why rational arguments for lesser evilist voting do not work. Lesser evilists become self-delusionists. They identify with their lesser evil candidate and delude themselves into adoring the person. Moore is not pushing the ""Elect her and then hold her accountable"" stuff. He says we have a responsibility to ""support her"" and ""get behind her,"" and that if after two years -- yes, TWO YEARS -- she hasn't lived up to a platform he's fantasized for her, well then, never fear, because he, Michael Moore, will run a joke presidential campaign against her for the next two years (this from a guy who backed restricting the length of election campaigns in one of his better works). 
+Moore maintains that virtually all criticism of Hillary Clinton is nonsense. What do we think, he asks, that she asks how many millions of dollars you've put into the Clinton Foundation and then she agrees to bomb Yemen for you? Bwahahaha! Pretty funny. Except that Saudi Arabia put over $10 million into the Clinton Foundation, and while she was Secretary of State Boeing put in another $900,000, upon   reportedly made it her mission to get the planes sold to Saudi Arabia, despite legal restrictions -- the planes now dropping U.S.-made bombs on Yemen with U.S. guidance, U.S. refueling mid-air, U.S. protection at the United Nations, and U.S. cover in the form of pop-culture distraction and deception from entertainers like Michael Moore. 
+Standing before a giant Air Force missile and enormous photos of Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore claims that substantive criticism of Clinton can consist of only two things, which he dismisses in a flash: her vote for a war on Iraq and her coziness with Wall Street. He says nothing more about what that ""coziness"" consists of, and he claims that she's more or less apologized and learned her lesson on Iraq. 
+What? It wasn't one vote. It was numerous votes to start the war, fund it, and escalate it. It was the lies to get it going and keep it going. It's all the other wars before and since. She says President Obama was wrong not to launch missile strikes on Syria in 2013. She pushed hard for the overthrow of Qadaffi in 2011. She supported the coup government in Honduras in 2009. She has backed escalation and prolongation of war in Afghanistan. She skillfully promoted the White House justification for the war on Iraq. She does not hesitate to back the use of drones for targeted killing. She has consistently backed the military initiatives of Israel. She was not ashamed to laugh at the killing of Qadaffi. She has not hesitated to warn that she could obliterate Iran. She is eager to antagonize Russia. She helped facilitate a military coup in Ukraine. She has the financial support of the arms makers and many of their foreign customers. She waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states wise enough to donate to the Clinton Foundation. She supported President Bill Clinton's wars and the power of the president to make war without Congress. She has advocated for arming fighters in Syria and for a ""No Fly"" zone. She supported a surge in Iraq even before President Bush did. 
+That's just her war problem. What about her banking problem, prison problem, fracking problem, corporate trade problem, corporate healthcare problem, climate change problem, labor problem, Social Security problem, etc.? 
+Moore parts company from substantive critique in order to lament unproven rightwing claims that Hillary Clinton has murdered various people. ""I hope she did,"" screams Moore. ""That's who I want as Commander in Chief!"" Hee hee hee. - Advertisement - 
+Then Moore shamelessly pushes the myth that Hillary tried to create single-payer, or at least ""universal"" healthcare (whatever that is) in the 1990s. In fact, as I heard Paul Wellstone tell it, single-payer easily won the support of Clinton's focus group, but she buried it for her corporate pals and produced the phonebook-size monstrosity that was dead on arrival but reborn in another form years later as Obamacare. She killed single-payer then, has not supported it since, and does not propose it now. (Well, she does admit in private that it's the only thing that works, as her husband essentially blurts out in public.) But Moore claims that because we didn't create ""universal"" healthcare in the 1990s we all have the blood of millions on our hands, millions whom Hillary would have saved had we let her. 
+Moore openly fantasizes: what would it be like if Hillary Clinton is secretly progressive? Remember that Moore and many others did the exact same thing with Obama eight years ago. To prove Clinton's progressiveness Moore plays an audio clip of her giving a speech at age 22 in which she does not hint at any position on any issue whatsoever. 
+Mostly, however, Moore informs us that Hillary Clinton is female. He anticipates ""that glorious moment when the other gender has a chance to run this world and kick some righteous ass."" Now tell me please, dear world, if your ass is kicked by killers working for a female president will you feel better about it? How do you like Moore's inclusive comments throughout his performance: ""We're all Americans, right?"" 
+Moore's fantasy is that Clinton will dash off a giant pile of executive orders, just writing Congress out of the government -- executive orders doing things like releasing all nonviolent drug offenders from prison immediately (something the real Hillary Clinton would oppose in every way she could). 
+But when he runs for president, Moore says, he'll give everybody free drugs. - Advertisement - 
+I'll tell you the Clinton ad I'd like to see. She's standing over a stove holding an egg. ""This is your brain,"" she says solemnly, cracking it into the pan with a sizzle. ""This is your brain on partisanship."" hillary and bush",FAKE
+8449,The Russian media just loves the campaign to demonize Putin,"By wmw_admin on November 3, 2016 The Saker — The Saker.is Nov 3, 2016 Last May I wrote an article entitled Counter-propaganda, Russian style in which I explained that far from banning or censoring the western anti-Putin/anti-Russia campaign, the Russia media reported about it in meticulous detail. Half a year later, not only is this still true, but the level of coverage has now sharply increased. Check out this screenshot from the latest (and most watched) weekly news show: Putin bashing reported on Russian TV. Click to enlarge Remember that roughly 80% plus of the audience watching this are strong supporters of President Putin. You can imagine what they think when they see these reports. The fully understand that the West hates Putin so much precisely because Putin is one of them, a real Russian who cares for the interests of the Russian people. So when the West demonizes Putin, it is really all the Russian people who are demonized and their conclusion is simple: the West does not hate Putin, the West hates *us*. As for “Blame it on Putin” – it has now become a real joke. One of the main effects of this kind of demonization is that the Russian public fully understands that there is no way back. In practical terms, most Russians believe that even if Russia pulled out of Syria, stopped supporting the Donbass or even decided to hand Crimea to the Ukies, the West would still continue to demonize Russia and try to subdue her . Furthermore, the Russians remember that the only time when the West liked Russia was when she was run by the drunken Eltsin and his coterie of Jewish oligarchs who pillaged Russia and whose reign had consequences similar to what a major war would result in. Any other Russia is simply unacceptable to the AngloZionist Empire. Seen in this light, the alliance of the West with both the Nazis in Kiev and the “moderate terrorists” in the Middle-East makes sense. This is not fundamentally different from the European’s alliance with the Ottomans during the Crimean War or the USA supported Japan against Russia in 1905 (only to then end up fighting against Japan a few years later). As long as X is anti-Russian, the West support X. It’s that primitive and that stupid. The Ukronazi regime in Kiev has understood that it has only one “commodity” left which it can sell to the West: its rabid russophobia. And since they are desperate, they make desperate and, frankly, comical efforts. Check out the new symbol of the Ukie military intelligence service: The Ukies point a dagger at the heart of Russia. Click to enlarge I don’t think I have ever seen the Ukie inferiority complex better illustrated. The Latin sentence “ Sapiens Dominabitur Astra ” (“the wise will rule the stars”) is a nice touch as it combines a non-cyrillic (Latin) alphabet, a reference to European astrology in the Middle Ages and a typically Ukrainian (cosmic) megalomania. Yet another proof, if needed, that all the Ukraine is is an “anti-Russia”. Make no mistake though, there is absolutely no fear of the West in Russia. Most Russians believe that the Russian armed forces are more than enough to keep West in check. And they are quite correct. But there is this acute awareness that were in not for the Russian military, Russia would be treated just like Iraq. In the meantime, the Russia media is gleefully feeding the Russian public every bit of russophobic propaganda produced in the West. Future generations will probably study this period and wonder at the absolutely mind-boggling stupidity of a western propaganda machine which is apparently completely oblivious at the impact of its propaganda on a nuclear superpower. The Saker",FAKE
+4905,Donald Trump is doing worse with Latinos than the previous 6 Republican presidential candidates,"Last year, during the early days of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump boldly promised, “I’m gonna win the Hispanic vote.”
+
+The past few days have suggested he was wrong. After Trump’s immigration speech focused on deporting millions of unauthorized immigrants and building a wall at the US–Mexico border, several of his top Latino advisers resigned or threatened to resign. And a new, huge survey shows Trump isn’t just losing the Latino vote — he’s losing it by far more than the past few decades of Republican presidential candidates.
+
+The survey, by America’s Voice and Latino Decisions, found that if the election were held today, 70 percent of registered Latino voters would vote for Hillary Clinton. Only 19 percent would vote for Trump. About 2 percent said they won’t vote for president, 4 percent said they’d vote for someone else, and 4 percent said they’re undecided or don’t know.
+
+The findings are quite credible: The survey was huge, reaching 3,729 Latino registered voters online and by phone between August 19 and 30. It has a margin of error of 1.6 percentage points.
+
+The findings are incredibly damning for Trump. To put this in context, this means that the Republican Party and Trump have effectively eliminated any gains the party made with Latino voters under President George W. Bush, who supported immigration reform that would have allowed unauthorized immigrants to gain legal status.
+
+In 2000 and 2004, Bush got 35 and 40 percent of the Latino vote. That was up from the share of the vote that Ronald Reagan (35 and 37 percent), George H.W. Bush (30 and 25 percent), Bob Dole (21 percent) got. It was also higher than what John McCain (31 percent) and Mitt Romney (27 percent) got in subsequent elections.
+
+Trump’s numbers, then, are below the previous six Republicans to run for president. And they’re especially low at a time when the Latino population has grown — from 14.8 million people in 1980 to 55.2 million in 2014.
+
+As for why Trump has so little support among Latino voters, it’s basically what you'd expect: 70 percent said that Trump has made the Republican Party more hostile to Latinos. And 68 percent said that Trump’s views on immigrants and immigration made them less likely to vote for Republicans in November.
+
+Meanwhile, 75-plus percent of Latino voters said President Barack Obama’s actions on immigration — such as letting undocumented immigrant youth stay in the country — made them more likely to vote for Democrats. And 64 percent said Hillary Clinton’s views on immigrants and immigration made them more likely to vote for Democrats.
+
+So Republicans seemed to be on a downward trend with Latino voters after George W. Bush. But with Obama, Clinton, and Trump, that slide seems to have sped up by quite a bit.",REAL
+6792,Nigerian Novelist Wonders Why Everyone Loves Hillary,"Nigerian Novelist Wonders Why Everyone Loves Hillary November 3, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
+Why does everyone love Hillary Clinton? It's hard to say. Her unfavorable ratings have hit 60%. That makes her more popular than 
+1. The Bubonic Plague 
+2. ObamaCare 
+3. Osama bin Laden's corpse 
+It's not much to go on. But the Atlantic decided to run a piece by Chimamanda Adichie titled,""Why Is Hillary Clinton So Widely Loved?"" 
+Your response to seeing the name Chimamanda Adichie was probably huh. Unless you're a gender studies student at an Ivy. In which case you know exactly who she is and love her. Chimamanda Adichie is a Nigerian novelist whose ""We should all be feminists"" is big in those circles. 
+The Clinton campaign is unbearably awkward and this panegyric by Adichie was an obvious attempt to channel some of that canned Obama poetry. And like most Hillary branding, it fails badly. 
+There are howlers like, ""There are millions who admire the tapestry of Hillary Clinton’s past"" and ""There are people who, when Hillary Clinton becomes the first woman to be president of the United States, will weep from joy"". It's not quite a hymn to Comrade Stalin. Nor is it getting there by any means except a tow truck. 
+And then there's the phrasing. Oh the phrasing. ""Hillary Clinton was guilty immediately when she stepped into the view of the American public as the first lady of Arkansas."" 
+This is an awkward attempt to channel that Obama poetry, but instead it reads like a DVD manual badly translated from the Japanese. 
+The Atlantic piece is full of lines that straddle the border between tin-eared propagandistic cliche and just bad writing. 
+""She was a lawyer full of dreams: 
+""She was guilty of not being a traditional first lady. She offended the old patriarchal order."" 
+Then there's the theme of the article, which is to just deny reality. 
+""A conservative writer labeled her a congenital liar when she was first lady, and the label stuck because it was repeated over and over—and it was a convenient label to harness misogyny. If she was a liar, then the hostility she engendered could not possibly be because she was a first lady who refused to be still and silent. “Liar’ has re-emerged during this election even though Politifact, a respected source of information about politicians, has certified that she is more honest than most politicians"" 
+The perfect timing for that defense would have been not right after Hillary Clinton shouted at a rally that she had been in New York on 9/11. But don't worry. Hillary is more honest than most politicians. A site supporting her said so. 
+"" Other words have been repeated over and over, with no context, until they have begun to breathe and thrum with life. Especially “emails.” The press coverage of “emails” has become an unclear morass where “emails” must mean something terrible, if only because of how often it is invoked."" 
+How about ""Classified emails""? Or ""illegal server""? Or ""violation of regulations dealing with the handling of classified material""? That's got lots of context. Or ""cover-up"". 
+""The people who love Hillary Clinton know that the IT system at the State Department is old and stodgy, nothing like a Blackberry’s smooth whirl. Hillary Clinton was used to her Blackberry, and wanted to keep using it when she became secretary of state."" 
+People who love Hillary know that she love high tech Blackberry. Hillary love Blackberry. She is a lawyer full of dreams who fights for the children of migrant workers and loves their smooth whirl. Politifact thrums with life. Says her Blackberry is more honest than the iPhone. Hillary has many dreams of thrumming Blackberries whirling smoothly that offend the traditional stodgy patriarchal order IT system. 
+""The American conservative media saw an opportunity to blow the “emails” story out of proportion, soon followed, almost bashfully, by the rest of the American media"" 
+Is that how it works in Nigeria? Because that's not how it works in America. 
+""There is no objective basis on which to equate Hillary Clinton to her opponent."" 
+They're both mammals? They need oxygen to live? They're better writers than Chimamanda Adichie. 
+""The people who love Hillary Clinton see the failings of the general American media, where news entertains rather than informs. They bristle when benign stories about her are covered with an ominous tone"" 
+They bristle and they hug their Blackberry and weep for they fear that the patriarchal stodgy IT systems will prevent Hillary from being the thrumming First Lady of North America. 
+""They know that she is a bit too careful, but they understand that she has to be, that she cannot afford spontaneity."" 
+You would think with all those six figure speeches, she could. afford a little 
+""her actions so falsely magnified, that she leaned into caution, wrapped herself in a kind of caution that sometimes makes her appear stilted "" 
+And wrapped in her caution, her whirling Blackberry in one hand, she bristled at the public, retracting her quills and occasionally hissing in an informed fashion for the children of migrant workers who admired the tapestry of her past. 
+""There are millions of Americans who do not have the self-indulgent expectation that a politician be perfect. They are frustrated that Hillary Clinton is allowed no complexity. "" 
+Get Beyonce on the phone. I think Adichie has got another hit.",FAKE
+4118,Paul Ryan is an endangered species: How congressional extremists could easily doom his speakership,"Barring that, what will actually happen is that Obama will veto the bill. Darn, so close, guys. And we were all so sure the 62nd time would be the charm.
+
+Now, this was only possible because the Senate passed a similar bill through the budget reconciliation process, which is not subject to minority filibusters and allows bills to pass with a simple majority vote. So Ryan didn’t really do anything different than his predecessor John Boehner would have, legislatively speaking. But he did get to tweet out a spiffy new: #OnHisDesk. Which in Washington is now preferable to the actual hard work of writing and passing legislation that might impact your constituents’ lives in tiny but positive ways.
+
+Hashtags and demagoguery aside, what the GOP has actually done is start off the New Year – and the 10-month push to Election Day – by voting to take away healthcare from millions of Americans.
+
+The larger point here is that, while it is still early in his tenure, so far the best evidence suggests that Paul Ryan’s House of Representatives is going to be pretty much as worthless as Boehner’s, at least this year: Do the bare minimum to keep the lights on and the government performing its basic functions, then placate the GOP’s angry right wing by letting them pass “messaging” bills that President Obama will laugh right out of the Oval Office.
+
+We’ve already seen the House take on an omnibus spending bill just before Christmas that Ryan needed Democratic votes to pass while the GOP’s Freedom Caucus was screaming for his head. This was pretty much how Boehner used to operate. The former speaker was an amiable party hack who didn’t really want to shut the government down to placate the gremlins that run through right-wingers’ minds whenever they see a line item for Planned Parenthood in the government’s budget. Such shutdowns might get the base excited, but they are bad for the business leaders and lobbyists who so recently held some semblance of control of the party
+
+So Boehner would listen to the extremists, pat them on their heads, pay lip service to the idea that, say, repealing Obamacare was worth giving thousands of federal employees indefinite and unpaid vacations, and then at the last minute go negotiate with Nancy Pelosi to keep the lights on. This was a terrible way to run the nation, and it eventually cost Boehner his job.
+
+There was never any reason to believe any of this would change with Ryan at the helm. But when the GOP was begging him to take the job, party leaders sold him as the only man who could unite his fractious caucus. Ryan himself promised the far right that he would return to them some of the power Boehner had yanked, that he would listen to their concerns without condescension, and that he would take action on the issues most important to them. He was helped by Boehner secretly negotiating one final spending deal with Obama, which allowed Ryan to pass the latest omnibus while telling conservatives that, gosh darn it, he hated to vote for such a monstrosity but his wily predecessor left him no choice. None of this is to say that Ryan and Boehner are ideologically similar. Ryan has long been a zealot on supply-side economics, demonstrating a Randian belief in radically cutting the size of government, mostly on the backs of the poor. Boehner, on the other hand, while generally conservative, never met an ideological principle he wouldn’t trade away for a bottle of Scotch and someone else paying his greens fees. But Ryan is pragmatic enough to understand his goals are unreachable by full-frontal assault. So you get him passing the omnibus and following it up with this latest attempt at repealing Obamacare. You have him slamming President Obama’s mild executive actions on guns (over which at least one Republican is threatening to shut down part of the executive branch), which keeps anyone from noticing the giant gift the business wing of the party is about to hand Volkswagen and its lobbyists after the automaker was caught earlier this year in a systemic violation of the Clean Air Act. In terms of the results he’s getting in the House, Ryan is basically Boehner with cleaner lungs and minus the rambling, wine-drunk press conferences. It remains to be seen whether this two-faced act will carry out through the entire year. The far right has been grumbling, and Ryan’s approval ratings have dropped. If the GOP thinks it has a real shot at winning the White House while retaining control of both houses of Congress, Ryan might be able to keep the right wing in line by pointing out the bonanza that will result for them with President Ted Cruz in the Oval Office. But if a Democrat takes the oath of office a year from now, far-right Republicans – and the GOP electorate in general – will be screaming very loudly for his scalp.",REAL
+7389,Trump’s HUGE Rally Crowds vs HIllary Clinton’s TINY Crowds,"Migrant Crisis Disclaimer 
+We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable. 
+Anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned, permanently. Daily Stormer Presents: Dr. David Duke © Copyright Daily Stormer 2016, All Rights Reserved",FAKE
+529,Can Republicans govern? Budget 2016 could be biggest test.,"Republican leaders vow to show that they can govern effectively by following through on a budget. But that will take compromises both within the Republican caucus and with the president.
+
+Two Sunday attacks add to recent rise in fatal shootings of US police
+
+Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky (l.), joined by Senate majority whip John Cornyn of Texas, speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill on last month. The Republican leadership team faces an early test of its capacity to govern with this year's annual budget process, which began this week with the release of the White House budget on Monday.
+
+The new GOP-controlled Congress, keen to prove that Republicans can govern, is faced with its first big test in Governing 101: the president’s $4 trillion budget proposal, delivered to Congress on Monday.
+
+Appropriating money to pay for government is a basic function of Congress. Now that Republicans rule the roost under the Capitol dome, they’re promising to tackle this job properly: to have both houses agree on a budget blueprint by the April 15 deadline, to work out the details in 12 annual spending bills, to have both chambers agree on those bills, and send them to the president for his signature in time for the start of a new fiscal year on Oct. 1.
+
+It’s a tall order. The last time Congress got to Step 1 – agreeing on a budget blueprint – was 2009. Since then, it’s been a perilous process, remembered for fiscal cliffs, a budget showdown, and forced across-the-board cuts (the dreaded “sequester”) that were never meant to be.
+
+House speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky both say there will be no more shutdowns or fiscal cliffs. Yet both essentially declared the president’s budget dead on arrival – setting the stage for a fiscal food fight.
+
+That doesn’t bode well for their governing pledge.
+
+“To govern means to compromise,” says William Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank. “If Republicans want to prove they can govern, then the president and Congress will have to show they can compromise.”
+
+As it stands, the president has started out with “a very clear ideological position that is almost 180 degrees opposite of the Congress,” says Mr. Hoagland, who has a long history of budget experience on the Hill.
+
+The White House budget increases spending, raises taxes, and projects a $1.8 trillion trim to the deficit over a decade. Leaders of the House and Senate budget committees, on the other hand, plan a blueprint that balances the budget in 10 years. Republicans oppose tax and spending increases, though both parties are concerned about automatic spending cuts to the military.
+
+John Feehery, former spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R) of Illinois, says it’s “essential” that Republicans return to the regular budget process.
+
+“If Republicans do this right, and they pass all the appropriations bills in regular order and get them through the House and Senate, they can present them to the president in a series of legislation that makes it awfully difficult for the president to veto,” he says.
+
+At that point, he explains, the argument is no longer about the size of the pie, just the pieces of it – and which party’s priorities are included in those pieces.
+
+Whether the Republicans succeed will come down to political will and patience. “There’s definitely going to have to be compromise,” says Feehery.
+
+He says he is encouraged by Senator McConnell’s “promise to govern” as evidenced in last week’s passage of the Keystone pipeline bill. It gained the backing of nine Democrats after three weeks of debate and a much more open amendment process than was afforded Republicans under former majority leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada.
+
+Also working in the leaders’ favor, he says, are voters. They may not care if Congress does its budget work, but sure do notice when it doesn’t. Republican presidential candidates, especially former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, will also want to see a Congress that’s functioning again, Feehery says.
+
+But even with a GOP majority, just approving a budget blueprint – which only requires a majority vote in both houses – could be difficult. Conservative hardliners in the House will make their demands, while moderate Republican senators facing tough election battles in blue or purple states will make theirs, says Hoagland. Twenty-four Senate Republicans are up for election in 2016, compared to only 10 Democrats.
+
+The process gets harder once committees take up to appropriation bills, which unlike the budget blueprint,will be subject to Democratic filibuster in the Senate and will have to clear a 60-vote threshold to pass. Republicans hold a 54-seat majority.
+
+Even if McConnell can keep all Republicans with him on key votes – also a tall order – he still needs six Democrats to pass spending bills.
+
+There’s simply no getting around it, if Republicans want to prove they can govern, they’ll have to compromise. So will the president. On opening day of the budget process, neither seemed in a compromising mood.",REAL
+5,"As Reproductive Rights Hang In The Balance, Debate Moderators Drop The Ball","WASHINGTON -- Forty-three years after the Supreme Court established the right to a safe and legal abortion in Roe v. Wade, the stakes have never been higher for those on both sides of the abortion debate. States have enacted 288 new abortion restrictions in the past five years that have shut down a slew of clinics across the country, and the next president could nominate Supreme Court justices who will determine the fate of legal abortion for decades to come.
+
+But even as abortion access for millions of women hangs in the balance, the issue has somehow been neglected by presidential debate moderators, causing the issue of reproductive rights to fade from the 2016 race. The Democratic candidates haven't been asked about reproductive rights at all in any of their four debates, and the Republicans have only been asked about abortion and funding for Planned Parenthood in the first two of the six debates they've participated in so far.
+
+Advocates working for and against abortion rights are baffled by the silence.
+
+“There are real and important differences between candidates here, and it's a loss for American women that they haven't been explored,” said Jess McIntosh, a spokeswoman for EMILY’s List, a group that helps elect pro-choice women to office.
+
+NBC moderators did not ask how Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) new health plan, released just two hours before the Democratic debate the network hosted Sunday, would handle public funding for abortion, and did not press Hillary Clinton on her view that federal restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion should be repealed. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) haven't been asked in the past four GOP debates about their opposition to allowing victims of rape or incest to get abortions, a position that is significantly more conservative than those held by prior Republican presidential nominees.
+
+The only abortion-related question GOP frontrunner Donald Trump has fielded during a debate was back in August, when Fox's Megyn Kelly asked him about his 1999 comment that he was ""very pro-choice."" His stance on abortion is much murkier these days, but no other moderators have chosen to ask him about it.
+
+Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, wants candidates on both sides to explain whether they support public funding for abortion or the kinds of clinic regulations that conservative states have passed to make it difficult for abortion providers to stay open.
+
+“Pro-life Americans would love to know whether candidates support health and safety standards for women who are exposed to great risks in abortion clinics,” said Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for AUL.",REAL
+7785,Re: 13 Year Old: “If Donald Trump Had A Brick For Every Lie Hillary Has Told He Could Build TWO Walls”,"Donald Trump and called out Hillary Clinton for her many lies. 
+""I bet if Donald Trump had a brick for every lie Hillary has told he could build two walls,"" she told the enthusiastic crowd in attendance. 
+""As a thirteen year old even I know Hillary Clinton is working for her own success and ways to control my life, my family’s life and your lives… She wants to make it Hillary’s America… not The Peoples’ America,"" she added. 
+Indeed, Hillary Clinton has told about as many whoppers in her lifetime as her husband Bill, whose famous lie was ""I did not have sex with that woman, not one time."" Her lies also compete in close proximity to those of Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Sobarkah . 
+There is definitely a great joke here that two walls could be built if Hillary's lies were combined, but the sadder reality is that she's even being considered for the White House. In fact, it's amazing that she can get any support. Oh wait, perhaps the only support she actually has come from people she pays to support her, and even that seems to be with reluctance .   shares",FAKE
+160,How Congress finally killed No Child Left Behind,Parker covered the Trump campaign and transition for the Times.,REAL
+3440,Get Ready For A Fight To Replace Scalia,"Get Ready For A Fight To Replace Scalia
+
+So it's only fitting that news of his death at age 79 ignited an immediate and partisan battle over who might take his place on the U.S. Supreme Court.
+
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kent., said the vacancy should not be filled until the new president takes office. And Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, which would oversee any nomination, said it's ""standard practice over the the last 80 years"" for lawmakers to not nominate and confirm such nominees during a presidential election year.
+
+But Democrats are crying foul, pointing out the Senate confirmed Ronald Reagan's nominee Anthony Kennedy by a vote of 97 to 0 in the election year of 1988. (Grassley's staff now says it should have said ""nominated and"" confirmed.)
+
+President Obama said Saturday evening that, ""I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in — due time.""
+
+The top Democrat in the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada, called on the president to make a nomination ""right away.""
+
+""Failing to fill this vacancy would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate's most essential Constitutional responsibilities,"" Reid added.
+
+There are nearly 11 months until a new president takes office, and in the interim, the high court will operate with only eight justices. That means if the jurists tie 4 to 4, the ruling in the lower court would stand, an issue that could have implications for the president's immigration and environmental initiatives; the availability of abortions; voting rights and redistricting; and affirmative action in higher education.
+
+""The American people deserve to have a fully functioning Supreme Court,"" said Sen. Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. ""It is only February.""
+
+The Senate had been scheduled to take frequent breaks for much of 2016, working in home districts and preparing for the forthcoming elections. But the sudden death of Justice Scalia, and the vacancy it creates, could put pressure on lawmakers to spend more time at work, in Washington. To win confirmation, a Supreme Court nominee effectively needs 60 votes. The newest member of the bench, Elena Kagan, was confirmed with just five Republican votes in 2010, and a few of those lawmakers have since left Congress.
+
+President Obama has already named two justices to the court, Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. In an interview with the New Yorker magazine two years ago, he stressed his emphasis on diversifying the ranks of the federal judiciary by appointing more women and minorities.
+
+A report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said only 36 high-court nominees have been rejected between 1789 and 2010. Eleven were voted down outright, and the remainder were either withdrawn or tabled or otherwise never received Senate votes.
+
+The most recent happened in 1987, when lawmakers nixed the nomination of Robert Bork by a vote of 58 to 42.
+
+There's no deadline or timetable for considering a Supreme Court nomination. CRS said Kagan waited 87 days between her nomination and a final vote. Justice Clarence Thomas waited 99 days after his nomination by President George H.W. Bush. And Bork 's nomination took 108 days.",REAL
+947,"Clinton, Sanders Let Loose in New York Debate | RealClearPolitics","BROOKLYN, N.Y.—With a critical primary contest just days away, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders met on a Brooklyn stage Thursday night for what could be their final debate.
+
+And, unlike their first debate many months ago and others in between, the candidates did not pull a single punch, underscoring the high stakes for both of them: Clinton, wanting to wrap up the primary and focus her energy and resources on the general election; Sanders, hoping to prolong the race through the summer.
+
+""If you’re both screaming at each other, the viewers won’t be able to hear either of you,"" CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer said at one point during the debate at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
+
+Given both Clinton and Sanders’ intimate familiarity with the state, each  tried to hammer home policy differences through a New York lens, from issues such as Wall Street influence to gun control to foreign policy as it relates to Israel. But the arguments put forth echoed messages each has been pushing for some time, and aren’t likely to influence the outcome of Tuesday’s contest in New York.
+
+Sanders has stepped back from questioning Clinton’s qualifications, but he did re-engage on his concerns about her judgment.
+
+""Does Secretary Clinton have the intelligence, the experience to be president? Of course she does, but I do question her judgment,” he said. “I question a judgment which voted for the war in Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of this country; voted for virtually every disastrous trade agreement which cost us millions of decent-paying jobs. And I question her judgment about running super PACs which are collecting tens of millions of dollars from special interests, including $15 million from Wall Street.”
+
+For her part, Clinton questioned Sanders’ depth of knowledge, invoking a New York Daily News editorial board meeting in which the Vermont senator struggled to answer questions on breaking up big banks and on foreign policy. “I think you need to have the judgment on day one to be both president and commander-in-chief,” she said.
+
+Clinton also reminded the audience of her connections to New York and to President Obama, whose legacy she says she would like to build upon. “The people of New York voted for me twice to be their senator,” she said. “And President Obama trusted my judgment enough to ask me to be secretary of state for the United States.”
+
+Clinton’s embrace of Obama throughout this primary process figures to help mobilize key coalitions that propelled his presidential victories, especially in the diverse and voter-rich New York City. She has argued that she has not only more pledged delegates than Sanders, but also more votes—even more than Obama had in building his lead over her in 2008, she noted. She is also hoping to calm concerns among Democrats that a prolonged primary would hurt the party in the general election, noting that the race between herself and Obama eight years ago went on longer than this one has and the party was still able to unite and win that November.
+
+“Where we stand today is that we are in this campaign very confident and optimistic,” she said, but “I’m not taking anything for granted, or any voter or any place.”
+
+For his part, Sanders continued to mobilize his base in a way that underscored Clinton’s potential vulnerabilities in trying to unite the party down the road.
+
+“Establishment politicians are never going to address the crises we face,” he said of his rival. “You can’t take money … and expect the American people to expect you’re going to stand up to these special interests.”
+
+The race has become much more heated in recent weeks, a notable shift in a party primary that had been largely, and unconventionally, cordial, especially in contrast to the Republican contest. Sanders has escalated his attacks in an effort to keep pace, raising questions about Clinton’s judgment, harping on her vote for the Iraq War and her acceptance of large sums of money for speeches given to Goldman Sachs and Verizon, among others.
+
+Sanders again called on Clinton to release the transcripts of her paid speeches. She deflected, even when pressed again by the moderators, by pushing Sanders to release his tax returns.
+
+For her part, Clinton has hit Sanders on the issue of gun control, invoking the families of Sandy Hook Elementary School victims, and criticizing her opponent over legal loopholes that give immunity from lawsuits to gun manufacturers. “We hear a lot from Senator Sanders about the greed and recklessness of Wall Street,” Clinton said. “But what about the greed and recklessness of the gun lobby.”
+
+Asked about the daughter of the Sandy Hook principal calling on Sanders to apologize for his stance on the issue, the Democratic socialist declined, but said he supported the right of the families to sue the manufacturer of the AR-15 used to kill children in the massacre. The issue of gun control figures to be a mobilizing factor among Democrats, particularly in New York, a state that both candidates claim as home turf: Clinton is a current resident who represented New York for eight years in the U.S. Senate, and Sanders was born and raised in Brooklyn.
+
+But each see the significance of the state differently. Clinton hopes an overwhelming win here will halt Sanders’ momentum and bring the primary closer to a conclusion, allowing her to shift focus to the Republican opponents. For Sanders, who has won the past seven contests but still lags behind in the delegate count, a win would keep alive some hope of clinching the nomination and deliver a blow to the Clinton campaign’s morale.
+
+Defeating Clinton in her adopted home state appears unlikely at this point for Sanders. The former secretary of state leads by nearly 14 points there, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. One recent NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll shows Clinton has expanded her lead over the past few days. The two candidates were tied in upstate New York, according to the poll. Sanders does best among younger voters (under age 45) and those who consider themselves very liberal.
+
+New York’s closed primary system will also pose a challenge for Sanders, as independent voters are a key part of his base. The campaign has worked to persuade such voters to register as Democrats in order to vote for him. After having twice won New York statewide, Clinton is no stranger to campaigning in the state. She has won endorsements from unions and the New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who ran her Senate campaign, as well as African-American leaders. Clinton’s message of building upon the legacy of Obama figures to serve her well there.
+
+But Sanders was able to draw 27,000 people for a rally in Greenwich Village. The image of a packed Washington Square Park, near the campus of NYU, captured the energy his campaign has generated, particularly among young people. The event also underscored a challenge Clinton could have if she becomes the nominee in galvanizing Sanders’ supporters for a victory in the general election.
+
+While Clinton continues to pile up delegates even as Sanders wins states, given the proportional allocation involved, his continued presence and influence have prolonged the race. He has also continued to show overwhelming fundraising prowess, hauling $44 million recently, which forces Clinton to take time away from the trail to raise money.
+
+Clinton will attend fundraisers in California over the weekend before heading back to campaign in New York City. After the debate, Sanders boarded a plane to Rome for meetings at the Vatican, and is expected to return Saturday evening.
+
+Sanders has pledged to stay in the race through to California in June. Asked if he would take the fight all the way to the Philadelphia convention, he said: “I think we're going to win this nomination, to tell you the truth.”
+
+The Clinton campaign, however, believes the momentum, math, and map will be in her favor next week and beyond.
+
+“I'm going to work my heart out here in New York until the polls close on Tuesday. I'm going to work in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland, all the way through California,” she said. “And when we end up with the number of delegates we need, we will unite the party and have a unified convention.”",REAL
+734,"On More than One Issue, GOP's Trump Sounds like a Democrat","As he tries to charm Republicans still skeptical of his presidential candidacy, Donald Trump has a challenge: On several key issues, he sounds an awful lot like a Democrat.
+
+And on some points of policy, such as trade and national defense, the billionaire businessman could even find himself running to the left of Hillary Clinton, his likely Democratic rival in the general election.
+
+Trump is a classic Republican in many ways. He rails against environmental and corporate regulations, proposes dramatically lower tax rates and holds firm on opposing abortion rights. But the presumptive GOP nominee doesn't fit neatly into a traditional ideological box.
+
+""I think I'm running on common sense,"" he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. ""I think I'm running on what's right. I don't think in terms of labels.""
+
+Perhaps Trump's clearest break with Republican orthodoxy is on trade, which the party's 2012 platform said was ""crucial for our economy"" and a path to ""more American jobs, higher wages, and a better standard of living.""
+
+Trump says his views on trade are ""not really different"" from the rest of his party's, yet he pledges to rip up existing deals negotiated by ""stupid leaders"" who failed to put American workers first. He regularly slams the North American Free Trade Agreement involving the U.S, Mexico and Canada, and opposes a pending Asia-Pacific pact, positions shared by Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.
+
+""The problem is the ideologues, the very conservative group, would say everything has to be totally free trade,"" Trump said. ""But you can't have free trade if the deals are going to be bad. And that's what we have.""
+
+Trump long has maintained that he has no plans to scale back Social Security benefits or raise its qualifying retirement age. The position puts him in line with Clinton. She has said she would ""defend and expand"" Social Security, has ruled out a higher retirement age and opposes reductions in cost-of-living adjustments or other benefits.
+
+""There is tremendous waste, fraud and abuse, but I'm leaving it the way it is,"" Trump recently told Fox Business Network.
+
+It's a stance at odds with the country's top-ranked elected Republican, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has advocated fundamental changes to Social Security and other entitlement programs. But it's also one that Trump argues keeps him in line with the wishes of most voters.
+
+""Remember the wheelchair being pushed over the cliff when you had Ryan chosen as your vice president?"" Trump told South Carolina voters this year, referring to then-vice presidential candidate Ryan's budget plan. ""That was the end of that campaign."" Ryan was Mitt Romney's running mate in 2012.
+
+Complicating the efforts to define Trump is his penchant for offering contradictory ideas about policy. He also has taken recently to saying that all of his plans are merely suggestions, open to later negotiation.
+
+Trump's tax plan, for instance, released last fall, called for lowering the rate paid by the wealthiest people in the United States from 39.6 percent to 25 percent and slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent.
+
+Trump described it as a massive boon for the middle class. Outside experts concluded it disproportionately benefited the rich and would balloon the federal deficit.
+
+Close to clinching the nomination, Trump now appears to be pulling away from his own proposal. While he still wants to lower taxes for the wealthy and businesses, he now says his plan was just a starting point for discussions and he would like to see the middle class benefit more from whatever changes he seeks in tax law.
+
+""We have to go to Congress, we have to go to the Senate, we have to go to our congressmen and women and we have to negotiate a deal,"" Trump said recently. ""So it really is a proposal, but it's a very steep proposal.""
+
+Trump has a similar take on the minimum wage. Trump said at a GOP primary debate that wages are too high, and later made clear that he does not support a federal minimum wage. Yet when speaking about the issue, he says he recognizes the difficulty of surviving on the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
+
+""I am open to doing something with it,"" he told CNN this month.
+
+On foreign policy, Trump already appears working to paint Clinton as a national security hawk who would too easily the lead the country into conflict.
+
+""On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,"" Trump said at a recent rally, He listed the countries where the U.S. had intervened militarily during her tenure as secretary of state and pointed to her vote to authorize the Iraq war while she was in the Senate.
+
+Trump's own ""America First"" approach appears to lean more toward isolationism. One of his foreign policy advisers, Walid Phares, recently described it as a ""third way.""
+
+""This doesn't fit any of the boxes,"" Phares said.
+
+Clinton has advocated using ""smart power,"" a combination of diplomatic, legal, economic, political and cultural tools to expand American influence. She believes the U.S. has a unique ability to rally the world to defeat international threats.
+
+She argues the country must be an active participant on the world stage, particularly as part of international alliances such as NATO. Trump has criticized the military alliance, questioning a structure that sees the U.S. pay for most of its costs.
+
+""No, I think I'm much tougher than her on foreign — and I think we won't have to use it,"" Trump recently told Fox News when asked whether he might come to Clinton's left on some foreign policy issues. ""You know, I appear that I might — maybe to the left. I believe in very, very strong defense. I believe in world peace. I want to help other countries.""",REAL
+2514,Obama administration stops work on immigrant program,"A series of legal setbacks have halted the government’s intensive preparations to move forward with President Obama’s executive actions shielding millions of illegal immigrants from deportation, even as community organizations continue a rapid push to get ready for the programs, according to U.S. officials and immigrant advocacy groups.
+
+Since a federal judge first blocked the new programs in February, the Department of Homeland Security has suspended plans to hire up to 3,100 new employees, most of whom would be housed in an 11-story building the government has leased for $7.8 million a year in Arlington, Va. That building, in the Crystal City area, is now sitting mostly unused, DHS employees say.
+
+Yet inside and outside the Beltway, community groups are mobilizing, educating immigrants and training volunteers to help them apply for relief, even though it remains unclear whether the program will ever begin. Most recently, a foundation headed by billionaire George Soros, undaunted by the court rulings, pledged at least $8 million to that effort.
+
+“We’re full speed ahead,” said Josh Hoyt, executive director of the Chicago-based National Partnership for New Americans, a coalition of pro-immigrant groups that have held more than 700 information sessions on the new programs and trained more than 2,000 volunteers to aid immigrants in applying for them.
+
+Obama announced in November that up to 5 million illegal immigrants would be eligible to be shielded from deportation — including undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents — as long as they met certain criteria. One of the signature initiatives of his presidency, the plan also expands a 2012 program that has deferred the deportations of more than 600,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children and has granted most of them work permits.
+
+But after Texas and 25 other states sued the administration, calling the moves unconstitutional, a federal judge in Texas in February put them on hold until the case is resolved. A federal appeals court recently upheld that injunction, with legal observers now saying the court fight could last until late in Obama’s term. The 2012 program remains unaffected.
+
+The legal battle highlights the explosive nature of the immigration debate, which has emerged as an early issue in the 2016 presidential race even as immigration legislation remains stalled in Congress. The fate of Obama’s executive action benefiting immigrant parents, known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, will resonate into the next administration. Most Republican presidential candidates have pledged to overturn Obama’s immigration actions, while leading Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has strongly endorsed them.
+
+As soon as Obama took his actions on Nov. 20, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “immediately began efforts to implement those initiatives,’’ said Marsha Catron, a DHS spokeswoman. The next day, the agency leased a 280,000-square-foot building on Crystal Drive in Crystal City to house DAPA employees, according to DHS documents sent to Congress.
+
+The building came fully furnished but required about $26 million in start-up costs, including $2.7 million for workstation and desktop equipment, documents show. Those costs were to be funded with fees collected from immigrants who had applied for other government programs, and DHS says DAPA would have no impact on any existing programs.
+
+Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of DHS, is central to managing the nation’s immigration system and processes more than 6 million citizenship and other applications and petitions each year.
+
+The plan also called for 1,000 employees, mostly new hires, to start up DAPA in Crystal City and 400 staffers at other service centers nationwide to process applications for the expanded 2012 program for immigrants brought illegally to the United States as children. That program is known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
+
+Over time, however, Citizenship and Immigration Services projected that a total of 3,100 new employees might be needed for the two programs, which were expected to cost up to $484 million per year and be paid for by the $465 application fees required for each applicant.
+
+By mid-February, DHS was days away from beginning to accept applications for the expanded DACA program, with the first DAPA applications to follow in May.
+
+But on Feb. 16, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas issued his ruling temporarily blocking both. Citizenship and Immigration Services “immediately took steps to ensure the agency ceased its preparations,’’ said Catron, who added that DHS is “disappointed” by that decision as well as the May 26 one by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upholding it.
+
+Since then, “everything is on hold,” said Kenneth Palinkas, president of National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council 119, which represents about 12,000 Citizenship and Immigration Services employees. Current employees who had been offered jobs in Crystal City have had the offers put on hold or rescinded, he said.
+
+As for the Crystal City building, only the first floor is being used to train employees, about 30 at a time, on various aspects of immigration law, said Palinkas, who recently toured the facility.
+
+Federal contractors, some of whom were also slated to work in Crystal City, have also been affected. DHS has canceled a request for proposals for a new mail and file room operations center to be staffed by about 400 contractors, documents said.
+
+“It’s kind of come to a screeching halt,’’ said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, which helps immigrants with legal and other issues. She said the Obama administration “is being very cautious. . . . They feel that injunction was very clear, that they’re not able to do anything.”
+
+But immigrant advocacy groups feel differently, she said, because activists are confident that the administration will eventually prevail in the courts. “There is a sense of being undeterred, that we are going to continue planning,” she said. “We need to make sure that the infrastructure is in place and ready to go.’’
+
+Across the nation, immigration advocacy organizations and other community groups are training people who will act as “navigators” — helping immigrants determine whether they are eligible for DAPA , locate key documents such as school transcripts and fill out the application. Activists describe the training as similar to that for another key Obama initiative, the Affordable Care Act, which also used navigators to help people enroll for health insurance.
+
+“The reality is you can’t turn on a switch in people’s lives and all of the sudden 5 million people pour into the gates of DHS and move into the application process,’’ said Ken Zimmerman, director of U.S. programs for the Open Society Foundations, of which Soros is founder and chairman.
+
+Zimmerman said the $8 million the organization is making available will go to a variety of community groups and will fund things such as new computer software to help them process applications. He said the foundations may donate more.
+
+In the Washington area, CASA — a Maryland-based immigrant advocacy group — is continuing the DAPA informational sessions it has been holding in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware since Obama’s announcement in November.
+
+At first, “hundreds and hundreds upon hundreds” of people showed up, said George Escobar, CASA’s senior director of human services. Since then, he said, “obviously interest has waned a little” amid frustration over the legal setbacks.
+
+“Our job is to keep people motivated,” added Escobar, who believes it is “highly likely” that DAPA will survive the court challenge. “We will continue to prepare for it,” he said.",REAL
+7263,How To Plan Farmer’s Calendar All Year Round,"  14, 2016 How To Plan Farmer’s Calendar All Year Round 
+A farmer’s work is never done. You’d think that in the winter when there are no crops to tend or hay to mow, there may be some time to take a break, and that’s somewhat true, but not really. 
+Winter is actually one of the busiest times of year; in addition to taking care of the animals, clearing snow, and keeping things running, you need to plan and prep for the next year. 
+Winter appears to be a time of sleep and relaxing by the fire, but for a homesteader, there is no such thing. If you have cows to milk and chickens to feed, then you still have to take care of that. Then there are all of the other tasks that you have to do: clearing the roof, bringing in firewood, making impromptu repairs. 
+Winter is a great time of the year to make a plan for what you need to do in the spring, summer, and fall to make your homestead successful. 
+We’ve put together a calendar of things to do in the winter to help make your homestead successful all year round. 
+Check your Stockpile 
+Winter is a great time to check your stockpile for several reasons, but the primary reason that we’re adding it to the calendar is so that you can decide what to plant in the spring. 
+If you’re running out of green beans but still have a ton of corn, you can adjust your crops accordingly. Plant more beans and less corn. The same thing goes for canned meals and condiments. If you’ve just about eaten all of your beef stew and salsa but still have a ton of chicken soup left, adjust accordingly. 
+You can also determine whether you’re best using your crops. Say you had a bumper crop of apples and made pie filling, applesauce, apple cider vinegar , and apple butter. Now you’re out of pie filling but still have 32 quarts of applesauce. It seems like you may want to adjust how you use your apples next year. 
+Make a chart and record your findings so that you can compare to last year and make your adjustments. You don’t want to use your entire stockpile. 
+It’s good to have enough for a couple of years, but you don’t want to can 6 months’ worth of apple butter and 5 years’ worth of okra, especially two years in a row. 
+Concentrate on Your Herbs/Winter Crops 
+I don’t know about you but I love herbs. They’re great for adding flavor, and for using medicinally. Since they’re easy to grow inside , you can grow them year round. Since you’re likely slam busy all summer and fall, wait until winter to harvest and store your herbs. This is a good time to make your essential oils and medicinal blends , too. 
+If you live in a moderate climate, you may be able to grow some winter crops such as garlic, kale, carrots and potatoes during the winter. They’re easy to grow and won’t take up hardly any time. Search the internet for crops that will grow in the winter according to your zone . 
+There are also early spring edibles that you can start growing and have ready to eat while you’re waiting on those peppers and tomatoes to grow. 
+Start Your Seeds 
+If you live in a zone where you have short summers and you want to grow crops that have a long growing period, start them inside as early as February. That way, you’ll have healthy seedlings or young plants to transplant when the weather warms up. Your garden will have a great start before the snow is even off the ground! 
+Make a To-Do List for the Coming Months 
+Plan your summer. Sit down and make charts of what you’re going to plant, how much of it you’re going to plant, and where you’re going to plant it. Keep in mind soil types and compatible plants when you’re making your chart. 
+Think about your animals. Do you want to breed? Do you need more eggs? Did you put back enough meat this year? Are your chickens cramped and need a new coup? How about the barn – does it need repairs? Is the tractor running rough? Do you need any new equipment? Make a list by month of all these projects that you need to address. 
+Plan Your Expenses 
+Now that you’ve sat down and planned your crops and equipment repairs and made a list of other things that you do, then plan how much you’re going to need to spend versus when you’ll need it and when you’ll have the money to do it. Try to project any equipment replacements or repairs that you’ll need, too. Remember to allow for any unexpected expenses. 
+You don’t have to stop with just the next year. Do a five-year plan, then adjust as needed. Keep adding a year every winter. This will really help keep you on track as long as you actually refer back to the list and follow it as much as possible. 
+Make Syrup 
+If you live in an area where you have birch or maple trees, late winter is when you can gather the sap from the trees and make your syrup for the year. Just FYI, it’s a bit of work to make, but it’s free and you can sell it for a great profit. That’s assuming your family doesn’t make you keep it! 
+Do all of the in-house repairs. Think about those creaky stairs, unpainted rooms, loose carpets and wobbly stools that you’ve been meaning to fix all summer. Now’s a great time to get all of that stuff done so that you can check it off the list. Video first seen on TacticalIntelligence . 
+Help Your Animals Adapt 
+Winter affects different animals in different ways. Chickens will likely slow down production when the weather changes. You can head this off a bit by making sure that they’re snug and warm, but make sure that the coop stays well-ventilated. Keeping your hens happy will make your breakfast a happy event, too. 
+Cows and horses, on the other hand, may need to be fed more so that they have enough energy to stay warm and (in the case of cows) keep producing quality milk. If you’re new to homesteading study up on your animals before winter so that you’ll know what to do to keep your animals safe and healthy. 
+Winter is definitely a bit slower than the rest of the year, but there are plenty of things that you can do to maintain and improve your farm. Relaxing a bit isn’t a bad thing, either – you work your buns off the rest of the year, so give your brain and your body a break. 
+Have Some Family Time 
+Farms are a ton of work and though we all squeeze in “together” time while we work, cleaning out the chicken coop together just isn’t the same as picking up a Redbox or heading out for pizza and an evening of fun. There’s so much work to be done in the other months that it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle and forget to have some fun. Now’s your chance! 
+Educate Yourself 
+Winter is a great time to use your mind instead of your back. Farming, homesteading, sustainability, and prepping are ever-changing beasts, so take the downtime to catch up on the latest news and ideas that are available all over the net. 
+Feel free to go old-school and buy some books and magazines to get some new ideas about how to move your farm forward. Think about planting guides, new equipment, new prepping ideas, or ways to help keep your animals healthy naturally. 
+Another good subject to study up on is the plants that you’re growing. If you don’t know all about each plant that you grow, take this time to learn. Not all plants like the same types of soil. Some like rich, loamy soil, some like sandy soil. Some grow great next to each other and others, such as tomatoes and potatoes, shouldn’t be grown together. 
+Just knowing these small facts will increase your yield and even improve the quality and flavor of your crops. 
+If you have anything else to add to the winter calendar to-do list,   
+We can all learn from each other, but never forget the ways our forefathers made their own food, harvested their own plants and made their own medicines to survive during gloomy   1 total views, 1 views today",FAKE
+1577,Surprised About Donald Trump's Popularity? You Shouldn't Be,"Surprised About Donald Trump's Popularity? You Shouldn't Be
+
+There are a lot of surprising things about Donald Trump's campaign. He has been atop polls almost constantly for nearly five months. Contrast that to GOP primaries of recent past, in which a series of ""front-runners"" have come and gone before a nominee was chosen.
+
+Likewise, he seems not only immune to fact checks but is helped when he is perceived to be a victim of media targeting — even when he has made blatantly untrue claims and refused to back down.
+
+Wednesday provided the latest Trump news that shocked (shocked!) many: Nearly two-thirds of likely GOP primary voters said in a Bloomberg poll that they supported his proposal to block all Muslims from entering the U.S. — a proposal that many legal scholars say would be unconstitutional and that many of Trump's GOP opponents blast as ""un-American.""
+
+But when you look at Americans' attitudes, not only on that specific question of Islam but toward politics in general, a lot of things that have surprised the political establishment about Trump aren't surprising at all.
+
+Let's start with that Bloomberg poll. One important caveat of this poll is that it's primary voters, not all GOP voters. Conventional wisdom says that primary voters (of either party) tend to have more extreme views than voters writ large, but they are who pick a nominee.
+
+It's true that Americans view Muslims more negatively than they do any other major religious group, as Pew found in a 2014 study. On a ""feelings thermometer"" of 0 (most ""cold"" or negative) to 100, Muslims scored a 40, on par with atheists' 41. At the other end were Jews, Catholics and evangelical Christians, at 63, 62, and 61, respectively.
+
+In addition, a majority of Americans — 56 percent — believe Islam is ""at odds with"" American values, up from 47 percent in 2011, according to a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute. The results are even more extreme on a partisan level, with 76 percent of Republicans agreeing with that idea.
+
+In another new PRRI survey, 67 percent of Republicans said that ""U.S. Muslims have not done enough to confront extremism,"" along with 45 percent of Democrats.
+
+Especially in a time when fear of an extremist Islamist terrorist group dominates the news, surveys like these show why some people might be particularly inclined to jump onto the Trump bandwagon.
+
+As a Trump supporter told a focus group this week, ""We have to do something."" And Trump has brought forth the biggest ""somethings"" of all candidates.
+
+Trump may be appealing to people who already have misgivings about Islam (or, prior to that, immigrants), but of course, it's not those attitudes that are driving his campaign. After all, his popularity has held, regardless of which topic he has chosen to focus on.
+
+Rather, a bigger phenomenon may be at work in why Trump and his ideas are so popular: polarization. It's not clear whether Americans are growing more polarized ideologically (that is, whether their ideas are growing further apart politically). What is clearer is that Americans are experiencing more affective polarization — that is, regardless of where their views are moving, liberals increasingly dislike conservatives, and conservatives increasingly dislike liberals.
+
+For a real-world spin on this, consider that 30 percent of consistent conservatives and 23 percent of consistent liberals say they'd be unhappy if their children married someone of the opposite party, according to a 2014 Pew poll.
+
+""Regardless of whether or not their political beliefs are separate, the degree of dislike and distrust between the parties is really high,"" said Adam Berinsky, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies political misinformation. ""Democrats and Republicans live in different worlds. So what's Trump tapping into? I think it's this idea that the world is going bad.""
+
+A few things have driven this dislike, as polarization expert and Vanderbilt University professor Marc Hetherington told NPR last month:
+
+— the rise of ""gut-level"" issues like terrorism, guns and abortion as political topics; 
+
+— the way race helped re-sort the political map in the past century; and 
+
+— how closely matched the two parties are. (Think about how much easier it is to hate a sports rival who's a constant threat to your team than one who's way worse or way better.)
+
+What it creates is distrust. Americans' levels of trust in the federal government are at nearly the lowest levels on record, as Pew reported last month.
+
+""More polarization begets poor performance, which begets worse trust, which gives you worse performance, which, of course, gives you more frustration,"" Hetherington said.
+
+A Lack Of Trust And A Want For 'Change'
+
+Notably, trust is lower among Republicans during a Democratic administration (just as trust is low among Democrats during GOP administrations) — and trust is exceedingly low among Republicans right now.
+
+All of that creates a perfect environment for a Trump to arise right now in the Republican Party. Lack of trust in government means Americans — particularly non-Democrats — may be particularly willing to vote for an ""outsider.""
+
+Similarly, as Hetherington explained, Democrats were willing to vote for the ""outsider"" Obama after eight years of a George W. Bush presidency. Obama and Trump's rhetoric may be vastly different, but Americans' willingness to vote for change — even if untested — is the common factor here.
+
+Polarization may also contribute to why Trump seems to have a Teflon skin when it comes to fact checks. He has over the years claimed that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. and, more recently, that there were ""thousands and thousands"" of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the attacks on the World Trade Center. He hasn't disavowed those ideas — even given repeated fact checks.
+
+And, more important, his supporters haven't abandoned him. In fact, they've become more intensely supportive.
+
+Polarization once again may be at work. When people increasingly dislike their countrymen across the aisle, it could reasonably make them more susceptible to ""motivated reasoning"" — loosely defined as what happens when one's reasoning process is clouded by emotions (such as hatred of the other party) and other pre-existing biases.
+
+Motivated reasoning can happen when new information challenges one's worldview. As political scientists from Appalachian State University wrote in a 2012 article, ""When individuals engage in motivated reasoning, partisan goals trump accuracy goals.""
+
+In these situations, people ""vigorously defend their prior values, identities, and attitudes at the expense of factual accuracy.""
+
+Getting back to Trump, this could lead his supporters to believe some of his more brazen claims about Muslim hatred toward other Americans, Sept. 11 celebrations, black-on-white homicide rates or immigrants and crime.
+
+To be clear, the willingness to believe in unsupported ideas is bipartisan. To take an extreme example, according to research from Dartmouth College political science professor Brendan Nyhan, Democrats were, as of 2006 (that is, during the Bush administration), roughly as likely to believe that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job as Republicans were, as of 2010, to believe that Obama wasn't born in the U.S.
+
+The point is that in this low-trust, highly polarized environment, when one party is always suspicious of the other, things that might have surprised Americans just a few decades ago are commonplace now.",REAL
+5266,#NeverTrump Goes Down in Flames in Final Attempt to Stop The Donald,"After a tireless campaign to unbind Republican delegates to ‘vote their conscience’ at next week’s convention, the anti-Trumpers were trampled at a marathon rules committee session.
+
+were pushing a proposal designed to stop Trump in the days leading up to the Republican convention next week. The proposal would unbind Republican delegates from how citizens in various states voted and allow them to vote instead based on their personal consciences.
+
+For weeks, members of the rules committee had been urged to support this rebel effort. One delegate said she had received some 400 emails urging her to support the so-called conscience clause.
+
+It all converged late Thursday night, after an exhausting day of mind-numbing, obscure rules changes. Then came the dramatic moment, a vote that one 40-year rules committee veteran said had ""obviously been the subject of more pre-convention publicity than any rules matter ever in living memory.""
+
+The incessant campaign of the anti-Trump rebellion rankled some of the delegates committed to the New York businessman. “The people who sent all those emails: It’s over, folks,” proclaimed Iowa delegate Steve Scheffler while the committee debated the proposal. “Let’s get behind our nominee right now.”
+
+The results were disastrous: Not only did the #NeverTrump delegates lose on their issue by an overwhelming number, but the Republican delegates voted to strengthen the binding of delegates.
+
+Using procedures to their advantage, pro-Trump forces on the committee shut down the #NeverTrump effort with ease. In the end, the anti-Trump delegates failed event to get a tallied vote on the “conscience clause”—they were shouted down in a voice vote. They were denied even the chance to debate the initiative.
+
+“This angst isn’t going to go away just because we paper over it with rules,” said Sen. Mike Lee, a rules committee delegate from Utah and a urging Trump instead to make the substantive case to Republican delegates for why they should support him.
+
+Not long after his speech, the senator walked out of the rules committee. He told The Daily Beast he didn’t want to comment on what happened inside.
+
+Unbinding proponents never expected to gain a majority of committee members. Instead, the anti-Trump Republicans set their sights on securing 28—a quarter—of the committee’s 112 members, which would have sent the proposal to the convention floor as a “minority report.”
+
+Kendal Unruh, a Colorado delegate leading the unbinding effort, claimed throughout the last week that the anti-Trump Republicans had secured the necessary 28 votes, citing the movement’s internal whip count. A Wall Street Journal last week found 20 members open to consider unbinding delegates.
+
+Yet a , published the day before the failed vote, found only five committee members in support of allowing delegates to vote their conscience.
+
+The anti-Trump Republicans now plan to take their fight to the convention floor next week. Under their interpretation of party rules, delegates have always been free to vote their conscience.
+
+The #NeverTrump movement’s last chance to stop Trump will be through a last-minute challenge on the convention floor, when state delegations participate in the official vote for the presidential nomination.
+
+Usually, each state delegation chairperson simply announces the state delegates’ vote count, as it has been pre-assigned by party rules. But an anti-Trump delegate could contest his or her state’s vote count and ask for, essentially, a redo of votes while on the convention floor—and the delegates hope to switch their votes away from Trump during the recount.",REAL
+5909,Hillary To Be Indicted After Election: Trump Responds To FBI Investigation,"Hillary To Be Indicted After Election: Trump Responds To FBI Investigation Clinton scrambles following FBI announcement on new email evidence Infowars.com - October 28, 2016 Comments 
+Alex Jones breaks down the FBI’s Friday announcement on the reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server as new evidence surfaces. 
+The new data was reportedly uncovered during a separate investigation into Anthony Weiner – the husband of Clinton ally Huma Abedin. 
+FBI Director James Comey cited “recent developments” for the bureau’s decision in a letter to committees and lawmakers today. 
+“In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton’s personal email server. Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony,” Comey wrote. 
+“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” 
+These new revelations could undoubtedly spell trouble for Clinton as Trump has vowed to fully investigate her actions upon winning the election. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+1665,Jeb Bush 3.0 will crash and burn: Why his new (new) strategy is almost certainly doomed,"It seems like every few weeks we get a new explanation for why Jeb Bush should continue running president. As the summer dragged and Donald Trump shot to the top of the national polls while Jeb’s support began to soften, Jeb’s plan was to use the debates to offer himself as a serious alternative to Trump, someone who could fix problems and get things done. He did that, and his numbers kept dropping. But not to worry, Jeb said as we transitioned to autumn, things will turn around once the mailers are sent out and the TV ads start airing in the early primary states. The mail went out and the ads were aired, and his numbers kept dropping. Here we are in late October, and JebWorld has a new rationale to offer: forget about the polls and forget about the early states, it’s all about money and delegates, and we’ll outlast everyone else.
+
+Mike Murphy, the head of Jeb’s super PAC, Right to Rise, gave a big interview to Bloomberg’s Sasha Issenberg this week in which he laid out pretty much every facet of his strategic thinking regarding Jeb’s candidacy. His group has been blasting Iowa and New Hampshire with millions of dollars in pro-Jeb propaganda for the last several weeks, only to see his candidate’s numbers keep dropping. So it was revealing when he described how he sees the race shaking out once the voting starts and insisted that the early states won’t matter:
+
+BLOOMBERG: During that period, you expect several candidates to be clumped together as far as delegates are concerned. MURPHY: Yeah, for a while, for a while. I mean February’s not really about delegates, it’s about media momentum. BLOOMBERG: When do you expect that to change? MURPHY: March 15 is the big day. On the 16th, I don’t think anybody will have a mathematical lock, but there definitely will be a very strong leading candidate.
+
+As Dave Weigel notes, this is the same thinking that animated Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign, which is weird given that Paul was an outsider running on an ideologically heterodox platform, while Bush is the concentrated essence of establishment Republican politics. The argument here is that Jeb, unlike other candidates, will have the financial resources to stay in the race basically forever, and once the other candidates flame out, their voters will come home to Team Bush. What they’re basing that assumption on is anyone’s guess, given that Republican voters seem to show nothing but growing contempt for Jeb as time goes by. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 44 percent of Republican primary voters could not see themselves supporting Bush.
+
+Team Jeb has a different view of things, obviously. In Murphy’s vision of the 2016 primary, there are two “lanes” for candidates. “I’m more interested in what percent of the electorate is considering Jeb versus others,” he explained. “I’m interested in lanes, kind of the Grievance Lane versus the Optimistic Lane.” Jeb, obviously, falls into the Optimistic Lane. Candidates like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee are the Grievance Lane inhabitants. But what about the other candidates? Specifically, what about Marco Rubio? He’s the big threat to steal away Jeb’s establishment support, so what does Murphy think of him?
+
+Well, while Jeb is in the Optimistic Lane, Rubio is in the – wait for it – Cynical Lane: MURPHY: What’s interesting about Marco’s campaign – and in the end I think all the essential truth of the stuff bubbles up to the voters and they sort it out pretty well – is there’s a cynicism to it. It’s cynical to run as the creature of new, fresh, while it’s all secret dark money. Maybe from one person, we don’t know. It’s cynical to say, “I’m going to take the lead on defeating this horrible Iran deal that we all hate,” and broadcast your ads to defeat that deal only on the Fox Network, where everybody is already against the deal, instead of running those ads on MSNBC to pressure Democratic senators that were the outcome to beating that deal. Cynically use it just to raise your name ID among Republican primary voters who already agree with you on the deal. There is a cynicism behind the young, fresh brand that I think is going to catch up with him. Jeb himself previewed his anti-Rubio strategy earlier this month, questioning Rubio’s leadership capabilities and suggesting the young first-term senator wasn’t up for the rigors of the presidency. What Jeb and Murphy are doing here is a version of what Hillary Clinton tried to do to Barack Obama in 2008. If you’ll recall, Obama spent basically the entire month of February 2008 dunking on Hillary, winning primary after primary and running up the delegate count. That prompted Hillary to attack the “Hope and Change” basis of Obama’s campaign and portray herself as someone who know how to do more than give speeches. “The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect,” she said of Obama’s message, laying on a thick layer of sarcasm. “Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be.” John McCain picked up the attack during the general election, casting Obama as an empty suit and a “celebrity.” That strategy did little to stop Obama, even though Hillary still commanded the loyalty of a massive chunk of the party. The same attack might have a bit more potency against Rubio, given that Republican voters have had it drilled into their heads that first-term senators make bad presidents. The problem for Jeb is that he doesn’t have the credibility with Republican voters to make this attack stick. They already dislike him and have shown no interest in buying what he’s selling, and nothing Jeb does seems to change that.",REAL
+5091,"A Tale of 2 Americas: Platforms Show World of Difference Between Dems, GOP","PHILADELPHIA -- In the same city where the framers met to craft the Constitution, Democrats triumphantly chose Hillary Clinton as their White House nominee Tuesday night, the first woman to ever lead a major political party into the general election.
+
+""If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch, let me just say I may become the first woman president but one of you is next. Thank you all. I can't wait to join you in Philadelphia. Thank you!"" Clinton proclaimed.
+
+Clinton's fierce primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, was the one who put her over the top, pulling a procedural move that allowed him to give her his delegates.
+
+It was an emotional day as Clinton supporters anticipated the historic moment and Sanders supporters faced reality.
+
+""It is with enormous pride that I cast my vote for Bernie Sanders,"" the Vermont lawmaker's brother, Larry Sanders, declared.
+
+Several other party leaders and speakers addressed the convention, but the crowd came alive when former President Bill Clinton took the stage.
+
+Clinton took Democrats through his life with Hillary by telling stories about her as a wife and mother while reminding them of her credentials.
+
+""She's been around a long time. She sure has. And she's sure been worth every single year she's put into making people's lives better. I can tell you this: if you were sitting where I'm sitting and you heard what I have heard at every dinner conversation, every lunch conversation, on every long walk, you would say this woman has never been satisfied with the status quo in anything,"" Clinton said of his wife.
+
+""She always wants to move the ball forward. That is just who she is,"" Clinton continued.
+
+Now that they have a nominee, Clinton supporters hope to use the party planks to bring the Sanders faithful back into the fold.
+
+Even though the climate is not as liberal as Sanders supporters would like here in Philadelphia, Democrats approved their most liberal platform, which stands in stark contrast to the platform passed by Republicans last week in Cleveland.
+
+Here's what you need to know about the visions and values of America's two political parties: It's a tale of two paths – two futures for America with two political platforms.
+
+""It really kind of gives a roadmap for the party's principles,"" said Teege Mettille, a DNC delegate from Wisconsin.
+
+On nearly every issue there's a distinction between the Democratic and Republican Party platforms.
+
+""We produced, by far, the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party,"" Sanders proclaimed.
+
+On abortion, Democrats turned their backs on 40 years of policy as they call for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment – a law signed by President Jimmy Carter that prohibits the use of federal tax dollars for abortion.
+
+It's a move that alienates one in three Democrats, according to Democrats for Life.
+
+Michael Wear, a former faith adviser to President Barack Obama, calls the move ""disappointing and misguided.""
+
+""I think the decision we have to make is whether we will continue to be an open tent, welcoming the people who disagree on such a core moral issue as the sanctity of life or whether we're going to become a more strident, closed off, frankly, less inclusive party,"" Wear reflected.
+
+On other social issues the differences in the platforms are vast.
+
+""There are things that are written in that platform that have never been written in there in the history of the party,"" Brandon Weathersby, with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said.
+
+Republicans call traditional marriage the ""foundation for a free society"" and acknowledge traditional families as ideal for raising healthy kids who are less likely to get in trouble.
+
+The Democratic platform, however, calls for expanding rights for LGBT Americans.
+
+On the environment, Democrats call for a carbon tax, while Republicans oppose it.
+
+""One of the things that we thought was really amazing - even though we're here as Hillary Clinton delegates, how proud we were that you could hear and see Bernie's voice in that platform to be the most progressive platform in our lifetime that the Democratic Party's every passed,"" David Mettille, a Wisconsin delegate, said.
+
+Sanders backers represent a growing gap between Democrats and Republicans on Israel.
+
+Even though the platforms include similar language about Israel, both parties oppose efforts to delegitimize Israel through the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
+
+Republicans take it further, calling the BDS movement anti-Semitic and call for legislation to stop actions that limit commercial relations with Israel.
+
+During the drafting of the Democrats' platform, debate about Israel caused so much passion that police had to wade into the audience as activists shouted down delegates.
+
+Sen. Sanders backed a measure to ""end the occupation"" of Palestinians. Liberal activists also called for the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip.
+
+""It is apparently the most progressive platform we've ever had, but it's far from what we wanted,"" Hillary Keys, a Sanders supporter, said.
+
+Keys says this is only the beginning. They're leaving Philly to focus on electing the most liberal candidates they can to every office, from dog catcher to president.
+
+In this election, more than ever before Americans have a clear choice between two very different visions.
+
+It's also a time when Christians have a chance to make a major impact.
+
+""There's an anxiety in our culture. It should be the Christian voice that is not echoing the despair but offering a voice of possibility and the love and a future in Christ and a security in Christ,"" Wear said.",REAL
+3210,Jeb seeks to shake shadow of Bush family name,"Nashua, New Hampshire (CNN) Jeb Bush took the podium at the mainstay presidential primary event ""Politics & Eggs"" in Manchester Friday morning, flanked by photos of his father and older brother.
+
+The pictures of the two presidents, Bush said, ""bring back really fond memories.""
+
+And yet, the likely 2016 presidential candidate would prefer that New Hampshire voters ignore them.
+
+As the former Florida governor mulls a presidential bid, his biggest political asset among establishment figures and donors—his family—is a liability with activists. And it's a particularly acute problem in the Granite State, home to the first-in-the-nation primary that helped sink President George H.W. Bush's re-election bid in 1992 and supported President George W. Bush's biggest primary challenger, John McCain, in 2000.
+
+In a two-day swing through the state featuring stops in Concord, Manchester and Nashua, the younger Bush sought to reverse his family's fortunes.
+
+""I'm going to have to show my heart, show who I am, tell my story,"" he said. ""It's a little different than the story of my brother and my dad. This may come as a shock to you, but you have brothers and sisters so you may appreciate this: We're not all alike. We make our own mistakes in life, we're on our own life's journey.""
+
+Thursday night in Concord, Bush joked that he is not running ""to try to break the tie between the Adams family and the Bush family""—the only two in American history to produce father-and-son presidents.
+
+He was self-effacing when asked about a match-up with Hillary Clinton, which would mean one of their two last names had been on primary or general election ballots in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
+
+""I have enough self-awareness to know that that is an oddity,"" Bush said.
+
+He also tried to disarm his skeptics. Asked at the New Hampshire GOP's summit—the event that drew the entire Republican field into the state for Friday and Saturday—about the prospects of a dynastic Clinton vs. Bush election, he said: ""I don't see any coronation coming my way, trust me.""
+
+""I mean, come on,"" he added. ""What are you seeing that I'm not seeing?""
+
+Bush hasn't officially entered the presidential race yet. But his Right to Rise political action committee has hired three key staffers in New Hampshire. Rich Killion, a Concord-based strategist who worked on Mitt Romney's 2008 campaign and has guided scores of local races, will lead Bush's efforts in the state. Rob Varsalone, who was George W. Bush's top in-state aide in the 2004 election and is close to Sen. Kelly Ayotte, and Nate Lamb, who was Scott Brown's field director in his unsuccessful Senate race last year, are also on board.
+
+At the New Hampshire GOP summit, Bush sought to strike a forward-looking tone.
+
+""We will not win if we just complain about how bad things are,"" Bush said. ""We also have to offer a compelling alternative so that more and more and more people join our cause.""
+
+He didn't mention any GOP foes by name, but—through the cloak of an assault on President Barack Obama—took a veiled shot at the three freshman Republican senators who have entered the race so far: Florida's Marco Rubio, Texas's Ted Cruz and Kentucky's Rand Paul.
+
+Bush said that ""accomplishment matters"" and, suggesting that his time as Florida governor is better preparation than Congress, added: ""The big desk is different than perhaps United States senator or another job.""
+
+Bush didn't throw much red meat to hardline conservatives, standing by his controversial stand in favor of immigration reform during his stops in New Hampshire, downplaying the importance of same-sex marriage and defending his calls for higher education standards, even as he said the federal government shouldn't push Common Core on states.
+
+But his biggest selling point was the eight years he spent as Florida's top executive, saying his record is an ""I'm-not-kidding conservative one.""
+
+The summit's attendees—particularly those who remembered the Bush family's first two presidents—said it wasn't his policies that concerned them, less than one year away from the state's primary.
+
+""The Bush family has been terrific, but I think we need a change,"" said Jim McHugh, a 63-year-old consulting business owner from Portsmouth.
+
+""It's probably not fair to him, simply because his dad and his brother were president, but I think I would like to see someone new,"" said Donna Slack, a 66-year-old Greenland retiree.
+
+""I certainly don't have anything against him personally. I think he did a wonderful job in Florida,"" she added.
+
+Bush earned strong reviews, though, from University of New Hampshire students—both of whom were in their early teenage years when Bush's brother was president, and who weren't alive when his father left office.
+
+""He's extremely personable, compared to some other candidates,"" he said. ""Some crowds I've seen him speak at are not exactly his type of conservatives, but I think he really knows how to adapt to every situation.""
+
+Michael Raccio, 21, another UNH student, said Bush ""really impressed me,"" but he'll probably back a more conservative contender, like Cruz, because Bush ""didn't address illegal immigration, and he has a shaky record on that.""
+
+""I was looking for him to address why he was in favor of giving in-state tuition to illegal immigrants in addition to giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, and he never mentioned a thing,"" he said. ""So I'm still left with a couple questions.""",REAL
+8025,Michael Klare: Whose Finger on the Nuclear Button?,"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+I was born on July 20, 1944, the day of the failed officers’ plot against Adolf Hitler. That means I preceded the official dawning of the nuclear age by exactly 369 days, which makes me part of the last generation to do so. I’m speaking not of the obliteration of two Japanese cities by America’s new “wonder weapon” on August 6th and 9th, 1945, but of the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexican desert near Alamogordo on July 16th of that year. When physicist Robert Oppenheimer , the “father of the atomic bomb,” witnessed that explosion, the line from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita , that famously came into his head was: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” 
+How apt it still remains more than seven decades later, at a moment when nine countries possess such weapons — more than 15,000 of them — in their arsenals, most of which are now staggeringly more destructive than that first devastating bomb, and as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare points out today, some of which are closer to possible use than at any point in at least a couple of decades. For those of us who lived through the years of bomb shelters, atomic movie monsters , the Cuban Missile Crisis (which left me, age 18, fearing I might be toast in the morning), the rise and fall of antinuclear movements, and nuclear nightmares of a sort I still remember vividly from my youth in a way I no longer recall the dreams of last night, it’s a horror to imagine that nuclear war is still with us; even more so, because, in Election 2016, we have a presidential candidate who is not only ignorant about those weapons in hard-to-believe ways, but who wonders why “we can’t use them,” and who might months from now have his finger on that “nuclear button” (or rather command of the nuclear codes that could launch such a war). Don’t tell me that this isn’t a living nightmare of the first order. 
+I find it eerie in the extreme and unnervingly apt that the Clinton campaign has brought back a living icon of our nuclear fears, the little girl from the 1964 election who appeared in the famous (or infamous) “ Daisy ” ad President Lyndon Johnson ran against Republican contender Barry Goldwater (who, in retrospect, seems like the soul of stability compared with you know whom). She was then seen counting to 10 as she plucked petals off a daisy just before an ominous, echoing male voice began the countdown to an atomic explosion that filled the screen. Now, that girl, Monique Luiz , a grown woman, is shown saying , “The fear of nuclear war we had as children, I never thought our children would ever have to deal with that again. And to see that coming forward in this election is really scary.” 
+She’s now 55 years old and, however the Clinton campaign may be using her, there’s still something deeply unnerving for those of us who had hoped to outlast the nuclear age simply to see her there more than five decades later. And if you think that’s unnerving on the eve of the most bizarre presidential election in memory, then read today’s piece by Michael Klare and imagine just how unsettling, in nuclear terms, the years ahead may prove to be.",FAKE
+7046,BUILD UP WW3 World War 3 Is Coming Current Situation Analysis,source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments,FAKE
+3570,Jeh Johnson calls for increased vigilance after Mall of America terror threat,"Americans must be vigilant in light of a terror threat calling for attacks at malls such as the Mall of America in Minnesota, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Sunday.
+
+""If anyone is planning to go to the Mall of America today, they've got to be particularly careful,"" he said on CNN's ""State of the Union."" ""There will be enhanced security there, but public vigilance, public awareness and public caution in situations like this is particularly important, and it's the environment we're in, frankly.""
+
+Johnson’s comments came after the release of a video Saturday that was purported to be from the Somali militant group al-Shabab and called for attacks on malls in the United States, Canada and Britain. The video used footage of the 2013 attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi and specifically mentioned the Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minn.; West Edmonton Mall in Canada; and Westfield mall in Stratford, England, among others, as potential targets.
+
+The video called on Muslims to conduct these attacks independently and quickly. “So hurry up, hasten towards heaven, and do not hesitate, for the disbelievers have no right whatsoever to rejoice in the safety of their lands until safety becomes a reality in Palestine and all the lands of Muslims,” an English-speaking narrator says in the video, provided by the Site Intelligence Group.
+
+Johnson said Sunday that groups such as al-Shabab are ""relying more and more on independent actors to become inspired"" and ""attack on their own.""
+
+He also said there was a need for a comprehensive approach to fighting the ever-present threat posed by terror groups, including the Islamic State, which is variously known as ISIS and ISIL.
+
+""Groups like ISIL, al-Shabab, AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] are now publicly calling for attacks, either through the Internet, through videos, through publications, which means that we need to respond militarily,"" he said. ""But we also have to have a whole government approach to law enforcement.""
+
+DHS Undersecretary Suzanne E. Spaulding elaborated on such an approach during a Senate hearing last fall. She noted that government officials routinely work with the private sector to understand the scope of threats they face and to share information and training. For instance, she said the DHS and the Energy Department regularly provide threat briefings to energy company CEOs and other executives about physical threats and cyberthreats. She also referenced the 2013 attack in Kenya.
+
+""In the wake of the terrorist attack on the shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, DHS and the FBI engaged more than 400 major malls across the United States to facilitate table-top exercises based on a similar attack involving active shooters and the use of improved explosive devices,"" Spaulding told lawmakers, according to a transcript.
+
+The Mall of America released a statement Sunday indicating that it takes potential threats seriously and that it had increased security.
+
+Johnson also said Sunday that he hopes Congress this week will ""finally come together"" and pass an appropriations bill that would not defund DHS. Should it be defunded, his headquarters staff would be ""dialed back to a skeleton,"" he said on CBS's ""Face the Nation.""
+
+Johnson has condemned House Republicans for their efforts to defund DHS over President Obama's immigration executive action.
+
+""I'm a little frustrated, frankly, because when I talked to my friends on the Senate side, they say, 'Go talk to the House.' And when I go talk to my friends on the House side, they say, 'It's not me, I passed my bill. Go talk to the Senate,'"" he said Sunday.
+
+Johnson also dived into the debate over how to refer to the Islamic State.
+
+On ""Fox News Sunday,"" he said that calling the militant organization an Islamic group gives it ""more dignity than it deserves."" He said the president's refusal to tie the militant organization to ""radical Islam"" is more about not giving the group religious ""legitimacy"" than about being politically correct.
+
+""To say that they are in any form Islamic cedes to them a playing field that they would like to be drawn into,"" he said.
+
+After making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, Johnson also addressed the National Governors Association winter meeting in Washington, where he again outlined the consequences of an agency shutdown.
+
+Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott (R), in an interview, disputed as ""baloney"" warnings by Johnson of the potential impact on states and cities, noting that all essential personnel would still be on the job even if funding is halted.
+
+Abbott also said that in light of the recent court ruling blocking implementation of the president's executive actions, it is now the Democrats who stand as the major obstacle to passing legislation in Congress. ""It would be irresponsible,"" he said, for Democrats to block action this week.
+
+Brady Dennis and Dan Balz contributed to this report.",REAL
+9737,Fox News Gets Destroyed While Trying To Blame Hillary Clinton For GOP Email Scandal,"By Jason Easley on Sun, Oct 30th, 2016 at 2:37 pm Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace tried to blame Hillary Clinton for the email scandal that Republicans created and got destroyed by Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace tried to blame Hillary Clinton for the email scandal that Republicans created and got destroyed by Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook. 
+This exchange between Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace and Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook highlighted why the email scandal isn’t working for the GOP. 
+Video: 
+Transcript via Fox News Sunday: WALLACE: The last question I want to ask you is that you’re acting as if it was the director who brought this into the election when the fact is that it was Hillary Clinton who brought this into the election. 
+I want to go back to the e-mail exchange on March 2nd, 2015, when The New York Times broke the story about Hillary Clinton using private e-mails. We’re going to put it up on the screen. 
+Clinton adviser Neera Tanden, “Why didn’t they get the stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy.” 
+Campaign chairman John Podesta, “Unbelievable.” Tanden, “I guess I know the answer, they wanted to get away with it.” 
+Robby, it was Clinton who delayed and it was Clinton who brought this into the presidential campaign. 
+MOOK: And it is Secretary Clinton who has said this was a mistake. It is Secretary Clinton who cooperated fully with the investigation. And it was Secretary Clinton who accepted the outcome of that investigation. And what secretary Clinton is doing now is saying, if there’s new information, get it out on the table. Let’s get it out. These could be duplicates. 
+Again, it’s been reported these e-mails may not have been sent or received by Secretary Clinton. We don’t know anything. And this close to an election, this unprecedented announcement of new information, when – when, again, it’s been reported by Yahoo! News that – that the FBI may have not even seen it. That – that – that Director Comey sent this unprecedented letter shortly before the election when he doesn’t even know what the information is. That’s disturbing. And we’re just asking him, get everything out there that he knows. 
+Fox News has no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Clinton, so they have been reduced to whining about why she didn’t release the emails sooner. What Wallace left out was that the release of Clinton’s emails represented an unprecedented level of disclosure. 
+Hillary Clinton didn’t cause this email scandal. House Republicans misused their Benghazi Select Committee to go on a fishing expedition for Hillary Clinton’s emails. 
+Robbie Mook destroyed Fox News with facts, because unlike Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton hasn’t worked to keep information hidden from the public. Trump has not released his tax returns, medical records, or an accounting of his business dealings with Russia. Trump has been the least transparent nominee in more than 40 years. 
+Republicans and conservative media are blaming Clinton for the scandal that they created as justification for continuing the investigations of her after the election. 
+Clinton’s campaign manager was able to wipe the floor with the Republican talking points because at the end of the day the email scandal remains a conspiracy about nothing.",FAKE
+6677,Trump Reveals American Muslim Solution,"Home | World | Trump Reveals American Muslim Solution Trump Reveals American Muslim Solution By Michael Ainsworth 10/11/2016 21:21:28 
+Many U.S. Muslims prefer Sharia law 
+WASHINGTON D.C. – USA – President elect, Donald Trump has today made his plans for Muslims in America known to reporters. 
+
+Donald Trump visited the White House today to meet with outgoing president Barack Hussein Obama on plans for the transference of power. To say the meeting was edgy and cold would be an understatement. 
+Trump’s landslide victory at the recent U.S. elections caught many off guard, and liberals are all still in deep shock that their delegate Hillary Clinton was not elected. 
+After the meeting at the White House, when asked about Muslims, Trump was at first hesitant about revealing his plans, but then answered emphatically that Muslims are a danger to the national security of the nation. 
+No Sharia 
+“I have already spoken in depth about Muslims. Our solution will be humane and just. Their religion is abhorrent and cannot be trusted. We cannot trust Muslims in our cities, our streets, our jobs. Look what happened in the San Bernardino shooting or the Orlando massacre? These atrocities were all committed by Muslims on U.S. citizens going about their daily lives. We can’t have this savagery amongst us. That’s why I’m calling for every Muslim to be registered in a database. We need to find out who the devout ones are, who the others are. We need to know if they own guns, and we need to stop their permits. We need to know and watch every Muslim in this country, and when the time comes I will make the final decision. We need to detain them until all the attacks stop. Detain or deport. We’ll give them a choice. Let’s not forget their mosques either, shut them down, we can and will do that. They have no place in America, a Christian God loving country.” 
+Another reporter asked about Muslims who wish to visit the United States. 
+“It’s common sense. We have no choice. There is already a no-fly list in place for known terrorists and criminals. Our policy in the name of Homeland Security will be that all Muslims are potential terrorists. Until the war of terror is over, this will be our policy. They can go and visit some other country, but Muslims will not be welcome in America while I am president.” 
+As reporters rushed to ask further questions, Trump halted them and moved on with his entourage. 
+There are fears for many Muslims in America today, as attacks on their person have risen by 25% already since Trump’s election victory. Many are now making plans to leave of their own volition. Share on :",FAKE
+7125,"This Year’s Mammogram Month Launched With Devastating Report On Harms, Lack Of Effectiveness","in: General Health , Medical & Health , Sleuth Journal , Special Interests I’ve written many articles on the hazards and drawbacks of getting a mammogram, which include: 
+• The risk of false positives . Besides leading to unnecessary mental anguish and medical treatment, a false cancer diagnosis may also interfere with your eligibility for medical insurance, which can have serious financial ramifications 
+• The risk of false negatives , which is of particular concern for dense-breasted women 
+• The fact that ionizing radiation actually causes cancer and may contribute to breast cancer when done over a lifetime. 
+Results published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) show that women carrying the BRCA1/2 gene mutation are particularly vulnerable to radiation-induced cancer 1 
+• The fact that studies repeatedly find that mammograms have no impact on mortality rates As so expertly demonstrated in the video above, created by Dr. Andrew Lazris and environmental scientist, Erik Rifkin, Ph.D., it’s easy to misunderstand the benefits of mammograms. Mammograms are said to reduce your risk of dying from breast cancer by 20 percent, but unless you understand where this number comes from, you’ll be vastly overestimating the potential benefit of regular mammogram screening . Most doctors also fail to inform patients about the other side of the equation, which is that far more women are actually harmed by the procedure than benefit from it. 1 in 1,000 Women Is Saved by Regular Mammogram Screening While 10 Undergo Cancer Treatment for No Reason Incredible as it may sound, the 20 percent mortality risk reduction touted by conventional medicine actually amounts to just 1 woman per 1,000 who get regular mammograms. How can that be? As explained in the video, for every 1,000 women who do not get mammograms, 5 of them will die of breast cancer. For every 1,000 women who do get mammograms, 4 will die anyway. The difference between the two groups is 20 percent (the difference of that one person in the mammogram group whose life is saved). On the other side of the equation, out of every 1,000 women who get regular mammograms over a lifetime: HALF will receive a false positive. So while they do NOT have cancer, about 500 out of every 1,000 women getting mammograms will face the terror associated with a breast cancer diagnosis 64 will get biopsies, which can be painful and carry risks of adverse effects 10 will go on to receive cancer treatment for what is in actuality NOT cancer, including disfiguring surgery and toxic drugs or radiation. Surgery, chemo and radiation are all risky, and dying from the treatment for a cancer you do not have is doubly tragic All things considered, the evidence seems quite clear; most women should probably avoid mammograms, as they cause far more harm than good. Many studies have now come to that conclusion, and the most recent research, 2 published just in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, again hammers home that point. Harms of Mammography Eclipse Benefits For this study, the researchers analyzed U.S. cancer statistics collected by the government in order to estimate the effectiveness of mammography. By comparing records of breast cancers diagnosed in women over the age of 40 between 1975 and 1979 — a time before mammograms came into routine use — and between 2000 and 2002, three key findings emerged. 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 The incidence of large tumors (2 centimeters or larger) has declined, from 68 percent to 32 percent The number of women diagnosed with small tumors has increased, from 36 to 64 percent The incidence of metastatic cancer, which is the most lethal, has remained stable This may initially sound like good news for mammograms, but in absolute numbers, the decrease in large tumors was actually rather small — a mere 30 tumors less per 100,000 women. Meanwhile, the dramatic increase in small tumors was mostly attributed to overdiagnosis — an estimated 81 percent of these small tumors did not actually need treatment. The fact that metastatic cancer rates remained even suggests we’re not catching more of them, earlier. Instead, we’re catching and treating mostly harmless tumors. The researchers also found that two-thirds of the reduction in breast cancer mortality was attributable to improved treatment, such as the use of tamoxifen. Breast cancer screening only accounted for one-third of the reduction in mortality. Lead researcher Dr. H.Gilbert Welch explains the findings of the study in the video above. As reported by WebMD: 9 “The upshot, according to Welch, is that mammography is more likely to ‘overdiagnose’ breast cancer than to catch more-aggressive tumors early. What’s more, the researchers said that while breast cancer deaths have fallen since the 1970s, that is mainly due to better treatment — not screening. Welch noted the current study’s findings have nothing to do with women who feel a lump in the breast. ‘They need to get a mammogram,’ he stressed. But, Welch suggested, when it comes to routine screening, women can decide based on their personal values.” Screening as Personal Choice When speaking to NBC news, Welch went on to say that “screening is a choice. It’s not a public health imperative.” 10 At present, most conventional cancer specialists do view mammograms as an imperative, although recommendations vary depending on who you listen to. As of last year, the American Cancer Society (ACS) recommends women of average risk should have their first mammogram at age 45, followed by an annual mammogram up until age 55. Women 55 and older should have them every other year. 11 Meanwhile, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends waiting until the age of 50, and only getting a mammogram every other year thereafter. 12 In response to heated debate over the varying guidelines, the U.S. Congress passed legislation requiring insurance companies to cover mammograms regardless of age. Not surprisingly, the ACS has sharply criticized the latest study. In a statement, chief cancer control officer of ACS, Dr. Richard Wender, said: “These conclusions are bold, attention-grabbing and should be taken with a grain of salt — actually, an entire spoonful.” The problem with Wender’s attitude is that this is by no means the first or only study suggesting that mammography has been vastly oversold. In fact, a number of studies have now refuted the validity of mammography as a primary tool against breast cancer. The Evidence Overwhelmingly Refutes Routine Use of Mammography Other studies that support the findings of the featured study include the following: ✓ Archives of Internal Medicine, 2007 : A meta-analysis of 117 randomized, controlled mammogram trials. Among its findings: Rates of false-positive results are as high as 56 percent after 10 mammograms. 13 ✓ Cochrane Database Review, 2009 : This review found that breast cancer screening led to a 30 percent rate of overdiagnosis and overtreatment, which actually INCREASED the absolute risk of developing cancer by 0.5 percent. The review concluded that for every 2,000 women invited for screening throughout a 10-year period, the life of just one woman was prolonged, while 10 healthy women were treated unnecessarily. 14 ✓ New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), 2010 : This study concluded that the reduction in mortality as a result of mammographic screening was so small as to be nonexistent — a mere 2.4 deaths per 100,000 person-years were spared as a result of the screening. 15 ✓ The Lancet Oncology, 2011 : This study described the natural history of breast cancers detected in the Swedish mammography screening program between 1986 to 1990, involving 650,000 women. Since breast lesions and tumors are aggressively treated and/or removed before they can be determined with any certainty to be a clear and present threat to health, there has been little to no research on what happens when they are left alone. This study however, demonstrated for the first time that women who received the most breast screenings had a HIGHER cumulative incidence of invasive breast cancer over the following six years than the control group who received far less screenings. 16 ✓ The Lancet, 2012 , showed that for every life saved by mammography screening, three women are overdiagnosed and treated with surgery, radiation or chemotherapy for a cancer that might never have given them trouble in their lifetimes. 17 ✓ Cochrane Database Review, 2013 : A review of 10 trials involving more than 600,000 women found mammography screening had no effect on overall mortality. 18 ✓ NEJM, 2014 : Drs. Nikola Biller-Andorno and Peter Jüni published a paper in which they describe the findings of an independent health technology assessment initiative to assess the effectiveness of mammography, of which they were a part: 19 “First, we noticed that the ongoing debate was based on a series of reanalyses of the same, predominantly outdated trials … Could the modest benefit of mammography screening in terms of breast-cancer mortality that was shown in trials initiated between 1963 and 1991 still be detected in a trial conducted today? 
+Second, we were struck by how nonobvious it was that the benefits of mammography screening outweighed the harms. 
+The relative risk reduction of approximately 20 percent in breast-cancer mortality associated with mammography that is currently described by most expert panels came at the price of a considerable diagnostic cascade, with repeat mammography, subsequent biopsies and overdiagnosis of breast cancers — cancers that would never have become clinically apparent … 
+Third, we were disconcerted by the pronounced discrepancy between women’s perceptions of the benefits of mammography screening and the benefits to be expected in reality. The figure shows the numbers of 50-year-old women in the United States expected to be alive, to die from breast cancer, or to die from other causes if they are invited to undergo regular mammography every [two] years over a 10-year period, as compared with women who do not undergo mammography … The Swiss Medical Board’s report was made public on February 2, 2014. 20 It acknowledged that systematic mammography screening might prevent about one death attributed to breast cancer for every 1,000 women screened, even though there was no evidence to suggest that overall mortality was affected. 
+At the same time, it emphasized the harm — in particular, false positive test results and the risk of overdiagnosis … The board therefore recommended that no new systematic mammography screening programs be introduced and that a time limit be placed on existing programs. In addition, it stipulated that the quality of all forms of mammography screening should be evaluated and that clear and balanced information should be provided to women regarding the benefits and harms of screening.” ✓ British Medical Journal (BMJ), 2014 : A Canadian study put the rate of overdiagnosis and overtreatment from mammography at nearly 22 percent. 21 ✓ JAMA Internal Medicine, July 2015 : Here, researchers concluded mammography screenings lead to unnecessary treatments while having virtually no impact on the number of deaths from breast cancer. A positive correlation between breast cancer screening and breast cancer incidence was indeed found, but there was no positive correlation with mortality. 22 , 23 ✓ Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, September 2015 : The conclusion of this study is stated right in the title, which reads: “Mammography screening is harmful and should be abandoned.” 24 , 25 In short, the authors concluded that decades of routine breast cancer screening using mammograms has done nothing to decrease deaths from breast cancer, while causing more than half (52 percent) of all women undergoing the test to be overdiagnosed and overtreated. According to lead author Peter C. Gøtzsche, had mammograms been a drug, “it would have been withdrawn from the market long ago.” It’s Time to Revise the ‘When in Doubt, Cut It Out’ Mentality Going back to where we started, even when using the cancer industry’s own statistics mammography comes up short, provided you understand what the 20 percent actually means. To reiterate, the difference between getting routine mammograms and not getting them is that the life of 1 in 1,000 women is saved. Four die even with mammograms, compared to five deaths among those who do not get screened. And again, 10 of those 1,000 screened women will be treated for cancer even though they do not actually have it. Clearly the choice is yours. If you find comfort in thinking you may be that one person who is saved, then by all means follow your heart or gut instinct. Just be clear about the risks, because the chances are far greater you could be one of the 10 who ends up undergoing chemo or a mastectomy for a tumor that would not have caused you harm. As noted by Dr. Joann Elmore of the University of Washington School of Medicine: 26 “We get credit for curing disease that never would have harmed the patient. We receive positive feedback from patients thanking us for ‘saving my life,’ alarming feedback from patients with ‘missed diagnoses’ and no feedback at all from patients whose cancer was overdiagnosed. The mantras, ‘All cancers are life-threatening’ and ‘When in doubt, cut it out’, require revision.” Solid Evidence for Vitamin D as a Cancer Prevention Tool Mammograms are portrayed as the best form of “prevention” a woman can get. But early diagnosis is not the same as prevention. And when the cancer screening does more harm than good, how can it possibly qualify as your best hope? I believe the evidence really speaks for itself when it comes to mammography. The same can be said for research into vitamin D, which repeatedly shows that optimizing your vitamin D level within a range of 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml) provides impressive cancer protection. I believe testing your vitamin D level is one of the most important cancer prevention tests available. Ideally get tested twice a year. There are exceptions, of course. If you feel a lump in your breast, a mammogram may be warranted, although even then there are other non-ionizing alternatives, such as ultrasound, which has been shown to be considerably superior to mammography, especially for dense-breasted women who are at much higher risk of a false negative when using mammography. One of the most recent studies 27 looking at vitamin D for breast cancer found that vitamin D deficiency is associated with cancer progression and metastasis. As noted by Stanford University researcher, Dr. Brian Feldman: 28 “A number of large studies have looked for an association between vitamin D levels and cancer outcomes, and the findings have been mixed. Our study identifies how low levels of vitamin D circulating in the blood may play a mechanistic role in promoting breast cancer growth and metastasis .” Having higher levels of vitamin D has also been linked to increased likelihood of survival after being diagnosed with breast cancer. 29 In one study, breast cancer patients who had an average of 30 ng/ml of vitamin D in their blood had a 50 percent lower mortality rate compared to those who had an average of 17 ng/ml of vitamin D. I am really grateful that the medical community has embraced vitamin D and started using it. However, it’s important to understand that the best way to get vitamin D is from sensible sun exposure, and if you’re really interested in optimal health and healing you will do everything in your power to get it. This is one of the reasons I moved to Florida. I have not swallowed vitamin D in over 8 years and still have levels over 60 ng/ml. There are many other benefits of sunlight exposure other than vitamin D. Over 40 percent of sunlight is near-infrared rays that your body requires to structure the water in your body and stimulate mitochondrial repair and regeneration. If you merely swallow vitamin D and avoid the sun, you are missing a primary benefit of sensible sun exposure. If you are stuck in the winter and have low vitamin D, it is probably best to swallow oral vitamin D like a drug, but please recognize that this is a FAR inferior way to optimize vitamin D levels and you are missing many important biological benefits when you avoid sun exposure. You can learn more about vitamin D’s influence on cancer and other health problems in my previous article, “ The Who, Why and When of Vitamin D Screening .” The fact of the matter is there are many strategies that are far more beneficial in terms of breast cancer prevention than mammography. So if you’re hitching your fate on mammograms, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. For key dietary guidelines and lifestyle strategies that can help reduce your cancer risk, please see my previous article, “ Top Tips to Decrease Your Breast Cancer Risk .” Another excellent resource is Dr. Christine Horner’s book, “Waking the Warrior Goddess: Dr. Christine Horner’s Program to Protect Against and Fight Breast Cancer ,” which contains scientifically validated all-natural approaches that can protect against and treat breast cancer. Submit your review",FAKE
+5979,Comey’s Clinton Foundation Connection,"Breitbart October 31, 2016 
+WASHINGTON, D.C. — A review of FBI Director James Comey’s professional history and relationships shows that the Obama cabinet leader — now under fire for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton — is deeply entrenched in the big-money cronyism culture of Washington, D.C. His personal and professional relationships — all undisclosed as he announced the Bureau would not prosecute Clinton — reinforce bipartisan concerns that he may have politicized the criminal probe. 
+These concerns focus on millions of dollars that Comey accepted from a Clinton Foundation defense contractor, Comey’s former membership on a Clinton Foundation corporate partner’s board, and his surprising financial relationship with his brother Peter Comey, who works at the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes. 
+Lockheed Martin 
+When President Obama nominated Comey to become FBI director in 2013, Comey promised the United States Senate that he would recuse himself on all cases involving former employers. 
+But Comey earned $6 million in one year alone from Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin became a Clinton Foundation donor that very year. 
+Comey served as deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft for two years of the Bush administration. When he left the Bush administration, he went directly to Lockheed Martin and became vice president, acting as a general counsel . 
+How much money did James Comey make from Lockheed Martin in his last year with the company, which he left in 2010? More than $6 million in compensation . 
+Lockheed Martin is a Clinton Foundation donor . The company admitted to becoming a Clinton Global Initiative member in 2010. 
+According to records , Lockheed Martin is also a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which paid Bill Clinton $250,000 to deliver a speech in 2010 . 
+In 2010 , Lockheed Martin won 17 approvals for private contracts from the Hillary Clinton State Department. 
+HSBC Holdings 
+In 2013, Comey became a board member, a director, and a Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee member of the London bank HSBC Holdings. 
+“Mr. Comey’s appointment will be for an initial three-year term which, subject to re-election by shareholders, will expire at the conclusion of the 2016 Annual General Meeting,” according to HSBC company records . 
+HSBC Holdings and its various philanthropic branches routinely partner with the Clinton Foundation . For instance, HSBC Holdings has partnered with Deutsche Bank through the Clinton Foundation to “retrofit 1,500 to 2,500 housing units, primarily in the low- to moderate-income sector” in “New York City.” 
+“Retrofitting” refers to a Green initiative to conserve energy in commercial housing units. Clinton Foundation records show that the Foundation projected “ $1 billion in financing ” for this Green initiative to conserve people’s energy in low-income housing units.",FAKE
+8179,Does The U.S. Government Really Know Who Hacked Democrats’ Emails?," Does The U.S. Government Really Know Who Hacked Democrats’ Emails? By Kassia Halcli
+ "" PBS"" - The hacking and public release of Democratic campaign and committee emails made the news and a presidential debate, with more leaks expected to come.
+This week, WikiLeaks published more emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Nearly 20 batches of campaign emails were released over the last month, in addition to Democratic National Committee emails released earlier this year.
+In the final presidential debate on Oct. 19, Clinton said documents released by WikiLeaks were part of Russian espionage on the U.S. She called on Republican candidate Donald Trump to acknowledge the Russia connection and condemn such actions.
+“She has no idea whether it’s Russia, China, or anybody else. She has no idea,” said Trump.
+“I am not quoting myself. I am quoting 17, 17 intelligence agencies. Do you doubt 17 military and civilian agencies?” Clinton asked.
+“Our country has no idea,” Trump responded.
+Clinton was citing the Oct. 7 statement from the U.S. intelligence community saying it was “confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions.”
+Analysts say, however, that the ability to determine who cyber attackers are, where they’re located and sometimes who ordered their operations is rarely definitive and comes in degrees of confidence.
+Beyond the government’s headline assertion that Russia is to blame, “it’s important to parse the public statement pretty closely,” said Susan Hennessey, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution. “They’re being really careful in their word choice.”
+The Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security said in a statement earlier this month that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
+But that statement does not mean that the U.S. has “direct evidence of senior official-level involvement,” Hennessey said.
+Without more definitive statements, it’s difficult for some technical experts to take the government’s word on faith, she and others have said.
+“There’s no evidence that this was done by the state itself, only evidence it was done by non-state actors that might be Russian-speaking,” said Jeffrey Carr, CEO of the cyber security consultancy firm Taia Global, referring to the evidence available to the public.
+That evidence, which was released by private threat assessment companies rather than official channels, indicates hackers used Cyrillic keyboards and operated during Moscow working hours.
+But indicators of identity like timestamps, language preferences and IP addresses “can be manipulated or faked rather easily,” said Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, a senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
+Trump has a point when he says we can’t know for sure, said Cris Thomas, an information security professional known online as Space Rogue.
+“I don’t know what [evidence] they have that couldn’t have been faked,” Thomas said.
+Sophisticated attackers have learned how to tamper with the technical indicators to mask their identity, or at least send analysts in the wrong direction.
+Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of CrowdStrike, hired by the Democratic National Committee to assess its breach, wrote a blog post attributing the hack to two separate Russian-intelligence affiliated groups, Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear.
+Alperovitch classed both as sophisticated actors, writing on CrowdStrike’s blog that their “tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none.”
+Fancy Bear is “very, very good at deception campaigns,” said Brian Bartholomew, who co-authored a report about the deception tactics that complicate attribution.
+But, he added, the group has recently seemed “a little more lax” about getting caught.
+Carr asked, if these hacks are a ploy by Russian President Vladimir Putin to install what Clinton has called “a puppet” at the helm of a Western democracy, why leave such obvious technical indicators in their wake?
+“That’s not even sloppy,” Carr said. “That’s just ignorant.”
+“Perhaps [Russia] wanted it traced back to them to show that they’re flexing their geopolitical muscle,” Schwartz said.
+Deception, however, “is exceptionally difficult to pull off at the level that is going to withstand the amount of scrutiny the government will put on it,” said Jason Healey, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative.
+Another complicating factor is that the first intrusions into the DNC go back more than a year, well before Trump, purported to be Putin’s favorite candidate, was perceived as having a reasonable chance of winning the Republican Party’s nomination.
+To think these hacks were in service of a farsighted, cunning plan designed by the Kremlin is “imputing a level of insight and ability to understand and predict the U.S. electoral system that certainly no one in the United States has demonstrated,” Hennessey said.
+A more likely explanation, she said, is that the hackers were conducting low-threshold espionage but ending up finding information that could be opportunistically released.
+The U.S. government has swaths of intelligence and the ability to operate beyond laws that constrain private sector threat assessment companies, said Guerrero-Saade.
+“As the public, we should really understand that there’s a lot more at play behind the scenes,” Bartholomew said.
+Judging by the practice established by its three previous attribution claims, the government is unlikely to release substantiating evidence, in order to guard U.S. sources and methods.
+The world of cyber crime “feels like the Wild West, but it’s not to say that nothing can be known,” Guerrero-Saade said.",FAKE
+2913,"Gen. Petraeus: Biggest threat to Iraq's stability is Iran-backed militias, not ISIS","Former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus says the biggest threat to long-term stability in Iraq isn’t the Islamic State -- but instead, Iran-backed Shiite militias.
+
+“What has happened in Iraq is a tragedy — for the Iraqi people, for the region and for the entire world. It is tragic foremost because it didn't have to turn out this way,” Petraeus told The Washington Post.  “The hard-earned progress of the surge was sustained for over three years. What transpired after that, starting in late 2011, came about as a result of mistakes and misjudgments whose consequences were predictable.”
+
+Petraeus, who continues to advise the Obama administration on Iraq despite his recent guilty plea for leaking classified information to his former mistress, says there is plenty of blame to go around for the chaos in the region.
+
+But Petraeus told the Post he thinks Iraq and coalition forces are making progress against ISIS.
+
+""In fact,"" he said, ""I would argue that the foremost threat to Iraq's long-term stability and the broader regional equilibrium is not the Islamic State; rather, it is Shiite militias, many backed by -- and some guided by -- Iran.""
+
+He told the Post the Iran-backed militias returned to the streets of Iraq in response to a fatwa by Shia leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani during a moment of “extreme danger” and acknowledged this prevented ISIS from continuing its offensive into Baghdad. But he said the militias went after Sunni civilians as well as extremists, ""and committed atrocities against them.”
+
+What’s resulted is that the group has been both part of Iraq’s salvation but also its the most serious threat in the campaign to get the Sunni Arab population in Iraq to believe they have a say, Petraeus argued.
+
+Petraeus, 62, admitted to having an affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell, following his resignation as CIA director. Prosecutors claimed that while Broadwell was writing her book in 2011, Petraeus gave her binders with classified  information he kept while he was top military commander in Afghanistan.
+
+In addition to working with the Obama administration, Petraeus has started to re-enter public life. He’s a scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and has taken a job at KKR & Co., a private-equity firm known for its large corporate takeovers.",REAL
+9268,Trump World’s Darkest Side,"Trump World’s Darkest Side November 8, 2016 
+Donald Trump’s campaign has exposed and spoken to the real pain and profound alienation of many Americans, but the candidate also has exploited those emotions with lies and appeals to prejudice, says Michael Winship. 
+By Michael Winship 
+When I grow up, I want to be Charlie Pierce , who covers politics for Esquire magazine and has toiled in our scrivener’s trade, as far as I can tell, since the late 1970s. 
+I know, technically, he’s a couple of years younger than I am, but he writes with the fierce wit and well-aimed anger to which I aspire, and as this wheezing milk train of a presidential campaign clanks into the final station, few have been as perceptive when it comes to trying to figure out just what the hell has happened to America this year. Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. (Photo credit: Grant Miller/RNC) 
+Charlie Pierce has done so with great style throughout, but now, thanks to Donald Trump and just hours before Election Day, he has come to the end of his watchdog rope. He wrote on Saturday that Trump — to whom he refers as El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago — had “managed to exceed even my admittedly expansive limits for political obscenity.” 
+Pierce was talking about Trump’s reaction after President Obama responded to an elderly heckler wearing a military tunic at a Friday campaign rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. 
+As the crowd booed the man, Obama said, “Hey! Listen up! I told you to be focused, and you’re not focused right now. Listen to what I’m saying. Hold up. Hold up! … Everybody sit down, and be quiet for a second… First of all, we live in a country that respects free speech. Second of all, it looks like maybe he might’ve served in our military and we got to respect that. Third of all, he was elderly and we got to respect our elders. And fourth of all, don’t boo, vote.” 
+In other words, the President showed poise, grace and yes, class. But shortly after, here’s how the moment was seen through Trump’s eyes at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania: “There was a protester and a protester that likes us,” Trump said. “And what happened is they wouldn’t put the cameras on him. They kept the cameras on Obama. … He was talking to a protester, screaming at him, really screaming at him. By the way, if I spoke the way Obama spoke to that protester, they would say he became unhinged.” 
+Unhinged? Really? We all know that Trump seems to get his news from an implanted electrode picking up propaganda signals from the Planet Mongo. But there comes a point when the lies piled upon lies become too much for even the fairest and most equable of us. Hearing Trump’s demonstrably false description of what happened at Obama’s rally, Charlie Pierce finally had it. 
+“Maybe it was because it was so ludicrously provable a lie,” he wrote. “[Trump] didn’t care. He never has cared. His contempt for the democratic processes and for the norms of self-government is matched only by the deep contempt he has for all the suckers who mistake his contempt for the American experiment for their deep disappointment in it. He has measured their intelligence by his heavily leveraged net worth and found them hilariously lacking. 
+“We are all the subcontractors who build his indomitable ego for him and, as such, he can stiff us according to his customary business plan. His campaign long ago became a sickening charade performed by a grotesque charlatan.” 
+The Scene in Reno 
+And so it is. Look, too, at how Trump and his followers at a rally in Reno, Nevada, on Saturday responded to a man with a “Republicans against Trump” sign. Before someone shouted “Gun!” and the moment turned even uglier, Trump had looked down and said, “Oh we have one of those guys from the Hillary Clinton campaign. How much are you being paid, $1,500?” As the crowd booed, Trump said, “Okay. Take him out.” The run-down PIX Theatre sign reads “Vote Trump” on Main Street in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. July 15, 2016. (Photo by Tony Webster Flickr) 
+The protester, a Reno resident named Austyn Crites, described himself as Republican and a fiscal conservative. He told The Guardian he was grateful to the police who removed him from the auditorium for interrogation — they kept him from being further kicked, choked and pummeled by the gang of Trump supporters who surrounded him. 
+Still, he said, “The people who attacked me — I’m not blaming them. I’m blaming Donald Trump’s hate rhetoric, … The fact that I got beat up today, that’s just showing what he’s doing to his crowds.” 
+Throughout the campaign, whenever Trump has egged on his followers, I’ve thought of that line in Young Frankenstein, when the angry Transylvanian villagers are told by the local police inspector, “A riot is an ugly thing, and I think that it is just about time we had one.” 
+Remember what Trump said when a protester was dragged out of a February rally in Las Vegas: “I love the old days — you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. … I’d like to punch him in the face.” 
+By now, you’ve heard it all before and the litany of lies, outrageous claims and insults has climbed so high that many of us have become numb and weary from the sheer repetition of Trump’s buffoonery. You can only go to so many demolition derbies before the sight of flaming car wrecks becomes routine. 
+Dog Whistles 
+What’s more, you can argue that far more insidious and frightening are the dog whistle attacks appealing to the baser instincts of the bigoted and ignorant. The latest: the closing ad from the Trump campaign that, with anti-Semitic overtones, points fingers at “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class.” Former   speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona. March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore) 
+As Josh Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo , “The four readily identifiable American bad guys in the ad are Hillary Clinton, George Soros (Jewish financier), Janet Yellen (Jewish Fed Chair) and Lloyd Blankfein (Jewish Goldman Sachs CEO)… This is an ad intended to appeal to anti-Semites and spread anti-Semitic ideas… This is intentional and by design. It is no accident.” 
+Here is something Charlie Pierce wrote back in May . Trump, he said, “is riding on a wave of pain that he never has felt.” 
+“He is riding on a wave of anxiety he never has encountered. Beyond their love of him, there is no indication that he is as deeply aware of what has powered his rise as the people whose fear, and doubt, and, yes, hatred has powered his rise. Their job is still to wait in line, cheer on cue, and give him the devotion that he has earned because, after all, he is He, Trump, and they’re not, and that will never change.” 
+Add it all up and to me, this is what it comes down to: Do you want to live in a United States where anger, prejudice and fear rule, and dissent is viewed as treason, or in a country where we try to meet every issue from terrorism to education with clear eyes and a rational mind? 
+This year’s choices are far from perfect, but nonetheless a choice must be made. To quote a founding father who believed in such things: liberty, once lost, is lost forever. This could be democracy’s last stop. Vote. 
+Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, and a former senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship .",FAKE
+8494,Over 500 Russian and Egyptian Troops Train to Kill Terrorists (Photos) - Boris Egorov - Russia News Now,"This post was originally published on this site 
+The first Russian-Egyptian anti-terrorist exercise, dubbed Defenders of Friendship-2016 was held on October 15-26. 
+It took place in the desert, between the Egyptian cities of El-Alamein and Alexandria. 
+The Russian Airborne Troops arrived in the African continent for the first time. 
+Over 500 Russian and Egyptian paratroopers took part in the drills. 
+More than 15 helicopters and planes, 10 items of air-droppable military hardware were involved. 
+Russian and Egyptian servicemen practiced localization and elimination of militant groups in desert conditions. 
+Foreign representatives, including ambassadors and military attaches, were present in the capacity of observers. 
+Egyptian military are going to use the experience of the Russian Airborne Troops in the fight against international terrorism. 
+In 2015, Russia and Egypt held their first joint maritime exercises in the Mediterranean near Alexandria. 
+Next Russia-Egypt joint drill may be held in Russia next year. Related ",FAKE
+5870,Have You Heard? Scientists Now Growing Human Ears From Apples,"The rogue work of one nonconformist scientist could one day enable us to grow cheap replacement body parts. Humanity in general and humans in particular have one dream: to live longer than the allotted age. If we could live forever, well, that’d be just swell, never mind the consequences.
+However enamored to the idea of just swapping out old organs for newer, flawless ones, we’re still a long way from mass producing body parts. Sure, there might be a few unorthodox laboratories secretly catering to the specific needs of the 0.01 percent, but these do nothing to benefit the rest of mankind. The reason behind this is that living matter is incredibly well-structured and its organized form is hard to grow outside of living things.
+For example, you could multiply and grow liver cells in a lab but you would end up with an organic mass unable to serve any useful function. That’s because a liver is much more than a number of hepatic cells; these cells need to form tissue, which is fed by blood vessels and crisscrossed by a network of neurons. All this needs to sit inside a scaffold called the extracellular matrix (ECM). Huh, another matrix keeping things together.
+COLORED IN BLUE ARE HUMAN CELLS GROWING ON AN APPLE SLICE SCAFFOLDING
+When growing organs in the lab, scientists don’t have a lot of options regarding the scaffolding they use. It’s either sourced from live animals and cadavers or 3D printed from proprietary materials. Both these practices are time-consuming and prohibitively expensive. Well, maybe not anymore.
+We used an apple and it cost pennies.
+Meet scientist-entrepreneur Andrew Pelling. Also a professor at the University of Ottawa, Pelling knows the only way to truly understand the world around us is to be curious and open-minded. That is how he got worldwide recognition for growing human ears from apple slices.
+In order to do this, Pelling and his team came up with some “minor modifications to well-known decellularization protocols that are typically applied to existing organs and tissues.” Decellularization is the process through which cells are flushed out from tissue, leaving behind only the extracellular matrix. Scientists have been doing this for decades, but never before has been fruit used to grow human ears.
+So how did they manage this feat of biohacking? Easy. Pelling’s wife is a musical instrument maker so she carves wood for a living. The scientist simply asked his wife to sculpt some ears from Macintosh apples. After removing all the apple cells from the apple ear, Pelling was left with a ready-to-use, cheap cellulose scaffold.
+“As weird as this is, it’s actually really reminiscent of how our own tissues are organized,” Pelling told the audience during a Ted Talk. “ And we found in our pre-clinical work that you can implant these scaffolds into the body, and the body will send in cells and a blood supply and actually keep these things alive. This is the point when people started asking me,’ Andrew, can you make body parts out of apples?’ And I’m like, ‘You’ve come to the right place.’” 
+
+The importance of this endeavor goes far beyond the shock value of using something as unassuming as an apple to potentially make us live longer. In a very unexpected way, fruits and veggies could help improve the lives of many sufferers. The thing is, you have to set them in a Petri dish rather than a plate.
+Sensing the importance of their project, Pelling and his team posted the instructions online as open-source. That way smaller laboratories on a tight budget could one day come up with solutions “to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen.” 
+That would leave us with more time to come up with great ideas, a process that coincidentally happens in the same kitchen.
+“ Now, I was in my kitchen, and I was noticing that when you look down the stalks of these asparagus, what you can see are all these tiny little vessels. And when we image them in the lab, you can see how the cellulose forms these structures. This image reminds me of two things: our blood vessels and the structure and organization of our nerves and spinal cord.” 
+Imagine using asparagus stalks to grow new neurons and them implanting them in the bodies of those with damaged nerve connections. If researched properly, this technology has the potential to save millions. It goes without saying that an unconventional, creative way of thinking needs to be in place way before mainstream science can accept the fact that the solution to so many of our problems is right there in front of us.
+In the meantime, don’t forget your fruits and vegetables. You know what they say, “an apple a day might save you from having to wear the same pair of tired-ass ears for the rest of your life.” Or so I’ve heard.
+Source: UFOholic 
+",FAKE
+3677,4 students arrested for Calif. school shooting plot,"Four students were arrested Saturday after police discovered a shooting plot involving Summerville High School in Tuolumne, Calif.
+
+Among the evidence, deputies said they found a list of the names of the targeted victims. Tuolumne County Sheriff Jim Mele said the students confessed.
+
+When asked what they said, Mele responded: ""that they were going to come on campus and shoot and kill as many people as possible.""
+
+The sheriff's department said they were contacted on Wednesday by school administrators regarding students who were making threats against faculty and staff.
+
+""As each one of them was identified they were removed from campus,"" Robert Griffith, Summerville Union High School District Superintendent, said. ""Their parents were called.""
+
+Deputies said the four students were in the beginning stages of the plot, and no one was hurt.
+
+""I can't imagine getting a phone call that something like that had happened at that school,"" Kristin said.
+
+Deputies said the suspects were in the process of obtaining the weapons they were going to use in the attack.
+
+All four students were arrested for conspiracy to commit an assault with deadly weapons. Their names will not be released because they're juveniles.",REAL
+9101,Most Popular Halloween Costumes Of 2016 - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Guy Wondering How Much Longer To Keep Picture Of Dead Friend As Profile Pic SANTA CLARA, CA—With several weeks now having passed since the tragic death of his old college roommate, local man Keith Bisbee told reporters Friday he is uncertain just how long he has to continue using a photograph of his departed friend as his F... New Report Finds Voters Have No Idea How Outraged They Supposed To Be About Anything Anymore WASHINGTON—Saying that at this point, they were just taking their best guesses at how they should react to each new scandal that emerged about the presidential nominees, voters across the country admitted Monday they had no clue how outraged they are supposed to be about anything anymore. Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign BROOKLYN, NY—In response to the FBI’s announcement that its investigation of him had produced new evidence that could pertain to its probe of the Democratic presidential nominee, Anthony Weiner reportedly sent an apology sext early Monday morning to the entire Hillary Clinton campaign. Nation Too Terrified To Look At What Trump’s Recent Rise In Polls Attributed To WASHINGTON—Claiming it felt queasy just thinking about what the cause could be, the nation’s populace said Monday it was too terrified to look at what Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s recent rise in the polls was attributed to. ",FAKE
+1595,Fiorina blasts CNN for debate rules that could exclude her despite rise in polls,"Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina is blasting CNN for relying in large part on old polling to determine who makes their prime-time debate stage next month.
+
+The former Hewlett-Packard CEO has been rising in the polls since what was widely seen as a breakout performance in the first Aug. 6 Fox News-Facebook debate where lower-polling candidates squared off.
+
+But in determining who makes their prime-time debate on Sept. 16, CNN plans to count a number of polls from the three weeks before the August debate, when Fiorina's numbers were low. The calculation could well exclude her.
+
+""It's frustrating to say the least if CNN is putting their thumb on the scale,"" Fiorina told Fox News on Friday.
+
+CNN plans to take an average of major polls from July 16 to Sept. 10, and allow the top 10 on the prime-time debate stage in Simi Valley, Calif. Others will be invited to an earlier debate. However, the Fiorina camp says because there were far more polls taken in the three weeks before the debate than since, CNN will be weighting pre-debate polls more than three times as heavily as post-debate polls. They argue it doesn't make sense to rely so heavily on old polling.
+
+""It doesn't seem right to me,"" Fiorina said Friday.
+
+Since the Aug. 6 debate, a Fox News poll has Fiorina in seventh place nationally with 5 percent, a significant increase from a pre-debate poll that put her in 12th place with 2 percent.
+
+A post-debate Rasmussen poll put her in a tie for fourth with 9 percent and this week's Quinnipiac poll has her in eighth place with 5 percent. Some key state polls have her doing even better.
+
+""I'm also comfortably within the top five in virtually every statewide poll that has been taken since that debate,"" Fiorina said Friday.
+
+A CNN spokeswoman told Fox News that ""we believe our approach is a fair and effective way to deal with the highest number of candidates we have ever encountered.""
+
+However, the Fiorina campaign blasted both CNN and the Republican National Committee for ""rigging the game"" to keep her off the main stage. Fiorina has also nudged CNN to simply take more polls to remedy the situation.
+
+""To be clear, if Carly isn't on the main stage, it will not be because her rise in the polls can't overcome lower polling from July, but because only two of CNN's chosen polling companies have released polls at all since the first debate,"" a Fiorina campaign aide told Fox News.
+
+An RNC spokesman told Fox News the party is legally barred from interfering with the media's rules.
+
+Still, Fiorina told Fox News on Thursday she wants the RNC to take charge.
+
+Fox News' Serafin Gomez and Howard Kurtz contributed to this report.",REAL
+8097,"Black Agenda Report for Week of Oct 31, 2016","News, information and analysis from the black left. Black Agenda Report for Week of Oct 31, 2016 Submitted by Nellie Bailey a... on Mon, 10/31/2016 - 20:45 Venezuela The Missing Black Movement Ingredient: Self-Determination 
+The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations will hold a National Black Political Convention on Self-Determination, November 5 and 6, in Washington, DC. “If you go through history, the fundamental thing that we’ve confronted is the loss of our self-determination as a people,” said Black Is Back chairman Omali Yeshitela . The Coalition has put forward a 19-point position on the need to put self-determination at the center of Black struggles. The 19 points “give us the beginning of some kind of a plan,” said Yeshitela. “It says, specifically, here is our view on self-determination and the subject of reparations, Black women, the question of police invasion and brutality in our community,” and many other issues. The “Moment of Truth” for the Empire 
+“We are entering a new moment in American history,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro , the Duboisian scholar and Black Radical Organizing Committee activist. “It is a moment of truth for the ruling class, for the ruling elite. What do they do when they are trumped at home -- forgive the pun -- and trumped internationally?” he asked. “Do they back off of empire, do they readjust, do they become peaceful, or do they up the stakes and attempt to resolve all problems with war abroad and oppression at home?” Dr. Monteiro is one of the planners of a Revolutionary Science for Radical Times conference, in Philadelphia, December 9 and 10. Hard Times in Venezuela 
+Despite what the corporate media are telling you, Venezuelans are not starving and the Socialist Party government will not be toppled any time soon. However, the rightwing opposition “is smelling blood” due to an economic crisis that “has made it very difficult for people to get access to imported goods, and many goods are very expensive,” said political science professor George Caccariello-Maher , of Drexel University, author of We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution . Corruption, smuggling and money speculation are serious problems, said Caccariello-Maher. However, the strength of the Left lies in the nation’s grassroots organizations and communes. “It would be very difficult for an opposition government to come in and attempt to throw them off their land” or return property to the private sector, he said. Happy Birthday, Rev. Pinkney! 
+Benton Harbor, Michigan, human rights leader Rev. Edward Pinkney, currently serving a 2 ½ to 10 year sentence on election tampering charges, turned 68 years old this month. Marcina Cole , a courtroom observer at Pinkney’s trial, teamed up with David Sole , of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice, to throw a birthday party for Pinkney, in absentia, in Detroit. “He’s definitely in support of other inmates, doing ministry work, and looking forward to being out very soon,” said Cole. She reported that Green Party vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka visited the political prisoner on October 19. “This was historical,” said Cole. “They know how powerful Rev. Pinkney is” -- and that he has allies on the outside. Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.",FAKE
+9287,Self-Help and the War on Common Sense,"=By= Jimmie Moglia Editor's Note The mechanism of control of the population is hiding in plain sight. It is the unwavering focus on self. Whether it is self-help, self-exploration, the inner self, the inner child, the focus is inward and a lifetime of training in narcissism. However, it is the planting of a seed that roots so deep that is on one hand and uncertainty of self, and on the other is a gut level distrust of the world. Then it is all muxed so thoroughly that there is a constant need of reassurance and the psycho babble self help self first over all. Welcome to faux individualism twenty-first century style. “… I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy, Which is as thin of substance as the air And more inconstant than the wind 
+Romeo and Juliet, act 1, sc. 4 W e know of the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on crime and sundry others. Less known is the war on common sense. It is waged daily on the victims and preys of the Self-help and Actualization Movement, or SHAM. It is a 9 billion $/year industry selling verbal fluff, illusion and fraud with total impunity.
+The impunity is guaranteed by the implicit and indirect association of the self-help industry with organized religion. The difference being that whereas religion sells happiness in the next life, self-help sells success in the current, under the guise of fulfilling the customer’s dreams. For, taking issue with the claims of the former is unthinkable. Hence organized religion provides a wide umbrella for all kinds of activities promising results without proof of delivery. 
+The army of the self-help salesmen consists of instructors with over-inflated and/or non existing credentials, veritable “riddling merchants for the nonce,” (1) promising to buyers that the winter of their discontent (2) will bloom into the summer of their satisfaction, if they purchase their advice at a considerable price. 
+They flatter the imagination with glittering ideas of wealth, power and ultimate fulfillment, easily obtainable by just wishing for them. Their ‘recipes’ for self-help are like Polonius’ “ springes to catch woodcocks ” (3) and those woodcocked by television, tabloid magazines and infomercials. 
+The self-help “instructors” are thousands – they deliver their pearls of wisdom, with statements like, for example, “Ya gotta want it!” The utterer of this profound truth was Tommy Lasorda, an ex baseball player turned helper for the self-helpless. He charges or charged $30,000 an hour for advice as follows, “The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person’s determination.” 
+The encyclopedia of platitudes and nonsense-in-drags supplied by self-help providers would be thick – I can only quote some examples. 
+Here is an extract from the manual “Stop Selling, Start Partnering – The New Thinking About Finding and Keeping Customers.” 
+Customers learn the new mode of thought at the Pecos River Learning Center in New Mexico. The three-day course combines classroom-style learning with physically challenging outdoor activities, such as falling off walls and descending mountain walls attached to a rope. Other similar centers include self-confidence building by resisting starvation or thirst. But here is a winning ticket from the Pecos River Learning Center (italics as in the original) “Playing to Win. We called this spirit, visit life strategy, playing to win. Playing to Win is the alternative strategy to playing not to lose. Playing to Win has nothing to do with the conventional understanding of winning, which is that if I win, someone else has to lose. Playing to win is a personal strategy defined as going as far as you can with all that you’ve got. The underlying tenet of blank to win is that life is about growing, accepting challenges, and never giving up. The most fulfilled, productive, and loving lives are those in which people have overcome challenges, have grown as a result, and constantly go as far as they can with everything they’ve got. Make no mistake. Playing to win is by far the more difficult strategy, because we often need to endure a short term pain to achieve long-term gain. For example saying you want to start your own business. That usually means you must quit your current job, get a second mortgage on your home, run the risk of failing, and struggle for a few years before it pays off. In the end, if it does stay off, you get to enjoy feelings of fulfillment and success. Yet, most people, when considering the choice, shy away from commitment, from the risk and the possibility of discomfort.” 
+Anyone can see that “Playing to win” compounds obviousness with emptiness. Here, and in hundred similar cases, we are witnessing evidence that “The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.” (4) 
+And yet, it is emptiness that survives even death. When the founder of the “Pecos River Learning Center” died, in his obituary it was possible to read, “Larry Wilson, who provided training through Wilson Learning and Pecos River Learning Center to a wide range of organizations that included Disney, the Minnesota Vikings and the CIA, has died.” 
+Unsaid was, however, that after the Minnesota Vikings undertook the extremely expensive training, the team arrived last in the championship of that year. We must shudder to think what results the CIA achieved, after mastering the art of “Playing to Win.” 
+The Pecos River Learning Center was later sold to another similar conglomerate for 16 million $. 
+Self-Help organizations, or self-helper individuals posing as organizations are in the thousands. I choose at random the “Option Institute.” Among many different “courses” here is the “Inner Strength Boot Camp” – a week-long program that will lighten the purse of each student of 4,650 dollars. 
+Baffled about a boot camp for “Inner Strength”? No problem. Here is the explanation, quote We’re all familiar with the term “boot camp.” An intensive, no-holds-barred, all-out, 8-cylinder experience where participants walk through the fires of deep personal challenge. And, in the end, they have rebuilt themselves into something – someone – vastly stronger and more powerful. Inner Strength BOOT CAMP takes this concept deeper. In truth, we can go through an “outer” strength boot camp, but no amount of physical exercise prepares us for the heavy lifting we face in our lives – financially, with our health, in our relationships, and within our careers. In the end it all comes down to Inner Strength – creating a way for ourselves to think and feel so that we have an unwavering, unstoppable, indestructible sense of our own strength, confidence, self-acceptance, and clarity. To accomplish this, we’ve constructed a course that powers through nine straight days of intensive work on you. (But you’re still only away for one workweek.) In this course, we help you to dig deep into every aspect of yourself. Once you’ve done that, we can (lovingly and non-judgmentally) challenge you to build who you are into the version of yourself that you always wanted to be, always thought you could be, but haven’t quite seen yet. In the end, we may not be able to control everything. But we can become people who determine how we handle everything. We can gain the tools to construct a core of strength, confidence, and clarity on the inside that’s impervious to events on the outside. We can be our own rock. And that’s why Inner Strength BOOT CAMP isn’t about changing the world. It’s about changing YOUR world. Would you like to: *** Remain truly relaxed and unfazed in the face of the judgments and criticism of others? *** Know who you are – without taking what others do personally or needing them to validate you? *** Create more loving relationships with the people that matter most to you? *** Overcome the obstacles that keep you from being present to what’s really important in your life? *** Speak authentically without fear? *** Sustain a sense of peace and comfort with an unpredictable world? *** Stay strong in what you believe and what you want? *** Understand exactly how you work…so you can change and rebuild the parts that don’t? If so, Inner Strength BOOT CAMP is for you. The way it works is that you arrive on Friday night, and then go full-blast from Saturday until the next Sunday. You will be shocked at how far you can get by taking a course in this totally immersive style (while still only being away for one workweek). Some special methods unique to Inner Strength BOOT CAMP: *** The Inner Strength Diary:A unique method of tracking your changes – and keeping yourself accountable *** Happiness Interaction Training Tactics (HITTS): Practical strategies getting people to treat you the way you want to be treated while living what you’ve learned *** The Book:The most powerful interactive exercise we’ve ever taught for learning to be totally present and focused *** The Two Sides of You: A special activity where we use digital enhancement technology to show you sides of yourself you might never have imagined *** What If???:A navigational path we help you create for yourself that allows you to completely trust your ability to take care of yourself – no matter what *** The “Ask Anything” Project: A method allow you to to get to know your fellow participants – and anyone else in your life – in a unique way unquote 
+And, should you still have doubts about the uniqueness of all this obviousness, there is an abundance of “testimonials.” People providing them span the range of human characters and are engaged in all pursuits that swarm upon the earth, from chef/caterers to software engineers. Here is the testimonial from a chef/caterer. quote I signed up for Inner Strength with a feeling that if it didn’t help, I’d be lost. Not only did the program give me practical, easy-to-use tools to help build my inner strength, it also helped me discover strengths I did not know I had. I’m now equipped to face anything in my path, and to deal with all issues with clarity and happiness. My life is no longer a battleground – it’s a playground! unquote 
+But where are the roots and which are the reasons for the extraordinary success of this ultimate industry of fluff? 
+It is a case of “Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied…” (5) For, the idea of obtaining instructions on the ways of the world is as old as the Bible, the Greeks and the Romans. In my view, the best “self-help” manual ever written is still Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.” 
+More recently, in 1937 Dale Carnegie published “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” The appeal of the book, in my view, consists not so much in the advice, which is sound, but in making the reader feel better emotionally. In fact, though by and large people do not behave at all as the manual suggests, the reader realizes that cultivating humanitarian and genteel feelings towards others has some kind of official sanction – even if, in practice and too often, kindness and openness are rated as symptoms of weakness. Unless, of course the “influenced people” see profit in being influenced. 
+The same considerations apply to N.V. Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking.” It is amply proven that when man is no longer cold, hungry or fearful, he becomes unhappy. It is “… the unseen grief that swells with silence in the tortured soul.” (6) The book suggests measures to alleviate the symptoms. 
+Nevertheless, the seminal event, triggering the chain reaction of self-help mania, was the 1967 book “I’m OK – You are OK.” Which, by the way, prompted the much more realistic publication of “I am dysfunctional, you are dysfunctional.” 
+Yet, “There is occasions and causes why and wherefore in all things.” (7) It is not by chance that the blossoming of the self-help industry coincided with the de-industrialization of the country, the “downsizings”, the “consolidations” and the explosive growth of part-time jobs. In essence, the factual impoverishment of the country paralleled the enrichment of the financial industry, which essentially is air, or rather paper, for practical reasons. Paper can be more easily manhandled, maneuvered, hidden, stolen and monopolized, hence the dramatic divergence in prosperity between the 1% and the rest. 
+Unable to fight back, “the miserable have no other medicine but only hope.” (8) Searching for solutions, large sections of the populace became the natural target (or victims) of the self-help industry. Whose psychological modus operandi is as follows: Dissecting the meaning of basic ideas such as right and wrong, good and bad, winning and losing etc. Giving alternative new connotations to words and concepts, e.g. family, love, discipline, blame, excellence and self-esteem. 
+Afterwards, or as a result of this lexical sleigh-of-hand, the ‘market’ is split into two segments: The victims, whose motto is “It’s not my fault”, and The empowerers, whose motto is “I think, therefore I win, I daydream, therefore I accomplish.” 
+The victimhood syndrome has found acceptance even outside the realm of the self-help industry. As I was writing this article, the daily newspaper of where I live, told the story of a criminal just condemned to 10 years in jail. He had stolen someone’s car, and a few days later, by chance, the rightful owner of the car spotted it in the parking lot of a store. Having another set of key, he opened the door of his car. Whereupon the thief reached him, threw him to the ground, stomped on his head and almost killed him – leaving him permanently disabled. 
+I think the sentence was lenient. But the defendant, with a 30-year long career in crime, brought up in his defense, his troubled childhood (i.e. “It’s not my fault.”) 
+But I digress. 
+The victimhood syndrome has also successfully instilled into people, especially women, worry, guilt, insecurity and inadequacy, turning an otherwise (possibly) uneventful life into a permanent winter of discontent. 
+The empowerers, or rather the sense of empowerment has convinced people that simply aspiring to do something is the same as achieving it. “Feeling good” about oneself and “positive self-worth” are more important than the much more challenging task of acquiring the skills required to gain recognition. 
+The “self-help” mania has a kind of counterpart, for example, in the “Jesus Festivals” held by prosperous and opulent preachers in the mega-churches of the US Bible Belt. 
+Yet, the desire to unquestionably accept the unbelievable runs deep in the American soul. In 1830, Frances Trollope, mother of the successful English novelist Anthony Trollope undertook a 2-year voyage to America, followed by the publication of a fascinating book, “The Domestic Manners of the Americans,” in which she also describes a religious “revival.” “The preacher described with ghastly minuteness, the last feeble fainting moments of human life, and then the gradual progress of decay after death, which he followed through every process up to the last loathsome stage of decomposition… Suddenly he bent forward as if to gaze on some object beneath the pulpit… And the preacher made known to us what he saw in the pit that seemed to open before him. The device was certainly a happy one for giving the effect to his description of hell. Repeatedly he invited and exhorted the young girls of the congregation not to be ashamed of Jesus, but to put themselves upon “the anxious benches” and lay their heads on his bosom. After that, three priests walked down and began whispering to the poor girls seated at the “anxious benches”. These whispers were inaudible to us, but the sobs and groans increased to a frightful excess. Young creatures, with features pale and distorted, fell on their knees on the pavement and soon sunk forward on their faces; the most violent cries and shrieks followed, while from time to time a voice was heard in convulsive accents exclaiming, “Oh Lord, Oh Lord Jesus, help me Jesus” and the like. Violent hysterics and compulsions seized many of them, and when the tumult was at the highest, the priest who remained above, again gave out a hymn as if to drown it.” 
+Trollope concludes, “It was a frightful sight to behold innocent young creatures, in the gay morning of existence, thus seized upon, horror-struck and rendered feeble and enervated for ever. … For myself, I confess that I think the coarsest comedy ever written would be a less detestable exhibition for the eyes of youth and innocence than such a scene.” 
+Returning to the present, the self-help movement has evolved from the personal realm to include the political. It is a contributing factor, for example in the adherence to the so-called political correctness, daughter of both victimization, or the culture of blame, and the self-esteem movement, a product of empowerment. 
+But, inspired by the vision of large profits at little or no cost, self-help (in the sense of platitudinal advise sold at high price), has branched even into hospitals and universities. 
+The World Health Organization now defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Starting from this platform, any reader can deduce that the sky is the limit. The Organization allocates funds to “wellness-based” models, which include research on loneliness and special after-school play programs, all aimed at achieving the ‘state of perfect health.’ 
+Through the same reasoning, public health official have invested millions in so-called “outreach programs” for drug abusers. Here is a declaration by an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, on the subject of women of color contracting HIV from dirty needles and unprotected sex, “In response to daily assault of racial prejudice and denial of dignity, women may turn to readily available mind-altering substance for relief. Seeking sanctuary from racial hatred through sexual connection as a way to enhance self-esteem, also may offer rewards so compelling that condom use becomes less of a priority.” It’s pure victimization at work, and out go the millions for other self-help programs, as their respective deliverers laugh all the way to the bank. 
+Even mid-sized companies engage high-priced lecturers to inspire motivation through ‘positive thinking,’ though there is no evidence of any positive effect. Considering that often, the company promoters of these program are the very ones who contradict the principles that the programs are supposed to inspire. 
+Or take the case of the sales seminar where the trainer tells 250 real-estate professionals from the same company that all of them could be the number one salesmen of the year. Self-help can even defy the most simple of mathematics. One of the salesmen will be, the others won’t. 
+Self-help has surreptitiously changed at large the general outlook on life. From, “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill go together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues” (9) to the philosophy embodied in the popular bumper sticker ‘BADASSE’ – Blame All Disappointments And Setbacks On Someone Else.” 
+By default, design, skill or luck, the self-help industry has found the formula for ‘success.’ Familiar sounding words applied in a different context puzzle the will (as in the example above, “Inner Strength Boot Camp.”) And hyperbolical images that fire the imagination prompt the willing victim to believe the unbelievable rather than accepting the inherent uncertainties of life. 
+In the end, self-help makes cowards of its victims, whose hue of resolution is sicklied over by the pale cast of thought, (10) or rather, by the evanescent and ridiculous promises destined to melt into air, into thin air. While the baseless fabric of the self-help visions, (11 ) the promised successes, praises, glories, wealth and happiness, dissolve, and leave only expensive bills behind. 
+And, as writer Steve Salerno has aptly concluded in his book SHAM, from where I extracted some of the examples, “The Self Help Industry has made America Helpless.” 
+** 1. King Henry IV, part 1 ** 2. from King Richard III ** 3. Hamlet",FAKE
+248,11 Benghazi takeaways: One for each hour,"Washington (CNN) The House Benghazi committee took its best swings at Hillary Clinton in a day-long hearing Thursday -- but the former secretary of state remained mostly calm throughout the hearing, save for a few animated moments in which she struggled to mask her contempt for her Republican inquisitors.
+
+The panel's seven Republicans tried to prove Clinton ignored U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens ' requests for additional security before the September 11, 2012, attacks during which Stevens and three other Americans were killed.
+
+But Clinton -- seeking an October trifecta after delivering a strong performance in the first Democratic presidential debate last week and then watching Vice President Joe Biden decide to sit out the race, bolstering her chances at the party's nomination -- gave them little new fodder.
+
+Here are 11 takeaways from the hearing, one for every hour it lasted.
+
+There would be no moment of exasperation like the one Clinton had made at a Benghazi hearing two years ago, when she asked of the attackers' motives: ""What difference, at this point, does it make?""
+
+Clinton spoke slowly in a measured tone -- careful to keep any anger or frustration in check even as Republicans attacked her.
+
+She even tugged at the heartstrings of those who were watching the hearing on television, saying that insinuations that she deliberately blocked requests for increased security are ""very personally painful.""
+
+""I would imagine I've thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I've lost more sleep than all of you put together,"" Clinton said.
+
+The following morning, one source told CNN that Clinton HQ was ""ecstatic.""
+
+""That was a president sitting there,"" the source, a Clinton campaign aide, said.
+
+Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, pushed Clinton hard over her use of a private email server -- mocking her as ""the most transparent person ever.""
+
+He demanded to know the search terms her attorneys used to sort through which emails were work-related and therefore should be turned over to the State Department and which were personal.
+
+""You might have made more mistakes -- we don't know,"" Jordan said.
+
+Clinton appeared a bit thrown, unable to answer questions about how, specifically, her lawyers combed through her emails.
+
+""I have been releasing my emails to the public,"" she said, a reference to the State Department's court-ordered release of her work emails.
+
+The hearing started at 10 a.m., and Jordan's line of questioning didn't begin until 7:45 p.m. If Republicans were hoping Clinton would be worn down, it didn't happen. But they did manage to push the portion about Clinton's private server into prime-time television. It was a risk, as some news outlets -- like Fox News -- had already cut away from the hearing.
+
+The email questions did push Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings over the edge, though, as he lambasted Republicans for trying to ""badger you into a gotcha moment.""
+
+""We're better than that. We are so much better. We're a better country,"" an impassioned Cummings said to Clinton. ""And we are so much better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign.""
+
+She said she couldn't recall.
+
+One of the most compelling -- and informative -- moments of the day unfolded shortly after 7 p.m. during an exchange with Rep. Susan Brooks, R-Ind., who repeatedly asked whether Clinton had spoken with Stevens after he was sworn in as the U.S. ambassador to Libya in May 2012 and before his death on Sept. 11, 2012.
+
+""We don't know the answer. Did you ever personally speak to him after you swore him in in May?"" Brooks asked Clinton, her voice raising with emotion. ""Yes or no please.""
+
+""Yes, I believe I did,"" Clinton replied. ""I don't recall.""
+
+It was a moment that will almost certainly be referred back to again and again, particularly by critics who believe Clinton did not do enough to secure the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi. It was reminiscent of those five words that still reverberate from her 2013 testimony: ""What difference does it make?""
+
+Her voice was calm. She stood her ground. But Clinton bluntly explained that there are many diplomatic personnel working in dangerous conditions -- not just Libya.
+
+""We have diplomatic facilities in war zones,"" Clinton said. ""We have ambassadors that we send to places that have been bombed and attacked all the time.""
+
+""Had you talked to him in July, he would have told you that he had asked to keep the security in Libya that he had,"" Brooks said. ""He was told no by your State Department.""
+
+Much of the focus in the lead-up to the hearing hasn't been on Clinton at all, but on the panel's chairman, Trey Gowdy.
+
+The former prosecutor's carefully laid plans for the hearing were thrown into a tailspin when Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy put Gowdy on defense by claiming the committee was scoring political points by dragging Clinton's poll numbers down. Gowdy spent weeks trying to show that the work is only focused on getting the truth -- not Clinton.
+
+But Gowdy's lines of questioning -- hitting Clinton about her friends and her emails -- will do little to erase doubts about his committee, especially as Democrats continue their threat to pull out altogether.
+
+It's unclear whether it sullies his future, though: Gowdy ultimately wants to leave Congress when the committee work concludes and become a federal judge, which would require a Republican in the White House.
+
+Gowdy was unable to say what was different between Thursday's event and the last time she testified.
+
+""I don't know that she testified that much differently today than the previous times she's testified,"" Gowdy told CNN.
+
+The biggest player in Thursday's hearing might not have been in the room at all.
+
+The committee's chairman, Gowdy, made Blumenthal the focus of the first 10-minute period in which he questioned Clinton. He highlighted negative remarks Blumenthal had made about other members of President Barack Obama's administration.
+
+""You know, Mr. Chairman, if you don't have any friends who say unkind things privately, I congratulate you, but from my perspective, I don't know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of four deaths of Americans,"" Clinton said.
+
+The committee has already interviewed Blumenthal. Democrats got frustrated enough with the GOP's comments about him that they moved to make public the transcript of that interview -- but Republicans voted down that motion.
+
+Said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California: ""I have to say, I just don't understand the preoccupation with Sidney Blumenthal.""
+
+7. Schiff and the Democrats who had Clinton's back.
+
+Clinton had a good ally on the panel in Schiff, who is the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. The closest member on the panel to classified intelligence, he gave her a lot of cover on the ""fog"" that happens in unfolding situations.
+
+He also was a bit of yin to Cummings' yang, in that his sharp attacks on his Republican colleagues have been overwhelmingly calmly delivered, while Cummings opted for more flash and bang.
+
+Both have allowed Clinton to deliver pure, emotionally powerful statements -- staying above the fray while the panel members handle throwing barbs.
+
+Clinton had more friends in the audience. Several Democrats made appearances in the hearing room throughout the day. At one point, Clinton turned and said to them, ""You've got my back -- literally!""
+
+8. All about the emails.
+
+Despite Republicans' assurances that Clinton's use of a private email server wouldn't be a primary focus of the hearing, the seven GOP members kept coming back to her emails.
+
+Brooks piled two stacks of Clinton's emails on her desk -- a taller set from 2011 and a shorter collection from 2012.
+
+Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, asked Clinton why she had never given Stevens her personal email address.
+
+He then pushed Clinton on whether Stevens had her home address, fax number or cell phone number, too -- reminding her that her friend Blumenthal does.
+
+Others pressed the same issue. It was part of an attempt by Republicans to demonstrate that Stevens' requests for additional security were ignored by Clinton because she didn't offer him enough access.
+
+""Help us understand how Sidney Blumenthal had that kind of access to you, Madam Secretary, but the ambassador did not,"" Gowdy said.
+
+The problem for Republicans, who appeared overly focused on what has become a political hot button, is that most of the resources the committee has are in the form of emails, thousands of documents they've received from the State Department about what happened in Libya and Benghazi. That limits their ability to press Clinton on records obtained otherwise.
+
+What about Thursday's marathon hearing will give the GOP new ammunition in the fight against Clinton and her performance on Benghazi? The revelations that she told both a top Egyptian official and her own family that the attack was premeditated and, respectively, carried out by an known terror group will likely be used against her.
+
+Jordan read out a conversation she had with then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil the day after the Benghazi attack in which she told him: ""We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest."" And he also read from an email to her family right after the attack in which she wrote: ""Two officers were killed today in Benghazi by an al Qaeda-like group.""
+
+Clinton explained the discrepancy between those sentiments and the administration's repeated statements in the days after the attacks that the attacks were spontaneous as largely due to fast-moving intelligence assessments in a chaotic period.
+
+But to Republicans, they are likely to be seized on as evidence that the administration was not upfront about the nature of the attacks. Many in the GOP have long maintained that the Obama administration wanted to conceal the attacks' ties to terrorists out of fear that would undermine a central argument in President Barack Obama's re-election campaign -- then in its closing weeks -- that he had been effective in fighting terror.
+
+Jordan submitted the former secretary of state to a dramatic period of questioning when he alleged that she and other Obama administration staff tried to blame the attack on the consulate on an anti-Muslim YouTube video to avoid undercutting Obama's claims that he had crushed al Qaeda.
+
+""You could live with a protest about a video, that won't hurt you, but a terror attack would,"" Jordan said, saying that Americans could accept, reluctantly, compatriots being killed abroad but ""what they can't live with is when their government is not square with them.""
+
+Clinton rejected the claim, saying in the desperate hours after the attack that information on the true nature of the assault on the compound by a mob was unclear.
+
+""I am sorry that it doesn't fit your narrative, congressman,"" Clinton said. ""I can only tell you what the facts are.""
+
+11. 'I really don't care what you say about me.'
+
+At the end of the 11th hour -- and after a brief coughing fit -- Clinton could no longer hide her contempt for the Republican-led committee, and particularly Gowdy.
+
+""I really don't care what you say about me. It doesn't bother me a bit,"" she said while defending Admiral Michael Mullen, who helmed a previous Benghazi investigation.
+
+She added: ""I can't help, Mr. Chairman, that you all don't like the findings"" of previous reviews.",REAL
+9894,Julian Assange PREDICTS Trump Will Lose – Still Missing Day 12,"10/27/2016 TRUTH REVOLT http://youtu.be/PsVNKmb6jEc There’s a lot of accusations going around that the 2016 election is r ... Netflix Ceo: TV’s Future includes Hallucination Pills 10/27/2016 INDEPENDENT The future of TV might everyone taking hallucinogenic drugs, according to the head of Netflix. The thr ...",FAKE
+8977,Taxpayers Shell Out $100K to Pay for Cops Caught Eating Weed & Assaulting People in Pot Shop Video,"Home / #Solutions / Taxpayers Shell Out $100K to Pay for Cops Caught Eating Weed & Assaulting People in Pot Shop Video Taxpayers Shell Out $100K to Pay for Cops Caught Eating Weed & Assaulting People in Pot Shop Video Claire Bernish October 27, 2016 Leave a comment 
+To settle a federal lawsuit stemming from a highly controversial raid on a cannabis dispensary — in which three nefarious cops were caught on surveillance video munching and edibles and making degrading comments about a disabled woman — taxpayers will be forced to shell out $100,000 via the City of Santa Ana, California. 
+In addition to the payout for damages to the store, the Orange County Register reports, misdemeanor charges against a dozen people accused of operating the dispensary illegally will be dropped. 
+On May 26, 2015, a group heavily-armed Santa Ana cops used a battering ram to storm Sky High Holistic with guns drawn , smashed surveillance cameras and confiscated recording equipment, and proceeded to make disparaging comments toward customers, some of whom were disabled. 
+In particular, these unabashedly power-tripping police suggested they should have assaulted a partially blind paraplegic woman — who was not only confined to a personal mobility unit, but had readily complied in the frightening encounter. 
+“Did you punch that one-legged old Benita?” a male officer of the law asks a female colleague as cameras recorded their conversation. 
+“I was about to kick her in the fucking nub,” the female officer of the law glibly replies. 
+Fortunately for the customers-turned-victims, cameras recorded the officers as they slowly completed the raid in a manner akin to a fraternity party — a few play darts while having a crude and wholly unprofessional conversation, while one samples what appears to be a marijuana edible he then shares with his buddies. 
+One camera remained surreptitiously hidden, evading officers’ efforts to cover their tracks in this armed burglary, and — when its video evidence went viral — proved to the world how unprofessional, abusive, and criminal these cops actually are. 
+According to allegations in the now-settled civil rights lawsuit, these errant officers devised a scheme to shut down dispensaries operating without a permit after Santa Ana voters passed a ballot measure allowing 20 dispensaries to operate following a lottery — for which Sky High had not been selected. 
+“The settlement of civil rights claims and dismissal of criminal actions shows Santa Ana is taking responsibility for improper actions it took, including the raid of Sky High Holistic, in support of its lottery-based marijuana regulation ordinance,” District Attorney Michael Pappas told the Register by email. 
+After a yearlong battle, misdemeanor charges were finally brought against three of the cops — petty theft for those who chowed down on the shop’s edible protein bars and cookies, and vandalism against the cop who destroyed all of the dispensary’s cameras. 
+Well, except that one . 
+Those charges are pending, and none of the three, who were initially suspended after the video went viral, remain employed with the Santa Ana Police Department — though law enforcement refused to elaborate for the Register on whether they had been terminated or had simply resigned. 
+Should former Officers Jorge Arroyo and Nicole Lynn Quijas be convicted of petty theft, they face a maximum six-month jail sentence and $1,000 fine. Former Officer Brandon Matthew Sontag faces up to 18 months in jail and a $2,000 fine for both the petty theft and vandalism charges if he is found guilty. 
+Pappas also noted the fight continues to have thousands in stolen cash and items returned to the rightful owners, as does his pursuance of a second lawsuit for an unspecified monetary amount in damages in the Orange County Superior Court. 
+Although the meager settlement is somewhat a victory for the victims — one of whom was a neighboring physician whose office had power and water cut during the incident — video evidences an armed and violent raid undertaken by cruel cops who appear as if they’ve discovered an enjoyable new sport. 
+Indeed if justice were truly to be served, all of the officers involved would be locked behind bars for performing a violent raid on a store providing a service to consenting customers on a voluntary basis. Share Social Trending ",FAKE
+1498,Bush donors await green light to jump ship,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+9747,Amnesty Intl: Western Backed Syrian Rebels Must End Unlawful Attacks In W. Aleppo,"Videos Amnesty Intl: Western Backed Syrian Rebels Must End Unlawful Attacks In W. Aleppo Up to 48 people including 17 children have been killed in civilian areas of government-controlled western Aleppo since the offensive began, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights. Be Sociable, Share! A screenshot showing Syrian rebels using an American made BGM-71 TOW missile. 
+The fierce offensive on western Aleppo city launched by armed opposition groups on 28 October has been marked by indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas that cannot be justified as a way to break the relentless siege that has sparked a humanitarian crisis in eastern Aleppo, Amnesty International said. 
+Up to 48 people including 17 children have been killed in civilian areas of government-controlled western Aleppo since the offensive began, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights. The goal of breaking the siege on eastern Aleppo does not give armed opposition groups a license to flout the rules of international humanitarian law by bombarding civilian neighbourhoods in government-held areas without distinction Samah Hadid, Deputy Director of Campaigns at Amnesty International’s Beirut regional office 
+“Armed opposition groups have displayed a shocking disregard for civilian lives. Video footage shows they have used imprecise explosive weapons including mortars and Katyusha rockets, whose use in the vicinity of densely populated civilian areas flagrantly violates international humanitarian law. Armed opposition groups must end all attacks that fail to distinguish between military targets and civilians.” 
+On 30 October an alleged “toxic gas” attack took place in al-Hamdaniyeh and al-Assad areas of western Aleppo causing dozens of injuries according to the Syrian state news agency SANA. 
+“Chemical weapons are internationally banned and their use is a war crime. Such weapons cause immense suffering and health damage. Their use can never be justified and regardless of who is behind this attack all parties to the conflict must halt the use of all prohibited weapons of war,” said Samah Hadid. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
+3900,Obama says he learned of Clinton using private email through news reports,"President Obama says he first learned from news reports that his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, used a private email account during her tenure, amid reports the White House and State Department may have known as far back as last August that Clinton did not use government email.
+
+“The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports,” Obama told CBS’ Bill Plante, in response to a question of when the president learned of Clinton’s use of a private email account for conducting government business.
+
+Obama, in an interview with CBS aired Sunday, continued to stand by his claims that “the policy of my administration is to encourage transparency… and that's why my emails -- the BlackBerry that I carry around -- all those records are available and archived and I'm glad that Hillary has instructed that those emails that had to do with official business need to be disclosed.”
+
+His comments came as Politico.com reported that Clinton’s staff made the decision to keep the news of the emails quiet after the White House, State Department and Clinton’s personal office learned in August that House Republicans had been given information showing that Clinton used a private email account to conduct official government business.
+
+During the CBS interview, Obama praised Clinton: “Let me just say that Hillary Clinton is and has been an outstanding public servant; she was a great secretary of state for me.”
+
+The White House struggled Friday to respond to the Politico report.
+
+White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that a few officials noticed Clinton wasn’t using a .gov email address. However, he did not say when they noticed and if it raised any red flags. Earnest also brought up the notion that he would not be surprised if Obama learned about it from “newspapers.”
+
+Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarret told Bloomberg News Friday morning she never received an email from Clinton’s private address and did not know if Obama or any other official did either.
+
+According to Politico, the White House, State Department and Clinton’s personal office knew in August that the former secretary of state had used a private email to conduct official business. The State Department became aware while the agency was preparing a batch of 15,000 emails requested by House Republicans in the Benghazi investigation.
+
+“State Department officials noticed that some of the 15,000 pages of documents included a personal email address for Clinton, and State and White House officials conferred on how to handle the revelation,” Politico wrote. “But those involved deferred to Clinton’s aides, and they decided not to respond.
+
+It is unclear who at the White House did the conferring. Jamal Ware, spokesman for the Republican-led Select Committee on Benghazi, confirmed that he noticed Clinton was included on messages at the address hdr22@clintonemail.com when going through State Department documents in “late summer,” and then more on documents in February.
+
+However, Ware told The Associated Press on Thursday that it wasn’t until Feb. 28, just days before the scandal broke, that the State Department acknowledged Clinton only used personal email while in office. After that, the committee, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., announced it has subpoenaed all of Clinton’s emails relating to Benghazi – including any communications from her personal email and server, as well as texts, attachments and pictures.
+
+The Associated Press earlier this week quoted an anonymous source saying the White House counsel's office was also not aware of Clinton's exclusive use of personal email during her tenure, and only found out as part of the congressional investigation.
+
+Clinton has drawn criticism for using a private server during the four years she was a top official in Obama’s cabinet. Her use of personal emails has raised questions as to whether all important messages were secure and if they were turned over for congressional investigations and lawsuits.
+
+She tried to dampen the growing controversy with a tweet Wednesday, saying she wanted the State Department to quickly release the emails during her time as secretary of state. But a senior State Department official told Reuters on Thursday the task would take time.
+
+""The review is likely to take several months given the sheer volume of the document set,"" the official said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+807,McCain on Trump: 'Foolish' to ignore will of GOP voters,"(CNN) Sen. John McCain is chastising GOP leaders for failing to embrace Donald Trump as the choice of millions of voters, laying out his most extensive views to date about Trump at the top of the ticket. He's also repudiating some of the presumptive nominee's comments -- particularly about prisoners of war.
+
+In a wide-ranging ""State of the Union"" interview in his campaign office in Phoenix, McCain criticized party leaders who are reluctant to back Trump, saying they are ""out of step"" with voters who have chosen the controversial businessman as the GOP standard-bearer. He defended Trump for being a strong and ""capable"" leader, particularly on foreign policy. He called on Trump to choose a running mate who could ""unite the party,"" possibly Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, even as he strongly defended his 2008 choice of Sarah Palin.
+
+But he also urged Trump to ""retract"" his criticisms of prisoners of war while blasting Trump's personal attacks during the primary campaign as off-putting.
+
+""Frankly, I have never seen the personalization of a campaign like this one, where people's integrity and character are questioned,"" said McCain, the veteran senator of nearly 30 years and his party's 2008 presidential nominee. ""It bothers me a lot. Because you can almost violently disagree with an issue, but to attack their character and their integrity -- then those wounds take a long time to heal.""
+
+Asked if Trump should continue calling Hillary Clinton ""corrupt Hillary,"" McCain said: ""Well, I wouldn't, but I'm not one to tell him how to campaign except on the part of uniting the party.""
+
+McCain, 79, said he'd back the nominee since GOP voters have had their say.
+
+""You have to draw the conclusion that there is some distance, if not a disconnect, between party leaders and members of Congress and the many voters who have selected Donald Trump to be the nominee of the party,"" McCain said when asked about the comments by House Speaker Paul Ryan and his close friend Sen. Lindsey Graham, both of whom have so far refused to back Trump.
+
+""You have to listen to people that have chosen the nominee of our Republican Party,"" McCain said. ""I think it would be foolish to ignore them.""
+
+At the same time, McCain would not commit to appearing on the same campaign stage as Trump, a tacit acknowledgment of the balancing act the Arizona senator needs to perform as he faces re-election this fall. He needs to court Trump backers in a state that the candidate handily won during the primary season, while also reaching out to independents, Latinos and women voters -- many of whom view the real estate mogul unfavorably.
+
+""A lot of things would have to happen,"" McCain said when asked if he would stump with his party's nominee. He said there'd have to be a condition first: ""I think it's important for Donald Trump to express his appreciation for veterans, not John McCain, but veterans who were incarcerated as prisoners of war.""
+
+McCain was referring to Trump's jaw-dropping comment last year on POWs, when he said, ""I like people that weren't captured.""
+
+""I'd like to see him retract that statement. Not about me, but about the others,"" said McCain, who was captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.
+
+Asked if he'd like Trump to retract his statements that many undocumented Mexican immigrants are ""rapists"" and criminals, McCain was more circumspect.
+
+""Oh, I don't know,"" McCain said. ""I think that it's important that we understand the importance of the Hispanic vote in America. Many states -- in Arizona, more than 50% of the kids in school are Hispanic. After the 2012 election, as you know, we laid out a blueprint and part of it was outreach to the Hispanic community. I think we ought to recognize that the Republican Party has to do that.""
+
+Despite having a friendly relationship with Hillary Clinton when the two served together in the Senate, McCain was sharply critical of the likely Democratic nominee, saying she would run a feckless foreign policy in the mold of Barack Obama. Trump, he said, would provide a much stronger dose of American leadership around the world.
+
+""Well, I think American leadership, he emphasizes that and I think that's important,"" McCain said when asked what specifically he likes about Trump's foreign policy platform. ""This president doesn't want to lead. Hillary Clinton was secretary of state for four years -- tell me one accomplishment that she can point to besides she flew more miles than any other secretary of state in history.""
+
+As a leading defense hawk, McCain, the Senate Armed Services Chairman, said he wanted to use his influence to ""steer"" Trump and the party toward Ronald Reagan's view of national security.
+
+Asked if he had confidence that Trump could be like Reagan, McCain said: ""I think that he could be a capable leader. I don't think anybody is -- no one could compare to Ronald Reagan, because he was the right man at the right time.""
+
+Still, McCain is worried that Trump's toxicity among Latinos could hurt him in his tough re-election race, where he's expected to face Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in the fall campaign.
+
+""There is a Hispanic vote, which I have to continue my good relationship with because of the turmoil that exists in the whole national campaign,"" McCain said, adding that every incumbent has to recognize the ""great turmoil"" that exists partly because of Trump's rhetoric and hardline immigration positions.
+
+Asked if the Trump effect was ""good or bad"" for him in the fall, McCain said: ""I don't think he affects it. I think that with 100% name ID people know me, but having said that, there is turmoil out there as we just discussed.""
+
+Given his long service on Capitol Hill, McCain knows full well that being an incumbent is a vulnerability with the approval rating of Congress at rock-bottom.
+
+""Anybody in this environment that would take a re-election in stride or for granted does not have an appreciation for the tumult that's out there amongst the electorate, and I'm confident of victory but to take anything for granted would be foolish.""",REAL
+7601,The Trump effect: Jack in the box and Obama's change,"The Trump effect: Jack in the box and Obama's change 09.11.2016 Donald Trump, having won the US presidential election, thanked his rival Hillary Clinton for her struggle, even though Clinton refused to speak to her supporters and sent the head of her election headquarters to speak for her instead. ""America will no longer settle for anything less than the best. We must reclaim our country's destiny and dream big and bold and daring. We have to do that. We're going to dream of things for our country, and beautiful things and successful things once again. I want to tell the world community that while we will always put America's interests first, we will deal fairly with everyone, with everyone,"" Trump said in his speech. ""Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream. I've spent my entire life in business, looking at the untapped potential in projects and in people all over the world,"" he also said. The Americans already joke that Trump's best post-election joke would be sending Hillary Clinton to Libya as an ambassador. Trump's victory has come as a shock for the Russian opposition. Ukraine remains in a state of shock as well as the Ukrainian administration was hoping for Clinton's support in the struggle against Russia. Print version Font Size To be honest, no one was expecting Donald Trump to win. It is worth recalling that from the start of the presidential campaign, everyone saw Trump as a clown and an absolute outsider of the campaign, while Hillary Clinton was seen as the leader. This years' presidential election in the United States has been, perhaps, the ""dirtiest"" and most scandalous election from the point of view of all the compromising materials that the candidates had to face in their campaigns. At some point, the leaders of the Republican Party were opposed to their own candidate. So why Trump? If one looks at recent polls by Gallup Foundation and other institutions of political sociology, one can see a huge percentage of ordinary Americans who do not trust both the election procedure and the existing political elites in both the Republican and the Democratic Party. According to the majority of US citizens, federal politicians do not represent the interests of the people - they represent the interests of certain corporations. Most importantly, many Americans understand that this is a system that they live in. Donald Trump with his slogan ""Make America Great Again!"" is a jack-of-the-box, who is not associated with all this party and, more broadly, backstage responsibility that has been blooming on Capitol Hill for many years. Hillary Clinton, is an old paralytic witch, whose laughter makes one shudder, but she carries the function of an appendage of American multinational corporations in politics. Donald Trump and his simple and somewhere populist decisions has challenged to revise both domestic and foreign politics of the United States. He has questioned the USA's membership in NATO and the funding of multiple US bases all over the world. Trump wants to give up on all that and use the money for the USA, and this is what US tax-payers are looking forward to. Common Americans are fed up with ideas of world hegemony and international confrontation. The American people are tired of corruption and excessive spending on the maintenance of their exceptional status. Donald Trump has promised to change all this. Donald Trump is indeed unpredictable in both negative and positive terms because he has never worked in any forms of the US government. He has zero experience in international affairs, which makes him an absolutely unpredictable persona, journalist Vladimir Poznerб a US citizen, believes. Democrats should have listened to what the people were saying. There were many petitions on the website of the White House to withdraw the Magnitsky Act, lift sanctions against Russia and revise USA's relations with the Russian Federation. What did the Democrats do? They deleted those petitions and reset website vote counters. Will the new USA try to improve the relations with Russia? Here is what Trump said about Russia a while ago: ""I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, which was a big, big incredible event. ""And you know what?"" he continued. ""They want to be friendly with the United States. Wouldn't it be nice if we actually got along with somebody?"" The US-Russian relations appear to be just a tiny part of the visible displeasure of American voters with the US political system. One can recall Al Gore, who received the majority of votes of citizens, but a minority of votes of electors. George W. Bush took office as president, but the American society did not have the degree of discontent and tension that one can see now. If the ""Gore scenario"" reoccur, America will face mass riots. Ordinary people are tired of the policy that had been formed in the USA after the Cold War. The US expert community that called Trump an absolute outsider, admit their defeat. Sociologist and professor at Princeton University, Sam Wang, said that the entire (sociological) industry has failed in the presidential election in the United States. Other experts have found a cause for Trump's triumph. Michael McFaul, former US Ambassador to Russia, tweeted: ""Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded. Well done"". There were no Russian observers in the US election. Suffice it to recall Putin's remarks about the banana country: ""Does anyone really think that Russia could influence the American people's choice in any way? The number of mythical, dreamt-up problems include the hysteria - I can't think of another word - that has broken out in the United States about the influence of Russia on the current elections for the US president. What, is America a banana republic?!,"" Putin said. ""Correct me if I am wrong. America is a great power,"" Putin said. The US expertocracy, as well as party policy-makers have long ceased to regard the American society as a standalone entity policy. Rather, they see the American society as a mass of people that one can easily manipulate with. Roughly speaking, the development of American democracy has led to the formation of a decorative role for the society. Yet, as we can now see, propaganda and manipulations do not have the last say, not even in the USA. British experts had also excluded the victory of the Brexit vote. They did not even believe that UK citizens would vote to leave the EU. They also hoped for mass manipulations and media propaganda. In general, Donald Trump has managed to grow into a universal, popular candidate. Who knows, maybe he will make America great without destroying the whole world for the purpose. Will he be change that Barack Obama failed to bring to life? Politonline",FAKE
+8780,Disabled veterans find freedom in water,"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. Disabled veterans find freedom in water By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 4, 2016 Disabled veterans 
+By Emily Cochrane 
+Anthony Lopez was surrounded by fish. 
+Hundreds engulfed him on a recent Sunday morning as he dove off the coast of Pompano Beach, just a 10-minute boat ride from shore. 
+“You’re in a different world,” said the retired U.S. Marine Corps corporal. “We’re not naturally supposed to be there, so it’s really awesome to see this stuff first hand.” 
+For the 28-year-old, scuba diving is a world where he can let go of the painful reminder of a 2009 vehicle rollover accident in Camp LeJeune, North Carolina: the muscle spasms from the blunt trauma to his back, the phantom pain in his left hand where all but one finger was amputated. 
+Read the Full Article at www.miamiherald.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on November 4, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+8420,Democrats begin search for candidate who knows how to use email,"Wednesday 9 November 2016 Democrats begin search for candidate who knows how to use email 
+Officials inside the Democrat party have begun a party-wide search for a candidate who knows how to use email. 
+Party strategists have decided that an inability to use email properly has cost them the White House, and that an aptitude for email will be a real vote winner in 2020. 
+As one DNC insider explained, “Trump has won the presidential election off the back of our inability to convince the American public we can set up and use a modern email service. 
+“If we can just address that one hurdle we can win back the White House in four years time. 
+“You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who is good with email, would you? Anyone? 
+“I don’t care about their policy objectives, or political views, or their religion – just promise me they know a blind-copy from a reply-all, and we’ll back them all the way. 
+“It’s the only reason we lost. Yes, it is, shut up.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+2202,Lessons from Obama's deal with Iran,"In April, President Obama announced the framework of a deal that he said would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
+
+“We only have three options for addressing Iran’s nuclear program” -- cutting a deal with Iran, “starting another war in the Middle East” or “hope for the best.”
+
+In deploying his favorite rhetorical device, the president reaffirmed to the world he only really saw one option: cutting a deal with Iran no matter the cost.
+
+If after witnessing six years of President Obama’s weak and feckless foreign policy wasn’t enough to embolden the regime in Tehran, President Obama’s comments in April must have convinced the mullahs they had the American president right where they wanted him.
+
+The price for President Obama’s penchant for negotiating from weakness is now clear. The deal announced with much fanfare by the White House two weeks ago comes nowhere close to the deal President Obama promised the American people he’d get.
+
+Far from the promise of preventing “Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” the deal brokered by President Obama and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry guarantees that the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror will be a nuclear threshold state in the next 15 years, but probably much sooner.
+
+The details of the breadth and scope of President Obama’s capitulations to Tehran are startling, even by his standards. But most alarming of all is the realization that President Obama decided to elevate an evil and illegitimate third-rate autocracy.
+
+In order to ensure that the damage done by President Obama can be repaired, we need to learn the lessons of his failures.
+
+They began long before he reached the White House, when during his campaign for the presidency he announced his willingness to meet, without preconditions, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.
+
+When American presidents speak, leaders around the world, both friends and foes, listen. And the listening begins long before the president is sworn into office. In addition, how candidates aspiring for the presidency now talk about Iran will send a clear signal to the world about their foreign policy vision. Our allies and adversaries alike want to know whether America will continue the retreat from the world begun by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or will America return to its indispensable leadership role in the world?
+
+Making that case begins now, by making it clear to the American people and the world that this is President Obama’s deal with Iran, not America’s deal with Iran.
+
+The next President must campaign for the office on the principle that has long guided American foreign policy toward Iran – that the regime cannot have mastery of dangerous nuclear technologies. Period.
+
+The next president must re-impose the sanctions waived by President Obama and work with Congress to impose new crushing sanctions on Iran’s leaders for their ongoing support for terrorism and brutal human rights abuses.
+
+This will require engagement with our European allies to lead them toward a different approach to Iran than the Obama-Clinton approach. Part of this reengagement must make it clear that European security does not benefit by empowering Iran’s terrorist proxies and missiles that can hit Europe’s cities. But the rest of the world also needs to realize that if Europe intends to pursue a strategy that empowers an unreformed Iran, America will put our security interests first.
+
+The next president must give Iran a choice: change your behavior, or face the collapse of your economy due to U.S. pressure.  Despite its inflammatory rhetoric, Iran’s clerical dictatorship has immense vulnerabilities. Iran’s economy continues to suffer from inflation and unemployment while rampant corruption plagues the state at all levels.
+
+A strategy of pressure will not just focus on Iran’s economy, but also its regional position. For Iran’s leaders to make painful concessions they have avoided thus far, they need to understand that there are consequences for their actions. The U.S. should undertake a systematic effort to isolate Iran in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic, its clients and proxies, should find no sanctuary in the region. The U.S. must do all it can to counter Iran’s nefarious plots in places like Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria or Yemen.
+
+This will be advanced by shoring up our alliance with Israel. The first step will be an end to the threatening rhetoric from senior U.S. officials warning of Israeli isolation and dismissing Israeli government leaders “who know what they’re talking about.”
+
+President Obama’s capitulation has made it more difficult, but not impossible, to prevent a nuclear Iran.  He has failed with Iran because he has failed as president.  This may be the best deal that a weak president can achieve, but a strong, trusted and respected America can do much better.
+
+Those who aspire to lead the greatest nation on Earth cannot wait until 2017 to begin making the case for a new approach toward this critical issue to the American people, and the world.
+
+Republican Marco Rubio represents Florida in the U.S. Senate. He is a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016.",REAL
+6566,Hillary Failing at Twitter Today: “Happy Birthday to This Future President”,"
+I know Hillary has probably never used a Twitter account personally in her entire life, but if she is, that would make this Tweet sent out on her official account even funnier.
+Happy birthday to this future president. pic.twitter.com/JT3HiBjYdj 
+— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 26, 2016 
+
+Not only does this woman obviously just know, with every fiber of her being, that’s she’s got the election in the bag, but now she’s wishing herself happy birthday?
+Who does that?
+Oh yeah, that’s right, no one.
+@HillaryClinton Whomever is managing your social media account needs to be fired immediately. No one wishes themselves a happy birthday.
+— Steve Peer (@everymahn) October 26, 2016 
+
+@HillaryClinton “when you wish a happy birthday to your self” pic.twitter.com/8Rnrjif5Fl 
+— seed (@seed30_Greek) October 26, 2016 
+
+What’s even more hilarious are the responses.
+@HillaryClinton I’ve seen that look before. pic.twitter.com/TQ7FaW7Mnr 
+— Ian McKelvey (@mckelvey_ian) October 26, 2016 
+
+@HillaryClinton Last picture taken before she became corrupt.
+— Everyday American (@NashRamblers) October 26, 2016 
+
+@HillaryClinton happy bday to the single most corrupt politician in the history of the USA! #NeverHillary 
+— Chuck Norris (@Chuck7817) October 26, 2016 
+
+Odd RT @HillaryClinton Happy birthday to this future president. pic.twitter.com/FpluGgnovD 
+— Marcus Hawkins (@HawkinsUSA) October 26, 2016 
+
+@HawkinsUSA @HillaryClinton Don’t you mean… pic.twitter.com/5nhQSSnVqT 
+— Truthstream Media (@truthstreamnews) October 26, 2016 
+
+@HillaryClinton pic.twitter.com/80Kzpu0WwE 
+— Deplorable Lil Trump (@USAneedsTRUMP) October 26, 2016 
+
+@seed30_Greek @HillaryClinton hitler was a sweet little child once too
+— First name here last (@Anodramazone66) October 26, 2016 
+
+@HillaryClinton happy birthday you cruel warmonger. pic.twitter.com/7pY5O6uudo 
+— Veronica (@PotluckPolitico) October 26, 2016 
+
+@HillaryClinton This IS a better birthday picture pic.twitter.com/V3bc4adfKL 
+— DeplorableHispanic (@bibi4Trump) October 26, 2016 
+
+@HillaryClinton pic.twitter.com/JnPLNrLeFP 
+— Wes Stull (@WesStull) October 26, 2016 
+Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Melissa Dykes of The Daily Sheeple . 
+Melissa Dykes is a writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple and a co-creator of Truthstream Media with Aaron Dykes, a site that offers teleprompter-free, unscripted analysis of The Matrix we find ourselves living in. Melissa and Aaron also recently launched Revolution of the Method and Informed Dissent . Wake the flock up! ",FAKE
+4876,Why early voting could favor Democrats in key states,"With early voting opening as early as next week in North Carolina, Democrats may get an initial leg up in the election.
+
+A cyclist rides past a sign directing voters to a primary election voting station early, in Phoenix. Early voting kicks off next week in North Carolina, the first in a two-month run of voting through key swing states where non-whites and young adults could give one of the presidential campaigns a decisive advantage before Election Day.
+
+Two months prior to Election Day, the first votes of the 2016 election will be cast next week in the battleground state of North Carolina.
+
+With early votes expected to make up 50 to 75 percent of ballots cast in North Carolina and other key swing states, the next two months could prove even more critical than Nov. 8th in deciding who will be the 45th president of the United States.
+
+The influence of early voting has been growing, and the major American political parties know it.
+
+“This is going to change the dynamics in [battleground] states, so that you will expect to see early rallies timed when the early voting opens up likely in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina,” Prof. Paul Gronke, founder and director of the Early Voting Information Center and a professor at Reed College, told NPR. “The candidates travel schedule will reflect this because they want to follow up this kind of enthusiasm and get people to the polls right away.”
+
+Historically, early voting has favored the Democrats in some key states, and in 2008 35 percent of votes are cast before the election according to the Associated Press. That's up from 22 percent in 2004.
+
+In 2008, for example, Barack Obama won 58 percent of the pre-election day votes to Sen. John McCain's 40 percent and managed to win Colorado, Florida, Iowa and North Carolina even though on election day more people in those states voted for Senator McCain – which speaks to the overall enthusiasm young and minority American Democrats felt for Obama.
+
+The 2012 presidential election saw a less dramatic divide between the Republicans and Democrats when it came to early voting. Mitt Romney pulled in more early Republican voters than the party usually sees, but the process still favored the Democrats with Obama ultimately winning the election.
+
+The debate surrounding early voting splits down party lines. Democrats argue that restricting voting in any way is an attempt to limit the turnout of minority and low-income voters who tend to vote Democrat. Republicans say the restrictions are necessary to prevent voter fraud. Mr. Trump is particularly worried about the election being rigged and has asked individuals to monitor polls to ensure Democrats do not attempt to vote multiple times.
+
+For Trump, the early voting challenge will be with Hispanic, black, and first-time voters who are more likely than white people to vote early, but tend to vote Democrat. Trump is lagging in the polls with these demographics now. Combined with the fact that Trump’s campaign organization is significantly behind Hillary Clinton’s in putting paid and volunteer workers into key swing states, and spreading the “get out and vote” message, Trump may struggle in early polls.
+
+“A campaign with a superior voting operation can make a difference, and right now Donald Trump has shown little sign of organization,” Ryan Williams, a former senior staffer to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, told the Associated Press, adding that Trump only just hired a national field director.
+
+Mrs. Clinton has been pushing for early voting since last June as a part of her voting rights platform, which includes repairing the Voting Rights Act and automatically registering voters when they turn 18, unless the opt out. She has strongly opposed attempts to limit the right to vote, such as the recently overturned voter ID law in North Carolina.
+
+Some 37 states and the District of Columbia allow voters to cast ballots by mail or at polling sites before Nov. 8.
+
+Early votes can also help reduce the logistical effort needed to get out the vote on Election Day.
+
+“We can’t say this will be locked up with early voting, but it can absolutely make a huge difference,” Marlon Marshall, Clinton’s director of state campaigns and political engagement, told the Washington Post. “Every early voter we get is one less person we need to mobilize on Election Day.”
+
+Some worry something critical could happen between when early voters cast their ballots and the official Election Day – and that could make them reconsider their choice. However, people who vote early are typically decidedly in one camp or the other.
+
+“Early ballots will come in not much earlier than a week or a week and a half before the election and when we have asked people about whether they have any regret or they would have changed their minds, very few said they would change their minds,” Professor Gronke told NPR. “You may not want them to cast their ballots early but many are ready to do so.”",REAL
+8043,*Breaking: Huma Abedin Thrown Off Hillary’s Campaign Plane!,"Home » Headlines » World News » *Breaking: Huma Abedin Thrown Off Hillary’s Campaign Plane! 
+Whelp, that didn’t take long. The fallout has begun for the Clinton Campaign. Huma Abedin has reportedly been thrown under the bus thrown off the plane… 
+#Hillarysemail Huma Abedin is not on the plane with #HillaryClinton today. She must be freaking out especially since she signed this doc. pic.twitter.com/KOwI5rN1pW 
+— Trump Street Team FL (@ChatRevolve) October 29, 2016 
+An image surfaced today of Huma in tears as she learned of the FBI reopening the criminal investigation: Anthony Weiner Gave FBI Permission To Search Devices, No Warrant Needed – https://t.co/tWZiq1T5t8 
+And perhaps the biggest news of the today, after Obama’s DOJ attempted to cock block Comey’s reopened investigation by denying the FBI’s search warrant request of Weiner’s laptop, Anthony is now fully cooperating with the investigation: Anthony Weiner Gave FBI Permission To Search Devices, No Warrant Needed – https://t.co/tWZiq1T5t8",FAKE
+6111,Britain No Longer a Sovereign Democracy,"Home | World | Britain No Longer a Sovereign Democracy Britain No Longer a Sovereign Democracy By Anzu Legion 03/11/2016 13:41:13 
+LONDON – England – Britain is no longer a sovereign democratic nation when 17.5 million people who voted for Brexit can be swept aside with illegal injunctions. 
+
+
+When Britain is being ruled by those who wish harm upon these shores from foreign nations, and pander to other nations to invade, then there is no reason to believe that we are living in a democratic sovereign nation. 
+This is the case when 17.5 million people voted on June 23 to leave the European Union, only to be overstepped by a few treasonous vipers who misled the High Court possibly due to corruption at the highest levels of the system. 
+The EU referendum was a legally bound vote with promises from the political establishment that the result would be respected. 
+To have the wrath of 17.5 million people on you will not be a nice thing, it will not be pleasant because the people never forget, and the coming election will result in some major changes. 
+We are currently embroiled within a constitutional crisis, where the will of the people is being superseded by a few litigational scum bags who do not realise the enormity of their decision to thwart the will of the people. 
+Boycott 
+You have condemned all members of parliament who supported Remain to unemployment. You will never be voted in again, including Theresa May who shoehorned herself into the role of prime minister. 
+Guyanese Gina Miller, who was instrumental in this decision is not even British, she is some investment banker cunt with no mandate to thwart the EU referendum. 
+As for the judges involved, you have no right to undermine the will of the people. It is most certainly a question of corruption at the highest levels where these supposed upholders of law, are working against the law and undermining democracy and Britain’s sovereign rights. 
+17.5 million people voted for Brexit and 17.5 million people will have their say in 2020 when the right people will be put in charge. 
+The people never forget.",FAKE
+7620,Russia Demands Explanation After US Hacks Entire Russian Infrastructure,"Ever since Wikileaks and hacking groups began releasing incriminating evidence against the Democrat National Committee and their presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the US establishment has... ",FAKE
+2530,Donald Trump to trek U.S.-Mexico border Thursday,"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump's colorful presidential campaign heads to the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday, where the billionaire businessman is sure to expand on his controversial comments about immigrants.
+
+He'll travel to Laredo, Texas, for a tour with U.S. border patrol agents.
+
+The trip comes as Trump dominates the Republican presidential contest -- both in the polls and in the headlines. He sparked a fierce debate among Republicans last month when he referred broadly to Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists . He angered many Republicans this weekend by questioning John McCain's status as a war hero. And on Tuesday, he escalated a verbal war with Lindsey Graham by releasing the South Carolina senator's cell phone number.
+
+A chapter of the National Border Patrol Council, the agency's union, invited Trump earlier this month to tour one of the most active parts of the border with the agents who work there. Hector Garza, the president of the chapter, told CNN earlier this month that he wanted ""to give Donald Trump a state of the border"" and a ""boots on the ground perspective.""
+
+Garza, a border patrol agent, said his invitation was not an endorsement of Trump's presidential run, saying that his group regularly invites politicians -- including previous tours with GOP Reps. Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Blake Farenthold of Texas.
+
+He also invited Sen. Ted Cruz, who is also vying for the Republican presidential nomination, last month.
+
+Garza said his organization's only goal is to encourage policies that will lead to a strong border and a safer environment for his fellow agents. The Laredo chapter is one of the largest in the country, Garza said, representing about 1,400 border patrol agents.
+
+While he would not comment on Trump's controversial remarks about Mexican immigrants, Garza said agents posted near Laredo ""do see a lot of aliens with a criminal history,"" and said that while not all are criminals, a ""large number"" have criminal backgrounds.
+
+Trump first told CNN he had been invited to the border by a group of border patrol agents during a phone interview two weeks ago. The visit will be Trump's fourth to the border, by his count.
+
+""I'm the only one that speaks their language,"" he said.",REAL
+5426,"EVIL HILLARY SUPPORTERS Yell ""F*ck Trump""…Burn Truck Of Daddy Fishing With 2 Yr Son Over Of Trump Bumper-Stickers [VIDEO] » 100percentfedUp.com","Email 
+These people are sick and evil. They will stop at NOTHING to get their way. Laws mean nothing to them, because they mean nothing to their President and his regime… 
+A California man says a stranger hurled expletives and set his truck on fire Thursday after seeing a pro-Donald Trump sticker on the bumper. 
+Hao Lee had taken his 2-year-old son fishing on a pleasant November afternoon in Sacramento. He parked his white Dodge Ram truck with a pair of Trump stickers on the bumper along Garden Highway. 
+“About a couple hours into fishing I heard someone yelling out ‘F’ Trump,” Lee told KTXL. 
+Lee and his son were only about 50 yards from where his truck was parked, near the edge of the river. TRENDING ON 100% Fed Up ",FAKE
+1719,Rand Paul shreds Ted Cruz over his showboating antics: “He is pretty much done for”,"Rand Paul may very well already be on his way out of the Republican presidential campaign, but he’s going out with a bang, not a whimper, forcefully rebuking his Senate colleague and Republican presidential rival, Ted Cruz, for being the root of Senate dysfunction.
+
+Paul told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade that he believed Cruz’s petty politics and disregard for Senate decorum have made him an ineffective legislator, writing off the Texas freshman’s future in the senate: “He is pretty much done for”:
+
+Ted has chosen to make this really personal and chosen to call people dishonest in leadership and call them names which really goes against the decorum and also against the rules of the senate, and as a consequence he can’t get anything done legislatively. He is pretty much done for and stifled and it’s really because of personal relationships, or lack of personal relationships, and it is a problem. I approach things a little different, I am still just as hardcore in saying what we are doing , I just chose not to call people liars on the Senate floor and it’s just a matter of different perspectives on how best to get to the end result.
+
+In July, Cruz called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the effective leader of the Republican Party, a liar on the Senate floor. Days later, his Republican colleagues refused to grant him the 16 votes needed to pass a simple procedural vote as a public rebuke of his outburst. This week, McConnell got his revenge, denying (for now) Cruz the government shutdown over Planned Parenthood he so desperately wanted to prop up his presidential campaign. Of course, that didn’t stop the stunts from Cruz — he tried to offer up a “referendum” on McConnell’s leadership this week before being summarily shutdown by his fellow Republican senators.
+
+Of course, Paul is mostly just backing up the senior senator from his home state of Kentucky, as he actually opposes the continuing resolution set to pass this week to keep the government operating for the time being. Paul, like Cruz, is in favor of defunding Planned Parenthood, even if that means shutting down the government over it. He just disagrees with Cruz’s tact: I would defund not only Planned Parenthood but hundreds and hundreds of regulations, hundreds and hundreds of wasteful programs. I would take them all out, put them on the table and say ‘You know what Democrats, it doesn’t take 60 votes to defund something, it’s actually going to take 60 votes to fund any of these programs,’ vote on them one at a time and we will see how many of these crazy programs get 60 votes. My guess would be very few, but that would take the courage to let the spending expire and start anew and let new programs all require 60 votes to pass Paul and Cruz would appear to be natural allies, with their Tea Party base of support and their libertarian bents, but since entering the Senate, the two have had markedly different styles. Cruz has been on a seemingly non-stop rant against the D.C. establishment while Paul has forged friendships and close political alliances with the party’s top leaders as he works double-time to keep his Senate seat while running for president.",REAL
+1596,Donald Trump would ‘strongly consider’ closing some mosques in the United States,"In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris last week, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said Monday that the United States must resume heavy surveillance of mosques. As president, Trump said, he would consider shutting down some mosques.
+
+""I would hate to do it, but it's something that you're going to have to strongly consider because some of the ideas and some of the hatred -- the absolute hatred -- is coming from these areas,"" Trump said in an interview on ""Morning Joe.""
+
+This isn't the first time Trump has said he's willing to consider closing down mosques, which some critics say would be a violation of the country's religious freedom protections. During an interview with Fox Business in late October, Trump said he was unsure if he would close mosques, but said, ""You’re going to have to certainly look at it.”
+
+During the Monday interview on ""Morning Joe,"" co-host Mika Brzezinski asked Trump if closing down mosques would only incite more hatred.
+
+""There's already hatred,"" Trump said. ""The hatred is incredible; it's embedded. It's embedded. The hatred is beyond belief. The hatred is greater than anybody understands. And it's already there. It's not like, what, you think that they think we're great people? It's already there. It's a very, very sad situation. And I know so many people, Muslims, who are such unbelievably great people, and they are being so badly tarnished by what's happening now. It's a shame.""
+
+Trump said the United States needs to resume its surveillance of mosques, especially in New York City, where he says such surveillance has ceased. He said that has been ""a mistake.""
+
+[Conservative suspicions of refugees grow in wake of Paris attacks]
+
+""You're going to have watch and study the mosques because a lot of talk is going on at the mosques,"" Trump said ""And from what I heard, in the the old days -- meaning a while ago -- we had great surveillance going on in and around mosques in New York City. And I understand our mayor totally cut that out. He totally cut it out. And I don't know if you brought that up, and I'm not sure it's a fact, but I heard that under the old regime we had tremendous surveillance going on in and around the mosques of New York City and right now that has been totally cut out.""
+
+At one point, host Joe Scarborough asked Trump if he agrees that only a small percentage of Muslims are violent radicals.
+
+""Yes,"" Trump responded, ""but it's a tremendous amount of horror and damage and vitriol. I mean, if you look at what's happening... this is something that needs to be stopped. And we have to be very strong. We have to be vigilant, and we have to be intelligent.""",REAL
+3563,FBI’s brazen terrorism lie: What the Boston Marathon bombing trial reveals about America’s deluded terror narrative,"Close to the end of the March 25 testimony in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial for his role in the April 25, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the government submitted a series of exhibits with chats from the defendant. One described wanting  President Obama to win the Presidential election as the “lesser of two evils” but asserting “killing Muslims is the only promise [Obama or Mitt Romney] will fulfill.” One joked about sex even while discussing studying the Quran. Another described transferring from UMass Dartmouth (in reality, Dzhokhar was already failing out), joking about transferring to an Ivy League school, but ending by saying “I wanna bring justice for my people.” These were chats with no context, simply read by an FBI agent, without even any guidance about with whom Dzhokhar was chatting.
+
+About the only one that made sense was one from December 25, 2012 that read “Doing something with Tamerlan,” Dzhokhar’s older brother who would go on to be killed in a police shoot out after the attack. “I’ll hit you up in a bit bro.”
+
+But when the defense tried to introduce related chats, noting how religious Tamerlan had become and explaining that the older brother had influenced Dzhokhar so much he had been sober for a month, the witness said he wasn’t sure it was about Dzhokhar’s older brother.
+
+It was just an example of the degree to which the prosecution in the marathon trial are cherry picking narrowly from the complex cultural world of Dzhokhar, a Chechen immigrant who grew up steeped in American culture in Cambridge, MA.
+
+Twice, the prosecution got caught in efforts to cherry pick too narrowly. On Tuesday, terrorism consultant Matthew Levitt took the stand to “decode” the boat on which Dzhokhar had tried to “shed some light” on his and his brother’s actions, showing confidently how everything Dzhokhar wrote on the boat must have derived from propaganda he had read written by Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric whose work has continued to exercise influence years after the US killed him in a drone strike. But the defense got Levitt to admit that — along with not speaking Arabic — Levitt had only reviewed the Awlaki related materials from Dzhokhar’s computer, considering neither the Quran nor Chechen culture in his analysis. Levitt also admitted to being paid $450 an hour for analysis that consisted of connecting dots that came pre-selected for him from the prosecution.
+
+Evidence submitted by the defense on March 31 revealed that Dzhokhar had spent more time at Pornhub, Craigslist, Manga sites, and free TV downloads than anything extremist (though that doesn’t account for what he was doing on Facebook or the Russian equivalent, VKontakte, the two sites where he spent most of his time). The defense also submitted evidence that suggests someone moved the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire to Dzhokhar’s computer the morning he left for Russia on January 21, 2012, which may have been an effort to clear it from Tamerlan’s computer before any border crossings where his computer might be searched.
+
+On March 10, a different FBI Agent, Stephen Kimball, read and interpreted Dzhokhar’s tweets. “I shall die young” said one. “September 10th baby, you know what tomorrow is. Party at my house!” After he had presented Dzhokhar’s online life as if everything presaged jihad, defense attorney Miriam Conrad exposed how little he understood. A Russian rap song, a Comedy Central skit, a soccer team, all presented as something else. Kimball hadn’t even clicked through Dzhokhar’s links on some of the tweets, which would have made the source clear. Nor did he check pictures before he declared a picture of a mosque to be Mecca; according to the defense, it was actually Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. He had, until being called on it by the defense, simply been parroting a narrative written by the prosecution. And it’s not just Dzhokhar’s online life that has been reduced to one flat interpretation. The defense briefly pointed out that a hard drive belonging to Tamerlan included Russian bombing materials, in addition to Awlaki materials. That was excluded from the testimony. None of this has an impact on guilt or innocence. “It was him,” Dzhokhar’s lawyer Judy Clarke started her opening argument, admitting her client had laid a bomb at the race that maimed and killed horribly. Dzhokhar will surely spend the rest of his life in prison, if he’s not executed. And yet the government has gone to great lengths to tell a simplistic story of two brothers who read some online magazines by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, made some bombs in the kitchen once used by their mother, and then killed three and injured hundreds at the marathon (this, in spite of the fact that the prosecution has presented ambiguous evidence about how the most lethal bombs used at the marathon were made). Dzhokhar — and in those moments when he gets mentioned anymore, Tamerlan — are presented as foreign terrorists responding to Arabic propaganda, not even Chechen ones, because that doesn’t fit the easy narrative the public is being presented. All those parts of Dzhokhar’s rap-listening, dope-smoking life that make him a quintessential American have been left unmentioned. Yet that American side to Dzhokhar committed this crime as surely as the propaganda written in Yemen did. Again, none of this will change the guilty verdict. What it will do, however, is sustain a fiction the FBI and the prosecution seem to want to preserve badly, that discovering terrorists, even retroactively, is a matter of simply decoding pre-selected dots rather than complex understanding. Discovering terrorists, in this flattened narrative, is about rooting out the foreign rather than discovering the terrorism that might be very much part of America.",REAL
+1078,Ben Carson’s Camp Plots Vice Presidential Bid,"In sunny Palm Beach, Florida, the remaining brain trust of Carson's failed presidential bid will try to find a way to keep his political aspirations afloat.
+
+Ben Carson’s campaign for president may be over. But his campaign for vice president is just beginning.
+
+Just a week after the former neurosurgeon Donald Trump, The Daily Beast has learned that members of Carson’s brain trust have set up a meeting in Palm Beach, where Carson has a plush mansion, on March 29 to discuss plans for the future.
+
+This Avengers-like crew includes Ben Carson Jr., Robert Dees (who joined the campaign as chairman before Carson dropped out), Ed Brookover (the most recent campaign manager), treasurer Logan Delaney and former senior adviser Mike Murray.
+
+The agenda, according to multiple sources familiar with the plan, will include a discussion of what to do with the massive 700,000-person mailing list they’ve accrued, the PAC connected with the campaign (which has already been for Carson as a potential vice presidential pick), and possibly establishing a formalized speaking program for the doctor.
+
+But the main focus of the meeting, sources familiar with the gathering told The Daily Beast, will be to put Carson in the best position to be offered the vice presidential spot by Trump should the mogul become the nominee.
+
+Delaney and Dees did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast. Shermichael Singleton, who is now handling media requests alongside longtime Carson ally Armstrong Williams, refused to answer any question as well. “Thank you for the email, but we’re not interested,” he simply responded.
+
+Brookover joined the Trump campaign already, as announced in a press release from the campaign last Friday. The release said that he would be heading up a ""Delegate Selection Team.""
+
+“I need to direct all inquires to Hope at Mr. Trump's campaign,” referencing Hope Hicks who is a spokesperson for the mogul’s camp.
+
+This further melding between the Carson and Trump campaigns comes after former Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett joined Trump’s camp as an adviser earlier this year.
+
+The news of this meeting arrives after Carson has made intimations that he was promised some sort of position in a potential Trump administration. However, it is unclear if the meeting itself will include any members of the current Trump campaign.
+
+But no one, Carson included, has really been coy about the fact that he’s willing and able to ride this out to the end with the oompa loompa-hued frontrunner at his side.
+
+After he ended his campaign at the Conservative Political Action Conference two weeks ago, Carson also announced that he would be heading up the My Faith Votes, which intends to mobilize Christian voters in the general election. According to the group’s website, Carson is their “National Honorary Chairman.”",REAL
+10275,Lawsuits Against Monsanto’s Roundup®,"By Catherine J Frompovich When I published the article, “Glyphosate Contaminates the Global Ecosystem: The Damning New PAN Report”, I mentioned a law firm as a resource because of the lawsuits it has... ",FAKE
+2695,Reddit administrators accused of censorship,"Administrators at the popular online forum Reddit have been accused of censorship after quarantining a subreddit titled 'european.'
+
+Subreddits, which are also known as communities, are forums dedicated to specific topics.
+
+“The administration has decided to censor free speech for Europeans and they quarantined the subreddit on the 12th of May 2016,” says a note on the subreddit link. With the subreddit set to private, the note adds that “You must be a moderator or approved submitter to visit.” Visitors to the subreddit were also urged to continue their discussions on Voat, another online forum.
+
+The question of bias in social media has erupted recently. The Reddit accusation came just days after anonymous allegations that contractors at Facebook deliberately suppressed conservative news on the site’s Trending Topics section. Facebook has denied any political bias, saying there is “no evidence” of the alleged activity.
+
+Reddit told FoxNews.com that the 'european' subreddit violated the forum's content policy. ""Quarantines on Reddit are rare - there are thousands of vibrant conversations flourishing on the site every day,"" it explained, in an emailed statement. ""Subreddits are quarantined only when the content is clearly offensive to the broader Reddit community.""
+
+Quarantining aims to prevent the content from being accidentally viewed by those who do not wish to do so.
+
+""A subreddit is quarantined when there are concerns that its content is extreme and could be offensive to people outside of that community,"" explained Reddit. ""The quarantine process doesn’t end the conversation; it adds an opt-in measure so that people have the choice to join the conversation,"" it added.
+
+Restrictions on a quarantined subreddit include requiring an explicit opt-in, requiring an account with a verified email address, no use of custom images and the removal of revenue generation.
+
+Related: Reddit updates content policy, bans a 'handful' of groups that exist 'solely to annoy' others
+
+The ‘european’ quarantining prompted a mixed reaction elsewhere on Reddit. Some users say that racist views were expressed on the subreddit, while others say that it hosted a range of opinions and cite the importance of open dialogue.
+
+Reddit, which had over 277 million unique visitors last month, uses teams of volunteers to moderate subreddits.
+
+The forum updated its content policy last year, consolidating multiple rules and policies into a single set of guidelines.
+
+A blogger with an interest in numbers, who uses the name Curious Gnu, recently crunched a Reddit dataset of 4.6 million comments and noted that 78 percent of Reddit threads with over 1,000 comments mention Nazis or Hitler. The blogger found that around 2.6 percent of comments in the ‘european’ subreddit mentioned Nazis or Hitler. A slightly higher percentage of comments on the ‘AskHistorians’ subreddit mentioned Nazis or Hitler, with around 2.75 percent of comments on the ‘history’ subreddit referencing the topics.
+
+Related: No censorship in Chinese Internet, says China's top censor
+
+Reddit prohibits illegal content, spam, publication of someone’s private and confidential information, sexually suggestive content featuring minors and anything that incites harm or violence against an individual or group of people. Content that harasses, bullies, or abuses individuals or groups is also banned.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+10013,Freddy Krueger Escapes Shooting – Injures Five At Halloween Party,"Posted on October 31, 2016 by Edmondo Burr in News , US // 0 Comments A man dressed as Freddy Krueger and an accomplice have shot five people at a large Halloween party in San Antonio, Texas. 
+Early Sunday a man dressed like the fictional serial killer from the film ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ opened fire on a large crowd after an argument turned violent. 
+The shooters are still at large. 
+Kens5 reports: 
+The shooting happened on the 2900 block of Aspen Meadow around 5 a.m. on Sunday. One of the residents who did not want to go on camera said he was throwing the party with his housemates and was taking fees at the door. RELATED CONTENT Two Teenagers Dead And 17 Injured In Florida Nightclub Shooting 
+He said several men he did not know showed up to the home and started a fight with his friends. He said the argument escalated into a shooting. 
+He said several people who attended the party captured part of the fight on Snapchat. This later reportedly helped police identify that there were two shooters involved. He said one man had a shotgun and the second man had a hand-gun. 
+There were five people who were injured in the shooting. Police said that one injured woman tried to drive to the hospital, but wrecked her car along the way. Jasmine De Hoyos, who attended the party, said there were more than a hundred people at the home. She said she helped one of the victims who got shot in the arm. 
+“I kind of applied pressure to the wound to make sure he didn’t bleed out. A couple of his friends were there with us. So, we were trying to keep him calm,” said De Hoyos. 
+No arrests have been made and police are still searching for the shooters. 
+“I’m kind of sad that this happened in this neighborhood because I like living here. It’s a really good neighborhood. It is what it is, and we’re just going to keep an eye out and try to keep each other’s back,” said Jeremy Collins, another neighbor. 
+The resident of the home who did not want to go on camera said one of his friends who got shot in the stomach is still in critical condition.",FAKE
+7646,Report: It Still Nowhere Near Okay To Act Like Donald Trump - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Report: It Still Nowhere Near Okay To Act Like Donald Trump Close Vol 52 Issue 44 · Politics · Election 2016 · Donald Trump 
+ITHACA, NY—In the hours since the Republican nominee’s stunning election to the nation’s highest office Tuesday night, reports have confirmed that, regardless of circumstance, it is not even remotely close to okay to act like Donald Trump. “Just to be perfectly clear, speaking or behaving in a manner similar to President-elect Trump is just as unacceptable now as it has ever been,” the reports stated, adding that in zero percent of cases is it even borderline permissible to conduct oneself either personally or professionally in a fashion akin to Trump, and that has not changed in the past two days. “In fact, acting like Mr. Trump does for even a moment will result in a wide range of negative social—and in some cases, criminal—consequences for you personally. Put simply, you should not be engaging with the world in any way comparable to Mr. Trump. This was true before he was elected, and it will be true long after he’s gone.” At press time, the reports’ findings were being summarily dismissed out of hand by roughly 45 percent of the nation’s population in a manner identical to that of Donald Trump. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
+Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
+10541,"Germany: Children in one school required to chant ‘Allahu Akbar’; in another, Christian events eliminated","Print 
+[Ed. – Coming soon to a — oh, wait. It’s already here .] 
+Pupils at a primary school were forced to chant “Allahu Akhbar” and “there is no God but Allah”, an appalled father has claimed. 
+The father of the pupil at the girl’s primary school in German ski resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen discovered that his daughter had been forced to learn the Islamic prayer when he discovered a handout she had been given. 
+He claimed she had been “forced” by teachers to memorise the Islamic chants and forwarded the handout to Austrian news service unsertirol24. 
+The handout read: “Oh Allah, how perfect you are and praise be to you. Blessed is your name, and exalted is your majesty. There is no God but you.” … 
+The incident comes just weeks after parents complained to German newspaper Hessian Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA) that their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” to accommodate the “diverse cultures” of other pupils.",FAKE
+2152,The White House wants to cut methane emissions from oil and gas operations,"Over the last six years, the Obama administration has been trying to address global warming with a flurry of rules aimed at reducing US carbon-dioxide emissions. First there were stricter fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks. More recently, the EPA proposed sweeping carbon regulations for coal-fired power plants (known as the ""Clean Power Plan"").
+
+The overarching goal was to cut US greenhouse-gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. That, the administration believed, would help advance global climate talks.
+
+But all of Obama's moves so far have been insufficient to get to that 17 percent cut by 2020. As recent analyses from the Rhodium Group and the Clean Air Task Force have argued, the US also needs to reduce methane emissions dramatically to get there:
+
+Carbon-dioxide is the biggest greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. But it's not the only one. There's also methane. The US burns a lot of methane — known as ""natural gas"" — for energy. But when methane leaks out of oil and gas wells or pipelines and into the atmosphere, it acts as a potent greenhouse gas. (The White House says it's 25 times as effective at trapping heat as carbon dioxide. Other scientists say 34 times.)
+
+In 2012, the EPA estimated that methane accounted for roughly 8.7 percent of US greenhouse-gas emissions (though this may be an underestimate). But experts have warned that methane leaks could be poised to grow in the coming years.
+
+Thanks to the fracking boom, US energy companies have been extracting more and more natural gas from shale formations. On one level, that's good news for climate change: utilities are now burning more natural gas for electricity instead of coal, which means lower carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants.
+
+The problem is that all this new drilling increases the risk of methane leaking into the air — and those leaks are undermining the climate benefits of the gas boom.
+
+In theory, it should be doable to plug these methane emissions, which can come from leaky pipelines or faulty drilling operations. Many companies already use infrared cameras to detect leaks and plug them. And they have financial incentives to do so — after all, these companies would rather capture that methane and sell it for money than just have it float off into the air.
+
+Many oil and gas companies are already taking steps to detect and plug leaks
+
+Still, the White House wants to make sure these leaks really get plugged. So, on Wednesday, it announced a goal of cutting methane emissions from oil and gas operations 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025.
+
+This would be done through a combination of guidelines for voluntary actions by the industry and a hodgepodge of new regulations crafted by the EPA and other agencies. Some rules would focus on methane leaks from new oil and gas wells. Others would focus on pipelines used to transport the natural gas. The Interior Department is updating standards for drilling on public lands.
+
+The White House noted that the oil and gas industry has already managed to cut methane emissions 16 percent since 1990 through voluntary measures. ""Nevertheless,"" it added, ""emissions from the oil and gas sector are projected to rise more than 25 percent by 2025 without additional steps to lower them.""
+
+Some environmental groups said the White House's plan didn't go far enough. For example, the EPA is currently only working on rules to reduce emissions at new oil and gas wells — and only much later will they work on rules for existing wells, which are by far the biggest source of emissions.
+
+""While setting methane standards for the first time is an important step, failing to immediately regulate existing oil and gas equipment nationwide misses 90% of the methane pollution from the industry,"" Conrad Schneider of the Clean Air Task Force said in a statement.
+
+Jayni Hein, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, agreed: ""EPA's steps announced today would trim the sector's methane releases by about a third. We can and should go farther by regulating existing oil and natural gas sources.""
+
+By contrast, many oil and gas companies don't want new regulations at all — they argue that the industry is already curbing methane leaks as is. ""Emissions will continue to fall as operators innovate and find new ways to capture and deliver more methane to consumers,"" said Jack Gerard, head of the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement. ""Existing EPA and state regulations are working. Another layer of burdensome requirements could actually slow down industry progress to reduce methane emissions.""
+
+Meanwhile, it's worth noting that there are other sources of methane besides oil and gas. In 2012, according to the EPA, roughly 30 percent of methane in the United States came from natural-gas and petroleum operations (though, again, that may be an undercount).
+
+Obama is relying on voluntary measures for methane in agriculture
+
+-- By contrast, 36 percent of US.methane emissions came from agriculture. The beef and dairy industry is a major contributor here: when cows belch, they produce methane (known as ""enteric fermentation""). Other sources include decomposing cow manure, as well as methane from rice cultivation.
+
+-- Another 18 percent came from landfills. When food and other trash decays in a landfill, the organisms that feed on that trash emit methane into the atmosphere.
+
+The Obama administration has been working on steps to cut methane in these areas, too. Back in March, the EPA announced it would come up with standards to reduce methane from all future landfills. It will then solicit public comments on whether to regulate landfills that have already been built.
+
+As for cow burps, however, the administration is relying on purely voluntary measures for now. In June 2014, the EPA unveiled a ""partnership"" with the dairy industry to speed up the adoption of methane digesters that turn cow dung into energy. The hope is to reduce methane emissions from the dairy sector 25 percent by 2020.
+
+Further reading: Obama has promised to cut US emissions 17% by 2020. Is that still possible?",REAL
+3029,A semi-radical plan to elect more moderates to Congress,"With ideological extremism on the rise in Congress, President Barack Obama argued during his State of the Union that America must reform its elections.
+
+""If we want a better politics, it’s not enough to just change a congressman or a senator or even a president,"" Obama said. ""We have to change the system to reflect our better selves.""
+
+Obama was less clear on how, exactly, America might pull this off. The president criticized gerrymandering — the process by which parties draw oddly shaped, highly partisan congressional districts — and called for campaign finance reform and repealing restrictions to voter access.
+
+These reforms, however, have gone nowhere. In the meantime, the incentives have only increased for politicians to stake out maximalist positions, with little structural reward for moderates who anger their bases.
+
+It raises the question: Does anybody out there have a better idea?
+
+Anne Kim, a policy editor at Washington Monthly and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, has proposed a new way to help fight polarization of Congress.
+
+In an essay published in the winter 2016 issue of Democracy, Kim calls for the creation of one ""at-large"" congressional seat in every state, chosen by voters statewide.
+
+We currently determine our House seats by slicing up a state's map into a bunch of different smaller segments, except for states with very small populations that only get one at-large representative. Under Kim's plan, every state with more than two representatives would get an ""at-large"" House member — someone who would be accountable to the whole state, rather than a narrow sliver of it.
+
+Vox's Matthew Yglesias has already advanced the idea of using at-large districts to reduce polarization. These plans envision treating the representatives as one at-large group, to be doled out proportionately after a statewide vote.
+
+Kim's proposal is more modest and perhaps more practical. By only asking for states to add one at-large seat, the plan preserves the benefits of the basic idea without requiring a wholesale transformation of how we conduct congressional elections.
+
+Federal and state law would have to be changed to make it possible. But doing so, Kim says, would likely create several dozen House seats that are by definition not gerrymandered — and, as a result, are more responsive to the actual demands of their constituents.
+
+""This seems like a simple and easy-to-understand mechanism to get moderate Americans a little more excited about a way for their voices to actually be heard,"" Kim says.
+
+Voters across a state are significantly more moderate than those in a gerrymandered district. Having a bloc of House members picked through statewide elections, Kim says, would make it at least more likely that there's an institutional incentive for politicians to move to the center.
+
+""The creation of new 'plurality-moderate' at-large seats in many states would increase the number of competitive seats while bolstering the odds for moderate candidates,"" Kim writes in her Democracy essay. ""Challenging the status quo might be an excellent and concrete opportunity to test moderate muscle.""
+
+There's also precedent for these kinds of seats. Before 1967, at-large districts existed in southern states as a way to prevent African Americans from getting elected to Congress. But that doesn't mean they couldn't be brought back now to serve a new purpose, Kim says.
+
+It would take an act of Congress — and thus a rare moment of bipartisan consensus — for the plan to be enacted.
+
+But in our interview, Kim argued that her plan could help an embattled Republican leadership that wants to regain control of a nomination process increasingly ceded to hardcore conservatives.
+
+""It's a way to defang the Tea Party. ... I'm not sure the GOP has gotten any favors by allowing that wing of the party to get as powerful as it has been,"" Kim says.
+
+She added: ""If the GOP has learned anything about reasserting the power of the establishment, this is certainly the way to do it. Because it would give GOP moderates a voice.""
+
+The idea sounds interesting, but it's unclear if at-large House members would reduce political polarization even if it were somehow implemented, according to experts interviewed for this story.
+
+""I think most political scientists would tell you that this is a nonstarter. For one thing, we already have 50 at-large districts — states — and the Senate is just as polarized as the House,"" said Morris Fiorina, a political science professor at Stanford University who has done extensive research on polarization.
+
+American politics is moving inexorably to the margins, and even in a statewide vote the candidate will have to win a primary, Fiorina noted. In other words, there's just not much reason to believe gerrymandering is the main culprit here.
+
+""Single-member or at-large, safe district or competitive, the candidate has to win a primary dominated by the wingnuts,"" Fiorina said.
+
+Matthew Dickinson, a professor of political science at Middlebury College, had a more measured response to the idea. He, too, noted that the Senate is highly polarized, and questioned the premise that gerrymandering was the key contributing factor to the rise of extremism in Congress.
+
+""It's an interesting proposition,"" Dickinson said of Kim's proposal, ""but I suspect it will have less of an impact in reducing polarization than the author thinks.""
+
+But Dickinson raised a possible counterargument to the counterargument. Yes, the Senate is very polarized. But is the Senate polarized at least in part because the House is?
+
+Dickinson pointed to an academic paper from 2011 that argued this point, noting that many of the highly partisan senators of today began as highly partisan members of the House.
+
+""The polarization in the House has directly contributed to polarization in the Senate,"" write Sean M. Theriault, of the University of Texas Austin, and David Rohde, of Duke University.
+
+In addition, Kim, the author of the Democracy piece, also pushed back on the idea that the Senate and the House were equally driven by party factionalism.
+
+""The Senate is polarized, but it's not nearly as polarized as the House,"" she said. ""The most extreme member of the Senate is not as extreme as the most extreme member of the House.""
+
+Kim also acknowledged that the plan would not represent a ""silver bullet"" for the problem. But with Democrats and Republicans in Congress moving further apart than ever before, she said, it seems worth trying.",REAL
+6644,Dozens Of Syrian Children Dead After Receiving Measles Vaccinations,"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Baxter Dmitry in Middle East , News // 0 Comments 
+At least 36 children are dead and over 50 suffering allergic reactions after receiving measles vaccinations under a UN-sponsored program in the rebel-held north of Syria. 
+Doctors in clinics in the towns of Jirjanaz and Maaret al-Nouman in the northeastern province of Idlib said children started falling ill shortly after the vaccinations were administered. 
+The mass vaccination drive was part of a high profile international effort to ensure the brutal civil war does not result in an outbreak of measles. 
+Reports on the number of children vary and are expected to climb. Relief organizations just over the border in Turkey said the loss of life was extensive, rising as high as 36 plus more than a dozen other children in a life-threatening conditions. 
+The Syrian rebel government, which controls the area of Idlib province and is attempting to oust Assad, had been administering the program with international support. They have since announced the immunization project has been stopped. 
+Parents accused rebel government health authorities of failing to store the vaccines properly, and of supplying out-of-date medication. But opposition officials denied accusations of negligence, saying that the vaccines came from Unicef and WHO, and that the same batch had successfully vaccinated 60,000 schoolchildren in 30 locations in recent days. “It’s very bad. The figures of dead we are getting go into the 30s. Children are dying very quickly,” said Daher Zidan, the coordinator of the medical charity, Uossm. “We think it will get worse.” 
+But the rebel government are blaming the Assad government. “ Primary investigations point to a limited security breach by vandals likely connected to the regime, which has been attempting to target the medical sector in Free Syria in order to spread chaos, ” the rebel ministry said in a statement. 
+The WHO said it was urgently checking the reports and could not confirm the toll. Other well-followed Syrian monitoring groups said there had been deaths. 
+“ At least 36 children have died and 50 others are suffering from poisoning or allergic reactions after measles vaccinations in Jirjanaz, in Idlib province ,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.",FAKE
+773,Here’s the Best Way to Stop Trump—and Save Republicans in the Senate and House,"We need a true conservative to run third party. Not to win. Just to save the GOP from total ruin. Suicide? No—it would be seen as heroic.
+
+Conservatives and the Never Trump movement are discouraged and rightfully so. Despite 60 percent of Republicans voting against Donald Trump this primary season, he is now the presumptive GOP nominee. A plurality of the voters have essentially allowed a stranger in our house.
+
+The problem of conservatives staying home on Election Day is something that needs to be reversed. If it is not, Republicans will likely lose not just the White House but their majority in the Senate. Their fight to hold it is an uphill battle already, but conservatives staying home would result in a Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Already at risk are incumbents Kelly Ayotte, Mark Kirk, Ron Johnson, Rob Portman, Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt and John McCain, as well as the seat being vacated by Marco Rubio.
+
+There are three ways to avoid conservatives being disenfranchised and not participating in November. First, the delegates at the Republican National Convention could stage some sort of coup that sees Trump lose the nomination. But this is not going to happen. Republicans are resigned to Trump as the nominee and delegates won’t rock the boat.
+
+Next, Trump finds a way to connect with and energize those on the legions on the right that say they will not vote for him. His relationship with conservatives has always been tenuous. Trump has had more positions on conservative issues than there are in the Kama Sutra. From four different positions on abortion in less than four days to not being willing to raise the Social Security retirement age to even pushing for the individual mandate. He has said he hates Obamacare, but he wants to just replace it with a better version of it—of course, Trump says he will do so by making “great deals.”
+
+Reconciliation is a long shot. It seems clear that the division within the Republican Party is vast and will not be repaired until, at the very earliest, after the election. Trump unifying the GOP is as likely as my going on a date with Jennifer Lawrence.
+
+This leaves us with the third option: a viable third-party presidential candidate whom conservatives would be excited about. Were a Ben Sasse, Tom Coburn, James Mattis (who already declined once), even a Mitt Romney or other conservative would improve the odds for many Senate Republicans just by energizing the conservative base. Without this viable third-party candidate, House and Senate Republicans are going to lose.
+
+Let’s not kid ourselves; we conservatives hold no illusion that a third-party candidate would be able to capture the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency. The best this candidate could hope for would be no candidate hitting 270 and the election going to the House of Representatives, where skillful lobbying would secure the presidency. But the chances that the election turns to the House are minimal. We’re probably looking at President Hillary Clinton, and we know it.
+
+Being the viable third-party presidential contender is a suicide mission of sorts. It is a form of self-sacrifice that demonstrates a willingness to endure the hardships of the campaign trail. Granted, it could also be argued that it is a sign of stupidity. From endless fundraisers and rubber chicken dinners to having every facet of your life picked apart by opponents and the press, it is not an enjoyable experience. In fact, it’s likely that what you will be remembered for will be some flaw that was exposed. Just ask Rick “Oops” Perry, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, John “Flip Flop” Kerry, Michael “Willie Horton” Dukakis, and numerous others.
+
+If and when Trump loses in November, this third-party candidate would be scapegoated by Trump supporters as the reason that Trump lost. It would be pure fiction, as Trump will be the reason for his own loss. The misogyny, the xenophobia, the childish insults, the utter lack of actual policy and the paucity of understanding of the issues will be his downfall. Voters already know who Trump is and what he represents. Given the level of fanatical zeal with which Trump’s supporters attack opponents, especially online, this third-party candidate will face a vicious amount of backlash and harassment.
+
+However, this candidate would be fondly remembered in conservative circles. After the general election, the Republican Party will begin to rebuild. The third-party candidate who ran to save vulnerable House and Senate Republicans would be an immediate leader whose voice would carry weight. On top of this, he or she would have endeared themself to these vulnerable Republicans whom they ran to save. Their campaign will have the benefit of being creating a lot of IOUs.
+
+Conservative leaders have soul searching to do and conversations to have. They know that Donald Trump is imperiling Republican majorities in the House and Senate. They know that they need to coalesce behind a viable third-party candidate whose campaign would energize the depressed conservative base and ensure they vote to save vulnerable Republicans in November. They know that it is not too late to beat back the Trumpkins and give conservatives an energy boost that would have them out on the front lines fighting to save GOP candidates over the next six months.",REAL
+5959,Devastating Wiki Leaks Show Scope Of Clinton Cover-Up [Video],"Leave a reply 
+On the October 27, 2016 Fox News Special Report Brett Baier digs deep into the latest Wikileaks release. It’s clear two of Hillary Clinton’s top aides were left completely in the dark about the email server. There is evidence of Bill Clinton lining his pockets. 
+Baier also takes a look at Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud in Florida. SF Source The Right Wing Conspiracy Oct. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+9411,Defense Secretary: US Talking to Turkey About Future Role in Raqqa,"Insists ISIS Capital Will Be Attacked With 'Forces Available' by Jason Ditz, November 02, 2016 Share This 
+Secretary of Defense Ash Carter today confirmed that negotiations with Turkey are ongoing related to the upcoming invasion of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto capital city of ISIS. Carter suggested Turkey’s involvement would only happen “ further down the road .” 
+The US announced that it intends to launch an invasion of Raqqa very soon, will conduct the operation concurrent with the ongoing invasion of Mosul in Iraq, and that Kurdish YPG forces will be providing the vast majority of the forces for this offensive. 
+That’s irked Turkey, particularly the last part, as Turkish officials repeatedly warned the US against allowing Kurds anywhere near Raqqa and have suggested their own involvement was contingent on there being no Kurds involved. 
+Carter’s comments suggest the US plan to invade without Turkey is unchanged, and that they intend to try to placate Turkey about the involvement of the YPG by giving them some involvement in the post-ISIS situation in Raqqa. Turkey is particularly keen to ensure that their own allies end up in control of Raqqa, and that’s likely the main incentive of this deal. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+1870,Here's Why All These Political Cattle Calls Matter,"Here's Why All These Political Cattle Calls Matter
+
+Stop us if you've heard this one before — the vast field of GOP presidential hopefuls is gathering in a critical early state this weekend to give speeches, woo voters and court activists. That's what's been happening nearly every weekend since the beginning of the year, with Republican groups, influencers and politicians each hoping to attract top-tier candidates to their event.
+
+With national Republicans trying to limit debates this year, the multifaceted events have become the new normal for both candidates and the media. On Saturday, both announced and likely GOP candidates will head to Iowa for the next one, where freshman GOP Sen. Joni Ernst will hold her inaugural ""Roast and Ride.""
+
+So far, there have been at least a dozen different cattle calls since January. And if it feels like there's been a lot of cattle calls this year, maybe that's because there's a lot of cattle. For lesser-known candidates in such a crowded field, the different events offer a chance to try to and catch fire with often little investment or infrastructure needed.
+
+""You have a megaphone from the inside out,"" said longtime Iowa GOP strategist Tim Albrecht. ""There's no other place these candidates can go where they will see 200 media confined to one location. That's potentially 200 stories they wouldn't have otherwise gotten. With these kinds of events, it's a very low bar to participate and to even be invited.""
+
+And in Iowa – a state where GOP voters insist on meeting their candidates early and often – the guaranteed national attention has also been a boon for state and local Republicans.
+
+""Everybody is a beneficiary of these events, whether it's the local county party, the state party the campaigns and the voters,"" Albrecht said, ""because this gives Iowans the opportunity to see these candidates and potential candidates on the same stage, back to back, to directly compare how each of them would handle a particular situation. These are a wonderful way for Iowans to gauge candidates on an Iowa stage who eventually want be on the world stage.""
+
+To national observers, the cattle calls have become the new debates and a way for hopefuls, who haven't been getting as much attention, to boost their profile, so they can ultimately make it onto the debate stage later this year.
+
+""A lot of the folks in the field not named [former Florida Gov.] Jeb Bush, [Wisconsin Gov.] Scott Walker, or [Florida Sen.] Marco Rubio, they don't have very high name ID,"" national GOP strategist Ford O'Connell said. ""That's why the cattle calls are taking on an added importance in the way we haven't seen before.""
+
+The field will naturally be winnowed down after the first few states vote early next year. But until then, if candidates aren't able to get momentum before the debates, ""donors aren't going to open up their wallets,"" O'Connell said.
+
+The burst of early events in 2015 helped some candidates jump to the head of the pack nationally. Albrecht pointed to Walker's breakout performance at the Iowa Freedom Summit this past January as one example. While he noted that Iowans had been wowed by his speeches already the previous year, the first major cattle call gave the Wisconsin governor the momentum he needed.
+
+""There was serious buzz after that event,"" said Albrecht, a former top aide to Gov. Terry Branstad, R-Iowa. ""Scott Walker has real star power.""
+
+He also pointed to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina — who performed well at last month's Iowa Lincoln Day Dinner and had a big crowd outside her room — and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who needs a comeback after not living up to the hype in the state four years ago — as candidates who have shone at the events.
+
+Both will be at Ernst's event this weekend — only Perry and Walker will be riding motorcycles along the GOP senator, though. Seven candidates will be in attendance, including Rubio, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
+
+Fiorina and Perry have yet to see much evidence of what activists say have been good performances. Both are still mired in single digits in both early state polls and national surveys, the latter of which will determine whether they make it onto the debate state during the first faceoff in August.
+
+That makes their continued performance in such cattle calls all the more important along with building their political operations.
+
+""Everything's been turned on its head, because of the capping of the debates and the calendar,"" O'Connell warned. ""You know if you're not on the first one or two debate stages, it's going to be hard to get past New Hampshire.""",REAL
+7411,Shiny Syrian Or White Rubble? This Viral Photo Is Dividing The Internet,"0 Add Comment 
+REMEMBER the dress debacle last year when billions of online users across the world were at war with one another over whether or not a dress was black and blue or white and gold? Well, prepare to engage in battle yet again folks with this viral picture that’s totes dividing the internets. 
+Uploaded to numerous social media channels yesterday morning, this picture of a Syrian man has gone viral after users struggled to figure out whether or not he was covered in white rubble from an airstrike – or if he was just all shiny and covered in some kind of silly oil. 
+“Once you see it, you just can’t see anything else,” posted one absolute genius, who pretty much summed up the whole picture with one epic tweet containing just 40 characters. 
+
+Whilst many internet players were quick to point out that the Aleppo man was shiny or covered in plastic, others corrected them by pointing out that the man was actually covered in concrete dust from an Assad led airstrike which launched an illegal barrel bomb that killed at least 15 people, many of whom were women and children. 
+“It’s crazy how your eyes deceive you like that,” pointed out another user of the internet web, “I’d say the guy didn’t know what hit him after his picture went viral”. 
+In fact, on closer inspection, it becomes obvious that the man is covered head to toe in chalk like material, probably from exploding concrete and falling rubble, as well as what appears to be ketchup on his forearm. Instagram user @reuters, who originally posted the snap, confirmed the red residue was in fact blood, sending the internet into yet another meltdown.",FAKE
+299,More conservative Republicans say they won't back Boehner for speaker,"The fledgling rebellion against electing John Boehner to a third term as House speaker gained momentum over the weekend, as nine conservative Republicans declared they intend to vote against the Ohio Republican when the House convenes on Tuesday.
+
+Among them, Reps. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and Ted Yoho, R-Fla., also have announced they will challenge Boehner for the position.
+
+""We lack a leadership and we lack vision of where the country's going,"" Yoho told Fox News on Monday. ""It's just not me feeling this.""
+
+Yoho said he'll keep his hat in the ring, even after Gohmert announced his own bid on Sunday.
+
+The odds of the effort unseating Boehner remain slim. Sending the election to a second ballot would require 28 votes against Boehner. No election of a speaker of the House has gone that far since 1923, when Frederick Gillette, R-Mass., won re-election on the ninth ballot. The vote is typically a formality and split along party lines.
+
+Yoho said Monday, though, that reaching a second round is their goal and ""we fully anticipate to get there.""
+
+The nine members who have declared their opposition to Boehner are Yoho and Gohmert, and Reps. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla.; Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.; Steve King, R-Iowa; Dave Brat, R-Va.; Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind.; Water Jones, R-N.C.; and Thomas Massie, R-Ky.
+
+""We have heard from a lot of Republicans that said, 'I would vote for somebody besides Speaker Boehner, but nobody will put their name out there,'"" Gohmert told ""Fox & Friends"" on Sunday morning, in announcing his own bid. ""That changed [Saturday] with Ted Yoho."" Gohmert also hinted that at least one other member would launch a challenge from within the GOP.
+
+Bridenstine, who released a statement late Sunday referring to the rebels as a ""Gang of Nine,"" hinted that more of his colleagues would make their opposition to Boehner public, vowing ""Monday, we will be in double digits.""
+
+Jones, the North Carolina congressman, told The Washington Times that as many as 18 conservatives will look to vote against Boehner.
+
+A Boehner spokesman said Sunday that the speaker was selected in November as the House Republican Conference's choice and that ""he expects to be elected by the whole House this week.""
+
+Though Republicans have built their majority under Boehner's leadership, most of the opposition to Boehner stems from the belief among some conservative members that he caved by agreeing last month to a $1.1 trillion federal spending bill, which averted another partial government shutdown. Those members believe Boehner did not do enough to punish President Obama for sidestepping Congress over immigration reform.
+
+“After the November elections gave Republicans control of the Senate, voters made clear they wanted change,” Gohmert said. “We were hopeful our leaders got the voters’ message. However, after our speaker forced through the (spending bill) by passing it with Democratic votes and without time to read it, it seemed clear that we needed new leadership.""",REAL
+381,Democrats are actually more enthusiastic than Republicans about trade,"Rank-and-file Democrats and independents are considerably more likely than Republicans to take a rosy view of foreign trade, and have been for several years, according to Gallup polling data.
+
+This in tension with the impression you would get from reading articles about the congressional politics of Trade Promotion Authority, where the vast majority of opposition is coming from Democrats, with Republicans singing the virtues of free trade.
+
+Part of the issue here is that Gallup is asking, in general, whether foreign trade is more of an opportunity for the US or more of a threat. The congressional debate is about a specific economic agreement, some of whose provisions are only loosely related to trade.
+
+Another possible explanation is that trade is currently identified in the public's eye with Barack Obama, who has been heavily promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But the timing on this doesn't quite work out — enthusiasm for trade among self-identified Republicans has been in a long-term decline since the early days of the Bush administration. It's perhaps related in some more generic sense to conservatives' greater nationalism.",REAL
+2701,"Bill O'Reilly claims false, admits Fox News: Why that won't hurt him at Fox","Fox News admits that Bill O'Reilly didn't actually see 'guys gun down nuns in El Salvador' or witness any bombings in Northern Ireland. Why Fox News is unlikely to suspend Bill O'Reilly for his exaggerations.
+
+Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?
+
+Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?
+
+Why are authorities slow to call the Ohio State attack 'terrorism'?
+
+Political commentator Bill O'Reilly seen here in 2013 attending the National Geographic Channel's ""Killing Kennedy"" screening in Washington. The Fox News Channel host initially contested allegations that he embellished his past as a war correspondent.
+
+""That's really what separates me from most of these other bloviators,"" Fox News host Bill O'Reilly once said before he found himself in the midst of a scandal about whether he's exaggerated the dangers of his past combat reporting, ""I bloviate, but I bloviate about stuff I’ve seen. They bloviate about stuff that they haven’t.”
+
+It turns out O'Reilly is no different from the other bloviators.
+
+In a statement quietly made to the Washington Post Friday, Fox News admitted that O'Reilly exaggerated about at least one of his reporting experiences, about seeing Irish terrorists bomb fellow citizens in Belfast. In a separate statement, O'Reilly adjusted his recounting of another reporting episode that was called into question, about seeing nuns murdered in El Salvador.
+
+Left-leaning publication Mother Jones touched off the controversy last month when it questioned O'Reilly's statements regarding his role in the aftermath of the Falklands conflict and compared him with Brian Williams, who was recently suspended from NBC Nightly News for exaggerating his reporting. Since then, for nearly two weeks, O'Reilly has been on the defensive against claims that he, too, exaggerated past combat reporting experience.
+
+Throughout, Fox News has dismissed the accusations as “nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates.”
+
+O'Reilly, in classic form, responded to the charges angrily, calling them “garbage” and the Mother Jones reporter a “liar” and a “guttersnipe.”
+
+But it turns out there have been at least three instances in which O'Reilly's claims have been discredited.
+
+First stop on the ""Bloviate-gate"" train: Northern Ireland, where O'Reilly claimed in his book ""Keep it Pithy,"" that he's ""seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs.”
+
+When the Washington Post pushed Fox News on the matter, a Fox News spokesman said Friday that O’Reilly was not an eyewitness to any bombings or injuries in Northern Ireland. Instead, he was shown photos of bombings by Protestant police officers.
+
+""By that logic, we've all ""seen"" the ISIS beheadings first hand,"" pop culture site Complex cracked.
+
+Next stop, El Salvador. On at least two separate occasions, O’Reilly claimed to have seen the murder of four American nuns in El Salvador.
+
+“I’ve seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador,” he said on his radio program in 2005. On his Fox News program, “The O’Reilly Factor,” he said in 2012, “I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.”
+
+The only problem? O’Reilly arrived in El Salvador months after the brutal killings and could not have witnessed them, liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, reported.
+
+O’Reilly responded in a statement to Mediate last week in which he was describing photos of the murdered nuns, not the crimes themselves.
+
+“While in El Salvador, reporters were shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast, including depictions of nuns who were murdered,” he said in the statement.
+
+Last stop, Florida. In his 2012 book, ""Killing Kennedy,"" O'Reilly claimed that he ""heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide,"" of Lee Harvey Oswald's associate, George de Mohrenschildt in a house in Florida in 1977.
+
+It turns out O'Reilly wasn't even in Florida when Mohrenschildt committed suicide, according to phone recordings CNN acquired.
+
+According to the phone recording, O'Reilly called Gaeton Fonzi, an investigative reporter who was known for his work on JFK's assassination, and asked if he had heard any personal details about Mohrenschildt's suicide. ""I'm coming down there tomorrow,"" O'Reilly is heard saying to Fonzi. ""I'm coming to Florida.""
+
+So what does this mean for Fox and O'Reilly?
+
+Not much, probably.
+
+As the Monitor's Peter Grier pointed out, ""he’s a political commentator, not a news anchor...Bloviation might be judged to be part of his job...That’s part of its appeal.""
+
+What's more, O'Reilly is intensely popular and a cash cow for Fox News, so this shouldn't dent his reputation at the cable network, which thrives on controversy.
+
+In fact, the scandal helped boost ""The O'Reilly Factor"" ratings: viewership has gone up 11 percent since it started.
+
+In other words, regardless of the findings, O'Reilly and his bloviating aren't likely to disappear from Fox News anytime soon.
+
+[Editor's note: The original story mistakenly indicated that Bill O'Reilly made his comments about what separates him from other bloviators during the current scandal. In fact, he made those remarks well before recent events.]",REAL
+3995,Turkish PM says deadly attacks likely were suicide bombings,"Nearly simultaneous explosions targeted a Turkish peace rally Saturday in Ankara, killing at least 95 people and wounding hundreds in Turkey's deadliest attack in years — one that threatens to inflame the nation's ethnic tensions.
+
+There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said there were ""strong signs"" that the two explosions — which struck 50 meters (yards) apart just after 10 a.m. — were suicide bombings. He suggested that Kurdish rebels or Islamic State group militants were to blame.
+
+The two explosions occurred seconds apart outside the capital's main train station as hundreds of opposition supporters and Kurdish activists gathered for the peace rally organized by Turkey's public workers' union and other groups. The protesters planned to call for increased democracy in Turkey and an end to the renewed violence between Kurdish rebels and Turkish security forces.
+
+The attacks Saturday came at a tense time for Turkey, a NATO member that borders war-torn Syria, hosts more refugees than any other nation in the world and has seen renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels that has left hundreds dead in the last few months.
+
+Many people at the rally had been anticipating that the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, would declare a temporary cease-fire — which it did hours after the bombing — to ensure that Turkey's Nov. 1 election would be held in a safe environment.
+
+Television footage from Turkey's Dogan news agency showed a line of protesters Saturday near Ankara's train station, chanting and performing a traditional dance with their hands locked when a large explosion went off behind them. An Associated Press photographer saw several bodies covered with bloodied flags and banners that demonstrators had brought for the rally.
+
+""There was a massacre in the middle of Ankara,"" said Lami Ozgen, head of the Confederation of Public Sector Trade Unions, or KESK.
+
+The state-run Anadolu Agency said the attacks were carried out with TNT explosives fortified with metal ball-bearings.
+
+Turkey's government late Saturday raised the death toll in the twin bomb blasts to 95 people killed, 248 wounded. It said 48 of the wounded were in serious condition — and a doctor's group said many of them had burns.
+
+""This massacre targeting a pro-Kurdish but mostly Turkish crowd could flame ethnic tensions in Turkey,"" said Soner Cagaptay, an analyst at the Washington Institute.
+
+Cagaptay said the attack could be the work of groups ""hoping to induce the PKK, or its more radical youth elements, to continue fighting Turkey,"" adding that the Islamic State group would benefit most from the full-blown Turkey-PKK conflict.
+
+""(That) development could make ISIS a secondary concern in the eyes of many Turks to the PKK,"" Cagaptay said in emailed comments, using another acronym for IS militants.
+
+Small anti-government protests broke out at the scene of the explosions and outside Ankara hospitals as Interior Minister Selami Altinok visited the wounded. Some demonstrators chanted ""Murderer Erdogan!"" — referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom many accuse of increasing tensions with Kurds to profit at the ballot box in November. Erdogan denies the accusations.
+
+Later Saturday, thousands gathered near Istanbul's main square denouncing the attacks and also holding the government responsible.
+
+The Turkish government imposed a temporary news blackout covering images that showed the moment of the blasts, gruesome or bloody pictures or ""images that create a feeling of panic."" A spokesman warned media organizations they could face a ""full blackout"" if they did not comply.
+
+Many people reported being unable to access Twitter and other social media websites for several hours after the blasts. It was not clear if authorities had blocked access to the websites, but Turkey often does impose blackouts following attacks.
+
+At a news conference, Davutoglu declared a three-day official mourning period for the blast victims and said Turkey had been warned about groups aiming to destabilize the country.
+
+""For some time, we have been receiving intelligence information based from some (Kurdish rebel) and Daesh statements that certain suicide attackers would be sent to Turkey... and that through these attackers chaos would be created in Turkey,"" Davutoglu told reporters, using the IS group's Arabic acronym.
+
+""The (Kurdish rebels) or Daesh could emerge (as culprits) of today's terror event,"" Davutoglu said, promising that those behind the attacks would be caught and punished.
+
+Davutoglu said authorities had detained at least two suspected would-be suicide bombers in the past three days in Ankara and Istanbul.
+
+Authorities had been on alert after Turkey agreed to take a more active role in the U.S.-led battle against the Islamic State group. Turkey opened up its bases to U.S. aircraft to launch air raids on the extremist group in Syria and carried out a limited number of strikes on the group itself. Russia has also entered the fray on behalf of the Syrian government recently, bombing sites in Syria and reportedly violating Turkish airspace a few times in the past week.
+
+On a separate front, the fighting between Turkish forces and Kurdish rebels flared anew in July, killing at least 150 police and soldiers and hundreds of PKK rebels since then. Turkish jets have also carried out numerous deadly airstrikes on Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq.
+
+Erdogan condemned Saturday's attacks, which he said targeted the country's unity, called for solidarity and canceled a planned visit Monday to Turkmenistan.
+
+""The greatest and most meaningful response to this attack is the solidarity and determination we will show against it,"" Erdogan said.
+
+Critics have accused Erdogan of re-igniting the fighting with the Kurds to seek electoral gains — hoping that the turmoil would rally voters back to the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP. Electoral gains by the country's pro-Kurdish party caused the AKP, founded by Erdogan, to lose its parliamentary majority in a June election after a decade of single-party rule.
+
+The attacks Saturday, which even surpassed twin Al Qaeda-linked attacks in Istanbul in 2003 that killed some 60 people, also drew widespread condemnation from Turkey's allies.
+
+Turkey's state-run news agency said President Obama called Erdogan to extend his condolences. The Anadolu Agency, citing unnamed officials, said Obama told Erdogan the United States would continue to side with Turkey in the fight against terrorism. It quoted Obama as saying the U.S. ""shared Turkey's grief.""
+
+Erdogan earlier said the twin bombings aimed to destroy Turkey's ""peace and stability."" Anadolu said the two leaders agreed to talk more in the coming days.
+
+German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent her condolences, calling the attacks ""particularly cowardly acts that were aimed directly at civil rights, democracy and peace.""
+
+""It is an attempt at intimidation and an attempt to spread fear,"" she said. ""I am convinced that the Turkish government and all of Turkish society stands together at this time with a response of unity and democracy.""
+
+NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said ""there can be no justification for such a horrendous attack on people marching for peace... All NATO allies stand united in the fight against the scourge of terrorism.""
+
+Saturday was the third attack against meetings of Kurdish activists. In July, a suicide bombing blamed on the Islamic State group killed 33 peace activists, including many Kurds, in the town of Suruc near Turkey's border with Syria. Two people were killed in June in a bomb attack at the pro-Kurdish party's election rally.
+
+""This attack (Saturday) resembles and is a continuation of the Diyarbakir and Suruc (attacks),"" said Selahattin Demirtas, leader of the Turkey's pro-Kurdish party. He held Erdogan and Davutoglu's government responsible for the latest attack, saying it was ""carried out by the state against the people.""
+
+In the aftermath of the Ankara attack, the PKK declared a temporary cease-fire. A rebel statement said Saturday the group is halting hostilities to allow the Nov. 1 election to proceed safely. It said it would not launch attacks but would defend itself.
+
+The government has said there would be no letup in its fight against the Kurdish rebels.
+
+""Our operations (against the PKK) will continue until they lay down arms,"" Davutoglu said late Friday.",REAL
+178,Immigration crackdown splits GOP,"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
+5917,"Project Veritas 4: Robert Creamer's Illegal $20,000 Foreign Wire Transfer Caught On Tape","Project Veritas 4: Robert Creamer's Illegal $20,000 Foreign Wire Transfer Caught On Tape   Zero Hedge 
+Project Veritas has just released Part IV of it's multi-part series exposing numerous scandals surrounding the DNC and the Clinton campaign, including efforts to incite violence at Trump rallies and, at least what seems to be, illegal coordination between the DNC, Hillary For America and various Super PACs. 
+Part IV focuses on a $20,000 foreign donation made by an undercover Project Veritas journalist to Americans United for Change (AUFC). Ironically, shortly after the $20k donation wire was released, the contributor's ""niece"" was offered an internship with Creamer's firm, Democracy Partners. 
+In the new video, Creamer says: “Every morning I am on a call at 10:30 that goes over the message being driven by the campaign headquarters … I am in this campaign mainly to deal with what earned media with television, radio, with earned media and social media, not with paid media, not with advertising.” He also mentions a conference call discussing a woman potentially coming forward to accuse Trump of inappropriate behavior. 
+Creamer, a seasoned Chicago activist who is married to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), whose Republican opponent, Joan McCarthy Lasonde has called for her to resign over her husband’s activities, also talks about his work with Barack Obama, whom he says he has known since the 1980s, when Obama was a community organizer in Chicago: “He’s a pro, I’ve known the President since he was a community organizer in Chicago.” 
+Elsewhere, Creamer adds: “I do a lot of work with the White House on their issues, helping to run issue campaigns that they have been involved in. I mean, for immigration reform for the… the health care bill, for trying to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence issues.” 
+In the effort to prove the credibility of the undercover donor featured in the videos and to keep the investigation going, Project Veritas Action made the decision to donate twenty thousand dollars to Robert Creamer’s effort. Project Veritas Action had determined that the benefit of this investigation outweighed the cost. And it did. 
+
+“First thing, like I said, thank you for the proposal. And I’d like to get the $20,000 across to you. The second call I’m going to make here is to my money guy and he’s going to get in touch with you and auto wire the funds to you,” said the PVA journalist. 
+
+Creamer told the PVA journalist to send the money to Americans United for Change. Shortly after the money was released, the “donors”“niece” - another Project Veritas Action journalist - was offered an internship with Creamer. 
+
+In an effort to see how far Creamer would go with the promise of more money, another Project Veritas journalist posing as the donor’s money liaison requested a meeting with Creamer. During that meeting, Creamer spoke about connections he had with Obama and Clinton. 
+AUFC President, Brad Woodhouse, subsequently returned the money, after Project Veritas started to release their undercover videos, citing ""concerns that it might have been an illegal foreign donation."" Oddly, Woodhouse was not terribly concerned about the ""legality"" of the donation when he chose to accept it a month prior. 
+In an unexpected twist, AUFC president Brad Woodhouse, the recipient of the $20,000, heard that Project Veritas Action was releasing undercover videos exposing AUFC’s activities. He told a journalist that AUFC was going to return the twenty thousand dollars. He said it was because they were concerned that it might have been an illegal foreign donation. Project Veritas Action was pleased but wondered why that hadn’t been a problem for the month that they had the money. 
+
+While the latest video focuses on the "" $20,000 illegal foreign contribution"" from an undercover Project Veritas journalist , the following comments from Robert Creamer were also rather intriguing in light of recent White House efforts to vehemently deny any connections between he and President Obama. 
+""Oh Barack Obama's was the best campaign in the history of American politics, I mean the second one, I mean the first was good too. I was a consultant to both, the second one, was everything hit on every level and every aspect. 
+
+He's a pro. I've known the President since he was a community organizer in Chicago . 
+
+I was just at and event with him in Chicago actually, on Friday last . He is just as good as ever. I do a lot of work with the White House on their issues. Helping to run issued campaigns that they have been involved in. I mean, for immigration reform for the...the health care bill...trying to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence issues."" 
+* * * 
+As a reminder, video 3 directly linking Donna Brazile and Hillary Clinton to efforts to disrupt Trump events. 
+
+Video 2 provided the democrat playbook on how to commit ""mass voter fraud"": 
+
+Video 1 revealed DNC efforts to incite violence at Trump rallies: Share This Article...",FAKE
+1201,"After strong debate, Christie, Bush resume attack on Rubio","New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie roared into Sunday after a fierce debate performance hours earlier in which he slowed rising, fellow GOP presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, with the New Hampshire primary ahead.
+
+“He’s a good guy, but he’s just not ready to be president,” Christie told “Fox News Sunday,” after attacking Rubio for his inexperience in running government. “I felt justified because I’ve been saying this for a long time.”
+
+Christie is one of three GOP candidates with governor experience competing with Rubio for the so-called “Republican establishment” vote and trying to stay alive in the race, with insurgents Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz also in the top tier.
+
+“I am tested and prepared and ready,” said Christie, arguing that Barack Obama becoming president as a one-term senator, like Rubio, has been a disaster for the country.
+
+“We don’t need another on-the-job training,” he said. “I’m glad the American people saw (Rubio’s debate performance) before they made another mistake.”
+
+In response to Christie’s attacks at the ABC debate Saturday night in New Hampshire, Rubio, R-Fla., stumbled and repeated himself several times about Obama’s running the country.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who like Christie is banking on a good showing in independent-minded New Hampshire, dismissed the notion that he’s competing with Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for the establishment vote, despite having a career that includes 18 years in Congress.
+
+“I am not an establishment candidate,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” “And I’m not an anti-establishment candidate.”
+
+He cited his individual efforts to reform welfare and the Pentagon and repeated that his 2016 platform includes a “path to legalization” for illegal immigrants in the country, while also calling for the completion of a wall along the southern U.S. border.
+
+He also dismissed the notion that New Hampshire is do-or-die for his campaign.
+
+“All I have to do is finish well,” he said. “I have the best ground game.”
+
+Bush, who like Rubio is from Florida, and was considered a mentor to the senator, on Sunday continued his efforts to move ahead of Rubio.
+
+“The simple fact is, I’m a leader,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” “Marco Rubio is a gifted speaker. But we’re competing for president of the United States, not the back bench of the Senate.”
+
+Trump was hit hard by Bush in the debate for his support of eminent domain, with Bush pointing out that Trump tried to take property for an ""elderly woman"" in Atlantic City for a casino parking lot.
+
+""Shush,"" Trump said to Bush as he tried to respond to the attack.
+
+Trump said several times Sunday that he thought he won the debate.
+
+He also told Fox News that he has a “good team” in New Hampshire and called last week’s Iowa Caucuses, in which he lost to Cruz, “complicated.”
+
+The billionaire businessman also suggested he would like to challenge Democratic presidential candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the general election.
+
+Trump suggested that Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, is perhaps a “Communist.”",REAL
+8206,"Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Swim, Scientists Discovered A Two-Headed Shark","posted by Eddie For the first time, scientists have observed a two-headed shark growing in an egg. This catshark ( Galeus atlanticus ) lives only in the western Mediterranean, at depths of 330 to 710 meters (1,082 to 2,329 feet), and is considered near threatened. Workers on a research vessel collected the embryonic fish as part of an expedition that retrieved 797 embryos from the western Mediterranean sea. It had two brains, four eyes, two mouths, twenty gills (double the usual ten), and two notochords — a developmental precursor of the spine. The two heads fused at the neck. Inside, it had two hearts, and a doubled digestive system that fused together where two stomachs met at a single intestine. When an animal has two heads it is said to exhibit dicephaly. The condition is relatively rare in the animal kingdom but has been seen in many different groups, from snakes to dolphins to people. You can see the shark in this figure, drawn from a paper in the Journal of Fish Biology where the researchers describe their discovery. Figures (d) and (e) depict another shark embryo with a single head. Two-headedness is believed to happen in all animals with spines. But it’s rare enough that it’s never been spotted in an egg-laying shark before. As recently as 1992 , some researchers believed that the uncommon body structure was the result of twins incompletely merging together. But now it’s widely accepted that the cause is actually an incomplete separation of one embryo into two. No one has yet offered a conclusive explanation for what causes this to happen. The two-headed shark embryo described in this paper would probably not have survived had it developed — though it won’t get the chance to try. When the researchers spotted the doubled shark through the translucent walls of its egg, they split the egg open and preserved the embryo for study. Read the original article on Tech Insider . Source:",FAKE
+6380,Politicians Will Feel the Heat From Rising Temperatures,"Politicians Will Feel the Heat From Rising Temperatures Posted on Nov 4, 2016 
+By Kieran Cooke / Climate News Network New research shows that the hotter it gets, the quicker the pace of political change. (Gabor Dvornik via Flickr) 
+LONDON—Voters who feel good about life—whether it is to do with their job, their marriage or even the success of their sports team—are more likely to support their politicians. On the other hand, those who are disgruntled and fed up are more prone to want a change of political leadership. That, at least, is the received wisdom of political pundits. Rising temperatures New research indicates that, in future, climate change—and specifically rising temperatures—could also be a key factor in undermining and determining political longevity. The hotter it gets, the theory goes, the quicker the pace of political change. 
+Nick Obradovich, a researcher at Harvard University in the US, has conducted what is described as the first ever investigation into the relationship between temperature, electoral returns and future climate change. 
+In a study published in the journal Climatic Change , Obradovich sets out to substantiate the idea that climate change, by threatening feelings of wellbeing, will lead to a quicker turnover of politicians and political parties. There is no doubting the thoroughness of his research: altogether, Obradovich analysed more than 1.5 billion votes cast in nearly 5,000 elections in 19 countries ranging from Argentina to Zambia between 1925 and 2011. This data was then set alongside meteorological records. The analysis indicates, says Obradovich, that “warmer than normal temperatures in the year prior to an election produce lower vote shares for parties already in power, driving quicker rates of political turnover”. “ Warmer than normal temperatures in the year prior to an election produce lower vote shares for parties already in power, quicker rates of political turnover” The study also finds that voter disgruntlement is more pronounced in warmer countries where average annual temperatures are above 21°C . “In these warmer places, voter support shrinks by nine percentage points from one election to the next, relative to office bearers in cooler electoral districts,” the study finds. Countries lacking historical electoral data—including those in sub-Saharan Africa already feeling the impact of climate change—were not included in the research. Obradovich also uses climate models to predict future voter behaviour, suggesting that the pace of political change in many countries between now and the end of the century is likely to considerably speed up. “Climate change may increase the frequency of democratic turnover most in warmer, poorer nations,” says the study. Fickle electorates Global warming is a complex problem that can only be tackled through international agreement and long-term planning. Obradovich says that faced with ever more fickle electorates, politicians in future will be tempted to focus on short-term policies instead of adopting longer-term strategies. This could not only hamper the fight against climate change but also cause economic and political upheaval. “Turnover in nations with weak democratic institutions can up-end political stability—if incumbents in weak democracies foresee a greater risk of losing office, they sometimes employ electoral fraud and pre-electoral violence to maintain power,” says Obradovich. “If these methods fail, incumbents’ loss occasionally precipitates post-electoral violence that can in turn induce broader civil conflict.” 
+Kieran Cooke, a founding editor of Climate News Network, is a former foreign correspondent for the BBC and Financial Times. He now focuses on environmental issues 
+Advertisement",FAKE
+4439,UN agency food aid vouchers in Syrian crisis diverted and sold for cash,"EXCLUSIVE: A World Food Program initiative that handed out hundreds of millions of dollars of food vouchers has been confronted with ""persistent"" diversion and sale of the vouchers to middlemen for cash by the growing flood of Syrian refugees in neighboring Jordan and Lebanon, according to its internal auditors.
+
+One reason for the diversion:  the agency  did not have systems in place to identify valid recipients, and its procedures were “not detailed enough to provide assurance that voucher transfers reached the correct beneficiaries in the correct amount,” the auditors have said.
+
+The full extent of the desperation voucher sales was not made clear in the most recent audit document obtained by Fox News, which covered WFP operations from July 2013 to March 2014.
+
+During the audited period,  however, spending on the Jordan and Lebanon voucher programs amounted to more than $230 million in 2013 alone-- nearly three-fourths of  the $317 million that WFP spent  that year on vouchers across the entire region affected by the Syrian conflict.
+
+A WFP spokesman, declaring that the agency has taken steps to meet the problem, indicated to Fox News that the cash-outs were continuing  at a reduced rate.
+
+The voucher issue is only one of a host of challenges that cloud the WFP relief effort in Syria and neighboring countries. One of the most glaring is that  much of the Syrian food distribution is  in the hands of charities and non-government organizations picked by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, which is considered by many critics to be too close to the Assad regime, and WFP “was not involved in the assessment or selection of these charities,” according to the agency’s  auditors
+
+Nor could WFP check consistently on how well those agencies were reporting: in all,  according to the recent internal audit, less than 40 percent of its distribution sites were visited  in 2014 by WFP or what auditors called a “third-party facilitator” who went where WFP staffers couldn’t.
+
+Moreover, that “facilitator”  was not required to report on the results in the same way that WFP staffers do, including an assessment of the “impact” of WFP programs, meaning how well they actually worked.
+
+CLICK HERE FOR THE AUDIT REPORT
+
+Beyond all that is the brutal reality of Syria’s ongoing war:  as WFP spokesman told Fox News in response to questions about the food delivery audit, “insecurity and access continue to be WFP’s greatest challenge inside Syria.”
+
+A big part of the problem is that the agency is still being handcuffed by the Assad regime in getting aid to hundreds of thousands of desperate people across the country.
+
+The WFP spokesman cited a report by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, which noted that between December 2014 and the end of February 2015, “719,000 people have been denied access [to U.N. relief convoys] or are waiting for approval by the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic at the national and governorate levels.”
+
+The same report also noted that relief had managed to reach about 158,000 people during that period—roughly 18 percent of the total mentioned.
+
+The fact that huge problems have arisen in making sure  food relief gets to the suffering  as planned are not exactly surprising  in  a relief operation as massive, chaotic and dangerous as  the one that the war is continuing to generate.
+
+The U.N. overall has appealed for some $8.4 billion  to cover the relief effort this year for Syria and its neighbors—roughly the size of the annual U.N. peacekeeping budget—even as the brutal civil war continues calamity and additional waves of refugees.
+
+Overall, some 12.2 million people are currently said by the U.N. to need humanitarian assistance, with 7.6 million of them Syrian internal refugees, and the remainder now living in surrounding countries.
+
+At the same time donor fatigue may be setting in:  after the $8.4 billion appeal,  the U.N. claimed that some $3.8 billion in pledges had been received. However,  the U.N.-managed Financial Tracking Service (FTS) notes that so far, only some $1.5 billion has been received.
+
+Specifically for its Syria response plan this year, WFP has so far received about $137 million, according to FTS—less than 20 percent of its $714 million announced requirements.
+
+The huge size of the required effort also calls for extra caution in dealing  with the “high-risk” problems the WFP auditors have uncovered.  For its part, a WFP spokesman told Fox News that many of the issues detailed in the recent audit were under control—although how much was still not exactly clear.
+
+When it came to checking on distribution efforts by charities it had not selected, the spokesman said,WFP continues to “as much as possible monitor distributions organized by all its partners throughout the country”—a sizeable caveat.
+
+At the same time that the spokesman acknowledged that the Syrian Arab Red Cross, or SARC, “collaborates with other charities” outside WFP’s ambit to support food distributions,  he added that the Syrian organization “provides detailed reports to WFP” on the activities of the charities it works with.
+
+The extent to which WFP can cross-check those reports, however, is part of the problem the auditors were noting. The spokesman also said that in 2014 WFP had carried out 76 percent of its planned 1,760 monitoring visits in 2014, “in a very unpredictable and volatile context” a significantly higher number than the auditors indicated.
+
+The spokesman added, however, that much of this “significant achievement” was the result of the “third-party monitors” that auditors had said used different, and less discriminating, measures of the actual achievements of the aid deliveries.
+
+This year, the spokesman said, “WFP is further enhancing its monitoring capacity”  by adding more WFP field monitors—and also more of the third-party monitors that auditors had criticized.
+
+Likewise, the spokesman said, WFP voucher programs had been overhauled. The agency, he said, had purged an electronic voucher system in Lebanon, deactivating those deemed invalid, and declared that “encashment trends are decreasing” in both Lebanon and Jordan--without specifying by how much.
+
+He also did not answer a Fox News question asking how many people  in Lebanon had received such electronic cards overall.
+
+The spokesman also underlined one of WFP’s bigger new achievements: the launching of a school feeding program in Syria that he said currently reaches almost 112,000 children, along with 75,500 young children who get specialized nutrition support.
+
+To put that in perspective, however, the U.N.’s 2015 Strategic Response Plan for Syria declares that “more than 5.6 million children” are in need of some kind of assistance, about  2.5 million children under age 5 need food aid, and some 370,000 need special nutritional help.
+
+George Russell is editor-at-large of Fox News and can be found on Twitter:  @GeorgeRussell  or on Facebook.com/GeorgeRussell",REAL
+6428,Voters Repudiate Clinton,"Scott 
+It’s really amazing to see how little of the blame is going to Clinton herself. It was her decision to set-up a private email server. It was her decision to serve as Secretary of State while accepting millions from foreign governments. It was her decision to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while unofficially running for President. It was her decision to call millions of Americans deplorable. 
+We have very little idea of what a Trump presidency will amount to. My best guess has been that he will be a Jimmy Carter cubed in Berlusconi packaging. 
+Recall that even though Carter has been the best former President of the modern era, he came to Washington as an outsider with his Georgia team. Despite having ben a governor and thus knowing how to draft legislation and get bills passed, he famously got little accomplished despite having a Democratic party majority in the House and Senate. 
+Trump is likely to spend his first year, and conceivably his entire Presidency, with all of the Democratic party and enough of the Republican party against him to stymie him, fighting for the right to govern. And that assumes he has an agenda beyond the very few goals he has articulated consistently: getting out of “bad” trade deals and entering into better ones; reducing immigration and deporting many undocumented immigrants (and building his famed wall); investing heavily in infrastructure; making NATO members pay their share of its budget (the theoretical level, 2% of each nation’s GDP, is largely footed by the US); cutting back our involvement in overseas conflicts; cutting taxes; and repealing Obamacare. 
+The only initiatives where the Republicans might back him solidly are cutting taxes and ending Obamacare, and even then, given the lobbying power of Big Pharma and the health insurers, the Republicans might not be as willing to pull the trigger on Obamacare as all their kvetching would lead you to believe. 
+There is one more Trump campaign promise that will serve as an important early test of his seriousness as well as his survival skills: investigating Clinton. Even if Obama pardons her, as our Jerri-Lynn Scofield has predicted, it will be critical for Trump to carry out a probe of the Clinton Foundation’s business while Clinton was Secretary of State. 
+If Trump is to cut the cancer of the neocons out of the policy establishment, he has to have them on the run. It is a reasonable surmise that Clinton’s enthusiasm for war was due at least in part to heavy Saudi support of the Foundation. Showing that American’s escalation in the Middle East, which Obama tried with mixed success to temper, was due in part, and perhaps almost entirely, to the personal corruption of the Secretary of State, would keep the hawks at bay, particularly if other prominent insiders and pundits were implicated in Clinton Foundation influence-peddaling. 
+It will be hard for Trump to do much to alter the course of the military-surveilance complex unless he can hamstring the warmongers. Just as Warren has argued relative to bank regulations, “personnel is policy.” If Trump is a fast learner, he’ll see that that is just as true on the foreign policy front. 
+Finally, those on the left need to turn the blame cannon aimed squarely at them back on the professional hacks who are truly responsible. Despite their tiresome chest-beating about meritocracy, these Acela corridor bubble-dwellers are constitutionally incapable of holding their fellow club member accountable. Their preening self regard repelled hard-working Americans who’d done the right thing, as in gotten an education, and if they were older, launched a career, bought a house and started a family, only to struggle harder and harder while seeing any vestige of security and hope of improved living standards erode. And unless they were at the top of the professional classes, they felt defeated by not being able to pay for their kids to go to college and being uncertain as to how to advise them with their educations and job prospects. 
+The Democrats under Clinton and Obama abdicated the duty of the elites, which is to improve the conditions for, or at least limit harm to, the members of the communities they lead. Even Bill Clinton did remember that the most important duty for a Democrat is to create jobs, even if he did so by presiding over a rise in household debt and a stock market bubble. 
+Young people, who poll well to the left of their elders, have inferred a lesson that the labor movement forgot: the exercise of power includes being willing to inflict punishment in the form of withholding support. Look at how diminished organized labor has become by casting its lot with the feckless Dems who’ve sold them out again and again. Hillary tried the Clinton “They have no where to go” trick one time too many, kicking the left after she only narrowly beat Sanders. And the left decided to return the favor. She made clear she has no intention of representing them. They heard her message loud and clear and acted accordingly. 
+As reader aab : 
+The big question to me is, take over the hollow shell of the Democratic Party, or crush it with a new party. Is it possible to take over the Ds — as weak as it is now as a party — without being corrupted and co-opted? I now hate my former party to such a degree, I find myself recoiling at having anything at all to do with it. But given all the institutional constraints, it still may be smart to try; the answer is above my pay grade, as they say. 
+This is an important question to consider as we see how the Democratic party responds to this well-deserved defeat. 0 2 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+10499,30th Infantry Division: “Work Horse of the Western Front” ~ 1951 US Army; The Big Picture TV-211,"Published on Oct 27, 2016 by Jeff Quitney The Big Picture TV Series playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list… 
+more at http://quickfound.net 
+‘The 30th Infantry Division –“Old Hickory” as this combat infantry division was affectionately called by military people both in and out of it. This National Guard Division is shown in North Carolina and Tennessee, and in combat. It rightfully earned its name as “the Work Horse of the Western Front.” Colonel Quinn appears and explains the clothing, equipment and food available to the combat infantryman.’ 
+“The Big Picture” episode TV-211 
+Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). 
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30th_In… ) 
+The 30th Infantry Division was a unit of the Army National Guard in World War I and World War II. It was nicknamed the “Old Hickory” division, in honor of President Andrew Jackson. The Germans nicknamed this division “Roosevelt’s SS.”. The 30th Infantry Division was regarded by SLA Marshall as the number one infantry division in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), involved in 282 days of intense combat over a period from June 1944 through April 1945… 
+The 30th Infantry Division arrived in England, 22 February 1944, and trained until June. It landed at Omaha Beach, Normandy, 11 June 1944, secured the Vire-et-Taute Canal, crossed the Vire River, 7 July, and, beginning on 25 July spearheaded the Saint-Lô break-through of Operation Cobra. 
+During Operation Cobra, on both 24 and 25 July, the 30th encountered a devastating friendly fire incident. As part of the effort to break out of the Normandy hedgerows, U.S. Army Air Force bombers from England were sent to carpet bomb a one by three mile corridor of the German defenses opposite the American line. However, Air Force planners, in complete disregard or lack of understanding of their role in supporting the ground attack, loaded the heavy B-24 Liberator and B-17 Flying Fortress bombers with 500-pound bombs, destroying roads and bridges and complicating movement through the corridor, instead of lighter 100-pound bombs intended as antipersonnel devices against German defenders. Air planners switched the approach of attack by 90 degrees without informing ground commanders, thus a landmark road to guide the bombers to the bombing zone was miscommunicated as the point to begin the bombing run. Start point confusion was further compounded by red smoke signals that suddenly blew in the wrong direction, and bombs began falling on the heads of the U.S. soldiers. There were over 100 friendly fire casualties over the two days, including Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, commander of Army Ground Forces. 
+The 30th relieved the 1st Infantry Division near Mortain on 6 August. The German drive to Avranches began shortly after. The 30th clashed with the elite 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, and fierce fighting in place with all available personnel broke out. The 30th frustrated enemy plans and broke the spearhead of the enemy assault in a violent struggle from 7–12 August. After the liberation of Paris, the division drove east through Belgium, crossing the Meuse River at Visé and Liège on 10 September. Elements of the division entered the Netherlands on 12 September, and Maastricht fell the next day. Moving into Germany and taking up positions along the Wurm River, the 30th launched its attack on the heavily defended city of Aachen on 2 October 1944, and succeeded in contacting the 1st Division on 16 October, resulting in the encirclement and takeover of Aachen… 
+After a rest period, the 30th eliminated an enemy salient northeast of Aachen on 16 November, pushed through Alsdorf to the Inde River on 28 November, and then moved to rest areas. On 17 December the division rushed south to the Malmedy-Stavelot area to help block the powerful enemy drive in the Battle of the Bulge… Share this:",FAKE
+7541,"The FBI, the DHS’s Customs and Border Protection, the Secret Service, and the Israelis are in cahoots","The FBI, the DHS’s Customs and Border Protection, the Secret Service, and the Israelis are in cahoots ‹ › Jonas E. Alexis graduated from Avon Park High School, studied mathematics and philosophy as an undergraduate at Palm Beach Atlantic University, and has a master's degree in education from Grand Canyon University. Some of his main interests include the history of Christianity, U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book , Christianity & Rabbinic Judaism: A History of Conflict Between Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism from the first Century to the Twenty-first Century. He is currently teaching mathematics in South Korea. He plays soccer and basketball in his spare time. He is also a cyclist. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled Zionism and the West. Alexis welcomes comments, letters, and queries in order to advance, explain, and expound rational and logical discussion on issues such as the Israel/Palestine conflict, the history of Christianity, and the history of ideas. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, Alexis asks that all queries be appropriately respectful and maintain a level of civility. As the saying goes, “iron sharpens iron,” and the best way to sharpen one’s mind is through constructive criticism, good and bad. However, Alexis has no patience with name-calling and ad hominem attack. He has deliberately ignored many queries and irrational individuals in the past for this specific reason—and he will continue to abide by this policy. By Jonas E. Alexis on November 4, 2016 ""Over the last decade, the NSA has significantly increased the surveillance assistance it provides to its Israeli counterpart, the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU; also known as Unit 8200), including data used to monitor and target Palestinians."" …by Jonas E. Alexis 
+
+My dear friend Mark Dankof has recently sent me an article which documents that a 17-year-old Israeli firm named Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization has been working with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, and DHS’s Customs and Border Protection since 2009. There is more: 
+“U.S. state and local law enforcement agencies use Cellebrite’s researchers and tools as well, as does the U.S. military, to extract data from phones seized from suspected terrorists and others in battle zones. 
+“In July, months after the unknown third party provided the FBI with a method for getting into the San Bernardino phone — an iPhone 5C running iOS 9 — Cellebrite announced that it had developed its own technique for bypassing the phone’s password/encryption lock. And the company is confident that it will be able to deal successfully with future security changes Apple may make to its phones in the wake of the San Bernardino case… 
+“Data extracted from phones has eclipsed data extracted from desktop and laptop computers in recent years, since the former can yield not only detailed logs about a user’s activities, interests, and communications, but also, in many cases, map the user’s whereabouts over weeks and months to produce a pattern of life.” [1] 
+Bloomberg itself confirmed that Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization has indeed been working with the FBI. [2] CNN calls Cellebrite “the mysterious ‘outside party’…” [3] 
+This shouldn’t be a surprise at all, for we know that the NSA and the Israelis are almost two sides of the same coin. The New York Times itself agrees with the prevailing view that “the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200.” [4] One can reasonably say that Israel has a way in which the NSA is loused up: “Over the last decade, the NSA has significantly increased the surveillance assistance it provides to its Israeli counterpart, the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU; also known as Unit 8200), including data used to monitor and target Palestinians. In many cases, the NSA and ISNU work cooperatively with the British and Canadian spy agencies, the GCHQ and CSEC. The relationship has, on at least one occasion, entailed the covert payment of a large amount of cash to Israeli operatives.” [5] 
+Solomon Ehrmann, a Viennese Jew, would have been pleased with what Israel has been doing. In a speech delivered at the B’nai B’rith in 1902, Ehrmann envisioned a future in which “all of mankind will have been jewified and joined in union with the B’nai B’rith.” When that happens, “not only the B’nai B’rith but all of Judaism will have fulfilled its task.” [6] 
+Baruch Levy, one of Karl Marx’s correspondents, would have agreed. He declared: “The Jewish people taken collectively shall be its own Messias…In this new organization of humanity, the sons of Israel now scattered over the whole surface of the globe…shall everywhere become the ruling element without opposition…. “The governments of the nations forming the Universal or World-Republic shall all thus pass, without any effort, into Jewish hands thanks to the victory of the proletariat…Thus shall the promise of the Talmud be fulfilled, that, when the Messianic epoch shall have arrived, the Jews will control the wealth of all the nations of the earth.” [7] 
+Well, Judaism is seeking to fulfill “its task” through the state of Israel, which we all know by now is based on the Talmud. [8] But Solomon, Levy, and others could not understand that no force is strong enough to impede the triumph of Logos in history. Julian the Apostate tried but failed miserably. Voltaire, Helvitius, d’Holbach, D’Alembert, Lametrie, Diderot, and nearly all the leading lights of the French Revolution tried. Not a single one of them succeeded because they were essentially fighting against the moral and political order, which is based on reason. 
+If Hegel is right, that reason will triumph in the end, then Solomon, Levy and their minions cannot win. Their evil work is actually drawing them closer and closer to destruction. These people will continue to fail because they are blind to higher realities. They cannot not see that ultimate reason is the beginning and end of human history. They should have at least read Hegel’s position on the philosophy of history. 
+World history, Hegel tells us, “is governed by an ultimate design…whose rationality is not that of a particular subject, but a divine and absolute reason,” [9] and sometimes this divine and absolute reason has a cunning way of working itself out in history, irrespective of what evil men intend to do. This “divine and absolute reason,” says Hegel will “realize its end” in due time. [10] 
+The carnal man simply cannot understand this “cunning of reason” because he is again blind to higher metaphysics. Higher realities goes back to Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle and was refined by people like Aquinas. It states that there is a mathematical, philosophical, moral, and political order in the universe and it is bigger than human beings. 
+Heraclitus wrote: “Listening not to me but to the Logos…” [11] According to scholar Eva Brann, Heraclitus “directs us not to intellectual self-reliance, not to seek some truth, but to comprehend and follow this truth: that said b the Logos.” [12] This Logos, according to Heraclitus, is both “a maxim and Wisdom Inarnate.” According to Brann’s interpretation of Heraclitus, “This great Logos has a wisdom, or rather it is the Wise thing, and this Wise Thing has a maxim, or rather it is that practical principle which guides everything through everything, relates all things to all things…” [13] 
+What Heraclitus and others of that era were trying to establish is that there is an order in this universe, which is undeniable. There is a mathematical, philosophical, esthetic, political and moral order. Any deviation from that order has serious consequences, including intellectual death. And anyone who studies the universe from a rational and truthful standpoint can recognize that order. 
+Even physicists and mathematicians like P. C. W. Davis, Sir Fred Hoyle, John D. Barrow, Frank J. Tipler, Sir Martin Rees, among others, have come to realized that the mathematical order in the universe demands an explanation. [14] That explanation cannot be attributed to chance at all. [15] 
+Rees himself argues that there are basically six numbers that sustain the physical properties of the entire universe. If you change any one of those six numbers (such as the strong nuclear force, gravitational force, etc.) “even to the tiniest degree, there would be no stars, no complex elements, no life.” Rees adds, “Had these numbers not been ‘well tuned,’ the gradual unfolding of layer upon layer of complexity would have been quenched.” [16] 
+Well, these numbers are “well tuned” because they were based on what the Greeks and St. John call the Logos, which the carnal mind ultimately rejects. This “absolute reason,” says Hegel, will bring about the end of history. 
+But looking at all the evil and chaos in this world, obviously the carnal man would think that there cannot be an “infinite power, which realizes its ends.” But Hegel would respond by saying that this is why this “infinite power” is “cunning” and is more powerful than human beings. 
+This “infinite power,” according to scholar Robert C. Tucker’s interpretation of Hegel, “fulfill its ulterior rational designs in an indirect and sly manner. It does so by calling into play the irrational element in human nature, the passions.” [17] 
+The carnal mind simply lacks vision and insight to understand all this because he limits himself only to the primitive idea that the material universe, as Karl Sagan hubristically propounded, “is all that is or was or ever will be.” [18] 
+The carnal mind cannot see that the materialist position lacks intellectual rigor to explain simple things like love, hate, justice, truth, hatred, etc. The best that the carnal mind can offer here is to posit that those things are simply illusions. As Nobel Laureate Francis Crick put it years ago in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis : “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” [19] 
+Richard Dawkins makes the same assumption when he argues that the universe is “just electrons and selfish genes,” therefore “meaningless tragedies…are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune.” [20] 
+The word “meaningless” itself implicitly assumes something called “meaningful.” And both words again assume that there is a “law” by which to differentiate what is “meaningful” and “meaningless.” And a law assumes a “lawgiver.” That’s what the carnal mind like Dawkins is promiscuously trying to deny! Perhaps people like Dawkins need to think goodness that they have never met people like Kant. 
+[1] Kim Zetter, “When the FBI Has a Phone It Can’t Crack, It Calls These Israeli Crackers,” The Intercept , November 1, 2016. 
+[2] Yaacov Benmeleh, “FBI Worked With Israel’s Cellebrite to Crack iPhone,” Bloomberg , March 30, 2016. 
+[3] Jose Pagliery, “Cellebrite is the FBI’s go-to phone hacker,” CNN , April 1, 2016. 
+[4] See James Bamford, “Israel’s N.S.A. Scandal,” NY Times , September 16, 2014. 
+[5] Glenn Greenwald, “Cash, Weapons, and Surveillance: The U.S. Is a Key Party to Every Israeli Attack,” The Intercept , August 4, 2014. 
+[6] Quoted in Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 331. 
+[7] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 1066. 
+[8] Marissa Newman, “Netanyahu reported to say legal system based on Talmud,” Times of Israel , May 8, 2014. 
+[9] George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 28. 
+[10] Ibid., 35. 
+[11] Quoted in Eva Brann, The Logos of Heraclitus: the First Philosopher of the West on Its Most Interesting Term (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2011), 15. 
+[13] Ibid., 21. 
+[14] See for example John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Paul Davis, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (New York: Mariner Books, 2006); Fred Hoyle, Evolution from Space (New York: Touchtone, 1984); Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe (New York: Rinehart, 1988). 
+[15] See Dean L. Overman, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997). 
+[16] Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 161. 
+[17] Robert C. Tucker, “The Cunning of Reason in Hegel and Marx,” The Review of Politics , Vol. 18, NO 3, July 1956: 269-295. 
+[18] Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Ballantine Book, 1980 and 1013), xxii. 
+[19] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 3. 
+[20] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 132. Related Posts:",FAKE
+10251,Comment on How Reiki Actually Works (The Science Part) by Energy Healing-Reiki,"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter The healing art of Reiki has been practiced and taught around the world for many years, with many believing its origins to be as ancient as those of humans themselves. With scientific research now emerging attesting to the ability of human thoughts, emotions, and intentions to affect the physical material world, an increasing number of scientists, quantum physicists in particular, are stressing the importance of studying factors associated with consciousness and its relation to our physical world. One of these factors is human intention.   Reiki essentially uses human intention to heal another person’s ailments. Practitioners usually place their hands on the patient in order to channel energy into them by means of touch. It can be roughly defined as using compassionate mental action and physical touch, energy healing, shamanic healing, nonlocal healing, or quantum touch. The popularity of this practice is exemplified by the fact that, as of 2000, there were more ‘distant healers’ in the United Kingdom than therapists practicing any other form of complementary or alternative medicine, and the same goes for the United States. ( Barnes PM, Powell-Griner E, McFann K, Nahin RL. Complementary and alternative medicine use among adults: United States, 2002 . Adv Data. 2004. May 27;( 343 ):1–19. [ PubMed ]) Quantum physicists have been advocating for the effectiveness of such treatment for some time. For example, Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory — winning him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 — stated that he “regards consciousness as fundamental” “ and derivative from consciousness.” He also maintained t hat “everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Distant healing involves factors associated with consciousness. Eugene Wigner, a well-known theoretical physicist and mathematician, emphasized that “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Richard C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, takes this idea even further in his article “The Mental Universe,” published in the journal Nature :   A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial—mental and spiritual. With so much evidence to support these ideas and with so many studies published on the subject, that this field remains the subject of ridicule to many in mainstream academia is simply baffling. A study published in The American Journal of Chinese Medicine, as seen in the US National Library of Medicine, demonstrated that a women with special abilities was and is able to accelerate the germination of specific seeds for the purposes of developing a more robust seed stock. The study determined that this woman could induce plant seeds to grow shoots and roots several cm long within 20 min using mentally projected qi energy. For a selected list of downloadable peer-reviewed journal articles reporting studies of psychic phenomena, mostly published in the 21st century, you can click HERE . Distant Healing Intention Therapies (DHI): An Overview of the Scientific Evidence Did you know that clinical trials testing the effectiveness of DHI have been being conducted since the mid-1990s? Serious scientific inquiry has been ongoing and continues to this day, with both systematic and meta-analytic reviews being published, many of which have concluded that, with nearly half of all the published studies on this topic exhibiting statistically significant results, further study is desperately needed. Your Inbox Will Never Be The Same Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. A number of studies involving DHI experiments using simple life forms and animals have also reported statistically significant results, which have been seen under randomized and blinded conditions which include enzymes, fungi, yeast, bacteria, cancer cells, red blood cells, fibroblasts, tendon cells, (tenocytes), and bone cells. Distant Mental Interactions With Living Systems (DMILS) Hundreds of experiments in this area, which is closely related to DHI, have been conducted as well. DMILS is not concerned with healing, but rather with searching for measurable empirical evidence that A can affect B in any way, rather than if A can heal B. These studies investigate the influence of A’s intention on B’s physiological state — a process referred to as “remote intention.” They further examine the influence of A’s attention on B’s physiological state while A gazes at B over a 1 way video link, called “remote staring.” Last but not least, they study the influence of A’s intention on B’s attention or behaviour, which is referred to as “remote helping.” The effects of distant mental interactions are measured using electrodermal activity, heart rate, blood volume pulse, and electrocortical activity (EEG electrodermal activity, heart rate, blood volume pulse, brain blood oxygenation [MRI], and electrogastrogram [EGG]). These studies have yielded remarkable results which have since been successfully repeated in laboratories around the world. An Overview Of The Scientific Evidence DHI is very popular as an alternative healing method, but scientific experiments thus far have failed to produce clinical results which can be reliably assessed. As Dean Radin ( Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences ) argues: The contradiction between persistent popularity and lack of clinical effectiveness may be due on the one hand to some healers, in some contexts, who do seem to produce remarkable outcomes, and on the other hand by conventional RCT protocols that may be incompatible with the nature of DHI phenomena. Tools must match the requirements of the subject, and if the right tools are not available, then new ones must be devised. In other words, it is inadvisable to use a sledgehammer to study the surface structure of a soap bubble. On the other hand, DMILS experiments, which relate to distant healing, more clearly indicate the existence of genuine interactions between people at a distance. As Dean Radin explains, this offers up some challenges: But the proof-of-principle offered by DMILS experiments more clearly indicates the existence of genuine interactions between distant people. This presents us with an evidence-based enigma worthy of serious consideration. However, for many researchers, the mere concept of distant healing continues to elicit significant resistance for two main reasons. The first is based on the assumption that “action at a distance” is impossible because it violates one or more physical or biological laws. The second is founded on the neuroscience-based assumption that the mind is identical to the brain, in which case it does not make sense to propose that the brain activity we call “healing intention” can interact with anything outside of the brain’s own body ( source ) While it’s quite clear that healing at a distance hasn’t yet been proven scientifically, DMILS effects do indeed manifest shifts in physiological measures, lending credibility to reports of distant healing being successful. Dean Radin himself maintains that “the implications of DHI for basic science epistemology and ontology and for pragmatic efforts to improve health healing are vast, deep, and perennially intriguing.” A Few Other Strange Reported Anomalies I find it interesting to consider how much scientific investigation into ‘psychic’ phenomena has been conducted by the Department of Defense. In the United States, for example, they had project Star Gate, which lasted more than two decades before being unexpectedly shut down. ( source ) One of the most popular projects within that program was remote viewing. According to a declassified report which has since been published in multiple journals: To summarize, over the years, the back-and-forth criticism of protocols, refinement of methods, and successful replication of this type of remote viewing in independent laboratories has yielded considerable scientific evidence for the reality of the [remote viewing] phenomenon. Adding to the strength of these results was the discovery that a growing number of individuals could be found to demonstrate high-quality remote viewing, often to their own surprise. . . . The development of this capability at SRI has evolved to the point where visiting CIA personnel with no previous exposure to such concepts have performed well under controlled laboratory conditions. ( source ) I just want to make it clear that psychic phenomena have been investigated at the highest levels of government, and probably still are. Who knows what information from these programs remains classified? And why do so many mainstream scientists criticize this research when scientists working at the highest levels of government are studying it? This topic has piqued the interest of more than just Western intelligence agencies, as China also actively works to identify individuals with extended human capacities. For example, a paper published in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in September 1981 in the journal Ziran Zazhi (Nature Journal) tilted “Some Experiments on the Transfer of Objects Performed by Unusual Abilities of the Human Body” (Shuhuang et al., 1981) reported that ‘gifted children’ were able to teleport small physical objects from one place to another. ( source ) A publication titled “Exceptional Functions of the Human Body” also makes some extraordinary claims, reporting highly accurate parapsychological effects, including clairvoyance, psychokinetic effects, and more. ( source ) A report published in 2010 by retired research chemist Dong Shen describes an experiment involving mental teleportation of bits of paper out of a sealed plastic film container. Fascinatingly, these methods were taught to others with a success rate of 40 percent. ( source ) “The results of the Chinese p-Teleportation experiments can simply be explained as a human consciousness phenomenon that somehow acts to move or rotate test specimens through a 4th spatial dimension, so that the specimens are able to penetrate the solid walls/barriers of their containers without physically breaching them.” – Eric Davis, Ph.D, FBIS ( source ) 
+Source Used & Suggested Reading:",FAKE
+7165,Mobilizing in Guatemala,"[Photo: Chiquibul Forest Reserve near Guatemalan border: top showing significant illegal clear cuts. while the bottom shows the beginnings of cutting. Credit: Tony Rath .] =By= Jeff Abott Editor's Note The forests, waterways, and tribal homelands are under growing threat across Latin and South America. Increasingly, the indigenous peoples are taking strong stands against the illegal activities, as well as the government sponsored intrusions into the Reserves. It seems that they are virtually the only ones willing to stand in the way of the decimation of their homelands, and of the wild rainforest on which out planet depends. The rainforest is essentially the lungs of the planet and it is being continuously destroyed. A cross Guatemala, indigenous communities are organizing to challenge logging in the country’s vast forests. These communities are concerned with the impact that both legal and illegal logging will have on their watersheds and on the environment.
+On June 15, concerned residents from the highland Ixil Maya municipality of Nebaj, Quiche staged a protest outside the municipal building to express their concern with the steady increase in trucks leaving town loaded with lumber. 
+The action was organized by residents and members of the Indigenous Authority of Nebaj in order to pressure the state authorities to strip the nine companies of their licenses to exploit timber on private lands. Residents raised concern over the fact that the deforestation affects everyone in the area. 
+Following the protest, concerned residents in the neighboring Ixil municipality of Chajul blocked and detained several trucks transporting lumber from the region for a number of hours. They demanded that the National Institute of Forests, or INAB, and the Division for the Protection of the Environment cease their operations and described the amount of lumber being taken from the local forests as “excessive.” 
+The Indigenous Authorities of Nebaj also issued a statement to INAB asking them to take action. But the government body declined to act and issued a statement that they are planting new trees for every one that is cut down. But this response did not satisfy concerned residents. “We went to the government bodies and issued statements asking to cease extending licenses for the exploitation of forests,” said Caty Terraza, the communications representative for the Indigenous Authorities of Nebaj. “They told us that they are sowing new trees, but how long will it take for those trees to grow to the same size as the trees that were there before?” 
+The companies involved in logging operations responded to the protests by significantly reducing the number of trucks transporting lumber from mountains. According to residents, however, it is unclear if this will continue into the future. 
+The mobilization of communities organizing to challenge logging operations in the highlands of Guatemala represent a growing concern over the destruction of the environment by companies. This challenge to logging companies reflects the understanding of communities of the vital part forests play in the protection of the water sources. 
+“The trees serve us and the animals,” Terraza said. “The loss of trees is drying up the aquifers. As a youth and as human, I must think of my future, and what I’m leaving my children.” Other communities held similar protests following the actions taken in the Ixil region. On June 26, a similar action was held in Santa Cruz del Quiche, the department’s largest city. Once again protesters were demanding that authorities stop issuing licenses for the exploitation of forests. Increase in Logging across Guatemala 
+Guatemala is home to vast forests and jungles, but these regions have increasingly come under threat to deforestation. Critics blame uneducated campesinos clearing land for agriculture as one of the prime culprits. This does represent a threat, but there are other bigger threats, including lumber companies, and organized crime. The protest over logging industry activity in indigenous regions occurs at a time in Guatemala of increased concern over deforestation, and comes after the historic march for water in April 2016. Community representatives, nongovernmental organizations, and activists see a connection between forests and water. The Guatemalan government, too, maintains a campaign of reforestation, but this has not stopped companies from cutting down forests for the valuable woods, or the razing of forests by narco-traffickers in the northern department of Petén to build landing strips. 
+The Guatemalan Ministry of the Economy actively promotes the investment of companies interested in exploiting the country’s nearly 2 million acres of forests. Logging companies and lumber traders have taken an interest in the vast forests of the highlands of Guatemala, where they can find rare hard and soft woods, such as teak, mahogany, oak and the more common pine. These resources can fetch hefty prices at market. 
+The exportation of lumber and products produced from wood from Guatemala has increased significantly. From 2013 to 2014, lumber exports increased 8 percent, from $6.7 million dollars to $8.6 million. This continues the long trend of the increase in the exportation of lumber and wood products, such as furniture. 
+But this increase in export of lumber brings the companies into conflict with indigenous communities. According to research by Guatemalan environmentalist and researcher, Juan Skinner, the indigenous regions of the country on average contain more forest cover than the non-indigenous regions of the country. 
+A 2005 report that Skinner authored highlights that municipalities that are less than 25 percent indigenous have forest cover of around 12 percent. Whereas regions where the population is more than 75 percent indigenous have forest cover of around 35 percent. Guatemala’s Mayan communities are not alone in their concern with the destruction of forests. The southern Xinca community of Quesada, Jutiapa has long taken steps to protect the forests that make up their communal territory. The Xinca people are one of the many ethnicities that make up Guatemala. The rural community in the southern department of Jutiapa has held their forest as communal lands since the 1850s, with subsequent generations continuing to protect the mountain and the forests. Today the forests represent 80 percent of the more than 13,500 acres of land, with the remainder utilized for crops, such as coffee and maize. “Our ancestors left us the land and a group to protect our mountain,” said Jak Mardogueo Ogorio, a representative of the communities’ Directive Council. “All this was passed down through the generations, and we continue this today. In order to cut a tree down, you first must receive permission from the council.” The community leaders have also barred any large-scale logging operations. “We don’t permit companies to operate in our forests,” Ogorio said. “In past epochs companies tried to negotiate for access to the forests, but they always wanted more. How many years for a new tree to grow? Up on the mountain there are trees that you cannot encircle with three people. This is what we are protecting.” 
+Ogorio and the other 13 members of the community council work directly with the residents to build awareness of the importance of the forests through regular meetings, trainings and a campaign to build alternative cooking stoves that utilize less firewood. In August and September 2016, the council implemented the insulation of 400 cooking stoves in conjuncture with Utz Che, a Guatemalan non-governmental organization. 
+“This project allows us to slow deforestation because the stoves use less firewood, and there is no need for more and more wood,” Ogorio said. “These stoves allow us to protect our forests.” 
+Community leaders of Quesada maintain vigilance over the threat of forest fires on communal lands for which they receive funding from INAB. This has generated work opportunity in a region where there are not many options. 
+The community of La Bendición in the southern department of Esquitla is one of the few regions on Guatemala’s southern coast not dominated by sugar and African oil palm plantations. Residents of the small community were displaced by the country’s 36-year-long internal armed conflict. At the end of the war they negotiated the purchase of a 5,500-acre coffee farm through the Land Fund in 2000 for about $1 million, far more than the value of the land. 
+When the families already burdened by debt arrived in 2001, they were shocked to learn that the land was not in the state that the Land Fund had promised. There were no rivers, as they were promised there would be, and the high winds meant that their crops were damaged, and there was no paved road. But there was a forest that contained an aquifer. Disappointed residents quickly left the community, leaving just 53 families of the original 170. 
+Residents continued to be burdened by debt, despite the rich forests. In 2002, the Land Fund proposed a solution: sell the forest. “The same Land Fund that assisted us in purchasing our land was pressuring us to sell the forests in order to resolve the debt,” said Veronica Hernandez, a 47-year-old community leader. “But we refused because if we would have sold our forests, we would have been left without water, or with contaminated water.” Since refusing to sell the land to logging interest, the community has organized to maintain the forests, and protect them from illegal logging and from forest fires. The residents also hold regular community-wide meetings to work to train everyone on the importance of the forests, and to guarantee that no one goes up into the mountain to cut down the precious trees. 
+Residents have also worked to develop projects like those being implemented in Quesada in order to decrease their impact on the forests. These stoves and solar projects are received across the community to great success. The residents’ resolve to protect their forest was further strengthened following the April 2016 water march, when thousands of campesinos marched to demand the protection of Guatemala’s water sources. 
+“The April march was important for us and other communities along Guatemala’s coast,” Hernandez said. “It has strengthened our drive to protect the forests and the mangroves along the coast.” 
+Despite the fact that the community was able to hold off the lumber interests following the purchase of the land, Hernandez and the other residents maintain vigilance to guarantee that no company comes to exploit their land and forests. “These companies always come into our communities to rob from us,” Hernandez said. “They then leave us with all the costs.” 
+Back in Nebaj, the Indigenous Authority is working to replicate the awareness in La Benedición and Quesada over the importance of forests. 
+“We are trying to inform community members of the impacts of deforestation,” Terraza said. This sharing of information is strengthened through the local Ixil University, which works to build awareness, and bring higher education to the region. 
+“But we have to do more,” Terraza added. “We must struggle to guarantee that people know what the impacts are.” 
+The Indigenous Authorities of Nebaj stated that they are considering other actions, including the continuation of pressure on the state bodies, including INAB, the continuation of protests, and the direct action of blocking trucks transporting lumber. 
+“[INAB] is an institution of the state,” Terraza said. “If we have all these trees, then it is because we have protected the forests for some time; our ancestors also protected these forests. It should not be so easy for them to arrive and issue licenses to companies to exploit the forests.” 
+Source: Z Magazine ( N0v 2016 ) 
+  Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation?",FAKE
+9279,"Kenyan refugee kills co-worker, self","Kenyan refugee kills co-worker, self 3 others shot by 'hard worker' fired from job Published: 6 mins ago 
+ROANOKE, Va. (AP) — A refugee from Kenya killed one former co-worker, wounded three others and then killed himself Tuesday in a workplace shooting that authorities are still trying to unravel in Virginia, police said. 
+Getachew Fekede, 53, had entered the U.S. through a refugee immigration program and worked for the railcar manufacturer FreightCar America before being fired in March when he stopped showing up for work, Roanoke Police Chief Tim Jones told reporters. 
+A neighbor told the Associated Press that Fekede quit his job over being harassed by a co-worker. Clarence Jones said Fedeke would send money to his mother back in Kenya and had grown concerned about his finances.",FAKE
+4898,"Amid immigration questions, how will GOP Hispanics vote?","Most Latino voters intend to support Democrat Hillary Clinton, but the more traditional conservatives are split between Republican Donald Trump and Libertarian Gary Johnson, who is beginning to court their vote.
+
+Protesters face off with a supporter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump outside the Phoenix Convention Center as the candidate gives a speech on immigration in Phoenix, Wednesday.
+
+The last week of the presidential race has focused on immigration, culminating with a visit to Mexico by Republican nominee Donald Trump and a campaign rally in Phoenix.
+
+Suggested solutions to illegal immigration and security have ranged from amnesty to border walls, but it has left most Hispanics supporting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and tossed others afield.
+
+""I'm going to flip, but not flop. I am no longer supporting Trump for president, but cannot with any conscience support Hillary [Clinton],"" Massey Villarreal of Houston told NBC Latino after Trump's Wednesday night speech.
+
+Mrs. Clinton currently has the lion's share of support from the nation's Hispanics, with as much as 76 percent of the vote, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in July.
+
+Gary Johnson, former Republican governor of New Mexico and Libertarian candidate for president, aims to siphon off the rest. On Monday, his campaign hired Lionel Sosa, who has worked for multiple Republican presidential campaigns beginning with Ronald Reagan's, to coordinate his outreach to American Hispanics, The Wall Street Journal reported.
+
+Mr. Sosa declared in a June op-ed in the San Antonio Express News, ""If my party winds up electing Donald Trump, I’ll have to bid farewell, hoping that one day soon, it comes to its senses.""
+
+He expressed his affection for the traditional values of the Republican Party. ""Here's my quandary,"" he wrote. ""If my party's left me, where do I go?""
+
+Sosa has gone to Mr. Johnson's campaign, and 16 percent of Hispanics have done the same, according to a Fox News Latino poll in August. Trump currently has 17 percent of the Latino vote, compared to Mitt Romney's 27 percent and former President George W. Bush's 44 percent.
+
+""The appeal of Johnson is that there is part of the Latino electorate who don't trust either Clinton or Trump,"" Ariel Armony, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh specializing in Latino politics, told Fox News Latino.
+
+In that sense, American Latinos are no different from the rest of the United States, as both Clinton and Trump have some of the lowest favorability ratings in recent political history. This mistrust is leading some Americans who otherwise support Republicans or Democrats to consider a third-party vote for the first time, The Christian Science Monitor reported.
+
+Johnson, especially with the experience of Sosa, may also appeal specifically to some Latino voters looking for immigration solutions. His platform on immigration is, not surprisingly, Libertarian.
+
+""We want immigration – we are a nation of immigrants,"" Johnson told a Saturday rally in Boston.
+
+He described his immigration solution: a simple work visa program that would give immigrants a means to enter the country, receive a Social Security card so they can pay taxes, and go to work, often doing jobs most Americans don't want.
+
+Johnson's is one of many ideas playing to a complex reality: Most Americans want some immigrants, but they want them to adapt to local culture, and many fear the current situation, the Monitor's Peter Grier wrote earlier this week.
+
+But because immigration touches many Hispanics so personally, the question of how to solve it leaves many wondering where to go.",REAL
+7593,Say What?! FBI Never Destroyed Laptops of Clinton Aides – AGENTS REFUSED TO DO IT,"0 comments 
+This is just too rich! The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops that Clinton and her aides turned over during the EmailGate investigation… and then agents REFUSED to do it. Now, the laptops have been subpoenaed and the FBI is just waiting for Congress to ask for them. Oh goody! All that evidence is about to come back into play along with Weiner’s laptop that has over 10,000 emails of Huma’s dealings with Hillary Clinton. Good times. Stick a fork in them… I’d say they may just be about done. 
+Washington D.C. attorney Joe DiGenova is the one that broke this explosive revelation. Hillary Clinton must be having multiple panic attacks right about now. I guess we are going to see just how well her health holds up over her corruption being exposed. I understand that she looks dead tired over all this. I’ll bet. Her lies are finally beginning to catch up with her. They should have long ago. 
+From The Daily Caller: 
+Agents within the Federal Bureau of Investigation never destroyed laptops given to them by aides of Hillary Clinton as previously reported , a Washington D.C. lawyer with a source close to the Clinton investigation says. 
+Washington D.C. attorney Joe DiGenova said on The David Webb Show on SiriusXM Friday night that despite the FBI agreeing to destroy the laptops of Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson as part of immunity deals made during the initial investigation of Clinton’s email server, agents involved in the case refused to destroy the laptops. 
+“According to the agreement reached with the attorneys who handed over their laptops, the laptops were to be destroyed per the agreement after the testimony was given –the interviews were given – – by the attorneys. The bureau and the department agreed to that,” DiGenova said. “However the laptops contrary to published reports were not destroyed and the reason is the agents who are tasked with destroying them refused to do so. And by the way the laptops are at the FBI for inspection by Congress or federal courts.” 
+DiGenova said the laptops have already been subpoenaed and the FBI is waiting for Congress to ask for them. 
+I’m sure Donald Trump is all smiles over these developments. In the end, Hillary Clinton was her own worst enemy and Donald Trump’s biggest supporter in this election. 
+“When I found out last Sunday that those laptops — by the way from somebody who is involved in the investigation by the FBI– had not been destroyed contrary to published reports, I could not believe that the Republicans had not gotten their hands on them even yet,” DiGenova said. Neither can I… come on GOP… you’ve just been handed the keys to the kingdom here. Time to go in for the kill. Don’t blow it this time. Related Items Terresa Monroe-Hamilton 
+Terresa Monroe-Hamilton owns and blogs at NoisyRoom.net . She is a Constitutional Conservative and NoisyRoom focuses on political and national issues of interest to the American public. Terresa is the editor at Trevor Loudon's site, New Zeal - trevorloudon.com . She also does research at KeyWiki.org . You can . NoisyRoom can be found on Facebook and on Twitter .",FAKE
+10170,Swiss volunteer firefighters: It’s ok to be a bit tipsy when reporting for duty,"Swiss volunteer firefighters: It’s ok to be a bit tipsy when reporting for duty Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 23:00 Get short URL A Swiss firefighter helps a volunteer during a save and rescue drill in Zurich's Letzigrund Stadium April 19, 2008. © Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters Volunteer firefighters along with other emergency workers operating heavy vehicles in Switzerland will be able to turn up on the job slightly tipsy under new government plans that are due to take effect on January 1. 
+Those working voluntary in the “blue light” industry who respond to urgent situations will no longer be penalised for being a tad merry so long as their blood-alcohol level doesn’t go over 0.50 percent, which is the limit for all other drivers, Reuters reports. 
+READ MORE: Clown arrested for drunk driving in Alabama (PHOTOS) 
+Describing the change as “necessary,” the Swiss Federal Roads Office said relief organizations are becoming more dependent on those who are not on duty or call. 
+“The government is addressing the need for the best possible recruitment of personnel in the event they are needed for unexpected rescue operations,” FEDRO said in a statement. 
+The blood-alcohol level currently stands at 0.10 percent for volunteers in the emergency service sector. 
+Zurich emergency services commander Peter Wullschleger said a full drinking ban still remains in force for all professional firefighters on duty or on call. 
+He added that the easing of restrictions was aimed at smaller communities where there is a shortage of professional firefighters who then rely on volunteers at short notice. 
+“With the ban, theoretically it would have been impossible for somebody enjoying even a nice glass of red wine during the Christmas holidays to fulfill their duty in the event of an emergency,” Wullschleger told Reuters.",FAKE
+9,Planned Parenthood’s lobbying effort; pay raises for federal workers; and the future Fed rates,"PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S LOBBYING GETS AGGRESSIVE. Congress may have spent August away from Washington but Planned Parenthood’s campaign to convince lawmakers to protect the group’s funding followed them back to their home states. Power Post has more.
+
+“Lawmakers will raise the stakes when Congress returns next week by threatening to defund the group through the federal appropriations process. Planned Parenthood’s counter-offensive is widespread and varied and is unfolding inside and outside the Beltway. The group has been organizing rallies, flooding lawmakers’ town hall meetings, commissioning polls, shelling out six figures for television ads and hiring forensics experts to try to discredit undercover video footage that sparked the controversy. The success of these lobbying efforts will be tested when Congress returns and must move a short-term spending bill to keep the government open. Some conservatives in both chambers are pushing to defund Planned Parenthood, even if a standoff with Democrats leads to a government shutdown.”
+
+FEDERAL WORKERS EXPECTED TO GET A PAY HIKE IN JANUARY. The stalled appropriations process in Congress means uncertainty for federal agencies and their workers but the White House isn’t waiting around for lawmakers to decide the fate of federal worker pay. Federal Eye’s Eric Yoder reports that President Obama sent a letter on Friday detailing plans for a 1.3 percent pay raise for federal workers.
+
+“It prevents what would be a much higher raise from being paid under the complex laws governing federal pay raises should no raise number be enacted into law by the end of the year. Congress could yet set a different figure, but the appropriations bills for 2016 so far have been silent on a raise. That continues a pattern that resulted in 1 percent raises being paid by default in January 2014 and 2015.”
+
+RATE HIKE AT THE FED STILL LIKELY. Speculation has been rampant in recent months over when the Federal Reserve will increase U.S. interest rates and the Wall Street Journal reports that all signs still point to a rate increase this year.
+
+“Inside the Fed, advocates for holding off a rate boost beyond this year aren’t getting much traction. In Jackson Hole, Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota was an isolated voice among officials for sustaining near-zero interest rates. He has lost his share of battles over policy, including the decision last October to end the Fed’s bond-buying program.”",REAL
+5839,Is the Fed Fix in for the election?,"By David Haggith, the Great Recession Blog . 
+As we near Halloween, the US stock market looks like it’s whistling past the graveyard near the end of a year that I predicted would be the dawn of “the Epocalypse.” (By that, I meant an economic apocalypse, the likes of which we’ve never seen.) 
+So far, however, that prediction has not manifested. In fact, the market’s fibrillating heartbeat in this graph exhibits a preternatural and eery calm. But it is too calm — too calm to be natural. The stock market plunged on my predicted schedule at the start of the year in what turned into the worst January in the US stock market’s history. Then, suddenly, it was resurrected, great death defied; but, after a rapid recovery it lost consciousness and now behaves more like the walking dead. 
+I have never seen a more rigged looking stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) has been flatlining in the narrowest range possible for almost four months. Coincidence, or has the Fed clandestinely set a threshold below which it will not let the market fall, just like it does openly for inflation — in order to make sure that nothing happens economically that would push voters toward Donald Trump? Is the Federal Reserve rigging the stock market in order to drag itself through this monstrous election cycle alive? 
+While the Fed is barred by law from buying stocks, it has been creating money for its banking proxies to buy stocks ever since the Great Recession hit. It’s common knowledge and also confessed this year by Fed officials , that the Fed has been pumping up the stock market; but I’m asking are they taking new extraordinary measures behind the scenes? The market now looks like it has been pushed as high as it will go and is being held against that ceiling by some mysterious levitating force. 
+Donald Trump recently made it clear that he’d love to put a stake in the heart of the Federal Reserve by firing Janet Yellen … if he could. The prospect of such an acrimonious relationship with a president, telegraphed so clearly by a candidate with a strong chance of winning, surely puts the Fed in a fearful state of self-preservation. All creatures in a state of self-preservation — especially the hideous ones — will do nearly anything to survive. 
+I can’t say that I know the Fed is doing anything new or different than what it has done for the past seven years; but I can say with certainty that this stock market doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen in the past seven years … or even that I’ve seen anytime in my career. 
+John Rubino of DollarCollapse.com calls it “The Boredom Before the Storm” and observes … 
+With all the surprising and disturbing things going on – Brexit, China’s soaring debt, US/Russia/China saber rattling, the unique US presidential race, the cyber attack that shut down big parts of the US Internet – you’d think that an unsettled world would be reflected in skittish financial markets. Instead we’re getting the opposite, with stock price movements becoming more and more placid as the year goes on. 
+Indeed. Like Rubino, I find it strange that, with so much disturbing news around the world, the stock market looks like a sea that is a smooth as glass (compared to how the market’s ups and downs have looked at any other time). You’d think there was never a season more calming to the nerves of investors than the last four months, even as Wall Street daily screams out its fears about a possible Trump victory. 
+In case you don’t think the above graph looks highly suspect, consider that the Dow has now closed below its fifty-day moving average every day without falling below its two-hundred-day moving average for thirty-two sessions. That may not sound like any technical big deal, but what that means is that the Dow has traded within the range of those two averages for the longest time in twenty-seven years ! In fact, the current stretch is three days longer ( and running ) than what the Dow managed back in 1989. (That’s just as far back as I had time to research to try to find a period that came close.) Is the White House also in on the fix … if a fix it is? 
+At a time when Barrack Obama has been boasting that his administration brought the national deficit down (and when I suspect the Obama Admin. would like to tamp it down as much as possible to make Democrats look good for the election), Federal government spending just leaped 67% in August over the month before and 23% over the year before. Another way of saying that is that this spending surge created a deficit for August that was 40% higher than last August’s deficit. 
+Why would the Obama administration risk losing its bragging rights over lowering the deficit so close to the election unless something more important than those bragging rights was at stake? (The president can, after all, do things by executive order to slow spending.) It could, of course, simply be that the King Pin and his henchmen recognized no one was buying their story, so they gave up maintaining the charade. Or … it could be that the economy began sinking so badly that massive efforts were needed to shore things up behind the scenes. Or … ? 
+While I don’t know the reasoning for the spending explosion at a time when the Obama wants to firmly establish his legacy as our savior from the Great Recession, I will note that there is nothing like a massive burst of last-minute government spending on top of whatever the Feral Reserve might be doing to superficially float the economy a little longer. If your boat starts leaking badly and you’re only a hundred yards from shore, the best solution is to power quickly toward shore, not spend time trying to make lasting repairs. No October surprise this October … so far … boo! 
+October has a reputation for being a nasty month for the stock market. It’s the month in which you had usually better buckle your seatbelt because October has seen more stock market crashes than any other month. Sixty-percent of the largest one-day drops in the US stock market have happened in October. 
+This Halloweenish month has broken more volatility records than any other month. That makes it especially odd that the VIX, which tracks market volatility, hasn’t been this steady in any month since the months that preceded the Great Recession. (Everyone thought everything was fine then, too.) 
+As short volatility market positions continue to build – largely as a consequence of central banks suppressing volatility to prevent recessions – maverick money manager Jesse Felder is warning the end result of the volatility trade could be a very painful lesson for investors with significant stock market repercussions. Having started out at Bear Stearns before co-founding his own multi-billion-dollar hedge fund, Jesse Felder is now more at home educating the masses on the truth in financial markets through his blog The Felder Report …. Felder expresses his concern that the lack of volatility will inevitably create more volatility, the likes of which have never been seen before. “I’m not calling for a stock market crash … but if you want to look at what’s the probability of that type of an event, it’s probably got to be as high as it’s ever been.” ( Business Insider ) 
+Felder also says in a television interview that another sign of “way too much complacency” in the stock market is that… 
+…we’re seeing financial stress; everybody’s dismissing it…. It’s big-time denial. 
+Investor complacency or even irrational exuberance are the hallmarks of the final days before a stock-market bust because markets crash when people are most blind. (If they weren’t blind, they’d see the problem coming and avert catastrophe.) Everyone was complacent in 2007 about all warnings, just as no one now seems to care that the market has plowed its mushy head into a ceiling that is slowly squishing down upon it. 
+This October looks more sloppy than choppy, and that’s … in spite of just entering another reporting period of fairly weak earnings, in spite of the European Central Bank talking about backing away from quantitative easing, in spite of the US national debt hitting twenty-trillion dollars, in spite of the Federal Reserve edging toward a possible interest-rate hike now that inflation and employment have met the Fed’s stated targets, in spite of the Bank of Japan holding back on its QE, in spite of China looking like another round of collapse is imminent, in spite of the largest and oldest banks in Europe teetering on collapse, in spite of the great European unwind called “Brexit,” in spite of a proxy war between the US and Russia flaring up in the Middle East, and in spite of that scary, red-haired Chucky doll named Trump. 
+Hmm. Is history’s calmest stock market in the midst of all that a sign of peak complacency or irrationality? Or is it a sign that the market is being firmly fixed in place by the Fed and the government? Either way, looks like a crash is imminent. You decide. I’ll just note that the market looks as calm as the eye in the middle of the hurricane that is, itself, surrounded by hurricanes. 
+While the ride has been mysteriously quiet for the last four months, note that the trend over those months is ever so gradually downward. So, if the fix is in, it is a fix that is barely holding, despite all the Fed and the government can throw at it. 
+Are investors just treading water, as some commentators explain, waiting until the election decides who is president. If so, that’s something they have not done with this level of calm in any previous election cycles. Or are the Fed and the Gov lifting with all their combined might in hidden ways to try to hold up a lowering ceiling so that no one will suspect the Obama-praised Obama recovery is already dead? 
+I don’t actually know. I just want to make the stinking peculiarity of this zombie economy abundantly clear.",FAKE
+3690,"Police Use Tear Gas, Arrest 9 During Protests In St. Louis","Police Use Tear Gas, Arrest 9 During Protests In St. Louis
+
+Police used tear gas and arrested nine people during protests in St. Louis on Wednesday.
+
+Demonstrators gathered after police shot and killed an 18-year-old they say pointed a gun at them. Police said protesters threw bottles and bricks at them, so they deployed armored vehicles and teams of officers in riot gear.
+
+""The Rev. Renita Lamkin of St. Charles, who regularly attended protests in Ferguson, went to Page Avenue with several other clergy members Wednesday evening. She accused the police of engaging in an overly aggressive response. "" 'There has to be a better way, but the better way is not to terrorize an already terrorized community,' she said. 'How they deal with the situation is classist and dehumanizing. The people here don't matter as much to them.' ""Kayla Reed of the Organization for Black Struggle also said she believed officers were too aggressive toward a crowd 'that never was all that big.' She claimed officers gave no warning firing canisters of smoke and tear gas.""
+
+Police defended their actions, saying they warned protesters that the gathering had been deemed an unlawful assembly.
+
+As The Associated Press reports, officers were serving a warrant at a home in that neighborhood Wednesday afternoon. They encountered two suspects.
+
+""The suspects were fleeing the home as [18-year-old Mansur] Ball-Bey, who was black, turned and pointed a handgun at the officers, who shot him,"" the AP says. Police say they found four guns and crack cocaine at the home.
+
+""Police said a 33-year-old white officer with seven years on the force and a 29-year-old white officer with nearly seven years experience fired their weapons after Ball-Bey pointed his gun at them. ""A black male in his mid to late teens escaped and remains at large. Police said they recovered a 9-mm gun with 'an extended magazine' from Ball-Bey that had been reported as stolen in Rolla, Mo. They also recovered three other guns at the scene.""
+
+Of course, these protests come at a time when tensions in the St. Louis area are running high. The last few weeks have been marked by events commemorating the shooting death of Michael Brown.
+
+The protests and clashes with police extended through the night. One vacant house was set on fire and the Post-Dispatch says police have received reports of businesses being set on fire.",REAL
+1075,Kasich’s Ohio Win Pushes G.O.P. Race Closer to Chaotic Convention,"Donald Trump expanded his commanding delegate lead Tuesday night by winning primary contests in Illinois, North Carolina and the winner-take-all state of Florida, prompting Senator Marco Rubio to suspend his campaign and bringing the Republican front-runner one step closer to securing the party’s nomination for president. While Trump lost the winner-take-all state of Ohio to the state’s governor, John Kasich, slowing his potential path to the White House, the billionaire developer remains the odds-on favorite to become the party’s standard-bearer in July, absent a convention-floor fight that could see G.O.P. leaders elevate Kasich or Ted Cruz in defiance of the Republican electorate.
+
+Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton also cleaned up Tuesday, shaking off her surprise loss last week to rival Bernie Sanders in Michigan by winning Ohio, Florida, Illinois and North Carolina, delivering a much-needed jolt of momentum to her campaign. Sanders gave Clinton a run for her money in each state, picking up a share of the night’s delegates, but remains hundreds of delegates behind in the overall count—a gap that may prove insurmountable, especially if Sanders is unable to convince Clinton’s hundreds of superdelegates to switch sides. (As of 7:00 A.M., the Missouri presidential primaries both remained too close to call, with Trump and Clinton ahead by just 0.2 percent each.)
+
+Despite Trump and Clinton’s dominating performances, Tuesday’s results all but guarantee that both races will continue until this summer, and, in the G.O.P.’s case, potentially after. Sanders controls a massive campaign war chest, as well as the proven ability to continue raising huge sums of money—the Vermont senator raised more than $5 million in the day following his victory in Michigan—and has indicated he is willing to spend big to win, all the way until the Democratic National Convention in July. On the Republican side, the window is closing to prevent Trump from reaching the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the G.O.P. nomination, but party leaders have made no secret of their intentions to block him, no matter what. Even if Trump surpasses that threshold, establishment party figures have indicated they could change convention rules or even launch a conservative third-party challenge—a suicide mission, but one some Republicans see as a necessary corrective to the existential threat posed by Trump’s insurgent candidacy. Either way, Cruz and Kasich are likely to remain in the race for the long haul, ensuring a three-month slog to what is sure to be a chaotic convention in Cleveland.
+
+In an election season defined by roiling anger toward Washington elites and economic policies that have contributing to a widening income gap, Kasich’s rousing victory in Ohio, and gee-whiz positivity, may be just a blip amid the wider revolt driving Donald Trump and, to a lesser extend, Bernie Sanders. Clinton has managed, with some success, to absorb that populist rage, running to the left by condemning Wall Street greed and turning against trade deals she previously supported. The Republican establishment, however, which long held together its unwieldy coalition of economic elites and working class whites by merging a pro-business platform with social conservatism, may not survive in its current form.
+
+The astounding popularity of Trump, a nationalist with little ideology beyond his belief that he is the sole candidate capable of restoring American greatness, has exposed the lie at the heart of the party: the majority of the conservative base doesn’t care about small business principles. They just want someone who will keep immigrants out and tell it like it is. After all, the limited-government ideology preached by the G.O.P. may have made their lives worse. Whether or not Trump can secure the delegates he needs to lock up the Republican nomination—a feat that will require winning some 60 percent of all remaining delegates from here on out—the damage to the G.O.P. will have been done.",REAL
+5788,Hillary and Trump Could Both Be Criminally Charged After The Election,"Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have made headlines recently for their alleged problems with the law . Trump, who in April of 2016 was named as the defendant in a lawsuit filed by Katie Johnson, is scheduled to appear before a court on December 16, 2016. The lawsuit alleges Trump, along with former banker billionaire and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, raped Johnson when she was thirteen. The incident allegedly happened in the 1990s. Epstein, who was convicted of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution in 2008, has also been associated with former President Bill Clinton, whose name appears in “ flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the ‘Lolita Express, ’” a term used in association with Epstein’s Boeing 727 jet. The jet was allegedly set up with beds where Epstein and guests “ had group sex with young girls .” The lawsuit was first filed in April , but U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Stevenson threw the suit out in May because Johnson then failed “ to state a civil rights claim .” The plaintiff was representing herself at the time, claiming to be unemployed and having only $276 to her name. In June, Johnson went on to refile the suit in the Manhattan federal court. This time around, Johnson filed the suit under the name “Jane Doe,” asking $75,000 plus attorney fees. But in September, Johnson dropped her lawsuit, only to have it refiled weeks later with three affidavits instead of two. While Trump is scheduled to appear in court for a status conference in December in reference to this case, it still requires more information before it leads to a trial or settlement. In contrast to Trump’s case, Clinton’s brush with the law is taking place at a different, more advanced level — but is still not close enough to conviction to ruin her chances of being elected. Just over a week before Americans head to the polls to cast their ballots, the FBI announced it would be reopening its the probe into presidential nominee and former secretary of state Clinton’s use of a private email server. The announcement followed the discovery of an email stash found on a laptop that belonged to former congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is a longtime Clinton aide. She claims to have been unaware that her emails were on Weiner’s device. Though the FBI has announced it obtained a warrant to review the 650,000 emails, it is unlikely the agency’s investigation will achieve any results before election day. The FBI is seeking to determine whether the messages found on Weiner’s computer include any classified information or evidence that may indicate Clinton undermined U.S. national security. In an article for Law Newz , Ronn Blitzer attempts to answer some of the questions the public might raise now that the FBI has announced the probe, attempting to determine how Clinton’s legal future will look if she’s elected president. While the law “ is hazy, ” Blitzer writes , he goes over several scenarios. First, he explains “ it’s highly unlikely that an indictment would come before November 8 .” If it happened, however, “ the indictment itself wouldn’t mean that Clinton could no longer run, as an indictment is only an accusation, not a convictio n.” Theoretically, he continues , “ the Electoral College could … go rogue and not vote for Clinton, even if their states tell them to .” Another possibility is that Clinton would be pressured, either by the DNC or the public, to “ give up her candidacy. ” In the case Clinton wins but is indicted before her inauguration, “ she could try to play beat-the-clock and hope to take office before her case concludes .” But if she’s both indicted and convicted before the inauguration and then sentenced, “ she may be deemed incapacitated, in which case Section 3 of the 20th Amendment kicks in and the Vice President-Elect, in this case Tim Kaine, would become President .” But if Clinton wins the election and is inaugurated as the investigation is carried on, “ Clinton would luck out ,” Blitzer explains , “ due to the philosophy that Presidents — and only Presidents — [sic] are immune from prosecution while in office .” Since the House of Representatives determined in 1873 that a president may only be impeached over offenses committed after their inauguration, Blitzer writes , impeachment over the email scandal isn’t likely to take place. And even if she’s convicted after moving to the White House, “ President Hillary Clinton could pardon herself .” These scenarios could all play out fairly similarly in Trump’s case, assuming the rape lawsuit filed against him leads to a conviction. But whether Clinton or Trump is elected, their federal or FBI probes may result in nothing more than footnotes in the grand scheme of things — especially once we’re faced with the realization that elected officials are required to meet lower standards of conduct than the rest of us . Only after the FBI probe is finalized will we know if Congress is willing to tackle the presidential immunity rules. source:",FAKE
+2179,‘We Caved’,"On a late July day this past summer, a roar filled the sky over Cairo. It was the sound of Barack Obama’s capitulation to a dictator.
+
+Eight new American fighter jets, freshly delivered from Washington, swooped low over the city, F-16s flying in formation. As they banked hard over the city’s center, they trailed plumes of red, white and black smoke—the colors of the Egyptian flag.
+
+For Egypt’s brutally repressive president, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the spectacle was a triumph, symbolizing not only his militaristic power at home, but also his victory over an American president who had tried to punish him before surrendering to the cold realities of geopolitics.
+
+Just two years earlier, Sisi had seized power in a military coup, toppling Mohamed Morsi, the democratically elected successor to Hosni Mubarak, himself a strongman of 30 years pushed out in early 2011 by mass protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In the summer of 2013, Sisi followed his coup with a brutal crackdown that would have done Saddam Hussein proud. His security forces arrested thousands of people, including much of his political opposition, and in one bloody day that summer, they gunned down some 1,000 pro-Morsi protesters (or more) who were staging peaceful sit-ins. The massacre was shocking even by the standards of Egypt’s long-dismal human rights record.
+
+Obama was appalled. “We can’t return to business as usual,” he declared after the slaughter. “We have to be very careful about being seen as aiding and abetting actions that we think run contrary to our values and ideals.”
+
+Several weeks later, Obama halted the planned delivery of U.S. military hardware to Cairo, including attack helicopters, Harpoon missiles and several F-16 fighter jets, as well as $260 million in cash transfers. He also cast doubt on the future of America’s $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt—a subsidy on which Cairo depends heavily, and much more than the United States sends to any country in the world aside from Israel.
+
+But a fierce internal debate soon broke out over whether and how to sanction Egypt further, a fight that many officials told me was one of the most agonizing of the Obama administration’s seven years, as the president’s most powerful advisers spent months engaged in what one called “trench warfare” against each other. It was an excruciating test of how to balance American values with its cold-blooded security interests in an age of terrorism. Some of Obama’s top White House aides, including his deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, and the celebrated human rights champion Samantha Power, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, urged the president to link further military aid to clear progress by Sisi on human rights and democracy. But Secretary of State John Kerry, then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Hagel’s successor, Ash Carter, argued for restoring the aid. Trying to punish Sisi would have little effect on his behavior, they said, while alienating a bulwark against Islamic radicalism in an imploding Middle East. “Egypt was one of the most significant policy divides between the White House and the State Department and the Department of Defense,” says Matthew Spence, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy.
+
+For months, Obama tried to split the difference. In meetings and phone calls with the Egyptian ruler, by now paranoid and resentful about America’s intentions, Obama and Kerry urged Sisi to respect human rights, while also seeking his help in countering the the metastisizing Islamic State in nearby Syria and Iraq. Sisi did little of either.
+
+In the end, Obama folded. This past March, he called Sisi once again, this time to explain that he would release the cash transfers and delayed hardware—including the F-16s—and end the administration’s threats to block the larger $1.3 billion annual aid package.
+
+“We caved,” says a former senior administration official who participated in the debates.
+
+In a long conversation recently, Rhodes, the speechwriter turned national security aide who has been with Obama from the beginning of his presidency, didn’t mince words when it came to the years-long internal battle over Egypt. “We’re in that sweet spot where everyone is pissed off at us,” Rhodes told me.
+
+And not just about Egypt. The persistent problem of how to deal with American-allied strongmen has long tripped up a president who prefers pragmatic solutions to moral purity but has been unable to find much of either in the Middle East. While every U.S. president struggles to balance values like democracy and human rights with national security, Obama has struggled more than most because of the vast gap between his inspirational rhetoric and the compromises he has made with thuggish world leaders, especially—but by no means exclusively—in a Middle East where authoritarian heads of state from Riyadh to Cairo have cracked down with renewed vigor after the unsettling protests of the Arab Spring.
+
+“The rhetoric got way ahead of the policymaking,” says Michael Posner, who served as Obama’s top State Department official for human rights and democracy in his first term. “It … raised expectations that everything was going to change.”
+
+“He’s never quite melded his rhetoric with his policies,” says Dennis Ross, who served as Obama’s top Middle East aide in his first term. Adds Robert Ford, who was Obama’s ambassador to Syria before resigning in frustration over the president’s policy there: “It seems like we are swinging back to the idea that we must make a choice between supporting dictators or being safe.”
+
+Their views were echoed in many of more than two dozen recent interviews with current and former administration officials, members of Congress, experts and activists—interviews that revealed a striking degree of frustration and disillusionment. Many Obama supporters started out believing that the president had grand ambitions for replacing George W. Bush’s militaristic posture with a more enlightened and progressive approach to the world before coming to believe they had misread a president who was not the idealistic internationalist they had thought he was.
+
+In hindsight, it seems clear that Obama came to office far more focused on showing the world that the Bush era was over than on any coherent strategy of his own for advancing human rights or democracy.
+
+But it didn’t seem that way at the time: Obama’s aides entered the White House full of plans for “dignity promotion”—a favorite phrase of Power’s meant to signal a contrast with Bush’s post-9/11 talk of “democracy promotion” and his second-term “Freedom Agenda” that many came to equate not with Bush’s lofty goal of “ending tyranny in our world” but with imposing Western values on countries like Iraq and Afghanistan at gunpoint.
+
+",REAL
+7812,"Bishop Williamson on Putin, Putin’s Meeting with Pope Francis, and the Fr. Gruner-Russian Meeting","Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / Bishop Williamson on Putin, Putin’s Meeting with Pope Francis, and the Fr. Gruner-Russian Meeting Essential Reading Soros/CIA Plan to Destabilize Europe By Wayne Madsen on September 28, 2015 
+The same forces that orchestrated the various ‘colour revolutions’ and the ‘Arab Spring’ are behind Europe’s migrant crisis. Wayne Madsen explains The Essene Gospel of Peace II By wmw_admin on April 26, 2007 
+Translated by Purcell Weaver and Edmond Szekely from its original Aramiac, a language that today few know but 2000 years ago was the language that Christ spoke and taught with In ‘Eisenhower’s Death Camps': A U.S. Prison Guard’s Story By wmw_admin on May 4, 2007 
+In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets; many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. The Illuminati Chronicles Part II By wmw_admin on November 28, 2007 
+A Short History of the New World Order Part II By cyberpatriot@hotmail.com Aug. 10, 1973 – David Rockefeller writes an article for the “New York Times” describing his recent visit to Red China: “Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also […] The Advent of the Anti-Christ By Rixon Stewart on August 2, 2010 
+A few words on the market meltdown and how it may assist the debut of a truly sinister figure Dov Zakheim 9/11 Mastermind Video By wmw_admin on May 15, 2010 
+Using legal injunctions, Dov Zakheim’s lawyers forced this website to remove an article we posted with the same title; which tells us he may have something to hide. Seems like others also think so as this video indicates. Watch it while you still can Holocaust, Hate Speech & Were the Germans so Stupid? – Updated By wmw_admin on March 23, 2011 
+The brilliant examination of the ‘Holocaust’ by Anthony Lawson has since been censored on the basis of a false Copyright infrigment. But as Lawson explains, this just another attempt to stiffle freedom of expression",FAKE
+6977,Hillary Clinton accused of stealing furniture from the State Department,"Email 
+Hillary Clinton swiped State Department furniture to decorate her Washington home, a former member of her security detail has alleged to the FBI. 
+“Early in Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, she and her staff were observed removing lamps and furniture from the State Department which were transported to her residence in Washington, DC,” an agent on the detail told the FBI. 
+The agent “does not know whether these items were ever returned to the government,” according to FBI notes. 
+The agent was assigned to Clinton in 2009, at the start of her term, but was not on the detail when Clinton left in 2013. 
+The accusations were part of 100 newly released pages of interview notes of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified material. 
+The department flatly denied the latest charges, saying Clinton took home only property that she owned.",FAKE
+4478,"Newt Gingrich: If Hillary Clinton Runs In 2016, Republicans 'Incapable Of Competing'","Clinton certainly has the resume to be a strong presidential contender: two terms as the first lady during her husband's popular administration, eight years as a U.S. senator from New York and four as a widely-acclaimed secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Not to mention that she has already mounted a presidential bid once before, during the 2008 Democratic primary. With quite a following among Democrats -- particularly women -- and an expert campaigner as a husband, Clinton is one of the frontrunners for the 2016 nomination. In fact, if the Iowa caucuses were held today, a Public Policy Polling survey found she would win 58 percent of the vote, outstripping the runner-up, Vice President Joe Biden, by a margin of 41 percent. Now the question is whether or not Clinton will decide to throw her hat in the ring in 2016. After her term as secretary of state ends this year, she has declared her intention to take a year off from politics entirely. And after that? Clinton says that she does not want to run in 2016, but that hasn't quashed hopes to the contrary. -- Sarah Bufkin",REAL
+4179,"Hillary supporters: We're excited, too, but also practical","Trump and Sanders get all the attention for their passionate support. But supporters at a Hillary Clinton rally are passionate, too – in their own way.
+
+As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?
+
+Retired deputy sheriff Debbie Boyd wears her support for Hillary Clinton at a rally at the University of California, Riverside, on Wednesday.
+
+The retired deputy sheriff wears a white straw hat on which a miniature Hillary Clinton doll sits, surrounded by flowers and little American flags. Red, white, and blue peace signs clatter around her neck, and “Hillary” stickers adorn her cheeks. She even carries around a picture-book biography of Mrs. Clinton that she hopes to get autographed.
+
+“She sends a message to little girls about what it means to be a leader,” says Ms. Boyd, a mother of two, when asked what excites her about her candidate.
+
+Few others standing in line for the Clinton rally at the University of California, Riverside on Tuesday wear their support as overtly as Boyd, a former Republican who switched parties to vote for Barack Obama in 2008. The orderly, almost quiet scene outside the venue seems to illustrate one of the most persistent criticisms leveled against Clinton: her lack of likability, expressed in part by a relative disinterest among her supporters.
+
+And when placed beside the more outspoken advocates for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – some of whom came to the Tuesday rally to protest Clinton’s candidacy – or the outrage that marks followers of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, Clinton voters do appear almost dispassionate.
+
+But none of that means the former secretary of State fails to inspire, her supporters say. To them, the ability to excite and rile up a crowd is less important than experience, a sense of respect, and the skill to negotiate one’s way out of a problem. These voters say they choose to show their enthusiasm in less sensational ways, whether it’s donating to Clinton’s campaign or encouraging others to educate themselves and turn out to vote.
+
+“I’m not looking for someone to entertain me,” says Boyd, as she squats on the grass to add tinsel to her “Hillary” poster. “I’m looking for someone to lead this country.”
+
+Which isn’t to say passion doesn’t exist among Clinton supporters. Inside the Johnson Family Practice Center at UC-Riverside, a current of anticipation runs through the gathering – an intimate affair that is typical of Clinton’s rallies. When she at last appears just after 6 p.m., the crowd cheers, waving campaign-issued balloons and posters.
+
+“We are very enthusiastic,” says Sebastiano Grasso, a local artist, dismissing any suggestion that Clinton is unable to galvanize her supporters. “We’re just not punching people, yelling at people.”
+
+Others, like Carrie Lucas, say they show their enthusiasm with actions, not words. Ms. Lucas, a ballroom dancing instructor from Corona, Calif., says she donates to the Clinton campaign with every paycheck.
+
+“I put my money where my mouth is,” she says.
+
+Denise Davis, a school administrator at the University of Redlands, defends Clinton’s ability to move her constituency.
+
+“If you’ve ever seen her live in person, she’s completely energizing,” Ms. Davis says, recalling how she managed to convince her mother to vote for Clinton over President Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries. “She went to see Hillary speak and that’s what swayed her decision.”
+
+But Davis's support for the former secretary of State goes beyond optics. To her, Clinton embodies progress that is earned over decades.
+
+“She’s very much interested in progressive, social change, and she’s in a position to make that change happen,” Davis says. “She would be the first female president – that’s huge in itself. But she has the best ability to make change happen.
+
+“That’s what fires me about her.”
+
+Likability was not always a criterion for electability. Indeed, the Founding Fathers would “be horrified by the modern presidential campaign,” Slate’s John Dickerson noted in 2012.
+
+“In their day,” he wrote, “no man worthy of the presidency would ever stoop to campaigning for it.”
+
+Particularly since the advent of television, however, the charm factor has haunted many a losing candidate.
+
+“There’s an assumption that the candidate you want to win is the candidate you prefer to” hang out with, says Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington. “It becomes a cue for whether [or not] you trust this person, whether they’ll understand people like you, whether they’ll have your interests at stake, whether they get what it’s like to be a real American living in this country right now. It’s all rolled up in this term called ‘likability.’ ”
+
+“I don’t think Hillary Clinton … comes off as a warm and fuzzy person you want to hang out with after work,” she says.
+
+And it shows, at least in the polls. As of mid-May, only 40.2 percent of Americans saw Clinton as a favorable candidate, according to the Huffington Post, which tracks data from more than 400 surveys nationwide. Mr. Trump is doing just worse, with 38.7 percent of voters viewing him as favorable in the same period. The figures represent some of the lowest favorability ratings for presidential candidates in American history.
+
+For Clinton, the problem is that “it’s hard from the outside to think of any non-career or pre-career aspect to her life,” writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. “Except for a few grandma references, she presents herself as a résumé and policy brief.… It’s hard from the outside to have a sense of her as a person; she is a role.”
+
+Yet the folks at the Clinton rally on Tuesday applaud her rational approach, saying they support her precisely because she is about her work and not her celebrity.
+
+“She has done so much for this country,” says Earlene Freeman, a retired registered nurse, as she leans on her walker. “She will better represent the values that I have; she wants people to reach their potential.”
+
+“And it’s time for a woman to be president,” she says.
+
+Clinton’s younger supporters seem to be thinking along similar lines.
+
+“Her approach is very analytical,” says Callie Scoggins, a senior at Redlands East Valley High School, about a half-hour drive from Riverside. “She won’t be quick to do something without considering the consequences.”
+
+“What it comes down to,” adds Tyler Washington, a new graduate at Riverside, “is that the other candidates are like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, offering magical rewards. Clinton is like the mom telling you to eat your vegetables.”
+
+That may not make her likable, he says, but “those thinking with their brains understand what’s more important.”
+
+“We don’t need a slogan,” adds Mr. Grasso, the artist. “We need solutions.”",REAL
+9162,"Artist's Impression Of ""The Clinton Machine"" - Russia News Now","This post was originally published on this site 
+If Hillary wins, I’m talking the loved ones into a hundred foot deep bunker or a southern hemisphere island. 
+Did you know Russia has the Sarmat ICBM that reaches all parts of America and Putin thinks Americans, who were, for the most part, not badly touched, the way Russians were, in previous world wars, should know how horrific war is? 
+If we have WWIII, and it looks like we will, you and I will suffer, terribly, if we live. 
+Snowflakes are voting for WWIII and they don’t know it. Related ",FAKE
+3801,Report: Obama Administration Makes 'No Progress' On Drone Program Transparency,"The Obama administration has made ""virtually no progress"" to increase transparency and accountability for its lethal drone program, a new report has concluded, with only months left to spare before the White House hands control of the targeted killing apparatus to a successor.
+
+The report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center said the administration is failing to release fundamental information about the program or to significantly overhaul it — even after a 2015 strike mistakenly left American contractor Warren Weinstein and Italian hostage Giovanni Lo Porto dead.
+
+""We have seen relatively few successes,"" said Rachel Stohl, a researcher at the center. ""The administration has been unwilling to provide the number of strikes, even in aggregate; the number of civilian casualties that they estimate that have occurred because of those strikes; the legal justification, unless required by court order, that allows the program to continue; so even on the most basic levels, what is the program doing, we don't know.""
+
+A bipartisan task force called on the White House nearly two years ago to reconsider its reliance on targeted killing of suspected terrorists, in part, because the strikes may be doing more harm than good by fomenting hatred overseas. But Stimson researchers said they've uncovered little evidence anything like that reorientation has happened.
+
+A senior administration official told NPR the White House goes to ""extraordinary lengths"" to avoid civilian casualties.
+
+The official added: ""Unlike our enemies, which deliberately and pointedly violate the law of armed conflict, the United States takes great care to adhere to the fundamental law of armed conflict principle of distinction, which requires that attacks be directed only against military objectives and that civilians and civilian objects not be the target of attack.""
+
+At least nine nations now have weaponized drones, and four have used them, the report said. ""It's important that the United States establishes good policy and sets an international precedent that demonstrates leadership and responsibility and transparency over the program because other countries are going to follow the U.S. lead,"" Stohl said.
+
+U.S. government officials have walked a fine line on the drone program, which is supposed to be secret. Former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden addressed the strikes in his new book and an opinion article in the New York Times Sunday, when he wrote: ""I think it fair to say that the targeted killing program has been the most precise and effective application of firepower in the history of armed conflict.""
+
+Days earlier, lawyers for the Obama administration appeared in an appeals court in Washington, D.C., to fight a demand by the American Civil Liberties Union for legal justifications and ""summary strike data,"" including the numbers and identities of people killed by weaponized drones.
+
+Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said the administration can't have it both ways.
+
+""The law of the drone campaign should not be a secret, nor should the CIA be permitted to withhold basic information that would allow the public to understand the implications of the government's policies,"" Jaffer said. ""This is particularly the case since so many senior officials have spoken so freely about drone strikes.""",REAL
+6406,"Political Party of Anarchists, Libertarians, Hackers, and Computer Geeks to Take Power in Iceland","By Claire Bernish at thefreethoughtproject.com
+In a country continuing to shirk the ordinary, Iceland’s Pirate Party — an amalgamation of anarchists, libertarians, and hackers, who want to ban digital surveillance — is predicted to win the country’s national elections this Saturday.
+This collection of free-thinkers have upturned the traditional Western political paradigm and hopes to use online public polls to shape governmental policy and end all Internet spying.
+Although the Pirate Party formed just four years ago, its popularity has skyrocketed — most likely for unconventional tactics aligning loosely with libertarianism — the promotion of privacy rights and personal freedoms, and simultaneous shrinking of Big Government.
+Edward Snowden has been offered the safe haven of Icelandic citizenship should the Pirates likely victory come to fruition — which makes sense, given the party’s anti-establishment roots.
+In fact, the Pirates have experienced astonishing success in a short time — taking the nation’s longstanding political traditionalists off-guard in the process — even the group’s founder, a programmer and former Wikileaks activist, is stunned.
+Asked whether she expected the explosion of enthusiasm for the nascent Pirate Party — which now leads in public polls with 22.6 percent — founder Birgitta Jónsdóttir decisively told the Washington Post , “No way.”
+But considering growing frustration with ever-increasing Western governments — and all of the surveillance programs, police state tactics, and chill on personal liberties — the rise of the Pirates, who describe themselves as neither right nor left but a radical mix of both, hardly seems too shocking.
+“People want real changes and they understand that we have to change the systems,” Jónsdóttir asserted, “we have to modernize how we make laws.”
+According to the Pirates’ website , “The Icelandic Pirate Party was founded on November 24th, 2012 based on the political ideology of the Swedish Pirate Party, which Richard Falkvinge founded in January 2006, to bring about internet copyright reform.”",FAKE
+6,"Despite Constant Debate, Americans' Abortion Opinions Rarely Change","It's been a big week for abortion news.
+
+Carly Fiorina's passionate (if inaccurate) depiction of a Planned Parenthood sting video was one of the most memorable moments of last week's GOP debate. And the House of Representatives on Friday passed two abortion-related bills — one aimed at cutting federal funds to Planned Parenthood, the other at punishing doctors who fail to provide medical care to infants that survive abortion attempts.
+
+Given all this, you could be forgiven for thinking there's been a public-opinion shift against abortion rights in the U.S.
+
+Abortion is one of those rare issues in which public opinion never seems to budge all that much. Americans are still more or less where they were on whether they think it should be legal as in 1975, just after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. That is, with the largest share of Americans somewhere in the murky middle.
+
+According to Gallup data, by 29 percent to 19 percent, Americans think it should be legal in all circumstances. But a majority — 51 percent — say it should be legal in only certain circumstances — in cases of rape, incest or where the mother's life is threatened, for example. That number has barely changed in 40 years.
+
+Those kinds of data stand in stark contrast to what's available about other social issues. Consider same-sex marriage, for example, where public opinion has swung dramatically toward legalization in the past decade.
+
+Or take the death penalty — upticks in crime and opposition to government spending are two factors that have driven Americans' opinions on this topic back and forth over the years.
+
+Abortion isn't like that. Strong majorities have consistently opposed overturning Roe since 1989, today by nearly 2 to 1.
+
+That's perhaps even more surprising when considering what's happened over the past 40 years: a patchwork of state laws passed to define very specific restrictions on abortion, a decline in teen pregnancy, and increasing political polarization. All of that has apparently neither caused nor been the result of big shifts in national public opinion on abortion.
+
+So what's going on?
+
+It might have to do with another fact about public opinion on abortion — it's a topic for which the realities are anything but black and white, which is exactly how the arguments are all too often framed in the political arena.
+
+A majority of Americans support legal abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy. But a majority also oppose it in the second and third trimesters. Most support it in cases of rape or incest, but most oppose it if the mother simply can't afford another child.
+
+Those opinions get much messier when you dive deeper into the research.
+
+""Not only is opinion remarkably stable ... it is deeply contradictory,"" said Karlyn Bowman, who studies public opinion at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. When people are asked, "" 'Is it murder?' people say yes,"" Bowman said. But if asked, "" 'Should it be a personal choice between a woman and her doctor?' a large majority say yes.""
+
+In one poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, 43 percent of Americans identified as both ""pro-life"" and ""pro-choice."" Those labels are their own source of uncertainty.
+
+Since the mid-1990s, the share of people who consider themselves ""pro-choice"" (by Gallup's count) has fallen moderately — even while opinions on abortion circumstances have held steady. (Still, a majority — 50 percent — consider themselves ""pro-choice,"" while 44 percent say they are ""pro-life."")
+
+These contradictions may be why public opinion holds so steady.
+
+""When that [contradiction] happens on a public policy issue, when there are deep contradictions, most people pull away from an issue,"" Bowman said. ""They don't see any reason to resolve the tensions in their opinions. So that leaves the topic up to the pro-life and the pro-choice activists. And those groups don't really represent most people.""
+
+Why Planned Parenthood is the focus
+
+So if most Americans don't firmly oppose abortion, one might say it's foolhardy for Republicans, like this week's GOP debate participants, to stake such firm anti-abortion stances.
+
+But abortion is an issue that fires up the bases of both parties. It's one of the top issues used by Republicans and Democrats to motivate, fundraise and organize.
+
+What's more, though, the latest abortion fight isn't focused on the larger issue of abortion itself. It's been about Planned Parenthood. And recent surveys suggest that public opinion on the organization is more malleable than opinion on the topic of abortion.
+
+Today, a plurality of Americans — 37 percent — view Planned Parenthood favorably, according to a recent Monmouth poll (with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points). But just three years ago, the same poll found that far more people — 55 percent — viewed the organization favorably.
+
+It's just one survey, but it suggests that making the abortion debate about Planned Parenthood (and taxpayer money) may be a more successful tactic for the GOP than trying to pass laws restricting abortion itself.
+
+Of course, that doesn't mean a shutdown over the issue would be a good idea for the GOP. The Republican Party's favorability rating fell sharply during the October 2013 partial government shutdown — making it one area where public opinion does tell a clear story.",REAL
+4362,Congressional Republicans are outraged that the EPA wants to protect our drinking water,"And the agency was ready for the critics. “The only people with reason to oppose the rule,” White House Senior Advisor Brian Deese told reporters on a press call Wednesday, “are polluters who knowingly threaten our clean water.”
+
+So who are those willful polluters? Congressional Republicans, along with a select group of Democrats from farm and energy-heavy states, who are already pushing legislation aimed at crippling the rule in both Houses. They’re characterizing it, as they do most EPA regulations, as a “power grab” and an overreach, and are vowing to destroy it the same way, presumably, they want to be allowed to destroy waterways.
+
+House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) summed up the overwrought sentiment nicely in his reaction to the rule’s release. “The administration’s decree to unilaterally expand federal authority is a raw and tyrannical power grab that will crush jobs,” he said. “These leaders know firsthand that the rule is being shoved down the throats of hardworking people with no input, and places landowners, small businesses, farmers, and manufacturers on the road to a regulatory and economic hell.”
+
+Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), who is sponsoring a bill with Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.) that would overturn the rule, called it “reckless and unwarranted” in a statement, and vowed to “work tirelessly to stop this expansion of federal control.”
+
+EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, in announcing the rule this morning, in fact pointed out that the agency has received over one million public comments on the rule since it was proposed last year. And it was based, she emphasized, on the best available peer-reviewed science.
+
+McCarthy also took care to stress that the rule has been changed from the proposed version to clarify that it does not apply to ditches or groundwater, and that agriculture will continue to be exempted. The rule “does not interfere with private property rights or address land use,” she elaborated. “It does not regulate any ditches unless they function as tributaries. It does not apply to groundwater or shallow subsurface water, copper tile drains or change policy on irrigation or water transfer.” “Farmers, ranchers, and foresters are all original conservationists, and we recognize that,” McCarthy said. Farmers are nonetheless some of the strongest opponents of the rule, along with other business interests New York Times identifies as “property developers, fertilizer and pesticide makers, oil and gas producers and a national association of golf course owners” — again, polluters that, under the status quo, are getting away with it. Those in favor of the rule, on the other hand? Aside from the usual groups interested in protecting the environment, which are all pretty thrilled, it’s backed, per one poll, by 80 percent of voters and, per McCarthy, 80 percent of small business owners. Craft breweries are also big fans: “Beer is about 90 percent water, making local water supply quality and its characteristics, such as pH and mineral content, critical to brewing,” a coalition of beer companies wrote to the EPA in 2014. President Obama, too, stood up for the rule Wednesday, asserting in a statement that it  “will provide the clarity and certainty businesses and industry need about which waters are protected by the Clean Water Act, and it will ensure polluters who knowingly threaten our waters can be held accountable.”",REAL
+1193,CNN basically ignored Ben Carson at Thursday’s debate. And that’s just fine.,"Ben Carson’s debate night in Houston can be summarized in one line: “Can somebody attack me, please?”
+
+Okay, his “fruit salad” line was pretty good, too, but it was his plea for negative attention that perfectly captured his irrelevance. He was so desperate for a chance to speak that he figured a verbal assault from one of his opponents — which, by rule, would entitle him to a response — might be the only way he’d get to talk.
+
+CNN, which broadcast the debate and supplied the moderator, Wolf Blitzer, didn’t even pretend that the retired neurosurgeon is still a factor in the Republican presidential nominating contest. Carson received just six questions in more than two hours and got only 11 minutes and 10 seconds of speaking time — roughly half the allotment of Ted Cruz and about a third of Donald Trump’s share, according to a tally by Politico.
+
+[Why is Ben Carson still running for president?]
+
+Managing talk time is always difficult, especially in a debate as fractious as Thursday’s. Trump, Cruz and Marco Rubio bickered, interrupted and shouted over one another constantly. But it’s philosophically challenging, too: Should a moderator try to grant equal time to every candidate or focus more heavily on the leaders?
+
+It depends. In November, when I interviewed Fox Business Network anchors Neil Cavuto and Maria Bartiromo before they moderated a GOP debate featuring eight candidates, they acknowledged some imbalance is inevitable but said they would attempt to dole out time more or less evenly.
+
+Their efforts made sense at that stage of the race — three months before the start of primary balloting, a point where polls aren’t very good predictors. On the day of that debate (Nov. 10), Trump and Carson were in a virtual tie atop the Republican field, according to the Real Clear Politics national average.
+
+Carson, of course, has plummeted since then; it was just too early for moderators to judge who was or was not legit and to hand out speaking time accordingly.
+
+But by now, it’s very clear that Carson has no shot to be the Republican nominee. While each of the other remaining candidates has managed to finish second or better in at least one of the first four primary states, Carson hasn’t placed higher than fourth. Those are real results — not polls. He hasn’t done well in the Midwest, Northeast, South or West. He has a very small constituency that is sticking by him, but there is zero reason to believe he's got a shot.
+
+It’s hard to understand why he’s still in the race, in fact.
+
+Debate moderators should be slow to dismiss candidates, allowing for the possibility of an improbable comeback. Perhaps that’s why John Kasich, whose own viability is in serious doubt, got almost exactly as much speaking time as Rubio.
+
+But Carson is so far out of the running that it would have been difficult to justify giving him much air. This was the last debate before Super Tuesday. The purpose was to help voters in the upcoming states — and elsewhere — choose among the candidates who could actually represent the Republican Party in the general election.
+
+Carson just isn’t one of them. And every minute devoted to him was a minute deducted from a real contender. This kind of thing is a judgment call, and CNN got the judgment right.",REAL
+6238,AIDS “Patient Zero” Not the Source of the Outbreak,"AIDS “Patient Zero” Not the Source of the Outbreak Although responsible somewhat for the spread of AIDS, he didn't bring it to the US Image Credits: frolicsomepl/Pixabay . 
+Scientists have managed to reconstruct the route by which HIV/Aids arrived in the US – exonerating once and for all the man long blamed for the ensuing pandemic in the west. 
+Using sophisticated genetic techniques, an international team of researchers have revealed that the virus emerged from a pre-existing epidemic in the Caribbean, arrived in New York by the early 1970s and then spread westwards across the US. 
+The research also confirms that Gaétan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant, was not the first person in the US to be infected, despite being dubbed “Patient zero” in a study of gay men with Aids in 1984. Based on that study, author Randy Shilts named Dugas in 1987 and wrote that “there’s no doubt that Gaëtan played a key role in spreading the new virus from one end of the United States to the other.”",FAKE
+4363,Is US now a climate change leader? How Obama's new plan measures up.,"The climate change plan announced by the Obama administration Monday is not as aggressive as plans by some other countries. But it suggests the US is serious about the issue and gives the country new credibility in climate talks.
+
+As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?
+
+President Obama speaks about his Clean Power Plan in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Monday The president is mandating even steeper greenhouse gas cuts from US power plants than previously expected, while granting states more time and broader options to comply.
+
+The Obama administration's new rules to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from existing power plants have helped propel the United States to a leadership role in international efforts to curb global warming, some analysts suggest.
+
+Monday's announcement of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is being seen as a significant step forward for the US and for the international process.
+
+""This is a case of leading by example,"" says Elliot Diringer, executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a climate- and energy-policy think tank in Arlington, Va. ""The rest of the world has been waiting a long time for the US to demonstrate the kind of leadership we're seeing now.""
+
+The plan adds to the US's diplomatic credibility on climate, adds Andrew Deutz, director of international government relations for The Nature Conservancy. And that is as significant as the emissions goals, he suggests.
+
+But how strict are the emissions goals themselves? Is the US on the verge of becoming a world leader in cutting carbon emissions?
+
+There’s no easy way to compare the climate efforts of different nations, specialists say, because negotiators working on a Paris treaty are taking a ""pledge and review"" approach. Each country chooses its own targets, based on a range of factors.
+
+The Clean Power Plan aims to cut CO2 emissions from existing power plants to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. It is part of a broader Obama administration plan to cut carbon emissions economy-wide. The goal for that broader plan is to reduce all CO2 emissions to between 26 and 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
+
+The European Union, by contrast, aims to cut emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels – a more-aggressive target – by 2030. Some European countries not in the EU, such as Norway and Iceland, aim to at least match the EU targets. Switzerland aims for 50 percent cuts.
+
+Meanwhile, China, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore are using 2005 as the base year for their targets, like the US. Canada, New Zealand, and Japan have proposed emissions cuts of 25 to 30 percent by 2030. China and Singapore have pledged to significantly reduce their carbon intensity – the amount of carbon produced per unit of gross domestic product. Their goal is to see that their emissions peak by 2030.
+
+Still others, such as Mexico, South Korea, Ethiopia, and Morocco, have set another, even softer baseline, offering to cut emissions between 32 and 64 percent, compared with what their emissions might have been in 2030 if emissions followed a ""business as usual"" path.
+
+Of particular interest are India, Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa, which have yet to submit plans, notes David Waskow, who heads the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute in Washington. Along with China, these countries fall into a category of newly industrialized nations whose economic aspirations could lead to troubling emissions paths.
+
+""People have tried to devise all sorts of formulas to suggest what an equitable distribution of effort would be,"" says Mr. Diringer. So far, none has stuck.
+
+Still, Monday's announcement gives the US fresh credibility in dealing with climate change. This new credibility first emerged last November, says Mr. Deutz, when Mr. Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping jointly announced their national offerings toward a new global climate pact during a summit in Beijing. For its part, China committed to capping emissions by 2030, with renewable energy sources accounting for 20 percent of the country's generating capacity. The country also would reduce its carbon intensity by 60 to 65 percent by 2030.
+
+""That did a couple of things,"" Deutz says. ""It put the US out there with a significant, credible target. It demonstrated that China was prepared to commit to an international target as well. And the fact that the US and China were moving together helped to unlock the negotiating space.""
+
+That played out in interesting ways a month later at global climate talks in Lima, Peru.
+
+""Suddenly the US became a credible, positive force in the negotiations, getting a lot more respect than it had previously,"" he says. ""It also meant that some countries that were hiding behind the US couldn't do that, and they were exposed.""
+
+Now, with the Clean Power Plan, which covers a sector of the economy responsible for 31 percent of the country's carbon emissions, the White House has added meat to the bones of its broader, international offering, Mr. Diringer says.
+
+How all this plays out in Paris remains to be seen. Counting EU countries as a single entity, so far 22 countries have proposed their individual contributions to a new treaty. Taken together, these represent 56 percent of global emissions. But the commitments fall far short of what it would take to put the world on track to meet its current global-warming objective – holding global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
+
+Many developing countries view as inadequate the emissions plans industrial countries have offered so far. Other difficult issues that don't involve emissions targets also remain to be solved.
+
+And even with a fully operational Clean Power Plan, a new administration faces a lot of work to achieve the overall emissions reductions Obama has put forward to the Paris meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, notes Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.
+
+Still, the Clean Power Plan represents ""a very important step"" in fulfilling the US's commitment, Mr. Meyer says. ""Given the history at the state level with things like renewable-electricity standards and energy efficiency programs, we think it's quite likely that the US could overachieve the standard"" in the Clean Power Plan.",REAL
+5984,"Hillary visits voters early polling stations, thus BREAKING THE LAW on camera – yet again nothing happens to her","November 2015 Ads Hillary visits voters early polling stations, thus BREAKING THE LAW on camera – yet again nothing happens to her Oct 26, 2016 Previous post 
+N.C.G.S. §163-166.4(a) No person or group of persons shall hinder access, harass others, distribute campaign literature, place political advertising, solicit votes, or otherwise engage in election-related activity in the voting place or in a buffer zone. 
+The buffer zone will be 50 feet from the entrance to the polling place except where deemed by the Wake County Board of Elections to be necessarily closer, but no less than 25 feet from the entrance to the polling place. There will be publication of information regarding the entrance location and distance of the buffer zone no later 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+7698,VA fails to properly examine thousands of veterans,"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. VA fails to properly examine thousands of veterans By Arnaldo Rodgers on October 29, 2016 VA 
+Thousands of veterans may have been improperly diagnosed by the VA. 
+The federal department admits it was improperly testing for traumatic brain injuries from 2007 through 2015. 
+Nate Anderson has served in the United States Army for 12 years. 
+“There’s a promise that we make to service members, that if you serve and you put your life on the line or sacrifice in whatever way you do, we’ll take care of you. I didn’t know what that was going to look like, it’s certainly not what I saw,” Anderson said. “This is something the VA should have been prepared for.” 
+He enlisted after 9/11. 
+“It was time in my generation that the desire to serve was strong,” he said. 
+Fast forward to 2008, Anderson was assigned to his first unit at Fort Bragg and deployed to central Afghanistan. 
+Read the Full Article at wncn.com >>>> Related Posts: The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on October 29, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+3776,Is Campus Rape Really An Epidemic?,"A documentary about campus rape contains the damning stories of many victims. But what about the alleged perpetrators?
+
+Of course, the next four years will see considerably more crying over peer pressure, soured romances, less-than-excellent grades, and horrible cafeteria food. But the dangers sketched in this documentary facing young women on campus are far graver than the ordinary stuff of growing pains—they revolve around sexual assault.
+
+The stories in the documentary are brutally evocative. “Two of us were sexually assaulted before classes had even started,” says Annie Clark, a former student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “You just stay there, and you hope you don’t die,” says Andrea Pino, another former UNC student, of being raped during her sophomore year at a fraternity party. Clark and Pino both filed federal complaints against UNC and have become leading activists in the fight to end campus rape.
+
+High-profile alleged campus rapes have led the news agenda in the last year. Emma Sulkowicz, a senior at Columbia University, has become the face of the movement with her “Carry That Weight” performance art activism—a pledge to haul her mattress around campus as long as her alleged assailant, Paul Nungesser, remains at the school.
+
+While there is little dispute that sexual assault is being poorly handled by universities, not everyone agrees on how schools are attempting to remedy the situation. Many are concerned that the refurbished systems to adjudicate campus sexual assault are kangaroo courts, where the accused is presumed guilty until proven innocent—even when there’s no evidence beyond he-said-she-said reports.
+
+“The Hunting Ground” presents one side of this fraught debate, and a very powerful and disturbing one at that. It features interviews with dozens of young women, and a few men, who recount horrifying details of their sexual assaults and subsequent lack of concern from school and law enforcement authorities.
+
+It does not feature testimony or representation from the victims’ alleged attackers, or any voice dissenting from the narrative focus that campus rape has become something of an epidemic, which is either being overlooked or appallingly dealt with by authorities.
+
+In the film, Kinsman says she had a drink at an off-campus bar one night and is “fairly certain there was something in that drink,” because she woke later to Winston raping her. She claims both the school and Tallahassee police failed her.
+
+The filmmakers don’t mention that two toxicology reports following the alleged rape found no drugs and little alcohol in her system. Nor do they note that, at a hearing in December, Kinsman didn’t say she had been drugged or unconscious. This isn’t to say the attack didn’t happen, but merely the documentary might have made clear the full array of evidence.
+
+The movie has succeeded on this front. New York magazine film critic David Edelstein, who is planning college visits with his daughter, a junior in high school, wrote in his review that he “found myself jotting rape school next to several of the candidates.”
+
+These documentaries are never unbiased. If they were, they wouldn’t be as emotionally compelling. In “Blackfish”, a heartbreaking documentary about the mistreatment of killer whales at Sea World and other water theme parks, Sea World is the cruel, money-grubbing man in the suit. Surely some who have worked with killer whales there would disagree, but their testimonies don’t fit the documentary narrative.
+
+As compelling as “The Hunting Ground” is, it perpetuates a panic about the campus rape crisis that distracts from a rational assessment of the issue. It would have done better to expose its villains in front of the camera—and let them hang, or convincingly defend, themselves.",REAL
+1385,Why America might elect a president it doesn't like,"Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have among the highest unfavorability ratings of recent presidential candidates. Their success shows how US politics is changing.
+
+Will Trump's plan to register Muslims make it to The White House?
+
+Tesla under Trump: How will electric cars fare under the next president?
+
+John McCain defies Donald Trump on torture: 'We will not waterboard'
+
+Audience members listen as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Clinton Middle School Saturday in Clinton, Iowa.
+
+It is possible, perhaps even probable, that this fall’s election will be contested between two of three most disliked presidential candidates of at least the past quarter century.
+
+And it is possible, perhaps even probable, that this is not a coincidence.
+
+A  Gallup survey released Saturday shows that Donald Trump has the highest unfavorability rating (60 percent) of any presidential candidate since the polling firm started tracking the figure in 1992. For her part, Hillary Clinton ranks third (52 percent) with the no-new-taxes-breaking George H.W. Bush of 1992 at No. 2.
+
+In other words, the 2016 presidential election could be decided between two people that the majority of Americans, according to Gallup, don’t like politically.
+
+How is this possible?
+
+Actually, it makes complete sense. In fact, one could argue that such a contest would perfectly befit the current political era.
+
+At a time when partisanship has taken new and more rigid forms, the result has been an America increasingly wary of the other side. Many Americans are increasingly motivated to vote against candidates rather than for them.
+
+Mr. Trump and former Secretary of State Clinton symbolize this shift in different ways, but they speak to the shrinking middle of American politics. As the national parties have less and less in common, their national candidates likewise have less in common, leaving voters with a starker choice that they are just as likely to oppose as embrace.
+
+Indeed, political scientists note that Americans are  more neatly “sorted” into the two parties than they have been in recent history. In other words, conservatives support Republicans and liberals support Democrats.
+
+No more “blue dog” Democrats who want to reform welfare. No more Northeast Republicans who want to address climate change.
+
+It means there is a brighter line between the national Democratic and Republican Parties than there has been in decades, because there is less internal pressure to moderate. If, increasingly, everyone in the party is left-of-center (or right-of-center), the party naturally shifts left (or right).
+
+The result is two sharply different visions for America, two sharply different sets of solutions.
+
+Another result is the vanishing swing voter. (See the Monitor’s  Cover Story on the subject.) A larger share of American voters might  register as independents than as Democrats or Republicans, but they don’t act that way. Those independents who reliably turn out to vote tend to take sides just like the partisans, voting in consistently partisan ways.
+
+“People are more confident in their opinions when they see polarized parties,” Corwin Smidt, a Michigan State University political scientist, told the Monitor. “They think, ‘Well, if the choices are so stark, it’s just not a gray area at all.’ ”
+
+And so they worry about the “other side” winning, according to research by Emory University political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster. They found that voting behavior is increasingly guided by this “negative partisanship.”
+
+This fall, it seems, American voters might have a lot to vote against.
+
+Trump has become the Republican front-runner precisely because of his lack of broader appeal,  argues pollster Frank Luntz in the Financial Times.
+
+“No high-polling presidential candidate in the modern era has so intrepidly drawn the ire of so many within the American  electorate,” he writes. “Yet in rendering one voting bloc utterly apoplectic, he has appealed viscerally to another. The balance of middle ground politics is not, shall we say, Mr. Trump’s bailiwick.”
+
+His calls for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and a temporary ban on all noncitizen Muslims entering the country are antithetical to those outside his conservative base, which partly explains their appeal within it.
+
+“He’s simply raising an important issue nobody else has the courage to talk about,” Mr. Luntz adds, paraphrasing the Trump voters’ reasons for supporting the billionaire.
+
+For Clinton, the issue is less ideological than historical. She is facing a  perceived lack of trustworthiness that dates back to her husband’s administration – and has been exacerbated by her handling of  State Department e-mails.
+
+Yet the same trends that have vaulted Trump to front-runner status are apparent in the Democratic primary process, too.
+
+Bernie Sanders could topple Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. And he is an avowed socialist talking about a revolution.
+
+“In Sanders’s vision, a massive grassroots uprising will shatter the constricting limits of today’s political debate and thrust forward long-time liberal goals such as single-payer health care and free public-college tuition,”  writes Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic. “For Sanders’s growing army, it’s an exhilarating prospect.”
+
+For Republicans, it is appalling.
+
+To some degree, this is what primaries do: push candidates toward the extremes. But there is a mounting sense that, as the parties move further apart, this year represents something new – or at least more intense.
+
+While the experience might be temporarily cathartic, evidence suggests it might not be ultimately satisfying. As Congress has become more sorted, Americans’ confidence in it has declined. Americans have less confidence in Congress than they do in any other major American institution – and have since 2010 – according to  a Gallup survey.
+
+After all, a revolution entails one side “winning” – not likely in a political environment where each side is becoming more entrenched to stop the other.
+
+“On both sides, the energy is with candidates … offering the dream of a clean sweep and a blank sheet on which to rewrite the nation’s priorities,” writes Mr. Brownstein. “Yet because the candidates offering such fundamental change are largely misdiagnosing the reasons for today’s impasse, it’s unlikely they could break it even if they capture the presidency.”
+
+Their misdiagnosis? Brownstein suggests that it’s unlikely one side can ignore the other to rewrite the nation’s priorities.
+
+“Given the nation’s underlying partisan divisions, the only way to advance bigger ideas may be through compromises across party lines that neither side is discussing much yet.”
+
+What this primary campaign has done, perhaps, is highlight the shifting political topography and distance between those party lines.",REAL
+581,Obama's community college proposal: dead on arrival?,"Knoxville, Tennessee (CNN) President Barack Obama's ambitious proposal to give millions of Americans more affordable access to a community college education and what he called a ""ticket to the middle class"" is unlikely to become law any time soon.
+
+His plan is to partner with states and fund the first two years of community college for Americans ""willing to work for it."" The White House will work to push this plan through Congress ""in the next few weeks,"" Obama promised.
+
+But with a roughly $60 billion price tag over the next 10 years, the proposal may have little chance of getting through the wall of Republican deficit hawks that now control both houses of Congress.
+
+Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, both Republican senators from Tennessee, joined Obama on Air Force One and at the community college during Obama's speech, but neither want Obama's plan to become federal law.
+
+That's despite the fact that Obama called his proposal bipartisan, noting that similar policies have been implemented by Tennessee's Republican governor and Chicago's Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
+
+Asked whether he would support Obama's proposal, Corker said ""Oh no, no, no, no, no,"" instead urging other states to take the president's initiative, and do something similar themselves rather than create ""a whole new bureaucratic federal program.""
+
+Sen. Alexander, chairman of the Senate's education committee and the former education secretary, echoed that in a statement on Friday saying states should follow Tennessee's lead.
+
+Obama's proposal, dubbed America's College Promise, wouldn't be the first broad-sweeping proposition that didn't get far in Washington, but --aided by a presidential push -- could still make inroads throughout the country by way of state and local initiatives.
+
+""It's not necessarily all about bills and funding,"" said Maine's Sen. Angus King who serves on the Senate Budget Committee. ""Sometimes it's about the bully pulpit and raising the profile of an issue.""
+
+King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, pointed to the President's previous ambitious proposal for universal early childhood education in 2013. It hasn't produced results on Capitol Hill, but has spurred attempts to provide Pre-K education in King's state of Maine.
+
+And while Congress hasn't raised the federal minimum wage since Obama called for an increase during last year's State of the Union, dozens of states and municipalities have since passed laws to create a higher minimum wage on their own.
+
+""Setting the national agenda is an important part of what the presidency is,"" King said.
+
+King said Obama is ""definitely in the target zone"" with his proposal, but said there would be a challenge to find the $60 billion, which he called ""a big number."" While he supports Obama's idea, King said he wouldn't endorse the proposal outright until he reviews the plan's funding mechanism, which remains a massive question mark.
+
+And King was thrilled to learn that Obama committed in his speech to working with Alexander on a bill King cosponsored that would shrink the size of the federal student aid application form, which has more than a hundred questions -- something college affordability advocates have pushed for in recent years.
+
+Obama's proposal would give states a huge break -- with the federal government picking up three-quarters of the cost of waiving community college tuition for the first two years, and leaving states to fund the rest.
+
+""States would have to do their part too. For those willing to do the work and for states and local communities who want to be a part of it, it could be a game changer,"" Obama said.
+
+Emphasizing that there are ""no free rides in America,"" free tuition would be contingent on students getting good grades, enrolling at part-time and following through on earning their degree.
+
+Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz told reporters on Air Force One recognized that the $60 billion plan was a ""significant investment.""
+
+""But it's one the president believes is worthwhile because we need to make sure that America's young people are getting the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century economy,"" Schultz said.
+
+Obama modeled the proposal on a Tennessee program started under Republican Gov. Bill Haslam a year ago.
+
+""Why not just build on something that works?"" Obama said at Pellissippi State Community College on Friday.
+
+Haslam launched the Tennessee Promise, a program that covers the cost of tuition and fees of a certificate or degree at any of the state's community colleges after students already kick in whatever financial aid they can get.
+
+But higher education experts stress that the Tennessee program doesn't make a community college education ""free"" since students incur many other costs to attend college -- from living expenses to lost wages.
+
+Lauren Asher, President of The Institute for College Access & Success, said Obama's plan is different (and, she said, better) since it would waive tuition costs and let students use federal aid, like Pell Grants for the neediest students, go toward expenses other than tuition.
+
+And Obama's focus on community colleges was also a welcome message, just one of the many steps the administration has taken to address college access and affordability, Asher said.
+
+""The President is rightly calling attention to the importance and value of community colleges and of education and training after high school,"" Asher said. ""What the President is proposing has the potential to help low-income students.
+
+Nicholas Wyman, CEO of the Institute for Workplace Skills and Innovation, a consulting firm, called Obama's focus on community colleges and skills-driven, vocational training a much-needed step to boost the U.S. economy.
+
+The number of job openings could halve the unemployment rate, but a massive gap between the skills of prospective employees and those in demand is holding the economy back. And by elevating community colleges, Obama is helping to destigmatize what many view as bottom-rung institutions.
+
+""Companies want to employ people with strong academics, but they also want to employ people with strong workplace skills. A lot of the community colleges offer that and unfortunately a lot of the four year colleges don't,"" Wyman said. ""This is an opportunity to move the community college system into the 21st century.""
+
+Obama also hit on a note that is a focus of Wyman's consulting firm, addressing the need to connect community colleges and employers who could benefit from the neatly-tailored skills of a community college graduate.
+
+And even if Obama's proposal flops in Washington, Wyman, who has travelled around the country, asserted that states are ""hungry for reforms.""
+
+""There's a lot of states who would look at this and often as you know states don't like being told what to do,"" Wyman said, and maybe they'll now take the initiative themselves.",REAL
+694,Donald Trump's obsession with himself,"From his condemnation of journalists to his racially tinged attacks on a judge presiding over a lawsuit related to Trump University to his feud with New Mexico GOP Gov. Susana Martinez, there's one thing in common about the mounting Trump controversies: The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is aiming to make the entire 2016 campaign about himself.
+
+American politics is littered with larger-than-life personalities. But no presidential candidate in living memory has built a campaign so exclusively on the foundation of his own personal, brand, self-congratulatory rhetoric and life story as Trump. And don't expect anything different if he makes it to the White House.
+
+""You think I'm going to change?"" he told reporters at a press conference this week. ""I'm not going to change.""
+
+Trump has prospered by being the loudest, most unapologetic salesman of self in politics that most seasoned observers have ever seen. He is not just the figurehead of his own campaign -- his personality is the campaign, as evidenced by stump speeches, press conferences and endless television and radio interviews that add up to an unstoppable torrent of self-promotion.
+
+""The Trump campaign is not about any cause, it is all about Trump,"" said Peter Wehner, who has watched candidates and presidents up close as an aide in the last three Republican administrations. ""His campaign is all about him. How he treats other people is all about him -- whether one is praised and patted on the head or cruelly mocked depends on what you have said about him.""
+
+Trump's self-aggrandizement has become a dominant theme of the presidential campaign.
+
+The billionaire boasts about his wealth, his portfolio of gleaming buildings and golf resorts, soaring poll numbers, the size of his crowds, his ""crazy"" television ratings, how Mexicans will love him, how his book is an all time best-seller and how his 757 jet is superior to Air Force One.
+
+It's an ego-driven strategy that would doom most politicians.
+
+But, so far, Trump's unique, personal and unconventional campaign style has worked. He's dispatched his rivals in a bloated Republican field and is now locked in a tight general election duel with Hillary Clinton. His style could even help him win over disaffected workers who also seem themselves as victimized by the political and economic establishment.
+
+Still, there are major questions about whether a personality-driven campaign -- lacking the traditional organizational and field skills -- can be successful during a complex national contest.
+
+The Clinton campaign is working overtime to make Trump's personal mythologizing look like a fatal flaw. The former secretary of state is mounting a two-pronged strategy that centers directly on Trump's persona. She hopes to make a case that his volatile personality makes him unsuitable to be commander-in-chief and to use incidents from his colorful character and business career to deconstruct Trump's carefully built self image.
+
+Trump's allies dismiss the idea that his campaign style lacks the gravitas and temperament required of a President, arguing that his tirades against the press, for instance, are merely a result of unfair coverage.
+
+""Many of the reporters know the facts, but choose to write horrible stories about him or portray him in a negative light,"" Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson told CNN's ""New Day"" on Wednesday, adding that if Trump becomes President he will have wide public support. ""So it's not going to get to the point of a temperament question because the people will be behind Mr. Trump.""
+
+Trump is hardly alone in getting high on himself: Self-confidence is synonymous with politics.
+
+But presidential candidates typically take pains to mask their personal ambition in a flurry of detailed policy positions and ostentatious attempts to feel the voters' pain.
+
+Peter Feaver, a former aide to President George W. Bush, said Trump's reliance on his personality is unique.
+
+""This persona is actually one he has been honing for decades,"" said Feaver, a former senior National Security Council official, noting that unlike other big personalities that took aim at the presidency, Trump lacked core ideological convictions.
+
+""Take Ronald Reagan for instance. He clearly had a persona that was built up over decades but even more he had a governing philosophy even as he was developing a persona,"" Fever said. ""Trump doesn't have that. He just has the persona.""
+
+Feaver also notes the irony that after spending eight years lambasting President Barack Obama as a hubristic, self-obsessed figure, Republicans are about to nominate someone who takes those perceived deficiencies to extremes.
+
+The presumptive GOP nominee is not known for introspection. But he seems to agree with critics who say the campaign is almost exclusively about himself.
+
+""A very good musician said Trump is the greatest in the world without a guitar, meaning without an instrument. I've got to stand up here by myself,"" Trump said in California last week, explaining his unique style of political performance art.
+
+He want on to boast how a good friend -- who was ""by the way, one of the most successful people in the country, in the world"" -- asked him how he was able to hold such large audiences in the palm of his hand.
+
+""I said, 'You know, honestly, it's not hard because there's so much love in the room. It's unbelievable.'""
+
+Such comments, laced throughout Trump's public appearances, reveal a politician apparently intoxicated with his own magnetism and brimming with self belief.
+
+And they contrast with the stump speeches of more conventional political nominees -- which sag with policies designed to lure various constituencies of a party and cliched invocations to a higher national purpose and political unity that Trump's speeches conspicuously lack.
+
+His public appearances, while hitting top political points on illegal immigration, free trade and U.S. allies who he says are fleecing America, are effectively a list of his personal triumphs -- that seem like the obsessions of a billionaire and have little in common with his heartland audiences.
+
+He frequently relates the tale of his new hotel in Washington in the city's old Post Office building which he says will come in under budget and ahead of schedule and will be ""a higher-quality hotel than anybody ever saw before."" And he often recalls the media frenzy as he and his wife Melania descended the escalator at Trump tower to launch his campaign last year, saying it ""looked, literally, like the Academy Awards.""
+
+Trump's implicit case is that his personality is so dominant, his presence alone makes the need for detailed policy proposals moot. That's why when he vows to rescue health care for veterans, he doesn't say how he will get it done. He promises to bring back jobs from Mexico and China -- again without revealing his approach. He says he will ""knock the hell out of ISIS"" but doesn't detail a credible military strategy.
+
+Given the billionaire's somewhat ill defined political creed and unpredictable style, no one can say for sure what his presidency would be like.
+
+But if the campaign is anything to go by, one thing is certain: it would be all about Trump.",REAL
+7942,“Organic” Food From China Found To Be Highly Contaminated,"With more and more people learning about the importance of eating healthy and safe produce, consumer demand for all things “organic” has skyrocketed. In the US alone, annual organic food sales have... ",FAKE
+8538,"Nintendo Cuts Full-Year Sales, Operating Profit Forecasts","« on: Today at 09:20:29 PM » Nintendo Cuts Full-Year Sales, Operating Profit Forecasts 26 October 2016 , by Yuji Nakamura and Takashi Amano (Bloomberg) - Boost from Pokemon Go fails to make up for sales outlook slump- Shares decline in European trading after results release Logged",FAKE
+7416,AT&T sold access to customer data to law enforcement – report,"AT&T sold access to customer data to law enforcement – report Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 18:10 Get short URL © Shannon Stapleton / Reuters New documents show telecommunications giant AT&T sold customer data to local law enforcement departments for a record-making $100k to $1 million last year. The company is currently seeking a $85 billion acquisition deal for Time Warner. 
+Documents show the telecommunications giant was not only working with US Drug Enforcement Agency but routinely sold customer data to local police departments who were investigating a range of crimes from murder to Medicaid fraud. The documents were first reported by The Daily Beast. AT&T provides the leads, then investigators just happen to find the exact same evidence through police work: https://t.co/d01Uc4iWYm — The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) October 25, 2016 
+Under its secretive program called Hemisphere, AT&T could search trillions of call records and analyze cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom they speak and potentially why. 
+The documents also show the company only required an administrative subpoena, a lower-level legal document which – unlike a search warrant – does not require authorization from a judge. Police departments paid anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million a year for access to the Hemisphere program. Under the agreement, police were prohibited from disclosing use of the program to the public or even in court. 
+“Like other communications companies, if a government agency seeks customer call records through a subpoena, court order or other mandatory legal process, we are required by law to provide this non-content information, such as the phone numbers and the date and time of call,” AT&T told the Beast in a statement. Must read: AT&T spying on citizens to make millions mining data for police & govt surveillance w/o a warrant https://t.co/VDSqCwOqL7 pic.twitter.com/NWe1tjJC7W — Anna Massoglia (@annalecta) October 25, 2016 
+Because of the ban on disclosing the existence of the Hemisphere program, law enforcement agencies were covering their bases by later seeking a court order for a wiretap, or trailing a suspect to gather evidence equivalent to what they had acquired through Hemisphere. 
+Unlike other telecommunications providers, AT&T stores metadata – call time, duration, location data – of its customers going back to 2008. AT&T was one of the first companies to be exposed for its role in government surveillance when it shared its customer’s metadata with the NSA. 
+Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician and whistleblower, revealed details about the NSA installing network hardware at a San Francisco, California site known at Room 641A to monitor, capture and process American telecommunications, beginning in 2002. 
+“I knew this wasn’t legal because the NSA is not supposed to do domestic spying,” Klein told RT in an interview in 2015. He said the engineering documents showed “they were tapping into the main data flow on the internet and sending that data down to the secret room.” 
+“I knew that was totally illegal. The apparatus itself did not provide for any kind of selection it was just a vacuum cleaner sweep of everything. That violates the Fourth Amendment right there which requires warrants for specific information,” Klein said. 
+AT&T was also known to have a “partnership” – through its Hemisphere program – with the DEA for the purpose of counter-narcotics operations. 
+The revelations come as AT&T’s proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner has surveillance critics and privacy advocates alarmed. 
+Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, told the Daily Beast he opposed the merger because it would allow AT&T ""to use Time Warner’s content as bait to invade every aspect of the lives and habits of its nearly 30 million wired customers of its broadband and television services – many through its DirecTV subsidiary – and its more than 100 million wireless subscribers."" 
+“It’s commercial surveillance,” Chester told the Beast, noting that through mobile devices, AT&T can even pinpoint the geographical locations of users.",FAKE
+2473,ObamaCare Opt-Out Act: Let all Americans make their own health care decisions,"In the coming weeks, Americans will embark on the painful process of filing their tax returns. While this annual ritual leaves most people confused, depressed and overwhelmed, many will be faced with the additional step this year of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars if they chose not to purchase health insurance under ObamaCare for 2014.
+
+Under the individual mandate required by the president’s new health care law, Americans for the first time must pay the higher of two penalties if they are uninsured and did not enroll in ObamaCare last year—either $95 per adult and $47.50 per child under 18, or 1 percent of their yearly household income above the $10,000 tax filing threshold. That means an individual earning $50,000 will face a penalty of $400 this year, and fines could reach up to $2,448 per person or up to $12,240 for a family of five.
+
+Unfortunately, these penalty rates will only continue to climb. Next year, penalties will more than double for those who do not enroll in ObamaCare in 2015, costing the same individual earning $50,000 per year a whopping $800, and families up to tens of thousands of dollars.
+
+No American should be forced into the president’s one-size-fits-all health care mandate. Health care should be based on the fundamental principle of freedom, and Americans should be able to have the ability to make their own health care decisions without fear that the government will extract onerous penalties from them.
+
+That is why we reintroduced The ObamaCare Opt-Out Act of 2014 in the Senate last week, important legislation that will allow Americans to opt-out of the individual mandate for health insurance coverage required by ObamaCare. This bill would allow individuals to either notify their state or the federal health care exchange, or use their tax filing to opt-out of ObamaCare and avoid the penalty.  According to the tax-services provider H&R Block, this would impact about 4 million uninsured Americans in 2015.
+
+After four years of ObamaCare, hardworking Americans continue to see their health care costs rise while their coverage choices diminish. It is far past time for American families to once again have the freedom to make their own decisions about what is best for their families.
+
+As the 114th Congress gets underway, we will continue to make this bill a priority and work to restore Americans’ freedom to buy affordable health insurance that works for them because they know what’s best for their families, not the Obama administration.
+
+Republican John Barrasso represents Wyoming in the U.S. Senate. He serves in the Senate as a member of both the Energy and Environment Committees. Follow him on Twitter@Sen.JohnBarrasso.",REAL
+1130,Another Primary Night's Results Confound (At Least Some) Expectations,"Another Primary Night's Results Confound (At Least Some) Expectations
+
+The latest day of primary voting was bad news for one leading candidate, good news for another and a setback for popular campaign narratives in both parties.
+
+You may have heard that Hillary Clinton was about to extend her Super Tuesday dominance to Mississippi and Michigan, putting the campaign of Bernie Sanders on the ropes once and for all. The Clinton story seemed all the more plausible given her feisty show in her seventh debate with Sanders and the struggle he seemed to have in more populous states.
+
+And you may also have heard the reports of Donald Trump's momentum finally stalling out. Over the weekend, in votes in Kentucky and Louisiana, late-deciders had broken against him. Trump still won those states, of course, but only because so many people voted early for him.
+
+This Trump scenario made sense given the millions of dollars in attack ads paid for by rivals and by independent superPACs opposed to his nomination.
+
+But not so fast. As it turned out, it was the Clinton juggernaut that lost a wheel in Michigan — while Trump's model stayed very much on track. He lost late-deciders again, but it mattered even less than it had in the earlier tests.
+
+Sanders, for his part, once again defied expectations. Michigan responded to his assault on trade deals, while not entirely buying Clinton's late attacks on his voting record on the auto industry bailout.
+
+Clinton may also have been expecting higher turnout among African-Americans, who backed her with 65 percent of their vote but did not supply enough votes to overcome Sanders' advantage outside of metropolitan Detroit. Clinton also failed to win the county that is home to Flint, the city with lead-poisoned water that she had made the focus of her campaign.
+
+Once again, Sanders reprised his astounding dominance of the youth vote, taking 87 percent of the votes of those under 30. He also won an overwhelming number of counties, large and small, throughout the state.
+
+Yet another storyline that crashed and burned Tuesday concerned a candidate running well out of the money so far this season. This was the myth known as ""the emergence of John Kasich,"" the Ohio governor many hoped might become the establishment alternative to Trump.
+
+Kasich went all-in for Michigan in hopes of generating momentum ahead of his do-or-die primary in his home state on March 15. But Kasich finished third, a hair or two behind Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. He may still win Ohio next week, but he will not be a factor anywhere else on a day when three other top-10 states will vote (Florida, Illinois and North Carolina).
+
+For his part, Cruz once again showed himself the master of the small state event (he won in Idaho) and the second-place finish (Michigan, Mississippi, Hawaii). Despite his maddening failure to defeat Trump in Southern states with big populations of evangelical white Protestants, Cruz has hung tough and racked up delegates.
+
+He is now just 99 delegates behind Trump. If he could win a few of the winner-take-all states, he could catch him, although the prospects of that appear increasingly remote. And if there is any GOP candidate with a chance of preventing Trump from reaching 1,237 delegates for a first-ballot nomination, it is now Cruz.
+
+It might help Cruz stop Trump if his fellow freshman senator, Marco Rubio, dropped out rather than contest his home state of Florida next week. But Rubio has vowed to remain for that test, even though he remains behind Trump in Florida polling and must battle Cruz and Kasich for votes there.
+
+Truth be told, Tuesday was a night of total frustration for Rubio, demonstrating how utterly his campaign strategy has failed. He not only finished third or worse in Michigan, Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii — he won exactly zero delegates for the night. His delegate count is now further behind Cruz than Cruz is behind Trump.
+
+Rubio was the young and charismatic candidate many Republicans had hoped would step up as the anti-Trump. But Rubio's recent attempts to do so with personal putdowns and constant attacks may have backfired, judging by his performance since he adopted Trump's slashing speaking style. Setting aside a small-turnout event in Minnesota and a primary in Puerto Rico, Rubio has now staggered winless through two-dozen primaries and caucuses.
+
+In the cold light of the day-after, it is possible the results from Tuesday will look different. Had Clinton eked out another 20,000 votes or so in Michigan, the headline might have been about her crossing the halfway point in pursuit of the 2,383 delegates needed to nominate on the first ballot at the July convention in Philadelphia. She has 1,221 now. Sanders has 571.
+
+The most frustrating element of the battle for Sanders is that even his best night since New Hampshire did not avail him in the delegate tally. Clinton's 66-point dominance in Mississippi won her nearly all that state's cache of 36 delegates, while Sanders' razor-thin margin in Michigan meant the two candidates split that state's 130 delegates almost evenly.
+
+All of that makes it difficult for Sanders to overcome Clinton's delegate lead, even if he continues to best her in the voting booths from here through June. Sanders strategist Tad Devine is fond of saying the race is a marathon, not a sprint, but winning a race of any duration still requires you to finish first.
+
+Sanders needs to make a habit of doing just that, and by wider margins than his breakthrough in Michigan gave him. Still, however steep the climb may appear, this Tuesday made it harder than ever to count the Vermonter out.",REAL
+5706,Being an utter cock no barrier to success,"Being an utter cock no barrier to success 09-11-16 THERE is no ‘glass ceiling’ for utter cocks any more, it has been confirmed. Donald Trump’s election success has been hailed as a victory by the cock, arsehole and bellend communities, who have for centuries struggled to gain acceptance in mainstream society. Total cock Roy Hobbs said: “Farage gave us hope, Trump has given us freedom. No longer will being an utter penis be frowned upon. “I can polish the ‘No Turning’ sign at the end of my driveway with pride, and drive my white 2011 BMW 7 Series right up anyone’s arse without fear of reproach. “The world told me I was wrong. But I was right, or rather if I was wrong it doesn’t matter any more. “I am an utter cock, hear my cry.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+8638,Must Read of the Day – Dennis Kucinich’s Extraordinary Warning on D.C.’s Think Tank Warmongers,"at 1:10 pm 3 Comments 
+WAR is a racket. It always has been. 
+It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. 
+A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. 
+– From Major General Smedley Butler’s War is a Rackett 
+Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has just penned an extremely powerful warning about the warmongers in Washington D.C. Who funds them, what their motives are, and why it is imperative for the American people to stop them. 
+The piece was published at The Nation and is titled: Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? Look at Their Donors . 
+Read it and share it with everyone you know. 
+W ashington, DC, may be the only place in the world where people openly flaunt their pseudo-intellectuality by banding together, declaring themselves “think tanks,” and raising money from external interests, including foreign governments, to compile reports that advance policies inimical to the real-life concerns of the American people. 
+As a former member of the House of Representatives, I remember 16 years of congressional hearings where pedigreed experts came to advocate wars in testimony based on circular, rococo thinking devoid of depth, reality, and truth. I remember other hearings where the Pentagon was unable to reconcile over $1 trillion in accounts, lost track of $12 billion in cash sent to Iraq, and rigged a missile-defense test so that an interceptor could easily home in on a target. War is first and foremost a profitable racket. 
+How else to explain that in the past 15 years this city’s so called bipartisan foreign policy elite has promoted wars in Iraq and Libya, and interventions in Syria and Yemen, which have opened Pandora’s box to a trusting world, to the tune of trillions of dollars, a windfall for military contractors. DC’s think “tanks” should rightly be included in the taxonomy of armored war vehicles and not as gathering places for refugees from academia. 
+According to the front page of this past Friday’s Washington Post, the bipartisan foreign-policy elite recommends the next president show less restraint than President Obama. Acting at the urging of “liberal” hawks brandishing humanitarian intervention, read war, the Obama administration attacked Libya along with allied powers working through NATO. 
+Indeed, I warned about this in last week’s piece: U.S. Foreign Policy ‘Elite’ Eagerly Await an Expansion of Overseas Wars Under Hillary Clinton . 
+The think tankers fell in line with the Iraq invasion. Not being in the tank, I did my own analysis of the call for war in October of 2002, based on readily accessible information, and easily concluded that there was no justification for war. I distributed it widely in Congress and led 125 Democrats in voting against the Iraq war resolution. There was no money to be made from a conclusion that war was uncalled for, so, against millions protesting in the United States and worldwide, our government launched into an abyss, with a lot of armchair generals waving combat pennants. The marching band and chowder society of DC think tanks learned nothing from the Iraq and Libya experience. 
+The only winners were arms dealers, oil companies, and jihadists. Immediately after the fall of Libya, the black flag of Al Qaeda was raised over a municipal building in Benghazi, Gadhafi’s murder was soon to follow, with Secretary Clinton quipping with a laugh, “We came, we saw, he died.” President Obama apparently learned from this misadventure, but not the Washington policy establishment, which is spoiling for more war. 
+The self-identified liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) is now calling for Syria to be bombed, and estimates America’s current military adventures will be tidied up by 2025, a tardy twist on “mission accomplished.” CAP, according to a report in The Nation, has received funding from war contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who make the bombers that CAP wants to rain hellfire on Syria. 
+The Brookings Institute has taken tens of millions from foreign governments , notably Qatar, a key player in the military campaign to oust Assad. Retired four-star Marine general John Allen is now a Brookings senior fellow . Charles Lister is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute , which has received funding from Saudi Arabia , the major financial force providing billions in arms to upend Assad and install a Sunni caliphate stretching across Iraq and Syria. Foreign-government money is driving our foreign policy. 
+As the drumbeat for an expanded war gets louder, Allen and Lister jointly signed an op-ed in the Sunday Washington Post, calling for an attack on Syria. The Brookings Institute, in a report to Congress , admitted it received $250,000 from the US Central Command, Centcom, where General Allen shared leadership duties with General David Petraeus. Pentagon money to think tanks that endorse war? This is academic integrity, DC-style. 
+And why is Central Command, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of transportation, and the US Department of Health and Human Services giving money to Brookings? 
+Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously told Colin Powell , “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it,” predictably says of this current moment , “We do think there needs to be more American action.” A former Bush administration top adviser is also calling for the United States to launch a cruise missile attack on Syria. 
+The American people are fed up with war, but a concerted effort is being made through fearmongering, propaganda, and lies to prepare our country for a dangerous confrontation, with Russia in Syria. 
+The demonization of Russia is a calculated plan to resurrect a raison d’être for stone-cold warriors trying to escape from the dustbin of history by evoking the specter of Russian world domination. 
+It’s infectious. Earlier this year the BBC broadcast a fictional show that contemplated WWIII, beginning with a Russian invasion of Latvia (where 26 percent of the population is ethnic Russian and 34 percent of Latvians speak Russian at home). 
+The imaginary WWIII scenario conjures Russia’s targeting London for a nuclear strike. No wonder that by the summer of 2016 a poll showed two-thirds of UK citizens approved the new British PM’s launching a nuclear strike in retaliation. So much for learning the lessons detailed in the Chilcot report. 
+As this year’s presidential election comes to a conclusion, the Washington ideologues are regurgitating the same bipartisan consensus that has kept America at war since 9/11 and made the world a decidedly more dangerous place. 
+The DC think tanks provide cover for the political establishment, a political safety net, with a fictive analytical framework providing a moral rationale for intervention, capitol casuistry. I’m fed up with the DC policy elite who cash in on war while presenting themselves as experts, at the cost of other people’s lives, our national fortune, and the sacred honor of our country. 
+Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by a list of the think tank’s sponsors and donors and a statement of the lobbying connections of the report’s authors. 
+It is our patriotic duty to expose why the DC foreign-policy establishment and its sponsors have not learned from their failures and instead are repeating them, with the acquiescence of the political class and sleepwalkers with press passes. 
+It is also time for a new peace movement in America, one that includes progressives and libertarians alike, both in and out of Congress, to organize on campuses, in cities, and towns across America, to serve as an effective counterbalance to the Demuplican war party, its think tanks, and its media cheerleaders. The work begins now, not after the Inauguration. We must not accept war as inevitable, and those leaders who would lead us in that direction, whether in Congress or the White House, must face visible opposition. 
+Thank you Mr. Kucinich, I couldn’t agree more. 
+For related articles, see:",FAKE
+6265,"This Election is Not About Trump, Its about a Giant Middle Finger to Washington DC.","Does anyone like Trump as a person ? The answer in No. It's not about that, it never was. This is about a giant middle finder to the DC Establishment. As a Citizen we only have one way to express our displeasure with DC. We are as divided as I've ever seen. This is not acceptable. If young people can't open businesses we have failed them. They can't. Trump is a tool we need for real change. He blew up the GOP. Our friends on the other side wanted Bernie. But, it was rigged against Bernie. Now you are going to support the very person who rigged your Primary. You almost blew up the DNC, but the job is not complete. We can not hand this crap to our younger generation. We will not. Only a billionaire can get this far on his own. He will be checked by Congress. Join us in giving the middle finger to the slave masters controlling our future. This Country belongs to us. Not a handful of wealthy families. This isn't about Trump. He's a tool in more ways than one. This is about cutting restraints and letting the American People go. At least, that's the way I see it.",FAKE
+9976,One Veteran’s War on Islamophobia,"One Veteran’s War on Islamophobia Nate Terani and Nick Turse, October 31, 2016 Share This 
+Originally posted at TomDispatch . 
+Recently, I was asked a question about Kill Anything That Moves , my history of civilian suffering during the Vietnam War. An interviewer wanted to know how I responded to veterans who took offense at the (supposed) implication that every American who served in Vietnam committed atrocities. 
+I think I softly snorted and slowly shook my head. 
+Already two books behind me, Kill Anything That Moves might as well have been written by someone else in another lifetime. In some sense, it was. 
+It takes effort for me to dredge up the faded memories of that work, a Kodachrome-hued swirl of hundreds of interviews on two continents over the course of a decade. But this particular question was easy enough to answer. Almost all the Americans I interviewed had seen combat, but most American veterans of the war hadn’t. Many had little or no real opportunity to commit war crimes. Case closed. 
+But that question caused me to recall a host of related queries that churned around the book. Questions by skeptics, atrocity-deniers, fair-minded interviewers attempting to play devil’s advocate. A favorite was whether the book was ""anti-veteran."" That, too, was a head-shaker for me. 
+""How could that be?"" I would respond. After all, the book owed its genesis to veterans. Veterans were key sources for it. Veterans provided the evidence. Veterans provided the quotes. Veterans even supplied the title. The book was, to a great extent, the history of the war as described to me by veterans. The story I told was their story. How could that in any way be anti-veteran? 
+Many of the vets I spoke with viewed their truth-telling as a form of patriotism, of continuing service to country. Nate Terani’s inaugural TomDispatch essay follows in the same American tradition. His eyes were opened to the abuse of military power while living in Iran as a boy. Later he would join the U.S. Navy and wear the stars and stripes with particular pride. September 11th and all that came after – notably the demonization of his Muslim faith in his homeland – imbued him with a new mission, one he now views as no less sacred than his military service. 
+From Smedley Butler to Andrew Bacevich , Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning , Vietnam Veterans Against the War to Iraq Veterans Against the War , the U.S. armed forces have produced a steady stream of truth-tellers and whistleblowers, men and women willing to serve their country in profound ways during trying times. There’s no bronze star for activism, no Navy Cross for unpopular or contrarian opinions, no Purple Heart for the hard knocks involved in speaking out against war crimes or Islamophobia or laying bare information vital to the American public. Veterans who dare to do so have sometimes walked a cold, lonely road far from the warm glow enjoyed by summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. Those who do so exhibit a special form of courage that may even exceed the bravery of the battlefield, the courage to stand tall and make oneself a target, a courage deserving ( with a nod to Thomas Paine ) of the love and thanks of man and woman. ~ Nick Turse 
+Tehran, USA Fighting Fundamentalism in America By Nate Terani 
+I’m not an immigrant, but my grandparents are. More than 50 years ago, they arrived in New York City from Iran. I grew up mainly in central New Jersey, an American kid playing little league for the Raritan Red Sox and soccer for the Raritan Rovers. In 1985, I travelled with my family to our ancestral land. I was only eight, but old enough to understand that the Iranians had lost their liberty and freedom. I saw the abject despair of a people who, in a desperate attempt to bring about change, had ushered in nationalist tyrants led by Ayatollah Khomeini. 
+What I witnessed during that year in Iran changed the course of my life. In 1996, at age 19, wanting to help preserve the blessings of liberty and freedom we enjoy in America, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Now, with the rise of Donald Trump and his nationalist alt-right movement, I’ve come to feel that the values I sought to protect are in jeopardy. 
+In Iran, theocratic fundmentalists sowed division and hatred of outsiders – of Westerners, Christians, and other religious minorities. Here in America, the right wing seems to have stolen passages directly from their playbook as it spreads hatred of immigrants, particularly Muslim ones. This form of nationalistic bigotry – Islamophobia – threatens the heart of our nation. When I chose to serve in the military, I did so to protect what I viewed as our sacred foundational values of liberty, equality, and democracy. Now, 20 years later, I’ve joined forces with fellow veterans to again fight for those sacred values, this time right here at home. 
+""Death to America!"" 
+As a child, I sat in my class at the international school one sunny morning and heard in the distance the faint sounds of gunfire and rising chants of ""Death to America!"" That day would define the rest of my life. 
+It was Tehran, the capital of Iran, in 1985. I was attending a unique school for bilingual students who had been born in Western nations. It had become the last refuge in that city with any tolerance for Western teaching, but that also made it a target for military fundamentalists. As the gunfire drew closer, I heard boots pounding the marble tiles outside, marching into our building, and thundering down the corridor toward my classroom. As I heard voices chanting ""Death to America!"" I remember wondering if I would survive to see my parents again. 
+In a flash of green and black uniforms, those soldiers rushed into our classroom, grabbed us by our shirt collars, and yelled at us to get outside. We were then packed into the school’s courtyard where a soldier pointed his rifle at our group and commanded us to look up. Almost in unison, my classmates and I raised our eyes and saw the flags of our many nations being torn down and dangled from the balcony, then set ablaze and tossed, still burning, into the courtyard. As those flags floated to the ground in flames, the soldiers fired their guns in the air. Shouting, they ordered us – if we ever wanted to see our families again – to swear allegiance to the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini and trample on the remains of the burning symbols of our home countries. I scanned the smoke that was filling the courtyard for my friends and classmates and, horrified, watched them capitulate and begin to chant, ""Death to America!"" as they stomped on our sacred symbols. 
+I was so angry that, young as I was, I began to plead with them to come to their senses. No one paid the slightest attention to an eight year old and yet, for the first time in my life, I felt something like righteous indignation. I suspect that, born and raised in America, I was already imbued with such a sense of privilege that I just couldn’t fathom the immense danger I was in. Certainly, I was acting in ways no native Iranian would have found reasonable. 
+Across the smoke-filled courtyard, I saw a soldier coming at me and knew he meant to force me to submit. I spotted an American flag still burning, dropped to my knees, and grabbed the charred pieces from underneath a classmate’s feet. As the soldier closed in on me, I ducked and ran, still clutching my charred pieces of flag into a crowd of civilians who had gathered to witness the commotion. The events of that day would come to define all that I have ever stood for – or against. 
+""Camel Jockey,""""Ayatollah,"" and ""Gandhi"" 
+My parents and I soon returned to the United States and I entered third grade. More than anything, I just wanted to be normal, to fit in and be accepted by my peers. Unfortunately, my first name, Nader (which I changed to Nate upon joining the Navy), and my swarthy Middle Eastern appearance, were little help on that score, eliciting regular jibes from my classmates. Even at that young age, they had already mastered a veritable thesaurus of ethnic defamation, including ""camel jockey,""""sand-nigger,""""raghead,""""ayatollah,"" and ironically, ""Gandhi"" (which I now take as a compliment). My classmates regularly sought to ""other-ize"" me in those years, as if I were a lesser American because of my faith and ethnicity. 
+Yet I remember that tingling in my chest when I first donned my Cub Scout uniform – all because of the American flag patch on its shoulder. Something felt so good about wearing it, a feeling I still had when I joined the military. It seems that the flag I tried to rescue in Tehran was stapled to my heart, or that’s how I felt anyway as I wore my country’s uniform. 
+When I took my oath of enlistment in the U.S. Navy, I gave my mom a camera and asked her to take some photos, but she was so overwhelmed with pride and joy that she cried throughout the ceremony and managed to snap only a few images of the carpet. She cried even harder when I was selected to serve as the first Muslim-American member of the U.S. Navy Presidential Ceremonial Honor Guard . On that day, I was proud, too, and all the taunts of those bullies of my childhood seemed finally silenced. 
+Being tormented because of my ethnicity and religion in those early years had another effect on me. It caused me to become unusually sensitive to the nature of other people. Somehow, I grasped that, if it weren’t for a fear of the unknown, there was an inherent goodness and frail humanity lurking in many of the kids who bullied and harassed me. Often, I discovered, those same bullies could be tremendously kind to their families, friends, or even strangers. I realized, then, that if, despite everything, I could lay myself bare and trust them enough to reach out in kindness, I might in turn gain their trust and they might then see me, too, and stop operating from such a place of fear and hate. 
+Through patience, humor, and understanding, I was able to offer myself as the embodiment of my people and somehow defang the ""otherness"" of so much that Americans found scary. To this day, I have friends from elementary school, middle school, high school, and the military who tell me that I am the only Muslim they have ever known and that, had they not met me, their perspective on Islam would have been wholly subject to the prevailing fear-based narrative that has poisoned this country since September 11, 2001. 
+In 1998, I became special assistant to the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy and then, in 1999, I was recruited to serve atthe Defense Intelligence Agency. In August 2000, I transferred to the Naval Reserve. 
+In the wake of 9/11, I began to observe how so many of my fellow Americans were adopting a fundamentalist ""us vs. them"" attitude towards Muslims and Islam. I suddenly found myself in an America where the scattered insults I had endured as a child took on an overarching and sinister meaning and form, where they became something like an ideology and way of life. 
+By the time I completed my military service in 2006, I had begun to understand that our policies in the Middle East,similarly disturbed, seemed in pursuit of little more than perpetual warfare. That, in turn, was made possible by the creation of a new enemy: Islam – or rather of a portrait, painted by the powers-that-be, of Islam as a terror religion, as a hooded villain lurking out there somewhere in the desert, waiting to destroy us. I knew that attempting to dispel, through the patient approach of my childhood, the kind of Islamophobia that now had the country by the throat was not going to be enough. Post-9/11 attacks on Muslims in the U.S. and elsewhere were not merely childish taunts. 
+For the first time in my life, in a country gripped by fear, I believed I was witnessing a shift, en masse, toward an American fundamentalism and ultra-nationalism that reflected a wanton lack of reason, not to mention fact. As a boy in Iran, I had witnessed the dark destination down which such a path could take a country. Now, it seemed to me, in America’s quest to escape the verydemons we had sown by our own misadventures in the Middle East, and forsaking the hallmarks of our founding, we risked becoming everything we sought to defeat. 
+The Boy in the Schoolyard Grown Up 
+On February 10, 2015, three young American students, Yusor Abu-Salha, Razan Abu-Salha, and Deah Shaddy Barakat, were executed at an apartment complex in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The killer was a gun-crazy white man filled with hate and described by his own daughter as ""a monster."" Those assassinations struck a special chord of sorrow and loss in me. My mom and I cried and prayed together for those students and their families. 
+The incident in Chapel Hill also awoke in me some version of the righteous indignation I had felt so many years earlier in that smoke-filled courtyard in Iran. I would be damned if I stood by while kids in my country were murdered simply because of their faith. It violated every word of the oath I had taken when I joined the military and desecrated every value I held in my heart as a sacred tenet of our nation. White nationalists and bigots had, by then, thrown down the gauntlet for so much of this, using Islamophobia to trigger targeted assassinations in the United States. This was terrorism, pure and simple, inspired by hate-speakers here at home. 
+At that moment, I reached out to fellow veterans who, I thought, might be willing to help – and it’s true what they say about soul mates being irrevocably drawn to each other. When I contacted Veterans For Peace , an organization dedicated to exposing the costs of war and militarism, I found the leadership well aware of the inherent dangers of Islamophobia and of the need to confront this new enemy. So Executive Director Michael McPhearson formed a committee of vets from around the country to decide how those of us who had donned uniforms to defend this land could best battle the phenomenon – and I, of course, joined it. 
+From that committee emerged Veterans Challenge Islamophobia (VCI). It now has organizers in Arizona, Georgia, New Jersey, and Texas, and that’s just a beginning. Totally nonpartisan, VCI focuses on politicians of any party who engage in hate speech. We’ve met with leaders of American Muslim communities, sat with them through Ramadan, and attended their Iftar dinners to break our fasts together. In the wake of the Orlando shooting , we at VCI also mobilized to fight back against attempts to pit the Muslim community against the LGBTQ+ community. 
+Our group was born of the belief that, as American military veterans, we had a responsibility to call out bigotry, hatred, and the perpetuation of endless warfare. We want the American Muslim community to know that they have allies, and that those allies are indeed veterans as well. We stand with them and for them and, for those of us who are Muslim, among them. 
+Nationalism and xenophobia have no place in American life, and I, for my part, don’t think Donald Trump or anyone like him should be able to peddle Islamophobia in an attempt to undermine our national unity. Without Islamophobia, there no longer exists a ""clash of civilizations."" Without Islamophobia, whatever the problems in the world may be, there is no longer an ""us vs. them"" and it’s possible to begin reimagining a world of something other than perpetual war. 
+As of now, this remains the struggle of my life, for despite my intense love for America, some of my countrymen increasingly see American Muslims as the ""other,"" the enemy. 
+My Mom taught me as a boy that the only thing that mattered was what was in my heart. Now, with her in mind and as a representative of VCI, when I meet fellow Americans I always remember my childhood experiences with my bullying peers. And I still lay myself bare, as I did then. I give trust to gain trust, but always knowing that these days this isn’t just a matter of niceties. It’s a question of life or death. It’s part of a battle for the soul of our nation. 
+In many ways, I still consider myself that boy in the school courtyard in Tehran trying to rescue charred pieces of that flag from those trampling feet. It’s just that now I’m doing it in my own country. 
+Nate Terani is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and served in military intelligence with the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is currently a member of the leadership team at Common Defense PAC and regional campaign organizer with Veterans Challenge Islamophobia . He is a featured columnist with the Arizona Muslim Voice newspaper. 
+Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook . Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead , and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World . 
+Copyright 2016 Nate Terani",FAKE
+6762,Morning Joe Destroys Corrupt Clinton Foundation (Laughable) “Total Corruption”,"Abby Martin Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Morning Joe Destroys Corrupt Clinton Foundation (Laughable) “Total Corruption” By VNN on October 28, 2016 'Pay for Play' and 'Quid Pro Quo' 'Shut Down The Foundation' 
+Inside the Clinton’s Foundation and Personal Gains They are bragging that they can shake down foundation clients, for Bill Clinton money… This is sleazy… Joe Scarborough. 
+Follow the money.",FAKE
+5541,Johnson & Johnson Lose Third Multimillion Dollar Case Over Baby Talc,"Johnson & Johnson Lose Third Multimillion Dollar Case Over Baby Talc Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay over $70 million in third cancer case Posted on November 1, 2016 by Carol Adl in News , US // 0 Comments 
+Big Pharma giant Johnson & Johnson has lost yet another legal battle in a row over its talcum powder which allegedly causes cancer. 
+A St. Louis jury awarded over $70 million dollars to a California woman as a result of her lawsuit which claimed that her ovarian cancer was caused by years of using Johnson & Johnson’s baby talc. 
+The trial started on September 26th and ended on October 27th and is the third successful lawsuit this year against Johnson & Johnson. RELATED CONTENT 
+Deborah Giannecchini of Modesto, California was diagnosed with the disease in 2012 and accused the company of ‘negligent conduct’ in making and and marketing the baby powder. 
+The lawsuit claimed Mrs Giannecchini contracted the disease after using baby powder in an intimate area. 
+Jim Onder, Mrs Giannecchini’s lawyer, said: ‘We are pleased the jury did the right thing. They once again reaffirmed the need for Johnson & Johnson to warn the public of the ovarian cancer risk associated with its product.’ 
+However, the company has rejected there is any risk to using their product – even in intimate areas – and will appeal the massive award. 
+Carol Goodrich, spokesman for the company said: ‘We deeply sympathize with the women and families impacted by ovarian cancer. We will appeal today’s verdict because we are guided by the science, which supports the safety of Johnson’s Baby Powder.’ 
+Earlier this year, two other lawsuits in St Louis ended in jury verdicts worth a combined $127million. But two others in New Jersey were thrown out by a judge who said there wasn’t reliable evidence that talc leads to ovarian cancer, an often fatal but relatively rare form of cancer. 
+Ovarian cancer accounts for about 22,000 of the 1.7million new cases of cancer expected to be diagnosed in the US this year. 
+About 2,000 women have filed similar suits, and lawyers are reviewing thousands of other potential cases, most generated by ads touting the two big verdicts out of St. Louis – a $72million award in February to relatives of an Alabama woman who died of ovarian cancer, and a $55million award in May to a South Dakota survivor of the disease. 
+Much research has found no link or a weak one between ovarian cancer and using baby powder for feminine hygiene, and most major health groups have declared talc harmless. Johnson & Johnson, whose baby powder dominates the market, maintains it’s perfectly safe. 
+But Onder of the Onder Law Firm in suburban St Louis, which represented plaintiffs in all three St Louis cases, cited other research that began connecting talcum powder to ovarian cancer in the 1970s. 
+He said case studies have indicated that women who regularly use talc on their genital area face up to a 40 per cent higher risk of developing ovarian cancer.",FAKE
+3257,Funding shortfall for Social Security disability program: Is it real?,"Republicans say Social Security’s support for people with disabilities will be 'broke' next year; the Obama budget suggests the system needs only a patch. But both sides agree: Something must be done by 2016.
+
+Why are Americans more open to torture than other nations?
+
+Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont (l.) talks as committee chairman Sen. Michael Enzi (R) of Wyoming listens during a hearing of the Senate Budget Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington earlier this month
+
+In the wake of Republican victories in the election last fall, pundits warned that Congress would be at loggerheads with President Obama on a number of budget issues in 2015, including over highway funding and the Department of Homeland Security.
+
+Not high on the list of hot topics: Social Security.
+
+Yet the vaunted social insurance system is suddenly a hot part of the fiscal debate in Washington – and it's not waiting for 2016 elections. The new Obama budget proposes a patch to the program’s support for people with disabilities, but Republicans say the system needs an overhaul, not a Band-Aid.
+
+How urgent an issue is this? Specifically, how real is the financial trouble for the disability program?
+
+The two sides are far apart on their characterizations, but they agree that something needs to be done, and a good case can be made that the reality is between the extremes.
+
+Many Democrats and liberals say, in effect, that Social Security’s Disability Insurance program is in trouble only if Republicans refuse to rubber stamp Mr. Obama’s fix.
+
+Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont, the top member of the Democratic caucus on the Senate Budget Committee, accused Republicans of trying “to manufacture a crisis where none exists.”
+
+On the Republican side, Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, who chairs that panel, says that “by December of next year, the program will be broke.”
+
+What's new is that after years of talk about Social Security's solvency and the need to reform it (or not), Congress has come to its first definitive fork in the road on the issue. Perhaps the problem isn’t as dire as Republicans say it is, but Obama also might not have a slam-dunk case for his patch.
+
+A good many economists agree with the Republican view that reforms are needed to keep the system solvent – and the sooner they’re enacted, the better it will be for the nation’s fiscal health.
+
+Here are key facts behind the rhetoric:
+
+These facts suggest that Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah had a valid point when he argued this week on the Senate floor that “having a joint trust fund exhaustion as a target doesn’t solve any fundamental financial problem facing ... Social Security.”
+
+At the same time, Democrats have a point when they note that rebalancing the tax revenues between the two trust funds has been done by Congress many times in the past.
+
+The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes that Congress has reallocated tax receipts between these two funds in the past, but generally accompanied by reforms to Social Security.
+
+House Republicans are seeking to block any such reallocation, unless it’s accompanied by reforms to shore up Social Security so promised benefits can be paid beyond 2033.
+
+The Social Security trustees said in their 2014 annual report that although Congress may consider another rebalancing, such a move ""might serve to delay DI reforms and much needed financial corrections for OASDI as a whole.""
+
+Regardless of whether the tax flows are rebalanced, the two programs may call for differing reforms to bolster their solvency.
+
+In the old-age program, possible fixes include asking high-earning Americans to shoulder bigger tax burdens, modestly raising the retirement age, and adjusting the inflation index used for benefits (so that annual cost-of-living increases aren’t so big).
+
+On the disability side, changes might include expanding incentives for people to work rather than rely on DI benefits. “Increasing employment among individuals with disabilities could improve their economic well-being and increase their autonomy while also reducing the fiscal strains on Social Security,” Stanford University economist Mark Duggan argued at a Senate hearing this week.
+
+The disability program has grown markedly in recent years. By 2012 it was accounting for 18 percent of all Social Security benefits, up from 10 percent in 1970, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
+
+Much of the expansion stemmed from demographics, as an aging population included more people developing disabilities in their later work years, a 2013 CBO analysis concluded. But it also found the growth in the program to be related to 1984 legislation that loosened the definition of conditions qualifying as disabilities, and in fluctuations in the economy – such as the long jobs drought following the 2008 financial crisis.
+
+“The DI rolls have barely grown for the last two years,” notes Kathy Ruffing of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
+
+That slowdown coincides with an easing of demographic pressures on the program, as the baby boomers retire, as well as the improving economy.",REAL
+7193,Can the Oligarchy Still Steal the Presidential Election?,"  
+The election was set up to be stolen from Trump. That was the purpose of the polls rigged by overweighting Hillary supporters in the samples. After weeks of hearing poll results that Hillary was in the lead, the public would discount a theft claim. Electronic voting makes elections easy to steal, and I have posted explanations by election fraud experts of how it is done. 
+Clearly the Oligarchy does not want Donald Trump in the White House as they are unsure that they could control him, and Hillary is their agent. 
+With the reopening of the FBI investigation of Hillary and related scandals exploding all around her, election theft is not only more risky but also less likely to serve the Oligarchy’s own interests. 
+Image as well as money is part of Oligarchic power. The image of America takes a big hit if the American people elect a president who is currently under felony investigation. 
+Moreover, a President Hillary would be under investigation for years. With so much spotlight on her, she would not be able to serve the Oligarchy’s interests. She would be worthless to them, and, indeed, investigations that unearthed various connections between Hillary and oligarchs could damage the oligarchs. 
+In other words, for the Oligarchy Hillary has moved from an asset to a liability. 
+A Hillary presidency could put our country into chaos. I doubt the oligarchs are sufficiently stupid to think that once she is sworn in, Hillary can fire FBI Director Comey and shut down the investigation. The last president that tried that was Richard Nixon, and look where that got him. 
+Moreover, the Republicans in the House and Senate would not stand for it. House Committee on oversight and Government Reform chairman Jason Chaffetz has already declared Hillary to be “a target-rich environment. Even before we get to day one, we’ve got two years worth of material already lined up.” House Speaker Paul Ryan said investigation will follow the evidence. 
+If you were an oligarch, would you want your agent under this kind of scrutiny? If you were Hillary, would you want to be under this kind of pressure? 
+What happens if the FBI recommends the indictment of the president? Even insouciant Americans would see the cover-up if the attorney general refused to prosecute the case. Americans would lose all confidence in the government. Chaos would rule. Chaos can be revolutionary, and that is not good for oligarchs. 
+Moreover, if reports can be believed, salacious scandals appear to be waiting their time on stage. For example, last May Fox News reported: 
+“Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender’s infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the “Lolita Express” — even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com. 
+“Clinton’s presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including “Tatiana.” The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls.” 
+Fox News reports that Epstein served time in prison for “solicitation and procurement of minors for prostitution. He allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on ‘Orgy Island,’ an estate on Epstein’s 72-acre island, called Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.” http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/05/13/flight-logs-show-bill-clinton-flew-on-sex-offenders-jet-much-more-than-previously-known.html Some Internet sites, the credibility of which is unknown to me, have linked Hillary to these flights. http://truepundit.com/breaking-bombshell-nypd-blows-whistle-on-new-hillary-emails-money-laundering-sex-crimes-with-children-child-exploitation-pay-to-play-perjury/ 
+This kind of behavior seems reckless even for Bill and Hillary, who are accustomed to getting away with everything. Nevertheless, if you are an oligarch already worried about the reopened Hillary email case and additional FBI investigations, such as the one into the Clinton Foundation, and concerned about what else might emerge from the 650,000 emails on former US Rep. Weiner’s computer and the NYPD pedophile investigation, putting Hillary in the Oval Office doesn’t look like a good decision. 
+At this point, I would think that the Oligarchy would prefer to steal the election for Trump, instead of from him, rather than allow insouciant Americans to destroy America’s reputation by choosing a person under felony investigations for president of the United States. 
+Being the “exceptional nation” takes on new meaning when there is a criminal at the helm. (Reprinted from PaulCraigRoberts.org by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+9595,Dentist Waiting Room Contains Disproportionate Number Of Boating Magazines,"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] Dentist Waiting Room Contains Disproportionate Number Of Boating Magazines November 11, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS , LIFESTYLE Share 0 Add Comment 
+PATIENTS waiting for treatment in a Waterford dental clinic have informed WWN of the curious ration of magazines about boats to magazine about any other topic in the waiting room. 
+Maguires Dental on St. Kenneth’s street in Waterford city appears to have four magazines about maritime affairs in it’s 9-strong pile of reading literature, with the remainder of the browsing material consisting of 5-year-old issues of Heat, Bella, and an Argos catalogue from 2012 with the back cover ripped off. 
+Declan Hanlon, in for a filling, spoke exclusively to WWN about the difficulties in passing the time in the waiting room when one hasn’t got much interest in yachting or yacht maintenance. 
+“I’m here over an hour like, and I’ve read up on Ashton Kutcher getting divorced from Demi Moore, the price of an electric shower, and how to make sure you’ve hired the right people to de-barnacle the side of your boat” said Hanlin, sounding kinda funny because his jaw is sore. 
+“Whoever puts out the magazines, take a bow. I’ve seen some terrible reading material in waiting rooms in my time, but Jesus Christ this stuff is the worst. Trust me, if you’re coming to this place, you sure as fuck don’t need to learn about boat maintenance”. 
+When pressed for better magazines in the waiting room, staff at Maguire Dental said they’d have a root around in a skip at the weekend, if they had time.",FAKE
+4221,Most non-Trump GOP voters say they would consider independent candidate,"Over half of non-Donald Trump voters in Tuesday’s Republican primaries say they would consider a third party or independent candidate should the businessman pick up the Republican nomination for the White House.
+
+The Fox News exit poll taken among voters in Missouri, Illinois, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, shows that six-in-ten non-Trump GOP voters would consider a third party candidate if the general election matchup was Trump versus Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
+
+Four-in-ten Republican primary voters overall would consider a third party or independent candidate, while approximately five-in-ten of late deciders would consider the same choice, Fox News’ exit poll said.
+
+Trump himself has repeatedly raised the possibility of running an independent campaign should he be treated “unfairly” by the Republican Party, despite signing a pledge to support whoever the eventual Republican nominee may be.
+
+Billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was understood to have been considering a third party run in recent months, but eventually decided against a run after concluding that there was not a viable route to victory, and his candidacy would likely hand the Republicans the White House.
+
+",REAL
+8078,A very accurate pisstake of craft beer culture,"Next Prev Swipe left/right A very accurate pisstake of craft beer culture If you want a nice pint of Bishops Bellend, or something to eat served out of a vintage ambulance in the vaping section in the back, this craft beer knob knows just the place.",FAKE
+2283,Marco Rubio doesn’t think sexual orientation is a choice but wants states to decide marriage,"Marco Rubio said Sunday that he believes sexual orientation isn't a choice, but he is opposed to courts deciding on marriage for same-sex couples.
+
+""I believe that sexual preference is something that people are born with,"" he said on CBS's ""Face the Nation.""
+
+Rubio also said that he believes marriage should be ""between one man and one woman"" but insisted ""it's not that I'm against gay marriage.""
+
+""States have always regulated marriage, and if a state wants to have a different definition, you should petition the state legislature and have a political debate,"" he said. ""I don't think courts should be making that decision, and I don't believe same-sex marriage is a constitutional right.""",REAL
+6476,How Putin Derailed the West   : Information," How Putin Derailed the West
+By Mike Whitney “Nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”
+— Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Between Two Ages: The Technetronic Era”, 1971
+“I’m going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe havens within Syria .not only to help protect the Syrians and prevent the constant outflow of refugees, but to gain some leverage on both the Syrian government and the Russians.”
+— Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Third Presidential Debate
+ "" Counterpunch "" - Why is Hillary Clinton so eager to intensify US involvement in Syria when US interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have all gone so terribly wrong?
+The answer to this question is simple. It’s because Clinton doesn’t think that these interventions went wrong. And neither do any of the other members of the US foreign policy establishment. (aka–The Borg). In fact, in their eyes these wars have been a rousing success. Sure, a few have been critical of the public relations backlash from the nonexistent WMD in Iraq, (or the logistical errors, like disbanding the Iraqi Army) but–for the most part– the foreign policy establishment is satisfied with its efforts to destabilize the region and remove leaders that refuse to follow Washington’s diktats.
+This is hard for ordinary people to understand. They can’t grasp why elite powerbrokers would want to transform functioning, stable countries into uninhabitable wastelands overrun by armed extremists, sectarian death squads and foreign-born terrorists. Nor can they understand what has been gained by Washington’s 15 year-long rampage across the Middle East and Central Asia that has turned a vast swathe of strategic territory into a terrorist breeding grounds? What is the purpose of all this?
+First, we have to acknowledge that the decimation and de facto balkanization of these countries is part of a plan. If it wasn’t part of a plan, than the decision-makers would change the policy. But they haven’t changed the policy. The policy is the same. The fact that the US is using foreign-born jihadists to pursue regime change in Syria as opposed to US troops in Iraq, is not a fundamental change in the policy. The ultimate goal is still the decimation of the state and the elimination of the existing government. This same rule applies to Libya and Afghanistan both of which have been plunged into chaos by Washington’s actions.
+But why? What is gained by destroying these countries and generating so much suffering and death?
+Here’s what I think: I think Washington is involved in a grand project to remake the world in a way that better meets the needs of its elite constituents, the international banks and multinational corporations. Brzezinski not only refers to this in the opening Quote: , he also explains what is taking place: The nation-state is being jettisoned as the foundation upon which the global order rests. Instead, Washington is erasing borders, liquidating states, and removing strong, secular leaders that can mount resistance to its machinations in order to impose an entirely new model on the region, a new world order. The people who run these elite institutions want to create an interconnected-global free trade zone overseen by the proconsuls of Big Capital, in other words, a global Eurozone that precludes the required state institutions (like a centralized treasury, mutual debt, federal transfers) that would allow the borderless entity to function properly.
+Deep state powerbrokers who set policy behind the smokescreen of our bought-and-paid-for congress think that one world government is an achievable goal provided they control the world’s energy supplies, the world’s reserve currency and become the dominant player in this century’s most populous and prosperous region, Asia. This is essentially what Hillary’s “pivot” to Asia is all about.
+The basic problem with Washington’s NWO plan is that a growing number of powerful countries are still attached to the old world order and are now prepared to defend it. This is what’s really going on in Syria, the improbable alliance of Russia, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah have stopped the US military juggernaut dead in its tracks. The unstoppable force has hit the immovable object and the immovable object has prevailed so far.
+Naturally, the foreign policy establishment is upset about these new developments, and for good reason. The US has run the world for quite a while now, so the rolling back of US policy in Syria is as much a surprise as it is a threat. The Russian Airforce deployed to Syria a full year ago in September, but only recently has Washington shown that it’s prepared to respond by increasing its support of its jihadists agents on the ground and by mounting an attack on ISIS in the eastern part of the country, Raqqa. But the real escalation is expected to take place when Hillary Clinton becomes president in 2017. That’s when the US will directly engage Russia militarily, assuming that their tit-for-tat encounters will be contained within Syria’s borders. It’s a risky plan, but it’s the next logical step in this bloody fiasco. Neither party wants a nuclear war, but Washington believes that doing nothing is tantamount to backing down, therefore, Hillary and her neocon advisors can be counted on to up the ante. “No-fly zone”, anyone?
+The assumption is that eventually, and with enough pressure, Putin will throw in the towel. But this is another miscalculation. Putin is not in Syria because he wants to be nor is he there because he values his friendship with Syrian President Bashar al Assad. That’s not it at all. Putin is in Syria because he has no choice. Russia’s national security is at stake. If Washington’s strategy of deploying terrorists to topple Assad succeeds, then the same ploy will be attempted in Iran and Russia. Putin knows this, just like he knows that the scourge of foreign-backed terrorism can decimate entire regions like Chechnya. He knows that it’s better for him to kill these extremists in Aleppo than it will be in Moscow. So he can’t back down, that’s not an option.
+But, by the same token, he can compromise, in other words, his goals and the goals of Assad do not perfectly coincide. For example, he could very well make territorial concessions to the US for the sake of peace that Assad might not support.
+But why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he continue to fight until every inch of Syria’s sovereign territory is recovered?
+Because it’s not in Russia’s national interest to do so, that’s why. Putin has never tried to conceal the fact that he’s in Syria to protect Russia’s national security. That’s his main objective. But he’s not an idealist, he’s a pragmatist who’ll do whatever he has to to end the war ASAP. That means compromise.
+This doesn’t matter to the Washington warlords .yet. But it will eventually. Eventually there will be an accommodation of some sort. No one is going to get everything they want, that much is certain. For example, it’s impossible to imagine that Putin would launch a war on Turkey to recover the territory that Turkish troops now occupy in N Syria. In fact, Putin may have already conceded as much to Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan in their recent meetings. But that doesn’t mean that Putin doesn’t have his red lines. He does. Aleppo is a red line. Turkish troops will not be allowed to enter Aleppo.
+The western corridor, the industrial and population centers are all red lines. On these, there will be no compromise. Putin will help Assad remain in power and keep the country largely intact. But will Turkey control sections in the north, and will the US control sections in the east?
+Probably. This will have to be worked out in negotiations, but its unlikely that the country’s borders will be the same as they were before the war broke out. Putin will undoubtedly settle for a halfloaf provided the fighting ends and security is restored. In any event, he’s not going to hang around until the last dog is hung.
+Unfortunately, we’re a long way from any settlement in Syria, mainly because Washington is nowhere near accepting the fact that its project to rule the world has been derailed. That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? The bigshots who run the country are still in denial. It hasn’t sunk in yet that the war is lost and that their nutty jihadist-militia plan has failed.
+It’s going to take a long time before Washington gets the message that the world is no longer its oyster. The sooner they figure it out, the better it’ll be for everyone. Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition . He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com .",FAKE
+3958,Downing of Russian plane reveals potential for more conflict,"The downing of a Russian warplane by Turkish F-16s over the Syrian border has split two obstinate strongmen deeply involved in Syria’s increasingly crowded civil war: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
+
+Officials from both countries on Wednesday discounted the possibility of direct conflict over the downing. “We are not going to wage a war on Turkey,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters, although he said Moscow viewed the attack as a “planned provocation.”
+
+The Turkish government offered its condolences for the deaths of a Russian pilot and a marine in the downing of the plane and an attempted rescue of its crew, Russia’s first combat fatalities in the country’s two-month-old airstrike campaign in Syria.
+
+But the incident has revealed the potential for conflict between foreign powers supporting and opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad despite a shared opposition to the Islamic State. In particular, Russian airstrikes against Turkish-backed rebel groups have fomented deep frustration in Ankara.
+
+“There is a clear message from the Turks with this downing of a Russian jet,” said Mustafa Alani, a Middle East expert at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center. “It is a check on Russia’s policy in the region. Russia can’t do whatever it wants.”
+
+Russia says its Su-24 bomber did not violate Turkish airspace, but Turkish officials say it did. Putin hypothesized Tuesday that even if the plane did briefly enter Turkish airspace, it was not a threat.
+
+[This is the Russian plane that Turkey just shot down]
+
+In Moscow at least, the event is being seen as something larger than an attack on an errant jet.
+
+“The conflict happened because Russia was attacking rebel groups allied with Turkey,” said Alexander Baunov, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, when asked about the possibility of an accidental clash. “It’s wrong to say that this happened because of anything like crowded skies.”
+
+The Russian Defense Ministry announced in a statement Wednesday that Russian fighter jets will now escort the bombers, and Moscow will move into Syria powerful new ground-to-air missiles that can reach across the country and far into Turkey from the Russian air base in the province of Latakia on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
+
+Additionally, analysts say, Russia will choose from a menu of asymmetric responses in retaliation against Turkey, including informal economic sanctions and providing military aid to Turkey’s enemies, including the Kurds.
+
+“Of course, Russia is going to intensify strikes on that part of Syria and on those groups that are affiliated with Turkey,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent Russian political analyst. He added that Russia probably would not scale back its deployment in Syria because of the incident.
+
+On Wednesday evening, Turkey’s state-run news agency, Anadolu, reported that Russian airstrikes targeted Turkish aid vehicles in the Syrian border town of Azzaz, killing at least seven drivers. The town is a hub for supplies being delivered from Turkey to Syrian rebels fighting government forces in the nearby city of Aleppo. The details of the incident could not be assessed independently.
+
+Shady al-Ouaineh, a media ­representative for Determined Storm, a rebel group associated with the Free Syrian Army, said in a telephone interview that Russia had dramatically intensified air raids in rebel-held areas of Latakia province. Syrian government forces and allied Shiite militiamen from Iraq, backed by Russian air cover, have been trying to advance on some of the last opposition holdouts in the province, said Ouaineh, close to where the Russian jet was shot down.
+
+“It is clear Russia is taking out its revenge on us here,” he said.
+
+[NATO faces new Mideast crisis after downing of Russian jet by Turkey]
+
+Russian attitudes toward Turkey, which were reasonably friendly a year ago, have turned cold with alarming speed. Most Russian tour operators stopped selling travel packages to Turkey on Wednesday. Protesters in Moscow pelted the Turkish Embassy with eggs and rocks, shattering windows. Russian lawmakers introduced a bill that would criminalize denying that the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire was a “genocide.” The issue remains highly sensitive: Turkey acknowledges that atrocities occurred but has long denied that what took place constituted a genocide.
+
+Last December, Russia diverted a planned gas line away from Europe to Turkey in order to spurn the West. That project’s fate is also now in doubt.
+
+“The consequences are going to be significant,” Lukyanov said.
+
+Russia will seek retribution against Turkey but wants to avoid antagonizing the West, Baunov said. “If this becomes a fight between Russia and the West, then that goes against the goals of the intervention in the first place: to escape international isolation connected to sanctions,” he said.
+
+Those sanctions were imposed after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and backed separatist rebels in Ukraine’s southeast.
+
+President Obama, meeting with French President François Hollande in Washington on Tuesday, said that Turkey had a right to defend its airspace and accused Russia of attacking moderate opposition groups as opposed to the Islamic State. Russia has said it carries out airstrikes only against terrorist organizations.
+
+“They are operating very close to a Turkish border and they are going after a moderate opposition that are supported by not only Turkey but a wide range of countries,” Obama said. At the same time he discouraged “any kind of escalation.”
+
+[U.S., France to press allies for more assets in fight against the Islamic State]
+
+The frantic Russian search for the missing bomber crew was marred by the death of a marine on an Mi-8 helicopter hit by an antitank missile.
+
+“One on board was wounded when he parachuted down and killed in a savage way on the ground by the jihadists,” Alexander Orlov, the Russian ambassador to France, told Europe 1 radio. “The other managed to escape and, according to the latest information, has been picked up by the Syrian army and should be going back to the Russian air force base.”
+
+Putin has promised the Russian public a limited engagement in Syria, with no ground forces, to limit casualties. Although the Syrian army has managed to halt a rebel offensive, Russian air power has not yet led to a significant turn of the tide in the war.
+
+“Turkey dealt a major blow to Putin, and now he’s been placed between a rock and a hard place,” said Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. “There could be mission creep where Russia will get entangled in an unwinnable war.”",REAL
+2928,"Retaliating For Killings, Egypt Launches Airstrikes Against ISIS In Libya",""" 'Your armed forces on Monday carried out focused air strikes in Libya against Daesh camps, places of gathering and training, and weapons depots,' the military said in a statement, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
+
+""It was the first time Egypt confirmed launching air strikes against the group in neighboring Libya, suggesting President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is ready to escalate his battle against militants seeking to topple his government.
+
+""The military said the dawn strike, in which Libya's air force also participated, 'achieved its targets accurately' and the pilots returned to base safely, the Egyptian military said, as state television ran brief footage of a fighter plane taking off in darkness.""",REAL
+2353,President Obama wants to disarm America,"President Obama is plotting with his attorney general to get our guns.
+
+The president will purportedly  bypass Congress and crack down on small scale gun sellers. Fox News reports the plan would require gun sellers to order background checks on prospective buyers and tighten laws for gun sales to those who have committed domestic-abuse offenses.
+
+Click here to sign up for Todd’s American Dispatch – a  must-read for conservatives!
+
+If the White House really wants to crack down on gun violence -- maybe they should enforce the laws that are already on the books.
+
+But that's not the point. This president ultimately wants to disarm the nation.
+
+The primary reason our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment was to protect all the other amendments.
+
+Just after the Muslim terrorist attack in San Bernardino the Washington Post found that 53 percent of voters oppose a ban on assault weapons -- a record high.
+
+The American people seem to understand what the president does not -- guns keep our families safe.
+
+So instead of declaring war on law-abiding gun owners  -- maybe the president ought to declare war on the true threat facing our nation -- radical Islam.
+
+The National Rifle Association accused the president of pulling a “political stunt” and Republican presidential candidates have widely condemned the president’s gun-control plans.
+
+“The president is a petulant child,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told ""Fox News Sunday."" “Whenever he doesn’t get what he wants…this president acts like a king.”
+
+“It is delusional, dangerous, not to mention unconstitutional,” she said. “We have a long list of criminals who own guns, who routinely purchase guns. We know who these people are, and we are not prosecuting any of them.”
+
+Texas Governor Greg Abbott summed up it up best in a tweet:
+
+""Obama Wants to impose more gun control. My response? COME & TAKE IT.""
+
+Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is ""God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values."" Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.
+
+",REAL
+689,"Sanders says 'tough guy' Trump should reconsider, still debate him","Sen. Bernie Sanders is calling out Donald Trump for withdrawing his offer to debate, an apparent attempt to goad the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and self-described “tough guy” into reconsidering ahead of California’s big June 7 primary.
+
+Sanders said Friday night on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” that he would still “love” to debate Trump and essentially asked him to reconsider.
+
+“First he said he would do it,” the Democratic presidential candidate said. “Then he said he wouldn’t. Then he said he would, then he said he wouldn’t do it.
+
+“So I would hope that if he changed his mind four times in two days changing the fifth time (would be possible.) You know, Trump claims to be a real tough guy, pushes people around. Hey Donald, come on up and let's debate about the future of America.""
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Trump recently suggested he would debate Sanders after Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton declined a Fox News Channel offer to debate him.
+
+However, Trump apparently changed his mind after getting 1,237 delegates on Thursday, the number needed to clinch the GOP nomination.
+
+“Now that I am the presumptive Republican nominee, it seems inappropriate that I would debate the second-place finisher,” Trump said Friday through his campaign. “As much as I want to debate Bernie Sanders -- and it would be an easy payday -- I will wait to debate the first place finisher in the Democratic Party, probably Crooked Hillary Clinton, or whoever it may be.”
+
+Clinton is now just 73 delegates short of the 2,383 needed to clinch her party’s nomination, with 913 still at stake, including 475 in California.
+
+Sanders has won nearly as many state contests as Clinton, including a string of wins in the past couple of months but has just 1,542 delegates.
+
+The Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist has been campaigning furiously in liberal-leaning California -- in hopes of winning or at least taking a sizeable number of delegates.
+
+He has vowed to keep his campaign alive into the party’s July nomination convention, and more delegates could give him more influence over the party’s platform.
+
+California has one of the most expensive media markets in the country. With campaigns having already spent so much of their money on earlier races, a national TV debate with Trump could certainly help Sanders.
+
+He first learned about Trump cancelling the debate offer at campaign event earlier Friday in Los Angeles County, with his remarks sounding like the ground work for his HBO comments.
+
+“I heard he was going to be debate. Then I heard he was not going to debate, then I heard he was going to debate. Well I hope that he changes his mind again. (Trump’s) known to change mind many times in the day. He’s a big tough guy. Mr. Trump what are you afraid of? Why won’t you debate here in California?""",REAL
+1833,Heard of George Pataki? Every four years he thinks about running for president.,"EDITOR’s NOTE: This story was originally published on May 1. It has been updated to include the news that Pataki has announced his presidential campaign.
+
+The tall man in a blazer burst into the Chipotle in the middle of the afternoon. He had a smile, a TV camera following him and the jovial air of a man who expects to be recognized.
+
+“George Pataki, from New York,” he said, shaking hands with the first two diners he met. “We’re doing the non-Hillary tour. We’re actually saying ‘hi’ to people.”
+
+Then the tall man moved on, to quiz the next table about their food. (“Chicken burrito? I gotta try something new.”) When he was gone, the first two diners wondered: Who was that? Do they not have Chipotle where he lives?
+
+“It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m from New York,’ ” said Aaron Lee, 22. “What are you doing here, then?”
+
+Officially, what George E. Pataki was doing was flirting — for the fourth time in 16 years — with the idea of running for president of the United States.
+
+A few weeks ago, Pataki was in New Hampshire: raising money, and telling people that he was close, close, close to making a decision. “I’m strongly leaning toward making the run,” he told a radio station in New Hampshire.
+
+This happened three times before. Every other time Pataki flirted with running, he didn’t [On Thursday, the Republican ex-governor of New York announced that this time, he is actually is running].
+
+Spring is the flirting season in American politics: in the early part of this year, more than 20 politicians were officially “considering” or “exploring” a run for president. The key to understanding this strange every-four-years ritual is to understand that there are two kinds of flirting.
+
+For the big-name candidates, the presidential flirt is a useful, temporary, legal dodge. They will run. They are essentially running already. But they don’t want to admit it yet, because that would bring on tighter fundraising rules.
+
+For the others — particularly the eight or so who have fallen out of the political spotlight — the flirt can be an end in itself. It allows them to experience some of the most pleasant parts of a campaign: audiences, media attention, a chance to raise money. And then it lets them escape before they have to face the less-pleasant parts. Such as getting crushed.
+
+This time, apparently, Pataki is ready to take that risk.
+
+“I make a joke that every four years, there’s the Olympics, there’s the World Cup and I come to New Hampshire thinking about running for president,” Pataki told a crowd of 15 people during a speech at a Sea-Doo and snowmobile dealership in Laconia, N.H.
+
+Nobody laughed. Then Pataki said this election was different: “This time, in all honesty, I see things differently.”
+
+Pataki, 69, has already lived a remarkable political life. The son of a postman, he unseated liberal icon Mario Cuomo (D) in a 1994 governor’s race — one of New York’s legendary upsets. Pataki then won second and third terms by large margins. He led New York through the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the rebuilding of Ground Zero.
+
+But he has not held office since 2007. Since then, his political star has faded somewhat.
+
+“Who is Bloomberg?” a “Jeopardy!” contestant said in January while looking at a photo of Pataki.
+
+The category was “New York governors,” and the clue was “He took New York into the 21st century.”
+
+“No,” host Alex Trebek said. The other two contestants stared blankly at the same photo, without buzzing in, until time ran out.
+
+Another sign: There used to be a museum about Pataki in his hometown of Peekskill, N.Y. It opened after he left office, complete with an exhibit where schoolkids could see Pataki’s gubernatorial desk.
+
+Then, in 2013, it closed. Its leaders thought maybe more schoolkids would visit if it was a Web site.
+
+“Basically, it would be like a monkey flying out of a unicorn’s [posterior]” if Pataki won the 2016 Republican nomination, said Florida-based GOP strategist Rick Wilson. If Pataki got into the GOP primary, he would face obstacles that go far beyond his meager name recognition. He is pro-choice. He signed strict gun-control laws. He let state government spending grow rapidly.
+
+In recent polls, his best showing has been 1 percent.
+
+“Let’s just say a meteor strikes the first debate and kills everyone except Pataki, who is stuck in traffic. Let’s hypothesize for a moment,” Wilson said. He thought. No. It still wouldn’t be Pataki. They’d find somebody else.
+
+But despite those long odds, Pataki came to New Hampshire last month for his eighth flirting-related visit since September. He later made a ninth.
+
+“I know I can appeal — not just to Republicans and conservatives — but to independents and intelligent Democrats as well,” Pataki told an audience of eight College Republicans at the University of New Hampshire.
+
+This is the heart of Pataki’s pitch to voters. He’s a Republican who won big in a blue state. He’s a reformer who would tame Washington’s bureaucracy. “I go there today, and it’s like I’m on an alien planet,” Pataki said of Washington. “They are an insular world. They talk a language you don’t understand.”
+
+In New Hampshire, Pataki’s crowds were not big. At the official opening of his super PAC’s office in Manchester, for instance, 25 people turned up. And one of them turned out to be an incognito staffer for Donald Trump. Think about that. If this was an intentional act of flirter-against-flirter espionage (which the Trump staffer denied), it might be the most pointless dirty trick in the history of American politics.
+
+Nevertheless, wherever Pataki went, the crowds were pleasant and admiring.
+
+“Under a Pataki administration,” one man asked him at a diner, how would Middle East policy change?
+
+This is one of the things that makes flirting worthwhile: for an ex-politician, it is an unlocked door back into the American political arena.
+
+That can mean new audiences for men used to audiences. The same College Republicans, for instance, had recently hosted a 2016 flirter whose odds are even longer than Pataki’s: former Virginia governor James Gilmore III (R). Gilmore left office in 2002.
+
+“I mean, thank God for Wikipedia,” said UNH senior Elliot Gault, 22.
+
+And the same kind of magic works on the news media. Before former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee (D) announced he was exploring a presidential run on April 9, The Washington Post had not quoted him about anything in nine months.
+
+In the weeks after that, The Post quoted him eight times. Er, nine.
+
+“Clinton is just too hawkish,” Chafee said in an interview, repeating his signature attack line on the Democratic front-runner, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.
+
+The other great thing about flirting is the money. While you flirt, you can raise it. And if you don’t run, you can spend it anyway.
+
+In 1999, for instance, Pataki flirted with a campaign, then gave up and endorsed George W. Bush. In 2007, he did it again. “I was very serious about it” that time, Pataki says now. “But: Mayor Giuliani.” The former New York City mayor was in the race, and Pataki didn’t think there was room for two New Yorkers. So he got out.
+
+Both times, Pataki raised more than $1 million in donors’ money. Both times, the New York Times reported, Pataki spent it — giving to allied Republican candidates, paying for Pataki’s travels, and paying a circle of Pataki’s own advisers, strategists and fundraisers.
+
+“I was very serious about it,” Pataki says. “But everywhere I went, people had committed to Mitt Romney.” He pulled the plug but still raised and spent more than $600,000 via a political nonprofit.
+
+This year, Pataki is raising money again — for a super PAC called “We the People, Not Washington.” Among those leading the fundraising are several Pataki associates who got paid from the money he raised in past flirtations. Aides wouldn’t say how much he’d raised or spent this time.
+
+“Because he was my friend, I wouldn’t feel cheated [if Pataki didn’t run]. I’m never one to say that a guy should be a suicide lunatic,” said Peter Kalikow, a New York real estate titan who donated to Pataki’s super PAC this year. In the last presidential cycle, Kalikow was a major backer of another long shot: pizza executive Herman Cain.
+
+Pataki’s aides said they had a strategy ready if their man really got into the race. He’ll stand out in the debates with his genial wit and executive experience. Then he’ll surge in New Hampshire, by appealing to libertarian-leaning . . .
+
+Perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
+
+“When I heard the name, I was like, ‘Pataki. Pataki. Pataki.’ But I didn’t know that he was the mayor of New York,” Tony Coutee, 42, a crane operator who was at the second table Pataki visited in that Manchester Chipotle, said incorrectly. After Pataki left his table, Coutee said, “I Googled him and found out.”
+
+While the two of them were talking, Pataki was into a full-blown, campaign-style restaurant schmooze. He bumped elbows with the grill man. He walked back to greet employees in the walk-in cooler (“He just shook my hand and I said I didn’t want to be on camera, and he asked if I was on parole,” one said, bewildered.) Pataki went through the line and loudly asked if he could leave a tip.
+
+Then he came back and sat down with Coutee and Soto. “I’m trying the chicken burrito,” Pataki told them.
+
+The two men quickly got up to leave.
+
+“Kinda normal,” Soto said of this only-in-flirting-season interaction, a pseudo-conversation with a pseudo-candidate, who never said what he was running for. “But abnormal.”
+
+Anu Narayanswamy in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+8194,VIDEO : Hillary Worshipper Rachel Maddow IN TEARS Over Reopened FBI Investigation – TruthFeed,"VIDEO : Hillary Worshipper Rachel Maddow IN TEARS Over Reopened FBI Investigation VIDEO : Hillary Worshipper Rachel Maddow IN TEARS Over Reopened FBI Investigation LOL By TruthFeedNews October 29, 2016 
+MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow broke down into tears live on the air while reporting on the FBI reopening their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails after finding new evidence on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. 
+Media analyst Mark Dice has the story. 
+Watch the video: 
+Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+2617,Netanyahu scores stunning victory – but at what cost? (+video),"The Israeli leader may be able to form a more stable government than his last, but he had to run hard to the right in the campaign and reverse his stance supporting a Palestinian state.
+
+Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greets supporters at the party's election headquarters in Tel Aviv, Wednesday, March 18, 2015. Netanyahu's ruling Likud Party scored a resounding victory in the country's election, final results showed Wednesday, a stunning turnaround after a tight race that had put his lengthy rule in jeopardy.
+
+Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 11th-hour campaign decision to swerve deep into right-wing territory – reversing his support for a Palestinian state and urging supporters to counter “droves” of Arab voters – has paid off in a stunning victory.
+
+His Likud party, trailing its leftist opponents in the final polls, not only closed the gap but surged to a six-seat victory over the Zionist Camp’s 24 seats in national elections Tuesday, according to a near-complete tally Wednesday morning.
+
+The clear margin will almost certainly give Mr. Netanyahu a fourth term as prime minister. And while President Reuven Rivlin called Tuesday night for the two top parties to form a national unity government, both rejected the idea.
+
+Netanyahu now looks much better positioned to build a right-wing nationalist government that would allow him to govern unfettered by the wide ideological differences that doomed his previous coalition.
+
+“Dear friends, against all odds, we got a great victory for the Likud party,” he said in a jubilant election night speech at Likud headquarters in Tel Aviv, to chants of “Bibi! Bibi! Bibi!”
+
+The fiercely fought campaign, which just days before the election seemed headed toward a major political upheaval, was in many ways a referendum on Netanyahu. The two main campaign slogans were, “Only Netanyahu” and “Just not Netanyahu.”
+
+With turnout increasing to 68.4 percent, and nearly a quarter of the votes cast for Likud, the voters’ answer was clear. But the political and social cost – never mind the $60 million price-tag of holding elections – remains to be seen. Once the confetti settles, and Netanyahu turns to the task of actually trying to rule a deeply fractured country besieged by enemies, he will be facing many of the same challenges – but with few fresh ideas, and perhaps fewer friends.
+
+“I was very disappointed with the fact that there was no real discussion about the issues,” Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein of the Likud party told reporters Tuesday night in Tel Aviv. “It was probably one of the lowest campaigns we had, and we wasted the opportunity as a country and a society, because when exactly are we going to discuss the real issues if not during an election campaign?”
+
+Netanyahu called early elections last fall after firing two of his coalition partners, Finance Minister Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni of the Hatnua party. He argued that he couldn’t govern effectively with such an ideological gap. One of the divisive issues was the coalition parties' opposition to a bill that would have formally identified Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, a move some saw as undermining its democratic nature and marginalizing the country’s 20 percent Arab population.
+
+At the time, another Netanyahu victory seemed a pretty sure bet. But Ms. Livni’s decision to partner with the Labor party’s Isaac Herzog gave the prime minister a run for his money, attracting voters with their more moderate position on Palestinians as well as their commitment to socioeconomic issues. As of the final polls last Friday, they were projected to win by three to four seats.
+
+So Netanyahu, widely recognized even by his foes as a shrewd politician, abruptly switched tack. After weeks of promoting himself as the only leader who could protect Israel against Iran, Hamas, and the Islamic State, he started talking about the things that were hurting Likud’s traditional blue-collar base – the skyrocketing cost of housing and groceries. He vowed to appoint as finance minister Moshe Kahlon of the Kulanu party, a former Likudnik from a humble background whose monopoly-busting policies reduced charges for cellphone plans by 90 percent.
+
+Netanyahu also openly cannibalized votes from estranged right-wing allies like Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party and Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beitenu. A day before the vote, he declared that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch, reneging on a 2009 pledge of support for the two-state solution to the Middle East conflict.
+
+That puts him on a collision course with the Obama administration, which is already fuming over his bombastic speech to Congress two weeks ago in which he criticized a potential Iran nuclear deal. But the reversal appears to have played well with his base.
+
+As early indications Tuesday showed an uptick in Israeli Arab voter turnout, Netanyahu warned his supporters that “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls,” putting a right-wing government in danger if they didn’t get out of their homes and vote.
+
+When exit polls came in Tuesday night, it was clear that his tactics had paid off. All three Israeli TV news channels showed him pulling even with the Zionist Camp led by Mr. Herzog and Ms. Livni, with each party getting 27 of the Knesset’s 120 seats and one poll putting Likud at 28.
+
+But only Wednesday morning was the full picture clear. With 99 percent of the votes counted, Likud is projected to get 30 seats to the Zionist Camp’s 24. Its victory came at the expense of estranged Netanyahu allies. Mr. Bennett, a rising star in the last elections, had to settle for eight seats; Mr. Lieberman was relegated to a record-low of six. Mr. Lapid of Yesh Atid, who as a rookie in 2013 captured 19 seats, also suffered and was downsized to 11.
+
+“We had an atmosphere of a neck-and-neck race, and when you have such an atmosphere we know that … first of all you increase the turnout,” says Abraham Diskin, a political scientist and former statistician for the Central Elections Committee. “Second, the two really leading parties are gaining power from the satellite parties, and that … really happened here.”
+
+The two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, got seven and six, respectively, and could well become coalition partners for Netanyahu. He is also courting Mr. Kahlon, whose Kulanu party secured a solid 10 seats.
+
+The Joint List, a bloc of Arab parties, made history by becoming the third-largest bloc for the first time, with 14 seats, while the left-wing Meretz party barely squeaked into the Knesset with four.
+
+Prof. Avi Degani, a pollster and president of the Geocartography Knowledge Group, told reporters Wednesday morning that the unexpected surge from Likud was due in part to inaccurate polling that may have galvanized long-time Likud supporters who were on the fence.
+
+“People who supported Likud got scared…. They say, I leave my fear and my inability to decide and I’m going to save the right and the Likud.”
+
+That certainly describes voters like Ran Ohayon, who was considering abandoning Likud but changed his mind on the eve of elections.
+
+“There’s a serious threat,” he said, sipping a foamy coffee outside a trendy Tel Aviv café on Tuesday. “We haven’t been in this situation since the [1973 Yom] Kippur War.”
+
+“There’s a lot of people thinking like me, and you will see that in the election,” he said.
+
+And he was right.",REAL
+2601,Netanyahu blasts Obama's Iran nuclear deal,"Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took his protest of the Iran nuclear agreement to the U.S. airwaves on Sunday.
+
+""This deal will both threaten us and threaten our neighbors,"" Netanyahu said on CNN's State of the Union.
+
+Netanyahu, who also appeared on NBC's Meet The Press and ABC's This Week, said the proposal will leave Iran's nuclear infrastructure in place.
+
+The Israeli leader spoke days after the U.S., allies and Iran reached the framework of an agreement in which the allies would reduce sanctions on Iran if it gives up the means to make nuclear weapons.
+
+The parties will now try to work out the details of a final agreement, with a deadline of June 30.
+
+President Obama and aides said diplomacy is the only alternative to military action against Iran's nuclear program.
+
+In his weekend radio address, Obama said the agreement would deny Iran the plutonium and enriched uranium needed to build a nuclear weapon.
+
+""Moreover,"" Obama said, ""international inspectors will have unprecedented access to Iran's nuclear program because Iran will face more inspections than any other country in the world, If Iran cheats, the world will know it.""
+
+In his television appearances, Netanyahu said the United States and its allies should intensify economic sanctions on Iran in order to force it to give up more of its nuclear program. He also questioned the effectiveness of inspections, saying Iran has cheated in the past.
+
+""I'm not trying to kill any deal,"" Netanyahu said on NBC. ""I'm trying to kill a bad deal.""
+
+Netanyahu also said the framework will lift sanctions on Iran too quickly, improving its economy. He told ABC that Iranian leaders will use the new money ""to pump up their terror machine worldwide.""
+
+Iran, meanwhile, says its nuclear program is designed for peaceful energy purposes, not weapons.
+
+In his radio address, Obama said he is looking forward to the debate with critics over Iran.
+
+""As president and commander in chief, I firmly believe that the diplomatic option — a comprehensive, long-term deal like this — is by far the best option,"" Obama said. ""For the United States. For our allies. And for the world.""",REAL
+9449,Will Carlos Danger Cut a Deal? - Russia News Now,"This post was originally published on this site 
+The criminal investigation underway over Anthony Weiner’s alleged child sex infraction has a couple of characteristics that make it especially awkward for Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, the estranged wife of Weiner and close companion of Hillary. 
+Ed Timperlake points out to me that in an underage sex investigation, all electronic communications of the investigative target are pursued. This probably led to the grand jury that was announced 11 days ago issuing a subpoena for all of the devices in the possession of Weiner and his family, including Huma. As Lucianne Goldberg quipped, they even seize the Speak & Spell toys in these cases. This grand jury is in New York, possibly less politically supervised than the first Hillary email investigation. 
+Evidently, some of these devices were not turned over in the first investigation and contained “pertinent” emails. We do not know with certainty, but some reports indicate the pertinent emails may have been found on Weiner’s laptop. Recall that the initial investigation did not convene a grand jury and did not, therefore, have subpoena power. It is possible that Huma Abedin misled the FBI over the existence of pertinent emails on her then husband’s computing devices. 
+So what could have been on the laptop Carlos Danger used for sexting? 
+Adam Yoshida, with a background in information technology consulting for affluent and powerful people emails: 
+…Clinton [was] using e-mails seemingly like most people use IMs or text messaging. Her holding onto Blackberries (and seven switching back to older models when the software was upgraded) [demonstrates this]. It might even explain at least SOME of the motivation for the e-mail server itself. I’ve seen plenty of cases where a powerful person says basically, “I want my e-mails on this thing” and, regardless of whether it’s a good solution, people respond, “ready-aye-ready.” 
+So, what could they have found on Weiner’s computers that would have caused such alarm? 
+I’d think one of two things: 
+1) Either that Huma signed in her e-mail account at one point and, presumably, it being Exchange or IMAP, dumped the whole account onto the computer and that account has plenty of e-mails between her and Clinton that were deleted. 
+Or – 
+2) There’s mention of Huma having a Yahoo account to which she would forward things for printing purposes. This struck me right away because, of course, printers are often difficult to configure as are e-mail accounts. It struck me as strange, yet very believable, that she mentioned that she’d forward stuff to that Yahoo account to print them. I mean, printing in theory should be platform agnostic, but – if you’re technically unsophisticated – you might have serious problems trying to setup an e-mail account or a printer on a device. Thus I imagine a scenario where she has a portable machine that either she can’t (or can’t be, for some reason) configured to use her home printer and a desktop machine (I imagine an slightly-older iMac here) that’s physically connected to the printer that serves as a shared “family computer” or whatever. She either can’t setup the e-mail account on that computer (perhaps it requires a VPN or something like that) or doesn’t want to, so she forwards everything that she wants to print to the Yahoo account that she does have setup on that computer. The FBI takes this computer as part of the Weiner investigation and, bam, they find thousands of e-mail messages – again, evidence of what was destroyed earlier. ",FAKE
+8717,Three local military veterans to receive recognition,"  Three local military veterans to receive recognition   31, 2016 veterans 
+BY STEVEN MAYER 
+Three military veterans from Bakersfield will be among more than 100 honored Sunday at an event in Sacramento designed to recognize former soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen who now serve the needs of veterans in their own communities. 
+David L. Jackson, Deborah K. Johnson and Wayne Wright — each of whom work in veteran assistance or support capacities in Bakersfield — will be honored at the sixth annual “Spirit of Veterans Day — Saluting Community Service Excellence” Ceremony. 
+Held at the B.T. Collins Army Reserve Center, the annual gala was established in 2011 by what is now the VFW Auxilliary, Post 67 with the assistance of Rep. Doris O. Matsui, D-Sacramento. 
+  www.bakersfield.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The   31,    ",FAKE
+4579,The ultimate triumph: President Trump,"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump will become the 45th president of the United States, CNN projects, a historic victory for outsiders that represents a stunning repudiation of Washington's political establishment.
+
+The billionaire real estate magnate and former reality star needed an almost perfect run through the swing states -- and he got it, winning Ohio, North Carolina and Florida.
+
+The Republican swept to victory over Hillary Clinton in the ultimate triumph for a campaign that repeatedly shattered the conventions of politics to pull off a remarkable upset. Clinton conceded to Trump in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
+
+Speaking at a victory party in New York, Trump was gracious toward Clinton and called for unity.
+
+""We owe (Clinton) a very major debt of gratitude to her for her service to our country,"" Trump said. ""I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.""
+
+He added: ""I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans.""
+
+Trump won with 289 electoral votes compared to 218 for Clinton, according to CNN projections.
+
+Trump's supporters embraced his plainspoken style, assault on political correctness and vow to crush what he portrayed in the final days of his campaign as a corrupt, globalized elite -- epitomized by the Clintons -- that he claimed conspired to keep hard-working Americans down.
+
+His winning coalition of largely white, working-class voters suggests a populace desperate for change and disillusioned with an entire generation of political leaders and the economic and political system itself.
+
+Now, Trump faces the task of uniting a nation traumatized by the ugliest campaign in modern history and ripped apart by political divides exacerbated by his own explosive rhetoric -- often along the most tender national fault lines such as race and gender.
+
+Trump is sure to follow his own playbook
+
+Trump will be the first president to enter the White House with no political, diplomatic or military executive experience. His victory will send shockwaves around the world, given his sparse foreign policy knowledge, haziness over nuclear doctrine, vow to curtail Muslim immigration and disdain for US alliances that have been the bedrock of the post-World War II foreign policy.
+
+His promises to renegotiate or dump trade deals such as NAFTA and to brand China a currency manipulator risk triggering immediate economic shocks around the globe.
+
+Trump, 70, will be the oldest president ever sworn in for a first term and will take the helm of a nation left deeply divided by his scorched-earth campaign. His victory was built on fierce anger at the Washington establishment and political elites among his grass-roots voters, many of whom feel they are the victims of a globalized economy that has resulted in the loss of millions of jobs.
+
+His victory ends Clinton's crusade to become the first woman to ever rise to the nation's highest office. It's a humiliating chapter in the long political career of Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
+
+Trump's win also deals a painful rebuke to President Barack Obama, whom he pursued for years with his birtherism campaign built on the false premise that Obama was born outside the United States. Now Trump will have the power to eviscerate Obama's political legacy -- including the Affordable Care Act, the latter's proudest domestic achievement.
+
+But there are deeper, more fundamental questions about Trump's presidency that will be key to his capacity to unify a deeply divided country and appeal to Americans who will feel outraged and disgusted by his victory.
+
+He's got the attention of the whole world
+
+Trump's campaign was built on rage, falsehoods and singling out culprits for the ills of modern America, including undocumented migrants, foreign nations such as China and Muslim immigrants.
+
+He mocked a disabled New York Times reporter, vowed to use the power of the presidency to put Clinton in jail and pledged to sue women who accused him of sexual assault.
+
+Trump has promised to build a wall on the southern border and make Mexico pay for it, and to deport undocumented migrants. He has vowed to reintroduce interrogation methods for terror suspects that are more extreme than waterboarding.
+
+So the demeanor that Trump will adopt as president and the manner in which he will behave will be closely watched -- not just in the United States, but among nervous leaders abroad.
+
+One of the many uncertainties about Trump's coming presidency is how his White House will interact with Republicans in Congress — and whether he and GOP leaders will heal their rift from the campaign.
+
+Republicans repelled a Democratic bid to recapture the Senate, giving the GOP control over Capitol Hill and the White House.
+
+That means it would fall to the GOP either to rubber stamp policies likely to mark a break from conservative orthodoxy or to provide a check on the power of Trump, who has shown every sign he will use executive power aggressively.
+
+House Speaker Paul Ryan will face intense pressure from pro-Trump members of his own coalition to cooperate with the new president.
+
+Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are likely to hold Trump's feet to the fire to ensure he lives up to his promise to appoint justices who could ensure a generational conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
+
+Clinton apparently failed to reassemble the diverse coalition that helped Obama win the presidency in 2008 and 2012.
+
+The events of Clinton's terrible final week on the campaign -- the revival of her email controversy by FBI Chief James Comey and a damaging drip, drip, drip of revelations by WikiLeaks which her campaign says was orchestrated by Russian intelligence -- could have helped consign her to defeat.
+
+There also is the question of Trump's temperament. Clinton repeatedly warned that he was unfit to control the nuclear codes because he could be baited with a tweet.
+
+Obama passionately denounced Trump as intellectually and temperamentally unfit to succeed him in the Oval Office.
+
+But now, he will be forced to greet his successor on the morning of Inauguration Day in January, and look on while he is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.",REAL
+9501,Pope Francis Commemorates 500th Anniversary Of Protestant Reformation,"November 1, 2016 Pope Francis Commemorates 500th Anniversary Of Protestant Reformation 
+Pope Francis is in Sweden to kick off the commemoration of 500 years since the Protestant Reformation. The reformation started in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the church door to denounce what he saw as abuses by the Catholic Church. 
+Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,",FAKE
+6007,US Claims Four Arms Ships From Iran to Yemen Caught in Past 18 Months,"Share This 
+Vice Admiral Kevin Donegan today claimed the US and other members of the Saudi-led naval blockade of Yemen had captured four ships with arms which they are claiming both came from Iran and were bound for Yemen, where they would’ve delivered the weapons to the Houthi movement. 
+The vice admiral claimed the US “knows” both where the ships came from and where they were going because they interviewed the crews of the captured ships. Only one of the four putative weapons ships was validated by the United Nations as being an actual smuggling attempt. 
+Donegan went on to claim that he believes Iran is “connected in some way” to recent incidents of missiles fired at a US ship off the Yemeni coast, though the Pentagon conceded one of those incidents likely never happened, and he offered no evidence of Iranian involvement in anything else. 
+The allegations were likely made by way of justifying US attacks on the Yemeni coast, as well as justifying Saudi Arabia’s ongoing naval blockade of Yemen, which Saudi Arabia recently denied is happening.  ",FAKE
+8132,WHO Cancer Agency Under Fire for withholding ‘carcinogenic glyphosate’ Documents,"WHO Cancer Agency Under Fire for withholding ‘carcinogenic glyphosate’ Documents IARC urged its scientists not to publish research documents on its 2015 weedkiller glyphosate review RT.com - October 27, 2016 Comments 
+The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), facing criticism over its classification of carcinogens, has reportedly been advising its scientific experts not to publish internal research data on its 2015 report on “probably carcinogenic” glyphosate. 
+The IARC urged its scientists not to publish research documents on its 2015 weedkiller glyphosate review, according to Reuters. The agency told Reuters on Tuesday that it tried to protect the study from “external interference,” as well as protect its intellectual rights, since it was “the sole owner of such materials.” 
+The scientists had been asked earlier to release all the documentation on the 2015 report under US freedom of information laws. 
+The groundbreaking review, published in March 2015 by the IARC – a semi-autonomous agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) – labeled the glyphosate herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Glyphosate is a key ingredient of Monsanto’s flagship weedkiller well-known under the trade name ‘Roundup.’ It is one of the most heavily used herbicides in the world and is designed to go along with genetically-modified “Roundup Ready” crops, also produced by Monsanto. 
+The IARC’s report caused problems for both the notorious agrochemical giant and the agency itself. 
+The report sparked a heated debate around the use of Roundup, and caused several EU countries – including France, Sweden, and the Netherlands – to object to the renewal of the glyphosate’s EU license. The vote on prolonging the glyphosate license for 15 years failed several times in June 2016, but the license was temporarily extended for 18 months during last hours before its expiration. 
+The controversial report has seemingly made the IARC a target for attacks from multiple directions, and raised scientific, legal, and financial questions. 
+Various critics, including those in the chemical industry, said the IARC’s evaluations are fuel for “unnecessary health scares,” since the IARC allegedly studies the potentially harmful substance itself, and not a “typical human” exposure to it. It remained unclear whether the critics urged a WHO body to test the potentially carcinogenic chemical on humans. 
+The critics also brought up other controversial statements from the IARC, over whether such things as mobile phones, coffee, red meat, and processed meat could cause cancer. 
+The agency defended its methods as scientifically sound and “widely respected for their scientific rigor, standardized and transparent process and…freedom from conflicts of interest.” Numerous freedom of information requests by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), a US conservative advocacy group, have since been turned down with this reasoning. 
+E&E Legal told Reuters that it is pushing a legal challenge over whether the documents in question belong to the IARC or to the US federal and state institutions where some of the experts work. Basically, it’s being decided whether the IARC, as part of the WHO, is truly independent and free from “conflicts of interest.” 
+According to Reuters, officials from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be questioned by a congressional committee about why American taxpayers fund the cancer agency, which faces much criticism over its allegedly faulty classification of carcinogens. 
+“IARC’s standards and determinations for classifying substances as carcinogenic, and therefore cancer-causing, appear inconsistent with other scientific research, and have generated much controversy and alarm,” a letter from US Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz to NIH director Francis Collins states, as quoted by Reuters. 
+The Oversight Committee demanded a full disclosure of NIH funding of the IARC, and even money spent in relation to the cancer agency’s activities. 
+IARC opponents from scientific circles vowed to provide their data on the matter. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which believes glyphosate is “unlikely pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans,” promised to release its raw data on the subject as part of its “commitment to open risk assessment.” The food safety watchdog made this statement in late September, and still has to deliver the promised information. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+7207,"Donald Trump to leave America for a younger, sexier country","Thursday 10 November 2016 by Davywavy Donald Trump to leave America for a younger, sexier country 
+President-elect Donald Trump has already got a much younger, sexier county lined up to replace America in his affections. 
+Concerns have already been raised after Trump demanded America enter into a pre-nup before he takes the oath of office. 
+Trump, who has already been accused of screwing Mexico when he thinks he can get away with it, defended his roving eye by saying that ‘any President’ would check out hot, available countries and there was nothing wrong with it. 
+Trump’s penchant for ‘exotic’ foreign names is well recorded, and the people of Brunei Darussalam are already concerned after he commented on ‘getting his tongue around their name’. 
+Meanwhile, members of NATO and the UN have been told to ‘put out or get out’ in what is being interpreted as a direct demand for favours. 
+“Look, if Puerto Rico weren’t a protectorate, I’d already be all over them. If I weren’t already their president and, you know, Is that terrible? Is it?”, he told reporters. 
+“And the Russian Republic. Daughter of the Soviet Union, sure, but they’re only 23 years old. And they’re big, voluptuous, you might say. That’s pretty sexy, am I right? 
+“I wonder if they’ve got a, you know, opening I might fill.” 
+North Korea, who are into uniforms and BDSM, have already signalled their willingness to enter into an affair with the President no matter what the consequences for him at home. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+7121,Markets collapse as Donald Trump is projected to win,"Markets collapse as Donald Trump is projected to win 09.11.2016 | Source: Pravda.Ru International stock indexes have declined against the backdrop of the news about Donald Trump's leadership in electoral votes in the US presidential election. Investors were counting on Hillary Clinton's victory. World stocks indices collapsed on Tuesday, 8 November, as Donald Trump is expected to win the battle and take office as the next President of the United States. Earlier, The New York Times has changed its forecast for Trump's victory from 80 to 95 percent. The futures on major US stock indices fell in the range of 3-4%, OTC trading data showed. Dow Jones fell by 3.5% (650 points), S&P 500 - by 4,26%, NASDAQ - by 4.1%. Japan's Nikkei 225 fell by 3.98% (to 682.88 points) China's Shanghai Composite dropped by 1.32% (to 41.66 points), the index of Chinese ""blue chips"" CSI300 - by 1.18% (39.65 points), the Hong Kong Hang Seng - by 2.85% (646.73 points). South Korea's KOSPI dropped by 2.43% (48.64 points). Australian ASX200 - by 1.64% (86.29 points). Donald Trump's projected victory in the US presidential election has led to the fall of the US dollar against other major currencies. The dollar has weakened against the Japanese yen by 3.46% and by 2.2% against the euro ($1.1265). The price of Brent crude oil fell to $ 44.5 per barrel. Futures for Brent fell by 3.75% and are currently trading at 43.9. The price of US Treasuries shows a positive dynamics, while gold futures have grown by 4%. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+3258,Many Opt to Take Social Security Before Full Retirement Age,"Taking Social Security benefits early comes with a price, yet more than 4 in 10 Americans who are 50 and over say they'll dip into the program before reaching full retirement age.
+
+An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 44 percent report Social Security will be their biggest source of income during their retirement years.
+
+Full benefits begin at 65 or 66 for those born between 1943 and 1954. Americans can begin collecting as early as age 62, but with benefits reduced by up to 30 percent, according to the Social Security Administration.
+
+""One thing we know for certain is that claiming early can have long-term repercussions on your fiscal security as you age,"" said Gary Koenig, vice president of Financial security at the AARP Public Policy Institute.
+
+Koenig said benefits increase significantly for those who wait, rising around 8 percent more for each additional year past age 66 and up to 70, when benefits max out.
+
+""So we encourage people to delay as long as possible,"" he said.
+
+But waiting is a luxury many Americans don't have.
+
+Ken Chrzastek of Chicago began drawing Social Security benefits at age 62 and pulled $50,000 out of an IRA after losing a retail job two years ago. He has been unable to find even part-time work. ""Hiring a 62-year-old is a liability for a company,"" he said.
+
+The poll found that Americans 50 and over have multiple sources of income for retirement but that Social Security is the most common by far. Eighty-six percent say they have or will have Social Security income. More than half had a retirement account such as a 401(k), 403(b), or an IRA. Slightly less had other savings. About 43 percent had a traditional pension.
+
+The average age at which people expect to start or have started collecting Social Security benefits is 64. Just 9 percent said they would wait until after they turned 70.
+
+While the retirement age has been rising in recent years, particularly for women, the average American still retires relatively early, at age 64 for men and age 62 for women, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
+
+Charles Jeszeck, director of education, workforce and income security for the Government Accountability Office, said there is no one right answer to when people should take Social Security, especially since increases in life expectancy are not spread out evenly between the rich and poor, or between ethnic groups.
+
+Included in any discussion about Social Security are lingering questions about its solvency.
+
+The Social Security trust fund has been running a surplus every year since 1984. Those surpluses are forecast to stop sometime around 2020, as more boomers start claiming benefits.
+
+The Social Security Administration says interest income from the fund should be able to bridge this gap until 2034. At that point, without changes, payments could shrink but not disappear.
+
+Gary Burtless, a Brookings Institution economist, said that people taking benefits early — or late — should have no impact on the trust fund. ""It costs the government roughly the same amount,"" he said.
+
+Among the presidential candidates, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have called for an expansion of Social Security. Donald Trump said during a debate in March, ""It's my absolute intention to leave Social Security the way it is.""
+
+Many Americans worry that they won't have enough to live on once they stop working, the poll said.
+
+Among those with incomes under $50,000, 58 percent say they feel more anxious than secure about the amount of savings they have for retirement. People with higher incomes appear less anxious, but still 40 percent of those with incomes of $100,000 or more worry whether their savings will be sufficient.
+
+Alison Cowen, 57, said she doesn't see any path for her to retire_ever. ""Not unless a miracle happens,"" she laughed sarcastically. ""I just don't have enough to live on for the rest of my life.""
+
+The poll said a quarter of workers over 50 say they never plan to retire, a sentiment more common among lower-income workers.
+
+Cowen, a saleswoman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, said she didn't save that much when she was younger, and a messy divorce 10 years ago meant she had to start over. ""I've got $20,000 in the bank, but I would need to figure out a way increase that substantially before I could ever think of retiring,"" she said.
+
+The AP-NORC Center survey was conducted March 8-27 by NORC at the University of Chicago, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It involved online and telephone interviews with 1,075 people aged 50 and older nationwide, most of whom are members of NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak panel. Results from the full survey have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.",REAL
+5912,"Walling them out, or walling us in?","Walling them out, or walling us in? Shall we wall off Canada, too? By Jim Hightower Posted on November 3, 2016 by Jim Hightower 
+Evading security cameras in the remote expanse along the U.S. border, three Guatemalans waited till dusk to slip illicitly into our country. 
+This is the stuff of Donald Trump nightmares—and if he were to witness such a scene, we can only imagine the furious rants that would follow. 
+But Trump will never see this scene or even know about it, because he’s facing south, fulminating against Mexicans and assuring his faithful followers that he’ll stop illegal entry into the U.S. by building a “ beautiful, impenetrable wall ” across our 2,000-mile border with Mexico. 
+Meanwhile, the scene described took place way up north, where rural Vermont connects to Canada. As the New York Times recently reported , “This area is a haven for smugglers and cross-border criminal organizations.” 
+With so many of our nation’s political and security officials obsessed with the southern border, more and more criminal action—including the smuggling of people, drugs, and weapons—has plagued our 5,500-mile Canadian border, the longest in the world between two countries. 
+Running from the Atlantic to the Pacific through sparsely populated and heavily wooded terrain, there’s often no clear demarcation of where Canada ends and the U.S. begins. Some farms, homes, and businesses actually sprawl across the border. 
+Only about 2,000 agents patrol this vast stretch, and officials concede they don’t even have a good guess of how many people and how much contraband is coming across, or where. 
+So, the question for Mr. Trump is: Shall we wall off Canada, too? And how much of our public treasury, democratic idealism, and international goodwill shall we dump into the folly of militarizing both borders? 
+By simply thinking we can wall the world out, we’ll be walling ourselves in—and that’s suicidal. 
+OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown . Distributed by OtherWords.or g . Commentary . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
+6714,Is your promising internet career over now Vine is dead? Write for NewsBiscuit to cheer yourself up, ,FAKE
+777,Trump's women problem,"(CNN) The thing about women, Donald J. Trump once wrote, is that they ""have one of the great acts of all time.""
+
+""The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers,"" he continued. ""The person who came up with the expression 'the weaker sex' was either very naïve or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye -- or perhaps another body part.""
+
+The provocative passage, along with several others, is contained in a chapter devoted to women in Trump's 1997 book, ""The Art of the Comeback.""
+
+His words on women have newfound relevance in 2016 as Trump's enigmatic relationship with the opposite sex is front and center in his campaign for President.
+
+The comments play on potential vulnerabilities for his likely general election opponent -- but they also highlight Trump's own significant hurdles with female voters as he tries to win their votes in November.
+
+He went on to connect Clinton with her husband's marital indiscretions.
+
+In a testy exchange, he told Cuomo he raised the issue as retribution for Clinton ""playing the woman's card to the hilt"" in the campaign.
+
+Trump raised that notion last week during his victory speech in New York, suggesting her appeal to female voters, based solely on gender, was her only asset.
+
+""She's got nothing else going on,"" he said.
+
+The intense scrutiny of the campaign has also renewed interest in Trump's crude banter about his sexual conquests and desires on Howard Stern's radio show.
+
+His controversial remarks then and during the 2016 campaign have taken a toll on his image among female voters.
+
+The women standing by him
+
+But for all the women who have voiced their collective disapproval in polling numbers, those closest to the billionaire businessman insist he's a model husband and father -- supportive, nurturing, and empowering.
+
+Some women who have worked for Trump offer a similar assessment: Despite his controversial public comments, he is a giving and inspirational boss, they say, and treats female employees no differently than their male counterparts.
+
+Still, it is difficult to paint a full portrait of Trump's dealings with women, because many who have worked with him over the years have no interest in talking publicly about a candidate who has shown no hesitation in striking back at his critics.
+
+A number of Trump's former female colleagues contacted by CNN did not return calls. Some refused to talk on the record. One prominent former Trump colleague hung up abruptly on a reporter, explaining that she had no interest in being hounded by the press.
+
+Hence, the lingering question: What's the deal with Donald Trump and women?
+
+The perception that Trump has a problem with females stems, in part, from high-profile clashes over the years in which he's called them names and ridiculed their appearance.
+
+Trump has said he loves women, finds them beautiful, and is not a sexist.
+
+Twice divorced by the time the book was published, Trump's views on women were shaped by what he saw as the aggressive behavior of females around him.
+
+He wrote of a married socialite who propositioned him on a ballroom dance floor as her husband looked on and about a bride-to-be ""jumping on top of me wanting to get screwed"" in his limousine a week before she was due to be married.
+
+""The level of aggression was unbelievable,"" he wrote of the dance floor incident. ""This is not infrequent, it happens all the time.""
+
+""Their sex drive makes us look like babies,"" he wrote of women at another point in the same book.
+
+Living up to his mother
+
+Trump opened the chapter on women by writing that part of ""the problem"" he has with them is ""having to compare them to my incredible mother, Mary Trump.""
+
+He recalled his mom as ""smart as hell"" and as ""a really great homemaker and wife to my father.""
+
+He came to see his mother's supporting role as a model not just for his own situation, but for any man who wants to succeed.
+
+""For a man to be successful he needs support at home, just like my father had from my mother, not someone who is always griping and bitching,"" he wrote. ""When a man has to endure a woman who is not supportive and complains constantly about his not being home enough or not being attentive enough, he will not be very successful unless he is able to cut the cord.""
+
+The passage did not explore the possibility of a woman as the family's primary wage-earner.
+
+Trump wrote that his ""big mistake"" with his first wife, Ivana, was ""taking her out of the role of wife and allowing her to run one of my casinos in Atlantic City, then the Plaza hotel.""
+
+She did an excellent job at both, he wrote, but once she took on those roles ""work was all she wanted to talk about.""
+
+""I will never again give a wife responsibility within my business,"" Trump wrote. ""Ivana worked very hard, and I appreciate the effort, but I soon began to realize that I was married to a business person rather than a wife.""
+
+On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump has said his wife, Melania, would make a great first lady.
+
+Melania Trump, a former model who has designed her own jewelry line for QVC, has emerged as an important advocate for her husband, driving the argument that he treats everyone equally.
+
+She has spoken about the importance of her career, but described herself in an interview with Parenting Magazine as a ""full-time mom"" to her son Barron. ""That is my first job.""
+
+Melania has tried to explain the paradox of Trump and women by saying that when her husband is attacked, ""He will attack back, no matter who you are.""
+
+""He encourages everybody, if you're a man or a woman,"" she said during an April 12 Trump family CNN town hall.
+
+His daughter Ivanka, a successful businesswoman in her own right, said during the CNN town hall that he taught her that there ""wasn't anything that I couldn't do if I set my mind to it."" She also praised him for hiring ""incredible female role models"" in ""the highest executive positions at the Trump organization.""
+
+But Trump has repeatedly stumbled into controversy with his asides about women over the past year, and his approval numbers among women have spiraled downward.
+
+The Republican Party was already facing a deficit among women voters. In 2012, Barack Obama led Mitt Romney among female voters by about 11 points -- with a particularly steep deficit among single women. (Romney beat Obama by 7 points among married women, who have generally viewed the GOP more favorably).
+
+In a March Quinnipiac University poll, 60% of women said they would not vote for Trump in a general election -- a reflection of his poor approval ratings among women in a wide variety of national polls.
+
+His campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, predicted Trump's image among women would improve as the campaign progressed. His aides have pointed out that he trounced his rivals among Republican women in recent GOP primaries, including Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut (though that is hardly a good measure of how he would fare in a general election).
+
+""Donald Trump's numbers are going to be strong with women because they want the same thing that everybody else wants,"" Lewandowski said in a telephone interview.
+
+""They don't vote based on gender. They vote on competency -- and that competency includes making sure that the nation is secure, which Donald Trump has pledged he will do, making sure we don't have illegal immigrants pouring across the border, and making sure individuals have opportunities for jobs.
+
+""Those are the things that cut across socio-economic status, they cut across gender, they cut across race.""
+
+Beyond focusing on those broad themes, however, Trump has done little to try to shore up his weaknesses among women voters.
+
+His various stumbles haven't helped. He angered both abortion-rights supporters and opponents, for example, when he said during an MSNBC town hall that women who have abortions should be punished if the procedure is outlawed—and then quickly reversed himself.
+
+His personal critiques of women's looks on the campaign trail have been pointed.
+
+When an anti-Trump super PAC cut an ad that used a revealing photo of Melania from her days as a super model, Trump blamed Cruz. ""Be Careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife,"" he tweeted.
+
+He offended some female voters when he re-tweeted an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz, a Goldman Sachs executive, next to Melania. ""A picture is worth a thousand words,"" the caption said.
+
+Angered by the tweets, Cruz warned his then-adversary to ""leave Heidi the hell alone,"" and told reporters: ""Strong women scare Donald.""
+
+Trump insisted the press stirred up the controversy. ""The media is so after me on women,"" the real estate magnate tweeted on March 26. ""Wow, this is a tough business. Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump.""
+
+But female voters seem increasingly skeptical as Trump prepares to take on Hillary Clinton, who is running to be the first female president.
+
+Some women who have worked for Trump say they find it difficult to reconcile some of his statements and written opinions with the way he treated them.
+
+Jill Cremer worked as a vice president overseeing real estate development at the Trump Organization for a decade beginning in 1998.
+
+She said it was a hard decision to leave, and she only learned after working elsewhere just how good she'd had it.
+
+""He was a fantastic employer,"" said Cremer, still a real-estate executive in Manhattan. ""I don't have one bad thing to say about him.""
+
+She said Trump ran the office as a meritocracy and was refreshingly unconcerned about educational pedigrees.
+
+Though she went to work for Trump at the relatively young age of 30, she said he put her on projects that challenged her and forced her to grow.
+
+""He'd say, `I believe in you. I'm gonna give you this -- now go run with it,"" Cremer recalled.
+
+""And I did it,"" she said.
+
+Cremer said Trump has made some cringe-worthy public comments involving women over the years, but she said he never talked that way to her or in her presence.
+
+""I don't know how to explain it,"" she said. ""But, when you're on the inside, it's different.""
+
+Lili Amini, who manages Trump's golf club in Palos Verdes, offered a similar description of her billionaire boss.
+
+Amini, who was identified by a Trump campaign aide as a female employee who could talk about his management style, said she met Trump in 2005 when she accompanied her father to work at the sprawling resort overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Her parents owned a flower business and maintained the plants and flowers at the Trump facility.
+
+She was 27 at the time and studying to be a buyer in the fashion world.
+
+She said Trump walked up and asked her father: ""Who's this?""
+
+He introduced his daughter and the two struck up a conversation. By the end of it, Amini recalled, Trump told her: ""I want you to work here.""
+
+She said she didn't know anything about running a food and beverage operation at the time, and didn't even know what job she was being offered. But after discussing the offer with her parents she decided it was too good to pass up.
+
+She started out as the small events coordinator and, with Trump's mentoring and support, has worked her way to general manager.
+
+She said Trump would periodically show up at the resort and each time he did would encourage her to learn everything she could about some new aspect of the business.
+
+He was always encouraging, she said, and always professional. He taught her, she said, to never doubt herself. ""He's been a great motivator,"" she said. ""Impossible is never a word that I use in my vocabulary.""
+
+Amini said Trump never made her feel like she got the job because she was a woman or that she was being second-guessed based on her gender after she rose through the ranks.
+
+""It's just about the work,"" she said. ""It's always about the work.""
+
+Trump received more mixed reviews from Barbara Res, who worked for Trump from 1978 to 1996 and helped oversee the construction of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
+
+Res said she had good working relationship with Trump and that it was an unusual move for him to hire her in 1978, because there were so few women working in the construction industry.
+
+But Res, who wrote about her experiences in her book, All Alone on the 68th Floor: How One Woman Changed the Face of Construction, said Trump became less approachable and accessible over time.
+
+In an essay for the New York Daily News, Res wrote that Trump was ""nasty to the people who work for him,"" that he could ""be very abusive and curt"" and had an ""incredible temper ... he lashes out at everyone.""
+
+""Of all the people I know who worked for or with Trump, including contractors, lawyers, architects, employees, only a very few actually like him,"" Res wrote in the New York Daily News. ""Some respect him, some don't. Many hate his guts.""
+
+But she said he had a good eye for talent, and had several strong women working for him in her heyday. He told her she was ""a killer"" and that wanting to be liked by her subordinates was a weakness.
+
+""Later, he would hire and promote many people with questionable qualifications,"" Res wrote in her New York Daily News essay. ""I could see, over time, his growing need to be coddled and agreed with,"" she wrote, adding that by the 1980s, he ""had taken to decorating his office with beautiful women.""
+
+""He changed,"" Res said in a telephone interview. ""I think it was fame and fortune, absolutely.""
+
+In his book, Trump wrote: ""I don't know why, but I seem to bring out either the best or worst in women.""
+
+He reiterated that ""they're really a lot different than portrayed,"" and ""far worse than men, far more aggressive.""
+
+He praised their intelligence and said they should be saluted for their ""tremendous power, which most men are afraid to admit they have.""",REAL
+7839,Venezuelan Police Officer Fatally Shot in Anti-Government Protests,"Get short URL 0 8 0 0 A police officer of the Venezuelan state of Miranda was fatally shot and another was wounded during an anti-government protest, local police said. 
+MOSCOW (Sputnik) – On Tuesday, the opposition-led National Assembly voted to initiate impeachment proceedings against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, claiming he had violated democracy, to which the president accused lawmakers of trying to stage a parliamentary coup. 
+""The deceased official got a gunshot wound in the abdomen. He died when he was being tended to in the Los Salias clinic. Another one is wounded in the arm,"" Miguel Mederico, the spokesman for the Miranda police, said on Twitter on Wednesday. Funcionario fallecido recibió impacto de bala en abdomen. Falleció cuando lo atendían en clínica de Los Salias. El otro está herido en brazo — Miguel Mederico (@MiguelMederico) October 27, 2016 
+​Earlier on Wednesday, opposition leader Henrique Capriles initiated a large-scale peaceful protest across the country to defend the nation’s right to a referendum on Maduro's recall. According to media reports, police in some Venezuelan cities started to use tear gas against the opposition protesters. Este video muestra momentos cuando dispararon durante protestas en Los Salias. https://t.co/inB2fkITSO — Miguel Mederico (@MiguelMederico) October 27, 2016 ...",FAKE
+7720,Clinton Staff Readies EMP Launch To Disable All Nation’s Electronic Devices - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Report: Saxophone Still An Okay Vehicle For Self-Expression While declaring that the musical instrument was by no means ideally suited to the task, a report released by the National Endowment for the Arts Thursday concluded that the saxophone nevertheless remains a fairly decent vehicle for expressing one’s ... Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Most Hotly Contested Down-Ballot Measures Of 2016 As Americans head to the polls, they will be presented with a number of issues to vote on besides choosing their representatives. The Onion gives voters an advance look at which measures will be included on the ballots in which states. New Heavy-Duty Voting Machine Allows Americans To Take Out Frustration On It Before Casting Ballot WASHINGTON—Saying the circumstances of this year’s presidential race made the upgrade necessary, election commissions throughout the country were reportedly working to install new heavy-duty voting machines this week that will allow Americans to physically take out their frustrations on the devices before casting their votes. New Report Finds Voters Have No Idea How Outraged They Supposed To Be About Anything Anymore WASHINGTON—Saying that at this point, they were just taking their best guesses at how they should react to each new scandal that emerged about the presidential nominees, voters across the country admitted Monday they had no clue how outraged they are supposed to be about anything anymore. Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign BROOKLYN, NY—In response to the FBI’s announcement that its investigation of him had produced new evidence that could pertain to its probe of the Democratic presidential nominee, Anthony Weiner reportedly sent an apology sext early Monday morning to the entire Hillary Clinton campaign. Nation Too Terrified To Look At What Trump’s Recent Rise In Polls Attributed To WASHINGTON—Claiming it felt queasy just thinking about what the cause could be, the nation’s populace said Monday it was too terrified to look at what Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s recent rise in the polls was attributed to. Anthropologists Discover Isolated Tribe Of Joyful Americans Living In Remote Village Untouched By 2016 Election WALDPORT, OR—A team of anthropologists announced Friday it had discovered an isolated tribe of blissful Americans who have never been exposed to the current presidential campaign or its candidates, noting that the newly identified population lives contentedly in a remote village completely untouched by the 2016 race. ",FAKE
+6050,"Team Clinton: Let’s Talk About Russia, Not the WikiLeaks Emails","Washington Free Beacon October 26, 2016 
+Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine and every one of their Democratic surrogates have pivoted to attacking Russia’s role in the WikiLeaks release of John Podesta’s emails when asked about their subject matter. 
+So thorough is this particular talking point that both Howard Dean and Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D., N.M.) blamed the Russians when asked about a totally separate matter involving quid pro quo accusations within the State Department. 
+So long as they’re asked about WikiLeaks, Team Clinton will just power through . This article was posted: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 7:33 am Share this article",FAKE
+1966,Romney moves to reassemble campaign team for ‘almost certain’ 2016 bid,"Mitt Romney is moving quickly to reassemble his national political network, calling former aides, donors and other supporters over the weekend and on Monday in a concerted push to signal his seriousness about possibly launching a 2016 presidential campaign.
+
+Romney’s message, as he told one senior Republican, was that he “almost certainly will” make what would be his third bid for the White House. His aggressive outreach came as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) — Romney’s 2012 vice presidential running mate and the newly installed chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — announced Monday that he would not seek the presidency in 2016.
+
+Romney’s activity indicates that his declaration of interest Friday to a group of 30 donors in New York was more than the release of a trial balloon. Instead, it was the start of a deliberate effort by the 2012 nominee to carve out space for himself in an emerging 2016 field also likely to include former Florida governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
+
+Romney has worked the phones over the past few days, calling an array of key allies to discuss his potential 2016 campaign. Among them was Ryan, whom Romney phoned over the weekend to inform him personally of his plans to probably run. Ryan was encouraging, people with knowledge of the calls said.
+
+Other Republicans with whom Romney spoke recently include Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) and Rob Portman (Ohio), former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Hewlett-Packard chief executive Meg Whitman, former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, former Missouri senator Jim Talent and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah).
+
+In the conversations, Romney said he is intent on running to the right of Bush, who also is working vigorously to court donors and other party establishment figures for a 2016 bid. Romney has tried to assure conservatives that he shares their views on immigration and tax policy — and that should he enter the race, he will not forsake party orthodoxy.
+
+On New Year’s Eve, Romney welcomed Laura Ingraham, the firebrand conservative and nationally syndicated talk-radio host, to his ski home in Deer Valley, Utah. Romney served a light lunch to Ingraham and her family as they spent more than an hour discussing politics and policy, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
+
+“He was relaxed, reflective and was interested in hearing my thoughts on the American working class,” Ingraham said in an e-mail Monday. “He was fully engaged and up to speed on everything happening on [the] domestic and international front. To me, it didn’t seem like he was content to be just a passive player in American politics.”
+
+Romney’s undertaking to re-engage and pursue anew the GOP’s leading financial and political players began Friday, when he told a private gathering of donors, “I want to be president.” He also told them that his wife, Ann, was “very encouraging” of another campaign.
+
+Romney is considering attending this week’s meeting of the Republican National Committee in San Diego and is working on a new message about economic empowerment, advisers said.
+
+“He’s a lot more focused in these calls on developing a path to victory and talking through a message, rather than talking about money,” said Spencer Zwick, Romney’s 2012 national finance chairman. “Mitt Romney has proven that he can raise the money.”
+
+This comes as Bush — another favorite of the Republican elite — is holding meetings with party leaders and financiers as he explores his campaign. Bush and Romney have overlapping political circles.
+
+Many of Romney’s past supporters may feel torn — not only between him and Bush but also among Christie, Walker, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and other Republicans who are weighing a run. Some already have publicly aligned with Bush and others.
+
+“They’re competing hard and it’s going to get complicated for Bush,” said former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). “But Romney still has to prove that he has the ability to reach out to ordinary, hardworking people and emote — smiling with one eye and crying with the other.”
+
+Romney’s outreach extends beyond his cheerleaders to onetime foes as well. He called Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who relentlessly attacked Romney on the stump and debate stage in 2012 during his presidential run. Gingrich said he told Romney, “There are no front-runners” in the 2016 race. “We have runners, but no front-runners.”
+
+Romney is measuring how much of his 2012 operation would gear up behind him again. He is particularly intent on rebuilding his past political infrastructure in New Hampshire, where he owns a vacation home in Wolfeboro. The state, which holds the first presidential primary, ignited his 2012 campaign when he won it resoundingly in a crowded field.
+
+As of Monday, Romney had secured the backing of his top two New Hampshire-based advisers, Thomas D. Rath and Jim Merrill.
+
+“He called me right after the Patriots beat the Ravens, so we were both in good moods,” Merrill said. “It was a good conversation. He was very clear that he is seriously considering a run. I’ve been with Mitt Romney since March 2006, so if he decides to do it, I’ll be there for him.” Rath, a former New Hampshire state attorney general, concurred in a separate interview: “I’ve been with Mitt Romney for eight years. If he’s in, I’ll make the coffee or drive the car — whatever he needs.”
+
+Romney also has called Brown, who ran unsuccessfully for Senate from New Hampshire in 2014, as well as former governor John Sununu, who was a surrogate for Romney in 2012 but has close ties to the Bush family after serving as chief of staff under then-president George H.W. Bush.
+
+Judd Gregg, a former U.S. senator from New Hampshire who backed Romney in 2008 and 2012, said, “He’s reaching out to people. My sense is he feels strongly he has an opportunity to do what was incomplete last time. He figures there’s a lot of buyer’s remorse now and that his message is a good message and it’ll resonate.”
+
+Romney is also paying attention to Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation caucuses, calling his former Iowa strategist, David Kochel. Romney, however, has not connected with Iowa Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley or Joni Ernst. “I haven’t talked to him in two years,” Grassley said Monday.
+
+One Romney adviser, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said, “Mitt’s a very restless character. He is not the type to retire happily, to read books on the beach. . . . He believes he has something to offer the country and the only way he can do that is by running for president again.”
+
+Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the GOP presidential nominee in 2008, was skeptical of a Romney candidacy and endorsed the idea of a “dark horse” run by his longtime friend in the Senate, Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.).
+
+Eric Fehrnstrom, a former Romney spokesman, ticked through issues that he said were motivating Romney to try again. “At home our economy is still not as strong as it could be,” he said. “Long-term growth is in doubt. And around the world there’s really deep concern that America’s leadership has unraveled and hostile forces have filled that vacuum.”
+
+Romney’s national finance network — which raised roughly $1 billion on his behalf for the 2012 campaign — came alive in the hours after he declared his interest in a 2016 bid.
+
+“When the news broke Friday, my phone started blowing up with texts, calls and e-mails from people that had donated to the campaign before and pledging their help,” said Travis Hawkes, a Republican donor in Idaho who served on Romney’s national finance council. “They say, ‘Let me know when you need my credit card number.’ My response to everyone has been, ‘Let’s just slow down and see what happens.’ ”
+
+“I don’t know, man, it’s a free country,” McCain said of a possible Romney campaign in 2016. “I thought there was no education in the second kick of a mule. . . . I respect his judgment, he’s a strong leader.”
+
+Dan Balz, Matea Gold and Paul Kane contributed to this report.",REAL
+4255,"MSNBC, DNC reach deal to host Democratic debate in New Hampshire","The tentative deal reached this weekend between the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders includes a debate Thursday at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.
+
+MSNBC announced Sunday it will host the debate, scheduled for 9 p.m. Eastern with Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow moderating. New Hampshire's first-in-the nation primary is Feb. 9.
+
+Clinton and Sanders are in a tight race before Monday's Iowa caucuses, and Clinton trails the Vermont senator in New Hampshire, raising the possibility that the Democratic front-runner could lose the first two contests. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has trailed them by wide margins.
+
+The Democratic National Committee says it's reached an agreement in principal to have the party sanction and manage more debates during the primary schedule, including the New Hampshire debate.",REAL
+8009,Deep Fried Offshore,"TJ Mott I've been a developer for the past seven years. Currently I'm in the aerospace industry and work with a variety of programming languages and operating systems. 
+Stephen worked for an Initech that sold specialized hardware: high-performance, high-throughput systems for complex data processing tasks in the enterprise world, sold at exorbitant enterprise prices. Once deployed, these systems were configured via a management app that exposed an HTTP interface, just like any consumer-grade router or Wi-Fi access point that is configurable through a website (e.g. 192.168.0.1). 
+Stephen worked with a diverse team of American engineers who were finishing up the management application for a new model. The product was basically done but needed a little bit of testing and polish before the official release. They expected several months of post-release work and then the project would go into maintenance mode. 
+Then disaster struck. A pointy-haired boss somewhere up in a fuzzy area of the organization chart simply labeled “Here be VPs” discovered the large salary difference between American engineers and off-shore workers, and decided American engineers were far too expensive for software “maintenance”. The company decided to lay off 300 software engineers and hire 300 fresh-out-of-college replacements in a foreign country with much lower labor rates. The announcement was overshadowed by the fanfare of the product’s release and proudly billed as a major “win” for the company. 
+Stephen was lucky enough to stay on and shift to other projects, the first of which was to assist with the transition by documenting everything he could for the new team. Which he did, in hundreds of pages of explicit detail, explaining how to use the source control repository for the project, execute and log unit tests, and who to contact when they had questions regarding the hardware itself. After that, he devoted himself to other projects. Months turned into years and Stephen assumed by the silence that the handover was successful and he’d never see the management app again. 
+Of course that isn’t what happened. 
+There’s an old joke on the Internet called “How to shoot yourself in the foot” (http://www.toodarkpark.org/computers/humor/shoot-self-in-foot.html) that lampoons the complicated process of shooting yourself in the foot in various programming languages. Here is one such entry: 
+370 JCL: You send your foot down to MIS and include a 300-page document explaining exactly how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot returns deep-fried. 
+Three years after the management app was passed off to the new offshore engineer team, a new panic was boiling through Initech. The management application was as slow as molasses, buggier than flies in soup, with a user interface that was battered and deep-fried in a nonsense language that vaguely resembled English. It also crashed a lot, each time requiring a power reset to bring the system back up. 
+Initech had simmered along by only shipping the original version, but now they had this expensive, powerful product with three years worth of hardware and firmware updates that the management app could not configure and thus were not available to customers. Several important customers canceled their support contracts rather than pay for half-baked updates that rarely worked, and many prospective customers passed them right by when basic features printed in the product brochure were “unavailable for demo”. They were falling behind in the industry. 
+It was bad enough that management finally decided to do something. 
+That something was to toss the offshore team and see how many of their old laid-off engineers they could scoop up, which was, not surprisingly, few. As one of the few original engineers who still worked there, Stephen was whisked away from his current projects to assist. 
+With a bite-sized portion of the old team re-assembled, they set to work to unscramble the situation. Stephen noticed that the last source control check-in was from three years ago. Upon further inspection, he realized that not one of the offshore engineers had ever committed. 
+He called up the offshore office to see if they had their own repository. The last few remaining offshore workers didn’t know, and when told to search every system they had, they replied they couldn’t because their local manager had sold all of their computer equipment on an auction site upon learning of their impending layoffs. 
+He then contacted the hardware team in hopes that maybe somebody had a clone of the offshore team’s repository, but the hardware guys claimed the software team was laid off three years ago and they were not aware of an offshore replacement team. 
+With no current source code, and an old repository that hadn’t been committed to in three years, Stephen and the team were left with no choice but to pick up exactly where they left off three years ago… [Advertisement] Manage IT infrastructure as code across all environments with Puppet . Puppet Enterprise now offers more control and insight, with role-based access control, activity logging and all-new Puppet Apps. Start your free trial today!",FAKE
+9819,TOP DOCTORS: CHEMOTHERAPY ONE OF DOZENS OF PROCEDURES SHOWN TO ‘GIVE NO BENEFIT’,"Home › HEALTH › TOP DOCTORS: CHEMOTHERAPY ONE OF DOZENS OF PROCEDURES SHOWN TO ‘GIVE NO BENEFIT’ TOP DOCTORS: CHEMOTHERAPY ONE OF DOZENS OF PROCEDURES SHOWN TO ‘GIVE NO BENEFIT’ 0 SHARES 
+[10/27/16] VICKI BATTS – Chemotherapy is arguably one of the medical industry’s biggest frauds . Perhaps that’s why it recently landed on a list of ineffectual treatments drawn up by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AMRC). 
+The list was created by 11 top specialists, who were each asked to think of five treatments they felt provided little to no patient benefits. And surprise, surprise – chemotherapy was one of them. Doctors from the AMRC said that chemotherapy cannot cure terminal cancer, and may bring unneeded distress in the final months of life. The Guardian reported: 
+“The treatment is ‘by its very nature toxic’, the college said. “Therefore, the combination of failing to achieve a response and causing toxicity can ‘do more harm than good.'” 
+Do more harm than good? You don’t say. 
+Research has shown that in some hospitals, up to 50 percent of cancer patients are dying, not from their disease, but from chemotherapy drugs. For the first time ever, researchers actually looked at the numbers of patients who were dying within 30 days of chemotherapy administration , which could indicate that the treatment was the cause of death rather than the cancer. What they found was horrifying. 
+The study, which was conducted by Public Health England and Cancer Research UK, found that the average 30-day mortality rate across England was about 8.4 percent for lung cancer and 2.5 percent for breast cancer. But, in some hospitals, those numbers were much higher. For example, at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, the 30 day mortality rate for palliative chemotherapy for lung cancer was 28 percent. In Milton Keynes, the death rate for lung cancer treatment soared up to 50.9 percent. 
+The research revealed that the death rate for lung cancer patients was higher than average in several areas, including Blackpool, Coventry, Derby, South Tyneside, Surrey and Sussex. 
+The data also revealed that about 1-in-5 people who underwent palliative care for breast cancer at Cambridge University Hospitals died because of chemotherapy treatment. 
+Of course, the industry was quick to defend their practices, with doctors suggesting that these occurrences could simply be the outcome of data problems, noting that even a few deaths could skew statistics. 
+However, no one really argued with the fact that chemotherapy is indeed a toxin. It doesn’t discriminate; it kills cancerous cells and healthy cells – and therein lies the rub. It may kill the cancer, but not without increasing your risks of getting cancer again in the future. 
+A 2004 study also found that cytotoxic chemotherapy does very little towards enhancing cancer survivors’ 5-year survival rates. The research, which was led by scientists from the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Northern Sydney Cancer Centre of the Royal North Shore Hospital, located in Sydney, Australia, raised serious questions about the actual efficacy of curative and adjuvant chemotherapies. 
+What they found was that in Australia chemo only contributed 2.3 percent to the 5-year survival rate in adults, and in the U.S., that number dropped to 2.1 percent. These findings suggest that overall, chemotherapy truly provides very little benefit to any patient’s survival. In their conclusion, the study authors wrote, “As the 5-year relative survival rate for cancer in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required.” 
+The AMRC urges doctors and patients to question whether or not particular treatments are necessary. After all, unwarranted and harmful treatments are truly anything but medicine . Post navigation",FAKE
+6206,Are We on the Eve of Total Life Extinction?,"A 23 kiloton tower shot called BADGER, fired on April 18, 1953 at the Nevada Test Site, as part of the Operation Upshot-Knothole nuclear test series.",FAKE
+293,"Understanding John Boehner, reluctant ringleader of GOP shutdown politics (+video)","With House Republicans pushing for a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood, Speaker John Boehner's leadership is again under scrutiny – and under fire.
+
+House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio holds a news conference following a House Republican caucus meeting at the Capitol in Washington earlier this month. REUTERS/
+
+House Speaker John Boehner likes to say he learned all the skills he needs for his current job during his childhood years in Ohio – mopping floors in his dad's bar and growing up with 11 brothers and sisters. In a two-bedroom house. With one bathroom.
+
+That’s got to teach a person patience, and the Republican speaker has an abundance of it. Some say too much, especially when it comes to the latitude he gives his rebellious right-wing faction – such as right now.
+
+With just 10 days before the federal government runs out of money, GOP hardliners are threatening the second widespread government shutdown in two years, this time over federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
+
+They’re also considering a rare maneuver to oust Mr. Boehner from the speaker’s chair. It’s not the first time they’ve plotted to get rid of him.
+
+Yet Boehner – “the coolest cucumber I know,” as one of his colleagues puts it – has been calmly exploring the options as the GOP leadership holds more than a half dozen “listening” sessions with members of the divided caucus. He still hasn’t found a funding solution that will satisfy everyone. He might not be able to. But pushing and prodding in his own unperturbed way, he won't stop trying.
+
+“What Boehner does is, he’s very patient. He lets things play out for a while. He doesn’t get mad…. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t,” says John Feehery, former spokesman for Denny Hastert, the longest serving Republican speaker.
+
+It’s the tactics – not the ideology – that separate the speaker from his right flank. In 2013, when tea partyers forced a 16-day partial government shutdown over Obamacare, Boehner was as opposed to the Affordable Care Act as they were.
+
+But he repeatedly warned against a shutdown. Failing to persuade, he eventually joined in, leading the way on several measures to delay or defund the president’s signature domestic program. On Day 16, after having exhausted all his options, he gave up the fight – and received a standing ovation from his caucus, hardliners included, for his efforts.
+
+As he explained to the former late-night television host Jay Leno last year, “You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.”
+
+This time, Boehner is again in lockstep with the right flank on the substance of the issue. Videos showing officials of Planned Parenthood, a women’s health provider, discussing the sale of aborted fetus parts for scientific research are “gruesome,” he has said, and the federal government should stop funding the group.
+
+Yet neither he nor Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky want to shut down the government over it. Trying to defund Planned Parenthood with a Democratic president in the White House is an “exercise in futility,” as Senator McConnell put it.
+
+At a closed-door GOP caucus meeting last week, the House leadership shared internal polling that showed that two-thirds of respondents in 18 GOP swing districts oppose shutting the government to try to stop funding Planned Parenthood, according to Politico. In 2013, the GOP’s approval ratings plummeted in the wake of the shutdown.
+
+That doesn’t mean much to Rep. John Fleming (R) of Louisiana, who belongs to the House Freedom Caucus, a group of more than 40 hardliners formed this year to challenge the GOP leadership. Congressman Fleming says he’s one of 31 members who have pledged not to vote for legislation – be it a short-term or long-term budget – that funds Planned Parenthood. “That’s my conscience vote.”
+
+And so the speaker has been patiently rolling out other options – investigations of Planned Parenthood in the House, legislation to freeze funding for the organization, and an abortion-related bill. Both bills passed the GOP-controlled House on Friday, but will be blocked by Senate Democrats.
+
+And that’s where another leadership proposal comes in. In order to actually get a defunding bill to the president’s desk, they’ve proposed using a legislative process known as “budget reconciliation” that only needs a majority vote to pass. It would get to the president all right, but he would veto it.
+
+Hardliners say they aren’t interested in this “show vote.” Instead they seem determined to press for the shutdown, and try to put the blame on the president.
+
+As the speaker cycles through his options and the calendar clicks closer to a shutdown, some of his allies are getting frustrated with the repeated clashes. There was another one earlier this year over immigration and funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
+
+Boehner supporter Rep. Devin Nunes (R) of California calls the hardliners “right-wing Marxists” who use extreme tactics to promote themselves – and then offer no realistic, alternative plans. The speaker, he says with exasperation, “let’s these guys get away with everything.”
+
+Take the case of Rep. Mark Meadows (R) of North Carolina, who in July filed a rare motion to “vacate the chair” and call a new election for the speakership. Such a move hasn’t been tried in 105 years – and it didn’t succeed then.
+
+The speaker could have killed off the Meadows resolution in the Rules Committee, which the speaker controls – but he didn’t. He could have brought it immediately to the floor for a vote he would have won, and stamped out the spark before it caught fire – as some of his allies urged. He didn’t.
+
+""He chose not to press his advantage and divide his caucus,"" said Rep. Tom Cole (R) of Oklahoma.
+
+In July, Boehner called the Meadows move “no big deal,” but right-wingers are talking about returning to it after the pope’s visit this week. It is unlikely to succeed but nothing is certain.
+
+Intraparty division is not new in Congress, says former House historian Ray Smock. He recalls the civil rights era, when both parties had deeply divided caucuses. But this is different, he says, because of the uncompromising wing of Boehner’s party.
+
+“I think Boehner is seriously trying to run the House the way it’s supposed to be run, but this has been a losing proposition for him since the advent of the tea party,” says Mr. Smock. “You’ve got an awful lot of members in that caucus that don’t really care that government functions well. They’re elected as antigovernment people.”
+
+Which raises the question: What’s the point of patience with recalcitrants?
+
+Mr. Feehery says the free rein Boehner gave the tea partyers during the last shutdown could have been meant as a learning experience for them – but it simply emboldened them. Now it’s time for the speaker to make an example of a few people “and just kick them out of the conference.”
+
+But then, Feehery admits, right-wing media would have a field day with that, and so would the “antiestablishment” presidential candidates.
+
+And that’s not the Boehner way. “Members get not just second and third chances, they get repeated chances to operate as members of the team,” says Congressman Cole, a Boehner ally.
+
+One thing’s certain: Democrats will not agree to defund Planned Parenthood. Boehner knows that. Eventually, he’ll have to work with Democrats to pass a “clean” funding bill that leaves the women’s health care provider alone.
+
+What happens between now and then, though, is anybody’s guess.",REAL
+8804,“Ignorant scum who disagree with me should be more tolerant” complains voter,"November 11, 2016 
+Following America’s shock election result, a voter has complained of increasing polarisation in the country between people who agree with her and “ignorant scum”. 
+“I just don’t recognise this country any more,” she said sadly. “I remember a time we could discuss things in a civil manner, with everyone being respectful of each other’s opinions.” 
+“Nowadays this seems to be impossible, due to the existence of people who obviously must be racist, misogynist knuckle-dragging arsewipes since they disagree with me.” 
+She also expressed concern that her political opponents harboured authoritarian tendencies, and said the sooner they were rounded up and put into camps the better “so that a more inclusive and tolerant political discourse can flourish again”. YaBasta",FAKE
+4287,Bob Dole on Ted Cruz: 'Nobody likes him',"Bob Dole said Wednesday that Ted Cruz at the top of the GOP ticket would mean ""wholesale losses"" for the party in Washington and across the country.
+
+“I don’t know how he’s going to deal with Congress,” Dole said in an interview with The New York Times. “Nobody likes him.”
+
+Dole, a former Kansas senator, was the Republican Party's presidential nominee in 1996.
+
+Donald Trump would ""probably work with Congress,"" though, Dole mused, because he's ""kind of a deal maker.""
+
+Dole characterized Cruz as an ""extremist"" unwilling to work with his own party. The Times' Maggie Haberman notes that Dole's comments reflect a larger tension that establishment Republicans feel with Cruz, who portrays himself on the campaign trail as their antithesis.
+
+Last month, Dole told MSNBC that he might oversleep and not vote next November were Cruz the Republican nominee.
+
+Dole also lamented Wednesday that Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor he supports for president, still ""needs to break out,"" and that moderate Republicans seem to have had a tougher time reaching voters this cycle.
+
+Should Hillary Clinton take on Cruz in a general election, she'd win easily, he said.
+
+So who could stop Cruz from getting the nomination?
+
+""I think it's Trump,"" Dole told the Times.
+
+A Cruz aide sought to capitalize on Dole's take on the race by branding him as an ""establishment icon"" who favored Trump over the Texas senator — an effort to cast Cruz as the true outsider candidate in the field.",REAL
+9475,US Engineers Prepare Bionic Device to Generate Electricity by Walking,"0 5 0 0 Field tests on the device are expected to begin in 2017. 
+WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — A device being developed will attach to a soldier’s upper and lower legs to generate electricity that is needed to power a growing array of high-tech gadgets in a soldier’s backpack, the US Army announced in a press release on Wednesday. ""Just by walking, soldiers could generate power,"" the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center’s Project Engineer Noel Soto said in the release. ""We are converting the movement of the knees when you walk into useful power."" 
+Field tests on the device are expected to begin in 2017, the release explained. Progressive Soft Exoskeleton: as Comfortable as Everyday Pants (VIDEO) ""The goal is to reduce the amount of batteries used by soldiers, or to be able to extend the mission with the same load,"" Soto noted. ""Soldiers are carrying a heavy load and a lot of that weight, 16 to 20 pounds for a 72-hour mission, is due to batteries.""
+Soldiers now carry multiple electronic devices that aid in strategy, communication and navigation, including computers, radios, mobile phones, battlefield situational displays and navigation tools, according to the release. ...",FAKE
+1955,Election 2016: Rand Paul poised to launch campaign,"Watch ""The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer"" Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET for an interview with Rand Paul.
+
+Louisville, Kentucky (CNN) For Rand Paul, it's all led to this moment.
+
+Since riding the tea party wave into the Senate in 2010, Paul has carefully built a brand of mainstream libertarianism -- dogged advocacy of civil liberties combined with an anti-interventionist foreign policy and general support for family values -- that he bets will create a coalition of younger voters and traditional Republicans to usher him into the White House.
+
+The test of that theory began Tuesday when the Kentucky senator made official what has been clear for years: He's running for president.
+
+""Today I announce with God's help, with the help of liberty lovers everywhere, that I'm putting myself forward as a candidate for president of the United States of America,"" Paul said at a rally in Louisville.
+
+Paul immediately hit the campaign trail for a four-day swing through New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada -- the states that traditionally vote first in the primaries and caucuses.
+
+In his speech, he called for reforming Washington by pushing for term limits and a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. He argued that both parties are to blame for the rising debt, saying it doubled under a Republican administration and tripled under Obama.
+
+""Government should be restrained and freedom should be maximized,"" he said.
+
+The line-up of speakers who introduced Paul sought to paint the senator as a nontraditional candidate with diverse appeal, and by the time he got on stage, he was the first white man to address the crowd.
+
+The speakers included J.C. Watts, a former congressman who's African-American; state Sen. Ralph Alvarado, who's Hispanic; local pastor Jerry Stephenson, who's African American and a former Democrat; and University of Kentucky student Lauren Bosler.
+
+""He goes everywhere. It doesn't matter what color you are. Rand Paul will be there,"" Stephenson said, firing up the crowd.
+
+So far, Paul joins only Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as a declared candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. ""His entry into the race will no doubt raise the bar of competition,"" Cruz said in a statement welcoming Paul into the race.
+
+But the field is certain to grow in the months ahead with Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham and others eyeing a campaign. Marco Rubio, a Florida GOP senator, is expected to launch his campaign next week.
+
+Bush, who said his 2016 decision is a ""while off,"" told reporters in Colorado Springs on Tuesday that ""libertarianism definitely has a place in the GOP"" but stressed that he differs with Paul on foreign policy.
+
+For now, the nomination is up for grabs with no clear front-runner. Paul came in third place at 12% in a CNN/ORC International Poll of Republicans. Bush led the pack at 16% while Walker came in second at 13%.
+
+But Paul, 52, will split from his father in one important way: his approach to the campaign. Where Ron Paul often focused on creating a libertarian movement, Rand Paul is planning a more strategic, less purist operation that could have a hope of competing in a general election.
+
+The elder Paul sat on stage at the rally on Tuesday with his wife, though he's not expected to be a public face for his son's campaign. He merely attended the event as a ""proud papa,"" a source close to the senator said.
+
+Elected in 2010 with strong tea-party support, Rand Paul quickly rose to national fame in part due to his father's back-to-back White House runs in 2008 and 2012, but also because of Rand Paul's willingness to fight fellow Republicans.
+
+He engaged in a war of words with Chris Christie two years ago over national security and federal spending and, more recently, he's taken swipes at Bush over issues like Common Core and medical marijuana.
+
+While he bills himself as a conservative realist, Paul still tries to wear the mantle as the Republican most reluctant to take the country into war.
+
+The cautious foreign policy dance has drawn criticism from his father's supporters, who say Paul has become too moderate, and from hawkish Republicans who fear he wouldn't go far enough as commander in chief to tackle problems overseas. Democrats and some Republicans, meanwhile, have accused him of flip-flopping and pandering to donors.
+
+On Tuesday, the Foundation for a Secure & Prosperous America -- a hawkish group from the right -- released a $1 million television ad buy against Paul's foreign policy, which hits the airwaves nationally on cable, as well as in the key early states that Paul will visit this week.
+
+Paul had been silent on the Iran deal until his speech on Tuesday, when he vowed to oppose any deal that doesn't guarantee Iran gives up its nuclear ambition.
+
+He also sought to sound aggressive on terrorism. ""The enemy is radical Islam and not only will I name the enemy, I will do what ever it takes to defend America from these haters of mankind,"" he said.
+
+In an interview later Tuesday, Paul argued that the ad was ""crazy"" and represented what he called the ""the naivety of the neocons.""
+
+""These loud, sort of juvenile voices putting pictures of bombs on ads, these are the people who are so reckless that it would be a grave danger to our country to ever have these people in charge of our country,"" he said in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News.
+
+In the same interview, Paul also weighed in for the first time on the religious freedom debate that took center stage last week after an Indiana law -- which has since been changed-- came under fire for what critics said was discrimination against gay and lesbian couples getting married.
+
+The 2016 Republican field largely came out in defense of the law, standing by the rights of small business owners such as florists and bakers to decline participating in same-sex weddings. Paul said he felt the law was ""unnecessary"" and that the country's founding fathers would be ""aghast"" that laws needed to be in place to protect religious rights.
+
+""That being said,"" he added. ""I think the law ought to be neutral and we shouldn't treat people unfairly.""
+
+Asked which takes precedence, religious liberty or same-sex marriage rights, Paul said, ""freedom.""
+
+""I don't think you can have coercion in a free society very well,"" he said. ""So I would think we ought to try freedom in most of these things.""
+
+Paul is actually running for two offices at the same time, trying to hold onto his Senate seat while also running for president. Kentucky's election laws say candidates can't appear on a ballot twice, but with reluctant support from McConnell, a Kentucky powerhouse, the state's GOP will likely change its presidential preference vote from a primary to a caucus. That would allow Paul to get around the rule.
+
+His interest in the Oval Office has never really been a secret. Shortly after the 2012 presidential election, he started crisscrossing the country to paint himself as a nontraditional Republican eager to court voters who don't typically live and vote in red areas.
+
+He spoke at historically black colleges and universities, as well as Democratic strongholds like inner city Detroit and the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on criminal justice reform and civil liberties, two issues he believes can bring more people into the Republican Party.
+
+""Liberal policies have failed our inner cities,"" he said Tuesday. ""Our schools are not equal and the poverty gap continues to widen.""
+
+But Democrats are eager to paint Paul as another member of the ""same old Republican Party.""
+
+""On issue after issue his policies are the same as the rest of the GOP, but even more extreme, and will turn back the clock on the progress we have made,"" said Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz in a statement.
+
+As one of the few national politicians who went to Ferguson, Missouri, Paul frequently boasts that there is no ""bigger defender of minority rights in the Congress"" than himself.
+
+He's steered clear of such hot-button issues more recently. Last week, for example, he was one of the few Republicans who didn't weigh in on religious freedom laws in Indiana and Arkansas that critics argued would allow businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians.
+
+Paul has also worked to maintain a following that includes a large swath of young voters who he partly inherited from his father. Heavy on tech and social media, his political team has opened an office in Austin, Texas, and will soon establish one in the heart of Silicon Valley. Like clockwork, Paul frequently holds up his phone during his stump speech and declares that what people do on their smartphones is ""none of the government's damn business.""
+
+His nontraditional style is complemented by Paul's wardrobe. The senator is known for wearing blue jeans with boots and a blazer when he's on the trail, and during the winter, he opts for a turtleneck and sport coat rather than a tie.
+
+And while he's not media shy—he's given hundreds of interviews in the past year alone—Paul can get short-tempered with reporters. He shushed a female interviewer in February, and last fall he blew up at a reporter who asked a question about foreign aid to Israel.",REAL
+6014,Hillary Clinton has a deep commitment.,"(7 fans) - Advertisement - 
+Hillary Clinton is very sincere and is committed to economy, employment, refugees, immigration and health reforms as a means of making lasting change in the US and in the world. Now we need to take concrete action and not waste time in rhetoric. Hillary Clinton is committed to build an infrastructure of education, employment, health care, small business, free press, electrical power, communications and transportation. Hillary Clinton has a deep commitment. She is active in our educational and development community, include her involvement with the government and with leaders. She played an important role in offering outreach to the people including women and children. We must vote for her. We should remember that the first condition for economic reforms is good leaders, and employment. Good leaders and employment opportunities are necessary not only for the economic growth but also for the security, physical well being and psychological comfort of the American citizens. US has always been demonstrated a decent and sustained growth rate because of a fully functioning democratic system. The pillars of the US democratic system include regular elections, peaceful transfer of power, American people's involvement in all development programs, and a reliable power among the states. This has enabled US to pursue a policy of economic liberalization, massive educational improvement and of providing a solid investment in a long-term perspective. Yes, US still suffers from unemployment, and faces challenges; these problems seem solvable soon. US needs to establish and implement long-term policies of economic growth. It should also create a well-organized and comprehensive development vision that all the political leaders should agree to follow. Making appropriate investments in our roads, electrification, and extension services would help considerably in improving Americans lives. Increasing investment in basic education and health care are important in ensuring that the poor participate meaningfully in the economic growth. A lack of education and health care hurts the poor today. And finally, President Hillary Clinton must focus on generating high rates of sustainable growth while ensuring that the benefits of that growth is spread to all parts of states. As we know, the solutions are the same everywhere, have a society based on equity and justice for everyone. - Advertisement - As we know, most countries do the opposite. Discrimination against women and children today is as bad as decades ago. It's always the issue of the privileged not caring, the poor get hurt and people of color and women especially get hurt the most. Thus, vote for Hillary Clinton, because the role of the leaders is more important and they can assist people's movements for economic growth. - Advertisement -",FAKE
+239,Paul Ryan will face 'monumental obstacles' as speaker,"After he managed to win support from his warring caucus, the full House is expected to elect Ryan as speaker on Thursday. But he won't have much time to celebrate, because he will immediately confront a series of divisive issues that could undermine his hold on the speakership just as he reaches the pinnacle of his career.
+
+At the heart of the list: fiscal fights that have badly divided the GOP since it took control of the House in the 2010 elections. Congress must raise the national borrowing ceiling -- or risk the first-ever default on U.S. debt -- by November 3 and then pivot to a high-stakes debate over funding the government the following month.
+
+The outgoing speaker, John Boehner of Ohio, is trying to take the debt limit off the table for Ryan, but he's running into familiar obstacles that could force the Wisconsin Republican to deal with the matter after he takes the top job.
+
+""If you think about what the debt is -- it's what happened in the past -- so I think that the speaker is trying to clean that up for before he leaves,"" Republican Rep. Tom Rooney of Florida told reporters, but he admitted that might not be possible with time running out before Boehner's last day at the end of this week.
+
+And Ryan will soon command the lead House GOP role in budget talks with the White House -- a discussion centered on raising domestic and defense spending by roughly $76 billion, and one bound to anger the same conservatives the likely new speaker wooed last week. President Barack Obama and Democrats on the Hill are insisting that any increase in national security spending be matched dollar for dollar with more money for domestic programs.
+
+But a deal with the White House could undermine the pledge Ryan has privately been making: that he would restore ""regular order"" and let congressional committees drive policy -- not the speaker's office.
+
+Rep. Mark Sanford, a South Carolina Republican and member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told CNN that if Ryan agrees to get rid of budget caps it will be a ""mixed bag"" since it will please defense hawks but anger small-government conservatives.
+
+""I suspect it would stir up the rank and file. And when you get the rank and file at the grass-roots level, other folks get stirred up within the conference,"" Sanford said.
+
+Sources familiar with the leadership discussions with the White House say there remains a possibility of a deal to scrap the automatic cuts known as sequestration for one year, but the two sides still are not in agreement over how to pay for the spending increases.
+
+Moreover, everything is on hold until House Republicans try to raise the debt ceiling this week -- and there is no consensus within the ranks on how to proceed. Senate Republicans want to extend the debt ceiling until 2017 to take the issue off the table during an election year. House Republicans were forced last week to pull back a proposal crafted by a group of conservatives, that conditioned any debt increase to more spending cuts and a regulatory freeze, because it didn't have enough support to pass. GOP leaders are still trying to come up with a proposal that includes some type of reforms their members can point to in return for increasing the nation's borrowing authority.
+
+All but two House Democrats signed a letter to Boehner on Friday demanding he move a ""clean"" extension of the debt limit -- one without conditions -- and warning that ""failing to do so will plunge the nation into default for the first time in American history, risking economic catastrophe.""
+
+But some House Republicans say that a short-term increase should be pursued, potentially putting the issue in Ryan's lap.
+
+Rep. David Brat, the Virginia Republican who unseated then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor last year, said Ryan should pair a debt ceiling increase with dollar-for-dollar spending cuts -- an idea Democrats strongly reject.
+
+""Leadership promised the American people that,"" Brat said. ""We don't want to go back on that if we give our word.""
+
+Rooney said it's possible that leaders could be forced again to take up a clean debt limit to avoid a default. While he'll oppose that approach, and noted Ryan voted against it last time, the Florida Republican said no one should blame Ryan for the struggle to avoid an economic crisis.
+
+""If you really hold Paul Ryan responsible for a clean debt limit vote in his first day on the job, I think that's a little unfair to say that that's on him, especially since he's worked so hard at the issues which really do directly deal with the debt and trying to fix that problem,"" Rooney said.
+
+Yet if Ryan or Boehner try to jam a debt ceiling bill through, they can expect outrage from their right flank.
+
+""I can't vote for a bill dropped on my desk 24 hours before the vote,"" said Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-South Carolina, a member of the House Freedom Caucus.",REAL
+2623,7 Times Obama Failed to Support Israel,Should the U.S. Continue to Support Israel?,REAL
+3164,"Trump, RNC announce joint fundraising deal","The move will help Trump consolidate the Republican Party apparatus under his leadership now that he has become the party's presumptive presidential nominee.
+
+It marks an official departure from Trump's claim that he's self-funding his campaign, and allows him to repay himself for the money he has already spent, if he chooses to do so.
+
+Under the deal, the Trump campaign and the RNC will establish two committees: Trump Victory and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee.
+
+Trump Victory -- for which the maximum contribution is $449,400 -- will benefit 11 states whose Republican parties are part of the agreement: Arkansas, Connecticut, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.
+
+Notably absent from that list: swing states. The only big general election battleground included is Virginia. The agreement doesn't cover states like Ohio, Florida and Colorado, where the race could be won or lost. Helping Trump Victory will be Lew Eisenberg, the RNC's finance chairman. He'll work with Trump finance chairman Steve Mnuchin. ""Lew Eisenberg is going to do an outstanding job leading this effort,"" RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement announcing the deal. ""Lew has already helped the RNC raise a record $135 million in support this cycle, and I have every confidence his track record of success will continue in this new role."" The Trump Make America Great Again Committee is a joint fundraising committee between the RNC and Trump's campaign. Joint fundraising committees are a regular part of the presidential election process. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has announced similar groups with the Democratic National Committee. The biggest benefit of the joint committees is that they allow donors to write checks much larger than the $2,700 limit for individual candidates. The joint fundraising agreement's structure will allow Trump to raise money not just for the general election, but for the primary -- taking advantage of a window to bring in extra money before he officially accepts the GOP's nomination. That could potentially allow Trump -- who regularly boasted that he was self-funding his campaign -- to reimburse himself for some of the millions of dollars he shelled out during his primary election fight. Trump, however, said on Wednesday that he has ""absolutely no intention of paying myself back for the nearly $50 million dollars I have loaned to the campaign."" It's not unusual to see states that aren't up for grabs in November included in joint agreements, because federal law limits the amount donors can give to $10,000 per state under such deals -- which means the more states that are included, the more money the candidate and the party can ask from each donor. Candidates also tend to include state parties they have strong relationships with as another way to exert control over the money raised. For instance, Mitt Romney's joint fundraising agreement in 2012 funneled money to Utah and Massachusetts -- states where Romney owned homes and had existing relationships. The $449,4000 limit includes a maximum limit of $2,700 for the Trump campaign's general election fund, $33,400 for the RNC, $110,000 for the 11 state parties and hundreds of thousands of dollars for party's building, legal and convention funds. ""We are pleased to have this partnership in place with the national party,"" Trump said in a statement. ""By working together with the RNC to raise support for Republicans everywhere, we are going to defeat Hillary Clinton, keep Republican majorities in Congress and in the states, and Make America Great Again.""",REAL
+10105,Not Guilty: The Power of Nullification to Counteract Government Tyranny,"Go to Article 
+“The people have the power, all we have to do is awaken that power in the people. The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government .”— John Lennon 
+How do you balance the scales of justice at a time when Americans are being tasered , tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed , hit with batons, shot with rubber bullets and real bullets, blasted with sound cannons , detained in cages and kennels , sicced by police dogs, arrested and jailed for challenging the government’s excesses, abuses and power-grabs? 
+Politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair. 
+No matter who sits in the White House, the shadow government will continue to call the shots behind the scenes. 
+Relying on the courts to restore justice seems futile. 
+Indeed, with every ruling handed down, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts, largely lacking in vision and scope, rendering narrow rulings focused on the letter of the law. This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. 
+Even so, justice matters. 
+It matters whether you’re a rancher protesting a federal land-grab by the Bureau of Land Management, a Native American protesting an oil pipeline that will endanger sacred sites and pollute water supplies, or an African-American taking to the streets to protest yet another police shooting of an unarmed citizen. 
+Unfortunately, protests and populist movements haven’t done much to push back against an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one. 
+It doesn’t matter who the activists are (environmentalists, peaceniks, Native Americans, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, or the Bundys and their followers) or what the source of the discontent is (endless wars abroad, police shootings, contaminated drinking water, government land-grabs), the government’s modus operandi has remained the same: shut down the protests using all means available, prosecute First Amendment activities to the fullest extent of the law, and discourage any future civil uprisings by criminalizing expressive activities, labelling dissidents as extremists or terrorists, and conducting widespread surveillance on the general populace in order to put down any whispers of resistance before it can take root. 
+Thus, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of juries and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional. 
+Just recently, in fact, an Oregon jury rejected the government’s attempts to prosecute seven activists who staged a six-week, armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. 
+In finding the defendants not guilty—of conspiracy to impede federal officers, of possession of firearms in a federal facility, and of stealing a government-owned truck—the jury sent its own message to the government and those following the case: justice matters. 
+The Malheur occupiers were found not guilty despite the fact that they had guns in a federal facility (their lawyers argued the guns were “as much a statement of their rural culture as a cowboy hat or a pair of jeans”). They were found not guilty despite the fact that they used government vehicles (although they would argue that government property is public property available to all taxpayers). They were found not guilty despite the fact that they succeeded in occupying a government facility for six weeks, thereby preventing workers from performing their duties (as the Washington Post points out, this charge has also been used to prosecute extremist left-wingers and Earth First protesters ). 
+Many other equally sincere activists with eloquent lawyers and ardent supporters have gone to jail for lesser offenses than those committed at the Malheur Refuge, so what made the difference here? 
+The jury made all the difference. 
+These seven Oregon protesters were found not guilty because a jury of their peers recognized the sincerity of their convictions, sympathized with the complaints against an overreaching government, and balanced the scales of justice using the only tools available to them: common sense, compassion and the power of the jury box. 
+Jury nullification works. 
+As law professor Ilya Somin explains, jury nullification is the practice by which a jury refuses to convict someone accused of a crime if they believe the “law in question is unjust or the punishment is excessive .” According to former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, the doctrine of jury nullification is “premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished.” 
+Imagine that: a world where the citizenry—not the government or its corporate controllers—actually calls the shots and determines what is just. 
+In a world of “ rampant overcriminalization ,” where the average citizen unknowingly breaks three laws a day, jury nullification acts as “ a check on runaway authoritarian criminalization and the increasing network of confusing laws that are passed with neither the approval nor oftentimes even the knowledge of the citizenry.” 
+Indeed, Butler believes so strongly in the power of nullification to balance the scales between the power of the prosecutor and the power of the people that he advises : 
+If you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights ; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer. 
+In other words, it’s “we the people” who can and should be determining what laws are just, what activities are criminal and who can be jailed for what crimes. 
+Not only should the punishment fit the crime, but the laws of the land should also reflect the concerns of the citizenry as opposed to the profit-driven priorities of Corporate America. 
+This is where the power of jury nullification is so critical: to reject inane laws and extreme sentences and counteract the edicts of a profit-driven governmental elite that sees nothing wrong with jailing someone for a lifetime for a relatively insignificant crime. 
+Of course, the powers-that-be don’t want the citizenry to know that it has any power at all. 
+They would prefer that we remain clueless about the government’s many illicit activities, ignorant about our constitutional rights, and powerless to bring about any real change. 
+In an age in which government officials accused of wrongdoing—police officers, elected officials, etc.—are treated with general leniency, while the average citizen is prosecuted to the full extent of the law, jury nullification is a powerful reminder that, as the Constitution tells us, “we the people” are the government. 
+For too long we’ve allowed our so-called “representatives” to call the shots. Now it’s time to restore the citizenry to their rightful place in the republic: as the masters, not the servants. 
+Nullification is one way of doing so. 
+Various cities and states have been using this historic doctrine with mixed results on issues as wide ranging as gun control and healthcare to “ claim freedom from federal laws they find onerous or wrongheaded .” 
+Where nullification can be particularly powerful, however, is in the hands of the juror. 
+The reality with which we must contend is that justice in America is reserved for those who can afford to buy their way out of jail. 
+For the rest of us who are dependent on the “fairness” of the system, there exists a multitude of ways in which justice can and does go wrong every day. Police misconduct. Prosecutorial misconduct. Judicial bias. Inadequate defense. Prosecutors who care more about winning a case than seeking justice. Judges who care more about what is legal than what is just. Jurors who know nothing of the law and are left to deliberate in the dark about life-and-death decisions. And an overwhelming body of laws, statutes and ordinances that render the average American a criminal, no matter how law-abiding they might think themselves. 
+If you’re to have any hope of remaining free—and I use that word loosely—your best bet remains in your fellow citizens. 
+Your fellow citizens may not know what the Constitution says (studies have shown Americans to be abysmally ignorant about their rights), they may not know what the laws are (there are so many on the books that the average American breaks three laws a day without knowing it), and they may not even believe in your innocence, but if you’re lucky, those who serve on a jury will have a conscience that speaks louder than the legalistic tones of the prosecutors and the judges and reminds them that justice and fairness go hand in hand. 
+That’s ultimately what jury nullification is all about: restoring a sense of fairness to our system of justice. It’s the best protection for “we the people” against the oppression and tyranny of the government, and God knows, we can use all the protection we can get. It’s a powerful way to remind the government—all of those bureaucrats who have appointed themselves judge, jury and jailer over all that we are, have and do—that we’re the ones who set the rules. 
+We could transform this nation if only Americans would work together to harness the power of their discontent. 
+Unfortunately, the government’s divide and conquer tactics are working like a charm. 
+Despite the laundry list of grievances that should unite “we the people” in common cause against the government, the nation is more divided than ever by politics, by socio-economics, by race, by religion, and by every other distinction that serves to highlight our differences. 
+The real and manufactured events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have all conjoined to create an environment in which “we the people” are more divided, more distrustful, and fearful of each other. 
+What we have failed to realize is that in the eyes of the government, we’re all the same. 
+In other words, when it’s time for the government to crack down—and that time is coming—it won’t matter whether we supported Hillary or Trump, whether we stood with the pipeline protesters or opposed BLM, or whether we spoke out against government misconduct and injustice or remained silent. 
+When the government cracks down, we’ll all suffer. 
+Here’s the thing: the government wants a civil war. 
+The objective: compliance and control. 
+Its strategy: destabilize the economy through endless wars, escalate racial tensions, polarize the populace, heighten tensions through a show of force, intensify the use of violence, and then, when all hell breaks loose, clamp down on the nation for the good of the people and the security of the nation. 
+The government has been anticipating and preparing for such a civil uprising for some time now. 
+Those protests in Ferguson , Baltimore and Baton Rouge to protest police brutality? The militarized police “ clad in Kevlar vests, helmets, and camouflage, armed with pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, and tear gas ” turning towns into war zones? The kenneling of pipeline protesters in North Dakota? 
+Those were just dress rehearsals for the government to work out the kinks in its operating manual on how to deal with civil unrest. 
+They were also previews of what’s in store if we continue to challenge the powers-that-be. 
+After all, it’s hard to persuade anyone to stand against tyranny when all you can promise them as a reward is persecution, prosecution and a one-way trip to the morgue. And when the outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion—the government always wins—it can seem pointless, even foolhardy, to dare to challenge the system. 
+So how do you not only push back against the police state’s bureaucracy, corruption and cruelty but also launch a counterrevolution aimed at reclaiming control over the government using nonviolent means? 
+You start by changing the rules and engaging in some (nonviolent) guerilla tactics. 
+Employ militant nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience , which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches. 
+Take part in grassroots activism, which takes a trickle-up approach to governmental reform by implementing change at the local level (in other words, think nationally, but act locally). 
+And then, as I explain in more detail in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , nullify everything. Nullify the court cases. Nullify the laws. Nullify everything the government does that is illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.",FAKE
+3330,State Dept. Admits Official Censored Sensitive Iran Nuclear Deal Video,"WASHINGTON - A State Department official deliberately cut several minutes of videotape from a news briefing dealing with sensitive questions about U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations before posting the footage to its website and YouTube, the agency said Wednesday.
+
+In the Dec. 2, 2013, briefing, a reporter asked about the department's denial earlier that year of secret talks between Washington and Tehran. Those discussions had been periodically occurring and eventually led to a breakthrough, seven-nation nuclear deal.
+
+Is the State department lying about the Iran nuclear deal? Jerusalem Bureau Chief Chris Mitchell weighed in on Facebook LIVE.
+
+Then-spokeswoman Jen Psaki responded at the briefing: ""There are times where diplomacy needs privacy.""
+
+But the exchange wasn't on video the department posted on its website and YouTube, even if it remained in the official transcript and backup video for broadcasters. Fox News discovered the discrepancy last month.
+
+On Wednesday, the State Department's current spokesman John Kirby said someone had censored the video intentionally. He said he couldn't find out who was responsible, but described such action as unacceptable.
+
+""Deliberately removing a portion of the video was not and is not in keeping with the State Department's commitment to transparency and public accountability,"" he told reporters.
+
+Kirby said he learned that on the same day of the 2013 briefing, a video editor received a call from a State Department public affairs official who made ""a specific request ... to excise that portion of the briefing."" The video editor no longer remembers the name of the person who called, he said.
+
+As a result, ""we do not know who made the request to edit the video or why it was made,"" he told reporters.
+
+While the State Department previously suggested a ""glitch"" occurred, the sensitivity of the removed portion raised questions.
+
+The reporter, Fox News' James Rosen, started his inquiry by referencing an earlier Feb. 6, 2013, briefing in which State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said no intermittent conversations were occurring between Obama administration and Iranian officials in one-to-one format, outside of larger multilateral gatherings.
+
+Eight months later, those gatherings had become public after reporting by The Associated Press and other media. And Rosen asked Psaki if her predecessor was speaking truthfully.
+
+Upon learning of the video's editing, Kirby said he ordered the original video restored on all platforms and asked the State Department's legal adviser to examine the matter. He said no further investigation will be made, primarily because no rules were in place against such actions.
+
+Kirby said he has ordered new rules created to prevent a recurrence.
+
+Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.",REAL
+6615,Must Read of the Day – The Clinton Presidency Is Going to Be a Miserable Slog,"at 2:52 pm 2 Comments 
+For a long time now, I’ve felt that no matter who wins this election, the U.S. is in for extremely difficult times over at least the next 4 years. The reason is twofold. First, when you combine Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders supporters (the latter didn’t just disappear), a majority of the population is in full on revolt against the status quo. This mood isn’t going anywhere. Combine this backdrop with the very high likelihood of an economic downturn, and you have a recipe for mayhem. This isn’t even taking into account the possible end to a multi-decade secular bull market in sovereign bonds, the ramifications of which represent a financial extinction-level event for much of the Western world. 
+When I look at the financial markets and note that they appear totally unwilling to even flirt with the very real possibility of a Trump victory, I conclude that the current status quo assumption is not only that Hillary will win, but that after she wins, the social mood will get better. I, on the other hand, think it will get far, far worse, as disgusted Trump and Sanders supporters push back relentlessly from day one. As I noted earlier today on Twitter: Sorry but if Clinton wins country becomes completely ungovernable. I don’t mean gridlock. I mean total madness. 
+— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) November 1, 2016 
+Of course, I’m not the only one. Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote an excellent piece earlier today published at The Week titled, The Clinton Presidency is Going to be a Miserable Slog , which is my must read of the day. 
+Here it is: Being on the cusp of electing the first woman president, and defeating a snarling, newly crass, and nationalist Republican Party should feel energizing for the American left. But it’s been tiring. The Democrats aren’t just electing a woman. They’re stuck electing this woman, Hillary Clinton. It’s been a slog . Clinton could not easily put away her socialist challenger Bernie Sanders. She would not release the transcripts of the paid speeches she gave to Wall Street banks. She could not name her accomplishments as secretary of state. She could not quite escape her own role in managing the political fallout from her husband’s affairs, or the appearance of corruption in the Clinton Foundation’s pioneering work in the field of do-gooder graft. When FBI Director James Comey gave us a healthy reminder of Clinton’s email scandal last week, liberals must have realized: It’s not just the campaign. The Clinton presidency is going to be a slog , too. The Clinton standard of political behavior has always had a lawyerly slipperiness to it. When the scandals come, it depends on your definition of “is.” When the headlines erupt, suddenly we discover that all of Clinton’s friends signed an affidavit contradicting the latest accuser or whistleblower. And, really, what difference, at this point, does it make? Partisans will note that Clinton’s ethical lapses and faults are minor compared to Donald Trump’s. Those comparisons are not going to matter in a few days. Some may object. They’ll reply that the only problem is the aggressive prosecutorial zeal of the Republicans. And it is true that Republicans have an ongoing grudge against Clinton. But let’s posit the existence of a vast right wing conspiracy that hates President Obama just as much as it hates the Clintons. Why is it only able to turn up news-driving scandals on the latter? Could it be that Obama, however detested by conservatives, conducts himself with higher ethical standards than Bill and Hillary? Clinton’s scandals and misdeeds often have little to do with the Democrats’ battle with Republicans. Clinton played fast and loose even with the Obama administration’s own rules. Obama had forbidden Clinton from giving a government job to the Clinton’s on-demand schemer Sidney Blumenthal — yet Clinton kept him on the payroll of her “charity” and kept up correspondence with him about Libya, even as he had business interests in a post-Gadhafi state. Despite explicit rules set by the Obama administration, the Clinton Foundation continued to operate as a bank in which foreign leaders and governments could deposit their quids, while Clinton was at the head of the State Department, able to distribute pro quos in return. Beyond the propensity to generate scandal, there is a larger reason that Clinton’s administration will be a slog. The 2016 election has been characterized by a demand for great change. And Hillary Clinton has run as the defender of the way things are, the way they’re going, and who they’re going for. Hillary Clinton received a vigorous challenge from a left wing that isn’t afraid to label themselves socialists. America’s center-right party ditched its commitments to establishment doctrine on free trade and liberalized immigration, and challenged the wisdom and justice of America’s post-Cold War political order. But Hillary Clinton will enter the White House as the caretaker for the status quo in American political life. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were not the men to carry forward this message of discontent to real political triumph. Both candidates represented their cause poorly. Trump was at once too crude and unethical himself. And Sanders had none of the political instincts and savvy to really go after Clinton in the primaries. Clinton is the face of a prosperous, grasping establishment that won’t bear challenge from the left or right. Her ability to survive scandal after scandal will not be received as some testament to her political canniness or some deep integrity. It will be received as just the system defending its own from attack. Her survival and her ability to win is a a tribute to the power and self-regard of our political class. And this class has no plausible solution for the nation’s foreign policy, for its immigration system, or for an economic system that abets the elite’s secession from their own nation. Clinton’s presidency will be a slog because she is exactly like the system she defends. She can point to the great wealth this system produces for its top clients. But neither she nor her cheerleaders can really claim that it looks like wisdom or justice to anyone else. Well done, Mr. Dougherty.",FAKE
+8764,Iraqi Army: US Hindering Advance on Mosul,"LUCIFER in the Temple of the Dog II ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Iraqi Army: US Hindering Advance on Mosul By GPD on October 31, 2016 TEHRAN (FNA)- The Iraqi army blasted the US for troubling its Mosul liberation operation through electronic jamming to disrupt the communication among various army units. “The US army troops have disrupted communication among Iraqi forces participating in the Mosul liberation operation,” the Iraqi army reported. Iraq’s joint military forces, including the Hash Al-Shaabi (popular forces), started their military operation in Western Mosul on Saturday to recapture Tal Afar and also prevent terrorists from fleeing to Syria. The Iraqi parliament’s Security and Defense Committee, meantime, confirmed that the advances of the Iraqi volunteer forces to the West of the city of Mosul has foiled the US plot to help the ISIL terrorists to flee to Syria. “Hashd al-Shaabi’s efforts in the biggest military operation in Mosul city blocked the US aid to senior ISIL commanders’ escape to Syria from the Western part of Mosul city. The parliamentary committee underlined that Washington intended to repeat the Fallujah scenario and help the ISIL commanders to escape to Syria. Earlier on Monday afternoon, the first units of the Iraqi army entered the strategic al-Karama region Southeastern Mosul. Al-Karama is the first region of Mosul city that the Iraqi army has entered after the city fell to the ISIL terrorists in July 2014. Earlier on Monday, Iraq’s joint military forces kicked off a new round of military operations from three directions towards the Eastern parts of Mosul after seizing control over a vast swathe of land in the surrounding areas of the city in Nineveh province. “The Iraqi forces started moving towards the Eastern bank of the Tigris river near Mosul city,” the Arabic-language media reported. The military operation towards the Eastern part of Mosul started on the 15th day of the Mosul liberation operation. Meantime, the Iraqi sources disclosed that the ISIL has laid mines and stationed snipers on the Eastern bank of the Tigris river. On Sunday, Spokesman of the Iraqi Volunteer Forces (Hashd al-Shaabi) Ahmad al-Assadi announced that the country’s joint military forces had seized back tens of villages since the start of the Mosul liberation operation about two weeks ago. “Iraq’s joint military forces have seized back 100 villages from the ISIL on the West of the city of Mosul,” al-Assadi said. He noted that a sum of 20 bomb-laden vehicles of the ISIL have also been destroyed to the West of Mosul over the past 12 days. Also on Sunday, local sources said ISIL has broadly planted bombs in toys and other attractive objects for children and civilians in areas they leave as Iraqi joint forces continue their advances in the military operations to liberate Mosul from the terror group grip. “ISIL used toys because they know the Peshmerga will not touch it, but children will,” said Colonel Nawzad Kamil Hassan, an engineer who says his unit has cleared more than 50 tons of explosives from areas once controlled by the militants. In the areas where ISIL rules for, the group has attempted to plant bomb before its retreat. A toy, a playing card and an abandoned watch are all detonators designed to spark the acquisitive curiosity of a returning civilian, who would be maimed or murdered by the explosion. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by GPD on October 31, 2016, With 148 Reads Filed under Investigations . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+7297,Hillary Clinton Appears Disoriented And Confused At New York Airport Day Before Presidential Election,"  Hillary Clinton Appears Disoriented And Confused At New York Airport Day Before Presidential Election A few seconds later, her handlers become aware that she's having a Parkinson's freeze moment, and immediately swarm around her pushing the video cameras backwards. But not before video of her is recorded showing she doesn't know what she's supposed to do.   After Hillary Clinton posed for photos with the media covering her, she was confused about whether she needed to board the awaiting plane or get in the motorcade that had just dropped her off. 
+Hillary Clinton was at the White Plains, New York airport about to start her day, when she exhibited some startling behavior . It was the very beginning of her day, so presumably she was rested and alert as she prepared to hit the campaign trail. Yet when speaking with the loud mob of reporters, she appeared to speak gibberish mixed in with her sentences, and laughing awkwardly even though nothing funny was being said. Then it got really weird. Shocking Video Footage Of A Confused Hillary Clinton Mumbling Gibberish On Campaign Trail 
+As she walks in the direction of her personal campaign plane, she suddenly freezes and is not sure whether she needs to get into the motorcade which had just dropped her off, or board the plane like she was supposed to do. 
+A few seconds later , her handlers become aware that she’s having another Parkinson’s freeze moment , and immediately swarm around her pushing the video cameras backwards. But not before video of her is recorded showing she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. Hillary’s Health: More than just a cough 
+The cameras capture her saying “where am I going”? and then “what am I doing”? before she disappears into the protective huddle of her watchers. 
+This stands is very stark contrast to am energized Donald Trump, making nearly a dozen stops in a 24 hour period and speaking for almost an hour wherever he goes. Hillary Clinton barely has the energy to get out of her car, and when she does get out, she has no idea what to do after that. 
+This deceitful woman is not only hiding her crimes and scandals , she and her people are also hiding the fact that she is very ill and physically unfit to serve for 4 years as president of the United States. SHARE THIS ARTICLE  ",FAKE
+600,"Election results: Bevin wins in Kentucky, Ohio rejects pot","(CNN) Matt Bevin, the controversial Kentuckian who attempted to dethrone Sen. Mitch McConnell last year and has vowed to eliminate the state's Obamacare programs, orchestrated a remarkable political comeback on Tuesday to win the state's governorship.
+
+In an upset victory by a surprisingly large margin, Bevin bested Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, a Democrat, in the contest.
+
+Bevin, a Republican often at odds with more mainstream elements of his party, solidly beat Conway 53%-44% in a race that Bevin was not expected to win by any significant margin.
+
+The wealthy businessman has pledged to shutdown the state's healthcare exchange and he's also expressed concerns about the expansion of Medicaid in Kentucky under the Affordable Care Act.
+
+In Mississippi, incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Bryant easily won his re-election against Democrat Robert Gray, a truck driver. The contest was pushed to the background, however, by a clash over a constitutional amendment that would allow voters to sue the state to boost funding for public schools.
+
+In Virginia, Democrats failed to capture control of the state Senate, where Republicans maintained the same narrow 21-19 majority they held before the election. Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe had campaigned aggressively in the run up to Tuesday's elections, seeking to flip control of the senate in order to advance key parts of his legislative agenda, in particular an expansion of Medicaid, and to build support for his longtime ally Hillary Clinton before 2016.
+
+Meanwhile, heated debate surrounding an effort to defeat a LGBT rights law in Texas could become hot fodder for the presidential candidates, a billionaire is backing a major effort to protect big game, and voters in Seattle are weighing a unique answer to the problem of money in politics.
+
+Here are some of the issues being decided Tuesday and that are sure to be dissected in the aftermath as pols, pundits and the press look for clues to what the results all mean in the 2016 contest for the White House:
+
+In Ohio, which was weighing a series of ballot initiatives that could have paved the way to the legalization of recreational marijuana, voters turned down the measure, CNN projects. Issue 3 would have effectively given a few businessmen a monopoly on cultivating the drug, which would have been sold at a limited number of places for sale in the state.
+
+Nick Lachey, the onetime lead singer of 98 Degrees, and other investors are behind ResponsibleOhio, the group that was pushing an initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use in the Buckeye State.
+
+""The people of Ohio have understandably rejected a deeply flawed, monopolistic approach to marijuana reform that failed to garner broad support from advocates or industry leaders,"" said one of those advocacy groups, The National Cannabis Industry Association. ""This debate has shown that there is a strong base of support for legalizing, taxing, and regulating marijuana.""
+
+Also on the pot front, Colorado voters are deciding what they want to do with the millions in revenue raised from its sale -- return the funds to taxpayers or use it to pay for school construction and other things.
+
+CNN projects Houston voters will reject the ""Houston Equal Rights Ordinance,"" a measure designed to protect lesbian, gay and transgender people. The ballot issue drew national attention, with conservative opponents claiming the law would allow troubled men to go into women's restrooms and locker rooms.
+
+On Tuesday afternoon, the Clinton campaign joined the fray, responding to a baiting tweet from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, that urged Houston to ""vote Texas values, not @HillaryClinton values.""
+
+The law passed by the city last year to protect lesbian, gay and transgender people, but Tuesday's vote repealed it.
+
+In recent months, the campaign to undo HERO has become a focal point for the right, which has spent millions and recruited an assortment of local celebrities to their cause, including former Houston Astros star outfielder Lance Berkman.
+
+""My wife and I have four daughters,"" Berkman said in an ad paid for by the Campaign for Houston PAC, which is seeking to repeal HERO. ""Proposition One would allow troubled men to enter women's public bathrooms, showers and locker rooms.""
+
+Supporters of the ordinance bristled at the claim, calling it fear-mongering against transgender men and women.
+
+How would you like some coupons to spend on your favorite candidate?
+
+That's what Seattle voters will now receive after the successful passage of the ""Honest Elections"" referendum, which was introduced to diminish the influence of money in politics.
+
+""Initiative 122"" will radically transform the financing of local campaigns. Under the measure, voters will each be given $100 in ""democracy vouchers"" -- four each, at $25 per -- to be shelled out to the candidates of their choice.
+
+It will also lower donation caps, ban contributions from corporations with significant city business interests, increase transparency and increase fines for electoral wrongdoing. Furthermore, officials who leave office will be required to spend three years on the sidelines before becoming eligible to register as lobbyists.
+
+This one's for Cecil the Lion, the big Zimbabwean cat killed in July by a dentist on safari from Minnesota.
+
+Washington state's Initiative Measure 1401, which was resoundingly passed by a greater than 2-to-1 margin Tuesday night, criminalizes ""selling, purchasing, trading, or distributing certain animal species threatened with extinction,"" raising the bar beyond where laws already on the books in New York, New Jersey and California have previously gone to protect big game.
+
+The measure is the brainchild of billionaire Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder, who has sunk millions of dollars of his own money into the campaign.
+
+Opponents, including the ""Legal Ivory Rights Coalition,"" had knocked the proposal for going too far. The group's website blared ""It's Not What They Say It Is!"" warning that grandmas looking to pass along their ""antique"" ivory will be made into criminals under the measure.
+
+Not complaining about the initiative's passage: Elephants and rhinoceroses -- often hunted for the ivory in their tusks and horns -- along with lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, marine turtles and sharks that are among the threatened species that supporters say would be helped by the referendum.
+
+On the other hand, Texans with a taste for ""hunting, fishing and harvesting"" got a constitutional boost on Tuesday, as voters there resoundingly passed Proposition 6.
+
+The amendment makes it more difficult for activist groups to push through new legislation or regulations aimed at expanding protections for animals or delicate ecosystems. The NRA lead the way in lobbying for its passage, with groups like the ""Dallas Safari Club"" also boosting the cause.
+
+With the measure's passage, Texas became the 19th state to guarantee its residents a constitutional right to hunt and kill almost all manner of wildlife and the freedom to catch and ""bag"" as many fish as they can haul back home.
+
+Airbnb, a vanguard of the so-called ""sharing economy,"" won a decisive victory in Tuesday's elections when San Francisco voters rejected a measure that would have critically limited the company's ability to operate in the city following a furious lobbying effort from proponents of both sides.
+
+Referred to as ""Prop. F,"" the defeated measure proposed a citywide ban on what are known as ""short-term rentals."" If successful, Prop. F would have effectively crippled Airbrb, the profitable hub for homeowners and renters who profit from leasing out rooms or houses to travelers for below market rates, in its hometown.
+
+The company had locked horns with the left over the measure, which activists supported amid growing tension over the lack of affordable housing in a city wracked by skyrocketing real estate prices. Rent and home sale prices in San Francisco have shot up in recent years, along with evictions, and critics say the fault lies, at least in part, with wealthy buyers who purchase housing for the express purpose of leasing it out for a quick profit.
+
+But for now, at least, Airbnb will be able to remain in its home.",REAL
+5249,Paul Manafort resigns as Trump campaign chairman after Breitbart shake-up,"After a week of horrible headlines, Paul Manafort abruptly resigned as chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign this morning. So much for a Friday news dump.
+
+Trump’s second campaign chief had already been effectively booted from his top role after Trump decided to bring in Breitbart News boss Stephen Bannon as his new campaign CEO and Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager over the weekend.
+
+The trouble for Manafort, who replaced first Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski earlier this summer, really began in earnest with Trump’s attacks on a Muslim American Gold Star family. Manafort, a longtime Republican player who has spent the last couple of decades lobbying on behalf of foreign dictators, was brought on by the campaign to deal with a possible contested convention. But the less than star-studded affair featured the prominent non-endorsement from former rival Ted Cruz and was bested by a Democratic convention that set-off a days long attack on the Khan family. Hardly a good look for Trump, by nearly all accounts.
+
+Manafort’s days reportedly grew numbered as Trump became enraged that his campaign was unable to mobilize Republican support over his attack on the Khans.
+
+As reports of Manafort’s connections to the Kremlin through his work with the pro-Russian Ukrainian government of Victor Yanukovych grew more troublesome, Trump moved to undercut the veteran political operative. In one week, there were reports that Manafort was listed on a secret ledger as having received $12.7 million in under-the-table payments, that he played a key role in fomenting pro-annexation sentiments in Crimea ahead of the Russian invasion, and that he illegally funneled foreign cash towards pro-Putin lobbying efforts in the U.S.
+
+Trump thanked Manafort for the contributions he made during his three months leading the campaign in a statement Friday. “I am very appreciative for his great work in helping to get us where we are today, and in particular his work guiding us through the delegate and convention process. Paul is a true professional and I wish him the greatest success,” Trump said. MANAFORT RESIGNS, per two sources briefed. Rick Gates remaining so far.",REAL
+7092,"James Bond wouldn’t make the grade in modern MI6, says Britain’s top spy","James Bond wouldn’t make the grade in modern MI6, says Britain’s top... James Bond wouldn’t make the grade in modern MI6, says Britain’s top spy By 0 41 
+Fictional super-spy James Bond’s lack of a moral compass would quickly rule him out of the intelligence services today, the head of MI6 said in a rare public statement. 
+In a question-and-answer session for the Black History Month website, spy chief Alex Younger said 007’s lack of an ethical core would have seen him rejected from training. 
+“ We know that if we undermine British values, even in the name of defending them, then we have failed. Our staff are not from another planet ,” Younger said. 
+“ They are ordinary men and women operating in the face of complex moral, ethical and physical challenges, often in the most forbidding environments on Earth .” 
+Read more 
+“ In contrast to James Bond, MI6 officers are not for taking moral shortcuts. In fact, a strong ethical core is one of the first qualities we look for in our staff, ” he added. 
+Younger insisted that Bond’s erratic individualism would certainly have rendered him unable to “get through our recruitment process.” 
+“ Whilst we share his qualities of patriotism, energy and tenacity, an intelligence officer in the real MI6 has a high degree of emotional intelligence, values teamwork and always has respect for the law… unlike Mr. Bond, ” Younger said. 
+Some, however, would contest claims that MI6 is a bastion of ethical conduct, not least during the UK’s heavy involvement in kidnap and torture in the post-9/11 world. 
+A Libyan kidnapped and delivered to the Libyan regime for torture recently questioned the commitment to morality of a previous MI6 head. 
+In July, Abdul Hakim Belhaj said former MI6 chief Mark Allen was mistaken if he thinks a recent article he wrote for a Christian magazine means his “account is settled with God.” 
+In 2004, Abdul Hakim Belhaj was kidnapped in Hong Kong with British complicity, along with his pregnant wife, and rendered back to his native Libya. He was then held and tortured by the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for six years. 
+A note faxed from Allen to the Libyan authorities told the regime’s spy chief Moussa Koussa: “ I congratulate you on the safe arrival of… the air cargo. ” 
+On August 4, a day before the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided it would not press charges against Allen, the ex-spook published a piece in the Catholic Herald on “ Christian ” approaches to terrorism. 
+Belhaj’s response, which had been offered to the Herald, was published on the website of the Reprieve human rights charity. 
+“ His words on the power of faith to see us through bloodshed are too rich to swallow, ” the torture victim wrote in reference to the now infamous ‘ air cargo ’ fax. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+2489,British firm aims to open immigration detention center near US-Mexico border,"The British security firm Serco has moved a step closer to entering the controversial but lucrative immigration detention market in the US, as the company successfully lobbied public officials in a small Texas county near the Mexico border to propose that the federal government open a family detention centre in the jurisdiction.
+
+The billion-dollar company, implicated in numerous immigration detention centre scandals in the UK and Australia, has been lobbying the US government for more than a year in an effort to win detention contracts, sparking sustained criticism from immigrant rights groups.
+
+The firm is now proposing that a shuttered nursing home in Jim Wells County, Texas, be reopened as a family detention centre, which could hold up to 600 detainees and would become the third privately managed centre in the United States.
+
+The Obama administration’s use of family detention centres that hold children and mothers has become one of the most contested elements of America’s border protection program.
+
+Serco representatives first approached officials in the county last month, as the company ramped up its lobbying efforts, following an open pitching invitation announced by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in April. On Monday, following a closed-door session between Serco lobbyists and the county’s five commissioners, the local government body voted to partner with Serco and pitch the proposal to Ice.
+
+The company has employed a number of experienced lobbyists in America, including a former senior Ice staff member, Kate Mills, and has already listed a job opening for a communications and logistics staff member close to the proposed centre “in the event of a contract award”.
+
+Judge Pedro Trevino Jr, the presiding member of the Jim Wells commissioners court, told the Guardian that Serco indicated up to 200 local jobs could be created at the centre. The county, with just over 40,000 residents, has had a spike in unemployment following the decline of the oil and gas industry in the region with the poverty rate climbing to 20%, according to census data.
+
+“People are most interested in the jobs it would create,” said Trevino, of the county’s reaction to the proposed deal, adding that county attorneys were continuing to research the proposal, wary of the controversy it could bring.
+
+“We know family detention centres are highly controversial and we want to put all our ducks in a row and gather facts before we make our final decision.”
+
+Although Ice opened an “information” pitching round designed for “market research” purposes, it has not yet confirmed if it will move on to receive formal proposals from potential family detention contractors.
+
+“There are several formalities that have to transpire with the [request for proposals] before we can begin to discuss,” an Ice public affairs officer told the Guardian.
+
+About 38,000 people were apprehended crossing the US-Mexico border in April alone, including more than 10,000 unaccompanied children and “family units”, according to US Customs and Border Patrol. This is the highest number since a surge in arrivals in June 2014, and will add pressure to the already strained detention network.
+
+Reports have also indicated that the Obama administration is planning raids that could lead to the detention and deportation of more Central American mothers and children who entered the country illegally.
+
+Serco has operated the Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre in the UK since 2007 and endured a string of abuse allegations, including that members of staff sexually assaulted female detainees. In Australia, where Serco operates all of the country’s mainland immigration detention facilities under a multibillion-dollar contract, the company has suffered sustained criticism after riots have broken out in centres on Christmas Island, dozens of detainees have self-harmed and others have made sexual assault allegations against staff.
+
+“Their actual track record is very different to what they say to people here in the US,” said Mohammad Abdollahi, director of advocacy for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services not-for-profit group in Texas. “There is no ‘right’ way to detain families, but they have shown, around the world, everything that is wrong with how you do it.”
+
+“Serco has international experience of managing immigration facilities. We are committed to looking after all those in our care with trust and respect,” said a US spokesman for the company in an emailed statement that confirmed Serco’s presence in Jim Wells County.
+
+The centre would be the corporation’s first in the United States, completing a triangle of family detention centers in south Texas, where Geo Group operates the 679-bed Karnes County Residential Center, and Corrections Corporation of America runs the 2,400-bed Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley. The only family facility outside of the state is a 96-bed facility in Pennsylvania that is operated by Berks County under an agreement with Ice.
+
+Most of the women and children held at the three facilities are seeking refugee status and asylum amid a humanitarian crisis in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
+
+Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, which operated a pilot “alternative to detention” program last year, says it found that housing the families in a less restrictive setting was a more cost-effective way to ensure they attended their immigration court hearings.
+
+“We saw that people seeking asylum have a huge stake in finishing the process that could give them a chance to potentially rebuild their life and live here in safety,” said Brittney Nystrom, LIRS director for advocacy. “We are creating additional trauma and pouring money down the drain.”",REAL
+3412,Merrick Garland’s instinct for the middle could put him in the court’s most influential spot,"Merrick Garland has the opportunity to become not only the newest member of the Supreme Court but also its most influential, taking a spot at the court’s center now reserved for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
+
+If the 63-year-old Garland is confirmed by the Senate — and there is no bigger if in all of Washington politics — he would help fulfill President Obama’s goal of remaking the court and become a part of a five-member liberal majority chosen by Obama and President Bill Clinton.
+
+Garland’s replacement of conservative icon Antonin Scalia would be the most significant shift on the Supreme Court since Clarence Thomas was confirmed in 1991 to replace the liberal civil rights giant Thurgood Marshall.
+
+But more than that, Garland could occupy the pivotal role as the court considers the most controversial cases­ of the day: affirmative action, abortion, gun rights, campaign finance regulation, the death penalty.
+
+For a decade, a version of that role has been played by Kennedy, the most powerful of the nine justices and the one who most often casts the deciding vote when the court’s conservatives and liberals deadlock.
+
+Just as Kennedy is to the left of the rest of the court’s Republican-nominated conservatives — and thus the justice most often in play — most scholars of the court think that Garland would probably be just to the right of all of the court’s liberals.
+
+No one knows for sure. But a review of his record on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and interviews with those who have watched him for years as a prominently mentioned Supreme Court hopeful see someone whose instinct is for the middle.
+
+“If confirmed, he’ll surely become the swing vote in most of the highly politicized cases, but more because he is a centrist than because he vacillates between more progressive and more conservative ideals,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law who watches closely the work of the D.C. Circuit, of which Garland is chief judge.
+
+Like others, Vladeck is most struck by the lack of controversy in a judge who has been on the bench nearly 20 years.
+
+“Chief Judge Garland’s jurisprudence is the epitome of centrist, case-by-case adjudication — not because he lacks deep methodological commitments, but because he’s never been prone to go out of his way to wax philosophical about those commitments,” he said. “He has a remarkable dearth of separate opinions, and even his majority opinions tend to be fairly efficient, technical resolutions of the legal questions before him.”
+
+Moreover, Garland is well known to the Supreme Court. More than 40 of his clerks have gone on to clerk for the justices, about a quarter of them for conservative members of the court. Such cross-pollination is increasingly rare.
+
+“Many fine Supreme Court justices took time to get their bearings,” said Justin Driver, a University of Chicago law professor who clerked for Garland and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen G. Breyer.
+
+“That would not be him,” Driver said. “He would hit the ground running.”
+
+Garland is known as a technical craftsman, with careful opinions that follow rather than push back at precedents either at his own court or the Supreme Court. He ranked in the top 10 percent of judges appointed in 1997 or after in a measure of both the quantity and quality of their work, according to an analysis by Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics start-up.
+
+Despite nearly two decades on what is often called the second-most-important court in the country — its judges often are nominated to take the next step to the high court — he has relatively few controversial rulings.
+
+The court often hears important government and regulatory cases but is rarely called upon to decide dramatic social issues such as affirmative action, abortion, same-sex marriage or the death penalty. Those have become staples at the Supreme Court.
+
+Conservatives acknowledge they have come up with a limited list of complaints. Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank that is normally a scourge of liberal jurists, acknowledged in a conference call with reporters that “the only criticism I’d make of him is that he’s a liberal.”
+
+Carrie Severino of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network criticized Garland as anti-Second Amendment. In 2007, he voted with the losing side on whether the entire D.C. Circuit should review a panel’s decision that struck down the District’s restrictive gun-ownership laws.
+
+She and Brian Rogers, executive director of the Republican group America Rising Squared, said Garland may be the “most anti-gun nominee” in decades.
+
+But a Republican judge joined Garland in saying that the landmark ruling about the Second Amendment’s protection of individual rights should be reviewed. The whole court did not take up the merits of the panel’s decision. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court in a dramatic 5-to-4 decision, with the majority opinion written by Scalia.
+
+But it would probably be just as accurate to describe Garland as the most conservative Supreme Court nominee by a Democratic president in decades. His prosecutor background and some of his rulings on the D.C. Circuit indicate that he would not take uniformly liberal positions on criminal justice issues; on the circuit, he is more likely to side with the government than his liberal colleagues.
+
+He is also deferential to government agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, and his rulings on labor issues are supported by unions. Liberal groups that might have wanted a more outspoken champion nonetheless say privately that they are confident that Garland would move the court in their direction.
+
+That was Whelan’s point, too: When it comes to the Supreme Court, a “supposed moderate liberal” is as good as any other kind of liberal.
+
+Garland has always been seen as the “safe” nomination that Obama kept in his back pocket. The president acknowledged that he considered Garland twice before and, with a Democratic-controlled Senate, opted instead for Sonia Sotomayor and then Elena Kagan.
+
+Garland looks more like a left-leaning version of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.: a Midwesterner with double degrees at Harvard who clerked for the same circuit judge, moved on to work for Supreme Court justices, served on the D.C. Circuit and made friends on both sides of the aisle.
+
+No one seriously doubts that Garland would move the court to the left and that his presence holds the promise for a reversal of the court’s trends on issues such as voting rights, environmental issues and, perhaps, campaign finance regulation.
+
+That is why the fight over his nomination is likely to be so fierce.",REAL
+8704,Comment on Shocking video shows Europe’s “refugee crisis” is a Muslim invasion by Refugees Invasion of Europe | Justice4Poland,"| December 1, 2015 at 6:38 am | Reply 
+This group of demented, destructive, abusive people is the world’s karma for kicking God out of their consciousness, being and world. If mankind maintained their love and reverence for their creator God, I believe this would not be happening and this people would already be contained and stopped. For America, Obama, Jarrett, Soros and their minions, who’re in agreement with this savage group, are the ones bringing America’s karma to her doorstep for kicking God out. The Godless liberals/communists are begging for these savages to destroy them by taking on the ways of evil, such as, abortion, perversions of sex and marriage, drugs, child abuse, etc. Do liberals really expect a positive outcome from having absolutely no morals and standards? They are probably quite a few of the same souls from the time of Pompeii, Soddom & Gomorrah, Roman and Greek Empires, Atlantis and Lemuria – review history and note where they and their country ended up. Atlantis & Lemuria crumbled and sank and now lies deep within the bottom of the ocean. We can still see the end result of Pompeii. What will it take to wake up these people from their hedonistic, anti-self thoughts and feelings??? How many lifetimes will they put themselves and the rest of society through this total destruction of their hearts, minds and souls? “You get what you give” and “whatever energy you put out into the universe returns to your doorstep” is truth. Hedonists are lost, lost, lost in their world of destructive unreality, and only God can pull them out of it. Pray for them and Earth to return to God reality.",FAKE
+4983,Trump to African Americans: 'What Do You Have to Lose?',"Donald Trump made his most direct appeal to African Americans on Friday, asking ""What do you have to lose?"" while slamming longstanding Democratic policies that have destroyed inner cities and sent manufacturing jobs to Mexico and other countries.
+
+""We cannot fix our problems by relying on the same politicians who created our problems in the first place,"" Trump told a rally in Dimondale, Mich., a suburb of Lansing in the southwestern part of the state. ""A new future requires brand-new leadership.
+
+""Look how much African-American communities have suffered under Democratic control,"" he continued in his appeal to the party's longtime base. ""To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump? What do you have to lose?
+
+""You're living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed.
+
+""What the hell do you have to lose?"" Trump asked before predicting, ""at the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African-American vote — because I will produce.
+
+""I will produce for the inner cities and I will produce for the African-Americans.
+
+""One thing we know for sure is if you keep voting for the same people, you will keep getting the same — exactly the same result,"" Trump said.
+
+""Hillary Clinton is a throwback to an ugly past where politicians preyed on our poorer citizens while selling them out for personal gain.""
+
+The Republican presidential nominee's speech comes after a bruising week that saw a major shake-up of his campaign staff, including a new chief executive, Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon, and Friday's resignation of campaign chairman Paul Manafort amid reports of lobbying ties to Ukraine.
+
+Trump has been referencing African Americans in speeches — mostly in suburban or heavily white communities — since last week's racial unrest over a police-involved shooting in Milwaukee, but Friday's comments marked his most direct appeal to date.
+
+He cited the contributions blacks have made to the country throughout history, hammered Democrat Hillary Clinton for backing policies that have ""harmed"" African-American communities over the years and said that his jobs plan would restore manufacturing to cities like Detroit and other Midwestern states.
+
+""The African-American community has given so much to this country,"" Trump said. ""They fought and died in every war since the Revolution. They've lifted up the conscience of our nation in the long march toward civil rights. They've sacrificed so much for the national good.
+
+""Yet, nearly four in 10 African-American children still live in poverty, and 58 percent of young African-Americans are not working. They cannot find a job.
+
+""We must do better as a country.""",REAL
+4543,Obama to name Marine Gen. Dunford chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff,"WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to name Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a senior Defense Department official said late Monday.
+
+Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, currently the leader of U.S. Transportation Command, will be named vice chairman, said the official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
+
+Dunford, a widely respected and well-liked officer at the Pentagon, has extensive battlefield experience, including as commander of all allied forces in Afghanistan. He will replace Army Gen. Martin Dempsey who is expected to retire later this summer after his second term expires. Selva would replace Adm. James Winnefeld.
+
+A formal announcement from the White House is expected Tuesday, the official said.
+
+Dunford quickly received support from one key member of the Senate Armed Services Committee — Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the panel's top Democrat.
+
+""I have come to greatly value General Dunford's counsel and insight, and I particularly appreciate the concern he has for our men and women in uniform under his command,"" Reed said.
+
+Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, hailed Dunford as well suited to the job. ""He is a brilliant choice,"" O'Hanlon said. ""Smart, wise, creative, pragmatic, calm, affable, experienced.""
+
+Dunford has been commandant since last October. Prior to that, he had led U.S. and NATO forces from February 2013 to August 2014 in Afghanistan and oversaw the withdrawal of tens of thousands of American troops from the country.
+
+An infantry officer, Dunford followed Gen. James Amos, a pilot, as commandant of the Marine Corps. He holds a master's degree in government from Georgetown University and a master's degree in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
+
+As chairman, Dunford will be the military's most senior officer and adviser to the president. The Senate must approve the nomination of Dunford for the two-year term. Most often, chairmen serve two terms.
+
+Among the primary challenges he'll inherit: the ongoing war against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria; Russia's increasing belligerence in Eastern Europe and the threat of automatic budget cuts known as sequestration.
+
+He'll also have to deal with China's increasing ambitions in the Pacific and the military's long-standing desire to shift its resources toward that region, O'Hanlon said.
+
+Selva's choice marks the return of airman to one of the top two slots for the first time since Gen. Richard Myers retired as chairman in 2005. Transportation Command lacks the visibility of some of the military's other top spots, including Central Command, which oversees the turbulent Middle East. But Transportation Command's function of moving troops, weapons and supplies around the globe is critically important.
+
+A cargo plane pilot, Selva also has extensive experience inside the Pentagon. He served as assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2008 to 2011.",REAL
+4055,Rout has Ukraine pleading for peacekeepers,"Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called Wednesday for an international peacekeeping mission in his nation’s war-torn east, a stark admission that his nation can no longer fend off pro-Russian rebels after a major battlefield defeat.
+
+Any international force on the ground would harden the battle lines after 10 months of fighting, forcing Ukraine to give up for now its attempts to reunify the nation. But it would also halt Russian-backed rebels from pushing onward toward Kiev.
+
+The suggestion came hours after thousands of Ukrainian troops fled the encircled railway hub of Debaltseve, where fighting only intensified after a cease-fire ostensibly took effect Sunday. Nearly a year after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, the fresh loss threatened tough political consequences for Ukraine’s pro-Western president amid questions of how the troops became surrounded in recent weeks.
+
+Soldiers described a chaotic nighttime retreat over eastern Ukraine’s frozen steppe, with shells raining down on them from two sides.
+
+The prospects for a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine were not immediately clear. Any U.N. Security Council mandate would be subject to a possible Russian veto. Poroshenko said he hoped for a European Union police mission, although what such a plan would entail on the ground remained unclear. Any E.U.-only plan appeared likely to be rejected by Russia, which has said that it views NATO’s encroachment on its borders as a security threat.
+
+“I invite you to discuss an invitation to a U.N. peacekeeping mission,” Poroshenko told a late-night meeting of his top security advisers, according to Ukrainian news outlets.
+
+The violence may increase pressure on President Obama to supply Ukraine’s military with weapons, a decision he said would be made only after the peace effort. E.U. leaders, meanwhile, said they would consider more economic sanctions against Russia.
+
+Elsewhere in Ukraine’s war-torn east, violence was abating as rebels announced that they had begun pulling back heavy weaponry in accordance with the cease-fire agreement. But the advance on Debaltseve suggested that the Russian-backed rebels had the strength to push forward when they wished.
+
+Poroshenko has staked his office on reuniting Ukraine and quelling Europe’s bloodiest conflict since the Balkan wars in the 1990s.
+
+Earlier in the day he called the retreat a “planned and organized withdrawal of certain units from Debaltseve.”
+
+The defeat was sure to stir a political cauldron over the prosecution of the war in Kiev, where charges of incompetence and even betrayal were lobbed at Ukraine’s military brass in the aftermath. The thousands of Ukrainian troops who were in and around Debaltseve represented a significant portion of the nation’s battle-ready soldiers.
+
+Ukraine’s flatlining economy is fueling even more anger toward Ukraine’s leaders. Natural gas prices are set to nearly triple under the terms of a bailout plan from the International Monetary Fund, sure to be politically radioactive. Ukraine’s currency fell to record lows on Wednesday.
+
+One of Poroshenko’s coalition allies in parliament called for criminal charges to be lodged against top military leaders.
+
+“There were enough forces and equipment. The problem is coordination and command,” Semen Semenchenko, a lawmaker who is also a volunteer militia commander, wrote on Facebook. “The head of the General Staff should be brought to liability. Period.”
+
+Western officials said Wednesday that the fighting called into question the viability of the peace deal, reached in Minsk, Belarus, last week between Russian President Vladimir Putin and European leaders.
+
+The situation in Debaltseve “is a massive violation of the cease-fire,” a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Steffen Seibert, said in Berlin. “It is a heavy strain on . . . the hope for peace in eastern Ukraine in general.” He said Germany was poised to push for further sanctions against Russia if fighting escalates.
+
+NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also said he was “deeply concerned” about the fighting.
+
+Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the fighting was inevitable after Poroshenko’s insistence at last week’s peace negotiations that the troops were not surrounded. But he said it must stop.
+
+Last week’s peace deal left a 60-hour window before the cease-fire was set to go into effect. That stipulation almost certainly led to an increase in fighting, as both sides sought to maximize their positions before the truce. No official explanation was given for the delay, although Ukrainian and European officials said at the time they were ready to have an immediate cease-fire. The window for continued fighting has led to speculation that rebels may have been seeking to seize Debaltseve before the truce took effect.
+
+Six Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the pullout, according to Poroshenko, although the real number seemed likely to be significantly higher, based on Ukrainian soldiers’ accounts of sustaining heavy fire during the late-night retreat. Many said they had only 10 minutes’ notice to grab what they could carry and flee, piling onto tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks as they sped toward the staging city of Artemivsk.
+
+It was not immediately clear how many troops escaped and how many remained in and around the town. Top military officials said that 85 percent of the troops had escaped as of Wednesday evening. Others may still be in hiding or were killed or captured, they said. Some soldiers said that many corpses were left behind.
+
+Front-line troops questioned on Wednesday why it took so long for the retreat to be ordered, saying that their situation had long ago become hopeless.
+
+“It’s not about Debaltseve as a city; it’s about Putin showing he can do what he wants,” said Lt. Viktor Kovalenko, the acting deputy commander of the battalion that had been charged with protecting railroads into Debaltseve. He said several people in his convoy were killed during the retreat, which began at 3 a.m. Wednesday, and that at least 50 troops were captured as they tried to flee.
+
+Kovalenko said supplies had run so low that one Ukrainian position was captured earlier this week simply because it ran out of ammunition.
+
+Another soldier described a harrowing early morning escape, speeding over pitch-black fields that had been hardened by frost.
+
+“We came under shelling, and we prayed to God to let us get out. There are a lot of wounded and killed people,” said Ihor Sevastyan, 47, who drove out of Debaltseve Wednesday in a green radio truck. The vehicle was riddled with large bullet holes, and one of the tires had been shot out. They kept pushing forward using the truck’s rim.
+
+Other than in Debaltseve, both sides said Wednesday that they were holding to the agreement. Rebels said they had begun to pull back heavy weaponry from the front lines, as stipulated by the cease-fire deal, and relatively little fighting was reported elsewhere in the region.
+
+Birnbaum reported from Moscow. Natasha Abbakumova in Moscow, Alexander Pustovit in Artemivsk, Ukraine, Stephanie Kirchner in Berlin, Daniela Deane in London and Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+2377,"Hot dogs, bacon and other processed meats cause cancer, World Health Organization declares","A research division of the World Health Organization announced Monday that bacon, sausage and other processed meats cause cancer and that red meat probably does, too.
+
+The report by the influential group stakes out one of the most aggressive stances against meat taken by a major health organization, and it is expected to face stiff criticism in the United States.
+
+The WHO findings were drafted by a panel of 22 international experts who reviewed decades of research on the link between red meat, processed meats and cancer. The panel reviewed animal experiments, studies of human diet and health, and cell processes that could explain how red meat might cause cancer.
+
+But the panel’s decision was not unanimous, and by raising lethal concerns about a food that anchors countless American meals, it will be controversial.
+
+The $95 billion U.S. beef industry has been preparing for months to mount a response, and some scientists, including some unaffiliated with the meat industry, have questioned whether the evidence is substantial enough to draw the strong conclusions that the WHO panel did.
+
+In reaching its conclusion, the panel sought to quantify the risks, and compared to carcinogens such as cigarettes, the magnitude of the danger appears small, experts said. The WHO panel cited studies suggesting that an additional 3.5 ounces of red meat everyday raises the risk of colorectal cancer by 17 percent; eating an additional 1.8 ounces of processed meat daily raises the risk by 18 percent, according to the research cited.
+
+“For an individual, the risk of developing colorectal cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed,” says Kurt Straif, an official with the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, which produced the report. “In view of the large number of people who consume processed meat, the global impact on cancer incidence is of public health importance.”
+
+About 34,000 cancer deaths a year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meats, according to figures cited by the panel.
+
+[WHO says hot dogs, bacon cause cancer. Does this mean we should all become vegetarians?]
+
+ 
+
+ The research into a possible link between eating red meat and cancer has been the subject of scientific debate for decades, with colorectal cancer being a long-standing area of concern. But by concluding that processed meat causes cancer, and that red meat “probably” causes cancer, the WHO findings go well beyond the tentative associations that some other groups have reported.
+
+The American Cancer Society, for example, notes that many studies have found “a link” between eating red meat and heightened risks of colorectal cancer. But it stops short of telling people that the meats cause cancer. Some diets that have lots of vegetables and fruits and lesser amounts of red and processed meats have been associated with a lower risk of colorectal cancer, the American Cancer Society says, but “it’s not exactly clear” which factors of that diet are important.
+
+Likewise, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the U.S. government’s advice compendium, encourage the consumption of protein-containing foods such as lean meats as part of a healthy diet. Regarding processed meats, though, the Dietary Guidelines offer a tentative warning: “Moderate evidence suggests an association between the increased intake of processed meats (e.g., franks, sausage, and bacon) and increased risk of colorectal cancer and cardiovascular disease.” The Dietary Guidelines do not assert that processed meats cause cancer.
+
+Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, which is updating the Dietary Guidelines with the USDA, have not yet reviewed the WHO report, a spokesperson said.
+
+[95 percent of the world's people may be wrong about salt]
+
+For consumers, the WHO announcement offers scant practical advice even while casting aspersions over a wide array of foods. Red meat includes beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton and goat. Processed meat includes hot dogs, ham, sausages, corned beef and beef jerky — or any other meat that has been cured, smoked, salted or otherwise changed to enhance flavor or improve preservation.
+
+How much of those is it safe to eat? The group doesn’t offer much guidance: “The data available for evaluation did not permit a conclusion about whether a safe level exists.”
+
+Should we be vegetarians? Again, the group does not hazard an answer.
+
+And how exactly does red meat and processed meat cause cancer? The group names a handful of chemicals involved in cooking and processing meat, most of them nearly unpronounceable, and some believed to be carcinogenic.
+
+“But despite the knowledge it is not yet fully understood how cancer risk is increased by red meat or processed meat,” the group wrote.
+
+Despite the voids in the science, the WHO findings might cast a pall over diners and those who serve them.
+
+At The Pig Restaurant on 14th Street NW in Washington, where the menu includes an array of pork products - kielbasa, prosciutto, pork cheek, etc - a worker sweeping the tables outside encouraged a reporter to look elsewhere for comments about cancer and red meat. Around the corner, outside the Whole Foods grocery, shoppers evinced a weary of fatalism regarding authoritative diet advice.
+
+“It makes some sense,” said Nassrin Farzaneh, a development consultant, carrying a bag out of the store, said of the WHO finding on processed meat. “But they say one thing and then two or three years later they something that contradicts it. It goes on and on.”
+
+“Everything causes cancer,” said Caroline Rourke, an energy policy analyst, also on her way out of the grocery. “Life causes cancer. Who cares what food does? Life is terminal, isn’t it?""
+
+[Another food to worry about? Honey not as healthy as we think.]
+
+In recent years, meat consumption has been the target of multi-faceted social criticism, with debates erupting not just over its role on human health, but the impact of feedlots on the environment and on animal welfare. The public debate over the WHO’s findings will probably play out with political lobbying and in marketing messages for consumers.
+
+An industry group, the North American Meat Institute, called the WHO report “dramatic and alarmist overreach,” and it mocked the panel’s previous work for approving a substance found in yoga pants and treating coffee, sunlight and wine as potential cancer hazards.
+
+The WHO panel “says you can enjoy your yoga class, but don’t breathe air (Class I carcinogen), sit near a sun-filled window (Class I), apply aloe vera (Class 2B) if you get a sunburn, drink wine or coffee (Class I and Class 2B), or eat grilled food (Class 2A),” said Betsy Booren, vice president of scientific affairs for the group.
+
+“We simply don’t think the evidence supports any causal link between any red meat and any type of cancer,” said Shalene McNeill, executive director of human nutrition at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
+
+But at its core, the issue revolves around science, and in particular the difficulty that arises whenever scientists try to link any food to a chronic disease.
+
+Experiments to test whether a food causes cancer pose a massive logistical challenge: they require controlling the diets of thousands of test subjects over a course of many years. For example, one group might be assigned to eat lots of meat and another less, or none. But for a variety of reasons involving cost and finding test subjects, such experiments are rarely conducted, and scientists instead often use other less direct methods, known as epidemiological or observational studies, to draw their conclusions.
+
+“I understand that people may be skeptical about this report on meat because the experimental data is not terribly strong,” said Paolo Boffetta, a professor of Tisch Cancer Institute at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine who has served on similar WHO panels. “But in this case the epidemiological evidence is very strong.”
+
+[Why the Bureau of Prisons stripped pork from the menu for federal inmates]
+
+Some scientists, however, have criticized the epidemiological studies for too often reaching “false positives,” that is, concluding that something causes cancer when it doesn’t.
+
+“Is everything we eat associated with cancer?” asked a much noted 2012 paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
+
+That paper reviewed the academic studies conducted on common cookbook ingredients. Of the 50 ingredients considered, 40 had been studied for their relation to cancer. Individually, most of those studies found that consumption of the food was correlated with cancer. But when the research on any given ingredient was considered collectively, those effects typically shrank or disappeared.
+
+“Many single studies highlight implausibly large effects, even though evidence is weak,” the authors concluded.
+
+Although epidemiological studies were critical in proving the dangers of cigarettes, the magnitude of the reported meat risk is much smaller, and it is hard for scientists to rule out statistical confounding as the cause of the apparent danger.
+
+Moreover, some skeptics noted that two experiments that tested diets with reduced meat consumption, the Polyp Prevention Trial and the Women’s Health Initiative, found that people who reduced their meat intake did not appear to have a lower cancer risk. It is possible, though, that the reductions in animal flesh were too small to have an effect.
+
+“It might be a good idea not to be an excessive consumer of meat,” said Jonathan Schoenfeld, the co-author of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition article and an assistant professor in radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School. “But the effects of eating meat may be minimal, if anything.”
+
+Was it wrong that the government steered people away from whole milk for decades?
+
+How Coca-Cola has tricked everyone into drinking so much of it
+
+What Americans do with fish is shocking
+
+Why Americans are falling out of love with one of their favorite fruits
+
+Whole milk, butter and eggs are now okay to eat. What's next?",REAL
+5699,Simon Parkes Updates: Swiss Earthquakes and DOS attacks,"Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
+Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
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+By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
+Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
+2248,17 biblical rules for marriage the Kim Davis set chooses to ignore,"Some people believe that Kentucky—or even all of America—should be subject to biblical law rather than constitutional law. They believe public servants like celebrity clerk Kim Davis owe their highest allegiance to the Bible, which means they shouldn’t be forced to give out unbiblical marriage licenses—like to gay couples. The issue is contested by a host of liberals, secularists, Satanists and moderate Christians. But assuming that Bible believers and religious freedom advocates carry the day, public servants will need to know their Good Book. The following 15-item quiz can be used to screen applicants for county clerk positions or as a guide for those already on the job.
+
+If Kentucky issues only biblical marriage licenses, to which of the following couples should a county clerk grant a license?
+
+1. A man with a consenting woman, but without her father’s permission. No. Numbers 30:1-16 teaches that a single woman’s father has final authority over legal contracts she may enter.
+
+2. A man, a nonconsenting woman, and her father. Yes. According to the Law of Moses a female is male property, as are slaves, livestock and children. (See Exodus 20:17, Exodus 21:7.) Her father can give her in marriage or sell her to a slave master. Female consent in the Bible is not a prerequisite for marriage or sex.
+
+3. A married man and three other women. Yes. The Old Testament endorses polygamy, and the New Testament does not reverse this—except for church elders (1 Timothy 3:2). (See Biblicalpolygamy.com)
+
+4. A childless widow and her husband’s reluctant brother. Yes. Genesis 38:8-10 makes it clear that a man has a responsibility to seed children for his deceased brother. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus doesn’t alter the tradition but does say it will no longer apply in heaven. (Matthew 22:24-28)
+
+5. Two men. No. Leviticus is clear. Two men having sex is an abomination, just like eating shellfish, getting tattoos, shaving your beard, or wearing blend fabrics. (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, 11:9-12, 19:28, 19:27)
+
+6. Two women. No, not even with their fathers’ permission. Paul’s epistle to the Romans (1:26) makes it clear that this is degrading and unnatural.
+
+7. A Christian and a Hindu. No. The Apostle Paul calls this being unequally yoked (2 Corinthians 6:14). If the applicants balk at your refusal, you might respond gently with Paul’s own words: “What fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion has light with darkness?”
+
+8. A soldier and a virgin prisoner of war. Yes, but you should provide written instructions on the purification ritual required before bedding her. The soldier must shave her head and trim her nails and give her a month to mourn her parents before the first sex act. Also, remind him that if she fails to “delight,” he must set her free rather than selling her. (Deuteronomy 21:10-14)
+
+9. A rapist and his victim. Yes, with qualifiers. The woman’s consent is not an issue, but her father should be present as he is owed 50 shekels (approximately $580) for the damage to his daughter. Also, the contract should have an addendum stating clearly that no divorce will be allowed. The rapist must keep her for life since, obviously, no one else will want the damaged goods. (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)
+
+10. A man and his wife’s indentured/undocumented servant. Yes, although you might remind the man that in this case a marriage license is not a prerequisite for sex, since community property laws apply. However, should God bless this union with babies, any offspring will belong to the man and his wife, not the indentured woman. (Genesis 30:1-22)
+
+11. A man and his mother, sister, half-sister, mother-in-law, grandchild, or uncle’s wife. Probably not. Although God’s law is timeless and unchanging, He does seem to shift on this one. In the book of Genesis, God rewards marriages between siblings—for example, the patriarch Abraham and his half-sister Sarah. But later texts specifically prohibit a variety of incestuous relationships (e.g. Lev. 18:7-8; Lev. 18:10; Lev. 20:11; Deut. 22:30; Deut. 27:20; Deut. 27:23). 12. A black woman and a white man, or vice versa. Absolutely not. Scripture is full of verses prohibiting interracial marriage (Gen. 28:6; Exod. 34:15-16; Num. 25:6-11; Deut. 7:1-3; Josh. 23:12-13; Judges 3:5-8; 1 Kings 11:1-2; Ezra 9:1-2, 12; Ezra 10:2-3, 10-11; Neh. 10:30; Neh. 13:25-27). 13. A gentile and a Jew. No. If the Jew should appeal to the Anti-Defamation League, remind them of how dangerous such a union could be: “Thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.” (Deuteronomy 7:3-4) 14. A man and a pregnant woman who claims to be a virgin.Yes. You may feel personal misgivings about a marriage that is based in deception from the get-go, but judge not that ye be not judged. One in 200 American women who give birth say they have never had sex. Rather than plaguing this young couple with your corrosive doubt, you can encourage them with the biblical virgin birth story, while taking care to avoid any sex-negative implications that might harm their marriage. 15. A man and a goat. Don’t be ridiculous. Can a goat sign a marriage license? 16. A man and a sex-trafficked teen he bought from a gangster. Yes, but not until Kentucky legalizes sex trafficking. Sexual slavery is quite common in the Bible, well regulated (Exodus 28:8), and frequently sanctioned or blessed by God. However, the New Testament teaches that we should pay our taxes and be law-abiding, even under a secular/pagan government. (Titus 3:1; 1 Peter 2:13-17) 17. Two zombies. Only if they are not Christians. Jesus states clearly that there will be no marriage for Christians in the afterlife (Matthew 22:24-28). Otherwise, marriage between the undead is not addressed in the Bible, and you should default to whatever the Supreme Court may have ruled on this matter. Note: Some liberal Christian license seekers may complain to you or your supervisor that these guidelines come mostly from the Old Testament, which has been replaced by a New Covenant under Jesus. Ask them if the Old Testament is still part of their Bible. Remind them that the Ten Commandments are in the Old Testament—all three versions. Lastly, quote the words of Jesus: Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5: 17-19). Stand firm. If the Bible is the perfect Word of the living God, your detractors are up against the Almighty himself. And, as the spiritual warfare hymn reminds us, the hordes of (liberal, gay, atheist, feminist) darkness cannot quench your light.",REAL
+10167,The Modern History of ‘Rigged’ US Elections,"The Modern History of ‘Rigged’ US Elections   Robert Parry, Consortium News 
+The United States is so committed to the notion that its electoral process is the world’s “gold standard” that there has been a bipartisan determination to maintain the fiction even when evidence is overwhelming that a U.S. presidential election has been manipulated or stolen. The “wise men” of the system simply insist otherwise. 
+We have seen this behavior when there are serious questions of vote tampering (as in Election 1960) or when a challenger apparently exploits a foreign crisis to create an advantage over the incumbent (as in Elections 1968 and 1980) or when the citizens’ judgment is overturned by judges (as in Election 2000). 
+The harsh truth is that pursuit of power often trumps the principle of an informed electorate choosing the nation’s leaders, but that truth simply cannot be recognized.Strangely, in such cases, it is not only the party that benefited which refuses to accept the evidence of wrongdoing, but the losing party and the establishment news media as well. Protecting the perceived integrity of the U.S. democratic process is paramount. Americans must continue to believe in the integrity of the system even when that integrity has been violated. 
+Of course, historically, American democracy was far from perfect, excluding millions of people, including African-American slaves and women. The compromises needed to enact the Constitution in 1787 also led to distasteful distortions, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation (although obviously slaves couldn’t vote). 
+That unsavory deal enabled Thomas Jefferson to defeat John Adams in the pivotal national election of 1800. In effect, the votes of Southern slave owners like Jefferson counted substantially more than the votes of Northern non-slave owners. 
+Even after the Civil War when the Constitution was amended to give black men voting rights, the reality for black voting, especially in the South, was quite different from the new constitutional mandate. Whites in former Confederate states concocted subterfuges to keep blacks away from the polls to ensure continued white supremacy for almost a century. 
+Women did not gain suffrage until 1920 with the passage of another constitutional amendment, and it took federal legislation in 1965 to clear away legal obstacles that Southern states had created to deny the franchise to blacks. 
+Indeed, the alleged voter fraud in Election 1960, concentrated largely in Texas, a former Confederate state and home to John Kennedy’s vice presidential running mate, Lyndon Johnson, could be viewed as an outgrowth of the South’s heritage of rigging elections in favor of Democrats, the post-Civil War party of white Southerners. 
+However, by pushing through civil rights for blacks in the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson earned the enmity of many white Southerners who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party via Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy of coded racial messaging. Nixon also harbored resentments over what he viewed as his unjust defeat in the election of 1960. 
+Nixon’s ‘Treason’ 
+So, by 1968, the Democrats’ once solid South was splintering, but Nixon, who was again the Republican presidential nominee, didn’t want to leave his chances of winning what looked to be another close election to chance. Nixon feared that — with the Vietnam War raging and the Democratic Party deeply divided — President Johnson could give the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a decisive boost by reaching a last-minute peace deal with North Vietnam. 
+The documentary and testimonial evidence is now clear that to avert a peace deal, Nixon’s campaign went behind Johnson’s back to persuade South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to torpedo Johnson’s Paris peace talks by refusing to attend. Nixon’s emissaries assured Thieu that a President Nixon would continue the war and guarantee a better outcome for South Vietnam. 
+Though Johnson had strong evidence of what he privately called Nixon’s “treason”— from FBI wiretaps in the days before the 1968 election — he and his top advisers chose to stay silent. In a Nov. 4, 1968 conference call , Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford – three pillars of the Establishment – expressed that consensus, with Clifford explaining the thinking: 
+“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.” 
+Clifford’s words expressed the recurring thinking whenever evidence emerged casting the integrity of America’s electoral system in doubt, especially at the presidential level. The American people were not to know what kind of dirty deeds could affect that process. 
+To this day, the major U.S. news media will not directly address the issue of Nixon’s treachery in 1968, despite the wealth of evidence proving this historical reality now available from declassified records at the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas. In a puckish recognition of this ignored history, the library’s archivists call the file on Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks their “X-file.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ LBJ’s ‘X-File’ on Nixon’s ‘Treason. ’”] 
+The evidence also strongly suggests that Nixon’s paranoia about a missing White House file detailing his “treason”– top secret documents that Johnson had entrusted to Rostow at the end of LBJ’s presidency – led to Nixon’s creation of the “plumbers,” a team of burglars whose first assignment was to locate those purloined papers. The existence of the “plumbers” became public in June 1972 when they were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate in Washington. 
+Although the Watergate scandal remains the archetypal case of election-year dirty tricks, the major U.S. news media never acknowledge the link between Watergate and Nixon’s far more egregious dirty trick four years earlier, sinking Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks while 500,000 American soldiers were in the war zone. In part because of Nixon’s sabotage — and his promise to Thieu of a more favorable outcome — the war continued for four more bloody years before being settled along the lines that were available to Johnson in 1968. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ The Heinous Crime Behind Watergate .”] 
+In effect, Watergate gets walled off as some anomaly that is explained by Nixon’s strange personality. However, even though Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, he and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who also had a hand in the Paris peace talk caper, reappear as secondary players in the next well-documented case of obstructing a sitting president’s foreign policy to get an edge in the 1980 campaign. 
+Reagan’s ‘October Surprise’ Caper 
+In that case, President Jimmy Carter was seeking reelection and trying to negotiate release of 52 American hostages then held in revolutionary Iran. Ronald Reagan’s campaign feared that Carter might pull off an “October Surprise” by bringing home the hostages just before the election. So, this historical mystery has been: Did Reagan’s team take action to block Carter’s October Surprise? 
+The testimonial and documentary evidence that Reagan’s team did engage in a secret operation to prevent Carter’s October Surprise is now almost as overwhelming as the proof of the 1968 affair regarding Nixon’s Paris peace talk maneuver. 
+That evidence indicates that Reagan’s campaign director William Casey organized a clandestine effort to prevent the hostages’ release before Election Day, after apparently consulting with Nixon and Kissinger and aided by former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, who was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate. 
+By early November 1980, the public’s obsession with Iran’s humiliation of the United States and Carter’s inability to free the hostages helped turn a narrow race into a Reagan landslide. When the hostages were finally let go immediately after Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, his supporters cited the timing to claim that the Iranians had finally relented out of fear of Reagan. 
+Bolstered by his image as a tough guy, Reagan enacted much of his right-wing agenda, including passing massive tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, weakening unions and creating the circumstances for the rapid erosion of the Great American Middle Class. 
+Behind the scenes, the Reagan administration signed off on secret arms shipments to Iran, mostly through Israel, what a variety of witnesses described as the payoff for Iran’s cooperation in getting Reagan elected and then giving him the extra benefit of timing the hostage release to immediately follow his inauguration. 
+In summer 1981, when Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes learned about the arms shipments to Iran, he checked on their origins and said, later in a PBS interview: 
+“It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment. … [This operation] seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration. And I understand some contacts were made at that time.” 
+Those early covert arms shipments to Iran evolved into a later secret set of arms deals that surfaced in fall 1986 as the Iran-Contra Affair, with some of the profits getting recycled back to Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist government. 
+While many facts of the Iran-Contra scandal were revealed by congressional and special-prosecutor investigations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the origins of the Reagan-Iran relationship was always kept hazy. The Republicans were determined to stop any revelations about the 1980 contacts, but the Democrats were almost as reluctant to go there. 
+A half-hearted congressional inquiry was launched in 1991 and depended heavily on then-President George H.W. Bush to collect the evidence and arrange interviews for the investigation. In other words, Bush, who was then seeking reelection and who was a chief suspect in the secret dealings with Iran, was entrusted with proving his own guilt. 
+Tired of the Story 
+By the early 1990s, the mainstream U.S. news media was also tired of the complex Iran-Contra scandal and wanted to move on. As a correspondent at Newsweek, I had battled senior editors over their disinterest in getting to the bottom of the scandal before I left the magazine in 1990. I then received an assignment from PBS Frontline to look into the 1980 “October Surprise” question, which led to a documentary on the subject in April 1991. 
+However, by fall 1991, just as Congress was agreeing to open an investigation, my ex-bosses at Newsweek, along with The New Republic, then an elite neoconservative publication interested in protecting Israel’s exposure on those early arms deals, went on the attack. They published matching cover stories deeming the 1980 “October Surprise” case a hoax, but their articles were both based on a misreading of documents recording Casey’s attendance at a conference in London in July 1980, which he seemed to have used as a cover for a side trip to Madrid to meet with senior Iranians regarding the hostages. 
+Although the bogus Newsweek/New Republic “London alibi” would eventually be debunked, it created a hostile climate for the investigation. With Bush angrily denying everything and the congressional Republicans determined to protect the President’s flanks, the Democrats mostly just went through the motions of an investigation. 
+Meanwhile, Bush’s State Department and White House counsel’s office saw their jobs as discrediting the investigation, deep-sixing incriminating documents, and helping a key witness dodge a congressional subpoena. 
+Years later, I discovered a document at the Bush presidential library in College Station, Texas, confirming that Casey had taken a mysterious trip to Madrid in 1980. The U.S. Embassy’s confirmation of Casey’s trip was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson to Associate White House Counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. in early November 1991, just as the congressional inquiry was taking shape. 
+Williamson said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown,” Beach noted in a “ memorandum for record ” dated Nov. 4, 1991. 
+Two days later, on Nov. 6, Beach’s boss, White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, convened an inter-agency strategy session and explained the need to contain the congressional investigation into the October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to ensure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992. 
+At the meeting, Gray laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation. The prospect that the two sets of allegations would merge into a single narrative represented a grave threat to George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it , the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.” 
+Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns and be of special interest to the President ,” Gray declared, according to minutes . [Emphasis in original.] 
+Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings. 
+Timid Democrats 
+But Bush’s White House really had little to fear because whatever evidence that the congressional investigation received – and a great deal arrived in December 1992 and January 1993 – there was no stomach for actually proving that the 1980 Reagan campaign had conspired with Iranian radicals to extend the captivity of 52 Americans in order to ensure Reagan’s election victory. 
+That would have undermined the faith of the American people in their democratic process – and that, as Clark Clifford said in the 1968 context, would not be “good for the country.” 
+In 2014 when I sent a copy of Beach’s memo regarding Casey’s trip to Madrid to former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, who had chaired the October Surprise inquiry in 1991-93, he told me that it had shaken his confidence in the task force’s dismissive conclusions about the October Surprise issue. 
+“The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he [Casey] did make the trip” to Madrid, Hamilton told me. “Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.” 
+Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation. 
+“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said, adding that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests. But that trust was at the heart of the inquiry’s failure. With the money and power of the American presidency at stake, the idea that George H.W. Bush and his team would help an investigation that might implicate him in an act close to treason was naïve in the extreme. 
+Arguably, Hamilton’s timid investigation was worse than no investigation at all because it gave Bush’s team the opportunity to search out incriminating documents and make them disappear. Then, Hamilton’s investigative conclusion reinforced the “group think” dismissing this serious manipulation of democracy as a “conspiracy theory” when it was anything but. In the years since, Hamilton hasn’t done anything to change the public impression that the Reagan campaign was innocent. 
+Still, among the few people who have followed this case, the October Surprise cover-up would slowly crumble with admissions by officials involved in the investigation that its exculpatory conclusions were rushed , that crucial evidence had been hidden or ignored , and that some alibis for key Republicans didn’t make any sense . 
+But the dismissive “group think” remains undisturbed as far as the major U.S. media and mainstream historians are concerned. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative or Trick or Treason: The 1980 October Surprise Mystery or Consortiumnews.com’s “ Second Thoughts on October Surprise. ”] 
+Past as Prologue 
+Lee Hamilton’s decision to “clear” Reagan and Bush of the 1980 October Surprise suspicions in 1992 was not simply a case of miswriting history. The findings had clear implications for the future as well, since the public impression about George H.W. Bush’s rectitude was an important factor in the support given to his oldest son, George W. Bush, in 2000. 
+President George W. Bush is introduced by his brother Florida Gov. Jeb Bush before delivering remarks at Sun City Center, Florida, on May 9, 2006. (White House photo by Eric Draper), if the full truth had been told about the father’s role in the October Surprise and Iran-Contra cases, it’s hard to imagine that his son would have received the Republican nomination, let alone made a serious run for the White House. And, if that history were known, there might have been a stronger determination on the part of Democrats to resist another Bush “stolen election” in 2000. 
+Regarding Election 2000, the evidence is now clear that Vice President Al Gore not only won the national popular vote but received more votes that were legal under Florida law than did George W. Bush. But Bush relied first on the help of officials working for his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, and then on five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to thwart a full recount and to award him Florida’s electoral votes and thus the presidency. 
+The reality of Gore’s rightful victory should have finally become clear in November 2001 when a group of news organizations finished their own examination of Florida’s disputed ballots and released their tabulations showing that Gore would have won if all ballots considered legal under Florida law were counted. 
+However, between the disputed election and the release of those numbers, the 9/11 attacks had occurred, so The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other leading outlets did not want the American people to know that the wrong person was in the White House. Surely, telling the American people that fact amid the 9/11 crisis would not be “good for the country.” 
+So, senior editors at all the top new organizations decided to mislead the public by framing their stories in a deceptive way to obscure the most newsworthy discovery – that the so-called “over-votes” in which voters both checked and wrote in their choices’ names broke heavily for Gore and would have put him over the top regardless of which kinds of chads were considered for the “under-votes” that hadn’t registered on antiquated voting machines. “Over-votes” would be counted under Florida law which bases its standards on “clear intent of the voter.” 
+However, instead of leading with Gore’s rightful victory, the news organizations concocted hypotheticals around partial recounts that still would have given Florida narrowly to Bush. They either left out or buried the obvious lede that a historic injustice had occurred. 
+On Nov. 12, 2001, the day that the news organizations ran those stories, I examined the actual data and quickly detected the evidence of Gore’s victory. In a story that day, I suggested that senior news executives were exercising a misguided sense of patriotism. They had hid the reality for “the good of the country,” much as Johnson’s team had done in 1968 regarding Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris peace talks and Hamilton’s inquiry had done regarding the 1980 “October Surprise” case. 
+Within a couple of hours of my posting the article at Consortiumnews.com, I received an irate phone call from The New York Times media writer Felicity Barringer, who accused me of impugning the journalistic integrity of then-Times executive editor Howell Raines. I got the impression that Barringer had been on the look-out for some deviant story that didn’t accept the Bush-won conventional wisdom. 
+However, this violation of objective and professional journalism – bending the slant of a story to achieve a preferred outcome rather than simply giving the readers the most interesting angle – was not simply about some historical event that had occurred a year earlier. It was about the future. 
+By misleading Americans into thinking that Bush was the rightful winner of Election 2000 – even if the media’s motivation was to maintain national unity following the 9/11 attacks – the major news outlets gave Bush greater latitude to respond to the crisis, including the diversionary invasion of Iraq under false pretenses. The Bush-won headlines of November 2001 also enhanced the chances of his reelection in 2004. [For the details of how a full Florida recount would have given Gore the White House, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ Gore’s Victory ,”“ So Bush Did Steal the White House ,” and “ Bush v. Gore’s Dark American Decade. ”] 
+A Phalanx of Misguided Consensus 
+Looking back on these examples of candidates manipulating democracy, there appears to be one common element: after the “stolen” elections, the media and political establishments quickly line up, shoulder to shoulder, to assure the American people that nothing improper has happened. Graceful “losers” are patted on the back for not complaining that the voters’ will had been ignored or twisted. 
+Al Gore is praised for graciously accepting the extraordinary ruling by Republican partisans on the Supreme Court, who stopped the counting of ballots in Florida on the grounds, as Justice Antonin Scalia said, that a count that showed Gore winning (when the Court’s majority was already planning to award the White House to Bush) would undermine Bush’s “legitimacy.” 
+Similarly, Rep. Hamilton is regarded as a modern “wise man,” in part, because he conducted investigations that never pushed very hard for the truth but rather reached conclusions that were acceptable to the powers-that-be, that didn’t ruffle too many feathers. 
+But the cumulative effect of all these half-truths, cover-ups and lies – uttered for “the good of the country”– is to corrode the faith of many well-informed Americans about the legitimacy of the entire process. It is the classic parable of the boy who cried wolf too many times, or in this case, assured the townspeople that there never was a wolf and that they should ignore the fact that the livestock had mysteriously disappeared leaving behind only a trail of blood into the forest. 
+So, when Donald Trump shows up in 2016 insisting that the electoral system is rigged against him, many Americans choose to believe his demagogy. But Trump isn’t pressing for the full truth about the elections of 1968 or 1980 or 2000. He actually praises Republicans implicated in those cases and vows to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia. 
+Trump’s complaints about “rigged” elections are more in line with the white Southerners during Jim Crow, suggesting that black and brown people are cheating at the polls and need to have white poll monitors to make sure they don’t succeed at “stealing” the election from white people. 
+There is a racist undertone to Trump’s version of a “rigged” democracy but he is not entirely wrong about the flaws in the process. He’s just not honest about what those flaws are. 
+The hard truth is that the U.S. political process is not democracy’s “gold standard”; it is and has been a severely flawed system that is not made better by a failure to honestly address the unpleasant realities and to impose accountability on politicians who cheat the voters. 
+Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).",FAKE
+1669,"Rubio, Cruz, Christie Improve Their Standing In Third GOP Debate","Rubio, Cruz, Christie Improve Their Standing In Third GOP Debate
+
+The Republican presidential race entered a new phase Wednesday night as the outsider candidates, who dominated the first two debates, were upstaged by several of their office-holding rivals — and by a budding controversy over the conduct of the third debate itself.
+
+Ben Carson, Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina were all on hand and all had their moments. But the featured performer of the night was Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida who, at 44, is the youngest contestant in the field. Also acquitting themselves well were his Senate colleague, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Chris Christie, the oft-embattled governor of New Jersey.
+
+Christie's much-maligned campaign had barely qualified for inclusion in this debate, but he seemed revivified by the questions and the interchange — especially the contretemps with the CNBC moderators.
+
+""Even in New Jersey what you're doing would be called rude,"" said Christie, referring to CNBC moderator John Harwood.
+
+Rubio became the debate's focus largely because of tough questions from the CNBC moderators that he deftly turned into recitations of his talking points. When other rivals tried to probe the same vulnerabilities, Rubio was quickly able to flip the polarity and deliver a put down in response.
+
+Questioned about his missed votes in the Senate (the most of any senator this year) and his stated lack of interest in that position, Rubio noted how many votes had been missed by senators in both parties pursuing the presidency in the past.
+
+When Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor sometimes described as Rubio's mentor, renewed the criticism (""What is it in the Senate, a French work week, where you only have to show up for three days?"") Rubio wondered why Bush had never spoken out about such things before.
+
+""The only reason why you're doing it now,"" Rubio charged, ""is because we're running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.""
+
+Bush was not able to establish much momentum after that, finishing near the bottom of the list in speaking time. It was his third flat performance in the debate series to date, and the most damaging in its timing. His campaign had highlighted the evening, calling it Bush's chance to rebut suggestions he lacks real enthusiasm for this campaign. In recent weeks, he has seemed diffident and off-message at times in public appearances. He has laid off staff, as his standing in the polls has continued to decline.
+
+Rubio, by stark contrast, was both sharp with a cutting remark and adept at the charming aside. Talking about a program for older people, he beamed boyishly as he said, ""I'd never vote for anything that would hurt my mom.""
+
+Rubio has been locked in the single digits in national polls and surveys in the early voting states as well. But many who watched the third debate expected that to change. And if the current front-runners should fade, leaving their voters up for grabs, the contest could become between Rubio and Cruz.
+
+The night's peak energy point came when Cruz fielded a typically truculent question from one of the CNBC moderators and hit it out of the park.
+
+""The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media,"" Cruz said.
+
+The debate audience, clearly a sympathetic crowd, roared its approval, nearly drowning out Cruz as he continued.
+
+""This is not a cage match,"" Cruz added. ""And, you look at the questions — 'Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?' 'Ben Carson, can you do math?' 'John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?' 'Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?' 'Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?'""
+
+Cruz contrasted these questions with those at the Democratic debate, even though that event was put on by CNN. He said all the Democrats were asked was, ""Which of you is more handsome and why?""
+
+Several of the other Republican candidates tried to get in on the crowd's appetite for media criticism before the evening was over. Their staffs were also complaining about the in-your-face tone of the CNBC crew. After the debate, Carson's campaign manager talked about renegotiating the terms of the remaining debates.
+
+Reince Priebus, the GOP national chairman who took control of the debates this year and made deals with the various news outlets, also expressed dismay after the debate and said changes would be made to future formats.
+
+Meanwhile, the man who has been proud of leading in polls among Republicans since July, Donald Trump, held his own Wednesday night despite a disappointing slide to No. 2 in some of the most recent tests both nationally and in Iowa. Trump delivered his stock lines about taxes, immigration and badly negotiated deals on trade and foreign relations. But the Trump presence was a measure less effervescent than on the stump or in earlier debates.
+
+The new leader in some polls, Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, reprised his role as the quiet man on stage. He had less speaking time than almost any other candidate, and when he had the spotlight, he did little to hold it. Asked for a weakness, he cited his failure to think of himself as presidential material (""until hundreds of thousands of people began to tell me that I needed to do it""). He also seemed unsure of his footing at times when describing his tax rate plan and other economic matters.
+
+But Carson, too, took the opportunity to push back on the CNBC journalists. When Carl Quintanilla asked about Carson's association with a controversial maker of nutritional supplements, Carson flatly denied any involvement and called the assertion ""pure propaganda.""
+
+In fact, Carson starred in a promotional video for the company and may face more questions about his statement in the days ahead. But when Quintanilla tried to follow up, the crowd booed and Carson took the out: ""See,"" he said, ""they know.""
+
+Carly Fiorina, regarded by many as the standout performer in the Sept. 16 debate, managed to get more speaking time this time than any of her rivals — in part, by resisting the moderators. But while she came across as self-assured and offered one of her best defenses of leadership at Hewlett-Packard a decade ago, Fiorina did not have a memorable exchange with Trump or any of the candidates.
+
+The other four candidates who took part may have experienced more frustration than fulfillment. Rand Paul, a senator from Kentucky, was one of the three candidates with fewest minutes of airtime. His efforts to climb into the tax debate were largely unsuccessful. Mike Huckabee had his usual moments of folksy humor but few scoring opportunities.
+
+The man who had the highest hopes for this round may have been John Kasich, the governor of Ohio who has tried to go after the non-politician front-runners, attacking the unrealistic promises of lower taxes and an end to illegal immigration. Kasich kicked off the evening with thinly veiled criticisms of Carson and Trump as potential occupants of the Oval Office.
+
+""My great concern is that we are on the verge, perhaps, of picking someone who cannot do this job,"" he charged, adding, ""We need somebody who can lead.""
+
+Trump promptly fired back with a withering rebuttal about Kasich's Ohio success being a windfall from oil produced by fracking, and about Kasich's partnership at Lehman Brothers shortly before that Wall Street firm collapsed and set off the worst of the 2008 financial panic.
+
+Kasich had a comeback, but his offensive came up short.",REAL
+192,Americans Don't Like New Congress Any Better Than The Last One,"Since last year, Americans have grown increasingly positive about jobs, the direction of the country and even the president -- but they're not yet willing to extend the same goodwill to Congress.
+
+Just 16 percent of Americans approve of Congress, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday. That's up from a 9 percent low during the 2013 government shutdown, but virtually unchanged since the end of last year.
+
+""Congress' poor track record notwithstanding, there is reason to believe this Congress will at least be rated more popularly going forward than the last two divided Congresses,"" Gallup's Andrew Dugan wrote. ""Typically, elections that hand control of Congress to one party provide an initial uptick in support for the new Congress.""
+
+A new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that most Americans think Congress is worse than it used to be, with a majority saying it is less civil and more divided than it was a decade ago.
+
+A 52 percent majority of Americans say congressional debates are less civil than they were 10 years ago, and 58 percent say Congress is now more divided along party lines. Americans 45 and older were the most likely to say things had devolved.
+
+Ironically, the woes of Congress are something partisan Americans can agree on: Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to say Congress is worse today.
+
+But while ratings for Congress remain low, Americans feel at least relatively warmer toward their own representatives. Twenty-six percent of Americans approve of the member representing their district, while another 26 percent disapprove and the remaining 47 percent are neutral or unsure.
+
+Republicans were by far the most satisfied, giving their representatives a net +17 approval rating, compared to a net -8 among independents and a net +3 among Democrats.
+
+Americans historically have been much more positive about their own representatives than about Congress as a whole, although the percentage who said they felt their own member should be re-elected dipped to a near-historic low in 2014.
+
+The HuffPost/YouGov poll was conducted Jan. 6-8 among 1,000 U.S. adults using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. Factors considered include age, race, gender, education, employment, income, marital status, number of children, voter registration, time and location of Internet access, interest in politics, religion and church attendance.
+
+The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the poll's methodology are available here.",REAL
+57,Million-dollar donors pump huge sums into 2016 White House race,"More than 50 individuals and entities have shelled out at least $1 million apiece to big-money groups backing presidential candidates — with close to half of the big donors giving to a super PAC aligned with former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
+
+With 15 months to go before Election Day, donors have already contributed $272.5 million to independent groups supporting the large Republican field, more than four times the $67 million raised through their official campaigns, according to a tally by The Washington Post.
+
+In all, 58 million-dollar donors together were responsible for $120 million donated to GOP and Democratic super PACs by June 30 — more than 40 percent of the total amount raised by those groups.
+
+Never before has so much money been donated by such a small number of people so early. The massive sums have empowered outside groups that face no contribution limits and are now serving as de facto arms of many campaigns.
+
+[How campaigns and their super PAC backers work together]
+
+“Clearly the action is with the super PACs and with people who can write seven-digit and bigger checks,” said Henry Barbour, a veteran GOP fundraiser based in Mississippi who is informally advising former Texas governor Rick Perry in his run. “It’s amazing, but a handful of people really can have a material impact on the race.”
+
+Topping the list of mega-donors on the right is New York hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, who donated $11 million to a super PAC aligned with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Houston private equity investor Toby Neugebauer gave $10 million to another Cruz super PAC. Kelcy Warren, a Dallas energy executive and the national finance chairman for Perry’s campaign, gave $6 million to two pro-Perry super PACs.
+
+Half a dozen donors have made $5 million contributions to Republican hopefuls, including Florida car magnate Norman Braman, who is backing Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida; Dallas tech entrepreneur Darwin Deason, who is supporting Perry; and Wisconsin roofing billionaire Diane Hendricks, who is supporting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
+
+While more money is flowing to Republican-allied PACs than to the official campaigns, the situation is the reverse on the Democratic side: 80 percent of the money raised to support Hillary Rodham Clinton and her rivals went directly to their campaigns.
+
+Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has said he does not want the support of a super PAC.
+
+But Clinton is flanked by her own wealthy allies who have the means to pump tens of millions into independent groups on her behalf. Already, eight have given $1 million to Priorities USA Action, one of her allied super PACs, which raised $15.6 million in all. The big backers include hedge-fund investor George Soros, media executive Haim Saban and film director Steven Spielberg.
+
+For the first time, nearly every presidential contender is backed by a deep-pocketed ally — and, in many cases, several. The groups are run by longtime advisers and former aides to the White House hopefuls, who have edged closer to their aligned super PACs than previous candidates dared.
+
+“There is now a new norm in how presidential candidates will run for office,” said David Donnelly, president of Every Voice, a group that advocates reducing the influence of the wealthy on politics. “It’s not about how much support they get from voters in Iowa and New Hampshire as the first benchmark. It’s about how much they can direct to these huge super PACs.”
+
+Bush spent most of the year headlining high-dollar fundraisers for his allied super PAC, Right to Rise, helping it collect a record $103 million while maintaining that he had yet not decided whether to run.
+
+The group hit its expected $100 million goal on June 30, the last day of the fundraising period, when it cashed 82 contributions totaling $3.5 million. Among them was a $1 million donation from Shahla Ansary, wife of former Iranian diplomat Hushang Ansary. He had given $1 million in February.
+
+[Racing to reach $100 million, Bush super PAC fundraising spiked in last three weeks of quarter]
+
+In all, 20 individuals and four companies donated at least $1 million to Right to Rise, with the largest sum coming from Coral Gables health-care executive Miguel Fernandez, who gave the super PAC more than $3 million.
+
+Fernandez told the Wall Street Journal that he was not looking for any favors from Bush.
+
+“I am sure there’s at least one [donor] that wants a solar power business and another who wants to build submarines,” Fernandez joked, according to the paper. “I have only given to Jeb because I think he has the right values.”
+
+The super PACs supporting Bush’s rivals for the GOP nomination were largely financed by a few wealthy patrons.
+
+Four groups called Keep the Promise that are supporting Cruz together raised more than $37 million, but 95 percent came from just seven contributors, including $15 million from the Wilks family of Cisco, Tex., which made billions designing hydraulic fracturing trucks.
+
+Half of the $20 million raised by Unintimidated PAC, which is supporting Walker, came from two women: Hendricks and Marlene Ricketts, wife of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts.
+
+Rubio’s allied super PAC, Conservative Solutions PAC, brought in slightly more than $16 million.
+
+Nearly a third of it came from Braman, a longtime patron of the Florida senator. Another $3 million came from Lawrence Ellison, the chief technology officer of Oracle, while Laura Perlmutter, wife of Marvel Entertainment CEO Isaac Perlmutter, donated $2 million. Besilu Stables LLC, a Florida-based horse-racing operation owned by Florida businessman Benjamin Leon, gave $2.5 million.
+
+America Leads, the super PAC supporting Chris Christie, raised $11 million. Hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen and his wife, Alexandra, gave the group $2 million, and another $1 million came from the Winecup Gamble Ranch in Nevada, owned by former Reebok chief executive Paul Fireman.
+
+A super PAC supporting former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee brought in a total of $3.6 million — $3 million of which came from Little Rock agribusiness ­executive Ronald M. Cameron.
+
+Half of the $3.45 million raised by CARLY for America, which is backing former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina, was donated by former Univision head A. Jerrold Perenchio.
+
+The number of seven- and eight-figure checks flooding into the race alarms veteran party strategists, who worry that the power is moving away from the candidates to independent and unaccountable groups.
+
+“You do not have a level playing field any longer,” said Fred Malek, a senior Republican fundraiser. “In my humble opinion, it pollutes the process. But since the law permits it, everyone is going to do it until the law changes.”
+
+Almost everyone, that is. At the moment, the GOP field is led by a candidate who has said he doesn’t need a super PAC: real estate impresario Donald Trump, who claims to be worth more than $10 billion.",REAL
+9424,Currency Crisis: Alasdair MacLeod On The Vexed Question of the Dollar,"Tweet Home » Gold » Gold News » Currency Crisis: Alasdair MacLeod On The Vexed Question of the Dollar There is little doubt that the rapid expansion of both dollar-denominated debt and monetary quantities since the financial crisis will lead us into a currency crisis. We just don’t know when, and the dollar is not alone… 
+
+From Alasdair Macleod : All the major paper currencies have been massively inflated in recent years. With the dollar acting as the world’s reserve currency, where the dollar goes, so do all the other fiat monies . Until that cataclysmic event, we watch currencies behave in increasingly unexpected, seemingly irrational ways. The fundamentals for Japan are not good, yet the yen remains the strongest currency of the big four. The Eurozone risks a systemic collapse, overwhelmed by political and financial headwinds, yet the euro’s exchange rate has proved relatively impervious to this deep uncertainty. The British economy is strongest, yet sterling is the weakest of the four majors. If nothing else, today’s foreign exchanges are evidence that subjectivity triumphs over macroeconomic thinking. Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds beats computer modelling every time. Furthermore, any official attempt to establish a rate for the dollar has to address two separate questions: the value of the dollar relative to other currencies, and its purchasing power for goods and services. The chart below indicates how the dollar has behaved against other currencies over the last five years, both on a trade weighted and on a predefined currency basis (DXY). It should be noted that the dollar has risen on both these measures by roughly 18% since early 2014. At the same time, the Chinese yuan has fallen against the dollar by about 12%, so it has actually risen slightly against the DXY basket as a whole, particularly against the euro component, where it has gained 12% since early 2014. This matters, because far from devaluing, which is what we are routinely told by dollar-centric analysts, the yuan has been relatively stable over time against a basket of currencies. It has been weak against the dollar and yen, but strong against both the euro and sterling. We should look at this from the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee’s point of view. America runs a record trade deficit with China, and the only major economies where China’s terms of trade have improved are with the US, excepting Japan . Therefore, the Fed is bound to be very sensitive to the dollar’s exchange rate with China’s yuan Furthermore, on two occasions when the Fed had signalled it was going to raise the Fed Funds Rate, it backed off when the Chinese lowered the rate at which it had pegged the yuan to the dollar. Chinese devaluation against the dollar is obviously a prime concern for the Fed. The situation becomes better understood when the Peoples Bank’s position is taken into account. The bank has been selling US Treasury stock in large quantities, stockpiling commodities and oil with the proceeds, though it has been diversifying into Japanese Government bonds as well. China’s dollars have been welcomed by markets, which are short of both quality collateral and raw currency. However, China’s supply of both has failed to stop the dollar rising against the yuan. Furthermore, China isn’t the only Asian and Middle Eastern state selling American paper, so the demand from other international players on the buy side has been immense, enough to determine the underlying direction of the dollar’s exchange rate. The situation is being exploited by the Peoples Bank. In effect, the Peoples Bank is in a position to dictate Fed policy by adjusting the rate at which it is prepared to supply dollars into the market. So long as the dollar remains fundamentally strong, it only has to slow the pace of Treasury and dollar sales for the dollar to rise, and therefore the Fed’s planned interest rate rises to be deferred. This is not understood properly by western commentators, who erroneously think China is being forced to defend a declining yuan. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will be interesting to see whether this happens again ahead of the December FOMC meeting, when for the umpteenth time we have been promised a rise in the Fed Funds Rate. A major consideration behind China’s foreign exchange policy is the outlook for the euro. The Eurozone represents a market as large as the US, with the added importance of being tagged onto the Asian continent. There can be little doubt that China sees her own long-term future being aligned more with Europe than America, despite Europe’s current troubles. It is, if you like, a situation that is primarily of strategic importance. Europe’s economy will need rescuing at some stage, and is therefore a future opportunity for China’s intervention. That plan is for the long term, and becomes increasingly valid the deeper the hole the Eurozone digs for itself. A disintegration of the EU would also be beneficial for Chinese ambitions. Meanwhile, in the short-term the euro has broken a crucial trend-line against the dollar, having completed a continuation head-and-shoulders pattern, targeting the 1.0600 area, which is the previous low seen in March and November 2015. This is our second chart. Neither the Peoples Bank nor the Fed need to be chart experts to see what’s happening. Brexit was very bad news for the euro, because it is a racing certainty that the event will turn out to be just the start of a new round of political and economic trouble for the Eurozone. The Italian economy in particular is imploding, with a non-performing loan problem that is roughly 40% of private sector GDP. So China can for the moment steer a course for the yuan between the euro’s devaluation and the dollar’s rise. The Fed sees in euro weakness an increase of currency-induced deflation for the US economy, and a loss of competitiveness for US exports. Chinese exporters are obvious beneficiaries as well, so the blame for deflation will be on China’s foreign exchange machinations. Anyway, China probably cares less than she ever did about the long-term consequences of her actions on the US economy. China has been selling her US Treasuries and reducing her dollar exposure to add to her stockpiles of raw materials and oil. She wants to keep her over-indebted businesses trading by maintaining a favourable exchange rate with the dollar, particularly given the developing train wreck that’s the Eurozone. And there’s not a lot the Fed can do about it. Gold and commodities The principal driver for the gold price is the prospect of monetary inflation transmuting into price inflation, and the inability of central banks to respond to this threat by raising interest rates sufficiently to control the balance of consumer preferences between goods and holding money. We are, of course, measuring gold in dollars, because the latter is the reserve currency for all the others. But, as stated above, there are two exchange considerations, the first being the dollar against other currencies, and the second the dollar against a basket of commodities. And here, we should note that over the long-term, the prices of commodities measured in gold are considerably more stable than the prices of commodities measured in fiat currencies. China has behaved as if she is thoroughly aware of gold’s pricing attributes, and has a deliberate policy of dominating the market for bullion. This is very different from the US’s domination of gold paper markets. Not only has China invested in unprofitable gold mines to become the largest producer at about 450 tonnes annually, but the state monopolises China’s refining capacity. She also imports doré for refining from other countries, and without doubt since 1983 has accumulated substantial quantities of bullion not included in monetary reserves. Furthermore, it is the only country that has encouraged its population, through television and other media, to accumulate physical gold. Make no mistake, for the last thirty-three years, the Chinese government has made a credible attempt to gain ultimate control over the physical gold market, and to extend gold’s protection to her own citizens. China does not manipulate the gold price. Instead, as described earlier, she is manipulating the dollar by regulating the exchange rate and by discouraging the Fed from raising interest rates. It is a temporary balancing act that only continues so long as desperate banks and their indebted borrowers continue to scramble for dollars, and China knows it. The Fed, for the moment, appears to be powerless to manage economic outcomes and is firmly trapped by China’s currency management, with interest rates stuck at the lower bound. And to make it worse, the weak euro, against which the dollar index (DXY) is very heavily weighted (57%!), threatens to force the DXY index even higher. The result, inevitably, is that monetary policy cannot be used to address future price inflation, which virtually guarantees there will be a higher gold price in 2017 and beyond. This is why, despite American wishful thinking, gold remains at the centre of the financial system. It is central partly because China’s ensures it is, and it is also China’s ultimate money for commodity and trade purposes. China most likely has enough gold to fully compensate for her reserve losses from the destruction of the dollar and the other fiat currencies on her reserve book. She is deliberately selling down her dollar exposure anyway, while she can. Lest we forget, communist economists in China were taught that capitalism destroys itself. For them, there is no clearer proof than the performance of the US economy and the dollar, and they do not intend to get caught up in its demise. Understand this, and you understand all. While the monetary role of gold in the future has yet to be determined by China, and it will be China or the markets that make the decision, for the moment it can be regarded as the ultimate insurance against global currency failure.",FAKE
+4060,Rural Nepal devastated by earthquake still awaits aid,"KATHMANDU, Nepal — Nepali citizens frustrated and angered by their government's chaotic and bureaucratic response to aiding earthquake victims are doing it themselves. They've hired their own trucks and stuffed vehicles with plastic sheets for shelter and bags of rice and lentils for food.
+
+Yet as each day passes since the magnitude-7.8 earthquake hit April 25, this self-help effort is becoming more complicated. Youth belonging to various political parties are putting up impromptu checkpoints on the road to the hardest hit areas or just chasing down vehicles with their motorbikes on narrow, isolated mountain roads and demanding the aid be handed over to them for distribution.
+
+Such political maneuvering is not uncommon, but it is angering many Nepalis.
+
+""I have nothing left. One daughter is buried under my house. my other daughter was sent to a hospital,"" said Bhampagiri, 72, who lives in the hamlet of Pawachok, a two-hour drive from this capital city. ""I have no food. Nothing. My house has collapsed so I sit here by the road and wait hoping someone will pass and help me,"" said Bhampagiri, who goes by one name.
+
+In the past week, the Nepali government has delayed customs clearance of international aid at Nepal's only international airport in Kathmandu and has been levying duty on truckloads of tarps being bused in from India by Nepali Good Samaritans. At the same time, the Nepali government has asked international donors to help with an additional 400,000 tents and tarpaulins, as well as blankets.
+
+The death toll is above 7,000 and is expected to rise significantly when hard hit but remote areas are reached. This week, the airport in Kathmandu received some much needed help from about 150 U.S. Marines.
+
+Commanded by Brig. Gen. Paul Kennedy, the Marines are helping to ease the piled up backup of aid material. They have brought in a UH-17 helicopter and four MV-22 Ospreys capable of short landing and takeoffs with a maximum load of 20,000 pounds of cargo so they can access remote rural areas.
+
+The Ospreys should help break the logistics bottleneck. They will be used to deliver food and plastic sheets to drop off points in the mountains, where relief teams will distribute them.
+
+""Nepal is the worse case scenario,"" said Kennedy, who has worked on natural disasters and knows Nepal well. ""It's landlocked, it's high altitude, it is going to tax even our military assets.""
+
+Access to food and shelter is critical in the coming days for hundreds of thousands of Nepalis in the mountains. The epicenter of the earthquake is an area with just a few narrow and unstable dirt roads carved out of sheer mountain sides, making access exceedingly difficult. Mud and brick houses are perched on tiny terraced fields with meandering goat trails leading to them.
+
+The earthquake not only flattened villages, hamlets and towns but it also cut them off from the rest of the country with massive landslides. Many now can only be accessed on foot or by helicopter.
+
+Before the arrival of the U.S. aircraft, Nepal had been using for relief operations 27 helicopters — seven belonging to the Nepal army, six from private companies and 14 from the Indian government. There is also a critical need for more trucks that can carry relief goods as far as the roads go into the mountains.
+
+This is just the beginning of what disaster experts call ""the sexy phase,"" the first response period when the world is focused on the disaster and donations pour in. It is very important to get this phase right so that reconstruction can take off, said Bill Berger the head of USAID's Disaster Assistance Response Team .
+
+""There is not enough capacity in the world to get everything to all the people of Nepal right now,"" Berger said. ""It has to move out based on need. We also have to plan the long-term.""
+
+Nearly all the Nepalis in the mountains are farmers. Every village has lost most of its young men to the Middle East and Malaysia, where they go for years to work as menial migrant workers, leaving behind parents, wives and sisters who now must fend with the overwhelming recovery challenges ahead.
+
+Sindhupalchok, Nepal's hardest hit district, is a scene of total devastation. Some houses are just mounds of bricks, others are missing walls and roofs, and concrete buildings have fallen on their sides. While some aid has reached the devastation in the district's capital, Chautara, no one has stopped to help the villages and hamlets along the way.",REAL
+7947,Democrats & Republicans Just Joined Forces To Condemn Comey’s Partisan Smears,"Comments 
+I learned exclusively tonight that the Democratic Coalition Against Trump is being joined by University of Minnesota Law Professor Richard Painter in a non-partisan joint campaign to mount a public campaign against an expedite a response to their parallel complaints against FBI Director James Comey for his partisan witch-hunt of Hillary Clinton. 
+Painter is a former Bush Administration White House Counsel who served as ethics counsel to the President. 
+“Richard Painter and I connected this evening, and we are sending out the message clearly that the FBI Director’s behavior is a non-partisan issue, and we will be sending out a joint press release tomorrow morning accordingly,” said Scott Dworkin, Senior Adivsor to the Democratic Coalition Against Trump. 
+Both parties seek to prevent future political interference by America’s top federal law enforcement agency into partisan elections. 
+“We plan to make joint television and other media appearances together with Professor Painter,” said Dworkin who plans to participate in the broadcasts, “or alongside other members of the DCAT.” 
+Each independently made similar complaints to Department of Justice’s Office of Special Counsel’s ruling about the FBI Director’s recent memo . 
+Because the memo has intruded on this year’s presidential election, DCAT and Painter are alleging that FBI Director Comey’s violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits pernicious partisan use of office by federal employees or officials. 
+The FBI Director ignored Justice Department policy guidance which proscribes public investigatory actions within 60-days of an election. It’s a policy that has been respected across parties and administrations for decades to keep justice and elections un-entwined. 
+Justice officials specifically advised Comey of the policy . 
+He sent a mea culpa letter to other FBI agents just hours after the election-impacting memo. 
+The Democratic Coalition Against Trump filed the first reported Hatch Act complaint against FBI Director Comey in the wake of his unusual memo Friday afternoon. 
+Yesterday, Professor Richard Painter filed his own Hatch Act and ethics complaint against the FBI Director and an ethics complaint over the same memo, which is also drawing the ire of the career professionals at the top federal investigatory agency.",FAKE
+1082,Is the GOP's stop Trump campaign too late?,"Washington (CNN) The Republican Party is waking up -- but it might already be too late.
+
+Donald Trump's stroll toward the GOP presidential nomination is starting to turn the denial evident for months among key party power brokers to desperation. The mood of some in the party was aptly summed up Thursday by Republican lobbyist and former congressman Vin Weber on CNN's ""The Lead"" with Jake Tapper.
+
+""All of a sudden, everybody is saying 'Oh My God — the house is burning down we should have done something before it got this far,'"" said Weber, who is supporting John Kasich in the presidential race and is calling on the party to unite behind the Ohio Governor.
+
+Sen. Marco Rubio, who pulled out of the presidential race on Tuesday after failing to take down Trump, had a grim assessment of the Republican Party's state of play on his first day back at work in the Senate on Thursday.
+
+""Hopefully there's time to still prevent a Trump nomination, which I think would fracture the party and be damaging to the conservative movement,"" Rubio told reporters.
+
+Anti-Trump forces are getting a sense of the backlash they'd face if they deny him the nomination. Trump warned earlier this week on CNN's ""New Day"" that the convention could deteriorate into a ""riot"" if he is blocked from power.
+
+And on Friday, a top Trump aide threatened to give up his credentials as a convention delegate and leave the Republican Party in a stark warning to the GOP about the ""consequences"" if Trump is blocked from the nomination.
+
+""I will tell you this, if the Republican Party comes into that convention and jimmies with the rules and takes away the will of the people, the will of the Republicans and the Democrats and Independents who voted for Mr. Trump, I will take off my credentials, I will leave the floor of that convention, and I will leave the Republican Party forever,"" Sam Clovis, a national co-chair for Trump's campaign, said Friday on ""New Day.""
+
+The deepening anxiety in the GOP was underscored by a meeting in Washington Thursday of prominent conservative leaders dedicated to finding a way to prevent Trump from securing the 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination.
+
+Trump's failure to win Ohio on an otherwise successful night of primaries Tuesday opened a narrow window for opposing forces in the Republican Party to wrest the nomination from him because it lengthened his odds of winning a majority of delegates. If he does fall short, Trump could face an acrimonious contested convention in Cleveland in July.
+
+Conservative activist Erick Erickson raised the specter of a ""unity"" ticket to stop Trump in a statement he issued after the meeting, noting that the party's revered icon Abraham Lincoln was not nominated until after the third convention ballot.
+
+""We believe that the issue of Donald Trump is greater than an issue of party,"" the statement read. ""It is an issue of morals and character that all Americans, not just those of us in the conservative movement, must confront.""
+
+One person at the meeting, Deborah DeMoss Fonseca, a former aide to late Sen. Jesse Helms, said that there was ""definitely a consensus of not wanting Donald Trump.""
+
+""I think there's still several scenarios that could play out. And I think this particular group will look for whatever it is that's going to do it,"" she said.
+
+Thursday's meeting was especially intriguing because it appeared to be the most concerted effort yet by the conservative movement, many of whose adherents view the New York real estate mogul as a political apostate, to stop Trump.
+
+But it remained unclear whether the initiative would be any more successful than previous attempts by the Republican establishment to thwart Trump.
+
+After all, a scorching speech by former GOP nominee Mitt Romney did nothing to slow the outspoken businessman. Nor did an extraordinary indictment by National Review, which devoted most of an issue to debunking Trump's conservative bona fides. And Trump boasted at his victory party on Tuesday night in Florida that he had won the Sunshine State despite a multi-million dollar negative ad blitz attacking him.
+
+And every candidate who tried to destroy Trump by hammering him on policy, his past business deals or his sometimes vulgar outbursts — including Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal -- only succeeded in sinking their own presidential prospects.
+
+The conservative uprising on Thursday was not the only eye-opening example of the Stop Trump movement.
+
+Former GOP candidate Lindsey Graham, who once said choosing between Trump and Cruz would be like picking between being shot and poisoned, made his choice. The South Carolina Senator told CNN's Dana Bash that he was now lining up behind the Texas Senator and would help raise money for him.
+
+Graham admitted that Cruz was ""not well liked"" among his peers on Capitol Hill, but implied he was the lesser of two evils.
+
+""I have doubts about Mr. Trump,"" Graham said. ""I don't think he's a Republican, I don't think he's a conservative, I think his campaign's built on xenophobia, race-baiting and religious bigotry. I think he'd be a disaster for our party and as Senator Cruz would not be my first choice, I think he is a Republican conservative who I could support.""
+
+The most fundamental weakness in any organized effort to stop Trump in the remaining contests in the Republican nomination is the math after more than half the states have voted.
+
+The billionaire only needs to win 55.5% of the remaining delegates to be awarded, according to a CNN estimate.
+
+Although he has only won 47% of the delegates awarded so far, the field, now consisting of just Trump, Cruz and Kasich, is much narrower than before and some contests are now winner take all affairs and do not hand out delegates proportionally as was the case in many previous contests.
+
+Republican political strategist Phillip Stutts said the next six weeks will be crucial in defining whether any attempt to deprive Trump of the nomination would even be possible.
+
+""If Trump is not slowed down, there is not a convention fight to be had,"" Stutts said, pointing to a set of northeastern primaries on April 26 in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island as critical to foes bent on stopping Trump.
+
+Another complication for the anti-Trump forces is that the billionaire could be the strongest force in a string of coming primaries. To slow his march, Kasich must show he can harvest more than the single victory he has so far -- on his home ground of Ohio.
+
+Alternatively, Cruz, who is Trump's closest rival with 418 delegates to the billionaire's 678, according to a CNN estimate, would have to show an appeal outside conservative heartland states that he is yet to demonstrate on a large scale.
+
+The strength of Trump's position has some of his allies warning that any attempt to snatch victory from his grasp would not just be unfair, it would be futile.
+
+Hopes that a compromise candidate could emerge at a contested convention also took a blow on Thursday when House Speaker Paul Ryan ruled himself out — though he admitted that a delegate showdown was becoming more likely in Cleveland.
+
+As the idea of the first contested convention in decades is gathering steam, the institutional leadership of the Republican Party finds itself in an unenviable position.
+
+Any attempt to deprive Trump of the nomination would not just cause uproar in a year in which establishment politicians have been toppled. It would effectively mean the disenfranchisement of 7.5 million voters who have backed Trump in the primary process so far -- voters who the GOP can ill afford to lose at a time when national demographics give Democrats an easier route to the White House.
+
+That's why officials like Republican National Committee Communications Director Sean Spicer say that the process of selecting a nominee must be inviolate if a candidate reaches the magic number of 1,237 delegates.
+
+""Our job is to wait until the voters decide who that nominee will be,"" Spicer told Wolf Blitzer on CNN's ""The Situation Room,"" calling on Republicans to unite to fight for the ""bigger prize"" -- depriving the Democrats of the White House.
+
+If the latest attempts to thwart Trump fail, and party power brokers decide they cannot stomach the Republican nominee, there may be a third option by embracing the final stage of grief — acceptance — and trying to limit the damage that they believe having Trump at the top of their ticket would unleash.
+
+That could mean striving to ensure that even if Democrats win the White House, they are unable to boost an incoming president by making significant gains in Congress.
+
+""Keeping the majorities in the Senate and the House is for us where the donors should be putting their money,"" said Stutts.",REAL
+9228,NYPD Source: Weiner Laptop Has Enough Evidence “to Put Hillary … Away for Life”,"Leave a reply 
+Selwyn Duke – Sex crimes with children, child exploitation, money laundering, perjury, and pay to play, reads the partial list of crimes that, say New York City Police Department sources, could “put Hillary and her crew away for life.”Shocking evidence of such criminality has been found on ex-congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer, say the sources, which was seized from him by NYC officials investigating his allegedly having sent sexually explicit texts to a 15-year-old girl. Moreover, Hillary Clinton’s “crew” supposedly includes not just close aide and confidante Huma Abedin and her husband, Weiner, but other aides and insiders — and even members of Congress. Reports True Pundit : 
+NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to: • Money laundering • Sex crimes with minors (children) • Perjury • Pay to play through Clinton Foundation • Obstruction of justice • Other felony crimes 
+NYPD detectives and a [sic] NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. 
+“What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.” 
+These revelations would explain why Director Comey reopened the investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information, a move that shook the political world and caused Comey to come under fire. As the NYPD chief put it, the new e-mails contents truly are “alarming.” 
+True Pundit also reports FBI sources as stating that Abedin and Weiner are both trying to cut immunity deals with federal officials and that, if they didn’t cooperate, they’d face long prison sentences. Abedin’s turning state’s evidence would no doubt be devastating for Clinton, as the two women have for years been joined at the hip. Abedin has at times been like Clinton’s shadow, has been called her “body woman,” and has even been rumored to be Clinton’s lesbian lover. So Abedin likely knows where, as is said, the bodies are buried. 
+Of particular note, the new e-mails allegedly contain information revealing that Hillary, Bill Clinton, Weiner, and numerous congressmen took trips to convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, where he is said to pimp out underage minors of both sexes to prominent people. The trips were taken aboard Epstein’s Boeing 747, dubbed the “Lolita Express”; the pedophile’s island, in the US Virgin Islands, has been called “ Sex Slave Island .” 
+These revelations would also explain why Clinton used powerful software called BleachBit to scrub damning information from her private server. According to BleachBit’s website, its program gives criminals and others the ability to “shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery.” 
+Yet it can’t scrub bumbling perverts from your personal life, and Weiner’s laptop also contains incriminating e-mails revealing the mishandling of classified information by Abedin and Clinton, say the sources. Both women “sent and received thousands of classified and top secret documents to personal email accounts,” and this information could have been “accessed, printed, discussed, leaked, or distributed by untold numbers … of unknown individuals,” writes True Pundit . 
+Consequently, FBI sources say the new Clinton investigation has been broadened and now includes matters such as how, informs True Pundit : • Abedin forwarded classified and top secret State Department emails to Weiner’s email • Abedin stored emails, containing government secrets, in a special folder shared with Weiner warehousing over 500,000 archived State Department emails. • Weiner had access to these classified and top secret documents without proper security clearance to view the records • Abedin also used a personal yahoo address and her Clintonemail.com address to send/receive/store classified and top secret documents • [a] private consultant managed Weiner’s site for the last six years, including three years when Clinton was secretary of state, and therefore, had full access to all emails as the domain’s listed registrant and administrator via Whois email contacts. 
+This story just adds more intrigue to a presidential campaign that is truly unprecedented, with a torrent of WikiLeaks and Project Veritas revelations and now Clinton’s Weiner woes. From vote fraud to inciting violence to child sex abuse to pay-for-play to perjury, it’s becoming clear to many that the Democratic Party — and the Clintons in particular — are essentially a criminal syndicate. 
+As former assistant FBI director James Kallstrom said in a Sunday interview, “The Clintons, that’s a crime family, basically. It’s like organized crime. I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool…. God forbid we put someone like that [Clinton] in the White House.” And now we know better why, as I wrote Sunday, this “appears standard FBI sentiment. I personally know of an ex-agent — someone with knowledge of Clinton ‘crime family’ dealings — who I’m told is having trouble sleeping at night due to the prospect of a Clinton presidency.” 
+All these revelations raise important questions: How could Hillary Clinton and her cohorts have bumbled so badly that they appear a cross between Inspector Clouseau and Boss Tweed ? 
+And if Clinton is so careless with her own personal survival, how can she be trusted with national survival? 
+Part of the explanation is general incompetence, yet there’s another factor: Both Clintons have engaged in continual criminality over the decades — and have been allowed to skate at every turn. This lack of accountability has led to complacency and ever-increasing brazenness, just as with a child never punished for wrongdoing. 
+So, finally, perhaps, Clinton corruption has reached critical mass. And with Donald Trump ahead 10 points (according to one respected poll) among the 88 percent of voters who have definitely made up their minds, maybe, come late Tuesday evening, some tossing and turning FBI agents will finally be able to enjoy a good night’s rest. SF Source The New American Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+1616,Rubio battles Cruz for Iowa edge,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+8023,Is It Safe To Use Expired Prescription Drugs?,"Backdoor Survival October 29, 2016 
+The topic of using expired prescription drugs comes up frequently in survival and preparedness circles. Although there are many articles detailing with the efficacy of outdated meds, one question I get over and over again is “what do I do when the meds run out?” 
+Whereas there is no single clear answer, one thing we can all start to do now hangs on to our old, unused meds. For the most part and with very few exceptions, they will be viable for two to twelve years beyond their expiration date. The secret is to keep them in a cool, dark, location that is not too dissimilar from your food storage. 
+In another exclusive article for Backdoor Survival, Dr. Joe Alton, a medical doctor who is well versed in survival medicine, is here today to give us an update on the use of expired drugs in a survival setting. In addition, for those of you that have asked, he is providing us with links you can use to initiate your own research on this important topic. 
+Of course, as with anything preparedness related, let your own good judgment prevail. 
+An Update on Expired Drugs in Survival Settings 
+In normal times, replacing expired medicines isn’t a major issue. You call your physician and get a refill for “fresh” meds. Medicine bottle descriptions and those in print and online sources tell you to discard any drug that has gone expired, a recommendation so common that it’s considered standard. 
+You might be surprised to know, however, that expiration dates have only been government-mandated since 1979. The expiration date is simply the last day that the pharmaceutical company will guarantee 100% potency of the product. In other words, you won’t grow a horn in the middle of your forehead or another ill effect if you take the drug the week after it expires. Indeed, it is rare for expired drugs, especially in pill or capsule form, to be any riskier than the non-expired versions. 
+This is an important issue to those preparing medically for survival scenarios. If you believe that some disaster will take society to the brink, then you should also understand that such a scenario also means that it’s unlikely that pharmaceutical companies will be functioning to manufacture drugs. Therefore, at one point or another, a well-supplied survival medic will have to make a decision regarding the use of an expired medication. 
+This is a decision that also must be made by government agencies such as FEMA and the Department of Defense. Federal warehouses store tens of millions of dollars’ worth of drugs meant for use in peacetime disasters. When these drugs expired, the forklifts came out and huge quantities of life-saving medicines were discarded.",FAKE
+9753,Scientists Find A Plant That Could Treat Diabetes And Kill Cancer Cells,"in: Natural Medicine Bitter melon is a fruit that grows abundantly in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Traditionally it has been used to treat diabetes and other more mild diseases or illnesses. More recently, bitter melon juice was shown to kill pancreatic cancer cells in vitro and in mice in a study done by the University of Colorado. Considering the results were seen in both in vitro and in vivo tests, the effectiveness of bitter melon juice in treating pancreatic cancer, and potentially other cancers, at a clinical level are promising.[ 1 ] “IHC analyses of MiaPaCa-2 xenografts showed that BMJ (Bitter Melon Juice) also inhibits proliferation, induces apoptosis and activates AMPK (adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase) in vivo . Overall, BMJ exerts strong anticancer efficacy against human pancreatic carcinoma cells, both in vitro and in vivo , suggesting its clinical usefulness.” Pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult cancers to treat due to the fact that it is often discovered late, leaving very little time to treat. Since traditional therapies (chemotherapy, radiation, surgery etc) were not showing promising results and littler advancement was being made, researchers have been looking elsewhere to find treatment. Interestingly, cannabis, specifically cannabinoids, have been shown to induce apoptic (programmed) death of human pancreatic cancer cells in vitro and stop pancreatic tumor growth in vivo.[ 4 ] Cannabis is perhaps one of the most popular treatments being aggressively pursued right now given its promising results both in labs and anecdotally. Many cancerous tumors have insulin receptors which move glucose to cancer cells helping them to grow and divide. Studies have shown that insulin encourages pancreatic cancer cells to grow in a dose dependant manner, since bitter melon has been shown to help regulate insulin levels, this could help prevent pancreatic cancer over the long-term. The Colorado University study was led by Dr. Rajesh Agarwal. They examined effects of bitter melon on 4 different lines of pancreatic cancer cells (in vitro) and in mice. For the in vivo studies, mice were injected with pancreatic tumor cells and were randomly divided into one of two groups. One group of mice received water, which was the control group, and the other group was given bitter melon juice for six weeks. [6] Researchers studied the tumors at the end of the study and results showed that bitter melon juice not only inhibited cancer cell proliferation but also induced apoptosis (programmed cell death). Compared to the control, tumor growth was inhibited by 60% in the treatment group and there were no signs of toxicity or negative effects on the body. With toxicity and negative effects being a huge role in traditional mainstream treatments, this was positive to see. Diabetes A number of clinical studies have been conducted to evaluate the efficacy of bitter melon for treating diabetes. Since it is believed that diabetes is a precursor for pancreatic cancer, researchers felt bitter melon could treat diabetes as well after seeing pancreatic cancer results. In 2011, results of a four week long clinical trial were published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology that showed modest hypoglycemic effects and significant fructosamine management for those taking 2000mg/day of bitter melon. As published by the study: “Bitter melon had a modest hypoglycemic effect and significantly reduced fructosamine levels from baseline among patients with type 2 diabetes who received 2,000 mg/day. However, the hypoglycemic effect of bitter melon was less than metformin 1,000 mg/day.”[ 3 ] Another study published in 2008 in the international journal Chemistry and Biology indicated that compounds in bitter melon improved glycemic control, helped cells uptake glucose and improved overall glucose tolerance. This study was done in mice and led to promising advancements in treating diabetes and obesity with bitter melon.[ 4 ] In contrast, a study published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in 2007 did not show significant benefit of the treatment of diabetes by bitter melon but 2 years later in the British Journal of Nutrition it was stated that “more, better-designed and clinical trials are required to confirm the fruit’s role in diabetes treatment.” Since that 2007 study, more studies have been done to show beneficial effects which perhaps was a result of better design. Conclusion When it comes to bitter melon juice, the current research available is showing strong results for specific types of cancer cell destruction, diabetes treatment and potential prevention of pancreatic cancer. Further research and clinical trials would be helpful to better understand how effective this plant can be and in what specific cases. It remains a very promising option that could be explored under the correct supervision. Other Uses of Bitter Melon Bitter melon has been used as a traditional medicine for a long time. It has been used to treat: colic, fever, burns, chronic cough, painful menstruation and skin conditions.[ 5 ]",FAKE
+5880,TREASON: This Election Fraud Goes All the Way TO THE TOP! — Bill Holter,"JS Mineset’s Bill Holter is back to help document the collapse. Bill says that the United States is becoming a banana republic right before our eyes. As Donald Trump recently stated,
+“The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this firsthand with the Wikileaks documents in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret, with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty. The Clintons are criminals.” 
+And still, the CIA mockingbird media targets Trump while giving Clinton a free pass.
+The fix is in. 
+
+Source: Silver Doctors 
+",FAKE
+1344,Insiders: Marco Rubio crashed and burned,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+10515,Arizona: “Poster Child” for ObamaCare’s Failures,"Email 
+“The Arizona market is the poster child for the problems the [ObamaCare] exchanges are experiencing nationally,” Milliman Inc. actuary Tom Snook told the Wall Street Journal . 
+It would be difficult to argue with Snook’s contention. While individual-insurance premiums are rising by an average of 25 percent across the country next year, Arizona’s premiums are set to grow by double or triple that, with some locales experiencing rate hikes topping 100 percent. Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes, Arizonans have but one insurance carrier from whom to purchase coverage, and one county nearly ended up with no carriers at all. 
+It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Arizona was originally the poster child for the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) success. The first year the ACA exchanges opened for business, the state had eight insurers offering a wide variety of plans at low prices, in part because of an expectation that the federal government would bail them out if they suffered losses. “A 2013 Society of Actuaries report suggested that the Arizona individual-insurance market could more than double, growing to 570,681 consumers, with more than 80% of them buying through the exchange,” wrote the Journal . “The health-care costs of the newer customer base would be around 22% higher than the old one, it suggested.” 
+Instead, as has been the case throughout the nation, Americans made health-insurance decisions based on their own needs rather than following the best-laid plans of politicians and bureaucrats. Those with pre-existing conditions took advantage of the ACA’s mandates that insurers cover them at rates comparable to those of their healthy neighbors, while those neighbors balked at buying coverage that was more expensive and less generous than they desired. The result: Enrollment fell well below expectations, with only 203,000 people buying exchange plans this year, while the cost of covering those enrollees was vastly greater than expected — “around 250% higher on average than individual members before the health law,” Jeff Stelnik, senior vice president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, told the Journal . 
+To make matters worse, the bailouts never came through. The federal risk-corridor program was supposed to transfer profits from successful insurers to unsuccessful ones, but so few insurers made money on the exchanges that the program could only cover 12.6 percent of losses. Congress refused to make up the difference from general revenues. 
+In Arizona, as elsewhere, this could only have one outcome: fewer insurers and higher premiums. Although the number of insurers increased to 11 in 2015, it returned to eight last year. Insurers were forced to raise rates each year — Blue Cross Blue Shield hiked premiums by 35 percent in 2014 — but it still wasn’t enough to break even, let alone turn a profit. The state’s ObamaCare co-op went under in 2015, and major insurers began pulling out of the state en masse this year. UnitedHealth Group and Aetna left entirely. Blue Cross Blue Shield and Health Net both announced they would exit the exchanges in Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, and Pinal County. That, in turn, would have left Pinal County without a single exchange insurer; but “after state and federal regulators ‘expressed their concern for Pinal residents,’” Blue Cross decided to remain in Pinal County after all, Stelnik told the Journal . 
+For 2017, every Arizona county will have only one insurer on its exchange, save for Pima County, home to Tucson, which will have two. However, according to the New York Times , only Health Net is offering a full range of plans in Pima County, while Blue Cross is solely selling catastrophic plans for people under 30. Considering that the ACA also allows people to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26, it seems likely that few will take advantage of Blue Cross’s offer. 
+“There are no choices, really, for anybody in Maricopa County,” Phoenix resident Ken Hoag told the Arizona Republic . “The lack of choice is like having empty shelves (and) no food in a third-world country. Do I live in Cuba?” 
+Of course, with mounting losses and no competition, it’s hardly surprising that premiums for individual plans are skyrocketing. Blue Cross Blue Shield is raising its rates by an average of 51 percent, Health Net an average of 75 percent. In Phoenix, premiums are going up a whopping 145 percent. Republic columnist Laurie Roberts notes that a typical 27-year-old Arizonan “buying the second lowest ‘silver plan’ will see premiums soar by 116 percent. If that 27 year old makes $35,000 a year, he’ll pay nearly 10 percent of his gross income for insurance even with an Obamacare subsidy. If he makes over $47,000, he’ll pay a jaw dropping $422 a month for insurance, up from $196 this year.” 
+That subsidy, as usual, is the ace ObamaCare supporters always have up their sleeve. The rate hikes, while huge, aren’t so bad because the subsidies will cover most of the extra cost, they argue. “That may be so,” Roberts observed, “but how sustainable is a system in which insurance premiums rise by 116 percent in a year? Or even 25 percent a year?” 
+Besides, subsidies don’t cover all the added expense. Hoag’s wife had to buy a new plan for 2017 because her old one is being discontinued. While her new plan’s benefits are comparable to those of her old plan, she is going to be stuck for an extra $50 a month in premiums despite her subsidy. 
+And what of Arizonans who earn too much money to qualify for subsidies? For them, the Times admits, “the price increases will be excruciating.” The paper cites one example: Leslie Rycroft of Scottsdale, who works in human resources, is paying $1,100 a month this year for a United Healthcare plan that has a $13,000 deductible for her family of four. Their income was a little too high to qualify for a subsidy, she said. When she looked at her options on HealthCare.gov last week, she said she was “absolutely horrified” to see only one insurer, Health Net, offering plans that started at $2,200 a month. “It’s beyond ridiculous,” she said. “All of a sudden you are paying $26,000 a year,” Ms. Rycroft said, “just for catastrophic health insurance.” 
+Thus, the Grand Canyon State has the unfortunate distinction of serving as the latest example of the great chasm between progressives’ pipe dreams and reality. As always, though, ordinary Americans, not the politicians who created this monster, are the ones suffering as a result. Is it any wonder that over half of Americans tell pollsters they disapprove of ObamaCare, and the number who say it has hurt them continues to rise? 
+The only wonder is that politicians, who normally live and die by opinion polls, haven’t done anything to address their concerns. Perhaps the upcoming elections will change that, but don’t hold your breath. Should you pass out and injure yourself, you might not be able to afford the medical bills with your ObamaCare-approved insurance — if you can even pay the premium. Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
+Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
+No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language. 
+No product advertisements. 
+Please post comments in English. 
+Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
+7979,Trump's New Ad Portraying 'Every Mother's Worse Nightmare' is Nothing Short of Chilling,"Share on Twitter The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
+In a campaign ad for Donald Trump, Laura Wilkerson talks about her horrific experience of her son being doused with gasoline and set on fire by an illegal alien. In the ad called “Laura,” she explains why Hillary Clinton's policies are harmful for America. ",FAKE
+7921,How WiFi & Other EMFs Cause Biological Harm,"How WiFi & Other EMFs Cause Biological Harm Professor Martin Pall, PhD – professor of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Science at Washington State... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/10/how-wifi-other-emfs-cause-biological.html Professor Martin Pall, PhD – professor of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Science at Washington State University, Pullman, says that WiFi & other EMFs can cause biological harm. In 2014 he said “I think this is going to be one of the major issues in the next few years. Most people are not aware of this, and the people who are mostly know the old data and there’s a lot of new stuff on this that’s extremely, extremely important”. According to some governments, it is not possible for microwaves from mobile phones, WiFi, ‘smart’ meters , etc. to cause harm, that research in the field is inconsistent and that there is no proof that such radiation can cause health issues. But Prof Pall who is an eminent physicist, geneticist and cell biologist, says they are wrong on all counts.In this video (below), Pall argues that research results showing harm are not “inconsistent” as is sometimes claimed, and that the health of the public now urgently needs to be protected. Pall’s extensive research over recent decades (some of his peer-reviewed studies on this subject are listed in the final two minutes of this presentation) shows that: Microwaves damage humans at levels far below present radiation limits, through mechanisms at the cellular level These biological mechanisms can – completely or partially – be behind growing “unexplained illnesses” like sudden cardiac death, ME, weakened immune system, fibromyalgia, post-traumatic stress, and increased DNA breakage, etc. The effects can in principle affect all multicellular animals, and is proven, for example, in mussels You need neither New Age, tendentious science or conspiracy theories to justify this. The conclusion to be drawn from Pall’s findings is that we face a new and increasingly present environmental pollutant. Some have called it the “21st century environmental bomb”, with implications for the environment, human health, construction of mobile towers, computers in schools, and handling of individuals presenting with symptoms of EHS. Martin Pall, prof. Em. at Washington State University, has an impressive body of work. His first article on EMFs and their role in VGCC activation earned a place in the “Global Medical Discovery” list of the most important articles in medicine in 2013. The video is footage from Arne Naess seminar 18th October 2014 Oslo: Source & reference: Yournewswire.com ; Video by Stop Smart Meters! (UK)  ",FAKE
+8186,One Photo Sums Up How Differently America Treats People Of Color And The White Bundy Militiamen,"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+Two stunningly depressing things happened in America on Thursday evening that demonstrate just how differently the country treats its citizens based on race – and they happened more or less at the same time. 
+In North Dakota, police driving armored vehicles (yes, like tanks) and armed with rifles, sound cannons, and shotguns loaded with “nonlethal” beanbags marched in formation to shut down peaceful protesters opposing an oil pipeline. A few states over in Oregon, a jury found that the violent militia group which led an armed occupation of a federal wildlife reserve was innocent of all charges and free to go . America is two countries with two different sets of rules, and Thursday evening highlighted that fact in stunning detail. 
+On Twitter, user @theshrillest put the juxtaposition in all its glory in a single screengrab. His twitter feed was a mixture of stories about the violent suppression of a peaceful protest led by a Native American tribe directly affected by the environmental impact of the oil pipeline and news of the release of the Bundy militia – a group of out-of-state rabblerousers who believe the federal government should be disbanded. 
+— 🇺🇸 (@theshrillest) October 27, 2016 
+This is the second time the Bundy family threatened to kill federal agents and expressed a desire to lead a revolution only to see zero charges stick to them. The group will now get to return to Nevada, just in time for an election in which many conservatives are openly stating that they plan on taking up arms if Trump loses. On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump. 
+On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. 
+You in? 
+— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
+In short, it’s a scary time to be a democracy. An Oregon jury just gave every white male in the country a not-so-subtle nod that violence against the government will be met with a look the other way when it comes time to a trial. 
+Featured image via Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+640,Elizabeth Warren's speech attacking Donald Trump made a bigger argument about Republicans,"Most of the headlines from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s speech at the American Constitution Society on Thursday were, understandably, about her attacks on Donald Trump.
+
+Highlighting Warren’s rapid succession of fusillades against Trump makes sense. After all, outside of this election, you don’t often get sitting US senators publicly calling the other party's presidential nominee a ""racist bully"" who has ""never risked anything for anyone and who serves no one but himself.""
+
+But Warren’s speech did much more than go after Trump. In her high-profile address, she pivoted from attacking the likely GOP nominee to attacking Republicans more generally, accusing the party’s leaders of orchestrating a prolonged ""assault"" on the independence of the federal judiciary in order to serve the wealthiest Americans.
+
+For instance, when Warren highlighted Trump’s racist attacks against Judge Gonzalo Curiel, she said they were born from the same essential motivation as other mainstream Republican initiatives like the blockade of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination and the Citizens United decision on campaign finance: to help the richest of the rich.
+
+""Donald Trump chose racism as his weapon,"" Warren said. ""But his aim is exactly the same as the rest of the Republicans: to pound the courts into submission for the rich and the powerful.""
+
+Now, it should be noted that many leading Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, have condemned Trump's remarks about Curiel. So it doesn’t seem entirely fair to blame them for what Trump has said there.
+
+But the line does give us insight into how one of the leading progressives sees Trump, and it suggests how a Warren-led Democratic Party might respond in 2016 and beyond.
+
+Many Democrats have said that Trump’s rhetoric against Curiel amounts to proof that he’s uniquely unfit for the presidency, as a sign that he goes far beyond even what other Republicans are willing to say.
+
+Warren didn’t take this approach. Over and over, she insisted that Trump’s comments about Curiel reflect the Republican attacks on the courts — the only difference being that they’re done with less tact.
+
+Where do you suppose that Donald Trump got the idea that he can personally attack judges, regardless of the law, whenever they don't bend to the whims of billionaires and big businesses? He's a Mitch McConnell kind of candidate … He is exactly the kind of candidate you'd expect from a Republican Party whose script for several years has been to execute a full-scale assault on the integrity of our courts, blockading judicial appointments so Donald Trump can fill them. Smearing and intimidating nominees who do not pledge allegiance to the financial interests of the rich and powerful. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell want Donald Trump to appoint the next generation of judges. They want those judges to tilt the law in favor of big businesses and billionaires like Donald Trump. They just want Donald Trump to quit being so vulgar and obvious about it.
+
+Warren connected Trump’s attacks on Curiel to Republican obstructionism against the judicial branch going back years, citing their unwillingness to confirm appointees like District of Maryland nominee Paula Xinis.
+
+She began the speech, for instance, by citing her Senate office’s new report, ""Going to Extremes: The Supreme Court and Senate Republicans’ Unprecedented Record of Obstruction of President Obama’s Nominees."" And she said wealthy corporations have flooded the political system with cash in an attempt to corrupt the judiciary.
+
+""The purpose is also to hamstring the president's ability to protect consumers and workers, to hold large corporations accountable and promote equality,"" Warren said. ""In other words, to undermine the fundamental principle of equal justice under law.""
+
+It seems pretty questionable whether obstructing federal judicial appointments is really comparable to Trump’s attacks against a judge’s heritage.
+
+But whether you buy Warren’s interpretation or not, as a partisan political strategy it has distinct pros and cons.
+
+On the one hand, attacking Trump by calling him a mainstream Republican is probably not going to be particularly devastating to Trump himself.
+
+Hillary Clinton's best shot at a landslide victory might be peeling away centrist Republicans turned off by Trump. If that's the case, comparing Trump's most outlandish attacks to the policy decisions of the party’s leaders may not prove particularly convincing.
+
+On the other hand, though, it could help Democrats in their effort to ensure that it’s not just Trump who goes down to defeat, but rather the Republican Party as a whole.",REAL
+5050,Clinton Goes After Republican Vote In Rare Fox News Interview,"Hillary Clinton made the case for her presidential bid in a rare interview with Fox News Sunday, reaching out directly to the conservative show’s primary audience: older Republican voters, many of them distrustful of her liberal politics and her conduct as secretary of state, but even more terrified by Donald Trump’s unpredictable temperament and seeming coziness with Russia.
+
+“We know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin, whether it's saying that NATO wouldn't come to the rescue of our allies if they were invaded” or “his praise for Putin—which is, I think, quite remarkable,” Clinton said, when asked by Fox host Chris Wallace about the recent hacking attack against the Democratic National Committee, which is widely believed to have been carried out by Russia in order to benefit Trump. Clinton didn’t go so far as to suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin would prefer to see Trump in the White House, but she said it “raises serious issues about Russian interference in our elections, in our democracy.” Trump’s history of praising Putin also “raises national security issues,” she argued.
+
+The sit-down interview, Clinton’s first since becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major party, and her first with Fox News Sunday in five years, was unusual for the veteran politician, who is often criticized for her sporadic interaction with the press. (Unlike Trump, who bombards the media constantly, Clinton hasn’t given a press conference in more than 200 days.) More unusual was what Clinton was trying to do: win over conservatives like George Will, who have been driven from the Republican Party by its decision to nominate as its standard-bearer a former reality TV star with little history of conservative principles.
+
+Clinton faces a steep uphill climb, however, in convincing Republicans that she is trustworthy and won’t overstep her bounds as president on the issue of immigration, both issues that Fox News—which re-aired the 10 A.M. Fox interview—has repeatedly hammered her on over the last year. Confronted with the fact that two-third of voters say they don’t trust her, the former secretary of state acknowledged she had to do more (“I have work to do to make sure people know what I have done and what I will do”) but argued that Americans’ impression of her is a caricature, not reality. “When I left office as Secretary of State, 66 percent of Americans approved of what I do,” she told Wallace. “I think that it's fair for Americans to have questions. I hope you'll ask Donald Trump why he is so untrusted by the American people.”
+
+The Democratic nominee also sought to allay Republican voters’ fears that she would take away or limit access to guns as president, a major obstacle to winning over uncertain conservatives who are worried about Trump. “I'm not looking to repeal the Second Amendment. I'm not looking to take people's guns away,” Clinton insisted, repeating what she had said in her Democratic National Convention speech last week, during which she had accepted her party’s nomination for president. “But I am looking for more support for the reasonable efforts that need to be undertaken to keep guns out of the wrong hands,” she continued. “The vast majority of Americans including gun owners support the kind of common sense reforms that I'm proposing.”
+
+Clinton’s interview with Wallace was the latest in a series of moves by the presidential nominee to expand her voting base beyond liberal and centrist Democrats to include more conservative voters. Days before, right-leaning pundits had watched with some concern as the Democratic National Convention gleefully co-opted an iconography and vocabulary traditionally belonging to Republicans: giant American flags, patriotic chants, and a parade of high-ranking military officials, police officers, former Reagan officials, and even Michael Bloomberg, once a Republican himself. The spectacle was, they fretted, more American than their own convention, a weeklong celebration of Trump.
+
+Clinton’s interview augurs potential difficulty on the horizon as she seeks to unite believers of old-fashioned, Reagan-era conservatism, with the ideals of a socialist from Vermont and his legion of scrappy supporters. But if anyone can scare more people into the Democratic Party’s big tent, it’s Donald Trump—and Clinton is holding open the doors. Already there are suggestions that the Democratic nominee could soon receive the endorsement of high-profile dissenters within the Republican ranks, even if it risks alienating some portion of her liberal base. Fox News itself may soon be shifting toward the center, as Rupert Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan move to reinvent the network in the wake of Roger Ailes’ departure amid a sexual harassment scandal. If there’s anyone who can capitalize on the coming shakeup with a carefully-tuned strategy of triangulation, it’s another Clinton.",REAL
+3645,A standard dejection in the IRS help line,"By midmorning, the line of taxpayers outside the IRS office stretched along the marble wall, past the elevators and water fountain, back to the metal detectors near the entrance of the Earle Cabell Federal Building.
+
+Andrew Concha came out into the hall holding a purple sign. He checked his watch — 11:04 a.m. — then calculated how many people could be seen before the Taxpayer Assistance Center closed at 4:30 p.m. He placed the sign behind the 17th customer, signaling to the other 30 or so in line that their chance of seeing a specialist that day was slim.
+
+“I’m not technically turning them away yet,” Concha explained. “I’m letting them know it may not be in their interest to wait three to four hours to see someone.”
+
+With Tax Day approaching, it was the best the IRS could offer.
+
+Five years of budget cuts by Congress have left the agency so cash-strapped that Commissioner John Koskinen doesn’t bother sugarcoating the state of customer service. “It’s abysmal,” he said.
+
+Nationwide, only 4 in 10 callers to the agency’s toll-free help line are getting through to a real person. The number of “courtesy disconnects” — a euphemism for an overloaded system hanging up on the customer — has reached 5 million so far this year, the agency reported.
+
+When callers do get a real person, they can forget about asking questions that require expertise. These are now considered “out of scope.” The customer-service agents have been instructed to only tell callers what tax forms they need, where to get them and where to look for online information. Staff can no longer offer line-by-line assistance, provide guidance on tax planning or tax law, or help make payment arrangements.
+
+And with 5,000 fewer agents than four years ago to go after tax cheats, officials estimate that $2 billion in revenue will go uncollected.
+
+At the Dallas tax assistance center, there’s an empty space where the office printer sat before it was yanked out. The maintenance contract was too expensive. The shelves in the Forms Room are mostly bare. The 40-page P-17, the bible of tax-return preparation, now costs $23 and must be ordered online.
+
+Overcrowding at the Dallas center came to a head in February when the fire marshal showed up and notified its manager, Johnny Holiday, that he couldn’t have customers sitting on the floor and blocking exits and walking space. So now, no one gets in the door unless the person has a seat in one of the 40 chairs in the waiting area.
+
+Late last month, Holiday called security officers when a man lunged at an employee, cursing, after waiting two hours to drop off documents for an audit.
+
+Holiday spends his time devising strategies to bring order to an office that, this being the IRS, should thrive on order. Twenty minutes before the doors open at 8:30 a.m. on a recent morning, he’s making sure that the Line Elimination Team is in place. Its job is do triage on the line, pulling customers out of the queue who have straightforward requests, such as asking to make a payment or to get a copy of an old return. Employees move along the line, handing out paper tickets as at the deli counter, asking customers in Spanish and in English why they are here.
+
+This task takes three of his specialists. That leaves only eight others to meet with taxpayers and answer their questions.
+
+As money has gotten tighter, the demands have grown. Two years ago, another walk-in center in DeSoto, 16 miles south of Dallas, closed, leaving the IRS office in the Earle Cabell building to absorb the business.
+
+With its gray carpets, dropped ceilings with fluorescent lights and keypad-coded doors five blocks from where John F. Kennedy was shot, the 16-story building in downtown Dallas built in 1968 is a monument to a time when there was more optimism about the federal government.
+
+Since 2010, Republicans on Capitol Hill have slashed the IRS budget by $1.2 billion, or about 17 percent, adjusting for inflation. Just this fiscal year, $346 million was cut.
+
+By contrast, cuts across the rest of the government have been far more modest and concentrated. Between 2012 and 2014, automatic spending reductions shrank non-defense spending, as adjusted for inflation, by 1.3 percent, while IRS spending was chopped 5.6 percent, according to Scott Lilly, a budget expert at the Center for American Progress.
+
+Even in an era of shrinking government, conservatives’ antipathy toward the tax-collection agency stands out. It is punishment for a string of missteps: an extravagant conference for employees in Anaheim, Calif., the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax exemptions, $1 million in bonuses given to agency employees who didn’t pay their federal taxes.
+
+“We deliberately lowered IRS funding to a level that will make the IRS think twice about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it,” Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.), who chairs the House panel that sets the agency’s budget, said at a hearing last month. The IRS, he said, should “focus on core missions providing taxpayer services.”
+
+Leslie Paige, vice president for policy and communications at Citizens Against Government Waste, said every government agency could sustain deep cuts and in particular the IRS.
+
+“I think taxpayers and their representatives need to think long and hard about throwing more money at an agency that has proven that it persistently mismanages and wastes the money they have gotten in the past,” she said.
+
+As funding has declined, the agency’s workload has grown. The IRS is helping to administer subsidies and compliance under President Obama’s health-care law and dealing with other new wrinkles in the tax code. It is also battling an epidemic of identity theft and new, sophisticated cheating schemes. Since the budget cuts, employees have processed 11 percent more returns, the IRS said.
+
+Koskinen, hired to restore trust in the IRS, is also looking for money to upgrade a system that still runs on COBOL, the computer language that debuted half a century ago. He needs more revenue agents. In Dallas, they only go after people who’ve cheated the government out of $1 million or more.
+
+“At this point it is a little frustrating when people say, ‘We keep cutting your budget so you’ll be more efficient,’ ” Koskinen said.
+
+When Jerry Reed finally made it to a cubicle inside the Dallas center, Andrew Concha apologized for the long wait. Reed just shrugged his shoulders.
+
+Reed’s tax return had been flagged because it reflected a refund of more than $10,000. The IRS suspected that Reed was a victim of identity theft. In reality, Reed was due the refund because he had taken a large business loss when his consulting business failed.
+
+He tried to resolve the confusion online but couldn’t figure how to proceed. He called the toll-free line, waited on hold for 90 minutes and hung up. Then he drove to the federal building one day after work, but he was too late to get a ticket. In the past, IRS employees would work as late as midnight during tax season, but now, with the elimination of overtime pay, they go home at 4:30 p.m.
+
+“Because of the cuts, people have really lost patience with us,” Concha said.
+
+In the high-rise building next door, money ran out for 200 seasonal employees a full month before the April 15 deadline, and they are being sent home, agency officials said.
+
+“They know the minute we say, ‘I’m going to have to transfer you to someone who can answer your question,’ they’re going to be on hold for a number of hours,” said Donna Miller, an agent working for the local chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union.
+
+Just then, an announcement came over the loudspeaker inviting all employees to Room 212 at 1 p.m. for a retirement party for a woman named Peg. Peg was not being replaced because of an IRS hiring freeze.
+
+No choice but to wait
+
+It has fallen to Chris Caroll, the operations manager, to buck up his beleaguered staff. Bald with a goatee, he walks the seven floors of cubicles every day, urging employees to e-mail, call and knock on his door if they need to talk.
+
+“We knew we had to be empathetic versus the typical management style,” he said. Yet he cannot even order them calendars, calculators or rulers.
+
+Back downstairs, Laurence Zeigler had figured out that he wouldn’t get to see anyone at the IRS on this day. All he needed, he said, was to give them his correct address. Near the exit, his credentials in a faded gray folder that long ago carried his vo-tech diploma, he vented to a friendly security guard.
+
+“Man, I just got laid off,” he said. “It’s like, I really need that money.” His $400 refund had been held up by an incomplete return.
+
+“I would just call them,” the guard offered. Waiting on hold did not sound like a great idea to Zeigler.
+
+Concha had come back out to check on the line.
+
+“If you get in this line, the wait will be two hours,” he told an anxious woman, who wanted to make sure her automated tax payment went through after her bank changed. “If you get inside, it will be another two hours.”
+
+“Did you say, another two hours?” someone called out. It was Kim Garrett, on her fifth visit to clear up the matter of her Social Security number, which she said the IRS didn’t have.
+
+“You can’t call,” Garrett said, to anyone who would listen. “You can’t get online, and you can’t see anybody. What are your options?”
+
+The others in line nodded in agreement.",REAL
+6726,"About Time! CNN Fires Donna Brazile for Rigging Debates, Giving Hillary Questions in Advance","Email 
+CNN made it official Monday, firing commentator Donna Brazile (shown) for giving Hillary Clinton questions in advance of debates with Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries. The avidly pro-Clinton network was virtually forced to sever ties with Brazile by the new revelations from the latest WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s hacked e-mails. Podesta, the longtime adviser/crony/fixer for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and currently chairman of Hillary’s election campaign, has now seen over 39,000 of his e-mails released by the WikiLeaks hacktivists, and they have been very revealing indeed, exposing the corruption, dirty tricks, and criminality of the Clinton political machine . 
+Brazile, a veteran Democratic Party hack, has been serving as interim chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) since July, when then-DNC chair Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign in an e-mail scandal that exposed Wasserman Schultz and other DNC officials blatantly taking sides with Clinton and sabotaging Sanders, in violation of DNC rules to maintain neutrality in primary campaigns. 
+As the Podesta e-mails reveal, Brazile was involved in those same ethics violations, extending to violating the rules for the televised debates. The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which sponsored the debates, states on its website : “All debates will be moderated by a single individual and will run from 9:00-10:30 p.m. Eastern Time without commercial breaks. As always, the moderators alone will select the questions to be asked, which are not known to the CPD or to the candidates.” 
+However, that obviously was not the case, as Brazile was providing Team Clinton with a heads-up of debate questions in advance. The first Brazile e-mail to leak out concerned the televised CNN-TV One Town Hall event on March 13 of this year. The day before, Brazile sent an e-mail to Clinton’s director of communications, Jennifer Palmieri, saying she’s worried about “HRC” (Hillary Rodham Clinton) facing a question on the death penalty. The subject heading of her e-mail was: “Re: From time to time I get the questions in advance.” 
+Here is the e-mail, as provided by WikiLeaks: On Mar 12, 2016, at 4:39 PM, Donna Brazile <   >; wrote: Here's one that worries me about HRC. DEATH PENALTY 19 states and the District of Columbia have banned the death penalty. 31 states, including Ohio, still have the death penalty. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, since 1973, 156 people have been on death row and later set free. Since 1976, 1,414 people have been executed in the U.S. That’s 11% of Americans who were sentenced to die, but later exonerated and freed. Should Ohio and the 30 other states join the current list and abolish the death penalty? Sent from Donna's I Pad. Follow me on twitter @donnabrazile 
+The following day, on the CNN-TV One Town Hall, co-moderated by CNN’s Jake Tapper and TV One’s Roland Martin, Hillary Rodham Clinton was indeed asked a question about the death penalty, by audience member Ricky Jackson — and HRC had a scripted answer ready and waiting. We, the public, did not find out that the game had been rigged until months later, when WikiLeaks released the incriminating e-mail on October 11. Nevertheless, even after the WikiLeaks release, most of the establishment media ignored the Brazile-Podesta-Palmieri skullduggery in favor of bashing Donald Trump over unsubstantiated, sensationalistic charges of sexual harassment. For nearly two weeks, Donna Brazile was allowed to wave off the e-mail evidence with diversionary tactics and charges that the e-mails are fabrications by WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence. 
+However, on October 20 Brazile was skewered on Fox News by a relentless Megyn Kelly, who refused to let her weasel her way through another interview. Not that the DNC chair didn’t try; Brazile kept going to script, using every diversion she could muster to avoid answering the direct, careful questions put to her by the Fox anchor. 
+She tried the Christian/persecution diversion: “As a Christian woman I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted,” Brazile told Megyn Kelly. 
+She tried the “poisoned fruit” diversion: “Podesta’s emails were stolen. You’re so interested in talking about stolen material, you’re like a thief that wanna bring into the night the things that are in the gutter.” 
+She tried the motor-mouth/repetition diversion, the total innocence diversion, and much more. 
+It was still more of the same patently absurd denial and rehearsed propaganda by Brazile when Kelly confronted her with the undercover video stings of top Democratic dirty tricks operatives Scott Foval and Bob Creamer, who were caught red-handed boasting of rigging elections and admitting to inciting violence at Trump rallies . 
+Incredibly, Brazile insisted to Megyn Kelly that “I always play ‘straight up’ and I’m going to be ‘straight up’ with you.” However, it was painfully clear by the end of the Fox “interview” that “straight up” Donna Brazile is as weasely and deceitful as “Crooked Hillary.” 
+It is noteworthy that during her Fox News interview, when Megyn Kelly repeatedly asked her where she got the advance debate questions, Brazile fatuously insisted that she had “never” received any questions from CNN. She continued repeating the same lines even when Kelly asked her directly if the questions had come not from CNN itself but from Roland Martin, the former CNN commentator who now works for TV One and co-moderated the Town Hall event. 
+In the same e-mail thread of March 12 cited above, Brazile responded to a reply from Jennifer Palmieri. Brazile told Palmieri: “I'll send a few more [debate questions]. Though some questions Roland submitted.” That would seem to be a very solid “clue” that Roland Martin was the source and Brazile was the conduit to Podesta and the Clinton Campaign. 
+Politico reporter Hadas Gold reported on October 12 that Politico had obtained an e-mail of March 12 from Roland Martin to CNN debate producers with the identical death penalty question that appeared in Brazile’s March 12 e-mail to Palmieri. What’s more, it was Roland Martin who introduced Ricky Jackson, the pre-selected, pre-scripted “audience” member who asked the rigged question about the death penalty. 
+As Gold reports, Martin initially denied that he had shared his questions “with anybody.” However, after being confronted with the fact that Politico possessed e-mail evidence to the contrary, he began walking the denial back to more ambiguous ground. 
+Media “Uncomfortable” but not Outraged — Deceit, Propaganda Continue 
+In an October 13 interview, Jake Tapper said he has “tremendous regard” for Brazile, but said the WikiLeaks revelation was “very, very troubling.” “It’s horrifying,” the CNN anchor said. “Journalistically it’s horrifying, and I’m sure it will have an impact on [CNN] partnering with this organization [TV One] in the future.” 
+The following day, on October 14, CNN spokeswoman Lauren Pratapas stated that CNN hadn’t given Brazile the debate questions in advance and announced Brazile had resigned from the network. “CNN never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate,” Pratapas said in a written statement. “We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor.” 
+The October 30 WikiLeaks release contains another Brazile-DNC-Podesta debate revelation, concerning the March 6 debate in Flint, Michigan, where Democrat Party operatives and their media allies have transformed lead poisoning into a false national issue with which to clobber Republicans. The Clinton-Sanders Democratic primary debate was hosted by CNN and moderated by Anderson Cooper. (See the full debate here .) 
+The event was held in Flint at Clinton’s request, as she herself pointed out during the course of the debate. A Brazile e-mail from March 5 of this year to Podesta and Palmieri, is entitled: “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash.” 
+“Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint” Brazile’s e-mail goes on to alert Hillary’s debate coaches. Sure enough, the lead poisoning question came up on cue, and HRC slammed in another easy homerun answer. 
+Yes, many in the pro-Clinton media industry are “uncomfortable” with the WikiLeaks revelations, but, judging from their continued overwhelmingly slanted coverage, the discomfort comes from being exposed, not from being disgusted with the serial cheating and lying of the Clinton camp and their media allies. There has been precious little outrage expressed by the pro-Clinton mainstream media elites of the kind and volume that would have gushed forth if the same rigging had been perpetrated by the Trump Campaign. There have been no media-orchestrated calls for TV One to fire Roland Martin, nor for the DNC to fire Donna Brazile, nor for Hillary Clinton to fire John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri. 
+The Brazile-Podesta-Palmieri debate e-mails are damning, but, arguably, not as serious as the many other revelations concerning the Clinton family’s rampant criminality on national security matters such as Uranium One, and the “pay-to-play” wheeling-dealing at the HRC State Department and the Clinton Foundation. However, the WikiLeaks e-mails released thus far have shown an alarming willingness and ability of Hillary Rodham Clinton and her DNC-Big Media allies to rig the election debates. And the ones we’ve seen may be only the tip of the iceberg. If this is the case in the primaries, are Donald Trump’s charges about rigging the November 8 election really all that outlandish, as the pro-Clinton media choir would have us believe? 
+Related articles :",FAKE
+5326,"Assad Says The ""Boy In The Ambulance"" Is Fake - This Proves It","Assad Says The ""Boy In The Ambulance"" Is Fake - This Proves It 
+Did the viral photo feature a child actor who has already been photographed 'being rescued' before? Donate! Originally appeared at The Moon of Alabama 
+From an interview with the Syrian President Bashar Assad by the Swiss SRF 1 TV Channel published October 19 2016: Journalist: This young boy has become the symbol of the war. I think that you know this picture. 
+President Assad: Of course I saw it. 
+Journalist: His name is Omran. Five years old. 
+President Assad: Yeah. 
+Journalist: Covered with blood, scared, traumatized. Is there anything you would like to say to Omran and his family? 
+President Assad: There’s something I would like to say to you first of all, because I want you to go back after my interview, and go to the internet to see the same picture of the same child, with his sister, both were rescued by what they call them in the West “White Helmets” which is a facelift of al-Nusra in Aleppo. They were rescued twice, each one in a different incident, and just as part of the publicity of those White Helmets. None of these incidents were true. You can have it manipulated, and it is manipulated. I’m going to send you those two pictures, and they are on the internet, just to see that this is a forged picture, not a real one. We have real pictures of children being harmed, but this one in specific is a forged one. 
+Assad was half wrong. The picture, printed on page 1 of newspapers all over the ""western"" world, was not ""forged"". It is a real picture from a White Helmet ""rescue"" video distributed by the Aleppo Media Center (AMC) (which is funded by the French French Ministry of Foreign Affairs). But the scene was carefully staged and we immediately recognized it as staged when it appeared. It was staged like many other ""rescue"" scenes with ""kids saved"" by the U.S./UK/D/J/NL financed White Helmets and their associated media. 
+Look for yourself, trust your eyes. 
+The ""boy in an ambulance"" scene features two identifiable kids. Omran and his sister. 
+Below are pictures of what we believe are the same kids in different scenes. 
+Here is the girl at another occasion. We will call this scene 1: 
+The Houston Chronicle reported about this scene and the picture carries this caption: An 8-year-old girl named Aya calls out for her father after an airstrike in Syrian on Monday, Oct. 10, 2016. 
+This combined one is captioned: Left: 8-year-old Aya in her everyday life in Syria. Right: 8-year-old Aya after an airstrike in Syria. 
+Notice the age as well as the girl's favorite colors - light turquoise and pink. Compared to the left picture the hair on the right looks powdered and artificially teased. While there is trickle of ""blood"" on her face and on her dress no wound is visible. 
+The Chronicle story is sourced to CNN which includes a short (staged) video and adds: The video and images were posted online by a pro-opposition activist group, Talbiseh Media Center. 
+It shows an 8-year-old girl in a medical facility, her hair and body covered with dust. There's blood tricking down her forehead, her nose. She looks confused and scared and keeps calling out for her father....Aya was pulled from under rubble along with her family members when an airstrike hit their home in Talbiseh on Monday. Talbiseh, a large town in northwestern Syria, is about 10 kilometers north of Homs. 
+A screenshot detail from the video: 
+The ""blood"" looks remarkably glossy, unlike natural blood which dries and looks dull pretty fast. The uni-color shirt the girl wears has no arms. 
+Now the same girl in a different ""rescue"" scene. We will call this scene 2. 
+whstatist1-1.jpg 
+The truck in the background has a ""White Helmets"" logo on the door. 
+A detail of the above picture. It is the same girl as in scene 1. The hair again seems powdered and teased: 
+Notice: Same habitus, same appearance, same wild hair as in scene 1; no visible wounds; turquoise shirt but with short arms; jeans with glitter 
+Here is the girl at scene 2 in an ambulance: 
+Same shirt and pants as above, no wounds, no pain and not attended to by anybody. Compare this with the video capture of scene 1 the Chronicle and CNN reported on. We strongly believe it is the same girl. 
+Now what seems to be a different take of scene 2. A ""White Helmet"" carries the girl and a boy. Notice the same clothing as in the other scene 2 pics above. The pic as well as some of the above from scene 2 was running in the Daily Mail on August 27. The incident is claimed to be the aftermath of a ""barrel bombing"" in the Bab al-Nairab neighborhood in east-Aleppo. 
+Why would two different men carry and ""rescue"" the girl. She, like the boy, looks fine - same cloth as above, no wounds, no damage to the extremities, no crying - just curiosity. 
+A detail of the faces in that picture: 
+A detail of the boy's face: 
+Now to the ""boy in an ambulance"" scene. The boy and the reportedly 8-year old girl on August 17 in the Qaterji neighborhood in east Aleppo introduced as ""Omran Daqneesh and his sister."" (pic source ): 
+The just ""rescued"" kids sit quietly but completely unattended to in a brand-new €100,000 ambulance. No shock therapy was initiated, no Trendelberg position or at least laying down flat. No one talks to them despite half a dozen photographers being around them. 
+Details of the kids - here the boy has the powdered and teased ""wild hair"" look. 
+Are these the same kids as in scene 2 above? 
+President Assad believes they are. 
+We agree. We also believe that all three scenes above are staged. The girl is the same in all three scenes. Her younger brother appears in scene 2 and 3. The White Helmets apparently ""rescued"" the girl in three different incidents on or about August 17, August 27 and October 10 in three different locations. 
+Isn't that a remarkably elysian miracle? 
+Or is it all part of the serial production of elaborately staged anti-Syrian propaganda? Delivered by a marketing organization (vid) funded by ""western"" governments and various similar financed opposition ""media organizations"". 
+Trust your eyes.  ",FAKE
+719,The Dems’ lethal weapon: Elizabeth Warren is the only Democrat that can cut Donald Trump down to size,"How do you solve a problem like Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign team is trying to figure that out with an effort that can best be described at the moment as “throwing a forest full of mud at the wall and seeing what sticks.” Which is fine this far from the election, especially with Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic primary still out there campaigning hard for the nomination despite the math being against him. For Team Clinton, there is nothing wrong at the moment with trying out some different lines of attack on Trump, finding those that resonate, and then fine-tuning them.
+
+But until either the campaign finishes fine-tuning or figures out a way to beam these moments from the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner speech directly into voters’ brains 24/7 for the next six months, they have Elizabeth Warren. The senator from Massachusetts is already showing herself to be the most effective Clinton surrogate out there. This is partly by default, as there are not a whole lot of high-profile Democrats yet making the case against Trump. But does anyone think Harry Reid can make a more persuasive case to motivate voters to turn out in November?
+
+It is hard to understate how smartly Warren is playing this game, even if you cynically assume her recent attacks on Trump are solely about positioning herself to become the leading candidate to run as Clinton’s vice president. (Which is not an assumption I’m making.) But so far, she is doing a better job of drawing a contrast between what the two parties stand for, or at least could stand for in terms of fighting for economic justice for working- and middle-class Americans, than any other public figure. Including Bernie Sanders, whose campaign in recent days seems to have devolved mostly into arguments about process and flipping superdelegates at the convention in Philadelphia this summer.
+
+Warren’s genius lies in her ability to take big concepts and distil them down into simple goals for Americans, such as being able to buy their own homes, send their kids to college, and participate in what used to quaintly be called the American Dream. She’s not stoking anger in service of demanding we overturn the established order. What the people want, she seems to say, is their own share, for which they have worked and saved and fought. What they want is their own little corner within the system, with reasonable economic security and access to the tools that help make that possible.
+
+Donald Trump can still have his penthouse in Trump Tower and his estate in Florida and who cares? Just so long as he’s abiding by the implicit social contract the nation has long followed, which says that we empower policies that ensure future generations can have it just as good, or even better, than we do. She seems incredulous that anyone could want otherwise. As she told the crowd in a speech at a gala honoring the Center for Popular Democracy on Tuesday: Donald Trump was drooling over the idea of a housing meltdown because it meant he could buy up a bunch more property on the cheap. What kind of a man does that? Root for people to get thrown out on the street? Root for people to lose their jobs? Root for people to lose their pensions? Root for two little girls in Clark County, Nevada, to end up living in a van? What kind of a man does that? Watch the speech and you can nearly see the contempt dripping from her lips and splattering on the lectern. This could be a remarkably effective counter to Trump’s jingoistic, chest-pounding promises to “make America great again,” which explicitly tend to exclude certain groups and elide the fact that many of his policies, such as upper-end-heavy tax cuts and repealing the Dodd-Frank banking reforms, would really only make America great again for people in a certain racial and economic strata that have quickly recovered their equilibrium after the financial upheavals of the last decade and a half. It’s a call for community and justice that does not actually demonize any citizens except one: Donald J. Trump. Of course, Warren will want to be careful, to dole this stuff out in small bursts and avoid over-exposure. But she can weave the story of America’s economically left behind into a morality play that takes aim at the villain nominated by the GOP, and do so without demagogy better than anyone else on the Democrats’ shallow bench right now. Better than Sanders or Clinton or the Big Dog, or maybe even Joe Biden, who is going to stay on the sidelines until later in the summer anyway. She’s the party’s best weapon for harnessing the energy of the left wing and the disaffection of average citizens, if it can keep using her effectively.",REAL
+611,"poll: Alarm, anxiety","Republican Pat McCrory is trailing in a tight race, but his campaign is challenging votes.",REAL
+8849,Erdogan Checks in with Obama Before Bombing Syria,"Erdogan Checks in with Obama Before Bombing Syria October 27, 2016 Erdogan Checks in with Obama Before Bombing Syria 
+Turkey's military operation in northern Syria will target the town of Manbij, recently liberated from ISIS by Kurdish-led forces, and the jihadists' stronghold of Raqqa, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday. In a speech in Ankara broadcast live, Erdogan said he had informed U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama about his plans for the operation in a telephone call. Syrian rebels, backed by Turkish warplanes, tanks and artillery, launched an operation dubbed ""Euphrates Shield"" in August to push Islamic State and Kurdish militia forces away from the border area of northern Syria. In a speech in Ankara broadcast live, Erdogan said he had informed U.S. President Barack Obama about his plans for the operation in a telephone call on Wednesday. Before Manbij and Raqqa, the operation will target the town of al-Bab, he said. 
+(ANKARA) - Turkey has been angered at Washington's support for the Kurdish YPG militia in its battle against ISIS in Syria, with Ankara regarding it as a hostile force with deep ties to Kurdish militants fighting in southeast Turkey. 
+A top U.S. military commander said on Wednesday YPG fighters will be included in the force to isolate Raqqa. Arab forces, and not Kurdish ones, are expected to be the ones to take the city itself, U.S. officials say. 
+READ MORE: ONLY RUSSIA CAN SAVE THE WEST FROM ITSELF IN SYRIA 
+Defence Minister Fikri Isik told state broadcaster TRT on Thursday that Turkey had asked the United States not to allow the YPG to enter Raqqa, saying it was ready to provide the necessary military support to take over the town. 
+Erdogan also said that the Iraqi region of Sinjar, west of Mosul, was on its way to becoming a new base for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants and that Turkey would not allow this to happen. Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+223,"Paul Ryan, a highway bill, and the political virtue of patience (+video)","A long-term highway bill, passed by the House Thursday, took years to work its way to the surface of a Congress that was never designed for the quick fix.
+
+House Speaker Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin smiles during his news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on Thursday. The House has voted to continue transportation programs for six years with no significant increase in spending.
+
+In the new House of Ryan, where lawmakers have been promised a greater say in legislating, members burned the midnight oil this week as they worked through scores of amendments to overwhelmingly pass a six-year, bipartisan highway bill on Thursday.
+
+It was the first long-term bill in a decade to repair America’s crumbling roads, bridges, and transit systems, and members jumped at the new opportunity to give their input.
+
+“There’s a lot of pent-up, legislative energy around here, and when a real piece of legislation comes along that impacts every district in America dramatically … then a lot of people have a lot of ideas,” says Rep. Peter DeFazio (D) of Oregon, the top Democrat on the House Transportation Committee and lead co-sponsor of the bill.
+
+The past few days have taught a lesson: patience. But ask Congressman DeFazio, and he'll say the patience needed to bring this bill to reality has been measured in years, not hours or days. He’s been working toward this day since he was named a subcommittee chairman in 2007. His own president resisted his efforts. Then the House changed hands.
+
+Even now, he acknowledges, the bill isn't what he wanted, since it keeps spending flat and is funded for only three years. But after such a long slog, he's pleased. “I’ve never really stopped working on it.”
+
+In life, patience is a virtue, and on Capitol Hill, doubly so. Congress was never designed for the quick fix. The Founding Fathers deliberately created two very different chambers so that there would be an opportunity for “second thoughts,” as former Senate historian Don Ritchie puts it.
+
+Turning ideas into a workable form and winning backing for a bill as big as this requires educating members, hearing them out, negotiating, and working with outside interests. It can take years to get to yes.
+
+Yet that’s easily forgotten or dismissed by some newcomers. This is especially true in the age of Twitter, when voters know instantly what their senator or representative did – or didn’t do – and then make their demands for instant results immediately known.
+
+Consider freshman Sen. Marco Rubio (R) of Florida, a man in a hurry to become president. He got fed up with the slow pace of the Senate, where in his first year in 2011 he asked in a floor speech, “Do we just stand around and do nothing?”
+
+For lawmakers who were once top dogs at home – Senator Rubio was speaker of the House in Florida – it’s frustrating to arrive as a pup in a slow-moving Congress that values seniority.
+
+In his early years, Rubio was left to author symbolic resolutions such as one that congratulated the Miami Heat for their NBA championship. He got his big break when he joined the “Gang of Eight” senators who pushed bipartisan immigration reform through the Senate in 2013. Then he watched it die slowly from neglect in the House.
+
+If he’s elected president, “we can begin to fix some of these issues that I’ve been so frustrated we’ve been unable to address during my time in the Senate,”  Rubio told NBC’s Matt Lauer recently. Has the Floridian talked to President Obama – himself a sprinting former senator – about the frustrations of working with Congress, even when your party controls both houses?
+
+John Boehner underscored the need for patience when he gave up the speaker’s gavel to Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin last week. “Real change takes time,” the outgoing speaker said to a packed chamber, as he reflected on his accomplishments. “Freedom makes all things possible. But patience is what makes all things real.”
+
+A subtle dig at the hard-line, rebellious Freedom Caucus, who drove him out of the speakership?
+
+“When you get people who are impatient and ideologically driven, they feel like fish out of water” in Congress, says former House historian Raymond Smock. “The truth of the matter is, they are, because ideology is the opposite of pragmatism.”
+
+A functioning Congress requires its members to want to govern, Mr. Smock says. Many people have many ideas on how to fix things, but the country is a big, wide place and the world is complicated. “Things are not so simple, and ideology tends to make things simple.”
+
+He quotes former Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill: “If you want efficient government, get yourself a dictatorship.”
+
+Frustration with the slowly turning gears of Congress is not new. Howard Shuman, an aide to former Sen. Paul Douglas (D) of Illinois during the civil rights fights of the 1950s and ’60s, told historian Ritchie in an  oral history about his “seven-year principle.”
+
+That’s how long he found it took to get from the inception of a significant legislative idea to its passage.
+
+“Most of the major legislation I worked on, that was new, forward looking, which started out heavily opposed and without a mandate, after seven years of convincing, of publicity, of talking, of arguing, of hearings, finally made it.... It took that much time, and that much effort, and that much struggle to come off. ‘Struggle’ is the word.”
+
+In truth, the battle over the highway bill isn't even finished yet. It could get full, six-year funding when House and Senate negotiators come together to hammer out the final version.
+
+At points, Congress has tried to make itself more efficient. After World War II, for instance, it tried joint committees, so witnesses wouldn’t have to testify twice. It didn’t work, mainly because the House and Senate are such different bodies – one controlled by the majority, the other designed to operate more by consensus.
+
+Crises, such as wars and economic catastrophes, can speed up action. And when things get really stuck, lawmakers try changing the rules – such as Speaker Ryan says he wants to do. Ironically, by opening up the process so that his members – particularly the Freedom Caucus – have more say and fewer gripes, it will take longer to get things done. On the other hand, it may also give him the buy-in he needs to move bills forward.
+
+“Everyone wants to feel part of the process and have their proposal considered,” says Rep. John Mica (R) of Florida, the former chairman of the Transportation Committee, in an interview. Speaker Boehner, too, opened up the process when he took over, but power eventually massed back at the top – partly for greater efficiency.
+
+This goes in cycles, says Congressman Mica. “Now that there’s been a rebellion, we’ll go back to this open process and see how it works.”
+
+DeFazio, on the other side of the aisle, thinks it could work well.
+
+“This is the way it used to be. We got more things done back then, even though it was more time consuming.”",REAL
+5044,'Repugnant': Families of War Dead Demand Apology From Trump,"The families of 17 service members who died fighting for the U.S. demanded an apology from Donald Trump on Monday, accusing him of ""cheapening the sacrifice made by those we lost.""
+
+They said the Republican presidential nominee's suggestion that the Muslim mother of a U.S. soldier who died in Iraq had not ""been allowed"" to speak at the Democratic National Convention was akin to ""attacking us.""
+
+A letter signed by the Gold Star families — the term for those who have lost loved ones during military service — also called Trump's comments ""repugnant, and personally offensive.""
+
+""When you question a mother's pain, by implying that her religion, not her grief, kept her from addressing an arena of people, you are attacking us,"" the letter added. ""When you say your job building buildings is akin to our sacrifice, you are attacking our sacrifice.""
+
+The letter was organized by Gold Star Mother Karen Meredith from VoteVets.org, an advocacy group that calls itself non-partisan but which has been described in the past as allied to Congressional Democrats. The Center for Responsive Politics says VoteVets.org is fueled ""largely by social welfare organizations aligned with Democrats and millions of dollars given by unions.""
+
+Over the weekend, Trump questioned why Ghazala Khan stood by quietly as her husband Khizr Khan talked about their son Humayun at the DNC.
+
+In the speech, Khan criticized Trump's policies and statements about Muslims. The real estate magnate ""sacrificed nothing and no one,"" Khan said, and questioned whether the Republican had even read the U.S. Constitution.
+
+The Khans' son, a U.S. Army captain, was killed by a car bomb in 2004 while guarding the gates of his base in Iraq, saving the lives of his fellow soldiers and civilians. He was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
+
+Related: Father of Fallen Soldier to Trump: 'You Have Sacrificed Nothing'
+
+Trump, who has called for Muslims to be barred from entering the country, responded to the speech by saying that maybe Ghazala Khan had ""not been allowed to have anything to say.""
+
+Trump's comments go ""beyond politics,"" according to the letter. ""It is about a sense of decency. That kind decency you mock as 'political correctness.'""
+
+It added: ""We feel we must speak out and demand you apologize to the Khans, to all Gold Star families, and to all Americans for your offensive, and frankly anti-American, comments.""
+
+The letter's signatories were 10 families whose loved ones died in Iraq and one that lost a father in Vietnam.
+
+And one of the nation's most prominent veterans groups -- the Veterans of Foreign Wars -- added its voice to the controversy Monday, calling Trump's criticisms of the Kahn family ""out of bounds.""
+
+""Election year or not, the VFW will not tolerate anyone berating a Gold Star family member for exercising his or her right of speech or expression,"" said organization chief Brian Duffy in a statement. ""There are certain sacrosanct subjects that no amount of wordsmithing can repair once crossed. Giving one's life to nation is the greatest sacrifice, followed closely by all Gold Star families, who have a right to make their voices heard.""
+
+Trump did not immediately respond to Monday's letter from the families. He previously hit back at criticism from the Khan family, saying he had ""made a lot of sacrifices ... I work very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs.""
+
+However, he tweeted about Khizr Khan on Monday morning.
+
+Trump also took to Twitter Sunday to defend past statements about Islam, terrorism and his record on the war in Iraq.
+
+Trump's comments have sparked a firestorm on social media and forced some GOP grandees to criticize the Republican nominee.
+
+His own running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, issued a statement Sunday saying he and Trump ""believe that Capt. Humayun Khan is an American hero and his family, like all Gold Star families, should be cherished by every American.""
+
+Other Republican leaders have also weighed in.
+
+""'Unacceptable' doesn't even begin to describe it,"" said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who unsuccessfully opposed Trump for the Republican nomination.
+
+""This is going to a place where we've never gone before, to push back against the families of the fallen,"" he said in a statement. ""There used to be some things that were sacred in American politics — that you don't do — like criticizing the parents of a fallen soldier even if they criticize you. ""
+
+Ghazala Khan also addressed Trump's comments in an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Sunday, writing: ""Here is my answer to Donald Trump: Because without saying a thing, all the world, all America, felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart.""
+
+She added: ""Donald Trump said I had nothing to say. I do. My son Humayun Khan, an Army captain, died 12 years ago in Iraq. He loved America, where we moved when he was 2 years old.""
+
+The emotional piece recounts how she and her husband worried about their middle son's safety when he was called to fight in Iraq.
+
+""We asked if there was some way he could not go, because he had already done his service. He said it was his duty,"" she wrote.
+
+She also addressed his comments about Muslims and sacrifice, stating: ""When Donald Trump is talking about Islam, he is ignorant.""
+
+Ghazala Khan added: ""Donald Trump said he has made a lot of sacrifices. He doesn't know what the word sacrifice means.""
+
+On Friday, she explained to MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell that she was anxious during her husband's speech, knowing her son's photo would appear behind her.
+
+""It was very nervous, because I cannot see my son's picture and I cannot even come in the room where his pictures are, and that's why when I saw the picture on my back, I couldn't take it. And I controlled myself at that time, so it is very hard,"" she said.
+
+Khizr Khan told O'Donnell that he could not have appeared at the DNC without his wife's close support.
+
+Speaking to NBC's TODAY on Monday, Khan said he was also grateful for an ""outpouring"" of support he had received in the wake of his speech. He had received many emails ""full of assurances that I am right — that we are right.""
+
+On Sunday, Khan told ""Meet the Press"" that ""we have a candidate without a moral compass, without empathy for its citizens.""
+
+""We don't take these values lightly,"" he said. ""We are testament to the goodness of this country. We experience the goodness of this country every day.""
+
+He also responded to a Trump campaign statement saying the candidate he believes Capt. Khan is ""a hero to our country.""
+
+While he appreciated the clarification, Khan added that ""it sounds so disingenuous because of his policies, because of his rhetoric of hatred, of derision, of dividing us. And that is why I implored him to read the Constitution.""",REAL
+9662,Juror 4: Oregon standoff prosecutors failed to prove ‘intent’ to impede federal workers,"Oregon Live 
+Juror 4 vigorously defends the across-the-board acquittals of Ammon Bundy and his six co-defendants, calling the rulings a “statement” about the prosecution’s failure to prove the fundamental elements of a conspiracy charge. 
+The full-time Marylhurst University business administration student was the juror who had sent a note to the judge on the fourth day of the initial jury’s deliberations in the case, questioning the impartiality of a fellow juror, No. 11, who the judge bounced from the jury a day later. 
+“It should be known that all 12 jurors felt that this verdict was a statement regarding the various failures of the prosecution to prove ‘conspiracy’ in the count itself – and not any form of affirmation of the defense’s various beliefs, actions or aspirations,” Juror 4 wrote Friday in a lengthy email to The Oregonian/OregonLive. 
+He expressed relief that he can now speak out freely, but he wasn’t ready as of Friday morning to drop his anonymity. He said his studies have suffered since the trial started, and he’s not ready for the attention revealing his identity would bring but felt it was important to defend the verdict. The judge withheld jurors’ names during the jury selection process and trial, instead referring to each by number. 
+The jury closely followed U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown’s instructions on how to apply the law to the evidence and testimony heard during the five-week trial, he said. 
+The jury returned unanimous verdicts of “not guilty” to conspiracy charges against all seven defendants. Each was accused of conspiring to prevent employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management from carrying out their official work through intimidation, threat or force during the 41-day occupation. 
+Juror 4 noted the panel couldn’t simply rely on the defendants’“defining actions” to convict. 
+“All 12 agreed that impeding existed, even if as an effect of the occupation,” he wrote. 
+“But we were not asked to judge on bullets and hurt feelings, rather to decide if any agreement was made with an illegal object in mind,” the Marylhurst student wrote. “It seemed this basic, high standard of proof was lost upon the prosecution throughout.” 
+Prosecutors had argued that the case, at its core, was about the illegal taking of another’s property. The heavily armed guards that manned the front gate and watchtower during the 41-day takeover, in and of itself, was “intimidating,” and prevented officers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management from carrying out their work, they said. 
+They argued that the alleged conspiracy began Nov. 5, when Ammon Bundy and ally Ryan Payne met with Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward and promised there would be extreme civil unrest in the community if he didn’t step in and block Harney County ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond. The Hammonds were slated to return to federal prison on Jan. 4 and serve out a mandatory minimum five-year sentence for arson on federal land. 
+Defense lawyers urged jurors in closing arguments not to mix-up the “effect” of the occupation – which undoubtedly kept federal employees from doing their jobs – from the “intent” of the occupiers. 
+Five of the seven defendants, including Ammon Bundy, testified. Many said that they were there to protest in support of the Hammonds and federal government overreach because they received absolutely no response from state or local government officials to their previous efforts to spur change. 
+The defense lawyers’ arguments, coupled with the jury instructions on how to apply the law to the evidence, resonated with jurors, Juror 4 noted. 
+“Inference, while possibly compelling, proved to be insulting or inadequate to 12 diversely situated people as a means to convict,” the juror wrote. “The air of triumphalism that the prosecution brought was not lost on any of us, nor was it warranted given their burden of proof.” 
+Juror 4 plainly stated that fellow Juror 11, during the initial round of deliberations, “had zero business being on this jury in the first place.” 
+Juror 11 had worked for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management as a ranch tech and firefighter “more than 20 years ago,” he had said during jury selection. Asked by the judge during voir dire if that experience would impede his ability to be a fair and impartial judge of the facts, he said, “Not really.” 
+Juror 4 explained why he didn’t alert the court immediately after he had heard Juror 11, on day one of deliberations reportedly say, “I am very biased.” 
+It wasn’t until the fourth day into deliberations that Juror 4 sent a note to the court, asking if a juror who had worked previously for the federal land management agency and outright told the panel he was “very biased” could be an impartial judge. The court, flummoxed by the development, a day later dismissed Juror 11 for “good cause,” after the prosecution and defense teams agreed to the dismissal. At the time, parties to the case weren’t sure which way Juror 11’s alleged bias fell. 
+Juror 4 said he “resisted the impulse” to send the question sooner in an effort to give his fellow juror a chance to explain himself. 
+In his email to The Oregonian/OregonLive, Juror 4, for the first time, also contended that Juror 11 “violated” the judge’s explicit orders “by hearkening to ‘evidence’ that was never admitted in this case, refused to consider the defendant’s state of mind and used imaginative theories to explain key actions.'” 
+Juror 4 said, though, he wishes that he “had sent the letter on day one, since it would have alleviated much stress for all of us.” 
+The Maryville business student said he is “baffled” by what he described as observers’“flippant sentiments” in the wake of the jury’s acquittals. 
+“Don’t they know that ‘not guilty’ does not mean innocent?” he wrote. “It was not lost on us that our verdict(s) might inspire future actions that are regrettable, but that sort of thinking was not permitted when considering the charges before us.” 
+The jury, he said, met with Judge Brown after the verdicts were announced and after the U.S. Marshals’ physical confrontation and arrest of Bundy lawyer Marcus Mumford. 
+He said many of the jurors questioned the judge about why the federal government chose the “conspiracy charge.” He said he learned that a potential alternate charge, such as criminal trespass, wouldn’t have brought as significant a penalty. 
+The charge of conspiring to impede federal employees from carrying out their official work through intimidation, threat or force brings a maximum sentence of six years in prison. 
+“We all queried about alternative charges that could stick and were amazed that this ‘conspiracy’ charge seemed the best possible option,” Juror 4 said. 
+— Maxine Bernstein",FAKE
+7407,Boaty McBoatface II? P&O bravely asks the public to name its new ferry,"Boaty McBoatface II? P&O bravely asks the public to name its new... Boaty McBoatface II? P&O bravely asks the public to name its new ferry By 0 50 
+The cruise company P&O has taken the plunge and decided to ask the public to name its new ferry. This comes in spite of the Boaty McBoatface debacle earlier this year. 
+A 2016 attempt by the public to name a £200 million ($243 million) arctic research vessel Boaty McBoatface was foiled when the fun police decided it was just too daft. 
+In a tweet posted on Wednesday, P&O threw caution to the wind, saying it is “ proud to announce that the name of our new ship… will be decided by you our guests! ” 
+Read more 
+Within minutes, Boaty McBoatface was reprised as a suggestion, alongside Cruisy McCruiseface and Shippy McShipface. 
+Other suggestions ranged from Hard Brexit to Bryan Ferry, after the 1980s pop star. Sensing a deliberate cry for attention, another tweeter branded the ship HMS Social Media Gimmick. 
+The original ‘Boaty McBoatface’ was eventually named RRS Richard Attenborough after the famed BBC explorer and zoologist. 
+Earlier this year, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) asked the public to choose a name via the internet competition ‘ Name Our Ship, ’ but after the exceedingly popular moniker ‘ Boaty McBoatface ’ won the poll with more than 124,000 votes, the builders overruled the decision. 
+In the face of public outcry, a small yellow submersible that will operate from the Richard Attenborough was christened Boaty McBoatface. 
+The BBC naturalist attended the traditional keel-laying ceremony in Merseyside in October. 
+The vessel will cost an estimated £200 million, and is the largest commercial shipbuilding project in Britain in over 30 years. It is expected to set sail to Antarctica in 2019, sending the most advanced research on the world’s oceans and climate change back to Britain. 
+Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today program, Sir David confirmed that the infamous moniker will be put to use for an autonomous submarine serving the ship. 
+ ",FAKE
+6005,Hillary has built the biggest big-money operation ever,"Email 
+
+BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — More than 100 of Hillary Clinton’s biggest donors crowded into the home of Casey and Laura Wasserman here on Thursday night, each having written a check for at least $33,400 to snag a ticket. The Hollywood glitterati in attendance — Elton John performed on the piano; Barbra Streisand mingled in the crowd — were sending her off for the home stretch of the campaign with north of $5 million in fresh funding. 
+It was a fitting capstone to a remarkable 18 months for Clinton on the lucrative California fundraising circuit, this final event anchored by a host committee of billionaires, Hollywood executives, media moguls and tech investors — Sean Parker, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Haim Saban, Chris Sacca — that each directed $416,000 to Clinton’s efforts. 
+Clinton calls them her “Hillblazers,” campaign bundlers who have given or raised at least $100,000 for her campaign. And she has erected an unparalleled and unprecedented infrastructure of 1,133 such people — nearly double the number of any past presidential candidate, including President Obama four years ago. 
+While Clinton and her advisers like to tout her small online donors, it is these bundlers in more than 40 states and four foreign countries who form the true backbone of her financial operation. Combined, this elite $100,000-and-up club has amassed a minimum of $113 million for Clinton and the Democratic Party — and the actual figure is likely far, far higher than that. (The biggest bundlers typically collect millions for campaigns.) 
+“We had the best base of donors and bundlers and raisers ever in 2008. It was even better in 2012. And it’s much better in 2016 than 2012,” said Wade Randlett, a San Francisco-based Democrat who has raised money for Clinton, Obama and Democratic causes for decades. “The Obama people basically 100 percent in are favor of Hillary. There’s really no loss because of ideology or bad blood. And she has added an enormous number of people, especially women.” 
+Among her bundlers are celebrities (Will Smith) and sports stars (Earvin “Magic” Johnson), Hollywood directors (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas) and corporate executives (Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg), Wall Street-types (Marc Lasry), media executives (Haim Saban and Anna Wintour) and members of Congress, including her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, who helped raise more than $100,000 for Clinton before he joined the ticket in July. 
+The Clinton campaign said 45 percent of its bundlers are women. 
+There are also federal lobbyists, from whom the Democratic Party under Obama refused to accept money, a prohibition that has since been rolled back. 
+This club has expanded to the point where Clinton would now struggle to fit all of these bundlers into a single ballroom. As of the end of June, she counted 496 such individuals and couples. By the end of July, it was 871. On August 31, it was 1,133. 
+It includes billionaires George Soros, Warren Buffett and Tom Steyer, super lobbyists like Steve Elmendorf and bold-faced names like Calvin Klein and J.J. Abrams. There is also a sprinkling of longtime Clinton family advisers, such as Vernon Jordan.",FAKE
+401,Hillary Clinton's first test,"“We obviously spoke about my passion and his passion, which [is] veterans and veterans issues,” he said.",REAL
+9033,There’s wildly conflicting information about what FBI actually found in renewed Clinton email probe,"There’s no clear consensus as of yet whether the emails were sent by Clinton herself, to Clinton, whether they were from her private server, or even whether any of the emails were new. 
+Here’s a breakdown of what has been reported thus far: Los Angeles Times : “The emails were not to or from Clinton, and contained information that appeared to be more of what agents had already uncovered, the official said, but in an abundance of caution, they felt they needed to further scrutinize them.” The Washington Post : “The correspondence included emails between Abedin and Clinton, according to a law enforcement official.” CNN : “The emails in question were sent or received by Abedin, according to a law enforcement official.” The New York Times : “Senior law enforcement officials said that it was unclear if any of the emails were from Mrs. Clinton’s private server.” ABC News : “These emails were not sent by Hillary Clinton, and the FBI has no evidence of wrongdoing by her, according to a source familiar with the investigation.”",FAKE
+5663,"If you think our media is racist, wait till you meet my grandfather, Prince Harry tells Meghan Markle","Radio Tuesday 8 November 2016 by Spacey If you think our media is racist, wait till you meet my grandfather, Prince Harry tells Meghan Markle 
+After calling out media ‘racism’ over coverage of his girlfriend, Prince Harry has warned Meghan Markle to brace herself for a meeting with Prince Philip. 
+The prince released a statement in which he said reporting of his relationship with the American actress had ‘crossed a line’ that was similar to suggesting you’ll get slitty eyes if you spend too long in China. 
+He went on to add that he understands there is curiosity about his private life, but he’s developed a tough skin that’s capable of dealing with an elderly gentleman asking if you work in a strip club. 
+The statement also raised concerns about Ms Markle’s safety after receiving anonymous warnings that some foreigners ‘still throw spears at each other’. 
+Prince Philip has revealed that he is looking forward to meeting his grandson’s new girlfriend. 
+“I’m not bothered where she’s from, as long as she can cook,” he said. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+2427,"Republicans keep scanning the horizon for path to scrap, replace ObamaCare","At 10:16 p.m. on Aug. 15, 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehman culled through data collected by the super-powered ""Big Ear"" radio telescope in Delaware, Ohio.
+
+And there it was.
+
+Staring back at Ehman was something SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) investigators had never found before or since. The data transcript collected by the Big Ear revealed an astonishingly strong, non-terrestrial signal which didn't even originate in our solar system. The anomaly lasted for 72 seconds. Experts believe it emanated from the constellation Sagittarius. Scientists contend the event observed by Ehman is the best candidate for a non-organic, extraterrestrial signal ever documented on Earth.
+
+A computer chronicling the episode spat out a vertical, alphanumerical series onto a dot matrix printer: 6EQUJ5.
+
+Ehman quickly circled the sequence and scribbled but a single word: ""Wow!""
+
+The aberration became known as the ""Wow! Signal."" Scientists have struggled to replicate Ehman's finding or locate a similar beacon there or anywhere in the cosmos. All efforts ended in failure. Ehman's episode stands alone.
+
+When it comes to ObamaCare, congressional Republicans find themselves in a similar bind. They're like scientists trying to locate the Wow! Signal. For six years now, congressional Republicans have made an effort to take out the health care law. Better yet, lay low the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and replace it with something else. Remember the GOP's old ""repeal and replace"" mantra from the Pledge to America, circa 2010?
+
+But there are two problems: Republicans have yet to come anywhere close to repealing the health care law. More importantly, they have yet to craft any legislation which would replace ObamaCare.
+
+Congressional Republicans are a lot like scientists. If they could, they'd staff the Very Large Array radio astronomy observatory in New Mexico or take shifts at the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Six years since a Democrat-led Congress first toiled on ObamaCare and five years since the president signed the bill into law, Republicans still scour the frequencies for the health care equivalent of the Wow! Signal. A legislative transmission from above that would fundamentally tilt the ACA.
+
+However, even Jerry Ehman detected the ""Wow! Signal"" once. ObamaCare opponents just keep coming up empty.
+
+Something big has to happen soon for Republicans. ObamaCare is the law of the land. And if a ""Wow!"" transmission is out there, it could come from an intergalactic source as mysterious as that perceived extraterrestrial source in Sagittarius: the U.S. Supreme Court. In just a few weeks, the high court will render its decision in King v. Burwell, a case evaluating the qualification of subsidies for the health care law. The Supreme Court could impale the ACA, ruling subsidies unconstitutional for some ObamaCare beneficiaries. Such an outcome could be catastrophic for the law. It also means that Republicans -- having talked a good game for years with little to show for it -- had better turn up their dials to capture that ""Wow!"" broadcast. The onus is on them.
+
+A working group of key House members has prepped for Supreme Court scenarios for months. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, R-Minn., and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., are the players here. They want to give states the chance to sidestep mandates which compel people to purchase insurance and void requirements that companies provide care for their employees. The trio also wants states to have the option to back away from ObamaCare.
+
+House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., is also crafting a package of tax incentives and tax credits which consumers could use to buy health coverage.
+
+It's anybody's guess, though, if these members will get the traction necessary to move a bill on the floor. Then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., spearheaded a working group a few years ago to find an ObamaCare replacement plan. No accord ever materialized. The reason Republicans never put an ObamaCare replacement bill on the floor is because the GOP rank-and-file never coalesced around a plan which could pass.
+
+Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., faces a potentially tough re-election in a swing state next year. Mindful of the policy calamity which could upend Capitol Hill after the Supreme Court ruling, the Wisconsin Republican authored a bill to maintain the subsidies for health care -- but only for a few more years. In exchange, the Obama administration would have to end the individual and employer mandates for insurance.
+
+But past is prologue here. It's anyone's guess if Johnson's idea could vault two parliamentary hurdles and secure supermajorities just to get the bill on the floor and stave off a filibuster. And no one knows what the appetite is for such legislation in the House. Republicans aren't going to get help from Democrats. It's unlikely that staunch conservatives would vote for anything short of a full, unvarnished repeal.
+
+Hence, the continual sky sweep by the legislative stargazers, searching for the ""Wow! Signal.""
+
+Health care is front and center Thursday in Washington. Last summer, the House of Representatives voted to sue the Obama administration over taking ""unilateral actions"" in administering the ACA. The GOP-led House charged that President Obama couldn't arbitrarily tweak and adjust deadlines and provisos in the law without the consent of Congress. Those allegations go before a federal court Thursday.
+
+The House alleges that the administration waived the employer mandate when it shouldn't have. Ironically, most conservatives want to dump the employer mandate. But they didn't like it when the administration altered the terms of that mandate without congressional action. Moreover, the House says the law spends money which Congress never allocated toward implementing the law. The House contends that subverts the Constitution.
+
+""Time and again, the president has chosen to rewrite the law whenever it suits him,"" said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, in a statement. ""No president is above accountability to the Constitution and the rule of law.""
+
+The House's lawsuit certainly does a lot for the GOP base and energizes Republican members -- eager to demonstrate that Obama extends his reach beyond constitutional parameters. That may be so. This exercise extends the conversation about ObamaCare. But it doesn't cut to the root of the problem facing Republicans when it comes to unraveling the law. This is a separate track which still doesn't dial in the ""Wow! Signal.""
+
+A definitive plan that can react to King v. Burwell (presuming the case goes the way GOPers want it to go) remains elusive. But until that happens, congressional Republicans sweep the legislative frequencies, searching for that interstellar health care solution.
+
+If and when they finally get it, they can mimic the penmanship of Jerry Ehman and his finding on a hot summer night in 1977. ""Wow!,"" they can write, having discovered a legislative path no one detected before on health care.
+
+Capitol Attitude is a weekly column written by members of the Fox News Capitol Hill team. Their articles take you inside the halls of Congress, and cover the spectrum of policy issues being introduced, debated and voted on there.",REAL
+5056,An open letter to Mr. Khizr Khan,"Editor's note: The following column originally appeared on the website US Defense Watch. It is reprinted with permission.
+
+I, like millions of Americans saw your speech at the DNC on Thursday night.
+
+I wish to offer my sympathy for the death of your son, Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in action in Iraq.
+
+As a former US Army officer, and a veteran of the Gulf War, I can certainly understand the pain and anguish that you and your wife endure every day.
+
+Your son died saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. As Jesus told his disciples, according to the Gospel of John, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
+
+Captain Khan is a hero. I am sure the soldiers he served with regard him as one. I know you and your wife do. Rest assured that millions of veterans regard your son as a hero as well.
+
+To paraphrase from the Book of Ecclesiasticus, your son’s name liveth for evermore.
+
+Your son made the ultimate sacrifice for his country, a country that was new to you and your family and one which you openly embraced and certainly love.
+
+When you and your family arrived to America from Pakistan, you assimilated into our country. You adopted American ways, learned our history and apparently you even acquired a pocket Constitution along the way. Good for you sir.
+
+But, there are many Muslims in America who not only have no desire to assimilate, but wish to live under Sharia Law.
+
+That is unacceptable to Americans. There is only one law of the land. That is the U.S. Constitution.
+
+As you well know, Mr. Khan, we live in violent times, dangerous times. Muslim madmen from ISIS and other radical Jihadi groups are on a murder and terror spree across the globe.
+
+Your religion of peace, Islam, is anything but that in 2016. That is a fact that is confirmed every time a Muslim shoots, bombs, beheads and tortures innocent men, women and children. This does not mean that every Muslim is a terrorist, but most terrorists, sir, are indeed Muslims.
+
+A Muslim terrorist attack has become the sign of the times.
+
+Regardless of what the feckless, naïve, leftist ideologue Barack Obama and his dimwitted colleagues John Kerry, Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel state, the United States and the West are at war with Radical Islam. It is the job of the president of the United States to protect his nation from all enemies; foreign and domestic. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama romanticizes Islam and refuses to accept reality, which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people across the world.
+
+Groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda have one goal, the complete destruction of the Judeo-Christian culture, our religions and our way of life.
+
+Many Americans have families that have been here for decades, even centuries. Many families like mine have relatives who fought in the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm. Some families have relatives who fought in the American Revolution.
+
+We don’t plan on letting our country be devoured by Muslim maniacs. We are Americans sir, and not unarmed, socialist European zombies. We will do what is necessary to protect the United States. While many Democrats and liberals see the world through rose colored glasses, conservatives understand that there is good and evil in this world. Evil must be destroyed before it destroys us.
+
+Strong measures, wartime measures, must be taken to protect this country from those that wish to annihilate us and our way of life.
+
+Mr. Trump’s plan to temporarily halt immigration from Muslim countries that are known to either support terrorism or harbor terrorist groups is not only pragmatic, but indeed it is constitutional. It is the constitutional duty of the president of the United States to protect this nation.
+
+There is simply no way to vet hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from war zones like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
+
+Europe is being destroyed because reckless leaders like Angela Merkel have opened the continent’s doors to a flood of over one million undocumented Muslims arriving with nothing more than a bad attitude and a haversack of Jihad.
+
+Do you think Americans are stupid? While the left lives in a dream world, the right does not. Mr. Trump understands the threat to his nation and the threat, sir, is not from Swedish Lutherans named Anna and Lars. The threat, sir, is from radical Islam.
+
+How in God’s name are U.S. immigration authorities supposed to know the true intentions of a 22-year-old Syrian man? It is impossible. You know it is impossible.
+
+How in God’s name are U.S. immigration authorities supposed to know the true intentions of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and thousands of other sundry Muslims who wish to arrive on our shores?
+
+It is impossible. You know it is impossible.
+
+Whether you, your wife, the Muslim world and millions of Democrats are offended by Mr. Trump’s realistic view of the world is irrelevant.
+
+Whether you, your wife and son would have been prohibited from emigrating from Pakistan to America under Mr. Trump’s wartime plan is irrelevant. The security of this great land supersedes your desires and the desires of others who wish to come here now. The United States of America has no obligation to open its doors in order to placate foreigners and liberals in our government.
+
+To adopt any other course but Mr. Trump’s would be a cause for further endangering the lives of Americans every day. That, sir, is unacceptable.
+
+You attacked Mr. Trump in front of a worldwide audience, yet you can’t understand the fact that he defends himself against attacks from you, Hillary Clinton and the left. What else is one to do sir?
+
+We must live in a world of reality, not a world of denial, delusion and fantasy the Democrats inhabit every waking day of their lives.
+
+Radical Islam is the enemy of everyone on this planet who believes in freedom and justice. Until it is destroyed, this nation must protect itself from enemies both foreign and domestic.
+
+Ray Starmann is the founder of US Defense Watch. He is a former U.S. Army Intelligence officer and veteran of the Gulf War, where he served with the 4th Squadron, 7th Cavalry, 3rd Armored Division “Spearhead!” Mr. Starmann was a contributing writer for several years at SFTT.org, founded by the late Colonel David Hackworth.",REAL
+4218,"Protesters try to block access to Trump rally in Arizona, ahead of big primary in border state","Protesters in Arizona briefly blocked access to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rally Saturday morning in Arizona, kicking off a full day of campaign events in the border state, which holds key primaries Tuesday.
+
+The protesters blocked a highway leading to Trump’s outdoor rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, near Scottsdale, before sheriff's deputies removed them and towed their vehicles.
+
+“We’re not going to let demonstrators intimidate this forum and this sheriff. Now we’re going to have a nice, nice rally for Donald Trump,” said Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who led the effort to remove the demonstrators and who has endorsed the GOP front-runner.
+
+Arizona has long been ground-zero for the politically-charged illegal immigration debate, with roughly 368 miles of border with Mexico and more border fence than any other state.
+
+Roughly 30 percent of Arizona’s population is Hispanic. And in 2010, the state passed one of the strictest anti-immigration laws in American history.
+
+“So much crime and drugs passing through the border. You know what? We’re going to build a wall, and we’re going to stop it,” Trump said at the rally, returning to his early and oft-repeated campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border and have Mexico pay for it.
+
+Arpaio – the self-described “America’s toughest sheriff” – said at least 10,000 people were kept waiting in the Arizona heat for about an hour as a result of the roadblock, which resulted in three arrests.
+
+Trump supporters and protesters exchanged words at the rally, but there were no initial reports of physical violence.
+
+Trump, who early in his campaign visited the border, leads the GOP field in Arizona with 34 percent of the vote, followed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at 21 percent and Ohio Gov. John Kasich at 13 percent.
+
+Trump held a larger rally later Saturday at the Phoenix Convention Center.
+
+Trump said protesters at his rally are ""taking away our First Amendment rights"" and vowed to take the country back if he's elected president.
+
+He called one protester at his Phoenix rally, who wore the Klu Klux Klan hood, ""disgusting."" Another group, carrying a ""Black Lives Matter"" sign were also kicked out.
+
+The rallies and protest follow a local border patrol union of Friday supporting Trump.
+
+Local 2544 said Trump asked for the endorsement and that officials responded by saying he is the only 2016 White House candidate to “publicly expressed his support” of the Border Patrol’s mission and it agents and that he has been “an outspoken candidate” on the need for a secure border.
+
+However, Art Del Cueto, president of the Tucson-based union, made clear that he would adhere to the larger National Border Patrol Council’s practice of not endorsing presidential candidates.
+
+The Supreme Court later upheld the most controversial part of Arizona’s 2010 law -- commonly referred to S.B. 1070 and that allows police to try to determine the immigration status of anybody arrested or detained if they have “reasonable suspicion” the suspect is in the U.S. illegally.
+
+However, the law also sparked widespread opposition including businesses threatening to leave the state.
+
+Trump and Cruz essentially call for those living illegally in the United States to return to their home country, while Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders want to allow them to stay.
+
+Several thousand miles away in New York, demonstrators also took to the streets to protest the Republican presidential hopeful.
+
+The protesters gathered Saturday in Manhattan's Columbus Circle, across from Central Park, with a heavy police presence. Demonstrators chanted: ""Donald Trump, go away, racist, sexist, anti-gay.""
+
+They marched across south Central Park to Trump Tower, the Fifth Avenue skyscraper where Trump lives. Then they marched back to Columbus Circle for a rally.",REAL
+1887,Count on Wide-Open 2016 Debate Over U.S.’s Role in the World,"The political world was obsessed last week with Jeb Bush’s problems in saying whether he would or wouldn’t have ordered the invasion of Iraq. But a more provocative statement about projection of American power actually came from a fellow presidential contender, Marco Rubio, in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
+
+“As president, I will use American power to oppose any violations of international waters, airspace, cyberspace or outer space,” Sen. Rubio declared. “This includes the economic disruption caused when...",REAL
+6215,U.S. Special Forces Join Fight For Mosul,"We Are Change 
+
+Fierce battle for the city of Mosul continues to shock Iraq and the whole Middle East with no significant results. The leading role belongs to the assault of the Iraqi army and Kurdish Self-Defense Forces—which still lack experience and skills—to capture the city in the shortest time.
+However, 500 elite commandos of the U.S. Special Forces, which had been transferred this week at Mosul should give new impetus to the assault. U.S. combatants are supported by Apache and Chinook helicopters.
+According to the Inside Syria Media Center , the U.S. Special Forces are located at the forefront of Iraqi and Kurdish combat formations. Military experts believe these combat conditions are atypical for the special operation forces which are aimed to carry out reconnaissance and other specific tasks.
+Elite combatants in Mosul actually perform the functions of infantry soldiers, resulting in inevitable great losses, which are going to be covered up and silenced by the Washington officials in the usual manner.
+Although the U.S. officials have repeatedly stated Mosul should be liberated from terrorists to eliminate the Islamic State, the decision to use U.S. Special Forces looks unjustified at first glance. However, the protracted nature of the assault on the city is forcing the Pentagon to take extreme measures to complete the operation before the U.S. presidential election. Therefore, the White House uses this situation, first of all, as a large-scale PR-campaign to support the candidate of the Democratic Party Hillary Clinton.
+In this context, it becomes clear why the U.S. Government refrained from active struggle against terrorists for so long choosing an opportune moment strangely coincided with the end of the presidential elections in the United States.
+Liberation of Mosul should also demonstrate to the world community the importance and crucial role of the American nation in the fight against the Islamic State. It is even more regrettable in the light of the recent Wikileaks’ revelations, which confirmed the United States and American tycoons’ role in the creation and funding of the Islamic State terrorists.
+The post U.S. Special Forces Join Fight For Mosul appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+2779,Why Obama is changing tune on pulling troops from Afghanistan,"The White House has revised existing plans to withdraw the majority of troops from Afghanistan by the end of the Obama administration.
+
+Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?
+
+Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?
+
+Why are authorities slow to call the Ohio State attack 'terrorism'?
+
+President Obama returns a salute prior to boarding Air Force One before his departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Md. Oct. 9. Obama will keep 5,500 US troops in Afghanistan when he leaves office in 2017, according to senior administration officials.
+
+President Obama will announce Thursday plans to slow efforts to bring US troops home from Afghanistan, and instead maintain the current level of 9,800 through much of 2016 before attempting another drawdown effort, senior administration officials said.
+
+""Our mission won't change,"" an official told Reuters.
+
+US troops will keep training and providing oversight to Afghan forces, while working to prevent Al Qaeda from threatening US security, the officials said.
+
+The Obama administration originally aimed to bring all but a force of about 1,000 troops for American embassy officials' security based in Kabul before leaving office in January 2017. Officials are now saying troops will be brought down to 5,500 starting sometime in 2017, under a new administration, and based out of the cities of Kabul, Bagram, Jalalabad, and Kandahar.
+
+Maintaining a presence of 5,500 troops in four places will cost about $14.6 billion per year, a marked increase over the original plan to keep a smaller force at the Kabul embassy for an estimated $10 billion, the official said.
+
+The decision involved months of negotiations between Washington, Afghan leaders, and commanders in the field about how to support Afghan forces, senior US administration officials said.
+
+At the end of 2014, Obama announced an end to the combat mission in Afghanistan, which spanned 13 years following 9/11. Since that proclamation, Afghan troops – supported by US and NATO forces – have led national security for the country.
+
+But late last month, Taliban militants overtook the northern city of Kunduz. For 15 days insurgents sent civilians fleeing their homes, destroyed government buildings, freed prisoners, and hunted officials. The city siege was the first since US troops have been engaged in Afghanistan, and signaled that Afghan security forces are not well equipped to handle the Taliban on its own.
+
+""Certainly we're watching and seeing how the Afghan security forces engage quite tenaciously in the fight in Kunduz,"" an official told Reuters.
+
+NATO allies are also considering a continued presence, the official said. More than 6,000 non-US forces are now in Afghanistan as part of the ""Resolute Support"" mission.
+
+Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and chief executive Abdullah Abdullah have advocated for a continued US military presence and last March discussed a slowed-down timeline with US military and administration officials while on a visit to the White House, according to officials.
+
+""The Afghan government is very comfortable with this commitment. They've been indicating a desire for this commitment for some time,"" an official told Reuters.
+
+This report contains material from Reuters and The Associated Press.",REAL
+8592,Canada Posts Perfect Tweet After Immigration Website Crashes,"While the United States sits on the edge of its collective seat as Donald Trump gains an electoral vote majority in his bid for the White House, its neighbor to the north seems to be getting a little cheeky. 
+Via Unilad 
+
+Reminding America of the Great White North’s cultural acceptance and freedom, the country’s official Twitter account wrote on Tuesday evening: “In Canada, immigrants are encouraged to bring their cultural traditions with them and share them with fellow citizens.”
+In Canada, immigrants are encouraged to bring their cultural traditions with them and share them with their fellow citizens. pic.twitter.com/MOuStZbSX7 
+— Canada (@Canada) November 9, 2016 
+
+As a Canadian, I can attest to this. It’s a stark contrast to much of what Trump has proposed in the last 16 months: A border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, a ban on Muslims entering the country, and racial profiling.
+But it looks like most Americans are taking it as an invitation: 
+@JasonABowman Maybe they meant that as an invitation to join them, just in case?
+— Jaimie Michelle (@JaimieMichelle) November 9, 2016 
+@Canada do you mean Americans too?
+— Stephen Whyno (@SWhyno) November 9, 2016 
+"" @Canada : In Canada, immigrants are encouraged to bring their cultural traditions with them and share them with their fellow citizens."" pic.twitter.com/162lvBnKaN 
+— bonafiedhoe (@pettyyonceh) November 9, 2016 
+"" @Canada : In Canada, immigrants are encouraged to bring their cultural traditions with them and share them with their fellow citizens."" pic.twitter.com/162lvBnKaN 
+— bonafiedhoe (@pettyyonceh) November 9, 2016 
+
+The tweet comes just after Canada’a immigration site crashed in light of the now-looking-very-likely possibility of a Trump win.
+This is what it used to look like: 
+
+And this is what it looked like Tuesday night, as the US election results rolled in, with Donald Trump in the lead: 
+
+Searches of ‘how to move to Canada’ surged starting at 6 p.m., according to Google Trends. And Quartz published a list of jobs in Canada that would be easy for Americans to apply for if they wished to relocate, Oregon Live reports.
+Looks like Canada’s population is going to double soon…
+",FAKE
+4452,Is Iran ‘already violating’ the nuclear deal by ‘illegally testing ballistic missiles?’,"“Senator Johnny Isakson fought President Obama’s reckless deal with the Iranian regime. Now Iran is already violating the agreement — illegally testing ballistic missiles, threatening Israel and supporting terrorism in the Middle East.”
+
+This ad begins with Isakson, who is running for his third Senate term, saying: “I voted against the nuclear deal with Iran for a ton of reasons.” Then, a narrator claims that Iran is already violating the agreement, which the senator opposed, by illegally testing ballistic missiles. (We spotted this ad on the website of our partners, Political TV Ad Archive.) Is that really the case? We did some digging.
+
+The formal name for the deal reached in July between Iran and world powers, including the United States, is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly called the “Iran deal.”
+
+Isakson, member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, opposed the deal. But Senate Republicans failed to advance legislation that would have allowed them to reject the agreement.
+
+The agreement was aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions. After the deal was reached, the United Nations Security Council — which had imposed sanctions on Iran to pressure it to negotiate — adopted Resolution 2231. The resolution endorsed the deal and outlined conditions under which sanctions are to be lifted. Under the resolution, ballistic missile restrictions expire after eight years.
+
+This is an important point in the context of Isakson’s ad: The Iran deal is not the same as U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231.
+
+The nuclear agreement was officially implemented this January, after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) certified that Iran had complied with all the nuclear-related measures it agreed to in July. Yet Iran has continued to test ballistic missiles and said it will not stop.
+
+The deal does not prohibit the testing or development of ballistic missiles. But the U.N. resolution does contain restrictions relating to ballistic missiles. So how is Iran able to continue its testing? Experts say the resolution’s language allows Iran to argue that its ballistic missiles do not fit within the restrictions laid out in Resolution 2231.
+
+Previous U.N. resolutions had stated that the council “decides that Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.” The new resolution states “Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”
+
+The language change from “decides that Iran shall not” to “Iran is called upon” represents a softening in tone, signaling a more non-legally-binding appeal. This change was made precisely because the Iran deal does not contain any limits on the country’s missile programs, said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey.
+
+“It is perfectly respectable for opponents of the agreement to object to the Iran deal on these grounds — the JCPOA removes missile-related sanctions without requiring Iran to limit its missile programs,” Lewis said. “This was the hardest part of the agreement for me to accept, even if that sanctions relief only occurs after eight years.”
+
+Further, the new resolution refers to missiles “designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons,” rather than “capable” of such delivery. So Iran now argues that its missiles are not “designed” for such capability.
+
+“If one finds that the missiles used are designed for nuclear weapon delivery, it appears to me that there will evidently be also a problem with the compliance with the JCPOA, which bans weaponization activities,” said Olli Heinonen, who led the IAEA’s safeguards section during the 2003-2005 talks between Iran and three European powers (Britain, France and Germany).
+
+That argument is possible but will be difficult to prove, experts say. A legal determination hasn’t been made one way or the other, meaning that the testing is not yet a violation of the Iran deal.
+
+The Isakson ad claims that Iran is “already violating the agreement” through these missile tests. The citation in the ad is an op-ed in U.S. News and World Report that Iran’s missile tests highlight weaknesses in the nuclear deal.
+
+The senator’s staff pointed to news articles describing the tests as a violation of the U.N. resolution. They noted that President Obama had accused Iran of going against the “spirit” of the nuclear agreement, as he did at an April news conference:
+
+But the ad itself does not say that Iran’s actions violate the “spirit” of the deal or that it violates the U.N. resolution. It says Iran is violating the agreement that Isakson opposed. That agreement would be the Iran deal, not the U.N. resolution.
+
+“There’s frustration [over the testing], and we have to look for effective policy tools to impede Iran’s missile program. But none of those tools, unfortunately, is the ability to say this is a violation of the Iran nuclear deal,” said Robert Einhorn, senior fellow at Brookings Institution and former special adviser on arms control and nonproliferation at the State Department.
+
+Einhorn added that it’s difficult to use the Security Council resolution as a policy tool, because Russia and China are reluctant to view missile tests as a violation of, or inconsistent with, the resolution.
+
+Isakson’s ad is about the Iran deal and his opposition to it. It claims that Iran is “already violating” the nuclear agreement by illegally testing ballistic missiles. Yet the actual deal did not have restrictions on ballistic missiles testing. Instead, the U.N. resolution that implements the deal contains the language. A range of experts we consulted said that the testing could be argued as violating the Iran deal but that it will be difficult. It’s an important technical distinction that is not reflected in the ad, ultimately misleading viewers. Moreover, it’s a matter of interpretation as to whether the testing is “illegal” under the resolution.
+
+We understand that it’s probably not as catchy for a narrator in a campaign ad to say, “Western leaders view Iran’s missile tests as a violation of the U.N. resolution passed in tandem” or that the testing is “inconsistent with the spirit of the Iran deal.” But both of those phrases are accurate, and are certainly preferable to the sweeping, inaccurate claim in the ad.
+
+Send us facts to check by filling out this form
+
+Sign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter",REAL
+9480,Saudi Arabia Should Continue to Seek New Revenue Sources - IMF,"Get short URL 0 0 0 0 Saudi Arabia’s government needs to stay focused on fiscal adjustment and find ways to increase revenue, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde said in a statement Wednesday. 
+WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The IMF chief praised Saudi Arabia’s economic-policy shift in response to falling oil prices as ""very welcome."" © AP Photo/ JOHN MOORE Saudi Arabia GDP Growth to Slow to 1.2% in 2016, Budget Deficit to Narrow to 13% ""These efforts should continue over the medium-term including through further increases in energy prices which are still low by international standards, further revenue-raising measures including from the planned introduction of excises and the VAT [value-added tax] at the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] level, and further spending restraint,"" Lagarde stated. 
+Global oil prices plunged to a 13-year low of under $30 a barrel in January of this year from $115 in June 2014 due to a production-and-supply glut that has posed major challenges for energy companies and oil-producing countries. 
+So far in 2016, the Saudi government has introduced a series of reforms intended to diversify the oil-reliant country's economy. ...",FAKE
+8760,‘McCarthyism’ Rides Again. And It's Again Poisoning the Foundations of a Free Society in the US - Justin Raimondo,"‘McCarthyism’ Rides Again. And It's Again Poisoning the Foundations of a Free Society in the US 
+Smears and intimidation vs. free debate, civil liberties and peace Originally appeared at Anti War 
+I’m often taken to task by some of my readers for characterizing the current anti-Russian hysteria as “McCarthyism.” After all, they say, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was right – there were, indeed, high-ranking individuals in the US government covertly sympathetic to the Soviet regime. And, yes, we now know that many of these were working directly for Soviet intelligence. 
+This was the predictable result of our wartime alliance with Russia: combined with the left-wing proclivities of the Roosevelt administration, and the “Popular Front” politics of the Communist Party USA during this period, it’s surprising that Soviet penetration of US government circles wasn’t more extensive than it turned out to be. 
+In any case, what we are seeing today with the revival of the cold war mindset is in many ways the complete opposite of the “old” McCarthyism: the target may be the same – Russia as the bogeyman de jour – but the methods and sources of the neo-McCarthyites are quite different. 
+To begin with, the “old” McCarthyism was a movement generated from below, and aimed at the elites: the “new” McCarthyism is a media construct, generated from above and created by the elites. 
+The average American, while hardly a Putin groupie, is not lying awake at night worrying about the “Russian threat.” The fate of Ukraine, not to mention Crimea, is so far from his concerns that the distance can only be measured in light-years. And when some new scandal breaks as a result of WikiLeaks releasing the emails of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, Joe Sixpack doesn’t think “Oh, that just proves Julian Assange is a Kremlin toady!” WikiLeaks is merely confirming what Joe already knew: that Washington is a cornucopia of corruption. 
+The Acela corridor elite, on the other hand, does lie awake at night wondering how they can pull off a regime change operation that will eliminate the “threat” represented by Putin once and for all. Ever since the Russian leader started mocking Washington’s hegemonic pretensions, criticizing the US invasion of Iraq, and pointing out how US-funded Syrian “rebels” are merely jihadists in “moderate” clothing, Putin has been in their crosshairs – and the propaganda war has been relentless. 
+This barrage has gone into overdrive with the launching of the Clinton campaign’s effort to smear Donald Trump as a Kremlin “puppet. ” You have to go all the way back to the earliest days of our Republic, when pro-British supporters of Alexander Hamilton were sliming the Jeffersonian Democrats with accusations that they were agents of the French revolutionaries, to come up with the historical equivalent of Hillary’s “you’re a puppet” charges directed at Trump. And the media, being an auxiliary of the Clinton campaign, has been filled with even more virulent screeds purporting to “prove” Trump is the Manchurian candidate . 
+One way in which the new McCarthyism is very much like the old is that it threatens to poison the intellectual atmosphere in this country, endangering the very foundations of our free society and academic standards of free inquiry and debate. Emblematic of this trend is a tweet authored by Dan Drezner , professor of international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a foreign affairs columnist at theWashington Post, in which he commented on a talk he heard at the Valdai conference, a regular event held in Russia focusing on Russo-American relations: 
+“At Valdai, John Mearsheimer says the Chinese and Russians love his realism. ‘I’m much more comfortable in Moscow than Washington!’"" 
+Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of political science at the University of Chicago, the author of six books, and the leading theoretician of the school of international relations known as “offensive realism.” He is, in short a scholar of some renown – and yet Drezner, considerably lower on the academic totem pole, feels empowered to slime him as somehow disloyal. How did we come to this sad state of affairs? 
+The poisoning of a society with propaganda used to take some time: today, the process is much faster, due to technological innovation, and especially the rise of the Internet and the growth of social media. In the old days, the McCarthyites had to rely on print media and radio to smear those “pinko college professors” and drive them out of academia. Today, someone like Drezner can sign in to their Twitter account and snark about how John Mearsheimer is more at home in Moscow and Beijing than in the good ol’ US of A, and his thousands of Twitter followers get the idea – that Mearsheimer is somehow anti-American – in an instant (and in only twenty words!). 
+The “old” McCarthyism was dangerous because, in some cases, people were targeted unfairly: anybody with dissident views was suspect, and especially anyone with vaguely left-wing opinions. And McCarthyism, which in its original form saw the main danger to America to be internal, soon morphed into something else entirely: a movement that sought a military confrontation with the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was McCarthyism that was the bridge that allowed neoconservative interventionists to invade the conservative movement and displace the “isolationism” of the Old Right. 
+The new McCarthyism poses new dangers that are, perhaps, more virulent than the old version and will have more immediate consequences. The above-mentioned smear of Prof. Mearsheimer encapsulates what the dangers are to academia: in the 1950s, left-wing professors had at least some protection from populist McCarthyites in that academics tended to jealously guard their turf and protect their own from outside incursions. Today, with the elites pushing Russophobia, those protections fall by the wayside. 
+Furthermore, the political class, where the new McCarthyism is rampant, has power – that is, it can translate its prejudices into policy more readily than any mass movement such as the one led by “Tail-gunner Joe.” If Hillary Clinton and her advisors really believe that Putin is out to defeat her and elect her opponent, then what can we expect will happen to US-Russian relations if and when she’s elected? 
+And while the American people aren’t exactly up in arms over the prospect of a “Red Dawn” scenario unfolding in the streets of America’s cities, the “mainstream” media’s longstanding anti-Russian crusade is clearly having an effect. A Pew poll shows that anti-Russian sentiment in the United States rose “from 43% to 72% from 2013 to 2014.” The “trickle down” effects of war propaganda work just as effectively as the “trickle-up” model, if not more so. 
+The real world consequences of a conflict with Russia, a nuclear-armed state, are fearsome to even contemplate: the political class in this country is playing a dangerous game of chicken, and they’re playing it with our lives and the lives of every person on earth. 
+Aside from the prospect of World War III, the effects of the new McCarthyism will be to distort our politics, infect our culture, and threaten our constitutional rights as Americans. It is entirely possible that a new witch-hunt will be launched by the Russia-haters in our midst, with a revived “Un-American Activities Committee” replete with congressional hearings, as well as “investigations” by law enforcement of “pro-Russian”“subversive” activities. With the media acting as a cheerleading section for these official and unofficial arbiters of political correctness, our future as a free society will be increasingly in doubt. 
+Finally, the new McCarthyism underscores the cynicism, opportunism, and downright viciousness of our political class, and especially the media, which has done nothing to question and everything to bolster the Russophobic propaganda put out there by self-serving lobbyists and politicians. It truly is a sickening sight, made all the more so by the self-professed “liberalism” of those who are in the vanguard of this revolting trend. 
+What these folks should remember is that the “old” McCarthyism was in large part a reaction to the “ Brown scare ” of the Roosevelt era, when “isolationist” conservatives were smeared as “agents of Hitler,” driven out of their jobs, and in some instances charged with “sedition.” This bout of war hysteria was driven, first of all, by the Communist Party and its media contingent, which had become more-patriotic-than-thou when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the Communist line on the war changed overnight. However, when the world situation changed again, and the Soviets were in Washington’s sights, the tables were abruptly turned – and Sen. McCarthy’s crusade took off. 
+The same thing can happen again. If the consequences of the new McCarthyism come to fruition in an armed conflict with Russia, or even a nuclear exchange, as Americans emerge from the radioactive wreckage they’ll be looking for someone to blame – and scapegoats won’t be that hard to find.  ",FAKE
+385,"As Democrats Grow Nervous, Clinton Tries To Appeal To Party Leaders","As Democrats Grow Nervous, Clinton Tries To Appeal To Party Leaders
+
+Hillary Clinton has spent much of the summer fending off questions about her private email account during her time as secretary of state. Bernie Sanders is gaining on her in the polls. And there's a looming possible challenge from sitting Vice President Joe Biden.
+
+That's a far cry from the beginning of this campaign when she was seen as an almost inevitable Democratic nominee.
+
+Now, she's trying to regroup and make the case before the very people who will choose that nominee — not voters, but her base: the party establishment.
+
+""I have been fighting for families and underdogs my entire life, and I'm not going to stop now,"" Clinton said at the summer meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Minneapolis Friday. ""In fact, I'm just getting warmed up.""
+
+She vowed that she is ""not taking a single primary voter or caucusgoer for granted.""
+
+But party leaders are growing concerned that Clinton has not wrested control of the storyline of those emails. It's made many bite their nails, and it's given the other four candidates currently in the race some hope that there's an opening for someone else.
+
+Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate, got a boost Saturday night from an Iowa poll showing him gaining on Clinton, just 7 points behind the front-runner.
+
+He underlined — in a not-so-veiled shot at Clinton — that ""politics as usual"" and ""same old, same old"" is not going to work in firing up Democratic voters to get out to the polls.
+
+Making a parallel argument to the one conservatives make on the Republican side, Sanders blamed the party, in part, for major losses in the 2014 midterm elections, because liberal base voters didn't have something to vote for.
+
+""We lost because voter turnout was abysmally, embarrassingly low, and millions of working people, young people, and people of color gave up on politics as usual and they stayed home,"" Sanders said.
+
+He added, ""With all due respect — and I do not mean to insult anyone here — that turnout, that enthusiasm will not happen with politics as usual. The same old, same old will not work.""
+
+Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley also took aim at the party's establishment, repeating his criticism of the Democratic debate schedule, which begins in October. He described it as a ""rigged process"" and ""a cynical move to delay and limit our own party debates.""
+
+O'Malley, who trails in the polls, wants more debates.
+
+""Four debates, and four debates only, we are told — not asked — before voters in our earliest states make their decision,"" O'Malley said, making for a rather awkward moment with DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz as he left the stage.
+
+Biden did not attend the meeting in Minneapolis. But in a conference call last week, the vice president told DNC members that he has been talking with his family about whether or not to enter the race. He said if he runs, he wants to give the campaign his whole heart and soul.
+
+""And right now, both are pretty well banged up,"" Biden said. His son Beau, a rising star in the Democratic Party, died of brain cancer in May.
+
+Ahead of her speech, Clinton released a series of memos highlighting her organizational strength in the four early voting states. She campaigned in Iowa last week with Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary and former Iowa governor. Vilsack was asked if his endorsement of Clinton, while Biden is considering a run, will make for awkward Cabinet meetings.
+
+""I love Joe Biden — just like we all do. He's a wonderful man,"" Vilsack said. But he said campaigns require difficult choices, and he and his wife are supporting Clinton.
+
+It may already be too late for Biden in the minds of many DNC members, who have backed Clinton by now. Take, for example, Florida committeeman Jon M. Ausman, who said this to Politico in Minneapolis:
+
+By rolling out early endorsements, Clinton is wise to try to make a show of strength now to ward off a Biden run, says Mo Elleithee, executive director of Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service. Elleithee is also the immediate past DNC communications director and worked for Clinton's 2008 campaign.
+
+""[Biden] will not have oxygen in the room if she has locked people down,"" Elleithee said. ""I think he is probably looking at the field and saying, 'OK, at this late date in the process, can I build the organization? Can I raise the money? And can my message break through?' ""
+
+Asked about Biden, Clinton said she believes the vice president is facing a tough decision, and she wants to give him the space and time to make it. She told reporters in Minneapolis that she's also learned some lessons from her primary loss to President Obama in 2008.
+
+""I got a lot of votes,"" she said, ""but I didn't — I didn't get enough delegates. And, so, I think it's understandable that my focus is going to be on delegates as well as votes this time.""",REAL
+8155,China’s Growing Amphibious Capabilities (two-parts video report),"Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
+9345,"BLACK VETERANS FOR TRUMP, too!","Donald Trump is on track to win more black votes than any time since 1960. In the past month, the number of black voters for Donald Trump has increased significantly. These black Trump supporters from Chicago don't want anything to do with #CrookedHillary #TrumpPence2016 #MAGA pic.twitter.com/8JRRR7Ai1l 
+— RSBN TV (@RSBNetwork) July 29, 2016 Gateway Pundit If Democrats lose 25% of the black vote they would lose Virginia, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina. Black Likely Voters for TRUMP @Rasmussen_Poll Oct 3 – 9%",FAKE
+1560,The all-American terror of Donald Trump: Inside the nightmare ideology that’s made him a hero to white fundamentalists,"He has been roundly condemned for these statement by key GOP figureheads like Senator Lindsey Graham, who called him a “xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot.” But the GOP should understand Trump’s popularity as a case of their chickens coming home to roost. The modern Republican Party has secured its base by pandering to the worst impulses of white male, working class, and white Christian fundamentalist rage. Only Trump doesn’t use a dogwhistle. He barks. And every time he does the GOP base responds by replenishing his poll numbers.
+
+Although this doesn’t seem like a viable longterm strategy, the short-term effects are important to watch. The responsiveness of the American public to his rhetoric of keeping white people safe reminds us again of the extent to which narratives about white safety drive U.S. social policy particularly on the right. For the cause of white safety much of the American public finds it reasonable to restrict the movement of Muslims both inside and outside of the U.S. But we don’t restrict conservative white men on the grounds that they disproportionately commit mass shootings at public places – churches, schools and colleges, movie theaters, and health care facilities.
+
+Another major effect of Trump’s rhetoric is the increased threat of violence that Muslim Americans face, because a front-running candidate for the presidency is using reckless discourse to substantiate the legitimacy of Islamophobic views. Since the Paris attacks last month there has been a sharp uptick in vandalism and violent rhetoric against mosques in the U.S. and abroad. My Muslim colleagues and friends have described feelings of heightened anxiety and fear as they move through public space and send their children to school. In New York, a young school girl was attacked by classmates who called her “ISIS” and tried to rip off her hijab.
+
+The GOP base is not merely racially ignorant; they are also prone to violence. By Trump’s logic, we should be placing tracking devices on all socially conservative white men who own guns. We should be interrogating the source of these white men’s radical views. We should understand the Church, particularly the conservative evangelical church as a breeding ground for white terrorism. White evangelicalism is the fundamentalist ideological arm of white social conservatism and of white American male terrorism.
+
+The story of 21st century U.S. state violence is not only a story of anti-Blackness. It is also a story of state-sanctioned Islamophobia that uses the tragic terroristic acts of 9/11 as a framework to mistreat Muslim Americans, and other Americans who appear to be of Arab or Middle Eastern descent. (There is no acknowledgement that not all Arabs are Muslims.)
+
+Using the extreme acts of a few to condemn the peaceful lives of the many is a hallmark of the American script of racism. White Americans do this to Black people when they suggest that Black intraracial violence justifies the overpolicing of all Black people. Americans do this to Muslims when we demand that key Islamic religious leaders step forward to quickly condemn the violence, so that we will not mistake lack of censure for allegiance.
+
+Yet, we did not require or expect conservative white male politicians and religious leaders to issue statements after the Planned Parenthood shooting affirming that Christian social values are anti-violent and condemning the actions of the shooter as an egregious mischaracterization of Christian values and principles. We did not ask all white men to feel shame over the actions of the shooter. The myth of white individualism absolves white people of a collective reckoning with the ways that white fundamentalism breeds violence against people of all colors and social backgrounds. This is why we must begin to understand whiteness as a kind of violent fundamentalism, one at the heart of the American project. Fundamentalism is always a struggle over values and an attempt by those who feel marginalized to order the universe through a set of moral absolutes that not-so-coincidentally also concede power to their particular worldview. Donald Trump is not particularly religious, despite his meeting with Black pastors. But he deploys whiteness as ideology with the fundamentalist zeal of the worst kinds of religious zealots and proselytizers. His rhetoric about protecting the U.S.-Mexico border—rhetoric that has been unfortunately taken up by two misguided Black female Trump enthusiasts—is just one more example of the kind of power laden demands for purity that adhere to fundamentalist ideologies. Whiteness as a fundamentalist ideology frames all others as enemies of the project of white supremacy. It authorizes violence against all who divest from the project of whiteness. It uses a narrative of marginalization and the need to regain power (to take America back) to justify aggressive and violent acts towards non-white groups. And it values and seeks to perpetuate whiteness as a way of life. Until we dismantle white fundamentalism, no people of color will be safe. All fundamentalist belief systems view other belief systems in zero-sum terms. Evangelical Christianity believes that the truer it is, the less true every other belief system is. White/American fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism also engage each other in zero-sum geopolitical terms. They will be locked into an endlessly violent battle of wills. To make it more plain, on the homefront, white Americans respond so strongly to acts of Islamic terror and with such fear, because they recognize this same capacity for fundamentalist rage in themselves. In a zero-sum battle of fundamentalism, either we are invading their shores or they are invading ours. Game recognize game. But terror and violence are not a game. People of color frequently become casualities of war in these internecine battles of competing fundamentalisms. Reinscribing whiteness and pedaling white fundamentalism as an ideology befitting of the 21st century will cause innumerable harm to all people of color. As a case in point, Trump used the Japanese internment to justify his current ideas about Muslims. And this is perhaps one of the most fundamental lessons that this Black Lives Matter moment can teach us: a nation that is wholly adversarial to Black life is not a nation fit for any non-white lives to inhabit. In America, Islamic fundamentalism is not our biggest threat. White fundamentalism is. And it is long past time for us to do something about it.",REAL
+2192,"Aiming to break ISIS, dollar by dollar","A UN meeting aims to coordinate financial efforts against the Islamic State. It can't deliver a knockout blow, but it can make an impact.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Smoke rises as Iraqi security forces and allied Popular Mobilization Forces shell Islamic State group positions at an oil field outside Beiji, Iraq, 155 miles north of Baghdad last month. The United States and Russia are going after the Islamic State group’s oil industry, destroying refineries and hundreds of tanker trucks transporting oil from eastern Syria in a heavy bombardment in recent days aiming to break the extremists’ biggest source of income.
+
+The finance ministers set to meet at the United Nations can’t put the Islamic State in a financial vise. But they can deliver some critical blows to an organization already showing signs of financial strain.
+
+And for a UN Security Council often at odds, the meeting of its finance ministers next week comes at an opportune moment, when terrorists attacks worldwide have created a sense of shared purpose – even, it seems, between the United States and Russia.
+
+The core of the Islamic State’s wealth is, in many respects, beyond the reach of next week’s meetings, hosted by the US. Only Turkey can shut its borders to the smugglers who carry Islamic State oil and other contraband, and only military force can deprive the group of the territory it uses for extortion and taxation.
+
+But a more coordinated effort at targeting the Islamic State’s finances can pay dividends. The US and others, for example, have used bank reports of suspicious financial transactions to more effectively target locations where the Islamic State is producing and loading oil products.
+
+Ramping up this coordination is akin to “squeezing the balloon” of Islamic State finances – though “not yet hard enough to pop it,” says Matthew Levitt, director of the counterterrorism and intelligence program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
+
+And it is vital to defeating the Islamic State, he says. “Any opportunity to get this level of attention and cooperation on an issue that will be central to destroying ISIS should be seized and built upon.”
+
+Terrorist attacks linked to the Islamic State in Beirut, Paris, and San Bernadino, Calif., appear to have galvanized the international community.
+
+“What is reassuring is how much the nations of the world are taking this threat more and more seriously and working together with greater unity,” said Farhan Haq, a spokesman for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to journalists earlier this week.
+
+Particularly promising are indications the US and Russia “agree that the effort to dry up ISIS funding can and must be toughened up,” says Mr. Levitt, using another acronym for the Islamic State.
+
+Both the US and Russia are pushing for a new council resolution on terror financing and could agree on one text by the Dec. 17 summit.
+
+Already, there are indications that the Islamic State is feeling a financial pinch.
+
+Holding the finance ministers summit at the Security Council underscores the importance world leaders are placing on both terror financing and the coordination of financial, intelligence, and military efforts. The summit will mark the first time that a council session will be chaired by a financial official – US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
+
+The finance ministers can work to apply greater scrutiny across the board – from financial transactions that offer crucial clues about the Islamic State economy to money brought into the Islamic State by foreign fighters and donors around the region.
+
+But the summit can only do so much.
+
+Half or more of the Islamic State’s financial resources are generated from taxation or extortion within the territories the group controls in Syria and Iraq. That means that successfully cutting Islamic State funding is directly linked to the international military campaigns aimed at shrinking its territory.
+
+“There are a number of actions that can be taken to reduce the financial streams, but one thing is clear: If you want to deprive ISIS of cash, you deprive it of territory,” says Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington.
+
+Moreover, the Islamic State trafficks much of its oil and antiquities across Turkey’s border with Syria, experts say. The US has been pressing Turkey for months – mostly behind closed doors – to do more, while Russia has been much more public with its accusations.
+
+Next week’s meetings are an opportunity for the international community to get on the same page to tackle some of these bigger funding streams.
+
+“We’re not going to get anywhere on a critical issue like terror financing if it all sinks into a lot of finger-pointing and recriminations,” says Levitt. “If you can get beyond the bickering, then a lot more good can be done if you focus on helping Turkey shut down that border.”",REAL
+7586,"ATTENTION WESTERN WORLD: If You Care About Your Country’s Security, Make Sure Everyone Gets Netanyahu’s Important Message",jewsnews © 2015 | JEWSNEWS | It's not news...unless it's JEWS NEWS !!! Proudly powered by WordPress — Theme: JustWrite by Acosmin Join the over 1.4 million fans of Jews News on FB…It’s NOT news unless it’s Jews News!,FAKE
+231,Why is Paul Ryan miffed about new budget deal?,"The budget deal was crafted by outgoing Speaker John Boehner behind closed doors. Hard-line Republicans don't like that, and neither does Ryan.
+
+Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., right, walks from a meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Oct. 26, 2015. The bipartisan deal announced by House Speaker John Boehner seems to be great for many in Congress, but Ryan has some beef with the proposed budget.
+
+The bipartisan deal announced by House Speaker John Boehner appears to be a win-win-win – for the White House, Republicans, and Democrats.
+
+The two-year pact not only averts a federal debt default next week, but also sidesteps a potential government shutdown in December.
+
+It beefs up both defense and nondefense spending. It heads off deep cuts in Social Security disability payments. And it prevents a significant increase in certain Medicare payments (Part B) for seniors.
+
+So then why is the presumed next speaker, Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, expressing such anger about it? Also, why are political observers rather downcast as well?
+
+Much of it has to do with the way the deal was put together – highly dependent on one man who is leaving the scene and highly reliant on a secretive negotiating process involving only a few key people and their staffs. Such a closed-door process is how Congress has gotten things done for decades. But the hard-line House Freedom Caucus has been demanding a different way – a bottom-up approach, which could actually complicate dealmaking for a future Speaker Ryan.
+
+Political observers have not trumpeted the deal because they see it as a one-off solution, created by Speaker Boehner’s pending exit. That coming departure has freed him up to negotiate directly with Democrats in Congress and with President Obama, unconcerned about another eruption on his right flank from the Freedom Caucus.
+
+“This is not a good sign for the budget process. The only way we got this done is for a speaker to resign. Is that what it's going to take to get a deal the next time?” asks Stan Collender, a federal budget expert in Washington.
+
+As for Representative Ryan, he took issue, at least publicly, with the process surrounding the deal. Legislation for it was filed very late on Monday night, and it will hit the House floor for approval on Wednesday. It’s expected to pass with heavy support from Democrats. Then it will head to the Senate, whose Republican and Democratic leaders were also in on the private negotiations.
+
+“I think the process stinks,” Ryan said Tuesday morning.
+
+“This is not the way to do the people's business,” he said. “We are up against a deadline – that's unfortunate.... As a conference, we should've been meeting months ago to discuss these things to have a unified strategy going forward.”
+
+That should be music to the Freedom Caucus’s ears, and Ryan would need that group’s support as speaker.
+
+The nearly 40 Freedom Caucus members, many of whom came to Congress on the tea party wave of 2010 or after, want to devolve power from the speaker’s office. Their preferred approach would empower committees, and themselves, to a much greater extent.
+
+“Putting together a very complex deal and giving members less than 48 hours to read it, study it, and vote on it with virtually no input – it’s about as bad as the process gets around here,” said Rep. John Fleming (R) of Louisiana, a member of the Freedom Caucus.
+
+Ryan was apparently not involved in the talks. That absolves him from the deal – which has elements of one he negotiated with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington to resolve a budget crisis just two years ago.
+
+“He wasn’t down there. He wasn’t even invited. He’s been trying to figure out if he’s going to be speaker this week, not if he’s cutting a debt ceiling deal,” said Freedom Caucus founder Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R) of South Carolina, sticking up for Ryan. “We believe him” when he says he’s frustrated by the process.
+
+Representative Mulvaney acknowledges that deals like this, in the end, have to be negotiated by the key players on both sides. It’s not possible for all 247 Republican members to be negotiators. The problem for him was that the chief negotiator was someone who is on his way out – someone whom the right wing had pushed out the door.
+
+Mulvaney and other Freedom Caucus members have big problems with the deal itself, not just how it was put together. They don’t like that it busts budget caps of the 2011 Budget Control Act by $80 billion, even as it raises the current $1.8 trillion debt ceiling.
+
+“That’s two strikes, and there are plenty of other third strikes in there,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R) of Kansas, another Freedom Caucus member. One of them is a change that he says would “destroy” crop insurance, of vital interest to his state.
+
+The budget increases are being offset by cuts elsewhere, including small-scale reforms to Social Security and Medicare – long sought by Republicans. But Representative Huelskamp is skeptical about whether those reforms will ever pay off, while Mulvaney says Boehner is “merely moving the deck chairs.”
+
+Some observers say that even by “cleaning out the barn” for his successor, Boehner hasn’t really made it easier on Ryan. The Freedom Caucus is even angrier at how this deal was handled, and it will insist that Ryan not follow such secret, last-minute negotiating.
+
+“The Freedom Caucus will not make it any easier for Paul Ryan to make similar concessions once he is in power,” writes Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, in an e-mail to the Monitor. ""Without the crisis atmosphere that results from budgetary differences, there will in many ways be more room for the parties to fight over issues.""
+
+“Paul is going to be in better shape than he would have been because a lot of the overly contentious issues will be off the table,” says Rep. Peter King (R) of New York, a moderate, in an interview. “He’ll be able to actually start working toward governing as opposed to going from crisis to crisis.”",REAL
+7026,US Airstrike Killed Five Al-Qaeda Members in Yemen on October 21 - CENTCOM,"Get short URL 0 2 0 0 The US military killed five suspected members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in an October 21 airstrike in central Yemen, the US Central Command said in a press release on Friday. 
+WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Earlier, US Central Command stated the previous airstrikes killed eight suspected members of al-Qaeda. 
+The first strike, on October 6, killed two people while a second strike conducted on October 19 killed six people. Both strikes were conducted in remote parts of the Shabwah Governorate. 
+""The United States military conducted a successful strike against members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on October 21, in a remote area of Marib Governorate, Yemen,"" the release stated. “Five AQAP enemy fighters were killed in the strike."" ...",FAKE
+8664,The Only Way to Save the World is to Save Yourself,"The Only Way to Save the World is to Save Yourself Nov 11, 2016 0 0 
+“We are not here to save the world. We are here to save ourselves, but in doing so, we save the world.” ~ Joseph Campbell 
+As I write this, some shit is probably going down at Standing Rock . For anybody awake to the tyranny at hand, the events of the last few months have weighed heavily on our hearts. But the thing people need to remember is this: We’re all Native Americans. If you were born in the USA, and you love the land you were born on (which includes the entire fucking planet, by the way!), you are a Native American. You are a Native Earthling, for shit’s sake. It’s all connected. Their fight is our fight. Skin color is irrelevant. Where you were born or where you migrated to is irrelevant. The only thing relevant is this: are you for freedom, life, cooperation, and love; or are you for statism, profit, divisiveness, and violence? As Derrick Jensen said, “We are the governors as well as the governed. This means that all of us who care about life need to force accountability onto those who do not.” 
+The media (even the alternative media, mind you) is trying to spin this as a land issue, or a Native American issue. But it’s not. This is a freedom versus tyranny issue. This is an anarchy versus statism issue. This is a life versus entropy issue. All land is free. We just need to quit focusing on imaginary lines and think cooperation first, competition second. All human beings are free. We just need to quit being obsequious to state-driven authority and start asking (and answering) the tough questions. 
+The only way to save the world is to save yourself. The only way to save the land from being poisoned is to save yourself from being poisoned (and from poisoning the land, yourself). The only way to save the environment from pollution is to save yourself from pollution (and from polluting the environment, yourself). In other words: The only way to save the Crashing Plane that is the Human Race is to put the oxygen mask on yourself first before attempting to put it on anybody else, and especially before attempting to right the plane. The oxygen mask, if you haven’t gathered already, is a metaphor for health, awareness, and truth. Save Yourself 
+“Only the individual can rise to the heights of consciousness and awareness. The more you belong to the crowd, the deeper you fall into darkness.” ~ Osho 
+Saving yourself is putting on the oxygen mask of health, awareness, and truth. But what does that mean? It means questioning yourself to the nth degree , to the point of self-interrogation, and then questioning some more. It means psychosocial upheaval. It means getting uncomfortable. It means admitting you are wrong. In short: It means pain, existential pain of monumental proportions. 
+Why is it so painful? Because much cognitive dissonance must be navigated. Everything that you’ve taken for granted as a fundamental truth must be turned inside out and given proper scrutiny. After such scrutiny, you will likely find that you were wrong about a great many things. But the only tool you need to weigh yourself against your deep questioning is the following anonymous quote: “When an honest man realizes that he is mistaken, he will either cease being mistaken or cease being honest.” 
+The question is: Do you have the courage to be honest with yourself? Because if you honestly choose the moral side of freedom, life, cooperation, and love, then you’re going to have to admit that statism provides none of these. It only sells the illusion of these. 
+Statism is about profit, ownership, divisiveness, and violence. It steals people’s freedom by enforcing, and profiting on, outdated and unjust laws (but only if the person believes in the law). It stifles life and human flourishing through calculative debt slavery and by convincing people into believing in an illusory debt. It creates physical divisiveness by drawing imaginary lines in the sand and declaring them “borders.” It creates psychological divisiveness through xenophobic nationalism and conditioned flag worship, setting up an us-versus-them mentality. When, really, the only us-versus-them mentality that holds any moral weight and intellectual validity is the freedom versus tyranny position. 
+Statism is tyrannical. There’s simply no way to wiggle out of this fact. It teaches authoritarianism and oppression. It teaches the individual to oppress and to tyrannize him/herself and others. It teaches people to blindly follow and obsequiously respect authority. It teaches extortion and violence. For if the authority of the state is not obeyed, or its many outdated and immoral laws are not followed, the individual is forced, violently if need be, to acquiesce. Comply or die, is what it comes down to. Either that or your freedom is taken away from you. 
+So, when it comes down to it, saving yourself is, first and foremost, waking yourself up from the spell that statism has over you . And then it’s breaking that spell. Break that particular spell, and freedom is at hand. Break that particular spell, and ( your ) life begins. Break that particular spell, and you free yourself to learn how cooperation and love actually work, because you will finally begin taking responsibility for your own shit. No Masters. No rulers. That means taking responsibility for yourself and your own actions as a social creature on an interdependent planet. No more leaning on the crutch of authority. No more codependence on the state. Saving yourself is choosing freedom. Save the World 
+“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live,’ Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so, every one of us shares the supreme ordeal––carries the cross of the redeemer––not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.” ~Joseph Campbell 
+So, you’ve saved (freed) yourself from the grip of the state. What comes next? Freeing others, of course. But not so fast. Just because you’re free from the state, doesn’t mean the state isn’t still there, rearing its ugly head. It is still there, oppressing and extorting. It is still there, tyrannizing and destroying the planet under the guise of progress. It’s still there, trying to suck you back in. It is still Goliath and you are still David. And just because you recognize statism as tyranny and oppression, doesn’t mean that others do. Remember: most people are devoted statists who don’t even realize they are statists. Yes, the ignorance is that thick. But, I digress… 
+You’ve secured your “oxygen mask” on the crashing plane that is the human race. Now it’s time to start helping others to secure their own masks. The problem here is: you can’t control other people. And, really, you don’t want to. You want people to be free, after all. That means you’re going to have to convince them . You’re going to have to be creative. You’re going to have to use your imagination and come up with novel ways to persuade them into being healthy. Yes, sadly it has come to that. The only way to bring health to those who are all-too-well-adjusted to a sick society, is to sell it. 
+The real kick in the pants is: most people don’t want to hear what you have to say. People are wrestling with their own cognitive dissonance. People are caught up in their own state driven conditioning and brainwashing. Those cops “serving and protecting” the enforcement of the unhealthy, unsustainable, climate changing (game ender) North Dakota pipeline , are all wrestling with their own cognitive dissonance, conditioning, and brainwashing. They’re simply losing their own inner battle and coming up with the only thing they know: the cowardice and violence of a statist. 
+So, it comes down to this: What do we (those who are already free and have their oxygen mask securely fastened) do against the cowardice and violence of the inured statist? We teach. We use our imagination to persuade them away from the unhealthiness of the state and toward the healthiness of freedom. We lead by example, influencing them with our courageous words and our actions. We coax them into freely putting their own oxygen mask on. For we know that volition is paramount if freedom is to be had. Force is the way of the state. Violence is the way of the state. A free human being helping others to be free must never use force or violence, lest they wish to be a tyrant. An authentically free human being wishes other human beings to be just as authentically free. 
+But, and here’s the rub, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Your right to waive your fist ends one inch from my nose.” 
+This means that when our health and freedom are under attack, we are morally justified to defend ourselves. And so, the most important thing we can do as free people, as individuals who have our oxygen masks securely fastened, is to stand our ground. To protect ourselves. Which, by extension, means protecting that which immediately sustains us: water, and the land that grows our food. The worst thing we can do is back down and play the pacifist. Like Derrick Jensen said, “ Love does not imply pacifism.” The Goliath that is the state will trample all over pacifism. Indeed, the road to an unhealthy, unsustainable, immoral, and violent world is paved with pacifism. It’s paved with people turning a blind eye. It’s paved with the inaction of people who recognized evil and did fuckall with it. 
+At the end of the day, Goliath (the state) is going to be Goliath. But Goliath is only Goliath because people believe in it. We dismantle goliath by convincing people not to give into Goliath’s unhealthy and unsustainable song and dance. First, we extract ourselves from being Goliath by transforming ourselves into courageous Davids. Then, we attempt to extract others from being Goliath. And if we cannot, we stand our ground and point out their cowardice and violence as unacceptable. We draw a line in the sand. We stand our ground. We protect our water. We declare, right in the face of the Goliath state, these courageous words by Thoreau : “I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” 
+About the Author 
+Gary ‘Z’ McGee , a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man . His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world. This article ( The Only Way to Save the World is to Save Yourself ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary ‘Z’ McGee and WakingTimes.com . Vote Up Gary Z McGee Gary ‘Z’ McGee , a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man . His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world.",FAKE
+7912,NO jail time for Muslim migrant who DUMPED BABY in road and left it for dead,"This is now becoming the norm. Just yesterday, I reported on a Muslim migrant who anally raped a 10-year-old boy and had his conviction overturned because “he didn’t know the boy didn’t want to be raped.” 
+Islamic supremacism in the West. 
+“No jail time for asylum seeker who dumped baby in road,” The Local, 19 Oct 2016: 
+A man who was furious at being thrown out of an asylum centre grabbed his own child and dumped her in the middle of a busy road – and has been given a nine-month suspended sentence. 
+The 27-year-old had been living in an asylum centre in Vienna’s Floridsdorf district and had already been given several warnings for being drunk and violent. 
+So when he turned up again intoxicated with a beer in his hand and was told to leave, he flew into a furious rage. 
+Spotting his baby daughter in a pram nearby, he grabbed her and ran into the busy road, and put her in the middle of a traffic lane. 
+The man’s lawyer denied however that he wanted to cause the child any harm, saying he wanted to take a photograph of her to indicate that they had been thrown out onto the street. 
+The child was saved when police officers arrived a short while later. 
+The court heard that",FAKE
+7578,Re: Schools All Over America Are Closing On Election Day Due To Fears Of Violence,"Schools All Over America Are Closing On Election Day Due To Fears Of Violence By Michael Snyder, on October 27th, 2016 
+Will this be the most chaotic election day in modern American history? All across the nation, schools are being closed on election day due to safety fears. Traditionally, schools have been very popular as voting locations because they can accommodate a lot of people, they usually have lots of parking, and everyone in the community knows where they are and can usually get to them fairly easily. But now there is a big movement to remove voting from schools or to shut schools down on election day so that children are not present when voting takes place. According to Fox News , “voting has been removed or classes have been canceled on Election Day at schools in Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere.” Just a couple days ago , I shared with you a survey that found that 51 percent of all Americans are concerned about violence happening on election day, and all of these schools closing is just another sign of how on edge much of the population is as we approach November 8th. 
+Many officials are being very honest about the fact that schools are being shut down on election day because they are afraid of election violence. The following comes from Fox News … 
+Several schools across the nation have decided to close on Election Day over fears of possible violence in the hallways stemming from the fallout from the heated rhetoric that consumed the campaign trail. 
+The fear is the ugliness of the election season could escalate into confrontations and even violence in the school hallways, endangering students. 
+“If anybody can sit there and say they don’t think this is a contentious election, then they aren’t paying much attention,” Ed Tolan, the Falmouth, Maine police chief, said Tuesday. His community has already called off classes on Nov. 8 and an increased police presence will be felt around town. 
+And without a doubt, voting locations are “soft targets” that often have little or no security. We have been blessed to have had such peaceful elections in the past, but we also need to realize that times have changed. I believe that there is wisdom in what Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told reporters … 
+“There is a concern, just like at a concert, sporting event or other public gathering that we didn’t have 15 or 20 years ago,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, co-chairman of the National Association of Secretaries of State election committee. “ What if someone walks in a polling location with a backpack bomb or something? If that happens at a school, then that’s certainly concerning.” 
+All it is going to take is a single incident to change everything. 
+Let us hope that it is not this election day when we see something like that. 
+Another reason why polling locations are under increased scrutiny this election season is because of concerns about election fraud. This is something that Donald Trump has alluded to repeatedly on the campaign trail. For instance, just consider what he told a rally in Pennsylvania … 
+“We don’t want to lose an election because you know what I’m talking about,” Trump told an overwhelmingly white crowd in Manheim, Pa., earlier this month. “Because you know what? That’s a big, big problem, and nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody has the guts to talk about it. So go and watch these polling places .” 
+And of course reports are already pouring in from around the country of big problems with the voting machines. In Illinois this week, one candidate personally experienced a machine switching his votes from Republicans to Democrats… 
+Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats. 
+Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library. 
+“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.” 
+In addition, if you keep up with my work on The Economic Collapse Blog , then you already know that a number of voters down in Texas have reported that their votes were switched from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . 
+Well, it turns out that those voting machines appear to have a link to the Clinton Foundation … 
+According to OpenSecrets, the company who provided the alleged glitching voting machines is a subsidiary of The McCarthy Group. 
+The McCarthy group is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation – apparently donating 200,000 dollars in 2007 – when it was the largest owner of United States voting machines. Or perhaps the 200,000 dollars went to paying Bill Clinton for speeches? 
+Either way, it doesn’t look good. 
+After everything that we saw in 2012 , I am convinced that there is good reason to be concerned about the integrity of our voting machines. 
+But Democrats don’t like poll observers, because they think that having too many poll observers will intimidate their voters… 
+“It’s un-American, but at the same time we have a long history of doing things like that ,” Ari Berman, author of the 2016 book “ Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America ,” previously told The Christian Science Monitor. “Voting was very, very dangerous. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that we’re at the same place today. I just think the loss of the [official poll observers] is going to be really problematic.” 
+Without a doubt, this has been the craziest election season that we have seen in decades, and I have a feeling that it is about to get even crazier. 
+But will the end result be the election of the most corrupt politician in the history of our country ? 
+If that is the outcome after all that we have been through, it will be exceedingly depressing indeed. 
+About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*",FAKE
+5657,Trump Mocks Biden's Dare To Take Him 'Behind the Gym'," 
+In the schoolyard of American politics, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stood tall Tuesday as he fired back at Vice President Joe Biden for a slam Biden sent his way last week.
+“The press always asks me: Don’t I wish I were debating him? No, I wish we were in high school — I could take him behind the gym. That’s what I wish,” Biden said last week while attacking him for comments that surfaced from Trump’s past.
+Trump commented on that remark Tuesday during a rally in Tallahassee, Fla.
+ 
+Related Stories Trump Dedicates D.C. Hotel: ‘The Future Lies With The Dreamers’ Trump Sets GOP Fundraising Milestone In Small-Donor Contributions Newt Gingrich Defends Donald Trump Against ‘Sexual Predator’ Accusations “Did you see where Biden wants to take me to the back of the barn?” Trump asked his fans.
+Donald Trump responds to Joe Biden saying he'd like to take Trump ""behind the gym"": ""I'd love that! Mr Tough Guy."" https://t.co/1vwBSd9c79 
+— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) October 25, 2016 
+
+“ I’d love that . I’d love that,” Trump added. “Mr. Tough Guy. He’s Mr. Tough Guy. You know, he’s Mr. Tough Guy, when he’s standing behind a microphone by himself.”
+ 
+Trump seemed to relish the thought.
+“Some things in life you could really love doing,” Trump said.
+I'm trying to envision something more fitting than this election actually ending in a Biden-Trump fist fight and i cannot
+— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 26, 2016 
+
+many, many, many economic problems could be solved by making a biden – trump boxing match pay-per-view
+— ☕netw3rk (@netw3rk) October 26, 2016 
+
+ 
+Trending Stories Frustrated With Media Bias, Trump Campaign Takes Its Case Directly To Voters With Nightly Show On Facebook Independent Voters Push Trump To The Front In Florida And Ohio RNC Official Takes CNN Host To Task For Claiming There Is No Media Bias Trump also threw a jab at the media.
+“By the way, if I said that, they’d say, ‘He’s violent. How could he have done that?'” Trump said.
+Trump, who according to one recent poll has a narrow lead in Florida, told supporters that he was confident of victory .
+“In 14 days we are going to win the state of Florida and we are going to win back the White House,” he declared.
+“We have a thing going on that they have never seen before. It is a movement. They have never seen anything like it before. We are going to win and we are going to bring back a lot of good things including common sense to the White House,” Trump added.
+“We have the power in our hands,” he said. “In just 14 days – 14 days? Can you believe this? I started, it was a year and a half. Now we’re down to 14 days.”
+“We had unbelievably tough, nasty primaries. We’re proud to say they were the most difficult and toughest primaries they say in the history of politics. And now we have a nasty, nasty election. But we have the facts on our side,” he added.
+What do you think?",FAKE
+4396,Obamacare Enrollees Anxiously Await Supreme Court Decision That Threatens Their Coverage,"“I’ve got my six-month, regular cancer checkup in June, and so I’m saying I hope they don’t come out with any kind of decision, just in case it’s bad news, until after,” Hines said. “You always get nervous, usually a day before or day of, going for a checkup. But I think I started a little more on the worrying ahead of time.”
+
+Hines, 59, has been relying on health insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces to help cover the costs of those checkups. But she has the misfortune of residing in a state, Virginia, where the federal government is operating that marketplace. Because of that, she could end up losing her tax subsidy to help purchase coverage right at the time her health takes a dive for the worse.
+
+The Supreme Court will issue a ruling this month on a lawsuit engineered by conservative activists alleging that a brief phrase in the law -- “exchange established by the state” -- means subsidies can only be provided to individuals residing in states that set up their own health insurance exchanges. Should the justices side with Obamacare's critics, Hines would be one of an estimated 6.4 million people in 34 states whose subsidies will disappear. Many will be forced to drop their health insurance because of heightened cost.
+
+For someone like Hines, who has had breast cancer three times, most recently in 2009, this presents a Hobson's choice. She considers health care coverage essential and must get screenings twice a year to ensure her cancer doesn't come back. But she has little money to afford insurance on her own. A former public relations professional, she’s devoted her life to caring for her ailing, octogenarian mother, and currently works part-time as an educator at the aquarium near her home in Virginia Beach. Her low income qualifies Hines for a subsidy that cuts the price she pays by about half, to $200 a month.
+
+“I could probably manage another year,” Hines said when asked if she could afford the coverage without the subsidy. She would have to draw down more of her retirement savings to pay for health care. But doesn’t have enough money to hold on to health insurance until she turns 65 and becomes eligible for Medicare, she said.
+
+Hines was one of six people the Huffington Post featured in a report this March on the case surrounding Obamacare's subsidies. At the time, the Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments on the case and the prospect of those subsidies potentially disappearing was becoming less abstract for those in states with federally run exchanges. The clock is ticking even louder now. And so, we decided to catch up with those we interviewed to see how their circumstances, health and mental well-being has changed.
+
+Lucas had an aortic aneurysm in 2010, so he has to keep monitoring his heart condition. Even though his most recent tests came up clean in May, Lucas knows the computed tomography (CT) scan he needs as part of his checkup every two years would cost him $11,000 without insurance, instead of $50 now. He also knows his prescriptions would run to $2,600 every three months rather than $65 with insurance. Lucas, who is self-employed, earns $25,000 to $30,000 a year, he said.
+
+Lucas might be shielded from the ramifications of a ruling against the subsidy if Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) persuades the GOP-majority state legislature to go along with his proposal to set up a state-run exchange. But as Lucas takes stock of the court decision to come, he's struck by what he sees as dramatically misplaced priorities among lawmakers in Washington.
+
+“Billions of dollars in corporate welfare to oil companies and whatnot, you know, and that’s not a problem for them, but I’m a person who gets $2,400 a year in subsidies to help pay for my insurance -- and I pay almost three times that much in taxes, so it’s not like I’m taking them on the negative side,” Lucas said.
+
+Blitz turns 33 on Monday. Since birth, he has dealt with aortic valve stenosis, meaning he has a heart valve that is too narrow. He recently received good news from his cardiologist that he can delay an expensive major operation he thought he’d need this year. But he will have to undergo a less serious procedure at a later date.
+
+All this would be difficult to handle on its own. But it's compounded by the problems Blitz has had in navigating the health care law. He ended up with a plan he doesn't recall picking. He lost his subsidy of $30 a month even though his income level should qualify him for some tax credit. And he assumed that his home state would get rid of all Obamacare exchanges entirely if the court ruled against the subsidies (in fact, state Republicans have passed a bill saying that Arizona won't set up a state exchange. The federal one will remain regardless).
+
+Were he to ultimately lose the subsidy, Blitz would figure out a way to pay for his insurance. He calls himself ""fortunate"" in that regard, compared to those who don't have savings to dip into or expenses to cut or friends to rely on. But Blitz's fortune -- if you want to call it that -- comes at a cost, and it underscores how the damage from a Supreme Court ruling for the plaintiffs extends beyond those who currently receive tax credits.
+
+Without the subsidies, most of the low- and moderate-income people using the health insurance exchanges will exit the exchanges, leaving those with the greatest health care needs -- people like Blitz with medical conditions -- as an increasing share of the market. Because people with greater medical needs generate more medical bills, that would increase expenses for insurance companies, forcing them to increase premiums. Those higher premiums, in turn, would lead more people to drop coverage. In the industry, they call this a “death spiral.”",REAL
+1615,Clinton’s Iowa dilemma,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+10147,Why Russia’s army can’t complete its modernization program,"RBTH Daily , army , military , arms The Buk-M3 anti-aircraft missile system. Source: Press Photo 
+On Oct. 21, on the day the Russian army received its new military technology, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that in October 2016 half of all the military hardware in the Russian armed forces now consisted of new models. 
+Shoigu, who also holds the rank of army general, noted that in accordance with a presidential decree, by 2020 70 percent of the army's technology will consist of updated models. The first Buk-M3 anti-aircraft missile system in the Russian army 
+One of the main ""gifts"" for Russia's army was the Buk-M3 anti-aircraft missile system. Shoigu said that the armed forces had received the first division of Buk-M3s. 
+""This is not only the modernization of the air defense system that the Russian army already has. Basically, this is a new model with old dimensions,"" explained Valery Yarmolenko, director of the press service at arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey. 
+He noted that the Buk-M3's key particularity is the location of the missiles in the launching containers, just like in the S-300 systems, which are simultaneously transport and launching containers. 
+Thanks to developments made by Russian manufacturers, the missiles can be fired from the 12 cylindrical containers 20 seconds after the system is set up. Unlike its predecessor, the new system can strike missiles and enemy planes not 15 but 70 kilometers (45 miles) away. 
+The Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper confirms that the Buk-M3 anti-aircraft missiles can strike surface and ground radiocontrast targets – that is, they can be used as tactical-guided missiles and not only defensive weapons. What else has the Russian army received? 
+In the last three months the Russian armed forces have received a series of defensive systems. Among them are the following: 
+- two regimental kits of S-400 anti-aircraft missiles systems and six combat Pantsir-S machines; 
+- the Bal and Bastion missile systems for the Western Military District; 
+- two divisions of Buk-M2 anti-aircraft systems; 
+- three intercontinental ballistic missiles; 
+- 100 Kalibr winged missiles and Onyx anti-missile systems for Russian Navy ships and submarines. 
+A BUK-M2E surface-to-air missile system on display during the International Aerospace Salon in Zhukovsky near Moscow / Source: Mikhail Voskresenskiy/RIA Novosti 
+Sergei Shoigu noted that during the Army-2016 Military Technological Forum near Moscow in early September Russia showed the world most of the new technology that the armed forces are now acquiring. 
+""Defense ministry representatives and foreign and Russian military experts could appreciate Russia's combat possibilities during the demonstrations,"" he said. Problems with rearming the army 
+""The modernization and development of the Russian armed forces program, which costs 22 trillion rubles ($343 billion today), can fully guarantee the country's security by the time it terminates in 2022. However, there is a series of problems that must be solved,"" said Viktor Yesin, former director of the General Staff of the Strategic Missile Forces. 
+In his words, the modernization of the defense industry, in which three trillion rubles have already been invested ($48 billion), is failing. 
+""This is due to the sanctions and the fall of Russia's economy. The process of import substitution in the defense enterprises is getting practically nowhere,"" said Yesin. Russia designing new ‘aircraft carrier killer’ torpedo to boost naval power 
+According to a source in the Russian defense industry, the main problem lies in the fact that Russia will not be able to substitute imported items in a series of key sectors in the upcoming years. 
+""One thing is the modernization of enterprises. But creating from scratch certain units that will produce the technology is another. The enterprises will be able to produce the ship and helicopter engines that were imported from other countries by 2018. However, there are many electronic systems accompanying these machines that Russia will not be able to produce independently,"" said the source. 
+According to Russian Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, the financing of the defense industry has diminished due to the crisis, a trend that may continue in 2017. 
+""Defense industry enterprises have long-term contracts to build ships, missiles, aviation and space satellites. There will be no sequestration here. During crises purchases of secondary technology – armored personnel carriers, engineer machines and so on – are reduced,"" explained the source. Why is Russia spending so much on modernizing its army? 
+According to Yesin, the share of defense expenses is unquestionably very big. But if Russia wants to feel secure and not worry about tomorrow, then money must be spent today in order to avoid a repeat of the 1990s and 2000s. 
+""In terms of nuclear weapons, we are on par with the U.S., but in terms of conventional weapons, we trail significantly. If we want to avoid war, we must make up for what we lacked in the 1990s and 2000s,"" said Yesin. Subscribe to get the hand picked best stories every week Subscribe to our mailing list Facebook",FAKE
+3154,Mormon Church Backs LGBT Protection,"In a landmark move, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced Tuesday that it is changing its posture toward gays. The church has decided to support anti-discrimination legislation for gays and lesbians in the realm of housing and employment. The church also announced that it it comes with the condition that no one can be forced to perform actions if he or she has religious objections. One example, a doctor who refuses to artificially inseminate a lesbian couple. Utah is facing two bills that protections for each group. Political watchers in the state have noted that both measures would be likely to pass if the LDS Church got behind it.
+
+“When religious people are publicly intimidated, retaliated against, forced from employment or made to suffer personal loss because they have raised their voice in the public square, donated to a cause, or participated in an election, our democracy is the loser,” said Elder Dallin Oaks, a member of the church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles. “Such tactics are every bit as wrong as denying access to employment, housing, or public services because of race or gender.”
+
+However, this month, the church was in hot water for planning to excommunicate a prominent critic of its same-sex marriage stance for the apostasy.
+
+",REAL
+9001,Small Stocks Threaten Breakdown – Can They Hang On?,"Small Stocks Threaten Breakdown – Can They Hang On? by IWB · October 27, 2016 
+by Dana Lyons 
+The Russell 2000 Small-Cap Index has violated (for now) the 2 key uptrend lines that we recently identified. 
+A main theme recently among both our posts and our quantitative risk analysis has been the battle between weakening market internals and resilient price averages. Despite deteriorating breadth and momentum, most of the major averages had been able to hold above the key levels that we’ve identified. For example, just 9 days ago , we highlighted 2 Up trendlines on the chart of the Russell 2000 Small-Cap Index (RUT). These lines (e.g., the post-2009 and post-February Up trendlnes), we suggested, were the key in determining whether the RUT would maintain its upward trajectory (above the lines), or see an expansion in potential downside. Recently, the RUT had been able (barely) to hold the top side of of the trendlines and maintain its path of least resistance to the upside. That path may have shifted today. 
+As these updated charts show, the RUT closed below the 2 key trendlines today – albeit by a fairly slim margin. 
+Wide Angle: 
+Close-Up: 
+While the winds may have potentially shifted following today’s action, the overall message here is the same as it was 9 days ago. Thus, we will repeat what we stated in that post: 
+If the RUT should “Continue to hold above the trendlines, the bulls will remain in control and the intermediate-term rally in small-cap stocks can persist further. Should the level give way, however, the bears may have their chance to finally deliver a more serious blow.” 
+Absent a quick recovery of the broken trendlines, the bears would appear to have their chance now, especially given the elevated status of our broad market risk assessment. The question is will they finally follow through, or will the small stocks manage to narrowly hang on once again?",FAKE
+5311,Black Lives Matter LOSES: America’s Respect For Police SURGES,"Pinterest 
+In the war between police and Black Lives Matter, the cop-hating race-baiters are losing. 
+A new study shows a dramatic increase in respect for law enforcement among all Americans, including blacks, who have been repeatedly told they were the victims of a racist, white-supremacist-supporting police force. 
+In just the last year, Americans who say they have a “great deal of respect” for police has jumped from 64 percent to 76 percent — the highest level since 1968. Those saying they have “some” respect for police is down to 17 percent and those claiming to have “hardly any” respect for police is down to 7 percent. 
+The Gallup survey flies in the face of the narrative of leftists and Black Lives Matter. They’re trying to convince Americans – especially black Americans – that the police are on a racist rampage and that they have nothing more to fear in this country than a man in uniform. 
+But the public doesn’t buy it. 
+With both whites and “non-whites,” respect for police is up sharply. Four in five white Americans say they have “a great deal” of respect for the police in their area, while just over two in three “non-whites” also say they have a “great deal” of respect. 
+Respect for police is highest among Republicans, at 86 percent, but even 68 percent of Democrats claim a “great deal” of respect. 
+Adults 55 and older (81%) have the most respect, but even those 18-34 had high levels of respect at 71%. 
+There is a moral to this for the BLM Social Justice Warriors: You can paint our cops as racist thugs, but we know better. Police risk their lives every day to protect us and deserve our utmost respect. And judging by this poll, they’re getting it. 
+From the Gallup Poll: 
+The sharp increase over the past year in professed respect for local law enforcement comes as many police say they feel they are on the defensive — both politically and for their lives while they are on duty — amid heated national discussions on police brutality and shootings. After an officer was killed by a gunman in Harlem last year, then-New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton warned that the U.S. has fostered “an anti-police attitude that has grown” and that the national dialogue on police-community relations needs to discourage individuals who “exhibit anti-police behavior or attitudes.” 
+Louisiana became the first state to pass a bill that treats acts targeted against police officers as a hate crime. Other states are discussing passing similar laws. It’s unclear whether the spike in respect for police will have staying power or if it reflects mostly a reaction to the retaliatory killings against police officers last summer. 
+Although confidence in police varies among subgroups, majorities of all groups say they have a great deal of respect for their local police. And the percentage of national adults who say they have “hardly any” respect for local law enforcement remains small.",FAKE
+8089,Clinton Snaps as Bernie and Trump Supporters Join Forces to Disrupt Rally,"We Are Change 
+Supporters of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump joined forces to disrupt a Hillary Clinton rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Tuesday evening — causing the former First Lady to snap.
+Pro-Trump heckler escorted out of Hillary rally by police. Goes out shouting ""Trump 2016"" pic.twitter.com/d3GQjSFHHz 
+— Jeff Poor (@jeff_poor) November 2, 2016 
+
+In the video, a protester is heard shouting “Bill Clinton is a rapist,” before a weak chant of “Hillary” begins from her low-energy crowd. This lead to groups chanting “Donald Trump” and other groups chanting “Bernie Sanders.” 
+In the video, as the Gateway Pundit notes, you can hear a Clinton supporter telling security, “there’s a whole bunch of them.” 
+Hillary Clinton gets protested in Ft Lauderdale by #Trump Street Team and others yelling Bill Clinton's a Rapist @charlespm777 @o_soflagrl pic.twitter.com/Cr9lBPNvwe 
+— Trump Street Team FL (@ChatRevolve) November 2, 2016 
+
+As this was going on, Clinton appeared to reach her limit and snap. 
+HILLARY LOSES IT! Goes Off On ‘Bill Clinton Is a Rapist’ Protester at FL Rally #HillaryForPrison screech voice?? pic.twitter.com/S6mkxvPSTh 
+— J.C. (@Hashtag1USA) November 2, 2016 
+
+The candidate began taking shots not at her opponent, but his supporters, you know, the ones she has also called “irredeemable” and “deplorables.” 
+“I get sometimes a little overwhelmed by the fact that I love this country,” Clinton shouted. “I think we already are great. I think we could be greater, and, you know, I am sick and tired of the negative, dark, divisive, dangerous vision and behavior of people who support Donald Trump. It is time for us to say, ‘No, we are not going backwards. We are going forward into a brighter future.’ So how do we do that? For the next seven days, we focus on what is important, do not get distracted or diverted – focus on the kind of country and world that we want to help create.” 
+She also urged her supporters to stage an “intervention” for anyone who would dare to vote against her corruption and frighteningly hawkish stance. 
+“I want you to do me another favor, if you know anybody who says they are thinking of voting for Trump, I want you to stage an intervention,” Clinton said. “And I want you to talk to this person because unless they are a billionaire who avoided paying taxes for 20 years and lost a billion dollars running casinos, they do not have anything to gain from Donald Trump.” 
+It’s funny, since it seems to be only her billionaire friends who benefit from her being in any position of power — just ask the people of Haiti . 
+Buy the new We Are Change t-shirt because you will enjoy shredding the Clinton News Network in public!
+
+The post Clinton Snaps as Bernie and Trump Supporters Join Forces to Disrupt Rally appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+9644,Iran’s Zarif to hold talks with Russia’s Lavrov on Syria in Moscow,"Politics Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (Photo by AP) 
+Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will pay an official one-day visit to Russia for talks on the Syrian crisis. 
+Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said on Wednesday that the top diplomat is due in Moscow on Friday. 
+He said that Zarif is scheduled to attend a trilateral meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem on regional developments, including the conflict in Syria. 
+According to Qassemi, Zarif will also hold a separate meeting with Lavrov to discuss Tehran-Moscow relations. 
+Meanwhile, Russia's RIA news agency, citing the Russian Foreign Ministry, reported that Zarif and Lavrov will also discuss the situation in Iraq. 
+Muallem's scheduled visit on Friday had earlier been announced by the Russian Foreign Ministry. 
+Iran and Russia have similar stances on the ongoing deadly crisis in Syria. Moscow and Tehran reject any foreign interference in the affairs of the war-hit country, stressing that only the Syrians are entitled to decide their own fate. 
+Iran has been providing military advisory assistance to the Syrian government in its campaign against terrorism. 
+Russia has also been carrying out airstrikes against terrorists' positions in Syria since September last year at the official request of the Damascus government. 
+Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. Over 400,000 people have so far been killed in the conflict, according to estimates by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura . 
+In neighboring Iraq, the Arab country’s army is also pressing ahead with a massive operation aimed at recapturing Mosul from Daesh Takfiri terrorists, who captured the strategic city in June 2014. 
+The army has been liberating more areas aroundMosul, with the Iraqi Joint Operations Command announcing that counter-terrorism units were only two kilometers away from the city. Loading ...",FAKE
+8431,"Anti-Trump protests are paid and staged, Craigslist reveals","November 12, 2016 348 Ads on Craigslist reveal that paid anti-Trump protesters and Soros-sponsored staged demonstrations are continuing to fuel hate and division. Share on Facebook 
+It was reported previously on The Duran that MoveOn – a George Soros controlled NGO, is behind the organization of anti-Trump protests across the country. As the protests continue, however, Craigslist has become an important recruitment tool for some of these organizers, and here is what it reveals: 
+Fight the Trump Agenda! We’re hiring Full-Time Organizers 15/hr! – reads a Craigslist ad from Washington CAN in Seattle . Activists are promised Medical, Dental, Vision, 401(k), Paid Vacation, Paid Sick Days, Holidays, and Leave of Absence . 
+Washington CAN claims to be the state’s oldest and largest grassroots non-profit with over 35 years of organizational experience. It is unclear whether it has any direct ties to Soros’s MoveOn, but it certainly wouldn’t be a wild assumption to make under the circumstances. 
+In another instance, a Craigslist ad exposed paid Anti-Trump protesters being recruited for a staged event in Los Angeles. And this time the Soros link is quite clear and in the open. TruthFeed reports: 
+In this case, a Craigslist ad in Los Angeles shows that activists are wanted to block traffic in the heavy traffic intersection of Highlands and Hollywood. 
+Here’s an example of a Soros employee literally “posing” as a protester. Not all that “grass roots.” 
+Obviously, no one is disputing the fact that there are millions of people unhappy with the election results. Neither is there any doubt that thousands across the the country are protesting genuinely out of emotion and desire to express their discontent. What’s important is that these people realize that they are playing right into the hands of an establishment agenda that doesn’t have America’s best interests in mind. 
+The election is over and we have a clear winner. The losing side has conceded, admitting that the election was fair and calling for a peaceful transition of power. For all the smart folks out there this is a clear indication that it’s time to go home, back to school, back to work, back to your daily routine and stop trying to prolong the division and hate that has been eating away at this country for far too long. ",FAKE
+3516,Islamic State claims responsibility for the Brussels attacks,"Islamic State suicide bombers brought terror, chaos and bloodshed to the city at the heart of European unity on ­Tuesday, detonating their nail-spewing bombs at an airport ­departures hall and on a subway train in attacks that left at least 31 people dead and prompted authorities to launch an intensive manhunt for at least one suspected accomplice.
+
+The wanted man accompanied two of the bombers to the airport, along with luggage heaving with explosives. Authorities were also hunting for a suspected Belgian bombmaker who trained in Syria with the Islamic State and later sneaked back into Europe. On Wednesday, Belgian state broadcaster RTBF identified two of the attackers who targeted Brussels as brothers Khalid and Brahim Bakraoui.
+
+Tuesday’s mass killings add this city to an ignominious but growing list of European capitals that have been struck in the past year by deadly attacks either perpetrated or inspired by the Islamic State, including Paris and Copenhagen.
+
+Authorities had been bracing for an attack in Belgium for months as the country has struggled to stem a tide of homegrown extremism and as the Islamic State has repeatedly threatened to hit Europe in its core.
+
+But when the attacks finally came, the magnitude was stunning. The day’s violence represented the worst on Belgian soil since World War II.
+
+“What we had feared has happened,” said Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. “This is a black moment for our country.”
+
+[‘People who died weren’t whole anymore. They were in pieces.’]
+
+The apparently coordinated explosions created a renewed sense of threat that spilled far beyond Brussels, as authorities boosted police patrols in cities such as Paris, London and Washington.
+
+The targets appeared to have been chosen for their symbolic value and for their ease of access.
+
+The attackers first struck
+
+ with twin bombings at the international airport, where early-
+
+morning travelers were preparing to board flights linking Brussels to cities across the continent and around the world. An hour later, a subway car transiting beneath the modernist glass-and-steel high-rises that house the European Union burst with smoke and flame.
+
+In addition to the dead, about 250 people were injured, Belgian officials said.
+
+Many of the injured lost limbs as shrapnel from the blasts radiated through packed crowds. Cellphone video recorded in the minutes after the airport blasts showed children cowering on a bloody floor amid the maimed and the dead. Footage from a subway station revealed desperate scenes as people dressed for a day’s work stumbled from the mangled wreckage into a smoke-drenched tunnel.
+
+Authorities acknowledged that they had been readying for an attack. But nothing like this, they said.
+
+“We never could have imagined something of this scale,” Interior Minister Jan Jambon told Belgian television station RTL.
+
+And even as the country tried to recover from the trauma of Tuesday’s strikes, there was evidence that more could be on the way.
+
+[How the Brussels attacks could force Obama to betray his policy instincts]
+
+The man being sought by police accompanied two of the bombers to the airport, according to a senior Belgian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details of the case. The taxi driver who transported them said they were hauling particularly heavy luggage that investigators believe was packed with explosives.
+
+At an apartment in the Schaerbeek area of Brussels, investigators later found explosive devices loaded with nails and chemicals, along with an Islamic State flag, the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
+
+“It was exactly the same type of bomb as at the airport,” the senior official said.
+
+Belgian police released surveillance images of three men pushing luggage carts at Brussels Airport. The prosecutor’s office said two of them — dressed in black with black gloves on their left hands, probably to conceal detonators — had blown themselves up. But the third, dressed in white, was on the loose. His identity was unknown, and despite a nationwide hunt — with heavily armed officers combing the streets and checkpoints at Belgian borders snarling traffic for miles — the suspect remained at large Tuesday night.
+
+Across the continent, authorities were also hunting 24-year-old Najim Laachraoui, a suspected Islamic State bombmaker, according to two European security officials.
+
+Laachraoui, a Belgian who was born in Morocco and raised in the Schaerbeek neighborhood, is believed to have trained in Syria and then returned to Europe. His DNA was found on one of the explosives belts from November’s Paris attacks, and he is thought to have traveled at one point with Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving suspect believed to have played a direct role in the Paris massacre.
+
+Tuesday’s attacks came only four days after Belgian counterterrorism authorities cheered the arrest of Abdeslam, 26, who was the most wanted man in Europe for the past four months. Abdeslam was discovered hiding in a Brussels apartment building in the Molenbeek neighborhood, near the center of the city. After the raid, officials said they had uncovered a web of suspects much broader than they previously imagined.
+
+Within hours of Tuesday’s assault, the Islamic State asserted responsibility for the attacks, according to a statement posted on the Amaq Agency, a website believed to be close to the extremist group. The message said Belgium was targeted because of its participation in an international coalition battling the group in Syria and Iraq. U.S. and European security officials said they believed the claim to be credible.
+
+The latest bloodshed made clear that European capitals remain perilously vulnerable despite attempts to dismantle the militant network that perpetrated the worst terrorist attack in Paris in generations last November.
+
+In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby said U.S. citizens were among the injured, but he would not say how many. No Americans are known to have died in the attacks, although that information may change, he said. The State Department also issued an alert on traveling in Europe, urging Americans to avoid crowded places and to exercise caution during religious holidays and at large festivals or events.
+
+Europe has struggled mightily with spillover from the churning conflict in Syria. Thousands of European citizens have traveled there to fight in a war that has become a focal point for jihadists around the world. Many have returned to Europe radicalized. Europe has vowed to confront them.
+
+[Why is Brussels under attack?]
+
+“We are at war,” said French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. “We have been subjected for the last few months in Europe to acts of war.”
+
+In Havana, at the end of a landmark trip, President Obama urged “the world to unite” to fight terrorism, and he pledged to “do whatever is necessary” to aid the investigation in Belgium.
+
+The assaults brought Brussels to a virtual standstill. The subway and the airport were closed — the latter will remain so on Wednesday — and Belgian leaders warned residents to stay indoors. Foreign governments, including Britain, issued advisories warning against travel to the Belgian capital.
+
+In France — where 130 people died Nov. 13 in attacks on a stadium, a music club and restaurants — Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that an additional 1,600 police officers were deployed and that security was boosted at border posts and major transportation hubs.
+
+On social media, an image soon appeared: a figure draped in the colors of the French flag embracing another tearful figure in the black, yellow and red of Belgium’s banner.
+
+At a news conference in Jordan, the E.U.’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, choked back tears after learning of the Brussels attacks.
+
+Belgium, a nation riven by ethnic rivalries among French, Dutch and German speakers, has struggled to address radicalization in its cities. A complex patchwork of security and police agencies is responsible for keeping an eye on potential threats. Many of them view one another as rivals rather than as colleagues.
+
+Still, security analysts said attacks on unsecured, high-traffic targets such as subway stations are extremely hard to defend against — even when authorities are focused on foiling such plots.
+
+“This is a kind of scenario every capital in Europe feared since the November attacks last year. A mixture of foreign fighters coming back with experience, local sympathizers on the other hand,” said Rik Coolsaet, a terrorism expert at Ghent University who has advised the Belgian government on how to fight radicalization. “You have such a large number of soft targets, and you cannot secure all of them.”
+
+Birnbaum reported from Moscow. James McAuley and Anthony Faiola in Brussels, Daniela Deane and Karla Adam in London, and Brian Murphy, Carol Morello and Matt Zapotosky in Washington contributed to this report.
+
+Live updates on the death toll, attack scenes and reactions around the world
+
+Why is Brussels under attack?
+
+At NATO headquarters, alert status raised just miles from attacks
+
+Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
+9354,The Clinton FBI Investigation Just Got Real,"The FBI is now “actively and aggressively” probing into Clinton Foundation corruption. The Clinton campaign is going down. The FBI seems to be sick of the DoJ’s favoritism. 
+Via YourNewsWire 
+
+Two separate sources have told Fox News about serious new breaks in the investigation. The fact that this is being reported on an MSM site is huge, bigger than huge.
+Did you catch that? The laptops that everyone THOUGHT the FBI destroyed were NOT, in fact, destroyed. Anyone who is caught lying has voided their immunity deals. (cough, Cheryl Mills, cough) There are new, not-seen-before emails, even though Clinton said she disclosed them all. It’s goin’ down. Right now. All of those people who were prepared to take one for Team Clinton might want to reconsider. It’s hard to imagine even Teflon-coated Hillary Clinton getting out of this mess.
+Watch this video and try to keep from jumping up and down with excitement: 
+",FAKE
+8791,5 Reasons to Try Acupuncture for Baby Eczema,"Keywords: Acupuncture , baby eczema , cure baby eczema , eczema cure , eczema treatment , heal eczema 
+There was a time when my son’s eczema became so severe I was willing to try any natural healing method. My baby was 5 months old when he developed eczema. We tried the usual dose of steroids and over-the-counter creams from our family doctor. It got so bad that his scars were not healing. He wasn’t sleeping. And I wasn’t sleeping. As a child, my mother took me to an Acupuncturist for migraines. And the migraines stopped after a handful of visits. I remember it being a pretty relaxing experience with the smell of incense and herbs and the quietness of the room. So, I took a leap of faith and booked us for an appointment with a Traditional Chinese Doctor who specialized in skin disorders, allergies, and asthma. Why Try Acupuncture & Traditional Chinese Medicine? Reason 1: Acupuncture has been practiced for almost 4000 years in China. 
+With that much history, it’s worth a try. It is a method of relieving pain or curing an illness by placing needles in the patient’s body at precise points along the 12 meridians in the body. Meridians are energy pathways that are associated with different organs within the body. The World Health Organization lists 300 ailments that are treatable by Chinese Medicine & Acupuncture. Reason 2: Acupuncture has helped children with eczema 
+In a study of 37 children who were treated with Chinese Medicinal herbs, the treatment reduced eczema symptoms by 90% in 18 of the children (see Sources). Although it was a small study size, the benefits seem to far outweigh the risks. When my son was a baby, even a 10% improvement in his symptoms would have been amazing for us. Reason 3: Acupuncture does not hurt babies 
+Many people worry about the needles hurting. But the needles that Acupuncturists use are about 1/100 th of a syringe needle. My son was a baby when we started the treatments, and he never cried out when getting the needles in him. Reason 4: Acupuncture relieved my baby’s eczema by 80% 
+Acupuncture healed the eczema to the point where we could figure out his triggers. Our doctor stabilized the eczema. Best of all, flare-ups only occurred when my baby was teething. His skin was softer than it had been in months. Acupuncture needs to be done on babies for a minimum of 3 months in order to see an improvement. This is because the treatment is trying to alter the immune response, which is a long process. But sometimes babies will respond quicker than that. We used a topical herb powder given to us by the doctor, and applied it to his skin. This topical mix had a similar effect as hydro-cortisone cream if I applied it 3-5 times per day with a cotton ball. Reason 5: Acupuncture is affordable 
+This is true especially if you go to a student clinic. You can pay the affordable price and yet the students are supervised by very experienced doctors. For child and baby treatments, it is even more affordable. It cost us about $15-$30 per visit on average (we tried a few different clinics). Some health plans will cover Acupuncture, so check with your health plan to see if yours covers it. To keep it affordable, I suggest trying to find a specialist in Acupuncture & TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), not a practitioner who does many different types of treatments. Tips for Helping Your Child While Getting Acupuncture 
+Bring a favorite stuffed animal, a book, or some toys. Try nursing your baby while they are receiving acupuncture. A baby only needs the needle in the acupressure point for a second and then they are pulled out. Adults typically have needles in for 45+ minutes for each treatment, because our bodies do not respond as quickly as babies’ bodies do. Check out my YouTube video for more tips! Find an Experienced & Accredited Acupuncturist 
+Make sure to look for an Accredited Acupuncturist or TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) Doctor. Be sure the Acupuncturist has some experience in your condition. Chat with the people in the waiting room. And see if they’ve had success with your doctor. I met a few moms in the waiting room that swore by the Chinese Doctor we were going to see. That made me feel more comfortable. 
+Find a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) Doctor who offers Certified Organic Chinese herbs. “Certified Organic” means the herbs were never sprayed with toxic pesticides and herbicides. As well, there have been some reports of heavy metals residue in Chinese herbs. Herbs are just as powerful as prescription medications and can have adverse effects if used improperly. Make sure to ask about the testing done on the herbs that you or your baby are prescribed. Every Condition Has Different Treatment Needs 
+Check with your family doctor to be sure you don’t have any conditions that would prevent you from using Acupuncture or Chinese Medicine. All the information in this article is provided for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for medical counseling. 
+Rosemary Hansen is a published author and devoted Mama. She is passionate about healing eczema naturally. Rosemary is a self-taught organic, whole foods chef. Her lifelong dream is to have a flock of pet dairy goats. Get a copy of her free e-book: “10 Natural Remedies for Soft Skin” at www.NaturalEczemaMama.com. 
+Sources:",FAKE
+1150,"Cruz dares Trump to sue him over abortion ad, vows to run it 'more frequently'","Ted Cruz is daring Donald Trump to sue him over an ad running in South Carolina that questions his record on abortion, rejecting the billionaire businessman’s complaints and vowing instead to run the ad “more frequently” because voters “deserve to know the truth.""
+
+""You have been threatening frivolous lawsuits for your entire adult life,"" Cruz said Wednesday. ""Even in the annals of frivolous lawsuits, this takes the cake.""
+
+The Cruz campaign adamantly defended the ad after the Trump campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding the campaign stop running it. Trump earlier this week also threatened to sue the Canada-born Cruz over his eligibility to run if he does not “take down his false ads and retract his lies.”
+
+Their feud has only escalated since then, with Trump regularly calling Cruz a liar – and the Texas senator now ridiculing Trump over his lawsuit threat.
+
+At a press conference in South Carolina on Wednesday, Cruz read from the cease-and-desist letter, calling it “one of the most remarkable letters I have ever read,” and challenged Trump to go through with his threatened suit.
+
+Cruz, who graduated from Harvard Law School and previously worked as Texas's top lawyer, said he would like to take Trump's deposition himself and that a lawsuit against the ad has no chance.
+
+The ad in question features footage of Trump in a 1999 interview saying he’s “very pro-choice.” The ad makes reference to the current debate over the vacancy at the Supreme Court and says, “We cannot trust Donald Trump with these serious decisions.”
+
+Trump's attorney sent Cruz a letter on Tuesday saying the ad was ""replete with outright lies, false, defamatory and destructive statements"" and Cruz could be held liable for damages if it's not taken down.
+
+In its own letter, the Cruz campaign called the threats “laughable” and said: “Are you seriously suggesting that the voter should not be allowed to hear what Mr. Trump has said or know what Mr. Trump has done?”
+
+Trump, though, stood his ground and reiterated that he is now pro-life.
+
+“I have been clear about my position on this issue for years. … If I want to bring a lawsuit it would be legitimate. Likewise, if I want to bring the lawsuit regarding Senator Cruz being a natural born Canadian I will do so. Time will tell, Teddy,” he said in a statement Wednesday.
+
+Cruz is also feuding with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio over alleged dirty tricks leading up to Saturday’s South Carolina GOP primary.
+
+Cruz on Wednesday denied being involved with anything untoward and called for anyone with evidence to come forward.
+
+Rubio was asked Wednesday to come up with evidence that Cruz's team was behind a fake Facebook page wrongly claiming that U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy had switched his endorsement from the Florida senator to Cruz.
+
+""It's just a pattern of people around his campaign that have continuously done things like that,"" Rubio said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+3094,Charleston Church Holds First Service Since Shootings,"""We ask that everything be done with dignity. There will be no backpacks, fanny packs or cameras. This is for security purposes,"" a man doing crowd control at the church told the swarm of people assembled near the door.
+
+Church members were given priority among a crowd that included mostly visitors and press. Women were allowed in first in a show of chivalry but also for security. ""We will be checking pocketbooks,"" announced one usher.
+
+Before long, the organist began playing ""Amazing Grace"" followed by ""What a Friend We Have in Jesus"". The choir, dressed in all white began the service, by singing ""Total Praise"", a gospel song that brought the crowd to its feet.
+
+""We are reminded this morning of the freshness of death. It comes like a thief in the night,"" said Norvel Goff, reverend and presiding elder of the African Methodist Episcopal district that includes Emanuel. Goff called congregants to the altar to pray. ""Many of our hearts are still broken. Many of us are still shedding tears. But we must take our burdens to the Lord and leave them there.""
+
+Goff continued, ""As we try to make sense of nonsense, pray for our children. We pray that God will give us the clarity of thought to share with them what God has shared with us.""
+
+One man erupted in tears on the way back to his seat repeating over and over, ""This is just an unthinkable tragedy. Help us, God.""
+
+Calvary preaches many things, including the inevitable rapture, the second coming of Jesus, and the “monogamous marriage between male and female as the foundation of the family.” The majority of the few dozen in attendance on Sunday were white.
+
+“This is what anger and hate against the church looks like,” Pastor Richard Perea said of the killings. “The liberal media must now care about church in a way they have not before.”
+
+Sunday’s sermon focused mostly on Bible study, going line-by-line through Biblical verses much in the same way ""The Beautiful 9"" at Emanuel did before alleged mass murderer Dylann Roof turned a gun on them.
+
+“I don’t think it has anything to do with religion, not at all,” Ashworth said, adding that in this time of tragedy, more people need to pray.
+
+“It was obviously a race issue in his heart,” Perea told HuffPost. “But why he went into a church versus down in the street, in my opinion, is something that was demonically influenced.”
+
+“After everything that’s happened in the past week, coming to church means that God is still sovereign,” Brooks said. “He still gives us this freedom to come and not be afraid even when people are prejudiced with hate in their heart.”
+
+When service was over at Emanuel A.M.E., parishioners were greeted by a sea of support from members of the community. Some people handed out bottles of water and cookies to churchgoers as they left the building. Others just shared kind words and hugs.
+
+Jack Logan, 52, the founder of a Put Down the Guns Now, a nonprofit based in South Carolina that is dedicated to reducing gun violence among young people, said he attended the service at Emanuel A.M.E. for that feeling of connection.
+
+ 
+
+ “This was a tragedy for South Carolina, and America,” Logan said. “I wanted to come down here, show love and take part in this great church service today.”
+
+Another visitor, 28-year-old Ryan Shepard, a court clerk, drove to Charleston from Atlanta just to be at Emanuel’s first church service since Wednesday’s tragedy.
+
+ 
+
+ “I think we’re in an important point in American history as it relates to race relations and facing some of the darker chapters of our nation’s past that we haven’t reconciled,” Shepard said. “I wanted to be present and a part of this mourning process, to witness and support the community here.”",REAL
+3926,"Rolling Stone debacle shows how hard, and needed, sex assault reporting is (+video)","Many sexual assault activists worry that fallout from the Rolling Stone story will put a chill on the coverage of sex crimes. But transparency and thoroughness in reporting can lead to better outcomes, media experts and others say.
+
+Rolling Stone is pledging to review its editorial practices after a leading journalism school issued a blistering critique of how it reported and edited a discredited article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia.
+
+The report from the Columbia Journalism School on the discredited Rolling Stone article about an alleged campus rape at the University of Virginia reads like a treatise on how not to conduct journalism. ""The [journalistic] failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking,"" says the Columbia report, which was commissioned by Rolling Stone.
+
+As fallout from the story continues (on Monday, the fraternity at the heart of the discredited rape allegations announced plans to pursue legal action against Rolling Stone), many sexual-assault activists worry that it will put a chill on the coverage of sex crimes – journalism that activists say is crucial to bringing rape out of the shadows and addressing it.
+
+""I think the worst-case scenario would be that journalists don’t want to cover this topic,"" says Tracy Cox, communications director for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC).
+
+But the authors of the Columbia report itself say they hope their critique of the Rolling Stone story is taken as a lesson to reporters and editors about how to do better, rather than as a discouragement to journalists against wading into such a fraught topic.
+
+Ms. Cox and media experts urge reporters to take the time needed to gather an array of facts and talk to a range of individuals. And they emphasize the importance of transparency – which includes disclosures about what reporters don't know and why. Also, no matter how sensitive journalists may be to a source, they can't suspend all skepticism, media observers say.
+
+""It would be a really unfortunate outcome if journalists backed away from doing this kind of reporting as a result of this highly visible failure, because this is important work. And it’s hard work,"" said Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and one of the authors of the report, in a press conference Monday. ""This kind of reporting environment, this kind of subject – it’s a new frontier for serious accountability journalism.... This is an area where we have got to have a conversation amongst ourselves about how to get better.""
+
+The Columbia report cites numerous instances where appropriate journalistic procedures should have raised red flags with the Rolling Stone story. A prime example: Editors should have insisted that reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely contact the three friends whom ""Jackie"" said she met with after the alleged rape.
+
+""We want [journalists] to see that despite the complexities and difficulties [in reporting about sexual assault, it] can be done well, can be done accurately, and can have widespread positive impacts,"" Cox says. ""Through their reporting, they’re telling victims' stories. They can help to contribute to widespread societal change.""
+
+Cox and media experts agree that there are many ways reporters can step into the murky territory of sexual-assault reporting – where reporters may be relying on non-adjudicated testimony and trying to find a delicate balance between being sympathetic to someone dealing with trauma while still exercising due diligence – and still avoid the mistakes that Rolling Stone made. The NSVRC has worked with the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., which teaches writing and media ethics, to develop a free online course for journalists who write about sexual assault.
+
+""If a story isn’t quite where it needs to be, it’s OK to hold it and flush out those facts and do more interviews,"" says Cox. ""It’s better to have the right story than go with something that’s wrong and in the end causes more harm than good.""
+
+One major problem with Ms. Erdely's story, note the authors of the Columbia report, may simply have been the way she approached it initially – her determination to find an illustrative example that corroborated the story she wanted to tell, and her decision to go with the one that seemed the most lurid and shocking, even though other, more verifiable accounts existed.
+
+""When journalists write stories, they usually start looking for one or two things when looking for examples or anecdotes. One of the things we look for is the thing that represents a larger reality. You can’t just pick out the easiest one to report,"" says Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at Poynter. Reporting about something like campus rape, or how institutions respond, may indeed call for occasional anecdotes to illustrate the story, he adds, but ""I think it also calls for tools now available to us like data analysis.""
+
+The Columbia report also talks about the problem with the reliance on pseudonyms – something Rolling Stone did for ""Jackie"" as well as the three friends and the date who she claimed instigated the gang rape.
+
+""Pseudonyms are inherently undesirable in journalism. They introduce fiction and ask readers to trust that this is the only instance in which a publication is inventing details at its discretion,"" says the report, which goes on to suggest that Rolling Stone consider banning them or allowing them only in very rare instances.
+
+""There’s this tremendous tension now between anonymity and verifiability. And this particular example of journalism malpractice has made it a lot harder,"" Mr. Clark says.
+
+Clark isn't convinced that granting automatic anonymity to sexual assault victims – which many media outlets routinely do – is a best practice, either for journalism or for addressing sexual assault.
+
+""Are you going to try to humanize [the victim] by giving her or him a false name? Are you doing that to protect their privacy? If you do that, will you be tempted to change other details to create a disguise that protects the person?"" he asks. ""All these moves we make to protect the vulnerable are a kind of form of the journalistic equivalent of witness protection, but they’re also a gateway drug for fabrication or exaggeration.""
+
+Cox at the NSVRC disagrees, noting that privacy is a huge issue for many victims and a reason they may not come forward, and that some fear for their safety. ""I don’t think abolishing all pseudonyms is the answer. I think you have to do it on a case-by-case basis,"" she says.
+
+Ultimately, media observers say, a lot of the Rolling Stone problems can be avoided with proper transparency.
+
+In certain cases, it may be impossible for some details to be corroborated – but when that's the case, the lack of corroboration should be made clear, the Columbia report says.
+
+""Transparency is a more important virtue than ever in journalism,"" says Clark. ""I think there was so little transparency in the Rolling Stone story that it should be a harsh reminder of what happens when we’re unwilling to tell our readers what we know, how we know it, and even more importantly, what we don’t know. And why we don’t know it.""",REAL
+477,"Walmart Gives 500,000 Workers A Raise","WASHINGTON -- In a move that could alter the minimum wage debate and improve the image of the world's largest retailer, Walmart announced it will raise the baseline wage of its current store employees to $10 per hour, bringing pay hikes to an estimated 500,000 workers.
+
+The company said in an announcement on Thursday that it would raise its wage floor to $9 in April, followed by a second boost to $10 by next February.
+
+The decision follows similar moves by other major retailers such as Gap and IKEA, but the sheer size of Walmart sets the company apart. The Arkansas-based retailer is the largest private-sector employer in the U.S., with an estimated 1.4 million employees, and it is largely seen as a trend-setter in the retail industry.
+
+""Overall, these are strategic investments in our people to reignite the sense of ownership they have in our stores,"" McMillon said. ""As a result, we firmly believe that our customers will benefit from a better store experience, which can drive higher sales and returns for our shareholders over time.
+
+""Right now we want to make sure everybody is crystal clear [on] how vital our store experience is for our future,"" McMillon added in a later CNBC interview. ""Customers need to be served, and associates need to be happy and love their job.""
+
+According to a Walmart spokesman, the new wage floors will apply to current employees. New hires next year will be earning at least $9, but will be bumped up to at least $10 per hour after roughly six months of training.
+
+In the CNBC interview, McMillon suggested that the improving U.S. economy -- with unemployment falling recently to 5.7 percent from a peak of 10 percent after the recession -- was also pressuring Walmart to raise wages.
+
+""It's great to see the job market getting better, and the market works, so we're adjusting to that market,"" he said.
+
+Walmart has long been saddled with a reputation as a low-wage employer, and its battles with labor unions -- in particular the United Food and Commercial Workers union -- stretch back decades. In recent years, labor groups have organized high-profile worker strikes to coincide with the company's Black Friday shopping events, pillorying the retailer over its pay practices.
+
+The across-the-board pay hikes should help rehabilitate that image. They will probably also help Walmart improve customer service in its stores. Over the past two years, bare shelves in Walmart supercenters have become a common sight. A report from a research firm last year traced the troubles in part to a lack of investment in the company's labor.
+
+""We know that this wouldn't have happen[ed] without our work to stand together with hundreds of thousands of supporters to change the country's largest employer,” Emily Wells, an OUR Walmart member, said in a statement Thursday from the group. Wells said she's currently earning $9.50 per hour and will now see a raise, though she added that workers still face erratic scheduling.
+
+A $10 wage would still leave many workers and their families below the poverty line, but it's well above the $7.25 federal minimum wage that still prevails in states without a higher one.
+
+The fact that Walmart is raising its base wage could help lawmakers in Congress in their push to raise the federal wage floor, which hasn't been raised since 2009. Democrats have proposed hiking it to $10.10 per hour and tying it to an inflation index, but Republicans in both chambers have blocked the measure from moving forward.
+
+""It is encouraging that the nation’s largest employer, Walmart, has recognized what Republicans in Congress fail to acknowledge: that $7.25 is significantly too low an hourly wage for any American worker,"" said Drew Hammill, spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). ""We hope that this move will help convince Republicans to stop blocking efforts to raise the wage.""
+
+With Congress gridlocked, many states have moved ahead with raises to their own minimum wages, with a slate of ballot measures passing in the November elections. For the first time ever, a majority of states now have a higher minimum wage than the federal level.",REAL
+4858,An open letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates: Bring on instant replay!,"As you gentlemen undoubtedly know, Week 1 of the 2016 NFL season concluded with its usual and unusual fanfare: roaring crowds, jammed parking lots, overserved fans, heartfelt renditions of “The Star Spangled Banner” (with some players kneeling, others raising their fists and an entire team locking arms) and several exciting games decided by just one point.
+
+While each contest this past weekend had its own series of questionable plays, viewers were at least assured a baseline sense of accuracy and “truth” in the outcome. That’s because there’s a system in place to examine and confirm every score, turnover or controversial play. The NFL has tweaked its instant-replay rules over the years in an effort to offer a sense of transparency to fans, casual fantasy players and big-time bettors following the action in Vegas. Although there probably always will be some plays that will generate partisan debate, the NFL has basically brought “fact-checking” into its games through the use of instant replay.
+
+Doesn’t the most important contest in the country deserve the same treatment? After working in Silicon Valley for the past decade, I have learned that digital technology can take democracy to a new level. Today facts, videos, photos and public documents are all readily available online for anyone to see. When presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appeared on last week’s prime-time forum with NBC’s Matt Lauer, America’s collective BS detector started to sound — loudly.
+
+Almost immediately, the electorate and the media began to question whether the moderators of the upcoming presidential debates can hold the candidates to a basic standard of truth.
+
+Therefore, since the future of our country and the world is at stake, I propose that the Commission on Presidential Debates change course and reform a clearly antiquated debate system and bring it into the information age. Specifically, I urge you, as heads of the commission, to leverage the technology built in this country by immigrants and the children of immigrants to perform real-time fact-checking on stage during the debates.
+
+Here is my proposal: During the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, the moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, should go about his business as usual, sitting in front of the candidates and posing questions — but be joined by a team of fact-checkers from Factcheck.org, a project run by the nonpartisan Annenberg Public Policy Center (itself part of Donald Trump’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania). Just like in professional football games, each side would be given two challenges. The candidates could then use them over the course of the 90-minute debate. If one heard a “lie” during the other’s response, he or she could press a button that would illuminate a red light at his or her podium. Once the other side finished its response, the moderator would allow the candidate who “threw the red flag” to explicitly challenge the statement at issue.
+
+Members of the fact-check team would then go to work to determine the veracity of the answer and relay their findings to the moderator. If the challenger were to be correct, then he or she would still have two challenges and the candidate whose statement was found false, well, would be shown to be a liar in front of the whole country. If, however, the challenge were to be unfounded — and the speaker’s statement is determined to be factually sound — then the challenger would lose one of his or her challenges and be shown as ill-informed.
+
+The candidates wouldn’t be the only ones who could issue a challenge, however. Just like how the NFL automatically reviews plays during the last two minutes of a half, the debate moderator and the fact-checkers could weigh in on any possible mistruths after the closing remarks and make the call without a candidate’s being able to respond.
+
+So careful what you say, Mr. Trump and Secretary Clinton, because under this scenario you would not have the final word — the truth would.
+
+Although it’s no game-show gimmick, this new format would make for riveting political theater and has the potential to bring in more than the 100 million expected debate viewers. Most important, though, those who tune in could expect to hear verifiable facts, even if only on a few nights.
+
+I have bounced this idea off a few colleagues and business leaders and their response has been the same: They love it but it would take way too long! This seemed to be a fair point, so I decided to test it. I took the subject of immigration and the proposed Great Wall of Mexico. I wanted to see what each candidate’s record or position was on securing America’s southern border. Trump has changed and restated his proposed policy of deporting 11 million immigrants in dizzying fashion. During his Fox News discussion with Sean Hannity, his proposal to grant amnesty came back on the table. Yet during his speech days later in Phoenix, it wasn’t. Sourcing these facts required mere microseconds in a YouTube search. It took me 0.75 seconds to find on Google what Secretary Clinton had said during her acceptance speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention: “We will not build a wall.” A second search that took another 0.54 seconds, however, turned up a Senate roll call vote on Sept. 29, 2006, when then-Senator Clinton voted for what is known as the Secure Fence Act of 2006. This bill authorized the allocation of $7 billion to build and fortify a 700-mile fence across all of Arizona’s border with Mexico, as well parts of those of California, New Mexico and Texas. So basically, this fact-check took about 1.2 seconds of searching and a few more seconds of reading. Given what happened last week at the Commander in Chief Forum hosted by NBC News (my former employer) in front of a live audience of veterans and families of veterans, I decided to focus on the much-scrutinized topics of email servers and Iraq. Secretary Clinton’s assertion that she took her use of the private email server “very seriously” and “did exactly what I should have done” stood somewhat in contradiction to what FBI Director Comey said on July 5, when he clearly observed about Clinton’s staffers, “There is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” In other words, if challenged, Secretary Clinton would have lost this round of fact-checking. Trump has claimed that he was against the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the very beginning. In this case, I consulted Factcheck.org, which described a Sept. 11, 2002 appearance by Trump on “The Howard Stern Show” when the host asked Trump if he supported a war with Iraq, and Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so.” The YouTube video of this segment is like the replay that clearly shows that the ball came out before the knee touched the ground — it doesn’t lie. Working in media and technology, as we do here at Salon, I fully recognize that this concept, like any innovative idea, needs beta-testing. A director at Factcheck.org told me, “Holding candidates accountable for making false statements is an admirable goal, but live fact-checking is a dangerous thing to do.” He cautioned, “I would be wary of it and, in general, use it only if the statement in dispute already has been thoroughly researched and proven clearly false.” That’s a high bar, of course, and perhaps that’s just as well. The 2016 debates are only a couple of weeks away and we have some more work to do to get this concept ready for primetime. But an interim step could be taken immediately. Both CNN and MSNBC have begun using a fact-check crawl at the bottom of the screen during their coverage of speeches. This is a great first step, one we would like to see the commission mandate for all the networks carrying the debates, so that the viewing public could see the record set straight in real time. I am not naive enough to think that these actions would stop the deceptive remarks, but it would certainly make the candidates think twice about it — for once. Note: A phone message left yesterday to the commission was not returned.",REAL
+8371,Federal Employee With Stage IV Cancer May Lose Job For Taking Medical Marijuana,"A 36-year-old U.S. man diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in March of this year is now being forced to confront the likelihood of losing his job should he choose to use marijuana for the purpose of relieving symptoms caused by his cancer and cancer treatments.
+John Doe is a married father of one. He spent at least ten years as a biologist and environmental protection specialist and planned large scale projects to minimize environmental impacts. He also directed the cleanup of solid waste sites and oil spills for several federal agencies. (We granted him anonymity because if he is suspected of using marijuana he will be fired.)
+He told Shadowproof that he hoped to move to the private sector in the months leading up to the diagnosis to be closer to his wife’s family or his own family. “But the diagnosis changed that, since a stage IV cancer patient can’t get life insurance on the private market and the health insurance available to federal employees was a better deal” for him than what was available under the Affordable Care Act. “It’s gotten worse since then.”
+After experiencing complications with the prescribed medicines for his cancer, the doctor recommended medical marijuana, “which is required to get a card in the state I had been living in and also in the state in which I live now.”
+Since marijuana is listed under the Controlled Substances Act as a schedule 1 substance by the DEA, doctors cannot prescribe it. “Dronabinol/Marinol gets around that by being a synthetic analog— apparently it’s okay if you pay a pharmaceutical company for it, but not okay if you grow it yourself,” Doe said.
+Doe was never offered a prescription for dronabinol. Instead, it was recommended he use medical marijuana should he need nausea relief and appetite stimulation, and he used it when he needed it to function, “which was typically for the several days following chemo so that I could stop the nausea. It’s constant, by the way, readers should know that it does not come in waves, and there is no relief.”
+But Doe had to hide his medical marijuana use from everyone. “Federal employees are barred from using any illegal drug and can be fired even if the use is on their own time away from work.”
+“All federal employees receive a memo each year from their agency solicitor or DOJ reminding them specifically that medical marijuana is not recognized as valid by the DEA, and since all marijuana (except dronabinol) is listed as schedule 1, it’s use is ‘inconsistent with federal employment’ and employees can be fired if they are caught using it or if they test positive during a drug test.”
+Unfortunately for Doe, drug testing is likely to expand from law enforcement, firefighters, commercial drivers, and seasonal employees to his position at the agency. Any employee may be forced to submit to a test if there is “reasonable suspicion” that employee is using drugs. “I’m not sure the threat of a lawsuit for discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act would help me forestall a drug test. I’d like to point out as well that my use has been limited to edibles, and that I do not work under the influence. When I use, it is after work so that I can eat.”
+Back in August 2015, Doe suffered bouts of constipation and diarrhea, symptoms he assumed were triggered by all the stress brought on after having his first child. While the constipation and diarrhea diminished, the issues did not entirely go away.
+Doe mentioned these symptoms to his doctor in October, who noticed that Doe had also lost around five or six pounds. “He then asked how the baby was doing and said that I was probably just dealing with stress and asked me to track how I feel and report back to him if things didn’t improve in a week.”
+Things did not improve, and he found himself having to use the bathroom more often than usual. After another doctor’s visit, he was asked to make some dietary changes and prescribed a laxative and stool softener with instructions to call back after a week or two if things didn’t improve.
+In November, after Doe’s symptoms continued to worsen, he made an appointment for a colonoscopy. Unfortunately, the hospital was booked so he had to wait.
+By mid-January, he used the bathroom nearly 10 times a day. “[The doctor] finally ordered a thorough set of blood and stool tests to look for a range of disorders, parasites, etc. Results that came back in mid-February were all in the middle of reference range for blood chemistry and negative for parasites. According to the doctor, I was healthy as a horse, and he gave me a large stack of literature on irritable bowel syndrome. It was at this point that the hospital finally found time to get me in for a colonoscopy.”
+In March, Doe finally had a colonoscopy. “I fell asleep on the gurney fully expecting to wake up and hear that it was IBS.” After waking up in the recovery room, the doctor came in and told him that she had some bad news. They found and removed a polyp in his sigmoid colon, which was the good news. He was then shown a picture of an obstruction a few inches further into his sigmoid colon.
+“There was a obstructing tumor so large that she couldn’t push the scope beyond that point. Preliminary diagnosis was colon cancer,” he shared. They had to do a CT scan immediately to see if the cancer spread, and he needed surgery within a week to install a colostomy bag to bypass the blockage.
+“I remember thinking, ‘Well, if they’d been able to get me in for a routine colonoscopy back in November I might not be in this situation,” followed by “I guess this means I can eat onions and garlic again since it’s not IBS.”
+Days after having a CT scan, Doe went in to work to fill out several forms, “mostly making sure my designations of beneficiaries were current and submitting an open-ended sick leave request.” While he was there, he received a call from the gastroenterologist. “My CT results were in, and they weren’t good. In addition to the tumor in the colon I also had numerous tumors in my liver and lungs. That was…hard to hear.”
+The doctors put off the consultation for surgery to install the colostomy until Wednesday of that week, but he didn’t make it that far. “My digestive tract was not happy after a full week of nothing but clear liquid, and I had trouble passing anything. My wife and I went to the emergency room on Tuesday and after waiting several hours had surgery to install the colostomy. That went well. Then we met with the local oncologist.”
+Doe was told they would focus on palliative care with drugs, and that surgery was not an option. “I give you about a fifty percent shot at living another two years.”
+He sought second opinions and got two, one at the University of Wisconsin and another at the University of Iowa. “Those doctors were more encouraging. Despite a stage IV diagnosis and spread [of cancer] to more than one distant organ, they held out hope that if my cancer responded well to chemotherapy perhaps we could consider surgery given my age and otherwise great health.”
+As of publication, Doe has done one course, or twelve rounds, of FOLFOX plus Avastin. FOLFOX is a chemotherapy regimen for colorectal cancer, and Avastin is a cancer medicine that is supposed to disrupt the growth of cancer cells.
+“I also took and continue to take several supplements my doctors have suggested to me: curcumin, vitamin D, vitamin E, etc. The tumor marker CEA in my blood samples dropped precipitously each time I went in for the next round of chemo, and CT scans at various points during treatment documented shrinkage of the tumors in the liver and lungs.”
+While comparing his most recent CT scan to the first scan, doctors have pointed out just how much the tumors had shrunk and noted that some of the tumors in the liver appeared to be mostly dead. “They also said that given my response to chemo, they’d like to give me a shot at surgery. To do that, they need to grow the unaffected lobe of my liver before surgery and then the surgery, assuming it happens, will be a great big invasive procedure to remove the tumor in my colon, some lymph nodes, and the still-affected part of my liver, and burn out the remaining tumor tissue in my lungs. I am looking forward to that, believe it or not.”
+Despite undergoing a series of traumatic symptoms, medical treatments, and consultations, Doe continues to work full time, and on a number of occasions he has worked during chemotherapy sessions in the hospital.
+At first, the only side effects he felt from the chemotherapy were fatigue and nausea. He told Shadowproof that each chemo session involves receiving an IV drug that helps minimize nausea, and that he was also prescribed prochlorperazine, which is to be taken every 8 hours and scopolamine patches to wear behind his ear to prevent motion sickness.
+The prochlorperazine worsened his fatigue, and after a few days of struggling to stay awake on prochlorperazine, he asked if there was anything else they could prescribe. “They gave me ondansetron, which also was to be taken every 8 hours. One doctor mentioned dronabinol, AKA marinol, synthetic THC (and approved by the FDA for treating nausea), but said that would be a last resort if nothing else worked.”
+“I wondered why, since I had been researching the hell out of my treatment options and a lot of patients strongly suggested that marijuana was by far the best thing to prevent nausea and stimulate appetite. The ondansetron worked to a degree. By six hours into a dose, I would feel nauseous, and my appetite wasn’t good for several days following treatments. This worsened over time, such that my nausea and suppressed appetite would last longer and longer after chemo sessions.”
+“I still continued to work but there would be long stretches of feeling uncomfortable when my nausea wasn’t controlled.”
+Should Doe lose his federal employment because he is taking marijuana to help him through cancer treatment, it will mean he also loses the life insurance policy he has through the government. If he loses that, he would be unable replace it, “as no insurance company will underwrite a new policy for a stage IV cancer patient.”
+“Being fired would cost my family dearly in the event that I die sooner rather than later, and losing the health insurance virtually guarantees that I would die sooner rather than later.”
+The cost of Doe’s chemotherapy runs between $10,000 and $20,000, depending on the hospital. “The insurance for families has quite a few copays and an annual $11,000 deductible for the family, $5,000 for the first family member to reach that number. I hit $5,000 pretty quickly after my diagnosis so while I still make copays for my family’s medical care I haven’t had to pay any for myself since May of 2016.”
+“I will have to start paying the deductible again on January 1 until I hit whatever deductible the insurance company sets for next year, which I assume will be higher than it was this year. I pay something like $350 a month for this insurance and the government pays an additional $900+ as part of my compensation package.
+Doe continued, “I haven’t seen how much the premiums in my state of residence will be going up for 2017, but I know the number of providers has dropped to one or two and those providers have limits on office visits, larger copays, and higher deductibles that I currently pay. Were I to be drug tested and fired, I would have to make do with one of those plans that carries larger costs and offers fewer benefits.”
+Right now, Doe has friends writing letters to the White House, their Representatives, and their Senators asking for either executive action to modify the 1986 Reagan Executive Order regarding off-duty drug use and to recognize state laws regarding medical marijuana. They are also helping him push for congressional action to grant marijuana the same exemption from the Controlled Substances Act “enjoyed by the alcohol and tobacco lobbies.”
+“I’d like to note that the White House responses so far have been tone deaf, and that while the responses have focused on a supposed lack of any therapeutic use of marijuana—despite the FDA approval for dronabinol, lots of state laws, and lots of very sick people saying it works—to avoid action. I’d like to know what therapeutic use alcohol and nicotine serve.”
+The White House’s response to these letters is distressing. It shows little concern for those impacted by blanket drug testing and zero tolerance drug policies. It reads in part:
+“This Administration opposes marijuana legalization, and our policy approach focuses on improving public health and safety through prevention, treatment, support for recovery, and innovative criminal justice strategies to break the cycle of drug use and crime. A considerable body of evidence shows that marijuana use, especially chronic use that begins at a young age, is associated with serious health and social problems. Studies also reveal that marijuana potency has tripled since 1990, raising serious public health concerns.
+At the same time, we share public concerns about ensuring limited Federal enforcement resources are dedicated to pursuing our highest enforcement priorities, such as preventing the distribution of marijuana to minors, preventing the sale of marijuana by criminal enterprises and gangs, preventing violence and the use of firearms in the cultivation and distribution of marijuana, and preventing drugged driving and other adverse public health consequences. We will also closely monitor implementation of marijuana legalization in individual States and prevent the diversion of marijuana to States that have not legalized its use, sale, or distribution. Outside of its highest enforcement priorities, the Federal Government has traditionally relied on State and local agencies to address marijuana activity through enforcement of their own narcotics laws.”
+Attorney Stefan Borst-Censullo, Counsel to Hoban Law Group, who specializes in cannabis legislation, explained that the federal government “defined the idea that employers have the right to terminate for off work drug use, and they’ve continued this tradition, regardless of state laws for medical marijuana.”
+Borst-Censullo told Shadowproof that this applies to “everyone,” as there is no existing marijuana law in the states which offers worker protection to patients, “and most state courts that look at the issue side with federal supremacy.” When it comes to whether or not medical marijuana users should be hopeful that they will see any changes, Borst-Censullo says no.
+“The Colorado Supreme Court ruled against a man with [multiple scoliosis] who was being blatantly discriminated against due to his ADA [Americans With Disabilities Act] status. But because marijuana is federally illegal, ADA doesn’t apply,” Borst-Censullo added.
+Doe hoped more exposure will pressure the President and Congress “to step into the 21st century” because “that is apparently what it will take to allow people access to medicine they need without fear of punishment for simply trying to control nausea or pain.” This isn’t just for him, he said. “This is for anybody and everybody in my situation.” He added, “And there are many of us.”
+The post Federal Employee With Stage IV Cancer May Lose Job For Taking Medical Marijuana appeared first on Shadowproof .
+",FAKE
+4381,Gay and lesbian troops will be protected by new Pentagon policy,"WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced Tuesday that gay and lesbian troops for the first time will be protected from discrimination by the same equal opportunity policy that protects other servicemembers.
+
+Carter announced the change at the Pentagon's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride event.
+
+The change ensures that gay and lesbian troops' complaints about discrimination based on sexual orientation will be investigated by the Military Equal Opportunity program, the same office that handles complaints based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
+
+""Discrimination of any kind has no place in America's armed forces,"" Carter said. The military needs ""to be a meritocracy.""
+
+The Pentagon rescinded its ""don't ask, don't tell"" policy in 2011. Under it, gay and lesbian troops could be kicked out of service if their sexual orientation became known.
+
+""With this policy revision, we are now ensuring that servicemembers are afforded protection against discrimination in the department's military equal opportunity program, provided to all military members,"" said Lt. Cmdr. Nathan Christensen, a Pentagon spokesman.
+
+Previously, gay and lesbian troops were required to register discrimination complaints with inspector general offices.
+
+Carter called diversity critical to developing the troops the Pentagon will need for future battles. Excluding qualified troops, he said, is ""bad defense policy.""
+
+Carter spoke before a standing-room-only crowd of troops from each service, from enlisted personnel to general officers and top civilian officials.
+
+Amanda Simpson, the highest-ranking transgender official at the Pentagon, told the audience she has her Army post not because of her gender but ""because I happen to be the best person to do the job.""
+
+The military still can kick out transgender troops for what it terms health reasons. However, the Army and the Air Force have made that process more difficult by requiring senior civilian officials to approve the discharges. The Williams Institute, a think-tank at the UCLA Law School that concentrates on issues regarding sexual orientation, estimates there are 15,000 transgender troops serving in the military.
+
+A review of military health policies, including the transgender ban, is underway, Christensen said.
+
+""The current periodic review is expected to take between 12-18 months; it is not a specific review of the department's transgender policy,"" Christensen said.
+
+Before dumping the ""don't ask, don't tell"" policy, allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly, the Pentagon conducted a nine-month study on the effect of rescinding it. That effort, led by Army Gen. Carter Ham in 2010, determined that the risks of repeal were low and manageable.
+
+Army Brig. Gen. Randy Taylor, who emceed Tuesday's ceremony, said he had to conceal his sexual orientation for most of his career, which included deployments to Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. Taylor singled out his husband for his sacrifice, and Carter shook his hand to loud applause.",REAL
+4528,"We must call him a terrorist: Dylann Roof, Fox News and the truth about why language matters","Language can obscure as much as it reveals. It’s important, now more than ever, to be clear, to call things by their proper name; to do otherwise is to risk confusion where none exists. What happened in Charleston was terrorism. Period. And terrorism, whatever else it is, is not senseless; it’s precisely the opposite.
+
+Terror is a tactic, not a cause. This is a crucially important distinction. Terrorists are calculating: they do what they do in order to inspire fear. If Dylann Roof had decided, on a whim, to gun down the first people he encountered – that would be senseless. But Dylann Roof was no nihilist. He believed in something. He was a racist. And he was propelled by specific ideas – about history, about black people, about white supremacy, and about various other cultural mythologies. “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go,” he remarked just before filling that church and those bodies with holes. These are not the words of a mentally ill person committing a senseless act; they are the cold, clear thoughts of a man on a mission, a man who knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. And this is why Dylann Roof is a terrorist.
+
+It’s been troubling to watch the media vacillate in their coverage of this story. Was it a hate crime? Was it terrorism? If there’s clarity about anything at all here, it’s about the motivations of the killer. He’s a terrorist, and he told us so. He wanted to send a message. Was he motivated by hate? Sure. But the act itself was terroristic by any measure.
+
+As many have pointed out, the media is unsure about what constitutes terrorism only when white people are the perpetrators. White men with guns are “lone wolves” or “mentally ill” or depraved criminals. Brown men with bombs are very obviously “terrorists.” This is a double standard with consequences. “Terrorism” is a word that resonates; it inspires urgency and collective action, both of which are needed if we’re to deal with the underlying problems. If white people can’t, by definition, be terrorists, then the term has no practical meaning; it’s about the actor, not the act. If terrorism is something only brown people do, then we should be honest and admit that. We should say that terrorism is about the color of the criminal, not the intent of the crime.
+
+Equivocating about the nature of the crime has an additional consequence: It diminishes the role of ideas. We can think of the human brain as a piece of hardware, and of ideas as software motivating behavior. Rather than focusing on the mental state of the murderer, we should be talking about the ideas that inspired the murders. Dylann Roof believed his country was under assault by black people. He walked into that church and killed those people under the delusion that he was a soldier in a war. The question is why did he think this? Where did he get this idea?
+
+We can’t know for sure, but here’s what we do know: Everyone saw this coming. In 2013, the DHS released a report warning of a growing danger from right-wing extremists. Indeed, officials believed domestic terrorism to be a greater threat than Islamic militants. Echoing this theme, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that domestic hate groups, often under the guise of “patriot groups,” have increased significantly since 2008, the year Obama was elected. I don’t know whether Dylann Roof was an active member of any of these groups, but it’s clear that he believed in and espoused their ideology. These findings ought to have inspired concern from the political and media establishment. However, because of the confusion about what terrorism is and who terrorists are, there was nothing but outrage on the right. House Republican Leader, John Boehner, dismissed the report as “offensive and unacceptable.” Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis called it “political and ideological profiling.” Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin wrote that it “was one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I’d ever read.” These people failed us. They failed, in part, because they were too consumed with foreign enemies to notice the presence of internal ones. They failed because they refused to see what was right in front of their faces. And they failed because they remained blind to the power of ideas, of rhetoric. For years, right-wing demagogues have propagated this myth that the country was under siege by black people and immigrants and communists and radical liberals and so on. Much of the Tea Party movement was motivated by this ideology. Conservative leaders decided, for political reasons, to indulge this, to capitalize on it. Perhaps that was wise as a political strategy, but there are consequences: You whip people into a frenzy for long enough, someone, eventually, is going to cross that line. Dylann Roof crossed that line. He was a homegrown terrorist. And he was the product of a nativist ideology of white supremacy, the flag of which flies still over the state capitol of South Carolina. Perhaps now we can reckon with the roots of this truth. That starts with calling it what it is: racially-motivated terrorism.",REAL
+6065,Tens of Thousands of People Just Got Fooled By FAKE Ballot Without Trump’s Name On It,"Pinterest 
+There have been plenty of stories of voter fraud across the country, but a photoshopped picture has taken the internet by storm. In it, Donald Trump’s name is left off of the ballot whil Hillary Clinton’s is listed twice. 
+The doctored photo hit Twitter and has since been re-tweeted tens of thousands of times. Take a look at the picture for yourself: 
+— Hatrick Penry (@Hatrick__Penry) October 24, 2016 Hey guys, seriously? How is this not viral yet? Are we going to be taken as that stupid and let it go? This is an Oregon Ballot. pic.twitter.com/4eSSrK3aaB 
+— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) October 27, 2016 
+About an hour after John Laussier started the hoax, he took responsibility for it and admitted that it wasn’t real: “In case its not super obvious that last tweet from me is a hoax. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet folks.” Is Trump on the Oregon ballot? YES. But a hoax grabbed a lot of retweets today. Official sample ballot >>> https://t.co/LR1smKW2pO pic.twitter.com/WvMIhyzUHz 
+— KVAL News (@KVALnews) October 21, 2016 
+“I’m hoping people figure out soon this was fake, and, in the future, look at what they’re passing on,” Laussier told KATU . “We’ve got to act responsibly. Get out your ballots, take a good hard look, and vote with some research!” 
+Laussier told KATU that it was “irresponsible of me to post the tweet,” and he apologized. LawNewz reported : 
+The Oregon Secretary of State’s Office told KGQ that they are evaluating whether the hoax violated election law. Spokesperson Molly Woon emphasized to the television station that the Oregon Secretary of State is “confident” in the election process. 
+While Laussier makes a good point about people being discerning about what they share on the internet, there are a couple of important points here. 
+First, there is good reason for people to be vigilant about voter fraud . There are numerous reports of the problem across the country and it’s good that people are paying attention. 
+Second, the mainstream media is largely in the tank for Clinton and operates as a propaganda machine. Most people don’t have the time — or if they do, don’t have the resources — to thoroughly vet something they come across. You know who has both? The media… but they refuse to do so because of their bias. 
+If this ballot was real, people may have been able to force change by bringing light to what would have been a serious problem. 
+That certainly doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be discerning or that they should repost or re-tweet everything they come across. There’s something to be said for people being vigilant, paying attention, and forcing those in the media and those in positions to do something about it to take a look. 
+Now, that doesn’t mean that people should automatically believe that something’s true and adjust their beliefs/voting decision because of it; it just means that it’s good that people are paying attention and forcing those in a position to check it out to do so. 
+While Laussier’s tweet was an interesting experiment, the timing was poor given the rampant voter fraud going on throughout the country. This was a hoax, but there are plenty of instances where it isn’t, and people shouldn’t be discouraged from being vigilant about it.",FAKE
+5767,Love Him Or Hate Him: Trump Is The Revolution Against The Establishment,"Oct 26, 2016 3:50 PM 0 
+Submitted by Claudio Grass via Acting-Man.com, The U.S. Elections: The Latest Crack in the System 
+The 2016 U.S. presidential elections are unprecedented: I don’t believe we have ever witnessed before a campaign year so toxic, so dangerously divisive and full of ad hominem attacks. Both camps have vilified the opposition and their followers, creating a schism in society. There has been no rational dialogue on the issues that truly concern the American public. 
+The schism 
+Instead, we have witnessed personal insults and petty attacks, rumors and gossip. At this point, as a result of this catastrophic campaign, the public will not vote in favor of the candidate they agree with the most or the one they like, but against the one they hate! 
+In this article, we do not focus on comparisons between Clinton and Trump; enough has been said and written about the candidates themselves. Here, we look at their supporters – the crowd behind the candidates, those that will in fact shape American policy making in the coming four years. 
+Hillary Clinton: The Establishment Remains in Control 
+The most important and formidable group within those backing Clinton belong to the upper echelon of society: Wall Street’s movers and shakers, big business, the top of the political pyramid and the servants and profiteers of the public sector. In one word: the establishment. 
+Clinton’s support base includes therefore practically everyone who profits from government regulations and government corruption – they have everything to lose if Hillary doesn’t win. It is the same group that advocates and leads the political correctness movement ; they are those state-bred and fed intellectuals who poison the university campus and mass media circus with their belief that they can transform the U.S. into a “utopia”. 
+The candidate anointed by the Deep State 
+In reality, this “utopia” will be created through intense centralization, endless wars and plundering, only to create a totalitarian government where the political elite enforces its will and instructs the public on how to live a happy life, which only benefits the top strata of society that designed it in the first place. Years ago, Jewish American philosopher Hannah Arendt summarized the toxic impact of political correctness as follows: 
+“There is no thought process without freedom. To deprive man of his liberty is to deprive him of his own ideas, and if one is not allowed to think, only subjugation and slavery remain.” 
+This can only be achieved through a strong foothold on the centralized state and its propaganda engine, the mass media, operating under the doctrine of Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, better known as public relations. 
+Then there’s the other extreme of Clinton’s supporters: the artificially created underprivileged minorities. These groups have come to depend on the state for support and protection, which has also made it easy for the state to indoctrinate them and reset their mindset to its advantage. 
+Those are the people who have fallen in the trap of thinking that only the state can provide them with what they need for a good life, when in reality it only disempowered them. The globalist Clinton herself accuses Trump of “populism”, casting “nationalism” in a negative light, but she is actually the one promising free lunches for everyone: lenient immigration laws, higher minimum wages, universal healthcare, etc. 
+Clinton also preaches against income inequality and condemns Wall Street greed in her speeches, while her campaign cashes in from Wall Street’s finest: JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. 
+Under those circumstances… what can you possibly do? Ms. Clinton’s top five donors are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, DLA Piper, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley. Somehow we don’t think Wall Street has reason to fear her much. Trump – the Greatest Politically Incorrect Shock in Decades? 
+Whenever people are forced by the government to accept and pay for things they do not want, the outcome is discontent and opposition, typically suppressed and downplayed by the mainstream media in accordance with the state’s agenda of political correctness. This further escalates the situation and things often take unpleasant turns, including the fostering of racist and bigoted subsections that we see within the Trump voting base. 
+But they are not the majority, not by long shot! One might get this impression, because the mainstream media tend to focus exclusively on this sub-set of supporters through footage and interviews at Trump rallies, because they are considered “interesting” material; after all, they say outrageously horrible things and are therefore great for TV sensationalism. 
+What does Donald Trump stand for? From my perspective, for anything and everything! He stands for everyone who is sick and tired of the current system and the political elite who have grown out of touch with ordinary American citizens. You will find them among the working class, small business owners, and the segment of society that used to be known as the middle class before the crisis; they all harbor grievances against the establishment. 
+There have been a few halfhearted attempts to paint Trump as part of the establishment because he is rich and has always hobnobbed with the elite as a result of his social status, but they have generally failed. For one thing, he is not a politician. For another thing, his consistent political incorrectness and the list of his political enemies (which includes many Republican Deep State zombies) has simply made it impossible to lump him with the establishment. 
+
+These are people who understand that the slogan “the Union and the Constitution forever” has been under attack and downgraded to nothing more than an empty phrase by the power elite and the Deep State. We see first hand how the Patriot Act directly violates not only the first amendment’s guarantee of free speech, but also the fourth and fifth amendments, thereby tearing apart the very foundation of a country once based on respect for civil liberties. 
+There is no doubt that the second amendment will be crushed under Clinton as well, “regulating to extinction” the natural right to self-defense and personal sovereignty. We must never forget that we are born with inherent rights, that can neither be granted nor taken away from us by the State. As Judge Napolitano once put it: 
+“Natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government. As our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. 
+
+A natural right is an area of individual human behavior – like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy – immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t need the government’s permission.” 
+Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face to face in the last of three presidential debates under the banner of “The Union And The Constitution Forever” 
+
+Even though polls suggest that Trump is trailing nationally, they probably underestimate exactly how big the Trump wave is, and it is significant: between 74% and 83% of Republicans said they will support him (according to polls conducted between Oct 9 th -11 th ). But there is also the silent majority that has been present at his rallies. This silent majority does not necessarily consist of Trump fans, but they do not want to see the country falling into the abyss of state centralization and political correctness. A sign often seen at Trump rallies these days – which continue to attract lots of people. Only recently, 20,000 deplorables came to see Trump at a rally in Tampa, while Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine motivated a grand total of 50 people to come and hear him speak in West Palm Beach (reportedly they weren’t particularly enthusiastic; we don’t know how many of the 50 were from the press). 
+
+They want to discontinue the economic system that has taken them from bad to worse – they are the American version of the European anti-establishment movement. They are well aware of Trump’s coarse character and crude remarks, but feel they can overlook that, for the sake of his main strategic advantage: Trump’s promise that he does not want America to be controlled by the establishment anymore. 
+A Tale of Two Hatreds 
+“Politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching… then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.” Hillary Clinton, National Multi-Housing Council, April 2013 
+One key reason behind the peoples’ hostility towards Clinton is that she personally embodies the hypocrisy and the hubris of the U.S. federal government itself: a government that maims and kills millions with its war on terror, it arms and supports murderous regimes and ideological fanatics and it is known to deploy chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. And yet, it somehow pretends to hold the moral high ground and lectures others on human rights. 
+Just as America is an “exceptional” country, for which normal standards don’t apply, Clinton is its “exceptional” candidate. She accuses her opponent of populism, when her own platform is entirely based on crowd-pleasing promises. 
+She calls Trump’s policies fascistic while her own would put the final nail on the coffin of free speech. She claims to stand up for the little guy, while she funds her campaign with Wall Street money. She positions herself as the defender of minorities’ and women’s rights, while her Foundation accepts donations from the most oppressive regimes on the planet. 
+Defending the rights of women isn’t cheap, so obviously one can’t be too picky and choosy about one’s donors. 
+
+At the same time, the American electorate also feels hostility for Trump; that hate is not equivalent though, as few would argue he is trying to hide who he is. The reason why so many dislike him is very different, and it has to do with the identity he projects. He is the ultimate “anti-intellectual”. 
+Of course the term “intellectual” is quite broad these days, and many intellectuals dislike Trump solely because of what it would say about who they are (in the eyes of their like-minded peers). But these people share a common denominator: they are educated beyond their intelligence and critically depend on repeating what other “intellectual” people say, as they feel (consciously or not) their ignorance would be exposed if they dared to express an original idea. 
+Trump’s world, according to a recent NYT cartoon. The statist intelligentsia certainly feels threatened by Trump. 
+The Day After: The Legacy of a Bitter Campaign Year 
+Unfortunately, whoever wins, the nation will pay a price for this “divide and conquer” rhetoric. Americans today are too polarized and the tensions that are brewing in the background will not just go away the day after the election: racial and social divisions, as well as the split caused by the choice between a planned vs. a free market economy, a big or a small government. 
+Under Trump, we can only hope that America will be given time to heal and to overcome these divisions. Free speech is key: Society can only heal if it returns to a culture of debate with a willingness to agree to disagree. 
+From what we know from modern American history, we shouldn’t be surprised that the financial markets appear to prefer Hillary over Trump. Wall Street, the bankers and the military industrial complex are expected to continue to thrive under President Clinton. The establishment will live on. Right now the establishment is seemingly pushing for war against Russia and Clinton is undeniably on board with this aggressive narrative. 
+And then we have Trump, who is certainly far from perfect. His objectification of women, his comments about Muslims and minorities, his crass demeanor: All these have made it very hard for him to find support for his genuine policy points. Will the “silent majority” be able to actually swing the election for Trump? Although the mainstream media seem to be of one mind regarding the election outcome, we certainly wouldn’t rule it out. If ever there was a candidate provoking the “Bradley effect” in polls, it is surely Trump. Moreover, thanks to Wikileaks it is by now public knowledge that the polls are indeed rigged . Readers may recall that we have expressed doubts about the accuracy of poll sampling methods already some time ago. 
+
+Even if the actual net effect of his policies were to benefit women, he won’t get them on his side by calling them pigs – there is a difference between free speech and just being plain rude, uncivil and vulgar. We may disagree with his infamous “wall” with Mexico and demands for “a new budget to rebuild our depleted military” (which makes him no different from Clinton). But he is an outsider, a businessman, and most importantly, a crack in system! 
+He challenges the status quo, and that’s why the status quo attacks him, by trying to ridicule both him and his voters, by painting them as extremists, or as ignorant and racist. The question is, why don’t we just let Trump be Trump? 
+As he himself said: “It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to!” . Consider the boldness of this statement – regardless of whether one agrees with him, he stands confidently for his principles and ideas, even against his own party’s leaders (many of which have withdrawn their support). This is a clear projection of power and independence; it says that no one can dictate their demands to him. It says that he is unafraid to speak his mind. 
+I say, we should trust his followers. It seems clear that most Trump voters are striving to defend the essence of the constitution and its original intent – to be the basis of a free society. And for me as a believer in civil rights and sovereignty, this is enough to give him or let me rather say, his voters, the benefit of the doubt.",FAKE
+9233,"MI5 Chief Gives First Ever Interview to Press, Hypes 'Aggressive Russia' - Jason Ditz","MI5 Chief Gives First Ever Interview to Press, Hypes 'Aggressive Russia' 
+The first time an active MI5 chief has spoken to the press   Antiwar.com 
+The first time a top British spy has ever given a newspaper interview, MI5 chief Andrew Parker has spoken with the Guardian , playing up the “growing threat” posed by Russia against British interests around the world. 
+Parker claimed a “whole range of state organs and powers” in Russia are being brought to bear against Britain and the US, claiming that the advent of cyberwarfare has increased the number of ways in which Russia can move against them. 
+Parker went on to claim that Russia defines itself by opposition to the West and, despite being a “covert threat for decades” has been increasingly hostile, citing their operations in Ukraine and Syria as proof that they are acting to just spite the West. 
+This has been a common western talking point, but in practice Western (read: US) policy in both Ukraine and Syria appears to have itself been built with an eye toward being on the opposite side from Russia in the first place, and Russia is then condemned for acting in their own interests. 
+This was particularly glaring in Syria, where Russia’s interest was obviously in the survival of a friendly Syrian government to host their naval base, and where “countering” Russia has brought the US “anti-ISIS coalition” into increasingly overt support for al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front, simply because they’re the ones most directly fighting against Russia.",FAKE
+8551,Russia is Hoarding Gold at an Alarming Rate — The Next World War Will Be Fought with Currencies,"Home / Be The Change / Antiwar / Russia is Hoarding Gold at an Alarming Rate — The Next World War Will Be Fought with Currencies Russia is Hoarding Gold at an Alarming Rate — The Next World War Will Be Fought with Currencies Jay Syrmopoulos October 26, 2016 1 Comment 
+Moscow, Russia – With all eyes on Russia’s unveiling their latest nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which NATO has dubbed the “SATAN” missile , as tensions with the U.S. increase, Moscow’s most potent “weapon” may be something drastically different. 
+The rapidly evolving geopolitical “weapon” brandished by Russia is an ever increasing stockpile of gold, as well as Russia’s native currency, the ruble. 
+Take a look at the symbol below, as it could soon come to change the entire hierarchy of the international order – potentially ushering in a complete international paradigm shift – and much sooner than you might think. 
+The symbol is the new designation of the Russian ruble, Russia’s national currency. 
+Similar to how the U.S. uses the dollar sign ($), the U.K. uses the pound sign (£), and the European Union uses the euro symbol (€), Russia is about to begin exporting its symbol internationally. 
+After the failed “reset” in U.S./Russian relations by the Obama administration, and the continued deterioration of the countries relationship, Washington began targeting entire sectors of the Russian economy, as well as specific individuals, meant to impose an economic burden so severe that it would force Moscow into compliance. 
+Instead of decimating Russia, what it precipitated was a Russian response of gradually weaning themselves off of the hegemony of the U.S. petrodollar, and working with China to create an alternative to the SWIFT payment system that isn’t solely controlled by Western interests (see Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank , New Development Bank). 
+According to the Corbett Report : 
+New reports indicate that China is ready to launch its SWIFT alternative, and for those who have their ear to the ground this is the most significant move yet in the unfolding process of de-dollarization that is seeing the BRICS-led “resistance bloc” breaking away from the financial stranglehold of the US-led “Washington Consensus.” 
+For those who don’t know, SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication and is shorthand for the SWIFTNet Network that is used by over 10,500 financial institutions in 215 countries and territories to transmit financial transaction data around the world. SWIFT does not do any of the clearing or processing for these transactions itself, but instead sends the payment orders that are then settled by correspondent banks of the member institutions. Still, given the system’s near universality in the financial system, it means that virtually every international transaction between banking institutions goes through the SWIFT network. 
+This is why de-listing from the SWIFT network remains one of the primary financial weapons wielded by the US and its allies in their increasingly important financial warfare campaigns. 
+Recently, financial guru Jim Rickards, author of the book “Currency Wars,” wrote that “Russia is poised for a major comeback in its economy. Russian bonds and stocks and the Russian currency, the ruble, will all benefit.” Rickards believes a “strong turnaround” is coming within Russia, and that this comeback will benefit the ruble. 
+While still suffering from the economic warfare being waged by the U.S., Russia has realized that as long they are subservient to the petrodollar, there remains a clear and present danger of the Russian economy being devastated by the whims of Washington. 
+The Bank of Russia, that nation’s central bank, is extremely clear about its mission, and monetary policy declaring on its website: 
+Monetary policy constitutes an integral part of the state policy and is aimed at enhancing well-being of Russian citizens. The Bank of Russia implements monetary policy in the framework of inflation-targeting regime, and sees price stability, albeit sustainably low inflation, as its priority. Given structural peculiarities of the Russian economy, the target is to reduce inflation to 4% by 2017 and maintain it within that range in the medium run. 
+In layman’s terms, that means that monetary policy, similar to nuclear weapons and the military, are “an integral part of the state policy” in Russia. While many analysts have noted the increased build-up in Russia’s military arsenal, seemingly few have highlighted the massive build-up of Russian gold reserves over the past decade. 
+Below is a chart showing Russian gold reserves between 1994 and last year, 2015: 
+Since 2006, there has been a year-on-year increase that reveals a significant upward trend. The chart clearly reveals that Russia’s state policy of increasing state monetary assets, in the form of gold. Additionally, the Russian government has been converting state rubles into gold assets. From 2006 to 2015, Russia’s state holdings of gold tripled. 
+Within just the past year Russia has substantially increased its gold holdings 
+According to the Business Insider : 
+In July of this year, the central bank of Russia added 200,000 ounces of gold to its reserves. The one-month uptick in Russian gold reserves — 200,000 ounces — is approximately equal to the entire annual output of Barrick Gold’s Turquoise Ridge gold mine in Nevada. 
+At that same rate — 200,000 ounces per month — in a mere five months, Russia would add to state gold reserves the equivalent of the entire annual output of Barrick’s massive Goldstrike mine in Nevada. 
+Currently, Russian gold reserves rank seventh in the world. It’s clear that there is a concerted effort by Russian authorities to build up the country’s gold reserves as part of a national strategy to negate the effects of economic warfare waged by the United States. 
+Rickards, in his 2011 book “Currency Wars,” theorized that Russia and China could combine their gold reserves to form a global gold-backed currency to compete against the U.S. dollar. Currently, Russian reserves stand at roughly 1,500 tonnes, with Chinese reserves totaling over 1,800 tonnes (according to China — it’s likely more), which would amount to a combined total of roughly 3,300 tonnes of gold. 
+The U.S. is about to lose overarching control of policymaking within the International Monetary Fund (IMF), thus the U.S. lockup on global gold is about to vanish, according to Business Insider. 
+Imagine for a moment the distinctly real possibility that Russian-Chinese alliance could exercise indirect (or even direct) control over the IMF’s gold reserve of over 2,800 tonnes. Russian, Chinese and IMF gold combined would equal roughly 6,100 tonnes, and would allow for direct competition with the U.S. gold reserves, estimated at 8,100 tonnes. 
+Russia and China have realized that the petrodollar is wielded by Washington as it’s weapon of choice when opposing a well-armed state, and clearly see the writing on the wall – thus working together to create a new global financial paradigm. 
+The reality is that the United States is $20 trillion dollars in debt, and eventually the time will come when the U.S. economy begins to implode — and all the fiat currency people are stuck holding will essentially be worth nothing more than the paper it’s printed on. Hard assets, such as gold and silver, should be bought and taken custody of while there is still an opportunity to do so, as a means of hedging against the potentially disastrous results of the U.S. using the petrodollar as a “weapon.” 
+It’s not Russian nuclear weapons that people should fear, as the policy of mutually assured destruction essentially voids any benefit of a state launching a first-strike nuclear attack. The true threat to America is our economic house of cards, built upon the back of a neoliberal trade policy that puts the “rights” of corporations over that of people . 
+Ultimately, the United States, Russia and China are all controlled by centralized power-hungry tyrants attempting to command powerful global bureaucracies like the IMF, the World Bank, SWIFT, New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Share Google + T. Mohr 
+Tell the Red Queen and her arms manufacturing friends that. Bullets and bombs will never go out of style with these murderers. Social Trending",FAKE
+10126,Sustainable salt water battery won’t corrode and can power your home for 10 years,"Sustainable salt water battery won't corrode and can power your home for 10 years Nov 14, 2016 0 0 
+A new home battery has been developed and released that runs off of salt water instead of acid, making for a sustainably created piece of technology that can charge your home for years . 
+Conventional lead-acid batteries use two lead plates, submerged in a solution of sulfuric acid and water. The sulfuric acid is highly toxic and can burn and damage the environment if the battery leaks. These batteries use a solution of salt water instead of acid and the results are astounding. 
+As opposed to lead-acid batteries, which can only be discharged to about 50% of their capacity, these salt water batteries can be discharged to 90%, meaning they can utilized 40% more of their energy per charge. 
+Each battery can handle 3,000 discharges, meaning they can last 3,000 days and nights. They are also stackable, useful for increasing your power needs. 
+Another awesome feature is that these batteries won’t catch on fire like lead-acid batteries. 
+If you’re interested in purchasing one, you can, through Aquion’s website . They are sustainably sourced and built and they don’t corrode. 
+Legit.",FAKE
+8469,"Ever Google Yourself? Do a “Deep Search” Instead, but brace yourself for the results","Home / Be The Change / Filming Cops / Ever Google Yourself? Do a “Deep Search” Instead, but brace yourself for the results Ever Google Yourself? Do a “Deep Search” Instead, but brace yourself for the results The Free Thought Project October 26, 2016 Comments Off on Ever Google Yourself? Do a “Deep Search” Instead, but brace yourself for the results 
+12 – sponsored content by 
+Ever try Googling someone only to come up with basic information and maybe a link or two to an outdated social media profile? There’s a new website going around that promises to reveal much more than just a simple google search can show you. 
+Been issued a speeding ticket? Failed to stop at a stop sign? What about your family members? And friends? If you are like most of us, the answer to at least one of those questions is “yes”—the vast majority of us have slipped up at least once or twice. 
+An innovative new website — Instant Checkmate is now revealing the full “scoop” on millions of Americans. 
+Instant Checkmate aggregates hundreds of millions of publicly available criminal, traffic, and arrest records and posts them online so they can easily be searched by anyone. Members of the site can literally begin searching within seconds, and are able to check as many records as they like (think: friends, family, neighbors, etc. etc.). 
+Previously, if you wanted to research someone’s arrest records, you might have had to actually go into a county court office—in the appropriate county—and formally request information on an individual. This process may have taken days or weeks, or the information might not have been available at all. With websites like Instant Checkmate , however, a background check takes just a few clicks of the mouse, and no more than a minute or two. 
+While preparing this article, I decided to run a quick search on myself to give the service a real-world test. To my dismay, the search revealed several items I’d long forgotten—one of them being for the possession of a fake ID I was (embarrassingly) issued back in college when I was just 18 years old. “possession of a fake ID I was (embarrassingly) issued back in college when I was just 18 years old” 
+After searching myself and finding those records, my curiosity was piqued, and I began researching family members—apparently my aunt Susanne isn’t a very good driver, judging by the numerous traffic citations that showed on her record. 
+One of the most interesting aspects of Instant Checkmate is that it shows not only criminal records, but also more general background information like court records, various types of licenses (FAA, DEA), previous addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, estimated income levels and even satellite imagery of known addresses—it’s really pretty scary just how much information is in these reports. 
+In addition to giving information on the specific person you search for, the report also includes a scrolling list of “local sex offenders” for whatever region you’ve searched—along with a map plotting out the locations of those offenders. I started perusing the ones that showed up in my report, and I was absolutely blown away when I stumbled upon my junior high school wrestling coach’s mug shot. 
+“I was absolutely blown away when I stumbled upon my junior high school wrestling coach’s mug shot.” 
+His crime was listed as “Out of state offense,”” so I wasn’t able to get the specifics (you usually can—this was an unusual case), but he was definitely a registered sex offender. Scary stuff. 
+I would definitely recommend this tool to friends and family. Anyone can start running background checks on Instant Checkmate within a few seconds—just click this link to get started. If you would like to search someone you know, click here . Note from the Author 
+I have to warn you before you start your search, the information you find may be overwhelming and has the potential of changing your view of the search subject forever. Keep this in mind when completing your search . – Heidi R.",FAKE
+9775,Financial Whistleblower Explains What’s About to Happen to the Economy,By Isaac Davis How is the government going to get people to pay their taxes if the government is not viewed as legitimate? ~ Catherine... ,FAKE
+6275,Comment on 4 Fascinating Things Quantum Physics Does In Nature by para kazanmak,"4 Fascinating Things Quantum Physics Does In Nature By Michael Danielson on November 9, 2015 Subscribe 
+Quantum Physics is a subject that is often discarded by everyday people as too esoteric or too new-agey (depending on which kind of QM you read about) to be useful in everyday life. We have all been introduced to QM as “the science of stuff too small to really matter to everyday life.” But recent developments in biological science have revealed that life itself puts powerful quantum mechanical principles to use as an everyday part of its function. “Quantum Biology” is one of the forefronts of modern science. Quantum Physics in Bird Navigation 
+We’ve known for decades that many species of birds migrate each year, most famously from north to south as the temperature drops in the temperate zones. But how they navigate during those migrations has always been a mystery. The magnetic field the Earth produces is terribly weak compared to the other forces that act on an animal’s body. Furthermore, biologists knew from studies that birds’ compasses are light-dependent, and that they detect magnetic fields relative to the surface of the planet, not the poles. 
+It wasn’t until the rule of quantum entanglement developed that we began to develop a theory of how bird compasses worked. Without delving too far into the science, the theory is that bird’s eyes contain a protein that itself contains millions of entangled electrons. When light enters the bird’s eye, it knocks some of those entangled electrons loose, but leaves others attached to the protein molecules. 
+The “loose” electrons are much more dramatically affected by the Earth’s magnetic field than the bound ones are, but the entanglement means the bound electrons move the same way. The subsequent “wiggling” of the protein that the bound electrons are attached to can be perceived by the bird’s retina and translated by its brain into a “picture” of the magnetic field it’s flying through. Quantum Physics in Photosynthesis 
+Plants, it seems, use quantum mechanics for one of the most important aspects of life on Earth: turning sunlight into the power that life runs on. The biggest mystery of photosynthesis for as long as we’ve understood it is “how is photosynthesis so efficient?” Our best machines achieve efficiencies of upwards of 30% — photosynthetic transfer of energy is upwards of 99% efficient. There are so many directions a photon could travel once it gets captured by a molecule of chlorophyll that science had no idea how such a high proportion of photons made it to the “reaction center” where they were used in building new molecules. 
+The answer turns out to be quantum coherence , the ability of a quantum particle to act like a wave until something “decoheres” it. The theory is that photons enter plant cells, are captured by chlorophyll, and rather than traveling in a particle-like manner, they travel as waves , and the “reaction center” has the ability to decohere those waves back into particle (photon) form. Quantum Physics In Your Digestion 
+Enzymes are catalysts — chemicals that trigger other chemical creations. But for decades, scientists have been unable to determine how enzymes can speed up reactions so much: up to a trillion times faster than they would naturally occur. Recent research has shown that enzymes may be a trigger of quantum coherence — as above — using the “wave side” of the wave-particle quality to cause electrons and even protons to simply “teleport” from one atom to another, bypassing the need for time, heat, and all of the other factors that enable or speed up classical chemical reactions. Quantum Physics In Your Sense of Self 
+Finally, worthy of a mention in passing is the theory being debated right now by many scientists: that quantum mechanics are fundamental to our consciousness . For centuries, humans have proposed “second processing systems” in the brain or body that run parallel to our normal neuron firings, and that these overlapping systems are what give rise to our ability to mentally separate ourselves from our circumstances — what we call “being conscious.” 
+Recent evidence has come up that the cytokine in the brain — what we used to think of as the “brain’s skeleton,” holding it all together — is in fact a massive quantum processor. Laced with what the scientists call “microtubules” that vibrate at incredible speeds, the cytokine system appears to be operating on the quantum level as a “trinary” computer — able to hold values of ‘on,’‘off,’ and the quantum superposition of being both on and off at the same time. 
+What exactly this would enable our “secondary processing system” to accomplish is currently being explored — but the results, if we find them, are bound to change a lot of our fundamental assumptions about what we, as human beings, are capable of. 
+Featured image courtesy of Cristóbal Alvarado Minic via Flickr. Shared using a Creative Commons license. About Michael Danielson 
+Michael ""Mr. Write"" Danielson is a full-time writer based in Shelton, Washington with a live-in research assistant he also happens to be married to and a live-in research dissistant who also happens to be his 7-year-old son. He's politically oriented in the same direction that a vial of Bernie Sanders' tears blessed by Pope Francis in a civil ceremony attended by Noam Chomsky and the entire administrative body of Planned Parenthood then sprinkled over the ghost of FDR by the light of the final episode of Phineas and Ferb playing on a projection TV powered entirely by kombucha and seitan would be oriented. He is not afraid of complex, run-on sentences as long as they get the point across, preferably with a little bit of poetry in. Also, he's really, intensely fond of bleeding-edge quantum physics research, and posts often on Quora about how everyone has economics all wrong. Like, all of it. Connect",FAKE
+7452,Clinton campaign blames FBI director for loss to Trump,"Politics FBI Director James Comey (AFP file photo) 
+Hillary Clinton’s top advisers blame FBI Director James Comey for the Democrat’s bruising loss to President-elect Donald Trump. 
+Navin Nayak, the head of the Clinton campaign’s opinion research division, sent an email to senior staffers Thursday, outlining “early signals” as to why the candidate lost the November 8 presidential election, POLITICO reported on Friday. 
+“We believe that we lost this election in the last week,” said Nayak’s email, which was published by POLITICO. “ Comey’s letter in the last 11 days of the election both helped depress our turnout and also drove away some of our critical support among college-educated white voters — particularly in the suburbs.” 
+“We also think Comey’s 2nd letter, which was intended to absolve Sec. Clinton, actually helped to bolster Trump’s turnout,” he continued. 
+The letter also highlighted several other challenges the Clinton team faced throughout the campaign, including a desire for change after two terms by a Democratic president and the reluctance of some Americans to vote for a female candidate. Hillary Clinton makes a concession speech after being defeated by Donald Trump in New York on November 9, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
+Despite those challenges, Nayak said, Clinton was on course to win until the last week, when “everything changed"" and the momentum began to shift in favor of Trump. 
+“Voters who decided in the last week broke for Trump by a larger margin (42-47). These numbers were even more exaggerated in the key battleground states,” he said. 
+The FBI director angered Democrats late in October by announcing in a letter to Congress that the agency had uncovered new emails connected to the Clinton email investigation. 
+Just over a week later, Comey notified Congress that Clinton would not face charges over the newly discovered messages. 
+Nayak said Comey’s letters encouraged Trump supporters and depressed the turnout for Clinton on Election Day. 
+“There is no question that a week from Election Day, Sec. Clinton was poised for a historic win. In the end, less than 110K votes out of tens of millions cast on Election Day made the difference in this race,” he wrote. 
+“In the end,” Nayak concluded, “late breaking developments in the race proved one hurdle too many for us to overcome.” 
+Clinton had been leading Trump throughout the campaign in most of the polls except for the last week of the election when she lost ground to Trump.",FAKE
+9761,"Readings in the Jewish Zionist Control of the United States: Interviews with Francis Boyle, James Petras, Kim Petersen","Part 1: Introduction 10 Shares
+9 0 0 1
+For the last 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts. This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices.
+— Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter [1]
+How the Interviews Came About
+The Marxian thesis that the dominant culture and ideology of a society (here referred to as Social Base or just Base) are those of the dominant class (here referred to as System) is a sharp tool to probe how political systems work and how they stay in power. Does this tool work in the U.S. model? Certainly, , the relation between the System and its Social Base has been regular since the inception of the thirteen colonies. Because of that sustained regularity, System and Base acted in convergent patterns of dependency. In historical perspective, it was not possible for the System to transform those colonies into states, and thereafter expand its conquests to form a continental empire without a solid social base that shared its purpose and visions for expansion. From that time onward, an ideological symbiosis ran between the System and the Base. Not only that, but each time the System modifies direction, philosophy, or ideology, the Base would adapt by modifying its attitudes and perception.
+The patterns of ideological association between the U.S. System and its Social Base extended into modern times, and the yardstick to measure them is the presidential elections. If you look at voters' turnout since 1960 , you will notice that a relative-to-large majority of Americans had voted in those elections. My interpretation of the vote in relation to Marx's thesis is the following. Voting for a system that is known for its aggressive imperialist policies, crimes around the world, overthrowing foreign governments not in line with Washington, and countless military interventions and invasions that left millions of people dead means one thing: Voting for that system while knowing its attributes, policies, and actions amounts to active sharing in its ideology, culture, and violence.
+MORE... Zionism is Racism Zionism goes from bad to worse, taking Judaism with it How modern is Israel? Green Party of Canada calls to revoke Jewish National Fund charitable status Caveat! That does not necessarily mean that all voters share the System's imperialistic values of violence and destruction of foreign peoples. The pertinent meaning of voting interpreted in relation to the System's foreign policy objectives versus the objectives of the Base resides in two concepts. Discarding immediately the notion that the Base has been cohabitated by the system, the first concept has it that the Base has given a mandate to the System to carry out its ideology of empire and imperialism based on the undeclared condition to spare the people from the horrors of foreign wars. A dichotomy sets in here. The System has its way of life, and the Base has its own. The second concept has to do with the basic tenets of colonialism. Meaning, if the System could be successful to obtain unspecified benefits through wars, then the base could share in these benefits despite aversion to violence and opposition to the institution of war as a means to resolve problems between nations.
+ A question: Would abstaining from voting resolve the issue of ""active sharing"" in the policies of the system? This subject is open for debate . . .
+The relation between the American System and its Base was uniform up to a certain point in history (late 1920s). Until that point, the American state was still busy completing its structural transformation into a big power status. That uniformity, however, managed to keep the patterns of the political power unchanged. To be exact, despite persistent immigration that should have altered the relations between the Base and government, as well as the composition of the latter, the dominance of the traditional ruling elites was 1) not open for challenge, and 2) shaped by an exclusive American Anglo-Saxon experience.
+But when Franklyn D. Roosevelt showed signs of surrender to the Zionist pressure on the issue of establishing a ""Jewish"" state in Palestine, he opened a large crack in the System. That was the first time in U.S. history where the powerful American imperialist state yielded to a foreign ideology that was not part of its basic project. With that, a movement with a limited religious social base began penetrating the files and ranks of the U.S. power. The rest is history. As a result, the unrelenting entrenchment inside the political structures of the United States coupled with accumulated changes in the configuration of the U.S. power, the dominant American System itself fell under the domination of one of its social factions—American Jewish Zionists.
+When Franklyn D. Roosevelt showed signs of surrender to the Zionist pressure on the issue of establishing a ""Jewish"" state in Palestine, he opened a large crack in the System.
+As a group, American Jewish Zionists have all attributes of an independent establishment. They possess efficient organizational structures, have a monolithic political presence across the American system, and they know how to finance their activities with U.S. tax money. I must note that their alignment with the global agenda of U.S. imperialism is a two-point expedient. The first is focused on being recognized as earnest operators at the service of America's interests. The second is tactical. To reap, on behalf of Israel, the benefits of alignment with slogans such as ""Israel is our only trusted ally in the Middle East"".
+The American Jewish Zionist experience is agenda driven. As such, their domestic and foreign agendas have precedence over any other Jewish-related consideration.
+On the domestic front, the focus could not be more evident: to consolidate Zionism and turn it into a means to 1) perpetuate Israel as an American national issue, and 2) make of them the principal factor in defining American politics. You can notice the endeavor clearly during U.S. elections when the Zionist media question whether this or that candidate is good for the Jews, and for Israel. Today, voicing dissent against the policies of American Jewish Zionism or criticizing Israel amounts to crime. Jimmy Carter experienced this firsthand. When he published his book: Palestine: Peace not Apartheid , American Jewish Zionists unleashed the fire of hell upon him.
+As for the Jewish Zionist foreign agenda, this is clear-cut and leaves no space for misunderstanding. It aims to induce, control, or lead the United States to 1) adopt hostile policies toward the Arab nations because due to their rejection of the Zionist state, and 2) undertake military actions against any country that appears as posing a potential or direct threat to Israel. Equally important, it demands that the United States keep denying the Palestinians rights for nationhood through American diplomacy. What is the rationale? Recognition of the Palestinian national rights means the invalidation of the Zionist state and its claim on Palestine.
+Because the Jewish Zionist control of the U.S. System is real and dominant, how does the American society figure vis-à-vis this dominance? Based on observations of the American society and its multiple cultural and ideological patterns, there can be but one answer: Zionism is not the dominant culture and ideology of the American people. It is, however, the dominant culture and ideology of the U.S. political system.
+OBSERVATIONS
+First, despite gargantuan Zionist propaganda apparatuses directed to the American people, Jewish Zionists have consistently failed to create interest or sympathy for Zionist issues and for Israel,
+Second, due to historically developed indifference to foreign issues, a majority of Americans have only vague ideas on what Zionism is,
+Third, to establish roots for their political dominance, Jewish Zionist activists invariably focus not on the American people, but on ways to control the American system from inside by controlling first the institutions that matter: White House and Congress.
+Fourth, this control did not happen because of elections. It is preponderantly due to the practice of appointing Jewish Zionists to important positions inside the administrations,
+Fifth, among the stratagems employed by Zionists when they run for elective offices, one was particularly effective: Take advantage of the reverence of the population for the idea of election. To do that, Jewish Zionist candidates rarely, if ever, talk about Israel or Zionism. Instead, they only debate matters of interest to the voters. Once elected though, promoting Israel via American legislations becomes the top hidden agenda,
+Sixth, and to conclude this particular argument, the fact that one administration after another succumbed to the diktat of Jewish Zionists (thus indirectly to Israel) in matters of foreign policy and wars proves that the culture and praxis of those administrations are those of the dominant ideology and culture—Zionism.
+Another point to discuss is the expansion of the Jewish Zionist power. By all accounts, such an expansion is not a phenomenon but an incremental process. In his book, The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite , Robert D. Kaplan defined the issue that I framed as a process in terms of gradual replacement of traditional diplomatic elites with new ideological elites that had no interest in the ways of the old school of diplomacy. Kaplan was unambiguous. He called these new elites by their names: Irish-Americans and Jewish-Americans.
+Kaplan's viewpoint on this replacement is important to our discussion. He argued that the old elites approached the U.S.-Arab relations with an open mind and readiness for dialog, all while keeping an eye on the U.S. imperialist interests. His argument opens the door for a veritable conclusion. The two groups of post-WWII American society that Kaplan mentioned had in fact changed the dynamics of U.S. foreign policy. (It is public knowledge that both groups are known for their hostility toward Arabs and Muslims—each for his own set of religious, political, and ideological rationales.). As for the successive shares of African-Americans and Hispanics in the making of the national policy of the United States, this is another argument.
+As a witness to history, in early 2012, I began drafting a comprehensive analysis on the role of American Jewish Zionists in the making of U.S. policies and wars in the Arab world. In May of that year, as my work became broad in scope, I decided to seek more views on the subject. I came up with the idea to conduct several interviews where I pose the same questions. While some of the prospective interviewees declined, and others accepted but then withdrew, three prominent thinkers acclaimed for their knowledge, scholarship, and outstanding political activism graciously gave me their views.
+They are Francis Boyle, a professor of international law, University of Illinois, College of Law; James Petras, a professor emeritus, University of Binghamton, New York; Canadian writer and former co-editor of the online publication of Dissident Voice Kim Petersen. Professors Boyle and Petras answered my questions via phone conversations, and, Petersen via email correspondence.
+However, in the weeks following the interviews, my work swelled up to such a length that it became unsuitable for internet publishing. In short, I was unable to honor my commitment to publish the interviews as planned. Today, as I thank Prof. Francis Boyle, Prof. James Petras, and Kim Petersen for sharing their invaluable insight, I apologize to them for the delay in putting the interviews out there to read.
+INTRODUCTION
+The turning point in the emergence of Jewish Zionism as a dominant American political force came about when Iraq invaded Kuwait. (Discussing the origins and strategic complications of that invasion goes beyond the scope of this introduction.) The Jewish Zionist establishment seized the occasion, mobilized its omnipresent propaganda operatives, and led colossal media campaigns to promote military actions against Iraq. To bring their war mania to fruition, they unleashed their ""experts"" in all directions. They talked about Iraq's ""formidable"" military capabilities and about Saddam's one-million-man standing army ready to invade Saudi Arabia and seize its oil. They told stories about Saddam Hussein's personal life, his bunkers, and his mortal ""nuclear threats"" to Israel. And they talked about Iraq's threats to U.S. interests and ""allies"" in the Middle East. . . . Here is a brief account of those events.
+On July 25, 1990, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein met with U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie. It is on record that Glaspie gave Hussein an unambiguous but indirect greenlight to resolve Iraq's problems with Kuwait militarily. On August 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait. On August 3, George H. W. Bush ordered the freezing of Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets and immediately placed Iraq under hermetic embargo. Considering the prompt, extraordinary anti-Iraq measures that the United States took in the first 24 hours of that invasion, one wonders what was pushing the U.S. to move so quickly on Iraq knowing that only two days earlier, this was conducting a U.S. proxy against Iran. The observation that the U.S. did not take similar actions when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, or when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 raises many questions. What were the U.S. rationales in taking such measures? Who conceived them? Did the U.S. entrap Iraq? Why? . . .
+The atmosphere that followed the invasion was surrealistic. Like a lightning bolt, U.S. imperialist and Zionist forces instantly mobilized their media, talking heads, retired generals, and bogus experts on the Middle East. The deafening uproar they made and all lies they told about atrocities committed by Iraq in Kuwait hid a definite scheme: Incite for war . In the period August 2, 1990 – January 14, 1991, Israelis and Jewish Zionists from all fields appeared en mass and in every possible medium available to urge the Bush regime to give up diplomacy in favor of war. On January 15, 1991, a 30-member ""coalition"" in which the U.S. had the lion share—ninety-seven percent of the total force—attacked Iraq. By every standard and minutia of details, the war on Iraq in 1991 was an American War .
+At the end of a war that destroyed one of Israel's Arab adversaries, George H. W. Bush might have thought of himself as America's ""laureate hero"". He did not predict though that his temporary freezing of the U.S. loan guaranties to Israel, would have unleashed the Jewish Zionist establishment against him. The fact that he lost to Bill Clinton (who opposed Bush's freeze, and who stated that Israel was the ""only country that paid back its debts"") indicated that American Jewish Zionists had finally reached their objective: To perfect ways to control the U.S. politics from the inside . In retrospect, it can be said that George H. W. Bush was the last non-Zionist American president. From Bill Clinton forward, U.S. presidents and their vice president became pawns in the Jewish Zionist play of power.
+Now, as the United States was preparing for war with Iraq to ""liberate"" Kuwait, thousands of antiwar activists and intellectuals from a wide spectrum of political convictions spoke loudly against it. But no one could have ever beaten Patrick J. Buchanan's memorable words about how American Jewish Zionists and Israel were pushing for that war. He said, ''There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East - the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner .'' [2] With that, Buchanan hit the proverbial nail on the head. A.M. Rosenthal, a ringleader of U.S. Zionist journalism could not bear what he heard. In a rebuttal, he unleashed an acerbic attack against Buchanan. His weapon of argument, so to speak, was the stale and trite accusation of ""antisemitism"".
+Whining, Rosenthal twisted Buchanan's clear words and went on to imply that Buchanan was in effect engaging in an ""anti-Jewish"" tirade. He re-interpreted Buchanan's words and cast them in a standard Zionistic fashion. He wrote that Buchanan's intention was ''The Jews are trying to drag us into war. Only Jews want war. Israeli Jews want war to save Israel's hide. American Jews who talk of military action against Iraq want war because it would suit Israeli interests. They are willing to spill American blood for Israeli interests."" [3]
+By inserting the word, ""Jew"" in his reply, Rosenthal and the New York Times behind him spat on the face of U.S. political reality under the tight grip of Zionism. We need not waste our breath on Rosenthal's petty tactic. His clear objective was to distract from the central issue, which is, Buchanan's opposition to the planned war against Iraq was unrelated to the religious denomination of those who were promoting it. Rather he was unmistakably referring to their political identity.
+Still, Buchanan was honest. He pointed the finger to Israel and its ""Amen corner"" because that was the truth. The fact that most Israelis and ""Amen corners"" happened to be of Jewish faith was nonissue. To conclude, it is evident that Buchanan, a dreamer of an American ""republic"" not ""empire"", could not stand by idle while seeing the United States sheepishly fastened to the yoke of Zionism and gutlessly prostrating before a tiny settler state, Israel.
+Buchanan did not stop there. Truthful and resolute, he dared to describe in categorical terms the pitiful condition of the U.S. Congress vis-à-vis Israel and American Jewish Zionists. He dubbed it as ""An Israeli-occupied territory"" [4]. Buchanan powerfully hit the target in such a way that countless cowardly American politicians would dare not think, let alone say. Notice that Buchanan had placed Israel before its U.S. ""amen corner"". I view this as a statement. He clearly implied that Israel is the primary decision maker. Did that also imply that U.S. Zionist groups (amen corner) are puppets moved by Israel? Most likely, if so, which has more power in setting the U.S. world agenda and policies: Israel or American Jewish Zionists? Dialectically, the answer should be Israel by means of its ""amen corner'.
+Now, in December 1991, Jim Lehrer (a former co-anchor of The Macneil/Lehrer NewsHour, and later sole anchor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer ) interviewed Pat Buchanan. It is important to mention, that Jim Lehrer has monopolized a significant position funded by federal tax money for over 30 years starting in 1975. Is that an issue? Yes, and to debate it, the following applies. Whenever a specific group of people, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, duopoly party apparatchiks, etc., keeps an important public post for such a long duration, the implication is unescapable: the group controls that post because of its embedded importance. . . . But more important, they have the power to keep it.
+Nonetheless, when a specific group continues to hold, throughout time, important positions inside public corporations, agencies, and branches of the U.S. government, a paradigm emerges. Either the group controls said corporations directly—that is why it is able to do what they want. Or, it controls them indirectly by controlling first who appoints the board of trustees and sets corporate policies and appointees. At any rate, considering this type of control, the assumption that such group has power over the government and its public corporations is reasonable.
+Additionally, the issue of monopoly of news is critical in another respect. It means that someone within the context of U.S. imperialism has decided that the U.S. public discourse must conform to predetermined patterns. In these patterns, issues such as Israel, Zionism, Palestine, U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, wars, etc., are designed to move only on linear grounds without ever touching the core of the matter.
+Before continuing, I must state that Lehrer's political views are not a subject to discuss vis-à-vis his program. For one, the NewsHour program is not about the personal views of presenters—it is about information prepared for the public from a public corporation. Second, whether Lehrer had sympathies for Israel or Zionism is nonissue because most viewers expect neutral discussions regardless of who delivers them. Nevertheless, a situation such as this has a consequence affecting the special relations between the narrated news/comments, the people who deliver them, and the people who hear them.
+Firstly, planning news delivery to attain specific results is a good technique for those in the business of indoctrination. Psychology and perception are the areas of expertise that news planners depend on to disseminate certain news and analyses. To be sure, these planners know that most viewers have no special or personal stakes on events happening in other countries. Still, the immediate consequence that controlled news and commentaries could generate is easy to predict. They also know they can seep to the viewers pre-conceived ideas through pleasant dialogs, affable manners, appearance of neutrality, and clever circumlocutions.
+To be fair to Lehrer, he was consistent in making intelligent questions. However, he was also consistent at doing something else. He would calibrate his questions in such a way as not to reveal new truths or solicit critical replies that could go beyond boundaries deliberately conceived so as not to be crossed. It is pragmatic to say that the observance of these boundaries would nicely serve the Zionist and imperialist discourse. In essence, a practice thusly followed is a preemptive mechanism of control cloaked as a professional presentation.
+Now, in his interview, Lehrer played dumb when he asked Buchanan about his bold characterization of the Congress. He phrased his question as follows, ""You have also said that Congress is an Israeli-occupied territory. Now, what do you mean by that ?"" [Italics are mine]
+COMMENT: Semantically as much as politically, Buchanan's figure of speech was terse and unequivocal. He plainly meant that the Congress observes Israel's agenda and acts accordingly. There was no need for Buchanan to say anything further because what he said had (and still has) basis in verifiable facts. With a question such as, ""what do you mean by that"" Lehrer was not seeking a rational reply from Buchanan. The form and content of the question had the objective of wanting to entrap Buchanan, make him retract, or at least contradict himself to show inconsistency. In essence, Lehrer had simply tried to deny that Israel controls the Congress through its ""amen corner"" because his ""what do you mean"" indicated astonishment rather than request for explanation. [5]
+To wrap up the issue, without exclusion, any denial of the Jewish Zionist control of the United States is a farce. Take Abraham H. Foxman of the infamous Anti-Defamation League as an example. Foxman authored a master‑deceptive propaganda book that he called, "" The Deadliest Lies : The Israeli Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control. [Italics are mine]. First, Foxman lied. He knew very well that the Jewish [Zionist] control is not a myth but a pervasive reality. Second, but most important, the problem is not the abstract ""Jewish control"" but the specific—Jewish Zionist control. This can be explained using a current universal truth: hundreds of thousands of Jews from all nationalities actively oppose Zionism on political, religious, ethical, historical, and ideological grounds.
+Foxman's denial means one of two things. Either he is a parochial charlatan when the subject is the undisputed power of American Jewish Zionism, or he is very ignorant of the history of Zionism , which is impossible. Either way, Foxman's business is propaganda, demagogy, and deception. Incidentally, Foxman's denial looks very similar to what some Arabs do in the Middle East. Villagers—but even some city folks—try to fend off ""envy"" by following an eon-old superstition. They fix a drawing on a wall in their shops or homes showing the palm of an open hand with an open eye in its center. It appears that Foxman and his associates have their own superstition. By decrying the ""deadliest lies"" against American Jewish Zionists, they try to fend off the accusation or the ""envy"" that Jews—specifically, Jewish Zionists—have power and influence.
+Of substance, did Foxman not learn or did anyone inform him about what John Foster Dulles told William Knowland (a pro-Zionist senator from California) back in February 1957? In an exchange about the proposed sanctions to get Israel out of Egyptian territory occupied by Israel in the Suez War, Dulles pronounced these prophetic words, ""We cannot have all our policies made in Jerusalem . . ."" [6]. That was in 1957. Today, all those who deride or deny the charge that Israel has a say on U.S. foreign policy and wars in the Middle East must prove that those who are making this charge are misinformed or just lying.
+Interestingly, years after Buchanan made that statement, the successive events proved his sharp assessment and political perspicacity. Two people vindicated his characterization of Capitol Hills as an Israeli-occupied territory"" and both used his words to make the point. The first is a former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, and the second is Philip Weiss, founder of MondoWeiss Website. In an article he wrote in 2011, Giraldi pointed to the Congress as, "" It’s Still Occupied Territory "". Weiss titled a piece he wrote in 2015 as such: "" Capitol Hill — still Israeli-occupied territory "".
+At this point, do American Jewish Zionists control the United States? Do they control it as polity or only the political system? Do they have real influence in setting U.S. foreign policy and wars against the Arab and Muslim nations? Or maybe all this talk is no more than baseless allegations?
+NEXT
+Part 2: Discussion
+Part 3: Interview with Francis Boyle
+Part 4: Interview with James Petras
+Part 5: Interview with Kim Petersen
+NOTES
+Jimmy carter, Speaking frankly about Israel and Palestine , Los Angeles Times, 8 December 2006 Pat Buchanan, The McLaughlin Group, Aug 26, 1990, Quote: d in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, What They Said: Israel and Its ""Amen Corner"" , February 1992 ON MY MIND; Forgive Them Not , The New York Times, 14 September 1990 Quote: d in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Is Congress an Israeli-Occupied Territory ?, July 1995 The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, What They Said: Israel and Its ""Amen Corner"" , Feb. 1992 David Tal, editor, The 1956 War: Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East, Frank Cass Publishers, 2001, p. 40",FAKE
+3986,"2 killed, 8 terror suspects held in France terror raid","Paris, France (CNN) French authorities took the offensive Wednesday, raiding a purported hideout of the suspected ringleader in last week's deadly Paris attacks in an operation that ended with eight detained, two dead and potentially more bloodshed thwarted.
+
+But what about that suspected ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud
+
+At one point, authorities believe he was holed up on the third floor of an apartment building in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Wednesday. Whether he was there when scores of heavily armed French police launched their assault at 4:20 a.m. Wednesday (10:20 p.m. ET Tuesday) is unknown.
+
+Some residents in the area told CNN they saw Abaaoud recently in the neighborhood and at a local mosque.
+
+Investigators zeroed in on the building after picking up phone conversations indicating that a relative of Abaaoud might be there. They met fierce resistance from the start, including an armored door, a woman who blew herself up and bullets flying back and forth for about an hour. The French officers even used powerful munitions, which led to one floor of the building collapsing.
+
+That violence produced rubble that included body parts, on which investigators are conducting DNA tests.
+
+French President Francois Hollande held up the vicious back-and-forth as further proof that ""we are at war"" with ISIS.
+
+""What the terrorists were targeting was what France represents. This is what was attacked on the night of November 13,"" he said. ""These barbarians targeted France's diversity. It was the youth of France who were targeted simply because they represent life.""
+
+France had already been part of the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS with airstrikes. But the country has stepped up its efforts since the series of shootings and explosions in Paris last week, which killed 129 people.
+
+Now, Hollande has proposed extending France's state of emergency for three more months -- a measure that, among other things, gives authorities greater powers in conducting searches, holding people and dissolving certain groups. To go after the Islamist extremist group, the French President also said he would appeal to world leaders -- including meeting next week with U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who have been at odds on what to do in Syria.
+
+""There is no more ... divide. There are only men and women of duty,"" he said. ""We must destroy this army that menaces the entire world, not just some countries.""
+
+'We could see the bullets'
+
+Whoever was inside the Saint-Denis apartment on Wednesday appeared to be ""prepared to act"" in possibly another attack, Molins said, noting their weaponry, structured organization and determination.
+
+Some 110 police swarmed on the diverse, working-class area that is home to the Stade de France sports stadium, where three suicide bombings took place days earlier.
+
+They first went into one apartment that had been under surveillance since Tuesday, a Paris police source said.
+
+Telephone communications on a wiretap by French and Belgian security agencies indicated a woman at the residence was Abaaoud's cousin, a Belgian counterterrorism official told CNN.
+
+That raid led them to another apartment on the same street. Molins described it as a complex operation. For almost an hour, he said, there was uninterrupted gunfire as police tried to get into the apartment.
+
+The violent standoff left residents in the area, already shaken by last week's attacks, startled and scared.
+
+""We could see the bullets,"" a woman, who identified herself only as Sabrine, told CNN affiliate France 2. ""We could feel the building shaking.""
+
+Three people in the Saint-Denis building itself, including one with a bullet wound in the arm, are among the eight detained, according to Molins. The others include the person who loaned the apartment to the suspected terrorists and his friend. Two of the eight held were hospitalized, Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told France Info radio.
+
+Saadana Aymen, a 29-year-old who lives one street down, couldn't believe what was happening in his neighborhood.
+
+""When you think of Saint-Denis, you don't think of terrorists,"" he told CNN. ""I'm shocked! Why would the terrorists pick this neighborhood?""
+
+That wasn't the only place where French authorities fanned out Tuesday night into Wednesday as they worked to find suspects tied to the attacks and cracked down on security.
+
+The Interior Ministry announced 118 searches led to the detention of at least 25 people, the confiscation of 34 weapons and the discovery of illicit drugs in 16 instances. In recent days, hundreds of similar operations have been conducted, the ministry said, resulting in 64 people being held and 118 put under house arrest.
+
+Authorities have not provided details about the arrests or said what connection they could have to Friday's attacks.
+
+Molins said investigators are working to piece together where terrorists were in the days and hours leading up to the attacks -- and with whom they had contact.
+
+They've encountered at least one piece of evidence that could help them in their search: One of the attacker's cell phones was found in a trash bin outside the Bataclan theater, where most of Friday's victims were gunned down.
+
+A message on the phone, according to Molins, said, ""Here we go, it's starting.""
+
+Authorities are trying to determine who the message was sent to, he said.
+
+And they're still trying to determine whether the suspected ringleader in the attack is still on the run, or whether his remains were found in the rubble.",REAL
+7945,Shocking! Hillary’s Henchwoman Sold Up the River To Save Her Bacon!,"This is a Daily News Brief for all of the civil servants out there who are just “doing their job”. I was (up until recently) one of those people.
+I learned first hand that no matter how good you are at your job, how much you save the taxpayer, and how many times you’ve saved your boss or the “higher ups” from getting in trouble, when you need them to stick their neck out for you, they just hang you out to dry.
+Huma Abedin is learning that firsthand now too… and Donna Brazile…The loyalty you feel in your heart to your country, or county is not reciprocated to you in your time of need. The Powers That Shouldn’t Be don’t give a rats patoot about you. I hope this Daily News Brief serves as a wake up call to all those who serve.
+
+Watch on YouTube 
+Sources: 
+Now Huma Is Just ‘One of My Staffers’ After Close Aide Gets Left Behind on Ohio Campaign Trip While Hillary Keeps up Her War on the FBI in Defiance of White House Backing for Comey 
+CNN Cuts Ties With Donna Brazile After Hacked Emails Show She Gave Clinton Campaign Debate Questions 
+The Globalization Of Media: A Failing Strike Force 
+Media Deception: You Are Not Getting the Truth Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by The Daily Sheeple of www.TheDailySheeple.com . 
+This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.TheDailySheeple.com. ",FAKE
+6063,"Janet Reno, First Female US Attorney General, Dies At 78","Janet Reno, First Female US Attorney General, Dies At 78 11/07/2016 
+NPR 
+Janet Reno, the first woman to serve as attorney general of the United States, died early Monday from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Reno’s goddaughter Gabrielle D’Alemberte and sister Margaret Hurchalla confirmed her passing to NPR. 
+Reno spent her final days at home in Miami surrounded by family and friends, D’Alemberte told The Associated Press. She was 78. 
+Reno served longer in the job than anyone had in 150 years. And her tenure was marked by tragedy and controversy. But she left office widely respected for her independence and accomplishments. 
+She was not President Bill Clinton’s first choice to head the Justice Department, nor his second. But after his No. 1 pick went down in confirmation flames, and his second choice also proved controversial, Clinton finally turned to Reno. 
+She was an unexpected pick. She had no connections to Clinton or Washington. But Clinton wanted a woman, and Reno was a big-time prosecutor, holding the top prosecutor’s job in Miami-Dade County, a position she had been elected to four times over 15 years. 
+Jamie Gorelick, who would later become deputy attorney general, was assigned to prep Reno for her confirmation hearing. “She was the least air-brushed candidate we have ever had for a Cabinet-level position,” says Gorelick. “She was herself, and she didn’t change herself for Washington.” 
+Reno arrived at the Justice Department knowing no one, and was immediately plunged into the siege at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas. Four federal agents had been killed and 16 wounded while serving a warrant to search for illegal guns. Seven weeks into the siege, pressed by the FBI, Reno authorized a raid on the compound, resulting in 76 deaths, including as many as 25 children and the Davidian leader David Koresh, who ordered his followers to set fire to the compound. 
+In two sets of Waco congressional hearings over the next two years, Reno would successfully quell critics on the right and left. 
+“What haunted me,” Reno explained at one hearing, “was that if I did not go in, I might be sitting there 10 days [later] … when [Koresh] came out with explosives, blew himself, some agents and the entire place up.” 
+Years later, however, in an interview with NPR shortly before leaving office, her regret was palpable. “We’ll never know whether it was a mistake or not, in one sense,” Reno admitted. “But knowing what I do, I would not do it again. I would try to figure another way.” 
+“Waco didn’t make her hesitant: It made her insistent about getting her own information,” observes Walter Dellinger, who served in two top Justice Department jobs under Reno. 
+Dellinger believes, for instance, that it may have been the Waco experience that led Reno to go personally to Miami in April 2000 to see if there was a way to avoid a forcible removal of 6-year-old Cuban refugee Elián González from the home of a great-uncle so the boy could be returned to his only living parent, in Cuba. 
+Elián had been rescued at sea after his mother and eight others drowned trying to get to the United States. Rescued by fishermen and brought to the U.S., he was soon turned over to his great-uncle. The Cuban community in Miami was in an uproar over the idea of returning the boy to his father, who lived in Cuba, and the furor soon bled over to Congress. 
+But when negotiations with the great-uncle failed, armed federal agents, acting on Reno’s orders, raided the home, removed Elián, and turned him over to his father, who had come to the U.S. to receive his son. When the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene, the two returned to their home in Cuba. 
+Janet Reno takes the oath as attorney general during a ceremony at the White House on March 12, 1993, while President Bill Clinton watches. 
+Barry Thumma/AP 
+Over the course of time, Reno would become embroiled in many controversies. She sought the appointment of a series of independent counsels to investigate four fellow Cabinet members and President Clinton himself. But she refused to authorize an independent counsel investigation of contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign after Justice Department lawyers concluded no crime had been committed by either the president or vice president. 
+The decision so infuriated Republicans that some called for her impeachment. “This is the most politicized Justice Department in the history of the United States,” railed Dan Burton, the Republican chairman of a key House oversight committee. 
+At 6 feet 2 inches, however, Reno stood tall in the political crosswinds. Gorelick observes that when members of Congress, like Burton, were unhappy with a government official, they threatened to call that official to testify. But Reno, who had served as a staffer in the Florida state Legislature, always said, “Fine, I’ll be there.” As a result, says Gorelick, “eventually all those who were threatening her with a hearing stopped doing that, because she prevailed in every outing that I can recall — she just went in there and laid out her views and bested those who would challenge her.” 
+The controversies that the Justice Department faced during Reno’s reign often eclipsed the many things that went well: the quick apprehension and successful prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers, for example; the pursuit of bombers of women’s health clinics that provide abortions; and the solving of the so-called Unabomber case. 
+After nearly two decades of fruitless pursuit, the FBI still had no idea as to the identity of the man dubbed the Unabomber, who had killed three people and injured 23. Then, in 1995, the bomber sent a letter to The New York Times offering to cease his terror campaign if the Times or the Washington Post would publish his 35,000-word manifesto against modern industry and technology. Neither newspaper was inclined to do that initially, but Reno, the daughter of two newspaper journalists, persuaded the newspaper owners to jointly publish the essay in the interests of public safety. 
+It paid off. The Unabomber’s brother recognized the style and ideas in the essay and tipped off the FBI, ending the bomber’s long reign of terror. Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, is now serving a life term in a maximum security federal prison. 
+In 1995 Reno was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She did not slow down, but her hands sometimes shook so hard you could hear them knocking against the table at a congressional hearing. She even joked about the disease, claiming that “shaking sometimes helps,” as in playing a steel drum or balancing her kayak. 
+That combination of toughness and self-deprecating humor, plus her determination to protect the Justice Department from improper influence, made her a hero to many who worked for her. 
+“Janet Reno led with her values,” says former Deputy Attorney General Gorelick, the department’s No. 2 official. “And that meant that if she decided that a certain path was the right thing to do, the people around her believed her and would charge up any hill behind her. … I’d never seen that before in quite the same way.” 
+Florida gubernatorial candidate and former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno speaks at the Florida Democratic Party State Conference on April 13, 2002, in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. She lost the Democratic primary. 
+Reno won enormous respect inside the department as well, because of her work ethic and dedication to understanding issues in the many parts of the Justice Department — from national security, to environmental questions, to the generally obscure field of Indian law. 
+U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch called her “one of the most effective, decisive and well-respected-leaders in [the department’s] proud history” who “never shied from criticism or shirked responsibility.” And former Attorney General Eric Holder said that “in a city where too many compromise their values for short term political gain, Janet Reno stood out as a person of integrity and of enduring values.” 
+Former Solicitor General Dellinger believes that Reno was prepared for the attorney general’s job early in life by her intellect and ungainly height. “This is a woman that went to Cornell and Harvard Law School at a time when very few women went to Harvard Law School, went through junior high and high school being twice as tall as anybody else and probably twice as smart … and that’s really, really tough.” 
+There were, of course, ups and downs in the eight years of Reno’s reign. But she said she always took the long view of her job. 
+“If the end brings me out right, what people said about me won’t make any difference, and if the end brings me out wrong, 10 angels saying I was right won’t make any difference,” she said in an interview with NPR in 1997. 
+President Clinton made little secret of his frequent displeasure with Reno and the wall of separation she erected between the Justice Department and the White House. Still, he never asked her to resign. Reno was the last Cabinet member he reappointed after his re-election in 1996. 
+“It was actually quite wonderful,” said Dellinger. “She just decided to stay, and it turns out that nobody could fire her.” 
+The tension between Clinton and his attorney general was apparent even as Clinton’s time in office drew to a close. In an interview with CBS News’ 60 Minutes , Clinton went out of his way to praise friends and foes alike, but when it came to his evaluation of Reno, he was tepid, to say the least. 
+“Good woman,” he said. “Tried really hard to do a good job. She’s a good person.” 
+“At least he didn’t say I was a bad person,” replied Reno, with a laugh. “I’ll take what I can get!” 
+Indeed, by the end of her tenure, Janet Reno had outlasted her critics and earned such a reputation for integrity and independence that comedian Will Ferrell’s parody of her became one of the iconic skits on NBC’s Saturday Night Live . The recurring skit was inspired by reports that Reno had cut quite a figure dancing at a Justice Department party. 
+On the last episode of the “Janet Reno’s Dance Party” parody, Ferrell, wearing a blue dress and pearls, reminisces about past glories and laments that the end of the party is near. Then, suddenly, the real Janet Reno comes crashing through the wall of the set, wearing the same blue dress and pearls as Ferrell, to deliver one of Ferrell’s signature lines: “It’s Reno Time!” 
+“Oh, Janet,” he says to the real Reno, as he mourns the end of the skit’s run, “what do you do when you get sad?” 
+“I just dance,” Reno replies, commanding the orchestra, “Now, hit it!” as she breaks out her best moves to “Twist and Shout.” It was her last day in office.",FAKE
+8068,How to Rig an Election: James O’Keefe Expose’- Follow the Money,"
+ 
+
+N.Morgan ) Project Veritas, the brain child of James O’Keefe, has released its fourth installment of the “ Rigging The Election ” series, an exposĂŠ that is described as a “ multi-part series which exposes the dark secrets at the highest levels of the DNC and Clinton presidential campaign .”
+In this latest installment, O’Keefe and Project Veritas  confirm the power money has amongst the network of questionable non-profits and consulting firms supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
+To help grease the wheels for the Project Veritas undercover reporters to gain access, a well placed donation of $20,000 “opened the door to their smoke filled rooms of illegal and dirty campaign dealings” , as O’Keefe puts it.
+The previous 3 installments of this series have forced the termination or resignation of two prominent democratic operatives: Robert Creamer and Scott Foval.
+In the video below, you have a front seat as the Project Veritas reporters infiltrate the seedy world of campaign contributions.
+( Video has adult language )
+To view the video, click here .
+P lease Donate to The Common Sense Show 
+ 
+PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US 
+
+ 
+
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer.   Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here   for more information.
+ 
+ 
+",FAKE
+8104,OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE: The Clintons’ Long History Of Losing Documents,"We Are Change 
+
+Bill and Hillary Clinton have a long history of losing documents during various investigations and scandals over the years going all the way back to their time in Arkansas.
+It’s not just the current investigation into deleted emails in which the State Department’s own internal probe found former Secretary of StatW Hillary Clinton violated federal record keeping laws . It’s not just whitewater, it’s several investigations where documents have turned up missing, exonerating the Clintons and clearing them of guilt, despite huge violations of obstruction of justice.
+HISTORY OF LOSING DOCUMENTS DURING INVESTIGATIONS: 
+In 1999, investigators looked into then First Lady Hillary and President Bill Clinton’s scandals, which included Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and other scandals. It was discovered that more than 1 million subpoenaed emails were mysteriously “lost” due to a “glitch” in a West Wing computer server . 
+During the Project X email scandal, career White House staffers and contractors found that someone close to the first lady had basically turned off the White House’s automated email archiving system. 
+WHITEWATER: 
+The first notable case is the whitewater land scandal fiasco, which started in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor. The allegation is that the Clintons used the Rose Law Firm and the Arkansas Financial Department Authority, as well as Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan owned by Susan and Jim McDougal , to scam Arkansas residents. An investigation was started when the Clintons invested and lost money in the Whitewater Development Corporation.
+An entire article could be dedicated to the Whitewater scandal, but what is important here is that documents for the whitewater investigation turned up missing were later discovered at the Clintons’ home .
+Ben Shapiro of Breitbart noted in his own article on Hillary’s long history of hiding documents :
+In 1996, a special Senate Whitewater committee released a report from the FBI demonstrating that documents sought in the Whitewater investigation had been found in the personal Clinton quarters of the White House. The First Lady’s fingerprints were on them. The documents had gone mysteriously missing for two years. 
+Mark Fabiani, special White House counsel, immediately stated that there was no problem, according to the Times: “He added that she had testified under oath that she had nothing to do with the documents during the two years they were missing and did not know how they ended up in the family quarters.” Hillary remains the only First Lady in American history to be fingerprinted by the FBI. Those weren’t the only missing Whitewater documents later found in the Clinton White House. 
+VINCE FOSTER: 
+The next notable case, which is also connected to Whitewater is Vince Foster. Foster worked alongside the Clintons as a top Rose Law firm attorney who had worked intimately with then First Lady Hillary Clinton throughout their career together. After Foster’s “suicide,” documents went missing from his office . Secret Service officer Henry O’Neill testified that he witnessed aides removing documents.
+Several years later, more documents pertaining to Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster again vanished, this time from the National Library including a document from Ken Star’s investigation that proves that the “suicide” of Vince Foster was actually a murder . In those documents is the smoking gun that shows that Vince Foster sustained not one but two bullet wounds. One to the neck and one to the head an impossible suicide scenario.
+In addition to that, experts have called Foster’s suicide note “a forgery.” One of my rules is once, twice, okay, but three times is not a coincidence—it’s a criminal conspiracy. Conspiracy, as in the legal definition not a theory none of this is a theory when it’s well sourced.
+TRAVEL GATE: 
+In 1996, the day before the Whitewater documents were found at the White House, a two-year-old memo emerged written by a former Presidential aide. According to the New York Times it proved that Hillary Clinton “had played a far greater role in the dismissal of employees of the White House travel office than the Administration has acknowledged.” 
+PROJECT X EMAIL GATE: 
+According to Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, Hillary’s top lawyer and top aide, Cheryl Mills “helped orchestrate the cover-up of another major scandal, often referred to as ‘Project X Email-gate.’” Over the course of years, the Clinton Administration allegedly withheld 1.8 million email communications from Judicial Watch’s attorneys, as well as federal investigators and Congress. In addition, Judicial Watch says that when a White House computer contractor attempted to reveal the emails, White House officials “instructed her to keep her mouth shut about the hidden e-mail or face dismissal and jail time.” 
+2015-2016 EMAIL GATE: 
+Where do I start about the botched investigation of Hillary’s private email server? The obstruction of justice is so broad, it’s insane. She used “bleach bit” software the day after being subpoenaed, smashed several BlackBerrys and iPads with hammers, was tipped off by the DoJ and DoS into the investigation, according to Wikileaks, etc.
+Clinton’s close ally Terry McAulife gave a donation to the wife of the Deputy Director Of The FBI. Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch towards the end of the investigation. The list goes on…
+2 TERABYTES OF DATA MISSING: 
+Two terrabyte drive with Clinton White House emails missing, presumed stolen from National Archives https://t.co/p3eZqxKxke pic.twitter.com/792rxje642 
+— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 3, 2016 
+
+Yet even with all of the evidence, the current FBI director—who has been revealed to be connected to the Clintons—has once again refused to acknowledge the corrupt career nature of the Clintons.
+Director James Comey told Congress Sunday that the FBI does not recommend charges against Clinton, even after an additional 650,000 emails were discovered on the laptop of her aide’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner.
+Whether it’s deleting emails or covering up documents to prevent prosecution, it has always been the Clinton way. Why is it that journalists can uncover this past historic information, but the FBI investigators can’t? 
+Something isn’t right. Drain the swamp and nominate AK for FBI Director 2017, and stay tuned to We Are Change. This case is closed. The Clintons are corrupt. That, or documents have somehow developed an artificial intelligence to stay away from the Clintons. It must be a right wing conspiracy. I would be willing to put my deplorable eggs into one basket and say it’s the latter.
+The post OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE: The Clintons’ Long History Of Losing Documents appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+1690,Lincoln Chafee Ends His Presidential Campaign,"Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee ended his long-shot presidential bid on Friday.
+
+""As you know, I have been campaigning on a platform of Prosperity Through Peace. But after much thought I have decided to end my campaign for president today,"" Chafee announced at the Democratic National Committee Women's Leadership Forum.
+
+The onetime Republican turned independent turned Democrat is the second candidate to withdraw this week, following former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb's announcement on Tuesday that he was ending his Democratic bid. Webb, however, left open the possibility of running as an independent.
+
+Both Chafee and Webb had barely campaigned, making only a handful of visits to early states. But more so than Webb, Chafee had struggled to make any dent at all in the race.
+
+Chafee had little financial backing for his campaign, raising just $8,300 from 10 major donors during the last quarter. But his few supporters told NPR this week they liked the positive attitude he brought to the race and hoped he would remain in the mix.
+
+The former senator, who hailed from a prominent political family in the Ocean State, had an unremarkable performance in last week's presidential debate. He spoke for just nine minutes during the two-hour faceoff.
+
+Chafee underscored that he had been against the Iraq War from the beginning, a contrast to front-runner Hillary Clinton's controversial 2002 vote. He echoed his anti-war sentiment in his withdrawal announcement on Friday, too.
+
+""The United States of America is so strong militarily, economically and culturally that we can take chances for peace. In fact, as a strong mature world leader, we must take chances for peace. If we have courage, if we take risks, we can have Prosperity through Peace, not just in the United States, but all over the world,"" Chafee said.
+
+At the debate, he also tried to needle Clinton on her and her husband's past scandals, proudly noting that he had never had a whiff of any misdeeds during his decades in office. But when he tried to engage Clinton over her email server and land a blow, she declined to engage.
+
+Chafee's most damaging answer was when he was asked why he voted to repeal banking regulations known as the Glass-Steagall Act. His answer was that he had just gotten to the Senate after his father died (he was appointed to succeed him) and that he was not familiar with the bill, making Chafee come across as even more unprepared.
+
+Even his sparsely attended announcement in June that he was running for the White House was widely panned, having spent much of his time advocating for the U.S. to switch to the metric system.
+
+Chafee, who like his late father, John, served as both senator and governor of Rhode Island, had an interesting life before entering politics, though. After attending an exclusive Northeastern prep school, where he was a classmate of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Chafee graduated from Brown University and then headed to Montana State University to learn to be a farrier, someone who shoes horses. For years he traveled around the U.S. working at racetracks.",REAL
+8986,"HUGE Air Drill, Over 130 Command Centers in Russia, CIS on Alert","HUGE Air Drill, Over 130 Command Centers in Russia, CIS on Alert 
+In addition, over 100 aircraft have been scrambled as part of the drill Originally appeared at RT Over 100 fighter jets, long-range bombers and combat helicopters have been scrambled at their bases across Russia and six post-Soviet states as the allies prepare to test their integrated air defense system in a massive military exercise. 
+More than 130 command and control centers have been put on alert in Russia and six former Soviet republics – Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. 
+All the countries contribute to the integrated air defense system overseen by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – an alliance of former Soviet republics that emerged after the collapse of the USSR. 
+The large-scale military exercise is to train high-readiness forces in dealing with “airspace violations, including by hijacked aircraft” as well as “assisting crews of aircraft in distress,” the ministry added. 
+Some 100 aircraft, including Su-27, MiG-29 and MiG-31 fighter jets, Su-24 and Su-34 bombers, as well as Su-25 ground attack jets and combat helicopters provided by the allies, are expected to take part in the drill. 
+Troops from electronic warfare and surface-to-air missile units are also participating. 
+The exercise started at 8am Moscow time with Tu-160, Tu-95MS and Tu-22M3 aircraft given the roles of aggressor. The planes, simulating an adversary force, were spotted over Eastern European and Central Asian airspaces, the Russian military said. 
+All units are being coordinated from a Russian Air Force command center located outside Moscow. 
+The joint CIS air defense system, established in 1995, currently focuses on protecting the ex-Soviet countries’ airspace as well as providing air or missile strike early warnings and coordinated responses. 
+Russia contributes the bulk of the system’s early warning and air defense capacities, with short- and long-range radar stations monitoring the area. 
+Notably, the system does not have a single commander. It is collectively controlled by the chiefs of the air defense forces of the member states themselves. 
+Bilateral air defense systems between Russia and its neighbors have also been established in recent years. Last December, an air defense agreement between Russia and Armenia was signed by the two countries’ defense ministers, Sergey Shoigu and Seyran Oganyan, respectively. 
+In 2013 Moscow signed a separate treaty on a joint regional air defense system with Kazakhstan. Russian and Belarusian anti-aircraft missile forces have already been unified into an integrated system designed to contain any security threats in the European theater. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount 
+If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire",FAKE
+8468,"After Vets Fight War, Feds Demand Money Back","After Vets Fight War, Feds Demand Money Back U.S. government continues to treat troops like second class citizens Infowars Nightly News - October 27, 2016 Comments 
+Thanks you for your service? 
+No. After promising bonuses & education benefits to military in order to get them to re-enlist for the Afghanistan & Iraq Wars, the Pentagon is now demanding the money back from vets who can’t afford to pay. 
+This is how Obama treats veterans — just like Hillary treats those who protect her in the Secret Service. 
+Can anyone trust their promises? NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+4569,Here Are Some Key People to Watch in 2015,"The former Florida governor and son and brother of presidents, a favorite of the GOP establishment, was the first Republican to move
+
+openly toward a 2016 White House run. The Spanish-speaker has strong ties to Florida’s Hispanic community and could expand the party’s reach into an increasingly diverse U.S. electorate. His access to donors, meanwhile, could shake up financing for Republicans as the race takes form.",REAL
+4237,"Super Tuesday II: Clinton sweeps Florida, Illinois, Ohio and North Carolina; Rubio quits after Trump wins Florida","The Democratic party moved a lot closer to choosing its nominee on Tuesday night. The Republican party moved a little closer to chaos.
+
+Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has won at least four of the five states where Democrats voted on Tuesday, with victories in Florida, Illinois, Ohio and North Carolina. The race in Missouri against Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) remains too close to call. Clinton’s staff said they expected to increase their lead in the race for Democratic convention delegates by about 300 — requiring Sanders to stage a near-miraculous comeback in the coming states.
+
+“We are moving closer to securing the Democratic party nomination and winning this election in November,” Clinton told supporters in West Palm Beach, Fla. Sounding hoarse, she seemed to be offering an olive branch to Sanders — who, so far, has shown little inclination to get out of a race that has given him an unprecedented national following. “I want to congratulate Senator Sanders for the vigorous campaign he’s waging,” Clinton said, giving it a try anyway. She has now won 15 states, as compared with nine wins for Sanders.
+
+On the Republican side, GOP front-runner Donald Trump won a key contest in Florida — a lopsided victory on the home turf of rival Sen. Marco Rubio, which caused Rubio to declare he was suspending his campaign. That brought Trump all of Florida’s 99 Republican delegates, the biggest prize awarded in any state so far. Trump has also been projected as the winner in Illinois and North Carolina, two states with 141 delegates between them. But, because those are not “winner-take-all” states, Trump will likely have to split some of those 141 with other candidates. The GOP race in Missouri remains too close to call.
+
+But Trump was denied a victory in another key winner-take-all state, Ohio, which was won by its own sitting governor, John Kasich. That victory doesn’t make Kasich a likely nominee: he has now won a grand total of one state. But, without Ohio’s 66 delegates, Trump now faces a difficult path to reach the majority of delegates he needs to avoid a “contested” GOP convention, in which no candidate enters with a majority of delegates locked up. In that chaotic situation — not seen in the GOP since 1976 — delegates could choose one of the candidates who ran, or someone else entirely. If their choice is not Trump, the party may have to face strong anger from his supporters, or even a third-party candidacy from Trump himself.
+
+Trump spoke to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., where he savored his victory over Rubio in Florida, despite a barrage of anti-Trump advertising. “Nobody has ever — ever, in the history of politics — received the kind of negative advertising that I have…vicious, horrible,” Trump said. But then, he said: “You explain it to me, because I can’t: my numbers went up.” He told supporters that he’d seen anti-Trump commercials during a broadcast of a golf tournament from Trump’s own club, and tried to distract attendees at the tournament from watching.
+
+Trump repeated his promise to bring the Republican party together: “We have to bring our party together. We have to bring it together. We have something happening that actually makes the Republican party probably the biggest political story anywhere in the world.”
+
+But he also, more than before, seemed to show signs of fatigue at the long grind of a campaign. Trump spoke of missing his youngest son, Baron, while he’s been out on the trail: “Baron. I never see my Baron,” Trump said. “He said, ‘When are you going to come home, Daddy? When are you coming home?’”
+
+Trump’s top rival, in terms of delegates, is Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) — who has won no states so far, though he is running neck-and-neck with Trump in returns from Missouri. Before the outcome in Missouri was known, Cruz spoke to supporters in Houston, and essentially declared that Kasich — even on his best night of the campaign — would be a non-factor from here on out.
+
+“Only two campaigns have a plausible path to the nomination, ours and Donald Trump’s,” Cruz said. “Nobody else has any mathematical possibility whatsoever.” He praised Rubio at length, trying to win over Rubio’s supporters — and the “#nevertrump” crowd that had coalesced around Rubio. “We welcome you to our teams, we welcome you with open and welcoming arms,” Cruz said. That, in itself, was an amazing moment and a sign of how Trump has reshaped the Republican landscape this year.
+
+A year ago, the idea that Cruz — the despised figure who led Republicans into an ill-fated effort to stop “Obamacare” and triggered a government shutdown instead — might be the best choice for the GOP establishment would have been too strange to be funny.
+
+[Kasich wins Ohio with an eye toward a contested convention]
+
+Kasich’s win in Ohio was celebrated by GOP operatives who launched a last-ditch campaign to thwart Trump’s march to the nomination.
+
+“You’re not the nominee until you get 1,237 delegates, and I don’t see how Trump gets there,” said Katie Packer, the strategist helping lead Our Principles PAC, which has spent nearly $13 million on a barrage of hard-hitting ads attacking the billionaire real estate developer. “Our goal was always to deprive him of Ohio and Florida, and the fact that we got halfway, we consider a win for the American people and the Republican party and certainly us.”
+
+Kasich has largely abstained from attacking Trump so far, but on Tuesday night – with the race narrowing, and his position improving – Kasich took a brief swipe at the front-runner. “I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land,” Kasich said. He took a remarkably different tone than the bombastic front-runner, who focuses on international trade and business deals. Kasich told his audience to make the world better in smaller ways, working harder at their jobs, and being kind to neighbors. At times, he did not seem to be speaking about a political campaign at all.
+
+“We’re all part of a giant mosaic. A snapshot in time. All of us here,” Kasich said, saying that every person in the audience had a purpose from God. “Our job…is to dig down and understand that purpose, and never underestimate our ability to change the world in which we live.”
+
+[Rubio’s demise marks the last gasp of the Republican reboot]
+
+Rubio, a first-term senator, had launched his campaign with a message of youth and optimism — but was unable to escape his support for a 2013 effort at immigration reform, which many conservatives believed was too lenient on undocumented immigrants. And he was unable to escape Trump, who hectored him as “Little Marco,” a tool of big donors.
+
+“After tonight, it is clear that — while we are on the right side — this year we will not be on the winning side,” Rubio said on Tuesday.
+
+Rubio eventually fired back, trying to fight on Trump’s level with insults about the front-runner’s tan and his fingers. He also called Trump a “con artist” for his involvement in a “university” that many students said defrauded them. But Rubio undercut his own message by saying that he would still vote for Trump, were he the nominee.
+
+That odd, mismatched strategy seemed to turn off voters: his poll numbers declined sharply. He won just one state, Minnesota, along with Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. Rubio, oddly, mocked the District of Columbia by name in his speech.
+
+“There’s nothing more you could have done,” Rubio said, speaking in the concourse of a Florida arena – he had rented the whole thing, but the crowd was so small that he only needed a hallway. “America’s in the middle of a real political storm. A real tsunami. And we should have seen this coming.”
+
+Even in defeat, however, Rubio could not escape Trump. A heckler shouted out “Trump for President!” The crowd booed, but Rubio shushed them. “Don’t worry, he won’t get beat up at our event,” he said, referring to alleged assaults of protesters at Trump events.
+
+[Rubio was lifted by 2010 wave. But he was swamped by the ‘tsunami’ of 2016.]
+
+In early exit polls reported by ABC News, Democratic primary voters had a split view of the two candidates: they tended to see Clinton as far more electable — but see Sanders as more honest. By a roughly 2 to 1 margin, Democratic voters said Clinton had a better chance than Sanders of beating Trump in a general election matchup across Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois and Missouri.
+
+But roughly 8 in 10 said Sanders was honest and trustworthy, compared with about 6 in 10 for Clinton. Sanders has dominated among honesty-focused voters all year while Clinton has won those focused on electability by a wide margin.
+
+According to those same early exit polls reported, large majorities of Democrats in Tuesday’s primaries would be satisfied with either Clinton or Sanders winning the Democratic nomination. At least 7 in 10 voters across primary voting states would be satisfied with each candidate becoming the party’s nominee, with slightly more satisfied with Clinton than Sanders.
+
+Among Republican primary voters, by contrast, preliminary exit polls showed unusual hesitancy about the prospect of Trump as the nominee. Across all of Tuesday’s states, a little more than half of GOP voters said they would be satisfied with Trump as the Republican nominee against Clinton, according to early exit polls from ABC News.
+
+Just under 4 in 10 Republican voters across Tuesday’s contests said they would consider a third-party candidate if Trump and Clinton were the nominees. Looking specifically at non-Trump supporters, ABC reported 6 in 10 would consider backing a third-party candidate if Trump became the party’s nominee.
+
+Separately, it was clear from exit polls that the majority of Tuesday’s GOP voters supported Trump’s proposal temporarily to ban foreign Muslims from entering the United States. In all, 66 percent agreed with that idea, according to exit polls reported by ABC News.
+
+Trump scored an early win Tuesday morning, swamping the tiny vote in a Republican caucus held in the Northern Mariana Islands, according to a tweet from the executive director of the GOP in the U.S. territory.
+
+The win earned Trump nine delegates, only a tiny sliver of the 367 delegates at stake Tuesday. But should the chaotic Republican race lead to a contested national convention in July, the win could prove important because of arcane party rules that require candidates to have won a majority of delegates in at least eight states or territories. The win was Trump’s eighth of the nominating season.
+
+Voting ran relatively smoothly across the country, although a frightening incident interrupted one Cleveland voting location, where police said a poll worker was arrested after pulling a gun during a verbal dispute with fellow workers.
+
+A spokeswoman for the Cleveland Police Department said Alan Bethea, 45, faced multiple charges. Police say he pulled a .380 handgun from his backpack during the argument. No one was injured.
+
+Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Missouri officials had estimated 34.1 percent of voters would take part in the primary, nearing 2008’s record turnout of 36 percent. News reports in other parts of the country also reported lines in hotly contested races.
+
+In North Carolina, where a controversial new voter identification law was in use for the first time, voting rights advocates were on alert for problems. A spokeswoman for the North Carolina State Board of Elections said late in the day that primaries were running smoothly.
+
+In Ohio, some voters appreciated the job Kasich has done as governor.
+
+“He’s done a great job for Ohio,” said Lauri Gillet, 42, a civil engineer who voted for Kasich in Westerville, the governor’s home town. “He’s the best of both worlds, from a business standpoint and a politics standpoint. And Ohio’s doing great. There’s been a ton of growth in the oil and gas industry.”
+
+Hundreds of thousands of ballots were already cast in early voting in Florida. Turnout was light in the early morning at a polling place near the airport in Miami. But the voters who showed up sounded passionate about their choices.
+
+Luis Joaquin Alonso, 79, said he voted for Trump, citing concerns about the deficit and the desire for someone to take on the political establishment.
+
+“I love this country,” he said, adding that Trump does, too, and that’s why he is running.
+
+“This guy has got plenty of money. He doesn’t need [more] money,” Alonso said.
+
+[Early voting: Nearly 2 million people have already voted in Florida]
+
+Florida’s primary is closed, meaning that independents, who have sided with Sanders in large numbers in other states, could not participate. The state is also home to large numbers of seniors, who have gravitated far more heavily toward Clinton elsewhere.
+
+In Miami, Luis Caldera, 61, said he voted for Clinton. He called her “the best option” and said her experience and his familiarity with her career set her apart.
+
+In Youngstown, Ohio, Dave Williams, 52, cast a ballot for Sanders, deeming the Vermont senator better for working people.
+
+“I lost my house when the stock market crashed. That was before the government was doing anything to keep people in their homes. And I’ve gone from a house since then to an apartment,” said Williams, a member of cement finishers local 179. “I’m an angry voter, how ’bout that? I’m angry about the way the country is working for the blue-collar worker. Hillary gets a big, fat zero on that.”
+
+[How Bernie Sanders is hijacking the Democratic Party to be elected as an independent]
+
+While out for breakfast Tuesday morning in downtown Chicago, Sanders predicted he could have a good night if larger numbers of voters take part in the contests — setting up a long nomination battle in states that are even friendlier to his campaign.
+
+“I think that if there is a large voter turnout, we are going to do just great here in Illinois, in Missouri, Ohio, and hopefully North Carolina and Florida,” Sanders said during a stop at Lou Mitchell’s, a Chicago institution. “In the states that are coming down the pike, we have great opportunities to win many of them, so we are feeling really good.”
+
+Sanders was accompanied by Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Rahm Emanuel last year. Part of Sanders’s strategy in Illinois has been mobilizing those disappointed with the tenure of Emanuel, a Clinton ally whose approval ratings have dropped to all-time lows.
+
+In North Carolina, Clinton campaigned at a polling place in Southeast Raleigh Magnet High School around midday on Tuesday, greeting supporters with hugs and selfies.
+
+She warned that her supporters might see public polling that shows her with leads in many of the states voting Tuesday and conclude that they don’t need to vote, which her campaign believes might have contributed to her unexpected loss to Sanders in Michigan last week.
+
+“Sometimes the reporting of polls, some might say: well, my candidate is doing so well, I don’t need to come out,” Clinton said. “But everybody should come out. There’s so much at stake in this election.”
+
+Clinton has been eager to pivot her campaign to confront Trump more directly. But asked Tuesday if she was concerned that a protracted primary fight with Sanders would impede Democrats’ ability to wage a general-election fight against the GOP nominee, she declined to encourage Sanders to leave the race.
+
+“He has a right to run his campaign in any way that he chooses, and I’m proud of the campaign we’ve run,” Clinton said.
+
+Trump’s rhetoric drove some voters Clinton’s way in the Democratic contest. Tonya Massenburg, 53, voted for Clinton in Raleigh because she is primarily concerned about “violence” and “racism” in the country right now — and less concerned about Sanders, about whom she said she knows very little.
+
+“I just hope that North Carolina pulled through for Hillary Clinton,” she said. “Because of the way this country is headed, it’s not very good.”
+
+Also Tuesday, Clinton announced that she has been endorsed by the mother of Michael Brown, the teenager whose 2014 shooting by police in Ferguson, Mo., brought more attention to officer-involved slayings of unarmed black men.
+
+The endorsement came as Clinton has appeared to lose ground to Sanders in Missouri, with the most recent poll showing an effective tie.
+
+“When I lost my son, I lost my world. ‘Big Mike’ was a big boy, but he was my baby boy, my only child, and his life was brutally taken from me,” Lezley McSpadden wrote in her endorsement statement.
+
+“This election season, we are at battle for the soul of our nation,” McSpadden said. “If we want to continue to build on the progress made by our country, we need a president who is ready to lead — and I trust Hillary Clinton.”
+
+McSpadden was among a group of African-American mothers who met privately with Clinton last year, and Clinton has made the mothers’ stories a regular part of her political speeches, as she talks about the need for criminal justice reform and better gun control.
+
+Helderman and Fahrenthold reported from Washington. Sean Sullivan and Ed O’Keefe in Miami, David Weigel in Youngstown, John Wagner in Chicago, Abby Phillip in Raleigh, and Scott Clement, Anne Gearan and Matea Gold in Washington also contributed.",REAL
+3353,Hillary Clinton to turn over private email server to Justice,"Washington (CNN) Hillary Clinton agreed to turn over her private email server to authorities on Tuesday, the same day an intelligence community inspector general told congressional committees that at least five emails from the server did contain classified information.
+
+The decision to hand over the server, as well as a thumb drive of all her work-related emails to the Justice Department, represents an effort to blunt an expanding probe into her use of a private email account.
+
+Clinton, now the Democratic presidential front-runner, ""directed her team to give her email server that was used during her tenure as (secretary of state) to the Department of Justice, as well as a thumb drive containing copies of her emails already provided to the State Department,"" her spokesman, Nick Merrill, told CNN early Tuesday evening. ""She pledged to cooperate with the government's security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them.""
+
+After conceding the presidency to Trump in a phone call earlier, Clinton addresses supporters and campaign workers in New York on Wednesday, November 9. Her defeat marked a stunning end to a campaign that appeared poised to make her the first woman elected US president.
+
+Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Cleveland on November 6, two days before Election Day. She went on to lose Ohio -- and the election -- to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
+
+Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Cleveland on November 6, two days before Election Day. She went on to lose Ohio -- and the election -- to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
+
+Clinton arrives at a 9/11 commemoration ceremony in New York on September 11. Clinton, who was diagnosed with pneumonia two days before, left early after feeling ill. A video appeared to show her stumble as Secret Service agents helped her into a van.
+
+Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.
+
+Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.
+
+After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""
+
+After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""
+
+Clinton walks on her stage with her family after winning the New York primary in April.
+
+Clinton walks on her stage with her family after winning the New York primary in April.
+
+U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""
+
+U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""
+
+Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.
+
+Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.
+
+Clinton ducks after a woman threw a shoe at her while she was delivering remarks at a recycling trade conference in Las Vegas in 2014.
+
+Clinton ducks after a woman threw a shoe at her while she was delivering remarks at a recycling trade conference in Las Vegas in 2014.
+
+Obama and Clinton bow during the transfer-of-remains ceremony marking the return of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.
+
+Obama and Clinton bow during the transfer-of-remains ceremony marking the return of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.
+
+Clinton arrives for a group photo before a forum with the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2012. The forum was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
+
+Clinton arrives for a group photo before a forum with the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2012. The forum was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
+
+Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.
+
+Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.
+
+In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
+
+In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
+
+Obama is flanked by Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference in Chicago in December 2008. He had designated Clinton to be his secretary of state.
+
+Obama is flanked by Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference in Chicago in December 2008. He had designated Clinton to be his secretary of state.
+
+Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.
+
+Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.
+
+Clinton and another presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, applaud at the start of a Democratic debate in 2007.
+
+Clinton and another presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, applaud at the start of a Democratic debate in 2007.
+
+Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year.
+
+Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year.
+
+President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999.
+
+President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999.
+
+The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998.
+
+The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998.
+
+Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
+
+Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
+
+The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
+
+The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
+
+The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook ""It Takes a Village"" in 1997.
+
+The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook ""It Takes a Village"" in 1997.
+
+The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President.
+
+The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President.
+
+Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
+
+Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
+
+During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus.
+
+During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus.
+
+In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.
+
+In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.
+
+Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of ""60 Minutes"" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992.
+
+Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of ""60 Minutes"" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992.
+
+The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President.
+
+The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President.
+
+Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985.
+
+Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985.
+
+In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea.
+
+In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea.
+
+Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974.
+
+Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974.
+
+Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School.
+
+Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School.
+
+Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.
+
+Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.
+
+Merrill said in the meantime, Clinton's team ""has worked with the State Department to ensure her emails are stored in a safe and secure manner.""
+
+The FBI, which is handling the matter, declined to comment Tuesday evening. David E. Kendall, Clinton's lawyer, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
+
+A senior Clinton campaign aide said the server hadn't yet changed hands as of Tuesday evening and Clinton's team is working with the Justice Department to arrange the logistics of the handover. The thumb drive, meanwhile, has been turned over. And Kendall, the aide said, has followed State Department guidance on safekeeping.
+
+Clinton's campaign believes there are no emails from her State Department tenure on the server, since it was wiped clean after she turned over her work-related emails to the State Department, the aide said.
+
+The aide said it's the Clinton campaign's understanding that the Justice Department isn't looking to reconstruct the server's history, but is instead concerned about the security of the emails today, since some are now classified, though they weren't classified or labeled as such at the time.
+
+For Clinton, the move -- which Republicans like House Speaker John Boehner have urged for months -- indicates her campaign sees a growing risk in the issue of her use of a private email server, which has stoked concerns about her trustworthiness.
+
+""It's about time,"" Boehner said in a statement Tuesday night.
+
+Since news broke in March of her use of a personal email address on a server kept in her Chappaqua, New York, home, Clinton has insisted that she's turned over all of her work-related emails to the State Department and deleted all others -- but wouldn't turn over her server to the government.
+
+Clinton has been dogged by poll numbers showing that more Americans, by a margin of about 20 percentage points, say she's not trustworthy rather than trustworthy. A late July CNN/ORC poll found that 58% of all registered voters say it is extremely important that the next president be honest and trustworthy.
+
+Rep. Trey Gowdy, who chairs the House Select Committee on Benghazi and has pushed for Clinton's emails for months, claimed credit for her decision to turn over the server.
+
+""The revelation that Secretary Clinton exclusively used private email for official public business, and the multitude of issues that emanated from her decision, including this most recent one, demonstrates what can happen when Congress and those equally committed to exposing the truth, doggedly pursue facts and follow them,"" he said in a statement.
+
+Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Clinton waited ""a long time"" before turning the server over.
+
+""That's a long time for top secret classified information to be held by an unauthorized person outside of an approved, secure government facility,"" he said in a statement. ""I look forward to the FBI answering my questions so the American people can be assured that everything has been done to protect our national security interests and hold accountable anyone who broke the rules.""
+
+Still, it's clear the GOP won't stop hitting Clinton on the campaign trail, accusing her of secrecy over her decision to wait five months to turn over the server.
+
+Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement Tuesday night that releasing the server does little to answer questions about Clinton's honesty.
+
+""If Hillary Clinton believed in honesty and transparency, she would have turned over her secret server months ago to an independent arbiter, not as a last resort and to the Obama Justice Department,"" he said. ""Of course, if she really cares about transparency, she would never have had a secret server in the first place.""
+
+Clinton's decision to hand over the server comes as the intelligence community's inspector general now says at least five emails stored on Clinton's server contained classified information. The documents were from a ""limited sampling"" of her emails and among those 40 reviewed, said the inspector general, Charles McCullough III.
+
+On Tuesday, McCullough sent four of the emails to chairs of several congressional committees. In a cover letter, he said two of the four emails included information that has now been classified up to top secret.
+
+One of the five emails has since been declassified because it was no longer time-sensitive. The intelligence community maintains the remaining two contained classified material, but is deferring to the State Department on whether they should be identified as such.
+
+McCullough said in the past that ""none of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings,"" but that some ""should have been handled as classified, appropriately marked, and transmitted via a secure network."" The State Department has told McCullough that ""there are potentially hundreds of classified emails within the approximately 30,000 provided by former Secretary Clinton.""
+
+Republicans shared exclusively with CNN Tuesday a review of those emails that the State Department had released, which they said showed Clinton and her aides sent information that would later be classified to six people's private email addresses. They include former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns; Cheryl Mills, who was Clinton's chief of staff at the State Department; and Jake Sullivan, who served as Clinton's top foreign policy adviser. Clinton also emailed information that would later be classified to close confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whose communications with Clinton about Libya have become a focus of the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks.
+
+""The fact that classified information was sent to and from Hillary Clinton to at least six separate individuals and potentially many more demonstrates just how big of a risk her decision to use a secret server poses to our national security,"" Republican National Committee research director Raj Shah told CNN.
+
+The probe into Clinton's email practices has now expanded to include some of her top aides as part of a larger investigation on the use of private email accounts by previous secretaries of state. The Republican chairmen of three Senate committees -- intelligence, homeland security and foreign relations -- sent a joint request in March for both inspectors general to investigate the personal emails of Clinton's aides.
+
+""We will follow the facts wherever they lead, to include former aides and associates, as appropriate,"" said Douglas Welty, a spokesman for the State Department's inspector general.
+
+In a July 17 letter to the State Department, Steve A. Linick, the State Department inspector general, said his office is reviewing ""the use of personal communications hardware and software by five secretaries of state and their immediate staffs."" The Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General is assisting in the review.
+
+One of the emails containing since-classified information was released to the public, prompting the intelligence community to ask the FBI to investigate the possible compromise of classified material. The State Department now has a team of analysts from the intelligence community to review Clinton's emails before any more are released to the public.
+
+Of the two top-secret emails sent to Congress on Tuesday, State Department spokesman John Kirby said they have not been released to the public and the department is ""taking steps to ensure the information is protected and stored appropriately"" while the determination was made.
+
+""Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011, and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton,"" Kirby said. ""They were not marked as classified.""",REAL
+2308,Barney Frank Powerfully Disproves Ben Carson's Comments On Homosexuality,"Barney Frank became a spokesman for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality as the country's first congressman to voluntarily come out, and in a conversation with HuffPost Live, Frank had strong words about comments by Ben Carson, who recently stated on CNN that being gay is ""absolutely"" a choice.
+
+The former Massachusetts Congressman, who has a new memoir out titled Frank, referenced troublesome mentalities like Ben Carson's as he described to host Alyona Minkovski the struggle of being a young teen who knew he wanted to go into politics but also knew ""people hated gay people.""
+
+""For those like Ben Carson, who just announced that it was a choice, I do want to say at 14 I did not choose to be a member of what I thought was the most hated group in America. That was not a typical teenage reaction at the time,"" Frank said Tuesday.
+
+Presidential hopeful Carson has since apologized for his comments, which cited prison as an example to back his claims. In an e-mailed statement to reporters, Carson wrote: “I do not pretend to know how every individual came to their sexual orientation. I regret that my words to express that concept were hurtful and divisive. For that I apologize unreservedly to all that were offended,” TIME reported.
+
+Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live's new morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!",REAL
+8628,Need to Burn Fat? Eat Dinner Early or Skip It to Help Weight Loss,"By Heather Callaghan, Editor Now that people are catching on that obesity equals toxin storage and endocrine problems – losing excess weight is more important than ever. “Meal... ",FAKE
+9859,"Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at New York University, explains how US elections are stolen:","Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at New York University, explains how US elections are stolen:
+http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45799.htm 
+He outlines what can be done, but those in power will not do it. Revolution is probably the only solution.
+The post Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at New York University, explains how US elections are stolen: appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+10065,Can The American People Defeat The Oligarchy That Rules Them?,"SPECIAL TO BUSINESS WEEK, MINDY KATZMAN, AUTH. EDITOR--Paul Craig Roberts in front of a portrait of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury.",FAKE
+8169,"Hillary Clinton Wants a Strong Russia. Wait, what did she say?","a reply to: Violater1 She wants your vote. And she will say anything to get it. She changes her mind as fast as public opinion changes. ROFL Damm - If we could get someone in office who would change their opinion to public opinion AND FOLLOW THROUGH, they would be my hero. They spend all their money finding out what we want, then they lie. Why can't we just get a representative in office? edit on 26-10-2016 by Isurrender73 because: (no reason given)",FAKE
+2658,How Workplace Injuries Are Adding To Income Inequality,"WASHINGTON -- There are no shortage of culprits in the national debate over rising income inequality, but President Barack Obama's Labor Department would like to add one more to the list: on-the-job injuries.
+
+In a new report issued Wednesday, Labor Department officials argue that workplace injuries and illnesses, coupled with an inadequate worker compensation system, are contributing to the gap between rich and poor in the U.S.
+
+According to the Labor Department, roughly 4 million serious injuries and illnesses are reported by employers each year, though the true tally is likely much higher. Workers who suffer a serious injury earn an estimated 15 percent less, or $31,000 on average, over the ensuing decade.
+
+""These injuries force thousands of working families out of the middle class and block many low-wage workers from getting ahead,"" David Michaels, head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told The Huffington Post. ""The studies all show that the majority of workers who get hurt never get any workers compensation, and they have to pick up the cost themselves. The workers who do [get workers comp] are never fully compensated.""
+
+According to the report, ""Adding Inequality to Injury: The Costs of Failing to Protect Workers on the Job,"" state laws and court rulings have made it harder for injured workers to recoup money, with workers compensation now covering only an estimated 21 percent of lost wages and medical bills due to injury or illness. The rest of the tab falls onto workers, their health insurers and taxpayers in general.
+
+While ""inadequate for the average worker,"" the system tends to be even less generous toward low-wage workers, according to the report. Immigrant workers, in particular, may be unaware of their rights, have a limited grasp of English or simply be afraid to report their injuries for fear of losing their jobs. As a result, many don't even file claims.
+
+According to the Labor Department, less than 40 percent of workers who are eligible to apply for workers compensation following an injury actually apply for it.
+
+Structural changes in the labor force have made workers more likely to get hurt on the job, Michaels said. He pointed to the prevalence of temp workers in warehousing and manufacturing, as well as ""independent contractors"" in the construction industry.
+
+Temp workers have typically been on the job a shorter period of time and undergone less training, making them more vulnerable to injury than permanent workers. And when workers are misclassified as self-employed independent contractors, companies dodge the liabilities that would typically come with an injury, giving them less motivation to ensure a safe workplace.
+
+""When the worker is misclassified, they'll never see workers compensation and they won't get unemployment insurance. They really pay a very significant cost,"" Michaels said. ""And if an employer isn't concerned [with liabilities], they have very little incentive to prevent those injuries.""",REAL
+5025,Obama says Trump 'unfit' for presidency,"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama offered one of his sharpest denunciations of Donald Trump to date Tuesday, declaring the Republican nominee entirely unfit to serve as president and lambasting Republicans for sticking by their nominee.
+
+The strong rebuke in the White House East Room came after Trump's criticism of the family of a slain Muslim US soldier, along with comments that displayed apparent confusion related to the Russian incursion into Ukraine.
+
+""The Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president,"" Obama said at a White House news conference with the Prime Minister of Singapore. ""He keeps on proving it.""
+
+The Trump campaign responded by going after the Democratic nominee as well as the President.
+
+""Hillary Clinton has proven herself unfit to serve in any government office,"" a Trump statement said, listing a number of policy concerns. ""Obama-Clinton have single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, handed Iraq, Libya and Syria to ISIS, and allowed our personnel to be slaughtered at Benghazi.""
+
+Later Trump in an interview with WJLA said of Obama: ""He's a terrible president. He'll probably go down as the worst president in the history of our country. He's been a total disaster.""
+
+Obama on Tuesday described his feelings about Trump as unprecedented, recalling disagreements with previous GOP presidential nominees Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney -- but never an outright sense they were unfit to serve.
+
+""The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn't appear to have basic knowledge of critical issues in Europe, the Middle East, in Asia, means that he's woefully unprepared to do this job,"" Obama said.
+
+Speaking alongside Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in the White House East Room, Obama said there are now weekly episodes in which even Republican party leaders distance themselves from Trump.
+
+""There has to be a point at which you say, 'Enough,' "" Obama said.
+
+Obama placed responsibility for Trump's statements squarely on his fellow Republicans, many of whom denounced his statements on the slain soldier's family but didn't withdraw their support.
+
+""What does this say about your party that this is your standard-bearer?"" Obama asked of GOP leaders. ""This isn't a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily and weekly where they are distancing themselves from statements he's making. There has to be a point at which you say, 'This is not somebody I can support for president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party.' ""
+
+Obama said that denunciations from Republicans of Trump's remarks ""ring hollow"" without an accompanying withdrawal of support.
+
+""I don't doubt their sincerity. I don't doubt they were outraged by some of the statements that Mr. Trump and his supporters made about the Khan family,"" Obama said. ""But there has to come a point in which you say, 'Somebody who makes those kinds of statements doesn't have the judgment, the temperament, the understanding to occupy the most powerful position in the world.' ""
+
+Trump and the family of the slain soldier have been locked in an increasingly bitter dispute over Muslims in America and the nature of patriotic sacrifice.
+
+After Khizir Khan, who lost his son in a suicide bombing in Iraq, declared at last week's Democratic National Convention that Trump had ""sacrificed nothing,"" the Republican nominee claimed he'd been ""viciously attacked"" and questioned why Khan's wife, Ghazala, didn't make her own remarks.
+
+Criticism from Trump's own party came swiftly, including in a lengthy statement from McCain, whom Trump previously derided for having been taken captive in the Vietnam War. But he and other top GOP leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, made little indication they would withdraw support for the Republican candidate.
+
+Trump has also taken flak for appearing unaware that Russian forces had annexed Crimea in early 2014, saying on ABC's ""This Week"" Sunday that President Vladimir Putin is ""not going into Ukraine."" Later, he argued that the people of Crimea ""would rather be with Russia than where they were"" -- an argument that Putin himself has made in justifying his annexation of the disputed Ukrainian territory.
+
+Trump looks for better Russia ties
+
+And he's maintained his view that fostering better ties to Putin would benefit areas of American foreign policy, including in the fight against ISIS. ""If we could get along with Russia, wouldn't that be a good thing, instead of a bad thing?"" Trump asked Monday during a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania.
+
+Trump also took heat for calling on Russia last week to release deleted emails from Clinton if they had obtained them in a hack of the Democratic National Committee, which US officials have fingered Moscow for.
+
+At the news conference, Obama said the alleged Russian hacking wouldn't necessarily prompt a complete freeze in relations between the the country and the United States.
+
+Noting that the FBI was still investigating the hack, Obama said cybersecurity was just another dispute of many between Putin and himself.
+
+""If in fact Russia engaged in this activity, it's just one on a long list of issues that me and Mr. Putin talk about,"" Obama said. ""I don't think that it wildly swings what is a tough, difficult relationship that we have with Russia right now.""
+
+Obama's administration, through the Justice Department's national security division, continues to investigate the hack. Neither the White House nor the FBI have publicly blamed Russia for the intrusion. But federal officials said there is strong evidence indicating the breach was perpetrated by hackers working on behalf of Russia intelligence.
+
+Trump has brushed off Democratic charges that Putin could be behind the hack in order to tip the US election in his favor, claiming he's never met the Russian leader and doesn't maintain a relationship with him. In statements from only a few years ago, however, Trump said he enjoyed warm ties with Putin.
+
+Obama's remarks Tuesday intensify his patten of inserting himself into the rancorous presidential race. While the President has freely criticized Trump in the year since the businessman entered the race, his denunciations have come faster and harsher in the last several weeks.
+
+At last week's convention, Obama named Trump repeatedly, arguing the candidate was ignorant of facts and intent on dividing the nation. And in June, Obama lit into Trump's response to the mass shooting in Orlando, saying he was peddling a dangerous vision.
+
+The President is expected to play an outsized role on the campaign trail in the coming months as Clinton works to motivate the supporters who helped elect Obama to office twice.",REAL
+4380,Supreme Court declares same-sex couples' 'fundamental right' to marry,"In a decision with profound implications, the Supreme Court asserted that under the US Constitution legal marriage may not be denied to same-sex couples, extending this right to all 50 states.
+
+As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?
+
+From left, Annie Katz of the University of Michigan, Zaria Cummings of Michigan State University, Spencer Perry of Berkeley, Calif., and Justin Maffett of Dartmouth University, celebrate outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, Friday after the court declared that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the US.
+
+In a landmark decision, the US Supreme Court on Friday ruled that gay men and lesbians enjoy a fundamental right to marry and that none of the 50 states has the power to defy that constitutional guarantee of freedom and equal protection.
+
+In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court issued the constitutional equivalent of a grand-slam homerun for same-sex couples across the United States.
+
+“The right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.
+
+“The court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry,” he declared. “No longer may this liberty be denied to them.”
+
+The high court also ruled that in addition to issuing licenses to same-sex couples, all 50 states must recognize the legitimacy of same-sex marriages performed in any other state.
+
+Currently, 37 states recognize same-sex marriages, while 13 states had maintained the traditional definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
+
+The high court decision represents a major advance for civil and equal rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. It marks the continued emergence of that community from its closeted, second-class existence for much of human history. And it establishes a firm legal foundation upon which gay rights advocates will push for broader freedoms, equality, and protections.
+
+At the same time, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion marks a significant setback for conservatives seeking to maintain the federalist structure of government. Rather than allowing the contentious social issue of marriage to be decided by the people and their elected representatives on a state-by-state basis, the high court decided instead to constitutionalize the issue of same-sex marriage and answer the question itself.
+
+The dissenting justices predict that that court’s actions in cutting off democratic debate over the issue will inflame opposition, rather than lead to national healing and greater tolerance. In addition, the decision sets the stage for more contentious battles ahead between gay rights activists and religious and social conservatives, they warn.
+
+“When decisions are reached through democratic means, some people will inevitably be disappointed with the results. But those whose views do not prevail at least know that they have had their say, and accordingly are – in the tradition of our political culture – reconciled to the result of a fair and honest debate,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a dissenting opinion.
+
+That democratic dynamic was cut short by the majority decision, the chief justice said.
+
+“By deciding this question under the Constitution, the court removes it from the realm of democratic decision,” Roberts said. “There will be consequences to shutting down the political process on an issue of such profound significance. Closing debate tends to close minds.”
+
+Kennedy dismissed such concerns. “Of course, the Constitution contemplates that democracy is the appropriate process for change,” he said, “so long as that process does not abridge fundamental rights.”
+
+When fundamental rights are at stake, he said, the court has a duty to address the issue.
+
+Kennedy said that marriage was a keystone of the social order in America and that it was intolerable to exclude gay men and lesbians from full participation in that order.
+
+“It demeans gays and lesbians for the state to lock them out of a central institution of the nation’s society,” he said.
+
+“The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is not manifest,” Kennedy said.  “With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.”
+
+In his dissent, Chief Justice Roberts called the majority decision “an act of will, not legal judgment.”
+
+“The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this court’s precedent,” he said.
+
+“If you are among the many Americans – of whatever sexual orientation – who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision,” the chief justice said.
+
+“Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits,” Roberts said.
+
+“But do not celebrate the Constitution,” he said. “It had nothing to with it.”
+
+The chief justice said the Constitution leaves to the people and their elected representatives the authority to define marriage.
+
+“The fundamental right to marry does not include a right to make a state change its definition of marriage. And a state’s decision to maintain the meaning of marriage that has persisted in every culture throughout human history can hardly be called irrational,” Roberts said.
+
+“In short, our Constitution does not enact any one theory of marriage. The people of a state are free to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, or to retain the historic definition,” he said.
+
+Friday’s decision stems from lawsuits filed by same-sex couples in four states – Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee – challenging their exclusion from traditional marriage laws.
+
+Some couples sued to be allowed to marry. Others sued to have same-sex marriages performed in other states recognized in their new state of residence.
+
+Lawyers for the states had argued that marriage is aimed at heading-off the societal problem of unwed mothers and fatherless children. They argued that it has existed through much of human history to encourage a man and woman to remain together as a family to raise their biological offspring.
+
+Lawyers for same-sex couples dismissed that explanation, arguing that allowing same-sex couples to marry would in no way undercut the ability of opposite-sex couples to marry and raise their own children.
+
+Kennedy’s majority decision comes less than two months after he commented during oral argument about the difficulty of a judge ordering the nation to change a definition of marriage that had existed throughout most of human history.
+
+“This definition has been with us for millennia,” Kennedy said during oral argument in late April. “And it’s very difficult for the court to say, oh, well, we know better.”
+
+But that is, essentially, what Justice Kennedy did on Friday.
+
+In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said the majority opinion represents a threat to American democracy by a majority of nine lawyers on the Supreme Court who claim the power to create liberties to be protected under the Constitution.
+
+Scalia said when the high court wields power to revise the Constitution it robs the American people of the freedom to govern themselves.
+
+“Until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best,” Scalia said. He said the court’s decision to end the debate and resolve the issue itself was a “naked judicial claim to legislative – indeed super-legislative – power.”
+
+“A system of government that makes the people subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy,” Scalia said.
+
+In his majority opinion, Kennedy said that if rights were defined only by those who exercised them, new groups would never be able to invoke those rights once they were denied. He said the right to same-sex marriage was part of the liberty promised in the Fourteenth Amendment.
+
+“The right to marry is fundamental as a matter of history and tradition, but rights come not from ancient sources alone. They rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era,” Kennedy said.
+
+“Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophic premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here.”
+
+“But when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the state itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied,” Kennedy said.
+
+“Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right,” he said.
+
+Joining Kennedy in the majority were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.
+
+Dissenting opinions were filed by Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.",REAL
+3618,White House to host counterterrorism summit Feb. 18,"In the way of recent attacks abroad, the White House will host a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism Feb. 18 that will highlight how local committees in United States have worked to curb extremism before violence takes place.
+
+The meeting aims to show how to prevent attacks by those prone to extremism ""in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence, efforts made even more imperative in light of recent, tragic attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, and Paris,"" according to a statement released by the White House press secretary.
+
+Officials from Boston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis-St. Paul will show how they've brought social service providers, such as mental health professionals and religious leaders, together with law enforcement officials. Representatives from other countries will also showcase their most successful efforts to engage communities -- including the private and tech sectors, as well as the religious community -- on the issue.
+
+The sessions will involve ""presentations, panel discussions, and small group interactions,"" the statement said, though it did not disclose specific participants.
+
+The White House released a strategy in August 2011, called Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States, aimed at stopping violent extremism by way of domestic initiatives.",REAL
+7954,Moronic Trump Campaign Thinks Reopened Clinton Email Investigation Will Save Them,"The Trump campaign is so desperate that they are openly celebrating the reopening of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. 
+Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted: A great day in our campaign just got even better. FBI reviewing new emails in Clinton probe @CNNPolitics https://t.co/WBltG2lAK6 
+— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) October 28, 2016 
+The problem with the idea that the emails will save Donald Trump and the Republican Party is that Clinton was beating Trump while the FBI did their first investigation into her emails. Clinton has led Trump all through the Congressional hearings into her emails. She led Trump throughout the FBI investigation into her emails. Clinton won the Democratic nomination with her emails being a story. 
+The point is that Hillary Clinton’s emails aren’t a big issue to the majority of voters. The people who aren’t Republicans in this election don’t care about her emails. 
+When compared to Trump sexually assaulting women, not paying federal income taxes, and being sued in two states for fraud, the emails seem like a quaint political scandal from a much simpler time. 
+There has also never been a shred of proof that Hillary Clinton did anything wrong. 
+Republicans can’t get past the basic hurdle of needing actual evidence to back up their email conspiracy. 
+Hillary Clinton is facing Donald Trump in this election, and only a moron or a truly desperate campaign manager clinging on the last bit of hope that she can find would believe that the reopening of an email investigation will make a bit of difference on election day. 
+The voters are speaking, and they don’t care about Hillary Clinton’s emails.",FAKE
+5273,VP vetting? Trump meets with Sen. Joni Ernst,"Donald Trump on Monday spent part of his July 4th with Sen. Joni Ernst -- fueling speculation that the Iowa freshman senator could be on the short list of his vice presidential picks.
+
+Ernst told Fox News they had a ""good conversation,"" adding, ""I will continue to share my insights with Donald about the need to strengthen our economy, keep our nation safe, and ensure America is always a strong, stabilizing force around the globe.""
+
+Earlier, Trump tweeted, ""I look forward to meeting (Ernst) today in New Jersey. She has done a great job as Senator of Iowa!""
+
+Over the weekend, Trump met with Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and his wife, though a Pence spokesman said ""nothing was offered.""
+
+The spokesman, Marc Lotter, added, ""The governor had warm, productive meetings with the Trumps."" He declined to say where the Saturday meeting was held. Pence is running for re-election against Democratic former state House Speaker John Gregg.
+
+Trump and Pence discussed Pence's policies during his term as governor which began in 2013, Lotter said. He also declined to discuss Pence's level of interest in the position, echoing a comment from Pence last week that he did not want to talk about ""a hypothetical.""
+
+Trump tweeted Monday about his Saturday meeting with Pence.
+
+""Spent time with Indiana Governor Mike Pence and family yesterday. Very impressed, great people!” Trump tweeted.
+
+As Pence and his wife arrived for a concert Sunday night at Conner Prairie, a history park in Fishers, the governor again declined to discuss whether he was interested in the position. He reiterated his support for Trump's candidacy and said the Trumps ""couldn't have been more kind and gracious"" during the meeting.
+
+Trump has never held public office and is considering a small group of political veterans as potential running mates.
+
+People with direct knowledge of Trump's vetting process say the list includes Pence, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.
+
+In addition to serving as governor, Pence served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 12 years.
+
+He also at one time had his own presidential ambitions but last year ruled out a run after his popularity fell in the wake of criticism over his handling of the state's religious objections law.
+
+Fox News' Chris Snyder and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9031,"Russian Report Warns: American Revolution Has Now Begun, May Last Entire Decade","
+A sobering new Security Council ( SC ) analytical report on the US presidential election states that a new American Revolution has begun which today’s popular vote is just the beginning of; and that could fully last up to an entire decade, especially if this election is stolen from Donald Trump. [Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]
+According to this report, Federation intelligence analysts in their “deciphering/uncovering” what the current US presidential election is really all about have heavily relied on “outliers” [a thing situated away or detached from the main body or system] such as artificial intelligence ( AI ) models, social media trends and psychological analysis of the American electorate.
+This report notes that the Security Councils use of these “outliers” to both understand and explain what is occurring during this US presidential election provides the only proven scientific evidence of what is occurring as the so called polling data used by the American propaganda media has been proven to be nothing more than a manipulation device used to keep people from voting for or supporting the anti-establishment candidate Donald Trump.
+Examples of this being true, this report explains, lie in too many examples to fully cite—but includes the once respected Monmouth University poll found manipulating data to favor Hillary Clinton , news networks NBC and CBS found manipulating polling data to show Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump when she was actually losing , and CNN manipulating their poll data to favor Hillary Clinton too .
+Unlike manipulated polling data showing Hillary Clinton will win this election, however, this report continues, the objective and independent scientific “outliers” used by Security Council research analysts show not only Donald Trump winning—but winning in a landslide victory.
+Evidence proving this assertion of a Donald Trump US presidential win, this report notes, lies first with artificial intelligence analysis—that includes the MogIA supercomputer showing Trump winning in landslide and showing he is more popular than President Obama , and a just released AI computer simulation showing Trump winning with 289 electoral votes compared to Clinton’s 249 .
+Social media trend lines in this election, likewise, proves a Donald Trump landslide win in this election, this report continues, as his Facebook-Twitter-Instagram-YouTube “presence” dwarfs Hillary Clinton’s by a staggering 74 million —and that is further validated by the over 700,000 Americans who have come to his campaign rallies, as opposed to the barely 60,000 that have attended Hillary Clinton’s .
+Most fascinating though of the “outliers” used in this Security Council report is the psychological analysis of the American electorate conducted by a virtually unknown US political project called “ We Need Smith ”—whose scientifically conducted studies shockingly proved that anyone from a liberal Democrat, to a conservative Republican was able to win the US presidency as long as they promised to destroy the corrupt political system currently ruling America .
+The “We Need Smith” project, this report explains, is named after a popular US Great Depression era movie called Mr. Smith Goes To Washington about a newly appointed United States Senator who fights against a corrupt political system—and that during this present US presidential election only Donald Trump and US Senator Bernie Sanders fit the mold of.
+Critical to note about the “We Need Smith” project too, this report continues, is that it was co-founded by the legendary American pollster Patrick Caddell —who almost singlehandedly was responsible for putting President Jimmy Carter in office in 1976, but also presided over Carter’s unprecedented defeat in 1980 at the hands of the US establishments most hated candidate Ronald Reagan.
+Seeking to understand how President Carter could go from victory to defeat in just 4 years, this report details, Patrick Caddell spent the past nearly 4 decades examining it—and coming to the scientific conclusion that the conventional wisdom that America is absolutely divided into warring tribes is simply not true, they are all just tired of being lied to .
+In fact, this report continues, Caddell’s research proved that the American political battleground is no longer over ideology but instead is all about insurgency—and with a staggering 84% of the American public believing that the elites live by a different set of rules and laws than ordinary people do , anyone running against them is assured victory.
+Interestingly to note too, this report says, is Caddell’s scientific analyses showing that the hatred of the American people towards their elites comes from both the left and right —and as evidenced by the equal explosive political movements known as Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party insurgencies .
+This report grimly concludes, however, with a warning that Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin’s attributed statement—“ Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. ”—may, indeed, be active in the present US presidential election after newly released secret documents revealed that Hillary Clinton’s main supporter, multi-billionaire George Soros, has not only been manipulating the entire American election system , but one of his companies is, also, providing vote county software to 16 States ( they’ve since denied )—and that should Donald Trump have this election stolen from him the people of that nation will most surely revolt.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+882,Four ways to fix American politics,"The roots of gridlock will never be addressed until we stop restating the problem and start focusing on the solutions. The good news is that we not only can bridge this political divide; we already are.
+
+It’s not just young revolutionary Bernie Sanders supporters or angry-as-hell Donald Trump fans who want to “change the system.” It’s also the president of the United States of America.
+
+The future we want “will only happen if we fix our politics,” said President Obama in his 2016 State of the Union address. “If we want a better politics, it’s not enough just to change a congressman or change a senator or even change a president. We have to change the system to reflect our better selves.”
+
+But exactly how do we do that? The president did not say. And when William Jefferson Clinton in 1992 and George W. Bush in 2000 expressed the same noble sentiment, they didn’t tell us how either.
+
+Our last three presidents did not tell us because they don’t know. They are products of the system and clearly are not going to reform much less revolutionize it. They have risen to the top of the leadership pyramid by playing the partisan game. Them telling us how to work together would be like an alcoholic telling us how to get sober: He knows everything about the topic except doing it.
+
+On both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans are recognizing that they are in a long-term political marriage that needs help. But even if both donkeys and elephants want to repair their broken relationship, they still need to learn how. The primary causes of dysfunction that Obama identified — the gerrymandering of congressional districts and the tyranny of money in campaigns — are certainly real. But these and other causes will never be effectively addressed unless we stop restating the problem and start focusing on the solutions.
+
+The good news is that we not only can bridge this political divide; in fact, we already are.
+
+I have recently interviewed and profiled dozens of Americans who know how to solve problems across the divide. They are doing so in state legislatures and on Capitol Hill; in living rooms and town halls; between corporations and anti-corporate activists; with police departments and minority communities; and in almost every sector of our society. When diverse groups connect in constructive dialogue, they make progress on issues ranging from criminal justice reform to internet privacy to education reform
+
+Literally dozens of major initiatives have had concrete successes bringing Left and Right together to break down the partisan wall and find common ground. They have succeeded where Capitol Hill has failed. This movement to reunite America is gaining momentum because it starts with four fundamental shifts that are a vital part of fixing our politics.
+
+From Confirming to Learning. Anyone who thinks that political leadership means thinking that whatever we believe is automatically right — and anyone who disagrees with us is wrong — is not part of the solution. Simply confirming what one already knows is not leadership; it is an addiction to being right. The movement to reunite America is redefining leadership to be about learning rather than about being know-it-alls. (Check out , or as examples of this shift.)
+
+From Control to Relationship. Particularly during elections, winning seems to be everything. “Controlling” the Congress and the White House appears to be the goal. But on the day after the election, whoever won or lost must forge a relationship with the opposition. Making relationships across the divide strong and healthy is today the key to accomplishing anything that endures. (Learn more from or the 2000-member ).
+
+From Position-Taking to Problem-Solving. America has a surplus of leaders with rigid positions and a deficit of leaders who solve problems. It’s time to reverse that imbalance. Across the country, a host of problem-solving organizations are gaining ground. (Examples include No Labels in Washington, D.C., to in San Francisco, from in Tallahassee to the in Kansas City.
+
+From Endless Campaigning to Effective Governance. The line between campaigning and governing used to be clear. Campaigns were brief preludes before Election Day, not never-ending tit-for-tat attacks that became a permanent part of civic life. But today campaigning is benefiting from unprecedented levels of investment, and governing is being paralyzed. Fortunately, from the offices of city mayors to state-level initiatives and even on the edges of Capitol Hill, red-blue coalitions are finding common ground on a wide range of policy issues ranging from criminal justice reform to education to defense spending. ( ’s “Next Generation” project, for example, has convened across-the-aisle collaboration in scores of state legislatures.)
+
+So we Americans do know how to work together. But we have to get past the soaring rhetoric from the right and the left about how they alone can “save America.” We have to get down to the real business of learning and applying boundary-crossing skills. If we actually want a “system that reflects our better selves,” let’s start with what works. Let’s take to scale the scores of projects where that is already happening.
+
+Mark Gerzon, president of Mediators Foundation, is the author of “ The Reunited States of America: How We Can Cross the Partisan Divide .”",REAL
+6803,Comment on 11 Things To Let Go Of Before The New Year by 11 Things To Let Go Of Before The New Year – Motivate3.com,"  The new year is almost here and it’s often a time when we all start to think about what we want to change for the next year. I’ve never been much a fan of the whole cliche of changing because of the new year, but why not embrace it as a time where we can make change?   Do a quick reflection right now. Do you feel like you have followed your dreams and passions this past year? Do you feel you got caught up in the stresses of life quite often? Did you feel judgement, negative self talk and anger were a big part of your days? Reflecting on how you’ve felt over your year and being honest with yourself about it gives you the chance to know how to adjust and move forward from this moment forward whether it be the new year or not. I’ve found in my own life that if I don’t pay attention to how I feel, what I create, what’s playing out in my life and take responsibility for it, it doesn’t change. It stays the same, I experience the same emotions or stagnant feelings, and I don’t move forward. But the moment I decide to take it into my own hands, I see how much I’m not a victim to what happens. 11 Things To Let Go of Before the New year 1. Stop all the negative self talk – It’s first because it’s probably one of the most important. The more we talk poorly about ourselves to ourselves or others, the more we disempower ourselves and empower all the things we wish to adjust about ourselves. Observe it, take note of it, and kick it. It’s not helping you. 2. Choose one bad eating habit and kick it! – Taking care of and fuelling your vessel is one of the most important things we can do in life to stay mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy. Pick one of your worst eating habits and aim to cut it out completely in 3 months. Whatever it might be, be honest with yourself and make it happen. Then take on the next bad eating habit in 3 months. 3. Let go of chasing ‘success’– So often we put up goals or plans for ourselves yet have this tiny limited scope of what success is. Next thing you know we bring stress, worry and fear into the equation throughout the whole journey because we may not be totally in line to hit this pin prick point of what success looks like to us. Instead, do your best to take the steps needed to get to where you want to go, but let go of the lure of success and what it looks like and means. There’s no such thing as failure. (more)   4. Kick the idea that you cannot achieve or follow your dreams – So often we have our ideas of what we are excited or passionate about, but let it go because we think we can’t do it or because it’s unrealistic. Instead of believing every word of that, take ONE step. One step towards making your passion or your dreams happen. The one step will lead to the next and the next, but you have to take the first one. Plan out that first step and take it! 5. Let go of the idea that you should run from your problems – We often get into this mentality that we just need to “get over it.” In theory this sounds sorta good, you move on from things that happen in the past or something to that effect. But by just forgetting about it, did we really move on? No, it gets triggered again later or lies dormant as a resented event etc. Instead, let’s face our problems and truly move past them. Journal about it, talk to someone else about it. Put the cards on the table to someone who cares about you and who can help you move past it. Pick someone who will see the bigger picture and be honest with you. You have all it takes to move past what challenges you. 6. Stop comparing yourself to others – This is a big one. So often we are looking at others and using what they have, do or are to compare it against us and make up a story. This whole game can make us sad or feel down about ourselves or it can feed our ego in a big way. Let it go, respect everyone’s journey, including your own and stop the need to compare yourself to others.   7. Stop judging others – Judging other people can become a habit and an addiction. It’s like something we can’t stop doing sometimes! Take a moment the next time you judge someone and observe it. Ask yourself why you did it, how did it make you feel? Etc. Make a conscious effort to stop. (more) 8. Stop the blame game – Blaming and pointing fingers when it comes to our challenges or what happens to us doesn’t allow us to look at and observe how we might have created or aligned with an experience to help make it happen. I’m not saying there’s no such things others can do to hurt you, I’m simply saying take responsibility for how you feel and don’t even point blame, it doesn’t help us. 9. Stop worrying and trying so hard to fit in and be accepted – This is something far too many of us do just to save face and not be “the weird one.” The reality is, it’s more ‘weird’ to be a version of yourself that isn’t genuine or real simply because you want to be accepted by others. It’s a choice you can’t maintain forever and the longer it goes the more uncomfortable you will feel. Be you, accept yourself, be genuine and don’t try to make others do the same when. Let it happen. Trust. 10. Let go of the need to control everything – Sometimes we can’t take a step forward in anything because we don’t know all the answers or all the variables. This is our obsession with control sometimes. Yes, observe a situation and make the best choices available to you, but don’t worry so much about needing to control or know every detail about it. Learn to leave things up to trust and knowing that things will work out as they need to. This doesn’t mean be reckless, just that you don’t need to control every thing, person and detail. 11. Stop procrastinating – This one goes with everything on the list. Stop putting it all off. Whatever it may be. The changes listed above, the hobby you want to, the career you want to explore, or the thing you want to tell to someone important to you. Stop putting it off and just do it! 
+ ",FAKE
+9657,Sad Hillary Clinton Finally Concedes To Trump Publicly,"Hillary Clinton publicly conceded the U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump Wednesday after a surprise defeat overnight. Her concession speech was largely well received, even by her critics. 
+Via Yournewswire 
+
+She did not lash out or challenge the result. Excerpts of her concession speech Wednesday in New York. This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for, and I’m sorry that we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country.
+I know how disappointed you feel because I feel it too, and so do tens of millions of Americans who invested their hopes and dreams in this effort. This is painful and it will be for a long time, but I want you to remember this: Our campaign was never about one person or even one election. It was about the country we love and about building an America that’s hopeful, inclusive and big-hearted.
+We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.
+Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power, and we don’t just respect that, we cherish it. It also enshrines other things: the rule of law, the principle that we are all equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values too, and we must defend them.
+And let me add, our constitutional democracy demands our participation not just every four years, but all the time. So let’s do all we can to keep advancing the causes and values we all hold dear: making our economy work for everyone, not just those at the top; protecting our country and protecting our planet; and breaking down all the barriers that hold any American back from achieving their dreams….
+Now, I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but some day someone will, and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.
+And to all the little girls who are watching this: Never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.
+By Hillary Clinton 
+—
+Hillary Clinton addresses staff and supporters at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan.
+",FAKE
+6522,Trump Adviser Says Israeli Settlements 'Not Illegal',"Marc Zell, co-chairman of Republicans Overseas Israel speaks as the Republican Party launches its first ever election campaign in Israel in Modiin, Monday, Aug. 15, 2016.
+Donald Trump’s adviser on Israel said on Wednesday that Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank are not illegal, adding that he believes the candidate agrees with him, putting the pair at odds with much of the world.
+Speaking to AFP at a rooftop restaurant on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion after a pro-Trump rally, David Friedman also said the US presidential candidate was “tremendously sceptical” about the prospects for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
+About 150 people, including right-wing Israelis and evangelical Christians, attended Wednesday’s Trump rally outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, near the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
+The compound is holy to both Muslims and Jews, who refer to it as the Temple Mount. Located in East Jerusalem, it was occupied by Israel in 1967 and later annexed in a move never recognised by the international community.
+Asked whether Trump viewed the West Bank as part of Israel, as many far-right Israelis do, Friedman did not answer directly.
+“I don’t think he believes that the settlements are illegal,” Friedman said.
+Myself and . @realDonaldTrump senior #Israel advisor David Friedman at the #JerusalemForever event that was held tonight at the old city. pic.twitter.com/2JxEWRrk8o
+— Israeli for Trump (@davidweissman3) October 26, 2016
+Israeli religious nationalists see the Palestinian territory as part of the country, citing Jews’ connection to the land from biblical times.
+The US has intensified criticism of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank in recent months, warning that it is eating away at hopes for a two-state solution.
+Settlements in the West Bank are viewed as illegal under international law and are major stumbling blocks to peace efforts because they are built on land seized in the 1967 war which Palestinians see as part of their future state.
+At an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in March, Trump described an “unbreakable bond” between the US and Israel.
+“When I become president, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on day one,” Trump told delegates, in a speech that heaped praise on Israel and derided Palestinians as perpetrators of violence.
+Recalling rounds of failed peace talks between the two parties, Trump blamed Palestinian leaders.
+“To make a great deal, you need two willing participants,” Trump said. “We know Israel is willing to deal. Israel has been trying to sit down at the negotiating table without preconditions for years.”
+Friedman reiterated that Trump would recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there – which would break with decades of precedent and put Washington at odds with most UN member states.
+There were chants of “lock her up” when Trump’s Democrat rival Hillary Clinton’s name was mentioned at the rally ahead of the 8 November vote – a common refrain among Trump supporters who want to see her jailed over an emails scandal.
+“I hate Hillary. She’s the same like (Barack) Obama,” said Ran Hofman, 54, who waved an Israeli flag. “They screw up the whole world.”
+A brief video message from Trump of about one minute was played at the event.
+“Together we will stand up to the enemies like Iran, bent on destroying Israel and her people,” Trump said. “Together we will make America and Israel safe again.”",FAKE
+1952,Can Libertarian Rand Paul Win A Republican Primary?,"Rand Paul is not like other potential presidential candidates.
+
+The Kentucky senator, who announced his candidacy for the White House on Tuesday morning, doesn't fit neatly into the molds of either party.
+
+Socially liberal on issues of crime and punishment — especially when it comes to drug sentencing — against a federal ban on same-sex marriage, and no foreign policy hawk, he's not your prototypical Republican.
+
+As a fiscal conservative and an opponent of abortion rights, though, he's certainly no Democrat either.
+
+""It's time for a new way, a new set of ideas and a new leader,"" Paul says in a Web video, with a heavy metal soundtrack, previewing his presidential campaign.
+
+Paul fits more with libertarians. And, though he is the scion of the last carrier of the torch of ""liberty,"" he's also not quite his father's libertarian.
+
+Paul's father, the former Rep. Ron, ran for president three times before retiring. The elder Paul, 79, was always regarded as something of a gadfly, an outspoken fresh voice in the Republican primary with a passionate following of young libertarians.
+
+Though Paul did not win a single state in 2008 or 2012, when measured by Election Day voting percentage, he routinely finished in the top three. In fact, he finished a solid second behind Romney in the critical early state of New Hampshire.
+
+But his band of young, engaged and determined Paul-ites proved one thing — they could organize. Ron Paul not only won straw poll after straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference and elsewhere, he also won the most delegates in several states, including Iowa. Though Paul finished third in vote total in the Hawkeye State, his campaign engineered what amounted to a takeover of the state Republican Party apparatus.
+
+""He has a number of assets,"" said Stu Rothenberg, founder of the Rothenberg Political Report. ""He has terrific fundraising potential. He has an army of supporters who will run into a burning building to vote for him.""
+
+Rand Paul has tried to use those supporters to help build on his father's foundation, reaching out to minority voters with an emphasis on criminal justice reform and to young audiences — like one in New Hampshire last year — with an appeal based on privacy and civil liberties.
+
+""How many people here have a cellphone?"" Paul asked. ""How many people think it's none of the government's damn business what you do on your cell phone?""
+
+""If I had to fill a large lecture room at my campus, I would bet a lot that Rand Paul could fill that room with young libertarian-minded conservatives,"" said Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire. ""Of that I have little doubt.""
+
+Though Rand Paul can fill a room with young libertarians in similar ways that his father could, he isn't a carbon copy of his dad. Paul has adjusted some of his policies to fit the mainstream of the GOP a bit better.
+
+Paul has emphasized where he agrees with evangelical Christians on gay marriage, telling a group of pastors last month that the First Amendment says to keep government out of religion, not religion out of government. And, in moves that show he understands the GOP has returned to its hawkish roots since the rise of the self-declared Islamic State militant group, he has changed his tune on defense spending, proposing $190 billion more for the Pentagon. And the second day of his presidential rollout finds him in South Carolina — in front of the aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Yorktown.
+
+Those moves toward the mainstream of the party may lose Paul some diehard libertarians, but, says David Boaz of the Cato Institute, most libertarians are thrilled.
+
+""I think Rand Paul is the most libertarian major presidential candidate that I can remember seeing,"" said Boaz, who's new book is called The Libertarian Mind, ""so it tells you that there is a constituency that wants this more libertarian approach.""
+
+Boaz sees Paul's adjustments as necessary and practical.
+
+""Rand Paul is trying to find a balance that reflects his own views and appeals to a plurality and eventually the majority of the party,"" Boaz said. ""To the extent that there is that constituency — skeptical of foreign intervention, skeptical of the surveillance state — he has that market in the Republican Party all to himself. Is it a big enough market? Well, that's what he's about to find out.""
+
+Paul's anti-establishmentarian campaign slogan for 2016 will be ""Defeat the Washington Machine; Unleash the American Dream.""
+
+That little slant rhyme invokes the memory of Paul crusading against the ""security state"" on the floor of the U.S. Senate in an old-fashioned, 13-hour filibuster two years ago. But if the goal for Rand Paul in 2016 is to emerge as the anti-establishment alternative to, say, Jeb Bush, Paul has to become more than just the libertarian candidate, Scala said.
+
+""He has to find a way to be more appealing to the mainstream of New Hampshire Republicans while keeping his appeal to his core vote, which I would describe right now as people who voted for his dad three years ago,"" Scala said. ""That's the trick for Rand Paul.""
+
+Paul, just as his father did with online ""money bombs,"" will likely be able to raise enough money to stick around for quite some time in the GOP primary. Analysts like Rothenberg are skeptical he will be able to pull off the improbable and become the Republican nominee, but Rothenberg wonders if Paul is laying the groundwork for a sea change within the party.
+
+""He may be starting a process that, down the road, will change the Republican Party, will start to bring in some new kind of faces into the Republican Party,"" Rothenberg said. ""And I wouldn't be surprised if in six or 10 years, this is a more libertarian party.""",REAL
+9947,UNsilenced: Whistleblower Exposes UN Culture of Corruption,"Email 
+When she stumbled across massive corruption and made-up statistics in her job at the United Nations, Rasna Warah knew she needed to act. But when she tried to blow the whistle, she was viciously attacked, publicly humiliated, threatened, intimidated, and more. Unfortunately, though, as Warah explains in her new book UNsilenced: UNmasking the United Nations' Culture of Cover-ups, Corruption and Impunity , her case is far from unique. 
+In fact, the corruption and lawlessness across the UN appears to be systemic. Some of the cases described in the book and the pages of The New American magazine make the scandals she exposed and the retaliation she suffered seem mild by comparison. Indeed, in her book, she actually spends very little time dwelling on her own case, but delves instead into some of the many other known and unknown scandals to rock the global organization. 
+Perhaps the most grotesque whistleblower-related story in recent memory surrounds the now-infamous case of Anders Kompass, the UN human-rights official who exposed child-rape by “peacekeeping” troops in Africa after the UN refused to act on it. But the book is filled with startling examples of corruption, mismanagement, and more, ranging from brazen theft of taxpayer money to the sexual abuse and exploitation of children by UN “peace” troops. Just the quotes from the UN whistleblowers exposing the putrid UN culture of impunity make the book worth reading. Apparently the UN did not want a “culture of snitches,” as one whistleblower put it. 
+It got so bad that in 2015, as Warah explains, a coalition of nine UN whistleblowers got together to raise the matter with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. “Each of us has blown the whistle on serious wrongdoing, gross misconduct, and even criminal acts at the United Nations,” the group wrote in the letter, which is quoted in the book. “Our collective experience of reporting misconduct in the UN covers sexual exploitation, abuse of power, corruption, and other criminals activity over a period of more than a decade and a half.” 
+Instead of the UN scrambling to make things right, though, it responded in every case by attacking the whistleblower instead of the crimes, abuse, and the people behind the problems. “Each of us has faced retaliation for reporting the wrongdoing,” the whistleblowers continued. “Our cases are well-known, and sadly, deter others from reporting wrongdoing. This must change.” Unfortunately for humanity, despite threats from Congress to cut funding, and increasingly widespread media attention, nothing has changed, as the book documents extensively. 
+Warah's realization that something was very wrong at the UN began while she was serving at UN-Habitat as an editor of various publications, including the important “State of the World's Cities” report. Her troubles began in 2009, when she traveled to Bahrain with Anna Tibaijuka, the executive director of the UN-Habitat agency that focuses on promoting “sustainable” cities. During the visit, Warah explained, some Bahrain officials asked how their money was being used. 
+“The executive director did not provide an adequate response, and thinking that perhaps she had not been briefed about it, I made my own inquiries when I returned to Nairobi,” explained Warah, a Kenyan of Indian heritage. “I discovered that at least $350,000 of the $1 million donation Bahrain had made to UN-Habitat could not be accounted for. When I asked my supervisors if they knew where the money went, they descended on me like a tonne of bricks, even threatening to not talk to me any more.” 
+At that time, Warah realized that “the money had probably been used on personal projects or maybe even diverted to individuals within the organization.” In an interesting turn of events, Warah later concluded that the monarchy in Bahrain did not even really care if its money has been used properly. Instead, it seems that the regime was involved in a sort of tit-for-tat agreement. 
+“In 2007, the Prime Minister of Bahrain, Shaikh Khalifa, had been awarded the UN-Habitat Scroll on Honour award for ´his outstanding efforts in raising the living standards of Bahrainis,´” Warah added in an e-mail about her experiences. “This was just before Bahrain experienced its own Arab spring, when the monarchy's legitimacy was being questioned. The huge donation to UN-Habitat was probably how Bahrain's monarchy 'bought' international legitimacy through the UN.” 
+Around that same time, Warah had already started to question how some of the alleged statistics used in the State of the World's Cities reports were actually being computed. “Many UN agencies deliberately exaggerate the scale of a problem or disseminate statistics that are not based on any scientific survey or research,” she wrote in the book. Many also “manufacture data,” she added, “because that is how they remain relevant, how they push their agenda on the international stage, and how they attract donor [taxpayer] funding.” 
+Sometimes UN officials and other international bureaucracies make up numbers and lie to coerce governments into changing policies, she explained. The book cites a number of examples of cooked up numbers to justify bigger budgets, more power and prestige, and various policy prescriptions. Some of the alleged “famines” in Somalia, for example, appear to have been concocted by UN bureaucrats by simply inventing or massaging statistics. Clueless journalists then parrot the invented UN numbers as part of a process that Warah referred to as the “CNN effect.” 
+Warah considers it a crime akin to plagiarism that should be severely punished. “When a UN agency publishes inaccurate, misleading, or unscientific statistics, it is even more unforgivable because the world's governments (i.e. member states of the UN) rely on those statistics to determine their national policies, priorities, and programs,” she continued, adding that “millions of people's lives can be affected by a single misleading or erroneous statistic.” 
+In particular, during her stint editing the UN world cities report, she was concerned about the “Gini coefficient” numbers used for cities, which seek to measure income inequality. She tried to figure out how these were being arrived at. Unsurprisingly, her superiors at the UN office were not pleased with the curiosity and additional scrutiny, Warah explained. 
+“My questioning resulted in several acts of retaliation, including public humiliation at office meetings, threats of non-renewal of contract, intimidating questioning during an interview for a post I had applied for and petty revenges, like forcing me to share my office with visiting consultants, even though I had made it clear that as editor of this important report I needed privacy and silence to carry out my work,” she explained in an e-mail. “I left the organization soon after due to frustration and a sense that my supervisors were hell-bent on making my life miserable.” 
+In response to the retaliation, Warah filed an official complaint at the UN “Ethics Office,” which is supposed to investigate claims and provide relief to whistleblowers. The office claimed that, “while there probably was evidence of wrongdoing at UN-Habitat, they could not establish whether I had experienced any retaliation,” Warah said, adding that determining whether retaliation took place is key to getting justice from the UN's internal systems. 
+The book also contains a very informative introduction by Beatrice Edwards, the international program director at the whistleblower advocacy group Government Accountability Project. Despite her general acceptance of the UN line regarding why it was founded and its alleged humanitarian purposes, Edwards highlights a number of extremely serious issues. Among those is the fact that UN personnel enjoy immunity from national and local laws, leading to a total lack of accountability that produces lawlessness and impunity. She also blasts the UN's supposed “internal system of justice” as subject to manipulation, calling its set-up “increasingly opaque and arbitrary.” 
+And indeed, as the book shows, the UN's pseudo-justice system is almost tragically discredited, and totally undeserving of the term “justice.” According to the book, only between three percent and four percent of whistleblowers who sought assistance from the UN “Ethics Office” had the retaliation against them substantiated by the “Ethics” people. That means a stunning 96 percent or more of whistleblowers who reported being persecuted for blowing the whistle at the UN received no relief. 
+Imagine being a UN worker who has observed criminality, and thinking about those odds. Of course, most people would simply choose to stay silent rather than jeopardize their career and livelihood for such meager odds. And so, with potential whistleblowers terrorized into submission, the widespread corruption, criminality and other horrors that plague the UN go unreported. The UN knows that, too, as it acknowledges in its reports about the drastic under-reporting of sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children by its scandal-plagued “peace” troops. 
+When Warah tried to blow the whistle and seek relief, she witnessed the failures firsthand. “Since the Ethics Office could not determine retaliation, I could not take my case forward,” she explained. “Later I realized that the Ethics Office fails to prove retaliation in about 98 per cent of the whistleblower cases it receives, which suggests that it protects senior UN management rather than UN whistleblowers.” Numerous UN whistleblowers who have spoken to this magazine in recent years have made the exact same charge, and the UN has done little to dispel that notion. 
+“The UN's culture of impunity ensures that those who do not rock the boat with uncomfortable truths get promoted while those who dare to speak out are castigated, ignored, demoted or fired,” wrote Warah in the book. “This is especially true in cases where the perpetrators of crimes are from powerful or influential countries that exert political pressure to ensure that their nationals' cases are not brought forward or are buried.” Think about the implications of that. 
+In the case of Danish UN diplomat Paul Bang-Jensen, who blew the whistle on the deliberate sabotage of a UN probe into Soviet atrocities in Hungary, and tried to protect the identity of witnesses to protect them and their families from torture and murder, the saga ended with his suspicious “suicide.” His death came after he had told his wife and others not to believe any claims that he would commit suicide. The New American magazine will publish an in-depth story on Bang-Jensen in the coming weeks. 
+There is so much more to learn from the UNsilenced book. For instance, Warah describes how international “aid” outfits bring in huge quantities of tax-funded food supplies right around harvest time, flooding the market with basically “free” food in huge quantities. This crushes prices, thereby destroying the incentive for locals to farm while perpetuating dependence on corrupt agencies funded by Western taxpayers, in addition to ensuring budget increases for global bureaucrats. 
+Another interesting fact brought out in the book: The British government's tax-funded propaganda arm, the BBC, has an unwritten policy that prevents the “news” agency from “coming down too hard” on the UN or its senior bureaucrats. The reason, according to an unnamed BBC journalist cited by Warah, is that exposing UN wrongdoing and crime might be perceived as “anti-development.” Other self-styled media organs refuse to expose UN wrongdoing because the left-wing journalists fear being associated with right-of-center individuals who want to shut down the UN, Warah, herself a left-winger, acknowledges in UNsilenced . 
+Some of the ideas proposed in the book to remedy the many problems include reforming the UN's internal justice system, setting up outside independent mechanisms, ensuring protection of whistleblowers, and more. Unfortunately, though, none of those recommendations get to the heart of the problem, which is that the dictator-dominated UN was flawed from the start and cannot be “reformed” enough to make it worth keeping. Surely protection for whistleblowers is needed — if only to ferret out criminals and bring them to justice, and to protect their victims, often children. But it will not solve the broader UN problem. 
+If there is anything to quibble about with the book, it is that it accepts as true many of the fundamental (and false) premises upon which the UN was established — the idea that “world peace” was the goal of leading UN founders such as butcher Joseph Stalin of Moscow and Soviet spy Alger Hiss of the United States, for instance. The book also occasionally treats leftist ideological claims — the idea that governments are responsible for feeding people, as just one example — as if they were facts. The ideological lens through which Warah reports, though, is easy to discern, and does not interfere with, or take away from, the excellent and brave work she has done exposing this cesspool of corruption and crime. 
+The book is well worth reading for anybody seeking information on UN corruption or the persecution of UN whistleblowers who try to do the right thing. For the sake of humanity and liberty, it needs to stop. Photos: Rasna Warah and her book UNsilenced 
+Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American , is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU . He can be reached at   
+Related articles:",FAKE
+3606,Charles Krauthammer: Obama: Charlie who?,"On Sunday, at the great Paris rally, the whole world was Charlie. By Tuesday, the veneer of solidarity was exposed as tissue thin. It began dissolving as soon as the real, remaining Charlie Hebdo put out its post-massacre issue featuring a Muhammad cover that, as the New York Times put it, “reignited the debate pitting free speech against religious sensitivities.”
+
+Again? Already? Had not 4 million marchers and 44 foreign leaders just turned out on the streets of France to declare “No” to intimidation, and pledging solidarity, indeed identification (“Je suis Charlie”) with a satirical weekly specializing in the most outrageous and often tasteless portrayals of Muhammad? And yet, within 48 hours, the new Charlie Hebdo issue featuring the image of Muhammad — albeit a sorrowful, indeed sympathetic Muhammad — sparked new protests, denunciations and threats of violence, which in turn evinced another round of doubt and self-flagellation in the West about the propriety and limits of free expression. Hopeless.
+
+As for President Obama, he never was Charlie, not even for those 48 hours. From the day of the massacre, he has been practically invisible. At the interstices of various political rallies, he issued bits of muted, mealy-mouthed boilerplate. Followed by the now-famous absence of any high-ranking U.S. official at the Paris rally, an abdication of moral and political leadership for which the White House has already admitted error.
+
+But this was no mere error of judgment or optics or, most absurdly, of communications in which we are supposed to believe that the president was not informed by staff about the magnitude, both actual and symbolic, of the demonstration he ignored. (He needed to be told?)
+
+On the contrary, the no-show, following the near silence, precisely reflected the president’s profound ambivalence about the very idea of the war on terror. Obama began his administration by purging the phrase from the lexicon of official Washington. He has ever since shuttled between saying that (a) the war must end because of the damage “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing” was doing to us, and (b) the war has already ended, as he suggested repeatedly during the 2012 campaign, with bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda “on the run.”
+
+Hence his call in a major address at the National Defense University to “refine and ultimately repeal” Congress’ 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the very legal basis for the war on terror. Hence his accelerating release of Gitmo inmates — five more announced Wednesday — fully knowing that up to 30 percent have returned to the battlefield (17 percent confirmed, up to 12 percent suspected but not verified). Which is why, since about the Neolithic era, POWs tend to be released after a war is over.
+
+Paris shows that this war is not. On the contrary. As it rages, it is entering an ominous third phase.
+
+The first, circa 9/11, involved sending Middle Eastern terrorists abroad to attack the infidel West.
+
+Then came the lone wolf — local individuals inspired by foreign jihadists launching one-off attacks, as seen most recently in Quebec, Ottawa and Sydney.
+
+Paris marks Phase 3: coordinated commando strikes by homegrown native-speaking Islamists activated and instructed from abroad. (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo killings, while the kosher-grocery shooter proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State.) They develop and flourish in Europe’s no-go zones where sharia reigns and legitimate state authorities dare not tread.
+
+To call them lone wolves, as did our hapless attorney general, is to define jihadism down. It makes them the equivalent of the pitiable, mentally unstable Sydney hostage taker.
+
+The Paris killers were well-trained, thoroughly radicalized, clear-eyed jihadist warriors. They cannot be dismissed as lone loons. Worse, they represent a growing generation of alienated European Muslims whose sheer number is approaching critical mass.
+
+The war on terror 2015 is at a new phase with a new geography. At the core are parallel would-be caliphates: in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State; in Sub-Saharan Africa, now spilling out of Nigeria into Cameroon, a near-sovereign Boko Haram; in the badlands of Yemen, AQAP, the most dangerous of all al-Qaeda affiliates. And beyond lie not just a cast of mini-caliphates embedded in the most ungovernable parts of the Third World from Libya to Somalia to the borderlands of Pakistan, but an archipelago of no-go Islamist islands embedded in the heart of Europe.
+
+This is serious. In both size and reach it is growing. Our president will not say it. Fine. But does he even see it?
+
+Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+10296,How To Open Your Chakras – As Explained By A Children’s Show [Watch],"Did you know? The human body has seven main chakras (or “wheels”), which are basically centers in which energy moves through. Modalities such as reiki work on clearing and opening the chakras to... ",FAKE
+10109,Feudalism – Medieval and Modern,"Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
+2108,The long history of linking climate change to American security,"""We have a little bit of money devoted to a comprehensive, worldwide effort to deal with the threat of global warming,"" the president said. ""It is simply a matter of science and evidence. It is … necessary to reverse it to stand up for America's values and America's interests.""
+
+Given that we've employed the standard trick of not naming the president, you may have guessed that the quote above doesn't come from President Obama's remarks at Wednesday's Coast Guard Academy commencement. In that speech, Obama linked the security of the country with the threat of climate change in the same way. But the comments above instead come from a speech about two decades ago -- by President Bill Clinton.
+
+The most remarkable thing about Obama's Coast Guard comments, in which he argued that we must address the threat of climate change if only to decrease global instability and risks to U.S. facilities, is that it's the refrain to a long-running tune. The link between our security and our carbon emissions has been drawn time and again.
+
+Within Obama's two terms, the drumbeat has been consistent. In 2009, the Navy looked at maritime security risks posed by climate change. In 2011, Rear Adn. David Titley gave a talk at TedxPentagon (!) that considered the issue. (That speech is below.) In 2012, a major general from the U.S. Northern Command warned that melting Arctic ice would create a new, northern coast that would enter into geopolitical considerations. And last year, the Pentagon released a report stating that ""[o]ur armed forces must prepare for a future with a wide spectrum of possible threats, weighing risks and probabilities to ensure that we will continue to keep our country secure.""
+
+In 2003, the Pentagon drafted a speculative plan that addressed the national security threat from an abrupt change to the world's climate -- a shift of several degrees of temperature in a matter of a decade or so. It garnered a substantial amount of attention at the time, but was mostly regarded as a thought experiment. Consensus remains that such a temperature change will happen much more slowly.
+
+But military experts under President George W. Bush were addressing the more realistic, slower effects of climate change, too. We reported in 2007 that the U.S. Army War College funded a conference to address the security implications of climate change. That was soon followed by a report from a panel of retired military leaders that was blunt: ""Global climate change presents a serious national security threat which could impact Americans at home, impact United States military operations and heighten global tensions."" DARPA started looking into military use of biofuels before Bush left office.
+
+Under Clinton, the administration was open in its advocacy on the issue, even if the military was more reserved. Vice President Al Gore had already called climate change ""the most serious threat we have ever faced"" in his book ""Earth in the Balance"" by the time Clinton was moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. After Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, House Republicans and retired military officials at that point worried that the protocol itself posed a national security risk, given that it required the reduction of energy use -- and the military used more energy than any other part of the government. In response, Clinton exempted the military from being affected.
+
+A link between national security and the climate even predates Clinton. In June 1988, a Senate committee addressed the problem of climate change for the first time, hearing testimony from several scientists, including James Hansen, then of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and who since has been an outspoken activist on the subject. After that hearing, Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund was asked to clarify some of his comments. In a responding letter, he wrote, ""For the U.S., continuous emissions at current levels or higher means continuous change, loss of ecosystems, and probably loss of farm productivity, wetlands, beaches and coastal infrastructure. The security of the nation depends on stabilization of the atmosphere.""
+
+At the Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday, President Obama played the same tune.",REAL
+8987,Russia And NATO Engage In One Of The Largest Military Build-Ups Since The Cold War,"  
+DAILY CALLER 
+  330,000 Russian troops amassing along European borders. 
+NATO will contribute a 4,000-strong force to bolster the defenses of its members in the Baltic states and eastern Europe. Four battle groups will be created out of forces by early next year. The battle groups will be bolstered by a 40,000-strong reaction force, and various reinforcements as needed. The plan is the fulfillment of a promise to increase the defenses of former Soviet-bloc members under threat from Russian aggression. 
+“This month alone, Russia is deploying nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad and suspending a weapons-grade plutonium agreement with the United States,” said Stoltenberg Wednesday while attending a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels, Belgium. The deployment of the missiles to Kaliningrad, a small Russian satellite territory located between Poland and Lithuania, puts Poland and the Baltic states directly in Russia’s sights. 
+U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced a battalion of 900 “battle-ready” soldiers will be deployed to eastern Poland as part of the new commitment. British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said his country will be sending a battalion of 800 soldiers to Estonia, in addition to a contingent of Typhoon fighter aircraft to Romania. Canada plans to send 450 troops to Latvia, backed by 140 Italians. Germany will contribute 400 to 600 troops to Lithuania. 
+Russia steadily built up its military presence on the European border for several months. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced a plan to recruit 30,000 additional forces to be stationed on Russia’s eastern flank in May, followed by the deployment of the Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad in early October. 
+The massive military build-up represents one of the largest since the Cold War, and comes at a time when tensions between the West and Moscow at are dangerously tense. 
+Send tips to [email protected] .",FAKE
+6842,Punishment Is Violent And Counterproductive," Punishment Is Violent And Counterproductive By Robert J Burrowes
+ Punishment is a popular pastime for humans. Parents punish children. Teachers punish students. Employers punish workers. Courts punish lawbreakers. People punish each other. Governments punish ‘enemies’. And, according to some, God punishes evildoers.
+What is ‘punishment’? Punishment is the infliction of violence as revenge on a person who is judged to have behaved inappropriately. It is a key word we use when we want to obscure from ourselves that we are being violent.
+The violence inflicted as punishment can take many forms, depending on the context. It might involve inflicting physical injury and/or pain, withdrawal of approval or love, confinement/imprisonment, a financial penalty, dismissal, withdrawal of rights/privileges, denial of promised rewards, an order to perform a service, banishment, torture or death, among others.
+Given the human preoccupation with punishment, it is perhaps surprising that this behaviour is not subjected to more widespread scrutiny. Mind you, I can think of many human behaviours that get less scrutiny than would be useful.
+Anyway, because I am committed to facilitating functional human behaviour, I want to explain why using violence to ‘punish’ people is highly dysfunctional and virtually guarantees an outcome opposite to that intended.
+Punishment is usually inflicted by someone who makes a judgment that another person has behaved ‘badly’ or ‘wrongly’. At its most basic, disobedience (that is, failure to comply with elite imposed norms) is often judged in this way, whether by parents, teachers, religious figures, lawmakers or national governments.
+But is obedience functional or even appropriate?
+Consider this. In order to behave optimally, the human organism requires that all mental functions – feelings, thoughts, memory, conscience, sensory perception (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste), truth register, intuition – must be developed and readily involved, without interference, in our life. If this happens, then all of these individual functions will play an integrated role in determining our behaviour in any given circumstance. This is a very sophisticated mental apparatus that has evolved over billions of years and if it was allowed to function without interference in each individual, human beings would indeed be highly functional.
+So where does obedience fit into all of this? It doesn’t. A child is genetically programmed to seek to meet their own needs, not obey the will of another. And they will behave functionally in endeavouring to meet these needs unless terrorized out of doing so. Moreover, they will learn to meet their own needs, by acting individually in some circumstances and by cooperating with others when appropriate, if their social environment models this.
+However, if a child is terrorized into being obedient – including by being punished when they are not – then the child will have no choice but to suppress their awareness of the innate mental capacities that evolved over billions of years to guide their behaviour until they have ‘learned’ what they must do to avoid being punished. For a fuller explanation of this, see ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. http://anitamckone.wordpress.com/articles-2/fearless-and-fearful-psychology/
+Unfortunately, as you can probably readily perceive, this process of terrorizing a child into suppressing their awareness of what they want to do so that they do what someone else directs is highly problematical. And it leads to a virtually infinite variety of dysfunctional behaviours, even for those who appear to have been successfully ‘socialized’ into performing effectively in their society. This is readily illustrated.
+Perhaps the central problem of terrorizing individuals into obedience of conventions, commands, rules and the law is that once the individual has been so terrorized, it is virtually impossible for them to change their behaviour because they are now terrified of doing so. If the obedient behaviours were functional in the circumstances then, apart from the obviously enormous damage suffered by the individual, there would be no other adverse social or environmental consequences.
+Unfortunately, when all humans have been terrorized into behaving dysfunctionally on a routine basis (in the Western context, for example, by engaging in over-consumption) then changing their behaviour, even in the direction of functionality, is now unconsciously associated with the fear of violence (in the form of punishment) and so desirable behavioural change (in the direction of reduced consumption, for example) is much more difficult. It is not just that many Western humans are reluctant to reduce their consumption in line with environmental (including climatic) imperatives, they are unconsciously terrified of doing so.
+By now you might be able to see the wider ramifications of using violence and threats of violence to force children into being obedient. Apart from terrorizing each child into suppressing their awareness of their innate mental capacities, we create individuals whose entire (unconscious) ‘understanding’ of human existence is limited to the notion that violence, mislabeled ‘punishment’, drives socialization and society.
+As just one result, for example, most people consider punishment to be appropriate in the context of the legal system: they expect courts to inflict legally-sanctioned violence on those ‘guilty’ of disobeying the law. As in the case of the punishment of children, how many people ask ‘Does violence restore functional behaviour? Or does it simply inflict violence as revenge? What do we really want to achieve? And how will we achieve that?’
+Fundamentally, the flaw with violence as punishment is that violence terrifies people. And you cannot terrorize someone into behaving functionally. At very best, you can terrorize someone into changing their behaviour in an extremely limited context and/or for an extremely limited period of time. But if you want functional and lasting change in an individual’s behaviour, then considerable emotional healing will be necessary. This will allow the suppressed fear, anger, sadness and other feelings resulting from childhood terrorization to safely resurface and be expressed so that the individual can perceive their own needs and identify ways of fulfilling them (which does not mean that they will be obedient). For an explanation of what is required, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’ which is referenced in ‘My Promise to Children’. https://nonviolentstrategy.wordpress.com/strategywheel/constructive-program/my-promise-to-children/
+So next time you hear a political leader or corporate executive advocating or using violence (such as war, the curtailment of civil liberties, an economically exploitative and/or ecologically destructive initiative), remember that you are observing a highly dysfunctionalized individual. Moreover, this dysfunctional individual is a logical product of our society’s unrelenting use of violence, much of it in the form of what is euphemistically called ‘punishment’, against our children in the delusional belief that it will give us obedience and hence social control.
+Or next time you hear a public official, judge, terrorist or police officer promising ‘justice’ (that is, retribution), remember that you are listening to an emotionally damaged individual who suffered enormous violence as a child and internalized the delusional message that ‘punishment works’.
+You might also ponder how bad it could be if we didn’t require obedience and use punishment to get it, but loved and nurtured children, by listening to them deeply, to become the unique, enormously loving and powerful individuals for which evolution genetically programmed them.
+I am well aware that what I am suggesting will take an enormous amount of societal rethinking and a profound reallocation of resources away from violent and highly profitable police, legal, prison and military systems. But, as I wrote above, I am committed to facilitating functional human behaviour. I can also think of some useful ways that we could allocate the resources if we didn’t waste them on violence.
+If you share this commitment and working towards this world appeals to you too, then you are welcome to consider participating in the fifteen-year strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ http://tinyurl.com/flametree and to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’. http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com
+Punishment can sometimes appear to get you the outcome you want in the short term. The cost is that it always moves you further away from any desirable outcome in the long run.
+Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com",FAKE
+9471,May puts nation on high-poppy alert,"November 6, 2016 
+Distracted by suffering refugees, confused by convoluted Brexit negotiations or just plain scared by a Trump presidency? No? Neither is your Prime Minster. Today Theresa May did what every true leader does in a crisis – which is to turn everyone’s attention to meaningless ephemera; like poppies, Grammar Schools and who should present the new ‘Bake-off’? 
+Taking a break from quashing the Orgreave Inquiry, Mrs May said FIFA’s stance of not politicizing sport was ‘outrageous’. A spokeswoman explained: ‘In these times of austerity, we need cheap, meaningless gestures accompanied by hollow outrage. If over-paid under-achieving footballers are not allowed to wear a poppy – then the terrorists have won. It’s a known fact that Afghan jihadists fear the poppy…although admittedly 80% of their income is based on the opium trade…um…er…I may not have thought this through…’ 
+Armed police are expected to patrol our streets, opening fire on anyone not wearing a poppy or failing to whistle the tune from ‘The Dambusters’. A Police Inspector remarked: ‘We may be perpetuating a mawkishly sentimental view of war but don’t think for a second you can get away with recycling last year’s poppy – we’re wise to that dodge!’ 
+Without a doubt this is the most important issue of 2016 – whether 22 footballers can wear poppies for 90 minutes in a stadium filled with 60,000 people wearing poppies. Some cynics have suggested Theresa May’s use of misdirection in these troubled times, is the political equivalent of David Copperfield pulling an elephant out his arse. Her spokeswoman countered: ‘The important thing is to remember those who sacrificed their lives in war– rather than the reasons behind it or making sure it never happens again’. Share this story... 
+Posted: Nov 6th, 2016 by Wrenfoe   Wrenfoe   Politics",FAKE
+1551,Why Putin praised Trump (Opinion),"Christian Whiton is a former deputy special envoy for human rights in North Korea for the George W. Bush administration. He is president of the Hamilton Foundation; a principal with DC Advisory, which is a public policy consultancy; and the author of ""Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War."" The views expressed are his own.
+
+(CNN) Vladimir Putin has his man in the U.S. presidential race: Donald Trump. On Thursday, the Russian president reportedly declared Trump to be the ""absolute leader"" of the race.
+
+Putin -- a natural if brawny showman who has posed fishing shirtless, shooting shirtless and horseback riding shirtless -- also said of Trump: ""He's a very lively man, talented without doubt.""
+
+Thus did the man who embodies the parody of homoeroticism from the 1970s endorse one who embodies the parody of a blow-hard executive from the 1980s. But while Moscow has long been interested in American politics, what inspired the man who has essentially run Russia since 2000 to take the unusual step of commenting on the election process of an adversary?
+
+Whether he knows it or not, Putin practices a key tenet of statecraft identified by Mel Brooks. His darkly comical musical ""The Producers"" features the number ""Heil Myself!"" (also known as ""Springtime for Hitler""), in which a campy rendition of the German dictator sings, ""It ain't no mystery, if it's politics or history, the thing you gotta know is, everything is showbiz.""
+
+The line could be the leitmotif of the reality show that is Trump's campaign.
+
+The Donald's approach to politics likely reminds Putin of himself and he empathizes. Not only do the two men share a love for spectacle and an appreciation of its ability to move low-information voters, but Putin also sees Trump's self-reference as something Moscow can exploit.
+
+Putin famously began his career as an intelligence officer. One thing the young Putin would have been taught by his employers at the KGB's First Chief Directorate, the agency's center for foreign intelligence collection, is to look for character flaws that can be used to enlist a target as an agent or, short of that, an unwitting helper. It's a fancied-up version of a con man looking for his mark.
+
+Recent American presidents have been easy prey for Putin. George W. Bush, who thought he got a ""sense of Putin's soul,"" mistook the Russian strongman for a friend. Barack Obama believed that a change in diplomatic tone would alter Putin's calculation of his nation's interests. Putin of course encouraged both vanities. The invaded people of Georgia and Ukraine can attest to who sized up whom better.
+
+The cherry on the cake would be a President Trump. Putin has no doubt observed that flattery works well on The Donald: from his tweets to TV appearances to debate performances, Trump is a lion to those who are critical and a lamb to those who suffer his repetitive imprecisions silently.
+
+Putin's giddiness over Trump's personal flaws shifts to outright desire when the candidate starts talking about U.S. policy toward Russia. In September, Trump said of the Russian leader : ""I will tell you in terms of leadership he is getting an 'A'..."" As Putin put warplanes and a base in Syria -- Moscow's biggest push into the Middle East and Mediterranean rim since the Cold War -- Trump said: ""Putin is now taking over what we started, and he's going into Syria, and he frankly wants to fight ISIS, and I think that's a wonderful thing.""
+
+This means that yet another U.S. political figure has mistakenly believed Russian interests will converge with America's. In reality, Putin has forces in Syria to shore up the dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and primarily fight Assad's non-ISIS opponents. And the ""A"" in leadership The Donald awarded Putin was earned by ruthlessly suppressing domestic dissent, playing to the most base instincts of the Russian public and launching foreign wars of aggression.
+
+Putin will happily pocket Trump's naivete. The Russian President said of the candidate: ""He's saying he wants to go to another level of relations -- closer, deeper relations with Russia. How can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome that.""
+
+When Putin sees Trump's unique combination of self-reference and self-delusion about Moscow's desire to assert itself at the expense of the West, he sees gold. Furthermore, he is assured that he could continue to expand Russia's sphere of influence -- perhaps even beyond the countries he has already invaded -- all the while saying he is doing nothing of the sort.
+
+The mendacity brings to mind that other Mel Brooks tour de force on statecraft: the movie ""To Be Or Not To Be."" In the film, another parody Hitler sings: ""I don't want war! All I want is peace ... peace ... peace ... A little piece of Poland, a little piece of France, a little piece of Austria ...""",REAL
+4606,Two Reasons Trump Could Actually Win (And Three Reasons Why He Won’t),"As volatile and nerve-wracking as the great Clinton-Trump Slugfest of 2016 has appeared from the outside, polling data have, for months, suggested a far more stable race. Polling aggregators and election prediction markets have consistently shown Hillary Clinton with an enduring lead over Donald Trump. Then, with less than two weeks remaining until Election Day, F.B.I. director James Comey decided to get involved, firing off a maddeningly vague letter to Congress, alerting them to the renewal of an investigation into new e-mails that may or may not pertain to Clinton’s use of a private server as secretary of state, and throwing the race into chaos. The Mexican peso plunged as Wall Street started pricing in the rising possibility of a Trump win, and the media went into overdrive, hyperventilating over a spate of new polls that showed the race tightening. Now, as we head into the final weekend before America’s much-anticipated day of reckoning, the Hive offers a perspicacious overview of all the multifarious reasons to panic, no matter who you’re voting for on Tuesday.
+
+Yes, the polls could be misleading
+
+The Chicago Cubs had a smaller chance of winning than Trump currently does, as Kellyanne Conway is quick to remind us. That isn’t to say that the statistics showing a likely Cubs win didn’t accurately take into account everything that sports bettors and analysts knew about both teams at the time. It’s merely to say that predictions are just that—our best guess for what will happen. All polls include a margin of error, and right now, Donald Trump is pretty close to striking distance. According to FiveThirtyEight, Trump lags Clinton by just 3.3 points in a polls-only forecast; in 2012, average polling turned out to be off by 2.7 points. Even if the electoral college seems to place Clinton ahead by wider margins in certain states, “this presumes that the states behave independently from national trends, when in fact they tend to move in tandem,” writes Nate Silver . If national polls are off by 2.7 points, for example, that would be more than enough to flip Wisconsin and Minnesota into Trump’s column, Silver notes. “She has quite a gauntlet to run through to hold her firewall, and she doesn’t have a lot of good backup options.”
+
+There’s a worrying degree of variation among polling aggregators, data scientists, and political analysts. While HuffPost Pollster, which excludes outlier polls, currently gives Clinton a 97.9 percent of victory, Silver’s model is far more conservative, giving Clinton a 68.1 percent chance to account for increased volatility. “[E]verything depends on one’s assumptions, but I think that our assumptions—a Clinton lead, sure, but high uncertainty—has repeatedly been validated by the evidence we've seen over the course of the past several months,” Silver recently told Politico.
+
+Others are far more optimistic. Neuroscientist Sam Wang, who out-predicted Silver in 2012, has observed that while some individual polls may place Clinton narrowly ahead, Trump’s rise shouldn’t be confused for momentum:
+
+“One thing that’s been apparent is that a major feature of voter opinion for last five elections—this is the sixth—is that voters have become entrenched,” says Wang. “The movement of voter opinion has been within a narrow range. In finance and other types of statistical analysis, we call this kind of movement a ‘regression to the mean.’ It happened in 2008, in 2012 and it’s happening this year. When things go too far in one direction, they’ll start to head back to a midpoint. Clinton is now at the low end of where she’s been this season. But if the regression to the mean holds, we should see a little movement back to Clinton. But we’ll see.”
+
+Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium pegs Clinton’s chances of winning at over 99 percent.
+
+The myth of the “secret” Trump voter
+
+“The silent majority is back,” Trump declared less than a week after Clinton’s F.B.I. drama broke out into the open. He was referring to a longstanding belief, possibly backed by political science, that there exist a vast swath of Trump supporters too embarrassed to tell pollsters they plan to vote for him. “When I poll, I do fine. But when I run, I do much better,” he bragged.
+
+Experts have thrown cold water on that idea. A POLITICO/Morning Consult study this week suggests that the myth of the shy Trump voter may be only half-right: according to the survey, Hillary Clinton led Trump by five points, 52 to 47, whereas if asked in an online poll or an automated call—two situations in which there was no possibility of social judgment—that gap narrowed to three points, with Clinton leading 51 to 48. Still, the effect was marginal, and Clinton won in both scenarios.
+
+Nate Cohn at the Upshot has argued that the mysterious newly registered voter is actually more liberal than most pundits have assumed. While Trump may have more enthusiastic white supporters, data shows no new registration “surge” in this category, whereas more younger white voters, minorities, and women registered for the first time. Pollsters and analysts, Cohn mused, were ignoring these “missing nonwhite voters,” and that “it’s Mrs. Clinton—not Mr. Trump—who stands to gain from a surge of new voters.”
+
+Other data also support the idea that polling is underestimating Clinton’s support. While black turnout has been soft compared to four years ago Latinos—who are usually under-polled—appear to be registering and voting at higher levels than before. Talking Points Memo reports that Latino early voting is up 100 percent in Florida, 60 percent in North Carolina, and 25 percent in Colorado and Nevada. Latino Decisions, a Latino advocacy group, told TPM that they are projecting as many as 3.5 million more Latinos will vote in 2016 than in 2012, which could help her win all four aforementioned swing states.
+
+So where does that leave us?
+
+The latest Clinton e-mail drama may not have caused any significant shifts nationally, outside of a brief hiccup, but it may have rearranged Clinton’s pathway to victory. A week after Comey sent his letter, Silver caught up with the recent polling and found that Clinton’s so-called “blue firewall” has started to weaken, with states such as New Hampshire and Michigan suddenly in greater danger of tilting Trump. ”It’s not clear that things are getting any worse for Clinton, but it’s also not clear that they’re getting better,” he concluded. In fact, nothing is getting much clearer than it has ever been—which, perhaps, is liberating in its own way.",REAL
+197,Jeh Johnson on DHS Impasse: Congress Jeopardizes National Security,"Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson suggested Sunday that Congress would be jeopardizing national security if it withholds his agency’s funding to undermine President Barack Obama’s executive action shielding millions of illegal immigrants from deportation. The administration is appealing a federal court’s ruling that blocked the executive order.
+
+“There are some who want to defund our executive actions and do it in a way that holds up the entire budget of homeland security for this nation. That is unacceptable from a public safety, homeland security view,” Mr. Johnson said on Fox News Sunday. Without congressional action, DHS funding expires Friday at midnight.",REAL
+7382,President Trump! A nightmare of the Ukrainian politicians! (English subs),"Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
+6749,Josh Fox on Dakota Access Pipeline Standoff: ‘Where the F*** Is Hillary Clinton Right Now?’,"Josh Fox on Dakota Access Pipeline Standoff: ‘Where the F*** Is Hillary Clinton Right Now?’   CREDIT 
+Filmmaker Josh Fox has a pretty good idea where Hillary Clinton is likely to be found starting Jan. 20. But before she makes her final play for the White House, Fox has a pressing question for the Democratic  . 
+“Where the fuck is Hillary Clinton right now?” Fox asked during his guest appearance on “Live at Truthdig” at the site’s Los Angeles headquarters. 
+That was more of a pointed question than a literal one, since anyone with a television or smartphone can easily track down where Clinton is making her latest campaign stump speech. 
+More specifically, Fox, who’s a climate activist and playwright as well as the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland,” was wondering why Clinton wasn’t anywhere near the contested grounds of North Dakota where the ongoing clash over the Dakota Access pipeline is reaching a volatile point. 
+  
+Remarking that “we all want to think that we would be on the right side” of history and that, for example, “if we were in Selma, we all would have marched with King,” Fox positioned Clinton squarely “on the wrong side of history right now” for maintaining a conspicuous silence about the DAPL battle. 
+“You cannot stand by when a racist occupying force that is run by the government of a rogue state is operating as an arm of the oil and gas industry, is attacking natives, is attacking protesters, is attacking people and torturing them in the ways that we saw in the Iraq War,” Fox said. “It’s unacceptable.” 
+Fox was equally unsparing about Clinton’s environmental credentials. “Hillary Clinton is not an environmentalist,” he said. “Hillary Clinton is not adequate on climate change. And right now, she’s standing by while human rights abuses are unfolding in America where she’s running for president.” 
+The director was making the media rounds to drum up support for the activists and members   allied protesters in North Dakota, some of whom faced off Thursday with police in riot gear as law enforcement and National Guard personnel forcibly removed protesters from their encampment near one of the pipeline’s construction zones. He was also putting out the word about the plight of fellow filmmaker Deia Schlosberg, producer of his 2016 documentary “How to Let Go of the World (and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change),” who was arrested and hit with conspiracy charges earlier this month while shooting footage of activists at a North Dakota tar sands pipeline. Schlosberg has been charged with three felonies and may face 45 years in prison. 
+WATCH: Amy Goodman Explains Decision to Turn Herself In to North Dakota Authorities (Video) 
+“We need to drop all the charges immediately, we need her footage back—her footage was confiscated,” Fox said of Schlosberg. “We definitely need an outcry and an outpouring of support for our journalists who are facing jail time for doing what is a constitutionally protected activity.” Fox has posted a videotaped statement about his colleague’s plight, as well as information about a petition, on this promotional site for his latest work. 
+Despite his robust criticism of Clinton, Fox told Truthdig’s Sarah Wesley, Emma Niles and Donald Kaufman that he was more concerned about the possibility of GOP nominee Donald Trump winning this election. Fox, who had supported Democratic candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and served on the Democratic platform committee at last summer’s party convention, said he understood Sanders’ reasons for backing the Democratic ticket: “If Bernie Sanders’ legacy was to contribute to the election of Donald Trump, I think his whole life would have been a failure.” 
+As for Green Party   Jill Stein? “I’m sorry. It’s immoral what she’s doing,” Fox said. “And I don’t care if I say this on air for the very first time—I spent eight years building the environmental movement, I spent eight years coast-to-coast building the [anti-]fracking movement, I went to 250 cities. I did not see the Green Party having a significant hand in the building of that movement.” 
+Watch the full interview below for more about Fox’s take on the presidential candidates, the Dakota Access pipeline crisis and how to be an effective activist (hint: Don’t try it at home):",FAKE
+3987,US military: 'Reasonably certain' airstrike killed notorious ISIS militant 'Jihadi John',"U.S. military officials said Friday they were “reasonably certain” an airstrike in Syria targeting ""Jihadi John"" killed the masked British national seen in videos depicting the beheading of hostages held by ISIS.
+
+Earlier, a U.S. military official, discussing the airstrike in Raqqa targeting the notorious jihadist, told Fox News, ""we are 99 percent sure we got him.""
+
+Col. Steve Warren said the U.S. military is “reasonably certain” that Mohammad Emwarzi, better known as “Jihadi John,” was killed in the U.S. drone strike Thursday night.
+
+In a Pentagon briefing Friday from Baghdad, Warren, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, sought to downplay the airstrike calling it more a “blow to the prestige"" of ISIS than a military victory. Warren called the strike “routine” and said similar strikes against mid-to high value ISIS leaders has occurred every two days since May.
+
+But Warren later said that Jihadi John’s death is “significant” blow to ISIS.
+
+""This guy was a human animal and killing him is probably making the world a better place,"" he added.
+
+Warren said the driver of the vehicle carrying Jihadi John was also killed after being struck by a hellfire missile fired from the U.S. drone.
+
+The killing of Jihadi John comes as the U.S. military is stepping up airstrikes throughout Iraq and Syria.
+
+Warren said Operation Tidal Wave II, a U.S.-led bombing campaign targeting ISIS’s oil infrastructure in eastern Syria near the city of Dayr as Zawr has been underway in recent days to destroy oil infrastructure controlled by ISIS.  ISIS receives two-thirds of its revenue from oil, according to Warren. Despite earlier attempts to destroy the refineries in eastern Syria, Warren said the damage inflicted earlier was repaired in a 24-hour period on average.
+
+The first “Tidal Wave” operation dates back to World War II when the U.S. targeted Nazi Germany’s oil infrastructure, according to Warren.
+
+Warren said the strikes going on today in eastern Syria against the oil refineries require “replacement parts that ISIS doesn’t have” and parts that, if ordered, could be tracked by the coalition.
+
+“We wanted them broken longer,” said Warren when asked why the strikes did not occur earlier.  Warren said strikes in the past year produced damage to infrastructure that was “easy to replace.”
+
+A senior military source told Fox News Emwazi was being tracked by the drone for most of the day Thursday while he met with other people. The source said the strike took place shortly after Emwazi came out of a building in Raqqa, when he was ""ID'd and engaged.""
+
+Sky News, citing sources inside Raqqa, reported that Emwazi was badly hurt in the air strike but still alive when he was brought to the hospital there. Later, however, the same sources said the hospital was sealed off to the public. Locals say the hospital is usually closed when an ISIS figure is killed, which allows the group to go on social media and claim he is still alive.
+
+A representative of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Daily Telegraph, ""a car carrying four foreign Islamic State leaders, including one British jihadi, was hit by U.S. air strikes [near] the governorate building in Raqqa city.
+
+""All the sources there are saying that the body of an important British jihadi is lying in the hospital of Raqqa,"" the activist added. ""All the sources are saying it is of Jihadi John but I cannot confirm it personally.""
+
+Emwazi, believed to be in his mid-20s, has been described by a former hostage as a bloodthirsty psychopath who enjoyed threatening Western hostages. Spanish journalist Javier Espinosa, who had been held in Syria for more than six months after his abduction in September 2013, said Emwazi would explain precisely how the militants would carry out a beheading.
+
+Those being held by three British-sounding captors nicknamed them ""the Beatles"" with ""Jihadi John"" a reference to Beatles member John Lennon, Espinosa said in recalling his months as one of more than 20 hostages.
+
+Emwazi is seen in videos showing the beheading of journalists Steve Sotloff and James Foley, American aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig, British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, and a number of other hostages.
+
+In the videos, a tall masked figure clad in black and speaking in a British accent typically began one of the gruesome videos with a political rant and a kneeling hostage before him, then ended it holding an oversize knife in his hand with the headless victim lying before him in the sand.
+
+A counterterror analyst told Fox News that Emwazi became so sought-after following his appearances in the beheading videos that he was shunned by ISIS leadership. The analyst said Emwazi had become the ""Typhoid Mary"" of the terror group, noting that his presence had prompted airstrikes on meetings, buildings, and other commanders.
+
+British Prime Minister David Cameron said Friday the drone action was ""a strike at the heart"" of ISIS, as well as ""an act of self-defense"" and the right thing to do.
+
+Cameron said Britain has been ""working, with the United States, literally around the clock to track him down.""
+
+""This was a combined effort,"" he said. ""And the contribution of both our countries was essential.""
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters in Tunisia Friday that extremists “need to know this: Your days are numbered, and you will be defeated.”
+
+Sotloff’s parents, Art and Shirley Sotloff, responding to the reports that Emwazi was killed issued a statement that said, “This development doesn’t change anything for us; it’s too little too late. Our son is never coming back.”
+
+“His death does not bring Jim back,” they said. “If only so much effort had been given to finding and rescuing Jim and the other hostages who were subsequently murdered by ISIS , they might be alive today.”
+
+ 
+
+ Haines’ daughter, Bethany Haines, told Sky News Friday that she felt an 'instant sense of"" relief"" when she heard Emwazi may have been killed. She said her feeling was because of ""'knowing he wouldn't appear in any more horrific videos.""
+
+Emwazi was identified as ""Jihadi John"" last February, although a lawyer who once represented Emwazi's father told reporters that there was no evidence supporting the accusation. Experts and others later confirmed the identification.
+
+Emwazi was born in Kuwait and spent part of his childhood in the poor Taima area of Jahra before moving to Britain while still a boy, according to news reports quoting Syrian activists who knew the family. He attended state schools in London, then studied computer science at the University of Westminster before leaving for Syria in 2013. The woman who had been the principal at London's Quintin Kynaston Academy told the BBC earlier this year that Emwazi had been quiet and ""reasonably hard-working.""
+
+Officials said Britain's intelligence community had Emwazi on its list of potential terror suspects for years but was unable to prevent him from traveling to Syria. He had been known to the nation's intelligence services since at least 2009, when he was connected with investigations into terrorism in Somalia.
+
+The beheading of Foley, 40, of Rochester, New Hampshire, was deemed by IS to be its response to U.S. airstrikes. The release of the video, on Aug. 19, 2014, horrified and outraged the civilized world but was followed the next month by videos showing the beheadings of Sotloff and Haines and, in October, of Henning.
+
+Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson, Jennifer Griffin, Catherine Herridge, Greg Palkot and The Associated Press contributed this report.
+
+Click for more from Sky News.",REAL
+348,UVA Suspect Faces 1st Degree Murder,"Jesse Matthew Jr. has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of University of Virginia second-year student Hannah Graham, according to reports from local media in Charlottesville. The charges are expected to be announced at a press conference Tuesday. Graham was last seen publicly at a bar with Matthew on Sept. 13, 2014. Her remains were found on an abandoned property in Albemarle County, Virginia, on Oct. 18. Matthew has already been charged in Graham’s disappearance—with abduction with intent to defile. Officials say Matthew has been forensically linked to the body of Morgan Harrington, a Virginia Tech student who was found dead in January 2010. He has been jailed for attempted murder, rape, and sexual-assault charges in regard to the rape and sexual assault of a Fairfax woman in 2005.",REAL
+3143,Blasphemy and the law of fanatics,"As they went on their rampage, the men who killed 12 people in Paris this week yelled that they had “avenged the prophet.” They followed in the path of other terrorists who have bombed newspaper offices, stabbed a filmmaker and killed writers and translators, all to mete out what they believe is the proper Koranic punishment for blasphemy. But in fact, the Koran prescribes no punishment for blasphemy. Like so many of the most fanatical and violent aspects of Islamic terrorism today, the idea that Islam requires that insults against the prophet Muhammad be met with violence is a creation of politicians and clerics to serve a political agenda.
+
+One holy book is deeply concerned with blasphemy: the Bible. In the Old Testament, blasphemy and blasphemers are condemned and prescribed harsh punishment. The best-known passage on this is Leviticus 24:16 : “Anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them. Whether foreigner or native-born, when they blaspheme the Name they are to be put to death.”
+
+By contrast, the word blasphemy appears nowhere in the Koran. (Nor, incidentally, does the Koran anywhere forbid creating images of Muhammad, though there are commentaries and traditions — “hadith” — that do, to guard against idol worship.) Islamic scholar Maulana Wahiduddin Khan has pointed out that “there are more than 200 verses in the Koran, which reveal that the contemporaries of the prophets repeatedly perpetrated the same act, which is now called ‘blasphemy or abuse of the Prophet’ . . . but nowhere does the Koran prescribe the punishment of lashes, or death, or any other physical punishment.” On several occasions, Muhammad treated people who ridiculed him and his teachings with understanding and kindness. “In Islam,” Khan says, “blasphemy is a subject of intellectual discussion rather than a subject of physical punishment.”
+
+Somebody forgot to tell the terrorists. But the gruesome and bloody belief the jihadis have adopted is all too common in the Muslim world, even among so-called moderate Muslims — that blasphemy and apostasy are grievous crimes against Islam and should be punished fiercely. Many Muslim-majority countries have laws against blasphemy and apostasy — and in some places, they are enforced.
+
+Pakistan is now the poster child for the anti-blasphemy campaign gone wild. In March, at least 14 people were on death row in that country, and 19 were serving life sentences, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. The owner of the country’s largest media group has been sentenced to 26 years in prison because one of his channels broadcast a devotional song about Muhammad’s daughter while reenacting a wedding. (Really.) And Pakistan is not alone. Bangladesh, Malaysia, Egypt, Turkey and Sudan have all used blasphemy laws to jail and harass people. In moderate Indonesia, 120 people have been detained for this reason since 2003. Saudi Arabia forbids the practice of any religion other than its own Wahhabi version of Islam.
+
+The Pakistani case is instructive, because its extreme version of anti-blasphemy law is relatively recent and a product of politics. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s president during the late 1970s and 1980s, wanted to marginalize the democratic and liberal opposition, and he embraced Islamic fundamentalists, no matter how extreme. He passed a series of laws Islamizing Pakistan, including a law that recommended the death penalty or life imprisonment for insulting Muhammad in any way.
+
+When governments try to curry favor with fanatics, eventually the fanatics take the law into their own hands. In Pakistan, jihadis have killed dozens of people whom they accuse of blasphemy, including a brave politician, Salmaan Taseer, who dared to call the blasphemy law a “black law.”
+
+We should fight terrorism. But we should also fight the source of the problem. It’s not enough for Muslim leaders to condemn people who kill those they consider as blasphemers if their own governments endorse the idea of punishing blasphemy at the very same time. The U.S. religious freedom commission and the U.N. Human Rights Committee have both declared that blasphemy laws violate universal human rights because they violate freedom of speech and expression. They are correct.
+
+In Muslim-majority countries, no one dares to dial back these laws. In Western countries, no one confronts allies on these issues. But blasphemy is not a purely domestic matter, of concern only to those who worry about countries’ internal affairs. It now sits on the bloody crossroad between radical Islamists and Western societies. It cannot be avoided anymore. Western politicians, Muslim leaders and intellectuals everywhere should point out that blasphemy is something that does not exist in the Koran and should not exist in the modern world.
+
+Read more from Fareed Zakaria’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+379,"Party insiders give Clinton early, commanding delegate edge","Hillary Rodham Clinton has locked up public support from half of the Democratic insiders who cast ballots at the party's national convention, giving her a commanding advantage over her rivals for the party's presidential nomination.
+
+Clinton's margin over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley is striking. Not only is it big, but it comes more than two months before primary voters head to the polls -- an early point in the race for so many of the people known as superdelegates to publicly back a candidate.
+
+""She has the experience necessary not only to lead this country, she has experience politically that I think will help her through a tough campaign,"" said Unzell Kelley, a county commissioner from Alabama.
+
+""I think she's learned from her previous campaign,"" he said. ""She's learned what to do, what to say, what not to say -- which just adds to her electability.""
+
+The Associated Press contacted all 712 superdelegates in the past two weeks, and heard back from more than 80 percent. They were asked which candidate they plan to support at the convention next summer.
+
+The 712 superdelegates make up about 30 percent of the 2,382 delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination. That means that more than two months before voting starts, Clinton already has 15 percent of the delegates she needs.
+
+That sizable lead reflects Clinton's advantage among the Democratic Party establishment, an edge that has helped the 2016 front-runner build a massive campaign organization, hire top staff and win coveted local endorsements.
+
+Superdelegates are convention delegates who can support the candidate of their choice, regardless of who voters choose in the primaries and caucuses. They are members of Congress and other elected officials, party leaders and members of the Democratic National Committee.
+
+Clinton is leading most preference polls in the race for the Democratic nomination, most by a wide margin. Sanders has made some inroads in New Hampshire, which holds the first presidential primary, and continues to attract huge crowds with his populist message about income inequality.
+
+But Sanders has only recently started saying he's a Democrat after a decades-long career in politics as an independent. While he's met with and usually voted with Democrats in the Senate, he calls himself a democratic socialist.
+
+""We recognize Secretary Clinton has enormous support based on many years working with and on behalf of many party leaders in the Democratic Party,"" said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign. ""But Sen. Sanders will prove to be the strongest candidate, with his ability to coalesce and bring young people to the polls the way that Barack Obama did.""
+
+""The best way to win support from superdelegates is to win support from voters,"" added Devine, a longtime expert on the Democrats' nominating process.
+
+The Clinton campaign has been working for months to secure endorsements from superdelegates, part of a strategy to avoid repeating the mistakes that cost her the Democratic nomination eight years ago.
+
+In 2008, Clinton hinged her campaign on an early knockout blow on Super Tuesday, while Obama's staff had devised a strategy to accumulate delegates well into the spring.
+
+This time around, Clinton has hired Obama's top delegate strategist from 2008, a lawyer named Jeff Berman, an expert on the party's arcane rules for nominating a candidate for president.
+
+Clinton's increased focus on winning delegates has paid off, putting her way ahead of where she was at this time eight years ago. In December 2007, Clinton had public endorsements from 169 superdelegates, according to an AP survey. At the time, Obama had 63 and a handful of other candidates had commitments as well from the smaller fraction of superdelegates willing to commit to a candidate.
+
+""Our campaign is working hard to earn the support of every caucus goer, primary voter and grassroots and grasstop leaders,"" said Clinton campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson. ""Since day one we have not taken this nomination for granted and that will not change.""
+
+Some superdelegates supporting Clinton said they don't think Sanders is electable, especially because of his embrace of socialism. But few openly criticized Sanders and a handful endorsed him.
+
+""I've heard him talk about many subjects and I can't say there is anything I disagree with,"" said Chad Nodland, a DNC member from North Dakota who is backing Sanders.
+
+However, Nodland added, if Clinton is the party's nominee, ""I will knock on doors for her. There are just more issues I agree with Bernie.""
+
+Some superdelegates said they were unwilling to publicly commit to candidates before voters have a say, out of concern that they will be seen as undemocratic. A few said they have concerns about Clinton, who has been dogged about her use of a private email account and server while serving as secretary of state.
+
+""If it boils down to anything I'm not sure about the trust factor,"" said Danica Oparnica, a DNC member from Arizona. ""She has been known to tell some outright lies and I can't tolerate that.""
+
+Still others said they were won over by Clinton's 11 hours of testimony before a GOP-led committee investigating the attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Clinton's testimony won widespread praise as House Republicans struggled to trip her up.
+
+""I don't think that there's any candidate right now, Democrat or Republican, that could actually face up to that and come out with people shaking their heads and saying, `That is one bright, intelligent person,""' said California Democratic Rep. Tony Cardenas.",REAL
+3254,"Chris Christie kicks off his comeback tour in N.H., going all-in on entitlement reform","GOFFSTOWN – Chris Christie kicked off a two day swing to New Hampshire with a sober prescription for tackling escalating entitlement spending.
+
+The New Jersey governor and potential Republican presidential candidate proposed raising the retirement age for Social security to 69, means testing for Social Security, and gradually raising the eligibility age for Medicare.
+
+Christie outlined his proposals on entitlement reform at a speech Tuesday morning at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College.
+
+“In the short term, it is growing the deficit and slowly but surely taking over all of government. In the long term, it will steal our children’s future and bankrupt our nation. Meanwhile, our leaders in Washington are not telling people the truth. Washington is still not dealing with the problem,” Christie said.
+
+“Washington is afraid to have an honest conversation about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid with the people of our country. I am not,” the governor added.
+
+Christie said that Social Security should be retirement insurance, and he proposed what he described as “modest” means testing.
+
+“Let’s ask ourselves an honest question: do we really believe that the wealthiest Americans need to take from younger, hardworking Americans to receive what, for most of them, is a modest monthly Social Security check? I propose a modest means test that only affects those with non-Social Security income of over $80,000 per year, and phases out Social Security payments entirely for those that have $200,000 a year of other income,” Christie said.
+
+He added that his proposal would only affect 2 percent of all Social Security recipients.
+
+When it comes to Medicare, Christie would increase the current sliding scare of means testing.
+
+“We should expand the sliding scale under my proposal. Seniors with an $85,000 a year income will pay 40% of premium costs and increasing it to 90% above $196,000 a year in retirement income, Christie said.
+
+Christie also proposed raising the retirement age for Social Security.
+
+“I’m proposing we raise the age to 69, gradually implementing this change starting in 2022 and increasing the retirement age by two months each year until it reaches 69. I also believe we need to raise the early retirement age – people who take their retirement early -- at a similar pace, raising it by two months per year until it reaches 64 from the current level of 62,” Christie
+
+And he also called for raising the eligibility age for Medicare at what he described as “a manageable pace of one month per year, so that by 2040, you’d be eligible for Medicare at 67 years old, and by 2064 would be 69 years old. Raising the eligibility age, slowly so that people can plan for it, has another advantage. It encourages seniors to remain in the workforce.”
+
+Christie also trained some of his fire on President Barack Obama, saying the president “has left us a debtor nation. In his short time in office, he has almost doubled the national debt – increasing it by over $8 trillion.”
+
+“It won’t be easy to turn around the fiscal mess that Barack Obama has left us either. He has avoided the tough decisions. Imagine that the straightforward discussion I’ve just had with you today, President Obama has been afraid to have with you for the last eight years -- from the day he declared for president in February of 2007 to this very day,” Christie added.
+
+[How Chris Christie is plotting a comeback with town hall meetings]
+
+Christie ended his speech by touting that he’s not afraid to tackle the difficult issues, like entitlement reform.
+
+“Here’s what you’ll learn about me. I have been talking about the growth of entitlements as a big problem, at both the state and federal levels, for a number of years. Not because it is politically popular, but because it is true. And because it will affect everything we can do as a country to make this century the second American century. I will not pander. I will not flip flop. I’m not afraid to tell you the truth as I see it, whether you like it or not,” Christie concluded.
+
+Prior to his address, Christie met with students at Saint Anselm College. After a conference call with conservative reporters who were unable to watch the speech, Christie was headed to a retail stop at Caesario’s Pizza on Elm Street in Manchester.
+
+Later in the day he was scheduled to hold a meet and greet at the Stone Church Tavern in Newmarket, followed by a closed door Seacoast Roundtable hosted by Renee Plummer, one of the most influential GOP activists along the coast.
+
+Wednesday Christie meets and greets voters at Chez Vachon, a breakfast spot in Manchester, before holding a town hall in Londonderry. He returns to New Hampshire on Friday to speak at the NHGOP’s First-in-the-Nation Leadership Summit. The two-day confab in Nashua’s attracting just about every declared candidate and probable Republican White House contender.",REAL
+8720,Russian Defence Minister in India | Russia & India Report,"Russian Defence Minister in India mil.ru 
+Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu sign protocol document after the 16th meeting of the India-Russia Intergovernmental Commission on Military-Technical Cooperation in New Delhi on Wednesday, October 26, 2016. Facebook ",FAKE
+1732,Democratic debate 2015: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders finally face off,"Watch the first Democratic presidential debate Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. ET live on CNN and CNNgo ; join the conversation at #DemDebate
+
+Washington (CNN) The shadow boxing that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have played at for months -- they've barely mentioned each other on the campaign trail -- will give way to more direct jabs Tuesday night.
+
+That's when the two rivals line up on stage at the first Democratic debate of the 2016 campaign, sponsored by CNN and Facebook. The encounter will provide a crucial opportunity for Clinton and Sanders -- the leading Democratic contenders -- to contrast their personalities, experience and approach to the key issues in the campaign.
+
+Though Clinton and Sanders have rarely mentioned each other's names, they are clearly reacting to each other and their rival's potential weaknesses. Sanders took aim at Clinton's Wall Street record and Iraq vote over the weekend; she put him on the defensive on guns and his poor standing with minority voters.
+
+Until now, they have each had good reason for avoiding full contact with the other. Clinton hasn't wanted to elevate Sanders and his surprisingly strong poll numbers, while Sanders has wanted to maintain his untraditional, above-the-fray image.
+
+On Tuesday, that calculus will change. And the distinctions they've subtly staked out on a range of issues are only likely to grow sharper.
+
+In the weeks leading up to the debate in Las Vegas, the two Democrats have been carefully finessing their political positions in relation to each other and their party's wide coalition, offering clues about how they will spar Tuesday night.
+
+Sanders has been signaling he will try to strike a contrast with Clinton on reining in Wall Street and on her record of support for military interventions overseas. The former secretary of state, meanwhile, is under pressure to prove to progressives who have flocked to Sanders that she genuinely cares about the middle class. She's expected to highlight her differences with her rival on gun control and to demonstrate the broad support she has among minority voters -- a key sector of the Democratic coalition where Sanders is struggling.
+
+As he limbered up for their clash, Sanders threw down the gauntlet on the Iraq War -- a thrust that Clinton has struggled to counter in the past -- hinting that she has hawkish views that are out of step with the majority of Democratic voters.
+
+His campaign issued a statement reminding voters that he, then a member of the House of Representatives, voted against authorizing the Iraq war in late 2002. At the time he argued that the conflict would destabilize the Middle East, kill large numbers of Americans and Iraqi civilians and hamper the war on terror against al Qaeda.
+
+The statement did not once mention Clinton -- but it did not have to. The then-New York senator did vote to authorize the Iraq war, and that vote was one of her greatest vulnerabilities in the 2008 Democratic campaign against Obama, who also opposed the war.
+
+The Sanders statement raised the possibility that Clinton's vote could haunt her for a second presidential campaign.
+
+""Democrats are no more fond of the Iraq war now than they were back then. That could be a problem,"" Peter Beinart, a foreign policy expert and CNN contributor, said Monday. He added that another Democratic candidate, former Virginia senator and Vietnam war veteran Jim Webb, who was also against the war, could double-team with Sanders to cause trouble for Clinton on the issue.
+
+Sanders has also been staking out territory to Clinton's left on Syria. The former secretary of state recently distanced herself from Obama's much-criticized policy on the vicious civil war by calling for a no-fly zone to be set up to shield refugees.
+
+Sanders issued a statement earlier this month pointing out that he opposes such an idea, warning that it could ""get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead to a never ending entanglement in that region.""
+
+The statement appeared to be a clear appeal to Democrats who share Obama's antipathy toward getting the United States entangled in another Middle Eastern conflict and who are wary of Clinton's more activist instincts on foreign policy.
+
+Sanders is not alone in seeing Clinton's foreign policy record as a vulnerability. Another Democratic candidate, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, also picked up on her Syria position Sunday -- saying on CNN's ""State of the Union"" that a no-fly zone was not advisable and warning that the former secretary of state was ""always quick for the military intervention,"" apparently referring to her previous support for military action in nations such as Iraq and Libya.
+
+Another area where Sanders seems more in tune with the progressive Democratic base is on Wall Street, especially since he has raised most of his money from small donors -- unlike the former secretary of state, who has been relying on big budget fund-raising events with rich contributors. Even with his small-donor focus, Sanders is nearly neck-and-neck in the fund-raising race with Clinton.
+
+Clinton has made strenuous attempts to connect with what her campaign has called ""regular"" Americans, stressing the need to raise up the middle class to feel the benefits of the economic recovery. But Sanders has said that she hasn't done enough, an argument he may expand upon on the debate stage.
+
+""People will have to contrast my consistency and my willingness to stand up to Wall Street and corporations with the secretary,"" Sanders said on NBC's ""Meet the Press"" on Sunday.
+
+The Vermont senator also will likely draw an implied contrast with Clinton on two other issues -- the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact the United States and 11 other nations reached this month and the Keystone XL pipeline designed to carry oil from Canada's tar sands across the United States.
+
+Clinton now says she is a 'no' on both issues, but she took months to get there -- despite fervent opposition to both projects from the left flank of the Democratic Party.
+
+""I am glad that she has reached that conclusion,"" said Sanders in Washington last week when asked about Clinton's opposition to a trade agreement she championed repeatedly as secretary of state. ""This is a conclusion that I reached from day one.""
+
+Yet Sanders is not alone in curating the battlefield for the Democratic debate. Clinton, while getting in line with progressive Democratic positions on big issues, has also been preparing to strike key contrasts with Sanders.
+
+Guns are one policy issue where Sanders is not completely in sync with the Democratic base, so Clinton is likely to exploit it on Tuesday night.
+
+She has been promising a forthright effort to enact new gun control laws after a string of recent mass shootings. It partly seems to be an attempt to focus attention her rival's record on guns, which recently saw him express his openness to reforms that would hold gun manufacturers liable for crimes committed with their weapons.
+
+Clinton has also spent the runup to the debate cementing her links to key voting blocs of the Democratic coalition -- especially in sectors of the party where Sanders is weak. She can point to broad appeal in the party, which could be key to eventually blunting the challenge from Sanders after early-voting contests in the less diverse states of Iowa and New Hampshire where he is strong.
+
+In recent weeks, Clinton has met representatives of the Black Lives Matter movement and has even criticized Obama for not going far enough in changing immigration laws.
+
+""Hillary has done a lot of work leading up to this debate that has pretty much gone unnoticed,"" Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton's 2008 campaign manager, said on CNN on Monday.
+
+""She's rolled out Latinos for Hillary, she has rolled out Women for Hillary, she has met with the leadership of Black Lives Matter, she has checked a lot of boxes walking into this debate,"" she noted. ""I think she is going to display tomorrow night (Tuesday) her vast support among this coalition.""
+
+The challenge that Sanders faces reaching out to minority voters, who are a vital part of the Democratic Party voting bloc, was underscored by a new CNN poll Monday finding that only 1% of nonwhite voters in the important early voting state of South Carolina favor him.
+
+That is a showing that Sanders must improve on if he is to come from behind and beat Clinton for the nomination.",REAL
+9934,Susan Rice: U.S. Must Integrate LGBT Rights into Gov’t and Foreign Policy,"October 28, 2016 Susan Rice: U.S. Must Integrate LGBT Rights into Gov’t and Foreign Policy 
+National Security Advisor Susan Rice told students at American University in a speech on LGBT rights Wednesday that the “United States must continue to integrate LGBT rights into our government and foreign policy,” including “creating a more diverse national security workforce.” 
+“This is an issue that I’m particularly passionate about, and one that President Obama has prioritized,” Rice said, “because without tapping America’s full range of races, religions, ethnicities, social and economic experiences—without embracing people of every sexual orientation and gender identity—we’re leading in a complex world with one hand tied behind our back.” 
+Rice, who once served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said that “whether we are talking about race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity, this fight for equal rights is what our history and values demand.”",FAKE
+1116,GOP Presidential Contenders Stay Classy With Major Shift In Debate Tone And Pitch,"GOP Presidential Contenders Stay Classy With Major Shift In Debate Tone And Pitch
+
+After one more debate among the Republican contenders for president, the postgame conversation was once again dominated by Donald Trump's behavior.
+
+But for once, it was about his good behavior. He did not shout or fulminate, nor did he pout or belittle his opponents or joust with the moderators.
+
+In fact, after an even dozen of these events, all four remaining candidates kept a remarkably even keel at the University of Miami. Their previous two meetings had been rife with personal attacks that, at times, became almost juvenile, but on this night all four seemed intent on elevating the tone and tending to business.
+
+The themes of the night were almost entirely policy oriented, with a few forays into political process and tiffs over who was doing better or more likely to win in November if nominated.
+
+The two-hour debate was shown on CNN and co-sponsored by the Salem Media Group and The Washington Times. And although there is at least one more debate scheduled in Salt Lake City on March 21, the Miami event had the feeling of a finale.
+
+The moderators began with a long discussion of job creation, which segued into trade, visas for high-tech workers, Social Security, the national debt, Obamacare, education policy, Common Core and, of course, immigration.
+
+Much of the attention was on Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who have together amassed more than 800 delegates to date. But both Marco Rubio and John Kasich, who face do-or-die primaries in their home states on Tuesday, had ample opportunity to defend their place in the race.
+
+Trump, as has been typical, got most of the air time, with more than 27 minutes. Cruz and Rubio followed with a little under 22 minutes each, Kasich with less than 19.
+
+Rubio and Kasich delivered solid reprises of their strongest debate moments to date, as if to say that if this was going to be their last outing, they would at least be at their best. Rubio, most notably, was once again the smooth and earnest spokesman for a new American dream, sharp on the issue details and long on the idealistic overtures. It was easier to understand why his expectations had been so high than to understand his third- and fourth-place finishes.
+
+""For over two centuries, America has been an exceptional nation,"" Rubio said. ""And now the time has come for this generation to do what it must do to keep it that way. If we make the right choice in this election, our children are going to be the freest and most prosperous Americans that have ever lived.""
+
+Kasich had this to say near the end of the debate:
+
+In essence, though, both Rubio and Kasich trail so far behind in the delegate count that they are at this point running for influence at the convention and a prospective vice presidential bid. Either might make a classic running mate with high name recognition and campaign experience.
+
+Florida is the largest swing state in the Electoral College, and no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio.
+
+Cruz, who has been Trump's closest competitor thus far, returned several times to the difference between talking about problems and knowing how to solve them.
+
+""Donald is right,"" Cruz said, gesturing toward Trump. ""For example, he was just talking about international trade. He's right about the problems. But his solutions don't work. So, for example, his solution on international trade, he proposed earlier a 45 percent tariff on foreign goods. Now, he backed away from that immediately, and he may come back with a different number tonight.""
+
+At another point, Cruz referred to his rival as ""a candidate who has been funding liberal Democrats and funding the Washington establishment,"" adding that ""it's very hard to imagine how suddenly this candidate is going to take on Washington.""
+
+Trump was once again the man in the middle. But he was markedly different in playing the central role. He found a deft way, when discussing education, to mention that former rival candidate Ben Carson would be endorsing him the next day (an important coup given Carson's image, aura and remaining bloc of voters).
+
+As ever, Trump pushed back when others pushed him, but without the ferocity seen in earlier debates. Questioned about how he could get tough on trade and immigration when his businesses brought in foreign workers and made products overseas, Trump responded calmly and firmly:
+
+Challenged over a protester who was beaten at one of Trump's rallies this week, Trump said he did not condone such behavior. But he also said some of the disturbances at his events were caused by ""bad dudes"" who had been violent and disruptive, and added a salute to the local police, who he said had handled these situations well and deserved more support and respect.
+
+The elevated tone of the Miami debate may have reflected the seriousness of the contest at this juncture. Tuesday brings the second biggest prize of the season: 99 delegates in the winner-take-all state of Florida. It is widely believed that Rubio must win his home state or fold his tent. Also winner-take-all is Ohio, where the same imperative hangs over incumbent Gov. Kasich.
+
+But the other three states voting, Illinois, North Carolina and Missouri, rank fifth, 10th and 18th by population and size of convention delegations. Taken together, the five states on March 15 offer nearly as many delegates as were available on Super Tuesday, March 1.
+
+At one point in the debate, the candidates were asked what they would do if none of them had the 1,237 delegates needed for a first ballot nomination.
+
+Trump said he expected to have enough on the first ballot, adding that if he did not he would expect to support whichever candidate had the most. He called on the others to promise as much:",REAL
+6343,Police arrest 141 in crackdown on North Dakota pipeline protesters,"Reuters 
+Police arrested 141 Native Americans and other protesters in North Dakota in a tense standoff that spilled into Friday morning between law enforcement and demonstrators seeking to halt construction of a disputed oil pipeline. 
+Police in riot gear used pepper spray and armored vehicles in an effort to disperse an estimated 330 protesters and clear a camp on private property in the path of the proposed $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline, according to photos and statements released by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department. 
+Some protesters responded by throwing rocks, bottles and Molotov cocktails at police, attaching themselves to vehicles and starting fires, police said. 
+“It was a very active and tense evening as law enforcement worked through the evening to clear protesters,” the department said. 
+A female protester fired three rounds at the police line before she was arrested, the department said. 
+In another shooting incident, a man was taken into custody after a man was shot in the hand. That “situation involved a private individual who was run off the road by protesters,” the department said in a Facebook post. 
+The 1,172-mile (1,885-km) pipeline, being built by a group of companies led by Energy Transfer Partners LP, would offer the fastest and most direct route to bring Bakken shale oil from North Dakota to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. 
+Supporters say it would be safer and more cost-effective than transporting the oil by road or rail. 
+But the pipeline has drawn the ire of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and environmental activists who say it threatens the water supply and sacred tribal sites. They have been protesting for several months, and dozens have been arrested. 
+In all, 141 people were arrested on various charges including conspiracy to endanger by fire or explosion, engaging in a riot and maintaining a public nuisance, the sheriff’s department said. 
+Native American protesters had occupied the site since Monday, saying they were the land’s rightful owners under an 1851 treaty with the U.S. government. 
+Video posted on social media showed dozens of police and two armored vehicles slowly approaching one group of protesters. 
+Reuters was unable to confirm the authenticity of the video, which showed a helicopter overhead as some protesters said police had used bean-bag guns in an effort to chase them out of the camp. 
+North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple said police were successful in clearing the camp. 
+“Private property is not the place to carry out a peaceful protest,” he said. 
+Members of the Standing Rock Sioux asked Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday to oppose the pipeline. She has not taken a public position on the issue.",FAKE
+7565,White,"0 44 
+To be white and from money is to live a life of largely unrecognized privilege, bequeathed as it is from one’s first wet, howling breath. In the affluent socio-economically partitioned town of Saratoga Springs, NY where I’m from there was actually a railroad track serving as the demarcation line between affluent whites residing on one side and the other side of which nothing was known because you just didn’t go there, ever. It was literally the “wrong side of the tracks”. 
+Raised in that remarkable state of incurious joy and suffering within narrow undiluted lines of stratified suburban sameness, I could not know or question the things kept from sight. Thus racial determinism was assumed passively, an acquired naivete fueled with the aspirational angst of middle class parenting that served as an omniscient narcotic fog, like carbon monoxide – not enough to be lethal, but just enough to render the critical faculties permanently dull until finally the things kept from sight could no longer be seen even upon close observation. 
+To be white is to watch but not see while being seen but never watched. It is to know that for whatever law enforcement is or is not, they are something that will never have anything to do with me. It is to know that on those rare occasions I am pulled over, it really is about a busted tail light. 
+To be white is to know that when a retail clerk approaches me, it’s about customer service and not the smothering sea of smiles…",FAKE
+10307,"Cannabis Protects The Brain From Traumatic Injuries And Concussions, Study Finds","By Brianna Acuesta Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about everything marijuana can do. More and more studies on the abilities of THC are being released recently, and the results are... ",FAKE
+1611,Clinton campaign tries to use report to exonerate candidate in email scandal,"The Hillary Clinton campaign, in an unusual late-afternoon conference call, touted an exclusive Fox News report on the origin of the FBI probe into the candidate’s server in a bid to argue it proves she did nothing wrong -- though a top government watchdog pushed back on the campaign's claims.
+
+The report by Fox News’ Catherine Herridge, for the first time, identified emails that helped kick-start the current investigation. The emails were from top Clinton advisers and had earlier been released to the Benghazi select committee.
+
+On the conference call Wednesday reacting to the report, top Clinton campaign aides said those emails were not marked classified at the time they were sent.
+
+However, despite the Clinton campaign’s claims, a spokeswoman for the intelligence community inspector general reiterated to Fox News that the information in the emails was in fact considered classified at the time it was sent.
+
+An aide to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, also issued a statement defending the intelligence community's concern. ""Just because the State Department may not think information is or should be classified, it does not have the authority [to] make that decision if it received the information from another agency,"" a Grassley spokesperson said.
+
+Campaign Press Secretary Brian Fallon acknowledged Wednesday they have a disagreement on that point with the intelligence community inspector general. Clinton campaign officials said on the call that, at worst, this is a dispute between two agencies, as the State Department also maintains the emails were not classified.
+
+Fallon said the campaign previously did not know which emails originally had been flagged, and called the Fox News report a “watershed” moment in understanding what led to the review. Calling the report “fortuitous” and saying they have no reason to doubt its veracity, the aides also emphasized the emails were not written by Clinton herself.
+
+“We again would like to see the government agencies involved in this process to proceed as quickly as possible in conducting a review of the emails,” Fallon said. “We think it will vindicate all the points we made today on this whole matter.”
+
+The emails identified by Fox News as helping spur the referral both pertained to Benghazi.
+
+The first was forwarded by Clinton adviser Huma Abedin. The 2011 email forwards a warning about how then-deputy chief of mission Chris Stevens was ""considering departure from Benghazi"" amid deteriorating conditions in a nearby city. The email was mistakenly released by the State Department in full, and is now considered declassified.
+
+The second was sent by Clinton aide Jake Sullivan. The partly redacted November 2012 email detailed how Libyan police had arrested ""several people"" with potential connections to the terror attack.
+
+Abedin and Sullivan now work for the Clinton presidential campaign
+
+Fox News understands those two emails were separate from four other emails that the inspector general flagged in July as containing classified information.
+
+A statement from the IG’s office last month, though, referenced one of the two emails, pointing to an “inadvertent release of classified national security information” by the State Department through its FOIA process. That statement also acknowledged the disagreement between the two agencies, saying the department denies the “classified character” of the information “despite a definitive determination from the IC Interagency FOIA Process.”
+
+Aside from that disagreement, the two emails also represent just a fraction of the hundreds of emails‎ that the IG and State Department have since flagged for containing potentially classified material.
+
+The Clinton campaign argued Wednesday that this whole experience speaks to the government’s tendency toward classification.
+
+“We think that this says more about the bent towards secrecy within some corners of the government. It says more about that than it does about Hillary Clinton’s email practices,” Fallon said.",REAL
+3681,Terror trail? Feds probe digital profile of SoCal massacre suspects,"The Muslim couple who stormed an office holiday party Wednesday in Southern California, mowing down 14 people before dying hours later in a shootout with police, possessed a massive arsenal of ammo, bombs and high-powered weapons -- and investigators were hoping that computer drives and cell phones seized from their home could tell them whether they were radicalized terrorists with more targets in their sights.
+
+Local and federal authorities - as well as President Obama - continued Thursday to resist calling the carnage at a San Bernardino social services facility terrorism, even as evidence mounted that the pair, who wore tactical gear and moved with grim precision, may have been jihadists armed to the teeth and hellbent on slaughtering innocent Americans. More than 5,000 rounds of ammunition were later found in their home, which sources described as ""an IED factory"" packed with explosives and bomb-making equipment.
+
+""At this stage, we do not yet know why this terrible event occurred,"" Obama said in an address from the White House. ""We'll get to the bottom of this and be vigilant getting the facts before we issue decisive judgments on how this occurred.""
+
+Syed Rizwan Farook, a U.S.-born citizen of Pakistani descent who had traveled to Saudi Arabia for nine days in the summer of 2014 and had recently begun wearing a full beard, and Tashfeen Malik, 29, burst into the facility Wednesday morning and sprayed up to 75 rounds at Farook's own terrified colleagues in a conference room where his employer, the county health department, was hosting a holiday party Farook had angrily bolted only minutes earlier. The pair escaped in a black SUV after the attack, which authorities said was over within as few as 10 minutes, only to resurface three hours later and less than 2 miles away in a fierce gun battle on the city's main drag.
+
+""They came prepared to do what they did, as if they were on a mission,"" said San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan, who refuted an earlier report by Fox News that the suspects wore GoPro cameras during their initial rampage.
+
+Farook, 28, who authorities said was born in Illinois, and raised in California and had worked as a $51,000-per-year restaurant inspector at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health for five years, was described by co-workers as a ""devout"" Muslim, who lived with his wife, child and grandmother in a home in nearby Redlands, which sources described as ""an IED factory."" Bomb squads working with robots swept the home late into the night Wednesday, and witnesses reported hearing several explosions. Malik, who had a 6-month-old baby with Farook, came to the U.S. on a K-1 (fiance of citizen) visa and had a Pakistani passport, according to authorities. It was not clear how long the couple had been together.
+
+Burguan said Thursday he was ""not aware of any notes"" that might shed light on a possible motive. A source briefed on the investigation told Fox News Farook had been in contact with individuals who had been the subject of previous terrorism FBI investigations, but those investigations had been closed.
+
+Meanwhile, jihadists and extremists took to social media to express joy over the American casualties, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
+
+One user, Muhammad Abu Ubaida, tweeted: ""Allah Akbar, and thanks for Allah, the killing of at least 30 people in a shooting incident in San Bernardino in California,"" under the hashtag, “America Burning.”
+
+Muslimah, a prominent pro-ISIS account, shared a photo believed to be of Syed Farook, and wrote: ""May Allah accept our brother & sister who were martyred after carrying out an operation against Crusaders in USA,"" MEMRI said.
+
+At an afternon news conference, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the FBI had taken the reins of the investigation, and a bureau spokesman said a focus of the probe is digital evidence collected from their homes, including hard drives, thumb drives and cell phones. While those could be part of a terror investigation, and FBI spokesman said it was too soon to ascribe religion as a motive.
+
+""It is a possibility, but we don't know that,"" said Assistant Regional FBI Director David Bowdich. ""It's possible it goes down that road. It's possible it does not.""
+
+A law enforcement source told Fox News that the couple were each carrying an AR-15 rifle and a pistol when they were shot and killed by police after a brief chase in their rented black Ford Expedition with Utah plates about 2 miles from the initial shooting site. The source said the vehicle also contained so-called ""rollout bags"" with multiple pipe bombs, as well as additional ammunition.
+
+""That's a military tactic for a sustained fight,"" the source told Fox News of the rollout bags.
+
+The guns found on the suspects, two rifles and two handguns, were purchased legally, according to Meredith Davis, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Burguan said Thursday Farook had purchased the handguns, but he did not say who had bought the rifles.
+
+It was unclear where the suspects may have been during the hours following the lightning-quick attack, but they did not get far. A police spokeswoman said police came across the SUV while ""doing follow-up work,"" and several reports said the car was at a nearby home police were staking out when the suspects got in and tried to flee. It was not immediately clear if that home was the one searched later in Redlands.
+
+About three hours after the shooting, with police looking for a dark SUV, officers staking out the Redlands home after being tipped off by a colleague disturbed by Farook's exit from the party saw a vehicle matching that description. Word that police were hot on their trail came even as emergency responders were treating the wounded on the scene, and sparked a flurry of law enforcement racing to the scene just blocks away. The gunfight, caught on cellphone video by a bystander, was a furious exchange in which 23 officers fired a total of 380 rounds at the suspects, according to Burguan. Two officers suffered non-life threatening injuries.
+
+In addition to the explosives found in the SUV, authorities discovered and detonated three pipe bombs late Wednesday at the Inland Regional Center, the complex where the initial shooting took place about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. Another source said investigators discovered a dozen pipe bombs in the house, as well as small explosives strapped to remote-controlled cars - a signature of terrorist groups including Al Qaeda, according to counter-terrorism experts. Police also found thousands of .223-caliber and 9mm rounds at the home.
+
+""""Clearly they were equipped and could have done an other attack,"" Barguan said. ""Luckily we stopped them before that.""
+
+ 
+
+ The initial shooting happened shortly before 11 a.m. local time at the state-run center, which includes three buildings where developmentally disabled people of all ages are treated. The conference area had been rented out by Farook's colleagues for a holiday banquet, according to authorities. Burguan said that Farook had angrily left the party before returning with Malik, however, other investigators doubted the shooting could be chalked up to a workplace dispute, due to the apparent planning behind the attack as well as the heavy weaponry used. On Thursday, officials raised to 21 the number of people injured in the attack.
+
+Patrick Baccari, a co-worker of Farook who suffered minor wounds from shrapnel slicing through the building's bathroom walls, told The Associated Press he had been sitting at the same table as Farook at the banquet before his colleague suddenly disappeared, leaving his coat on his chair.
+
+Baccari also said that Farook had traveled to Saudi Arabia for about a month this past spring. When Farook came back, word spread that he had gotten married and the woman he described as a pharmacist joined him shortly afterward. Baccari added that the reserved Farook showed no signs of unusual behavior, although he grew out his beard several months ago. A five-year-old profile for Farook on a dating site said he was ""religious"" and enjoyed hanging out in the ""back yard doing target practice with younger sister and friends.""
+
+Center employees, who undergo monthly training drills to prepare for active shooter situations, initially thought the incident was a drill, according to the Los Angeles Times. But when real bullets flew, several hid in closets, barricaded themselves in rooms or fled for their lives.
+
+The Inland Regional Center is one of 21 facilities serving people with developmental disabilities run by the state, said Nancy Lungren, spokeswoman for the California Department of Developmental Services. The social services agency administers, authorizes and pays for assistance to people with disabilities such as autism and mental retardation. On an average day, doctors at the regional centers would be evaluating toddlers whose parents have concerns and case workers meeting with developmentally disabled adults.
+
+Fox News' Adam Housley and Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.",REAL
+4586,Your election night survival guide: what to expect as polls close,"To become the 45th president of the United States, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump has to win 270 electoral college votes. The candidates have spent what feels like 100 years locked in mortal combat, but in the next few hours there will finally be a victor. (Well, probably. If there’s a 269-vote tie, or a mandatory recount, prepare for constitutional chaos.)
+
+Each state is assigned a certain number of electoral votes, ultimately based on its population. California has the most, with 55. Seven states – Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming – have just three electoral votes. Washington DC gets three too.
+
+While there are 50 states in the US, most of these are “safely” Republican or Democrat. They vote the same way every time going back at least six elections. So the presidential election boils down to just a handful of “swing states” – the 10 or 11 states that have a recent history of selecting both Republicans and Democrats.
+
+This is why voters in places such as Ohio, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado and New Hampshire are subjected to a barrage of television advertising and campaign stops. It’s also why you have not seen Clinton and Trump holding rallies in Louisiana (safely Republican) or Washington (safely Democratic).
+
+Trump faces a much more difficult path to victory. He needs to win almost all of these swing states to become the next president, whereas if Clinton wins two or three, she wins the race.
+
+This is because Democrats start from a stronger position. There are 18 states plus DC that have voted for a Democrat for president in every election since 1992. That batch amounts to 242 electoral votes. There are only 13 states that have voted for a Republican in every election since 1992. Those states carry just 102 electoral votes.
+
+If Clinton simply wins all the states that have voted for her predecessors in the recent past, then adds Florida (which has 29 electoral votes), she is the next president. If she loses Florida but wins, say, Virginia and North Carolina, she will be the next president.
+
+Trump needs to hold on to all the historically Republican states, win states such as Georgia and Arizona – which are usually Republican but where he has struggled in the polls – and then win enough swing states to tip him over 270.
+
+Buckle in because now the real fun begins: polls close in eastern Kentucky and most of Indiana. (Parts of each state are on central time, so the polls there close at 7pm ET.)
+
+Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, is the governor of Indiana. In the past 50 years the state has voted Democrat only once – for Barack Obama in 2008.
+
+In some states we will know the winner almost immediately after the polls close. Most news outlets, including the Guardian, rely on the Associated Press to “call” races.
+
+AP is able to announce the winners so quickly because it deploys thousands of people on election night to collect results from states, counties and locales as they are announced. It also uses exit polls and voting history.
+
+Solidly Democratic or Republican states are likely to be called quickly. Swing states are likely to take longer.
+
+Election drinking: Donald Trump doesn’t drink. But Donald Trump doesn’t have to worry about the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. A nice way to toast – and mock, if you were minded to do so – the 70-year-old builder might be to mix up a “The Donald” cocktail as you settle in for the night. It’s got vodka, Goldschläger gold-leaf cinnamon schnapps and orange juice. But the most fun bit is the cotton candy on top. Doesn’t it look just like his hair?
+
+Election fuel: It could be a long night, or a short one. But at this stage we likely do not yet know, so our advice is to fuel yourself for a marathon, not a sprint. And you can feed yourself and honour Ohio’s prominent role in US elections by preparing a Cincinnati chili. It’s a more Mediterranean take on your traditional chili, brought to Cincinnati by Macedonians in the 1920s. If you’re drinking more than one of “The Donald” cocktails, you will want to line your stomach!
+
+Election soundtrack: Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. A perfect kick-off to election night, given that both candidates are incredibly unpopular with the American public. Trump likes the Rolling Stones and played this song at his rallies. The Rolling Stones do not like Donald Trump, and asked him to stop. He didn’t.
+
+Voting ends in three key swing states: Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire (where a minimal number of polling stations may stay open until 8pm ET).
+
+
+
+Florida’s 29 electoral college votes have proved crucial in the recent past. Al Gore can tell you that. He narrowly lost the state – some still believe he actually won – and the election to George W Bush, despite winning the national popular vote.
+
+Away from the top of the ticket, Florida senator and one-time Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio is up for re-election. He has been running a bit ahead of Democrat Patrick Murphy in the polls. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who resigned as chair of the Democratic National Committee in July after leaked emails showed the party favoring Clinton’s campaign, is expected to comfortably win re-election to Congress.
+
+Virginia was a reliably Republican state until Obama won there in 2008 and again in 2012. The state’s mix of less-educated, rural voters; wealthy suburbanites; federal government employees and military families; academics; jet-setters and so on make it difficult to read, but Clinton has been decisively ahead this year.
+
+New Hampshire has been won by a Democrat in five of the past six presidential elections. But the Granite State gave Trump his first big primary win, and recent polling here has shown a tight race.
+
+Other states closing at 7pm ET include South Carolina and Vermont – Bernie Sanders’ home state. Sanders won the Democratic primary in Vermont by an amazing 73 points. But now he’s with her.
+
+Election drinking: Supercall.com has a cocktail called “Hillary’s Dirty Little Secret”. It’s a vodka martini with hot sauce in it, a reference to an interview in April where Clinton said she always carried a bottle of hot sauce. You could quip to your friends that it’s a perfect choice, as the race is “beginning to heat up!”
+
+Polls close in West Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio. Expect the result from West Virginia very quickly – Trump should win easily.
+
+North Carolina and Ohio are swing states and will take longer. Ohio has been seen as a reliable bellwether state, voting for the presidential winner in every election since 1964. That run might be coming to an end, however, either because of the state’s changing demographics or because of the strangeness of the current contest, in terms of the unfavorability of both candidates.
+
+While its demographics are complicated – a mix of Rust Belt, big cities, Appalachia, farmland and more – the Ohio electorate has grown more white and less educated than the national mean. That trend appears to account in part for Trump’s strength in the Buckeye State this year.
+
+Election soundtrack: The Pretenders, Message of Love. Because Chrissie Hynde is was born in Akron, Ohio. You could also make a point about spreading a message of love. Or of someone pretending to spread a message of love. Not that we’re questioning, in any way at all, how much politicians love the voters.
+
+
+
+In 2012, the Associated Press called the Indiana result just before 8pm. Vigo County, which borders Illinois in west Indiana, is seen as the ultimate bellwether. It has voted for the winner of every presidential election in 30 of the past 32 elections – dating back to 1888. Keep an eye out for its result.
+
+Republicans have long dreamed of winning Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes, based on growing support among once flourishing manufacturing and mining sectors in the south-western and north-eastern corners of the state. But Clinton has been creaming Trump in polls in Philadelphia and its suburbs, which is where most of the people live, and she has been comfortably ahead in statewide polls for months.
+
+Pennsylvania will also be under scrutiny on election day because of Trump’s controversial claims that there has been voter fraud in Philadelphia in the past and his calls for “volunteer election monitors”.
+
+The results in non-swing states will start to come in thick and fast. Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey and Rhode Island all close at 8pm ET, and we can expect AP to call all these states pretty much immediately.
+
+Maine’s polls also close at 8pm. It is one of only two states – the other is Nebraska, where voting finishes at 9pm – that splits its electoral votes according to congressional district.
+
+The state as a whole is likely to vote Democrat, but Trump may steal an electoral vote in Maine’s second district, which is made up of more rural voters.
+
+Election fuel: There’s a whole “Chefs for Hillary” page on Pinterest, a tribute to Clinton’s attempts to win the foodie vote. One of the recipes is provided by John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign. It’s called Salsa di Noci and is basically nuts and pasta, but arranged into a large “H” shape.
+
+The polls in Georgia close at 7pm or 8pm, depending on location. In the 2012 election, Mitt Romney was declared the winner just before 8.30pm. A Democratic candidate hasn’t won in Georgia since proper southern boy Bill Clinton in 1992, but strong support for Hillary Clinton in Georgia counties with a high African American population, and in Atlanta, have made her a threat to Trump.
+
+If Clinton wins Georgia, Trump might as well concede. (Don’t hold your breath.)
+
+Election tunes: Marvin Gaye, Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler). The African American vote is in, and Trump gets a big 1%.
+
+Polls close in two traditional swing states: Wisconsin and Colorado, and in Arizona, which is usually firmly Republican but is swingy this year.
+
+
+
+An increasingly influential Hispanic bloc and Mormons who can’t stand Trump – not to mention a superior Democratic ground game – mean that Clinton has a decent chance of becoming the first Democrat to win Arizona since her husband in 1996.
+
+When the polls close in New York, at 9pm ET, they will have been open for 15 hours – the longest polling window of any state. Barring an almighty upset, Clinton will quickly be declared the winner.
+
+Wyoming, Louisiana, North and South Dakota, Kansas and Texas all close at 9pm too. The networks should swiftly call these for Trump … unless loose talk of Clinton taking Texas, which last went Democratic in the Watergate era, comes true? If it’s that kind of night, water the horses and go to town.
+
+Nebraska, which like Maine splits its electoral votes by congressional district, shuts its polls at 9pm ET. Barack Obama won Nebraska’s second district – Omaha – in 2008. Clinton could do the same this year, thanks to a well-financed get-out-the-vote effort spearheaded by Susan Buffett, daughter of Warren.
+
+Election fuel: New York cheesecake. Hillary Clinton was born in Chicago but was a senator from New York for eight years. Donald Trump was born in Queens, New York, before inheriting his father’s successful real estate business. In January, Trump claimed his popularity was such that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue [in New York City] and shoot somebody” without losing voters. Trump has been trailing Clinton by 20% in New York.
+
+Election soundtrack: Fleetwood Mac, Silver Springs. “I know I could’ve loved you, but you would not let me,” laments Arizona’s Stevie Nicks. Might Trump be thinking the same thing when the Grand Canyon State’s results come in?
+
+Given Clinton’s apparent strength in Pennsylvania, we may see the state called for her by 10pm (or, in a deeply troubling upset for her, Trump may win). The New Hampshire result should also come in around this time. They will offer one of the first concrete indications of how the night is going.
+
+Nevada and Iowa are the final swing states to close their polls. In the past two elections, Iowa was called quickly for Obama. Montana and Utah also close at 10pm; both are traditionally safe Republican states, but Trump’s unpopularity means independent Evan McMullin, who’s from Utah, has a strong chance of becoming the first non-Republican or Democrat to win electoral college votes since 1968.
+
+Utah has been called soon after the polls close in the recent past. If McMullin is declared the winner, it’s a good sign that the night is truly in uncharted territory, terra incognita, in the most exciting way. Former congressional staffer Evan McMullin: buckle up, America.
+
+More election drinking: Yuengling brewery – the oldest brewery in the US – is based in Pennsylvania. Its owner came out in support of Trump in October, a move which has seen some drinkers boycotting the beer. You could however source some craft ale from the Victory Brewing Company, also based in Pennsylvania. We might be getting an idea of who will be victorious around this time.
+
+Election soundtrack: Neon Trees, Your Surrender. It’s almost definitely not about conceding a presidential election, but if Trump fails to win Utah, Neon Trees’ home state, then he might want to think about surrendering to Clinton.
+
+Polls in California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington close at 11pm ET. These are all safe Democrat states that are unlikely to unexpectedly impact the outcome.
+
+Back in 2012, the Associated Press called the swing states of Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio – worth a combined 48 electoral votes – in the space of 30 minutes at around 11pm, then declared Obama’s re-election at 11.38pm.
+
+In 2008, networks announced Obama had won just after 11pm.
+
+We might know the outcome sooner this time. Or we might not know for a while.
+
+If Clinton’s lead in opinion polls translates to the actual polls, then we may see states called for her earlier, on the back of strong early voting results. If enough swing states are called quickly, we could find out the result before 11pm ET. Or, if Trump proves the polls wrong, the race could as quickly run to him.
+
+Separately, there are some individual states to look out for.
+
+Ohio is one. Some polling experts believe that if Trump doesn’t win there, it is effectively game over. Fivethirtyeight.com gave him less than a 1% chance of winning the presidency if he fails to take the Buckeye State.
+
+Likewise, if Trump loses North Carolina or Pennsylvania or Florida, it also becomes very difficult for him to win.
+
+And beyond that, if Clinton can win Georgia – remember, these are usually solidly Republican – it would suggest she is in for a blowout victory that could see the election called for her very early.
+
+In 2012, Virginia was only called for Obama after midnight and Florida was not called for four days. Clinton is polling well ahead of Trump in Virginia, and strong early voting results might see her announced the winner early.
+
+Election soundtrack: Queen Latifah, U-N-I-T-Y. We may see the first female president, following a campaign marked by sexism and inappropriate behaviour towards women. Queen Latifah called out the disrespectful treatment of women in this 1994 hit.
+
+Election fuel: Cuban sandwich. Florida’s signature dish is said to have originated in Cuba or in Key West, part of the Florida Keys archipelago. It’s got ham, swiss cheese, mustard and pickles in it, and might be a good way to soak up the booze.
+
+In the early hours, we would expect a victory speech and a concession speech –though Trump has spoken of a threat that the election could be rigged and refused to say that if he loses he will accept the result.
+
+If elected, Clinton would be the first woman to be elected US president. She has repeatedly spoken about breaking the “glass ceiling” in politics, and has chosen to hold her election night party at New York City’s Javits Center, which actually has a glass ceiling.
+
+If Trump is elected, he will be the first person with his own vodka line to be elected president, and only the fifth president to have never held elected office.
+
+The winner will have 73 days to set up a new government before they are sworn into office on 20 January 2017.
+
+But if you’re concerned about post-election withdrawal symptoms, don’t worry: the midterm elections, sometimes seen as a referendum on the president, will take place in November 2018. All 435 members of the House of Representatives will be up for re-election, along with a third of the Senate and more than half the governors.
+
+And then, in summer 2019, a whole new cast of hopefuls will announce their presidential campaigns, and the whole thing starts over again. Great!
+
+On theguardian.com, obviously. We’ve got reporters and videographers stationed around the country. We’re liveblogging all day and night.
+
+NBC’s coverage of the 2012 election night was the the most watched of all channels, with an average of 12.1m viewers. Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie and Chuck Todd will be co-hosting on Tuesday, and veteran Tom Brokaw will be involved as an analyst. NBC will be superimposing a map of the United States onto the Rockefeller Center ice rink.
+
+Fox News has Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier lined up to anchor its coverage of the night. They’ll have Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer on hand to dissect the results. Rove didn’t have such a good time of it in 2012, when he refused to accept that Ohio had voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Let’s see how he gets on this time.
+
+ABC will have George Stephanopoulos anchoring from New York City. Robin Roberts will be tracking Clinton, Amy Robach will be with Trump. Michael Strahan will be out in Times Square interviewing the men and women on the street and getting reaction as the votes come in.
+
+NPR will be manned by Robert Siegel, Audie Cornish, Rachel Martin, and Ari Shapiro until 2am ET. As well as Clinton v Trump, they’ll be following congressional and senate races around the country. NPR has also commissioned an artist to live-paint a mural of the electoral college map, filling in states as they are called. You’ll be able to watch that on Facebook.
+
+The BBC will have Andrew Neil and World News America host Katty Kay stationed in Times Square. North America editor Jon Sopel will be with Clinton and World News America Laura Trevelyan will be following Trump, and Jeremy Vine will be explaining the results as they come in.
+
+Sky News will also be based in Times Square. Jeremy Thompson will anchor Sky’s America Decides special on election night, Adam Boulton will be in Washington DC, and Kay Burley will be out and about talking to voters and campaigners. The news channel says it is sending “more people than ever” to cover the election.
+
+Katy Perry, Roar. Played at almost every Clinton rally over the past year. Perry is a big Clinton supporter.
+
+Lady Gaga, Hair. There aren’t very many songs devoted to hair. This is one that is. Gaga has endorsed Clinton.
+
+OMD, If You Leave. A lament to us losing Barack Obama as president. “Seven years went under the bridge, like time was standing still.” He’s served eight years, but you get the idea.
+
+Yoko Ono, Sisters O Sisters. A cry for gender equality and female empowerment. What better way to ring in the country’s first female president? If that happens.
+
+Ice T feat Jello Biafra, Shut Up, Be Happy. For the dread moment when Trump looks like he might win.
+
+America is now under martial law.
+
+All constitutional rights have been suspended.
+
+Do not attempt to contact loved ones, insurance agents or attorneys.
+
+Do not attempt to think or depression may occur.
+
+Curfew is at 7pm sharp after work.”
+
+Simon & Garfunkel, America. For that shining-eyed moment when Clinton is heading for victory, but how you wish it was Bernie.
+
+REM, I Believe. For that moment when the state of Georgia turns Democratic Blue.
+
+The Delfonics, Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time). Pennsylvania turns away from Clinton? How about a classic Philly soul walk-out tearjerker.
+
+Roy Ayers, We Live In Brooklyn Baby. Clinton campaign HQ needs a home-borough anthem. “Our time is now, we gonna make it baby...”
+
+The Donald: It comes with a thing of cotton candy on the top that looks like Trump’s hair. What more do you want? From Liquor.com:
+
+Pour the vodka and Goldschläger into an ice-filled Collins glass, and top with the orange juice. Garnish with an orange wheel and big puff of cotton candy.
+
+Hillary’s Dirty Little Secret: Cocktail website Supercall.com came up with this. It uses hot sauce, referencing an interview in April where Clinton said she carried hot sauce around with her.
+
+Put the ingredients in a shaker tin with ice. Shake it up for 12 seconds. Strain it into a coupe cocktail glass and garnish with a cornichon pickle.
+
+Potus Punch: Thank you to Omni Hotels for this one.
+
+It’s pretty easy to make: “muddle berries”, the recipe says, then add ice, add the remaining ingredients, stir it up and pour it over ice.
+
+There’s a whole “Chefs for Hillary page” on Pinterest. One of the dishes is by John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign.
+
+Salsa di Noci: Use a blender to grind up 2.5 cups of walnuts to a paste. Coat a sauté pan with olive oil and toast the nuts. When they’re golden brown, add half a stick of butter and 1 cup of chopped canned tomatoes. Add 1tsp of salt and .5tsp of pepper. Stir it up then add 1.5 cups of chicken stock. Simmer, then add 3tbsp of chopped fresh basil. Toss 1lb pasta with the sauce, and add .5 cup of parmesan cheese. To finish, arrange the pasta into a “H”. For Hillary.
+
+You can also find six of Trump’s favorite recipes here.
+
+What’s the mood where you are? Share your pictures and views with us.",REAL
+4524,"Orlando gunman who pledged loyalty to ISIS was ‘homegrown’ extremist radicalized online, Obama says","ORLANDO — President Obama said the gunman who opened fire in a nightclub here Sunday appeared to be motivated by extremist propaganda online, while saying that investigators delving into the attacker’s background have not found anything linking him with radical groups.
+
+Even as new details emerged from law enforcement officials about the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history — a massacre that left 49 people dead and dozens of others wounded — authorities said the widening investigation was still working to determine more about what motivated the attack.
+
+The rampage also reverberated on the presidential campaign trail, as the leading presidential candidates offered dueling speeches Monday that pivoted off the attack.
+
+Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, called for a ban on immigrants from any area of the world with a history of terrorist attacks against the United States, going beyond his previous calls to bar Muslims from traveling to the country. In her own remarks, Hillary Clinton, the expected Democratic nominee, said stronger gun control laws were needed to prevent suspected terrorists from having access to weapons.
+
+While law enforcement officials were still working to determine what motivated the gunman — 29-year-old Omar Mateen — the FBI said Monday that he had been placed on a terrorism watch list during a 10-month period in 2013 and 2014 after he was investigated for inflammatory comments he made to co-workers.
+
+During a three-hour hostage standoff with police after the shooting spree Sunday, Mateen referenced the Islamic State, and the militant group — also known as ISIS or ISIL — claimed Monday that Mateen was a “soldier” for its self-proclaimed caliphage. However, officials say that so far, no signs have emerged that he was guided by groups outside the country.
+
+“We see no clear evidence that he was directed externally,” Obama said during remarks in the Oval Office. “It does appear that at the last minute, he announced allegiance to ISIL. But there is no evidence so far that he was in fact directed by ISIL, and at this stage there’s no direct evidence that he was part of a larger plot.”
+
+Obama said the shooting appeared so far to be a case of “homegrown extremism.”
+
+The comments by Obama and other law enforcement officials Monday offered the sharpest look yet at what authorities believe may have motivated the gunman who attacked Pulse, a popular gay club in Orlando.
+
+“We’re working hard to understand the killer, and his motives, and his sources of inspiration,” FBI Director James B. Comey said Monday. “We’re highly confident that this killer was radicalized, and at least in some part through the Internet.”
+
+Even as this information emerged, police were still revealing details about the shooting and the hostage situation that followed, while relatives of victims were still awaiting word about whether their loved ones were among the wounded or dead.
+
+[Classmates say Orlando gunman was ‘cheering’ on 9/11]
+
+Comey said that during the three-hour standoff the gunman had with Orlando police officers, there were three different 911-related calls. The gunman called 911 about half an hour after opening fire and then hung up the phone, Comey said. Mateen then called a second time and spoke briefly to a dispatcher before hanging up again, and then the dispatcher called him back and they spoke briefly.
+
+“During the calls, he said he was doing this for the leader of ISIL, who he named and pledged loyalty to,” Comey said.
+
+However, Comey said there were no signs that Mateen was tied to any kind of network, and he added that it remained unclear exactly what extremist group this attacker supported.
+
+In addition to referencing the Islamic State, Mateen also mentioned the Boston Marathon bombers as well as a Florida man who had joined an al-Qaeda affiliate and carried out a suicide attack in Syria, leaving his specific sympathies unknown, Comey said.
+
+Law enforcement officials in Florida, meanwhile, offered a new accounting of the shootout. Orlando Police Chief John Mina said that police first encountered Mateen shortly after the initial gunfire at about 2 a.m., when an off-duty officer working at the club — Adam Gruler, a 15-year veteran of the force — exchanged shots with Mateen.
+
+Additional officers called to the scene soon joined in another gun battle, at which point Mateen retreated further into the building and, eventually, into a bathroom. The police then held back because there were no more gunshots, Mina said, and they tried to negotiate with Mateen to avoid any more bloodshed.
+
+Mateen was in a bathroom with four or five people, while another 15 or 20 were in another bathroom, Mina said. During these negotiations, Mateen was “cool and calm” and did not make many demands, Mina said.
+
+After about three hours, police said they decided to storm Pulse after the shooter referenced bomb belts or explosives. Mina said the police used explosives and then an armored Bearcat to break a hole in the club’s wall. Hostages poured out, and Mateen — armed with a pair of guns — came out as well.
+
+During the gun battle, Mateen was killed and one Orlando police officer — Michael Napolitano, a 14-year veteran of the force — was injured when a bullet struck his Kevlar helmet. In a statement Monday, police identified Napolitano and the other officers who fired shots at the nightclub. Following state protocol, all 11 of these officers have been relieved of duty while the state investigates their shootings.
+
+However, much still remains unclear, including whether any hostages might have been injured or killed by crossfire.
+
+In a news conference Monday, Mina said storming the building “was the right decision to make” because police thought other lives might be in danger.
+
+Authorities say they are continuing to explore whether other people may be connected to the case. The investigation into Mateen has expanded to look at other people, and it stretches from Florida to Kabul.
+
+Investigators also said Monday that they had found a third gun in Mateen’s car and were working to trace its origins after learning that the two weapons he had during the shooting — a handgun and an assault-rifle-type weapon — were purchased legally.
+
+There is now “an investigation of other persons,” A. Lee Bentley III, the U.S. attorney for much of Central Florida, said at a news conference Monday. Bentley said prosecutors have “no reason to believe that anyone connected to this crime is placing the public in imminent danger,” but he offered no other details.
+
+“We’ve been collecting a great amount of electronic and physical evidence,” Bentley said Monday. The FBI also said Monday that investigators have processed more than 100 leads so far.
+
+Authorities said Monday afternoon that they had identified relatives or next-of-kin for nearly all of the victims, making notifications for 48 of the 49 people killed. (On Sunday, police had included Mateen when saying 50 people were killed.) For many, the hours stretching from Sunday into Monday were filled with dread as they awaited word about whether their loved ones were among the wounded or dead.
+
+All the bodies were removed from the club by 11 p.m. Sunday, authorities said.
+
+[Floor plans show interior of club where 49 were killed]
+
+Orlando Regional Medical Center, where many shooting victims were taken, said Monday that the hospital was still treating 29 people, including five who were “in grave condition.” A number of victims were in critical condition or in shock, the hospital said. Hospital officials also said local blood banks had more than 600 units on hand due to the surge in people who donated blood after the shootings.
+
+As the investigation into Mateen moved into its second day, many questions remained unanswered — including what, specifically, might have motivated him. Bentley said investigators were serving search warrants, and the FBI asked anyone with information about the 29-year-old’s life to call 1-800-CALLFBI.
+
+In Orlando and beyond, the investigation was still trying to determine the steps that led up to the attack Sunday.
+
+Comey said the FBI was working to determine the role anti-gay bigotry may have played in Mateen’s choice of a target. The Islamic State has carried out a relentless campaign against gay people, releasing videos showing its members gruesomely executing people they said were homosexual.
+
+Mateen had been on the FBI’s radar twice in recent years. In 2013, agents opened an investigation that lasted 10 months after Mateen made comments to co-workers about terrorist groups and expressed a desire to martyr himself.
+
+Investigators interviewed him twice, but Mateen said he made the remarks in anger because he felt co-workers were teasing him for being Muslim, and the preliminary inquiry was closed in 2014, Comey said.
+
+Two months later, Mateen again came to the attention of federal agents looking into the Florida man who blew himself up in Syria, Comey said. Mateen and this man attended the same mosque, according to Comey. Again, the FBI interviewed Mateen, looked into his possible ties to the suicide bomber, determined that there were no strong ties and moved on.
+
+Even given Mateen’s mentions of the Islamic State, the level of possible connections between the gunman and the militant group were unclear.
+
+The Islamic State’s al-Bayan Radio described him Monday as “one of the soldiers” of its self-described caliphate, but it offered no further details on possible contact before the attack, said the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors statements by extremist factions.
+
+If it does appear that the Orlando gunman was radicalized from material available online, it would follow a pattern seen in earlier shooting rampages in San Bernardino, Calif., and Chattanooga, Tenn., last year.
+
+A U.S. official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence assessments, said that attacks inspired by the Islamic State, even when conducted without support from the group’s core operation, helped illustrate to followers that they remained a significant military force despite loss of territory in Iraq and Syria over the last year.
+
+“In a sense, inspired attacks and attacks conducted in their name globally” allows them to perpetuate a key perception: continued expansion, the official said. Such attacks show would-be supporters that “they’re very much still alive and potent.”
+
+Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter, speaking en route to Brussels, told reporters that the shooting should “further steel everyone’s resolve to defeat ISIL and its parent tumors in Iraq and Syria.”
+
+[There was another terrible case of gun violence over the weekend]
+
+As terrorism again surged to the forefront of the country’s political debate, Trump and Clinton shifted plans for events Monday to focus their remarks on national security.
+
+Clinton, speaking in Cleveland, warned that the threat posed by the Islamic State is “metastasizing” and vowed to make “targeting lone wolves a top priority” if elected.
+
+She also said that someone who has been watched by the FBI “shouldn’t be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked.” Clinton, echoing remarks Obama has made, also said the shooting was a reminder of the need for stronger gun control laws.
+
+“It’s essential that we stop terrorists from getting the tools they need to carry out attacks,” she said. “I believe weapons of war have no place on our streets.”
+
+Before his speech in New Hampshire, Trump made television appearances to reject calls for more gun control and repeatedly accuse Obama of being somehow sympathetic with radicalized Muslims.
+
+“We’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said.
+
+Orlando now joins the mournful list of terrorism-linked bloodshed — Brussels in March, Paris and San Bernardino last year, the Boston Marathon in 2013, London in 2005 and other sites — and is certain to strike deep into American debates over gun rights and how far authorities can go to track potential terrorism threats. And the shooting struck a popular gay club on its Latin night.
+
+From around the world, condolences and pledges of support poured in. Vigils and memorials were held from New Zealand to Europe. The Eiffel Tower will be lit in rainbow colors Monday evening.
+
+In Afghanistan, the country’s chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, said the Orlando attack “tells us that terrorism knows no religion, boundary and geography. Terrorism must be eliminated.”
+
+Officials in Afghanistan — Mateen was born in the United States, while his parents were born there — also opened investigations into any possible connections between the gunman and militant groups. Yet Mateen’s father insisted his son had no Islamist terrorism ties and showed no warning signs the day before the shooting.
+
+Mateen had legally purchased the two guns — which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said were an ­AR-15-type weapon and a 9mm semiautomatic pistol — within “the last few days,” according to Trevor Velinor of the ATF.
+
+A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation, said the FBI had found nothing in Mateen’s past that would have legally blocked him from purchasing a gun. The bureau’s previous inquiries, the official said, would have been insufficient to achieve that.
+
+Mateen purchased two guns from the St. Lucie Shooting Center, shop owner Ed Henson said at a news conference Monday.
+
+“An evil person came in here and legally purchased two firearms from us,” Henson said, adding that Mateen had multiple security licenses and passed a full background check before he was allowed to buy the guns.
+
+Henson said if Mateen hadn’t bought the guns at his shop, he would have been able to buy them somewhere else.
+
+“We happened to be the gun store he picked. It’s horrible,” said Henson, who spent two decades with the New York Police Department before retiring in 2002. “I’m sorry he picked my place. I wish he’d picked nowhere.”
+
+Mateen’s ex-wife, Sitora Yusifiy, said he beat her repeatedly during their brief marriage, and she called him unstable.
+
+Mateen’s father, however, called his son “very dignified.” In a video posted to Facebook shortly after midnight, Seddique Mateen, who lives in Florida, called the shooting “tragic” but said his son was “a good son and an educated son.”
+
+He said his son shouldn’t have carried out the massacre because “God himself will punish those involved in homosexuality.”
+
+“I don’t know what caused him to shoot last night,” said the father, who has hosted a U.S. -based television show on Afghan affairs and describes himself as an important figure in his homeland.
+
+“No radicalism, no,” the father told The Washington Post late Sunday from his home in Port St. Lucie, Fla. “He doesn’t have a beard even. . . . I don’t think religion or Islam had anything to do with this.”
+
+Berman reported from Washington. Emma Brown, Brian Murphy, Jenna Johnson, Missy Ryan, Adam Goldman and Jerry Markon in Washington; Katie Zezima, Hayley Tsukayama and Amanda Elder in Orlando; Abby Phillip in Cleveland; and Thomas Gibbons-Neff in Brussels contributed to this report. Also contributing: Greg Miller, Joby Warrick, Tim Craig, Sarah Larimer and Julie Tate.
+
+The history of the AR-15, the weapon that had a hand in the United States’ worst mass shooting
+
+Islamic State shows it can still inspire violence as it emphasizes attacks abroad
+
+This story will be updated throughout the day.",REAL
+5819,Biden and Trump Agree to Fight Pistol Duel--Final Arrangements Pending,"Thursday, 27 October 2016 Biden and Trump to Duel 
+Seeking to duplicate, if not surpass, the famous duel between Vice President Aaron Burr and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, and Vice President Joe Biden, agreed to fight a pistol duel. Although details of the duel have yet to be finalized, Amiko Aventurista, reports the duel will likely take place on the eve of the election. 
+Three independent sources confirmed negotiations over broadcast rights are extremely tense. Trump demands the duel be the inaugural show of his new venture, Trump TV. ""It was my idea. I was the one who said I could shot someone on Fifth Avenue and my supporters would be with me. Other than Hilary, Obama, Rubio, Cruz, Jeb Bush, and a ton of others, I can think of no one better to shot than hair plug Joe. I'm the greatest shooter ever. A real sniper."" 
+Biden insist MSNBC must be the broadcaster because its liberal and minority audience wants to see Trump with several gun shots. In a response to Trump, Biden said, ""There is no way I can miss. His hair glows bright orange. All I have to do is point toward the glow"". 
+Megan Kelly of Fox says Fox must host the show because she wants to see ""blood"" coming everywhere out of Trump just like he said blood was coming out of her. CNN's Wolf Blitzer decline to comment. Even ESPN is making a play for the event, pointing out it regularly shows non-traditional sporting events, such as bull riding, cross bow, and bowling. 
+Both sides agree Lin Manuel Mirada, producer of the hit Broadway show, Alexander Hamilton, should direct the event. Manuel Mirada said, ""I would be honored to produce the event. I know my smash Broadway hit, Hamilton, is only a show about a duel not a real duet but I think that experience qualifies me to produce a show about a real duel. After all, the only difference is the guns are real."" 
+The National Rifle Association (NRA) has agreed to fully pay for and sponsor the event. NRA President Wayne LaPierre release the following statement, ""Finally we have bi-partisan agreement. I should have thought of this first"". Make Amiko Aventurista's  ",FAKE
+9643,Russia Has Called the War Party's Bluff     :," Russia Has Called the War Party's Bluff
+A hot war is not going to break out after Nov. 8th - thanks to shrewd moves and preparation by Moscow
+By Pepe Escobar
+ "" RI "" - Cold War 2.0 has reached unprecedented hysterical levels. And yet a hot war is not about to break out – before or after the November 8 US presidential election.
+From the Clinton (cash) machine – supported by a neocon/neoliberalcon think tank/media complex – to the British establishment and its corporate media mouthpieces, the Anglo-American, self-appointed “leaders of the free world” are racking up demonization of Russia and “Putinism” to pure incandescence.
+And yet a hot war is not about to break out – before or after the November 8 US presidential election. So many layers of fear and loathing in fact veil no more than a bluff.
+Let’s start with the Russian naval task force in Syria, led by the officially designated “heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser” Admiral Kuznetsov, which will be stationed in the eastern Mediterranean at least until February 2017, supporting operations against all strands of Salafi-jihadism.
+The Admiral Kuznetsov is fully equipped with anti-ship, air defense, artillery and anti-submarine warfare systems – and can defend itself against a vast array of threats, unlike NATO vessels.
+Predictably, NATO is spinning with alarm that “all of the Northern Fleet”, along with the Baltic Fleet, is on the way to the Mediterranean. Wrong; it’s only part of the Northern Fleet, and the Baltic Fleet ships are not going anywhere. The heart of the matter is that when the capabilities of this Russian naval task force are matched with the S-300/S-400 missile systems already deployed in Syria, Russia is now de facto rivaling the firepower of the US Sixth Fleet.
+ To top it off, as this comprehensive military analysis makes clear, Russia has “basically made their own no-fly zone over Syria”; and a US no-fly zone, viscerally promoted by Hillary Clinton, “is now impossible to achieve.”
+That should be more than enough to put into perspective the impotence transmuted into outright anger exhibited by the Pentagon and its neocon/neoliberalcon vassals.
+Add to it the outright war between the Pentagon and the CIA in the Syrian war theatre, where the Pentagon backs the YPG Kurds, who are not necessarily in favor of regime change in Damascus, while the CIA backs further weaponizing of “moderate”, as in al-Qaeda-linked and/or infiltrated, “rebels”.
+Compounding the trademark Obama administration Three Stooges school of foreign policy, American threats have flown more liberally than Negan’s skull-crushing bloody baton in the new season of The Walking Dead.
+Pentagon head Ash Carter, a certified neocon, has threatened “consequences”, as in “potential” strikes against Syrian Arab Army (SAA) forces to “punish the regime” after the Pentagon itself broke the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire. President Obama took some time off weighing his options. And in the end, he backed off.
+So it will be up for the virtually elected – by the whole US establishment — Hillary Clinton to make the fateful decision. She won’t be able to go for a no-fly zone – because Russia is already doing it. And if she decides to “punish the regime”, Moscow already telegraphed, via Russia’s Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov, there will definitely be “consequences” for imposing a “shadow” hot war.
+Sun Tzu doesn’t do first-strike
+Washington, of course, reserves for itself a “first-strike” nuclear capability, which Hillary Clinton fully supports (Donald Trump does not, and for that he’s also demonized). If we allow the current hysteria to literally go nuclear, then we must consider the matter of the S-500 anti-missile system – which effectively seals Russia's air space; Moscow won’t admit it on the record because that would unleash a relentless arms race.
+A US intel source with close connections to the Masters of the Universe but at the same time opposed to Cold War 2.0 as “counter-productive”, adds the necessary nuance: “The United States has lost the arms race, indulging in trillions of dollars of worthless and endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now is no longer a global power as it cannot defend itself with its obsolete missiles, THAAD, Patriot and Aegis Land Based Ballistic Defense System, against Russian ICBMs, even as the Russians have sealed their airspace. The Russians may be as much as four generations ahead of the US.”
+Moreover, in the deep recesses of shadow war planning, the Pentagon knows, and the Russian Defense Ministry also knows, that in the event some
+Dr. Strangelove launched a nuclear preemptive strike against Russia, the Russian population would be protected by their defensive missile systems – as well as nuclear bomb shelters in major cities. Warnings on Russian television have not been idle; the population would know where to go in the – terrifying — event of nuclear war breaking out.
+Needless to add, the ghastly possibility of US nuclear first-strike turns all these WWII-style NATO war games in Eastern Europe into a pile of meaningless propaganda stunts.
+So how did Moscow plan for it all? According to the US intel source, “they took out almost all the military budget from their stated federal budget, lulling the West into thinking that Russia could not afford a massive military buildup and there was nothing to fear from Russia as they were finished as a world power.
+The [stated] military budget was next to nothing, so there was nothing to worry about as far as the CIA was concerned. If Putin showed publicly his gigantic military buildup, the West could have taken immediate remedial actions as they did in 2014 by crashing the oil price.”
+The bottom line then would reveal the Pentagon as totally unprepared for a hot war – even as it threatens and bluffs Russia now on a daily basis; “As Brzezinski has pointed out, if this is the case it means the US has ceased to be a global power. The US may continue to bluff, but those that ally with them will have nowhere to go if that bluff is called, as it is being now called in Syria.”
+The US intel source is adamant that “one of the greatest military buildups in history has taken place right under the nose of the Russian Central Bank head Elvira Nabiullina and the Russian Ministry of Finance while the CIA awaits what they think will be the inevitable Russia collapse.
+The CIA will be waiting forever and eternity for Russia to collapse. This MGB maneuver is sheer genius. And demonstrates that the CIA, which is so drowned by data inputs that they cannot connect the dots on anything, must be completely reorganized. In addition, the entire procurement system of the United States military must also be reorganized as it cannot ever keep up if new weapon programs as the F-35 take twenty years to develop and then are found obsolete before they even enter service. The Russians have a five-year development program for each new weapons system and they are far ahead of us in every key area.”
+If this analysis is correct, it goes against even the best and most precise Russian estimates, according to which military potential may be strong, asymmetrically, but still much inferior to US military might.
+Well-informed Western analysts know that Moscow never brags about military buildups – and has mastered to a fault the element of surprise. Much more than calling a bluff, it’s Moscow’s Sun Tzu tactics that are really rattling loudmouth Washington.",FAKE
+233,"Congressional leaders pushing debt limit plan, ahead of speaker vote","Congressional leaders and the Obama administration are getting closer to a potential deal on a plan to address looming debt limit and budget deadlines, Fox News has learned -- as House Speaker John Boehner tries to avert one last fiscal crisis before handing the reins over to his successor.
+
+Rep. Paul Ryan, the front-runner for Boehner's job in elections set for later this week, would be poised to inherit a plate of problems on the budget front unless the current leadership can resolve it.
+
+The U.S. government faces a Nov. 3 deadline to raise the federal borrowing limit, and a Dec. 11 deadline to pass a new budget.
+
+Fox News has learned that leaders, though, are nearing a two-year budget agreement that would also raise the debt ceiling. Tentatively, the plan would hike the debt ceiling through as far as the spring of 2017, after the presidential election. Plus, it would fund the government through at least next October.
+
+The matter is being negotiated at the highest levels among a cadre of only about 10 officials, Fox News is told.
+
+But multiple sources made clear this is not resolved yet -- and will need to be addressed at a series of congressional meetings set for Tuesday.
+
+If an agreement is reached, it's unclear whether Boehner would try to push it through under his leadership or push it to the next speaker.
+
+Without a vote to raise the debt ceiling, the U.S. government could be unable to pay all its bills, threatening benefit payments and agency operations and raising prospect of an unprecedented government default. At the same time, the routine raising of the debt ceiling -- this time, past an $18.1 trillion mark -- has outraged fiscal hawks worried that the government borrowing is unsustainable. Since President Obama took office, the national debt has increased nearly $8 trillion.
+
+While the debt ceiling has presented a recurring crisis on Capitol Hill, this time there was not even a roadmap for raising it, until now. Republicans have been demanding budget cuts as part of any deal, but House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and the White House insist on a ""clean"" measure without strings attached.
+
+Conservative groups have been putting pressure on allies in Congress not to give in.
+
+""If Congress doesn't use the power of the purse, we don't need a Congress and we just have an executive with no check,"" Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, told ""Fox News Sunday.""
+
+Needham said he thinks Ryan ""wants to use that leverage"" that comes with the debt ceiling deadline.
+
+Fox News is told Ryan is not part of the current negotiations.
+
+Secret-ballot GOP elections are set for Wednesday in the vote for speaker, followed by a full House vote Thursday. Rep. Ryan, R-Wis., appears to have the lion's share of support from all wings of the Republican conference.
+
+But if the budget and debt problems are not resolved, Ryan, the GOP's 2012 vice presidential nominee, could face immediate -- and perhaps competing -- tasks: passing must-do debt and spending bills likely to be opposed by a majority of Republicans, even while he attempts to unite a badly fractured House GOP.
+
+Conservative Republicans suggest Ryan could get leeway for how he navigates the immediate crises he inherits, including the debt ceiling, if it's not dealt with before he assumes the speakership.
+
+""If we get six months down the road and nothing's really changed, if we get eight months down the road and nothing's really changed, then I think it's, `Everybody needs to get a helmet' time,' "" said GOP Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada. ""There's a reason John Boehner decided to resign.""
+
+After announcing his surprise plans last month to leave Congress on Oct. 30, Boehner expressed a desire to ""clean the barn"" of messy must-pass legislation, rather than leave it for his successor. The debt limit was at the top of the list, given the impending deadline and the reluctance of most Republicans to pass an increase without accompanying spending cuts the White House is ruling out.
+
+Fox News' Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5776,"Radio Derb Transcript For October 21 Up: The Magic Bricks Of PS 199, Et Cetera", ,FAKE
+5920,Be Sure to Join Our Election Night Live Blog/Open Thread Tomorrow Evening,"by Yves Smith 
+This unprecedented election season is finally coming to a close. Join us for commentary and discussion as the results roll in. 
+Lambert will kick off the election night live blog at 8:30 PM tomorrow evening. With the presidency and the Senate majority in play, there’s a lot to watch. The presidential and vice presidential live blogs were lively, so we expect another evening of incisive and often humorous conversation. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+1140,Why House Democrats think Donald Trump can deliver them big gains,"There's a sense of growing optimism among Democrats that if Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket they might have a chance at what otherwise seems impossible: curtailing the GOP's stranglehold on the US House of Representatives.
+
+The fundamental landscape is deeply unfavorable to House Democrats. They're down 30 seats and behind in fundraising with district boundaries drawn in such a way that winning a national majority of votes won't deliver them a majority of seats. They need, fundamentally, something game-changing and weird to happen. And then, like magic, along comes Donald Trump, who happens to be weak in exactly the sort of Republican-leaning suburban districts they are hoping to peel away from the GOP.
+
+""[Trump] makes districts that would have been hard-core tossup districts"" into ones that lean Democratic, and gives Democrats ""a little bit of a push"" in Republican-leaning districts across the country, according to Kelly Ward, the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
+
+In a practical sense, the DCCC's pre-Trump vision was heavily focused on the long-term planning of what they call The Majority Project, a multi-cycle effort to simultaneously improve the DCCC's field and data infrastructure while understanding which districts are being made newly competitive by ongoing demographic change.
+
+""Data shows us that Democrats are moving into Republican districts and making them more Democratic over time, as we look between now and 2020,"" DCCC chair Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) told me just before Trump's Super Tuesday sweep. Post-sweep, Ward says, the Trump takeover ""accelerates this for us.""
+
+For a sense of exactly how lost and forlorn House Democrats were before Trump breathed new life into their hopes, it's useful to look beyond the DCCC to the behavior of Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen. Himself a former DCCC chair, he was widely regarded as a likely successor to Nancy Pelosi as the Democrats' leader in the House, since the top two Dems behind her in the party hierarchy, Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn, are both quite old themselves.
+
+But rather than hold on to a safe House seat and hope to sweep into the speakership, he chose to resign his seat in order to fight a tough contested primary for the Democratic nomination for an open Senate seat in Maryland — a clear indication that he saw no short-term path to significant gains in the House.
+
+And he's not alone. House Democrats face two serious headwinds in their quest for a majority that they are essentially powerless to cure.
+
+The first is that the map is simply very unfavorable to them. Back in 2012, Barack Obama won considerably more votes than Mitt Romney, but Romney actually carried more House districts. This is because Democrats, through a mix of partisan gerrymandering and natural geography, are more likely to be packed into lopsided districts. To win the House, they need a landslide, not just a win.
+
+The second is that House landslides, when they happen, almost always hurt the incumbent president's party.
+
+The basic dilemma for a House minority whose party controls the presidency is that either people are generally happy with the status quo, in which case the president is likely to be popular but voters are unlikely to vote out tons of House incumbents, or else people are unhappy with the status quo, in which case the voters are likely to punish both the president and his co-partisans in the House.
+
+Democrats' only real hope for 2016 is for something off-the-charts weird to happen in presidential politics. Something like, say, a vulgar real estate developer turned reality television host with scant record of involvement in the conservative movement erupting onto the scene with an under-developed policy agenda and a track-record of offensive statements and inflammatory rhetoric.
+
+It is, of course, possible that if Trump secured the Republican nomination, he will prove himself to be an exceptionally skilled candidate who mops the floor with Hillary Clinton in ways we can barely imagine today. It is also possible that unpredictable events — terrorist attacks, foreign wars, financial crises — will impinge on the election in ways that badly damage Clinton's hope. In either of those cases, House Democrats will be dragged down too.
+
+But based on what we know of Trump so far, he seems likely to be a weak general election nominee who is weak specifically in areas that House Democrats see as growth possibilities.
+
+Democrats' top targets are a series of suburban districts where Republican incumbents have retired, somewhat fatigued with the incessant inter-caucus warfare among House Republicans. These kind of districts — places like PA-8, MN-2, NV-3, NY-19 — are places whose Republican voters are disproportionately well-educated and supporting non-Trump candidates. Those are the voters most likely to be persuaded to swing to Clinton or just stay home as a reaction to GOP disunity in the face of Trumpism.
+
+Meanwhile, one crucial element of Democrats' larger focus has been on identifying areas where the Latino population is growing rapidly in ways that are likely to make them more competitive over the medium term.
+
+But a big challenge Democrats traditionally face is that Hispanics punch below their weight in terms of actual voter turnout. Ward believes that ""turnout momentum that we could see among Hispanic voters because of Donald Trump could accelerate that competition."" In general, she notes that Democrats win when turnout is high, and the media's fascination with Trump is creating ""heightened electoral awareness"" in a way that should boost Democrats.
+
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has, according to press reports, already privately told colleagues that his caucus will drop Trump ""like a hot rock"" if his presence at the top of the ticket seems to be hurting Senate candidates in New Hampshire, Florida, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.
+
+Dropping your party's presidential candidate is a tough trick to pull off for a Senate candidate, and it's not clear that it's at all possible in a House race.
+
+Most people, after all, simply don't pay that much attention to their local member of Congress. Meanwhile, national media is overwhelmingly focused on the presidential race. Ward argues, plausibly, that the celebrity presence of Trump in the race should only exacerbate that tendency for presidential politics to crowd out everything else.
+
+""Donald Trump will define this election as we have seen from day one,"" Ward says, ""he will dominate the attention and he will create the narrative of the election.""",REAL
+8044,Look What Students FORCED To Do After Muslims FLOOD Germany,"You are here: Home / US / Look What Students FORCED To Do After Muslims FLOOD Germany Look What Students FORCED To Do After Muslims FLOOD Germany October 27, 2016 Pinterest 
+Is this coming to the United States? 
+Children in school in Germany are being taught to chant Islamic prayers, including the phrase “Allah Akbar,” which is used before Radical Islamists commit terrorist attacks. 
+The father of a girl at a school in Garmisch-Partekirchen, Germany, discovered his daughter was forced to learn the Islamic prayer when he found a handout she was given, The Express is reporting . He said his daughter was “forced” by teachers to memorize the Islamic chants and forwarded the handout to a news organization in Australia. 
+The handout read: “Oh Allah, how perfect you are and praise be to you. Blessed is your name, and exalted is your majesty. There is no God but you.” 
+It had been given to the girl during a lesson in “ethics” at the Bavarian school. 
+Headteacher Gisela Herl did not confirm the incident when questioned, but said the school would issue a written statement detailing its position in the coming week. 
+The incident comes just weeks after parents complained to German newspaper Hessian Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA) that their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” to accommodate the “diverse cultures” of other pupils. 
+The Sara Nussbaum House daycare centre in Kassel refused to put up a Christmas tree, tell Christmas stories or celebrate Christmas in general because it said only a minority of pupils were Christian. 
+A spokesman for Kassel explained: “There will be no Christmas celebrations, in the strictest sense. Because the majority of children at this kindergarten are not Christian the festival will not be celebrated in the way that it is at other schools.” 
+Migrants now outnumber native children at many schools in Germany as the country has been inundated with migrants in recent years. 
+More than one million migrants are estimated to have arrived in Germany during the last year alone. 
+The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees estimates that another 200,000 people will apply for asylum in 2017.",FAKE
+455,The unemployment rate is now lower than it was at any time during Reagan's presidency,"As of this month, the unemployment rate is now lower than it was at any point during Ronald Reagan's administration:
+
+That said, the labor force participation rate has fallen since Reagan's day. That's mostly about population aging — there are a lot more retired people now than there used to be — and a little bit about more people being in college, but that doesn't fully explain it. The labor force participation rate of ""prime-aged"" men between the ages of 25 and 55 has been steadily declining for decades, and in the past 10 years the participation rate for prime-aged women has fallen slightly as well.",REAL
+637,Elizabeth Warren declares herself ready to be Hillary Clinton's running mate,"Senator Elizabeth Warren has declared herself ready to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the US presidential election.
+
+The Massachusetts senator – popular among the progressive wing of the Democratic party – made the declaration shortly after endorsing Clinton, calling her “a fighter with guts” who would keep Donald Trump out the White House.
+
+In an interview on MSNBC, Warren was asked by Rachel Maddow: “If you were asked to be Secretary Clinton’s running mate, do you believe you could do it?”
+
+
+
+In another interview with the Boston Globe on Thursday, Warren endorsed Clinton as the party’s presidential nominee, saying: “I’m ready to jump in this fight and make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States and be sure that Donald Trump gets nowhere near the White House.”
+
+According to the Globe she also praised Clinton’s primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, saying that he had run an “incredible campaign”.
+
+
+
+Speaking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Thursday evening, Warren said the Sanders campaign had been “powerfully important”.
+
+“He ran a campaign from the heart, and he ran a campaign where he took these issues and really thrust them into the spotlight – issues that are near and dear to my heart – and he brought millions of people into the democratic process,” she said.
+
+
+
+But, Warren said, “Hillary Clinton won. And she won because she’s a fighter, she’s out there, she’s tough. And I think this is what we need.”
+
+Warren’s endorsement came within hours of President Barack Obama formally giving his endorsement to Clinton’s candidacy. “I’m with her,” Obama said, in a video recorded on Tuesday. “I don’t think there has ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”
+
+Vice-President Joe Biden also appeared to give his endorsement on Thursday, referring in a speech to “… whoever the next president is – and God willing it will be Hillary Clinton”.
+
+
+
+Warren, a favourite of the progressive left who taught constitutional law at Harvard, is seen as a possible running mate who could help entice back a disaffected left that has been excited by Sanders but ambivalent about Clinton.
+
+
+
+Warren has been especially fierce recently in her criticism of Donald Trump, attacking the presumptive Republican nominee in a searing string of speeches, setting herself up for a prominent and pugilistic role in the presidential election whether she is on the ticket or not.
+
+
+
+Earlier on Thursday, at a speech to the American Constitution Society in Washington DC, Warren hit out at Trump as “just a businessman who inherited a fortune and kept it rolling along by cheating people”.
+
+She described him as “a loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud who … serves no one but himself”, and said his attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over the Trump University suit, was “exactly what you would expect from somebody who is a thin-skinned racist bully”.",REAL
+4426,Elizabeth Warren: Why the media won’t take no for an answer,"Has it come to this? We’re now begging Elizabeth Warren to run for president.
+
+Are journalists so determined to slow down the Hillary coronation that they will badger and beseech the freshman senator until she runs just to stop the media torture?
+
+Folks, this is getting embarrassing.
+
+How many times does Warren have to say she is not pursuing the presidency before we take her at her word? How many different ways does she have to word her denials?
+
+Sure, a woman-on-woman contest for the Democratic nomination would be fascinating to cover in a country that has had 44 male presidents. But read my lips: Not. Going. To. Happen.
+
+When Warren makes Shermanesque disavowals in dozens of interviews, why does each journalist think that this time there will be a different result?
+
+This has to transcend the desire for a horse race. Some pundits’ hearts simply beat faster when the Massachusetts Democrat talks about taking on Wall Street and battling special interests. The prospect of her launching a liberal crusade in 2016 excites them in ways that Hillary’s cautious, establishment-oriented approach does not — even more so in the wake of the email furor.
+
+Take the Boston Globe, whose editorial page has openly urged its home-state gal to take the plunge:
+
+“Democrats would be making a big mistake if they let Hillary Clinton coast to the presidential nomination without real opposition, and, as a national leader, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren can make sure that doesn’t happen. While Warren has repeatedly vowed that she won’t run for president herself, she ought to reconsider…
+
+“A presidential campaign would test Warren as never before. Her views on foreign policy are not fully formed. And on many other important issues — climate change, gun control, civil rights — Warren could struggle to articulate clear differences between herself and Clinton. That’s a risk she should be willing to take.”
+
+Which brings us to the “Today” show. Warren has been making the rounds to promote the paperback edition of her book, and swatting away the inevitable question. Savannah Guthrie would not give up.
+
+She began: “You didn’t think you’d get away with this interview without my asking you point-blank: Are you going to run for president?”
+
+“No,” Warren said. “I’m not running and I’m not going to run.”
+
+The senator said she had a great job and wants to fight for such issues as student loans, medical research and the minimum wage. But Guthrie was not to be deterred.
+
+“Let me make sure that we underscore this and maybe bold it and put it in all caps…It has seemed you were hedging a little bit in the past. I don’t hear you hedging now. Are you saying unequivocally, I am not running for president in 2016?”
+
+Warren started laughing. “I’m not running. I’m not running,” she said.
+
+Guthrie tried another angle: Warren was the “perfect person” to push these middle-class issues, but her supporters are “afraid Hillary Clinton won’t give voice to these issues that you care about.”
+
+Warren wouldn’t take the bait and didn’t mention Hillary in her answer. So Savannah tried again: Is Hillary “the right messenger”?
+
+“I think we need to give her a chance to decide if she’s going to run,” said Warren, who obviously knows Hillary is running.
+
+That must have been it, right? Uh uh.
+
+“Possibly I’m beating a dead horse here,” Guthrie said, admitting the obvious, “but did you ever even entertain, consider the possibility, of running for president?”
+
+Guthrie was doing her job, trying to prod Warren into uttering a newsworthy sound bite rather than just repeating her talking points and plugging her book.
+
+As in romance, Warren is more desirable for being unobtainable. Mitt Romney went through the same thing, with the press badgering him about running a third time, until he said he might, whereupon the same press ripped him for being a bad candidate. And many forget that Warren had a rocky campaign when she won her Senate seat.
+
+Elizabeth Warren’s dogged denials on “Today” should end this question once and for all. But journalists, who are in denial, will keep on asking.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+5331,DNC Renews Lawsuit Against RNC Over Voter Intimidation (VIDEO),"DNC Renews Lawsuit Against RNC Over Voter Intimidation (VIDEO) By Lisa Bonanno on October 29, 2016 
+According to a document filed in federal court this past Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee is taking Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee to task over their plans to “monitor” the polls. 
+The filing says that the RNC is violating a consent decree by: “… Supporting and enabling the efforts of the Republican candidate for President, Donald J. Trump, as well as his campaign and advisors, to intimidate and discourage minority voters from voting in the 2016 Presidential Election. Trump has falsely and repeatedly told his supporters that the November 8 election will be ‘rigged’ based upon fabricated claims of voter fraud in ‘certain areas’ or ‘certain sections’ of key states. Unsurprisingly, those ‘certain areas’ are exclusively communities in which large minority voting populations reside.” 
+The document goes on to name some of the specific quotes and directives that Donald Trump has given supporters. It also mentions that: “Following the third presidential debate, Trump’s campaign manager told a reporter that the campaign was working to combat purported voter fraud by ‘actively working with the national committee, the official party, and campaign lawyers to monitor precincts around the country.'” 
+This shows that the RNC is involved in this effort, which has already begun . Trump ally Roger Stone organized “Vote Protectors,” who are instructed to conduct “exit polls.” Initially, the volunteers were asked to upload video of voters, create ID badges and wear red shirts at specific polling places. After journalistic inquiry , Stone said he would change his tactics. He simply created a new website, but that’s another story. 
+The Democratic National Committee is going after Trump and the RNC for violation of a consent decree signed in 1982. At that time, the RNC was involved in voter suppression in targeted areas known to vote predominantly Democrat. They hired off-duty sheriffs and police officers to go to polling places in those areas displaying a sign stating “This area is being patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force.” There were other activities, such as the challenge of individual voter registrations in certain communities. 
+The consent decree forcing the RNC to cease its 1982 “ballot security” activities resulted from a successful DNC suit. The decree expires next year. In the current suit, the DNC seeks to renew it for another eight years. 
+34 years later, we have an old tactic re-branded by the same party to do the same thing: intimidate minority voters. The DNC opens fire against RNC voter intimidation tactics 
+Featured Image via screenshot from YouTube video Connect with me",FAKE
+9313,Press TV: Duff on UN Condemnations of “Moderate Terrorists”,"By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 31, 2016 
+The UN’s special envoy for Syria has condemned militants’ deadly rocket attacks on residential areas of western Aleppo. 
+Staffan de Mistura said, in a statement, the U-N has credible reports civilians have been killed in the attacks. De Misutra blamed the militants for the attacks, calling them relentless and indiscriminate. His reaction came after at least seven civilians, including three children died in Aleppo as a result of the shelling. 
+Syrian media say several were also wounded amid relentless shelling by terrorists on civilian targets in Western Aleppo. Foreign-backed terrorists have stepped up attacks across Aleppo, bringing the total number of civilians killed in the past two days to over 40. The Syrian observatory for Human Rights confirmed 14 children are among the dead and another 250 civilians have been wounded in the terrorist shelling. Fighting has stepped up in Aleppo, with around 15 hundred terrorists massing around the western edges of the flashpoint city. Government forces and allied fighters have successfully managed to foil any advance by the terrorists. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 31, 2016, With 158 Reads Filed under World . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+6270,Supreme Court Rules Priests DO NOT Have to Report Child Abuse,"In a highly controversial decision, the Louisiana Supreme Court has ruled that Catholic priests are not “mandatory reporters” of child abuse they are made privy to as a result of administering sacramental confessions. 
+According to Patheos , the ruling references article 609 A(1) of the Louisiana Children’s Code: 
+With respect to mandatory reporters: Notwithstanding any claim of privileged communication, any mandatory reporter who has cause to believe that a child’s physical or mental health or welfare is endangered as a result of abuse or neglect or that abuse or neglect was a contributing factor in a child’s death shall report in accordance with Article 610. 
+The Oct. 28 ruling states in part: 
+… any communication made to a priest privately in the sacrament of confession for the purpose of confession, repentance, and absolution is a confidential communication under La. Code Evid. 511, and the priest is exempt from mandatory reporter status in such circumstances by operation of La. Child. Code art. 603, because “under the … tenets of the [Roman Catholic] church” he has an inviolable “duty to keep such communications confidential.” 
+The case which originally brought this issue before the court was that of a young woman who told a Baton Rouge-area Catholic priest that a longtime parishioner had sexually assaulted her when she was 14-years-old. The priest in turn did not report the abuse. 
+Tell us what you think of this controversial ruling in the comments section.",FAKE
+9073,All Brexit arguments settled by 0.5 per cent third-quarter growth,"All Brexit arguments settled by 0.5 per cent third-quarter growth 28-10-16 
+ALL debates about the negative impact of Brexit have been settled for good by Britain’s 0.5 per cent third-quarter growth. 
+Leading Remain campaigners, including former chancellor George Osborne, are preparing public apologies and the nation’s 16 million Remain voters are expected to follow suit. 
+Joanna Kramer of Bristol said: “It’s not easy to admit you’re wrong but I don’t see I have any choice. 
+“Britain is thriving with only a 0.2 per cent decline on expected growth, national pride has exploded into a proud display of healthy scepticism towards supposed child refugees, and I was a fool. 
+“How could I have been so blind not to see that glory would be upon us this soon, if only we had the courage to take back control? 
+“I’m sorry, everyone. I’m sorry I was a traitor.” 
+Brexit voter Stephen Malley said: “What am I going to do for conversation now?” 
+Share:",FAKE
+4536,Fact-checking Barack Obama's 2016 State of the Union address,"Editor's note: We also annotated the State of the Union on Medium. Follow us on Medium to see our commetary.
+
+President Barack Obama went after his doubters in his final State of the Union address, dismissing their warnings about the country’s economy and military preparedness under his watch as ""political hot air.""
+
+""Let me tell you something: The United States of America is the most powerful nation on earth. Period. It's not even close. It's not even close,""
+
+Yet even as he defended his seven years as commander in chief, Obama acknowledged he didn’t deliver on his to bring a more civil tone to a sharply divided Capitol Hill.
+
+""It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency  —  that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better,"" Obama said. ""There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.""
+
+PolitiFact is fact-checking several statements from Obama’s speech, as well as the Republican response from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
+
+A year ago, Obama used the same setting to claim the United States has seen ""our deficits cut by two-thirds"" during his tenure. We rated that claim .
+
+During his 2016 State of the Union address, Obama raised the bar, saying, ""We’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters.""
+
+When we checked Obama’s assertion a year ago, he compared his first budget year in office, 2009, with 2014, using the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP. Economists consider this a valid way to measure the size of the deficit. In fact, for most purposes, it’s the best way, since it factors in the economy’s change over time.
+
+According to this data, the deficit as a percentage of GDP has fallen by 76 percent -- almost exactly what Obama said.
+
+If you use dollars rather than percentage of GDP, the decline is a bit smaller but still pretty close -- 70 percent.
+
+That said, experts have told us that while Obama's math may be correct, it's missing some important caveats. It's important to note that the deficit swelled in 2009 partly because of the massive stimulus program to jumpstart the cratering economy. Also, experts have said the more important question is whether Obama has put the government on a path that will keep deficits stable.
+
+""And the answer is no,"" said Princeton University economics professor Harvey Rosen, because entitlement programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, have not had substantial reform.
+
+There’s no way Obama’s final State of the Union wouldn’t mention his most significant legislation. In spite of its controversy, Obama said the Affordable Care Act has led to nearly 18 million more people gaining health insurance and has helped to slow health care cost inflation. He added that the law didn’t destroy the job market, despite pessimistic predictions from critics.
+
+""Our businesses have created jobs every single month since it became law,"" he said.
+
+Because Obama referred specifically to ""our businesses,"" we looked at private-sector employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics starting in March 2010, when Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. Of the 70 months since, Obama is correct that every single one has seen positive job growth.
+
+There’s room for argument over what the growth would have looked like absent the health care law, but Obama’s statistic is on target.
+
+Obama cited education as an area of bipartisan agreement, but he brought up a shaky statistic in the process.
+
+""We agree that real opportunity requires every American to get the education and training they need to land a good-paying job,"" he said. ""The bipartisan reform of No Child Left Behind was an important start, and together, we’ve increased early childhood education, lifted high school graduation rates to new highs, (and) boosted graduates in fields like engineering.""
+
+At first glance, he appears to be correct about high school graduation rates. But there's an important caveat. So we rate the claim .
+
+In December, the that the rate had reached 82.3 percent, and the department billed it as a ""new record high.""
+
+However, the department acknowledged it was the ""highest level since states adopted a new uniform way of calculating graduation rates five years ago.""
+
+It's a key distinction because high school graduation rates can be a slippery topic and difficult to track. Different states and different school districts have used different measures over the years. For example, some states included private school students who received public funding.
+
+The last time the rates were close to being this high was for the class that graduated in 1970, when the Education Department pegged the rate at 78.7 percent.
+
+Yet because the current method for calculating rates is only five years old, it's not clear that the 1970 rate, or even the subsequent ones, are comparable to current rates.
+
+Obama defended American might in the face of attacks from critics who say the United States has become a weak player on the national stage.
+
+""We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined,"" Obama said.
+
+We found Obama’s claim is in the ballpark. So it rates Mostly True.
+
+One set of international military spending figures comes from the   (SIPRI), which maintains an online database of military expenditures since 1988 for more than 170 countries. By their calculation, the United States spends more than the next seven countries combined.
+
+In 2014, the most recent year available, the United States led the world in military spending at $610 billion, marking 34 percent of the world total,  . U.S. expenditures were nearly three times higher than China, the second-highest nation with an estimated $216 billion in military spending. Russia was in third place at $84.5 billion.
+
+But counting together military spending from the eight countries after the United States comes out to $646.4 billion, surpassing the United States’ $610. Omitting No. 9 on the list, Japan, the calculation comes out to about $601 billion.
+
+, put together by the fiscal policy-focused Peter G. Peterson Foundation, shows the United States’ spending in stark contrast to the next seven highest spenders:
+
+Another data set matches Obama’s claim exactly. The United States does spend more than eight countries combined according to the   (IISS), a London-based think tank that also tracks military spending. The United States spent $581 billion on the military in 2014, according to IISS, while the eight next-highest spenders combined spent about $531.9 billion.
+
+Calculating military expenditures for worldwide comparisons is inherently challenging, in part because there is no common definition of what constitutes military spending. Further, a country’s expenditures does not necessarily correlate perfectly with its military capabilities.
+
+In the Republican response proceeding Obama’s speech, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley praised Obama’s speech-giving but criticized his ability to deliver on the goods.
+
+""The president's record has often fallen far short of his soaring words,"" Haley said. ""As he enters his final year in office, many Americans are still feeling the squeeze of an economy too weak to raise income levels.""
+
+Six years into the economic recovery, are income levels really still in the doldrums?
+
+For the most part, yes. Haley’s statement rates
+
+Haley is basically correct if you look at Census Bureau data for median household income, adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted, median household income has fallen from $57,357 in 2009 to $53,657 in 2014, the most recent full year available.
+
+That’s a decline of 6.4 percent over a five-year period once inflation is taken into account. Obama himself seemed to acknowledge this trend when he spoke about ""more and more wealth and income"" concentrated at the top and ""squeezed workers.""
+
+Median income is lower now compared to 2009. It is, however, slightly up from its low point in 2012.
+
+Haley’s claim is generally accurate but somewhat depends on your time frame and what you would consider a rise in income levels.
+
+Obama repeated his longstanding request to Congress that they work with him to close the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama campaigned on this pledge, and we’ve been on our Obameter.
+
+During the State of the Union, Obama spoke of American leadership as encompassing ""a wise application of military power and rallying the world behind causes that are right.""
+
+""That is why I will keep working to shut down the prison at Guantanamo: It’s expensive, it’s unnecessary, and it only serves as a recruitment brochure for our enemies,"" he said.
+
+Because Obama is still asking for this at the end of his presidency, we’ve rated his campaign pledge as .
+
+As for Obama's statement that Guantanamo ""only serves as a recruitment brochure"" for terrorists, this doesn't square with reporting by PunditFact, which found that the facility has never really been a key component of ISIS or al-Qaida propoganda. More often, they focus on airstrikes and the American military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
+
+Obama also seemed to be responding to Republican attacks that he didn’t take seriously enough the fight against Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL:
+
+""As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story ISIL wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit.""
+
+We explored this claim in a story without rating it on our Truth-O-Meter. We found general agreement among experts that ISIS aspires to become an existential threat to the United States. But that’s not the same thing as actually being one.
+
+Obama presented a range of statistics designed to show his economic record in a positive light during his 2016 State of the Union address. He kicked it off with this assertion: ""The United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world.""
+
+We should note up front that many of the experts we checked with considered Obama’s claim to be vague and difficult to prove. ""This is the type of braggadocio statement that is hard to interpret in a rigorous way,"" said Barry Bosworth, an economist at the Brookings Institution.
+
+However, many of the same experts agreed that if you had to choose one country for the title of ""strongest, most durable economy in the world,"" it would be the United States.
+
+We turned to projections for GDP growth over the next two years released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of economically advanced countries. The group looked at 43 countries, ranging from large, advanced economies to smaller, advanced economies to large, emerging economies.
+
+The United States ranked almost exactly in the middle of the OECD’s list -- No. 21. Experts told us, however, that a middling ranking on this list doesn’t necessarily mean the United States’ economic outlook is weak. (The full chart is at the end of this article, ranked in descending order by projected GDP growth in 2016).
+
+For starters, many of the countries with higher projected growth rates have significantly smaller economies, making a comparison with the United States apples-to-oranges. These countries include Ireland, Iceland, the Slovak Republic, Poland, Israel, Latvia, Luxembourg, Lithuania and Estonia.
+
+In addition, a few countries have much higher projected growth rates, but they are generally considered emerging economies, making for a different but equally questionable type of apples-to-oranges comparison. These include the top three countries on the projected-growth list: India, China and Indonesia.
+
+The most direct comparisons to the United States are probably the other six members of the elite Group of 7 economies — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan. And all of them rank below the United States when measured by projected growth for 2016 and 2017.
+
+As for employment, the United States scores well among its closest competitors. Hoddenbagh pointed to data showing only one of the Group of 7 with a lower unemployment rate than the United States’ current 5 percent. Japan’s unemployment rate is 3.3 percent.
+
+We rated the claim Mostly True.
+
+This story is updated as new fact-checks are published.",REAL
+9869,Why hydrogen peroxide should be in every home,"Why hydrogen peroxide should be in every home 
+Sunday, October 30, 2016 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer (NaturalNews) Inexpensive, nontoxic, versatile and potent: Hydrogen peroxide is a wonder product that belongs in every home.Hydrogen peroxide is widely known as a disinfectant for minor cuts and scrapes, but many people don't understand that it works simply by oxidizing microbes to death. Hydrogen peroxide is simply water with an extra oxygen atom attached; in this unstable form, the oxygen breaks off from the water and forms a free radical solution that is highly reactive. But once it has reacted, the only byproducts are non-reactive oxygen and water. This is why, when used properly, hydrogen peroxide is so safe.Hydrogen peroxide is so safe and effective that our own immune systems actually generate it as the first line of defense against microbes as diverse as bacteria, viruses, yeast and parasites. In this context, it also appears to act as an anti-inflammatory. Natural remedies So how can you make hydrogen peroxide work for you? Unsurprisingly, many of this product's greatest uses are as natural cures or for some other health-promoting function. For example, a nasal spray made from one tablespoon of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide in a cup of non-chlorinated water can be an effective treatment for sinus infections. Toothaches caused by minor infection can be treated with a hydrogen peroxide mouthwash; the same mouthwash can also remove bad breath.If you think you're coming down with a cold, stave it off by placing a few drops of hydrogen peroxide in your ears each morning.Hydrogen peroxide is also a potent anti-fungal. A 50–50 mix of hydrogen peroxide and water, sprayed on the feet every night and allowed to dry, is a good way to get rid of athlete's foot and other fungal infections. A similar (but much more diluted) cure can be used on plants suffering from fungus; in this case, dissolve half a cup of hydrogen peroxide in a gallon of water and spray on the affected plant. Replace your cosmetics! You can also get lots of use from hydrogen peroxide around the home. Mixed with baking soda, it makes a great toothpaste. It can also be used to protect water that you expect to be standing for a while, such as that in a humidifier or steamer – a pint of hydrogen peroxide mixed in will prevent microbial growth. Similarly, you can use hydrogen peroxide as a toilet bowl cleaner; let it sit for 20 minutes and then scrub.When properly diluted, hydrogen peroxide can detox your skin by stripping away harmful environmental toxins. Just mix 2 quarts of hydrogen peroxide into a full bathtub and soak for half an hour or more.Other cosmetic uses of hydrogen peroxide include cleaning your contact lenses – it denatures proteins that build up on the lenses – or helping to remove ear wax buildup. A few drops in the ears, followed by a few drops of olive oil, will cause earwax to break up and drain out.Hydrogen peroxide can also be used as a safer, gentler alternative to bleach for lightening your hair. Household uses Hydrogen peroxide isn't just for your body; it can also be for your dog's! Hydrogen peroxide can induce rapid vomiting in dogs that have swallowed dangerous objects. Vomiting should only be induced upon a vet's recommendation, however.Finally, hydrogen peroxide can be great for your clothing. Use it instead of bleach to whiten your laundry. More carefully applied, it can take out organic stains by breaking apart the proteins causing the discoloration. This is particularly effective with blood.Use caution when applying hydrogen peroxide directly to clothing, as it may bleach or discolor some fabrics. But if you have a fresh, organic stain, you should be fine if you pour on just a small amount of hydrogen peroxide, wait a few minutes (it should foam), and then rinse it off with cold water and soap. Sources for this article include:",FAKE
+1094,"Hillary will never survive the Trump onslaught: It’s not fair, but it makes her a weak nominee","Among these, let me nominate one more: listening to Hillary partisans explain to those of us who support Bernie Sanders just how naive we are. Only Hillary, we are told, has a real shot at winning in November. She’s the only one with a realistic grasp of how Washington works, whose moderate (and modest) policy aims might, realistically, be enacted. It often sounds as if Clinton’s central pitch to voters isn’t that she has a moral vision for the country, but that she owns the franchise on realism.
+
+Bernie, meanwhile, is just a sweet-shouting rube whose quarter-century as a congressman and senator has somehow failed to instill in him an appreciation for the twin plagues of grift and gridlock.
+
+For us benighted hippies, the standard counter-argument at this point is that our man understands all too well the magnitude of Washington’s dysfunction, which is why he’s calling for a political revolution: to obliterate the most heinous aspects of the status quo, starting with corporate-sponsored elections.
+
+I happen to agree with this. But there’s a sadder and more pointed response to Hillary’s reality brigade. Namely, that they need to face the reality of what the 2016 election is going to be like with Hillary at the top of the ticket.
+
+Before I outline that particular shitstorm, let me issue a few sure-to-be-ignored (and therefore pointless) caveats. First, I myself was a Hillary supporter until Sanders entered the race. (More precisely, until I read his policy positions.)
+
+Second, I will enthusiastically support Hillary when and if she is nominated. Years ago, I interviewed the secretary and I say now what I said then: She is a brilliant and compassionate public servant. If presidential elections in this country were based on policy positions and moral intention, on how each candidate hopes to solve common crises of state, Clinton would win going away.
+
+Alas, the reality is that Hillary is among the most hated politicians in America. There is, to begin with, her dismal favorability rating, which stands at 53 percent, with a net negative of 12 percent. (Sanders has a net positive of 12 percent.)
+
+But even more important is the intensity of the animus against her, and the sad mountain of baggage she carries with her as a candidate.
+
+No matter who the GOP nominee is, the battle plan against Hillary will be the same: a tawdry and unrelenting relitigation of all the phony scandals cooked up by the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” that she identified nearly two decades ago.
+
+Cue up the Pearl Jam, folks, because we’re going all the way back to the ’90s: Whitewater, Travelgate, Troopergate, Lewinskygate, with a little Vince Foster Murdergate, for a dash of blood. But wait—those are just the golden oldies! You’ll also be hearing about the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Pardons. Of course, what respectable slander campaign would be complete without the new material? Benghazi, the private email server, the Wall Street speeches?
+
+The dark corporate money and talented propagandists aligned against Hillary will make the Swift Boat Veterans look like toy soldiers.
+
+And because our Fourth Estate is driven at this point almost entirely by the desperate promotion of scandal narratives and conflict, every one of these paid attacks will be amplified by so-called free media, or what us starry-eyed hippies used to call journalism.
+
+I’m not blaming Hillary for this sad state of affairs. I’m just trying to be—what’s the word I’m looking for? Ah yes, here it is—realistic about how it’s going to go down. Republicans tend to lose when they have to talk in specific terms about policies, priorities and solutions. They win when elections are reduced to brawls and/or personality contests. (See Reagan/Carter, Bush/Kerry, et al.) But if Donald Trump is the nominee, as seems most likely right now, he will also enjoy two genuine lines of attack against Hillary. The first is the same one Bernie just used to upset her in Michigan: the fact that free trade pacts are wildly unpopular with many Americans. Trump has been full-throated (and, as usual, somewhat full of shit) in his condemnation of free trade, and it has been one of his most successful pitches. You can bet your bottom yen that he’ll hammer Hillary on this, as if she personally whipped votes for NAFTA. He’ll excoriate various forms of crony capitalism (deals cut with big pharma, bogus military contracts, etc.) that Democrats such as Hillary either endorsed or enabled through timidity. And he’ll blast her for backing our trillion-dollar boondoggle in Iraq, too. These accusations will be framed in terms of a larger narrative: that Hillary represents business as usual in Washington, that she’s just another career pol beholden to the donor class and to the Wall Street swells who paid her millions to deliver her secret speeches. Trump may be a sexually insecure adolescent with a penchant for inciting racial violence, but the one undeniable aspect of his appeal is that he recognizes the toxic nature of the status quo and will, by sheer force of personality, bring it down. This promise is about as flimsy as a Trump University diploma. But it’s resonating with voters who feel Washington’s carnival of corruption is beyond redemption. All of which brings us back to that credulous waif from Brooklyn, by way of Ben and Jerry’s. Donald Trump can holler all he wants about how Crazy Bernie is a socialist. But he (and the super Pacs) won’t be able to distract voters by digging up scandals in his past. Nor will Trump be able to portray him as a corporate stooge. In fact, the shocking success of the Sanders campaign is predicated on many of the same essential frustrations Trump is exploiting: corporate influence, wage stagnation, trade. This is why polls consistently show Sanders beating Trump more convincingly than Clinton does. The right wing knows how to go after Hillary, because they’ve been doing so for 30 years. Within the media and a significant portion of the electorate, the neural pathways have already been carved out. Hillary is defensive, programmed, ethically suspect. They are going to have a more difficult time smearing a candidate whose biggest liabilities are his “extreme” policy positions, most of which sound more like a common sense corrective to the excesses of capitalism. Higher taxes on corporations and the super-wealthy? Healthcare as a right? A higher minimum wage? Increased funding for education and infrastructure? Good luck demonizing those positions, Big Donald. None of this is to suggest that Hillary won’t beat Trump, if they wind up as the nominees. Nor that she won’t be a great president. But if Hillary supporters want to claim the mantle of realism, they should start by accepting very real liabilities of their candidate.",REAL
+2581,Boehner moves to push off immigration fight to 2015,"House Speaker John Boehner announced plans Tuesday to effectively push off a looming battle over President Obama's immigration policies until next year, while potentially averting a partial government shutdown later this month.
+
+The speaker met behind closed doors Tuesday with fellow Republicans. Boehner is attempting a balancing act -- as he tries to avert a budget showdown, while also letting conservatives vent over the president's controversial executive actions on immigration.
+
+Congress needs to approve a new spending bill by Dec. 11 to avoid a partial shutdown, and opposition to Obama's immigration approach has complicated that effort.
+
+The plan, as of Tuesday, is a two-step approach. The House would vote later this week for a largely symbolic measure disapproving Obama's executive actions to suspend deportations for millions of immigrants here illegally. The bill would try to block those actions, but would certainly face a presidential veto, if it made it past the Senate.
+
+The House would then vote next week on a must-pass spending bill, with a twist.
+
+The plan would fund most elements of the government for the remainder of the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2015. But, under one proposal, it would only fund immigration-related activities until early next year -- setting up a new fight over immigration in early 2015, when Republicans control both the House and Senate.
+
+While Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was being grilled over immigration at a Capitol Hill hearing, Boehner said Tuesday that Obama has ignored the American people.
+
+""This is a serious breach of our Constitution,"" Boehner said.
+
+He also said lawmakers ""have limited options and abilities to deal with it directly.""
+
+It's unclear whether Boehner's plan has enough support.
+
+Some conservatives want more; they circulated bill language Monday stipulating that no money or fees ""may be used by any agency to implement, administer, enforce or carry out any of the policy changes"" announced by Obama.
+
+Meanwhile, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi put Republicans on notice last week that her party wouldn't support a plan that didn't fund the government for the entire fiscal year and also chipped away at some immigration-related activities. In the Senate, Democrats still maintain the majority and could cause problems for any plan that does not fully fund the government through next year.
+
+Fox News' Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+918,"After New York Wins, Trump And Clinton Look Forward To Knockout Round","After New York Wins, Trump And Clinton Look Forward To Knockout Round
+
+A powerful wind swept across the 2016 presidential race Tuesday night as the political pendulum came swinging back with a vengeance.
+
+Routed in Wisconsin just two weeks ago, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stormed back to take the high-stakes primary in their home state of New York in convincing fashion. Each won about three-fifths of the vote and widened their already imposing leads among pledged delegates.
+
+In so doing, both Trump and Clinton opened a pathway to winning their nominations outright before the conventions begin in July. In recent weeks, doubts had arisen as both front-runners seemed to lose altitude and as rivals promoted the prospect of open conventions in both Cleveland and Philadelphia.
+
+But after New York, the pressure is back on the challengers, who will find fewer opportunities to narrow the gap in delegates with every passing week. The last best chance to stop either Trump or Clinton may well be next week, when Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware hold the next-to-last round of multistate primaries. A total of 144 delegates will be available for Republicans and 392 for Democrats. There will not be a comparable package until the season's final day on June 7.
+
+A sweep for either front-runner next week would make stopping Trump or Clinton not only daunting but mathematically infeasible. Even the chances of a second ballot at either convention would go from forbidding to remote.
+
+So when the history of 2016 is finally written, the smashing results from New York may well be cast as the key inflection point. Trump was declared the winner shortly after polls closed, tallying 60 percent of the statewide vote. When counting ended, Trump was poised to claim all 14 at-large delegates and about 75 of the 81 delegates awarded by congressional district.
+
+For her part, Clinton did almost as well as Trump in percentage terms with 58 percent, while she outpolled Trump in the raw vote by nearly half a million. She did not dominate the delegate count quite as much as Trump, but only because the Democrats divide their delegates proportionally — both statewide and district by district. She took home an estimated 135 new delegates to Sanders' 104. She already had 39 of the state's 44 superdelegates (who are free to change their minds).
+
+Still, the outcomes may have been equally discouraging for challengers in both parties. Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders, winners in Wisconsin and in a handful of caucus states that lent them momentum in the weeks since mid-March, stumbled badly in the Empire State. Both had hoped to at least limit the damage they would suffer on Trump's and Clinton's turf, while looking to friendlier venues ahead.
+
+But instead, the front-runners ran roughshod across the landscape. Cruz finished a weak third with scarcely 1 vote in 7, earning zero delegates. New York Republicans preferred Ohio governor John Kasich, who got 1 vote in 4 statewide and gained perhaps three or more delegates (his first since he won his home state a month earlier).
+
+Bruising as the loss was for Cruz, it may have been just as bitter for Sanders on the Democratic side. Clinton only increased her delegate lead by about 30 in the crucial category of pledged delegates. But the real pain for her rival was the opportunity cost. Sanders' team had given it their all in New York, outspending Clinton on TV and hoping visibly for an upset — or at least a narrow loss that could be spun as a moral victory.
+
+Trump, with his delegate lead growing again, can look to another stretch of promising ground next week. Polls give him an edge in all five contests, with 144 delegates at stake. A sweep would greatly enhance his chances of reaching the majority of delegates needed for a first-ballot nomination (1,237).
+
+There is an active ""stop Trump"" movement, both in social media and in the higher circles of the GOP establishment. Senators seeking re-election in swing states have been advised to stay away from Trump and even to skip the convention.
+
+Cruz has been successful in certain states in placing sympathizers in delegate slots that are committed to Trump on the first ballot. The individuals who occupy those slots would be expected to defect from Trump on later ballots.
+
+But all that will be moot if Trump can get close enough to the magic number that a few pre-convention deals might well put him over the top. After a win like he scored in New York, such a ""last mile"" strategy looks increasingly plausible. At his victory rally at Trump Tower, Trump left the stage to the strains of Frank Sinatra singing: ""If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere, it's up to you New York, New York.""
+
+For her part, Clinton was sounding equally sanguine just blocks away, telling a throng of her supporters that the race was ""in the homestretch and victory is in sight."" She did not say it, but Sanders now needs to win 60 percent of the delegates in every contest remaining — just to overtake Clinton in pledged delegates. He has no discernible path to turning around her advantage in superdelegates.
+
+Neither candidate's race is over, yet. Weeks and months of pre-convention politicking remain. But after next week, it is possible that — for one or both of the front-runners — it will no longer be far from over.",REAL
+1915,Hillary Clinton Can’t Run for President,"Thousands have run for president, but only one candidate has ever unrun for the office: Hillary Clinton. Ever since she finally announced her entry into the contest a couple of weeks ago, she has been unrunning with ferocity. First she road-tripped a minivan 1,000 miles from New York to Iowa to … listen.
+
+Listening tours (or sessions) are supposed to add a little fabric softener to a politician’s starchy image, buffing their scaly reptilian exteriors down to kid-leather smoothness. The technique worked for Clinton in New York, where booking upstate listening stops helped her win a Senate seat in 2000. Listening is the epitome of unrunning, allowing a candidate to do nothing at all but remain operational. Today, Clinton is listening in New Hampshire, and a full-time physician has been assigned to her care, lest the pure calm of bland political chitchat turn her life signs negative and she unruns herself to death.
+
+Why is Clinton unrunning? If the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination were a Little League baseball game, the party would have already recognized Clinton’s insurmountable lead and invoked the mercy rule to give the victory to her. By unrunning, she avoids the intense political debate that would only call attention to her underfunded, unannounced and relatively unknown rivals, Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee and Joe Biden, all of whom are un-unrunning at various paces.
+
+With nine months until the first presidential primary, Clinton can’t afford to actively run for president. Indeed, if she had her druthers, she probably wouldn’t even be unrunning now. She was pressured by the constant press attention about when she was going to announce and the email controversy. That sort of press attention was positive media attention she couldn’t control, and only by announcing could she dial it down. The email controversy was negative media attention she couldn’t control without the attention-deflecting machinery of a campaign. Indeed, she may be the first politician to announce for the presidency in order to decrease attention in her candidacy.
+
+She’s succeeded wildly. Her coffees, roundtables, discussions and “spontaneous” meetings with voters have immersed her campaign into a box of dry ice and slowed it to the lowest metabolic levels. Suspended animation would look vigorous compared to what Clinton is now doing. This is smart. Steady coverage on the inside of newspapers is exactly what she wants. I buy what Team Clinton stalwart Donna Brazile recently told BuzzFeed’s Ruby Cramer about the campaign’s pacing (“There’s a rhythm. She’s starting off like Beethoven, with melodies and chords that people understand. But she’s got to end up like Beyoncé”) except to my ears early Clinton sounds more like a hobbled version of the Beatles’ “Within You Without You” than Beethoven.
+
+Actively running for president at this point would be too politically damaging for Clinton. By actively running, she would have to declare herself for or against the current administration, something she doesn’t want to do until it presents some advantage. By unrunning, she can blend passively into the background, where she can be there but not here. Depending on how suggestible the audience that is listening with her, Clinton unrunning looks like a continuation of the Clinton and Obama legacy without explicitly saying so.
+
+Having gotten what they wished for, an official Clinton candidacy, the press must now cover the Clinton 2016 slow lane the best they can. The press already knows almost everything about her, and she’s not going to voluntarily serve any fresh meat, so reporters and editors will have to go to the freezer and the landfills where her past is stored. That’s one reason behind the press excitement over Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Even if there’s nothing damning in the book, reporters can grind out hundreds of column inches on the subject and make it relevant to the campaign. The only alternative until the campaign awakens from dormancy will be profiles of the 24-year-old staff wizards (I’m sure they exist) who are vitalizing the Clinton campaign. I shudder.
+
+What should ordinarily follow unrunning would be running, but that won’t be possible for Clinton. Until the 2016 campaign boiler room fires up with an identity of its own, she’ll be rerunning her 2008 campaign, necessitating yet another transition in her candidacy. According to POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush, the Clinton campaign plans to spend more time generating calm and less time fighting the press than it did in 2008. We’ve got plenty of time to come up with a snazzy phrase to describe the new, yet-to-be-released Clinton method, but until we come up with a winner, how about “un-rerunning”?
+
+Double-unrunning would mean taking an unrunning campaign several gears lower than a silent John Cage composition. Dash to your keyboard and send me emails with definitions of these variations: “triple-unrunning,” “reverse-unrunning,” “bellyfeel running,” and “duckspeak running” ( Shafer.Politico@gmail.com ). Subscribe to my email alerts before I declare my list full. My Twitter feed is like a multiverse. And, am I the last writer on the planet who promotes his RSS feed?",REAL
+7096,Mike Pence says “shalom” to Israel’s Republicans,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 5 + 13 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
+2426,Obamacare case: All eyes on 2 justices,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+130,South Carolina police officer charged with murder after shooting man during traffic stop,"A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder Tuesday after shooting and killing a black man following a routine traffic stop over the weekend.
+
+The decision to charge the officer, Michael Thomas Slager, came after graphic video footage emerged depicting Slager firing a volley of bullets into the back of Walter Scott, who was running away.
+
+Officers rarely face criminal charges after shooting people, a fact that has played into nationwide protests over the past year over how the police use deadly force. Yet this case took a swift, unusual turn after a video shot by a bystander provided authorities with a decisive narrative that differed from Slager’s account.
+
+“It wasn’t just based on the officers’ word anymore,” said Chris Stewart, an attorney for Scott’s family. “People were believing this story.”
+
+Authorities on Tuesday also pointed to the video as a turning point in this case and apologized to the family for the shooting.
+
+“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” North Charleston Mayor R. Keith Summey said at a news conference. “If you make a bad decision, don’t care if you’re behind the shield … you have to live with that decision.”
+
+The Justice Department said Tuesday that the FBI would investigate the shooting along with the department’s Civil Rights division and the South Carolina U.S. Attorney’s Office.
+
+“The Department of Justice will take appropriate action in light of the evidence and developments in the state case,” the department said in a statement.
+
+Summey and the city’s chief of police announced at a news conference that Slager, 33, would be charged and arrested. Slager, who has been fired, was arrested by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the agency investigating the shooting, and booked into the Charleston County jail shortly before 6 p.m. on Tuesday. He faces a possible death sentence or life in prison.
+
+“It’s been a tragic day for many,” Eddie Driggers, the police chief, said at the news conference. “A tragic day for many.”
+
+[How the shooting reignites the debate over body cameras]
+
+The shooting began with a routine traffic stop after 9:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. After Slager stopped a vehicle, he began chasing Walter Scott, 50, and fired his Taser, according to the incident report and city officials.
+
+Footage of the shooting, first obtained by the New York Times and the Post and Courier newspaper, showed Scott fleeing from Slager across a tree-lined patch of grass. Slager fires a series of shots at Scott, who appears to be unarmed, striking Scott “multiple times in the back,” according to an affidavit filed Tuesday evening.
+
+Slager told the dispatcher, “Shots fired and the subject is down, he took my Taser,” according to the portion of the report filled out by another officer who relayed what he heard.
+
+The video shows Slager picking up an item and placing it near Scott, though it is unclear if this is the Taser or something else. Police later said that Scott was hit with the Taser at least once, because part of it was still attached to him when other officers arrived on the scene. But city officials said that Scott was clearly too far away to use a Taser if he did have it.
+
+“I can tell you that as a result of that video and the bad decision made by our officer, he will be charged with murder,” Summey said at the news conference.
+
+After Slager shot Scott, the officer handcuffed the man’s hands behind his back and he remained there. The police report says that “several officers” gave Scott first aid, but it does not state how long it took them to administer that aid.
+
+This shooting comes after incidents in Ferguson, Mo., and New York, among other places, have drawn heavy scrutiny over confrontations that ended with black men dead. The unrest has continued into this year, as a shooting in Madison, Wis., was followed by lengthy protests.
+
+[How many police shootings a year? No one knows.]
+
+North Charleston, the third-largest city in the state, has a different demographic breakdown than the rest of South Carolina. Two-thirds of South Carolina residents are white, while North Charleston has more black residents (47 percent) than white residents (41 percent), according to the U.S. Census.
+
+But the city’s police force does not reflect that breakdown, as four out of five North Charleston officers last year were white, according to the Post and Courier. The city’s police department announced in February that it would obtain 115 body cameras for its officers after obtaining $275,000 in state funding.
+
+Authorities stressed that the episode in South Carolina was not indicative of the city’s entire police force of 342 remaining officers, instead calling this a singular “bad decision” made by one officer.
+
+“I think all of these police officers, men and women, are like my children,” Driggers said. “So you tell me how a father would react … I’ll let you answer that.”
+
+[Current law gives police wide latitude to use deadly force]
+
+Scott’s family praised the decision to charge Slager with the shooting and was “grateful” someone came forward with the video footage, an attorney said.
+
+“They were sad,” Stewart, the family attorney, said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening from Scott’s mother’s home. “There is nothing that can bring their son and brother back, but they are relieved that charges were filed.”
+
+Scott’s family members had gathered at the home on Tuesday evening, including Scott’s four children and three brothers. His family and attorneys held a brief news conference Tuesday night, saying that they planned to file a lawsuit against the city and police department.
+
+“All we wanted was the truth, and through the process we’ve received the truth,” said Anthony Scott, Walter’s brother. “I don’t think that all police officers are bad cops, but there are some bad ones out there.”
+
+Slager was initially represented by David Aylor, a local attorney, who in a statement provided to local media soon after the shooting said: “I believe once the community hears all the facts of this shooting, they’ll have a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding this investigation.”
+
+But on Tuesday, shortly before Slager’s arrest was announced, Aylor told The Post that he is no longer representing the officer.
+
+“I don’t have any involvement in that case moving forward,” he said. “No involvement.”
+
+[Why South Carolina indicted three other white officers in four months.]
+
+This was the 11th time an officer has shot someone in South Carolina so far this year, according to Thom Berry, a spokesman for the state Law Enforcement Division. Berry said that the investigation into this shooting is “still very much in progress,” so he declined to comment on details of how the agency obtained the video footage.
+
+Although officers fatally shoot and kill hundreds of people each year, only a handful of cases result in the officer facing criminal charges. Video recordings of the fatal encounters are becoming pivotal factors in whether prosecutors and grand jurors bring charges, experts said.
+
+“Video has changed everything because it provides documentation that was never available before,” said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University. “Now, everyday citizens, when they recognize there is a dispute, they start recording video with their smart phones.”
+
+However, these recordings do not always result in officers being charged. Footage of a New York City police officer placing Eric Garner in a chokehold last summer provoked widespread outrage, but the grand jury decided not to indict the officer. That decision, like that of the Missouri grand jury that did not indict the white police officer who shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, sparked a national wave of protests aimed at the way African American men are treated by police.
+
+Officials and activists in South Carolina said they were asking the community to keep calm in the wake of the video’s release and the decision to seek murder charges against him.
+
+“We want to ask the community to remain calm,” Elder Johnson of National Action Network said Tuesday.",REAL
+5710,"‘We never denied Israel’s right to Jerusalem, Temple Mount’","November 7, 2016 ‘We never denied Israel’s right to Jerusalem, Temple Mount’ 
+Levy quizzed him about those controversial issues as well as his support for Syrian President Basher Assad and charges that his country had intervened in the US elections. 
+How does Russia explain its support of the UNESCO vote “to disregard the historic connection between the Jewish people and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,” Levy asked Medvedev. 
+The issue had been blown out of proportion, he responded speaking in Russian, with a Hebrew translation by Channel 2. 
+There have been some ten votes by UNESCO Boards and Committees on such Jerusalem resolutions, Medvedev said. 
+“There is nothing new here,” he said, as he dismissed the significance of UNESCO texts that refer to the Temple Mount solely by its Muslim name of Al Haram Al Sharif. 
+“Our country has never denied the rights of Israel or the Jewish people to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount or the Western Wall,” Medvedev said. 
+“Therefore there is no need to politicize this decision,” Medvedev said, adding that such resolutions, were “not directed against Israel.” 
+Similarly, he said, there was nothing contradictory in Russia’s sale and shipment of the advanced S-300 advanced surface to air missile defense system to Iran.",FAKE
+7867,King Rufus Found Buried Under Parking Lot Near Beaulieu Motor Museum,"Saturday, 29 October 2016 Another clue was an arrow in the lung area. 
+King William II Rufus was the son of William the Conqueror and King of England from 1087 to 1100. Described as uncouth, barbaric, lacking both morals and ethics, addicted to vice, and definitely not the most popular king, he was killed by an arrow to the lungs-probably shot by one of his own men. 
+Although his body was left where it lay when he was shot in the New Forest, it was said it was later removed to Winchester Cathedral. From there, the bones were scattered around during the English Civil War and later put in a giant mortuary chest along with Kings Egbert, Ethelwulfe, and others. 
+But the body of King William II Rufus was actually identified at the Motor City Museum, which is near the New Forest area where King Rufus was shot. Apparently, the king was so popular that they just dug a shallow grave in the New Forest area and tossed him in. 
+The grave was discovered when the museum was breaking ground in its parking lot for a new area to display its 1895 Knight auto. The workers came upon some bones (apparently the citizens who buried King Rufus didn't bother with a coffin) and sent them to the British Museum for identification. 
+Since the royal Norman DNA was on file, it was determined to be Rufus from process of elimination. And someone had carved ""Rufus"" on the femur. Make Al N.'s day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
+3041,"""Political identity is fair game for hatred"": how Republicans and Democrats discriminate","In 1960, Americans were asked whether they would be pleased, displeased, or unmoved if their son or daughter married a member of the other political party.
+
+Respondents reacted with a shrug. Only 5 percent of Republicans, and only 4 percent of Democrats, said they would be upset by the cross-party union. On the list of things you might care about in child's partner — are they kind, smart, successful, supportive? — which political party they voted for just didn't rate.
+
+Fast forward to 2008. The polling firm YouGov asked Democrats and Republicans the same question — and got very different results. This time, 27 percent of Republicans, and 20 percent of Democrats, said they would be upset if their son or daughter married a member of the opposite party. In 2010, YouGov asked the question again; this time, 49 percent of Republicans, and 33 percent of Democrats, professed concern at interparty marriage.
+
+For Shanto Iyengar, director of Stanford's political communications lab, the marriage polls were yet more evidence that something important was changing in American politics.
+
+The big institutions and broad outlines of our political system have been so stable for so long that it makes it hard for people to see when the tectonic plates of American politics are actually shifting. There's been a Democratic Party and a Republican Party for most of the country's history, and they've always bickered, so it's easy to assume — particularly in a country with a short historical memory — that the partisanship we see now is simply how it's always been.
+
+But Iyengar was coming to believe that today's political differences were fundamentally different from yesterday's political differences; the nature of American political partisanship, he worried, was mutating into something more fundamental, and more irreconcilable, than what it had been in the past.
+
+Political scientists have mainly studied polarization as an ideological phenomenon — in this view, party polarization is really another term for political disagreement, and more polarization simply meant more severe disagreements. But it's hard to find the evidence that the disagreements among ordinary Americans have really become so much more intense.
+
+""If you look at Americans' positions on the issues, they are much closer to the center than their elected representatives,"" Iyengar says. ""The people who end up getting elected are super extreme, but the voters are not.""
+
+But even as American voters remained relatively centrist, they seemed to be getting angrier and more fearful of the other side.
+
+After every election, researchers ask voters an almost endless series of questions, creating a rich record of why Americans vote the way they do. The result is called the American National Election Survey, and beginning in the 1980s it began to show something puzzling.
+
+What caught Iyengar's eye was a section of the survey known as ""the thermometer."" The thermometer asks people to rate their feelings toward the two political parties on a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is cold and negative and 100 is warm and positive. Iyengar noticed that since the 1980s, Republicans' feelings towards the Democratic Party, and Democrats' feelings towards the Republican Party, had dropped off a cliff.
+
+In 1980, voters gave the opposite party a 45 on the thermometer — not as high as the 72 they gave their own party, but a pretty decent number all the same.
+
+After 1980, though, the numbers began dropping. By 1992, the opposing party was down to 40; by 1998, it had fallen to 38; in 2012, it was down to 30. Meanwhile, partisans' views towards their own parties had remained pretty much unchanged — that 72 from 1980 had only fallen to 70 by 2012.
+
+Iyengar's hypothesis was that rising political polarization was showing something more fundamental than political disagreement — it was tracking the transformation of party affiliation into a form of personal identity that reached into almost every aspect of our lives.
+
+If he was right, then party affiliation wasn't simply an expression of our disagreements; it was also becoming the cause of them. If Democrats thought of other Democrats as their tribe and of Republicans as a hostile tribe, and vice versa, then the consequences would stretch far beyond politics — into things like, say, marriage.
+
+And the data was everywhere. Polls looking at the difference between how Republicans viewed Democrats and how Democrats viewed Republicans now showed that partisans were less accepting of each other than white people were of black people or than black people were of white people.
+
+But there was no way partisanship — an identity we choose, and that didn't matter much to us 50 years ago — could possibly have become a cleavage in American life as deep as race, right? That seemed crazy.
+
+So Iyengar decided to test it.
+
+The experiment was simple. Working with Dartmouth College political scientist Sean Westwood, Iyengar asked about 1,000 people to decide between the résumés of two high school seniors who were competing for a scholarship.
+
+The resumes could differ in three ways: First, the senior could have either a 3.5 or 4.0 GPA; second, the senior could have been the president of the Young Democrats or Young Republicans club; third, the senior could have a stereotypically African-American name and have been president of the African-American Student Association or could have a stereotypically European-American name.
+
+The point of the project was to see how political and cues affected a nonpolitical task — and to compare the effect with race. The results were startling.
+
+When the résumé included a political identity cue, about 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans awarded the scholarship to their co-partisan. This held true whether or not the co-partisan had the highest GPA — when the Republican student was more qualified, Democrats only chose him 30 percent of the time, and when the Democrat was more qualified, Republicans only chose him 15 percent of the time.
+
+Think about that for a moment: When awarding a college scholarship— a task that should be completely nonpolitical — Republicans and Democrats cared more about the political party of the student than the student's GPA. As Iyengar and Westwood wrote, ""Partisanship simply trumped academic excellence.""
+
+It also trumped race. When the candidates were equally qualified, about 78 percent of African Americans chose the candidate of the same race, and 42 percent of European Americans did the same. When the candidate of the other race had a higher GPA, 45 percent of African Americans chose him, and 71 percent of European Americans chose him.
+
+But Iyengar and Westwood wondered whether these results would really hold outside the laboratory setting. After all, the study's participants knew their answers were being judged by the researchers. Perhaps discriminating against members of the other party was socially acceptable in a way discriminating against people of the other race simply wasn't. In other words, perhaps people are willing to show their partisan bias whereas they hide their racial bias, and that was what was behind the results.
+
+So Iyengar and Westwood came up with another test — a test that would be much harder to fool.
+
+Taking an implicit-association test is a humbling experience. Your job, as the test taker, is to hit a letter on your keyboard when certain word and images flash together. The instructions are to go as fast as you can, but the fastest you can go is sluggish compared with the pace of the program. You get nervous, your finger stumbling over the keys, hitting the wrong ones. And the whole time you're doing it, you know you're being judged, and you realize, with a sickening certainty, that the verdict isn't going to be good.
+
+The point of IATs is to measure the snap judgments your brain makes at speeds faster than conscious thought. Mountains of psychological research shows that these judgments are powerful — that much of what we consciously think is an after-the-fact rationalization for the instant judgment we made before we had time to think. IATs are meant to expose those judgments.
+
+The test is grounded in studies of racism: Researchers will ask subjects to pair positive words with black and white faces, and see which they have more trouble doing. The underlying insight is that the task is easier to complete when it aligns with people's automatic, unconscious reaction than when it isn't — you're faster when you can go with instinct then when you have to suppress it. Study after study shows that IATs are at least somewhat predictive of real-world racial bias. They have since been extended to measure bias in gender, age, weight, and more.
+
+Iyengar and Westwood's idea was simple: Why not use an IAT to measure partisan bias, too?
+
+So they built one. And the results were fascinating. But before we run through them, Iyengar and Westwood kindly shared their code with us, and so you can take the test here, or at the top of this article, and see how strong your bias is.
+
+The results showed, as you might expect, that Democrats exhibit an automatic bias against Republicans, and vice versa. What was surprising was that the bias partisans exhibited for their out-group exceeded the bias white participants showed for black people, or that black participants showed for white people. According to the test, Americans are more automatically partisan than they are automatically racist. (If you want to know your own results on the racism test, you can take a version meant to test racial bias here.)
+
+This was, to Westwood, a bit of a shock. ""To be honest, I didn't expect this to work at all,"" he says. ""The common story is most Americans don’t care about politics, they don’t understand politics, they don’t understand policy. So you wouldn’t expect Americans to have strong preferences. That’s where I started.""
+
+Together, the two experiments suggest that partisanship now extends beyond politics — it's becoming a fundamental identity in American life, and may well lead to discrimination in completely apolitical contexts.
+
+I asked two other political scientists — John Sides and Danny Hayes, both of George Washington University — whether they bought Iyengar and Westwood's data. Both said they did, though they noted that opportunities for partisan discrimination are less common than opportunities for racial or gender discrimination, if for no other reason than partisanship is less visible.
+
+Still, the impulse to discriminate against the out-party is real. ""The more partisanship becomes a social identity — and I think this is as true today as it's been in modern American politics — the more we should expect people to engage in in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination,"" Hayes said.
+
+Iyengar's hypothesis is that partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination that contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages.
+
+""Political identity is fair game for hatred,"" he says. ""Racial identity is not. Gender identity is not. You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints. A Republican is someone who chooses to be Republican, so I can say whatever I want about them.""
+
+You can see an example when you look at the media, Westwood observes. There are no major cable channels devoted to making people of other races look bad. But there are cable channels that seem devoted to making members of the other party look bad. ""The media has become tribal leaders,"" he says. ""They’re telling the tribe how to identify and behave, and we’re following along.""
+
+Iyengar and Westwood's research is a fundamental challenge to the way we like to believe American politics works. A world where we won't give an out-party high schooler with a better GPA a nonpolitical scholarship is not a world in which we're going to listen to politicians of the other side on emotional, controversial issues — even if they're making good arguments that are backed by the facts.
+
+""[The media] is telling the tribe how to identify and behave, and we’re following along""
+
+Iyengar's initial insight was that political polarization might be less about policy than it is about identity, and his research more than proves it. ""The old theory was political parties came into existence to represent deep social cleavages,"" he says. ""But now party politics has taken on a life of its own — now it is the cleavage.""
+
+That changes the playbook for cynical presidential candidates, policymakers, pundits, and so on.
+
+""The major take-home here is it’s relatively easy to score points by attacking the opposition and touting the goodness of one’s own party,"" says Westwood. ""If you’re trying to get the largest return from voters, it would make sense for politicians to try to activate social identity rather than focus on policy.""
+
+Winning an argument, at least when you're talking to co-partisans, is less about persuasion than about delegitimization — the savvy move isn't to try to build a better case than the other side, but to make clear that the other side is the other side.
+
+Westwood is quick to note that the comparison to racism doesn't mean that partisanship is somehow worse than racism, more pervasive, or more damaging. It's easier to see — and thus discriminate — against people based on their skin color than their partisanship, for instance. And as Jenée Desmond-Harris has written, political beliefs are a choice with moral implications while race is not. Judging someone on whether they support gay marriage, universal healthcare, or gun laws is far different than judging someone on the color of their skin.
+
+What Iyengar and Westwood's research shows, however, is that partisanship is no longer just a political phenomenon. Party and ideology have become powerful forms of personal identity, and the way they inform our lives — who we listen to, who we help, even who we love — now stretches far beyond the political realm.",REAL
+2831,Obama Authorizes Deploying Up To 450 More Troops To Iraq,"Obama Authorizes Deploying Up To 450 More Troops To Iraq
+
+Update at 12:20 p.m. ET. Up To 450 More Troops:
+
+President Obama has authorized the Pentagon to send up to 450 additional troops to Iraq in an effort to beef up the training of local security forces in their fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
+
+In a statement, press secretary Josh Earnest said the military personnel will ""train, advise, and assist Iraqi Security Forces at Taqaddum military base in eastern Anbar province.""
+
+He added: ""The President made this decision after a request from Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi and upon the recommendation of Secretary Carter and Chairman Dempsey, and with the unanimous support of his national security team.""
+
+The U.S. already has 3,100 troops in the country. They're deployed at four established training sites. The additional troops will be deployed to Anbar province, an area just west of Baghdad that is reportedly now under Islamic State control.
+
+The Obama administration is considering sending hundreds more troops into Iraq to help train local forces to fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
+
+NPR's Tom Bowman reports the move comes after Islamic State militants reportedly took over the provincial capital city of Ramadi in the Sunni heartland.
+
+He filed this report for our Newscast unit:
+
+""U.S. trainers now in Iraq have focused mostly on the Shiite-dominated Army. Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren told reporters that the U.S. would like to see more Sunnis come into the pipeline for training. ""Officials say hundreds more American trainers could be sent to Anbar province, the Sunni enclave just west of Baghdad that is now largely under the control of Islamic State fighters. ""Sunni tribal leaders have long complained of mistreatment by the Shiite-dominated government. ""The Pentagon is now working up added training options for the White House. There are already some 3,000 American troops in Iraq, either training and advising Iraqi troops or providing security.""
+
+President Obama addressed this issue during a press conference earlier this week. Obama said he was still waiting on a finalized plan from the Pentagon.
+
+""We don't yet have a complete strategy because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis as well about how recruitment takes place, how that training takes place,"" Obama said. ""And so the details of that are not yet worked out.""
+
+Fox News reports that the Pentagon also plans to open another training base in Anbar province. The network quotes Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying it's still unclear whether more troops will be needed for that base.",REAL
+7580,BREAKING: FBI Gets Search Warrant For State Department Emails On Weiner’s Computer (VIDEO),"BREAKING: FBI Gets Search Warrant For State Department Emails On Weiner’s Computer (VIDEO) By Michelle Oxman on October 30, 2016 Subscribe 
+On Sunday afternoon, October 30, 2016, the FBI obtained a search warrant for emails on a laptop owned by Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. You’ll remember that Weiner was under investigation for sexting a 15-year-old girl. As it happened, the same laptop also contained emails that Abedin, Clinton’s Chief of Staff at the State Department, forwarded to her personal Yahoo account so she could print them. That’s why FBI agents got Director James Comey’s approval to seek access to the emails, as Comey told Congress (and we reported ) on Thursday, October 28. A Rather Unusual Warrant 
+Now, when is the last time you ever heard about a search warrant being granted? I bet you can’t think of one. That’s because police and prosecutors ask the court to issue warrants in secret. That makes sense, even to those of us who usually err on the side of supporting civil liberties. After all, if you knew the police had a warrant to search your home or your computer, what would you think of doing? 
+Why do we know about this warrant? Because James Comey told Congress there were new emails “pertinent” to the Clinton investigation. Trump supporters argued that the government must have reviewed the emails and would only have released the information if there was important new evidence. In reality, the FBI couldn’t do so legally. Why? Because the warrant to search the computer for evidence of Weiner’s contact with a 15-year-old girl could not have covered Huma Abedin’s work-related emails from three or more years earlier. There’s a helpful explanation of the legal issues relating to the search warrant in today’s Washington Post. 
+Still, faced with the innuendo and implications of illegality in Comey’s vague letter, Clinton and her supporters insisted that the FBI disclose what it had. Perhaps the FBI didn’t want to admit that it didn’t know what it had. Or maybe the FBI didn’t want to admit that it had gotten its knowledge illegally. Getting a search warrant bought the FBI time, though, and left the whole mess hanging over Clinton’s head as she approaches the last week of the campaign. Violating Policy 
+There seems to be no doubt that Comey’s letter to Congress violated two long-standing tradition and policies: (1) prohibiting discussion of ongoing investigations; and (2) not taking actions to favor one side or another in elections. Two former Deputy Attorneys General, one Democrat and one Republican,publicly questioned Comey’s fitness to lead the FBI because of it. In addition, others have pointed out that Comey has repeatedly gone beyond established limits in his discussions of the Clinton email investigation. The Known Unknowns 
+We still don’t know whether any of the emails on that computer contain new information. We don’t know whether Secretary Clinton ever sent emails to Abedin’s personal account on that computer or received emails from Abedin via that account. We don’t know whether classified information was sent or received via this personal computer. We don’t know what any of the emails would tend to show about Clinton’s respect for classified information. After all, it wasn’t Clinton, but Abedin, who forwarded the emails. One Final Question 
+Apparently, the FBI agents working on the Weiner case became aware several weeks ago that the computer contained emails that Abedin forwarded to herself while she worked at the State Department. Why did they wait until last Thursday to tell Comey? Surely they anticipated his likely reaction? Did they “play” Comey to manipulate the election results? 
+
+About Michelle Oxman 
+Michelle Oxman is a writer, blogger, wedding officiant, and recovering attorney. She lives just north of Chicago with her husband, son, and two cats. She is interested in human rights, election irregularities, access to health care, race relations, corporate power, and family life.Her personal blog appears at www.thechangeuwish2c.com. She knits for sanity maintenance. Connect",FAKE
+8400,Tokyo could ban US troops from stationing on disputed isles,"  
+  block the US from being stationed on the islands off Hokkaido in the strategic Sea of Okhotsk, if this helps persuade Russia to give them back. 
+The islands are inhabited, and in Russia are called the Southern Kurils – but for Japan they are Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan, and the Habomai islet group. These territories, which became Russian after Japan’s defeat in World War II under the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, saw a rift between the two countries preventing them from signing the peace treaty to formally end the war. Tokyo insists the four islets are not part of the Kuril chain and should be returned under its control. 
+In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Bloomberg that Russia does not “trade territories.” But ahead of his visit to Tokyo in mid-December, Japan’s diplomatic sources told Kyodo News that Moscow would hand over Shikotan and Habomai islet group following the peace deal, as stated by the 1956 Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration. 
+The sources, however, said Russia may be concerned that the US military could be stationed on the territories after Japan gets them back. According to Article 5 of the Japan-US security treaty, Washington is allowed to station its troops in areas administered by Japan. 
+The Japanese government is now looking into the potential consequences, should they exclude the islands from Article 5, the sources said, with one of them adding that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could go as far as announcing that the islands do not fall under Article 5. 
+Other sources, however, think that “a realistic scenario is that the prime minister shows his political will and seeks consent from the United States.” 
+At the same time, “Russia won’t agree to hand over [the islands] unless the possibility of stationing the US military there is ruled out,” a source familiar with the Japanese-Russian ties told The Japan Times over the weekend. 
+Nevertheless, convincing the US to okay such conditions seems very difficult, a Japanese government source said, adding that “It could even shake the foundations of the [Japan-US military] alliance.” 
+For Russia, the area around the disputed islands is of “extremely high importance” because it faces the Sea of Okhotsk, a Japanese government source said, and a foreign military in these waters could hamper both essential military drills and the use of a major access route to the Pacific Ocean. 
+Tokyo has already rejected the report, saying they are not planning to review Article 5, TASS news agency said, citing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida reiterated it, adding that the Japan-US treaty “applies and will apply” to all territories and waters which are administered by Japan. 
+Earlier in the month, Tokyo also denied Nikkei’s report that Japan and Russia were discussing joint administration of the Kuril Islands. 
+“There is no change in Japan’s fundamental position that Japan will conclude the peace treaty with Russia by resolving the issue of the possession of the four northern islands,” Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Yasuhira Kawamura told Reuters in an email at that time. 
+Russia has always insisted that any change in the status of the islands is out of the question, as it would constitute a reassessment of the results of World War II, which is expressly banned by international treaties.",FAKE
+10166,Putin being FRAMED at UN for War Crimes in Syria Explained,"Putin being FRAMED at UN for War Crimes in Syria Explained 11/02/2016 In today’s video, Christopher Greene of AMTV explains why the UN is framing Vladimir Putin for War Crimes in Syria. 11/02/2016 PRESS TV Russia's military and NATO forces are holding parallel military exercises in two neighboring Balkan countrie ... S Korea coast guard opens fire on China boats 11/02/2016 PRESS TV South Korean coast guard vessels have opened fire on Chinese trawlers allegedly fishing illegally off South ... FBI Releases Clinton Foundation Investigation Records 11/02/2016 DAILY CALLER The FBI on Tuesday released documents related to a now-closed federal investigation of an alleged pay-to ... AMTV Archives",FAKE
+2077,Even ExxonMobil says climate change is real. So why won’t the GOP?,"To understand how dangerously extreme the Republican Party has become on climate change, compare its stance to that of ExxonMobil.
+
+No one would confuse the oil and gas giant with the Sierra Club. But if you visit Exxon’s website, you will find that the company believes climate change is real, that governments should take action to combat it and that the most sensible action would be a revenue-neutral tax on carbon — in other words, a tax on oil, gas and coal, with the proceeds returned to taxpayers for them to spend as they choose.
+
+With no government action, Exxon experts told us during a visit to The Post last week, average temperatures are likely to rise by a catastrophic (my word, not theirs) 5 degrees Celsius, with rises of 6, 7 or even more quite possible.
+
+“A properly designed carbon tax can be predictable, transparent, and comparatively simple to understand and implement,”Exxon says in a position paper titled “Engaging on climate change.”
+
+None of this is radical. Officials negotiating a climate agreement right now in Paris would take it as self-evident. Republican leaders in the 1980s and 1990s would have raised no objection.
+
+But to today’s Republicans, ExxonMobil’s moderate, self-evident views are akin to heresy. Donald Trump, the leading GOP presidential candidate, says, “I don’t believe in climate change.”Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.)says, “Climate change is not science, it’s religion.”Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) at the moment seems to acknowledge that climate change might be real but opposes any action to deal with it.
+
+Well, you may say, Trump revels in his stupidities, and most of the presidential candidates are appealing to the rightmost wing of their primary electorate at the moment. What about the grownups in the party, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.)?
+
+In an op-ed for The Post published as President Obama traveled to Paris for the opening of the climate talks, McConnell slammed Obama’s policy for harming the middle class without measurably affecting climate change.
+
+Does that mean, I asked the majority leader’s press secretary, that he believes climate change is real, and are there policies he would favor to mitigate the risk?
+
+The spokesman answered: “While the Leader has spoken often on energy and the President’s policies, I don’t believe he’ll have anything new today. And as to the President’s policies, the President says he’s for ‘all of the above.’ He got that line from us. But as to his climate proposal and the Paris proposals, I think he’s spoken clearly on that in his op-ed. I hope that helps.”
+
+I tried once more: “So as to whether he believes climate change is real, or would favor any policies to mitigate it, I should just say, declined to answer?”
+
+A genuine conservative, as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state George P. Shultz has written, would acknowledge uncertainties in climate science but look for rational, market-based policies to lessen the risk without slowing economic growth. A revenue-neutral carbon tax, as in a bill Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has introduced, fits the description precisely.
+
+What then explains the know-nothingism of today’s Republicans? Some of them see scientists as part of a left-wing cabal; many of them doubt government’s ability to do anything, let alone something as big as redirecting the economy’s energy use. Almost all of them, along with quite a few Democrats, would rather not tell voters that energy prices need to rise for the sake of the environment.
+
+Their donors in the oil and gas industry encourage their prejudices. Three years ago, Grover Norquist, the Republicans’ anti-tax enforcer, said that a carbon tax wouldn’t violate his no-tax-increase pledge if the proceeds were returned by lowering the income tax, though he made clear he didn’t like the idea.
+
+The next morning, the lobbying arm of the oil and gas industry swung into action. “Grover, just butch it up and oppose this lousy idea directly,”the American Energy Alliance said. “This word-smithing is giving us all headaches.”
+
+For most of us, the reaction to this would have been: Butch it up? But Norquist got the message and within hours issued a clarification: Only a constitutional amendment banning the income tax could justify a carbon tax.
+
+So the industry deserves its share of blame, and that includes ExxonMobil, which hardly trumpets its views on the advantages of a carbon tax. (Its most alarming slide, on the 5-degree temperature rise, can’t be found on its public site.)
+
+But blaming it all on Big Oil lets the politicians off too easily. Yes, McConnell represents a coal state, and, yes, he wants to preserve his Senate majority. If those considerations are more important to him than saving the planet, let him say so to our children and grandchildren. Let’s not blame the oil companies for the pusillanimity of people who are supposed to lead.
+
+Read more from Fred Hiatt’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+5332,Russian Researchers Discover Secret Nazi Military Base ‘Treasure Hunter’ in the Arctic [Photos],"The mystery surrounding The Third Reich and Nazi Germany is still a subject of debate between many observers. Some believe that Nazi Germany, under the control of Adolf Hitler, possessed supernatural powers, and largely employed pseudo-science during the 1933-1945 period. However, some also hold that the above belief is just a mere speculation without any proven fact. Over the years, researchers have searched extensively for answers to some of the more mysterious activities associated with Nazi Germany.
+Nazi Germany invaded Russia (formerly the USSR) during the Second World War on June 22, 1941. At the time, the German army progressed deep into Russian territory, gaining ground close to the capital Moscow, before the Russians could counter-attack, eventually driving the Nazis back.
+During the Nazi occupation in Russia, in 1942, the Nazis built a secret military base around the Arctic, code-named “Schatzgraber” or “Treasure Hunter,” which was reportedly very instrumental in the war against Russia. The base was primarily used as a tactical weather station for planning the strategic movements of Nazi troops, warships and submarines. The base also housed eminent Nazi scientists, whom conducted many experiments to help progress a German win of the war. It was widely speculated at the time that the Nazis used the base to contact aliens or extraterrestrial beings. The controversial Ahnenerbe was even linked to the base. The Ahnenerbe was an institute in Nazi Germany. Responsible for researching archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race, it is rumored to have had heavy occult influences. Founded on July 1, 1935, by Heinrich Himmler, Herman Wirth and Richard Walther Darré, the Ahnenerbe later conducted experiments and launched expeditions in attempts to prove that mythological Nordic populations had once ruled the world.
+However, the Nazis abandoned the base in 1944 – a time when the Russian army began its offensive, pushing the Germans out of the country. According to a war-time story, supplies had dwindled to dangerously low levels, and the Nazi officers stationed at the base outpost were forced to kill and eat polar bear, which ultimately, was infected with trichinosis. This caused those stationed at the base to fall severely ill and eventually they required rescue by a German U-boat. Despite Russian authors telling the story of “Treasure Hunter,” some observers consider it a myth, doubting its existence.
+But Russian researchers have now announced that “Treasure Hunter” has been discovered, saying the base is on the island of Alexandra Land in the Arctic Circle, located 620 miles from the North Pole.
+A senior researcher at the Russian Arctic National Park, Evgeny Ermolov said in a statement announcing the discovery : “Before it was only known from written sources, but now we also have real proof.”",FAKE
+7735,Even Democratic Voters Don’t Trust Hillary,"
+ 
+
+ 
+Even the Democrats don’t trust Hillary. The stats are amazing and it goes to show that this election is not even close. The details are in the following video.
+ 
+
+ 
+P lease Donate to The Common Sense Show 
+ 
+PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US 
+
+ 
+
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.
+",FAKE
+2311,Federal Judge Overturns Nebraska Gay Marriage Ban,"U.S. District Judge Joseph Bataillon issued the ruling Monday, saying county clerks will be permitted to begin issuing gay marriage licenses on March 9.
+
+""[A]ll relevant state officials are ordered to treat same-sex couples the same as different sex couples in the context of processing a marriage license or determining the rights, protections, obligations or benefits of marriage,"" he wrote in the order.
+
+The Nebraska attorney general's office has already said it will appeal the judge's order. Attorney General Doug Peterson is confident the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals will grant the appeal.
+
+Bataillon has struck down the state's ban on gay marriage before; in 2005, the judge ruled the ban unconstitutional, but the Eight Circuit reversed his decision in July 2006.
+
+The news comes just after the state lifted a 20-year-old ban on gay people becoming licensed foster parents. The policy barred unmarried, unrelated adults who live together from fostering children. Included in the restriction were same-sex couples and people who identify as gay -- even those living without a partner.",REAL
+9077,"Comment on SJWs Outrage over Leonardo DiCaprio ""white Rumi"" role Unfounded, Iranian Explains Why by ztech","David Franzoni, the writer of Gladiator, announced that he wants to cast Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Rumi in an upcoming bio-pic about the medieval Persian poet . Franzoni has also suggested casting Robert Downey Jr. in the role of Rumi’s mentor and dear friend, Shams of Tabriz. White liberals, ‘people of color’ and others partial to de-colonial theory are at it again claiming that white people have misappropriated something – or in this case, someone – of their own. Hurling accusations of “whitewashing” at Franzoni and Hollywood, they are trending the hashtag #RumiWasntWhite . 
+In fact, Rumi was white. He was an ethnic Persian who wrote the vast majority of his world-renowned poetry in his native language. The Persians are the cultural-historically dominant subgroup of the ethnic and linguistic grouping of Iranian peoples, which also includes the native peoples of the Caucasus region (especially in Azerbaijan and Ossetia), the Kurds, Pashtuns, and Balochis among others. The so-called ‘Tajiks’ of Central Asia (present-day northern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and part of Uzbekistan) are simply Persians who have been given another name by 19th century British and Russian colonialists who schemed to colonize this area of Iran. 
+It is not just any area either. Known as “Khorasan” or sunrise land in Persian, this is where the majority of native Persian scientists and poets of the so-called ‘Islamic Golden Age’ hailed from. It is also Rumi’s birthplace. Stan means province in Persian. Afghanistan and the rest of the stans in that region are totally artificial nation-states, which is partly why they are so dysfunctional. The Persian spoken in the stans is referred to as “Dari” (Parsie Darbari or “Tajiki”) because it was the courtly (Darbari) language of the Crown (Taj). 
+The Persians and other Iranians never called their realm “the Persian Empire” or referred to their country as “Persia.” This was an ancient Greek designation that caught on in the West. When, in 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi asked Westerners to refer to his country by its proper name he meant to remind the West that “Iran” is shorthand for Iran Shahr, a middle Persian form of the ancient Persian Aryana Khashatra or “Aryan Imperium.” To this day, many natives of the part of Khorasan that Rumi hails from refer to their land as Aryana. The first recorded usage of the term “Aryan” is in the rock carved inscriptions of ancient Persian Emperors such as Darius and Xerxes, who used to sign their decrees: “I am a Persian, son of a Persian… an Aryan of Aryan lineage.” 
+These men were white and they established the most tolerant, humanitarian, and constructive form of government in pre-modern times, which at its zenith counted nearly 1 out of every 2 people on Earth among its subjects. I am not even counting the realms governed by Scythians and Sarmatians, northern Iranian tribes who refused the Empire, and rode freely in an area from the Ukraine to the Gobi. Their warrior women became the basis for Greek legends about the Amazons. The Persians and their northern cousins were phenotypically identical to modern Europeans, having all descended – ethnically and linguistically – from the same Indo-European or Caucasian community of prehistory. 
+It is only beginning with the catastrophic Arab invasion of Iran Shahr in the 7th century AD that Iran’s ethnic composition began to be forcibly altered. (The Hellenistic colonization of the Persian Empire did not have this effect, since the Greeks were fellow Aryans.) Consistent with their messenger’s mandate in the Quran, after burning libraries, mutilating art, and massacring urban populations, these half-savage desert tribesmen took to enslaving and selling Persian women at public markets. Two centuries of Persian insurgency, especially in the Azerbaijan and Mazandaran regions, ended in defeat. The Zoroastrian mystics who led this Khorramdinan (“those of the Joyous Religion”) insurgency – a continuation of ancient Persia’s Mazdakite sect – donned the cloak of Islam in order to survive. They were badly persecuted nonetheless, since the idea of esoteric (Bateni) interpretation (Zand) is declared heresy by the Quran itself – which insists that its legal injunctions are clear, perfect, and unalterable. These Batenis or Zandiqs were the nucleus of the Sufi movement whose epitomizing voice Rumi eventually becomes. 
+When he was born in 1207, Khorasan was still ethnically white. Some of the region’s illustrious scientists were forced to pen their treatises in Arabic, rather than in their native Persian, because their research was being commissioned by Arabs (who at first just tried to wipe out Persian science). However, Persian remained the language of poetry and the Persian poets of Khorasan, especially Ferdowsi, actually saved the Iranian national identity by maintaining the linguistic structure that enfolded an Aryan modality of thought within itself, and by fostering the kind of living tradition of ancient Indo-European lore that we see in the Shahnameh. The poets, and even the Iranian scientists forced to write in Arabic, effected a Persian Renaissance of sorts that both inspired and reinforced regional revolts that came to the brink of liberating large parts of Iran from the Arab Caliphate by the 11th century AD. 
+Then the Turks and Mongols poured in from Asia in the 12th and 13th centuries, respectively. During Rumi’s adolescence, the Mongol hordes rushed into Khorasan forcing his family to flee from Balkh in 1219 and head westwards across Iran, moving each time the Mongols advanced further. Entire cities were razed. Ultimately the Mongols would be responsible for a genocide of half – yes, half – of the Iranian population. The half that survived was subjected to plunder, rape, and forced miscegenation. Rumi ultimately wound up in Anatolia, which is where Mowlana Jalaluddin Balkhi picked up his nickname. Rum (pronounced Roum) is the Persian name for “Rome”, including the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium – so Rumi means “the Roman”. Konya, where Rumi settled, was hardly Turkish when he arrived there. 
+Easternmost Anatolia, the home of the Kurds, has always been ethnically and linguistically Iranian. This region, and the more central part of Anatolia in which Rumi’s family settled, had only been conquered by the Seljuq Turks (which the Ottomans broke off of later on) for a little over a century. It was a conquest as bloodthirsty as the Mongol one (in fact, the Turks and Mongols are ethnically related), the most catastrophic consequence of which was the miscegenation of the population of Azerbaijan – itself a Turkicized appellation for Azar Padegan or “Fire Stronghold”, that province of Iran in the Caucasus mountains that was thought to be the birthplace of Zarathustra (one reason why the insurgency against the Arab-Muslims was based there). From Baku to Tabriz, Azerbaijan was demographically white and it took centuries of Seljuq Turkish occupation to change this before Iranians re-conquered the area. So there is no reason whatsoever to think that Shams, the mentor from Tabriz that Rumi met in 1244, was other than a white man. He was certainly a native Persian speaker, and a newly arrived Seljuq Turk in Azerbaijan in those days would have spoken Turkish. 
+The worst thing about the Turkish and Mongol invasions was not that they represented a second wave of miscegenation in a white nation already under Arab occupation, it is that both of these Asian conquerors adopted an orthodox form of Islam. Largely nomadic and illiterate tribes, unlike the highly-civilized Persians, the Mongols and Mongoloid Turks felt at home in the worldview of the Quran. One wonders how Rumi’s mystical philosophy would have taken shape had he grown up in an Iran where the Persian Renaissance of the generation before him were to have continued. Iranians say, Masnavié Mowlavi ast Qorân be zabâné Pahlavi, meaning “the Mathnawi of Rumi is the Quran in Pahlavi.” The term Pahlavi refers to the middle Persian language of Pre-Islamic Iran, so that the saying suggests Rumi made out of Islam something tolerable to the Persian ethos. Of course, as I suggested above, Rumi only represents the culmination of this process, which I would describe as a kind of Sufi Stockholm Syndrome. A brutally colonized and terrorized population of ‘very understanding’ white folks come to identify with their hostage taker and begin to make excuses for him that are so good that he would never have been able to dream them up himself. So if there is any whitewashing going on, it is Rumi who whitewashed Islam. 
+Some of the less vile people who have jumped on the #rumiwasntwhite bandwagon have tried to say that his ethnicity really does not matter, since his message is for all mankind. The fact is that a “message for all mankind” (women included) is an Aryan idea in the first place, and a specifically Persian one at that. Ancient Greek writers and thinkers, like Herodotus and Xenophon, who lived under the Persian Empire knew that the opposition to slavery, religious tolerance, a humanitarian concern for the welfare of all peoples, and a Cosmopolitan openness to learning from other cultures were Persian ideals. They were grounded in the worship of Wisdom preached by Zarathustra and became state policy under Cyrus and Darius. This tradition survived the vicissitudes of centuries of history, influencing Roman Europe through Mithraism and guiding the statecraft of Khosrow Anoushiravan – one of the late great Persian Emperors in the century before the Arab-Muslim Conquest of Iran. There is an agenda to erasing this heritage: it allows de-colonial theorists to claim that only non-white people can be colonized, and to demonize white colonialism by excluding the benevolent Persian Empire from the history of the white world. Iran’s glorious history – that of Rumi’s folk – puts the lie to their claim that Caucasian superiority in science, technology, and the arts always came at the expense of exploited non-white peoples. 
+Despite Rumi’s best efforts to whitewash Islam, anyone who has seriously studied Islamic scripture and law knows – as he should have – that this is apostasy: “Love’s creed is separate from all religions: the creed and denomination of Lovers is God.” “Love’s valley is beyond all religions and cults… here there is no room for religions or cults.” What these verses sound like are the teachings of the Nizari Ismailis, better known as the Order of the Assassins, who actually did and still do claim that Rumi was secretly a preserver of their movement. The Nizaris adopted Persian as their liturgical language. They were the Sufis who remained truest to the Khorramdin teachings after the failed insurgency against the Arab invasion. In fact, they renewed the insurgency by waging a winning war against the Caliphate – until the Turks and Mongols descended on Iran. 
+#RumiWasWhite and so were all Persians and other Iranians before being colonized, genocided, raped, and plundered by Semitic Arabs and Asiatic Mongols and Turks – half-savage peoples who parasitically appropriated the greatness of Iranian (i.e. Aryan) Civilization in the name of Islam. 
+Besides even if Rumi wasn’t white, what about 100% white roles played by black actors? Why the hell do we have movies with black vikings? Why is the heck was Heimdall played by a black actor named Idris Elba in the Thor movie? Where is the uproar there? Of course there’s no uproar because there is an agenda in which whites are labeled “evil” no matter what they do.",FAKE
+1176,"Trump, Sanders Crush the Competition in New Hampshire Primaries","Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Donald Trump gave victory speeches Tuesday night in New Hampshire after winning their parties vote in the state's primary.
+
+Each took the top spot after second-place finishes in the Iowa caucuses. It's a boost for their standing in a highly competive election season.
+
+ 
+
+Trump's first victory of the 2016 White House race means he's no longer a political rookie but the front-runner for his party's presidential nomination.
+
+CBN News' David Brody will share his insights on the outcome of the New Hampshire primary on Wednesday's The 700 Club.
+
+Trump started out his speech by thanking his wife, family and other supporters.
+
+""We are going to make America great again, but we're going to do it the old-fashioned way,"" Trump said. ""The world is going to respect us again, believe me.""
+
+""We're going to make the deals for the American people,"" he said. Trump went on to talk about repealing Obamacare, making trade deals, rebuilding military, creating jobs and protecting the borders.
+
+Dr. Paul Bonicelli, professor of government at Regent University, breaks down the numbers from last night’s New Hampshire primary. Watch below:
+
+""We are going to make our country strong again. We are going to start winning again. We are going to make America so great again. Maybe greater than ever before.""
+
+John Kasich grabbed the second spot, with 16 percent of the vote.
+
+""There's something that's going on, that I'm not sure that anyone can quite understand. There's magic in the air with this campaign,"" Kasich told supporters. ""We see it as an opportunity for all of us, and I mean all of us, to be involved with something that is bigger than our lives.""
+
+Cruz, Bush and Rubio had a tight outcome, with Cruz narrowly winning third place.
+
+The overcrowded GOP party shrank after the Iowa caucus, and more candidates could end their campaign following the evening's results.
+
+Ben Carson, bringing in only 2 percent of the votes, is already on his way to South Carolina to prepare for the next round, his campaign team reiterating that he has not dropped out of the race.
+
+Chris Christie won't reveal whether his campaign will continue. When asked what place he needs to come in at a minimum to continue he responded, ""I don't get into that stuff. Next!"" he said, calling on the next reporter.
+
+ 
+
+And the win for Sanders completes his rise from presidential long shot to legitimate challenger for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton.
+
+""When we stand together, we win. Thank you, New Hampshire!"" Sanders celebrated on Twitter.
+
+""Nine months ago we began our campaign here in New Hampshire,"" he said. ""And tonight, what appears to be a record-breaking turnout, because of a huge voter turnout - we won!""
+
+Sanders encouraged his supporters to maintain their excitement and commitment for the November election.
+
+Hillary Clinton used her concession speech to rally her supporters. She referenced equal pay for women, racism, LGBTQ rights, and poverty.
+
+""When people anywhere in America are held back by injustice that demands action,"" she said, admitting she has work to do to win the millennial vote. ""Even if they are not supporting me, I support them.""
+
+It was a higher turnout than in 2008, and one thing voters on both sides agreed on in exit polls was they feel betrayed by the government and their parties.",REAL
+2744,"Monica Lewinsky’s latest comeback, fueled by media remorse","Monica is having a media moment—courtesy of the same press pack that once pilloried her.
+
+When it comes to Lewinsky, apparently, there is some journalistic guilt coming to the fore.
+
+David Letterman has expressed remorse for mocking Monica, saying it was a “sad human situation.” Bill Maher says, “I gotta tell you, I literally feel guilty.”
+
+New Republic writer Rebecca Traister says: “Whether it’s guilt, or sophistication, or thinking a little harder about sexual power dynamics, I think people have started to think: ‘Oh right, she probably does have a right to tell her story. And that’s a good thing.’ ”
+
+These observations come from a New York Times piece in which Lewinsky shrewdly allowed reporter Jessica Bennett to follow her around, producing a largely sympathetic profile timed to her TED talk.
+
+At 41, says the piece, “she is likable, funny and self-deprecating. She is also acutely intelligent, something for which she doesn’t get much credit. But she is also stuck in a kind of time warp over which she has little control…
+
+“She is also very, very nervous. She is worried about being taken advantage of, worried her words will be misconstrued, worried reporters will rehash the past.”
+
+But, of course, Monica herself has to rehash the past in order to get people to pay attention to her future. That’s what she has to merchandise.
+
+I’ve long felt that the media crucified Monica for her mistakes as a young White House intern, while being more than happy to resuscitate the boss who took advantage of her, Bill Clinton, as a global statesman. After dropping out of sight for a long time in the wake of Clinton’s impeachment, she keeps reintroducing herself to the public, with a Vanity Fair essay and other media forays. Lewinsky is smartly trying to become a crusader against cyberbullying, even though her humiliation took place in the pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter era.
+
+In the TED talk, she said:
+
+“Now I admit I made mistakes — especially wearing that beret — but the attention and judgment that I received — not the story, but that I personally received — was unprecedented. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo and, of course, ‘that woman.’ I was known by many, but actually known by few. I get it. It was easy to forget ‘that woman’ was dimensional and had a soul…
+
+“In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity. … I lost my sense of self,” Lewinsky continues. “When this happened to me, 17 years ago, there was no name for it. Now we call it cyber-bullying.”
+
+It does seem like getting trashed and humiliated is a daily occurrence now, at least for people in the public eye.
+
+Jonathan Capehart, the black Washington Post columnist, writes a brave piece concluding he was wrong about Ferguson and that the hands up/don’t shoot narrative was a lie. He gets slimed from the left on Twitter, with people calling him a “house Negro” and accusing him of trying to get white folks to like him. For those who disagree, he had to be attacked as a racial traitor.
+
+Ashley Judd was trash-talking about sports when she was flooded with online rape threats and misogynistic messages.
+
+Judd, describing herself as a survivor of rape and sexual assault, is fighting back.
+
+""I read in vivid language the various ways, humiliating and violent, in which my genitals, vaginal and anal, should be violated, shamed, exploited and dominated,"" she writes. Judd is threatening to sue her online harassers.
+
+So this is very fertile territory for Monica Lewinsky. She is a flawed messenger, to be sure. She is using the issue for personal rebranding, to be sure.
+
+But it’s a worthy cause, better than peddling handbags. And perhaps Monica finally has the guilty media on her side.
+
+Click for more from Media Buzz
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+5732,7 Halloween Treats That Trick Children Into Cleaning,"It can be toilsome getting children into one cleaning habit. Nevertheless, there are seven that will show off the splendors of the treats and tricks exclusive to Halloween. Children of all ages can help clean up the house every day, unknowingly.
+7 Halloween Treats That Trick Children Into Cleaning:
+1. LolliPop Ghosts You will need:
+Lollipops Fast food napkin Roll of black ribbon Black marker This is a resourceful way to recycle fast food napkins. To make lollipop ghosts for Halloween, fold one at a time over an unopened lollipop, tie black ribbon beneath the candy and draw two eyes and a mouth to get a unique ghost expression.
+2. Spooky Village Deluxe You will need:
+Empty Milk Cartons (the cardboard kind) Empty Cereal Boxes Black and White Construction Paper Stapler Scissors Cereal boxes and milk cartons can quickly be turned into a Spooky Village background. Cut the cereal box in half and gluing black construction paper to either side causing a dark and gloomy effect. Do this by coating washed and dried milk cartons with glue, white construction paper can be used to cover all logos and wording on the containers. Cut-outs of rectangles, squares and triangles can be used to the houses for the roof, windows, and doors. Excess pieces of the construction paper can be transformed into haunting ghosts throughout the spooky village.
+3. Pumpkin Jar Lights You will need:
+Orange paint Paper plate Newspaper Candles Empty Jars Black marker Empty jars sitting in the recycling bin can become resourceful Halloween light jars. Begin placing the orange paint on the paper plate. Then roll the jars in the paint, then place on paper to dry. Once dry, insert a candle, and add slits for eyes in black magic marker.
+4. Soda Can Mummies You will need:
+Soda cans Masking Tape Black magic marker Rinse soda cans thoroughly before setting out to dry, then wrap layers of masking tape around the whole can covering all designs, lastly add eyes with the black magic marker.
+5. Halloween Eggs You will need:
+Eggs Large pot Bowls Food Coloring Assorted colored markers Boil eggs in a large pot of water for 30 minutes, let cool in cold water for 10-15 minutes, dry off eggs with a paper towel, then dip eggs into bowls of food coloring for the desired coloration. Lay eggs on a napkin to dry, once dry, add scary designs using assorted colored markers.
+6. Monster Leaf-Filled Bags You will need:
+A Rake Leaves Halloween trash bags or Black trash bags Whiteout Children will not even realize they are cleaning up the yard when gathering leaves and stuffing them into Halloween decorated or black trash bags. Whiteout can accent the eyes and mouth on the black trash bags. Tie a knot in all bags once filled, and place them throughout the front and back yards for decoration.
+7. Halloween Tye-Dye T-Shirts You will need:
+Old T-shirt (stained okay) Food coloring Circular aluminum pan Water Fill the bottom of the aluminum pan with water, just to cover the surface, and then roll the t-shirt up and bend to fit into the pan. Apply desired food colors in swirls above the shirt. Next spin the pan and t-shirt by placing dominant hand in the middle of the pan, moving hand in circular motion. Count to 20 and unroll shirt to hang and dry.
+All seven treats that can trick children into cleaning during Halloween may be store bought or substituted with household items inexpensively.
+By Jhayla D. Tyson
+Edited by Cathy Milne
+Sources:
+CNN: Halloween Crafts Made From Household Items
+Times Leader: Be Scary but Safe this Halloween
+Top & Feature Image Courtesy of U.S. Army Garrison Red Cloud’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
+First Inline Image Courtesy of Alice’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
+Second Inline Image Courtesy of Greg Goebel’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License crafts , halloween , recycling , spot",FAKE
+487,A boss often can fire you while you're hospitalized,"SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Five days — that's how many sick days Tom McLaughlin took to lose his job at a carton manufacturer.
+
+McLaughlin was in the hospital for three of those days, being treated for a potentially life-threatening flare-up of an infection in two sores on his right leg.
+
+His doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., pleaded last week with Bell Inc. to keep McLaughlin, saying his medical care was necessary. He had ignored her advice and returned to work once already in April, even as his daughter pleaded with him to stay in the hospital.
+
+It was no use. The 49-year-old was two months shy of his one-year anniversary with the company — too green to qualify for Family and Medical Leave Act benefits. Bell told him he had to go, that he didn't quality for medical leave.
+
+""Our world fell apart in a week,"" said his wife, Kristi McLaughlin, who works part-time as a pastor at a small Mitchell, S.D., congregation about an hour west of here. ""He was the primary income. He was the primary breadwinner. He provided the insurance. We're looking now at food stamps. We're looking at moving.""
+
+The McLaughlins' situation is not rare.
+
+Under state and federal law, few legal protections are ironclad for employees who miss work for illness. If attendance is deemed essential, employers have little obligation to extend leave to employees on the job less than a year.
+
+Bell's chief executive, Ben Arndt, would confirm only that Tom McLaughlin had been a night supervisor for the Sioux Falls-based folding packaging manufacturer.
+
+""We respect our employee's privacy, and our policy is to not discuss employee's personal matters with anyone other than the employee,"" Arndt wrote in email. ""We would encourage anyone who can meet the requirements of an open position to apply or to re-apply.""
+
+Those who work for companies with 50 or more employees can apply for unpaid time off under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, but they qualify only after a year on the job. Hospital stays count, but not every sort of illness does.
+
+If an illness qualifies, a covered employee is eligible for job-protected unpaid leave of up to 12 weeks.
+
+Even with a doctor's note — or call, in this case — employers are fully within their rights to terminate an ill worker go if that person hasn't been on the job a year. An employer in South Dakota doesn't need a specific reason to fire an employee, a legal concept called termination at will.
+
+South Dakota has had a constitutional amendment that prohibits joining a union as a condition of employment, what supporters call a right-to-work law, since 1946, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Union contracts often provide additional protections for ill workers; 6% of the state's workers are represented by unions and 5% are members.
+
+Only Connecticut, California, the District of Columbia and Massachusetts have state- and districtwide paid sick leave laws, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families, a Washington-based nonprofit. At least 18 cities also have such ordinances, and California's and Massachusetts' laws aren't effective until July.
+
+It's unclear which, if any other, states require employers to provide unpaid time off for illness. So how a worker who's sick is treated largely depends on where the person works.
+
+Those who believe they've been discriminated against because of a disability, as Tom McLaughlin does, can file a complaint with the state, i.e. the South Dakota Department of Labor and Regulation.
+
+Even then, the hurdles to overcome for an outcome in a worker's favor are significant, said James Marsh, the department's labor and management division director. Claims about job loss because of illness or disability make up about a fifth of the claims each year.
+
+""We get calls about that every day,"" he said.
+
+Only a fifth of all claims are substantiated. Employers can terminate someone who is disabled because of poor attendance if attendance is considered an essential job function.
+
+Marsh gave an example of a police officer who has to be on the beat.
+
+""If they're not showing up, they're not fulfilling an essential job requirement,"" Marsh said.
+
+If South Dakota's lone claims investigator finds discrimination, which takes about six months, the resulting document can be used to file a civil lawsuit or a claim with the state's Human Rights Commission.
+
+""It's the difference between a cop pulling you over for speeding and a judge deciding you've committed a crime,"" he said. ""We're the cops. … You're not going to be guilty of discrimination by virtue of the fact that we've found probable cause.""
+
+The state isn't the only avenue for claims of discrimination, of course. Federal discrimination claims about sex, race, age and disability go through the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.
+
+If the federal agency finds that a company has not made reasonable accommodations, the EEOC can take action itself, fining employers for a violation regardless of potential lawsuits. Mediation is possible through the EEOC, as well.
+
+Tom McLaughlin believes that he was discriminated against but realizes that proving it could be an uphill slog.
+
+The company told Tom McLaughlin that he needed to be there on the floor as a supervisor, he said. But Tom McLaughlin knew that Bell had been without a night supervisor for years before he started in June.
+
+Operations at the packaging-materials plant had been re-worked with him in the night supervisor's role, McLaughlin said. But the work had been done without one.
+
+""They said, 'Our hands are tied. We don't have any choice,' "" Tom McLaughlin said. ""I said, 'Bell has a choice.' They didn't have much to say about that.""
+
+Even if he had a job, he could not return to work tomorrow. Even with the hospital care, the infection is nowhere near gone.
+
+He wears a wound vacuum over his shoulder that pulls fluid at a steady drip through a tube connected to the black-bandaged, plastic-wrapped divots in his leg.
+
+A nurse comes to empty the bag three times a week. Antibiotics are pumped into his arm daily.
+
+He can't work on light duty for at least a few more weeks, and full healing is at least three months and thousands of dollars away.
+
+He wants to work. He just can't, not yet.
+
+""I can't remember the last time I haven't been able to work,"" Tom McLaughlin said.",REAL
+10088,Why Comey Reopened the Hillary Investigation (The real reasons),"Posted 10/31/2016 10:54 am by PatriotRising with 0 comments 
+This last Friday it became public record that FBI Director James Comey reopened the Hillary Clinton email server investigation after repeatedly testifying before Congress and the world up to last July that he’d closed the case , after in his words not finding sufficient evidence of “any criminal wrongdoing ” to indict her in spite of her four years as Secretary of State egregiously breaching our national security , committing obstruction of justice and willful tampering with evidence, deleting 30,000 emails after receiving a court subpoena constituting destruction of evidence, not to mention repeatedly engaging in perjury before Congress and the FBI. 
+
+But obviously, a federal investigation still in process in late June never stopped serial rapist-crime boss Bill Clinton’s illegal ambush at the Phoenix airport of Comey’s boss US Attorney General Loretta Lynch “clearing” the way for Hillary to proceed without consequence to be anointed as the next US figurehead puppet president by the ruling elite. Because it’s so blatantly obvious to the entire world that Hillary is guilty as sin, Comey’s whitewash didn’t go over well with either Americans or longtime FBI agents who reacted angrily to Comey’s over-the-top corruption. Subsequently, in recent months Comey has had a virtual mutiny on his hands as in the FBI boss has lost all credibility, respect, and moral authority. 
+
+A former federal attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova spelled it all out in a WMAL radio interview last Friday just hours after the news was released that Comey had sent a letter informing Congress that the case is being reopened. DiGenova said that with an open revolt brewing inside the FBI, Comey was forced to go public on Friday with reopening the investigation. The former DC attorney added that the FBI investigators discovered more emails on a phone confiscated from the former New York Congressman and separated husband Anthony Weiner that also included his wife and longtime Hillary’s right-hand woman Huma Abedin’s communications that allegedly bear pertinent relevance to the Hillary case. Funny how things have a karmic way of coming full circle – the Clintons first introduced Weiner and Abedin 15 years ago and they married a half dozen years ago. 
+
+In a separate FBI investigation involving Weiner’s alleged sexting messages with a 15-year old minor , the phone in question was handed over to the FBI. The investigating teams of both the Weiner and Hillary cases compared notes and apparently additional emails not already issued by WikiLeaks or already in FBI possession recently came to light on Weiner’s phone . The legions of rank and file FBI agents were already fuming over Comey’s complete ethical and legal lapses in his choice not to indict Hillary. Joe diGenova believes that FBI personnel forced Comey’s hand to reopen the investigation after giving him the ultimatum that if he failed to do so, the FBI defiantly would. According to diGenova, this latest plot twist only proves that: 
+
+The original investigation was not thorough, and that it was an incompetent investigation. 
+
+Otherwise, had a real investigation been conducted, that Weiner phone used by both Anthony and Huma would have been picked up by the FBI and its contents thoroughly scrutinized long before now. 
+
+In addition to stating the obvious, that the higher-up feds had already made the decision to not consequence Hillary for her crimes, speculating on why that phone was not already submitted to the FBI as evidence, the former DC attorney concluded: 
+
+There could be one explanation: Huma Abedin may have denied that any other phone existed, and if she did, she committed a felony. She lied to the FBI just like General Cartwright , and if she did, she’s dead meat, and Comey knows it, and there’s nothing he can do about it. 
+
+Finally, diGenova dropped one more bombshell in Friday’s interview. An inside source has revealed to him that the laptops belonging to key Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, both wrongly granted immunity , were not destroyed after all as previously reported, but have been secretly kept intact by investigating FBI agents refusing to destroy incriminating evidence as part of the in-house whitewash. Additionally like their boss, Hillary’s aides also sent classified material using private servers. On top of that, longtime aide Cheryl Mills on multiple occasions has perjured herself lying under oath for the Clinton crime family, tasked with “cleaning up” (aka covering up) their countless scandals over the past several decades. Indeed the whole Clinton entourage not already “mysteriously” winding up in the growing Clinton dead pool are all unindicted criminals protected by the corrosively corrupt DC cronyism where backroom deals (a la Bill’s airport ambush) are brokered based on whatever dirt’s been gathered and used as bargaining blackmail chips against all parties involved. That’s how the Washington crowd stays immune from any and all accountability as well as stays alive. Violate that crime syndicate code of conduct and you lose your life as more recent victims earlier this year have. 
+
+In a “leaked” memo to his FBI that surfaced on Fox Friday night, Comey outlined his reasons for reopening the case in light of the new information the director believes would have ultimately been leaked to Congress and the public anyway. So in full damage control/CYA mode, the beleaguered director now going public really had no choice in the matter. His underlings were chomping at the bit to both out and oust him. In an obvious attempt to weakly claim some moral high ground, Comey wrote in his memo: 
+
+I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. 
+
+Though his leadership and character are perceived by the vast majority of both FBI personnel as well as American citizens to presently lay in ruin as a pathetically shameful stain and humiliating joke on both the FBI organization and Washington in general, James Comey appears to be feebly attempting to save his own career and reputation for appearing now to “come clean.” But make no mistake, his moral turpitude displayed throughout this Hillary debacle from early 2015 to now has over-exposed him as a total lackey and fraud, so at this late stage of the game, redemption is not even an option. But the criminal misconduct, rampant corruption and diabolical evil committed by those at the highest puppet levels of federal power, and especially the elite puppet masters controlling them, their sins produce far more devastating consequences than this morally lacking man in the middle of this latest controversy. 
+
+Because there is no way that the FBI will properly conclude this part 2 of the Hillary investigation saga before the November 8 th election, Hillary, and her Democrats are predictably crying foul , demanding that the FBI immediately disclose what it has, which of course is a moot point that won’t happen. It seems highly unlikely that the email texts from Abedin and Weiner found on his phone would not contain clear criminal evidence that implicates Hillary. Since Hillary was the globalist choice after Obama was selected in 2008, it seems unlikely that the puppet masters would not permit this latest development to even occur. But then perhaps the ruling elite is pulling the plug on Hillary, concluding that she simply carries too much liability baggage with her deteriorating health condition and never-ending scandals, maybe the globalists are rethinking an alternative replacement like her obnoxiously aggressive VP candidate, the Jesuit-trained and educated Tim Kaine. 
+
+That said, there are some cynics who believe that this recent odd turn is the last ditch desperado attempt being staged to overturn Trump winning by a landslide. This conjectured scenario goes something like this: a few days prior to the election the FBI will once again “clear” Hillary of all charges. This, in turn, would offer her the last minute much needed boost being able to cash in on her worn out persecution complex , plagued forever by her “right wing conspiracy” theory against the “much maligned” woman of destiny. 
+
+In response to all her scandals, Hillary’s M.O. has always been to falsely blame some villainous sinister force. This year it’s been Putin hacking into her emails, and Trump, Putin, and Assange colluding and plotting behind her back. She’s always been as paranoid as Richard Nixon , attempting to deflect the heat she draws from her own skullduggery lies by constantly pointing fingers to externalize blame onto others. It’s a deeply rooted pathological complex that certain tightly screwed sociopaths possess. 
+
+This latest sudden turn of events obviously has James Comey incurring the wrath of Hillary Democrats as well as the Justice Department. By disclosing the reopened investigation so close to the election date that undoubtedly casts some influence on the potential outcome, Comey is defying his AG boss while clearly violating DOJ written policy . Lynch herself even tried to quash Comey’s letter to Congress. But as diGenova alluded, by Comey’s own past misdeeds (and those of his boss and Obama as well), the FBI director placed himself between this rock and a hard place by his own slipshod, half-ass probe failing to acquire Weiner’s phone the first time around. 
+
+The entire sordid affair of this year’s totally rigged political election – pre-fixed in Hillary’s favor – blatantly reveals to America the gross misnomer of the US “justice” system being two-tiered, one for elitist crime cabal bosses like Hillary and the other for the rest of us 99% no longer protected in a totalitarian police state by our once rule of law the US Constitution. Regardless of what happens in the future, the truth genie’s already been let out of the bag, and for eyes open enough to see, it’s floating in the Washington cesspool of filth, debauchery and deception regularly perpetrated by our “entrusted perps” we have as our so called leaders. 
+
+Moreover, this year’s unending batches of Wiki-leaked DNC/Hillary emails and Project Veritas undercover campaign videos confirm that the entire US political, as well as economic system, is morally and financially bankrupt, irreparably broken and in need of complete overhaul. Voter fraud and election fraud are rampant. Soros funded electronic voting machines that are preprogrammed to vote for Hillary are operating in 16 key battleground states. America’s internal house now is in total disarray, badly in need of a deep cleaning purge like never before. Mainstream media is strongly biased against Trump in its blind support for Hillary . As Secretary of State she treasonously sold out our nation, placing us all at high security risk and under foreign interest control at the hands of high rolling bidders so she and her fat cats can get richer as fellow partners-in-crime from places like Saudi Arabia and Israel, destroying our once sovereign country while aiding, abetting, financing and supporting our enemies the global terrorists around the world. She helped create ISIS and plans world war against Russia, China and Iran. The traitors in our government and their globalist puppet masters – the Rothschilds, Rockefellers , the Bushes and Clintons all need to be rounded up, imprisoned and tried at The Hague for both treason and their endless crimes against humanity. 
+The Best of Joachim Hagopian 
+Joachim Hagopian [ ] is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at http://empireexposed.blogspot.com . Previous article by Joachim Hagopian: Another US False Flag? Do you enjoy reading Patriot Rising?",FAKE
+9908,Comment on Fury as German primary school ‘forces’ children to chant ‘Allahu Akbar’ in Muslim prayer by Dr. Eowyn,"Posted on October 28, 2016 by DCG | 2 Comments 
+Ain’t multiculturalism grand? 
+From Daily Express : The father of the pupil at the girl’s primary school in German ski resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen discovered that his daughter had been forced to learn the Islamic prayer when he discovered a handout she had been given. 
+He claimed she had been “forced” by teachers to memorise the Islamic chants and forwarded the handout to Austrian news service unsertirol24. 
+The handout read: “Oh Allah, how perfect you are and praise be to you. Blessed is your name, and exalted is your majesty. There is no God but you.” 
+It had been given to the girl during a lesson in “ethics” at the Bavarian school. 
+Headteacher Gisela Herl did not confirm the incident when questioned, but said the school would issue a written statement detailing its position in the coming week. 
+The incident comes just weeks after parents complained to German newspaper Hessian Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA) that their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” to accommodate the “diverse cultures” of other pupils. The Sara Nussbaum House daycare centre in Kassel refused to put up a Christmas tree, tell Christmas stories or celebrate Christmas in general because it said only a minority of pupils were Christian. 
+A spokesman for Kassel explained: “There will be no Christmas celebrations, in the strictest sense. Because the majority of children at this kindergarten are not Christian the festival will not be celebrated in the way that it is at other schools.” 
+Migrants now outnumber native children at many schools in Germany as the country has been inundated with migrants in recent years. More than one million migrants are estimated to have arrived in Germany during the last year alone. 
+The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees estimates that another 200,000 people will apply for asylum in 2017. 
+DCG",FAKE
+3637,"Rieder: Charlie Hebdo goes on, and that matters","Charlie Hebdo will not go away. And in the wake of unspeakably hideous tragedy, that's very good news.
+
+The attack Wednesday that killed 12 members of the staff, including editorial director Stephane Charbonnier, was bad enough. Allowing the thugs who carried out the massacre to kill the French satirical weekly would have been catastrophic.
+
+Despite the deaths of most of its senior journalists, the show will go on, Richard Malka, the paper's lawyer, told Le Monde. And the newspaper plans to print 1 million copies, a figure that dwarfs its usual print run of 60,000.
+
+In an interview on French television reported by the Guardian, Patrick Pelloux, a doctor who also writes for the paper, put his finger on why this decision is essential.
+
+""It's very hard,"" he said. ""We are all suffering, with grief, with fear, but we will do it anyway, because stupidity will not win.""
+
+If Charlie Hebdo were simply to go away, he said, the death of his colleagues would have been ""for nothing.""
+
+Charlie Hebdo stirred up controversy with its irreverent, sometimes crass take on the world. It particularly offended Muslims with its treatment of the prophet Mohammed.
+
+Extremist zealots, not known for their senses of humor, hope to control the conversation through fear. Whether it's shooting up Paris newspaper offices, beheading journalists in the Middle East or ruthlessly and relentlessly persecuting reporters and editors in despot-ruled nations, the goal is the same: Kill the messengers and make the message go away.
+
+But it can't.
+
+The pen is mightier than the sword, the saying goes. But it certainly doesn't always seem that way. The power of evil people who kill without conscience can make the pen (or the keyboard) seem frail indeed, completely overmatched.
+
+Years back, giving a commencement address at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, humorist Gene Weingarten brandished a mammoth scabbard and a tiny pen. Gene was on to something.
+
+But the way truth continues to emerge is that there is often someone to pick up the shield of the slain colleague. Despite the sharply escalating anger of covering international flashpoints, for example, journalists continue to bear the enormous risks.
+
+In Casablanca, Victor Laszlo (played by Paul Henreid) talks about why he believes the Nazis will never prevail: ""And what if you track down these men and kill them, what if you killed all of us? From every corner of Europe, hundreds, thousands would rise up to take our places. Even Nazis can't kill that fast.""
+
+I can't say I'm quite as sanguine as Victor was. But I'm very glad to see that Charlie Hebdo will go on.",REAL
+4441,Obama will walk away from Iran talks if no inspections,"WASHINGTON — President Obama said Sunday that his administration will walk away from negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program unless the United States can verify that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.
+
+""If we cannot verify that they are not going to obtain a nuclear weapon— that there's a breakout period so that even if they cheated we would be able to have enough time to take action — if we don't have that kind of deal, then we're not going to take it,"" the president said in an interview onCBS' Face the Nation.
+
+""If there's no deal,"" Obama said, ""then we walk away.""
+
+The United States and its allies have until March 24 to reach an agreement with Iran. Obama wants to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons while still allowing the country to enrich uranium to use for energy production.
+
+""Over the next month or so, we're going to be able to determine whether or not their system is able to accept what would be an extraordinarily reasonable deal if in fact, as they say, they are only interested in peaceful nuclear programs,"" Obama told correspondent Bill Plante. ""And if we have unprecedented transparency in that system, if we are able to verify that in fact they are not developing weapons systems, then there's a deal to be had, but that's going to require them to accept the kind of verification and constraints on their program that so far, at least, they have not been willing to say yes to.""
+
+He said talks with Iran, which have been going on for more than a year, have not cost the United States anything. Iran has been abiding by an interim agreement not to advance its nuclear program, the president said.
+
+""We're not losing anything through these talks,"" Obama said.
+
+Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also appearing on Face the Nation, said he and Obama have the same ultimate goal in trying to ensure that Iran does't develop nuclear weapons. But Netanyahu said he doesn't trust that inspections will prevent the Iranians from cheating and developing weapons.
+
+""I do not trust inspections with totalitarian regimes,"" Netanyahu said. ""What I'm suggesting is that you contract Iran's nuclear program, so there's less to inspect.""
+
+Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress last Tuesday, warning U.S. lawmakers against a deal with Iran.
+
+The Senate must weigh in on whatever deal is reached, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said.
+
+""The Iranians are fomenting trouble in Syria, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen,"" McConnell said on Face the Nation. ""All over the Middle East, they're on the march. They've had enhanced influence in Iraq. We can't ignore all of their other behavior in looking at the potential nuclear deal. What we do know about the deal is it looks like it will leave the (nuclear) infrastructure in place with one of the worst regimes in the world.""
+
+McConnell said he is working to put together a veto-proof majority to support a measure giving Congress the authority to approve or disapprove of any deal.
+
+Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., agreed that Congress has a role in whatever deal may be reached.
+
+""Congress passed the sanctions itself, so Congress has very much an interest in the sanctions,"" Schumer said in a separate Face the Nation interview. ""I pushed that it shouldn't be done before there's an agreement...but after that, yes, Congress has a right to weigh in and I support it.""",REAL
+3211,The 2016 Republican field might be the most diverse ever — for either party,"The addition of Carly Fiorina (not a white man) and Ben Carson (not a white man) to a Republican 2016 field that already includes Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul means that the 2016 Republican field will likely be the most diverse from either party since at least 1992. Given how the country has diversified -- and given how many non-white-men are already in the GOP field -- it's likely that the current class is the most diverse ever. With one caveat.
+
+We pulled data on the major presidential contenders from each election since Bill Clinton first won the presidency. What constitutes a presidential contender is admittedly subjective, so we focused (but not exclusively) on those who actually made it onto ballots and those who won delegates. Giving us this:
+
+For 2016, we included a number of people who aren't yet actual candidates, including Martin O'Malley on the Democratic side and Republicans Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal. (Why didn't we include Trump? Because: Who is that? Who is ""Trump""? Also.) Those likely candidates are the faded icons on the chart below.
+
+Even once we add in all of those mostly white-male Republican maybes, the party's 2016 field is the most diverse on either side. One more white male, though, and the balance tips to the 2008 Democrats, with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson in a smaller field. (In terms of the sheer number of non-white men, the giant 2016 GOP field will be hard to beat.) There's only one non-white woman on our chart: 2004 Democrat Carol Moseley Braun.
+
+Since 1990, the percentage of the country that is white has dropped from more than 80 percent to just above 70 percent, according to Census Bureau data. That increased diversity is reflected in the candidates that the parties field. We'll note, though, that the percentage of women in America has always been a bit above 50 percent, but the percentage of women that have run for president since 1992 has been below 10 percent.
+
+Which is something that at least one of this year's candidates will probably point out.",REAL
+1179,Donald Trump may be showing us the future of right-wing politics,"Pundits and politicians have been shocked by the Trump phenomenon, startled that so many Americans could be so enthusiastic about his anti-democratic style proposals.
+
+But Trump is not that original. His actual proposals are in keeping with longstanding trends in U.S. history and society, with the rejection and nativism that have erupted after each immigration wave. His style is reminiscent of populist and fascist leaders who’ve succeeded both in Europe and Latin America during periods of economic stress, including such recent champions as Hugo Chávez and Silvio Berlusconi, authoritarians who elevated themselves and their supporters rather than building party structures or democratic institutions.
+
+Some observers believe – or, perhaps, hope — that Trump’s followers misunderstand or don’t believe in what he represents. They’re wrong. We will explain.
+
+The Trump movement cannot be dismissed as one of frustrated moderates
+
+Some observers, including President Obama, suggest that his voters are misguided. Here in the Monkey Cage, Doug Ahler and David Broockman argued that Trump is a textbook example of an ideological moderate. Still others portray Trump followers as working-class outcasts of the changing economy that see his candidacy as a way to channel their frustrations. And many U.S. pundits—such as George Packer in The New Yorker—explain all this by saying that voters on left and right are “angry” with Washington, and that both Trump and Sanders represent a new wave of populism.
+
+But Trump and Sanders must not be conflated. Sanders wants to politicize inequality. Trump, rather, is advocating for anti-politics, by which we mean that Trump’s language, and his followers’ celebration of his speeches, primarily express a rejection of politics in a democratic key. Trump’s stance represents the antithesis of Sanders’s call for political change. Trump’s narrative insists that he is above the fray of politics. This is, of course, an ideological and political claim. Returning America to national and international anti-democratic traditions it is just a different kind of politics.
+
+And Trump’s followers explicitly agree with what he says. In December, seven out of 10 republicans believed that Trump “tells it like it is.” As Sarah Palin suggested when she endorsed Trump in Iowa, Trump stands against politics as usual as represented by “establishment candidates” who are “wearing political correctness like a suicide vest. And enough is enough.” While the establishment hears random insults, his followers hear a list of the enemies of a homogeneous America.
+
+Many studies have revealed the link between resentment toward blacks and immigrants, on the one hand, and support for Trump on the other. In other, words, his supporters like Trump not despite his anti-democratic qualities, but precisely because of them. His campaign rallies often include incidents of physical violence against perceived outsiders. At a rally in Las Vegas, according to NBC News, one man shouted “Sieg heil.”
+
+We believe racism and charismatic leadership bring Trump close to the fascist equation but he might be better described as post-fascist, which is to say populist.
+
+From our research, let’s take a definition of populist post-fascism. This is a political style which has an extremely sacralizing understanding of politics. The leader understands politics as a theology in which he or she is the only who knows what is best for the nation. Populists consider people as formed by those who follow a unique vertical leadership; political antagonists are conceived as enemies who are potential or actual  traitors to the nation.
+
+Populists want leaders to be charismatic embodiments of the voice and desires of the nation as a whole. They argue for a strong executive and the discursive, and often practical, dismissal of the legislative and judicial branches of government. Toward that end, they engage in radical nationalism and emphasize popular culture, as opposed to other forms of culture that do not represent “national thought.” Finally, populism is an authoritarian form of electoral democracy that nonetheless rejects dictatorial forms of government.
+
+Modern populism arose from the defeat of fascism, as a novel post-fascist attempt to bring back the fascist experience to the democratic path, creating in turn an authoritarian form of democracy that would stress strong leaders and caudillos such as General Juan Perón in Argentina and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
+
+In populism, political democracy is strained but never eradicated, as it had been with fascism. Modern post-fascism pushes democracy to its limits but, generally, without breaking it. Trump’s vision of America is the latest example of this attempt to redefine democratic theory and practice.
+
+Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Trump does not have a real party. He wants to be the Republican candidate, but party officials and ideologues reject him. In contrast, fascist leaders were often founding members of movements and then emerged as their leaders.
+
+As we mentioned earlier, Trump’s leadership is more akin to that of Hugo Chávez and Silvio Berlusconi. While Chávez – who started his own government reality show — invoked a vague ideological platform to gain power, in practice he centralized decision-making, attacked freedom of speech and dismantled the division of powers, always by invoking an external threat.Berlusconi denigrated institutions; used his billionaire status to prove he was a political outsider; and channeled the new European populism’s anti-migrant sentiment to hold power.
+
+Trump uses anti-immigrant sentiment more often than Berlusconi and other leaders like Chávez’ successor Nicolas Maduro, bringing his rhetoric closer to that of other post-fascist politicians like Marine Le Pen in France.
+
+The Republican leadership rejects Trump. Indeed, many conservatives call him a fascist. But Trump embodies many of the party’s views on immigration, Islam, climate change, women’s roles, minority voting, and so on. Trump and his followers differ not in kind but in the clarity and radical way in with which they express some of the extreme consequences of the tea party agenda.
+
+If we consider a longer historical process in which the Republican Party in particular has been traveling steadily farther toward populism, Trump and his followers might very well be showing us the future of U.S. right-wing politics.
+
+Federico Finchelstein is professor of history and department chair at The New School in New York and author, among other books, of The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War. Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth-Century Argentina and Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945 .
+
+Pablo Piccato is professor of history at Columbia University and author of The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere and City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931.",REAL
+7515,Joint Way Forward Deal Does Not Lead to Peace or Progress for Afghans,"Joint Way Forward Deal Does Not Lead to Peace or Progress for Afghans   Nazifa Alizada Afghans protest in Stockholm against the Joint Way Forward deal with signs that read: “Do not sell us for money.” (Shahmama and Salsal National Association (SANSA)) 
+I was born in Ghazni province of Afghanistan but have no memories of my birthplace. When I was 3, the Taliban took over and forced me and my family to flee the country. I was too little to realize any of this. I still have a blurred image of an old orange bus, a loaf of bread, and rugged, dusty mountains. 
+As I grew older, my mother explained that the bus belonged to my father, and we did not attempt to migrate to Iran at first. The Soviet invasion and the Afghan civil war taught people of my village how to protect themselves when crises get heated. The men would move their women and children to the dark, moist undergrounds immediately and make them stay there until the situation calmed down. We were not lucky enough to fit in the underground this time. We passed two days in a mountain—the blurred mountain, in my mind—and hopelessly moved toward Iran. 
+My Afghan identity took my precious childhood from me. In Iran, I refrained from playing with other kids since they would mock my Afghan accent. I preferred to stay home to avoid hearing “Afghani kesafat,” or “Afghani Ashghal,” literally meaning “the garbage Afghan,” on the street. 
+  
+When I turned 7, schools refused to let me attend because I was an undocumented Afghan migrant. I enrolled in a school run by refugees for refugees and did my primary schooling there. But the school lacked human and capital resources to offer classes beyond seventh grade, and an undocumented Afghan refugee could not get any further education. Constant insults, seclusion and deprivation of the right to a quality education were the gifts Iran provided me in my childhood. 
+In 2001, upon the fall of the Taliban regime, my family and I returned to Afghanistan. At first glance, Kabul resembled anything but a city. Crumbled walls, broken glass, burned buildings, dusty roads and bullet shells on the streets all were evidence of the war. We did not expect a war-weary city to be any better. Yet one thing lured us into returning: safety and the hope for a better future. The Joint Way Forward deal between the European Union and Afghanistan misses this crucial point. 
+In early October, the Afghan government and the EU signed this bilateral deal, which facilitates deportation of thousands of Afghan asylum seekers. In return, the EU promised to continue its generous aid package to Afghanistan. The deal promises job creation for returnees, emphasizes reintegration and resettlement programs, and ensures the safe return of vulnerable groups, in particular unaccompanied minors and women. 
+None of these factors are enough to prevent hundreds of thousands of Afghans from taking the perilous journey toward Europe without a guarantee of security. After the fall of the Taliban, thousands of Afghan families returned to the war-torn country despite being aware of the existing limited opportunities. 
+Peace, hope for the future and stability were the factors which drove Afghans back to their homeland for the first time since 2001. The irony is that the lack of these very notions in 2015 made thousands of others abandon the country. With more than 11,000 civilian casualties, 2015 is the worst year in terms of security since the fall of the Taliban. 
+The Joint Way Forward is based on the illusion that Afghanistan is safe. Kunduz, one of the country’s major cities, fell into the hands of the Taliban for the second time this year. The war forced hundreds to flee the city, while hundreds of others remained defenseless and stuck. 
+In Badghis, a northwestern province, at least 60 police officers surrendered to the Taliban with their guns and resources. Three districts of Farah, a western province, already are ruled by insurgents. The Taliban rules many districts of Helmand province, and active war goes on in the city every so often. 
+Nengarhar, Paktia, Paktika, Ghazni, and most other provinces are no better. Even the shortest highways—such as the Kabul-Ghazni, or Kabul-Wardak, routes—are controlled by the Taliban. Unknown numbers of people are being kidnapped or killed based on ethnic and religious reasons, or for having ties with foreign or government officials, on a regular basis. 
+At least three bombs have exploded in different areas of Kabul since the deal was signed. By considering Afghanistan safe, despite the ongoing turmoil, the EU flinches from its humanitarian responsibility. 
+Afghans have fled uncertainty, insecurity and the abusive policies of their government with the hopes of establishing a better life for themselves in Europe. They never imagined they would risk their entire lives to be sold back to the government they just escaped. More than a mere failure of security in Afghanistan, the EU-Afghan deal is a failure of humanity. 
+Most EU countries warn their citizens against travelling to Afghanistan and mark it unsafe on their Foreign Affairs website. If it is not safe for EU citizens to spend a few days in Afghanistan, how is it safe for Afghans to live their whole lives there? Such deals reinforce double standards and spotlight how differently people’s lives are valued in today’s world. 
+Europe’s decision to deport Afghans is hasty, unconstructive and shortsighted. People’s lives are being endangered for a second time. Statistics show that a great number of previous deportees already have attempted to return to Europe through Balkan routes. Many others lack social support to stay in Afghanistan after migrating to Europe from Pakistan or Iran. 
+The deal is also unproductive for Europe, since it could lead to a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis. 
+The current bilateral EU-Afghan deal will be a colossal failure unless the EU forces the Afghan government to prioritize security. Dealing with corruption and regaining people’s trust is the next big move to push people back to their homeland. 
+The developed world should not use aid as a negotiating tool to pressurize poorer nations. 
+People’s lives are not political capital. 
+Nazifa Alizada of Afghanistan is a graduate of the Asian University for Women. She currently works with the National Secretariat for Gender Research at Gothenburg University in Sweden. TAGS:",FAKE
+5855,Dakota Pipeline Protests Are Working! One Bank May Pull Funding of Pipeline Build,"Dakota Pipeline Protests Are Working! One Bank May Pull Funding of Pipeline Build 
+While all eyes have been on the recent election results, protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline achieved a quiet victory. One bank may be pulling its investments in the project, leaving the Dakota Access Pipeline with very little money to continue its build. 
+
+DNB, Norway’s largest bank, has reportedly loaned $350 million to Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) for the construction of the pipeline.The bank is worried that Indigenous rights are being overlooked by Energy Transfer Partners. 
+
+DNB states that it will take initiative and use its position to try to find a constructive solution to the conflict. If the bank finds that these initiatives do not give appeasing answers or results, DNB will consider ending its involvement in financing the project. 
+
+Violence by police against protesters drove the bank to review its investment in the controversial pipeline. 
+
+As knowledge about what is going on in North Dakota reaches international countries, corporations are forced to question their own involvement in the pipeline build. 
+
+Standing Rock Sioux Tribe members, Indigenous peoples from First Nations around the planet, activists, and even well-known reporters and move stars are all speaking out against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Protesters have occupied several camps along the Missouri River near Cannon Ball, and North Dakota. 
+
+The protests have a history of police violence against peaceful protesters. ETP hired private security mercenaries who were untrained. These employees unleashed vicious dogs on crowds of unarmed protesters and at least 6 were mauled. 
+
+Since then, militarized police with tanks have replaced mercenaries. Activists have been pepper-sprayed, maced, beaten, shot with bean bag projectiles and rubber bullets, tasered, blasted by LRAD and sound cannons, and have been strip-searched, detained in dog kennels, had their arms marked with numbers, and more. 
+
+Police violence and tactics have been so bad that even representatives from the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues have been amassing testimony from witnesses and victims about excessive force, unlawful arrests, and mistreatment in jail. 
+
+Amnesty International USA brought human rights observers to monitor the situation. 
+
+ETP has brazenly ignored requests by President Obama and several federal officials for ETP to halt construction until a tribal lawsuit and permit reviews conclude. 
+
+During the chaos of Election Day, ETP announced it will be moving forward with drilling to begin installation of the pipeline beneath Lake Oahe in only two weeks, hinting that it would do so with or without appropriate permits. 
+
+DNB views these acts as unacceptable and will likely revoke its financial support if ETP continues to ignore Indigenous requests. 
+
+If DNB withdraws its financial support, the bold move could inspire other major investors to follow suit, especially if the public continues to apply pressure. 
+
+Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science. Follow her adventures on Instagram.",FAKE
+3246,Republicans in state governments plan juggernaut of conservative legislation,"Legislators in the 24 states where Republicans now hold total control plan to push a series of aggressive policy initiatives in the coming year aimed at limiting the power of the federal government and rekindling the culture wars.
+
+The unprecedented breadth of the Republican majority — the party now controls 31 governorships and 68 of 98 partisan legislative chambers — all but guarantees a new tide of conservative laws. Republicans plan to launch a fresh assault on the Common Core education standards, press abortion regulations, cut personal and corporate income taxes and take up dozens of measures challenging the power of labor unions and the Environmental Protection Agency.
+
+Before Election Day, the GOP controlled 59 partisan legislative chambers across the country. The increase to 68 gives Republicans six more chambers than their previous record in the modern era, set after special elections in 2011 and 2012.
+
+Republicans also reduced the number of states where Democrats control both the governor’s office and the legislatures from 13 to seven.
+
+Republicans in at least nine states are planning to use their power to pass “right to work” legislation, which would allow employees to opt out of joining a labor union. Twenty-four states already have such laws on the books, and new measures have been or will be proposed in Wisconsin, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Ohio, Colorado, Kentucky, Montana, Pennsylvania and Missouri.
+
+Democrats and union officials warn Republicans against going too far, just a few years after bills targeting public-sector employee unions sparked protests in Wisconsin and Ohio. “These bills have proven time and time again to decrease wages and safety standards in all workplaces,” said Stephanie Bloomingdale, secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO.
+
+A new round of the culture wars is also inevitable in 2015. Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for the antiabortion Susan B. Anthony List, said she expects that measures to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy will advance in Wisconsin, South Carolina and West Virginia. Missouri, too, is likely to take up some abortion-related bills.
+
+In Tennessee, voters gave the legislature new powers to regulate abortion, and state House Speaker Beth Harwell (R) has said her chamber will take up three measures requiring mandatory counseling, a waiting period and stricter inspections of clinics.
+
+Conservative activists also are targeting Common Core, the national education standards adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia over the past few years. Opposition from parent and community groups has become a hot political issue on the right over the past year, leading three states — Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina — to drop out of the program.
+
+Some states will attempt to join those three in leaving the program altogether. Others will try to change testing requirements or prevent the sharing of education data with federal officials. In recent interviews, several Republican governors who support Common Core say they expect debate in their forthcoming legislative sessions.
+
+“The biggest concern and opposition you hear from conservative legislators is, ‘We don’t want Washington dictating curricula,’ ” said Utah state Sen. Curtis Bramble, a Republican.
+
+Republicans also are likely to take up measures diluting the power of the EPA, which has proposed state-by-state targets for reducing carbon emissions. A dozen states have challenged proposed EPA regulations on power plants in federal court.
+
+New Republican governors in states such as Arkansas and Arizona and legislators in North Carolina, North Dakota and elsewhere will prioritize cutting personal or corporate income tax rates. States that have experienced a revenue boom from energy taxes will have to contend with falling receipts as the price of oil declines. Tax revenue in other states is coming in slower than expected, presenting a challenge in many of the 49 states that require balanced annual budgets.
+
+“With the increasing costs of Medicaid and education, balancing the budget is going to be a challenge,” said South Dakota state Sen. Deb Peters (R), who chairs the Appropriations Committee.
+
+But Republicans also caution that they have to use their newfound political power to govern effectively and avoid overreach.
+
+“If [Republicans] go too far, they’re not going to be the speaker and the majority leader two years from now,” said Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R), whose party took total control of the state legislature in November. “There’s a very narrow window to demonstrate that they can lead, that we can lead.”
+
+Michael Sargeant, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said, “Democrats are going to articulate an agenda that’s forward-thinking.” Republicans, especially those considering possible presidential bids, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, “are worried about taking on some of these fights, because [Democratic constituencies] are going to fight back,” he said.
+
+So there will be exceptions to the coming conservative juggernaut. Despite conservative opposition to Obamacare, some Republicans are debating whether and how to accept federal Medicaid expansion. Republican governors of Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, North Carolina and Tennessee have said they will try to persuade their legislators to accept federal funding, while Democratic governors in Montana and Pennsylvania will work with Republican-controlled legislatures in a similar vein.
+
+“We were one of the states that sued on [the Affordable Care Act]. I thought it was both bad policy and I thought it was unconstitutional. The courts said I was wrong,” said Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead (R), who is advocating a modified expansion plan. “Even though I have serious disagreements with the law, this is the current law. How do we as a state make the best of it?”
+
+Legislators said they are closely watching the Supreme Court, which will decide this year whether health-care subsidies under the ACA are constitutional in states that did not create their own health exchanges. “If the Supreme Court decides the Obamacare subsidies and employer penalties do not apply in states with federal health-care exchanges, then that will generate a huge new discussion in state legislatures,” said Tennessee state Sen. Brian Kelsey (R), who chairs the Judiciary Committee.
+
+Legislators also will debate myriad less-partisan issues that have arisen as technology advances, including cybersecurity policies, regulations on electronic cigarettes and ride-sharing services. And the daunting specter of growing pension liabilities is likely to lead to contentious confrontations amid stretched budgets.
+
+Lawmakers in a handful of states are considering how to regulate and tax the electronic cigarette industry; so far, three states have banned e-cigarettes from smoke-free workplaces, and Minnesota and North Carolina levy taxes on them. The e-cigarette industry, eager to avoid lawsuits and public relations disasters, has encouraged at least some regulations.
+
+Several states are grappling with the rise of ride-sharing services, such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar. Outgoing Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D) is likely to sign a measure regulating the emerging industry, and Uber is negotiating a similar agreement with Nevada regulators.
+
+Some legislatures will debate “right to try” legislation, which would allow people with terminal illnesses access to experimental drugs before those drugs win final approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana and Missouri already have versions of such laws on the books.
+
+And as marijuana legalization takes effect in two more states, in addition to the two where the drug was already legal, legislators in most states are expected to debate a rash of drug law revisions. Pure legalization bills will be introduced in 18 states, while decriminalization bills will be introduced in 15, according to a tally maintained by the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project.
+
+States will lobby the new ­Republican-led Congress on a handful of issues that impact budgets. A bipartisan group of legislators has urged Congress to pass the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would allow taxation of online sales, though GOP control in Washington makes passage unlikely. Thirty-nine governors — Democrats and Republicans alike — have encouraged Congress to extend funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides states about $13 billion for medical coverage for about 8 million children from low-income families. And states want Congress to pass a long-term extension of the Highway Trust Fund, which top Republicans in Washington have said is a priority.
+
+“State legislatures need a long-term funding solution for their transportation infrastructure. If Congress does not act, states will have to look at other funding solutions,” said Mick Bullock, a spokesman for the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.
+
+Mounting budgetary challenges from earlier years will dominate legislative attention in a handful of states. About half of all states are operating at or above their maximum prison capacity, according to corrections experts, putting pressure on legislatures to alleviate crowding. Some states will have to deal with increasingly underfunded pension plans, which could threaten to swamp state budgets over the long term. In Illinois, where the state pension is funded at less than 40 percent, Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner (R) made pension reform a cornerstone of his campaign this year.
+
+The American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative organization that helps Republican legislators coordinate measures among states, supports moving public pensions from a defined benefit system to a defined contribution system. ALEC considers Oklahoma, which passed a pension reform bill in 2014, to be the model.",REAL
+375,"Sanders, Dem establishment battle boils over","With the Democratic presidential primary in its twilight, frustration within the ranks over the party's handling of the primary process spilled out this week as Bernie Sanders supporters lashed out at party leaders, arguing that their candidate has been treated unfairly.
+
+The public outpouring of anger began last weekend at the Nevada Democratic Party convention, where Sanders supporters who said Hillary Clinton's backers had subverted party rules shouted down pro-Clinton speakers and sent threatening messages to state party Chairwoman Roberta Lange after posting her phone number and address on social media.
+
+That led Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and other top party leaders to demand an apology and publicly ruminate on the possibility of violence at the Democratic National Convention in July as they prepare for a general election battle with Donald Trump.
+
+Obama administration officials on Wednesday played down concerns about escalating tensions, likening the race to the 2008 primary fight between Clinton and then-Sen. Barack Obama.
+
+But Sanders isn't backing down. A campaign spokesman said Wednesday that the campaign was ""looking into"" whether to ask for a recount in Kentucky, where Sanders narrowly lost on Tuesday night, and he fired up his crowd in Southern California Tuesday night by calling out the Democratic establishment.
+
+The Sanders campaign on Tuesday did condemn unruly behavior from supporters and those who made threats to party leaders, but made clear it is sticking with its stance that the party is subverting the process in a way that benefits Clinton.
+
+""These claims that our campaign is sort of fomenting violence in some way are absolute nonsense,"" Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told CNN's Wolf Blitzer Tuesday night, adding that the campaign ""absolutely, categorically"" condemns any threatening behavior.
+
+The breakdown in civility comes after what has otherwise been a comparatively polite campaign season for Democrats, but the frustration exposes a rift in the party and undercuts the notion that Clinton will be able to march into the Democratic convention this summer with a party unified behind her.
+
+""The problem is that there are long-simmering concerns about unfair treatment out in the Nevada Democratic Party,"" Weaver added. ""We are not going to allow the millions of people who supported Bernie Sanders to be sort of rolled over in places like Nevada by the way they handled that convention.""
+
+Earlier on Tuesday, Sanders released a statement suggesting that his supporters were justified in feeling like the party has given them a raw deal.
+
+""If the Democratic Party is to be successful in November, it is imperative that all state parties treat our campaign supporters with fairness and the respect that they have earned,"" Sanders' statement read. ""Unfortunately, that was not the case at the Nevada convention. At that convention the Democratic leadership used its power to prevent a fair and transparent process from taking place.""
+
+In an interview with CNN, Wasserman Schultz said that statement wasn't enough.
+
+""I was deeply disturbed,"" she said. ""The senator's response was anything but acceptable. It certainly did not condemn his supporters for acting violently or engaging in intimidation tactics and instead added more fuel the fire.""
+
+The DNC chairwoman, however, said she has not spoken directly with Sanders, but that her staff has been in touch with the Vermont senator's campaign. She also pushed back against Sanders' accusation that the party had rigged the system against him.
+
+""We've had the same rules in place that elected Barack Obama. These rules were adopted for state parties all across the country in 2014,"" she said. ""They were followed and even if the Sanders supporters were frustrated, there is never, under any circumstances, a place for violence and intimidation to be resorted to in response.""
+
+On CNN's ""New Day"" Wednesday morning, Weaver accused the DNC chairwoman of ""throwing shade.""
+
+""We can have a long conversation about Debbie Wasserman Schultz and how she's been throwing shade on the Sanders campaign,"" Weaver said.
+
+""I gotta say it's not the DNC,"" he added. ""By and large the DNC has been very good to us, but not Debbie Wasserman Schultz.""
+
+Wasserman Schultz brushed off Weaver's comments later in the day.
+
+""My response to that is hashtag SMH (shake my head),"" Wasserman Schultz told Blitzer on ""Wolf."" ""We need to focus on one thing: get through this primary and work to prepare for the general election and make sure that we can continue to draw the contrasts between either one of our really fine candidates who are focused on helping people reach the middle class and make sure that we get equal pay for equal work and create jobs and not let the Republicans take health care away from 20 million Americans.""
+
+'He should get things under control'
+
+Speaking to reporters in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday afternoon, Vice President Joe Biden said if such disruption happens again, ""He's going to have to be more aggressive in speaking out about it.""
+
+""But here we are in May, as was pointed out,"" Biden continued. ""Hillary was still in this in May, in June. I'm confident that Bernie will be supportive if Hillary wins, which the numbers indicate will happen. So I'm not worried. There's no fundamental split in the Democratic Party.""
+
+Leading congressional Democrats also pushed Sanders to rein in his supporters. Reid called Sanders' response ""a test of leadership"" for Sanders, and a source in his office told CNN that the Nevada senator is waiting to hear from the senator himself on the matter.
+
+""The convention was Saturday. It's now Wednesday afternoon. And he hasn't spoken about it,"" the source said.
+
+California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, who spoke on behalf of Clinton at the Nevada convention, condemned the behavior.
+
+""He should get things under control,"" Boxer said. ""We're in a race that is very critical. We have to be united.""
+
+""This is a character moment for Bernie Sanders. He's got to figure out how he's true to his values and his ideals fully,"" said CNN political commentator Van Jones.
+
+""I think Hillary and Bernie both misunderstand this movement. I think Hillary just sees it as just a bunch of rowdy kids that at some point will just calm down and fall into line,"" he said, later adding, ""I think Bernie actually only sees the good in his followers. I think Bernie really misunderstands there is a nasty edge to his following that he's not taking seriously enough.""
+
+Sen. Tim Kaine criticized Sanders' responses in the wake of reports that Democrats felt threatened at and following the convention.
+
+""What he did yesterday was sort of say it's the party's fault,"" Kaine told CNN. ""That deflection of responsibility is not leadership.""
+
+Kaine added that the angry protests could be ""dirty tricksters in the crowd"" and not just Sanders' supporters.
+
+""I don't think we should assume that all of the people raising hell are Bernie people,"" Kaine said.
+
+Sanders goes after the establishment in fiery speech
+
+Speaking in Southern California Tuesday night, Sanders fired up the crowd by calling out the Democratic leadership.
+
+""The Democratic Party is going to have to make a very, very, profound and important decision. It can do the right thing and open its doors and welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change. That is the Democratic Party I want to see."" Sanders said.
+
+""I say to the leadership of the Democratic Party: Open the doors, let the people in! Or the other option for the Democratic Party, which I see as a very sad and tragic option is to choose and maintain its status quo structure, remain dependent on big money campaign contributions and be a party with limited participation and limited energy,"" he said.
+
+The crowd responded by chanting, ""Bernie or Bust!"" the equivalent of the Republican #NeverTrump slogan for the Democratic race.
+
+His speech barreled through his list of Clinton contrasts, comparing his stances with her (and criticizing those stances) on minimum wage, fracking, breaking up the big banks, and her use of super PACs.
+
+In response to the chaos in Nevada, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook simultaneously praised the passion and participation of Sanders' supporters while adding that Clinton believes that ""no one should be intimidated, harassed or threatened in this process."" He called on them to focus that energy on unifying the party, a task that could be difficult given the raw feelings many Sanders supporters have for Clinton after the primary.
+
+""Supporters of both Clinton and Sanders deserve respect for the work they have put into their campaigns,"" Mook said. Ultimately, we are confident that the passion and energy from the primary will be united in a common purpose -- to move forward the ideals of our party and keep the White House out of Donald Trump's hands.""
+
+White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Wednesday downplayed any tensions between the two campaigns.
+
+He recalled a similar ""tenor"" to the 2008 contest between Clinton and Obama, saying those tensions were ""no less intense"" and didn't lead to a negative result in the general election.
+
+""I think one of the lessons of 2008 is not to confuse passion in primary for disinterest in the general election,"" he said, adding that ""highly motivated"" supporters were good for democracy.
+
+While the spotlight this year was on the Republican primary and prospect for a contested convention and protests at the national convention in Cleveland, some Democrats now worry about that happening at their convention in Philadelphia.
+
+Wasserman Schultz said the incidents in Nevada would result in the DNC reviewing its procedures for Philadelphia.
+
+""As a result of this happening this weekend, we will have conversations both at the staff level as well as my having conversations with the candidates so that we can make sure that both campaigns are focused on making sure that we can allow this process for the duration of the primary to play out in a civil and orderly way,"" she said.
+
+But the DNC chairwoman said she wasn't worried about violence happening at the convention.
+
+""This was absolutely a serious concern, which is why I said what needed to be said yesterday and others have said that there was real concern,"" Wasserman Schultz told Blitzer Wednesday afternoon. ""But it is important and I am confident that the candidates take the messages to heart about making sure that we respond and conduct ourselves in a civil and orderly way.""
+
+California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, however, warned that Sanders' intention to take his candidacy to the Democratic convention could spark unrest similar to the chaotic 1968 convention in Chicago and the riots surrounding it.
+
+""It worries me a great deal,"" Feinstein told CNN's Manu Raju. ""You know, I don't want to go back to the '68 convention, because I worry about what it does to the electorate as a whole -- and he should, too.""
+
+And Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois also said he's concerned about violence in Philadelphia.
+
+""We saw what happened at the Trump rallies, which broke into violence, people punching one another. I don't want to see that happen at the Democratic Party,"" Durbin told CNN. ""I call on Bernie to say to his supporters: be fervent, be committed but be sensible. Don't engage in any violence.""
+
+Weaver pledged Tuesday night that the convention will be peaceful.
+
+""There's not going to be any violence in Philadelphia, Wolf, I guarantee you that,"" he said on CNN. ""We hope for a fair and orderly convention.""",REAL
+7852,Election 2016: A Political System In Crisis,"Share This: BY NILE BOWIE T he outcome of strangest and most consequential election cycle in recent American history will soon be upon us. Regardless of who becomes the next president, this election will forever be synonymous with the rogue candidacy of Donald Trump and the demographic shifts that have emboldened the right. Though it may be a close election, it is widely presumed that public antipathy towards Trump – the first major party candidate who is near-universally opposed by both major parties – will tilt the odds in Hillary Clinton’s favour. Nonetheless, Trump’s support base of primarily white, blue-collar Americans will be a major factor for the political establishment to contend with in the years ahead. These voters are frustrated by their economic marginalisation wrought by neoliberal trade deals and economic policies and are contemptuous of traditional political elite, their internationalism and liberal identity politics. For these voters, fear of immigration is entwined with the precarity of being working class, their troubling prejudices notwithstanding. Economic disempowerment and political disenfranchisement have accelerated under President Obama, to the detriment of the American middle class. White, blue-collar Americans have witnessed the offshoring of their jobs and the erosion of their status in society, and Trump has masterfully stroked their resentment and discontent by playing on their fears of Muslims, immigrants and minorities. Trump’s views often contain unusual contradictions and seem to be delivered impromptu. What remains consistent are his authoritarian views on crime and justice, vows to close the borders to refugees, Muslims and economic migrants, scepticism of overseas ‘democracy promotion’ and America’s role in international alliances, foreign policy views both isolationist and belligerent and of course, his distinctive megalomaniacal hubris. Trump’s real problem with the Washington establishment is that he isn’t part of it. His campaign represents an insurgent faction of the oligarchical class that aims to displace and replace the standing political elites. Bipartisan opposition to Trump is grounded in the belief that he would be an unreliable proxy and a liability, someone too narrow and unpredictable to manage the common affairs of the ruling class and the US deep state. Moreover, the US establishment is not interested in being led by such a contentious figure, who would draw protest and public opposition in a way that more conventional establishment candidates largely do not. For example, Trump’s rhetoric on immigration seems to engender more public outrage than the immigration policy under Obama, who has deported more people than any other president in history. That being said, Hillary Clinton is a more dangerous candidate in many ways. Trump understands that the political system is rigged and the economy is oriented to serve various elite interests, a message that resonates across the political spectrum, even with anti-Trump segments of the electorate. As a hated political outsider not tied directly into the power and the money structure of the political system, there would be no shortage of gridlock and checks on the authority wielded by Trump in the unlikely event that he becomes president. By contrast, Clinton wields enormous political influence inside the corridors of political and corporate power through personal relationships and connections. Policy and legislation shaped by donor money, lobbyist groups and special interests have been a hallmark of the Clintons’ time in public office. The very fact that she is standing for office while being investigated by the FBI, having committed actions that would have ended the careers of other politicians and government employees, speaks for itself. It has been reported by various sources that the FBI’s recent decision to reopen the investigation into the Clinton email scandal less than two weeks before election day has been motivated by an internal backlash within the agency’s rank and file, forcing FBI director James Comey’s hand as a means of addressing internal critics who believe he buried the Clinton probe for political reasons. Clinton’s email scandal is not the real issue. She has spent her political career ruthlessly advancing the interests of high finance, the military industrial complex and corporate America, with dramatic repercussions for minorities and the marginalised inside the United States, and the civilian populations of countries targeted for US military intervention and destabilization during the her time as an influential first lady, senator and secretary of state. Clinton has spent her long career advocating hawkish US military supremacy and banking deregulation, expanding the private prison industry to the detriment of impoverished African-American communities, dismantling the social safety net that marginalised families rely on, and enabling the consolidation of corporate power through secretive trade agreements. On the campaign trail, she has characterised her work as advancing the interests of women and families. Rather than addressing the political substance of revelations uncovered by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign, backed by Obama administration officials, has reverted to neo-McCarthyism by labelling opposition voices as surrogates of Russia, explicitly accusing Moscow of meddling in the US election process. The Clinton campaign has repeatedly evoked the historic struggle for civil rights and aspirational rhetoric of ‘breaking glass ceilings’ in the interest of a faux-feminism which prioritizes the equal opportunities of women to lead the nation’s highest office, while at once tone-deaf to the consequences faced by women and families on the receiving end of executive policies. The Democratic Party has become a parody of moral posturing, self-relishing its candidates with rhetoric that has no connection with policies in reality. It is the party of establishment insiders and corporate donors who openly engineer the presidential nomination process to favour their preferred candidate by virtue of the undemocratic super-delegate system. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign inspired millions of Americans for good reason, has proven himself to be tepid and cowardly in the face of practices that have proven beyond doubt that the Democratic Party establishment conspired against him. Bernie’s campaign centred around a rather modest, comparatively tame centre-left progressive platform that did not seriously question US militarism and the values of American exceptionalism. For the Democratic Party at large, the Sanders campaign represented a concession too far. The Clinton campaign even had the impudence to directly hire disgraced Democratic chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz after leaked emails exposed her partisanship. Rather than addressing the political substance of revelations uncovered by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign, backed by Obama administration officials, has reverted to neo-McCarthyism by labelling opposition voices as surrogates of Russia, explicitly accusing Moscow of meddling in the US election process. Accusations of Russian interference without accompanying evidence are at best a short-sighted means of deflecting responsibility for the corrupt actions of the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party insiders. The next American president will have to confront the realities of strained relations with Russia. Clinton is known for her public enmity toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and would at best perpetuate the status quo of mutual distrust and limited cooperation. At worst, her policies could risk a military confrontation with Russia should she pursue the establishment of a no-fly zone over Syrian airspace, which she publically advocated during the presidential debates. Trump is the most prominent American political figure to advocate détente with Russia, openly breaking with his neoconservative running mate Mike Pence. Trump has criticised Clinton for supporting anti-government insurgents in Syria and called for jointly targeting ISIS with the Russian, and by extension, Syrian militaries. Trump, being very critical of Iran, also signalled he was willing to fight against ISIS on the same side as Tehran. He has also offered support for the establishment of a safe zone inside Syrian territory, potentially in cooperation with the Syrian government and its allies. Both candidates would pursue a different policy approach from the incumbent administration in Syria, but Clinton’s no-fly zone holds greater potential to deepen military hostilities between major powers. Clinton has generally been critical of Obama’s foreign policy in Syria and elsewhere for not asserting US power strongly enough. Despite the differences in style and demeanour, the range of policies offered by the entrenched two-party system is limited to varying shades of centre- to far-right. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the least trusted and most unpopular presidential candidates in modern history. Despite the public disillusionment with major party candidates, it remains to be seen whether American voters will cast ballots for third parties such as the Libertarian Party or Green Party, which are seeking to garner 5 percent of the popular vote to become eligible to receive public campaign funding. More likely than not, American voters will cast their ballots ‘against’ Trump by voting for Clinton and vice versa, fueling the cyclical politics of the lesser evil that have been a feature of American presidential elections for decades. More than any other US election in recent history, the candidates represent the rot of an American political establishment marred by scandal, hypocrisy and the relentless pursuit of hegemony. To advocate one over the other is ultimately defeatist. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nile Bowie is a columnist with Russia Today (RT) and a research assistant with the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), an NGO based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. 
+What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda? =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.",FAKE
+9194,"After terrorizing America with Zika scaremongering, Washington Post now admits Zika virus doesn’t cause brain deformities after all","Site Map 
+Select Page After terrorizing America with Zika scaremongering, Washington Post now admits Zika virus doesn’t cause brain deformities after all 
+Posted by Madeline | Oct 26, 2016 | 2016 , Daily Blog | 0 | Thanks Nancy!
+Natural News 
+(NaturalNews) The entire leftist media is not merely dishonest and corrupt, their science writers are unbelievably stupid and ill-informed about nearly everything in the natural world. Today, after months of printing fear-inducing “Zika terrorism” stories that scared America half to death while convincing the government to funnel billions of dollars into Zika vaccine research for Big Pharma, the Washington Post now admits it had no idea what it was talking about . 
+But rather than admitting its own science writers were scientifically illiterate propagandists pushing quack narratives as news, the paper now blames other scientists for the gross error by publishing a headline that’s once again dishonest and deceptive: “Scientists are bewildered by Zika’s path across Latin America,” it proclaims. 
+Bewildered about “Zika’s path?” The story headline should actually read, “Zika HOAX revealed… it doesn’t cause brain damage after all.” (Read it at this link .) Washington Post has been shamelessly pushing the Zika HOAX for months… with no apology to readers 
+In the story, writers Dom Phillips and Nick Miroff essentially reveal that what the Washington Post has been writing about the Zika virus has been based entirely in government propaganda and pandemic lies pushed by the CDC, which of course has close ties to the criminal vaccine industry: 
+Nearly nine months after Zika was declared a global health emergency, the virus has infected at least 650,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean, including tens of thousands of expectant mothers. 
+But to the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil. 
+Yes, the Washington Post now says the scientists are “bewildered” that their apocalyptic scare stories that caused female athletes to skip out on the Rio Olympics and scared tens of millions of Americans into poisoning themselves with DEET (a neurotoxic chemical) turned out to be total hogwash. DEET, by the way, combines with carbamate class pesticides to cause neurological dysfunction in humans , which coincidentally increases the number of people who watch CNN or read the Washington Post. 
+For the record, no one who reads Natural News is surprised by this revelations that has left mainstream scientists “bewildered.” It’s not bewildering to me. I called Zika a total hoax from day one, pointing out that the brain deformities were caused by larvacide chemicals dumped into the water supply , not by Zika. See some of my stories that clearly spelled all this out months before the Washington Post had any clue what they were writing about: 
+March 2, 2016: Zika PAYDAY! Obama wants to funnel $1.8 billion for vaccine research and more 
+I even published a mini-documentary revealing the published science that shows how DEET insecticide causes brain damage in humans. You can watch it at this link or view the video below: 
+If anyone from the Washington Post bothered to read Natural News and learn about real science, they would have learned that Zika has infected tens of millions of people throughout South America for decades , with absolutely no measurable increase in neurological deformations. (But facts be damned, the WashPost had a panic to push!) Nation after nation records tens of thousands of infections with ZERO birth defects… 
+Despite the factual reality of the situation, the state-controlled propagandists writing for rags like the Washington Post — a bogus newspaper that has lost all credibility in the minds of intelligent people — continued to pummel home their kooky science theories that claimed much of the U.S. South would be overrun by brain damaging mosquitoes, turning Southerners into shrunken-brained mutants while pregnant women fled northward to survive the airborne insect onslaught. 
+Instead, nothing happened . No explosion in shrunken-headed babies. No wave of birth defects across Florida, even as city officials desperately bombarded their own cities with brain-damaging insecticides. No national emergency declared by Obama to bring back DDT and eradicate baby-murdering mosquitoes by dousing our open streets with thick clouds of organophosphate neurotoxins. 
+Instead, the rate of neurological birth defects in most countries approached zero. Via the Washington Post’s own graphic: (partial list) 
+Venezuela: 60,791 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects Honduras: 31,933 Zika infections… ONE birth defect Guadalupe: 30,969 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects Puerto Rico: 29,084 Zika infections… TWO birth defects Mexico: 4,837 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects 
+From the WashPost article: 
+Brazilian officials were bracing for a flood of fetal deformities as Zika spread this year to other regions of the country, Marinho said. However, “we are not seeing a big increase.” 
+Gee, really? 
+The vast majority of the brain defects, it turns out, came from just one small region of Brazil. A total of 2,033 children are so far recorded with neurological defects there, even while most other countries throughout the region had ZERO birth defects (or near zero). 
+So what gives? Zika mosquitoes apparently carry geopolitical maps so they can solely target Brazil 
+You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that the stupid science theories of the mainstream media are total hokum and bunk . If Zika really did cause brain defects, it would have spread all across South America by now. It would have spread into Florida, California, Mississippi and Louisiana. It would have devastated the American South, Cuba, Haiti, Curacao and all the other island nations across the Caribbean. 
+Yet the neurological defects were limited almost exclusively to Brazil. 
+Somehow, if we believe the illiterate Washington Post science writers — who may in fact be the only brain damage victims of Zika in North America — mosquitoes carry MAPS to make sure they only activate their brain damage voodoo in Brazil . 
+“…[A]lthough the outbreak has spread this year to more than 50 nations and territories across the Western Hemisphere, U.N. data shows just 142 cases of congenital birth defects linked to Zika so far outside Brazil,” says WashPost. 
+Yes, my friends: GPA-carrying Zika mosquitoes are very careful to limit their pandemic voodoo to just one region of Brazil. By sheer coincidence, that’s the same region where larvacide chemicals were dumped into the public water supply. 
+Apparently, there isn’t a single “official” scientist in the entire global government who has thought to test the water. Just freaking WOW… Let’s throw these morons out of power in every election, okay? They don’t deserve any positions of authority over anyone else. They’re all so incredibly stupid, they couldn’t survive at all unless they functioned as parasites on the taxpayers. They aren’t giving up hope just yet… science writers desperately hope for more brain damaged babies to prove them right 
+Enthusiasm for more brain damaged babies runs high at the Washington Post, which explains why they are all in for Hillary Clinton, the candidate of choice for brain damaged adults . Writing with a sense of real enthusiasm, the Washington Post can’t wait for more brain damaged babies to appear: 
+Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are closely watching Puerto Rico, which has reported more than 26,800 cases of Zika. More than 7,000 pregnant women could be infected by the end of the year, according to the CDC. (Yippee?) 
+And now, the loony tunes quack science of the Zika “scientists” goes apoplectic, grasping for silly metaphors to try to obscure the fact that they are all stupid beyond belief . Via the WashPost: 
+“Now we’ve settled on Zika as the smoking gun, but we don’t know who pulled the trigger,” said Marques, speaking from Recife, where he is working with government researchers. 
+Huh? Wha? The metaphor doesn’t even make any sense. 
+Maybe the problem is too much fornicating. Seriously, this is now part of their idiotic theory: 
+“Sexual habits and hygiene may also play a role,” he said, explaining that researchers are looking at whether sexual transmission can infect the uterus and placenta with the virus, potentially exposing the fetus to elevated risk. “We suspect the villain has an accomplice, but we don’t know who it is,” Marques said. 
+Huh? Do they seriously think that people only have sex in Brazil but not other South American countries? Where does the Washington Post find these morons? I’m a real scientist saying all this 
+As you read all this, remember that I have rapidly become one of the world’s leading research scientists on the quantitation of cannabinoids in hemp extracts using mass spec instrumentation. I led the team that developed the most pioneering (and accurate) CBD mass spec analysis method in existence today. You can read about it at this link . I also routinely test water, food and environmental samples for heavy metals, pesticides and a multitude of chemical contaminants. When I say these Zika scientists are complete morons, that’s the educated opinion of an accomplished scientist correctly pointing out the lunacy of Zika scaremongering. 
+I could have solved this entire problem in the first few days by analyzing and detecting brain-damaging larvacide chemicals in the public water supply in Eastern Brazil. The entire project would have taken just a few days and cost almost nothing. Instead, Obama handed $1.8 billion to the vaccine companies in the midst of the Zika panic pushed by laughable rags like the Washington Post. It’s all a racket, of course, just like their coverage of elections and political candidates. Everything you read at the Washington Post is a deception of one kind or another . The paper exists solely to promote the propaganda of the state so that the population can be manipulated and controlled. The Washington Post exists to terrorize the citizens with fascist propaganda parading as science 
+As you’ve also learned by now, the corrupt leftist establishment of junk science, criminal politicians and idiotic journalists isn’t interested in legitimate scientific solutions . They all function as extensions of a fascist state that must routinely terrorize its citizens with pandemic boogeyman scare stories in order to demand absolute obedience to the vaccine mandates that actually do damage the brains of children. 
+Thus, SCIENCE be damned. They’ve got an agenda to push, and it doesn’t matter to them whether that agenda is based on a single shred of real science. Zika is dangerous because they told you so, in exactly the same way they told you Hillary Clinton is totally honest, Obamacare would make health care more affordable, there’s no such thing as voter fraud in America, and GMOs and vaccines are really, really good for you. 
+So you can put down the DEET and stop poisoning your skin like an obedient idiot. Yes, it was all a scam. Yes, the official “science” was totally rigged. Yes, the media lied to you yet again. Yes, the CDC is a criminal racket. Yes, all the health “officials” were completely full of s**t. And no, Zika is not going to cause your babies to be born with shrunken heads. VACCINES, on the other hand, will most definitely cause brain damage, as they still contain mercury, a potent neurotoxin the Washington Post ridiculously insists becomes magically neutralized when you inject it into the body of a child. 
+Red more unintentional scientific comedy at this Washington Post article . Share:",FAKE
+3574,Obama Says Terrorists Seek Legitimacy by Using Religious Tie,"President Barack Obama said the U.S. and its allies must strip away any legitimacy that Islamic State and al-Qaeda claim by portraying themselves as religious movements.
+
+Obama, who has come under criticism from Republicans who say he avoids acknowledging the Muslim roots of extremist groups, said terrorists use religion as a recruiting tool by portraying the U.S. and European nations as being at war with Islam.
+
+“We must never accept the premise they put forward, because it is a lie,” Obama said Wednesday in Washington on the second day of a White House summit on combating extremism. “They are not religious leaders. They’re terrorists. And we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”
+
+Deadly attacks in Paris, Sydney and Copenhagen by individuals of Muslim background and possibly inspired by the brutal tactics of Islamic State, along with the group’s spread in Syria, Iraq and now Libya, have raised alarms in Europe and the U.S. about the danger of lone-wolf terrorists, driven by extremist ideology and difficult to detect before they act.
+
+At the summit, the Obama administration is convening representatives of Muslim organizations, law enforcement officials and local political leaders to swap ideas about how to stem root causes of extremism. It also has invited leaders from overseas to take part.
+
+Obama said civic leaders must recognize that Islamic State and al-Qaeda “deliberately target their propaganda in the hopes of reaching and brainwashing young Muslims” through videos, social media and other online outlets. He said the one way to counter that is to alleviate the alienation and poverty that are the extremists’ best recruiting tool.
+
+In the U.S., he said, local and federal authorities must make sure that Muslims aren’t isolated and that they are welcomed and integrated into society.
+
+“Muslim Americans feel they have been unfairly targeted,” he said. “We have to be sure that abuses stop, are not repeated, that we do not stigmatize entire communities.”
+
+Former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, who is chairman of a political action committee aimed at electing Republicans, called the conference a “farce” in a statement and said the administration should be targeting terrorists rather than offering “pie-in-the-sky social welfare programs” to Muslims here and overseas.
+
+The administration’s strategy is also aimed at drawing in the domestic Muslim leaders who Obama is leaning on to identify and isolate potentially violent extremists. Yet some groups say they remain suspicious about the administration’s motivation.
+
+The Muslim Advocates, an Oakland Calif.-based group that that was invited to a White House meeting earlier this month, expressed concern that Obama’s requests for “partnerships” with Muslim community and religious leaders is code for requiring leaders to play a law enforcement role.
+
+They also blasted Obama for focusing too narrowly on Muslims, a decision that the group says reinforces a negative stereotype that Islam and terror are linked.
+
+“This whole day is focused on American Muslims, frankly,” Farhana Khera, the group’s executive director, said in a telephone interview. “It strikes at the core of what we are as Americans.”
+
+Obama is speaking on the topic again tomorrow at the State Department during a session that includes representatives from overseas, including France, Belgium, Mexico and Japan.",REAL
+8753,Why NATO is put on war footing against Russia,"Why NATO is put on war footing against Russia 07.11.2016 Jens Stoltenberg claimed that given growing tensions in relations with Russia, hundreds of thousands of the NATO military men would be brought to higher level of readiness. Before that he stated that there's no danger and constructive relations with Moscow should be built. Now, according to him, the NATO authorities intend to prepare significant ground forces, which would be capable of containing 'Russian aggression'. What for are these acts?Andrey Koshkin, Ph.D. in Political Science:'First of all, it should be noted that we've caught the US at double standards in politics, and policy of the NATO military political alliance is the same. They react to Washington's order, which says that they should build-up potential, as Russian aggression is to be shown constantly. And how can it be shown? In order to show Russia's aggression, its own residents and armed forces should be shaken up. How can they be shaken up? Just switched to a more high level of readiness. That is what they are doing. If the Armed Forces are switched to a more high level of readiness, common residents of the Western states will react immediately. Yes, the danger is real if the Armed Forces are put on a war footing, and these are funds after all. The funds should be taken from taxpayers, that is why a new wave of anti-Russian hysteria has been set off in the mass media. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+5985,Top five donors to Clinton campaign are Jewish,"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / Top five donors to Clinton campaign are Jewish Essential Reading The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part II By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
+Former City of London insider reveals that the depopulation program would begin with a planned war between Israel and Iran. More importantly, he goes onto to describe how we can derail their plans for global dominance Coming Clean By wmw_admin on April 29, 2004 
+Chemtrails are not the product of some ‘Conspiracy Theory’. They are real. We get the low down from an aircraft mechanic who has done his own investigating US ‘backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria, blame it on Assad govt': Report By wmw_admin on June 15, 2013 
+This report appeared in January, 2013, but was subsequently removed from the Mail’s website. Fortunately some observers copied extracts, which we repost here The Advent of the Anti-Christ By Rixon Stewart on August 2, 2010 
+A few words on the market meltdown and how it may assist the debut of a truly sinister figure The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part I By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
+Bill Ryan talks to a former City of London insider who participated in a meeting where the elite’s plans for depopulation were discussed. The meeting, which took place in 2005, also discussed a planned financial collapse Dov Zakheim and the 9/11 Conspiracy By wmw_admin on April 23, 2010 
+Our web hosts were threatened with legal action after lawyers representing none other than Dov Zakheim himself claimed this article was “defamatory.” Due to an oversight the article was not fully removed so read it before Zakheim gets us shut down The Lady, The Queen and what it really means By wmw_admin on December 28, 2009 
+Every picture tells a story and with some photos and a few words Paul Powers shows us what was hidden in the background when Queen Elizabeth II met pop sensation Lady Gaga They Live By wmw_admin on August 19, 2012 
+Considered by some as prophetic, many will find eerie echoes of present day concerns in John Carpenters 24-year-old ‘They Live’. View the cult classic here The Life of an American Jew in Racist Marxist Israel Part II By wmw_admin on October 27, 2006 
+Written nearly twenty years ago, Jack Bernstein’s words now have a prophetic ring which he paid for with his life Al Qaeda – The Database By Wayne Madsen on May 15, 2009 
+Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence, tells of the origins of Al Qaeda and its ultimate purpose",FAKE
+4813,The worst election ever,"Dragging on for an excruciating eternity, this election season has demeaned democracy, elevated mediocrity and insulted and embarrassed us all on just about every level imaginable: Intellectually, with regard to the lack of focus on policy and substance; ethically, with a complete disregard for integrity and character; and morally, driven by a disgraceful descent into racist and xenophobic vitriol.
+
+Given that our country has consistently climbed down the educational attainment ladder, and that inane and banal reality TV shows draw more eyeballs than books and opera , it should not surprise us that a growing swath of the electorate is more enthused by a coarse, bullying celebrity than by an awkward policy wonk.
+
+But what's doubly disappointing -- as we head into the crucial presidential debates -- is that this lack of intellectual depth is enabled not only by the candidates, but also by the topics they gravitate to, which the media frenzy then exacerbates.
+
+These are topics that don't matter when it comes to making a difference in the future of our country: the size of a candidate's hands (and therefore other body parts), the now-moot birther issue, the Monica Lewinsky and Marla Maples scandals, the name-calling and finger pointing about who is more racist than whom, who is healthier than whom.",REAL
+9181,Tomb Opened Where ‘Jesus was Resurrected After Crucifixion For The First Time…’,"Via TruthAndAction SPONSORED LINKS 
+The location of the tomb is inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The tomb has been sealed since at least 1555 A.D. and was opened briefly as work progressed in restoring the site. 
+It’s the location where the body of Jesus is said to have been placed after his crucifixion 2000 years ago. This tomb within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was opened for only 60 hours as renovation work progressed on this site that is holy to Christians. And a remarkable discovery was made. 
+After removing the marble slab that encased the tomb, scientists at the University of Athens and National Geographic were stunned to find a limestone burial shelf intact and a second marble slab with a cross carved into its surface. Researchers were given the unprecedented access as part of restoration work. 
+The team were shocked to find portions of the tomb are still intact today, having survived centuries of damage. The original surface was exposed during the restoration work being done at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, according to National Geographic. 
+Until then, marble had encased the slab since at least 1555 AD, and likely centuries earlier. When work first began the conservation team from the National Technical University of Athens showed only a layer of material underneath the marble slab. 
+But as researchers continued their work over the course of 60 hours – and with just a few hours left before the tomb was to be resealed, another marble slab with a cross carved into its surface was exposed. Highlighting the sensitivity of the tomb, scientists were given only 60 hours to view the site before it was sealed again. 
+‘This is the Holy Rock that has been revered for centuries, but only now can actually be seen,’ said Antonia Moropoulou of the National Technical University of Athens, who is leading the restoration of the Edicule. 
+The burial slab was enclosed in an 18th century shrine structure known as the Edicule – a word derived from the Latin term aedicule meaning ‘little house’. The team cut a window into the southern interior wall of the Edicule, exposing one of the cave walls. 
+The tomb has now been resealed and will probably not be opened again for hundreds, possibly even thousands, of years. But before it was resealed, the surface of the rock was extensively cataloged. 
+There is considerable support for this being the actual place where Jesus’ body was placed, although that cannot be known for certain. The evidence for this is not definitive, however, according to Dan Bahat, a former district archaeologist in Jerusalem and in Galilee. 
+‘We may not be absolutely certain that the site of the Holy Sepulchre Church is the site of Jesus burial, but we certainly have no other site that can lay a claim nearly as weighty, and we really have no reason to reject the authenticity of the site,’ Bahat said. 
+Given that the site might not be reopened for hundreds or thousands of years, this 60-hour window into the ancient past has given researchers as well as Christian believers an unprecedented opportunity to study the origins of the faith.",FAKE
+512,The House GOP budget is a gimmick,"Six men in green ties took the stage in the House television studio Tuesday, and House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, a slight leprechaun of a man with silver hair and dark eyebrows, approached the microphone.
+
+“Good mor — top o’ the mornin’ to ya!” Price announced. “Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all.”
+
+It was altogether fitting that Republicans rolled out their budget during a festival of inebriation in honor of the man who magically (and apocryphally) banished snakes from Ireland. What Republicans have done with their budget is no less fantastic: They have employed lucky charms and mystical pots of gold to make them appear more sober about balancing the budget than they actually are.
+
+“We do not rely on gimmicks or creative accounting tricks to balance our budget,” the House Republicans say in the introduction to their fiscal 2016 budget.
+
+True, the budget does not rely on gimmicks. The budget is a gimmick.
+
+It pretends to keep strict limits on defense spending — so-called “sequestration” — but then pumps tens of billions of extra dollars into a slush fund called “Overseas Contingency Operations.” That means the funds count as emergency spending and not as part of the Pentagon budget.
+
+It assumes that current tax cuts will be allowed to expire as scheduled — which would amount to a $900 billion tax increase that nobody believes would be allowed to go into effect.
+
+It proposes to repeal Obamacare but then counts revenues and savings from Obamacare as if the law remained in effect.
+
+It claims to save $5.5 trillion over 10 years, but in the fine print — the budget plan’s instructions to committees — it only asks them to identify about $5 billion in savings over that time.
+
+It assumes more than $1 trillion in cuts to a category known as “other mandatory” programs — but doesn’t specify what those cuts would be.
+
+It relies on $147 billion in additional revenue from “dynamic scoring,” a more generous accounting method.
+
+It doesn’t account for the $200 billion plan now being negotiated to increase doctor payments under Medicare and to extend a children’s health-care program.
+
+The difficulty concealing all these sleights of hand might explain why Price was in such a hurry to leave his news conference Tuesday. His predecessor, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), liked to give lengthy seminars on his conservative budgeting theories, but Price took questions for just six minutes before an aide hollered “last question.” The chairman was gone a minute later, and reporters gave chase to the leprechaun. “Can your budget pass?” one of them asked.
+
+“I think so,” Price said, before locating his confidence. “Sure. Absolutely.”
+
+It was the latest instance of the Republicans discovering how difficult it is to govern now that they have unified control of Congress. In the past four years, budget debuts were academic exercises because there would never be agreement between the Republican House and Democratic Senate. But now the budget might actually mean something, and the firebrands elected in the past three elections need to show how they would handle the country’s finances. It turns out they govern much like those who came before them — with legislative smoke and mirrors.
+
+Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.), one of those on the stage, observed that “folks are playing with the opportunity for the first time in my short congressional career to actually bring a budget to the United States.”
+
+“Playing” is a good verb for the occasion.
+
+Price, a Georgia Republican who ran the conservative Republican Study Committee, delivered a long statement, imparting his assurance that “we believe in America.” At least three times he held up the 43-page budget for the cameras. But after the 10-minute preamble, the questioning quickly got tricky for Price.
+
+Why didn’t he ask committees to come up with more than $5 billion in savings?
+
+“That’s a floor, not a ceiling,” Price said, adding something about “an opportunity to provide a positive solution that the American people desire.”
+
+Andy Taylor of the Associated Press asked him about the $900 billion tax increase and the Obamacare revenues assumed in the budget.
+
+“Because we believe in the American people, and we believe in growth,” replied Price, predicting higher-than-expected economic growth would boost tax revenues.
+
+Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times asked Price if he would detail the $1 trillion in mandatory cuts that the budget doesn’t identify.
+
+“Take a peek at ‘A Balanced Budget for a Stronger America,’ ” Price replied, holding up the budget again for the cameras.
+
+“I’m looking at it,” Weisman said. “It doesn’t specify.”
+
+It didn’t — and that’s the sort of trick Republicans can no longer get away with now that they’re in charge.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+3863,Obama announces restrictions on distribution of military-style equipment to police,"President Obama is banning local police departments from receiving a range of military-style equipment from the federal government -- from grenade launchers to bayonets to certain armored vehicles -- as he implements the recommendations of a panel that examined the controversial gear giveaways in the wake of the Ferguson riots.
+
+The White House announced Monday that Washington would no longer provide some military-style gear while putting stricter controls on other weapons and equipment distributed to law enforcement. The details were released in advance of an Obama visit to Camden, N.J., Monday afternoon where he met with youth and law enforcement.
+
+Nine months earlier, scenes of heavily armed police in riot gear dispelling racially charged protests in Ferguson touched off a debate about federal programs that let local law enforcement apply for such equipment. The White House initially suggested Obama would maintain those programs, but an interagency group found ""substantial risk of misusing or overusing"" items like tracked armored vehicles, high-powered firearms and camouflage could undermine trust in police.
+
+Speaking in Camden, Obama said the use of militarized gear by police can give the public the feeling that law enforcement is like ""an occupying force.""
+
+In previewing the president's trip, the White House said that effective immediately, the federal government will no longer fund or provide armored vehicles that run on a tracked system instead of wheels, weaponized aircraft or vehicles, firearms or ammunition of .50-caliber or higher, grenade launchers, bayonets or camouflage uniforms. The federal government also is exploring ways to recall prohibited equipment already distributed.
+
+With scrutiny on police only increasing in the ensuing months after a series of highly publicized deaths of black suspects nationwide, Obama also is unveiling the final report of a task force he created to help build confidence between police and minority communities in particular.
+
+In addition to the new equipment-transfer bans, a longer list of equipment the federal government provides will come under tighter control, including wheeled armored vehicles like Humvees, manned aircraft, drones, specialized firearms, explosives, battering rams and riot batons, helmets and shields. Starting in October, police will have to get approval from their city council, mayor or some other local governing body to obtain it, provide a persuasive explanation of why it is needed and have more training and data collection on the use of the equipment.
+
+The issue of police militarization rose to prominence last year after a white police officer in Ferguson fatally shot unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown, sparking protests. Critics questioned why police in full body armor with armored trucks responded to dispel demonstrators, and Obama seemed to sympathize when ordering a review of the programs that provide the equipment. ""There is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement and we don't want those lines blurred,"" Obama last in August.
+
+But he did not announce a ban in December with the publication of the review, which showed five federal agencies spent $18 billion on programs that provided equipment including 92,442 small arms, 44,275 night-vision devices, 5,235 Humvees, 617 mine-resistant vehicles and 616 aircraft. At the time, the White House defended the programs as proving to be useful in many cases, such as the response to the Boston Marathon bombing. Instead of repealing the programs, Obama issued an executive order that required federal agencies that run the programs to consult with law enforcement and civil rights and civil liberties organizations to recommend changes that make sure they are accountable and transparent.
+
+That working group said in a report out Monday that it developed the list of newly banned equipment because ""the substantial risk of misusing or overusing these items, which are seen as militaristic in nature, could significantly undermine community trust and may encourage tactics and behaviors that are inconsistent with the premise of civilian law enforcement."" The Justice Department did not respond to an inquiry about how many pieces of equipment that are now banned had been previously distributed through federal programs.
+
+The separate report from the 21st Century Policing task force has a long list of recommendations to improve trust in police, including encouraging more transparency about interactions with the public. The White House said 21 police agencies nationwide, including Camden and nearby Philadelphia, have agreed to start putting out never-before released data on citizen interactions like use of force, stops, citations and officer-involved shootings. The administration also is launching an online toolkit to encourage the use of body cameras to record police interactions. And the Justice Department is giving $163 million in grants to incentivize police departments to adopt the report's recommendations.
+
+Ron Davis, director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the Department of Justice, told reporters he hoped the report could be a ""key transformational document"" in rebuilding trust that has been destroyed in recent years between police and minority communities.
+
+""We are without a doubt sitting at a defining moment for American policing,"" said Davis, a 30-year police veteran and former chief of the East Palo Alto (California) Police Department. ""We have a unique opportunity to redefine policing in our democracy, to ensure that public safety becomes more than the absence of crime, that it must also include the presence of justice.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6377,Dilbert Creator Explains “How Do I Know The Emails Are That Bad?”,"
+If you’re following the news, you know FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI found a bunch of emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
+As Dilbert Creator Scott Adams notes, there appears to be two main observations:
+1. Comey seemed pro-Clinton when he dropped the initial email case.
+2. Comey seems anti-Clinton this week because he announced a new round of investigations right before the election.
+So, how can both behaviors be explained? 
+First some background from Adams on ‘The Persuasion Filter’ :
+As my regular readers know, the Persuasion Filter is related to the idea that the human brain never evolved to accurately comprehend reality . In order for us to be here today, our predecessors only needed to survive and procreate. They had no need to understand reality at any basic level. And we have no such need either. That’s why you might believe you are reincarnated from a monk and I might believe my prophet flew to heaven on a winged horse but we can both get through the day just fine. Many different interpretations of reality are good enough for survival. I like to describe reality as each person living their own movie, which works well unless our script’s conflict. When that happens, one of us goes into cognitive dissonance and rewrites our past to make the movies consistent. 
+That’s how I see the world.
+Last year in this blog I suggested that the most productive and predictive way to view reality is through what I call the Persuasion Filter. That’s what I have been using to make spooky-good predictions about the election so far. And that’s what I’ll use today to give you an alternate movie about James Comey. Compare it to the movie you are running in your head and see which one better predicts the future.
+The base assumption of the Persuasion Filter is that people are irrational 90% of the time and only rarely – when no emotions are involved – truly rational. This is the reverse of the common filter for reality, in which people are assumed to be rational 90% of the time and a bit crazy 10% of the time. That’s some background for context.
+Read more here… 
+So, back to Comey, Adams asks – which movie does the best job of explaining our observations and also predicting the future? 
+Some say Comey is a political pawn in a rigged system. By that movie script we can explain why he dropped the initial email case. But we can’t explain why he’s acting against Clinton’s interests now. What changed?
+Well, some say Comey had to reopen the case against Clinton after discovering the Weiner laptop emails. If he failed to act, there might be a revolt at the FBI and maybe a whistleblower would come forward . But that leaves unexplained why Comey detailed to Congress how Clinton appeared to be guilty of crimes at the same time he said the FBI was dropping the case. If Comey had been protecting Clinton on the first round, he would have softened his description of her misdeeds, wouldn’t he? But he didn’t seem to hold back anything.
+And none of those hypotheses explain why the people who know Comey have high regard for his integrity. Comey also has the security of a 10-year appointment as Director, so he has a low chance of getting fired or politically influenced. That’s exactly why the job has a 10-year term. Given what we know of Comey before any of the Clinton emails, any movie that casts Comey as an ass-covering weasel is probably making a casting mistake.
+So allow me to offer an interpretation of events that casts Comey as more of a patriot and hero than an ass-covering weasel. Compare my interpretation with whatever movie you have in your head and see which one works best for explaining and predicting.
+My movie says Comey had good evidence against Clinton during the initial investigation but made a judgement call to leave the decision to the American public . For reasons of conscience, and acting as a patriot, Comey explained in clear language to the public exactly what evidence the FBI found against Clinton. The evidence looked damning because it was. Under this interpretation, Comey took a bullet to his reputation for the sake of the Republic. He didn’t want the FBI to steal this important decision away from the people, but at the same time he couldn’t let the people decide blind. So he divulged the evidence and stepped away, like the action hero who doesn’t look back at the explosion. 
+In the second act of this movie, Comey learns that the Weiner laptop had emails that were so damning it would be a crime against the public to allow them to vote without first seeing a big red flag. And a flag was the best he could do because it was too early in the investigation to leak out bits and pieces of the evidence. That would violate Clinton’s rights.
+But Comey couldn’t easily raise a red flag to warn the public because it was against FBI policy to announce a criminal investigation about a candidate so close to election day. So Comey had a choice of either taking another bullet for the Republic or screwing the very country that he has spent his career protecting. 
+In this movie, Comey did the hero thing. He alerted the public to the fact that the FBI found DISQUALIFYING information on the Weiner laptop. And he took a second bullet to his reputation. 
+How do I know the new emails are that bad? 
+I start by assuming Comey is the same man now as the one who was carefully vetted before being hired to protect the integrity of one of our most important institutions. And even Comey’s critics concede he’s smart. 
+So…
+The way you know the new emails are disqualifying for Clinton is because otherwise our hero would have privately informed Congress and honored the tradition of not influencing elections. Comey is smart enough to know his options. And unless he suddenly turned rotten at his current age, he’s got the character to jump in front of a second bullet for the Republic.
+According to this movie, no matter who gets elected, we’ll eventually learn of something disqualifying in the Weiner emails.
+And we can’t say we weren’t warned. Comey took two bullets to do it. 
+So compare this movie to your own movie and see which one does the best job of explaining the observed facts. And when we find out what is in the Weiner laptop emails, compare that news to my prediction that the information is disqualifying.
+The Persuasion Filter says there is no preferred reality. We all see our own movies. In my movie, Comey’s has a consistent personality from start to finish. He starts out his career as a smart, competent patriot and he later proves it by taking two bullets for the Republic. If your movie script has Comey suddenly changing his basic character for this election season, don’t expect an Oscar. 
+Read more here… 
+Of course if you’re a Democrat, this is all irrelevant and Comey is “A Putin puppet” (Howard Dean), “a federal law-breaker who should never have been appointed” (Harry Reid), and “a partisan, prejudiced individual” (Eric Holder)…
+NEW: Former Attorney General Holder, dozens of other former DOJ officials pen letter criticizing FBI director Comey. https://t.co/aXmWvAiFMg pic.twitter.com/FskFeDpoyE 
+— ABC News (@ABC) October 31, 2016 
+
+You decide which makes more sense – Scott Adams’ “movie” or the real partisan hacks above? Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Zero Hedge of www.zerohedge.com . ",FAKE
+3150,God is on the ropes: The brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified,"Darwin also didn’t have anything to say about how life got started in the first place — which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England, a young MIT professor who’s proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. “[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta magazine early in 2014, that’s since been republished by Scientific American and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he’s saying, life itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.
+
+The notion of an evolutionary process broader than life itself is not entirely new. Indeed, there’s evidence, recounted by Eric Havelock in “The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics,” that it was held by the pre-Socratic natural philosophers, who also first gave us the concept of the atom, among many other things. But unlike them or other earlier precursors, England has a specific, unifying, testable evolutionary mechanism in mind.
+
+Quanta fleshed things out a bit more like this:
+
+From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
+
+It doesn’t mean we should expect life everywhere in the universe — lack of a decent atmosphere or being too far from the sun still makes most of our solar system inhospitable for life with or without England’s perspective. But it does mean that “under certain conditions” where life is possible — as it is here on Earth, obviously — it is also quite probable, if not, ultimately, inevitable. Indeed, life on Earth could well have developed multiple times independently of each other, or all at once, or both. The first truly living organism could have had hundreds, perhaps thousands of siblings, all born not from a single physical parent, but from a physical system, literally pregnant with the possibility of producing life. And similar multiple births of life could have happened repeatedly at different points in time.
+
+That also means that Earth-like planets circling other suns would have a much higher likelihood of carrying life as well. We’re fortunate to have substantial oceans as well as an atmosphere — the heat baths referred to above — but England’s theory suggests we could get life with just one of them — and even with much smaller versions, given enough time. Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600, was perhaps the first to take Copernicanism to its logical extension, speculating that stars were other suns, circled by other worlds, populated by beings like ourselves. His extreme minority view in his own time now looks better than ever, thanks to England.
+
+If England’s theory works out, it will obviously be an epochal scientific advance. But on a lighter note, it will also be a fitting rebuke to pseudo-scientific creationists, who have long mistakenly claimed that thermodynamics disproves evolution (here, for example), the exact opposite of what England’s work is designed to show — that thermodynamics drives evolution, starting even before life itself first appears, with a physics-based logic that applies equally to living and non-living matter.
+
+Most important in this regard is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in any closed process, there is an increase in the total entropy (roughly speaking, a measure of disorder). The increase in disorder is the opposite of increasing order due to evolution, the creationists reason, ergo — a contradiction! Overlooking the crucial word “closed,” of course. There are various equivalent ways of stating the law, one of which is that energy cannot pass from a cooler to a warmer body without extra work being done. Ginsberg’s theorem (as in poet Allen Ginsberg) puts it like this: “You can’t win. You can’t break even. You can’t even get out of the game.” Although creationists have long mistakenly believed that evolution is a violation of the Second Law, actual scientists have not. For example, physicist Stephen G. Brush, writing for the American Physical Society in 2000, in “Creationism Versus Physical Science,” noted: “As Ludwig Boltzmann noted more than a century ago, thermodynamics correctly interpreted does not just allow Darwinian evolution, it favors it.”
+
+A simple explanation of this comes from a document in the thermodynamics FAQ subsection of TalkOrigins Archive (the  first and foremost online repository of reliable information on the creation/evolution controversy), which in part explains: Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder. However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can’t have more usable energy still? That passage goes right to the heart of the matter. Evolution is no more a violation of the Second Law than life itself is. A more extensive, lighthearted, non-technical treatment of the creationist’s misunderstanding and what’s really going on can be found here. The driving flow of energy — whether from the sun or some other source — can give rise to what are known as dissipative structures, which are self-organized by the process of dissipating the energy that flows through them. Russian-born Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work developing the concept. All living things are dissipative structures, as are many non-living things as well — cyclones, hurricanes and tornados, for example. Without explicitly using the term “dissipative structures,” the passage above went on to invoke them thus: Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature? In a very real sense, Prigogine’s work laid the foundations for what England is doing today, which is why it might be overstated to credit England with originating this theory, as several commentators at Quanta pointed out, noting other progenitors as well (here, here and here, among others). But already England appears to have assembled a collection of analytical tools, along with a sophisticated multidisciplinary theoretical approach, which promises to do much more than simply propound a theory, but to generate a whole new research agenda giving detailed meaning to that theoretical conjecture. And that research agenda is already starting to produce results. (See his research group home page for more.) It’s the development of this sort of detailed body of specific mutually interrelated results that will distinguish England’s articulation of his theory from other earlier formulations that have not yet been translated into successful theory-testing research agendas. Above all, as described on the home page mentioned above, England is involved in knitting together the understanding of life and various stages of life-like processes combining the perspectives of biology and physics: Living things are good at collecting information about their surroundings, and at putting that information to use through the ways they interact with their environment so as to survive and replicate themselves. Thus, talking about biology inevitably leads to talking about decision, purpose, and function. At the same time, living things are also made of atoms that, in and of themselves, have no particular function. Rather, molecules and the atoms from which they are built exhibit well-defined physical properties having to do with how they bounce off of, stick to, and combine with each other across space and over time. Making sense of life at the molecular level is all about building a bridge between these two different ways of looking at the world. If that sounds intriguing, you might enjoy this hour-long presentation of his work (with splashes of local Swedish color) — especially (but not only) if you’re a science nerd. Whether or not England’s theory proves out in the end, he’s already doing quite a lot to build that bridge between worldviews and inspire others to make similar efforts. Science is not just about making new discoveries, but about seeing the world in new ways — which then makes new discoveries almost inevitable. And England has already succeeded in that.  As the Quanta article explained: England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab. “He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.” Creationists often cast themselves as humble servants of God, and paint scientists as arrogant, know-it-all rebels against him. But, unsurprisingly, they’ve got it all backwards, once again. England’s work reminds us that it’s scientists’ willingness to admit our own ignorance and confront it head on — rather than papering over it — that unlocks the great storehouse of wonders we live in and gives us our most challenging, satisfying quests.",REAL
+2106,Two°: readers pick story on meat and climate change,"CNN columnist John D. Sutter is reporting on a tiny number -- 2 degrees -- that may have a huge effect on the future. He'd like your help. Subscribe to the ""2 degrees"" newsletter or follow him on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram . He's jdsutter on Snapchat.
+
+(CNN) Update: This poll is now closed and the results are in: Readers selected food and meat's impact on climate change as the next topic for CNN's Two° series. Thanks to everyone who voted! Sign up for the Two° newsletter to get updates about that story and this series.
+
+Every story needs a villain -- and climate change is no exception.
+
+Knowing which countries and industries contribute to climate change, and in what proportions, is key to understanding how we can fix this problem and avoid 2 degrees Celsius of warming , which is what policymakers regard as the threshold for ""dangerous"" climate change.
+
+Plus, this story is complicated by the fact that nearly all of us -- certainly those reading this column on a mobile phone or computer -- contribute to climate change in some way.
+
+We're all partly to blame.
+
+I'm going to be exploring this idea of ""climate villains"" for the next month or so, as part of CNN's Two° series , which looks at that threshold for dangerous warming. That's the point at which some island nations are expected to be submerged , drought risks go up considerably and water availability goes down.
+
+I'd like your help in deciding which bad guys to target.
+
+Below, you'll find a Facebook poll that lists four of my favorite climate villains, all of which came from your suggestions. Pick the one you find most interesting and I'll go out into the world to report on the winner. The poll closes at 5 p.m. ET on Sunday, August 16.
+
+I've met people -- smart people, reasonable people -- who think that climate change is caused by aerosols from hairspray (it isn't) or that it's just part of a natural warming cycle (it's not). Burning fossil fuels for electricity and heat, as well as chopping down rainforests, contributes to climate change.
+
+Here's a breakdown of global greenhouse gas emissions by sector, according to 2012 data synthesized by the World Resources Institute. This is kind of a ""blame"" chart.
+
+On Wednesday, I asked people on Facebook to identify their preferred climate villains . Among the most interesting (and sometimes humorous) responses you submitted: dinosaurs (""they turned into the oil that we want to get at, right?""); millennials (""It is always millennials' fault for everything ...""); parents (""the process of procreation ... results in increases in demand of the earth's resources and is the driving force for most of our planet's woes""). I was mentioned by name (""John Sutter. I bet he's double secret super villain. No doubt.""), as was Willis Carrier , the guy who commercialized the modern air conditioner, and James Watt, who invented an efficient steam engine
+
+You also identified more nebulous bad guys, like apathy, greed, ignorance and consumerism. Geography found its way into the mix, too. China, America and the ""3rd world"" all made your list.
+
+Some countries are more to blame than others, sure. But it turns out that the most industrialized countries -- the United States, European countries and, increasingly, China and India -- are among the biggest contributors to climate change, because they burn the most fossil fuels.
+
+Those are the countries most responsible for the warming we're already seeing, as well as for much of the warming that we will seen in coming years. According to the World Bank, the atmosphere already has warmed 0.8 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times , and about 1.5 degrees of warming is already ""locked in"" to the atmospheric system because of how much carbon we've burned.
+
+All of this data is a rough guide to help you vote. Each of the four topics you suggested for this poll is a worthy candidate. Our diets, our reliance on fossil fuel reserves, our willingness to turn precious forests into farms and our addiction to gas-burning cars and other dirty modes of transit -- all of these contribute to climate change. And each is worth exploring in depth.
+
+I don't want to play the blame game forever. I agree with those of you who said we need to move past finger-pointing and toward solutions. I do think, however, that by exploring who and what's causing climate change, we'll have a better sense of how to solve this urgent problem.
+
+So, please vote. Tell your friends. And thank you for helping decide where I'll focus my energy.",REAL
+2758,Backstory: Behind the terror takedown,"When a U.S. special operations team suddenly surrounded the car carrying the Islamic State's second in command, he was given the split-second option of surrendering. Instead, he began firing.
+
+Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, also known as Abu Ala al-Afri and Haji Imam, died in a hail of bullets early Thursday morning on an isolated road in eastern Syria, a location described by U.S. military officials as being ""in the middle of nowhere.""
+
+Defense Secretary Ash Carter told a press conference Friday he was ISIS' finance minister. But the terror leader also was considered the man most likely to take over for ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, if he were captured or killed.
+
+Details of the takedown emerged Friday, including descriptions of the elite U.S. assault force arriving in helicopters as drones flew overhead, tracking him.
+
+When al-Afri refused to surrender, he and all those with him were killed. If he had been captured, he would have been interrogated and then handed over to Iraqi authorities.
+
+The U.S. team had been practicing the mission for weeks. ""It was a really good mission,"" one source familiar with the developments told Fox News. ""It was precision and went as planned.""
+
+""We are systematically eliminating ISIL's cabinet,"" Carter said at the news conference.
+
+“The removal of this ISIL leader will hamper the organization’s ability to conduct operations both inside and outside of Iraq and Syria.""
+
+Carter described the target as responsible for funding ISIS operations and involved in some external affairs and plots.
+
+He said this was the second senior leader successfully targeted this month, in addition to the group’s “minister of war” Omar al-Shishani, or “Omar the Chechen,” killed in a recent U.S. airstrike.
+
+A U.S. official told Fox News that the Brussels terror attack earlier this week prompted the raid in Syria.
+
+Al-Afri is a former physics professor from Iraq who originally joined Al Qaeda in 2004. After spending time in an Iraqi prison, he was released in 2012 and traveled to Syria to join up with what is now ISIS.
+
+On May 14, 2014, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated him as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” for his role with ISIS.
+
+The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joe Dunford, also said at the press conference that more U.S. troops might be headed to Iraq soon.
+
+""The secretary and I both believe that there will be an increase to the U.S. forces in Iraq in the coming weeks,” Dunford said. “But that decision hasn't been made.""
+
+He added that despite a number of high profile strikes against the terrorists, “by no means would I say that we're about to break the back of ISIL or that the fight is over.""
+
+Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.",REAL
+7542,Deputy Shot and Killed by Fellow Deputy While Having a Conversation on Weapon Safety,"Home / Blue Privilege / Deputy Shot and Killed by Fellow Deputy While Having a Conversation on Weapon Safety Deputy Shot and Killed by Fellow Deputy While Having a Conversation on Weapon Safety Matt Agorist November 2, 2016 1 Comment 
+Fresno, CA — A 20-year veteran deputy of the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department was shot and killed Monday by his fellow officer. Officials immediately ruled it an accident and began the narrative that the gun somehow just went off on its own. 
+“We do not know yet the mechanics of how the weapon discharged,” Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims said. “So far, we have absolutely no reason to believe this was anything more than a tragic accidental shooting.” 
+Deputy Sgt. Rod Lucas was having a conversation near the Fresno Yosemite International Airport about how to carry backup weapons when one deputy’s weapon was discharged striking Lucas in the chest. 
+Lucas was in the room with two other deputies, and, according to Mims, there was no dispute at the time — ironically, just a conversation about weapons safety. 
+“The detective had his weapon out. During this discussion, the detective’s weapon discharged,” the sheriff said. “Sgt. Lucas was struck by the bullet in his chest, and he dropped to the ground.” 
+According to FOX, Mims did not disclose the type of firearm involved in the incident, calling it “an improved secondary weapon for the detective.” She said all witnesses have been interviewed except for the detective, who was not identified, due to his mental state which she described as extremely upset. 
+“We’re giving him the time he needs,” said Mims, who declined to identify the detective by name. “We’re taking care of him.” 
+Imagine for a moment, that a non-cop ‘accidentally’ shot and killed another man. Would they be allowed this same opportunity to not be investigated? Would a person who just killed someone in a room be ‘taken care of’ if they simply used the excuse of the gun accidentally going off? 
+Sadly enough, this is the third such incident in only a week in which a cop’s firearm ‘accidentally discharged’ and put the lives of others in danger. 
+At a Halloween party over the weekend, a cop in North Carolina shot and severely injured her own daughter as she showed off her service weapon. She has not been charged. 
+Prior to that shooting, a cop in Ohio fired his weapon into a daycare center — while it was fully occupied. 
+Despite the officer clearly admitting to committing the misdemeanor offense of discharging a firearm within city limits, police have yet to charge him. 
+Imagine if the people in these incidents were not police officers. The double standard is glaring. 
+Aside from the above the law treatment of these officers, the excuse of the weapons accidentally discharging is nothing short of asinine. 
+Guns do not fire themselves. 
+Weapons companies spend a significant amount of time and money making sure their guns don’t simply ‘go off.’ While it is entirely possible for older single action revolvers, which required the hammer to be cocked, to go off when dropped, the idea of a modern pistol accidentally firing without someone pulling the trigger is simply absurd. 
+There are more guns than people in the United States. It is estimated that Americans own around 357 million firearms. If these weapons were so prone to accidentally firing, there would be a lot of dead Americans. However, that is clearly not the case. 
+The reality is that these cases involve police, who are entrusted by the public to responsibly carry weapons, failing miserably at their jobs. You could rest assured that if a mere citizen were to shoot and kill another person while ‘discussing backup weapons,’ they would be cast out by the anti-gun crowd and plastered across the mainstream media. They would also be in jail. 
+However, if your job is to carry a firearm for a living to ostensibly protect society and you kill your own colleague while doing this job — you are immediately presumed innocent and given special treatment. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter and now on Steemit Share Google + Phil Freeman 
+Improved backup weapon means it’s been to the gunsmith for modification, reduction in trigger pull is the most common. So my guess is detective kojack was showing off his new play pretty and the hair trigger spring he just installed and shot this cop. Well done safety meeting I say. One less gangster in Fresno. Social",FAKE
+4228,All three Republican presidential candidates back away from pledge to support eventual nominee,"JANESVILLE, Wis. — None of the three remaining Republican presidential candidates would guarantee Tuesday night that they would support the eventual GOP nominee for president, departing from previous vows to do so and injecting new turmoil into an already tumultuous contest.
+
+Mogul Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich were each given a chance during a CNN town hall in Milwaukee to definitively state they would support the nominee. All three declined to renew their pledge. As recently as March 3, in a Fox News debate, all three said they would support the nominee.
+
+“No, I don’t anymore,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, when asked if he remains committed to the Republican National Committee pledge he previously signed. Trump said that he would instead wait to see who emerges as the nominee before promising his support.
+
+The GOP presidential candidates talked about the charges against Donald Trump's campaign manager, Muslims in the U.S. and more, and backed away from past pledges to support whomever becomes the nominee during the CNN town hall on March 29. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
+
+“I have been treated very unfairly,” Trump added.
+
+Trump and his team have braced for the possibility of a contested convention in recent weeks, as opposing forces have set their sights on denying him the nomination by preventing him from crossing the necessary delegate threshold.
+
+Trump said that he believes establishment Republicans and the RNC in particular have not treated him with respect.
+
+“I’m the front-runner by a lot. I’m beating Ted Cruz by millions of votes,” he said. “This was not going to happen with the Republican Party. People who have never voted before, Democrats and independents are pouring in and voting for me.”
+
+Cruz was asked three times by Cooper whether he would support the nominee. Each time, he declined to pledge to support the nominee no matter what.
+
+""I'm not in the habit of supporting someone who attacks my wife and attacks my family,"" Cruz said, referring to Trump.
+
+When Cooper followed up, Cruz replied: ""Let me tell you my solution to that: Donald is not going to be the GOP nominee.""
+
+Cooper pressed him a third time. Cruz responded: ""I gave you my answer.""
+
+Kasich said he would have to ""see what happens"" in the race before he could answer the question.
+
+Trump pointed to strategic maneuvering in Louisiana that could result in Cruz capturing more delegates from the state despite the fact that Trump won the statewide vote.
+
+“I call it bad politics. When somebody goes in and wins the election and goes in and gets less delegates than the guy that lost, I don’t think that’s right,"" he said.
+
+On the question of supporting the ultimate party nominee, “I’ll see who it is,” Trump said. ""I’m not looking to hurt anybody. I love the Republican Party.""",REAL
+362,"Defense Secretary Carter endorses 3-year timeline in Obama anti-ISIS plan, backs off criticism","Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Wednesday endorsed the three-year expiration date in President Obama's request to Congress to authorize military force against the Islamic State -- backing off his position from just last week.
+
+The newly sworn-in Pentagon chief testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in support of the president's new proposal for war powers to target ISIS militants.
+
+He said it gives the military the necessary authority and flexibility to wage this campaign, and specifically addressed the three-year sunset.
+
+""The president's proposed authorization affords the American people the chance to assess our progress in three years' time, and provides the next president and the next Congress the opportunity to reauthorize it, if they find it necessary,"" he testified. ""To me, this is a sensible and principled provision.""
+
+But just last week at a similar House hearing, Carter said such a timeline would be ""political.""
+
+He said the three-year sunset ""is not something that I would have deduced from the Department of Defense's necessities, the campaign's necessities, or our obligation to the troops.""
+
+However, he said at the time that he understands why it was included. Carter said last week -- and reiterated on Wednesday -- that he still ""cannot assure"" that the fight against ISIS will be over in three years.
+
+Congressional Republicans and other critics of the president's plan argue that an expiration date on such a military effort tells the enemy the U.S. military's plans. Republicans also have expressed unhappiness that Obama chose to exclude any long-term commitment of ground forces, while some Democrats voiced dismay that he had opened the door to any deployment whatsoever.
+
+Carter and other top administration officials adamantly defended the terms of the request at Wednesday's hearing. Carter said the request does not include a long-term commitment of ground forces because ""our strategy does not call for them.""
+
+He spoke alongside Secretary of State John Kerry and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
+
+Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said he hopes the hearing would help start a process where both parties can reach agreement on a new authorization to fight ISIS militants, who have seized territory across Iraq and Syria. Obama sent his draft to Capitol Hill last month.
+
+""As we have received that authorization for the use of military force, what we have come to understand is that -- and this is not a pejorative statement, it's an observation -- we don't know of a single Democrat in Congress, in the United States Senate, anyway, that supports that authorization for the use of military force,"" Corker said.
+
+Obama's proposal would allow the use of military force against ISIS for three years, unbounded by national borders. The fight could be extended to any ""closely related successor entity"" to ISIS, which has overrun parts of Iraq and Syria.
+
+The 2002 congressional authorization that preceded the American-led invasion of Iraq would be repealed under the White House proposal, a step some Republicans were unhappy to see. But a separate authorization approved by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks would remain in force, to the consternation of some Democrats.
+
+The struggle to define any role for American ground forces is likely to determine the outcome of the administration's request for legislation. The White House has said that the proposal was intentionally ambiguous on that point to give the president flexibility, although the approach also was an attempt to bridge a deep divide in Congress.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2557,Marco Rubio: Critics of Immigration Bill Were Right,"Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Friday that he is indebted to America for welcoming his Cuban immigrant parents, while he continued to back away from his 2013 legislation that would have allowed illegal immigrants to become U.S. citizens.",REAL
+4316,Bernie Sanders can’t win this way: Why his admirable debate performance still can’t unseat Hillary Clinton,"Anderson Cooper was, mostly, the model of a good debate moderator: focused on issues, well-prepared, quick to follow up, only occasionally lapsing into stupidity—as when he asked Bernie Sanders about his past as a conscientious objector, a topic relevant to exactly nobody—and generally keeping things moving.
+
+Granted, Cooper had a vastly different situation to contend with than his predecessors who dealt with the Republicans. There were only five candidates onstage, and none of them were eager to go to war with each other. All that was left to do was talk about actual policy. In fact, the moment that drew the biggest round of applause from the Las Vegas audience was when Sanders growled that he was bored with all the mishegoss around Hillary Clinton’s emails. Refusing to attack Hillary? The crowd ate it up.
+
+And what about Hillary? All eyes had been trained on her—would she crumble under the weight of the email scandal? Would she tremble as Bernie barked his applause lines? Of course not. The debate provided her with perhaps the most sustained platform she has had so far to show off her policy chops, remind everyone that she is a fearsomely polished debater and bask in the warmth of a crowd that was truly on her side. There was nothing especially new about anything she said—time and again, she took a more cautious, more hawkish approach to the issues thrown at her—but she made no major errors and even landed a few surprising and effective blows, as when she took Sanders to task for his record on gun control. Her biggest potential pitfalls—like her disastrous foreign policy record, her close ties to Wall Street and those nagging emails—were mopped up far more easily than they might have been. In one of her smarter lines, she defended her vote to invade Iraq by noting that President Obama had asked her to serve in his cabinet—an answer that managed to both shamelessly evade the question about her judgment and win over the debate audience all at the same time.
+
+Sanders has been one of Clinton’s top headaches, but his resolute unwillingness to go after her too much meant that he didn’t pose a real challenge for her during the debate. Instead, he stuck to his core themes, belting his messages about inequality and bankers out like Ethel Merman trying to hit the back of the balcony. Bernie Sanders knows how to work a crowd of liberals, so this strategy worked. It’s tough to see how that will change the dynamic of the race, though. If Sanders is serious about winning the nomination, there’s only one way to do that, and that’s through Hillary Clinton. As she showed, she won’t be shy about taking him down if she has to. As for the other three people in the race… well, they were also present. Martin O’Malley made an intermittently energetic appeal to be the alternative Bernie Sanders. It was an appeal that mostly fell flat. Jim Webb spent the majority of his time either whining about how he wasn’t being allowed to speak more or giving what sure sounded like sentences but didn’t quite seem to end up as sentences. And Lincoln Chafee gave what is likely to go down in history as one of the worst debate answers of all time when he explained his vote for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act by saying that he had just gotten to the Senate, didn’t know what was going on, and, oh, his father had just died. Nice knowing ya, Linc! One last thing: CNN desperately needs to rethink how it uses its journalists in these debates. Dana Bash, Don Lemon and Juan Carlos Lopez were quite literally tokenized, pressed into service only when a topic relevant to their particular demographic came up. Under the circumstances, it would have been better not to have them there at all. Or maybe—gasp!—CNN could have someone who is not a white man lead a debate for once?",REAL
+8274,"'Russia has no intention of attacking anyone -this is absurd,' says Vladimir Putin","October 28, 2016 112 While the Western press continues scaring its public of ""Russian aggression"" and blaming Russia for influencing the 2016 American presidential elections, Vladimir Putin just made a speech that is unlikely to appear in any mainstream media. Share on Facebook 
+At the meeting of experts at the Valdai Club in Sochi on October 27, Putin said about the U.S. elections: “a look at various candidates’ platforms gives the impression that they were made from the same mould – the difference is slight, if there is any.” 
+Putin called U.S. stories of “Russian hacking the U.S. election” as a “mythical and imaginary problem” and “the hysteria the USA has whipped up over supposed Russian meddling in the American presidential election,” instead of focusing on the domestic issues: 
+“The United States has plenty of genuinely urgent problems, it would seem, from the colossal public debt to the increase in firearms violence and cases of arbitrary action by the police. You would think that the election debates would concentrate on these and other unresolved problems, but the elite has nothing with which to reassure society, it seems, and therefore attempt to distract public attention by pointing instead to supposed Russian hackers, spies, agents of influence and so forth.” 
+“Does anyone seriously imagine that Russia can somehow influence the American people’s choice? America is not some kind of ‘banana republic’, after all, but is a great power. Do correct me if I am wrong.” 
+Putin reminded us who the real rulers are: 
+“The expanding class of the supranational oligarchy and bureaucracy, which is in fact often not elected and not controlled by society, or the majority of citizens, who want simple and plain things – stability, free development of their countries, prospects for their lives and the lives of their children, preserving their cultural identity, and, finally, basic security for themselves and their loved ones.” 
+Referring to the Western elites’ downplaying the growing gap between rich and poor, Putin said: 
+“It seems as if the elites do not see the deepening stratification in society and the erosion of the middle class, while at the same time, they implant ideological ideas that, in my opinion, are destructive to cultural and national identity. And in certain cases, in some countries they subvert national interests and renounce sovereignty in exchange for the favor of the suzerain.” 
+Putin reminded everyone that current situation of instability in the world is a direct result of the choice made by the United States after the end of the Cold War to take “the course of simply reshaping the global political and economic order to fit their own interests.” By taking this course, the U.S. missed a chance to make globalization “more harmonious and sustainable in nature.” 
+In their euphoria of winning the Cold war, the United States “essentially abandoned substantive and equal dialogue with other actors in international life, chose not to improve or create universal institutions, and attempted instead to bring the entire world under the spread of their own organisations, norms and rules. They chose the road of globalization and security for their own beloved selves, for the select few, and not for all. But far from everyone was ready to agree with this.” 
+This victorious attitude led to the system of international relations where “rules and principles, in the economy and in politics, are constantly being distorted and we often see what only yesterday was taken as a truth and raised to dogma status reversed completely. “ 
+On the Western hypocrisy and double talk, Putin said: 
+“If the powers that be today find some standard or norm to their advantage, they force everyone else to comply. But if tomorrow these same standards get in their way, they are swift to throw them in the bin, declare them obsolete, and set or try to set new rules.” 
+Russian president reminded about the U.S.-led decision “to launch airstrikes in the center of Europe, against Belgrade, and then came Iraq, and then Libya,” and turning the UN into a tool of U.S. foreign policy: 
+“The operations in Afghanistan also started without the corresponding decision from the United Nations Security Council. In their desire to shift the strategic balance in their favor these countries broke apart the international legal framework that prohibited deployment of new missile defense systems. They created and armed terrorist groups, whose cruel actions have sent millions of civilians into flight, made millions of displaced persons and immigrants, and plunged entire regions into chaos.” 
+In the global economy, multilateral institutions also became a tool to promote the interests of few: 
+“We see how free trade is being sacrificed and countries use sanctions as a means of political pressure, bypass the World Trade Organization and attempt to establish closed economic alliances with strict rules and barriers, in which the main beneficiaries are their own transnational corporations. And we know this is happening. They see that they cannot resolve all of the problems within the WTO framework and so think, why not throw the rules and the organization itself aside and build a new one instead.” 
+Always referring to the U.S. as “some of our partners,” Putin stressed that they “demonstrate no desire to resolve the real international problems in the world today.” Instead of making OSCE, “a crucial mechanism for ensuring common European and also trans-Atlantic security,” it was shaped into “an instrument in the service of someone’s foreign policy interests.” 
+About constant vilification of Russia and trumpeting of “Russian aggression,” Putin said: “they continue to churn out threats, imaginary and mythical threats such as the ‘Russian military threat’. This is a profitable business that can be used to pump new money into defense budgets at home, get allies to bend to a single superpower’s interests, expand NATO and bring its infrastructure, military units and arms closer to our borders. 
+Of course, it can be a pleasing and even profitable task to portray oneself as the defender of civilization against the new barbarians. The only thing is that Russia has no intention of attacking anyone. This is all quite absurd. 
+It is unthinkable, foolish and completely unrealistic. It is simply absurd to even conceive such thoughts. And yet they use these ideas in pursuit of their political aims. 
+The question is, if things continue in this vein, what awaits the world? What kind of world will we have tomorrow? Do we have answers to the questions of how to ensure stability, security and sustainable economic growth? Do we know how we will make a more prosperous world?’ ",FAKE
+6906,Iceland Election: Pirate Party prepares for major win [VIDEO],"Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
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+Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
+2880,Egypt bombs Islamic State targets in Libya after beheading video,"In retaliation for the gruesome killing of Egyptian Christians on a beach in Libya, Egypt sent its air force on the attack against Islamic State targets there Monday, in a move that threatened to ensnare Egypt in a regional conflict with the militants.
+
+Egypt’s Foreign Ministry on Monday called on the U.S.-led coalition striking Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq to broaden its scope to North Africa and take action against the extremist group in Libya. Italy said it would weigh a military intervention in its former colony across the Mediterranean to thwart the Islamic State.
+
+Libya’s air force also said that it had launched raids against militants in eastern Libya in coordination with Egypt and that the strikes had killed more than 60 fighters. The chief of staff for Libya’s air force told Egyptian state television that the raids would continue Tuesday.
+
+Egyptian fighter jets targeted Islamic State training camps and weapons stocks in Libya in a wave of dawn airstrikes, according to a statement from the Egyptian armed forces. Egypt’s military did not specify where its strikes took place.
+
+“We must take revenge for the Egyptian blood that was shed,” said the statement from Egypt’s military, which was posted along with a video of a warplane taking off at night. Later, the army posted footage of four strikes it said were carried out on “Libyan soil.”
+
+“Seeking retribution from murderers and criminals is our duty,” the army said. “Let those far and near know that Egyptians have a shield that protects them.”
+
+The statement marked the first time Egypt has publicly acknowledged military involvement in Libya, which has been torn apart by political chaos since an uprising that ousted longtime dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011. In August, U.S. intelligence officials said Egypt was carrying out strikes against Islamist groups in Libya in joint operations with the United Arab Emirates. Egypt denied those claims, however.
+
+Islamic State militants released a horrific video Sunday of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians who had been taken hostage in the Libyan city of Sirte in two separate incidents in December and January.
+
+In the video, masked jihadists marched the Christians, who were from Egypt’s Coptic minority, onto a sandy beach and forced them to their knees before sawing off their heads.
+
+The brutal killings were portrayed as retaliation against what the video referred to as “the hostile Egyptian church.” Captions refer to Kamilia Shehata, an Egyptian Coptic woman who in 2010 was rumored to have converted to Islam before police and the church clergy isolated her. The Coptic Church in Egypt said Sunday that it had identified the men in the video as the missing Egyptians.
+
+The footage was the first propaganda video from the Libyan branch of the Islamic State, which in Iraq and Syria has declared a caliphate over a wide swath of territory under its rule.
+
+At the Vatican, Pope Francis paid tribute to the victims.
+
+“The blood of our Christian brothers is a testimony which cries out to be heard. It makes no difference whether they be Catholics, Orthodox, Copts or Protestants. They are Christians. Their blood is one and the same,” he said.
+
+In Beirut, the leader of the Hezbollah movement, which has been fighting the Islamic State in Syria and now Iraq, condemned the beheadings.
+
+At least three militant groups in Libya have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, announcing “provinces” of the caliphate in the south, east and around the capital, Tripoli, in the west. Libya’s turmoil has allowed the extremists to make inroads into several cities.
+
+A political crisis has split Libya’s leadership and the armed groups that proliferated after the uprising into two vying governments — one in Tripoli led by Islamists and another in Tobruk that is recognized by the international community.
+
+In the fracturing of the country since the removal of Gaddafi, Egypt has backed more-secular forces aligned with former Libyan general Khalifa Hifter, who launched his own offensive against Islamist militants in the eastern city of Benghazi last spring. Egypt shares a porous 700-mile border with Libya.
+
+In Rome, officials said Italy would weigh participating in a military intervention to keep forces from the Islamic State group from advancing in Libya should diplomatic efforts fail, the Associated Press reported.
+
+Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti has said Rome could contribute 5,000 troops to lead such a military mission. But Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said Italy would defer for now to the U.N. Security Council.
+
+Reports in Libyan media said Monday that air raids in the eastern city of Derna, a jihadist stronghold, had killed a number of people, but those reports could not be immediately verified.
+
+Videos posted on social media purported to show destroyed buildings in Derna allegedly targeted in the strikes.
+
+The Tripoli-based branch that claimed the beheadings also claimed responsibility for a deadly attack that killed 10 people, including one American, in a luxury hotel in the capital last month.
+
+“The Egyptian people are shocked,” said Safwat al-Zayyat, a retired general in Egypt’s military. “But there is an attempt [by the jihadists] to drag Egypt” into war in Libya, he said.
+
+“We must be cautious, as the Americans say, of putting boots on the ground.”
+
+Liz Sly in Beirut contributed to this report.",REAL
+10492,TOP BRITISH GENERAL WARNS OF NUCLEAR WAR WITH RUSSIA; “THE END OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT”,"Paul Joseph Watson Senior British army officer and former deputy supreme allied commander Europe Gen. Sir Richard Shirreff warns that NATO faces “nuclear war with Russia in Europe,” and that America is already technically at war with Russia. In a hawkish article for CNN , Shirreff asserts that the west faces the biggest threat from Russia since the Cold War and that Vladmir Putin plans to “re-establish Russia’s status as one of the world’s great powers” by marching into the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Comparing the west’s policy towards Putin to the appeasement of Hitler, Shirreff claims that Moscow, “may have already lit the fuse that could lead to the unthinkable: nuclear war with Russia in Europe.” Under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, an attack on one NATO member country represents an attack on all member countries, meaning the United States would be at war with Russia if Russian troops set foot in Baltic countries. “A Russian attack on the Baltic states puts America at war with Russia — meaning nuclear war, because Russia integrates nuclear weapons into every aspect of its military doctrine,” writes Shirreff. He also states that “Russia is at war with America already,” recycling the claim, which remains unproven, that Russia is behind the email hacks that led to Wikileaks’ publicizing of Clinton campaign emails. “And don’t think Russia would limit itself to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Any form 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+517,"As deadlines come and go, Puerto Rico's debt crisis grows (+video)","Puerto Rico defaults on a $422-million debt payment Sunday, but Congress can't agree on a rescue plan with both Democratic and Republican lawmakers wary of any bailout bill.
+
+A member of a labor union shouts slogans while holding a Puerto Rico flag during a protest in San Juan September 11, 2015. Thousands of public sector workers demonstrated on Friday against an austerity plan to help pull Puerto Rico out of a massive debt crisis, saying the private sector should take more of the pain. The island's government is calling for shared sacrifice, and concessions from citizens and investors alike, as it tries to lift itself out of a $72 billion debt hole.
+
+Puerto Rico’s May 1 deadline on a $422-million debt payment has arrived, and US lawmakers are no closer to finding a solution for the island’s financial woes.
+
+Most of Sunday’s payment is principal and interest due from the Government Development Bank, Puerto Rico’s main bond issuer and fiscal agent.
+
+“That deadline is imminent, but Republicans in the House and Democrats in the administration are still haggling over the terms of a bill to rescue Puerto Rico,” writes The New York Times. “Missing the payment risks further destabilizing its shrunken economy. And there are concerns that the passage of any legislation could be delayed until the island nears the tipping point of its debt woes: a $2-billion debt payment due on July 1.”
+
+Before Congress left Washington Friday for a weeklong recess, legislators were deadlocked over any plan that could be seen as similar to bailout bills of the 2008 financial crisis. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) is leading a draft of a tentative rescue plan in the House, but it has faced opposition from legislators in both parties who see the bill as nothing more than a bailout.
+
+“For me, I think to any human being, ‘bailout’ means you’re going to get money to solve your problem,” said Representative Bishop. But the bill would “give Puerto Rico access to a court-enforced debt restructuring in exchange for the imposition of a federal fiscal oversight board,” so the island would get no direct money out of the deal. “So to say it’s a bailout, it’s obviously not just a stretch of the meaning of the word, there has to [be] an ulterior motive.”
+
+Puerto Rico’s Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla is frustrated with Washington’s inaction because he has warned about a default on Sunday’s deadline for months. And while Washington may be at a standstill, the financial crisis has everyday implications for the 3.47 million people who call Puerto Rico home.
+
+The island’s unemployment rate was 11.8 percent in March, more than twice  the overall US rate of five percent. Tens of thousands of government workers have been laid off since 2009 to cut costs and 10 percent of the island’s schools have been closed since 2014.
+
+These personal hardships along with others have led to Puerto Rico’s largest mass exodus in the last 50 years. The island county has witnessed a 9 percent population decline in the 21st century, with almost seven percent occurring between 2010 and 2015.
+
+“Population growth was once the norm in Puerto Rico,” explains Pew Research in a March study of population data from the US Census Bureau. “The island’s population grew by 10% from 1980 to 1990, and by 8% from 1990 to 2000. But as the effects of a decade-long economic recession have mounted, Puerto Ricans – who are US citizens at birth – have increasingly moved to the US mainland, with many settling in Florida.”
+
+According to the Census Bureau data, economic opportunity is a primary driver for the mass outmigration: 40 percent of the island-born Puerto Ricans moving to the continental US say their main reason for moving was job-related, and another 39 percent cite ""family and household"" reasons.
+
+But the continental US is not immune to Puerto Rico’s financial ills.
+
+“A massive default from Puerto Rican bonds can create a financial contagion in the US municipal bond market,” Jose Caraballo-Cueto, Director of the Census Information Center at the University of Puerto Rico, writes for NBC News. And the new influx of Puerto Ricans to the continental US will further strain our country’s public services, adds Dr. Caraballo-Cueto, as the majority of islanders moving to the mainland are very poor. “Moreover, U.S. exports – especially agricultural products – to Puerto Rico will be reduced even further if the Great Depression of Puerto Rico deepens.”
+
+And regardless of future side effects of the island’s bankruptcy on the overall US economy, the US government has “a shared responsibility” on Puerto Rico’s crisis, notes Caraballo-Cueto. Not only has the US banned Puerto Rico’s access to federal and local bankruptcy laws that could have restructured 70 percent of the country’s debt, but it has also upheld a marine law from 1920, the Jones Act, that cripples the country’s international trading by essentially only permitting US ships to enter or leave Puerto Rican ports as all other foreign vessels are subject to absurdly high customs and import fees.
+
+“Most people think July 1 is atomic bomb day,” Sergio Marxuach, public policy director of the Center for a New Economy in Puerto Rico, tells The Washington Post. “ May 1 is still significant.”",REAL
+4291,Trump says Cruz’s Canadian birth could be ‘very precarious’ for GOP,"Donald Trump said in an interview that rival Ted Cruz’s Canadian birthplace was a “very precarious” issue that could make the senator from Texas vulnerable if he became the Republican presidential nominee.
+
+“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem,” Trump said when asked about the topic. “It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head.”
+
+Trump added: “I’d hate to see something like that get in his way. But a lot of people are talking about it and I know that even some states are looking at it very strongly, the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”
+
+Cruz responded to Trump’s comments on Twitter later Tuesday evening by referring to an iconic episode of the sitcom “Happy Days,” in which the character Fonzie jumps over a shark on water skis. The image has become a symbol of something shopworn and overdone.
+
+Trump’s remarks — part of a backstage interview before a rally here Monday night — come as Cruz is rising as a serious threat in the presidential campaign, especially in Iowa, where some polls have shown Cruz eclipsing the billionaire mogul. The two have had a cordial and at times even friendly relationship over the past year, but they are competing intensely for the support of conservatives as the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses draw near.
+
+There have been recent signs of tension. At a rally last month in Iowa, Trump told voters of Cruz: “Just remember this — you’ve got to remember, in all fairness, to the best of my knowledge, not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba, okay? Just remember that . . . just remember.”
+
+In the interview with The Washington Post, Trump said he was providing a candid assessment of his leading opponent rather than initiating a personal attack and reviving the “birther” debate that he once led against President Obama. He repeatedly said he is hearing chatter on the topic among voices on the right. “People are bringing it up,” he said.
+
+Trump has veered from shrugging off the issue to raising more questions himself. In an interview with ABC News in September, Trump said he did not think Cruz’s birthplace was an issue. “I hear it was checked out by every attorney and every which way and I understand Ted is in fine shape,” he said.
+
+But months earlier in Iowa, Trump told reporters that it could be a “difficult problem.”
+
+“He’s a friend of mine. I have great respect for him. . . . certainly it’s a stumbling block, and he’s going to have to have it solved before he goes too far,” Trump said, according to the Dallas Morning News.
+
+Speaking late Tuesday in Sioux Center, Iowa, Cruz laughed off questions about Trump’s comment, saying he would let his campaign’s “Happy Days” tweet speak for itself.
+
+When pressed, Cruz turned it back to the media, saying the focus should be on substantive issues.
+
+“And one of the things that the media loves to do is gaze at their navels for hours on end by a tweet from Donald Trump or from me or from anybody else. Who cares?” he said. When asked why he would tweet a video clip, he said: “Why do it? Because the best way to respond to this kind of attack is to laugh it off and move on to the issues that matter.”
+
+Despite this, Cruz maintains he still likes Trump and doesn’t intend to throw insults.
+
+The Constitution requires a president to be a “natural-born citizen.” Anyone born to a U.S. citizen is granted citizenship under U.S. law, regardless of where the birth takes place, as long as the citizen parent has resided in the United States or its territories for a certain period of time. At the time of Cruz’s birth, the required period was at least 10 years, including five years after the age of 14.
+
+Cruz’s mother was a U.S. citizen when he was born in Calgary in 1970; his father was born in Cuba. Cruz has long said that because his mother is a citizen by birth, he is one as well and fits under the definition of a natural-born citizen. Since his election to the Senate, Cruz has released his birth certificate and renounced his Canadian citizenship.
+
+Legal scholars agree that Cruz meets the Constitution’s natural-born citizenship requirement, though it is untested in the courts.
+
+Several previous presidential candidates have run for office with similar backgrounds, such as Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the 2008 Republican nominee, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone to U.S. citizens.
+
+In the interview, Trump alluded to an ongoing lawsuit in Vermont, where a man is trying to keep three Republican presidential candidates, including Cruz, off the ballot. According to the Rutland Herald, the lawsuit names state officials as defendants.
+
+Trump has long flirted with “birtherism,” questioning Obama’s love of country and legal claim to the presidency. He supported efforts to investigate Obama’s birth in Hawaii and often suggested that the president was born outside the country.
+
+Trump’s crusade reached its zenith in 2011, when Obama felt obliged to publicly release his long-form birth certificate. The president then mocked Trump over the issue at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that year. Since then, Trump has quieted his speculation about Obama’s birth, while still declining to accept Obama’s legitimacy as president.
+
+Katie Zezima in Sioux Center, Iowa, contributed to this report.",REAL
+2942,Syria's Assad says he receives info about US-led coalition's anti-ISIS strikes,"Syrian President Bashar Assad says that his government has received information about airstrikes carried out by a U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State terror group, but has denied any direct coordination between the parties.
+
+Assad made the claims in an interview with the BBC that was broadcast Tuesday. He said that messages about the airstrikes were conveyed to Damascus by third parties, including the Iraqi government.
+
+""Sometimes they convey [a] message, [a] general message, but there's nothing tactical,"" Assad said. ""There is no dialogue. There's, let's say, information, but not dialogue.""
+
+Many members of the coalition, which includes four Arab countries, have urged Assad to relinquish his position since the beginning of Syria's bloody civil war in 2011. However, Syria's ruler has clung grimly to power despite heavy fighting that has caused the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people.
+
+Now, coalition jets share the skies with Assad's own air force, which also targets the terror group, commonly known as ISIS. However, Assad told the BBC that he would not formally join the coalition, which includes Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
+
+""No, definitely we cannot and we don't have the will and we don't want, for one simple reason -- because we cannot be in an alliance with countries which support terrorism,"" Assad said, in an apparent reference to the moderate Syrian rebels, which are supported by the United States. Assad also said that he would refuse to discuss action against ISIS with U.S. officials because, he said, ""they don't talk to anyone, unless he's a puppet.
+
+""And they easily trample over international law, which is about our sovereignty now, so they don't talk to us, we don't talk to them.""
+
+Assad also dismissed efforts to arm and train a force of moderate rebels to fight ISIS on the ground in Syria as a ""pipe dream.""
+
+The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the program to arm and train Syrian rebels, run by the CIA, had been beset by issues, including weapons shipments that were between 5 and 20 percent of what was requested by rebel commanders.
+
+Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates launched airstrikes Tuesday against ISIS from an air base in Jordan, marking its return to combat operations against the militants after halting the strikes late last year.
+
+The Gulf federation's official WAM news agency quoted the General Command of the UAE Armed Forces as saying that Emirati F-16s carried out a series of strikes Tuesday morning.
+
+The fighters returned safely back to base after striking their targets, the statement said. It did not elaborate, nor did it say whether the strikes happened in Syria or Iraq. The militants hold roughly a third of each country in a self-declared caliphate.
+
+American officials say the Emirates halted airstrikes in December after a Jordanian pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, was captured when his plane crashed behind enemy lines. Al-Kaseasbeh was later burned alive by the militants.
+
+The Emirates had not commented on the suspension, and Tuesday's statement was the first confirmation it had restarted combat operations.
+
+There was also some good news from the region Monday, as coalition officials said that Kurdish Peshmerga fighters had seized three bridgeheads on the west bank of the Tigris River from ISIS fighters north of Mosul. The attack was supported by four coalition airstrikes that had provided close air support.
+
+""This most recent Peshmerga operation is yet another example of how Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] can be defeated militarily using a combination of well-led and capable ground forces,” said Lt. Gen. James Terry, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve.
+
+However, a senior U.S. official told Fox News that any campaign to retake Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, from ISIS was not ""weeks away"", contradicting statements made over the weekend by Gen. John Allen, President Obama's special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition.
+
+""We don’t want this to be a fair fight, we need to build up the Iraq military first,"" the official said.
+
+Elsewhere, Reuters reported, citing Syrian activist groups, that ISIS had withdrawn some of its fighters and equipment from areas around the northwestern Syrian city of Aleppo, a hotbed of anti-Assad feeling. The U.K.-Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that ISIS had redeployed some of its forces to do battle against Kurdish fighters and mainstream rebels further east, but had not completely withdrawn from the area.
+
+The Observatory estimates that approximately 70 ISIS fighters have been killed in an escalation of coalition airstrikes since the group released video last week of a Jordanian pilot being burned alive.",REAL
+5475,U.S. calls for special Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces talks - Russia accepts,"Thu, 27 Oct 2016 15:29 UTC The United States has called for a special meeting with Russia over alleged violations of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty - a landmark Cold War-era agreement. Washington wants the Special Verification Commission (SVC) to discuss the problems related to the treaty's compliance . The event is expected to take place in mid-November. The INF set up the Special Verification Commission as a way to deal with disputes surrounding the treaty. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan can also attend the meeting because they housed intermediate range missiles before the disintegration of the Soviet Union and remain parties to the treaty. No SVC meeting has been convened since 2003. Russia welcomes the United States' offer. «We have responded positively», said Mikhail Ulyanov, the head of Foreign Ministry's Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Department. The treaty, which bans testing, producing, and possessing ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 to 5,500 kilometers, eliminated an entire class of missiles from Europe, and set up an extensive system of verification and compliance. Two years ago, the United States first asserted that Russia was in violation of the treaty , by developing a missile system that fell within the INF prohibitions. Last year, Rose Gottemoeller, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, said that Russia risked provoking «military and economic countermeasures» if it continued to stonewall the INF issue. The US has not released any specifics about which exactly Russian missile is the source of the violation. It should be noted that if Washington cannot present compelling evidence of the Russian non-compliance, the United States could be seen by the world as the party that killed the INF Treaty . The only thing the State Department has said is that an unspecified Russian ground-launched cruise missile breaches the agreement. The issue has been in focus of US media outlets recently. For instance, an article published by The New York Times on October 19 said « Russia appears to be moving ahead with a program to produce a ground-launched cruise missile». According to the article, «the concern goes beyond those raised by the United States in July 2014, when the Obama administration said that Russia had violated the 1987 treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces». On the very same day, The Wall Street Journal chimed in saying «The US is escalating a dispute with Russia over its accusations that Moscow possesses banned missile technology» . On October 17, two top House Republican chairmen - House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (Texas) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (Calif.) - wrote a letter to the US president saying «It has become apparent to us that the situation regarding Russia's violation has worsened, and Russia is now in material breach of the treaty» . Russia, in turn, has accused the US of violating the pact. According to Russia's officials, the Aegis Ashore missile defense system that the US has activated in Romania and plans to install in Poland represents a violation of the treaty. Aegis Ashore uses the naval Mk-41 launching system, which is capable of firing long-range cruise missile. This is a blatant violation of the INF Treaty provisions. The treaty bans launchers capable of firing intermediate range missiles. Mk-41s deployed in Europe may launch short and intermediate range cruise missiles deep into Russian territory . A US intermediate range weapon launched from Romania or Poland would require only a short flight time to reach beyond the Urals. Russia has also said that American armed drones violate the treaty. The US plans to arm tactical aviation in Europe with modernized B61-12 guided warheads will virtually nullify all the benefits of the INF Treaty from the point of view of Russia's security. The aircraft could fly from bases in Lithuania, Estonia and Poland to Russia's largest cities in 15-20 minutes - not that much longer than the flight time of the missiles scuttled by the INF treaty. If the US really wants the talks to produce a positive result, all these concerns should be part of the agenda. The SVC meeting will take place against the background of Russia's withdrawal from the plutonium disposal deal with the US because of Washington's non-compliance , recent movement of nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad , rising tensions over NATO's ground forces to deploy near Russian borders in 2017, US withdrawal from the agreement over Syria and apparent disintegration of arms control regime. Only political unity among the major global powers can reverse the disintegration process. Non-compliance, technical or material, is not the only problem the INF faces. Russia and the US adherence to the treaty's provisions does not prevent other countries from efforts to acquire ground-based intermediate range nuclear capability. The treaty should become multilateral. Russia and the US could cooperate in an effort to reach this goal with the help of the United Nations. It may be kind of forgotten today as so many things have happened since then, but in October 2007 Russia and the United States issued a joint statement to call on all countries to join a global INF Treaty addressing the First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) of the UN General Assembly. Setting the existing differences aside, the parties could revive the process in an effort to involve other states. The SVC meeting may become a venue for addressing other issues related to arms control. The concerns are there. Candid talk is the best way to address the burning problems of mutual interest. The US has demonstratively refused to discuss the host of problems related to the ballistic missile defense in Europe. This stance is erroneous. The US should change its approach to the problem. The two great powers do need a venue for arms control dialogue. The reached agreement to restart contacts within the framework of SVC against the background of US presidential election gives hope that the tide may gradually turn. Comment: As usual, the U.S. blames Russia for what the U.S. is doing. And as usual, they provide no evidence or argumentation. They can't even say which Russian ""missile"" violates the treaty! Thankfully, these talks will give Russia the opportunity of bringing up the issue of the U.S.'s very real violation of the INF treaty.",FAKE
+1431,Democratic town hall: Will Clinton pitch backfire? (Opinion),"Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review, and a former CNN producer and correspondent. Follow her @FridaGhitis . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+(CNN) Hillary Clinton roared to a clear victory in the Iowa town hall Monday night , coming across as energetic, articulate, knowledgeable and experienced. I never thought I'd find myself commenting on the clothing choices of female political candidates (men have almost no choices to make) but in this case, Clinton's red top underscored her fiery presentation. For once, the men may have wished they had worn red jackets!
+
+There was, however, a downside for Clinton in her triumph -- the once seemingly inevitable Democratic nominee opted to tie herself ever more closely to President Barack Obama's foreign policy. Indeed, come the general election, Clinton's full-throated defense of the controversial Iran deal and other foreign policy choices will make it that much harder to distance herself from the broader historic catastrophe of the unraveling of the Middle East that has unfolded during Obama's watch.
+
+Still, with a surging challenge from the left in the form of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton may have felt she had no choice but to embrace Obama's legacy more closely in an effort to earn the vote of party activists and other committed Democrats. The polls show Democrats, by massive majorities , have backed Obama's performance throughout his presidency. To secure the nomination, then, Clinton may need to become Obama's candidate, even if in the fall campaign she faces a general public among which less than half the voters are satisfied with the current administration.
+
+Fortunately for Clinton, the task of drumming up Democratic support by aligning herself with the President was made easier just hours before the town hall began when Obama gave an interview that sounded close to an endorsement, ""[The] one thing everybody understands is that this job right here, you don't have the luxury of just focusing on one thing,"" the President said, in what sounded like a dig at Sanders, who has made the fight against income inequality the focus of his campaign.
+
+Sanders, of course, showed why he has excited so many voters. The event format was not designed to produce blockbuster ratings by creating clashes between the candidates. Instead, it looked like a series of job interviews for the presidency; a fitting format for Iowa's voters, who take their democratic responsibilities very seriously.
+
+In Sanders they, and viewers at home, saw a man who displays a singular level of unrehearsed honesty and a clear commitment to fighting against a wrong that troubles him (as it undoubtedly does many Americans). As Sanders reminded everyone, in the aftermath of the multibillion dollar bank bailouts that followed the subprime lending and the widespread pain of the Great Recession, it is nothing short of infuriating that the people who created the mess received millions of dollars in bonuses. This even as life became harder for many Americans and as inequalities continued to grow.
+
+Sanders declared ""we need a political revolution."" And, when asked to explain what it means to be a democratic socialist -- a label not normally embraced by voters in the world's most successful capitalist economy -- Sanders did a convincing job of explaining that democratic socialism means ""economic rights, the right to economic security, should exist in the United States of America,"" adding that ""it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1% in this country own almost 90% -- almost-- own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%.""
+
+When questioned about his lack of foreign policy experienced compared with Clinton, Sanders pointed to his vote against the war in Iraq. On the question of how the next president could get anything done in the current climate of partisanship, Sanders said his track record in government proves he can get legislation approved. But it was difficult not to notice that Clinton offered a more extensive explanation about why her foreign policy expertise mattered, explaining how results comes down to relationships, and adding that she knows how to find common ground and build ties.
+
+The time in the spotlight for the third Democrat in the race, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, amounted to little more than a break between the two halves of the main event. O'Malley may be hoping that the complicated rules of the Iowa caucuses will produce a miracle for his campaign, but it was difficult to see what he offers that is more compelling than the two alternatives. He certainly tried to look the part, even taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves in a moment that seemed right out of an old ""West Wing"" episode -- clearly rehearsed and by now something of cliché.
+
+Unfortunately for the governor, the more ""mature"" candidates offered plenty of dynamism of their own, even if it came packaged under more wrinkles.",REAL
+2259,Opponents divided on how — or whether — to resist justices’ ruling,"When Friday began, there were 14 states where same-sex couples still could not legally marry. By the afternoon — after a confusing day of orders and counter-orders by governors, attorneys general and county clerks — couples had married in all of them but one.
+
+The holdout was Louisiana. There, Attorney General James D. “Buddy” Caldwell (R) condemned the Supreme Court’s ruling, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, as “federal government intrusion into what should be a state issue.”
+
+What’s more, Caldwell said, he had read the text of the decision. And he’d found no specific line saying that Louisiana had to obey it.
+
+“Therefore, there is not yet a legal requirement for officials to issue marriage licenses or perform marriages for same-sex couples in Louisiana,” he said in a statement. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who announced Wednesday that he is running for president, criticized the justices’ decision but said his state will comply with it once an appeals court officially gives the order.
+
+Across the country, some conservatives called for “resistance” to the high court’s ruling, which they said tramples on the Bible and the Constitution’s protections of states’ rights.
+
+[The GOP candidates are split into two fields over gay marriage]
+
+In most places, that didn’t happen Friday. But in several states, conservative officials did try to delay or block the implementation of the decision.
+
+In addition to Louisiana, there was Mississippi, which blocked almost all same-sex marriages, saying it needed a lower court’s permission to proceed. A few same-sex couples in Mississippi did get married in the window between the Supreme Court’s ruling and the state’s order to stop.
+
+In Alabama, two officials announced another method of resistance: If they couldn’t stop same-sex marriage, they would stop marriage itself. They said they would no longer issue marriage licenses to anyone, gay or straight, ever again.
+
+“I will not be doing any more ceremonies,” said Fred Hamic (R), the elected probate judge in rural Geneva County. The other was Wes Allen (R), the probate judge in Pike County. Both said that state law doesn’t require their counties to issue marriage licenses at all. If people want to wed, they can go to another county.
+
+“If you read your Bible, sir, then you know the logic. The Bible says a man laying with a man or a woman laying with a woman is an abomination to God,” Hamic said. “I am not mixing religion with government, but that’s my feelings on it.”
+
+And then there was Texas, where confusion reigned.
+
+Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) had warned county clerks not to issue same-sex marriage licenses until he could give them orders.
+
+Then the decision came.
+
+He denounced the ruling in general terms but never told clerks how, or whether, to implement it. That left county officials on their own.
+
+At the Williamson County clerk’s office in Georgetown, just north of Austin, officials said they were not issuing same-sex marriage licenses Friday, pending a review of the justices’ decision by county officials.
+
+“We’re good lawyers, we have to read the whole thing and then issue guidelines,” said Brandon Dakroub, first assistant county attorney. The forms would have to be updated, for one thing: The old ones are meant for one man and one woman.
+
+In the meantime, officials had posted a sign in the hallways, telling same-sex couples what to do if they couldn’t wait. “Bexar, Travis and Dallas [counties] are issuing if you cannot wait for our software changes,” the sign said.
+
+That was true: Clerks in more liberal, urban Texas counties had begun issuing licenses anyway, without waiting for guidance from the state capital. But that wasn’t always easy. In Harris County, which includes Houston, the county attorney actually ordered the county clerk to begin issuing them. But the clerk refused.
+
+“We were told if we use the wrong form it will be null and void,” a deputy clerk told the Houston Chronicle. Later in the afternoon, Harris County began issuing same-sex marriage licenses after all.
+
+Adding to the confusion in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued a memo that required state agencies to respect the “sincere religious beliefs” of people who don’t agree with same-sex marriage. But his memo didn’t say anything about when or how same-sex couples could get married.
+
+Texas state Rep. Cecil Bell Jr. (R) — a leading voice of resistance to same-sex marriage — said he hoped the state’s leaders would try to stop the implementation of the ruling.
+
+Somebody would sue, he said.
+
+But a lawsuit would take time. And, Bell said, time is their best hope now.
+
+“Hopefully it takes long enough to where we have . . . a situation where the [Supreme] Court changes,” because a Republican president appoints new justices who see same-sex marriage differently, he said.
+
+In the remaining states that had not permitted same-sex marriage — Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee — state officials said they will carry out the court’s ruling.
+
+“Recognizing that there are strong feelings on both sides, it is important for everyone to respect the judicial process and the decision today from the U.S. Supreme Court,” Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) said in a statement. The possibility of a backlash to Friday’s ruling was anticipated by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. In a dissent, he said that same-sex marriage already had a lot of political momentum — but that the court’s decision could short-circuit that. “Stealing this issue from the people will for many cast a cloud over same-sex marriage,” he wrote.
+
+[The Fix: The Supreme Court did Republicans a favor]
+
+Some conservatives — mainly without political power themselves — said that the only correct response was to resist the decision.
+
+“I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch,” said former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R), who is running for president. “We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat.”
+
+Huckabee did not say what, exactly, he meant by “resist.” In Arkansas, at least one county began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on Friday.
+
+In other cases, the call was for a kind of second-order resistance. Private citizens couldn’t stop the marriages, perhaps, but they could refuse to bake wedding cakes or provide services for receptions.
+
+Or leaders of larger institutions could risk their bottom lines by refusing to treat same-sex unions like other marriages.
+
+Rick Scarborough, the leader of a Texas-based group that gathered 55,000 signatures to “defend” marriage, said that, for instance, a Christian school could fire an employee for being married to another man.
+
+“That’s what we mean by civilly disobeying. We’re not going to change our practice or our pattern to fit the whims of the Supreme Court,” he said. “If you sue us, we’ll face the lawsuits, and we’ll continue until bankruptcy . . . or jail time, if required.”
+
+Scarborough is a minister, but he doesn’t have a church of his own to put on the line. Still, he’s encouraging others to do so, reminding them of a song about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego — Old Testament figures who were cast into a furnace because they would not renounce God.
+
+“The song we teach our kids is, ‘They wouldn’t bend, they wouldn’t bow, they wouldn’t burn,’ ” he said. In this fight, Scarborough said, Christians may not be that fortunate: “We are not going to bend, we are not going to bow. If necessary, we are going to burn.”
+
+But Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said the church should not seek legal confrontations — but rather should focus on a spiritual message, describing the value of heterosexual marriage.
+
+“If the government were to force Christian churches . . . to perform same-sex marriages, then yes, we couldn’t do that,” Moore said in a conference call with reporters. “That does not mean, though, that . . . we can’t obey laws, including bad laws, that we don’t agree with.”
+
+Bishop Joe S. Vasquez of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Austin, the largest diocese in Texas, counseled a similar message.
+
+“This causes confusion among those who are faithful to the Gospel and erodes rights of persons in each state,” he said, adding that “Jesus taught that, from the beginning, marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman.”
+
+“Regardless of the court’s decision,” he said, “the nature of the human person and marriage remains unchanged and unchangeable.”",REAL
+4091,Planned Parenthood fallout: Why it's unfair to blame abortion opponents,"Some of the rhetoric on the left about the awful shootings at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado is troubling.
+
+ 
+
+ Some of the rhetoric on the right after such cases has also been troubling.
+
+ 
+
+ I say this to pundits and politicians after each tragedy: Don’t demonize the other side because some crazy guy goes on a shooting spree. But it’s a temptation that many are unable to resist.
+
+ 
+
+ Words matter, of course, and rhetoric can be incendiary. But it’s still unfair to draw a link between media and political debate and some violent sociopath who doesn’t value human life.
+
+ 
+
+ Inevitably, we’re left with a wave of finger-pointing over which party is “politicizing” the situation, which unfortunately diverts attention from the victims.
+
+ 
+
+ It didn’t take long after Friday’s shooting in Colorado Springs, which killed three people, including a police officer, and wounded nine others. Democrats rushed to put out statements, and Republican presidential candidates were mostly silent.
+
+ 
+
+ Hillary Clinton, after a supportive “we #StandWithPP” tweet, said: “We should be supporting Planned Parenthood, not attacking it…And it is way past time to protect women’s health and respect women’s rights, not use them as political footballs.”
+
+ 
+
+ President Obama, as he has after other mass shootings, turned to gun control, saying that if we truly care about this, “we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough.”
+
+ 
+
+ Both statements could be called “political,” but were relatively restrained in tone.
+
+ 
+
+ I get that the GOP candidates are staunchly opposed to abortion and have been sharply critical of Planned Parenthood, especially after the deeply disturbing videos in which staffers spoke cavalierly about the harvesting of fetal organs (which prompted an apology from the group’s president and a change in its practice).
+
+ 
+
+ But three people--including an Iraq war veteran, a mother of two--are dead because they were at a clinic that provides a legal service.
+
+ 
+
+ Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and John Kasich put out statements of sympathy for the victims in the 36 hours after the attack. Would the others have acted differently if the police officer had been murdered at a Starbucks instead?
+
+ 
+
+ Still, Planned Parenthood’s executive vice president, Dawn Laguens, ratcheted things up significantly by declaring “it is offensive and outrageous that some politicians are now claiming this tragedy has nothing to do with the toxic environment they helped create. Even when the gunman was still inside of our health center, politicians who have long opposed safe and legal abortion were on television pushing their campaign to defund Planned Parenthood.”
+
+ 
+
+ Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, said those opposed to abortion ""have ignited a firestorm of hate"" and ""knew there could be these types of consequences."" So the murders are ""not a huge surprise,"" she told the Washington Post.
+
+ 
+
+ Sorry, but linking the actions of a mentally disturbed gunman to the “toxic environment” that Republicans “helped create” is the old blood-on-the-hands argument. So is ""firestorm of hate"" language. Opponents of abortion and critics of Planned Parenthood are in no way responsible for this terrible crime.
+
+ 
+
+ On “Fox News Sunday,” Carly Fiorina reiterated her opposition to Planned Parenthood and said while the attack was ""obviously a tragedy,"" “anyone who tries to link this terrible tragedy to anyone that oppose abortion or opposes the sale of body parts” is engaging in “typical left-wing tactics.”
+
+ 
+
+ Mike Huckabee, on CNN, called the attack “domestic terrorism” that is “absolutely abominable, especially to those of us in the pro-life movement because there’s nothing about any of us that would condone or any way look the other way at something like this.” He then likened the murders to what goes on inside Planned Parenthood clinics, “where many millions of babies die.”
+
+ 
+
+ Cruz denounced ""some vicious rhetoric on the left blaming those who are pro-life…The media promptly wants to blame him on the pro-life movement when at this point there’s very little evidence to indicate that.""
+
+ 
+
+ But sometimes the guilt-by-association allegations fly the other way.
+
+ 
+
+ When two Ferguson police officers were shot in March, Front Page magazine ran this headline: “Obama and the Media Have the Blood of Cops on Their Hands.”
+
+ 
+
+ When a sheriff’s deputy was killed in Houston in August, Cruz said: “Cops across this country are feeling the assault. They're feeling the assault from the president, from the top on down, as we see — whether it’s in Ferguson or Baltimore, the response from senior officials, the president or the attorney general, is to vilify law enforcement.”
+
+ 
+
+ I understand that passions run high in these life and death cases. But partisan blame-shifting doesn’t help the situation and simply becomes one more political brawl in the wake of senseless violence.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+1278,GOP 2016: Is it time for Jeb Bush to pack up his attack ads and go home?,"We are just one week away from the Iowa Caucuses. The presumed front runner last year at this time? Jeb Bush. Or rather “Jeb!” as his campaign has dubbed him, hoping to add a little excitement to the mix (and possibly to underplay his famous last name.)
+
+But after one year of failing to rev up voter enthusiasm, is it time for Jeb to pack up his attack ads and go home?
+
+Not only are his poll numbers far from where his supporters thought they would be by now, Jeb is also acting as spoiler, destroying the candidate most likely to beat Hillary Clinton. In doing so, it appears his nasty campaign against Marco Rubio has wrecked his own chances. In clobbering his popular rival and one-time mentee, Bush has shown himself either incapable of bucking the operatives running his Super PAC, or full of baloney.
+
+After eight years of Barack Obama, the last thing this country needs is another weak-kneed leader. Or a hypocrite.
+
+For months, Jeb Bush publicly agonized over whether he should run for president.  Bush worried that he would be forced into the political gutter, claiming that he would only run if his campaign could focus “on the issues.” He was eager to lay out his prescriptions for solving the country’s ills, to push education and tax reform, for instance, but not keen to engage in a cage match with the other contestants.  He wanted to run “joyfully” because he thought the country needed a candidate who would “lift the country’s spirits.”
+
+The head of Bush’s Super PAC apparently sees the campaign differently. Since Right to Rise (R2R) has raised ten times the money brought in by the campaign, it’s easy to imagine who’s calling the shots. Mike Murphy, according to some, is on a personal vendetta against Marco Rubio, whom Bush loyalists consider disloyal for having entered the race. As a result, R2R has spent an astonishing $20 million on ads attacking the Florida Senator – about one third of the Super PAC’s ad spending to date, and more than the group has spent undermining any other candidate.
+
+Some of the ads target Rubio’s attendance record in the Senate, and his numerous missed votes. Some paint him a flip-flopper, changing positions with the shifting political winds. And then there was a cheesy ad mocking Rubio’s boots, of all things, which surely was another rung down into the gutter. (In fairness, the New York Times ran no less than four pieces on Rubio’s boots.)
+
+That poke was, as Rob Garver described it in The Fiscal Times, supposed to be funny but instead came across as “awkward and uncomfortable, like a Dad joke told in a car full of teenagers.”
+
+Has the assault on Rubio helped Bush? Certainly not in Iowa, where R2R has spent $8.5 million blasting Rubio. In that state, Bush is languishing in fifth place with only 3 percent of the vote, compared to 14 percent going to Rubio and 37 percent to Trump. In more moderate New Hampshire, a state where the Bush-Rubio rivalry is critical to both campaigns, the Bush Super PAC has spent $7.5 million attacking Rubio.
+
+The gap between Bush and Rubio has narrowed, but most polls show Marco leading by a few points. The ads appear to have hurt Rubio, who was comfortably in second place in early January, with 14 percent of the vote. But, they haven’t helped Bush, who has been stuck since the beginning of the year at 8 percent.
+
+Perhaps more important, the attack ads haven’t helped Bush nationally. Back in September the former Florida governor claimed an almost 10 percent support amongst GOP primary voters; now he’s under 5 percent. In terms of how voters see Bush, the news is not good. Some 54 percent have an unfavorable view of Jeb compared to 32 percent who see him more kindly.
+
+The gap has widened in recent months. Ditto for Marco Rubio, who during most of the past year had a net favorable rating; he is now upside down, with the unfavorable/favorable ratio at 41/36.
+
+Jeb Bush has disappointed followers who expected him to run as he had promised, on solving the nation’s issues. As a successful governor of a successful state, Bush brings gravitas and stature to the race. He has also disappointed those who expected Bush’s ability to raise huge early money to put him and keep him out front; Donald Trump upended those expectations, and every other aspect of the race.
+
+Jeb has also disappointed those who expected him to be a better campaigner. After all, he has run for office successfully in the past; people wonder now, how did he win?
+
+The most likely answer is that he won by being himself, not the puppet of his Super PAC. Though there is supposed to be clear distance between the campaign and R2R, Murphy’s influence is undoubted. Murphy and Bush have worked together on campaigns since 1997; Murphy claimed in a Bloomberg interview, “I understand what Jeb wants, I understand what kind of campaign he wants…”  So, was Bush’s promise of a “joyous” campaign utter bunk, or has he been hijacked by his operatives?
+
+The most cringe-worthy moment of Jeb’s campaign came during the CNBC debate, when he challenged Rubio over missed votes. The moderator had already raised the issue and Rubio had successfully parried it, making Bush’s attack superfluous and awkward. Jeb had clearly been instructed to go after Rubio, and he did as he was told.
+
+That was not Bush’s only awkward campaign moment. Like Hillary Clinton chastising the banks that pay her so well, the more inauthentic Jeb becomes, the more likely he is to flop.  Perhaps that’s why he can barely deliver a sentence that doesn’t include a verbal hitch. In his head, he is thinking one thing, but his directors have him saying another.
+
+Jeb could come back, but to do so he has to campaign as himself – showing voters the serious but also personable candidate they see in small gatherings.
+
+Take back control of the campaign, ditch the nastiness, and he might have a shot.
+
+The sooner the better.
+
+Liz Peek is a writer who contributes frequently to FoxNews.com. She is a financial columnist who also writes for The Fiscal Times. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter@LizPeek.",REAL
+1631,Democratic debate: 's Reality Check team inspects the claims,"Washington The Democratic candidates for president gathered in Des Moines, Iowa, for their second debate Saturday, and CNN's Reality Check team spent the night putting their statements and assertions to the test.
+
+The team of reporters, researchers and editors across CNN selected key statements and rated them: True; Mostly True; True, but Misleading; False; or It's Complicated.
+
+Previous CNN Reality Check coverage of the Democratic and Republican candidates can be found here . This story will be updated throughout the night.
+
+Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threw her support behind a $12 hourly minimum wage at Saturday's debate. That's lower than the $15 an hour minimum backed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, as well many progressive activists nationwide.
+
+Clinton defended her stance, saying: ""If you go to $12, it would be the highest historical average we've ever had."" That's the ""smartest"" way to move forward, she added.
+
+Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said, ""When you talk about the long-term consequences of war, let's talk about the men and women who came home from war, the 500,000 who came home with PTSD and traumatic brain injury.""
+
+Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said, ""The Muslim nations in the region -- Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Jordan -- all of these nations, they're going to have to get their hands dirty, their boots on the ground. They are going to have to take on ISIS. ... Those Muslim countries are going to have to lead the effort. They are not doing it now.""
+
+Launched in September 2014, the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS consists of more than 60 coalition partners, including more than a dozen Muslim-majority countries. All of the countries Sanders mentioned are part of that coalition -- with the exception of Iran, which has been countering ISIS in separate initiatives that include training, advising, and supporting Iraqi and Syrian forces fighting ISIS.
+
+The actual contributions of each member of the U.S.-led coalition vary widely. As of October 2014, Saudi Arabia's contribution consisted of warplanes and training for Syrian rebels fighting ISIS. They also donated $500 million to UN humanitarian efforts in Iraq. Turkey has allowed foreign troops to launch attacks against ISIS from within its borders, and in July, began launching its own airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. Jordan launched airstrikes against ISIS early in the campaign, but later suspended its participation when one of its aircraft went down in Syria and one of its pilots was taken hostage. Jordanian strikes resumed after ISIS announced it had killed the Jordanian pilot.
+
+Few of the coalition's members have contributed active ground troops. In 2014, Egypt sent forces to Libya to bomb ISIS positions there. In late October, the United States authorized the deployment of about 50 special operations forces to northern Syria to fight ISIS. The Obama administration is also considering a special forces task force to fight ISIS in Iraq.
+
+In June of 2014, Iraqi officials said that Iran had sent about 500 Revolutionary Guard troops to fight alongside Iraqi troops against ISIS. The Iranian Foreign Ministry denied this, but Iran's president said Iran was prepared to help advise Iraq if asked.
+
+Sanders is correct that, at present, the primary coalition fighting ISIS is led by the United States. But several of the Muslim countries in the coalition have lost soldiers and civilians in the battle against ISIS.
+
+Former Gov. Martin O'Malley said, ""The truth of the matter is net immigration from Mexico last year was zero."" He then challenged viewers to fact-check him, and we couldn't resist.
+
+Additionally, the actual number of Mexicans living in the United States consistently declined throughout 2014. The U.S. Border Patrol also reported that in the 2014 fiscal year, the number of Mexicans apprehended along the border decreased 14% when compared to the 2013 fiscal year.
+
+The information we have suggests that the net immigration rate is negative -- which is actually not zero -- but it is close, and probably still supports O'Malley's point.
+
+Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley often goes back to his record as governor to explain how he would best shepherd the nation's economy in the White House. But he went a step further than he typically does during Saturday night's debate and took credit for Maryland's high median incomes.
+
+O'Malley was answering a question of how precisely he would freeze college tuition around the nation and whether his blueprint from Maryland would work across the U.S.
+
+""The blueprint in Maryland that we followed is we raised the sales tax by a penny and made our public schools the best public schools in America for five years in a row with that investment. And yes, we did ask everyone -- the top 14% of earners in our state -- to pay more in their income tax and we were the only state to go four years in a row without a penny's increase to college tuitions,"" O'Malley said.
+
+The answer, nationwide, is paying for priorities by taxing capital gains income like normal income, he said.
+
+""I believe capital gains, for the most part, should be taxed the same way we tax income from hard work, sweat and toil,"" O'Malley said. ""And if we do those things, we can be a country that actually can afford debt-free college again.""
+
+But in the exchange he also took credit for the state's median income level -- long the highest in the nation.
+
+""So while other candidates will talk about the things they would like to do, I actually got these things they would like to do. I actually got these things done in a state that defended not only a AAA bond rating, but the highest median income in America,"" O'Malley said.
+
+There's no question that Marylanders have done, on average, much better than those in other states since the recession. It's actually had the highest median income every year since 2006, when the median income was $65,144, to last year, when it was $73,971.
+
+In his answer, O'Malley did not explain how his economic plan kept high-wage jobs in Maryland.
+
+But President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush may be better able to make that claim because of the large share of federal employees in Maryland. A ""Governing"" magazine analysis of federal employment statistics from 2013 determined that Maryland had the largest share of federal workers for the total workforce of any state, something that the governor has nothing to do with.
+
+Maryland had 145,300 people working for the government, equal to 5.5% of the state's total non-farm employment. Virginia had more federal employees -- 172,500 -- but they only accounted for 4.6% of the total state employment.
+
+And a Washington Post review of federal salaries found that federal workers do quite well compared to many other industries -- earning an average salary of $78,500 as of 2012.",REAL
+4539,Interior: No more new Arctic oil leases for remainder of Obama's presidency,"WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is canceling its plans to sell oil drilling rights in the Arctic Sea through 2017, a remarkable turnaround since expanding drilling by approving new drilling permits for Shell Oil earlier this year.
+
+But Royal Dutch Shell's decision last month to suspend its oil exploration in offshore Alaskan waters — citing disappointing results from a well in the Chukchi Sea — prompted the Interior Department to cancel further oil leases.
+
+“In light of Shell’s announcement, the amount of acreage already under lease and current market conditions, it does not make sense to prepare for lease sales in the Arctic in the next year and a half,” said Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell.
+
+The Obama administration came under fire from environmental groups after approving permits for Shell to drill even as President Obama was embarking on a three-day trip to Alaska to highlight the effects of climate change in the Arctic. Those same groups applauded Friday's move, with the Natural Resources Defense Council calling it ""an essential reprieve"" for Arctic Waters.
+
+""The next step should be to take Arctic and Atlantic waters off the table to oil and gas drilling for good,"" said NRDC's Franz Matzner.
+
+Also Friday, the department also denied requests by Shell and the Norwegian company Statoil to extend existing years beyond 10 years. Both companies had asked for five-year extensions, arguing that they should have more time because regulations had prevented them from exploring for oil. Without those extensions, the leases will expire by 2020.
+
+Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the decision was ""absurd."" The Interior Department is throwing up regulatory roadblocks to prevent drilling, she said — and then using the lack of drilling to justify canceling the lease sales.
+
+“This is a stunning, short-sighted move that betrays the Interior Department’s commitments to Alaska and the best interests of our nation’s long-term energy security,"" said Murkowski, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee. ""Today’s decision is the latest in a destructive pattern of hostility toward energy production in our state that began the first day this administration took office, and continued ever since.""",REAL
+3652,"FBI: Orlando suspect U.S. citizen, vowed allegiance to Islamic State","PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Investigators were reviewing a range of possible terror and hate-crime links to a gunman who professed his allegiance to the Islamic State from the scene of a horrific mass shooting at a crowded Orlando nightclub early Sunday that left at least 50 dead and 53 others wounded, the FBI said.
+
+Omar Mateen, 29, of Fort Pierce, Fla., acknowledged his support for the terror group during a 911 call to local law enforcement from the nightclub, Orlando FBI chief Ron Hopper said.
+
+During the call, placed in the pre-dawn hours after the first round of shots were fired, Mateen also made reference to the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, said a separate federal law enforcement official who was not authorized to comment publicly.
+
+The disclosure closely tracked an account provided earlier Sunday by California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Schiff said that a Department of Homeland Security briefing indicated that Mateen had made the radical proclamation before he died in a shootout with authorities.
+
+“Whether this attack also was ISIS-directed remains to be determined,’’ Schiff said in a statement.
+
+Hopper also confirmed Sunday that Mateen had been interviewed by federal authorities three times in connection with two investigations during the past three years. In the most recent case, the FBI reviewed Mateen's alleged contacts in 2014 with Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, an American suicide bomber from Florida who died in Syria the same year.
+
+Hopper said the case was closed when investigators determined that Mateen's contacts were ""minimal.'' A federal law enforcement official later said a review of the Abu-Salha case found no direct contact between Mateen and the bomber. The two attended the same mosque, the official said.
+
+In a 2013 investigation, investigators interviewed Mateen twice about ""inflammatory comments'' the gunman made to a co-worker about possible ties to international terrorism. That case also was closed when authorities were unable to ""verify'' the comments.
+
+In both cases, the federal law enforcement source said, Mateen agreed to be interviewed and cooperated with investigators.
+
+Mateen was not under investigation at the time of the shooting, a status that allowed for his purchase of a handgun and an AR-15 rifle which were used in the assault. A Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives trace found that the firearms were purchased ""legally'' in Florida within the ""last few days.''
+
+Investigators, meanwhile, were interviewing members of Mateen’s family Sunday in an attempt to learn what may have prompted the assault, two federal law enforcement officials said.
+
+NBC News reported that the attacker’s father indicated that Mateen recently expressed anti-gay sentiments, but one of the officials said investigators were still reviewing a wide range of possible motivations.
+
+The official also said investigators were reviewing Mateen’s recent travels and contacts to learn more about possible preparations for the attack, now the largest mass shooting in U.S. history.
+
+According to Florida court records, Mateen was married in 2009 and divorced two years later.
+
+Mateen married Sitora Yusufiy on April 16, 2009. The marriage license was issued in St. Lucie County, Fla., records show. A dissolution of marriage was filed in July 2011.
+
+Yusufiy could not be immediately reached. But in an interview with The Washington Post, the ex-wife claimed she was beaten repeatedly.
+
+A former Fort Pierce police officer who once worked with Mateen as a security guard at PGA Village in Port St. Lucie, Fla., said Mateen was ""unhinged and unstable.""
+
+Daniel Gilroy said he worked the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift with G4S Security at the south gate of the community for several months in 2014 and 2015. Mateen took over from him for a later shift.
+
+Gilroy said Mateen frequently made homophobic and racial comments. Gilroy said he complained to his employer several times and quit after he said Mateen began stalking him with up to 20 or 30 texts per day. He also left Gilroy 13 to 15 phone messages a day, the former officer said.
+
+""I quit because everything he said was toxic,"" Gilroy said Sunday, ""and the company wouldn't do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people.""
+
+John Kenning, a regional G4S chief executive, confirmed that Mateen had been employed there since September 2007.
+
+""We are shocked and saddened by the tragic event that occurred at the Orlando nightclub,'' Kenning said in a written statement. ""We are cooperating fully with all law enforcement authorities, including the FBI, as they conduct their investigation. Our thoughts and prayers are with all of the friends, families and people affected by this unspeakable tragedy.''
+
+Two of Mateen's prior acquaintances described the gunman's actions as completely out of character for the person they knew.
+
+""He would never shoot anybody or kill anybody,'' Lamont Owens said, adding that he had not seen Mateen for a ""few'' years.
+
+Another associate, Ryan Jones, described Mateen as ""normal,'' though he also acknowledged not having contact with Mateen for several years.
+
+""He was a cool, calm and collected person,'' Jones said.
+
+Born in New York, Mateen lived in a Fort Pierce apartment complex that was teeming with law enforcement officials Sunday. He also used a mailing address at his parents' nearby Port St. Lucie, Fla., address.
+
+Mateen received an associates of science degree in criminal justice technology in 2006 from Indian River State College, according to college spokeswoman Michelle Abaldo.
+
+Contributing: Anthony Westbury and Nicole Rodriguez in Port St. Lucie; Johnson reported from Washington.",REAL
+1107,GOP candidates set aside insults,"There was an unfamiliar buzz on the debate stage here Thursday night: the sound of Republican presidential candidates engaging in a sober discussion of policy, rather than savaging each other.
+
+Their 12th debate took a markedly different tone as Donald Trump’s remaining three rivals prepare for a crucial round of primaries next week that could represent their last chance of stopping him on his march to the GOP nomination.
+
+While there were sharp exchanges, they were over Social Security, visa programs for foreign workers, how to fix the veterans’ health-care system, policy toward Cuba and the merits of free trade deals. No one mentioned “Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted” or the size of anyone’s hands.
+
+“We’re all in this together,” Trump said. “We’re going to come up with solutions. We’re going to find the answers to things.
+
+“And, so far, I cannot believe how civil it’s been up here,” the celebrity billionaire marveled.
+
+That was because each of them has something to prove and little time to do it.
+
+Trump sought to project a command of issues and a temperament that is suited to the Oval Office, rather than a reality show.
+
+Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida was attempting to repair the damage that he has done to his reputation, and his presidential prospects, by baiting Trump with schoolyard taunts.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas portrayed himself as an outsider, like Trump — but one with greater intellectual depth.
+
+And Gov. John Kasich of Ohio emphasized his blue-collar roots and his governing experience — the latter commodity being one that thus far has not found a market in this year’s discontented electorate.
+
+Trump’s opponents drew pointed yet substantive contrasts with the front-runner over his view that many Muslims around the world “hate” the United States. Cruz, Rubio and Kasich argued that Trump’s rhetoric unnecessarily and dangerously alienates many peaceful followers of Islam, the world’s second-largest religion.
+
+“I know that a lot of people find appealing the things that Donald says because he says what people wish they could say,” Rubio said. “The problem is presidents can’t just say whatever they want. They have consequences, here and around the world.”
+
+Trump countered that Rubio and other politicians espouse a political correctness and diplomatic tone that endangers Americans.
+
+“Marco talks about consequences,” Trump said. “Well, we’ve had a lot of consequences, including airplanes flying into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and could have been the White House. . . . You can be politically correct if you want. I don’t want to be politically correct. I want to solve problems. And we have a problem of hate.”
+
+Rubio shot back: “I’m not interested in being politically correct. I’m interested in being correct.”
+
+Kasich said radical Islam is the greatest threat to the United States.
+
+“They want to destroy everything we’re about,” Kasich said. But he also noted that cultivating alliances of shared trust with such Muslim countries as Saudi Arabia and Jordan is critical to the U.S. mission of defeating Islamic State terrorists.
+
+Cruz agreed. “The answer is not simply to yell, ‘China bad, Muslims bad.’ You’ve got to understand the nature of the threats we’re facing and how you deal with them.”
+
+A clear difference emerged on Social Security, with Trump vowing not to tinker with the popular federal retirement program and other candidates arguing that the system requires a sweeping overhaul, including pushing back the retirement age, to avert a future debt crisis.
+
+“I will do everything within my power not to touch Social Security — to leave it the way it is, to make this country rich again, to bring back our jobs, to get rid of deficits, to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse, which is rampant in this country,” Trump said.
+
+Rubio said Trump’s promise is unrealistic. “The numbers don’t add up,” the senator said, a line he repeated again and again.
+
+“The bottom line is we can’t just continue to tiptoe around this and throw out things like, ‘I’m going to get at fraud and abuse,’ ” Rubio said. “You still have hundreds of billions of dollars of deficit that you’re going to have to make up. And here’s the thing: If we do not do it, we will have a debt crisis.”
+
+Cruz sounded a similar call. “Social Security right now is careening towards insolvency, and it’s irresponsible. And any politician that doesn’t step forward and address it is not being a real leader.”
+
+Trump was challenged on the fact that even as he has railed against the effects of international trade and immigration, he has profited from hiring foreign workers and manufacturing clothing in China and Mexico.
+
+“I’m a businessman. These are laws. These are regulations. These are rules. We’re allowed to do it,” Trump said. “So I will take advantage of it; they’re the laws. But I’m the one that knows how to change it. Nobody else on this dais knows how to change it like I do, believe me.”
+
+Cruz and Rubio, meanwhile, stressed the importance of distinguishing between trade deals that help the economy and U.S. workers and those that do not.
+
+“We’re getting killed in international trade right now,” Cruz said. “And we’re getting killed because we have an administration that doesn’t look out for American workers and jobs are going overseas. We’re driving jobs overseas.”
+
+Trump so far has won GOP contests in 15 states. He has accumulated about 458 Republican delegates, which is 99 more than his closest rival, Cruz. To win the nomination, a candidate needs 1,237 delegates.
+
+Some GOP leaders, including 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, are vowing never to vote for the man who appears increasingly likely to be their party’s standard-bearer in November. There is also more talk of a contested party convention in July, in which GOP leaders might engineer a way of awarding the nomination to someone else.
+
+The billionaire mogul used his opening statement to send a message to those who would stand in his way: Join the movement.
+
+“One of the biggest political events anywhere in the world is happening right now with the Republican Party,” Trump said. “Millions and millions of people are going out to the polls and they’re voting. They’re voting out of enthusiasm. They’re voting out of love. . . . Frankly, the Republican establishment, or whatever you want to call it, should embrace what’s happening.”
+
+Trump also took a more statesmanlike tone when he was asked about violence at his rallies, which has included protesters being roughed up.
+
+“I certainly do not condone that at all,” he said.
+
+“There is some anger,” Trump said of the supporters who show up to cheer him. “There’s also great love for the country. It’s a beautiful thing.”
+
+Kasich, however, suggested that the tone of Trump’s rallies speaks to a larger problem. “I worry about the violence at a rally, period,” the Ohio governor said. “The unity of this country really matters.”
+
+The race will reach what could be an inflection point next week, with primaries in five states, including closely watched Florida and Ohio.
+
+They are must-win for home-state candidates Rubio and Kasich. And for the first time, delegates will be awarded on a winner-take-all basis, which means that if his rivals cannot curb Trump’s momentum, he will accelerate on his path to the nomination.
+
+Thursday’s debate at the University of Miami, sponsored by CNN, The Washington Times and Salem Radio Network, was the last time they would all be on the same stage before the next round of primaries.
+
+A field that numbered nearly 20 candidates in their first face-off in August — so many that the debate had to be split into a main event and an undercard — has shrunk to four.
+
+Trump has led nearly without interruption since then, and he has set the pace and tone, to the dismay of an increasingly impotent Republican establishment.
+
+Rubio tried to put the brakes on Trump, and to get under his skin, by adopting the billionaire’s own tactics. Starting at a debate in Houston on Feb. 25, he unleashed a barrage of personal insults. At one point, he made a joke about the size of Trump’s hands that also suggested his genitalia are small.
+
+But it backfired, as Rubio lost 18 of the next 20 contests.
+
+“At the end of the day, it’s not something I’m entirely proud of,” Rubio acknowledged Wednesday. “My kids were embarrassed by it, and if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t.”
+
+On Thursday night, the adults took a lesson from the kids.
+
+David A. Fahrenthold in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+5483,Low-Cost Wind Turbine to Power an Entire House for a Lifetime Starts Selling in India,"By Amando Flavio For some time now, these words “for the cost of an iPhone, you can now buy a wind turbine that can power an entire house for a lifetime” have been trending on some alternative news... ",FAKE
+8973,The Great Wall Street/Washington Con Job: Part 4 Of The Recovery Which Didn’t Happen,"The Great Wall Street/Washington Con Job: Part 4 Of The Recovery Which Didn't Happen By David Stockman.   During the last few days we have been debunking the notion that Imperial Washington's massive monetary and fiscal stimulus caused the so-called ""recovery"". To the contrary, it has actually poisoned the regenerative powers of American capitalism by causing capital and resources to flow out of the main street economy and into the speculative casinos of Wall Street.  ",FAKE
+10469,"Election Countdown and the Russians, with Trevor Loudon","  We are Gulag Bound / *Resisters' Log* / Election Countdown and the Russians, with Trevor Loudon Election Countdown and the Russians, with Trevor Loudon November 5, 2016, 9:06 am by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton Leave a Comment 0 
+By: Cliff Kincaid | America’s Survival 
+Trevor Loudon talks abut his film, “Enemies Within,” and Russian involvement in the November 8 election… 0 Gulag-wide Bulletins from Sovereignty Unbound We respect your privacy, time, and inbox. Track us Down @GulagBound Like the Gulag There are many important matters that Gulag Bound itself is not treating on a daily basis. For that reason we suggest The Globe & Malevolence and the sites shown under ""Key Links in our Chains,"" below. Your Daily Intelligence Brief MattSkosh on Secret Service Agents Pay a Visit to Anti-Obama Artist Sabo Tags activism Agenda 21 anti-American revolution authoritarianism Barack Hussein Obama II candidate eligibility collectivists & propaganda communisty organizations corruption crisis strategy Democrat finance & banking fraud George Soros globalism - NWO global Marxist-fascist movement government domination of resources history illegal immigration Islam Islamism jihad jihadism Israel kleptocracy labor unions Marxism Marxofascism Marxstream media Military Mitt Romney Obamacare health control Occupy Wall Street race-baiting/racism Republican Right of Private Property Russia Sovereignty Tea Party terrorism U.S. Congress U.S. Constitution U.S. Presidency (POTUS) United Nations (UN) video violence voting youth & education Sabotage What good will it do, to protect the United States of America, or our presumed interests against the aggressiveness of China, Russia, or Islam, if, partially in fear of these threats, we lose our free and independent nation to the stealth imperialism of transnational and global governance? As America threatens to shatter, we must see how a semi-covert, global, cartel collective and their NWO in the USA (""progressive"" neo-Marxists and neo-fascists corporatists, updated with 21st Century techniques and technology) intentionally perpetrate this sabotage, while we patriots try to prevent it. Have a look around our camp, as we struggle to survive. - your tour guide Archives Militarization in America About DHS militarization, see the new, breakthrough analysis from James Simpson, "" Police Militarization, Abuses of Power, and the Road to Impeachment "" and our earlier, ""Marxist President’s Military Exercises in These U.S. Cities; Yours One?"" 
+About the trajectory of this, we must pray, communicate, keep calm, and do not become the first to engage. If it comes to it, do not even respond in kind, until after the after the first times that extreme, anti-American violence is done by them. It calls for an attitude of self sacrifice -- first cheek, second cheek, then no more. 
+And speak out about the potential and strategic ""sense"" of the Obama/NWO's DHS carrying out false flag missions of violence, blaming it on American patriots, perhaps upon our militia movements. 
+We are in a real war, right now (of which others and I have been trying to alert fellow Sovereign Citizens for years) and the prime war is for the minds, hearts, and wills of the American People. We are opposed by an anti-American insurrection using any means of power (see Gramsci, Frankfurt School) including government power, as they are granted that opportunity.",FAKE
+2869,"Bush weighs in on Obama's Iran, ISIS challenges","Former President George W. Bush weighed in on his successor's foreign policy challenges in a closed-door meeting over the meeting, voicing concerns about Iran's trustworthiness as Washington and Tehran resume nuclear talks.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting Monday with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif in New York. The U.S. and five world powers are trying to finalize a nuclear deal with Iran by the end of June.
+
+But Bush, who rarely comments on the Obama administration's efforts in public, offered a word of caution about the negotiators on the other side of the table, during a closed-door meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition on Saturday in Las Vegas.
+
+According to a report in Bloomberg View, Bush warned that new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani appears ""smooth,"" but said: ""You've got to ask yourself, is there a new policy or did they just change the spokesman?""
+
+Just how tough Bush was on the sitting commander-in-chief, though, is a matter of dispute.
+
+The Bloomberg report said Bush was highly critical of President Obama's efforts on Iran and the Islamic State
+
+But another attendee, Eric Golub, told FoxNews.com this characterization was ""totally wrong.""
+
+""[Bush] went out of his way not to criticize President Obama,"" Golub said.
+
+The meeting was off-the-record, but Golub -- a conservative comedian who describes himself as a ""passionate Jewish Republican"" -- said he's speaking out to correct the record.
+
+Golub confirmed Bush's comments on Rouhani, but said the ex-president was criticizing Iran, not Obama, in sounding a cautious tone about the course of talks.
+
+At the heart of the pending Iran deal is a commitment by Iran to roll back its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. While Obama says those sanctions could snap back if needed, Bush apparently cast doubt on that claim.
+
+""You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That's how Americans should view the deal,"" he said, according to Bloomberg.
+
+Bloomberg also reported that Bush accused Obama of putting the U.S. in ""retreat"" while criticizing Obama's efforts to check the rise of the Islamic State.
+
+Golub said Bush wasn't quite so harsh. He said Bush specifically said he did not want to project an image of the U.S. in retreat.
+
+The toughest Bush appeared to get was quoting Sen. Lindsey Graham as saying the 2011 troop pullout from Iraq was a ""strategic blunder.""
+
+Golub said Bush described ISIS as Al Qaeda's ""second act"" and was delivering the basic message that they're ""evil killers"" -- and the way to deal with them is to kill them.
+
+The New York Times described Bush's comments on Saturday as a ""tacit critique"" of his successor. Golub described the Times' account as more accurate than the one in Bloomberg.
+
+To date, Bush indeed has largely avoided commenting on the current administration -- though former Vice President Dick Cheney has been outspoken in his condemnation of Obama's national security policies.
+
+The Iran talks, though, have generated a heated international debate. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing Congress at House Speaker John Boehner's invitation, blasted the preliminary nuclear deal before it was even announced.
+
+Critics like Netanyahu say it does not close Iran's path to a nuclear weapon, and merely delays that possibility while giving Iran access to funding by lifting sanctions.
+
+Proponents, though, say the framework deal is better than the alternative options -- including military conflict -- and would allow international inspectors to ensure Iran is living up to its end of any agreement.",REAL
+9392,"Hillary’s Healthcare ‘Fix’ Exposed, Millions Of Americans Will End Up DEAD","Share This 
+Don’t be deceived by Hillary Clinton’s lie that she’ll fix Obamacare. She already tried to fix healthcare in 1994 when President Bill Clinton put her in charge of transforming our healthcare and insurance plans. She called it Hillarycare, and like Obamacare, it failed miserably. Now, her plans for Obamacare have been exposed — along with how millions of Americans will end up dead thanks to her “fix.” 
+Hillary Clinton is a very dangerous woman. The one thing that scares healthcare professionals is her plans to fix Obamacare, which is falling apart with premiums going through the roof. It was always going to fail. 
+As a Registered Nurse for over 20 years, working in the inner city in Los Angeles, I saw firsthand how health care works. When Barack Obama and his Democratic minions passed Obamacare in 2010, I freaked out, knowing this would bring untimely deaths to many of my fellow Americans, and now that Hillary says she’ll fix Obamacare, I can be silent no more. Hillary promises to fix Obamacare with full blown socialized medicine 
+The first thing you need to realize is that Obamacare was never the ultimate plan. It was meant to be a step toward total socialized medicine. Hillary will put Obamacare on steroids, and the goal is for a complete government controlled system that every American is enrolled in, where that is the only choice you have. 
+This is the same system that plagues Canada and Great Britain, and it means Americans will die. Instead of your doctor deciding what type of care you get, there are strict guidelines which all doctors must follow. If you are a woman diagnosed with ovarian cancer, you will only be given one path to take. You will not be allowed to find out about cutting edge drugs or treatments. You will be sent home to die. Kathleen Sebelius said, under Obamacare, “someone lives and someone dies.” 
+Under socialized medicine, it’s all about cost effectiveness, and ovarian cancer has a high death rate. So, you’re not worth the expensive treatment that may cure you or help you live longer. You won’t even know those treatments exist. They’ll pat you on the head, say how sorry they are, and tell you that they will do everything they can to keep you “comfortable.” 
+This won’t affect the ultra-rich. This will affect the lower and middle class, who can’t afford to seek treatment on their own. 
+Socialized medicine will affect even happy events like having a baby. In keeping with the culture of death that surrounds socialized medicine, here’s what happened to one mother in Great Britain whose baby was born at 22 weeks — an age at which some infants have survived when life-saving measures were used. Tracy Goodwin watched in horror as they let her baby die. 
+Forty-six minutes later [after he was born], and despite her desperate pleas to midwives for assistance, Miss Godwin’s son died as she held him. 
+She has since been told that the hospital has a policy not to resuscitate babies born earlier than 24 weeks into pregnancy. [via Daily Mail ] Tracy Goodwin (left) holds her baby boy, born at 22 weeks (right). 
+If you need to see a doctor, good luck. In Canada, they have to wait 3-4 months just to see their “primary care physician.” Canadians wait on average 35 weeks, or 6 months, to see a specialist after getting a referral, according to the Fraser Institue . If you have cancer, you could be dead by the time you can see an oncologist. 
+This is why most doctors and nurses are fleeing healthcare. We can no longer help our patients the right way, with clear consciences, and those doctors and nurses who support this kind of system are lying to themselves into believing that this system is healthcare. It’s managed deathcare, and that is what Big Brother does best. 
+What’s the answer? Donald Trump . He will repeal Obamacare, and even if he does nothing else, it’s a win. He is putting healthcare back into the free market where it belongs. What drives insurance prices down? Competition — and that is what he will do when he opens up buying healthcare across state lines. 
+Lastly, a brain surgeon should be paid more than a truck driver, no offense to truck drivers. Yet, under socialized medicine, doctors are made to take a salary which is capped. This, in itself, does not give our smartest kids any incentive to become a brain surgeon. Making a lot of money drives those interested in medicine to become doctors. It’s just a fact, and it made our healthcare system the best in the world before Obama came along. 
+Back in 1994, Hillary tried to pass socialized medicine called Hillarycare, and it failed. Now, she is back, promising to fix Obamacare with Hillarycare, but if you value your loved ones’ lives, there is only one thing to do. Make sure people realize what is at stake in this election. Literally, their lives are on the line if Donald Trump doesn’t win.",FAKE
+613,The Kochs' plan to beat Reid,Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan does a lot of media but only has 2 public supporters,REAL
+2674,"How will Facebook, Google and Twitter define the ""Hate"" they plan to censor?","Bloomberg reports that “U.S. Internet giants Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc., Google and Microsoft Corp. pledged to tackle online hate in less than 24 hours as part of a joint commitment with the European Union to combat the use of social media by terrorists.” Further, the companies “said it remains a ‘challenge’ to strike the right balance between freedom of expression and hate speech.”
+
+It makes perfect sense if you believe in the existence of evil, and therefore of hatred. It’s not just a right, but a moral imperative to forbid it on social media platforms. The most obvious example is, of course, ISIS and whatever other terrorist groups exist. It’s pretty much a unanimous consensus given that even ISIS et. al. would readily admit they hate the West.
+
+So why are conservatives alarmed? Why are they pointing I-told-you-so fingers at those  – this writer being one --  who recently visited with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, and then vouched for the sincerity of the FB brass (but not other sites) that  forcefully stated its desire to work with conservatives?
+
+At the meeting at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters the discussion focused on the roles of the “curators,” those individuals hired by the company to ensure that community standards are met. It’s a necessary endeavor but also one that introduces the human factor and, as a result, subjective opinion. It’s not difficult to find the slippery slope where matters of “hatred” are concerned.
+
+What is “hate,” as defined by leftists, the very community from which these curators hail?
+
+The Southern Poverty Law Center is a prominent radical leftist group hell-bent on poisoning society against conservatives, especially the social kind. It features a “Hate Map” with the locations of conservative organizations of all stripes. The Family Research Center, The Center for Security Policy, the Center for Family and Human Rights, ACT for America and the Traditional Values Coalition – these are but a few. And what views do these “haters” hold? Some support traditional marriage, some stopping illegal immigration, some fighting radical Islam.
+
+A writer for the leftist website Salon has his example of hatred – the Confederate flag, which he calls “the American swastika.” “[D]isplaying the Confederate flag anywhere is, at bottom, an act of hate. It should be recognized as such, and punished as a hate crime.” (He later reversed himself, heroically likening his “inconsistency” to that of Frederick Douglas.)
+
+According to “The College Fix,” an employee from Loyola Marymount University was discussing her views on sexual orientation with three students. “Both the police and the university’s Bias Incident Response Team [!] are investigating the stated belief that only two genders exist, male and female, as a hate crime.”
+
+The College Republican Chapter at DePaul University stands accused of a “hate crime” for writing Trump’s name in chalk on sidewalks.
+
+Speaking of which, when a pro-life student group at John Hopkins University used a sidewalk to counsel women near an abortion facility, it was denied official campus club recognition by the college student government for promoting “hate speech.”
+
+Google “tea party” and “hate speech” and you get 1,280,000 listings.
+
+Far left agitators branded Brendan Eich a “hater” and forced him to step down as head of the company he founded, Mozilla, because he contributed $1,000 to a traditional marriage referendum in California (which passed). Dan Cathy of Chick-fil-A was also targeted as a “hater” for defending traditional marriage. GLAAD’s website features a list of over 100 opponents who serve as media commentators but who should be expelled from civilized society for being “extremists” or “haters.” The list includes six U.S. Catholic bishops.
+
+The “Washington Redskins” is hate speech, too.
+
+The list seems endless. Virtually any belief opposed by the radical left is branded “hatred” and that belief spoken becomes “hate speech.” The goal is to silence the conservative world view through censorship, period. The fringe will use every means available to pressure these online giants to follow suit. Will Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft comply?
+
+L. Brent Bozell III is founder and president of the Media Research Center.",REAL
+6793,WALL STREET JOURNAL JUST EXPOSED EXACTLY HOW & HOW MUCH IT COST HILLARY To BRIBE The FBI to AVOID CHARGES!,"November 2015 Ads WALL STREET JOURNAL JUST EXPOSED EXACTLY HOW & HOW MUCH IT COST HILLARY To BRIBE The FBI to AVOID CHARGES! Oct 27, 2016 Previous post ELDER PATRIOT – There are no limits to the Clinton’s web of corruption. Even the FBI’s vaunted reputation for integrity has fallen victim to reach of this evil witch with a capital B. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Hillary Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe contributed in excess of $675,500 to the Senate candidacy of the wife of FBI agent Deputy Director Andrew McCabe who oversaw the investigation into her use of an illegal homebrew server that exposed our national secrets to Russian hackers. McAuliffe has been a Democrat operative whose willingness to do the Clinton’s dirty work over a long number of years saw him rewarded with the governorship of Virginia. As governor, McAuliffe recruited the wife of the FBI’s lead investigator to be his party’s senate nominee at the behest of Hillary Clinton who was already being investigated by the FBI. 
+Acting on the direction of Hillary Clinton, McAuliffe’s PAC contributed $467,500 directly to the Senate Campaign of D. Jill McCabe according to campaign finance records. But, that wasn’t even the extent of the financial support he extended to Jill McCabe. McAuliffe directed the Virginia Democratic Party to support McCabe’s by assuming the costs of her campaign mailers to the tune of another $207,788. 
+While there are no laws preventing anyone from making or accepting political contributions to the 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+5286,Truth is Out There: Astronomers Capture 234 Signals From Space,"posted by Eddie Astronomers have recorded mysterious signals from 234 stars that they believe could indicate the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence – a notion that’s sure to excite alien truthers and beyond. Astronomers Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier from Laval University in Canada analyzed 2.5 million stars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey ( SDSS ) project. In their resulting study published in Solar and Stellar Astrophysics journal, the pair conclude that the peculiar signals they recorded could be from aliens trying to make contact with Earth. The researchers came to this potential explanation based on a previous study by Borra which predicted the shape of an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) signal. The 234 signals identified match this shape exactly. The fact that only a small fraction – 234 out of 2.5 million – of the stars in our sun’s spectrum emitted this signal also matches the previous ETI hypothesis. However the theory that these signals are the result of aliens is only one of a number of possibilities, according to the study, and they could in fact derive from any one of “several possibilities” such as “ rotational transitions in molecules” or “rapid pulsations”. So is this the discovery we’ve been waiting for to finally confirm we’re not alone in the universe? Not quite.. The authors admit that further work is needed to confirm this theory and are also considering the ‘unlikely’ scenario that the signals are due to highly peculiar chemical compositions in a small fraction of galactic halo stars. Breakthrough Listen Initiative , a scientific and technological exploration program that includes Stephen Hawking and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on its board , has announced plans to research the findings further but says a breadth of independently verified proof is required to substantiate the claims. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” the group points out in a statement . “It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations.” “Internationally agreed-upon protocols for searches for evidence of advanced life beyond Earth (SETI) require candidates to be confirmed by independent groups using their own telescopes, and for all natural explanations to be exhausted before invoking extraterrestrial agents as an explanation,” they added. From Around the Web Founder of WorldTruth.Tv and WomansVibe.com Eddie ( 8968 Posts ) 
+Eddie L. is the founder and owner of www.WorldTruth.TV. and www.Womansvibe.com. Both website are dedicated to educating and informing people with articles on powerful and concealed information from around the world. I have spent the last 36+ years researching Bible, History, Alternative Health, Secret Societies, Symbolism and many other topics that are not reported by mainstream media.",FAKE
+4385,Indiana Law: Sorting Fact From Fiction From Politics,"The culture wars are always percolating beneath the surface in presidential politics — until something or someone pushes them to the surface.
+
+That something early in this cycle is Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Republican Gov. Mike Pence, who is considering a run for president in 2016, signed into law last week. It has caused a firestorm of criticism from those who say the law could lead to discrimination against gays and lesbians, including businesses like Apple and Angie's List; the NCAA, which is hosting the men's college basketball Final Four in Indianapolis; and even other states like Connecticut, which banned state-paid travel to Indiana.
+
+Pence seemed surprised by the backlash and has had some difficulty explaining his position. Other potential 2016 candidates have leapt to his defense, and some, like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, went further than the Indiana governor.
+
+Supporters say Indiana's law is similar to the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed in 1993.
+
+As is often the case in controversies, however, the facts have become muddled and conflated. So what are the facts? How are the two laws different? And how have politics on both sides shaped the response?
+
+Seeking 'Clarification' And A 'Fix,' As The Contenders Weigh In
+
+On Tuesday, Pence said there has ""been misunderstanding and confusion and mischaracterization of this law."" But he said he is seeking ""clarification"" and a ""fix"" to the law with legislation ""that makes it clear that this law does not give businesses a right to deny services to anyone.""
+
+On Monday, though, the law became part of the presidential campaign with Republican presidential candidates weighing in after a Sunday show performance from Pence that raised more questions. Pence sidestepped half a dozen specific questions about whether the law could lead to discrimination against gays and lesbians.
+
+Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush contended that facts had not been established, and once they are, ""people aren't going to see this as discriminatory at all.""
+
+Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker backed the law and said through a spokesman that it was about ""the right for Americans to exercise their religion and act on their conscience.""
+
+Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said the law ""is giving voice to millions of courageous conservatives.""
+
+Rubio, though, did something the other candidates did not. He more directly addressed the charge that businesses could discriminate against gay and lesbian couples. Gay-rights advocates, for example, say if a gay or lesbian couple wanted a flower arrangement or cake for a reception, a florist or caterer could lawfully choose not to fill the order, if he has a religious objection.
+
+Rubio said he thinks businesses should have that right.
+
+""The issue we're talking about here is should someone who provides a professional service be punished by the law because they refused to provide that professional service to a ceremony that they believe is in violation of their faith?"" he said on Fox News Monday. ""I think people have a right to live out their religious faith in their own lives.""
+
+Most conservatives, including Pence, have mostly not addressed that charge head-on. Instead, they say, the law is unfairly maligned. After all, other states have similar laws and even Democrat Bill Clinton signed a federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law as president.
+
+Hillary Clinton, for the record, tweeted: ""Sad this new Indiana law can happen in America today. We shouldn't discriminate against ppl bc of who they love.""
+
+The White House on Tuesday blasted Pence and others, who ""falsely suggest"" the two laws — Indiana's and the federal one — are the same.
+
+""That is not true,"" White House press secretary Josh Earnest said at the White House daily briefing. He cited the spirit of the law as well as the text. He said the 1993 law ""was an effort to protect the religious liberty of religious minorities based on actions that could be taken by the federal government.""
+
+On the other hand, ""The Indiana law is much broader,"" Earnest continued. ""It doesn't just apply to individuals or religious minorities. It applies to, and I'm quoting here, 'a partnership, a limited liability company, a corporation, a company, a firm, a society, a joint stock company, or an unincorporated association.' So this obviously is a significant expansion of the law in terms of the way that it would apply. ... [T]his is a much more open-ended piece of legislation that could reasonably be used to try to justify discriminating against somebody because of who they love.""
+
+First, let's start with how and why the 1993 law came to be. The federal law stemmed from an Oregon Native American man, who lost his job in 1990 after testing positive for drugs. He had used peyote as part of a religious ritual. The ""fix"" to that problem became the federal RFRA, introduced by soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, then a House member from New York. A companion bill passed the Senate and was introduced by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.
+
+Nineteen states, in addition to Indiana, have since enacted their own RFRAs, but as The Atlantic notes, just South Carolina and Texas have similar variations to Indiana's and neither seems to go quite as far.
+
+Indiana Vs. Federal Law — What Do They Say?
+
+The Federal RFRA states that ""Government shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability. ...""
+
+The Indiana law also states, ""A governmental entity may not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion, even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.""
+
+That is, the federal law states, except when it ""is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.""
+
+Indiana also states the exception as ""(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and (2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.""
+
+But that's where the similarities end.
+
+The federal law does not go so far as to define a ""person."" Indiana's law does. And a ""person,"" by its standard, is not what you might think.
+
+Section 7 of the Indiana code includes people, churches and corporations in that definition:
+
+As related to whether, why or who can sue, the federal law says:
+
+The Indiana law goes further. In Section 9, it states that ""a person,"" in this case meaning an individual, church, limited liability company, etc., ""whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.""
+
+So, in other words, while the federal law states that a person can sue the government for a grievance, Indiana makes a point of stating that it doesn't matter if government is involved.
+
+Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College, notes in National Review that while some read the federal provision as pertaining only to government, it has actually split federal courts. ""Private parties,"" he points out, ""had brought suits against corporations.""
+
+For example: ""[T]he D.C. Circuit held that the Catholic University of America could raise RFRA as a defense against a sex-discrimination claim brought by a nun and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alike.""
+
+That said, the Indiana law explicitly wipes away any ambiguity.
+
+Support for gay rights has increased dramatically over the past decade. Since former President George W. Bush proposed a ban on same-sex marriage during his 2004 presidential re-election campaign, support for same-sex marriage has reversed.
+
+In 2004, a majority of the country — 55 percent — was against it, while 42 percent was in favor, according to Gallup. Now, it's exactly the opposite, with 55 percent saying they're in favor of same-sex marriage and 42 percent saying they're against it.
+
+What's more, in 2004, 54 percent said gay or lesbian relations were ""morally wrong."" In 2014, 58 percent said it was ""morally acceptable,"" while just 38 percent said it was wrong. That is a huge cultural and political shift in a relatively short time.
+
+It's something Republican pollster Whit Ayres likens to approval of interracial marriage in the 1970s to 1990s. In his book, 2016 and Beyond: How Republicans Can Elect a President in the New America, he points out, citing Gallup numbers, that in 1972, some 60 percent of Americans disapproved of interracial marriage. Twenty-five years later, 64 percent approved with the lines crossing when the country split about evenly in 1983.
+
+""It looks similar to gay marriage,"" Ayres told reporters at a breakfast meeting Tuesday sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. ""The values of young people, I believe, this is where we are headed as a country."" He added, ""We are headed to where a political candidate who is perceived as anti-gay will never connect with people under 30 years old.""
+
+But going inside the numbers helps explain why both sides are singing very different tunes on the Indiana law. For example, Gallup found that 3 in 4 Democrats are in favor of same-sex marriage (as were almost 60 percent of independents), but the opposite was true for Republicans with 72 percent opposed, as of 2013.
+
+That makes it difficult to get through a Republican primary being too strongly in favor of gay rights with a significant portion of the base considering themselves ""social values"" religious voters.
+
+""That's a challenge,"" said Ayres, who is advising Rubio.
+
+He points out that Republicans under 30 support same-sex marriage. A Pew poll in 2014, in fact, found 61 percent of young Republicans in favor.
+
+So, while times are changing with Republicans on gay rights, they are doing so more slowly than the more rapid change taking place in the country at large.",REAL
+4324,Does Carly Fiorina's business experience at HP matter?,"Fiorina and Trump are both touting their CEO qualities in their bid for the White House. But the differences between executive and political power are enormous.
+
+As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?
+
+Was Carly Fiorina a good business executive, or a poor one? That’s a hot question in United States politics as Ms. Fiorina rises in the polls. Right now, the media is full of in-depth examinations of her tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard and her 20 years at Lucent. Both firms grew during her tenure but both struggled after she left, and it remains unclear whether her decisions contributed to their stumbles.
+
+However, amid the flurry of competing profit claims and clashing job figures, there’s a third question that’s going largely unasked: Is the top-level business experience of Fiorina and Donald Trump actually relevant to the presidency?
+
+After all, the Oval Office is a very different place from a Fortune 500 corner office. Government bureaucrats don’t instantly obey orders. Troublesome lawmakers can’t be dismissed. Reporters are so interested in your decisions that a horde of them occupies a press office in your own building.
+
+Some CEO qualities are indeed useful in politics, JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said Sunday on “Meet the Press."" Successful business executives have a general talent for running things, he said, and for identifying and recruiting successful subordinates.
+
+“It’s not sufficient, though. You have a whole other set of attributes” necessary to the presidency, said the JP Morgan chief. “It’s complex. It’s three-dimensional chess.”
+
+Mr. Dimon is a self-identified Democrat who has supported Hillary Clinton in the past. So it’s possible he has a partisan interest in pushing the notion that CEO experience isn’t a White House prerequisite. But it’s undeniable that the greatest presidents weren’t business leaders. In at least one case – Harry Truman – a successful president was a private sector flop.
+
+Herbert Hoover was a prominent mining engineer, executive, and investor before his disastrous Oval Office tenure. Jimmy Carter, peanut broker, is typically ranked near the bottom of modern presidents. George H. W. Bush made a fortune in oil, and then lost his presidential reelection bid amid an ailing economy.
+
+George W. Bush was the first US president with an MBA. Given the rise of that credential among the American elite class, it’s unlikely he’ll be the last.
+
+In fact, 2016 could be a business executives’ year. Fiorina and Trump both insist that business experience is crucial to understanding the economy and job creation and to bringing order and clarity to difficult issues. Trump in particular boasts that America would be transformed by the sheer power of his business acumen. Pressed last month by George Stephanopoulos of ABC News about how he would find and deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, and where he’d get the billions to pay for the move, Trump said, “It’s called management.""
+
+The substance of Trump’s immigration proposals aside, “management” might not be enough to carry them out, or indeed to push though and then execute any complex, controversial US political action.
+
+The differences between executive and political power are simply enormous. By comparison, executives are the masters of their domain. Their leverage over subordinates is direct, and considerable. Their ability to set strategy for their entity is similarly unchallenged.
+
+Presidents have little of that. Their hiring power extends to their own staff and cabinet top levels. Congress holds the purse strings and has a huge say in the direction of the nation. Public opinion is a powerful influence.
+
+In his classic study of the office, “Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents,” the influential scholar Richard Neustadt argued that presidents are weak when it came to domestic matters. They weren’t in any sense the nation’s CEO.
+
+“Presidential power is the power to persuade,” Mr. Neustadt concluded.
+
+That involves lots of skills CEOs don’t need. They include the ability to cajole 435 lawmakers, all of whom think they should be sitting in your chair. They include the ability to take an indirect line toward your goal, and often settling for far less than you wanted. They include an inclination to compromise and an acceptance that muddling through isn’t so bad, particularly when it comes to foreign policy.
+
+“There’s no equivalent in the corporate world to the separation of powers that often thwarts a president’s will. And the job demands political savvy more than managerial experience,” wrote Bloomberg’s David Lynch in 2012 when considering businessman Mitt Romney’s presidential qualifications.
+
+This doesn’t mean CEOs are by definition unqualified for presidential duties. To reach the top, they need drive, clarity, the ability to set goals, and the ability to rally a staff – all useful qualifies in politics.
+
+And business failure can lead to political success. The outline of Harry Truman’s story is well-known: He’s the failed haberdasher who rose to finish World War II and save Europe with the Marshall Plan. But Truman’s Kansas City clothing store thrived, until an economic downturn sucked it under. Many of Truman’s friends from National Guard days used the store as an informal clubhouse, and through the store he met many local small businessmen and joined civic associations.
+
+This gave him his entrée into the local Democratic machine. He entered county politics, then won a US Senate seat, and was chosen as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president.
+
+On the afternoon of April 12, 1945, Truman received an urgent summons from the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt met him and told him that FDR had died.
+
+Truman asked Mrs. Roosevelt “Is there anything I can do for you?”
+
+“Is there anything we can do for you?” she replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.”",REAL
+3704,Marines’ killer set off no red flags,"[Read the latest on the Chattanooga shooting]
+
+As investigators sought to decipher the motives of the gunman who targeted U.S. troops in Chattanooga, Tenn., they also began to confront the uncomfortable question of whether counterterrorism agencies are reaching the practical limits of what they can do to detect homegrown plots.
+
+On Friday, federal officials said they were investigating the shootings Thursday in Chattanooga as a possible terrorist attack but were a long way from drawing conclusions. They said the gunman, 24-year-old Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, had not previously drawn the attention of authorities, save for a drunken-driving charge a few months ago.
+
+On Saturday, the Navy said a male petty officer died at 2:17 a.m. of wounds received in Thursday’s shooting — bringing the number killed in the rampage to five. The sailor’s name had not been released.
+
+Abdulazeez’s travels to the Middle East, his acquisition of several firearms and his recent online musings about the meaning of Islam were coming under fresh examination as hundreds of federal agents sought to reconstruct his movements and mind-set.
+
+“At this time, we have no indication he was inspired by or directed by anyone other than himself,” Edward Reinhold, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s office in Knoxville, Tenn., told reporters Friday.
+
+U.S. officials said that devices including a computer and cellphone believed to have belonged to Abdulazeez were being examined by FBI technicians in a laboratory at Quantico, Va.
+
+The FBI said that Abdulazeez was armed with at least two rifles or shotguns, as well as a handgun, when he opened fire on a military recruiting center and a Navy Reserve facility in Chattanooga. Authorities did not give a more detailed description of the firearms or say how he obtained them.
+
+“Some of the weapons were purchased legally and some of them may not have been,” Reinhold said.
+
+[Video: Who was the Chattanooga gunman?]
+
+U.S. counterterrorism officials have become increasingly worried about the ability of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda offshoots to attract and radicalize followers in the United States. At the same time, authorities have expressed concern that their ability to detect such contact has been eroded by the spread of encrypted communication.
+
+Federal authorities have arrested more than 10 people over the past six weeks who are suspected of having ties to the Islamic State. U.S. officials said the crackdown was part of an effort to suppress a surge in suspected plots aimed at unleashing violence on U.S. targets during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended the day of the attacks in Chattanooga.
+
+But officials have also said that homegrown radicals have gotten better at hiding their intentions and cloaking their contacts with overseas groups, despite a massive expansion in U.S. surveillance capabilities since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
+
+Two U.S. law enforcement officials said Abdulazeez traveled to Jordan on four occasions prior to the shootings. The last trip he took was from April 2014 to November 2014. One of the officials said there was no information the trips were connected to attempts to enter Syria or establish contacts with a terrorist group.
+
+Jordan has been a way station for foreign fighters attempting to enter Syria, including a 22-year-old U.S. citizen who similarly went undetected during trips to Jordan before carrying out a suicide attack in Syria last year.
+
+But Jordan is also a popular tourist destination, one of several nations bordering Syria that account for more than 2 million travelers who arrive in the United States each year.
+
+Moreover, Abdulazeez had a grandmother and other relatives in the country, according to neighbors and court papers.
+
+And while his father, Youssuf Abdulazeez, was investigated by the FBI in 1994 and again in 2002 for donating to Palestinian groups suspected of having ties to terrorism, U.S. officials said the father was removed from a terrorism watch list a decade ago.
+
+Based on the limited information available so far, the younger Abdulazeez appears to have repeatedly brushed up against U.S. screening systems without triggering an alert, said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
+
+“You have to do something that would set off some type of alarm,” Nunes said in an interview. Because of the mounting odds against disrupting plots, as well as the countermeasures being taken by terrorist groups, Nunes said that stopping attacks is “becoming tougher and tougher.”
+
+Nunes said the FBI has warned lawmakers repeatedly in recent months that the bureau was facing a surge in the number of threats it is tracking — many based on intelligence gleaned overseas — but has been unable to connect those tips to individuals or specific targets in the United States.
+
+“The FBI has warned us that there are a bunch of threats that they know about but can’t find,” Nunes said. “They have enough specifics to say something is being planned. We know [the Islamic State] is talking to someone but we can’t find the person.”
+
+U.S. counterterrorism officials emphasized Friday that they have no evidence so far that the attack by Abdulazeez fell into that troubling security gap.
+
+Four Marines were killed in Thursday’s attack: Gunnery Sgt. Thomas J. Sullivan of Hampden, Mass.; Staff Sgt. David A. Wyatt of Burke, N.C.; Sgt. Carson A. Holmquist of Polk, Wis.; and Lance Cpl. Squire K. Wells of Cobb, Ga.
+
+[Profiles of the Marines who died in Chattanooga]
+
+An unidentified Navy petty officer and a Chattanooga police officer were wounded. Abdulazeez was killed after exchanging gunfire with police.
+
+While the FBI was cautious in making judgments, other lawmakers said there was clear reason to suspect that Abdulazeez had been inspired, directly or indirectly, by the Islamic State or a similar group.
+
+“Based on my experience, I think he was radicalized by these individuals in Syria,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told reporters. “The threat is real and it comes from the Internet,” he added. “They don’t have to travel to Iraq and Syria. . . . They’re already here.”
+
+Abdulazeez could trace his heritage to several parts of the Middle East — he was born in Kuwait as a Jordanian citizen, although his parents identified themselves as Palestinians. He came to the United States with his family while very young and grew up in Chattanooga, attending a local high school and earning a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
+
+In addition to his visit to Jordan last year, he traveled there on at least one prior occasion, during a combined trip to Kuwait in 2010, according to the official Kuwait News Agency.
+
+A high school friend, Levon Miller, added that Abdulazeez traveled abroad once every few years. “He’d take off for a month or two mostly during his college breaks,” Miller said, although he said he didn’t know details about where he went.
+
+Other signs emerged Friday that Abdulazeez and his four sisters had grown up in a troubled household, afflicted by marital strife and debt.
+
+His father filed for federal bankruptcy protection in 2002. Seven years later, his mother filed for divorce, charging that her husband had sexually and physically abused her, and had threatened to take a second wife. The couple later reconciled.
+
+Three months ago, Abdulazeez was hired as a shift supervisor by Superior Essex, a firm that manufactures specialty wiring and cables. Co-workers said he called in sick last weekend and hadn’t been seen since.
+
+Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Cari Gervin in Chattanooga, and William Branigin, Brian Murphy, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan, Mark Berman, Sari Horwitz, Carol D. Leonnig, and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+7380,The Day After,"Or, how to stop worrying and love staving off the dystopian nightmare that threatens. Trump's victory party By Liam Miller / filmsforaction.org 
+Here we are. President Trump. 
+I’m going to say it again. The pain will stop sooner. We have to toughen ourselves up. 
+President Trump. 
+Look. I’m not surprised. 
+Turnout was low. Trump and Clinton each got 58 million votes and change. But it was enough to hurl Trump into office. 
+The polls were close; but Clinton’s supporters just haven’t been passionate enough, while Trump’s supporters are all too. 
+We’re looking at a bad situation. Potentially nightmarish. But we’re also looking at the one situation that can get people to start working together who might otherwise have simply continued to jockey for power. (I’m looking at you, establishment Democrats.) 
+Mind you. It’s still wretched. But look at it this way: now, we can deal with our racist, sexist, patriarchist history head on. 
+Every Sanders supporter is, deep inside, saying “I told you so”. And they’re right. 
+Virtually every poll had Bernie thumping Trump soundly. All the arguments people make in favor of Trump, which they seemed to think outweighed his flaws, included bucking the system. All of those people would have voted for Bernie. Someone very close to me, who had been a Republican for four decades, registered Democrat to vote for Bernie in the primary; and they voted for Trump yesterday. 
+Bernie was the people's candidate; independents (who now comprise 45% of the electorate) favored him 2:1. There's no doubt he would have trounced Trump; but there is also no doubt that Bernie's ideas are America's ideals. We just can't let these lunatics have their way with the country. 
+So look. There’s really no time to lose. Let’s get the ball rolling. The midterms are two years away; we need to win big. Trump has a Republican Congress; dear lord, the horror. There's a presidential election to win two years after that. Local elections up and down the line. And a lot of grassroots organizing, fundraising, and door-knocking to accomplish. 
+At least the Koch brothers and most of the establishment Republicans hate him too. 
+Pull together, people. We got this. This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License 3.5 ·",FAKE
+1299,Ted Cruz Says Only He Can Beat Donald Trump,"MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.— Ted Cruz has a simple message for South Carolina: I’m the only candidate who can stop Donald Trump. Before addressing a raucus crowd of about 200 in this beach resort, Mr. Cruz told reporters that his third place finish in New Hampshire made it clear “the only candidate who can beat Donald […]",REAL
+5138,Speakers List: Trump's convention has pols and celebs,"There are war heroes, a casino mogul and even an underwear model, yet Donald Trump is relying heavily on his party's establishment to fill the speaking program for next week's Republican National Convention.
+
+The presumptive presidential nominee has approved a convention program that features at least 20 current or former elected officials, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Noticeably absent from a speaker list obtained by The Associated Press early Thursday are many athletes or A-List celebrities that Trump's team long suggested would help make his presidential nominating convention unlike any other.
+
+Yet there is no shortage of political outsiders.
+
+Speakers will include four of Trump's children, Las Vegas casino owner Phil Ruffin, and actor and former underwear model Antonio Sabαto Jr. College football star Tim Tebow will also appear on stage, the campaign confirmed Thursday morning. And in a slap at Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, Mark Geist and John Tiegen will also address the convention, both survivors of the deadly 2012 attack on the American diplomatic consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
+
+""This impressive lineup of veterans, political outsiders, faith leaders and those who know Donald Trump the best -- his family and longtime friends -- represent a cross-section of real people facing the same challenges as every American household,"" said Trump spokesman Jason Miller.
+
+Despite the list of familiar politicos, the convention program is a reminder that the Republican Party remains deeply divided over Trump's candidacy.
+
+Some of the GOP's biggest names were not on the list because they refused to participate in four-day convention, which begins on Monday.
+
+The GOP's two living presidents, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and its two most recent presidential nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney, all plan to avoid the Cleveland affair -- as does Ohio's Republican Gov. John Kasich. Shrugging off the high-profile absences, Trump's team suggested the convention lineup would help highlight Trump's outsider appeal.
+
+""We are totally over-booked. We have great speakers, we have winners, we have people that aren't only political people,"" Trump told Fox News Channel on Tuesday. ""We have a lot of people that are just champions and winners.""
+
+The New York billionaire acknowledged in recent days that he'd be hewing a little closer to tradition.
+
+""Look, I have great respect for the institution of the conventions. I mean to me, it's very important. So we're not going to change the wheel,"" he said on Fox.
+
+New England Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady, a Trump friend, was initially teased as a possible speaker, but will not appear next week in Cleveland. Neither will former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight or legendary boxing promoter Don King, a Cleveland resident and passionate Trump supporter.
+
+The program will instead feature people like pro golfer Natalie Gulbis, retired astronaut Eileen Collins, and Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White. In addition to the Benghazi survivors, former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, author of the book, ""Lone Survivor,"" will make an appearance, along with Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke, a vocal critic of the Black Lives Matter movement.
+
+The convention will also highlight religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the famed televangelist, and Haskel Lookstein, the New York rabbi who converted Trump's daughter, Ivanka to Judaism.
+
+Trump does not forget his business relationships, giving speaking slots to real estate investor Tom Barrack, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and even the general manager for Virginia's Trump Winery, Kerry Woolard.
+
+And in a nod toward party unity, Trump will feature several former presidential competitors, including Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Ben Carson and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
+
+Two finalists in Trump's search for a running mate made the list as well: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich. The other finalist, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, was not included in the program obtained by the AP.
+
+Trump had already announced that his children would be speaking, along with his wife Melania, whom he said was already working on remarks.
+
+Ivanka Trump, who along with Trump's other adult children, has been playing an increasingly central role in the campaign, predicted in a recent radio interview the GOP convention would be ""a convention unlike any we've ever seen.""
+
+""It will be substantive. It will be interesting. It will be different. It's not going to be a ho-hum lineup of, you know, the typical politicians,"" she said.",REAL
+9777,All we need to know about Trump’s demise we learned from his campaign launch speech,"Will shake things up 
+Media ratings magnet / Likely to steal all the thunder 
+Since Trump’s June 2015 announcement speech, every word or phrase listed above describes what the American electorate witnessed or felt during the campaign because, as I said, Trump’s consistency has been uncanny. 
+Now, let’s now examine three quotes from the speech and then refer back to the list. All three reinforce the premise in my headline. But it was the following statement that haunted Trump’s campaign from the second the words left his mouth: 
+When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. 
+Watching Trump say that on live television, I immediately thought, “There goes the Hispanic vote!” The fact is demographic voter data shows that for a Republican to be elected president, he or she must win at least 47% of the national Hispanic vote. Then poof, in one 20-second rant, Trump destroyed all the Republican Party’s Hispanic outreach rendered since Romney won only 27% of the Hispanic vote in 2012. 
+From the “impression list,” Trump’s inartful Mexican statement branded him with “lacks a political filter,” and “lacks presidential demeanor” to put it mildly. These two major negative “branding phrases” may have begun with his much-maligned Mexican comments, but later applied to numerous Trump-isms which popped up over the last year slowly undermining and unraveling his chances of ever winning 270 electoral votes. 
+Next is a Trump foreign policy gem about terrorism: 
+Islamic terrorism is eating large portions of the Mideast. They’ve become rich. I’m in competition with them. 
+What the #@& does that mean? Let’s go to the “impression list” where we apply incoherent, inarticulate, uninformed, and desperately in need of a speech writer , to name just a few. And once again, repeat after me: “Aall we need to know we learned….” 
+For my last selection, I chose an example of how Trump, right out of the starting gate, tried to antagonize and denigrate other Republican presidential candidates (and later high-ranking party leaders.) It is important to note that Trump made the following statement within the first minute of his announcement speech: 
+The other candidates — they went in, they didn’t know the air conditioning didn’t work. They sweated like dogs. They didn’t know the room was too big because they didn’t have anybody there. How are they gonna beat ISIS? I don’t think it’s gonna happen. 
+Yikes! That nonsensical statement exploded the “impression list.” It was the opening act of an obstinate candidate who, we found out too late, is totally resistant to change even after his campaign began its slow-motion meltdown. 
+Sadly, Trump’s announcement speech stands as living proof that he flunked kindergarten etiquette. Circling back to Flughum’s theory, during his campaign, Trump never learned to clean up his own mess and has never said he was sorry after hurting someone (or a group of someones.) 
+In the end, Trump’s likely defeat will be written off as an historical fluke. He will be viewed as a charismatic, untested, one-time outsider candidate who spearheaded a successful movement of fed-up voters. Through his celebrity status, he managed to parlay mass frustration into winning the Republican presidential nomination but, along the way neglected to learn the basics of kindergarten-level political behavior. 
+The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of the editors. 
+Cross-posted at RedState",FAKE
+633,Why I'm running for president,"Gary Johnson is the presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party and a former governor of New Mexico. The views expressed are his own. Watch CNN's Libertarian Town Hall with Gary Johnson and Bill Weld on Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET.
+
+(CNN) What does it say about the level of discontent in our country that a professional salesman can launch a presidential campaign with a promise to build our very own Great Wall of China and a vague promise to ""make America great again"" -- and become the Republican standard-bearer?
+
+And the Democrats? It is long overdue that we have a woman as a legitimate contender for the White House. But Hillary Clinton is the definition of the establishment so many are determined to reject.
+
+What does all this tell me? It tells me that America may finally be ready for a presidential candidate who believes in the free market, but rejects crony capitalism. They may be ready for a candidate who actually governed a border state...and DOESN'T believe that a Great Wall is a substitute for immigration reform that today's politicians cannot summon the courage to enact.
+
+Of course, I finished my second term as governor of New Mexico more than a decade ago -- back in 2003. And when I left office, I was done.
+
+I had been elected governor when everyone said I didn't have a chance. A businessman who had never sought or held elected office, running as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. My prospects for success were dismissed by pretty much everyone.
+
+But I worked hard, and told New Mexicans what I would do if elected: Reduce the size of the government, cut taxes and apply businesslike common sense to the job of governing. My state elected me, I did what I said I would do, and they re-elected me by an even bigger margin. After that second term, I walked away to resume what was -- and is -- a pretty good life.
+
+I have had the good fortune to be able to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. I have enjoyed the freedom I had gained from building a successful business from scratch, making some money and creating the lifestyle I wanted.
+
+As for being governor, I did what I said I would do. I told people the truth, and I tried to run the state the same way I ran my business, and my life: Don't promise what you can't deliver. Deliver what you can on time and under budget. And most of all, don't waste anyone's time or money. I vetoed bills we didn't need nor couldn't afford -- 750 of them. To this day, some call me ""Governor Veto.""
+
+I enjoyed being governor. I didn't enjoy the politics, but it was satisfying to make a difference in people's lives, force debates on issues that needed to be discussed, and put the principles of smaller government and greater freedom into practice.
+
+After my service as governor was finished, I largely stayed away from politics. I went home, pursued my passions for skiing and cycling, climbed Mount Everest, built my dream house and enjoyed my freedom.
+
+But there was a big problem. I found I could not sit on the couch and watch as the politicians in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike, ran up trillions in debt, sent our young men and women into harm's way to fight ill-advised wars, and turned our government from a protector of freedom into a threat that is intruding into virtually every aspect of our personal and financial lives.
+
+I couldn't stand by and do nothing. I had my freedom, and I had my comfortable life, but I couldn't accept the fact that the politicians were making it increasingly difficult for my kids and millions of others to achieve their dreams as I had achieved mine.
+
+So, in 2012, I ran for president . But it became clear rather quickly that the system wasn't ready for my kind of classical liberalism. I tried to run as a Republican, but didn't fit into the mold demanded by the Republican primary gauntlet. I couldn't evangelize about family values that may be wonderful personal values, but that are frankly none of the government's business. I couldn't talk about increasing defense spending at a time when we are broke. And I had to tell the truth about entitlements that must be reformed if we are ever to balance the federal budget.
+
+So I went home to the Libertarian Party. Libertarians, broadly speaking, are fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Running as the candidate who could unapologetically advocate those principles was, well, liberating. I didn't win, but I garnered more votes than any Libertarian candidate in history.
+
+Along the way, I learned a lot about the American people. Americans are fed up with politicians who lie, who don't really want to change anything, and for whom being elected and re-elected are ends in themselves.
+
+Millennials -- who will soon be a full one-third of American adults -- may be especially ready to become engaged in politics with a candidate who wants to give them a government that will leave them alone and get its finances in order so that they don't inherit an economic collapse.
+
+But all Americans who are rightfully and deeply concerned that a feckless foreign policy is allowing the likes of ISIS to not only threaten our safety, but humiliate us, may be ready for a candidate who will pursue reality-based foreign and military policies that actually fulfill government's most basic responsibility to keep us -- and our freedoms -- safe.
+
+So ... for those who are asking ""Why am I running for president in 2016?"" the answer is simple. I believe America might be ready for something -- and somebody -- different.",REAL
+7488,FBI Agents Must Come Forward to Confront Corruption,"FBI Agents Must Come Forward to Confront Corruption November 07, 2016 FBI Agents Must Come Forward to Confront Corruption 
+We are in uncharted territory. Unfettered corruption has metastasized to the highest levels of government. FBI Director James Comey, a man once widely respected throughout all levels of law enforcement, has sadly sealed his legacy as a crooked shill for the Clinton crime family. It’s the theatre of the absurd. Based upon his Sunday announcement that he intends to put the kibosh, for now at least, on Hillary Clinton’s criminal investigations, Mr. Comey has asked the American people to believe that the FBI thoroughly reviewed 650,000 emails from Anthony Weiner’s laptop in a whopping 691,200 seconds. I suspect Comey may have come across details of his own impending “suicide” on Weiner’s hard drive. It’s little wonder that trust for government is at an all-time low, and that the FBI has become a national laughing stock. 
+Indeed, a preponderance of legal and political analysists agree that the level of corruption and cover-up forcing Richard Nixon to resign his presidency in disgrace in 1974, pales by comparison to the evidence behind the multiple criminal investigations surrounding Hillary Clinton – the Democratic Party’s embattled presidential nominee. Both the Clinton Foundation and Clinton email scandals represent, jointly and separately, Watergate on steroids. 
+While a week ago Mr. Comey sent a letter to both Republicans and Democrats in Congress advising them that, “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear pertinent to the [ongoing Clinton] investigation,” an even greater bombshell shook the Clinton camp mid-week. “Fox News reports Wednesday night that the FBI’s Clinton Foundation probe has produced an ‘avalanche of evidence’ likely to result in indictments,” reports the Washington Times. 
+“Bret Baier, based on two sources, said in a tweet that ‘barring obstruction they’d likely continue 2 push to try for an indictment.’” The “obstruction” referenced, as Baier later explained, is that presently being conducted by the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) in general, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch in particular. As leaks indicate, the DOJ has placed a roadblock at every corner in an effort to obstruct the ongoing FBI investigations into Mrs. Clinton’s illicit activities. Multiple reports further indicate that said DOJ obstruction has triggered an uprising within the Bureau. 
+“Mr. Baier,” continues the Times, “said the probe into pay-for-play charges at the Foundation by the Bureau’s White Collar Crime division has been going on for more than a year and has involved multiple interviews with numerous individuals.” 
+It doesn’t take a beltway insider to recognize that if Hillary Clinton takes the White House on Tuesday, an unprecedented constitutional crisis looms large. An already divided nation will be thrown into chaos, and a hyper-partisan Washington D.C. will effectively settle, like concrete, into total gridlock. 
+The aforementioned criminal investigations into Secretary Clinton’s activities, though intertwined in a tangled web of deleted emails, pay-to-play shakedowns and obstruction of justice, are otherwise quite easy to understand. While serving as Secretary of State Mrs. Clinton had a private email server installed in the basement of her Chappaqua, NY home with the express, and very much illegal, purpose of leveraging her federal power and authority to both solicit Clinton Foundation donations, and to conduct official State business. The private server enabled her to avoid government oversight and accountability, and to racketeer under cover of darkness. 
+Mrs. Clinton then obtained and used a private email address, , to conceal her illicit activity. While soliciting bribes from foreign dignitaries, Islamic terrorist nations, and foreign corporate wheeler-dealers, she likewise transmitted highly classified government information over her unsecured network. No less than five enemy nations then hacked the account with little difficulty, gaining access to classified State secrets. 
+Mrs. Clinton shamelessly – treasonously – placed her own personal enrichment above national security and the lives and safety of American citizens both at home and abroad. 
+Thus, in the interest of both justice and the best interests of the American people, FBI agents and other government officials with direct evidence of Hillary Clinton's crimes (and the Obama DOJ’s ongoing cover-up) should immediately release that evidence to both Congress and the public at large. It’s not a “leak” when the level of systemic crime and corruption has reached critical mass, as it has within both the Obama administration and Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. These public servants will be whistleblowers, not rouge agents – patriots, not partisans. Their oath is to the U.S. Constitution, not to a second rate community organizer, his Marxist political party, or that party’s career criminal presidential nominee. 
+They’d better hurry, though. Mr. Obama likely has his Clinton pardon already drafted and saved on “we the people’s” very-much-secure government server. 
+Matt Barber is founder and editor-in chief of BarbWire.com . He is author of “Hating Jesus: The American Left’s War on Christianity,” a columnist, a cultural analyst and an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. Having retired as an undefeated heavyweight professional boxer, Matt has taken his fight from the ring to the culture war. (Follow Matt on Twitter: @jmattbarber). Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+7791,"Donald Trump announces an Urban Revitalization plan for Black Americans…. As a counter move, Hillary Clinton announces a free Rap Concert!","— Dr.Darrell Scott (@PastorDScott) October 27, 2016 
+.seriously? 
+e: WTF IT’S TRUE Rapper Jay Z will headline a concert for Hillary Clinton in Cleveland before Election Day, according to a Clinton aide. The event — which aides expect will draw thousands — is part of an ongoing series of concerts that aim to motivate young people to turn out for Clinton the way they turned out for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.",FAKE
+4015,Syrian official says 'wide-scale offensive' launched,"(CNN) The Syrian regime, which had appeared earlier this year to be on the ropes, has ""launched a wide-scale offensive,"" a senior military official said Thursday.
+
+The aim is ""eliminating the terrorist groups and liberating the areas and towns that have suffered from terrorism and its crime,"" Gen. Ali Abdullah Ayyoub, the Syrian army chief of staff, said on state media,
+
+Ayyoub provided no details of the area in which the offensive is being launched or its size and scope.
+
+But he acknowledged the key role being played by Russia , which appears bent on supporting a Syrian regime that had been badly in need of help.
+
+""Following the Russian military airstrikes that diminished the fighting capacity of ISIS and other terrorist groups, the Syrian armed forces maintained their military initiative,"" Ayyoub said.
+
+Shoigu said the strikes were launched from the Caspian Sea using precise long-range missiles that flew 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) to their targets.
+
+The report appeared to offer fresh evidence that Russia's primary goal is propping up al-Assad rather than fighting terrorism.
+
+Even as its ships and warplanes conducted fresh strikes, Russia said it was willing to cooperate with the United States in carrying out attacks in Syria.
+
+However, speaking to reporters in Rome, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called the Russian campaign of airstrikes in Syria a ""fundamental mistake."" He said the United States was not ready to cooperate with Russia on operations in Syria.
+
+The U.S. military recently had to divert an aircraft over Syria to ensure it could maintain a safe flying distance from a Russian fighter, a Pentagon representative said. Until the two countries agree on mutual flight safety rules in Syrian airspace, U.S. pilots are under orders to change their flight path if a Russian plane is within 20 nautical miles (37 kilometers), a senior defense official told CNN.
+
+Russian warplanes conducted heavy airstrikes Wednesday on Islamist factions, accompanied by shelling from government forces, according to the UK-based, anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
+
+The head of the observatory said that there were no ISIS positions in the areas targeted and that fierce clashes were taking place on the ground between regime forces and their allies and armed Islamist rebel factions, including the Ahrar al-Sham and al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front.
+
+Wednesday's clashes are the fiercest in the last month, the observatory said.
+
+But Turkey, Syria's neighbor to the north, cast fresh doubt Wednesday on whether Russia's goal was to go after ISIS.
+
+A fraction -- 3.5% -- of Russia's airstrikes in Syria so far have targeted the terror group, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.
+
+On Thursday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called recent violations of Turkish airspace unacceptable and said the alliance stood ready to help Turkey protect itself.
+
+Speaking after a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels, Belgium, Stoltenberg said the alliance was in constant dialogue with Turkey, and its determination to help Turkey defend itself was ""rock solid.""
+
+""A political solution to the crisis in Syria is more needed than ever,"" he said.
+
+The U.S. Embassy in Syria also questioned Russia's targets.
+
+The developments came a day after Stoltenberg expressed alarm over how the Russian military had grown on several fronts in Syria, including boots on the ground. Russian planes have also incurred into Turkish airspace twice, he said.
+
+""It's unacceptable, it's dangerous, and it's reckless behavior and it adds to the tensions,"" he told CNN.
+
+Stoltenberg said he doubted that Russia was interested primarily in fighting ISIS.
+
+""I'm also concerned that Russia is not targeting ISIL but instead attacking the Syrian opposition and civilians,"" he said.
+
+The latest U.S. assessment indicates that Russia has moved ground combat weapons and troops to western Syria where anti-regime forces are, according to two American defense officials. The United States sees the move as Russia ""stepping up its ground activity"" in Syria to attack those forces, rather than ISIS elements, according to one of the officials.
+
+But Russian officials deny ramping up military activity. Officials quoted by state media said there would be no ground operation in Syria and -- in contrast to what officials had said earlier -- Russia would try to prevent any ""volunteers"" from going to Syria.",REAL
+7990,Trump Makes Special Announcement After Homeless Lady Attacked By Liberals,"Share This After a homeless black Trump supporter was brutally set upon by an intolerant liberal mob, Donald Trump made an incredible announcement. 
+A homeless black woman who has been guarding Donald Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star from vandals was recently set upon by ruthless liberals, ripping up her signs and assaulting the helpless woman. However, as soon as Trump heard about what the leftist thugs had done, he immediately issued a special announcement that has us cheering. 
+After privileged millionaire James Otis obliterated the Donald’s sidewalk star on Wednesday, an unnamed homeless woman boldly took it upon herself to act as guardian, making the cold slab her new temporary home. Utilizing her sleeping spot as her own political platform, the courageous vagrant created signs to peacefully showcase her support for Trump. Unfortunately, she underestimated just how savage and intolerant liberals are, especially when it comes to the minorities they claim to champion expressing a different opinion. 
+Just one day after the homeless woman set up residence next to Trump’s star, a mob of vicious anti-Trump thugs attacked her, RT reports. After pushing her around and stealing her signs, some of the only property she owns, the animals knocked her and her cart down, continuing to hurl sickening insults and snatch things. 
+Video captured the enraging assault, showing the woman lying on the ground, shaking, and holding back tears. Fortunately, the heart-breaking story quickly made its way to Trump, the only politician concerned with this transient’s well-being. Now, the Republican nominee has made an incredible announcement befitting of a U.S. president. 
+The Gateway Pundit reports that Trump was so appalled by the mob’s treatment of this destitute woman that he has not only announced that he has a special “gift” for the victim but promises to seek justice for her barbaric abusers. The presidential candidate’s attorney, Michael Cohen, proclaimed on Friday that Trump promises the woman will have “the last laugh on these thugs.” . @DiamondandSilk @realDonaldTrump someone please help me locate this woman as Mr. Trump has a gift for her… 
+— Michael Cohen (@MichaelCohen212) October 28, 2016 
+At Trump’s behest, Cohen exploded on Twitter, repeatedly requesting followers to find the homeless woman. He explained that they have checked, but she is no longer staying on Trump’s star. However, the candidate wants to “change her life” when he finds her. 
+Proving just how passionate Trump is about helping the woman, Cohen spent much of Friday responding to tweets, hoping to find some clue as to the woman’s current whereabouts. One user asserted that the woman is Marsha Lee , a resident of Santa Monica. However, it is unclear if this information is accurate. 
+Cohen assured that the police are investigating the incident and he and Trump will do everything possible to see that the thugs responsible for the assault are brought to justice. It’s truly heart-warming to see such a powerful man going out of his way to do something significant for someone considered “the least of these.” 
+Hopefully, this woman will receive the mystery gift Trump has waiting for her and the savages who bullied an innocent homeless person will be punished for their cowardly behavior. Of course, don’t expect Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to say that her black life matters or even apologize for the thuggery of their own supporters. In fact, neither of them has come forward to help the unfortunate victim of their national policies that never helped her off the streets in the first place. 
+This stomach-churning incident just goes to show how tolerant the left is when it comes to blacks, or anyone else for that matter, simply having an opinion with which they disagree.",FAKE
+3743,Feds Search Home in Mohammed Event Shooting,"An Phoenix apartment was searched by federal agents Monday as part of an investigation into a shooting outside a Mohammed cartoon contest.
+
+On Sunday, Texas police killed two gunmen after they opened fire on participants in a contest to draw cartoons of Islam's prophet Mohammed in the Dallas suburb of Garland.
+
+As the cartoon contest, hosted by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, was ending, two men arrived in a car, jumped out, and started shooting.
+
+""This is very scary. We heard boom, boom, boom, and then all of a sudden we saw the cops everywhere,"" Garland resident Kim Easley told Dallas-Fort Worth's WFAA-TV.
+
+""They drove up, got out, and opened fire on the security officer,"" Garland police spokesman Joe Harn said.
+
+After the security guard was hit, Garland police returned fire, killing both gunmen.
+
+Sunday's attack took place following remarks by Geert Wilders, a Dutch lawmaker known for his outspoken criticism of Islam.
+
+""We are here in defiance of Islam to stand for our rights and freedom of speech,"" Wilders told contest participants. ""That is our duty.""
+
+""Our message today is very simple,"" he continued. ""We will never allow barbarism, never allow Islam, to rob us of our freedom of speech.""
+
+FBI agents are hoping the Phoenix residence will offer clues as to what motivated the shooting.
+
+Meanwhile, there's evidence Sunday's attack was inspired by the Islamic State.
+
+Approximately 20 minutes before the shooting, a Twitter account expressing support for ISIS used the hashtag #TexasAttack and indicated two men were going to give their lives for Allah.
+
+An ISIS spokesman called the gunmen ""brothers"" of the Islamic State.",REAL
+3977,Suspected mastermind of Paris massacre killed in terror raid,"The man widely known as the suspected mastermind of last Friday's Paris attacks that killed 129 people, who bragged that he could always stay one step ahead of Western intelligence, was killed in the police raid north of Paris Wednesday.
+
+Officials also confirmed that his cousin was killed, when she apparently blew herself up.
+
+Abdelhamid Abaaoud, 27, had been linked to as many as four thwarted attacks since this spring, including the plot to kill passengers on a Paris-bound high-speed train in August, a plot that three young Americans helped foil. He was identified from skin samples after the Saint-Denis apartment raid, the French prosecutor's office reported.
+
+Later Thursday, police in the eastern French city of Charleville-Mezieres blew open a door to enter a house during a new raid.
+
+French police are looking for anything that could be linked to jihadi networks or illegal weapons. Police spokeswoman Mathilde Coulon would not give further details about the Thursday evening raid.
+
+Abaaoud had claimed he successfully moved back and forth from Europe to Syria coordinating terror attacks, and narrowly escaped a January police raid in the Belgian city of Verviers. “Allah blinded their vision and I was able to leave... despite being chased after by so many intelligence agencies,"" he told the ISIS magazine Dabiq.
+
+Two counterterrorism sources tell Fox News his death marks a major advance for the investigation, but add they are operating on the premise that more senior suspects connected to the plot are still out there.
+
+They describe Abaaoud as the “Mohammed Atta” of the Paris attacks, the “tactical guy” who identified and pulled together the operatives, in the same way the lead hijacker kept the 9/11 teams on course.
+
+They emphasize that based on his skill set and experience, Abaaoud was not the strategic planner, in the same way Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was for the 9/11 attacks. The Paris massacre involved a plot or plots with multiple layers and upwards of 20 players, according to the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Texas Republican Michael McCaul.
+
+Police say they launched Wednesday's operation after receiving information from tapped phone calls, surveillance and tipoffs suggesting that Abaaoud was holed up in the apartment. Investigators said it was still unclear how he died. Eight other people were arrested.
+
+French authorities did not know he was in Europe before the massacre, France's interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Thursday. He demanded Europe do everything in its power to ""vanquish terrorism.""
+
+During the raid, according to one police official, an officer approached Abaaoud's cousin, Hasna Aitboulahcen, and asked her, ""Where is your boyfriend?"" She responded angrily: ""He's not my boyfriend!"" Then there was an explosion.
+
+The bodies recovered in the raid were badly mangled, with a part of the woman's spine landing on a police car, complicating formal identification. Her possible role in the Paris massacre was unclear.
+
+Abaaoud's death may provide some relief not only for Europeans, but also for his own family. “We are praying that Abdelhamid really is dead,” his sister, Yasmina, said last year, The New York Times reported. At the time, there was word he died fighting for ISIS, but it eventually emerged that he escaped Syria for Europe.
+
+His own father, Omar, said the jihadi ""dishonored"" his family, the Times added.
+
+Abaaoud had also used Internet social networks to try to recruit women from Spain to join ISIS, Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz said Thursday.
+
+The manhunt for at least two other suspects believed to have participated in the attacks continued. Police have identified one of them as Salah Abdeslam, who grew up in the same Belgian district as Abaaoud, the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek.
+
+There was no indication Abdeslam escaped to neighboring Spain or tried to do so, Diaz added. He told Antena 3 television that security officials from several countries were called together in Paris to discuss the possibility that Abdeslam might try to cross into a country bordering France.
+
+Spanish police say French authorities sent a bulletin to officers across Europe asking them to watch out for a Citroen Xsara car that could be carrying Abdeslam.
+
+Also Thursday, authorities say they detained nine people during as many raids in the Brussels area. Two of the detentions were related to Friday's massacre, and seven others involved the entourage of Bilal Hafdi, one of the suicide bombers at the stadium, but related to issues from before the Paris attacks, according to a prosecution official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
+
+The official refused to provide any details on the two detainees linked to the Paris attacks. There are currently already two suspects in custody charged with terrorist murder and belonging to a terrorist group.
+
+Friday's attacks wounded hundreds of people, and left Europe and much of the world on edge French Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned Thursday that associates of the attackers could use chemical and biological weapons, as he urged Parliament to extend a state of emergency.
+
+Valls said ""terrorism hit France, not because of what it is doing in Iraq and Syria ... but for what it is."" The French Senate is set to vote Friday on prolonging the nation's state of emergency by three months.
+
+The state of emergency expands police powers to carry out arrests and searches, and allows authorities to forbid the movement of people and vehicles at specific times and places.
+
+Turkey's president urged Muslim nations to unite against the extremist groups that he says are tarnishing Islam. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Islamic countries have a responsibility to ""stand hand-in-hand and show a clear and principled position"" against the Islamic State group, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram.
+
+Erdogan added that countries must combat poverty, which he described as the ""swamp"" that breeds terrorism. Erdogan was addressing health ministers from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at a meeting in Istanbul.
+
+Fox News' Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+10341,Sex workers reject ‘biased’ BBC prostitution documentary,"Sex workers reject ‘biased’ BBC prostitution documentary Sex workers reject ‘biased’ BBC prostitution documentary By 0 47 
+Sex workers say the BBC’s ‘Sex, Drugs & Murder: Life in the Red Light Zone’ documentary, which portrays the lives of women in the Holbeck area of Leeds, Britain’s first legal red light district, is “biased” and unrepresentative. 
+They argue the program buys into stereotypes and general ignorance, including the view that women are driven into prostitution by drug habits rather than economic pressures brought on by austerity. 
+Read more 
+The show follows the daily lives of Sammi Jo, Stacey, Debi and Kayleigh, who sell sex to pay for their addictions. They work in an area also known as Red Light Zone, where women can sell sex between 7pm and 7am without being arrested. 
+Sammi Jo, who had to be taken from her parents as a child due to abuse, said she turned to drugs and drink “as a comfort.” 
+Mother-of-three Kayleigh recounted how despite her family’s attempts to help her get clean she would quickly relapse. 
+“I came off of it and within two days I robbed my brother’s PlayStation games to go sell for money, and that just led into a routine of, I’d have heroin, go work, and I’d have heroin to forget about working,” she told the program. 
+“It’s just a total vicious cycle.” 
+But sex workers union English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) believes the show is “biased” and shows only the darker side of the industry. 
+“This BBC3 film is yet another biased piece on the sex industry,” a spokeswoman for the group told RT. 
+“Most street-based sex workers are not drug users yet the film chooses to focuses only on women on drugs. It ignores the truth that in many areas around the UK the majority of sex workers are on the streets because of benefit cuts and sanctions. 
+“If the press ignore that they are colluding with the government in hiding the devastating consequences of their austerity policies, 80 percent of which have targeted women.” 
+The group said the Red Light Zone provides Leeds sex workers with a safe environment to operate. 
+According to local police, prostitutes have been three times more likely to report violent incidents since decriminalization came into place in Holbeck. In the first year, between 2014 and 2015, 61 violent incidents were reported to the police. The previous year only 49 cases of assault were reported. 
+“Some women were glad to work in the Leeds ‘no arrest zone’ because it meant they weren’t being constantly harassed by the police,” the ECP spokeswoman added. Immigration raids 
+The ECP said it is the police themselves who are endangering the lives of sex workers. 
+“Since the immigration crackdown everyone is on edge and hiding from officials. Women feel that once again the police are prioritizing criminalization over protection and this is deterring them from reporting violence,” the group complained. 
+Last week the London Metropolitan Police raided six massage parlors in Soho and Chinatown, arresting 24 people – 17 of whom were seized on “suspicion of immigration offenses.” 
+The Met released a statement saying the operation was “aimed at bringing to justice those who seek to profit from the exploitation of vulnerable people.” 
+The ECP, however, claims the swoops are “part of a racist witch-hunt against migrant sex workers, which has got worse since Brexit, even though women have the right to be here under EU law.” 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+7249,"Comment on You Are What You Read: Research Reveals The Importance Of What You’re Reading by Du er, hvad du læser. | Dyslexic workers","  According to a new study published in the International Journal of Business Administration in May 2016, your love for “light reading,” and web-based aggregators like Reddit, Tumblr and BuzzFeed may not be doing you any good. The researchers concluded that what students read in college directly affects the level of writing they achieve . In fact, students who pick up academic journals, literary fiction, or general nonfiction wrote with greater syntactic sophistication than those who preferred the former options. Furthermore, the highest scores came from those who resorted to academic journals, and the lowest to solely web-based content. But then again, “good writing” is often subjective. What we’re really talking about here is whether our overall ability to convey what we want to say comes across well to the masses. Why You Need To Start “Deep Reading” As opposed to light reading, which involves little more than comprehending and decoding words, deep reading involves reading that is slow, immersive, emotional, and morally complex. When you are deep reading, you are absorbing language rich in detail, allusion, and metaphor. This style of reading works to engage the part of the brain regions that allow the reader to feel as though they are experiencing the event. It’s thought of as an exercise that promotes brain health — boosting your levels of empathy because you practice reflection, analysis, and personal subtext. Light reading lacks these meaningful attributes. Online blogs, for instance, are said to lack a genuine voice, viewpoint, and analysis that provokes deeper thoughts. Essentially, you’ll likely forget what you read in mere minutes. Likewise, Stanford University researchers concluded the benefits of deep reading as opposed to light reading. They found that close literary reading gives your brain a workout in multiple complex cognitive functions. And while simple pleasure reading increases blood flow to different areas of the brain, deep reading proves more of an effective brain exercise. Why You Should Read Poems An article published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies reported that more emotionally charged writing works to arouse several regions in the brain that respond to music . When comparing reading poetry and prose, researchers found that poetry activates the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes — both of which are linked to self-analysis. For the study, volunteers also read their favorite poems, which stimulated parts of the brain associated with memory. These areas of the brain, predominantly located on the right side, had already been shown to provoke “shivers down the spine” as a result of an emotional reaction to music. Why You Should Read Literary Fiction Recent experiments have revealed that reading literary fiction makes way for better performance on tests of affective theory of mind, or understanding others’ thinking and wellbeing. The study published in the International Journal of Business Administration found that this type of reading enhances theory of mind, which may be influenced by a higher amount of engagement with real works of art as opposed to reading magazine articles, interviews, and online nonfiction reporting.   Pick Deep Reading Over Watching Television When you turn on the TV, you’re signaling your brain power to shut down. Likewise, reading lightweight material for entertainment simply doesn’t fire up your writing brain to help you become a better writer. So, rather than turning on the tube or scrolling through articles on Facebook, spend more time deep-reading literary fiction and poetry. 
+ ",FAKE
+1010,How Wisconsin could be a turning point in the GOP race (+video),"Donald Trump is forecast to lose Wisconsin, and while that doesn't necessarily signal a deeper shift in the race, it could be decisive nonetheless.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz greets supporters from the back of a pickup truck at a campaign stop at Altoona Family Restaurant in Altoona, Wis., last week.
+
+It was, Republican opponents of Donald Trump said at the time, a last-ditch rallying cry to prevent the mercurial billionaire from winning the GOP presidential nomination and effectively taking over the party.
+
+Five weeks later, #NeverTrump is still trending – and the Republican movement to derail the “Trump train” faces its moment of truth Tuesday in the Wisconsin primary. Conservative groups have spent millions of dollars on television and radio attack ads. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a onetime contender for the nomination, has rallied support for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Mr. Trump’s top opponent. In Milwaukee, whose suburbs are rich with Republican voters, conservative talk radio hosts have been skewering Trump relentlessly.
+
+“Honestly, If Donald Trump does win in Wisconsin, I don’t know how he’s possibly stoppable,” says Charlie Sykes, Wisconsin’s top conservative radio voice, speaking Monday on MSNBC.
+
+“But I do think that people are going to look back at Wisconsin and say, ‘All right, this is exactly what it will take to stop Donald Trump from being the Republican nominee.’ ”
+
+There are indications that Wisconsin could indeed slow Trump’s momentum. One key poll has Senator Cruz 10 points up.
+
+For his part, Mr. Sykes says the lead-up to Wisconsin has uncovered a “formula” for stopping Trump that includes a new willingness by the media to drill down on issues with Trump – as MSNBC host Chris Matthews did last week on abortion. Trump said he believed women should be punished for having abortions, then quickly reversed himself after an uproar ensued.
+
+But many of Wisconsin’s lessons about how to beat Trump are particular to the state. Its deeply ingrained sense of civility, as well as its relatively higher levels of education and religious adherence, all play to Trump’s weaknesses.
+
+In the end, Wisconsin’s biggest contribution to the #NeverTrump movement could simply be in denying him the delegates he needs to win a majority by the Republican National Convention this summer. At the convention, Trump’s chances of securing the nomination will plummet if he can’t do it on the first ballot.
+
+In Wisconsin, Trump has been his own worst enemy, with a brash style that clashes with the state’s culture of civility.
+
+“Even when Scott Walker was battling the unions [in 2011] and 100,000 people were marching around the capitol, those were family-friendly events,” says Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “There were massive policy disagreements, but not a lot of personal insults.”
+
+Trump’s recent retweet of an unflattering picture of Cruz’s wife, Heidi, is just one example of his tone-deaf approach in Wisconsin, the only state voting Tuesday. Trump’s repeated attacks on Walker and on the Republican speaker of the House, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, have also baffled observers, as both men are popular among the state’s Republicans.
+
+Trump is running into the buzzsaw of a state GOP that coalesced around Walker during his clashes with public unions and the subsequent recall election in 2012, which the governor survived, followed by his reelection in 2014.
+
+“That means there’s not a rump group of the party ready to bolt to go to Trump,” says Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette University Law School poll. Last week, the poll showed Cruz beating Trump, 40 to 30 percent.
+
+On the plus side for Trump, Wisconsin does not register voters by party and allows same-day registration. So first-time or infrequent voters inspired by Trump’s message can easily turn out for him.
+
+Ultimately, observers still expect Cruz to win, though there are important demographic reasons not to put too much stock in a Cruz victory. Nate Cohn, a specialist on voter analytics at The New York Times, points to several factors that have always spelled trouble for Trump in Wisconsin, including:
+
+Education. The state is average or above average in every educational category, while support for Trump skews toward those with less education. Wisconsin is unusual in that “many of its most strongly Republican areas are well-educated suburbs,” Mr. Cohn notes.
+
+Religion. Wisconsin is also a bit above average for religious adherence, and “with the exception of white Roman Catholics, Trump fares worse in areas where larger shares of the population are reported to be religious adherents,” Cohn writes.
+
+Family. Trump also fares worse in areas with strong traditional families; Wisconsin has an above-average number of married couples.
+
+Ancestry. Wisconsin’s population skews toward those from “predominantly Protestant countries in Northern Europe,” a demographic in which Trump has struggled, Cohn reports.
+
+In short, Wisconsin Republicans are similar demographically to those in Iowa, Kansas, and Utah, all states where Cruz beat Trump – who then rebounded.
+
+The key for Trump will be to recover quickly if he loses Wisconsin. The calendar both helps and hurts him. The next contest isn’t until April 19, so he potentially faces two weeks of being cast as a loser. The good news for him is that the next contests are on friendlier turf – his home state of New York, followed by Pennsylvania.
+
+But if Trump loses Wisconsin badly enough that he earns no delegates, his path to clinching the Republican nomination before the convention becomes steeper. Then, his biggest failing as a candidate – his weak organization – could come into play.
+
+He has a dearth of insiders both nationally and inside the state parties who can defend his interests in delegate allocation.
+
+Trump has already reportedly been losing delegates to Cruz, whose operation is going after those who are uncommitted or won by candidates no longer in the race.
+
+Trump has attempted to address this by bringing in veteran Republican strategist Paul Manafort to wrangle delegates at the convention, a major “get.”
+
+The third remaining GOP candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, remains an important factor, preventing Trump and Cruz from going against each other one-on-one. Governor Kasich appears to have benefited from the departure of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio from the race March 15. He scored 21 percent in the latest Marquette poll, up from 8 percent in late February, and is the choice of older-generation GOP leaders in the state, including former Gov. Tommy Thompson and former Rep. Scott Klug.
+
+Polling shows Kasich beating Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in the general election in November, while both Cruz and Trump lose to Mrs. Clinton.
+
+“At least at the moment, he seems to have a better chance at preventing another Clinton presidency,” says Rich Bonomo, an engineering researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
+
+Kasich trails far behind Trump and Cruz in the delegate count, and the only way he can win the GOP nomination is through a contested convention. But for some Wisconsin voters, Kasich is an important option – the only candidate left with executive branch governing experience and more-moderate Republican policies.
+
+Rebecca Forbes Wank, bookkeeper for the University of Wisconsin press, says she doesn’t like Cruz, because he’s “so far to the right.” And she can’t vote for Trump, in part because “the way he’s been running has made it OK for people to be racist.”
+
+That leaves her with Kasich. In ultra-liberal Madison, Trump and Cruz supporters are few and far between, but in the wider state, they are the ballgame. And after Tuesday, Republicans nationally will be one step closer to knowing whether they’re headed for a contested convention.",REAL
+443,"The next recession could be around the corner, and the Fed isn't ready for it","Around the world, markets are in chaos. Japan's stock market plunged 5 percent on Friday, while markets in France, Germany, and the UK all saw big losses on Thursday. The US stock market is doing better than most, but it is also down since the start of the year. Oil hit a new low on Thursday of $26 per barrel.
+
+These declines reflect growing concerns that the world economy is headed for another recession. Before 2007 we’d say, ""If things get bad, the Fed will cut interest rates."" But with the Fed’s benchmark rate below 0.5 percent already, a substantial cut would mean rates that are below zero. That's an unorthodox strategy, and it might not even be legal, according to testimony by Fed Chair Janet Yellen before congressional committees this week.
+
+The Fed needs a new strategy: Stop targeting interest rates and instead target the growth of the overall economy. Moving away from interest rate targeting would give markets confidence that the Fed has the tools to deal with the next economic downturn, which would reduce the danger of another 2008-style meltdown.
+
+Unfortunately, there's little sign that the Fed is laying the groundwork for a shift in strategy. Instead, Yellen seemed to be in denial about the magnitude of the challenge she is facing.
+
+""Let’s remember that the labor market is continuing to perform well,"" she said to the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday. ""We want to be careful not to jump to a conclusion about what is in store for the economy."" Maybe not — but the Fed needs to be prepared for the worst.
+
+""The Fed needs to change their fundamental approach,"" argues Scott Sumner, a monetary policy expert at the Mercatus Center. Right now the Fed's policy discussions are all about where to set short-term interest rates. But not only does that approach stop working when interest rates fall to zero — as they did in 2008 — but interest rates aren't even what people actually care about.
+
+Instead, Sumner argues, the Fed should start directly targeting a variable people do care about: either the inflation rate or (even better) the total amount of spending in the economy. He argues that the Fed should focus on setting long-run goals for these variables and then doing whatever it takes to meet those goals.
+
+The Fed currently has an official target of 2 percent inflation. But the central bank's actions make it clear that it's not serious about this target. Last December, for example, the Fed's own forecast showed that inflation would be around 1.6 percent in 2016 — and the forecast inflation rate had actually been falling. Yet the Fed raised interest rates anyway. That was a pretty clear signal to the markets that the Fed cared more about returning to ""normal"" interest rates than it did about achieving its inflation target.
+
+The problem isn't just that the economy will grow a little bit slower in early 2016 than it could have otherwise. By ignoring its own targets, the Fed sent a message that it wasn't really committed to robust growth over the long run, which undermines businesses' confidence in the recovery and discourages investment.
+
+The solution, Sumner argues, is for the Fed to use a strategy called level targeting to make its own targets more credible. Under a level targeting regime, the Fed would compensate for missing its target in one year by overshooting the following year. For example, in 2015, the Fed's preferred measure of inflation came in at 1.4 percent — 0.6 percent below the Fed's 2 percent target. Under level targeting, the Fed would aim to achieve 2.6 percent inflation in 2016, delivering 2 percent inflation on average in 2015 to 2016. That would not only support faster economic growth in 2016, it would also give the markets more confidence in the Fed's forecasts for 2017, 2018, and beyond.
+
+Abandoning interest rate targeting might seem radical, but the Fed has actually done it once before, in the late 1970s. Back then, it seemed that no matter how high the Fed raised interest rates, it couldn't get inflation under control. So in 1979, the Fed stopped targeting interest rates altogether.
+
+Instead, it simply set a target for the total amount of money in the economy. Fed Chair Paul Volcker knew that if the amount of money in circulation stopped rising, the inflation rate would eventually have to stop rising too. It took a couple of years (and helped induce a major recession in 1980), but it worked.
+
+A big reason the strategy worked is that markets believed Volcker was serious about the target. Targeting the money supply directly signaled he was willing to let interest rates go as high as they had to in order to get inflation under control. Once markets believed he was serious, they started doing a lot of his work for him — and businesses began to curtail price increases in the expectation that the overall inflation rate was going to decline.
+
+Today we're facing the reverse situation. A big reason the economy has been recovering so slowly is that businesses are worried about sluggish growth — or, worse, another 2008-style meltdown — in the coming years. So they've been reluctant to invest, making slow growth a self-fulfilling prophecy.
+
+If the Fed can convince businesses that it's serious about delivering consistent growth, businesses will start investing more in the expectation that demand for their products will grow — and that investment will itself produce growth.
+
+Level targeting is a strategy for giving the market more confidence in the Fed's long-term targets. And while inflation-based level targeting would work better than what we're doing now, Sumner argues that the best strategy would be to target the total amount of spending in the economy. This approach, known as nominal GDP targeting, has been endorsed by prominent economists such as Christina Romer.
+
+There are two big problems with the Fed's current strategy of focusing on interest rates. The obvious one is that once rates hit zero, the conventional approach to monetary policy becomes ineffective. After rates hit zero in 2008, the Fed was forced to use an ad hoc strategy known as ""quantitative easing"" to pump more money into the economy. Lacking experience with this new strategy, the Fed twice made the mistake of ending easing too early, slowing the economic recovery between 2010 and 2012.
+
+The larger problem with zero interest rates, however, is politics. People are used to thinking of low interest rates as a sign of easy money and vice versa, so the zero interest rate struck many as a sign of recklessly easy monetary policy. In the years after the financial crisis, critics warned that Fed policies would create runaway inflation.
+
+In retrospect, it's clear that these concerns were unfounded. The average inflation rate since 2008 has been well below the Fed's 2 percent target, while the economy has suffered from persistently slow job and wage growth. But fear of a political backlash for doing ""too much"" discouraged Yellen's predecessor, Ben Bernanke, from acting decisively to promote economic growth.
+
+More recently, the Fed has come under a lot of pressure to ""normalize"" — that is, raise — rates above zero percent. After resisting these pressures for most of 2015, the central bank finally pulled the trigger in December, boosting its target rate from zero percent to 0.25 percent. It did this despite the fact that — as Vox's Matt Yglesias pointed out at the time — most economic indicators suggested that a rate hike would do more harm than good.
+
+This is the flip side of the situation the Fed faced in the 1970s. Because interest rates were high, many people thought monetary policy was too tight, and the Fed faced a lot of pressure to cut rates. But cutting rates triggered another wave of inflation, forcing the Fed to raise rates once again. Interest rate targets had become a distraction, and abandoning them helped Volcker focus on the variable he really cared about: inflation.
+
+Negative interest rates are one way the Fed could try to salvage the current regime of focusing on interest rates. But it's not a very good one.
+
+Just as you might have a savings account with your bank, so a nation's banks all have accounts with their nation's central bank. The money deposited in these accounts is called reserves, and in recent years a lot of banks around the world have chosen to build up huge reserve war chests. That's frustrating to central bankers who have been trying to encourage banks to stimulate economic activity by lending out the money.
+
+So recently Japan's central bank and some central banks in Europe have been experimenting with negative interest rates on reserves. Last month, the Japanese central bank announced that banks would be assessed a 0.1 percent penalty on their reserves — an interest rate of -0.1 percent. A bank with a billion yen deposited with the Bank of Japan will now have to pay 1 million yen per year for the privilege.
+
+Obviously, 0.1 percent is not a very big number, so the direct effects of Japan's new policy won't be very large. But going negative breaks through an important psychological barrier — once a central bank has instituted a slightly negative interest rate, it's more likely to cut rates further in the future.
+
+In her testimony before Congress this week, Yellen was pressed on whether the Fed would follow its European and Japanese counterparts and impose a penalty on reserves. Yellen demurred, saying that the Fed's experts were still studying whether negative interest rates would be legal and technically feasible.
+
+But even if the Fed ultimately decides to adopt negative rates, there are real limits on how far they can go. If negative interest rates get too steep, banks have an obvious alternative: They can get physical cash and store it in a big warehouse. By definition, cash is worth as many dollars a year from now as it is today.
+
+There are a couple of ways central banks could try to make negative interest rates more feasible. University of Michigan economist Miles Kimball, for example, advocates a shift to a new form of electronic money that would allow central banks to impose economy-wide negative interest rates. Others argue that the Fed should raise its inflation target so that real, inflation-adjusted interest rates can go lower. But not only do both of these approaches have technical challenges, they're also likely to be intensely unpopular with voters.
+
+So even if the Fed adopted negative rates, it wouldn't improve the effectiveness of the current interest rate targeting regime very much. Just as the Fed got stuck at zero percent interest rates in 2008, it could get stuck at -1 percent interest rates in 2017 or 2018. So the Fed is going to need a new framework that's less dependent on interest rates regardless. It might as well get started.",REAL
+9979,The Modern History of ‘Rigged’ US Election,"By Robert Parry
+The United States is so committed to the notion that its electoral process is the world’s “gold standard” that there has been a bipartisan determination to maintain the fiction even when evidence is overwhelming that a U.S. presidential election has been manipulated or stolen. The “wise men” of the system simply insist otherwise.
+We have seen this behavior when there are serious questions of vote tampering (as in Election 1960) or when a challenger apparently exploits a foreign crisis to create an advantage over the incumbent (as in Elections 1968 and 1980) or when the citizens’ judgment is overturned by judges (as in Election 2000).
+Presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan photographed together in the Oval Office in 1991. (Cropped from a White House photo that also included Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.)
+Strangely, in such cases, it is not only the party that benefited which refuses to accept the evidence of wrongdoing, but the losing party and the establishment news media as well. Protecting the perceived integrity of the U.S. democratic process is paramount. Americans must continue to believe in the integrity of the system even when that integrity has been violated.
+The harsh truth is that pursuit of power often trumps the principle of an informed electorate choosing the nation’s leaders, but that truth simply cannot be recognized.
+Of course, historically, American democracy was far from perfect, excluding millions of people, including African-American slaves and women. The compromises needed to enact the Constitution in 1787 also led to distasteful distortions, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation (although obviously slaves couldn’t vote).
+That unsavory deal enabled Thomas Jefferson to defeat John Adams in the pivotal national election of 1800. In effect, the votes of Southern slave owners like Jefferson counted substantially more than the votes of Northern non-slave owners.
+Even after the Civil War when the Constitution was amended to give black men voting rights, the reality for black voting, especially in the South, was quite different from the new constitutional mandate. Whites in former Confederate states concocted subterfuges to keep blacks away from the polls to ensure continued white supremacy for almost a century.
+Women did not gain suffrage until 1920 with the passage of another constitutional amendment, and it took federal legislation in 1965 to clear away legal obstacles that Southern states had created to deny the franchise to blacks.
+Indeed, the alleged voter fraud in Election 1960, concentrated largely in Texas, a former Confederate state and home to John Kennedy’s vice presidential running mate, Lyndon Johnson, could be viewed as an outgrowth of the South’s heritage of rigging elections in favor of Democrats, the post-Civil War party of white Southerners.
+However, by pushing through civil rights for blacks in the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson earned the enmity of many white Southerners who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party via Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy of coded racial messaging. Nixon also harbored resentments over what he viewed as his unjust defeat in the election of 1960.
+Nixon’s ‘Treason’ So, by 1968, the Democrats’ once solid South was splintering, but Nixon, who was again the Republican presidential nominee, didn’t want to leave his chances of winning what looked to be another close election to chance. Nixon feared that — with the Vietnam War raging and the Democratic Party deeply divided — President Johnson could give the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a decisive boost by reaching a last-minute peace deal with North Vietnam.
+President Richard Nixon with his then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in 1972.
+The documentary and testimonial evidence is now clear that to avert a peace deal, Nixon’s campaign went behind Johnson’s back to persuade South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to torpedo Johnson’s Paris peace talks by refusing to attend. Nixon’s emissaries assured Thieu that a President Nixon would continue the war and guarantee a better outcome for South Vietnam.
+Though Johnson had strong evidence of what he privately called Nixon’s “treason” — from FBI wiretaps in the days before the 1968 election — he and his top advisers chose to stay silent. In a Nov. 4, 1968 conference call , Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford – three pillars of the Establishment – expressed that consensus, with Clifford explaining the thinking:
+“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”
+Clifford’s words expressed the recurring thinking whenever evidence emerged casting the integrity of America’s electoral system in doubt, especially at the presidential level. The American people were not to know what kind of dirty deeds could affect that process.
+To this day, the major U.S. news media will not directly address the issue of Nixon’s treachery in 1968, despite the wealth of evidence proving this historical reality now available from declassified records at the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas. In a puckish recognition of this ignored history, the library’s archivists call the file on Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks their “X-file.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ LBJ’s ‘X-File’ on Nixon’s ‘Treason. ’”]
+The evidence also strongly suggests that Nixon’s paranoia about a missing White House file detailing his “treason” – top secret documents that Johnson had entrusted to Rostow at the end of LBJ’s presidency – led to Nixon’s creation of the “plumbers,” a team of burglars whose first assignment was to locate those purloined papers. The existence of the “plumbers” became public in June 1972 when they were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate in Washington.
+National Security Adviser Walt Rostow shows President Lyndon Johnson a model of a battle near Khe Sanh in Vietnam. (U.S. Archive Photo)
+Although the Watergate scandal remains the archetypal case of election-year dirty tricks, the major U.S. news media never acknowledge the link between Watergate and Nixon’s far more egregious dirty trick four years earlier, sinking Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks while 500,000 American soldiers were in the war zone. In part because of Nixon’s sabotage — and his promise to Thieu of a more favorable outcome — the war continued for four more bloody years before being settled along the lines that were available to Johnson in 1968. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ The Heinous Crime Behind Watergate .”]
+In effect, Watergate gets walled off as some anomaly that is explained by Nixon’s strange personality. However, even though Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, he and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who also had a hand in the Paris peace talk caper, reappear as secondary players in the next well-documented case of obstructing a sitting president’s foreign policy to get an edge in the 1980 campaign.
+Reagan’s ‘October Surprise’ Caper In that case, President Jimmy Carter was seeking reelection and trying to negotiate release of 52 American hostages then held in revolutionary Iran. Ronald Reagan’s campaign feared that Carter might pull off an “October Surprise” by bringing home the hostages just before the election. So, this historical mystery has been: Did Reagan’s team take action to block Carter’s October Surprise?
+President Ronald Reagan, delivering his Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1981, as the 52 U.S. hostages in Iran are simultaneously released.
+The testimonial and documentary evidence that Reagan’s team did engage in a secret operation to prevent Carter’s October Surprise is now almost as overwhelming as the proof of the 1968 affair regarding Nixon’s Paris peace talk maneuver.
+That evidence indicates that Reagan’s campaign director William Casey organized a clandestine effort to prevent the hostages’ release before Election Day, after apparently consulting with Nixon and Kissinger and aided by former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, who was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate.
+By early November 1980, the public’s obsession with Iran’s humiliation of the United States and Carter’s inability to free the hostages helped turn a narrow race into a Reagan landslide. When the hostages were finally let go immediately after Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, his supporters cited the timing to claim that the Iranians had finally relented out of fear of Reagan.
+Bolstered by his image as a tough guy, Reagan enacted much of his right-wing agenda, including passing massive tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, weakening unions and creating the circumstances for the rapid erosion of the Great American Middle Class.
+Behind the scenes, the Reagan administration signed off on secret arms shipments to Iran, mostly through Israel, what a variety of witnesses described as the payoff for Iran’s cooperation in getting Reagan elected and then giving him the extra benefit of timing the hostage release to immediately follow his inauguration.
+Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush with CIA Director William Casey at the White House on Feb. 11, 1981. (Photo credit: Reagan Library)
+In summer 1981, when Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes learned about the arms shipments to Iran, he checked on their origins and said, later in a PBS interview:
+“It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment. … [This operation] seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration. And I understand some contacts were made at that time.”
+Those early covert arms shipments to Iran evolved into a later secret set of arms deals that surfaced in fall 1986 as the Iran-Contra Affair, with some of the profits getting recycled back to Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist government.
+While many facts of the Iran-Contra scandal were revealed by congressional and special-prosecutor investigations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the origins of the Reagan-Iran relationship was always kept hazy. The Republicans were determined to stop any revelations about the 1980 contacts, but the Democrats were almost as reluctant to go there.
+A half-hearted congressional inquiry was launched in 1991 and depended heavily on then-President George H.W. Bush to collect the evidence and arrange interviews for the investigation. In other words, Bush, who was then seeking reelection and who was a chief suspect in the secret dealings with Iran, was entrusted with proving his own guilt.
+Tired of the Story By the early 1990s, the mainstream U.S. news media was also tired of the complex Iran-Contra scandal and wanted to move on. As a correspondent at Newsweek, I had battled senior editors over their disinterest in getting to the bottom of the scandal before I left the magazine in 1990. I then received an assignment from PBS Frontline to look into the 1980 “October Surprise” question, which led to a documentary on the subject in April 1991.
+PBS Frontline’s: The Election Held Hostage, co-written by Robert Parry and Robert Ross.
+However, by fall 1991, just as Congress was agreeing to open an investigation, my ex-bosses at Newsweek, along with The New Republic, then an elite neoconservative publication interested in protecting Israel’s exposure on those early arms deals, went on the attack. They published matching cover stories deeming the 1980 “October Surprise” case a hoax, but their articles were both based on a misreading of documents recording Casey’s attendance at a conference in London in July 1980, which he seemed to have used as a cover for a side trip to Madrid to meet with senior Iranians regarding the hostages.
+Although the bogus Newsweek/New Republic “London alibi” would eventually be debunked, it created a hostile climate for the investigation. With Bush angrily denying everything and the congressional Republicans determined to protect the President’s flanks, the Democrats mostly just went through the motions of an investigation.
+Meanwhile, Bush’s State Department and White House counsel’s office saw their jobs as discrediting the investigation, deep-sixing incriminating documents, and helping a key witness dodge a congressional subpoena.
+Years later, I discovered a document at the Bush presidential library in College Station, Texas, confirming that Casey had taken a mysterious trip to Madrid in 1980. The U.S. Embassy’s confirmation of Casey’s trip was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson to Associate White House Counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. in early November 1991, just as the congressional inquiry was taking shape.
+Williamson said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was]a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown,” Beach noted in a “ memorandum for record ” dated Nov. 4, 1991.
+Two days later, on Nov. 6, Beach’s boss, White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, convened an inter-agency strategy session and explained the need to contain the congressional investigation into the October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to ensure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992.
+C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel under President George H.W. Bush.
+At the meeting, Gray laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation. The prospect that the two sets of allegations would merge into a single narrative represented a grave threat to George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it , the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.”
+Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns and be of special interest to the President,” Gray declared, according to minutes . [Emphasis in original.]
+Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings.
+Timid Democrats But Bush’s White House really had little to fear because whatever evidence that the congressional investigation received – and a great deal arrived in December 1992 and January 1993 – there was no stomach for actually proving that the 1980 Reagan campaign had conspired with Iranian radicals to extend the captivity of 52 Americans in order to ensure Reagan’s election victory.
+Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana.
+That would have undermined the faith of the American people in their democratic process – and that, as Clark Clifford said in the 1968 context, would not be “good for the country.”
+In 2014 when I sent a copy of Beach’s memo regarding Casey’s trip to Madrid to former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, who had chaired the October Surprise inquiry in 1991-93, he told me that it had shaken his confidence in the task force’s dismissive conclusions about the October Surprise issue.
+“The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he [Casey] did make the trip” to Madrid, Hamilton told me. “Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”
+Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation.
+“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said, adding that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests. But that trust was at the heart of the inquiry’s failure. With the money and power of the American presidency at stake, the idea that George H.W. Bush and his team would help an investigation that might implicate him in an act close to treason was naïve in the extreme.
+Arguably, Hamilton’s timid investigation was worse than no investigation at all because it gave Bush’s team the opportunity to search out incriminating documents and make them disappear. Then, Hamilton’s investigative conclusion reinforced the “group think” dismissing this serious manipulation of democracy as a “conspiracy theory” when it was anything but. In the years since, Hamilton hasn’t done anything to change the public impression that the Reagan campaign was innocent.
+Still, among the few people who have followed this case, the October Surprise cover-up would slowly crumble with admissions by officials involved in the investigation that its exculpatory conclusions were rushed , that crucial evidence had been hidden or ignored , and that some alibis for key Republicans didn’t make any sense .
+But the dismissive “group think” remains undisturbed as far as the major U.S. media and mainstream historians are concerned. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative or Trick or Treason: The 1980 October Surprise Mystery or Consortiumnews.com’s “ Second Thoughts on October Surprise. ”]
+Past as Prologue Lee Hamilton’s decision to “clear” Reagan and Bush of the 1980 October Surprise suspicions in 1992 was not simply a case of miswriting history. The findings had clear implications for the future as well, since the public impression about George H.W. Bush’s rectitude was an important factor in the support given to his oldest son, George W. Bush, in 2000.
+President George W. Bush is introduced by his brother Florida Gov. Jeb Bush before delivering remarks at Sun City Center, Florida, on May 9, 2006. (White House photo by Eric Draper)
+Indeed, if the full truth had been told about the father’s role in the October Surprise and Iran-Contra cases, it’s hard to imagine that his son would have received the Republican nomination, let alone made a serious run for the White House. And, if that history were known, there might have been a stronger determination on the part of Democrats to resist another Bush “stolen election” in 2000.
+Regarding Election 2000, the evidence is now clear that Vice President Al Gore not only won the national popular vote but received more votes that were legal under Florida law than did George W. Bush. But Bush relied first on the help of officials working for his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, and then on five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to thwart a full recount and to award him Florida’s electoral votes and thus the presidency.
+The reality of Gore’s rightful victory should have finally become clear in November 2001 when a group of news organizations finished their own examination of Florida’s disputed ballots and released their tabulations showing that Gore would have won if all ballots considered legal under Florida law were counted.
+However, between the disputed election and the release of those numbers, the 9/11 attacks had occurred, so The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other leading outlets did not want the American people to know that the wrong person was in the White House. Surely, telling the American people that fact amid the 9/11 crisis would not be “good for the country.”
+So, senior editors at all the top new organizations decided to mislead the public by framing their stories in a deceptive way to obscure the most newsworthy discovery – that the so-called “over-votes” in which voters both checked and wrote in their choices’ names broke heavily for Gore and would have put him over the top regardless of which kinds of chads were considered for the “under-votes” that hadn’t registered on antiquated voting machines. “Over-votes” would be counted under Florida law which bases its standards on “clear intent of the voter.”
+However, instead of leading with Gore’s rightful victory, the news organizations concocted hypotheticals around partial recounts that still would have given Florida narrowly to Bush. They either left out or buried the obvious lede that a historic injustice had occurred.
+Former Vice President Al Gore. (Photo credit: algore.com)
+On Nov. 12, 2001, the day that the news organizations ran those stories, I examined the actual data and quickly detected the evidence of Gore’s victory. In a story that day, I suggested that senior news executives were exercising a misguided sense of patriotism. They had hid the reality for “the good of the country,” much as Johnson’s team had done in 1968 regarding Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris peace talks and Hamilton’s inquiry had done regarding the 1980 “October Surprise” case.
+Within a couple of hours of my posting the article at Consortiumnews.com, I received an irate phone call from The New York Times media writer Felicity Barringer, who accused me of impugning the journalistic integrity of then-Times executive editor Howell Raines. I got the impression that Barringer had been on the look-out for some deviant story that didn’t accept the Bush-won conventional wisdom.
+However, this violation of objective and professional journalism – bending the slant of a story to achieve a preferred outcome rather than simply giving the readers the most interesting angle – was not simply about some historical event that had occurred a year earlier. It was about the future.
+By misleading Americans into thinking that Bush was the rightful winner of Election 2000 – even if the media’s motivation was to maintain national unity following the 9/11 attacks – the major news outlets gave Bush greater latitude to respond to the crisis, including the diversionary invasion of Iraq under false pretenses. The Bush-won headlines of November 2001 also enhanced the chances of his reelection in 2004. [For the details of how a full Florida recount would have given Gore the White House, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ Gore’s Victory ,” “ So Bush Did Steal the White House ,” and “ Bush v. Gore’s Dark American Decade. ”]
+A Phalanx of Misguided Consensus Looking back on these examples of candidates manipulating democracy, there appears to be one common element: after the “stolen” elections, the media and political establishments quickly line up, shoulder to shoulder, to assure the American people that nothing improper has happened. Graceful “losers” are patted on the back for not complaining that the voters’ will had been ignored or twisted.
+U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
+Al Gore is praised for graciously accepting the extraordinary ruling by Republican partisans on the Supreme Court, who stopped the counting of ballots in Florida on the grounds, as Justice Antonin Scalia said, that a count that showed Gore winning (when the Court’s majority was already planning to award the White House to Bush) would undermine Bush’s “legitimacy.”
+Similarly, Rep. Hamilton is regarded as a modern “wise man,” in part, because he conducted investigations that never pushed very hard for the truth but rather reached conclusions that were acceptable to the powers-that-be, that didn’t ruffle too many feathers.
+But the cumulative effect of all these half-truths, cover-ups and lies – uttered for “the good of the country” – is to corrode the faith of many well-informed Americans about the legitimacy of the entire process. It is the classic parable of the boy who cried wolf too many times, or in this case, assured the townspeople that there never was a wolf and that they should ignore the fact that the livestock had mysteriously disappeared leaving behind only a trail of blood into the forest.
+So, when Donald Trump shows up in 2016 insisting that the electoral system is rigged against him, many Americans choose to believe his demagogy. But Trump isn’t pressing for the full truth about the elections of 1968 or 1980 or 2000. He actually praises Republicans implicated in those cases and vows to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia.
+Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
+Trump’s complaints about “rigged” elections are more in line with the white Southerners during Jim Crow, suggesting that black and brown people are cheating at the polls and need to have white poll monitors to make sure they don’t succeed at “stealing” the election from white people.
+There is a racist undertone to Trump’s version of a “rigged” democracy but he is not entirely wrong about the flaws in the process. He’s just not honest about what those flaws are.
+The hard truth is that the U.S. political process is not democracy’s “gold standard”; it is and has been a severely flawed system that is not made better by a failure to honestly address the unpleasant realities and to impose accountability on politicians who cheat the voters.
+Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ). 
+Source: Consortium News 
+Via: Global Research 
+",FAKE
+5127,The Cleveland Show: Convention starts under security cloud,"You must file back to the Democrats’ convention in Chicago in 1968 to find a similar political forum which unfolded under such a pall and the potential for epic violence.
+
+And frankly, as the GOP convenes its Cleveland conclave, things could be even more volatile after the three police murders in Baton Rouge.
+
+Security concerns are off the chart in Cleveland. The country reels from Baton Rouge -- just days after the assassinations of five Dallas-area police officers. We haven’t even mentioned talked about controversial police shootings of black motorists in Baton Rouge and Minnesota. Turkey boils. People are still trying to piece together a murder-by-Renault-truck scheme in Nice, France.
+
+When was Orlando again?
+
+And then there are the politics at the GOP convention.
+
+This convention features the most-unconventional candidate to head the ticket of a major political party in decades.
+
+Welcome to the Cleveland Show.
+
+It wasn’t long ago that Ryan’s predecessor, former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, suggested the GOP should try to draft the Wisconsin Republican as the 2016 standard-bearer should Donald Trump fail to secure the nomination on the first ballot. Then Ryan called a press conference this spring to quash (once and for all) suggestions that there was some way Republicans would draft him.
+
+So Ryan is sticking with his day job.
+
+A better place to be?
+
+In the days after Orlando, Ryan tried to cobble together a terrorism/guns package before Congress bolted Washington for a protracted, seven-week recess. But those efforts collapsed after Republicans rejected virtually any gun legislation. There didn’t appear to be the votes for a plan authored by Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas. It would grant the attorney general a three-day window to halt potential gun sales for prospective terrorists.
+
+“I think what we should be focused on is listening to people in communities who have done a good job of merging law enforcement with the communities so that these kinds of problems don’t occur,” Ryan said after the questionable traffic stop killings and police violence.
+
+Dallas was known in law enforcement circles as one of those agencies which had done just that in recent years. Still, look what happened.
+
+Democrats struggled to keep their focus on firearm laws. On Thursday night, House Democrats staged a “speak-out” about guns at sunset on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol. But even that scored scant coverage. Just an hour before the protest, the now-infamous white lorry tore through the streets of Nice, bludgeoning everyone in its path.
+
+One violent news story, usurped by another violent news story. Before long, it too was usurped by another violent news story: the coup attempt in Turkey. And then that fell by the wayside too as soon as gunfire cut down officers in Baton Rouge.
+
+Baton Rouge frayed nerves even further in Cleveland.
+
+Immediately, the union representing the Cleveland Police Department fired off a request to Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Law enforcement wanted Kasich to suspend a state law allowing for the open-carry of firearms around the convention zone.
+
+“Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state Constitutional rights or state laws as suggested,” said Kalmbach.
+
+During an appearance on Fox News, Steve Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association, took issue with Kasich.
+
+“That’s a well-written political statement. There’s no basis in reality. The governor could easily declare a state of emergency and act with executive powers,” said Loomis.
+
+Of course, this is precisely why some Democrats assert it’s important to change the law. If the law poses danger, then change it.
+
+We’ll find out soon if the law is right on this score.
+
+Keep in mind that Cleveland banned everything from water pistols to tennis balls in an area near the convention. But firearms are fine under the Buckeye State’s open-carry statute.
+
+One can only imagine how the Baton Rouge shootings could reignite the gun debate in Washington.
+
+Interestingly, most of the gun reform efforts propounded by Democrats – and even some Republicans – would do little to end the spate of violence which now grips the country. Moreover, another utterly incomprehensible slaughter of law enforcement on the eve of the most combustible political convention in nearly a half-century unglues those already fretting about security in Cleveland. If the police aren’t safe, then no one is safe. That means all Constitutional freedoms are in jeopardy, too.
+
+No wonder everyone is flipped out about security at the Republican convention. And we haven’t even gotten to the Democratic convention next week.
+
+Everyone is expecting the Republican convention to erupt into a conflagration – be it a political melee in the hall or violent protests in the streets. The bar is pretty low. But if things actually go well, a successful, relatively calm convention helps establish calm elsewhere. But if things erupt into mayhem, all bets are off.
+
+It’s possible a debate over guns and unrest could dominate the conversation. If so, the trend of police shootings coupled with violence in Cleveland could very well drive Democrats closer to their goal of votes on gun bills.
+
+And that could be the ultimate irony of the Cleveland convention.",REAL
+3354,"Senior Clinton aide maintained top secret clearance amid email probe, letters show","EXCLUSIVE: A senior Hillary Clinton aide has maintained her top secret security clearance despite sending information now deemed classified to the Clinton Foundation and to then-Secretary of State Clinton's private unsecured email account, according to congressional letters obtained by Fox News.
+
+Current and former intelligence officials say it is standard practice to suspend a clearance pending the outcome of an investigation. Yet in the case of Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff at the State Department, two letters indicate this practice is not being followed -- even as the Clinton email system remains the subject of an FBI investigation.
+
+In an Oct. 30, 2015, letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa -- who has been aggressively investigating the Clinton email case -- Mills' lawyer Beth A. Wilkinson confirmed that her client “has an active Top Secret clearance."" The letter said previous reporting from the State Department that the clearance was no longer active was wrong and due to ""an administrative error.""
+
+A second letter dated Feb. 18, 2016, from the State Department's assistant secretary for legislative affairs, Julia Frifield, provided additional details to Grassley about the ""administrative error."" It, too, confirmed Mills maintained the top secret clearance.
+
+The letters come amid multiple congressional investigations, as well as an FBI probe focused on the possible gross mishandling of classified information and Clinton's use of an unsecured personal account exclusively for government business. The State Department is conducting its own administrative review.
+
+Under normal circumstances, Mills would have had her clearance terminated when she left the department. But in January 2014, according to the State Department letter, Clinton designated Mills “to assist in her research.” Mills was the one who reviewed Clinton’s emails before select documents were handed over to the State Department, and others were deleted.
+
+Dan Maguire, a former strategic planner with Africom who has 46 years combined service, told Fox News his current and former colleagues are deeply concerned a double standard is at play.
+
+""Had this happened to someone serving in the government, their clearance would have already been pulled, and certainly they would be under investigation. And depending on the level of disclosure, it's entirely possible they would be under pretrial confinement for that matter,"" Maguire explained. ""There is a feeling the administration may want to sweep this under the rug.”
+
+On Monday, the State Department was scheduled to release the final batch of Clinton emails as part of a federal court-mandated timetable.
+
+So far, more than 1,800 have been deemed to contain classified information, and another 22 “top secret” emails have been considered too damaging to national security to release even with heavy redactions.
+
+As Clinton's chief of staff, Mills was a gatekeeper and routinely forwarded emails to Clinton's personal account. As one example, a Jan. 23, ‎2011 email forwarded from Mills to Clinton, called ""Update on DR meeting,"" contained classified information, as well as foreign government information which is ""born classified.""
+
+The 2011 email can be declassified 15 years after it was sent -- indicating it contained classified information when it was sent.
+
+Fox News was first to report that sworn declarations from the CIA notified the intelligence community inspector general and Congress there were ""several dozen emails"" containing classified information up to the most closely guarded government programs known as “Special Access Programs.”
+
+Clinton has maintained all along that she did not knowingly transmit information considered classified at the time.
+
+The U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual lays out the penalties for taking classified information out of secure government channels – such as an unsecured email system. While the incidents are handled on a ""case by case"" basis, the manual suggests the suspension of a clearance is routine while ""derogatory information"" is reviewed.
+
+The manual says the director of the Diplomatic Security Service, ""based on a recommendation from the Senior Coordinator for Security Infrastructure (DS/SI), will determine whether, considering all facts available upon receipt of the initial information, it is in the interests of the national security to suspend the employee’s access to classified information on an interim basis. A suspension is an independent administrative procedure that does not represent a final determination …”
+
+Fox News has asked the State Department to explain why Mills maintains her clearance while multiple federal and congressional investigations are ongoing. Fox News also asked whether the department was instructed by the FBI or another entity to keep the clearance in place. Fox News has not yet received a response.
+
+Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.
+
+Pamela K. Browne is Senior Executive Producer at the FOX News Channel (FNC) and is Director of Long-Form Series and Specials. Her journalism has been recognized with several awards. Browne first joined FOX in 1997 to launch the news magazine “Fox Files” and later, “War Stories.”",REAL
+8455,"Hillary Clinton’s $500,000 Bribe to the FBI Came Through Virginia – CONFIRMED!","With more than 50 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents assigned to investigate Hillary Clinton’s criminal use of a private email server, how did she avoid charges? 
+Now, the smoking gun has emerged. 
+Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a long-time Clinton insider and former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman, steered at least $675,000 to the election of the wife of an FBI official involved in the Clinton probe. McAuliffe’s political action committee gave $467,500 to the state senate campaign for FBI agent Andrew McCabe’s wife. He is now the deputy director of the FBI. 
+More money came to her through the Democratic Party of Virginia : 
+Jill McCabe received an additional $207,788 from the Virginia Democratic Party, the report states, which is heavily influenced by McAuliffe. 
+The money directed by McAuliffe began flowing two months after the FBI investigation into Clinton began in July 2015. Around that time, the candidate’s husband was promoted from running the Washington field office for the FBI to the No. 3 position at the FBI. 
+Within a year, McCabe was promoted to deputy director, the second-highest position in the bureau.[…] 
+The governor’s office claimed the FBI’s McCabe met the governor only once — on March 7, 2015, when McAuliffe persuaded Jill McCabe to run. 
+The 2015 Virginia state Senate run — her first run for public office — was unsuccessful as she lost to the incumbent Republican. 
+McAuliffe “supported Jill McCabe because he believed she would be a good state senator. This is a customary practice for Virginia governors… Any insinuation that his support was tied to anything other than his desire to elect candidates who would",FAKE
+9139,Cop Fired After Shooting Own 11-year-old Daughter at a Halloween Party,"Home / Badge Abuse / Cop Fired After Shooting Own 11-year-old Daughter at a Halloween Party Cop Fired After Shooting Own 11-year-old Daughter at a Halloween Party Matt Agorist November 1, 2016 Leave a comment 
+Lincolnton, NC — Time and again, police prove that the government having a monopoly on the use of weapons is a terrible idea. A glaring example of this incompetence is evidenced through a recent case in North Carolina in which a police officer shot her own daughter. 
+On Monday, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office announced that deputy Misty Michelle Flowers, 38, was terminated after she shot her 11-year-old daughter over the weekend. 
+The shooting happened as Flowers, who is entrusted by the state to act responsibly with a firearm, was showing off her service weapon to friends Saturday night when she squeezed the trigger. The bullet then went through the wall and hit her daughter in another room. 
+“I find gross negligence and the disregard for the safety of others was displayed in the incident Saturday night and therefore Officer Flowers was terminated today,” Sheriff David Carpenter said. “This is totally separate from the SBI investigation into the incident that occurred at her residence.” 
+According to WNCN: 
+Lincoln County deputies said they were called to the home at 11:23 p.m. and started tending to the girl’s injury. The child was taken to CHS-Lincoln and then airlifted to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte for surgery. According to deputies, she was in stable condition after treatment. 
+Neighbors say there was a Halloween party going on at the house where this happened. 
+Flowers has been with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office since 2015 and worked for the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office before that. 
+“During this entire situation, my focus has been on the well-being and condition of the child involved and am of the understanding the child is going to be ok after the surgery. This is a very tragic situation for all involved, the officer, her family, her career and everyone that has been touched by this,” Carpenter said. “We continue to pray for healing of the child and the entire family as the investigation continues over the next several days.” 
+According to the SBI, an investigation into the incident is still ongoing. It is unclear whether or not Flowers will face any charges. 
+This is the second such incident in only a week in which a police officer accidentally fired their weapon endangering the lives of children. Last week, the Free Thought Project reported on the Ohio cop who fired his weapon into a daycare center while it was fully occupied. 
+Despite the officer clearly admitting to committing the misdemeanor offense of discharging a firearm within city limits, police have yet to charge him. 
+“Right now our law department has it and they are reviewing it to see if there should be any charges,” Police Chief Jack Davis said last Wednesday morning. 
+“It was a very unfortunate incident for the school, as well as him,” he added. 
+Outside of skating out of the misdemeanor charge so far, this officer also seems to be avoiding the felony offense of discharging a weapon in a gun-free school zone. 
+Imagine for a moment that you were showing off your pistol to friends at a Halloween party and all of the sudden, you accidentally squeeze off a round and shoot your own daughter. 
+There are two possible scenarios that would take place; the first one being that a SWAT team responds and you are killed. The second, less lethal result would be your inevitable arrest and charges of public endangerment, unlawful discharge, illegal use of a firearm, assault with a deadly weapon, terrorism, or a myriad of other charges associated with sending a deadly projectile hurling through a wall and into a child. You would immediately be facing fines, jail time, probation, and firearms restrictions. 
+However, if you are a government agent who’s trusted with carrying a deadly weapon into places others cannot, you needn’t worry about any of those repercussions. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter and now on Steemit Share",FAKE
+4815,How Trump is following in Sanders's fundraising footsteps (+video),"Much like former Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump is wildly popular among small donors, raising millions with contributions of less than $200. But there's no guarantee this pattern will continue for future Republicans.
+
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump meets supporters after addressing a GOP fundraising event in Birch Run, Mich., in August. Mr. Trump has set new records among small donors for a Republican presidential candidate.
+
+Republican candidate Donald Trump, who did little to establish a fundraising army for his presidential primary campaign, has raked in an unprecedented amount of donations for a Republican candidate in the last three months, leading some to liken his efforts and success to that of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont.
+
+Mr. Trump has already raised nearly $100 million from donors writing checks for less than $200 – an impressive feat considering he only started soliciting donations in May and had just $1.3 million on hand in June, Politico reported. As the numbers roll in, many Republicans are surprised by the real estate mogul’s fundraising success among small donors, noting that Democrats typically rake in a high number of small to moderate donations, while Republicans rely on fewer donors, but larger sums of money.
+
+In 2008 and 2012, Republican candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney pulled in less than $64 million from small donors, The Wall Street Journal reported.
+
+“I’ve never seen anything like this,” a senior Republican operative working with the campaign’s small-dollar fundraising operation, told Politico. “He’s the Republican Obama in terms of online fundraising.”
+
+Or the Senator Sanders, who built his primary campaign with average donations of just $27 and famously said he did not have, or want, a super political action committee (PAC). By soliciting small contributions, Sanders’s campaign was able to raise $229 million through June, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brought in $238 million before the help of super PACs.
+
+“Sanders’s ability to attract small donors has truly been remarkable,” Anthony Corrado, a professor at Colby College who studies campaign finance and presidential elections, told The Atlantic during Sanders’s campaign. “Small-dollar donations have become the bedrock of his campaign, and he has been able to motivate more donors more quickly to raise more money from small amounts than was the case for [Barack] Obama or [Howard] Dean.”
+
+Despite Trump’s latest success among small donors, some say it’s not enough, and that such success comes from different tactics than those used by Democrats.
+
+“I would just put it in the perspective of they’re still not doing as well as they should be doing and they’re doing too little too late,” Kenneth Pennington, the former digital director for Sanders’s campaign, told Politico. “Once they start copying some of things Democrats are doing, then I’ll get worried.”
+
+Instead, Trump is using his name to capitalize on donations, and has offered the chance to have dinner or other meetings with the candidate and his family in return for donations. An email campaign offers autographed copies of Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal, for $184.
+
+Sanders’s campaign, on the other hand, used lengthy appeals over email, sometimes between 1,000 to 2,000 words to garner donations.
+
+“We find that people develop a deeper investment and appreciation for the campaign when they’re being counted as part of something bigger than themselves,” Robin Curran, Sanders’s former digital-production director, told The Atlantic in March.
+
+While Trump’s fundraising success might mirror that of Sanders, it’s worth noting that money wasn’t enough to win the primary for the Vermont senator when he ran against Mrs. Clinton, and there’s no guarantee Trump’s donation bounty will help him fair any better against the Democrat. Some also question whether Trump's success will usher in a new era of small donations for future Republican candidates.
+
+“A lot of them probably don’t realize that 20 percent of the money goes to the RNC otherwise they probably wouldn’t give,” an operative working with the candidate and the RNC, which has started a joint fundraising venture with Trump, told Politico. “People are giving money to the joint fundraising committee because Donald Trump’s name is on it.”",REAL
+4879,Buzzfeed: Leaked Colin Powell Emails Rip 'Racist' Trump as 'National Disgrace',"Former Secretary of State and retired four-star Gen. Colin Powell, who served under three Republican presidents, called Donald Trump ""a national disgrace"" and an ""international pariah"" in a personal email, BuzzFeed News reported.
+
+According to the outlet, the June 17 email to Emily Miller, a journalist who was once Powell's aide, took steely aim at the GOP nominee, saying he ""is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him"" – and at Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, whom Powell wrote ""is calibrating his position again.""
+
+BuzzFeed reported the website DCLeaks.com — which has reported but unconfirmed ties to Russian intelligence services — obtained Powell's emails. BuzzFeed reported it has seen the posts.
+
+According to the outlet, in an Aug. 21 email, Powell blasted Trump for embarking on a ""racist"" movement insinuating President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
+
+""Yup, the whole birther movement was racist,"" Powell wrote, according to BuzzFeed. ""That's what the 99 percent believe. When Trump couldn't keep that up, he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim.
+
+""As I have said before, 'What if he was?' Muslims are born as Americans everyday.""
+
+Powell also derided former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who advises Trump, saying the sex scandal-plagued executive would hurt Trump's chances among women voters.
+
+""And Ailes as an advisor won't heal women, don't you think?'"" Powell wrote, per BuzzFeed.
+
+According to BuzzFeed News, the other emails included:
+
+BuzzFeed said Powell responded to the emails by saying: ""I have no further comment. I'm not denying it.""",REAL
+5067,Life Among the Berned,"“I hope you realize the irony of what she’s doing,” Paul Czisny, a Wisconsin delegate for Bernie Sanders, said, nodding his head backward at a young woman in the stands, a piece of white tape across her mouth that said in stark black letters SILENCED. Periodically, she stood up and photographers rushed over, camera shutters whirring, to snap her admittedly very dramatic portrait.
+
+“She’s able to vote, she’s able to get elected as a delegate, she’s able to come here,” Czisny rolled his eyes. He’s as pissed off as anyone about the business of the Democratic National Committee emails—“it just feeds the frustrations of the Bernie people”—but he was frustrated with people like that young woman. “Unfortunately, all they’re doing is aiding the Trump camp,” he said. “Virtually no one here”—meaning the Bernie delegates—“is going to vote for Trump, but will they stay home? Will they vote for Jill Stein [of the Green Party]? I find this maddening because we’ve seen this movie before, and if we think Bush was a disaster, Trump will be an even bigger disaster.”
+
+Like the other Bernie supporters in the Wisconsin delegation, he doesn’t love Hillary Clinton, but he would do the adult thing and vote for her come November. “Because I’m not selfish,” says 22-year-old Bernie activist Hailey Storsved, who led the student movement for Sanders at her university. “It’s kind of like saying, ‘I’m taking my ball and going home.’”
+
+Monday night's Democratic National Convention felt, at times, like an unsettled argument—a restive Sanders contingent looking for opportunities to boo the primary opponent he'd been railing against for months, and boo everyone she'd invited to support her. But a big part of the argument was underway within the Sanders camp itself: How long to hold out against your own party's nominee? This is politics, after all: At what point did principle become a kind of vanity?
+
+I tried to talk to the young woman with the tape over her mouth, but she refused to communicate, silenced as she was. Instead, she showed me a Facebook post she wrote. “The DNC is threatening that they might pull my credentials if I don’t take this off,” she wrote of her mouth tape. Her name is Angie Aker. “They want to truly silence me. They don’t even want me to have this much free speech.”
+
+A follow-up question about who she was and why she felt silenced resulted in her showing me her screen: another Facebook post. “FOR THE MEDIA LOOKING FOR CONTEXT ON MY “SILENCED” CRY FOR HELP: the establishment wants us to lie for them and say we are behind Hillary when it’s clear there hasn’t even been a fair primary,” she wrote. “I’m desperate to show somehow it’s not true.”
+
+Then she ran out of Facebook posts to show me, and commandeered my notepad to scribble me notes, like a modern Beethoven. “Everyone has to vote their conscience,” she wrote, echoing Ted Cruz at last week’s Republican convention. “I don’t know who I’ll vote for. But I know I won’t cast my vote out of fear anymore.”
+
+“We’re talking about the political maturation of left-wing politics,” said Peter Rickman, a young man leading the Wisconsin delegation, a longtime left-wing activist, and a Sanders supporter. He was going to get behind Clinton, rallying fellow Bernie-ites to her side because, as he said, “We don’t need to love Hillary, but we need to mobilize so that, after November, we’re fighting for a progressive agenda under a Clinton White House and not being on the defensive in a proto-fascist regime.” When I asked him about the silenced woman in his delegation, he too rolled his eyes at Aker. He leaned in conspiratorially. “She runs Upworthy,” he said, referring to the social media site. “Soon someone is going to put two and two together that she’s just doing this to get personal attention.” (Aker actually works in video licensing for the site.)
+
+There was a periodic booing from behind the very polite and very pragmatic Wisconsin delegation, most of whom seemed at peace with the need to vote for Clinton in the fall. “Oh, that’s not us,” one of them told me. “That’s New Mexico.”
+
+Up a few rows was the New Mexico delegation, which was in the thick of a civil war.
+
+“No, never,” said a young man named Rusty Pearce, a Sanders delegate from the state. “This is a political revolution and a political revolution doesn’t just stop.”
+
+“We will continue to work to elect progressives up and down the ticket,” said a freckled middle-aged woman named Nicole Renee Peters. She also wasn’t voting for Hillary. “I’m not for Hillary and I’m not for Trump,” she said defiantly. “I will never vote for Hillary.” Most of their state delegation, they both told me confidently, was for Sanders and felt the same way.
+
+“Unfortunately, that’s not true,” chimed in an older woman named Theresa Trujeque standing next to me with a Hillary sign. “The majority is for Hillary.” Twenty-four delegates out of 43 were for Hillary.
+
+“That’s with the superdelegates!” Peters and Pearce interjected.
+
+After some squabbling and eye-rolling at me—Can you believe her? Can you believe these two?—they agreed that there were 18 delegates for Hillary and 16 for Bernie.
+
+“They’ve been telling us to shut up all day,” Peters complained to me.
+
+“They’ve been fighting and booing all day,” Trujeque complained to me.
+
+“They’ve been fighting with the poor delegates with Indiana,” Trujeque scolded. “It’s not respectable.”
+
+“Well, I don’t find it respectable that Hillary Clinton lied under oath!”
+
+“I’ve been involved in the Democratic Party for years and there’s no fraud, no corruption we take care of everyone. Some people have never been involved.”
+
+“I’ve been involved for many years!”
+
+“That’s because I’ve lived in New Mexico for almost a whole year!”
+
+“Well, then don’t try to change us New Mexicans!”
+
+The Bernie people told me elaborate tales of how the DNC outfoxed and cheated them at every turn—and there were very many turns, so many we had to keep going over them for clarity until they pointed defiantly to a young man, the communications director for the New Mexico delegation, eyeing them nervously. “He’s going to take our credentials away as soon as this interview is over!” one of them said. It was the first the young man, named Joe Kaburek, heard of it. “We need to do a better job of talking to them,” he said diplomatically.
+
+In Cleveland, a Cruz underground refused to concede and get behind the party’s nominee, and their candidate gave them the satisfaction of a principled last stand: He refused to endorse a man they loathed with every fiber of their being. In Philadelphia, the Bernie holdouts had no such luck. Their man endorsed a woman they loathe with every fiber of their being, and asked them to vote for her in November. Instead of getting booed, like Cruz, they were the ones doing the booing. They booed Lilly Ledbetter, they booed Cory Booker, and they managed to refrain from booing Michelle Obama. When Elizabeth Warren spoke, the Bernie holdouts of Michigan sat there in grim anger, arms crossed, fake birds pinned to their hats. They liked Warren, but didn’t like that she was selling out to Hillary. “Not for sale!” some of them yelled.
+
+
+
+When Bernie emerged on stage, they screamed his name and his slogans—“This is what democracy looks like!” Many of them cried and refused to believe it was over. “It’s not over!” some of them shouted. “Nooooo!” others hollered. Up and down this Midwestern section, Bernie supporters who so reviled superdelegates were praying for them to see the light and switch to Bernie’s side Tuesday, thereby annulling the popular vote of the Democratic primary, which had not been in their favor. “You never know how many people have turned since WikiLeaks!” one Michigan delegate told the correspondent of Michigan Radio. She held out hope that Tuesday's vote would tilt toward Bernie.
+
+“Are you going to vote for Hillary in November?” the reporter asked her.
+
+“I’m voting for Bernie tomorrow,” she said, defiantly. “He asked us to vote for him tomorrow.”
+
+“He also asked for you to vote for Hillary in November,” the reporter pressed.
+
+Nearby, a schoolteacher named Tammy Lewis sat weeping softly. “We’ll never have a chance like this again,” she said, dabbing her dark eyes with a white tissue. Her husband, she said, was a NAFTA victim and she wasn’t about to let TPP destroy her family a second time. But she was at a loss after Bernie’s speech. “He’s doing what he has to do,” she said with a melancholy admiration. “He knows he has to stop Trump. He’s a good man.”
+
+“I’m voting for Bernie tomorrow, that’s what I came here to do,” she said with a quiet sadness. Would she vote for Hillary in the fall, as Bernie had asked of her? “Maybe,” she said, lost. “I don’t know. I know I have to stop Trump, too. But the choice is either I press the pause button or go back in time with Trump.” She rose to leave and wiped her eyes.
+
+“It’s not what I wanted,” she said, and left the hall.",REAL
+4961,Opinion: The flaws of Trumpspeak,"Michael D'Antonio is the author of the new book , ""The Truth About Trump."" The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
+
+(CNN) America seems to be catching onto the flaws of ""Trumpspeak"" -- the GOP candidate's method, perfected over decades in the public eye, of winning attention and creating an illusion of unbounded success.
+
+Polls in key swing states and nationally now show him well behind Hillary Clinton and some of his rhetorical tricks, like the use of ""people are saying"" to spread falsehoods while avoiding responsibility for them, have become popular memes
+
+Still, anything can happen with nearly three months left to go in the election. So it's instructive to look at the five elements of Trumpspeak:
+
+The media record is littered with moments when Donald Trump appeared to set a new mark for outrageousness that even he couldn't surpass. Then came another day and a new bizarre performance. The current example of the presidential candidate at his Trumpiest is the argument that President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the ""founder"" and ""co-founder"" of ISIS.
+
+2) The art of the false claim
+
+Although Trump routinely attacks the press for its supposed bias, he consistently promotes arguments with little basis in fact and no specific sources. With phrases like ""many people are saying"" and ""I'm hearing,"" Trump manages to insert unsubstantiated notions into the electoral discourse without taking responsibility for the messages he's sending.
+
+Trump's innuendo had no basis in fact. When he spoke, the president's short form birth record had been released by officials in Hawaii, and there was no mystery about his college years. Nevertheless, Trump built a following with this method and continues to use it.
+
+4) I'm a winner (even when I'm not)
+
+How is it that someone who cares so much about numbers as represented in his business record and ratings comes to declare himself a winner in ways that can be so readily refuted? It's possible that the template was established so long ago that it's an ingrained habit.
+
+When I interviewed Trump, he told me more than once that in his youth he had been the best high school baseball player in New York State. In those years, the Empire State was home to several future major leaguers and at least one future Hall of Famer. The players who competed in big city leagues played against the toughest opponents. Trump played for a tiny school that squared-off against other small schools in Upstate New York. The chance that he was ""the best"" is practically zero.
+
+Why does he do it?
+
+Gingrich cited the comments about Obama and ISIS as an example. ""I know what Trump has in his mind, but that's not what people hear,"" said Gingrich. In a rare case of self-correction, Trump explained that he was practicing ""sarcasm"" when he linked Obama to the founding of ISIS. He offered the same explanation when he mused about how Russian hackers should muck around in Clinton's email accounts.
+
+Trump's excuses, like his behavior, resemble what one might expect from a bullying child who is caught tormenting a sibling. Any adult who has ever interceded in this kind of conflict knows to expect to hear ""I was only kidding"" and ""Can't you take a joke?"" from the kid who is doing the harm. In Trump's case, of course, the childishness does harm to the country as a whole and, as the case of Tur suggests, poses a real threat to specific individuals.
+
+Trump is the same person he was as a boy. ""When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same,"" Trump once told me. ""The temperament is not that different.""
+
+Having studied Trump intently over the last three years, I would agree that he's the same person he was as a child, but I would peg the exact date to the summer between seventh and eighth grade. It was then that his parents, exasperated over his behavior, sent him away to a military academy because they couldn't handle him. There he was plunged into a cruel and often violent environment where grown men trained young men by smacking them around. In the meantime, his four siblings were comforted in the luxury of the Trump mansion, peacefully attended by domestic help and educated at posh private schools.
+
+Trump was, by his own admission, an out-of-control child, and he says that he needed the discipline he got at the military academy. I agree, but I don't think the discipline took. This is what the more sober minded elders of the GOP, Gingrich included, are discovering now. Trump is still the unruly child who will not be tamed. The chances of him accepting discipline now, at age 70, after a lifetime of accumulating wealth, power and attention, are slim to none.",REAL
+1051,Axelrod: The slow-motion implosion of the Republican Party,"David Axelrod is CNN's senior political commentator and host of the podcast "" The Axe Files. "" He was senior adviser to President Barack Obama and chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
+
+That's where the Republican Party finds itself today, both in its nominating battle and in its implacable ""not even a hearing"" stance on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Merrick Garland.
+
+Privately, and to some degree publicly, Republicans seem resigned to death in November by fire or by hanging. The prolonged nominating process is merely a means of determining the nature of the execution and limiting the risk to other candidates on the ballot.
+
+The normal pattern of GOP nominating contests for the past two decades is that the party endures heated primary fights between populist, evangelical and center-right candidates, only to settle on the leading establishment choice.
+
+Having stoked anti-Obama fever in order to score midterm victories at the polls and then failed to deliver on pledges to derail major elements of the President's agenda, the party elite now finds itself overrun by a wave of outrage and discontent.
+
+That wave has carried Donald Trump to the brink of the nomination, a hostile takeover that so horrifies the Republican establishment that many are now turning in desperation to a man they dislike almost as much as the prospect of Trump as their standard-bearer.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz's entire tenure since his arrival in Washington in 2013 has been dedicated to taunting a Republican leadership he views as accommodationist.
+
+He called Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a ""liar"" on the floor of the Senate. He led the party over the cliff of a government shutdown in a vain effort to derail Obamacare. To this day, he casts his campaign as one to upend ""the Washington cartel"" of insiders and lobbyists who he says have betrayed the GOP and the country.
+
+Now, that same ""cartel"" is slowly and grudgingly embracing Cruz, who is currently running a distant second to Trump, as their last, best hope to deprive the bilious billionaire of the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination.
+
+Sen. Lindsey Graham's painfully tepid ""endorsement"" of Cruz last week, followed by Mitt Romney's announcement that he would stand up for the Texas senator in Tuesday's Utah caucuses, reflected the dilemma in which the GOP finds itself.
+
+In backing Cruz, neither of these pillars of the Republican establishment spent a whole lot of time extolling his virtues, focusing instead on the man they are desperate to stop.
+
+""Today, there is a contest between Trumpism and Republicanism,"" Romney said. ""Through the calculated statements of its leader, Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence. I am repulsed by each and every one of these.""
+
+So he's for the other guy.
+
+Jeb Bush followed in similarly measured fashion on Wednesday.
+
+Many are gravitating to Cruz, arguing, as Bush did, that his predictable views are more plausible in a Republican nominee than the philosophically promiscuous, cult of personality spectacle that is Trump.
+
+""I don't like Cruz, but I can defend most of his positions with a straight face,"" one prominent Republican leader told me. ""I don't know how I go on TV and make an argument for Trump.""
+
+There is a potential bonus of a Cruz nomination, this party leader explained. For the past several cycles, conservative activists have complained that by nominating relatively moderate candidates -- Romney in '12 and Sen. John McCain in '08 -- the party spurned its base and depressed Republican turnout.
+
+""Let's have Cruz, and we will put that issue to rest,"" said this party leader, convinced that the Texan's appeal, pitched to evangelicals and the right, is too narrow to command a general election. ""If it's Trump, there will be no resolution. Each side will blame the other for the disaster.""
+
+But all these efforts to stop Trump may well be too late. Even if they succeed in depriving him of the delegates he needs to clinch the nomination, his victory in Arizona's winner-take-all primary meant Trump probably will come close.
+
+That would leave the party establishment in the unhappy position of either embracing the front-runner or courting a rebellion among his supporters by dumping him. And while a few weeks ago, many still talked hopefully about swapping in a fresh and more appealing recruit -- say, House Speaker Paul Ryan -- the somber realization is seeping in that it will be hard enough to topple Trump, much less bypass Cruz at the same time.
+
+Though Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, would enter a general election campaign with historically high negatives, she is running well ahead of Trump, whose unfavorable ratings eclipse even hers.
+
+Cruz runs a tighter race in early polls. But as a factional candidate, his ability to grow is very much in question.
+
+Only Gov. John Kasich is outrunning Clinton in general election trial heats. But Kasich has won just one of the first 37 nominating contests -- his own state of Ohio -- and netted not one delegate in Tuesday's races in Arizona and Utah.
+
+Kasich's brand of compassionate conservatism might sell in a general, and he would be a comfortable choice for the party establishment. But he has struggled to find traction within a party riven by anger.
+
+The party leaders are prisoners of their base.
+
+Base politics also has trapped the Republican leadership when it comes to Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
+
+While some opponents have portrayed Garland as a threat to the Second Amendment, his record over 19 years on the federal bench makes it hard to paint the judge out of the mainstream. He is more liberal than Republicans in the Senate would prefer but as moderate a choice as they probably would get from any Democratic president.
+
+A solid majority of Americans feels that the Senate should take up the Garland nomination rather than allowing the seat, left vacant by the death in February of Justice Antonin Scalia, to go unfilled for more than a year.
+
+But were Garland seated to replace Scalia, a conservative judicial icon, he would shift the balance of the court, giving it a majority of Democratic appointees for the first time in decades.
+
+That's why McConnell has ordained that the Garland nomination will not get even a hearing, much less a vote.
+
+The right has threatened summary expulsion for any Senate Republican who breaks ranks with the majority leader over Garland.
+
+Erick Erickson, an influential conservative commentator, threw down the gauntlet on my podcast, ""The Axe Files.""
+
+""If Republicans cave, I mean, this would be more the end of the Republican Party than Donald Trump,"" he said. ""Because, I mean, going back to Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the Supreme Court has been the issue of the Republican Party. It comes up in every campaign -- presidential campaign, it comes up in every congressional campaign, every even-numbered year. And if the Republicans were then to say in this year -- after years of saying, 'The Supreme Court hangs in the balance; you must vote Republican' -- 'Hey, we're going to go through with this,' it would be game over.""
+
+All this has put the six Republican senators running for re-election in states that voted for Obama in a terrible bind. Swing voters in those states, already probably influenced by the presidential race, also would be among those favoring action on the Garland nomination.
+
+That group includes Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who suddenly is facing a challenge from a former Democratic lieutenant governor, the aptly named Patty Judge.
+
+Playing base politics -- tolerating nativism, birtherism and promising obstruction at every turn -- could cost Republicans the presidency and threaten control of the Senate.
+
+And if the GOP crashes and burns, it will probably get a more liberal court nominee than Garland from the next President Clinton.
+
+For seven years, the GOP establishment knowingly and cynically rode the anti-Obama tiger, feeding the beast with a steady diet of red meat.
+
+Now, whatever happens at the Cleveland convention, the party elite may wind up as dinner.",REAL
+8182,Assad Aide: US May ‘Navigate & Direct’ ISIS From Mosul Into Syria,"  Carol Adl in Middle East , News , US // 0 Comments 
+According to President Assad’s media adviser, the way the US-led coalition is conducting its operation in Mosul suggests that Washington may be planning to “navigate” ISIS terrorists into Syria in accordance with its longstanding strategy for the region. 
+Islamic State terrorists fleeing from Mosul into Syria would become a “huge danger to our sovereignty, to our country,” Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban told RT adding that “Russia and Syria are looking at this issue extremely seriously. We’re not going to sit and watch… The way they encircle Mosul shows they would like these terrorists to move into to Syria…” 
+RT reports: 
+“They’re navigating terrorism from one place to another, limiting terrorism in one place, directing it to another place. That’s the absolute truth of what is happening in our region,” she explained. 
+Western states only “speak about fighting terrorism” and in meantime supply so-called “moderates” who eagerly share Western aid with not so “moderate” militants, according to the aide. 
+“Unfortunately, Western partners speak about fighting terrorism, but they honestly do not. Quite the contrary, what they do on the ground is to supply weapons and armaments to terrorists whom they call ‘moderate’, while we know that on the ground there’s no ‘moderate terrorism.’ They all exchange weapons and armaments on the ground. And they all constitute danger not only to Syria, but to the region and to mankind as well,” Shaaban said. 
+“We see Western countries announcing that they will be supporting what they call ‘Syrian moderates’. There are no ‘Syrian moderates’, they are carrying on butchering people. Those are not ‘moderates’ for sure.” 
+A never-ending storm in Western media, which are trying to diminish all the counter-terrorism efforts of Damascus and its allies, is a deliberate campaign that started at the very beginning of the Syrian crisis, Shaaban said. It was always “absolutely incredible, full of lies and falsifications” and totally “irrelevant to reality.” 
+“One of the great challenges we’re facing in the 21st century is the Western corporate media, that is no longer a media that depends on investigation, or cares about its credibility, or cares about the truth. Give me the names of Western journalists who are on the ground on Syria and who are actually looking at what is happening and reporting to Western people…” 
+The attempts to pin the alleged airstrike on an Idlib school on Damascus or Moscow is one of the most recent examples of that campaign. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, which debunked the Idlib “hoax,” the latest smear campaign is waged with a purpose to diverse the attention of international community away from the “war crimes committed by the US-led coalition” during the Mosul offensive. 
+The US-led coalition and the US itself proved to be very untrustworthy partners in battling terrorism, unable to live up to their pledges, she said. 
+“Russia signed an agreement with the United States and the United States was not able to implement its own agreement… The Pentagon prevented the White House from implementing an agreement.” 
+Following Friday’s meeting between Russian, Iranian and Syrian diplomats, Shaaban said Damascus is interested in attracting additional “credible” partners to the alliance, in order to battle the “most challenging” issue of our age. 
+“We’re in an alliance against terrorism, we’re in a war against terrorism, we have so many joint interests among our countries. … [The meeting was] focused on what is the best way to try and gather more regional and international forces to truly and honestly engage in a battle against terrorism, as we all understand that terrorism is the most challenging issue for the humanity in the 21st century,” Assad’s adviser said. 
+Damascus believes more countries will join in the counter-terrorism alliance of Russia, Iran and Syria, Shaaban said. 
+“I’m sure this nucleus of alliance is going to attract more countries. Now, if you think of India, or Brazil, or South Africa, or Algeria, or Tunisia, naturally you believe that there’s no problem that these countries probably in the future joining… I’m sure there are many countries who would like to be more active, China for example, who should be more active in fighting terrorism.”",FAKE
+10323,BREAKING: Since Donald Trump Won The Presidency Ford Shifts Truck Production From Mexico To Ohio,"BREAKING: Since Donald Trump Won The Presidency Ford Shifts Truck Production From Mexico To Ohio 3 Shares Comments 
+Ford’s heavy duty pickup trucks which used to be built in Mexico started rolling off an assembly line in Ohio this week. 
+That’s good news for the 1,000 Ford workers in Ohio, who might have otherwise been out of work. 
+It’s also good publicity for Ford ( F ), which has been under fire for investing so much in Mexico. In April, the automaker said it would invest $2.5 billion in transmission plants in the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Guanajuato, creating about 3,800 jobs there. 
+Ford’s south-of-the-border strategy has drawn heavy criticism from groups such as the United Auto Workers union and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. 
+The Avon Lake, Ohio, plant produced its first batch of Ford’s full-size F-650 and F-750 pick up trucks on Wednesday. 
+“Our investment…reinforces our commitment to building vehicles in America,” said Joe Hinrichs, Ford president, The Americas. “Working with our partners in the UAW, we found a way to make the costs competitive enough to bring production of a whole new generation of work trucks to Ohio.” 
+The move comes at a delicate time for Ford. 
+The United Auto Workers union is in negotiations with the automaker as well as General Motors ( GM ) and Fiat Chrysler ( FCAM ) on new labor deals to replace those that expire next month. And promises by the automakers to keep production and jobs at U.S. plants is a major focus of the union. 
+The union is particularly worried about the plan Ford announced in July to shift production of the C-Max and Focus out of a Wayne, Mich., plant in 2018. The automaker hasn’t said where that work will go, but employees fear those cars will be built in Mexico. It’s also not clear whether any other cars will be made at the Wayne plant instead, in order to protect about 4,000 jobs. 
+“We’re actively pursuing other alternatives for the Wayne plant that will be discussed with our UAW friends. We haven’t decided what will go there,” said Ford spokeswoman Kristina Adamski. 
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently said that if he’s elected he would take steps to make it more expensive for manufacturers to shift work to Mexico and then export the items back to the United States. 
+“How does that help us?” Trump said about the Ford investment in Mexico while campaigning in Michigan this week. “Mexico is becoming the new China.” ",FAKE
+7022,Comment on Leaked Audio Catches Clinton Red-Handed Talking About Rigging Elections by john smith,"Home / Be The Change / Government Corruption / Leaked Audio Catches Clinton Red-Handed Talking About Rigging Elections Leaked Audio Catches Clinton Red-Handed Talking About Rigging Elections The Free Thought Project October 29, 2016 2 Comments 
+Decade-old audio exposes then-Senator Hillary Clinton saying the US should have manipulated Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 to prevent a Hamas victory. The presidential candidate lamented that the US didn’t “determine who was going to win.” 
+“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” then-New York Senator Clinton told the Jewish Press, a New York-based weekly newspaper, several months after the January election. 
+“And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win,” she said. 
+Until Friday, the comment Clinton made on September 5, 2006, only existed on a private audio cassette belonging to journalist Eli Chomsky. An editor and a staff writer for the Jewish Press, he interviewed Clinton at the newspaper’s office in Brooklyn. 
+Chomsky, who shared and played the tape for the Observer, says it is the only existing copy of that meeting with Clinton, during which the Palestinian parliamentary election was among top topics. The comments have been posted on SoundCloud. 
+Speaking to the news portal, he recalled being confused by the fact that “anyone could support the idea — offered by a national political leader, no less — that the US should be in the business of fixing foreign elections.” 2006 audio emerges of Clinton proposing election rigging in Palestine; censored by Israeli press for past 10 years https://t.co/LsMYcUzJR4 
+— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 28, 2016 
+The interview took place nine months after the Hamas movement claimed 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats, pushing aside the US-favored Fatah movement and securing the right to form a new cabinet. That victory was neither welcomed in Israel, nor in the US. In Washington, where Hamas is considered a terrorist organization, officials repeatedly stated that they would not work with a Palestinian Authority that included Hamas. 
+Then-President George W. Bush spoke of the elections as symbolizing the “power of democracy,” but refused to deal with Hamas as long as it opposed Israel’s existence and espoused violence. 
+That day in September 2006, Clinton made “odd and controversial comments,” all now saved on the 45-minute record that Chomsky “held onto all these years.” 
+“I went to my bosses at the time,” Chomsky told the Observer. “The Jewish Press had this mindset that they would not want to say anything offensive about anybody — even a direct quote from anyone — in a position of influence because they might need them down the road. My bosses didn’t think it was newsworthy at the time. I was convinced that it was and I held onto it all these years.” Share",FAKE
+3971,"France, Belgium move to tighten security; FBI said to warn of threat in Italy","Responding to rising threats across Europe, France on Thursday sought to extend a sweeping state of emergency for three months, as Belgium proposed tough new measures to detain and monitor suspects who support jihadist groups.
+
+The calls for a crackdown came as French prosecutors confirmed Thursday that the accused ringleader of the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris was killed in a massive pre-dawn police raid Wednesday. The death of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian militant of Moroccan descent, did little to calm European unease about the specter of more attacks.
+
+In Italy, officials said the FBI had warned of a specific threat in Vatican City, Rome and Milan.
+
+In an ominous address — echoing the debate in the U.S. Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said authorities must imagine that the grimmest threats are possible.
+
+“We know and bear in mind that there is also a risk of chemical or biological weapons,” Valls told Parliament during debate on extending the country’s state of emergency. The temporary measure was enacted immediately after the deadly multi-pronged attacks on Paris that killed at least 129 people and wounded more than 350.
+
+French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve warned that now “it is necessary to move fast and hard.”
+
+He said that “all Europe must work together to defeat terrorism” and called for an emergency meeting of the continent’s interior ministers Friday.
+
+Some European leaders seemed prepared to sweep aside cherished traditions that protect rights to privacy and civil liberties.
+
+In Belgium, Prime Minister Charles Michel pressed Parliament to pass tough measures to imprison citizens returning home from fighting in Syria and to broaden law enforcement’s ability to tap phones and detain suspects for three days without charges. He called for shutting down Web sites that advocate for jihad, or Islamic holy war.
+
+The moves came as fears ratcheted up across Europe of more hidden terrorist cells preparing similar strikes.
+
+Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said Italian security forces were “working to identify five people” who may be planning attacks on St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, Milan’s Duomo or the La Scala opera house.
+
+The U.S. State Department issued a travel warning to American citizens visiting Italy, calling those landmarks “potential targets” but also flagging possible threats to “churches, synagogues, restaurants, theaters and hotels” in Rome and Milan.
+
+Gentiloni told the Italian state television network RAI that the FBI provided information about the five possible suspects.
+
+The three-month extension of emergency laws would grant the French government powers to conduct stops and searches, ban large gatherings in public places, and put suspected extremists under house arrest.
+
+The measure, approved in the National Assembly on Thursday, now goes to the French Senate for expected final backing Friday.
+
+In Belgium, police searched at least eight homes in connection with Bilal Hadfi, 20, one of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks, and Salah Abdeslam, 26, a fugitive believed to have been involved in the attacks but who slipped away amid the chaos.
+
+Nine people were arrested, including friends and family of Hadfi, who blew himself up outside the Stade de France north of Paris during a soccer match between France and Germany. He and six other assailants died in the series of attacks on multiple targets, which also included the Bataclan concert hall and several restaurants and bars.
+
+[Islamic State is losing ground. Will that mean more attacks overseas?]
+
+Michel, the Belgian prime minister, asked Parliament for new measures that would require immediate jailing for citizens returning from presumed militant activity in Syria, where the Islamic State has some of its main strongholds. Under the request, those on terrorist watch lists — about 800 residents in Belgium currently — would be forced to wear ankle bracelets to track their movements.
+
+Further proposed measures called for the deployment of 300 troops and more leeway in conducting house raids. Michel also called for stronger border controls — an appeal that highlights wider debates across the European Union on how to reconcile its policies of control-free travel with demands to combat the Islamic State and other militant factions.
+
+Some of the proposed rules, including mandatory registration of all passengers boarding high-speed trains and planes, would affect a significant portion of the population.
+
+In Brussels, a top magistrate, Karel Van Cauwenberge, said he was concerned that the new measures could be abused by law enforcement. “I understand in the fight against terrorism, people want to go far, but we still have to be cautious,” he said. “Depriving people of their freedom for three days is extreme.”
+
+The E.U. planned an extraordinary meeting Friday to focus on how to stem the traffic in firearms, much of it coming from the formerly ­conflict-ridden Balkans, and on setting common standards for deactivating old guns.
+
+E.U. officials will also discuss ways to enable border police to check passports against a police database. Another issue for the bloc is whether to allow security services to have access to passenger lists, as they do in the United States.
+
+[Will ISIS losses mean more attacks overseas?]
+
+In Germany, where the threat of a terrorist attack forced the cancellation of an international soccer match Tuesday, politicians studied plans to deploy the army to aid the police and protect possible terrorist targets, including train stations and stadiums. The proposal was dividing the German government.
+
+The police raid Wednesday north of Paris was in part a response to what French officials thought was a plan to stage a follow-up terrorist attack in La Defense, a financial district northwest of Paris, two police officials and an investigator close to the probe said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief members of the media.
+
+President Obama, during a ­visit to the Philippines, spoke by phone with French President François Hollande, the White House said. The two leaders plan to meet next week in Washington to review strategies against the Islamic State.
+
+Mekhennet reported from Paris. Annabell Van den Berghe in Brussels, Brian Murphy in Washington, David Nakamura in Manila, Daniela Deane in London, and Anthony Faiola, Virgile Demoustier, Emily Badger and Karla Adam in Paris contributed to this report.
+
+The long war against Islamist extremism has become more complicated than ever
+
+In a neighborhood under siege, ‘it seemed like real war’
+
+Suspected architect of Paris attacks is dead, according to two senior intelligence officials",REAL
+1714,"Mulling 2016 run, Biden speaks with top labor leader","Harold A. Schaitberger, the president of the powerful International Association of Fire Fighters, spoke Friday morning with Vice President Joe Biden, who strongly indicated in the phone conversation that he is planning to run for president, a source familiar with the discussion said.
+
+The IAFF is one of the most influential labor groups in the U.S. Biden is especially close to labor, which could be a key constituency for him if he seeks the White House.
+
+Schaitberger declined to comment on the call, saying he does not discuss private conversations. But the source said Biden talked about campaign strategy with Schaitberger and indicated a final decision on whether he would run for president is imminent.",REAL
+9857,Aid Agencies in Iraq Brace for Exodus as Civilians Flee Mosul,"First Civilians From Surrounding Towns Arrive in Camps   
+Aid agencies which have been trying to prepare for the huge influx of displaced persons from the city of Mosul are reporting the first arrivals of civilians who fled the surrounding towns , most arriving on foot, and many with nothing more than the clothing on their backs. 
+The agencies are playing up the months of preparation they engaged in, but exactly how they will cope with what could easily be a million new refugees with very little assistance from either the Iraqi government or from the US-led coalition, is still up in the air. 
+The UN has reported six camps are ready to accept about 50,000 people, and 11 more camps are in the process of being readied. At the same time, the UN has warned that they don’t have the funding to support all of these refugees over the long run, and the Mosul battle looks to very much be the long run. 
+Iraq has warned civilians in Mosul against fleeing from the city, a warning that came after the US announced they intend to conduct air strikes against fleeing ISIS fighters. It’s unclear how many civilians will be able to “stay put” as they were ordered, but the expectations of an intense urban battle are likely to drive many to flee while they still can.  ",FAKE
+10138,Inside The Mind Of An FBI Informant; Terri Linnell Admits Role As Gov’t Snitch,"Inside The Mind Of An FBI Informant; Terri Linnell Admits Role As Gov’t Snitch by IWB · October 27, 2016 Tweet 
+FBI informant Terri “Momma Bear” Linnell tells why she became an informant, and what she told the FBI during the Bundy occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns Oregon earlier this year, in her first-ever interview. The occupation of the refuge ended with the death of rancher Robert “LaVoy” Finicum and the arrests of dozens of other protestors. 
+Only much of what she said was a lie and interviewer Bobby Powell, Publisher of The Truth Is Viral news program, knew it. Eye-witness testimony from three separate individuals dispute Linnell’s account of events during the raid of a campground in Maryland during Operation American Spring by more than 40 agents from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, Maryland State Police, and the Secret Service. 
+The witnesses all say Linnell was escorted away from the campground by the Secret Service while her friends and fellow campers were on their knees with automatic assault rifles pointed at their heads for hours. 
+There is also evidence to indicate, including a slip of Linnell’s own tongue, that she has been an informant for the FBI, and possibly even a paid agent, since the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2010.",FAKE
+4344,"Marco Rubio, announcing 2016 campaign, focuses on 'everyman' credentials (+video)","It’s not that Americans won’t elect wealthy presidents, but political experts say a candidate needs to use empathetic language and offer policies that show relatability to voters. Sen. Marco Rubio tried to do this Monday.
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio officially announced his intention to run for president of the United States at an event in Miami's Freedom Tower Monday evening.
+
+Call him the un-Mitt. In announcing his presidential candidacy on Monday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R) of Florida highlighted his “everyman” credentials: the son of Cuban immigrants – his father was a bartender and his mother a maid – who was able to achieve an American dream that he wants to make sure is operative for future generations.
+
+On Monday, there were no Mitt Romney insensitivities about a wife’s “couple of Cadillacs” or about immigrants deporting themselves. As Senator Rubio commented after Mr. Romney’s defeat in 2012, “It’s hard to make an economic argument to people who think you want to deport their grandmother.”
+
+What Rubio was getting at back then was the Republican nominee’s apparent lack of empathy for voters. Pollsters measure that with questions such as: Does the candidate “understand” or “care about” people like you?
+
+In 2012, Romney failed the empathy test big time, losing the “care about” question 81 to 18 percent against President Obama in national exit polling – even though he led in every other category that voters said mattered most in making their decision (leadership, vision, and values).
+
+The empathy question is “very, very important, and probably in the end is the ultimate criteria,” says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.
+
+The question “is particularly important right now because voters think politicians are out of touch with their lives. They think this economy is not working for average people,” says Ms. Lake, known for the Battleground poll she does with GOP pollster Ed Goeas.
+
+It’s not that Americans won’t elect wealthy presidents – think FDR, JFK, and the Bushes. “One does not need to come from humble roots to be president,” says Margie Omero, a Democratic strategist with the bipartisan polling firm Purple Strategies. But, she says, a candidate needs to strike the right tone, use empathetic language, and offer policies that show relatability to voters.
+
+“Clearly one of Marco Rubio’s strengths is his ability to put himself in the shoes of voters or at least use the language that’s familiar to voters,” Ms. Omero says. “He has a skill at using that everyman, everyperson tone. Ultimately, people want to see policies as well.”
+
+On Monday evening, Rubio poured on the empathy and optimism, even as he warned about a “diminished” America and endangered opportunity for all. He touched only briefly on policy points – citing a need for tax and immigration reform, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and a robust foreign policy that does not cave on Iran or ignore human rights abuses in places like Cuba.
+
+The youngest candidate to enter the race jabbed his older opponents, saying the country needs leadership that breaks free from ideas ""stuck in the 20th century,"" an indirect dig at Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Jeb Bush.
+
+But Rubio’s main focus before supporters at Miami’s Freedom Tower, which is a former US point of entry for Cuban refugees, was his family’s story of opportunity in America, and its universal message.
+
+After telling of his dad’s long nights behind a bar, and of his father’s words to him – quoted in Spanish – that the son could achieve all the things the parents never could, Rubio went on to speak of the dreams of other Americans – of single moms, students, landscape workers, and, yes, bartenders.
+
+“If their American dreams become impossible, we will have just become another country. But if they succeed, this 21st century will also be an American century,” he said, describing that as the message of his campaign.
+
+Democrats typically have an advantage on the empathy question, say strategists from both parties. But demographic changes in the electorate make it a necessity that Republicans improve that performance.
+
+The GOP white voter base is shrinking – a point driven home during presidential election years, when more minorities come out to vote. Romney won only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012. The 2016 GOP nominee will have to perform in the mid-40s with Latinos, says GOP pollster – and Rubio adviser – Whit Ayres.
+
+“It’s important for [Republicans] to do better on ‘cares about people like me,’ because you’re going to have an electorate that’s going to be around 31 percent nonwhite,” said Mr. Ayres at a Monitor breakfast last month.
+
+Of course, the electorate is big and diverse, and “people like me” can be, well, everyone: women, Evangelicals, African-Americans, young people, seniors, business owners, the middle class.
+
+“It’s certainly a lot to ask of any one candidate to be able to understand everybody,” strategist Omero says. “People don’t expect presidential candidates to agree with them on every single issue, but that that person has an open mind and that they love the voter – they want to hear about the voter’s problems.”
+
+At this early stage in the campaign, candidates – and those preparing to jump in – have room to grow in their messaging and identification with voters, Omero says, noting that none of the candidates are really popular right now.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz (R) of Texas, in reaching out to conservative Evangelicals, likes to share his faith and tell the story of how his boyhood family was preserved by his father’s turning to Jesus Christ. His father – who fled Cuba when he was 18 years old – eventually became a Baptist preacher.
+
+Sen. Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky, who has a strong libertarian streak, is reaching out to Millennials and minorities through casualness in his dress and manner, some unorthodox policy positions, and a message that bashes both Democrats and Republicans.
+
+Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who has not yet formally announced his candidacy, talks of his concerns as a parent and as someone who grew up in a “kind of poor” household, supported by his preacher father and a mother who was a part-time secretary. He flipped burgers to help pay for college – which he never finished.
+
+“They’re positioning themselves against Jeb Bush,” pollster Lake says.
+
+Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton, too, needs to connect with voters in an empathetic way – not so much on policy, but in her manner and personal story.
+
+Her comment last year that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House was a turnoff to many. In the video announcing her campaign Sunday, she vowed to serve as a ""champion"" of ""everyday Americans.""
+
+“I think people feel that she is fighting for them – that she has the policies in place and experience and dedication of service to fight for the middle class,” says Omero. “But she, like the Republican field, is going to need to continue to connect to individual voters.”",REAL
+5219,Pence's Debate Performance Puts Pressure on Trump | RealClearPolitics,"The Donald Trump campaign is setting a high bar for the Republican nominee’s next debate performance.
+
+Campaign advisers and surrogates believe the town hall format of Sunday’s forum will be advantageous for Trump, who feeds off energy from crowds, and will showcase his non-traditional campaign style. Trump is also going to rehearse for his second showdown with Hillary Clinton, after appearing unprepared in his first matchup, with a town hall Thursday night in New Hampshire.
+
+“Mr. Trump does very well in town halls. That’s because he connects with real people. That’s because he’s not a politician,” Jason Miller, the campaign’s communications director, said after Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate.
+
+The largely well-received performance by running mate Mike Pence in his matchup with Tim Kaine adds pressure to the man on the top of the ticket. The Indiana governor excelled on the debate stage in areas Trump did not -- namely, refusing his opponent’s bait and deflecting criticisms. Pence sat in stark contrast to Trump in terms of his ability to stay steady and stridently on message, and some conservatives delighted in his articulation of conservative principles and topics that have been generally ignored by the GOP nominee.
+
+In many ways, Pence provided a map for Trump, and shifted the discussion, if even for a moment, away from the worst several days of the candidate’s campaign. The vice presidential candidate’s showing lays the groundwork for Trump, who has little room for error on delivering.
+
+But the campaign has also been careful to draw a distinction between the two men on the GOP ticket. Asked whether Pence would be helping Trump with debate preparation or giving advice, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told RealClearPolitics there were no plans to get the governor involved because they are different candidates with different styles and personalities. During interviews, Conway dismissed the notion of Pence upstaging the top of the ticket and argued that the governor’s performance displayed Trump’s good character judgment.
+
+Indeed, Trump took credit for the debate. “Mike Pence did an incredible job, and I'm getting a lot of credit,” Trump said during a campaign rally in Nevada on Wednesday, noting the governor was his “first hire” after clinching the GOP nomination. “He was cool, he was smart ... Mike had the single most decisive victory in the history of presidential debates.”
+
+Pence played the good soldier afterward. “From where I sat, Donald Trump won the debate,” he said Wednesday, kicking off a bus tour in Virginia before routing through Pennsylvania and Ohio.
+
+Pence displayed his loyalty to his ticket while also buying some protection for his own future in politics, defending his running mate through deflection. He denied controversial statements made by Trump regarding women, Mexicans, nuclear weapons, and Russian aggression, among other issues. He went so far as to dismiss his own past praise of Vladimir Putin’s leadership in Russia, a statement that is easily accessible online. At the same time, he showed daylight between himself and Trump at points, calling Putin “small and bullying,” for example. But the dismissals and denials were often overshadowed by his ability to quickly turn back to prosecuting Clinton.
+
+If Pence offered lessons in debating and preparation, it’s not clear whether and how Trump will take them. He figures to give some indication Thursday night, through an invitation-only, town hall-style forum in New Hampshire, a state he won in the primary and where he visited just last week.
+
+While Trump gains energy from crowds at large rallies, he is less practiced at some of the more intimate town hall events. During the general election, he has participated in televised formats with Fox News host Sean Hannity, but those contained more favorable crowds and questions.
+
+“The town hall format ideally helps showcase a candidate's relatability,” says GOP strategist Kevin Madden, who was a top adviser for the Mitt Romney campaign. “[Trump is] very good when it comes to connecting with large crowds and feeding off of their energy. The town hall format is more sedate. It also requires a lot of prep, and Trump has shown an aversion towards prep.”
+
+The Trump team, though, isn’t using the candidate’s inexperience with the format to set low expectations, as campaigns typically do. Conway said on Fox News Wednesday morning that Trump will deliver a “powerful performance” on Sunday night in St. Louis. “It’s a much better format for him than Hillary Clinton. He’s more practiced dealing with people one on one. He’s going to take the case right to her.”
+
+The more intimate and personality-revealing format could pose challenges for Trump, who has talked about raising the specter of former President Bill Clinton’s infidelities. He will have to answer questions from voters who may not agree with him or support him. The setting also places an emphasis on body language and movement around the stage.
+
+The Clinton campaign, seeing an uptick in polling after the first debate, is helping to set the higher expectations for Trump.
+
+“We are expecting him to be better prepared for the next debate,” campaign manager Robby Mook said Tuesday night. “We know that there is a calm, cool, and collected Donald Trump that can show up, and we expect that that’s what will happen. He has stated that he will make all sorts of … attacks. We actually don’t expect that. We think that he understands that that is not the right strategy.”",REAL
+1711,Hillary’s Faberge egg candidacy,"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+Buzz Cut:
+
+ • Hillary’s Faberge egg candidacy
+
+ • O’Malley: ‘Contrasts will become apparent’
+
+ • Power Play: Border surge redux
+
+ • 2016 GOP Power Index: Christie tries to get a rally going
+
+ • The bull is back
+
+HILLARY’S FABERGE EGG CANDIDACY
+
+ New Hampshire is a happy place for Hillary Clinton. It was there in 1992 that her husband saved his candidacy, with her help, from the sex scandal that was about to consume it. Bill Clinton’s second-place finish was enough to keep his campaign on track. Sixteen years later, a tearful plea to New Hampshire voters
+
+helped her win there and break the momentum of upstart Barack Obama, setting up an arduous six-month battle for the nomination. On this visit, Clinton needs no comeback. There is no contest among Democrats, so far. But there is danger. With independent and moderate voters likely to be drawn to the high-octane, wide-open GOP nominating contest, the Democratic primary electorate will likely be more liberal than it was in 2012. If Clinton is going to be again denied the presidency, New Hampshire would be a good place for the revolution to begin. But so far, Democrats are falling in line.
+
+ 
+
+ [Clinton tours Whitney Brothers, Inc., a family-owned small business, today in Keene, New Hampshire. She will participate in a roundtable discussion with employees and company leadership.]
+
+ 
+
+ As Clinton tries to have it both ways on issues like free trade, she is counting on Democrats to indulge her. Clinton’s strategy appears to be based on an expectation that her party will continue to treat her candidacy as something rare, fragile and valuable – the Faberge egg candidate. But the handling keeps getting rougher. As the NYT reports today, a bombshell book is due out soon that makes the case that the Clintons’ massive fortune was amassed in part with the help of overseas patrons, some very unsavory. “The book, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, asserts that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return.” The scandals around Clinton continue to remind Democrats what they don’t like about their presumptive nominee.
+
+ 
+
+ [WashEx: “Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is drawing a populist bead on lavish Wall Street pay packages as she revs up her march to the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, but in some respects the fat-per-speech fee she can charge puts her far ahead of the top 10 highest-paid American CEOs.”]
+
+ 
+
+ If at any time Democrats start taking her challengers seriously, Clinton could find herself in serious trouble. But that is a very big “if.” None so far look plausible, though former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is hovering closer to that space. Even so, she remains a prohibitive favorite. The chances, though, of Clinton having to defend her record and explain her ethical lapses in the context of a primary campaign seem to be growing steadily. Can Clinton, baggage-laden and with so many unanswered questions really avoid participating in debates? A candidate who still hasn’t answered a single tough question or spoken to any reporter a full week after declaring would appear to be living in some denial.
+
+ 
+
+ [Watch Fox: Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry reports live from New Hampshire.]
+
+ 
+
+ O’MALLEY: ‘CONTRASTS WILL BECOME APPARENT’
+
+ NPR: “Martin O'Malley, former governor of Maryland, says he’ll decide by late May if he’s running for president. … O’Malley is positioning himself to Clinton’s left, and even President Obama's left. He’s for a much higher minimum wage, and against a major trade deal - the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep, O’Malley also said he wants to increase Social Security benefits, even though some people would pay more taxes. … Last month, he addressed a crowd in Iowa while standing on a chair. Last week, he gave a speech at Harvard. And this week, he’s in the early primary state of South Carolina. ‘I’ve been an executive and a progressive executive with a record of accomplishments,’ the former Baltimore mayor said of the difference between him and Clinton. ‘I think contrasts will become apparent.’”
+
+ 
+
+ [CBS: “‘I believe that if you have the executive experience, the ideas that can serve our nation well, and the ability to govern, you should offer your candidacy and then let the people decide. If we do that, then we can be the party that leads our country into the future,’ O'Malley said in an interview with CBS’ ‘Face the Nation’ Sunday. ‘But we won’t do it unless we offer ideas for the future and break with things like bad trade deals, the systematic deregulation of Wall Street that many Democrats were complicit in and helped get us into this mess.’”]
+
+ 
+
+ Webb bashes Iran deal - WashEx: “Former Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., on Sunday criticized the White House’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran, saying that the administration’s negotiators had given away too much and that would create further problems in the Middle East. ‘We don't want to be sending signals into this region that we are acquiescing to the situation where Iran might become more dominant,’ Webb, a potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of the U.S. Navy, said in an appearance on the CNN program ‘State Of The Union.’”
+
+ 
+
+ Chaffee stays on Hillary’s Iraq war support - The Hill: “[Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s] way of making a name for himself against his newly adopted party’s frontrunner is to hit the former secretary of State particularly hard on the issue that was a liability in her failed 2008 run. ‘She needs to be asked hard questions about her Iraq war vote and her tenure as Secretary of State and where she wants to take this country,’ he told The Hill in an interview. ‘I think she’s tone deaf on some of these issues.’ Clinton and Chafee both served in the Senate during the run-up to the war, but while Clinton ultimately cast her vote in favor of authorizing troops, Chafee voted no.”
+
+ 
+
+ 2016 Democratic Power Index - 1) Hillary Clinton; 2) Martin O’Malley; 3) Jim Webb [+1]; 4) Joe Biden [-1] 5) Lincoln Chaffee 6) Elizabeth Warren [-1]
+
+ 
+
+ [Watch Fox: Chris Stirewalt joins Gretchen Carlson on “The Real Story” in the 2 p.m. ET hour with the latest on who’s up and who’s down in the 2016 Power Index.]
+
+ 
+
+ POWER PLAY: BORDER SURGE REDUX
+
+ The administration says the numbers are down, but with a surge expected soon, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, tells Chris Stirewalt that much like last summer, thousands of minors are pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border and that the system is becoming overwhelmed. WATCH HERE.
+
+ 
+
+ WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…
+
+ What would a painting of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto look like? Dusty rose colors yielding to wild, intense slashes of crimson, one would think. How about the Talking Heads’ “Naïve Melody”? Surly that would be deep blues with warm flashes of orange. Right? Even for those not celebrating 4/20, visualizing beloved music is commonplace, but very personal and highly subjective. Cool Hunting brings us the story of artist Tim Bavington, who is exploring the connection between music and color in a studio on the edge of the desert in Las Vegas. Bavington developed a color wheel that allows him to translate each note in a piece of sheet music to a line of color on a canvass. The results are arresting and will make you say “Yes!” when you see some of your favorite songs turned into art.
+
+ 
+
+ Got a TIP from the RIGHT or LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+ 
+
+ POLL CHECK
+
+ Real Clear Politics Averages
+
+ Obama Job Approval: Approve – 44.7 percent//Disapprove – 50.3 percent
+
+ Direction of Country: Right Direction – 29.6 percent//Wrong Track – 60.5 percent
+
+ 
+
+ 2016 GOP POWER INDEX: CHRISTIE TRIES TO GET A RALLY GOING
+
+ After a weekend of intense campaigning in New Hampshire by every viable Republican candidate, no big upsets in your GOP Power Index, but a couple of things are coming into focus: First, the two tiers in the top 10 are becoming clearer. As each day goes by, it will be harder to break out of the bottom five and into the top. The other big development from the weekend is that Chris Christie’s long and large investment in New Hampshire is going to yield something for the New Jerseyan. Christie is counting on New Hampshire to keep him in the game long enough to make it to the debate state. Given the number of independents and even moderate Democrats likely to flock to the GOP’s open primary, Christie may get his moment.
+
+ 
+
+ 1) Jeb Bush; 2) Scott Walker; 3) Marco Rubio; 4) Ted Cruz; 5) Rand Paul; 6) Mike Huckabee; 7) Carly Fiorina; 8) Chris Christie [+2]; 9) John Kasich; 10) Rick Perry [-2]
+
+ 
+
+ On the Radar - Ben Carson, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham
+
+ 
+
+ What would you say? - Give us your take on the GOP field and we will share the best and brightest with the whole class. Send your thoughts to FOXNEWSFIRST@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+ 
+
+ Humble, pie - Politico: “[F]ormer Florida governor [Jeb Bush] worked hard on this foray to exude humility. He distanced himself from his brother and father, insisting that he is his ‘own man’ who will roll out his own ideas. He declined to critique George W. Bush’s foreign policy during one of his press gaggles on the grounds that it would require him to look backward when he was focused on the future. He also repeatedly invoked the birth this week of his fourth grandson.”
+
+ 
+
+ [Bush heads to Washington State today for a roundtable and reception for his super PAC ‘Right to Rise.’ The roundtable prices start at $12,500 per couple.]
+
+ 
+
+ Walker keeps it real - WaPo: “Calling voters ‘folks’ and boasting about his cut-rate suits from Jos. A. Bank, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker campaigned vigorously in New Hampshire…Walker’s brash, populist pitch was a direct shot at his better-heeled GOP rivals and the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he dismissed as out of touch as well as beatable…Walker presented himself as a natural fit.”
+
+ 
+
+ Rubio makes Iran a centerpiece of campaign - Wash Times: “The Florida Republican said the best way to thwart Iran is to leave unilateral and international sanctions in place. ‘You combine that with a very clear demarcation to the Iranian regime. And that is this. If you cross this threshold, you will face military action on the part of the United States,’ he told CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ program. ‘We don’t want that to happen. But the risk of a nuclear Iran is so great that that option must be on the table.’ The Senate Foreign Relations Committee cleared a calibrated approach to the ongoing negotiations last week, with Republicans and Democrats unanimously approving a bill that would force any Iran nuclear deal to be submitted to Congress.”
+
+ 
+
+ [Rubio got his groove on to his favorite tunes. Or so TMZ made it seem. The entertainment site snagged a quick interview with Rubio at Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport. The Florida Senator said that he was a fan of David Guetta and Swedish House Mafia. As he walked away TMZ added a little music and slow motion to his strut.]
+
+ 
+
+ Cruz’s pitch: Victory, not compromise - Bloomberg: “In Litchfield [N.H.], [Sen. Ted Cruz] promised conservatives that they could win without ‘making the party bigger.’ Just as [Sen. Rand Paul] had, he embraced the trappings of the setting; his wife, Heidi, even doffed an ‘Armed and Fabulous’ baseball cap, provided by one of the gun groups. A man wearing a shirt with the legend ‘Molon Labe’ (Greek for ‘come and take it’) stood feet away from a man plastered in dragon tattoos….  They were interested in libertarian principles, and Cruz was offering—unlike Paul—liberty without compromise. ‘If you compare 2004, the last race Republicans won, to 2008 and 2012, by far the biggest difference is the millions of conservatives who showed up in 2004, who stayed home in 2008, and stayed home in even bigger numbers,’ said Cruz. ‘So how do you win? I think the key question is, you figure out how to bring back those millions of voters.’”
+
+ 
+
+ [In a National Review op-ed, Ted Cruz took on NYT’s Friday editorial that called the Texas Senator’s support of the Second Amendment “strange” and “silly.”]
+
+ 
+
+ Rand’s brother: He’s just like dad - BuzzFeed: “Rand Paul’s brother [Ronnie Paul] says that when it comes to ideology, there’s ‘no difference’ between his brother, the Kentucky senator and Republican presidential candidate, and his father, the former congressman and three-time presidential candidate….‘The difference is purely in implementation,’ Paul’s eldest son said.”
+
+ 
+
+ [NY Daily News: “Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul got the Clinton-bashing ball rolling early Saturday at the First in the Nation Republican Leadership Summit, snarking that when the former secretary of state travels, “there’s going to need to be two planes — one for her and her entourage, and one for her baggage. “I’m concerned that the plane with the baggage is really getting heavy and teetering.”]
+
+ 
+
+ Don’t underestimate Huckabee - NYT: “It is easy to overlook the significance of evangelicals in the Republican Party. It may even seem that their influence is waning as the country rapidly becomes more liberal on cultural issues, and as some Republican candidates adopt more moderate stances on same-sex marriage. But the religious right remains the single largest voting bloc in the Republican Party, and that role has not diminished at all over the last decade. Evangelical Christians make up 49 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners, according to a Pew Research polarization data set from 2014 consisting of 10,000 interviews. White evangelicals represent 40 percent of Republican leaners. They represent as much as 80 percent of the primary vote in the Deep South and, more significantly, around 60 percent of Iowa caucus-goers.”
+
+ 
+
+ Bank shot: Carly jabs Bubba on ‘hormones’ - Daily Mail: “Soon-to-be Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina put a cork in the bubbling debate, started this week by a female CEO, about whether a woman president could control her hormones. 'Not that we haven’t seen a man’s judgment clouded by hormones in the Oval Office,' Fiorina told a crowd of New Hampshire Republicans this morning - a clear dig at former President Bill Clinton. Clinton, whose wife Hillary is now a Democratic presidential candidate, faced impeachment during his second term in office over his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.”
+
+ 
+
+ [Fiorina hits Indianapolis today as the keynote speaker for the 25th Annual Lugar Series Luncheon.]
+
+ 
+
+ Christie connects - NJ.com: “Gov. Chris Christie sent a strong signal this past week he's working a different strategy for a likely 2016 presidential bid….[he] appears more interested in letting people ask him questions than simply giving speeches.  [At the N.H. GOP summit] Christie introduced himself briefly on Friday and then jumped right into questions…the New Hampshire version of the Christie town hall was toned down, felt less orchestrated and gave more of an opportunity for the voters who play an important role in deciding the nation's next president to ask what was on their minds.”
+
+ 
+
+ [National Review examines the odds against Christie as a comeback kid.]
+
+ 
+
+ Kasich ‘more serious’ on 2016 presidential bid -  The Hill: “Ohio Gov. John Kasich is becoming increasingly interested in joining a crowded Republican presidential field in 2016, he said Sunday, although all options remain on the table. ‘I’m more and more serious or I wouldn’t be doing these things,’ Kasich said Sunday on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ referring to his recent travel to early voting states, including stops in South Carolina and New Hampshire this weekend.”
+
+ 
+
+ Perry builds brain trust - Bloomberg: “Rick Perry is beefing up his policy shop. … That effort now includes the hiring of the widely respected Avik Roy, a former health care adviser to Mitt Romney and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who will become RickPAC's senior adviser, the person said. Also coming on board: Abby McCloskey, whose conservative credentials include work as an economic policy program director for American Enterprise Institute, will head Perry’s national policy team. Brett Fetterly, a graduate student at John Hopkins University who studied under former U.S. Ambassador Eric Edelman, will coordinate Perry’s foreign policy shop.”
+
+ 
+
+ EMPOWERED BY MIDTERM FLIP, MANCHIN WILL STAY IN SENATE
+
+ Roll Call: “Sen. Joe Manchin III will not be taking any country roads home to West Virginia any time soon. The Democratic senator announced Sunday he’s decided against seeking a return to the Mountaineer State’s governor’s mansion in 2016. That’s good news for Manchin’s fellow Democrats as an open Senate seat could prove difficult to hold in a special election. His term is not up until the 2018 cycle.”
+
+ 
+
+ [The dean of West Virginia political journalism, Hoppy Kercheval, has the lay of the land in the state post-Manchin announcement.]
+
+ 
+
+ DANA’S GUIDE FOR PATRIOTIC PARENTS
+
+ Dana Perino describes her experience visiting Washington as a child and how that inspired her to pursue a career in politics. In her new book “And the Good News Is…,” Perino recommends that parents take their children to Washington, D.C. twice – once when they are between the ages of 7-10 for the wonder of it all, and then again between ages 15-17 after they’ve learned more about our system of government and have studied more American history.”
+
+ 
+
+ THE BULL IS BACK
+
+ A few weeks ago, we brought you the story of the giant, anatomically correct metal bull statue at a restaurant in Utah getting turned into a steer. Well, it’s back. After owner Stephen Ward heard numerous complaints about the removal he decided to give the bull back his party-hat shaped extremity. Ward said his decision had nothing to do with authorities or their desire to have it removed, but he does plan on suing the mayor for ‘lying’ about him in an interview. The mayor said Ward had a variance for his liquor license due to his proximity to a local school. Ward denies this claim, and said he has the city “by the...” well, you can guess what he said.
+
+ 
+
+ Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News.  Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+7032,Meet the journalist facing 45 years in jail for filming the tar sands pipeline protest in North Dakota,"Meet the journalist facing 45 years in jail for filming the tar sands pipeline protest in North Dakota 
+Thursday, October 27, 2016 by: Natural News Editors Tags: First Amendment , Dakota Pipeline , criminal journalism (NaturalNews) Are North Dakota authorities waging a war against the public's right to know about the ongoing Standing Rock pipeline protests? We are joined by documentary filmmaker Deia Schlosberg, who was charged earlier this month with three felonies for filming an act of civil disobedience in which climate activists manually turned off the safety valves to stop the flow of tar sands oil through pipelines spanning the U.S. and Canada.The actions took place in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and Washington state. Schlosberg is an award-winning filmmaker and was the producer of Josh Fox's recent documentary, ""How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change."" She was filming the action at a valve station owned by TransCanada in Walhalla, North Dakota. She was arrested along with the activists, and her footage was confiscated. Then she was charged with a Class A felony and two Class C felonies—which combined carry a 45-year maximum sentence.(Article republished from DemocracyNow.org ) TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: But we're joined right now in Los Angeles by Democracy Now! video stream by Deia Schlosberg, the award-winning documentary filmmaker, producer, who was arrested on October 11th in a different area of North Dakota, while reporting on a climate change protest in Walhalla, North Dakota, charged with three felonies, facing 45 years in prison, if convicted. Also with us, Josh Fox. His article in The Nation, ""The Arrest of Journalists and Filmmakers Covering the Dakota Pipeline is a Threat to Democracy—and the Planet."" His previous documentaries include Gasland, which first exposed the harms of the fracking industry, nominated for an Academy Award, also made Gasland 2, which aired on HBO.We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Deia, describe what happened to you. DEIA SCHLOSBERG: Well, on October 11th, I was working as a climate reporter, as I've done for years and years and years, as Josh and I were doing, and the rest of the How to Let Go of the World team, when we made the film. And I was documenting people taking a stand, people on the frontlines of the fight to lessen the impacts of climate change. So, there were—there were five activists across four states that had planned to turn the emergency shutoff valves on the five pipelines that bring all Canadian oil sands into the U.S. And I was documenting this occurrence at the North Dakota site, outside of Walhalla, as you said. I was—I was filming the action. I was on public land. I was on a public road and at no point trespassed, at no point, you know, broke in or destroyed any property. I had nothing to do with the planning of the event. I was there to document it. I think it's essential for journalists to—journalists and filmmakers to go where the mainstream media is not. And there's a major hole in the coverage of climate change and people that are already dealing with the consequences of climate change and people that are fighting climate change. So, I take that responsibility very seriously. AMY GOODMAN: So when did the police come? DEIA SCHLOSBERG: The police came after—well, the activist that was doing the action, Michael, had called the company ahead of time to say that he was—he was going to shut off the valve, so they could—to give them ample time to take any emergency precautions. And then he turned the valve. And meanwhile, the company notified the local police. So, after the valve was closed, they came in probably about 15 minutes. I had my camera set up on a tripod on the public road. And they told me I was arrested for being an accessory to a crime, at which point I was brought to the local jail . I figured it would—things would just have to clear up once they realized what was— AMY GOODMAN: So, they charged you with three felonies? DEIA SCHLOSBERG: —that I was just, you know, exercising my First Amendment— AMY GOODMAN: What were the felonies? DEIA SCHLOSBERG: Conspiracy—they were all conspiracy charges: conspiracy to theft of public—theft of property, conspiracy to theft of service and conspiracy of interfering with a public—a critical public infrastructure. AMY GOODMAN: And you face 45 years in jail? What is your comment on this? DEIA SCHLOSBERG: What is my what? Sorry, the connection is— AMY GOODMAN: What do say about this? DEIA SCHLOSBERG: It's absolutely outrageous. Yeah, I mean, this is what I—this is what I do for my living. This is what I've done for years and years. There's absolutely no grounds for these charges.Read more at: DemocracyNow.org",FAKE
+5554,UK Involvement in US’ Secret Drone War Revealed,The US’ secret drone war has largely been shrouded in mystery since its inception. Despite its secrecy there is no denying that the US drone program represents one of Obama’s most... ,FAKE
+4349,Battle Lines For 2016 Emerge As Republican Hopefuls Unveil Campaign Themes,"WASHINGTON -- To run for president in 2016, potential candidates must formally register before May 1, 2015, making the first months of this year a crucial time for them to weigh their options. Over the next 104 days, each member of the potential Republican roster, which includes governors, senators, has-beens and long shots, must decide whether to invest the next two years and millions of dollars into a bloody political battle -- where the prize is the chance to wage an even bigger war.
+
+Early this week in Washington, two potential candidates, Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rand Paul (Ky.) gave speeches at the conservative Heritage Foundation, each strategically highlighting issues to further his national ambitions. Cruz laid out an ambitious policy agenda that included repealing Common Core education standards, abolishing the IRS, repealing Obamacare and building the Keystone XL pipeline. What all these goals have in common (besides how popular they were with the audience) is that they emphasize Cruz's ferocious opposition to President Barack Obama. Battling the Obama administration has been a hallmark of Cruz's time in the Senate, and it will likely be a strong selling point among voters who identify with the tea party movement.
+
+Instead of playing to the crowd like Cruz did, Paul touted his support for individual rights by arguing that ""activist"" (practically a four-letter word among conservatives) judges could be a good thing if their rulings expanded individual rights. The next day, Paul spoke in support of gun rights at an event in New Hampshire. On Thursday, he flew to Nevada, where he said voters would appreciate his stance on privacy rights. By the end of the week, he seemed to have emerged as the field's preeminent champion of individual rights, a position he has worked to cultivate during his first term in the Senate.
+
+Like Paul, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also has trademark issues, though in his case they're not the ones he wants to focus on in a GOP primary. As governor, Bush instituted lofty statewide education benchmarks that closely resemble the Common Core state standards which have been adopted by more than 40 states since 2010. The trouble for Bush is that many conservatives view Common Core as a government takeover of schools. Equally unpopular with the GOP base is Bush's support for comprehensive immigration reform, which was passed by the U.S. Senate in 2013, but stalled in the Republican-controlled House.
+
+Rather than talk about education and immigration, Bush has chosen to focus on a populist economic message he has honed recently, aimed at creating new ways for poor and middle-class Americans to move up the economic ladder. The only drawback of this focus for Bush is that his rivals like it, too. Thus far, at least four of Bush's potential challengers have also indicated that they plan to focus their campaigns on populist themes of creating opportunity and upward mobility for the working class. To campaign strategists, this comes as no surprise.
+
+""The populist economic message is probably going to be there in some way for nearly every candidate in 2016, both Democrats and Republicans,"" said Walker, who helped engineer the GOP takeover of the House in the early 1990s. ""The question then becomes: Which candidate is better at delivering this message to voters? That's what will begin to sort them out.""
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has long been talked about as a potential 2016 contender, published a book this week on his plan to create upward mobility: American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone. It seems increasingly likely, however, that Rubio will sit out the presidential race, rather than compete against the likes of Bush and Cruz. He recently said he will not make a final decision about 2016 until later this month, following a meeting with his top donors. If Rubio were to run, though, his hawkish views on foreign policy would likely resonate with GOP voters worried about the turmoil in the Middle East. Rubio is a vocal supporter of increased U.S. sanctions on Iran, as well as Congress' leading critic of normalizing relations with Cuba.
+
+As Rubio retreated from the political fray this week, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney jumped in head first. According to his advisers, Romney plans to rebrand himself as a poverty-fighting populist in his third run for the White House. In 2012, the career private equity investor infamously dismissed the ""47% of Americans"" who were ""dependent on government,"" so his sudden concern for the poor could prove a tough sell to voters. Perhaps more promisingly, though, he also plans to market himself as a foreign policy hawk. Aides to Romney said on Monday that current events had vindicated the former governor's prediction three years ago about the threat posed by Russia. In a field likely to be stacked with new faces, Romney's foreign policy views could give his third-time candidacy a fresh spin.
+
+The same is true for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, another candidate who plans to rebrand himself as a populist in 2016. Best known to voters as a conservative culture warrior, Santorum got a boost in 2012 after winning the Iowa caucuses, though he struggled to connect with voters outside that state. He appears to be trying to remedy that problem with his 2014 book, Blue Collar Conservatives. In the book, Santorum skewers the GOP for failing to understand working-class people. He also lays out his plan for a ""pro-growth, pro-worker agenda,"" a jobs plan that is based mostly on increased drilling, mining and fracking.
+
+Like Santorum, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has proven in the past that he can win over socially conservative voters, but has accomplished relatively little beyond that. In recent months, Baptist preacher-turned-politician has been sharpening his own populist message, which he sets out in his forthcoming book, God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy. The book diagnoses the GOP with a severe case of elitism and a ""seeming indifference to the struggling class."" Huckabee also fans the flames of the culture wars, wagging his finger at Hollywood starlets and criticizing racy song lyrics. Still, he remains folksy and likable, traits that are especially important in a primary.
+
+On the question of personality, there is no bigger wildcard in the race than retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, whose rags-to-riches life story and anti-government rhetoric have helped to make him a conservative darling and a likely 2016 longshot contender. Given that Carson lacks any political experience, his message so far has tended to focus on what's wrong with the world, or with Americans, or with government, or with the media. Speaking at a Republican National Committee retreat in California on Thursday, Carson told the crowd that his perceived liability was in fact an asset: ""I will admit, I do not have experience in certain things, like empowering special interests and growing the government and wasting taxpayer money and dishonoring our military and deserting our allies and lying to the people and submitting to the [political-correctness] police.""
+
+As Carson struggles to craft a campaign message out of his lack of experience, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has the opposite problem: a governing record that, after five years in office, is so mixed that it's nearly impossible to boil down into a single theme. After winning nationwide praise for his handling of Hurricane Sandy in 2013, Christie's political star began falling thanks to a string of casino closings, a budget shortfall and an ongoing ethics investigation. Nonetheless, on Tuesday Christie delivered a ""State of the State"" address that read like a preview of his 2016 presidential campaign. He spoke of ""a divisiveness and distrust [that] has seeped into our communities and neighborhoods,"" and he called for ""a New Jersey renewal and an American renewal."" Christie also took a few swipes at Washington gridlock, railing against those ""leaders in Washington [who ... ] stoke division for their own political gain.""
+
+Even with a strong record of governing under his belt, though, Perry still needs to overcome the ghosts of his failed previous bid for the GOP nomination. The same is true for Romney, Santorum and Huckabee, the three other repeat candidates likely to enter the 2016 race. While they may have more experience than their rivals in managing a huge national campaign, all four run the risk that voters' enthusiasm for them will be dampened by political déjà vu.
+
+Furthermore, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a relative newcomer on the national stage, signaled on Thursday night that he intends to make voter fatigue an issue in the primary. Speaking at the same RNC meeting that Carson had addressed earlier that day, Walker told the crowd that ""people want a fresh, new look [and] new ideas"" from the GOP. He urged the party to ""find a new, fresh leader out there who can take big bold ideas"" from state governments and grassroots advocates, and implement those ideas on a national scale.
+
+Walker also heaped blame on Washington in much the same way that Christie and Perry did -- with one key difference. For the Wisconsin governor, Washington is synonymous with the ""big-government special interests"" who led a recall effort against him in 2013. After a bitter and polarizing fight, Walker won the recall vote, but after that he abandoned any pretext of being nonpartisan. He peppered his speech on Thursday with stories about his past political fights with unions and state employees, and emphasized the way he ""took the power out of the hands of the big-government special interests.""",REAL
+4024,EXCLUSIVE: UN sex abuse scandal: Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announces new inquiry,"Faced with a growing uproar over the United Nations’ handling of allegations of child sexual abuse by non-U.N. peacekeepers in the Central African Republic, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has suddenly scrambled to announce an “external, independent review” panel to examine that issue, along with “a broad range of systemic issues related to how the U.N. responds to serious information of this kind.”
+
+Ban, who declared himself “deeply disturbed” by the situation, said on Wednesday his intent was “to ensure that the United Nations does not fail the victims of sexual abuse, especially when committed by those who are meant to protect them.”
+
+In fact, Fox News has learned, Ban’s action was also urged on him two days earlier by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, as U.N. member states dickered in committee over a resolution that criticized Ban for the “perceived lack of timely information” he had provided on the abuse issue and the “lack of protection of whistleblower” associated with the CAR incidents.
+
+At the time of Ban’s announcement, U.S. and European diplomats were still offering up alternative wordings in committee to temper the harsher language.
+
+Ban’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told Fox News that “the need to set up such a review has been in discussion for a long time,” but the specific terms of reference of the inquiry and its membership were not revealed in Ban’s announcement, though he did specify it would look into “the treatment of the specific report of abuse in the Central African Republic.”
+
+According to Dujarric, both the terms of reference and the membership of the probe will be revealed “as soon as possible” –a fairly clear indication that Ban’s sparse announcement was intended more as an initial fire-fighting gesture than a fully-planned response to the sex-abuse crisis.
+
+Another way to look at it is that the U.N.’s top bureaucrat was trying to keep the explosive sex abuse issue from spinning further out of control, amid a gout of document leaks, finger-pointing and U.N. investigations criticized as focused on hushing up leakers than on protecting additional young and starving children in the war-torn CAR from rape, sodomy and other predatory offenses.
+
+Moreover, the CAR controversy is only the latest crest in a swelling critique of the U.N.’s ability to protect the innocent from sex abuse where its blue-and-white flag is flying—a critique that includes a long-suppressed report of U.N.-appointed experts who have decried a “culture of impunity” in U.N. peacekeeping missions when it comes to such crimes.
+
+The latest controversy has been further fueled by U.N. document leaks that raised the possibility of retaliatory collusion by the organization’s independent Ethics Officer; the head of its main independent internal watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS); the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights; and Ban’s top deputy against Anders Kompass, a senior U.N. human rights official who first brought the Central African Republic scandal into the daylight.
+
+That interpretation was strenuously denied by one senior U.N. official, who requested anonymity, while for her part, the U.N.  Ethics Officer, Joan Dubinsky, declined comment saying “I don’t believe it is appropriate to comment on leaked documents.”
+
+U.N. spokesman Dujarric told Fox News that an investigation of Kompass by OIOS for “possible staff misconduct,” initiated in March, would nonetheless continue in parallel with the still-unformed inquiry panel. “Any relevant information of a broad systemic nature that will come out of that investigation will be considered by the review,” he declared.
+
+Kompass has already been asked to resign at the behest of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein. He refused.
+
+Kompass was then briefly suspended from his work—until a U.N. tribunal reversed the action-- in conjunction with his investigation by OIOS for passing on transcripts by U.N.-collected testimony from children who described their sexual abuse and exploitation by French and African peacekeepers in the chaos-shattered CAR in 2013 and 2014. The children were aged from 9 to 13.
+
+The troops were from a multinational contingent that preceded the current U.N. peacekeeping mission in CAR—the U.N. forces took over in September 2015-- but were operating with U.N. Security Council approval.
+
+Kompass got the U.N. report on the childrens’ testimony on July 15, 2014. He told a French diplomat about it roughly a week later, and in a written declaration has said he told his immediate superior in the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) about his disclosure “shortly thereafter.”
+
+Kompass has subsequently made no secret of the fact that he passed on the raw testimony to French military authorities by the end of that month, bypassing his own superiors, who said they discovered the action when French investigators approached the U.N.  It was more than eight months later that he was asked to resign.
+
+In a wave of claims and counter-claims, U.N. and French officials have each blamed the other for delays in investigating the allegations, but while the U.N. has claimed that it has cooperated fully, its interviewers only answered written questions from the French military probers.
+
+The investigative waters were roiled even further with the publication of internal emails and documents that showed top U.N. officials, including Ethics Office head Dubinsky, along with OIOS head Carman LaPointe, Zaid, and Ban’s chef de cabinet, Susana Malcorra, grappling with how to cope with the Kompass actions.
+
+The documents were published by a non-government organization named AIDS-Free World, as part of a campaign called Code Blue. The campaign calls for an “entirely independent, external Commission of Inquiry, with full access to the U.N. as well as subpoena power, to examine every facet of sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping operations” and an automatic end to diplomatic immunity for any U.N. official or peacekeeper accused of such abuse.
+
+Among the documents were emails that summarized a meeting among the officials on the periphery of a March 19-20 Ban Ki-moon retreat in Turin, Italy, where they agreed to ask Kompass to “document the sequence of events that he believed supported” a claim to whistleblower status—a designation that ultimately is made by the Ethics Officer, independently of other U.N. branches.
+
+Other emails document a dispute within OIOS over who would authorize Kompass’ investigation—a responsibility claimed by Lapointe personally.
+
+The documents also underline a profound confusion among the officials about what they were even supposed to be discussing—for much of the conversation at least some of them believed they were discussing malfeasance in Mali.
+
+CLICK HERE FOR THE CODE BLUE DOCUMENTS.
+
+According to a senior U.N. official, the internal discussions about Kompass and his case were no more than a routine sorting-out of the responsibilities involved in dealing with an employee who had already admitted his actions while simultaneously claiming protected whistleblower status for them.
+
+In the U.N.’s case, establishing that status often involves notification of the established chain of command of perceived wrongdoing before going elsewhere with the information, which Kompass did not do.
+
+At the same time, the official noted, OIOS’ investigations division is a “mess” that is rife with dissention and back-biting, which made its proper functioning nearly impossible.
+
+For critics, however, the same documentation is proof that the ostensible independence of OIOS and the U.N. Ethics Office in investigating wrong-doing and protecting whistle-blowers is only a sham.
+
+“The Code Blue documents show that Malcorra and others at the most senior levels of the UN were entirely indifferent to the welfare of little boys as young as nine years old being subjected to the most egregious sexual abuse,”   argues Peter Gallo, a former OIOS investigator who left the organization in March.
+
+“The very essence of whistleblower protection is to protect staff members from retaliatory actions by management, but in the UN, it is now clear that the Ethics Office and management are on the same side.”
+
+“There should be a solid wall between these people,” Paula Donovan, co-founder of AIDS-Free World, told Fox News. “The regulations are very clear. They are supposed to be impartial.” And when they were joined by Zaid—Kompass’ boss—and his deputy “that was completely against the rules.”
+
+Instead, she argued, the evidence points to the conclusion that they were “investigating the best way” to get rid of him.
+
+The propriety of the meetings and emails concerning Kompass was also criticized by Robert Appleton, the former head of investigations for the U.N.  Procurement Task Force, a special anti-corruption unit within OIOS that existed between 2006 and 2009.
+
+The communications are “deeply troubling,” Appleton, a highly-regarded former U.S. prosecutor, told Fox News.  “Their priorities appear to be quite skewed.”
+
+Among other things, he said, during his tenure at OIOS, “we did not coordinate with the Ethics Office - -other than to recommend that they pursue whistleblower retaliation claims.”
+
+In addition, “OIOS is independent for a reason,” Appleton asserted, “in part so that the process not only is, but appears to be, fair, objective and free of bias and influence.
+
+“Investigations are conducted in confidence so as not to prejudice the process , prejudice the subject, or the outcome, and so as not to create a conflict with the administration that potentially needs to carry on with disciplinary processes following the investigation.”
+
+The same questions of confidence are going to surround Secretary-General Ban’s newly announced “external independent review.”
+
+A spokesman for the Code Blue campaigners, for example, “welcomed” the announcement and then added provisos, starting with “No member of existing U.N. staff should be appointed to investigate nor to act as the investigators’ secretariat,” and the notion that the broader the inquiry, the better.
+
+To be credible, the spokesman added, the inquiry should include an examination of “top members of the Secretary-General’s own staff,” singling out by title Dubinsky, LaPointe and Malcorra.
+
+But there should also be plenty of other grist for the panelists’ work, including a report that OIOS itself has promised to make public by mid-June, entitled an “Evaluation of protection against sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping operations.”
+
+Based on recent U.N. experience, the news it brings is unlikely to be good.
+
+George Russell is editor-at-large of Fox News and can be found on Twitter:  @GeorgeRussell or on Facebook.com/George Russell",REAL
+6778,Future Diwali celebrations to be organized by ISIS!,"Monday, 31 October 2016 Diwali firework celebrations cause environmental disaster over India!! 
+This weekend's Diwali celebrations all over India have caused more pollution than Chinese factories produce in a year! The WHO measured record levels of air pollution hanging above major cities and declared India an environmental catastrophe! 
+The Indian government refused to comment on the catastrophe fueling the idea that they purposely allowed, encouraged and perpetrated the environmental disaster to happen in the hope that it would cause a cull in their over-bloated population. 
+The WHO are sending scientists in to Indian's major cities to find out how many people have died after inhaling huge amounts of smoke caused by their own fireworks. Under the cover of a thick layer of smog, government bulldozers were observed cleaning up the debris, dead bodies and giving holy cows smog masks; the perfect cover-up. 
+Exactly how many people did not survive the celebrations is not yet clear because it will take days for the smog to disintegrate, but the Indian Government are hoping the bulldozers will do a fine job and many slums surrounding Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai, etc, will be half empty when the smog disappears! 
+The annual celebration of suicidal firework displays will continue until the Indian Government cull the population by at least a third and proposals to engage ISIS to help in organizing future Diwali festivals has received a positive response from ISIS fighters fleeing Iraqi bombs in Mosul. ISIS fighters have been promised refuge and amnesty if they can organize mass killings in India just as good as they did in Syria and Iraq! Make Jaggedone's  ",FAKE
+9309,"Neil Armstrong: Their Ships Were Far Superior To Our -Boy, Where They Big","Everyone is familiar with the broadcast images of Neil Armstrong's historic first steps on the moon, and many believe his footsteps to be the first ever on the lunar surface. However, during a documented NASA symposium, Armstrong made comments alluding to the fact that not only had other species visited the moon, but that there were signs of colonization there upon.
+
+
+The Real Reason NASA Refuses a Return to the Moon 
+
+Armstrong stated in an interview with an unnamed professor at the symposium that their presence on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission was immediately noticed and addressed by an alien race. The beings that occupied the lunar air space made very clear their displeasure of the human's arrival on the moon's surface:
+
+Armstrong: It was incredible … of course, we had always known there was a possibility … the fact is, we were warned off. There was never any questions then of a space station or a moon city.
+
+Professor: How do you mean “warned off”?
+
+Armstrong: I can’t go into details, except to say that their ships were far superior to ours both in size and technology – Boy, where they big! … and menacing … No, there is no question of a space station . 
+
+Armstrong: Naturally – NASA was committed at that time, and couldn’t risk a panic on earth…. But it really was a quick scoop and back again. (Above Top Secret, p. 186)
+
+Additionally, there are reports that upon arrival on the moon Armstrong witnessed structures on the surface resembling shops and other buildings obviously not designed by man. It is believed that while footage exists of these findings, the decision was made not to make these films public so as to not incite public panic.
+
+WATCH THE VIDEO: 
+NASA's unwillingness to move forward with lunar cities or even stations can easily be explained by the fear of going against the will of a much more advanced race. Armstrong stated that this fear is what lead to the following Apollo missions to only include a quick landing and sample collection. With this limited access to the moon, NASA or any other space exploration organization would be greatly hindered in their efforts to establish surface space stations of any type and lunar colonies would be completely infeasible.
+
+Could it be that human's exploration of the cosmos is closely regulated by alien races? What lengths would those races go to prevent space travel advancement by humans? Perhaps in the future, humans will gain the favor of the celestial inhabitants and be privy to the mysteries of beyond.
+
+Disclose TV 
+SOURCE ",FAKE
+323,2nd New York prison worker charged in killers' escape,"Plattsburgh, New York (CNN) Gene Palmer, the second prison employee charged in connection with the escape of two convicted murderers in upstate New York, admitted he provided the fugitives with tools and other items that unintentionally ""made their escape easier,"" according to a statement he gave the state police.
+
+Palmer, a prison guard for more than 27 years, told investigators that within the last eight months he provided inmate David Sweat with a pair of needle-nose pliers and a flat-head screwdriver, according to the court document. Late last month, he said in the statement, he delivered a package said to contain a pound of frozen ground beef and two tubes of paint to the other inmate, Richard Matt
+
+Palmer's court appearance Thursday was adjourned because he is changing lawyers. Attorney Andrew Brockway said he ""simply doesn't have the resources"" to defend Palmer, who will appear in court on Monday.
+
+Joyce Mitchell, another prison employee charged in connection with the escape, admitted to putting hacksaw blades and drill bits into the hunk of hamburger meat, according to Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie. She has pleaded not guilty to charges of aiding the escapees.
+
+Asked whether he assisted in the escape, Palmer told investigators: ""No. Not intentionally.""
+
+He continued, ""Matt provided me with elaborate paintings and information on the illegal acts that inmates were committing within the facility. In turn, I provided him with benefits such as paint, paintbrushes, movement of inmates, hamburger meat, altering of electrical boxes in the catwalk areas.
+
+""I did not realize at the time that the assistance provided to Matt and Sweat made their escape easier. The altering of the electrical boxes was to enhance their ability to cook in their cells.""
+
+The screwdriver and needle-nose pliers weused to fix electrical breakers in the catwalk behind their cells. That area was part of the escape route, an official familiar with the investigation told CNN on Wednesday.
+
+Palmer's statement reveals the complicated relationship between inmates and employees at the prison.
+
+On another occasion, Palmer said, he helped Matt conceal ""two-oil based tubes"" of paint that he had purchased for the inmate in the catwalk. At the time, Sweat was under investigation and Palmer said he had Matt take the tubes from his cell to the catwalk, where the paint was hidden atop an air vent, according to the court document.
+
+Palmer said he met Matt in 2009 and Sweat about five years ago. He said he bought white zinc and white titanium paint and paintbrushes for Matt on two occasions, according to the document. Palmer also said he bought a large tube of acrylic paint for Sweat about two years ago. He said he gave Sweat the pliers and other tools on four occasions.
+
+The tools were found at Palmer's home after police executed a search warrant, according to the official familiar with the investigation.
+
+Palmer told investigators that as a ""favor"" he allowed Sweat to ""change the electrical wiring in the cell electrical boxes,"" the document said. He said he allowed Sweat into the catwalk of the block where the prisoners were housed.
+
+Brockway declined to comment on the specific charges Wednesday.
+
+Palmer posted bail of $25,000 and was released from jail early Thursday.
+
+""Mr. Palmer has been completely cooperative with the investigation,"" Brockway said. ""He will continue to cooperate. He's a man of integrity who made some mistakes.""
+
+According to the court document, after the convicts escaped, Palmer tried to destroy evidence of the paintings the inmates had given him, burning some of them in a fire pit at his home and burying others in nearby woods.
+
+He faces three felony charges -- one count of promoting prison contraband, two counts of tampering with physical evidence -- and one misdemeanor charge of official misconduct.
+
+Palmer's June 20 interview with the state police was videotaped, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN.
+
+Access to the catwalk was not unusual for prisoners. The prison used inmates to do plumbing and electric work, sometimes allowing them to go in the catwalk area, a former maintenance supervisor said.
+
+The former supervisor, who worked at the prison for 35 years, said inmates filled those positions when the maintenance department was short staffed. Correction officers were also understaffed at times, and inmates conducted repair work unsupervised. The ex-supervisor left the facility six years ago.
+
+The former supervisor said inmates worked unplugging toilets, changing lights, fixing leaks and repairing wiring. Their work took them inside cells and to the catwalks behind the cell walls for major pipe repairs.
+
+Inmates sometimes asked prison employees for favors, such as sending a letter or asking for a pack of cigarettes, the ex-supervisor said. Inmates started with small favors and followed up with bigger requests, sometimes threatening to turn in the employee for delivering on the smaller offense.
+
+Palmer said life as a prison guard was as miserable as those of the prisoners. ""With the money that they pay you, you'll go bald, you'll have high blood pressure, you'll become an alcoholic, you'll divorce, and then you'll kill yourself,"" he said.
+
+Mann described the jail scene all those years ago: ""Everywhere we go, prisoners are handling knives and power tools,"" he said in 2000.
+
+""Even then, that detail kind of freaked me out,"" he said a week after the jail break.
+
+Palmer's arrest came as more than a dozen investigators from the New York State Inspector General's Office arrived at the prison to investigate possible breaches of security protocols that allowed Matt and Sweat to escape, a state law enforcement official said. The two men have been on the lam since June 6.
+
+Investigators are going through visitor logs and documents related to prisoner and employee movements at the jail, the official said.
+
+They are also looking into whether prison guards on the honor block would sleep during their evening shifts and if that allowed Sweat and Matt to remain virtually unsupervised as they worked to prepare their escape, a law enforcement official told CNN.
+
+As authorities try to figure out what went wrong at the prison, hundreds of law enforcement officers are still rummaging through dense woodland surrounding a hunting cabin the fugitives are believed to have burglarized. Authorities said a number of items were recovered from the Mountain View cabin, some 30 miles west of the jail, including a sock, according to Wylie. While the district attorney wouldn't say if the sock's red markings were blood, he did tell CNN's Anderson Cooper, ""I do know that a DNA profile was from one of the socks.""
+
+The 75-square-mile primary search area is roughly 20 miles west of the prison. State forest rangers describe the terrain as treacherous, not just for the escapees but also for police and other searchers.
+
+""The area is heavily forested. The undergrowth is thick,"" Capt. John Strife said. ""The vegetation is a combination of trees, saplings and brush.""",REAL
+2278,Ark. governor won't sign 'religious freedom' bill as is,"LITTLE ROCK — As local and state leaders and organizations pressured Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson to veto House Bill 1228 — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — the governor said Wednesday he won't sign the bill in its current form.
+
+The full House passed the ""religious freedom"" bill Tuesday afternoon after three concurred amendments passed the House Judiciary Committee on Monday. The measure was sponsored by Rep. Bob Ballinger, R-Hindsville. Hutchinson had said he would sign the bill into law.
+
+Ballinger said the governor has five days from the time he received the bill — not including Sunday — to act. He said that if Hutchinson does nothing, HB1228 will go into law; he has to veto the bill to prevent that.
+
+The Republican governor said the bill wasn't intended to allow discrimination based on sexual orientation.
+
+""It has been my intention all along to have House Bill 1228 to mirror the federal act,"" Hutchinson said Wednesday. ""The bill that is on my desk at the present time does not ... mirror the federal law.""
+
+He was referring to the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act signed by President Clinton in 1993.
+
+""I asked that changes be made in the legislation. I've asked leaders in the General Assembly to recall the bill so that it mirrors the federal religious act,"" Hutchinson said.
+
+He wants lawmakers to either recall the bill or pass a follow-up measure to make the proposal more closely mirror the federal law. He wants the bill to make sure it reflects the values of the people of Arkansas and minimizes discrimination in the workplace.
+
+Hutchinson didn't specifically call for changes that would prohibit the law from being used to deny services to someone, but he said he didn't believe the bill was intended to do so.
+
+""This law that is under consideration does not extend discrimination,"" Hutchinson said.
+
+In speaking about the divisiveness of the issue, Hutchinson said there was a divide in his own house. His son Seth signed the petition urging him to veto the bill.
+
+""This is a bill that in ordinary times would not be controversial, but these are not ordinary times,"" he said.
+
+""I want to make it clear that Arkansas wants to be a place of tolerance,"" Hutchinson said.
+
+Before Wednesday's news conference, many organizations raised concerns about what the measure could mean for business in the Natural State.
+
+Retail giant Walmart, headquartered in Bentonville, posted a statement to Twitter on Tuesday saying HB 1228 does not reflect the company's values and urged Hutchinson to veto the legislation.
+
+The bill as written would prevent state and local governments from infringing upon religious beliefs without a ""compelling"" interest. Supporters maintain it is not a discriminatory bill, but opponents say it will allow widespread discrimination against gays and lesbians.
+
+Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed a similar measure into law last week and is seeing widespread criticism by businesses and organizations.
+
+Monday, Acxiom, one of Arkansas' largest employers and a longtime supporter of workplace diversity, announced the marketing technology company's firm opposition to the bill. In a letter to the governor, the company wrote, ""The bill inflicts pain on some of our citizens and disgrace upon us all.""
+
+Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola encouraged Hutchinson to veto the bill. In a news release Tuesday he stated, ""Any piece of legislation that is so divisive cannot possibly be good for the state of Arkansas and its people.""
+
+""There certainly is that impression that it would be a negative step,"" state economic forecaster Michael Pakko said. He said it's not clear whether there would be drastic implications for the state if the bill becomes law, but it would affect some business decisions, especially for companies that have taken a stance against the bill.
+
+""There is a likelihood this bill would cause confusion more than anything else, and that alone could have some negative impact on the economy,"" Pakko said.
+
+""It's just not the way to do business, and we're not going to do it that way,"" said North Little Rock Chamber of Commerce CEO Terry Hartwick.
+
+He said discrimination has never been an issue in the area, and he doesn't understand why it's become an issue now.
+
+""We're here to serve, and that's the way a chamber should be, to take in anybody. We're open for business, to do business as usual and to satisfy that customer, whomever they shall be,"" Hartwick said.
+
+The Little Rock Chamber of Commerce also objected to the the bill, simply stating, ""This is bad for business and bad for Arkansas.""",REAL
+706,RNC scrambles to calm state GOP officials,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+951,What to watch at 's key Clinton-Sanders debate in New York,"New York (CNN) Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will face off in CNN's Democratic presidential debate in Brooklyn Thursday night as they spar ahead of a critical contest in New York -- a state where both candidates have deep roots.
+
+The April 19 primary here will come as Clinton -- whose campaign has been dogged by Sanders' unexpected endurance -- is on an urgent mission to widen her delegate lead and lock up her party's nomination.
+
+Next week's contest will serve as one of Sanders' last opportunities to change the dynamics of the Democratic race. And in turn, it will offer Clinton a crucial opening to once and for all shake the pervasive narrative that her rival -- even as he lags behind in the delegate count -- continues to enjoy real momentum; tens of thousands of Sanders supporters rallied in Washington Square Park in Manhattan Wednesday night.
+
+In a sign of the mounting pressure for both candidates, over the past few weeks, their exchanges on the campaign trail have grown increasingly bitter. Sanders has publicly questioned Clinton's judgment and credibility, while Clinton has hit back by accusing her rival of being inexperienced and promoting an unrealistic platform.
+
+Next week's contest will also be an especially personal one for both Democratic hopefuls.
+
+Clinton, who served as the state's senator for eight years, currently has a home in Chappaqua and chose to base her campaign headquarters in Brooklyn. Sanders, meanwhile, was born and raised in Brooklyn and still has a thick New York accent.
+
+Both candidates are also insistent that they are best equipped to take on Republican front-runner Donald Trump -- another New Yorker.
+
+Here is to watch when the two square off:
+
+Thursday's Democratic debate could be the feistiest yet.
+
+Over the past few weeks, Clinton and Sanders have ramped up their attacks, hitting each other harder on both character and policy. The new tenor of the race is in stark contrast to the earliest stages of the race, when the two candidates were cordial and made painstaking efforts to avoid going after each other.
+
+Sanders, in particular, prided himself in running a positive campaign, constantly reminding voters that he had never run a negative ad in his political career.
+
+But with the Democratic race dragging on into the spring, fresh tensions are bubbling up to the surface.
+
+Things grew even more heated when the Sanders campaign put out a press release questioning Clinton's credibility this week -- an attack that was met with ferocious pushback.
+
+He was born here. She was elected here.
+
+For each, Tuesday's contest is something of a homecoming. And with 247 delegates at stake, the stakes are higher than ever. Clinton is expected to come out on top, but with momentum at his back after winning six out of the last seven contests, Sanders believes New York could provide a chance for him to prove that he can stay in the race.
+
+""I am enormously proud to be the senator from Vermont, but I have not forgotten where I was born and that is Brooklyn,"" Sanders told a crowd in Brooklyn last week. ""I think we have the campaign that has the momentum. ... And, with your help, we will win New York.""
+
+A Sanders victory here would be a huge psychological blow toun the Clinton campaign, which has posited that the state is solidly her territory. Sanders' advisers are basing their strategy on convincing superdelegates that he can overtake Clinton over time, and victory here would help him make his case. However, with Clinton's lead in pledged delegates, her team knows that Sanders not only needs to win at least 56 percent of the remaining delegates to catch up.
+
+Thursday's debate will be the largest platform yet for Clinton and Sanders to make their case to a state that could be pivotal in the race. Look for both of them to make major appeals to Democratic voters here based on their personal backgrounds.
+
+Just across the river from the site of Thursday's CNN debate looms something that has engulfed the 2016 Democratic race: Wall Street.
+
+Vowing to break up the big banks and railing against the outsized role of Wall Street in the American political system are at the core of Sanders' campaign. His unlikely bid for president has attracted a massive following in large part because of his populist message and promises to help poor and lower-income families.
+
+But the fight between Clinton and Sanders over Wall Street has not only unfolded over policy disagreements.
+
+Sanders has consistently used the financial industry to paint Clinton as an establishment insider in the pocket of special interests. He has slammed the former secretary of state for accepting donations from financial institutions, suggesting that she is beholden to big-money interests.
+
+One major Wall Street bank has found itself in the middle of this flashpoint: Goldman Sachs.
+
+At issue are three speeches Clinton made to Goldman Sachs, for which she was paid $675,000. Sanders has repeatedly called on Clinton to release the transcripts from those speeches, saying the public has a right to know what she said in those private settings.
+
+Clinton said she would only do so if all of her rivals running for president are also held to the same standards.
+
+Recently, Clinton has found a fresh line of attack against Sanders on the issue of Wall Street.
+
+Asked whether she thinks her connections to Wall Street will play a more central role in the debate now that the race has come to New York, Clinton told reporters this week: Bring it on.
+
+""Let it happen. I have a record. As your senator, I spoke out. I called for changes. I have the best policy toward dealing with what needs to happen to prevent Wall Street from ever wrecking Main Street again,"" she said. ""Sen. Sanders couldn't even answer questions about whatever his plan is so we'll talk.""
+
+In an extensive interview with the New York Daily News, Sanders struggled to answer in detail questions about financial reform -- one of the pillars of his campaign. Clinton seized on the interview to raise questions about Sanders' readiness to be president.
+
+President Barack Obama made a candid admission over the weekend: his administration wasn't adequately prepared to handle the fall of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
+
+The United States helped oust Gadhafi in 2011. As secretary of state, Clinton was a major actor in those efforts and as a presidential candidate has remained a defender of U.S actions in Libya. But her tenure at the State Department has been a significant vulnerability for Clinton: Republicans and critics have persistently criticized her handling of the 2012 attacks at a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, which killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
+
+Sanders, for his part, has more broadly targeted Clinton's views on regime change. This tension could resurface Thursday night if Clinton chooses to defend Obama administration's engagement in Libya.
+
+A key fight between Sanders and Clinton spilled out into the open with the recent release of a video showing Clinton angrily responding to a climate activist who accused her of accepting ""fossil fuel money"" while the candidate shook hands with supporters after an event.
+
+When the activist, who is affiliated with environmentalist groups Greenpeace and 350 Action, asked if Clinton would ""reject"" funds from those industries, Clinton responded that she did not accept money directly from fossil fuel companies—an action that is illegal anyway, since corporations can't directly contribute to political campaigns—but that she did take money from individual donors who work in those industries. ""I'm so sick of the Sanders' campaign lying about me. I'm sick of it,"" Clinton said.
+
+In truth, oil and gas industry employees have donated to both Clinton and Sanders. Clinton has received more than $300,000; Sanders about $50,000.
+
+But Sanders has not backed down from the attack line, and his campaign has pointed to ""lobbyists and bundlers for the industry"" who have donated to Clinton and donations to super PACs supporting Clinton.
+
+""Secretary Clinton owes us an apology. We were not lying. We were telling the truth,"" Sanders said during a rally on April 1 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
+
+Although the candidates and their surrogates have answered questions about the issue since Clinton's altercation with the climate activist, Thursday's debate could be the first time they address it with one another directly in public. If Sanders confronts Clinton on it, it could be an opportunity for Clinton to try to put the attack to rest before a large audience.",REAL
+6912,ACLU Threatens War Against President Trump,"  ACLU Threatens War Against President Trump   The ACLU has a message for Donald Trump. They are not impressed with many of Trump's campaign promises, and threaten the new president-elect with court if he tries to implement them. 
+The ACLU has a message for Donald Trump. 
+NEW YORK — In response to Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union , had the following statement: 
+“For nearly 100 years, the American Civil Liberties Union has been the nation’s premier defender of freedom and justice for all, no matter who is president. Our role is no different today. 
+“President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression. 
+“These proposals are not simply un-American and wrong-headed, they are unlawful and unconstitutional. They violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. If you do not reverse course and instead endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality, you will have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at every step. Our staff of litigators and activists in every state, thousands of volunteers, and millions of card-carrying supporters are ready to fight against any encroachment on our cherished freedoms and rights. 
+“One thing is certain: we will be eternally vigilant every single day of your presidency and when you leave the Oval Office, we will do the same with your successor.",FAKE
+1729,Why Marco Rubio has a real shot at 2016 Republican nomination,"Ted Cruz remains a conservative favorite in 2016. In 2012, the establishment backed his Senate opponent in Texas, then Lt. Governor David Dewhurst. The conservative grassroots backed Cruz and pushed him over the finish line. Cruz has since remained a favorite of the grassroots with a continually antagonist relationship with the Republican establishment.
+
+In 2010, Rand Paul, before Cruz, was a grassroots favorite. The Republican Establishment backed his rival, Trey Grayson. Paul rallied a coalition of conservative grassroots and Ron Paul acolytes to trounce Grayson and win the Kentucky Senate seat. Since then, Paul has wobbled between maintaining grassroots support and developing establishment support. In 2014, for example, he backed Mitch McConnell for re-election and has taken an occasional aggressive position to contrast himself from Cruz.
+
+In the same year Rand Paul won, the man who started the major revolt between grassroots activists and party leaders ran. It was the Rubio race that really exposed the divide between the base and the leadership. The leadership backed then Florida Governor Charlie Crist. The grassroots, led by former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, allied with Marco Rubio. Activists began urging a boycott of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Washington group that helps the GOP take the Senate.
+
+Rubio, over 2009, rose in the polls from three percent to victory. Crist was forced to flee the GOP to the Democratic Party where he has been beclowning himself ever since.
+
+Once in Washington, Rubio remained a favorite of the grassroots until he tried to cut a deal with the Democrats on immigration. To his credit, he went on Rush Limbaugh’s program to defend it. He made aggressive outreach to conservatives behind the scenes. But it hurt him and the deal died.
+
+Since then, Rubio has been very quiet. Behind the scenes, he has voted quite often with Senators Cruz and Mike Lee of Utah. He has been a voice for fiscal sanity, small government, and strong foreign policy.
+
+He is also one of the kindest and most approachable men in Washington. He would rather talk football than politics. He would rather be with his wife and kids than at a fundraising event or Washington social party.
+
+Monday, Rubio will declare his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. Cruz and Paul have gotten the attention so far. All three of these conservative senators, the grassroots revolutionaries, are announcing ahead of the smorgasbord of governors and other would be Republican contenders. Rubio’s path to the stage in Miami today explains why he might be better positioned than Cruz or Paul to make some headway.
+
+Cruz remains the conservative grassroots’ darling. They see him as the purest conservative candidate and he probably is. If Cruz starts making deals to garner establishment support, however, he potentially sees his base collapse with a sense of betrayal. Cruz thinks he has the base firmly on his side. That is usually the moment the ground begins to soften.
+
+Paul has ceded the conservative grassroots to Cruz and has set about reorganizing his father’s coalition. Many conservative grassroots, though they sympathize with Paul on fiscal and civil libertarian issues, murmur in aggravated tones that Paul backed McConnell in 2014 and did not back Ted Cruz’s efforts to defund ObamaCare in 2013. Instead, Paul used that to try to contrast himself as an adult in the room versus Cruz and the grassroots. Then there are his national security issues, which give a lot of the right heartburn.
+
+Rubio, however, is the original Tea Party candidate. His candidacy united the grassroots against the leadership and he won. The Washington crowd convinced themselves he could not win, but the grassroots proved they could pick a winner. Rubio was the first.
+
+While Cruz and Paul began forging coalitions, Rubio worked to not undermine his relations with the grassroots while not antagonizing the establishment. His immigration compromise hurt him, but he seeks the nomination in an party that nominated both John McCain and Mitt Romney, two men to the left of Rubio on immigration.
+
+Monday in Miami, Marco Rubio will declare his candidacy for the presidency and of the three conservative Senators to run, he is most likely the Goldilocks of the bunch. He is not too tied to the grassroots to antagonize the establishment. He is not too tied to the civil libertarians to antagonize the conservatives. And he has not gone out of his way to reject the base of grassroots supporters who got him elected in order to curry favor with the leadership.
+
+He strikes the right balance. He has also been so sufficiently off the radar, by design, for so long that many donors and primary voters will want to listen again to the man who united the right to beat Charlie Crist and the establishment in 2010.
+
+They may like what they hear.
+
+Erick Erickson is a Fox News contributor. He is host of ""Erick on the Radio"" and founder/editor of The Resurgent. He is the founder of RedState.com. Follow him on Twitter @EWErickson.",REAL
+4937,Trump’s Alt-Right. Hillary’s Alt Left.,"In an attempt to give moderate Republicans, who are disturbed by Donald Trump, an escape hatch,  Hillary Clinton has dubbed Trump and his supporters the ‘Alt-right.’  In layman’s terms, she means you are bigoted, racist, homophobic, xenophobic and a demagogue if you support Trump.
+
+In doing so, she’s defending the Republican Party of Mitt Romney who was also called elitist and racist in the last presidential election of 2012.
+
+Many define the “alt-right” as opposing diversity and immigration, believing they are superior to all other humans. This is the Clinton campaign’s vain attempt to thwart Trump’s unprecedented outreach to minorities for the past two weeks (as no Republican ever has).
+
+In reaction, Clinton’s vice-presidential running-mate Sen. Tim Kaine compared Trump and his supporters to slave owners.  Kaine? This represents the Alt-Left.
+
+The Alt-left is a group of people who have nothing to offer. They have no facts to support their opinion and their factual assessments are grossly out of context and disingenuous. This group will blame minority communities’ problems on the rest of the country. They will use shocking statistics pointing to the harsh realities these minorities face. But, when a candidate like Trump begins to share those same numbers and offer different solutions, they attack what was previously their own language as racist and dark.
+
+Clinton is the queen of the kingdom of Alt-Left. Spanning four decades, a single year hasn’t known the absence of a Hillary Clinton scandal. She wants us to forget that.
+
+‘Alt-Lefters’ have no common sense or business acumen so they cheat in order to make profit:  The Clintons’ Whitewater scandal.  One doesn’t have to look further than to the video of Hillary Clinton laughing about helping a rape victim (who she knows was guilty) escape prosecution. When it comes to politics, which delivers a lot of personal-power, the corruption is even worse: private email servers exposing state secrets, the selling of access (for tens-of-millions of dollars) via donations to their so-called ‘charity’ Clinton Foundation and an avalanche of lies covering up this illicit behavior.
+
+Clinton is appealing to the moderate-Republicans with her Alt-Right rhetoric. She knows they are scared. I call these ‘moderates’ rabbits. They stand on the side of the road and nibble on the grass. At the first sight of traffic they run into the weeds and hide. They serve very little purpose and they reproduce rapidly. The Alt-Left (uh…Clinton) is the car. The moment she swerves in their direction, the moderate Republican-rabbit runs.
+
+What is the Alt-Right? In my view, these are the people who fight back, run toward challenges, speak with candor and a refreshing air of the truth. Occasionally, they make you cringe due to a heart of passion (not hate). These are the leaders and influencers who have the ability to cause change.
+
+On the Alt-Left, truth has no place in the journey for power and attention. For example, the Democratic National Committee email leak (from Wikileaks) proves they will even cheat amongst their own ranks.  Disgraced chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz gave us a glimpse of their playbook: attack and destroy all political foes.  The call to action was to attack Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders regarding his faith and religion, essentially casting him as an atheist.
+
+The Alt-Left’s only agenda is to disparage their opponent in order to cause fear and distract voters from assailant’s own deviant behavior. Their biggest weapon is to camouflage the vast array of differences amongst races, faith, gender and cultural backgrounds while projecting their own inherent racism, immorality, bigotry and elitism onto their opponent.
+
+The Alt-Left exhibits many of the traits of borderline personality disorder (BPD): fear of abandonment, up and down moods, unstable self-image, impulsive and risky behavior. These symptoms are the personification of people who consistently use projection.
+
+I’m certainly not labeling anyone as BPD, but I am pointing out that the Alt-Left has some of the worst personality traits known to mankind.
+
+The ‘Alternative Right’ is not inherently ‘Right’ or conservative at all. It’s simply a group of people who have thrown political correctness aside and have decided to support a disruptor –  someone who can break up the political strongholds in Washington and return it to the people.
+
+The Alt-Right movement is powered by truth and by pointing out the failures of our country’s present leadership. It shares the reality of how grim this country’s future appears without sweeping change to our political and cultural behavior.
+
+Their truths are an absolute defense. It’s not racist, bigoted or demagoguery. The only way to deal with the truth is to embrace it or attack its messenger. “Alt-Right” is the attack.
+
+Bryan Crabtree is the host of The Bryan Crabtree Show, which can be heard on Atlanta’s Biz 1190.",REAL
+2780,Jimmy Carter offers help for Russia’s bombing campaign in Syria,"Former President Jimmy Carter said recently that he provided maps of Islamic State positions in Syria to the Russian embassy in Washington, a move apparently at odds with the Obama administration’s official policy of not cooperating with Russia in the Syrian war.
+
+Carter said on Sunday in Georgia that he knows Russian President Vladimir Putin “fairly well” because they “have a common interest in fly fishing.” When he met with Putin in April along with other global leaders to discuss the crises in Syria and Ukraine, the Russian president gave him an email address so the two could discuss his “fly fishing experiences, particularly in Russia,” Carter said.
+
+The civil war in Syria, where U.S. officials say Russia has bombed rebels and CIA-backed groups rather than the Islamic State terrorist group, has also been a topic of conversation between the two. Carter said he sent maps of the Islamic State’s locations in Syria, produced by the Carter Center, to the Russian embassy so Moscow could improve the accuracy of its strikes.
+
+“I sent [Putin] a message Thursday and asked him if he wanted a copy of our map so he could bomb accurately in Syria, and then on Friday, the Russian embassy in Atlanta—I mean in Washington, called down and told me they would like very much to have the map,” Carter said at his Sunday school class in Georgia, according to a video of his remarks first aired by NBC News. “So in the future, if Russia doesn’t bomb the right places, you’ll know it’s not Putin’s fault but it’s my fault,” he added as the audience laughed.
+
+Obama administration officials have publicly said the United States will not collaborate with Russia as long as it targets U.S.-backed rebels in an effort to prop up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime ally of Moscow. The administration has said Assad must eventually step down as part of efforts to seek a political resolution to the Syrian war. “We are not prepared to cooperate on strategy which, as we explained, is flawed, tragically flawed, on the Russians’ part,” said Ash Carter, U.S. defense secretary, earlier this month.
+
+Click for more from the Washington Free Beacon.",REAL
+6795,Burnt homes and broken promises: the Jungle evicted,"[Graphic: Calais street scene by Harriet Paintin of Bow and Brush .] =By= Harriet Paintin and Hannah Kirmes-Daly Editor's Note The news of the destruction of the Calais refugee camp, known as “The Jungle”, has been pointed to by many as part of the hardening of European hearts to the terrible plight of refugees who have made it to their shores. It is relatively easy to make appropriate noises and go on with one’s life, but add a visual component and what remains is much more haunting. This can be particularly true with an artiti’s hand in the mix for his or her feelings and impressions are carried forward and the painting (or sculpture, or sometimes photograph) places us as a surrogate in that place and time. This clearly happens with this article so read at your own risk … and I hope you will. L ast week saw the brutal destruction of the Calais Jungle, Europe’s largest unregulated refugee camp and home to around 10,000 people who have built communities, collective solidarity and even an autonomous economy. The eviction of the camp yet again calls into question Europe’s asylum policy as refugees who have fled war, persecution and destruction once again witnessed their homes and community spaces razed to the ground, this time as part of a “humanitarian effort”. French authorities declared on Wednesday that the camp was empty, but hundreds of people — including unaccompanied minors — remain in an incredibly precarious position, sleeping rough and at risk of arrest. Unlike most refugee camps in Europe where food and facilities are provided by authorities, the Jungle evolved as a relatively autonomous entity, more like a shanty town than a camp. Restaurants, shops, barber shops and community spaces lined the muddy high street, which served not only as small commercial enterprises, but also as spaces of collective solidarity where people would gather, share information and build their community. Without these networks of support, the experience of being a refugee is infinitely more isolating and confusing. The Day Before the Eviction The day before the eviction a tense, uneasy mood settled among the residents of the Jungle, many of whom decided to leave on their own terms. Rather than giving up their autonomy and freedom for a place on one of the state provided buses to “Healthcare and Advice Clinics” (CAOs) and detention centers across the country, they left before they could be forced to leave, traveling to Paris, Marseille, anywhere they might have friends or hope of finding shelter. In one of the few restaurants which remained open, people attempted to keep a brave face as they spent the last day among friends with whom they had spent the last few months, years even. Some were resigned to whatever might happen the next day, throwing out light hearted comments to disguise their apprehension, “we’re not scared of the police! We’re Afghan, the police should be scared of us!” A young married couple had only just heard the news of the eviction; they were frantically trying to work out how they could avoid the risks of separation, of detention, and of becoming locked into the French asylum system which is already crumbling in its own inadequacy to provide aid, security and safety to the vulnerable. Aged just 18 and 20 years old, they had traveled together from Eritrea, fleeing the horrors of dictatorship and indefinite military conscription, in search of safety and a life worth living. “I just want a safe place for my wife. We want to build a life together; we can’t live in camps anymore, relying on the state for tiny handouts and waiting in line for food,” exclaimed the young man. The only reassurance they received from a British volunteer was that, as Eritreans, they face little chance of deportation as Europe has finally recognized that Eritrea is an unsafe country, unlike Afghanistan. A middle-aged Afghani man who had been listening in on the conversation interjected at this point, “who says Afghanistan is safe?! You ask your governments how Afghanistan can be safe, while drones and bombs fall from the sky, who sent them?! While your soldiers patrol our villages, who sent them?! Who is responsible for Al-Qaeda, for the Taliban?! Tell me!” Afghanis comprise a significant proportion of the Jungle’s residents. In light of a recent EU agreement with Afghanistan which means that European aid money is dependent on the Afghani government agreeing to accept 80,000 deportees, Afghanis stand little chance of being granted asylum in Europe. This man highlighted the painful contradiction felt by so many in the Jungle, that the nations responsible for so much of the violence in their country turn them away when they seek protection. So many have already had their asylum cases denied in various European countries and now expect to be deported. Their long journeys of flight and hope will end right back where they started. The high street, once a buzzing center of activity, was deserted; the closed shops, restaurants and barber shops reduced to empty shells with broken windows lining a muddy street. The police perimeter was already firmly in place, a man cycling past with plastic bags of clothes was pulled over and interrogated. “It’s just clothes! Nothing else,” he insisted as the policeman in full riot gear roughly pulled out the contents of the bags, revealing just clothes, nothing else. Misinformation and Confusion French authorities claimed that 7,500 beds had been made available, that a simple registration procedure would see people onto buses to transport them to three CAOs across the country, or possibly detention centers. Three different lines for single men, families, and minors, marked out by pictograms. This registration would take place on October 24 and 25, with the demolishment of the camp scheduled for the 25th. Women’s protest ( Harriet Paintin ) This information had been made available far too late to be translated and transmitted to the many languages and residents of the Jungle, meaning that Monday morning began with an overwhelming sense of chaos, disorganization and misinformation that would come to characterize the following days. Scarce scraps of information were filtered down through various organizations on the ground and painstakingly analyzed by everyone, volunteers and refugees alike, in an attempt to understand what was happening. As Clouchard states, “misinformation is to democracy what propaganda agencies are to totalitarian states”. In the context of this eviction the lack of information felt like not just an organizational slip-up, but a deliberate attempt to misinform and mislead people. In the confusion that ensued, people were unable to take balanced, well-informed and empowered decision about their futures; instead, they were herded onto buses that they didn’t even know the destination of. At one point, volunteers tried to hand out maps, to enable refugees to decide between the three locations that were supposed to be on offer to them. Officials shouted back, “this is not allowed, people don’t have a choice, don’t give them a map!” The Registration Process Calais police registration lines ( Harriet Paintin ) With a heavy media and police presence the mood was subdued and access was restricted to accredited media (500 people) and a handful of volunteer organizations. Inside, people packed up their homes and belongings in the cold, gray morning light and headed towards the police lines for registration. The long line of unaccompanied minors waited for their futures to be determined by one woman peering into their face for about 30 seconds to decide if they were under 18. Inside the Jungle however, far from the complete chaos which everyone had been expecting, there were pockets of relative normality as those who did not want to take the buses busied themselves with their daily lives, cooking lunch for their children, playing guitar. As for the official demolition, the police cordoned off a tiny section of the camp and invited journalists to watch as they carefully dismantled it. When the real demolition began the following day all access to the high look-out point in the camp was restricted to journalists, where they would have been able to see the bulldozers and cranes destroying houses, and countless fires breaking out across the camp. Jungle house on fire ( Harriet Paintin ) One of the most noticeable homes on fire was a beautifully constructed two-story building complete with a terrace. The inhabitants had set the house on fire themselves as a symbol of protest; they did not want their home and their memories to be destroyed at the hands of the police. As the smoke climbed into the sky, they laughed and reminisced about their past years in the Jungle. Only three people of a community of more than twenty were left, everybody else had already left, to Paris, to flats in Calais; not a single one was planning on taking the bus. In the midst of this dehumanizing chaos there were several moments of resistance like this where people, for a brief moment at least, were able to take control of their situation and express discontent. Faced with extreme police repression and no individual rights, these actions were incredibly powerful. Individuals carried flags of their home nations up and down the line of policemen who stood stoic and expressionless in their riot gear. The women of the camp, so infrequently visible that their presence has even at times been doubted, organized themselves and protested against their treatment, calling out for “safety and dignity for all women! Underage, overage, we’re all the same! In [camps in] Paris we sleep on the streets!” The Fire At about 3am on Wednesday morning a huge fire started, burning all the homes and possessions left behind. A fire which quickly spread out of control throughout the camp and razed it to the ground, leaving the high street looking like a devastated ghost town. Later, the registration area quickly descended into chaos as people were told that the last buses were leaving that afternoon. The line for minors closed early and hundreds were told to come back the next day. In the midst of this chaos and confusion the destruction of the camp continued in full force as the bulldozers and cranes moved in. Calais Jungle burning scene ( Harriet Paintin ) “It’s exactly like the scenes we have run away from, it’s just like watching our homes being burnt by the rebel forces” gasped one young man from Sudan as he gazed upon the desolation and destruction before him. After the last buses departed, the French authorities and some media outlets reported that the camp had been cleared and the eviction was a success, ignoring the hundreds left behind. Having been turned away by the authorities for the third day running, children were ordered back into a Jungle which by this time had become an apocalyptic scene of burning buildings, toxic smoke, exploding gas canisters. They had nowhere else to go but the streets, with no information about what options are open to them, if any. This eviction may have been dressed up as a “humanitarian effort” but the blatant contradictions between the official line of events and the reality on the ground reveals gaping fault-lines in Europe’s refugee policies. With unaccompanied minors left sleeping on the street, then by no stretch of the imagination has this been a successful operation. Rather, this is nothing but a complete failure on behalf of the authorities who are responsible for their protection. If the eviction was planned with the best interests of the Jungle residents in mind, then it would have worked out in a different way. There has been a refugee camp in Calais since the early 1990s, and after each eviction people have returned to rebuild. Long term residents of the Jungle believe that there is nothing that the authorities can do to stop people coming and trying to reach the UK; they are confident that before long, small camps will spring up again, but without the facilities and systems of mutual cooperation and aid that people have built in the Jungle their survival will be even more precarious. 
+
+Harriet Paintin is a freelance writer and musician, and Hannah Kirmes-Daly is a freelance reportage illustrator. They work together on documenting individual stories through art and music, focusing on refugee stories. Follow them at brushandbow.com. 
+Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation?",FAKE
+1050,"In Trump's World, Women Have Always Been Objects","The tagline for the 2016 GOP race might as well be, ""Make America Misogynist Again."" On Wednesday night, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz got into a Twitter spat. After a conservative anti-Trump SuperPAC ran a gross, slut-shaming ad which used a half-naked photograph of Trump's wife Melania, Trump threatened to ""spill the beans"" on Cruz's wife, Heidi, presumably because he thought Cruz was behind the ad. (The SuperPAC is not affiliated with the Cruz campaign, though it is backing Cruz against Trump.)  Trump then retweeted the below image, which compares a model shot of Melania with an unflattering photograph of Heidi. ""These images are worth a thousand words,"" reads the meme, implying that when it comes to the position of First Lady, all that matters is a woman's hotness.
+
+To Cruz's credit -- and I truly can't believe I'm giving a man who has compared abortion to slavery credit for anything that has to do with women -- Cruz didn't take Trump's bait. Instead he responded with this tweet:
+
+For Trump, and the GOP candidates writ large, the 2016 election has come down to a pathetic (and terrifying) rallying cry for traditional masculinity. There have been comments about hand size and comments about dick size and comments about Marco Rubio's ""high-heeled booties."" Trump has indirectly called Cruz a ""pussy"" and a ""soft, weak little baby,"" and said that Romney would have ""dropped to his knees"" for a 2012 endorsement. As The Guardian's Jessica Valenti put it, Trump and Cruz have officially ""gone full cavemen."" We are seeing the #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag play out in real time.  As women -- or any group of people who aren't straight, white men -- continue to demand their voices be heard, and that policy change accordingly, we will see a backlash from those traditional arbiters of power. The 2016 GOP race has become their vicious last stand. Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist  and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.",REAL
+2533,Ted Cruz Says GOP Leaders Planned To Cave On Immigration All Along,"Cruz’s remarks came soon after House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) decided to bring up a “clean” bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, backing down from the effort to use department funding to strip authority for Obama’s executive actions.
+
+""Since December, the outcome has been baked in the cake. It was abundantly clear to anyone watching that leadership in both houses intended to capitulate on the fight against amnesty,"" Cruz said, adding, ""It was a strategy doomed to failure. It’s an old adage in Washington: Never take a hostage you’re not prepared to shoot.""
+
+Cruz's comments referred to the decision made in December 2014 to stall funding only for DHS, which made that agency the GOP's major source of leverage in the immigration battle. The Texas Republican pointed out that he earned the ""animosity and ire"" of his colleagues at that time because he supported threatening to shut down government agencies.
+
+""There was no chance, zero, that Republicans were going to fail to fund the Department of Homeland Security because Republicans care deeply about homeland security,"" Cruz continued.
+
+But Cruz failed to note that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had vowed to prevent all federal agencies, not just DHS, from shutting down. The shutdown strategy was doomed by the fact that the Senate has too few Republicans to overcome opposition from Democrats, who are against the method of using government funding to target White House policies. As a result, McConnell and Boehner had few practical options to achieve Cruz's objective of standing up to Obama through a shutdown.
+
+Still, Cruz implied the leaders did not try very hard, saying they should at least have chosen a better hostage.
+
+""If we had been serious about this fight, and we should have been, the continuing resolution [under which DHS funding expired in February 2015] should have focused on the EPA, or the IRS or the Department of Labor,"" Cruz said. ""Now, those are departments which a majority would be prepared to allow funding to temporarily expire in order to use as leverage.""
+
+When a reporter pointed out that Cruz himself did not take advantage of an opportunity in last week's battle to delay funding a little longer, the senator defended himself, saying: ""I have fought against executive amnesty at every stage using every tool that is available. Leadership has made the decision to capitulate.""
+
+""We see a pattern over and over again. When Republicans are running for office, they tell their constituents they will be conservative, they will honor and defend the Constitution, they will follow through on the principles their constituents are trusting them to follow through upon,"" Cruz said. ""And yet, sadly, in Washington, far too many forget those promises the day after the campaign.""",REAL
+603,The Surprising Voting Rights Issue Both Democrats and Republicans Support,"The Supreme Court gutted a key portion of the law in 2013 and told Congress to provide a fix. But only a handful of Republicans support a House bill that would do so by specifying which states and localities with a history of minority voter suppression require extra scrutiny when changing their voting laws. In the Senate, Democrats still can't find a single GOP co-sponsor for their forthcoming bill.
+
+""I think if someone is judged to have completed their debt to society, then that's certainly something that should be seriously considered,"" said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). ""I don't think someone -- if they paid their debt to society -- why they can't re-enter society.""
+
+Currently, the question of whether an ex-offender can vote in a state or federal election is largely determined by where the person lives. Some states permanently revoke voting rights for people convicted of a felony. Other states, like Maine and Vermont, never strip felons of their voting rights, even while they are in prison. Most states do restore voting rights to ex-felons after they have served their full sentence, but the process for registering again to vote can be burdensome.
+
+Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, said that states are taking action on this front and the “general trajectory is to ease restrictions.” Since 1997, Brennan reports, at least 23 states have expanded voter eligibility or eased the process by which rights are restored.
+
+The issue is also forging unusual alliances on Capitol Hill. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a potential 2016 presidential candidate, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are co-sponsors of the Civil Rights Voting Restoration Act of 2015, which would reinstate voting rights to nonviolent ex-offenders for federal elections, unless an individual is serving a sentence or a term of probation at the time of the election.
+
+""A criminal record is currently one of the biggest impediments to voting in federal elections,"" Paul said in a statement. ""The Civil Rights Voting Restoration Act will reform existing federal law and give low-level ex-offenders another opportunity to vote. This is an issue that I feel strongly about, and I will continue to fight for the restoration of voting rights in the hopes of giving non-violent ex-offenders a second chance.""
+
+Their bill doesn't have any other co-sponsors. But given the sentiments of Graham and McCain, for example, that may be more because it's not on people's radars right now.
+
+But that bill goes further than the Paul-Reid plan: It would restore voting rights for federal elections to anyone, including violent offenders, who is not incarcerated and serving a felony sentence at the time of the election. That appears to be a line Republicans won't cross, given that none are signed onto that bill in either chamber.
+
+HuffPost counted 10 Senate Republicans who are co-sponsors of at least one criminal justice reform bill, and reached out to all of them to see if they support restoring voting rights to ex-offenders. Besides Paul, Graham and Hatch, those senators include John Cornyn (Texas), Mike Lee (Utah), Ted Cruz (Texas), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Johnny Isakson (Ga.), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and David Perdue (Ga.).
+
+Cardin did a little test recently to see what kind of support he'd get on a voting rights measure -- and he got decent results. During last week's Senate budget debate, he offered an amendment to fund an initiative to notify inmates of their voting rights and produce a report on the effect of criminal disenfranchisement laws on minorities. The vote was purely symbolic, but four Republicans supported it: Paul, Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Bob Corker (Tenn.) and Lamar Alexander (Tenn.).",REAL
+3782,Michael Brown's Family To File Wrongful Death Lawsuit,"The family of Michael Brown will file a civil lawsuit against the city of Ferguson, Missouri, and former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, an attorney for the family announced Thursday.
+
+The news comes just one day after the U.S. Department of Justice officially announced its decision not to file federal charges against Wilson for fatally shooting Brown last July.
+
+In a press conference, family attorney Anthony Gray expressed the family’s disappointment in the Justice Department’s decision and announced the next legal actions they plan to take.
+
+“We are officially formulating a civil case that we anticipate will be filed very shortly on behalf of the family,” Gray said. “We plan to demonstrate in a court of law that Wilson’s choice to use deadly force was unreasonable and unnecessary.”
+
+Brown's parents, Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., attended the conference but did not make any comments. However, their frustration with the department's decision is widely shared by many local officials, residents and protesters -- some of whom took to the streets Wednesday evening to demonstrate their outrage.
+
+The criticism was further fueled by a scathing report released by the Justice Department, also on Wednesday. The report revealed that the city of Ferguson had engaged in unconstitutional patrolling practices that routinely discriminated against African-Americans. It also disclosed emails proving racial bias on behalf of Ferguson police officials.
+
+""[It] really just confirms what many of us already knew and what has been experienced by many African-Americans here in the St. Louis region for quite some time,"" St. Louis Alderman Antonio French told HuffPost Live on Wednesday, referring to the report.
+
+""Some of the specific details were shocking, [but] there's a culture that's been allowed to fester in Ferguson and one that's really been experienced by African-Americans for years and boiled over last year,"" French continued.
+
+Attorneys for the Brown family say they hope some level of accountability can be reached through the civil case. Meanwhile, French has taken the lead in calling for the resignation of the chief of the Ferguson Police Department.
+
+“I think some of the specific details outlined in this Department of Justice report really make it impossible for him to stay there,” he said. “When you have the culture that exists with these racist emails ... the stats alone suggest he needs to go.""",REAL
+3444,Audio: Justice Scalia on black students at top schools,"""There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well,"" Scalia said Wednesday during oral arguments in a case involving a race-conscious college admissions plan. The 79-year-old justice, speaking to a hushed courtroom, then referenced a friend-of-the-court brief filed in the case. ""One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas,"" he said, ""they come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they're being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.""
+
+Scalia said he wasn't ""impressed"" that the University of Texas may have fewer African Americans. ""Maybe it ought to have fewer. And maybe some -- you know, when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks admitted to lesser schools, turns out to be less.""
+
+Reid took to the Senate floor Thursday to condemn Scalia's statements. Lewis, a civil rights icon who marched in Selma, released a statement saying he was ""shocked and amazed"" by Scalia. ""His suggestion that African Americans would fare better at schools that are 'less advanced' or on a 'slow track' reminds me of the kind of prejudice that led to separate and unequal school systems—a policy the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional decades ago,"" Lewis said.
+
+The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court sit for their official photograph on October 8, 2010, at the Supreme Court. Front row, from left: Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Anthony M. Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Back row, from left: Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito Jr. and Elena Kagan. Scalia was found dead on February 13 at a Texas ranch he was visiting. – Justice Antonin Scalia was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 to fill the seat vacated by Justice William Rehnquist when he was elevated to chief justice. A constitutional originalist -- and a colorful orator -- Scalia was a member of the court's conservative wing. At the time of his death, Scalia was the court's longest-serving justice. – In 2005, Chief Justice John G. Roberts was nominated by President George W. Bush to succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as an associate justice. After Chief Justice William Rehnquist died, however, Bush named Roberts to the chief justice post. The court has moved to the right during his tenure, although Roberts supplied the key vote to uphold President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. – Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was appointed to the court by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. He is a conservative justice but has provided crucial swing votes in many cases and authored landmark opinions, most notably in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. – Justice Clarence Thomas is the second African-American to serve on the court, succeeding Justice Thurgood Marshall when he was appointed by President George H. W. Bush in 1991. He is a conservative, a strict constructionist who supports states' rights. – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she is a strong voice in the court's liberal wing. – Justice Stephen G. Breyer was appointed to the court in 1994 by President Bill Clinton and is part of the court's liberal wing. – Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006 and is known as one of the most conservative justices to serve on the court in modern times. – Justice Sonia Sotomayor is the court's first Hispanic and third female justice. She was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 and is regarded as a resolutely liberal member of the court. – Justice Elena Kagan is the fourth female justice and is counted among the court's liberal wing. She was appointed in 2010, at the age of 50, by President Barack Obama and is the court's youngest member. On Friday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Scalia should recuse himself from any case before the high court involving discrimination. ""It's so disappointing to hear that statement coming from a justice of the Supreme Court,"" she told Politico. ""It clearly shows a bias."" Janai Nelson, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, was sitting in court when Scalia spoke. ""My first reaction was disbelief and disappointment,"" Nelson said. ""In a case with this much significance, for a Supreme Court justice to make comments that amplify the myth of racial inferiority, is deeply disheartening."" Scalia's comments have also spawned a protest Twitter hashtag, #StayMadAbby, where African-Americans have posted pictures of themselves celebrating their college graduations. The court does not allow video into the room or any type of live broadcasts of oral arguments and only releases audio at the end of each argument week. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have pressured justices to permit live video, with no success. While Scalia's words reverberated outside the legal world, they were familiar to some of those who have been following the legal challenge to affirmative action in higher education. One person who had no visible reaction to Scalia was Justice Clarence Thomas, who rarely speaks during oral arguments. While Thomas and Scalia don't agree on every case, they agree quite a bit. Thomas, the only African American on the bench, has made clear that he thinks public universities should not take race into consideration. He dissented from a 2003 case that upheld the admissions program at the University of Michigan Law school. And as for the lawyer who Scalia was addressing, Gregory S. Garre, he took the question in stride and was quick to respond forcefully. Garre, the former solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration, is defending the University of Texas against a challenge from Abigail Fisher, a white woman from Texas who is suing the university arguing she was denied admission based on her race. ""Frankly, I don't think the solution to the problems with student body diversity can be to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they're going to inferior schools,"" Garre said in response to Scalia. Garre has defended the university before the court on two separate occasions. Like others immersed in the affirmative action debate, he likely recognized that Scalia was referring to the controversial ""mismatch"" theory popularized by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor Jr. in their book, ""Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's intended to Help, and why Universities won't admit it."" They filed a brief in the case, as did Gail Heriot of the University of San Diego School of Law. ""Research indicates that students who attend schools where their entering academic credentials put them towards the bottom of the class are less likely to succeed then similarly-credentialed students attending schools where their academic credentials more closely 'match' the typical student's,"" Heriot wrote. Heriot was not in court to hear Scalia, but she read a transcript of arguments and she defends Scalia's comments. ""He was trying to articulate the extensive literature that shows race-preferential admission policies end up hurting rather than helping their intended beneficiaries, especially in the area of science and engineering,"" she said afterwards. ""We do ourselves a great disservice when we jump all over people for failing to phrase a question in the best possible way,"" Heriot added. The first time the Fisher case was heard by the court in 2012 the justices issued a very narrow opinion and sent the case back down to the lower court to take another look. In a concurring opinion, Thomas echoed the mismatch theory. ""The University admits minorities who otherwise would have attended less selective colleges where they would have been more evenly matched,"" Thomas wrote. ""But, as a result of the mismatching, many blacks and Hispanics who likely would have excelled at less elite schools are placed in a position where underperformance is all but inevitable because they are less academically prepared than the white and Asian students with whom they must compete"" he said. Read: Supreme Court declines to take up ban on assault weapons Thomas, and his other eight colleagues all attended elite universities, a point not lost on Nelson, who took Scalia's comment to also be a dig at historically black colleges and universities. ""In additon to denigrating an entire group of students, he also denigrated many of the institutions that have successfully served African Americans when a majority of the institutions in this country would not,"" she said. Sign up for CNN Politics' Nightcap newsletter, serving up today's best and tomorrow's essentials in politics.",REAL
+2252,The next battle over same-sex marriage,"(CNN) The battle over same-sex marriage may have drawn to a dramatic close Friday at the Supreme Court. But as several justices noted in forceful dissents, the war between religious and LGBT rights is far from over.
+
+In a landmark opinion, a divided Supreme Court ruled that states cannot ban same-sex marriage, establishing a new civil right and handing gay and lesbian advocates a long-sought victory.
+
+President Barack Obama, speaking after the highly anticipated ruling, urged those celebrating to keep in mind that many Americans oppose same-sex marriage ""based on sincere and deeply held beliefs."" Those beliefs, he suggested, should remain a protected part of the country's ""deep commitment to religious freedom.""
+
+Still, fierce battles over religious and LGBT rights, like the one fought this spring in Indiana, seem likely to intensify across the country after Obergefell v. Hodges.
+
+While polls show that a majority of religious Americans now support same-sex marriage, many prominent groups -- such as the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- do not. Leaders from those groups pledged on Friday to seek legal means to shield their beliefs from state interference.
+
+In his sweeping decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote for the majority, briefly mentioned faith groups' right to object to same-sex marriage.
+
+""The First Amendment ensures that religions, those who adhere to religious doctrines and others have protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths,"" Kennedy said.
+
+The point bears repeating, the justice said.
+
+""It must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned.""
+
+But more conservative justices and a number of religious groups chided Kennedy for failing to mention the First Amendment's ""free exercise"" clause.
+
+Religious rights (and rites) aren't limited to preaching and teaching, they argued. They also entail individuals' and organizations' ""free exercise"" of faith, a wide swath of activities that run from sacred ceremonies to performing charitable works and running businesses according to religious principles.
+
+""Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally,"" Justice Clarence Thomas said in his dissent, ""and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.""
+
+He dismissed the majority's nod toward religious liberty as a ""weak gesture,"" arguing that the ruling could have ""ruinous consequences.""
+
+""In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well,"" Thomas said. ""Today's decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter.""
+
+Friday's decision makes it ""all but inevitable,"" the conservative justice said, that competing definitions of marriage will come into conflict. Thomas suggested that pastors and churches will be confronted with demands to participate in and endorse same-sex marriages.
+
+There is historical precedent for such demands, Thomas said, citing Virginia laws that once imposed criminal penalties on pastors who presided over mixed-race marriages.
+
+Chief Justice John Roberts said ""hard questions"" will arise when people of faith exercise their religious liberty in ways that conflict with the new right to same-sex marriage.
+
+What happens, the chief justice asked, when a religious college provides student housing only to heterosexual couples? Or a faith-based adoption agency refuses to place children with same-sex spouses? Would both lose their tax exemptions?
+
+""There is little doubt that these and similar questions will soon be before this Court,"" Roberts continued. ""Unfortunately, people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.""
+
+The conservative justice said that Friday's ruling on same-sex marriage ""is not of special importance to me.""
+
+""It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me,"" Scalia said. ""Today's decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.""
+
+Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, the U.S. Catholic bishops' point-man on religious rights, said Friday's ruling will affect ""thousands"" of state and local statutes across the country. The archbishop said he could foresee ""a lot of legal controversies in terms of the way we organize and run our ministries.""
+
+Most troubling for the Catholic Church, Lori said in a conference call with the media, is that while ruling recognizes religious groups' right to free speech, it doesn't acknowledge ""the right to follow our teachings when we are intersecting with the broader society.""
+
+Evangelicals, too, who make up about 25% of the country's population, pledged to fight the legal implications of Friday's ruling.
+
+""We will not allow the government to coerce or infringe upon the rights of institutions to live by the sacred belief that only men and women can enter into marriage.""
+
+One of the statement's signees, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, called ""religious liberty"" the ""next front in the skirmish in American life.""
+
+The skirmish will likely endure for years, Moore said at a press conference on Friday, with casualties on both sides.
+
+""One of the most tragic results we could possibly see is an unrelenting cultural war from progressives toward those who dissent because of deeply held religious convictions.""",REAL
+717,"Clinton, Sanders Split the Votes in Tuesday's Primaries","Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders split the votes in Tuesday's primaries, with Clinton barely pulling out a victory in Kentucky, while Sanders won a decisive victory in Oregon.
+
+And the socialist senator from Vermont again claimed he can beat presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in the general election in November.
+
+""If the Democratic Party wants to be certain that Donald Trump is defeated – and that we must do – we together are the campaign to do that,"" Sanders said.
+
+Despite the split, Clinton is virtually certain to be the Democrat's nominee and polls are showing a very tight race between her and Trump.",REAL
+7768,"Hillary Clinton staffer: ""Black Voters Are Stupid""","
+A new email released as part of the Wikileaks Podesta dump features Clinton ally Brent Budowsky accusing Hillary operative David Brock of having a plan that relied upon black voters being “stupid”.
+The Wikileaks email ID 31909 , sent to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and another Clinton ally CEO Roy Spence, centers around a discussion of a Bernie Sanders campaign ad which featured “many black faces”.
+Back in January, Clinton operative David Brock caused consternation within the campaign when he publicly claimed that Bernie Sanders didn’t care about black people.
+Budowsky is not impressed with Brock’s outburst, writing in the email, “Brock makes the cardinal mistake of those who bring politics into disrepute with voters. He tells a lie that people will know is a lie, and insults the intelligence of black voters with a kind of elitist racism that Bill and Hillary Clinton should not be seen with.”
+“I guess Brock’s plan is that black voters are stupid and will not watch the ad and believe his lie,” writes Budowsky.
+“I cannot think of anything more desperate, more stupid and more self-destructive than David Brock lying about the Bernie ad and playing a seamy brand of the politics of race using the tactic of deceit on her behalf,” adds the The Hill and Huffington Post columnist, before offering to write a campaign ad for HIllary to counter the Bernie Sanders ad.
+The email once again underscores the Clinton camp’s paranoia about not being able to authentically connect with African-American voters in a way that Bernie Sanders could.
+Some black voters have been reluctant to support Clinton as a result of her support for a 1994 crime bill that resulted in the mass incarceration of young black Americans, whom Hilary referred to at the time as “super predators”.
+
+
+Source 
+",FAKE
+8055,"A Reader Refers Us To Englishman Pat Condell On Brexit, The Trump Election, And “America’s Moment Of Truth”", ,FAKE
+10271,Is this not just the PERFECT icing on the #OctoberSurprise cake?,"— Pedro Lomax (((✟))) (@PedroLomax) October 28, 2016 
+As if today’s news couldn’t get any better … There will never be a National Cyber Security Awareness Month like this one. 
+— Matt Frost (@mattfrost) October 28, 2016 
+You’re kidding, right?",FAKE
+1087,"Sorry, Hillary, but we’re done: Keep repeating racist myths and praising Kissinger and the Reagans. I’m switching to Bernie Sanders","If the 2016 presidential campaign were a football game, the Democrats would be heading into it as two-touchdown favorites. Facing a Republican Party that seems to have collectively lost its mind, America’s purportedly liberal party only needs to put forth a minimally competent candidate to win an election in which that candidate will face either a reality TV star who combines ranting racist rhetoric with a bottomless ignorance of every policy question under the sun, or an extreme right-wing religious fanatic.
+
+With the presidential election all but being handed to them, the Democratic Party’s powers that be have almost unanimously decided that Hillary Clinton is liberal America’s best hope to keep the nation from being taken over by right-wing maniacs. (In terms of endorsements, FiveThirtyEight.com’s formula currently has Clinton ahead of Bernie Sanders by a total of 478 to six. Even the much-reviled Donald Trump has more support among Republican power brokers than Sanders has from Democratic pooh-bahs).
+
+The problem with this decision is that it’s becoming clear that Hillary Clinton is a really bad candidate. I say that not as a Bernie Sanders supporter: my attitude toward the Democratic primary has been that just about the only relevant consideration is the question of whether Clinton or Sanders would be more likely to win the general election, given how catastrophic a GOP win would be.
+
+Until recently, I was assuming that Clinton would be a stronger challenger to either Trump or Cruz, so I was hoping she would win out against Sanders. But I’ve changed my mind about that.
+
+Clinton keeps making serious mistakes – and these mistakes follow a pattern that reveal why she’s making it increasingly difficult for even mildly progressive voters to support her.
+
+Clinton’s latest blunder was her bizarre claim that Nancy and Ronald Reagan played an important role in getting Americans to talk about AIDS in the 1980s: “It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980s,” Clinton told MSNBC. “And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.”
+
+This is not merely false, but the precise inverse of the truth. Ronald Reagan managed to avoid ever mentioning the AIDS epidemic for the first several years of his presidency. The famous activist slogan “Silence = Death” was coined in response to the Reagan administration’s studied refusal to even acknowledge the epidemic. Indeed, the Reagans “started a national conversation” about AIDS in the same sense that Donald Trump has started a national conversation about the extent to which racism characterizes much of the Republican Party’s base.
+
+Clinton’s surreal historical revisionism – which she walked back after a firestorm of criticism – is typical of the eagerness with which she embraces even the most dubious figures, as long as they are members of what my colleague Scott Lemieux calls America’s “overcompensated and underperforming elites.” For example, Clinton continues to cozy up to Henry Kissinger, and to the same bankers who came close to wrecking the world economy just a few years ago, shortly before they started paying her millions of dollars to give speeches to them. A few weeks ago she repeated the racist myth that “radical” Northerners imposed corrupt governments on the defeated South after the Civil War, and thus paved the way for Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. This week she engaged in some good old-fashioned red-baiting, criticizing Sanders for opposing America’s sordid history of dirty wars in Latin America, which she mischaracterized as his support for Communist dictatorships. All of this is both wrong as a matter of principle, and stupid politics to boot. How many votes does she think she’s going to get from (increasingly imaginary) “moderate Republicans” as a consequence of this 1990s-style triangulation? Not nearly as many as she’ll lose among disgusted liberals, who remember that the Contras were terrorists, that Kissinger is a war criminal of the first order, that Reconstruction didn’t cause the virulent racism that undermined it, and that the Reagans’ silence regarding AIDS contributed to countless unnecessary deaths. I will, of course, vote for Clinton if she’s the nominee – she is after all vastly preferable to either Trump or Cruz – but by now this is starting to feel like pointing out that a sprained ankle is preferable to a heart attack.",REAL
+9867,Abby Martin Exposes Hillary Clinton Chair John Podesta,"Videos Abby Martin Exposes Hillary Clinton Chair John Podesta With his brother Tony at the Podesta Group, John is also one of the most powerful corporate lobbyists in the world. The Podesta family weaves their business through John’s DC think tank Center for American Progress, where policies are made for their corporate sponsors. Be Sociable, Share! Screenshot [Youtube] With the Wikileaks release of thousands of emails belonging to John Podesta, very little is known about Podesta himself.
+While he is treated as just a well-meaning Clinton supporter who has had his privacy unjustly exposed, he is actually one of the most powerful people in Washington, who has operating mostly behind-the-scenes. 
+He’s the chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and was the man advising the last two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. 
+With his brother Tony at the Podesta Group, John is also one of the most powerful corporate lobbyists in the world. The Podesta family weaves their business through John’s DC think tank Center for American Progress, where policies are made for their corporate sponsors. 
+Podesta’s emails show that the so-called “progressive” wing of the establishment is really just a neoliberal insiders club of the rich and powerful. In this episode of The Empire Files, Abby Martin exposes political operative John Podesta’s political rise and network of shady corporations, brutal dictatorships and media collaborators. 
+Watch the prelude to this exposé, where Abby exposes Hillary Clinton’s business of corporate shilling and war making.",FAKE
+1071,"Expected wins for Clinton, Trump rivals in big Saturday balloting, but will it be enough?","Polling and caucus sites opened Saturday morning in five states in which rivals to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will try to slow the Democratic and Republican front-runners' march to their respective party’s presidential nomination.
+
+Republicans are caucusing in Kansas, Kentucky and Maine, while Democrats are caucusing in Kansas and Nebraska. Republicans and Democrats also are voting Saturday in the Louisiana primary.
+
+Maine Democrats caucus on Sunday, while voters in both parties go to the polls in the Puerto Rico primary.
+
+Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz is hoping to do well in Kansas, Kentucky and Maine caucuses, and the Louisiana primary. A good showing would help him secure his position as the No. 2 GOP candidate ahead of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. But neither appears to have a path toward winning enough delegates or the nomination.
+
+""Being a conservative cannot just be about how loud you're willing to scream ... or about how many names you call people,"" Rubio said Saturday at CPAC, the annual gathering of conservatives, just outside of Washington.
+
+Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s only primary competitor, is favored to win the Kansas and Nebraska caucuses.
+
+Clinton’s campaign manager braced supporters for the potential setback in a memo Wednesday that suggested the former secretary of state may lose the caucus states this weekend.
+
+“Sen. Sanders has clear advantages and is investing heavily in two upcoming caucuses (Kansas and Nebraska),” Robby Mook wrote in a memo.
+
+In total, 109 Democratic delegates are up for grabs, while Republicans are competing for 155.
+
+Clinton leads Sanders 1,066 to 432 in the delegate race. Either needs 4,763 to win the party nomination.
+
+On the Republican side, Trump leads with 329 delegates, followed by 231 for Cruz, 110 for Rubio and 25 for Kasich. The GOP canidate needs 2,472 to win the nomination, with increasing talk, particularly within the GOP establishment, about having a so-called “broker convention” to stop Trump’s insurgent candidacy.
+
+Trump has won in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia.
+
+Cruz has won in Iowa, Alaska, Oklahoma, Texas and now Kansas. Rubio won Minnesota on Super Tuesday earlier this week.
+
+Republican candidate Ben Carson, meanwhile, suspended his campaign on Friday.
+
+""We are going to make America great again,"" Trump said at a rally Saturday afternoon in Wichita, Kansas, sticking with his signature campaign slogan.
+
+He also tried to appeal to heart land voters with his so-far wining message of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, restoring America's military might and repealing and replacing ObamaCare.
+
+""You premiums are going up like a rocket ship,"" Trump said to cheers from the packed rally.""
+
+Trump late went to north Orlando, Florida, for a rally ahead of the state’s March 15 winner-take-all primary that is considered a must-win for Rubio. A win in Florida and Ohio, another take-all March 15 primary, would be a huge step toward Trump winning the nomination.
+
+On Friday, Trump pulled out of CPAC. Trump had been scheduled to speak at the four-day gathering but said he would be campaigning instead in Kansas and Florida. Florida holds its primaries on March 15.
+
+CPAC organizers suggested they cancelled Trump’s appearance because he wouldn't take questions, a format all invited candidates were asked to follow.
+
+“Guess what, tomorrow is an election,” a Trump spokeswoman said Friday, giving her explanation about why the candidate won’t attend the event.
+
+The CPAC controversy follows a raucous Fox News Republican debate Thursday night in Detroit in which Cruz, Rubio and Kasich teamed up against Trump to cast him as a political salesman willing to say anything and take any position to win the nomination.
+
+They hammered him on alleged inconsistences on his policy details and business dealings, including the now-defunct Trump University, which is being sued for scamming students out of thousands of dollars.",REAL
+8007,"The FBI Union’s President Just Quit, Penned Scathing Open Letter Blasting Comey","Comments 
+Director James Comey of Federal Bureau of Investigation stirred up a hornet’s nest with his decision to interfere in our election by giving House Republicans more ammunition to smear Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over her “email scandal”– and not even everyone in his own agency is happy about it. 
+The head of the FBI’s Agent Association (FBIAA), Reynaldo Tariche , resigned tonight to work in the private sector in protest over Director Comey’s decision to use the FBI as a political tool on behalf of Donald Trump. “Importantly, we will not be used for political gains, and any implication that the FBI Special Agents are unwilling or incapable of performing effective investigations is simply false.'” 
+And quit he should. Comey’s behavior has been most unbecoming as the head of a federal law enforcement agency who is obligated to remain impartial for the good of our nation. The FBI has no idea what the emails that “may be pertinent” that were discovered on disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop actually contain; there was no need to alert Congress and doing so so close to an election is an obvious move to try to tip the scales in favor of the most unqualified and morally abhorrent candidate our nation has ever seen. 
+Read his letter here: 
+Dear Members, 
+After 26 + years of service for the greatest Law Enforcement organization in the world I am retiring from the FBI today. I have accepted a position in the private sector within the Banking Industry. It has truly been a pleasure and honor to serve with the men and women of the FBI in the relentless pursuit of protecting the American people from Domestic and International threats. I will be eternally grateful to have worked side by side with the most dedicated individuals who carry out the FBI mission 24 hours a day seven days a week. 
+My two terms as President of the FBIAA have been spent in a whirlwind of travel, meetings and other important work on behalf of the members of the FBI AA. It has truly been an amazing journey to witness the incredible work being done on a daily basis by the FBI around the world. Equally impressive has been to see how the FBI family helps each other in times of need including; deaths, family illnesses, natural disasters or any unforeseen tragedy. I am confident that incoming FBIAA President Tom O’Connor, the National Executive Board, and our entire FBIAA team will continue the work of advancing the mission of this incredible organization. 
+The FBIAA’s mission includes defending the work and integrity of FBI Special Agents. As a non-partisan organization, comment on political campaigns or candidates is atypical for us, and we intend to keep it that way. Yet, in this intensely partisan election cycle, we find our work—our integrity—questioned as it relates to the investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Thus, honoring our mission, we will continue to remind federal officials and the public that the FBI Special Agents who undertook this investigation did so with an unwavering focus on complying with the law and the Constitution, as we do with all of our investigations. Importantly, we will not be used for political gains, and any implication that the FBI Special Agents are unwilling or incapable of performing effective investigations is simply false. 
+May God bless the FBI family and may God continue to bless the United States of America",FAKE
+1805,True Believer? Why Donald Trump Is The Choice Of The Religious Right,"True Believer? Why Donald Trump Is The Choice Of The Religious Right
+
+When Donald Trump stepped to the podium in a football stadium in Mobile, Alabama, filled with 30,000 people there to hear him spread the gospel of Trump, he was overcome.
+
+""Now I know how the great Billy Graham felt,"" Trump said last month.
+
+Trump and Graham, the famed Baptist revival preacher and counselor to presidents, are not exactly cut from the same cloth. And yet, Trump is winning over Christian conservatives in the current Republican presidential primary.
+
+That's right — the candidate currently leading among the most faith-filled voters is a twice-divorced casino mogul, who isn't an active member of any church, once supported abortion rights, has a history of crass language — and who says he's never asked God's forgiveness for any of it.
+
+If that sounds like an Onion story, it's not. His blunt talk against a broken political system in a country rank-and-file evangelicals believe is veering away from its traditional cultural roots is connecting. He pledges to ""Make America Great Again,"" a positive spin on the similar Tea Party refrain of ""Take Our Country Back.""
+
+That redeeming message — and his tough talk on immigration, foreign policy and the Republican establishment — is quite literally trumping traditional evangelical concerns about a candidate's morality or religious beliefs.
+
+""I've come to see somebody that's not scared to say what he thinks, and he thinks like I think,"" gushed Joe Smart, a security guard who was at a Trump event in Greenville, S.C., last month. ""He's religious, and from what I hear, he's going to change the White House back to Christianity. I pray every night that our nation will come back to God.""
+
+It's all left prominent evangelical leaders in disbelief.
+
+""Trump has made his living as a casino mogul in an industry that preys on the poor and incentivizes immoral and often criminal behavior,"" said Dr. Russell Moore, head of the influential Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
+
+Moore offered a searingly blunt assessment of the current GOP front-runner in an interview with NPR. ""He's someone who is an unrepentant serial adulterer who has abandoned two wives for other women,"" he added. ""He's someone who has spoken in vulgar and harsh terms about women, as well as in ugly and hateful ways about immigrants and other minorities. I don't think this is someone who represents the values that evangelicals in this country aspire to.""
+
+Whether evangelical voters — who have been so key to national Republican presidential success — will heed that message or stick with a candidate who seems so anathema to many of their core beliefs will be tested as the campaign wears on.
+
+Finding Trump Appeal In The Buckle Of The Bible Belt
+
+In the heart of the Bible Belt at a Greenville, S.C., convention center last month — just down the road from the iconic evangelical school Bob Jones University — the line was long to get in to hear Trump's latest sermon against political demons.
+
+When pressed, many in the crowd in the key early primary state said they didn't know about some of Trump's more controversial statements regarding his faith.
+
+On whether he'd ever asked for forgiveness from God for his sins, he told pollster Frank Luntz this in Iowa in July:
+
+He went on to describe the sacrament of communion this way:
+
+Audrey Lindsey of Spartanburg, S.C., said she hadn't heard those comments, but believed his later exhortations of his faith. ""He says his favorite book is the Bible,"" Lindsey said, ""and I believe that's what it's going to take — good, honest Christian people praying for this country.""
+
+But Trump, who says he ranks the Bible just ahead of his own Art of the Deal, has been unable in this campaign to name his favorite Bible verse or even testament.
+
+""Well, I wouldn't want to get into it, because to me, that's very personal,"" Trump told Bloomberg. When pressed, he demurred, saying, ""I don't want to get into specifics.""
+
+He said the Old and New Testaments were ""probably equal.""
+
+So, is Trump one of those ""good, honest Christian people""?
+
+""That's a question mark,"" Lindsey said. ""That's between him and God. I know people make mistakes, and you can change your life. I'm hoping through this situation that if he's not a Christian, he'll come to know Christ.""
+
+Larry Linsin of Seneca, S.C., is also willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
+
+""People do change, if it's an honest, legitimate turnaround,"" said Linsin, who is also considering voting for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, someone with long evangelical credentials. ""None of us has a perfect past.""
+
+'I Love Them. They Love Me.'
+
+Like with most things, Trump is confident about his appeal to evangelical voters.
+
+""I love them. They love me,"" he said in a press conference following his Greenville speech. ""I am protestant — I am Presbyterian. I love the evangelicals. Why do they love me? You'll have to ask them — but they do.""
+
+The polls so far bear that out. A national CNN poll out last week showed Trump (32 percent) and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson (28 percent) as the top choices among self-identified evangelicals.
+
+In South Carolina, a state where nearly two-thirds of the GOP electorate identifies as evangelical or born-again Christians, Trump led Carson 33 to 13 percent, according to an August Monmouth University poll. In Iowa, Monmouth had Trump narrowly behind Carson with religious voters.
+
+It's an astonishing development, particularly considering the rest of the Republican presidential field. He leads a Southern Baptist minister in former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, two sons of preachers in Cruz and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, plus former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who won over Iowa evangelicals four years ago to take the first presidential nominating contest.
+
+Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in Iowa and president of The Family Leader, said many religious voters see a kinship with Trump in his targets.
+
+""It's not surprising is that the enemy of our enemy is our friend,"" Vander Plaats said. ""That's the art of political warfare. He's calling out the establishment, the 'media elite,' and he's calling out a lot of people.""
+
+James Guth, a professor of political science at Furman University in Greenville who studies the intersection of religion and politics, said he, like many, have been ""baffled"" by the rise of Trump. But he echoed Vander Plaats in noting that evangelicals like that he's attacking a common enemy — the GOP establishment.
+
+""He's quite clearly putting it to the Republican Party,"" Guth said, ""and a lot of evangelical Christians feel like they've been neglected by the Republican Party.""
+
+The Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody explained it this way in July:
+
+Robert Jeffress, pastor of the megachurch First Baptist Dallas, wrote that evangelical voters aren't under any delusion that Trump believes the same as them. Instead, they're just glad he's closer to their beliefs than President Obama:
+
+When the Christian World Magazine surveyed 94 top evangelical leaders in July about who they support for 2016, Trump was near the bottom of the pack. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was their choice.
+
+Moore contends that polls showing Trump ahead may be inaccurately identifying evangelicals and not differentiating among people who are committed, regular churchgoers.
+
+""There ought to be a criterion of character for candidates for public office,"" Moore said. ""Someone who has a life and a tenor of life that is so obviously at odds with what evangelicals claim to be their values, ought to cause some alarm.""
+
+Trump's lack of support among leaders may be because they are skeptical that he's a true believer. In addition to his past support for abortion rights, his divorces and inability to identify Bible verses, questions remain about his moral conviction on abortion and same-sex marriage. And there are holes in his story about something as basic as where he goes to church.
+
+Trump recently agreed with an interviewer's suggestion that a good Supreme Court nominee would be his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. But she supports abortion rights. Many of Trump's rivals and conservative groups, like Concerned Women for America, pounced.
+
+Trump talks fondly of growing up going to Sunday School at First Presbyterian Church in the Jamaica section of Queens, N.Y. When asked by NPR where he currently attends, he said he goes to Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.
+
+Yet the church says he's not an active member.
+
+What's more, Marble Collegiate is part of the Reformed Church in America — typically considered more of a mainline rather than evangelical denomination. The church is supportive of gay rights, according to its website.
+
+Vander Plaats — who backed the Iowa winners in both 2008 (Huckabee) and 2012 (Santorum) and will reveal his pick for president around Thanksgiving this year — said he thinks Trump is ""very genuine."" He trusts that his conversion on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage is real.
+
+But Vander Plaats noted that Trump's lack of support for Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who was jailed for not issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, could be a problem for him. Huckabee and Cruz, on the other hand, rallied to her side and stood with her as she was released from jail Tuesday.
+
+""[Voters] will hold his feet to the fire on a very real issue,"" Vander Plaats said, ""and that's a danger issue for him.""
+
+Trump will hold a gathering of evangelical leaders at the end of the month. But it's led by Paula White, a Florida televangelist who preaches the ""prosperity gospel"" — a belief that it's God's will to financially bless devout Christians, something controversial in many evangelical circles.
+
+Can The Support Of The Rank-And-File Last?
+
+Throughout the summer, Trump defied political gravity. After each gaffe that would have been fatal for a conventional candidate, Trump has instead only soared.
+
+The large field of candidates is helping Trump with evangelicals. There isn't one candidate the religious right has rallied around, so their support is split.
+
+Guth, for one, is skeptical Trump's appeal can last. ""I think as time goes on, many people in the evangelical community will begin to have reservations,"" he predicted. ""Some of that fascination with Trump will eventually wear off once they become more aware of his downside.""
+
+It very well could be that as religious conservatives learn more about Trump's positions or another candidate connects as the primaries get closer, their support fades. But Moore conceded that evangelicals have not always supported the candidate who lines up exactly with what they believe. But even of those candidates, they were always men who espoused a legitimate moral turnaround.
+
+Religious conservatives are credited with fueling George W. Bush's 2000 election and 2004 re-election despite his past with drugs and alcohol. And one of their heroes is Ronald Reagan, who himself was divorced.
+
+Bush, of course, is the quintessential redemption story. While he never expressed publicly that he was ""born again,"" he did point to a 1985 conversation with the aforementioned Billy Graham. Bush wrote in his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep, that Graham ""planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year.""
+
+Trump has pointed to no such conversion.
+
+""As of right now, Donald Trump is the incarnation of a bumper sticker,"" Moore said. ""The support for Donald Trump is a way of sending message of anger with the status quo, and there are many people angered with the status quo. But I don't think that that necessarily translates into people wanting to hand the nuclear codes to that living bumper sticker.""",REAL
+4264,Democrats scramble for pivotal bloc in the next 2 contests: Minority voters,"The race for the Democratic presidential nomination turned sharply Wednesday into a battle for Hispanic and African American voters, who are expected to play a decisive role in a long list of upcoming contests in Southern and Western states.
+
+Although former secretary of state Hillary Clinton enjoys a dramatic advantage over Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) among minorities, his resounding victory Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary gives him a shot of momentum that he hopes could turn that tide.
+
+Making clear how crucial minority support will be, Sanders’s first stop after leaving New Hampshire was in Harlem, where he met Wednesday morning with the Rev. Al Sharpton and Benjamin Jealous, the former head of the NAACP.
+
+“If the elections were held today in both those states, we would lose,” Sanders said in an interview, referring to Nevada and South Carolina. “But I think we have momentum, I think we have a shot to win, and if we don’t win, we’ll do a lot better than people think we will.”
+
+Swamped by a wave of populist support for Sanders in New Hampshire, Clinton’s campaign signaled Wednesday that the spectacular loss will not throw her off a careful course set months ago that relies in part on strong support among minorities.
+
+With a blast of announcements about endorsements, travel plans and more, the Clinton campaign sought to turn to subjects — gun control, criminal justice, the water crisis in Flint, Mich. — that speak to African American and blue-collar voters in the states that vote next.
+
+“There is no change to our core argument, our plan, and you saw that in what we are saying as we look to the states that vote in March,” Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon said Wednesday.
+
+The Sanders campaign, meanwhile, predicted that once voters in the next round of nominating states tune in, his message of economic fairness will resonate regardless of race. Sanders has argued that many of his initiatives — including a higher minimum wage, paid family leave and free college tuition — should be more appealing to African Americans and Latinos, given the greater share of economically struggling families in those communities.
+
+Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s campaign manager, said that internal polling is starting to show movement in Sanders’s direction among younger voters of all backgrounds in upcoming states.
+
+“Younger voters are clearly the strongest group for Senator Sanders, and this is sort of reminiscent of the Obama campaign — where younger voters were the president’s strongest bloc as well — across racial lines,” Weaver said.
+
+Clinton had no public appearances Wednesday. She and Sanders meet for another Democratic debate on Thursday in Milwaukee. Clinton is expected to strike a more aspirational, optimistic tone that is a tacit acknowledgment that simply knocking down Sanders’s ideas as unrealistic was not enough.
+
+A chief complaint among Clinton backers appalled by her 22-point loss Tuesday in a state with long and fond ties to the Clinton political franchise is that she isn’t getting through to voters. Exit polling and other data show that Clinton did not connect in New Hampshire — not with men, not with women, not with the young and not with blue-collar voters.
+
+The next two Democratic contests will come in Nevada, where 30 percent of the Democratic electorate in 2008 was black or Hispanic, and in South Carolina, where 55 percent of the 2008 Democratic electorate was black. In March, another slew of Southern states with large African American populations will vote.
+
+Clinton has long been thought to have a Southern “firewall” — an insurmountable advantage with minority voters. Sanders has never demonstrated an ability to attract minorities; his strong showing in Iowa and his trouncing of Clinton in New Hampshire were in states, like his home state of Vermont, where more than 90 percent of the population is white.
+
+An NBC News-Wall Street Journal-Marist poll taken in January in South Carolina showed Clinton with the support of 74 percent of black voters, compared with 17 percent for Sanders.
+
+Tad Devine, a strategist for the Sanders campaign, said that Sanders need not win a majority of black voters in South Carolina in order to put together a coalition with white voters to beat Clinton.
+
+In South Carolina, the Sanders campaign is paying “dozens” of canvassers $15 an hour to go door to door, primarily in the black community, to pitch his candidacy, Weaver said. Cornel West, the noted black scholar who has fallen out of favor with many African Americans because of his sharp criticism of President Obama, also has campaigned extensively in South Carolina for Sanders. Atlanta rapper Killer Mike, another Obama critic, has helped spread Sanders’s message in appearances, online discussions and social-media posts.
+
+Clinton has been quietly organizing in the state since April and has hosted 1,900 grass-roots events. During a recent weekend of campaigning, aides say the campaign contacted 100,000 voters through canvassing and phone banks. Mothers who have lost children to gun violence, including some who were shot by police officers, are planning to campaign on her behalf in South Carolina and other Southern states, and celebrities will be enlisted to visit barbershops and beauty salons to talk up Clinton’s campaign.
+
+“We’re not fighting to win a certain percentage of the vote, we’re fighting to earn the support of the community, we’re fighting for every last vote,” said Marlon Marshall, Clinton’s director of states and political engagement. “She has a multi-decade history of fighting for the African American community. Throughout this entire campaign we’ve seen her go into these communities, have these conversations, talking about issues that matter to the African American community. She’s not just now doing this, she’s done this her whole life, and that’s an important point to make.”
+
+Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) predicted that Clinton’s loss in New Hampshire would not shake her support in his state.
+
+“It won’t matter a whole lot,” he said even before the polls had closed in New Hampshire on Tuesday. He said there have been some signs of support for Sanders on college campuses around the state. “There’s not been a big surge. The reliable primary voters that I know don’t seem to have shifted at all.”
+
+Clinton’s African American allies unleashed a wave of criticism against Sanders on Wednesday, strongly criticizing him for being “absent” on issues that matter to black voters — but demonstrating an awareness that she may be vulnerable, in the wake of New Hampshire, to an erosion of support.
+
+“Bernie Sanders as mayor, as a member of the House, as a member of the United States Senate, has been missing in action on issues that are important to the African Americans,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said on a conference call with reporters.
+
+In addition to rolling out the support of African American celebrities such as Angela Bassett this week, Clinton landed the endorsement of the South Carolina House Democratic leader, J. Todd Rutherford, who joined in the criticism of Sanders.
+
+Rutherford faulted Sanders for voting in favor of a 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which has been blamed for helping usher in an era of mass incarceration. Bill Clinton, who signed the bill into law as president, has expressed regret for the consequences of the legislation.
+
+Jaime Harrison, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, is remaining neutral because of his post. He pointed squarely to the reasons that African American and female support is crucial to a Democratic victory in his state.
+
+In the most recent competitive Democratic primary, in 2008, 61 percent of the electorate was female, and 55 percent was African American, Harrison said. That combination means that the key voting bloc in South Carolina are black women.
+
+“If you want to know who is going to win, you need to talk to African American women,” Harrison said.
+
+For now, they are predisposed to support Clinton. If Sanders has any chance of making it close or of winning, Harrison said, “he has to cut into her support among African American women.”
+
+Hillary Clinton’s poor showing with young voters and with women of nearly every age in both Iowa and New Hampshire gives many of her allies shivers, and Sanders’s inroads among African Americans have raised alarm.
+
+Sanders has won the support of Jealous, the former NAACP head, and he met Wednesday with him and Sharpton, the civil rights leader. Sharpton said he will wait until a scheduled meeting with Clinton next week before issuing an endorsement.
+
+“My generation was the first generation raised in the era of mass incarceration,” Jealous told reporters after the meeting. “My children are now 3 and 10, and I do not intend for my children to be food for our prisons the way that my brothers and sisters have been. There is no candidate in this race who is fiercer in standing up for those who need allies in the struggle than Bernie Sanders.”
+
+Sanders also scored surprise support Wednesday from influential African American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had earlier excoriated Sanders for not supporting reparations for slavery.
+
+The Congressional Black Caucus is moving quickly to defend Clinton. The CBC’s leaders said they will appear Thursday morning at a club adjacent to the Democratic National Committee to endorse Clinton for president, through the CBC PAC, and then send many of their members to states, including South Carolina, where black voters are crucial.
+
+“It’s one thing to endorse and do nothing. It’s another thing to endorse and to go to work,” said Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.), chairman of the CBC PAC.
+
+Meeks said that 90 percent of the 20-member board of the political action committee voted to endorse Clinton, none voted for Sanders and a few, including Clyburn, the No. 3 House Democratic leader, abstained because they had not yet endorsed in the race.
+
+Clyburn, in an interview with MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” reiterated earlier comments to The Washington Post that he is considering endorsing Clinton after previously saying he would stay neutral until the primary vote in his state.
+
+Sanders’s rise, particularly among young voters, even young African American voters, has struck a nerve with veteran members of the caucus who think these voters are behaving naively.
+
+“Many of these are first-time voters, and Senator Sanders’s message resonates with the younger generation because of the promises that he is making,” said Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), chairman of the caucus. “But Mrs. Clinton and others are going to challenge the message by suggesting that it is unrealistic to believe that we can accomplish all of the things that Senator Sanders proposes.”
+
+Scott Clement, Paul Kane and Vanessa Williams contributed to this report.",REAL
+8915,US Abstains From UN Vote Against Cuba Embargo,"Embargo Remains Politically Contentious Within the US   
+For the first time ever, the US has abstained from the UN vote denouncing the ongoing US embargo of Cuba. The resolution passed through the general assembly 191-0, with the US and Israel the only ones abstaining. 
+The UN has been voting overwhelmingly against the embargo for decades, but it is only in the past year that President Obama has started to criticize the embargo himself, and has sought to ease a lot of the long-standing restrictions on the island nation. 
+The matter is hugely politically contentious within the US, however, with many in the Republican Congress condemning the White House for easing the restrictions, and the Congressional leadership so far preventing any more easing of the restrictions on commerce. 
+The UN resolution itself is non-binding, and the real significance is not that it passed, but rather that the US abstained, which while reflecting the administration’s position is unusual, as it criticizes the US Congress internationally.  ",FAKE
+10496,"The Products that Make Men Grow Breasts, Linked to Cancers of the Prostate and Liver","Owned by Unilever, the Axe brand includes a range of men’s grooming products with many of the ingredients never even tested for safety according to the C.I.R. – Cosmetic Ingredient Review. Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals 
+Axe products are loaded with endocrine disrupting chemicals. Endocrine disruptorsare exogenous, synthetic chemicals that have hormone-like effects on both humans and wild-life and interfere with the endocrine system by either mimicking or blocking our natural hormones and disrupting their respective body functions. Member scientists of the Endocrine Society issued a report in which they claim: 
+“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostrate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology.” 
+New studies are also revealing that these harmful chemicals may be causing physical feminization in males. A study published by the International Journal of Andrology found that feminization of boys can now be seen through their play habits. 
+Medical experts are now wondering whether exposure to years of these toxic chemicals is part of the reason so many older men are low on testosterone and experiencing erectile dysfunction. So they take a little blue pill and get exposed to even more chemicals and the cycle continues. Aluminum Zirconium Tetrachlorohydrex Gly 
+Aluminum zirconium tetrachlorohydrex gly is the active ingredient in Axe deodorant products. One or more animal studies show kidney or renal system effects at very low doses, mammalian cells show positive mutation results, animal studies show reproductive effects at moderate doses. 
+Aluminum was first recognized as a human neurotoxin in 1886, before being used as an antiperspirant. A neurotoxin is a substance that causes damage to nerves or nerve tissue. 
+COCAMIDOPROPYL BETAINE 
+COCAMIDOPROPYL BETAINE is a very toxic ingredient which has been linked to cancer in animal tests. The biggest danger of using a product with cocamidopropyl betaine is its potential contamination with nitrosamines . 
+Nitrosamines are created when nitrosating agents are combined with amines. Nitrosamines have been identified as one of the most potent classes of carcinogens, having caused cancer in more than 40 different animal species as well as in humans. PPG-14 Butyl Ether 
+PPG stands for popypropylene glycol, which is made from a completely artificial petroleum product, methyl oxirane. Another name for that is propylene oxide (which is a probable human carcinogen). Propylene oxide is also an irritant and highly flammable. Butyl ethers are in the paraben family, and they are toluene derivatives (toxic petrochemical compounds). Toluene has proven to have a harmful affect on the reproductive system while parabens have been linked to cancer. 
+PEG-8 Distearate 
+According to a report in the International Journal of Toxicology by the Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR) committee, impurities found in various PEG compounds include ethylene oxide; 1,4-dioxane; polycyclic aromatic compounds; and heavy metals such as lead, iron, cobalt, nickel, cadmium, and arsenic. Many of these impurities are linked to cancer. BHT 
+There have been many studies which demonstrate that BHT accumulates over time in the body, having a toxic impact on the lungs, liver and kidneys amongst other negative effects. A study by Gann in 1984 showed that BHT was capable of promoting chemically-induced forestomach and bladder cancer in male rats. 
+A 1988 Swedish study by Thompson looked at both BHT and BHA. They found that both were toxic and tumour promoting. Both antioxidants were observed to be cytotoxic in a concentration-dependent manner at concentrations ranging from 100 to 750 microM. At equimolar concentrations BHT was more cytotoxic than BHA.",FAKE
+5631,Post-Maidan Ukraine Has Become a Full Fledged Totalitarian State - Volodymyr Chemerys,"Media skeptic Post-Maidan Ukraine Has Become a Full Fledged Totalitarian State 
+In Ukraine, the state apparatus, far-right movements and patriotic citizens are working together to shut down debate and silence criticism   Open Democracy 
+This article, which originally appeared in Ukrainian on a Ukrainian website, is indicative of a growing realization in Ukraine that those who supported the ""revolution"" for freedom and democracy in that country were duped. The author, however, sadly maintains the baseless preconception that Russia is the ultimate model of totalitarianism that Ukraine must avoid - in fact today's Russia bares no resemblance to the reign-of-terror state Ukraine has degenerated into. But the acknowledgement that the war in Donbass is being used by the Kiev regime to maintain control over society is very significant 
+Under Ukraine’s pre-Maidan criminal regime, any pressure on journalists used to provoke a wave of indignation. This indignation, which came from journalists, human rights defenders and civic activists themselves, even became a precursor to the first Maidan in independent Ukraine — the protests under the banner of “Ukraine without Kuchma”. 
+Information about temnyky, the authorities’ secret instructions to the press about what they should and should not report, and the murders of critics of the regime invariably provoked protests. The arrest of a journalist solely for expressing his opinion in print could raise a wave, even a tsunami, of public outrage. Indeed, in 2004, putting an end to temnyky was one of the slogans behind the Orange protest. pa-25751119-1_2.jpg March 2016: 2,000 people rally in support of Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko at Independence Square in Kiev. (c) Sergei Chuzavkov / AP / Press Association Images. 
+In post-Maidan Ukraine, temnyky , arrests and censorship have become commonplace . What’s more, repression against dissidents and even murder have become socially acceptable . The murder of the journalist Oles Buzyna in April 2015 or the burning of dozens of people in Odesa in May 2014 now find their justification in the speeches of “ patriots ”. Meanwhile, former opposition journalists who gained seats as parliamentary deputies refuse to defend their colleague Ruslan Kotsaba, the blogger who spent a year and a half in jail for his views. In all, over 100 journalists , bloggers and indeed ordinary people who expressed their views about the war in the Donbas, conscription , the constitutional order of Ukraine (law enforcement authorities qualify such views as “ separatism ”) and other issues have been criminally prosecuted in Ukraine for their publications. 
+The boldest predictions of George Orwell’s 1984 have come to pass — phrases like “civil war” have become taboo. In their place, we have newspeak. In particular, the newspeak term “hybrid war”, which means everything in our mass media from military action in the east to an article in the New York Times. 
+To be fair, it should be noted that justifications of violence and murder of “enemies” have not been accepted by society as a whole — only by one segment of social media, the mass media and those who call themselves “Maidan activists”. However, that fact does not bestow a rosier vista of Ukraine today. Critics of the current state of affairs generally remain silent for fear of repression or they censor themselves. Meanwhile, our mass media presents the postings of the “Facebook Hundred” or the speeches of “patriots” as though they were the voice of the entirety of Ukrainian society. 
+It used to be that the prohibition of an opposition party would evoke society’s indignation. After all, there were no precedents for this after 1991 in Ukraine. Now, however, banning the Communist Party of Ukraine and a number of other parties was met with silence inside the country. Only international human rights organisations protested the ban. 
+The practice of “five minutes of hatred” (again reminiscent of Orwell) has become commonplace. True, these “five minutes”— mass attacks in social media and the news media against Nadia Savchenko, Tetiana Montian, Stanislav Serhienko, Volodymyr Zelensky as well as “anti-corruption activists” and “euro-optimists”— last not for five minutes, but often weeks on end. The initiators of such campaigns (the authors of the first posts) are advisors to the president (Yuri Biriukov), public officials (Anton Herashchenko, Georgy Tuka) or structures that belong to representatives of the pro-government People’s Front (Mykola Kniazhytsky, Serhiy Pashynsky). 
+Is it right to talk about signs and tendencies of totalitarianism in post-Maidan Ukraine? And how important is it to dwell on them, to emphasise them? 
+Informing has become socially acceptable in post-Maidan Ukraine. The State Security Agency (SBU) encourages it. The website Myrotvorets (“Peacemaker”) collects informers’ reports and regularly publishes lists of “enemies” — journalists and civic activists. These lists often become an instruction of sorts for the actions of ultra-right paramilitary groups, who use violence against “traitors”, attacking participants in social protests, anti-war, anti-fascist meetings, threatening and even beating up journalists. 
+For example, the Myrotvorets website published lists of journalists who were careless enough to get press accreditation in the Donetsk People’s Republic, resulting in a wave of brutal threats against them by “patriots” . International human rights organisations and OSCE Representative on Media Freedom Dunja Mijatovic were forced to take a stand given that foreign journalists and not just Ukrainians were among those subject to attack. The lists of “undesirable people” created by activists of the ultra-right Azov Civic Corps became the basis for attacks on left-wing and anti-fascist activists. 
+Something really has happened to us —Ukraine has changed after the last Maidan. From a country that stood out for its level of civic freedoms on the territory of the former USSR, it is transforming into a copy of the Russian Federation in terms of the suppression of those freedoms. 
+Are we actually agreeing to this? 
+Practically according to Arendt 
+The facts above show that several aspects of civic life in today’s Ukraine are under the control either of state organs or non-state far-right formations. And citizens who want to express views that are not approved by these formations face threats, violence or criminal prosecutions. 
+A number of NGOs and internet resources monitor what bloggers say on social media, the publications and activities of journalists and civic activists, appearances by actors and singers (both Ukrainian and Russian), television broadcasts, films and peaceful gatherings. The result of this “monitoring” is usually an appeal to state bodies such as the SBU, the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Information (the “Ministry of Truth” as it is called by many journalists), National Council for Television and Radio, State Film Agency, demanding that criminal charges be brought against certain people, that broadcast of certain television programmes or films be prohibited, that television broadcast licences be revoked. 
+One example is the Vidsich page in social media, and the activity of the “Citizens’ Council” of the State Film Agency, in response to whose submissions a number of Ukrainian and Russian television programmes were not allowed to be shown. In many instances, state bodies actually bring criminal charges against journalists (the case against Ruslan Kotsaba was brought on the basis of a denunciation of an informer) and they prohibit certain films. The April 2016 ban on broadcasting the cult 1970s Soviet film Garage is symptomatic of this practice . rian_02928582.lr_.ru_1_0.jpg 4 September: the Kyiv headquarters of Inter TV, a major Ukrainian broadcaster, suffers an arson attack. (с) RIA Novosti. In other incidents, ultra-right activists, openly racist and Nazi (such as Azov) formations have themselves attacked television stations such as Ukraina and Inter, social protests, anti-war meetings, meetings with left wing and antifascist banners and symbols, actions of the LGBT community . As a rule, these attacks take place with the police passively standing by. 
+During these attacks on mass media outlets, the attackers demand changes to their editorial policy and the portrayal of events in Ukraine according to their “patriotic” point of view only. As a result of this pressure, attacks and criminal prosecutions citizens refrain from stating their views in public and the mass media censors itself. 
+The initiators of campaigns against dissent are typically the representatives of ultra-right formations, as well as those civic activists who previously presented themselves and currently do so as people with a liberal and democratic outlook. However, these campaigns succeed primarily as a result of either the support or the inactivity of state institutions. 
+In essence, a mechanism has been created in post-Maidan Ukraine to control citizens expressing their thoughts and opinions 
+Apart from that, state bodies also take an active role in restricting civil rights. The Verkhovna rada has adopted a set of such laws. In particular, changes have been made to Ukraine’s Criminal Code that permit the prosecution of people who oppose conscription and those who call for a halt to military operations, or “for opposing the Ukrainian army”. The 2015 law on “decommunisation” established the basis for banning a number of political parties and prosecuting citizens who hold left-wing views. 
+During 2014-2015, Ukraine’s parliament introduced changes to existing articles and introduced new ones in the special section of the Criminal Code “Crimes against national security” — Articles 109, 110, 110-2, 111, 112, 113, 114 and 114-1. According to these norms, any actions, public calls or the circulation of materials advocating the fall of the existing order are crimes that incur prison sentences of up to 15 years. In today’s judicial proceedings, the state prosecutor interprets these legal norms in such a way as to treat any approval of the Soviet experience or speaking out against the violation of civic and social rights in Ukraine, sympathy for a federal system of government or criticism of the general military mobilisation (normal things in democratic countries) as grave crimes, up to and including “state treason”. 
+In essence, a mechanism has been created in post-Maidan Ukraine to control citizens expressing their thoughts and opinions, as well as a mechanism to suppress freedom of speech, expression, assembly and association. This is a combined mechanism made up of cycles of action by state and non-state bodies. 
+Today, at the end of 2016, this mechanism is not all encompassing, but it already bears the marks of totalitarianism. Much in accordance with the classical works of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and of Karl Popper’s The Open Society. 
+To control everything 
+The numerous investigators of totalitarianism didn’t agree on a common definition. That why it’s worth identifying what the classical works share in common. 
+Thus, totalitarianism is a system of social relations that establishes full (total) control over the important aspects of people’s lives. Above all, over the social and political aspects. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956) declined to give an abstract definition of the term and proposed instead an empirical approach on the basis of the practice of fascist Italy (where this term originated), Nazi Germany and the USSR. In their treatment, totalitarianism was not so much full control over a person’s activity (which is impossible in principle) as the absence to any limits to such control. 
+Only social movements, movements of citizens who have become conscious of their social interests, can destroy the movement of mass men united around “a single way of thinking” 
+The subject of control: Arendt distinguishes between the totalitarian state and the totalitarian movement. Until the time a totalitarian movement leads to a totalitarian state, it will attempt to control the activity of the citizenry. For example, with the help of people in black shirts and brown shirts. On the other hand, the state apparatus (its special services, censors) will not be able to completely control the citizenry without the assistance of formally non-state actors: Party committees, Komsomol or Hitler Youth and especially police informers. The latter are the most important mechanism of control because they allow the state “to listen in on everyone”. Therefore, the subject of total control over society is not the state alone but also the totalitarian movements. 
+According to Arendt totalitarian movements and states have in common the conception of an objective enemy. Totalitarianism can hardly exist without such a conception. After all, it must explain to the popular masses the reasons why it needs to restrict their civic rights and why they must endure total control: 
+The introduction of the notion of “objective enemy” is much more decisive for the functioning of totalitarian regimes than the ideological definition of the respective categories. If it were only a matter of hating Jews or bourgeois, the totalitarian regimes could, after the commission of one gigantic crime, return, as it were, to the rules of normal life and government. As we know, the opposite is the case. The category of objective enemies outlives the first ideologically determined foes of the movement; new objective enemies are discovered according to changing circumstances. 
+Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism 
+There already exists in contemporary Ukraine a functioning mechanism of control over the expression of people’s views and their social and political activity. It lies in uncovering treason (the meme that became widespread here over the past two years) and by neutralising treason through criminal prosecution, violence, campaigns of persecution in social media and mass media, by establishing “a single way of thinking” through propaganda and newspeak. 
+The most important element in this mechanism is self restraint or self censorship. When one part of society accepts the argument that it is necessary to restrict their civil rights and indeed the rights of all citizens for the sake of “victory” over the enemy, the objective enemy. 
+Erich Fromm called this process a flight from freedom. 
+War as the basis for totalitarian tendencies 
+The empirical evidence shows us that totalitarianism was not introduced from outside the three model countries (fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the USSR) or in opposition to their internal political processes. It was a domestic product. However, not every country in which such tendencies appear in the form of totalitarian movements necessarily become totalitarian states. Nor can we say that the totalitarian tendencies appeared in Ukraine as a result of someone’s evil intent, say Putin’s or Poroshenko’s, because these tendencies are the result of social and political processes in the specific conditions of war. And for now there is no basis to claim that we will surely fall into the abyss of totalitarianism. 
+But there are evident totalitarian tendencies in Ukraine today. And they have appeared as a result of societal processes, in the first instance as a result of the war. 
+The general condition for the emergence of totalitarian tendencies and their consolidation is that objective enemy. And this enemy becomes recognised and felt by everyone precisely during a war. It was no accident that German Nazism grew out of the traumatic experience of the First World War. 
+The war in the east has become the main argument for justifiying control over citizens’ expressions of their views and their actions. August 2016: Ukrainian soldiers play table tennis at a damaged swimming pool in the village of Marinka, near Donetsk. (c) Max Black AP/Press Association Images. 
+The division of people between “us” and “the enemies”, characteristic of a state of war, is a foundation for repressing those that “patriotic” movements place in the opposing camp. You can then remove their civil rights, or it may indeed be necessary to do so. Otherwise they might overwhelm you. 
+Accordingly, the level of public discussion typical of a democratic and pluralistic society is significantly depressed in a society experiencing totalitarian tendencies. The only argument typically appearing during such a discussion is naming (slandering) one’s opponent as “an agent of the enemy”. After that any other argument is useless. That is, even discussion itself isn’t becomes superfluous. 
+In our particular situation such a “discussion” has descended into a caricature. For example, after the tragic events of 31 August 2015 in front of the parliament when representatives of the government and the far right Svoboda party started calling each other “agents of the Kremlin”. 
+Something really has happened to us — Ukraine has changed after the last Maidan 
+War is a self sufficient condition for a totalitarian mentality to be formed, or even a necessity. An end to war means the loss of the justification and the arguments in favour of control and prohibitions. And it therefore constitutes a danger to the very existence of these totalitarian movements. 
+These are all elements in the construction of the mass man according to Arendt. In fact, a totalitarian society is composed of such mass men. 
+Dynamic balance 
+Is it right to talk about signs and tendencies of totalitarianism in post-Maidan Ukraine? And how important is it to dwell on them, to emphasise them? 
+It is important that these tendencies are not ignored. After all, not every country where such totalitarian tendencies and movements have appeared went on to become a totalitarian state. 
+The two fundamental factors of totalitarian practice today in Ukraine — the state apparatus and ultra right movements — are in a dynamic balance. Complementing and at the same time combating one another, they have occupied their place on the political terrain of this country for two and a half years now in an attempt to control civil society. 
+Apart from that there is no other important feature characteristic of all classical totalitarian states. There is neither authoritarianism , nor a supreme leader. 
+But this balance can be upset at any time. 
+In what direction it moves – towards totalitarianism or democracy – depends on how social processes unfold in Ukraine. Only social movements, movements of citizens who have become conscious of their social interests, can destroy the movement of mass men united around “a single way of thinking” for the sake of “victory over the objective enemy” and total control over oneself and one’s fellow citizens.",FAKE
+3114,Pope Francis arrives in New York City for second stop on US trip,"Pope Francis kicked off his second United States stop in New York City with a Thursday evening prayer at St. Patrick's Cathedral, one of the nation's best-known churches.
+
+Thousands of people lined up along Fifth Avenue to greet him with cheers as he made his way in his open-sided popemobile to the center of one of the nation's largest Roman Catholic archdioceses.
+
+The cathedral's bells pealed as Francis waved to and blessed the crowd, even giving the occasional thumbs-up.
+
+New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo , Mayor Bill de Blasio, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer and other dignitaries greeted him on the cathedral steps.
+
+Pope Francis landed in New York City Thursday afternoon to begin the next part of his visit to the U.S., which will take him from the United Nations to a school in East Harlem.
+
+During the evening prayer, Francis thanked American nuns for their strength and courage in a deeply meaningful acknowledgement of their service following a years-long Vatican crackdown.
+
+U.S. priests and sisters erupted in applause when Francis told American nuns that he wanted to thank them for their strength, spirit and courage and to ""tell you that I love you very much.""
+
+It was the strongest expression yet of his gratitude for American nuns after the Vatican under his predecessor ordered an overhaul of the largest umbrella group of U.S. sisters, accusing them of straying from church teaching. The nuns denied the charge and received an outpouring of support from American Catholics, and the crackdown ended this year, two years early, with no major changes.
+
+Francis also expressed his solidarity with Muslims following the hajj stampede in Saudi Arabia, where more than 700 people were killed.
+
+Francis said he wanted to offer a ""sentiment of closeness in light of the tragedy"" that the Muslim people had suffered on Thursday.
+
+He also raised the clergy sex-abuse crisis, by consoling clergy for the suffering the scandal had caused them.
+
+Francis told members of religious orders and diocesan priests that he was aware they had ""suffered greatly"" by having to ""bear the shame"" of clergy who had molested children. He thanked them for their faithful service to the church in the face of the scandal.
+
+A group of 200 people welcomed Francis as his chartered American Airlines plane touched down at John F. Kennedy International Airport shortly after 5 p.m. Thursday.
+
+Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, five Catholic schoolchildren and other guests gathered at the airport while snipers stood atop police vehicles while a high school band played a rendition of Frank Sinatra's “New York, New York.”
+
+Cardinal Francis Dolan of New York greeted Francis with a hug and a kiss as he arrived onto the tarmac.
+
+Francis then handed out mass cards and spoke with onlookers after Catholic schoolchildren presenting him with a bouquet and collection of prayers written by students in the city's 86 Catholic schools.
+
+After landing at the airport, Francis traveled to Manhattan by helicopter and hopped into a Fiat hatchback, traveling in the same style as he did while in Washington.
+
+Over 40 hours in New York, Francis will address world leaders at the United Nations, participate in an interfaith service at the Sept. 11 memorial and celebrate Mass at Madison Square Garden. He will visit a school in Harlem and take drive through Central Park.
+
+It’s the first papal trip to New York since Pope Benedict XVI visited in April 2008.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8372,Nation’s Top Lawyers Have Had Enough Of Trump (TWEETS),"Ted Boutrous is a successful lawyer. He is a well known litigator in one of the country’s most prestigious law firms. In fact, they’ve represented people like Mark Cuban and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. 
+He’s a good guy, too! 
+I know this because Boutrous has offered to represent anyone who is sued by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for exercising their right to free speech. 
+And he won’t charge you for it. I repeat: I will represent pro bono anyone #Trump sues for exercising their free speech rights. Many other lawyers have offered to join me. https://t.co/LJf6TtmGZU 
+— Ted Boutrous (@BoutrousTed) October 22, 2016 
+Boutrous is not alone, either. 
+Laurence Tribe is a well known constitutional law professor at Harvard University. He’s promising the same free defense of anyone sued by Trump just for telling the truth. You can count on me to help with this pro bono, @BoutrousTed https://t.co/hwC2K0TLCB 
+— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) October 23, 2016 
+Pretty cool! This restores my faith in Americans, for sure. 
+It seems that there are a lot of people who are disgusted with Trump’s constant threats to sue. USA Today reports that Trump has been involved in over 3, 500 lawsuits. He routinely uses the law to badger and intimidate his opponents. 
+Trump has famously refused to pay contractors who have worked on his multi-million dollar projects. When those small companies ask for payment, Trump glibly tells them to take him to court, knowing that the costs would stop them from going forward. They end up settling for cents on the dollar, every time. 
+He has also threatened to sue various media outlets when they report information that he doesn’t like. Donald Trump threatens legal action against NBC over 'Access Hollywood' tape https://t.co/IWhwwHcHjz via @CNNMoney 
+— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) October 28, 2016 
+Most recently, the Republican blowhard threatened to sue the women who have stepped forward to accuse him of sexual impropriety. 10,000 Lawyers offer to pay to represent @nytimes and take discovery from @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/w84vgcoyRs 
+— Lance Tane (@LanceTane) October 13, 2016 
+That threat, as well as his threats to sue the media, prompted the famous lawyer to send his original tweet offering a pro bono defense. The response to his offer has been excellent. Boutrous said : “Ever since I sent that tweet, the outpouring from other lawyers and people who want to help is just incredible. It was so offensive to fundamental First Amendment values and democratic principles to have someone threaten to sue people who are criticizing him. The First Amendment is designed to protect exactly that kind of speech.” 
+This is the part that Donald Trump seems incapable of understanding. It is a violation of the U.S. Constitution to deny people the right to speak freely, even if they criticize you. 
+Having written my fair share of articles that criticize the big orange buffoon, I’m very happy to know these guys have my back! 
+Featured image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr . Available through Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike Generic License 2. 0 About Karen Shiebler 
+Karen is a retired elementary school teacher with many years of progressive activism behind her. She is the proud mother of three young adults who were all arrested with Occupy Wall Street. To see what she writes about in her spare time, check out her blog at ""Empty Nest, Full Life"" Connect",FAKE
+2653,Boston bombing trial plea deal fails,"As accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev goes on trial Monday few doubt the outcome of the first phase of the two-phase trial. It's the second, the sentencing phase, including a possible death sentence, that has been the subject of behind the scenes discussions.
+
+Federal prosecutors and defense attorneys for Tsarnaev have held talks on a possible plea agreement but failed to reach one, U.S. officials familiar with the talks say.
+
+The discussions in recent months have centered on the possibility of Tsarnaev pleading guilty and receiving a life sentence without parole, according to the officials.
+
+But the talks have reached an impasse because the Justice Department has resisted removing the death penalty as a possibility, these officials say.
+
+A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney in Boston declined to comment. Attorney Judy Clarke, who represents Tsarnaev, didn't respond to a request for comment. The outcome so far is unusual for Clarke who helped negotiate plea deals that saved the lives of notorious criminals including 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Jared Loughner, who carried out the mass shooting that killed six and gravely injured former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. RELATED: A tale of two Tsarnaevs on eve of trial in Boston Marathon bombing Jury selection is set to begin Monday in the case, with Tsarnaev facing 30 counts including detonating a weapon of mass destruction. Three people died and 264 people were injured in the April 15 attacks. Attorney General Eric Holder is a critic of the death penalty, but he authorized seeking capital punishment in this case saying Tsarnaev acted in ""an especially heinous, cruel and depraved manner."" He also cited a seeming lack of remorse. Tsnarnaev's brother Tamerlan was killed in a confrontation with police during the manhunt that followed the bombing. Among the evidence prosecutors are expected to use against him are statements claiming to be angry at U.S. wars that killed Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are several reasons to pursue a plea deal, including to spare survivors and victim families from having to relive the trauma of the bombings, and to save financial costs in a case that has already cost millions of dollars. The case's toll on victim families has been at issue in the case. Prosecutors tried to bar Tsarnaev from being able to view autopsy photos of victims, claiming it would cause new suffering to their survivors. A judge rejected that request. Boston US Attorney Carmen Ortiz has overseen the plea discussions. Any decision to remove the death penalty as a possibility would have approval from Holder. The attorney general Friday also authorized prosecutors to seek the death penalty against the man accused of shooting a TSA employee at Los Angeles Airport in 2013.",REAL
+5358,TOP DEMOCRATIC DONOR: BLACKS ARE “SERIOUSLY F***ED IN THE HEAD”,"Home › POLITICS › TOP DEMOCRATIC DONOR: BLACKS ARE “SERIOUSLY F***ED IN THE HEAD” TOP DEMOCRATIC DONOR: BLACKS ARE “SERIOUSLY F***ED IN THE HEAD” 0 SHARES 
+[11/2/16] PROJECT VERITAS – In a new video released by Project Veritas Action, a top Democratic donor is caught on camera disparaging members of the African American community at a fundraiser for North Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Deborah Ross. 
+In the video, prominent Ross donor Benjamin Barber expresses his opinion about blacks who vote Republican by comparing them to Nazis. 
+“Have you heard of the Sonderkommandos ? Jewish guards who helped murder Jews in the camps. So there were even Jews that were helping the Nazis murder Jews! So blacks who are helping the other side are seriously fucked in the head. They’re only helping the enemy who will destroy them. Maybe they think ‘if I help them we’ll get along okay; somehow I’ll save my race by working with the murderers,’” said Barber at a fundraiser for Ross on the Upper West Side of New York City on September 19, 2016. 
+Project Veritas Action thought it was important to share Barber’s words with African American Republicans in North Carolina. They expressed outrage over the comments that were made at the Ross fundraiser. 
+“I think that Deborah Ross has shown her true colors. If this is not a, if that…what you just showed me is not racism and condescending and basically calling blacks stupid and ignorant and saying that we are voting against our own self-interest if we support any republican. I am appalled. I am in incensed. Deborah Ross should be called to task for something like that,” said Bishop Wooden, a black voter in North Carolina. 
+Project Veritas Action Fund (AKA Project Veritas Action) was founded by James O’Keefe to investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct. Post navigation",FAKE
+9254,"Crisis of Conscience? Obama Frees Scores of Drug Offenders from Prison, Including 42 Lifers, Days Before Election","Home / #Solutions / Crisis of Conscience? Obama Frees Scores of Drug Offenders from Prison, Including 42 Lifers, Days Before Election Crisis of Conscience? Obama Frees Scores of Drug Offenders from Prison, Including 42 Lifers, Days Before Election Matt Agorist October 28, 2016 1 Comment 
+“Prison is for rapists, thieves, and murderers. If you lock someone up for smoking a plant that makes them happy, you’re the fucking criminal.” – Joe Rogan 
+Washington D.C. — The timeless words of Joe Rogan seem to be taking their toll on the consciences of American politicians. To kidnap and lock people in a cage for a personal choice and action that harms no one, is an evil act. Some politicians are figuring this out — or at least pandering to public demand. Either way, the result is the same. 
+Despite largely continuing the drug war and drastically increasing raids on medical marijuana facilities as compared to his predecessor, Barack Obama has somehow managed to dupe people into thinking he was pro legalized pot. And now, as his reign comes to an end, he seems to be reversing course. 
+Over the years, Obama has blown a lot of smoke (pun intended) when it came to his views on the war on drugs. He’s played Mr. Nice Guy while his heavily militarized government task forces have laid waste to the rights and property of peaceful people trying to help their fellow man by growing medical marijuana. 
+Under Obama, police in America, through the federal 1033 program , have acquired MRAP’s, grenade launchers, and even Apache attack choppers; most of which have been used enforcing immoral and unethical drug laws. However, no one, not even the almighty Barack Obama, can stop an idea whose time has come. 
+The people have spoken, and politicians who continue to call for the imprisonment of non-violent individuals for their personal choices are being exposed for the vile and obstinate tyrants they are. 
+Apparently this notion has made it to the ear of his majesty, Barack Obama. In a recent show of humanity, he’s freed several dozen more non-violent drug offenders. 
+According to Reason Magazine , this latest batch of commutations raises Obama’s total so far to 872, nearly all of them involving nonviolent drug offenders. That is more commutations than were issued by his 11 most recent predecessors combined. According to the White House , the 688 commutations since the beginning of 2016 are “the most ever done by a president in a single year”—not surprising, since Obama’s commutations have been strikingly backloaded, with 79 percent coming during his last year in office and 98 percent in the second half of his second term. He shortened just one sentence during his first term. 
+As the chart shows below, either Obama’s conscience is weighing on him or political pressure is is winning. 
+According to a report from Reason: 
+Obama clearly is trying hard to make up for lost time. In a speech on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said there will be “many more [commutations] to come.” Wednesday White House Counsel Neil Eggleston said Obama is committed to “using his clemency authority through the remainder of his time in office.” If he maintains this month’s rate in November, December, and January, his total will be around 1,500. If he picks up the pace, he could still reach the “thousands” predicted in 2014. 
+Even 2,000 commutations would represent just 6.9 percent of the 29,000 or so petitions Obama has received , making him slightly more merciful than Richard Nixon by that measure. That nevertheless would represent a huge improvement from where Obama stood just six months ago. 
+Any time the state admits it was wrong, and innocent people are freed from their cages of oppression; it’s a win for freedom. If one life is spared the horrid fate of being caged like an animal for possessing or ingesting a plant that grows from the ground, this is good news. 
+However, there are tens of thousands of non-violent drug offenders locked in steel cages across this country, many of them are in for possession alone. The slow and rusty cogs of the bureaucratic leviathan can’t turn fast enough. For every non-violent drug offender the president frees, five more are thrown in. Why? Locking up drug users has proven to be quite the profitable venture. 
+It is much easier to walk out on the street corner and shakedown a teenager who may have an illegal plant in his pocket than it is to examine the evidence in a rape or murder case. The so-called “Private” Prisons know this and have subsequently found their niche in this immoral war on drugs. 
+The term Private Prison is a farce from the get-go. 
+A truly Private prison would not be solely funded by taxpayer dollars. These Private prisons are nothing more than a fascist mixture of state and corporate, completely dependent upon the extortion factor of the state, i.e., taxation, as a means of their corporate sustenance. 
+A truly Private prison would have a negative incentive to boost its population for the simple fact that it is particularly expensive to house inmates. On the contrary, these fascist, or more aptly, corporatist prisons contractually require occupancy rates of 95%-100%. 
+The requirement for a 95% occupancy rate creates a de facto demand for criminals. Think about that for a second; a need or demand for people to commit crimes is created by this corporatist arrangement. The implications associated with demanding people commit crimes are horrifying. 
+Creating a completely immoral demand for “criminals” leads to the situation in which we find ourselves today. People, who are otherwise entirely innocent, are labeled as criminals for their personal choices and thrown in cages. We are now witnessing a vicious cycle between law enforcement, who must create and arrest criminals, and the corporatist prison system that constantly demands more prisoners. The police and prison corporations know that without the war on drugs, this windfall of money, cars, and houses — ceases to exist. 
+If you want to know who profits from ruining lives and throwing marijuana users in cages, we need only look at who bribes (also known as lobbies) the politicians to keep the war on drugs alive. 
+Below is a list of the top five industries who need you locked in a cage for possessing a plant in order to ensure their job security. Police Unions: Coming in as the number one contributor to politicians for their votes to lock you in a cage for a plant are the police themselves. They risk taking massive pay cuts and losing all their expensive militarized toys without the war on drugs. Private Prison Corporations: No surprise here . The corporatist prison lobby is constantly pushing for stricter laws to keep their stream of tax dollars flowing. Alcohol and Beer Companies: These giant corporations hate competition, so why not pay millions to keep a cheaper and far safer alcohol alternative off the market? Pharmaceutical Corporations: The hypocrisy of marijuana remaining a Schedule 1 drug, “No Medical Use Whatsoever,” seems criminal when considering that pharmaceutical companies reproduce a chemical version of THC and are able to market and sell it as such. Ever hear of Marinol? Big pharma simply uses the force of the state to legislate out their competition ; which happens to be nature. Prison Guard Unions: The prison guard union s are another group, so scared of losing their jobs, that they would rather see thousands of non-violent and morally innocent people thrown into cages, than look for another job. 
+What does it say about a society who’s resolute in enacting violence against their fellow human so they can have a job to go to in the morning? 
+The person who wants to ingest a substance for medical or recreational reasons is not the criminal. However, the person that would kidnap, cage, or kill someone because they have a different lifestyle is a villain on many fronts. When does this vicious cycle end? 
+The good news is that the drug war’s days are numbered, especially seeing that it’s reached the White House, and they are taking action, even if it is symbolic. Evidence of this is everywhere. States are defying the federal government and refusing to lock people in cages for marijuana. Colorado and Washington served as a catalyst in a seemingly exponential awakening to the government’s immoral war. 
+Following suit were Oregon, D.C., and Alaska. Medical marijuana initiatives are becoming a constant part of legislative debates nationwide. We’ve even seen bills that would not only completely legalize marijuana but deregulate it entirely, like corn. 
+As more and more states refuse to kidnap and cage marijuana users, the drug war will continue to implode. We must be resilient in this fight. 
+If doing drugs bothers you, don’t do drugs. When you transition from holding an opinion — to using government violence to enforce your personal preference, you become the bad guy. Don’t be the bad guy. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter and now on Steemit Share geneww1938 
+The best way to stop illegal dealers and drug use is to stop trafficking by the criminal cartel behind our government. When was the last time we heard of a drug bust that disrupted street consumption ! The elitist’s cartel derive billions from international trafficking to wit: Google “Bush, Clinton drugs Mena Airport AK”. Social Trending",FAKE
+2882,Kerry tells Capitol Hill critics of Iran nuclear deal to 'hold their fire' until final deal,"Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday that he will go to Capitol Hill this week to brief congressional members about the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal and urged opponents to “hold their fire” until they see a final deal later his year.
+
+The administration has since reaching the April 1 deal urged the Senate not to vote on legislation that would require congressional approval to ease sanctions on Iran, as Tehran curtails its uranium-enrichment program. And President Obama has vowed to veto such legislation, if passed.
+
+Kerry said he would brief House members on Monday and senators on Tuesday. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is set to take up the legislation on the same day.
+
+The administration should be free to negotiate without interference until the June 30 deadline for a final agreement, Kerry said on CBS' ""Face the Nation.""
+
+""We've earned the right to be able to try and complete this without interference, and certainly without partisan politics,"" Kerry said.
+
+The Senate bill, by committee chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., would give Congress a 60-day review and a say on any deal.
+
+Under the bill as currently written, Obama could unilaterally lift or ease any sanctions that were imposed on Iran through presidential action. But Congress could block the president from providing Iran with any relief from congressional sanctions.
+
+Senators on both sides of the issue have introduced more than 50 amendments to the legislation.
+
+Opponents of the deal say they don’t know the exact details because both sides are giving different interpretations. Among their concerns are the guidelines for inspecting Iran's nuclear sites and when the sanctions will be lifted.
+
+Kerry told NBC’s “Meet the Press” the United States won’t sign a bad or ambiguous deal.
+
+“If there’s not an understanding, we won’t sign it,” he said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6032,Bad Jewish Losers Lament Trump’s Victory on BBC Newsnight,"By Francis Carr Begbie 
+ERIC CANTOR , Republican politician, and LISSA MUSCATINE, Hillary Clinton’s former speech writer, were two of the many Jews given free rein to reflect on Donald Trump a few days ago before millions of BBC viewers. 
+“In the end one could not help noticing one interesting if rather awkward fact about that edition of BBC Newsnight. The editor, two out of three of the main presenters, and all seven of the main interviewees in Washington and London were JEWISH. Not bad for a group said to represent less than 0.4% of the British population.” — Francis Carr Begbie 
+You might think that after a disaster as humiliating as the election of Donald Trump that our anointed elites would take this opportunity for a bit of humility — that this would be an opportunity for introspection and some soul-searching self-reflection. 
+Well, the good news is that you would be wrong. For this would involve a level of self-awareness far beyond our narcissistic elites. All around they are demonstrating a complete inability to understand the forces behind their humiliation at the hands of a man they dismissed as a joke from day one and whose demise they predicted every inch of the way. 
+This self-deception was wonderfully on display in an immediate post-election edition of the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight , broadcast to the nation the day after and including a number of American interviewees. In a specially extended version of the show, programme editor Ian Katz dispatched Emily Maitlis , Mark Urban and David Grossman to find answers on the day after the result. 
+In both London and Washington a stellar line up of the finest brains from the media and the academy were assembled to help them chew it over. 
+Entertainingly, the vanity, narcissism and entitlement of the BBC presenter-ocracy was fully on view, proud and undented. To the accompaniment of the Beatles tune “Fool on the Hill” anchor Emily Maitlis could barely contain her rage and sputtered about how “a game show host and someone who owned a beauty pageant” could become president. 
+Populism, uprising, nationalism versus globalism; as with former President Bush’s puzzlement over “the vision thing,” they seemed to be able to mouth the words but comprehension was lacking. 
+With every guest, Emily Maitlis showed that old habits die hard or not at all. She dripped condescension from the outset, snapping at immigration traitor , pro-Israel fanatic former US Congressman Eric Cantor who was perhaps trying to redeem himself given the new winds in the Republican Party: “We talked about the vulgarity of this man … This is a man who talked of grabbing women by the pussy. Is that a man you are proud [of]?” An angry school teacher furious with the behaviour of her immature, irresponsible charges. 
+Easily the funniest moment in the programme came during a virtuoso splenetic performance from historian Simon Schama who seemed to think it was Germany in 1933 all over again. Race, he said, was more important factor in the election than the economic arguments. SIMON SCHAMA, ASHKENAZI JEW 
+Wriggling in his seat, as if it was subjected to regular electric shocks, he said. 
+“It is really weird to me how we pussyfoot around the toxic malodorous element of race which has played an important part of this. Anti-semitism has long been part of populism… [beginning] in the early twentieth century. Even today there were sinister references by the likes of senator Jeff Sessions to George Soros who was singled out as a particularly odious figure in this international banking conspiracy.” 
+(To which many people in the Alt Right might have replied: “couldn’t have put it better myself.”) 
+Schama almost lost it completely when co-interviewee and neocon stalwart Melanie Phillips told him to calm down a bit. 
+“It is not a moment for calm, it is not a moment for calm.” he screeched. MELANIE PHILLIPS, ASHKENZI JEW AND VIRULENT ZIONIST 
+Melanie knows very well what these anti-semitic dog whistles are like. This too is part of populism. We are facing a cataclysmic moment. Melanie is right to say it is a populist revolt. It is nothing to do with conservative republican politics. It amuses me to hear that Eric Cantor imagines that things are going to go on as they always did in the Republican party … [that they] will restrain Donald Trump. They won’t. George Washington warned about despotism and that is what we are facing. 
+Melanie Phillips, for her part, agreed the most important problem was anti-Semitism, but she saw it coming from a completely different quarter. 
+There are noxious elements around. … Clearly some of the people supporting Trump are anti-semitic and racists but that is also true of people on the left. There is no sign that he (Trump) personally is anti-semitic or racist. People call people racist when they want to restrict as he does, legal immigration. Anti-semitism is now at record levels at liberal universities overseen by liberal professors and liberal vice chancellors. 
+Studio presenter Evan Davies muttered about how they had to give up something to people worried about the loss of their traditional societies and really act on illegal immigration. But Schama wasn’t listening. He was worried about David Duke. 
+Donald Trump re-tweeted a neo-Nazi tweet. It is not a coincidence that David Duke, KKK Imperial Wizard, is exhilarated and rejoicing with the advent of Trump who is his man. We will see race crimes, hate crimes explode now. We will have a far-right supreme court which will reverse Roe [v.] Wade. 
+As a glimpse into the fevered imagination of at least one strongly identifying Jew, it could not have been more revealing. Before Schama actually self-detonated on air, the programme moved on to more heavyweights. 
+Neoconservative think tanker Danielle Pletka , senior vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, complained she had no idea what Trump’s policies were. Which was not very helpful. 
+Mary Kaldor , professor of global governance at the London School of Economics, complained that Trump was “wildly unpredictable” in his stated foreign policies. “He says ‘I love Israel,’ then he says he wants to be neutral between Israel and Palestine.” For her the real danger seemed to be peace. Or as she framed it, Trump getting friendly with Putin to create an “alliance of authoritarian right wing leaders.” 
+But it was the Pulitzer prize-winning historian of communism Anne Applebaum who painted the most apocalyptic scenario. Applebaum, who has never seen a “Deep State” she didn’t like, said that Trump had been disdainful for NATO and cannot understand why America needs to be in Europe. His admiration for Vladimir Putin as an ideal was very worrying. ANNE APPLEBAUM . . . ANOTHER ASHKENAZI JEW 
+Europeans need to start from the assumption that United States is not a reliable partner. We need to keep repeating that until it sinks into people’s brains. 
+She really said that. 
+Applebaum said Trump sees no need for a relationship with the UK. He said that Trump, who has spent millions developing his two golf courses, which include Turnberry, is, apparently, “not an anglophile and has no interest in Britain. Hillary Clinton does.” Surely, asked presenter Grossman, the Brexit referendum puts Britain and the USA on the same page? Applebaum: “No, no, no.” 
+Both these women think it makes the election of Marie le pen more likely. Likely correct, and thank god for that! 
+Alan Greenspan , former chairman of the Fed, was wheeled on to say that he, a lifelong Republican had not voted. He also explained that Trump would not be able to get rid of the current Federal Reserve Bank chair Janet Yellen without a complicated impeachment process. 
+Earlier in the show, Maitlis tried to get Republican Eric Cantor to condemn Trump but got no change. Cantor responded lamely about Trump’s promise to build a border wall. “I’m not so sure that is going to happen” — showing (not surprisingly) that he remains an immigration traitor at heart. And he continues to show his allegiance to Israel. Cantor said he was less interested in Trump’s immigration policies than his Middle East policies, including his intention to get rid of ISIS. 
+Lissa Muscatine , Hillary’s former speech writer, assured Maitlis that her old college friend had bounced back as strong as ever. 
+Elsewhere David Grossman did a breakdown of the vote to show that women and Hispanics had leaned to Trump in far greater numbers that anyone thought possible. (In fact, a solid majority of White women voted for Trump, proving Schama right: Trump voters are racists.) In the end one could not help noticing one interesting if rather awkward fact about that edition of BBC Newsnight . The editor, two out of three of the main presenters, and all seven of the main interviewees in Washington and London were Jewish. Not bad for a group said to represent less than 0.4% of the British population. 
+I should note, however, that there were a smattering of Vox pop style three-second sound-bite interviewees of men in baseball hats celebrating in bars and so on. There was also an abortive panel of a Hispanic man, black woman and Jewish New York Times reporter, and there was a Latvian politician down the line. But otherwise it was an extremely Kosher programme. 
+The BBC operates one of the most aggressive affirmative action policies in the Western world. In keeping with its position as the Vatican of political correctness, a finger is kept on the scales of employment opportunity to ensure that jobs are skewed heavily for favoured groups. 
+But given that self-awareness is one area where the elites are notably deficient, it might be s good idea to remind them of the massive Jewish overrepresentation on display here. This is one very privileged group indeed. Overrepresented and overprivileged, one might say. Like this? Share it now.",FAKE
+9587,Giuliani on FBI’s exoneration of Hillary: ‘We are supposed to be a country of justice’,"Giuliani on FBI’s exoneration of Hillary: ‘We are supposed to be a country of justice’ Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani tell it like it is By Shepard Ambellas - November 7, 2016 ( INTELLIHUB ) — Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared on Fox News’ Sean Hannity Show Sunday, to talk about how out of place the Director of the FBI James Comey’s remarks were regarding the Clinton investigation. 
+Giuliani said that back in July there was already “overwhelming evidence” that Hillary Clinton “violated the law.”‘Now in November we are hearing that she had her maid print out classified material routinely.’ 
+“So if she was completely reckless back in July, the new revelation makes the situation much worse,’ Giuliani told Hannity. 
+To top it all off, Giuliani said that Clinton Foundation monies were supporting Chelsea Clinton “for more than a decade” and that “Chelsea’s husband, with Chelsea’s help, was going to foundation donors and raising money for his hedge fund.” 
+This is “racketeering,” Giuliani said. 
+Sean Hannity pointed out during the exchange that the FBI is operating on a dual standard and if anyone else other than Hillary was being investigated they already would have been locked up for destroying subpoenaed information. 
+#NoJustice 
+#HillaryForPrison2016 Shepard Ambellas is an opinion journalist, filmmaker , radio talk show host and the founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News & Politics. Established in 2013, Intellihub.com is ranked in the upper 1% traffic tier on the World Wide Web. Read more from Shep’s World . Get the Podcast . Follow Shep on Facebook and Twitter . ©2016. Intellihub.com.  ",FAKE
+1238,"Ted Cruz Wins Iowa Caucus, Clinton Holds Narrow Lead Over Sanders","Cruz, a conservative lawmaker from Texas, won with 28 percent of the vote compared to 24 percent for businessman Trump in the Republican contest. Marco Rubio, a U.S. senator from Florida, came in third with 23 percent, easily making him the leader among establishment Republican candidates.
+
+Clinton, a former secretary of state, and Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist U.S. senator from Vermont, both came in at roughly 50 percent with 95 percent of the state's precincts reporting results. Sanders declared the results a tie.
+
+Former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, who had trouble gaining any traction in the Democratic race, suspended his campaign. He took third place with less than one percent.
+
+Cruz's win and Rubio's strong showing could dent the momentum for Trump, whose candidacy has alarmed the Republican establishment and been marked by controversies such as his calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States.
+
+""Tonight is a victory for courageous conservatives across Iowa and all across this great nation,"" Cruz, 45, said during a victory speech that lasted more than 30 minutes. Buoyed by evangelical voters, Cruz thanked God. He said the results showed that the nominee would not be chosen by the media, the Washington establishment or lobbyists.
+
+Trump, 69, congratulated Cruz and said he still expected to win the Republican nomination for the Nov. 8 election.
+
+""I'm just honored, I'm really honored,"" Trump told supporters. He said he looked forward to the next contest next week in New Hampshire, where polls show him ahead.
+
+Clinton, 68, said she was breathing a ""big sigh of relief"" after the results. She lost to then-Senator Barack Obama in 2008. The former first lady congratulated Sanders and did not declare victory in her remarks.
+
+""It is rare that we have the opportunity we do now to have a real contest of ideas,"" she said.
+
+Sanders, 74, said he and Clinton were in a ""virtual tie"" and said he was overwhelmed.
+
+""Nine months ago, we came to this beautiful state, we had no political organization, we had no money, we had no name recognition, and we were taking on the most powerful political organization in the United States of America,"" he said.
+
+The results could shift momentum in both races. Clinton hoped for a strong finish against Sanders to vanquish his insurgent candidacy. Sanders is leading in opinion polls in New Hampshire.
+
+Rubio's third-place finish established him as the Republican mainstream alternative to Trump and Cruz.
+
+""I am grateful to you, Iowa. You believed in me when others didn't think it was possible,"" Rubio, 44, said.
+
+The results could have ramifications going forward.
+
+""There is now blood in the water for Donald Trump,"" said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. ""Ted Cruz proved he could successfully beat back Trump attacks because he had a great ground game and identified well with evangelical voters.""
+
+Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said he was suspending his campaign for the Republican party nomination. Huckabee won the Iowa caucus in 2008.
+
+Iowa has held the first nominating contests, called caucuses, since the early 1970s, giving it extra weight in the U.S. electoral process that can translate into momentum for winning candidates. The caucuses are voter gatherings that take place in 1,100 schools, churches and other public locations across the Midwestern state.
+
+The 2016 election is shaping up to be the year of angry voters as disgruntled Americans worry about issues such as immigration, terrorism, income inequality and healthcare, fueling the campaigns of Trump, Sanders and Cruz.
+
+Market reaction in Asia to the results was muted, with U.S. stock futures down around half a percent.
+
+""Financial markets might be more comfortable with Hillary (Clinton) than Bernie (Sanders),"" said Sean Callow, a strategist at Westpac Bank in Australia.
+
+""There would have to be at least some jitters over the guy who plans to break up the big banks. But it's probably too early to expect the U.S. presidential race to have an impact on the U.S. stock market.""",REAL
+5600,ITALIAN MAYOR blasted for scathing verbal attack on African Muslim savages who have been invading Southern Italy,"ITALIAN MAYOR blasted for scathing verbal attack on African Muslim savages who have been invading Southern Italy Yes, his words may be racist and anti-Muslim, but look at the videos below to see what African Muslim illegal alien invaders are bringing to Italy and you won’t be so quick to condemn him. What would you say if they did the same thing in your cities? Thousands of Muslims lift their asses to Allah in front of the Coliseum in Rome to protest the government’s closing of hundreds of illegal mosques UK Express (h/t Brenda K) An Italian mayor has come under fire after saying he will shoot ’niggers and gypsies’ and build a pig farm next to mosques as tensions continue to rise over the illegal alien Muslim invasion of southern Italy. More than 160,000 economic freeloaders posing as asylum seekers have been housed in Italy since the start of 2014, according to date from the interior ministry. Italy has been one of the first destinations along migrants typical routes for months, receiving thousands of new arrivals who continue to risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean on rickety smuggler’s boats. But many have been critical of the welcoming of so many refugees – and now one Mayor from the town of Albettone in Vento has launched a scathing attack on the new arrivals. Speaking on La Zanzara on Radio 24, Joe Formaggio said: “Immigrants? If they send them to us, we will protect our houses. We are proud to be racists.” The mayor claims his city “exports brains and imports niggers” who “are less intelligent than us, they are inferior”. Amid possible plans to open a mosque in the city, he claimed he would open a “large farm of pigs if they open a mosque here”. Mr Formaggio added: ”If refugees are sent here to Albettone, the barricades in Gorino will be seen as nothing. “Here we do not want immigrants, niggers or gypsies. They have a lower IQ: history proves it. “We have a shooting range and the highest number of licenses to carry weapons in the whole Veneto region. “And we do not want anyone to come and bother us. They risk their lives around us.” The comments were deemed so strong that the Secretary General of the Vicenza Chamber has been forced to intervene. Calling the comments “irresponsible”, Giampaolo Zanni said: “The Chamber of Vicenza totally rejects the Mayor of Albetton’s statements about the black population. “None of us underestimates the problems arising from illegal alien Muslim invasion migration. “But responses like those of the Mayor of Albettone are not only xenophobic and racist, but are also dangerous as they encourage feelings of racial hatred, and therefore are in stark contrast to the values of our constitution.” Thousands of Italians have come out in large protests against the never-ending Muslim invasion of their country.",FAKE
+5987,Study: Running linked to extended lifespan and brain repair,"Study: Running linked to extended lifespan and brain repair 
+Saturday, October 29, 2016 by: Amy Goodrich Tags: running , brain repair , longevity (NaturalNews) We don't have to be scientists to know that exercise is good for us. However, researchers at the Ottawa Hospital and the University of Ottawa in Canada have added another item to the long list of potential health benefits of regular exercise. They found that running triggers a particular molecule called VGF, a nerve growth factor that can help repair brain and nerve damage in mice with an unusually small cerebellum and a shorter lifespan. The cerebellum is the part of the brain important for balance and coordination.Although more research will be needed to determine how the healing process would work in a human brain, the Canadian researchers are hopeful that their groundbreaking discovery may open new doors in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Put on those running shoes and extend your life In the study, published in the scientific journal Cell Reports , the researchers reported that VGF production induced by running in a wheel extended the life of mice with smaller cerebellums and difficulties in walking. Typically these mice only lived for 25 to 40 days, but when they were allowed to run, they lived for over a year , which is the normal lifespan for a mouse.Furthermore, they discovered that the running mice had a better sense of balance, and showed increased levels of myelin production. Myelin plays a key role in a healthy brain . It is the insulating material of our nerves, and is best compared to the plastic material around electrical cables. Lose that protective layer and nerves will have difficulty carrying their messages as quickly or efficiently, resulting in a host of neurological issues.While running improved the quality and quantity of life for the mice, they had to maintain their healthy running habit. Once the opportunity to exercise was taken away, they began to degenerate again and their lifespans shortened once more. The positive effects of regular exercise Dr. Picketts, a senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital and professor at the University of Ottawa, said that these findings shine a new light on the effect exercise might have on people suffering from neurodegenerative diseases, like multiple sclerosis (MS), that involve a loss of myelin or insulation of the nerve fibers.""With multiple sclerosis, you get a lot of degeneration of the (neuron) insulation, and patients with MS go through these relapses and remissions,"" Picketts said. ""We're really hoping that maybe if we could use VGF to limit the number of degenerations, (it would) really allow remissions to be more prevalent and longer,"" he added.Last month, another study published in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair , showed that exercise helped gerbils who had a stroke to recover their memory, partly though myelin repair around the neurons.However, when Dr. Picketts and his colleagues analyzed myelin levels in healthy mice, running didn't seem to produce any significant change. These findings suggest that VGF-triggered myelin repair probably only kicks in when our brain or nerves are under attack.""Generally, healthy people [already] have normal levels of myelin,"" noted Dr. Matias Alvarez-Saavedra, lead author of the study.Of course, that doesn't mean healthy people should not exercise. Many studies have linked regular exercise to healthy brain changes such as improved memory, increased blood flow and decreased inflammation in the brain. Sources for this article include:",FAKE
+1927,Hillary's policies: Where's the beef?,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+3093,"Polarization Vortex: Obama, Bush Approval Shows Widest Partisan Gap","Many Republicans claim that President Obama is among the most polarizing presidents in modern history. If the results of a new Gallup survey measuring his approval rating are any indication, they might be right.
+
+The president's overall approval rating for his just finished sixth year in office stood at 42.6 percent, according to Gallup. That's well below Bill Clinton's or Ronald Reagan's sixth-year average (63.8 percent and 59.9 percent, respectively). Even so, Obama's average for the year is still ahead of Richard Nixon (25.4 percent), who was by this point in his presidency mired in Watergate; George W. Bush (37.3 percent); or Harry S. Truman (38.6 percent).
+
+But another measure that looks at how Republicans and Democrats view presidential performance shows that Obama is on track to be the most polarizing president ever, nudging out his predecessor with an average 70-point gap between the political parties.
+
+""Both Bush and Obama were elected with hopes of unifying the country. However, the opposite has happened, at least in the way Americans view the job the president is doing, with presidential evaluations more divided along party lines than ever before, Gallup notes.
+
+""These increasingly partisan views of presidents may have as much to do with the environment in which these presidents have governed as with their policies, given 24-hour news coverage of what they do and increasingly partisan news and opinion sources on television, in print and online,"" the polling organization says.
+
+In his sixth year in office, 79 percent of Democrats approve of Obama's performance, while just 9 percent of Republicans do. George W. Bush's numbers were exactly reversed in year six of his presidency (79 percent of Republicans approval vs. 9 percent for Democrats).
+
+Obama and Bush had their most polarized approval ratings in their fourth years in office, both with a 76 percentage point gap between Republicans and Democrats for the final year of their first term (although Bush had slightly higher approval from both parties, the gap was still the same). As Gallup points out, the fourth year is typically the most polarized in a president's due to it being an election year.
+
+According to Gallup: ""Each of Obama's six years in office rank among the 10 most polarized in the last 60 years, with George W. Bush holding the other four spots. Bush's most polarized years were his fourth through seventh years in office, after the rally in support for him following the 9/11 terror attacks had faded. Clearly, political polarization has reached new heights in recent years, under a Republican and a Democratic president.""",REAL
+9057,How to Solve the Illegal Immigration Problem,"  
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s recent speech on immigration really missed the point. I understand Trump’s frustration over the US government’s inability to control the US borders and keep out those who would come to this country illegally. Trump was right that the media ignore legitimate questions we have on our immigration policy and he is right that special interests have a great interest in maintaining the status quo. 
+However when it comes to really solving the immigration problem he gets it all wrong. And instead of making us more free and prosperous, his solutions will accelerate our downward slide toward authoritarianism. 
+First let’s consider his idea of building a big wall between the US and Mexico. It is said that all one needs to get over an eight foot fence is a nine foot ladder. Or perhaps a shovel. So walls are never very good at keeping people out. But they are very good at keeping people in. Just ask the East Germans. The communist government claimed in 1961 that it had to build a wall around the portion of Berlin it controlled to keep the population safe from the evil capitalist wreckers and saboteurs. It didn’t take long for the world to realize that the real threat to the East German leaders was that the people trapped in East Berlin would try to get out. We have all seen the horrific videos of East German civilians risking – and losing – their lives to escape that prison of razor wire and cinder block. 
+Is this really what we want for our own future? 
+What a wild conspiracy theory, some may claim. The wall would never be meant to keep us from leaving. Well ask the IRS. Under a tax enforcement provision passed in 2015, the US government claimed the right to cancel any American citizen’s passport if Washington claims it is owed money. 
+Trump also made E-Verify the center of his immigration speech. He said, “We will ensure that E-Verify is used to the fullest extent possible under existing law, and we will work with Congress to strengthen and expand its use across the country.” 
+While preventing those here illegally from being able to gain employment may appeal to many who would like to protect American jobs, E-Verify is the worst possible solution. It is a police state non-solution, as it would require the rest of us legal American citizens to carry a biometric national ID card connected to a government database to prove that the government allows us to work. A false positive would result in financial disaster for millions of American families, as one would be forced to fight a faceless government bureaucracy to correct the mistake. Want to put TSA in charge of deciding if you are eligible to work? 
+The battle against illegal immigration is a ploy to gain more control over our lives. We are supposed to be terrified of the hoards of Mexicans streaming into our country and thus grant the government new authority over the rest of us. But in fact a Pew study found that between 2009 and 2014 there was a net loss of 140,000 Mexican immigrants from the United States. Yes, this is a government “solution” in search of a real problem. 
+How to tackle the real immigration problem? Eliminate incentives for those who would come here to live off the rest of us, and make it easier and more rational for those who wish to come here legally to contribute to our economy. No walls, no government databases, no biometric national ID cards. But not a penny in welfare for immigrants. It’s really that simple.",FAKE
+8739,Syria conflict: Food rations run out in rebel-held Aleppo,"November 11, 2016 Syria conflict: Food rations run out in rebel-held Aleppo 
+The last remaining food rations are being distributed in besieged rebel-held eastern districts of the Syrian city of Aleppo, the UN has said. Humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland warned that without a resupply there would be no food left to hand out next week to the 275,000 people living there. Mr Egeland ruled out airdrops of food, explaining that they were not possible in densely-populated urban areas. Government forces launched a major assault on eastern Aleppo in September. Since then, troops have pushed into several outlying areas with the help of Iranian-backed Shia militias and Russian air strikes. Rebels launched a counter-attack in an attempt to break the siege in late October. But their progress slowed after early gains.",FAKE
+4166,"Sanders plans Tuesday meeting with Clinton to discuss agenda, calls VP slot ‘very unlikely’","Sen. Bernie Sanders said Sunday that he plans to meet Tuesday night with Hillary Clinton about her agenda as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and will make other decisions about the future of his campaign after that.
+
+“I simply want to get a sense of what kind of platform she will be supporting, whether she will be vigorous in standing up for working families and the middle class, moving aggressively in climate change, health care for all, making public colleges and universities tuition-free,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And after we have that kind of discussion, and after we can determine whether or not we are going to have a strong and progressive platform, I will be able to make other decisions.”
+
+Sanders told host Chuck Todd that he will have more than 1,900 delegates at the convention and that he needs to determine “what kind of agenda there will be if Secretary Clinton gets elected, if she wins the election.”
+
+During a separate TV appearance Sunday, Sanders said he thinks it is “very unlikely” that Clinton would pick him as her running mate.
+
+Asked about the prospect of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) filling that slot, Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that he is a “great admirer” of Warren.
+
+When asked whether Clinton is capable of leading a “political revolution” — a phrase that has motivated Sanders’s campaign — Sanders said she was not, but that she could implement some solid progressive policies.
+
+“Will she got as far as I would like her to go? No, she won’t,” Sanders said.
+
+“Meet the Press” and “This Week” were two of three morning talk shows on which Sanders appeared Sunday. He was also interviewed by CBS's ""Face the Nation.""
+
+[How Bernie Sanders’s day in Washington got eclipsed by Democratic unity]
+
+The interviews are Sanders’s first since he met with President Obama on Thursday, the same day that Obama, Vice President Biden and Warren endorsed Clinton.
+
+The senator from Vermont said Thursday that he plans to compete in the final Democratic primary of the year, Tuesday in the District, making good on his pledge to stay in the race until all voters have had a chance to weigh in on the nomination.
+
+Sanders previously vowed to stay in the race until the Democratic convention in Philadelphia next month, in a last-ditch attempt to win the nomination by flipping the allegiances of hundreds of superdelegates who’ve previously announced their support for Clinton, the party’s presumptive nominee.
+
+He made no mention of that strategy during his interviews on Sunday morning.
+
+Later Sunday, Sanders met at his home in Burlington, Vt., with a few dozen leading supporters. Speaking to the press, he did not say he was exiting the race, however.
+
+""Are we going to take our campaign for transforming Democratic Party into the convention? Absolutely,"" he told reporters. He also said he is ""very good at arithmetic.""
+
+As of Sunday, Clinton had accumulated 2,784 delegates, including superdelegates, exceeding the amount needed to clinch the nomination by more than 400, according to the latest Associated Press tally, which put Sanders’s total at 1,877.
+
+To have a shot at wresting the nomination from Clinton, Sanders would need to flip the allegiances at least 400 of the 581 superdelegates who have announced their support for Clinton — about 70 percent of them.",REAL
+2954,"Disillusioned and self-deluded, Bowe Bergdahl vanished into a brutal captivity","Army Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl was fed up. He was five weeks into a deployment in southeastern Afghanistan and frustrated with his mission and his leaders. He and his fellow soldiers weren’t going after the Taliban as aggressively as he wanted, and his sense of disillusion added to the disgust for the Army that he had begun developing while still in basic training.
+
+Looking to make a stand, Bergdahl hatched a plan: He would run away from his platoon’s tiny outpost in Paktika province late on June 29, 2009. He would stay away from the Army a day, maybe two, and then reappear about
+
+19 miles away at a larger installation and demand to air his grievances with a general. He knew that the region was crawling with insurgents, but he had “outsize impressions of his own capabilities,” according to an investigating officer, and was determined to create enough chaos to get the attention of senior commanders.
+
+Those were among the details that emerged in a preliminary hearing here late last week. The soldier, carrying just a disguise, a knife and some provisions, was captured by insurgents by 10 a.m. the following morning, beginning four years and 11 months of captivity and torture by the Haqqani network, a group affiliated with the Taliban, according to Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, the senior officer who carried out an investigation of Bergdahl’s actions and interviewed him at length.
+
+The case against Bergdahl, who is charged with desertion and misbehaving before the enemy, is the most closely scrutinized desertion prosecution in the military in decades — perhaps since that of Pvt. Eddie Slovik, a soldier who became the only American executed for desertion since the Civil War. The officer overseeing the Bergdahl hearing, Lt. Col. Mark A. Visger, is expected to make a recommendation in the coming days to U.S. Army Forces Command, at Fort Bragg, N.C., about whether Bergdahl should be court-martialed.
+
+Bergdahl, now 29 and a sergeant, was recovered in May 2014 in a controversial swap in which the White House approved the release of five Taliban detainees from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They are now in Qatar.
+
+Emotional testimony has underscored the relentless brutality that Bergdahl had to endure, as well as the chaos caused by his disappearance and the lingering resentment of some of his comrades.
+
+The case has also raised questions about the Obama administration’s handling of it, which included inviting Bergdahl’s parents to speak at the White House after the soldier was recovered, with national security adviser Susan E. Rice saying he served with “honor and distinction.”
+
+[Bergdahl will require lifetime of care for injuries suffered in captivity]
+
+The White House has since concluded that it badly misplayed the optics of Bergdahl’s release, according to administration officials. Bergdahl’s parents were in Washington the day he was recovered, and a quick decision was made to include them in a Rose Garden announcement, with little thought given to the ramifications of making Bergdahl appear to be a hero, the officials said.
+
+Bergdahl joined the Army a few years after washing out of initial training for the Coast Guard. The Washington Post reported previously that it was for psychological reasons, but Bergdahl’s lawyer and Dahl were more specific in the hearing: The future Taliban captive was diagnosed with depression and sent home after he was found in distress in a Coast Guard barracks, sitting on a floor with blood in his hands, possibly from a bloody nose, Dahl testified.
+
+“He wasn’t ready for it,” Dahl said of life in the Coast Guard. “He was overwhelmed, found himself in the hospital and was released.”
+
+Bergdahl received a waiver to enlist in the Army. He was physically fit and well regarded for his work ethic, but quickly became disenchanted with his fellow soldiers and the Army’s training program. Among his gripes: He couldn’t believe higher-ranking soldiers wanted him to lock his wall locker to prevent theft and saw pre-deployment training at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., as “lame,” Dahl said.
+
+Bergdahl was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division’s 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, of Fort Richardson, Alaska. There, he took offense to a motivational speech made by the senior enlisted soldier to the entire battalion. The command sergeant major said in jest that, like other soldiers, he liked to pillage and plunder, but Bergdahl took it literally, Dahl said.
+
+In Afghanistan, there was another misunderstanding, Dahl said. Soldiers from Bergdahl’s unit weren’t all wearing their whole uniforms one day, a violation that upset then-Lt. Col. Clinton Baker, Bergdahl’s battalion commander.
+
+Baker launched into a tirade to get his point across, kicking rocks in the process. Bergdahl was convinced that Baker had disturbed an Afghan grave, a suggestion that perplexed the others present, Dahl said.
+
+The general found that Bergdahl’s childhood living at “the edge of the grid” in Idaho in relative isolation hurt his ability to relate to other people. As a result, he was an extremely harsh judge of character and “unrealistically idealistic,” Dahl said.
+
+“I think he absolutely believed that the things he perceived were absolutely true,” he added.
+
+Bergdahl could have gone to a number of people in his chain of command with concerns about his platoon. But he thought that they were in the Army for the money, or otherwise incapable of responding, Dahl said.
+
+In some ways, the soldier did consider others before running away from Observation Post Mest, Dahl said. He told Dahl that he picked the night he disappeared in part because he knew another platoon already would be on the way in the morning to relieve Bergdahl’s, thus providing additional manpower to deal with his vanishing. He didn’t want to take his 5.56mm squad automatic machine gun with him alone outside the wire because he figured it would draw attention, but also decided against stealing a 9mm pistol because that would have gotten a fellow soldier in trouble, Dahl said.
+
+Bergdahl’s disappearance was noticed around dawn, when he was due to take a guard shift. Capt. John Billings, his former platoon leader, testified that he was in shock that one of his men could have vanished, and initially thought his soldiers were pulling a joke on him. Reality eventually set in, though, and he informed his company commander, then-Capt. Silvino Silvino.
+
+“I felt sick to my stomach,” said Silvino, now a major. “I didn’t know what was going to come after that. . . . I instructed him to go look high and low, and everywhere he could.”
+
+Coalition forces across eastern Afghanistan altered their operations that summer looking for Bergdahl, exposing soldiers to additional and dangerous missions. That remains a sensitive point, amid allegations from Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers that at least six U.S. troops died because of his actions. Dahl said he examined a variety of evidence, and found nothing that connected the deaths directly to Bergdahl. But the search-and-rescue operations undoubtedly altered security in the region, military officials said, and plunged the units involved into hastily planned missions.
+
+Baker, the former battalion commander, recalled that one platoon conducted 37 consecutive days of operations — long enough that new socks and T-shirts had to be delivered to the soldiers, since theirs were rotting on their bodies.
+
+Bergdahl, meanwhile, was already in Pakistan. He was relentlessly beaten in captivity with rubber hoses and copper cables. He repeatedly tried to escape, said Terrence Russell, an official with the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, who interviewed Bergdahl after his return.
+
+Bergdahl was moved to at least six different locations, including one referred to as a Taliban prison. After escaping once for nearly nine days, Bergdahl was put in a 7-foot cage, blindfolded and left there for most of his last 3½ years in captivity, Russell said.
+
+Bergdahl has been accused often of cooperating with the insurgents or even seeking them out, but Russell said there is no evidence to support those claims. The Haqqani network forced him to make videos that were released online.
+
+Russell grew visibly agitated while describing the conditions Bergdahl faced, wiping tears away at one point. While the sergeant has been accused of many things, Russell said, he was “an organization of one,” with no fellow prisoners who could keep his spirits up.
+
+“He did the best job he could do,” Russell said, “And I respect him for it.”
+
+Bergdahl’s attorney, Eugene Fidell, argued during closing arguments at the preliminary hearing that his client should not be court-martialed for either of the charges he now faces. There is probable cause, Fidell acknowledged, to charge him with a lesser offense, being absent without leave for one day, but the moment he was taken captive, Fidell said, that designation should have ended. The maximum penalty for being AWOL for one day is 30 days of confinement.
+
+An Army prosecutor, Maj. Margaret Kurz, said that Bergdahl’s actions hurt the Army, his fellow soldiers and the mission in Afghanistan, and he must be punished.
+
+“One does not just walk away into the Afghan wilderness,” she said, “and then return as though nothing happened.”
+
+Bergdahl’s former officer: ‘Absolute disbelief that I couldn’t find one of my men.’
+
+In sparse prose, Bergdahl details his captivity for the first time",REAL
+5576,Leaked Memo Exposes Shady Dealings Between Clinton Foundation Donors And Bill’s “For-Profit” Activities,"Leaked Memo Exposes Shady Dealings Between Clinton Foundation Donors And Bill’s “For-Profit” Activities   Zero Hedge 
+We have written frequently in recent weeks about a feud that erupted between Chelsea Clinton and Doug Band back in 2011 after Chelsea raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest between Band's firm, Teneo, the Clinton Foundation and the State Department (see here , here, here and here ). The feud ultimately resulted in Band being forced to draft a memo spelling out, in vivid detail, the many entangled relationships between himself, Teneo, the Clinton Foundation and the State Department. Fortunately, today's Wikileaks dump included that memo which reveals, for the first time, the precise financial flows between the Clinton Foundation, Band’s firm Teneo Consulting, and the Clinton family’s private business endeavors. 
+The memo starts with a brief background on Teneo, which was created in June 2011, shortly after Declan Kelly resigned from his position as ""United States Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland,"" a position to which he was appointed by Secretary Clinton. 
+In June 2009, DK Consulting was founded by Declan Kelley. Mr. Kelly served as COO of FTI Consulting until June 2009, when he stepped down and established DK Consulting. At that time, he also became the United States Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland . Pursuant to the terms of his exit agreement with FTI and consistent with the ethics agreement of his uncompensated special government employee appointment at the State Department, Mr. Kelly retained and continued to provide services to three paying clients ( Coke, Dow, and UBS ) and one pro bono client (Allstate) . In late 2009, Declan retained me as a consultant to DK Consulting to help support the needs of these clients. 
+
+In May 2011, Mr. Kelly resigned his Envoy position at the State Department. In June 2011, Mr. Kelly and I founded Teneo Strategies ; simultaneously, Mr. Kelly closed DK Consulting and shifted its clients to Teneo. 
+
+Throughout the past almost 11 years since President Clinton left office, I have sought to leverage my activities, including my partner role at Teneo, to support and to raise funds for the Foundation . This memorandum strives to set forth how I have endeavored to support the Clinton Foundation and President Clinton personally. 
+In a subsequent section of the memo entitled ""Leveraging Teneo For The Foundation,"" Band spells all of the donations he solicited from Teneo ""clients"" for the Clinton Foundation. In all, there are roughly $14mm of donations listed with the largest contributors being Coca-Cola, Barclays, The Rockefeller Foundation and Laureate International Universities. 
+
+The donations from Dow Chemical are particularly notable for several reasons. First, because of other emails revealed by WikiLeaks and other FOIA requests, we now know that Dow Chemical CEO, Andrew Liveris, was granted special access to then Secretary Clinton back in July 2009 at the same time he was embroiled in ongoing litigation with another Clinton Foundation donor, Kuwait, over a failed joint-venture that would have netted Dow $9BN in cash . As Band notes in his memo, 1 month after being granted special access to Secretary Clinton, Liveris invited President Clinton and Band out for a day of golf. Moreover, shortly after his meeting with Secretary Clinton and golf outing with President Clinton, Liveris decided to donate $500,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative ...very convenient timing for all involved. 
+In August of 2009, Mr. Kelly invited Mr. Liveris to play golf with President Clinton and me. Mr. Kelly subsequently asked Dow to become a CGI sponsor at the $500,000 level, which they did , as well as making a $150,000 donation to the Foundation for President Clinton to attend a Dow dinner in Davos. 
+The story gets even more bizarre when Band reveals in the following footnote that Liveris provided the Dow Chemical plane to fly President Clinton and his staff from New York to California and then California to North Korea for their golf outing . We would assume this is a simple typo by Band and/or he's just geographically challenged...if not, this certainly raises a whole other set of questions for Bill. 
+Mr. Liveris provided the Dow plane to fly President Clinton and his staff to and from California for our trip to, and from, North Korea . As a private trip, the Foundation had to pay the costs of airfare; Mr. Liveris’ in kind contribution saved the Foundation in excess of $100,000 . 
+According to the Dialy Caller , Dow Chemical paid Teneo $2.8 million in 2011 and $16 million in 2012 for a variety of ""consultancy services"". Of course, Bill Clinton was an honorary chairman of Teneo and, as such, was set to be paid $3.5 million for that position even though he ultimately only kept $100,000 because of the scandals that erupted around the firm, including their advisory relationship with MF Global. 
+Finally, Band also offers the following commentary on the ""$50 million in for-profit activity"" he was able to secure for Bill Clinton (as of November 2011) as well as the ""$66 million in future contracts, should he choose to continue with those engagements."" 
+Independent of our fundraising and decision-making activities on behalf of the Foundation, we have dedicated ourselves to helping the President secure and engage in for-profit activities – including speeches, books, and advisory service engagements . In that context, we have in effect served as agents, lawyers, managers and implementers to secure speaking, business and advisory service deals. In support of the President’s for-profit activity, we also have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the President and his family – for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like. Neither Justin nor I are separately compensated for these activities (e.g., we do not receive a fee for, or percentage of, the more than $50 million in for-profit activity we have personally helped to secure for President Clinton to date or the $66 million in future contracts, should he choose to continue with those engagements). 
+
+With respect to business deals for his advisory services, Justin and I found, developed and brought to President Clinton multiple arrangements for him to accept or reject. Of his current 4 arrangements, we secured all of them; and, we have helped manage and maintain all of his for-profit business relationships. Since 2001, President Clinton’s business arrangements have yielded more than $30 million for him personally, with $66 million to be paid out over the next nine years should he choose to continue with the current engagements. 
+A big part of those ""for-profit"" activities was a $3.5mm annual payment from Laureate... 
+...and millions in speaking fees arranged by Band. 
+
+Confused? Here is a simpler recap from the NYT's Nick Confessore: This Doug Band memo, in the latest Podesta dump, is the Rosetta stone of the Teneo-Clinton Foundation complex. https://t.co/a1g3nSoGPM 
+— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016 Band's argument: I am not get fully compensated for all of the stuff I do for Clintonworld, so you should let me do Teneo. Everyone wins. 
+— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016 Now, you could argue: So what? If Band gets his clients to pop over money to a charity, why is that bad? 
+— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016 But consider that Band was selling his clients on idea that giving to foundation was, in essence, a way to bolster their influence. 
+— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016 Clinton & Band built a platform for executives to bolster their companies' images, bathe in BC's praise, and do some good, while... 
+— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016 ...Teneo extracted earnings for Band and, depending on what you see in these e-mails, Clinton himself. Teneo paid Clinton until late '11. 
+— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016 I guess you can wave it all off as a nothingburger. But Chelsea Clinton and some of Clinton's other aides were clearly freaking out. 
+— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016 Generally, the emails show Clinton's *own closest aides* troubled or horrified by things that her surrogates have spent years waving off. 
+— Nick Halloween (@nickconfessore) October 26, 2016 
+
+With that, we look forward to Donna Brazile's explanation of how this is all just an attempt to ""criminalize behavior that is normal.""",FAKE
+815,How Bernie changed Hillary,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+4848,Donald Trump questions Clinton’s health at rally in Ohio: ‘You think this is easy?’,"Donald Trump publicly raised questions about Hillary Clinton’s health for the first time since the former secretary of state was forced on Sunday to leave a ceremony for the victims of 9/11.
+
+Speaking in an air-conditioned minor league basketball arena in Canton, Ohio, Trump made his most direct reference to Clinton’s recent diagnosis of pneumonia and her campaign saying she left the event in New York because she felt “overheated”.
+
+“You think this is easy?” Trump asked. “In this beautiful room that’s 122 degrees. It is hot, and it is always hot when I perform because the crowds are so big. The rooms were not designed for this kind of crowd. I don’t know, folks. You think Hillary Clinton would be able to stand up here and do this for an hour? I don’t know.”
+
+The Republican nominee later went on to add of his Democratic rival, “Now she’s lying in bed, getting better and we want her better, we want her back on the trail, right?”
+
+Sounding like the classic unscripted Trump, the Republican presidential nominee often deviated from his teleprompters in a 40-minute speech that ranged from Clinton’s health to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
+
+The issue of candidate health and medical records has come to the forefront after the Clinton campaign revealed on Sunday – eight hours after she abruptly left the ceremony at the National September 11 Memorial – that the former secretary of state had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days earlier. The Democratic nominee had to be helped into a van while leaving. Afterward, Clinton cancelled all public events for three days.
+
+Clinton has since released more detailed medical information from her doctor describing her as “healthy and fit to serve as president”. In contrast, Trump has yet to share further medical information to the public besides a brief letter written in December that said he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”. However, in an interview with controversial TV doctor Dr Oz, set to air on Thursday, the 70-year-old Trump reportedly said that he would like to lose 15 pounds, doesn’t exercise and is fond of fast food.
+
+Trump also addressed the water crisis in Flint, a former car manufacturing hub that has seen tens of thousands of jobs disappear in recent decades. “It used to be cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico,” the Republican nominee said. “Now the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint.” Ford said on Wednesday that it was moving all its small-car production to Mexico.
+
+Earlier in the day, Trump had visited the city and ended up in a confrontation with a local pastor. Trump was visiting a church that serves as a water distribution center for residents when he started critiquing Clinton. The pastor, Faith Green Timmons, interrupted and made clear: “Mr Trump, I invited you here to thank us for what we’ve done in Flint, not give a political speech.”
+
+Later in Ohio, Trump, buoyed by recent polls that showed him taking the lead in that crucial swing state, was in high spirits in front of a cheering crowd. His supporters, many of them wearing Trump-themed apparel, ate up applause lines such as when Trump asked who would pay for his famous border wall. He received loud shouts in return of “Mexico”.
+
+The crowd also booed and hissed when Trump told them, “President Obama just announced a 30% increase to refugee admissions coming into this country.” Trump added after the loud chorus of boos subsided that “that was hard to take”. The Republican nominee added of the proposal: “It’s bringing the total to 110,000 refugees in just a single year, and we have no idea where they come from, it’s a great Trojan horse.” Looking ahead to history’s judgment, Trump noted, “I don’t want be known in 200 years for having created a Trojan horse by a different name.”
+
+The uncharacteristic return to his unscripted rally style comes the day before the Republican nominee is scheduled to make a major economic policy speech at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. There, the Republican nominee will introduce a tax reform proposal.
+
+Trump has previously introduced two other tax reform plans. First, in 2015, where he emphasized that half of Americans in lieu of paying taxes would simply mail a card to the IRS saying “I win”, and more recently in August where he proposed to reduce the number of tax brackets to three while drastically cutting rates. The speech on Thursday is expected to be a more expansive elaboration of the August proposal.
+
+• This article was amended on 19 September 2016 to clarify when Hillary Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia.",REAL
+6264,780 Palestinian homes razed in occupied W Bank's Area C in 2016,"Palestine Palestinians check the flat of Amjad Aliwi after Israeli authorities demolished it in the northern occupied West Bank city of Nablus on October 11, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
+A new report has revealed that the number of Palestinian homes demolished by Israeli authorities in the largest division of the occupied West Bank since the beginning of the current year stands at more than 700. 
+Israel's Hebrew-language Haaretz newspaper reported on Friday that a total of 780 Palestinian homes have been demolished in Area C of the West Bank, which constitutes about 61 percent of the territory and is under full Israeli military control, since January, leaving 1,129 people homeless. 
+That compares to 453 demolitions in the area last year, which left 580 Palestinians without any place of residence. 
+The newspaper noted that a total of 125 Palestinian homes have also been destroyed in East Jerusalem al-Quds since the start of the year, up from 78 last year. 
+The demolitions affected 164 Palestinians in the region, marking an increase from 108 the previous year. 
+The revelations came only two days after Israeli military forces razed three Palestinian homes in the Beit Hanina and Silwan neighborhoods of East Jerusalem al-Quds, displacing at least 44 people, including minors. 
+International bodies and rights groups argue that Israel’s sustained demolitions of Palestinian homes and structures in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds are an attempt by the Tel Aviv regime to uproot Palestinians from their native territories, and confiscate more land for expansion of illegal settlements. 
+More than half a million Israelis live in over 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem al-Quds. 
+The presence and continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian lands have created a major obstacle for the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East. 
+The Palestinian Authority wants the West Bank as part of a future independent Palestinians state, with East Jerusalem al-Quds as its capital. Loading ...",FAKE
+1216,"Sparks fly at Clinton, Sanders debate over who is more progressive","Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders clashed sharply Thursday over who is more progressive, at a debate that saw the former secretary of state ratcheting up her criticism of the Vermont senator on several fronts – even accusing him of engineering an “artful smear” with suggestions she could be “bought” by donors.
+
+The debate, the first since the Iowa caucuses and last before next week’s critical New Hampshire primary, was by far the most confrontational of the Democratic primary race.
+
+Clinton, coming off a narrow Iowa win and trying to shrink Sanders’ huge lead in Granite State polls, stayed on offense for most of the night. She slammed Sanders’ campaign promises as too costly, while standing firm in claiming she’s a true “progressive” despite Sanders’ comments to the contrary.
+
+Sanders, meanwhile, dug in as he questioned whether Clinton really “walks the walk” of the progressive cause – and described her as the candidate of the “establishment.”
+
+“Secretary Clinton does represent the establishment. I represent, I hope, ordinary Americans,” he said, stressing that he, unlike Clinton, doesn’t enjoy super PAC backing and is funded in large part by small-dollar donations.
+
+The verbal jabs flew quickly, and Clinton left few allegations unchallenged, visibly fed up with a campaign trail narrative that has painted her as the candidate of Wall Street. She rebutted Sanders’ “establishment” charge by questioning whether someone running to be the first female president can carry that label.
+
+The most heated moment at the MSNBC-hosted debate in Durham, N.H., came when Clinton told Sanders she rejects the suggestion that anyone who takes donations or speaking fees from interest groups can be bought.
+
+“Enough is enough,” Clinton said, telling Sanders the “attacks by insinuation” are not “worthy” of him. Clinton said if Sanders has something to allege, “say it directly,” but: “You will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received.”
+
+She closed: “I think it’s time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out in recent weeks.”
+
+That line earned a groan from Sanders and some boos from the audience.
+
+Sanders went on to link Wall Street deregulation with billions spent on lobbying and campaign contributions.
+
+“Some people think, yeah, that had some influence,” he said.
+
+Clinton, meanwhile, described herself as a “progressive who gets things done,” and ripped Sanders for suggesting Clinton cannot be a “moderate” and a “progressive” at the same time. She teased Sanders as being the “self-proclaimed gatekeeper for progressivism” and said she doesn’t know anyone who fits his definition.
+
+The fireworks underscored the tight state of the race going into New Hampshire’s contest next Tuesday. Clinton arrived on the debate stage clearly ready to rebut Sanders’ proposals and accusations – notably his oft-repeated criticism that she, as senator, erred by voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq.
+
+“A vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS,” she countered.
+
+Yet as Clinton stressed her secretary of state experience and Sanders said that factor is “not arguable,” the Vermont senator noted experience is not the only point.
+
+“Judgment is,” he said, again pointing to the 2002 Iraq vote. “One of us voted the right way, and one of us didn’t.”
+
+As she has at prior debates, Clinton also challenged the senator’s proposals for free college and universal health care. “The numbers just don’t add up,” Clinton said.
+
+She questioned how the country could, for instance, pay for free tuition at public colleges, as Sanders wants, and accused him of wanting to effectively scrap ObamaCare – a charge he denied.
+
+Sanders defended his plans, particularly for universal health care.
+
+“I do believe we should have health care for all,” he said.
+
+The former secretary of state met the Vermont senator on stage in Durham, N.H., after eking out a narrow victory in Monday’s caucuses. While her campaign celebrated the win, Sanders’ strong showing in the state nevertheless has helped boost his fundraising – and he heads into New Hampshire with a steady double-digit lead in the polls.
+
+There remains an ongoing dispute, however, over the Iowa results. The Des Moines Register editorial board earlier Thursday called for an audit of the Democratic caucus results, citing problems and confusion at polling sites.
+
+Asked at Thursday’s debate about the editorial, Sanders said, “I agree with the Des Moines Register.”
+
+He said after speaking with precinct captains, the campaign believes they may have “at least two more delegates.”
+
+Yet Sanders, who has complained how some local delegates were allocated based on coin tosses, also said they should not “blow this out of proportion. “
+
+“This is not the biggest deal in the world,” Sanders said.
+
+Asked if she’d participate in an audit, Clinton said, “Whatever they decide to do, that’s fine.”
+
+Clinton, separately, said she's ""100 percent confident"" nothing will come of the FBI probe into her personal email use as secretary of state.
+
+The Democratic debate on Thursday was the first to feature Clinton and Sanders one-on-one, with former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley now out of the race following his distant third showing in Iowa.
+
+The debate was one of four added to the calendar earlier this week, after the Democratic National Committee and the two campaigns agreed to the terms.  The party had come under criticism for its sparse schedule, and was accused of trying to shield Clinton from debates.",REAL
+6359,"‘UFO’ Spotted Over Vienna, Frightened Onlookers Call Police","posted by Eddie Startled residents in the Austrian cities of Graz and Vienna were so spooked by an apparent UFO hovering in the skies, they called the police. Footage was uploaded on social media showing the bright object flying through the skies and while many people were skeptical of the sightings, others thought an alien invasion was imminent. In one clip, an object can be seen flying through the sky as bystanders stand in shock. 
+This isn’t the first time a flying object has created such hype in Austria. During the 2016 New Year festivities, another UFO was spotted reportedly being hit by lightning in Lower Austria. For now, though, “the truth is out there.” From Around the Web Founder of WorldTruth.Tv and WomansVibe.com Eddie ( 8922 Posts ) 
+Eddie L. is the founder and owner of WorldTruth.TV. and Womansvibe.com. Both website are dedicated to educating and informing people with articles on powerful and concealed information from around the world. I have spent the last 36+ years researching Bible, History, Alternative Health, Secret Societies, Symbolism and many other topics that are not reported by mainstream media.",FAKE
+8125,Police Investigate Fraud after Voter Registration Flips from Republican to Democrat,"Police Investigate Fraud after Voter Registration Flips from Republican to Democrat Pennsylvania State Police investigating voter manipulation Image Credits: flickr, dokidoki . 
+Pennsylvania State Police are investigating a couple’s claim that their political party affiliation was fraudulently changed from Republican to Democrat on their voter registration applications. 
+“The Pennsylvania State Police are investigating a case of fraud,” authorities noted in a press release Tuesday. 
+“On the above date [10/09/16], unknown Actor(s) filed fraudulent Pennsylvania voter registration applications on behalf of the Victims,” a 46 year-old male and a 47 year-old female from the town of New Ringgold in Schuylkill County. 
+“The application changed their political affiliation from republican to democrat.” 
+“The Victims were made aware of these changes on 10/21/16 when the Schuylkill County office of voter registration sent them new voter registration cards.” 
+Infowars reached out to the Pennsylvania State Police who had no new updates, but stated they are currently actively investigating the incident. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP  ",FAKE
+3268,Mitch McConnell's mission to keep the GOP majority,"Washington (CNN) Mitch McConnell is the Senate majority leader -- and he'd like to keep it that way.
+
+Heading into the final year of his first session leading the chamber -- which begins Monday when the Senate returns from its winter recess -- the Kentucky Republican is developing a carefully tailored legislative agenda. It is designed to support his top priority, which is not losing power to Democrats, who controlled the Senate for most of the past decade and who are committed to reclaiming it in the November elections.
+
+To complicate his effort, the soft-spoken and methodical McConnell must accomplish this against the backdrop of a wildly unpredictable 2016 GOP presidential nominating campaign that has two anti-Washington agitators -- businessman Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas -- leading the pack. The controversial tone of their campaigns has mainstream Republicans deeply concerned about the impact on down-ticket candidates -- such as moderate GOP senators from purple states who must be re-elected if Republicans are to hold the Senate -- especially if Trump or Cruz win the Republican nomination.
+
+Republicans currently have a narrow 54-46 advantage and must defend 24 seats this fall, seven in swing states that voted for President Barack Obama. Democrats need to protect just 10 seats, only one of which is considered competitive.
+
+A constant and challenging task in the months ahead for McConnell will be to protect incumbent senators like Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin from politically difficult votes on free trade, guns, abortion, and other sensitive social issues that could cause them trouble back home.
+
+McConnell, who is firmly rooted in the establishment wing of the GOP, spent his first year running the chamber with a strategic eye toward the 2016 Senate elections. He believes he made an important down payment to voters by proving Republicans can govern more effectively and successfully than Democrats.
+
+""By any objective standard, I think the Senate is clearly back to work,"" McConnell said at a year-end news conference.
+
+He pushed through a number of major bills -- such as highway funding and education reform -- that were signed into law by Obama and he diligently prevented any real threat of government shutdowns or other dramatic ""fiscal cliffs"" that have shaken voters' nerves in recent years.
+
+""I wanted to end those sort of rattling experiences that the American people don't like. It never produces a positive result anyway,"" McConnell said. ""I took those off the table the day after the election and we began to figure out how to get the Senate working again.""
+
+McConnell is tight-lipped about exactly which bills he will put on the floor and when ahead of the November election. Aides say many of those decisions need to be made after a joint House and Senate Republican retreat in Baltimore later this week. But he's made clear that restoring a regular appropriations process -- where all 12 government spending bills will be debated and voted on separately -- is key.
+
+Democrats fought that approach last year because Republicans were demanding higher spending for defense needs than domestic programs, a standoff that led to a breakthrough budget deal that set top-line government spending figures for 2016 and 2017. Because of that, Democratic leaders believe McConnell's ambition to take up all the spending bills may be doable.
+
+""That seems to be pretty fertile ground for bipartisan compromise,"" said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York).
+
+It may be ambitious to believe all these bills can actually pass the partisan Congress, especially with a legislative calendar truncated by the political conventions and other campaign activities. But if the parties could agree on some individual spending bills it would lower the risk of major government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins October 1. That would be a relief to GOP leaders and a sign to voters they kept their word to avoid calamity.
+
+While there is a laundry list of other bills the Senate could take up this year -- including a massive international trade deal and sweeping criminal justice reform -- McConnell might be reluctant to negotiate anything major with a lame duck Democratic president and hold out to see if a Republican can win back the White House.
+
+""I think no matter which party controls the White House, during a presidential year everything is overtaken by that election,"" said Brian Walsh, a former top official at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect GOP Senate candidates. ""I think both parties are in a wait-and-see mode in terms of who is going to control the White House in the following year. I think it's only prudent to hold off on big issues like this and see where things are in 12 months.""
+
+McConnell's aim for a more modest legislative agenda differs dramatically with the priorities of the new House Speaker Paul Ryan who has said he wants his chamber to be an ""ideas factory.""
+
+Ryan also must placate a restive right flank that wants to push high-profile legislation that will draw sharp campaign year contrasts with Obama and congressional Democrats. Some of those hot-button issues -- dealing with abortion, guns, climate change and more -- will be politically complicated for McConnell if they are sent over from the House just as he is trying to protect swing state senators from tough votes.
+
+Other issues will compete for McConnell's attention. Many Republicans want to pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force against ISIS, something that has regularly stalled in the past over policy differences. Ryan has approved a fresh look at an AUMF and if the House approves one if could put pressure on McConnell to act.
+
+The House is also readying to act on new sanctions against North Korea.
+
+On the domestic front, a battle is expected on a bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration over a push by some Republicans to privatize air traffic controllers.
+
+Democrats will demand votes on their agenda too. Helping Puerto Rico solve its debt crisis is a top priority for Democrats as is passing more gun control laws. Republicans leaders have signaled they are open to possible legislation for the troubled U.S. territory but are flatly opposed to any new gun law, despite Obama's recent push on the issue.
+
+""We're going to do more on guns,"" said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. ""We're not going to be silent on that.""
+
+'Do no harm' to GOP senators?
+
+McConnell has already signaled he doesn't want to take up the Trans-Pacific Partnership measure — a legacy item for Obama — until after the election. Putting off votes on the controversial multi-nation free trade pact could benefit GOP senators up for re-election in rust belt states like Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Rob Portman of Ohio where the loss of jobs to free trade deals is a sensitive subject.
+
+McConnell also has said he doesn't intend to draft a major overhaul of the tax code this year, even though it's a top goal of Ryan's.
+
+Because government funding levels were set in last year's budget deal, McConnell could skip doing a budget resolution this year, several congressional aides told CNN. Dropping the time-consuming budget process could give GOP Senate candidates more time at home campaigning. It would also allow them to avoid the ritual ""vote-a-rama"" when senators can offer up an infinite number of amendments, many of which are aimed at putting political squeezes on those running for re-election.
+
+A spokesman for McConnell denied that was true.
+
+""We're planning on a budget,"" Don Stewart said.
+
+Walsh, who as an official at the NRSC helped Republicans win back the Senate two years ago after eight years of Democratic majorities, said the key for McConnell and his conference is ""demonstrating that they are doing the business of the American people in terms of funding the government, passing bills on time. And that will benefit their candidates.""
+
+""I think the big issue is do no harm,"" he said.",REAL
+1701,"As deadlines pass, Biden remains opaque about a 2016 candidacy","Another deadline has come and gone with no decision from Vice President Biden about his possible late-breaking entry into the presidential campaign.
+
+Biden seems poised to continue his deliberations for several more weeks — and possibly into early November — leaving precious little time to launch a bid and get on the ballot in key early primary states. Prominent donors are being courted, and senior strategists with ties to President Obama’s past campaigns are in conversation with Biden’s team.
+
+The continued indecision has made it all but certain that the vice president will not take part in the first Democratic debate Oct. 13 in Las Vegas, leaving the stage to the top two competitors, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and several others.
+
+At times, Biden sounds far from ready. But then there are moments like Thursday night, when Biden sprinkled his remarks to a Manhattan crowd with comments that sounded like someone with a keen interest in running.
+
+He made a reference to the many miles he has traveled as vice president — now clocking in at more than Clinton did as secretary of state. He also drew an ideological contrast with Sanders, who has generated enthusiasm on the left with his populist economic agenda.
+
+“I’m not Bernie Sanders,” Biden said at the Concordia Summit. “He’s a great guy, he really is. But I’m not a populist; I’m a realist.”
+
+When Biden talks like that, it feeds speculation that he is getting ready to join the race, and there is plenty of activity around him to suggest that he is overseeing a campaign in the making.
+
+And yet, there is a parallel universe of greater significance, the single factor that no one can overcome, which is that Biden’s family is still grieving the loss of Biden’s son Beau, who died of brain cancer four months ago at age 46. The vice president has repeatedly said that no decision about running for president can be made until his family is ready to commit, even if it means that the moment passes.
+
+“It’s just not quite there yet, and it might not get there in time to make it feasible to run and succeed because there are certain windows that will close. If that’s it, that’s it. It’s not like I can rush it,” Biden said in an interview with America, a leading Jesuit news site, just before Pope Francis arrived in Washington last week.
+
+Some Biden loyalists have been counseling against the delayed approach because it could give Clinton time to recover from self-inflicted wounds her campaign has suffered over the continued fallout of investigations into her use of a private e-mail server while serving as secretary of state.
+
+Nine days after the debate, Clinton is scheduled to appear before a House committee established to investigate what happened in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012, when four Americans were killed. Democrats began to rally around Clinton this week after remarks by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy ­(R-Calif.) touted that the investigation had hurt her politically, prompting leading Democrats to call the investigation a political exercise.
+
+Even though he is not expected at the Las Vegas debate, Biden will share a forum with Clinton this weekend. He will deliver the keynote address Saturday at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual dinner in Washington. Clinton will speak to the gay rights group earlier in the day.
+
+Biden’s decision-making process continues along two separate tracks, as it has over the past several months. The first is a methodical effort by a small team of advisers to survey the political landscape, and the second is Biden’s internal family deliberations.
+
+With every week that passes, Biden and his political team believe they are more ready than ever to launch a campaign. But with every week that passes, Biden is that much closer to the point of no return — when it would be too late to mount a credible campaign.
+
+Critical states such as New Hampshire, Texas and Florida have filing deadlines that start in November and December, requiring campaign staff on the ground to assemble voter signatures.
+
+That sets up a particularly tense October. The vice president has already blown through previous decision-making timelines, beginning with the end-of-August or early-September dates that advisers suggested in the spring, before the public knew that Beau Biden’s brain cancer had a recurrence.
+
+By late summer, Biden’s camp clarified that the end of summer — officially Sept. 23 — was a more likely deadline, only to float Oct. 1 in recent weeks because that would still allow him to be on stage at the Oct. 13 debate. On Thursday, officials at CNN, the host of the Las Vegas event, reported that Biden is not expected to participate.
+
+Those close to Biden suggest the debate would be high-risk for him. Despite his shoot-from-the-hip image, Biden is meticulous with debate preparations. For his 2012 vice presidential debate against Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Biden logged 100 hours of preparation, including 60 hours that had been completed a full month before the encounter.
+
+Instead of debate prep, Biden has devoted recent weeks to his vice-presidential duties. Last week, his schedule was consumed with the papal visit and the state visit by Chinese President Xi ­Jinping. Earlier this week, he spent a day in New York in a round of meetings with foreign leaders attending the U.N. General Assembly, and he returned there Thursday for a pair of events devoted to diplomacy.
+
+Next Thursday, he will deliver remarks at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on infrastructure funding to boost the economy, which some loyalists believe could be the hallmark of a campaign theme.
+
+The now-lengthy deliberation has given Biden’s advisers plenty of time to make a thorough assessment of the political landscape, identify available talent and scope out prospects for raising enough money. Biden’s team is confident that he could raise $30 million or so to get through the first round of primaries and caucuses.
+
+They have identified people willing to help staff a campaign, both those with past associations with Biden and many who were involved in President Obama’s 2008 or 2012 campaigns.
+
+No firm offers have been made to prospective staffers, but Biden loyalists have a good sense of who they would try to slot into the key jobs. And as one person with ties to the Obama political network, though not in direct conversation with Biden’s team, put it: “There’s a lot of talent available.’
+
+The Associated Press reported Thursday that two Obama campaign veterans — Paul Tewes, who ran the successful Iowa caucus campaign in 2008 that was a key to winning the nomination, a field expert, and Marie Harf, now the State Department spokeswoman — were in talks to work on the potential Biden campaign.
+
+Those close to Biden make no bold predictions of victory in what would be a potentially fierce contest against Clinton and Sanders. Nor are they making their calculations based on the belief that Clinton has been so weakened during the first months of her candidacy that she would be easy to defeat. Their calculations are based, instead, on the assumption that she would be a formidable opponent.
+
+As much as he says he is not ready to make the decision, Biden has dangled hope to his supporters who view his son’s loss as a rallying cry, frequently recalling his own father’s admonition to “just get up” when life knocked him down.
+
+“That’s what Beau wants us to do. That’s what Beau expects his father to do,” Biden told the Jesuit news site. “So we’re just getting up and moving on.”",REAL
+1285,"As Washington publically frets over storm, GOP worries about impact of Trump, Cruz on Hill majority","Essentially everyone in Washington is freaking out about the blizzard.
+
+But for several weeks now, many congressional Republicans have privately freaked out about the prospects of Donald Trump or, to a lesser degree, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, emerging as the party’s standard-bearer in the presidential sweepstakes.
+
+The theory is that both candidates are so polarizing that their electoral prospects will impale Republican candidates down the ballot.
+
+Let’s start with the House. The GOP currently holds a 246-188 edge over Democrats. The current vacant seat belonged to former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and is expected to stay in Republican hands. So for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s 247-188 in favor of the GOP. Democrats would have to flip a staggering net of 30 seats to reclaim control of the House.
+
+Democrats would be rapturous at the prospects of rank-and-file Republicans having to defund Trump or Cruz -- or run away from them.
+
+Democrats could probably put a substantial dent in that 30-seat Republican margin. But that’s expected in a presidential election year. It’s just a question of how many more seats a Trump or Cruz candidacy could turn to Democratic control.
+
+But make no mistake: Knowledgeable sources on both sides of the aisle are clear that it would be almost impossible for Democrats to win back the House this cycle. That net gain of 30 seats is just too high a bar. The map favors Republicans.
+
+There aren’t a lot of “swing” districts in which Democrats could steal a seat or two. Nothing is ever out of the question. But the likelihood of Democrats nabbing the House majority is low at this writing.
+
+The Senate, however, is another story. Republicans already faced an uphill climb to retain their majority this fall. The GOP must defend 24 seats. Only 10 Democratic seats are up this cycle. Plus, it’s a presidential year. And, many of the Republican seats on the ballot are in “purple” states or states that President Obama won in 2008 and 2012.
+
+For the GOP, Sens. Ron Johnson, Wis., Mark Kirk, Ill., Rob Portman, Ohio, Kelly Ayotte, N.H., Pat Toomey, Pa., and Richard Burr, N.C., are running in competitive states. Democrats would also like to win the seat now held by GOP Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who is running for president and not seeking re-election to the Senate.
+
+Democrats must also defend the seat of Sen. Michael Bennet, Colo., and the seat of retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada.
+
+Colorado and Nevada are potential GOP pickups. Republicans currently hold a 54-46 advantage over the Democrats in the Senate (two independent senators caucus with the Democrats).
+
+So a net gain of five seats isn’t out of the realm for Democrats. Many political theorists think those seats in swing states could all tilt to the Democratic side if Trump or Cruz is the nominee.
+
+This pariah status for Trump and Cruz is rare. On Thursday, a reporter asked Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., whether he preferred Cruz over Trump.
+
+“It’s like being shot or poisoned. It doesn’t really matter,” replied Graham. “Donald Trump is the most-unprepared person I’ve ever met to be commander-in-chief.”
+
+Last week, House and Senate Republicans huddled jointly in Baltimore for their annual issues retreat. Much of the conversation focused on an approach to fighting ISIS, terrorism and polling. Trump and Cruz weren’t there.
+
+But their specter haunted the entire confab. As a result, Republican leaders tried to present a positive image and sidestep internecine battles that loom inside the party.
+
+“What happens above us on the presidential campaign is out of our control. So you try to control what you can control,” said Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune, S.D.
+
+When asked about the eventual nominee, Thune left scribes with a less-than-confident answer that spoke deeply to Republican divisions.
+
+“Hopefully we’ll be able to sync up with their agenda,” he said about the nominee.
+
+House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., sought to deflect inquiries about the GOP chasms and pivoted to fissures among Democrats.
+
+“I think if you look at the fractures, there are more on the Democratic side,” proffered Scalise. “Hillary Clinton hasn’t been able to close the deal yet. I think you are going to see a very united convention.”
+
+The most-prominent issue next to Trump and Cruz is the unity of Republicans heading into the convention. Everyone seems to be talking about it -- except for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
+
+The speaker dismissed a reporter’s inquiry who asked if he thought the GOP would conduct a brokered convention.
+
+“That's ridiculous,” Ryan protested. “How do I know? I think that's ridiculous to talk about that.”
+
+Even though people are talking about it….
+
+And to hear Ryan and Scalise chatter, everyone will be in lockstep come convention time.
+
+“We’re going to support whoever our nominee is because that’s the Republican primary voter’s decision,” Ryan said.
+
+That’s where Democrats think they have Republicans in a fix if the GOP nominates Trump or Cruz.
+
+Reid said he’d like to see the Senate vote on some of Trump’s policies - specifically the plan to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.
+
+This is why Republicans fear Trump -- and why Democrats would love to put GOPers on the spot and exploit the schism.
+
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell retorted that “what is good for the goose is good for the gander.” The Kentucky Republican argued he might concoct votes on the policy positions of Clinton or fellow Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders, Independent-Vermont.
+
+Adam Jentleson, a top aide to Reid, indicated to Fox that Democrats “would accept the deal McConnell proposed in a heartbeat -- votes on Trump’s policies in return for votes on Clinton/Sanders policies.”
+
+In many respects, congressional Republicans are trying to rise above the fray.
+
+“We need to appear like the sane ones,” said one senior House aide.
+
+That’s why Ryan’s pushing a robust policy agenda and “vision” items this year.
+
+“There’s a lot of us who believe this is a make or break year. We are going to build an agenda that is agnostic to our nominee,” said Texas GOP Rep. Bill Flores, chairman the Republican Study Committee, the largest bloc of conservatives in the House.
+
+The agenda “is a key piece of infrastructure that any presidential nominee would need,” he said.
+
+In short, House GOPers are hoping to “wag the dog” a little. If say Trump is the nominee and he propounds far-flung ideas, perhaps congressional Republicans can temper that red meat with bona fide policies that represent core values of the party.
+
+But that doesn’t stop everyone from freaking out on Capitol Hill. Maybe Trump and Cruz already wagged the dog. And then those in Congress are the ones who look like they’re out of step with the nominee their party selects.",REAL
+10283,Hillary Releases The Most Inspiring Video EVER Chronicling Her Historic Rise To The Top,"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+Here we are, on the cusp of what is most definitely the most important presidential election of our lifetimes. There’s a lot on the line that goes far beyond politics. It goes into the character of the candidates, and their fitness for office. In GOP nominee Donald Trump, we have an unstable reality star who is dangerously unqualified, temperamentally unfit, and nothing more than a bigoted demagogue who has managed to fleece half the nation into believing his authoritarian ways will solve all their problems. 
+On the other hand, we have Hillary Clinton taking up the mantle for the Democrats. She will take the nation forward into a brighter future, reassure and protect our allies, and continue the social and economic progress that President Obama has done so much for. We’re talking about a woman who has been First Lady, a United States Senator, and Secretary of State. She performed admirably in all of those roles. 
+And now, at the end of what has been a bruising, ugly campaign thanks to the dangerous rhetoric of one Donald J. Trump, we have forgotten one thing: We are witnessing history. Hillary is the first woman to shatter the glass ceiling to become the nominee of one of America’s two major parties. It’s easy to lose sight of all of that in such a crazy election season, but we have much to celebrate. 
+Luckily, Hillary’s campaign didn’t lose sight of that, and they released an amazingly inspiring video that chronicled her meteoric rise to the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. It goes from the announcement, through the primaries, and through the ridiculousness of having to run against Donald Trump. And here we are, waiting with bated breath on the eve of this stressful election, and Hillary has given us the priceless gift of something to celebrate in a world that feels quite bleak right now. Without further ado, here it is, The Story of Us, via Hillary’s Twitter: The story of this campaign. pic.twitter.com/8cft9HD0RI 
+— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 5, 2016 
+So, take a deep breath, watch that amazing video, and remember – VOTE BLUE. 
+Here’s to you, Hillary, and hopefully, in two days we’ll be calling you what you’ve been destined to be called your whole life: MADAME PRESIDENT. 
+Featured image via Hillary Clinton Twitter Share this Article!",FAKE
+5630,"They Said What?!: Find Out What Liam Neeson, Lorena Garcia, And Kyle Chandler Have To Say","Email Ever wonder what’s on the mind of today’s most notable people? Well, don’t miss our unbelievable roundup of the best and most talked about quotes of the day: “ Of course ‘Schindler’s List’ is one of the saddest movies of all time, but I’m not going to brag about it every chance I get. ” —Liam Neeson On humility “ When I put something in the microwave, I like to whisper to it that I’m ‘sending it to solitary.’ It’s a fun little joke, and the food and I can both laugh, knowing that it’s coming back out very soon. ” —Lorena Garcia “ Some good stuff going on there. Love them. ” —Kyle Chandler",FAKE
+4297,Marco Rubio's strategy is utterly baffling,"There's something odd about Marco Rubio's presidential campaign: He hasn't been doing all that much, er, campaigning in the early states.
+
+Unlike most recent presidential nomination winners, who have invested serious time and effort into campaigning and building organizations in at least one of either Iowa or New Hampshire, Rubio has taken a positively relaxed approach to both. He doesn't show up very often, doesn't do much campaigning when he is around, and doesn't seem to be building very impressive field operations.
+
+And it's raising eyebrows. James Pindell of the Boston Globe wrote last week that Rubio's New Hampshire surge was ""riddled with doubts,"" and that GOP insiders are bemoaning his ""lack of staff"" and ""activity."" National Review's Tim Alberta and Eliana Johnson reported Wednesday that Rubio's ""weak ground game"" was angering Iowa Republicans. And the New Hampshire Union Leader wrote an editorial headlined, ""Marco? Marco? Where's Rubio?""
+
+For a candidate who's so often deemed ""The Republican Barack Obama,"" it sure seems like Rubio has missed some key lessons from the president's historic 2008 campaign. And this isn't good optics for a candidate who's already been criticized (somewhat unfairly) for missing lots of Senate votes, either.
+
+The conventional wisdom is that a candidate needs to win either Iowa or New Hampshire to win the nomination. In fact, every nominee for decades has done that, except for Bill Clinton in 1992 (an odd year in which the Iowa caucuses effectively ""didn't count"" because Iowan Tom Harkin was running). Candidates who've tried to ""skip"" both early states in hopes that a later win will propel then to prominence have failed miserably.
+
+Furthermore, said conventional wisdom continues, the way to win in both Iowa and New Hampshire is to work hard on the ground. The candidate should spend a lot of time there. The campaign should build up a network of local relationships, winning over supporters one by one. And the campaign should focus on organizing, to identify committed voters and make sure they actually turn out to the polls. (Organizing like this helped power Barack Obama to victory in Iowa in 2008.)
+
+Yet Rubio doesn't appear to be focusing on any of this:
+
+Now, it's not that Rubio is ignoring Iowa and New Hampshire. Indeed, his operation has spent millions on ads in each state. His team just doesn't appear to be spending time on this nuts-and-bolts campaign activity that so many political professionals think is crucial to actually winning.
+
+If we believe what Rubio's advisers are saying, they aren't using these tactics too much because they genuinely believe their effectiveness is overrated. They're saying that they think ads and media coverage, not field or campaign events, are the keys to victory.
+
+""More people in Iowa see Marco on ‘Fox and Friends’ than see Marco when he is in Iowa,"" Rubio's campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, told the New York Times. And Alberta and Johnson report that Rubio's team believes ""a sprawling operation weighs down a campaign and wastes precious resources that could be spent on TV ads that reach more voters."" (Presumably, Rubio isn't making more campaign trips to the early states so he can spend more time raising money that can fund these crucial ads.)
+
+Perhaps Rubio's team is right, and most other campaigns are just wasting their resources by spending big on organizing. But it's a questionable hypothesis. So far this year, ad spending appears to have had little relation to candidates' poll standing. (It has definitely enriched many political consultants, though.)
+
+Another possible explanation is that Rubio's campaign is trying to savvily lower expectations for his performance in both states, because neither is a particularly good fit for him. Iowa has lately tended to elevate evangelical favorites, and New Hampshire has sometimes opted for flinty, independent-thinking outsiders. Perhaps Rubio hopes he'll get a pass for doing poorly in both states because he didn't really try.
+
+But that may be too clever by half. The evidence seems to indicate that if you want to win the nomination, you need to do really well in either Iowa or New Hampshire — otherwise, you quickly vanish from the media spotlight and from voters' thoughts, much like Rudy Giuliani did in 2008. If Rubio hopes to avoid this fate, he should probably get to work.",REAL
+363,11 service members in Black Hawk crash presumed dead,"The 11 service members who were onboard a Black Hawk helicopter that crashed Tuesday night on the Florida panhandle coastline are presumed dead, a Pentagon official said, but a search-and-rescue operation was still underway Wednesday in a desperate search for survivors.
+
+Seven Marines and four soldiers were onboard a UH-60 helicopter as part of a training exercise when the chopper ran into heavy fog. Human remains and helicopter parts were recovered earlier Wednesday.
+
+""It's a tough day,"" Maj. Gen. Glenn H. Curtis, the adjutant general of the Louisiana National Guard, where the unit was based. ""They're under my command. I take very seriously their safety and well-being, and that of their families.""
+
+Kim Urr, 62, who works at the nearby Navarre Beach campground, said she heard a strange sound, followed by two explosions around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday.
+
+""It sounded like something metal either being hit or falling over, that's what it sounded like. And there were two booms afterward, similar to what you hear with ordnance booms, but more muffled,"" Urr said.
+
+President Obama spoke with the military leaders involved and expressed his condolences to the families before saying he's confident of a detailed and thorough investigation, said his spokesman, Josh Earnest.
+
+""Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families as the search and rescue continues,"" Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Capitol Hill.
+
+The Black Hawk crashed as Marines and National Guardsmen practiced ""insertion and extraction missions,"" using small boats and helicopters to get troops into and out of a target site, said Capt. Barry Morris, spokesman for the Marine Corps Special Operations Command at Camp Lejeune.
+
+Like the Army's Green Berets and the Navy's SEALs, these Marines were highly skilled unconventional warriors, trained to endure grueling conditions and sensitive assignments on land and at sea, from seizing ships to special reconnaissance missions and direct action inside hostile territory.
+
+The helicopter was part of a nighttime training mission Tuesday at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. There was dense fog in the area at the time of the crash but officials have not said what caused the helicopter to go down.
+
+Fog had reduced visibility to less than two miles at the time, according to the National Weather Service. Another helicopter participating in the exercise turned back because of the bad weather before the other Black Hawk crashed, authorities said.
+
+Despite the human remains washing ashore, the military still called it a rescue mission Wednesday, said Sara Vidoni, a spokeswoman for Eglin Air Force Base, outside Pensacola.
+
+The fog remained so heavy Wednesday that search boats just offshore could be heard but not seen, blasting horns as their crews peered into the choppy water. It finally began to lift in the afternoon, enabling a helicopter to slowly survey the water.
+
+About a dozen airmen wearing fatigues walked shoulder-to-shoulder down the beach, scanning the sand, while civilian rescue crews and searchers with dogs joined the effort.
+
+The Coast Guard said debris was first spotted about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, and that the search area expanded to a 17-mile stretch of the narrow sound separating Santa Rosa Island from the Florida Panhandle mainland.
+
+The Marines were part of a special operations group based in Camp Lejeune. They had arrived Sunday for a week of training.
+
+None were immediately identified, so that families could be told first.
+
+The helicopter that crashed had joined the training from an airport in nearby Destin. The site includes 20 miles of pristine beachfront under military control since before World War II — an ideal place for special operations units from across the military to practice, test range manager Glenn Barndollar told The AP last year.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2295,Same-sex couples wed in Alabama,"(CNN) Tori Sisson and Shanté Wolfe of Tuskegee, Alabama, camped outside the Montgomery County Courthouse overnight, hoping that when the sun rose Monday, they'd be the first same-sex couple to be legally married in the county.
+
+They arrived at 2 p.m. Sunday and set up their tent. Expecting a crowd -- of mostly media and friends, or their ""chosen family,"" as many of their kin don't approve of their relationship -- they awoke at 5 a.m. Monday to get dressed ""so that when we got out of the tent we'd look like a million bucks,"" Sisson said.
+
+Sisson, 24, and Wolfe, 21, have known each other for seven years. They've been dating for two. Last year, the pair got ""spiritually married"" in Tuskegee, but it wasn't a state-recognized union -- where all the rights and benefits of matrimony are conferred on both partners.
+
+They previously considered going to a state that allowed same-sex marriage, but Wolfe balked at the idea.
+
+""We work here and we pay taxes here, and we didn't feel it was right that we'd have to do that because nobody else does,"" she said.
+
+Though there were some minor computer problems in issuing their license, their wish soon came true.
+
+With one of their godmothers performing the ceremony, they exchanged vows outside the courthouse and kissed as a phalanx of media cameras captured the moment. (One of those cameras belonged to the Human Rights Campaign, a watchdog group involved in marriage equality advocacy; Sisson works for the organization.)
+
+Sisson wept, while Wolfe did not.
+
+""One of us has to hold it together,"" Wolfe quipped.
+
+Sisson's tears weren't borne solely of the bliss that comes with being joined in union with your beloved. Sure, those sentiments were there, Sisson said, but she cried also because she had been thinking all night about the myriad couples who were denied the opportunity she and Wolfe were able to seize Monday.
+
+""We have the honor to be the first couple in Montgomery County to do this. It's amazing,"" Sisson said, explaining the ""overwhelming and overflowing love I have for Shanté but also for people and the hope I have in my heart that this really means progress here.""
+
+How we got here
+
+Though the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama cleared the way for same-sex marriages to begin Monday in Alabama, the famously conservative chief justice of the state Supreme Court on Sunday mounted a last-ditch effort to stop the weddings, instructing probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
+
+That didn't stop several couples from converging on county courthouses across the state. Probate Judge Alan King in Jefferson County, the state's most populous, said there appeared to be a larger-than-usual crowd outside the courthouse when he arrived at work Monday.
+
+""Effective immediately, no Probate Judge of the State of Alabama nor any agent or employee of any Alabama Probate Judge shall issue or recognize a marriage license that is inconsistent"" with the state code or constitution, Moore wrote in the order.
+
+The American Civil Liberties Union called Moore's order spurious and reminded Alabama's probate judges they are sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution, which outweighs state law on this issue.
+
+""Judge Roy Moore has no authority to trump a federal court's decision,"" said Susan Watson, executive director of the ACLU of Alabama. ""By issuing his 'order,' he has done nothing but create confusion among the different probate offices across the state. Whereas some counties are issuing licenses to same-sex couples, there are many who aren't. Unfortunately, we have received a number of complaints to that effect.""
+
+The Human Rights Campaign has already denounced the order as a ""clear violation of all codes of legal ethics,"" and several counties -- including Jefferson, Montgomery and Madison -- have told CNN they intend to issue same-sex marriage licenses Monday.
+
+But in Tuscaloosa County, where five same-sex couple were awaiting licenses when the court opened Monday, chief probate clerk Lisa Whitehead said the court would follow Moore's guidance.
+
+""We will be issuing traditional marriage licenses,"" she told CNN.
+
+Shelby, Marshall and Houston counties also are declining to issue the licenses, and in Lee County, where two same-sex couples attempted to tie the knot Monday, Judge Bill English said he, too, was ""complying with an order from the chief justice late last night.""
+
+Other probate judges weren't sure Moore had the law behind him.
+
+""I was shocked,"" King said of his reaction to Moore's order. ""I'm old enough to remember the George Wallace stand in the schoolhouse door. I was a kid at the time.""
+
+King was referencing the 1963 attempt by then-Gov. Wallace to stop the federally ordered desegregation of schools by blocking black students from entering the University of Alabama's Foster Auditorium.
+
+Contacted before his court opened for the day, King said he doesn't want to be on that side of history. After consulting with attorneys who helped him analyze Moore's order, ""I'm convinced it's my duty to follow the U.S. Constitution and the federal court order. At 8 a.m., we will be issuing marriage licenses to all in Jefferson County. ... I don't think (Moore's order) is grounded in legal theory, just like Gov. Wallace in the 1960s was not grounded in law,"" he said.
+
+Gov. Robert Bentley said he would not punish probate judges who issue the licenses.
+
+He added that he had ""great respect"" for the legal process and said, ""We will follow the rule of law in Alabama, and allow the issue of same sex marriage to be worked out through the proper legal channels.""
+
+The federal court that struck down the ban permitted a stay until Monday to allow probate courts to prepare. Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the marriages until the high court rules on a case on its docket that will decide the fate of same-sex marriages in four states.
+
+""In this case, the Court refuses even to grant a temporary stay when it will resolve the issue at hand in several months,"" Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a dissent. ""I would have shown the people of Alabama the respect they deserve and preserved the status quo while the Court resolves this important Constitutional question.""
+
+Strange responded in a statement: ""In the absence of a stay, there will likely be more confusion in the coming months leading up to the Supreme Court's anticipated ruling on the legality of same-sex marriage."" Strange further advised probate judges to consult with their attorneys ""about how to respond to the ruling.""",REAL
+3969,"Fate of Paris attack mastermind unclear after raid, but intel sources reportedly say he's dead","French investigators would not publicly identify one of two people killed in a terror raid north of Paris early Wednesday — the other being a woman who detonated a suicide vest — but The Washington Post, citing two senior European intelligence officials, reported that the suspected mastermind of Friday's terror attacks was dead.
+
+The man believed to be the architect of the massacre, 27-year-old Belgian Islamic State militant Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had mocked Western authorities for his ability to slip out of their sights, into and out of Syria. Investigators traced him to an apartment just north of Paris in suburban Saint-Denis by tracking phone conversations and piecing together surveillance images and witness accounts, according to Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins and French Interior Minister Bernard Cazenueve.
+
+The Post reports its intelligence sources spoke on condition of anonymity.
+
+Police confirm a woman in a suicide vest blew herself up during the raid, severely damaging the building's structural integrity. She apparently was Abaaoud's cousin, in her twenties and from the northwestern suburb of Clichy La Garenne, French media reported.
+
+Molins said a terror cell linked to the Paris massacre had been operating out of that apartment, and was ready to act again. He said at one point, police fired some 5,000 rounds during ""uninterrupted"" shooting that lasted nearly an hour. A reinforced door to the apartment initially blocked the heavily-armed policy squads, he added.
+
+In addition, the manhunt for Salah Abdeslam, an ISIS gunman believed to have taken part in Friday's attacks, continued Wednesday. Molins said neither Abaaoud nor Abdeslam were among the seven men arrested in Wednesday's raid.
+
+Abaaoud was believed to be in Syria after a January police raid in Belgium, but bragged in ISIS propaganda of his ability to move back and forth between Europe and Syria undetected.
+
+One of the men arrested said he lived in the apartment, let some people stay there as a favor, and ""didn't know they're terrorists."" Jawad Bendaoud added that someone had ""asked me to put some people up for two, three days, and I provided this service.""
+
+He said, ""I don't know where they come from ... If I would have known, I wouldn't have let them stay.""
+
+Bendaoud spoke to BFMTV as police led him away. He had been sentenced to eight years in prison for killing his best friend in a 2006 fight.
+
+French police confirmed that five officers suffered minor injuries in the raid. A police dog was also killed when the female suicide bomber blew herself up.
+
+The apartment is just over a mile from the Stade de France stadium, which was targeted by three suicide bombers during Friday's attacks. Riot police cleared people from the streets, pointing guns at curious locals to move them off the roads.
+
+One person who lived near the site of the siege posted a 10-second video of the scene on her street. A series of bangs sounding like automatic weapons fire could be heard. The message accompanying the tweet translates to ""It's an intervention by police ... street closed, officers, etc.""
+
+French authorities sent out a bulletin to police across Europe asking them to watch out for a Citroen Xsara car that could be carrying Salah Abdeslam, a Spanish security official told AP. One of his brothers, Brahim, blew himself up in Paris.
+
+In all, overnight raids across France led to 25 arrests and the seizure of 34 weapons. The new tally was announced Wednesday by the Interior Ministry.
+
+The weapons seized since Friday include 11 military-style firearms, 33 rifles and 31 handguns, according to police.
+
+Seven attackers died in Friday's gun-and-bomb rampage through Paris that killed 129 and wounded over 350 others. Police had said before the raids that they were hunting for two fugitives suspected of taking part as well as any accomplices. That would bring the number of attackers to at least nine.
+
+And French president Francois Hollande said any places where people are ""glorifying"" terrorism will be shut down. The bill to extend France's state of emergency for three months includes a measure that enables authorities to close ""any association or gathering"" -- which notably includes mosques and community groups -- that would encourage people to carry out terrorist acts.
+
+Speaking on French television Wednesday, Hollande said ""we are at war"" with ISIS. He called for a ""large coalition"" working together against Islamic State militants to destroy a group that threatens the whole world and ""commits massacres"" in the Mideast.
+
+Hollande told lawmakers, “I know you have at heart the willingness to undertake this task.” He added that the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle just left to help French military operations in Syria against ISIS.
+
+Fox News' Greg Palkot and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+7315,Russia Warns US Is Now A Colour Revolution “Active Zone” Due To Trump Victory,"
+A grim new Ministry of Defense ( MoD ) report circulating in the Kremlin today states that intelligence analysts of the System of Forward-looking Military Research and Development ( SFLMRD ) have now placed the United States in the “ active zone ” of nations currently undergoing a “ Colour Revolution ” as both US and EU elites have united to topple the soon to come government of President-elect Donald Trump. [ Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]
+According to this report, SFLMRD intelligence analysts are tasked with using “ modern/sophisticated ” technologies to ensure and protect the Federation’s national security interests—and of which the MoD has previously identified “ Colour Revolutions ” as being one of the gravest threats, not only to Russia, but the entire world.
+During the MoD’s 2014 meeting of the Moscow Conference on International Security , this report explains, Federation military commanders labeled “ Colour Revolutions ” as a new US and European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other nations as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties .
+The some of first of these Western “ Colour Revolutions ” to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world, this report continues, was in 2003 when the legitimately elected democratic government of Georgia was overthrown in what was called the “ Rose Revolution ”—and that turned this once peaceful nation into a Western military puppet who, in 2008, launched an unprovoked attack against the Federation , but that was quickly and decisively defeated.
+Next to be attacked by a Western “ Colour Revolution ”, this report notes, was Ukraine, in 2004, who’s “ Orange Revolution ” resulted in the 2014 overthrow of that nations legitimately elected government in what the powerful American private intelligence agency Stratfor (aka The Shadow CIA ) called “ the most blatant coup in history ”—and like Georgia before it, has, likewise, been used by the West as a military puppet against the Federation .
+In 2005, this report continues, the West then launched a “ Colour Revolution ” against Kyrgyzstan called the “ Tulip Revolution ”—but that ultimately failed leading that nation, in 2014, to expel the US military from its territory .
+Once the subversive tactics of the West in their using their “ Colour Revolutions ” against other nations was “ deciphered/discovered ”, this report says, both Iran (2009-“ Green Revolution ”) and Russia (2011-“ White (Snow) Revolution ”) were able to be stop them from being successful and causing great loss of life.
+To exactly how the West “ engineered/manipulated ” their “ Colour Revolutions ”, this report explains, was through the use of what are called non-governmental organizations ( NGO’s ) using very innocuous sounding names that the United States and European Union would secretly funnel millions-of-dollars into for the purpose of fermenting rebellion—and which, in 2015, President Putin signed a law against preventing their nefarious actions in the Federation .
+Heading nearly all of these Western backed and financed “ Colour Revolution ” NGO’s, this report details, is the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros —who has not only fomented rebellions across the world costing thousands of innocent lives, he was, also, recently exposed as being Hillary Clinton’s puppetmaster controlling all of her actions during her failed bid to become the US president .
+Unlike the Federation that has protected itself against a George Soros led, and US-EU funded, NGO “ Colour Revolution ”, this report grimly warns, the United States government has now become the most vulnerable nation in the world to this type of “ rebellion/warfare ” as he funds hundreds of organizations violently opposed to both America and that nations core moral values .
+And immediately upon Donald Trump being elected as the 45 th President of the United States, this report states, these George Soros funded NGO’s launched their newest “ Colour Revolution ” intended not only to destroy President Trump, but the entirety of America.
+Led by the George Soros funded MoveOn.org NGO , this report continues, this new “ Colour Revolution ” striking American began with tens-of-thousands of protesters striking nearly all of the United States largest cities —and that was quickly followed with thousands of these revolutionaries calling for the assassination of President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence before they can take office .
+To the main “ purpose/reason ” behind these protests, this report explains, is to initiate a “ brutal/violent ” response from US government forces seeking to suppress them and reestablish order—which in turn these revolutionaries will use as an example of how the American government is no longer legitimate because it’s killing innocent people, and, therefore, must be overthrown.
+Not being understood by the American people about how these “ Colour Revolutions ” work, this report continues, is that they are intended to last for years—like in Ukraine that took a full 10 years before that government was overthrown.
+To the most basic reason why this “ Colour Revolution ” is now targeting the United States, this report details, are the US-EU elites fear of President-elect Donald Trump whose choice of nationalism over globalism has left European leftist leaders in “ complete horror ” as the populace revolution he, Trump, is leading is soon to wash ashore in Europe as new elections for nearly all of the continent are nearing—with Holland being the first fall , and France soon to follow , and whose next leader, Marine Le Pen , just proclaimed: “ Congratulations to the new President of the US, Donald Trump, and the American people – free! ”
+With the US propaganda mainstream media still in denial of what has happened to them because of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, and Google now reporting that their top search term is “ How did Donald Trump win? ” , this report further states, it bears notice that the Kremlin and its intelligence analysts were among the only entities in the world who correctly stated Donald Trump would win—and as we had detailed in numerous reports, including Russia Confirms Supercomputer Findings Showing Donald Trump Landslide Victory and Russian Report Warns: American Revolution Has Now Begun, May Last Entire Decade .
+But to the most global consequential outcome of Donald Trump becoming the 45 th President of the United States, this report concludes, (and as we had previously alerted you to on 13 May in our report Putin Warns Military Commanders: “If It’s Hillary Clinton, It’s War” ) was President Putin’s advisor Sergei Glaziev stating just hours ago how close to catastrophe our world actually was: “ Americans had two choices: World War III or multilateral peace. Clinton was a symbol of war, and Trump has a chance to change this course .”
+Let’s all hope President Trump can, indeed, change this course because the world, literally, now hangs in the balance if he doesn’t.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+8383,Heroic Prego Advertisement Replaces Refreshed Webpage’s Presidential Campaign Banner - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Hillary Clinton Waiting In Wings Of Stage Since 6 A.M. For DNC Speech PHILADELPHIA—Saying she arrived hours before any of the members of the production crew, sources confirmed Thursday that presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been waiting in the wings of the Wells Fargo Center stage since six o’clock this morning to deliver her speech at the Democratic National Convention. Depressed, Butter-Covered Tom Vilsack Enters Sixth Day Of Corn Bender After Losing VP Spot WASHINGTON—Saying she has grown increasingly concerned about her husband’s mental and physical well-being since last Friday, Christie Vilsack, the wife of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, told reporters Thursday that the despondent, butter-covered cabinet member has entered the sixth day of a destructive corn bender after being passed over for the Democratic vice presidential spot. DNC Speech: ‘I Am Proud To Say I Walked In On Bill And Hillary Having Sex’ A friend of the Clinton family describes a Hillary who America never gets to see: the one he saw having sex. Trump Sick And Tired Of Mainstream Media Always Trying To Put His Words Into Some Sort Of Context NEW YORK—Emphasizing that the practice was just more evidence of journalists’ bias against him, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stated Thursday that he was sick and tired of the mainstream media always attempting to place his words into some kind of context. Who’s Speaking At The DNC: Day 4 Here is a guide to the major speakers who will be addressing attendees on the final night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention Bound, Gagged Joaquin Castro Horrified By What His Identical Twin Brother Might Be Doing Out On DNC Floor PHILADELPHIA—Struggling to free himself from the tightly wound lengths of rope binding his wrists and ankles together, bruised and gagged Texas congressman Joaquin Castro was reportedly horrified by what his identical twin brother, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, might be out doing on the floor of the DNC Thursday. Obama: ‘Hillary Will Fight To Protect My Legacy, Even The Truly Detestable Parts’ PHILADELPHIA—Emphasizing the former secretary of state’s competence and tenacity during his Democratic National Convention address Wednesday night, President Barack Obama praised Hillary Clinton as someone who would work tirelessly to defend and advance the legacy he had built, even the “truly repugnant parts.” Tim Kaine Clearly Tuning Out In Middle Of Boring Vice Presidential Acceptance Speech PHILADELPHIA—Describing the look of total disinterest on his face and noting how he kept peering down at his watch as the speech progressed, sources at the Democratic National Convention said that Virginia senator Tim Kaine clearly began tuning out partway through the boring vice presidential acceptance address Wednesday night. Cannon Overshoots Tim Kaine Across Wells Fargo Center PHILADELPHIA—Noting that the vice presidential nominee had been launched nearly 100 feet into the air during his entrance into the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night, sources reported that the cannon at the back of the Wells Fargo Center had accidentally overshot Tim Kaine across the arena, sending him crashing to the stage several dozen feet beyond the erected safety net. Biden Regales DNC With Story Of ’80s Girl Band Vixen Breaking Hard Rock’s Glass Ceiling PHILADELPHIA—Devoting a large portion of his speech to the “pioneering, stiffy-inducing” all-female quartet, Vice President Joe Biden regaled the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night with the rousing story of the metal band Vixen breaking hard rock’s glass ceiling in the late 1980s. ",FAKE
+8220,IF HILLARY CLINTON IS CHARGED WITH OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE SHE COULD GO TO PRISON FOR 20 YEARS,"Home › POLITICS › IF HILLARY CLINTON IS CHARGED WITH OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE SHE COULD GO TO PRISON FOR 20 YEARS IF HILLARY CLINTON IS CHARGED WITH OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE SHE COULD GO TO PRISON FOR 20 YEARS 0 SHARES 
+[10/31/16] MICHAEL SNYDER -In the world of politics, the cover-up is often worse than the original crime. It was his role in the Watergate cover-up that took down Richard Nixon, and now Hillary Clinton’s cover-up of her email scandal could send her to prison for a very, very long time. When news broke that the FBI has renewed its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, it sent shockwaves throughout the political world . But this time around, we aren’t just talking about an investigation into the mishandling of classified documents. I haven’t heard anyone talking about this, but if the FBI discovers that Hillary Clinton altered, destroyed or concealed any emails that should have been turned over to the FBI during the original investigation, she could be charged with obstruction of justice. That would immediately end her political career, and if she was found guilty it could send her to prison for the rest of her life. 
+I have not seen a single news report mention the phrase “obstruction of justice” yet, but I am convinced that there is a very good chance that this is where this scandal is heading. The following is the relevant part of the federal statute that deals with obstruction of justice … 
+Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsified, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under Title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. 
+If Hillary Clinton is sent to prison for 20 years, that would essentially be for the rest of her life. 
+I have a feeling that the FBI is going to find a great deal of evidence of obstruction of justice in Huma Abedin’s emails. But unfortunately there is not likely to be a resolution to this matter before November 8th, because according to the Wall Street Journal there are approximately 650,000 emails to search through… 
+As federal agents prepare to scour roughly 650,000 emails to see how many relate to a prior probe of Hillary Clinton ’s email use, the surprise disclosure that investigators were pursuing the potential new evidence lays bare building tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee. 
+Metadata found on the laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, suggests there may be thousands of emails sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe. 
+Of those 650,000 emails, an inside source told Fox News that “ at least 10,000 ” would be of interest to the investigation. 
+At this point, FBI officials have not even begun searching through the emails, because a search warrant has not been secured yet. The following comes from CNN … 
+Government lawyers haven’t yet approached Abedin’s lawyers to seek an agreement to conduct the search. Sources earlier told CNN that those discussions had begun, but the law enforcement officials now say they have not. 
+Either way, government lawyers plan to seek a search warrant from a judge to conduct the search of the computer, the law enforcement officials said. 
+But the FBI is reportedly already searching a laptop that was co-owned by Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, and no warrant was necessary for that search because Weiner is cooperating with the FBI. 
+Many have been wondering why FBI Director James Comey would choose to make such a bold move just over a week until election day. Surely he had to know that this would have a dramatic impact on the election, and it is unlikely that he would have done so unless someone had already found something really big. In addition, Comey was reportedly eager to find an opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of his peers at the FBI. The following is an excerpt from a Daily Mail article that was written by Ed Klein, the author of a recently released New York Times bestseller about the Clintons entitled “ Guilty As Sin “… 
+‘The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary,’ said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week. 
+‘Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,’ said the source. ‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.’ 
+According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice. 
+He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom. 
+So what happens next? 
+In the most likely scenario, the FBI will not have time to complete the investigation and decide whether or not to charge Hillary Clinton before the election. This means that we would go into November 8th with this scandal hanging over the Clinton campaign, and that would seem to be very good news for Donald Trump. 
+However, it is possible that once the FBI starts searching through these emails that they could come to the conclusion very rapidly that charges against Clinton are warranted, and if that happens we could still see some sort of announcement before election day. 
+In the unlikely event that does happen, we could actually see Hillary Clinton forced out of the race before November 8th. 
+Once again, this appears to be very unlikely at this point, but it is still possible. 
+If Clinton was forced to step aside, the Democrats would need to come up with a new nominee, and that process would take time. In an article later today on The Most Important News I will reveal who I believe that nominee would be. 
+In such a scenario, the Democrats would desperately need time to get their act together, and so we could actually see Barack Obama attempt to delay or suspend the election . The legality of such a move is highly questionable, but Barack Obama has not allowed a little thing like the U.S. Constitution to stop him in the past. 
+This week is going to be exceedingly interesting – that is for sure. 
+The craziest election in modern American history just keeps getting crazier, and I have a feeling that even more twists and turns are ahead. 
+It sure seems ironic that Anthony Weiner is playing such a central role this late in the story, and I can’t wait to see what is in store for the season finale. Post navigation",FAKE
+4485,Kamala Harris announces U.S. Senate bid,"Los Angeles (CNN) Hours after California Attorney General Kamala Harris began raising money for a bid to replace Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate, billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer outlined the case for his own run Tuesday and said he would decide soon -- setting up the likelihood of an exorbitantly expensive contest that could have two Democrats facing off in November of 2016.
+
+California's two Senate seats have been locked down by Boxer and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein since 1992, closing off statewide opportunities for the next generation of politicians . Under California's new top-two primary system, the top two candidates in the first round will advance to the general election, regardless of their party.
+
+In a column on the Huffington Post website, Steyer said he was intrigued by the opportunity of taking on interests in Washington that ""oppose recognizing global warming and fight against the rights and futures of average Americans.""
+
+""Washington needs to be shaken up and we need climate champions who will fight for the next generation,"" Steyer said. ""California Democrats are blessed to have a deep bench of talent, and I will decide soon based on what I think is the best way to continue the hard work we have already started together to prevent climate disaster and preserve American prosperity.""
+
+Steyer and Harris would be among the most formidable contenders for Boxer's seat, along with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has said he is ""seriously considering"" a run. Several members of the California congressional delegation and of the state leadership have signaled interest, including Rep. Loretta Sanchez, Rep. John Garamendi, and state Treasurer John Chiang.
+
+In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Sanchez touted her focus on working families, immigration reform and affordable healthcare: "" I have advocated for policies that give all families the same access to the American Dream,"" she said. ""Californians deserve a strong voice in Washington and I have never been afraid to speak up, which is why I am seriously considering running for the United States Senate in 2016.""
+
+But lesser-known candidates could face great difficulty raising the money needed to run. Boxer raised some $35 million in conjunction with party committees for her 2010 race against former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina.
+
+Steyer, a former hedge fund manager from San Francisco whose net worth has been estimated at $1.6 billion by Forbes, has pledged to give away the bulk of his fortune to public interest and philanthropic causes during his lifetime. He has been a vocal opponent of the Keystone XL pipeline and a free-spending advocate for California environmental causes.
+
+His NextGen Climate Action Committee spent more than $74 million in the midterm elections -- much of it Steyer's money -- trying to defeat candidates who had expressed doubt about climate change, but they had little demonstrable success in a Republican wave year.
+
+While Villaraigosa could build a strong Southern California base, and draw on his support from California's growing Latino community, Harris also has a solid fundraising base in California from her two statewide runs and her close alliance with President Barack Obama.
+
+She has won praise as attorney general for pursuing banks that did not follow proper procedures when they foreclosed on the properties of California homeowners and she has kept a steady focus on reducing recidivism and truancy.
+
+""I will be a fighter for the next generation on the critical issues facing our country. I will be a fighter for middle class families who are feeling the pinch of stagnant wages and diminishing opportunity,"" she continued. ""I will be a fighter for our children who deserve a world-class education, and for students burdened by predatory lenders and skyrocketing tuition. And I will fight relentlessly to protect our coast, our immigrant communities and our seniors.""
+
+Newsom has told many confidantes that he is interested in running for governor when Jerry Brown faces term limits in 2018, and he and Harris share the same political consultants. In a statement on his Facebook page, Newsom said it was better ""to be candid than be coy"" and noted that it would be better for his three children, Montana, Hunter and Brooklynn, if he stayed in California.
+
+""While I am humbled by the widespread encouragement of so many and hold in the highest esteem those who serve us in federal office, I know that my head and my heart, my young family's future and our unfinished work all remain firmly in the state of California -- not Washington, D.C. Therefore I will not seek election to the U.S. Senate in 2016,"" Newsom said.
+
+Hinting at his potential alliance with Harris, he added that in the months to come, he looked ""forward to doing whatever I can to help elect California's next great Democratic senator -- one worthy of succeeding Barbara Boxer and serving this remarkable state of dreamers and doers in the United States Senate.""
+
+Shortly after Boxer announced that she would retire from the Senate in 2016, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said he would not run for the seat.",REAL
+5141,How Trump overshadowed Clinton's bad weekend,"(CNN) In any normal presidential election, it would be hard to overshadow news that the FBI interviewed one of the candidates for three and a half hours about potential criminal behavior.
+
+But in 2016, Donald Trump seems to be able to seize any news cycle -- intentionally or otherwise.
+
+His Saturday tweet of a graphic that included Hillary Clinton's face, a six-pointed star, a pile of cash and the words ""most corrupt candidate ever"" drew immediate backlash for evoking anti-Semitic imagery. The image was posted 10 days earlier to an anti-Semitic, white supremacist message board.
+
+The graphic @realDonaldTrump tweeted yesterday was first posted on an anti-Semitic forum: https://t.co/nlsH0ocvdV pic.twitter.com/RfEB7bKGFm
+
+Trump on Monday morning initially addressed the controversy -- again on Twitter -- by blaming the ""dishonest media"" for ""trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff's Star, or plain star!""
+
+Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff's Star, or plain star!
+
+On Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign finally issued a statement on the matter -- one that amounted more to a response to the Clinton campaign statement than an explanation of his tweet.
+
+Trump rejected the Clinton campaign's accusations that his tweet was anti-Semitic by slamming ""false attacks"" and insisting the star represented a sheriff's badge.
+
+""These false attacks by Hillary Clinton trying to link the Star of David with a basic star, often used by sheriffs who deal with criminals and criminal behavior, showing an inscription that says 'Crooked Hillary is the most corrupt candidate ever' with anti-Semitism is ridiculous,"" Trump said in a statement.
+
+Trump's statement did not address the fact that the campaign tweeted an image that had previously been posted on an anti-Semitic, white supremacist message board. His statement also didn't explain where the campaign obtained the image.
+
+On Monday night the Trump campaign's social media director, Daniel Scavino, filled in some details on what he said were the image's origins.
+
+""The social media graphic used this weekend was not created by the campaign nor was it sourced from an anti-Semitic site,"" Scavino said in a statement separate from Trump's. ""It was lifted from an anti-Hillary Twitter user where countless images appear.""
+
+""The sheriff's badge -- which is available under Microsoft's 'shapes' -- fit with the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it,"" Scavino added.
+
+Scavino also said that as the campaign's social media director, ""I would never offend anyone and therefore chose to remove the image.""
+
+Trump's stumbles were suddenly back in the spotlight on a weekend that would have otherwise focused on Clinton's vulnerabilities.
+
+Trump's prolific Twitter habit is once again forcing Republicans to confront questions about the temperament of the man they will soon formally nominate as their presidential candidate and his apparent unwillingness to forcefully reject the support of those with racist or anti-Semitic views. It also comes as Trump tries to manage a more disciplined campaign, underscoring fears among some in the GOP that the businessman is unable to avoid self-inflicted wounds.
+
+Adding to the fire is the Trump campaign's refusal to answer questions about the tweet, its origin or whether anyone would be held accountable. It simply deleted the tweet and replaced the six-pointed star with a circle.
+
+The Clinton campaign blasted Trump's tweet Monday as part of a broader pattern.
+
+""Donald Trump's use of a blatantly anti-Semitic image from racist websites to promote his campaign would be disturbing enough, but the fact that it's part of a pattern should give voters major cause for concern,"" Sarah Bard, Hillary for America's director of Jewish outreach, said in a statement. ""Now, not only won't he apologize for it, he's peddling lies and blaming others. Trump should be condemning hate, not offering more campaign behavior and rhetoric that engages extremists.""
+
+It's not the first time Trump's own controversies have overshadowed Clinton's as a result of the presumptive Republican nominee's unforced errors.
+
+Two days before Trump created a weeks-long news cycle by accusing a judge of being biased because of his Mexican heritage, Clinton faced one of the most damaging news items of her candidacy when the State Department's inspector general released a scathing assessment of Clinton's private email use.
+
+But Trump's tirade on the judge, his doubling down on those race-based accusations and the ensuing rift it provoked between Trump and newly-supportive Republican leaders eclipsed Clinton's email woes.
+
+Shielded by the holiday weekend, top Republicans in the House and Senate were quiet on Trump's latest controversy.
+
+But the campaign's refusal to show any sense of accountability when it comes to the tweet may only add to the storm.
+
+The first prominent Trump surrogate to address the controversy was not a campaign spokesperson or Trump himself, but was instead Trump's recently-ousted campaign manager Corey Lewandowski who blamed ""political correctness run amok"" for the outcry during a Sunday interview on CNN's ""State of the Union.""
+
+""There's no anti-Semitism in Mr. Trump's body, not one ounce, not one cell,"" he told CNN's Alisyn Camerota, adding later, ""Not every six-sided star is a Star of David.""
+
+Trump on Sunday, meanwhile, refused to address the controversy over his tweet and sought to refocus scrutiny onto Clinton.
+
+He slammed a ""totally rigged"" system that likely will not bring criminal charges against Clinton and criticized former President Bill Clinton's private meeting with the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch just days earlier.
+
+He then tweeted condolences on the passing of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. But still no word about his use of an image circulating in anti-Semitic circles.
+
+Trump's tweet Monday addressing the graphic may only serve to further extend the controversy, drawing attention away from both Clinton's email scandal and a news cycle this week that was expected to focus on Trump's imminent decision to pick a running mate before the GOP convention.
+
+Trump's latest trouble is especially loaded because it's not the first instance of him tweeting or retweeting something linked to white supremacists.
+
+Trump has previously retweeted neo-Nazi accounts including one named ""@WhiteGenocideTM."" In November, he retweeted a graphic of false and racist crime statistics overstating the numbers of blacks killed by other blacks.
+
+And amid a groundswell of support from white supremacists, Trump and his campaign have been slow and even loathe to reject the support of those individuals.
+
+When pressed by CNN's Jake Tapper earlier this year on the support of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who continues to peddle in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, Trump initially said falsely he did not know of Duke and would not disavow his support. He would later do so and blame a faulty earpiece.
+
+And when he was later confronted by CNN's Wolf Blitzer about anti-Semitic death threats some of his supporters were directing at a Jewish reporter who wrote a profile about Trump's wife, the presumptive Republican nominee refused to condemn those actions.
+
+""I don't have a message to the fans,"" Trump said when pressed on the anti-Semitic death threats in an interview with Blitzer in May. ""A woman wrote an article that's inaccurate.""
+
+Now, questions continue to swirl around how his campaign obtained and decided to tweet a graphic that had circulated on a message board filled with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and neo-Nazi message boards -- and whether he will repudiate the support of individuals who prescribe to that ideology.",REAL
+1617,"Poll: Hillary Clinton tops Donald Trump, GOP field on handling terror","Americans trust Hillary Clinton to handle the threat of terrorism more than any of the leading Republican candidates for president in the wake of the Paris attacks, according to a new poll.
+
+The Democratic front-runner leads most of the GOP candidates by a wide margin, and tops GOP front-runner Donald Trump by 8 points and second-place Ben Carson by 9 points.
+
+The closest gap is with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is within the margin of error of Clinton, with Clinton at 46% and Bush at 43%.
+
+The Washington Post-ABC News poll out Monday asked Americans if they would trust Clinton or one of five Republican candidates more. She led Trump 50% to 42%, Carson 49% to 40%, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz 47% to 40%, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio 47% to 43%.
+
+The poll did not ask about Clinton's Democratic opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. The poll also found that Americans strongly disapprove of how President Barack Obama is handling ISIS and the threat of terror broadly. Americans disapprove of how Obama is handling ISIS in Iraq and Syria, with 57% who disapprove and 35% who approve. Fifty-four percent also disapprove of his handling of the threat of terrorism, compared with 40% who approve. Questioners surveyed 1,004 American adults by telephone Nov. 16 to Nov. 19, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Sign up for CNN Politics' Nightcap newsletter, serving up today's best and tomorrow's essentials in politics.",REAL
+288,"Boehner’s worst failure yet: Incompetence, near-shutdown & sorry state of GOP “governance”","On Friday afternoon, just a few short hours before the Department Homeland Security was set to shut down, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives scheduled a vote to grant DHS three more weeks of funding. The idea was to buy John Boehner some time to do… something. The legislative impasse that led us to the precipice of the shutdown was created by Boehner, who passed a bill tying DHS appropriations to the rollback of President Obama’s immigration executive actions. He spent several weeks insisting that the House had “done its job” and would not pass any new legislation funding DHS. But Senate Republicans and Democrats came together to pass a clean DHS funding bill, which forced Boehner to once again act. Rather than bow to political reality and take the only route available to him to actually fund the agency, Boehner opted to prolong the agony and punt.
+
+And he couldn’t even do that. The three-week continuing resolution failed when over 50 conservative Republicans voted against it, rebuking Boehner and the leadership and sending the entire process into utter chaos with less than half a day remaining until the shutdown.
+
+As has happened so many times over the last four years, the rest of the Congressional leadership was impelled to overcome Boehner’s incompetence and cobble together a last-minute solution. Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid pushed a one-week CR through the Senate late Friday night, and Nancy Pelosi instructed House Democrats to support its passage, with the promise from Boehner that the House would pass a clean, long-term DHS funding bill this week. The one-week bill passed with the overwhelming support of Democrats, and Obama signed it.
+
+So, for all intents and purposes, the House minority leader was calling the shots last Friday, determining which legislation would pass and mapping out future votes. Boehner was along for the ride, keeping a low profile with the rest of the Republican leadership while the Democrats held press briefings sketching out the way forward. It’d be embarrassing enough of this had never happened before, but it’s getting difficult to keep track of how many times Pelosi has had to bail out Boehner. That it is still happening despite the fact that Boehner is now sitting on one of the largest Congressional majorities in decades is about as damning an indictment of his speakership as one could ask for.
+
+And that spells real trouble going forward. The story of the first two months of the all-Republican Congress has been complete dysfunction and the inability to perform the rudimentary tasks of government. The Republicans are fighting amongst themselves and venting obvious frustration with Boehner’s shambolic approach to governing. On Friday night, McConnell passed the one-week CR and then immediately adjourned the Senate for the weekend – putting all the pressure to act on Boehner and sending a clear message that he’s done with this fight. Earlier in the day, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) pleaded with House Republicans to stop the madness. “Hopefully we’re gonna end the attaching of bullshit to essential items of the government,” he said.
+
+But the DHS finding fight is just the first test of basic governance confronting the Republican Congress. Sometime later this year the U.S. is going to bump up against the debt limit, and there’s an excellent chance that the debt limit renewal will coincide with the next appropriations fight (the “Cromnibus,” passed last December, only funded government operations through this September). The difficulty the Republicans have had working in concert to fund a single department doesn’t bode well for a combination debt limit/government funding showdown (with the attendant threats of default and shutdown). But before we even get to that point, there’s a chance the Republican Congress will have to deal with the potentially catastrophic fallout from the King v. Burwell decision. If the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies in 37 states, Republicans will be under intense pressure to do something to mitigate the damage. Can anyone credibly argue that Congress is up to the task when the Speaker of the House has little to no control over one-fifth of his caucus? And, of course, the DHS funding fight still has to be resolved. Congress bought themselves an extra week, and Democrats agreed to the extension with the thinking that cold political logic and a sense of self-preservation will finally push Boehner to give in and fund the agency without strings. But Boehner’s capacity for illogical and irrational behavior is why they’re in this situation to begin with. Boehner will eventually cave, but there’s no guarantee when that will happen. And really this fight never should have happened in the first place. From the moment of its inception, the Republican strategy was bound to fail. But the leaders in both houses of Congress plowed ahead because they had no idea what else to do, and now they’re being dragged along as the Democrats push through last-minute legislative patches to keep the lights on at DHS. There are a lot of words to describe that process, but “governance” is not one of them.",REAL
+3605,Belgian Terrorists Had Police Uniforms,"Two people were killed Thursday in Verviers, Belgium, when police raided an apartment used by suspected terrorists. Two unidentified people were killed, a third injured, and 15 others detained. Police found four AK-47 assault rifles, explosives, and police uniforms inside the apartment. No police or members of the public were harmed. Separately, a Belgian arms dealer turned himself in on Thursday during a different raid in Charleroi, but police have made no connections to last week’s attacks in Paris that left 17 dead. Local media outlets reported the dealer was suspected of supplying the weapons used in a French supermarket siege, however, police are still investigating a possible connection. “For the moment, we certainly can’t confirm a link,” said Eric Van der Sypt, a spokesman for the office of the Belgian federal prosecutor.
+
+",REAL
+3601,"Police in Belgium, France, and Germany make arrests in latest anti-terror raids","Dozens of terror suspects were arrested in Belgium, France, and Germany early Friday, a day after Belgian authorities said that they halted a plot to attack police officers by mere hours.
+
+Eric Van der Sypt, a Belgian federal magistrate, told a news conference Friday in Brussels that 13 people had been detained in Belgium in connection with the plot, with another two arrested in neighboring France. He added that a dozen searches had led to the discovery of four military-style weapons including Kalashnikov assault rifles.
+
+On Thursday, Belgian police had moved against a suspected terrorist hideout in the eastern town of Verviers. In the ensuing firefight, two terror suspects were killed, while a third was wounded and arrested.
+
+At the time, officials said the militant group targeted in the raid included some who had returned from Syria. Authorities have previously said 300 Belgian residents have gone to fight with extremist Islamic formations in Syria; it is unclear how many have returned.
+
+Authorities in Belgium signaled they were ready for more trouble by raising the national terror alert level from 2 to 3, the second-highest level. Prime Minister Charles Michel said the increase in the threat level was ""a choice for prudence.""
+
+""There is no concrete or specific knowledge of new elements of threat,"" he said.
+
+Meanwhile, French police arrested at least 12 people in anti-terrorism raids in three towns around Paris, the city prosecutor's office said early Friday.
+
+The prosecutor's office said that the raids were targeting people with links to Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who attacked a kosher supermarket Jan. 9 and claimed ties to the Islamic State terror group. Police officials earlier told The Associated Press that they were seeking up to eight to 10 potential accomplices
+
+Coulibaly was one of three gunmen who carried out a series of terror attacks that resulted in the deaths of 17 people. Authorities in France and several other countries are looking for possible accomplices. One suspect, Coulibaly's common-law wife Hayat Boumeddiane, is believed to have fled to Syria earlier this month.
+
+Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported Friday morning that the Gare l'Est train station in Paris had been closed and evacuated due to a bomb threat. A police official, who was not authorized to be publicly named, told the AP that the station was closed ""as a precaution,"" but would not give further details. The Gare l'Est is one of the major stations in Paris, serving cities in Eastern France and countries to the east.
+
+Also Friday, Berlin police said that they had taken two men into custody on suspicion that they were recruiting fighters and procuring equipment and funding for the Islamic State group, better known as ISIS, in Syria.
+
+The two were picked up in a series of raids involving the search of 11 residences by 250 police officers. Authorities said the raids were part of a months-long investigation into a small group of extremists based in Berlin. However, they also said there was no evidence the group was planning attacks inside Germany.
+
+The group's leader, identified only as 41-year-old Ismet D. in accordance with privacy laws, is accused organizing the group of largely Turkish and Russian nationals to fight against ""infidels"" in Syria. Emin F., 43, is accused of being in charge of finances.
+
+Those recruited include Murat S., a 40-year-old Turkish man who was arrested in September after returning from Syria where had allegedly gone to fight.
+
+In an unrelated raid, German police arrested 26-year-old German-Tunisian dual national into custody Thursday on suspicion he had gone to fight with the terrorist group in Syria. Police made the arrest in Wolfsburg, 120 miles outside Berlin.
+
+Earlier Thursday, Belgian authorities said they were looking into possible links between a man they arrested in the southern city of Charleroi for illegal trade in weapons and Coulibaly.
+
+The man arrested in Belgium ""claims that he wanted to buy a car from the wife of Coulibaly,"" Van der Sypt said. ""At this moment this is the only link between what happened in Paris.""
+
+Van der Sypt said that ""of course, naturally"" we are continuing the investigation.
+
+At first, the man came to police himself claiming there had been contact with Coulibaly's common-law wife regarding the car, but he was arrested following a search of his premises when indications of illegal weapons trading were found.
+
+A Belgian connection figured in a 2010 French criminal investigation into a foiled terrorist plot in which Coulibaly was one of the convicted co-conspirators. The plotters included a Brussels-area contact who was supposed to furnish both weapons and ammunition, according to French judicial documents obtained by The Associated Press.
+
+Spain's National Court said in a statement it was investigating what Coulibaly did in the country's capital, Madrid, with Boumeddiene and a third person who wasn't identified but is suspected of helping Boumeddiene get from Turkey to Syria.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8683,A Tear in the Fabric of America’s Political Theater,"[Graphic: Clinton vs Trump by DonkeyHotey .] Paul Jay interviews Henry A. Giroux Editor's Note The idea here that there politics is theater is not new; however, “political theater” has never taken on the connotations that embrace what this campaign has revealed. It is clear that there has been an agreement about what “story” is being played out, but that has gotten repeatedly derailed by two (now 3) sources of counter-story. One source, as noted in the following interview, are the wikileak materials. Another source has been Trump himself. While he may not understand politics, he is very adept with theater and controlling the media, and he has played them like a piano. Throughout this endless campaign I kept remembering “there is no such thing as bad press.” Trump has certainly proved the truth of that adage repeatedly. The third source is James Comey. His repeated breaching of judicial-political norms will likely reverberate well after November 8th.
+Mentioned within this interview is the phenomenon of Americans seeming inability to maintain a long term memory. I believe this is a rich area to examine though this is not the focus of this discussion. Most people in the U.S. seem to live in the cultural equivalent of anteretrograde amnesia and lack the ability to make long term memories that extend beyond themselves. They remember their own histories, but their social memory is constantly being rewritten and little if anything seems to stick. Transcript PAUL JAY, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore. I’m known for a documentary I made called Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows. It was about professional wrestling and a battle between Bret Hart and Vince McMann and we got a lot of behind the scenes coverage in that and I got to know the wrestling world some. It occurred to me that there’s a certain kind of press that covers wrestling much the way a lot of press covers American politics. Now everyone that has any sense about them at all knows that professional wrestling is theater. In fact, the film I made helped kind of make that clear for everyone. But it is theater and everyone acknowledges it’s theater but there is still some press out there that plays along and covers the wrestling theater as if it’s real. Well I think much the same thing goes on in American politics. Much of the election campaigns are positioning, rhetoric, language, supposedly support this, oppose that, which is really all part of the theater. But because it does affect the horse race of the outcome of the elections, most of the corporate media covers all of this theater as if it’s real. Well something’s happening in this election which because of partly the bluster and in some ways weird honesty of Donald Trump, some of that theater is breaking down. The WikiLeaks about Hillary Clinton and behind the scenes machinations of the Clinton campaign, there’s been somewhat of a tear in the fabric of this theater. Now joining us to talk about this is Henry Giroux. Henry joins us from Hamilton, Ontario. He’s a professor of scholarship in the public interest at McMaster University and author of his most recent book, America at war with itself. Thanks for joining us Henry. HENRY GIROUX: It’s a pleasure to be with you. JAY: So, what do you make of the idea that wrestling and American politics have a lot in common? GIROUX: I think it’s a fabulous analogy. I think that in many ways what we see happening is the cultural celebrity which has never really been taken too seriously, although it confers a great deal of authority, has all of a sudden outed itself. It’s out of the closet. I mean people realize that what we’re getting is not only an exercise in performance and showmanship but we’re also getting what I would call, an elimination of the truth. The truth is one of the great causalities of this particular election cycle. It’s never been more visible than it is now. In one hand, what you have basically a celebrity who has no trouble lying because he believes that nobody will really take him too seriously because he thinks he really is a celebrity. On the other hand, you have the alternative press, you have the alternative media exposing all the nonsense that of course Hillary Clinton believes in and making it clear that she has no lock on honesty either. It seems to me that as the truth begins to disappear, questions are being raised about what are the conditions that produced this. What are the contradictions at work here? What does it mean for instance when Hillary Clinton says she believes in families and she believes in children and she worked for the Children’s Defense Fund when in actuality as the first lady, she had no trouble calling black youth super predators, she basically supported her husband’s welfare program which did horrible things for pro minorities? She supported an educational system in part that had nothing to do with the imagination and real learning. Had everything to do with accountability and standardization. So, it goes on and on. I think that as this fabric gets torn, as the veil gets sort of taken away and as the mystic of theater begins to dissolve, a kind of shocking reality emerges. One steeped in corruption, despair, inequality, poverty, systemic violence, racism, that becomes increasing difficult for the American political, financial, and corporate elite to basically legitimize. JAY: I think the Clinton campaign’s particularly interesting. First of all, you have a 74 senator from Vermont. If he’d had maybe another month or two, might’ have actually might have won in terms of especially in his weakness in the south and amongst African Americans. Another month or two and he might have sorted some of that out. It’s quite remarkable that someone at least in terms of mainstream media, someone who came from obscurity, I think people that followed progressive politics, he was certainly well known. But for most of the country, they barely knew his name. To go from there to almost winning and there’s some suggestion, some of the specific state races he certainly didn’t lose fairly. Now you have the majority of the country simply says they don’t believe Hillary Clinton is a truth teller. They think she’s a liar. They don’t trust her. Yet she’s the only candidate these elites got. Trump lies exposed. Even the republicans, the fact that the system couldn’’t come up with better candidates within the republican party to actually take on someone like Trump that should’ve been an easy duck to shoot of anybody of any caliber. The whole caliber of these political candidates has just banal. GIROUX: I think what’s interesting here is that the republican party, they couldn’t come up with a decent candidate because they had no sense of the degree to which they had violated any principles that sort of [attaches] them to any notion of civic justice or to the economic issues that have caused enormous anger throughout the country, that they were unwilling to address. I think there’s another issue here. I think the issue is something you mentioned earlier about Bernie Sanders, who I find very hopeful, in that people don’t realize that language matters and I think what Bernie did, taking off from the Occupied movement which gave us a new language about inequality. Bernie gave us a language for economic and social justice and political justice in a way that we haven’t heard before because it was endlessly being replayed over and over again. I think that what you have there is you have the power of what I call a reimagination machine that attacks a disimagination machine. He took the disimagination machine which covers everything over in lies and false metaphors and indecent stories and corruption and he exposed them and I think that one of the great beginnings, one of the great movements for any form of insurrection of democracy is to make power visible. I think he did that. I think the black lives matter movement does that. I think they’re all driving liberals absolutely crazy because it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the liberals to basically defend this thing that they call democracy. It’s not a democracy at all. They know it. But they don’’t have a language to basically come back at this. I know. I was listening to a radio this morning and I don’’t know if you know this but the alt-right, they’’re responding to this by intimidating people, by attempting to ruin the lives of now I think it’s like 500 reporters throughout the United States attacking their families, putting stuff on twitter, putting pictures of their children up in ways that are utterly disgusting and vile. I think you see two moments here. You see a moment of impending fascism which is utterly violent and criminogenic. Then you see another moment which is criminogenic but not as violent. But’ its grappling at the same time with some way to rescue itself by pointing only to Trump without at the same time pointing to its own liabilities. JAY: I think the sort of mediocrity banality of these candidates, it’s not just a happen chance, and many of the presidents in the past and I would put both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – they’re smart guys. I disagree with probably 98 or 99% of their policies and both of them were involved in what I think could be categorized as war crimes, including Bill Clinton and sanctions on Iraq and the drone policy and others and the development of the war on Syria with Obama and such and Libya of course. But that being said, these are smart guys. They speak in full paragraphs. They are articulate. They can crack jokes. They’re knowledgeable. But it was under their watch that we had a great leap in this transfer of wealth to the top 1 or so percentile. A great leap in the parasitism of capital. Casino capitalism. Massive derivatives and speculative markets and this very parasitical, very degenerate you could say type of capital created this orgy of profits for this top tier at a level they’d never seen before and when you live in the bubble of those massive profits, perhaps they have no idea what’s going on amongst the American people. So, all of a sudden they get this shock in the republican party and almost a major shock in the democratic party and I don’t know if they really come back from this because I don’t know if they can really get out of this bubble disconnect with what’s going on in terms of daily life. GIROUX: They meaning the financial elite. Is that what you’re saying? JAY: Well the financial and political elites, yea. GIROUX: Exactly. Well I don’t want to underestimate the power of the cultural apparatuses that they control to basically normalize what appears to be unimaginable. I mean I’m always shocked by that I think the real issue here is that we live in a country in which memory is very short. We live in a culture of the immediate. I’m often shocked about what gets forgotten 5 days after the news cycle. So, the real question is, how do you keep the count of memories. These images. How do you keep this language up? This critical language that consistently reminds people of the contradictions and the crimes. The United States is a war culture. I mean there’’s no other way to talk about it. It’s primarily organized for the production of violence at almost every level. Of course, the punishing state is getting worse and the acceleration of police violence is getting worse. I think as long as the alternative media can focus on and sustain these images and these stories and these counter narratives, I think they’re fine. But it’s a hard fight because as you well know Paul the mainstream media controls most of the media and so the real question here is how do we take the question of culture and power and education and link it to everyday life in ways that allow it to travel across a variety of public spheres so that these memories and injustice and corruption can be sustained? JAY: Thanks very much for joining us Henry. GIROUX: My pleasure. JAY: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network. 
+Henry A. Giroux, Contributing Editor C urrently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: American at War with Itself , Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Land 2011), On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013). Giroux’s most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). He is also a Contributing Editor of Cyrano’s Journal Today / The Greanville Post , and member of Truthout’s Board of Directors and has his own page The Public Intellectual . His web site is www.henryagiroux.com .   [email-subscribers namefield=”YES” desc=”” group=”Public”]",FAKE
+9103,Michelle Malkin SCHOOLED The Idiots On ‘The View’ On Obama’s LIES To America. They’re SPEECHLESS!,"Ads Michelle Malkin SCHOOLED The Idiots On ‘The View’ On Obama’s LIES To America. They’re SPEECHLESS! Oct 29, 2016 Previous post 
+For those of you who don’t know who Michell Malkin is, she is an author, blogger, columnist, and has recurring appearances on Fox News and other conservative media outlets. Malkin is one of the smartest and most accurate proponents in all of conservative media. If Ann Coulter is at the top, Malkin is in a close second. 
+The View on the other hand, is filled with the biggest liberal dummies you can imagine. None of which are bigger or more insane than Joy Behar. Every time a political pundit or personality comes on the show, Behar always has to throw in her $.02 even though she has never held any office in her life, yet she talks like her s*** doesn’t stink and she knows everything. 
+Well this time when Malkin was on, she had enough. As they discussed her book about corruption in the Obama campaign, Malkin let her have it. 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+7681,"Hillary Clinton Attempted To Hack WikiLeaks And Delete Everything, Assange","Email 
+Julian Assange claims that Hillary Clinton’s campaign used hackers to attack WikiLeaks’ servers. WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief says that despite the Ecuadorian embassy shutting down its internet to stop accusations of interference in U.S. elections, his organisation will keep on publishing until the elections are over. 
+Via YourNewsWire SPONSORED LINKS 
+“Everyday that you publish is a day that you have the initiative in the conflict,” Assange said via telephone at a conference in Argentina on Wednesday. Scroll Down For Video Below! 
+The whistleblowing website has been releasing emails from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, on a daily basis since early October. Assange claimed the release “whipped up a crazed hornet’s nest atmosphere in the Hillary Clinton campaign” leading them to attack WikiLeaks. 
+“They attacked our servers and attempted hacking attacks and there is an amazing ongoing campaign where state documents were put in the UN and British courts to accuse me of being both a Russian spy and a pedophile,” he added. 
+Ecuador’s decision to shut down his internet was described by Assange as a “strategic position” so that its “policy of non-intervention can’t be misinterpreted by actors in the US and even domestically in Ecuador.” He said he was sympathetic with Ecuador, insisting they face the dilemma of having the US interfere with their elections next year if they appear to interfere with the US elections next month. MORE: #WikiLeaks has activated contingency plans after #Assange 's internet link was intentionally cut off https://t.co/octsMseme1 
+— RT (@RT_com) October 17, 2016 
+Assange, who claimed the embassy will be without internet until the election is over to avoid accusations of interference, said he did not agree with Ecuador’s decision but did understand it. WikiLeaks will not be affected by the decision as they do not publish from Ecuador, he said. 
+He did, however, reject the idea that WikiLeaks is interfering with the US election, claiming, “this is not the interference of electoral process, this is the definition of electoral process – for media organizations and, in fact, everyone to publish the truth and their opinion about what is occurring. It cannot be a free and informed election unless people are free to inform.” 
+He also attacked US TV networks, many of whom he accused of being “controlled by Clinton supporters.“ We were fastest on #Podestaemails6 , faster than @wikileaks , and the US conspiracy machine can’t handle it https://t.co/njAae50qDd 
+— RT (@RT_com) October 13, 2016 
+The Podesta emails will make no difference to the election result, according to Assange. “I don’t think there’s any chance of Donald Trump winning the election, even with the amazing material we are publishing, because most of the media organizations are strongly aligned with Hillary Clinton,” he said. 
+Assange said journalists and people who work in the media are predominantly middle class and view Trump as representing “what in their mind is white trash.”",FAKE
+2044,Gov. Jindal 'thinking and praying' about 2016 run - Politics.com,"Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said on Monday he was ""thinking and praying"" about a presidential run and said that an announcement could follow the midterm elections or ""sometime after the holidays.""
+
+If he decides to run, Jindal would likely be the first Republican candidate to announce his decision. Most potential challengers have said they are waiting until spring 2015.
+
+In his speech, Jindal tried to rouse hawks in the party by harshly criticizing President Barack Obama.
+
+""The Russian reset, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Europe, China, and the list goes on. In each of these areas, it's not just the President took too long to come up with an answer. It's that the answer was wrong,"" he said at an American Enterprise Institute event.
+
+Jindal called Obama's cutting back on defense spending ""foolish"" and ""unacceptable"" at a time when the administration has considered intervening in several foreign conflicts.
+
+The two-term governor went on to say that the U.S. is at war with ISIS and that the President's hesitancy to call it a fight is ""a projection of weakness.""
+
+He also slammed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a potential Democratic presidential candidate, for making decisions the he believes has set America on a path for ""more chaos, more conflict and more wars.""
+
+""Today, we are living with the consequences of the Obama-Clinton ideas when it comes to foreign, domestic and defense policy... If only it had the help of a wise, steady hand, a policy expert in dealing with foreign affairs, he'd have come up with better answers. But instead he just had Hillary Clinton,"" he said.
+
+In a set of policy proposals, Jindal suggested that defense spending should be 4% of the country's GDP. He also called for increasing the Pentagon's funding, following the administration's decision to cut back $78 billion in 2011 as a way to decrease the deficit.
+
+In the interim before potentially launching his campaign, Jindal hopes to see the Republican Party take the initiative rather than being known as the opposition party. Jindal mentioned that several Republican members have sided with Obama in the past, including on defense spending cutbacks.
+
+""[The people] are frustrated with the President, but they have yet to hear a comprehensive alternative from the Republicans. All they heard so far is that we are opposed to many of his policies,"" he said. ""What they are hungry for is a positive agenda from the Republican side.""",REAL
+1697,"Poll: Donald Trump, Ben Carson dominate GOP field as Fiorina falters","Washington (CNN) Donald Trump and Ben Carson now stand alone at the top of the Republican field, as Carly Fiorina's brief foray into the top tier of candidates seeking the GOP nomination for president appears to have ended, a new CNN/ORC poll finds .
+
+Fiorina has lost 11 points in the last month, declining from 15% support and second place to 4% and a tie for seventh place.
+
+At the same time, Carson has gained eight points and joins Trump as the only two candidates with support above 20%. As in early September before Fiorina's spike in support, Trump and Carson are the first choice candidate of about half of the potential Republican electorate. All told, nearly two-thirds of Republican voters choose Trump or Carson as either their first or second choice for the nomination.
+
+Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates.""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey.""
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23.""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant.""
+
+Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House.""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement.
+
+No other candidates made significant gains since the last CNN/ORC poll conducted just after the Republican debate hosted by CNN and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
+
+The new poll comes amid a flurry of polling being released about a week before the GOP candidates will again meet on the debate stage. The polling criteria set by the organizers of that debate, set to take place October 28, appear likely to result in 10 candidates taking the main stage. Aside from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who ended his campaign shortly after last month's debate, it's likely to be a rematch of those who debated in Simi Valley.
+
+Fiorina's decline comes across the demographic and political spectrum, with her support now topping out at 8% among those with college degrees. Last month, she stood at 22% among the same group. Fiorina has dropped 11 points among women and 12 points among men, fallen 18 points among independents, 17 points among those age 50 or older, and 15 points among conservatives.
+
+The poll finds Republican voters increasingly satisfied with their field of choices, 32% say they are ""very satisfied"" with the group of candidates running for president, up from 23% in July. Republicans also remain more enthusiastic about the presidential race than Democratic voters. In the new poll, 68% of Republican voters say they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting for president in next year's election, compared with 58% among Democratic voters.
+
+Those enthusiastic voters are even more strongly behind Trump and Carson than Republican voters generally, while less enthusiastic Republicans are more likely to say they back Bush. Trump's support among the enthusiastic voters is 30%, with Carson at 25%, while Bush's support dips to just 3%. Among those who say they are ""somewhat enthusiastic"" or less, 22% back Trump, 16% back Carson and 15% back Bush.
+
+There are some signs in the poll that Carson's numbers get a boost if turnout in GOP primaries and caucuses follows the same patterns it has in the past. Carson runs about evenly with Trump among the groups that make up the largest blocs of GOP primary voters: conservatives, self-identified Republicans and white evangelicals. Carson also nearly matches Trump's support among those voters with college degrees, with 24% backing Trump, 23% backing Carson and 13% backing Rubio.
+
+A gender gap has reemerged in the data in the last month, with Carson matching Trump's support among women (23% back each) with Bush behind at 9%, Huckabee at 7% and Fiorina and Rubio each at 6% among GOP women.
+
+Trump has larger edges over Carson among men (31% to 21%, with Rubio at 10%) and independents who lean toward the Republican Party (32% Trump to 19% Carson).
+
+The CNN/ORC Poll was conducted by telephone October 14-17 among a random national sample of 1,028 adults. Results among the 465 registered voters who say they are Republicans or independents who lean toward the Republican Party have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.",REAL
+10219,Sentencing for Murderer of Rare Book Dealer,"This past week, on Monday, Oct. 24, 2016, a judge with the Oxford Crown Court in the United Kingdom sentenced Michael Danaher to life in prison for murdering rare book dealer, Adrian Greenwood. The purpose of the crime was to steal a rare first edition of the book, “The Wind in the Willows.” Danaher argued he killed Greenwood in self-defense, yet it only took two hours to render a unanimous guilty charge. Adrian Greenwood, 42, was found dead after being stabbed 30 times at his Oxford home in April.
+Prosecuting Attorney Oliver Saxby told the court that this was a “brutal” murder that included stab wounds to the “chest and neck and a deep wound to his back.” There was also evidence of torture and blunt wounds indicating Greenwood had been “stamped on.” The sentence Danaher received for murdering the rare book dealer was life in prison or no less than 34 years. Saxby explained to the court that Danaher stabbed Greenwood until the knife broke, after which he began beating him. Saxby went on to say that Danaher, “cool as you like, he helped himself to that first edition of ‘The Wind in the Willows,’ and Adrian Greenwood’s phone, and his laptop and his wallet.”
+The book is valued at £50,000 but Danaher listed it on eBay for only £2,000 after returning home from murdering Greenwood. Danaher learned that Greenwood was in possession of the book after he tried selling a copy on eBay in August of 2015. Danaher had been planning the crime for some time. He also had a list in an Excel file on his laptop titled “Enterprises” of other wealthy persons who were targets. It included their addresses, the method to be used like “stun gun” and the “expected take” from each target. Next to Greenwood’s name on the list Danaher wrote “Modus: Any!! Expected take: rare books.”
+Saxby, the prosecutor, told the jury the wealthy targets on Danaher’s list “exudes a sense of resentment. It is almost as if these people who, because of their wealth . . . deserve to be subjected to what he has planned.” The jury was comprised of four women and eight men. The names on the list included Simon Cowel, Kate Moss, Jeffery Archer and others. About two weeks before Danaher’s attack on Greenwood, he tried to break into wealthy businessman Adrian Beecroft’s house pretending to be a delivery man, but Beecroft’s wife believed the man to be suspicious and “raised the alarm,” which caused Danaher to flee. He later drafted a letter on his laptop to Mrs. Beecroft demanding 200 bitcoin or about £96,000 for leaving them alone. The letter was never sent.
+The sentencing handed down by the Oxford Crown Court for murdering book dealer Greenwood over “Wind in the Willows” is perhaps a relief to those who were on his list. The author of the book is Kenneth Grahame and it was published in 1908. “Wind in the Willows” is a children’s book known for its “mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality and camaraderie.” Its text is available online for free as part of Project Gutenberg.
+By Joel Wickwire
+Sources:
+BBC News – Man Guilty of Murdering Adrian Greenwood Over “The Wind in the Willow” Book
+The Guardian – Alleged Killer of Antiques Deal Had List of Famous Targets, Jury Told
+The Las Angeles Times – British Book Dealer Slain for His First Edition of “The Wind in the Willows”
+Top and Feature Image Courtesy of Ken Wilcox’s Flicker Page – Creative Commons License
+In-Line Image Courtesy of Karen Cox’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
+ book",FAKE
+8105,Hate Rising with Jorge Ramos,"Hate Rising with Jorge Ramos Fusion, October 28, 2016 
+From the Ku Klux Klan to the so called alt-right movement, white supremacist groups are growing in numbers and influence. In “Hate Rising,” Jorge Ramos shows us how their ideas, usually confined to private and secretive gatherings, are becoming mainstream thanks in part to the rhetoric on the campaign trail this election cycle. [Editor’s Note: An extended version of the interview with Jared Taylor is available here .]",FAKE
+3005,Sympathy for victims but no apology as Obama makes historic Hiroshima visit,"Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of American POWs who died in Japanese camps during World War II.
+
+HIROSHIMA, Japan — President Obama made an emotional and historic visit to this once-shattered city Friday, embracing survivors of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bomb blast and renewing calls for an end to nuclear weapons.
+
+He did not, however, apologize for the decision to drop the bomb.
+
+""We come to Hiroshima to ponder the terrible forces unleashed in the not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead,"" Obama said in a speech at Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park.
+
+An estimated 140,000 people — including a dozen captured American airmen and thousands of forced laborers from Korea — were killed in the world’s first atomic bombing at Hiroshima. Another 70,000 people died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki three days later.
+
+Friday’s visit was the first by a sitting U.S. head of state and appeared carefully crafted to focus on reconciliation, rather than troubling questions of wartime blame or responsibility.
+
+Atomic bomb survivor groups in the past have called for the United States to apologize for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, which they call inhumane. Some American veterans and former prisoners of war have opposed an apology, arguing that the twin bombings saved lives by hastening the end of a long and cruel war.
+
+Japan surrendered unconditionally on Aug. 15, 1945, nine days after the Hiroshima bombing.
+
+During the hour-long visit, Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe laid wreaths at a cenotaph dedicated to bombing victims, toured the peace park and an adjoining museum and met privately with bomb survivors.
+
+The park is located near ground zero of the Hiroshima bombing and features the iconic “A-bomb dome” – a burned out commercial exhibition building that was one of the few structures near the epicenter that remained standing.
+
+The cenotaph includes the names of all victims of the Hiroshima bombing, including 12 American airman who were being held in the city at the time of the attack.
+
+In a poignant moment after his speech, Obama shared an extended public embrace with 79-year-old Shigeaki Mori. The Hiroshima bomb survivor spent more than 35 years tracking down relatives of the American airmen, whose fate had remained unknown for decades.
+
+In his speech, Obama said Mori “sought out the families of Americans who were killed here because he believed their loss was equal to his own.”
+
+Barry Frechette, a filmmaker who produced a recent documentary on Mori’s decades-long quest, said Mori and other survivors are not looking for an apology.
+
+“The most important thing we can do is recognize what happened, and understand the horrible consequences of war,” Frechette said in an email interview from his home in the United States.  “We heard from U.S. POW families about how terrible a sacrifice was paid in the loss of their loved ones. But we also heard what terrible consequences were paid on the Japanese side, too, especially to civilians.”
+
+Obama and Abe spoke before about 100 invited guests, including aging bomb victims and local high school students, and hundreds of Japanese and foreign journalists.
+
+The peace park, one of the most popular visitor sites in Japan, was closed to the public Friday as a security precaution. But large and seemingly supportive crowds began gathering outside the grounds early in the day.
+
+Matt Steckling, 25, a Chicago native who has lived in Hiroshima for about a year and a half, was among people in the large crowd just prior to Obama’s arrival and said he was curious to witness the event.
+
+“It’s going to mean a lot for people here to see him come and lay flowers and pay his respects. No one expects him to apologize — the gesture, the visit alone, is enough,” Steckling said.
+
+Obama’s visit followed a two-day summit with leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized democracies in Ise-Shima in central Japan.  Anticipation had been growing that Obama would visit Hiroshima after Secretary of State John Kerry become the highest-ranking Cabinet member to visit the city last month.
+
+Recent polls have shown that most Japanese wanted Obama to visit Hiroshima, but no longer thought an apology was necessary.
+
+Kinue Tokudome, executive director of the U.S.-Japan Dialogue on POWs, said she was disappointed that no American former prisoners of war were invited to attend the ceremony but hoped Obama’s visit would have a positive influence. More than 10,000 Americans died in Japanese camps during World War II, often under appalling conditions.
+
+A U.S. POW support group announced last week that the White House had invited a former POW to accompany Obama during Friday’s visit. But the White House later said that no such invitation had been extended.
+
+""I believe president Obama's visit to Hiroshima is a good thing and hope that it will encourage us, Japanese and Americans, to have more open and honest dialogue on our shared history,” she said.
+
+""Our visit to Hiroshima will honor all those who were lost in World War II and reaffirm our shared vision of a world without nuclear weapons,"" Obama said at a press conference this week.
+
+Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945. Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize largely on his stated goal of controlling the spread of nuclear weapons.",REAL
+7501,Kashmiris observes Black Day decades after India occupied Kashmir,"Kashmiris observes Black Day decades after India occupied Kashmir Thu Oct 27, 2016 10:22PM Pakistanis shout slogans in the support of the Kashmiri people during a protest in Lahore on October 27, 2016. © AFP 
+Javed RanaPress TV, Islamabad 
+Kashmiri people observe the Black Day all over the world particularly in their disputed region which is divided between Pakistan and India. The date marks almost 7 decades of violence in Kashmir. On the eve of the event Pakistani, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif warned India that it will face serious consequences if its soldiers do not stop killing civilians in border regions along the so-called Line of Control (LoC) which divides Indian-controlled Kashmir from the Pakistani side. Loading ...",FAKE
+9061,Trump Supporters in Philadelphia Paint Nazi Propaganda on Election Night,"
+Journalist Naomi Klein swatted down New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman on twitter, when he tried to lay the... Kenneth Lipp November 9, 2016 
+A polling location in Azusa, California was just attacked by an active shooter, killing one and wounding at least three others,... Nathan Wellman November 8, 2016 
+A Trump supporter has been taken into custody after pulling a gun on another voter at a polling location in... Nathan Wellman November 8, 2016 
+Law enforcement was called on a man in East Lansing, Michigan for singling out two women wearing hijabs and allegedly attempting... Nathan Wellman November 8, 2016 
+Right-wing propagandist James O’Keefe, famous for destroying ACORN by releasing a deceptively edited video that inaccurately implied that the low-income voting rights organization was... Nathan Wellman November 8, 2016 
+In the latest example of excessive policing, a single mother in Stockton, California is facing up to a year in jail... Zach Cartwright November 7, 2016 
+A Saint Louis mother is outraged after a photo surfaced, showing a local police officer pose next to her dead son’s... Zach Cartwright November 5, 2016 
+A federal judge in battleground state North Carolina has ordered conservative state officials to restore thousands of people back onto the... Nathan Wellman November 5, 2016 
+A US district judge in Ohio has officially issued a restraining order against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign in an... Nathan Wellman November 4, 2016 ",FAKE
+3754,"After riots, Baltimore residents take to streets – to help one another","There was no great, centralized effort, or call from city leaders, to make Tuesday a day of service in Baltimore. Baltimore just did it.
+
+A man cleans up Pennsylvania avenue as Maryland State police stand guard Monday in Baltimore, April 27, 2015. Baltimore erupted in violence on Monday as hundreds of rioters looted stores, burned buildings and at least 15 police officers were injured following the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died after suffering a spinal injury in police custody. The riots broke out blocks from where the funeral of Gray took place and spread through much of west Baltimore.
+
+Mid-morning, when the crew outside Shake and Bake Family Fun Center was ready to pack it in, Jasmine Forbes and Emma Richardson were still clearing old brush out of a gutter, taking turns holding a trash bag. The friends had been cleaning all morning, and would keep at it, in different spots around West Baltimore, well into the afternoon.
+
+“I’ve turned my back on my community so many times,” says Ms. Forbes, who works at the Maryland Science Center. “I can’t sit and watch my brothers and sisters suffering anymore. We need to do better as a community, as for everyone – black, white, whatever race you are. Everyone needs to do better.”
+
+Across Baltimore yesterday, thousands of people took small steps toward community-building, as grassroots volunteer efforts, amplified through social media, grew into a day of collaboration following a night of riots. Many nonprofits put out calls for help, and community leaders helped direct people to where the needs were greatest.  But there was no great, centralized effort, or call from city leaders, to make Tuesday a day of service in Baltimore.
+
+Baltimore just did it.
+
+Spontaneously, people emerged from their homes after a long night of watching parts of their city burn outside their windows, or on CNN. By threes, then dozens, and eventually hundreds, they showed up: to neighborhood cleanups, food distributions, and a host of other volunteer efforts.
+
+In some areas, there were so many people on the streets, there was nothing left to clean. The atmosphere was festive. Stores offered discounts on cleanup supplies. Volunteers handed out garbage bags and water.
+
+By 9 a.m., residents had already cleared away much of Monday night’s destruction. So volunteers went further, hauling years’ worth of trash out of alleys and yards.
+
+“It feels good to be out,” says preschool teacher Paola Albergate, pulling on gloves on a blighted block of Pennsylvania Avenue, as helicopters circled overhead. “Everyone’s so upset, and it’s a good place to come together as a community, and I feel like that’s part of what we need right now – a big part of it.”
+
+Near the Shake & Bake in Sandtown, people with rakes took to the alleys, yards, and streets. Kids as young as four helped to sweep.
+
+Nearby, students from the Maryland Institute College of Art bagged trash and documenting the events of the morning. Parents wheeled by with brooms, pushing toddlers in strollers. Volunteers who had to leave passed their work gloves to those arriving without them. In the road median by Mondawmin Mall, where Monday’s violence began, somebody planted flowers.
+
+Gregory Watson, a firefighter in Baltimore County, came to West Baltimore to check on an uncle, then joined the cleanup of a nearby vacant lot.
+
+“It needed to be done,” he says, “and I think this is a beautiful thing, to see so many people come out that actually care about the city.”
+
+City schools closed for the day, and many employees took the opportunity to volunteer. Meg Grouzard, a history teacher at Baltimore School for the Arts, hit several cleanup sites with two fellow teachers, hoping to see current and former students there. She’d been able to catch up with some by e-mail and Facebook, but – since Mondawmin is a major transit hub for school kids – she wanted to make sure her kids had gotten home safely Monday.
+
+Guided by Facebook posts and a Google Doc compiling areas of great need, the three teachers struck out, eventually landing on Pennsylvania. There, they spent the early afternoon hauling bags of trash out of an overgrown alley, behind a block on which every business – Wonder Land Liquor, R&M Grocery, and Tye & Company Salon – was gutted Monday night.
+
+Kim Peace was there too, with her 7-year-old granddaughter Tyaunah Diggs. The two had walked half a mile, from their home in the Gilmor Homes housing project, to help sweep and haul away trash. Tyaunah, who wants to be a teacher, said she’d rather be in school.  But Ms. Peace remembers the last Baltimore riots, in 1968, when she was around the same age as her granddaughter is now. She says she didn’t want either of them to miss this.
+
+“This our community, and I’m a help clean it up,” she says. “I don’t feel that people should messing their community up like they doing. They going do something, do it in peace.”
+
+Other big volunteer efforts around the city centered on food. Nearly 85 percent of kids in Baltimore’s public schools qualify for free or low-cost meals, and on school cancellation days, many go without. On Tuesday, businesses and organizations large and small tried to help, organizing on social media with the hashtag #baltimorelunch. One local institution, Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse (go for the Communism, stay for the tofu spread) offered a “safe space” and free lunch to city school students. The international nonprofit Operation Help or Hush, which grew out of the Ferguson, Mo., protests, sent pizzas and snacks to churches and playgrounds around the city.
+
+Still other volunteers organized medical help, checked on elderly community members, and brought food and drink to the owners of looted business or to fellow volunteers. City recreation centers opened for kids who had no school. At gatherings, community organizers passed out voter registration forms. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra scheduled a free community concert, and other musicians took their talents to protest sites. Throughout the city, citizens demonstrated peacefully. Churches opened their doors.
+
+“Have mercy on our beloved Baltimore,” attendees prayed Tuesday evening at an interfaith service at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church, a mile from the corner of Pennsylvania and North Avenues, the site of major looting Monday.
+
+At “Penn and North,” the festive spirit that took hold during the morning cleanup lasted until dusk:  there were dancers, a drum line, a prayer circle, and people grilling hotdogs. As curfew approached, more than 25 people formed a human wall between the police and the crowd, to protect both sides.
+
+Todd Marcus, executive director of the Sandtown-based nonprofit Newborn Holistic Ministries, whose volunteers were heavily involved in cleanup efforts Tuesday, says he was moved by the hundreds of volunteers he saw streaming into the neighborhood he has called home for 20 years.
+
+“It’s very emotional, and it’s very encouraging,” he says. “The challenge is for us to make that commitment as a society to the long-term kind of underlying challenges that caused this tension and this explosion. And that’s what we’re not good at.”
+
+He scanned the windows along Pennsylvania, many of which were boarded up long before this morning.
+
+“So what happens later on today?” he asks. “And what happens tomorrow, and in the next months or years?”",REAL
+1660,GOP campaigns push to take more control of debates,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+2692,A Golden Rule for journalists: Objectivity is a myth but fairness is a must,"Back when I was a pup of a reporter, a wise old editor at The New York Times pulled me aside after I submitted a news story with too much attitude. His name was Shelly Binn, and I’ll never forget the bright red line he drew for me.
+
+“Nobody expects you to be objective,” he said. “That’s impossible because we all have feelings and opinions. But you have to be fair to both sides, no matter how you feel.”
+
+There it was, a golden rule of journalism: Objectivity is a myth, fairness is a must. Obviously, the CNBC debate moderators never got the lesson.
+
+The news business is in trouble and overt displays of media bias of the kind we witnessed Wednesday are a big reason. Technology and changing lifestyles have fractured markets and wrecked revenues, but self-inflicted wounds compound the damage.
+
+The moderators’ relentless badgering, arrogance and ignorance toward the GOP candidates was so bad that their performance was universally panned, no small feat at a time when the media, like everything else, is polarized. The tenor provoked astonishment over the failure of network brass to recognize the black eye coming its way.
+
+To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.
+
+Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist.",REAL
+2665,Los Angeles Times backs Clinton over Sanders,"The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board's endorsement comes four days before California holds its crucial primary. It wrote that although ""California's Democratic primary owe a debt of gratitude to Bernie Sanders for a campaign that has emphasized issues that otherwise might have been ignored,"" the voters ""should cast their votes for Hillary Clinton.""
+
+The editorial board wrote that Clinton ""is not only more knowledgeable about domestic and international affairs than Sanders, but also more likely to achieve objectives they have in common.""
+
+The board also opined Friday that Clinton has a ""steadiness, seriousness and a commanding grasp of issues about which the blowhard businessman is dangerously ignorant.""
+
+The paper was not shy in noting Clinton's liabilities, though, writing that the former first lady has a ""penchant for secrecy and self-protection"" as reflected in her exclusive use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state. The California primary is expected to put Clinton well over the number of delegates she needs to clinch the Democratic nomination. Clinton nodded to as much during her swing through the state on Friday. ""If all things are expect to occur as I hope they will, by Tuesday, I will have captured the Democratic nomination for president,"" Clinton said in Westminster.",REAL
+1810,Exodus from Puerto Rico could upend Florida vote in 2016 presidential race,"Puerto Rico’s economic crisis meant Jeffrey Rondon, 25, struggled to find even part-time work, so he recently joined the growing exodus from his Caribbean island to Florida. Now he holds a full-time restaurant job and something that could upend the 2016 presidential election — the right to vote in Florida, the biggest of all swing states.
+
+“It’s important to vote and be heard — it’s a privilege,” said Rondon, who is one of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have moved to Florida in the past year.
+
+As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans are relatively easy to register to vote, and they are attracting unprecedented attention because they could change the political calculus in a state that President Obama won by the thinnest of margins in 2012: 50 percent to 49.1 percent.
+
+“It’s a potential game changer for the state,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic Research at the Pew Research Center. “It’s the biggest movement of people out of Puerto Rico since the great migration of the 1950s.”
+
+[Is it lights out for Puerto Rico?]
+
+Puerto Rican voters tend to lean Democratic, but a great number of the newcomers do not identify with any party, making them appealing targets for politicians and recruiters on both sides. Like those living in other U.S. territories, people in Puerto Rico cannot vote for president in the U.S. general election.
+
+Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is leading the large number of Republican presidential candidates in Florida polls, recently made a high-profile visit to Puerto Rico. On Monday, he will address three separate gatherings in Orlando, and among those with whom he is meeting are many Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics.
+
+Hillary Rodham Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidate, has visited the island in the past and polled very well with Puerto Ricans when she ran for president in 2008.
+
+“I think you are going to see a hyper-focus in Florida, the likes of which we have never seen. I do think Puerto Ricans can change the political landscape,” said Cristóbal Alex, president of the Democratic-backed Latino Victory Project.
+
+Jennifer Sevilla Korn, who works on Hispanic outreach as the Republican National Committee’s deputy political director of strategic initiatives, said that the GOP has been watching the shifting demographics of Florida and that the Puerto Rican vote “is definitely rising in importance.”
+
+“It’s been growing for years,” she said, adding that in 2016, “you have to get a good portion of Puerto Rican votes to win Florida.”
+
+She said Republicans are building community relationships, opening offices in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods, going door to door and showing up at Latino events of every size, “from 30 to 30,000 people” and setting up GOP booths
+
+“I see the vote as up for grabs,” she said.
+
+[Puerto Rican debt crisis forces its way onto presidential political agenda]
+
+Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth, has been struggling with $72 billion in debt and soaring unemployment. The Pew Research Center calculates that the island’s population dropped by 11,000 people a year in the 1990s, but between 2010 and 2013, the loss accelerated to 48,000 a year.
+
+This year, with economic problems growing, the number leaving for the mainland is even higher.
+
+Florida — particularly the area around Orlando in central Florida — has become the hottest destination for Puerto Ricans. Disney World and the many jobs associated with the tourist industry around it offer entry-level jobs.
+
+Puerto Rican professionals and entrepreneurs also are relocating to Florida, which they see as a welcoming place where it is ever easier to find a shop with a Puerto Rican flag, food and music.
+
+In addition, a growing number of Puerto Ricans from New York, Chicago and elsewhere on the mainland are moving to central Florida, or, as many call it, “Little Puerto Rico.”
+
+“The weather is better here than New York!” said Larry Rivera, the New York-born manager of Kissimmee’s Melao Bakery, which features Puerto Rican sweets and offerings such as mofongo, a fried plantain dish with garlic.
+
+Rivera said everyone is talking about all the newcomers. He sees the influx in the lines of Puerto Ricans at Melao that sometimes stretch out the door. “I see all the new faces, and I see that when people are applying for jobs, their last address was the island,” he said.
+
+Rondon, who moved to Florida in October to find work, was recently hired at Melao. Jobs were so hard to come by in Bayamon, on the north side of the island, that Rondon said he could earn only $150 a week with part-time work at Home Depot. So he, his brother and his mother relocated to Florida, and he now works 40 hours a week or more and earns three times what he did.
+
+His dream, he said, is to own a home in Florida, and he is excited about voting in the U.S. presidential election for the first time. He says he has a “good feeling about Hillary Clinton,” but the candidate he has heard the most about is Donald Trump, so, he says, “I need to learn more.”
+
+Puerto Rico’s party system is different from the U.S. system. Though there is no general-election presidential vote, there are Republican and Democratic presidential primaries on the island, and delegates are sent to the national conventions.
+
+Some Puerto Ricans blame politicians for wrecking the island’s economy and say they are in no hurry to have anything to do with politics. But big efforts are underway to engage the newcomers.
+
+“I’m telling them if you don’t vote, you don’t count — it’s like you don’t exist,” said Jeamy Ramirez, 37, who works for Mi Familia Vota, a national nonprofit group that registers Latinos. She said her group has signed up about 3,000 new voters in central Florida since March, a great number of whom were Puerto Rican and did not register with either party.
+
+One of the newcomers Ramirez registered is Yarinneth Castro, 26, who arrived two months ago. The college student, who hopes to be a court psychologist, said she will be listening for a candidate who addresses her two big issues: better health-care coverage and help for Puerto Rico. “I am interested in the person, not the party,” she said.
+
+In a state famous for razor-thin margins of electoral victory, the influx of thousands of people is mobilizing many activists.
+
+“Everyone remembers that George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes in 2000. You are talking about 1,000 families coming here a month. It’s stunning,” said Anthony Suarez, president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association in Florida. He has helped organize a bipartisan forum that he calls “Political Salsa” to engage newcomers on the issues.
+
+Mark Oxner, chairman of the Osceola County Republican Party, said, “We’re telling them what the Republican Party stands for and that a lot of their values align with the Republican Party,” especially on social issues such as opposition to abortion. He added, “We need to reach out to the Puerto Rican base and tell them we believe in the same things.”
+
+State Sen. Darren Soto, a Democrat, is running to be Florida’s first Puerto Rican in Congress. He is seeking the 9th District seat vacated by Alan Grayson, a Democrat who is running for the U.S. Senate. Many Democrats hope that Soto’s candidacy in central Florida will energize Puerto Rican turnout in the presidential year.
+
+The Puerto Rican vote “helped Barack Obama win Florida twice,” Soto said, and now, “because of the higher influx, it will be a bigger factor.”
+
+Puerto Rican elected officials from New York and Chicago plan to come down early next year to hold political rallies. In 2014, caravans of cars where organized to get the vote out — as many as 70 cars bearing Puerto Rican flags blaring through a neighborhood — and there will be bigger efforts in 2016.
+
+Soto said those coming from Puerto Rico can register to vote fairly easily — they simply have to prove residency, as people do when they get a driver’s license, by showing utility bills or rental leases. “It’s no different than a person moving here from New York,” he said.
+
+Soraya Marquez, the state coordinator for Mi Familia Vota, said her team goes to supermarkets, housing complexes and festivals — anywhere people gather — to ask people whether they want to register. After finding out whether a person is a U.S. citizens, they usually use a Florida driver’s license or identification card to get the person’s details and help them sign up.
+
+The group hands the voter applications over to the state supervisor of elections. If that office approves the application, it mails the person a voting card, usually within two weeks. Marquez said Mi Familia Vota aims to register 10,000 people in central Florida this year and 20,000 more next year. Many other groups are helping people register, too.
+
+Vivian Rodriguez, chairman of the Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Florida, said registering to vote is key, but that’s just the beginning. “Nobody anticipated this large migration, but it is changing politics,” she said. “It’s a good opportunity for us. But we have a lot of work to do.”
+
+Scott Clement in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+8518,Does Putting Three Dots And A Question Mark At The End Of A Headline Make People Curious Enough To Click…?,"0 Add Comment 
+STUDIES have shown that websites which fill their pages with headlines that end with three dots and a question mark have to do very little else to attract thousands of clicks from unsuspecting web users. 
+The findings come after a year-long internet study, which found that content hosting sites can survive simply by exploiting the human brain’s natural tendency to seek the answer to a question that is seemingly directed straight at them, even if they have very little interest in the subject at hand. 
+Web users are just as likely to click through on headlines such as ‘Did Amy Huberman show too much flesh at last night’s event…?’ as they are on headlines such as ‘Can this tractor pull this other tractor up a hill…?’, meaning that little or no effort is required to run a thriving media empire. 
+“Can this kitten reach his food…? Does this grandmother know all the words to Lose Yourself…? Who cares, it’s all clicks” said one entertainment website owner. 
+“Once we worked out the old three dots and a question mark formula, then we knew we were set for life. People just can’t help but click on that. It’s like catnip for the bored mind”. 
+It is believed that the success of the formula is so great, that all news will come in that format in the near future. Already, Brian Dobson is working on his delivery of news headlines such as ‘Were there many people killed in the Middle East today…?’ and ‘Did the government get the 8th amendment sorted out…?’.",FAKE
+6027,Do You Know What It Means To Be An Introvert?,"Leave a reply 
+Kate Bartolotta – In this day and age where the constant use of social media demands that we label and define ourselves to others in every way possible, it’s important to understand the true meaning and use of the word introvert. 
+A lot of people use the words “introverted” and “shy” interchangeably; they don’t mean the same thing. 
+As someone who works with people all the time, you’d think I’d be an extrovert. I’m friendly. I’m not shy. But when I get close to my “people time” limit, it’s time to shut down, be quiet and hole up with a good book. I love helping people, but there’s a huge reason that I balance that type of work with work where I get to be quiet and dive in to working with words instead of being bombarded with interaction. 
+It’s because—although I don’t fall into some of the old stereotypes—I’m an introvert. 
+I spent years feeling guilty if I wanted to spend time alone instead of doing things with friends. I learned to make the best of it, and often pushed myself to be social—even when it felt exhausting. Many people do this, as extroversion tends to be prized in our society, while introversion is seen as a “second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.” It is none of those things. It’s the way an estimated two-thirds to one-half of us are wired, and it can be our greatest asset. 
+As I mentioned, being introverted isn’t the same thing as being shy (though there’s nothing wrong with being shy either) . Many shy people are also introverted, but one doesn’t really have much to do with the other. The best explanation I was ever given (and maybe one of the biggest “aha!” moments of my adult life) was that while extroverts are energized by connecting and spending time with others, introverts need inward-focused, alone time to recharge. 
+Being introverted has nothing to do with lack of confidence. Many confident people are introverted, and gather their strength from the time they spend alone rather than from the input of others. In some ways, I believe that the ability to enjoy being by yourself says a great deal about your confidence. 
+It isn’t that introverts don’t like social time—it’s that for us, social time is giving out energy rather than receiving energy. 
+A lot of us fall somewhere in the middle between the two, and some interactions take more out of people than others. 
+A few things to consider if someone you care about falls more on the introverted end of the spectrum: 1. Think of each of us as having a cup of energy available. 
+For introverts, most social interactions take a little out of that cup instead of filling it the way it does for extroverts. Most of us like it. We’re happy to give and love to see you. When the cup is empty, though, we need some time to refuel. We aren’t mad. We don’t stop caring about you. We’ll be so happy to see you and talk to you again when we’ve had some time to decompress. 2. Silence isn’t a bad thing. 
+Really. It’s not an insult. It’s the introvert’s way of conserving energy and restoring him or herself. If we can be quiet with you (and you can be content being quiet with us) it’s a huge compliment and a huge relief. Other times the quiet really does need to be spent alone. We come back when we’re ready. It’s worth the wait. 3. Just because someone is friendly, she isn’t necessarily an extrovert; just because someone is quiet doesn’t mean he’s an introvert. 
+If you pay attention to people you care about, often you can see what energizes them and what drains them. If you aren’t sure, ask. If you notice a friend seems wiped out, ask if spending time together sounds like fun or if they’d like some down time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve become almost giddy because plans were cancelled—even with people I love. When you know someone needs some space in order to re-energize, be respectful and give it to them. It isn’t rejection. 4. Text. Write letters. Email. We love it. 
+There are times that you can’t beat a face to face conversation, I’d agree 100%. But for introverts, sometimes being able to stay connected and stay in touch in a less intense and less draining way is a huge help. Being in crowds is tough. Even long conversations can be tough if we’re already “peopled out.” Having the freedom to respond when we are ready is a great feeling. Sometimes, it’s right away. If it’s not, don’t be offended. (It’s not you…it’s me. Really!) 5. All of this really comes down to respect. 
+Each of us has our own set of boundaries, our own way of communicating and our own needs. When you care about someone, you choose to communicate with him or her in ways that show you love and respect them. If your cup is filled by lots of interaction with others, go for it! Be in tune with your own needs, and enjoy the way that time with others energizes you. If someone you love is an introvert, and needs time to him or herself, tune into and respect that as well. We don’t do activities alone because we are sad, or negative or depressed; we do it because that’s what fills our cup back up. We’ll be even happier to see you when we come back. 
+Kate Bartolotta –“One of the best things I’ve read on the subject was the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts by Susan Cain. The shorter 12-question quiz on her site can give you some good insights into your own personal introversion or extroversion that bypasses some of those long held stereotypes (P.S. I’m 12 for 12).” SF Source Dreamcatcher Reality  ",FAKE
+9892,Lavrov Schools European Diplomats in Logic Using Examples of Yemen and Ukraine,"Get short URL 0 44 0 0 Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is no stranger to driving a good point home. Speaking to representatives of the Association of European Businesses in Moscow on Tuesday, Russia's top diplomat explained how Western countries have absolutely contradictory approaches to virtually identical problems in Yemen and Ukraine. 
+At the meeting, Lavrov devoted a great deal of his speech to the subject of the crisis in Ukraine, the issue which effectively sparked the crisis in relations between Western countries and Russia, and resulted in tens of billions of dollars in economic losses for both sides, not to mention heightened military tensions. © Sputnik/ Vladimir Sergeev Saving Face: 'West's Attitude to Crimea Will Not Change' After US Elections Pointing out the difference in approach to Western policy in response to the crises in Ukraine and that in present-day Yemen, the foreign minister effectively schooled Western officials for their illogical behavior.
+Lavrov recalled that when Yemen faced a coup in September 2014, and Yemeni President Hadi fled to neighboring Saudi Arabia, Western politicians reacted by demanding the reinstatement of the country's legitimate president. However, facing the exact same situation in Ukraine in February 2014, US and European leaders reacted very differently. ""For over two years, the international community has been demanding that President Hadi be returned to Yemen and his legitimacy be reaffirmed,"" Lavrov recalled. ""But our European colleagues, who share this view, remain silent when we ask them why the same principled approach cannot be applied to Ukraine."" 
+Lavrov pointed out that two-and-a-half years ago, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland brokered a deal between Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the opposition, promising early elections in exchange for his security and an end to riots in the streets of Kiev. But just hours after the deal was signed, Yanukovych was ousted, and forced to flee in fear for his life. Apparently, the diplomat said, European officials ""have more respect for Yemen and its political system than for Ukraine, where experiments can continue it seems. Ukraine has been suffering from this for several decades now."" ...",FAKE
+999,Marco Rubio Ends Bid after Losing His Home State,"MIAMI - Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio dropped out of the race for president Tuesday, ending his White House bid after a humbling loss in his home state to Donald Trump.
+
+""It is not God's plan that I be president in 2016 or maybe ever,"" the Florida senator told a crowd of supporters in Miami.
+
+While he didn't name Trump, Rubio warned against embracing his brand of divisive politics: ""I ask the American people, do not give into the fear, do not give into the frustration,"" he said.
+
+Rubio's decision was prompted by losses in all but three of the presidential nomination contests, but Florida's winner-take-all primary proved the most devastating. Only six years earlier, he was a tea party favorite who crushed the GOP's ""establishment"" candidate to win a seat in the U.S. Senate.
+
+But the political tables turned on him in the 2016 presidential race, where he was lambasted as mainstream in a year when voters cried out for an outsider.
+
+In the final week, he dedicated time and resources almost exclusively to the Sunshine State, urging voters to stop Trump from ""hijacking"" the Republican Party. He went so far as to tell his supporters in Ohio to vote for Buckeye State governor John Kasich since his chances were better to win there.
+
+Despite his intense rivalry with Trump, Rubio only indirectly criticized him during much of the campaign. He pivoted to an all-out assault on the businessman's character and ethics after a dismal Super Tuesday performance March 1, when he clinched only one of the 11 contests.
+
+In recent weeks, the attacks deviated from policy to personal. At one point, Rubio equated Trump's small hands with his manhood. But the strategy backfired with voters and donors and Rubio later said he regretted the attacks.
+
+Like other Republicans, Rubio had pledged to support the eventual GOP nominee. But, in recent days, he expressed having second thoughts. He told reporters Saturday that the chaos and divisiveness at Trump's rallies, including the one in Chicago canceled last week, had made it harder for him to view the front-runner as a viable candidate.
+
+The 44-year-old senator had seemed destined for the national spotlight. Time magazine placed him on its cover in early 2013, dubbing him the ""Republican Savior.""
+
+In under a decade, he had gone from West Miami commissioner to state legislator to Florida House Speaker. In 2010, he challenged a sitting governor for a U.S. Senate seat and won after starting more than 50 percentage points behind in the polls, catapulted by a wave of tea party supporters.
+
+He launched his presidential campaign at the Miami Freedom Tower, where tens of thousands of his fellow Cuban-Americans had been processed as refugees. He promised lower taxes, less regulation, tighter federal spending, modernized immigration laws, and the repeal and replacement of ObamaCare.
+
+At the time, Rubio's friend and one-time mentor, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, seemed his biggest hurdle to get to the Oval Office.
+
+Enter Trump. By mid-summer, he turned the Bush-Rubio rivalry into a telenovela without the sizzle. Bush dropped out after the Feb. 20 South Carolina primary.
+
+In the Iowa caucuses, Rubio came in a better-than-expected third place, nearly beating Trump for second. He then banked on a big showing in New Hampshire but a stunningly poor debate performance - in which he frequently repeated talking points and was called ""scripted"" by rival Chris Christie - led to a dismal fifth place.
+
+""Our disappointment tonight is not on you. It's on me,"" he told supporters that night.
+
+Rubio came in second in South Carolina and Nevada, but on March 1, Super Tuesday, he collected just one win in 11 contests.
+
+The final blow came two weeks later, at home.
+
+Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.",REAL
+877,Is Cruz too conservative to win? NY Times says he's sooo right-wing,"Ted Cruz is a very, very conservative guy.
+
+Like, ultra-conservative. Seriously, hyper-conservative. As in, you wouldn’t believe how conservative.
+
+That is the unmistakable message of a New York Times piece that aims to plumb the depths of the senator’s ideology—and, near the top, notes that John McCain called him a “wacko bird.”
+
+I’m all for scrutinizing the candidates and their stands on the issues, even if this story begins with sort of a forehead-slapping tone. We would see more of this coverage of Cruz if the media consensus wasn’t that Donald Trump is still the most likely nominee.
+
+Most of the media attention surrounding Cruz focuses on his trench warfare to lure delegates away from Trump; his response to charges by Trump; and some version of the Time magazine question, “Likable Enough?”
+
+Cruz advisers believe the Texan is softening his testy image by launching a charm offensive. This includes joking around with Jimmy Fallon (in his Trump wig), using his wife Heidi as a surrogate and appearing on CNN with his young daughters. They believe Mitt Romney lost in 2012 because many people didn’t like him, and are trying to avoid that problem.
+
+Cruz is also using more humor, telling “Good Morning America” yesterday that he is the only GOP candidate “who doesn’t eat pizza with a knife and fork.”
+
+In the runup to today’s New York primary, where the Cruz camp is hoping to win a few delegates at best, the senator has been attacking Trump as someone who has supported liberal Democratic causes for 40 years. So he’s hardly hiding the fact that he’s a true-blue conservative.
+
+The Times piece starts out with a laundry list. It says that on immigration Cruz is “to the right of Ronald Reagan,” who backed a liberalization compromise in 1986. Of course, most of the GOP is now to the right of Reagan on this issue.
+
+Cruz “opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest,” and supports an amendment to allow states to avoid performing or recognizing same-sex marriages.
+
+Cruz favors the gold standard, wants to abolish the IRS, and has criticized Trump on deportation policy—full stop—“from the right.”
+
+The larger point, of course, is that Cruz would be a weak candidate, “the  most conservative presidential nominee in at least a half-century, perhaps to the right of Barry Goldwater.” And we all recall what happened to him.
+
+And here’s the sort-of praise: Cruz “anticipated the rightward tilt of the Republican Party of today, grasping its conservatism even as colleagues dismissed him as a fringe figure.”
+
+Cruz told Bill O'Reilly yesterday that ""the Times is not exactly a barometer for the mainstream."" Asked about his position on abortion, he said it is Hillary Clinton's position on the issue that is ""radical.""
+
+""I recognize the media loves to focus on issues where they can hit Republicans over and over again,"" Cruz said, but that his main focus will be jobs.
+
+Now there’s little question that Cruz could have a rough time when he has to defend his positions on abortion, immigration, even his flat-tax plan to a national electorate, not just Republicans.
+
+Even some mainstream Republicans think he would lead the party to defeat, although part of the establishment is reluctantly embracing him as an alternative to Trump.
+
+But in the latest Fox News poll, Cruz is in a virtual tie with Hillary Clinton, trailing by 1 point, while Trump trails by 7 points (and John Kasich leads her by 9). On paper, at least, Cruz and Trump would lose to Bernie Sanders by 12 and 14 points, respectively.
+
+For now, Cruz advisers believe they are beating Trump at the delegate game and that some party regulars are insulted by the billionaire’s attacks on a crooked system. These are the kind of delegates, they say, who would throw their weight behind Cruz on a second ballot.
+
+If the race between the two men becomes more competitive, expect to hear much more from the media about how Cruz is an unapologetic right-winger.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+8591,Hillary Clinton Sells 20% of US Uranium To Russia WTF ?,"We Are Change 
+
+Hey — had you heard that uranium is an incredibly scarce resource and that Russia is buying it all up? 
+No, me neither. 
+But that’s what I’ve discovered on the campaign trail. 
+Apparently a few years back Hillary Clinton betrayed the country — yet again — by selling 20% of our precious uranium supply to Russia in return for yet more payola.
+As secretary of state she “approved” a deal to sell Uranium One, a company that controlled a fifth of U.S. uranium production, to the Russian atomic agency Rosatom. In return she and Bill received vast amounts of payoffs from the Kremlin and related interests — most notably a $500,000 speaker fee for Bill from a Moscow-based investment bank, which works out at about $250,000 net of tax.
+(Money also went to the Clinton Foundation charity, from which the Clintons personally steal money through a channel so clever and cynical that it remains hidden). 
+The deal is a perfect example of “Clinton Corruption,” says Donald Trump. “As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton signed off on a deal allowing Russians to take… control of about 20% of America’s uranium supply to the Russians.”
+It shows the “long and lucrative history of financial deals with the Russians, particularly with the Russian government,” says Peter Schweizer, author of the book “Clinton Cash,” director of the film of the same name, and an editor at large for the always-reliable Breitbart website. Uranium is “a fundamental issue of national security,” Schweizer told Lou Dobbs Tonight on Fox Business. “It’s not like oil and gas that you can find all sorts of places. They are precious few places you can mine for uranium, in the United States is one of those areas.”
+Even the New York Times — a wholly owned subsidiary of the Worldwide Clinton-Illuminati-Spectre Cabal — was critical. “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” it reported in a big expose published earlier this year, in which it even floated the prospect of a Putin “monopoly” of uranium down the road.
+It’s all very, very troubling. Apart from just one teensy weeny little problem.
+Uranium isn’t a scarce resource that Vladimir Putin, or anyone else, is about to control.
+Uranium is a massive drug on the international commodity markets. There is a worldwide glut. It is produced all around the world, and there is so much of it washing around that the price is in free-fall — and has been for almost 10 years. Right now the world’s uranium miners are so desperate that they are actually giving it away for less — literally — than it costs them to dig it out of the ground.
+Uranium prices have collapsed by a staggering 88% since their peak in the summer of 2007. They are down about three quarters since the February 2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster in Japan, which caused that country to switch off most of its reactors and caused everyone else to review their nuclear-energy production.
+As it happens, the price of this allegedly precious commodity just hit a new low of $20 a ton (In 2007 it was $160). It’s now half the price it was when the Russians took control of Uranium One. According to the World Nuclear Association, the miners’ trade body, that’s about 20% below the average cost of digging it out of the ground. Two thirds of the world’s uranium costs more than $20 a pound to mine.
+The problem is that while lots of mines are producing it, hardly anyone wants it. Nearly all of the commercial use for uranium is for nuclear energy. Nuclear reactors are being mothballed. Plans for massive nuclear expansion are being shelved or reconsidered. Fukushima caused a massive political backlash against nuclear energy.
+Even countries that still plan on building many more reactors — such as China and India — started slow-walking their plans and rethinking. And then the price of other sources of energy, such as oil and gas, collapsed. So there is even less demand for new reactors.
+Meanwhile, despite the panic, U.S. uranium output isn’t very important anyway. According to the World Nuclear Association, the U.S. ranks ninth among global producers. Our production is less than one quarter of Australia’s and less than one tenth of Canada’s. The U.S. accounts for about 2% of total uranium production worldwide — meaning that the U.S. mines now in Putin’s hands account for about 0.4% of world output.
+Whoa! You can really see why Vladimir Putin wanted “control” of it — and why the Clintons were able to charge him in return a stratospheric $250,000 net (plus, of course, the secret funds stolen from the Clinton Foundation) in return.
+Why hasn’t there been an investigation? Where is the FBI when you really need it?
+OK, maybe “technically,” Hillary didn’t personally actually “approve” the deal. Turns out she had no actual veto power over it. But she was one of many people who could have referred it to the president, who could have blocked it. There are lots of others who also approved it, including multiple regulators and stock exchanges around the world (Uranium One is actually a Canadian company). The fact that they all waved it through just shows how wide the Clintons’ tentacles really stretch.
+But I always like to end on a positive note, and I have one now. If uranium really is a scarce and precious resource and Vladimir Putin is secretly trying to corner the market, as so many of these sources allege, then obviously sooner or later the price is going to explode. And if that’s true, I know an easy way you can guarantee yourself a fortune.
+Just go out and buy stock in Uranium Participation Corp. URPTF, -0.36% a publicly traded Canadian company that functions effectively as a uranium trust. It simply owns a lot of uranium on behalf of investors. Its price has, of course, absolutely collapsed along with the underlying price of the uranium in its vaults, and the stock is now at record lows.
+Although it is a Canadian stock, and its primary exchange is in Toronto, the stock also trades freely over the counter in the U.S.
+I assume that all those people raging against Hillary’s evil uranium “sell out” to Putin, and warning about the coming uranium apocalypse, have plunged tons of their own money into the stock. Right?
+And if they haven’t — what does that tell you?
+Via. Market Watch 
+Follow WE ARE CHANGE on SOCIAL MEDIA SnapChat: LukeWeAreChange 
+fbook: https://facebook.com/LukeWeAreChange 
+Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange I nstagram: http://instagram.com/lukewearechange Sign up become a patron and Show your support for alternative news for Just 1$ a month you can help Grow We are change We use Bitcoin Too ! 12HdLgeeuA87t2JU8m4tbRo247Yj5u2TVP Join and Up Vote Our STEEMIT The post Hillary Clinton Sells 20% of US Uranium To Russia WTF ? appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+8751,2009 FLASHBACK: “What If” Remixed,11/08/2016  ,FAKE
+7886,Podesta emails - Re: Obama Says He Didn’t Know Hillary Clinton Was Using Private Email Address - NYTimes.com,"View source Re: Obama Says He Didn’t Know Hillary Clinton Was Using Private Email Address - NYTimes.com From:pir@hrcoffice.com To: jennifer.m.palmieri@gmail.com Date: 2015-03-08 10:21 Subject: Re: Obama Says He Didn’t Know Hillary Clinton Was Using Private Email Address - NYTimes.com Ok. Sounds like people are putting words into his mouth. On Mar 8, 2015, at 7:56 AM, Jennifer Palmieri <jennifer.m.palmieri@gmail.com<mailto:jennifer.m.palmieri@gmail.com>> wrote: Suggest Philippe talk to Josh or Eric. They know POTUS and HRC emailed. Josh has been asked about that. Standard practice is not to confirm anything about his email, so his answer to press was that he would not comment/confirm. I recollect that Josh was also asked if POTUS ever noticed her personal email account and he said something like POTUS likely had better things to do than focus on his Cabinet's email addresses. Sent from my iPad On Mar 8, 2015, at 12:40 AM, Philippe Reines <pir@hrcoffice.com<mailto:pir@hrcoffice.com>> wrote: I find it odd the NYT didn't actually quote the President saying what's in their headline. Especially since the story has a disbelieving tone to his not noticing. One of us should connect with the WH just so they know that the email will show his statement to not make sense. I'm happy to do so to Josh Earnest since Jen is in a weird position, unless Cheryl or John you want to (or already have) with someone else. But it's not unreasonable to assume that Josh is going to get asked how this was possible, and he should have the factset. Especially if it's some weird technical thing with the President's email setup that he doesn't see addresses. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/us/obama-says-he-didnt-know-hillary-clinton-was-using-private-email-address.html Download raw source Delivered-To: john.podesta@gmail.com Received: by 10.25.24.71 with SMTP id o68csp815128lfi; Sun, 8 Mar 2015 05:21:43 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.70.30.162 with SMTP id t2mr38495774pdh.142.1425817301725; Sun, 08 Mar 2015 05:21:41 -0700 (PDT) Return-Path: <pir@hrcoffice.com> Received: from na01-bn1-obe.outbound.protection.outlook.com (mail-bn1bon0087.outbound.protection.outlook.com. [157.56.111.87]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id bi15si2383845pdb.24.2015.03.08.05.21.40 (version=TLSv1.2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA bits=128/128); Sun, 08 Mar 2015 05:21:41 -0700 (PDT) Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 157.56.111.87 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of pir@hrcoffice.com) client-ip=157.56.111.87; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 157.56.111.87 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of pir@hrcoffice.com) smtp.mail=pir@hrcoffice.com Received: from CY1PR0301MB0617.namprd03.prod.outlook.com (25.160.142.24) by CY1PR0301MB0732.namprd03.prod.outlook.com (25.160.159.150) with Microsoft SMTP Server (TLS) id 15.1.106.15; Sun, 8 Mar 2015 12:21:38 +0000 Received: from CY1PR0301MB0617.namprd03.prod.outlook.com ([25.160.142.24]) by CY1PR0301MB0617.namprd03.prod.outlook.com ([25.160.142.24]) with mapi id 15.01.0099.004; Sun, 8 Mar 2015 12:21:37 +0000 From: Philippe Reines <pir@hrcoffice.com> To: Jennifer Palmieri <jennifer.m.palmieri@gmail.com> CC: John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com>, CDM <cheryl.mills@gmail.com>, =?windows-1252?Q?Nick=0D=0A_Merrill?= <nmerrill@hrcoffice.com>, Heather Samuelson <hsamuelson@cdmillsgroup.com> Subject: =?Windows-1252?Q?Re:_Obama_Says_He_Didn=92t_Know_Hillary_Clinton_Was_Usin?= =?Windows-1252?Q?g_Private_Email_Address_-_NYTimes.com?= Thread-Topic: =?Windows-1252?Q?Obama_Says_He_Didn=92t_Know_Hillary_Clinton_Was_Using_Pr?= =?Windows-1252?Q?ivate_Email_Address_-_NYTimes.com?= Thread-Index: AQHQWWJwYRF+GQsZaU2O152Pna5kkJ0SeyOAgAAG8F0= Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2015 12:21:36 +0000 Message-ID: <17B2908F-F9FA-4518-8D24-3FD49AAEEB2D@hrcoffice.com> References: <20150308054059.5902416.1752.1552@hrcoffice.com>,<B09DE10E-3545-4264-BA57-8DA771CF75F9@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <B09DE10E-3545-4264-BA57-8DA771CF75F9@gmail.com> Accept-Language: en-US Content-Language: en-US X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: x-originating-ip: [73.200.111.123] authentication-results: gmail.com; dkim=none (message not signed) header.d=none; x-microsoft-antispam: UriScan:;BCL:0;PCL:0;RULEID:;SRVR:CY1PR0301MB0732; x-forefront-antispam-report: BMV:1;SFV:NSPM;SFS:(10009020)(377454003)(24454002)(110136001)(54356999)(15975445007)(83716003)(82746002)(16236675004)(2900100001)(19617315012)(99286002)(19580405001)(19580395003)(86362001)(87936001)(36756003)(2950100001)(2656002)(77156002)(62966003)(40100003)(33656002)(66066001)(106116001)(50986999)(46102003)(76176999)(102836002)(92566002)(104396002)(42262002);DIR:OUT;SFP:1101;SCL:1;SRVR:CY1PR0301MB0732;H:CY1PR0301MB0617.namprd03.prod.outlook.com;FPR:;SPF:None;MLV:sfv;LANG:en; x-microsoft-antispam-prvs: <CY1PR0301MB0732CE7A0443C6281E131E81A71A0@CY1PR0301MB0732.namprd03.prod.outlook.com> x-exchange-antispam-report-test: UriScan:; x-exchange-antispam-report-cfa-test: BCL:0;PCL:0;RULEID:(601004)(5002009)(5005006);SRVR:CY1PR0301MB0732;BCL:0;PCL:0;RULEID:;SRVR:CY1PR0301MB0732; x-forefront-prvs: 0509245D29 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=""_000_17B2908FF9FA45188D243FD49AAEEB2Dhrcofficecom_"" MIME-Version: 1.0 X-OriginatorOrg: hrcoffice.com X-MS-Exchange-CrossTenant-originalarrivaltime: 08 Mar 2015 12:21:36.7877 (UTC) X-MS-Exchange-CrossTenant-fromentityheader: Hosted X-MS-Exchange-CrossTenant-id: cd8891aa-8599-4062-9818-7b7cb05e1dad X-MS-Exchange-Transport-CrossTenantHeadersStamped: CY1PR0301MB0732 --_000_17B2908FF9FA45188D243FD49AAEEB2Dhrcofficecom_ Content-Type: text/plain; charset=""Windows-1252"" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Ok. Sounds like people are putting words into his mouth. On Mar 8, 2015, at 7:56 AM, Jennifer Palmieri <jennifer.m.palmieri@gmail.co= m<mailto:jennifer.m.palmieri@gmail.com>> wrote: Suggest Philippe talk to Josh or Eric. They know POTUS and HRC emailed. J= osh has been asked about that. Standard practice is not to confirm anythin= g about his email, so his answer to press was that he would not comment/con= firm. I recollect that Josh was also asked if POTUS ever noticed her perso= nal email account and he said something like POTUS likely had better things= to do than focus on his Cabinet's email addresses. Sent from my iPad On Mar 8, 2015, at 12:40 AM, Philippe Reines <pir@hrcoffice.com<mailto:pir@= hrcoffice.com>> wrote: I find it odd the NYT didn't actually quote the President saying what's in = their headline. Especially since the story has a disbelieving tone to his n= ot noticing. One of us should connect with the WH just so they know that th= e email will show his statement to not make sense. I'm happy to do so to Jo= sh Earnest since Jen is in a weird position, unless Cheryl or John you want= to (or already have) with someone else. But it's not unreasonable to assum= e that Josh is going to get asked how this was possible, and he should have= the factset. Especially if it's some weird technical thing with the Presid= ent's email setup that he doesn't see addresses. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/us/obama-says-he-didnt-know-hillary-cl= inton-was-using-private-email-address.html --_000_17B2908FF9FA45188D243FD49AAEEB2Dhrcofficecom_ Content-Type: text/html; charset=""Windows-1252"" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <html><head><meta http-equiv=3D""Content-Type"" content=3D""text/html; charset=3DWindows-1= 252""></head><body dir=3D""auto""><div>Ok. Sounds like people are putting words into his mouth.<br><br><br></div><div><br> On Mar 8, 2015, at 7:56 AM, Jennifer Palmieri <<a href=3D""mailto:jennife= r.m.palmieri@gmail.com"">jennifer.m.palmieri@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><div><div>Suggest Philippe talk to Josh or Eric. They know POTUS and HRC e= mailed. Josh has been asked about that. Standard practice is no= t to confirm anything about his email, so his answer to press was that he w= ould not comment/confirm. I recollect that Josh was also asked if POTUS ever noticed her personal email account and he sai= d something like POTUS likely had better things to do than focus on his Cab= inet's email addresses.<br><br> Sent from my iPad</div><div><br> On Mar 8, 2015, at 12:40 AM, Philippe Reines <<a href=3D""mailto:pir@hrco= ffice.com"">pir@hrcoffice.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type=3D""cite""><div><div style=3D""white-space:pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"">I find it odd t= he NYT didn't actually quote the President saying what's in their headline.= Especially since the story has a disbelieving tone to his not noticing. On= e of us should connect with the WH just so they know that the email will show his statement to not make sense= . I'm happy to do so to Josh Earnest since Jen is in a weird position, unle= ss Cheryl or John you want to (or already have) with someone else. But it's= not unreasonable to assume that Josh is going to get asked how this was possible, and he should have the f= actset. Especially if it's some weird technical thing with the President's = email setup that he doesn't see addresses. </div><div style=3D""white-space:pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;""><br></div><div style=3D""white-space:pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;""><a href=3D""http= ://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/us/obama-says-he-didnt-know-hillary-clinto= n-was-using-private-email-address.html"">http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/0= 8/us/obama-says-he-didnt-know-hillary-clinton-was-using-private-email-addre= ss.html</a></div><br><div style=3D""color: rgb(38, 38, 38); font-family: Calibri, 'Slate Pro', sa= ns-serif;""></div></div></blockquote></div></body></html> --_000_17B2908FF9FA45188D243FD49AAEEB2Dhrcofficecom_-- e-Highlighter",FAKE
+3980,Mali: At least 20 dead after gunmen storm luxury hotel in capital,"The gunmen seized 170 hostages in the attack on Friday. Malian soldiers, along with US and French special forces, rescued hostages as they attempted to regain control of the hotel.
+
+Could the juvenile suspects in the Tennessee wildfires be tried as adults?
+
+UPDATE at 9:30 pm Eastern time: Heavily armed Islamic extremists seized dozens of hostages Friday at a Radisson hotel, but Malian troops, backed by US and French special forces, swarmed in to retake the building and free many of the terrified captives, according to The Associated Press. At least 20 people, including one American, were killed along with two gunmen during the more than seven-hour siege, a Malian military commander said.
+
+Gunmen seized a luxury hotel in the Malian capital of Bamako Friday and took 170 people hostage, killing at least three of them while some 20 others have been released.
+
+The Malian military said 10 gunmen stormed the Radisson Blu hotel shouting ""Allahu Akbar,"" or ""God is great,"" in Arabic before firing on hotel guards Friday morning.
+
+Malian soldiers, with help from United Nations peacekeeping troops, currently have the hotel surrounded. A Malian military official told the Associated Press that three deaths were confirmed. Two of the dead are Malian and the other is a French national, according to CNN.
+
+It also appears that those who have been released were made to recite Koranic verses first, Reuters reports. The news wire also reports that the gunmen are currently making their way through the hotel floor by floor.
+
+The Rezidor Hotel Group, which operates the Radisson Blu, released a statement saying 30 the hostages were hotel staff and the other 140 were guests. The 190-room hotel, located near government ministries and diplomatic offices, is popular among foreigners in the former French colony. Turkish Airlines said that six of its crew members are part of the hostage hold-up. Chinese, French, and Belgian nationals are also believed to be inside.
+
+There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but this year has seen an uptick in jihadist violence across Mali. An attack on a restaurant in Bamako in March was the first time the capital had been attacked in years.
+
+In 2012, after a coup in Bamako, Mali's north fell under the control of Islamic extremists who took advantage of a Tuareg uprising. In 2013, the French Army took control of the north and a UN-brokered peace deal was signed with Tuareg separatists.
+
+France and other Western nations have been working with the Malian government to prevent the Islamist militants from regaining a foothold in the north. A UN spokesman said that the Radisson Blu was host to a large delegation of UN workers involved in the ongoing peace process.
+
+In August, nine people, including four members of the UN mission, were killed in a hotel attack in the central town of Sevare after heavily armed gunmen entered a hotel popular with European military officers. The attacks was significant because the popular tourist town was the demarcation line between government-controlled areas of Mali and those that were controlled by Islamist militants, the Wall Street Journal reports.
+
+The Christian Science Monitor reported in August that there were signs that militants were strategically moving south to places like Bamako, after having been confined to cities such as Timbuktu in the north.
+
+""It's a troubling sign that the armed Islamist groups are intent on stepping up the pressure both on the Malian government and on the UN and French presence,"" Bruce Whitehouse, a Mali expert and associate professor at Lehigh University, told AP. ""They want to show they are not just contained within the north and that they're not afraid to confront their primary enemies where they're strongest.""",REAL
+7111,Comment on Morning Joe Destroys Corrupt Clinton Foundation (Laughable) “Total Corruption” by Debbie Menon,"Abby Martin Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Morning Joe Destroys Corrupt Clinton Foundation (Laughable) “Total Corruption” By VNN on October 28, 2016 'Pay for Play' and 'Quid Pro Quo' 'Shut Down The Foundation' 
+Inside the Clinton’s Foundation and Personal Gains They are bragging that they can shake down foundation clients, for Bill Clinton money… This is sleazy… Joe Scarborough. 
+Follow the money.",FAKE
+9812,"As of 6:00 AM NOVEMBER 6th, Trump is leading in major national polls","Nina November 6, 2016 @ 2:39 pm 
+Polish government and common people (except liberal and leftist opposition which lost everything in last year election) pray for Trump to be the president of USA. Dubi November 6, 2016 @ 2:25 pm 
+With bitches like this hillary fan America is lost if she wins. She is lucky I wasn’t that cop who has the patience of Job, because I don’t! GO TRUMP! ! ! 
+WATCH: Video of Obnoxious Trump-Hater Getting Justice Explodes…6 MILLION Views This obnoxious Donald J. Trump hater has gone viral in a major way, and it’s not good. Here’s what happened to this anti-Trumper on video that has netted her six million views… This is AWESOME! Read more…",FAKE
+134,Rudy Giuliani's fall from America's Mayor,"But by amplifying his charge that President Barack Obama doesn't love America, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani appears ready to risk sullying the powerful mythology that grew around his leadership when he steadied and steeled the nation in the terrible, confusing time after 9/11.
+
+Since those fleeting days when he was a unifying figure, Giuliani has more often dealt in waspish rhetoric and savage mockery -- especially of a president he says has ""failed.""
+
+""America's Mayor"" has gone rogue, lashing out at Democrats and liberal orthodoxy on the war on terror and saying, for example, during the Ferguson controversy last year that the biggest danger to a black child was not from a white police officer but from another African American.
+
+The latest firestorm over Obama's patriotism may complete Giuliani's political journey from the center left of the Republican Party to the conservative jungles where Sarah Palin and Donald Trump roam.
+
+""Rudy has devolved into this red meat Republican base ideologue who periodically seems to need self identification,"" said Douglas Muzzio, a political scientist at Baruch College and a New York City media commentator. ""Maybe it is Rudy in his dotage, where he has lost whatever boundaries he once had. He sounds like a bitter old man.""
+
+Giuliani seems to be relishing his moment back in the spotlight.
+
+But he's also causing awkward moments for Republican candidates limbering up for a crack at the presidency in 2016 -- a fact the White House was quick to exploit on Friday.
+
+""It's sad to see when somebody who has attained a certain level of public stature, and even admiration, tarnishes that legacy so thoroughly,"" said Obama's spokesman, Josh Earnest. ""And the truth is, I don't take any joy, or vindication, or satisfaction from that. I think, really, the only thing that I feel is I feel sorry for Rudy Giuliani today.""
+
+Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz also joined in, seeking to use Giuliani to frustrate the GOP's effort to short circuit controversies which could tarnish the party's image.
+
+""Now is the time for its leaders to stop this kind of nonsense. Enough,"" she said.
+
+Giuliani's blast, delivered in a closed door Republican dinner, and repeated in a media tour, centers on a claim that Obama was not brought up to ""love"" his country like most Americans.
+
+It's a familiar charge from the conservative fringe, that Obama is somehow different and doesn't view America as an exceptional paragon but is obsessed with apologizing for its failings.
+
+""I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe the president loves America,"" Giuliani was quoted as saying by Politico.
+
+Asked by Fox News host Megyn Kelly Thursday whether he wanted to apologize, Giuliani replied: ""Not at all. I want to repeat it.""
+
+""I don't feel this love of America,"" Giuliani said. ""I believe his initial approach is to criticize the United States.""
+
+Giuliani dug in further in an interview with the New York Times, rejecting the idea that his remarks were born of racism.
+
+""I thought that was a joke, since (Obama) was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, "" said Giuliani. ""This isn't racism. This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism,"" said Giuliani.
+
+Far from being chastened, Giuliani, who wore a conspiratorial grin on Fox News, seems gleeful in the firestorm. His behavior might be explained by a boxing maxim he was taught as a boy, which may also shed light on his calmness on 9/11.
+
+""My father taught me ... when you get hit in the face for the first time, you're going to panic,"" Giuliani said in an interview with Forbes magazine in 2011. ""Instead of panicking, just accept it. Stay calm. And any time anybody hits you, they always leave themselves open to be hit.""
+
+Giuliani's actions may be both a glimpse at his political philosophy and reflect a decision to wade into the political echo chamber to solidify his standing among a certain group of conservatives.
+
+""He understands political posturing, he understands the effectiveness of rhetoric,"" said Errol Louis, a CNN political commentator from New York. ""He clearly wants to play a role on the national stage. I guess he has chosen the role of bulldog -- go after the president, attack him, make wild accusations.""
+
+With a failed presidential campaign behind him, and having been out of office for a decade-and-a-half, it may be that Giuliani sees his future on the conservative talk circuit.
+
+""To the extent that Giuliani will be involved in the game moving forward, it will be as a commentator or an analyst,"" said Costas Panagopoulos, a campaigns expert at Fordham University, New York. ""In order to do that successfully these days, it helps to be controversial, sometimes inflammatory. I am not surprised that he has become increasingly forceful in his comments in the media. He is convinced that will help him.""
+
+Giuliani has rarely been known to back down. He was a Yankee fan growing up in Brooklyn, a ruthless prosecutor who took on unions and the Mob and a hard driving Republican who ran a liberal city.
+
+When he awoke on September 11, 2001, Giuliani was a polarizing figure with a large ego and a sharp tongue. He might have purged New York street crime but was starting to grate on the city's nerves at the end of his second term.
+
+Within hours, with a staggering display of calm, purpose and leadership, he had recast himself as a modern-era Winston Churchill, steadying and inspiring his people in their darkest hour. His heroics were such that he became one of those politicians who become known by a single name.
+
+Marching up Broadway, he grabbed a mike and told people to evacuate southern Manhattan. He conjured up national resolve and resistance, as a country waited hours to see its president, out of sight on Air Force One.
+
+""People tonight should say a prayer, for the people that we have lost, and be grateful that we are all here,"" he said in a late night press conference 12 hours after the Twin Towers came crashing down in a toxic cloud of fire and ash. ""Tomorrow New York is going to be here and we are going to rebuild and we are going to be stronger from before.""
+
+Making Giuliani its Man of the Year, Time Magazine said: ""When the day of infamy came, Giuliani seized it as if he had been waiting for it all his life.""
+
+But he struggled to meet huge expectations. His 2008 presidential campaign was a bust, plagued by poor organization and his liberal views on social issues that conflicted with the conservative base.
+
+But there was also a sense that he was playing the September 11 card too much: Joe Biden's crack that there were ""only three things he mentions in a sentence, a noun a verb and 9/11"" was funny because it bore more than a ring of truth.
+
+That was years ago now. But while his years of elective office are behind him, Giuliani still seems to pine for the political spotlight. So he has every incentive to keep this row going as long as he can.",REAL
+2901,Even Fox News is outraged at Boehner and Netanyahu's plan to undermine Obama,"Fox News is not exactly known as an ally of the Obama administration, especially when it comes to disputes between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, or disputes between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
+
+Yet two prominent Fox News hosts, Chris Wallace and Shepherd Smith, harshly criticized Boehner and Netanyahu on Friday for secretly arranging a Netanyahu speech to Congress that is transparently aimed at undermining President Obama, and set up without the White House's knowledge.
+
+The White House, State Department, and many foreign policy observers, including prominent former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, expressed outrage over the move. And, in a sign of just how many lines Boehner and Netanyahu crossed, so did the two Fox News hosts.
+
+""I agree 100 percent,"" Wallace said when Smith read a quote from Indyk criticizing the Boehner-Netanyahu maneuver. Wallace went on:
+
+And to make you get a sense of really how, forgive me, wicked, this whole thing is, the Secretary of State John Kerry met with the Israeli Ambassador to the United States for two hours on Tuesday, Ron Dermer. The ambassador, never mentioned the fact that Netanyahu was in negotiations and finally agreed to come to Washington, not to see the president, but to go to Capitol Hill, speak to a joint session of congress and criticize the president's policy. I have to say I'm shocked.
+
+Smith said, ""it seems like [Netanyahu's government] think[s] we don't pay attention and that we're just a bunch of complete morons, the United States citizens, as if we wouldn't pick up on what's happening here.""
+
+Wallace pointed out that Netanyahu might face political backlash in Israel over this ""very risky political strategy,"" which could damage Israel's relationship with the United States.
+
+Here is the backstory: On Wednesday, Boehner announced that he had invited Netanyahu to come speak to a joint session of Congress in late February (later pushed to early March) on Obama's nuclear negotiations with Iran, which both Boehner and Netanyahu oppose, and which Republicans are seeking to blow up by forcing new, deal-killing sanctions on Iran. What made this such a remarkable breach is that Boehner had reached over Obama to make the invitation, which he and Netanyahu kept secret from the White House. That is a major breach in US foreign policy, which is supposed to be unified; things like official visits by heads of state almost always go through the White House.
+
+Perhaps worse, Republicans are letting a foreign leader use the floor of Congress to bash the American president, thus not just allowing but helping a foreign country meddle in American foreign policy. (This is not the first time either. Republicans invited Netanyahu to speak to Congress in 2011, an opportunity he also used to lambast Obama.)
+
+For his part, Netanyahu is once again attempting to undermine the American president who is by far his most important ally, and is using Congress as a campaign stop on his own bid for reelection in Israel's March elections.
+
+""Bibi and dermer might have finally gone too far""
+
+While backlash was anticipatable, Netanyahu likely did not imagine it extending to Fox News.
+
+""After watching this I think Bibi [Netanyahu] and [Israeli ambassador to the US Ron] Dermer might have finally gone too far,"" Lisa Goldman, the director of the Israel-Palestine Initiative at the New America Foundation, wrote on Facebook of the Fox News segment. ""They miscalculated the American Zeitgeist and didn't realize that when a foreign power, even a favorite ally, shows a lack of respect for US institutions, a red line has been crossed.""
+
+To Goldman's point, both Smith and Wallace, in expressing outrage at Netanyahu, pointed out that the Israeli leader had defied President George W. Bush's demand that Israel cease settlement growth in the West Bank, and had resisted Bush's efforts at an Israel-Palestine peace deal. The issue, for them, was not principally one of partisan politics, but of this ostensible ally repeatedly mistreating the United States and its president, regardless of political party.
+
+If the Netanyahu government and Ron Dermer's embassy are watching this, and they certainly should be, they should be alarmed that even this crucially important element of their American support base is beginning to see the Netanyahu government as less of an ally.",REAL
+1103,Why Team Clinton's not sweating Trump,"Joel Benenson is a world-class worrier, but he isn’t especially worried about Donald Trump in the fall.
+
+Trump isn’t freaking out just Republicans these days: Democrats, panicked by the Manhattan mogul’s seemingly unstoppable rise in the primaries, see him as an ocher ogre capable of undoing President Barack Obama’s legacy and undermining the civility supporting American democracy.
+
+Trump-phobia has infected many people in Hillary Clinton’s extended orbit — especially her notoriously jelly-kneed donors — and they are dutifully fretting over Trump’s dark-alley debate style, his promise to napalm the Clintons with personal attacks and, above all, his magical-realism appeal to angry Rust Belt whites.
+
+Benenson, the Clinton campaign’s bearded principal pollster and chief strategist, can’t even bring himself to pay lip service to Trump, whom he sees as a one-man Democratic turnout machine and a turn-off switch to moderates in both parties. His analysis of the 2016 landscape leads him to the conclusion that Trump has virtually no path to the presidency (he won’t say the same thing about Bernie Sanders) and presents Clinton with renewed opportunities in purple states — especially North Carolina and Arizona.
+
+Indeed, when I interviewed him for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast on Friday, the usually easygoing Benenson was in a tense and testy mood, bracing for an uncertain battle against Sanders on Tuesday — lashing the Vermont senator for impugning Clinton’s character. But when I mentioned Trump — specifically the developer’s claim he could swipe New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and the lot from the Democrats — his Charlie Brown cloud lifted instantly.
+
+“It’s not real,” a grinning Benenson said of Trump’s repeated claim he can defeat Clinton (or Sanders) by wrestling away swing-state voters.
+
+“I don’t see any state that Democrats have won five out of six times, or six out of six times, that Trump, you know, at face value, poses a threat in. I just don’t see it,” said Benenson, who was the top pollster in Obama’s two successful presidential campaigns.
+
+“What’s the evidence of it? The evidence of it, they’ve turned out a lot of people. I think he’s broken 50 percent in only one state, right? … If you look at the states that Democrats have won … in five out of the last six [presidential contests], it adds up to 257 electoral votes. It means you only need 13 more to get to 270, if we perform that way.”
+
+Other Obama alumni — including 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe — are basically on the same page, although they think Trump’s unpredictability (coupled with Clinton’s innate caution as a candidate) could cause unexpected problems. Benenson said he hasn’t polled extensively on Trump yet, but he thinks Trump has so antagonized minority voters — and turned off moderate whites with his harsh rhetoric and chaotic rallies — that Clinton might exceed Obama’s 2012 total of 332 Electoral College votes.
+
+North Carolina, which Obama won narrowly in ’08 and lost by 2 percentage points four years later, would likely be target No. 1 in a Clinton-Trump showdown. “That’s going to be a very problematic state for Republicans,” he said. “Now, we played there in 2012, but not a lot. The president didn’t go into the state. We let Romney outspend us 5-to-1.”
+
+It would be nice to have the luxury of focusing exclusively on Trump (or, better still, concocting a game plan against Ted Cruz, the Clinton camp’s preferred opponent). But there’s the small matter of clearing aside Sanders, who has a front-runner’s online fundraising operation and a terrier-with-teeth-in-your-leg competitive tenacity that could keep him in the fight until the convention.
+
+A couple of weeks ago, Clinton’s team was very confident she was close to wrapping up the nomination. But when I asked Benenson to look ahead to Tuesday’s big five-state contest, he hit the basic talking points: She was ahead by 215 pledged delegates, a bigger lead in that category than Obama ever enjoyed in ’08. And he demurred when I asked whether Clinton would emerge with a “substantial” net delegate gain for the night. “Substantial?” he said. “There are a lot of delegates. Like I said, if there are 867 out there — I don’t know how we’ll be measuring substantial by the end of the night, and I can’t forecast it, because some of these states are closer than others.”
+
+Like everybody else, Benenson was a bit blindsided by Sanders’ stunning win in Michigan last week (Brooklyn’s data team predicted a 5-point Clinton win; public pollsters had Sanders losing by three or four times that margin). Moreover, it’s no secret that he has struggled (along with the candidate herself) to sharpen Clinton’s sprawling competence-and-policy-mastery platform into a compact, inspirational, bumper-sticker message to compete with Sanders’ anti-Wall Street crusade. Reports of friction between him and the Clintons have been overstated, he told me.
+
+“You know, she’s been on the road more, and I’m here more in New York and Brooklyn,” said Benenson, the highest-ranking member of Clinton’s team who hadn’t worked with her on previous campaigns. “But I think we’ve gotten to know each other more. We talk very frankly. She knows I speak my mind; I’m somebody who does, and I think that works for her. … I like it when we’re doing debate prep and there’s a lot of back-and-forth, and you’re hearing her talk. She’s often the one who comes up with the best things because they come from what she’s believed for a long time, and I think it’s a pretty powerful place to be. I think this is a woman who knows who she is, knows why she’s doing this.”
+
+Benenson is protective of Clinton and has, not surprisingly, cultivated a not-inconsiderable disdain for Sanders and his sharp-elbowed team. “He’s been in the free media, been leveling very — and the whole campaign has been leveling very explicit attacks on Secretary Clinton. He’s tried to impugn her character,” he said, his voice rising to a near shout. “He does it all the time. He does it, you know, in a way that has given him enough wiggle room to say, ‘No, no, I’m not being negative,’ but of course he is. His whole campaign.”
+
+Sanders’ criticisms of Benenson’s former boss, Obama, are especially galling. Walk into the pollster’s 33rd-floor office in midtown Manhattan and you’ll find a minimuseum full of first-rate ’08 ephemera: The conference room is festooned with “Obama Wins” newspaper headlines, and a cardboard cutout of the 44th president stares back at you benevolently as you sit on the waiting room couch.
+
+“The things he says about Barack Obama. … It actually pisses me off … because it’s disingenuous,” Benenson said, flashing real anger. “Don’t stand on a stage in front of television cameras, with millions of people when you’re running in a Democratic primary, and say he’s a friend of yours and you work with him.”
+
+“You know, I’d like to remind everybody what he said when Barack Obama was under attack by Republicans running for reelection in 2012, when he called [Obama] weak, a disappointment to millions of people, and said he didn’t have the backbone to stand up to Republicans,” he said, suggesting Sanders is more comfortable slamming his allies than the common enemy. “I haven’t heard him say a word about George Bush. Have you even heard him mention George Bush’s name on the campaign trail?”
+
+The contempt, in many ways, is born of familiarity. Benenson, like Sanders, is an overachieving outer-borough working-class Jew who was drawn to progressive political causes early in life. Both had peripatetic young adulthoods that didn’t portend powerful futures on the national stage. Sanders college-hopped, abandoning his native Brooklyn for bucolic Vermont, where he earned a living as a carpenter, writer, filmmaker and freelance gadfly before winning the Burlington mayor’s race as a socialist.
+
+Benenson, who looks a decade younger than his 63 years, took an even more circuitous path. He dropped out of Queens College, just short of graduation, to work in avant-garde theater. Then, to pay his rent, he accepted an uncle’s offer to help run a beer distributorship in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. And that’s where he spent the night of the 1977 New York City blackout — staked out at the front door, a shotgun borrowed from his girlfriend’s brother loaded on his lap. Then he wanted to become a Yankees beat reporter, which eventually led to a successful career as a political scribe for the New York Daily News. He is a rarity in the media-suspicious world of the Clintons: Many of his oldest friends are reporters — Adam Nagourney of the Times, Roger Simon of POLITICO, Serge Kovaleski (the Timesman whose disability Trump mocked at a rally) and Obama message man David Axelrod, who made his name at the Chicago Tribune.
+
+Like Sanders, who was arrested for participating in a civil rights demonstration as a student in 1960s Chicago, Benenson had his own brush with protest and the police. In 1970, a day after the Kent State shootings, a 17-year-old Benenson was (in his words) “detained” after joining a group of anti-Vietnam War protesters who blocked the heavily trafficked Long Island Expressway.
+
+But their paths diverged in ways that say much about the character of each man and of each campaign. While Sanders spent most of his teens and 20s as an activist for socialist and student organizations, Benenson was attracted to mainstream Democratic politics. His hero was Bobby Kennedy, and he casts the New York senator’s 1968 campaign as the hybrid of idealism and pragmatism currently embodied by his 2016 boss.
+
+In our interview, Benenson started to talk about Kennedy matter of factly, but he broke down as he described watching TV coverage of Martin Luther King’s assassination in his mother’s Laurelton living room. He remembers the image of Kennedy, jumping on top of a parked car to address a seething African-American crowd in Indianapolis. “What we need in the United States is not division,” Kennedy said. “What we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.”",REAL
+169,Ryan and McConnell confront their first big test,Parker covered the Trump campaign and transition for the Times.,REAL
+358,Dozens of intelligence analysts reportedly claim assessments of ISIS were altered,"Dozens of intelligence analysts working at the U.S. military's Central Command (CENTCOM) have complained that their reports on ISIS and the Nusra Front in Syria were inappropriately altered by senior officials, according to a published report.
+
+The Daily Beast reported late Wednesday that more than 50 analysts had supported a complaint to the Pentagon that the reports had been changed to make the terror groups seem weaker than the analysts believe they really are. Fox News confirmed last month that the Defense Department's inspector general was investigating the initial complaint, which the New York Times reported was made by a civilian employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
+
+At a panel discussion Thursday moderated by Fox News' Catherine Herridge, DIA Director Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart also confirmed the probe and said the DIA will let the investigation play out. He said the DIA ""delivers the truth wherever the debate takes us.""
+
+The Pentagon acknowledged the IG investigation as well.
+
+""I think ... the best thing for us to do is wait"" for the IG investigation, spokesman Peter Cook said. He said Defense Secretary Ash Carter expects ""candid assessments"" from the intelligence teams.
+
+""Unvarnished, transparent intelligence is what this secretary expects on a daily basis,"" he added.
+
+The assessments in question are prepared for several U.S. policymakers, including President Obama.
+
+The Daily Beast report, which cited 11 individuals, claimed that the complaint being investigated by the Defense Department was made in July. However, several analysts reportedly complained as early as this past October that their reports were being altered to suit a political narrative that ISIS was being weakened by U.S.-led airstrikes in Syria.
+
+""The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,"" the report quotes one defense official as saying.
+
+According to the report, some analysts allege that reports deemed overly negative in their assessment of the Syria campaign were either blocked from reaching policymakers or sent back down the chain of command. Others claim that key elements of intelligence reports were removed, fundamentally altering their conclusions. Another claim is that senior leaders at CENTCOM created a work environment where giving a candid opinion on the progress of the anti-ISIS campaign was discouraged, with one analyst describing the tenor as ""Stalinist.""
+
+The report alleges that when the analysts' complaints were initially aired, some of those who complained were urged to retire, and did so. Facing either resistance or indifference, other analysts self-censored their reports, the Daily Beast claims.
+
+The defense official quoted by the Daily Beast said that some who spoke up did so out of guilt that they did not express doubts about former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's alleged chemical weapons program in the run-up to the Iraq. War.
+
+""They were frustrated because they didn’t do the right thing then,"" the official said.
+
+The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have been advised of the complaint that prompted the inspector general's investigation, which is required if Pentagon officials find the claims credible.
+
+Government rules state that intelligence assessments ""must not be distorted"" by agendas or policy views, but do allow for legitimate differences of opinion.
+
+Central Command spokesman Col. Patrick S. Ryder said in a statement Wednesday that they welcome the IG's ""independent oversight.""
+
+""While we cannot comment on ongoing investigations, we can speak to the process and about the valued contributions of the Intelligence Community (IC),"" he said, adding that intelligence community members typically are able to comment on draft security assessments. ""However,"" he said, ""it is ultimately up to the primary agency or organization whether or not they incorporate any recommended changes or additions. Further, the multi-source nature of our assessment process purposely guards against any single report or opinion unduly influencing leaders and decision-makers.""
+
+Earlier this summer, on the eve of the anniversary of the launching of airstrikes against Iraq, the Associated Press reported that U.S intelligence had concluded that the airstrikes had helped stall ISIS after sweeping gains in the summer of 2014. However, the report also said the terror group remained a well-funded army that could easily replenish its numbers as quickly as fighters were eliminated.
+
+Click for more from The Daily Beast.",REAL
+9943,Has Economics Failed?,"Email 
+It is especially painful for me, as an economist, to see that two small cities in northern California — San Mateo and Burlingame — have rent control proposals on the ballot this election year. 
+There are various other campaigns, in other places around the country, for and against minimum wage laws, which likewise make me wonder if the economics profession has failed to educate the public in the most elementary economic lessons. 
+Neither rent control nor minimum wage laws — nor price control laws in general — are new. Price control laws go back as far as ancient Egypt and Babylon, and they have been imposed at one time or other on every inhabited continent. 
+History alone should be able to tell us what the actual consequences of such laws have been, since they have been around for thousands of years. Anyone who has taken a course in Economics 1 should understand why those consequences have been so different from what their advocates expected. It is not rocket science. 
+Nevertheless, advocates of a rent control law are saying things like ""this will prevent some landlords from gouging tenants and making a ton of money off the housing crisis."" 
+The reason there is a housing crisis in the first place is that existing laws in much of California prevent enough housing from being built to supply the apartments and homes that people want. If landlords were all sweethearts, and never raised rents, that would still not get one new building built. 
+Rising rents are a symptom of the problem. The actual cause of the problem is a refusal of many California officials to allow enough housing to be built for all the people who want to rent an apartment. 
+Supply and demand is one of the first things taught in introductory economics textbooks. Why it should be a mystery to people living in an upscale community — people who have probably graduated from an expensive college — is the real puzzle. Supply and demand is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge. 
+A century ago, virtually any economist could have explained why preventing housing from being built would lead to higher rents, and why rent control would further widen the gap between the amount of housing supplied and the amount demanded. Not to mention such other consequences as a faster deterioration of existing housing, since upkeep gets neglected when there is a housing shortage. 
+Today's economists have advanced to far more complicated problems. It is as if we had the world's greatest mathematicians but most college graduates couldn't do arithmetic. 
+Part of the problem is that even our most prestigious colleges seldom have any real curriculum requirements that would ensure that their graduates had at least a basic understanding of economics, history, mathematics, science or other fundamental subjects. 
+Many students and their parents spend great amounts of money, and go into debt, for an education that too often leaves them illiterate in economics and ignorant of many other subjects. 
+Part of the problem is that many college graduates do not take a single course in economics. Another part of the problem is that many economics departments leave the teaching of introductory economics in the hands of some junior or transient faculty member, or even graduate students who get stuck with the job. 
+One of the things that made me proud of the economics department at UCLA when I taught there, decades ago, was that teaching the introductory economics course was the job of a full professor, even if not the same professor every year. 
+In all too many subjects today, the introductory course is taught by junior faculty, transient faculty or graduate students, while the full professors teach only upper level courses or postgraduate courses. 
+That may save a department the expense of staffing the introductory course with their more highly paid members. But, it is extravagantly expensive from the standpoint of society as a whole, when it means sending graduates out into the world unable to see through the wasteful economic hokum spread by politicians. 
+That is how you get ill-informed voters who support price controls of many kinds, without understanding that prices convey economic realities that do not change just because the government changes the prices. It is as if someone's fever was treated by putting the thermometer in cold water to bring the temperature reading down. You don't get more housing with rent control. 
+
+Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com . 
+COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
+Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
+No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language. 
+No product advertisements. 
+Please post comments in English. 
+Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
+6981,Obamacare Architect Gruber Demands “Larger Mandate Penalty”,"  Paul Joseph Watson Bureaucrat who said “stupidity” of Americans helped get law passed doubles down 
+Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber – the bureaucrat who once bragged that the “stupidity” of the American people was crucial for passing the health care law in the first place – told CNN that the “fix” for Obamacare was to impose a “larger mandate penalty”. CNN’s CAROL COSTELLO: “So let’s talk about how exactly you can fix Obamacare. I just need you to be specific because I think people really want answers. So Hillary Clinton says she can fix Obamacare. So what would one fix that would drive premiums down?” JONATHAN GRUBER: “Look, once again, there’s no sense it has to be fixed. The law is working as designed. However, it could work better. And I think, probably the most important things experts would agree on is we need a larger mandate penalty“… Gruber’s arrogance is incredible. Even after the Obama administration acknowledged that premiums are set to skyrocket next year, Gruber thinks that the answer is to financially punish Americans to an even greater degree. Gruber is essentially admitting that Obamacare is designed to make Americans destitute. “ObamaCare was never designed *not* to overwhelm you with the shifting of massive costs. ObamaCare was designed to crush you in costs,” points out the Conservative Treehouse blog . His comments shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given what Gruber thinks of the American people. A series of videos that emerged in 2014 featured Gruber admitting that Obamacare was deceptively crafted in order to fool “stupid” Americans into not realizing that it would mean massive price hikes and that the law’s “lack of transparency (was) a huge political advantage” in selling it.",FAKE
+10193,“Donald Trump And The Rise Of White Identity In Politics”, ,FAKE
+8823,"ALERT – New Bill Clinton Mistress Confirmed, Hillary Camp Panics…","ALERT – New Bill Clinton Mistress Confirmed, Hillary Camp Panics… Oct 28, 2016 Previous post The identity of one of Bill Clinton’s long-time mistresses was just revealed. The former president’s Secret Service detail nicknamed the mistress “Energizer” because of the way Bill always “perked up” and seemed revitalized after her visits. Julie McMahon has been outed by the press as Bill Clinton’s “Energizer,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Energizer Bunny. This mother of three and socialite has publicly denied being one of Clinton’s lovers, but a plethora of purported evidence is now unfolding online in an effort to refute McMahon’s claims of innocence, as per Bizpac Review . McMahon reportedly lives just a few minutes away from Bill and Hillary Clinton’s home in New York, which is called Whitehaven. If the Clintons were Republicans, the liberal mainstream media would be calling them racists over the chosen name of their luxurious estate. Always, Julia McMahon would arrive at Whitehaven via SUV. She would only stay a few hours sometimes, but other times she would spend an entire week at the Clinton residence. Julia McMahon reportedly met both Bill and Hillary in 1998 when he was president. Although the Clinton campaign has tried to label McMahon a friend to both of the Clintons, she only visited or spent the night at the house when Hillary wasn’t home, the Daily Mail reports. Sometimes, McMahon allegedly arrived just mere minutes after the departure of the former first lady. The Secret Service agents on the Clinton Whitehaven detail were reportedly not ever privy to the woman’s name, but they were allegedly under strict orders not to approach or stop her when she arrived. Every member of a president’s family is protected by a Secret Service detail. The Secret Service reportedly uses the same letter to assign a codename to protectees. Bill Clinton’s Secret Service name is reportedly “Eagle” and Hillary’s is “Evergreen.” The Secret Service may have run out of “E” codenames over the years thanks to all of Bill’s lady friends. Author Ron Kessler revealed the name of the Energizer mistress in his new book, The First Family Detail: Secret",FAKE
+9146,BREAKING: We Caught Obama Spending 30 Million Dollars Against Trump To Rig This Election,"It’s no secret that Obama and his puppets are doing everything they possibly can to rig the election against Trump. Positive Trump polls are coming all the time, so it’s all hands on deck from the Democrats to do whatever it takes to hand the election to Hillary.
+Obama’s latest move involves registering immigrant voters who will most likely be voting for Hillary in November and he’s spent TONS of your taxpayer money doing it.
+From Judicial Watch :
+Months after the Obama administration spent $19 million to register new immigrant voters that will likely support Democrats in November, it’s dedicating an additional $10 million in a final push as the presidential election approaches. The money is distributed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Homeland Security agency that oversees lawful immigration, to organizations that help enhance pathways to naturalization by offering immigrants free citizenship instruction, English, U.S. history and civics courses. Officially, they’re known as “citizenship integration grants.”[…]
+Judicial Watch went on to say… The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been aggressive in promoting its citizen integration grant program this year, offering large sums to recruit new groups that can offer immigrants the services they need to become citizens. Clearly, the ultimate goal is qualifying as many immigrants as possible to vote since they tend to cast ballots for Democrats. “We intend to award about $1 million to first-time recipients in the Citizenship and Integration Grant Program for fiscal year 2016,” the agency’s grant announcement states. “If you represent one of these organizations, or know of an interested organization, we strongly encourage that organization to consider applying. Additionally, another $9 million will fund programs that provide both citizenship instruction and instruction and naturalization application services.” Some might consider this a cash giveaway.[…]
+Practically every federal agency is participating in the effort by contributing resources and creating programs to help immigrants. For example the Department of Labor (DOL) is implementing “new workforce programs” for the “new Americans” and the Department of Education is promoting “funding opportunities” to assure that the immigrants “are provided the tools they need to succeed.” The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is collaborating with other agencies to release a career and credentialing toolkit on “immigrant-focused career-pathways programs.” The Department of Justice (DOJ) and USCIS are making sure the new Americans have worker rights and protections and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is launching a two-year pilot to assure that non English speakers have “meaningful access to housing programs” subsidized by American taxpayers.
+Obama likes to pretend that he’s doing this for the greater good of America, but the truth is it’s just part of the overall agenda to do whatever it takes to make sure Democrats run Washington and continue to drive our country into the ground.
+Source: End the Fed 
+More from Breitbart… Schweizer: Obama’s DOJ ‘Transferring Money to Left-wing Groups’ ‘to Influence This Election’ By John Hayward
+On Wednesday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM , Clinton Cash author and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer discussed the latest GAI report about the Obama Justice Department’s funneling of money to left-wing groups using fines levied against financial institutions. Breitbart Editor-in-Chief and SiriusXM host Alex Marlow described the report as exposing the Justice Department of “quite literally extorting companies to fund left-wing activists.”
+“When I first joined Breitbart,” Schweizer recalled, “There was a scandal called Pigford where the federal government was basically taking taxpayer money and giving it to people who were claiming to be victims who were not victims and giving them billions of dollars. This is in that tradition.”
+He explained:
+What’s really happening here is simple. You’ve got large financial institutions on Wall Street, you’ve got banks like Bank of America, who have in some cases committed financial crimes. I think some of them are real, some of them may not be, but set that aside for a minute. The Department of Justice has gone after them and basically said, ‘You committed these offenses, you’ve got to pay restitution in the form of billions of dollars.’ Okay, they committed the crime, they ought to pay that.
+Now, ostensibly that money, those billions of dollars, are supposed to go to the victims of their financial crimes. If your Wall Street broker committed fraud, you’re supposed to be made whole with this money, and the rest of it is supposed to go to taxpayers.
+The problem is the Obama Justice Department has been diverting literally more than $650 million to left-wing groups. They do it under the guise of, “Well, you know, if this bank discriminated against lenders racially, we’re going to give this money to these left-wing quote-unquote housing groups to help deal with the problem.”
+But that’s not what’s going on. These housing groups are advocacy groups. They’re left-wing organizations. They are registering voters and getting voters out to the voting booth. And they specifically target what they call quote-unquote progressive voters.
+So this is taking the Department of Justice, which we’ve experienced so much in recent years has been politicized by this Administration, even further to where now the Department of Justice is transferring money to left-wing groups — in an effort, frankly I think, to influence this election.
+Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
+LISTEN: 
+
+Source: Breitbart 
+",FAKE
+1349,Think the Iowa polls were bad? Wait until New Hampshire,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+1565,Why Ted Cruz Could Have A Real Shot At The GOP Nomination,"Why Ted Cruz Could Have A Real Shot At The GOP Nomination
+
+Perhaps the clearest sign that Ted Cruz is seriously challenging Donald Trump's dominance in the Republican primary race is that Trump has started attacking him.
+
+Up until recently, the two have been operating in a state of detente, if not outright kinship. Through all the controversial statements Trump has made in this campaign, including his call last week to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., Cruz has steadfastly avoided saying anything critical of Trump, instead criticizing reporters for asking him to pass judgment on Trump's positions.
+
+In an interview with NPR last week, Cruz was asked about the proposed Muslim ban and simply said, ""I disagree with Donald on that.""
+
+But behind closed doors, Cruz was recorded saying last week that voters are asking themselves, ""Who am I comfortable having their finger on the button?"" In audio obtained by the New York Times, he added that, ""It's also a question of judgment"" — ""a challenging question"" for Trump, Cruz said. (He also lumped in retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who has sunk in polls after making serious missteps in statements about foreign policy.)
+
+After that audio was released, Trump called out Cruz on Twitter.
+
+A short time later, Cruz denied in a tweet that he had any issue with Trump.
+
+But the dam appears to have broken. Since then, Trump has called Cruz a ""maniac,"" and at an event in South Carolina over the weekend he tried to undermine Cruz's base of support among evangelical Christian conservatives based on the fact that Cruz is the son of a Cuban immigrant.
+
+""I do like Ted Cruz, but not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba, in all fairness,"" Trump said. (In reality, a poll conducted this year showed that 5 percent of Cuban residents are evangelical.)
+
+That was a targeted attack, since Trump has plenty of reason to worry about Cruz's position in Iowa, with its large base of evangelical voters. A Des Moines Register-Bloomberg poll released Sunday, conducted by venerable Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer, showed Cruz opening up a 10-point lead over Trump in that state, with 45 percent of evangelicals backing Cruz.
+
+Cruz also received the most coveted endorsement from an evangelical leader in the state last week.
+
+There was good news for Cruz nationally over the weekend, as the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll showed him jumping into second place behind Trump, 27 percent to 22 percent.
+
+But does Cruz have a path to the nomination? The short answer is: Yes.
+
+For casual observers of politics, Cruz might fit the mold of past candidates like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee — hard-core conservatives, popular with the religious base of the GOP, who won Iowa but just couldn't pull together enough support to overcome establishment candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney.
+
+But Cruz has some key fundamentals on his side. For one thing, he dominates the evangelical wing of the GOP, and has strong support among Tea Party backers. He's been able to raise money and build a campaign organization more effectively than Huckabee or Santorum.
+
+The latest fundraising reports released in October showed Cruz with more cash in the bank than any other GOP candidate, with $13.8 million. Neither Santorum in the 2012 cycle nor Huckabee in the 2008 cycle reported more than $2 million cash on hand at any point in the campaign.
+
+In states like Iowa and South Carolina, Cruz has held a massive event with thousands of supporters in attendance called the ""Rally for Religious Liberty."" It's a potent theme this year since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. It's also something Cruz has played up in his day job, leading the charge on Capitol Hill to pull federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
+
+Part of the explanation of why Cruz is so well-poised is also the anti-establishment moment we are in. Cruz is very unpopular among his colleagues in Washington. In a typical election, that could make it hard to raise money and solidify a campaign. But in a GOP primary race where Washington is as good an enemy as Hillary Clinton herself, Cruz is making the most of it.
+
+One of the consistent jokes in his stump speech goes like this: ""I spent most of last week in Washington, D.C., so it is great to be back in America.""
+
+Another thing Cruz has going for him is the primary calendar, where you can see his path shaping up.
+
+First up is Iowa on Feb. 1, where he's now leading the pack. If he wins there, he goes into New Hampshire with low stakes. No one expects Cruz to do well in New Hampshire on Feb. 9 — so he can't lose the expectations game there.
+
+Then there's South Carolina on Feb. 20, where the vote is split among evangelical, military and establishment Republicans. Trump is leading there now, but if Cruz comes out of Iowa with a win (and the wind at his back), he could have a real shot in South Carolina, where he held one of those large rallies last month and is locking up the endorsements of pastors. Both will help in turning out evangelical voters in the state.
+
+If Cruz were to win — or even come in a strong second — in Iowa and South Carolina, he would go into Super Tuesday on March 1 with the big mo'(mentum).
+
+It's dominated by Southern states this year, which in the past have been marginalized in the primary calendar even though they have become the deep red heart of the Republican Party. This year, many Southern states banded together to set their primaries on this single day and create a regional superprimary, forcing candidates to spend more time campaigning in the South.
+
+Regardless of how the politics of 2016 were shaping up, that arrangement was likely to give a strong conservative like Ted Cruz an important early boost — and a whole bunch of delegates. That day includes the GOP primary in Texas, Cruz's home state. Texas' 155 delegates are more than 10 percent of the total that a candidate needs to win the Republican nomination, though they will be awarded proportionally as opposed to winner-take-all.
+
+This is all to say Ted Cruz has a path to the nomination that runs through Iowa and South Carolina and could carry through the Southern primaries on Super Tuesday.
+
+Of course, others could easily spoil that. The candidate many in the Republican establishment and Beltway pundits are awaiting to challenge Trump is Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. His campaign is trying to make a big play this week as he barnstorms early voting states, including Nevada, where the GOP candidates will meet for their next debate Tuesday.
+
+Nevada, where Rubio lived for a time as a child and maintains ties with the large Mormon community, is the only early voting state where he looks poised to succeed at this point. Of course, there's his home state of Florida as well — another big prize, with 99 delegates that will be awarded on a winner-take-all basis on March 15. But that's getting awfully late in the primary calendar to spark momentum behind a campaign. For now, Rubio is solidly in the second tier and is looking to make a surge like it appears Cruz is doing now.
+
+But despite what Rubio might do, or what Cruz is doing, you can't pretend Donald Trump isn't still dominating the race. Even if he doesn't retake the lead in Iowa, he's ahead in New Hampshire and South Carolina. He's also been campaigning consistently in the South.
+
+If there was any doubt that Trump had a serious path to the nomination, it was dispelled this week by a report in the Washington Post that several top establishment Republicans, including RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, huddled in Washington to figure out what to do to stop Trump should he get to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next summer with a sizable chunk of delegates.
+
+At this point, it's impossible to say what would prevent that from happening. Except maybe, just maybe, it could be Ted Cruz.",REAL
+881,Voters have given up on trust: Kirsten Powers,"As faith in American institutions falls, voters poised to hand 2016 races to two pillars of dishonesty.
+
+If the primaries Tuesday night go as expected, handing commanding victories to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, we might as well make it official: America's voters have given up on trust.
+
+In February, when Gallup asked voters the first word that came to mind when they thought of Clinton, the top answers were: “dishonest/liar/don’t trust her/poor character.” As many people said Hillary is “criminal/crooked/thief/belongs in jail” as believed she is “capable of being president/qualified.” Still, she is on her way to locking up the Democratic presidential nomination.
+
+This was not an outlier poll. When Quinnipiac asked the same open-ended question last year, the most often cited word in connection with Hillary was “liar,” followed by “dishonest” and “untrustworthy.”  Quinnipiac also found that Trump and Clinton had the worst scores among top candidates on honesty: 61% said Clinton was not honest and trustworthy; 54% said the same about Trump. Only 23% of voters in the Quinnipiac poll said Bernie Sanders was not honest and trustworthy.
+
+In the New York primary — which Clinton won handily — honesty was ranked as the second most important issue among voters; 80% of voters who put honesty first gave their votes to Sanders, and only 20% said the same for Clinton. Voters interested in experience and electability went ever more strongly for Clinton.
+
+Interestingly, in the Quinnipiac poll the first word that came to mind when voters heard “Jeb Bush” was “family” followed by “honest.” We know what happened to him. Similarly, in a March ABC News/Washington Post poll, only 45% of Republican leaners deemed Trump “trustworthy,” but 63% labeled the now-vanquished Marco Rubio as having that quality.
+
+Voters are so cynical about politicians — like most everyone else in power — that a reputation for being trustworthy doesn't translate into victory.
+
+This is a sad state of affairs but not a surprise. Major institutions have been losing the trust of the American people for years. According to Gallup, “2004 was the last year most institutions were at or above their historical average levels of confidence.” Banks, the Supreme Court, religious institutions and the government have seen a consistent decline of trust.
+
+In November 2008, as President-elect Obama was set to take office, Democratic policy gurus Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck wrote a paper, “Change You Can Believe in Needs a Government You Can Trust.” The authors rang alarm bells about the decline of trust in government and the importance of restoring it. They wrote, “Trust shapes the limits of political possibilities. When trust is high, policymakers may reasonably hope to enact and implement federal solutions to our most pressing problems. When trust is low … policymakers face more constraints.”
+
+The hope was Obama could restore trust in government. He didn’t. Instead, we have reached the point where voters no longer seem able to conjure up the image of an honest and qualified politician. They'll just choose the one they think is most qualified and live with the treachery.
+
+If the death of trust in politics is real, don't expect its demise to be any less important this fall in choosing between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Their matching reputations for a flexible approach to the truth will likely cancel each other out. What is more disturbing is that even if one of them were to emerge as clearly more trustworthy, there's not much reason to believe it would alter the dynamics of the race.
+
+And why would it? The only calculation voters seem to be making is what kind of lies they want to be told.
+
+In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.",REAL
+2406,Conservatives fear leaders soft on Obamacare,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+7072,Will Hillary Select Her Own Prosecutors?,"By Bill Sardi November 1, 2016 Journalist Carl Bernstein, who played a key role in uncovering the Watergate scandal in the Nixon era, says Hillary Clinton’s email fiasco is in no way “bigger than Watergate.” [ Politico Oct 29, 2016] But Watergate was a simple break-in at a Democrat electioneering office. Hillary Clinton not only operated her email system outside normal security procedures but did so to hide the fact she was operating her pay-to-play schemes at the State Department and was lining her pockets with millions of dollars in the process. Hillary Clinton literally put the State Department up for sale says a report published in the New York Post. [ New York Post Aug 9, 2016] Even more criminal is that the Democrat Party is attempting to cover up Clinton’s scheme that keeps offering favors to even foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation, making the Democrat Party a complicit to criminal activity (as if that is something new to them). The Justice Department sought to bar the Justice Department (FBI) from proceeding ahead with its investigation of Hillary’s emails, which is the reason why Anthony Weiner’s emails were not scrutinized early on. [ Daily Mail UK Oct 31, 2016] Is America going to elect Hillary Clinton and watch her use her power to appoint an Attorney General and a new FBI chief to get off the hook? Hillary Clinton may still be under investigation after she is elected. [ Daily Mail UK Oct 30, 2016] Hillary Clinton could go to prison for 20 years if charged with obstruction of justice. [ Info Wars Oct 31, 2016] Expect a Presidential pardon if that ever happens. While Hillary Clinton is now playing the role of victim of an “October Surprise” that the FBI chose to run against her, 24 years ago Bill Clinton cheered an 11 th -hour indictment in his bid for reelection. [ Washington Examiner Oct 30-2016] Meanwhile, another email gets uncovered where Hillary Clinton’s top aides were drooling over a Super Pac that planned to work hand-in-hand with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, something that is legally forbidden. As Hillary’s team ponders this development, one of Hillary’s top aides says in her email: “That’s fine. But skirting if not violating the law doesn’t help her INMHO” (slang/acronym: in my humble opinion). [ Zerohedge.com Oct 31, 2016] Hillary Clinton opened her last week of campaigning with a TV advertisement that revisits the 1964 “Daisy” ad that attempts to claim Trump is a reckless leader who can’t be trusted with the “bug red button” that would launch a nuclear war. Clinton has said there is only a 4-minute window to decide to launch a nuclear war. [ Washington Post Oct 31, 2016] The irony is that a vote for Hillary Clinton has been said to be a vote for war. CNN has been caught drumming up a claim that Donald Trump urged his supporters to vote multiple times. [ Mediaite.com Oct 30, 2016] The Best of Bill Sardi Tags: Bill Sardi [ ] is a frequent writer on health and political topics. His health writings can be found at www.naturalhealthlibrarian.com . His latest book is Downsizing Your Body . Copyright © 2016 Bill Sardi Word of Knowledge Agency, San Dimas, California. This article has been written exclusively for www.LewRockwell.com and other parties who wish to refer to it should link rather than post at other URLs.",FAKE
+2858,Stranded in Yemen: Americans left to find own way out,"(CNN) ""My son served in the army for four years. In Iraq. He served because we love our country. As we should. Now look at us?""
+
+Muna Mansour is gesturing around her at the slatted cargo hold she and her family -- all nine of them -- are trying to get comfortable in. They're squeezed in with two other families. On the ground by my feet, Muna's middle grandchild is sleeping, curled up beside an oil drum.
+
+""There's nowhere to sleep, there's no food -- you can see how people are just thrown around all over the place,"" she said.
+
+Muna is from Buffalo in upstate New York. Her family is among the dozens of Americans caught in the crossfire of warring parties in Yemen. And although many other countries evacuated their citizens, India most notably ferrying out around 5,000, the United States has said it is too dangerous for them to directly evacuate American nationals.
+
+For more than three weeks, neighboring Saudi Arabia has been conducting airstrikes in Yemen. They want to drive out the Shiite Houthi rebels, whose opposition to the government grew from protests to a takeover of government buildings and some territory. At one time, the Houthis held Yemen's President under house arrest, before he escaped and fled.
+
+The bombings have decimated some cities, including Aden, and foreigners find themselves trapped.
+
+""I was there when the Indians picked up 200 of their people from the port. It was embarrassing. We were just sitting there waiting for someone to come and say 'OK where are the Americans, let's pick them up,' "" she said.
+
+""I called the Riyadh embassy,"" she adds, referring to the U.S. Embassy in neighboring Saudi Arabia. ""I told them there were about 75 families here waiting at the port. My family has been waiting there for two weeks. We ran out of money, we ran out of food.""
+
+The State Department said it is too risky to conduct an evacuation of citizens from the area.
+
+""We have to make a decision based on the security situation and what is feasible to do,"" State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said earlier this month. ""And given the situation in Yemen is quite dangerous and unpredictable, doing something like sending in military assets even for an evacuation could put U.S. citizen lives at greater risk.""
+
+A group of U.S. organizations, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League, have filed a lawsuit against the State Department and Defense Department over the government's stance on evacuations.
+
+It was purely coincidence that led to Muna being on board this ship, a wooden vessel chartered by CNN to reach the port city of Aden, in Yemen.
+
+Muna was visiting her sick father in Aden when fighting broke out around her. With the Houthi forces to the north and the waters of the Gulf of Aden to the south, the city is essentially besieged. It took us over 30 hours of travel -- and a lull in the fighting -- for us to be able to dock at one of Aden's smaller ports.
+
+She has a ""nice, normal life"" in New York and said she couldn't wait to get back.
+
+Our ship was the first the port had seen in over a week. We agreed to take back 60 refugees -- including 15 Americans -- who had gathered at the port's gate when news of our arrival spread. But of course that's nowhere near enough. So many more are desperate to leave.
+
+I asked Muna what life in Aden was like. ""My daughter-in-law would crouch down and hide in the kitchen,"" she recalls. ""It was just bombs all the time. Gunshots. People running down the street.""
+
+She trails off into silence.
+
+For everyone here with us on the boat, there are families left behind. Mothers and fathers. Daughters and sons.
+
+The first night on board our boat had an almost festive air. Our new passengers were laughing and sharing cigarettes, euphoric at their escape. One woman though was sitting alone on deck and I realized she was crying. She told me her 15-year-old son was trapped on the other side of one of the many front lines that are now etched into the city's streets.
+
+They'd waited for 10 days, but neither her son nor her parents could cross over to the port, in Al Tawahi district. Too scared to risk missing the boat and endangering the lives of their other three children, her husband had convinced her to board. When they called to tell her son he also had news for them: He'd joined the fight against the Houthi forces.
+
+For Muna, her ordeal ended at Djibouti Port where Christina Higgins, the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission, was among the embassy staff waiting to meet them. I asked Higgins about the sense of abandonment Muna and many of the other Americans trapped in Yemen said they felt.
+
+""We have one of the branches of al Qaeda that's especially active. There's the Houthis -- neither of these two groups friendly to U.S. citizens. We've had to weigh very, very carefully what is the safest way, the best way for us to help them.""
+
+Higgins said ultimately each U.S. citizen is going to have to judge what is best for themselves and their families.
+
+""For many U.S. citizens, that's going to mean sheltering in place. For other U.S. citizens, we're actively working at getting information to them on different avenues for travel out of Yemen.""
+
+Watching them hand out cookies, water and phones to reassure those waiting at home, it's clear the staff here are overjoyed to have some of their citizens safe and sound. There are many more though of course who are still in danger.
+
+There are no definitive records, but the 15 Americans on board our ship said they had counted 75 more families waiting in Aden port who couldn't afford an ""exit/transport"" fee being charged to depart Aden.
+
+In this time of crisis, the $300-a-person fee wasn't an official tax, but something that local fishermen were charging to ferry passengers to the boat to board.
+
+That's 75 more families waiting for another happy coincidence to dock at Aden's deserted ports.",REAL
+2853,Obama: U.S. would use force to defend Gulf allies,"Thurmont, Maryland (CNN) President Barack Obama, facing Persian Gulf countries deeply skeptical about his proposed nuclear deal with Iran, said Thursday that the U.S. would use military force if necessary to defend its Arab allies.
+
+Obama had spent the day huddled with leaders from the region at his Camp David retreat, and emerged from their summit declaring that he was as committed as ever to protecting them from aggression, a reference to Iran.
+
+A joint statement delivered at the end of the gathering declared that the U.S. will continue to ""deter and confront external aggression against our allies and partners, as we did in the Gulf War,"" and that the U.S. Is ready would work with them to determine an appropriate response in the face of such aggression, ""including the potential use of military force.""
+
+Anxieties about Iran's nuclear ambitions were far from abated by the end of the summit, and Obama acknowledged differences persist between himself and the oil-rich monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council bloc — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — with whom he met. But the leaders expressed optimism that enhanced defense ties would bring relations between the region and the United States to new levels.
+
+Obama said he didn't want to ""deny the concerns"" of Arab nations over the potential reduction in sanctions on Iran under the deal -- which they fear will embolden Tehran -- and that he wasn't asking the nations to approve the preliminary pact reached in April.
+
+""Given that I'm not going to sign off on any deal until I've seen the details of it, I wouldn't expect them to either,"" Obama said.
+
+But he insisted that his defense of the deal -- which included explanations of some of its technical details -- had made a difference.
+
+""That was important to them. And I think gave them additional confidence,"" he said.
+
+Arab leaders emerging from the summit expressed optimism that the gathering had yielded an historic boost in their ties to the U.S.
+
+Calling the summit ""unprecedented,"" Saudi foreign minister Adel al Jubeir said the day had brought U.S.-Gulf ties to an ""entirely different level over next decades.""
+
+Obama, speaking to reporters at the conclusion of the summit, said his country's relationship to the Gulf states was entering a new era based on strong defense ties.
+
+""I was very explicit,"" Obama said. ""The United States will stand by our GCC partners against external attack and will deepen and extend the cooperation that we have when it comes to the many challenges that exist in the region.""
+
+He listed specific areas the United States would commit to defending Gulf allies, including aiding in the development of a collective missile defense system.
+
+But even the stepped-up commitments to the region stopped short of the formal mutual defense pact that some of the nations -- wary of an empowered Iran -- desire.
+
+The summit comes as the Gulf Cooperation Council bloc -- comprised of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates -- are particularly concerned about an emerging U.S. deal with Iran over its nuclear program, which they worry will empower arch-foe Tehran.
+
+The statements from Obama at the conclusion of the summit outlined U.S. commitments to the GCC, including expediting arms transfers to the region, staging a new large-scale military exercise against terror and cyber attacks, and forming a new partnership to improve counterterrorism and missile defense cooperation.
+
+U.S. officials hoped the wooded setting in the Catoctin Mountains would foster a relaxed dynamic in the discussions, which have also included Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who is steeped in the details of the Iran nuclear deal.
+
+Before the summit began, Arab diplomatic officials said the Gulf states themselves had decided to cool the temperature and accentuate the positive in meetings with the U.S. officials.
+
+The gulf countries have been seeking a more significant upgrade of their security alliance than the U.S. is willing to confer, despite the planned U.S. boost to arms, training and other security measures.
+
+The GCC foreign ministers met Tuesday night and agreed that, though they weren't getting everything they wanted from the U.S., they are going to build on what they are getting. They want this to be the first of a regular summit, with the next one in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, next year.
+
+Obama, speaking Thursday, said he had committed to attending a future GCC summit, though didn't specify where.
+
+Still, the lack of participation by GCC leaders has been widely perceived as a sign that many of its members are displeased with what the U.S. is offering and want to convey displeasure at various administration policies, including talks with Iran over its nuclear program.
+
+Only the leaders of Qatar and Kuwait attended, with the king of Saudi Arabia canceling at the last minute and Bahrain's king attending the Royal Windsor Horse Show outside London. While there, he is expected to meet with Queen Elizabeth II.
+
+Both U.S. administration officials and Saudi government aides said there was no snub intended by Saudi King Salman's withdrawal of his RSVP over the weekend.",REAL
+1505,Hillary Clinton says early lead was 'artificial',"Clinton, in an appearance on ""The Tonight Show,"" agreed that she and Sanders are ""in a tight race,"" a fact that she finds ""pretty exciting.""
+
+After noting she and Sanders are close, host Jimmy Fallon reminded Clinton that she once ""had a 20-point lead at one point.""
+
+""That is really artificial, all of those early soundings and polls,"" Clinton said. ""Once you get into it, this is a Democratic election for our nominee and it gets really close, exciting. And it really depends upon on who can make the best case that you can be the nominee to beat whoever the Republicans put up and try to get your folks who support you to come out.""
+
+She added, ""I find it pretty exciting. This is not a job they give away. You really do have to work hard for. It is the hardest job in the world, so, I get up everyday and go right at it.""
+
+In mid-2015, as both Sanders and Clinton launched their respective campaigns, polls showed the former secretary of state with leads as high as 60 points nationally In the last week, however, Sanders has begun to close Clinton's lead in national and early state polls. A New York Times/CBS Poll found Clinton's national lead at 7 percentage points. Clinton's interview with Fallon was her second appearance on ""The Tonight Show"" as a presidential candidate and came on the same night as the Fox Business Network hosted a Republican debate. The former secretary of state told Fallon that she usually doesn't watch the debates live because she loves ""to be able to fast forward"" through them. Fallon said the Republican candidates ""might say something bad about"" Clinton during the debate, suggesting she should ""have a drinking game where every time they say your name you do a shot."" ""I don't think I would make it past the first half hour,"" Clinton remarked. Fallon also goaded Clinton into a comment on Donald Trump by telling the former senator that the Republican front-runner has been talking about her on the campaign trail. Clinton's response: ""He is a lot more obsessed with me than I am with him."" Clinton and Fallon closed the appearance by carrying out a mock interview, with Fallon acting like he was interviewing Clinton for the president of the United States. ""How did you hear about the position,"" Fallon asked. ""Are you willing to relocate,"" Fallon followed up. ""For the right job, I am,"" Clinton responded. And Fallon's final question: ""Lastly, is there an email address (where) we can reach you?"" Clinton's response: ""You can follow me on Snapchat.""",REAL
+9204,Aspartame Turns Into Formaldehyde And Methanol In The Body: Donald Rumsfeld Got It Legalized,"Did you know that Aspartame literally turns into formaldehyde and methanol inside your body? 
+Via AlternativeNews 
+It breaks down into, according to one paper, “phenylalanine (50%), aspartic acid (40%) and methanol (10%) during metabolism in the body. The excess of phenylalanine blocks the transport of important amino acids to the brain contributing to reduced levels of dopamine and serotonin.”
+Video Below Well put by another paper: “Aspartame is a widely used artificial sweetener that has been linked to pediatric and adolescent migraines. Upon ingestion, aspartame is broken, converted, and oxidized into formaldehyde in various tissues.”
+5 academic papers are cited in this video, showing exactly what Aspartame does to the body, including one study that plays devil’s advocate, and honestly fails.
+Aspartame, as methanol can cause blindness, is linked to deterioration of vision, several cancers, and a litany of other ills. One chemical Aspartame breaks down into in your body, aspartic acid, acts as an excitotoxin.
+This video explains what Aspartame really does, and how two time Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld almost single-handedly pressured the FDA into legalizing it for the pharmaceutical corporation Searle.
+",FAKE
+2488,Should 'Birthright Citizenship' Be Abolished? - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com,"“Birthright citizenship,” the constitutional rule that a child born in and under the jurisdiction of the United States is a U.S. citizen, is in the news a lot these days. Several G.O.P. candidates, including Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum and Scott Walker, have joined Donald Trump in calling for an end to this rule — or at the very least questioning it — as part of their immigration platforms.
+
+Should birthright citizenship be abolished and, if so, what impact would it have in the United States? What alternative citizenship model should the U.S. adopt instead?",REAL
+1628,Democratic debate: 6 takeaways,"(CNN) Hillary Clinton , Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley met for the second Democratic presidential primary debate on Saturday night, an event that finally saw a fight between the front-runner and her chief opponent, but also coming a day after a deadly terror attack that shocked the world.
+
+From left, Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley prepare to debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday, November 14. It was the party's second presidential debate.
+
+From left, Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley prepare to debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday, November 14. It was the party's second presidential debate.
+
+Here are the six key takeaways from the debate:
+
+Clinton distanced herself from President Barack Obama's now-controversial comment in an interview Thursday that the U.S. had ""contained ISIS."" During Saturday's debate, Clinton asserted that ISIS ""cannot be contained"" and must simply be ""defeated.""
+
+As she has in the past, Clinton also suggested that she had argued ""early on that we needed to find a way to train and equip moderates."" Clinton reportedly argued for a more forceful administration plan to help the Syrian opposition early on in the civil war that has since exploded.
+
+The Vermont senator in the first debate appeared unprepared or unwilling to go after Clinton with any real vigor.
+
+But Saturday night, Sanders suggested Clinton is in the pocket of Wall Street and tied her vote to authorize the war in Iraq to the rise of ISIS. Clinton, meanwhile, knocked Sanders on his mixed record on guns and suggested his policy proposals are too simplistic.
+
+In the most forceful exchange of the night, Sanders pointed to the millions of dollars in donations Wall Street has funneled to Clinton's campaigns over her political career.
+
+""Why over her political career has Wall Street been a major, the major campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton? Maybe they're dumb and they don't know what they're going to get, but I don't think so,"" Sanders said. ""I have never heard a candidate, never, who has received huge amounts of money from oil, from coal, from Wall Street from the military industrial complex, not one candidate -- 'Oh these, these campaign contributions will not influence me.' But why do they make millions of dollars of campaign contributions? They expect to get something, everybody knows that.""
+
+As she did in the first debate, Clinton hit Sanders on guns, calling the Vermont senator's vote to shield gun makers from some lawsuits a ""terrible mistake"" and urging Sanders to admit as much, as she has done regarding her Iraq vote.
+
+Sanders responded by suggesting there's little daylight between himself and Clinton and O'Malley on guns.
+
+3. ...but he still holds back
+
+Sanders didn't take the gloves off completely during Saturday night's debate in Iowa.
+
+Instead, he took a pass on one of the biggest points of contention of the 2016 cycle: Clinton's record as secretary of state.
+
+Given a chance to slam Clinton's tenure, Sanders demurred, instead pivoting to his ""disagreement"" with Clinton over her vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002, more than six years before she became secretary of state.
+
+Republicans are already picking apart Clinton's track record as secretary of state, but Sanders' simply wouldn't take the bait.
+
+4. The moments that could come back to haunt Clinton
+
+However, Clinton's response to Sanders -- when she beat back the suggestion that she is influenced by Wall Street donors -- could really come back to bite her.
+
+Clinton explained her connection to Wall Street by tying her relationship to her role in helping to rebuild New York's financial district after the 9/11 attacks.
+
+Twitter was ablaze Saturday night over the response, and the Republican National Committee was quick to blast out a best-of compilation of political observers' reactions.
+
+Clinton at one point said she is ""from the '60s"" -- a moment in the debate that could be replayed in political ads down the line suggesting she is part of the past, not the future, of American leadership.
+
+The debate Saturday night began with the candidates pausing on stage, taking a moment of silence to remember the victims of the terrorist attacks that ripped Paris apart just a day earlier.
+
+Clinton said while ""our prayers are with the people of France tonight...that is not enough"" and called for better coordinated efforts to root out ISIS, the radical group that claimed responsibility.
+
+She said Americans should see the terrorist attack as a reminder that the election ""is not only about electing a president, it's also about choosing our next commander in chief.""
+
+Sanders made brief note of the terrorist attacks at the top of his opening statement, but quickly pivoted to the core message of the campaign: ""a rigged economy"" that benefits billionaires.
+
+Still, Sanders made a bold claim in his reference to Paris: ""Together, leading the world, this country will rid our planet of this barbarist (sic) organization called ISIS.""
+
+And O'Malley, after saying his heart goes out ""to the people of France in this moment of loss,"" quickly called for ""fresh thinking"" and ""new approaches"" -- a definitive nod to his youth and the generational contrast the 52-year-old offers to Clinton's 68 years and Sanders' 74.
+
+All three candidates refused to say the fight was with radical Islam, instead focusing on using the word ""jihadist"" to describe the threats spotlighted in the Paris attacks.
+
+6. O'Malley gets a zinger, then shrinks away
+
+But O'Malley also missed a couple of key moments where he could have shined.
+
+His central contention is that it's time for a new generation of leadership -- meaning no more baby boomers like Clinton. But he lacked a strong, convincing response to one of the debate's final questions: When have you been most tested in your life, and how did it prepare you for the presidency?
+
+O'Malley's response conceded that he is untested -- that nothing he's been through as mayor of Baltimore or governor of Maryland comes close to the crises he would face as President.
+
+Trump later responded to O'Malley's insult on Twitter by calling him a ""clown.""",REAL
+2103,"Climate change happening 'right now,' Obama says ahead of Alaska trip","WASHINGTON — President Obama sought to spotlight the effects of global warming Saturday as he prepared to travel to Alaska this coming week.
+
+“Alaskans are already living with its effects,” he said in his weekly address.
+
+The state — currently experiencing one of its worst wildfire seasons on record — is expected to see its average temperatures rise by 6 to 12 degrees if nothing is done to halt climate change, Obama said. Four villages there are already in imminent danger from rising sea waters as sea ice and glaciers melt.
+
+“This is all real. This is happening to our fellow Americans right now,” he said. “Think about that. If another country threatened to wipe out an American town, we’d do everything in our power to protect ourselves. Climate change poses the same threat, right now.”
+
+The president is striking a tricky balance between environmental conservation and energy production — he has long supported expanded oil drilling off the Alaskan coast, the very fuel that has contributed to global warming.
+
+Obama is facing sharp criticism from environmentalists for his Alaska trip, which begins Monday. One activist organization, CREDO, said the president’s visit is a symbol of “the self-defeating hypocrisy of his policies on energy and climate.”
+
+“Climate leaders don’t drill the Arctic,” the group said in an online petition. “Talking about the urgency of climate change while allowing massive fossil fuel extraction isn’t leadership, it’s hypocrisy.”
+
+Obama said in his weekly address that he shares concerns about offshore oil drilling, noting he remembers the BP oil spill in the Gulf “all too well.” But he said the United States still has to rely on oil and gas while it is transitioning toward renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar.
+
+“As long as that’s the case, I believe we should rely more on domestic production than on foreign imports, and we should demand the highest safety standards in the industry — our own,” Obama said.
+
+He noted that while his administration issued a permit to Shell to drill off the Alaskan coast, it also mandated strict safety standards that the company has yet to meet.
+
+“It’s a testament to how rigorous we’ve applied those standards that Shell has delayed and limited its exploration off Alaska while trying to meet them,” Obama said. “The bottom line is, safety has been and will continue to be my administration’s top priority when it comes to oil and gas exploration off America’s precious coasts.”
+
+During his three-day trip, Obama is scheduled to participate in a climate change conference in Anchorage, tour a glacier and travel to coastal fishing towns.
+
+“I’m looking forward to talking with Alaskans about how we can work together to make America the global leader on climate change around the globe,” he said. “Because what’s happening in Alaska is happening to us. It’s our wakeup call, and as long as I’m president, America will lead the world to meet the threat of climate change before it’s too late.”",REAL
+10129,George Takei Invited To Thanksgiving At The Baldwins’ To Referee Trump Feud (TWEETS/VIDEO),"George Takei Invited To Thanksgiving At The Baldwins’ To Referee Trump Feud (TWEETS/VIDEO) By Natalie Dailey   
+This has been one of the craziest election seasons in our lifetimes. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is saying incredibly disgusting and insulting things just about every day. It has caused major angst and arguments among many families. 
+A famous family, the Baldwins, has been arguing about the candidates on Twitter. The youngest brother, Stephen Baldwin, supports Trump, and he had a heated Twitter exchange with his brother, Billy. 
+Star Trek actor George Takei, retweeted the exchange: Waiting for Alec as Trump to weigh in, bigly. pic.twitter.com/ZaVkmO4SQy 
+— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) October 27, 2016 
+Billy Baldwin weighed in again when he said: Hey George… you want to come to Thanksgiving this year? 
+We are going to need a referee. 
+— Billy Baldwin (@BillyBaldwin) October 28, 2016 
+Their older brother, Alec Baldwin, has played Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live for several sketches now. Alec did such a good job, that it drew the attention of whiny baby Trump, who said : “Watched ‘Saturday Night Live’ hit job on me. Time to retire the boring and unfunny show. Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Media rigging election!” 
+Stephen Baldwin also weighed in on his older brother’s Trump impression when he said : “Well, he’s got the voice down very wellI. I think it’s getting a little too nasty right now. I don’t think it’s very funny. I don’t think there’s anything funny about this election. I think it’s very serious.[sic]” 
+Stephen Baldwin is definitely an ardent Trump supporter. He posts lots of tweets supporting the Oompa Loompa for president. Mr. President …",FAKE
+10274,The End Game Closes In On The Clintons As The Deep State Turns,"Leave a reply 
+Mike Adams – My fellow Americans, we are watching history unfold before us with such sound and fury that we are likely to never witness comparable events again in our lifetime. As of today, I am now convinced that the deep state has turned on Hillary Clinton and will unveil damning in the next few days that will end the Clintons’ reign of terror over America and collapse her bid for the presidency. 
+The mainstream media, of course, will never report this news for the simple reason that they are the propaganda arm of the criminal Clinton cartel. As such, they will lie to the public to the bitter end, even as the Clinton Titanic sinks with all of them on board (in deep, frigid waters, no less, with no more lifeboats to be found). 
+The so-called “deep state”— the powerful insiders who really run the intelligence services and inner layers of untouchable bureaucracy — has decided Hillary Clinton is too damaged to defend any longer . Even if she were to win by stealing the election, she would be so mired in criminal investigations and political illegitimacy that she would rip the nation to shreds while fighting for her own political survival. 
+It has now been decided, I believe, that Hillary Clinton will be taken out of power by releasing criminally damaging emails which have long been held by the NSA and FBI. This will likely happen before the coming weekend. Once that is accomplished, the next goal will be to wait for President Trump to take office, then destroy the U.S. economy through a controlled, global debt collapse so that Trump can be blamed for the near collapse of western economies. (Remember: The deep state isn’t pro-Trump. They’re still all about defending the establishment. But Hillary is one bridge too far for even the statists to stomach…) 
+Instead of allowing Hillary Clinton to take power and destroy America from the top, in other words, deep state power brokers have reverted to “Plan B” which is to let Trump take the White House, then destroy America through the controlled demolition of its currency and economy. This is simpler than it sounds. Bringing down the debt pyramid of a nation carrying nearly $20 trillion in national debt isn’t exactly rocket science. All they have to do is stand back and stop manipulating the markets and stop printing new money for a few months while raising interest rates. Monetary gravity will do the rest… 
+In the mean time, Hillary Clinton and a long list of her co-conspirators are going to find themselves charged with obstruction of justice , lying under oath, destruction of evidence, conspiracy, corruption and other serious charges that will lead to serious prison time for many. 
+The criminal racket of the Clintons is about to implode. The participants will be charged under the RICO Act for “racketeering” activities, for which ample evidence already exists. A new video from Steve Pieczenik describes some of this 
+In this video, intelligence insider Steve Pieczenik lays out how high-level intelligence insiders are now working in concert to “reverse the Clinton coup” that’s attempting to take over America and destroy it from within. 
+Even if you don’t believe Pieczenik — and I fully realize he’s controversial in his own way — this short video is a very important “must watch” explanation to know what people in the intelligence community are doing…“we’ve initiated a counter-coup…” 
+The Clintons are going to go “full murder” in a last ditch, desperate effort to save themselves 
+Beware of what may yet unfold in the coming days. Like a cornered wild animal, the Clintons are extremely dangerous when they realize they have nothing to lose by going “full murder” in an attempt to save themselves. 
+I will not be surprised the least bit if bodies of people in high places start piling up over the next week. Watch for news reports of mysterious car crashes, swimming pool accidents or “natural” deaths involving people like James Comey, who’d better have armed security personnel around him at all times. 
+Look for desperate measures such as the Clintons attempting to blackmail Obama, Comey or anyone who they think might serve as leverage to save their own skins. We might also see desperate false flag attacks unfold in the next few days, although that’s increasingly unlikely since it seems the Clintons are now on their own (they would need the assistance of Obama to pull off another Sandy Hook, you see). A deal has already been struck with Obama 
+Most likely, deep state operatives have already struck a deal with Obama to avoid prosecuting him for his own serious crimes as long as he stays out of the way as Hillary Clinton’s head is served up on a platter. This likely explains why Obama is now publicly saying he trusts Comey (and refuses to go to bat for Hillary). There’s no love lost between Obama and the Clintons (remember 2008?). 
+As all this is going down, the propaganda ministry of the Clinton regime — CNN, NYT, Washington Post, etc. — is going to explode into an all-out “bat-s##t crazy” conspiracy theory phase where they blame the Russians, extraterrestrials, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster for everything that’s imploding around the Clintons. Mainstream media news reports are going to increasingly sound like sociopathic babble from crazy people grasping at whatever outlandish theories they can invoke. Maybe crop circles were created by the Russians as a secret code to Wikileaks and Donald Trump, eh? 
+Meanwhile, conspiratorial operatives like George Stephanopoulos fully realize they are probably going to jail for collusion and sedition , so they have nothing left to lose by desperately trying to put Hillary in the White House via any means at their disposal, including totally faking negative news against Donald Trump (which is, of course, the entire news mission of CNN at this point, a disgraced propaganda network run by anti-American traitors). If the vote is stolen for Hillary Clinton, all hell breaks loose 
+Should the globalist Soros operators manage to steal the vote, bribe the electoral voters or rig the black box voting machines sufficiently to place Hillary Clinton in the White House, all Hell breaks loose across America : • The FBI goes into full indictment mode to push criminal charges for the Clinton criminal regime. • Donald Trump launches a massive legal challenge to the election outcome, dispatching an army of lawyers to level a vast assortment of charges involving coordinated voter fraud, the rigging of voting machines, the attempted bribery of Electoral voters and so on. • The U.S. military revs up its plans for an armed military coup to depose Clinton and restore democracy. This one should be especially entertaining to watch unfold if it gets activated… (and yes, YOU will beg for a short-term military dictatorship as long as they promise to depose Clinton and restore open, fair and free elections). • Armed U.S. citizens prepare for a massive march on Washington to take back their democracy and restore a lawful society where the political elite don’t get away with corruption, fraud and murder. Expect this march to be joined by police officers and federal law enforcement officials of all kinds. • The NSA likely goes into “full dump” mode to unleash every scrap of damning criminal evidence against Hillary Clinton. This will likely be joined by CIA assets who already have the goods on the Clintons and their “Lolita Express” pedo joy rides. • Wikileaks, Anonymous and every former NSA analyst goes into “destroy the Clintons” mode and begins to hack and expose every last shred of email evidence ever possessed by the Clintons and anyone close to them. Anonymous alone has enough technical clout to accomplish this with little or no outside help. (I expect Kim Dotcom to be aiding this entire effort as well, as he rightly holds extreme hatred toward Hillary Clinton… as do we all, come to think of it.) • The establishment Republicans in the U.S. Congress will, as usual, meekly surrender to the democrats, pulls down their britches and bend over to prepare to take it in the rear because that’s what they do best when the going gets tough. Totally useless politicrats like John McCain can’t get their pants around their ankles quickly enough when democrats start accusing them of something. These useless heaps of human baggage will be tossed out of Washington as the revolution unfolds, replaced with individuals who actually honor the U.S. Constitution (like Rep. Louie Gohmert). I root for all groups working to save America and expose the criminal politicians 
+Bring out the marshmallows and weiners, folks: This is going to be the most bizarre campfire front row seat to U.S. history that anyone has witnessed in over 200 years. Try not to trip and “face plant” into the flames as all this unfolds. It might be a smart idea to have some preparedness supplies at the ready, since no one really knows just how nasty this is all going to get. (And thank God Hillary doesn’t have her fingers on the nuclear launch codes, or she’d probably launch them just to change the narrative…) 
+As for me, I’m with anybody who’s trying to save America , restore democracy and throw the establishment criminals in prison. Like almost everybody else, I’ve had enough of the lies, the corruption, the media deceptions and the incessant blood sucking parasites in Washington D.C. who are too arrogant and stupid to realize just how much they’re universally despised. The revolution is ON. Anonymous, Wikileaks, Project Veritas, the FBI and the NSA have all been activated. There’s no stopping them now, and all the details of all the crimes of the Clintons are about to spill onto the stage of history, dirty deeds and all. 
+Be warned, you are probably not psychologically prepared for the truth about what the Clintons really are. You will probably vomit. SF Source Natural News Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+5148,How 2016 became the fact-check election,"Spin and overstatement have long been a part of political rhetoric. But this year is pushing fact-checkers into overdrive. And that's not all bad.
+
+Professional fact-checkers might be excused for being a tad exhausted this campaign season.
+
+Tracking the public statements of 22 major-party candidates during the primaries was one thing. But a general election pitting Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton – two candidates with abysmal scores for honesty among voters – is another, sending the fact-checking world into overdrive.
+
+Is Mr. Trump really worth $10 billion, as he claims? (Not according to Forbes magazine.) Is it true that Mrs. Clinton “slept” during the Benghazi terror attack in 2012, as Trump says? (No, according to Clinton testimony.) Was Clinton allowed to use a personal email server when she was secretary of State, as she has asserted? (No, according to a recent report by the State Department’s Office of the inspector general.)
+
+Trump alone is enough to keep the entire fact-checking industry afloat. When the flamboyant billionaire gave a big speech recently denouncing Clinton, the Associated Press assigned 12 reporters just to check the veracity of his assertions – “a whole platoon of journalistic talent that could have been doing other things,” moaned Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple.
+
+It’s easy to get discouraged by all the charges of lying hurled around – Lyin’ Ted, LyingCrookedHillary (both a verbal Trump charge and the name of a Trump campaign site), handouts from the Clinton campaign that lay out Trump’s “lies, hypocrisy, and catastrophic ideas.” And certainly, to some voters, the whole tone of the campaign is so depressing, the answer is just to tune out and stay home on Election Day.
+
+But to veteran fact-checkers, it’s the time to shine. Angie Drobnic Holan, editor in chief of the Pulitzer Prize-winning site PolitiFact.com, says she’s “really optimistic,” citing the growth of media fact-checking.
+
+“You can have a cynical take on that, but mine is more optimistic,” because fact-checking is especially needed this year, she says. “Donald Trump is a candidate who has persistent problems with accuracy, and I’m heartened that there’s widespread recognition that this is someone who needs to be fact-checked.”
+
+Trump supporters, not surprisingly, disagree. Jeffrey Lord, a regular on CNN defending Trump, calls media fact-checkers “elitist” and says the candidates themselves do a better job of countering each other’s assumptions.
+
+This “self-policing” concept sounds a bit like having a basketball game with no referees. And besides, it’s just not going to happen. Media fact-checking is here to stay. So are politicians who say things that aren’t true and accuse each other of lying. But there’s a spectrum of political speech: There are out-and-out lies – deliberately false statements meant to deceive – then there are statements that are unintentionally false, exaggerations, and spin. Sorting through the differences can be impossible, as it requires knowing what’s inside the speaker’s head.
+
+And what about a candidate who makes big promises, knowing they can’t be fulfilled? That’s another form of political speech that is less-than-truthful, but which voters have come to expect – and often excuse.
+
+In a recent focus group, veteran pollster Peter Hart asked 12 Republicans if they thought a President Trump would ever actually build a wall across the Mexican border. Eight people voted no. Same with his promise to deport the 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. And yet most of the 12 were fine that these promises would likely go unfulfilled.
+
+“They don’t hear a pledge, they hear, ‘I’m going to do something,’ “ says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, which sponsored the focus group.
+
+But making pie-in-the-sky promises is one thing. Statements of fact that prove false are another, and that’s where fact-checkers are having a field day. PolitiFact has judged 174 statements by Trump so far, and found only 16 to be either true or mostly true. Seventy have been judged false, and another 34 rated “Pants on Fire,” referring to claims that are “not only inaccurate but also ridiculous,” according to Ms. Holan.
+
+With Clinton, PolitiFact has judged 218 statements and rated 112 true or mostly true, 24 false, and three “Pants on Fire.”
+
+The next question is whether the assessments of PolitiFact and other fact-checkers actually penetrate public consciousness?
+
+“Our traffic is better than it’s ever been,” says Holan, whose site is affiliated with the Tampa Bay Times. “Media organizations are doing fact-checking in part because it’s very popular with readers.”
+
+Professor Jamieson, whose Annenberg center launched the first political fact-checking website, FactCheck.org, in 2003, is less sanguine.
+
+“Fact-checking has never been more important, more complicated, and less likely to reach its target audience with the desired corrected information,” Jamieson says.
+
+Part of the problem is the ever-accelerating news cycle. “In order to get a correction through, you have to get people to stand still long enough to hear it,” she says.
+
+Another issue, particularly for fact-checking operations attached to news sites, is low public opinion of the media. Only 6 percent of Americans have a “great deal of confidence” in the press, according to a survey released in April by the Media Insight Project.
+
+Holan of PolitiFact says that when readers accuse her site of partisan bias against Trump, she counters with data that show Republicans who do well on the PolitiFact “Truth-o-Meter,” such as Jeb Bush.
+
+Of course, former Governor Bush didn’t do very well as a presidential candidate; voters don’t necessarily favor a candidate because he or she is more factual. Moreover, for a slice of the electorate, this cycle reflects a break from politics as usual – and that includes an embrace of candidates who speak to voters without the filter of polls, focus groups, and scripted statements.",REAL
+9715,Shameful Obama Legacy: White Man Beaten Viciously For Voting Trump,"Home | World | Shameful Obama Legacy: White Man Beaten Viciously For Voting Trump Shameful Obama Legacy: White Man Beaten Viciously For Voting Trump By Doctor Zee 10/11/2016 22:42:48 
+CALIFORNIA – USA – Racial tensions have increased tenfold since the Obama election in 2008, but it’s getting worse after Trump in 2016. 
+
+
+All that Obama brought to America is hatred, vicious race divisions and unpunished violence committed by blacks. 
+Here we see an unbridled example of this Obama legacy at work, where an elderly white man is set upon by a pack of African Americans, or in U.S. media terms ‘young people’ simply because the man voted for Donald Trump. 
+Blow after blow are administered on this man’s head by cowardly creatures lower than animals, intent on brutally beating him down.",FAKE
+236,The GOP’s unfortunate Benghazi hearing,"THE HOUSE Select Committee on Benghazi further discredited itself on Thursday as its Republican members attempted to fuel largely insubstantial suspicions about Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2012 Benghazi attacks. Grilling Ms. Clinton all day, they elicited little new information and offered little hope that their inquiry would find anything significant that seven previous investigations didn’t.
+
+In fact, the highlight of the hearing came before lawmakers asked any question at all, in Ms. Clinton’s opening statement, as she offered a stout defense of the need for assertive U.S. diplomacy and engagement — even, or especially, when the circumstances are not ideal.
+
+“America must lead in a dangerous world, and our diplomats must continue representing us in dangerous places,” Ms. Clinton said. “We have learned the hard way when America is absent, especially from unstable places, there are consequences. Extremism takes root, aggressors seek to fill the vacuum, and security everywhere is threatened, including here at home.” It would be disastrous if future administrations held back in fear of politicized backlash if and when tragedies occurred.
+
+When questioning began, Ms. Clinton repeatedly pointed out that Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, one of four Americans who died in the attacks, did not ask to pull out of Benghazi; in fact, he chose to travel there with knowledge that doing so carried significant risk. Republicans argued that those facts did not excuse the lack of significant diplomatic security in Libya, grilling Ms. Clinton on why more of Mr. Stevens’s requests for additional security were not honored.
+
+On that, Ms. Clinton argued that she was not personally responsible for diplomatic security — the State Department’s security experts were — and she insisted that budget constraints limited how much security they could deploy around the world. She also pointed out that intelligence experts lacked knowledge about the dangers in eastern Libya around Sept. 11 and 12, 2012, and they knew of no credible threat to U.S. diplomats on those days in particular. An astoundingly large portion of the rest of the hearing focused on petty questioning related to Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal and other wastes of time.
+
+Ms. Clinton is not blameless. As she admitted, she had final responsibility for the actions of those who served under her. A State Department review found bureaucratic failures that contributed to the relatively light security in Benghazi. While it’s unreasonable to expect Ms. Clinton to have known about Mr. Stevens’s precise circumstances, she bears some blame for the bureaucratic context in which security decisions were made.
+
+Yet the major, top-line policy fumble in Libya stemmed not from callousness or incompetence on Ms. Clinton’s part but from the Obama administration’s broader failure to live up to the vision of assertive U.S. engagement she articulated on Thursday. Had the United States devoted more effort and resources to helping the fledgling Libyan government, the country might well have been more stable in 2012 and since.
+
+As she has on the campaign trail, Ms. Clinton hinted Thursday that she would use America’s international toolbox with ambition — “I believe, lead with diplomacy, support with development and, as a last resort, defense” — and probably more confidently than President Obama has. If the hearing was useful at all, it was in filling out her larger vision for U.S. foreign policy.",REAL
+9028,Homeless man looking a bit down today for some reason,"Homeless man looking a bit down today for some reason 27-10-16 A HOMELESS man who is usually upbeat seems a bit down today and no one’s quite sure why. Bill McKay, 56, usually sings Born in the USA while greeting passers-by but locals claim he doesn’t quite seem his usual jolly self. Local Barista, Julian Cook said, “He’s usually so full of life. Dancing about the place, proposing to every girl who walks past him and then laughing when they walk off. But today he’s just sat there looking bloody depressed. “I wonder why he’s in such a mood? “ Usually I’d give him a cup of coffee and a bit of cake for being so entertaining but if he’s going to just sit there looking like he wants to cry then he can sod off.” When asked why he was so down, McKay simply shook his head, muttered something about the government and then looked off down the street with a heavy sigh. Cook added: “See. What’s funny about that?” 
+Share:",FAKE
+1839,Biden faces hurdles as he weighs late 2016 bid,"Washington (CNN) As Vice President Joe Biden continues to contemplate a late entry into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, he faces obstacles toward arriving at yes -- not least of which is his own emotional state three months after his son's death.
+
+After a week of meetings with key Democrats -- including influential Sen. Elizabeth Warren and labor leader Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO -- Biden on Friday didn't appear any closer to making a decision, which advisers still expect is weeks away.
+
+He'll have more chances to consult members of his party next week, when he heads south to rally support behind the administration's nuclear deal with Iran. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, invited Biden to make the case for the agreement in person in south Florida on Thursday.
+
+The DNC has kept Biden and his political team abreast of debate schedules heading into the fall, and most Democratic operatives say the vice president must decide by the first forum -- a CNN-sponsored event on Oct. 13 -- whether or not he's running.
+
+Biden still faces the daunting proposition of raising enough campaign cash to compete with the tens of millions already collected by Hillary Clinton, and carving out support among key Democratic voting blocs to make a dent in her front-runner status.
+
+But weighing heaviest, friends say, is the grueling toll a third presidential campaign could exact on his family.
+
+He told a conference call of Democrats this week that he was still in the process of determining ""whether or not there is the emotional fuel at this time to run,"" just months after his eldest son Beau Biden lost his battle with brain cancer.
+
+Associates say the vice president's son Hunter supports a bid, and Beau encouraged his father to join the race before he died. But having weathered two previous presidential bids, the Biden family is intimately familiar with the withering pace and barbed attacks that would come with becoming a candidate again.
+
+His wife, Dr. Jill Biden, is said to be apprehensive about joining another run for president as her family continues to grieve.
+
+""I've given this a lot of thought and dealing internally with the family on how we do this,"" Biden told Democrats on the conference call this week, as first reported by CNN.
+
+""The calculus for this has been evaluating his personal feelings, having just come off Beau's passing,"" said James Smith, a South Carolina state legislator who's a supporter of Biden's.
+
+Deciding whether to run for president ""has little to do with a calculation of his own ambitions,"" Smith said.
+
+A Quinnipiac survey this week showed Biden faring well against potential Republican challengers; in potential general election match-ups against Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, he performs better than Clinton. His favorability rating was higher than any candidate actually running for the Democratic nomination. And even though he has yet to declare his intentions, he's still running ahead of former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chaffee or former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb.
+
+But even those numbers may not be enough to convince Biden that jumping into the race is worth it. Politicians merely contemplating a bid -- and not yet subject to the attacks of their rivals or scrutiny from opposition researchers -- often poll better than when they become full-blown candidates.
+
+Case in point: Clinton, whose favorability stood near 60% last fall as she contemplated a run, but had dropped to 44% in the latest CNN/ORC survey taken in mid-August.
+
+Clinton's campaign this week attempted to flex its organizing muscle by unveiling endorsements in key early voting states, including from former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, currently serving alongside Biden in the Obama administration as agriculture secretary.
+
+Vilsack was the first cabinet secretary to declare an allegiance in the Democratic primary, though other key figures within the Clinton orbit were also signaling wariness about a Biden run.
+
+""Running for office is one thing. You have to also have the energy for that process,"" said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served as Obama's first chief of staff and supports Clinton in the primary. ""You also have to have the energy for the job.""
+
+Former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, another Clinton supporter, told The New York Times this week that Biden has ""served the country so well"" but that making a run for president ""I just don't think ... would be a wise move.""
+
+Clinton, speaking at the summer meeting of Democrats in Minnesota, said she wanted to give Biden the ""space and time"" to make up his mind.
+
+""I have the greatest affection and admiration for the vice president,"" she said during a press conference in Minneapolis. ""This is a difficult decision for him to make.""
+
+As she spoke, members of the ""Draft Biden"" group were eagerly making the case for a Biden candidacy to Democratic Party members and so-called ""superdelegates.""
+
+Their pitch: that it's ""too early to anoint"" a front-runner in the Democratic race and that influential party members should remain open-minded about selecting a candidate to support.
+
+""While the vice president is working through his process on whether or not he actually wants to run for president ... we continue to make the public case for why we think he's the best candidate for our party to put up for the presidency,"" said Steve Schale, an adviser to the group.
+
+A key mission: developing a campaign infrastructure in early voting states Biden could utilize if he decides to jump in.
+
+'Going to be up to the American people'
+
+For Biden, the decision on entering the race risks dividing loyalists to President Barack Obama, who has repeatedly praised Biden's work as vice president while also proclaiming Clinton an exemplary secretary of state.
+
+Some White House aides have expressed concern a Biden bid -- at this point, still a longshot against Clinton -- could end poorly, damaging the vice president's political legacy.
+
+Obama discussed the potential of Biden joining the race during a regularly scheduled lunch with the vice president Monday, and hasn't dissuaded the vice president from running as he's publicly weighed a run over the past several months.
+
+Asked this week about potentially having to decide between his vice president and his former top diplomat, Obama offered his typical demurral.
+
+""Joe and Hillary are wonderful people and great friends,"" he told CNN Philadelphia affiliate WPVI during an interview at the White House Wednesday. ""Joe's been as good a vice president as I think we've seen in American history. Been at my side on every tough decision I've ever made.""
+
+Clinton, meanwhile, ""was one of our best secretaries of state and helped work on a whole range of important issues,"" Obama said. ""The truth is, though, the great thing about American democracy is it's not up to me. I'm just one voter. It's going to be up to the American people.""
+
+The White House says Obama will indeed vote in the Illinois Democratic primary next year, and hasn't ruled out a presidential endorsement in the race.",REAL
+7573,"Donald Trump promises to pardon Snowden, Assange, and Manning","Donald Trump promises to pardon Snowden, Assange, and Manning By Kilgoar , on November 13th, 2016 Donald Trump pardons American Heroes 
+THE SWAMP — Sunday evening at a Republican fundraising dinner in Washington DC, Donald Trump promised to pardon Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning. 
+Speaking to the group of neoconservative elites, Trump said, “These are people who have done good things, heroic things for America. Heroes. Meanwhile the Mexicans are rewarded with citizenship for having babies on our land, illegally. I think we need to change things around a bit, deny citizenship to all Mexicans forever. But first thing’s first, we’re going to build the wall.” 
+Trump even suggested he is considering appointing Snowden and Assange to positions in his cabinet, saying, “These are smart, smart people. Just look at what they’ve done for us already. Why are we going after them, rather than asking for their help? Think about it. If we spent as much time going after ISIS as we spend on them — well there wouldn’t have ever been an ISIS. I might hire them. 
+“Hillary’s emails were a disaster. Total. Disaster. That’s why I’m going to get Snowden be my Cyber General. I’m going to go to war on hackers and secure our computers. Don’t get me wrong, I love computers. But ISIS uses computers a lot, and we must be vigilant.” 
+“Assange, he knows so much. So so much. If anyone can help me to drain the swamp, it’s Assange. I think he’d make a great secretary of state.”",FAKE
+6914,Which States Don't Have Mexicans?,"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+Dear Mexican: ¿ Por que no hay un pinche líder entre nosotros o de nosotros los mexicanos? Para que tuviera los tanates bien puestos y hablara frente al congreso y les dijera sus verdades a los hipócritas políticos. ¿Será que “nuestros lideres” son unos miedosos o vendidos? No hay uno solo (solo el Chapulín Colorado) que nos defienda, tanta humillación que han tenido los negros, siempre de sirvientes o mozos, pandilleros y drogadictos (en Hollywood) y nadie protesta y salen con que Memín Penguin es ofensivo, otra de esas y nos subimos el cierre, ¿eh? En serio , “Ask a Mexican” , ¿Como podría yo hablar delante del congreso, local, estatal o federal? ¿Sería mucho pedir? 
+Pónganse las Pilas, Putos 
+Dear Readers: For those of you who still don’t habla —and if you don’t habla , ¿ que chingado estas esperando ?— the writer asked where’s the Mexican leader who’ll take us into the Promised Land of American acceptance, then couldn’t help but to attack blacks while he had my attention. Ya cállate con los “pinche negros,” pendejo . And Mexicans did have a messiah who saved us all—his name was Juan Gabriel, and he recently died. 
+Are there any states in which Mexicans are not yet a majority? 
+Gabacho Really Wants to Know 
+Dear Gabacho: Bruh, the Reconquista ain’t that advanced—yet. New Mexico has the highest percentage of Latinos at 47 percent of its total population, but most of them don’t even consider themselves Mexican. The next-highest states are California and Texas, with 38.2 percent of their respective populations Latino per the U.S. Census, although Texas has the higher percentage of Mexicans in that group because of all the South Americans and Central Americans in California. And the state with the lowest Latino percentage of its people? West Virgina, at 1.3 percent. Raza : don’t be scared, and move to the Mountain State. Don’t forget that hillbillies are just brothers from a different madre . 
+
+Forgive me for not using neat-sounding Spanish words in this email; my Spanish is rusty, and it’s late. While I plan to learn it again, I’m getting ahead of myself. Reading through the archives of your column, it seems that you have forgotten, or chosen to ignore, those gabachos who actually do not hate the Mexicans. Take me for example. While this email is relatively devoid of Spanish phrases, I love the Spanish language. I studied it in high school, and wholly intend to learn it again, probably next semester. I love Mexican food, and I mean the real stuff (although I do enjoy Taco Bell as well). My high school was relatively small, and we had a lady come in to tutor the few of us who cared to learn Spanish. While she had lived here quite awhile, she had not assimilated into America . She cooked for us one day, and that started my love for authentic Mexican food. She also instilled in me a fascination for Mexican culture. I even would go so far as to say that I would support an amnesty program: Mexicans will always be here, so why not make them legal? If they’re not gonna do it the legal way, then we might as well throw in the towel. I wrote all this to simply remind you that not all Americans hate Mexicans: quite the contrary. Some of us love them! 
+Too Tired to Think Up an Interesting Pen Name, or Any Interesting Questions 
+Dear Gabachos: While I appreciate you and other gabachos who stand by Mexicans, be careful with your words: Trump just might deport you to if he wins. Oh, and #fucktrump 
+Ask the Mexican at themexican@askamexican.net, be his fan on Facebook, follow him on Twitter @gustavoarellano or follow him on Instagram @gustavo_arellano!",FAKE
+5049,"Media trumpeting Trump implosion, but is it real?","This is what a full-fledged feeding frenzy looks like.
+
+With Donald Trump facing the roughest stretch of his candidacy, the media have moved from questioning his sanity to depicting a campaign in disarray and top Republicans still wondering whether they can dump the nominee.
+
+That won’t happen, of course, but it’s an indication of the toxic nature of the coverage and the flood of anti-Trump leaks now washing across the media landscape.
+
+There’s a natural piling-on effect when campaigns go off the rails: The polls dip, the critics step up their rhetoric, staffers start pointing fingers, and the press keeps the vicious cycle going.
+
+But I’ve never seen anything like this.
+
+Things reached the point yesterday morning that CNBC’s John Harwood tweeted: “Longtime ally of Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager: 'Manafort not challenging Trump anymore. Mailing it in. Staff suicidal.'""
+
+And there was this from CNN: “A source tells @DanaBashCNN that some Trump campaign staff are frustrated w/ candidate lately, ‘feel like they are wasting their time.’""
+
+I am told by knowledgeable campaign sources that Manafort is not going anywhere and believes that Trump will be getting back on message.
+
+I am further told that reports of a planned “intervention” with the candidate, led by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, are false.
+
+And the sources also say that, contrary to media reports, party chairman Reince Priebus is not furious with Trump, though he is disappointed with the nominee’s refusal to endorse Paul Ryan.
+
+Trump and the House speaker appear to have an increasingly tenuous relationship. Trump is also refusing to back John McCain, one of several Republicans who ripped him for his handling of the Khizr Khan controversy.
+
+Manafort told Fox’s Jon Scott that the campaign is “in good shape.”
+
+Asked about reports that outside allies were plotting an “intervention” with the candidate, Manafort said: ""This is the first I'm hearing about it,"" adding that some in the media are “saying untrue things.
+
+
+
+Much of this grows out the Khan debacle, which the media seized upon after his Democratic convention speech about his son’s death in Iraq but which Trump then fueled by criticizing a Gold Star family.
+
+That, in turn, revived fears among Republicans that Trump is too busy picking fights with everyone who insults him to run a disciplined campaign. I’m told there is frustration within his campaign that he keeps diverting to side issues, often in response to cable news chatter, rather than staying focused on attacking Hillary Clinton.
+
+Even Gingrich, a close adviser and VP finalist, is criticizing his friend (while also lambasting media bias). “He has not made the transition to being the potential president of the United States, which is a much tougher league,” Gingrich told Maria Bartiromo. He added that “some of what Trump has done is just very self-destructive.”
+
+Along comes ABC’s Jonathan Karl, reporting that “senior party officials are so frustrated — and confused — by Donald Trump’s erratic behavior that they are exploring how to replace him on the ballot if he drops out.”
+
+MSNBC ran headlines all day about the Trump ""intervention,"" but there were no signs it would materialize.
+
+All of this has mushroomed into a tsunami of negative media coverage, with very little scrutiny of Clinton, at least right now.
+
+Trump has been at war with the press from the day he got in the race, even as he drew enormous amounts of ink and airtime. But he can't expand his base simply by bashing the media, as satisfying as that may be.
+
+The pundits, especially the ones on the left and right who detest him, are enjoying this latest chance to write him off.
+
+But that has proven dangerous in the past. And campaign narratives, even the most relentlessly negative, have a way of changing at a moment's notice.
+
+
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+8162,2:00PM Water Cooler 11/1/2016,"By Lambert Strether of Corrente . 
+TTP, TTIP, TISA 
+CETA: “The provisional application of CETA refers to the fact that some things—like the tariff reductions—will come into operation immediately, assuming the European Parliament agrees. But other areas, notably the ISDS/ICS, must wait for full ratification of the deal. That requires all of the EU’s 28 member states to go through national ratification processes, which will probably take several years” [ Ars Technica ]. “And despite what the commission would have you think, it is by no means certain that all the national parliaments will approve CETA.” More: 
+For example, a tweet by Katharina Nocun pointed out that left-wing and green parties could block its passage in Germany. At various times, there have been hints that other countries’ parliaments may not agree to the deal, but it’s not yet clear what the current situation is around the EU….. 
+Another serious threat to CETA’s coming into force are legal challenges. As part of the deal to obtain Wallonia’s permission to sign CETA, the EU agreed that the ICS framework would be examined by the EU’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). If the CJEU finds that the approach is incompatible with the EU’s fundamental principles, it will either have to be dropped from CETA (and TTIP ), or CETA itself will fall (as will TTIP). 
+In addition, there are two constitutional challenges to CETA, one in Canada , and one in Germany. 
+Good wrap-up of the state of play. 
+TTIP: ” A much-debated trade deal between the European Union and the United States is not dead and negotiations will continue with the new U.S. administration after November’s elections, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said on Saturday” [ Reuters ]. TTIP dresses up for Halloween. As a zombie! 
+TPP: “[new Zealand] Prime Minister John Key believes the TPP still has a 50-50 chance of being passed in the lame-duck Congressional period after the November 8 presidential election” [ Otago Daily Times ]. 
+TPP: “TPP Is Exciting. Let’s Make the Case for It” [Tyler Cown, Bloomberg ]. “So what then is the exciting, big-picture case for TPP? I say it’s to keep North America, and especially the U.S., the world’s leading economic cluster for the foreseeable future.” It’s a cluster, alright. 
+TPP: “Only 38 per cent of Japanese want to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, according to a survey published by the newspaper Nikkei, showing a growing public distrust of free trade agreements” [ The Advertiser ]. “The government of Japan under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has proposed to ratify the TPP before the end of the current parliamentary session, on November 30, in order to ensure that Japan is the first country to give its assent to the agreement.” 
+2016 
+Days until: 6. That’s less than a week! 
+Corruption 
+“If there is any lesson to be learned from the ghosts of Watergate, it is that the big-money support of a leader who has lost the ability to deliver the goods crumbles very quickly as the endgame unfolds” [ Of Two Minds ]. 
+Downballot 
+“Democrats are poised to gain seats in the House of Representatives this year, but with well over a dozen competitive races still viewed as tossups just one week before Election Day, the extent of that gain — and whether Republicans can stem the bleeding and keep a strong grip on their majority — remains uncertain” [ RealClearPolitics ]. “GOP insiders say their polling in swing districts has stabilized, and they feel energized by the news Friday that the FBI is looking into emails that could be related to its previously close investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server.” 
+“Hillary Clinton’s campaign has nearly taken up residence in North Carolina, strategically eyeing what it calls the “Checkmate State” as a way to soundly block Donald Trump’s path to the presidency” [ RealClearPolitics ]. As we wrote yesterday . 
+The Trail 
+I expected the Clinton campaign to have pulled up its dump truck and unloaded some serious oppo Monday or today; but so far as I can tell, all we have are damp squibs (1) and (2). Clearing the way for Wikileaks on Wednesday? 
+(1) “Why Trump’s Russian server connection is less suspicious than it sounds” [ Engadget ]; Franklin Foer’s original piece of crap piece here, in the Jeff Bezos Shopper’s lifestyle insert (I’m not dignifying it with square brackets because the reaction by tech twitter is universally derisive). 
+(2) “Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes” [ New York Times ]. “Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time.” I’ve helpfully underlined the weasel phrase. 
+Democrat Email Hairball 
+“Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, last year signed a $7,000-a-month contract with the foundation of a major Clinton donor who made a fortune selling a type of mortgage that some critics say contributed to the housing collapse, hacked emails show” [ Politico ]. How cozy! 
+” Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run” [Thomas Frank, Guardian ]. 
+[T]he emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers. 
+The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent. 
+They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves. 
+The good people. 
+Stats Watch 
+Purchasing Managers’ Manufacturing Index, October 2016: “A marked upturn in new orders leads a very positive manufacturing PMI” [ Econoday ]. “The increase in orders is centered in domestic demand though export orders also improved. Backlogs are another plus, rising to the best level in three months…. Based on this report, the manufacturing sector, after a flat year, is now accelerating into year end.” But: “There is nothing in the ISM or Markit reports that would leave one to think manufacturing is on the mend” [ Econintersect ]. 
+Institute For Supply Management Manufacturing Index, October 2016: “ISM’s manufacturing sample reported no better than moderate conditions [below consensus]. But new orders are a disappointment, still showing monthly growth but at a much slower rate” [ Econoday ]. “The construction sector, despite unusually low mortgage rates, has been struggling this year with the softness in single-family housing posing continued challenges for what is otherwise a strong new home market.” And: ” ISM employment index is not useful in understanding manufacturing jobs growth. The ISM employment index appears useful in predicting turning points which can lead the BLS data up to one year” [ Econintersect ]. 
+New Normal: “Another factor, too, is the productive capacity that was built up to support a consumption engine that is no longer running at full tilt. Companies have more equipment and infrastructure than they are currently using, and with unused capacity, there is little reason to invest in new equipment or technologies. This helps explain the weak rate of capital spending in GDP – and may also help answer the vexing question of why productivity gains are so anemic. After all, productivity might be enhanced by innovation, which requires research and investment” [ Econintersect ]. 
+Construction Spending, September 2016: “Construction spending remains weak but indications on housing do show limited improvement” [ Econoday ]. And: “well below the consensus forecast” [ Econintersect ]. But: “Overall, however – construction is now contracting after spending nearly 5 years expanding year-over-year. Still note that the rolling averages did improve” [ Econintersect ]. “But the confusion is that construction spending does not correlate to construction employment – casting doubt on the validity of one or both data sets.” 
+Housing: “Nearly half of the homes purchased in major cities in Florida are all cash buyers. Cleveland is also seeing nearly half of all home purchases being made with all cash” [ Doctor Housing Bubble ]. The “All Cash Buyer Percentage” in Miami is 54% (!), and in Los Angeles 20%. Cleveland, 45% and Pittsburgh, 42%. 
+Coops: “Today, National Cooperative Bank, known for providing banking solutions tailored to meet the needs of cooperatives nationwide, released its annual NCB Co-op 100®, listing the nation’s top 100 revenue-earning cooperative businesses. In 2015, these businesses posted revenue totaling approximately $223.8 billion. The NCB Co-op 100® remains the only annual report of its kind to track the profits and successes of cooperative businesses in the United States” [ Market Wired (DB)]. See also this list of coop-oriented podcasts . 
+Shipping: “Study shows e-commerce consumers are loyal to UPS, USPS, and FedEx… in that order” [ DC Velocity ]. Non-union trails… 
+Shipping: “Developers are having a harder time finding space for new warehouses in increasingly crowded and expensive U.S. cities. Their answer: build upward” [ Wall Street Journal , “Prologis to Build First Multistory Warehouse in the U.S.”]. “[M]ultistory warehouses are already common in countries like Japan and Singapore, as well as elsewhere in Asia and Europe, where vacant land is harder to find. ” Like New England mills… 
+Shipping: “None of the world’s biggest container-shipping companies is likely to post a profit this year, a top executive of French shipping giant CMA CGM said Monday” [ Wall Street Journal , “Grim Year Forecast for Big Shipping Firms”]. 
+Shipping: “A mainstay of the U.S. domestic shipping business is struggling to stay afloat. Lawyers who put International Shipholding Corp. into bankruptcy in July say they have a deal to bring the vessel owner’s troubled operations under the umbrella of a larger Florida-based maritime services firm. International Shipholding’s survival battle hasn’t gotten the attention of bigger turmoil in the global shipping business, but the 69-year-old company’s collapse highlights the impact that the downturn in demand is having across the entire shipping supply chain” [ Wall Street Journal ]. Wow. 
+Shipping: “The cascading of increasingly larger containerships from the Asia-Europe trade to smaller trades is set for a second, “potentially more destructive”, phase, with a new generation of ultra large container vessels moving into north-south lanes” [ Lloyd’s List ]. 
+Shipping: “A giant fire engulfed a beached tanker today killing at least ten workers at the Gadani shipbreaking area in Pakistan injuring another 50” [ Splash 247 ]. “A welding error led to a blast on the ship, which rapidly spread into a blaze with images and videos seen by Splash showing dark, vast plumes above the beached vessel.” 
+Shipping: “Over 90 percent of world trade moves by sea, but once cargo is on a ship, it enters a zone with little information about the path ships are taking or the stops they are making. Only in recent years have the largest ships begun regularly transmitting location data, and even now, a ship may stop its transmission and ‘go dark’ at any time” [ MIT Technology Review ]. 
+Honey for the Bears: “Economic Planning Associates Inc.’s (EPA) latest freight rail-car forecast for total deliveries in 2016 has edged up to 61,800 units from 60,300 units. But, weakness in the market for certain cars has prompted the firm to lower its estimate for 2017” [ Progressive Railroading ]. Another straw in the wind for 2017. “‘Strength in box cars, hi-cube covered hoppers and mid-sized hoppers prompted EPA to increase this year’s total delivery estimate. However, weaknesses in tank cars, coal cars, flat cars and mill gons will serve to lower 2017 assemblies to 41,000,’ stated EPA’s report, which was released yesterday. ‘After a further easing to 40,000 car deliveries in 2018, demand for rail cars will rebound on an annual basis, reaching 51,500 cars in 2021.'” 
+Fodder for the Bulls: “But as the year has progressed, worries about the state of the world’s second-largest economy have abated as economic data have firmed. There’s a bevy of evidence from domestic figures and other metrics sensitive to the state of the Chinese economy now showing that the nation isn’t in the midst of a disruptive downturn” [ Bloomberg ]. 
+Apparel: “In an industry famous for shrouding the connection between what it costs to manufacture garments and accessories, and the price that consumers pay for those items, Everlane seemingly fills a void; hence, its success. Price transparency aside, on the heels an array of garment manufacturing-related tragedies in recent years and amongst a larger call – particularly from millennials – for more ethically sound garments, Everlane founder and CEO, Michael Preysman, a former Investment Associate, saw a business opportunity in ethically made clothing” [ The Fashion Law ]. “In accordance with Everlane’s motto, we ask: Why would a brand based on transparency not list its factories?… Making vague and unsubstantiated claims in lieu of providing cold hard facts is a common trend that runs through the Everlane model.” 
+Commodities: “BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s biggest miner, is hot for electric vehicles” [ Bloomberg ]. “”As you see more renewables and EVs, we also will see an impact on copper demand,” Fiona Wild, BHP’s vice president, sustainability and climate change, said Tuesday at a conference in Shanghai hosted by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. ‘EVs at the moment have about 80 kilograms of copper in them. As they become more efficient, you see a greater amount of copper in those vehicles, so there’s always upside for copper.'” NOTE: “Bloomberg New Energy Finance” is listed on the cover of the McKinsey report on self-driving cars (PDF), whose infamous footnote 17 is analyzed here . They seem to have provided much of the data, including data for Exhibit 10. Talking their book? 
+Commodities: “A slump in demand for iron ore and coal in Europe has resulted in a marked decrease in dry bulk throughput at the Port of Rotterdam. In the first nine months of the year, it handled 60.3m tonnes of dry bulk, or 7.8% lower than the same period last year, the port said” [ Lloyd’s List ]. 
+The Bezzle: “Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies” [ National Bureau of Economic Research ]. “Passengers have faced a history of discrimination in transportation systems. Peer transportation companies such as Uber and Lyft present the opportunity to rectify long-standing discrimination or worsen it. We sent passengers in Seattle, WA and Boston, MA to hail nearly 1,500 rides on controlled routes and recorded key performance metrics. Results indicated a pattern of discrimination, which we observed in Seattle through longer waiting times for African American passengers—as much as a 35 percent increase. In Boston, we observed discrimination by Uber drivers via more frequent cancellations against passengers when they used African American-sounding names. Across all trips, the cancellation rate for African American sounding names was more than twice as frequent compared to white sounding names.” 
+Political Risk: “Variations in the market’s performance under Democratic and Republican administrations, measured by the average of yearly returns over more than 160 years, are so small as to be negligible, said Vanguard senior investment strategist Jonathan Lemco, a former professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University” [ Bloomberg ]. “A recent survey did show that the election ;is causing U.S. voters high anxiety . ;But according to readings of the CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX, the level of market anxiety is pretty normal, said Lemco. Volatility “hasn’t exceeded normal levels for a presidential election year, and there is no indication that it will deviate from typical patterns after the election,” he wrote in a recent report .” 
+“Issues about morality, the market, and the constitutional order should have been central to the policy debate about macroeconomics. They weren’t. The standard policy frame eliminated them from discussion, causing a chasm in the policy debate in which the common framework shared by Keynes and Hayek disappeared” [ Evonomics ]. “Market fundamentalists incorrectly were portrayed as heartless and uncaring about the poor by followers of Keynes. Keynesians were incorrectly portrayed as unthinking supporters of big government by followers of Hayek. 
+Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 22 Fear (previous close: 30, Fear) [ CNN ]. One week ago: 48 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 1 at 12:30pm. Nobody standing between Mr. Market and the pitchforks? 
+Big Brother Is Watching You Watch 
+“How Despots Use Twitter to Hunt Dissidents” [ Bloomberg ]. For years, Twitter has offered access to its “Firehose”—the global deluge of tweets, half a billion a day—to a number of companies that monitor social media. Some of those companies resell the information—mostly to marketers, but also to governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Some of these authorities use the data to track dissidents, as Bloomberg Businessweek has learned through dozens of interviews with industry insiders and more than 100 requests for public records from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. There’s nothing illegal about selling Twitter data, but it’s uncomfortable for a company that promotes itself as a medium for free speech and protest.” One more reason Twitter should be a coop? 
+Standing Rock and #NoDAPL 
+“Did #DAPL Security Worker Wielding an AR-15 Rifle Try to Infiltrate Native Water Protectors?” [ Democracy Now!] ” More details are emerging from Thursday, including video footage of a man who appears to be a Dakota Access security contractor holding a rifle, with his face covered by a bandana, apparently attempting to infiltrate a group of water protectors. A Standing Rock Sioux tribal member says he saw the man driving down Highway 1806 toward the main resistance camp with an AR-15 rifle on the passenger side of his truck. Protectors chased down his truck and then pursued him on foot in efforts to disarm him. In the video, the man can be seen pointing the rifle at the protectors as he attempts to flee into the water. He was ultimately arrested by Bureau of Indian Affairs police. Protectors say inside the man’s truck they found a DAPL security ID card and insurance papers listing his vehicle as insured by DAPL. ” 
+Winter supplies for the protesters: Firewood is #1 [ Sacred Stone Camp ]. So if you’ve got a truck and a couple of cords… 
+“How to Talk About #NoDAPL: A Native Perspective” [ Truthout ]. “In discussing #NoDAPL, too few people have started from a place of naming that we, as Indigenous people, have a right to defend our water and our lives, simply because we have a natural right to defend ourselves and our communities. When ‘climate justice,’ in a very broad sense, becomes the center of conversation, our fronts of struggle are often reduced to a staging ground for the messaging of NGOs.” 
+“Dakota Access pipeline protests: UN group investigates human rights abuses” [ Guardian ]. “‘When you look at what the international standards are for the treatment of people, and you are in a place like the United States, it’s really astounding to hear some of this testimony,’ said Roberto Borrero, a representative of the International Indian Treaty Council.” 
+“At least 1.3 million people had ‘checked in’ to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation on Facebook as a show of support for activists trying to block the pipeline, after one user claimed that authorities were tracking protesters on social media. The Sheriff’s Department said Monday that the claim was ‘absolutely false'” [ Los Angeles Times ]. So can I take that as a confirmation? Anyhow, “ strength of weak ties” with Facebook, but at least the logic is “I am Spartacus!” 
+Black Injustice Tipping Point 
+“Like Abusive Policing, Denial of Access to Mortgage Credit for Black Americans is a Growing Crisis” [ Institute for New Economic Thinking ]. “In a report commissioned by the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, Carr and co-author Michela Zonta report that homeownership for black people right now is shockingly low — less than the national rate during the Great Depression, which stood around 43-44 percent.” 
+Class Warfare 
+“Opioid overdoses among kids, teens have nearly tripled in recent years” [ New York Times (DK)]. 
+“[C]ollectively, mergers at [the scale of the proposed $85 billion combination of AT&T and Time Warner] are reconfiguring the American economy in ways that seem to be tilting the scales toward the interests of ever-larger corporations, to the broad detriment of labor” [Eduardo Porter, New York Times ]. “As Senator John Sherman, the principal author of the nation’s core antimonopoly law, put it more than a century ago, a monopoly ‘commands the price of labor without fear of strikes, for in its field it allows no competitors.'” 
+News of the Wired 
+Exhaustive compilation of reaction to the Apple MacBook Pro event [ Milen.me ]. “From where I’m standing, Apple are redefining (shrinking) their target audience for the Mac platform. If you feel left out by the latest updates and the neglect on the desktop, it’s simple as Apple deciding not to serve your segment’s needs. I know that it can feel quite personal to Mac devotees, like me, but it’s simply business and strategy.” In other words, the rollout wasn’t a debacle; Apple has decided it doesn’t want to serve the professional market any more (including, one would have thought critically, the market in content creation). Since the Mac accounts for 10% of Apple’s revenues, that may be a rational business decision. But if Cook really thinks “the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop” he’s delusional, and I don’t care if he paid for a marketing study. I own both and I know. The ultimate strength of the Mac was always the Human Interface Guidelines — gradually being crapified as iOS idioms infest OS X — which imposed a similar “look and feel” across all applications that ran on the Mac platform. It would be nice if Ubuntu, say, could achieve the same thing. Sadly, that doesn’t seem likely, for reasons both technical and cultural. My first Mac was a 512KE. It was a good run. 
+* * * 
+Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here . And here’s today’s plant (Rex): 
+Rex wrote: 
+Attached is a folder of some of the bees and wasps that frequent a patch of mint in my front yard. The mint is in a half wine barrel and wired to keep the goats from eating all of it. These wasps are only a few of the many different species I see, every morning the thing is abuzz with dozens of types of pollinators. Wasps, hornets, bees, flies… 
+As a WASP, I appreciate this! 
+Readers, Water Cooler is a standalone entity, not supported by the very successful Naked Capitalism fundraiser just past. Now, I understand you may feel tapped out, but when and if you are able, please use the dropdown to choose your contribution, and then click the hat! Your tip will be welcome today, and indeed any day. Water Cooler will not exist without your continued help. Donate 0 0 0 0 0 0 This entry was posted in Water Cooler on by Lambert Strether . About Lambert Strether 
+Lambert Strether has been blogging, managing online communities, and doing system administration 24/7 since 2003, in Drupal and WordPress. Besides political economy and the political scene, he blogs about rhetoric, software engineering, permaculture, history, literature, local politics, international travel, food, and fixing stuff around the house. The nom de plume “Lambert Strether” comes from Henry James’s The Ambassadors: “Live all you can. It’s a mistake not to.” You can follow him on Twitter at @lambertstrether. http://www.correntewire.com",FAKE
+1508,5 things to watch in tonight’s GOP debate,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+8346,Assange tells the sordid truth about the US elections,"VIDEOS Assange tells the sordid truth about the US elections There’s so much information that it’s difficult to see the large mosaic created by the tiny parts By Daisy Luther - November 8, 2016 
+When you put together everything we’ve learned about the corruption in our government and electoral system, it paints an ugly picture. There’s so much information that it’s difficult to see the large mosaic created by the tiny parts. 
+UPDATED: Today, Julian Assange made a statement about the election . In recent months, WikiLeaks and I personally have come under enormous pressure to stop publishing what the Clinton campaign says about itself to itself. That pressure has come from the campaign’s allies, including the Obama administration, and from liberals who are anxious about who will be elected US President. On the eve of the election, it is important to restate why we have published what we have. The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks – an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself. Our organization defends the public’s right to be informed. This is why, irrespective of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election, the real victor is the US public which is better informed as a result of our work. The US public has thoroughly engaged with WikiLeaks’ election related publications which number more than one hundred thousand documents. Millions of Americans have poured over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us. It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment. We publish material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere. When we have material that fulfills this criteria , we publish. We had information that fit our editorial criteria which related to the Sanders and Clinton campaign (DNC Leaks) and the Clinton political campaign and Foundation (Podesta Emails). No-one disputes the public importance of these publications. It would be unconscionable for WikiLeaks to withhold such an archive from the public during an election. At the same time, we cannot publish what we do not have. To date, we have not received information on Donald Trump’s campaign, or Jill Stein’s campaign, or Gary Johnson’s campaign or any of the other candidates that fufills our stated editorial criteria. As a result of publishing Clinton’s cables and indexing her emails we are seen as domain experts on Clinton archives. So it is natural that Clinton sources come to us. We publish as fast as our resources will allow and as fast as the public can absorb it. That is our commitment to ourselves, to our sources, and to the public. This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election. The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers. I spoke at the launch of the campaign for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, because her platform addresses the need to protect them. This is an issue that is close to my heart because of the Obama administration’s inhuman and degrading treatment of one of our alleged sources, Chelsea Manning. But WikiLeaks publications are not an attempt to get Jill Stein elected or to take revenge over Ms Manning’s treatment either. Publishing is what we do. To withhold the publication of such information until after the election would have been to favour one of the candidates above the public’s right to know. This is after all what happened when the New York Times withheld evidence of illegal mass surveillance of the US population for a year until after the 2004 election, denying the public a critical understanding of the incumbent president George W Bush, which probably secured his reelection. The current editor of the New York Times has distanced himself from that decision and rightly so. The US public defends free speech more passionately, but the First Amendment only truly lives through its repeated exercise. The First Amendment explicitly prevents the executive from attempting to restrict anyone’s ability to speak and publish freely. The First Amendment does not privilege old media, with its corporate advertisers and dependencies on incumbent power factions, over WikiLeaks’ model of scientific journalism or an individual’s decision to inform their friends on social media. The First Amendment unapologetically nurtures the democratization of knowledge. With the Internet, it has reached its full potential. Yet, some weeks ago, in a tactic reminiscent of Senator McCarthy and the red scare, Wikileaks, Green Party candidate Stein, Glenn Greenwald and Clinton’s main opponent were painted with a broad, red brush. The Clinton campaign, when they were not spreading obvious untruths, pointed to unnamed sources or to speculative and vague statements from the intelligence community to suggest a nefarious allegiance with Russia. The campaign was unable to invoke evidence about our publications—because none exists. In the end, those who have attempted to malign our groundbreaking work over the past four months seek to inhibit public understanding perhaps because it is embarrassing to them – a reason for censorship the First Amendment cannot tolerate. Only unsuccessfully do they try to claim that our publications are inaccurate. WikiLeaks’ decade-long pristine record for authentication remains. Our key publications this round have even been proven through the cryptographic signatures of the companies they passed through, such as Google. It is not every day you can mathematically prove that your publications are perfect but this day is one of them. We have endured intense criticism, primarily from Clinton supporters, for our publications. Many long-term supporters have been frustrated because we have not addressed this criticism in a systematic way or responded to a number of false narratives about Wikileaks’ motivation or sources. Ultimately, however, if WL reacted to every false claim, we would have to divert resources from our primary work. WikiLeaks, like all publishers, is ultimately accountable to its funders. Those funders are you. Our resources are entirely made up of contributions from the public and our book sales. This allows us to be principled, independent and free in a way no other influential media organization is. But it also means that we do not have the resources of CNN, MSNBC or the Clinton campaign to constantly rebuff criticism. Yet if the press obeys considerations above informing the public, we are no longer talking about a free press, and we are no longer talking about an informed public. Wikileaks remains committed to publishing information that informs the public, even if many, especially those in power, would prefer not to see it. WikiLeaks must publish. It must publish and be damned. 
+In this enlightening interview, Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks , puts it all together in an easy-to-understand synopsis. Via Daisy Luther Featured Image: Joe Mesa/Flickr Daisy Luther is a single mom who lives in a small village in the mountains of Northern California, where she homeschools her youngest daughter and raises veggies, chickens, and a motley assortment of dogs and cats. She is a best-selling author who has written several books, including The Organic Canner , The Pantry Primer: A Prepper’s Guide to Whole Food on a Half-Price Budget , and The Prepper’s Water Survival Guide: Harvest, Treat, and Store Your Most Vital Resource . Daisy is a prolific blogger who has been widely republished throughout alternative media. On her website, The Organic Prepper , Daisy uses her background in alternative journalism to provide a unique perspective on health, self-reliance, personal liberty, and preparedness. You can follow her on Facebook , Pinterest , and Twitter .",FAKE
+9035,The Corbett Report: Accept no substitutes!,"10/27/2016 at 10:24 pm 
+Noticed you were inactive and glad you’ve recovered from your illnesses. All the best to you and you family- On the fake Corbett websites, Can you blame them? We all want to be you James! At least, we all strive to be the great researcher you’re teaching us to be! Keep up the great work.",FAKE
+4537,The dark age of congressional warfare: Inside Obama’s last State of the Union & the fight for the future of government,"Recall those heady days seven years ago when President-elect Obama’s promise to unite the two parties to work for the common good was still an article of faith among the true believers. The fact that he had managed to transcend America’s great original sin to become the first African American president was an amazing political feat but too many people, including some in the administration and at times the president himself, understood that to mean that he had pacified the Republicans. During the transition, the assumption was that there was a unique opportunity to solve all the big problems at once due to this unique historical moment.
+
+On January 15, 2009, EJ Dionne of the Washington Post wrote a column called “Audacity without Ideology” that laid out the administration’s thinking:
+
+There are at least three keys to understanding Obama’s approach to (and avoidance of) ideology. There is, first, his simple joy in testing himself against those who disagree with him. Someone who knows the president-elect well says that he likes talking with philosophical adversaries more than with allies. But Obama’s anti-ideological turn is also a functional one for a progressive, at least for now. Since Ronald Reagan, ideology has been the terrain of the right. Many of the programs that conservatives have pushed have been based more on faith in their worldview than on empirical tests. How else could conservatives claim that cutting taxes would actually increase government revenue, or that trickle-down economic approaches were working when the evidence of middle-class incomes said otherwise?
+
+The second key was the quite obvious fact that the economy would require liberal solutions with which nobody on the right could possibly disagree so there was no need to even talk about ideology. Obama could just subsume all objections under “mountain of data” and that would be that.
+
+The third key was the “telltale notions” that would define his presidency: “sacrifice,” “grand bargain” and “sustainability.” Sacrifice was the benefits people would have to give up in order that the president could reform the government from top to bottom. This would entail figuring out a way to control health care costs, cut the “entitlements” and get limits on carbon emissions. And because this was all just simple common sense and so very pragmatic, the political system could have no objections.  Dionne described it his way:
+
+The economy was in freefall, the election had been decisive and the new president came in with a congressional majority so it was reasonable for the Democrats to believe they had a mandate. But despite the fact that there had been a bogus impeachment, a stolen election and a war based upon lies, the president didn’t seem to have truly recognized what the Republican Party had become. They were not on board with his plan to “pragmatically solve problems” and everyone should have been crystal clear on that when the Senate could only get three Republicans (Collins, Snow and Specter) to vote for a stimulus package to deal with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
+
+By the time the Democrats started putting together a health care plan, the Tea Party had been formed and a plan was in place. Senator Jim DeMint was declaring, “if we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo.” They did everything they could but they couldn’t stop it. Obamacare passed on a party line vote and a year later, Senator Mitch McConnell said, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Republicans didn’t even pretend to be dealing in good faith and decided that their midterm victory meant they had a mandate to control the government from one house of Congress. The result was the debt ceiling crisis, a government shutdown and sequestration. The president proposed his Grand Bargain idea of cutting Social Security but the Tea Party would have none of it as long as the White House insisted on getting some revenue from the wealthy.  It was hopeless. As former Obama administration staff member Dan Pfeiffer said, “He had hopes of being able to change the polarization, not just in the country, but in Washington.” But they learned it was a lot harder than they thought. Pfeiffer said it was President Obama’s biggest regret that he had not been able to deliver on that promise. But nobody could have delivered on that promise. The polarization that exists today has always been with us. What’s new is that the two parties are now divided ideologically when in the past the ideological divide existed within both of them. Our system, with all of its checks and balances, doesn’t work very efficiently under such conditions. Thinking about this recent history inevitably makes you wonder what will happen with the next president. It’s logical to assume that if one of the Republicans wins next November this dynamic would change. One of the most frightening political scenarios imaginable is one in which a President Trump or Cruz wins the presidency and has a congressional majority to help them enact their agenda. But it pays to keep in mind that President Obama had that (for an admittedly short period) along with a major crisis which demanded government action. We know how that turned out. There’s no guarantee that this would happen under a Trump administration, of course. But he is so eccentric (to put it politely) that he would likely find himself at odds with his own party on much of his agenda. It’s very hard to see how such a person could even function. A President Cruz is a much clearer proposition. His party establishment has no love for him but he is smart and resourceful and would likely hit the ground running with a plan to enact his agenda. But like President Obama, he would likely have a very short window in which to do it. It’s fair to assume he’s aware of that. Whether any of the so-called establishment candidates get that is an unknown but both Bush and Kasich have been out of Washington for a long time and Rubio seems to be oblivious to its current dynamics.  But regardless of which one might win, the first two years of a GOP administration with a GOP majority would be a very dangerous time. One assumes the Democrats are all fully aware of what they are dealing with at this point. With the Republicans still in full extremist mode, unless the Democrats win an unprecedented landslide (very unlikely in this polarized political environment) a progressive agenda will probably only be fulfilled around the edges. There are no more illusions of Grand Bargains and changing the polarized political system through pragmatic policies designed to give everyone a little of what they want. Until these Republicans sober up, the best we can hope for is that Democrats can keep the GOP from dismantling every bit of progress that’s been made over the past half century and stop them from starting World War III. There’s nothing more important than that.",REAL
+9527,"Awesome Video Shows The REAL Donald Trump, Presidential Candidate","Donald Trump is loud, rude, bombastic and just awful , right? 
+That’s what the media is telling you. 
+They’ll play the awful Billy Bush audiotape over and over again, repeat comments he made decades ago about women, and recycle his “What an awful woman!” comment during the debate. 
+But that’s the side of Donald Trump the media wants you to see. 
+Perhaps the real Donald Trump is soft-spoken, humble, thoughtful and intelligent. 
+In a short video announcing the opening of his new hotel in Washington (a revitalization of the old Post Office in the district), Trump speaks about what it took to get the building remodeled. 
+He used the work on the post office as a metaphor for rebuilding America. 
+“This building is an historical landmark, a true American original,” he said. “It had all the ingredients of greatness, but it has been neglected and left to deteriorate for many, many decades. It sat there so beautiful and so empty and was falling into a very, very bad state of condition. 
+It had the foundation for success. All of the elements were here. Our job was to restore it to its former glory, honor its heritage, but also to imagine a brand new and exciting vision.” 
+Everyone should watch this video: 
+No yelling, no screaming. Just Donald Trump explaining how to make America great again.",FAKE
+5636,A Transformational November of Taking a Stand,"Leave a reply 
+Henry Seltzer – The astrology of November features Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Eris. All the outer planets are strongly represented in the New Moon and Full Moon configurations, so that, as the month continues to unfold, our awareness of the transformational intensity of these times that we are living through is ever-present. The October 30th New Moon sets the stage for this powerful November cycle, bringing forward into the picture the astrological factor of thoughtful Mercury, in close conjunction with the Sun and Moon that day, and representing greater consciousness and a species of abstract logical analysis. 
+The sign placement of these personal planets being Scorpio becomes an added factor of emotional intensity that stirs us deeply, especially when we consider that Mercury is in partile or same-degree trine formation with the Pisces placement of numinous Neptune. We are therefore this entire month experiencing a compassionate and a highly idealized time of recognizing what we all hold deep inside ourselves, that directly connects with, and supports and underlies, the surface details of all our activities in the visible physical plane that we more consciously inhabit. 
+As befits this Scorpionic time of the year, the surface layers of our more normative comings and goings are only part of the story now, with the vast unseen realm of unconscious process taking a major role in the characterization of this month’s true activity. 
+Neptune, along with the other outer planets, represents access to numinous realities beyond the purely physical, the significant life of our deep internal process. This is the vast unconscious realm, deep within, which Freud and Jung first annunciated in the early 20th century, and which finds even greater credence today. The highlighted placements of Uranus with Eris, and of Saturn and Pluto, complete the roster of planetary significators, also including Venus in close aspect with Mercury and Mars at the timing of the mid-month Full Moon that punctuates this rather intense monthly cycle. 
+The new planet, Eris, beyond Pluto, only named as recently as 2006, represents the astrological archetype of Spiritual Warrior: that is to say the determination to stand up for what one most deeply believes, at soul level. This energy is strongly highlighted now, and is thus prominent on our inner radar, because still within little more than a degree of Uranus, and closely squared by Mars, in the timing of the New Moon that initiates the Scorpio cycle. 
+The question that comes up for everyone quite poignantly these days is whether you can find that inner urge for true achievement, what you feel, at the most profound level, that you must, at all costs, accomplish in this lifetime. This might have nothing to do with success in the eyes of the world, but is nevertheless vital from the standpoint of an inner drive, deep within, for what feels most important. 
+This month of November represents quite a ride. When we see in the timing of the First Quarter Moon of Monday, November 7th, that the Sun and Moon are closely aligned with both Saturn and Pluto, in the same degree that they occupy, in the two signs between, and that Saturn is almost exactly in parallel aspect with Pluto, we can be sure that in some profound and completely individual fashion, the structure of our lives is changing. 
+We can see this also in the collective, where this thought can give us courage as we come to understand that we are not hopelessly enmired in an existing status quo, but that everything, even the underlying social fabric of our lives, is in serious flux. 
+With the Full Moon of the following Monday, November 14th, at the 22 degree mark of Scorpio, the same degree that Eris occupies in Aries, we come to a culmination of these remarkable two weeks, the launch point for the remainder of the November cycle. We come as well to a better understanding of what we have going on deep within us. This includes the necessity for standing up for ourselves, and for our most deeply held values, no matter what. SF Source Astrograph Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+5739,3 More Emotions Men Should Master,"  3 More Emotions Men Should Master 3 More Emotions Men Should Master 
+André is a young European who left his decaying country in 2012 for greener pastures. He enjoys exploring subterranean places, reading about a host of interconnected topics, and yearns for Tradition. November 3, 2016 Mind 
+Passions and emotions are an almost bottomless pit. Start digging there and you will find new ones, or new relations between this and that tidbit of emotional content. So-called Enlightenment philosophers who tried to theorize the passions—something that had been done at greater length, actually, by Thomas Aquinas—could never agree on how many there were or even how much they exactly mattered in the course of life. 
+Whether or not you have been reading my last two pieces on the topic, remember this is about mastering passions in the most general sense. This is not only about emotional restraint or seduction. Our own emotional states are the first in line, but mastering the passions is also about spotting what other people are feeling, how they can be led to a specific course of action, and what tends to make them tick. Mastering the passions is far from evident, it rather takes times and experience: the concepts and directions I am providing here aim at giving some conscious clarity about things that are by nature a bit muddy. 
+Artists, though they often suffer from mental problems, are skilled at painting a particular vision in vivid colours, allowing their public to share a specific point of view and emotional state. This is something the elite know very well. Critics trashed Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged because they could see themselves painted there as passive-aggressive cultural parasites. Rand’s novel was more cogent, and attracted more heat, than her barely original “philosophical” pieces today sold at the cheapest price on the second-hand book market. 
+More recently, the movie The Fall (2004) got backlashed by some of the mainstream media on the grounds that it depicted Hitler as “too human.” While seeing actor Bruno Ganz pondering, eating, talking to his closest company or getting angry, the viewer could perhaps feel a bit of empathy to him. Which is, of course, unacceptable to a Left that clings to the idea of a crazy, careless, “inhuman” dictator to be forever cast as an embodiment of evil. Hollywood directors do not like witnessing others competing with their own emotional mastery. 
+We need artists, as well as qualified cultural critics, to take some distance from the mainstream propaganda disguised as entertainment and expand an alternative culture and artworks. Emotions explored in the present series can be used just that way. 1. Gratitude 
+Gratitude denotes a trained and refined disposition. Being graceful means “recognizing that the good in our life can come from something that is outside us and outside our control” (Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell , chap.8, p.61). It focuses on positive things we already have and that cannot be ascribed to our sole merit or efforts. 
+The traditional world, whatever the particular cultural or religious form it was embodied into, always emphasized the necessity of being grateful. You owed your existence to God, to your family and your community. None of these goods were actually deserved, which meant you had to be grateful for them and repay them by being a dutiful member of the community as well as a dutiful father for your own children. A lot of prayers and ancient rites imply a thanksgiving for what one already has. 
+Moving later in time, it is striking to see that modern progressivism breeds the exact opposite mindset. The ideology of rights make many goods granted, not a “thank you for” but an “I have a right to.” Neophilia (the relentless pursuit of novelty) always casts a bad shadow on what has been around for some time, as if what was coming later was always better. 
+Advertisement, gossip culture, economic growth pressure, quest for victimhood lead to envy and always being more or less frustrated with what one already has, regardless of what it is. By leading us to always want more, progressivism makes us oblivious to what we already have or how it does not stem from pure individual merit—and, when it flatters the ego, it makes us complacent and far from cultivating the art of being thankful. 
+Turning our backs from the modern, ungraceful mindset is easier said than done. To start with: loud-mouthed girls should be remembered they owe their nice, luxurious workplaces to the men who built them, LGBTBBQ should thank their heterosexual parents and ancestors for their very lives, anti-white black activists should remember they would not even exist had their ancestors not benefited from their white colonizers healthcare technology. Feel free to expand the list. Ultimately, I think, every person who is modern or westernized enough can be outed as ungraceful for something. 2. Trust 
+A famous study showed that multiculturalism was closely correlated with defiance and a lack of trust in each other. Provided that we enlarge a bit our definition of multiculturalism, this absolutely makes sense. Some ethnic groups are especially prone to violence, and some “minority” groups are rewarded for freely accusing the silent majority, but the hegemony of political correctness made it a taboo. Communities have been fragmented by individualism, i.e. each person looking to take as much as she can, and by an “antiracist” white guilt that soon became an intra-white generalized suspicion of “racism.” People do not identify anymore with the larger society and often cannot even identify with a smaller community—which makes everyone else a potential enemy. 
+Yet, without trust, life becomes unbearable. If you can’t go to the streets without the possibility of getting mugged by, say, BLM activists , or go to a family meal without the prospect of a lukewarm struggle with aging leftist parents, or have a relationship with a girl without the possibility of her making a false rape accusation , there aren’t a lot of things you can do on the long run. Without trust in other people, you have to trust the complex of big corporations, NGO, and State institutions we call the system—and be dependent from it for things as basic as food and shelter. 
+Only trust in each other can make life sustainable and long-term projects workable. To re-create trust, we have to make people accountable and bound to precise rules, reward good behaviours while punishing bad ones. Actions must bear consequences. But before neomasculinity gets into power, men should strive to establish a reputation through reliability, persistence, and a strong mindset. I could wager you have been more trusting of your Facebook friends last years than of the mainstream media , the former conveying more trustworthy information than the latter. 3. Desire 
+Modern capitalism and progressivism always ran on desire. Want cheaper prices? More goods? Better goods? More TV channels to watch? More monies? More ego and thinking you are the hot shit? Well, just buy in X or do some work for Y, and here it is… um, nah, you just have to do some more, and some more, and some more. In the end, you forgot why exactly you are doing what you’re doing, or why you started to watch TV. But it all started with you led to perform something, no matter how surreptitiously framed as spontaneous or normal it was. 
+The system plays on desires in three ways. It sets things to be desired, things to be feared or never desired at all, and things to be consummated without end. Things to be desired include everything the advertisement wants you to desire, like a revolving credit, a new sofa, an SUV or whatever, as well as the next step of “ progress ” as it has been elaborated on the top of the pyramid. 
+Things to be feared are where the system wants you to be resigned and fatalistic: did you ever feel sad to see all these girls losing themselves into a sea of fat, bitching, and SJW-propaganda spouting? Too bad, that’s globalization, resistance is futile, move on! At last, things to be consummated are mainly produced to keep you busy and programmed though you are not really practising anything beyond staring at a screen. 
+Lately, an important shift has been happening between the first and third ways to play on desires. Decades before, the average consumer had to desire owning more junk or being part of the “progress”: the system needed him to work and monitor his peers. Today, the junk is already everywhere, PC culture is already hegemonic, and the average American worker is no longer needed. Active desire is not needed anymore. 
+Thus, the system has shifted into making the average Joe more passive. Instead of actually desiring more, the consumer should be content with surrogates of everything—pseudo-group identity with team sports, pseudo-sports with football and basket on TV, pseudo-sex with porn, pseudo-life with video games, pseudo-family life with animals, pseudo-expertise when the average libtard obnoxiously parrots the media on everything. This is Brzezinski’s tittytainment in a nutshell. 
+Even if you don’t give up on having a real life instead of a surrogate, the system will still want you to desire things only for yourself, thus retreating into individualism, instead of trying to actually weight on the world. Either you surrender to “the progress” or you try to ignore it before it comes for you. As if nothing could change. 
+Don’t let the elite frame the world according to its own interests. Desire self-realization and weighting on the course of the world. Of course, our female counterparts should desire being loving, caretaking, and definitely on our side. To conclude this series 
+Once again, it is hard to sketch in a few words what could be done with passions or emotions. What I have mostly dwelled into is how those already in power manipulate them and what we could do as to take them back. If you find the topic worthy of interest, you can expand it in two directions: first, documenting yourself on a particular passion or emotion, and second, using some by stirring it with a certain aim in mind. 
+In the former case, I would recommend Neel Burton’s Heaven and Hell (quoted several times in the course of this series) as a point of departure. In the latter, being creative or simply assertive is up to you. Whether this looks more like efforts or self-persuasion or artistry does not matter much. 
+Here, as well as in seduction, a tight framing is key. Whatever the topic, no vocabulary and no picture are really neutral, which is a problem as our perception and thinking orientation are often conditioned by these. The mastery of emotions is reinforced—and reinforces—the mastery of representations. If this sounds far-fetched, let me provide some examples of use, examples you are absolutely free to expand as it suits you. 
+In the comments space, several guys here have been giving a very negative portrayal of the nice guy: he would be a fake, a “sneaky bastard,” a “jerk.” So guys who want to get laid or have their own interests, just as everyone else, are jerks? This looks like internalized feminist thinking. In my opinion, nice guys should elicit empathy, which goes through a positive portrayal emphasizing their willingness to respect the girl or how they were likely raised by an unmanly culture. 
+A recent ROK piece about mainstream media has shown how these are making a conscious effort to hide and de-legimitate white victimhood: they paint vividly any crime where the victim is non-white and the perpetrator is, but mention no detail or do not mention at all any crime perpetrated by non-white(s) on white(s). 
+The same pattern appears in the movie Elysium (2013), when the (of course) white villain mentions children she wants to protect from a mass of brown invaders, yet these children are never shown and consequently stir no empathy from the average watcher, whereas the brown-skinned are vividly depicted as humane and not responsible for their own poverty. 
+Analyzing these phenomena is fine, but ultimately insufficient. Creative people on our side have to provide an alternative that includes mastered emotions. Picking up girls is part of, and gives some experience in, this wider game.",FAKE
+5043,Voting rights rulings could deal blow to Republicans in 2016 elections,"Shortly after Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, the former chair of the North Carolina Republican party wrote an anxious postmortem saying something had to be done about the students and black voters whose unprecedented turnout had turned the state blue for the first time in 32 years.
+
+The alternative, the former state chair Jack Hawke wrote, was that the country would “continue to slide toward socialism”.
+
+That “something” turned out to be a notorious omnibus law – better known to its detractors as the “monster law” – passed by a Republican-majority state legislature in 2013. The legislation gutted many of the progressive voting rules that had contributed to Obama’s razor-thin margin in the state: same-day registration, a lengthy early voting period and out-of-precinct voting by provisional ballot – all favored disproportionately by African American voters and students. The law also introduced a strict voter ID requirement, with the anticipated effect of suppressing Democratic votes even further.
+
+Had the law stood, it could have been the biggest setback for voting rights in North Carolina since the Jim Crow era, a brazen attempt by conservatives to upend the rules of democratic engagement and block access to groups most likely to oppose them. The Republicans have sought to couch their maneuvering in more benign terms, as a form of justifiable partisan warfare. Hawke noted in his postmortem that the Democrats had been motivated, united and well-financed in 2008, and said it was up to the Republicans to respond in kind.
+
+That argument has come crashing down, following a flurry of remarkable court rulings over the past two weeks accusing North Carolina and three other Republican-run states – Wisconsin, Kansas and Texas – of violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act and intentionally discriminating against African Americans and other classes of voters. State and federal judges have struck down laws that could have given the Republicans a significant edge in close races this November, lifting the spirits of voting rights activists who have been campaigning against such laws for more than a decade.
+
+“Winning an election does not empower anyone in any party to engage in purposeful racial discrimination,” the fourth circuit court of appeals ruled in the North Carolina case on Friday. “When a legislature dominated by one party has dismantled barriers to African American access to the franchise, even if done to gain votes, ‘politics as usual’ does not allow a legislature dominated by the other party to re-erect those barriers.”
+
+The omnibus law has been almost entirely swept away and is now unlikely to be resurrected in any form before November, when Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will be fighting over every vote in North Carolina, where recent polls show them less than two points apart.
+
+In Kansas, which is not a swing state, a state court pushed back against an attempt by the state’s top Republican elections official, Kris Kobach, to prevent an estimated 17,500 Kansans from voting in state and local races even though they have been recognized as eligible by federal courts. They will now be allowed to participate fully in primary elections this Tuesday.
+
+In Texas, also not a swing state, a federal appeals court has ordered the state government to find a remedy for eligible voters unable to comply with the country’s single most restrictive and blatantly partisan voter ID law – a law recognizing concealed-carry weapons permits as valid ID but not student cards from state universities.
+
+And in Wisconsin, which is a swing state, the federal courts have delivered a double rebuke to Governor Scott Walker and his contention that one of the country’s most efficiently run election systems was in need of a major overhaul. One federal judge ruled last week that eligible voters unable to meet the requirements of the state’s voter ID law could instead produce an affidavit attesting to their identity. On Friday, a different federal judge struck down much of Wisconsin’s version of the North Carolina omnibus law – a 2013 act that restricted early voting, extended the residency requirement for new voters and denied provisional voters the chance to vote out of precinct.
+
+“The legislature’s immediate goal was to achieve a partisan objective,” Judge James Peterson charged in a blistering ruling, “but the means of achieving that objective was to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans.”
+
+Taken together, these rulings represent a stunning rejection of more than a decade of Republican strategy in states where the party has taken control of the legislature, the governor’s mansion or both.
+
+“The tide is turning against the proponents of voter suppression across our country,” longtime voting rights activist Kirsten Clarke, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement. “It is time for elected officials to see the writing on the wall and abandon efforts to lock Americans out of the ballot box.”
+
+Bob Phillips of Common Cause North Carolina was similarly jubilant. “This is a big win,” he said after the fourth circuit ruling. “It affirms that democracy is for everyone.”
+
+Republican leaders were either too stunned to offer an immediate response, or else accused “activist” judges of making an incorrect interpretation of the law. Despite the GOP’s protestations that it is championing “commonsense” safeguards against fraud, most political analysts agree that turnout has been a preoccupation. As demographic trends move away from the GOP’s overwhelmingly white base, it has become obvious over several election cycles that the fewer voters come to the polls, the better the party tends to do.
+
+Numerous studies, including one by the Government Accountability Office, have shown that voter ID laws can shave two to three percentage points off Democratic turnout – a margin that can easily swing a race for the House, the Senate or the presidency.
+
+Peterson was unable to throw out Wisconsin’s voter ID provision entirely because it was upheld by the higher federal courts in 2014, just as Indiana’s was a few years earlier. Plenty of other obstacles to voter registration and participation remain, for example in Florida where third-party registration drives have all but ceased because of a Republican-backed law passed in 2011.
+
+In other words, not every obstacle to voting will be removed across the country before November, but the latest rulings nevertheless make life more difficult for the Trump campaign, especially if the race remains close and states like Wisconsin and North Carolina prove crucial to his chances.
+
+The judicial decisions are also likely to affect down-ticket races – for example, in the west Texas congressional district where the former Democratic representative Pete Gallego lost his seat by about 2,000 votes in 2014 and now stands a much better chance of winning it back. One academic study suggested he lost 10,000-15,000 votes because of the impact of the voter ID law.
+
+Bound up in the battle for voting rights is a bigger ideological fight, over the legacy of racism in America and the continuing need for legislation to protect certain minorities. Before 2013, when the supreme court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina and Texas would not have been able to pass their repressive voting laws because they would have been blocked by the justice department’s civil rights division.
+
+At the time, the supreme court’s chief justice, John Roberts, argued that policing of racism in elections should be determined by “current conditions” and that, in his view, discrimination did meet the “pervasive, flagrant, widespread and rampant” level that had justified the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s.
+
+That view was sharply contested by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among others, and by the rank and file of the North Carolina NAACP, which reacted to the omnibus law by staging weekly protests in the streets known as “Moral Mondays”. The Rev William Barber, the head of the North Carolina NAACP, who had a prominent speaking slot at last week’s Democratic national convention, has described the battle against the new voting laws as “our Selma”.
+
+Now it seems likely that both the voter ID question and the related question of voter discrimination will come back to the supreme court, at which point Roberts will have to decide whether “current conditions” are as upbeat as he assumed in 2013.
+
+In the meantime, voting rights activists in North Carolina and other states will be keeping a hawk eye out for further attempts to restrict voting through disinformation or other time-honored means.
+
+“Folks are not going to put their guard down,” said Phillips, of Common Cause. “We and others will continue to double down on education to make sure there’s no confusion. Whatever the folks pushed these laws through try to say from here on to Election Day, we will make sure it’s accurate, not misleading.”",REAL
+4985,"Even under oath, Trump struggled with the truth","The lawyer gave Donald Trump a note, written in Trump’s own handwriting. He asked Trump to read it aloud.
+
+Trump may not have realized it yet, but he had walked into a trap.
+
+The mogul had sent the note to a reporter, objecting to a story that said Trump owned a “small minority stake” in a Manhattan real estate project. Trump insisted that the word “small” was incorrect. Trump continued reading: “I wrote, ‘Is 50 percent small?’ ”
+
+“This [note] was intended to indicate that you had a 50 percent stake in the project, correct?” said the lawyer.
+
+For the first of many times that day, Trump was about to be caught saying something that wasn’t true.
+
+It was a mid-December morning in 2007 — the start of an interrogation unlike anything else in the public record of Trump’s life.
+
+Trump had brought it on himself. He had sued a reporter, accusing him of being reckless and dishonest in a book that raised questions about Trump’s net worth. The reporter’s attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition.
+
+For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.
+
+The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements — and with his company’s internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable — cornered, out-prepared and under oath.
+
+Trump had misstated sales at his condo buildings. Inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs. Overstated the depth of his past debts and the number of his employees.
+
+That deposition — 170 transcribed pages — offers extraordinary insights into Trump’s relationship with the truth. Trump’s falsehoods were unstrategic — needless, highly specific, easy to disprove. When caught, Trump sometimes blamed others for the error or explained that the untrue thing really was true, in his mind, because he saw the situation more positively than others did.
+
+“Have you ever lied in public statements about your properties?” the lawyer asked.
+
+“I try and be truthful,” Trump said. “I’m no different from a politician running for office. You always want to put the best foot forward.”
+
+In his presidential campaign, Trump has sought to make his truth-telling a selling point. He nicknamed his main Republican opponent “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz. He called his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, “A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR!” in a recent Twitter message. “I will present the facts plainly and honestly,” he said in the opening of his speech at the Republican National Convention. “We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.”
+
+Trump has had a habit of telling demonstrable untruths during his presidential campaign. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has awarded him four Pinocchios — the maximum a statement can receive — 39 times since he announced his bid last summer. In many cases, his statements echo those in the 2007 deposition: They are specific, checkable — and wrong.
+
+Trump said he opposed the Iraq War at the start. He didn’t. He said he’d never mocked a disabled New York Times reporter. He had. Trump also said the National Football League had sent him a letter, objecting to a presidential debate that was scheduled for the same time as a football game. It hadn’t.
+
+Last week, Trump claimed that he had seen footage — taken at a top-secret location and released by the Iranian government — showing a plane unloading a large amount of cash to Iran from the U.S. government. He hadn’t. Trump later conceded he’d been mistaken — he’d seen TV news video that showed a plane during a prisoner release.
+
+But, even under the spotlight of this campaign, Trump has never had an experience quite like this deposition on Dec. 19 and 20, 2007.
+
+He was trapped in a room — with his own prior statements and three high-powered lawyers.
+
+“A very clear and visible side effect of my lawyers’ questioning of Trump is that he [was revealed as] a routine and habitual fabulist,” said Timothy L. O’Brien, the author Trump had sued.
+
+The Washington Post sent the Trump campaign a detailed list of questions about this deposition, listing all the times when Trump seemed to have been caught in a false or unsupported statement. The Post asked Trump whether he wanted to challenge any of those findings — and whether he had felt regret when confronted with them.
+
+He did not answer those questions.
+
+In 2005, O’Brien, then a reporter for the New York Times, had published a book called “Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald.” In the book, O’Brien cited people who questioned a claim at the bedrock of Trump’s identity — that his net worth was more than $5 billion. O’Brien said he had spoken to three people who estimated that the figure was between $150 million and $250 million.
+
+Trump sued. He later told The Post that he intended to hurt O’Brien, whom he called a “lowlife sleazebag.”
+
+“I didn’t read [the book], to be honest with you. . . . I never read it. I saw some of the things they said,” Trump said later. “I said: ‘Go sue him. It will cost him a lot of money.’ ”
+
+By filing suit, Trump hadn’t just opened himself up to questioning — he had opened a door into the opaque and secretive company he ran.
+
+O’Brien’s attorneys included Mary Jo White, now the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Andrew Ceresney, now the SEC’s director of enforcement. The lawsuit had given them the power to request that Trump turn over internal company documents, and they used it. They arrived at the deposition having already identified where Trump’s public statements hadn’t matched the private truth.
+
+The questions began with that handwritten note and the 50 percent stake that wasn’t 50 percent.
+
+“The 30 percent equates to much more than 30 percent,” Trump explained. His reasoning was that he had not been required to put up money at the outset, so his 30 percent share seemed more valuable.
+
+“Are you saying that the real estate community would interpret your interest to be 50 percent, even though in limited partnership agreements it’s 30 percent?” Ceresney asked.
+
+“Smart people would say it’s much more than 30 percent.”
+
+TRUMP: I got more than a million dollars, because they have tremendous promotion expenses, to my advantage. In other words, they promote, which has great value, through billboards, through newspapers, through radio, I think through television – yeah, through television.
+
+And they spend – again, I’d have to ask them, but I bet they spend at least a million or two million or maybe even more than that on promoting Donald Trump.
+
+LAWYER: But how much of the payments were cash?
+
+LAWYER: So when you say publicly that you got paid more than a million dollars, you’re including in that sum the promotional expenses that they pay?
+
+TRUMP: Oh, absolutely, yes. That has a great value. It has a great value to me.
+
+LAWYER: Do you actually say that when you say you got paid more than a million dollars publicly?
+
+On to the next one.
+
+“I was paid more than a million dollars,” Trump said when Ceresney asked how much he’d been paid for a speech in 2005 at New York City’s Learning Annex, a continuing-education center.
+
+“But how much of the payments were cash?”
+
+Trump said his personal math included the intangible value of publicity: The Learning Annex had advertised his speech heavily, and Trump thought that helped his brand. Therefore, in his mind he’d been paid more than $1 million, even though his actual payment was $400,000.
+
+“Do you actually say that, when you say you got a million dollars publicly?” Ceresney asked.
+
+As the deposition went on, the lawyers led Trump through case after case in which he’d overstated his success.
+
+The lawyer played a clip from Larry King’s talk show, in which King asked Trump how many people worked for him. “Twenty-two thousand or so,” Trump said.
+
+“Are all those people on your payroll?” Ceresney asked him.
+
+“No, not directly,” Trump said. He said he was counting employees of other companies that acted as suppliers and subcontractors to his businesses.
+
+Another one. In O’Brien’s book, Trump had been quoted saying: “I had zero borrowings from [my father’s] estate. . . . I give you my word.”
+
+“Mr. Trump, have you ever borrowed money from your father’s estate?”
+
+“I think a small amount a long time ago,” Trump said. “I think it was like in the $9 million range.”
+
+Another one. In one of his own books, Trump had said about one of his golf courses: “Membership costs $300,000. I think it’s a bargain.”
+
+“In fact, your memberships were not selling at $300,000 at that time, correct?”
+
+“We’ve sold many for two hundred” thousand, Trump said. Then, Trump pushed it upward: “We’ve sold many for, I think, two-fifty.”
+
+But this was not the place to push it.
+
+The lawyer had an internal Trump document that showed the true figure — “$200,000 per membership,” Ceresney said.
+
+LAWYER: You didn’t correct it when you read the book?
+
+TRUMP: Well, I did correct it, and she didn’t correct it.
+
+But you could have her in as a witness, and I’m sure we’ll bring her in as a witness because what she wrote was — I asked her to change it to “billions of dollars in debt,” and she probably forgot.
+
+LAWYER: And when you read it, you didn’t correct it?
+
+LAWYER: You didn’t see it.
+
+TRUMP: I read it very quickly. I didn’t see it. I would have corrected it, but I didn’t see it.
+
+In some cases, Trump acknowledged he was wrong — but not that he was at fault. Instead, he sought to turn the blame on others.
+
+“This is somebody that wrote it, probably Meredith McIver,” Trump said at one point when confronted with another false statement. “That is a mistake.”
+
+McIver, a staff writer with the Trump Organization, blazed into the public eye last month for having inserted plagiarized material — taken from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech — in the convention speech of Trump’s wife, Melania. McIver said it had been an innocent mistake.
+
+But in this deposition more than eight years earlier, Trump was blaming her for a mistake in one of his own books, “How to Get Rich.” In the 2004 book, co-written with McIver, Trump described his massive debt load during a low period in the early 1990s. “I owed billions upon billions of dollars — $9.2 billion to be exact,” the book said as it retold the story of his rise back to success.
+
+The depth of that financial hole made it seem even more impressive that Trump had climbed out again. But the figure was wrong. His actual debts had been much less.
+
+“I pointed it out to the person who wrote the book,” Trump said, meaning McIver.
+
+“Right after she wrote the book?”
+
+Then the lawyer showed Trump another book he’d written with McIver, three years later.
+
+“In fact, I was $9 billion in debt,” Trump read aloud. A similar error, repeated. It was McIver’s fault again.
+
+“And when you read it, you didn’t correct it?”
+
+“I read it very quickly,” Trump said about a book he was credited with writing.
+
+LAWYER: When you wrote, “O’Brien . . . threatened sources by telling them he can, quote, ‘Settle scores with enemies by writing negative articles about them,’ ” what was the basis for that statement?
+
+TRUMP: Just my perception of him.
+
+I don’t know that he indicated anything like that to me, but I think he probably did indirectly. Just my dealing with him.
+
+In other cases, the lawyers prodded Trump into admitting that he had made authoritative-sounding statements without any proof behind them. These statements were another kind of untruth.
+
+They were not necessarily false. They might have been true.
+
+But Trump said them without knowing one way or the other.
+
+“What basis do you have for that statement?” Ceresney asked in one case, about an assertion from Trump that O’Brien had been reported to the police for stalking.
+
+“I guess that was probably taken off the Internet,” Trump said.
+
+On to the next one.
+
+“You wrote, ‘O’Brien . . . threatened sources by telling them he can, quote, settle scores with enemies by writing negative articles about them,’ ” Ceresney asked, reading Trump’s words from a legal complaint. “What was the basis for that statement?”
+
+“Just my perception of him,” Trump said. “I don’t know that he indicated anything like that to me, but I think he probably did indirectly.”
+
+The most striking example was a question at the very heart of the legal case: What was Trump’s actual net worth?
+
+Trump had told O’Brien he was worth up to $6 billion. But the lawyers confronted him with other documents — from Trump’s accountants and from outside banks — that seemed to show the real figure was far lower.
+
+The lawyers asked: “Have you ever not been truthful” about your net worth?
+
+Trump’s answer here was that the truth about his wealth was — in essence — up to him to decide.
+
+“My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings,” Trump said. “But I try.”
+
+The interrogation finally ended after two days. Trump’s attorney made a final demand.
+
+“I want the record to be crystal clear that every single word, every question, every answer, every word, is confidential,” said the attorney, Mark Ressler.
+
+In 2009, a judge dismissed Trump’s case against O’Brien. Trump appealed, but in 2011 that was denied, too.
+
+Along the way, this once-confidential deposition became part of the public record when O’Brien’s attorneys attached it to one of their motions.
+
+In a brief statement this week, Trump said he felt the lawsuit was a success, despite his loss.
+
+“O’Brien knows nothing about me,” Trump said. “His book was a total failure and ultimately I had great success doing what I wanted to do — costing this third rate reporter a lot of legal fees.”
+
+O’Brien, now executive editor of Bloomberg View, said Trump got that wrong. The publisher and insurance companies covered the cost.
+
+“Donald Trump lost his lawsuit and, unlike him, it didn’t cost me a penny to litigate it,” he said.",REAL
+1781,"For Carly Fiorina, money hasn't yet followed the hype","Washington (CNN) In theory, Carly Fiorina should be one of the best fundraisers in the Republican field.
+
+She was the breakout star in CNN's Republican debate on Wednesday, the second straight contest in which she's distinguished herself. She's the former CEO of a major company and she's well-connected in donor-rich California.
+
+But she has a problem: The money hasn't followed the hype -- yet.
+
+""Buzz tends to turn on the money spigot, and she's clearly getting a lot of buzz out of last night,"" said Ken Kies, a longtime Republican bundler and lobbyist. ""But it's probably not enough to fuel the tank to get you through to February.""
+
+Buoyed by two consecutive widely praised debate performances, Fiorina is expected to surge in the next round of public opinion surveys. But party insiders say her next challenge will be to convert that goodwill into hard dollars that can drive votes come next winter.
+
+Despite her deep connections to the conservative movement in Washington and to the moneyed class of Silicon Valley, Fiorina's campaign had only $1 million on hand as of this summer (just slightly more than the same amount as Rick Perry, who has since dropped out of the race due to financial problems.) The former Hewlett-Packard executive took in about $1.7 million in the first two months of her campaign, less than every other Republican candidate she shared the stage with on Wednesday that reported totals.
+
+And her super PAC, which can collect checks of unlimited size, only hauled in about $3.5 million, a smaller sum all the more harmful given the candidate's unusual dependence on the outside group. Almost half of that money came from one of the party's biggest donors, Jerry Perenchio.
+
+She'll face an early test: Fiorina's campaign will have only two weeks to capitalize on Wednesday's performance before needing to file new numbers with election officials. But her supporters -- along with top, unaligned GOP fundraisers -- say the narrative is about to change.
+
+""My emails are going crazy today,"" said Karolyn Dorsee, who is organizing a San Diego fundraiser for Fiorina but hasn't committed to help her exclusively. ""If my little world here is any indication, she is on fire.""
+
+Her world likely isn't -- Fiorina's first reports reveal that she drew heavily from the deep well of California donors, something she may need to broaden to make a serious run for the GOP nomination. But even top moneymen working for other campaigns said they expected the new Republican star to give their fundraising shops a run for their money, predicting that she could post mammoth returns in the final two weeks of what is traditionally a sleepy quarter.
+
+There were already immediate signs on Thursday that donors were watching CNN's debate closely. Stanley Hubbard, a Minnesota billionaire and a top backer of struggling Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, said he planned to give the maximum he could to Fiorina's campaign, $2,700 (though he said the only super PAC he'd give to would be Walker's.)
+
+""Maybe she's another Margaret Thatcher. She's terrific,"" said Hubbard, who is also cutting new $2,700 checks to Chris Christie and Marco Rubio. ""We think they're breakthrough people.""
+
+Hubbard is part of a network of top-flight donors organized by Charles and David Koch, who surprisingly extended an invitation to Fiorina to address their millionaires as an exclusive conference this summer. That coveted speaking slot gave the Californian a chance to win over some of the biggest GOP whales, who could easily write seven-figure checks to Fiorina's super PAC.
+
+That group has perhaps gone further than any other outside group at taking the place of a traditional campaign. The super PAC, christened CARLY for America, is often times confused in reports with the official operation, Carly for President. The super PAC officials travel with the candidate as she barnstorms the country and helps the businesswoman collect endorsements from early-state officials.
+
+But it has struggled to reel in large donations beyond Perenchio, convincing only a handful of Republican donors to give six-figure amounts to the group. (The super PAC supporting Jeb Bush's bid, for instance, raised 30 times the amount than did Fiorina's.) The group's second biggest donation came from a separate super PAC bankrolled by billionaire Republican Bob Mercer, but Mercer is expected to overwhelmingly back Fiorina rival Ted Cruz, whom he originally gifted $11 million.
+
+Fiorina loyalists say that Wednesday night's debate means more big-money backers are en route.
+
+""I don't know if she really has a chance to win, but I like seeing her in these debates,"" said Orlando executive Richard Lee, who gave the group $25,000 in April despite originally pledging to not get involved in the primary. ""After last night, she should probably be able to do better.""
+
+That's the thinking of many Republican donors, who like Hubbard and Mercer, are supporting Fiorina as a ""side bet"" in a 16-candidate field. Some of the biggest names in Republican politics appear on Fiorina's campaign-finance reports, but with small dollar amounts next to her name. They may envision her as a pitbull against the Democratic nominee -- ""she'd eat Hillary Clinton alive,"" said Hubbard -- or as a worthwhile investment in the party that has been attacked by Democrats as waging a ""war on women.""
+
+And while Hubbard's $2,700 could be a token of more to come, top fundraisers point out that candidate cannot wage a campaign entirely on the back of a super PAC (Perry's group raised more than $17 million, but his cash strapped campaign lasted 100 days.) Candidates tend to spend months building professional fundraising operations that can systematically collect maximum checks from dozens of their associates, and top bundlers say that doesn't bloom overnight.
+
+""Will people go out of their way to call their friends?"" asked David Beightol, a top bundler for Mitt Romney who is now raising money for Bush. ""If she has those tools in place, she could do really well. If she doesn't, she might get a lot of little donors — and that won't hurt — but to make a difference she's going to have some big donors too.""
+
+Fiorina friends say she is fine being underestimated as a fundraiser -- arguing that both of the past two debates are evidence that she'll beat expectations.
+
+""She believed that at first, no one would take her seriously. Then, that she's nice to have there,"" said super PAC donor Phil Lebherz, an ally from California.
+
+Lebherz said she's now taking the third step: ""And then she's a threat.""",REAL
+8903,News: Shaking Up Washington: Donald Trump Just Appointed A Cloaked Man As Secretary Of The Hook,"Email 
+Time to say goodbye to politics as usual. 
+In another stunning game changer that has further upended the political establishment, President-elect Donald Trump this morning announced the nomination of a mysterious cloaked man to serve as his secretary of the Hook. 
+Yep. Trump promised change, and right away he’s appointing a nameless robed man to lead the Department of the Hook. How’s that for a shock to the system? 
+The silent man, whose face is completely shrouded within a thick, hooded cloak, is rumored to have topped the shortlist of candidates for secretary of the Hook after emerging alone from a dense forest at night and immediately causing all greenery within the Washington beltway to wilt. 
+Trump has already lauded his nominee as “a wonderful man with an absolutely tremendous cloak” whom he trusts do an “unbelievable job” discharging the duties of the position, which include abiding by the Hook, interpreting the Covenant of the Hook, and holding aloft the candle whose flame subtracts light from its surroundings. 
+“The man in the cloak is going to be a fantastic secretary of the Hook. Just fantastic,” said Trump, who added that the secretary will be second in the presidential line of succession. “No one is better qualified to enforce the covenant than this man. His cloak is dark, he was born before Christ, I don’t know his name, he has the Hook now, and he’s ready to fight for us!” 
+And don’t look now, but the presumptive secretary of the Hook is already making waves. At dawn this morning, he led the Zealots of the Hook in a procession through the streets of Washington, toward the open entrance to the Onyx Pyramid, an edifice by the Lincoln Memorial that residents could not remember ever having existed but that the cloaked man assured Americans in a terse press release “has always been and shall forever be.” 
+One thing’s for sure: This appointment signals a whole new political era in the nation’s capital. We can’t wait to see how this bold move turns out!",FAKE
+9188,Heseltine strangled dog as part of Thatcher cabinet initiation ceremony,"Heseltine strangled dog as part of Thatcher cabinet initiation ceremony 01-11-16 LORD Heseltine has admitted strangling his mother’s dog for his initiation into Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. The 83-year-old peer said that every member of Thatcher’s inner circle was forced to take a life and steal something irreplaceable from close family to prove they were outside bourgeois morality. He continued: “It’s an idea I believe she took from Aleister Crowley. I decided to get both my trials over with at once and choked the dog with my bare hands. “My mother never forgave me, of course, but I have to say it worked. From that moment on I had no sentimental respect for life, and human suffering was no longer any impediment to policy. “Of course, I was still terribly upset by what she did to Westland. That poor helicopter company. Still brings tears, even now.” The revelation follows Sir Geoffrey Howe’s admission that he threw a chimp from a moving train, Lord Tebbit’s boast of thrashing owls with a riding crop in the Cabinet Room, and Nigel Lawson’s confession that he hypnotised a swan to fly into a brick wall. 
+Share:",FAKE
+3180,Ronald Reagan made it all worse: How Republicans — the real party with their hands out — convinced white America that government was out to get them,"Real “patriots,” the Bundys claim, stand against a behemoth government that has grasped their lands and their rights. America, after all, is made by ambitious individuals working their way up. A government that promotes social welfare or regulates business destroys the American system because it both limits a man’s ability to make money and requires tax revenue. Those taxes strike at the very heart of individualism because they redistribute money from hard workers to lazy people.
+
+Ammon and Ryan Bundy and their compatriots are quite clear about exactly who those lazy people are. The younger Bundys’ father, Cliven, the Nevada rancher who started an armed standoff with government officials in 2014 over grazing rights, had plenty to say about the “Negro” who lived in government housing and “didn’t have nothing to do.” African-Americans’ laziness led them to abort their children and send their young men to jail. Bundy wondered: “are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life… or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
+
+And yet, the Bundys are perfectly comfortably taking money from government programs themselves. Aside from animal kill programs that protect herds, drought relief payments, and the 93 percent discount at which the government assesses grazing fees, Ammon Bundy borrowed more than $500,000 from the federal government through a loan guarantee program for small businesses. Ammon Bundy’s father, Cliven, owes the government more than $1 million in grazing fees for running his cattle on public land. No matter how you slice it, taxpayers have subsidized the Bundys.
+
+Observers have made much of this obvious contradiction. But it is not a sign only of the Bundys’ lack of self-awareness, or even simply of white supremacy. It is the intellectual formula that has driven American politics since 1980.
+
+That formula was laid down immediately after the Civil War. In 1865, the South was so devastated by the war that Southerners, white and black, were starving. To provide rations and medical care, and to place homeless Southerners on farming land, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. To emphasize that government aid would be temporary, they placed what became known as the Freedmen’s Bureau within the War Department. In summer 1865, military officers distributed 150,000 rations, a third of them to white people. But the agents also took on an unexpected role. Southern states refused to let ex-slaves testify in court, leaving them to the tender mercies of angry white Southerners, who cheated, beat, raped and murdered them. So Freedmen’s Bureau officers began to hear the cases that pitted black and white Southerners against each other.
+
+While agents often forced black people back to work for abusive employers or demanded subservient behavior, they decided cases in favor of ex-slaves about 68 percent of the time. So Southern Democrats rewrote history. They had not fought the Civil War over slavery after all, they insisted. They had fought it to stop a huge government bureaucracy from forcing its way into their homes and regulating the way they treated “their people.” They had fought, they now claimed, not for slavery, but for states’ rights.
+
+When Congress tried to expand the Freedmen’s Bureau the following year to enable it to provide education for poor Americans of all races, President Andrew Johnson added the final ideological piece to the Democrats’ attack on an activist government. That piece was taxation. During the war, the Republican Congress had created the nation’s first national taxes, including the income tax. Johnson vetoed the bill expanding the Freedmen’s Bureau on two grounds. First, although the schools in the bill would have disproportionately helped whites in the border states, Johnson claimed that it provided benefits for African-Americans that had never been accorded to white people. Second, he explained that the bill would create an army of officials that would harass Southern whites, while the taxes necessary to support them would impoverish hardworking white people.
+
+This formula—that an activist government sucks white tax dollars to provide for lazy minorities—has been sold to voters ever since. It caught on largely because of the odd happenstance that it coincided with the rise of the American cowboy. During this very moment, the cattle industry was taking off on the Western plains. Cowboys tended to be former Confederates who were dirt poor and good with a horse and a gun. Their dirty, hard, ill-paid and dangerous lives mirrored those of Eastern industrial workers, but Southern Democratic newspaper editors grabbed hold of the idea of the free and independent cowboy as the embodiment of American individualism. Cowboys, they said, were the very opposite of the ex-slaves the government was coddling. Cowboys were hardworking young men who asked nothing of the government. The reality, of course, was that the cattle industry depended almost entirely on the American government. The Army protected herds and cattlemen against Indians, Congress funded the railroads that moved cattle to Eastern markets, and Indian agents bought cattle to fulfill the ration provisions of treaties. Cattlemen, in short, received massive government subsidies. But the image of the Western cowboy as a hardworking man who asked only to be left alone got traction among Southerners and Northern Democrats who hated the idea of black rights, and who loathed the Republicans’ activist government that was trying to enforce those rights. By the 1870s, ex-Confederates had taken their support for Western individualism a step further. They insisted the federal government was actively persecuting Western individuals. Their hero was Jesse James, the former Confederate guerilla-turned-criminal. When a Republican state government in Missouri refused to let ex-Confederates sit on juries or practice law, Democrats used the fugitive James to bludgeon their political opponents. James was “an angel of light,” as one said, who wanted to turn himself in to authorities, but could not because he would not get a fair trial in a courtroom full of his political opponents. He was a good man, the story went, but the government was forcing him into criminality. And then, the governor of Missouri cut a deal with Robert Ford to kill James. That a government official had colluded to murder a citizen added fuel to the idea that Westerners were in danger from an overweening government. The political construct that lionized Western individuals and demonized an activist government, a government that apparently helped minorities, was a product of a peculiar moment in American history. Neither the moment nor the ideology lasted. The political construct that idealized cowboys fell into disrepute during and immediately after the New Deal. In those years, Americans turned away from Western individualism and toward the idea of an activist government. Westerners and Southerners both, after all, were suffering from the Dust Bowl and the boll weevil. They wanted government programs even more than Easterners did. But in the 1950s, the Movement Conservative war on the New Deal resurrected the post-Civil War political cliché. Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, Movement Conservatives have tapped into the idea that an activist government redistributed wealth to lazy minorities. But they have also pushed hard on the idea that true Americans are Western individualists. Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater launched this association in 1964 by dismissing Brown v. Board as governmental overreach and fictionalizing his wealthy upbringing as a hardscrabble Western frontier story; Ronald Reagan made it even more explicit by contrasting his image of the Welfare Queen with his own cowboy hat and Western ranch. And yet, the Goldwater and the Reagan stories mirrored those of the historical Western individual: their regions, and their own families, prospered only when government contracts poured money into their communities. To them, there was no contradiction between their championing of individualism and benefiting from government largess. According to Movement Conservatives, Americans who believe in individualism want nothing from the government, and thus, unlike grasping minorities, they are the nation’s true patriots. The government should do nothing for “lazy black Americans,” who only want an un-American redistribution of wealth through taxes. But, paradoxically, the government can—and should—use tax money to help America’s individualists. This is the peculiar contradiction that defines today’s politics. Confederates, cowboys, anti-government diatribes from people who are prime beneficiaries of government programs … thanks to the Bundys we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Reconstruction by reliving it.",REAL
+167,10 members of Congress took trip secretly funded by foreign government,"The state-owned oil company of Azerbaijan secretly funded an all-expenses-paid trip to a conference in Baku, on the Caspian Sea, in 2013 for 10 members of Congress and 32 staff members, according to a confidential ethics report obtained by The Washington Post. Three former top aides to President Obama appeared as speakers at the event.
+
+Lawmakers and their staff members received hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of travel expenses, silk scarves, crystal tea sets and Azerbaijani rugs valued at $2,500 to $10,000, according to the ethics report. Airfare for the lawmakers and some of their spouses cost $112,899, travel invoices show.
+
+The State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, known as SOCAR, allegedly funneled $750,000 through nonprofit corporations based in the United States to conceal the source of the funding for the conference in the former Soviet republic, according to the 70-page report by the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent investigative arm of the House.
+
+The report reflects the most extensive investigation undertaken by the ethics office, which was created seven years ago in response to a number of scandals on Capitol Hill, including lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s illegal funding of lawmakers’ trips.
+
+The nonprofit corporations allegedly filed false statements with Congress swearing that they were sponsoring the conference. The findings have been referred to the House Ethics Committee for investigation of possible violations of congressional rules and federal laws that bar foreign governments from trying to influence U.S. policy.
+
+SOCAR released a statement saying that its support of the conference was no secret and blaming the nonprofits for not filing the proper disclosures.
+
+“At no time did SOCAR hide from the attendees of the conference our involvement,” the statement said. “SOCAR has never been under investigation in this matter because the responsibility for disclosing SOCAR’s financial support for the conference fell to those who were the trip’s sponsors.
+
+“We have cooperated fully. We are therefore disappointed that the compliance procedures may not have been followed correctly by the trip’s sponsors and we are unclear why these disclosures were omitted.”
+
+Tom Rust, chief counsel and staff director for the Ethics Committee, and Kelly Brewington, a spokeswoman for the Office of Congressional Ethics, declined to comment.
+
+The conference, titled “U.S.-
+
+Azerbaijan Convention: Vision for the Future,” took place on May 28 and 29, 2013. During the previous year, SOCAR and several large energy companies sought exemptions for a $28 billion natural gas pipeline project in the Caspian Sea from U.S. economic sanctions being imposed on Iran.
+
+The congressional investigators could not determine whether lawmakers used their official positions to benefit SOCAR or the pipeline project. They also found no evidence that the lawmakers or their staff members knew that the conference was being funded by a foreign government.
+
+The investigators noted that the lawmakers relied on representations made to them by two Houston-based nonprofit corporations, the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians (TCAE) and the Assembly of the Friends of Azerbaijan (AFAZ). The lawmakers told investigators that they had obtained approval for the trip from the Ethics Committee.
+
+The report said members of the ethics panel wrote to the Office of Congressional Ethics requesting a halt to the investigation so that the matter could be taken up by their own committee. OCE officials declined the request. A government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter said OCE feared that the ethics panel, which has a reputation among watchdog groups for shielding lawmakers from embarrassing disclosures, would not take any meaningful action.
+
+The pipeline has long been an important U.S. policy objective because it would bolster European security by offering an alternative to Russian gas.
+
+One of SOCAR’s partners was the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), a relationship that had threatened to scuttle the deal if sanctions were approved without an exemption for the Shah Deniz Natural Gas Project. ­SOCAR and NIOC were partners with 10 percent of the project each, while BP and Norwegian-based Statoil each held 25.5 percent. Russian-based Lukoil also had a 10 percent share, and Turkish Petroleum Corp. had 9 percent.
+
+Congress had approved two sanctions bills containing passages that exempted the project, which Obama signed into law in August 2012 and January 2013. On June 3, 2013, five days after the Baku conference, Obama signed an executive order assessing economic sanctions against Iran that also exempted the project.
+
+The Post reported about the trip at the time, in an article noting that three former Obama political advisers — Robert Gibbs, Jim Messina and David Plouffe — spoke at the conference, which was attended by current and former members of Congress. Politico also wrote about the trip, and the Houston Chronicle reported that SOCAR had been a sponsor of the conference and raised questions about the nonprofits involved. Only one Western news organization covered the event, the Washington Diplomat, a monthly that writes about the diplomatic community in the nation’s capital.
+
+But no information surfaced at the time about the alleged $750,000 payment from SOCAR to the nonprofits. Ethics investigators obtained a wire transfer showing that SOCAR sent the $750,000 to AFAZ. SOCAR’s legal counsel told the investigators that the money was “dues” that were “intended to be used as funding for the Convention.”
+
+The lawmakers who took the trip were Reps. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), Yvette D. Clarke (D-N.Y.), Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.), Rubén Hinojosa (D-Tex.), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.), Leonard Lance (R-N.J.), Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.), Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Ted Poe (R-Tex.) and then-Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Tex.).
+
+Clarke is a member of the Ethics Committee.
+
+Another lawmaker, Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), attended as part of a separate congressional delegation and his expenses were not paid by the conference, according to the report.
+
+“My official visit was part of my House Armed Services and NATO responsibilities,” Turner told The Post in a statement. “The conference did not pay my expenses and I did not receive any gifts.”
+
+Davis told The Post that the Ethics Committee approved the trip, which he took with his wife, and that he didn’t realize it had been funded by SOCAR. He said he saw the oil company’s logos in Baku, but “to be very honest about it, I didn’t pay them much attention, honestly.”
+
+He also said that during the conference he received one rug, which was delivered to his hotel room and is in storage in his basement in Chicago. He said he is considering donating the rug to a museum or a charity.
+
+Davis also said lawmakers should ask more questions about the source of funding for travel.
+
+“Some of these things that we take sometimes for granted probably require a bit more investigation or more prudence,” he said. “So maybe we’ll exercise a bit more scrutiny. I will.”
+
+Hinojosa, who attended the conference with his wife, said he was also unaware of SOCAR’s involvement.
+
+“Prior to the trip to Azerbaijan and Turkey, I sought approval from the U.S. House Committee on Ethics to travel,” he said in a statement. “I believed the purpose of the trip was to strengthen U.S.-Turkey and U.S.-Azerbaijani relations. I received souvenirs of what I believed to be of minimal value and in compliance with the House Gift rule.”
+
+The statement added: “Importantly, the report notes that there is no evidence to suggest that Members of Congress who went on the trip knew that impermissible sponsors and organizers may have been involved and that Members relied on the sponsors’ representations in good faith.”
+
+Ladan Ahmadi, a spokeswoman for Meeks, said in a statement that the congressman “had no reason to believe that the trip was in any way inappropriate. He understood the rug to be a permissible courtesy gift.”
+
+Glenn Rushing, the chief of staff for Jackson Lee, said in a statement: “Congresswoman Jackson Lee submitted to the House Ethics Committee all of the information available to her regarding sponsorship of this travel and received advance approval for this trip, in writing, from the House Ethics Committee, fully in accordance with House Ethics Rules. The congresswoman made this trip only because of the approval by the House Ethics Committee.”
+
+Lance declined to comment, citing the ongoing ethics investigation. A senior staff member who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the congressman was unaware SOCAR had sponsored the event and that he had returned the one rug he received after he got back to Washington. The staff member also said Lance received a pair of earrings and reimbursed the nonprofit group that helped organize the conference $100 immediately upon returning to New Jersey.
+
+Clarke and Stockman did not respond to requests for comment.
+
+Although lawmakers told investigators that they were unaware that the Azerbaijani government had underwritten the trip through its oil company, investigators noted that SOCAR organized much of the conference in plain sight. The oil company issued invitations, sponsored visa entries for the lawmakers and staff members, and hung banners and placards emblazoned with SOCAR’s logo throughout the conference halls in Baku.
+
+The investigators concluded in their report that “a person’s ignorance of the true source of travel expenses is not an absolute shield from liability for receipt of travel expenses from an improper source.”
+
+Several members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which has oversight of U.S. relations with Iran and the economic sanctions, attended the conference. They included one of the panel’s most influential members, Poe, who chairs its subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation and trade.
+
+The report said Poe was among those who did not fully cooperate with the Office of Congressional Ethics or did not acknowledge receipt of their request for information.
+
+In a statement to The Post, Shaylyn Hynes, Poe’s spokeswoman said, “Congressman Poe did cooperate,” providing investigators with documents and answers to their questions.
+
+“The House Committee on Ethics then requested that the OCE cease its review because it was conducting its own investigation,” Hynes’s statement said. “As a result, we alerted OCE that we were communicating and cooperating directly with the House Committee on Ethics, the official arbiter of House ethics matters.”
+
+Hynes’s statement added that the congressman thought the conference was being sponsored by the nonprofits.
+
+“In its report, the OCE clearly states it did not receive any evidence that the Congressman knew that TCAE was not the sole organizer or sponsor of the travel,” Hynes’s statement said. “The OCE further correctly found that ‘Representative Poe acted in good faith reliance on information received from the purported trip sponsor and approval from the Committee on Ethics.’ ”
+
+According to the report, three other lawmakers who took the trip also declined to cooperate with the ethics office or did not respond: Jackson Lee, a member of the Homeland Security Committee; Lance, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee; and Meeks, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
+
+Lance’s staff member said the lawmaker had been ready to cooperate with the Office of Congressional Ethics when he was told by the House Ethics Committee that it would examine the case. Lance is now cooperating with that panel.
+
+Meeks also provided documents to the OCE but did not give an interview to investigators after learning that the ethics panel was conducting its own investigation, his spokeswoman, Ahmadi, said in a statement.
+
+“Congressman Meeks is committed to cooperate with the Ethics Committee in its review of this matter,” she said.
+
+Several lawmakers said they thought they had properly reported their travel expenses on their disclosure forms. Several said they believed they did not need to disclose the gifts because their value did not exceed the $350 reporting threshold.
+
+Lujan Grisham told ethics investigators that she did not disclose the rugs because she did not think they were particularly valuable. She also thought that they were unattractive.
+
+“It’s not a carpet I would have purchased,” the congresswoman said.
+
+A spokesman for Lujan Grish­am told The Post that the congresswoman “takes House Ethics rules seriously” and sought approval for the trip by the House Ethics Committee.
+
+“The Office of Congressional Ethics concluded, as reported by the news media, that Rep. Lujan Grisham was led to believe the travel was sponsored by a nonprofit organization, and not any other source,” Gilbert Gallegos, the spokesman, said in a statement. “Rep. Lujan Grisham acted in good faith as she relied on the approval by House Ethics Committee.”
+
+In recent years, as relations between the United States and Iran have deteriorated over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Congress and the Obama administration have stepped up economic sanctions. The government of Azerbaijan, which shares a border with Iran, hired several lobbying firms to build a better relationship with policymakers in Washington.
+
+As Congress weighed a new round of sanctions against Iran in 2012, SOCAR opened an office in Washington, buying a building in Dupont Circle for $12 million. On April 25 and 26, 2012, a conference called “U.S.-Azerbaijan Relations: Vision for Future” was held at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in downtown Washington.
+
+Among the attendees were Poe, Meeks and Jackson Lee. Ethics investigators said it appeared that SOCAR was a “major funder” of the conference, citing interviews and photographs published on a Web site for the event that showed banners with ­SOCAR’s logos inside the hotel.
+
+At the time, Congress was considering the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act. The bill contained a provision that would exempt the gas pipeline project from Iranian sanctions. The provision said that “nothing” in the measure would apply to “the development of natural gas and the construction and operation of a pipeline to transport natural gas from Azerbaijan to Turkey and Europe.”
+
+Three months later, on July 30, 2012, Obama signed an executive order authorizing additional sanctions against Iran and exempting the pipeline. On Aug. 1, Congress approved the sanctions legislation and the exemption. Obama signed it into law nine days later.
+
+Before adjourning for Christmas, Congress approved another sanctions bill called the Iran Freedom and Counter-Proliferation Act, which was part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013. That bill also contained an exemption for the gas pipeline. On Jan. 2, 2013, Obama signed the legislation into law.
+
+Soon, members of Congress began receiving invitations to attend a springtime conference in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, known for its mix of medieval architecture and gleaming modern buildings along the shores of the Caspian Sea.
+
+A month before the conference, the nonprofit AFAZ was set up in Houston, home to some of the world’s largest energy companies. “Evidence revealed that ­SOCAR founded AFAZ in the month prior to the Convention and transferred $750,000 to an AFAZ bank account prior to the Convention,” the OCE report said. AFAZ was created as an “educational, cultural, business, congressional advocacy and charitable organization” with the mission of building “bridges between the United States and Azerbaijan,” according to the nonprofit’s Web site.
+
+The investigators for the Office of Congressional Ethics found that AFAZ and the other Houston-based nonprofit, TCAE, concealed the true source of the funding for travel and other expenses for the U.S. officials.
+
+“The OCE found that the disclosed nonprofit sponsors contributed virtually no money towards congressional travel to Azerbaijan and played a very limited role in organizing the Convention,” the report said.
+
+On April 16, 2013, Kemal Oksuz, an executive in charge of the nonprofits, wrote to the president of SOCAR, requesting $750,000 to underwrite the conference, according to the report. In return, Oksuz pledged that SOCAR’s “logo will be used on all printed materials, banners and website, and that SOCAR will be recognized as the Main Sponsor of the Convention.”
+
+On May 13, SOCAR transferred $750,000 into the Wells Fargo account of AFAZ, according to the report. Three days later, AFAZ made its first money transfer to pay for the plane tickets for the conference attendees.
+
+“SOCAR and AFAZ provided gifts in the form of impermissible travel expenses to congressional travelers in violation of House rules, regulations and federal law,” the ethics investigators said.
+
+Oksuz did not respond to requests for comment.
+
+Last summer, the Houston Chronicle published an examination of the Baku conference and interviewed Oksuz. He told the newspaper that he was not required to disclose corporate sponsorships because “those contributions always came after the conventions.”
+
+The investigators said five nonprofits affiliated with the Azerbaijani government said they sponsored the conference, filing sworn statements with the Ethics Committee in April and May 2013.
+
+“The five sponsoring organizations contributed no funding for the congressional travel in spite of false affirmations on the forms they submitted to the Committee on Ethics,” the investigators wrote in the report.
+
+SOCAR assembled a list of lawmakers, other U.S. officials and private individuals it wanted to attend the three-day conference. The oil company invited more than 30 people to speak in Baku, according to the report, including Gibbs, Messina and Plouffe. SOCAR also invited Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who had lost his reelection campaign in 2012.
+
+In addition to SOCAR, BP, ConocoPhillips and KBR also helped to underwrite the costs of the conference, estimated at $1.5 million. Those costs included $100,000 for hotel accommodations, $75,000 for food and entertainment, and $1.2 million for travel and other expenses.
+
+Several members of Congress and their staff members also took side trips to Turkey, traveling to Istanbul, Ankara or both, the investigators found. They included Clarke, Hinojosa, Lance and Lujan Grisham.
+
+The Bosphorus Atlantic Cultural Association of Friendship and Cooperation, a Turkish nonprofit organization, covered the expenses, the report said. The lawmakers did not disclose the role of that nonprofit.
+
+“Members of Congress who traveled to Turkey accepted payment of travel expenses from impermissible sources, resulting in an impermissible gift, in violation of House rules and regulations,” the report found.
+
+Investigators also said lawmakers received a number of gifts, including crystal tea sets, briefcases, silk scarves, turquoise earrings, gold-painted plates and Azerbaijani rugs. Some congressional staff members told the investigators they thought that the rugs were worth about $300 — $50 below the reporting threshold — and that they didn’t need to disclose them on their forms filed with the Ethics Committee.
+
+The report said “evidence suggests” that all lawmakers received at least one rug and some got two, one prayer-size and one area rug. Many staff members also received rugs.
+
+Only one lawmaker, Bridenstine, disclosed the rugs on his financial forms. He had them appraised: the smaller rug at $2,500 and the larger at $3,500. In a July 2013 letter to the Ethics Committee, he said he wanted to donate the larger rug to the House Clerk’s Office.
+
+Bridenstine was the only lawmaker to offer to pay for the rugs out of his own pocket, telling the committee that he would like to purchase the smaller rug “at fair market value.”
+
+But, ultimately, he decided not to keep the rugs.
+
+“Having sought advice from the Committee on Ethics, I determined the best course of action was to return the rugs and I did so,” he said in a statement to The Post. “I also received a porcelain tea set which was valued at $87, well under the Foreign Gifts Disclosure Act rules, and an educational book and four local traditional music CDs.”
+
+Amy Brittain, Kimbriell Kelly, Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Steven Mufson contributed to this report.",REAL
+6786,The Chinese Who Saw the Perils of Westernization,"Posted on October 28, 2016 The Chinese Who Saw the Perils of Westernization Sacco Vandal, American Renaissance, October 28, 2016 They cautioned their countrymen 100 years ago. 
+Many Westerners fear the decline of their own society while they foresee Chinese ascension and impending dominance–with alternating tones of fear or enthusiasm. The United States is growing demographically and may remain a viable cultural entity, but the consensus is that Europe faces demographic disaster. China and the West seem to be approaching an inversion of their relationship of just over a century ago, during the late Qing period, when the West was dominant and China was peripheral. [1] 
+Patrick Buchanan described the Western dilemma in 2008: 
+What happened to us? What happened to our world? When the twentieth century opened, the West was everywhere supreme. For four hundred years, explorers, missionaries, conquerors, and colonizers departed from Europe for the four corners of the Earth to erect empires that were to bring the blessings and benefits of Western civilization to all mankind. . . . Whatever became of those men? Somewhere in the last century, Western man suffered a catastrophic loss of faith–in himself, in his civilization, and in the faith that gave it birth. [2] 
+Although the United States remains the strongest–but not the sole–superpower, European peoples are in decline everywhere. In another book, Mr. Buchanan points out that “In 1960, people of European ancestry were one-fourth of the world’s population; in 2000, they were one-sixth; in 2050, they will be one-tenth. These are the statistics of a vanishing race.” [3] Mr. Buchanan is hardly the first to warn of impending doom for the West. The lamentations of Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) are well known. Less known, however, are the Chinese from the same period who dreamed of a resurgence for China and warned of Western decline. These voices from the late Qing Dynasty may now seem prescient. 
+Spengler saw the First World War as a sign of the West’s inevitable decline. Many of the Chinese literati who had at first been smitten with the dynamism of the West also came to see the war in the same way: Western civilization was in a state of crisis that would lead to its destruction. Today, Mr. Buchanan also calls the First World War a “mortal wound” that was “inflicted upon our civilization.” [4] Meanwhile, the Chinese, who have resurrected many of the tenets of their traditional civilization after decades of Maoist rule, argue that Western liberalization and democratization are not the True Way by which they will inherit the Earth. As China begins to return to traditional Chinese pragmatism and the West implodes, certain late Qing intellectuals now appear vindicated. Devastation after WWI. 
+First among them were Yan Fu (1854–1921) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929). The dynamism of the West at first impressed them, leading them to promote Westernization in China. However, by the end of their lives, both men had come to see the dynamism of the West as self-destructive. They exhorted China to take a middle path between traditionalism and modernization, hoping that this might by the key to supplanting the West. 
+China in trouble 
+In the latter half of the 19th century, China was at a technological and military disadvantage. It lost a series of wars with Western powers and was forced to accept unequal treaties. This led various ministers of the Qing Dynasty, such as Li Hongzhang (1823–1901) to advocate mild forms of modernization. Meanwhile, the Meiji government in Japan had started an ambitious effort of full-scale Westernization beginning in 1868. And in 1895, after Japan defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War, it became obvious to most Chinese intellectuals that their nation’s program of limited modernization was not enough. 
+Until the mid 19th century, Europe had been an inconsequential backwater for China. As late as 1793, a British attempt to establish a greater amount of trade with the Qing was rebuffed with the assertion by the Qianlong emperor (1711–1799) that China “possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no products within its own borders,” and thus had “no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians.” [5] By the mid 19th century, industrialization had made the West vastly more rich and powerful. However, some Chinese thought the sudden dynamism of the West also had intellectual origins. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, China found itself at the mercy of the Western powers that it once looked down upon. 
+Darwin’s dangerous idea 
+In 1895, Yan Fu was superintendent of the Beiyang Naval School. In an explanation of Western civilization to fellow Chinese intellectuals, he focused on the theory of evolution. As a young man, he had studied in England and become familiar with social Darwinism, and came to see it as the cultural fountainhead of wealth and power. “Since the publication of [Darwin’s The Origin of Species ],” wrote Yan, “of which nearly every household in Europe and America now has a copy, there has been a tremendous change in the scholarship, politics, and religion of the West. The claim that the revolution in outlook and intellectual orientation occasioned by Darwin’s book exceeds that of Newtonian astronomy is hardly an empty one.” [6] Yan spent the next ten years translating works on English evolutionist thought by men such as Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Thomas Huxley (1825–1895) in the hope of converting his colleagues to social Darwinism. Yan Fu was attracted to social Darwinism while studying in England. 
+Perhaps it took an outsider to see the power of evolutionary thought. Darwin’s theory shook Westerners but it also gave them a certain will to power. Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” led the transformation of Darwinism into social Darwinism, which called upon Western man to glorify victory in social competition. Victory in competition was the purpose of all life everywhere. 
+Yan quickly saw the winning-at-all-costs ruthlessness of social Darwinism as a remedy for China. Writing in his work on Yan’s life, Benjamin Schwartz writes: 
+What interests [Yan] is not so much the Darwinian account of biological evolution qua science. It is precisely the stress on the values of struggle–assertive energy, the emphasis on the actualization of potentialities within a competitive situation. The image of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ does not depress him. It exhilarates him. [7] 
+Yan nevertheless worried that it might be too late for China to adopt social Darwinism, and that his country would be overwhelmed by the nations that had. In a 1895 newspaper essay, “On Strength,” he wrote: 
+Months and years slip by, and with rapacious neighbors all around, I fear that we will be too late, that we will follow Poland and India, providing an example of Darwin’s [elimination] before we have been able to implement Spencer’s methods. . . . Alas, our individual lives are not worth the worry, but what of our descendants, and the 400,000,000 of our race? [8] 
+The battle for reform 
+After defeat in the Sino-Japanese war, many Chinese intellectuals, such as Yan, began to advocate full-scale Westernization. Japan had already adopted social Darwinism in its pursuit of Western wealth and power, and the Chinese intelligentsia began to believe that China should follow suit. In 1898, the Guangxu emperor (1871–1908) appointed the minister Kang Youwei (1858–1927) to head a reform movement after Kang had requested permission to imitate Japan: 
+As to the republican governments of the United States and France and the constitutional governments of Britain and Germany, these countries are far away and their customs are different from ours. Their changes occurred a long time ago and can no longer be traced. Consequently I beg Your Majesty. . . to take the Meiji Reform of Japan as the model for our reform. The time and place of Japan’s reform are not remote and her religion and customs are somewhat similar to ours. Her success is manifest; her example can easily be followed. [9] 
+The emperor agreed, and the minister initiated a flurry of Meiji-style reform. A bright young man named Liang Qichao worked with Kang as his protégé, and he became one of the most influential Chinese advocates for Westernization. However, Kang and Liang’s efforts were quickly aborted after an imperial coup under the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908). Liang Qichao 
+After the Empress Dowager cut short what later became known as the Hundred Days Reform, Kang and Liang escaped political persecution by fleeing to Japan. Once there, Kang continued to support the Qing dynasty and to justify an agenda for Chinese reform via cautious appeals to Confucianism. Liang, however, ultimately broke with Kang and–like Yan–began to espouse “a new view of world history strongly colored by social Darwinism: a struggle for survival among nations and races.” [10] 
+He wrote: 
+If we wish to make our nation strong, we must investigate extensively the methods followed by other nations in becoming independent. We should select the superior points and appropriate them to make up for our own shortcomings. [11] 
+Liang increasingly came to see social Darwinism as the fuel of the West’s dynamism, one of the “superior points” that China would do well to “appropriate.” Writing from Japan, he exerted great influence on young Chinese. Together, Yan and Liang instilled in an entire generation of Chinese students a fervent desire for change. But this influence did not bring social Darwinism to China. Instead, it brought the 1911 Revolution, the New Cultural Movement (1915–1921), and the May Fourth Movement of 1919–perturbations that would spin China into over half a century of upheaval. 
+Accommodative versus transformative thought 
+Despite their attraction to social Darwinism and their sometimes radical calls for reform, Yan and Liang were not revolutionaries. Indeed, although Liang and–especially–Yan attacked various instances of Chinese backwardness, they continued to support the Qing Dynasty, advocating slow transition into a constitutional monarchy based on the British model. Once the 1911 Revolution succeeded, however, Liang grudgingly threw his support behind the new republican government, but Yan continued to support monarchy. 
+Questioning the West 
+The First World War was a shock to reformers who wanted to embrace the West. As the war dragged on, aging reformers such as Yan and Liang became increasingly disillusioned with not only transformative revolution, but Westernization and even the West. Yan wrote that the carnage of the war was a consequence of Western traits: “Such has been the effect on the human race of civilization and science! When I look back on our [Chinese] sacred wisdom and culture, I find that it foresaw this even at that early date. . .” [12] 
+Yan explained further: 
+As I have grown older and have observed the seven years of republican government in China and the four years of bloody war in Europe–a war such as the world has never known–I have come to feel that [the West’s] progress . . . has lead only to selfishness, slaughter, corruption, and shamelessness. When I look back upon the ways of Confucius and Mencius, I find that they . . . have profoundly benefited the realm. This is not my opinion alone. Many thinking people in the West have gradually come to feel this way. [13] 
+Liang wrote that “recently many Western scholars have wanted to import Asian civilization as a corrective to their own,” and, indeed, the latter half of the 20th century saw the importation of philosophical, religious, and cultural curiosities from the East and into the West. In the meantime he stated his goal for China: 
+I therefore hope that our dear young people will, first of all, have a sincere purpose of respecting and protecting our civilization; second, that they will apply Western methods to the study of our civilization and discover its true character; third, that they will put our own civilization in order and supplement it with others’ so that it will be transformed and become a new civilization; and fourth, that they will extend this new civilization to the outside world so that it can benefit the whole human race. [14] 
+Because of the devastation of the First World War, these two thinkers who had once promoted modernization and Westernization instead advocated a modernization without Westernization (or at least minimal Westernization). They seemed to believe that the course of the West was not sustainable and that the West could be supplanted by China if it modernized in a way that was compatible with its nature and culture. They seem to have realized that social Darwinism was a false promise, and that the forces it unleashed could destroy the West. 
+China and the West today 
+In the end, China did not follow Japan down the path of Westernization. A burgeoning Chinese nationalism grew up around anti-Japanese sentiment, and this enmity was extended to the West after Japan instead of China was awarded Germany’s Chinese concession at Versailles in 1919. Ultimately, communism on the Soviet model provided the Chinese with an alternative to both Chinese traditionalism and the West. China entered a period of socialist tyranny under Mao Zedong (1893–1976). 
+After Mao’s death, China began to abandon Maoism. It is still nominally communist, but since the 1980’s, it has followed the example of Hong Kong and Taiwan and has increasingly returned to the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. Chinese now praise Yan and Liang for their wisdom and prescience. The post-Mao leadership of the People’s Republic of China–beginning with Deng Xiaoping–has espoused views nearly identical to those advocated by Liang over a century ago. [15] Statue of Liang Qichao in Tianjin. 
+At the same time, Westerners are now studying the warnings of Yan and Liang about the inherent instability of the West. As Western liberals such as Martin Jacques herald the coming Chinese domination, there may be a generation of European and American scholars who find themselves in a position similar to that of Yan and Liang: struggling to understand why their civilization has fallen behind that of a rival whose inferiority was once taken for granted. 
+Thus, while China has found its way back to the middle path, balancing its modernization and Westernization with pragmatism, caution, and Confucianism, the West is disintegrating in a chaos of heterogeneity and decadence. The warnings of Spengler have come true, and Patrick Buchanan forecasts the death of the West. Russia and parts of Eastern Europe are trying to save themselves from liberalism and democracy, but success is not guaranteed. 
+Thinkers in the Alt-Right are wrestling with the question of how to save our own white civilization. The old order is collapsing due to challenges from abroad and the immigrant invasion. Non-whites are chopping up the West the way the West once chopped up China. We are Yan Fu and Liang Qichao. We must forge a plan for the preservation of our race. 
+“Sacco Vandal is a founding editor of VandalVoid.com and coauthor of The American Militant Nationalist Manifesto .” See Patrick Buchanan, The Death of the West (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002); David Goldman, How Civilizations Die (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2011); Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2009); Larry Kelley, Lessons From Fallen Civilizations (Austin: Hugo House Publishers, 2012); Mark Steyn, America Alone (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2009); and Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008). Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War (New York: Random House, 2008), ix-x. Patrick Buchanan, Death of the West (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 11-12. Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War (New York: Random House, 2008), 502. “Modern History Sourcebook: Qianlong: Letter to George III, 1793” Internet History Sourcebooks, accessed March 20, 2014, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1793Qianlong.asp . Yan Fu, “On Stength” in vol. 2 of Sources of Chinese Tradition , edited by William Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 256. Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 46. Yan Fu, “On Stength” in vol. 2 of Sources of Chinese Tradition , edited by William Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 258. Kang Youwei, “The Need for Reforming Institutions” in vol. 2 of Sources of Chinese Tradition , edited by William Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 270. William Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, ed., Sources of Chinese Tradition , vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 288. Liang Qichao, “Renewing the People” in vol. 2 of Sources of Chinese Tradition , edited by William Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 290. Yan Fu, quoted in In Search of Wealth and Power , Benjamin Schwarz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 235. Yan Fu, quoted in In Search of Wealth and Power , Benjamin Schwarz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 235. Liang Qichao, “Travel Impressions from Europe” in vol. 2 of Sources of Chinese Tradition , edited by William Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 378-379. See Max Ko-wu Huang, The Meaning of Freedom (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2008), Chapter 1; and Orville Schell, Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform (New York: Panteon Books, 1988), chapter “Liang Qichao: China’s First Democrat.”",FAKE
+10272,"New Clinton Probe Dead from the Start, John Podesta’s Best Friend at DOJ In Charge of Investigation","Elon Musk to Completely Revolutionize the Energy Industry with New Tesla Solar Roof Home / BREAKING NEWS / New Clinton Probe Dead from the Start, John Podesta’s Best Friend at DOJ In Charge of Investigation New Clinton Probe Dead from the Start, John Podesta’s Best Friend at DOJ In Charge of Investigation Claire Bernish November 1, 2016 Leave a comment 
+Late on Friday evening, the FBI announced the reopening of its investigation of Hillary Clinton and her opprobrious emails, and the Department of Justice quickly followed suit on Monday, vowing to “dedicate all needed resources to quickly review emails in [the] Clinton case,” according to a tweet by the Associated Press . BREAKING: Justice Dept. says it'll dedicate all needed resources to quickly review emails in Clinton case. 
+— The Associated Press (@AP) October 31, 2016 
+Both announcements, made after Clinton aid Huma Abedin’s emails were discovered on estranged husband Anthony Weiner’s computer, come amid growing internal contention, as the FBI and DOJ parse out how to deal with the pressure of a rapidly approaching presidential election, as well as public perception the original investigation had been purposely bumbled in favor of the Democratic nominee. 
+However welcome or unwelcome the news of reopened investigations might be, one major detail — revealed in Wikileaks ongoing publications of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails — presents evidence the Justice Department’s probe could amount to little more than a smoke screen to placate an irate public. 
+Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik promised Congress in a letter the Justice Department “will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible.” #BREAKING Senior DOJ official sends letter to lawmakers responding to request for more information about email review. #8days pic.twitter.com/PCgT2ODkQd 
+— Just the Facts (@JTF_News) October 31, 2016 
+Perhaps that vow, from a government branch putatively dedicated to ensuring the criminal element is duly punished for misbehavior, should reassure those increasingly suspicious of an obviously-rigged system. 
+Perhaps, before Wikileaks revealed interdepartmental communications and corruption, that promise might have held weight beyond a symbolic gesture of obligation — but as Podesta’s emails reveal, it’s entirely possible this reopened investigation is failed from the start. 
+Kadzik, in fact, maintains a cozy enough relationship with Podesta to have had dinner with the Clinton insider just one day after the former secretary of state testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October. 
+And the pair’s familiarity isn’t held to a simple dinner party, as the Daily Caller reported , “Podesta and Kadzik, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, were in frequent contact, other emails show. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.” 
+So, Kadzik — an extremely close friend to the chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — is tasked with heading the newly reopened investigation of Hillary Clinton. 
+Clinton couldn’t ask for an arrangement better situated to again find insufficient evidence worthy of bringing charges against her. As far as conflicts of interest go, this takes the cake. 
+“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, Matthew Whitaker, told the Daily Caller . 
+If political wranglings and connections marred transparency and neutrality the first time around, it would be reasonable to assume the players haven’t since magically unentangled themselves from Clinton and her campaign mere days before Americans take to the polls. 
+“It’s the kind of thing the American people are frustrated about is that the politically powerful have insider access and have these kind of relationships that ultimately appear to always break to the benefit of Hillary Clinton,” Whitaker continued, also noting the controversial meeting between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac in Phoenix during the DOJ’s previous investigation. 
+In fact, Kadzik, as an Obama appointee to the Justice Department beginning in 2013, also initiated the effort to have Loretta Lynch appointed to the role of Attorney General. 
+And the friendship between Kadzik and Podesta — as well as their connections to the Obama administration and additional officials overseeing the Clinton investigation — spans decades. 
+In 2008, for example, as the Washington Free Beacon reported from one of the leaked emails, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik have a supportive role in Obama’s presidential campaign — particularly because the latter was a “fantastic lawyer” who managed to keep Podesta “out of jail.” 
+Although Kadzik, as head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, does not have a direct role in ‘chain of command’ for the Clinton investigation, he does field inquiries from Congress concerning her emails. 
+Noted by the Daily Caller , in “November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation,” which sparked outrage by the GOP over potential conflicts of interest. 
+Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis voiced particular concerns about Lynch’s longtime connections to the Clintons in a February 1, 2016 letter , and that Obama’s appointees “are being asked to impartially execute their respective duties as Department of Justice officials that may involve an investigation into the activities of the forerunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.” 
+While the Daily Caller ’s report goes much further in depth concerning the relationships of Podesta and Kadzik with the Clintons and their insiders, it can be easily surmised in even a simple perusal of facts there could be no possible way an investigation this critical — and with resounding implications — would maintain any semblance of impartiality. 
+When Julian Assange vociferously denounces the U.S. electoral and political systems as rigged beyond repair, these connections are precisely what he’s referring to. 
+It might calm an irate public to hear an investigation had to be reopened — but when the effort involves the same players as the first round, the outcome is all-too predictable. Share Social Trending",FAKE
+5319,A Digital 9/11 If Trump Wins,"  Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Many of his recent articles appear on the renowned Canadian-based news website Globalresearch . He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He specializes in Middle East and East Africa issues and has also given several American radio interviews as well as TV interviews on Press TV and Russia Today. His interests include capitalism, imperialism and war, socialism, justice and peace, agriculture and trade policy, ecological impact, science and technology, and human rights. He is also a musician and songwriter. Previously, he was based in Bahrain and witnessed the political upheavals in the Persian Gulf kingdom during 2011 as well as the subsequent Saudi-led brutal crackdown against pro-democracy protests. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted many human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream media, including ,The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring. A Digital 9/11 If Trump Wins By Finian Cunningham on November 6, 2016 It is a green light for a coup d’état by the Deep State forces who found that they could not win through the “normal” rigging methods. 
+by Finian Cunningham 
+SPUTNIK 
+There are disturbing signs that a digital 9/11 terror attack is being readied for election day in the US to ensure that Donald Trump does not win. 
+Such an attack – involving widespread internet and power outage – would have nothing to do with Russia or any other foreign state. It would be furnished by agencies of the US Deep State in a classic “false flag” covert manner. But the resulting chaos and “assault on American democracy” will be conveniently blamed on Russia. 
+That presents a double benefit. Russia would be further demonized as a foreign aggressor “justifying” even harsher counter measures by America and its European allies against Moscow. 
+Secondly, a digital attack on America’s presidential election day this week, would allow the Washington establishment to pronounce the result invalidate due to “Russian cyber subversion”. That option stands to be invoked if the ballot results showed Republican candidate Donald Trump as the imminent victor. 
+Democrat rival Hillary Clinton is the clear choice for the White House among the Washington establishment. She has the backing of Wall Street finance capital, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex and the Deep State agencies of the Pentagon and CIA. The fix has been in for months to get her elected by the powers-that-be owing to her well-groomed obedience to American imperialist interests. 
+The billionaire property magnate Trump is too much of a maverick to be entrusted with the White House, as far as the American ruling elite are concerned. The trouble is, however, that despite the massive campaign to discredit Trump his poll support remains stubbornly close to Clinton’s. 
+The latter has been tainted with too many scandals involving allegations of sleazy dealings with Wall Street, so-called pay-for-play favors while she was former Secretary of State, and her penchant for inciting overseas wars for regime change using jihadist terrorist foot-soldiers. 
+As one headline from McClatchy News only days ago put it: “Majority of voters think Clinton acted illegally, new poll finds”. 
+Trump is right. The US presidential election is “rigged”. Despite handwringing condemnations by pundits, it seems obvious that the system is heavily stacked against any candidate who does not conform with the interests of the establishment. The massive media-orchestrated campaign against Trump is testimony to that. 
+But such is popular disgust with Clinton, her sleaze-ball husband Bill and the Washington establishment that her victory is far from certain. Indeed in the last week before voting this Tuesday various polls are showing a neck-and-neck race with even some indicators putting the Republican narrowly ahead. 
+Over the weekend, the Washington Post, which has been one of the main media outlets panning Trump on a daily basis, reported this: “The electoral map is definitely moving in Trump’s direction”. 
+This is where a possible Deep State contingency plan is being readied to scupper a shock win by Trump. 
+In recent days, American media are reporting a virtual state of emergency by the US government and its security agencies to thwart what they claim are Russian efforts to incite “election day cyber mayhem”. 
+In one “exclusive” report by the NBC network on November 3, it was claimed that: “The US government believes hackers from Russia or elsewhere may try to undermine next week’s presidential election and is mounting an unprecedented effort to counter their cyber meddling.” 
+On November 4, the Washington Post reported : “Intelligence officials warn of Russian mischief in election and beyond.” 
+Apparently, the emergency security response is being coordinated by the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the National Security Agency and other elements of the Defense Department, according to NBC. 
+These claims of Russian state hackers interfering in the US political system are not new. Last month, the Obama administration officially accused Moscow of this alleged malfeasance. 
+Russian President Vladimir Putin has lambasted American claims that his country is seeking to disrupt the presidential elections as “hysterical nonsense”, aimed at distracting the electorate from far more deep-rooted internal problems. 
+The Obama administration and its state security agencies have not provided one iota of evidence to support their allegations against Russia. Nevertheless the repeated charges have a tendency to stick. Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder. 
+The Clinton campaign has for months been accusing Trump of being a “pro-Russian stooge”. Her campaign has also claimed that Russian hackers have colluded with the whistleblower organization Wikileaks to release thousands of private emails damaging Clinton with the intention of swaying the election in favor of Trump. 
+Wikileaks’ director Julian Assange and the Russian government have both rejected any suggestion that they are somehow collaborating, or that they are working to get Trump elected. 
+But on the eve of the election, the US authorities are recklessly pushing hysteria that Russia is trying to subvert American democracy. Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 is quoted as saying: “The Russians are in an offensive mode and the US is working on strategies to respond to that, and at the highest levels.” 
+NBC cites a senior Obama administration official as saying that the Russians “want to sow as much confusion as possible and undermine our process”. 
+Ominously, the news outlet adds that “steps are being taken to prepare for worst-case scenarios, including a cyber-attack that shuts down part of the power grid or the internet.” 
+Nearly two weeks ago, on October 21-22, the US was hit with a widespread internet outage.The actors behind the “distributed denial of service” were not identified, but the disruption was nationwide and it temporarily disabled many popular consumer services. One former official at the US Department of Homeland Security described the event as having “all the signs of what would be considered a drill”. Could that cyber-attack have been the work of US Deep State agencies as a dress rehearsal for an even bigger outage planned for November 8 – election day? 
+The Washington establishment wants Clinton over Trump. She’s the marionette of choice for their strategic interests, including a more hostile foreign policy towards Russia in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere. 
+But Trump might just snatch an election day victory from the jaws of defeat. George Soros-NGO manipulator 
+In which case, the shadowy forces that really rule America will trigger a “digital 9/11”. It’s not difficult to imagine the chaos and mayhem from internet blackout, power, transport, banking and communications paralysis – even for just a temporary period of a few hours. 
+Months of fingering Russia as a destabilizing foreign enemy intent on interfering in US democracy to get “Comrade Trump” into the White House would then serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In that event, the US authorities could plausibly move to declare the election of Donald J Trump null and void. 
+In fact the scenario could be contrived to a far more serious level than merely suspending the election result. The US authorities could easily feign that a state of emergency is necessary in order to “defend national security”. 
+That contingency catapults beyond “rigged politics”. It is a green light for a coup d’état by the Deep State forces who found that they could not win through the “normal” rigging methods.",FAKE
+684,US election 2016: Can Clinton win over Republican moderates?,"Some may have expected Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton to swing further left to woo supporters of her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders ahead of the California primary on Tuesday.
+
+Instead she came out swinging against Donald Trump in a scathing speech that made clear she's looking to appeal to a broad centre in the general election.
+
+Billed as a national security speech, her address lacked any new proposals. Instead it was a forceful, often mocking, rebuke of the presumptive Republican nominee, as she framed her pitch in patriotic terms that could also resonate with Republicans.
+
+Mrs. Clinton presented herself as the real defender of American values and a commander-in-chief with a steady hand who believed in America as an exceptional country.
+
+Mr Trump on the other hand, ""believes America is weak. An embarrassment. He called our military a disaster. He said we are, and I quote, a third-world country,"" said Mrs Clinton, speaking in San Diego, a city with 95,000 military personnel.
+
+Mrs Clinton was introduced by the spouse of an active duty naval officer and spoke with 20 US flags prominently displayed behind her.
+
+Although still fighting a primary, Mrs. Clinton is clearly making a play for independent and Republican voters who are concerned about Mr Trump's erratic foreign policy pronouncements but also his statements on women, Mexican immigrants and Muslims. On Thursday, the head of Hispanic media relations for the Republican National Committee, Ruth Guerra, resigned.
+
+Mrs Clinton has always had the potential to appeal to moderate Republicans turned off by their party's stance on social issues such as gay marriage, abortion and even guns, but who feel she is tough enough on foreign policy.
+
+In late April, during her speech after her victory in the Pennsylvania primary, Mrs Clinton appealed to ""thoughtful"" Republicans, independents and Democrats to stand together against divisive candidates on the Republican side.
+
+Although House speaker Paul Ryan finally endorsed Donald Trump on Thursday after weeks of hesitation, prominent Republicans are not rushing actively to back the presumptive Republican nominee just yet. At least nine Republican governors, and a number of senators, are steering clear from their party convention in July.
+
+There has also been a trickle of lifelong, prominent Republicans who openly say they will vote for a Democrat for the first time in their life in November.
+
+Mrs Clinton's message on American global leadership may not resonate widely with the GOP (Grand Old Party; Republican) base which is turning more isolationist - but it is finding an audience with many moderates and foreign policy thinkers.
+
+On Twitter, the hashtag #RepublicansforHillary was trending for a day this week, after an interview on US cable TV with a former Reagan administration official, Doug Elmets, who said that ""four years of Hillary Clinton is better than one day with Donald Trump as president"".
+
+Widely quoted in the US media as well was retired army colonel Peter Mansoor, a former aide to General David Petraeus during the Iraq war.
+
+Mr Mansoor said he would be voting for Mrs Clinton not because he had converted to being a Democrat, but because Mr Trump was dangerous.
+
+Elections are not won on Twitter and a handful of Republicans won't tip the balance in November, but the chatter on social media is bringing out voices from the Republican party silent during the raucous days of the Republican primaries and raising questions about a ripple effect.
+
+Mr Trump has been criticised by leading names such as former secretary of defence Robert Gates, former CIA director Michael Hayden, former Bush administration spokesperson Tony Fratto, historian Max Boot and commentator David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W Bush.
+
+Clinton campaign aides were not willing to discuss their strategy to appeal to moderate Republicans, especially while the Democratic primary is still under way. But they acknowledged there were Republicans, particularly those concerned with foreign policy issues, who could support her.
+
+Vin Weber, a Republican strategist and former congressman who supported Jeb Bush in the primaries, said Mrs Clinton should enlist Republican advisors.
+
+""If she were campaigning like her husband, she would move to the centre, and try to get votes that are not locked up by the Republican Party,"" said Mr Weber, who said he was still doing some hard thinking about how to vote in November.
+
+Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg says a recent poll shows moderate Republicans represent a ""stunning 31% of the GOP base"", what he describes the alienated third of the party.
+
+""They are disproportionately college graduates in a white, working-class party, and they are socially liberal.""
+
+On marriage equality, climate change or abortion rights, those GOP moderates are more in sync with the Democratic party. The poll, conducted in February when all the Republican candidates were still in the race, showed that 10% of Republican moderates would vote for Clinton.
+
+Kori Schake, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, said that Clinton's challenge would be to convince anti-Trump Republicans they actually need to vote for her - not simply refrain from voting for Mr Trump.
+
+""Republican refuseniks are not enough to make a difference,"" she said.
+
+Ms Schake said presenting Mr Trump as dangerous was an effective strategy, but it was also key for Mrs Clinton to frame her pitch in economic terms.
+
+She had to press home the damage she believed a Trump presidency would cause to the economy - but to do so would require moving decisively to the right of Mr Sanders, and risk alienating many in her own party.
+
+""I've just come back from Cuba, and I've seen what a Sanders economy looks like,"" said Ms Schake.
+
+Mrs Clinton will seek to unify the Democratic party ahead of the convention, She will not undo the positions she has taken during the drawn-out primaries to appeal to the Democratic base.
+
+But to win those moderates Republicans, she will now need to present herself not just as the candidate of her party's middle but of America's centre.",REAL
+9847,Harry Reid Just Accused FBI Of Hiding “Explosive Info” About Trump & Putin,"Comments 
+Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid just sent a scathing open letter to FBI Director James Comey, calling him out for smearing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton while hiding a sinister truth about Donald Trump that the public deserves to know. In it, he accuses the controversial FBI Director of sitting on secret “explosive” intelligence information about the Republican presidential campaign’s coordination with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Reid wrote : 
+The double standard established by your actions is clear. 
+In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government – a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity. The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information. 
+By contrast, as soon as you came into possession of the slightest innuendo related to Secretary Clinton, you rushed to publicize it in the most negative light possible. Moreover, in tarring Secretary Clinton with thin innuendo, you overruled longstanding tradition and the explicit guidance of your own Department. 
+You rushed to take this step eleven days before a presidential election, despite the fact that for all you know, the information you possess could be entirely duplicative of the information you already examined which exonerated Secretary Clinton. 
+Senator Reid continued by notifying Comey of violating the Hatch Act, whic forbids federal employees from engaging in partisan acts. Even further, Reid said that he regretted helping President Obama break a long Republican filibuster of his nomination to head the FBI just three short years ago. 
+It’s not surprising that there is a tangible link between Putin and Trump, especially after an interview of the Republican claiming he has a relationship with the Russian dictator was unearthed by the Democratic Coalition Against Trump and authenticated by MSNBC host Thomas A. Roberts this week . 
+Which begs the question, what is the Republican Party’s standard bearer hiding regarding his dealings with Vladimir Putin? Related Items:",FAKE
+9388,Doctors Restore Ken Burns’ Full-Color Vision After Removing Massive Tumor From Filmmaker’s Visual Cortex - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Doctors Restore Ken Burns’ Full-Color Vision After Removing Massive Tumor From Filmmaker’s Visual Cortex Close Vol 52 Issue 43 · News · Celebrities · Entertainment · Healthcare 
+CLEVELAND—Speaking to reporters following the successful eight-hour procedure Tuesday, neurosurgeons at the Cleveland Clinic confirmed they had removed a golf ball–sized tumor from the visual cortex of filmmaker Ken Burns, restoring the documentarian’s ability to see in full color. “We’re happy to report that the surgery went smoothly, and beginning today, Mr. Burns will no longer be limited to perceiving the world in shades of black, white, and sepia, and will instead be able to experience the entire spectrum of hues that most of us take for granted,” said Dr. Amrita Singh, noting that the 63-year-old director and producer of The Civil War , Prohibition , and Jazz had awakened from anesthesia and was reported to be marveling at the vividness of his surroundings, human faces, and photographs. “It appears that the removal of this tumor also reduced intense pressure that had built up inside Mr. Burns’ visual processing center; as a result, his eyesight has sharpened considerably, and he’ll notice that he won’t need to lean in close anymore to make out the details of images. It’s going to seem like a whole new world to him.” Dr. Singh added that an additional inner-ear surgery would be required to correct the balance issue that causes Burns to slowly drift from left to right. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
+Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
+1114,Democrats clash over immigration at Florida debate,"Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton accused each other of either failing immigrants or pandering to them during a spirited debate Wednesday evening defined in part by the candidates’ most direct attacks on one another and on Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
+
+Sanders, a senator from Vermont, said Clinton, the former secretary of state, had turned her back callously on children fleeing violence in Honduras, while he had wanted to welcome them into the United States two years ago.
+
+“Secretary Clinton said, ‘Send them back,’ ” Sanders thundered near the start of the night.
+
+“Misrepresentations can’t go unanswered here,” Clinton replied curtly, and she went on to say Sanders had supported the work of American “vigilantes” patrolling the southern border to stop illegal immigration. Sanders denied the charge.
+
+The angry exchange set the tone for a two-hour debate that ranged over national and international issues and also explored the raw emotions surrounding the separation of immigrant families as the result of deportations. In front of an expressive audience at Miami Dade College, each candidate pledged to go further than President Obama to protect immigrants in the United States without proper documentation and to give them a path to achieve U.S. citizenship.
+
+The debate, sponsored by The Washington Post and the Spanish-language network Univision, was conducted partly in Spanish, and it was unusual for the emotional notes struck by audience members who recounted personal stories of immigration difficulties and who challenged the candidates for remedies.
+
+The session came a day after Sanders won an upset victory in Michigan by attacking Clinton as a free-trader with little regard for American jobs. In that contest he also made surprising inroads with African Americans, among Clinton’s most reliable constituencies to date.
+
+The next big test for both candidates will come Tuesday, when Democrats — and Republicans — vote in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio.
+
+The biggest prize is Florida, the site of Wednesday’s debate. The most recent polls have shown Clinton with a sizable lead over Sanders here, beating him by more than 25 points and posting strong support among Hispanics. The debate Wednesday was the last time the candidates were scheduled to be face to face before the Tuesday primaries.
+
+Clinton sought to turn the page quickly here from her embarrassing and unexpected loss in Michigan, which appeared to slow some of her recent momentum toward the nomination.
+
+“This is a marathon, and it’s a marathon that can only be carried out by the kind of inclusive campaign that I’m running,” Clinton said, a sidelong swipe at Sanders’s base of support among white voters.
+
+“It was a very close race, and we’ve had some of those,” Clinton said. “I’ve won some, I’ve lost some.”
+
+She angrily dismissed a question about whether she would quit the race if she is indicted as the result of an FBI investigation into the personal email system she set up when she was secretary of state and whether she or her senior advisers mishandled classified information as a result.
+
+“It’s not going to happen,” she sputtered. “I’m not even going to answer that question.”
+
+When given the chance, neither candidate took the opportunity to call Trump, the billionaire real estate developer who has a commanding lead in the race for the Republican nomination, a “racist.”
+
+Clinton said she was disturbed by many things that Trump has said and stood for, including his call for a ban on Muslims seeking to enter the United States. She called such positions “un-American.”
+
+“I think what he has promoted is not at all in keeping with American values,” she said. She mocked Trump’s plan to build what she called a “very tall wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border.
+
+Sanders also stopped short of using the term “racist,” but he called Trump’s promise to deport all of the approximately 12 million immigrants who are here illegally “vulgar.”
+
+“I think that the American people are never going to elect a president who insults Mexicans, who insults Muslims, who insults women, who insults African Americans,” Sanders said.
+
+Immigration is an issue of keen interest in Florida, and the debate included a personal appeal from a woman in the audience, who asked in Spanish what each candidate could do to reunite families such as hers who have been divided by U.S. immigration policy.
+
+“Ma’am, I will do everything I can to unite your family,” Sanders said. “Your children deserve to be with their mother.”
+
+Clinton praised her “incredible act of courage” for sharing her story and said: “It’s time to bring families together.”
+
+Clinton aggressively went after Sanders for voting against a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2007 that was sponsored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
+
+“Imagine where we would be today if we had achieved comprehensive immigration reform nine years ago,” Clinton said.
+
+Sanders said that he had opposed the bill because of provisions on guest workers that would have kept them in working conditions he called “akin to slavery.” He noted that he voted for a 2013 bill that he said fixed some of those problems.
+
+“They were cheated, they were abused, they were humiliated,” Sanders said.
+
+Clinton said she doubted such a bill would have been supported by Kennedy, then-Sen. Barack Obama and herself. She was a U.S. senator from New York at the time.
+
+“That was one of the many excuses used not to vote for the 2007 bill,” Clinton said of Sanders’s explanation.
+
+Sanders countered that Clinton had taken less friendly positions toward undocumented immigrants on the issuing of driver’s licenses and on protecting those fleeing violence in Honduras.
+
+The Michigan victory injected unexpected drama into a Democratic race that had seemed all but settled before Tuesday. Clinton had seemed on the verge of locking up the nomination, and her advisers maintain that is still the case.
+
+But with Michigan, the biggest and most diverse state he has won so far, Sanders has a firmer claim to legitimacy and momentum. In pre-election polls in Michigan, Clinton had a lead of more than 20 percentage points. But on primary night, Sanders won the state by 1.5 points.
+
+The candidates were pressed about their respective places in a race in which Clinton holds a commanding lead in the delegate count, particularly once superdelegates are factored in. With the support of those elected officials and other party leaders, Clinton has now collected 1,221 delegates to 571 for Sanders.
+
+Sanders emphasized his signature issue — Wall Street reform and the country’s unequal distribution of wealth — and tweaked Clinton over closed-door speeches she gave to Wall Street firms after leaving the State Department.
+
+He pushed Clinton to release the transcripts of those paid speeches she gave in the run-up to her presidential bid, including one to Goldman Sachs for which she received $225,000.
+
+“When you get paid $225,000, that means that speech must have been an extraordinarily wonderful speech,” Sanders said, playfully saying that’s why she should share it.
+
+Asked whether he thinks she said different things behind closed doors, Sanders said: “That is exactly what releasing the transcripts will tell us.”
+
+Clinton countered that she has “a public record and you can look it up,” suggesting she has been tough on the financial sector.
+
+Sanders has pledged to continue his insurgent campaign through the Democratic convention in July. Sanders’s powerful liberal appeal and proven ability to energize young supporters potentially saps enthusiasm and money from Clinton while exposing her to continued attacks that may weaken her before she ever faces a Republican opponent.
+
+Sanders’s online fundraising prowess has all but guaranteed that he can stay in the race for as long as wants. His campaign sought to parlay his unexpected success in Michigan into another big push for donations, asking supporters to help him raise $5 million by midnight Wednesday — a feat that it said “would stun the establishment.”
+
+Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters earlier Wednesday that the Michigan victory does not change the mathematical advantage that Clinton holds over Sanders.
+
+“We are confident we are nearing the point where our delegate lead will essentially be insurmountable,” Mook said.",REAL
+7098,Sex Bombshell Exposed After Hillary Couldn’t Hide What She Did Back In 2011,"Sex Bombshell Exposed After Hillary Couldn’t Hide What She Did Back In 2011 Posted on October 31, 2016 by Robert Rich in Politics Share This 
+Hillary Clinton is backpedaling these days, but her past isn’t making things any easier on her. In fact, it seems that her dirty deeds from 2011 just came to the surface in the form of a sex bombshell – and not even she could hide it forever. 
+With the FBI reopening its investigation into Hillary’s emails and private server, on account of another case into Anthony Weiner’s sexting of an alleged minor, it seems that there are some startling details coming forward. Although we all know that Weiner is a long-time pervert and sexual predator, it looks like things have been going on for longer than we thought – and Hillary knew about it all along. Everyone who knew Anthony Weiner targeted underage girls back in 2011: John Podesta, Neera Tanden, and Hillary Clinton (left), and Jennifer Palmieri (right) 
+According to Mail Online , Hillary’s camp knew that Weiner was talking to and sending sexually graphic images to an underage girl all the way back in 2011, yet they did nothing to stop him. In fact, Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign communications director in 2011, sent an email to John Podesta, now chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign, and Neera Tanden, another Clinton adviser, detailing Weiner’s predatory and criminal behavior. 
+Married to Hillary’s current top aide, Huma Abedin, at the time, Weiner’s indiscretions were made public knowledge to Hillary’s camp and only met with a mere “oof” from Podesta. Further reports indicate that police were sent to the 17-year-old girl’s home at the time to interview both the child and her parents. Anthony Weiner and his sex pics 
+Of course, as we all know now, Weiner has come under official investigation after sending lewd messages to a different 15-year-old girl more recently. However, one can only wonder if Weiner’s most recent victim could have been spared if his predatory behavior was addressed back in 2011 rather than swept under the rug. 
+Although he’s been widely deemed the black sheep of the political realm, it certainly appears that his divorce and early resignation was the least of concern pertaining to the fallout of his behavior. Seeing how the most recent of Weiner’s consequences just slapped Hillary, it doesn’t take much to imagine the hell he’s living in right now. Anthony Weiner and steamy messages he sent to a woman other than his wife 
+However, it is good to have these things out in the open as it helps show the true Hillary Clinton – the one she never wanted you to know about. There’s no question that Hillary would do whatever it took to remain in power, but this is just ridiculous. 
+Because of her neglect and the blind eye turned by her staff, an underage girl was allowed to be victimized because the truth would have a negative effect on them. There really is no jail cell that’s suited for what Hillary deserves but she will most certainly have to answer for her misdeeds after she’s dead and gone from this earth – and suffering for an eternity sounds rather fitting for the vile things she’s done.",FAKE
+1037,"Who's Best For Hispanics? Clinton, Sanders Debate","MIAMI -- Fighting for Florida and beyond, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders tangled in an intense debate Wednesday night over who's the true friend of American Hispanics, trading accusations over guest worker programs ""akin to slavery"" and the embracing of ""vigilantes"" against immigrants.
+
+ 
+
+They had even worse things to say about Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
+
+ 
+
+Facing off just six days before Florida gives its verdict on the presidential race, Clinton faulted Sanders for repeatedly voting against a 2007 comprehensive immigration reform bill; he faulted her for opposing a 2007 effort to let people who were in the country illegally obtain driver's licenses.
+
+ 
+
+Had the immigration package passed back then, Clinton said, ""a lot of the issues we are still discussing today would be in the rearview mirror.""
+
+ 
+
+Sanders retorted that he opposed the legislation because it included a guest worker program ""akin to slavery.""
+
+ 
+
+The debate opened with a question that appeared to startle Clinton.
+
+ 
+
+Univision's Jorge Ramos asked her if she would drop out of the race if indicted over the handling of her email while secretary of state.
+
+ 
+
+""Oh for goodness, that is not going to happen,"" Clinton declared. ""I'm not even answering that question.""
+
+ 
+
+The FBI is investigation the possibility of mishandling of sensitive information that passed through Clinton's private email server.
+
+ 
+
+Sanders, as he has in the past, declined to bite on the issue, saying, ""The process will take its course."" He said he'd rather talk about the issues of wealth and income inequality.
+
+ 
+
+Both candidates were bedding for momentum after Sanders startled Clinton with an upset victory in Michigan on Tuesday.
+
+ 
+
+Clinton stressed that she has a strong lead in the delegates, declaring, ""This is a marathon, and it is a marathon that can only be carried by the kind of campaign I am running.""
+
+ 
+
+Sanders said his Michigan surprise was evidence that his message is resonating.
+
+ 
+
+""We are going to continue to do extremely well,"" he said, adding that he expects to convince superdelegates who are backing Clinton to switch to his column.
+
+ 
+
+Immigration commanded considerable attention for good reason: Florida is home to nearly 1.8 million Hispanics, including about 15 percent of the state's Democrats.
+
+ 
+
+Hispanic voters have made up about 10 percent of voters in the Democratic primaries so far this year, and Clinton has been getting about two-thirds of their votes to about one-third for Sanders. The Vermont senator, for his part, stresses that he's making progress on winning over younger Hispanics.
+
+ 
+
+Clinton at one point accused Sanders of supporting legislation that would have led to indefinite detention of people facing deportation, and for standing with Minutemen vigilantes. He called that notion ""ridiculous"" and ""absurd,"" and accused Clinton of picking small pieces out of big legislative packages to distort his voting record.
+
+ 
+
+""No, I do not support vigilantes and that is a horrific statement and an unfair statement to make,"" he said, adding: ""I will match my record against yours any day of the week.""
+
+ 
+
+For all the disagreements, the overall tone of the candidates was considerably less tense than their Sunday faceoff. Sanders even paused at one point to make fun of his own pronunciation of ""huge"" as ""yuge.""
+
+ 
+
+Both found agreement in pointing to GOP front-runner Trump as markedly worse on immigration than either of them.
+
+ 
+
+Clinton mocked the Trump's plan for a wall on the Mexican border, saying he'd build ""the most beautiful tall wall, better than the great wall of China"" to be ""magically"" paid for by Mexico. That, she said, is a fantasy.
+
+ 
+
+Sanders largely agreed, adding his hope that in the immigration debate ""we do not, as Donald Trump and others have done, resort to racism and xenophobia and bigotry.""
+
+ 
+
+The candidates squared off soon after a testy debate in Michigan on Sunday in which they argued about trade and economic issues of particular interest in the industrial Midwest.
+
+ 
+
+With Missouri, Illinois, Ohio among the states that will be voting on Tuesday, the candidates returned to a pointed matter they'd already argued about three days earlier, scuffling over Sanders' vote against 2009 legislation that bailed out the auto industry, among others. Sanders said he opposed the bill because it also bailed out big banks that had fueled the recession to begin with. Clinton stressed she'd made a different judgment to side with the automakers.
+
+ 
+
+Overall, 691 delegates are at stake on Tuesday, including 99 in Florida, which awards all its delegates to the winner rather than dividing them up proportionately..
+
+ 
+
+Clinton has won 762 pledged delegates compared to 549 for Sanders, with 10 delegates from recent primaries still to be allocated. When superdelegates are included, Clinton leads 1,223 to 574, more than halfway to the 2,383 needed to win the Democratic nomination.
+
+ 
+
+___
+
+ 
+
+Benac reported from Washington. AP Writers Sergio Bustos and Ken Thomas in Miami, and Hope Yen in Washington contributed to this report.
+
+(Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed).
+
+",REAL
+9629,"Hillary Arrives At Rally, Makes One Weird Move That Left Onlookers Puzzled","Hillary Arrives At Rally, Makes One Weird Move That Left Onlookers Puzzled Posted on October 27, 2016 by Alisha Rich in Politics Share This 
+As Hillary Clinton makes her last few rounds of appearances before election day, the presidential hopeful will feel a little bit of the pressure that the presidency will demand. However, when she arrived at her rally in Lake Worth, Florida, she attempted to make one move that she hoped no one would notice. 
+There have been many questions over the course of Hillary Clinton’s campaign regarding her health. As a result of her age and her lifestyle, there’s no doubt that her body is starting to feel the effects of aging – whether she likes to admit it or not. 
+However, video footage of her recent rally in Florida shows how desperate she is to keep her health problems hidden, but her attempt was met with failure the moment she hit the stage. In fact, the Democratic presidential candidate struggled to climb one single step. The video captures one of her aides rushing towards her side as she attempted to climb up the riser. 
+“She needed assistance to get onto it as she could be seen reaching her hand out for a boost or some added steadiness,” according to The American Mirror . “The aide extended his hand and Clinton held on tightly as she made her way up the 18 inches.” 
+Although Hillary Clinton insists that her health isn’t an issue, the number of incidents she has had paints quite a different picture. If you take a close look at the video, the aide can even be seen standing behind her, reaching for her waist – probably preparing for the event of her falling. 
+We have said it time and time again – she’s not fit to be president. Although her health is a major concern considering how demanding the presidency can be on a person, it’s her disastrous political history that raises, even more, concerns.",FAKE
+5747,The Daily Traditionalist: Jeff Schoep and the NSM,"Radio Aryan October 29, 2016 
+Matthew Heimbach brings us the last show of the week accompanied by Jason Augustus and special guest Jeff Schoep from the National Socialist Movement. Jeff tells us how he has been involved in White Nationalism for around 25 years and reminds us of the sacrifices that many good men have made over that time to promote our cause, being imprisoned or physically attacked for their beliefs. The NSM is a political movement as well as being involved in street activism, so they are involved in a lot of community outreach work. Jeff talks about how their roots go back to George Lincoln Rockwell and the only groups that have legitimate ties to his movement are the New Order and the NSM. He was taught by the people who had learned from him and public service was always a part of what they were doing. 
+Jason asks what it was like to be a political skinhead involved in National Socialism and what changes he has seen in his time. Years ago a fight just used to be a fight, but nowadays you can be hit with hate crime charges as well, which can lead to lengthy prison sentences and ruined lives, just for a fistfight that may not have even involved racial politics. You cannot even defend your life any more without being charged with hate crime, as we have seen recently in Britain, where activists have received serious jail time for defending themselves against violent antifa in Kent. Jeff is banned from Britain as well as Matt, not due to any criminal activity but just because his speech is politically incorrect. Matt reminds us that the reason for this is because they have no answer to our talking points. They cannot debate us so they always seek to shut us down. 
+The NSM will be taking an important role in the new Nationalist Front alliance with the TWP and Jeff talks about previous attempts to do this before, where good people have tried to broker a peace between the various organisations but due to petty reasons were never able to achieve it. He explains how the main problem has always been personality issues, where people have an issue with someone and then make up stories about them to cause problems. 
+The TWP and the NSM will be at a national rally together at the state capital of Pennsylvania on November 5th and all are welcome, especially other organisations. Jeff reminds us that although it is good to be promoting stuff on the internet, real political change has always been made on the streets. He suggests that if people are worried of being caught on camera, they should just wear a hat and sunglasses. Matt points out that he has never met anyone at an event that he has ever then gone on to have problems with on the internet. 
+For the last part of the podcast Jeff talks about how he has worked to modernise the NSM, distancing them from German symbols and concentrating on American ones instead. He has taken some flak for this but believes that if we want to win, then we will have to start taking risks, after all, who dares wins. 
+Presented by Matthew Heimbach and Jason Augustus with special guest Jeff Schoep 
+The Daily Traditionalist: Jeff Schoep and the NSM – DT 102816",FAKE
+2715,I watched Megyn Kelly for six weeks: How I learned to uncode the Fox News propaganda machine,"As numerous surveys have revealed, Fox News may be the “most-watched” cable news channel, but its viewers are older than those of its competitors (though, to be fair, the competition’s viewers are pretty old, too), and its most devoted ones are consistently conservative.  Rutenberg’s piece raised the possibility that Kelly might be able to attract younger and more ideologically diverse viewers, especially “independents” who watch Fox from time to time but are not regulars.
+
+The magazine’s cover went so far as to suggest that Kelly’s style and departures from conservative orthodoxy might even make her appealing to … readers of the New York Times! (That appeal, such as it is, seems likely to have been undercut in recent weeks by Kelly’s bafflingly out of touch interview of the Duggars and her resort to the tired, racially coded “not exactly a saint” to describe the teenage girl knocked down by a cop in McKinney, Texas.)
+
+These departures from orthodoxy have become legendary among close followers of the media and have earned her praise from a variety of figures outside the conservative movement.  Rutenberg calls them “Megyn moments”: occasions when she asks a conservative guest, nearly always an older white man, a sharp question that doesn’t necessarily fit within the conservative worldview.
+
+Rutenberg’s argument struck me as dubious. While conducting research for my book on the history of TV news, I watched lots and lots of old segments and programs, including many from Fox News.  I’m pretty familiar with Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Shepard Smith and the rest of the Fox crew, including its regular pundits. But I hadn’t seen that much of Kelly.  Could Ailes really be moving away from his successful formula of pandering to Fox’s conservative base?  By watching Kelly’s program, could I learn about important subjects unreported by the Times and the other “mainstream media” that I follow?  Or perhaps acquire new and useful perspectives on things that I thought I understood?
+
+To find out, I watched “The Kelly File” nearly day every from early March through the first week of May.  I saw her report on everything from the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account, and watched her interviews with Republican presidential aspirants and her coverage of the riots in Baltimore in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death. But, in the end, I wasn’t impressed — and not because Kelly is a conservative and her program trumpets conservative points of view.  The problem is that she is a conventional Fox News television anchor, and Fox News isn’t about nuance or complexity, the things I look for in news reporting and analysis.
+
+It’s true that she is less doctrinaire than Hannity.  And she can occasionally ask good questions — though, mostly, it’s her prosecutorial style, rather than the question itself, that it is noteworthy.  Watching her regularly, however, made me realize that she’s merely a slightly different version of O’Reilly — she’s a smart, engaging television personality whose “reports” reaffirm the conservative ideology of most of her viewers.
+
+Kelly’s biggest attribute is her personality.  She’s intelligent, down-to-earth and can poke fun at herself as well as at her guests.  And, no doubt much to Ailes’s delight, she has developed a very effective broadcasting style.  Her husky voice, quick wit and experience as a lawyer give her an admirable air of authority.  In the peculiar style favored by FNC producers, she evokes a still glamorous ex-cheerleader.  She is also a superb performer, never losing her cool or command of her program.  She’s well-suited for television journalism, and in another era, would likely have been a big star for the networks.
+
+Sadly, however, she works for Fox News, a purveyor of a kind of television journalism that has become the norm for cable news, even among channels that eschew its conservatism.  That means covering only a few stories, usually the ones most likely to appeal to their target audience, and following them very closely over the course of the broadcast day, sometimes through live reports from the field, but mostly by allowing assorted guests to opine and pontificate about them.  At Fox News and MSNBC, anchors routinely join in the pontificating, and these breaks with old-school journalistic practice are part of their appeal.  It makes them seem “real,” and as Ailes recognized long ago, most viewers of TV news prefer this to the detachment displayed by journalists at the major networks and CNN.  And Fox at least has the ratings to prove it. Kelly is most certainly “real,” and she opines and pontificates no less than O’Reilly and Hannity.  This is why she is popular with Fox News viewers, who expect this from their prime-time anchors in particular.  But I doubt it will appeal to very many real independents (as opposed to people with largely conservative beliefs who like to think they are independents) or readers of the Times.  And this isn’t just because “The Kelly File” covers so few stories or because Kelly expresses her opinions about so many things.  The same can be said about Rachel Maddow. It’s because Kelly’s program isn’t very informative, even when she devotes attention to stories given short shrift by other news outlets.  With a handful of exceptions — usually compelling breaking news stories like the tragic Germanwings airline crash — every story Kelly and her producers select is predictable.  And, rather than exploring their complexity, Kelly and her guests dumb them down so that everything fits neatly into their viewers’ worldview. I was shocked at how few subjects, sources and points of view “The Kelly File” presents, and by her almost ritualistic recourse to the same old conservative clichés and talking points during discussion and analysis, even when more interesting and complicated angles virtually begged to be examined.  As on “The O’Reilly Factor,” the role played by liberal guests is to be flayed by the host and her allies.  Often this is easy because such guests are academics or policy wonks unaccustomed to talking in sound bites; sometimes their statements are so out of touch with reality that they almost invite ridicule.  Even those famous “Megyn moments” are too few for my liking.  And they always are followed by gracious and supportive remarks that demonstrate to viewers that Kelly is on the side of the “good guys.” Watching Kelly reminded me of what I learned while researching my book — that Fox News, particularly during prime time, really isn’t in the news business.  It’s in the entertainment business.  To a certain degree, this is true of most all television news.  But in FNC’s case, there is a difference.  Fox News’ core audience is more than just a particular slice of the larger consumer marketplace.  It’s a group of people with firm convictions and a coherent ideological worldview — not unlike orthodox Marxists back in the early 1900s.  And part of what Fox does is make this worldview seem even more coherent — and impervious to information that might undermine or contradict it.  That’s actually what its viewers want, and, from the start, Ailes and FNC have eagerly given it to them. I’m sure Ailes would like to expand FNC’s audience and win over viewers whose views are less doctrinaire.  This would be good business, and Ailes is a brilliant businessman.  But I can’t see this happening without him alienating his most loyal viewers, who prefer every story and virtually every fact filtered through the lens of ideology.  At least in present form, “The Kelly File” isn’t going to do this, despite Kelly’s undeniable appeal as a broadcaster.",REAL
+2000,President Paul? Wall Street on high alert,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+5810,Refusal to Acknowledge Uniqueness of Holocaust Constitutes a “Second Genocide” Against Jews,"Diversity Macht Frei October 27, 2016 
+The Jews have successfully foisted Holocaust propaganda on the entire western world, instilling generations of Europeans with an irrational sense of guilt about their own culture, history and civilisation. Children are forced to read Anne Frank’s bogus diary, which was written by her father. Trips to Auschwitz are expensively arranged. Schindler’s List is dutifully screened. And politicians line up to pay their respects at Holocaust Memorial Day. 
+The focus on Hitler instead of other higher-bodycount mass murderers like Stalin and Mao, and the elevation of Jewish victimhood at the expense of other targeted groups, constitute an extraordinary manifestation of Jewish Privilege; one that begins to seem anomalous sooner or later. And this sense of its anomalousness provokes attempts turn the Holocaust propaganda ceremonies into more general commemorations of suffering. In Eastern Europe, as I have written about before, there has also been an effort to draw parallels between Hitler and Stalin, advancing the notion of a “Double Genocide”. 
+But the Jews are not happy about this attempt to take their preciousss away. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Seth J. Frantzman even calls this tendency towards universalism a “second genocide”. 
+In recent years there has been a tendency to revise the history of the Holocaust. In the West this takes the form of universalizing it and diluting its meaning. For instance a statement by then EU high representative for foreign affairs Catherine Ashton in 2014 didn’t mention Jewish victims when it sought to “honor every one of those brutally murdered in the darkest period of European history.” 
+… 
+THE DOUBLE genocide concept being advanced in Eastern Europe appears slightly less pernicious than that of universalization. Whereas universalization turns every atrocity into a “holocaust” and accuses Jews of being “particularist” or “judeo-centric” for caring about the Shoah, the double genocide view accepts that there was a Holocaust but then wants to add another pillar of victims beside it, not totally dilute the two. 
+However Efraim Zuroff has noted that this amounts to “claiming that Communist crimes were just as bad as those of the Third Reich and in fact constitute genocide, and the glorification of Lithuanians who fought against the Soviets.” The result is that in countries across Eastern Europe there is an attempt to lionize those like Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist who fought the communists. 
+But what happens when those local nationalists were also antisemites or when the local narrative is that, yes, the Nazis killed many Jews, but “we” lost many more to the Soviets. For them commemoration of the Jewish victims palls in comparison to their own historic memory. 
+Double genocide is built on local nationalism that wants the country’s suffering to come first, not Holocaust memory. Universalism is built on disappearing the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and replacing them with everyone. Universalism constitutes a second genocide, aimed at memory and taking away of Jewish rights to memorialize their own people, a right taken away from no other group. 
+Source 
+So we goy have our marching orders. We must prostrate ourselves in front of the Holocaust from now to eternity, humbly handing over cash to its “victims” and their descendants; we must meekly acknowledge the “uniqueness” of their suffering; we must beseech their forgiveness. And we must never ask why it is that, across thousands of years of history, the Jews have so consistently provoked antagonism among the peoples they have lived among.",FAKE
+4200,"On To Indy: Hoosier State Could Be Stand For Trump Challengers, Sanders","On To Indy: Hoosier State Could Be Stand For Trump Challengers, Sanders
+
+Everyone knew Iowa would matter — and New Hampshire, too. The other February contests got a lot of attention, as did Super Tuesday and the mega-states like New York. And, yes, late in the season, you heard people saying, it might all come down to California.
+
+But when did anyone know to get excited about Indiana?
+
+It comes late in the season, with the great majority of states voting sooner and allocating the great majority of delegates, so no one seemed to give a hoot about the Hoosier State — the one and only primary on May 3.
+
+But it has come down to this. The months of campaigning and the millions of dollars and TV hours have brought the contest to the doorstep of the Midwest. With its mix of farmland and once-mighty industrial base, Indiana looks like the last stand for die-hards in both the stop-Trump forces of the Republican Party and the populist revolt on the left of the Democratic Party.
+
+That is because the last two weeks of events in April have combined to put front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton so far ahead in their respective parties that only the most extraordinary events could prevent their nominations.
+
+On Tuesday night, five states voted in the East: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. All five went big for Trump. Clinton won all but Rhode Island, several by big margins.
+
+Trump now has about 75 percent of the delegates he needs for a first-ballot win. Clinton has about 90 percent of her nominating number, including majorities of pledged delegates and superdelegates. Both could lose all the voting events that remain through June and still reach the conventions with pluralities among the delegates.
+
+The Associated Press says Trump now has 950 delegates to the 560 bound to his closest competitor, Ted Cruz. His lead is probably bigger than that because he is likely to claim most of the 54 delegates from Pennsylvania who are currently unbound. Trump picked up more than 100 delegates on Tuesday; Cruz got three.
+
+Similarly, on the Democratic side, the AP shows Clinton with 1,618 pledged delegates to 1,267 for Bernie Sanders. In addition, she can fall back on her fantastic cushion of superdelegates, the elected and party officials who have given 519 commitments to Clinton and just 39 to Sanders, so far. It is likely the remaining superdelegates will be similarly disposed to Clinton, and the campaign will unveil their commitments at an advantageous time.
+
+Sanders pledged Tuesday night to fight on ""until the last vote is cast."" That could mean the last vote in the primaries on June 7, or it could mean the last vote at the convention in Philadelphia in late July. Either way, Sanders was no longer talking about ""a path to victory,"" but rather a truly progressive platform for the party. In the meantime, he wants to keep his movement together and as robust as possible on the road to the convention. So he keeps running.
+
+To re-energize his drive for his remaining goals, Sanders well might focus on Indiana, where he has campaigned in recent days. Distrust of Washington and Wall Street is strong along the Wabash, and distress over trade deals thrives on the shores of Lake Michigan to the north. Recent polling in the state has shown Sanders within striking distance of Clinton in Indiana, trailing by about the same margin as Cruz trails Trump.
+
+For her part, Clinton in her victory remarks Tuesday made clear her confidence in winning. But she was gracious to Sanders and moved in his direction on several issues, including the role of money in politics, adding once again that ""there is much more that unites us than divides us.""
+
+On the Republican side, though, the drive for unity has yet to begin. Both Cruz and Kasich remain in the race. Trump opponents from both the establishment and the ""movement conservative"" media continue to search for other options, including means to force the nomination process beyond a first ballot.
+
+With Tuesday's results, however, Cruz has no mathematical chance for a first-ballot victory, and Kasich's was extinguished a month ago. To even keep his flame flickering, Cruz must overtake Trump in Indiana next week and forge a miraculous late-inning comeback.
+
+Indiana is key for Cruz because it has many voters who identify as very conservative or evangelical, two groups with whom he has done well elsewhere. It is also the test of Cruz's eleventh-hour alliance with rival Kasich. Cruz agreed not to campaign in late-voting Oregon and New Mexico if Kasich would stay out of Indiana. Kasich acceded, although his description of the deal has cast doubt on its terms and effectiveness.
+
+At this moment, it is a popular idea among many campaign watchers that Cruz struck the deal to get Kasich out of the way in Indiana and give himself the one-on-one showdown with Trump he's been wanting all along. Who knows? By the time Oregon and New Mexico roll around, Kasich might not even be in the race.
+
+Trump had belittled the Cruz-Kasich pact in recent days and dismissed both his rivals Tuesday night. Anointing himself the ""presumptive nominee,"" he proceeded to turn his guns on Clinton. ""All she has is the woman card,"" he said. ""And the thing is, women don't like her. ... If she were a man, I doubt she'd have more than 5 percent of the vote.""
+
+Clinton seemed to have anticipated that attack earlier in the evening, saying: ""If fighting for paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in.""",REAL
+2704,Blaming the media for Trump: Why that utterly misses a political upheaval,"With Donald Trump closing in on the Republican nomination in Indiana today, there is a new wave of finger-pointing to assess blame for this allegedly horrible outcome.
+
+And those who fault the media are having one last hurrah.
+
+Nowhere is this more evident than on the cover of Politico Magazine, which features Trump facing a media mob with the headline: “What Have We Done?”
+
+It’s a study in self-flagellation, this argument that Trump would not be where he is today without being propped up by the press. Many of his detractors refuse to acknowledge that a non-politician is winning this thing by getting a record number of GOP primary votes, so the thing must be rigged by reporters.
+
+Politico’s special media issue is so packed with anti-Trump essays that there is little attempt at balance. One exception is media writer Jack Shafter, who says the blame game “gives too much credit to the media and too little credit to Donald Trump.”
+
+But then there’s reporter Ben Schreckinger, who became the fulltime Trump correspondent despite the fact that working for Politico is his first job out of college. Perhaps that’s why he is so angry at criticism from Trump and his deputies and a lack of access, both of which are standard fare in the political big leagues.
+
+Former New York Post gossip writer Susan Mulcahy argues that Trump used to lie to her and once gave a scoop to the New York Times rather than confirm it to her.
+
+But the most important article is by Campbell Brown, the former CNN and NBC anchor, who I like and respect: “Why I Blame TV for Trump.”
+
+Now you have to factor in that Brown cannot abide Trump. She calls him a chronic liar, a misogynist, shockingly ignorant, and a man who condones violence. So this is the writing of an outspoken critic.
+
+Brown says TV news is rolling over for The Donald: “Trump doesn’t force the networks to show his rallies live rather than do real reporting. Nor does he force anyone to accept his phone calls rather than demand that he do a face-to-face interview that would be a greater risk for him. TV news has largely given Trump editorial control. It is driven by a hunger for ratings—and the people who run the networks and the news channels are only too happy to make that Faustian bargain.”
+
+This, aside from the business about “real reporting,” is a fair point. Trump’s rallies got so much more live coverage than any of his competitors that it gave him an unfair advantage.
+
+Brown misses the old “800-pound gorillas of TV news” like Tom Brokaw, who could push back against commercial decisions. But of course, the broadcast networks don’t cover politics in a major way and have ceded that turf to cable.
+
+“So yes, I believe Trump’s candidacy is largely a creation of a TV media that wants him, or needs him, to be the central character in this year’s political drama,” she writes. “And it’s not just the network and cable executives driving it. The TV anchors and senior executives who don’t deliver are mercilessly ousted. The ones who do deliver are lavishly rewarded. I know from personal experience that it is common practice for TV anchors to have substantial bonuses written into their contracts if they hit ratings marks. With this 2016 presidential soap opera, they are almost surely hitting those marks. So, we get all Trump, all the time.”
+
+Here’s what Brown, who candidly admitted she left CNN because she couldn’t match the ratings of Fox and MSNBC, is missing:
+
+Trump has seized much of the “free” air time by doing many, many more interviews than his rivals, and by driving the campaign dialogue—which all candidates try to do but are usually too cautious or dull to pull off.
+
+Many reporters have dug hard into Trump’s businesses, his rhetoric, his promises, his contradictions—but these stories and segments have done little to dent his lead. He is seemingly impervious to most media criticism, in part because his supporters don’t trust the press, but it’s not for lack of trying.
+
+A huge portion of the media attention lavished on Trump is harshly negative, often from conservative and liberal commentators who oppose him on ideological grounds. Trump punches back hard, especially on Twitter, though he’s toned it down of late. The billionaire actually benefits from denunciations by those his supporters view as members of a failed media/political establishment.
+
+And don’t forget how the Huffington Post and New York’s Daily News have demonized Trump from the beginning, or all the mainstream media pundits who spent months insisting he was a sideshow, that he would fade, that this or that controversial remark would produce his imminent demise.
+
+There is much to criticize in the media’s coverage of Donald Trump. But to say the media were the engine that powered his candidacy is to miss the way he overpowered his rivals and forged a connection with millions of Republican voters.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+8905,The FBI Can’t Actually Investigate a Candidate Such as Hillary Clinton.,"Dispatches from Eric Zuesse This piece is crossposted at strategic-culture.org The power above the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the U.S. Attorney General, and, above that person, the U.S. President. That’s whom the FBI actually serves — not the U.S. public. This is the reason why the FBI is having such internal tensions and dissensions over the investigation of Hillary Clinton: Not only is she the current President’s ardently preferred and designated successor — and overwhelmingly supported also by America’s artistocracy and endorsed by the aristocracy’s press — but the top leadership of the FBI have terms-in-office that (unlike, for example, the term of the U.S. Attorney General) do not end with the installation of the next President; and these people will therefore be serving, quite possibly, the very same person whom they are now ‘investigating’. This is the reason why James Comey, the FBI’s Director, let Clinton totally off the hook on July 5th, when he declined to present the case to a grand jury: he and the rest of the FBI’s top management violated three basic principles of trying white-collar-crime cases when a prosecutor is serious about wanting to prosecute and obtain a conviction against a person — he (and they) wanted to keep their jobs, not be fighting their boss and their likely future boss. Hillary: For all intents and purposes, above the law. If America were an authentic democracy, there would be a way for the FBI to serve the public even when the U.S. President doesn’t want it to. According to the only scientific study that has ever been done of the matter, the U.S. federal government is a dictatorship not a democracy. This was reluctantly reported by the researchers, whose own careers are dependent upon the aristocracy which they were finding actually controls that government. They found that the U.S., at the federal level, is not a democracy but an “oligarchy,” by which the researchers were referring to an “economic elite,” America’s billionaires and centi-millionaires who control America’s international corporations and the ‘charities’ (such as think tanks) that are dependent upon them — including many that directly affect U.S. politics, such as the think tanks or other way-stations for former U.S. government employees to become hired by private firms. The authors of the only empirical scientific research-study that has been done of whether the United States is a democracy , or instead a dictatorship, excluded the very term “aristocracy” (or “collective dictatorship” such as an “economic elite” is if that “elite” actually is in control of the given nation’s government) from their article. They did this so as for the meaning not to be clear to the U.S. public. In any country in the modern world where an aristocracy exists, aristocrats nowadays try to hide their power, not (like in former eras) display their power by crowns and other public symbols of ‘the nobility’. The closest the study’s authors came to using that term, “aristocracy,” was their only sentence that employed the pejoritave term for an aristocracy, “oligarchy.” That obscure lone sentence was: “Jeffrey Winters has posited a comparative theory of ‘Oligarchy,’ in which the wealthiest citizens — even in a ‘civil oligarchy’ like the United States — dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth and income protection.11″ .. Their 11th footnote made clear that they were referring here to the book Oligarchy , by Jeffrey A. Winters, which stated the ‘theory’ that this article had actually just confirmed in the American case. Their article mentioned the book — and the “oligarchy” — only in this one footnote, so that the authors of the article (whose own careers are dependent upon America’s ‘oligarchs’) won’t be able to be accused by oligarchs (or in any way thought by their own financial benefactors — America’s aristocrats) to have called the U.S. an “oligarchy” (a collective dictatorship by the few super-rich and their agents). To apply either term — “aristocracy” or “oligarchy” — to one’s own country, is now viewed as negative, an insult to the country’s controlling elite. Neither scholars nor scholarly publishers wish to insult the people who ultimately are their top funders. .. This article was written in the standard unnecessarily obscurantist style of social ‘scientists’ who want to be comprehensible only to their peers and not to the general public. Doing it this way is safer for them, because it makes extremely unlikely that their own benefactors would retaliate, against them or else against the institutions that hire them, by withdrawing their continued financial and promotional support (such as by no longer having them invited onto CNN as an “expert”). (This type of fear prevents theory in the social ‘sciences’ from being strictly based upon the given field’s empirical findings: it’s not authentically scientific. The physical sciences are far less corrupt, far more scientific. The biological sciences are in-between.) .. One particular reason why the authors never called the people who control the U.S. government an “aristocracy,” is that everyone knows that the Founders of the U.S. were opposed to , and were engaged in overthrowing, the existing aristocracy, which happened to be British, and that they even banned forever in the U.S. the use of aristocratic titles, such as “Lord” or “Sir.” Consequently, within the U.S., the only term that the aristocrats consider acceptable to refer to aristocrats, is “oligarchs,” which always refers only to aristocrats in foreign countries , and so is considered safe by the aristocrats’ writers (including scholars and political pundits) to use. .. Everyone knows: in accord with the clear intention of America’s Founders , the U.S. should eliminate from its citizenry any aristocrat (any self-enclosed and legally immune group that holds power over the government), but Americans naturally accept the existence of “oligarchs” in other countries (and “good-riddance to them there”), typically the ones in countries U.S. foreign policy opposes and often overthrows by means of coup or outright military invasion (any form of conquest, such as in 2003 Iraq, or 2011 Libya). It’s fine to refer to other countries’ aristocracies as ‘oligarchies’, because any such foreign aristocracy can therefore be declared to be bad and ‘deserving’ of overthrow. Thus, any aristocracy that is opposed to America’s aristocracy (especially one that’s opposed to being controlled by the U.S. aristocracy), and which wants to be controlling instead their own independent nation, can acceptably be overthrown by coup (such as Ukraine 2014 was) or invasion (such as Libya 2011 was). Thus, calling a foreign aristocracy an “oligarchy” is supportive of, not oppposed to, the U.S. aristocracy — and, so, “oligarchy” is the term the authors used (on that one occasion, and they never used the prohibited term “aristocracy”). .. Nonetheless, despite the cultural ban on describing the U.S. as an “aristocracy,” the authors were — as obscurely as they were able — proving that the U.S. is an aristocracy, no authentic democracy at all. Or, again, as they said it in their least-obscurantist phrasing of it: .. “Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis, even though our findings probably understate the political influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite Americans — though useful, and the best we could generate for a large set of policy cases — is probably less consistent with the relevant preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or the alignments of engaged interest groups. Yet we found substantial estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater.” .. ‘Greater’ than what? They didn’t say. That’s because what they were saying (as obscurely as possible) is that it’s probably ‘greater’ than is shown in the data that was publicly available to them, and upon which data their clear finding is that the U.S. is an aristocracy, no democracy at all. Or, as they also put it: “Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis.” But, actually, “Economic Elite Domination theories” (virtually all of which come down to positing an aristocracy that consists of the billionaires — and centi-millionaires — and their corporations, and their think tanks, and their lobbyists, etc.) did phenomenally well, in their findings, not just ‘rather well’ — they simply can’t safely say this. Saying it is samizdat, in the U.S. dictatorship. .. They were allowed to prove it, but not to say it. So, that’s what they did. They didn’t want to “upset the applecart” from which they themselves are feeding. .. The simplest (but no less accurate) way of stating their finding is: the U.S., at least during the period the researchers probed, which was 1981-2002, was an aristocracy, no democracy at all. The U.S., in other words, was (even prior to the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which is making the aristocracy even more concentrated among even fewer people) a country of men (and women — that’s to say, of individuals ) not of laws; it’s a dictatorship, in short; it is not a country “of laws, not of men” . America’s Founders have finally lost. The country has been taken over by an aristocracy. .. And one of those “men” now, is actually Hillary Clinton, even though she is no longer officially holding governmental power. They know she soon might be. That’s why, the FBI cannot really, and seriously , investigate her. .. It’s not for legal reasons at all. It’s because of whom she is. In fact, purely on the basis of U.S. laws, she clearly ought to be in prison . Any honest lawyer, inside or outside the FBI, has long known this, because the actual case against her is ‘slam-dunk’ , even though the FBI has refused to investigate it and has limited its ‘investigation’ only to peripheral ‘national security’ issues. (The #2 person at FBI, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, right below Director James Comey, specified this limitation to his ‘investigators’. They simply weren’t allowed to investigate her, except on the hardest-to-prove crimes that she probably but not definitely did also do. The slam-dunks were just off-limits to them. McCabe’s wife’s political campaign had received $675,000 from the PAC of Terry McAuliffe , a close friend of the Clintons, who chaired Hillary’s 2008 Presidential campaign. And, even on the harder-to-prove matters, which FBI Director Comey declined on July 5th to pursue, they stood a strong chance of winning, if only Comey hadn’t prevented their moving forward to try — but those issues are tangential to the basic case against her, anyway.) .. There are at least six federal criminal laws which accurately and unquestionably describe even what Ms. Clinton has now publicly admitted having done by her privatized email system, and intent isn’t even mentioned in most of them nor necessary in order for her to be convicted — the actions themselves convict her, and the only relevance that intent might have, regarding any of these laws, would be in determining how long her prison sentence would be. .. I have already presented the texts of these six laws (and you can see the sentences for each one, right there), and any reader can easily recognize that each one of them describes, unambiguously without any doubt, what she now admits having done. Most of these crimes don’t require any intent in order to convict (and the ones that do require intent are only “knowingly … conceals,” or else “with the intent to impair the object’s … use in an official proceeding,” both of which “intents” would be easy to prove on the basis of what has already been made public — but others of these laws don’t require even that); and none of them requires any classified information to have been involved, at all . It’s just not an issue in these laws. Thus, conviction under them is far easier. If a prosecutor is really seeking to convict someone, he’ll be aiming to get indictments on the easiest-to-prove charges, first. That also presents for the prosecutor the strongest position in the event of an eventual plea-bargain. As Alan Dershowitz said , commenting on one famous prosecution: “They also wanted a slam-dunk case. They wanted the strongest possible case.” Comey simply didn’t; he wanted the hardest -to-convict case. His presentation was a brazen hoax. That’s all. .. That’s the real scandal, and nobody (other than I) has been writing about it as what it is — a hoax. But what it shows is that maybe the only way that Clinton will be able to avoid going to prison is by her going to the White House. Either she gets a term in the White House, or else she gets a (much longer) term in prison — or else our government is so thoroughly corrupt that she remains free as a private citizen and still above the law, even though not serving as a federal official. .. Even if she is convicted only on these six slam-dunk statutes (and on none other, including not on the ones that Comey was referring to when he said on July 5th that, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case”), she could be sentenced to a maximum of 73 years in prison (73 = 5 + 5 + 20 + 20 + 3 + 10 + 10). Adding on others she might also have committed (such as the ones that Comey was referring to, all of which pertain only to the handling of classified information), would mean that her term in prison might be lengthier still, but what’s important in the email case isn’t that; it’s to convict her on, essentially, theft and/or destruction of U.S. government documents by means of transferring them into her private email and/or smashing hard drives. No one, not even a U.S. federal official, can legally do that, and those six laws are specifically against it. .. Motive is important in Ms. Clinton’s email case, because motive tells us why she was trying to hide from historians and from the public her operations as the U.S. Secretary of State: was it because she didn’t want them to know that she was selling to the Sauds and her other friends the U.S. State Department’s policies in return for their million-dollar-plus donations to the Clinton Foundation , and maybe even selling to them (and/or their cronies) U.S. government contracts, or why? However, those are questions regarding other crimes that she might have been perpetrating while in public office, not the crimes of her privatized email operation itself; and those other crimes (whatever they might have been) would have been explored only after an indictment on the slam-dunks, and for further possible prosecutions, if President Obama’s people were serious about investigating her. They weren’t. Clearly, this is selective ‘justice’. That’s the type of ‘justice’ an aristocracy imposes. .. Why, then, did Comey finally switch to re-open the Clinton case? It wasn’t merely the discovery of some of her previously unknown emails on the computer of Anthony Wiener, husband to Hillary’s closest aide Huma Abedin. As Politico on October 28th reported , “Another former Justice official said Comey’s letter [announcing the re-opening of Hillary’s case] could be part of an effort on his part to quiet internal FBI critics who viewed him as burying the Clinton probe for political reasons. ‘He’s come under a lot of criticism from his own people for how he’s handled this. He’s trying to gain back some of their respect,’ former Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce said. ‘His ability to do what he does largely depends on the respect within his own ranks.’” .. Joachim Hagopian at Global Research headlined on October 30th, “The Real Reasons Why FBI Director James Comey Reopened the Hillary Email Investigation” , and reported: .. “Former federal attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova spelled it all out in a WMAL radio interview last Friday just hours after the news was released that Comey had sent a letter informing Congress that the case is being reopened. DiGenova said that with an open revolt brewing inside the FBI, Comey was forced to go public on Friday with reopening the investigation. … Finally, diGenova dropped one more bombshell in Friday’s interview. An inside source has revealed to him that the laptops belonging to key Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, both wrongly granted immunity , were not destroyed after all as previously reported, but have been secretly kept intact by investigating FBI agents refusing to destroy incriminating evidence as part of the in-house whitewash.” In other words: Comey was between a rock (the resignation-letters piling up on his desk from subordinates who felt that no person should be above the law) and a hard place (his ability to stay on at the FBI and not have a scandal against himself bleed out to the public from down below). The U.S. wasn’t yet that kind of dictatorship — one which could withstand such a public disclosure. In order for it to become one, the aristocracy’s control would have needed to be even stronger than it yet is. .. Also on the 30th, Ed Klein in Britain’s Dail Mail bannered : .. EXCLUSIVE: Resignation letters piling up from disaffected FBI agents, his wife urging him to admit he was wrong: Why Director Comey jumped at the chance to reopen Hillary investigation. James Comey revived the investigation of Clinton’s email server as he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents, sources say. The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim [Comey] announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary. He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents… .. So, does this now mean that, finally, the FBI will bring before a grand jury the evidence that Hillary Clinton blatantly violated those six federal criminal laws against stealing and/or trying to destroy federal documents? .. There has never — at least since 1981 — been so severe a test of the extent to which this nation is (as those researchers found it to have unquestionably been between 1981 and 2002) an “oligarchy.” However, a serious criminal prosecution of Ms. Clinton would potentially start an unwinding of this dictatorship. .. The present writer will make no prediction. However, obviously, the results of the election on November 8th will certainly have an enormous impact upon the outcome. Since I think that anyone but a complete fool can recognize this much, I’m confident enough to assert it — a conditional about the future. About the author =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS",FAKE
+8321,Moveable Feast Cafe 2016/11/14 … Open Thread,"Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
+2896,Obama's big new resolution on ISIS is really about limiting presidential power,"President Obama sent a draft Authorization for the Use of Military Force to Congress on Wednesday afternoon, seeking a vote on the formal legal authorization of a limited military campaign against ISIS. It's a move that's roiling Capitol Hill and leaving many of his co-partisans a bit puzzled. As one aide to a backbench Democrat put it to me, ""why is he doing this?""
+
+After all, in an exclusive interview with Vox published earlier this week, Obama observed that ""I have the authority as commander-in-chief to send back 200,000 Americans to re-occupy Iraq"" if he wants to:
+
+A 2001 resolution passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks gives the president broad authority if he wants to use it, and this new, more limited resolution the president is asking for doesn't repeal it. That makes the whole thing look pointless to members of congress who don't want to deal with it. But to a president interested in his legacy, the proposed ISIS AUMF is an important step toward re-engaging congress with questions of war and peace — and toward addressing some still-unresolved issues in executive power raised back in 2001.
+
+One key figure here is Denis McDonough, who is unusual for a White House Chief of Staff in that he has a background that is primarily on foreign policy issues, and is unusual for a foreign policy specialist in having spent his formative years on Capitol Hill. When Barack Obama arrived in the Senate in 2005, he was in an unusually favorable position to attract talented congressional staff. Democrats had taken a beating in both the 2002 and 2004 cycles, so lots of people needed jobs. As a promising freshman, he was able to hire Pete Rouse, who just the year before had been chief of staff to Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle. McDonough came into Obama's orbit during the 2008 campaign through Rouse, having been Daschle's senior foreign policy aide during 9/11 and the debate over invading Iraq.
+
+This is not a time primarily remembered by the world as an era of legislative sausage-making. But of course things looked different to Daschle and his team.
+
+The former Senate leader recounts in his 2004 book Like No Other Time that he worried the Bush administration's initial draft AUMF in the wake of 9/11 ""was a blank check to go anywhere, anytime against anyone the Bush administration or any subsequent administration deemed capable of carrying out an attack."" Daschle writes of a ""frenetic series of discussions"" he carried out with the White House, aimed at crafting ""language that gave the President the authority he needed without making that authority unlimited.""
+
+Later, discussing Iraq, Daschle focuses less on the specifics of WMD intelligence or regional strategy than on how ""our staffs were negotiating quite intensely with the President's people to hammer out some kind of agreement"" on AUMF language, and his disappointment that this proved more difficult than the earlier one.
+
+In practice, however, that hard work put into the 2001 AUMF hasn't panned out McDonough and others who worked in congress to ensure the grant of authority was limited. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have used its legal authority to mount military campaigns not only in Afghanistan but across the border in Pakistan, and then around the world from Yemen to Somalia to Libya.
+
+While Obama has been promiscuous in the range of military targets he's selected, he's also been relatively restrained in terms of the quantity of military force he's willing to apply to any given problem. His successor, except in the very unlikely event of a Rand Paul win, is quite likely to be more hawkish. And Obama's willingness to stretch the meaning of the 2001 AUMF to encompass a wide range of violent Islamist organizations with no real connection to the 9/11 attack creates a legal principle that could underwrite all kinds of things. Obama has no intention of dispatching hundreds of thousands of troops to Nigeria to fight Boko Haram. But under the prevailing legal order he — or more to the point, his successor — could.
+
+Osama bin Laden has been dead for years now. But it seems clear at this point that a range of violent groups with different degrees of practical and ideological cross-linkages will be a feature of the world for quite a long time. Vaguely worded AUMFs, in that context, tilt the balance of power toward executive discretion and away from congressional involvement.
+
+Obama's proposed ISIS AUMF doesn't alter the problematic 2001 AUMF. But it does take three important steps back from the brink of a forever war scenario.
+
+In a practical sense, of course, Obama's hands remain untied — which is part of why the debate is vexing to Congressional Democrats who'd rather deal with other things.
+
+But in a political sense, it's a proof of concept. The history of executive-congressional relations on national security is dominated by congress alternating between periods of assertion (notably in the wake of Watergate, but also during the Reagan years with regards to Central America, and in the early 1930s) and periods of abdication. Presidents deliberately trying to jolt Congress into limiting executive authority are very rare. But with his term in office coming to an end, Obama wants to do just that — with an eye toward limiting not just his own authority, but his successor's.",REAL
+6620,Report: FBI to Move to “Likely Indictment” Of Clinton Foundation,"Home / BREAKING NEWS / Report: FBI to Move to “Likely Indictment” Of Clinton Foundation Report: FBI to Move to “Likely Indictment” Of Clinton Foundation Claire Bernish November 3, 2016 1 Comment 
+A new report says the FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation has taken a “very high priority” after dragging on for over a year in its White Collar Crime Division, and a preponderance of evidence means a forthcoming indictment is “likely.” 
+Two unnamed, separate sources with “intimate knowledge” of the investigation told FOX News ’ Bret Baier the FBI is “actively and aggressively pursuing this case” — even re-interviewing key people for the third time. 
+Ironically, one of the anonymous sources told Baier the investigation has benefited from ongoing publications by Wikileaks of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, in that “There is an avalanche of new information coming in every day.” 
+Taken in conjunction with the rapidly approaching presidential election on November 8, it appears Julian Assange’s ‘October Surprise’ could have lasting implications beyond lifting the veil from behind-the-scenes wrangling by Clinton campaign insiders, corporate media, and Democratic National Committee. 
+However, even before Wikileaks began publishing the Podesta Files, unnamed law enforcement sources told FOX News , the bureau had collected “a great deal of evidence.” 
+“FBI agents have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple people on the foundation case,” FOX reports, “which is looking into possible pay for play interaction between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.” 
+Indeed, an indictment on the pay-for-play scandal appears likely, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Department of Justice. 
+Real Clear Politics summarized major points of Baier’s revealing report, noting the FBI’s investigation is “far more expansive than anybody has reported so far.” 
+In fact, although previous revelations the FBI had made special “side agreements” to “destroy” the laptops of Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson — which prompted scathing criticism and doubts about possible purposeful decimation of evidence — Real Clear Politics notes those computers “have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them.” 
+Baier reports, “As a result of the limited immunity deals to top aides, including Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, the Justice Department had tentatively agreed that the FBI would destroy those laptops after a narrow review. We are told definitively that has not happened. Those devices are currently in the FBI field office here in Washington, D.C. and are being exploited. 
+“The source points out that any immunity deal is null and void if any subject lied at any point in the investigation.” 
+Further, elaborating suspicions about aide Huma Abedin’s now-estranged husband’s laptop causing the FBI to relaunch its investigation, Real Clear Politics notes, “Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.” 
+While Baier’s sources, being unnamed, are impossible to verify, the FOX report comes on the heels of reporting by the Wall Street Journal — also citing unnamed sources “familiar” with the same investigation — which states, “Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay.” 
+Those sources, paraphrased by the WSJ , explained, “Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called ‘Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.’” 
+Inter- and intra-agency disputes over the strength of evidence surrounding the pay-to-play allegations against the Clinton Foundation left senior officials at both the FBI and DOJ at odds with lower-ranking investigators, who felt that — in combination with ‘Clinton Cash’ and the aforementioned recordings — promising leads deserved to be pursued. 
+Internal discord spilled into the public arena recently when FBI Director James Comey took the highly anomalous step of publicly announcing the investigation had been re-started — sparking condemnation by President Obama, politicians, and other officials about potentially influencing the looming election. 
+Partly fueling the internal squabble over investigating the foundation are those who blame Comey’s second-in-command, “deputy director Andrew McCabe, claiming he sought to stop agents from pursuing the case this summer. His defenders deny that, and say it was the Justice Department that kept pushing back on the investigation,” the WSJ reports. 
+While FBI agents continued making headway in an informal probe to decide whether a full investigation was warranted, official in the Justice Department began objecting to their actions, under the premise the evidence was flimsy at best — despite further statements from informants and additional information beyond what had been presented in “Clinton Cash.” 
+As the WSJ describes: 
+“FBI investigators grew increasingly frustrated with resistance from the corruption prosecutors, and some executives at the bureau itself, to keep pursuing the case. 
+“As prosecutors rebuffed their requests to proceed more overtly, those Justice Department officials became more annoyed that the investigators didn’t seem to understand or care about the instructions issued by their own bosses and prosecutors to act discreetly.” 
+Friction between the DOJ and FBI reached a pivotal point when a ‘senior Justice Department official’ summoned McCabe to a meeting over the perception agents had rebuffed instructions from superiors not to pursue the investigation further. 
+“Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” the WSJ quoted McCabe asking the official. 
+“Of course not,” the DOJ official is said to have replied. 
+Whether or not quashing a deeper investigation into the Clinton Foundation had, in actuality, been the Justice Department’s intent may never be clear — but given the overlapping dates of this bickering and the FOX News report of the yearlong probe, it would seem the Clintons are still very much treading water. Share",FAKE
+4437,ISIS activity prompts threat level increase at bases,"Washington (CNN) Security conditions at U.S. military bases have been increased over growing concerns about terror threats, officials said Friday.
+
+A U.S. official confirmed to CNN that U.S. military bases are now at ""Force Protection Bravo,"" which is defined by the Pentagon as an ""increased and predictable threat of terrorism."" It is the third-highest threat level on a five-tier scale used by the Department of Defense.
+
+U.S. military officials added Friday that the announcement, which comes in the aftermath of the shooting at a Texas cartoon contest featuring drawings of the Prophet Mohammed, was not the result of a specific threat but because the military had become concerned about several recent incidents.
+
+The military became alarmed when one of the jihadists linked to the Garland attack tweeted the name and address of a U.S. military officer connected to the military's Syrian rebel training program, a U.S. military official told CNN.
+
+The tweet, first published on an account connected to British-born jihadist Junaid Hussain, was sent out a few days before the attack on the cartoon exhibit and appeared to encourage an attack on the address.
+
+Hussain is the same jihadist who is also believed, according to U.S. law enforcement officials, to have been messaging with Elton Simpson, one of the two attackers of the Texas event, and had been urging Simpson to take action.
+
+That followed the publishing several weeks ago on ISIS-connected accounts of the name and addresses of about 100 military members.
+
+On Thursday, FBI Director James Comey told reporters that there are thousands of ISIS, also known as ISIL, followers online in the U.S.
+
+""We have a general concern, obviously, that ISIL is focusing on the uniformed military and law enforcement,"" Comey told reporters Thursday.
+
+The order to upgrade the threat level was signed by Admiral William Gortney, head of the U.S. Northern Command, which oversees all U.S. military installations in the continental U.S. The security order affects 3,200 sites, including bases, National Guard facilities, recruiting stations and health clinics, a Pentagon official said.
+
+""We have the same concern about the potential threat posed by violent homegrown extremists,"" said Captain Jeff Davis, spokesman for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM.
+
+Davis declined to specify the new security measures.
+
+But the change in threat level status could mean more checks of vehicles entering bases, and more thorough identity checks of all personnel. Davis emphasized that ""this is the new normal, that we are going to have increased vigilance and force protection. We seek to be unpredictable.""
+
+A U.S. military official said the order to raise the force protection level to Bravo also applies to all National Guard installations, recruiting stations, and ROTC detachments, though practically speaking, the official acknowledges it will be difficult for the ROTC detachments to do much more than security awareness.
+
+In addition, security was raised recently at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, in response to a perceived threat to the base security, another U.S. military official said. The threat was never deemed credible, but it came after another security concern at a base in Delaware used by Vice President Joe Biden when he flies home.
+
+On Friday, Wright-Patterson announced that the Air Force museum, which is part of the base, was canceling a planned Friday night concert and was stopping tours that were regularly offered until further notice. The base said this was ""due to elevated security measures.""
+
+Since NORTHCOM was established in October 2002, the threat level has reached Bravo on four occasions: Feb. 9, 2003, amid concerns al Qaeda was planning attacks on American targets; Dec. 21, 2003, when officials were concerned about attacks during the holiday season; May 1, 2011, in the aftermath of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden; and the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
+
+It reached ""Delta,"" its highest level, on Sept. 11, 2001, Pentagon officials told CNN at the time.",REAL
+3243,Several Republican players moving quickly to signal intent to run in 2016,"Less than two months after the 2014 elections, the 2016 Republican presidential race is taking clear shape — with several major players moving quickly to carve out their space (and maybe keep others from carving it up) in the contest.
+
+No one typifies that early movement better than former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who has formed a leadership PAC, said he is actively exploring a presidential bid and resigned all his roles on corporate and nonprofit boards.
+
+That flurry of activity took Bush from “well, maybe he might run” to “he’s definitely running” in the minds of Republican activists, political professionals and potential rivals.
+
+And he was far from the only one. Outgoing Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who flopped in his 2012 presidential bid, has made it clear for many months that he plans another run for the White House. Ditto his Lone Star State colleague Sen. Ted Cruz. Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) has been aggressively organizing for his presidential bid almost since arriving in the Senate in 2011.
+
+On Saturday, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee joined that growing group by announcing that he was ending his show on Fox News Channel to seriously consider running for president.
+
+“As much as I have loved doing the show, I cannot bring myself to rule out another presidential run,” Huckabee said in a statement on his Web site Saturday night. “I say goodbye, but as we say in television, stay tuned. There’s more to come.”
+
+All the sudden movement — particularly from Bush and Huckabee — has the potential to dramatically alter the face of the just-beginning race to be the next Republican presidential nominee.
+
+Bush is, without question, the favorite son of the GOP establishment — a group that includes, most important, many of the major donors who helped propel his brother George, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and Mitt Romney to the Republican nomination over the past decade and a half.
+
+Although no one has said that Bush being in means they are out — Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), a Bush protege, has been most outspoken about that — there’s no debate that Bush takes up lots of space that others would like to occupy.
+
+Rubio, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie are all affected — to varying degrees — by Bush’s aggressive move toward the race. And it’s hard not to see the decision by Sen. Rob Portman (Ohio) not to run — announced in late 2014 — as anything other than a reaction to the increasing likelihood that Bush is in.
+
+The effect of Huckabee’s active consideration of the contest is less obvious than Bush’s, but no less important. Although it has been more than six years since he last ran for president, Huckabee remains the preferred candidate of the same social conservatives who propelled him to a surprise win in the 2008 Iowa caucuses.
+
+Huckabee’s appeal among social conservatives — particularly in Iowa — will mix up the plans of people such as Cruz, neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), who won Iowa in 2012.
+
+So, why all the early movement in the 2016 race?
+
+At one level, it’s not all that unusual. Remember that then-Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D) got into the 2008 presidential race just two days after the 2006 election ended .
+
+But Bush and Huckabee are not the long shots that Vilsack clearly was. (Vilsack was out of the race by February 2007, before most people knew he had gotten in.) Both are well-known figures who rank at or near the top of most national polling on the race.
+
+Their decisions to move as aggressively as they have is probably the result of two major factors: fundraising and Hillary Clinton.
+
+To raise north of $75 million, which looks like the floor of what it might require to win the Republican nomination, takes lots and lots of time. (Romney raised and spent $76.6 million to capture the nomination in 2012.) The sooner a candidate starts building a national cash-collection operation — not to mention infrastructures in early states — the better.
+
+Then there is Clinton, who looms as the near-certain Democratic presidential nominee — a fundraising and polling juggernaut who is striking fear in the hearts of Republicans who fret about the prospect of spending 16 straight years without control of the White House.
+
+Clinton’s lack of any serious primary competition should — emphasis on should — allow her to not only conserve cash but also position herself message-wise for the general election almost from the minute she becomes a candidate. (No, her running isn’t a done deal. But it’s damn close.)
+
+The GOP knows that, and the party has acted to counter that edge — seeking to limit the number of presidential primary debates and strictly control the nominating calendar in hopes of producing a nominee sooner rather than later.
+
+Some of the major Republican candidates are following that lead — trying to get the jump on their potential competitors and prove their readiness to take on (and take down) Clinton in the general election.
+
+What remains to be seen is what the early actions by Bush and Huckabee — among others — mean for the race as it goes forward. Does Bush keep other establishment candidates out? Does Huckabee actually run, and, if so, what does that mean for Cruz and Santorum? How will the Republican electorate react to such a quick-starting race?
+
+More questions than answers. But if the early pace of the 2016 field is any indicator, we will get answers sooner than you might think.",REAL
+8543,"Comment on When Asked about Undercover Videos, Hillary Walks Out on Press Conference by Matibob","Posted on October 26, 2016 by Michael DePinto 
+For anyone who has heard about, but not yet had a chance to learn the details about the undercover operation produced by James O’Keefe ’s Project Veritas about the inner workings of the Democrat Party, you’re in luck. I have written two different posts covering the subject from different angles, and this will be the third, covering Hillary’s response. Each post include at least some, if not all of the undercover recordings released so far by James O’Keefe . 
+For over a year, O’Keefe risked his life by going deep undercover into the Democrat Party’s factory of corruption, and just this week after everyone laughed at Trump for calling the election rigged, O’Keefe began releasing portions of the SHOCKING video he took while undercover. In the videos, some of the highest ranking members of the DNC make some of the most jaw-dropping admissions of guilt you’ve EVER heard in your lives, not the least of which is, “[w]e have a call with Hillary’s campaign EVERY DAY to go over what areas need more focus.” 
+In the first post I wrote titled, George Soros’ Master Blueprint to Conquer the West Gets Caught on Camera , I go into detail about how the money funding all the illegal operations caught on film comes from Hillary Clinton ‘s largest donor, none other than George Soros . One very high ranking Democratic operative explains what happens with the money once it comes in. Upon receipt: 
+“[t]he campaign (Hillary Clinton campaign) pays the DNC, the DNC pays Democracy partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval group, and the Foval Group goes and executes the sh** on the ground.” 
+WOW! Then, when questioned about the legality, the response was: 
+“It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherf**ker.” 
+That’s just the beginning. The evidence gets infinitely worse. Then, in the second post I wrote titled, This Video Guarantees a Trump Win Even With Hillary’s Fraud Machine , I present an honest look at both candidates, and how they operate. The post contains 100% of the released undercover footage so far, so you learn EXACTLY who is prescribing what to whom, and I assure you that nothing can prepare you for what James managed to catch on film. You’ll be sick. 
+Then, I contrast the criminal enterprise Hillary is running with a montage of videos taken over a 30 year span of Donald Trump , and in each of the clips spanning all those years, Trump is asked about potentially running for the Presidency some day. Some of the answers are 30 years old, and all are spontaneous. Unlike the scripted (and now we know, totally false) statements we consistently get from Hillary, it is painfully obvious the answers Trump gives are genuine, and from the heart. 
+Love him or hate him, good luck arguing that Trump isn’t authentic in the video. You get a good look at who would be in the Oval Office, and it’s not the caricature that Team Hillary has tried so hard to create. On the other hand, Team Hillary’s behavior is utterly indefensible, and she knows it, which is why she runs like hell in the video below the second reporters begin to ask her about the recordings. 
+There’s nowhere to run now though Hillary… You and your staff have a lot to answer for… much of which is criminal in nature (go figure!) 
+Article posted with permission from The Last Great Stand 
+Michael DePinto is a member of the fast growing un-silent American majority that is sick of the insanity going on in this country right now. He has been accused of being vitriolic, bombastic, sarcastic to the extreme, and probably worse behind his back. Michael is sick of being branded a right wing-extremist, racist, homophobe, warmonger, or whatever other asinine adjectives Liberal Progressives have for the words COMMON SENSE these days. Michael is also a blogger at The Last Great Stand and an Attorney. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+7192,This Cursed Black Angel Statue KILLS Anyone Who Dares Touch It,"The paranormal world can be extremely fascinating, but also very dangerous. One must be cautions when dwelling in the shadows of the uncanny realm which could scar your soul for eternity. The thought of encountering a ghost can be exciting and scary, although there are some extreme cases of spiritual contact that can cause not only mental, but also physical damage.
+
+
+Even worse than encountering a ghost, is being in contact with cursed objects. In this case we're talking about a specific statue on Oakland Cemetary, Iowa City, which is called the ""Black Angel"" . 
+
+This statue is said to hold a death curse, so who ever dares to touch it will die in a very short amount of time, sometimes right on the spot. It is unknown about the true origin of the curse, but there are several different stories.
+
+There are also disturbing accounts of people dying after touching the statue.
+
+Watch the following video to know more! 
+Disclose TV SOURCE ",FAKE
+3161,How Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell took such different approaches to supporting Donald Trump,"House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s deepest ideological instincts were formed in the conservative movement of the 1980s. “You have to understand, I come from the conservative wing of the party, I’m a movement conservative,” the Wisconsin Republican told a small group of reporters soon after becoming speaker.
+
+Three weeks later, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) explained that his first instincts were to help get his endangered Republican incumbents reelected, right down to scheduling votes on legislation. “Our majority will be maintained only if we do well in purple states,” McConnell said in a December interview with The Washington Post.
+
+That distance between two of the three most important Republicans in the nation is at the core of how Ryan and McConnell came to such different conclusions about what to do about the emergence of the other most powerful Republican: Donald Trump.
+
+On Wednesday evening, 24 hours after Trump won the Indiana primary and knocked out his remaining presidential contenders, McConnell released a tepid statement saying he would support the nominee. By Thursday afternoon Ryan appeared on CNN to question Trump’s conservative credentials on key policy positions, lambaste his campaign of “belittlement” toward women and minorities, and said he was not yet prepared to support Trump.
+
+[Ryan says he is ‘not ready’ to back Trump, deepening GOP divide]
+
+That Ryan-McConnell split also explains a broader divide among Republicans here in Washington. Much of the Republican political class is coming to terms with the inevitable — Trump will be their nominee — and figuring out how best to handle what they consider a bad situation.
+
+But for the idealists — some say ideologues — who came of age worshiping the Ronald Reagan doctrine of free markets, strong national defense and an optimistic “shining city upon a hill” tone, they cannot countenance Trump taking over what they still consider a conservative party.
+
+Ryan, 46, is very much in this wing of the party. He cited his late political mentor, Jack Kemp, a 1980s congressman whose optimistic economic vision became a bedrock conservative principle, in his declaration that “I’m not there yet” in supporting Trump.
+
+Today’s conservative intelligentsia has been so flummoxed by Trump’s ascendancy because, on so many issues, he is squarely against Ryan’s worldview. Trump is ready to start trade wars with China and other nations, rather than support trade deals that Ryan himself helped craft as a committee chairman before he became speaker. Trump has criticized lawmakers for considering sweeping changes to Social Security and Medicare, the very issues that sparked the rise of Ryan when he released budgets with optimistic titles like “Pathway to Prosperity” that included radical changes in entitlement policy.
+
+Perhaps the only thing they seem to share these days is a love of the media and the back-and-forth jousting it provides — yet Trump uses his TV appearances to advance slash-and-burn tactics with opponents, while Ryan frequents shows to talk about a “confident America” with bold conservative ideas to help the poor.
+
+“A lot of Republicans want to see is that we have a standard bearer that bears our standards,” Ryan told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “The Lead” Thursday.
+
+[Ryan tries to pivot from “disheartened state of politics"" – without ever mentioning Donald Trump]
+
+What’s stunning to these Reagan-worshiping disciples is that a lot of Republican voters don’t want someone who bears Ryan’s standards. Trump did not just win the nomination, but he has, quite simply, routed the field.
+
+“The man has won over 10 million votes,” said Josh Holmes, a top political adviser to McConnell. That’s more votes than any Republican ever in a presidential primary.
+
+Looking at that equation, McConnell made a different, highly tactical decision on Trump. Sticking by his previous assurances he would support the nominee, McConnell said that the businessman had some work ahead of him. “As the presumptive nominee, he now has the opportunity and the obligation to unite our party around our goals,” McConnell said in a brief statement.
+
+Advisers to both GOP leaders confirmed that each side knew ahead of time what was coming. Ryan’s and McConnell’s chiefs of staff, David Hoppe and Sharon Soderstrom, are close friends who first worked together in the 1980s. They remain in close contact over each decision, and did so this week.
+
+Where Ryan saw Trump’s ideological apostasies, McConnell saw a simple reality that he needs to make the best of: Trump no longer has any opponent and he’s going to be the nominee, collecting votes from tens of millions of Americans in November.
+
+It’s time to figure out how those endangered Republicans — eight of whom are facing tough competition in states that will also be presidential battlegrounds — can appeal to middle-of-the-road voters who will ultimately tip the balance in their races but also not alienate the Trump supporters.
+
+“McConnell has never spent a lot of time wringing his hands about situations he cannot control,” Holmes said. “His job is to run the Senate and help his members and stay out of their way as they navigate their state’s politics.”
+
+Some Washington insiders suggested that Ryan’s move gave endangered House Republicans cover to take similar positions and steer clear of Trump questions. Instead, Democrats said Ryan gave them the freedom to keep asking, almost daily, whether Trump had “earned” their vote, a position that Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) took Friday in her suburban battleground district.
+
+“This starts an alarm clock that will go off eventually,” Matt Thornton, communications director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said. “By setting up the ‘earn my vote’ standard, Republicans are only begging the question, ‘OK, what does that mean?’ When will Trump earn your vote?”
+
+McConnell considers himself an artful tactician who rarely hands his opponents a weapon to use against him. Ever since Ryan began talking about drafting a “bold” agenda for Republicans, McConnell has given polite public support without any assurances his candidates would support it, lest some proposal be too far reaching for any of them.
+
+“Before taking up measures, I’m going to be in consultation with my members, and it is a fact that we have a number of members up in purple states this year,” McConnell said in December.
+
+Ryan never held back, promising early on a vision based on his upbringing under Kemp. “The conservative movement is beginning to concentrate itself on the fact that 2016 is everything, and the best way to have the best outcome is to unify by applying our principles to ideas and offering an agenda. So to me, the best path to unify is to propose and offer an exciting agenda,” the new speaker told reporters back in November.
+
+It’s just no longer clear which Republicans agree with the exciting agenda Paul Ryan wants to craft.",REAL
+3323,VA secretary asks Iraq War veteran: 'What have you done?',"Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald on Wednesday asked a Republican lawmaker who served in both Iraq wars, ""What have you done?"" as the two men sparred over huge cost overruns at a troubled Denver VA hospital.
+
+McDonald was defending the VA's budget at a hearing when he and Colorado Rep. Mike Coffman tussled over construction delays and cost increases at the long-delayed hospital project.
+
+After a few minutes of arguing, McDonald snapped at Coffman: ""I've run a large company, sir. What have you done?""
+
+Coffman, an Army veteran, did not respond at the hearing. But the four-term lawmaker said in a statement later that he could tell McDonald a few things he hasn't done.
+
+""I have never run a federal agency that tolerates corruption the way the VA has. I've never built a hospital that's years behind schedule and hundreds of millions over budget. And I've never been a shill for inept bureaucrats who allowed American heroes to die on a medical waiting list,"" he said.
+
+The last comment was a reference to a wait-time scandal that cost former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki his job. McDonald, a former Procter & Gamble CEO, took over as VA secretary in July. He has vowed to improve VA's delivery of services such as health care and disability benefits and make it a ""model"" for other government agencies.
+
+The dust-up started when Coffman criticized the VA for citing its legal efforts to defend the Denver hospital project as a major accomplishment.
+
+""How is that a success?"" Coffman asked. ""You lost that case on every single point for the hospital in my district that is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.""
+
+""I think that that's just characteristic of your glossing over the extraordinary problems confronted by your department,"" Coffman added. ""This is a department mired in bureaucratic incompetence and corruption.""
+
+McDonald said he was offended by Coffman's remarks and noted that he had only been on the job for six months.
+
+""You've been here longer than I have. If there's a problem in Denver, I think you own it more than I do,"" he told Coffman.
+
+McDonald then offered to give Coffman his cellphone, ""and you can answer some of the calls and see if I'm making a difference for veterans.""",REAL
+6874,Europe’s Morality Crisis: Euthanizing the Mentally Ill,"The Washington Post 
+Excerpts: Once prohibited — indeed, unthinkable — the euthanasia of people with mental illnesses or cognitive disorders, including dementia, is now a common occurrence in Belgium and the Netherlands. 
+This profoundly troubling fact of modern European life is confirmed by the latest biennial report from Belgium’s Federal Commission on the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia, presented to Parliament on Oct. 7. 
+Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002 for patients suffering “unbearably” from any “untreatable” medical condition, terminal or non-terminal, including psychiatric ones. 
+In the 2014-2015 period, the report says, 124 of the 3,950 euthanasia cases in Belgium involved persons diagnosed with a “mental and behavioral disorder,” four more than in the previous two years. 
+Read the full article at The Washington Post . 
+See Also:",FAKE
+3414,Updated: Sandoval not interested in potential Supreme Court nomination,"Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval announced Thursday morning that he's declining a possible nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court.
+
+“Earlier today, I notified the White House that I do not wish to be considered at this time for possible nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States,"" Sandoval said in a statement Thursday. ""I have also spoken to Senators Reid, Heller and McConnell and expressed the same desire to them. The notion of being considered for a seat on the highest court in the land is beyond humbling and I am incredibly grateful to have been mentioned.""
+
+The White House declined to say Thursday whether Sandoval was ever seriously considered in the first place.
+
+“Even after the fact, I’m not going to get into a lot of details about who's on the president's list and who is not,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said.
+
+Nevada's senior U.S. senator, Harry Reid, recommended Sandoval for President Barack Obama's consideration in filling a vacant seat on the Supreme Court. News of Sandoval's vetting leaked to the public on Wednesday as the White House considered Sandoval, among other unidentified candidates, for the nomination.
+
+Reid's office did not comment Thursday on Sandoval's withdrawal.
+
+Sandoval's ultimate nomination was seen by many as unlikely, with his name suggested to pressure Republicans into considering a nominee from their own party. Sandoval, formerly a federal district court judge, is a moderate Republican.
+
+Since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia earlier this month, Republican leaders in the Senate have vowed to block any of the president's proposed replacements.
+
+“I really do think it was a serious idea for him to be considered,” said Richardson, professor of sociology and judicial studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. ""I don’t think he was being used as a pawn.""
+
+Still, Richardson sees why Sandoval would remove himself once his name leaked. Sandoval has been thrown into a political brawl between Republicans and Democrats, he said.
+
+""I can understand why the governor wouldn’t want to get caught up in that,"" Richardson said. ""I think, in the future, his name will be brought up again. He's a moderate Republican. They're thin on the ground these days.”
+
+Sandoval is not a textbook Republican. He does not actively oppose gay marriage or abortion, and he recently pushed through the largest tax increase in Nevada history.
+
+Nevada's Republican Sen. Dean Heller said he supports Sandoval's decision to withdraw from Supreme Court consideration, but he views Sandoval as a legitimate candidate.
+
+""I hope the next president will consider him in the future,"" Heller said in a statement on Thursday.
+
+Even if Sandoval was a serious contender for the Supreme Court, history suggests his chances are slim. Twenty-one justices have been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court since 1956, and they share similar backgrounds, according to The Supreme Court Historical Society.
+
+Two-thirds of Supreme Court justices attended either Harvard or Yale law schools. A couple earned their law degrees at Northwestern or Stanford universities. Columbia University, Howard University and the St. Paul College of Law made isolated appearances.
+
+Of the eight members currently serving on the Supreme Court, four earned their law degrees at Harvard, three went to Yale and one attended Columbia.
+
+Sandoval earned his degree at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law in 1989.",REAL
+8822,Nestle to launch new non-GMO products ... How shocked will Monsanto be?,"Nestle to launch new non-GMO products ... How shocked will Monsanto be? 
+Thursday, October 27, 2016 by: Vicki Batts Tags: GMOs , Nestle , Monsanto (NaturalNews) One of the food industry's most prominent players recently announced that they will be expanding their line of non-GMO products, due to the ever-increasing customer demand for clean food. Nestle may have wowed consumers with their choice, but it may make some waves with their good friend, Monsanto .""The company is broadening its product offerings to give consumers more options with no GMO ingredients and identifying these products with the SGS-verified 'no GMO ingredients' claim,"" the food giant stated on Tuesday.""Nestle USA understands that consumers are seeking choice and many prefer to select products with no GMO ingredients,"" they declared.Of course, this is not Nestle's first move towards GMO-free products. In April, Nestle announced that they would be removing GMO ingredients from six of their top-selling ice cream products, as well. The company states it is trying to evolve along with consumer demands. It is great to see that companies are beginning to realize that consumers want options; no one wants to be forced to buy GMO products.It is easy to want to applaud Nestle for their decision to continue to expand their line of non-GMO products. However, it is also clear that this company is doing so out of their own financial interests – not because they care about what people are eating. Organic, GMO-free foods are the newest trend, and smart manufacturers are beginning to see that they will not win anyone over by insisting that GM, pesticide-laden food products are safe. ""If you can't beat 'em, join 'em,"" is a philosophy Nestle has clearly taken to heart.Nestle is not an angelic company, even if they have decided to start serving up ""GMO-free"" options. Just three years ago, they donated millions of dollars to prevent and oppose GMO labeling in Washington state, along with Monsanto and other biotech firms. Truth Out reports that on October 18, 2013, the Grocery Manufacturers of America disclosed that several of their largest, most powerful players silently donated large sums of money to oppose Initiative 522. This bill would have required grocery items containing GMO ingredients to be labeled as such. The group chose to voluntarily release the names of the silent donors, after Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a lawsuit against their concealment of corporate donors.Nestle was among the top three highest contributors, and donated a cool $1.5 million to keep GMO ingredients under wraps and off product labels. Nestle also made a large donation to oppose similar legislation in California the year before, in 2012. The bill ultimately failed, after Big Food and Big Biotech joined forces and together raised a staggering $46 million to prevent its passing. And we're supposed to believe they care?The controversial history of Nestle doesn't end with their consistent financial support of GMO labeling opposition efforts. It is a corporation that is wrought with wrongdoings and corrupt practices. Look no further than their outright theft of water in California.Given that the coastal state is currently being plagued by a devastating drought, you might be shocked to learn that just last year Nestle pumped a disturbing 36 million gallons of water out of one of the state's water sources, known as Strawberry Creek. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water , estimates that Nestle is making millions of dollars in this way.""They're converting a public resource into private profit,"" he told Los Angeles Magazine .The most shocking thing is that their permit to pump water from the creek expired in 1988. The forest service has allowed Nestle to gouge the creek for water at will, so long as they continue to pay a minuscule access fee. While bottled water accounts for only a small fraction of California's water use, the overall environmental impact of what their practices are doing to a drought-stricken state have yet to be examined.Nestle has been subject to countless other controversies, including human rights violations, and has been host to many environmental and product safety issues.To put it simply: Nestle may be trying to win over customers with their non-GMO products, but they don't deserve to. Monsanto may be shocked, but only because Nestle is still one of their own. Sources:",FAKE
+8885,World Markets Rally with Glee After Hillary Email Dismissal,"World Markets Rally with Glee After Hillary Email Dismissal November 07, 2016 World Markets Rally with Glee After Hillary Email Dismissal 
+Global equity markets surged on Monday, as did the U.S. dollar, putting them on track for their biggest gains in weeks after the FBI stood by its view that no criminal charges were warranted against Hillary Clinton. The news lifted a cloud over the Democrat's presidential campaign and gave it new momentum just two days before the U.S. election It also sent the benchmark S&P 500 index up more than 1 percent. The index was on pace to snap a nine-day losing skid, its longest in more than 35 years, and to post its best daily performance in over four months. European stocks were up 1.4 percent and many of the safe-haven assets that had performed so strongly last week when polls showed Republican candidate Donald Trump closing the gap reversed course as gold and bonds fell. 
+Investors had been unnerved in recent days by signs of a tightening presidential race, preferring what is seen as a known quantity in Clinton, over the politcal wild card, Trump.",FAKE
+856,How Bernie Sanders beat the polls and won Indiana,"For the second week in a row, there was a temporary glitch in the Associated Press’s election night data. On Tuesday, that glitch was to Hillary Clinton’s favor, showing her with 2,000 more votes in Vigo County, Indiana, than she actually had. That gave Clinton a giant margin in early returns, vastly at odds with what exit polls showed — and far bigger than the 7-point margin she enjoyed in the final polling average from RealClearPolitics.
+
+Within minutes, the wrong numbers in Vigo County were erased, and, over the next hour or so, Clinton’s remaining lead started to vanish. It wasn’t until about two hours after polls closed — at about the same time that Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican race, all but handing the nomination to Donald Trump — that the Democratic race in Indiana was called for Bernie Sanders. He’d beaten the polls, as he did in nearby Michigan — and probably, once all the votes are in, by a wider margin.
+
+After Sanders lost five of six races over the last two weeks and won only the small state of Rhode Island, the Indiana win was no doubt a welcome psychological boost. But why did Sanders win Michigan and Indiana, while losing other Midwestern states such as Missouri (narrowly), Illinois and Ohio?
+
+Unlike in the Republican contests, there have been pretty consistent patterns that have defined the Democratic matchups. Bernie Sanders consistently does better with younger and more liberal voters; Clinton does better with older, more moderate and black voters.
+
+In Indiana, preliminary exit poll data reported by CNN showed that the electorate in the state was more likely to identify as liberal than in other Midwestern states, and less likely to identify as moderate. What’s more, the change since 2008 was much larger than in those other states.
+
+But Sanders also won Michigan, where there were relatively few voters who identified as liberal.
+
+The best predictor of outcomes to date is how many black voters came to the polls. There’s been a correlation between how many black people live in a state and how well Hillary Clinton has done there, an effect that’s slightly stronger in states with closed primaries (meaning that independents, who strongly back Sanders, can’t vote). Indiana’s population was right at the inflection point of those curves, right at the point where you’d expect a close race.
+
+On Tuesday night, the percentage of the electorate that was black was slightly lower than the average of all contests for which we have polling data so far, but not dramatically so. Black voters preferred Clinton by a 3-to-1 margin. But white voters — nearly three-quarters of the electorate — leaned heavily toward Sanders, giving him nearly six in 10 of their votes. (On average so far, the two have been equally matched, about 50-50.) Sanders also did better with the upper end of the young-voter bracket, a group that turned out more heavily than they did in 2008. Those two shifts made the difference.
+
+It wasn’t totally unexpected that Sanders would pull out a win in the state, despite the polls being against him. FiveThirtyEight’s model, which looks at racial composition and the type of primary, figured that Sanders would win by 7 points — slightly more than where it is right now.
+
+Despite Sanders’s win, and despite slightly narrowing the delegate gap with Clinton, Sanders’s position for winning the nomination actually got worse. He needed, by our estimates, to win 64.9 percent of the delegates to stay on track to pass Hillary Clinton. He'll end up getting somewhere around 53 percent of them, if current figures hold. Meaning that he’ll need even more of what remains in order to possibly pass Clinton’s pledged delegate total — demonstrating again why doing so is a nearly impossible feat. (The Indiana results also made it impossible for Sanders to clinch the nomination with pledged delegates.)
+
+What’s particularly remarkable about the night’s results is that Donald Trump was expected to win, did, and knocked Ted Cruz out of the race. Hillary Clinton was expected to win and didn’t, and Bernie Sanders soldiers on despite underperforming on the delegates he needs in order to win and despite the fundamentals of the Democratic race having not changed in nearly two months.
+
+Part of that loops back to the way the Democratic race is divisive in the way the Republican race isn’t. There are very passionate groups of supporters for Bernie Sanders that want him to keep fighting. So he’ll keep fighting.
+
+And, as with Tuesday night, occasionally winning.",REAL
+8153,"Why the ECB is Going to Print, Print, PRINT!","by Yves Smith 
+Yves here. This article is a sad vignette of how severely central bankers and many economic commentators, in this case one at Westpac, are locked into destructive orthodox thinking. The ECB’s unconventional monetary policy experiment has been an abject failure. And the reason should be obvious: businesses don’t borrow to expand just because money has gone on sale. They borrow to expand if they see an opportunity and if the cost of funding does not constrain the growth plan. The parties most likely to borrow just because money is cheap are the last ones you want to do that: financial speculators, since the cost of money is one of their biggest costs and zombie businesses, since they will borrow if they can to keep an otherwise failed venture going. 
+Notice also that Westpac, presumably following the ECB, views more consumer demand for credit as a good thing. Since more and more economic studies have found that borrowing by households is economically unproductive beyond a modest level, policymakers need to get over the wrongheaded idea that they should promote growth in consumer credit. 
+It is also bizarre to see what central bankers have rationalized or ignored in order to persist in increasingly counterproductive monetary experiments. For instance, super low interest rates drain demand by reducing incomes of savers and retirees. Yet the monetary authorities told themselves that pensioners would choose to spend their capital to maintain their lifestyles. That’s not what has happened. They’ve cut spending and even tried increasing saving to make up for lost returns. For the most part, the ones who have eaten into their nest eggs had no choice. Similarly, super low interest rates signal a lack of official confidence about the economy, and unprecedented monetary experiments are very disconcerting to many businessmen. If the officialdom is signaling deflationary risk, the rational response is to save, since goods and services will be cheaper later. 
+By David Llewellyn-Smith, founding publisher and former editor-in-chief of The Diplomat magazine, now the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics website. Originally posted at MacroBusiness 
+From Westpac’s Elliot Clarke 
+A key purpose behind the ECB’s alternative easing programs has been to materially improve credit provision and conditions in the Euro Area economy. Exhibiting a lagged relationship with the business cycle and further hampered by the health of European banks, success on this front has been slow and limited. 
+As referenced in their most recent policy statement, “loan dynamics followed the path of gradual recovery observed since the beginning of 2014”. However, that has only left annual growth in loans to non-financial corporates and households at 1.9%yr and 1.8%yr respectively at September 2016. 
+These are hardly strong outcomes and, of late, there has been a clear lack of momentum, meaning further material gains are unlikely for the forseeable future. Indeed, from the detail of the ECB’s own bank lending survey, there is evidence to suggest credit growth is set to slow. 
+Starting with non-financial corporates, the ECB survey reports that there is a clear downtrend in current credit demand, with the net per cent of respondents reporting increased demand for credit from firms having peaked in the first quarter of 2016 and consistently declined ever since. 
+Expectations of future growth in non-financial corporate loan demand is also in a clear downtrend. Importantly, the peak in the expected series came in mid-2015 (six months ahead of the actual series’ peak) and has endured. It should be noted though that the expected series peaked at a high level and is still consistent with positive credit growth – so we are not anticipating an outright contraction in new lending. 
+The purpose for new loans for corporates also remains unhelpful to the growth outlook for the real economy. Having improved from mid-2015 to early 2016, the six months to October saw demand for credit to fund fixed asset investment abate. 
+Ergo, after a prolonged contraction to mid-2015, it seems a recovery in real investment has failed to launch. This is partly attributable to a lack of confidence in the outlook. But it has also come as a result of loan conditions for firms remaining tight. The ECB’s survey suggests conditions have only improved incrementally since mid-2014. 
+The above results imply only limited support to job creation and therefore to household incomes. It is unsurprising then that growth in credit to households also looks to be peaking at a fairly modest pace relative to history. 
+As for non-financial corporates, households in the Euro Area are clearly benefitting from lower interest rates. Yet the overall credit conditions they are currently experiencing are little changed from a year ago, or indeed late-2013. Note that since end-2013, the average percentage of banks reporting an easing in standards for mortgages and consumer credit has been 2% and 3% respectively. In the three years prior, an average of 14% and 6% of respondents reported tighter conditions each quarter. 
+The above analysis does not, of itself, justify the ECB continuing its asset purchases well beyond March 2017 – there are many market and political points that also need to be considered. But it does suggest that credit provision in the Euro Area is not yet self sustaining. Without the ECB’s support, the Euro Area’s economy; banks; and financial markets will be left in a fragile state, susceptible to any and all economic or financial shocks. 
+Add the political strife building across the Continent that is threatening further eurozone fracturing with the Italian referendum in December, Netherlands election in March, French election April-May, German election in September then Italy six months later and there is no way that the ECB can allow economic weakness and/or peripheral funding stress to creep back in. 
+It is going to print until the cows come home. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+9046,Comments circulating about the Republican presidential candidate,"comments circulating about the Republican presidential candidate Interesting: Not what I thought it was going to be. This is an eye-opener my friends. Please Read all the way to the bottom and pass it on! ""He's been divorced and remarried. He can't commit to anything.""""He's dangerously ignorant about international affairs. The Russianleaders will walk all over him.""""He has no filter- doesn't think before he speaks.""""Until recently, he was a Democrat. He's not a real Republican. Hehasn't paid his GOP dues.""""He used to be Pro Choice. Now, suddenly he's Pro Life?""""That can't be his real hair!""""He's a loose cannon. No one wants HIS finger on the nuclearbutton.""""His opponent has the experience and political savvy to bepresident. He does not.""""His temperament disqualifies him from ever beingCommander-In-Chief.""""He's proven himself to be mentally unstable.""""The military will never accept him as Commander-In-Chief. He's notsmart enough.""""The GOP doesn't want him to be the head of the party. He could never reach across the aisle to get anything done.""""Most Republican voters will just stay home rather than go out andvote for him.""""Evangelicals will never support him.""""He says '(Lets) Make America Great Again'. How dare he say wearen't still great?""""His intellect is thinner than spit on a slate rock.""After all his gaffs, he doubles down on them instead of admittinghe made a mistake.""""He's threatening to upend our treaties and relationships with ourallies by demanding that they pay for their own defense!""""Because of his gross factual errors he might take rash action andneedlessly lead this country into open warfare!""""He's racist, xenophobic, and fuels the fires of hatred!""""The rising turnout of his voters are not loyal Republicans orDemocrats and are alienated from both parties because neither takes asympathetic view toward their issues. ""The fact that he could be deemed a serious candidate for presidentis a shame and embarrassment for the country.""Is he Safe? ...he shoots from the hip ... he's over his head ...What are his solutions?""Voters want to follow some authority figure, a leader who can takecharge with authority; return a sense of discipline to our government; and,manifest the willpower needed to get this country back on track -- Or atleast a leader from outside Washington."" ​",FAKE
+7067,The Fix Is In: NBC Affiliate Accidentally Posts Election Results A Week Early: Hillary Wins Presidency 42% to Trump’s 40%,"Posted 11/03/2016 12:44 am by PatriotRising with 1 comment 
+Why The U.S. Presidential Election Has The Entire World Confused By Brandon Smith 
+
+Well, everyone thought it was a sure thing — Hillary Clinton had the White House in the bag; the entire political system from the DNC to the RNC and the mainstream media had already called the election over and done. Online gambling sites listed Clinton as a sure bet and Irish site Paddy Power even paid out one million dollars on the assumption of a Clinton win. And then, one Weiner ruined everything — Anthony Weiner. 
+
+The revelation of an October surprise re-opening of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of classified data on private and vulnerable email servers does not come as a shock to me, but it certainly does to many people around the world. Hundreds of mainstream outlets are scrambling to spin the news as misconduct by the FBI rather than a victory for the halls of justice. Numerous alternative media analysts are rushing to cover their butts and admit that there is now a “chance” of a Trump win. Confusion reigns supreme as the weirdest election in U.S. history continues to bewilder observers. 
+
+The first issue that needs to be addressed is the lack of an open mind displayed by some when it comes to the real purpose behind this election. The second issue here, of course, is one of timing. 
+
+Through the majority of this election cycle the public consensus has been that Clinton will win. Some argued that Trump would not be able to compete with the leftist media empire standing against him, while others have argued that the entire system including the Republican establishment would ensure that Trump would fail. The alternative media has in the past simply pointed out that elections have always been rigged, either by the elites playing both sides of the competition, or through outright voter fraud. They have assumed that the elites want Clinton, and therefore, the election has already been decided. 
+
+I tend to agree with the latter point of view, though I disagree with the conclusion. U.S. elections are indeed controlled, and have been for decades, primarily through the false left/right paradigm. However, as I have been pointing out since I correctly predicted the success of the Brexit referendum, I don’t think that Clinton is the choice of the elites. 
+
+I outline my reasons for this conclusion in-depth in articles like ‘2016 Will End With Economic Instability And A Trump Presidency’ , published in August. For the past several months it seems as though I have been the only person holding the view that Trump will be president. Only in the past few days have I received emails from readers stating that they used to think I was probably crazy, but now they aren’t so sure… 
+
+To be clear, my position is that Trump is slated to take the White House and that this is by design. This has been my position since before Trump won the Republican Primaries, it was my position when the election cycle began, it has never changed, nor have my views on the reasons for this outcome ever changed. Of course, the election is not over yet, and if Clinton ends up soiling the already thoroughly soiled Oval Office with her presence, then everyone can color me confused as well. That said, here are some issues that I think many people are overlooking when coming to conclusions on the election and the events surrounding it. 
+
+Clinton Is The Worst Candidate The Elites Could Have Chosen 
+
+I have been studying the activities and behaviors of establishment elites for over a decade and I have to say… they are not stupid. They certainly have hubris, and I would not call them “wise,” but they are definitely devious. They know how to rig a game. They know how to play both sides. They know how to cheat to get what they want when it comes to politics and how to manufacture consent from portions of the public. They’ve been doing it a long time. They have mastered it. 
+
+So, in my view it is rather insane for the elites to field a candidate such as Hillary Clinton IF the entirety of their globalist empire hangs in the balance (I don’t think it does). Though she is fond of BleachBit, the woman is unbleachable. With a decades-long rap sheet from her work at Rose Law Firm (in which document destruction and “misplacement” was apparently routine) to her interference with investigations into Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, to the strange odyssey surrounding her lies on the Benghazi attack, as well as her rampant mishandling of classified documents as head of the State Department, not to mention the Clinton Foundation’s pay to play scandals, it is impossible to endear her to the masses. Her dismal crowd turnouts are rather indicative of this. 
+
+On top of all this, Clinton’s anti-Russia rhetoric is coming off as absolutely crazy, and I think this is by design. Many in the alternative media, while assuming that Clinton is paving the way for WWIII, forget that the average person may not be up to speed on the same information we are, but most of them aren’t ignorant. Clinton’s ravings on Russian hacking and potential war are even putting liberals off rather than inspiring their confidence. 
+
+One would think that if the elites have their veritable pick of any politician to represent their interests in the White House and convince the American public to go along for the ride, Clinton would be the worst choice. Even if the intention were to rig the election in favor of Clinton, she would be a lame-duck president the second she took office, and, her mere presence would galvanize conservatives to the point of mass rebellion. 
+
+This is not generally how the elites play the game. Instead, they prefer co-option to direct confrontation. 
+
+Which President Is Better For The Elites During An Economic Breakdown? 
+
+If you consider the premise that Clinton is NOT the chosen one, and that the entire election is theater, the situation changes rather drastically. 
+
+Those that follow the underlying economic data that the mainstream tends to ignore know that large swaths of the global financial system are not long for this world. With Europe’s banking system plunging towards a Lehman-style event, the OPEC production freeze deal ready to fall apart yet again, and the Federal Reserve threatening to raise rates into recessionary conditions in December, our already floundering fiscal structure is approaching another crisis. 
+
+My questions has always been who would the elites rather have in office when this crisis occurs? I’ve said it a hundred times before and I’ll say it again here: with Clinton in office, globalists and international financiers get the blame for any economic downturn. With Trump in office, conservative movements will be blamed. In fact, I suggest anyone who doubts this scenario watch stock market reactions every time Trump rises in the polls or Clinton faces renewed scandal. The narrative is already being prepared — a Trump win equals a market loss. 
+
+For those that think it outlandish that the public could be tricked into blaming Trump and conservatives for an economic crisis, I suggest they consider that possession is nine-tenths of the law in the minds of many. People can also be irrational when facing financial ruin. I would remind readers that history is written by the victors. The globalists plan to be victorious in the dismantling of America and our founding principles. Whether or not they succeed is really up to average conservatives and liberty proponents, not Trump. 
+
+The FBI’s Move Prepares The Way For Trump 
+
+Clinton and the DNC argue that FBI Director James Comey’s announcement of a re-opened investigation is politically motivated. And they are right, sort of. The real motivation, I believe, is that Clinton was never meant to win the election in the first place, and that the elites want Trump placed in power during the final hours of the U.S. economy. Everything else is just a Kabuki dance. 
+
+The democrats are crying foul and accusing Comey of “working with Putin,” or working with the alt-right. The nefarious Harry Reid has even accused the FBI of hiding Trump’s supposed ties to the Russian government and violating the Hatch Act. 
+
+I think much of this outrage is real, as I believe much of the mainstream media attacks on Trump are coming from people who really think they are waging a propaganda war to get Hillary Clinton elected. This, however, does not mean that the elites plan to install Clinton. 
+
+Some might see my position as bizarre. I understand. But equally bizarre to me are some of the rationalizations people attempt to argue when dealing with the Comey revelation. 
+
+For example, the argument that the entire re-opening of the investigation is a complex ploy designed by the establishment to distract away from the Wikileaks data dumps. This makes little sense. If anything, the re-opening investigation is only bringing MORE attention to the Wikileaks data, not less. If the elites were hoping to create a distraction, they failed miserably. 
+
+The FBI’s announcement ONLY harms the Clinton campaign. Period. Even if it fizzles out, even if they announce that nothing was found, the investigation hitting the news streams so close to election day refocuses all public attention back on Clinton’s corruption and will continue to do so for the next week at least. The idea that the elites hope to use it to help Clinton is nonsensical. 
+
+I have also seen the argument that Comey is acting to cover his own posterior, perhaps because of a fear that Trump may steal away a victory. I find this equally absurd. Months back the consensus among alternative analysts was that Comey (placed in the FBI by Obama) was a traitor and the FBI was a puppet agency of the establishment. Now, suddenly, Comey is worried about a possible Trump win and so takes an action which might self-fulfill the prophecy? 
+
+Comey does what he is told. The FBI is an owned and operated elitist franchise. They do not go rogue. If the rogue FBI narrative were true and Comey actually feels the need to cover his bases with Trump, then it is only because he knows something the rest of us do not. With Clinton in office, his goose would be cooked after this little incident. Comey only gains an advantage if Trump is slated to win. 
+
+Trump May Or May Not Be Aware Of The Plan 
+
+The bottom line, according to the evidence I have seen in terms of elitists influence over U.S. elections, is that if Trump wins it will only be because they wanted him to win. The FBI firestorm this past week appears to support my view and we still have another week left for further Clinton ugliness to be revealed. I also expect that if Trump wins, the reaction from conservatives and liberty activists will be that the event was a “miracle,” a shocking upset against the establishment. Much like the reaction to the Brexit referendum. I continue to hold that conservatives and sovereignty champions in Europe and America are being set up to take the fall for a coming global destabilization. 
+
+I have not taken this position just to be contrary. If I think about it honestly, my position is truly a losing position. If I am mistaken and Clinton wins on the 8th then I’ll probably never hear the end of it, but that’s a risk that has to be taken, because what I see here is a move on the chess board that others are not considering. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. 
+
+That said, if I am right, then I still lose, because Trump supporters and half the liberty movement will be so enraptured that they will probably ignore the greater issue — that Trump is the candidate the elites wanted all along. 
+
+If I am right, I cannot say either way if Trump is aware that he will be a potential scapegoat for the elites. With Trump on the way to the White House I can guarantee a Fed rate hike in December. Imagine what a staged war between Trump and the Federal Reserve will do to the U.S. dollar? What a way to destroy the currency’s world reserve status and make way for the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights! I also suspect that widespread rioting is on the schedule as well from various social justice mobs; a perfect excuse for expansive martial law measures, don’t you think? 
+
+The point is, as horrifying as a Clinton presidency might be to conservatives (or to everyone), don’t get too comfortable under Trump. The party is just getting started and our vigilance must be even greater with a conservative White House, because, like it or not, everything Trump does is going to reflect on us. We can no more allow unconstitutional activities under Trump than we could under Clinton. If you think the election has been chaotic and confusing so far, just wait until after it is over. 
+
+If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here . We greatly appreciate your patronage. You can contact Brandon Smith at: Do you enjoy reading Patriot Rising?",FAKE
+3421,Joe Biden in 1992: No nominations to the Supreme Court in an election year,"Senate Republicans determined to block President Obama’s promised Supreme Court nominee embraced an unlikely ally Monday: Vice President Biden.
+
+More precisely, they embraced a fourth-term Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) who, while serving in 1992 as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, delivered a sprawling, 90-minute floor address that included a call for halting action on Supreme Court nominees in an election year.
+
+Biden delivered his remarks in late June, as the court approached the end of its term — the traditional season for retirement announcements — and as President George H.W. Bush waged an uphill campaign for a second term amid an economic slowdown and sinking approval ratings.
+
+[[In 1992, Joe Biden called for an election-year blockade of Supreme Court nominations]]
+
+Were there a vacancy, Biden argued, Bush should “not name a nominee until after the November election is completed,” and if he did, “the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over.”
+
+“Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself,” he continued. “Where the nation should be treated to a consideration of constitutional philosophy, all it will get in such circumstances is partisan bickering and political posturing from both parties and from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.”
+
+Biden, as vice president, has called in recent days for the Senate to take up the nomination Obama promises to make to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who was found dead Feb. 13 in Texas.
+
+“To leave the seat vacant at this critical moment in American history is a little bit like saying, ‘God forbid something happen to the president and the vice president, we’re not going to fill the presidency for another year and a half,’ ” he told Minnesota Public Radio on Thursday.
+
+Biden said Monday in a statement that the 1992 speech pertained to “a hypothetical vacancy” and that the excerpt Republicans highlighted was “not an accurate description of my views on the subject.”
+
+“In the same statement critics are pointing to today, I urged the Senate and White House to work together to overcome partisan differences to ensure the Court functions as the Founding Fathers intended,” he said. “That remains my position today.”
+
+Republicans wasted no time highlighting Biden’s long-forgotten remarks. The current Judiciary Committee chairman, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), rose on the Senate floor Monday afternoon to deliver fulsome praise for Biden and the newly unearthed speech.
+
+Grassley set out what he called “Biden Rules”: There ought to be no presidential Supreme Court nominations in an election year, and if there is such a nomination, the Senate ought to “seriously consider” not holding hearings on the nominee.
+
+In the 10 days since Scalia’s death, politicians of both parties have been forced to square their current positions on whether or not to confirm Obama’s promised nominee with their past statements on judicial nominations.
+
+For instance, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who now favors leaving the nomination to Obama’s successor, has been confronted with a 45-year-old law review article in which he suggested that “political matters” should not be relevant to the Senate’s consideration of a Supreme Court nomination.
+
+But Biden’s remarks were especially pointed, voluminous and relevant to the current situation. Embedded in the roughly 20,000 words he delivered on the Senate floor that day were rebuttals to virtually every point Democrats have brought forth in the past week to argue for the consideration of Obama’s nominee.
+
+Biden anticipated, for instance, that he would be accused of blockading an embattled Republican president’s nominees out of political expediency. “That would not be our intention,” he said. “Instead, it would be our pragmatic conclusion that once the political season is under way, and it is, action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over. That is what is fair to the nominee and is central to the process.”
+
+And he dismissed fears that an eight-member court could not effectively function: “The cost of such a result — the need to reargue three or four cases that will divide the justices four to four — are quite minor compared to the cost that a nominee, the president, the Senate, and the nation would have to pay for what would assuredly be a bitter fight, no matter how good a person is nominated by the president.”
+
+As Biden’s remarks circulated Monday, one Republican senator broke with his colleagues to call for hearings and an up-or-down vote on Obama’s nominee. Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, who faces a difficult campaign this year in a Democratic state, said in a Chicago Sun-Times op-ed that he could support “a nominee who can bridge differences, a nominee who finds common ground and a nominee who does not speak or act in the extreme.”
+
+But, by and large, Kirk’s GOP colleagues have held the line and have refused to even entertain the possibility of confirming a justice this year. One Judiciary Committee Republican who has backed some Obama nominees, Jeff Flake of Arizona, said Monday he would not vote to confirm a replacement for Scalia this year.
+
+“This is not about the potential nominee,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said Monday. “This is about who chooses.”
+
+At the White House, press secretary Josh Earnest said President Obama made additional phone calls in recent days to lawmakers from both parties, including some on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to discuss his ongoing deliberations and plans for selecting a nominee. But Earnest declined to offer specifics on the timeline or whom Obama is considering.
+
+Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of just two currently serving Republicans who supported both of Obama’s previous Supreme Court picks, said the White House has so far “made no outreach whatsoever” to discuss a path forward for a nominee.
+
+David Nakamura and Kelsey Snell contributed to this report.",REAL
+1919,"As campaigns launch, poll finds GOP field stays tight","The recent formal entries into the Republican race by Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have stirred up the GOP field somewhat, but still, no clear leader has emerged. The new poll finds Jeb Bush has held on to the top spot among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, but Bush's edge is slight and there are multiple contenders for the nomination who could overtake him with just a small increase in support at the same time that some previously strong contenders have faded.
+
+Overall, 17% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents back Bush for the GOP nomination, while 12% support Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Paul and Rubio stand at 11% each, with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 9% and Cruz at 7%. Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, both of whom placed second in CNN/ORC polls as recently as last fall, are now well behind the leader at 4% each.
+
+Bush's edge in the nomination contest extends across several attributes viewed as key to winning the presidency. He is most often named as the candidate with the right experience to be president (27%), as the one with the best chance of beating the Democratic nominee in the general election next November (26%) and as the strongest leader in the large field of GOP contenders (21%). He is also more often seen as the candidate with the clearest vision for the country's future (19%), who cares the most about people like you (18%), and who most closely shares your values (19%).
+
+On one metric, however, Bush has an emerging challenger. While 18% see Bush as the candidate who best represents the future of the Republican Party, the same share say fellow Floridian Rubio is the best representation of the GOP's future. Paul, at 10%, is the only other candidate in double digits on this question.
+
+Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has said his decision to run for the Republican nomination will be based on two things: his family and whether he can lift America's spirit. His father and brother are former Presidents. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has created a political committee that will help him travel and raise money while he considers a 2016 bid. Additionally, billionaire businessman David Koch said in a private gathering in Manhattan this month that he wants Walker to be the next president, but he doesn't plan to back anyone in the primaries. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is establishing a committee to formally explore a White House bid. ""If I run, my candidacy will be based on the idea that the American people are ready to try a dramatically different direction,"" he said in a news release provided to CNN on Monday, May 18 , an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, has said the United States needs a ""political revolution"" of working-class Americans looking to take back control of the government from billionaires. He first announced the run in an email to supporters early on the morning of Thursday, April 30. Sen. Bernie Sanders , an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, has said the United States needs a ""political revolution"" of working-class Americans looking to take back control of the government from billionaires. He first announced the run in an email to supporters early on the morning of Thursday, April 30. On March 2, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson announced the launch of an exploratory committee. The move will allow him to raise money that could eventually be transferred to an official presidential campaign and indicates he is on track with stated plans to formally announce a bid in May. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has said he'll make a decision about a presidential run sometime soon. A potential bid could focus on Graham's foreign policy stance. Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid Sunday, April 12, through a video message on social media. She continues to be considered the overwhelming front-runner among possible 2016 Democratic presidential candidates. Sen. Marco Rubio announced his bid for the 2016 presidency on Monday, April 13, a day after Hillary Clinton, with a rally in Florida. He's a Republican rising star from Florida who swept into office in 2010 on the back of tea party fervor. But his support of comprehensive immigration reform, which passed the Senate but has stalled in the House, has led some in his party to sour on his prospects. Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat former governor and senator of Rhode Island, said he's running for president on Thursday, April 16, as a Democrat, but his spokeswoman said the campaign is still in the presidential exploratory committee stages. Jim Webb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, is entertaining a 2016 presidential run. In January, he told NPR that his party has not focused on white, working-class voters in past elections. Vice President Joe Biden has twice before made unsuccessful bids for the Oval Office -- in 1988 and 2008. A former senator known for his foreign policy and national security expertise, Biden made the rounds on the morning shows recently and said he thinks he'd ""make a good President."" New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has started a series of town halls in New Hampshire to test the presidential waters, becoming more comfortable talking about national issues and staking out positions on hot topic debates. Rep. Paul Ryan, a former 2012 vice presidential candidate and fiscally conservative budget hawk, says he's keeping his ""options open"" for a possible presidential run but is not focused on it. Sen. Rand Paul officially announced his presidential bid on Tuesday, April 7, at a rally in Louisville, Kentucky. The tea party favorite probably will have to address previous controversies that include comments on civil rights, a plagiarism allegation and his assertion that the top NSA official lied to Congress about surveillance. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz announced his 2016 presidential bid on Monday, March 23, in a speech at Liberty University. The first-term Republican and tea party darling is considered a gifted orator and smart politician. He is best known in the Senate for his marathon filibuster over defunding Obamacare. Democrat Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor, released a ""buzzy"" political video in November 2013 in tandem with visits to New Hampshire. He also headlined a Democratic Party event in South Carolina, which holds the first Southern primary. Republican Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, announced in 2013 that he would not be seeking re-election, leading to speculation that he might mount a second White House bid. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a social conservative, gave Mitt Romney his toughest challenge in the nomination fight last time out and has made trips recently to early voting states, including Iowa and South Carolina. Political observers expect New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to yield to Hillary Clinton's run in 2016, fearing there wouldn't be room in the race for two Democrats from the Empire State. The poll suggests Rubio's campaign rollout has helped raise his profile in the party, boosting him into the top five in the overall race for the GOP nomination. But sustaining that momentum through the many campaign rollouts to come could be a challenge. Cruz's announcement raised his numbers among Tea Party backers, but he has shown little improvement elsewhere. Among tea party supporters, Cruz and Walker tie for the top slot at 15%, Rubio follows at 14%, Paul 12%, and Bush 11% with the rest in single digits. In a March CNN/ORC poll, Cruz had just 6% among Tea Party backers, Walker had 22%. Cruz and Walker's tea party strength seems to rest on their credentials as strong leaders, perhaps burnished by their high-profile stands on Obama's health care overhaul in the Senate and labor issues in Wisconsin, respectively: 21% of tea party Republicans call Cruz the strongest leader in the field, 16% say Walker is. The poll finds little sign of an announcement bump for Paul. In general, Republicans see Bush as the best possible candidate to match up against the Democratic nominee in 2016, but in hypothetical general election matchups against Clinton, Bush trails by a large margin, as do each of the other seven Republicans tested. RELATED: Ready to run Hillary Clinton tries again Marco Rubio fares best against the former first lady, trailing Clinton by 14 points, 55% to 41%. Bush trails Clinton by 17 points, 56% to 39%. Christie and Paul fall 19 points behind Clinton, each putting up 39% to Clinton's 58%. Huckabee, Walker, Carson and Cruz each trail Clinton by more than 20 points. Clinton declared her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president with a web video and promptly hit the road to Iowa and New Hampshire. Her campaign begins in an extremely strong position among Democrats nationwide: nearly 7 in 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents support her. Overall, 69% back the former secretary of state over Vice President Joe Biden (11%), Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (5%), former Virginia senator Jim Webb (3%), former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee (1%) and former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley (1%). Clinton is also the second choice of just over half of the Democrats who prefer someone else for the nomination. All told, Clinton is the first or second choice of 83% of the potential Democratic electorate. Jim Webb: ""I look forward to listening and talking with more people in the coming months as I decide whether or not to run."" Joe Biden: ""That's a family personal decision that I'm going to make sometime at the end of the summer."" Martin O'Malley: ""I've been very encouraged as I travel around the country by a number of people who repeat again and again and again their desire for getting things done again as a country and also for new leadership to get those things done."" Elizabeth Warren: ""I'm not running for president....I don't get who writes these headlines or what they're about. I think there's just kind of a pundit world out there."" Jerry Brown: ""If no one runs and [everyone] says we'll have an absent Democratic nominee, would I rule that out? I mean, that would be a little silly, wouldn't it?"" Former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee is a one-time Republican, turned independent, now Democrat and is exploring a run for the presidency. On Hillary Clinton, he told CNN ""... anybody who voted for the Iraq War should not be president and certainly should not be leading the Democratic Party."" Bernie Sanders: ""I haven't made up my final decision and I've got to say a lot of my strongest supporters say, 'Bernie, you've gotta stay out of the damn Democratic Party, run as an Independent."" Kirsten Gillibrand: The New York senator has said she'll support Hillary Clinton ""110 percent."" Andrew Cuomo (in 2014): ""I'm focusing on running for governor. And then I'm going to focus on being the best governor I can be."" Brian Schweitzer: When asked by Time if he would be a better candidate for president than Clinton: ""Well, I think so, of course. I think I have a background and a resume that isn't just in government."" Any possible Democratic competitors face a steep uphill battle in trying to draw support away from Clinton. Democrats are broadly enthusiastic about a Clinton candidacy, far more than they are for any other potential nominee. Overall, 58% of Democrats say they would be enthusiastic if she won the party's nomination. About a quarter say they would be enthusiastic about a Biden nomination (26%) while 11% say so about Sanders, 7% Webb, 6% O'Malley and 2% Chafee. One area where Clinton's numbers wilt: Only about half of Democratic men (49%) say they would be enthusiastic about having Clinton atop the Democratic ticket, compared with nearly two-thirds of Democratic women (65%). Democrats overwhelmingly see Clinton as holding several presidential characteristics. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats see Clinton as a strong and decisive leader (88% say that description applies to her) and as having a vision for the country's future (88%). About 8 in 10 say she represents the future of the Democratic Party (82%) and cares about people like them (82%). Democrats are slightly less apt to say Clinton is honest and trustworthy, though three-quarters do view her as honest (75%, about the same as in March). The CNN/ORC International poll was conducted by telephone, April 16-19, among a random national sample of 1,018 adult Americans. Results for the full poll have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Among the 435 Republicans and independents who lean Republican, it is 4.5 points, and among the 458 Democrats and independents who lean Democratic, it is 4.5 points.",REAL
+281,Meet the Republicans who ousted John Boehner. They're just getting started.,"Several Republicans started the House Freedom Caucus earlier this year to push House leadership to fight harder. They're feeling emboldened at a crucial moment.
+
+Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R) of Utah hopes to be the choice of conservatives in his run for House speaker in a longshot challenge to majority leader Kevin McCarthy of California.
+
+When the House broke for its August recess, Republican Rep. John Fleming went home to Louisiana to connect with voters. He got an earful.
+
+He traveled the state, and whether he spoke with a lowly company employee, a middle manager, or a business owner, they all said the same thing: “They are very disappointed in how we Republicans are doing in Washington,” says Rep. Fleming, a physician elected in 2008.
+
+Fleming says his constituents see a GOP-controlled Congress failing to check President Obama, even as federal regulations are hurting them personally. It doesn’t matter to them that the president has veto power, or that Democrats can still block Republicans in the GOP-controlled Senate.
+
+“They just don’t want to hear that. That’s an excuse to them,” he says in an interview. “They at least want a fight.”
+
+Fleming is doing his darndest.
+
+In January, he and eight other hard-line Republicans formed the House Freedom Caucus to challenge the GOP leadership, which they claim is not fighting hard enough for Republican priorities. Now they’re bigger and they're emboldened. They just succeeded in driving out Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio, who recently stunned Washington with the news that he will retire from Congress on Oct. 30.
+
+In the weeks ahead, the Freedom Caucus will have plentiful opportunities to push the fight further – from the speaker's race to a combustible mix of fiscal deadlines this fall. Though members say they have not yet settled on a strategy, one thing is certain: They are not afraid of government shutdowns, fiscal cliffs, or any other hardline tactics that typically made Boehner wince.
+
+Republicans have not gotten what they wanted, they say, not because these gambits failed, but rather because leadership didn't commit to them, heart and soul.
+
+And they want that to end now.
+
+For this invitation-only group of about 40 members, which meets regularly at a Capitol Hill restaurant called the Tortilla Coast, the fight starts with the GOP's election for the speakership and other GOP leadership offices, which will take place in a secret ballot on Thursday.
+
+Mr. Boehner said he wanted to spare his members and the institution the “turmoil” of an expected attempt to oust him. But to many conservatives, like the members of the Freedom Caucus, turmoil is not the problem. They want real change in the top-down way the House is run and are making demands.
+
+That pressure bubbled over Sunday when Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R) of Utah suddenly joined the race, challenging Boehner’s presumed successor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R) of California. Congressman Chaffetz says he was ""recruited"" as an alternative to majority leader McCarthy. He doubts Boehner’s right-hand man can get enough conservatives to win a final floor vote for speaker without having to rely on Democrats. That vote will occur at the end of the month.
+
+""You don't just give an automatic promotion to the existing leadership team,"" Chaffetz said on ""Fox News Sunday."" Voters “want us to take that fight to the Senate. They want us to take that fight to the president.”
+
+Beyond the race for the speakership, the House has a to-do list chock full of pressure points for the Freedom Caucus, including debt, budget, and tax deadlines. Many in Washington are quaking over the deadlines. They remember previous cliff-hanger negotiations between the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress. They wonder whether the Freedom Caucus will trigger a government shutdown over federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the way hardliners did over Obamacare in 2013.
+
+Caucus members see the coming weeks as an opportunity. Exactly what their fight will look like “is kind of fluid,” says Rep. Matt Salmon (R) of Arizona, another caucus founder. But “as we go forward, we’re going to consider anything and everything,” he said last week.
+
+Whether Republicans are fighting hard enough for their priorities is a matter of opinion, and forms a dividing line in the party that runs from voters, to Congress, to the presidential race.
+
+Sixty percent of Republican voters say they feel “betrayed” by their political party, according to a September Fox News poll. Two-thirds of GOP primary voters do not believe Republican majorities have done enough to block Obama’s agenda, the poll finds.
+
+“It’s somewhat subjective, 'Did you fight hard enough for your priorities?' With Boehner, the answer is, ‘No, you didn’t,’ ” says Matt Kibbe, the former head of the tea party advocacy group Freedom Works.
+
+Mr. Kibbe is the kind of person Boehner means when he rails against “false prophets” who gin up the base with unrealistic promises. The speaker blames outside groups such as Freedom Works and Heritage Action for egging on the 2013 shutdown, a strategy he says was doomed to fail. He and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky have since vowed not to repeat a shutdown.
+
+But Kibbe says it is Boehner who is the false prophet, promising in the 2010 GOP “Pledge to America” to roll back spending to 2008 levels and to repeal Obamacare if the Republicans won the House.
+
+“You have to believe that they never meant it,” says Kibbe, who is now a senior adviser to Concerned American Voters, a super political action committee for GOP presidential candidate and libertarian, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
+
+“This idea that shutting down the government is a fundamental loser for Republicans – I just don’t buy it,” Kibbe continues. He notes that it was only after the shutdowns of 1995 and early ’96 that Republicans, under the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich, were able to strike a deal on welfare reform with President Clinton.
+
+“Clinton took Gingrich seriously; Obama has never taken Boehner seriously.”
+
+Fleming couldn’t agree more. He points to the stunning midterm election of 2014, which returned a historic number of Republicans to the House and handed the Senate to GOP control – despite the shutdown the year before.
+
+Republicans rarely put a bill on the president’s desk that he doesn’t like, Fleming complains. Indeed, the president has only vetoed four bills in his seven years in office – though he’s made plenty of veto threats.
+
+“We could be getting more than we’re getting now,” Fleming says. “By raising the white flag before the discussion debate even begins, we’ve already lost.”
+
+Other Republicans – hardly moderates – don’t see it that way.
+
+Take Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform. He’s famous for his Taxpayer Protection Pledge to oppose tax increases. Most Republicans in Congress have signed it.
+
+Ideologically, Republicans are more united today than ever, he says. What Republican is for Obamacare? Or for tax increases?
+
+Under Boehner’s leadership, he notes, the House scrapped earmarks. Republicans negotiated permanent tax cuts for most Americans. They got budget caps and the first real spending cuts since the end of World War II. They reformed a part of Medicare in what’s known as the “Doc Fix.” They even sued the president.
+
+“People take progress for granted,” says Mr. Norquist. “What you would like is not the question. I would like rubies and diamonds.... It's, 'What can you   accomplish?’ ”
+
+In Congress, a backlash may be building against Freedom Caucus hardball tactics. Last month, a caucus member quit, saying tactics were harming, not helping, the GOP cause. Over in the Senate, Republican colleagues shouted down tea party favorite Sen. Ted Cruz (R) of Texas last week over his procedural move related to spending and Planned Parenthood.
+
+“There’s a lot of frustration. In some sense, this group treats Republicans like they’re their enemy,” says Rep. Tom Cole (R) of Oklahoma, a Boehner supporter. “It’s always inappropriate to try and blackmail your teammates.”
+
+The Oklahoman understands the anger of Freedom Caucus members. The political roadblocks to the GOP agenda frustrate him, too, but anger clouds their judgment, he says. The caucus pursues things that “demonstrably don’t work,” such as threatening to shut down the Department of Homeland Security over the president’s immigration policy.
+
+Cole hopes that a new speaker can help calm the waters. “I think we’ve got an opportunity for a little bit of a new beginning.”",REAL
+6060,Self-Driving Truck’s First Mission: A 120-Mile Beer Run,"New York Times – by Mike Isaac SAN FRANCISCO — The futurists of Silicon Valley may not have seen this one coming: The first commercial delivery made by a self-driving truck was 2,000 cases of Budweiser beer. On Tuesday, Otto , the Uber-owned self-driving vehicle operation, announced the completion of its first commercial delivery, having delivered its beer load from Fort Collins, Colo., to Colorado Springs, a roughly 120-mile trip on Interstate 25. In recent years, Uber has predicted a future in which you can ride in a self-driving car that will take you where you want to go, no driver necessary. But the idea that commercial trucking could be done by robot is a relatively new idea — and a potentially controversial one, given the possibility that robots could one day replace human drivers. “We think this technology is inching closer to commercial availability,” Lior Ron, co-founder of Otto, said in an interview. In August, Uber acquired Otto, a San Francisco start-up run by a number of veterans of Google’s long-running autonomous vehicle research. Though largely symbolic, the beer delivery marks the first commercial partnership for Otto, which was founded less than a year ago. Terms of the deal between Otto and Anheuser-Busch InBev , which owns the Budweiser brand, were not disclosed. “We’ve tested with trailers, of course, but there’s nothing like actually doing the real thing, end to end,” Mr. Ron said. The delivery was indicative of Uber’s larger ambitions to become an enormous transportation network, one in which the company is responsible for moving anything, like people, hot meals or cases of beer, around the globe, at all hours and as efficiently as possible. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, has said he envisions a future in which transportation will occur in different ways, using both manned and unmanned vehicles. Otto is a particularly large bet for Uber, which paid nearly $700 million for the start-up only a few months after the company started publicly discussing its self-driving-truck ambitions. Since backing down from its money-burning effort to dominate the Chinese ride-hailing market in August, Uber has invested more time and resources to focus on breaking into the trucking market. Annual trucking industry revenue topped $720 billion in 2015, according to American Trucking Association estimates. A good part of that total came from top brands that rely heavily on the trucking industry to transport their goods. Anheuser-Busch, for example, delivers more than a million truckloads of beer domestically every year. “We view self-driving trucks as the future, and we want to be a part of that,” said James Sembrot, senior director of logistics strategy at Anheuser-Busch. Though the delivery went smoothly, the two companies did not indicate whether there would be any further deals. For this initial delivery, Otto’s truck departed Anheuser-Busch’s facility in Loveland, Colo., in the early morning before reaching the interstate in Fort Collins. The truck drove through Denver — alongside regular passenger car traffic — and navigated to its destination in Colorado Springs without incident. Otto said a trained driver was in the cabin of the truck at all times to monitor the vehicle’s progress and take over if necessary. At no point was the driver required to intervene, the company said. Future expansion of the pilot program will allow Otto to test for more types of road and weather conditions, a major factor in autonomous vehicle route plotting.",FAKE
+869,Bernie Sanders: What's his endgame now?,"Even 24 hours ago, there was the faintest hope he could be the nominee. Now, Bernie Sanders is shifting gears.
+
+Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders listens as audience members cheer during an election night campaign event at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena Tuesday in Huntington, W.Va.
+
+Bernie Sanders knows he can’t win the Democratic presidential nomination. He said as much, even before losing decisively to Hillary Clinton in four out of five primaries Tuesday.
+
+Yet Senator Sanders remains in the race. But he now fills a wholly different niche than he did even 24 hours ago. Gone is Sanders the candidate with a slim remaining hope that he could still be the Democratic nominee. Enter Sanders the message candidate.
+
+And the message is this: that Sanders has tapped into a current of discontent within the Democratic base, particularly among young people, that’s not going away. And he intends to press his agenda all the way to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia this summer.
+
+“The people in every state in this country should have the right to determine who they want as president and what the agenda of the Democratic Party should be,” Sanders said in a statement Tuesday night. “That’s why we are in this race until the last vote is cast.”
+
+The intent, he added, is to “fight for a progressive party platform” that includes a $15 minimum wage, an “end to our disastrous trade policies,” Medicare for all, breaking up big banks, ending fracking, free public college, and a carbon tax to address climate change.
+
+The upside for Sanders is that he keeps his issues on the public radar, and continues to nudge the more moderate Mrs. Clinton to the left. The risk is that he looks like a sore loser, as some have called him, and prevents the Democratic Party from fully focusing on the task at hand: defeating the Republicans in November.
+
+Clinton – who won Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Connecticut, and lost only in Rhode Island – pivoted anyway toward a message of Democratic unity and toward a general election fight in which she hopes to attract independents as well as Republicans uncomfortable with the direction of their party.
+
+“If you are a Democrat, an independent or a thoughtful Republican, you know their approach is not going to build an America where we increase opportunity or decrease inequality,” Clinton said. “So instead of us letting them take us backwards we want America to be in the future business.”
+
+In her pitch to Sanders supporters, Clinton sought to portray herself  as a progressive with a pragmatic streak
+
+“We have to be both dreamers and doers,” she said.
+
+Clinton also reminded voters of the historic nature of her candidacy, now placing her firmly in position to become the first female major-party nominee in American history and potentially the first woman president. In the process, she took a dig at Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who swept all five states Tuesday.
+
+“Now, the other day, Mr. Trump accused me of playing the, quote, woman card. Well, if fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in,” Clinton said.
+
+For Sanders, a self-described social democrat who has fought for decades on the issues now at the heart of his campaign, the 2016 race remains, in a way, a dream come true. The once-obscure senator from Vermont is now a national figure, with a national platform to press his cause.
+
+And for many reasons, he truly has no reason to drop out.
+
+Exhibit A is his incredible fundraising. Most candidates will stay in a race as long as they have two nickels to rub together, and Sanders has plenty. He has outraised Clinton three straight months – average donation $27, as the rally chant goes – and his “take” is accelerating. In March alone, he raised $44 million, a monthly record for the Vermont social democrat.
+
+Exhibit B is his huge rallies. Who can argue with the exhilaration Sanders must feel when he takes the stage to address thousands of screaming fans?
+
+Exhibit C is his party affiliation – or lack thereof. Sanders isn’t really a Democrat. He may say he is (sort of) for the purposes of this presidential race, but when faced with pleas to step aside for the good of the party, he shrugs. In his world, the “party” is the establishment, and that’s what he’s fighting.
+
+Exhibit D is the “what ifs.” There remains a chance that Clinton could be indicted over her use of a private e-mail server, and her handling of information now deemed classified, while she was secretary of State. The financial doings of the Clinton family foundation represent more unknown territory with potentially bad optics.
+
+If Clinton were forced from the race, Sanders would be the last person standing for the Democratic nomination. True, Vice President Joe Biden could jump in, though that would offend many voters’ sense of fairness – especially the Sanders voters, whose support will be needed in November, no matter who wins the Democratic nomination.
+
+Exhibit E is history. Many a pundit has pointed out that in 2008, after a spirited primary season, then-Senator Clinton dropped out of the presidential race and embraced her rival, Barack Obama. But that didn’t happen until June of that year, after all the primaries were over. Then-Senator Obama still won the election.
+
+So for now, at least, it’s probably too soon to claim that Sanders is doing irreparable harm to Clinton’s campaign. Clinton has high negatives for a likely nominee, but the Republicans are pounding her much harder than Sanders is. Remember that Sanders took one of Clinton’s biggest Achilles’ Heels – her e-mails – off the table in their first debate.
+
+Remember also the “PUMAs” of 2008. It’s an acronym whose meaning isn’t suitable for a family newspaper, but it stood for Clinton voters claiming they’d never vote for Obama simply for the sake of “party unity.” Most Clinton voters ended up backing Obama anyway.
+
+Let’s also be clear: Even if Sanders doesn’t actually intend to take his challenge of Clinton all the way to the convention floor in Philadelphia, why should he and his strategists say that now? In politics, candidates are fully “in it” until they’re not.
+
+Sanders, in a way, can already claim victory. He has already pushed Clinton to the left on trade; chances are, she would not have rejected the Obama-backed Trans-Pacific trade deal absent Sanders’s objections.
+
+Sanders has also established $15 as the liberal benchmark for raising the minimum wage, no doubt a spur toward Clinton’s support for the Fight for $15 advocacy campaign. Clinton prefers to push for a $12 federal minimum wage, citing political feasibility, but has said she’d sign a bill raising the federal minimum wage to $15.
+
+Sanders says he’s waiting to see what a Clinton platform looks like before he decides how much to campaign for her. In an MSNBC interview last week, Sanders called the process a “two-way street,” suggesting she has to move more toward his philosophy before he’ll help her.
+
+“I want to see the Democratic Party have the courage to stand up to big-money interests in a way that they have not in the past, take on the drug companies, take on Wall Street, take on the fossil fuel industry, and I want to see them come up with ideas that really do excite working families and young people in this country,” Sanders said.
+
+In an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” last week, Clinton said that when she dropped out of the 2008 race, 40 percent of her supporters were unwilling to vote for Obama. So she got to work.
+
+“I nominated him at the convention. I went from group to group, even as late as the convention, convincing people who were my delegates to come together, to unify,” she said.
+
+It’s also worth pointing out that by facing a competitive primary to the bitter end, Obama was in fighting trim for the general election – and organized in all 50 states. Clinton may not be happy with Sanders’s continued campaign, but he has at least given her a window into how a sizable portion of her party’s voters see the world.
+
+For now, Sanders holds a lot of power.  He can join hands with Clinton at the convention or he can keep fighting. If he chooses the latter path, he could do serious damage to the Democratic Party. But the more likely scenario, say Democratic strategists, is that Sanders declares moral victory and backs Clinton – if not enthusiastically.",REAL
+3939,Obama Pushes Castro on Human Rights During Joint Conference,"President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro took questions over human rights and the U.S. economic embargo during an unprecedented joint news conference Monday, putting the Cuban leader in the hotspot in front of a public not used seeing to their leader being questioned.
+
+Obama continued to press the Communist leader on human rights issues.
+
+""We continue, as President Castro indicated, to have some very serious differences, including on democracy and human rights,"" said Obama said. The U.S. president planned to meet with Cuban dissidents Tuesday.
+
+But when an American reporter asked about political prisoners in Cuba, Castro pushed back, denying such prisoners even existed.
+
+""What political prisoners? Give me a name or names,"" Castro said.
+
+Castro also blasted the long-held American embargo, which he called ""the most important obstacle"" to his country's economic development. Obama has called on Congress to lift the blockade, but lawmakers have not held a vote on the repeal.
+
+ 
+
+""The embargo is going to end,"" Obama said. ""When, I can't be entirely sure, but I believe it will end.""
+
+Despite the tensions, Obama heralded a ""new day"" in the U.S.-Cuba relationship, saying ""part of normalizing relations means we discuss these differences directly.""
+
+Earlier, with his hand placed on his heart Obama began his first full day in Cuba at Revolution Square, listening to a band as it played the American National Anthem. He is hoping his historic visit will push relations between the two countries forward.
+
+The president placed a wreath at the memorial to Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti. At 11:30 AM, Obama ventured to Havana's Palace of the Revolution for the one-on-one meeting with Cuban President Raoul Castro.
+
+While the president does not expect immediate political change, he knows Castro's economic reforms have opened the door to American investment and opportunity on the island nation.
+
+""It's a historic opportunity to forge new agreements and commercial deals, to build new ties between our two peoples and for me to lay out my vision for a future that's brighter than our past,"" the president told staffers at the U.S. Embassy in Havana.
+
+U.S. companies are eager to do business with Cuba's 11 million people, and Google will be among the first to take advantage of the changed relationship.
+
+Obama has announced the technology giant will expand Wi-Fi and broadband Internet access on the island. So far, only about 5 percent of Cubans enjoy such access.
+
+But only hours before the president arrived in Cuba and toured old Havana with his family, police clashed with human rights protestors. At least 50 demonstrators were arrested.
+
+Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz tweeted support for the Cuban people and criticized the visit.
+
+""Political prisoners languishing in dungeons across the island will hear this message: Nobody has your back. You're alone with your tormentors. The world has forgotten about you,"" he wrote in Politico.
+
+""There will be no mojitos at the U.S. Embassy for them,"" he continued. ""Raul Castro denies their very existence.""
+
+GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump said he supports a new relationship with Cuba, but suggests President Castro should have greeted the president when he arrived.
+
+""There was nobody there to greet him. Folks, what are we doing, what are we doing? Now here's how a thing like that is supposed to work. Number one, he has his people call up and say, 'Who is going to be greeting the president?' If they say nobody, you don't go until somebody's there because you don't want to look like a fool,"" Trump insisted.
+
+But not everyone is critical. American Alan Gross, who was released from a Cuban prison a year ago, told CBN News' Gary Lane the president's visit is a courageous move.
+
+""You sat in a prison cell for five years. Is it the right course?"" Lane asked.
+
+""Well, absolutely,"" Gross replied. ""If we had had diplomatic relations 55 years ago, 50 years ago, 45 years ago, six years ago,  I might not have had to forfeit five years of my life.""
+
+""The whole idea of constructive engagement helps to avoid circumstances like this,"" he continued. ""And people who are critical of the process that we've recently gone through really need to take a look at that.""
+
+Obama's visit will conclude Tuesday with a televised speech to the Cuban people, attendance at a baseball game, and a possible meeting with political dissidents.",REAL
+8721,"“National Mood” Focus Group Reflects Angry, Divided America","“National Mood” Focus Group Reflects Angry, Divided America 0 shares by A. Griffee / November 7, 2016 / POLITICS / A focus group of 23 people put together by CBS News revealed a frightening look at what America has become – a divided nation. 
+Republican pollster, public opinion analyst and CBS News consultant Frank Luntz interviewed the group, and even lost it himself during the heated discussion. He came away deeply disturbed by what he saw. 
+Whether they were Republicans or Democrats, supporting Trump or Clinton, they were all angry. Out of the 23 people, only 3 raised their hands saying they were voting for a candidate. The others were voting just to vote against a candidate. 
+“When we don’t agree on the same facts, how can we possibly agree on the same solutions?” Luntz asked. 
+My “angry voter” focus group will be on @60Minutes tonight. 
+First time I’ve ever lost my composure during a group. 😳 pic.twitter.com/6vUNsSVLEb 
+— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) November 6, 2016 How many of you are voting against a candidate? Pollster . @FrankLuntz asks a focus group, tonight on #60Minutes pic.twitter.com/v5Px4JrB9d 
+— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 6, 2016 Voters have become “vicious,” says pollster @FrankLuntz . They have “deep-seated resentment” about their choices for president pic.twitter.com/wFcM1gC18w 
+— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 6, 2016 
+
+Sign up to get breaking news alerts from Dennis Michael Lynch. Subscribe ",FAKE
+2341,Determined to kill: Can tough gun laws end mass shootings?,"The flag at Desert Hot Springs' Condor Gun Shop flew at half-staff on Friday morning. Less than two days had passed since two shooters, armed with four guns, killed 14 people and wounded 21 more at an office holiday party in San Bernardino.
+
+The shooting, which the FBI is investigating as an ""act of terrorism,"" forced the nation's attention to the city 40 miles west of Desert Hot Springs. It also prompted a flood of calls to Condor Gun Shop, an unheated cabin across from a swath of open desert at the edge of the city.
+
+""Since (Wednesday), my phone has been ringing off the hook,"" said Torrey Harris, whose family has owned the shop since 1971. ""It didn't stop ringing until 11:30 at night.""
+
+Harris said that, after most mass shootings, longtime gun owners seek to stock up on weapons and ammunition that they think California will try to ban in reaction to the incidents of violence. The state legislature often passes a slew of gun control laws in the months after these tragedies.
+
+But Harris said the response she saw after San Bernardino was different.
+
+""I would say a good 40% of my calls (Wednesday) were people who have never owned a firearm in their life,"" Harris said.
+
+Gun control activists already say Wednesday's shooting demonstrates the need for background checks for ammunition sales. But even California's gun control laws, among the strictest in the nation, haven't prevented seven mass shootings using legally purchased guns since 2006.
+
+Gun rights advocates maintain that laws don't affect criminals and only make it more difficult for people to protect themselves.
+
+Harris believes some of those people calling her shop have adopted a similar position.
+
+""They looked at (San Bernardino) and said, 'You know what, we have to be able to fight back, and I'm not going to be the person cowering in the corner of a room waiting to be shot,'"" she said.
+
+Data on mass shootings is sparse, and even the definition of ""mass shooting"" varies widely. The FBI, for instance, defines the events as incidents where at least four people are killed, while a popular online ""shooting tracker"" states that a mass shooting occurs when at least four people, including the shooter, are injured by gunshots.
+
+By the FBI's definition, as counted by USA TODAY, there have been 22 mass shootings this year; by the Shooting Tracker's analysis, San Bernardino was number 353 and one of two mass shootings that day.
+
+Despite this variance, experts don't believe mass shootings are happening more often than they did in past decades. In California and across the country, violent crimes with firearms have declined significantly since the 1980s.
+
+At the same time, however, we've become more afraid.
+
+""It was Sandy Hook that really got people's attention and started this intense focus on (shootings),"" said James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist who's written several books on mass murder, referring to the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
+
+Since then, he said, ""Even though the incidence hasn't increased, fear has.""
+
+A 2015 Congressional Research Service report on mass public shootings found that 2012 was a particularly brutal year — seven mass public shootings, compared to an average of four per year — and suggested that the horrific year had a lasting impact on public opinion.
+
+""Several such mass murders in 2012, seven incidents by most counts, compounded a fear among many people that, 'this could happen to me',"" the authors of the report wrote.
+
+After the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook, support for controls on gun ownership spiked to 51% of the U.S. population —its highest level in five years, according to the Pew Research Center. Support for laws protecting the right to own guns fell from 49% to 42%.
+
+Polls showed a return to pre-Sandy Hook opinion levels about six months later. But in comparison, a shooting that killed six people at a 2011 rally for Ariz. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords didn't significantly impact public opinion on gun control, according to a poll conducted in the following days by the Pew Research Center. Neither did a 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech that killed 32 people.
+
+For some, that fear has resulted in a new desire to bear arms. Pew data suggests that, in 1999, nearly half of gun owners bought them for hunting, compared to 26% for personal protection. By Feb. 2013, those positions had almost reversed: nearly half of gun owners wanted weapons for personal protection, compared to 32% for hunting.
+
+Condor Gun Shop owner Harris said, in the last five years, she's begun selling firearms to more women and first-time buyers. During the last 10 years, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade group for firearms manufacturers, has also seen a steady increase in first-time and female gun owners.
+
+About 25 to 30% of customers are first-time gun buyers, who often purchase a gun for protection. More than 30% of customers are women, NSSF spokesman Mike Bazinet said.
+
+Harris said she's started asking first-time gun owners what changed their minds about purchasing a firearm. More and more people tell her that they want to be responsible for their own safety.
+
+""Just like buying car insurance, you go out and you buy it and you hope you never have to use it, but you're really thankful if you ever get into an accident. And a lot of people who buy these firearms do the same thing,"" Harris said. ""It really has changed, the whole mindset of a lot of people who are buying guns now.""
+
+But, according to San Bernardino police, Syed Rizwan Farook — one of the San Bernardino shooters — purchased his two guns legally from a federal licensed firearms dealer. Another person bought two .223-caliber rifles —a DPMS A-15 and Smith & Wesson M&P15 — legally. Only the shooters' modification attempts to the assault weapons, to make one rifle accept 30-round magazines and one rifle fully automatic, made them illegal to possess.
+
+So for gun control advocates, mass shootings are sirens, calling for further limits on access to guns.
+
+In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, for example, the California state legislature passed at least 14 bills tightening restrictions on gun ownership — more gun laws than it had passed in the previous six years combined. Gov. Jerry Brown signed laws banning conversion kits for ammunition magazines, toughening mental health reporting requirements and closing a ""loophole"" that allowed single-shot handguns to bypass safety requirements.
+
+In 2014, a bill cited a shooting in Isla Vista — when a gunman shot and killed three people and fatally stabbed three others near the University of California Santa Barbara campus — as the reason for its necessity. That measure, now a law, allows judges to temporarily keep people from purchasing or possessing guns if family members or law enforcement think they might harm themselves or others.
+
+While nearly 40 states have relaxed gun rules in the last two decades, California has enacted more than 50 major gun bills since 1994. The pro-gun control Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, based in San Francisco, gave California's laws an A- in 2014, the highest grade given to any state. Guns & Ammo Magazine, with a pro-gun rights stance, ranked the state fourth-worst in the country for gun ownership.
+
+Already, in the wake of the San Bernardino tragedy, gun control advocates are touting a 2016 ballot initiative that Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed in October. The measure proposes background checks for ammunition purchases and bans possession of high capacity magazines.
+
+""Ammunition is what makes a firearm into a deadly weapon, and we should have background checks on firearms and ammunition,"" Law Center staff attorney Ari Freilich said. ""These individuals, it looks like they stockpiled 3,000 to 4,000 rounds of ammunition. They did it without having to show ID, without having to pass a background check.""
+
+Prior to San Bernardino, California had seen seven public shootings since 2006 that claimed four or more lives (not counting those police believe were gang-related), according to USA TODAY's ""Behind the Bloodshed"" tracker. In four of those shootings, the weapons shooters used were purchased legally and registered to the shooters. In two other incidents, the guns were purchased legally but registered to other people.
+
+In only one incident, the 2013 rampage near Santa Monica College, did law enforcement say that the weapons used were illegal in California.
+
+""Here (in California), as pretty much everywhere in the country, anybody who isn't disqualified by virtue of them having a felony conviction can get a gun, and can get a bunch of guns, and can get guns that are quite deadly, because guns are deadly,"" said Eugene Volokh, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA and writer for ""The Volokh Conspiracy,"" a legal blog hosted by The Washington Post.
+
+Freilich believes mass shootings with guns that have been purchased legally, like Wednesday's in San Bernardino, emphasize the need for more stringent gun control.
+
+""I do think (San Bernardino) highlights to legislators and to the California public that despite all that we've done — California has the toughest gun laws in the nation — more clearly needs to be done,"" Freilich said.
+
+Since the late 1980s, the crime rate has dropped in California and nationally by about 50%, according to the California Attorney General's Office and the FBI.
+
+Gun control advocates attribute that drop in California in part to gun control laws. However, some researchers, including Volokh, doubt that conclusion— pointing out that violence has dropped nationwide even though most states have loosened gun control laws and California is widely known to have the strictest laws in the nation. The percentage of homicide victims killed by firearms has remained steady in California since 1990, according to the California Attorney General's Homicide Report.
+
+Realistically, the battle to prevent mass tragedies with legislation may be futile, Volokh said.
+
+""Let's look at somebody who is a would-be mass shooter. This person has essentially decided to have the defining event of his life, and possibly the concluding event of his life, be mass murder,"" Volokh said. ""This is somebody who is very motivated to commit the crime, and again, we know he is motivated because he's willing to give up his life to do that.""
+
+Wednesday's shooting was perpetrated by people determined to kill, Volokh said.
+
+The shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, have been identified as husband and wife, and investigators found a dozen pipe bombs and more than 4,500 rounds of ammunition in the home they were renting in Redlands.
+
+The FBI is investigating the mass shooting as an 'act of terrorism.'
+
+While gun control may help reduce violence in general, criminologist James Alan Fox doesn't think legislation will help prevent mass shootings like these.
+
+""Gun control can do a lot in terms of impacting the kind of gun crime you see every day. Will it avert mass killings? Not really,"" Fox said. ""They'll find a way to get a gun. If they can't get one legally, which most of them can, they'll borrow one, steal one — but they'll get one.""
+
+For Torrey Harris of Condor Gun Shop, this tragic conversation is becoming routine.
+
+""I've gone through this so many times now, I know how the cycle goes,"" Harris said. ""There are going to be people who are yelling and screaming for more gun laws and people who are going to be yelling and screaming for less, and unfortunately, probably nothing is going to happen, which I think frustrates both sides.""
+
+On Friday, it was business as usual at Harris' gun shop. A customer walked in the door, hoping to buy a handgun. Harris began the legal steps of selling a gun in California, asking the customer for identification, proof of residency and his Firearm Safety Certificate. Now, he'll have to submit to a background check.
+
+In 10 days, he can pick up his gun.
+
+The process of purchasing a gun in California
+
+•Obtain a Firearm Safety Certificate by passing a knowledge test. The test, made up of 30 true-false and multiple-choice questions, is drawn from a 46-page study guide available online. Copies of the test are available in English and Spanish.
+
+•Present the Firearm Safety Certificate, a California ID or driver's license and a utility bill or car registration with your current address to a licensed firearms dealer.
+
+•Choose your firearm. According to the California Department of Justice, there are currently 822 handgun models approved for sale in the state. Long guns are subject to individual regulations rather than a pre-approved list.
+
+•Get a handling demonstration from the seller, including how to load, unload and lock the gun. The seller and buyer must both sign an affidavit saying the demonstration occurred.
+
+•Pay for the gun and keep your receipt.
+
+•Return in 10 days to pick up the gun, provided you passed the background check.
+
+•At this time, buy a gun lock or show a receipt to show that you bought one in the last 30 days.",REAL
+8745,World’s Life Expectancy Cut By 4 Billion Years,"0 Add Comment 
+THE WORLD’s leading scientists have hastily revised Earth’s life expectancy after taking on board new data which has just come to light in the last 24 hours. 
+Huge, cataclysmic tremors felt on North America faultlines have led scientists from leading institutions to report that the planet, once estimated to live on for some 4 billion years in one form or another, may not live as long as once predicted. 
+“We are compelled to alter our projections for Earth’s life expectancy dramatically,” explained lead researcher at the Institute of Studies, Professor Thalia Ambrosio. 
+“While Earth’s vital signs initially looked normal enough, we’re now looking at 4 years tops,” Prof. Ambrosio added. “We’re raising the end of the world alert level from red to a tanned, leathery orange”. 
+This startling news has had a profound effect on the Earth’s population, with many asking what they can do to prolong the life of the planet. 
+However, scientists were quick to point out that the cut in life expectancy is not something that is likely to change. 
+“We know people are keen to help, but honestly, some people are under the impression moving to Canada will somehow help the planet which we must point out doesn’t really do anything,” Prof. Ambrosio concluded. 
+The group of scientists confirmed they could go into specific details about just how the world will come to an end in the coming years, but will resist doing so because ‘you look worried enough as it is’.",FAKE
+8173,PAY TO PLAY : Hillary’s Two Big Favors For Morocco Netted Her $28 Million – TruthFeed,"PAY TO PLAY : Hillary’s Two Big Favors For Morocco Netted Her $28 Million PAY TO PLAY : Hillary’s Two Big Favors For Morocco Netted Her $28 Million Breaking News By TruthFeedNews October 31, 2016 
+By Richard Pollock – DailyCaller 
+Hillary Clinton did two huge favors for Morocco during her tenure as secretary of state while the Clinton Foundation accepted up to $28 million in donations from the country’s ruler, King Mohammed VI, according to new information obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group. 
+Clinton and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Lisa Jackson tried to shut down the Florida-based Mosaic Company in 2011, operator of America’s largest phosphate mining facility. 
+Jackson’s close ties and loyalty to the Clintons were revealed when she joined the Clinton Foundation’s board of directors in 2013, just months after she left the EPA. Jackson is also close to John Podesta , Clinton’s national campaign chairman. 
+Morocco’s state-owned phosphate company, OCP, would ostensibly have benefited from Jackson’s move to shut down Mosaic. Mohammed donated up to $15 million to the Clinton Foundation through OCP. 
+Clinton also relaxed U.S. foreign aid restrictions on Morocco, thus allowing U.S. funds to be used in the territory of Western Sahara where OCP operates phosphate mining operations. The aid restrictions stemmed from Morocco’s illegal occupation of the territory since 1974. 
+Morocco is repeatedly condemned for seizing the territory and for unilaterally extracting the country’s valuable minerals, impoverishing what’s left of the local Sahrawi Arabs. 
+No nation recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara and the United Nation’s Security Council legal office and the International Court of Justice both demand that Muhammed withdraw his claim over the territory and end illegal extraction of minerals. 
+An email WikiLeaks made public last week illustrated how Clinton, while acting as secretary of state, negotiated an additional $12 million donation to the Clinton Foundation from Muhammed in return for holding the 2015 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting in Marrakech, Morocco. Another $1 million payment came from OCP to cover the expenses of the CGI meeting. 
+The regulatory assault against the U.S. phosphate industry began in earnest when Jackson launched a barrage of intimidating regulatory initiatives against Mosaic. Environmental concerns about phosphates date from 1979 but the EPA did little to address concerns related to phosphate mining until Jackson’s 2011 moves. 
+The regulatory assault on the U.S. phosphate industry encompassed several agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS aircraft flew at low altitudes over Mosaic’s central Florida operations in search of environmental problems. The EPA also threatened large Superfund penalties, which could have bankrupted Mosaic. 
+Phosphates are essential ingredients in fertilizers used in American farming. Closing or reducing Mosaic’s output would have cost tens of thousands of American jobs and injured the country’s agricultural productivity. 
+It also would leave the U.S. dependent upon foreign phosphate producers, but particularly Morocco’s OCP. The only other countries that mine phosphates are Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. 
+Rep. Dennis Ross, a Republican congressman who represents the Florida district where Mosaic operates, told TheDCNF he now sees why the EPA went after Mosaic. 
+“The tactics makes perfect sense as to why the EPA, under Lisa Jackson’s tutelage, targeted Mosaic’s phosphate operations in my district. I was never given any answers when I questioned Lisa Jackson about the EPA’s deliberate actions against Mosaic,” Ross told TheDCNF. 
+“Now I know why. An environmental concern never existed. This targeting was all done as a payback to Morocco for donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation,” Ross said. 
+An uproar from Florida regulators push-back from the state’s congressional delegation and the agency’s tenuous legal position all forced the EPA to end its threats against Mosaic. 
+Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican who is vice-chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and a vocal critic of the Clinton Foundation, agreed with Ross, saying “these facts seem to reveal the possibility of more pay-to-play activities at the Clinton Foundation.” 
+“It would be especially troubling if the Clinton Foundation was working with the EPA to suppress the American phosphate industry in favor of Morocco. The EPA and Clinton Foundation should be forthcoming about their dealings with the Moroccan government and the American phosphate industry.” 
+Clinton’s 2012 support of a rider on the U.S. foreign aid bill permitting foreign aid to be sent to the Western Sahara arguably legitimized Moroccan occupation of territory and depopulated the Sahrawi Arabs. Native Moroccans were sent into the country by the government to extract the minerals. 
+The rider approved by Clinton said that U.S. foreign aid funds “may be used in regions and territories administered by Morocco,” meaning, the Western Sahara. The Western Sahara is classified a “Non-Self-Governing Territory” under international law. 
+“Previously, United States excluded Western Sahara from bilateral assistance to avoid seeming to endorse Moroccan control,” said Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, in a legal review of occupied territories around the world. 
+Hans Corell, the U.N. Security Council’s Under-Secretary for Legal Affairs, said in January 2002 that “if further exploration and exploitation activities were to proceed in disregard of the interests and wishes of the people of Western Sahara, they would be in violation of the international law principles applicable to mineral resource activities in Non-Self-Governing Territories.” 
+A Dec. 10, 2015 report by the International Court of Justice ruled that “the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Morocco over Western Sahara is not recognized by the European Union or its Member States, or more generally by the UN, and the absence of any international mandate capable of justifying Moroccan presence on that territory.” 
+But none of that mattered to former President Bill Clinton, who said nothing about the world’s condemnation of Morocco’s exploitation of the area for its phosphate industry, while speaking at the Clinton Foundation’s 2015 Marrakech CGI conference. Instead, he praised it. 
+“The Moroccans who are here will tell you that in the last several years, they have become the Saudi Arabia of phosphates, and what they have done with it, to diversify their economy and to make it part of a comprehensive strategy instead of another example of resource curse, is very impressive indeed,” Clinton said. 
+“Hillary Clinton sold her soul when they accepted that money,” reported Politico the day after the Marrakech CGI conference. 
+H/T – DailyCaller 
+Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+7465,Vermont deer attempt to flee to Canada after election results roll in.,"Debate a draw at minus 6 on a ten point scale Wide-ranging response to presidential debate 2 has now settled down to a tie, with a rating of minus 6 on a ten point scale for each candidate. A 1 on a ten point scale would be much lower than a 9. A 9 would indicate ""very good"" or ""excellent.""... The President in the locker room Spoof Investigations has just been handed a video related to a certain candidate for president in the 2016 election. It shows him in his own locker room at Trump Tower being interviewed by a radio show host with first name Billy. This new inter... Obama Replaces John Kerry with Jack Reacher as the New Secretary of State Trying to secure his legacy, especially when it comes to foreign policy, President Barack Obama replaced reigning Secretary of State, John Kerry, with Jack Reacher. Obama wanted to leave the White House remembered as a tough guy who could handle the... Kirk lands killer blow on Trumphole™ with 'Rope a Dope' Weapon™ The Earth Defense League has landed a killer blow on the Trumphole™ Fleet using a variation of Mohamed Alis 'Rope a Dope' strategy and has developed a 'Give the Psychopath Enough Rope to Hang Himself' Gun™ The Earth Defense League hea... Trump's Minority Outreach Met With Deafening Silence Faced with faltering poll numbers, Donald Trump and his advisors are taking a shot at tapping the African American vote, which normally goes Democratic 9 to 1. His recent outreach, however, might be doing more harm than good. Trying to piggyba...",FAKE
+8761,Trump Will Be President – How Alt-Market Predicted The Outcome Five Months In Advance,"This article was originally published by Brandon Smith of Alt-Market.com and first appeared at Personal Liberty 
+
+Taking a hard-line position on the outcome of any world changing event is not an easy thing to do, especially when your position is contrary to about 99% of your peers. The chorus of voices telling you that you are wrong (or crazy) is enough to drive most people to simply parrot the majority view and avoid the incessant browbeating. The alternative media and the liberty movement suffer from this problem almost as much as the so-called mainstream does.
+That said, you do what you have to do when you see a subversive play unfolding in the geopolitical game that the elites are playing.
+During the first half of 2016, I made the “wild” prediction that the Brexit referendum vote would in fact be successful. Only a couple of other analysts in the world made the same prediction, but did so months beforehand and never reiterated their prediction again. I based my prediction, which I stood by to the very day of the vote, on the behavior and rhetoric I had observed among the global banking elites prior to the Brexit. The elites had adopted a steady narrative; the claim that “populists” (conservatives) were about to rise in political power, and that this would lead to the collapse of the financial world.
+My theory – elites and globalists were about to open the door for conservatives to take control of a ship that was already sinking. And, once our financial ship sunk, they would blame conservative movements for the collapse that the ELITES had originally created. In other words, conservatives are being set up as scapegoats for a global fiscal crisis that has been decades in the making.
+In my post-Brexit analysis article titled ‘Brexit Aftermath – Here’s What Happens Next’ , published in June, I stated:
+“In light of the Brexit I’m going to have to call it here and now and predict that the most likely scenario for elections will be a Trump presidency. Trump has consistently warned of a recession during his campaign and with the Brexit dragging markets lower over the next few months, he will probably be proven “prophetic.” 
+….Even if Trump is a legitimate anti-establishment conservative, his entry into the Oval Office will seal the deal on the economic collapse, and will serve the globalists well. The international banks need only pull the plug on any remaining life support to the existing market system and allow it to fully implode, all while blaming Trump and his conservative supporters. 
+The mainstream media has been consistently comparing Trump supporters to Brexit supporters, and Trump himself has hitched his political wagon to the Brexit. This fits perfectly with the globalist narrative that populists and conservatives are killing the global economy and placing everyone at risk.” 
+In my article ‘2016 Will End With Economic Instability And A Trump Presidency’ I stated:
+“I am consistently reminded of the Brexit surprise when I look today at the polling numbers on the U.S. election. The erratic and inconsistent polling shows Trump climbing, then suddenly sinking days later, then climbing again without any clear catalysts. Many polls contradict each other, just as the polls did before the Brexit, and, the same kind of circus atmosphere is present, if not more prevalent. 
+It may be possible, if not certain, that this is all a game. The Brexit outcome was predetermined, which is how elites like George Soros scored successful investment bets on the referendum passing, and the reason why the Bank for International Settlements gathered central bankers from around the world as the vote was taking place. 
+I believe that the U.S. presidential election has also been predetermined; with a Trump win.” 
+In my most recent article ‘Why The U.S. Presidential Election Has The Entire World Confused’ I stated:
+“U.S. elections are indeed controlled, and have been for decades, primarily through the false left/right paradigm. However, as I have been pointing out since I correctly predicted the success of the Brexit referendum, I don’t think that Clinton is the choice of the elites.” 
+“To be clear, my position is that Trump is slated to take the White House and that this is by design. This has been my position since before Trump won the Republican Primaries, it was my position when the election cycle began, it has never changed, nor have my views on the reasons for this outcome ever changed…” 
+I have to say, I received more attacks on my Trump call than I did my Brexit call. The vast consensus was that a Hillary Clinton win was inevitable. It would seem that my position has once again been vindicated (and yes, I am congratulating myself).
+The bottom line is, Trump is on the way to the White House because the elites WANT HIM THERE. Now, many liberty proponents, currently in a state of elation, will either ignore or dismiss the primary reason why I was able to predict the Brexit and a Trump win. These will probably be some of the same people that were arguing with me only weeks ago that the elites would NEVER allow Trump in office.
+So, to clarify: 
+Trump may or may not be aware that he and his conservative followers have been positioned into a a trap. We will have to wait and see how he behaves in office (and he WILL be in office, despite the claims of some that the elites will try to “stop him” before January). My primary point is THAT IT DOES NOT MATTER, at least not at this stage. The elites will initiate a final collapse of the global economy under Trump’s watch (this will probably escalate over the course of the next six months), and they WILL blame him and conservatives in general. This IS going to happen. The elites play the long game, and so must we.
+While millions of Americans are celebrating Trump’s win today, I will remain even more vigilant. The party is just getting started, folks. Don’t get too comfortable.
+Stay tuned for my next article, in which I will predict the likely trends and changes that will take place through December into 2017. In the meantime, please continue to support Alt-Market so that I can keep bringing accurate analysis and predictions to the Liberty Movement.
+Regards, 
+Brandon Smith, Founder of Alt-Market.com 
+If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here . We greatly appreciate your patronage. You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com ",FAKE
+8064,Hillary Is DONE After Blunt Cowboy Makes Shocking Announcement On Live TV,"Hillary Is DONE After Blunt Cowboy Makes Shocking Announcement On Live TV Posted on October 27, 2016 by Amanda Shea in Politics Share This Fox News Host (left), Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller (right) 
+Lies and cover-ups don’t sit well with Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller who took advantage of his live interview to make a shocking announcement. After exposing Hillary Clinton and leaving the reporter speechless, it’s safe to say that it’s over for the lying Democratic candidate. 
+Miller went on Fox News on Wednesday to discuss what he was witness to in his state that Hillary definitely didn’t want to get out. With election day just around the corner, when a crucial decision falls into the hands of Americans who will determine the course to the country for the next four years, the proud cowboy didn’t hold back. He delivered a stunning statement that not only put Hillary in her place, it shut her down completely. 
+This election has been unlike any other in history and apparently so has the early voter turnout, namely in the Lone Star State. It’s not even voting day yet, but patriotic Texans have already turned out in record-breaking droves to be sure to get their ballot in early, with an overwhelming number voting for Donald Trump. The attendance at his rallies seems to have translated to the polls, but Miller also revealed something else in his statement that needs to be known. 
+“We have a record number of people registered to vote in Texas. We’re having record turnouts, the first day, the second day of voting. And it’s not Bernie Sanders supporters coming out to support Hillary. It’s not Barack Obama supporters coming out to support Hillary,” he first announced before making the next stunning statement. “ It’s a new surge of Trump voters, many who have never registered to vote. Many who have not voted in eight or ten elections so they’re not reported in the polls …” YUGE RECORD BREAKING VOTES in TEXAS!!! & Its Not Bernie Fans or Obama Voters for Hillary Clinton!! ALLL Donald Trump Folks😃 #wednesdaywisdom pic.twitter.com/Sn79fMhwXG 
+— DEPLORABLE TRUMPCAT (@Darren32895836) October 26, 2016 
+Trump has awoken the American spirit in all of us, including those with no previous interest in politics or voting who now feel called to action by his energy and the need for that in our leadership. Hillary has tried her hardest to convince the public that the race is over before it’s even ended by claiming the win and painting Trump as inept. She’s employed tactics of oversampling Democrats to skew the poll results and “prove” her point, but the reality is revealed in the record we’re seeing set already in Texas — which is likely just the start. 
+The only emotion Hillary has stirred in the majority of citizens is divisiveness and hate, while her counterpart has done something she is not and will never be capable of. Single-handedly, Trump brought back what Americans have been desperate for over the last eight years of lame duck leadership from Barack Obama. We want someone who proves that he loves his country, is ready to enact real change that everyone can see and not just be lied to about, a man who keeps his promises, loves the God that our country was built on, and will do whatever it takes to honor our rights and defeat our enemies.",FAKE
+7930,US Government Acknowledges That al-Qaeda Is Not A Priority In Syria,"By Darius Shahtahmasebi at theantimedia.org
+Last week, the U.S. State Department acknowledged that al-Qaeda-linked terror group Jabhat al-Nusra is not a “priority” for the United States’ efforts in Syria.
+One might ask, then: if al-Qaeda in Syria is not a priority for the war on terror, what is?
+State Department spokesman John Kirby provided some useful insight into this dilemma, stating:
+“The only thing that stands between where we are now and a permanent and enduring ceasefire in Syria is Bashar al-Assad and his supporters . We recognize Al-Nusra as a spoiler, we have concerns about co-mingling, I’ve talked about this ad nauseam.”",FAKE
+2110,Climate change crusade goes local,"While US leaders remain bogged down in debate over global warming, local communities are acting on their own to hold back rising seas. Witness Miami Beach's elevated streets.
+
+Florida’s state leaders are running hard from climate change. The governor, Rick Scott, doesn’t want state employees to even utter the words. Former Gov. Jeb Bush and US Sen. Marco Rubio, both Republican presidential aspirants, offer a medley of objections to scientists’ calls for bold action on climate change.
+
+Eric Carpenter shrugs. The director of Miami Beach’s Public Works Department sits at his desk, poring over tables of high tides on his computer. He is calculating how many pumps he needs to buy to keep the city’s streets from being flooded from a rising sea caused by climate change.
+
+Under a broiling sun, he takes a visitor a few blocks from his office, to where contractors are pouring concrete to replace a section of a city street. The new roadway is being laid incongruously 2-1/2 feet above the sidewalk cafe tables and storefront entrances at the old street level. The extra height is in preparation for the seas and tides that Mr. Carpenter already sees engulfing this section of Miami Beach.
+
+“The facts are the facts, and we have to deal with them,” he says.
+
+In city after city in South Florida, local officials are dealing with climate change. So, too, are municipalities big and small across the United States. The same determination is evident among governors and legislators in more than two dozen states. And it is magnified worldwide: Surprising progress in grappling with global warming is coming from surprising nations.
+
+This groundswell of action on climate change is producing solutions and often bypassing lagging political leadership. The gathering force of these acts, significant and subtle, is transforming what once seemed a hopeless situation into one in which success can at least be imagined. The initiatives are not enough to halt the world’s plunge toward more global warming – yet. But they do point toward a turning point in greenhouse gas emissions, and ambitious – if still uneven – efforts to adapt to the changes already in motion.
+
+“The troops on the ground, the local officials and stakeholders, are acting, even in the face of a total lack of support on the top level,” says Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pa. “The impacts of climate change are pretty bad and projected to get much worse if we continue business as usual. But there still is time to avert what we might reasonably describe as a true catastrophe. There are some signs we are starting to turn the corner.”
+
+Philip Levine, the mayor of Miami Beach, agrees. “We may not have all the answers,” he says. “But we’re going to show that Miami Beach is not going to sit back and go underwater.”
+
+Representatives from more than 190 countries will gather in Paris in December to try to agree on international strategies for dealing with climate change. They will be spurred by their own alarm at a succession of storms, droughts, and heat waves affecting millions of people on the planet, and by outside calls, such as the moral edict from Pope Francis, to care more about the world.
+
+The record of past such meetings is not encouraging. But the representatives will arrive as progress on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, often overlooked, has been mounting:
+
+•Wind and solar power generation are bounding ahead faster than the most optimistic predictions, with a fivefold increase worldwide since 2004. More than 1 in 5 buildings in countries such as Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and even Albania are now powered by renewable energy.
+
+•The US saw its greenhouse gas emissions peak in 2007. They have fallen about 10 percent since, and are roughly on course to meet President Obama’s pledge to reduce emissions in the next 10 years by about 27 percent from their peak.
+
+•China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, paradoxically leads the world in installed wind and solar power, and is charging ahead on renewables. China and the US ended their impasse over who is most responsible to fix global warming, agreeing in November to mutually ambitious goals. Experts say China already has cut coal consumption by 8 percent this year, and the environmental group Greenpeace says China stopped construction of some new coal power plants.
+
+•Worldwide, carbon dioxide emissions, a principal component of greenhouse gases, did not grow in 2014, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions remained flat even as the global economy grew – an important milestone.
+
+•Coal-fired power plants are being replaced rapidly by natural gas plants, which are cleaner and emit half the greenhouse gases. Britain saw an 8 percent drop in greenhouse gas emissions last year, which is attributed to national energy policies, more energy efficiency, and the switch from coal.
+
+•Tropical rainforests, which absorb carbon dioxide, are being cut down at a slower rate than in the past – 13 million hectares per year, compared with 16 million in the 1990s, according to the latest figures from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. That is still alarmingly high but shows progress, in part because of vows by big corporations not to buy palm oil grown on deforested lands. Brazil has made notable progress in reducing deforestation of the Amazon.
+
+In the US, state and local governments are taking bold action even as the national discussion about the looming climate crisis remains paralyzed along political lines. In South Florida, for example, officials of four populous counties shun the rhetoric from GOP presidential aspirants and officials in the state capital and gather regularly to plot cooperative climate change strategy.
+
+That group, the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, is considered a national model for the kind of shoulder-to-shoulder effort needed to address the problem. They came up with an agreed estimate of sea level rise and identified the most vulnerable areas of the region, and now are plowing through more than 100 recommendations for action.
+
+“There are no new funding sources coming down from the state or the Feds,” says Susanne Torriente, assistant city manager for Fort Lauderdale, one of the participants of the compact. “Would it be good to have state and federal dollars? Yes. Are we going to wait until they act? No.”
+
+Their cooperation was born, essentially, on the back of a napkin. Kristin Jacobs, now a state representative who was a Broward County commissioner in 2008, was lamenting at the time that the 27 disparate municipal water authorities in the region could not agree on joint action. So she and others came up with the idea of getting local officials together in a classroom.
+
+“We said, ‘Let’s have an academy,’ ” she recalls, and the Broward Leaders Water Academy began offering elected officials in South Florida six-month courses in water hydraulics and policy. It has now graduated “three generations of elected officials,” she says.
+
+Figuring out what to do about climate change – whether it is building up dunes on the beaches, raising the height of foundations, or shifting developments back from the coastline – takes a cooperative approach. “We couldn’t do it by just saying ‘this is the way it is’ – the Moses approach,” Ms. Jacobs says. “We had to do it with compliance and acquiescence and leadership.”
+
+Normally, direction on some of these issues might have come from state officials. But not in Florida. Not on climate change.
+
+“We didn’t have to worry about those who don’t believe,” Jacobs says. “At the end of the day, when the water is overtopping your sea wall, you don’t really care that you didn’t believe in climate change last week. You do believe in it this week.”
+
+Built on the edge of the sea, Miami Beach is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to the vicissitudes of the ocean. Its boutique commercial district and canyons of pastel apartments sit on a sieve of porous limestone. The leaky footing was formed over the eons from accumulated seashells, coral, and fish skeletons.
+
+Today the rock acts as a giant wick, giving the relentless ocean a route for subterranean attack. Seawater pushes in from underground and often gurgles to the surface in inconvenient places. On days of really high tides – even without any rain – the briny invasion turns some city streets into small lakes, snarling traffic and cutting off businesses. Locals call it “sunny day flooding.”
+
+The man charged with stopping the sea – or at least getting tourists and residents out of its way – is Carpenter, an affable engineer with a burly physique. Carpenter took over the city’s Public Works Department two years ago. His recurring nightmare is of rising seas, frequent storms, and “king” tides sweeping through Miami Beach – and doing it in full view of the world. He knows that whatever the city does – or does not do – to prepare for climate change will be tested soon on a stage before a global audience.
+
+“What we do here is magnified because of who we are,” he says. Miami Beach thrives on a global reputation for glamour, for cultural fusion, for beaches, for heat – from the sun in the day and its epicurean club culture at night. That’s not an image that sits well with flooded streets. But the water is already coming.
+
+As the Atlantic Ocean warms and expands, fed by melting polar ice caps, the seawater is pushing back into the 330 storm-water pipe outlets designed to drain rain from city streets. So Miami Beach is in the process of installing as many as 80 pumps, at a cost of nearly $400 million, to make sure the water flows outward.
+
+“If the seas are continuing to rise, and the tidal events are higher than the inland elevation, we have to pump,” says Carpenter.
+
+The city plans to raise the level of 30 percent of its streets, encouraging businesses to abandon or remodel their first floors to go to a higher level. Carpenter says he wanted to go up nearly six feet, but town officials said “we are going too fast.” So they settled on just over three feet.
+
+“I don’t think this is where we want to be long-term, but it’s enough to get us through the next 10 or 20 years,” he says, while standing on a new section of road at Sunset Harbor, looking down at the cafe tables on the sidewalk below, where the street used to be.
+
+Mayor Levine echoes the importance of dealing with the future encroachment of the sea – now. “We did not ask for climate change or sea level rise,” he says. “But we are the tip of the spear. We don’t debate the reason why; we just come up with solutions.”
+
+Forty miles to the north, past Fort Lauderdale, Randy Brown and his utilities staff in Pompano Beach are also trying to halt the sea. Like the rest of South Florida, the coastal city of 100,000 residents is confronting the ocean above and below ground.
+
+They are burying a new network of water pipes – painted grape purple – running to businesses and homes. The pipes contain sewer water that has been treated to remove the smell and bacteria and then siphoned from a pipe that used to discharge it into the sea.
+
+Pompano Beach residents use the water for their lawns and gardens, bypassing the restrictive bans on lawn sprinkling. This recycled water then trickles down into the Biscayne Aquifer.
+
+Cleansed as it sifts through the ground, it helps reduce the shrinking of the freshwater aquifer, which is being drawn down by the town’s 26 wells and is threatened by underground salt water pushed inland by the rising sea level. Homeowners pay about two-thirds less for the recycled water than they do for potable water.
+
+When city officials first laid out the program at a public meeting, bringing a cake to set a neighborly tone, “it was a fiasco. [Residents] called it dangerous,” chuckles Maria Loucraft, a utilities manager.
+
+Now, people “say they can’t wait for it to get to their area,” adds Isabella Slagle, who goes to public events with a mascot, a purple-colored sprinkler head with sunglasses, named “Squirt” by elementary school students.
+
+Green lawns trump the political arguments over climate change, says Mr. Brown. “We don’t say ‘climate change,’ ” he admits. “It’s ‘protecting resources’ or ‘sustainability.’ That way, you can duck under the political radar.”
+
+Some don’t want to avoid the radar. Last October, the South Miami City Commission voted to create “South Florida” and secede from the rest of the state, in part because, they said, the state government in Tallahassee was not responding to their pleas to help them deal with climate change.
+
+“It got a lot of press but nobody in the state took it very seriously,” muses the mayor, Philip Stoddard, over a sandwich on the campus of Florida International University, where he is a biology professor. “But it did get people talking about climate change.”
+
+“My house is at 10 feet elevation,” he adds. “My wife and I – our question is – will we be able to live out our lives in our house? I’m 58. We don’t know. It’s going to be a close one. If you look at the official sea level projections, they keep going up, which is a little disquieting. If you look at the unofficial projections, they scare the hell out of you.”
+
+While South Florida is a leader at local cooperation, officials in towns and cities across the country are struggling to react to a warming climate. Many municipalities have drafted action plans. Boston is converting its taxis to hybrids and requires new buildings to be built with higher foundations. Chicago is planting green gardens on city roofs to reduce the air conditioning needed to cool buildings. Seattle is helping residents install solar panels. Montpelier, Vt., vows to eliminate all fossil fuel use by 2030. Houston is laying down “cool pavements” made of reflective and porous material, and planting trees for shade.
+
+Governors and state legislators across the country have gotten the message, too. While Congress will not debate the “Big Fix” – putting a price or a cap on carbon pollution – some states are already doing it. About 30 percent of Americans live in states that have rules capping carbon dioxide emissions and markets that allow companies to buy and sell carbon credits.
+
+In addition, 28 states have set mandatory quotas for renewable energy from their electric utilities. Seven states have set ambitious targets for overall greenhouse gas reductions – California has promised a reduction of 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
+
+“The best thing Congress can do right now is stay out of the way,” says Anna Aurilio, director of the Washington office of the nonprofit advocacy group Environment America. Between the state efforts and the executive orders by Mr. Obama, she says, the US is on track to meet the administration’s greenhouse gas goals.
+
+“When we look at programs currently in place or set to be implemented, we can come close to the US commitment” of a 27 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years, she says. “But we know we have to go much, much further.”
+
+To get near the goal of keeping average global warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or less, climatologists predict that countries must largely abandon the fossil fuels that have driven technological societies since the Industrial Age – achieving an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
+
+That is an imposing goal, since billions of dollars are invested in new and existing fossil fuel power plants that can last 30 to 50 years. Even if solar or wind energy is cheaper than coal, oil, and natural gas, the owners of fossil fuel plants will be reluctant to abandon their investments. But the decisions are starting to come from the people, not just governments or corporations.
+
+“When you have enough action taking place at the grass roots, sometimes that’s a more effective means of implementing change on a large scale,” says Penn State’s Mr. Mann.
+
+Nicole Hammer is one of the foot soldiers in the new war on global warming. A biologist, consultant, and former assistant director of a university center on climate change, she quit and decided to work with nonprofit groups, including the Moms Clean Air Force, an organization that campaigns to stem air pollution and climate change.
+
+“I realized we have more than enough science to take action on climate change,” she says while walking at an ecology park near her home in Vero Beach, Fla. “People who normally wouldn’t be involved in environmental issues are starting to speak out.”
+
+She believes community involvement is the key to solutions, because the problems are felt most keenly at that level. “We have people in communities who have to put their kids in shopping carts to get across flooded streets to get food,” she says. “When you see that happening – and then you see people at high levels denying it – it’s disappointing and it’s incredibly frustrating.”
+
+Public outcry has helped close coal-burning power plants, which produce the dirtiest energy. Coal plants now provide about one-third of the electricity in the US – down from more than half in 1990. Tightening pollution standards and cheaper natural gas prices have prompted utilities to close 200 coal-fired plants since 2010, the Sierra Club estimates, and the trend would only accelerate under new clean air regulations unveiled by Obama in early August.
+
+Until recently, one argument against closing coal plants was that if the US didn’t burn its own abundant coal reserves, they would just be exported to China. But Chinese authorities are so sobered by their public’s resentment of the thick coal soot and industrial pollution that they are turning with startling speed to renewables. China reached a significant agreement with the US in November to cap its greenhouse gas pollutions by 2030, and further impressed experts in July by promising to ramp up renewables to provide 20 percent of its power, a sharp turn away from its pace of bringing a new coal power plant on line every 10 days.
+
+“China has become a policy innovator,” says Nathaniel Keohane, vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund, who worked on international climate issues in the Obama administration.
+
+Other countries are plotting their own ways to curb greenhouse gases. Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain are ramping up solar energy. France has embraced nuclear. Denmark, Portugal, and Nicaragua led in wind power in 2014. Brazil is adding hydroelectric plants as well as sharply reducing deforestation. Kenya and Turkey are tapping geothermal power. And smaller countries such as Costa Rica, Iceland, and Paraguay have found financial and tourism benefits in being at or very near “carbon neutral.”
+
+Still, the current projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on when the world will see a significant decline in global emissions vary widely – from about 2030 to after 2100 – based on guesses of how countries respond. But the dramatic shift to natural gas in the US, and the racehorse expansion of hydraulic fracturing to get it, are demonstrations that if new technologies are profitable, industries can pivot quickly.
+
+“We can make that turn,” Mr. Keohane predicts. “Imagine the day when emissions are falling instead of rising. Imagine when we are winning rather than losing.”",REAL
+5371,Trader Joe’s Fires Employee For Non-Genuine Smile - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Man Wearing ‘Jewmerica’ T-Shirt Never Dreamed He’d See This Day SAND SPRINGS, OK—Feeling a mixture of intense pride and abject disbelief after news networks called the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, local man Terry Williams, who is currently wearing a T-shirt adorned with the word “Jewmerica,” told reporters late Tuesday night that he never dreamed he’d see this day during his lifetime. Nation Throws Off Tyrannical Yoke Of Moderate Respect For Women WASHINGTON—Political experts are hailing Donald Trump’s historic presidential victory early Wednesday as a resounding declaration that the nation is finally ready to cast off the tyrannical yoke of moderate respect for women that has suffocated the citizens of this country for generations. ",FAKE
+7226,"Young Fellas Made Of Nothing These Days, Finds Scientific Study","We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] Young Fellas Made Of Nothing These Days, Finds Scientific Study November 10, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS , HEALTH Share 0 Add Comment 
+DOCTORS studying the make-up of young fellas have found that they are made of nothing these days, in contrast to the men of old. 
+The scientific study, carried out by a team of genetic experts at Trinity College Dublin, found that the majority of Irish males aged between 16-30 have grown a lot weaker physically and less resilient to cold temperatures over the past 60 years. Of 100 Irish males tested in physical work environments, 67% percent moaned about being tired and fatigued after just two minutes. 
+“We put the study group to work on a local farm picking spuds, weeding gardens and doing general old time shit,” lead researcher Professor Conor Tracey explains, “We even made them travel to work in their bare feet. The results we got back were absolutely appalling to tell you the truth. Only a small minority of the men got on with their chores without complaining”. 
+In fact, further testing found that 89% of those studied were ‘perishers’, a trait increasing in modern day males. 
+“Nearly every one of them began whinging about the cold during the picking stones in the frost task,” Dr. Tracey added, “They began complaining that their ikkle fingies were sore, and that they couldn’t feel their hands or feet from the cold. Poor pets. Several lads even tried to pretend they were sick in a bid to get out of the job, and one 18-year-old subject began crying for his mammy like a big baby, so he did”. 
+The study concluded that 92% of Irish men were found to be made of nothing these days, compared to the young fellas of years ago who used to walk to school in their bare feet, before then going to work in the mines for 18 hours a day.",FAKE
+4428,Deadly suicide blast in Istanbul tourist area is linked to the Islamic State,"A suicide bomber believed to be linked to the Islamic State struck the historic heart of Istanbul on Tuesday, killing at least 10 people in what would be the group’s first major attack on Turkey’s vital tourism industry.
+
+The bombing, which injured 15 others, took place in the shadow of the city’s famous nine-domed Blue Mosque, which draws visitors from around the world. Most of the victims were German nationals, Turkish officials said.
+
+The targeting of Turkey’s tourism trade puts the group on a more direct collision course with the Turkish state, which has been criticized for not doing enough to prevent militants from using the country as a crucial route for recruits, supplies and oil smuggling.
+
+But the militants appear increasingly desperate to strike overseas as they lose territory in Iraq and Syria.
+
+“This terror organization, the assailants and all of their connections will be found and they will receive the punishments they deserve,” said Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. He said the attacker was a member of the Islamic State, though the group has not asserted responsibility for the attack.
+
+The blast occurred just before 10:30 a.m. in the Sultanahmet district, an area that includes the 400-year-old Blue Mosque; Hagia Sophia, a former Byzantine-era basilica; and the lavish Ottoman Topkapi Palace.
+
+The attacker, identified by Turkish authorities as a 28-year-old of Syrian origin, mingled with a group of German tourists as they gathered near the Obelisk of Theodosius, an ancient Egyptian monolith brought to Istanbul — then known as Constantinople — in the 4th century.
+
+Turkish news outlets later identified the attacker as Nabil Fadli, adding that he had been born in Saudi Arabia.
+
+Eight of those killed were Germans, according to authorities. In addition, officials said that at least 15 people were injured in the explosion, including nine Germans and other foreigners — among them a Peruvian and a Norwegian.
+
+“Today Istanbul was hit. Paris has been hit. Tunisia has been hit. Ankara has been hit before,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in Berlin. “International terrorism is once again showing its cruel and inhuman face today.”
+
+The White House also condemned the “heinous attack,” which it said “struck Turks and foreign tourists alike.” In a statement Tuesday, National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said that the United States stands with NATO ally Turkey, a “valued member” of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, and pledges “our ongoing cooperation and support in the fight against terrorism” in the face of the Istanbul attack.
+
+[NATO-member Turkey on front lines of Western-Russian divide over Syria]
+
+Directly and indirectly, tourism makes up about 12 percent of Turkey’s gross domestic product, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, an international travel-industry organization, with the country welcoming about 40 million tourists a year.
+
+The vast plazas and surrounding streets of Sultanahmet, normally busy with merchants, vendors and visitors, were quiet late Tuesday, with many restaurants empty. The area immediately around the blast was cordoned off by police.
+
+Yahya Ibrahim, an imam from Perth, Australia, was visiting with his wife and three children when the blast hit.
+
+“We were just about to head into the mosque but then decided to have breakfast first,” he said. A “huge boom” reverberated through the streets, he said, which his 9-year-old daughter thought was thunder.
+
+Ibrahim said that the attack wouldn’t deter them from visiting again. “On a theological basis, it’s a perversion of Islam,” he said of the Islamic State’s ideology. “On a practical level, it’s murder.”
+
+[Pentagon pushes allies to help choke off Islamic State networks]
+
+The Islamic State probably has the capability to launch an extended terror campaign against Turkey, said Firas Abi Ali, a senior analyst at IHS, a global risk analysis firm.
+
+“Its territorial losses in Iraq and Syria may well have led the group to assess its needs to expand its influence and capability in Turkey,” he said. “If today’s attack was perpetrated by the Islamic State, it would reflect a shift in the group’s strategy and herald a broader campaign against Turkey.”
+
+However, such a move “will likely provoke a significant backlash by the Turkish government,” he said.
+
+Turkish forces have not directly intervened in the Syrian conflict, but Ankara has been under pressure from Western governments to crack down on the cross-border flow of people and supplies to Islamic State strongholds in Syria. Last summer, Turkey opened its Incirlik air base to U.S. warplanes carrying out airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria.
+
+Turkey is also a key backer of rebel groups opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and it has recently stepped up its ­decades-old fight against Kurdish separatists.
+
+In the past, Turkish groups have staged their own attacks in the country. A year ago, a Chechen woman believed to be linked to militant factions blew herself up outside a police post in Sultan­ahmet, killing one police officer.
+
+There were also two major suicide attacks on peace activists in the country’s southeast last year, killing more than 100 people. The government blamed the Islamic State for those explosions, but the militant group never asserted responsibility.
+
+Cunningham reported from Baghdad. Brian Murphy and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+128,"Yes, Black America fears the police. Here’s why.","Last July 4, my family and I went to Long Island to celebrate the holiday with a friend and her family. After eating some barbecue, a group of us decided to take a walk along the ocean. The mood on the beach that day was festive. Music from a nearby party pulsed through the haze of sizzling meat. Lovers strolled hand in hand. Giggling children chased each other along the boardwalk.
+
+Most of the foot traffic was heading in one direction, but then two teenage girls came toward us, moving stiffly against the flow, both of them looking nervously to their right. “He’s got a gun,” one of them said in a low voice.
+
+I turned my gaze to follow theirs, and was clasping my 4-year-old daughter’s hand when a young man extended his arm and fired off multiple shots along the busy street running parallel to the boardwalk. Snatching my daughter up into my arms, I joined the throng of screaming revelers running away from the gunfire and toward the water.
+
+The shots stopped as quickly as they had started. The man disappeared between some buildings. Chest heaving, hands shaking, I tried to calm my crying daughter, while my husband, friends and I all looked at one another in breathless disbelief. I turned to check on Hunter, a high school intern from Oregon who was staying with my family for a few weeks, but she was on the phone.
+
+“Someone was just shooting on the beach,” she said, between gulps of air, to the person on the line.
+
+Unable to imagine whom she would be calling at that moment, I asked her, somewhat indignantly, if she couldn’t have waited until we got to safety before calling her mom.
+
+“No,” she said. “I am talking to the police.”
+
+My friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults, we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had thought to call the police. We had not even considered it.
+
+We also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us had made a set of calculations, an instantaneous weighing of the pros and cons.
+
+As far as we could tell, no one had been hurt. The shooter was long gone, and we had seen the back of him for only a second or two. On the other hand, calling the police posed considerable risks. It carried the very real possibility of inviting disrespect, even physical harm. We had seen witnesses treated like suspects, and knew how quickly black people calling the police for help could wind up cuffed in the back of a squad car. Some of us knew of black professionals who’d had guns drawn on them for no reason.
+
+This was before Michael Brown. Before police killed John Crawford III for carrying a BB gun in a Wal-Mart or shot down 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park. Before Akai Gurley was killed by an officer while walking in a dark staircase and before Eric Garner was choked to death upon suspicion of selling “loosies.” Without yet knowing those names, we all could go down a list of unarmed black people killed by law enforcement.
+
+We feared what could happen if police came rushing into a group of people who, by virtue of our skin color, might be mistaken for suspects.
+
+For those of you reading this who may not be black, or perhaps Latino, this is my chance to tell you that a substantial portion of your fellow citizens in the United States of America have little expectation of being treated fairly by the law or receiving justice. It’s possible this will come as a surprise to you. But to a very real extent, you have grown up in a different country than I have.
+
+As Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness, puts it, “White people, by and large, do not know what it is like to be occupied by a police force. They don’t understand it because it is not the type of policing they experience. Because they are treated like individuals, they believe that if ‘I am not breaking the law, I will never be abused.’”
+
+We are not criminals because we are black. Nor are we somehow the only people in America who don’t want to live in safe neighborhoods. Yet many of us cannot fundamentally trust the people who are charged with keeping us and our communities safe.
+
+As protest and revolt swept across the Missouri suburb of Ferguson and demonstrators staged die-ins and blocked highways and boulevards from Oakland to New York with chants of “Black lives matter,” many white Americans seemed shocked by the gaping divide between law enforcement and the black communities they are supposed to serve. It was no surprise to us. For black Americans, policing is “the most enduring aspect of the struggle for civil rights,” says Muhammad, a historian and director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. “It has always been the mechanism for racial surveillance and control.”
+
+In the South, police once did the dirty work of enforcing the racial caste system. The Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement were often indistinguishable. Black-and-white photographs of the era memorialize the way Southern police sicced German shepherds on civil rights protesters and peeled the skin off black children with the force of water hoses. Lawmen were also involved or implicated in untold numbers of beatings, killings and disappearances of black Southerners who forgot their place.
+
+In the North, police worked to protect white spaces by containing and controlling the rising black population that had been propelled into the industrial belt during the Great Migration. It was not unusual for Northern police to join white mobs as they attacked black homeowners attempting to move into white neighborhoods, or black workers trying to take jobs reserved for white laborers. And yet they strictly enforced vagrancy laws, catch-alls that gave them wide discretion to stop, question and arrest black citizens at will.
+
+Much has changed since then. Much has not.
+
+
+
+Last Fourth of July, in a few short minutes as we adults watched the teenager among us talking to the police, we saw Hunter become a little more like us, her faith a little shaken, her place in the world a little less stable. Hunter, who is biracial and lives with her white mother in a heavily white area, had not been exposed to the policing many black Americans face. She was about to be.
+
+On the phone, she could offer only the most generic of suspect descriptions, which apparently made the officer on the other end of the line suspicious. By way of explanation, Hunter told the officer she was just 16. The police called her back: once, twice, then three times, asking her for more information. The interactions began to feel menacing. “I’m not from here,” Hunter said. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
+
+The fourth time the police called, she looked frightened. Her interrogator asked her, “Are you really trying to be helpful, or were you involved in this?” She turned to us, her voice aquiver. “Are they going to come get me?”
+
+“See,” one of us said, trying to lighten the mood. “That’s why we don’t call them.”
+
+We all laughed, but it was hollow.
+
+My friend Carla Murphy and I have talked about that day several times since then. We’ve turned it over in our minds and wondered whether, with the benefit of hindsight, we should have called 911.
+
+Carla wasn’t born in the United States. She came here when she was 9, and back in her native Barbados, she didn’t give police much thought. That changed when she moved into heavily black Jamaica, Queens.
+
+Carla said she constantly saw police, often white, stopping and harassing passersby, almost always black. “You see the cops all the time, but they do not speak to you. You see them talking to each other, but the only time you ever see them interact with someone is if they are jacking them up,” she said. “They are making a choice, and it says they don’t care about you, it tells you they are not here for your people or people who look like you.”",REAL
+1392,This is a dishonest campaign: 17 Hillary Clinton memes the media just won’t stop pushing — or factcheck,"This is becoming a straight-up rerun of the 1948 campaign against Henry Wallace. Except that Clinton is running well to the right of Truman and even, in some respects, Dewey. It seems as if Clinton is campaigning for the vote of my Grandpa Nat. There’s only one problem with this strategy: He’s been dead for nearly a quarter-century.
+
+As was true of McCarthyism, it’s not really Sanders’ communism or his socialism that has got today’s McCarthyites in the Democratic Party worried; it’s actually his liberalism. As this article in the Times makes clear:
+
+“Some third party will say, ‘This is what the first ad of the general election is going to look like,’” said James Carville, the longtime Clinton adviser, envisioning a commercial savaging Mr. Sanders for supporting tax increases and single-payer health care. “Once you get the nomination, they are not going to play nice.” A Sanders-led ticket generates two sets of fears among Clinton supporters: that other Democratic candidates could be linked to his staunchly liberal views, particularly his call to raise taxes, even on middle-class families, to help finance his universal health care plan; and that more mainstream Democrats would have to answer to voters uneasy about what it means to be a European-style social democrat.
+
+Raising taxes to pay for popular social programs: That used to be the bread and butter of the Democratic Party liberalism. Now it’s socialism. And that—now it’s socialism—used to be the bread and butter of Republican Party revanchism. Now it’s Democratic Party liberalism.
+
+The new line of argument against Sanders winning the nomination is that African American voters are Clinton’s “firewall,” which will engulf the Sanders campaign once it heads South.
+
+There have been God knows how many articles making this claim over the last two days, celebrating the Clintons’ deep and storied relations with the black community—how, whatever the Clintons’ policy positions (support for mass incarceration, welfare reform, etc.), both Hillary and Bill do the kind of retail and symbolic politics that black voters care most about. (I’ll note in passing but not comment on the patronizing condescension of this position). And that we’ll see all of this come into play after Iowa, when the campaign heads to South Carolina.
+
+It could be true.
+
+But first let’s go to the Wayback Machine and see how black leaders in South Carolina responded in 2008 the last time the Clintons worked their magic there:
+
+Speaking of Jim Clyburn and South Carolina, he was on NBC recently, talking about Clinton’s firewall in 2016. Start listening at 2:30, where he says that if Sanders wins by ten points in Iowa, that firewall could disappear very quickly. As it did in 2008.
+
+And lo and behold: According to a poll released last week, support for Clinton in South Carolina is plummeting. Back in December, Clinton had a 36-point lead over Sanders. As of last week, that lead has been cut nearly in half. Forty-seven percent of Democratic voters now favor Clinton; 28% favor Sanders. That’s still a lot of support for Clinton, but it’s considerably smaller than in December, when she had 67% of the vote.
+
+Now it’s true that Sanders hasn’t gotten those defectors from Clinton. What seems to have happened is that a significant chunk of her supporters are reconsidering their support (Sanders’s support is nearly what it was in December). Which could mean many things. One possibility is that voters are waiting to see what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire, where Sanders is doing well.
+
+But the most interesting part of the polls is the racial and gender breakdown of the vote: Clinton is losing a higher percentage of her black supporters than of her white supporters, and Sanders is making greater gains among women than among men.
+
+On December 17, this is how the polls looked (see the thirteenth page, which is labeled page six):
+
+On January 22 (the poll was actually concluded on the 15th), this is how the polls looked:
+
+Between December and January, we see major drops in support for Clinton among all categories of voters. But there’s a greater drop among black voters (30%) than among white voters (24% drop). There’s also a virtually identical drop among male (36%) and female (34%) voters.
+
+Sanders’s support among black voters remains practically the same as it was in December (he sees a tiny drop among white voters). But more interesting is that while he’s made gains among both male and female voters, the gains among women (28%) are much greater than among men (13%).
+
+Remember Sister Souljah? In 1992, Bill Clinton chose to go after her as a signal to white voters that he and the Democrats were no longer beholden to black voters. It was a signature moment not only for him but also for the Democratic Party: They weren’t going to be the party of quotas, welfare and black people. Which makes the claim that Sanders is bad—and Clinton is great—on race all the more galling. Have we forgotten everything? Well, there’s one figure in the United States today who hasn’t: Sister Souljah. Back in November, she spoke out against Clinton’s campaign. 4. A Little Nutty and a Little Slutty Speaking of forgetting everything: David Brock, the man who called Anita Hill “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” now says “black lives don’t matter much to Bernie Sanders.” Brock is described here as “a top Clinton ally” who “runs several super PACs aiding her candidacy.” Only in this country could such a charlatan make these sorts of claims and get away with it. As Sanders surges in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire—opening up an 8-point lead in Iowa and a 27-point lead in New Hampshire—and the pundits and party elites get squirmier and squirmier about his possible victory, I’m reminded of this line from Brecht: Would it not be easier
+
+ In that case for the government
+
+ To dissolve the people
+
+ And elect another?
+
+First they came for the Revolution because I was not a Revolution. Then they came for the Parliamentary Socialism because I was not a Parliamentary Socialism. Then they came for the Third Party because I was not a Third Party. Then they came for the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party because I was not a Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party. Then they came for the Green Lantern because I was not a Green Lantern.
+
+Speaking of German writers, in “The German Ideology,” Marx wrote, “In all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura.” I was reminded of that quote when I stumbled across this story from the summer. Back in July, while everyone was touting Clinton’s sensitivity and deftness (and Sanders’ insensitivity and tone-deafness) around issues of mass incarceration and Black Lives Matter, this little tidbit was reported in the Intercept. And completely ignored: Lobbyists for two major prison companies are serving as top fundraisers for Hillary Clinton….Richard Sullivan, of the lobbying firm Capitol Counsel, is a bundler for the Clinton campaign, bringing in $44,859 in contributions in a few short months. Sullivan is also a registered lobbyist for the Geo Group, a company that operates a number of jails, including immigrant detention centers, for profit. As we reported yesterday, fully five Clinton bundlers work for the lobbying and law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in America, paid Akin Gump $240,000 in lobbying fees last year. The firm also serves as a law firm for the prison giant, representing the company in court….The Geo Group, in a disclosure statement for its investors, notes that its business could be “adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws.” Apparently, the new rule of American politics is: So long as you say the right thing, you can do anything. Postscript: In October, Clinton was forced to stop working with these clowns from the prison industrial complex. And return all the money. Sanders never had to return a dime. Because he never took a dime. Sanders has gotten a lot of heat from the left for saying he’s against reparations. It’s a complicated issue, the substance of which I don’t want to comment on here. Instead I’ll just note that in 2008 another presidential candidate was asked about his position on reparations. Here’s what he had to say: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama opposes offering reparations to the descendants of slaves, putting him at odds with some black groups and leaders.The man with a serious chance to become the nation’s first black president argues that government should instead combat the legacy of slavery by improving schools, health care and the economy for all. “I have said in the past — and I’ll repeat again — that the best reparations we can provide are good schools in the inner city and jobs for people who are unemployed,” the Illinois Democrat said recently. “Let’s not be naive. Sen. Obama is running for president of the United States, and so he is in a constant battle to save his political life,” said Kibibi Tyehimba, co-chair of theNational Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. “In light of the demographics of this country, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect him to do anything other than what he’s done.” But this is not a position Obama adopted just for the presidential campaign. He voiced the same concerns about reparations during his successful run for the Senate in 2004. I pointed this out on Twitter to Killer Mike, the rapper who’s supporting Sanders. He retweeted me, which may be just about the biggest endorsement on Twitter I’ve ever gotten. Except for that time Morgan Fairchild retweeted me. And that time John Cusack retweeted me. But who’s counting? After Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood endorsed Clinton, Sanders said they were part of “the establishment.” Clinton and her supporters made a big to-do of it. But this response from Garance Franke-Ruta was the most sublime: Bernie remarks a reminder how left economics & new social movements—civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights—have always been uneasy allies
+
+No, not really.
+
+Back in 1985, that old dinosaur of a socialist Bernie Sanders was signing a Gay Pride Day Proclamation on the grounds that gay rights were civil rights.
+
+Back in the 1990s, while the Clintons were supporting DOMA and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” that old dinosaur of a socialist helped lead the opposition to both policies on the grounds that they were anti-gay.
+
+And throughout his career in the Senate, Sanders got consistently higher ratings from civil rights organizations than Clinton did while she was a senator.
+
+The only thing this whole episode is a reminder of is how poorly journalists do their job.
+
+Speaking of the establishment, Clinton is now claiming that it’s Sanders who’s the establishment, while she is, I don’t know what. Whatever she calls herself, I wonder what she calls this:
+
+You’ll be hearing a lot in the coming weeks about what a political savant Hillary Clinton is—and what a political naif Bernie Sanders is. You already have. On Sunday or Monday, I counted five such articles alone. Here’s some information to consider when you hear that kind of talk: Even though the Clinton team has sought to convey that it has built a national operation, the campaign has invested much of its resources in the Feb. 1 caucuses in Iowa, hoping that a victory there could marginalize Mr. Sanders and set Mrs. Clinton on the path to the nomination. As much as 90 percent of the campaign’s resources are now split between Iowa and the Brooklyn headquarters, according to an estimate provided by a person with direct knowledge of the spending. The campaign denied that figure. The campaign boasted last June, when Mrs. Clinton held her kickoff event on Roosevelt Island in New York, that it had at least one paid staff member in all 50 states. But the effort did not last, and the staff members were soon let go or reassigned….For all its institutional advantages, the Clinton campaign lags behind the Sanders operation in deploying paid staff members: For example, Mr. Sanders has campaign workers installed in all 11 of the states that vote on Super Tuesday. Mrs. Clinton does not. Even Bill Clinton is questioning the strategic wisdom of the Clinton campaign: Bill Clinton is getting nervous.With polls showing Bernie Sanders ahead in New Hampshire and barely behind, if at all, in Iowa, the former president is urging his wife to start looking toward the delegate-rich March primaries — a shift for an organizing strategy that’s been laser-focused on the early states. Bill Clinton, according to a source with firsthand knowledge of the situation, has been phoning campaign manager Robby Mook almost daily to express concerns about the campaign’s organization in the March voting states, which includes delegate bonanzas in Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Texas. Many Clinton allies share the president’s desire for more organization on the ground; they see enthusiasm that’s ready to be channeled, but no channel yet in place. “Iowa matters a ton, but it seems to be the campaign’s only focus,” said one person close to the campaign’s operations in a March state — one of nearly a dozen Clinton allies with whom POLITICO spoke for this article. “It’s going to be a long primary, and the campaign seems less prepared for it than they were in 2008.” 11. We Are All Socialists Now From the great state of Iowa: Little noticed in this week’s Des Moines Register-Bloomberg Politics Iowa poll was this finding: a remarkable 43 percent of likely Democratic caucus participants describe themselves as socialists, including 58 percent of Sanders’s supporters and about a third of Clinton’s. Senator Bernie Sanders’s speech on Thursday explaining his democratic socialist ideology carried little risk among supporters and other Democrats: A solid majority of them have a positive impression of socialism, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released this month. Fifty-six percent of those Democratic primary voters questioned said they felt positive about socialism as a governing philosophy, versus 29 percent who took a negative view. Another pundit trope is that Sanders is not popular among women. There is a gender gap in this primary, in fact, but it’s not only the one you may have heard about. According to the latest USA Today poll: There is a gender gap as well — and not the one that favors Clinton among baby boomer women. Men under 35 support Sanders by 4 percentage points. Women back him by almost 20 points. The possibility of breaking new ground by electing the first female president apparently carries less persuasive power among younger women than their mothers’ generation.Stone is ready to support Clinton, though she prefers Sanders. “He’s actually talking about breaking up the big banks and helping income inequality,” she says, “and given that I’m currently unemployed, income inequality is pretty important.” A fact that apparently has caught the Clinton campaign completely off-guard: Mrs. Clinton and her team say they always anticipated the race would tighten, with campaign manager Robby Mook telling colleagues last spring that Mr. Sanders would be tough competition. Yet they were not prepared for Mr. Sanders to become so popular with young people and independents, especially women, whom Mrs. Clinton views as a key part of her base. Chelsea Clinton, who lives in a Gramercy Park apartment that she and her husband bought three years ago for $10.5 million, says: I was curious if I could care about (money) on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t. Reminds me of that old joke: One fish asks another, “How’s the water?” The other replies, “What the hell is water?” 14. The Immense and Shitty Hassle of Everyday Life Under Capitalism… Arin Dube launched an interesting discussion on his Facebook page the other day. Riffing off of a bunch of Paul Krugman’s posts, which are fairly critical of Sanders’ healthcare plans, Arin wondered whether Sanders’ focus on single-payer, after all the drama and struggle over Obamacare and its achievements in terms of extended coverage, really makes political sense. There are excellent arguments on all sides, and Arin’s voice is always one that I listen to. But I posted this comment on his page because I have this nagging feeling that a lot of the discussion around healthcare and insurance in the media is missing a critical reality. I’m posting it less as a definitive statement and more as an opening to see if my own intuitions and experiences track with those of others. I recognize that I really could be an outlier here, so feel free to tell me that I am. I just find it hard to believe that my experience of this system is so completely sui generis. Anyway, here’s an edited version of what I said: Can I speak to this less from the policy or political perspective or more from the individual perspective, as a way of getting to the political perspective?My family has insurance: I get mine from CUNY and my wife and daughter get theirs from my wife’s employer. From what I can gather, we have decent insurance. Yet when I think about the mountains of time I have to spend dealing with health care and insurance—the submission of forms, the resubmission of forms, haggling with the insurance companies to make sure things that should be covered are covered (or simply to make sure that forms are being processed at all), getting the doctor to revise forms b/c the diagnostic or procedure codes may not be correct or may have changed (which they do with alarming frequency, it seems)—and the consistent surprises I experience about how much we still have to pay—after the deductibles, the premiums, the co-pays, the out-of-networks are accounted for—before we even get reimbursed, I can’t quite believe the statements that are out there about how there’s just not a constituency for further reform. Again, we have pretty good insurance. We are pretty healthy and don’t have out-of-the-ordinary needs. We are comparatively well off and highly educated. Yet there’s an inordinate hassle of time, and in the end a lot of costs we have to absorb ourselves (and a tremendous amount of confusion, despite my PhD, about how those costs get calculated and distributed), which I find maddening (and expensive!) Am I just that sui generis? Or is it that the academic and media discourse is so focused on a certain kind of aggregate data that it ignores that there are huge costs that are being shouldered by individuals—and that if there were political leadership that could really speak to those costs, there might be more of a constituency than we realize? What I take Sanders to be doing is making these individual costs a public or political problem; what I see mostly happening in the discussion is a shuffling off of those costs onto the individual so that they simply disappear from the political calculus. It’s a classic issue of politics: one side (a very small side, it seems) wants to make what is personal and individual into something public and political, while another side— including, it seems, a lot of reformers—tends to escort those personal and individual experiences off into the shadows. What I’m saying here doesn’t confront, I recognize, the reality of the institutional intransigence of those who are opposed to reform. That’s a separate issue. But when I hear that Obamacare has solved this problem for 90% of the population, and I think that my family is up there in the relatively well off sector of that population yet experiences significant costs and burdens that we find very hard to shoulder and understand—well, I just wonder if we’re really seeing this reality whole. I was building here on an old theme of mine: the immense and shitty hassle of everyday life that is life in contemporary capitalism. I wrote about that in Jacobin a few years ago. In the neoliberal utopia, all of us are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives….We saw a version of it during the debate on Obama’s healthcare plan. I distinctly remember, though now I can’t find it, one of those healthcare whiz kids — maybe it was Ezra Klein — tittering on about the nifty economics and cool visuals of Obama’s plan: how you could go to the web, check out the exchange, compare this little interstice of one plan with that little interstice of another, and how great it all was because it was just so fucking complicated. I thought to myself: you’re either very young or an academic. And since I’m an academic, and could only experience vertigo upon looking at all those blasted graphs and charts, I decided whoever it was, was very young. Only someone in their twenties — whipsmart enough to master an inordinately complicated law without having to make real use of it — could look up at that Everest of words and numbers and say: Yes! There’s freedom! This has nothing to do with the election, but what the hell? I did manage, when I wasn’t tearing my hair out or having an aneurism over the campaign commentary, to read a lot of Clarence Thomas and secondary work on commercial speech. And it struck me in reading all this material that Citizens United and campaign finance law may be a massive sideshow to the real drama around money/speech that’s occurring in conservative jurisprudential circles. Conservatives aim, it seems, to use the First Amendment to strike down entire economic regulatory regimes at the state and federal levels. On the grounds that so much of commercial life is a mode of speech, which should be protected like other modes of speech. In one instance they struck down a licensing law in D.C. that required tour guides to be registered with the city: violation of free speech. Thomas is at the center of this, and it’s really unclear how far the conservatives on the Court will be willing to go. It raises some fascinating questions because the connection between money and speech—as I’m discovering in this excellent dissertation I’ve been reading—is an old and surprisingly complicated one in political theory, in which Aristotle and Locke play critical roles. (Locke’s pamphlet against the devaluation of the pound may have been, according to this author, the single most influential writing he did up until the 19th century.) Anyway, lots going on in this arena, which we should all be paying more attention to. There’s a lot of fretting—both well meaning and cynical—out there about whether Sanders can win. Here’s the deal, people. For the last decade and a half, we’ve been treated to lecture after lecture from on high about how if you want things to change, you have to build from below. Well, that process has been going on for some time. Unlike purists of the left and purists of the center (who are the most insufferable purists of all, precisely because they think they’re not), I look at the various fits and starts of the last 15 years—from Seattle to the Nader campaign to the Iraq War protests to the Dean campaign to the Obama campaign to Occupy to the various student debt campaigns to Black Lives Matter—as part of a continuum, where men and women, young and old, slowly relearn the art of politics. Whose first rule is: If you want x, shoot for 1,000x, and whose second rule is: It’s not whether you fail (you probably will), but how you fail, whether you and your comrades are still there afterward to pick up the pieces and learn from your mistakes. Though I’ve not been involved in all these efforts, I know from the ones that I have been involved in that people are learning these rules. But at some point, you have to put that knowledge to the test. Now the Sanders campaign is putting it to the test. Is it too soon? Maybe, probably, I have no idea. None of us does. But you can’t possibly think we got anything decent in this country without men and women before us taking these—and far greater—risks, taking these—and far greater—gambles. Sometimes I think Americans fear failure in politics not for the obvious and well grounded reasons but because they are, well, Americans, that is, men and women who live in a capitalist civilization where success is a religious duty and failure a sin, where Thou Shalt Succeed is the First Commandment, and Thou Shalt Not Fail the Tenth. Is it not the right time for the Sanders campaign? The Republicans control the Congress, Sanders might lose to Trump or whomever, we don’t have the organizational forces in place yet? Well, re the first two concerns, when will that not be the case? As for the third, well, that’s a very real concern to me. But we won’t know in the abstract or on paper; we have to see it in action to know. Right now, the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire are telling the pundits and fetters: We are reality, deny us at your own peril. (I’m fantasizing a campaign where Sanders racks up more and more victories, and the pundits get more and more hysterical: He can’t win, he can’t win!) Maybe the putative realists—for whom reality seems to be more of a fetish or magical incantation—ought to listen to them. Oh, and did I mention that I got retweeted by Killer Mike?",REAL
+1931,How Candidates Announce Can Say A Lot About Their Campaigns,"How Candidates Announce Can Say A Lot About Their Campaigns
+
+Now that Democrat Hillary Clinton has officially launched her presidential campaign, the 2016 race for the White House is underway.
+
+The GOP got its third entrant in what is shaping up to be a crowded field when Florida Sen. Marco Rubio announced his bid Monday.
+
+How and where a candidate chooses to roll out a campaign can say a lot about the type of race he or she intends to run, at least in the early going.
+
+Rubio announced from his hometown of Miami at the Freedom Tower. This is not by coincidence. Rubio, a relative newcomer to national politics, will use this locale to underscore his biography as a son of Cuban immigrants who represents the new face of the GOP. On Monday, Freedom Tower was described by Morning Edition's Renee Montagne as ""kind of Statue of Liberty for Cuban-Americans."" The site was used as a processing center for Cubans fleeing the Castro regime in the 1960s.
+
+Contrast Rubio's rollout with Clinton's foray into the 2016 race over the weekend. She used a highly produced video in which she proclaims, ""I'm running for president."" No need for a TV-ready backdrop for her announcement; she's been a household name for some 20 years. Her biggest hurdles are relatability and showing her Democratic base she's not taking anything for granted — ready to roll up her sleeves to earn the party's nomination.
+
+The first time you actually see Clinton comes more than 90 seconds into the video and after brief testimonials, including from a gay couple talking about their upcoming wedding, a black heterosexual couple preparing for the arrival of a newborn and a Latino mother moving to a new home so her soon-to-be kindergarten-age daughter can attend a better school. Viewers see Clinton, who has been in a protective Secret Service bubble for two decades, interacting with ordinary Americans, a nod to the stripped-down, retail politicking campaign she plans to kick off in Iowa starting Tuesday.
+
+As NPR's Domenico Montanaro pointed out over the weekend, Clinton's video isn't terribly different from 2007 when she launched a Web-only video in which she said, ""Let the conversation begin."" Back then, she had stiff competition in then-Sen. Barack Obama, who announced his candidacy in Springfield, Ill., on the grounds of the Old State Capitol — the same place where in 1858 Abraham Lincoln delivered his ""House Divided"" speech.
+
+Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, like Clinton now, was making his second run for the White House. The former governor of Massachusetts opted to announce his first run in 2007 from The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Mich. He did so to highlight his ties to the state. His father was governor there and the senior Romney also ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1968. In an effort to counter the criticism that his wealth made him out of touch, Romney switched gears and went for a stripped-down approach in 2011. He announced on a farm in New Hampshire in an effort to cultivate support from voters in that early-voting state.
+
+The two other announced 2016 candidates, Republican Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, also announced in two different types of places. One represents ""home""; the other, the type of constituency the candidate would like to woo.
+
+Paul announced in Louisville, Ky., a liberal-leaning city within his Republican-leaning state. NPR's Don Gonyea, who covered the rollout, said the libertarian-leaning conservative is running as a ""nontraditional Republican"" who is trying to broaden the GOP's appeal beyond its traditional base. Paul, whose father, Ron, is a congressman from Texas, grew up in the Lone Star State. He attended Baylor University in Texas before going to Duke Medical School in North Carolina. But afterward, Paul and his wife moved to Kentucky, where they started their family.
+
+On the other hand, Cruz chose Liberty University. He has no ties to the college, a Southern Baptist institution founded by Jerry Falwell. He went to school at Princeton and Harvard and grew up in Texas. But the backdrop is a beacon for any candidate interested in coalescing support among evangelicals or born-again Christians. And that's key in early states like Iowa and South Carolina, where more than half of Republican voters identify as white evangelical or born-again Christians.",REAL
+2963,Obama speech: Reassurances about ISIS fall flat in Oval Office address,"In the wake of the worst terrorist attack in America since 9/11, President Obama could have used his Oval Office address on Sunday night to announce different policies than the ones that have obviously failed to keep America safe from radical Islam.
+
+He could have explained why a long-feared arrival of low-tech, soft-target terrorism had occurred, and what he would do to rectify the problem—beginning with apologizing for giving a U.S. visa to a jihadist from Pakistan and agreeing to stop his plan to bring more Syrian refugees here.
+
+He could have announced a plan to undermine the ideology of our enemies—radical Islam—which impelled Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik to wage war in San Bernardino last week.
+
+Instead he did what he always does with security threats: blame others for his administration’s lapses and do the minimum to appear to be reacting to them without actually doing anything.
+
+In calling for Congress to ban those on the no-fly list from buying guns, Obama is attempting one of his trademark shifts in blame for problems he has created.  The president instinctively wants to react to every security threat by assailing his domestic opponents.
+
+Even if his proposed ban and other gun control measures were in place, they would not have stopped the attack in San Bernardino.  Recent attacks like those in Paris show that jihadists have little problem overcoming gun laws, which serve mainly to disarm the law-abiding.  Obama could also look to his adopted hometown of Chicago to see that gun control doesn’t work.
+
+Obama’s moralizing about avoiding “suspicion and hate” implied, once again, that Americans are bigoted — another attempt to shift blame.  It echoed a statement last week by Attorney General Loretta Lynch that the government would prosecute anti-Muslim speech that “edges toward violence,” whatever that means.
+
+Thus did our government reveal its contempt for us and our Constitution in the wake of an attack it failed to prevent.
+
+Obama’s reassurances about the fight against ISIS fell flat.  In effect, a ragtag army of about 20,000 men have stood up to a year and a half of a U.S.-led war and prevailed—all the while expanding their influence around the globe.  Their success has inspired attacks like the ones in Paris and San Bernardino.
+
+Calling for Congress to approve retroactively his anti-ISIS campaign, as he did again in his Sunday evening prime time address, will do nothing to improve the flagging effort.  This is merely another attempt to shift blame for failure down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to Congress.
+
+Obama failed to climb down from his assessment that ISIS is “contained”—something that not even his own top general believes.
+
+The president also preemptively surrendered to ISIS insurgents he said would sap any American-led ground forces, despite the success of the 2007 surge in Iraq that proved otherwise, and the fact that a U.S-led coalition could turn administration of Syria over to local tribes after destroying ISIS.
+
+Sunday nights’ sad speech makes one wonder what the White House was thinking.  Obama has always resisted addresses from the Oval Office for unclear reasons.  In one of only two other such speeches during his tenure, he cheered our exit from Iraq, in which hard-won American gains were thrown away and the vacuum ISIS would eventually fill was created.
+
+Whatever the reason, his aversion to Oval Office addresses may have been wise: the setting doesn’t suit him.
+
+The office awaits a new president who can confidently explain how a restored America with restored alliances can defeat ISIS rapidly and with overwhelming force, fight back in the cultural and ideological war radical Islam is waging against us, and defend rather than blame the American people.   
+
+
+
+Christian Whiton was a State Department senior advisor in the George W. Bush administration. He is author of ""2003-2009. He is the author of ""Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War"" (Potomac Books, 2013).",REAL
+4326,Fiorina wins when she stumps Trump,"(CNN) CNN Opinion asked a range of contributors for their take on the CNN debate of Republican presidential candidates. Who were the winners and losers? The opinions expressed in these commentaries are theirs.
+
+The Republican race for president just got a lot more serious.
+
+At the second Republican presidential debate, there was minimal name-calling and personal insults by Donald Trump, and all of the candidates not named Donald Trump rushed into the void, taking advantage of an opportunity to make a good impression -- succeeding more often than not.
+
+The clearest winner of the debate was Carly Fiorina, who successfully challenged Trump -- criticizing his wisecracks about her personal appearance and challenging his credentials as a global businessman by deftly ticking off hotspots around the world and suggesting ways she would tackle them.
+
+But other candidates took turns at laying out specific plans and contrasting their ideas with those of their rivals. Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian, took issue with Jeb Bush's vow to crack down on recreational marijuana, and Chris Christie jumped into the conversation to warn about the dangers of marijuana use leading to abuse of harder drugs -- a point underscored by Fiorina, who talked about the death of her stepdaughter, who was a drug user.
+
+The big news in all of this was that the field of candidates weren't dancing to Trump's tune. Instead, they talked in a serious way about serious issues, and for considerable swaths of the debate it was possible to forget Trump was onstage at all: Marco Rubio and Christie went back and forth on climate change, and Ted Cruz debated Bush over the process and criteria for naming Supreme Court justices. Ben Carson argued for a two-tier minimum wage.
+
+It remains true that a large percentage of the Republican voting base is disgusted by politicians and convinced that a brash straight-talker like Trump might fix this. But the debate served as a reminder that Trump's 30% support also means that 70% of Republican voters are looking for a different candidate to support. The debate proved they have plenty of viable choices.
+
+To be taken half as seriously as a man, goes an old adage, a woman must be twice as good. Her male rivals ought to be taking Carly Fiorina a lot more seriously than that today because she was better -- a lot better -- than most of them in the CNN debate.
+
+She came prepared with crisp, coherent responses to nearly every issue raised and delivered two of the best monologues of the night -- one when she spoke movingly about burying a child lost to drug addiction, the other about empowering every woman to realize her aspirations. She also put down Donald Trump on his slur about her face; he lamely praised her looks when, instead, he should have apologized.
+
+Trump seemed tight at the start, needlessly picking fights, but he got his bearings halfway through and finished upbeat. I doubt he will pay much of a price for his early bombast but he may well see Fiorina, more than Ben Carson, soon nipping at his heels.
+
+A debate that seemed long did have one major virtue: it allowed other candidates far more openings to distinguish themselves. Marco Rubio and Chris Christie took the most advantage: both were much more effective than in the first debate. The race itself, like the debate, is likely to seesaw back and forth for many weeks to come.
+
+David Gergen is a senior political analyst for CNN and has been a White House adviser to four presidents. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he is a professor of public service and co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.
+
+Carly Fiorina won on style and substance. Unlike Marco Rubio, who dominated the few times he spoke, Fiorina made sure she had more than a few bites at the mic. Unlike Jeb Bush, who could only politely respond to Donald Trump's insults, while still losing most of the exchanges, Fiorina proved to be the only candidate who could effectively push back on Trump and his substance-free assertions.
+
+Her perfectly calibrated and classy response to his insult of her face was an instant classic destined to dominate debate highlight reels. Now Trump is calling Carly Fiorina a ""wonderful person"" and ""beautiful."" That's the Trump-English definition for ""apology. "" That's Fiorina-English for ""a win.""
+
+Fiorina handled the attacks on her business record deftly and then attacked Trump's habit of hanging creditors out to dry in the wake of his bankruptcies. For a GOP generally in trouble with women, she's the only candidate that could get away with calling the move to change the face on the $20 bill a pander. And she's right. We should know our history and make new history -- today -- by considering Carly Fiorina the breakout top tier candidate of Round 2.
+
+Margaret Hoover is the president of the right-leaning advocacy group American Unity Fund, and author of ""American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party."" She is the host of SiriusXM's ""Get It Right with Margaret Hoover.""
+
+Trump came out swinging -- but ended up missing. Not only wasn't he substantive -- again -- but he made some pretty bizarre statements. He thinks a flat tax is more complicated than a regressive tax. He said that vaccines cause autism. He wants Syria and ISIS to fight each other. He will get along with Putin. This stuff doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The question is whether any is ever applied to Trump.
+
+Ben Carson also suffered some serious stumbles that will likely hurt him, namely the bizarre suggestion that a ""bully pulpit"" would have been a better response to 9/11 than fighting terrorists. Saying that Americans aren't willing to perform agriculture jobs, that our Air Force isn't ""capable"" and our Marines aren't ""ready,"" is pretty irresponsible stuff.
+
+I think Carly Fiorina, on the other hand, managed to beat already high expectations. She was sharp, quick on her feet and delivered more than one great applause line. Particularly effective was her emotional plea to defund Planned Parenthood. And she used every opportunity to get as granular and specific on policy as she could. I expect her poll numbers to rise.
+
+S.E. Cupp is the author of ""Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity,"" co-author of ""Why You're Wrong About the Right"" and a columnist at the New York Daily News.
+
+No big themes, no clear sense of vision emerged from the three hours of jawing in tonight's debate. Such are the downsides, I suppose, of putting 11 candidates on a stage and divvying up 1-minute slots for each candidate to make a mark.
+
+So we saw flashes of Christie the populist, Fiorina the Trump slayer, Kasich the sunny multilateralist, Trump the bombast, Rand the constitutionalist, Carson the logician. But their claims didn't add up to much that was especially comprehensible, certainly not memorable.
+
+To be sure, there were moments -- the best, perhaps, being Fiorina telling Trump that women across America know exactly what he meant when he insulted her looks. Rubio gave another strong performance, though it remains unclear whether he can capitalize on these performances on the campaign trail. Huckabee and Walker, by contrast, couldn't seem to nudge the conversation much at all.
+
+My wish for the next debate on October 28? We narrow down the list, dig a little deeper and force the candidates to say something serious about the confluence of urban challenges associated with class, race and drug enforcement that, just now, only Rand Paul seems willing to discuss.
+
+Biggest winner: George W. Bush, long forgotten, who was invoked as the man who kept America safe -- a claim that received the loudest applause of the night.
+
+Biggest disappointment: Once again, no serious or sustained discussion of issues involving race, poverty, and violence in American cities. These were barely recognized last go around. They weren't so much as mentioned tonight.
+
+William Howell is the Sydney Stein professor in American politics at the University of Chicago.
+
+Carly Fiorina was the big winner tonight. She is the only candidate to date to take on Trump and come out a winner. She was polished, showed policy depth and has the outsider bio that is so in vogue this year. Fiorina now has more momentum than any Republican candidate not named Trump has had in this campaign.
+
+Rubio was also very sharp tonight, but he seems unable to have the sorts of moments that get shared online and talked out around the dinner table, which is why he went down not up in the polls after a similarly solid performance in the last debate.
+
+Jeb Bush was markedly better than the last debate (which is like being the tallest of the seven dwarves), but his most memorable moment was passionately defending his brother whose legacy is an albatross around his neck.
+
+Ultimately, the eventual Democratic nominee was the biggest winner, because the Republican's continue to unlearn all the lessons of 2012 by taking far right positions on immigration, women's health, and climate change
+
+Dan Pfeiffer is a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and served in the White House in a variety of roles, including communications director.
+
+At nearly three hours, this was a debate for the true political junkies. To me, the most resonant memory was that of the various Republican presidential candidates, on and off the camera, crying ""Jake! Jake!"" to moderator Jake Tapper, signaling their desire to jump into the discussion.
+
+Ironically for a debate that took place at the Ronald Reagan library, the 2016 hopefuls showed that they differ in style from our 40th president. Reagan was known for his sunny disposition. He was a genial man who did not hurl insults at his rivals. He appealed to Americans' best selves with his innate optimism. By contrast, the Republicans on the stage tonight presented a gloomy vision of our nation, and at time acted peevish and petulant with one another -- a far cry from the courtly Reagan.
+
+Yet for all the attacks on each other, the candidates also missed opportunities to call each other out. Nobody pointed out that, for much of her adult life, Carly Fiorina did not bother to vote at all. Nobody mentioned that, under Sen. Marco Rubio's proposed overhaul of our immigration policies, people like his working class parents would not have been allowed in the country. Nobody asked Mike Huckabee about the religious liberties of American Muslims or Mormons.
+
+The immigration portion of the debate, meanwhile, was a disappointment. The immigration proposal that merited the most discussion was Donald Trump's impractical, inhumane plan for mass deportations. It was disheartening to see legitimate questions about immigration reform devolve into sniping about speaking Spanish, birthright citizenship and -- of course -- border security.
+
+Any serious consideration of what to do with the estimated 11 million undocumented people already here was missing -- as was any mention of the fact that conservative icon Reagan signed the Immigration and Control Act of 1986, which allowed nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants to get amnesty after entering the country illegally.
+
+Equally troubling was the fact that the ""Black Lives Matter"" movement -- one of the most powerful social justice movements of our time -- did not merit any discussion.
+
+The winner tonight? That would be Fiorina. She faced up to personal and professional attacks with aplomb. Her experience in corporate America has clearly given her the skills necessary for making a strong presentation. Not at all hesitant about asserting herself, she proved that she belonged on the big stage tonight.
+
+The loser tonight was Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. He has been fading in the polls lately, and this was his chance to show potential supporters and donors that he is still a major player. Instead, between Trump's bravado and the occasional flourishes of the other candidates -- Rubio on foreign policy, Fiorina on her business record -- Walker seemed to get lost in the shuffle. Unlike nearly every other candidate, Walker did not have one strong ""moment.""
+
+Like most, I thought Carly Fiorina was tonight's big winner. I think her strongest moment had nothing to do with Donald Trump.
+
+The weak field helped. Trump kicked Jeb Bush around like a failed prospect on ""The Apprentice."" Bush's biggest applause line was defending his brother, which I'm sure the Hillary Clinton campaign loved. Nearly all rushed to promise magical toughness fixes to the Middle East and more deportations, while failing to mention the economy until it was an excuse not to act on climate change.
+
+Fiorina reminds me of a more human Mitt Romney. She is a polished and poised debater. The question is whether her business track record of mass layoffs comes back to haunt her, as it did Romney.
+
+But on Wednesday tonight, she combined personal stories with policy specifics better than anyone else on the stage. Asked about drug policy reform, she gave a heartbreaking account of the loss of a child that moved every watching parent of all parties -- and then transitioned seamlessly into a conservative case for reforming our criminal justice system.
+
+That answer was all the more impressive because it came in the midst of a number of strong responses that showed the broad consensus on scaling back our system of mass incarceration. Kudos to CNN's Jake Tapper for posing a question that moved us past Trump's noisy racism, and provoked Bush's apology to his mom, Fiorina's tearjerker and a healthy dose of substance.
+
+Julian Zelizer: Rivals figure out how to undercut Trump
+
+In the first half of the debate, Donald Trump succeeded in his basic campaign strategy: make the entire contest about him. When most people were watching, Trump was continually a focal point of the discussion. Early, on he launched a series of ad hominem attacks, like telling Rand Paul he shouldn't even be on the stage and making quips about his looks.
+
+This has been his strategy since entering the race -- constantly attack and constantly be attacked. Either way, the result is that Trump is the story. In an age of media-driven politics, where video clips and quick sound bites are the currency of choice, he advances his cause.
+
+During the first two hours, the moderators often used Trump's statements (on immigration or on Fiorina's business record for example) as the basis of their questions to other candidates. Very often the split screen would show answers by someone like Christie, with the other half of the screen still on Trump whether or not this was relevant.
+
+But during the last hour of the debate, when fewer people were watching, his opponents started to show that the best way to undercut is to talk about issues. Besides all the blows Trump suffered, including the basic message that he is an entertainer rather than a leader, the camera was no longer focused on him.
+
+Many of the candidates had their moments. Carly Fiorina scored points with conservatives when she talked about defunding Planned Parenthood, as well as her call for policies to help women in the workplace. Her overall performance, including her retort to Trump's comments about her appearance, won applause. Sen. Marco Rubio offered emotional answers to the questions about immigration and showed his chops on foreign policy.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz got in a few criticisms of the Supreme Court, while John Kasich boasted of his deep experience and ability to move to the center.
+
+Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker touted the record of his administration, while New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie finally had a chance to talk about issues other than scandalous bridges, including economic growth and law and order. His performance gave a boost to a dying candidacy.
+
+Paul discussed drugs and criminal justice as well as the need to limit American involvement overseas. Ben Carson spoke about vaccine policies and defending free markets and wealth. Jeb Bush had a chance to defend his brother's policies after 9/11, connecting his statements to how he would address terrorism.
+
+Whenever foreign policy came up, Trump almost seemed to duck down behind his lectern. Just as important, all of the candidates started to make tougher statements about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, remembering that ultimately she would be the main target of the GOP. ""Who will prosecute Hillary Clinton?"" asked Christie.
+
+While this debate probably won't knock Trump off from his pedestal, it offers a road map to his opponents about how to undercut his success. Shifting to issues and shifting to policies -- not allowing him to shape the entire conversation -- is the best way to trump Trump.
+
+Winner: Anyone but Trump, although Trump was not a clear loser.
+
+Maria Cardona: Rivals knew it was make or break
+
+Tonight's debate finally started to break the Trump fever! The other GOP candidates found their inner adults, stood up to Trump -- somewhat -- and importantly, demonstrated their command and experience on policy details and their more realistic solutions to the country's problems.
+
+While they are all wrong on the issues -- their immigration divisiveness and their focus on defunding Planned Parenthood to the point of forcing a government shutdown are dangerous territory and weaken the party's general election viability -- it was clear they all knew how much was riding on their performances.
+
+Carly Fiorina was masterful throughout the debate. She was adroit, witty and showed she would not back down, but did so in a very graceful way. She also schooled Donald Trump and many of the others on foreign policy and other issues. She played and looked the part.
+
+Marco Rubio shone brightly when discussing foreign policy, and his and Fiorina's command of subject matter was a stark contrast with Trump, who was completely absent from the discussion.
+
+Jeb Bush did a much better job this time around, but still lost tonight. He is such a cringe-worthy, awkward candidate. And while he went toe to toe with Trump at times (and had a good, funny line towards the end when asked what Secret Service code name he would choose -- Eveready, he said looking at Trump, because it's ""high energy"" ), he looked uncomfortable in his own skin every time he tried to defend himself or get tough with Trump.
+
+Will this be the beginning of the dimming of Trump, who up until now had gotten away with myths, bluster, distortions and outright lies in the place of facts, solutions, pragmatic approaches, respect and grace? Still early to say, but at least the candidates scored some important points against Trump and used the opportunity to let voters get to know them better.
+
+The biggest winner from Thursday night's CNN Republican presidential candidate debate: Carly Fiorina. Not only did she speak with expertise and fluency on policy, but Fiorina added some emotional inflection and personal touches to connect with the voters. Most importantly of all-- she managed to be the first candidate to go toe-to-toe with Trump on stage and come out the clear victor.
+
+Fiorina was joined by several other candidates with standout performances. Sen. Marco Rubio (who if not the eventual president, might make a great secretary of state) came off as polished on stage and wonky on policy. The same was true for Sen. Ted Cruz, who burnished his constitutionalist credentials at every opportunity and focused his fire on President Barack Obama's administration rather than his fellow GOP candidates. Gov. Chris Christie, for his part, also turned in a solid performance, as he managed to pull off both bravado and charm -- even managing to sound earnestly conservative a few times.
+
+The biggest loser tonight? Donald Trump, not only because he clearly didn't win, but he even failed to be the center of attention beyond the opening minutes of the debate. Trump is, of course, style over substance, but even his style faltered tonight.
+
+And while he had a few entertaining, humorous moments, Trump also had some head-shaking blunders. His non-apology to Fiorina, where he called her ""beautiful,"" crashed and burned -- you could almost hear the groans across America.
+
+Others in the ""not good enough"" category were: Sen. Rand Paul, Gov. Scott Walker and Gov. John Kasich, all of of whom may be following Gov. Rick Perry's lead in exiting the race much sooner than they anticipated.
+
+Surprisingly, this was not episode No. 2 of the ""Trump and Friends"" reality show that many expected (and frankly some hoped for from an entertainment point of view.)
+
+This was much more of a substantive debate, in part because the candidates refused to fight with each other or the moderators -- with a few exceptions, i.e., Donald Trump versus Rand Paul. This allowed the debate to reveal a contrast between the candidates who were pandering, offering conservative GOP primary voters red meat on issues, and those candidates who were being realistic and responsible, such as on issues like immigration and the Iran nuclear deal.
+
+For example, Jake Tapper challenged Donald Trump (using a quote of Ben Carson) about his plan to deport the 11 million plus undocumented immigrants as being unworkable. We heard Ted Cruz boast that he would tear up the Iran deal if elected president. But Trump and Ohio Gov. John Kasich focused on enforcing the agreement. And Carly Fiorina called out Trump's proposal to end birthright citizenship as being wholly impracticable because it would require amending the 14th Amendment.
+
+The race is now moving from the reality show mode to one of substance, which might be a little less exciting, but better for voters in assessing the candidates.
+
+Once again, Carly Fiorina stole the show. Her comfort level on stage, command of the issues and her ability to deliver razor sharp responses, cut down Donald Trump with the precision of a political scalpel. Fiornia accomplished something no other candidate on that stage was yet to do: She made Donald Trump and his egomaniacal, larger than life candidacy look small.
+
+While Trump engaged in his typical nonsequitur, ad hominem attacks, Fiorina came across thoughtful, prepared and tough on issues both foreign and domestic. When Jake Tapper asked Fiorina to respond to Trump's insult of her face during a Rolling Stone interview, and his attempt to walk it back by claiming that he meant her persona not her looks, she simply said to thunderous applause, ""I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.""
+
+At that point, Trump pulled up lame. He responded, ""I think she has a beautiful face. She's a beautiful woman,"" which was met with crickets and collective incredulity from the audience. It was one of the most memorable exchanges of the night. It felt as though Trump showed up prepared for a Comedy Central roast, not a debate to help decide the next leader of the free world.
+
+Another standout moment came during a discussion on defunding Planned Parenthood over its fetal organ harvesting controversy when Fiorina looked into the camera and challenged President Obama and Hillary Clinton to ""watch these tapes. ... Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain. ... This is about the character of our nation, and if we will not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us."" A man sitting next to me said, ""I just got goose bumps."" As did I.
+
+Both Carly Fiorina and Sen. Marco Rubio, who in his own right had another very strong night, especially on foreign policy matters, came across as the adults in the room and delivered powerful performances on issues that resonate with the American people. We'll see if that's reflected in the polls moving forward.
+
+Tara Setmayer is former communication's director for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, and a CNN political commentator.",REAL
+5041,Rural America confronts a new class divide,"Farms that once generated wealth for entire communities are now creating a new class of superfarms, which are concentrating wealth and income at the top.
+
+Peanut farmer Gary Dawson fills a water tank just outside Hawkinsville, Ga. Dawson has reduced his permanent crew of workers from dozens in the 1970s to about nine today
+
+The rows of low-slung plants under the hot Georgia sun are deceptive: It’s what grows underground that counts.
+
+“I love this dirt more than anything – except my son,” says farmhand Franklin “Spanky” Laidler, jumping off his red tractor onto a field where peanuts burrow in the ground.
+
+For many, that love of this sandy Southern soil is more than just a way of life, it’s a wealth generator. Mr. Laidler says he works so much that if he was paid hourly instead of salaried, “I’d be a millionaire.” Instead, it’s his boss who has grown wealthy on these 9,000 acres. “He could quit farming now and he’d have nothing to worry about.”
+
+A different harvest takes place at the Pulaski County dump, just outside Hawkinsville. At night, men with headlamps, like monster fireflies, pick through the day’s detritus looking for valuable scraps to sell.
+
+These are two pictures of income inequality in rural America.
+
+The widening gulf between the haves and have nots is not limited to the Rust Belt’s cast-off manufacturing workers, working class suburbanites, or inner-city poor working on a stagnant minimum wage. The same trends have taken hold in farm country, though in different forms. The farms that once generated wealth for entire communities are now creating a new class of superfarmers.
+
+The trend is not unprecedented. When the South was more agrarian, the divide was worse – land ownership was the ultimate “unequalizer.”
+
+But after a period of more equal wealth, the trend is clearly back toward greater inequality, with more money in the hands of the few. Automation has made farm jobs disappear, and at the bottom of the income ladder, many rural residents are still struggling to recover from the Great Recession.
+
+For places like Hawkinsville, these trends represent a deepening challenge for how to sow hope. And yet, rural America retains some advantages for addressing those broken hopes. It begins, experts say, with a willingness to reject the tendency toward insularity and open arms and minds to new ideas.
+
+“Communities that are waiting for either [Donald] Trump or [Hillary] Clinton to come into office and solve all their issues are being unrealistic,” says David Peters, a rural sociologist who studies heartland inequality at Iowa State University in Ames. “Residents and community leaders do, however, have this power to build up trust in the community … [in order] to marshal investment and resources. Yes, it’s difficult. But it’s within their power to change.”
+
+The most striking thing about rural America's inequality is what you don't see. Wealth is not marked by gated communities or mansions. Fashion plates do not strut along Commerce Street in downtown Hawkinsville. Indeed, there’s a ramshackle air to the place, broken only occasionally by the one sign of ostentation: brand-new Ford F-350s growling down the highways.
+
+Yet wealth has been growing here until recently – in part because of a short-term turn in the farming cycle; in part, because of long-term consolidation.
+
+A run of high prices in the aftermath of the Great Recession meant farmers like Gary Dawson were able to slash their debts and pay cash for tractors and more land. He could expand because bigger machinery and improved soil-conditioning techniques allowed him to farm more land more efficiently.
+
+“We started with a four-row harvester and now we’re running a 12-row one,” he says.
+
+The farming cycle is now turning against farmers. Net cash farm income is expected to fall for the fourth year in a row this year. Midwestern farmland prices have fallen sharply from record highs. Nevertheless, by expanding and becoming more efficient, Mr. Dawson is joining the ranks of superfarmers – a longterm trend that is putting farm production and wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
+
+The level of concentration varies by crop and by region.
+
+A quarter-century ago, the South's big cotton farmers (with at least 1,000 acres planted) were already producing 30 percent of the nation's crop; by 2007, it was half, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Midwestern corn and soybean farmers – once the backbone of a rural middle class – are moving in the same direction. By 2007, big farmers produced nearly a third of the corn crop (up from 9 percent in 1992).
+
+“What most people think of as family farms don’t exist in large numbers anymore, but what exists are large family businesses … in the $3 to $5 million range,” says Mr. Peters, the Iowa State sociologist.
+
+And the bigger the farm, the bigger its average profit margin. By 2011, as crop prices were rising, the average midsize family farm was worth $2.6 million and earned $156,000 a year – two-thirds of that from farming. Large family farms were worth $4.8 million and earning $413,000; very large farms, just under $10 million and earning $1.7 million.
+
+As this wealth accumulates, it is being spread to fewer and fewer people. The midsize to very large operations represent less than 8 percent of the 2.1 million farm households in the United States, most of which rely on income outside agriculture for their livelihood. And as the big operations become more mechanized and efficient, they're not hiring droves of new farmhands. Mr. Dawson has reduced his permanent crew from dozens in the 1970s to about nine today.
+
+“A typical [large] farmer is not going to admit that they’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, in part because nowadays … those who have traditionally performed jobs on the farm are left out of any sort of share in the wealth that’s being produced,” says Jonathan Bryant, a history professor at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, who studies small-town life in the South. “That’s become a difficult situation for a lot of folks, and many just leave. Those that don’t are the people you see in those clustered groups of rotting trailer houses: They’re stuck as much as some person in a Central American country is stuck.”
+
+In Hawkinsville, over half of its high school graduates leave for college or someplace else every year and don’t come back. Despite his success in farming, Dawson's children have gone on to professional work elsewhere. His daughter is an architect; his son works at Robins Air Force Base, just up the road, as a software technician.
+
+For those who haven’t shared in the farm boom, the disparity looks exactly like despair.
+
+Count Rex Milner and his wife, Leeanne, among them. As a just-weaned kitten attacks a rock in their front yard, they describe what seems a far cry from a rural paradise in middle Georgia. Yes, they can float down the lazy Ocmulgee River in inner tubes – the local go-to entertainment. But as with hundreds here, the Milners rely not on a paycheck but on a federal disability check, which they pad with what amounts to a permanent yard sale. “You’ve got to scrounge for every dollar you get,” says Mr. Milner, a junk dealer who combs the countryside and flea markets for items he can mark up and sell. “It’s never been this bad, the economy.”
+
+They’d love to move to another place and start over. But cash-poor and burdened with high-interest debt, he says, “We’re stuck.""
+
+For the most part, locals like the Milners don’t blame big farmers. After all, it’s hard to criticize those whose hard work has been bolstered by good fortune, even though they may have been born into a land-rich family. Instead, it’s Hillary Clinton or President Obama who are the main targets of bitter complaints.
+
+""Inequality works both ways: It’s not just concentration of wealth, but it’s also what happens at the bottom,” says Peters, the rural sociologist. “The upshot is that the trend of the withering middle class has occurred in rural areas much further and quicker than in urban and metro communities in general.”
+
+The current rural inequality is not unheard of, at least in the South.
+
+“We have seen this kind of inequality before, and it’s when we were highly agriculturally dependent in the nation,” says Linda Lobao, a rural sociologist at Ohio State University in Columbus. “It’s always the case with land in rural communities: land makes power. And power often doesn’t want change.""
+
+Farmers in the 1970s also saw several good years back-to-back and bid up land prices, only to see the farm economy collapse in the 1980s. When land prices crashed, many indebted operators lost their farms Another price downturn could happen, squeezing farm incomes again. Net cash income is projected to fall by a third this year versus the 2012 peak. And land prices have already begun to ease downward.
+
+Hawkinsville is not thriving: A restaurant featuring “best burgers in town” is not open at the supper hour. Town fathers have been working for 30 years to renovate an old opera house, But it's still not done. An old firehouse shows cracks in its foundation, waiting, year after year, for renovation.
+
+Sociologists say reforms may have to run deeper than opera house grants for many divided farm towns grappling for survival in the new economy.
+
+According to Peters and Professor Lobao, rural communities that have managed to thrive despite the dour employment dynamics exhibit similar values: an openness to change and outsiders. In many parts of the country, rural towns that have welcomed immigrants, especially, have seen their downtowns, if not thrive, at least manage a slower population decline than more insular communities.
+
+Last year, the White House Rural Council launched Rural Impact, which is helping 10 rural and tribal communities fight income inequality primarily by giving children more educational options. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack calls it a “whole-family framework for addressing child poverty.”
+
+More broadly, “the key is to try to organize people in some manner to put more claims on local government, to gain more political power,” says Lobao. In many income-divided towns, she adds, there’s a sense that those who don’t farm are “subject to forces that are beyond their control, which leads to a more fatalistic approach.”
+
+But in a recent survey of 99 struggling farm towns, adds Peters, “we find that communities that have higher levels of social capital – the level to which people trust one another, and whether they’re tolerant of different opinions and allow newcomers to be involved in decisionmaking and power structures – those tend to have better economic and demographic outcomes.”
+
+[Editor's note: The cutline for the photo of Franklin 'Spanky' Laidler has been corrected to correspond with his quote in the story.]",REAL
+8028,Japan’s Lost Black Hole Satellite Took This LAST Photo. Proves Something MIND-BOGGLING!,"Japan’s Lost Black Hole Satellite Took This LAST Photo. Proves Something MIND-BOGGLING! Please scroll down for video 
+This remarkable photo is the last thing Japan’s lost satellite, Hitomi, captured. 
+Black holes with their ability to consume an entire galaxy, are perhaps the most feared object in the heavens due to the voracious appetite which they hold. It has now been discovered that black holes also have the ability to also feed the growth of galaxies. 
+Black holes effectively affect and control the growth and expansion of galaxies, acting as a kind of regulator. It appears from recent discoveries that the universe has a life and death cycle for its heavenly bodies. Black holes appear to be at the center of this life cycle, a kind of grim reaper and giver of life all rapped up into one clever little package. 
+The discovery of this process was noted by a Japanese satellite shortly before its unfortunate demise. The satellite had been focused on the Perseus Cluster which has at its center a super massive black hole. Data from the satellite demonstrated that black holes provide energy for the growth of galaxies. Remember that energy is never lost but instead changed and transformed as time moves on so it makes sense that black holes both absorb and expel energy. Energy is transformed and never destroyed, not even by black holes . 
+Black holes are formed when a star of enormous magnitude ultimately burns out, and the core collapses into a black hole. The process of a star dying out is a kin to what happens when a nuclear reactor melts down which is both an awesome and terrifying event. Once formed, the black hole absorbs anything which winds up in its path, which includes entire galaxies. The magnitude of such destruction of mass is overwhelming and difficult for the human mind process. 
+This article (Japan’s Lost Black Hole Satellite Took This LAST Photo. Proves Something MIND-BOGGLING! ) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
+7028,Obama's UN Ambassador: Cuba is Right About Our Human Rights,"Obama's UN Ambassador: Cuba is Right About Our Human Rights October 29, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
+You may remember Ambassador Samantha Power from the time she proposed invading Israel. Since then she's gone on to a glorious career of representing the Castro regime at the UN. Or is it the Obama regime. It naturally gets confusing when the US Ambassador to the UN sides with the enemy against her own country. 
+""For more than 50 years, the United States had a policy aimed at isolating the government of Cuba. For roughly half of those years, UN Member States have voted overwhelmingly for a General Assembly resolution that condemns the U.S. embargo and calls for it to be ended. The United States has always voted against this resolution. Today the United States will abstain. [Applause.] Thank you."" 
+Under Obama, Power was told to abstain from opposing a resolution critical of the United States. And they say Obama is some sort of anti-American traitor. I don't see it. If he were, we would be seeing signs of it by now. 
+Anyway, Power then went on to audition for the job of the UN ambassador from Cuba by claiming that critiques from a brutal Communist dictatorship about our human rights are well-founded... 
+""Let me be among the first to acknowledge – as our Cuban counterparts often point out – that the United States has work to do in fulfilling these rights for our own citizens. And we know that at times in our history, U.S. leaders and citizens used the pretext of promoting democracy and human rights in the region to justify actions that have left a deep legacy of mistrust."" 
+Somehow though siding with Communist dictatorships who are the enemy while betraying our allies in the region does not create any mistrust. Only opposing the left does.",FAKE
+8863,"Punk Targets Hurricane Victim’s Home, Flees When Surprised by Armed Owner","Elderly Woman Spots Drone Above Property… Her Next Move Leaves Operators STUNNED 
+Hough recalled waking up to the sound of glass breaking and footsteps inside his home as the intruder used a rock to smash out a sliding glass door. 
+“It was a strong guy, a big guy,” Hough said, referencing his broken door. “I wouldn’t have been able to kick that out.” 
+Grabbing his revolver, Hough took up a defensive position at the top of the stairs and waited until he saw the man who had broken into his home.   
+“I knew pretty much where he was,” he explained. “He came across my dining room and to the foot of my stairway. I had a revolver and fired at him twice.” 
+Though he didn’t hit the burglar with his two shots, they were more than enough to send the punk scrambling back out the broken glass door and away from what turned out to be a well-defended home. 
+“I missed, obviously, but I think I scared him,” Hough added, pointing to the bullet holes in his wall. “He certainly didn’t expect to see me.” 
+The armed homeowner used his cellphone to call the police, who responded promptly despite the raging hurricane going on around them.  ",FAKE
+8341,Comment on Shocking Insinuation About Carl Sagan & Extraterrestrials Made By X-NASA Astronaut by Is This What You Think They Would Look Like? Supposed Pictures of Real Extraterrestrials - New Earth Media,"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter A few years ago, Neil deGrasse said that yes, extraterrestrials may be visiting our planet, and people do see Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), but he also stated that it is a big leap for one to assume a UFO is of extraterrestrial in origin. ( source )   As you will see from the information below, it’s not a big leap, which is why so many other scientists around the world support the extraterrestrial hypotheses. It’s also important to note that this article is not implying that Carl Saga is a ‘bad’ person. If this information is indeed true, we still do not know the circumstances and details of it. It is a common occurrence for ‘UFO’s to be tracked on military radar , and more and more people are starting to believe that these objects are of extraterrestrial origin. and there is a good amount of evidence to believe that. One reason for this is the disclosure of evidence supporting such a hypothesis in recent years. If you want to see a fraction of that evidence, you can check out this article or the one pertaining to military radar linked above, or you can visit the exopolitics section of our website, here . If you really want to go in depth and read some proper studies on this topic, you can check out Richard Dolan’s books . They are a great place to start, he is a brilliant academic and one of the world’s leading researchers on the topic of UFOs. Sagan’s Close Colleague Apart from the congressional hearings on this subject, and the fairly recent citizens hearing that took place, along with the release of official documentation, there has been a surge in people believing that ETs are real because of the work of scholars like Dr. Brian O’Leary. Brian was a close colleague of Carl Sagan, who recruited him to teach at Cornell University in the late 1960’s, where he researched and lectured in the department of astronomy and physics. After Cornell, he taught physics, astronomy, and science policy assessment at various academic institutions, including the University of California Berkeley, Hampshire College, and finally at Princeton University from 1976 to 1981. After this he went on to Washington, where he would become an advisor to various political leaders, presidential candidates, and the United States Congress.   Before all of this, Dr. O’Leary was a NASA astronaut and a member of the sixth group of astronauts selected by NASA in August of 1967. One year after that, as mentioned above, Sagan recruited him to teach at Cornell. O’Leary was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as secretary of the American Geophysical Union’s Planetology Section. Furthermore, he was the team leader of the Asteroidal Resources Group for NASA’s Ames Summer Study on Space Settlements. He was a founding board member of the International Association for New Science as well as founding president of the New Energy Movement. “Carl Sagan called me from Cornell and asked me to join the faculty. I accepted the offer and spent many years at Cornell in the astronomy department, planetary science department. And I became very creative in research then, but still within the bounds of western science, but in the planetary exploration program. That was for a period of about a decade.” ( source )( source ) As you can see, his resume is more than extensive, and O’Leary is just one out of hundreds of people with this type of distinguished background to blow the lid on the extraterrestrial phenomenon. I use his video below in a lot of my extraterrestrial/UFO related articles, and I apologize to our regular readers, but I feel it’s always useful to share with readers who have yet to come across it. The clip is taken from the Thrive documentary which, if you haven’t seen yet, I highly recommend. You can read his entire biography — though I’ll warn you it is quite large — HERE . Above I’ve provided only the highlights of his impressive career. Brian passed away shortly after this video was taken. Apparently it happened shortly after having a heart attack and a diagnosis of intestinal cancer. What He Said Carl Sagan Did He had some interesting things to say during a live interview with Kerry Cassidy of Project Camelot (view full live interview here , read transcript of video here ). O’Leary and Sagan were close for a number of years, but had a little bit of a falling out when O’Leary decided to leave Cornell. In the interview, he remarked: It was… One very cold snowy day in May, I landed in Syracuse, and there was a horizontal blizzard — in May — and I said: That’s it for upstate New York . And Carl thought that was very frivolous. Because, of course, he was kind of an empire-builder kind of guy; and he also had a huge ego. After he left, O’Leary started to examine some of Carl’s work. He said that the famous “Face” in Cydonia on Mars — photographed by Viking in 1975, this enormous formation (about a mile across) resembled a human face and created a major buzz at the time — was tampered with by Sagan before being released to the public: It was very, very disappointing to me, because not only was Carl wrong, he also fudged data. He published a picture of the “Face” in Parade Magazine , a popular article, saying that the “Face” was just a natural formation, but he doctored the picture to make it not look like a face. At this time, Sagan and O’Leary were arguably the world’s two leading experts on Mars, and they entered into many disagreements over that face. This rift was made clear in O’Leary’s publication in 1998, “Carl Sagan & I: On Opposite Sides of Mars.” It can be found in The Case for the Face: Scientists Examine the Evidence for Alien Artifacts on Mars , eds. Stanley V. McDaniel and Monica Rix Paxson. Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press. In May of 1990, O’Leary released a paper titled “ Analysis of Images of the Face on Mars and Possible Intelligent Origin ” which only further demonstrated his skepticism. It was published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol.43 No.5. O’Leary also went on the record and stated: I began to realize, just directly from the scientific point of view, not only hearsay, that this man was colluding with NASA, that there might be more to this than before. . . . Carl was on a committee with a number of notable people. There was a report issued by the Brookings Institution in 1961 — and that’s about when I knew Carl, during those years; the ’60s mostly was when I worked closely with him — that he and this other group said: Well, if any ETs ever showed up on the Earth, it has to be covered up. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to manage this, because if we can’t, then it would be too much of a culture shock. Quite a shocking statement from someone of Brian’s stature, isn’t it? In the interview, he goes on to say that Carl and his colleagues recommended that the governments cover up the UFO phenomenon, and that he believes this provided justification for the ongoing cover-up It’s important to note that this does not make Sagan a ‘bad guy.’ He was clearly the opposite of that, and his love for science and educating humanity was quite clear. If he was in favour of covering this up, if he did know about it, there is a very good chance it was done for what they perceived to be, good reasons. Sure, there might be some corporate reasons, and some other not so pleasant reasons the cover-up remains today, but it’s plausible to assume that in the beginning, perhaps there was no I’ll intent. “Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source) Why It’s Time To Listen To Contactees, Abductees & Experiences/ A Psychological Standpoint Just to clarify, ‘contactees’ are usually those who have reported ‘friendly’ contact experiences with extraterrestrials, ‘abductees’ are those who have had what they perceive to be fearful experiences, and experiencers are those who neither view the experience as ‘good’ or ‘bad,” but simply just an experience. It’s important to note this, because various people have reported different types of experiences with different types of beings. “Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered… We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time.” – Dr. Edgar Mitchell, ScD, 6th man to walk on the Moon ( source ) ( source ) The reality is that some people who claim to have had contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings actually have. John Mack, A Harvard professor, psychiatrist and Pulitzer Price recipient stresses that: “Yes, it’s both. It’s both literally, physically happening to a degree; and it’s also some kind of psychological, spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it asks us to stretch to open to realities that are not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which our consciousness, our, if you will, learning processes over the past several hundred years have closed us off.” ( source ) We published an article earlier this year regarding John Mack, and more than 60 school children witnessing non-human beings and a large craft landing. The children were interviewed by him, and it was quite a remarkable story with all of the children providing very similiar stories. Until this day these children have been speaking of it, an event occurred more than 20 years ago…. “They describe these events like a person talks about something that has happened to them. I can tell that these are people of sound mind telling me something…” (quote continued and taken from the video linked below) -Dr. John Mack, professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School You can watch THIS video of Mack Interview the children, and you can read THIS article that goes more into detail on that case. According to retired McGill University professor in the Department of Psychology (research areas beings cognition and cognitive Neuroscience), Dr. Don Donderi: “Some of what people report as UFOs are extraterrestrial (ET) vehicles. Some of those extraterrestrial vehicles actually have ET crews, and some of those ET crews catch and release humans.” ( source ) Academicians like these, and others like Richard Dolan , David M. Jacobs and more have been studying this phenomena for decades, and the reports of beings and examining why they are here, what they are doing, what they look like and more has been documented by their (and others) research. What I find most fascinating about these stories is how many of them seem to compliment each other instead of contradicting each other, which just adds to the mystery. As far as physical research goes: “There are a great many photographs of such body marks, many of which are in an equilateral triangle pattern of red dots on the wrist or near the ankle. Also common are scoop marks,” in which it appears as if a small amount of tissue was removed from beneath the skin, leaving an indentation.” -Richard Dolan (taken from his book, UFOs for the 21st century mind ) Below is a clip of Dr. Roger Leir. a doctor of podiatric medicine, and arguably the best known individual with regards to extracting alleged alien implants. He has performed more than fifteen surgeries that removed sixteen separate distinct objects. These objects have been investigated by several prestigious laboratories, including Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico Tech, and many others. Unfortunately, he passed away in March 2014, but his legacy lives on. 
+Truth is, as former NASA astronaut and Princeton Physics Professor puts it, “there is abundant evidence that we are being contacted, that civilizations have been visiting us for a vary long time.” ( source ) Interesting Quotes About The UFO Phenomenon (A Few Out Of Many) ***Please keep in mind, the documentation regarding this phenomenon can be found from links that were mentioned in the very first paragraph of this article ” Everything is in a process of investigation both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world. The nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data.” – General Carlos Castro Cavero (1979). From “UFOs and the National Security State, Volume 2,″ written by Richard Dolan. “There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, by other civilizations. Who they are, where they are from, and what they want should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not be the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.” ( source ) – Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee “There is another way whether it’s wormholes or warping space, there’s got to be a way to generate energy so that you can pull it out of the vacuum, and the fact that they’re here shows us that they found a way.” ( source ) – Jack Kasher, Ph.D, Professor Emeritus of physics, University of Nebraska. “This thing has gotten so highly-classified… it is just impossible to get anything on it. I have no idea who controls the flow of need-to-know because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it to be my business since. I have been interested in this subject for a long time and I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified.” – Senator Barry Goldwater, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (source) “Yes, it’s both. It’s both literally, physically happening to a degree; and it’s also some kind of psychological, spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it asks us to stretch to open to realities that are not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which our consciousness, our, if you will, learning processes over the past several hundred years have closed us off.” – John Mack,Dr. John E. Mack, a Harvard University psychologist and Pulitzer prize winner” ( source ) “An extraterrestrial influence is investigating our planet. Something is monitoring the planet and they are monitoring it very cautiously.” — 2008 Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel ( source )( source ) “Some of what people report as UFOs are extraterrestrial (ET) vehicles. Some of those extraterrestrial vehicles actually have ET crews, and some of those ET crews catch and release humans.” — Dr. Don Donderi, a retired McGill University Professor of 40 years in the Department of Psychology ( source ) “Intelligent beings from other star systems have been and are visiting our planet Earth. They are variously referred to as Visitors, Others, Star People, Et’s, etc…They are visiting Earth now; this is not a matter of conjecture or wistful thinking. – Theodor C. Loder III, Phd, Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences, University of New Hampshire ( source ) “Decades ago, visitors from other plants warned us about where we were headed and offered to help. But instead, we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after.” – Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defense Minister ( source ) My people tell of Star People who came to us many generations ago. The Star people brought spiritual teachings and stories and maps of the cosmos and they offered these freely. They were kind, loving, and set a great example. When they left us, my people say there was a loneliness like no other.” – Richard Wagamese , Ojibway Author ( source ) I’m skeptical about many things, including the notion that government always knows best, and that the people can’t be trusted with the truth. The time to pull the curtain back on this subject is long overdue. We have statements from the most credible sources – those in a position to know – about a fascinating phenomenon, the nature of which is yet to be determined. John Podesta, for example — former White House Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, Barack Obama’s right hand man (councillor), and the current head of Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign,Taken from Leslie Kean’s 2010 New York Times bestseller, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record, in which Podesta wrote the forward “Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered… We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time…I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real.” – Doctor Edgar Mitchell, 6th man to walk on the moon( source ) ( source )( source) 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+784,"In The Name Of Party Unity, Trump Meets With Ryan, Other GOP Leaders","In The Name Of Party Unity, Trump Meets With Ryan, Other GOP Leaders
+
+Donald Trump arrived in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to meet with his party's congressional leaders to hash out their differences and talk GOP unity ahead of what is likely to be a pitched general-election battle against Hillary Clinton.
+
+First up was a private meeting with House Speaker Paul Ryan. The two arrived around 9 a.m. ET at the Republican National Committee in a session orchestrated by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.
+
+Swarms of journalists, protesters and onlookers crowded around the building just behind the U.S. Capitol. The crazy scene included a Trump impersonator in a huge piñata mask mocking Trump on a megaphone, immigration activists, signs that read ""Trump is a racist"" and ""Islamophobia is un-American,"" and chants of ""GOP RIP, GOP RIP.""
+
+Leaders entered through the back door, avoiding a media scrum of 50 or so reporters.
+
+Ryan sent shock waves through the GOP when he announced last week that he was not yet ready to embrace the New York businessman as the GOP standard-bearer.
+
+""It's going to take more than a week just to repair and unify this party,"" Ryan told the Wall Street Journal in a Facebook Live interview. ""If we just pretend we're unified without actually unifying, then we'll be at half-strength in the fall, and that won't go well for us.""
+
+Ryan told reporters that he does not really know Trump. They met briefly in 2012 when Ryan ran on Mitt Romney's presidential ticket. The two men also spoke on the phone in March.
+
+Ryan said the meeting is, in part, a relationship-building exercise. He told reporters Wednesday that he does not expect he will change Trump's mind on policy matters where they disagree, but he wants the Trump wing and the Ryan wing of the party to work together this fall.
+
+""This is a big-tent party,"" Ryan said. ""There is room for different policy disputes in this party. We come from different wings of the party. The goal here is to unify the various wings of the party around common principles so we can go forward unified.""
+
+Trump initially dissed Ryan for not endorsing his campaign, but he offered a more conciliatory tone in an interview with Fox's Bill O'Reilly.
+
+""I have a lot of respect for Paul, and I think we are going to have a very good meeting,"" Trump said.
+
+Asked if he expected Ryan to ""fall in line"" and endorse him, Trump responded: ""I don't think 'fall into line' is the right words. I think he loves this party, he loves this country, and he wants to see something good happen.""
+
+Trump is also expected to meet with the House GOP leadership team. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., have endorsed Trump. House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., the highest-ranking GOP woman in Congress, has not. Like Ryan, she says she wants to meet with Trump before she makes that call.
+
+Trump will then meet with Senate GOP leaders. Unlike Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., quickly announced his support for Trump after the candidate's decisive victory in the May 4 Indiana primary that made his nomination a foregone conclusion.
+
+""I think most of our members believe that he's won the nomination the old-fashioned way: He got more votes than anybody else,"" McConnell told reporters Tuesday, ""and we respect the voices of the Republican primary voters across the country.""",REAL
+1427,Trump Calls for the Return of Waterboarding by US,"“You know, they don’t use waterboarding over there; they use chopping off people’s heads,” Trump said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” Waterboarding, a method of torture in which water is poured over the face of an immobilized prisoner to simulate drowning, is “peanuts” compared with that, Trump said. He said he “would absolutely bring back interrogation and strong interrogation.”
+
+Ben Carson, running 4 percentage points behind Trump in the latest Bloomberg Politics national poll, taken Nov. 15-17, declined to say whether he’d favor waterboarding, during an appearance on the same program.
+
+“I’m not one who is real big on telling the enemy what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do,” Carson said.
+
+Trump seemed to moderate earlier comments that were taken as support for a U.S. government registry of Muslims, saying he wants a database for refugees coming into the country from Syria.
+
+“When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don’t know if they’re ISIS, we don’t know if it’s a Trojan horse,” Trump said. “And I definitely want a database and other checks and balances.”
+
+The billionaire New York real-estate developer also argued for a program to monitor activity at U.S. mosques.
+
+“I don’t want to close mosques; I want to surveil mosques,” he said. Without what he called “strong measures,” he warned that “you’re going to see buildings coming down all over New York City and elsewhere.”
+
+Carson, a retired doctor, also agreed with heavy monitoring of those with the most potential of leaning toward terrorism.
+
+“We should monitor anything -- mosques, church, school, you know, shopping center -- where there is a lot of radicalization going on,” Carson said, acknowledging that it could require beefing up U.S. intelligence capabilities.
+
+Carson, who has said he favored what he considered a fairly easy measure to undermine the Islamic State’s finances by destroying their oil fields, was questioned on that point after President Barack Obama said such methods aren’t so simple according to the “best military minds.”
+
+“We don’t really have the option of deciding whether it’s easy or not to take them out,” Carson said Sunday. “We need to get rid of their ability to derive money from oil, whether we take the fields or whether we blow the fields up.”
+
+He said Iraqi military forces may perform better if they worked directly with U.S. special operations personnel.
+
+Trump was also questioned Sunday about whether he would favor banning people on terrorist watch lists from obtaining firearms, to which he responded, “If somebody is on a watch list and an enemy of state and we know it’s an enemy of state, I would keep them away, absolutely.”",REAL
+3273,McConnell announces 'Plan B' to stop Iran deal,"Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced a ""Plan B"" to halt a nuclear deal that would lift sanctions against Iran.
+
+The measure, which Republican aides said likely would be voted on Thursday, would prevent President Obama from lifting the sanctions until Iran releases four jailed Americans and recognizes the right of Israel to exist.
+
+McConnell made the announcement as Democrats prepared for a second time to filibuster a resolution of disapproval of the nuclear deal. Soon after McConnell's remarks, 42 Democrats again filibustered the resolution, preventing it from getting the 60 votes needed to advance.
+
+""My strong preference is for Democrats to simply allow an up-or-down vote on the president's Iran deal."" McConnell said. ""But if they're determined to make that impossible, then at the very least we should be able to provide some protection to Israel and long-overdue relief to Americans who've languished in Iranian custody for years. Either way, this debate will continue.""",REAL
+6013,Hillary Responds To Creepy Joe Biden Caught Groping Dozens of Young Women,"Hillary Responds To Creepy Joe Biden Caught Groping Dozens of Young Women Also, Michelle Obama hosts an event for rappers who promote rape Alex Jones | Infowars.com - October 28, 2016 Comments 
+As if the POTUS race could not get any creepier — we now have Mr. groping young girls, VP Joe Biden, come out against the words Donald Trump used. 
+Alex Jones illustrates how Biden, Hillary and Tim Kaine are some of the creepiest people around. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . The Most Offensive Halloween EVER! - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force",FAKE
+8912,"Spin, MSM! Spin! Hillary/FBI news has Republicans ‘pouncing’ like crazy","— Nathan Wurtzel (@NathanWurtzel) October 28, 2016 
+Let’s get to it: 
+— Alex Leary (@learyreports) October 28, 2016 
+Of course. @learyreports @marcorubio There you go! Just got the first square in my ""Predictable MSM Story Reaction"" Bingo chart covered. Thanks, man! 
+— Shane Styles (@shaner5000) October 28, 2016 
+Inevitable? Of course. But that doesn’t make it any less obnoxious. There it is- Republicans always ""pounce"" on scandal involving a Democrat. https://t.co/rMqilpw6pc 
+— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) October 28, 2016 
+When will the MSM get some new material? They should be concerned about being this predictable.",FAKE
+3194,GOP candidates jockey for position in final debate dash,"Less than a week before a bushel of 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls square off for the first time in two Fox News debates, billionaire businessman Donald Trump is holding firm to his primary lead -- while his lower-polling rivals battle for visibility in hopes of making the cut for the prime-time stage.
+
+Trump, seemingly reveling in his role as instigator and bipartisan punching bag, opened up a 7-point lead over the rest of the field in the most recent national poll. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also are polling consistently well.
+
+Rather, the 11th-hour dash is among those in the middle and back of the pack, competing for the last of 10 slots in the prime-time event at Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena.
+
+The Aug. 6 debate is hosted by Fox News, in conjunction with Facebook and the Ohio Republican Party.
+
+The 9 p.m. ET stage will be open to the top 10 candidates in recent national polls. With 17 total candidates now in the race – former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore was the latest, announcing his bid Thursday – not everyone will make the cut.
+
+Those who don’t can qualify for an earlier debate, at 5 p.m. Fox News has eased the criteria for that debate, and candidates will no longer have to reach at least 1 percent in the polls to make the stage, though there are other criteria.
+
+The only Fair & Balanced App ™ that gives you the Power to Decide! Download the Fox News Election HQ 2016 app for iPhone or Android phone.
+
+But there is heavy competition for the main event, the first time leading candidates will face off after seemingly weekly campaign kick-offs.
+
+“There’s too many, and so there is going to be a culling of the herd,” said Mark Jones, political science fellow at the Baker Institute at Houston’s Rice University.
+
+With national poll placement dictating who gets prime-time, the candidates on the margin are doing their best to boost their visibility, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
+
+Perry challenged poll-leader Trump to a pull-up contest after a week of pummeling the billionaire real estate tycoon for his comments on Mexican illegal immigrants and Sen. John McCain.
+
+Meanwhile, Christie declared war on marijuana this week, promising Coloradans they had better enjoy legalized pot today because he will enforce federal laws against it when he is in the White House.
+
+Speaking with Fox News on Thursday, the Garden State guv said ""we're very confident we'll be at the 9:00 debate.""
+
+After spending the last several months going after Bush – now third in the RealClearPolitics poll average, behind Walker – Christie is competing these days more with Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Christie clocked in at 3 percent in the same RCP average, right behind Kasich, putting them on the tail end of the top 10.
+
+Potentially outside the margin, but fighting to get in, are Perry, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.
+
+Former New York Gov. George Pataki and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham are further behind. Each, though, has been trying to take on Trump in recent weeks, with the latter putting out a viral video of himself destroying a cell phone – a response to Trump giving out his number during the McCain flap (Graham had lashed out at Trump for questioning his friend McCain’s heroism, triggering Trump’s ire).
+
+“I think the top eight candidates are comfortable where they are,” said Jones. “[The others] are pushing the envelope with the goal of rising above the dust that was created when you have 17 candidates running.”
+
+Not making the prime-time cut isn’t the end of the road by any means, and there’s still plenty of time before the Iowa caucuses.
+
+“I don’t think being left out of the debate is a death knell,” said Steve Deace, who hosts a conservative radio talk show in the Hawkeye State. However, he said, “it can hurt from a momentum standpoint, in that it is a spotlight you are not getting.”
+
+“It will be a huge spotlight and I think for someone who is underfunded and under-organized who is impressive when they are in front of people, like Bobby Jindal, this is the spotlight they are going to need.”
+
+Perhaps an indication of how comfortable the GOP front-runner feels right now, Trump is in Scotland and attended the Women's British Open at one of his resorts – though he still talked campaign shop with reporters Thursday.
+
+Bush, though, is back on the stump stateside on Friday, with plans to address the National Urban League, along with retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Walker and Christie are campaigning in Iowa Friday, as is Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. Kasich is in New Hampshire.
+
+For all the buzz and attention surrounding Trump, there is now pressure on him to perform.
+
+“He is clearly the man of the hour from a buzz standpoint,” Deace said. “I think with one or two exceptions, the goal of the others is to get him to go from zany to crazy, to self-immolate.”
+
+But that might be difficult, considering he’s weathered a string of controversies over his blunt remarks since entering the race. The worst thing that can happen is for Trump to pull his punches and wimp out, Deace said. “His entire campaign is based on him being a blunt instrument he can get back at Washington with. If he dulls those edges, that would be the death knell for him.”
+
+Deace said the others, though, have something to gain by not going for the bait.
+
+“It will be interesting to see how Scott Walker performs in this environment. I think we have to see if this [debate] diminishes his stature or he is able to craft an everyman persona who is a nice contrast to the bigger personalities,” he said. On the other hand, “I think Ben Carson has a much more reserved, laid-back way of communicating than the rest of these candidates. Will he bore people, or be seen as the adult in the room?”",REAL
+7706,"Emma Watson Urges US Women to Consider Gender Equality Nov 8, Gets Massive Wake-Up Call on Facebook","Getty - Timothy A. Clary 
+British actress Emma Watson is best known for her role as Hermione Granger in the “Harry Potter” movies, but in 2016, her career took a shift in a very different direction. 
+Watson, who is a self-described feminist and activist, announced earlier this year she was taking the year off to study, while simultaneously working as a UN Ambassador in the gender-equality-focused “HeForShe” campaign. 
+But the 26-year-old recently weighed in on American affairs on Facebook , explaining how the presidential election will affect the entire world : 
+“At times, politics may seem disillusioning, filled with rhetoric and smokescreens. However, regardless of our personal beliefs, it can’t be denied that the result of the upcoming US presidential election will have ripple effects around the world and impact, in one way or another, the lives of millions and millions of people.” 
+Watson continued by explaining how the United States is like her “second home,” having close friends that live in the U.S. She added that now, more than ever, she wishes she could vote: 
+""We know one of the most reliable indicators of peace and prosperity, nationally and globally, is not a country's level of wealth, democracy, or ethno-religious identity; but how well its women and girls are treated (Sex and World Peace by Valerie Hudson). The next president will be able to make decisions about women, about their bodies, about how they are treated at work, on university campuses and at school, about how men treat women and about their rights as citizens . These decisions affect how young people form their ideas of gender. 
+These decisions will affect whether we believe equality is an idea that matters."" Loading Facebook Post... 
+She even defended the American men she knows well, saying they treat women the way they deserve to be treated, but stressed the issue shouldn't be “overlooked or brushed aside”: 
+""In the last US election, 70 million women cast ballots versus 60 million men. Women, your vote could swing this election. Please go out and vote on the 8th of November. Read up on both sides of your state propositions (if you have any). 
+You have real power to decide the future of generations to come."" 
+Watson's letter undoubtedly had good intentions and amassed 144,000 “likes” on Facebook, but some Americans felt her message was incomplete. 
+Carisa Schram, an American woman, argued about those voting for Hillary Clinton in the name of “gender equality”: 
+“Just because she is a the female candidate doesn't mean she is the right female candidate. Her track record or the attempted erased record is appallingly despicable. The way she has treated women is absolutely deplorable. I could never vote for this woman and be able to sleep peacefully at night.” 
+John Silk, also an American citizen, piled on the reasons why he wouldn't be voting for the female candidate: 
+“So you think the woman running for office is a shining example of what the first woman American president should be? A person who cheated in order to win the nomination. A person who committed crimes others have been jailed for. A person running a proven corrupt organization? As a citizen of the US this is not who I want as the first female prez. You maybe but not Hillary. No woman should back her up if they truly support women's rights. Voting for her because she is a woman and ignoring her short comings is a travesty to our country.” 
+Mason Frost commented : 
+""I have to disagree with much of this post. 
+For one, how well women and girls are treated is promoted over democracy. I agree with equality, but it shouldn't have any sort of cost to the democratic process. 
+Also, there are many more issues than gender equality. That would not be the single basis of my vote. There are so many more factors: economy, immigration, national security, foreign relations, SCOTUS, protections of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, taxes, etc. 
+If you ever cast a vote based on a single issue, you aren't properly carrying out your duty as an American."" 
+Though Watson didn't mention either presidential candidate's name in her post, it was pretty clear to most that she's rooting for Clinton. 
+According to Glamour UK , the actress spoke last month at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan to promote the UN's HeForShe initiative. Watson celebrated the possibility of a first female president: 
+“I don't know if I would have believed you if you had told me two years ago before I made my HeforShe speech that we might have the first female president of the United States.” Emma Watson talks 'excruciating' election: 'I wish I could cast a vote' // Easy enough, just walk across the border https://t.co/6P5e2ibzfR — James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 26, 2016 
+A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows Clinton with a 20-point lead over Trump among female voters. ",FAKE
+5243,Unpacking Donald Trump’s history with this fall’s debate moderators,"After months of uncertainty, Donald Trump has committed to participating in the general-election presidential debates.
+
+“I expect to do all three. I look forward to the debates,” Trump told reporters in Ohio on Monday. “I think it is an important element of what we’re doing. I think you have an obligation to do the debates.”
+
+One reason for the long delay in Trump's agreement to join Hillary Clinton onstage this fall had been complaints about the schedule — in particular, two debates that conflict with prime-time National Football League games.
+
+But perhaps the biggest reason for the holdout: the identities of the journalists asking the questions at those face-offs. “I'll have to see who the moderators are,” the Republican nominee told Time magazine last month. “Yeah, I would say that certain moderators would be unacceptable, absolutely.” Trump had boycotted a primary debate because he was unhappy with the inclusion of Fox News host Megyn Kelly as a moderator. The stakes were lower then, but he showed he was willing to follow through on the threat.
+
+As of Friday, the lineup was out: NBC’s Lester Holt will moderate the first debate on Sept. 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.; ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Anderson Cooper will lead a town-hall-style forum at Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 9; and Fox News’s Chris Wallace would handle the questioning at the final debate on  Oct. 19 at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
+
+[Why Donald Trump might not debate Hillary Clinton]
+
+The diverse roster named by the Commission on Presidential Debates included:
+
+Vice-presidential debate moderator Elaine Quijano also represented a couple of milestones, as the first Asian American moderator of a general-election debate and the first to work primarily for a digital network (CBSN).
+
+None of the names on the list were deal-breakers for Trump. But he has tangled with all of them in the past.
+
+The GOP nominee probably had no objection to Wallace, given that he twice agreed to participate in GOP primary debates moderated by the “Fox News Sunday” anchor. But Wallace was tough on him at those events, most memorably when he used full-screen graphics to fact-check Trump on the spot.
+
+Wallace later told me: “Do I take a certain pleasure when I open the gate and he decides to walk down the path and I’ve got the bear trap at the end of the path? Yeah. Sure.”
+
+Holt, who moderated a Democratic primary debate, has likewise tripped up Trump with fact-checks. In a June interview, he pressed for evidence to support Trump’s claim that Clinton was asleep at critical times during the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and got the casino magnate to admit that his assertion might not be true.
+
+“She was asleep at the wheel, whether she was sleeping or not,” Trump conceded. “Who knows if she was sleeping?”
+
+Later in the interview, Holt flummoxed Trump by asking how he could say for certain that Clinton's private email server was hacked.
+
+HOLT: But is there any evidence it was hacked other than routine phishing? TRUMP: I think I read that, and I heard it, and somebody also gave me that information. TRUMP: I will report back to you. I will give it to you. HOLT: You said it with such certainty yesterday. TRUMP: I don't know if certainty. Probably she was hacked.
+
+Holt isn't the only journalist with a record of throwing Trump off balance.
+
+Trump participated in a primary debate moderated by Raddatz but faced only a few questions from her: Raddatz split duties with ABC’s David Muir, and there were seven candidates onstage. The exchanges were uneventful.
+
+But Raddatz absolutely grilled Trump last summer in his first interview after saying Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was “not a war hero.” She also confronted Trump about his rhetoric in general.
+
+“There seems to be a pattern, Mr. Trump,” Raddatz said. “When you’re criticized or attacked, you often respond with name-calling, using terms like ‘dummy,’ ‘loser,’ ‘total losers’ on Twitter and elsewhere. You even demean some people’s physical appearance. Is that something you would continue doing if you were president? Isn’t that language beneath the office of the president?”
+
+Trump has granted many interviews to Raddatz’s partner in the second debate, Cooper, who moderated two Democratic primary debates. When the GOP standard-bearer finally agreed to appear on CNN recently for the first time in more than two months, it was on Cooper’s program.
+
+That interview produced more headlines about Trump’s immigration flip-flops, as Cooper pressed him to reconcile the “softening” he had described to Sean Hannity with the hard-line stance he took early in the campaign. At one point in the conversation, Trump accused Cooper of being on Clinton’s side.
+
+“I know you want to protect her as much as you possibly can,” said Trump, who often refers to CNN as the Clinton News Network.
+
+The hard questions Trump has faced from these moderators were well within the bounds of fairness. But Trump is not one to limit himself to rational bias claims. Even those fall moderators who have been involved with a presidential debate in past cycles can expect to oversee face-offs unlike any they have handled before.
+
+This story has been updated.",REAL
+1269,"Fiery Republican race heads to S.C., known for dirty tricks and brawls","One of the first signs that the presidential campaign had arrived in the wild and woolly political state of South Carolina came Wednesday morning in this coastal retiree haven when Sen. Lindsey O. Graham introduced his favored candidate, Jeb Bush, and issued a warning.
+
+“If you’re not ready to play,” he said, “don’t come to South Carolina.”
+
+A state known for its nasty political brawls is about to host an epic one, pitting a foul-mouthed celebrity billionaire against a band of senators and governors scrapping to challenge him. The Republican presidential candidates arrived here Wednesday ready for 10 days of combat that could bring clarity to what so far has been a muddy nomination contest.
+
+Since Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary failed to deliver much certainty, the Palmetto State’s GOP primary on Feb. 20 could prove determinative for a trio of candidates vying to become the GOP establishment’s consensus alternative to front-runner Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
+
+The attacks began early on Wednesday. Aboard a chartered jet en route to Spartanburg, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) bashed Bush, his one-time mentor, for lacking foreign-policy experience and Trump for not sharing policy specifics. Later in the day, he talked up his opposition to Common Core education standards, an implicit dig at Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who are proponents.
+
+Meanwhile, Bush and his aides hit Kasich for expanding Medicaid under President Obama’s health-care law and for supporting military defense cuts. “He led the charge to expand Medicaid and is quite proud of that,” said Bush, a former Florida governor. “I wouldn’t be proud of that, to be honest with you.”
+
+Bush also hit Trump, calling him a “phenomenal entertainer” who lacks the temperament to be president.
+
+Katon Dawson, a former state GOP chairman who has not endorsed anyone, explained what makes the South Carolina primary unique.
+
+“People in Iowa expect the candidate to trudge through the snow, do small meetings in diners,” he said. “In New Hampshire, they expect a candidate to come to their living room, sit on the sofa, have some coffee. In South Carolina, 700,000 people want to see how you take a punch.”
+
+[Rubio leaves New Hampshire with his campaign badly damaged]
+
+Trump sits in the pole position here, where the billionaire mogul’s anti-immigration, outsider crusade has found deep support. Top South Carolina Republicans see Trump as the one to beat, noting that the electorate historically votes based on values and emotion.
+
+Trump rallied a few thousand supporters in a livestock arena at Clemson University in Pendleton, where he went after only one opponent: Bush. Trump called him “low energy” and a “stiff” who is controlled by his donors. “The last thing we need is another Bush,” Trump said as the crowd cheered.
+
+Trump has about a dozen campaign staffers and four offices in the state, along with three RVs that function as mobile offices in rural areas. But it is unclear whether they can persuade the thousands of people who pack his rallies to cast ballots for him in a primary expected to draw exponentially more voters than the Iowa or New Hampshire contests.
+
+The most consequential moment may be Saturday night’s debate on CBS, where Trump could come under intense fire from Cruz and Bush and where Rubio will seek redemption from a disastrous debate that wounded him in New Hampshire. In 2012, Newt Gingrich’s electric performances in two debates the week before the primary lifted him from a hobbling third place in the polls to a decisive victory over Mitt Romney.
+
+Rubio, coming off a humbling fifth-place finish in New Hampshire, seemed to be in search of catharsis. The candidate accused of being too scripted opened up to reporters aboard his plane for a rare 45-minute news conference.
+
+He drew on his time as a college football cornerback to frame his outlook. “You’re gonna get beat,” Rubio said, adding: “You gotta put that play behind you, because the next play is just as important.”
+
+Rep. Trey Gowdy, one of Rubio’s biggest backers in South Carolina, said the key is to “let people meet Marco.”
+
+
+
+“When you meet him, you love him,” Gowdy said. He recalled a recent swing through a Spartanburg restaurant: “By the end of Marco walking around the tables in the restaurant, he was far more popular than anyone he was with. To know him is to love him.”
+
+Two candidates did not make the trip to South Carolina. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former technology executive Carly Fiorina announced Wednesday that they were suspending their campaigns after disappointing finishes in New Hampshire. This leaves six major candidates, including retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, still in the race.
+
+Trump’s dominance here puts him in the crosshairs of Cruz, who defeated the businessman in the Iowa caucuses after a caustic advertising blitz and attacks on the stump. Cruz plans to replicate that strategy in South Carolina.
+
+“The only way to beat Donald Trump is to highlight the simple truth of his record — it is not conservative,” Cruz said Wednesday in Myrtle Beach.
+
+Cruz was more specific on Mike Gallagher’s talk radio show, highlighting Trump’s past support for abortion rights and bank bailouts.
+
+Cruz is getting backup on the airwaves from his allied super PAC, Keep the Promise I, which has committed more than $2.5 million in the state. Strategist Kellyanne Conway, who runs the group, said the ads would repeat similar attacks leveled against Trump in Iowa.
+
+“There’s some nagging concern he’s gone through the political witness-protection program to emerge a spanking new conservative,” Conway said. “Eminent domain is a big problem for him. If Trump’s entire narrative of ‘I’m for the little guy’ hits a speed bump, it’s because South Carolina becomes more familiar with the victims of Trump’s success.”
+
+Bush is taking a three-pronged approach in South Carolina: Keep up attacks on Trump’s temperament and lack of serious policy ideas; raise doubts about Rubio’s maturity and governing experience; and remind voters in the military-heavy state that Kasich once advocated deep Pentagon spending cuts.
+
+He will be helped by his super PAC, Right to Rise USA, which Wednesday pumped in another $1.7 million in ad dollars on top of roughly $10 million already budgeted. The group is airing one TV ad attacking Rubio’s lack of legislative accomplishments and another featuring an endorsement from former president George W. Bush.
+
+During a Wednesday campaign stop in Bluffton, Bush focused mostly on Trump. When a man asked what he thought of Trump’s vow to run the country like a business, Bush replied, “The problem with Trump is he went bankrupt four times.”
+
+Bush has 20 paid staffers working out of four offices across the state, and his advisers are counting on goodwill for his family name as well as the enthusiastic endorsement of Graham.
+
+Since dropping out of the presidential race, Graham, the state’s senior senator, has quickly become one of Bush’s top strategists. The two have bonded during long car rides and debate prep sessions.
+
+“I’m going to make this a referendum on commander-in-chief,” Graham said. “The centerpiece of my campaign was defending this country, winning a war we couldn’t afford to lose, and the reason I picked Jeb is I think he’s most qualified to do the job.”
+
+Bush plans to make his South Carolina campaign a family affair. He turns 63 on Thursday and is scheduled to make appearances with his wife, three grown children and four grandchildren. He also is expected to campaign with his brother.
+
+“Jeb Bush is bringing in the firepower of 43,” said Dawson, an ally of the former president’s. “If Trump wants to tangle with George W. Bush, that ain’t like tangling with the former governor of Florida. That’s tangling with a Texan, and if the George W. Bush we all know shows up, the one who’s a competitor — well, I relish seeing that fight.”
+
+[With second-place finish, Kasich is thrust into relevance]
+
+Potentially standing in Bush’s way is Kasich, who was buoyant following his surprisingly strong second-place finish in New Hampshire. But Kasich is getting a late start in South Carolina, where he has just three full-time staffers. His super PAC, New Day for America, has a robust presence in the state and plans to air ads.
+
+Kasich is targeting moderate voters in specific areas of the state where he can pick up delegates based on South Carolina’s proportional allocation rules, such as Charleston, populated with many business-friendly Republicans, as well as diverse counties in and around Columbia.
+
+Kasich told reporters flying with him to Charleston on Wednesday that he hopes to keep his message optimistic, while acknowledging that the South Carolina dynamic could be dramatically different.
+
+“I know we can’t just go through this, you know, like falling off the turnip truck and saying that everything is just going to be positive, because I’m going to have to respond to some of this stuff,” Kasich said. “But I’m starting to really think we’re on to something.”
+
+Sullivan reported from Spartanburg, S.C., and Rucker reported from Washington. Robert Costa in Manchester, N.H., Jose A. DelReal in Charleston, S.C., Jenna Johnson in Pendleton, S.C., David Weigel in Concord, N.H., and Katie Zezima in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+3781,The feds probably won't dismantle the Ferguson PD. That's a good thing.,"Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday he was ""prepared to use all the powers"" the federal government has to get the city of Ferguson, Missouri, in line with the Constitution. Asked if that included ""dismantling the police force,"" Holder said, ""If that's what's necessary, we're prepared to do that.""
+
+It sounds like a radical move on Holder's part. But don't get too swept up in it. The DOJ doesn't exactly have the power to dismantle the Ferguson police department if the city doesn't consent — and would have to go through a lot of steps before getting that power. Plus, dismantling the embattled police department might not fix some of the worst problems outlined in the Justice Department's report.
+
+The Department of Justice doesn't have the power to dismantle local police departments at will. The way it's probably going to ""work with"" the City of Ferguson, as Holder also hinted today, is by drawing up an agreement where Ferguson's police would still be independent, but would be monitored by the DOJ. (The agreement would be enforced in federal court.) The feds would only take over if the city failed, and failed badly, to make the changes laid out in the agreement.
+
+This nearly happened in Oakland in 2012; as a compromise, the federal government fired the police chief but left the department under the city's control. But it was a full decade after the agreement was first signed.
+
+if dismantling happens, it'll be something the city agrees to do itself — or even suggests to begin with
+
+If Holder really wants to tear down the Ferguson Police Department and start over, the best way to do that would be to make dissolution part of the original court-enforced agreement. If the city didn't agree, he could sue them to do it (which would also take years).
+
+But given how expensive it's going to be for Ferguson's police to comply with the likely court agreement, it might actually be cheaper for them to agree to give up and try again. So the possibility exists that the Ferguson police department will be dissolved — but it would almost certainly be because the city of Ferguson agreed to do it, or even suggested it in the first place. That also means the city would be in charge of putting together whatever is going to replace the Ferguson PD.
+
+Getting rid of the police in Ferguson would only address half of the problems identified by the federal government. The Department of Justice also found massive discrimination and Constitutional violations in the municipal court system, including arresting people for showing up to court without being able to afford a court fee; suspending drivers' licenses of people who didn't even know that they'd had a court date, let alone missed one; and setting jail bonds not based on what someone would be able to pay, but based on making the most money for the city.
+
+There's no way the federal government's going to be satisfied if Ferguson reforms its police but leaves its courts the way they are. Disbanding the police department might allow the city to focus on reforming the courts, but it won't be enough on its own.
+
+More importantly, though, who would do police work in Ferguson after the Ferguson police force gets dismantled?
+
+the actions of ""other law enforcement agencies in st. louis county...have contributed to a general distrust"" of police
+
+Typically, a nearby police force is brought in to take over: either temporarily, while a new police department is hired from the chief down, or permanently, on a contract. And it's not at all clear whether other police departments in the St. Louis area are any better. After all, residents had plenty of experience with the St. Louis County police last summer during the protests after Michael Brown's death — and they didn't treat protesters any better than Ferguson police did.
+
+The DOJ report certainly indicates that the problem in St. Louis is bigger than Ferguson. In fact, some of the things it faults the Ferguson police for doing are things they're being asked to do by other jurisdictions, like arresting people without warrants based on requests from police in other departments. By the same token, many of the unfair court practices the DOJ found appear to be pretty typical in municipal courts in the area.
+
+The report even says: ""Individuals’ experiences with other law enforcement agencies in St. Louis County, including with the police departments in surrounding municipalities and the County Police, in many instances have contributed to a general distrust of law enforcement that impacts interactions with the Ferguson police and municipal court.""
+
+If Eric Holder wants to dismantle the problems facing the criminal-justice system throughout the St. Louis area, he's welcome to try — but it's going to take a lot more investigations and potential lawsuits than the one he has going right now.",REAL
+3253,"At Social Security office with a million-person backlog, there’s a new chief","At the Social Security Administration, two officials in charge of one of the government’s worst backlogs—more than 1 million people awaiting a decision about federal disability benefits—have been shifted to other jobs.
+
+Glenn Sklar oversees Social Security’s Office of Disability Adjudication and Review, a branch with about 1,445 special judges who must decide if people who’ve applied for benefits are disabled enough to get them. James Borland is Sklar’s deputy.
+
+[Past coverage: The Social Security office of judges who hear appeals for disability benefits is 990,399 cases behind]
+
+This week, Social Security told its employees that both Sklar and Borland would be moving to other positions within the agency, according to documents obtained by the Washington Post. Both men have been in their jobs since 2010. The office’s new head will be Terrie Gruber, transferred from another part of the Social Security administration.
+
+Last year, the Post wrote about the slow-moving, unwieldy bureaucracy they oversee–which had been running behind since the 1970s, and was only getting more so. At the end of last year, 1,003,580 people were stuck in just one part of the disability process, waiting for a judge to hold a hearing and make a personalized decision about their health and ability to work. The average wait time for those people was 435 days. Both numbers were rising.
+
+Last fall, Sklar told the Post that the agency’s backlog could be fixed, if Social Security got enough funding. ““We have a proven track record of getting the job done when we have adequate and sustained funding,” he said.
+
+LaVenia LaVelle, a spokeswoman for Social Security, said in a statement that Carolyn Colvin—the agency’s acting commissioner since 2013–was making changes in the top ranks. “This is not about an individual but about ensuring under Acting Commissioner Colvin’s leadership the Agency is ready to continue its world class customer service to the American public,” LaVelle said in a statement.
+
+This backlog has also come under congressional scrutiny, led by Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford (R). Lankford has called for reforms that would fix some of the system’s oddest features: it asks judges to use an official list of available jobs that hasn’t been updated in decades, and it sets up perverse incentives that encourage beneficiaries’ hired “representatives” to delay the process.
+
+D. Randall Frye, the president of a union that represents Social Security’s special disability judges, said he hoped that the system’s new leaders and Congress would make changes that streamlined the bureaucracy–and also that they would hire more judges.
+
+“The receipts [of new cases] continue to rise. Right now, we have just over a million cases waiting for a hearing,” he said. “That’s unprecedented.”",REAL
+4875,"Poll: Nine weeks out, a near even race","Washington (CNN) Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton start the race to November 8 on essentially even ground, with Trump edging Clinton by a scant two points among likely voters, and the contest sparking sharp divisions along demographic lines in a new CNN/ORC Poll.
+
+Trump tops Clinton 45% to 43% in the new survey, with Libertarian Gary Johnson standing at 7% among likely voters in this poll and the Green Party's Jill Stein at just 2%.
+
+The topsy-turvy campaign for the presidency has seen both Clinton and Trump holding a significant lead at some point in the last two months, though Clinton has topped Trump more often than not. Most recently, Clinton's convention propelled her to an 8-point lead among registered voters in an early-August CNN/ORC Poll. Clinton's lead has largely evaporated despite a challenging month for Trump, which saw an overhaul of his campaign staff, announcements of support for Clinton from several high-profile Republicans and criticism of his campaign strategy. But most voters say they still expect to see Clinton prevail in November, and 59% think she will be the one to get to 270 electoral votes vs. 34% who think Trump has the better shot at winning.
+
+Neither major third party candidate appears to be making the gains necessary to reach the 15% threshold set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, with just three weeks to go before the first debate on September 26.
+
+The new poll finds the two major party candidates provoke large gaps by gender, age, race, education and partisanship. Among those likely to turn out in the fall, both candidates have secured about the same share of their own partisans (92% of Democrats back Clinton, 90% of Republicans are behind Trump) but independents give Trump an edge, 49% say they'd vote for him while just 29% of independent voters back Clinton. Another 16% back Johnson, 6% Stein.
+
+Women break for Clinton (53% to 38%) while men shift Trump's way (54% to 32%). Among women, those who are unmarried make up the core of her support, 73% of unmarried women back Clinton compared with just 36% of married women. Among men, no such marriage gap emerges, as both unmarried and married men favor Trump.
+
+Younger voters are in Clinton's corner (54% to 29% among those under age 45) while the older ones are more apt to back Trump (54% to 39% among those age 45 or older). Whites mostly support Trump (55% to 34%), while non-whites favor Clinton by a nearly 4-to-1 margin (71% to 18%). Most college grads back Clinton while those without degrees mostly support Trump, and that divide deepens among white voters. Whites who do not hold college degrees support Trump by an almost 3-to-1 margin (68% to 24%) while whites who do have college degrees split 49% for Clinton to 36% for Trump and 11% for Johnson.
+
+Support for Johnson seems to be concentrated among groups where Clinton could stand to benefit from consolidating voters. Although direct comparison between the poll's two-way, head-to-head matchup and its four-way matchup doesn't suggest that Johnson is pulling disproportionately from either candidate, his supporters come mostly among groups where a strong third-party bid could harm Clinton's standing: Younger voters (particularly younger men), whites with college degrees, and independents, notably.
+
+The poll follows several national polls in August suggesting that the margin between the two candidates had tightened following the conventions. A CNN Poll of Polls analysis released Friday showed that Clinton's lead had been cut in half when compared with the height of her convention bounce.
+
+Speaking to reporters aboard her campaign plane Tuesday, Clinton shrugged off a question about the CNN/ORC survey.
+
+""I really pay no attention to polls. When they are good for me -- and there have been a lot of them that have been good for me recently -- I don't pay attention,"" Clinton said. ""When they are not so good, I don't pay attention. We are on a course that we are sticking with.""
+
+While enthusiasm for the campaign has continued to inch up, it remains well off the mark compared with this point in other recent presidential election years. In the new poll, 46% say they are extremely or very enthusiastic, compared with 57% at this point in 2012, 60% in early September of 2008 and 64% in September 2004.
+
+Further, nearly half of voters say they are less enthusiastic about voting in this election than they have been in previous years, while just 42% say they're more excited about this year's contest. Although this question hasn't been asked in every presidential election year, in CNN/ORC and CNN/USA Today/Gallup results dating back to 2000, this poll marks the first time that a significantly larger share of voters say they are less enthusiastic about this year's election. The lack of enthusiasm spikes among Clinton supporters. A majority of Clinton's supporters say they're less excited about voting this year than usual (55%) while most of Trump's backers say they're more excited this time around (56%).
+
+That could be contributing to Trump's slim advantage among likely voters. Among the broader pool of registered voters, Clinton edges Trump by 3 points. The shift among these voters since the convention is largely due to a rebound in Trump's numbers rather than a slide in Clinton's. He's gone from 37% support then to 41% among registered voters now.
+
+Trump holds an edge over Clinton as more trusted to handle two of voters' top four issues -- the economy (56% trust Trump vs. 41% Clinton) and terrorism (51% Trump to 45% Clinton). Clinton holds a solid edge on foreign policy (56% trust her to Trump's 40%), and the public is divided over the fourth issue in the bunch, immigration. On that, 49% favor Clinton's approach, 47% Trump's. At Trump's recent campaign appearances, he has argued that he would do more to improve life for racial and ethnic minorities, but voters seem to disagree, 58% say Clinton is better on that score vs. 36% who choose Trump, and among non-whites, 86% choose Clinton to just 12% who think Trump would better improve their lives.
+
+Trump has his largest edge of the campaign as the more honest and trustworthy of the two major candidates (50% say he is more honest and trustworthy vs. just 35% choosing Clinton) and as the stronger leader, 50% to 42%. Clinton continues to be seen as holding the better temperament to serve effectively as president (56% to 36%) and better able to handle the responsibilities of commander in chief (50% to 45%).
+
+On honesty, Clinton's backers express greater skepticism about their candidate than do Trump's supporters. When asked which candidate is more honest and trustworthy, 94% of Trump's backers say he is, while just 70% of those behind Clinton choose her, with 11% saying Trump is more trustworthy and 17% saying neither of them are. And when voters were asked to name the one issue that would be most important to their vote for president, 5% named honesty or trustworthiness as their top choice, ranking it on par with foreign policy and jobs.
+
+Both candidates remain largely unliked, with majorities saying they have an unfavorable view of each candidate in the new poll.
+
+The CNN/ORC Poll was conducted by telephone Sept. 1-4 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults. The survey includes results among 886 registered voters and 786 likely voters. For results among registered or likely voters, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
+
+Correction: The CNN/ORC Poll topline document released Tuesday contained an error, numbers showing the partisan makeup of the sample on the methodology page were transposed. The correct party makeup of all adults in the poll is 32% Democratic, 28% Republican, 40% independent or something else. This is a similar Democratic tilt to the previous CNN/ORC Poll, in which 28% of respondents described themselves as Democrats and 24% Republicans and on par with the average across all CNN/ORC Polling conducted this year, which yields a 5-point Democratic advantage.""
+
+Among those determined to be likely to vote, 36% described themselves as Democrats, 32% as Republicans.",REAL
+7359,Voting Machine Shocker: Video Proof Election Is Rigged!,"The Clinton campaign have found a way to rig voting machines in order to commit election fraud, and America is completely clueless. 
+Via YourNewsWire 
+Dominion Voting Systems, the biggest voting machine owner in the United States, has been Exposed donating to the Clinton Foundation, and has close ties to George Soros.
+In 2010 Dominion Voting Machines bought out the right to own the machines in 600 jurisdictions across 22 different states, according to Wikipedia.
+
+The same company, Dominion Voting, has also been exposed donating enough money to the Clinton Foundation to make it to their online donor list. Is it any wonder voters have already started reporting that some machines are flipping their votes?
+How blatant is that! Just take a look at the Clinton Foundation’s website itself.
+
+Wow. That is just such a strange coincidence, don’t you think? Right around the same time Hillary Clinton was deciding to retire as Secretary of State and focus on her campaign, this company bought out half the voting machines in the country. And if that is not bad enough, one of the top owners of Dominion Voting is none other than the king of corruption himself, George Soros.
+But it gets even worse. 
+Dominion Voting Systems and The Clinton Foundation did a 2.25 million dollar charity initiative in developing nations together called the DELIAN Project.
+“In 2014, Dominion Voting committed to providing emerging and post-conflict democracies with access to voting technology through its philanthropic support to the DELIAN Project, as many emerging democracies suffer from post-electoral violence due to the delay in the publishing of election results. Over the next three years, Dominion Voting will support election technology pilots with donated Automated Voting Machines (AVM), providing an improved electoral process, and therefore safer elections.”
+This presents a very troubling conflict of interest. Most Americans would certainly agree that voting machines should have zero connection to presidential candidates and their foundations.
+As we previously reported , the Democratic primaries were essentially rigged. So why wouldn’t the general U.S. election potentially be manipulated in favor of the elite’s preferred candidate? If you think this is as important of information as I do, then share this out immediately. Time is of the essence.
+",FAKE
+8175,6 Natural Herbs To Prevent Mental Disorders,"By Alma Causey When it comes to our health, we do everything humanly possible to maintain it. However, when it comes to our mental well-being, we often ignore our emotional extremes and mood swings.... ",FAKE
+916,"Can Donald Trump really hit 1,237 before Cleveland?","(CNN) Donald Trump is now the only Republican presidential candidate with a realistic chance of winning the 1,237 votes to clinch the nomination before the national convention this summer.
+
+But getting there will be a tough undertaking, and one that leaves little room for error.
+
+Trump's commanding victory in New York, where he won more than 60% of the vote and the vast majority of the 95 delegates up for grabs, marked a turning point in the delegate race. The Manhattan real estate mogul now has improved his chances of winning the nomination outright, while his chief rival, Ted Cruz, would need a minor miracle to win on the first ballot.
+
+""We don't have much of a race anymore,"" Trump said in his victory speech at Trump Tower on Tuesday. ""We're going to go into the convention I think as the winner.""
+
+Barry Bennett, a senior adviser for the Trump campaign, told CNN's Chris Cuomo that he thinks Trump will get 1,237 before summer.
+
+""Probably right around that first week of June,"" he said Thursday on ""New Day."" ""We will reach 1,237. 100%.""
+
+
+
+There are 15 contests remaining, with 674 bound delegates still up for grabs. Trump has 846, and if he were to continue on at his current rate -- 47% -- he would still finish about 75 short of the magic number, according to according to CNN estimates.
+
+Cruz, meanwhile, would have to win every single remaining bound delegate to reach precisely 1,237 and ensure a first-ballot win.
+
+Because the Texas senator has worked to capture delegates who would in theory back him once they are freed from their formal obligations to Trump or other candidates, winning at the outset is potentially critical for the New Yorker's overall chances.
+
+Trump's campaign is publicly confident it will get there. In talking points circulated to surrogates Wednesday, the campaign predicted that the front-runner would accumulate more than 1,400 delegates -- ""and thus a first ballot nomination win in Cleveland.""
+
+To get across the finish line before July, he will need to score at least one more tough victory. Trump figures to do well in next week's contests on the Eastern seaboard, but could be tripped up or held in later contests in states like Montana and Oregon.
+
+It's expected that Trump will pick up a sizable chunk of California's 172-delegate haul on June 7, meaning the real wild card will be Indiana. The Hoosier State, which votes on May 3, offers 57 delegates. Like in New York, it employs a hybrid system that awards those delegates on both winner-take-all basis statewide and by congressional district. Nebraska, one week later, will deliver all 36 of its delegates in a winner-take-all contest.
+
+But Trump on Wednesday signaled the importance of Indiana, making it his first stop after his New York victory.
+
+""It's a rigged, crooked system that's designed so that the bosses can pick whoever they want,"" he said of the primary contest, re-upping his attacks on RNC during a Wednesday rally in Indianapolis. ""It's rigged for lobbyists. It's rigged for the donors and it's rigged special interest. It's dishonest.""
+
+Cruz, who will be in the state on Thursday, is saying he is confident the contest will extend into the summer.
+
+Cruz's declaration essentially sets up the final weeks of the campaign as a choice for Republicans: Trump or No Trump.
+
+To help him defy Cruz and other naysayers, Trump has beefed up his political operation.
+
+For months, the campaign relied on an unusually small and insular operation at the top. But in recent weeks, it became clear that Trump was frustrated by what he believed was the Cruz campaign outmaneuvering him on delegate collection. He appeared especially troubled by the results in Colorado, where Cruz swept all of the delegates there at the state's Republican Party convention.
+
+Sensing that something had to change, Trump shook up his operations, bringing on veteran GOP consultant Paul Manafort to serve as convention manager. Manafort is now tasked with the broad responsibility of overseeing the ""nomination process.""
+
+Speaking to reporters after Trump was declared winner of the New York primary Tuesday, Manafort said the campaign had simply entered a new phase.
+
+""We're in a phase where the end game requires winning smart,"" he said.",REAL
+6661,Aide Said He Was Running 'Bill Clinton Inc.' in New WikiLeaks Dump," Aide Said He Was Running 'Bill Clinton Inc.' in New WikiLeaks Dump
+By MaryAlice Parks
+ "" ABC "" - A 12-page memo written by a former aide to President Bill Clinton illustrates how he and other advisers raised millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons after they left the White House, according to a new batch of emails released by WikiLeaks.
+The purported memo from Doug Band details how he and his team locked in lucrative speaking deals for Bill Clinton and how he leveraged his work at his global consulting firm, Teneo Strategies, to persuade clients to contribute to the Clinton Foundation. Band described his work as running ""Bill Clinton Inc.""
+""We also have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the president and his family – for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like,” Band allegedly said in the document.
+A Teneo representative told ABC News in a statement: ""As the memo demonstrates, Teneo worked to encourage clients, where appropriate, to support the Clinton Foundation because of the good work that it does around the world. It also clearly shows that Teneo never received any financial benefit or benefit of any kind from doing so.""
+Band, the Clinton Foundation and staff for Bill Clinton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
+The memo appeared to be targeted at informing lawyers and top Clinton advisers about fundraising efforts. In previously released emails, dated just days before this memo, Band expressed concern over the conflated, tangled and confused web of personnel roles and money in the Clinton world, citing, for example, his opinion that Chelsea Clinton was running a business out of the family foundation office. In this memo, he pushed for more clearly defined roles and documents outlining conflicts of interest.
+Around this same time, in late 2011 and early 2012, Chelsea Clinton, according to the emails, was complaining and threatening to launch internal investigations after hearing that Teneo employees were making solicitations and evoking her father’s name without his approval. This offended Band, and in one email exchange, he purportedly called her a “spoiled brat kid.”
+""I don't deserve this from her and deserve a tad more respect or at least a direct dialogue for me to explain these things,” Band allegedly wrote in an email to John Podesta , now chairman for Hillary Clinton 's campaign.
+Band added that Chelsea Clinton “has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she’s doing because she, as she has said, hasn't found her way and has a lack of focus in her life.”
+In the memo, Band said he had convinced Dow Jones and Coca-Cola, two Teneo clients, to give to the Clinton Foundation and pay for in-kind services to Bill Clinton, such as his trips to conferences. It also discussed how Band urged UBS to hire Hillary Clinton to give paid speeches. Moreover, the memo revealed that Laureate International Universities, a for-profit school, was paying Bill Clinton $3.5 million annually to serve as its Honorary Chairman.
+The Clinton campaign has not confirmed nor denied the authenticity of the emails or commented on any content in them. ABC News has not determined the authenticity of the emails published by WikiLeaks.
+ABC News' Matthew Claiborne contributed to this report.",FAKE
+2983,"Christie accuses Paul, Lee of siding with ‘criminal’ Snowden on NSA","New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie lashed out at Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rand Paul, R-Ky., on “Fox and Friends” Wednesday, over their efforts to block the renewal of the Patriot Act.
+
+Christie, a fellow Republican and likely presidential candidate who backs the Patriot Act, accused Lee and Paul of ""siding with"" NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
+
+“He’s a criminal, he’s a criminal and he’s hiding in Russia, and he’s lecturing to us about the evils of authoritarian government, while he lives under the protective umbrella of Vladimir Putin,” Christie said. “That’s who Mike Lee and Rand Paul are siding with – with Edward Snowden? Come on.”
+
+The beef between the senators and Christie has been growing for some time. Christie had told supporters in New Hampshire that “you can’t enjoy our civil liberties if you’re in a coffin.”
+
+Lee later told CNN he found the remark “really disappointing” and it reflected “governing by fear and governing by false choice.” He also said Christie should be ashamed of himself.
+
+The feud with Lee and Paul, a declared presidential candidate, comes as Congress is stuck on what to do about expiring NSA surveillance programs.
+
+Lee backs an alternative to the Patriot Act called the USA Freedom Act. The House-passed bill aims to limit bulk collection of metadata on American citizens. But neither that, nor a straight, short-term extension of the Patriot Act, was able to advance in the Senate before lawmakers left on the holiday break. The data collection program is set to expire at the end of the month.
+
+During his interview on Fox News, Christie also blasted President Obama’s strategy in the Middle East – citing the Islamic State’s growing influence, as well as Syrian President Bashar Assad's.
+
+“If a President Christie had drawn a red line in Syria,” the United Sates would have gone after Assad as promised, he said.
+
+Christie also criticized Obama for not being aggressive enough bringing together allies in the Middle East.
+
+“They need American support and American leadership and American strategic vision, this president hasn’t put it out there, this is the guy who called them the JV,” Christie said. “Now, all of a sudden. He’s got a strategy that’s successful? It’s been disappointing to watch it.”",REAL
+10236,Trump Wants To Appoint Alt-Right Propagandist Steve Bannon As His Chief Of Staff,"  
+Now that the election is over, Donald Trump is deciding who he will appoint to fill his cabinet. Although most the names on his list are fairly horrifying, none more so than who he is considering for White House Chief of Staff. Trump’s top pick is reportedly former Breitbart bigwig, Steve Bannon. 
+So what does a chief of staff do ? Well, the person holding this position is often called “the most powerful man in Washington.” 
+“The duties of the White House chief of staff vary, yet traditionally encompass the following, such as: select and supervise key White House staff, control access to the Oval Office and the president, manage communications and information flow, and negotiate with Congress, executive branch agencies, and external political groups to implement the president’s agenda.” 
+“In fulfilling these duties, the chief of Staff oversees and coordinates the efforts of the following offices within the EOP and White House Office: the Council of Economic Advisers, National Security staff, Office of Management and Budget, Office of Legislative Affairs, and Office of Management and Administration, to name a few.” 
+Okay, so that’s an important job. So who the hell is Steve Bannon? Not surprisingly, he is the worst of the worst. 
+David Badash over at The New Civil Rights Movement summed it up quite nicely: Bannon “stepped down at Breitbart to run the final few months of Trump’s campaign, but for years he has run one of the most popular far, far right wing websites, Breitbart. It masquerades as a news site but it’s home to the alt-right, as Bannon has bragged. In other words, the white supremacists and white nationalists, the anti-Semites, the anti-LGBT crowd, the anti-Black crowd, the anti-diversity, anti-feminism, anti-Obama movement. Racists, homophobes, bigots of every stripe get their ‘news’ at Breitbart. And it got Trump elected.” 
+According to court filings from his divorce proceedings, Bannon is not only a sadistic wife beater , but he is also every bit as anti-Semitic as Breitbart itself. His wife testified that he fought against allowing his daughters to attend an upscale school because of the number of Jewish children that attended. 
+“He said that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.” 
+This man , this is who Trump wants to have serving as the White House Chief of Staff. His advisors are encouraging him to choose RNC Chair Reince Priebus, but we all know how Trump is with taking advice from people who might actually know what they’re talking about. Who cares if Bannon actually knows anything about how to run the damn country, Trump just wants the biggest bigot he can find. 
+Featured image via Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+8466,Links 11/9/16: Election Day,"by Yves Smith 
+Be sure to vote today if you haven’t already! Even if you dislike the Presidential choices, downticket races are important. 
+And an overdue note: Thanks SO much to those of you who came out to meet me in Dallas last week. We had a group of 30-35 attend, including someone from Iowa and a libertarian who declared that NC was one of only three non-libertarian sites that he reads. We have a lively discussion and I think everyone had a good time. 
+The organizer of the evening, Steve in Dallas, circulated a list for people who wanted to be on a Dallas Meetup listserv. Some participants had already left by then, so if you missed the opportunity to sign up and would like to be included or missed this meetup but want to be kept in the loop, please ping me at yves_at_nakedcapitalism.com and I’ll send your coordinates to Steve. Please put “Dallas Meetup” in the subject line. 
+At the end of the evening, Steve raised an important issue: he’s tried getting friends and family members to read NC and other independent media, with much less success than he’d like. I volunteered that most people don’t want to question authority, and that going outside the mainstream media was tantamount to admitting that the traditional press was wrong, or doing a superficial job. 
+This chart might help get traditional media loyalists to consider that reporting isn’t what it used to be 
+If readers have other approaches that have worked, please share them in comments. Thanks!",FAKE
+5527,Why The U.S. Presidential Election Has The Entire World Confused,"in: Politics , Sleuth Journal , Special Interests Well, everyone thought it was a sure thing — Hillary Clinton had the White House in the bag; the entire political system from the DNC to the RNC and the mainstream media had already called the election over and done. Online gambling sites listed Clinton as a sure bet and Irish site Paddy Power even paid out one million dollars on the assumption of a Clinton win. And then, one Weiner ruined everything — Anthony Weiner. The revelation of an October surprise re-opening of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of classified data on private and vulnerable email servers does not come as a shock to me, but it certainly does to many people around the world. Hundreds of mainstream outlets are scrambling to spin the news as misconduct by the FBI rather than a victory for the halls of justice. Numerous alternative media analysts are rushing to cover their butts and admit that there is now a “chance” of a Trump win. Confusion reigns supreme as the weirdest election in U.S. history continues to bewilder observers. The first issue that needs to be addressed is the lack of an open mind displayed by some when it comes to the real purpose behind this election. The second issue here, of course, is one of timing. Through the majority of this election cycle the public consensus has been that Clinton will win. Some argued that Trump would not be able to compete with the leftist media empire standing against him, while others have argued that the entire system including the Republican establishment would ensure that Trump would fail. The alternative media has in the past simply pointed out that elections have always been rigged, either by the elites playing both sides of the competition, or through outright voter fraud. They have assumed that the elites want Clinton, and therefore, the election has already been decided. I tend to agree with the latter point of view, though I disagree with the conclusion. U.S. elections are indeed controlled, and have been for decades, primarily through the false left/right paradigm. However, as I have been pointing out since I correctly predicted the success of the Brexit referendum, I don’t think that Clinton is the choice of the elites. I outline my reasons for this conclusion in-depth in articles like ‘2016 Will End With Economic Instability And A Trump Presidency’ , published in August. For the past several months it seems as though I have been the only person holding the view that Trump will be president. Only in the past few days have I received emails from readers stating that they used to think I was probably crazy, but now they aren’t so sure… To be clear, my position is that Trump is slated to take the White House and that this is by design. This has been my position since before Trump won the Republican Primaries, it was my position when the election cycle began, it has never changed, nor have my views on the reasons for this outcome ever changed. Of course, the election is not over yet, and if Clinton ends up soiling the already thoroughly soiled Oval Office with her presence, then everyone can color me confused as well. That said, here are some issues that I think many people are overlooking when coming to conclusions on the election and the events surrounding it. Clinton Is The Worst Candidate The Elites Could Have Chosen I have been studying the activities and behaviors of establishment elites for over a decade and I have to say… they are not stupid. They certainly have hubris, and I would not call them “wise,” but they are definitely devious. They know how to rig a game. They know how to play both sides. They know how to cheat to get what they want when it comes to politics and how to manufacture consent from portions of the public. They’ve been doing it a long time. They have mastered it. So, in my view it is rather insane for the elites to field a candidate such as Hillary Clinton IF the entirety of their globalist empire hangs in the balance (I don’t think it does). Though she is fond of BleachBit, the woman is unbleachable. With a decades-long rap sheet from her work at Rose Law Firm (in which document destruction and “misplacement” was apparently routine) to her interference with investigations into Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, to the strange odyssey surrounding her lies on the Benghazi attack, as well as her rampant mishandling of classified documents as head of the State Department, not to mention the Clinton Foundation’s pay to play scandals, it is impossible to endear her to the masses. Her dismal crowd turnouts are rather indicative of this. On top of all this, Clinton’s anti-Russia rhetoric is coming off as absolutely crazy, and I think this is by design. Many in the alternative media, while assuming that Clinton is paving the way for WWIII, forget that the average person may not be up to speed on the same information we are, but most of them aren’t ignorant. Clinton’s ravings on Russian hacking and potential war are even putting liberals off rather than inspiring their confidence. One would think that if the elites have their veritable pick of any politician to represent their interests in the White House and convince the American public to go along for the ride, Clinton would be the worst choice. Even if the intention were to rig the election in favor of Clinton, she would be a lame-duck president the second she took office, and, her mere presence would galvanize conservatives to the point of mass rebellion. This is not generally how the elites play the game. Instead, they prefer co-option to direct confrontation. Which President Is Better For The Elites During An Economic Breakdown? If you consider the premise that Clinton is NOT the chosen one, and that the entire election is theater, the situation changes rather drastically. Those that follow the underlying economic data that the mainstream tends to ignore know that large swaths of the global financial system are not long for this world. With Europe’s banking system plunging towards a Lehman-style event, the OPEC production freeze deal ready to fall apart yet again, and the Federal Reserve threatening to raise rates into recessionary conditions in December, our already floundering fiscal structure is approaching another crisis. My questions has always been who would the elites rather have in office when this crisis occurs? I’ve said it a hundred times before and I’ll say it again here: with Clinton in office, globalists and international financiers get the blame for any economic downturn. With Trump in office, conservative movements will be blamed. In fact, I suggest anyone who doubts this scenario watch stock market reactions every time Trump rises in the polls or Clinton faces renewed scandal. The narrative is already being prepared — a Trump win equals a market loss. For those that think it outlandish that the public could be tricked into blaming Trump and conservatives for an economic crisis, I suggest they consider that possession is nine-tenths of the law in the minds of many. People can also be irrational when facing financial ruin. I would remind readers that history is written by the victors. The globalists plan to be victorious in the dismantling of America and our founding principles. Whether or not they succeed is really up to average conservatives and liberty proponents, not Trump. The FBI’s Move Prepares The Way For Trump Clinton and the DNC argue that FBI Director James Comey’s announcement of a re-opened investigation is politically motivated. And they are right, sort of. The real motivation, I believe, is that Clinton was never meant to win the election in the first place, and that the elites want Trump placed in power during the final hours of the U.S. economy. Everything else is just a Kabuki dance. The democrats are crying foul and accusing Comey of “working with Putin,” or working with the alt-right. The nefarious Harry Reid has even accused the FBI of hiding Trump’s supposed ties to the Russian government and violating the Hatch Act. I think much of this outrage is real, as I believe much of the mainstream media attacks on Trump are coming from people who really think they are waging a propaganda war to get Hillary Clinton elected. This, however, does not mean that the elites plan to install Clinton. Some might see my position as bizarre. I understand. But equally bizarre to me are some of the rationalizations people attempt to argue when dealing with the Comey revelation. For example, the argument that the entire re-opening of the investigation is a complex ploy designed by the establishment to distract away from the Wikileaks data dumps. This makes little sense. If anything, the re-opening investigation is only bringing MORE attention to the Wikileaks data, not less. If the elites were hoping to create a distraction, they failed miserably. The FBI’s announcement ONLY harms the Clinton campaign. Period. Even if it fizzles out, even if they announce that nothing was found, the investigation hitting the news streams so close to election day refocuses all public attention back on Clinton’s corruption and will continue to do so for the next week at least. The idea that the elites hope to use it to help Clinton is nonsensical. I have also seen the argument that Comey is acting to cover his own posterior, perhaps because of a fear that Trump may steal away a victory. I find this equally absurd. Months back the consensus among alternative analysts was that Comey (placed in the FBI by Obama) was a traitor and the FBI was a puppet agency of the establishment. Now, suddenly, Comey is worried about a possible Trump win and so takes an action which might self-fulfill the prophecy? Comey does what he is told. The FBI is an owned and operated elitist franchise. They do not go rogue. If the rogue FBI narrative were true and Comey actually feels the need to cover his bases with Trump, then it is only because he knows something the rest of us do not. With Clinton in office, his goose would be cooked after this little incident. Comey only gains an advantage if Trump is slated to win. Trump May Or May Not Be Aware Of The Plan The bottom line, according to the evidence I have seen in terms of elitists influence over U.S. elections, is that if Trump wins it will only be because they wanted him to win. The FBI firestorm this past week appears to support my view and we still have another week left for further Clinton ugliness to be revealed. I also expect that if Trump wins, the reaction from conservatives and liberty activists will be that the event was a “miracle,” a shocking upset against the establishment. Much like the reaction to the Brexit referendum. I continue to hold that conservatives and sovereignty champions in Europe and America are being set up to take the fall for a coming global destabilization. I have not taken this position just to be contrary. If I think about it honestly, my position is truly a losing position. If I am mistaken and Clinton wins on the 8th then I’ll probably never hear the end of it, but that’s a risk that has to be taken, because what I see here is a move on the chess board that others are not considering. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. That said, if I am right, then I still lose, because Trump supporters and half the liberty movement will be so enraptured that they will probably ignore the greater issue — that Trump is the candidate the elites wanted all along. If I am right, I cannot say either way if Trump is aware that he will be a potential scapegoat for the elites. With Trump on the way to the White House I can guarantee a Fed rate hike in December. Imagine what a staged war between Trump and the Federal Reserve will do to the U.S. dollar? What a way to destroy the currency’s world reserve status and make way for the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights! I also suspect that widespread rioting is on the schedule as well from various social justice mobs; a perfect excuse for expansive martial law measures, don’t you think? The point is, as horrifying as a Clinton presidency might be to conservatives (or to everyone), don’t get too comfortable under Trump. The party is just getting started and our vigilance must be even greater with a conservative White House, because, like it or not, everything Trump does is going to reflect on us. We can no more allow unconstitutional activities under Trump than we could under Clinton. If you think the election has been chaotic and confusing so far, just wait until after it is over. If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here . We greatly appreciate your patronage. Article first posted at Alt-Market.com Submit your review",FAKE
+1313,New Hampshire primary: How the outsiders won -- and the insiders crumbled,"(CNN) This story was reported by Dana Bash, Gloria Borger, Abigail Crutchfield, Jeremy Diamond, Chris Frates, Noah Gray, Ashley Killough, Betsy Klein, Elizabeth Landers, Phil Mattingly, Dan Merica, Sara Murray, Mark Preston, Manu Raju, Gabe Ramirez, Maeve Reston, Lauren Selsky, Sunlen Serfaty, Cassie Spodak, Gregory Wallace, and Jeff Zeleny. There was more than a hint of irony in Donald Trump's win in New Hampshire Tuesday night.
+
+In a state that has always been known for giving new political life to the hardest-working candidates, he swept the field. He lapped his closest challenger, Ohio Governor John Kasich, by double digits, and he notched his first win in this presidential contest by acting more like a traditional candidate.
+
+Trump's victory speech was gracious and restrained with a long list of thank yous for family members and campaign staff. He acknowledged that he had learned the lesson in Iowa that the ground game matters, and paid more attention to turning out his voters in New Hampshire. Most striking, he had nothing but compliments for his fellow rivals.
+
+In fact, Trump had been a mere spectator in the biggest brawl of the week -- the showdown between New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio that recast the Republican race.
+
+Entering New Hampshire after the Iowa caucuses last Monday, Rubio had been the candidate to beat, but Trump didn't even touch him. It was Christie who demolished Rubio, halting his momentum during Saturday night's debate in a moment that could go down in history as one of the toughest exchanges of the GOP primary campaign.
+
+Though on the sidelines, Trump underscored the power of the moment during the commercial break as Christie walked across the stage to see his wife. Someone grabbed Christie's arm from behind, and the New Jersey governor turned to see none other than the taunter-in-chief Donald Trump.
+
+""Oh my God. That was brutal,"" Trump muttered to Christie on the debate stage, according to someone familiar with the exchange. ""Tremendous.""
+
+Perhaps staying out of the fray this week (with the exception of a vulgar swipe at Ted Cruz on the eve of the election) helped Donald Trump. He swept a range of demographic and ideological groups, appealing to six-in-ten New Hampshire voters who said they were looking for an outside candidate.
+
+The commanding victories in New Hampshire by two outsiders — Trump and Democratic winner Bernie Sanders — reinforce the tremendous vulnerability of the establishment in the 2016 presidential race. Insiders in both parties are struggling to find their footing in a year when voters are fed up with the status quo. Democrat Hillary Clinton is looking toward the March contests as her firewall. John Kasich is trying to capitalize on his moment after climbing to second in New Hampshire. Jeb Bush is hoping to hang on by engineering a strong performance in South Carolina. Chris Christie has headed home to assess his chances amid indications that he will soon end his bid, according to two sources. And Marco Rubio is trying to regroup after a humiliating defeat.
+
+Meanwhile, Trump only got stronger Tuesday night. After he underperformed in the polls in Iowa -- a fact many Iowa strategists attributed to the weakness of his ground game compared to that of winner Ted Cruz -- Trump's campaign made a concerted push to reach voters in New Hampshire who might not head to the polls.
+
+In addition to his big rallies, he added smaller, more intimate events and retail stops where he could mingle with voters, apparently with great success.
+
+""We are coming to the end of a beautiful, beautiful journey,"" he said during a town hall in Londonderry Monday afternoon. ""It should be a very big day for the nation.""
+
+The dreamer takes on the doer
+
+The outsiders understood that they had captured their moment: Sanders congratulated his supporters Tuesday night by promising ""nothing short of a political revolution.""
+
+He vowed that his ""movement"" would bring together working people who have given up on the political process.
+
+""We will all together say loudly and clearly that the government of our great nation belongs to all of us, not just a few wealthy campaign contributors,"" he told a boisterous crowd. ""That is what this campaign is about. That is what the political revolution is about.""
+
+The momentum for a resounding win in the first-in-the-nation primary came a week earlier with his surprising strength in Iowa. Votes were still being counted in Iowa when Sanders boarded his charter plane to New Hampshire after midnight. The feat he had just achieved once seemed unthinkable: the 74-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont had come within a fraction of a percentage point of slaying Clinton, the anointed candidate of the Democratic establishment and one of the most famous women in the world.
+
+Hours earlier, Clinton had dashed on stage to claim her somewhat tenuous victory before the networks even called it. But as Sanders and his aides winged their way to New Hampshire past midnight, they knew the narrative had shifted in their favor.
+
+With that razor-thin margin, the world would view the result as a tie. That meant the Vermont Senator had cleared a huge hurdle: dispelling doubt that he could be viable. And that meant everything for the campaign's momentum in New Hampshire. The money was pouring in online.
+
+""When we began this campaign, I think it is fair to say we were considered to be a fringe campaign. I would hope most people no longer believe that,"" Sanders told reporters as he stood in the aisle, illuminated by the ultra violet glow of the interior lights on his Eastern Airlines 757.
+
+""We are in this to the convention,"" he said. ""Tonight shows the American people that this is a campaign that can win.""
+
+Sleep could wait. By 5:15am that morning, he was standing on the back of a flatbed truck in Bow, New Hampshire, his breath visible in the cold New Hampshire air.
+
+""Jane and I, we cannot believe that you're here at 5 o'clock in the morning,"" Sanders said, as he and his wife rallied supporters in the pre-dawn darkness. ""Something is wrong with you guys!""
+
+But the electricity surrounding him that morning was a harbinger of what would unfold in the week to come.
+
+For Team Clinton, the imperative of closing a polling gap of more than twenty points a week before the New Hampshire primary seemed almost surreal. This, after all, was a state that had been kind to her and her husband. It was here that Bill Clinton positioned himself as the ""comeback kid"" in 1992. Her tearful moment at a Portsmouth coffee shop sharing her struggles with a group of women in 2008 allowed her to rebound after her humiliating third-place finish in Iowa.
+
+Long before Sanders emerged as a threat this cycle, she had insisted she was taking nothing for granted, airing ads in New Hampshire as early as August. Clinton and her aides labored throughout last year to build the narrative that this was her historic moment.
+
+At her first post-Iowa rally this past week with New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan, she was greeted here in the Granite State as the first woman to ever win the Iowa caucuses. Female senators flew up from Washington to canvass for her in hopes of breaking what she had called that highest, hardest glass ceiling.
+
+But the overt appeal to the historic nature of her candidacy didn't seem to be resonating in 2016.
+
+For weeks, tensions had been swirling within her camp about how to knock out the charismatic Vermont Senator, who had captured the same kind of cool that Barack Obama did in 2008. Some Clinton aides felt she'd been playing it too safe. Now behind by double digits, the stage seemed set for a long and protracted delegate fight.
+
+Though New Hampshire seemed like a lost cause, she punched hard in Thursday night's debate, skewering Sanders' lofty proposals as fantasy that could never be achieved.
+
+She bristled at Sanders' efforts to cast her as a creature of Wall Street: ""It's time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out,"" she told him. At the same time, she continued to stumble through answers about the $675,000 she was paid for three speeches from Goldman Sachs, which only seemed to reinforce Sanders' most powerful line of attack against her that she was the ultimate insider.
+
+""Did you have to be paid $675,000,"" CNN's Anderson Cooper asked Clinton during CNN's Democratic town hall in New Hampshire a day earlier on Wednesday.
+
+""Well, I don't know. Um, that's what they offered,"" she replied, seemingly caught off guard by the question. At the time she accepted those fees, she told Cooper, she wasn't sure she was going to run again for the White House.
+
+""I didn't know to be honest, I wasn't -- I wasn't committed to running,"" she said.
+
+Preparing for defeat, Clinton and her aides spent the week trying to lower expectations, with the candidate herself wondering aloud whether she should have skipped the Granite State primary altogether and moved on to firmer ground in Nevada and South Carolina, states with far more diverse populations where Sanders is not expected to run as strong.
+
+Sanders had a home-court advantage in New Hampshire, she and her surrogates insisted over and over again, and there wasn't much she could do about it.
+
+""Their argument is -- and it has got some strength to it -- look, you are behind here, you are in your opponent's backyard,"" Clinton told supporters at a campaign event in Derry mid-week. But ever the fighter, she vowed to press on: ""I know I've got some ground to make up. I'm ready. I'm going to fight until the last vote is cast.""
+
+Behind the scenes, Clinton's aides were already looking at the map ahead: airing ads in South Carolina and Nevada to lock in minority voters who will be critical to their delegate counts and marshaling their teams in upcoming caucus states like Maine and Minnesota where Sanders thinks he can do well.
+
+In a sign of resignation about Tuesday's likely result, they even sent Clinton out of state Sunday to Flint, Michigan, to talk about the water crisis -- an issue of great importance to many minority voters who have watched the scandal unfold in horror.
+
+The most ominous development for Clinton: the yawning gap between her and Sanders among young voters, who broke heavily in Sanders' favor, according to exit polls Tuesday night.
+
+Most strikingly, women under age 30 split 79% for Sanders to 20% for Clinton.
+
+While many Clinton allies are deeply puzzled by gap, Clinton has tried to strike a positive note, stating at her campaign events, including Tuesday night, that even if young women were not with her, she will still fight for them.
+
+Pressing her case, she also stressed that the struggle for women's equality is far from over. But she may have been harmed in the final days when others took that message too far. Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state, touched off a firestorm as she mocked Sanders' call for a ""revolution"" at Clinton's rally in Concord Saturday.
+
+Introducing Clinton at that event -- which somewhat ominously was filled with out-of-state canvassers and some political tourists -- Albright said the real revolution in the 2016 race would be electing the first woman president.
+
+""We can tell our story of how we climbed the ladder, and a lot of you younger women think it's done,"" Albright said, before pivoting to a scorching rebuke of young women supporting Sanders: ""It's not done. There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other.""
+
+The crowd cheered and Clinton laughed, but the comments risked further alienating young women supporters of Sanders.
+
+The controversy over Albright's comments was amplified by discussion of Gloria Steinem's observation earlier in the week in an interview with ""Real Time"" host Bill Maher that young women were supporting Sanders to meet ""boys.""
+
+""They're going to get more activist as they get older,"" Steinem told Maher. ""And when you're young, you're thinking, 'Where are the boys?' The boys are with Bernie.""
+
+Steinem sought to smooth over her comments in a Sunday Facebook post, but the sting of her words and Albright's remained. Some young women voters in New Hampshire said they were dismayed by what they viewed as shaming by the Clinton campaign and its allies.
+
+Gabrielle Greaves, a University of New Hampshire student, who had attended the CNN town hall with both Sanders and Clinton earlier in the week, said the Albright and Steinem flap only reinforced the ""disconnect between the generations.""
+
+""Older women just can't fathom why we aren't voting for Hillary Clinton, and I don't really think they're trying to understand,"" said Greaves, a 19-year-old Brooklyn native in an interview here in Manchester.
+
+""I think a lot of older women think we don't understand how much Hillary Clinton has sacrificed, and how much she's been through and what she's done for women. Just because I don't think she should be president doesn't mean I'm not thankful for the things she has done.""
+
+Greaves added that ""there's just something I don't trust about Hillary Clinton."" Bernie Sanders, she said, ""is a genuine soul.""
+
+""I just want the older generation to have the confidence in us that we can make decisions,"" she said. ""Just because we have opposing views, doesn't mean we're not intelligent enough to think about these things and consider all the options.""
+
+The question of trust continued to dog Clinton throughout her events all week in New Hampshire. Interviews with voters after her rallies suggested she was having trouble closing the sale as some Democrats worried about her liabilities ahead.
+
+Jane Fargo came to Clinton's Concord rally over the weekend holding a sign that said ""Convince Me"" in red letters. She left unconvinced by the former Secretary of State.
+
+""I'm really torn. Who is going to look out best for my interests? My investments are going down; I'm looking at retirement in 12 years and it's really scary,"" said Fargo, a 52-year-old middle-school teacher from Bow. ""I love Bernie's fiery spirit. Somebody's got to go shake up something and that sells me toward Bernie.""
+
+Standing next to the bleachers in the gymnasium where Clinton had just spoken, Fargo said she liked her ideas but worried about ""how entrenched she is.""
+
+""She just been in government forever, so is she already sold out? Or is she really going to go in and shake things up like Bernie is promising to do?""
+
+""I'm looking for change. I want change,"" Fargo said. At the same time, ""when they say Clinton will be ready on day one, I've got a feeling she'll be ready on day one,"" she said. As for Sanders? ""That's my qualm right there, you hit the nail on the head.""
+
+In the final days, Sanders' rallies crackled with the kind of electricity that accompanies a candidate on the rise.
+
+Taking the stage in Portsmouth Sunday afternoon, he peeled off his jacket and tossed it to the beanie-clad college kids on the stage behind him -- who cheered as though they were in the presence of a rock star.
+
+The cheers built to a crescendo as he ticked through the items in his stump speech -- railing against the ""rigged economy,"" promising universal health care, vowing to take on the big banks and a broken criminal justice system. He engaged in call-answer exchange with the crowd as he encouraged them to shout out how much student debt they were carrying as he talked about his plans for free college.
+
+""$100,000? ... You win,"" he said, pointing to one woman in the crowd.
+
+To laughter, he mocked the refrain he has heard from Clinton's allies: ""Your ideas are so ambitious.""
+
+Sanders paused for a beat. ""We will get them done because people will demand that we get them done,"" he thundered.
+
+Clinton's closing days of her New Hampshire campaign carried eerie echoes of her 2008 campaign.
+
+Bill Clinton, who had been a subdued and measured advocate for his wife leading up to the Iowa caucuses, lashed out at Sanders supporters in the final weekend -- condemning sexist attacks and calling out the media for being too soft in their coverage of Sanders.
+
+""When you're making a revolution, you can't be too careful about the facts,"" the former President said. ""You're just for me or against me.""
+
+His critique of Sanders' agenda as unachievable recalled 2008, when he dubbed Barack Obama's campaign a ""fairy tale."" Once again, the former President warned, Democratic voters were rolling the dice.
+
+By Monday, the die seemed cast. The conversation around the Democratic campaign focused not on a comeback, but on a campaign shakeup.
+
+Looking to change the story line, Hillary Clinton was circumspect, saying in an MSNBC interview that the campaign was ""taking stock.""
+
+On the trail, she struck a poignant tone in the final hours: ""For me, this is a labor of love,"" she said at one of her last events at a restaurant on Manchester's West side.
+
+She conceded defeat in a statement at 8 pm shortly after the polls closed in New Hampshire Tuesday night.
+
+""I still love New Hampshire, and I always will,"" she said, taking the stage with her husband and daughter at Southern New Hampshire University.
+
+But she was looking ahead to South Carolina and the states beyond, telling her donors in an email that she wouldn't be discouraged by the results.
+
+""I wish tonight had gone differently,"" she wrote in a fundraising email. ""But I know what it's like to be knocked down -- and I've learned from long experience that it's not whether you get knocked down that matters. It's about whether you get back up.""
+
+One political knock-down changed the trajectory of the GOP campaign in New Hampshire: Christie's merciless takedown of Rubio, who had seemed on the cusp of muscling the other establishment candidates out of the race for a three-way contest with Trump and Cruz.
+
+Given Tuesday night's results with Kasich's strong second-place finish, Christie's maneuver to damage Rubio ultimately looked like a kamikaze mission for the governor, who staked his entire campaign on New Hampshire but ended up in sixth place.
+
+A week earlier after Rubio's surprisingly strong third-place finish in Iowa, it had looked as though the establishment had finally found their candidate to rally around.
+
+But with the skill of a New Jersey street fighter, Christie managed to single-handedly halt what Rubio's aides had dubbed ""Marco-mentum"" Saturday night by taking his rival's greatest strengths -- his youth, his charisma, his uplifting message -- and turning them into weaknesses.
+
+Rattling Rubio with unflinching eye contact, Christie had walked the Florida senator into a trap: one that made him appear inexperienced, unready for the role of commander in chief, a robotic candidate programmed with scripted lines, who seemed to wilt under pressure as sweat beaded on his forehead.
+
+""I like Marco Rubio, and he's a smart person and good guy, but he simply does not have the experience to be president of the United States,"" Christie said during that debate moment. ""We've watched it happen, everybody, for the last seven years. The people of New Hampshire are smart. Do not make the same mistake again.""
+
+During the past month, the Christie-Rubio rivalry had turned intensely personal.
+
+Rubio's allies had set their mark on Christie in early January just as he seemed to be rising in the polls on the strength of his many town halls here. Early that month, the super PAC supporting Rubio, Conservative Solutions PAC, unleashed multi-million dollar ad buy.
+
+They put out a pair of scorching ads faulting the New Jersey Governor for his past position on Common Core, for his expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare, and for New Jersey's economic woes. One ad was essentially a montage of photos of Christie and Obama after Superstorm Sandy, a sore spot with conservative voters.
+
+The other raised the specter of the George Washington Bridge scandal, the scheme to close lanes and create traffic tie ups that embroiled officials in his administration. ""Chris Christie. High Taxes. Weak Economy. Scandals,"" the ad's tag line said. ""Not what we need in the White House.""
+
+Christie and his allies were furious. In private conversations, Christie told aides he couldn't believe the response that Rubio was getting from voters and donors given his thin resume in Senate and what he viewed as a lackluster record of accomplishments, according to a person familiar with the conversations.
+
+After Iowa, with their poll numbers still in single digits, Christie seized his moment to strike.
+
+Some members of Christie's team became even more riled up by the calls they received after Iowa, suggesting Christie should drop out so the party could coalesce around Rubio.
+
+As candidates began shifting their campaigns toward the Granite state on Feb. 2, Christie telegraphed his strategy to reporters, remarking that it was going to be an ""interesting week"" for Rubio.
+
+He tested his lines about the dangers posed by first-term senators on the stump. And then the real onslaught began when he unleashed his new attack line for Rubio -- calling him the ""boy in the bubble"" who relied on advisers for canned lines.
+
+Relishing his performance after the debate, Christie quoted ""the great political philosopher Mike Tyson,"" the heavyweight-boxing champion.
+
+""Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face,"" he told reporters.
+
+The debate moment was played again and again -- even on Tuesday morning as voters were headed to the polls.
+
+People close to Rubio acknowledged that his performance in the debate clearly had an impact in the polls. But the headlines about how Rubio had choked were even more devastating.
+
+On Tuesday night, he took full responsibility: ""Our disappointment tonight is not on you,"" he told the crowd at his victory party. ""It's on me. I did not do well on Saturday, and it will never happen again.""
+
+Allies of Bush and Kasich were virtually giddy, in large part because the debate had reset the race for donors who had been leaning toward Rubio.
+
+Once again, these skittish donors were back on the sidelines -- frozen at least for a time. And it was clear that the fight for the establishment lane could continue for weeks to come.
+
+In interviews on the campaign trail with New Hampshire's famously late deciders, many voters who had been enamored by Rubio admitted the debate had given them second thoughts. They echoed Christie's suggestion that Rubio might end up getting destroyed by Hillary Clinton in a general election.
+
+Some were baffled by the fact that Rubio had repeated the same line four times in the debate and then repeated a line almost verbatim in one of his final events. What had once seemed like admirable message discipline from a polished candidate had turned into a viral meme. In the final days, Rubio was shadowed across the state by Rubio robots (paid for, of course, by the Right to Rise ""super PAC"" supporting Bush).
+
+The doubts introduced late in the game mattered on Election Day.
+
+Stephanie Tsepas, who ran into Rubio at her polling place in Derry Tuesday, had gone to see one of his town halls Friday and left with a headache, she said, because he seemed so robotic and rehearsed.
+
+""I felt like I was living in one of his commercials,"" Tsepas said. She had a chance to engage at a more personal level with the Florida senator at her polling place, asking him about his plan to fund cures for cancer, a disease that her husband has.
+
+Ultimately she cast her vote for someone else, though she would not say whom.
+
+""He could be a great candidate for president,"" Tsepas said of Rubio. ""I just don't think now is his time.""
+
+But as the results showed, the Christie-Rubio duel that dominated the final days of the first-in-the-nation primary cut both ways. After a disappointing finish, Christie headed home to review his options.
+
+He may have taken a step too far in his effort to halt Rubio's momentum. Roger Fletcher, who had been considering the New Jersey Governor, decided he would side with the ""victim, not the bully.""
+
+""Thanks to Chris Christie's bashing, I went with Marco Rubio,"" he wrote to Bash after casting his vote Tuesday.
+
+The fight to break out of the pack
+
+The Christie-Rubio showdown was a moment that had long been in the making in the crowded establishment lane here in New Hampshire. Four candidates — Rubio, Christie, Kasich and Bush — had labored in the shadow of Trump, and ultimately Kasich benefited most from that jumble in the middle of the pack.
+
+From the beginning, those four candidates knew there would be another ticket, or perhaps two, out of New Hampshire beyond Ted Cruz and Trump. Though Cruz was not a natural fit for the New Hampshire voters, his ground game has proven exceptional so far and was able to ride his Iowa victory into more comfortable territory in South Carolina without facing high expectations here.
+
+Casting about for more moderate New Hampshire voters, Bush, Kasich and Christie all committed early to the John McCain model, driving from one corner of the state to another, holding dozens of town halls and lingering until the last voters had a chance to shake hands and ask questions.
+
+Behind the scenes it was a bloodbath of negative ads and mailers behind the scenes. By January, the candidates and their allies had spent at least $30 million on negative ads, according to Kantar Media/CMAG.
+
+A large portion of that spending was by the pro-Bush super PAC, Right to Rise, which sought to cast Rubio as a vote-skipping political novice and Kasich as a budget buster who had agreed to expand Medicaid as part of Obamacare. One mailer from Right to Rise showed pictures of Kasich and Rubio on a pair of red dice: ""Don't roll the dice. America needs a leader we can trust.""
+
+Despite all that spending, Bush flailed as he repeatedly tried to take on Trump without success. But he became a better campaigner during his time in New Hampshire. He kept his town halls wonky and policy-focused, insisting even during his final campaign stops here that he was still ""a joyful warrior.""
+
+Voters would often walk away from his town halls marveling that the campaigner that they had just seen on stage was a different person than they'd seen in the debates. He became accustomed on the rope line to being counseled by voters, who tried to buck him up by offering unsolicited advice about how to improve his debate performances.
+
+In the final weekend, his campaign ramped up its ground game, which had focused largely on the populous southern band of New Hampshire, by bringing in dozens of former aides to President George W. Bush and President George H.W. Bush, as well as friends from Florida to knock on doors and make phone calls. He drew one of his biggest crowds with a special appearance by 90-year-old Barbara Bush, who called her son ""the world's nicest man"" during an appearance Thursday night in Derry.
+
+""He's not a bragger -- we don't allow that,"" Barbara Bush said that night. ""But he's decent and honest. He's everything we need in a president.""
+
+Becoming more emboldened over time, Bush tried to cast his attempted takedowns of Trump as an act of valor, going so far as to call Trump a ""whiner"" and ""a liar"" in one of his final tweets the day before the primary.
+
+""I'm defending the honor of people that I really respect,"" Bush told CNN's Dana Bash in an interview Monday. ""I'm a joyful warrior. There's a difference between sitting back and watching someone try to hijack a party that I believe will allow people to rise up again.""
+
+Like Christie, Bush also became increasingly willing to go after Rubio in the final weeks. He offered his most pointed criticism of the Florida senator in an MSNBC interview Friday, shrugging when asked what Rubio had accomplished in the Senate: ""Nothing,"" he said. ""He's a great guy. But he's not a leader."" And he refused to apologize for the attack ads by Right to Rise. ""Politics ain't bean bag,"" he told reporters.
+
+At his final rally in Portsmouth on Monday night, Bush reminded attendees that he'd gone to nearly every nook and cranny of New Hampshire, including about 15,000 different Dunkin' Donuts. His ground game was sophisticated and well-funded -- particularly after he had shifted resources and staff from his Miami headquarters to the Granite state.
+
+""You're from New Hampshire, you can change the course of anything,"" Bush told voters in Portsmouth Monday night. ""If you don't think the pundits are right, the obituaries that have been written about all the candidates, including me.... if you disagree with that you can reset this race tomorrow. You have that power. No one else does. It's an extraordinary responsibility.""
+
+In one of the ironies of Tuesday night's race, it was Kasich's sunny campaign that ultimately notched him a second place finish behind Trump.
+
+Kasich's advisers had always believed that he had a strong chance here because of his moderate record and potential appeal to New Hampshire's undeclared voters. And they invested in data to help target those late-deciding independent voters in the final hours.
+
+Throughout the process, Kasich had also chafed at what he viewed as unfair attacks on his record. After an event earlier this week, he complained to reporters that his campaign had millions of dollars spent against them.
+
+""They can't even build mailboxes big enough to put all the negative advertising in from all these campaigns,"" he said. But he believed his ground game would ""insulate us from all these attacks.""
+
+As Rubio stumbled, Kasich's strategists saw an opening, bringing in some 500 out-of-state volunteers to help them canvass and make phone calls in the final days.
+
+He was one of the few candidates who looked like he was having fun on the campaign trail -- taking a break between his 99th and 100th town hall in Hollis, New Hampshire, Friday to engage in a snowball fight with reporters and aides.
+
+""If we win, I think it will send a powerful message,"" Kasich said a day earlier, ""because I think now is the time to be positive.""
+
+He touched on those themes in his victory speech after coming in second to Donald Trump, asserting that there was ""magic in the air"" and describing his campaign as an effort ""to restore the spirit of America"" while ""leaving no person behind.""
+
+""Maybe we are turning a page on a dark part of American politics,"" he said, ""because tonight the light overcame the darkness.""
+
+But the path ahead remains cloudy for the establishment: With a jumbled mess of candidates still vying for third late Tuesday night, the brutal battle in New Hampshire that was supposed to clarify the race ultimately may have simply led to stalemate.",REAL
+4568,"Obama Imposes Sanctions On Venezuela, Invoking Emergency Powers","Citing an ""erosion of human rights guarantees"" and corruption in Venezuela, President Obama issued an executive order Monday imposing sanctions on members of the country's military and intelligence services.
+
+The White House says the executive order builds on the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014, part of a response to a violent crackdown on government protests.
+
+Obama also invoked his emergency powers to declare ""a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.""
+
+U.S. relations with Venezuela are currently in tatters, even as it attempts to forge new ties to Cuba.
+
+As NPR's Parallels blog reported Sunday, ""President Nicolas Maduro accuses the U.S. of plotting a coup against him, and is expelling most U.S. diplomats from Venezuela. He is also demanding that Americans secure visas to enter the country.""
+
+President Obama's executive order freezes the assets of seven individuals, ranging from Gustavo Enrique González López, the director general of Venezuela's national intelligence service, to the head of Venezuela's Bolivarian National Police, Manuel Eduardo Pérez Urdaneta.
+
+Like several others on the list, the two men are charged with being involved with ""significant acts of violence or conduct that constitutes a serious abuse or violation of human rights.""
+
+The White House's list also includes prosecutor Katherine Nayarith Haringhton Padron, who is accused of charging members of Venezula's opposition with crimes such as ""assassination/coup plots based on implausible — and in some cases fabricated — information.""",REAL
+2059,"Clinton leads 2016 poll in Iowa, but Rand Paul is close (+video)","Clinton leads 2016 poll: Hillary Clinton tops the latest poll of potential 2016 presidential candidates in Iowa. Clinton comes out ahead of Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Rand Paul.
+
+Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton laughs at a speech during a February ceremony honoring her at the Pentagon in Washington. Clinton leads the latest poll in Iowa.
+
+Husband Bill says, ""Relax."" Let his wife enjoy a bit of a private life for the first time in two decades.
+
+But as far as the pollsters are concerned, the 2016 race is underway. And Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is certainly acting like he's in the race.
+
+The latest poll out of Iowa has former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton beating Florida Sen. Marco Rubio handily (48 vs. 37 percent), but could face a tougher race against Senator Paul (46 vs. 42 percent), according to a new poll by Quinnipiac University .
+
+The poll says that Iowa voters would give the race to either Senator Rubio or Senator Paul, if the Democratic Party candidate was Vice President Joe Biden.
+
+""The major difference between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joseph Biden is that she runs much better among independent voters, although Sen. Rand Paul runs better among that key group than either Democrat,"" said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
+
+""In general Sen. Paul appears to be the better GOP candidate at this point in Iowa. Part of the reason may be the publicity from his recent high-profile visit to the state, but more likely is that he begins with a solid base of support - the folks who voted for his father in the 2008 and 2012 caucuses.""
+
+As The Christian Science Monitor reported , Rand Paul was in Iowa two weeks ago, and was popular among Republicans.
+
+In a recent survey of [only] the registered Republican voters in Iowa, Paul won 39 percent of the vote with Marco Rubio next in line at just 20 percent. (Among Democrats , Hillary Clinton won 43 percent with Vice President Joe Biden winning 27 percent.) Earlier this year, Paul won a straw poll vote at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) . At a Monitor-sponsored press gathering last month , Paul said he would not decide whether to run before 2014. Meanwhile, he’s just unique enough among the GOP field – and just different enough from his father – to keep drawing attention.
+
+On Monday night, Paul was in another key primary state. He addressed a sold-out New Hampshire Republican Party dinner of some 500 attendees. At that dinner speech, as he did in Iowa, he criticized Hillary Clinton's handling of the terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. ""If I had been president, I would have relieved [Hillary Clinton] from office. Without question that is a dereliction of duty,"" said Paul in Concord, N.H., according to Realclearpolitics.com.
+
+Another Quinnipiac poll of voters in New Jersey , taken in March, also showed Clinton vanquishing three Republican contenders. Clinton beat New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (45 to 37 percent), in that poll. Voters surveyed also showed her beating Rubio and US Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin by even wider margins. The poll did not ask about Senator Paul.
+
+""Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would start a 2016 presidential campaign with enormous advantages,"" Mr. Brown of the Quinnipiac said in a statement after the New Jersey poll.  ""She obviously is by far the best known and her more than 20 years in the public spotlight allows her to create a very favorable impression on the American people. But it is worth noting that she had very good poll numbers in 2006 looking toward the 2008 election, before she faced a relative unknown in Barack Obama.""
+
+When asked about his wife's 2016 plans, earlier this month Bill Clinton said , ""She’s taking a role in the [Clinton] foundation, she’s writing books, she’s having a little fun being a private citizen for the first time in 20 years.”
+
+And then what?",REAL
+2753,"Hours from deadline, bipartisan Medicare bill heads to White House","America's doctors can rest easy: Not only has Congress ensured they will be paid in full for the services they render to Medicare patients, it has ended the yearly ritual putting that in doubt.
+
+The Senate voted 92-8 to approve a long-term ""doc fix,"" as the legislation adjusting Medicare fees has long been known, less than three hours before federal officials would have reduced payments to health-care providers by 21 percent. President Obama has indicated that he will sign the bill, which also extends the federal Children's Health Insurance Program, a key Democratic priority.
+
+Despite the last-minute nature of the vote, it was lauded by Hill leaders as a bipartisan triumph for both removing a yearly headache from the legislative calendar but also by implementing modest reforms to Medicare, including future incentives for doctors to deliver better care as well as premium hikes for the wealthiest Medicare recipients.
+
+[Congress congratulates itself for the ‘doc fix’ deal, but can it happen again?]
+
+“Instead of kicking this important Medicare payment issue down the road again, a strong bipartisan majority in Congress voted to finally solve the problem and ensure that seniors on Medicare don’t lose access to their doctors,"" Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement.
+
+Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said the vote was ""a milestone for the Medicare program"" for unraveling a ""common-sense-defying"" reimbursement system.
+
+McConnell called Tuesday night's vote ""another reminder of a new Republican Congress that’s back to work,"" but it could not have happened without support from top Democratic leaders. The deal was forged last month in the House, in a bargain struck by Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to eliminate the yearly ""doc fix"" votes while implementing some cost-cutting reforms to Medicare and extending the children's insurance program.
+
+The bill passed the House 392 to 37 on March 26. The Senate did not act on the bill before leaving the next day for a two-week recess.
+
+The ""doc fix"" has been necessitated by a 1997 legislative provision known as the Sustainable Growth Rate, which mandated that Medicare fees could not exceed the growth in the overall U.S. economy. But as actual health-care costs have far outstripped the fee hikes allowed by the 1997 legislation, Congress has been forced to step in on a yearly basis to reset the rates or risk the possibility that many health-care providers would stop treating Medicare recipients.
+
+Before the final Senate vote Tuesday, senators rejected six amendments, the adoption of any of which would have sent the bill back to the House, busting the midnight deadline. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said earlier this month that it would begin processing cut-rate payments to doctors starting Wednesday.
+
+The bill passed over the objections of the Senate's most conservative senators, who pushed colleagues to pay for the $141 billion in net spending that the Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill will create over the next decade. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) accused his Republican colleagues of hypocrisy for touting a budget resolution that will balance the federal budget by 2025 while passing a Medicare bill that will undermine that goal.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), a presidential candidate, said in a statement Tuesday that any deal ending the ""doc fix"" should be ""fully paid for and include significant and structural reforms to Medicare that provide seniors more power and control over their health care.""
+
+An amendment offered by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) would have offset the additional spending by repealing the health-care individual mandate -- the cornerstone of President Obama's Affordable Care Act. That measure went down along party lines in a vote requiring a 60-vote majority, with no Democrats or independents joining the Senate's 54 Republicans.
+
+Republicans, meanwhile, banded together to defeat Democratic amendments that would have doubled the children's health insurance extension from two years to four, eliminated abortion restrictions in the bill and beefed up funding for women's health, and eliminated a cap on Medicare coverage for physical therapy.
+
+While Cruz and Rubio opposed the bill, a third presidential hopeful, professional ophthalmologist Rand Paul (R-Ky.), supported it.",REAL
+5715,"Hope for the best, prepare for the worst…", ,FAKE
+9117,The Real Reason Why The Clinton Email Scandal Is Back Has Nothing To Do With Helping Trump,"By Jason Easley on Fri, Oct 28th, 2016 at 6:36 pm The reason why the Clinton email scandal is getting pushed 11 days before the election has nothing to with Trump's DOA White House bid, and everything to do with helping Republicans keep control of Congress. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+The reason why the Clinton email scandal is getting pushed 11 days before the election has nothing to with Trump’s DOA White House bid, and everything to do with helping Republicans keep control of Congress. 
+On the surface, the sudden revival of Hillary Clinton’s emails looks like an October surprise designed to help Republican nominee Donald Trump. The problem with this theory is that both Democrats and Republicans acknowledge that Trump is toast. 
+Unless Hillary Clinton’s emails say, “LOL. I was the shooter on the grassy knoll,” there is nothing that would stop her from winning the election. In fact, the emails FBI Director was investigating did not come from Clinton or her server. They seem to have very little to do with Hillary Clinton or her presidential campaign. 
+The emails are like catnip to Republican voters, who have been promised for years that if they keep sending Republicans to Congress, they’ll bring down a Democratic president, and that is the real reason behind the email scandal revival. 
+For the next ten days, Republican Congressional candidates are going to be able to campaign on investigating Hillary Clinton. The Republican candidates can pretend like Trump doesn’t exist because their new pitch to voters is, “Vote for me and I’ll bring down Hillary.” 
+Donald Trump is a lost cause. Millions of ballots have already been cast in swing states. Trump is being out organized and trounced by Clinton on the ground. 
+To understand the real value of the email scandal to the Republican Party, look down the ballot. 
+The Hillary Clinton email scandal is nothing more Republican get out the vote operation to save their majorities in Congress.",FAKE
+3823,How the next few weeks could determine the fate of Obama’s legacy,"June is shaping up as a time of reckoning for President Obama — and his legacy.
+
+Over the next three weeks, he could record significant wins on three of his most ambitious initiatives. Or have each of them blow up in his face.
+
+And those outcomes are largely outside of the president’s control.
+
+On Capitol Hill, lawmakers in the House are nearing a make-or-break vote on Obama’s broad ­Pacific Rim free trade deal with 11 other countries. At the Supreme Court, the nine justices will soon rule on a crucial provision in the president’s landmark 2010 health-care law, with the insurance plans of more than 6 million people in the balance. And in Geneva, U.S. and Iranian diplomats face a June 30 deadline to announce a deal on the future of Tehran’s nuclear program.
+
+A string of victories would provide the administration political momentum heading into the final stretch of Obama’s presidency, as he begins to frame the story of his administration after years of fierce combat with Republicans. A string of losses would undermine the White House’s message of transformational progress just as the 2016 campaign for his successor heats up and his presidency is examined in the crucible of an election season.
+
+“This is a consequential time for the administration,” said Simon Rosenberg, founder of NDN, a liberal think tank. “It’s reflective of the fact that Obama has been a very ambitious president, which sometimes runs counter to the D.C. media narrative.”
+
+The hurdles facing the administration are distinct and unpredictable, and inside the West Wing, Obama aides, who said it reflects the extent to which the president is still driving the country’s political agenda, have compartmentalized their fight on each front. Teams of policy experts and political advisers are plotting strategies and working through various contingencies independently.
+
+“It’s going to be a busy summer,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest, adding officials had “already expended significant political capital” in an effort to achieve some of these priorities.
+
+But White House allies acknowledged that the president and his advisers are acutely aware of the stakes. The health-care law is considered Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, the trade accord is central to his economic agenda, and the Iran nuclear deal could reshape the security environment in the Middle East and stand as his defining foreign policy success.
+
+“People are conscious of it. These are hugely consequential inflection points on the substance of his presidency,” said one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his former colleagues freely.
+
+Julie Smith, a former national security adviser to Vice President Biden, called the summer “determinative” for the president’s agenda. “A lot of what hangs in the balance will be determined in the next couple of weeks,” she said.
+
+Obama has projected confidence as he wields the powers of the presidency to influence the debate where he can. He invited a handful of Democratic lawmakers who support his trade initiative to accompany him on Air Force One to a summit with European leaders in Germany this week.
+
+The House plans to vote by next week on legislation, which the Senate has approved, that would give Obama additional authority to complete the ­Trans-Pacific Partnership. The president has called the accord a linchpin in his bid to ensure that the United States remains the world’s dominant economic power in the face of China’s rise.
+
+[READ: The odd bedfellows in the push for trade passage in the House]
+
+It marks a rare chance for Obama to show he can work with the GOP, which largely supports his push, but he faces intense opposition from labor unions and progressive Democrats.
+
+“I’m not going to hypothesize about not getting it done,” he said Monday during a news conference in Germany. “I intend to get it done.”
+
+On health care, Obama was equally defiant. The Supreme Court is considering in King v. Burwell whether to strike down government subsidies for people who purchase coverage on the federal health insurance exchange. Obama on Monday called such an interpretation a “contorted reading” of the Affordable Care Act, and added that the case “probably shouldn’t have even been taken up” by the court.
+
+The administration has insisted that there is no backup plan if the court strikes down the subsidies, which could force 6.4 million Americans to lose their insurance. Both sides on Capitol Hill are preparing for a political blame game if that happens. During an appearance Tuesday at the Catholic Health Association in Washington, Obama cast the health law as “woven into the fabric of America.”
+
+“There’s something deeply cynical about the ceaseless partisan attempts to roll back progress,” he said. “You’d think it was time to move on.”
+
+If the court guts the law, “it would be a terrible thing,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “But from the perspective of the parties, it would completely galvanize Democrats to make the Supreme Court a massive issue in the election.”
+
+On the flip side, a loss for Obama in the courts would buoy Republicans who have denounced the law as a costly program that will impede the nation’s economic growth.
+
+“Instead of jousting with reality again, perhaps he’ll consider the concerns of the constituents who write in every day to tell us how this law is hurting them,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday.
+
+One of the president’s top legacy items got a legal reprieve Tuesday, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected state and industry challenges to a proposed rule limiting greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants as premature.
+
+The issue of Iran’s nuclear capability also came up during Obama’s meetings in Germany. White House aides have emphasized that he does not consider the June 30 deadline a soft target that could be pushed back more than a few days if an agreement is still being finalized.
+
+“Iran has a historic opportunity to resolve the international community’s concerns about its nuclear program, and we agreed that Iran needs to seize that opportunity,” Obama said after meeting with his European counterparts.
+
+The president has invested significant political capital in preserving the framework of the tentative deal that would scale back Tehran’s nuclear program for 10 to 15 years, slowing Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon, according to the administration. Republicans and some Democrats, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have denounced the agreement and argued that Washington is foolish to trust Tehran.
+
+Robert Dallek, a presidential historian, said that no matter how these initiatives fare over the next several weeks, it will take years to evaluate whether Obama ultimately achieves his policy goals. Still, Dallek said, presidents naturally become more preoccupied with their legacy as they approach the end of their second term.
+
+“They’re very mindful of what history’s going to say about them, and they’re eager to shape how history views them,” he said.
+
+And for White House staff members, who have experienced significant turnover, the ticking clock adds to the anxiety as they race to lock in the president’s most ambitious initiatives.
+
+“People who have been there a long time start thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I wish we could get this over with,’ ” said Joseph Hagin, who served as deputy chief of staff for President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2008. “People are tired, people are leaving, and it’s depressing to the people who are staying. It’s really this summer when people start to realize it’s coming to a close. But you’ve still got to be on your game.”",REAL
+4446,Intelligence report commissioned by White House says ISIS not contained,"A new intelligence report commissioned by the White House says that the ISIS terror group will grow in numbers and gain ground unless it suffers significant losses in Iraq and Syria.
+
+The findings sharply contradict previous statements by President Obama and other White House officials that the Islamic State has been ""contained"" by a program of U.S.-led airstrikes and the deployment of approximately 3,500 U.S. forces to train and otherwise aid moderate Syrian rebels and Kurdish fighters.
+
+On Sunday, a U.S. official told Fox News that ISIS has been able to effectively recruit and attract affiliates despite losses on the ground, and has now supplanted Al Qaeda as the primary global jihadist threat.The official said that going forward, the entirety of the ISIS threat must be addressed, and the group's main base of operations in Syria must be “degraded.”
+
+The findings were first reported by The Daily Beast, which said the White House asked for the assessment prior to the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, in which ISIS militants killed 130 people in a series of coordinated shootings and suicide bombings.
+
+In response to the report, The Daily Beast said President Obama had directed Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford to come up with new strategies against ISIS.
+
+One recommendation, announced by Carter Tuesday, is a special operations cell with the ability to capture senior ISIS leaders in the hope of finding out more about their networks.
+
+However, the Daily Beast reported that Carter's announcement took military planners by surprise, since they had yet to finalize important details, including the rules of engagement under which such raids would be carried out.
+
+The eight-page report was compiled by a team of analysts from the CIA, NSA, and other agencies, the website reported.
+
+""This intel report didn't tell us anything we didn't already know,"" an official told The Daily Beast. ""It was lots of great charts showing countries highlighted across the globe, with some groups having pledged allegiance to ISIS and others leaning towards it.""
+
+The report also described how the terrorist group with aspirations of founding an extremist Islamic caliphate already has a network of groups that have pledged allegiance or are vying for membership in a dozen countries.
+
+Click for more from The Daily Beast.",REAL
+6643,Major Democratic Donor: African-Americans are “Seriously F***ed In The Head”,"The best kept secret of politics today is that it’s liberals, not conservatives, who are racist, but it won’t be such a secret after today. Of course, it’s always been a matter of historical record that it was the Democrats who supported not just slavery but segregation as well. 
+Via TruthAndAction 
+
+In fact, they were so opposed to civil rights that they formed the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War (remember Robert Byrd? It’s no coincidence that he was a KKK Grand Wizard you know!)
+But instead of owning up to their past misdeeds, Democrats peddle the fiction of a “reset” that saw the racists in their party migrate to the GOP, allowing them to become a kinder, more tolerant organization. This narrative unravels, however, when one hears what one of the party’s biggest donors had to say about African-Americans who don’t vote the way he wants them to.
+As one of the biggest donors to the Democratic Party, Benjamin Barber was easily able to gain access to a fundraiser for the Clinton campaign. The billionaire had trouble understanding how African-Americans could possibly vote differently from him however, expressing the sentiment that they were “seriously f***ed in the head” for supporting the GOP and comparable to Jews who sold out their people during the Holocaust.
+See the video below: 
+",FAKE
+2761,Istanbul: Explosion by ISIS bomber kills at least 10,"Istanbul (CNN) The suicide bomber who killed at least 10 foreigners Tuesday in a popular central Istanbul tourist area belonged to ISIS, officials said -- an attack that shows the group's nerve, reach and capacity for terror.
+
+No group claimed responsibility for the blast, yet Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu pinned blame on the group that calls itself the Islamic State, which has entrenched itself in neighboring Syria and Iraq while proving willing time and again to lash out elsewhere.
+
+At least eight Germans died in the blast between the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque tourist attractions in Istanbul's cultural and historic heart, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, warning that figure may rise. A Turkish official earlier told CNN that at least nine Germans were killed. Davutoglu indicated that the 15 wounded were from inside and outside his country, with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier saying nine of those were German.
+
+""They haven't just targeted those who died,"" Davutoglu said. ""They have targeted the whole of Turkey and the whole world.""
+
+Born in 1988, the man responsible for the blast was not among the thousands being tracked by Turkish authorities, having ""newly (come) into Turkey from Syria,"" Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said.
+
+This violence can be pinned on many groups, including forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Yet ISIS has been behind many of the worst atrocities there and elsewhere in the region, a fact that's made the terror group a top target for civilized countries.
+
+A member of NATO, Turkey has increasingly been engaged in this fight -- including allowing the United States to launch strikes from Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey and clamping down to curb more fighters from going through its territory to join the group. ISIS has responded by singling out Turkey as a primary target, and a recent issue of its Dabiq magazine had a cover showing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan alongside U.S. President Barack Obama.
+
+And Davutoglu stressed Turkey wouldn't back down after Tuesday's attack, urging his countrymen and people worldwide to unite against this threat.
+
+""We will continue our fight against terror with the same firm attitude,"" said the Prime Minister, insisting his country will continue working with the U.S.-led coalition to combat ISIS. ""We will never compromise, not one single inch.""
+
+'I saw shocked tourists falling to the ground'
+
+Tuesday's blast rattled Sultanahmet Square around 10:20 a.m. (3:20 a.m. ET) and brought a rush of ambulances and security forces to an area that would have been heavily guarded on any day.
+
+""I've never heard such a loud explosion in my life,"" Sener Ozdemir, a 45-year-old shop owner, told Turkey's semi-official Anadolu news agency. ""...Just after the incident, I saw shocked tourists falling to the ground.""
+
+Targeting outsiders would be in line with attacks executed or inspired by ISIS, which has enemies everywhere and has proven willing to strike those who don't subscribe to its twisted, hard-line version of Sharia law.
+
+Turkey is a popular destination for Germans, and Germany's foreign ministry urged travelers in Istanbul ""to avoid public gatherings (and) tourist attractions for now"" after the attack.
+
+The Peruvian foreign ministry said in a statement that one of its citizens is in stable condition at a hospital after being wounded.
+
+A Norwegian citizen was taken to a nearby hospital after the incident, foreign ministry spokesman Frode Andersen told CNN.
+
+""The type of monuments that are in Sultanahmet Square are the type that ISIS has been blowing up in Syria,"" Gohel told CNN. ""It's seen as a place where you have a mesh of different entities. It's a real melting pot.""
+
+The blast comes as Turkey deals with multiple security threats -- from longstanding nemesis the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, as well as ISIS, which has taken over swaths of Syria and Iraq on its quest to form a far-reaching caliphate.
+
+Turkey's actions against ISIS, which first emerged out of Iraq but now has its de facto capital in Syria, are more recent but have nonetheless made it a target of that terrorist group.
+
+Its military cooperation with the United States and other NATO nations in particular has angered ISIS, said Fadi Hakura, associate fellow at Chatham House.
+
+Tuesday's blast -- if it's confirmed to be the terror group's work -- ups the ante for Ankara, forcing it to step up its anti-ISIS fight even more, according to the Asia-Pacific Foundation's Gohel.
+
+""An attack like this is designed to create economic, political and social consequences,"" Gohel told CNN. ""Turkey has to realize that the pipeline that feeds ISIS from Turkey to Syria has to now be cut off, because incidents like this are not one-offs. This could be part of a series of plots.""
+
+And given that the dead aren't Turkish, this attack directly impacts other countries as well. While it's not known if the bomber targeted any one nationality, the idea of terrorists targeting tourists is not new -- as illustrated in last March's attack on Tunis' Bardo Museum and June's mass shooting at a Tunisian beachfront hotel
+
+""We have a free society ... but there are people who want us harmed,"" said Merkel, referring to the Tunisia attacks and the more recent ones targeting civilians in Paris. ""... We will persevere.""",REAL
+7420,Coming Unglued,"By John Kaminski on October 30, 2016 John Kaminski — The Rebel.org Oct 24, 2016 Dark secrets remain unrevealed as society’s fabric disintegrates Why is every major politician surrounded by Jewish ‘advisers’? 
+Too many things don’t make sense. 
+What makes us act against our own best interests? 
+Why are we Americans encircling Russia with tanks and missiles? Why do we create our own terrorists and bomb our own allies? Why do we blow up our own buildings and claim that the crime was done by terrorists who simply cannot be found? What do the misanthropes who operate the gears of power want by causing constant conflict? 
+Sometimes Washington reminds me of the Old Testament, ruled by a wrathful God who orders us to kill those whose property we wish to steal. Why would we hire the most odious criminals in the world to butcher the inhabitants of Middle Eastern countries? I mean, whose work are we doing by these actions, covertly funding Israel-friendly Arab radicals to demolish nations who refuse to do our bidding? 
+There can be only one answer. America is no longer run by Americans. Because the same people who commit the crimes own the newspapers and TV networks, most Americans don’t realize their country has long ago been taken away by the very international bankers Henry Ford warned us about, who Adolf Hitler warned us about. 
+Now Ford and Hitler are the most widely reviled personalities from the 20th century. Not a day goes by when you don’t hear something nasty about them. They tried to stop the Jewish takeover of reality. The tidal wave of Jew-owned white noise media overwhelmed them. 
+What most people still don’t realize is that none of these neocon wars would have happened had Hitler won World War II. He never wanted to conquer anyone. He only wanted the return of Germany’s ancestral lands, which had been stolen by the Jewish allies (US, Britain, USSR) after World War I. 
+All the horror stories about Hitler are projected Jewish fantasies that have dominated the Western airwaves for a half century. They are meant to obscure Hitler’s economic miracle and the path to a financial future free of the vampire Jews. 
+Hitler floated seven peace proposals prior to World War II. But because he had challenged the Jewish monopoly of control of the world’s financial affairs, the Jews would let him have no peace. The secret Jew Roosevelt pushed the levers of war. Winston Churchill started bombing the first day he took office. 
+Think of all the wars that have been spawned by the Jewish murder machine since that time, the 1940s. It’s impossible to say that none of them would have happened, but had Hitler won, the Jews would not now be strutting around the world using U.S. military might as its brutal enforcer to rob all nations of the their most valuable possessions, and even more chilling, to stamp out all traces of opposition to their psychopathological hijacking of everyone’s reality. 
+You can’t live a normal life because of the Jews, harvesting and neutering everything they encounter, like some robot parasite destined to suck the life out of the world, as Hitler and Ford both warned us about, turning your food into poison and your daughters into tramps. 
+There is no one to turn to for help. Turn to the wrong person and you can get killed. 
+Call the cops and your pet’s as good as dead. 
+Anywhere in the white United States, if you saw a woman being raped by 20 men on the street, everyone’s first impulse would be to stop the crime, or at least report it to the cops. 
+Not so in the ugly deserts of the Middle East, where insane Arab terrorists hired by Jews and Americans commit the most barbaric crimes in order to blame these false flag atrocities on people it means to exterminate, a task for which any excuse will do for these world famous killers. 
+This is the real American personality, the goons who hired those al-Qaeda mercenaries to rape and kill Qaddafi in the streets, people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Stone cold killers. And they laugh about it. 
+If you were in your right mind, you wouldn’t ever trust people like this. 
+America gassed those hundreds of children in Syria and tried to blame it on Assad. People finally began to realize that nothing the U.S. government ever says is true. The terrorists who supposedly slit people’s throats are so over-the-top because they are all a Hollywood act < http://www.globalresearch.ca/isis-beheadings-of-journalists-cia-admitted-to-staging-fake-jihadist-videos-in-2010/5399345 >. 
+Americans have begun to realize that they are the killers they thought they had been fighting. It turns out the fight has just begun. 
+Unglued. Society is becoming unglued. The fabric of society is disintegrating. What horrific chaos is sure to follow can only be envisioned by our most harrowing nightmares. 
+There are no explanations that adequately describe what exactly is happening to the world at the present time except to note that things that once seemed to work now no longer do. 
+It seems like freedom has been devalued and shackled, and governments make too many decisions the people never wanted, like the World Wars, the Great Depression and the War on Drugs. 
+To be an American today is like living in a grand old steamship that is not so slowly sinking into a jellified ocean, petrified minds in a viscous sea of misinformation, afraid to challenge orders they know are lies, sliding into oblivion without a clue that they are doing so. 
+The separation of the population into chosen and neglected applies to all religions, guaranteeing perpetual sectarian strife. Those who are chosen believe it is their right to rob and kill whomever they choose, that they are simply following the laws of nature and the personalized deity they choose to hallucinate. 
+Governments have adopted this policy. Peace is achieved when robbers agree to divide the spoils. The rest of the people are left to scramble for scraps. It has always been this way, I think. 
+The government overreach to extend help to needy immigrants is really part of a ploy to dilute the American electorate into undereducated slaves who will support the government through any atrocity because it is the government that is keeping them alive. 
+This is how the Democrats guarantee themselves a majority of citizens too grateful for the financial help to ever quarrel with the government’s expansionist objectives and its continuing restrictions on individual rights. 
+There are simply too many subjects to be addressed, to be worried about. 
+They swathe all the final cuts of vegetables, right before it goes to market, with Glyphosate, to make sure everyone gets poisoned. 
+Step in brackish Louisiana water with a cut on your foot and your body will completely disintegrate in a few weeks. 
+The fallacy of the cloister regiments us into soldier slaves, causing us to murder those who disagree with what we say. 
+The more technology increases the faster human abilities dissipate. 
+The flaw of democracy is that the people with the money can convince the people with the guns to start shooting at any time. 
+The government has blackmailed states into implementing a Communist agenda that reduces the intelligence of citizens. 
+So many lies told over so many years. 
+As long as we try to see things through the toxic filter of Jewish media, what we see will be a mirage that aims to mislead, exploit or destroy us. Coming unglued. 
+The world is coming unglued. 
+Like the Atlantic Gulfstream, the circadian rhythm of the planet has been disrupted. 
+Ever since it was discovered that men will kill each other over practically anything, there have been those who will cultivate disagreements for profit, such as weapons makers who seek to widen their markets by endlessly promoting conflict, or newspaper owners who fan the flames of discord and scandal and watch their profits skyrocket. 
+It’s like we’re all spectators at the old Roman Coliseum only instead of some hapless prisoner getting chewed up by lions, the stakes in this entertainment are if the beast wins much of the known world will be turned to rubble and most of us will be suddenly dead. This is no exaggeration. Just ask the people in Syria or any of a dozen other countries that Israel, using U.S. muscle, has destroyed. 
+It’s like the shadow of Judaism casts its evil pall over every area of human endeavor, pollutes everything, cheapens our lives, makes everything artificial. Why do Jews seek to murder the natural? 
+Why do they strive toward wanting to be everyone’s jailer and demanding immunity for their obnoxious crimes against humanity, whom they call beasts while their heckling Heebs twitch and moan to the insanities of their so-called holy book. 
+They suck the blood of their babies’ penises. How insane do you have to be? 
+Failure to identify this threat and solve this mystery has now placed human society in absolute peril, as the majority of human beings sinks into a second class consciousness, while those with the keys to kosher success join the ranks of ruthless guards keeping watch on a world of pathetic prisoners. 
+Too many things don’t make sense. 
+Is our fear of death so strong that we have to destroy ourselves to prove we are immune to it? Better yet would be acknowledgment of its inevitability that would create a clearer view of who we are and what we’re doing. 
+Because what we’re doing now, and how we are proceeding further into this toxic reality we have created for ourselves, offers us no future except and increasing decay and corruption that the Jews seem to love so much. Like bloodthirsty vultures they look for stricken carcasses on the road that they can devour in their insatiable drive to consume the whole world and everything in it. 
+The Jews intend to kill everything natural and replace it with a Jewish product that can be controlled from afar. They will fail in this attempt and likely destroy humanity in the process. 
+In any case, we are well on our way to being completely regimented with independent consciousness no longer an option. 
+We have no fix on the future. Neither presidential candidate offers us a way out of our trouble because neither will admit the overwhelming control inflicted by the Jews on the whole world is leading to a mindless police state in which our only thought will be to serve the state no matter how cruel and depraved that assignment might be. 
+To disagree with the aims of the Jewish monster state is to court your own death, or at least to be slandered and ostracized by people you thought were your friends. 
+Too many things don’t make sense. What unexplored dark corner of our brains would make us create our own enemy in order to keep our fellows enslaved and exploited? John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, constantly trying to figure out why we are destroying ourselves, and pinpointing a corrupt belief system as the engine of our demise. Solely dependent on contributions from readers, please support his work by mail: 6871 Willow Creek Circle #103 , North Port FL 34287 USA.",FAKE
+7219,Video: Journalist Covering Pipeline Protests Shot While Conducting Interview,"Videos Video: Journalist Covering Pipeline Protests Shot While Conducting Interview During an interview, this journalist was shot point-blank by police. Fortunately, the entire ordeal was caught on camera. | November 7, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! A member of the Stutsman County SWAT team who declined to give his name nor to be identifiable by badge stands guard by an armored personnel carrier while deployed to watch protesters demonstrating against the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Stand Rock Sioux Reservation, in Cannon Ball, N.D., Sunday, Oct. 30, 2016. 
+Tensions continue to escalate in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, where protesters attempt to peacefully face off against riot police and the National Guard. In addition to being maced and beaten with batons, activists opposing the four-state Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) have been tased and even shot with rubber bullets. 
+As the recent incident (below) reveals, violence seems to only be escalating rather than ceasing. Though the UN has called on the U.S. government to halt all construction of the pipeline , its development continues. Desperate and on edge, activists at Standing Rock continue to put their lives on the line, unaware of what will come next – prepared to expect anything. Unfortunately, what recently occurred is a reminder of the danger people protesting corporate greed face. I was shot by militarized police WHILE interviewing a man on camera at #StandingRock …and here's the footage. #NoDAPL https://t.co/FfWiSCbiKf pic.twitter.com/4DRwNPkfZ9 
+— Erin Schrode (@ErinSchrode) November 3, 2016 
+During an interview with Cantapeta Creek, activist and journalist Erin Schrode was talking when out of nowhere, police shot her with a rubber bullet. She can be heard screaming, “Ow!” before crumbling to the ground. 
+In the Facebook post , Schrode wrote that while “militarized police” shot her at “point-blank range”, she was physically unhurt but shaken from the attack. In an interview with Fusion , she later relayed that she couldn’t fully comprehend what had happened but just remembered being in “excruciating pain.” 
+She said: “I couldn’t fathom that I’d just been hit. Why would they target me? Why would they shoot anyone? There was absolutely nothing violent, aggressive, provocative going on at the protests yesterday.” 
+The day after the activist realized she’d caught the entire incident on camera, she quickly uploaded it to social media to share with the world. 
+What’s happening in Standing Rock doesn’t just pertain to the indigenous in the area, it affects present and future generations. In addition to trying to protect the Missouri river, activists supporting the Standing Rock Sioux tribe are hoping to preserve sacred burial ground and send a message about the need to respect Native American treaties. Commenting on the scene at Standing Rock, Schrode says: “I can’t believe what is happening here in Standing Rock. It’s a scene like I’ve never seen anywhere else in the world, and it’s right here at home.” 
+You can bet that this activist isn’t leaving Standing Rock until justice is served. She’ll remain – like the majority of people who have set up camp on the edge of the reservation – until the pipeline is halted or all are physically forced off the land. If the latter occurs, expect deafening outcry from activists around the world. These men shot me at #StandingRock today. I pray for them– and for our peaceful, prayerful water protectors. #NoDAPL https://t.co/hUXigAF6u4 pic.twitter.com/5HI14dTEO8 
+— Erin Schrode (@ErinSchrode) November 3, 2016 This work by True Activist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.",FAKE
+7989,The Top 5 Conspiracy Theories That Were Proven To Be True Because Donald Trump Ran For President,"  The Top 5 Conspiracy Theories That Were Proven To Be True Because Donald Trump Ran For President Every election year, charges of favoritism in the media fly back and forth, this is as old as the Republic itself. But this year, conspiracy theorists have claimed that the MSM was not only in the bag for Crooked Hillary, but actively working to secure her election with false polls, false stories and rampant and illegal collusion with the candidate.   Thank you, WikiLeaks , for making this a memorable year for discovering the truth behind the power that controls our system. 
+Historians will look back on the Presidential Election of 2016 as the, not “a”, but the turning point in American history for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which will be that, because Donald Trump ran and was attacked by such an army of haters, that the truth about so many things previously kept hidden was brought out into the open. So today we are happy to bring you: The Top 5 Conspiracy Theories Proven To Be True In 2016 THE BUSH FAMILY ARE PART OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER: Every since George H.W. Bush uttered his “ we will bring in a New World Order ” speech in 1991, conspiracy theorists has speculated that the Bush Crime Family were not really Republicans or even Conservatives, but globalists with a secret agenda. It took the nomination of Donald Trump as the Republican candidate for president to bring these worms out from under their rock. Not only have they opposed Trump, and refused to support the nominee of the party they claim to belong to, they are actively working to try and elect Crooked Hillary , globalist candidate for president. PROVEN TRUE. THE LIBERAL MAIN STREAM MEDIA IS CORRUPT: Every election year, charges of favoritism in the media fly back and forth, this is as old as the Republic itself. But this year, conspiracy theorists have claimed that the MSM was not only in the bag for Crooked Hillary , but actively working to secure her election with false polls , false stories and rampant and illegal collusion with the candidate . WikiLeaks, one of the best friends the truth has in America, exposed all that and more this election 2016. It showed that not only were the conspiracy theorists right, they didn’t go far enough in their speculations. PROVEN TRUE. THE DNC RIGGED THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION PROCESS: After candidate Bernie Sanders exhibited Trump-sized crowds everywhere he went, people were shocked when he was so easily beaten by Crooked Hillary who struggles to draw people to her rallies. As it turned out, the DNC was not only actively working to nominate Hillary , they were also actively working to suppress the momentum of Bernie Sanders. PROVEN TRUE. THE CLINTON FOUNDATION SOLD ACCESS TO THE STATE DEPARTMENT: For years now, conspiracy buffs have made the claim that the Clinton Crime Family, and Crooked Hillary sold access to the State Department for cash and favors. A book called Clinton Cash was even published documenting all this. But when WikiLeaks released emails proving this to be true and exposing the connections, it ceased to be a theory albeit remaining a conspiracy. PROVEN TRUE. GEORGE SOROS IS THE POWER BEHIND NEARLY ALL OF IT: George Soros real life history reads like a sordid crime novel. Born Jewish, he switched teams as a teenager in WWII and sided with the Nazis . This began a life of crime and intrigue that helped him amass an enormous fortune. Revelations in 2016 have showed Soros to be one of Hillary Clinton’s largest single donors , his orders were carried out by Crooked Hillary’s State Department, he funded the race riots which started in 2015, and he is behind massive voter fraud both here and around the world. If you go to vote and see a SmartMatic voting machine , immediately demand a paper ballot if you want your vote to be accurately recorded. George Soros is even the financial power behind the massive wave of Muslim migration in Europe. And the money behind Black Lives Matters as well. PROVEN TRUE. 
+So thank you, WikiLeaks , for making this a memorable year for discovering the truth behind the power that controls our system. And thank you, Donald J. Trump, for having the courage to run this campaign, spending $100 million of your own money, and calling us to make America great, again. CNN Caught Covering Up Hillary Cheating at Debates: Gen. Flynn: Clinton should step down from race: George Bush Sr. New World Order Live Speech Sept 11 1991: Crooked Hillary Lies For 10 minutes straight: WikiLeaks exposes relationship between Crooked Hillary and illegal activities to hide illegal email server: Ingraham: ‘Obscene’ how the Democrats have turned on Comey Trey Gowdy Smashes Lying Loretta Lynch & Hillary Clinton Like A Boss: I know where Hillary Clintons deleted emails are and how to get them legally @TGowdySC @seanhannity @realDonaldTrump . 100% true. Retweet. pic.twitter.com/eir8r0FJ8M 
+— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 SHARE  ",FAKE
+4190,Trump Scoffs at Cruz Choosing a Running Mate: 'He Can't Win',"It's an unusual move for a presidential candidate to pick a vice presidential running mate before winning his party's nomination – even more unusual when his path to the nomination is blocked. But despite trailing Trump, Cruz went ahead and announced his choice.
+
+But will he hit a home run by naming former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his running mate – or will he strike out?
+
+""Carly isn't intimated by bullies,"" the Texas senator declared Wednesday. ""Over and over again, Carly has shattered glass ceilings.""
+
+""This is the fight of our time,"" Fiorina said during Wednesday's announcement. ""And I believe Ted Cruz is the man to lead that fight. And I am prepared to stand by his side and give this everything I have, to restore the soul of our party, to defeat Donald Trump, to defeat Hillary Clinton, and to take our country back.""
+
+Fiorina tussled with Trump early in the primary season for comments he made about her face. The GOP front-runner dismissed this latest move.
+
+""A new relationship has started – Cruz and Carly,"" the tycoon said. ""Cruz can't win. What's he doing picking a vice president?""
+
+Trump had other things to talk about as well. He gave a major foreign policy speech in Washington and said America's allies would have to start paying for their own defense. He also railed on the Bush and Obama administrations for not stopping persecution of Christians in the Middle East.
+
+""We have done nothing to help Christians, nothing, and we should always be ashamed of that – for that lack of action,"" he said.
+
+Trump went from there to Indiana where he got the endorsement of legendary Indiana Hooters basketball coach Bobby Knight, ahead of Tuesday's primary.
+
+""If we win Indiana, it's over,"" he said. ""It's over. I'm not playing games with Indiana.""
+
+After Indiana votes, Clinton is hoping it's also over for Bernie Sanders. The delegate math is not with Sanders, who rallied thousands of screaming fans at Indiana University hours after he announced the layoffs of hundreds of campaign staffers.
+
+""Next Tuesday let's have the largest voter turnout in Indiana history,"" Sanders said.
+
+Cruz is 400 delegates behind Trump and while he expects to win Indiana, if he doesn't, analysts say it's all over.",REAL
+1380,The Many Faces of Iowa’s Caucus Voters,"Iowa’s caucuses are the embodiment of retail politics, typically rewarding candidates who build support—and enthusiasm—one county at a time. Social conservatives have asserted their influence in recent years, with conservative Rick Santorum narrowly edging out the more centrist Mitt Romney in 2012. But the state isn’t a monolith, and demographic characteristics may help handicap the Republican race.
+
+Data from The Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls suggest a GOP primary electorate defined by three broad lanes: a highly religious bloc that supports socially conservative candidates such as Ted Cruz and Ben Carson; a more moderate slice of voters with higher incomes and education levels who back ‘establishment’ candidates like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush; and a third constituency of Donald Trump supporters representing a secular, populist movement.
+
+Viewed through that lens, here’s a look at where each type of candidate might build a winning coalition in Iowa.
+
+Related article: How Donald Trump Happened: The Demographics Behind His Supporters »",REAL
+4934,How Millennial voters see this election,"Millennials are not politically monolithic. With more than 75 million of them, they will shape the political landscape for years to come. Yet they are an unpredictable grab bag of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism.
+
+Anibal David Cabrera, 31, stands in front of a mural in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa, Fla., on July 7, 2016. A Jeb Bush die-hard in the primaries, he's now supporting Trump and hopes the business mogul can make good on his promises.
+
+The oldest millennials — nearing 20 when airplanes slammed into New York City's Twin Towers — are old enough to remember the relative economic prosperity of the 1990s, and when a different Clinton was running for president. The nation's youngest adults — now nearing 20 themselves — find it hard to recall a reality without terrorism and economic worry.
+
+Now millennials have edged out baby boomers as the largest living generation in U.S. history, and more than 75 million of them have come of age. How they vote on Nov. 8 will shape the political landscape for years to come. Yet with less than three months to go before Election Day, the values of young Americans whose coming-of-age was bookended by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Great Recession are emerging as an unpredictable grab bag of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism.
+
+What they share is a palpable sense of disillusionment.
+
+As part of its Divided America series, The Associated Press spent time with seven millennial voters in five states where the oldest and largest swath of this generation — ages 18 to 35, as defined by the Pew Research Center — could have an outsized influence in November. They are a uniquely American mosaic, from a black teen in Nevada voting for the first time to a Florida-born son of Latino immigrants to a white Christian couple in Ohio.
+
+Taken individually, these voters illustrate how millennials are challenging pollsters' expectations based on race, class and background in surprising ways, reacting to what they see as the loss of the American Dream. They are intent on shaping something new and important that reflects their reality — on their own terms.
+
+""Millennials have been described as apathetic, but they're absolutely not. I think you can see from this election year that they're not, and that millennials have a very nuanced understanding of the political world,"" said Diana Downard, a 26-year-old Bernie Sanders supporter who will vote for Hillary Clinton. ""So yeah, I'm proud to be a millennial.""
+
+Just 5 percent of young adults say that America is ""greater than it has ever been,"" while 52 percent feel the nation is ""falling behind"" and 24 percent believe the U.S. is ""failing,"" according to a GenForward poll released last month. The first-of-its kind survey of young people between the ages of 18 and 30 was conducted by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
+
+Fifty-four percent believe only a few people at the top can get ahead in today's America, and 74 percent say income and wealth distribution are uneven, according to the poll.
+
+Briana Lawrence, a 21-year-old videographer and eyelash artist from Durham, North Carolina, identifies with those numbers.
+
+She was just 7 on Sept. 11 and the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks is the only time she can remember the nation feeling united, even if only by grief. With $40,000 in student debt, she's working hard to establish her own cosmetic business after graduating from North Carolina Central University. She plans to vote for Hillary Clinton, but feels America has lost its way.
+
+""My biggest hope for this country is for us to come back together as a community. As a United States of America, to unite together again,"" she said.
+
+But millennials know that getting to that place won't be easy. Many, like Lawrence, are saddled with college debt and have struggled to find jobs.
+
+In Denver, 1,600 miles to the west, Downard also has almost $40,000 in student debt that's already changed her path. A dual U.S. and Mexican citizen, she feels she can't afford to work for an overseas organization — one of her dreams — and plans to delay having a family at least 10 years.
+
+""We went to college in pursuit of a better life and really, now, we're kind of just paralyzed by our student debt,"" said Downard, who works for a nonpartisan organization that works to improve youth voter registration. ""You can't even think about those sorts of alternative options.""
+
+In part because of these economic pressures, a 2014 Pew Research Center poll found that — for the first time in more than 130 years — adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living with their parents than with a spouse or partner in their own residence. And one in four millennials say they might not ever marry, a Pew survey found.
+
+Only 8 percent of young adults feel their household's financial situation is ""very good,"" and education and economic growth ranked No. 1 and No. 2 as the issues that will most influence their vote, according to the GenForward poll.
+
+""We might be in a 'good-ish' finance situation right now as a country, but I was always taught there's ups and downs in the finance world and with every up, there's a down. So we should be preparing for that down to come,"" said Brien Tillett, who graduated this spring from a high school just miles from the Las Vegas Strip.
+
+Tillett, who turned 18 in July, was 10 when the recession hit and sucked the wind out of his family. His mother, a single parent, was in a car accident that hospitalized her for three months and, with no safety net, the family struggled.
+
+""It was to the point where I would not ask my mother to go hang out with my friends because I didn't want her to worry about money,"" said Tillett, whose brush with insolvency has deeply influenced his views.
+
+The national debt is his No. 1 concern.
+
+As a young black man, he's turned off by remarks by Donald Trump that he finds racist and xenophobic, but likes Trump's aggressive stance on the economy. ""We're trillions of dollars in debt and that should not be happening,"" said Tillett, who started running track at a two-year college this month.
+
+He strongly considered voting for Trump, but will now vote for Clinton because Trump has become ""a loose cannon"" in recent weeks. Still, he's angry about Clinton's use of a private email server when she was Secretary of State. ""We have to basically question if we can truly trust her with all of our nation's secrets,"" he said.
+
+Anibal David Cabrera was in high school when Tillett was just a small boy — but he's part of the same generation.
+
+The son of a Honduran mother and Dominican father, he graduated from college in 2008 as the recession was picking up steam. A finance major, he wanted to work for a hedge fund or bank, but the economic collapse meant jobs had dried up. Eventually Cabrera, now 31 and living in Tampa, Florida, got an accounting job at a small tech firm.
+
+He feels he's entering the prime of his life a few steps behind where he could have been, through no fault of his own.
+
+A Jeb Bush die-hard in the primaries, he's now supporting Trump and hopes the business mogul can make good on his promises.
+
+""My biggest hope for the country would be a prosperous economy. That is something my generation has kind of never seen,"" Cabrera said. ""We never got to experience the rapid growth of the '80s or the '90s, and I think my generation would love to see that.""
+
+Shared pain does not lead to shared views among his generation.
+
+Millennial voters' disdain for traditional party affiliation have made them particularly unpredictable. Half describe themselves as political independents, according to a 2014 Pew Research report — a near-record level of political disaffiliation. As a generation, they tend to be extremely liberal on social questions such as gay marriage, abortion and marijuana legalization. Yet they skew slightly conservative on fiscal policy and are more in line with other generations on gun control and foreign affairs.
+
+Trip Nistico, a recent graduate of the University of Colorado, Boulder's law school, is an avid supporter of gun rights who goes to shooting ranges but also supports same-sex marriage. The 26-year-old Texas native voted for President Barack Obama in 2008 — his first presidential election — and Mitt Romney in 2012.
+
+""I'm pretty liberal on social issues. I don't really think that — on a national level — they're really as important as some of these other issues we've been discussing,"" he said.
+
+He's supporting Trump because his preferred candidate, the Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson, isn't likely to crack the polls.
+
+Trump remains wildly unpopular among young adults, however, and nearly two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 believe the Republican nominee is racist, according to the GenForward poll. Views of Hillary Clinton also were unfavorable, though not nearly to the same extent.
+
+Many millennials are angry that Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders has withdrawn and are disillusioned with the electoral process.
+
+Forty-two percent of voters under 30 have ""hardly any confidence"" that the Republican presidential nomination process is fair and 38 percent feel the same about the Democratic process, according to the GenForward poll. The survey was taken before the leak of Democratic National Committee emails that roiled the Democratic Party.
+
+Bill and Kristi Clay, young parents and devout Christians from rural Ohio, offer a portrait of millennials struggling to choose a candidate who matches their values.
+
+They have two sons, 4 and 6, and are adopting a child from the Philippines. They serve meals with their church at inner-city soup kitchens in nearby Columbus and have a mix of political views that, Bill Clay says, comes from following ""the lamb, not the donkey or elephant.""
+
+Kristi Clay opposes same-sex marriage and abortion and names those as her top issues this election. Yet the 32-year-old school librarian is still reluctantly leaning toward voting for Clinton. ""You have to look at the big picture,"" she says.
+
+Bill Clay, meanwhile, shares his wife's views on the more conservative issues, but they hold what some would consider more liberal views on matters such as immigration.
+
+""If we're going to try to be Christian-like, and embrace people, I don't think you can shut the borders to an entire group of people just because of the fear that some of them don't like us,"" said Clay, 33, who voted for Barack Obama in the last two elections but supported Republican Marco Rubio this time.
+
+Yet that strong faith has not helped him find much inspiration in the current candidates, both of whom he sees as self-serving and unwilling to budge on important issues.
+
+""I'm feeling a little pessimistic this year,"" he said.
+
+The Clays say they will vote no matter what, but whether their millennial brothers and sisters do the same is an open question.
+
+The millennial vote rose steadily beginning in 2002 and peaked in 2008, with excitement over Obama's first campaign. In 2012, however, just 45 percent of millennials cast ballots and participation has leveled off or dropped ever since, said John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard University's Institute of Politics.
+
+""They have a somewhat different perspective in terms of politics, ""Della Volpe said. ""It hasn't really worked. They haven't been part of a movement that's been effective.""
+
+Yet Tillett, the teen in Nevada, exudes youthful idealism as he talks about casting his first vote in a presidential election.
+
+""It means a lot to me personally because I'm making a difference in my life and in the country. My vote does matter,"" he said. ""It really does.""
+
+AP journalists Gillian Flaccus reported from Colorado, Nevada and Oregon; Tamara Lush from Florida and North Carolina; and Martha Irvine from Ohio.",REAL
+1816,Donald Trump Tops 30% in /ORC poll,"Trump gained 8 points since August to land at 32% support, and has nearly tripled his support since just after he launched his campaign in June. The new poll finds former neurosurgeon Ben Carson rising 10 points to land in second place with 19%. Together, these two non-politicians now hold the support of a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, and separately, both are significantly ahead of all other competitors.
+
+Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush stands in third place with 9%, down 4 points since August, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz holds fourth place with 7%. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker follow at 5%, with all other candidates at 3% or less, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who notched the only other statistically significant shift in the poll by falling 5 points since August.
+
+Trump's gains come most notably among two groups that had proven challenging for him in the early stages of his campaign -- women and those with college degrees. While he gained just 4 points among men in the last month (from 27% in August to 31% now), he's up 13 points among women, rising from 20% in August to 33% now. Trump has also boosted his share of the vote among college graduates, increasing his support among those with degrees from 16% in August to 28% now. Among those without degrees, he stands at 33%, just slightly higher than the 28% support he had in August.
+
+Trump has also catapulted ahead of the rest of the field among Republicans who back the tea party movement, from 27% support in August to 41% now. Among that group in the new poll, Carson follows with 21%, and Cruz, another candidate with an anti-Washington message, holds third with 11%. No other candidate tops 5% among tea partiers. Carson's gains, meanwhile, have come chiefly among core partisans -- he's up 13 points among Republicans and 11 points among conservatives -- and he runs closest to Trump among white evangelicals (32% back Trump, 28% Carson), a key voting bloc within the Republican primary electorate. Carson also has enthusiasm at his side. Republicans are more than twice as likely to say they would be enthusiastic with Carson at the top of the ticket than if Rubio, Cruz, Walker or Bush led the GOP into 2016, and while he and Trump are about even in enthusiasm (43% would be enthusiastic if Carson got the nod, 40% if Trump did), fewer say they would be disappointed if Carson emerged the victor (20% would be dissatisfied or upset if Carson won, 32% if Trump did). Still, most Republican voters (51%) think Trump is most likely to emerge as the GOP winner, well ahead of the 19% who think Bush will top the party ticket and 11% who think Carson will. In a July poll, 14% of Republican voters said they thought Walker was most likely to wind up the winner, in the new poll, that figure stands at just 1%. Support for the ""outsider"" contingent of Trump, Carson and to some extent businesswoman Carly Fiorina (who hasn't built on her post-debate boomlet in this poll, she has just 3% support) rests more on their positions on the issues than their experience outside of Washington. Among those backing one of those three candidates without experience in elective office, 75% say they back them because of their views on the issues, 16% because of their on-the-job experience and 7% because they dislike the other candidates. Among those backing candidates who have previously been elected to office, 34% say their experience is the main draw, 51% issue positions, and 14% say it's due to dislike of the other candidates. 
+
+
+
+""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement. Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House.""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement. 
+
+
+
+""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant."" Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23.""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant."" Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid.
+
+
+
+""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University. 
+
+
+
+""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey."" Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates.""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey."" , an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, announced his run in an email to supporters on April 30. He has said the United States needs a ""political revolution"" of working-class Americans to take back control of the government from billionaires. 
+
+
+
+""This great nation and its government belong to all of the people and not to a handful of billionaires, their super PACs and their lobbyists,"" Sanders said at a rally in Vermont on May 26. Sen. Bernie Sanders , an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, announced his run in an email to supporters on April 30. He has said the United States needs a ""political revolution"" of working-class Americans to take back control of the government from billionaires.""This great nation and its government belong to all of the people and not to a handful of billionaires, their super PACs and their lobbyists,"" Sanders said at a rally in Vermont on May 26. Although Bush's support for the nomination has dipped only slightly since the August poll, there are few positive signs for a man once seen as the front-runner for the nomination. The 19% who think he's most likely to win the party's nomination is down from 31% in July. Nearly half of Republicans (47%) say they would be dissatisfied or upset should he win the nomination, and just 16% say they would be enthusiastic about his candidacy if he did win. And his push to be the candidate of economic growth hasn't resonated: Just 7% who call the economy an extremely important issue say they would back him for the Republican nomination. As Trump and Carson have gained, Republican voters have begun to gain enthusiasm for the coming presidential election. While 28% described themselves as ""extremely enthusiastic"" about the election in July and August, that's now climbed to 34%, while deep enthusiasm among Democrats has dipped from 33% to 28%. Trump's growth in the field has also come alongside an increase in attention to the issue of illegal immigration. A majority of Republicans now call the issue extremely important to their vote for president, 51% now call it extremely important, up from 39% in a June CNN/ORC poll. Among that group, Trump holds a wide lead, with 42% support compared with 17% for Carson, 10% for Cruz, 9% for Bush and 5% for Walker. The CNN/ORC Poll was conducted by telephone September 4-8 among a random national sample of 1,012 adults. This sample included 930 interviews with registered voters, 474 of whom were self-identified Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. For results among all registered voters, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Among Republican voters, it is plus or minus 4.5 points.",REAL
+2437,It's National Health Care Decisions Day: Who will you designate?,"We know that at least 90% percent of Americans have heard of a living will, but still only about one third have one. Even among nursing home residents, only 65% have some type of Advanced Care planning documentation. This is not news in the health care community, but if we want to change these numbers we have to ask “why?”
+
+Hospitals have at least been asking about advanced directives since the early 1990s. The Federal Patient Self-Determination Act of 1990 requires all facilities participating in Medicare to inform patients about their decision-making rights and ask if they have an advanced care directive. This is why any admission to the hospital—even of a young, healthy adult—starts with questions about “code status” or advanced directives.
+
+We learned from this that many people have not thought about end-of-life care. To address this gap and facilitate the resource intensive discussions advanced care planning requires, the Affordable Care Act originally included a provision that would have made these discussions a billable service. Unfortunately the provision was removed after fears arose that reimbursing for these conversations would result in “death panels.”
+
+But despite the conversations occurring under these laws, the Institute of Medicine report this fall on Dying in America, and the growing dialogue about dying in America—the popularity of Atul Gawande’s book, ""Being Mortal,"" demonstrates significant public interest in how people age and die and how the medical profession responds—many Americans remain silent about their own wishes. As practitioners, we do not think it is out of fear. We think it is simply that these are hard conversations to have.
+
+These are not routine questions to be answered in a vacuum. Do you want to be on a ventilator if you cannot breathe? Do you want antibiotics if you have an infection? Do you want nutrition and hydration if you cannot eat?
+
+All of these considerations require context and details: How sick am I? What is my prognosis?
+
+What social and financial supports do I have?
+
+And what’s more, the answer to those questions is constantly changing.
+
+April 16th is National Health Care Decisions Day. The purpose is to educate, empower, and inspire the public and providers to take action on advanced care planning. In spreading the word about advanced care planning, we want to stress the importance of designating a surrogate and letting your loved ones know who that is.
+
+A surrogate is a loved one of your choosing who will speak for you if you cannot. He or she will be able to look at the entire landscape of your care, discuss the situation with your provider, understand in real time the details of what is happening, and then make a decision that best coincides with your wishes. You can use your state’s Advanced Directive form to designate a surrogate or agent. Alternatively, you can designate a medical power of attorney (POA) through a POA form. You should be sure to share a copy of the signed form with your surrogate.
+
+As health care providers working in the field of palliative care—a growing branch of medical care personalized to each patient with a focus on quality of life and symptom management—we believe a chronically ill person plays a pivotal role in the development of an individualized plan of care.  When patients are clear about their wishes, research shows they enjoy more personal comfort, greater satisfaction regarding their healthcare, and often a longer life.
+
+It is so hard to make decisions about hypothetical situations, but that is where many Americans, especially younger ones, find themselves when faced with advanced care planning discussions.
+
+ This National Health Care Decisions Day we challenge everyone to think about your surrogate.
+
+Who would that be? Have you talked to him or her about end-of-life care before? Are you willing to legally designate that person on an advanced directives card you keep in your wallet?
+
+For most of us, our end-of-life wishes will be refined in conversations we will have over a lifetime, punctuated by different pressured circumstances. And that is ok. But designating a surrogate is a first step that may be your most important step.
+
+On April 16th, whom will you designate?
+
+Gary W. Dodd, M.S.N and M.Div., works as a Board-Certified Adult Nurse Practitioner with Aspire Healthcare and seeks to promote holistic care for individuals through his interactions with patients, writing and public speaking.
+
+William ""Bill"" H. Frist, M.D. is a nationally-acclaimed heart and lung transplant surgeon, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, and chairman of the Executive Board of the health service private equity firm Cressey & Company.",REAL
+8502,Defense Board: White House Blocked Navy From S. China Sea Warship Passages,"Washington Free Beacon October 26, 2016 
+Senior White House officials blocked the Navy from conducting needed freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea amid growing concerns that China is militarizing newly reclaimed islands, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. 
+A working paper produced in September 2015 by John Hamre, the policy board chairman, called for an immediate resumption of Navy warship passages to prevent China from taking over the strategic Southeast Asian waterway. 
+The internal document was disclosed Monday by WikiLeaks as part of its latest batch of hacked emails from the account of John Podesta, campaign chairman for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The Obama administration has accused “Russia’s senior-most officials” of hacking and leaking the emails posted to WikiLeaks and other sites in order to influence the 2016 election. 
+The document was labeled “Chairman’s Working Notes of the Defense Policy Board – Chinese Island-Building in the South China Sea.” It was sent to Jake Sullivan, the Clinton campaign’s senior policy adviser, by Stuart Eizenstat, a Defense Policy Board member who was advising the campaign on internal Pentagon deliberations. This article was posted: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 7:35 am Share this article",FAKE
+24,Pro-Lifers Take over Planned Parenthood's #PPShoutYourStory,"Pro-lifers have taken to social media to use Planned Parenthood's own campaign hashtag against them.
+
+Planned Parenthood centers and supporters across the country took to Facebook and Twitter encouraging women to share how Planned Parenthood has helped them, using the hashtag #PPShoutYourStory.
+
+Clinics posted messages like this one, hoping for positive participation around the country:
+
+""As part of the ?#?PPShoutYourStory? campaign, people around New Mexico have been sharing their stories of how Planned Parenthood has impacted their lives. Participate in our all-out Twitter rally to shout your story about what Planned Parenthood means to you. Thursday, July 16 at 12:30 p.m. MT. Save the date!"" posted on Planned Parenthood Votes Colorado Facebook page.
+
+Thousands of people have joined in on the hashtag to share their stories, but not in the way the organization hoped for. A quick click on the hashtag displays countless stories of women permanently traumatized from their visits to Planned Parenthood.
+
+""Hey planned parenthood: I was born alive in one of your clinics, burned in my mother's womb for 18 hrs #PPShoutYourStory"" @giannajessen.
+
+""I had an abortion at 16 & regret it every day. I wish I had a 37 yo & grandkids instead of regret. #PPShoutYourStory"" @GeorgetteForney
+
+""I'm married 23 yrs two lovely kiddos and a successful new business #noChildsacrificed #PPShoutYourStory"" @conservgal
+
+""Actually women do excel w/o it costing the lives of their babes-That's my story #PPShoutYourStory #PPSellsBabyParts"" @Kyleenwright
+
+""Let me disclose my shame. I have had two abortions. Two...Twenty years ago, unmarried but in a relationship I thought would be my last, a violent morning sickness revealed to me that I was with child. The man in my life, at 24, was a mental boy and couldn't or wouldn't face fatherhood. And I was a coward, afraid to lose him,"" Julie Ludlum posted on her Facebook page.
+
+""So with grief and disgust, I went to Planned Parenthood. I was cavalierly offered a video about something but not given other options and had no individual counsel...I swore to myself it would never happen again. Ten years later, different man, same scenario. This time, I begged him to please, please let me keep this child...I share your disgust and frustration, but abortion number two still happened,"" she wrote.
+
+""That was Thomas, and I nearly followed him into death out of guilt and self loathing and a very tempting bridge over San Diego traffic. But I'm here. My life and my horrible sins have been redeemed through the work of Jesus on the cross...So I will continue to post information about Planned Parenthood because ?#?PPkillsbabies? and ?#?PPsellsbabyparts?... ?#?DefundPP? Don't ?#?StandwithPP.?""
+
+Ludlum did not use the hashtag in her original post, but several of her friends included it as they shared her story on Facebook.
+
+""Between our culture's declarations of belief that abortion revolves around a woman's personal choice are other women out of their depths responding by their actions a potential child was never nor ever will be a sheer choice, despite attempts to make it one. #PPShoutYourStory,"" Sean Brendon Stewart wrote.",REAL
+5486,Guess Who Ordered Hillary To Leave Our Men To Die In Benghazi,"Guess Who Ordered Hillary To Leave Our Men To Die In Benghazi Oct 27, 2016 Previous post 
+This email that was recently released by WikiLeaks shows that Hillary Clinton received an order from the Saudis to leave our men to die in Benghazi. Hillary also lost 1.5 billion dollars that was sent to the country and got 4 Americans killed. This is the first U.S. ambassador to die in more than thirty years. There are thousands more people that died in Libya as it fell into chaos. 
+Via: LWN 
+The Saudi royal family then “donated” millions to the Clinton Foundation and to the Hillary campaign. The country then fell into chaos and became an ISIS stronghold. Mrs. Clinton does not want this brought up. 
+Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+844,"Cruz, Kasich campaign announce collaboration to deny Trump delegates","The presidential campaigns of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich announced late Sunday that they were coordinating their efforts in three upcoming primary states in an extraordinary attempt to prevent Republican front-runner Donald Trump from clinching the GOP nomination before this summer's convention.
+
+In a pair of simultaneously released statements, the campaigns announced that Kasich would pull out of Indiana to give Cruz ""a clear path"" ahead of that state's winner-take-all primary May 3, while the Cruz campaign will ""clear the path"" for Kasich in Oregon, which votes May 17, and New Mexico, which votes June 7.
+
+""Having Donald Trump at the top of the ticket in November would be a sure disaster for Republicans,"" Cruz's campaign manager, Jeff Roe, said. ""To ensure that we nominate a Republican who can unify the Republican Party and win in November, our campaign will focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Gov. Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico, and we would hope that allies of both campaigns would follow our lead.""
+
+The arrangement marks a sharp reversal for Cruz's team, which aggressively opposed the idea of a coordinated anti-Trump effort as recently as late last week. Yet it underscores a bleak reality for the billionaire businessman's Republican foes: Time is running out to stop him.
+
+A statement from the Trump campaign called the move ""a horrible act of desperation from two campaigns who have horribly failed.""
+
+The Kasich campaign confirmed to Fox News that it had canceled two Indiana campaign events scheduled for Tuesday. As recently as three days ago Kasich's campaign announced investments in Indiana, including the opening of two offices and the creation of a campaign leadership team.
+
+Campaign manager John Weaver said in his statement that the Kasich team hoped to perform well in Oregon and New Mexico, which Weaver said were ""structurally similar"" to northeastern states where Kasich performed well earlier in the cycle.
+
+""Our goal is to have an open convention in Cleveland,"" Weaver added, ""where we are confident a candidate capable of uniting the party and winning in November will emerge as the nominee.""
+
+The announcement came less than 48 hours before voting begins across five Northeastern states where the New York billionaire is poised to add to his already overwhelming delegate lead. Trump campaigned Sunday in Maryland, which will vote on Tuesday along with Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware.
+
+Trump needs 1,237 delegates to win the Republican nomination. If he falls short, the national Republican gathering in July will evolve into a rare contested convention.
+
+At a rally in Hagerstown, Md., Trump stressed repeatedly that he expects to win the 1,237 delegates needed in the first round of voting to stave off a contested convention.
+
+
+
+""I only care about the first. We're not going for the second and third and fourth and fifth,"" said Trump.
+
+
+
+Even before the plan was announced, Cruz had all but abandoned the Northeastern states in favor of Indiana, which holds its primary on May 3. Both Cruz and Kasich had cast the state as a critical turning point.
+
+
+
+""Keeping Trump from winning a plurality in Indiana is critical to keeping him under 1,237 bound delegates before Cleveland,"" Kasich's campaign said Sunday. ""We are very comfortable with our delegate position in Indiana already, and given the current dynamics of the primary there, we will shift our campaign's resources west and give the Cruz campaign a clear path in Indiana.""
+
+Indiana will award 57 delegates to the winner of its primary. Oregon and New Mexico have 28 and 24 proportionately awarded delegates at stake, respectively.
+
+Fox News' Dan Gallo and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+3819,Obama digs in on plan to close Guantanamo prison camp,"President Obama doubled down Friday on his push to shutter the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, calling it a magnet for “jihadi recruitment” and vowing to present his closure plan to Congress -- while keeping his cards close to the vest on whether he’d try to use executive action to finish the job.
+
+The president addressed his plans at a year-end press conference at the White House, before heading to Hawaii for his annual family vacation. With the Guantanamo push standing as a major piece of unfinished business going into his final year in office, Obama was asked about his strategy.
+
+Obama said he’ll present Congress with his plan, and argued that the camp remains one of the “key magnets for jihadi recruitment.”
+
+“For us to close it is part of our counterterrorism strategy,” Obama said.
+
+As he spoke to the press, his Defense Department is said to be moving a plan to potentially transfer another 17 inmates out of the facility – part of the effort to reduce the number of detainees at the camp as much as possible.
+
+The president, though, faces deep resistance from some in Congress over the final closure plan, and particularly the expectation that the administration will try to bring any inmates who cannot be transferred or released elsewhere to the U.S. mainland.
+
+Obama would not say definitively Friday if he’d use executive action should Congress continue to block him – but suggested it’s an option on the table.
+
+“We will wait until Congress has definitely said no to a well-thought-out plan with numbers attached to it, before we say anything definitive about my executive authority here,” Obama said.
+
+More broadly, Obama vowed Friday not to fade in the background but instead use his remaining months to push longstanding goals to fruition.
+
+""In 2016, I'm going to leave it all out on the field,"" he said.
+
+“With the terror threat as great as it’s been since 9/11 and ISIS gaining ground, President Obama’s self-serving victory lap looks incredibly out of touch,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. “Two weeks on the golf course isn’t going to get us any closer to defeating radical Islamic terrorism or keeping our country safe from another attack.”
+
+The president, though, portrayed 2015 as one of significant progress for his agenda, pointing to diplomacy with Iran and Cuba and an Asia-Pacific trade agreement as big wins for his administration. He also praised a Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage and a congressional rewrite of the No Child Left Behind law as further victories for causes he's made central to his presidency.
+
+Still, he said, he plans to do much more in 2016.
+
+""I said at the beginning of this year that interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter -- and we are only halfway through,"" Obama said.
+
+Calling attention to his signature legislative achievement, Obama announced that 6 million people had signed up for health care so far this year under the Affordable Care Act, a surge that officials say illustrates the program's durability.
+
+After the news conference, Obama was to depart for San Bernardino, California, where he planned to meet with families of the 14 victims of the terror attack. He then will fly to Hawaii to spend Christmas and New Year's with his family. Obama has vacationed in Hawaii every year since taking office.
+
+Obama on Friday, after spending the week trying to reassure the public about security measures in place following the San Bernardino and Paris terror attacks, also vowed to keep hitting the Islamic State.
+
+“Our air campaign will continue to hit ISIL harder than ever,” he said.
+
+At the same time, he acknowledged difficulties in balancing civil liberties against security needs – when asked about complaints security officials are not adequately screening social media of visa seekers, after it emerged one of the California attackers had made jihadist comments online.
+
+Obama stressed that private communications are “harder to discern.” He said the government would be “engaging with the high-tech community” to figure out a better way to track suspected terrorists.
+
+“We’re going to have to continue to balance our needs for security with people’s legitimate concerns about privacy,” he said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+10489,YouTube bans 'Clinton's black son',"Print Side-by-side of Bill Clinton and Danney Williams 
+NEW YORK –YouTube on Wednesday suspended the account of Danney Williams, the 30-year-old who has claimed since the 1990s to be the black son of former President Bill Clinton. 
+YouTube, citing “repeated or severe violations of our Terms of Use and/or Community Guidelines,” declared the account “cannot be restored.” 
+The YouTube decision blocked the nine-minute feature “BANISHED – The Untold Story of Danney Williams,” which had received 1.2 million views since Williams posted it last week. Produced by filmmaker Joel Gilbert, it drew nearly 100,000 views per day and more than 1,000 viewer comments, with the overwhelming majority expressing support for Williams and outrage at the Clintons for not being willing to allow a DNA test to determine paternity. 
+Like the reporting you see here? Sign up for free news alerts from WND.com, America’s independent news network. 
+“My YouTube account has been deleted, but the same video appears in 50 other places on YouTube alone,” Williams said on his Facebook page after being notified of YouTube’s decision. “[YouTube] can’t handle the truth! Please share #BillClintonSon.” 
+Twitter also continues to allow Williams to post the “Banished” video on Danney Williams’ page , but the Twitter link to YouTube displays the message : “This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated. Sorry about that.” 
+The video is still running on Danney Williams-Clinton’s Facebook page , as well as on the YouTube channel operated by Gilbert. 
+Attempt to silence Danney Williams? 
+Gilbert told WND he helped Williams file an online appeal form on YouTube asking why the account was suspended and demanding it be immediately reinstated. 
+“The behavior of YouTube/Google in suspending Danney’s account is outrageous! There have been absolutely zero violations of any kind let alone a severe one of any YouTube terms or guidelines,” Gilbert said. 
+Gilbert was outspoken in charging YouTube with partisan political motives for the suspension. 
+“The only possible explanation is that the Clinton campaign requested YouTube/Google to silence Danney, ‘to run him off the plantation’ as Danney said Hillary Clinton did to him and his aunt when he was a small child and they were chased off the grounds of the Arkansas governor’s mansion in 1990,” Gilbert said. 
+“Danney cannot be silenced any longer,” he continued. “Hillary may try to sweep Danney Williams under the rug, but it’s not going to work this time. His story is out there, and every day more and more people understand Bill and Hillary Clinton banished this young man from their family because of the color of his skin.” 
+See the Danney Williams video feature: 
+WND reported Oct. 19 that in the hours before the third and final presidential debate, attorneys for Williams were in Las Vegas to announce their intention to file a paternity suit demanding DNA evidence from the former president. 
+Accompanying the dramatic announcement was a rap music video celebrating Williams that went viral on the Internet. 
+No definitive DNA test 
+WND reported that no DNA test was conducted in 1999, despite media reports to the contrary when Williams’ claim first surfaced. 
+Clinton defenders since 1999 have contended the tabloid Star Magazine conducted a “DNA showdown” proving Bill Clinton was not Williams’ father, citing Star Magazine editor Phil Bunton saying at the time, “There was no match, nothing even close.” 
+But in an interview, Bunton told WND that no blood sample was obtained from Clinton and Star Magazine never published a story documenting a laboratory test. 
+“I don’t remember ever seeing any laboratory test that was done on Clinton’s DNA,” Bunton told WND. 
+Bunton is now the owner of the Rivertown Magazine in Haverstraw, New York. 
+He affirmed to WND that the tabloid relied on the DNA evidence for Clinton published by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, extracted from the infamous Monica Lewinsky blue dress. 
+“We got a lot of phone calls from several people in the media, including the New York Times, wanting to know when we were going to get the DNA back,” Bunton recalled to WND. “We thought it was going to turn out to be his son, but when the DNA came back there was no story there even to write.” 
+The DNA test released by Kenneth Starr was the second of two DNA laboratory tests the FBI had run on Clinton, but the public record leaves no doubt that Starr withheld the more robust test conducted by the FBI. 
+‘Twitter rules’ 
+Many other figures who have challenged the Democratic Party or the left-leaning media narrative also have run into trouble with social media outlets, including James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas, which has exposed Clinton campaign voter fraud and agitation in a series of hidden-camera videos. Just as O’Keefe was preparing to release new revelations of voter fraud Oct. 13, Twitter shut down his account , claiming violations of “Twitter Rules.” The notice said he “must delete the tweets that are in violation of our rules, which prohibit: harassing other users, threatening other users, disclosing other users’ private information” or violating “other rules.” In a statement, O’Keefe said he relies on social media to “bypass the media and directly reach the public.” On Monday, O’Keefe wrote in a tweet Project Veritas was unable to upload its third video in the series to YouTube, calling the apparent block “bizarre.” Earlier this month, O’Keefe was forced to delete a tweet critical of a Hillary Clinton staffer to regain use of his account after it was suspended for a day. His account was suspended in the hours before a release of a new hidden-camera video that exposed a Clinton ally saying she could use executive action on guns, the Daily Caller reported . Project Veritas posted an undercover video Oct. 17 proving Hillary Clinton supporters were inciting violence at Donald Trump rallies to gain negative media coverage. Millions of viewers watched the video in just a few hours, but it didn’t show up on Google’s “trending” list on YouTube, which Google owns, noted SilenceisConsent.net . It did, however, trend on Twitter, which Google does not own. Breitbart blogger Milo Yiannopoulos was suspended permanently by Twitter minutes before his “Gays for Trump” party at the Republican National Convention. For some 11 months, the makers of the new movie “I’m Not Ashamed,” about the first victim of the Columbine killers in Colorado in 1999, were unable to promote their movie through YouTube. The trailer was taken down late in 2015, and the movie’s entire channel was suspended . 
+Among the conservatives censored by Facebook : Conservative activist and Trump supporter Lauren Southern received a 30-day ban from Facebook because she complained about a friend’s account being censored. Facebook locked a 12-year-old black middle schooler’s account for posting a video supporting Rudy Giuliani’s comment that Obama “doesn’t love America.” The admin of a pro-Trump group was banned for saying Trump is not anti-Muslim, but anti-ISIS.",FAKE
+3928,Here's how moms get pushed out of the workforce,"This week, Katharine Zaleski confessed her sins against motherhood on Fortune, and it went viral.
+
+Zaleski is now the cofounder and president of PowerToFly, a firm that works to match women with flexible jobs. But before that, she was working in media, at the Washington Post and Huffington Post.
+
+Her column no doubt did well for the sheer shock value. (She recounts how she said nothing when an editor proposed firing someone ""before she 'got pregnant.'"") But another reason it resonates so strongly could be that the worst of Zaleski's actions line up with emerging research around the ways women — especially moms — are discriminated against in the workplace. Women have felt this for years. But the research, and now the confessions, are catching up.
+
+Zaleski recounts a few of her worst transgressions:
+
+1. I secretly rolled my eyes at a mother who couldn’t make it to last minute drinks with me and my team. I questioned her ""commitment"" even though she arrived two hours earlier to work than me and my hungover colleagues the next day. 2. I didn’t disagree when another female editor said we should hurry up and fire another woman before she ""got pregnant."" 3. I sat in a job interview where a male boss grilled a mother of three and asked her, ""How in the world are you going to be able to commit to this job and all your kids at the same time?"" I didn’t give her any visual encouragement when the mother – who was a top cable news producer at the time – looked at him and said, ""Believe it or not, I like being away from my kids during the workday… just like you."" 4. I scheduled last minute meetings at 4:30 pm all of the time. It didn’t dawn on me that parents might need to pick up their kids at daycare. I was obsessed with the idea of showing my commitment to the job by staying in the office ""late"" even though I wouldn’t start working until 10:30 am while parents would come in at 8:30 am.
+
+It's easy to see why the column went viral: it's not only enraging, but it's also a conversion story — once Zaleski had a baby herself, the scales fell from her eyes and she realized the error of her ways.
+
+we're very good at honoring motherhood. but we seem to have trouble when moms need a paycheck or have career aspirations.
+
+She also gets into some of the very issues researchers have begun uncovering.
+
+For example, many working moms know that ""opting out"" isn't always opting out. Zaleski's story echoes an eye-opening December study of Harvard Business School alums. Many of those high-achieving women had stopped working, not because they wanted to be stay-at-home moms but because the working world had started to shun them.
+
+Some women get subtle messages, as Harvard's researchers write...and as Zaleski shows, some women get interviewers asking them how they'll commit to a job and kids at the same time.
+
+A lack of flexibility for parents can also show up in women's paychecks. For example, Zaleski expected parents to conform to a non-parent schedule, coming to 4:30 pm meetings. That kind of rigidity can prevent women from keeping up with men. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin found in a 2014 study that flexibility in hours plays a huge part in creating more pay equality between men and women. As she wrote, ""The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours.""
+
+It's true that Zaleski and Harvard Business School alums are breathing some rarefied air. But even the most basic kind of flexibility is unavailable to many American workers. According to the White House, only 39 percent of US workers report having access to paid family leave for the birth of a child. Even more shockingly, employers say only 11 percent of workers are covered, meaning some employers may be offering informal arrangements.
+
+It's true that not all bias in the workplace is as deliberate as that in Zaleski's former world — indeed, a lot of it may be subconscious. But it reflects a twisted attitude — that our society values motherhood but not the mothers themselves. In cards, poems, songs, movies, books, even commercials, we are very good at honoring mothers for being moms. What we seem to have trouble with is when those moms need to earn money or want to advance their careers.",REAL
+6834,AIG Quadruples Limits for Terrorism Insurance to $1 Billion,"« on: Today at 08:36:35 PM » AIG Quadruples Limits for Terrorism Insurance to $1 Billion 26 October 2016 , by Sonali Basak (Bloomberg) - AIG seeks to “respond to terrorist attacks worldwide”- Insurer has hired more than 600 engineers to manage risk Logged",FAKE
+6812,Scientists find 19 pieces of NON-HUMAN DNA in the Human Genome,"According to a new study, eight percent of our DNA is ALIEN. In fact, it is made up of NON-HUMAN, viral fragments. The new study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . 
+The recent study revealed that there is literally non-human DNA residing in modern humans’ genome. This study comes after a froup of researchers from Tufts and University of Michigan Medical School examined 2,500 people.
+Experts discovered that our DNA is less human and that nineteen pieces of Ancient Viral DNA exist within our own genome.
+Most strikingly, experts discovered the full genetic mockup for an entire virus within 2 percent of the people they examined. According to sciencedaily.com , whether or not the virus can be replicated or reproduced, isn’t yet known. But other studies of ancient virus DNA have shown it can affect the humans who carry it.
+ScienceDaily reports that the study offers new insight on human endogenous retroviruses. HERV’s are actually antique diseases which possess eerily similar characteristics to human immunodeficiency virus, the precursor to AIDS.
+Experts believe that this ‘Viral DNA0 has been passed down through thousands of generations of human beings. The study’s authors are still unsure whether the ancient strains of DNA could cause infections.
+“This one looks like it is capable of making infectious virus, which would be very exciting if true, as it would allow us to study a viral epidemic that took place long ago,” says senior author and virologist John Coffin, Ph.D. of the Tufts University School of Medicine. “This research provides important information necessary for understanding how retroviruses and humans have evolved together in relatively recent times.”
+“Many studies have tried to link these endogenous viral elements to cancer and other diseases, but a major difficulty has been that we haven’t actually found all of them yet,” says co-first author Zachary H. Williams, a Ph.D. student at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University in Boston. “A lot of the most interesting elements are only found in a small percentage of people, which means you have to screen a large number of people to find them.”
+“This is a thrilling discovery,” says co-first author Julia Wildschutte, Ph.D., who began the work as a Ph.D. student in Coffin’s lab at Tufts. “It will open up many doors to research. What’s more, we have confirmed in this paper that we can use genomic data from multiple individuals compared to the reference human genome to detect new HERVs. But this has also shown us that some people carry insertions that we can’t map back to the reference.”
+Reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/E2326.full.pdf
+Source: EWAO 
+",FAKE
+1409,Five takeaways from the GOP debate,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+4244,"Trump wins in Hawaii, Mississippi and Michigan","Donald Trump won convincing victories Tuesday in the Michigan and Mississippi primaries, as well as the caucuses in Hawaii, suggesting that the intensified GOP establishment assault on Trump’s character and record had not yet wounded the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.
+
+In Michigan and Mississippi, Trump galvanized huge populations of white working-class voters with his populist economic pitch, nativist rhetoric and outsider appeal to win by double-digit margins, further solidifying the billionaire mogul’s lead in the rollicking nomination battle.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) came in second in the Hawaii caucuses. But he won Idaho decisively, followed by Trump in second and trailed by Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
+
+But the night’s marquee event was in Michigan, where late returns showed Kasich and Cruz still competing for second place behind Trump. In Mississippi, Cruz ran a distant second. Finishing far behind in both states was Rubio, who was on track to record some of his poorest results of the season and was in danger of not qualifying for a single delegate in either state, nor in Idaho.
+
+Tuesday’s contests come at a critical juncture for the Republican Party. The runaway front-runner only a couple of weeks ago, Trump was forced onto the defensive over the past week by his own missteps and by a barrage of savage attacks from his rivals and opposing super PACs.
+
+But Trump prevailed — and sought to seize the mantle of the party’s presumptive nominee as he claimed victory Tuesday night.
+
+Speaking from his golf club in Jupiter, Fla., Trump delivered an impassioned and colorful defense of his business credentials, his candidacy and his personal brand itself. He vowed to work to reelect fellow Republicans up and down the ballot this fall and argued that his campaign was the only one truly expanding the GOP coalition.
+
+“The turnout has been just massive for every week,” Trump said. “We will take many, many people away from the Democrats.”
+
+“What we’re going to do is beat Hillary Clinton — and we’re going to beat her badly,” he added, referring to the leading Democratic candidate.
+
+With a starkly different fate on Tuesday night was Rubio, who registered embarrassingly low vote totals in Michigan and Mississippi. Late returns showed him running in last place in both states, although he was hopeful of doing better in Idaho and Hawaii, both states where his campaign had made investments.
+
+Rubio, who spent Tuesday campaigning in Florida, where he is under intense pressure to win, sought to brush aside Tuesday night’s results as the returns began rolling in.
+
+“I believe with all my heart that the winner of the Florida primary next Tuesday will be the nominee of the Republican Party,” Rubio told a crowd in Ponte Vedra Beach. He then directly confronted Trump: “It’s not enough to stand up here and say you’re going to make America great again. You deserve to know how.”
+
+Rubio has struggled to recover from a string of poor finishes in recent contests and has been an uneven performer in the two weeks since he went on the offensive against Trump.
+
+In his victory remarks, Trump mocked Rubio for the attacks.
+
+“He became hostile a couple of weeks ago, and it didn’t work,” Trump said. “Hostility works for some people but not for everybody. He would’ve been better off had he kept the original pitter-patter going.”
+
+The scene at Trump’s victory party was surreal, with members of the Trump National Golf Club Jupiter dressed in cocktail attire sipping wine and nibbling from charcuterie boards and fresh fruit.
+
+“What happened to Marco Rubio!? Aww, poor little Marco!” one attendee said after Michigan was called, borrowing one of Trump’s campaign-trail taunts.
+
+Displayed near the candidate’s podium were bottles of Trump-branded wine and Trump-branded water, as well as piles of raw, unpackaged steaks he said were “Trump Steaks,” to push back against detractors who criticized him over those products.
+
+In Michigan, the night’s marquee contest, Kasich was poised to register a relative surprise. The Midwesterner has been largely counted out of the national race, but Kasich campaigned harder across Michigan than any other candidate, holding upbeat town hall meetings throughout the state.
+
+Late returns showed Kasich locked in a close race for second with Cruz, with each receiving about a quarter of the vote. The Ohioan was banking on a strong finish in Michigan to give him a needed jolt heading into his must-win home-state primary next Tuesday.
+
+Addressing supporters Tuesday night in Columbus, Kasich projected victory there in a week.
+
+“Think about where we started,” Kasich said. “In the contest going forward, the three of us that remain — we are in a virtual dead heat.” He was referring to Trump, Cruz and himself — writing off Rubio, whom Kasich’s campaign now sees as a spoiler.
+
+At stake Tuesday were 150 convention delegates, which were to be awarded proportionally based on candidates’ performances by congressional district in each of the four states. Each state has thresholds for receiving delegates; in Michigan, for example, candidates must finish with 15 percent of the vote or better to qualify for delegates.
+
+For Trump, Michigan represented the first test of his electoral strength in the Rust Belt. His populist pitches on trade, economic development and immigration resonated deeply with the working-class voters who flocked to the polls in huge numbers.
+
+Michigan is the kind of Democratic-leaning state — Pennsylvania is another — that Trump and his advisers have argued he could make competitive in a general election.
+
+Trump faced another test in Mississippi, a heavily Republican Bible Belt state where he had long been favored because of his anti-immigration, nativist rhetoric. He held a massive, raucous rally on Monday evening in Madison, Miss.
+
+In both states, early network exit polling reported by CNN showed vast majorities of Republican primary voters were angry or dissatisfied with the federal government.
+
+That data showed that Mississippi primary voters divided sharply along ideological lines between Trump and Cruz, with 46 percent identifying as “very conservative,” the most of any contest this year. Strong conservatives have been Cruz’s best constituency this year, and he led Trump by roughly 10 percentage points in the preliminary data. But Trump led by at least 20 points among Republicans who identify as somewhat conservative or moderate.
+
+Fully 85 percent of the voters in Mississippi’s Republican primary said they were evangelical Christians, the exit polling shows. Cruz has focused on appealing to evangelicals with a socially conservative message, but in Mississippi as elsewhere, Trump appears to have blocked Cruz from gaining an edge. The early data found Trump with a small edge among evangelical Christians and a 2-to-1 lead among non-evangelicals.
+
+Late returns showed Trump winning roughly half of the vote in Mississippi, similar to the landslides he won in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee last Tuesday. The fact that Trump’s Mississippi margin mirrored his double-digit wins in those states — as opposed to his much narrower, four-point win over Cruz in Louisiana on Saturday — suggested that Trump’s popularity had not slipped among conservatives despite the heavy attacks on him.
+
+Some recent polls nationally and in key states have contained warning signs for Trump, indicating that his refusal to immediately disavow former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, his debate-stage quip about his manhood, and fresh attacks on his business dealings and character — or a combination of all three — were taking their toll.
+
+Trump is counting on his big wins in Tuesday’s contests, followed by a strong performance in Thursday night’s debate in Miami, to put himself back in full control of the nominating contest before next Tuesday’s primaries in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, which could be determinative.
+
+But the GOP establishment has been trying to keep Trump on his heels. Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, recorded phone calls sent to Republicans in Michigan and other states voting Tuesday on behalf of Rubio and Kasich. Romney has not endorsed a candidate, but he has become a fierce Trump critic, and in the calls he urged Republicans to vote against Trump.
+
+“I believe these are critical times that demand a serious, thoughtful commander in chief,” Romney says in the calls. “If we Republicans were to choose Donald Trump as our nominee, I believe that the prospects for a safe and prosperous future would be greatly diminished — and I’m convinced Donald Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton. So please vote tomorrow for a candidate who can defeat Hillary Clinton and who can make us proud.”
+
+Tuesday’s biggest prize was Michigan, which awards 59 of the 150 delegates. Although polls showed Trump with a substantial lead, Cruz made a hastily scheduled stopover in Grand Rapids late Monday, hoping to mobilize conservative voters there.
+
+Michigan has relatively few evangelical voters and is hardly tailor-made for Cruz, though there are strong social conservative and libertarian strains in the Republican base. Cruz saw an opportunity to capi­tal­ize on his gains in last weekend’s contests and take advantage of Rubio’s struggles to finish a strong second.
+
+Contending with him for that position was Kasich, who was on the rise in recent days while approaching the Michigan primary like a governor’s race. He campaigned in every corner — including the remote Upper Peninsula — and racked up a bushel of endorsements from local officials.
+
+The exit polls showed more than 6 in 10 Michigan voters made up their minds well before Tuesday, and Trump won them by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. But Kasich was the chief beneficiary of voters who decided in the final week, winning them with 43 percent compared with 25 percent for Cruz and 18 percent for Trump.
+
+Ed O’Keefe in Miami; Jose A. DelReal in Jupiter, Fla.; David Weigel in Columbus, Ohio; and Scott Clement and Juliet Eilperin in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+8037,Berkley Professor Claims Hillary Clinton Email Investigation Nothing More Than a Sexist ‘Bitch Hunt’,"at 3:47 pm Leave a comment 
+Today’s college-related article is not about safe spaces, macro aggressions and trigger warnings. Rather, it’s about a remarkably stupid claim made by Robin Lakoff (a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley), that the entire email scandal plaguing Hillary Clinton is a nothing more than a vast patriarchal driven conspiracy manufactured by men for the sole purpose of taking down a strong and powerful woman. No, I’m not kidding. 
+  delusional Time published article, Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women : 
+‘It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman’ 
+I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. 
+The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around. 
+If the candidate were male, there would be no scolding and no “scandal.” Those very ideas would be absurd. Men have a nearly absolute right to freedom of speech. In theory, so do women, but that, as the creationists like to say, is only a theory. 
+Clinton’s use of a personal server has not been found to be a crime. Then how is it that so many have found the charge so easy to make, and make stick? How has her use of the server made plausible all the claims that she is “deceptive” and “untrustworthy”? 
+It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman in general. Of course, in the year 2016, no one (probably not even The Donald) could make this argument explicitly. After all, he and his fellow Republicans are not waging a war on women. How do we know that? They have said so. And they’re men, so they must be telling the truth. 
+But here’s Hillary Rodham Clinton, the very public stand-in for all bossy, uppity and ambitious women. Here are her emails. And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do—engaging in high-level public communication—well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something. We will invoke the terminology of criminal law to account for our feelings. She’s getting away with treason! Put her in jail! We can’t quite put our fingers on it, but the words sure do make a lot of people feel better, so they must be right. 
+So that’s the take of Berkley linguistics professor Robin Lakoff. Now here’s the take from Charles S. Faddis, a former CIA operations officer with 20 years of experience in intelligence operations. 
+As Mr. Faddis writes   I have worked in national security my entire life. Most of that has been in the intelligence community surrounded by   For twenty years, I worked undercover in the Central Intelligence Agency, recruiting sources, producing intelligence and running operations. I have a pretty concrete understanding of how classified information is handled and how government communications systems work. Nobody uses a private email server for official business. Period. Full stop. 
+The entire notion is, to borrow a phrase from a Clinton campaign official, “insane.” That anyone would presume to be allowed to do so is mind-boggling. That government officials allowed Hillary Clinton to do so is nauseating. Classified and unclassified information do not mix. They don’t travel in the same streams through the same pipes. They move in clearly well defined channels so that never the twain shall meet. Mixing them together is unheard of and a major criminal offense. If you end up with classified information in an unclassified channel, you have done something very wrong and very serious. Accidentally removing a single classified message from controlled spaces, without any evidence of intent or exposure to hostile forces, can get you fired and cost you your clearance. Repeated instances will land you in prison. Every hostile intelligence agency on the planet targets senior American officials for collection. The Secretary of State tops the list. Almost anything the Secretary of State had to say about her official duties, her schedule, her mood, her plans for the weekend, would be prized information to adversaries. It is very difficult, in fact, to think of much of anything that the Secretary of State could be saying in email that we would want hostile forces to know. As we wait for more information on the latest revelations, let’s quickly note what we already know Hillary Clinton did. While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email address for official business. Instead of using a State Department account, she used a personal email account, housed on a private server located in her home in Chappaqua, New York. The Department of State exercised zero control or oversight in this process. No government security personnel were involved in protecting them. When the House Select Committee on Benghazi asked to see these emails, the Department of State said they did not have them. Clinton’s lawyers then went through all the emails on her server. They turned over 30,000 emails they decided were work related and deleted all of the rest. How they made the decision as to which emails to share and which to destroy remains unknown. Active government officials were not involved in this process. Hillary says she did not use the account to transmit   This has been proven false. The FBI found over 100 messages that contained information that was classified when sent, including numerous email chains at the level of Top Secret/Special Access Programs. They don’t get any more highly classified, it’s the virtual summit of Mt. Everest. One theme pertained to the movement of North Korean nuclear assets obtained via satellite imagery . It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this is extremely sensitive information. The FBI found another 2,000 messages containing information that should have been classified at the time it was sent. How much more classified information may have been in the tens of thousands of emails, which Clinton’s lawyers erased, is completely unknown. Hillary Clinton supporters like to ask rhetorically, “Well, what about Colin Powell?” Nice try , but using your own private email address which received 2 emails determined to be classified later, is nothing like deliberately operating a home brewed server, and then see it handle thousands of classified e-mails. 
+What happens next we do not know. What we do know already is this. While serving in one of the most senior positions in the United States Government, Hillary Clinton was at a minimum, grossly negligent in the handling of classified information and when confronted with this practice, acted immediately to destroy information and prevent a full, fair and complete investigation of any damage to national security. Anyone else who did such things in the government would long ago have been tried, convicted and sent to jail. You decide if you want to send her to the White House instead. 
+I’ll let readers decide who has a better read on the situation. In the meantime, back to your safe spaces my little snowflakes. In Liberty,",FAKE
+5779,Trump and all the other far right leaders are Zionist stooges,"Naming Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain and Marine Le Pen in France, the UN accused them of employing “fear” tactics similar to those of the Islamic State group. Note: U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein has really hit the nail on the head here. Not only has he correctly pointed out that Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine LePen, Geert Wilders and the rest of the far-right leaders employ the tactics of fear and bigotry but he also correctly identifies their agenda as being the promotion of hatred with the eventual result that ‘colossal violence’ will ensue.
+However, he does not go far enough in exposing these scumbags, most likely because he knows he would be placing himself in the crosshairs of the Zionists who stand behind these puppets.
+What went unsaid is that all of these people are stooges for the Zionists and Israel, they are tasked with creating horrible divisions in our societies, turning white against brown and black, Christian against Muslim, indigenous against migrant.
+This is the Zionist agenda to weaken and enslave via the strategy of divide and conquer, as laid out in the Protocols of Zion. They want to destroy our nations by promoting inter-racial hatred and violence; they want to see the nation states of the west burn down in a wave of racially motivated violence; that is why Trump spouts such hateful and disgusting rhetoric against Mexicans, blacks and Muslims, it is to promote a race war that would devastate America. — Ian Greenhalgh, Veterans Today 
+
+Trump and Europe’s Far-Right Fanning Flames of Hate: UN The United Nations human rights chief on Monday accused U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump of spreading “humiliating racial and religious prejudice” and warned of a rise of populist politics that could turn violent.
+In comments at a security and justice conference, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said he was addressing Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders and other “populists, demagogues and political fantasists.”
+Naming Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain and Marine Le Pen in France, among others, he accused them of using “fear” tactics similar to those of the Islamic State group, also known by its Arabic acronym, Daesh.
+“Make no mistake, I certainly do not equate the actions of nationalist demagogues with those of Daesh,” he said. “But in its mode of communication, its use of half-truths and oversimplification, the propaganda of Daesh uses tactics similar to those of the populists.”
+In a tweet, Wilders called Zeid “an idiot.”
+Zeid labelled Wilders’ March 2017 election platform, which calls for no Muslim immigrants, the closing of mosques and the banning of the Quran, as “grotesque.”
+“The U.N. is grotesque,” Wilders responded. “Let’s get rid of these bureaucrats.”
+But Zeid said Wilders’ rhetoric could have terrible consequences.
+“History has perhaps taught Mr. Wilders and his ilk how effectively xenophobia and bigotry can be weaponized,” he said.
+“The atmosphere will become thick with hate; at this point it can descend rapidly into colossal violence,” he warned.
+Source: Telesur 
+Via: Veterans Today 
+More from Political Insider… Just 11 Days Before the Election, Israel Sends Incredible Message to Donald Trump! WHOA 
+America is supporting Donald Trump, and his message to clean up the corrupt federal government is winning over millions of voters.
+It’s a refreshing message, and Trump’s conservative vision is why he earned more votes than any Republican primary candidate in history!
+In fact, Trump is so popular, his support is world-wide.
+Here’s what’s going on in Jerusalem now. There is a clear message here that Hillary Clinton can’t be happy about.
+As Yahoo News reports :
+On a rooftop overlooking the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, around 200 American-Israeli fans of Donald Trump gathered to proclaim their support for the Republican candidate, convinced he will be Israel’s best friend if elected.
+Wearing “Make America Great Again” baseball caps, the small crowd, ranging from Holocaust survivors in their 80s to grinning teenagers in Trump t-shirts, said they didn’t care about the sexual assault allegations against the candidate or the online anti-Semitism of some of his supporters.
+“Trump will let Israel be itself and make its own decisions, that’s what I like,” David Weissman, a 35-year-old from Queens, New York, who moved to Israel three years ago, said at the event late on Wednesday.
+“He’s not a saint, but look at his achievements. He’s not afraid to identify the enemy as radical Islam, and he’s not going to support the two-state solution,” he said, referring to long-standing efforts to forge peace with the Palestinians.
+Clearly, the people of Israel have seen the mess caused in the Middle East by 8 years of weakness from President Barack Obama’s White House.
+
+After Obama’s devastating and illegal pay-off to the Iranian regime, the Israeli people have a lot riding on the 2016 presidential election. They can’t continue to protect their citizens from harm if liberals in America keep funding their enemies.
+This is why Trump is popular in Israel:
+
+On day 1, Trump will have a better relationship with Israel than Obama ever had. Israel is our ally, and they deserve our support.
+Source: Political Insider 
+",FAKE
+6532,Nevada: Rep. Election Workers Intimidated,"Nevada: Rep. Election Workers Intimidated November 08, 2016 Myla Gibson, 3, waits as her father Ken Gibson fills out a ballot for the presidential election at the James Weldon Johnson school in East Harlem, 
+Republican volunteers called 911 claiming Clinton supporters were Harassing them. 
+Volunteers canvassing and dropping off literature at houses Monday for Nevada Republican senate candidate Rep. Joe Heck were followed by supporters of Hillary Clinton, who then subsequently pulled down the literature, a source within the Nevada Republican Party told The Daily Caller in an exclusive report. The staffers following them were wearing HRC buttons and HRC stickers. Beyond following them, the HRC workers began going up to houses and illegally removing Heck literature from the doors,” the Nevada GOP source said. “When the Heck volunteers noticed this going on, they stopped to take pictures of the illegal action.” The source said that, “Within a few minutes, more HRC campaign workers showed up. At this point, the Heck volunteers began to feel threatened and called 911 to report HRC workers illegally removing campaign literature and harassing the Heck volunteers.” 
+Reports like the case in Nevada may seem minor to some, but those that have been called to pray over this election know that it only confirms the need for prayer. The kind of anger and even violence that can manifest during and after elections is something to be taken seriously. We have seen violence erupt during elections in other countries, and it certainly isn't something we want to see in the United States. The call is to pray without ceasing Church! 
+Article by The Daily Caller / TRUNEWS analysis. 
+Article by , Correspondent for TRUNEWS Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+4540,"White House Makes Trade Pitch, With Focus on Moderates","President Barack Obama is ramping up efforts to convince individual House members to grant him fast-track authority to negotiate trade deals, focusing his efforts on a dwindling group of undecided Democratic lawmakers.
+
+But Democrats who have already backed the deal publicly said these members need to be convinced they are not trading away their own political futures for a vote on fast-track. Potentially decisive are moderate, pro-growth members of the New Democrat Coalition. Its vice-chair, Rep. Jim Himes (D., Conn.), spoke as recently as Monday to the president, after fielding calls from the White House during last week’s recess as well.",REAL
+6761,What The 2016 Election Has Exposed,"There are some things that we have learned about the United States from this election. We’ll need to keep these in mind as we make efforts to return sanity to society.
+The federal government has been corrupted Probably the most shocking lesson of this election is that the entire federal government has been coopted to serve a single party—the Democrats. The best example of this was the behavior of FBI Director James Comey. The FBI is part of the Executive branch of government so Comey reports to Loretta Lynch, who in turn reports to Obama. Despite this fact, one expects that the FBI be allowed a high degree of discretion to honestly investigate individuals regardless of which political party they belong to. After all, the US was founded upon the idea that we are all equal before the law.
+Comey’s actions reveal that the FBI has thrown equality before the law out the window. At first the FBI investigated Clinton’s use of an unsecure, personal email server to conduct national business while she was Secretary of State. But even though Clinton apparently violated several laws that have gotten other people severe jail sentences, Comey exonerated her back in July with a hand slap.
+In a move that surprised everyone, Comey re-opened on October 28th the criminal investigation of Clinton after 650,000 emails State Department emails were found on pervert Anthony Weiner’s computer. Trump supporters rejoiced and Hillary supporters expressed outrage. But the White House calmly called Comey “a man of integrity.” Did they know something we didn’t?
+It turns out the fix was in from the beginning because just 48 hours before election day, Comey exonerated Clinton again . The FBI director likely intended to clear Clinton of wrongdoing before the election to defuse Donald Trump’s criticism of her.
+The big lesson is that the law is applied selectively. Wealthy, politically-connected people don’t need to play by the same rules as everyone else. Unless this situation is corrected, it means the rule of law is dead—and that is a very grave lesson indeed.
+The elites are in control but… Elites want you to believe they are super smart and super powerful like the Great Oz.
+I’ve written many times about the control that globalist elites exert on the country through their control of the media, educational institutions, and politicians through the form of bribes (donations, cushy job offers, speaking fees). By controlling the flow of information and setting the narrative, the globalists are able to control the masses like cattle. The good news is that their control is not complete. They are not omnipotent.
+The weakness of the elites has been demonstrated in three ways. The first was with the Brexit vote. When Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to hold a referendum on the UK’s membership in the EU, he never dreamed that Britons would actually vote to leave. All the polls at the time showed that any movement to leave would go down in flames. Still, through the work of men like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the British populace voted to leave the EU. The Brits on the leave side had to endure being called racist and look past polling that said they had no chance to win.
+The second way was the campaign of Trump himself. The GOP had planned a coronation for Jeb Bush. The rest of the GOP field was “me too” candidates who were virtually indistinguishable from Jeb. Trump came in with an uncompromising message and crushed Jeb and the rest of the little Jebs. The elite plan to have Hillary versus a weak conservative was completely thrown into disarray by Trump’s campaign. Even if Trump has lost the general, it is still a victory because now, instead of seeing the Great Oz, we see the globalists behind the curtain.
+The third manifestation of the weakness of the elites is the rise of the Alt Right. A tiny group of young people on the internet was able to quickly wake up large segments of the population. Only a year ago, terms like nationalism and globalism were rarely heard in the US. Now, we have grandmothers in Texas tweeting about how we need to lay the axe to the globalists.
+The overall lesson is that we should not fear the globalist elite. They exist and they are able to fool a majority of the population, but not all of us. With sound strategy, they can be defeated.
+The Elite have completely divorced themselves from non-elites 
+In the past, Europe had an aristocracy. This aristocracy had a close relationship with the rest of the people in the country. The aristocracy was expected to defend the nation in case of war. They also had the same religion as the rest of the country. We already knew that the modern “aristocracy” of the globalist elites has no responsibilities toward the rest of us, but, thanks to WikiLeaks, we have now learned that they don’t even share the same religion.
+WikiLeaks revealed that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager are close friends with Marina Abramovic, a Serbian artist who performs occult rituals she calls “ spirit cooking .” Spirit cooking appears to be set of magical rituals that use bodily fluids such as menstrual blood, urine, and semen to achieve certain goals, usually sex-related. It also involves at least minor sacrifices: one “recipe” calls for cutting one’s figure and “eat[ing] the pain.”
+While spirit cooking is certainly grotesque, it is not my intention to focus on it except to point out that it has become a sort of initiation ritual into the US globalist elite. Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Jay-Z and Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Gwen Stefani have all attended these rituals and I would not be surprised to learn that many other politicians, CEOs, and bankers also participate. Getting invited to one of these spirit cooking sessions means that you have gained entry into the wealthy elite in the US. There are probably similar groups or rituals for the modern day European elites.
+There are several things at work here. Most of the spirit cooking participants probably don’t believe in the efficacy of the spirit cooking ritual. It is more like a college fraternity initiation. It only means something in terms of one’s social standing. Also, the satanic imagery of spirit cooking and its sexual overtones are big middle fingers to Christianity which our elite regard as the religion of the unwashed masses.
+In both of these ways, our modern “elite” have separated themselves from the rest of us. They don’t share the same destiny as us. If the country starts going to hell, the wealthy elite can just pick up and move to another country or they can live in small, heavily guarded compounds, untouched by the damage their policies have caused. And they even lack a common morality with us. In their own eyes, their wealth has somehow put them beyond the traditional moral code that guides the rest of us.
+The fact that the elites have no regard for the rest of the country does not bode well for them. The aristocracy of old knew that their fortune was bound up with that of their countrymen. The modern elite lack this wisdom. Once enough of the hoi polloi realize it, it is only a matter of time before these pseudo-elites are deposed from their pedestal.
+Conclusion With Trump’s election, the problem of federal government being used for political purposes will be mitigated. However, the problems with our indulgent pseudo-elite will continue to be a force that prevents the patriarchy from returning. In any case, we can be grateful that the election of 2016 has exposed some of the cancers that are eating away at our society.
+Read More: Rigged: FBI Reveals It Has Evidence Hillary Clinton Broke Law, But Will Not Prosecute 
+",FAKE
+4605,Pence: We Will Accept the Outcome,"Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence on Sunday pledged Donald Trump's campaign would accept a ""clear outcome"" to the U.S. presidential election but said both campaigns reserved legal options if there was a disputed result.
+
+""The campaign has made it very clear that a clear outcome, obviously, both sides will accept. But I think both campaigns have also been very clear that in the event of disputed results, they reserve all rights and remedies,"" Pence said in an interview on ""Fox News Sunday.""",REAL
+1963,Foster Friess chides Rand Paul in not-so-private email,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+1959,Poll: Ted Cruz's Support Surges After Campaign Launch | RealClearPolitics,"Being the first Republican to officially declare his campaign for president has given Ted Cruz a boost, according to a new poll.
+
+The Texas senator came in third place among nine presidential contenders with 16 percent support, according to a survey from Public Policy Polling (D). In a similar poll near the end of February, Cruz was near the bottom with just 5 percent support.
+
+The top of the poll was similar to a month ago, with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker leading the way with 20 percent backing from Republican primary voters. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is second with 17 percent and Cruz now close behind.
+
+Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and neurosurgeon Ben Carson are tied with 10 percent – a significant drop for Carson, who was in second place with 18 percent in the February poll. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio both had 6 percent support, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry rounded out the field with 4 and 3 percent, respectively.
+
+Cruz’s sizable jump in the poll is likely attributable to his March 23 speech at Liberty University, where he officially announced his candidacy for the White House. The first-term senator is well known for his opposition to the Affordable Care Act and leading the effort to shut down the government over the health care law in 2013.
+
+It will be clear in a few weeks whether other candidates see similar jumps after their announcements. Paul is expected to declare his bid next week, and Rubio has an April 13 date booked for an announcement.
+
+Cruz’s quick rise and Carson’s decline follow a pattern similar to what happened during the 2012 Republican primary cycle, according to Public Policy Polling President Dean Debnam.
+
+“A couple of months ago Ben Carson was the hot thing in the field, now Ted Cruz is and Carson’s support is drying up,” Debnam said. “It’s very reminiscent of the boom and bust we saw with various candidates four years ago. And Jeb Bush remaining steady as others rise and fall is also similar to how things went for Mitt Romney went that cycle.”
+
+The poll of 443 Republican primary voters, conducted March 26-31, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.",REAL
+10216,End of the World? Italy Devastated By Series of Major Earthquakes,"A series of major earthquakes have plagued Italy (Rome) in recent days. Could we be witnessing the start of the end of the world?
+Could we be living through the times described in many religious prophecies and texts?
+You decide!
+
+Watch on YouTube 
+Source: Is the ‘Big One’ About to Hit Rome? Series of Tremors and Volcano’s Reawakening Prompt Fears of Major Quake Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by The Daily Sheeple of www.TheDailySheeple.com . 
+This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.TheDailySheeple.com. ",FAKE
+9684,Will The Deep State Win The Election?,"Written by Daniel McAdams Monday October 31, 2016 Most of the country is on the edge of its seat over next week's presidential election. Will it be Hillary? Trump? We don't know. One thing we do know is that the real winner will be a public/private hybrid known as the ""deep state"" that ensures Washington's policies do not significantly shift out of its favor. They will come out on top regardless of who wins next week. There are more ""private"" contractors with top secret clearances than government employees. A recently released FBI memo referenced the ""7th Floor Group"" or ""Shadow Government"" made up of very high-ranking State Department officials and perhaps others. This not conspiracy, it is conspiracy fact. What can be done about it? Plenty. We are joined by Rutherford Institute president John Whitehead to discuss in today's Liberty Report: Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.",FAKE
+836,The new mess Republicans have created for themselves: Clinton’s brutal anti-Trump ad highlights why the GOP can’t plausibly endorse Trump,"The Republican Party has put itself in an impossible position. For months they’ve told us, over and over and over again, how unstable Trump is, how unfit for office he is. They’ve told us he’s a “con artist,” a “clown,” a “bigot.” Now that he’s decimated their party, now that’s he toppled every hackneyed candidate he’s faced, they’re forced to perform an about-face and endorse him as their nominee for president.
+
+It won’t work. And no one will buy it.
+
+Hillary Clinton’s campaign has already done the easy work of compiling the statements made by Republicans about Trump. The result, predictably, is brutal. In less than 90 seconds, we hear – mostly from other Republican presidential candidates – why Trump is a menace who must be stopped. Here’s a few highlights:
+
+“This is an individual who mocked a disable reporter, who attributed a reporter’s question to her menstrual cycle…” – Mitt Romney
+
+“The most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency.” – Marco Rubio
+
+“The man who only feels big when he’s trying to make other people feel small” – Carly Fiorina
+
+“The man is utterly amoral…a narcissist at a level I don’t this country has ever seen.” – Ted Cruz
+
+“He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot…This guy is so unfit to be commander-in-chief” – Lindsey Graham
+
+Some party elders will have the dignity to follow their conscience and hold to their convictions. Both George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, for instance, informed The Hill that they do “not plan to participate in or comment on” the presidential race. Neither Bush attended the previous convention, but the decision not to comment at all is revealing. It says, as clearly as possible, “We can’t support Donald Trump for president.”
+
+Others, like South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who accused Trump of cynically exploiting an angsty public during her response to the Obama’s State of the Union address, are already falling into line. “I have great respect for the will of the people,” she told The Charleston Post and Courier, “and as I have always said, I will support the Republican nominee for president.” She quickly added, however, that she’s “not interested in serving as vice president.”
+
+And there will be many Republicans, like Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez, who know Trump is cartoonishly unqualified but nevertheless support his candidacy. From a New York Times report this morning: “Senator Kelly Ayotte of New New Hampshire, who is in a tough re-election race, signaled that she would ‘support’ Mr. Trump but not ‘endorse’ him, as a spokeswoman put it, a rhetorical contortion that other Republicans repeated privately. Representative Raul R. Labrador of Idaho, a staunch conservative, said he would support Mr. Trump but derided him for ‘not knowing much about the Constitution or politics.’ Former Gov. Bob Martinez of Florida, who retains a strong network of donors, said he would raise money for Mr. Trump but was unsure about his proposals, like temporarily banning foreign Muslims from entering the United States.” This is what happens when politicians put re-election or party over the moral imperative to do right by the country. You can’t say, in good faith, that Trump doesn’t know anything “about the Constitution or politics” but that you support him nonetheless. This is the presidency, after all – it’s rather important that the candidate know such things. Nor is there any room to equivocate about Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the country – it’s both wrong and unconstitutional. Republicans let this monster into their house. He’s their problem. They have a responsibility to do what’s right – the stakes are too high to do otherwise. If they choose blind fidelity to the party over their obligation to the country, they’ve lost the right to call themselves public servants.",REAL
+4423,Megyn Kelly interrogates Tom Cotton on Iran letter: “What’s the point in writing to the Iranian mullahs?”,"On Monday, Cotton drafted a letter — signed by 46 other senators — addressed to “leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” warning that any deal reached on the country’s nuclear program could be killed by the next administration “with the stroke of a pen.” The letter generated fierce criticism not only from the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, but also from conservative quarters, including the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which Kelly noted called Cotton’s correspondence a “distraction.”
+
+“Well, on the contrary, Megyn, I think that this debate we’re having is incredibly important and helpful to raising just what a bad deal President Obama is about to make with Iran,” Cotton responded. “The last two days, we’ve focused on the terms of the deal, which is: One, President Obama will accept a 10-year sunset clause; and two, he has conceded a vast uranium enrichment capability to Iran that paves the way for Iran to get the bomb, as Prime Minister Netanyahu said last week,” he added, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inflammatory March 3 address before Congress.
+
+Kelly pressed: “But what’s the point in writing to the Iranian mullahs? What are you gonna do?” She noted that many in the Iranian leadership have dismissed Cotton’s letter, while he has irked the Obama administration and even alienated congressional Democrats skeptical of the nuclear talks. “Megyn, if you talk to most Iran experts, they’ll tell you that Iran’s leaders don’t understand our constitutional system,” Cotton answered. “So we need to be crystal clear with the leaders of Iran: Any deal that’s not approved by Congress won’t be accepted by Congress,” he later said. Kelly continued to emphasize that if Cotton is so keen on congressional review, offending Democrats in Congress may not be the optimal way to go about the matter. For his part, Cotton asserted that he wants Democrats to join his effort, effectively torpedoing diplomacy and reprimanding their president. Good luck with that.",REAL
+788,Why Hillary Clinton wins even when she loses,"We're not with her. That's what Democratic voters in West Virginia said Tuesday night, with Hillary Clinton losing to Bernie Sanders. Although the loss was not unexpected, Clinton's campaign sure seems like one long slog of speeches, handshakes and voter selfies on the way toward the 2016 convention in Philadelphia.
+
+This extended campaign, however, is actually the best thing that could have happened to Clinton. She has benefited enormously from the presence of Sanders. Now Team Clinton must build on lessons learned from the primaries as they prepare to run against Donald Trump in the general election.
+
+Then look at Clinton these days, speaking out about income inequality, campaign finance reform, and the evils of the big banks on Wall Street. Hmm, where could those winning themes have come from? From Bernie, thank you, who proved that progressive voters are tired of not having a voice in national politics. His success pushed Clinton to the left, and she is a better candidate for it.
+
+Despite Clinton's experience as first lady, senator, and secretary of state, there is an understandable tendency of many Democratic voters to be wary of anything resembling a Clinton ""coronation.""",REAL
+10004,Hillary Endorsed Donald Trump for President According to Wikileaks,"Hillary Endorsed Donald Trump for President According to Wikileaks “I endorse Donald Trump”- I am Hillary Clinton and I Approve this messageary 
+Here’s Gary Franchi as he reports that that before running against billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump for the presidency, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an audience at a private, paid speech she wanted to see more successful businessmen and women run for office because they can’t be bought. 
+AMAZINGLY, SHE SAID DONALD TRUMP WOULD BE AN EXCELLENT PRESIDENT!!!",FAKE
+7087,DNC Files Lawsuit to Bar Citizen Journalists From the Polls,"We Are Change 
+The Democratic National Committee has filed a lawsuit against the Donald Trump campaign, state Republican parties, and Roger Stone’s “Stop the Steal” group — asking the court to bar “citizen journalists” from the polls.
+A Bernie Sanders delegate at the DNC in July.
+“The campaign of Donald J. Trump, Trump’s close advisor Roger J. Stone, Jr., Stone’s organization Stop the Steal Inc., the Ohio Republican Party (‘ORP’), and others are conspiring to threaten, intimidate, and thereby prevent minority voters in urban neighborhoods from voting in the 2016 election,” the lawsuit claims.
+In reality, Stop the Steal is simply planning to have volunteers conduct their own exit polls outside of polling stations. Despite their never having mentioned targeting minorities, or intimidating anyone, multiple outlets picked up the Democrat’s version story after Stop the Steal announced their effort.
+“The Clintons had to cheat and rig the system to steal the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders. Why wouldn’t they try to steal the election from Donald Trump?” Stop the Steal’s website states. They are calling for “targeted EXIT-POLLING in targeted states and targeted localities that we believe the Democrats could manipulate based on their local control, to determine if the results of the vote have been skewed by manipulation.”
+Democratic outlets such as the Huffington Post and Media Matters have posted breathless articles claiming that exit-polling, which is conducted by every major media outlet, is somehow intimidation if done by an organization that favors the Republican candidate.
+“Trump and Stone appear to be of like minds when it comes to deploying citizens to the polls on Election Day to watch other citizens vote. Trump regularly encourages his mostly white supporters to stand guard on Election Day at polling stations in areas where the population is largely made up of minorities and ‘watch’ the polls,” the Huffington Post wrote.
+The article the quoted Trump himself, where he makes absolutely no mention of targeting minority voters.
+“You’ve got to go out, and you’ve got to get your friends, and you’ve got to get everyone you know,” they quoted Trump saying at a rally in Pennsylvania, “and you’ve got to watch your polling booths. I hear too many bad stories, and we can’t lose an election because of, you know what I’m talking about.”
+We Are Change spoke to Jack Posobiec of Stop the Steal to learn more about their efforts, and the lawsuit.
+“Our exit polling plan is very simple, we are going to dress in neutral, non-partisan clothing and request voters take the survey after they are finished voting. We are using the same types of questions that the AP uses regarding how someone voted, their top election issues, and asking their demographic info. The only difference is we are going to focus on one party rule precincts that have been reported to have irregularities in the past, such as in inner city Philadelphia,” Posobiec explained.
+When asked to clarify whether or not they intend to campaign, or harass, voters before they enter the polls, Posobiec stated that is not their intention.
+“We are only talking to people after they have completed voting, and will be dressed in neutral clothing. We also requested our volunteers to not wear Red, as there is a large movement of Trump supporters to wear red on election day, and we want to remain neutral,” he explained.
+Posobiec then referenced the infamous case of the New Black Panther Party actually intimidating voters , with weapons, in 2008. Many believed that the case was mishandled before being dropped.
+“I was involved in filming the Black Panthers dressed in black military clothing swinging billy clubs at white voters in Philadelphia in 2008, so I am very surprised our neutral exit polling plan would be seen as ‘intimidation’ by the Democrats,” he continued.
+Justice officials who served in the Bush administration argued that the department had enough evidence to pursue the case, and that it was dropped for political reasons.
+“Holder’s officials argued that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not apply to white people, only for minorities,” Posobiec stated. “In retrospect, this was the first sign that Obama would politicize the DOJ. Explains why they blocked the FBI from investigating the Clinton Foundation, or sending 100 FBI agents to Ferguson.”
+When asked if they would be fighting the lawsuit, Posobiec stated that they absolutely will be.
+“We absolutely are. These tactics were used against Citizens for Trump to shut down our rally in Cleveland in July, and we received the aid of the ACLU and won in court,” he said.
+In the lawsuit, the DNC asks the court to “declare that defendants’ ‘exit polling’ and ‘citizen journalist’ initiatives are contrary to law,” and bar them from encouraging anyone to do so, or from doing it themselves.
+“They are fighting scrutiny from independent citizens, but our elections are the fundamental cornerstone of American democracy, and should be held to the highest standard possible,” Posobiec stated. “Given the depth of collusion we have seen between mainstream media and establishment partisan political operatives this election through Wikileaks, we need citizen journalists and independent exit polls more than ever now.”
+During the primaries, there were unprecedented discrepancies between the exit polling and actual counted votes — always in Clinton’s favor.
+“They cheated the debates, they cheated Bernie, so its perfectly reasonable to be concerned they would cheat in November,” he concluded.
+Posobiec also stated that they are in no way coordinating with the Republican National Committee or the Trump campaign.
+The post DNC Files Lawsuit to Bar Citizen Journalists From the Polls appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+2635,"Cleveland, DOJ announce changes in police force","The city of Cleveland and Department of Justice announced Tuesday how they are moving forward on agreed changes to the city's police force.
+
+The consent decree is the next step after the city agreed to changes last year following a scathing report from DOJ investigators regarding patterns of civil rights violations and excessive force by the Cleveland police . It will mean years of court-supervised monitoring of the Cleveland Police Department.
+
+In a 105-page report , Justice and city leaders unveiled reforms that included commitments to ""bias-free policing"" , new crisis-intervention efforts and changes to officer recruitment and discipline. The leaders called on the city to buy into the changes and embrace what they billed as a transformation in the city's policing.
+
+""I am issuing a call of action to our entire community to support this hard work together,"" said U.S. Attorney Steven M. Dettelbach. ""The people who may criticize the police are not the enemy -- they are part of the community.""
+
+When then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced the findings in December, the city's mayor and police chief said they were in agreement that recommended changes had to be implemented. The agreement required the city to create a reform plan.",REAL
+9607,Moscow downplays Spain’s refusal to let Russian warship refuel in Ceuta,"navy , RBTH Daily , spain , syria Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov in international waters off the coast of Northern Norway on Oct. 17, 2016. Source: Reuters 
+Madrid has decided not to allow the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov to refuel in the port of Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the North African coast, reneging on a previous agreement with Moscow. 
+On Oct. 26, the warships of the Northern Fleet's aircraft carrier group led by the cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov , having passed the English Channel, were moving toward Gibraltar. 
+Their route and tasks, according to presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, are ""in a sealed envelope marked 'Top Secret'."" 
+As the Spanish Foreign Ministry said earlier, the ships were to arrive on Oct. 28 in the port of Ceuta (a Spanish enclave in Morocco). The permit, as Madrid noted, was issued in September. 
+However, when the news of the imminent arrival of the ships in Ceuta made the press, Spain came under heavy criticism from its NATO allies. 
+NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that he would not have had anything against the refueling of Russian ships in other circumstances, but now he was extremely concerned that they could be used to attack Aleppo. Similar statements were made by politicians and military figures from the UK and the U.S. 
+In Spain itself, the Republican Left of Catalonia was most vocal in protesting against the arrival of the Russian ships in Ceuta. Their press service confirmed to Kommersant that members of the Congress of Deputies of Spain from the party had demanded that acting Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo and acting Defense Minister Pedro Morenesa explain why Russian ships involved in the Syrian operation were being serviced in the territory of a NATO country. 9 intriguing facts about the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier 
+Initially, the Ceuta authorities were confused about the situation. Since 2011, the enclave's port has been visited, according to the newspaper El Pais, by 60 Russian vessels. 
+""The normal criteria for accepting the visits was 'the safety of the surroundings, population and port',"" The Spain Report said, citing sources in the port's administration. But under the barrage of criticism, the Spanish Foreign Ministry announced yesterday that it was reviewing ""the decision following consultations."" 
+But by the middle of the day, El Pais quoted diplomatic sources as saying permission would be revoked if it was confirmed that the ships were heading to Syria. Without waiting for the outcome, the Russian authorities themselves abandoned the idea. ""We affirm that the ships will not enter the port of Ceuta, because the route has changed,"" the Russian Embassy in Spain said. Moscow's reaction 
+Speaking to Kommersant, the Embassy's press secretary Vasily Nioradze Embassy urged the media not to dramatize the situation. ""Approval of such stopovers is a routine process,"" he said. ""We send a request in advance, and the decision is made based on international law and the requirements of the host country. Now this decision was made, in other cases it will be different."" 
+Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov chose to place a different accent on the incident: According to him, the Russian military department provided for the possibility of ""a technical stopover [in Ceuta – Kommersant] of individual ships or a supply vessel from the group of ships, in agreement with the Spanish side."" 
+However, according to him, no official request from the Defense Ministry was sent to Madrid. 
+""The representatives of the Spanish leadership said that due to the pressure on them from the U.S. and NATO, the entry of the Russian ships in the port of Ceuta would be inappropriate,"" said Konashenkov. Publicly, however, the Spanish authorities did not make such statements. Russian experts: Cruiser is on training mission 
+Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (TsAST), does not view the change of the Admiral Kuznetsov 's route as a disaster. 
+""We might as well refuel in Algeria or Malta, I’m betting on Algeria since Malta is an EU member state and it will face the same problems as Spain,"" he told Kommersant. Russia to establish a permanent naval base in Syria 
+At the same time, according to Pukhov, the arrival of the Admiral Kuznetsov in Syria is unlikely to radically change the balance of forces in the region, but it will allow Russia to increase its international prestige. 
+""The French use an aircraft carrier in that region, because they do not have a base, while we do have one,"" he said. “The purpose of the Kuznetsov 's mission is likely to be training. Pilots of deck aircraft need to train, and Syria provides an opportunity to do it in combat conditions."" 
+TsAST expert Andrei Frolov added that the Admiral Kuznetsov 's mission has ""an advertising component.""""India is thinking about buying MiG-29K/KUB deck fighters for future aircraft carriers, and a demonstration of their capabilities in Syria will help it decide sooner,” he said. Subscribe to get the hand picked best stories every week Subscribe to our mailing list Facebook",FAKE
+6204,Woman Uses Milk And Gelatin To Remove Blackheads,"posted by Eddie I’m the kind of person who notices every little thing on my face. Now, I may not act on everything little thing that “pops” up, so-to-speak, but I definitely notice! A stray eyebrow hair? Yeah, I see you there. A little pimple: how could I miss it? But none of these things compare to the feeling of finding a little patch of nasty blackheads popping up. I get them around my chin and nose. And, honestly, I really don’t know how to effectively deal with them at home. So, I end up popping them. Anyone who has ever done this knows that nine times out of ten, popped blackhead will turn into something way worse! I got sick of the whole process. Get rid of a blackhead to get a pimple instead? No thanks. So that’s why I got really excited to see a natural remedy I could try at home. If you’re anything like me, you’ll definitely want to check this out, too. When you try it, make sure to snap a pic and upload it in the comments so everyone can see how awesome this blackhead mask is in action! Here is how you transform your face for the better–naturally! 1. Get the ingredients: milk and gelatin. 
+Since you’ll be putting these things directly on your face, I highly recommend choosing high-quality options here. Also, make sure the gelatin is unflavored. 2. Measure, then mix. 
+Put the gelatin (1 Tablespoon) in a container first, then add the milk (1-2 Tablespoons). Mix. 3. Rinse your face while microwaving the mix for 15 seconds. 
+The heat makes this mix so soft. You’ll want to put it on straight away to ensure the desired smoothness. 4. Apply the warm mixture to your face. 
+You can spread this mix all over or do some spot treatments — your choice. Just remember to use it quickly! 5. Let it soak in! 
+Grab your smartphone; you’ve got about 15 minutes to spare here. Better yet, take note and make some funny faces in the mirror. 6. Start peeling away those nasties! 
+Once it’s dry, grab a corner and start slowing peeling. Get ready to be amazed! 7. Pull! Make sure to get them all! 
+This is the most satisfying part — seeing all those disgusting blackheads meet their fate. 
+Source:",FAKE
+3686,Police: Bryce Williams kills self after on-air slayings,"(CNN) After he shot two journalists on live TV and before he shot himself, Bryce Williams sent a message: ""I've been a human powder keg for a while....just waiting to go BOOM.""
+
+Those were the words the gunman wrote in a chilling fax to ABC News, according to the network. The document purportedly from the Virginia shooter came after he gunned down WDBJ-TV journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward , spurring a manhunt that ended when he turned a gun on himself as troopers closed in.
+
+The shooter -- a former reporter for the Roanoke station -- is dead, but the investigation into Wednesday's attack is far from over. Authorities say the fax to ABC, the gunman's other attempts to reach out to the media and his social media posts just after opening fire could be key pieces of evidence as they try to pinpoint what led to the deadly shooting.
+
+Franklin County Sheriff Bill Overton said authorities weren't sure about the gunman's motive, but are looking at his past employment at WDBJ as well other evidence, including the fax he allegedly sent to ABC News in New York.
+
+""Many of you have gotten a lot of the correspondence, emails that had been sent out. It's obvious that ... this gentleman was disturbed in some way of the way things had transpired,"" and that ""at some point in his life, things spiraled out of control,"" Overton said.
+
+In the message, according to ABC, the gunman said the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting in June is what put him over the edge, but he wrote that his ""anger has been building steadily"" because of racial discrimination and sexual harassment he claims to have endured.
+
+The writer expressed admiration for the shooters who massacred students at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech. And he said he put a deposit down for a gun two days after the Charleston shooting.
+
+""As for Dylann Roof? You (deleted)! You want a race war (deleted)? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE (deleted)!!!"" the document reportedly said.
+
+During a live broadcast from near Moneta, at about 6:45 a.m., TV viewers saw the camera fall to the ground and caught the briefest glimpse of a man who appeared to point a gun toward the downed cameraman.
+
+The station cut away to a shocked anchor back in the studio.
+
+And the TV station's camera wasn't the only one rolling.
+
+Two videos posted on a Twitter account under the name Bryce Williams show someone walking up to the WDBJ news crew and pointing a gun at them.
+
+Another tweet said, ""I filmed the shooting."" The Facebook and Twitter account were suspended shortly after the tweets.
+
+Video shows the gunman approaching Parker, a WDBJ reporter, and photographer Ward as Parker conducted a routine interview for a local story.
+
+Ward's back is to the gunman. Parker is in profile, and the interviewee is facing the gunman. The shooter appears to take his time aiming the gun, presenting it and then withdrawing it, before composing the angle of his video. He opens fire on Parker first. Both Parker and the interview subject scream.
+
+Police are not sure how the gunman knew Parker and Ward were reporting from Bridgewater Plaza, Overton said.
+
+Authorities tracked the shooter's cell phone to locate him, according to federal officials and the Augusta County Sheriff's Department.
+
+Just before 11:30 a.m., Virginia State Police saw the car they believed Williams was driving headed east on Interstate 66. With emergency lights activated, a trooper tried to pull him over, police said.
+
+The driver refused to stop and sped away before running off the road and crashing into an embankment around mile marker 17.1 in Fauquier County, more than 170 miles away from the site of the shooting.
+
+Troopers found the driver inside with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Virginia State Police Sgt. F.L. Tyler told reporters. He was transported to a hospital and pronounced dead Wednesday afternoon, Tyler said.
+
+Williams was a reporter at WDBJ for about a year, according to a former employee of the station. He was fired from that job, though the reason was not made public, the ex-employee said.
+
+""Two years ago, we had to separate him from the company. We did understand that he was still living in the area,"" WDBJ General Manager Jeff Marks said.
+
+(Williams) had a level of a long series of complaints against co-workers nearly from the beginning of employment at the TV station,"" said Dennison, who is now spokesman for the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources.
+
+""That really had nothing to do with his termination, and after a lot of investigation both internally and externally, all of these allegations were deemed to be unfounded. And they were largely under, along racial lines, and we did a thorough investigation and could find no evidence that anyone had racially discriminated against this man,"" he said.
+
+Marks, the station's current general manager, said he'd heard Williams had leveled accusations in the past, but he noted that he and Parker hadn't worked at the station at the same time.
+
+""I don't think (reporter) Alison (Parker) and that individual even overlapped here,"" he said.
+
+According to tweets from the Bryce Williams account, Alison had ""made racist comments,"" while ""Adam went to hr on me after working with me one time!!!"" There was no elaboration, and CNN was unable to immediately confirm whether either claim was true.
+
+Court documents indicate Williams crossed paths with Ward on the day he was fired.
+
+Ward filmed the former reporter's angry outburst as police tried to get him to leave the station's building, according to the documents, which are part of a lawsuit Flanagan filed against the TV station.
+
+That day, Williams also handed his manager a small wooden cross, and said ""You'll need this,"" before being escorted out of the building by police.
+
+The court documents outline months of disciplinary action against Williams. In addition to describing multiple meetings about his anger and behavior, they show that station management told him to seek counseling.
+
+The woman Parker was interviewing was injured in the shooting.
+
+Gardner is recovering from emergency surgery and is in stable condition, according to Carilion Franklin Memorial Hospital in Rocky Mount.
+
+The gunman was believed to have fired six or seven times, Marks said.
+
+Ward's fiancée was in the control room and saw the shooting, Marks told CNN.
+
+""Our hearts are broken,"" Marks said. ""We have people walking around here in tears, lots of hugs.""
+
+Ward joined WDBJ in 2011 after graduating from Virginia Tech with a degree in communication and media studies, according to his Facebook page. He began attending the university in 2007, a few months after a gunman went on a deadly rampage, leaving 32 people dead.
+
+Another journalist at the anchor's desk said Ward was engaged to be married to morning show producer at WDBJ, Melissa Ott, and Ward recently told her, ""I'm going to get out of news. I think I'm going to do something else.""
+
+Parker was the morning reporter for the Roanoke station and a native of Virginia, having spent most of her life outside Martinsville.
+
+She joined WDBJ last year after completing a summer internship as a news reporter in 2012.
+
+""Today we received news that no family should ever hear. Our vivacious, ambitious, smart, engaging, hilarious, beautiful, and immensely talented Alison (was) taken from the world. This is senseless and our family is crushed,"" Parker's family said in a statement.
+
+Chris Hurst, a reporter for the station, described himself as ""numb."" He tweeted that he and Parker ""were very much in love"" and had just moved in together after dating nine months, ""the best nine months of our lives. We wanted to get married. We just celebrated her 24th birthday.""
+
+A local pastor, ""a friend of the newsroom,"" is at the station, consoling Parker's and Ward's co-workers, Marks said.
+
+""You know, you send people into war zones, you send people into dangerous situations and into riots, and you worry that they are going to get hurt.,"" Marks told CNN. ""You send somebody out to do a story on tourism and -- how can you expect something like this to happen?""",REAL
+6733,"The Comey Confrontation: In Our New Third-World America, Corruption Is A Feature, Not A Bug", ,FAKE
+8561,Thousands Of “Organic” Beauty Products Found Containing Banned Chemicals,"Beauty products that claim to be ""organic"" or ""natural"" are far from it. Credit: Wise Geek 
+When it comes to the term “organic,” there’s actually not as much regulation surrounding use of the word as consumers would like. The U.S. Department of Agriculture regulates organic claims in farm products, but it’s the controversial Federal Drug Administration that has control over cosmetics. 
+Though the USDA has strict standards for organic food products, the FDA does not even have an official definition for the term “organic.” On their website, the question “Does FDA have a definition for the term organic?” is met with this answer: 
+“No. FDA regulates cosmetics under the authority of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) and the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (FPLA). The term ‘organic’ is not defined in either of these laws or the regulations that FDA enforces under their authority.” 
+The FDA does have some regulations that are overseen by the USDA via the National Organic Program, but the policing efforts when it comes to cosmetics are seriously lacking. By looking at EWG’s Skin Deep database, it was determined that over 5,000 products use the word “organic” in their brand name, product name, product label or list of ingredients. 
+Depending on the placement of the word, certain regulations can be bypassed , and that’s why most of these products are actually horrible and receive the lowest Skin Deep score possible despite claiming to be “organic.” The use of chemicals is still allowed even in these seemingly wholesome products and some of these chemicals are so poor for your skin that they are banned in many countries. 
+When a beauty product claims to be “made with 100% organic or natural ingredients,” it can be misleading because they are often referring to a single ingredient that is organic or naturally-derived rather than all of their ingredients. Other tactics used to confuse consumers include using the terms like “eco-friendly” or “vegan,” both of which are even less regulated than using organic on a label. Unless there is a third-party company that you trust backing these claims, they are likely a farce and have no substance. 
+Since there is so much confusion surrounding these loaded words, consumers should be wary when they encounter products that make bold claims like this. Instead of taking their labels at face value, simply take a look at the ingredients and research a few to see what they really are. If the majority of them are things you cannot pronounce, it’s likely that most are made with synthetic chemicals and far from being “natural” or “organic.” 
+What are your thoughts on this news? Please share, like, and comment on this article! 
+This article ( Thousands Of “Organic” Beauty Products Found Containing Banned Chemicals ) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com 
+Do you like our independent & investigative news? Then please check these two settings on Facebook to guarantee you don't miss our posts:",FAKE
+2711,The Insiders: CNBC has probably changed GOP presidential campaign debates forever,"Predictions are dangerous things. That said, here’s a prediction for you: John Harwood will never again participate in a GOP debate. Republicans are beyond angry about the conduct of the CNBC moderators — Harwood, Carl Quintanilla and Becky Quick — during Wednesday night’s primary debate. Actually, more than one Republican asked me before the debate what I thought of Harwood as a moderator. I’ve known John for forever and I admit to breaking out in a mild cold sweat whenever I was told he was holding on the phone. But I thought of him as a mostly fair-minded, smart reporter, even if I’ve also always thought of him as “one of them” as far as Republican thinking goes. Generally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with having an adversarial group of moderators ask good questions. But the moderators’ approach to this debate was beyond properly adversarial and was probably a game-changer in more ways than one. After every election, the parties tweak the debate process and change the rules to one degree or another. You can bet the old paradigm of turning over management of the debates to a specific media organization — especially one with a reputation for an anti-Republican bias — is going to end.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who had a breakthrough moment in the debate railing against the moderators’ insulting questions, did a follow-up interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier and reiterated a pretty good suggestion about the debate structure. Cruz asked why the Republican National Committee doesn’t plan at least one debate with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin as moderators. Well, that’s not a bad idea. It’s easy to suggest that the moderators should be at least neutral so they don’t simply offer up a series of softball questions that don’t challenge the candidates or put them outside of their comfort zones. But the words “Rush Limbaugh” and “softball questions” have never been used in the same sentence. I don’t think this group of Republican candidates would ever feel coddled by Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin. That trio would all ask tough questions that are of real interest to Republican voters. And I think it would be a ratings juggernaut.  Anyway, Cruz is right — the moderators in the Democratic primary debate praised the candidates and avoided creating too much fighting or tension among the candidates. There’s a big difference between a moderator asking probing questions that Republican voters want to know the answers to and taking pot shots and making belittling points under the guise of asking a question.
+
+After all, this is the Republican primary contest and we have a big field of talented candidates. There’s nothing wrong with asking questions that are central to Republican concerns and sensibilities. The primaries should be all about Republicans asking other Republicans questions. The debacle of the CNBC debate was probably the last gasp of the grandstanding liberal media as far as the GOP’s managers are concerned. The media will no longer be allowed to conduct debates the way they think their like-minded colleagues in the media want a Republican debate to be conducted. Or in this case, the way they think their like-minded colleagues in the media want the Republican primary process to be belittled, disrupted and generally diminished.
+
+That being said, the GOP shouldn’t overdo it in crying foul about the debate. We don’t need a Warren Commission and we don’t need to get bogged down and look like a bunch of whiners. Republicans should not be distracted by the process. We are complaining that the debate wasn’t about the issues, so let’s have our say but then move on and start discussing the issues that Republican voters care about.",REAL
+525,Obama budget would fund public works program with tax on overseas profits,"President Obama unveiled a $4 trillion budget Monday, featuring an ambitious public works program, a one-time tax on foreign profits kept overseas by corporations, tax credits for middle-class Americans, and a 1.3 percent pay raise for federal employees and troops.
+
+The massive document is a blueprint for what Obama has been calling “middle-class economics,” but congressional Republicans are likely to view it merely as the president’s opening bid in a contentious process designed to forge a tax and spending plan for the new fiscal year.
+
+The document will become, if not law, another defining moment for the president as he tries to carve out priorities for his remaining two years in office. Administration officials have tried to map out potential political trade-offs by offering elements such as a corporate tax revision that could appeal to Republicans, while asking for more spending on infrastructure.
+
+But the president is also seeking to fund his proposals by raising taxes on the richest Americans, an approach that has immediately drawn Republican opposition.
+
+House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), appearing on television Sunday, rejected many of Obama’s ideas for raising taxes on the wealthy as “envy economics.”
+
+The president’s budget features a six-year, $478 billion public works program for upgrading the nation’s infrastructure, including roads, railroads and ports.
+
+The package is bigger and stretched over more years than Obama’s earlier unsuccessful requests for infrastructure money.
+
+The administration is proposing to pay for the ambitious program in part with revenue from a one-time mandatory 14 percent tax on about $2 trillion in profits that corporations have been keeping overseas in order to avoid corporate income taxes here. The tax would be a sizable hit on multinationals and a way of discouraging them from parking money in foreign countries.
+
+The administration also is seeking to lower the corporate federal income-tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent by closing loopholes.
+
+And the president wants to raise pay for federal workers and troops by 1.3 percent, which would be more than the 1 percent pay bump given to them the past two fiscal years.
+
+The administration is also seeking a 6 percent increase in research and development spending, a “substantial investment” in early education, boosts in efforts on cyber-security, and resources to fight the Islamic State and other foreign threats.
+
+The Office of Management and Budget said the president’s plan would produce a $474 billion deficit, or 2.5 percent of the gross domestic product, which is little changed from the current fiscal year but in line with deficits as a share of the economy over the past half-century.
+
+The budget requests exceed the spending caps established in 2010 by $74 billion spread evenly between military and non-military discretionary spending, and while the administration is proposing offsets, it also argued strongly for the elimination of the limits that trigger wide cuts known as sequestration. “We’ve seen bipartisan agreement that the sequestration is mindless and is not the right approach for our country,” said a senior administration official.
+
+The OMB also forecasts that over the next decade, nearly $6 trillion will be added to the national debt, but that would represent a small decline as a share of the economy at 73.3 percent in 2025, said a congressional aide familiar with the plan who was not authorized to speak about it publicly. That forecast includes $1.8 trillion in deficit-reduction measures, said another person familiar with the plan.
+
+The administration said it “achieves these goals by replacing mindless austerity with smart reforms, paying for all new investments” and seeking new savings.
+
+That isn’t likely to appease Republicans, however, who are expected to quickly dismiss Obama’s budget request and start drafting their own blueprint that would seek to eliminate deficits entirely over the next 10 years and tackle the biggest drivers of government spending: Social Security and federal health programs.
+
+Although the president has previewed his tax and spending priorities over the past two weeks, the budget provides important — and controversial — details.
+
+“This is a budget that fleshes out the president’s State of the Union address and puts meat on the bones of his middle-class economics agenda,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. “It makes important strategic investmens to sharpen our competitive edge, including investments in infrastructure, science research and education — things that have helped power the American economy in the past — and we risk falling behind if we don’t make those investments going forward.”
+
+Van Hollen added that the administration is proposing tax changes — including an increase in the capital gains tax and expanded tax credits for families with children — “designed to address what is currently a tilt in the tax code in favor of those who make money off of money and against those who make money off of hard work.”
+
+According to a Tax Policy Center paper, if all of the major individual income tax provisions were fully phased in, the president’s package would raise taxes by an average of $164 per household in 2016. But winners would outnumber losers by more than 7 to 1, with the tax increases concentrated among the richest 1 percent of households.
+
+The vast majority of households in the bottom four quintiles would pay lower taxes — or receive larger refunds — as a result of the policy proposals. Those in the lowest quintile would by far save the most.
+
+“My job is to present the right ideas,” Obama told NBC News in a pre-Super Bowl interview broadcast from the White House. “If the Republicans think they’ve got a better idea, they should present them. But my job is not to trim my sails and not tell the American people what we should be doing, pretending somehow that we don’t need better roads or more affordable college.”
+
+The president will also propose approximately $1.8 trillion in deficit-reducing measures over a 10-year period. Those measures, which resemble past proposals, would include about $160 billion in higher income and Social Security taxes resulting from immigration reform, $400 billion in health care savings. and $640 billion from taxes raised mostly by eliminating deductions without raising rates. Additional savings would come from lower interest costs on the federal debt.
+
+One item that will still be in the printed version of the budget: a tax on withdrawals from 529 accounts designed to promote parents’ savings for college tuition. After that proposal was recently greeted with a backlash, the administration retreated from the idea, but it was too late to change the printed budget.
+
+Obama administration officials have been trying to link various tax and spending changes to build support among members of Congress who might favor only one part of those pairings.
+
+Treasury Secretary Jack Lew recently said that the windfall resulting from taxing foreign profits accumulated by corporations should go to funding the infrastructure program. The administration also paired increases in capital gains taxes and a new fee on the liabilities of big banks and insurance companies with proposals to expand middle-class tax credits and free community-college education. And the administration has also said that it wants to break through spending caps for discretionary spending by equal amounts for military and non-military programs.
+
+But making those trade-offs will prove more difficult in Congress than on paper.
+
+For example, the tax on foreign profits, regardless of whether they are brought back to the United States, is likely to face strong headwinds in Congress. Obama’s plan would impose an immediate tax of up to $280 billion on U.S.-based multinationals at a time when many lawmakers are worried about pushing companies to move their headquarters overseas.
+
+The 14 percent tax would “transition” to a long-term 19 percent rate, senior administration officials said.
+
+As previously announced, the budget will include an increase in the top capital gains tax rate to 28 percent, which would fall primarily on the richest 1 percent of Americans.
+
+“What I think the president is trying to do here is to, again, exploit envy economics. This top-down redistribution doesn’t work,” Ryan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It may make for good politics; it doesn’t make for good economic growth.”
+
+For example, Ryan called Obama’s plan to expand the amount of inherited wealth subject to the capital gains tax “a bad idea” that would make it “really hard for a family to pass on a family business to the next generation.”
+
+Still, Ryan embraced some of Obama’s proposals for cutting taxes, especially for the struggling middle class. Ryan has long endorsed expanding the earned-income tax credit to childless adults, for example, saying it “pulls people into the workforce.”
+
+“We really believe that we should reform the entire tax code for all people — individuals, families, businesses, simpler, the whole thing. But it is pretty clear to us that the president doesn’t agree with that on individuals,” Ryan said. “So the question is — which I don’t know the answer to — is there common ground on aspects of tax reform that we think can help grow the economy? . . . We’ll find out.”
+
+Lori Montgomery and Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.",REAL
+7152,NYPD Source: Weiner Laptop Has Enough Evidence “to Put Hillary ... Away for Life”,"Email 
+Sex crimes with children, child exploitation, money laundering, perjury, and pay to play, reads the partial list of crimes that, say New York City Police Department sources, could “put Hillary and her crew away for life.” 
+Shocking evidence of such criminality has been found on ex-congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer, say the sources, which was seized from him by NYC officials investigating his allegedly having sent sexually explicit texts to a 15-year-old girl. Moreover, Hillary Clinton’s “crew” supposedly includes not just close aide and confidante Huma Abedin and her husband, Weiner, but other aides and insiders — and even members of Congress. Reports True Pundit : NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to: • Money laundering • Sex crimes with minors (children) • Perjury • Pay to play through Clinton Foundation • Obstruction of justice • Other felony crimes NYPD detectives and a [sic] NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. “What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.” 
+These revelations would explain why Director Comey reopened the investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information, a move that shook the political world and caused Comey to come under fire. As the NYPD chief put it, the new e-mails contents truly are “alarming.” 
+True Pundit also reports FBI sources as stating that Abedin and Weiner are both trying to cut immunity deals with federal officials and that, if they didn’t cooperate, they’d face long prison sentences. Abedin’s turning state’s evidence would no doubt be devastating for Clinton, as the two women have for years been joined at the hip. Abedin has at times been like Clinton’s shadow, has been called her “body woman,” and has even been rumored to be Clinton’s lesbian lover. So Abedin likely knows where, as is said, the bodies are buried. 
+Of particular note, the new e-mails allegedly contain information revealing that Hillary, Bill Clinton, Weiner, and numerous congressmen took trips to convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, where he is said to pimp out underage minors of both sexes to prominent people. The trips were taken aboard Epstein’s Boeing 747, dubbed the “Lolita Express”; the pedophile’s island, in the US Virgin Islands, has been called “ Sex Slave Island .” 
+These revelations would also explain why Clinton used powerful software called BleachBit to scrub damning information from her private server. According to BleachBit’s website, its program gives criminals and others the ability to “shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery.” 
+Yet it can’t scrub bumbling perverts from your personal life, and Weiner’s laptop also contains incriminating e-mails revealing the mishandling of classified information by Abedin and Clinton, say the sources. Both women “sent and received thousands of classified and top secret documents to personal email accounts,” and this information could have been “accessed, printed, discussed, leaked, or distributed by untold numbers ... of unknown individuals,” writes True Pundit . 
+Consequently, FBI sources say the new Clinton investigation has been broadened and now includes matters such as how, informs True Pundit : • Abedin forwarded classified and top secret State Department emails to Weiner’s email • Abedin stored emails, containing government secrets, in a special folder shared with Weiner warehousing over 500,000 archived State Department emails. • Weiner had access to these classified and top secret documents without proper security clearance to view the records • Abedin also used a personal yahoo address and her Clintonemail.com address to send/receive/store classified and top secret documents • [a] private consultant managed Weiner’s site for the last six years, including three years when Clinton was secretary of state, and therefore, had full access to all emails as the domain’s listed registrant and administrator via Whois email contacts. 
+This story just adds more intrigue to a presidential campaign that is truly unprecedented, with a torrent of WikiLeaks and Project Veritas revelations and now Clinton’s Weiner woes. From vote fraud to inciting violence to child sex abuse to pay-for-play to perjury, it’s becoming clear to many that the Democratic Party — and the Clintons in particular — are essentially a criminal syndicate. As former assistant FBI director James Kallstrom said in a Sunday interview, “The Clintons, that’s a crime family, basically. It’s like organized crime. I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool.... God forbid we put someone like that [Clinton] in the White House.” And now we know better why, as I wrote Sunday, this “appears standard FBI sentiment. I personally know of an ex-agent — someone with knowledge of Clinton ‘crime family’ dealings — who I’m told is having trouble sleeping at night due to the prospect of a Clinton presidency.” 
+All these revelations raise important questions: How could Hillary Clinton and her cohorts have bumbled so badly that they appear a cross between Inspector Clouseau and Boss Tweed ? 
+And if Clinton is so careless with her own personal survival, how can she be trusted with national survival? 
+Part of the explanation is general incompetence, yet there’s another factor: Both Clintons have engaged in continual criminality over the decades — and have been allowed to skate at every turn. This lack of accountability has led to complacency and ever-increasing brazenness, just as with a child never punished for wrongdoing. 
+So, finally, perhaps, Clinton corruption has reached critical mass. And with Donald Trump ahead 10 points (according to one respected poll) among the 88 percent of voters who have definitely made up their minds, maybe, come late Tuesday evening, some tossing and turning FBI agents will finally be able to enjoy a good night’s rest.  ",FAKE
+6098,Biden Doesn't Stand a Chance. Clinton's Secretary of State Will Be Vicky Nuland - Daniel Larison,"Taming the corporate media beast Biden Doesn't Stand a Chance. Clinton's Secretary of State Will Be Vicky Nuland Originally appeared at The American Conservative 
+Joe Biden is reportedly being considered for Secretary of State in a Clinton administration: 
+Joe Biden is at the top of the internal short list Hillary Clinton’s transition team is preparing for her pick to be secretary of state, a source familiar with the planning tells POLITICO. 
+If Biden is on such a list, I doubt he is at the top of it, and my guess is that he wouldn’t be the nominee in any case. There are other likely choices, including Victoria Nuland, that would be a better fit with Clinton and would be even more likely to share her foreign policy priorities. Kelley Vlahos reported earlier this year on Nuland’s record: 
+Where will Victoria Nuland be after January? Nuland is one of Hillary Clinton’s protégés at the State Department, and she is also greatly admired by hardline Republicans. This suggests she would be easily approved by Congress as secretary of state or maybe even national-security adviser—which in turn suggests that her foreign-policy views deserve a closer look. 
+If Nuland can be considered a Clinton protege, Biden is more of a rival. During the first Obama term, Biden and Clinton were frequently on opposing sides of internal foreign policy debates, and in his 2015 announcement that he wouldn’t run for president Biden offered what I took to be a rebuke of Clinton’s more aggressive foreign policy positioning: 
+We have to accept the fact that we can’t solve all of the world’s problems. We can’t solve many of them alone. 
+The argument that we just have to do something when bad people do bad things isn’t good enough. It’s not a good enough reason for American intervention and to put our sons and daughters’ lives on the line, put them at risk. 
+Probably their most significant disagreement was over intervention in Libya: Clinton was a major supporter, and Biden saw no compelling reason for the U.S. to intervene. Biden has a fairly hawkish record over the last twenty years, but even he couldn’t see why the U.S. should get involved there. As recently as June, he was publicly claiming vindication for opposing an intervention that Clinton touts as “smart power at its best.” I don’t see why she would want Biden as her Secretary of State, and I definitely don’t see why he would want to serve in her administration.",FAKE
+3706,"From victims’ families, forgiveness for accused Charleston gunman Dylann Roof","President Obama challenged the nation Friday to confront the “terrible toll of gun violence” a day after a white man opened fire in a historic black church, killing nine people whose mourning relatives addressed the alleged killer for the first time with a message of despair and forgiveness.
+
+In an emotional courtroom encounter here, a mother and daughter, a sister and grandson, among others, spoke directly to Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old charged Friday with nine counts of murder. He appeared for the bond hearing from jail through closed-circuit television.
+
+As Roof’s face filled much of the screen — his eyes lowered, two guards in body armor flanking him from behind — surviving relatives told Roof his crime had devastated their families. But some said they forgave him, and, recalling the spirit of the venue where he staged his attack, pledged to pray for his soul.
+
+“We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with welcome arms,” Felicia Sanders, whose son Tywanza Sanders was allegedly killed by Roof. Police say Roof spent an hour among the parishioners Wednesday evening before opening fire.
+
+“Tywanza Sanders was my son. But Tywanza Sanders was my hero. Tywanza was my hero,’’ she said, her voice trembling. “May God have mercy on you.”
+
+Thousands of miles away, addressing the U.S. Conference of Mayors in San Francisco, Obama spoke angrily about Charleston, which joins a grim roll call of cities such as Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., and Oak Creek, Wis., where mass shootings have occurred during his time in office.
+
+His frustration was directed primarily at Congress, which failed to pass a set of publicly popular gun control bills that he pushed after the December 2012 elementary school shootings in Newtown, where 20 children and six others were killed.
+
+“We don’t know if it would have prevented what happened in Charleston,” Obama said. “But we might still have some more Americans with us. We might have stopped one shooter. Some families might still be whole. You all might have to attend fewer funerals.
+
+“And we should be strong enough to acknowledge this,” he said.
+
+The force of his words signaled a shift from his comments at the White House a day earlier. Then, he expressed a sense of resignation that any gun control measures, while needed to prevent another mass shooting, would likely happen “at some point” after he left office.
+
+“I’m not resigned. I have faith we will eventually do the right thing,” Obama said Friday without offering specific policy proposals of his own. “You don’t see murder on this kind of scale, this kind of frequency in any other advanced nation on earth.”
+
+The attack inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has left Charleston in mourning and a nation, from the president to parishioners here, struggling to understand and explain the aftermath.
+
+The shooting was the deadliest attack on a place of worship in the United States since 1991, when nine people were killed at the Wat Promkunaram temple near Phoenix.
+
+Authorities announced Friday that Roof had been charged with nine counts of murder and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.
+
+His attorney has not commented, though his family issued a statement Friday extending sympathies to the victims and asking for privacy.
+
+“Words cannot express our shock, grief and disbelief as to what happened that night,’’ the statement said.
+
+More evidence also emerged that Roof, a high school dropout with a criminal record that began this year, may have been motivated by racial hatred. Law enforcement officials said he had confessed, and that during the confession, expressed strong anti-black views. Officials characterized him as unrepentant and unashamed.
+
+Roof told officers that he wanted word of his actions to spread, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
+
+Yet Roof also acknowledged to authorities that he had briefly reconsidered his plan during the time he spent watching the Bible study group after entering the church, two people briefed on the investigation said.
+
+Roof said he “almost didn’t go through with it because they were so nice to him,” one of the people said, before he concluded that “I had to complete my mission.”
+
+As he methodically fired and reloaded several times, the person said, Roof called out: “You all are taking over our country. Y’all want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about.”
+
+An affidavit filed by Charleston police detective Richard Burckhardt said the time that Roof spent with parishioners before opening fire amounted to about an hour.
+
+The document does not state what, if anything, occurred in the moments before the shooting. But it says all victims were hit multiple times.
+
+Before leaving the church, the affidavit states, Roof stood over someone “and uttered a racially inflammatory statement to the witness.”
+
+South Carolina’s governor on Friday urged prosecutors to seek the death penalty for the shootings. “We will absolutely want him to have the death penalty,” Gov. Nikki Haley told NBC’s “Today” show.
+
+But prosecutors said the decision about whether to seek execution had not yet been made. The prosecutor pursuing the case, Scarlett A. Wilson, said at news conference that she will make the decision after speaking to relatives of the victims.
+
+“They deserve to know the facts first. They deserve to be involved in any conversations regarding the death penalty,” Wilson said.
+
+Meanwhile, a federal civil rights investigation into the attacks was also underway, which authorities said will be conducted along with the state probe. Federal officials have described it as a hate crime investigation.
+
+When Roof was arrested — about 250 miles from Charleston in neighboring North Carolina — he had a Glock .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun that law enforcement officials said he obtained in April, either receiving it as a birthday gift or buying it himself with birthday money. The gun was purchased legally, officials said.
+
+At Roof’s bond hearing, Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old shooting victim Ethel Lance, was among those who addressed him.
+
+“I forgive you,” Collier said, her voice breaking. “You took something very precious from me. I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”
+
+Roof is being held on a $1 million bond.
+
+Horwitz and Markon reported from Washington. Anne Gearan in Charleston; Ken Otterbourg in Shelby; and Brian Murphy, J. Freedom du Lac, Mark Berman, Thad Moore and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+7502,(The Onion) Strongside/Weakside: Theo Epstein,"In just five seasons, Chicago Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein assembled a team that is competing for the franchise’s first World Series title since 1908. Is he any good? Strongside 
+Finished first in class at Yale School of Sabermetrics 
+Only person in America emotionally invested in Single-A South Bend Cubs 
+Views baseball game as hundreds of formulas running across field 
+Believes this might be the year he finally wins fantasy baseball league 
+Can explain phenomenon of curses using highly complex linear regression 
+Turned the 2002 Red Sox into a contender using only the second-highest payroll in baseball Weakside 
+No fucking way he could do this magic turnaround shit for the Padres 
+Lucky shirt costs $400 
+Not even sure how to use gut feeling at this point 
+Helped make Curt Schilling a World Series hero 
+Took almost six years after college to achieve every single one of his dreams 
+Still doesn’t have statistic named after him Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
+Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines",FAKE
+8325,Trump to deport everyone who is not Native American,"Trump to deport everyone who is not Native American 14-11-16 PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump has confirmed plans to deport 318 million non-Native American immigrants. As part of a wider plan to restore America’s old values of shamanism, living in cone-shaped tents and going on vision quests, Trump will remove anyone who is less than 50 per cent Native American, including his family and himself. He said: “We have forgotten the tribal values that made this nation great. We have lost our connection with nature and no longer even fear the Wendigo, the mighty shape-shifter who comes with the winds. “By 2017 there will be buffalo back on all the plains, Kevin Costner is going to help me and I will scalp anyone who stands in my way.” Trump voter, Martin Bishop said: “This is exactly what we wanted from Trump. “ Kick all the foreigners out, including me, my wife, kids and everyone I know. It’s Brexit plus plus plus.” He added: “The antelope is my spirit animal.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+3190,Will the GOP Mount a Third-Party Challenge to Trump?,"Donald Trump may have eased some Republican fears Tuesday night when he declared his intention to stay inside the party. But if their angst has been temporarily eased at the prospect of what he would do if he loses, they still face a far more troubling, and increasingly plausible, question.
+
+What happens to the party if he wins?
+
+With Trump as its standard-bearer, the GOP would suddenly be asked to rally around a candidate who has been called by his once and former primary foes “a cancer on conservatism,” “unhinged,” “a drunk driver … helping the enemy.” A prominent conservative national security expert, Max Boot, has flatly labeled him “a fascist.” And the rhetoric is even stronger in private conversations I’ve had recently with Republicans of moderate and conservative stripes.
+
+This is not the usual rhetoric of intraparty battles, the kind of thing that gets resolved in handshakes under the convention banners. These are stake-in-the-ground positions, strongly suggesting that a Trump nomination would create a fissure within the party as deep and indivisible as any in American political history, driven both by ideology and by questions of personal character.
+
+Indeed, it would be a fissure so deep that, if the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run—from the Republicans themselves.
+
+That threat, in turn, would leave Republican candidates, contributors and foot soldiers with painful choices. A look at the political landscape, the election rules and the history of intraparty insurgencies suggests that it could turn 2016, a year that offered Republicans a reasonable chance to win the White House and with it total control of the national political apparatus, into a disaster.
+
+With Trump as the nominee, the Republican Party would face a threat to unity on several fronts. His victory would represent a triumph of an insurgent movement, or impulse, within the party. Historically speaking, this is exactly the kind of intraparty victory that guarantees political civil war.
+
+The most striking examples of party fissure in American politics have come when a party broke with a long pattern of accommodating different factions and moved decisively toward one side. It has happened with the Democrats twice, both over civil rights. The party had long embraced the cause of civil rights in the North while welcoming segregationists—and white supremacists—from across the South. In 1948, the party’s embrace of a stronger civil rights plank led Southern delegations to walk out of the convention. That year, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond led a National States Rights Democratic Party—the “Dixiecrats”—that won four Southern states. Had President Harry Truman not (barely) defeated Tom Dewey in Ohio and California, the Electoral College would have been deadlocked—and the choice thrown into the House of Representatives, with Southern segregationists holding the balance of power. Twenty years later, Alabama Governor George Wallace led a similar anti-civil-rights third party movement that won five Southern states. A relatively small shift of voters in California would have deadlocked that election and thrown it to the House of Representatives.
+
+In two other cases, a dramatic shift in intraparty power led to significant defections on the losing side. In 1964, when Republican conservatives succeeded in nominating a divisive champion of their cause in Barry Goldwater, liberal Republicans (there were such things back then) like New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Michigan Governor George Romney and others refused to endorse the nominee. More shockingly, the New York Herald-Tribune, the semi-official voice of the GOP establishment, endorsed Lyndon Johnson—the first Democrat it had supported, ever. With his party split, Goldwater went down in flames. Eight years later, when a deeply divided Democratic Party nominated anti-war hero George McGovern, George Meany led the AFL-CIO to a position of neutrality between McGovern and Richard Nixon—the first time labor had refused to back a Democrat for president. Prominent Democrats like former Texas Governor John Connally openly backed Nixon, while countless others, disempowered by the emergence of “new Democrats,” simply sat on their hands. The divided Democrats lost in a landslide.
+
+Would a Trump nomination be another example of such a power shift? Yes, although not a shift in an ideological sense. It would represent a more radical kind of shift, with power moving from party officials and office-holders to deeply alienated voters and to their media tribunes. (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham have not exactly endorsed Trump, but they have been vocal in defending him and in assailing those who have branded Trump unacceptable.) It would undermine the thesis of a highly influential book, “The Party Decides,” which argues that the preferences of party insiders is still critical to the outcome of a nomination contest. This possibility, in turn, has provoked strong feelings about Trump from some “old school” Republicans. Says one self-described “structural, sycophantic Republican” who has been involved at high levels of GOP campaigns for decades: “Hillary would be bad for the country—he’d be worse.”
+
+A battle over ideology or influence, however, explains only one kind of defection from party ranks. The other—one that would hold particular peril for Trump-as-Republican-nominee—arises from a belief that a chosen candidate is simply unfit, by character or temperament, to hold office. And on at least one occasion, a prominent politician sacrificed his electoral chances out of that belief.
+
+In 1986, former Senator Adlai Stevenson III had every reason to believe he would be following his father's footsteps into the Illinois governor’s mansion. Four years earlier, the Democrat had lost a race for that office by fewer than 5,000 highly disputed votes. But in 1986, his easy primary win in March was overshadowed by what happened elsewhere on the ballot: Two followers of Lyndon LaRouche, a cultish, conspiracy-minded demagogue, won the Democratic nominations for lieutenant governor and secretary of state. Stevenson was so horrified by the thought of placing LaRouche’s acolytes in positions of political power that he bolted the party line, running instead as an independent. He lost decisively. (Sen. Alan Dixon, who remained on the Democratic line, easily won reelection.)
+
+Republicans faced a similar issue in 1991, when former Klansman David Duke made it into the gubernatorial runoff in Louisiana. While he proclaimed himself a Republican, he was roundly rejected by the party at every level—the outgoing GOP governor endorsed former Governor Edwin Edwards—and Duke lost overwhelmingly to Edwards. (It’s a campaign best remembered for the bumper sticker touting the ethically challenged Edwards: “Vote for the crook—it’s important.”)
+
+It’s this example that perhaps offers the best parallel to what Trump would face as the nominee. If you want to see the most sulfurous assaults on Trump, don’t look to the editorial pages of the New York Times or the comments of MSNBC personalities; look instead to the most prominent media voices in the conservative world: National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary and the columns of George Will and others. In part, they deplore his deviations from the conservative canon; deviations that former Reagan aide and onetime FCC Chairman Dennis Patrick summarizes this way: “Many of my colleagues from the Reagan administration would have a hard time pulling the lever for Trump. We weren’t just Republicans, we were conservatives. It is very difficult to square any principled theory of conservative governance with much of what Trump says.""
+
+But it’s more, much more than policy that has stirred the ire on the right: It’s the vulgarity, the fusion of ignorance and arrogance, the narcissism, the dissembling on matters great and small. The composite portrait of Trump painted by these outlets—leavened only by a grudging acknowledgment that he’s touched on legitimate concerns about immigration and terror—makes the idea of handing over the nuclear codes to Trump unsettling. And it makes the idea of embracing him as the alternative to Hillary Clinton somewhere between a reach and a lunge.
+
+What a Trump nomination represents, then, is a victory that leaves significant slices of the party unwilling or unable to accept the outcome. Whether he’s seen as an ideological heretic for his views on trade, taxes and government power or as a demagogue whose clownish bluster and casual bigotry make him temperamentally unfit for office, the odds on massive defections are very high.
+
+But what kind of defections? Based on the folks I’ve talked with, it could take different forms. One is a simple, quiet step away from any work on behalf of the top of the ticket. That’s what the self-described “structural, sycophantic Republican”—will do. While he fervently hopes Trump will meet the fate of past front-runners like [Rudy] Giuliani and [Newt] Gingrich, he says that in the event of Trump’s victory, “I would put all my heart, soul and energy into saving the Senate. I’d work to turn out votes so that [Kelly] Ayotte and [Pat] Toomey and [Ron] Johnson survive. In the end, every Republican, every conservative, knows what a disaster it would be to have Clinton as president. So the key is to make sure the checks and balances were in place.”
+
+Others, however, can envision much more radical outcomes. Dan Schnur spent a lifetime in the vineyards of the Republican Party, working in the Reagan and Bush presidential campaigns and serving as communications director for the California Republican Party. He’s now an independent and heads the Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. He argues “a Trump nomination would virtually guarantee a third-party campaign from a more traditional Republican candidate.”
+
+Why a Republican? The short answer is to save the party over the long term. “It's impossible to conceive that Republican leaders would simply forfeit their party to him,” he says. “Even without the formal party apparatus, they'd need to fly their flag behind an alternative, if only to keep the GOP brand somewhat viable for the future. Otherwise, it would be toxic for a long, long time.”
+
+Romney strategist Stu Stevens, who still believes Trump will fade—indeed, that “he will not win a single primary”—nonetheless agrees that a Trump nomination would trigger a “very strong third-party effort.” And Rob Stutzman, another veteran of California Republican politics—he helped spearhead the 2003 recall that put Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Governor’s Mansion—foresees a third party emerging, both as a safe harbor for disaffected GOP voters and to help other Republican candidates.
+
+“I think a third candidate would be very likely on many state ballots,” he says. “First of all, I think most GOP voters would want an alternative to vote for out of conscience. But Trump would also be devastating to the party and other GOP candidates. A solid conservative third candidate would give options to senators like Ayotte, Johnson and [Mark] Kirk to run with someone else and still be opposed to Hillary. In fact, I think it’s plausible such a candidate could beat Trump in many states.”
+
+Any candidate attempting a third-party bid would confront serious obstacles, such as getting on state ballots late in the election calendar. As for down-ballot campaigns, most state laws prohibit candidates from running on multiple lines; so a Senate or congressional candidate who wanted to avoid association with Trump would have to abandon the GOP line to re-run with an independent presidential contender. The Stevenson example shows that leaving a major party line is fraught with peril—although the write-in triumph of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2010 suggests that it can sometimes succeed.
+
+The very fact that serious political thinkers are contemplating such a possibility demonstrates that when Republicans look at the perils posed by a third-party bid from Donald Trump, they may be looking in the wrong direction. It’s not Trump the Defector that could trigger the biggest threat to the party, but Trump the Nominee.",REAL
+9731,Easy Street Recent Used Vinyl Arrivals!,Support Us Easy Street Recent Used Vinyl Arrivals!,FAKE
+4257,Here’s How Michael Bloomberg Becomes President,"Impossible, you say? In this crazy year, what’s impossible? Against Trump and Sanders, Bloomberg could win. Here’s how.
+
+Bloomberg decided to run back in March of 2016 only when he saw that Trump and Sanders were on track to be nominated by the Republicans and Democrats. He viewed both as dangerous men who would wreck the country. And Bloomberg saw a path. He thought voters would eventually see that he had been a highly successful mayor of a city larger than all but a handful of states and was far more fit for high office than either of them. He would run as an unprecedented blend of insider and outsider—representing elites but smashing the two-party status quo that voters despised.
+
+The journey began in mid-winter. After Trump plastered the field in New Hampshire on Feb. 9 and won by double digits on Feb. 20 in South Carolina, Republicans proved powerless to resist his hostile takeover of their party. With his opposition divided, Trump edged Ted Cruz in home state Texas on March 1, and then, on March 15, Marco Rubio in home state Florida and John Kasich in Ohio, all but eliminating all three. By then the die was cast on the Republican side, though Americans and millions watching around the world still had to slap themselves to prove they weren’t dreaming.
+
+Democrats suddenly had to do the same in their party. Sanders won 60 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, romping not just with young liberals but even older moderate women who were supposed to be Hillary’s base. Clinton prevailed in the Nevada caucuses by five points on Feb. 20, but Sanders showed surprising strength outside his base with Latino voters. When Hillary won by a much smaller margin than expected in South Carolina on Feb. 27, it showed that Bernie would also avoid being overwhelmed by pro-Hillary African-American voters in the big industrial states.
+
+After Nevada and South Carolina, party leaders breathed a sigh of relief thinking Hillary was home safe, but that’s always the moment with the Clintons when new voter doubts about them set in. Hillary is best when she’s in trouble and worst when sitting on a lead. She underperformed badly on Super Tuesday, losing Massachusetts by a big margin (she had trailed there in the polls for weeks) and, shockingly, Texas, where the state’s longstanding populist tradition returned with a vengeance. On March 8, Sanders carried Michigan, which had gone for Jesse Jackson in 1988. That gave him momentum the following week to come close in Hillary’s home state of Illinois and to carry Ohio, where he reminded Democrats of their populist senator, Sherrod Brown, though Brown supported Hillary.
+
+Bloomberg easily won all three of the fall debates. He was far more knowledgeable than Trump, who continued his pattern of not preparing on issues. When Trump predictably tried to belittle Bloomberg, he failed badly. Bloomberg was no “loser” in the only way Trump ever kept score. And the fear arguments fell flat with a mayor who had rebuilt New York after the 9/11 attacks. Meanwhile, Bloomberg schooled Sanders on how to create jobs and make the economy grow, eviscerating his plans as unaffordable and leading to tax increases on the middle class.",REAL
+7803,Hillary Clinton’s Gun Control Agenda Exposed in WikiLeaks Emails,"  The Daily Sheeple 
+There is no doubt about it. Hillary Clinton is after your guns. 
+Brian Fallon, national press secretary for the Clinton campaign, wrote in an email dated October 4, 2015 that Clinton intends to stop the “gun show loophole”, meaning all private gun sales, by executive order : 
+Circling back around on guns as a follow up to the Friday morning discussion: the Today show has indicated they definitely plan to ask bout guns, and so to have the discussion be more of a news event than her previous times discussing guns, we are going to background reporters tonight on a few of the specific proposals she would support as President – universal background checks of course, but also closing the gun show loophole by executive order and imposing manufacturer liability . 
+Imposing manufacturer liability means that after Sandy Hook, Bushmaster and Remington Arms would have been prosecuted for having a hand in the murder of children and school staff members for firearms that were legally sold. When a lawsuit brought against these manufacturers was found to be frivolous, Clinton made a big fuss about it on Twitter: It's incomprehensible that our laws would protect gun makers over Sandy Hook families. We need to fix this. https://t.co/96uBe92wPi 
+— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 15, 2016 
+In September 1993 during a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Hillary Clinton was asked by Senator Bill Bradley if she supported a 25% sales tax on handguns and automatic weapons. She was very clear in her support of taxing guns: 
+“I’m all for that. I just don’t know what else we’re going to do to try to figure out how to get some handle on this violence,” said Clinton. “I’m speaking personally, but I feel very strongly about that.” 
+In another email exchange dated January 14, 2016, Clinton wrote about using racial division to further her gun control agenda by selectively ignoring occurrences of gun violence that were not racially motivated. For this reason, according to the email, the Clinton campaign did not include the story of Jordan Davis in an essay on gun violence: 
+This is great. My edits are attached. The only flag here is that Jordan Davis was killed by a white man, so arguably – this crime was racially motivated, which takes this outside the discussion of gun violence. Was there another mother in the Chicago meeting where the shooting was NOT racially motivated? If yes, we should use that story instead of Jordan Davis. 
+In another email from March 17, we see an exchange about how to attack Donald Trump and a press call with Arizona locals about gun control. When asked about an anti-gun op-ed article by the Clinton Campaign, Chairman John Podesta wrote that he fears blowback from Clinton’s supporters: 
+Interestingly, I am worried about blowback from our supporters. Contributed by The Daily Sheeple of www.TheDailySheeple.com . Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+47,Jeb Bush says he is making campaign 'adjustment',"CHARLESTON, S.C. — Jeb Bush says he's not reducing his presidential campaign, he is simply refocusing it with an eye toward the early caucus and primary states.
+
+""We've made an adjustment in our campaign,"" Bush said Saturday before conducting a town hall in the pivotal state of South Carolina. ""That's what leaders do.""
+
+Stumping the Palmetto State a day after his campaign announced staff reductions and pay cuts, Bush dismissed critics who said the changes reflect a struggling campaign that is losing ground to any number of rivals.
+
+""Blah, blah, blah,"" Bush said. ""That's my answer — blah, blah, blah.""
+
+The cuts came after a slide in polls that now show the former Florida governor well behind Donald Trump, Ben Carson and other Republican candidates, creating some unrest among Bush donors.
+
+In response, Bush cited a number of candidates who have held early leads in Republican contests and then faded, a list that ranges from Herman Cain to Rudy Giuliani. John McCain, meanwhile, rallied from internal campaign troubles to win the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.
+
+""October is not when you elect people,"" Bush said before hosting a town hall at a Catholic high school in Charleston. ""It's February, and then you move into March.""
+
+Bush said his efforts now focus on four contests in February: The Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary, the South Carolina primary and the Nevada caucuses. He said he is also taking aim at a March 1 group of primaries, including key southern states like Georgia and Texas.
+
+""We have a campaign that is designed to win,"" Bush said. ""And I'm going to win.""
+
+In discussing his campaign changes, Bush also talked about the changing nature of the Republican race. He cited a ""new phenomenon"" of candidates who have risen in the polls without any previous political experience, an apparent reference to Donald Trump and Ben Carson. He described them as ""the frontrunners right now"" who will be ""held to account, just like all of us will.""
+
+Later Saturday morning, Bush again referred to the early Republican contests during the town hall hosted by Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., talking up the importance of South Carolina in the primary process on several occasions. ""The February states are important,"" Bush said.
+
+Scott — who has not yet endorsed in the primary — said after the town hall he doesn't think Bush's campaign changes will hurt him in South Carolina. The senator compared the slim-down to the diet that Bush himself used to lose weight.
+
+""I think he's doing the Paleo diet to his campaign,"" Scott said.
+
+Also appearing at the town hall: U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., two days after chairing a hearing in which Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton testified about the 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya.
+
+""I don't know what y'all were doing Thursday,"" Gowdy told the supportive crowd. ""I had a rough Thursday.""
+
+Democrats have accused Gowdy of conducting a partisan investigation designed to target Clinton's presidential campaign. Bush and Scott praised the South Carolina congressman for seeking the truth about the attack that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.
+
+""I've been in the limelight myself a few times,"" Bush said. ""And it's not easy.""",REAL
+6835,The Google Trend That Reveals It’s ALL OVER For Hillary,"Well it was a no brainer for Killery to want everybody to vote for her before all the info on her wild e-mail handling came out. 
+There are a lot of states that will not allow you to change your early vote!! 
+I don’t think it will matter because she will more than likely have the electoral vote in her favor. 
+And yes if google was checking this trend they more than likely would have molested it by now. 
+Let’s prey that enough people in the swing states that allow people to change their vote will do so.",FAKE
+2284,Which Communities Are Most Divided on Gay Marriage?,"The fight over Indiana’s Religious Freedom Law became part of the 2016 presidential discussion this week, with American’s rapidly shifting view of gay rights and gay marriage at the center of a public uproar over the ordinance.",REAL
+9075,"To Protect and Swerve: Police Chief Caught Speeding, Gets a Laugh but No Ticket (Video)","
+Video footage of a police chief being pulled over for traveling at speeds above 100 miles per hour was only released after one irritated citizen watched the top cop drive into the sunset without as much as a ticket.
+
+Some criminals are let off with a slap on the wrist, but one Arkansas police chief got off with a slap on the wrist for speeding, with responding officers laughing during the traffic stop.
+Brinkley Police Department Chief Edward Randle was pulled over by a state trooper who had been called for assistance by a Brinkley police officer. However, any concern the trooper may have had quickly disappeared when he recognized Randle while approaching the truck.
+“ Where are you going so fast? ” the trooper asked Randle, chuckling. Randle told the trooper that he was heading to “ the game ,” a football game he was refereeing later that evening, KTHV reported .
+When the Brinkley officer approached the vehicle, Randle proceeded to give him a hard time, saying: “I know you didn’t call the state police!” The officer explained that he did not announce the truck’s license plate into the reading, saying, “ I didn’t have your plate, so it didn’t go over. ”
+The only time the reason for Randle’s speeding was mentioned in the recording was when the state trooper told him, “ I had you locked in at 107 [miles per hour]. ”
+“ It won’t go over 95, ” Randle replied.
+Randle continued to defend himself using this argument, telling KTHV that the truck has a governor device on the engine that prevents it from going above 95 miles (153 km) per hour. However, the officer told Randle that he was driving 90 miles (145 km) per hour and was still only trailing Randle.
+Randle denied going close to 95 miles per hour, he even denied the trooper’s comment that he had been driving “ 71 (114 km) at the curve. ”
+The confrontation ended quickly with all parties going their separate ways after a sum total of 45 seconds. The whole issue would have likely flown under the radar, had it not been for a citizen who witnessed it.
+Benjamin Martin was leaving Clarendon, a nearby town, when he noticed the Brinkley police car in Clarendon city limits and pulled over to watch. What he saw troubled him, to say the least.
+“ I find it, you know, very disheartening, that anyone, public official or not, would show such blatant disregard for the speed limit, and put the lives of innocent others at risk, ” Martin told KHTV, adding, “ I just feel that no one’s above the law, and you know, if it was me, I would’ve gotten a ticket. ”
+Martin continued, “ As a chief of police, and as a law enforcement officer, you’re sworn to protect and serve, which is the opposite of putting the lives of others at risk. ”
+However, Randle feels differently and claimed that after nearly three decades in law enforcement, he knows better than to put others at risk with dangerous driving. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by RT.com of RT.com . ",FAKE
+1655,Jeb Bush's view from the bottom,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+3901,Our President and the Constitution: Barack Obama has gone rogue,"Can the president rewrite federal laws? Can he alter their meaning? Can he change their effect? These are legitimate questions in an era in which we have an unpopular progressive Democratic president who has boasted that he can govern without Congress by using his phone and his pen, and a mostly newly elected largely conservative Republican Congress with its own ideas about big government.
+
+These are not hypothetical questions. In 2012, President Obama signed executive orders that essentially said to about 1.7 million unlawfully present immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before their 16th birthdays and who are not yet 31 years of age that if they complied with certain conditions that he made up out of thin air they will not be deported.
+
+In 2014, the president signed additional executive orders that essentially made the same offer to about 4.7 million unlawfully present immigrants, without the age limits that he had made up out of thin air. A federal court enjoined enforcement of the 2014 orders last month.
+
+Last week, the Federal Communications Commission -- the bureaucrats appointed by the president who regulate broadcast radio and television -- decreed that it has the authority to regulate the Internet, even though federal courts have twice ruled that it does not.
+
+Also last week, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, whose director is appointed by the president, proposed regulations that would outlaw the only mass-produced bullets that can be fired from an AR-15 rifle. This rifle has been the target of the left for many years because it looks like a military weapon; yet it is a lawful and safe civilian rifle commonly owned by many Americans.
+
+This week, the president’s press secretary told reporters that the president is seriously thinking of signing executive orders intended to raise taxes on corporations by directing the IRS to redefine tax terminology so as to increase corporate tax burdens. He must have forgotten that those additional taxes would be paid by either the shareholders or the customers of those corporations, and those shareholders and customers elected a Congress they had every right to expect would be writing the tax laws. He has eviscerated that right.
+
+What’s going on here?
+
+What’s going on is the exercise of authoritarian impulses by a desperate president terrified of powerlessness and irrelevance, the Constitution be damned. I say “damned” because when the president writes laws, whether under the guise of administrative regulations or executive orders, he is effectively damning the Constitution by usurping the powers of Congress.
+
+The Constitution could not be clearer. Article I, section 1 begins, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” Obama actually asked Congress to write the laws he is now purporting to write, and Congress declined, and so he does so at his peril.
+
+In 1952, President Truman seized America’s closed steel mills because steel workers went on strike and the military needed hardware to fight the Korean War. He initially asked Congress for authorization to do this, and Congress declined to give it to him; so he seized the mills anyway.
+
+His seizure was challenged by Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., then a huge operator of steel mills. In a famous Supreme Court decision, the court enjoined the president from operating the mills.
+
+Youngstown is not a novel or arcane case. The concurring opinion by Justice Robert Jackson articulating the truism that when the president acts in defiance of Congress he operates at his lowest ebb of constitutional power and can be enjoined by the courts unless he is in an area uniquely immune from congressional authority is among the most highly regarded and frequently cited concurring opinions in modern court history. It reminds the president and the lawyers who advise him that the Constitution imposes limits on executive power.
+
+The president’s oath of office underscores those limits. It requires that he enforce the laws faithfully. The reason James Madison insisted on using the word “faithfully” in the presidential oath and putting the oath itself into the Constitution was to instill in presidents the realization that they may need to enforce laws with which they disagree -- even laws they hate.
+
+But Obama rejects the Youngstown decision and the Madisonian logic. Here is a president who claims he can kill Americans without due process, spy on Americans without individualized probable cause, start wars on his own, borrow money on his own, regulate the Internet, ban lawful guns, tell illegal immigrants how to avoid the consequences of federal law, and now raise taxes on his own.
+
+One of the safeguards built into the Constitution is the separation of powers: Congress writes the laws, the president enforces the laws, and the courts interpret them. The purpose of this separation is to prevent the accumulation of too much power in the hands of too few -- a valid fear when the Constitution was written and a valid fear today.
+
+When the president effectively writes the laws, Congress is effectively neutered. Yet, the reason we have the separation of powers is not to protect Congress, but to protect all individuals from the loss of personal liberty. Under Obama, that loss has been vast. Will Congress and the courts do anything about it?
+
+Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.",REAL
+9909,News: Hope For The GOP: A Nude Paul Ryan Has Just Emerged From An Ayahuasca Tent With Visions Of A New Republican Party,"Email 
+Since Donald Trump entered the election over a year ago, he has single-handedly destroyed the GOP, leaving both the House and the Senate in utter disarray. But although many political strategists believe permanent damage has been done, conservatives shouldn’t lose hope yet, because Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has just emerged fully nude from an ayahuasca tent with visions of a new Republican Party. 
+A fresh GOP platform requires fresh leadership, and when Speaker Ryan journeyed to South America last week to embark on an immersive psychedelic vision quest of political rebirth, he just proved he’s the only one for the job. 
+After traveling to Peru and entering a makeshift tent with nothing but a towel, 200 mg of DMT, and a bucket to vomit in, Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) spent the last 12 hours lying nude on the jungle floor, enduring bursts of vivid consciousness in which he watched the secrets of a unified, more moderate GOP unfold before his very eyes. 
+While under the influence of the powerful psychedelic, ancient spiritual guides appeared before the congressman, instructed him to remove his clothes, and held him down as lifelike projections of Republican leaders twisted and contorted around him until the perfect cabinet had revealed itself amid infinite realities in which tax cuts and fiscal budgets exploded into cacophonous symphonies, all to create a Republican Party that mobilizes key voter constituencies. 
+Check out these tweets he posted just a few moments after emerging nude from his tent in the Amazon rain forest! 
+Whoa. Democrats have been pretty confident this past year, but if Paul Ryan’s visions of the Republican party are right, they better watch out! 
+Say what you want about Paul Ryan, but he’s a man who refuses to give up. On the one hand, is it possible that the speaker’s grand ayahuasca visions of a new Republican Party are just a temporary fix? Sure. But on the other hand, if he plays his cards right, his proposals could have an even larger impact than they did during the thousands of years he lived while trapped inside his own mind. 
+One thing is for sure: Paul Ryan emerged fully nude from that ayahuasca tent with a new perspective, and people are starting to take notice.",FAKE
+9770,Massive marine park declared in Antarctic Ocean,"This undated handout photo received from the Antarctic Ocean Alliance on October 28, 2016 shows a Adelie penguin on pack ice in the Ross Sea in Antarctica. © AFP 
+International leaders have joined hands to create the world’s largest marine park in the Antarctic Ocean. The European Union and 24 countries have reached a momentous agreement to open the Ross Sea Park. 
+The deal was sealed in Hobart, Australia after prolonged negotiations run by the United Nation’s Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. 
+The Ross Sea marine park will cover an area of 1.55 million square kilometers and is to be protected from commercial fishing for 35 years. 
+The preserved area covers more than 12 percent of the Southern Ocean and is home to more than 10,000 species. Scientists and activists consider the deal a historic milestone after decades of global efforts in marine preservation. 
+The Ross Sea is seen as one of the world's most ecologically important oceans for its unique qualities. Scientists believe that the marine park can be a platform for a deeper understanding of climate change impacts. 
+The 25-member commission comprised of Russia, China, the US and the EU had to have unanimous support for the decision. Loading ...",FAKE
+1214,South Carolina Black Voters Not Feelin’ the Bern,"Sorry, but Sanders doesn’t think like mainstream black voters. The tell is Cornel West. He hates Obama. We do not.
+
+Iowa and New Hampshire had their turns in the spotlight, and Nevada comes this Saturday. And a week after that, my state, South Carolina, will host its own Democratic primary. Compared to those first two states, ours is highly diverse. Battle ground, trial phase—call it what you will—South Carolina, once a crucible of the civil rights movement and Barack Obama’s surge, can help vet the candidate best aligned with the black community.
+
+Bernie Sanders is not that candidate—not next to Hillary Clinton. From his bouts with the president to the laws he contested to the company he keeps, Sanders raises alarm bells for Obama supporters, especially those from the African-American community.
+
+Back in 2012, while still a proud Independent, Sanders took a page from the Republican playbook and called for a primary challenge to Obama’s presidency. His aim: to contrast “a progressive agenda as opposed to what Obama is doing,” as if to say affordable health care and safe cities are not “progressive” enough goals. The Democrats I know would disagree.
+
+That anti-Obama jab followed an earlier resistance to the Affordable Care Act, now considered President Obama’s greatest legacy. Back in 2009, coming from the far left wing, Sanders held out on voting “yes,” hoping instead for an impossible ideal. Over 200,000 South Carolinians now have quality, affordable health insurance through Obamacare. If Sanders fulfills his campaign promise and starts those talks from a blank slate, then he risks undoing years of progress.
+
+Improving health care matters greatly to our community. It’s no secret that African Americans die earlier than whites and suffer in larger numbers from diseases like diabetes and heart disease. We also die twice as often from gun violence. In Charleston County alone, blacks accounted for 29 percent of the population in 2014 but claimed 78 percent of gun violence deaths. We demand equality where our lives are at stake, and on that note Sanders has a mixed record on gun safety, having opposed reforms that Obama now pushes.
+
+The Vermont senator once voted for legislation that allowed the Charleston shooter to buy a gun despite a clerical error—the now-infamous “Charleston Loophole.” More recently, he voted down legislation meant to shield gun makers from victim lawsuits. When President Obama last month refused to back “any candidate, even in my own party, who does not support common-sense gun reform,” he may well have been referring to Sanders.
+
+In what perhaps struck the candidate as an act of solidarity, Sanders also chose Cornel West as liaison to South Carolina’s black voters. As The Washington Post puts it, West serves as Sanders’s “controversial traveling companion” and “has been highly critical of President Obama.” That’s an understatement. Cornel West hates President Obama. He once called the president “a brown-faced Clinton,” “a Rockefeller Republican in blackface,” and a “counterfeit” progressive.
+
+My own father, Cleveland Sellers, was a real civil rights-era activist, as were Jesse Jackson and Rev. Joseph A. Darby. All of them are alive and well with deep South Carolina roots and could have been surrogates for Sen. Sanders. So of all the black leaders Sanders could have chosen, why West? West is a scholar, sure, but his views are extreme, and they clash with much of the pro-Obama black community.
+
+Bernie Sanders means well, and his calls for income equality rightly resonate with Democratic voters. But certain issues—gun violence and health care among them—and certain viewpoints—Cornel West’s not among them—appeal specifically to most African Americans. My vote goes to someone who supports President Obama and intends to wholly and ambitiously build on his legacy. That someone is not Bernie Sanders.",REAL
+435,"Employers Added 38,000 Jobs in May","The U.S. economy created the fewest number of jobs in more than five years in May, hurt by a strike by Verizon workers and a fall in goods producing employment, pointing to labor market weakness that could make it difficult for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.
+
+Nonfarm payrolls increased by only 38,000 jobs last month, the smallest gain since September 2010, the Labor Department said on Friday. Employers hired 59,000 fewer workers in March and April. The government said the month-long Verizon strike had depressed employment growth by 34,000 jobs.
+
+The goods producing sector, which includes mining and manufacturing, shed 36,000 jobs, the most since February 2010. Even without the Verizon strike, payrolls would have increased by a mere 72,000.
+
+The Verizon workers, who were considered unemployed because they did not receive a salary during the payrolls survey week, returned to their jobs on Wednesday. They are expected to boost June employment.
+
+The jobless rate fell three-tenths of a percentage point to 4.7 percent in May, the lowest since November 2007. The decrease in the unemployment rate was in part due to people dropping out of the labor force.
+
+Economists polled by Reuters had forecast payrolls rising 164,000 in May and the unemployment rate falling to 4.9 percent.
+
+Fed Chair Janet Yellen has said monthly gains of roughly 100,000 jobs are needed to keep up with growth in the work-age population. The U.S. central bank has signaled its intention to raise rates soon if job gains continued and economic data remained consistent with a pickup in growth in the second quarter.
+
+Yellen said last week that a rate increase would probably be appropriate in the ""coming months,"" if those conditions were met. Data on consumer spending, industrial production, goods exports and housing have suggested the economy is gathering speed after growth slowed to a 0.8 percent annualized rate in the first quarter.
+
+The Fed hiked its benchmark overnight interest rate in December for the first time in nearly a decade.
+
+There is still no sign of meaningful wage growth. Average hourly earnings rose five cents, or 0.2 percent, last month. That kept the year-on-year rise at 2.5 percent.
+
+Economists say wage growth of between 3.0 percent and 3.5 percent is needed to lift inflation to the Fed's 2.0 percent target. There are, however, signs that inflation is creeping higher as the dampening effects of the dollar's past rally and the oil price plunge dissipate.
+
+There was little change in other measures of labor market slack. A broad measure of unemployment that includes people who want to work but have given up searching and those working part-time because they cannot find full-time employment held steady at 9.7 percent in May.
+
+The labor force participation rate, or the share of working-age Americans who are employed or at least looking for a job, fell 0.2 percentage point to 62.6 percent.
+
+The gains in May were broadly weak, with the private sector adding only 25,000 jobs, the smallest since February 2010. Mining employment maintained its downward trend, shedding 10,000 positions. Mining payrolls have dropped by 207,000 since peaking in September 2014, with three-quarters of the losses in support activities.
+
+Manufacturing employment fell by 10,000 jobs. The Verizon labor dispute reduced information sector jobs by 34,000.
+
+Retail payrolls rose 11,400 after shedding jobs in April for the first time since December 2014. Temporary help jobs fell 21,000.",REAL
+9081,Hillary and the Ghosts of Watergate,"Posted on November 1, 2016 by Charles Hugh Smith 
+The parallels between Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon are not legal–they are political: specifically, how can a leader crippled by scandal and cover-ups govern? 
+In even blunter terms: how can a crippled politico deliver the goods to the special interests who bet their cash and political capital on the politico’s ability to deliver favors? 
+Among the many ghosts of Watergate, one specter especially haunts Hillary: once the special interests and party stalwarts who defended you through every scandal and every cover-up–month after month and year after year, on the promise that you would deliver the goods upon ascending to the presidency–realize you are too damaged to deliver anything of value to anyone, why would they continue supporting you? 
+Once a politico has to declare “I am not a crook” based on legalese rather than a moral foundation, that politico’s ability to lead has vanished. Hillary and her supporters rely entirely on legalese parsing of wrong-doing rather than on a self-explanatory, basic moral foundation of right and wrong. 
+Declaring “I am not a crook” because the wrongdoing escapes prosecution is the same as declaring “I am above the law.” If the foundation of one’s ability to lead is a reliance on legal parsing and allies in the Department of Justice squashing investigations while handing out immunity like candy on Halloween, the political capital required to lead no longer exists. 
+Ultimately, the President leads by moral suasion. Even the political act of delivering the goods to the special interests that funded your campaign and your wealth must be backed by the moral authority of personal integrity and a morally grounded appeal to the common good. 
+A politician who has effectively zero personal integrity is only as viable as his/her ability to deliver favors to the few (i.e. special interests) over the objections of the many. A reliance on cold-blooded horse-trading only works if the leader has enough political capital to arm-twist everyone into granting favors to allies and special interests. 
+But this political capital rests on moral suasion and support earned not by issuing promises but by leading the nation through thorny thickets to solutions that work for the many, not just the few. 
+Once the ability to lead has been lost, special interests can forget about getting favors. And once they realize their politico is a liability rather than an asset, self-preservation requires abandoning the liability as quickly as possible. 
+It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. Anyone who thinks Hillary has the personal integrity to build sufficient political capital to lead is delusional. Anyone who believes Hillary has the moral foundation to deliver the goods to the myriad special interests that have funded her campaign and her personal wealth is equally delusional. 
+Are Goldman Sachs et al. delusional? If there is any lesson to be learned from the ghosts of Watergate, it is that the big-money support of a leader who has lost the ability to deliver the goods crumbles very quickly as the endgame unfolds.",FAKE
+2664,Donald Trump is blatantly racist — and the media is too scared to call him out on it,"Donald Trump, the actual Republican candidate for president, now endorsed by his party leaders, openly said he wants to exclude someone from a government job because of his race and ethnicity.
+
+As the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, Trump said he wants to disqualify the federal judge overseeing the Trump University case because of his ""Mexican heritage"" and membership in a Latino lawyers association:
+
+Mr. Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had ""an absolute conflict"" in presiding over the litigation given that he was ""of Mexican heritage"" and a member of a Latino lawyers' association. Mr. Trump said the background of the judge, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants, was relevant because of his campaign stance against illegal immigration and his pledge to seal the southern U.S. border. ""I'm building a wall. It's an inherent conflict of interest,"" Mr. Trump said.
+
+This is pure racism. There's no subtlety, no dog whistle, no coded language.
+
+Somehow this isn't too surprising. Trump is, after all, the presidential candidate who launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants criminals and ""rapists,"" and he proposed banning all Muslims from entering the US.
+
+And with this latest remark, Trump is just turning the thinly veiled subtext into text. He had already previously brought up Curiel's Mexican heritage, suggesting that there was a conflict of interest because of it but not saying it quite so explicitly.
+
+Reading this, it's hard for me, a Hispanic American, to avoid feeling a little personally insulted. This suggests that Trump would probably dismiss my opinion — indeed, this article — because of my name. Yet millions of Americans — and a major political party — want him to be president, despite his clear racism.
+
+Maybe the media plays a role here. After all, instead of calling it like it is, CBS News, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have called Trump's comments about Curiel ""racially charged"" and ""racially tinged,"" the weasel words the media typically uses to describe racism. It makes one wonder: What would it take for them to finally call Trump or his remarks just plainly racist? If claiming a qualified, vetted judge shouldn't be able to do his job because of his race and ethnicity isn't racist, then what the hell is?
+
+Perhaps the problem is Hispanic people are vastly underrepresented in media. As the journalism organization ASNE found, racial minorities make up less than 13 percent of the field — despite making up about 38 percent of the total US population. That might make it harder for a lot of journalists to see just how racist Trump's remarks are.
+
+If that's the case, maybe it would be helpful for the predominant white journalists in the field to consider: If President Barack Obama or President Marco Rubio said all white people should be banned from acting as judge in a court case against him, would that be considered racist? And how is that any different from what Trump is doing?
+
+There should be no doubt about it now: Donald Trump is racist. He wants to exclude people from government jobs because of their race and ethnicity. That is the literal definition of racism. The media shouldn't shy away from pointing that out, and the people supporting Trump should know that's exactly what they're supporting.",REAL
+7809,"Little-Loved by Scholars, Trump Also Gets Little of Their Cash","Little-Loved by Scholars, Trump Also Gets Little of Their Cash Peter Olsen-Phillips, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 7, 2016 
+It’s no secret that campaign contributions from higher education have favored Democratic candidates for years. When it comes to the current presidential race, however, data show that the gap between left and right has grown from a rift into a chasm. 
+A Chronicle analysis of Federal Election Commission data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics shows Donald Trump raising a tiny fraction of the campaign money that the previous two Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, drew from higher-education professionals over comparable time periods. 
+Across higher education, donations in congressional and Senate races showed a ratio of Democratic to Republican giving similar to that of the two previous presidential-campaign cycles. But support for Mr. Trump stood at less than 8 percent of what Senator McCain raised from higher-ed professionals, and around 4 percent of the donations that Mr. Romney pulled in over the same time period, once the figures were adjusted for inflation. 
+As of June 30, faculty members and others who work in higher education had donated $76,668 to Mr. Trump’s campaign committee and to support “super PACs”–independent committees that can raise and spend unlimited funds. By comparison, people working in academe had given $6.4 million to Hillary Clinton. Those figures account for donations of at least $200 that the Center for Responsive Politics has determined come from people associated with higher education. They are the most-recent figures available. 
+{snip}",FAKE
+10145,Ask Holly: What’s everyone’s problem?,"Ask Holly: What's everyone's problem? 27-10-16 Dear Holly, Apparently hardly anyone wants to listen to me on the radio, even though I work so hard discussing pointless drivel with myself for hours on end interspersed with soul-destroying tracks by Coldplay and Michael Buble. What’s everyone’s problem? Chris London Dear Chris, My dad’s had a great idea for Channel 4’s new direction with Bake-Off. Instead of all this old lady nonsense about Victoria sponges and gingham and witty lesbians, the new version should be called ‘The Great British Man-Off’ and it’ll be a load of competitive middle aged blokes being bawdy and doing manly stuff like re-sealing the bath and shouting at the radio and getting frustrated with tools. Everyone on the show will be worried about going bald and every episode will end with an embarrassing scuffle in a pub car park. Hope that helps,",FAKE
+2203,Obama: Battle against ISIS Could Take Decades,"President Barack Obama is proposing a new strategy in the fight against ISIS, saying the battle against the Islamic State will not be quick. In fact, he says it could take decades.
+
+During a rare visit to the Pentagon, Obama laid out his revamped strategy, saying the fight against the Islamic State will require more than just weapons.
+
+""No amount of military force will end the terror that is ISIL unless it's matched by a broader effort, political and economic,"" he said.
+
+The president said coalition forces will go after the heart of ISIS, but he did not call for more bombing or more troops, announcing instead a shift in focus to counter the terror group's public relations tactics.
+
+Obama pointed to a string of ISIS defeats in the region due to airstrikes targeting the group's supply lines. But he said more needs to be done to recruit and train Syrians for the fight on the ground.
+
+When it comes to lone wolf terrorists in America inspired by ISIS, the president admitted they're harder to detect, saying U.S. national security must remain vigilant.
+
+Obama pointed to increased efforts to counter ISIS's propaganda that's spreading worldwide via social media.
+
+""We also have to acknowledge that ISIL has been particularly effective at reaching out to and recruiting vulnerable people around the world, including here in the United States,"" he said.
+
+While the fight against ISIS will be long, the president said he's confident the terrorists won't win.
+
+But Republicans remain skeptical, saying Obama's plan doesn't go far enough.
+
+""A speech isn't a strategy,"" said Cory Fritz, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. ""At no point in his remarks did President Obama indicate he's doing anything to change course and actually build the broad, overarching plan that's needed to take on these savage terrorists and win.""
+
+Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said the president ""doesn't have a strategy.""
+
+""I didn't sense that he had a rock solid strategy on how to deal with this and defeat it,"" Chaffetz said.",REAL
+6519,"Trump Livid After Beyonce And Jay Z Support Hillary, Explodes With Rage","Share on Facebook 
+Republican Donald Trump has never been good at controlling his anger, and the same goes for his insane jealousy. 
+Last night, Jay Z and Beyonce shared the stage with Hillary Clinton at a concert in Cleveland, Ohio. The A-list couple showed Clinton a stunning amount of support, followed by a powerful speech by the Democratic candidate herself. It was a monumental moment, and Trump hated every second of it. 
+At a rally of his own, Trump couldn’t hide the fact that he was green with envy. Trump said: 
+“We’re going to do it, folks. We’re going to do it. Oh boy, are we going to win Pennsylvania big. Look at this. I hear we set a new record for this building. And by the way, I didn’t have to bring J Lo or Jay Z, the only way she gets anybody. I’m here all by myself. I am here all by myself. Just me. No guitar, no piano, no nothing.” 
+Trump didn’t even try to hide how sorry he felt for himself, and it was obvious that he was trying really hard not to completely lose it over the fact that no one likes him and almost no celebrities want to be affiliated with him. You can watch Trump give his pathetic, desperate speech below: 
+Trump’s bullsh*t campaign is finally coming to an end. He spent the beginning of his campaign promising America that he’d run a star-studded campaign, and he has almost nothing to show for it almost a year later. Not even his own Republican colleagues wanted to appear with him on the campaign trail, forcing Trump to go it alone. 
+Of course Trump is jealous and bitter. While Clinton doesn’t need the support of the massive amount of celebrities who have endorsed her, their support is a clear sign that she is doing something right and her campaign is something worth standing by. You can watch Beyonce and Jay Z stand with Clinton below: 
+Featured image via Alex Wong / Getty Images Patti Colli My passion is bringing attention to human rights and equality issues. In addition to writing for New Century Times and other political platforms, I also run a website and digital magazine dedicated to social issues and promoting equality in all forms. Post navigation",FAKE
+1033,How Donald Trump sees himself,"He trusts no one, and places a premium on revenge. (""If you do not get even, you are just a schmuck!"")
+
+He treats every decision he makes ""like a lover,"" sometimes thinking with his head, other times with other parts of his body, because it reminds him to ""keep in touch with my basic impulses.""
+
+And to make creative choices, he writes: ""I try to step back and remember my first shallow reaction. The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.""
+
+This is Donald J. Trump as he sees himself and the world.
+
+CNN scoured thousands of pages of books, speeches, profiles and television interview transcripts from the past three decades to stitch together a portrait based entirely on the Republican presidential front-runner's own words.
+
+Taken together, his words offer further insight into the leadership style of the billionaire-turned-politician, whose extraordinary candidacy has simultaneously electrified and repulsed large swaths of the electorate.
+
+Trump authored more than a dozen books about his experiences in the business world that shaped this outlook -- most of them self-help treatises with titles including the 1987 best-seller ""The Art of the Deal,"" 2004's ""Think Like a Billionaire: Everything You Need to Know About Success, Real Estate, and Life,"" and 2007's ""Think Big.""
+
+Trump himself has shared his story in detail. Some recurrent themes in his writings include strength, success, self-confidence, distrust and revenge. He has often written and spoken about what he sees as the decline of the United States, a bedrock theme of his presidential campaign.
+
+""The world is a vicious and brutal place, he wrote in ""Think Big."" ""Even your friends are out to get you: They want your job, they want your house, they want your money, they want your wife, and they even want your dog.''
+
+""When people wrong you, go after those people, because it is a good feeling and because other people will see you doing it,"" he writes. ""I always get even.""
+
+'If I had been the son of a coal miner'
+
+Trump's life story, in the broadest of brush strokes, goes like this:
+
+He was born the son of wealthy New York real-estate developer Fred C. Trump. He went to a private military academy in high school, attended Fordham for two years, then the Wharton School of Finance from which he graduated.
+
+While his father did business in Brooklyn and Queens, Trump set off to make his mark in Manhattan. He became fabulously wealthy (think penthouse, helicopter, yacht, private plane) in the real estate boom of the '80s, then nearly lost it all when the boom went bust. He has since rebounded to the tune — he says — of a personal fortune of $10 billion. (Forbes estimates his net worth at $4.5 billion).
+
+As he has run his empire and ascended as a mega star on reality TV, Trump has often been accused of being a bully, which he denies.
+
+He does, however, acknowledge being a ""very assertive, aggressive kid.""
+
+When he was in elementary school he formed the opinion that his music teacher didn't know much about music.
+
+So, Trump punched him in the face, he wrote in 1987's ""The Art of the Deal.""
+
+""In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye,"" he wrote. ""I'm not proud of that, but it's clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way. The difference now is that I like to use my brain instead of my fists."" (He adds that he ""almost got expelled"" over the incident.)
+
+The elder Trump completed his project and liked it so much that he glued the blocks together.
+
+It was a self-admiration that would carry over into his real life as a builder.
+
+In ""Think Big,"" he writes of the emotional reaction he has when arriving to work at Trump Tower.
+
+""I love to see the crowds of people oohing and aahing at the stunning marble and the breathtaking 80-foot waterfall,"" he wrote. ""In truth I am dazzled as much by my own creations as are the tourists and glamour hounds that flock to Trump Tower ... or any of my other properties.""
+
+The mutual admiration of his work, Trump wrote, makes him feel ""a little closer to them even though we've never met.""
+
+The billionaire developer has long felt a kinship with blue-collar workers -- and he believes the feeling is reciprocated. There is without question an aspirational nature to his candidacy, and blue-collar workers have shown up at the polls in droves to support his bid for the Republican nomination — often expressing admiration for his success and a belief that his financial wealth will free him from the influence of special interests if he makes it to the White House.
+
+""Rich men are less likely to like me,"" Trump told Playboy in a 1990 interview, ""but the working man likes me because he knows I worked hard and didn't inherit what I've built.""
+
+Trump acknowledges he was born wealthy — he grew up in a 23-room house in the Jamaica Estates section of Queens — and that his father loaned him money to begin his own business. But he stresses that he set himself apart when he headed to Manhattan and began building skyscrapers instead of affordable rental units.
+
+""I often say that I'm a member of the lucky sperm club,"" he wrote in 2009's ""Think Like A Champion.""
+
+""But did it give me a natural talent? I don't think so. It gave me an advantage that I deliberately chose to develop into an advantage.""
+
+There is an ""it"" factor people like him are born with, Trump has said.
+
+To explain what he meant by ""it,"" Trump, the son of a multi-millionaire, evoked the plight of mine workers with black lung disease in the interview with Playboy.
+
+""If I had been the son of a coal miner I would have left the damn mines,"" said Trump, then 43. ""But most people don't have the imagination—or whatever — to leave their mine.""
+
+""They don't have 'it,' "" he said.
+
+Trump seems most self-critical when writing about the near collapse of his real-estate empire in 1990.
+
+""In the early 90s I was in a ton of debt. I had gone from the smartest guy in town to a complete zero,"" he wrote in 2007's ""Think Big."" ""I went from being a super genius to a moron.""
+
+He recalled walking down the street one day with his then-wife, Marla Maples, and reflecting on his situation. He pointed to a nearby man.
+
+""That beggar over there is worth $900 million more than I am,"" he wrote.
+
+""What do you mean?"" Maples asked.
+
+""Because I'm $900 million in debt,"" he replied, ""and at least he has money in his pocket.""
+
+He attributed his fall not only to the revision of the tax code by Congress in 1986 — which he said destroyed ""just about any incentive anyone might have for investing in real estate"" — but also to his own complacency.
+
+""You just get a feeling of invincibility,"" he said, reflecting on his downward spiral in that book.
+
+""You let down your guard. You don't work as hard. Then things start to go in the wrong direction.""
+
+Trump, who has written that he sleeps three-to-four hours a night so he can devote as much time as possible to his work, does not dwell on his misfortune on the campaign trail, except to establish the depths from which he re-emerged.
+
+He threatened to sue a Washington Post reporter who wrote about the bankruptcy of the Taj Mahal, one of his casinos in Atlantic City, according to an interview with that reporter on NPR's ""Fresh Air."" Trump also reacted indignantly to a question about his bankruptcies during CNN's September debate last year, insisting that he merely took advantage of U.S. laws to help his business.
+
+Back on top in the mid-2000s, Trump wrote ""Think Big,"" which shows the evolution of his management style and his values as a leader.
+
+""DO NOT TRUST ANYONE,"" reads one chapter subheading.
+
+""I used to say, 'Go out and get the best people, and trust them.' Over the years I have seen too many shenanigans, and now I say, 'Get the best people and don't trust them.'""
+
+Another maxim in Trump's world is revenge.
+
+""I always get even,"" he writes in a chapter dedicated to the subject.
+
+""She was a nobody in her government job and going nowhere,"" Trump wrote of the unnamed woman. ""I decided to make her into somebody.""
+
+Under his mentoring, Trump wrote, the woman became powerful in real estate and bought a beautiful home.
+
+When Trump was under intense financial pressure in the early '90s, he asked the woman to make a phone call to ""an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank who would have done what she asked.""
+
+So Trump ""got rid of her,"" he wrote.
+
+""She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad,"" he continued. ""Over the years many people have called asking for a recommendation for her. I only give her bad recommendations. ...This woman was very disloyal, and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable.""
+
+Trump punctuated the anecdote with several bullet points at the end of the chapter, including:
+
+""When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades"" and ""Go for the jugular so that people watching will not want to mess with you.""
+
+That approach was shaped by his own travails in business in the early 1990s as he watched his empire collapse around him.
+
+""I believe in an eye for an eye — like the Old Testament says,"" he wrote in ""The Art of the Comeback.""
+
+""Some of the people who forgot to lift a finger when I needed them, when I was down, they need my help now, and I'm screwing them against the wall. I'm doing a number.... And I'm having so much fun.""
+
+While Trump's writings and statements are geared primarily toward the business world, he has routinely weighed in on politics over the years.
+
+Favorite themes are the need for national strength and restoring America's stature abroad, which he says has been diminishing for decades.
+
+In the Playboy interview, he referred to the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in which some 10,000 government troops killed an unknown number of protestors.
+
+""When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,"" Trump said. ""Then they were vicious. They were horrible, but they put it down with strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak ... as being spit on by the rest of the world.""
+
+In ""Think Big,"" he criticized then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a smiling, waving lightweight who is no match for the murderous dictators she was dispatched to deal with.
+
+""Condi Rice just goes over there to get her picture taken,"" Trump wrote.
+
+Trump states without equivocation that he could accomplish a feat that has eluded politicians for decades:
+
+""I could negotiate peace in the Middle East -- very few other people could,"" he wrote in ""Think Big.""
+
+Aside from a brief flirtation with the idea of a presidential bid in 2000, however, Trump has spent most of his years in the spotlight denying or downplaying such aspirations.
+
+""I think I'm almost too honest to be a politician,"" he told CNN in 1997.
+
+""I'm too forthright. I'm too — I think I'm too honest,"" he said, ""but I do believe I'm too forthright to be a politician.""",REAL
+7751,Back Story Of FBI’s Hillary Cover-Up,"Back Story Of FBI’s Hillary Cover-Up FBI corruption exposed Infowars Nightly News - October 28, 2016 Comments 
+Angry law enforcement investigators are talking about corruption at the top of the FBI’s “investigation” of Hillary. 
+Here’s how it went sideways. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . The Most Offensive Halloween EVER! - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force",FAKE
+8010,"Hillary FRANTIC As Dirty Secret Implodes, Gets Worse With Prison Bombshell","Share This 
+Hillary Clinton thought her email scandal was in the rearview mirror, but it just blew up in her face days before the election. Unfortunately for her, everything just got worse as a bombshell just exploded – and seeing how the topic is about prison, it looks like things are about to get juicy. 
+There’s no doubt that Hillary is as crooked as they come. Although the left would have you believe otherwise, with the presidential hopeful all but admitting her criminal acts, not too many people believe them. 
+However, things just got a lot worse for Hillary, but his time, it’s not only her presidential campaign that’s in jeopardy. According to The Economic Collapse , Hillary Clinton is looking at a whopping 20 years behind bars if she’s convicted of “obstruction of justice” – a term that could very well be a life sentence for a woman of her age. A sight we may get to see soon, and one that Hillary Clinton rightfully deserves 
+As of this point, no one is mentioning the phrase “obstruction of justice,” but that doesn’t mean the idea isn’t floating out there. In fact, when you look at the actual definition of the term in regards to the Federal statute, you start to get a better idea of just how guilty Hillary is: 
+Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsified, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under Title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. 
+We already know that Hillary is guilty of trying to cover this up. Not only did she delete and “bleachbit” her server in a desperate attempt to block the FBI from finding out her dirty little secret, but then she said she didn’t have the emails they were looking for. 
+Of course, when others stumbled across the mythical 33,000 emails, things started to take a turn – and it all just got worse. According to The Wall Street Journal , the FBI now has another 650,000 emails to sort through with about 10,000 pertinent to Hillary’s case. Things aren’t looking so good for Hillary Clinton 
+Why did FBI Director James Comey find the need to come forward with this information so close to the election? Well, as it turns out, the answer is rather simple – redemption. 
+According to a Daily Mail article written by Ed Klein, the author of a bestseller about the Clintons entitled Guilty As Sin , it seems as though Comey was suffering for letting off Hillary so easy. As explained by Klein: 
+“Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,” said the source. ‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist. He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom.” 
+Further speculation pertaining to Comey’s reasoning seems to indicate that the urgency here stems from the information actually found. Knowing just how much the release would impact the election, one can only assume that Comey was only comfortable in doing so as someone had already found something really big. 
+The fact of the matter is, people had lost faith in justice after Comey’s dismissal of Hillary’s charges. After proving that power meant exclusion from the law, it seems as though the FBI Director is trying to right that wrong today. Furthermore, as there seems to be something of substantive nature, Hillary can expect to be facing 20 years behind bars – a sentence a great many people would feel is justified.",FAKE
+505,An Obama boom?,"According to a transition pool report, the media personalities are as follows: NBC News President Deborah Turness; CNN President Jeff Zucker and network...",REAL
+10343,What Is Behind The Push For War With Russia?,"What Is Behind The Push For War With Russia? What Is Behind The Push For War With Russia? By 0 23 
+This is a Jewish thing. But it is not just that Jews want to destroy things for no reason. But this is, especially among the American Jewish elite, a vendetta against Vladimir Putin. This vendetta was described by American academia’s preeminent Russia scholar, Professor Stephen F. Cohen. 
+To be sure, Cohen did not say in so many words that this was a “Jewish” vendetta. But he also did not call it a “globalist” or “corporate” or “reptilian Nazi” vendetta, which are just ways of distracting attention away from the Jewish role. He blamed a war party which he described as led by the (((New York Times))), the (((Washington Post))), and officials in the Defense and State Department like (((Victoria Nuland))). Connect the dots for yourselves, goys. 
+He does not say why this “war party,” as he calls it, wants to regime change Putin. But a look at recent Russian history, a history that he has written so much about, makes it clear. 
+After the Soviet Union was dismantled in what was basically an unconstitutional coup carried out by the Russian President Boris Yeltsin at a time when Russia was just one (although by far the largest) of the 15 Soviet republics that made up the Soviet Union, he proceeded to privatize state assets as part of a “shock therapy” program pushed by Harvard Professor (((Jeffrey Sachs))), who was brought in as an advisor by Privatization Minister (((Anatoly Chubais))). 
+President Clinton sent over more Jews to advise Yeltsin on how to…",FAKE
+1434,3 winners and 2 losers from Sunday night's Democratic presidential debate,"Sunday night's Democratic debate was, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz insisted, timed to ""maximize the opportunity for voters to see our candidates."" Given that it was held on the Sunday before a federal holiday, that seems … dubious. But whoever wasn't deterred by the debate's inauspicious timing saw an event that was both substantive and sort of lackadaisical. Almost all the discussion focused on policy, but Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton began awkwardly attempting to slip in attacks on each other, though neither really seemed that comfortable doing it. The most animated of the bunch was Martin O'Malley, who seemed energized by his quest to successfully say something, anything, without being talked over.
+
+It'll take a few days for poll results to trickle in, which will provide the closest thing to an objective answer of who actually won the debate. But in the meantime, here are the candidates who ended the night better off than they started it — and the ones who slipped.
+
+Bernie is now posting his best poll numbers of the campaign to date, as he excitedly pointed out in a moment that echoed Donald Trump's matter-of-fact citation of polling at Thursday's Republican debate. He's only 4 points behind in Iowa and gaining, solidly ahead in New Hampshire, and has momentum nationally too. There's a very real possibility that he wins the first two primary contests and leaves Clinton scrambling to recover in South Carolina.
+
+What Sanders needed to do Sunday night was maintain that momentum, continue his appeal to liberal base voters, and blunt any attacks that Clinton might be tempted to unleash at him. He accomplished all of that, even if he didn't give a focused, dominant performance. His release of his single-payer financing details denied Clinton a major attack line, he avoided getting bogged down in guns (clearly his worst issue from the Democratic base's perspective), and he struck an ecumenical tone that made him seem relatively above the fray as Clinton tried out various critiques targeting him.
+
+Perhaps his strongest moment was when he erupted at Andrea Mitchell after being asked about Bill Clinton's affairs:
+
+Andrea Mitchell: Senator Sanders, let me ask you a question, you called Bill Clinton's past transgressions, quote, totally, totally, totally disgraceful, and unacceptable. Senator, do you regret saying that? Bernie Sanders: I was asked a question — you know one of the things, Andrea, that question annoys me. I cannot walk down the street, Secretary Clinton knows that, without being told how much I have to attack Secretary Clinton. To get me on the front page of the paper, I have to make a vicious attack. I have avoided doing that. I'm trying to run an issue-oriented campaign. [Applause] I was asked a question… Andrea Mitchell: You didn't have to answer it that way though, why did you? Bernie Sanders: Then if I don't, there's another front page. Yes, and I mean this seriously, we've been through this. Yes, his behavior was deplorable, have I said a word? No, I have not. I'm going to debate Secretary Clinton, Governor O'Malley on the issues facing the American people, not Bill Clinton's personal behavior.
+
+This appeals to older Democrats still pissed at the media's preoccupation with Bill's sexual misconduct while still reminding people of it and condemning it as ""deplorable."" It makes him seem above such frivolity and interested in waging a positive, issue-oriented campaign.
+
+Best of all, Clinton didn't get a chance to respond, even though her campaign attacked Sanders this week for appearing to go negative in one TV spot. After a debate when she clearly went negative at Sanders — and a week in which a notable surrogate attacked him not on the issues but for his age — this made Clinton seem threatened by Sanders and desperate to attack him, as he brushed off the attacks and pivoted to the issues.
+
+Oh yeah, and this is the first debate in which Bernie got the most speaking time of any candidate, beating Clinton by two and a half minutes:
+
+It was only eight years ago that Hillary Clinton was repeatedly attacking Barack Obama as a dangerously inexperienced naif who would be unable to get anything of consequence done as president. Now she presents herself as a defender of his sundry accomplishments, and attacks Sanders for being insufficiently supportive of the president.
+
+""The fact is, we have the Affordable Care Act,"" Clinton declared. ""That is one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party, and of our country, and we have already seen 19 million Americans get insurance."" She also cited Sanders's past criticisms of the president and flirtation with supporting a primary challenge against him in 2011-'12:
+
+Clinton's message is clear: I am the true defender of Obama's legacy, I will preserve his gains, while Sanders dismissed them.
+
+Sanders replied not by defending his past critiques of Obama, but by distancing himself from them and insisting he's a huge fan of the president: ""In 2006 when I ran for the Senate, Senator Barack Obama was kind enough to campaign for me. 2008, I did my best to see that he was elected, and in 2012, I worked as hard as I could to see that he was re-elected. He and I are friends, we've worked together, we have differences of opinion.""
+
+As for Clinton's claims that he would threaten the Affordable Care Act, he rebutted, ""We're not going to tear up the Affordable Care Act. I helped write it."" Sanders isn't disavowing Obama's legacy at all: He's embracing it, and selling himself as the natural person to build on it.
+
+O'Malley made the same point in his introduction, declaring, ""We need to come together as a people and build on the good things that President Obama has done.""
+
+The Democratic primary, then, is a competition among three people, all of whom embrace Obama's legacy, celebrate it as a huge success, and differ only on the matter of who's best equipped to defend and expand his accomplishments. No matter who wins, that this is the debate goes to show just how beloved Obama remains within the Democratic Party, and how he and his presidency will continue to define the party's mission for years after he's left office.
+
+Sanders's spat with Mitchell aside, the moderating Sunday night was about as strong as it's been at any debate for either party this entire cycle. Mitchell and Lester Holt held the line against candidates talking over each other and speaking past their time limits, and Holt especially was willing to ask follow-up questions when candidates were evasive. When Sanders avoided a question about why he flip-flopped about lawsuit immunity for gun companies, Holt pressed him: ""Senator, you didn't answer the question that you did change your position on immunity for gun manufacturers. Can you answer the question as to why?""
+
+Similarly, when Sanders positioned himself as tougher on Wall Street than Clinton, Holt didn't just ask Clinton to reply, he framed the reply to ensure it was more useful to viewers: ""Secretary Clinton, help the voter understand the daylight between the two of you here.""
+
+Most importantly, almost all of their questions were substantive, policy-oriented, and designed to not be answerable simply by reference to candidates' past statements. Sanders may have largely dodged Mitchell's question about how he accounts for the failure of single-payer in Vermont — despite Mitchell's great efforts to force him to answer it — but it was a perfect angle: It doesn't get Sanders to regurgitate his stump speech, but it forces him to engage with the actual implementation challenges his Medicare-for-all proposal faces.
+
+Holt and Mitchell served as a reminder of what engaged moderating, meant to inform viewers rather than provoke conflict or appease campaigns through lax timing rules, looks like. Future moderators would do well to follow the example they set.
+
+At the risk of sounding tautological, Clinton lost by not winning. The trends aren't in her favor at the moment. Sanders is gaining in Iowa and is starting to be treated like a serious candidate by the press. Her attempts to attack Sanders's support for single-payer health care this week were widely perceived as backfiring, especially among liberal primary voters who might be tempted to support Clinton out of practicality. She needed a debate in which she could show that Sanders was out of his depth, not someone you could plausibly see actually functioning as president. She didn't do that this time around.
+
+Instead, she had a debate where she tried to throw everything she could at him to see what stuck. She tried the single-payer attack, but given that Bernie released his plan before the debate, it sounded more convoluted than effective: ""I have to say I'm not sure whether we're talking about the plan you just introduced tonight, or we're talking about the plan you introduced nine times in the Congress."" Ouch?
+
+She tried attacking Sanders as insufficiently pro-Obama, largely for reasons related to Wall Street reform, which generally didn't sound that persuasive. Hearing that Obama took Wall Street money isn't likely to make primary voters think, ""Hmm, a guy I like took money from bankers, clearly I should vote for Hillary Clinton, who also takes money from bankers."" It just raises the visibility of the fact that Hillary Clinton gets finance money and Sanders doesn't — which, on the margins, is going to bring a lot more people to Sanders's column than to Clinton's.
+
+Her gun attack was pointed and strong, raising all of Sanders's key failings in quick succession:
+
+It was probably the best hit she got against Sanders in the whole debate.
+
+Poor guy. The former Maryland governor began his remarks with, ""My name is Martin O'Malley"" — a cringe-worthy reminder that many primary voters don't even know who he is or that he's running for president. And he didn't get a lot of opportunities to change that situation throughout the evening. Take a look at the speaking time chart again:
+
+Even O'Malley's protests that he wasn't being heard wound up getting ignored:
+
+Martin O'Malley literally asked for the ability to speak for 10 seconds and Lester Holt answered him, ""No.""
+
+By then end of the debate, you could see sheer shock and gratitude on his face when it came to closing statements. ""Before we leave, is there anything you wanted to say tonight that you haven't gotten a chance to say? And we'll start with Gov. O'Malley,"" Holt said. ""Didn't see that coming, did you?""
+
+There's actually a strong case for O'Malley over Sanders and Clinton, as a hyper-competent governor with solid liberal credentials and a record of accomplishment. That's not a case that O'Malley was able to present Sunday night.",REAL
+2585,Netanyahu steps back from full opposition to Palestinian state,"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backtracked Thursday from a clear campaign statement that as long as he was the leader of Israel there would be no independent Palestinian state.
+
+“I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution. But for that, circumstances have to change,” Netanyahu, who won reelection Tuesday, told MSNBC in an interview.
+
+Earlier this week, in the heat of the Israeli campaign, with pre-election polls suggesting that he might lose, Netanyahu made the sensational promise that he would not support the creation of a Palestinian state on his watch, an open reversal of his earlier stance supporting a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
+
+The head-spinning pivot did not convince White House officials, who suggested Thursday that Netanyahu’s maneuvers could prompt a shift in U.S. policy toward Israel, particularly in the United Nations, where the United States has been Israel’s strongest advocate and defender. The White House described its commitment to Israeli and Palestinian states existing side by side in peace as a “bedrock” principle of U.S. policy in the region.
+
+[What now for U.S. Israel-ties?]
+
+In a sign of the Obama administration’s extreme frustration, White House press secretary Josh Earnest denounced Netanyahu’s actions as “cynical, divisive election-day tactics” that are unworthy of the values that the United States and Israel share. “Words matter,” Earnest added.
+
+Netanyahu’s actions had “eroded” that foundation and will mean that the United States “needs to rethink our approach,” he said. “And that’s what we will do.”
+
+Despite the strained relations, President Obama called Netanyahu to congratulate him on his victory, as well as to express concern about his election-eve rhetoric and to stress U.S. commitment to a “sovereign and viable” Palestinian state.
+
+The call, which also reaffirmed the importance of U.S.-Israel cooperation on matters of intelligence and security, reflected the delicate balancing act facing the White House as it weighs the need to support one of its closest allies while also demonstrating its growing frustration with Netanyahu.
+
+Obama had declined to meet with Netanyahu this month when he was in Washington to deliver a speech to Congress that raised concerns about the administration’s negotiations with Tehran over Iran’s nuclear program. The speech represented yet another sore spot in the two leaders’ strained relationship.
+
+One option that the White House is considering is acceding to the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution that outlines the broad parameters of a two-state solution and involves significant sacrifice on the part of the Israelis and the Palestinians. Such a resolution would “set down a marker for both societies and the future,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who served as chief of staff to the special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in the Obama administration.
+
+The administration has previously opposed such efforts to impose a solution on the conflict from the outside. But the White House could argue that such a measure, which would probably be drafted by European allies, would help shield Israel from more extreme punitive measures, such as sanctions or war crimes charges in the International Criminal Court, which the Palestinian Authority has vowed to pursue after it joins in April.
+
+The move would also be seen widely as an effort on the part of the White House to punish Israel’s prime minister. “The president has to decide if this is worth it,” Goldenberg said. “This is a huge political lift for the White House.” Such a move would probably come this spring or summer to shield Democratic presidential candidates from the political fallout.
+
+The White House said Thursday that no decisions had been made on whether or how the United States should shift its approach to Israel.
+
+After winning a resounding victory Tuesday to a fourth term as prime minister, Netanyahu went on U.S. TV news shows — and not Israeli programs — on Thursday to walk back his statements.
+
+Netanyahu, who only days earlier suggested that any evacuation of the occupied territories would be akin to ceding ground to “radical Islam,” was suddenly insisting that he hadn’t changed his policy.
+
+As proof, the prime minister cited a speech he gave at Bar-Ilan University in 2009 in which he famously said he supported a two-state solution, as long as Israel’s security was guaranteed and the newly created Palestinian nation was demilitarized.
+
+Over the past six years, whenever it seemed as if Netanyahu was fighting against a two-state solution, his aides referred reporters to his Bar-Ilan speech.
+
+Netanyahu returned to that speech in an interview with Fox News on Thursday. “I didn’t retract any of the things I said in my speech six years ago,” he said.
+
+Instead, he blamed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for his reluctance to continue talks. “He’s made a pact with the Palestinian terrorist organization, Hamas, that calls for our destruction,” the prime minister said, referring to the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip.
+
+He added that “conditions in the Middle East have changed to the point where any territory we withdraw from is immediately taken up by Iranian-backed terrorists or by the [Islamic State].”
+
+Although the Islamic State has no presence in Israel, the West Bank or Gaza, it does operate in neighboring Syria. It’s “a dozen miles away from us,” Netanyahu said. “It’s thousands of miles away from you.”
+
+Palestinian leaders scoffed at what they called Netanyahu’s disingenuous attempt to recast his remarks while blaming others.
+
+Abbas said that Netanyahu’s words “are proof, if correct, that there is no seriousness in the Israeli government about a political solution,” according to the Agence France-Presse news agency.
+
+Saeb Erekat, who spent nine months last year as the top Palestinian negotiator in talks led by Secretary of State John F. Kerry, said, “What Netanyahu said wasn’t electioneering. It was him.”
+
+“This new Israeli government is determined to bury a two-state solution,” Erekat said, adding that there is “a big difference between tough negotiator and non-negotiator” and that all Netanyahu and his team have brought to talks is “make-believe, illusions, plays.”",REAL
+34,House passes extreme ban on abortion coverage,"House Republicans managed to pass an extraordinarily restrictive law to drop federal funding for abortion on Thursday, after deciding to pull the plug on a vote to ban abortions after 20 weeks scheduled for the same day. The vote ever-so-dramatically coincides with the 42nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, as well as antiabortion activists’ annual March for Life in Washington.
+
+The House approved the broadened abortion curbs by a near party-line 242-179 vote. The White House warned that President Barack Obama would veto the measure, all but ensuring that it would never become law. […]
+
+The approved bill would permanently bar federal funds for any abortion coverage and block tax credits for many people and businesses buying health insurance that covers abortions. That would exceed current abortion restrictions.",REAL
+8777,Israel snubs UNESCO’s Temple Mount resolution with ancient Jerusalem papyrus,"Israel snubs UNESCO’s Temple Mount resolution with ancient Jerusalem papyrus   22:13 Get short URL © Ronen Zvulun / Reuters Israel presented an ancient fragment of text in Hebrew referencing Jerusalem and recalled its ambassador to UNESCO in a gesture of protest against a resolution which criticized Israel for restricting Muslims’ access to a holy site in the city. Trends Palestinian statehood 
+The text, written on a 11cm by 2.5cm papyrus, was dated by the Israel Antiquities Authority to the 7th century BCE and was said to be the earliest Hebrew reference to Jerusalem outside of the Bible. 
+“From the king's maidservant, from Na'arat , jars of wine, to Jerusalem,” read the two lines of script. Archeologists believe it to be document detailing payment of taxes or transfer of goods. 
+“Hey UNESCO, an ancient papyrus dating to the 1st Temple 2700 yrs ago has been found. It bears the oldest known mention of Jerusalem in Hebrew,” Ofir Gendelman, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote on Twitter. Here is a letter from the past to UNESCO. It explains in Hebrew, our connection to Jerusalem and its centrality - from over 2700 years ago. pic.twitter.com/W36LEhHHj2 — PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) October 26, 2016 
+The official’s jab was directed at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which earlier on Wednesday passed a controversial resolution criticizing Israel for its handling of the holy site in Jerusalem called Temple Mount by Jews and Haram al-Sharif by Muslims. The resolution was adopted after heated debate over its wording, and particularly the Arabic names used in the document. Israel accused UNESCO and its Arab members of trying to undermine Jewish connections to the holy site. UNESCO and the PA, pay attention: Back in 1924 the Palestinian Supreme Muslim Council officially recognized that the Temple Mount was Jewish pic.twitter.com/qrFHKyCKFl — Ofir Gendelman (@ofirgendelman) October 26, 2016 
+In response to the move, Israel also recalled its ambassador to UNESCO for consultations, while Netanyahu called the situation a “ theatre of the absurd.” 
+""We'll decide what to do, what our next steps will be,” toward the organization, the Israeli PM added. PM: As the Theatre of the Absurd at UNESCO continues, our ambassador there will return for consultations. More steps will be considered. — Ofir Gendelman (@ofirgendelman) October 26, 2016 
+Temple Mount is administered by the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, a religious institution under the auspices of the Jordanian crown, which is responsible for managing rights of visitation and worship, management and repairs under the so-called Status Quo agreement. Read more Netanyahu mocks UNESCO motion on Temple Mount: Like denying bond between Batman and Robin 
+Israel has controlled East Jerusalem since 1967 and officially annexed it in 1980, though the move has not been recognized by the international community. Israeli authorities have been increasing security in the area recently, occasionally blocking access to the Al-Aqsa mosque and sparking outrage among the Muslim worshipers. The conflict over the holy site and the perception that Israel was trying to change the status quo is seen as a major factor in the latest spree of knife violence by Arabs against Jews. 
+Although the UNESCO resolution removed multiple references to Israel’s “occupation” of east Jerusalem and the Old City from the original draft, the softened text did not address all of Israel’s complaints. 
+The conflict is aggravated by the fact that many Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be capital of their national state, while Israel considers the entire city its own capital.",FAKE
+3496,Why the GOP Could Take Obama’s Corporate Tax Proposal Seriously,"President Barack Obama‘s budget for next year, released Monday, is filled with ideas, programs and proposals with prospects for adoption by the new Republican-controlled Congress that range from dismal to zero.
+
+It may seem illogical to direct hopes for agreement toward one of the most far-reaching and politically fraught proposals on the president’s wish list, but, in fact, there are two big forces that can pry open the door to at least a serious bipartisan discussion on corporate tax reform this year. The first is inversions and the second is infrastructure.",REAL
+1156,Hillary Clinton plays literal attack dog in effort to shore up Nevada,"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton turned to animal impersonations Monday as the former secretary of state ramped up her effort to secure victory over surging Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in this Saturday's Nevada caucuses.
+
+Speaking before a crowd in Reno, Clinton described how she would like to fact-check various Republican claims. He began her story with a recollection of a political ad that aired on the radio in Arkansas. The ad featured a dog that the announcer claimed would bark any time a candidate said an untrue statement.
+
+""We need to get that dog and follow him around and every time they say these things, like, 'oh the Great Recession was caused by too much regulation,"" Clinton said before yelping, ""Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf!"" to general applause.
+
+Clinton and her opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have criss-crossed the Silver State in recent days. On Sunday, they wound up at opposite ends of a pew in the same Las Vegas church.
+
+Sanders' ground game is catching up to the Clinton machine as well. The so-called Democratic socialist's campaign has over 100 staffers on the ground and has more than doubled its paid staff here since last month, along with spending double on his television spots compared to Clinton - $2.93 million to Clinton’s $1.46 million.
+
+Adding to the uncertainty is a relative lack of polling coupled with a sense of the momentum being behind Sanders in the wake of his thumping victory over Clinton in last week's New Hampshire primary. Showing the importance her team has placed on Saturday's caucuses, Clinton skipped a campaign event in Florida, sending her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to stump in her stead.
+
+As in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has publicly pinned his hopes in Nevada to voter turnout. ""Everything in my political gut tells me that we have the momentum here in this state,"" he told a rally in Las Vegas Sunday, ""and if people come out in large numbers on caucus day, we’re going to win.""
+
+It is possible to win the Nevada caucuses, but lose the all-important battle for Democratic National Convention delegates. That's exactly what happened to Clinton in 2008 against then-Senator Barack Obama.
+
+The Clinton campaign may not have helped its cause in Nevada with comments made last week by campaign spokesman Brian Fallon in which he compared Nevada to the more racially and ethnically homogenous Iowa and New Hampshire.
+
+""There’s an important Hispanic element to the Democratic caucus in Nevada,"" Fallon said. ""But it’s still a state that is 80 percent white voters. You have a caucus-style format, and [Sanders will] have the momentum coming out of New Hampshire presumably, so there’s a lot of reasons he should do well.""
+
+That remark reportedly angered allies of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, with one telling Politico that Reid had ""pushed hard to move Nevada near the front of the primary calendar precisely because of its diversity.""",REAL
+619,Top Republicans join Obama in condemning Trump’s words,"Top Republicans joined with President Obama and other Democrats Tuesday in sharply condemning Donald Trump’s reaction to the nightclub massacre in Orlando, decrying his anti-Muslim rhetoric and his questioning of Obama’s allegiances as divisive and out of step with America’s values.
+
+Trump — who just a week ago signaled an intent to snap his campaign into a more measured tone for the general election — showed no sign of backing down from his suggestions that Obama was somehow connected to or sympathetic with terrorists, telling the Associated Press that the president “continues to prioritize our enemy” over Americans.
+
+In separate appearances, both Obama and his potential successor, likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, blasted Trump’s proposal to ban foreign Muslims from the United States as dangerous and contrary to the nation’s traditions.
+
+A visibly angry Obama also dismissed Trump’s repeated demands for him to use the term “radical Islam” when speaking about the Orlando shootings and other attacks. “Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away,” Obama said. “This is a political distraction.”
+
+Clinton described Trump’s response to Orlando as rife with “conspiracy theories” and “pathological self-congratulations.”
+
+The remarkable bipartisan outcry over Trump’s positions — coming at a moment of national mourning after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history — set off a new wave of alarm within the GOP over whether the real estate mogul’s promised pivot to the general election would ever materialize. The rift also highlighted the enduring tensions between establishment figures who want to be more inclusive and the bulk of the party, which backs Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and has rallied around him as the presumptive nominee.
+
+[Orlando gunman’s wife under scrutiny in struggle to piece together motives]
+
+Some of Trump’s most ardent backers defended his response to the Orlando attack, saying drastic measures were needed to keep the nation safe. But most Republicans on Capitol Hill tried to distance themselves from Trump’s comments following the terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that killed at least 49 people. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) refused to respond to questions about Trump at his weekly news conference.
+
+House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) denounced Trump for trying to rally support for his anti-Muslim policies, while others castigated Trump for the accusations he has lobbed at Obama.
+
+“I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country’s interest,” Ryan told reporters. “I do not think it is reflective of our principles, not just as a party but as a country.” He called for “a security test, not a religious test” for immigrants.
+
+In a speech Monday, Trump had reiterated his calls for such a ban and expanded its potential reach to include any country with “a history” of terrorism against the United States and its allies. He blamed the Orlando attack — which authorities say was carried out by a man born in America to Afghan parents — in part on a system that “allowed his family to come here.”
+
+At a rally Tuesday night in Greensboro, N.C., Trump attacked Obama for criticizing him and defended barring foreign Muslims.
+
+“Once again we’ve seen that political correctness is deadly,” Trump said.
+
+“And just so you understand: I have many Muslim friends,” he added at one point. “There doesn’t seem to be assimilation. We don’t know what’s going on.”
+
+Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has praised Trump at times for his willingness to shake up politics and recently met with the mogul, expressed serious unease Tuesday with how Trump responded to a national tragedy.
+
+“Traditionally, it is a time when people rally around our country, and it’s obviously not what’s occurred, and it’s very disappointing,” Corker said.
+
+Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a leading national security hawk, said he had “run out of adjectives” for Trump. “I don’t think he has the judgment or the temperament, the experience to deal with what we are facing,” said Graham, who does not currently support the mogul.
+
+Graham, like other Republicans, took issue with Trump’s apparent suggestions in Monday interviews that Obama may identify with the radical Muslim terrorists. Obama “either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump told Fox News.
+
+Trump expanded on that Tuesday, saying in an emailed response to questions from the Associated Press: “President Obama claims to know our enemy, and yet he continues to prioritize our enemy over our allies and, for that matter, the American people.”
+
+Graham said that Trump “seems to be suggesting that the president is one of ‘them.’ I find that highly offensive. I find that whole line of reasoning way off base. My problems with President Obama are his policy choices.”
+
+Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who faces a challenging reelection bid, also called Trump’s insinuations about Obama “offensive.”
+
+Speaking after meeting with his National Security Council, Obama dismissed Trump’s many calls for him to change the way he talks about terrorism.
+
+“That’s the key, they tell us. We can’t get ISIL unless we call them ‘radical Islamists,’ ” Obama said, referring to the Islamic State militant group. “What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is: none of the above.”
+
+At a campaign event in Pittsburgh, Clinton excoriated Trump and challenged Republicans to repudiate him. Clinton said Trump failed to demonstrate an ability to deliver a “calm, collected and dignified response” to the Orlando attack.
+
+“Instead, yesterday morning, just one day after the massacre, he went on TV and suggested that President Obama is on the side of the terrorists,” Clinton said. “Just think about that. Even in a time of divided politics, this is way beyond anything that should be said by someone running for president.”
+
+Trump has also said Obama should “resign” because of his refusal to utter the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” But one of the mogul’s top backers on Capitol Hill said Trump doesn’t expect that to happen.
+
+“What I think Trump’s saying is: You need to get in the game and start leading, or get out of here,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). “That’s just his way of expressing it. And I think people understood that. He doesn’t expect President Obama to resign, but he’s saying you can’t do this job effectively if you don’t understand the nature of the threat we face.”
+
+Sessions said there was no discussion at a 90-minute Senate GOP lunch of Trump specifically; instead it focused on terrorism.
+
+Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), an Air National Guard major and leading House GOP voice on national security issues, broke sharply with Trump.
+
+“I guess I appreciate Mr. Trump’s fieriness in talking about it, but you don’t do it by alienating the very people that we need, and those are moderate Muslims,” he said. “We have to use the folks that frankly are not radicalized, which is the vast majority of Muslims, to win this war.”
+
+Nationally, 64 percent of Republican voters said in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll that they approve of Trump’s Muslim ban — as did 45 percent of independents — while 26 percent of Democrats said they approve.
+
+Last week, Trump delivered a subdued speech that celebrated his primary wins and looked ahead to a matchup with Clinton. His campaign told allies that Trump was strategizing for a new phase of the campaign.
+
+But by this week — after a series of fiery rallies in which he called out enemies by name and then his response to Orlando — many Republicans were left scratching their heads.
+
+Lanhee Chen, a GOP foreign policy expert who served as policy director on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, called Trump’s Monday speech a “huge wasted opportunity.”
+
+“What he has said overall about foreign policy is very troubling,” said Chen, who said he has many issues with the mogul but does not consider himself part of the “Never Trump” wing of the GOP.
+
+Chen said Trump needs to “start defining what his presidency would look like” in “more than just a few sound bites.” But he added: “I’m not holding my breath.”
+
+David Nakamura and Paul Kane in Washington, Abby Phillip in Pittsburgh and Jenna Johnson in Greensboro, N.C., contributed to this report.",REAL
+5101,"Clinton, Democrats try not to get drowned out during GOP convention","Cincinnati (CNN) While Republicans rally in Cleveland this week, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, with help of the Democratic National Committee, will set up shop in the ""Rock and Roll Capital of the World"" to cast the Republican ticket as out-of-touch with what voters actually want.
+
+But the Clinton campaign also plans to spend a substantial amount of time on defense this week, especially around Clinton's exclusive use of a private email server as secretary of state.
+
+In a fact sheet written and distributed by Brian Fallon, Clinton's national press secretary, the Clinton campaign argues that while Donald Trump will focus on Clinton's emails and FBI Director James Comey's investigation and comments about the issue, most of what the presumptive Republican nominee will say will be false.
+
+""With the Republican National Convention set to take place next week, Trump is likely to continue distorting Comey's words about Clinton's emails,"" Fallon wrote, adding that while some comments Comey made did provide initial fodder for Trump, his testimony on Capitol Hill earlier this month on the topic ""ended up substantiating what Clinton has long said.""
+
+The prepared as defense is not just a nod to the fact that Clinton's email controversy continues to nag her, but it's also an acknowledgement to the fact that the one thing that may unite all Republicans in Cleveland this week is disdain for the idea of a Clinton presidency.
+
+Dozens of Clinton aides, from a headquarters less than a mile from the Quicken Loans Arena, will also push their counter-convention plan -- titled ""Better Than This"" -- this week, trying to ""amplify the idea that America is better than the divisive and dangerous rhetoric Donald Trump has offered us,"" said Christina Reynolds, Clinton's rapid response director.
+
+Clinton's top dollar super PAC, Priorities USA, will also blanket the city in anti-Trump advertising, making sure anyone who gets into a cab in Cleveland gets the question, ""Does Donald Trump really speak for you?""
+
+The super PAC has paid for their ad to play in 125 cabs in Cleveland for the entirety of the Republican convention. The spot, which features women and fathers with the daughters wearing Trump shirts and reading some of his more controversial lines about women, will be played an estimated 28,000 times, said the group's spokesman, Justin Barasky.
+
+Clinton herself will not be in Cleveland, but unlike past year when opposing candidates would stay dark most of the week, the former secretary of state has stops scheduled in Ohio, Minnesota and Nevada.
+
+On Monday, when Republicans plan to focus on the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi at their convention, Clinton will announce a plan to register 3 million new voters by Election Day in November when she speaks at the 107th NAACP Annual Convention in Cincinnati, an aide said Sunday.
+
+After the speech, Clinton will attend a Cincinnati voter registration rally for volunteers who have completed at least one shift for Clinton's campaign.
+
+The aide added that voter registration will be a primary campaign focus during the week of the RNC, with the campaign and other Democratic groups hosting more than 500 registration events across the country. Multiple events will take place in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
+
+Clinton will also travel to Minneapolis on Monday to attend the American Federation of Teachers Convention and headline a fundraiser.
+
+Clinton will then travel to Nevada on Tuesday, where she will speak at the 42nd International AFSCME Convention and headline another fundraiser.
+
+With much of the political world focused on the Republicans in Cleveland, it is expected that Clinton will respond to Republicans at these events.
+
+Earlier this month in Virginia, Clinton knocked the Republican convention as a great event ""If you are into bigotry, bluster and bullying.""
+
+""We are going to have a great convention in Philadelphia,"" Clinton said. ""I have no idea what is going to happen in Cleveland.""
+
+She added, ""It is going to be entertaining I am sure if you are into bigotry, bluster and bullying, if you are into drawing lines between Americans, if you are into insulting groups of Americans, if you are into saying you don't want to let Muslims into the country, you want to round up and deport 11 million people with a quote deportation force, if you enjoy seeing women demeaned.""
+
+The Democrats will have an uphill battle to get attention, though. Conventions are a boon for the hosting party, in part, because of the blanket coverage they get by the press. Trump will likely lead cable and broadcast news every night, so the goal Democrats have is to muddy his message and break in at all.
+
+Clinton's aides in Cleveland will try to break through the media's focus on the Republicans with a series of press conference, press calls and events.
+
+""We believe the Republican convention will be a great recruiting tool -- reminding voters how important it is to help Hillary Clinton make history and ensure that Donald Trump never takes the White House,"" Reynolds said.
+
+According to Reynolds, Democratic events in Cleveland will includes appearances by Sen. Al Franken, Rep. Tim Ryan and Rep. Xavier Becerra, all Democrats who have been talked about as possible vice presidential options for the former secretary of state.
+
+Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz will also headline events, along with Rep. Marcia Fudge, Rep. Joyce Beatty, Ohio Senate candidate Ted Strickland, Rep. Ruben Gallego, Rep. Joe Crowley and Rep. Bennie Thompson.",REAL
+3238,GOP Hopefuls’ 2016 Theme Has a New Pitch,"Several Republicans eyeing presidential bids in 2016 are tackling policy questions not typically identified as conservative priorities, including wage stagnation and aid for the poor, an early bid to address a political weakness that helped sink the party’s last White House nominee.
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio devoted his new book, “American Dreams,” to revamping programs for the poor and middle class. Ohio Gov. John Kasich will use his inaugural address Monday to renew his call to help “people in the shadows.” And former...",REAL
+7882,EMERGENCY: Congress Considers Historic Action Over Comey’s Re-Opening of EmailGate,"1 comment 
+James Comey went from being the darling of the left, to their arch nemesis in an instant. When the four devices, including a laptop, were seized in the Anthony Weiner sexting case, over 10,000 of Huma Abedin’s State Department emails were discovered. First off, Comey had a duty to disclose those emails. Second, as far as redemptive opportunities go, this one is golden. Comey gets a chance to do the right thing and remove some of that tarnish from his name and from the FBI. 
+Now, Congress is considering holding an emergency hearing this next Friday… just four days before the general election. It’s unprecedented and you can bet the Democrats will try to stall. Comey will star at the hearing and the fact that the Department of Justice is either stalling or just refusing to issue a warrant for those emails is telling. That won’t hold up forever… eventually, a federal judge will step in if the DOJ insists on flaunting more corruption. But timing is everything here. Almost assuredly those laptops that the FBI supposedly destroyed, but didn’t, will come up as well. 
+From Western Journalism : 
+Both parties in Congress jockeyed for position Saturday in the wake of the dramatic bombshell delivered by the FBI on Friday regarding new evidence that has led the FBI to breathe new life into its investigation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. 
+Republicans sought to move the issue to the front burner in the week before Election Day, while Democrats castigated the FBI for announcing its probe. 
+One report claimed House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, was considering holding a hearing Friday to grill Comey about the most current evidence and investigation. 
+Congress is currently on its usual pre-election recess. 
+The possibility of a pre-election hearing or briefing was also raised by Sen. Ron Johnson , R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. 
+If the hearing happens (and I pray it does), there will be fireworks all the way into election day and beyond. There’s a really good chance now that Trump may win because of all this. If Clinton wins, this scandal will follow her into the White House as will impeachment proceedings and an indictment. We could wind up with her resigning almost immediately and Tim Kaine becoming president. Shudder. 
+I doubt that House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz is going to let this slide. He’ll be a bull dog on it and he’ll get his hearing this next Friday probably. Both Clinton and Abedin are going to go down over this. I don’t think Congress has ever faced an emergency quite like this one in our lifetime. Related Items Terresa Monroe-Hamilton 
+Terresa Monroe-Hamilton owns and blogs at NoisyRoom.net . She is a Constitutional Conservative and NoisyRoom focuses on political and national issues of interest to the American public. Terresa is the editor at Trevor Loudon's site, New Zeal - trevorloudon.com . She also does research at KeyWiki.org . You can . NoisyRoom can be found on Facebook and on Twitter .",FAKE
+4656,Poll: Clinton leads Trump by three points,"With less than two weeks to go, the race for the White House has narrowed as Hillary Clinton now has a three-point advantage over Donald Trump.
+
+That’s within the margin of error of the national Fox News Poll of likely voters.
+
+Clinton is ahead of Trump by 44-41 percent.  Another one-in-ten back a third-party candidate and four percent are undecided.  Last week she was up by six points (45-39 percent) and before that by seven (45-38 percent).
+
+The poll, released Wednesday, finds Clinton leads 49-44 percent in the head-to-head matchup.  That 5-point advantage is at the edge of the error margin.  She was up 7 a week ago (49-42 percent).
+
+CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POLL RESULTS.
+
+Trump is helped by increased backing among independents and greater strength of support: 68 percent of those backing Trump support him “strongly,” compared to 61 percent for Clinton.
+
+Independents favor Trump over Clinton by 13 points (41-28 percent).  He had a 7-point advantage last week, and two weeks ago they were tied at 35 percent each.  Third-party candidates play a role here, as Gary Johnson (14 percent) and Jill Stein (7 percent) receive the combined support of more than one-in-five independents.
+
+In the four-way race, Trump leads among whites (+14 points) and men (+5), although his best groups remain white evangelical Christians (+56) and whites without a college degree (+28).
+
+Clinton has commanding leads among blacks (+77 points), unmarried women (+27), voters under 30 (+18), and women (+10).  First-time voters are also more likely to back her (+16).
+
+The candidates garner almost equal backing among the party faithful:  83 percent of Democrats back Clinton, while 81 percent of Republicans support Trump.
+
+“To be competitive, Trump needs to consolidate support among Republicans and carry independents,” says Republican pollster Daron Shaw.  “That’s where he’s made in-roads in the last week, mostly by focusing his attention on the economy and Obamacare.”   Shaw conducts the Fox News Poll with Democratic counterpart Chris Anderson.
+
+Trump’s substantive strength is the economy.  He’s trusted over Clinton by four points, yet that’s the only issue where he bests her.  More trust Clinton to handle foreign policy (+15 points), immigration (+3), and terrorism (+3).
+
+Who would voters put across the table with Russian President Vladimir Putin?  More trust Clinton to negotiate with Putin by 3 points (47-44 percent among registered voters).  That’s down from a 13-point lead on this measure in April (53-40 percent).
+
+All in all, likely voters don’t think Trump is up to the task:  less than half think he’s qualified to be president (46 percent) and even fewer feel he has the temperament to serve effectively (36 percent).  Plus, over half lack confidence in his judgment in a crisis (56 percent).
+
+Clinton trounces Trump on each of those measures:  64 percent believe she’s qualified, 62 percent say she has the temperament, and 56 percent are confident in her judgment.
+
+Plus, Clinton continues to receive more positive personal ratings.  She has a net negative rating of eight points (45 favorable vs. 53 unfavorable), while Trump is underwater by 14 (42 favorable vs. 56 unfavorable).  In addition, when undecided voters and those backing third-party candidates are combined, 26 percent have a favorable view of Clinton vs. 18 percent for Trump.
+
+Yet despite Trump’s weaknesses on traits, it’s still a tight race.  That’s because, at least in part, lots of folks prioritize issues when deciding their vote.  By a 59-28 percent margin, more say their decision is about the issues as opposed to the character of the candidates.  Those backing Trump are more likely to be voting on issues than character by a wide 57-point margin (73-16 percent).  For Clinton supporters, the choice is more about issues by 12 points (47-35 percent).
+
+Compared to 2008, this is a more character driven election.  At that time, voters said issues were more important than personal qualities by a 71-14 percent margin.
+
+""The bottom hasn't fallen out for Trump and Clinton hasn't pulled away, but the race isn’t as close as the 3-point lead suggests,” says Anderson.  “Trump needs a solid majority of undecided voters and wavering supporters of third-party candidates, and that’s extremely unlikely since most of them think he lacks the judgment, temperament, and qualifications to be president.""
+
+There are a couple of areas where the two are about evenly matched.  First, 52 percent feel Clinton “stands up” for people like them, and 49 percent feel that way about Trump.
+
+Also on their honesty -- or lack thereof:  a record-low 30 percent of likely voters think Clinton is honest and trustworthy, while 34 percent say Trump is.
+
+Here are five additional takeaways from the poll.
+
+- 63 percent of Trump’s supporters believe things in the United States generally favor “other people,” rather than people like them.  Forty-four percent of Clinton’s supporters feel that way.
+
+- Twice as many voters expect Clinton to win as think Trump will (64-26 percent).  Fully 86 percent of Democrats think Clinton will win, while 49 percent of Republicans think Trump will.
+
+- Trump supporters (34 percent) are more than three times as likely as Clinton supporters (10 percent) to say they won’t accept the election outcome if their candidate loses.  Eighty-eight percent of Clinton supporters say they’ll accept the outcome, up from 74 percent in September.
+
+- The generic congressional ballot test is also tight:  47 percent back the Democratic candidate in their congressional district, while 45 percent support the Republican.  Among those backing the GOP congressional candidate, 79 percent go for Trump in the four-way presidential race.  Clinton gets 82 percent of those backing the Democratic candidate.
+
+“Models suggest a 2-point Democratic advantage on the generic ballot would result in a gain of about 11 seats in the House and 4 in the Senate,” says Shaw.  “That means the GOP would retain an edge of about 20 seats in the House, while the Senate would be very much up for grabs.”
+
+- The political parties are about evenly matched in popularity among likely voters.  The Democratic Party has a net positive rating of four points (51 percent favorable vs. 47 percent unfavorable).  The Republican Party has a net negative rating by just one point (48 percent favorable vs. 49 percent unfavorable).
+
+The Fox News Poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,309 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from October 22-25, 2016.  The survey includes results among 1,221 likely voters.  The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points for results among both registered and likely voters.",REAL
+4593,Donald Trump’s success reveals a frightening weakness in American democracy,"As the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Ben Franklin walked out of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to find an anxious crowd. According to a diary entry recorded by James McHenry, a signatory to the Constitution, a woman from Philadelphia was the first to speak to Franklin.
+
+""Well, doctor,” she asked, “what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?""
+
+""A republic,” Franklin famously replied. “If you can keep it.""
+
+Perhaps we cannot.
+
+This reads like hyperbole. But is it? Consider, for a moment, the knife’s edge on which the republic rests. The election is 24 hours away. As I write this, Donald Trump is 1.8 points behind Hillary Clinton in the RealClearPolitics polling average. And here is what we know of Donald Trump.
+
+He is a man who routinely praises dictators. Of Vladimir Putin, Trump said, ""He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country."" Of Kim Jong Un, Trump said, ""You've got to give him credit. He goes in, he takes over, and he's the boss. It's incredible."" Of Saddam Hussein, Trump said, ""He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn't read them the rights.""
+
+It’s not just that Trump admires authoritarians; it’s that the thing he admires about them is their authoritarianism — their ability to dispense with niceties like a free press, due process, and political opposition.
+
+Trump has promised — in public, and repeatedly — to bring this hammer to American governance. He stood in a nationally televised debate and vowed to jail his opponent if elected. He has proposed strengthening libel laws to make it easier to cow the press and antitrust laws to punish Jeff Bezos and Amazon for the Washington Post’s coverage of his candidacy. In a recent speech at Gettysburg meant to preview his first 100 days in office, Trump said he would sue all of the women who accused him of sexual assault.
+
+During rallies, Trump has exhorted his followers to assault protestors, and has promised to pay their legal fees if their thuggery leads to arrest. He has warned that the only way he could lose the election would be if it is rigged, and has suggested he may refuse to concede.
+
+And all this ignores his more basic flaws. He is cruel, lazy, and reckless. He knows nothing of policy and has not bothered to find anything out. He is easily baited, reliant on sycophants, and prone to conspiracy theories. He is a bigot who slimed an American-born judge for his Mexican heritage and a misogynist who boasted that his celebrity gave him license to commit sexual assault. He has cast doubt on America’s commitment to the NATO alliance and offhandedly encouraged Saudi Arabia and Japan to build nuclear weapons. His business is rife with conflicts of interest, and his campaign has been amateurish and poorly managed.
+
+Here is the compliment I can pay Donald Trump, and I pay it with real gratitude: He never hid who he was. Perhaps he lacked the self-control, or the self-awareness. Whatever the reason, he never obscured his authoritarian tendencies, his will to power, his sexism, his greed, his dishonesty, his racism, his thirst for vengeance.
+
+And he is still only 1.8 points behind.
+
+It is likely, though not certain, that Hillary Clinton will win on Tuesday. But even if she does, here is what must be said of American politics in 2016: We came within inches of electing Donald J. Trump president of the United States of America. We did this even knowing exactly what he stood for, exactly what he had threatened to do, exactly what kind of man he was.
+
+A narrow Trump loss is another way of saying a near Trump win. A 3-point victory for Clinton implies that if Trump were merely a bit more self-disciplined, if he had not bragged about sexual assault while wearing a microphone, if his opponent’s pneumonia had lingered a bit longer, America would be ruled by a cruel narcissist with authoritarian ambitions. It will mean that if unemployment were a few percentage points higher, if the man who murdered two police officers last week had been brown rather than white, if Trump’s odd-bedfellows alliance of Russian hackers and angry FBI agents had been a bit more effective, Trump would have won.
+
+Perhaps, on Tuesday, we will dodge the bullet. But we will still need to understand how we came to be standing in front of a gun.
+
+There is a comforting and popular explanation for Trump’s rise: He is the product of an extraordinary period of economic pain, demographic anxiety, and elite backlash. This argument holds that the condition of the country — or at least the condition of Trump’s supporters — is catastrophic, and Trump’s rise is a response to the suffering.
+
+This is reassuring; it makes Trump into a kind of political natural disaster, a hurricane that relied on a rare alignment of winds and rains and warmth, a combination that occurs once in lifetime and can be forgotten once it’s been survived.
+
+But there is nothing in polls of national attitudes, or indicators of economic health, that reveals this moment as uniquely fertile for the rise of a strongman. In 1992, when Pat Buchanan ran for president on a Trump-like platform, unemployment was higher, consumer confidence was lower, and Americans reported themselves more dissatisfied with the state of the country. But Buchanan lost handily.
+
+And as we have learned more about Trump’s supporters, and have come to understand more about the year in which he rose, these explanations have grown more and more strained.
+
+The belief that Trump is a predictable reaction to acute economic duress crumbled before the finding that his primary voters had a median household income of $72,000 — well above both the national average and that of Clinton supporters.
+
+The idea that Trumpism arose as a response to a stalled economy collapsed as America experienced its longest sustained run of private sector job growth, and the highest single-year jump in median incomes, in modern history.
+
+The idea that Trump was a reaction to failed trade deals and heavy competition from immigrants slammed into data showing support for him showed no relationship to lost manufacturing jobs and was strongest in areas without immigrant labor.
+
+The idea that Trump is a reaction to historic disgust with American elites is at war with President Barack Obama’s approval ratings, which have risen above 50 percent and now match Ronald Reagan’s at this point in his presidency.
+
+The reality is that the patterns of Trumpism, the trends of the US economy, and the polls measuring the American mood have stubbornly refused to fit the comforting theory that this is an extraordinary candidacy that could only emerge in an extraordinary moment. Indeed, if this were a period as thick with economic pain and anti-establishment sentiment as the pundits pretend, Trump’s victory would likely be assured.
+
+Once you appreciate that fact, the lesson of Trumpism becomes much scarier: We are more vulnerable than we thought to reactionary strongmen. It can happen here.
+
+To Americans of another era — particularly the founding era — it would seem bizarre that we are reaching so far, and straining so hard, to explain the popular appeal of a charismatic demagogue. As former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote:
+
+The American political system is structured the way it is in part due to the founders’ fear of demagogues. It’s a reason why the American presidency is so weak, why the executive is checked by other branches, why the Senate’s members were originally selected by state legislators.
+
+It is a credit to the long success of our political institutions that we think dangerous men can only win elections in far-off lands. And so it is the weakening of those institutions that demands our attention now.
+
+Donald Trump’s nearness to the presidency rests on two separate accomplishments — or, if you prefer, two separate institutional failures — that are often conflated. The first is his victory in the Republican Party’s presidential primaries. The second is his consolidation of elite Republicans, and of the Republican-leaning electorate.
+
+Trump won the GOP primaries with 13.8 million votes. The distance between those 13.8 million voters and the more than 60 million votes he is expected to receive tomorrow is vast, and was far from assured.
+
+In 1972, for instance, George McGovern won the Democratic primary even though much of the Democratic Party viewed him with suspicion and even fear. Major Democratic interest groups, like the AFL-CIO, refused to endorse him in the general election, and top Democrats, including former governors of Florida, Texas, and Virginia, organized “Democrats for Nixon.” McGovern went on to lose with less than 40 percent of the vote, a dismal showing driven by Democrats who abandoned a nominee they considered unacceptable.
+
+A similar path was possible for Trump. Elites within the Republican Party viewed him with horror. His primary opponents spoke of him in apocalyptic terms. Ted Cruz called Trump a ""pathological liar,"" ""utterly amoral,"" and ""a narcissist at a level I don't think this country's ever seen."" Rick Perry said Trump’s candidacy was ""a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded."" Rand Paul said Trump is ""a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag. A speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president."" Marco Rubio called him “dangerous,” and warned that we should not hand ""the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.""
+
+And then every single one of those Republicans endorsed Trump. Ted Cruz told Americans to vote for the pathological liar. Rick Perry urged people to elect the cancer on conservatism. Rand Paul backed the delusional narcissist. Marco Rubio campaigned to hand the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.
+
+The list goes on. Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, has endorsed Trump, as has Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee. Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana, commiserated with Dan Senor, a former Bush appointee, over the fact that Trump was “unacceptable” — and then became his vice president.
+
+With this kind of elite consolidation, it’s little wonder that Trump has managed to consolidate Republican-leaning voters behind him. The final NBC/WSJ poll of the election found that 82 percent of likely Republican voters were supporting Trump — precisely matching the 82 percent of likely Democratic voters supporting Clinton. Trump did not get McGoverned.
+
+There are two analyses that must be made of this. The first is moral. There are many Republicans who honestly believe Trump will make a good, or at least adequate, president; their endorsement of his candidacy is perfectly honorable, even if I think it wrongheaded. But many of the Republicans mentioned here believe Trump is a threat to world peace and to fundamental norms, values, and institutions of American democracy; their endorsements of his candidacy will stain the rest of their careers, and if he is elected, and if the worst comes to pass, they will be remembered by history for their abandonment of country.
+
+The second analysis that must be made is structural. And, believe it or not, that’s where things get scary.
+
+Political scientist Julia Azari has written the single most important sentence for understanding both Trump’s rise and this dangerous era in American politics: “The defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong.”
+
+Here is the problem, in short: Parties, and particularly the Republican Party, can no longer control whom they nominate. But once they nominate someone — once they nominate anyone — that person is guaranteed the support of both the party’s elites and its voters. Unlike in McGovern’s day, when ticket splitting was common, any candidate able to win his party’s presidential primaries can now count on his party’s support, and so has a damn good chance of winning the presidency.
+
+Political parties, and political party primaries, were traditionally bulwarks against demagogues rising in American politics — they were controlled by gatekeepers who acted as checks against charismatic demagogues. Donald Trump would never have made it through the convention horse-trading that used to drive nominations; he would never have survived a process that required support from party officials.
+
+But in recent decades, we have slowly destroyed the ability of party officials to drive party primaries. What’s more, we have come to see party officials exercising influence as fundamentally illegitimate.
+
+“Political scientists think of parties as the fundamental building blocks of democracy, and people think of them as the impediment to democracy,” says Hans Noel, a political scientist at Georgetown University. “In other systems, you wouldn’t even have primaries — the whole thing would happen at a party convention. But here, when the DNC makes choices that influence the outcome of a primary, that looks undemocratic.”
+
+The results have been stark. The reigning political science theory of primaries going into this election was known as “The Party Decides,” and it stated, basically, that party elites controlled primary outcomes by driving money, media attention, and endorsements.
+
+No single idea has been as decisively wrecked by 2016 as that one. And when you examine the reasons for its failure, you see they are unlikely to end with Trump.
+
+Money turned out to be much less important to winning primaries than anyone thought — just ask Jeb Bush, who spent $130 million only to be humiliated, even as Trump spent almost nothing to win. Moreover, the internet keeps making it easier to fundraise off an energized base — a dynamic that is empowering high-enthusiasm outsider candidates like Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz and weakening party establishments and the big-dollar donors they control.
+
+Similarly, parties used to drive media attention by signaling to reporters which candidates to take seriously. But that process, too, has been democratized — social media makes it easy to communicate with supporters directly and made it more valuable for audience-hungry media outlets to cover the candidates with intense fan bases that send stories viral across Facebook or Reddit. That, again, favors exciting outsiders with enthusiastic supporters over vetted establishment grinds.
+
+But the primary resource party officials have when influencing primary elections is the trust of voters. That’s why endorsements are important, and have traditionally been predictive of the eventual winner: They represent party officials using the credibility they have built with their voters to persuade them of whom to vote for.
+
+Trump didn’t have any Republican endorsements to speak of until he had already won a slew of primaries. But the void of official support arguably helping him — it was proof that he really was untouched and untainted by the unpopular GOP establishment. This represented the Republican Party failing at the most basic job of a political party: Helping its voters make good decisions. The GOP’s elites have so totally lost the faith of their base that their efforts to persuade Republican voters were ignored at best and counterproductive at worst.
+
+But this also presents a puzzle: If partisans have lost so much faith in their party establishments, then why are they so much likelier to back whomever their party nominates? The answer, in short, is fear and loathing of the other party.
+
+Since 1964, the American National Election Studies have been asking Republicans and Democrats to describe their feelings toward the other party on a scale that runs from cold and negative to warm and positive. In 1964, 31 percent of Republicans had cold, negative feelings toward the Democratic Party, and 32 percent of Democrats had cold, negative feelings toward the Republican Party. By 2012, that had risen to 77 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of Democrats.
+
+Today, fully 45 percent of Republicans, and 41 percent of Democrats, believe the other party’s policies “threaten the nation’s well-being.” This fear is strongest among the most politically involved. Which makes sense: You're more likely to take an active interest in American politics if you think the stakes are high. But that means the people driving American politics — and particularly the people driving low-turnout party primaries — have the most apocalyptic view of the other side.
+
+This is driven by the reality that the two parties have grown more ideologically distant from each other, and so the stakes of elections really have grown larger. In 1994, 34 percent of Republicans were more liberal than the median Democrat, and 30 percent of Democrats were more conservative than the median Republican. Today only 8 percent of Republicans are more liberal than the median Democrat, and only 6 percent of Democrats are more conservative than the median Republican.
+
+And polarization begets polarization. The angrier and more fearful partisans are, the more of a market there is for media that makes them yet angrier and yet more fearful. It is no accident that the CEO of Breitbart News, a hyper-ideological conservative media outlet that specializes in scaring the hell out of its audience, is leading Trump’s campaign. One reason Trump has been able to consolidate Republican support is that Republican-leaning media has convinced itself, and its base, that the alternative to Trump is a criminal who belongs in jail. This offers a rationale for voting Republican even if you don’t particularly like your candidate: a majority of Trump voters say they are voting against Clinton rather than for Trump.
+
+This raises the possibility that Trump’s support from Republicans is merely an artifact of Clinton’s unpopularity. I’m skeptical. Before they had convinced themselves Clinton is a criminal, many Republicans — led by Trump — convinced themselves Obama was born in Kenya and constitutionally ineligible to serve as president. And while those attacks were driving Obama’s popularity down, Clinton’s numbers were so high that it became fashionable to speculate over whether Obama needed to replace Joe Biden with Clinton to win reelection.
+
+Clinton’s weaknesses are real, but her unpopularity among Republicans is structural — her four percent approval rating among Republicans isn’t so far off from the six percent Obama registered at the end of the 2012 election.
+
+“We’ve got this online media where the profits are driven by controversy and clicks,” Sarah Rumpf, a former Breitbart writer, told Vox. “It’s just an activism problem in general, where it’s easier to fundraise and easier to get members when you can declare an emergency, when you can declare a crisis, when you can identify an enemy.”
+
+This helps explain the unified party support for Donald Trump. Republican officeholders are terrified that if they don’t support him, or are seen as in any way contributing to Clinton’s election, they’ll face the wrath of their conservative base and be defeated in the primary challenges that the Tea Party used to such devastating effect in 2010 and 2012. Paul Ryan got a taste of this after distancing himself from Trump after the release of the Access Hollywood tape: His popularity plummeted, and a majority of Republicans said they preferred to see Trump representing the party than Ryan.
+
+So here, then, is the key failure point in modern American politics, and observing it in action requires looking no further than the Republican Party: Voters’ dislike of their own party has broken the primary process, but fear of the opposition has guaranteed unified party support to the nominee. That means whoever manages to win a flawed competition dominated by the angriest, most terrified partisans ends within spitting distance of the presidency.
+
+Party primaries were traditionally bulwarks against demagogues rising in American politics. Now they are the method by which they will rise.
+
+“The thing I keep coming back to is the Muslim ban,” says MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “That was an actual policy he called for while running for president, and if you switched in Jews for Muslims, it was immediately clear what it was. And it wasn’t disqualifying. To me, that was so, so upsetting.”
+
+Hayes is the author of the book Twilight of the Elites, and he has spent a lot of time thinking about elite failures. And there were elite failures that led to Trump: the anger left over from the Iraq War, and from the financial crisis, is certainly part of his rise. But the other problem with elites this year is harder to talk about: They were underpowered.
+
+“The gatekeepers have been extraordinarily diminished,” Hayes says. “The best example of this, to me, is the newspaper editorial page. It’s the ultimate old-school gatekeeper. I find it so remarkable that the Columbus Dispatch, USA Today, all these gatekeepers have come to the proper, correct conclusion on Trump, and said, ‘No fucking way!’ But no one cares. They don’t control the gate. They can lock the gate and someone can walk around it three feet down the fence.”
+
+Elites are often blamed for Trump’s rise — he is said to be the backlash to their failures, their corruption, their obliviousness, their self-dealing, their cosmopolitanism, their condescension. All that may be true, but past moments in American politics have also featured angry voters, out-of-touch elites, and social problems. Those moments, however, featured political and media gatekeepers with more power, and so Trump-like candidates were destroyed in primaries, or at conventions, or by a press that paid them little mind.
+
+Now, however, traditional gatekeepers have neither the power nor the cultural capital to stop Trump-like candidates. And in the Republican Party, where the collapse of institutional authority is most severe and most dangerous, the aftermath of a Trump loss will further weaken the party’s center, as Trump’s supporters turn on the elites whose tepid backing, they will argue, doomed their candidate. Sean Hannity, for instance, has already called Paul Ryan a “saboteur,” and Breitbart published an article headlined “He’s with her: Inside Paul Ryan’s months-long campaign to elect Hillary Clinton president.’”
+
+It is hard to see how the Republican Party’s core institutions or top officials emerge strengthened if Trump loses narrowly, and it is likely that they will be effectively replaced, co-opted, or hollowed out if he wins.
+
+Meanwhile, the social conditions that led to Trump — the rapid browning of America foremost among them — will persist and even accelerate. Already, nonwhites make up a majority of children under 3 years old. The country is on a fast path to becoming majority minority, and many white male voters will continue to perceive this change as a loss in both status and political power, which, in some ways, it is. Eventually, these conditions will run into a recession that brings with it much sharper economic pain.
+
+This is not to say Republicans will always, or even routinely, nominate candidates as dangerous as Trump. Much had to go wrong for him to be nominated. But having been nominated, much will have to go right for the country not to elect him, and more will have to go right for it to not elect someone like him in the future. The lesson of this unnerving year is that less can be taken for granted than we thought — the American people are not immune to demagogues, and the American political system is too weakened to reliably stop them. America, like all the world’s other countries, is vulnerable to catastrophic political failure. It can happen here.
+
+Trump will likely lose on Tuesday. But if he loses, it will be because he is a crude, undisciplined demagogue. The world also produces clever, disciplined demagogues. And they are the ones who truly threaten republics.",REAL
+183,"Congress moves to kill union election rules, setting up new Obama veto","President Obama is expected to deliver the fourth veto of his presidency after Congress passed legislation Thursday overturning new union election rules which labor groups believe could help boost membership but business groups say will leave employers at a disadvantage during organizing drives.
+
+Opponents of the new rules, issued last year by the National Labor Relations Board and set to take effect next month, refer to them as allowing ""ambush elections,"" because they could allow a representation election to take place in less than two weeks after an official petition is filed. Under current rules, those elections can take place no sooner than 25 days after filing, and often take place considerably later than that.
+
+The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, said the rules would ""stack the deck against employers"" and ""virtually eliminate employers' opportunities to communicate their views, stifling a full and robust debate among employees about unionization.""
+
+The NLRB, however, said the new rules represent a long-delayed update to union election procedures, one ""designed to remove unnecessary barriers to the fair and expeditious resolution of representation questions"" by streamlining procedures and allowing for modern electronic communications instead of paper-based filings.
+
+Major labor groups strongly support the changes. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called them ""modest but important reforms"" that would ""help reduce delay in the process and make it easier for workers to vote on forming a union in a timely manner.""
+
+""Too often, lengthy and unnecessary litigation over minor issues bogs down the election process and prevents workers from getting the vote they want,"" Trumka said in December.
+
+The Senate approved the bill this month, 53 to 46, on a party-line vote that had Republicans in favor of overturning the rules and Democrats opposed. The House voted Thursday, also largely along party lines, 232 to 186.
+
+The Obama administration indicated March 3 that the president is likely to veto the bill, saying the new rules will help ""level the playing field for workers so they can more freely choose to make their voice heard.""
+
+The bill comes to Obama's desk amid tensions with labor groups over his pursuit of fast-track trade authority to complete the sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accords.
+
+Should Obama use the veto, it would be his second since Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate. Last month, he vetoed a bill mandating approval of the Keystone XL pipeline; the Senate came five votes short of overriding the veto.",REAL
+9100,Monetary Policy at the Time of Elections,"by Yves Smith 
+By Silvia Merler, an Affiliate Fellow at Bruegel who formerly worked as Economic Analyst in DG Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission. Originally published at Bruegel Tim Duy ’s Fed Watch says that, as expected, the Federal Reserve left policy unchanged this month and the statement itself was largely unchanged as well. The near term inflation outlook improved from September to November, and with the year-over-year impacts of oil prices falling out of the data, headline inflation will track back upwards, which is not a big surprise. With regards to the timing of the next move, Duy argues that the language suggests conditions are moving in the right direction, but the Fed is still waiting for some “further” evidence. A continuation of recent trends will likely be sufficient as the “further” evidence needed to justify a rate hike in December. Would a Trump victory derail a hike in December? Duy does not think this is likely at this juncture, and we should rather be focusing on the labour market. A slowdown in hiring to something closer to 100k a month would probably end the downward pressure on the unemployment rate and raise questions about the Fed’s basic forecast that the unemployment rate will continue to decline in the absence of additional rate hikes. We get two employment reports before the December meeting. For the Fed to stay on the sidelines yet again, we probably need to see both reports come in weak. The bottom line is that the Fed is looking past the election to the December meeting for its second move in this rate hike cycle and probably it would take some unlikely softer numbers to hold them back again. Greg Ip , on the other hand, writes in The Wall Street Journal that Tuesday’s election matters. Typically, the Fed is guided by the economic data and elections are just transitory nuisances with little significance for the outlook. But this is no typical election, as one of the candidates represents a dramatic break with economic orthodoxy – with promises of protectionism and tax cuts but few details. Trump’s election would dramatically raise uncertainty, which is the reason why the stock market has tended to go down when his odds of winning go up. For the Fed, lower stock prices translate into less wealth, which is negative for the outlook in its own right. Additionally, the Fed will assume that uncertainty in the rest of the economy will mirror what happens in the markets. All of this reduces the odds it would actually raise interest rates in December. Ip argues that the Fed can take politics into consideration without being motivated by politics: when political decisions can potentially change the course of the economy, the Fed has to incorporate that into its decisions. Thus, a Trump victory would probably cast enough of a pall over the outlook to give the Fed reason to delay its next rate increase into next year. Ironically, Mr Trump may discover that he, not Mr Obama, is the reason the Fed hasn’t tightened. Richard Clarida , commenting the FOMC statement over at PIMCO’s blog, says that there was little expectation that the Fed would announce a hike in November. The committee members said nothing in their public remarks since the September meeting to suggest that a rate hike was under serious consideration this week. Indeed, the odds of a November hike as priced by the fed funds futures market were only 16%, and for at least the past 20 years the Fed has never moved when the market has priced less than a 50% chance of a move. As for the balance of risks, the language remained in the statement after making its first appearance this year in the September Fed statement. This is relevant because it would be difficult for the Fed to justify a hike if it believed that risks were tilted to the downside, or if the outlook were so uncertain it could not even characterise the risks. Clarida does not think that the Fed is trying to signal that the odds for a December hike have diminished. A year ago, the Fed wanted to boost market odds of a hike when it thought those odds were too low. Going into today – with those odds at 70% – the Fed appeared to be content to make minimal changes to the statement only six days before the US election. Whereas in September 2016 three FOMC members dissented, at this month’s meeting dissenters were only two. So this Fed statement seems aimed at making as few waves as possible: it is a placeholder until the Fed next meets and a rate hike in December continues to be likely, if not a done deal. Natixis’ Philippe Waechter argues that the Fed is ready for December, under the assumption that Clinton wins the election. He argues that the language on inflation is the only noticeable change in the language of this statement as compared to the previous one – together with the remarks on consumption that appears less strong than in September. The Fed wants to recover room for manoeuver in its monetary policy and this is the reason why it is by now ready to accept an increase in the rates. Nevertheless, it is also acting in a context where it needs to signal that it remains vigilant. In an asymmetric approach to monetary policy, the Fed prefers to act too late (at the risk of inflation) than too early (at the risk of a slowdown in economic activity). Tiffany Wilding , again on PIMCO’s blog, looks at one indicator on which Fed’s officials have recently trained a lens: the labour force participation rate. The participation rate has risen 0.5 percentage point over the past year, and the rise has occurred despite demographic and other secular trends implying that it should have declined about 0.3 ppt. During the news conference following the Federal Reserve’s September meeting, chair Yellen highlighted this development as a reason to believe there is more slack in the labour market than previously thought. Wilding argues that the rise is not primarily the result of previously discouraged workers reentering the labour force, but stems largely from a decline in the number of long-term unemployed individuals (25 to 54-year-olds) dropping out. Notably, the decline comes on the heels of a very elevated pace of dropouts in 2014 and 2015, suggesting only limited scope for additional improvement. On the surface, it’s a good sign that people are now looking for a job longer. However, the CPS data suggest the number of marginally attached and underemployed individuals as a percentage of the working-age population hasn’t declined significantly since the participation rate started to increase last year. Taken together, these developments could indicate declining and more limited labor market slack. With respect to the participation rate, Wilding believes that the demographic and other secular forces which have driven trend declines in the participation rate will likely take over again. She views participation rate trends as a downside risk to the case for two to three hikes in the federal funds rate by the end of 2017. Meanwhile, Kenneth Rogoff says markets nowadays are fixated on how high the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates in the next 12 months. This is dangerously shortsighted: the real concern ought to be how far it could cut rates in the next deep recession. Given that the Fed may struggle just to get its base interest rate up to 2% over the coming year, there will be very little room to cut if a recession hits. The two best ideas for dealing with the zero bound (negative rates and higher inflation target) are off-limits for the moment. Of course, there is always fiscal policy to provide economic stimulus. But it is extremely undesirable for government spending to have to be as volatile as it would be if it had to cover for the ineffectiveness of monetary policy. There may not be enough time before the next deep recession to lay the groundwork for effective negative-interest-rate policy or to phase in a higher inflation target. But that is no excuse for not starting to look hard at these options, especially if the alternatives are likely to be far more problematic. The Economist’s Free Exchange argues that not every argument for keeping interest rates low is a good one. Central bankers may be too keen to spot inflation in the data, but if monetary policy operates with a lag, it makes sense to raise rates before you hit the target, to prevent overshoot. When doves reject this logic, they are implicitly criticising the Fed’s 2% inflation target, not its strategy for achieving its goal. Inflation targets do not call for making up for past mistakes, and central banks should try to do what they say they are trying to do. This also means that in an equal and opposite situation where the Fed must bring inflation down after an upward shock, it should loosen policy while inflation still exceeds 2%. It is easy to dismiss these points as academic, given that inflation has been below target for too long. At present, the biggest threat to central bank credibility is clearly on the downside. But when doves deny the logic of changing policy in advance of achieving the inflation target, they overreach. The data show plenty to be dovish about: doves should simply point that out and, if they want a price level target, say as much. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+4953,Gary Johnson Avoids Typical Third-Party Fade; Best Polling Since Perot in ‘92,"A couple of weeks ago in this space I pushed back against assertions by FiveThirtyEight number-cruncher Harry Enten that Gary Johnson's polls have been ""trending downwards,"" indicating that ""voters may be moving away from third-party options."" Well, today Enten is back with an interesting piece headlined ""Gary Johnson Isn't Fading.""
+
+While noting what we have been warning you about here for years—third-party candidates typically see their crest of polling support halved by Election Day, according to Gallup—Enten explains that Johnson's numbers have so far not followed this pattern. In fact, the Libertarian may have already weathered the most difficult part of the calendar: ""Most third-party candidates didn't lose that much support between late summer and Election Day,"" Enten writes. ""Besides John Anderson in 1980, no candidate ended up finishing more than 3 percentage points below where they were polling in late August. The average drop-off is about 2 percentage points.""
+
+So how does Johnson's 9 percent stack up at this point in the campaign against other third-party candidates since World War II? According to numbers compiled by Enten here, fourth place, behind Ross Perot in 1992 (20 percent then, finished at 19), George Wallace in '68 (17/14), and Anderson in '80 (14/7). He's just a tick above Perot in '96 (8/8), behind which nobody comes close (sorry, Libertarians!). Because of his staying power, FiveThirtyEight has adjusted its predictions for Johnson's final vote upward, to 7.1 percent.
+
+But what about the debates, I hear you ask. Well, while #TeamGov and its supporters are touting this new Qunnipiac poll showing 62 percent of Americans think the Libertarian should be in next month's televised showdown, that and a glass of water will get you a drink. As Enten notes, Johnson may not be fading, but he's also not particularly rising, either, and there's a whole lotta real estate between 9 and the required 15 percent. The L.P. ticket did reach a new high this week in the Quinnipiac poll (10 percent, up from 8 percent in June), and tied previous highs in polls by NBC News/Survey Monkey (11 percent), Rasmussen Reports (9 percent), and Reuters/Ipsos (7 percent), but at this advanced date, ties go to the loser.
+
+Looking for a glimmer of hope? Here's one intriguing gap in the numerical record. Of the Commission on Presidential Debates' determinative Big Five polls, in which Johnson has been averaging 10 percent instead of 9, none of them have produced results in the last three weeks. Beginning any minute now, we should have a much clearer idea whether the Libertarians are rising in the polls that actually matter.",REAL
+1151,Bernie has already won the future of the Democratic Party,"As the Democratic presidential contest reaches the third state, what began as a coronation is now an exciting dead heat. Yet by one measure, Bernie Sanders is ­already a clear winner.
+
+Regardless of whether the senator from Vermont captures the actual nomination, he has won the future of the Democratic Party.
+
+Sanders is demolishing the last remnants of the old order, as represented by Hillary Clinton and her split-the-difference triangulation. It is Sanders, not she, who is the true heir of the radical politics of Barack Obama.
+
+Calling a paradigm shift is like forecasting a recession — predict it often enough and you’ll eventually be right. Yet the developments unfolding before our eyes suggest the Democratic Party is undergoing a massive change. And a 74-year-old socialist is the architect.
+
+A major piece of evidence is the enormous youth vote he attracts. In Iowa and New Hampshire, he beat Clinton by about 70 points — 84 percent to 15 percent — among voters under age 30. And despite the nasty demands by Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem that women must support Clinton, Sanders got 82 percent of the young female vote.
+
+By contrast, Obama in the 2008 primaries typically beat Clinton among young people by about 20 points. With studies showing that most people stay in their first political party for many years, the young, ultra-liberal voters who turned out for Obama, and who are being joined by the Sanders wave, could dominate the party for a generation.
+
+Click to read Goodwin’s full column in the New York Post.
+
+Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist.",REAL
+9056,"2 Reminders to Ignore the ""Trump is Doomed"" Polls","2 Reminders to Ignore the ""Trump is Doomed"" Polls   
+We've recently had two object lessons in the worthlessness of the ""Trump is Doomed"" polling saga. A few days ago, the media was loudly trumpeting that Hillary's victory was inevitable, that the polls were in and she was going to ignore Trump and focus on building her administration and winning downticket races. And then, just like last time around, the numbers turned around again. 
+I was recently asked to predict the race. I answered that the one thing I could predict is that the media will claim a landslide for Hillary right before the election. That much is very likely. 
+It's in the media's interest to spread FUD by promoting polls that predict not just a Hillary win, but a landslide, creating the perception that voting is useless. The more Republicans feel that the outcome is futile, the less likely they will be to go out and vote. But the scandal polling numbers have a history of rebounding. This remains a challenging and very unusual election. 
+The premature panic we've seen in some circles is unhealthy. We shouldn't completely ignore poll numbers, but neither should we treat them as inevitable. 
+We've had two major lessons in why that's short sighted.",FAKE
+5770,Hate Speech as a Weapon: Reporters Are Charged for Covering Disturbances,"Hate Speech as a Weapon: Reporters Are Charged for Covering Disturbances   26, 2016 
+Editor of Austria’s Largest Paper Charged with ‘Hate Speech’ over Migrant Article … An editor of Austria’s largest paper, Kronen Zeitung, is to be tried for hate speech over a commentary he wrote about the migrant crisis last year. –Breitbart News 
+This is part of a larger attack on the Western media, especially the alternative media. 
+It’s surely not a coincidence that these attacks are being launched in several countries. The attack are being coordinated in our view by the same groups involved in the expanding scourge of globalization. 
+More: 
+On 25 October 2015, Christoph Biro wrote of the masses of migrants who were travelling through the Syrian countryside and remarked on the assaults and property damage committed by migrants, reports Kurier. 
+Calling the majority of the migrants “testosterone-driven Syrians”, Mr. Biro recounted the multiple reports of migrants carrying out, in his words, “extremely aggressive sexual assaults”. 
+He also detailed Afghan men had slashed the seats of the trains that were transporting them to Germany because they refused to sit where Christians had previously sat. 
+Biro did not perform the acts but merely reported on them and drew a conclusion. But nonetheless he may go to jail. 
+His case is not isolated but part of a trend. It is one that has reached the US, where Hillary Clinton has hinted at the adoption of similar approaches should she become president. 
+In fact, both Clinton and President Barack Obama have suggested that those who are involved in “hate speech” via media presentations ought to suffer “consequences.” 
+The argument is that such writing disturbs civil society and encourages violence. But this is wrongheaded. People should be prosecuted for actual violence – for deeds not words. 
+ZeroHedge reports: 
+A couple of days ago we noted that protests in North Dakota, over the Dakota Access Pipeline, were growing increasingly hostile with police arresting over 125 people just last weekend alone. 
+Another startling discovery from the weekend was reports of police efforts to shoot down multiple media drones which some thought indicated an increasing hostility toward press seeking to cover the protests. 
+Certainly, Deia Schlosberg, a documentarian who was recently charged with three felonies for filming activists shutting off oil pipelines, would tend to agree. 
+The point here is that Schlosberg is not being prosecuted for deeds, only for her coverage. 
+This is part of a larger effort to conflate reporting with “doing” – and marks a virtual revolution in the way journalism is conducted. 
+In the future, if this tact is pursued, it will be government and law enforcement that can decide what’s going to be covered, depending on the interpretation of the coverage. 
+Conclusion: If the reporting is seen as “inciting” violence or disturbance of civil society, the reporter can face legal consequences as grave or graver than the individuals actually performing the actions. This amounts to virulent censorship.",FAKE
+18,How Planned Parenthood could shut down the government,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+1351,Democratic debate: 's Reality Check team inspects the claims,"(CNN) The Democratic candidates for president gathered in New Hampshire Thursday for their fifth debate, and CNN's Reality Check team spent the night putting their statements and assertions to the test.
+
+The team of reporters, researchers and editors across CNN listened throughout the debate, selecting key statements and rating them either true; mostly true; true, but misleading; false; or it's complicated.
+
+As in past debates, Hillary Clinton took on Bernie Sanders' voting record on gun control legislation. Thursday night, it came up regarding a debate over who is the true ""progressive candidate.""
+
+Clinton said, ""If we're going to get into labels, I don't think it was particularly progressive to vote against the Brady Bill five times. I don't think it was progressive to vote to give gun makers and sellers immunity,"" referring to Sanders' voting record.
+
+So, regarding the Brady Bill, what is Sanders' record?
+
+There were several votes in that bill's evolution, the first vote coming in 1991. Sanders voted against a draft that required a seven-day waiting period for background checks. A subsequent version of the bill returned to the House and Sanders voted against it. Then, in 1993, two more drafts returned to the House, and Sanders voted against those. Finally, later in 1993, the Brady Bill finally passed, but without Sanders' vote.
+
+Sanders has defended his votes, saying that it constituted federal overreach.
+
+Sanders also added, ""I am absolutely willing, as I've said for many, many weeks, if not months, to take another look at that piece of legislation.""
+
+Though Sanders may have his reasons for voting against the Brady Bill, Clinton's claim that he voted against it five times is true.
+
+The topic of big money influencing American politics was raised by Sanders, who said it was ""undermining American democracy.""
+
+Clinton attempted to distance herself from perceptions her campaign is influenced by Wall Street interests, saying, ""I think the best evidence that the Wall Street people, at least, know where I stand and where I have always stood is because they are trying to beat me in this primary.""
+
+It was a refrain she used in Wednesday night's town hall, too: ""Everybody that I know who looks at what's happening in this campaign sees the same thing: The Wall Street interests, the money interests, the Republican political interests are spending a lot of money to try to defeat me.""
+
+Wall Street interests may be spending a lot in support of her opponents, but of all the candidates, Clinton is the leading recipient of donations from individuals in the securities and investments industry.
+
+Clinton implies that Wall Street has no fondness for her. But given that her campaign received $2.9 million from securities and investment donors, the most of all the candidates, Republican or Democrat, our verdict is false.
+
+Clinton accused Sanders of not telling voters the truth about his proposals, particularly his Medicare-for-all plan.
+
+""I am not going to talk about big ideas like single-payer and then not level with people about how much it will cost. A respected health economist said these plans would cost a trillion dollars more a year. I'm not going to tell people that I will raise your incomes and not your taxes and not mean it,"" Clinton said.
+
+Actually, according to that health economist, Gerald Friedman of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Sanders' universal health care plan would cost nearly $1.4 trillion a year.
+
+But Sanders has recently been upfront about how much it will cost. He released Friedman's assessment alongside his plan for Medicare-for-all last month.
+
+Also, Sanders has acknowledged that the plan calls for a new 2.2% income tax on all Americans and a 6.2% levy on employers, as well as additional taxes on the wealthy. The Vermont senator, however, argues that ultimately middle class Americans will save money under his health plan because they will no longer pay premiums to private insurers.
+
+Reality Check: Clinton on classified information in her emails
+
+Clinton claimed she ""never sent or received any classified material"" when she was secretary of state, and the State Department is ""retroactively classifying"" information in her emails.
+
+It is true that all the classifications we've seen in emails released by the State Department have been retroactive, meaning the State Department determined there was a need to classify the information as they were preparing the emails for release and so they ""upgraded"" it to classified.
+
+The State Department also maintains that none of Clinton's official emails (of the 85% reviewed and released so far) contained information that was marked as classified when it was sent.
+
+All of the classified redactions the public has seen so far have been the result of retroactive classifications, but the investigation into whether the information was classified during her time in office is ongoing. For that reason, our verdict is it's complicated.
+
+During a back-and-forth about health care, Sanders pointed to his role in Congress during the creation of the Affordable Care Act.
+
+""I am on the Health, Education, Labor Committee. That committee wrote the Affordable Care Act. The idea that I would dismantle health care in America while we're waiting to pass a Medicare-for-all is just not accurate,"" Sanders said, adding later: ""I helped write that bill, but by moving forward, rallying the American people, I do believe we should have health care for all.""
+
+Sanders did indeed sit on the Senate panel that helped craft the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and used his post to advocate loudly for a single-payer system in which insurance is provided by the government to all citizens.
+
+Sanders wasn't alone; many liberal Democrats pushed for such a provision when crafting comprehensive health care reform. But the single-payer option proved to be divisive, and opposed by most Republicans.
+
+That led to the development of alternative mechanisms to get more Americans insured: the establishment of marketplaces for Americans to purchase health insurance, and an individual mandate requiring all Americans obtain coverage.
+
+When Sanders' preferred version of the bill failed to come up for a vote, he diverted his focus instead to securing the inclusion of billions of dollars in funding to community health centers.
+
+But he remained skeptical of a bill that didn't include a single-payer plan. Indeed, in the months leading up to a final vote on the bill, Sanders voiced doubt that he could support the version that lacked such a system (ultimately, he did vote for the Affordable Care Act).
+
+While Sanders played a major role in the debate over health care reform, and helped craft an $11 billion inclusion into the final measure, his claim to have ""helped write"" the measure misrepresents his part in creating the central pillars of Obamacare.
+
+Reality Check: Sanders as the longest serving independent in the history of Congress
+
+Sanders, a Vermont independent, stressed his longevity and independence on Thursday when he said, ""I am the longest serving independent in the history of the United States Congress.""
+
+Sanders was first elected to the House of Representatives as an independent from Vermont in 1990 and assumed office in January 1991. He won his Vermont Senate seat in 2006. As a result, although he caucuses with the Democratic Party, Sanders has been an independent in Congress for 25 years.
+
+This 25-year tenure is indeed the longest of an independent member of Congress.
+
+Byrd was first elected to the House in 1932 as a Democrat. He entered the Senate in 1965 and switched parties to become an independent in 1970 after a clash with the Democratic Party leadership in the run-up to the 1972 presidential election. He left office in 1983, giving him 13 years as an independent.
+
+Unlike Byrd, Davis, who had been an associate justice of the Supreme Court and was appointed by Abraham Lincoln, initially assumed office as an independent in 1877 and left office in 1883, giving him six years in Congress as an independent.
+
+Sanders' 25 years in Congress is easily the longest span as an independent.
+
+Sanders threw an elbow at some of the country's largest financial institutions.
+
+""Six financial institutions in America today have assets of roughly $10 trillion, equivalent to 58% of the (gross domestic product) of the United States of America. That is a lot of money,"" Sanders said.
+
+The six largest financial institutions are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, as of September 2015, according to the Federal Reserve Bank.
+
+So, doing the math: $9,845,804,000,000 (assets) / $18,128,200,000,000 (GDP) =.5431
+
+Accordingly, the assets of the six largest institutions equal roughly 54% of the GDP.
+
+Reality Check: Sanders 'endorsed' by New Hampshire newspaper
+
+Asked by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow why his campaign put up an ad insinuating that he was endorsed by the Nashua Telegraph, Sanders said that his campaign was careful never to say he was ""endorsed"" by a newspaper.
+
+""As I understand it, we did not suggest we had the endorsement of the newspaper. Newspapers who make endorsements also say positive things about other candidates and to the best of my knowledge that is what we did. So we never said, never said that somebody, a newspaper, endorsed us that did not. What we did say is, 'Blah blah blah blah' was said by the newspaper,"" Sanders said.
+
+However, in the next clip, the ad said that The Valley News of Lebanon, New Hampshire, ""endorsed"" Sanders. That paper did not endorse Sanders.
+
+The Clinton campaign and fact-checkers hit him throughout the day Wednesday and Thursday for the spot and the Sanders campaign eventually revised the ad to remove the ""endorsed"" language.
+
+Discussing the need for reforms improving access to care at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Sanders said that a group funded by the Koch brothers is promoting the privatization of the agency. An organization called Concerned Veterans for America is sanctioned by the influential conservative siblings, Sanders said.
+
+Wayne Gable, CVA's chief executive and trustee, is also a board member of a Koch-backed organization called Freedom Partners, according to a 2013 tax filing. That filing lists CVA as the business name of an affiliated organization called Vets for Economic Freedom Trust. The filing states the tax exempt group had $3 million in contributions and a nearly equal amount of expenditures, money allegedly spent advocating for ""policies that will preserve the freedom and liberty that veterans and their families so proudly fought and sacrificed to defend.""
+
+The group produced an anti-Obamacare web video in 2013, ""Government Health Care Equals Disaster,"" suggesting that the scandal at the VA was a prelude to a looming disaster prompted by the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
+
+Unfortunately, the CVA has a glossy, yet glitchy website and there is not much documentation of the group's financials and its staff post-2013. According to the Guidestar charity finder, the organization has not yet filed its IRS 990 form for 2014. Furthermore, its affiliated group, Vets for Economic Freedom Trust is not a verified exempt organization, according to the IRS exempt check search tool.
+
+Sanders is correct in describing the group's Koch lineage and its intent. Our verdict is true.",REAL
+5684,Comment on Tutorial: Riding The Philippine Jeepney by Ivan Jose,"adobochron 1 Comment 
+MANILA, Philippines (The Adobo Chronicles, Manila Bureau) – This is a tutorial on how to ride the jeepney which is an important mode of mass transportation in many cities and towns in the Philippines. 
+Many of you may already be familiar with these rules, etiquette and tricks but for those who are visiting the country for the first time or are returning nationals (balikbayan) who have been away for a long time, you might want to keep this tutorial handy. First of all, not all jeepneys you encounter are as colorful, shiny and clean as the one pictured here. If you are bothered by smoke or the smell of gasoline, remember to always carry and wear a disposable surgical mask. It also helps with, you know, body odor. In most cases, there are no jeepney stops like there are bus stops. Wherever you are, be rest assured that so long as there is room for one more passsenger, the jeepney will stop for you. Speaking of room, when the driver says the capacity of his jeepney is 10 passengers on either side, you can’t argue. Ten means ten, even if only half your butt sits comfortably on the padded seat. Only cash payment is accepted, but you probably already know that. Exact fare is appreciated but Mr. Driver is happy to provide change except very early in the day. “Barya lang po sa umaga!” No five hundred peso bills in the morning, please. Jeepney fare is passed on from one passenger to another until it reaches the driver. The same is true for any change back due the passenger. It takes a village to ride the jeepney you know. If you don’t want to be bothered by other passengers asking you to pass on the fare to the driver, sit as far as possible from the driver, assuming that premium spot is vacant. The jeepney driver would appreciate it so much if you pay your fare before you start texting on your mobile phone. “God knows who doesn’t pay,” says one jeepney sign. There are two phrases you need to learn when riding the jeepney: “Bayad po” (here’s my fare) and “Para po” (this is my stop). If you don’t speak the language, no worries. Just pass on your fare to the passenger next to you and he or she will know what to do. And if you need to disembark, just knock on the jeepney’s roof. It also means “please stop.” There are discounted fares for students and seniors. Be sure to say “one senior” or “one student” when paying your fare. Otherwise, you pay full fare. Filipinos have learned to respect seniors and people with disabilities. The spot closest to the jeepney entrance (farthest from the driver) is reserved for them. Isn’t that nice? As always, hold on to the hand rails. It can be a very bumpy ride. Rate this:",FAKE
+3944,World overlooks Ethiopia drought crisis that is leaving millions hungry,"FENTALE, Ethiopia — Sitting in the blistering sun as she cradles her 2-month-old baby, Genet Tamisat is one of hundreds of mothers waiting to have their children checked for malnutrition, as Ethiopia faces its worst drought in decades.
+
+“I have nothing to eat at home. I can’t even buy maize by myself,” said Tamisat, who also has a 4-year-old son. “People can look at us and think we’re OK, but we are in great danger. We have nothing.”
+
+Despite the crisis confronting Tamisat and millions of other Ethiopians lacking food and drinking water, a world caught up in strife is paying insufficient attention to their plight, because it is distracted by other urgent needs.
+
+The government and the United Nations are trying to raise $1.4 billion to feed 10.2 million Ethiopians, but only half has come through so far, as the wars in Syria and Yemen plus the migrant crisis dominate the news.
+
+“Fundraising for this response has been very slow,"" said Chege Ngugi, national director of the charity ChildFund Ethiopia. ""My priority is to support the efforts of the government of Ethiopia to save lives, but we’re not reaching everybody.”
+
+A strong El Nino has blocked two consecutive rainy seasons that normally nourish crops that feed 85% of the country. The drought has forced the government to find additional food aid from the United States and other donors.
+
+The U.S. Agency for International Development dispatched an response team to Ethiopia to provide emergency assistance that includes nearly $4 million in corn and wheat seeds for more than 200,000 families.
+
+Here in the Oromia region, which includes central Ethiopia, the land is arid as far as the eye can see. Animal carcasses — some fresh, some old — are scattered across patches of dusty earth.
+
+Humanitarian needs in this Horn of Africa country have tripled since the start of 2015 as the situation deteriorates.
+
+Malnutrition rates in the worst-affected areas have surpassed 20% — higher than the World Health Organization’s emergency threshold of 15%, said Challiss McDonough, regional spokeswoman for the U.N.'s World Food Programme.
+
+This year, the food program will help more than 2 million children, pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers suffering from moderate acute malnutrition.
+
+The U.N.’s children’s fund, UNICEF, estimates that almost 500,000 children need treatment for severe acute malnutrition.
+
+“Even with interventions, the situation is getting worse,” said Eyoel Lemma, who works at ChildFund Ethiopia in Fentale.
+
+He said ChildFund, with help from the U.N., also provides supplementary food and malnutrition treatment to children under age 5. But that becomes a major difficulty as families migrate to different areas looking for water and pasture for their livestock, as well as to find jobs.
+
+As a result, many people miss out on the food rationing programs.
+
+One woman on the move is Haso Bultum, 27. After hours of walking in the sun across barren mountains, she reached a rural health care facility here in Fentale with her malnourished 9-month-old twins.
+
+“It’s very hard. I’ve had no sleep, because we’re trying to find some food for our cattle,” she said. “To save ourselves we’re constantly moving.”
+
+While Ethiopia has the fastest growing economy in the world and has lifted millions of citizens out of poverty, the reality is that 80% of Ethiopians are still dependent on agriculture.
+
+McDonough from the World Fund Programme warned that her organization could run out of food within two months.
+
+“We have been calling for urgent funding for months now, and still have only about a quarter of the resources that we need for the next six months. Unless we receive significant new funding very soon, we could start running out of food for relief assistance by May,” McDonough said.
+
+Samuel Ferfu, manager of the Children’s and Family Charitable Organization in Fentale, said another major issue is the lack of access to water. Almost 6 million people need emergency water, according to UNICEF.
+
+“There’s no water at all — the river is dry,” he said. “No water makes sanitation impossible, and as a result, the prevalence of disease will increase.”
+
+For the time being, Ethiopians are praying that rain will reach the worst-affected areas, but flooding is a serious risk after a lengthy drought.
+
+“Soon the rain will come, and people’s worries will be flooding. But they have nothing except their homes to lose. They’ve already lost all their animals and crops,” said Lemma from ChildFund Ethiopia.
+
+For Tamisat, 27, and her young children, talk of rain in the coming months is a false hope.
+
+“We have no water and no food,"" she said, wiping sweat off her forehead. ""I don’t know what is coming for the future, but I have no hope about the rain.”",REAL
+7357,75% of Americans Think Biased U.S. Media – Not Foreign Interests Such As Russian Hackers – Real Threat To Fair Election - Russia News Now,"This post was originally published on this site 
+A Suffolk University/USA Today poll released Friday found that 75.9% of Americans believe the mainstream media “would like to see [Hillary Clinton] elected president.” 
+The poll also found that only 10% of Americans believe that “foreign interests such as Russian hackers” are “the primary threat that might try to change the election results”. In contrast, 45.53% believe “the news media” is the primary threat to the election: 
+Indeed, the New York Times , Boston Globe , Los Angeles Times , CNN and other mainstream media admitted to us they were going to try to throw the election for Hillary. (And leaked emails show widespread collusion between the media and the Clinton campaign.) 
+Americans widely distrust the mainstream media. With good reason … Related ",FAKE
+3285,Tom Cotton calls for ‘global military dominance’ in maiden Senate speech,"Over the course of just a few days last week, Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) went from relatively anonymous freshman senator to what seemed like the tip of every tongue in Washington --  thanks to the letter he wrote and got 46 fellow Republicans to join, warning the ruling Iranian regime to be wary of negotiating a nuclear deal with President Obama.
+
+But here's a fun fact: Cotton made his big splash before even giving his first speech on the Senate floor.
+
+That occasion came late Monday, when Cotton delivered his ""maiden speech,"" which is typically given after a period of silence and as a statement of principles or objectives rather than a comment on the partisan issue of the day.
+
+Cotton's address has gotten a lot less attention than his Iran letter, and that is not surprising: Where the letter was terse and seemingly calculated to influence the multiparty nuclear negotiations now underway, the half-hour speech was dense, rich in historical references, and calibrated to further establish Cotton as the Republican Party's young leading light on foreign affairs and defense -- positioning him to assume the mantle now worn by elders like John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
+
+""An alarm should be sounding in our ears,"" Cotton said. ""Our enemies, sensing weakness and hence opportunity, have become steadily more aggressive. Our allies, uncertain of our commitment and capability, have begun to conclude that they must look out for themselves, even where it is unhelpful to stability and order. Our military, suffering from years of neglect, has seen its relative strength decline to historic levels.""
+
+The speech contained numerous references to Winston Churchill and Cotton compared the current foreign policy moment to the prelude to World War II. He articulated a litany of national security threats, ranging from Iran to North Korea to Russia, but the speech was notable for the hard line it took on a question now threatening to divide Capitol Hill Republicans as they try to write a 2017 budget: Is it more important to control federal spending or strengthen the national defense?
+
+Cotton was clear: America must have ""such hegemonic strength that no sane adversary would ever imagine challenging the United States. 'Good enough' is not and will never be good enough.""  That strength, he said, should come at whatever the necessary costs. While the budget must be slashed, it should not be balanced on the backs of the military.
+
+“Our enemies and allies alike must know that aggressors will pay an unspeakable price for challenging the United States,"" Cotton said. ""The best way to impose that price is global military dominance.”
+
+An excerpt from his full speech:
+
+Trying to balance the budget through defense cuts is both counterproductive and impossible. First, the threats we face will eventually catch up with us, as they did on Sept. 11, and we will have no choice but to increase our defense budget. When we do, it will cost more to achieve the same end state of readiness and modernization than it would have without the intervening cuts. This was the lesson we learned in the 1980s after the severe cuts to defense in the 1970s. Second, we need a healthy, growing economy to generate the government revenue necessary to fund our military and balance the budget. In our globalized world, our domestic prosperity depends heavily on the world economy, which, of course, requires stability and order. Who provides that stability and order? The U.S. military.",REAL
+4760,Trump has a challenge with white women: ‘You just want to smack him’,"With just five weeks of campaigning left, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are scrambling to win over female voters in America’s suburbs as well-educated white women have emerged as perhaps the presidential campaign’s most pivotal swing voting group.
+
+The Democratic and Republican nominees and their surrogates are making direct appeals to female voters in campaign appearances in the suburbs of North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other battleground states; in television ads on channels such as Bravo and shows such as “Dancing With the Stars”; and on Facebook, where people’s feeds inundate them with campaign commentary.
+
+But polls and focus groups, as well as interviews with women here in the battleground state of New Hampshire, show that Trump — who spent the past week haranguing a Latina former beauty queen over her weight — has a considerable challenge with many female voters.
+
+“It’s very clear that Trump is doing extremely well among white non-college-educated men . . . but white women with a college degree is a huge impediment to getting where he needs to be,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “I’m not sure what he can do about it given all the comments he’s made about women over the last 15 months.”
+
+Trump’s troubles were evident here in Nashua, a commuter exurb of Boston, where six women in a knitting circle were lounging on the couches and armchairs of a yarn shop the other day talking about — what else? — Trump. They were Republicans, Democrats and independents, all of them moms — and all of them ready to give him a permanent timeout.
+
+“You just want to smack him,” said Pam Harrison, 56, who voted for Republican Mitt Romney four years ago.
+
+Watching Trump debate reminded Kristen Schwartz, 40, of dinner-table conversations with her in-laws: “It’s not polite to interrupt people, but if you stop to breathe or think about your point, they just talk over you and the conversation just gets louder and louder and louder.”
+
+In an unnerving campaign season, what keeps their anxieties in check is the belief of Sandy Zielie, 46, the shop’s owner: “Women are going to save this country this election.”
+
+Female voters may not save the country in the way the knitters of Nashua would like, but they almost certainly will swing the election. Clinton and Trump are targeting many intersecting groups and subgroups of swing voters, but strategists for both campaigns said white women with college degrees are at the top of their lists.
+
+[Trump’s bad week is a ‘nightmare’ for the GOP]
+
+Trump’s temperament has been a flash point since he entered the race, especially among women. So it was that many of Clinton’s surgical strikes against Trump in their first debate were designed to sow fresh doubts, especially when Clinton recounted how he had shamed Venezuelan-born Alicia Machado, the 1996 Miss Universe pageant winner, for gaining weight. The controversy continued for days, as Trump lashed out at Machado, including maligning her in an erratic series of tweets starting at 3:20 a.m. Friday.
+
+The Miss Universe episode has not gone over well with the female voters he needs to win over.
+
+“I have always voted Republican, but I don’t feel like I could vote for Trump this year,” Rosanna Koehlert, 58, a college graduate and housewife, said as she shopped the other day in Merrimack, N.H. “He shouldn’t be making fun of people and making them self-conscious about the way they look. That’s not what a president should be.”
+
+The modest lead Clinton has held in national and state polls can be attributed to her outsized advantage among white women with college degrees. Four years ago, Romney carried this demographic over President Obama, 52 percent to 46 percent, according to exit polls. Yet Trump is losing it badly — 32 percent to Clinton’s 57 percent in a late September Washington Post-ABC News poll of likely voters.
+
+Among white women without college degrees, however, Trump leads Clinton 52 percent to 40 percent. The two candidates are virtually tied among white women overall: 46 percent for Clinton and 44 percent for Trump, according to the Post-ABC survey.
+
+For Clinton, who would make history as the nation’s first female president, winning a larger share of white women voters than Obama did could help her offset any relative erosion in support from young voters, for instance. It also could balance any rise in turnout among white men for Trump, a group with which he enjoys an over 2-to-1 lead.
+
+“Everything’s about swing voters,” said a senior Clinton campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss campaign strategy. “We know that white suburban women are critical for both parties . . . and the lowest hanging fruit for expansion among that group is more likely to be college-educated white women.”
+
+Meanwhile, Trump is trying to squeeze as many votes as he can from whites generally — including a subgroup with which he is quite unpopular, college-educated women — to offset losses among blacks, Latinos and other minorities.
+
+“Some women have already gone into their respective corners, and they will support Clinton or Trump and not move,” said Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager and pollster. “But the persuadables are swinging back and forth because they know there’s always more to learn, more to see, more to know.”
+
+Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster who closely studies the political attitudes of female voters, said women have been cool to Trump’s candidacy for several reasons.
+
+“It’s not just about the toxic language he uses towards all the various women he knows publicly, but it’s also his lack of fluency on policy, his lack of understanding about caregiving,” Omero said. “It’s clearly not his comfort zone. He’s got this very harsh tone, in general, that a lot of women respond very badly to.”
+
+For months now, Clinton’s advertisements have used Trump’s own words to undermine his character. The spots have been aimed at women and evoke visceral responses. One of the campaign’s most recent ads, called “Mirrors,” depicts girls looking at their reflections as Trump is heard talking crudely about women’s bodies.
+
+Clinton is laboring to persuade voters who identify as “moderate,” regardless of their party affiliation. In 2012, moderates made up 41 percent of the electorate, and Obama won them 56 percent to Romney’s 41 percent, exit polls show. Many moderates live in suburban areas, and although they cross over into many demographic groups, the Clinton campaign’s private data suggest they hold similar values and beliefs.
+
+“There are threads here that make these groups very important to winning the presidency,” said the Clinton campaign official, saying they support same-sex marriage, prioritize climate change and education, and recoil against candidates seen as sexist or bigoted.
+
+To repair his image among moderates, Trump has enlisted his elder daughter, who rates as one of his most effective surrogates according to the campaign’s internal research. Ivanka, 34 — who has three small children and is an entrepreneur and an executive in her father’s real estate company — helped Trump craft a child-care policy, which they rolled out together last month in a Philadelphia suburb.
+
+Ivanka stars in a new ad, her first of the general election, in which she says that her father “understands the needs of a modern workforce” and is committed to changing “outdated labor laws” to support women with children. The spot, called “Motherhood,” will air this week nationally and in swing states on women-focused cable channels, including Lifetime, Bravo and OWN (the Oprah Winfrey Network), as well as on network prime-time shows including “Dancing With the Stars,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Voice.”
+
+[Ivanka Trump stars in new campaign ad to help her father appeal to women]
+
+Trump’s women-focused ad campaign will continue with a second spot, called “Childcare,” that casts Trump as a champion of affordability and fairness for middle-class families, Conway said.
+
+This is partly an attempt to change the subject from Trump’s temperament and character, and to tell voters that he is more of a change agent than Clinton.
+
+“If this election is about Hillary Clinton and is fought on the issues, Donald Trump wins,” Conway said. She ticked through the issues she wants Trump to focus on in the final weeks: security (not only terrorism, but also opioid abuse), affordability, fairness and ethics.
+
+Conway said the Trump campaign recently analyzed the advertising of Clinton and her super-PAC allies and found that the two issues discussed the least were education and health care.
+
+“I said, ‘Bingo! That’s what we’ll talk about every day — health care and education,’” Conway said. “She says she’s been ‘fighting for women and children,’ but where’s the product? Where’s the deliverable? Why do so many women live in poverty? Why do so many women not have health insurance?”
+
+It may be difficult for female voters to tune everything else out, however. Lisa Faust, 45, one of the knitters here in Nashua, was trained as a chemical engineer and is raising a son with Down syndrome. She can’t stop thinking about the time Trump mocked a disabled journalist.
+
+“What’s distressing to me is that Trump has made it socially acceptable to embrace bigotry and racism,” Faust said. “How do you say to an 11-year-old child, ‘That’s not acceptable behavior,’ but the leader of our country thinks it’s acceptable? That really gets to me.”
+
+Emily Guskin in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+1265,Rubio surges back to electrify South Carolina,"His wife, Melania, and 10-year-old son, Barron, will likely join him after Barron finishes the school year this spring.",REAL
+1939,"GOP still party of stupid: Scott Walker, Fox News and why 2016 hopefuls must appease wingnut base on evolution","One might have expected the Great Whitebread Hope to be a little better prepared — or at least be politically skilled enough — not to come right out and say, “I’m going to punt on that one.” It was amateur hour, to say the least. Still, he may have been more skilled than people gave him credit for. Walker showed that he understands the Republican base far better than the likes of George Will, who said on Fox News last week that press questions about evolution are “a standard way of trying to embarrass Republicans … We should be able to come to terms with the fact when asked about evolution you say yes. And if one syllable of one word is not enough say Paleontology. Everything says evolution is a fact. Get over it.”
+
+The sad fact is that polling shows fewer and fewer Republicans believe in evolution.
+
+“Evolution has become the religion of the elite. It’s a religion to the [level of] fanaticism of what they would say was the people at the Scopes monkey trial, the Christians waving their Bibles who were not really thinking through the facts, they were just outraged because it was against God’s law. The truth of the matter is that the evolutionists like George Will, waving their evolutionary theory, have become as rabid and unreasoned as what they accuse the Scopes monkey religionists of doing to Darwin during that time. It has become a religion. Science has disproven so much of evolution…. These guys are wrong, Scott Walker is right.”
+
+It’s unclear to what she’s referring when she asserts that science has disproved evolution but it’s a clever idea that explains how Scott Walker’s follow-up comments on Twitter might make sense to the creationist base of the GOP:
+
+But what’s politically important here isn’t the science vs. faith issue.  It’s what Rios says about elitism. Laura Ingraham explained it best in her 2004 book “Shut Up and Sing”:
+
+It was Southern religiosity that led to one of the most vicious literary assaults on any single group in American History. H.L. Mencken became a hero to generations of elites through his newspaper reporting on the “Scopes Monkey Trial.” Uninterested in the subtleties of the debate over evolution — completely indifferent to the concerns of those who felt their traditional religious teaching to be in danger from teachers who despised them and their culture — Mencken gleefully seized upon the case to mock and ridicule everything he could find in the South. We owe the popularization of the phrase “white trash” to Mencken. He also coined the phrase “Bible Belt” to describe the “bigoted” South. In true elite fashion, Mencken approved of the elitist antebellum South of the slaveholders but couldn’t stand the postwar South, where power had devolved to the despised white trash…
+
+Believing in evolution, therefore, is an outgrowth of reverse racism against salt-of-the-earth white Southerners and a sign of liberal solidarity with the elite antebellum slaveholders. You have to give her credit for pulling that bizarre rationale for rejecting evolution together. After all, it’s not really religion that holds the GOP base together, it’s a sense of victimization. And this thesis weaves a number of important strands into a colorful if ahistorical tapestry.
+
+It presents a bit of a problem for conservative leaders, however. As you can see from Rios’ unhappiness at George Will’s forthright support for evolution, people who actually believe in science (as it’s understood by scientists anyway) are considered traitors to the cause. And most of them are less willing than Will to buck the victimization creed. George W. Bush famously equivocated by saying “the jury is still out,” adding, “I’d make it a goal to make sure that local folks got to make the decision as to whether or not they said creationism has been a part of our history and whether or not people ought to be exposed to different theories as to how the world was formed.”
+
+A few years back Ben Adler at the New Republic quizzed a group of leading conservative intellectuals and commentators about evolution, and their fevered dance of denial was worthy of Katy Perry’s  dancing shark troupe at the 2015 Super Bowl. Here are a few examples: Whether he personally believes in evolution: “I don’t discuss personal opinions. … I’m familiar with what’s obviously true about it as well as what’s problematic. … I’m not a scientist. … It’s like me asking you whether you believe in the Big Bang.” How evolution should be taught in public schools: “I managed to have my children go through the Fairfax, Virginia schools without ever looking at one of their science textbooks.” Whether he personally believes in evolution: “I’ve never understood how an eye evolves.” What he thinks of intelligent design: “Put me down for the intelligent design people.” How evolution should be taught in public schools: “The real problem here is that you shouldn’t have government-run schools. … Given that we have to spend all our time crushing the capital gains tax I don’t have much time for this issue.” Whether he personally believes in evolution: “I do believe in evolution.” What he thinks of intelligent design: “If intelligent design means that evolution occurs under some divine guidance, I believe that.” How evolution should be taught in public schools: “I don’t believe that anything that offends nine-tenths of the American public should be taught in public schools. … Christianity is the faith of nine-tenths of the American public. … I don’t believe that public schools should embark on teaching anything that offends Christian principle.” Whether he personally believes in evolution: “It’s impossible to answer that question with a simple yes or no.” Whether he personally believes in evolution: “Do I believe in absolute evolution? No. I don’t believe that evolution can explain the creation of matter. … Do I believe in Darwinian evolution? The answer is no.” … “Evolution [has] been so powerful a theory in Western history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and often a malevolent force–it’s been used by non-Christians and anti-Christians to justify polices which have been horrendous. I do believe that every American student should be introduced to the idea and its effects on society. But I don’t think it ought to be taught as fact. It ought to be taught as theory. … How do you answer a kid who says, ‘Where did we all come from?’ Do you say, ‘We all evolved’? I think that’s a theory. … Now the biblical story of creation should be taught to children, not as dogma but every child should know first of all the famous biblical stories because they have had a tremendous influence as well. … I don’t think it should be taught as religion to kids who don’t wanna learn it. … I think in biology that honest teachers gotta say, ‘Look the universe exhibits, betrays the idea that there is a first mover, that there is intelligent design.’ … You should leave the teaching of religion to a voluntary classes in my judgment and only those who wish to attend.” If a Republican politician wants to go straight to the right-wing heart on this issue he would say what presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said with just the right amount of smug insider wingnut humor: “If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, that’s fine. I’ll accept that. I just don’t happen to think that I did.” That’s the kind of statement that will elicit cheers from your GOP base and make the likes of Laura Ingraham applaud wildly. Unfortunately, it won’t carry much beyond Mencken’s loathed Bible Belt or right-wing radio.It needs to be massaged into something much more anodyne with a dog whistle embedded within it. And once he was briefed by his handlers, Walker toed the required line quite well. It’s a sign of his familiarity with social conservative language that he understands, if nobody in the punditocracy does, that it’s better to “punt” than get it wrong. He knows he’ll never get past Iowa if he does.",REAL
+7545,Mudslide on major highway in Colombia kills at least 6,"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 22:57 UTC © AP Photo/Luis Benavides A police officer, bottom, gestures to rescue workers looking for survivors at the site of a mudslide that killed at least six people along a highway in Copacabana, on the outskirts of Medellin, Colombia, Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2016. A landslide on the main highway linking Colombia's two biggest cities has killed at least six people and trapped an unknown number under tons of earth. Antioquia state rescue chief Mario Parodi says four people were rescued and hospitalized after the Wednesday morning disaster covered all four lanes of the highway linking Bogota with Medellin. Rescuers with dogs joined the search for victims. Parodi said two motorcycles, a truck and two small vehicles were buried by the slide, which covered two football fields. He said the highway would be closed for several days. Landslides are not uncommon in Colombia's rugged mountainous terrain. Source: Associated Press",FAKE
+4308,Rand Paul is just hilariously trolling Republicans now — and inadvertently revealing the two words behind the GOP’s biggest lie,"Fox Business’s Tuesday night Republican debate was equal parts thuddingly dull and thoroughly truth-averse, save for one interesting moment when Rand Paul took a moment to troll Marco Rubio about defense spending, and not just because Paul managed to unnerve the usually slick as a snail Rubio. Admitting that we spend a lot of money and that’s not very “fiscally conservative” is a third rail in Republican politics and yet there Paul was, looking alive, hollering, “We need a safe country, but did you know, we spend more on our military than the next ten countries combined. I want a strong national defense, but I don’t want us to be bankrupt.”
+
+It wasn’t like he declared himself an atheist or anything, but in a debate format geared towards maximum tedium, it was pretty entertaining. Indeed, for people who don’t live in the conservative bubble, it helped make Rand Paul seem like the sanest person on the stage last night, though that’s like a 2-year-old beating a bunch of newborns in a foot race. But the audience wasn’t really  having it. Paul got a smattering of applause, but it’s not clear if it’s because anyone agreed with him or that they just liked that someone was bothering to entertain them for a moment.
+
+At this point, the only reasonable cause Paul has to run for president is that he hates Republicans and enjoys exposing, every chance he gets, how they are a bunch of lying hypocrites with this entire “small government” talking point. It can’t be that he wants to win, since trolling people about their delusions is not known as a way to win friends.
+
+To hear conservatives talk, this principle of “small government” is sacred, inviolable and the supposed Democratic opposition to it stems no doubt from their ideological commitment to evil. Why we are supposed to love “small government” is rarely explained. Like daylight savings time or that rule about not taking the Lord’s name in vain, it just is, and not for we mere mortals to question.
+
+If you do start to question it, it becomes immediately apparent that finding a Republican who legitimately wants to shrink the size of the government, on principle, is harder than finding a Republican who has warm things to say about Planned Parenthood. On the contrary, one strong consistent trend over the past century is that Republican presidential administrations contribute more to the federal debt than Democratic ones. Even though almost no one knows it, deficit spending under President Obama has been consistently dropping, now shrunk by a $1 trillion compared to what the federal government had to spend to recover from the Bush recession. Principled adherence to “small government” would simply not lead to voting Republican, if only out of fear that all that war-mongering rhetoric would lead to more expensive adventure wars like the previous President Bush gave us.
+
+And, as Paul compulsively points out, this is partially because Republicans love the military. Watching Tuesday’s debate, you would get the strong impression that cutting even one dollar of military spending is the equivalent of sending a cruise ship full of free weapons to ISIS and bringing them over to the United States to be let loose in Miami. When you actually start to prod conservatives, you will quickly discover that “small government” isn’t a principle at all, and doesn’t even touch the truly sacred principles like profligate defense spending.
+
+That’s because “small government” is and always will be a cover story for the real principle at stake, which is halting government activities aimed at ameliorating injustice and inequality. If you listen carefully to any Republican who is not Rand Paul, you’ll see that the concept of “big government” only encompasses two ideas: Regulations on business that protect workers or the environment and social spending.
+
+To be clear, even the category of “social spending” that qualifies as “big government” is exceedingly limited. Anything spent on middle class or wealthy people is not “big government,” but if the money goes to help lower income people—especially if they are perceived as disproportionately people of color—then all hell breaks loose. In practice, this means that Republican voters don’t treat Medicare and Social Security or other social safety net programs for the middle class as “big government”. In numbers, that means that only about 10% of federal welfare spending is considered “big government” by your average Republican politician. Consider: The term “big government” doesn’t cover Social Security, which is a quarter of the federal budget. But it is used frequently to slur “Obamaphones”—a program that provides low cost cell phones to low income people—which costs our federal government $0, because it’s paid for directly by telecom companies and not through federal taxes. And, of course, “big government” is rarely, if ever, used by conservatives to slur unnecessary regulations passed on abortion clinics for the sole purpose of reducing abortion access, or to raise the alarm about police overreach, such as “stop and frisk”. “Big” and “small” government are never defined by expenditures or by levels of government intrusiveness. The terms instead reflect whose interests are being served. Are wealthy people being served at the expense of working people, or is white privilege being protected? Then it’s “small” government. Are underprivileged people getting a leg up or are workers being protected? Then it’s “big” government. In conservative parlance, it’s “big” government to tell Hobby Lobby they can’t interfere with their employee’s reproductive choices, but it’s “small” government if legislators pass a bunch of laws interfering with women’s reproductive choices. The consistent theme here is not the actual size of the government, but whether the goal—interfering with women’s reproductive choices—is being advanced. None of this is new or particularly hard to figure out. Which is why it remains such a mystery that Rand Paul is running for president. Surely he must know that “small government” is a code term for “squash the little guy” and not an actual declaration of principles about government spending and overreach. You can’t spend more than five minutes around Republicans without seeing that quite clearly. Nor does he really articulate why you should want a literal small government if it’s not to advance the “squash the little guy” principle. There is no converting people to his point of view, since “small government” doesn’t appeal as a principle without this overarching need to reassert unjust power systems. Hell, even Paul doesn’t really believe his own nonsense, since Mr. Small Government still wants to use government power to force unwilling women to give birth. The only explanation that makes sense is that Paul’s a troll and that his campaign is a very expensive way to get some lulz at the expense of other Republicans. In an election cycle featuring Donald Trump, it’s not even the oddest motivation there is to run for president.",REAL
+432,"Report Says Trade Deal Would Boost U.S. Economy, But Opponents Say No","Report Says Trade Deal Would Boost U.S. Economy, But Opponents Say No
+
+If Congress were to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it would help the economy, though not by all that much, the U.S. International Trade Commission said Wednesday.
+
+By 2032, TPP would be increasing real GDP by nearly $43 billion annually, and supporting an additional 128,000 full time jobs.
+
+""TPP would have positive effects, albeit small as a percentage of the overall size of the U.S. economy,"" the ITC concluded.
+
+The biggest winner on a percentage basis would be agriculture and food, which would see a $10 billion boost, up 0.5 percent, by year 15 of the deal.
+
+""It is very difficult for us to find new markets,"" American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said at a press conference. This trade pact ""is good for America,"" he added.
+
+The biggest loser would be manufacturing, natural resources and energy, which would be down by a collective $10 billion, or 0.1 percent, after 15 years, the ITC said.
+
+Congress asked the independent federal agency to assess the economic impact of the proposed trade deal involving the United States and 11 other countries.
+
+President Obama strongly supports the pact and signed it in February. But the deal is on ice without congressional approval. At this time, no action is planned on Capitol Hill.
+
+Next week, Obama will be visiting Vietnam and Japan, where he will highlight his support for an economic partnership with those two countries, along with Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru.
+
+The deal is intended to open markets for U.S. exporters and farmers, and help protect intellectual property. And it is supposed to strengthen the U.S. political position in Asia.
+
+""TPP allows America – and not countries like China – to write the rules of the road in the 21st century, which is especially important in a region as dynamic as the Asia-Pacific,"" Obama said at the time of the signing.
+
+In general, most economists say TPP would help more than harm the U.S. economy.
+
+But Lori Wallach of Public Citizen says the new report shows the pact could have disastrous effects.
+
+Last year, Public Citizen said trade deals ""have failed to meet their corporate and political backers' glowing promises of job creation.""
+
+But the ITC report on NAFTA issued in January, 1993, predicted only modest gains. It said the ""estimated long-term gains in U.S. and Canadian real GDP are 0.5 percent or less.""
+
+In the post-World War II era, the U.S. economy has average 3.21 percent annual GDP growth rate.
+
+For the 20th anniversary of NAFTA's implementation, the Congressional Research Service found this: ""In reality, NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters. The net overall effect of NAFTA on the U.S. economy appears to have been relatively modest.""
+
+But whether this new TPP forecast will turn out to be right won't be known for a long time. The proposed trade deal ""will come into effect anywhere from five to maybe 30 years from now,"" Brandeis Professor Peter Petri said at the White House briefing earlier in the week. ""It's basically a long-term gradual transition in which very small changes will be made along the way, up as long as 30 years in the future.""
+
+Trade has become a central issue in this year's election cycle. For example, Republican Donald Trump has called TPP ""a horrible deal,"" while Bernie Sanders, running for the Democratic nomination, regularly refers to trade deals as disasters.",REAL
+4065,Ambivalence on arms for Ukraine separates Obama from his backers,"President Obama promised on Monday that Russia would suffer consequences for its continued aggression in eastern Ukraine, but he made one thing explicitly clear: He was in no rush to push America deeper into the conflict.
+
+Caution has been the hallmark of the president’s foreign policy for much of the past six years: Obama spent months reviewing his Afghanistan strategy in 2009 before settling on the troop surge, he went back and forth over whether to bomb Syria after the government there used chemical weapons on its own people, and in the early days of the Arab Spring he straddled the line between protesters and then-President Hosni Mubarak for weeks before deciding it was time for the dictator to go.
+
+Obama has held his careful deliberations up as a point of pride, contrasting them with the actions of his predecessor, President George W. Bush, whom he blamed for rushing the country into an unwise war in Iraq.
+
+Amid rising calls to send weapons to Ukraine’s armed forces, Obama suggested Monday that he was still thinking about it. “What I’ve asked my team to do is look at all options — what other means can we put in place to change [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s calculus — and the possibility of lethal defensive weapons is one of those options that’s being examined,” he said.
+
+The president’s ambivalence regarding arms for Ukraine has separated him from many of his traditional Democratic supporters, including some who served in his government and now are questioning his priorities. Obama has often seemed reluctant to plunge too deeply into a conflict that he doesn’t view as a major threat to the U.S. homeland or the nation’s security.
+
+Some of the president’s hesitancy could also stem from the high priority he’s placed on reaching an agreement this year with Iran to end its nuclear program. Putin and Russia have played an important role in keeping the pressure on Tehran during the delicate negotiations.
+
+The conflicting priorities have left some of the president’s backers asking whether he has played down the threat posed by Putin.
+
+“This is a damned serious thing,” said a former senior administration official who worked on the Ukraine issue, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about the president’s policy. “There’s a sense that the president doesn’t agree.”
+
+Obama isn’t alone in his reluctance to send weapons to Ukraine. Even the most ambitious plans to arm the Ukrainian military wouldn’t give the country the firepower it needs to resist the Russian army. Sending more arms into the country could inflame an already violent conflict and prompt Putin to mount even more aggressive attacks in support of the separatist rebels.
+
+Those concerns have led most European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to come out against the idea of sending American arms to Ukraine.
+
+But Obama’s reluctance to ship weapons to Ukraine is also reflective of a broader foreign policy philosophy that recognizes that the United States, despite its vast power, also has limited resources and, as a result, must be disciplined in setting priorities and exercise strategic patience.
+
+On Friday, Susan E. Rice, Obama’s top foreign policy adviser, introduced the president’s new National Security Strategy — his first in five years — and laid out one of the main lessons the administration has learned.
+
+“Too often what’s missing here in Washington is a sense of perspective,” said Rice, Obama’s national security adviser. “We cannot afford to be buffeted by alarmism in a nearly instantaneous news cycle.”
+
+By the new strategy’s reckoning, most of the threats that consume Washington, such as an aggressive Russia, don’t rise to the level of dire threats to the nation. Even the Islamic State, whose fighters have taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria, doesn’t pose a real danger to the American way of life.
+
+“Yes, there’s a lot going on,” Rice said in introducing the new strategy. “While the dangers we face may be more numerous and varied, they are not of the existential nature we confronted during World War II or the Cold War.”
+
+Instead, the president’s strategy asserts that less-traditional threats, such as climate change, global pandemics and cyber­attacks, represent the most pressing long-term dangers to the nation and deserve more focus.
+
+The strategy has put the president at odds with some of his longtime supporters in the traditional Democratic foreign policy establishment. Nowhere has the break been more apparent than on the issue of arming Ukraine. The list of prominent Democrats who have called for shipping weapons to Ukraine includes former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright, liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and even Ashton Carter, Obama’s choice to be secretary of defense.
+
+At issue is whether Obama can afford to play for time in Ukraine. Almost a year after the Russian military’s moves into Crimea and Ukraine, the conflict is by most measures worse than ever. The sanctions that Obama hoped would force Putin to reverse course have punished the Russian economy but haven’t changed the leader’s calculus.
+
+The president spoke out forcefully Monday about the need to check Putin, saying that the world could not “stand idle and simply allow the borders of Europe to be redrawn at the barrel of a gun.” But Obama also has suggested that the weakness of the Russian economy, which has been battered by sanctions, and Putin’s isolation will eventually force him to back off his aggressive stance.
+
+Obama’s calls for patience, however, have led some to question whether he’s underestimating the costs of inaction. “The problem with assuming weakness and letting the situation play out is that Putin can still wreak a lot of damage,” said Dennis Ross, a former administration official and a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.",REAL
+842,Ted Cruz popularity among Republicans takes a serious nosedive: Gallup,"Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s popularity among Republicans has plummeted in recent months and now more of them have negative views of him than positive ones, according to Gallup data released Monday.
+
+The proportion of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who view Cruz favorably has dropped to 39% — down from 61% in January — and the share who view him unfavorably has skyrocketed, going from 15% in January to 45% now.
+
+“Republicans' views of Cruz are now the worst in Gallup's history of tracking the Texas senator,” Gallup Editor Frank Newport said.
+
+The data comes as Cruz has made several moves to try to shore up support for his campaign and stop Donald Trump from winning enough delegates to clinch the Republican presidential nomination. He and Ohio Gov. John Kasich had tried to make a deal so Cruz could take on Trump one-on-one in Tuesday’s Indiana primary. That appears to have fallen apart.
+
+He named Carly Fiorina as his running mate last week, even though he hasn’t clinched the nomination and it is mathematically impossible for him to do so on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention.
+
+Cruz said this week that he nevertheless intends to go the distance, ""as long as we have a viable path to victory.""
+
+Here’s what’s happened to his popularity ratings in the Gallup polling:
+
+“After a holding period of sorts in March and early April, Cruz's image began to deteriorate significantly in the last two weeks, with his positive and negative lines crossing in the middle of last week,” Newport said.
+
+At the same time, Trump’s popularity among Republicans surged in recent weeks, with the amount who view him favorably growing from 53% to 59% and the share who view him negatively shrinking from 41% to 35%.
+
+Of course, both still have popularity problems with the general electorate — 29% more people have a negative view of Trump than a positive one and 25% more view Cruz negatively than positively.",REAL
+8066,“Fu**ing Insane”: Clinton Aide Freaks Out About Hillary Emails in Message Just Released by WikiLeaks,"
+Dang, so this email just got released: ""Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered?"" https://t.co/jXc1mHi5vn — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 27, 2016 The Backstory: 
+Clinton surrogate Neera Tanden was going on CNN with Jake Tapper in July of 2015, where she was told she'd be shown a new poll comparing Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders and others, including Jeb Bush. While she didn't know the results of said poll, she told John Podesta (via email) that she expected it to be rough. 
+Podesta fired back: 
+“PS can you imagine what the Republicans would do to [Bernie] if he were the nominee?” 
+To which Tanden replied: 
+""Well, let's see what the poll actually says. 
+Let's hope the Democratic party is not suicidal."" 
+Then Tanden dropped the hammer: 
+""Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And 
+has that person been drawn and quartered? 
+Like whole thing is fucking insane."" 
+WikiLeaks has thus far released 33,000 Podesta emails. While the Clinton campaign has yet to confirm their accuracy, they have also not challenged their authenticity. It's been 3 weeks since @WikiLeaks began publishing Podesta emails. Not one doc has been claimed - let alone demonstrated - to be doctored. — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 27, 2016 
+Expect even more to come out over the next two weeks, but keep this in mind: Way back in 2015, the people at the top of the Clinton campaign were at war over the decision to let her use personal emails. 
+Will that continue if — or when — she returns to the White House? Image Credit: Pool/Getty Images 
+Editor's Note: This story was updated after publishing to correct that Tanden, not Podesta, gave the money quote. ",FAKE
+1668,The inside story of Trump campaign’s connections to a big-money super PAC,"As he brags that he is turning down millions of dollars for his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has leveled a steady line of attack against his rivals: that they are too cozy with big-money super PACs and may be breaking the law by coordinating with them.
+
+“You know the nice part about me?” he told reporters in Iowa in August. “I don’t need anybody’s money.”
+
+What Trump doesn’t say is that he and his top campaign aide have connections to a super PAC collecting large checks to support his candidacy — a group viewed by people familiar with his campaign as the sanctioned outlet for wealthy donors.
+
+This summer, Trump appeared at at least two events for the Make America Great Again PAC, which took his campaign slogan as its name and received financing from his daughter’s mother-in-law. A consultant for the super PAC is a Republican operative who has previously worked with Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, according to several people with direct knowledge of their ties.
+
+The Trump campaign’s links to the low-profile group could undercut the candidate’s posture as the only Republican in the race who has not sought to curry favor with wealthy donors, a central part of his anti-establishment message.
+
+Lewandowski denied that Trump or the campaign had given the green light to Make America Great Again.
+
+“Unlike other campaigns, we don’t have a quote-unquote designated super PAC that we tell people to give money to,” he said.
+
+In a later interview, he threatened to file a lawsuit if The Washington Post reported that Trump had given the group his blessing.
+
+“I want to be crystal clear,” Lewandowski said. “There is no sanctioned super PAC.”
+
+Trump did not respond to requests for comments made through Lewandowski and communications director Hope Hicks.
+
+[Voters are mad about mega-donors, and it’s helping Trump and Sanders]
+
+There are a number of links between the real estate tycoon’s political operation and the Make America Great Again PAC.
+
+Mike Ciletti, a Colorado-based operative who told Politico in August that he is a consultant for the super PAC, was at the Trump campaign offices repeatedly in May and June, according to two people familiar with the visits. WizBang Solutions, the small Commerce City, Colo., printing company where Ciletti serves as a director, is a vendor to the campaign, collecting more than $56,000 in payments so far, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
+
+The Trump campaign has paid Ciletti’s printing firm since April, with the most recently reported payment on Sept. 18. Since July, Ciletti has been serving as the super PAC’s consultant. Such an arrangement with a common vendor is permissible under federal rules only if the firm has a strict firewall in place to prevent coordination. Neither Ciletti nor the company’s president returned repeated requests for comment.
+
+In one of several interviews with The Post, Lewandowski first denied knowing Ciletti or anyone connected to the super PAC. “I don’t know him,” Lewandowski said.
+
+Two days later, when confronted with the campaign’s payments to Ciletti’s firm, Lewandowski acknowledged he was familiar with Ciletti.
+
+“I know a lot of people,” he said. “I know of Mike Ciletti.”
+
+After being pressed for more details, he hung up.
+
+As Trump has soared to the top of the GOP field, he has vehemently criticized the influence of rich contributors, expressing disgust at the proliferation of super PACs and their close ties to other presidential contenders. While candidates are not supposed to collaborate directly with super PACs, they have found creative ways to work in concert.
+
+In a recent interview with The Washington Post, the New York tycoon said he planned to go after his opponents for pushing the limits of federal coordination rules.
+
+“They’re in total cahoots with their [super] PACs, which they’re not allowed to be,” Trump told The Post earlier this month. “They’re all in total cahoots. They put their friends in there. One good thing about me: I’m not.”
+
+[The 2016 presidential contenders and their big-money backers]
+
+Trump has been pressing that argument at his rallies, recently going after former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.
+
+“You know the candidate’s not allowed to talk to the PAC, right?” Trump asked a crowd in the Atlanta suburb of Norcross on Oct. 10. “They’re not allowed to talk to the PAC. You think that Bush is talking to his PAC?”
+
+“You think that Hillary is talking to her PAC?”
+
+“Not allowed to, by the way, not allowed to,” Trump continued. “I don’t.”
+
+Bush spokeswoman Allie Brandenburger dismissed Trump’s comments as a “baseless attack,” saying the campaign “fully complies with all federal campaign compliance and finance laws and regulations.” A Clinton spokesman declined to comment.
+
+Since Trump’s candidacy has taken off, a dozen super PACs with names such as Art of the Deal PAC and Let’s Trump Politics have sprung up to support him. But only one is viewed as operating with his blessing, according to four people familiar with the internal dynamics who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
+
+Sources say that the groundwork for the PAC was laid in the spring. As he drew close to announcing his candidacy, Trump talked privately with friends and advisers about the benefits of having an allied super PAC to help cover expenses, according to three people familiar with the conversations. He and his aides were also said to have been worried that unscrupulous individuals could create scam PACs that would take advantage of Trump supporters, and they are said to have talked about the need to have a reputable entity in place. The discussions are said to have occurred before Trump became an official candidate, after which he faced restrictions on how he could interact with an outside group.
+
+Lewandowski denied that such conversations occurred. “Mr. Trump has $10 billion,” he said. “He doesn’t care about a super PAC.”
+
+[Inside the fabulous world of Donald Trump, where money is no problem]
+
+At the time, Ciletti was already helping the Trump team. He had previously worked with Lewandowski when the latter was a top official at the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, which used Ciletti’s company, WizBang Solutions, as a vendor, according to people familiar with their relationship. Americans for Prosperity reported in FEC filings paying WizBang $46,000 in the 2014 elections for mailers in Colorado, North Carolina and North Dakota.
+
+The Trump campaign first paid WizBang in April to print T-shirts and business cards — two months before Trump declared his candidacy — and has paid the firm every month since, campaign finance filings show.
+
+Lewandowski gave conflicting statements to The Post about whether he had made the decision to hire Ciletti, at first saying he had not and then in a subsequent conversation saying he did not remember. He declined to say how he knew the Colorado consultant.
+
+“I know of a lot of people,” he said. “I have been in politics for 25 years.”
+
+Ciletti, who was a consultant for now-Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.)’s 2010 congressional bid, is listed in corporate filings as the director of WizBang Solutions, which is headquartered in an industrial park off the interstate in Commerce City outside of Denver.
+
+Although WizBang Solutions offers some marketing services, it’s best known locally for its printing shop, which produces glossy mailers, signs and other items. The firm’s president, Marty Soudani, did not respond to requests for comment.
+
+Ciletti began working with Trump’s team in the run-up to his June 16 announcement and visited the Trump Tower offices multiple times, according to two people who saw him there. By July, he was fielding pitches from vendors who wished to do work for the PAC, according to a consultant who did a presentation for Ciletti.
+
+The Make America Great Again PAC was registered with the FEC on July 1. A Denver lawyer named Jon Anderson sent in the paperwork. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
+
+The super PAC’s Web site prominently features a photo of Trump and his quotes, as well as news articles about his campaign. “We believe in the conservative principles America was founded upon and know that with the right leadership the citizens of this country will come together to help Make America Great Again,” reads a statement on the site.
+
+A nonprofit group called Make America Great Again that shares the same treasurer as the super PAC was also registered by Anderson, who submitted the incorporation papers in August with the Colorado secretary of state. Like super PACs, nonprofit groups can accept unlimited donations, but they are not required to disclose their contributors. Such organizations, set up under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, can do some political activity but that cannot be their primary purpose.
+
+Over the summer, Trump attended at least two events for the Make America Great Again PAC: one in Manhattan in July at the home of a woman who is a longtime Trump business associate, as first reported by Politico, and another in August at the New Jersey beachfront mansion of Seryl and Charles Kushner, his daughter Ivanka’s in-laws, as CNN reported.
+
+Guests did not have to donate to the super PAC to attend the Kushners’ event, but they were given information about how to make a contribution, and many wrote checks for various amounts, according to a person familiar with the situation.
+
+Seryl Kushner also contributed $100,000 to the Make America Great Again PAC, according to a Kushner family spokesman, who said Trump did not solicit the donation.
+
+Under FEC rules, candidates are allowed to appear at fundraisers for super PACs but they cannot request donations of more than $5,000.
+
+Lewandowski said the two gatherings that Trump attended were not fundraisers, calling the party at the Kushner estate “a family event.”
+
+When asked whether Trump knew the receptions were organized by the super PAC, Lewandowski did not respond directly. “They were both just a meet-and-greet,” he said. “He gave brief remarks and then left.”
+
+Make America Great Again PAC has not yet reported making any expenditures. The group will not have to disclose any information about its donors until Jan. 31, the day before the Iowa caucuses.
+
+On the trail, Trump has maintained that he has no idea who is setting up super PACs on his behalf.
+
+When asked by a reporter in New Hampshire last week whether he would call on such groups to cease raising money, Trump responded: “I know nothing about them, because I have nothing to do with them. I don’t even know the people running them.”
+
+Alice Crites, Anu Narayanswamy and Philip Rucker contributed to this report.",REAL
+4491,U.S. Flag Flies Over Embassy In Cuba For First Time In 54 Years,"U.S. Flag Flies Over Embassy In Cuba For First Time In 54 Years
+
+Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry presided over a ceremony reopening the U.S. Embassy in Havana, including a flag-raising ceremony — an event that will mark the first time the Stars and Stripes have flown over a diplomatic compound there in 54 years.
+
+Kerry, speaking before assembled dignitaries, remembered the strained history of U.S.-Cuba relations, including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet Union was discovered to be siting nuclear rockets on the island nation.
+
+""I was a student then and I could still remember the taut faces of our leaders,"" he said. ""We were unsettled and uncertain about our future because we didn't know when we went to bed what we would find when we woke up.""
+
+The people of Cuba ""would be best served by a genuine democracy,"" he said, but added that it was ""unrealistic"" to expect Cuba to make such a transition anytime soon. ""Cuba's future is for Cubans to shape,"" he said.
+
+Speaking in Spanish, Kerry said the ceremony showed that the U.S. and Cuba ""are no longer enemies, but neighbors.""
+
+Three U.S. Marines who lowered the flag at the embassy in 1961, when Havana and Washington severed diplomatic ties, accompanied Kerry to the ceremony and presented the new flag to Marines to hoist once again to the strains of the Star Spangled Banner.
+
+The Washington Post reports that the three Marines, retired Master Gunnery Sgt. Jim Tracy and then-Lance Cpl. Larry C. Morris and then-Cpl. F.W. Mike East, all now in their 70s, ""will appear in Havana alongside Secretary of State John F. Kerry and raise the flag again. It has been more than 54 years since U.S. relations with Cuba were severed, but the embassy has reopened following an agreement reached earlier this year between Havana and Washington.""
+
+NPR's Michele Kelemen says: ""The State Department has come under criticism for not inviting leading Cuban dissidents to the embassy. Officials say that's because this is a government-to-government event. Activists are invited to a reception later, at the U.S. ambassador's residence.""
+
+And, the Associated Press reports:",REAL
+8352,US General: Warplanes Will Kill Fleeing ISIS Fighters Around Mosul,"Iraqi Govt Warns Civilians Against Fleeing Mosul by Jason Ditz, October 31, 2016 Share This 
+According to Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigan, the commander of US air forces in the Middle East, the anti-ISIS coalition is now planning on carrying out airstrikes against any fleeing ISIS fighters around Mosul, trying to prevent escape from the massive city with aerial surveillance and targeted strikes. 
+This appears to be a response to growing concerns, both within the region and internationally, that the fall of Mosul will mean thousands of seasoned ISIS fighters popping up elsewhere around the world, destabilizing the Middle East and Europe. 
+Preventing them from escaping Mosul, however, raises a major concern that the relative lack of US intelligence on who it is targeting, and determination to shoot first and ask questions later is going to lead to US warplanes attacking groups of fleeing civilians that they come across. 
+The “solution” to this appears to be preventing civilians from fleeing the city as well, despite it being an open combat zone that will likely be facing months of combat. Iraqi officials are now said to be warning Mosul civilians not to try to escape, insisting they will be safer if they stay put. 
+Staying put in a city during an invasion is far from safe, but suggests US warplanes are going to be particularly indiscriminate in targeting people fleeing Mosul. In the recent offensive against the ISIS city of Manbij, US warplanes killed hundreds of civilians they “mistook” for ISIS, and Mosul is a much larger city with a lot more people to be mistaken for ISIS. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+4583,Presidential Transition of Power Begins amid Nationwide Protests,"Trump’s victory has been followed by talk in GOP circles of repealing Obamacare and getting the economy back on track. CBN’s Jennifer Wishon and economist Steve Moore addressed these issues and more on The 700 Club.
+
+President-elect Donald Trump met with President Barack Obama at the White House Thursday in what turned out to be a cordial first step in the transfer of power.
+
+“We talked about foreign policy, we talked about domestic policy,” the president told reporters following the 90-minute meeting, adding that it's important for the country to come together to face the challenges ahead.
+
+Trump, for his part, said he looks forward to being with the president ""many, many more times.""
+
+CBN's David Brody and Jenna Browder talk to protesters outside the White House Thursday. (Audio begins at 1:30)
+
+The meeting came as thousands of anti-Trump protestors hit the streets Wednesday, from New York to Philadelphia to Chicago and Los Angeles, to express their anger over Trump's surprising victory.
+
+One protestor expressed the shock and disbelief of many Clinton supporters when she said, ""Something horrific and unbelievable has happened.""
+
+But Trump promised to be a president for all Americans.
+
+""To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people,"" Trump said in his victory speech Wednesday morning.
+
+Obama also called for Americans to come together, saying, ""It is no secret that the president-elect and I have some pretty significant differences. We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country.""
+
+Although many world leaders also expressed support for Trump, Europeans who watched the election closely and expected a certain Clinton victory were still trying to come to grips with the results.  French President Francois Hollande said Trump's victory ""opens a period of uncertainty.""
+
+Much more certain is Trump's agenda for his first 100 days.  A top priority is to repeal and replace Obamacare.
+
+""Believe me, we'll get rid of that,"" Trump warned when he was on the campaign trail. ""I've been saying it for years.""
+
+                                                 
+
+ Trump has also promised middle class families a 35 percent tax cut, although the Tax Foundation, which has reviewed the plan, said it would actually cut taxes for several income levels.
+
+                                     
+
+ Trump has also vowed to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and to make it a lot tougher for persons from terror-related countries to enter the U.S., saying, ""Radical Islamic terror is right around the corner. We have to be so tough, so smart, so vigilant.""
+
+                                                 
+
+ The president-elect is also eager to fill the empty seat on the Supreme Court, which has been vacant since Justice Antonin Scalia's death in February, with a conservative justice -- and he could get more chances to appoint justices.
+
+Wall Street quickly adjusted to the idea of a Trump presidency.  After an initial sell-off, stocks posted strong gains.
+
+Meanwhile, President-elect Trump has a lot on his plate, and a lot to talk about when he meets with President Obama.",REAL
+6120,"Now More Than Ever, We Must Tell the Truth About the Iraq War","We Must Tell the Truth About the Iraq War Posted on Oct 30, 2016 
+By Jodie Evans / AlterNet Ewan McIntosh / CC BY-NC 2.0 
+“The only silver lining of the Brexit vote is that it will reduce medium term attention on Chilcot – though it will not stop the day of publication being uncomfortable,” former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the previous U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in a July 4th email obtained by the Intercept. 
+As it turns out, these words would be prescient. The Chilcot Report , a damning 12-volume, 2.6-million-word inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq War, did not get much attention on either side of the pond upon its July release. The probe was overlooked at a time that the Iraq War was still raging even though everyone thought it was over, and the millennials I talked to had little idea of the lies or the costs. This summer and fall, it became increasingly clear that the tumultuous U.S. election cycle will not propel anyone with a peace platform to the presidency. I decided I needed to do something that will be useful in the face of even more wars after the election madness is over. 
+So we launched a People’s Tribunal on the Iraq War as a tool to bring the anti-war movement together and build what is needed for 2017. We aim to lay the lies and costs at the feet of President Barack Obama and call for a commission on Truth and Accountability. There are years’ worth of testimony in reports, lawsuits, books and articles. We have read the facts about the lies and costs over the years. But the totality has never been been pulled together to show the breadth of all effected. 
+According to a report released last year by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Physicians for Global Survival and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the U.S. invasion and occupation killed at least one million Iraqi people. That would be more 10 million people in the United States if we compared it in terms of percentage of the population. Imagine the effect of 10 million people dying. 
+Advertisement Square, Site wide 
+There are over 100,000 casualties on the side of the U.S. and the coalition of the willing, with a small percentage of those dead. The rest are living with permanent physical and psychological wounds, some so bad that U.S. military veterans are committing suicide at a rate of 20 a day. In 2012, suicides surpassed war as a the leading cause of death in the U.S. military. 
+Since 2001, U.S. wars have cost taxpayers nearly $5 trillion, according to a new report from Brown University’s Watson Institute. But few can understand what that number actually means. Nor does this amount count the cost to people in Iraq or other members of the coalition of the willing. 
+I have heard these reports at various tribunals over the years. But numbers and facts don’t change hearts and minds. This tribunal will be different. It will be a people’s tribunal, to be witnessed by the public, which will be presented with a large body of evidence. 
+The participants on the days of the tribunal will be “delivering” evidence with a five-minute statement about the meaning of that evidence. Dennis Kucinich will present the letter he wrote to Congress in October of 2002 outlining his research which showed there was no operational connection between the Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda or weapons of mass destruction. Jeremy Corbyn will deliver the Chilcot Report. Elizabeth Holtzman, the member of Congress in the 1970s recognized as the woman who impeached Nixon, will deliver her book calling for the Impeachment of George W. Bush. 
+We will be joined by people from across the United States and world. The World Tribunal on Iraq , which culminated in Istanbul, Turkey and has held sessions across the globe, will deliver all of these testimonies. The Brussels Tribunal will deliver the book and testimony that emerged from their efforts. Inder Comar will deliver the documents that make up the ongoing class action suit against six members of the George W. Bush administration alleging that the Iraq War constituted a war of aggression. There will be over 50 offers of testimony each day. 
+On day one, December first, we will focus on the lies that fed the drive to war. On day two, we will hear more than 50 people testify to innumerable costs of U.S. war in Iraq, which in fact goes back at least 25 years . 
+Yes, there is a staggering cost to U.S. taxpayers—but also the cost to the planet and the militarization of our cities and police departments. We will hear from the mother of a young black man who was killed the last week of high school by a cop who was a veteran of the Iraq War suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. We will hear from soldiers who were raped by fellow soldiers. Rabbis and priests will discuss the cost to our morality. We will hear about the costs of the U.S. use of depleted uranium to Iraqis and the children of American soldiers who served there. The event will be live streamed on The Real News, with testimony delivered in person, by live stream or by video. The combination of all the testimony will be delivered to Obama and Congress. But the real work has already begun. The coalition is using the tribunal to gather local communities to discuss the cost of war to them, encouraging them to review what they could have had instead of war. Such collective exercises demonstrate how the costs of war come home, literally. 
+Most of the members of our coalition are outreaching to their lists to join with a call to Obama for a Commission on Truth and Accountability. Other partners are outreaching for voices that still need to join those testifying. When the election is finally over, testifiers will begin to discuss their testimony in the media, laying a path to the tribunal of details, broken hearts, destroyed communities and devastated families. We must tell our truth as passionately and effectively as the architects of war tell their lies. We must come together and gather the stories of destruction and loss, in order to witness and remember. Join in. Make it your own. Share with your community. Raise awareness. The time to stop the next war is now.",FAKE
+5392,Culture War – The ‘Have Mores’ Mock DAPL Protectors for Halloween,"Waking Times 
+More evidence emerges that a culture war, or class war, is brewing between the 99% and the 1%, between the ‘Have-Mores’ and the ‘Have-Nots.’ Or, more truthfully between the middle and lower socio-economic classes who are forced to follow the law and pay taxes, and the elite who are allowed to be absolutely lawless and ruthless in their accumulation of wealth and privilege. 
+In a speech in 2000 at the Al Smith Dinner for charity , the same event that recently hosted presidential candidates Trump and Clinton together, former President George W. Bush reminded us who the political elite works for in this nation, and in the world at large. 
+“This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base” ~George W. Bush 
+This sort of trickle-down mentality of disdain for the middle classes has not since the days of monarchs been as visible as it is today in 2016. The 1% are doing the most insane things with the wealth that is being stolen from the rest of us by way of collusion between corrupt government and the want-all banking cabal, and sadly, this mentality is being bred into succeeding generations of the entitled. 
+Indigenous activists accompanied by sympathizers from all walks of life are being beaten, tazed, gassed, bitten, and shot at by a front line of private security, police, and national guard on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Their efforts to oppress the people who live on this land, who have for generations buried their ancestors here, are backed by a court system which is actively targeting sympathetic journalists who dare to expose this living tyranny. The politicians on high in Congress and the White House are committed to silence in support of the financial interests of the pipeline project . READ: This is the Man Militarized Police at Standing Rock are Working For 
+As reported by Vincent Schilling of Indian Country Today , Halloween is being celebrated by the ‘Have Mores’ in North Dakota this year, and some apparently find it entertaining to mock the ‘Water is Life’ struggle of the Sioux people whose native treaty lands have been invaded in recent months by the oil cartel backed by militarized police. 
+“In the midst of the struggles faced by Native people on the frontlines of NoDAPL, some individuals have taken to social media, posting pictures of themselves in Native American “NoDAPL” Halloween costumes. In one photo, two girls wearing feathers and shirts with #NoDAPL are in a liquor store holding beers while another couple posed with makeshift costumes holding a bottle of wine, also holding #NoDAPL signs. In the post with the two girls, which appears to have been taken from Snapchat, one of the signs reads, “I Godda Job, I’m a Water Pertecter.” The caption on the screen captured image says, “Let’s start a riot!” The woman on the left of the photo has what appears to be chains on her ankle.” [ Source ] In another photo, a couple is seen in mock Indian garb, ready to get drunk on the high vibes of ignorance and disrespect. 
+The photos are of North Dakota, and it’s worth mentioning the original route of the Dakota Access pipeline was slated to carry the oil just 10 miles north of Bismarck, N.D., however, residents in these areas were able to avert pipeline construction in this area, citing environmental concerns. 
+“An early proposal for the Dakota Access Pipeline called for the project to cross the Missouri River north of Bismarck, but one reason that route was rejected was its potential threat to Bismarck’s water supply, documents show.” 
+As reported by MPR News on September 13th, 2016: 
+“The Dakota Access Pipeline was originally proposed to run about 10 miles north of Bismarck, N.D., crossing the Missouri River. This route was rejected in the Corps’ environmental assessment due to its close proximity to source water protection areas, multiple conservation easements and residential areas — the North Dakota Public Service Commission has a 500-foot residential buffer requirement.” 
+In other words, residents of Bismarck were able to stop this pipeline from being built in their backyards, and some now find the same struggle by the Sioux people worthy of ridicule, further amplifying the cultural differences between groups of people who depend upon the same resources for survival. The Culture War is First and Foremost the Economic War 
+Such disconnectedness and such disrespect for the struggle against corporate ownership of the land and water that sustains all life on human earth is a sad trend , but it’s important to understand that the brewing culture war has its roots in the financial tyranny that has gripped planet earth. We are all being raped by an emerging global corporate scheme of government that derives its power from manipulation of the money supply through a private banking system that is not accountable to any electorate, nor to the rule of law. 
+As such, the inevitable outcome is a culture war, where those who value life and have respect for the natural world will be pitched in conflict with the entitled and belligerent 1% whose continued entitlement increasingly depends upon the protective shield of violence gained from the deployment of a radically militarized police state who serves not the people. Read more articles by Dylan Charles . About the Author 
+Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com , the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com , a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. He may be contacted at . This article ( War Brewing as the ‘Have Mores’ Dress Up as DAPL Protectors for Halloween ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. 
+~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
+692,The Art of the Swindle,"Predators, by and large, do not attack the strongest prey in the wild. They instead target the vulnerable, the very young, and the very old—the prey that is least able to defend itself. Trump University, the defunct real-estate education program created by presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, pursued a similar approach, according to its former employees in legal documents unsealed Tuesday. The Art of the Upsell: How Donald Trump Profits From 'Free' Seminars “Based upon my personal experience and employment, I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money,” said Ronald Schnackenberg, a sales manager at Trump University in 2006 and 2007. Those declarations and other internal Trump University documents depict an aggressive, ethically dubious business model that targeted potential customers’ financial fears and socioeconomic anxieties and offered Trump’s personal brand as the solution—a strategy later echoed in his presidential campaign.
+
+In his declaration, Schnackenberg recounted meeting a couple after a live event in New York City in 2007. Apparently swayed by the presentation, they expressed an interest in purchasing a $35,000 Trump Gold Elite program, the most expensive tier available. “I did not think it was an appropriate program for them because of their precarious financial condition—they had no money to pay for the program, but would have had to pay for the program using disability income and taking out a loan based upon equity in his apartment,” he testified. “Trump University reprimanded me for not trying harder to sell the program to this couple.” A different salesperson closed the deal with them. “I was disgusted by this conduct and decided to resign,” Schnackenberg said. Schnackenberg made the declaration in September 2012—about three years before Donald Trump announced his presidential bid—as part of a class-action lawsuit against the businessman by former Trump University customers. The declaration and other trial documents remained under seal until Tuesday after federal judge Gonzalo Curiel—a newfound target of Trump’s stump-speech anger—ordered many of them to be made public Friday in response to a public-interest motion by the Washington Post. For a Trump University employee, failure simply meant the abstract loss of potential profit. For a Trump University student, however, failure could mean financial ruin.
+
+Official scripts and guidelines in Trump University’s sales playbooks harnessed this fear to drive prospective buyers towards the product. During one-on-one sessions after the $1,500 second-tier seminar, the playbook encouraged salespeople to assess each customer’s fears, goals, and financial status, then “close the deal” on the next tier of seminars. “When you introduce the price, don’t make it sound like you think it’s a lot of money, if you don’t make a big deal out of it they won’t,” the playbook advises. “If they can afford the gold elite don’t allow them to think about anything besides the gold elite.” The Trump Gold Elite package, which included a series of retreats, a three-day “in-field mentorship,” and a free trial on foreclosure-tracking software, cost $35,000. If the customer hesitated, the playbook offered a sample text to “push them out of their comfort zone” by criticizing their financial status. “It’s time for you to be 100% honest with yourself,” the suggested text read. “You’ve had your entire adult life to accomplish your financial goals. I’m looking at your profile and you’re not even close to where you need to be, much less where you want to be. It’s time to fix your broken plan, bring in Mr. Trump’s top instructors and certified millionaire mentors and allow us to put you and keep you on the right track. Your plan is BROKEN and WE WILL help you fix it.” The playbook also includes rebuttals to common concerns about spending up to $35,000 on a series of seminars. For example, if customers want to try real-estate investing on their own, salespeople were told to pepper them with technical questions about their business plan, apparently to undermine their self-confidence.
+
+“How are you going to locate the properties? How are you determining ARV? All cash offer? Where is your financing coming from? How will you negotiate price? Terms? What about exit strategies?” the playbook offers as suggested dialogue. “One mistake on any one of these and you’re broke, beaten, and worse off than you are now.” “You can ask them questions so they realize they don’t have a chance for long term or short term success,” the playbook then reminds the employee. Amidst this sea of imagined dangers, the salesperson would then pivot to pitch Trump University as a lifeboat. “The risk isn’t spending 35K – it’s entering into the world of REAL ESTATE without specialized knowledge, guidance and trained professionals in the field holding your hand,” the playbook’s rebuttals said. “WE are the safe decision.” The playbook frequently tells Trump University employees to lean on the instructors’ and mentors’ wisdom as a selling point. But Jason Nichols, a Trump University sales executive who worked for the company in 2007, challenged this depiction in his declaration to the court. “The Trump University instructors and mentors were a joke. Most of them were not experts in real estate and did not [have] experience in the real estate techniques they were teaching,” Nichols said. “They were unqualified people posing as Donald Trump’s ‘right-hand men.’ They were teaching methods that were unethical, and they had little to no experience flipping properties or doing real estate deals. It was a façade, a total lie.”
+
+Other rebuttals suggested by training materials likewise appealed to customers’ insecurities while invoking Trump’s success. What if customers say they want to invest that $35,000 fee in property instead? “You have no specialized knowledge or system to fall back on,” the playbook suggests. “Mr. Trump doesn’t use his own money to invest and look at his success!” Or a customer might say they have enough information to invest on their own. “But what we’re offering is a proven system from Mr. Trump to help you close multiple deals every month, with a millionaire mentor by your side making sure you don’t make any mistakes, and creating the most amount of profit per deal,” the playbook counters. “Let me ask you a question; are you capable of making one or two mistakes on your own?” (In parentheses, the salesperson is instructed to smile while saying these lines.) The scripts and rebuttals emphasize the risk of not taking part in the program while evading its inherent risks. What if the customer doesn’t want to go into debt by purchasing the seminars? “Every single company goes into debt when they are first starting out, EVERY SINGLE BUSINESS!” the playbook says. “The profits pay off the debt and before you know it, your new real-estate business will start making amazing returns.” Corinne Sommer, the former manager of Trump University’s events departments, recalled how instructors in the second-level seminars, which cost roughly $1,500 to attend, would ask customers to call their credit-card companies to triple or quadruple their credit limit and max out their credit cards for real-estate investments.
+
+“While Trump University’s advertisements claimed it wanted to help consumers make money in real estate, in fact, based upon my experience, I believe that Trump University was only interested in selling every person the most expensive seminars they could possibly buy on credit,” Sommer testified. “I recall that some consumers had showed up who were homeless and could not afford the seminars, yet I overheard Trump University representatives telling them, ‘it’s ok; just max out your credit card.’” Not everyone proved unhappy; the filings also included testimony from many graduates of Trump University who professed themselves delighted with the decisions they’d made. Trump University came to an end five years before Trump’s presidential campaign officially began. But both products rely on a similar three-part strategy. The first part is an emphasis on insecurity. For Trump University’s sales team, that meant focusing on the customer’s personal financial shortcomings when closing a deal. For Trump himself, it manifests as stump speeches bemoaning the decline in American manufacturing, the peril of illegal immigration, the rise of China and ISIS, and how “we don’t win anymore.” These insecurities may or may not be grounded in reality. But the solutions to them often aren’t. Trump University promised an easy path to wealth and success in the real-estate market just as the housing bubble was about to burst. (“Let’s get you enrolled today so you can start building a real estate empire,” reads one suggested line from the playbook.) Trump’s campaign solutions are even more grandiose, ranging from a giant wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to a military so large and strong “we’ll never have to use it.” The third part is Trump, or, perhaps more accurately, Trump’s personal brand, in all its coiffed and gilded glory. Decades of effort invested in making a surname synonymous with business acumen and extravagant wealth imbued Trump University with a legitimacy it could not otherwise acquire. Trump himself also relies on this on the campaign trail—not the name recognition, but its association with “winning.” For both Trump and Trump University, the goal is for prospective customers and potential voters alike to think his success can rub off on them, too. But that payoff may never come. “I do not believe that Trump University taught Donald Trump’s investing ‘secrets,’” one former Trump employee testified. “Donald Trump came from a wealthy family and had resources at his disposal to purchase real estate—that is the secret—one the average consumer could not replicate.”",REAL
+9531,"Luis Lázaro Tijerina: Americans and the Trump ""Victory"" - Russia News Now","This post was originally published on this site 
+The Scandal That Shook America 
+For the first time since my return to the US in 2000 – and taking into account my ten-year stay in the seventies — I see Americans losing faith in… 
+The level of irrationality, confusion, and “negative energy” is the most astonishing signal emanating from the US presidential elections. This is a… 
+What is arguably one of the most influential and far-reaching election in modern history is finally taking place today. The US is tasked with… 
+As we have already said many times, the main aspect of this political season is not elections, but war. But if elections do have importance somewhere… 
+The chiefs of the Hunkpapa Lakota and Yanktonai Dakota Indians, their people, and others, including Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian… 
+Andrew Korybko about the results of US elections and Trump’s victory 
+Hillary Clinton, in a trademark act of cynicism, has decided to cast Russia, it’s leader and by extension its people as an enemy of the United States… 
+On Sunday, the first round of presidential elections was held in Bulgaria. The turnout exceeded 50%, but none of the candidates received the required… 
+Washington made another attempt to escalate the conflict in Syria on Saturday. The consequences may be dramatic: the Syrian-Iraqi crisis is turning… 
+The great presidential debate on September 26th, 2016 – set to be the first of three – was the subject of great controversy in the mainstream media…. 
+This year is the 15th anniversary of the the events of September 11th, 2001. That morning, New York was faced with the collapse of the World Trade… Related ",FAKE
+4787,Temperament question dominates Clinton-Trump debate,"Trump's comment that he has a 'winning temperament' was the most-tweeted moment of the debate, pointing to the debate's main theme.
+
+Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton answers a question as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump listens during the presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., on Monday, Sept. 26, 2016.
+
+From the beginning of the 2016 presidential race, Donald Trump has faced a nagging question: Does he have the right temperament to be commander-in-chief?
+
+He's brash, he's entertaining, he's thin-skinned – none of which disqualify him, in the eyes of many voters, from sitting in the big chair and making the big decisions. But on Monday night, the Republican presidential nominee faced the toughest test yet in his highly anticipated first debate against Democrat Hillary Clinton: Could he go toe-to-toe against an experienced political debater and come across as a plausible president?
+
+The bar was low, and Trump began the debate strongly. The billionaire scored points against Clinton on the economy, jobs, and trade. ""We're losing our good jobs,"" Trump said, reinforcing a theme that has propelled him to a commanding lead among non-college-educated white men – and a virtual tie in the overall race.
+
+But soon enough, the temperament issue reared its head as Trump began interrupting and at times, shouting. According to Vox.com, Trump interrupted Clinton 25 times in the first 26 minutes, and by the end, had interrupted her three times as often as she had interrupted him, 51 to 17.
+
+Finally, the meta became the explicit, when Trump raised the issue of temperament himself.
+
+""I have much better judgment than she does,"" he said, talking about Clinton's vote for the Iraq war as a senator. ""There's no question about that. I also have a much better temperament than she has, you know?""
+
+Laughter rang out from audience, despite debate ground rules that forbade audience reaction.
+
+""I think my strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament,"" he said. ""I have a winning temperament. I know how to win. She does not.""
+
+It was the most-tweeted-about moment of the debate, according to Hollywood Reporter. ""When 'I have the right temperament' gets the biggest house laugh, it's not going your way,"" tweeted Broadway star Lin-Manuel Miranda.
+
+Clinton soon came back to the topic, when discussion turned to US-Iran relations, and Trump's statement last week that he would shoot Iranian vessels ""out of the water"" if they bothered American ships.
+
+""That is not the right temperament to be commander-in-chief,"" Clinton said.
+
+Merriam-Webster.com reports that the exchange sent viewers to their dictionaries, and that look-ups of the word ""temperament"" spiked. Inquiries were 78 times higher than the site’s usual hourly average.
+
+But the meaning of temperament is easier sensed than described. Merriam-Webster’s definition is “the usual attitude, mood, or behavior of a person or animal.” That, it seems, could mean anything.
+
+In a political context, a presidential temperament could refer to prudence, wisdom, and restraint. Trump's outsize personality, and his willingness to say things other politicians wouldn’t dare, has struck some voters as a breath of fresh air in an era when most politicians play it safe and speak in poll-tested sound bites.
+
+Trump's rhetoric – at times ""politically incorrect,"" in his view – set him apart from the rest of the GOP primary field and helped him to the party's presidential nomination.
+
+But now he's playing for the presidency itself, and his tone and comportment have emerged as major sticking points for some voters. And there remain loyal Republicans who would like to support their party's nominee, but still aren't there yet – voters Trump needs to win in November.
+
+One such voter, Richard Bonomo, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, watched the debate closely but after it was over, did not indicate a readiness to commit to Trump.
+
+""Trump held his own,"" Mr. Bonomo said in an email. ""Clinton did get in several very good points, but her record of lying makes it difficult to accept uncritically just anything she says.""
+
+Overnight polls showed Clinton as the ""winner"" of the debate, but post-debate polls can be fleeting and don't predict the ultimate outcome of a presidential race.
+
+""It was a fiery debate that won't move a lot of votes,"" says Republican strategist Ford O'Connell. ""So all eyes will be focused on the second debate. Remember, voters are grading the candidates differently. Trump has the momentum in the polls, and therefore he just has to be plausible in the Oval Office. Which he was.""
+
+Still, he acknowledges that Clinton scored points, noting how she put Trump on the defensive about his refusal to release his tax returns and on ""birtherism"" – Trump's longtime questioning of whether President Obama was born in the United States, which he only recently said was a settled issue.
+
+""The good news for Trump is that he went toe-to-toe with Secretary Clinton on the debate stage, which elevated his legitimacy as a candidate – something especially crucial when you are the challenger party candidate,"" Mr. O'Connell said. ""As we move on to the second debate, look for both candidates to tweak their tactics – particularly Trump.""
+
+Indeed, Trump's biggest failing in the debate may have been his many missed opportunities. He didn't go after Clinton for calling half of Trump supporters a ""basket of deplorables."" He also skipped the Clinton Foundation, Benghazi, and Clinton's ties to Wall Street.
+
+Clinton, for her part, can be expected to continue to pound Trump on his range of vulnerabilities, including his temperament, his business record, and his comments about women and minorities.
+
+In the business world, ""half of the money spent on marketing is wasted; we just don’t know which half,"" says David Redlawsk, chairman of the political science department at the University of Delaware, Newark. ""It's the same with information flows in a campaign. We know they matter somewhere, but it's hard to know which matter.""",REAL
+2382,Are Democrats crippling Obamacare?,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+10390,Trump warning: the start of World War III and ISIS,"Chaosistan , Phenomenon of Terrorism by Gulam ASGAR MITHA (Canada) 
+The American lust for power and neo-con agendas has been causing catastrophes in the Middle East and the Muslim world now for over four decades. What is, however, a cause for greater fear is that this is leading towards a global conflict. The world just got another warning, this time from Donald Trump the US Republican Presidential candidate who has been speaking the truth though rather incoherently since he is not a politician. He has been set up by a strong establishment to ensure that Hillary Clinton wins the November 4 elections. It may seem that the Republicans did not want to host a conflict which is why they provided an opening for Trump against Hillary who will go down in history as the first US woman President. She has no qualms towing the neo-con agenda. 
+Trump has now openly come out on CNN on October 26 and suggested that Hillary Clinton, when elected, will start World War 3. Why? In my opinion the best reasonings were provided by WeAreChange in a video titled ISIS: The Start of World War 3 (2014) . So here we’ve Trump who warns not only about the Great War but he is mentioning the need to focus on ISIS and not on Syria. One must remember that the seeds for the Great War were planted in 2011 in Libya first and following that in Syria under the pretext of toppling Assad. 
+There are too many dots to connect but by connecting some dots chronographically, it is interesting to note a few facts. One is that ISIL (the L being Levant) drove through from Eastern Syria into Iraq stretching from Mosul to Tikrit to slightly north of Baghdad along the banks of River Euphrates for establishing the “Islamic Caliphate”. Euphrates is the eastern boundary that Israel claims is the Biblical greater Zion; the Nile being the western boundary. Two, ISIL fighters appeared in a most enigmatic manner in early 2014, very well armed. Some sources have suggested that the weapons were looted from Libyan armories stashed by NATO to topple Gaddafi in 2011 and then smuggled into Syria through Turkey a key NATO ally. On June 13, 2013 the New York Times reported that three Qatari C-17 cargo planes collected arms from Libya then returned to Al-Udeid base from where the cargo was then flown to Ankara, Turkey, along with other weapons and equipment that the Qataris had been gathering for the rebels, officials said. Sources have suggested that funding of $2-4 billion initially came from Saudi Arabia and Qatar through Turkey. 
+Three, the behaviour of the “terrorists” was unbecoming of Islamic preaching or what any Muslim would condone, especially that towards women and children. Four, within one year of ISIL takeover of a large part of Iraq, the P5+1 nuclear deal was finalized as a historic achievement. 
+Though US-NATO may not have directly created ISIL or ISIS, there has most definitely been suggestions that the US played a covert role with the overt objective of creating a Sunni bloc. 
+With retrospect to Iran, the Supreme Leader Ayotallah Ali Khamenei had told Javed Zarif that he supports the P5+1 N-deal maintaining that Iran never had the need for a N-bomb. His reservations were about the Israeli-American interests specifically that “beneath the nuclear bowl lies a half nuclear bowl”. He suggested to Zarif to try and find out the agenda but most importantly to get the sanctions lifted. In words of many experts the Iranians got more out of the deal. The Ayatollah was probably aware of the agenda which could well be the Shia-Sunni conflict. The sanctions against Iran had failed to satisfy the US towards weakening Iran; in fact Iran has become stronger much to American chagrin. By lifting the sanctions the US has economically and politically empowered Iran and by default created a Shia bloc extending from Iran to Lebanon which includes Iraq, Syria and Yemen. 
+Iran had covertly supported Hezbollah in the July 2006 conflict with Israel and now they’re again supporting Iraq to successfully oust ISIL from Iraq. Mosul is the last remaining ISIL bastion after which they might flee and regroup with Jabhat Fatal al-Sham (formerly Al-Nusra) and the Sunni coalition (including Turkey, Egypt and Arab countries) in Syria where Russia, Iran and Hezbollah might become engaged in an open conflict. 
+President Obama has not supported the no-fly zone (NFZ) in his watch mentioning that the Syrian civil war is “not a conflict between the US and any party in Syria” although former US secretary of State Hillary Clinton has publicly supported the idea. In a paper published by the Washington based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) on November 4, 2015, it is mentioned that a UN sponsored NFZ resolution is desirable but not essential for US action. The ISW paper has stated that “if the US intends to lead a sustainable negotiated settlement to the Syrian Civil war or to reinvigorate the moderate rebels, establishing a NFZ is essential.”If as President, Hillary Clinton does arbitrarily institute the NFZ without a UN approval that would certainly imply the direct involvement of the US in the conflict which could well become the flashpoint for the Great War 
+It might interest the reader that the founder of ISW is none other than Dr. Kimberly Kagan, wife of Dr. Frederick Kagan who is associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington based conservative (neo-con) think tank and a signatory to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The Kagan family also include Donald, Robert (characterized as a leading neo-conservative) and Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in which position she maneuvered the Ukrainian crisis in early 2014. Are these diplomats, including John Kerry, slated to be a strong part of Ms. Clinton’s cabinet? 
+In conclusion, it is not unreasonable to forego that Trump is correct that Hillary Clinton could catalyse the Syrian civil war into a global conflict. This author’s premise and We Are Change video provides the reasoning that ISIS is the start of WW III. 
+Gulam Asgar Mitha is a retired Technical Safety Engineer. He has worked with several N. American and International oil and gas companies. He has worked in Libya, Qatar, Pakistan, France, Yemen and UAE. Currently Gulam lives in Calgary, Canada and enjoys reading and keeping in tune with current global political issues. RELATED POSTS",FAKE
+6670,Trump Win Jitters New World Order Financial Markets,"Trump Win Jitters New World Order Financial Markets November 02, 2016 Trump Win Jitters New World Order Financial Markets 
+(LONDON) - World stocks, the dollar and oil fell on Wednesday, while safe-haven assets such as gold and the Swiss franc rose as investors were rattled by signs the U.S. presidential race was tightening just days before the vote. Investors were beginning to rethink their long-held bets of a Nov. 8 victory for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton amid signs her Republican rival Donald Trump could be closing the gap, deepening the recent decline across major stock markets. Asian stocks hit a seven-week low on Wednesday, while European bourses followed Wall Street's lead overnight and slid to a four-month low. Bonds rose alongside gold, the Swiss franc and Japanese yen, with the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasuries falling for the third day in a row. British gilts, which have recently been slammed by uncertainty surrounding the post-Brexit UK outlook, surged too. 
+""The lead up to the U.S. presidential election was always expected to be lively but the events of the last couple of days have seriously taken their toll on investor sentiment,"" said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at Oanda in London. 
+Investor anxiety has deepened in recent sessions over a possible Trump victory given uncertainty on the Republican candidate's stance on key issues including foreign policy, trade relations and immigrants, while Clinton is viewed as a candidate of the status quo. 
+READ MORE: EUROPE IS HOPING FOR A CLINTON WIN BECAUSE THAT MEANS MORE DEALS WITH IRAN 
+Europe's index of leading 300 shares was last down 0.4 percent <.FTEU3>, having earlier hit a four-month low of 1,313 points. Britain's Britain's FTSE <.FTSE> and Germany's DAX <.GDAXI> fell 0.4 and 0.7 percent, respectively. 
+MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.MIAPJ0000PUS> dropped 1.1 percent to seven-week lows while the yen's rise to a two-week high helped push Japan's Nikkei <.N225> down 1.8 percent. 
+U.S. stock futures recovered earlier losses, pointing to a fall of only 0.1 percent at the open. This would still signify a fresh four-month low for Wall Street. 
+PRICING A TRUMP VICTORY 
+The tumultuous presidential race appeared to tighten after news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was reviewing more emails as part of a probe into Clinton's use of a private email server. 
+While Clinton held a five-percentage-point lead over Trump, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Monday, some other polls showed her Republican rival ahead by 1-2 percentage points. 
+Barclays strategists estimate that a rise in Trump's polling odds to 50 percent could see the S&P 500 fall 4-5 percent, and potentially as much as 10-11 percent if he wins. 
+This has unnerved markets and the CBOE volatility index <.VIX>, often seen as investors' fear gauge, rose to a two-month high above 20 percent. 
+The tension in markets came as the Federal Reserve holds its two-day policy meeting, with its statement due later on Wednesday. While traders do not expect a rate hike just a week ahead of the presidential election, they are looking for signs that the Fed will move in December. 
+Investors have grown increasingly confident in recent weeks that the Fed will follow through next month, attaching an 80 percent probability to such a move, according to fed funds futures pricing. 
+But currency traders have sold the dollar this week in part because they suspect Trump would prefer a weaker dollar given his protectionist stance on international trade, and in part because the uncertainty surrounding a Trump win might lead to a more dovish stance from the Fed in the months ahead. 
+The dollar fell again on Wednesday, after posting its biggest one-day fall on Tuesday in two months. 
+The euro rose 0.4 percent to touch $1.11 for the first time in more than three weeks. It is up about two percent from its 7-1/2-month low of $1.0851 hit last week. 
+Against the yen, the dollar fell 0.8 percent to 103.24 yen from three-month high of 105.54 yen set on Friday. 
+""If you had a long dollar position on the view that the dollar would gain because Clinton would win, you would surely close that position because her victory is less certain,"" said Koichi Yoshikawa, executive director of financial markets at Standard Chartered Bank. 
+Other safe-haven assets also rose. The Swiss franc hit a four-month high of 1.0750 francs per euro , its highest level since late June, while gold reached a four-week high of $1,297 per ounce. 
+Oil prices fell for the fourth day in a row, sliding to one-month lows. Brent crude futures fell more than 1 percent to $47.53 per barrel, and U.S. crude was down as low as $46.06 . Oil has lost 10 percent in the last two weeks. 
+Story contribution by Reuters ; Commentary by TRUNEWS Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+1566,"GOP contenders prep for loud, ugly holiday season","Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+5500,Here’s What Happens in Your Brain When You Lie,"posted by Eddie A new study revealed that consistent small lies could alter the way on how a certain part of the brain associated to negative emotions respond to lie, desensitizing our brain in the process and encourages bigger lies in the future. The study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience , is the first to provide empirical evidence that telling small lies could gradually lead to larger lies. Additionally, the study is also the first to have a deeper look on the brain’s responses to repeated and increasing acts of dishonesty. “When we lie for personal gain, our amygdala produces a negative feeling that limits the extent to which we are prepared to lie,” explained senior author Dr Tali Sharot, from University College London Experimental Psychology, in a statement . “However, this response fades as we continue to lie, and the more it falls the bigger our lies become. This may lead to a ‘slippery slope’ where small acts of dishonesty escalate into more significant lies.” For the study, the researchers recruited 80 volunteers. The participants took part in a team estimation task that involved guessing the number of pennies in the jar and sending their estimates to unseen partners using computers. The researchers introduced the participants in different scenarios that may affect their estimation. As the baseline scenario, the participants were told that aiming for the most accurate estimate would benefit them and their partners. Other scenarios include over- or under-estimating the amount of pennies would either benefit them both, benefit them at their partner’s expense, benefit their partners at their expense and benefit one of them without any effect on the other one. The researchers observed that participants started exaggerating their estimates in the scenario in which over-estimating would benefit them at the expense of their partner. The exaggeration of the estimates elicited a strong response from the amygdala. However, as the Due exaggerations of the estimate continue to escalate throughout the study, the response from the amygdala declined. These findings show that the amygdala signals aversion to acts that considered to wrong or immoral. However, repeated acts of dishonesty can solicit a blunt response from the brain, reducing the emotional response to dishonest acts. Source:",FAKE
+9184,Donald Trump Destroyed as Fact Checker Reveals Trump Lies 20 to 37 Times Per Day,"By Hrafnkell Haraldsson on Mon, Oct 31st, 2016 at 7:59 am In Donald Trump ""you have a candidate who is frequently saying 20 false things in a day, up to 37 on some days."" Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+CNN’s Brian Stelter calls Donald Trump a “uniquely fact-challenged candidate,” which is a prelude to introducing Daniel Dale, Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star , who fact checks every single word Trump utters and tallies them up for his paper . 
+Dale says most fact-checkers look at two or three things Trump says, “meticulously fact-checks them and posts an article,” but “that doesn’t work when you have a candidate who is frequently saying 20 false things in a day, up to 37 on some days.” 
+For example, Dale tallied 35 Trump lies on Tuesday, October 25: Donald Trump said 35 false things yesterday. #TrumpCheck pic.twitter.com/EwfYFEDFx9 
+— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 26, 2016 
+Which, as Dale pointed out , followed “his record-tying 37 false claims on Monday,” not coincidentally, a day on which Trump called fact checkers “scum.” 
+Watch courtesy of CNN’s Reliable Sources: ""There is a massive imbalance in the frequency of dishonesty."" @DDale8 says Trump lies a lot more than Clinton https://t.co/Kp6KvPNtmO 
+— Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) October 30, 2016 
+The mainstream media likes to play the false equivalence game but there is no equivalence between Trump and Clinton. As Dale told Stelter, “There is a massive imbalance in the frequency of dishonesty.” Trump, says Dale, “is not a normal political liar.” 
+For example, look at the presidential debates , in which Dale found 104 Trump false statements as opposed to 13 by Clinton. 
+Dale’s judgment is that “there is no comparison in her level of accuracy with her opponent.” 
+Trump also lies “pointlessly,” argues Dale, explaining to Brian Stelter that, 
+“He gets things wrong where there is no political advantage to be gained and in those cases, it is not clear whether he’s lying or confused or unwilling to take the time to learn the facts.” 
+This was Mark Cuban’s complaint, of course, that Trump has no interest in learning. 
+In the end, it matters less why Trump lies than that he does, especially since he is busily convincing his base that Hillary Clinton is the dishonest candidate. And it is working. This is a trope frequently repeated by Trump’s supporters. You can correct them as often as you want; it will have no effect. 
+The lie has taken hold – one of many – many more than you likely expected, and observational bias takes care of the rest. The Trump base is effectively lost to our shared reality, and as Dale tweeted last night, 
+“If Trump loses, the Smart Republican Excavation is going to have to involve some long, hard base re-education.” 
+Given the GOP’s history with facts, good luck with that. 
+Image: Screen capture Twitter",FAKE
+4146,"Work: It's not a four letter word, it's a world-changing vocation","Work can be a four-letter word in our culture. Pundits demagogue against successful businesses, and demonize the one-percent as “financial parasites” said to be profiting unfairly. Charitable and non-profit work is extolled often as a better way to help a community. But in truth, if you want to change the world, consider starting a business that makes a tangible contribution to the lives of the people around you.
+
+It’s interesting that in the Bible so many of the greatest leaders had a day job. Jesus was a carpenter; Luke a doctor; Moses a shepherd; Deborah a judge; Paul a tentmaker – the list goes on. While the Bible does describe duties for people of faith who are in church work, the larger message of scripture is that “whatever you do, in word or deed, do as unto the Lord.”
+
+Among the community of believers and in our current modern day culture, a prejudice has developed against mainstream secular work as a way to make a significant contribution to a community. This attitude ignores the very real impact that a good paying job has on a person, a family, the community and even the world at large. With Americans spending an average of 47 hours a week at work, it’s time to consider whether a better way to change the world is to make it better at work.
+
+One reason that people may be dreaming of non-profit work is that so many don’t like their jobs. Most people – 8 out of 10 in fact – hate their jobs, and may be dreaming of a different kind of life, according to Deloitte’s Shift Index Survey. If that is even partially accurate, it’s easy to understand how people can dream of a life of doing something good for others that feels more worthwhile than dealing with a curmudgeon for a boss.
+
+Even as job creation has dramatically declined, with a 38-year low in the labor force participation rate, an increasing number of people have chosen to join the non-profit world. “From 2001 to 2011, the number of nonprofits in the United States grew 25 percent while the number of for-profit businesses rose by half of 1 percent, according to the most recent figures compiled by the Urban Institute,” noted the New York Times. In fact, according to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations of all kinds are registered in the United States.
+
+Still, most people spend their days in for-profit companies, as non-profits employ 10 percent of the workforce in 2010, accounting for about five percent of Gross Domestic Product.
+
+""Since 9/11, there's been more of a -- I don't mean this to sound pejorative -- knee-jerk reaction to start a new charity whenever something goes wrong … (however) very few of these charities are going to last,"" said Chuck McLean, vice president of research for GuideStar, which tracks nonprofit activity.
+
+Frankly, non-profit and ministry jobs are still work, with all the ups and downs of employment. Many in charitable efforts find it’s not as glamorous at it might look from the outside.
+
+Consider the ultimate job from the non-profit world, the local pastor. A Fuller Institute Project that began in 1998 and picked up in 1998 by the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute of Church Leadership Development took a look at how pastors were handling the pressures of caring for a hurting community. With more than 18 years of data to consider, research found that 70 percent were so stressed they often considered leaving the ministry, while 35 to 40 percent actually did give up after about five years.
+
+No matter the profession, one way that you can practically care for people is to create jobs in an environment that cares for and values people, both customers, vendors and employees.
+
+It’s fascinating that today the most popular fast-food chain comes from a company that does not hide its family values while making sure every customer gets a good meal.
+
+Consider the rise of the humble chicken sandwich at Chick-fil-a, a high quality product in an enjoyable environment, in a company that cares for its employees.
+
+And importantly, those with a job have the means to contribute time and money.
+
+Sometimes called Tentmakers, referencing the Apostle Paul who supported himself with his skill, volunteers who financially support themselves with outside employment are invaluable for cash-strapped charities. Those with means make a huge difference. Consider Luke 8, where we learn about some wealthy women who contributed to Jesus’ ministry on earth “out of their private means.”
+
+Good jobs, with a steady income, empower Americans to be the most charitable people in world.
+
+According to the National Philanthropic Trust, almost 96 percent of American households donate to charity, giving an average of more than $2,900. In fact, even as the economy has been stagnant, Americans increased their giving 7.1 percent from 2013 to 2014, the last figures available.
+
+Given the pressing needs of the world, a profitable company that provides a lifetime of opportunity for employees, excellent service for the community, and a source of income that can allow employers and employees alike to contribute to the needs around them is world changing.
+
+A good job provides the means to give back, remembering the instructions in in Deuteronomy 16:17, “Each of you must bring a gift in proportion to the way the Lord your God has blessed you.”
+
+Robert Dickie III is president of Crown, a non-profit dedicated to helping people create long term plans for personal financial, career, and business success. He is the author of the newly release book, ""THE LEAP - Launching your Full-Time Career in Our Part-Time Economy."" (Moody Publishers January 6, 2015). Follow him on Twitter@RobertDickie.",REAL
+2404,The most predictable disaster in the history of the human race,"Ask him, and he'll tell you himself. ""I'm very optimistic,"" he says. See?
+
+And why shouldn't Bill Gates be an optimist? He's one of the richest men in the world. He basically invented the form of personal computing that dominated for decades. He runs a foundation immersed in the world's worst problems — child mortality, malaria, polio — but he can see them getting better. Hell, he can measure them getting better. Child mortality has fallen by half since 1990. To him, optimism is simply realism.
+
+But lately, Gates has been obsessing over a dark question: what's likeliest to kill more than 10 million human beings in the next 20 years? He ticks off the disaster movie stuff — ""big volcanic explosion, gigantic earthquake, asteroid"" — but says the more he learns about them, the more he realizes the probability is ""very low.""
+
+Then there's war, of course. But Gates isn't that worried about war because the entire human race worries about war pretty much all the time, and the most dangerous kind of war, nuclear war, seems pretty contained, at least for now.
+
+But there's something out there that's as bad as war, something that kills as many people as war, and Gates doesn't think we're ready for it.
+
+""Look at the death chart of the 20th century,"" he says, because he's the kind of guy that looks at death charts. ""I think everybody would say there must be a spike for World War I. Sure enough, there it is, like 25 million. And there must be a big spike for World War II, and there it is, it's like 65 million. But then you'll see this other spike that is as large as World War II right after World War I, and most people, would say, 'What was that?'""
+
+""Well, that was the Spanish flu.""
+
+No one can say we weren't warned. And warned. And warned. A pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.
+
+In a 1990 paper on ""The Anthropology of Infectious Disease,"" Marcia Inhorn and Peter Brown estimated that infectious diseases ""have likely claimed more lives than all wars, noninfectious diseases, and natural disasters put together."" Infectious diseases are our oldest, deadliest foe.
+
+And they remain so today. ""In a good year, flu kills over 10,000 Americans,"" says Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ""In a bad year, it kills over five times that. If we have a pandemic, it will be much worse. People think the H1N1 flu wasn’t so bad. But more than 1,000 American kids died from H1N1!""
+
+Each new year seems to bring its own sensational candidate for the next pandemic. In 2014, of course, it was  the Ebola outbreak — which killed more than 10,000 people, and sent much of America into hysterics. This year, a particularly infectious form of bird flu has ripped through 14 states, killing or forcing the slaughter of 39 million birds. Public health authorities are forcing the grisly massacre because the more birds around for the flu to infect, the more chances the flu has to mutate and reassemble itself into a form that can infect humans.
+
+It isn't just the news that carries warnings. The culture is thick with our fear of infectious disease. Zombies, for instance, are everywhere — World War Z was a best-selling book and a blockbuster movie; The Walking Dead has become one of television's most popular shows. And zombies are a metaphor for infectious disease.
+
+""When I was a kid, I watched AIDS go from an obscure, arcane curiosity to a global pandemic,"" Max Brooks, author of World War Z, told the CDC. ""What drove me crazy was that unlike the Black Death or the Spanish Influenza, AIDS could have simply been stopped by a pamphlet: A couple dos and don’ts, a little education and clear-headed leadership and it might have ended up as a footnote in a virologists’ medical text. If that’s not zombies, I don’t know what is.""
+
+The CDC has even released a document titled ""Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse."" The point, obviously, isn't that the CDC expects a zombie apocalypse around the corner; it's that since a zombie apocalypse is simply an infectious disease apocalypse, talking about how to avoid becoming a zombie is a safe way for people to talk about how to protect themselves from pandemic disease.
+
+""When confronted with real anxiety, a lot of people shut down,"" Brooks said. ""For them, planning for an actual crisis is just too scary, too paralyzing to think about. Make it a zombie attack, though, then there’s some psychological padding.""
+
+Pandemic disease is something our culture thinks about, knows about, fears. It's so topmost on our minds and in our nightmares that we've created an elaborate metaphorical architecture so we can talk about it even with people who are too scared to talk about it. We think about it so much, it seems almost ridiculous that we aren't ready. But we're not. Not even close.
+
+Just look what happened with Ebola.
+
+Ron Klain was an odd choice for Ebola czar.
+
+Klain entered the Obama administration as Vice President Joe Biden's chief of staff. This was, itself, notable: Klain was chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore, too, making him the only person to serve in that position for two different vice presidents.
+
+He quickly proved himself an exceptional fixer for the Obama administration, with a mix of policy, political, and bureaucratic chops that everyone agreed was rare. And so when President Obama needed someone to coordinate the US government's response, he turned to Klain. And Klain did his job. After a few early, botched cases, the Ebola outbreak ended on American soil. Ebola became what Americans were used to it being: someone else's problem.
+
+But talk to Klain today, and he doesn't sound like a guy exulting in victory. He sounds scared. He doesn't think Ebola showed that America's response can work. He thinks it showed how easily it could fail.
+
+""You can’t use the word lucky or fortunate about something like Ebola that killed 10,000 people,"" Klain says. ""But it was the most favorable scenario for the world to face one of these things. Ebola is very difficult to transmit. Everyone who is contagious has a visible symptom. It broke out in three relatively small countries that don’t send many travelers to the US. And those three countries have good relationships with America and were welcoming of Western aid.""
+
+""With a pandemic flu, the disease would be much more contagious than Ebola,"" Klain continues. ""The people who are contagious may not have visible symptoms. It could break out in a highly populous country that sends thousands of travelers a day to the US. It could be a country with megacities with tens of millions of people. And it could be a country where sending in the 101st Airborne isn’t possible.""
+
+Ebola, Klain thinks, shows how unprepared the world was for a disease that it's known about for decades and that, comparatively speaking, spreads pretty slowly. A person infected with Ebola can be expected to pass the disease on to two people, barring effective countermeasures (epidemiologists call this the ""reproduction number""). Two is not that high, as these things go. The SARS virus had a reproduction number of four. Measles has a reproduction number of 18.
+
+What happens when the world faces a lethal disease we're not used to, with a reproduction number of five or eight or 10? What if it starts in a megacity? What if, unlike Ebola, it's contagious before the patient is showing obvious symptoms?
+
+Past experience isn't comforting. ""If you look at the H1N1 flu in 2009,"" Klain says, ""it had spread around the world before we even knew it existed.""
+
+Behind Gates's fear of pandemic disease is an algorithmic model of how disease moves through the modern world. He funded that model to help with his foundation's work eradicating polio. But then he used it to look into how a disease that acted like the Spanish flu of 1918 would work in today's world.
+
+The results were shocking, even to Gates. ""Within 60 days it's basically in all urban centers around the entire globe,"" he says. ""That didn't happen with the Spanish flu.""
+
+The basic reason the disease could spread so fast is that human beings now move around so fast. Gates's modelers found that about 50 times more people cross borders today than did so in 1918. And any new disease will cross those borders with them — and will do it before we necessarily even know there is a new disease. Remember what Ron Klain said: ""If you look at the H1N1 flu in 2009, it had spread around the world before we even knew it existed.""
+
+Gates's model showed that a Spanish flu–like disease unleashed on the modern world would kill more than 33 million people in 250 days.
+
+""We've created, in terms of spread, the most dangerous environment that we've ever had in the history of mankind,"" Gates says.
+
+The science fiction writer William Gibson has a good line: the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. And nowhere is that truer than in health care.
+
+According to the World Health Organization, the United States spends more than $8,000 per person, per year, on health care. Eritrea spends less than $20. Traditionally, Americans thinks of that as Eritrea's problem. But if a highly infectious, highly lethal new disease presents in Eritrea, and the world is slow to learn about it, then it will quickly become America's problem.
+
+This is, of course, what happened with Ebola. If it had made its first appearance in the United States, it likely would have been caught, and contained, quickly. But as my colleague Julia Belluz wrote, the countries where the 2014 outbreak began ""happen to be three of the poorest in the world, and it took them at least three months to even realize they were harboring an Ebola outbreak."" By the time Ebola was recognized, it was already out of control — and so, for the first time, it made its way to American shores.
+
+When I ask the CDC's Frieden what's needed to catch these diseases early, he doesn't hesitate. ""The most effective way to protect people is basic public health infrastructure,"" he says. ""That means laboratories for finding specimens, getting them tested, and discovering what's spreading. It means field epidemiologists. It means emergency operation centers. And you need to have that available day in and day out. If we've learned anything, it’s that you want an everyday public health system you can scale up for an emergency, not a system you only use in case of emergencies.""
+
+The good news is this kind of system isn't all that expensive. Basic public health infrastructure is fairly cheap — around a dollar per person, per year. ""There’s no magic here,"" says Frieden. ""In Uganda, you have motorcycle couriers picking up specimens from hundreds and hundreds of health-care centers all over the country. They then send them to centralized centers. The expense isn't huge.""
+
+The difficulty often isn't money; it's priorities. These aren't sexy investments. ""It doesn’t cost nearly as much as building a fancy hospital in your capital,"" says Frieden, with evident frustration.
+
+But if you can find the disease and test it, then modern technology really does come into play. We can rapidly decode the basic structure and pathways of new diseases in ways that were unimaginable even a few decades ago — and that means we can come up with a response much more rapidly.
+
+The bad news? ""You need a government that works,"" sighs Frieden.
+
+Pandemic infections present three basic problems of governance. The first is countries that don't want to admit they need international help because they don't want to admit they have a problem in the first place.
+
+""Guinea did not want to declare an Ebola epidemic,"" Gates says, ""because in terms of investors and travel, it's a death sentence.""
+
+And it wasn't just Guinea, or even just Ebola. As Michael Specter wrote in the New Yorker:
+
+The second is countries that can't admit international help, either because the state is too weak and fragmented to effectively coordinate with international actors or because the state is hostile to the organizations that would need to come in and offer relief. Imagine an outbreak that begins in Syria right now, and you get the idea.
+
+The third problem is that no one really trusts the efficacy of the international institutions that would most naturally coordinate the response.
+
+There is no other way to say this: the World Health Organization's Ebola performance was a disaster. ""The WHO’s slow response to Ebola has been universally condemned,"" reported the Guardian. ""The director general’s committee — which can declare a public health emergency — was not convened until August, eight months after the first cases and five months after public warnings from Médecins Sans Frontières, whose doctors were on the front line.""
+
+Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel is now leading an effort to reform the organization. But similar mistakes during the SARS crisis and H1N1 have led to similar calls for WHO reform, and little has happened.
+
+This isn't just an issue of bureaucratic incompetence. The WHO is underpowered for the problems it's meant to solve. About 75 percent of its funding comes from voluntary donations, and there's no mechanism by which it can quickly scale its efforts during an emergency. The WHO's member countries could fix this by giving the WHO more reliable, permanent funding — or even more reliable emergency funding mechanisms. But so far, no suggestions along those lines have gained much traction.
+
+The result is that the WHO that will face the next major disease outbreak is likely to be quite similar to the WHO that faced Ebola, and H1N1, and SARS. As a senior US delegate to the World Health Assembly told Vox, ""Are we sure [the WHO] can do better next time? No.""
+
+Whether through the WHO or some other mechanism, most experts agree that the world needs some kind of emergency-response team for dangerous diseases. But no one knows quite how to set up that team. ""That's what we’re lacking in the global system — a battalion of people in white helmets,"" says Klain. ""But who will own it? Control it? Pay for it? Deploy it? Those are the tricky things.""
+
+This is in stark contrast to war, which is not necessarily more deadly to the human race, but is much better planned for. ""When you talk about war,"" Gates says, ""there are all these rules about how the government can seize various ships. But when an epidemic comes along, who is supposed to survey the private capacity and go out there and grab all these things?""
+
+Look at what happened during Ebola, Gates continues. ""Where was the equivalent of the military reserve, where you get on the phone and you said to people, Now come! And they had been trained, and they understood how to work together. People who want to volunteer, do we pay them? What do we do with them after they come back, when people might have this fear that they've been exposed? Are employers going to take them back? What are the quarantine rules? It was completely ad hoc.""
+
+This is what's so maddening about the modern fight with epidemic disease. Unlike in past eras, humanity has the tools it needs to protect itself. But global travel has far outpaced global governance — or even global disease response. Diseases move much faster than governments. ""This is the hole in the global system,"" Klain says, and no one really knows how to fix it.",REAL
+2626,"Hope and change, the Hebrew edition","There is an path for Democrats to regain the presidency — and it does not run through Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin.",REAL
+8276,"Iraq and US confident to retake Mosul, Daesh can't 'conduct full-fledged military action'"," 39 UTC © Hikmet Durgun The Daesh terrorists' combat capabilities are nearly exhausted, and they are no longer capable of preventing Mosul from being liberated by Iraqi and Kurdish troops, Yazidi fighter Newsal Haci told Sputnik Turkey. In an interview with Sputnik Turkey, Yazidi soldier Newsal Haci, who serves with the Iraqi army, pointed to the inability of Daesh (ISIL/ISIS) to resist the liberation of Mosul, where he said the terrorists' combat capabilities' are already running out. He added that the Iraqi army is sweeping through territory formerly held by Daesh terrorists, and that the Iraqi forces currently need to cover just five kilometers to reach Mosul. © Sputnik/ Hikmet Durgun Yazidi fighter Newsai Heci ""We are fighting for a democratic and secular Iraq, and we intend to liberate Mosul and the Yazidi people from Daesh terrorists at all costs,"" according to Haci. The Yazidis, an indigenous ethnic group with their own religion and customs, have been routinely oppressed and even enslaved under jihadist rule. ""The jihadists' efforts are running out, and they already cannot conduct full-blow military activity, and are instead focusing on staging car bomb and trap mine explosions,"" he said. © Sputnik/ Hikmet Durgun A Yazidi fighter taking part in the Iraqi army's operation to liberate Mosul. Haci added that it is due to the fact that Daesh can no longer fight as they did before that the terrorists started to resort to such tactics. ""We continue to move forward. To date, we have managed to kill more than 80 jihadists,"" he concluded. © Sputnik/ Hikmet Durgun Yazidi fighters taking part in the Iraqi army's operation to liberate Mosul. Meanwhile, Fezile Mustafa from the village of Terzilla near Mosul which was recently liberated from Daesh terrorists told Sputnik that she and her five children would only return to the village after the Iraqi army drives Daesh out of Mosul. © Sputnik/ Hikmet Durgun She said that ""it is simply impossible"" to return to Terzilla now that the village had been sacked and her home destroyed. ""We will return only after Mosul is liberated. Perhaps more than anything else, we want two things, namely, the liberation of Mosul from Daesh and to return home,"" she added. © Sputnik/ HİKMET DURGUN Hezale Mustafa On October 17, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi announced the start of a military operation to retake Mosul from Daesh. According to local media, about 30,000 Iraqi soldiers and 4,000 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters are taking part in the operation, which is backed by the airstrikes being carried out by the US-led international coalition. Earlier this week, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that Turkish artillery and tanks are supporting Peshmerga's efforts to liberate Mosul, adding that if necessary Turkish air forces may assist in in the military operation. Comment: The US also seems optimistic retaking Mosul: US Central Command Expects More Resistance From Daesh Militants in Mosul US Central Command's Gen. Joseph Votel said that despite obstacles he is confident that Mosul would be retaken. The US Central Command's Gen. Joseph Votel warned Wednesday that, as an operation to liberate Mosul progress, the resistance of Islamic State (ISIL or Daesh) terrorists will increase. ""I would expect we are going to run into more obstacles [and] more VBIEDs [vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices]. They've had a long time to prepare for that fight, so all of that we're going to contend with here very, very soon,"" Army Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of the Pentagon's unified command for the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, told NBC. Army Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander of the US-led Combined Joint Task Force fighting Daesh, confirmed the information, adding that the Daesh deployed an ""extraordinary"" number of rockets and VBIEDs in Mosul. Nevertheless, he expressed confidence that Mosul would be retaken.",FAKE
+588,The meaning of Matt Bevin: Why his victory undermines a major Democratic Party theory,"Sure, Bevin is better on the campaign trail than he was during his failed attempt to oust Sen. Mitch McConnell in 2014. But as a recent piece about the race in the Atlantic made clear, he still isn’t good. And while the voters of Kentucky are undoubtedly conservative, a look-over of Bevin’s political history reveals a man on the wrong side of the line separating “hyper-conservative” from “radical fringe.”
+
+But he won, anyway. And despite what pre-election polls suggested, the outcome wasn’t even close.
+
+This raises myriad questions for the Democratic Party, both in Kentucky and the nation as a whole. Most of those questions will center on the party’s get-out-the-vote apparatus, which increasingly seems to be useless for any election in which Barack Obama isn’t a candidate. In general, I chalk that up to the decline of organized labor. But Kentucky was never exactly Michigan. (In fact, the state is something of an outlier recently when it comes to the nation’s larger de-unionization trend.)
+
+Regardless of unions’ strength, though, Democrats had hoped that policy successes would inspire their constituents to come out and vote. Specifically, they hoped that Bevin’s vow to dismantle the Affordable Care Act in Kentucky (as much as he can, that is) would inspire the hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians who’ve benefited to vote for its protection. By almost any metric, after all, Kynect — what they call the ACA in Kentucky — has been an inspirational success.
+
+Democrats hoped voters would reward the party for successfully implementing such a major policy. But from today’s vantage, it’s painfully obvious that they didn’t. And that’s not just a problem in the Bluegrass State — it’s a problem for all Democrats. Because one of the foundational assumptions behind Kynect, the ACA, and much of the entire Democratic Party agenda is that good policy makes for good politics. In Kentucky, at least, it didn’t.
+
+What does “good policy = good politics” mean? It basically means that an effective program can survive, even if it’s unpopular at the outset. Those who benefit, the theory goes, will eventually become a constituency (if they aren’t already) and will organize to preserve it. Think of Social Security or Medicare: They weren’t necessarily super-popular when they were first implemented, but once people started relying on them, they became the so-called third rail of American politics. But as left-wing critics of the Democratic consensus have long argued, there’s a problem with analogizing the ACA and Social Security. One of the programs is universal — everyone puts in; everyone takes out — and the other isn’t. And this isn’t incidental. It’s the reason why so many Tea Party types will rail against “handouts” but cherish their Medicare. It’s because they believe they’re simply receiving what they’re owed (they aren’t) and that the benefits go to them instead of good-for-nothing moochers. There are plenty of people in Kentucky right now who are better off because of the ACA. But many of them are beneficiaries of the law’s Medicaid expansion (which Bevin has promised to change, if not revoke) and thus lack political influence. And the rest? As far as many of them know, it’s not the ACA or “Obamacare” that they now rely on. It’s Kynect. And Bevin didn’t campaign against Kynect. He campaigned against Obamacare. Kentucky Democrats got the policy right, in other words; but it never paid political dividends. In fairness, it’s too early to say the debate is over. If Bevin tries to make good on his promises and is greeted with a backlash, he may trim his sails or abandon the initiative. Still, it’s not like Democrats didn’t spend much of the campaign warning about Bevin’s plans for health care in Kentucky. They did — a lot. It didn’t make a difference.",REAL
+8423,"NATO Goes On High Alert To Block Donald Trump Presidency, Put Hillary Clinton In Power","
+A gravely written Ministry of Defense ( MoD ) report circulating in the Kremlin this morning is warning the Security Council ( SC ) that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO ) has now placed upwards of 300,000 of its military forces on “high alert” that this Western alliance’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg claims is due to growing tensions with Russia —but that Federation intelligence analysts state are intended to be used, instead, for a full-scale invasion of the United States to prevent Donald Trump from assuming the presidency. [Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]
+According to this report, MoD intelligence analysts became “concerned/alarmed” over a 25 October US military joint air defense exercise in the Arabian Sea that coordinated US Navy aircraft carrier defense of US Air Force transport and refueling aircraft—but that further analysis revealed was but a precursor to a much larger planned American military “event” scheduled for 14 December as part of the Pentagon’s planning for the upcoming inauguration of their next president.
+The Pentagon’s planning for their 14 December “event”, this report continues, involves the Atlantic Ocean deployment between the United States and European Union of the aircraft carriers USS George H.W. Bush , USS George Washington and USS Abraham Lincoln whose fighter aircraft will be defending the US Air Forces’ Air Mobility Command’s ( AMC ) staggering deployment of 200 KC-135 Stratotanker air-to-air fueling aircraft, 150 C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft, 150 C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and 75 C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft—all of which are “planned/scheduled” to leave the US empty, and return fully loaded.
+Raising MoD “fears/concerns” even more about this planned Pentagon “event”, this report notes, is all of the US military commanders involved in it being given copies of a cryptically written Executive Order signed by President Obama 3 days ago (4 November) that states “ global health security is a core tenet of our national strategy for countering biological threats ” and directs the US Defense Department and US Secretary of State to cooperate, coordinate and communicate with unnamed foreign defense ministries .
+With relations between the United States and the equally globalist European Union hanging in the balance as the majority of the EU’s leaders fear a Donald Trump presidency , this report continues, many in the US are openly warning that Hillary Clinton, and the leftist forces loyal to her, are preparing to stage a “ false flag ” attack to regain their hold on power—including one of the most feared and powerful American political operatives named Roger Stone who is, likewise, openly warning it could very well happen.
+As to why Hillary Clinton fears a Donald Trump presidency, MoD intelligence analysts in this report explain, is due to the massive exposure to the American public of her many crimes—including her cover-up of child rape and sex trafficking.
+Making Hillary Clinton’s dire situation even worse, this report continues, was FBI Director James Comey, yesterday, basically informing her that he wasn’t prepared to indict her for her email crimes—but that US government “deep state” sources are now leaking was a “ploy/gambit” to keep President Obama from pardoning her before Donald Trump could assume the presidency.
+With Hillary Clinton having disgraced the entire journalism profession in America for decades to come, this report says, these propagandists crimes against the citizens of US continue to astound the whole world—including the once respected television news network CNN now being proven to have colluded with Clinton to destroy Donald Trump.
+But to one of the greatest crimes against the American people these Hillary Clinton propagandist journalists are responsible for, this report says, is their failing to tell them that her top aide, Huma Abedin, is, in fact, an imbedded spy bought and paid for by Saudi Arabia that the Federation has warned the US government about for decades.
+But to the shockingly worse crime being committed against the American people, this report concludes, is President Obama himself now openly calling for all illegal immigrants in the United States to vote for Hillary Clinton, and pledging that the corrupt government he now controls will do nothing about it.
+And though not mentioned in this MoD report, there are no greater examples of how corrupt the Obama-Clinton regime has made America then the cases of a young California single mother named Mariza Reulas who is facing years in prison for the crime of selling a single supper to a member of her ladies food club and the destruction of MIT professor Cesar Hidalgo for daring to tell to the truth about Clinton’s emails—both occurring while Hillary Clinton, and all of the criminals associated with her, are still able to walk free—but if Donald Trump is allowed to survive he may be able to save, along with the United States itself.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+496,Nearly 300K New Jobs In February; Unemployment Dips To 5.5 Percent,"Nearly 300K New Jobs In February; Unemployment Dips To 5.5 Percent
+
+The U.S. economy added 295,000 jobs last month, according to the Labor Department's monthly survey, and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.5 percent. The latest strong data beat expectations and follow a robust jump the previous month — a sign that the nation's economy is finally picking up steam.
+
+Economists had predicted the economy would add 240,000 jobs in February and that the unemployment rate would notch back down to 5.6 percent, where it stood for December. The slight increase in the rate last month was attributed to strong growth in the labor force.
+
+The average workweek for nonfarm payrolls was 34.6 hours, a figure that has held steady for five months. The average hourly wage rose 3 cents, to $24.78.
+
+As NPR's John Ydstie reported this morning ahead of this morning's release by the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, the report for January ""was stellar on almost every count. It revealed a monthly average for job growth of 336,000 over the previous three months, and it showed strong wage gains after years of disappointing growth.""
+
+For February, the Labor Department says more jobs were added in food services and drinking places, professional and business services, construction, health care and in transportation and warehousing.
+
+The latest report comes as the Federal Reserve has signaled that it is likely to raise interest rates, possibly as soon as June, based on the generally more robust U.S. economy and concerns about inflation pressures.
+
+Today's reports shows 51,000 new jobs last month in professional and business services and 29,000 new jobs in construction. Transportation and warehousing added 19,000 jobs, and the retail sector gained 32,000. Over the past year, construction and retail have collectively gained about 320,000 jobs.
+
+Reuters reports from London: ""The dollar hit an 11-year high against major currencies on Friday as investors bet the monthly U.S. jobs report would increase the chances of rate hikes, even as the European Central Bank embarks on a 1 trillion euro bond-buying campaign.""",REAL
+9936,[WATCH] Hillary Clinton’s “Crazy Eyes” Surface AGAIN!,"There’s something seriously wrong with this woman… Hillary Clinton's crazy eyes caught again, this time at #AlSmithDinner . pic.twitter.com/jiUyS4QNgi",FAKE
+8012,"Yes, creationists can be real scientists, too","About | | Archive David Rives is known for his presentation ""The Heavens Declare the Glory of God"" and as host of TBN's ""Creation in the 21st Century."" His GPS observatory-class telescope allows David to share his passion for the heavens with others through astro-photography and astronomical events. THE HEAVENS DECLARE: Yes, creationists can be real scientists, too Exclusive: David Rives offers testable hypotheses supported by data from Bible-believers ...more",FAKE
+4142,"Rubio: My pro-family, pro-growth tax reform plan for the 21st century","Six months ago, Senator Mike Lee and I offered a variety of ideas on how to reform America's tax code to be both pro-growth and pro-family. Our goal was to slash rates, shrink the IRS, create jobs, grow wages, and empower parents all at the same time. Since offering these ideas, I have gathered input from Americans of all economic backgrounds and engaged in discussions with leaders across the conservative movement to form a complete, pro-growth, pro-family tax reform agenda for the 21st century.
+
+My plan is a significant departure from the old school tax reform ideas that so often come out of Washington. First, on the individual side, my plan reduces the number of brackets from seven to three: 15%, 25%, and 35%. The plan eliminates all exemptions and deductions, except for a charitable contribution deduction and a reformed home mortgage interest deduction.  Taxpayers will instead receive a personal tax credit that phases out for higher-income Americans.  This greatly simplified code will cut taxes for the vast majority of people.
+
+Second, my plan cuts rates for all businesses – large and small – to no higher than 25%, which would finally make us competitive again with the rest of the developed world. My plan recognizes that big businesses shouldn’t get a larger tax cut than small businesses, which are the main drivers of economic growth. To further spur job creation, I will end federal taxation of business investment by allowing for immediate expensing. I will also shift to a territorial tax system, thus ending the double-taxation of profits earned abroad for both businesses and individuals.
+
+Furthermore, my plan eliminates the double-taxation on saving and investment income. It provides a transition period during which we will move to a 0% tax rate on dividends and capital gains, which is a forward-looking way to benefit millions of everyday savers across all income levels. My plan also eliminates the death tax, finally putting an end to one of the IRS's most insulting practices.
+
+A critical component of my plan is tax relief for middle-class parents. By providing a new child tax credit of up to $2,500, which phases out for wealthier Americans, we can ease the extraordinary financial burdens of parenthood. While some well-respected voices oppose this tax relief, I remain adamant that empowering struggling families should be a priority for any modern reform plan. I know from firsthand experience how expensive it is to raise children in the 21st century, and I believe our tax code should support parents rather than drain their budgets.
+
+My reforms will target some of the highest costs facing families today. As part of my efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare, I will reform the tax treatment of health care to reduce costs and promote individual ownership of health insurance. I will consolidate all higher education tax incentives into one simple provision that will help millions of Americans pursue higher education. I will also promote an individual and corporate tax credit to finance school choice.
+
+I believe one of the greatest threats to family life today is that too many Americans have to give up being with loved ones in times of great need in order to avoid losing their jobs. I will begin to solve this problem by providing a limited 25% non-refundable tax credit to any business that offers between four and twelve weeks of paid leave to workers with qualifying family or medical issues – for example, a newborn child in need of care, an elderly parent with declining health, a personal health crisis, or a spouse’s deployment.
+
+My tax reform plan is designed to advance America's two most important goals in this century: a growing, opportunity-rich economy and strong, financially-secure families. Everyone in politics claims to support these goals, yet I can already hear the establishment voices saying my modern approach to tax reform is all wrong. They will say the tax code of the 20th century will continue to work in the 21st. They will say we can continue to raise taxes and increase spending without long-term consequences. They will say that to protect your job we need to raise your boss’ taxes – or that for you to climb up the economic ladder we have to pull someone else down.
+
+I disagree. I believe everyone can benefit from a pro-growth and pro-family tax reform plan.  I believe by cutting taxes and simplifying the tax code, we will grow our economy and create more taxpayers rather than more taxes. I believe the plan I’ve offered is a vital step toward creating high-paying modern jobs, fostering more opportunity for more Americans, and making the 21st century a New American Century.
+
+Republican Marco Rubio represents Florida in the U.S. Senate. He is a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016.",REAL
+7378,Ancient mosque inscription confirms Jerusalem Temple,"November 3, 2016 Ancient mosque inscription confirms Jerusalem Temple 
+The Mosque of Umar, located in the village of Nuba, about 16 miles south of Jerusalem, is believed by locals to have been built by Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, under whose rule Arab armies conquered Jerusalem and the rest of Byzantine Palestine in the mid-7th century, reported the Times of Israel. His successor, Abd al-Malik, the fifth caliph, built the better-known Dome of the Rock atop the Temple Mount in A.D. 691. 
+A recently studied limestone dedicatory plaque in the Nuba mosque describes the village as an endowment for the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, but what is notable is it refers to the Dome of the Rock as “the rock of the Bayt al-Maqdis” – “Holy Temple” – the literal translation of the Hebrew term used by early Muslims for the city of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount’s gold-dome shrine. 
+The stone bearing the inscription sits above the mosque’s niche that faces toward Mecca. 
+It reads: “In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, this territory, Nuba, and all its boundaries and its entire area, is an endowment to the Rock of Bayt al-Maqdis and the al-Aqsa Mosque, as it was dedicated by the Commander of the Faithful, Umar ibn al-Khattab for the glory of Allah.”",FAKE
+5241,A new 50-state poll shows exactly why Clinton holds the advantage over Trump,"With nine weeks until Election Day, Donald Trump is within striking distance in the Upper Midwest, but Hillary Clinton’s strength in many battlegrounds and some traditional Republican strongholds gives her a big electoral college advantage, according to a 50-state Washington Post-SurveyMonkey poll.
+
+The survey of all 50 states is the largest sample ever undertaken by The Post, which joined with SurveyMonkey and its online polling resources to produce the results. The state-by-state numbers are based on responses from more than 74,000 registered voters during the period of Aug. 9 to Sept. 1. The individual state samples vary in size from about 550 to more than 5,000, allowing greater opportunities than typical surveys to look at different groups within the population and compare them from state to state.
+
+[How the Post-SurveyMonkey poll was conducted]
+
+The massive survey highlights a critical weakness in Trump’s candidacy — an unprecedented deficit for a Republican among college-educated white voters, especially women. White college graduates have been loyal Republican voters in recent elections, but Trump is behind Clinton with this group across much of the country, including in some solidly red states.
+
+The 50-state findings come at a time when the average national margin between Clinton and Trump has narrowed. What once was a Clinton lead nationally of eight to 10 points shortly after the party conventions ended a month ago is now about four points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. A number of battleground states also have tightened, according to surveys released from other organizations in recent days.
+
+The Post-SurveyMonkey results are consistent with many of those findings, but not in all cases. Trump’s support in the Midwest, where the electorates are generally older and whiter, appears stronger and offers the possibility of gains in places Democrats carried recently. He has small edges in two expected battlegrounds — Ohio and Iowa — and is close in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, each of which Democrats have won in six consecutive elections.
+
+At the same time, however, Trump is struggling in places Republicans have won consistently and that he must hold to have any hope of winning. These states include Arizona and Georgia, as well as Texas — the biggest surprise in the 50-state results. The Texas results, which are based on a sample of more than 5,000 people, show a dead heat, with Clinton ahead by one percentage point.
+
+Clinton also leads by fewer than four points in Colorado and Florida and is tied with Trump in North Carolina. In Colorado, other polls have shown a larger Clinton lead. In Mississippi, Trump’s lead is just two points, though it’s doubtful that the GOP nominee is in much danger there.
+
+In a two-way competition between the major-party candidates, Clinton leads by four points or more in 20 states plus the District of Columbia. Together they add up to 244 electoral votes, 26 shy of the 270 needed to win.
+
+Trump leads by at least four points in 20 states as well, but those add up to just 126 electoral votes. In the 10 remaining states, which hold 168 electoral votes, neither candidate has a lead of four percentage points or better.
+
+A series of four-way ballot tests that include Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein project a somewhat narrower Clinton advantage, with more states showing margins of fewer than four points between the two major-party candidates. But even here, at the Labor Day weekend turn toward the Nov. 8 balloting, the pressure is on Trump to make up even more ground than he has in recent weeks if he hopes to win the White House.
+
+The poll finds Johnson is poised to garner significant support. He is currently receiving at least 15 percent support in 15 states. The libertarian’s support peaks at 25 percent in New Mexico, where he served two terms as governor. He is only four points shy of Trump’s 29 percent standing there. His support in Utah is 23 percent, and in Colorado and Iowa it is 16 percent. Stein has less support in the poll, peaking at 10 percent in Vermont and receiving at least 7 percent support in 10 states.
+
+Overall, the results reflect Trump’s strategy of maximizing support in older, whiter Midwestern states where his anti-free-trade message and appeals to national identity generally find more fertile ground.
+
+But his struggles elsewhere, including places that have long supported Republicans, illustrate the challenges of that strategy in more diverse states where his stances on immigration and some other positions have turned off Democrats, independents and many Republicans.
+
+To win the election, Trump must quickly consolidate the Republican vote. With prominent Republicans declaring they will not support Trump and some even announcing they will back Clinton, this represents a major challenge for the GOP nominee. In the Post-SurveyMonkey poll, Clinton is winning 90 percent or more of the Democratic vote in 32 states, while Trump is at or above that level in just 13.
+
+As expected, the Clinton-Trump contest has split the electorate along racial lines. Their bases of support are mirror images: On average, Clinton does 31 points better among nonwhite voters than whites, and Trump does 31 points better among white voters than nonwhites.
+
+The electorate is also divided along lines of gender and education, in many cases to a greater extent than in recent elections. Averaging across all 50 states, Clinton does 14 points better among women than men, and Trump does 16 points better among men than women. Clinton is winning among women in 34 states, and she’s close in six others. Trump leads among men in 38 states, is tied in six and trails in the other six.
+
+It is among college-educated voters, however, where Trump faces his biggest hurdle. In 2012, white voters with college degrees supported Republican nominee Mitt Romney over President Obama by 56-42 percent. Romney won with 59 percent among white men with college degrees and with 52 percent among white women with college degrees.
+
+So far in this campaign, Clinton has dramatically changed that equation. Among white college graduates, Clinton leads Trump in 31 of the 50 states, and the two are about even in six others. Trump leads among college-educated whites in just 13 states, all safe Republican states in recent elections.
+
+Across 49 states where the poll interviewed at least 100 white college-educated women, Clinton leads Trump with this group in 38 states and by double-digit margins in 37. Averaging across all states, Clinton leads by 23 points among white women with college degrees.
+
+Trump’s base among white voters without a college degree remains strong and substantial. He leads Clinton in 43 of the 50 states, and the two are roughly even in five others. She leads among white voters without a college degree in just one state: Vermont.
+
+Overall, Clinton does 19 points better among white college graduates than whites without degrees while Trump does 18 points better among whites without degrees than whites with college educations, on average.
+
+Trump’s challenge in the states that remain close will be to produce significant turnout among white, non-college voters to offset those Clinton margins, but it’s far from clear that there are enough of them to be decisive. Absent that, the GOP nominee must find a way to appeal to these college-educated voters during the final weeks of the campaign.
+
+Trump’s strength across some of the states in the Midwest is one potential bright spot for the Republican nominee. Clinton’s biggest lead among the contested states in that region is in Pennsylvania, where her margin is just four points. In Wisconsin and Michigan, she leads by a nominal two points, while Trump leads by four points in Iowa and three points in Ohio.
+
+Recent polls by other organizations have indicated that Wisconsin has tightened over the past month. A recent Suffolk University poll in Michigan shows Clinton leading by seven points, and the RealClearPolitics average in Ohio shows Clinton ahead by three points. Overall, among the quintet of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Pennsylvania, Michigan has been the Democrats’ most reliable of the group, always one of the 15 best-performing Democratic states over the past five elections.
+
+The Rocky Mountain West is another area of fierce competition. The Post-SurveyMonkey poll shows Colorado closer than other polls there, with Clinton leading by just two points and the race tied when Johnson and Stein are included. Meanwhile, Clinton and Trump are roughly even in Arizona. In Nevada, Clinton enjoys a lead of five points in head-to-head competition with Trump but by just three points in a four-way test.
+
+Of all the states, Texas provided the most unexpected result. The Lone Star State has been a conservative Republican bastion for the past four decades. In 2012, President Obama lost the state by 16 points. For Democrats, it has been among the 10 to 15 worst-performing states in the past four elections.
+
+The Post-SurveyMonkey poll of Texas shows a dead heat with Clinton at 46 percent and Trump at 45 percent. Democrats have long claimed that changing demographics would make the state competitive in national elections, but probably not for several more cycles.
+
+A comparison of the current survey with the 2008 Texas exit poll (there was no exit poll there in 2012) points to reasons the race appears close right now. Trump is performing worse than 2008 GOP nominee John McCain among both whites and Hispanics, while Clinton is doing slightly better than Obama.
+
+Among men, Trump is doing slightly worse than McCain did eight years ago. The bigger difference is among women. McCain won a narrow majority of women in Texas while Trump is currently below 40 percent. That’s not to say Texas is turning blue in 2016. Given its history, it probably will back Trump in November and possibly by a comfortable margin. But at this stage, the fact that it is close at all is one more surprise in a surprising year.",REAL
+5175,"#MemeOfTheWeek: Trump Asked 'The Gays,' And Got Answers","#MemeOfTheWeek: Trump Asked 'The Gays,' And Got Answers
+
+After last week's mass shooting that killed 49 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, politicians of all stripes have been speaking out about the LGBTQ community — arguing what should be done to protect them, speaking to the importance of their safe spaces, and pledging commitment to their needs. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, per usual, seems to have made the most waves with his words.
+
+On Monday, one day after the attack, Trump spoke as an ally of the community. ""A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens because of their sexual orientation,"" Trump said. He then called the attack a ""strike at the heart and soul of who we are as a nation,"" as CNN reported, saying it was an ""assault"" on people's ability to ""love who they want and express their identity.""
+
+But by Wednesday, the tone had shifted. While Trump seemed to still be showing sympathy to gays and lesbians, the delivery was off for many watching — his talk shifted from support for the community to boastful pride. ""The LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community — they are so much in favor of what I've been saying over the last three or four days,"" Trump said during a campaign stop in Atlanta on Wednesday, defending his tough talk on limiting Muslim immigration and fighting ISIS.
+
+""Ask the gays what they think and what they do, in, not only Saudi Arabia, but many of these countries, and then you tell me — who's your friend, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?""
+
+We're not even going to touch the fact that he used ""the"" in a strange way with those words, a thing he's done before when referencing other minority groups, like the Latinos, or the blacks. What stood out most, besides that precariously placed definite article, was the question: ""Ask the gays.""
+
+Well, the gays answered. It was an exercise in Gay GIF (and Vines, and stills) Magic.
+
+Some were just beyond words.
+
+Even Hillary Clinton got in on the fun, with one simple word.
+
+There was a certain power on display in all the tweets, and in the LGBTQ community's ability to not just speak for itself, but to find humor in a painful week, when politicians could be seen as using gays and lesbians as political props. But there is also a more serious undercurrent to #AskTheGays — how, why, and how quickly an entire group can become political footballs in moments of such distress.
+
+To be fair, both Clinton's and Trump's records on LGBTQ issues are up for debate. Trump has spoken less disparagingly of gays and lesbians than he has of other minority and affinity groups, though he has opposed issues like same-sex marriage. He has said he would allow transgender people to use any bathroom at Trump Tower, but also argued that states should be allowed to decide their own policies concerning bathrooms for transgender individuals.
+
+Hillary Clinton has gained the endorsement of most major LGBTQ organizations, and has campaigned with her support of same-sex marriage and transgender rights. But she did not always support same-sex marriage, and has made some missteps with the LGBTQ community before — most recently during the funeral of Nancy Reagan, when she argued that Reagan had helped advance the nation's conversation on AIDS. (Nancy Reagan's husband was actually silent on AIDS for years.)
+
+Still, Clinton seems to have the advantage — in a May Gallup poll, 54 percent of those who identify as LGBT view Clinton as favorable while only 18 percent view Trump as such.
+
+There is much to unpack in the way LGBTQ people have been both marginalized, co-opted, and embraced in just a matter of days since a physical safe space was taken from the community. But, in a way, #AskTheGays was able to create a safe space online in a week where it might have been particularly hard to find those spaces in the real world or our political discourse.",REAL
+4293,Clinton debate performance enough to keep Biden on sidelines?,"Hillary Clinton was seen to help stabilize her faltering campaign Tuesday night with a debate performance that left little doubt she has a solid grip on the Democratic presidential race -- and may have sent a strong message to Joe Biden that time is running out if he envisions jumping in.
+
+The Democratic front-runner and her closest competitor, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, dominated the debate stage in Las Vegas, relegating the other low-polling candidates to footnote status. But with the most to lose Tuesday night, the Clinton camp seemed to come out of the debate revitalized, with aides calling it the ""best day"" of their campaign.
+
+""I think things have stabilized,"" Clinton pollster Joel Benenson said.
+
+That claim will be put to the test in the coming weeks. The vice president continues to mull a 2016 bid, and the debate had been viewed by analysts as a significant factor in that ultimate decision.
+
+Biden watched the debate Tuesday night from afar, at the Naval Observatory residence -- and time will tell whether he thinks there's still room for him. On Wednesday, Biden said only that all the candidates did a good job and he's ""proud of all of them.""
+
+In comparison with the Donald Trump-dominated GOP debates, the lead-off showdown in Las Vegas Tuesday night was a relatively cordial affair for the Democrats, with the lively disputes centering on policy differences and not personal put-downs. But Clinton was the clear lightning rod, challenged early and often on her shifting positions - while also hitting back and trying to position herself as a practical progressive with every bit as much credibility with the base as candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders.
+
+""I'm not taking a backseat to anybody on my values, my principles and the results that I get,"" Clinton said, describing herself as a ""progressive who likes to get things done.""
+
+The front-runner, who has faced an insurgent challenge from her left in Sanders' campaign, was visibly ready to tangle Tuesday with him and the three other candidates on stage at the CNN-Facebook debate.
+
+While Sanders railed against a ""casino capitalist process,"" Clinton warned against abandoning the system that built America's middle class. And Clinton sparred with Sanders and others as they questioned her call for a no-fly zone in Syria, and criticized her 2002 support, as a senator, for use of force in Iraq, a decision she's since called a mistake.
+
+Former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee called it a ""poor decision"" and said he did his ""homework"" when he opposed that measure.
+
+Clinton, in her defense, noted that President Obama asked her to be secretary of state because ""he valued my judgment.""
+
+When former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley suggested lawmakers were overtaken by ""war fever,"" Clinton quipped: ""I am in the middle here - lots of things coming from all directions."" She then tweaked O'Malley by thanking him for endorsing her in 2008.
+
+While Clinton and Sanders sparred at times, the Vermont senator mostly avoided aggressively attacking Clinton on stage.
+
+When Clinton was pressed on her personal email scandal, Sanders even jumped to her defense.
+
+In one of the more memorable moments of the night, Sanders said: ""I think the secretary is right. ... The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.""
+
+Clinton said, ""Me too."" She thanked him and shook his hand.
+
+Chafee, though, added that ""credibility is an issue.""
+
+The exchange came after Clinton responded to a question on the email scandal by saying she's taken responsibility for it and acknowledged it was a mistake.
+
+She quickly pivoted to challenging the work of the congressional Benghazi committee, calling it ""basically an arm of the Republican National Committee.""
+
+The former secretary of state was also challenged on her policy flips by moderator Anderson Cooper, who asked if she will say anything to get elected.
+
+""I've been very consistent over the course of my entire life,"" Clinton responded. But she said ""like most human beings,"" she has absorbed new information.
+
+Clinton was specifically challenged for opposing the Pacific-nation trade deal she once supported as secretary of state. Though she once called it the ""gold standard,"" she said Tuesday the deal ""didn't meet my standard."" She said she couldn't tell voters it would raise their wages.
+
+Clinton, though, tried to turn the tables on her rivals, and took a crack at Sanders' record on gun control.
+
+Asked if the Vermont senator is tough enough on gun violence, Clinton said, ""No, not at all"" and urged the country to stand up against the NRA.
+
+She criticized him for voting for a 2005 bill giving gun manufacturers immunity from lawsuits. After Sanders described that bill as complicated, she said, ""It wasn't that complicated to me.""
+
+Sanders responded, ""All the shouting in the world"" is not going to end the violence. He said the country needs to reach a consensus, and stressed that rural states view gun laws differently than other states.
+
+Throughout the debate, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, the fifth candidate on stage, struggled to elbow his way into the conversation. He stressed his military experience and push for criminal justice reform and other issues while in the Senate.
+
+Toward the end of the debate, Webb challenged Sanders for his big-spending proposals
+
+""Bernie, I don't think the revolution's gonna come,"" he said, adding he doesn't think Congress would pay for a lot of his plans.
+
+Webb, Chafee and O'Malley are all averaging at or below 1 percent in the polls nationally, according to RealClearPolitics.",REAL
+3278,Is Mitch McConnell next?,"(CNN) Conservatives at the Values Voter Summit cheered Friday morning when they learned that House Speaker John Boehner was retiring. Friday afternoon, they cheered again when someone suggested the next establishment Republican to lose his job should be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
+
+""Here's what I say in response to Speaker Boehner stepping down. Mitch McConnell, it is now your turn,"" Louisiana Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Bobby Jindal said to raucous applause.
+
+After the news of Boehner's resignation, Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon told reporters he had texted his fellow conservative friend, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, with the simple message: ""the next guy in the crosshairs is probably McConnell.""
+
+The Kentucky Republican has never been the favorite of tea party-aligned conservatives. His budget deals with the Obama administration -- most notably the December 2012 agreement with Vice President Joe Biden averting the so-called fiscal cliff -- haven't endeared him to the base who say he gives up too much. He has declined to get rid of the Senate filibuster in order to block the Iran nuclear deal, and critics say he surrendered the fight over federal funding for Planned Parenthood by declaring early on that he would actively seek to avoid a government shutdown.
+
+But McConnell likely isn't going anywhere. While talk radio may call for his head, there are no signs of a true in-house groundswell against him. Making things more difficult for a would-be insurgent, the Senate leader is elected only by his or her conference, meaning it would be harder to get the critical mass needed to unseat him.
+
+That doesn't mean conservatives will be silent -- McConnell epitomizes the Republican establishment in Washington that several of the top GOP presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are running against.
+
+Seventy-two percent of Republican primary voters said they are dissatisfied with the ability of Boehner and McConnell to achieve their party's goals, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. And 36 percent wanted them immediately removed from their leadership positions.
+
+Jindal's other big applause line at the Values Voter Summit regarding Boehner: ""That's one down, that's 434 more to go.""
+
+McConnell's office declined to comment, but referred CNN to the second-ranking Senate Republican, John Cornyn. ""As someone who's in constant contact with our members, it's clear Leader McConnell has overwhelming support within the conference,"" Cornyn said.
+
+Rep. Bill Flores, R-Texas, said many House GOP members were frustrated with Senate Republicans for not pushing a more conservative agenda and taking up bills the House passed.
+
+""In my view the Speaker fell on his sword for all of Congress, and I hope the Senate starts to get things done.""
+
+To reporters, Salmon aimed his frustration at the filibuster and the 60-vote threshold that Democrats have used to block House GOP initiatives.
+
+""A lot of the problem that we're engaged in is because the Senate doesn't take any action on anything,"" Salmon said. ""And there is nothing that any presidential candidate on our side says that will ever be realized as long as the modern day filibuster is enacted the way it is today.""
+
+McConnell has been tested before from the right. He defeated tea party challenger Matt Bevin in a contentious 2014 Republican Kentucky Senate primary. And in July, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tore into McConnell in a rare personal attack on the Senate floor, accusing the majority leader of lying. Cruz said McConnell had promised he had not cut a deal to allow a vote on the Export-Import Bank, an institution Cruz believes is corrupt.
+
+""If he was telling us the truth that there was no deal, why would he do what he just did?"" Cruz asked. ""We now know that when the majority leader looks us in the eyes and makes an explicit commitment that he is willing to say things that he knows are false.""
+
+Cruz's attacks, however, may only have served to remind conservatives about how powerful McConnell is. Several influential Republican senators chastised Cruz after the incident.
+
+""Squabbling and sanctimony may be tolerated in other venues -- or perhaps on the campaign trail,"" Hatch said, ""but they have no place among colleagues in the United States Senate.""",REAL
+3438,Washington digs in for Supreme Court fight,"Washington (CNN) The White House is making clear that President Barack Obama will defy Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail who want him to leave the momentous task of nominating a new Supreme Court justice to the next administration.
+
+""This is not the first time that Republicans have come out with a lot of bluster, only to have reality ultimately sink in,"" White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz told reporters Monday.
+
+Schultz pointed to previous White House victories over the GOP-led Congress -- raising the debt limit, implementing the Iran nuclear deal and reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank -- and said history shows ""Republicans fell back when their positions aren't tenable.""
+
+Washington is in tumult after the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia, which left a turbulent White House race transformed, a lame-duck president back at the center of the political storm and Senate Republican leaders juggling an electoral hand grenade. After the shock of Scalia's passing and the swift eruption of a bitter partisan feud over his replacement, Obama and his GOP adversaries are digging in for a showdown.
+
+Schultz emphasized Obama's plans to nominate a successor to Scalia and said it's the Senate's job to fulfill its constitutional duty to consider that nominee.
+
+""There are no caveats. The Constitution does not include exemptions for election years or for the president's last term in office. There's no exemption for when a vacancy could tip the balance of the court,"" Schultz said.
+
+But he said Obama won't select a nominee immediately.
+
+""The president will take the time and rigor this process deserves before selecting a nominee. I would not anticipate an announcement this week, especially given that the Senate is out of recess,"" Schultz said Monday. ""But as soon as the Senate returns, the president was very clear that he's going to fulfill his constitutional responsibility to nominate a successor to Justice Scalia.""
+
+That position ensures a titanic fight over Scalia's replacement, placing Obama on a collision course with Republicans while thickening the plot of an election that now leaves the White House, the Senate and the nation's top court up for grabs.
+
+GOP presidential candidates are leading the charge in the battle over a replacement for Scalia, a beloved icon for conservatives who was found dead at the age of 79 at a resort in West Texas on Saturday. They are warning that since an appointment could remake the court for a generation as key legal battles over abortion rights, affirmative action and campaign finance loom, it should be put off until next year.
+
+""This is for the people to decide,"" Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said at a rally in South Carolina on Monday. ""I intend to make 2016 a referendum on the U.S. Supreme Court.""
+
+Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already warned Obama not to try to fill the vacancy on the Court, saying it should be up to a new president to weigh in once voters have spoken in November.
+
+McConnell must navigate a treacherous political moment and decide whether a Republican maneuver to block a confirmation process could benefit his party at the polls or risk driving up Democratic turnout in November and put his grip on the Senate at risk.
+
+Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and several other Democrats want Obama to choose a Supreme Court nominee who would inflict maximum political pain on Republicans because he or she would be very difficult for the GOP to oppose, according to two Democratic sources.
+
+In other words, some influential Senate Democrats want Obama to choose a nominee who Republicans would ordinarily support but are only opposing now because it's an election year. This, they believe, would allow them to paint the GOP as intransigent and well outside of the mainstream, undermining the Senate GOP's election-year argument that they are committed to governing in a bipartisan manner.
+
+Going this route, they believe, would increasingly ratchet up pressure on at-risk Republicans who are facing tough reelections, energize the Democratic base and potentially flip the Senate if the GOP stands in their way and denies a popular nominee a vote.
+
+Reid spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough shortly after Scalia's death, according to a source familiar with the call.
+
+It's unclear who specifically Reid wants in the post. Some Democrats point to appellate judge Sri Srinivasan, who would be the first justice of South Asian descent serving on the court and was confirmed to his current post by a 97-0 vote in 2013.
+
+""I think the president, past is prologue, will nominate someone who is in the mainstream,"" Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, the likely incoming Democratic leader, said Sunday.
+
+But several other Democrats are also pointing to other potential groundbreaking choices and candidates who don't hold judicial posts, including Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota and Cory Booker, D-New Jersey.
+
+The sudden political crisis also put one group of Republicans -- swing-state senators whose seats could dictate whether the GOP can hang on to the chamber in November -- in a difficult position. Privately, senior Democratic officials told CNN that there's little chance of Obama's nominee winning confirmation unless these endangered GOPers break ranks.
+
+One vulnerable incumbent, Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, would not say if they wanted the Senate to deny Obama's nominee a vote.
+
+Sen. Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia, who often votes with Republicans, wants the Senate to act on a nominee when the President puts one forward, an aide to the senator told CNN.
+
+But several others made clear they stood with Republican leaders who believe that the issue could invigorate conservative turnout in November.
+
+""I strongly agree that the American people should decide the future direction of the Supreme Court by their votes for president and the majority party in the U.S. Senate,"" Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a vulnerable incumbent, said in an email to CNN.
+
+And in a statement, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican facing a competitive reelection fight in 2016, said the Senate should not confirm a Supreme Court nominee until a new president is elected.
+
+""We're in the midst of a consequential presidential election year,"" Ayotte said, ""and Americans deserve an opportunity to weigh in given the significant implications this nomination could have for the Supreme Court and our country for decades to come.""
+
+On Monday, Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania became the fourth of five swing-state Republicans to back McConnell's strategy.
+
+""We should honor Justice Scalia's legacy, and we should put off a decision on his replacement until the newly-elected president can make his or her choice,"" Toomey said in a statement.
+
+Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican up for re-election this year, also said Monday he thought the future president should nominate Scalia's replacement.
+
+""Whether the next president is a Republican or Democrat, I will judge any nominee on the merits, as I always have,"" Portman said in a statement.",REAL
+7634,Comment on 4 Reasons Why Your Diet Sucks by The Most Important Concepts The Manosphere Taught Me,"Home This Month Popular 4 Reasons Why Your Diet Sucks 4 Reasons Why Your Diet Sucks March 2, 2013 19 Comments Body 
+1. You have no idea how much you are eating. 
+Ever wonder why you can’t gain any muscle or lose any body fat? Well, the first place to look for the answer is your diet. Are you eating the requisite amount of calories for your goals? If you want to gain muscle you have to eat more calories than you burn, whereas if you want to lose body fat you have to eat fewer calories than you burn. There is no way around this simple fact. Even though this is nothing more than a grade school physics problem, I’m still baffled by the number of guys out there whining about being “hardgainers” or “endomorphs.” Invest in a food scale and track your intake. It’s really not that hard. 
+2. You are constantly looking for the next best supplement to take. 
+This is the game equivalent of asking for the one magic pick up line that will allow you to swoop top shelf girls left and right. The hard truth is that the vast majority of supplements are a complete waste of money. Guys flock to supplements because it’s an easy fix. Instead of putting in the time and hard work needed to obtain the results they desire, they look for shortcuts in order to get ahead. Unfortunately, these shortcuts don’t exist. The only time you should be worrying about supplements is when you have all of the other nutritional building blocks in place. 
+3. You think you don’t have the time to eat healthy. 
+A lot of guys complain about being too busy to eat nutritious meals made mostly of whole foods. Guys will also complain about not having enough time to hit the gym after work (or during their lunch break). The problem here is not one of time , but rather of priorities . Guys would rather sleep-in than get up early to make themselves a good lunch to take to work. The bottom line is this: if you value your health then find the time to make yourself nutritious meals. Ditch the excuses. 
+4. You think there is one “best” diet for everyone 
+I’ve been in this game long enough to know that there is no one particular diet that is best for everyone. I remember about 10 years ago people were losing their minds over The Atkins Diet. About 5 years later people moved on to The Paleo Diet, and now Intermittent Fasting is all the rage. New diets will always be on the horizon, which pretty much guarantees that arguments on the internet about which diet is the “best” will never end. I do not know what the “best” diet is. What I do know is that all good diets have several things in common such as being based around whole foods, and acknowledging the importance of portion control, protein, fiber, and other important nutrients. Aside from these basics, whether you eat low carb or high carb, three meals a day or six meal, is entirely up to you and your lifestyle but make sure you get the basics down first. 
+If you can get a handle on just these four areas of your nutrition you will be ahead of the vast majority of individuals out there.",FAKE
+9222,Hillary Clinton enjoys solid lead in early voting: Reuters/Ipsos poll,"By Reuters   5:51 pm Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump by 15 percentage points among early voters surveyed in the past two weeks, according to the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project.   
+By Maurice Tamman 
+NEW YORK (Reuters) – With 11 days to go before the U.S. presidential election, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump by 15 percentage points among early voters surveyed in the past two weeks, according to the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project. 
+Though data is not available for all early voting states, Clinton enjoys an edge in swing states such as Ohio and Arizona and in Republican Party strongholds such as Georgia and Texas. 
+An estimated 19 million Americans have voted so far in the election, according to the University of Florida’s United States Election Project, accounting for as much as 20 percent of the electorate. 
+Overall, Clinton remained on track to win a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the Reuters/Ipsos survey showed. 
+Having so many ballots locked down before the Nov. 8 election is good news for the Clinton campaign. On Friday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it is examining newly discovered emails belonging to Clinton’s close aide, Huma Abedin. Those emails were found on a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, Abedin’s estranged husband, during an unrelated investigation into illicit messages he is alleged to have sent to a teenage girl. The Reuters/Ipsos survey was conducted before the news emerged Friday afternoon. 
+It remains unclear whether the FBI inquiry will upset the balance in the race. The bureau disclosed nothing about the Abedin emails, including whether any of the messages were sent by or to Clinton. Over the summer, the FBI said it was closing its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email system while secretary of state. Until Friday, her campaign seemed to have weathered the initial FBI email probe. 
+Clinton has held a lead averaging four to seven percentage points in polls in recent weeks as the Trump campaign wrestled with accusations by women of groping and other sexual advances. Trump has said none of the accusations are true. He also struggled in the recent presidential debates and faced questions about his taxes. 
+As of Thursday, Clinton’s odds of receiving the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency remained at greater than 95 percent, according to State of the Nation polling results released Saturday. The project estimated she would win by 320 votes to 218, with 278 votes solidly for the Democrat. 
+Clinton’s lead among early voters is similar to the lead enjoyed by President Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney at this point of the 2012 race, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken at the time. Obama won the election by 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206. 
+But even before the latest email news, it had been a difficult week for Clinton. News coverage of Trump’s accusers had diminished, while Clinton confronted the almost daily release by WikiLeaks of emails purportedly hacked from her campaign manager’s account. This week’s leaked messages raised questions about former President Bill Clinton’s finances. 
+And her lead in the States of the Nation project fell slightly from last week. Though the projected Electoral College votes hardly moved, the number of states solidly for Clinton slid from 25 to 20 this week. Trump didn’t see any additional states tilt solidly to him, but he did see some gains: The swing states of Pennsylvania, Colorado, Iowa and Nevada all moved from leaning to Clinton to being too close to call. 
+Still, Trump’s path to a victory is narrow, and any realistic chance rests on his winning Ohio, North Carolina and Florida. As of Thursday, Ohio remained a toss-up. Florida and North Carolina were still tilting toward Clinton, according to the States of the Nation results. 
+Early voting data for Florida and North Carolina was not yet available this week. In Ohio, Clinton led Trump by double digits among early voters. The project’s broader polling suggests the state is deadlocked between the two candidates. 
+In Arizona, Clinton also was solidly ahead among early voters. In the past month, Arizona has gradually moved from a solid Trump state to a marginal Clinton state, although it is still too close to call, according to the project results. 
+In Georgia, she enjoyed a similar lead among early voters. Overall, Georgia leans to Trump, but his lead narrowed to five percentage points this week, down from eights points last week and 13 points a month ago. 
+Even in Texas, where Trump enjoys a sizable lead, Clinton has a double-digit edge among early voters, according to project results. 
+The States of the Nation project is a survey of about 15,000 people every week in all 50 states plus Washington D.C. State by state results are available by visiting http://www.reuters.com/statesofthenation/ 
+(Editing by James Dalgleish) 
+Hillary Clinton enjoys solid lead in early voting: Reuters/Ipsos poll added by Reuters on Sat, Oct 29th, 2016",FAKE
+9058,Hoping for the best and preparing for the worst: A look inside the American Redoubt movement,"CBC News 
+A large map with the slogan “Pray for the Redoubt” hangs behind the till at Warren Campbell’s army surplus store located just outside Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. 
+Campbell moved his family from California about a year and a half ago, in part, because he believes the U.S. economy is on the verge of collapse, but also to get more God and less government in his life and to live around like-minded people. 
+“The American Redoubt is a stronghold, it’s the last bastion for God, country, liberty, constitution, Second Amendment and home schooling,” he said. Warren Campbell inside his army surplus store Redoubt Surplus and Tactical near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (Erin Collins/CBC) 
+A redoubt is a little-used military term that refers to a temporary fortification. The American Redoubt is both a movement and an unofficial geographic zone that includes Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon. 
+The term was coined in 2011 by survivalist James Wesley Rawles, who identified the region as the best place to wait out a disaster in the U.S., be it natural, economic or political. 
+Rawles sees the Redoubt as a place where mostly conservative, Christian Americans who are worried about the future should move and prepare for the worst. The goal is to create a safe haven where like-minded Americans, many of whom refer to themselves as “preppers,” can live off the land, be more self-sufficient and wait out the calamities to come. ‘The holy cause of liberty’ 
+Past the tactical gear and through a hallway at the back of Redoubt Surplus and Tactical , you’ll find Pastor Warren Campbell’s other venture, The Lordship Church . 
+Adorned in military garb and sporting an Abe Lincoln-style beard, Campbell sets out folding metal chairs to get ready for his weekend service, where about three dozen people usually come to hear him preach. 
+“We love to preach on liberty, the holy cause of liberty — George Washington called liberty a sacred fire and our liberties are very, very dear to us, especially the liberties we have in Jesus Christ.” Pastor Warren Campbell inside his makeshift church connected to his army surplus store in northern Idaho. (Erin Collins/CBC) 
+Campbell says he’s met dozens of people who have recently moved to the area, mostly from California and Colorado, because they’re frustrated with what they feel is government overreach, including rising taxes, stiffer gun regulations and the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. 
+He says he’ll likely vote for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Nov. 8, primarily because he believes a Hillary Clinton administration would erode religious freedoms and the right to bear arms. 
+And despite the polls, Campbell believes Trump will win. If he doesn’t, he expects the Redoubt will get a lot more crowded. 
+“I think we will see a great influx of people, more than we are seeing right now, multiplying by thousands, coming here for safety and refuge.” 
+With all the mudslinging and scandal that has defined this U.S. presidential campaign, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising there’s talk of political migration. 
+Once again this election cycle, some Democrats, including several celebrities , have threatened to move to Canada should their candidate lose. 
+Folks in the Redoubt suspect plenty of Trump supporters will consider a move of their own if their candidate loses, although not quite as far north. ‘People want to feel safe’ 
+A short drive away, customers peruse the display cases at Ed Santos’s busy Post Falls gun shop and shooting range. They’re served by staff wearing side arms who show off everything from handguns to automatic weapons. 
+‘The American Redoubt is a stronghold, it’s the last bastion for God, country, liberty, constitution, Second Amendment and home schooling.’ – Warren Campbell, owner of Redoubt Surplus and Tactical 
+Santos says many of the people coming through his shop these days are new arrivals looking for a fresh start and a quieter, more peaceful life. 
+“Many of the things that attracted my wife and I to this area are the same things that are attracting people today — people want to live in a place that feels like a community, people want to feel safe when they go out at night.” 
+Santos, a former army officer, cop and minor pro hockey referee, says the facility is signing up new members every day, and “many of them, the vast majority of them in fact, are from out of this area.” Ed Santos fires a pistol inside the gun range attached to his Port Falls Idaho gun shop. 
+More than 300 kilometres east, that search for safety and community drew Chuck Leveque and his wife to a wooded property in the isolated foothills of Flathead County, Mont. 
+The former Las Vegas vice cop says his biggest worry is that terrorists could knock out America’s electrical grid. 
+Leveque opens the creaky doors of a large shipping container in his yard to show how he’s prepared for the threat. 
+“This is our fuel storage container and we have a tank with 275 gallons of diesel and a tank with 275 gallons of non-ethanol regular gasoline.” 
+The fuel will run Leveque’s generator in the event of a prolonged power outage. He says he’s stored enough food and water for him and his wife to survive for up to four years. 
+But Leveque believes he will also need to protect what he’s stored from those who are less prepared, so, like many people here in the Redoubt, he has stockpiled weapons and ammunition, too. Chuck Leveque opens up the sea lift container that holds two tanks of fuel to run his generator in case the power grid goes down. (Erin Collins/CBC) 
+“The U.S., and Montana in particular, is a gun culture, and in the event of a large catastrophe, we would need the guns to defend ourselves against people who would want to take our property and our preparedness stores.” 
+In the meantime, he worries the country’s political and economic power is waning, saddled with too much debt and a political system that has ground to a halt. 
+It’s a problem he expects will get worse after the presidential campaign. 
+“No matter which way the election turns out, there is going to be a lot of angst by either side.” Canning bullion and bullets 
+Inside a nondescript industrial mall near Kalispell, Mont., DJ Lebaron puts the finishing touches on a can of dehydrated eggs inside his store, Big Sky Preppers . 
+Lebaron, who is originally from southern Alberta, provides survival products and training, including how to can everything from gold bullion to bullets. 
+“You want to pack them tight so that they don’t sound like bullets if somebody shakes it,” he said. 
+For Lebaron, life in the Redoubt is about hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. It’s a mantra he adopted while working with FEMA, America’s disaster management agency, during the earthquake that rocked the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989. 
+“When bad things happen, people that you have called your friends for years are no longer your friends,” he said. “When people are cold, tired and hungry, they forget all about friendships.” 
+His biggest worry is that a natural disaster like an earthquake or flood will disrupt normal life in America. But he says the growing uncertainty about America’s political and economic future is a close second. 
+He says Trump presents conservatives in the Redoubt with a difficult choice this election. 
+“People, if they are voting, are going to be voting for Trump, but people don’t want Trump because nobody can control him and they are worried about what he will do, so I guess I will call that a man-made disaster.” 
+He expects the divisions this presidential campaign has reinforced across the country will remain long after the election and will feed some Americans’ desire to retreat to the Redoubt. 
+“There is very much a division or a schism in the United States today, where people are literally, ‘Which side of the fence are you on?'”",FAKE
+726,"Trump Willing to Meet N.Korea's Kim, Wants to Renegotiate Paris Climate Accord","In a wide-ranging discussion, Trump also said he disapproved of Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions in eastern Ukraine, called for a renegotiation of the Paris climate accord, and said he would dismantle most of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations if he is elected president.
+
+The presumptive Republican nominee declined to share details of his plans to deal with North Korea, but a meeting with Kim would mark a major shift in U.S. policy towards the isolated nation.
+
+""I would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him,"" Trump said of Kim.
+
+""At the same time I would put a lot of pressure on China because economically we have tremendous power over China,"" he said in the half-hour interview at his Trump Tower office in Manhattan.
+
+China is Pyongyang's only major diplomatic and economic supporter.
+
+Trump said the United States is treated unfairly in the Paris climate accord, which prescribes reductions in carbon emissions by more than 170 countries. A renegotiation of the pact would be a major setback for what was hailed as the first truly global climate accord, committing both rich and poor nations to reining in the rise in greenhouse gas emissions blamed for warming the planet.
+
+Turning to the economy, Trump said he planned to release a detailed policy platform in two weeks. He said it would dismantle nearly all of Dodd-Frank, a package of financial reforms put in place after the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
+
+""I would say it'll be close to a dismantling of Dodd-Frank. Dodd-Frank is a very negative force, which has developed a very bad name,"" Trump said.
+
+The New York billionaire also said he perceived a dangerous financial bubble within the tech startup industry. He said tech companies were attaining high valuations without ever making money.
+
+Trump also said he eventually wants a Republican to head the U.S. Federal Reserve, but said he is ""not an enemy"" of current chair Janet Yellen.
+
+""I'm not a person that thinks Janet Yellen is doing a bad job. I happen to be a low-interest rate person unless inflation rears its ugly head, which can happen at some point,"" he said, adding that inflation ""doesn't seem like it's happening any time soon.""",REAL
+8896,‘Anti-Establishment’ Trump Plans to Appoint Goldman Sachs and George Soros Insiders,"Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Sunrise, Fla.
+Contrary to his anti-establishment stance — which supporters readily boast as a viable alternative to Hillary Clinton — Donald Trump’s establishment roots run so deep, the billionaire real estate mogul plans to appoint a former Goldman Sachs partner and George Soros Fund manager as Secretary of the Treasury should he win the election.
+Steve Mnuchin came on board Trump’s campaign as finance chair in May, raising eyebrows of many who felt his 17-year history with Sachs — and affiliation with liberal globalist George Soros as an Investment Professional of Soros Fund Management — conflicted directly with the then-presumptive nominee’s conservative stance and criticisms of establishment politicians.
+“It is difficult to see how a second-generation Goldman Sachs partner would secure such a prominent position in an administration delivered by a populist wind,” Compass Point analyst Isaac Boltansky told Politico of Trump’s curious choice for Treasury Secretary.
+According to Fox Business Network , Trump’s confidence in winning the White House has fomented enough to begin picking Cabinet members, and besides the anomalous choice of Mnuchin for the Treasury, sources said he’s considering New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for Attorney General and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for Homeland Security Secretary.
+Trump has, of course, expended great efforts in criticizing opponent Hillary Clinton’s deep ties to the banking and Wall Street elite; and prior to garnering the Republican nomination, extended that critique to competitor Ted Cruz, saying in one debate:
+“I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.”
+Zero Hedge noted when Trump hired the left-leaning hedge fund manager and financier as finance chair that Mnuchin had previously donated multiple times to various Democrats, including Barack Obama and none other than Hillary Clinton.
+Further substantiating his establishing banking insider status — the precise profile Trump claims publicly to loathe — Mnuchin worked at Goldman Sachs for 17 years, headed OneWest Bank prior to its purchase by CIT Group in 2015, and now sits on CIT’s board while also serving as chairman and chief executive of Dune Capital Management, a private investment firm with a focus on financing big-time Hollywood movies, like “Avatar.”
+If Mnuchin’s Wall Street ties don’t trouble Trump’s supporters enough, the hedge fund manager’s links to George Soros — an ardent Clinton fan — certainly will.
+In fact, in terms of opposition, Soros has spent billions influencing global politics by inserting his brand of leftism wherever possible — and earlier this year even pledged , with others, some $15 million specifically to mobilize Latinos and immigrants to defeat Donald Trump.
+“Steven is a professional at the highest level with an extensive and very successful financial background,” Trump said upon bringing Mnuchin into his campaign. “He brings unprecedented experience and expertise to a fundraising operation that will benefit the Republican Party and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton.”
+Indeed, Trump’s campaign, Quote: d by the Daily Caller , said Mnuchin “has previously worked with Mr. Trump in a business capacity and brings his expertise in finance to what will be an extremely successful fundraising operation for the Republican Party.”
+While business dealings certainly bring ordinarily clashing personalities into contact on occasion, these details about the relationship between Trump and Mnuchin evidence the former’s links to the left.
+Despite the nominee’s many diatribes excoriating Hillary Clinton as out-of-touch with the American populace, Trump’s own status as a billionaire belies both their decades-old friendship and striking similarities — particularly as darlings of the establishment.
+Should you choose to vote on the 8th, it would be prudent to keep in mind blustery campaign rhetoric — from any politician — only constitutes so much hot air.
+This article originally appeared on The Free Thought Project.",FAKE
+9762,Comment on Award Winning American Journalist Exposes The True Origin Of ISIS & The “War On Terror” by HILLARY CLINTON’S TIES TO ISIS SUPPORTERS | osmanisnin,"  “The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” – Mark Twain ( source )   Award winning journalist Ben Swann shares a number of facts regarding the origin and creation of ISIS, the supposed terrorist group that seems to have replaced Al-Qaeda and, according to former FBI translator and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) Sibel Edmunds, has revived the “terror war industry.” When it comes to supposed “terrorist” attacks, it’s no secret that the government or the “powers that be” are involved in some way, shape, or form. We’ve seen this with Al-Qaeda, and various documents that have tied them to U.S. intelligence agencies like the CIA. We’ve also seen a lot of shady circumstances surrounding the “terrorist” attacks that occurred on 9/11; the evidence alone has approximately half of the American people believing it was an inside job – a simple Google search of the polls will show you that, and for the evidence we are referring to, you can access our articles on that topic here . “All three buildings were destroyed by carefully planned, orchestrated and executed controlled demolition.” – Professor Lynn Margulis, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and National Academy of Science member, one of many academics who has been very outspoken regarding 9/11 ( source ) ( source ) All of this activity continues to be used as more justification for a heightened national security state, one in which citizens are being forced to give up their freedoms and privacy in order to be “protected” from such attacks. The entire national security state would crumble if people found out that it was their own government perpetrating these attacks, and this realization is finally beginning to leave the realm of conspiracy and enter into the realm of reality in the minds of the masses. It’s about time. “Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.” – David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps intelligence officer, and the second-highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence ( source )   The “terrorists” we are pointing our fingers at (or so I believe, along with many others, after having done careful research) are a creation of Western intelligence, used to justify the infiltration of other countries for ulterior motives. Those who usually do not believe that, almost one hundred percent of the time have not actually done any research, or examined the information for themselves. This is the power mainstream media has over us – if something is depicted on television, it’s instantly believed without question. Any other explanation which does not come from a major mainstream media outlet (like CNN, for example), or fit the framework of accepted knowledge, seems to be met with harsh resistance. This resistance comes despite the fact that a tremendous amount of evidence is available in the form of videos, documents, and whistle-blowers, yet a large majority of people still refuse to do any research for themselves, or again, believe something contrary to what Western media is telling them. “The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, and any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.” – Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook 
+ ",FAKE
+2724,The attacks on George Stephanopoulos are getting the problem backward,"On the one hand, I find it weird that George Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation. He should have known how it would look.
+
+On the other hand, look is really the operative word there. It's not as if Stephanopoulos's ties to the Clintons were some kind of closely guarded secret:
+
+Stephanopoulos worked on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign for president. He was communications director in Clinton's White House. The sudden realization that Stephanopoulos might be, in his heart of hearts, sympathetic toward the Clintons is a bit odd.
+
+It's easier to see what's going on here when you realize Stephanopoulos wasn't the only media figure to donate to the Clinton Foundation. Dylan Byers reports that the hyper-conservative Newsmax gave more than a million dollars. So did James Murdoch — yes, he's one of those Murdochs — and the News Corporation Foundation, the Murdoch family's philanthropy, threw in at least another $500,000.
+
+But no one much cares about those donations because no one really thinks Newsmax or Fox News are going to end up biased toward the Clintons. They care about Stephanopoulos's donation because they think Stephanopoulos is already biased toward the Clintons, and this just proves it.
+
+But the attacks on Stephanopoulos are getting the possible scandal almost exactly backward. Stephanopoulos, Murdoch, Newsmax, and all the other Clinton donors weren't donating to the Clinton Foundation because they're biased toward the Clintons; they were donating to the Clinton Foundation because they want the Clintons to be biased toward them.
+
+After all, if you're a powerful media figure trying to help out the Clintons on the sly, the last thing you want to do is publicly donate $75,000 to them so everyone thinks you're in their pocket. But if you're a powerful media figure — or a giant corporation — who wants to keep good relations with the Clintons, maybe you do want to make that donation. Bill Clinton, after all, was watching those donations carefully, and he was grateful to the people and institutions that stepped up to support a project he cared about.
+
+It's hard to remember now, but Clinton managed, for a moment, to depoliticize his foundation pretty effectively. At the time Stephanopoulos made his contribution, supporting Clinton's charity was almost as bipartisan as supporting Simpson-Bowles. This was a moment when Mitt Romney and Donald Trump were also supporting the Clinton Foundation, after all. But that speaks to the deeper corruption of the Clinton Foundation, which became, to all appearances, a way for pretty much anyone to buy some goodwill with the Clintons.
+
+Look at the other names on Byers's list of media or media-related companies that donated to the Clinton Foundation: Carlos Slim, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg L.P., Time Warner, AOL, HBO, Twitter, Google. These titans and institutions weren't donating to Clinton Foundation just because they liked the Clintons — they were donating to the Clinton Foundation because they wanted the Clintons to like them.
+
+Which is all to say that while it was a mistake for Stephanopoulos to donate to the Clinton Foundation, it didn't change much: he's either biased toward the Clintons in a way that affects his coverage, or he isn't, and that would have been true with or without his contribution. The more worrying question is whether the Clintons are biased toward the people and companies who give millions of dollars to their foundation.",REAL
+4695,"Fight night in Las Vegas: High stakes for Trump, Clinton and Chris Wallace","Chris Wallace has got his work cut out for him.
+
+The Fox News anchor has a rare opportunity as the moderator of tonight’s third and final debate here in Las Vegas. But it comes at an especially tumultuous time in the campaign.
+
+I have no doubt about Wallace’s ability to ask fair, probing questions of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Well before I came to Fox, I believed that he was one of the toughest interviewers in the business. He has a wealth of experience to draw upon, including his previous stints at NBC and ABC, going back to his coverage of the Reagan White House.
+
+Third debates usually matter less than the first two. The candidates have usually thrown their best stuff at each other and wind up recycling many of their attacks.
+
+But this is not most campaigns.
+
+Wallace told me after he became the first Fox journalist tapped to moderate a general-election debate that he’d have to wait in writing most of the questions to see what was covered in the first two faceoffs. Turns out a whole lot has happened since St. Louis.
+
+The final encounter comes as Trump is denying allegations of sexual misconduct by nine women, and whether they are telling the truth or not, this changes the environment more drastically than Trump merely boasting about groping women on a tape he has dismissed as locker-room talk. And Trump has been increasingly at war with Paul Ryan, talking and tweeting about voter fraud, and accusing the media of rigging the election.
+
+The debate also comes as a near-daily drip of disclosures from Wikileaks – and newly released FBI files from her email investigation -- causes more damage to the Clinton campaign. This goes beyond embarrassing comments and coziness with journalists to collusion with the State Department (including talk of a quid pro quo in exchange for changing the secret designation for some of the emails sent from Clinton’s private server).
+
+These stories hang like a shadow over the Las Vegas Strip.
+
+But while I assume that Wallace will deal with those stories fairly early, he also has the responsibility of tackling trade, terrorism, taxes and other issues that affect hundreds of millions of Americans. These subjects are too important to get short shrift in favor of the more scandalous and salacious stuff.
+
+This is the last time for Trump and Clinton to make their case before a mass audience when it comes to persuading voters, but also in attacking their opponents and fending off the broadsides that come their way.
+
+Beyond the zingers and tough exchanges, the debates always come down to which candidate can make more Americans feel comfortable with the prospect of him or her siting in the Oval Office and acting as their champion. The polls show that questionable temperament is Trump’s greatest liability and dishonesty is Clinton’s biggest albatross.
+
+No matter what he does, if the past is any indication, Wallace will draw criticism from partisans on both sides.
+
+But as he told me, he is there to facilitate a debate between two people, one of whom will be the next president. Chris would be perfectly satisfied if no one is talking about him after Las Vegas.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+4824,Trump’s Hitlerian disregard for the truth,"The Economist, a fine British newsmagazine, is rarely wrong, but it was recently in strongly suggesting that the casual disregard for truth that is the very soul of Donald Trump’s campaign is something new under the sun. The technology — tweets and such — certainly is, but his cascade of immense lies certainly is not. I’d like to familiarize the Economist with Adolf Hitler.
+
+I realize that the name Hitler has the distractive quality of pornography and so I cite it only with reluctance. Hitler, however, was not a fictional creation but a real man who was legally chosen to be Germany’s chancellor, and while Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor does he have designs on neighboring countries, he is Hitlerian in his thinking. He thinks the truth is what he says it is.
+
+Soon after becoming chancellor, Hitler announced that the Jews had declared war on Germany. It was a preposterous statement because Jews were less than 1 percent of Germany’s population and had neither the numbers nor the power to make war on anything. In fact, in sheer preposterousness, it compares to Trump’s insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States — a position he tenaciously held even after Obama released his Hawaiian birth certificate.
+
+At the time, people tried to make sense of Hitler’s statements by saying he was seeking a scapegoat and had settled on the Jews. Not so. From my readings, I know of no instance in which Hitler confided to an intimate that, of course, his statements about Jews were, as we might now say, over the top. In fact, he remained consistently deranged on the topic. He was not lying. For him, it was the truth.
+
+Trump’s fixation on Obama’s birthplace is similar. It was not, as far as he’s concerned, a lie. It was a strongly felt truth that he abandoned only last week and then only under intense pressure — not out of conviction. To Trump, the lie was not what he had been saying about Obama’s birthplace; it was the one he had told when he finally was compelled to say that Obama was born in the U.S.A. The reason he did not apologize for having so long insisted otherwise is that an apology would have crossed his personal red line. Like a child, he had his fingers crossed.
+
+Just as Hitler’s remarks about Jews were deeply rooted in German anti-Semitism, so was Trump’s birtherism rooted in American racism — with some anti-Muslim sentiment thrown in. Trump’s adamant insistence on it raised issues not, as some have so delicately put it, about his demeanor, but instead about his rationality. It made a joke out of the entire furor over revealing his medical records. I’m sure that Trump is fine physically. Mentally, it’s a different story.
+
+In a purloined email, Colin Powell called Trump’s birther fixation “racist.” But the former secretary of state has never done so publicly, and his hesitation about Hillary Clinton — “for good reason she comes across as sleazy” — is no excuse for being AWOL in this fight. Like Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz and some other GOP grandees, he has retreated to a neutral corner, as if the fight is not his, too. They all have their qualms with Clinton, but not a single one of them can possibly believe that the United States and its values will not survive her presidency. A Trump presidency is a different matter.
+
+It’s a mistake to make the unreasonable compatible with the reasonable — to think, say, that Trump cannot be serious about this birther stuff or building a wall or likening the difficulties of becoming a billionaire to the loss of a son in Iraq. That was the authentic Trump, a man totally unburdened by concern for anyone else.
+
+There is no lie that cannot be believed. Even after Germany had murdered most of Europe’s Jews, allied investigators at the end of World War II found that many Germans believed, as historian Nicholas Stargardt put it, that their country’s defeat only “confirmed the ‘power of world Jewry.’ ”
+
+Germany was not some weird place. At the advent of the Hitler era, it was a democracy, an advanced nation, culturally rich and scientifically advanced. It had a unique history — its defeat in World War I, the hyperinflation of the 1920s — so it cannot easily be likened to the contemporary United States. But it was not all that different, either. In 1933, it chose a sociopathic liar as its leader. If the polls are to be believed, we may do the same.",REAL
+93,University of Missouri protests: 'Just a beginning',"(CNN) On Tuesday, students went to classes as they usually do. Football players intended to take the field in preparation for their game against Brigham Young University on Saturday.
+
+But something was very different at the University of Missouri campus.
+
+Students on Tuesday woke up to what protesters call a small but important victory: a weeks-long protest movement that ousted both the university president and the school's chancellor.
+
+African-American students at Missouri have long complained of a mealy-mouthed response by school leaders in dealing with racism on the overwhelmingly white Columbia campus. Black student leaders have conveyed their displeasure over students openly using racial slurs and other incidents.
+
+""This is just a beginning in dismantling systems of oppression in higher education, specifically the UM system,"" said Marshall Allen, a member of the protest group Concerned Student 1950.
+
+The speed of Wolfe's resignation shocked many. As late as Sunday, Wolfe didn't sound like a man who planned to leave his job, putting out a statement expressing a desire to have an ""ongoing dialogue to address these very complex, societal issues.""
+
+But the tide had already turned against him Saturday night, when about 30 black members of the Missouri Tigers football team declared in a tweet that they wouldn't play until Wolfe was gone. By Sunday, more members of the team, black and white, and head coach Gary Pinkel publicly backed the players, and the media started paying attention.
+
+By Monday morning, student groups were calling for walkouts and some faculty offered protesting students their support. The calls for his resignation grew louder.
+
+So Wolfe -- who had presided over the university system, which includes the main University of Missouri campus in Columbia, along with the University of Missouri-St. Louis, University of Missouri-Kansas City and Missouri University of Science and Technology -- stepped down, saying he took ""full responsibility for the inaction that has occurred"" and urged the university community to listen to each other's problems.
+
+""It is my belief we stopped listening to each other; we didn't respond or react,"" he said. ""Use my resignation to heal and start talking again.""
+
+Students, faculty and staff converged on the Carnahan Quad after Wolfe's announcement. There, they linked arms and swayed side to side, singing, ""We Shall Overcome.""
+
+Though the protesting students and some faculty say racial problems on campus go back decades, the current crisis took flight back in September, when Student Government President Payton Head took to Facebook to complain about bigotry and anti-homosexual and anti-transgender attitudes at the school after people riding in the back of a pickup truck screamed racial slurs at him.
+
+""For those of you who wonder why I'm always talking about the importance of inclusion and respect, it's because I've experienced moments like this multiple times at THIS university, making me not feel included here,"" he wrote.
+
+In early October, a drunken white student disrupted the Legion of Black Collegians, an African-American student group, while the group prepped for homecoming and used a racial slur when he was asked to leave.
+
+Later that month, Concerned Student 1950 -- named for the year African-American students were first admitted to the university -- issued a list of demands, including an apology from Wolfe, his removal from office and a more comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum overseen by minority students and faculty.
+
+L'Damian Washington, a former wide receiver on the football team, said that he was happy the team was able to add leverage to Butler's hunger strike and that the protest wasn't just about Missouri or being black. It was about discrimination in all forms everywhere, he said.
+
+""Only a minority knows what it feels like to be a minority on campus,"" he said.
+
+It's difficult to put yourself in others' shoes, he said, explaining that even though he and Butler are black, his experience -- as a football player -- on campus was different from Butler's.
+
+A statement from head coach Pinkel and Missouri athletic director Mack Rhoades, released after Wolfe's announcement, said football activities would resume Tuesday.
+
+The two men addressed the media Monday afternoon.
+
+""There's no playbook. There's no script for what all of us have been dealing with. And I think, certainly, it's been also a great learning experience for everyone involved,"" said Rhoades.
+
+""As we move forward, it's paramount as a campus and a community that this not divide us, but rather bring us together to listen, to grow, to understand and to create positive change,"" the athletic director said.
+
+If the Tigers had failed to take the field Saturday against the Brigham Young University Cougars at Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the NFL's Chiefs, the team would have been forced to pay a cancellation fee of $1 million, according to a copy of the contract published in The Kansas City Star earlier this year.
+
+""Our team's excited about getting going again and playing, and we're looking forward to our game against BYU this weekend,"" Pinkel told reporters, saying he got involved because he supports his players and because Butler's life was ""on the line.""
+
+""My support of my players had nothing to do with anyone losing their job. With something like this, football became secondary,"" Pinkel said. ""I just know my players were suffering and they felt awful, and again, I'm like their dad, and I'm going to help them in any way I can.""
+
+The University of Missouri's Columbia campus has a population of 35,000 students. The undergraduate student body is about 79% white, while African-Americans make up roughly 8% of undergraduates. The school's faculty is also more 70% white with black representation of just over 3%, according to the university.",REAL
+5292,US-backed Forces Launch Raqqa Offensive as Terror Fears Grow in Europe,"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+A Syrian Kurdish and Arab force backed by US air strikes has launched an offensive against the Islamic State’s de facto Syrian capital at Raqqa aimed at maximising pressure on Isis when it is already under attack in Mosul in Iraq. Anti-Isis forces advanced six miles in the first four hours of the attack, capturing many villages and farms. 
+The move against Raqqa, a city of 320,000 people on the Euphrates River, is by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which numbers about 30,000 fighters, of whom 20,000 are seasoned Kurdish fighters and 10,000 are drawn from the Sunni Arab population of northern Syria. The US is keen not to provoke Turkey which has denounced the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) as terrorists. 
+US officers say that one reason for seeking to isolate and capture Raqqa now is that it is at the centre of planning and execution of Isis terrorist operations against Europe, the US and the wider world and they fear such an operation is about to be launched. General Stephen Townsend, the US commander of Operation Inherent Resolve, which is aimed at eliminating Isis, said last week that “we know they’re up to something. And it’s an external plot; we don’t know exactly where; we don’t know exactly when.” He added that this uncertainty was creating “a sense of urgency.” 
+It would be keeping with Isis’ actions in the past that it seeks to counter-balance setbacks on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria by staging spectacular terrorist atrocities abroad that show that it is still to be feared and can strike when and where it wants. It carried out two suicide bombings in Iraq on Sunday killing 25 people and wounding 50 in the cities of Tikrit and Samarra. 
+The US-led war against the Caliphate declared after Isis captured Mosul in June 2014 has now reached a critical stage with Isis’s many enemies closing in on all sides. Iraqi troops, whose offensive against Mosul started on 17 October, are meeting strong resistance in the east of the city with one unit surrounded and cut off for a time when Isis fighters appeared behind it. 
+The assault on Isis in both Syria and Iraq is very much orchestrated by the US and dependent on US-led airstrikes to destroy Isis positions. This may be more difficult to do as Iraqi army units move into Mosul which may have as many as 1.5 million people still in it. Some are seeking refuge behind the advancing government troops, but the numbers on the main road east of Mosul did not seem very large on Sunday, possibly because it is too dangerous for people to leave their houses and the Iraqi Army has told them to stay there. 
+The opening of the Raqqa offensive brings with its political complications that may exceed the military difficulties because Turkey does not want Raqqa to fall to a force dominated by the YPG, which is the Syrian arm of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has been fighting a guerrilla war against the Turkey Army since 1984. The US has been trying to avoid an armed confrontation between the YPG and Turkey or Turkish backed forces, a possibility that has grown since Turkey had its local allies seize Jarabulus and a strip of territory along the Syrian-Turkish border in August. 
+The mainly Kurdish SDF will be moving into a fertile area north of Raqqa where the population is Sunni Arab. There are doubts among the Syrian Kurds about suffering casualties trying to take an Arab city, which they cannot keep, when they would prefer to move west and link up their present swathe of territory with the Kurdish enclave at Afrin further west, but this is being resisted by Turkey. The Syrian Kurds are doing what the US wants because their future is very dependent on US military and political support. The SDF said it had received weapons from the US, including anti-tank missiles, and some 50 US advisers are reported to be accompanying the advance to call in airstrikes. 
+The SDF spokesman Talal Sillo was quoted as saying that “we want to liberate the surrounding countryside, then encircle the city, then we will assault and liberate it,” he said. Asked about the possibility of intervention by Turkey or its local allies, he replied: “Of course, to begin the operation, we have made sure there will be no other forces but the SDF in the operation.” 
+Underlining the complexity of the present situation, an SDF official, Rezan Hiddo, said Turkey has been an “obstacle” to the Raqqa campaign all along. He said that if Turkey moves against Kurdish areas in northern Syria then the Kurds would stop their campaign directed at Raqqa, adding: “we cannot extinguish the fire in our neighbours’ house if our home is burning.” 
+Isis is using its traditional mixture of suicide car bombs, snipers, booby traps and Improvised Explosive Devices, but these no longer create the terror they once did. Counter-measures are more effective. Major General Maan al-Sadi told Iraqi state television that Isis fighters had launched more than 100 car bombs against his forces in east Mosul, which is only one of the fronts in the fighting. A Counter Terrorism unit came under attack from the rear after advancing into east Mosul, when Isis fighters emerged from houses behind them and isolated the convoy, preventing reinforcements from getting through. Surrounded and low on ammunition, they had to shelter in houses before they finally got out on Saturday. He Isis news agency Amaq released footage on Sunday of captured or destroyed military vehicles, including the burnt wreckage of a Humvee it said was taken in the eastern district of Mosul. Fighters shouted “Allahu Akbar (God is Greatest)” and unloaded ammunition and communications equipment. (Reprinted from The Independent by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+1645,"Here’s Hillary Clinton’s big 2016 challenge, in one chart","As many have already observed, one of the big questions that will help decide whether Hillary Clinton wins the White House next year is this: Can Clinton turn out the coalition that helped power Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 wins at the same levels that the president did?
+
+A new poll by veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, to be released later this morning, illustrates the challenge Clinton faces.
+
+The new poll, which was commissioned by Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund and conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, shows that members of the Rising American Electorate — minorities, millennials, and single women — are significantly less tuned in to next year’s election than GOP-aligned voter groups are.
+
+The poll has some good news for Democrats. The survey, which was taken in four key battleground states — Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin — suggests that in those states, the demographics do favor Dems. That’s because the poll finds that RAE voter groups — who helped drive Obama’s wins — now make up a “majority or near majority of the vote” in all those states. The poll also finds Dems leading in Senate races in two of those states and tied in two others.
+
+But members of the RAE are insufficiently engaged in next year’s election when compared to Republican-aligned voter groups:
+
+Unmarried women, minorities, and particularly millennials are less interested in next year’s voting than seniors, conservatives, and white non-college men are. Non-college women — a group the Clinton camp is reportedly eyeing as a way to expand on the Obama coalition — are also less interested.
+
+“Unmarried women are a key dynamic in American politics,” Page Gardner, the president of Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, tells me. “It’s clear that the party or candidate who can increase turnout of unmarried women and the other segments of the Rising American Electorate will be well-positioned for victory in 2016.”
+
+Now, obviously there is a very long way to go, and plenty of time for these voter groups to get more engaged. If Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, and the prospect of electing the first female president seems increasingly within reach, you could see engagement kicking in much more substantially. (It will be interesting to see how non-college, unmarried, minority and millennial women respond.)
+
+But Greenberg’s pollsters are sounding the alarm now, warning that Democrats need to take more steps to tailor their message towards boosting the interest level among these voters. As Stan Greenberg outlines in his new book, America Ascendant, the key to engaging these voters is two-fold. It isn’t enough to simply outline bold economic policies to deal with college affordability, child care (universal pre-K), workplace flexibility (paid family and sick leave), and so forth, though those things are crucial. What’s also required to engage these groups, Greenberg argues, is a reform agenda geared to reducing the influence of the wealthy, the lobbyists, and the special interests over our politics. Today’s new poll suggests the same.
+
+The basic problem outlined by Greenberg (and noted by other Dem pollsters) is that, even if Democratic economic policies are broadly popular, this isn’t enough on its own, because many Americans don’t believe government can or will actually deliver on those policies. Greenberg writes: “when voters hear the reform narrative first, they are dramatically more open to the middle-class economic narrative that calls for government activism in response to America’s problems.”
+
+Thus, it’s not an accident that Clinton, in addition to embracing a robust economic agenda, has also stressed campaign finance and voting access reform. Her campaign knows engaging these voter groups on Obama-like levels is crucial to her White House hopes, and seems to share in Greenberg’s analysis.
+
+* IT’S ON!!! TED CRUZ VERSUS MARCO RUBIO: Bloomberg reports that Ted Cruz is carefully escalating the attacks on Marco Rubio, now that both are roughly tied in national polls. Cruz is making the case that he is a real conservative, while Rubio is competing in the “moderate” lane. But:
+
+As I noted on Friday, the GOP race could shape up as a battle between Cuban-Americans over who is more anti-“amnesty.”
+
+* ARE DEMS BROADENING THE SENATE MAP? Politico takes a look at the Senate map and finds signs that Democrats may be putting unexpected states in play:
+
+But Dem chances of winning in places like North Carolina and Indiana may not be as great as expected. Still, Dems only have to flip four seats out of the above seven if they win the White House.
+
+ * A BIG PUSH FOR AUTOMATIC VOTER REGISTRATION: The New York Times reports that a group called iVote, which is headed by former aides to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, is pushing a national bill that would require states to make voter registration automatic with the issue of driver’s licenses. That’s not going anywhere. But:
+
+It’s another reminder of the long-term importance for Democrats of regaining ground on the level of the states.
+
+* AMERICANS DON’T THINK GOVERNMENT WORKS FOR THEM: A Los Angeles Times poll released over the weekend showed a fascinating disconnect: Americans say by roughly 60-40 that “unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy” is a bigger problem than “over-regulation of the free market that interferes with growth.”
+
+But only one in 10 say the federal government “increases opportunities for people like me,” while half say government “gets in the way.” This — majorities see an unfair economy, but most don’t believe government can do anything about it for them — perhaps confirms the problem laid out in the lead item. (Though generic “government” always polls badly.)
+
+* A DEEP DIVE INTO HILLARY’S EMAILS:  Hillary Clinton has claimed that “90 to 95 percent” of her work related emails are “in the State Department system.” Glenn Kessler does a very deep dive into the controversy over this statement and what is really true and what isn’t, concluding that it is “not unreasonable” for her to claim that most those emails might be in the State Department’s system, but that it is wrong for her to definitively declare this to be so.
+
+The upshot is that these emails were sent over State Department servers, because they were sent to other State employees with .gov accounts, but the department has not made any official determination of how many of them have been captured.
+
+* WHY IS MORTALITY RISING AMONG WHITES? With a new paper showing rising mortality rates among middle aged whites, Paul Krugman knocks down the conservative explanation that faults the left for eroding traditional values:
+
+Krugman also suggests that many of these Americans may be feeling betrayed by the American dream, though he concedes economic explanations may not account for what’s happening.
+
+* AND WE’VE HIT ANOTHER GRIM CLIMATE MILESTONE: Nothing to see here, folks:
+
+Which gives me another excuse to link to my new feature on the current state of GOP climate skepticism.",REAL
+7903,"World Champion Boxer Manny Pacquiao Builds 1,000 Homes For Poor Filipinos","After earning millions for fighting Floyd Mayweather, the boxer and politician used a portion of his earnings to construct homes for 1,000 poor families in his hometown. Manny Pacquiao is more than a world-class athlete or a Filipino politician. He’s a compassionate activist who paid for 1,000 homes to be built to help out underprivileged families in his hometown. 
+Via Anonews 
+
+Earlier this year, Pacquiao proclaimed his good deed on Facebook: “I’m so happy giving this houses free to my constituents in Sarangani Province from my own pocket more than thousand families are the beneficiaries.”
+The Star reports that the ‘born-again Christian’ was inspired to help poor families after duking it out with Floyd Mayweather. Though he lost the boxing match, he still earned millions of dollars in the ‘fight of the century’ and felt it was his duty to give back.
+He wrote: 
+“As faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms, each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others. I’m still building more because I always believe what the bible says offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.”
+The act of compassion could be nothing more than a calculated political move, but nonetheless, 1,000 families have secure living spaces thanks to the Senator’s generosity. That, we believe, is worth celebrating.
+",FAKE
+8911,JUST IN: FBI Reopens Hillary Clinton Email Probe,"JUST IN: FBI Reopens Hillary Clinton Email Probe Please scroll down for video 
+The Federal Bureau of Investigation has announced its plans to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails just 11 days before the presidential election, reigniting a massive controversy that has haunted the Clinton campaign for months. 
+Three months after the investigation was closed, FBI director James Comey said he found more emails that were ""pertinent"" to the investigation of Ms Clinton’s personal email server, which Ms Clinton had been accused of misusing during her tenure as secretary of state. 
+“In previous congressional testimony I refer to the fact that the FBI has completed its investigation of former secretary Clinton’s personal email server,"" Mr Comey said. 
+""Due to recent developments I am writing to supplement my previous testimony. Related Articles FBI Successfully Recovers Hillary Clinton’s Deleted Emails 
+""In connection with an unrelated case the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent, and I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday and I agreed the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation."" 
+He said he ""cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant"", and did not say how long the investigation would take. 
+The new investigation is reportedly not related to WikiLeaks. 
+The email controversy has dogged Ms Clinton's campaign for months. 
+She repeatedly said she handed over 33,000 emails to the FBI and the Justice Department to determine whether she had sent or received top secret or classified information on an unsecured server. 
+The FBI also denied a ""quid pro quo"" arrangement with the state department to downgrade certain information in the emails from ""classified"" to ""unclassified"" . 
+Mr Comey told the Justice Department in July that although Ms Clinton had displayed ""extreme carelessness"" which could have lead to adversaries hacking her account, he did not recommend any criminal charges. 
+The Justice Department decided to clear the presidential nominee of all charges the same month. 
+It is not yet known where these new emails came from or what they say. The Clinton campaign has not yet commented. 
+As the news broke, Ms Clinton was flying to Iowa to speak alongside women's rights leaders at two rallies. 
+At a rally in New Hampshire, Donald Trump told the crowds: ""Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let take her criminal scheme into the oval office. 
+""I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice are now willing to have the courage to write the horrible mistake that they made."" 
+He has previously said Ms Clinton should be behind bars and accused her of ""deleting thousands of emails"" to hide them from the FBI, which Ms Clinton denied. 
+The news was also jumped on by Republicans including house speaker Paul Ryan, who said Ms Clinton had ""nobody but herself to blame but herself"". 
+""She was entrusted with our nation's most important secrets, and she betrayed that trust by carelessly mishandling highly classified information,"" he said in a statement, renewing his call to exclude Ms Clinton from any classified briefings until the matter was ""fully resolved"". 
+Along with the investigation over her emails sent and received as secretary of state, the US government recently accused Russia of hacking emails from the Democratic National Convention, which exposed Ms Clinton's team's planned smear of former opponent Bernie Sanders. Related Articles",FAKE
+6002,What Is At Stake In the Election,"Here Are The Presstitutes Who Control American’s Minds: http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2016/10/26/1010359-65-us-journalists-at-a-private-dinner-with-hillary-clintons-team-and-john-podesta/ 
+I just heard an NPR presstitute delare that Texas, a traditional sure thing for Republicans was up for grabs in the presidential election. Little wonder if this report on Zero Hedge is correct. Apparently, the voting machines are already at work stealing the election for Killary. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/texas-rigged-first-reports-voting-machines-switching-votes-hillary-texas 
+From my long experience in journalism, I know the American public is not very sharp. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to believe that Americans, whose jobs, careers, and the same for their children and grandchildren, have been sold out by the elites who Hillary represents would actually vote for her. It makes no sense. If this were the case, how did Trump get the Republican nomination despite the vicious presstitute campaign against him? 
+It seems obvious that the majority of Americans who have been suffering terribly at the hands of the One Percent who own Hillary lock, stock, and barrel, will not vote for the people who have ruined their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren. 
+Furthermore, if Trump’s election is as impossible as the presstitutes tell us—Hillary’s win is 93% certain according to the latest presstitute pronouncement—the vicious 24/7 attacks on Trump would be pointless. Wouldn’t they? Why the constant, frenetic, vicious attacks on a person who has no chance? 
+There are reports that a company associated with Hillary backer George Soros is supplying the voting machines to 16 states, including states that determine election outcomes. I do not know that these reports are correct. However, I do know for a fact that the oligarchic interests that rule America are opposed to Trump being elected President for the simple reason that they are unsure that they would be able to control him. 
+It is hard to believe that dispossessed Americans will vote for Hillary, the representative of those who have dispossessed them, when Trump says he will re-empower the dispossessed. Hillary has denigrated ordinary Americans who, she says, she is so removed from by her wealth that she doesn’t even know who they are. Clearly, Hillary, paid $675,000 by Goldman Sachs for three 20-minute speeches, is not a representative of the people. She represents the One Percent whose policies have flushed the prospects of ordinary Americans down the toilet. 
+What is really disturbing is the pretense by the presstitute scum that Trump’s lewd admiration for female charms is deemed more important than the prospect of nuclear war. At no time during the presidential primaries or during the current presidential campaign has it been mentioned that Russia is being assaulted daily by propaganda, threatened by military buildups, and being convinced that the United States and its European vassals are planning an attack. 
+A threatened Russia, made insecure by inexplicable hostility and Western propaganda, is a danger manufactured by the neoconservative supporters of Hillary Clinton. 
+If the American people are really so unbelievably stupid that they think lewd remarks about women are more important than avoiding nuclear war, the American people are too stupid to exist. They will deserve the mushroom clouds that will wipe them and everyone else off the face of the earth. 
+Donald Trump is the only candidate in the primaries and the general election who has said that he sees no point in conflict with Russia when Putin has shown nothing but desire to work things out to mutual advantage. 
+In contrast, Hillary has declared the thrice-elected president of Russia to be “the new Hitler” and has threatened Russia with military action. Hillary talks openly about regime change in Russia. 
+Surely, in a free media at least one person in the print and TV media would raise this most important of all points. But where have you seen it? 
+Only in my columns and a few others in the alternative media. 
+In other words, we are about to have an election in which the important issue has played no role. And yet allegedly we are the exceptional, indispensable people, a people’s democracy protected by a free press. 
+In truth, this mythical description of America is merely a cloak for the rule of the Oligarchs. And the Oligarchs are risking life on earth for their continual supremacy. (Reprinted from PaulCraigRoberts.org by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+3522,Donald Trump featured in new jihadist recruitment video,"Last month, The Washington Post reported that white nationalists have begun using Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a recruitment tool.
+
+Now, the polarizing Republican presidential front-runner has become the recruitment fodder for another group of marginalized extremists.
+
+A propaganda video released by the Somali-based al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabab includes a clip of Trump calling on the United States to bar Muslims from entering the country, according to news reports. Trump made the statement following the Islamic State-inspired shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., last month.
+
+The video was produced to look similar to a documentary and calls upon African Americans to join a holy war against the United States, according to the BBC.
+
+Claiming the United States is a hotbed of racial inequality, police brutality and anti-Muslim sentiment, the film is an indictment of U.S. race relations and also includes historical civil rights-era footage of Malcolm X, an unnamed white supremacist and African Americans in prison, according to CNN.
+
+The clip showing Trump, the BBC noted, arrives 10 minutes into the 51-minute propaganda video.
+
+On either side of the Trump footage, NBC reported, are clips of Anwar al-Awlaki, the late al-Qaeda recruiter, urging Muslims in the United States to move to Islamic countries or wage war against the West at home. A U.S. citizen, al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike carried out in Yemen in 2011.
+
+“Yesterday, America was a land of slavery, segregation, lynching and Ku Klux Klan, and tomorrow, it will be a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps,” Awlaki can be heard saying in recorded footage.
+
+He adds: “The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens.”
+
+The al-Kataib Media Foundation released the video on Twitter on Friday, according to NBC.
+
+Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But Saturday afternoon, news of the video did nothing to dim the ardor of supporters gathering for his rally in Biloxi, Miss. They began lining up seven hours before the candidate was scheduled to speak, and they utterly rejected the premise that Trump was providing grist for propagandists.
+
+Some wondered whether the video was real. More insisted that the al-Qaeda affiliate was attacking Trump out of fear.
+
+“ISIS, Al-Shabaad, al-Qaeda, all those groups — they don’t want Trump in office,” said Richard Coyne, 52, an Army veteran from nearby Gulfport, who retired last year.  “They want the status quo, which is unfortunately pro-ISIS, pro-Al-Qaeda, pro-Muslim.” ISIS is another name for the extremist group Islamic State.
+
+Sarah Anderson, 57, of Hattiesburg, also an Army veteran who had once worked at the checkpoint at the Berlin Wall, said that any terrorist group that cited Trump was doing so because it is “scared to death of him.”
+
+“He’s a threat to them,” she said. “That’s the opposite of promoting what the terrorists want.”
+
+Some voters were unaware of the video but well aware that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had warned of Trump’s rhetoric being promoted to recruit terrorists. Tom Simmons, a 68-year-old Vietnam War veteran from nearby Vancleave, was reminded of a time 45 years ago when liberals worried so much about winning hearts and minds that they did not do what was necessary for victory.
+
+“I can’t comprehend anything that the Democrats say,” Simmons said. “The terrorists fear Trump right now. They’re going to do anything they can to make him look ridiculous and sound ridiculous.”
+
+In controversial remarks made after the San Bernardino attack, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
+
+[Donald Trump would strongly consider closing some mosques in the United States]
+
+The propaganda video includes that line, but bleeps out the word “hell,” according to CNN.
+
+In the wake of the Paris attacks, Trump said he would “strongly consider” shutting down some mosques and heavily surveilling others.
+
+“I would hate to do it, but it’s something that you’re going to have to strongly consider because some of the ideas and some of the hatred — the absolute hatred — is coming from these areas,” Trump said in an interview on “Morning Joe.”
+
+The video arrives on the heels of several heated exchanges between Trump and Hillary Clinton, in which Clinton has claimed Trump’s language aids jihadists.
+
+“If you go on Arabic television, as we have, and you look at what is being blasted out — video of Mr Trump being translated to Arabic,” Clinton said at an Iowa town hall last month. “ ‘No Muslims coming to the United States,’ other kinds of derogatory, defamatory statements — it is playing into the hands of the violent jihadists.”
+
+Trump’s comments, Clinton added, “lights an even bigger fire for them to make their propaganda claims through social media and in other ways.”
+
+Trump responded to Clinton’s assertion by calling her “a liar.”
+
+“It’s just another Hillary lie,” Trump said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” late last month. “She’s a liar, and everybody knows that.”
+
+David Weigel contributed to this report from Biloxi, Miss.
+
+Muhammad Ali on Donald Trump: ‘Muslims have to stand up’ to anti-Islamic speech
+
+Why Donald Trump’s call for a Muslim ban may work for him, in two charts",REAL
+5359,Purely Coincidental or the Path to a Stolen Election? Voters Report ‘Irregularities’ with Voting Machines Across the US,"As millions of Americans head to the polls to cast their ballots, reports of voting machine ‘irregularities’ and other various issues have already begun to surface across the country.
+Please note we will continue to update as this story as new reports surface. 
+According to FOX2 Michigan, voters in the cities of Detroit, Sterling Heights, Novi, Holly and Roseville have reported machines being unable to accept their ballots, forcing many to leave their them in the hands of polling location volunteers.
+Via Fox2 
+FOX 2 has received dozens of calls and emails from voters saying the machine at their polling place isn’t working correctly.
+An overwhelming number of voters from several cities report the machine isn’t able to accept the ballot… Many voters are concerned, though, that their vote may not be counted since they won’t be there to physically see it go through the machine.
+FOX 2 has also spoken with some election volunteers who are frustrated because they’re not sure who to contact for help getting a new machine.
+One voter in Pennsylvania took to Twitter to voice his frustrations, posting footage of a voting machine swapping a vote for GOP candidate Donald Trump to Democrat Hillary Clinton.
+H/T GatewayPundit 
+this is what I was talking about, they fixed it but it was on some nut shit at first. pic.twitter.com/GO5Y9FCnYN 
+— ædonis | hotep (@lordaedonis) November 8, 2016 
+
+CBS2 KDKA in reported other voters experiencing the same issue in Pennsylvania:
+
+The Philadelphia Republican Party has posted video of voter fraud witness Brittany Foreman recounting her experience at a 52nd ward polling location.
+“My name is Brittany Foreman… and today I witnessed Voter Fraud.” #VoterFraud ILLEGAL. Please SHARE pic.twitter.com/5Plk8FszuT 
+— Philly GOP (@PhillyGOP) November 8, 2016 
+
+A Twitter user in New Jersey alleges a possible case of identity theft in their state:
+@nj1015 hearing about a case of voter fraud in mount laurel. Name was already signed for when person showed up to cast vote #voterfraud 
+— Cara Flodmand (@MsHistory08) November 8, 2016 
+
+Twitter user Bonco states he received the following voter guide at a Greensboro, North Carolina polling location.
+@realDonaldTrump #VoterFraud in NC at the polling place in Greensboro @ Rankin Elementary School, This is being handed en-route to the door pic.twitter.com/LOoP486lRx 
+— Bonoc (@DievasLives) November 8, 2016 
+
+—-
+Problems at the poll such as suspected voter fraud or intimidation? Report it!
+-Department of Justice 800-253-3931
+-Donald Trump Campaign voter hotline 844-332-2016 or submit a report online here 
+-Contact us to share your story here 
+",FAKE
+342,How Rand Paul’s criminal justice pitch is playing on the trail,"BOWIE, Md. - The last time Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) spoke at a historically black college around here, it didn't go well.
+
+Paul spoke at Howard University nearly two years ago, a trip that was filled with fumbles. He bungled the name of Edward Brooke, a Howard graduate who was the nation's first black Senator elected since Reconstruction, and asked if the audience knew the NAACP was founded by Republicans.
+
+Friday, he came here to Bowie State University, another historically black college -- and this time, he came as a politician who seemed to have found his footing when it came to talking about race.
+
+Paul was greeted with a standing ovation and his points were peppered with applause from the audience, a cross-section of races and ages. And some people liked what he had to say.
+
+Shaniah Haskins, an 18-year-old freshman criminal justice major at Bowie State, said she'd wanted to hear Paul's views on the system.
+
+""The simple fact is he'd change things for minorities based not just on race, but on other factors,"" including economic status, she said. ""He actually seems like he has a lot of ideas.""
+
+Over the past few years, Paul has made criminal justice reform one of his signature issues. More recently, he's tied the call for reducing arrests and changing sentencing laws to the situation in Ferguson, Mo.
+
+Speaking just days after the release of a scathing Department of Justice report that showed the Ferguson police department engaged in a systemic pattern of racial discrimination -- and the shooting of two officers -- Paul focused his remarks again Friday on reforming the criminal justice system. He spent about an hour at Bowie State University, about 18 miles from Washington. The visit there underscored one of Paul's goals as he ramps up to a universally expected announcement that he will run for president: reaching out to young and African-American voters.
+
+Paul evoked Martin Luther King's ""Two Americas"" speech, and said that the split still exists, and by not reforming the criminal justice system the nation will stay divided.
+
+""There is still significant segregation in our society,"" Paul said.
+
+In Ferguson, Paul said, there are about 10,000 more arrests each year than the total population of the city. The frustration that is boiling over isn't only due to the killing of an unarmed black teenager by police there, or the death of a black man selling loose cigarettes in New York City, but because of longstanding disparities in the criminal justice system. .
+
+""It isn't just about what happened this year. It's about this building up,"" he said. ""I call it an undercurrent of unease in this country. There are still two Americas.""
+
+Paul's remarks are likely a preview of how he will handle issues of race and criminal justice should he jump into the presidential race. He often speaks of a trip he made to Ferguson last year, where he met with community leaders. He discussed it, unease he said he found in Ferguson and King's speech at a dinner for the American Prospect Magazine last month.
+
+""You're not a part of that,"" he said to an audience that include billionaire David Koch, ""But imagine what it's like to be poor and to get a $100 fine and to have interest added to that and to have it be a $200 fine and we're putting people in jail for civil fines. We've got to figure out what justice is.""
+
+At Bowie State, Paul told stories of people who had been put in jail unfairly due to mandatory minimums or because they couldn't afford to fight the system. Sentencing disparities aren't purposeful, he said, but ""are actual and real.""
+
+Felony convictions, he said, are the ""number one"" thing that prevent people from voting, and he said that expunging criminal records for minor offenses would help the economy by making it easier for people to get jobs.
+
+""Criminal justice, or the lack of criminal justice, it's not a black or white problem,"" Paul said. ""It's a poverty problem.""",REAL
+3783,Police shooting of Antonio Zambrano-Montes in Washington state could be the next Ferguson,"The cellphone video shows Zambrano-Montes, a Mexican national, running away from cops after allegedly throwing rocks at police officers and cars, according to the New York Times. At one point, Zambrano-Montes turns around, and police open fire, killing him.
+
+Investigators said police shot at the unarmed man 17 times, hitting him five to six times.
+
+Police arrested Zambrano-Montes for assaulting an officer in January 2014, according to the Times. Police said he had thrown objects at them and tried to grab an officer's gun. He pleaded guilty in June.
+
+Family members told the Times that Zambrano-Montes was unemployed in recent months. They said he was increasingly depressed and disoriented after he fell from a ladder at an apple orchard and broke both his wrists. In January, he was caught in a house fire that destroyed his belongings.
+
+""What I know is that he was alone, that his wife had left him, that he couldn't see his daughters,"" Pedro Farias, his 32-year-old cousin, told the Times. ""I don't know what his reasons were"" for throwing rocks at police, ""but I know all of this affected him.""
+
+Among the similarities between Ferguson, Missouri, and Pasco are racial disparities between the city's residents and local government. Pasco is nearly 56 percent Hispanic, but its local government isn't representative of the city's racial makeup, the New York Times reported:
+
+The same was true in Ferguson following the August 9 police shooting of Michael Brown. The St. Louis suburb is 67 percent black, but at the time of the Brown shooting the mayor and police chief were white, just one of six city council members was black, zero school board members were black, and only three out of 53 commissioned police officers were black, according to the Los Angeles Times.
+
+The Zambrano-Montes shooting fanned tensions between the local Hispanic community and city government. Hundreds of protesters marched in the week following Zambrano-Montes' death, with some voicing concerns that their own children could be killed by police. In response, the Pasco Police Department claimed it's working to recruit more Hispanic officers.
+
+Similar protests, now under the banner of ""Black Lives Matter,"" came about following several police killings of black boys and men in 2014. In Ferguson, former police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old. In Ohio, police killed 22-year-old John Crawford and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in two separate shootings after mistaking toy guns for actual weapons. In New York City, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed 43-year-old black man in a chokehold.
+
+The most reliable data on police shootings, gathered by the FBI through local and state agencies, is extremely limited — to the point that some criminal justice experts disavow analyzing it altogether — since it's based on voluntary self-reporting. But the data is especially limited for Hispanic victims of police shootings.
+
+Samuel Walker, a retired criminal justice professor from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said there's no research on how many Hispanic victims are left out of police shooting data, but he has reason to believe they're undercounted.
+
+Walker pointed out that other parts of the criminal justice system sometimes classify Hispanic people as white, likely overestimating the number of non-Hispanic white people shot and killed by police and underestimating Hispanic victims. In many cases, determinations of race and ethnicity are made by low-level officials, potentially leading to even more errors based on perceptions and prejudices regarding race.
+
+Florida, the state with the third largest Hispanic population, is entirely excluded from the FBI's national tally of police shootings, further skewing the numbers.
+
+""In short,"" Walker wrote in an email, ""we have no reliable data on Hispanic/Latino people shot and killed by the police.""
+
+Two Supreme Court decisions in the 1980s, Tennessee vs. Garner and Graham v. Connor, set the legal framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable.
+
+Constitutionally, ""police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances,"" David Klinger, a University of Missouri-St. Louis professor who studies law enforcement officers' use of force, said in August. The first circumstance is ""to protect their life or the life of another innocent party"" — referred to as the ""defense-of-life"" standard by police departments. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others.
+
+The logic behind the second circumstance, Klinger explained, comes from Tennessee vs. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He'd stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The court ruled that cops couldn't shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger said, ""they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you've got a violent person who's fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight.""
+
+what matters is the officer's ""objectively reasonable"" belief that there is a threat
+
+The key to both of the legal standards — defense-of-life and stopping a fleeing violent felon — is that it doesn't matter whether there is an actual threat when force is used. Instead, what matters is the officer's ""objectively reasonable"" belief that there is a threat.
+
+That standard comes from the other Supreme Court case that guides use-of-force decisions: Graham v. Connor. This was a civil lawsuit brought by a man who survived his encounter with police officers, but was treated roughly, had his face shoved into the hood of a car, and broke his foot — all while suffering a diabetic attack. The court didn't rule on whether the officers'  actions had been justified, but said police couldn't justify their conduct solely based on whether their intentions were good. They had to demonstrate that their actions were ""objectively reasonable,"" given the circumstances and compared to what other police officers might do.
+
+What's ""objectively reasonable"" changes as the circumstances change. ""One can't just say, 'Because I could use deadly force 10 seconds ago, that means I can use deadly force again now,'"" Walter Katz, a California attorney who specializes in oversight of law enforcement agencies, said in August.
+
+In the case of Zambrano-Montes, the legal questions are whether he was actually fleeing after he turned around and whether he posed an imminent threat to the officers or others, which police could substantiate if he was throwing rocks at officers as they allege.",REAL
+5951,The words Extraordinary Claims needs to be banished when talking Extraterrestrials,"The words Extraordinary Claims needs to be banished when talking Extraterrestrials page: 1 link I was reading an article that talked about Extraterrestrials the other day and of course at the end of the article the tired line about Extraordinary measures....blah, blah, blah came out towards the end of the article. This needs to stop when talking about Extraterrestrials. It may have been an extraordinary claim 60 years ago but it's not today. With the scientific evidence we have today, many people including one of the top Scientist of our time has reached the conclusion that Extraterrestrials exist based on the evidence. Hawking said,""Aliens almost certainly exist."" These are conclusions reached based on the evidence not extraordinary claims. The article was on a possible signal that could be of Extraterrestrial origin. This signal matches a prediction made in 2012 and it's just science. This is what was said at the end of the article and it's this type of thinking that needs to stop. With things like water found on other planets, exoplanets in habitable zones, extremophiles in places we thought life couldn't exist, building blocks of life found on comets and more, saying Extraterrestrials exist isn't an extraordinary claim but a possible explanation based on the evidence. Here's what was said. “The one in 10,000 objects with unusual spectra seen by Borra and Trottier are certainly worthy of additional study,” the team said in a statement. “However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. “It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations. Internationally agreed-upon protocols for searches for evidence of advanced life beyond Earth (SETI) require candidates to be confirmed by independent groups using their own telescopes, and for all natural explanations to be exhausted before invoking extraterrestrial agents as an explanation. www.independent.co.uk... First, the Scientist who are behind this study never said UNEQUIVOCALLY. This is an old tactic that's used by some people on this board from time to time. They can't debate the evidence presented so they try to make it seem as you made a blanket sstatement. The Scientist say ""PROBABLY"" right there on the updated comments on their published paper. Here's what they said: But they make clear that further work will need to be done to confirm or deny that hypothesis. That will need to be done by watching for the same signals on different equipment so that all other explanations can be discarded. Again, NOBODY SAID UNEQUIVOCALLY. I hate it when people do that. This is why I always ask people to quote me where I said this or that because when people can't debate the evidence they try to debate against things that were never said. They also said this: ALL natural explanations need to be exhausted BEFORE Extraterrestrials are invoked as a possible explanation. WHAT!!! That makes no sense. This standard would make it almost impossible to find an Extraterrestrial signal. In most cases ALL natural explanations will never be exhausted so we will have to talk about these things in terms of probability and what's most likely and least likely at least at first. Look, it's easy to cherry pick after the fact. Like I said, an earlier study about the search for Extraterrestrials PREDICTED that we would see these signals and that would be evidence to support the hypothesis. That's just Science. If you look at the sentence, it says BEFORE you can even invoke Extraterrestrials as a possible explanation. Again, that's absurd. Extraterrestrial existence needs to be looked at as a possible explanation based on the observed evidence not an extraordinary claim. edit on 26-10-2016 by neoholographic because: (no reason given)",FAKE
+5705,Selling ‘Regime Change’ Wars to the Masses,"Selling ‘Regime Change’ Wars to the Masses October 28, 2016 
+Propaganda is now such a pervasive part of Western governance that any foreign leader who resists the prevailing power structure can be turned into a demon and made a target of a “regime change” war, explains John Pilger. 
+By John Pilger 
+American journalist Edward Bernays is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions. 
+In 1929, as a publicist for the cigarette industry, Bernays persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behavior then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” Edward Bernays, a pioneer in the modern use of propaganda. 
+Bernays’s influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it.” 
+He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government.” 
+Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and filmmaker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged. 
+Tale of Two Cities 
+Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people. But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front-page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties. Samantha Power, Permanent Representative of the United States to the UN, addresses the Security Council meeting on Syria, Sept. 25, 2016 (UN Photo) 
+In the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics. 
+The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us” – by the United States and Britain. They even have a media center that is funded by Britain and America. 
+Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the “bad guys,” condemned for assaulting and bombing the city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city. 
+Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain, and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad. 
+Behind the Fanatics 
+What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria. U.S.-backed Syrian “moderate” rebels smile as they prepare to behead a 12-year-old boy (left), whose severed head is held aloft triumphantly in a later part of the video. [Screenshot from the YouTube video] Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al Qaeda and the Nusra Front and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.
+Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century, the invasion of Iraq. The U.S. television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to effuse over then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s fabrications. 
+The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?” 
+He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq.” 
+It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question — Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer, and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous. 
+In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul. 
+There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on July 7, 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps. 
+When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy.” That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak. 
+“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.” 
+Punishing Independence 
+The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country. Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct. 20, 2011. 
+The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable. 
+As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked. From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage. 
+Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitized intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.” 
+The West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the U.S. and Britain sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms – is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are malnourished. 
+Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs – “our” bombs – that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals. The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news. 
+Refined Messengers 
+Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia – and with careers on the BBC, the Guardia n, the New York Times , the Washington Post . New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia) 
+These organizations are known as the “liberal media.” They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT. And they love war. While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life. 
+In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie. 
+In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable. 
+So Gaddafi was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died!” 
+The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian : “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.” 
+Intervention – what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction. 
+According to its own records, NATO launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, “most [of them] under the age of ten.” 
+As a direct consequence, Sirte became a capital of ISIS. 
+Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times , the Washington Post and the Guardian , and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and 
+dangerous Cold War. All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO. 
+Inversion of Reality 
+This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear-and-scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first Cold War. Once again, the Russkies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, flanked by Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria “Toria” Nuland, addresses Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting room at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on July 14, 2016. [State Department Photo] The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine – except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count.
+Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government. 
+There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. 
+A Freak Show 
+To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behavior and opinions. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaking to the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on   credit: AIPAC) 
+To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the Twenty-first Century. This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China. 
+To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China. 
+In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news. 
+Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House. 
+The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world – unlike Hillary Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China. 
+The Clinton Danger 
+Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressing the AIPAC conference in Washington D.C. on   credit: AIPAC) 
+She has now pledged to support a “no-fly zone” in Syria – a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime – a distinction for which the competition is fierce. 
+Without a shred of public evidence, Clinton has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public. 
+That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders. 
+Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way – in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target. 
+Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on Nov. 8. If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defense drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays’s “torches of freedom.” 
+Scott McClellan, who had been George W. Bush’s press spokesman, once called the media “complicit enablers.” Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history. 
+In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”",FAKE
+9301,DAMNING Clinton Footage Leaks DAYS Before Election – SEE IT BEFORE IT'S DELETED,"Comments 
+Throughout this election, Hillary Clinton has been claiming to be a “warrior for women” who will do everything in her power to help victims of sexual assault. That’s why it came as bad news to her when the video above this story surfaced… 
+Infowars reported that the video shows child rape victim Kathy Shelton explain how Clinton allowed her rapist to go free when she was his defense lawyer, even thought she knew he was guilty. Afterwards, Clinton was caught on a recording laughing about the fact that she’d just knowingly set a child rapist free. 
+“He took a lie detector test,” Clinton said on the recording, according to The American Thinker. “I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs (laughs).” 
+SHARE this story so we can spread Shelton’s story and let people see who Hillary Clinton REALLY is! ",FAKE
+7550,"Black Agenda Report for Week of Oct 31, 2016","News, information and analysis from the black left. Black Agenda Report for Week of Oct 31, 2016 Submitted by Nellie Bailey a... on Mon, 10/31/2016 - 20:45 Venezuela The Missing Black Movement Ingredient: Self-Determination 
+The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations will hold a National Black Political Convention on Self-Determination, November 5 and 6, in Washington, DC. “If you go through history, the fundamental thing that we’ve confronted is the loss of our self-determination as a people,” said Black Is Back chairman Omali Yeshitela . The Coalition has put forward a 19-point position on the need to put self-determination at the center of Black struggles. The 19 points “give us the beginning of some kind of a plan,” said Yeshitela. “It says, specifically, here is our view on self-determination and the subject of reparations, Black women, the question of police invasion and brutality in our community,” and many other issues. The “Moment of Truth” for the Empire 
+“We are entering a new moment in American history,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro , the Duboisian scholar and Black Radical Organizing Committee activist. “It is a moment of truth for the ruling class, for the ruling elite. What do they do when they are trumped at home -- forgive the pun -- and trumped internationally?” he asked. “Do they back off of empire, do they readjust, do they become peaceful, or do they up the stakes and attempt to resolve all problems with war abroad and oppression at home?” Dr. Monteiro is one of the planners of a Revolutionary Science for Radical Times conference, in Philadelphia, December 9 and 10. Hard Times in Venezuela 
+Despite what the corporate media are telling you, Venezuelans are not starving and the Socialist Party government will not be toppled any time soon. However, the rightwing opposition “is smelling blood” due to an economic crisis that “has made it very difficult for people to get access to imported goods, and many goods are very expensive,” said political science professor George Caccariello-Maher , of Drexel University, author of We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution . Corruption, smuggling and money speculation are serious problems, said Caccariello-Maher. However, the strength of the Left lies in the nation’s grassroots organizations and communes. “It would be very difficult for an opposition government to come in and attempt to throw them off their land” or return property to the private sector, he said. Happy Birthday, Rev. Pinkney! 
+Benton Harbor, Michigan, human rights leader Rev. Edward Pinkney, currently serving a 2 ½ to 10 year sentence on election tampering charges, turned 68 years old this month. Marcina Cole , a courtroom observer at Pinkney’s trial, teamed up with David Sole , of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice, to throw a birthday party for Pinkney, in absentia, in Detroit. “He’s definitely in support of other inmates, doing ministry work, and looking forward to being out very soon,” said Cole. She reported that Green Party vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka visited the political prisoner on October 19. “This was historical,” said Cole. “They know how powerful Rev. Pinkney is” -- and that he has allies on the outside. Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.",FAKE
+4230,Donald Trump can’t stop saying nasty things about women. It could cost him.,"A nasty feud that escalated Thursday between Donald Trump and his chief Republican rival over their wives set off a new wave of alarm among establishment Republicans, who fear that the GOP front-runner would drive away female voters in a general-election fight with likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
+
+Trump’s gender problem flared again this week as he and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas traded insults while Cruz’s wife, Heidi, became the target of vitriol on social media from Trump and his supporters. At one point, the real estate mogul retweeted an unflattering image contrasting Heidi Cruz’s appearance with his wife, Melania, a retired model.
+
+“The images are worth a thousand words,” read the caption on the photo that Trump retweeted to his 7.2 million followers.
+
+That message and others have prompted an outcry among Republicans and Democrats alike, while Cruz said Thursday that “real men don’t bully women.”
+
+“Our spouses and our children are off-bounds,” Cruz told reporters while campaigning in Dane, Wis. “It is not acceptable for a big, loud New York bully to attack my wife. It is not acceptable for him to make insults, to send nasty tweets.”
+
+The altercation underscores the striking nastiness of the GOP primary race and the uncomfortable gender politics surrounding Trump, who has a long history of making incendiary remarks about women and their appearance. Trump has shown little reluctance in attacking his female rivals — or some of his rivals’ spouses — in ways that strike many as sexist or demeaning, and many fear that the insults are a harbinger of the gutter rhetoric to come if he faces Clinton in November.
+
+Trump has called Clinton “very shrill,” belittles her for a lack of stamina and energy, and late last year jabbed her and husband, Bill Clinton, for the latter’s marital indiscretions while he was president. In another instance, Trump said Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” in her 2008 primary fight against then-Sen. Barack Obama.
+
+“I have some very real concerns should he become the nominee. I think it would be catastrophic for our party,” said GOP strategist Katie Packer, who leads the Our Principles PAC, an anti-Trump super PAC. “Half of the reason why I’m fighting so hard to stop Donald Trump is because I think he’s a walking, talking stereotype of a sexist misogynistic pig.”
+
+Polling shows Trump sliding among women in recent months, hurting the GOP’s already shaky position with that demographic. Trump’s favorability numbers have decreased 10 points among women nationwide since November, to 23 percent, while his unfavorable number among women has jumped to 75 percent from 64 percent, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll taken this month.
+
+The changes among men have been less pronounced, with 37 percent now favorable and 59 percent unfavorable. In the states that have voted so far, Trump received an average of 41 percent of the male vote and 34 percent of the female vote.
+
+The fight with Cruz began earlier this week when Make America Awesome, an anti-Trump super PAC, circulated ads on Facebook featuring a risque photograph of Melania Trump from a 15-year-old British GQ photo shoot. It was part of a concerted push to diminish the billionaire among values voters in Utah.
+
+[The GOP — and its big funders — scramble to insulate Congress from Trump]
+
+“Meet Melania Trump. Your next first lady. Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday,” the ad read.
+
+Trump, who went on to lose the Utah caucuses, excoriated Cruz and issued a threat via Twitter: “Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!”
+
+Trump — who wrongly alleges that Cruz was behind the ad — defended the tweet Wednesday on Fox Business Network, saying it was a “disgraceful” and “terrible thing” that demeaned his wife, “a very, very successful model.”
+
+Then came Wednesday night, when Trump retweeted the unflattering image of Heidi Cruz, setting off a fresh series of condemnations.
+
+To Trump’s critics, the attacks on Cruz are just the latest in a troubling pattern of reducing women to their physical appearance and disparaging them in exceptionally personal ways.
+
+Exhibit A is the long-running on-again, off-again feud with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, whom Trump called “crazy” and “average in so many ways” in a series of tweets last week. Fox News said the name-calling is part of a “sick obsession” that “is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate.”
+
+Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a former presidential candidate and an outspoken critic of Trump, said Thursday on MSNBC, “I’m worried that young women think that the standard-bearer of the Republican Party believes that Megyn Kelly is a bimbo.”
+
+GOP strategists fear that Trump clinching the nomination could present an opportunity for Democrats, who are poised to choose the first female presidential nominee and who in past elections have accused Republicans of waging a “war on women” over access to affordable women’s health care, abortion rights and pay equity.
+
+Trump’s treatment and views of women have been a central issue throughout his presidential campaign. At the first GOP debate, in August, Trump berated Kelly for asking him about past insults of women and singled out actress Rosie O’Donnell as the specific woman he referred to as a “fat pig.” A month later, Trump criticized the appearance of rival Carly Fiorina, the only woman who sought the GOP nomination. “Look at that face,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. “Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”
+
+Marcy Stech, communications director at Emily’s List, which has endorsed Clinton, said “the Republican base might find this amusing, but the reality is that these are just the kinds of misogynistic and outrageous comments that will cause lasting damage with women voters.”
+
+She added: “We’ll have plenty of opportunities to remind women voters of this moment even after today’s news cycle has blown over.”
+
+Packer said Trump’s standing with female voters could also endanger the GOP’s hold on the Senate or even the House. At the same time, Packer said, she thinks the anti-Trump movement could prevent the party from being branded by Trump alone.
+
+“Hillary Clinton is very, very vulnerable among this group of women that she needs to have as her base: independent women, and soft Republican women. She’s very vulnerable with them today,” Packer said. “Should we nominate Donald Trump, they will flock to her because they see him as someone who’s repulsive. And it’s not just about so-called ‘women’s issues,’ it’s about how he values women and about how he’s willing to make women feel to benefit himself.”
+
+For months Trump has defended himself against accusations of being offensive to women, saying that he hits all his challengers equally. He labeled former Florida governor Jeb Bush “low energy” and sought to diminish Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida with the nickname “Little Marco.”
+
+“I’d hit you the same way,” Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd in February when pressed on the issue. “I mean, you are the perfect one to ask that question — you have been, you know, under fire from me for a long time, and you are far from a woman.”
+
+“I think there are some women — there’s one sitting right over there in the beautiful red dress. You see that woman over there? I have great respect for that woman over there,” he said, as Todd clarified to viewers that Trump was talking about veteran reporter Andrea Mitchell.
+
+“I have great respect for that woman,” he said. “And I don’t know that she knows I’m talking about her. I’m talking about you. I would never do that to you.”
+
+Emily Guskin, Abby Phillip and David Weigel contributed to this report.",REAL
+2263,We Republicans Lost On Gay Rights. That’s A Good Thing.,"I’m not among those Republicans who have “evolved” on the issue of gay rights. I didn’t need to. I’ve always been attracted to the GOP message of more freedom and less government, but thought it hypocritical and counter to the core of our philosophy that Republicans would not apply those tenets to gay rights. But of course I was often the black sheep in campaign meetings during the 1990s and 2000s. There goes McKinnon again. Taking up for the gays. Although “gay” wasn’t the word that was used back then.
+
+Politically, while it once helped political parties to use gay rights to divide and score political points (and the GOP didn’t have a monopoly on the issue; remember it was Bill Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage Act), the wedge issue has now lost its edge, even, I would argue, in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. No Republican can win the nomination without the support of the business community. And Big Business is now at odds with the social conservative faction of the Republican Party over gay and transgender equality — and Big Business is winning.
+
+Look at what’s happened in four states dominated by the GOP in the past year.
+
+Weeks before the Super Bowl kickoff in 2014, the Arizona Legislature passed a bill allowing businesses to refuse service to gay customers. This “religious freedom” measure made it OK for business owners to kick customers out of their establishments if they opposed homosexuality on religious grounds. Scores of corporate titans in the travel and tourism industry, together with the NFL, opposed the bill. Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed it.
+
+In Indiana this March, lawmakers tried to pass similar legislation, followed by a hell-hath-no-fury response led by Eli Lilly, Salesforce and Angie’s List, which canceled a $40 million project planned for Indianapolis. Marriott’s CEO said the legislation was “pure idiocy from a business perspective.” Gov. Mike Pence modified the bill, but the damage was done. (The state has since hired a global PR firm to resuscitate its image following the brouhaha.)
+
+In Arkansas, same story. Seeing the firestorm that occurred in Indiana, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson didn’t sign the original bill that hit his desk after calls for him to veto it came from his own son, and from Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, which said the bill ran counter to the company’s values. In the end, the governor signed a less toxic, less controversial bill.
+
+And this week, Texas became the latest to join the fray.
+
+The Lone Star State just wrapped its legislative session, which included two “religious freedom” constitutional amendments. Learning from what happened in the above states, industry groups and major businesses went out pre-emptively — let me say that again: pre-emptively — before such bills made it too far in the Legislature. The conservative state chamber of commerce, the Texas Association of Business, took the lead.
+
+The amendments “would devastate economic development, tourism and the convention business,” said Bill Hammond, TAB’s CEO. “One has to look no further than Indiana to realize what a detriment this would be, and how hard it would be to sell Texas to the rest of the country. The Super Bowl [in Houston in 2017], the Final Four, all those things would be at risk in Texas if this were to become part of our Constitution.”
+
+More than 250 Texas companies — American Airlines, Dell, Texas Instruments, Dow Chemical, the Dallas Mavericks — went on record with a general pledge in support of treating gay and transgender Texans fairly and equally under the law — and that welcoming and inclusive communities are essential to their bottom line.
+
+Both amendments in the Texas Legislature died a quick death.
+
+So: four states, same story and same result. If the “religious freedom” strategy can’t work in Texas — the bastion of conservatism and beacon for business — where can it work?
+
+It’s not news this country has come a long way on LGBT rights. An evolution, a massive one, has taken place. Culturally, we’ve gone from taboo to tolerance, and in some cities, total embrace. Elections are always about the future, never about the past. And so my advice to GOP candidates is to recognize that since our society has largely moved on, and business has moved on, so should the party of Abraham Lincoln, who fought a civil war over civil rights.
+
+Discrimination is now simply bad for the bottom line and bad for any brand, whether a company’s or a state’s. When it comes to recruitment and retention, the millennial generation, which will be 75 percent of the workforce by 2030, doesn’t have much tolerance for anti-gay anything. In fact, it’s become somewhat of a litmus test. 73 percent of millennials support LGBT nondiscrimination, according to Public Religion Research Institute. Surely, they use it as one criterion when deciding where to work.
+
+Most businesses now have their own internal nondiscrimination policies for LGBT employees, but they want to see their larger communities in which they operate adopt similar welcoming and inclusive policies. Top talent is looking for both a great job and a great quality of life. To most folks, I would venture, that does not mean a city or state that looks the other way when discrimination happens.
+
+It’s clear from the reaction of many of America’s leading corporations, that Big Business wants to do the right thing for and by employees — all of them. And most CEOs of the Fortune 500 are Republicans. So, they are paving the way for more in our party to jump on board with gay rights. If it’s good for business, it’s generally good for the Republican Party.
+
+Negative national headlines on religious freedom continue to fuel a negative image of the entire party. Both in my private conversations with and in public (and private) polling, conservatives are moving ever closer to supporting full equity for LGBT Americans. Gallup’s Values and Beliefs poll released last month showed a more than 20 percentage-point increase since 2001 in Americans (63 percent) who believe “gay and lesbian relations” are “morally acceptable”. You don’t get to a supermajority like that without Republicans. Even Texas conservatives support protecting gay and transgender folks from employment discrimination.
+
+Republicans, like the rest of Americans, support nondiscrimination laws because most of us have gay family members, friends and co-workers and want to treat them as we would want to be treated. And having heard from moms and dads who want this great country to treat their gay child just like their straight child has been a powerful narrative. It really is all about family standing up for one another. Most people believe equality under the law can and does work well alongside protecting religious freedom — which must be and is protected, even cherished, in our Constitution.
+
+Shockingly, it’s still legal in the United States of America, even as we may be on the brink of having marriage equality in all 50 states, to fire and evict gay and transgender folks — and kick them out of a restaurant — simply for being who they are. This is patently wrong and needs to be fixed.
+
+Democrats and Big Business are at work fixing it, together. That would have been an odd pairing years ago. The GOP position is untenable — and out of step with one of its key constituencies. It’s time to stand up to the social conservative wing and move into the future.",REAL
+3281,"Senate Leaders Announce Deal On Human Trafficking Bill, Clearing Path For Loretta Lynch Vote","WASHINGTON -- Senate leaders announced Tuesday that they've resolved a weeks-long standoff over a sex trafficking bill containing controversial anti-abortion language, clearing the way, at last, for U.S. attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch to get her confirmation vote.
+
+Lynch has been waiting for more than five months for a confirmation vote. Most recently, Republican leaders tied the vote to passage of the trafficking bill. That bill has nothing to do with Lynch, but as long as it wasn't moving, neither was Lynch's confirmation.
+
+Aides to Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) have been working for weeks to break the impasse. As introduced, the bill would have collected fees from sex traffickers and put them into a new victims fund that would be subject to the Hyde Amendment, the federal provision that bars the use of federal funds for abortions except in cases of rape and incest. Democrats objected to the abortion language in general, but more so because the bill expanded the Hyde Amendment to include private funds.
+
+Under the deal announced Tuesday, the bill will create two funding streams. The first one flows from fines collected from sex traffickers, and would be used for survivor services excluding health care. This stream would not include Hyde Amendment restrictions. The second one would come from community health center funds that are already subject to the abortion limits.
+
+The deal lets both parties walk away with a solid talking point: Democrats can celebrate that they prevented an expansion of Hyde, while Republicans can say they didn't cave on restricting abortion funds.
+
+""I’m pleased that we were able to reach a deal that gets this done in a way that does not expand restrictions on women’s health to non-taxpayer dollars or to new programs, and provides survivors with real dedicated funds for the support and services they need,"" Murray said on the Senate floor.
+
+A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he expects the Senate to pass the sex trafficking bill on Wednesday. From there, the Senate will move to Lynch's confirmation vote.
+
+McConnell said the attorney general nominee should get a vote ""in the next day or so.""
+
+Last week, President Barack Obama fumed that Republicans have made Lynch wait for so long, saying the delay is just ""embarrassing.""
+
+CORRECTION: This story previously misstated the nature of the survivor services that would benefit from the funding collected from sex trafficking fines under the legislation. Those services would not include health care.",REAL
+7059,Report Exposes Inner Workings of Facebook and How Clinton Loyalists Control Your Newsfeed,"posted by Eddie Censorship by Facebook has become a thorn in the side of nearly anyone with an opinion differing from the narrative touted by the corporate press — for instance, sentiments not praising Hillary Clinton — and now, through both a new report from Reuters and emails published by Wikileaks, we have insight into why certain posts are targeted. Facebook relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human judgment to remove posts deemed offensive, violent, or otherwise unacceptable to its community standards — but precisely how the ultimate call to take down posts, pages, and groups are made remains unknown. And Facebook takedowns, no matter the improvements to the process the social media behemoth claims to make, have been no less controversial or questionable — and those whose posts are censored have little if any recourse to argue their case. Recent examples of head-scratchers which led to an international uproar, include Facebook’s removal of the iconic Vietnam War photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc — who, at just 9-years-old, was captured on film by an Associated Press photographer fleeing the aftermath of an errant napalm attack near a Buddhist pagoda in the village of Trang Bang. That photograph helped cement in the collective American mind the horrors of the war, and ultimately fueled the success of the anti-war effort — but Facebook arbitrarily pulled the image for nudity — and proceeded even to ban the page of the Conservative prime minister of Norway for also posting the image. Ultimately, the social media company reversed course in that case — but not before also taking down the equally iconic image of civil rights leader Rosa Park’s arrest. But taking down of the image of Kim Phúc might not have been simply an error of AI, since it had been used as a specific example in training the teams responsible for content removal, two unnamed former Facebook employees told Reuters . “Trainers told content-monitoring staffers that the photo violated Facebook policy, despite its historical significance, because it depicted a naked child, in distress, photographed without her consent, the employees told Reuters.” In the final decision to reverse that censorship, Facebook head of the community operations division, Justin Osofsky, admitted it had been a “mistake.” According to Reuters , to whom many current and former Facebook employees spoke on condition of anonymity, the process of judging which posts deserve to be remove and which should be allowed will, in certain instances, be left to the discretion of a small cadre of the company’s elite executives. In addition to Osofsky, Global Policy Chief Monika Bickert; government relations chief, Joel Kaplan; vice president for public policy and communications, Elliot Schrage; and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg make the final call on censorship and appeals. “All five studied at Harvard, and four of them have both undergraduate and graduate degrees from the elite institution. All but Sandberg hold law degrees. Three of the executives have longstanding personal ties to Sandberg,” the outlet notes. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg also occasionally offers guidance in difficult decisions. But there are others. Company spokeswoman Christine Chen explained, “Facebook has a broad, diverse and global network involved in content policy and enforcement, with different managers and senior executives being pulled in depending on the region and the issue at hand.” For those on the receiving end of what could only be described as lopsided and inexplicable censorship, recourse is generally limited and can be nearly impossible to come by. Often, the nature of posts and pages removed insinuates political motivations on the part of the censors. Indeed, and once again flaring international controversy, Facebook disabled , among others, the accounts of editors of Quds and Shehab New Agency — prominent Palestinian media organizations — without explanation or even a specific example given for justification. Although three of four Palestinian-focused accounts were restored, Facebook refused to comment to either Reuters or the accounts’ owners why the decision was reversed, except to say it had been an ‘error.’ In fact, although Chen and other Facebook insiders spoke with Reuters directly about contentious content removal policies and procedures, many details of the processes remain covert and sorely intransparent to the public who is so often forced to cope with the consequences. Earlier this year, an exposé by Gizmodo showing Facebook’s suppression of conservative outlets via its “Trending Topics” section appeared to evidence extreme bias in favor of liberal and corporate media mainstays. Alternative media, too, which provides reports counter to the mainstream political and foreign policy paradigm, has often been the subject of controversial take-downs, censorship, and suppressive tactics — either directly by Facebook, or through convoluted algorithms and artificial intelligence bots. However, considering Sheryl Sandberg and her loyalists populate the top-level group deciding the fate for content removal complaints, it would appear Wikileaks could provide answers for both post censorship and suppression of outlets not vowing complete fealty to the preferred, left-leaning narrative. In a June 4, 2015, email to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta — an enormous cache of whose emails are still being published on a daily basis by Wikileaks — penned by Sandberg in response to condolences on the death of her husband, states , in part, “And I still want HRC to win badly. I am still here to help as I can. She came over and was magical with my kids.” After a wave of post removals and temporary page bans, it appears Facebook has begun to come to its senses for what actually violates community standards — and what might have political worth contrary to the views of its executives. Senior members of Facebook’s policy team recently posted about the laxing of rules governing community standards, which — though welcome — might only provide temporary relief. Quoted by the Wall Street Journal , they wrote : “In the weeks ahead, we’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest—even if they might otherwise violate our standards.” While the social media giant deems itself a technology, and not news, platform, Facebook is still the bouncing off point for issues of interest for an overwhelming percentage of its users. Although it perhaps has some responsibility in regard to the removal of certain content, putting censorship in the hands of only a few individuals in certain instances is a chilling reminder of the fragility — and grave importance — of free speech. source:",FAKE
+3152,Anti-Semitism growing in Europe,"While I understand this sentiment is coming from a place of concern, European Jews should not leave out of fear and should push their leaders to defeat anti-Semitism and radical Islamist terrorism. That said, none of this is surprising. After all, we've recently witnessed murderous terrorist attacks on the Jewish communities of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Paris, attacks that have shaken an already fearful community to its core. Each attack adds to the feelings of insecurity among European Jews and adds more levels of necessary security.
+
+As a result of the intensified wave of anti-Semitism and Islamist terrorism, Jews in Europe are eschewing Jewish identifying symbols and are afraid to attend prayers and to send their children to their Jewish schools. This has led to an unprecedented desire to leave their home countries and flee to greater freedom and security.
+
+But seeing schools doubling as high-security facilities sends a message to our children -- who are the next generation of European Jewry -- that their lives are in constant danger.
+
+Of course, it is understandable and natural that the authorities choose to take heightened security measures to prevent further loss of life. But the fight must be taken to the perpetrators rather than allowing it to infringe further upon the everyday lives of the victims. If, in the words of European leaders, they would like the Jews of Europe to stay and not to emigrate, then they must find a way to return a semblance of normalcy to the everyday lives of Jews across the continent. To defeat this bloody and belligerent strain of terrorism and the specter of radical Islamism and Jew-hatred, European authorities must be more proactive in hunting down terrorists before they act and not grant them a victory by further imposing restrictions on Europe's Jews. The threat is not country specific, so the response must be found in Europe as a union. European nations need to immediately and urgently come together to form a pan-European authority to deal with anti-Semitism and this new form of homegrown radical Islamist terrorism, with significant resources tasked with finding concrete practical solutions. The first step that has to be taken is to bolster and improve intelligence-gathering and sharing across Europe. The current system is neither efficient nor vigilant enough. Many of the perpetrators of the recent massacres of Jews were well-known to the police. Many crossed borders, seemingly with little trouble, before and after they committed their bloody acts. Police and law enforcement also need to be strengthened. This includes actively enforcing laws against incitement and anti-Semitic speech and taking a firmer approach against those who promote hate and violence. Enforcement authorities must enter and act within largely Muslim areas where police might ordinarily be reluctant to enter Additionally, new legislation to combat radical Islamist terrorism and anti-Semitism must be passed. The reality is that Europe is dealing with a new threat using an infrastructure that was not built to deal with homegrown terrorists who run freely in Europe and kill people seemingly at will. In short, European authorities have to change the current mode of action and move from a paradigm of almost pure defense onto the attack. Our continent has known in the past how to deal with threats to our way of life, and as in the past, the best chance of victory is to be found in a continentwide unity of purpose. Any weakness in a European-wide response to this new threat -- not just to Jews, but also to the very essence that our union was built upon, like freedom of thought and speech -- will be exploited by the terrorists and their supporters. There are probably dozens of attacks at various stages of planning taking place in towns and cities across Europe. It is not enough just to increase security at any possible target, because this policy alone is not working and cannot be a long term answer. It is time Europe went on the offensive.",REAL
+7598,"Comment on ""The Working Class Won the Election"" by Paul Craig Roberts","Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+The US presidential election is historic, because the American people were able to defeat the oligarchs. Hillary Clinton, an agent for the Oligarchy, was defeated despite the vicious media campaign against Donald Trump. This shows that the media and the political establishments of the political parties no longer have credibility with the American people. 
+It remains to be seen whether Trump can select and appoint a government that will serve him and his goals to restore American jobs and to establish friendly and respectful relations with Russia, China, Syria, and Iran. 
+It also remains to be seen how the Oligarchy will respond to Trump’s victory. Wall Street and the Federal Reserve can cause an economic crisis in order to put Trump on the defensive, and they can use the crisis to force Trump to appoint one of their own as Secretary of the Treasury. Rogue agents in the CIA and Pentagon can cause a false flag attack that would disrupt friendly relations with Russia. Trump could make a mistake and retain neoconservatives in his government. 
+With Trump there is at least hope. Unless Trump is obstructed by bad judgment in his appointments and by obstacles put in his way, we should expect an end to Washington’s orchestrated conflict with Russia, the removal of the US missiles on Russia’s border with Poland and Romania, the end of the conflict in Ukraine, and the end of Washington’s effort to overthrow the Syrian government. However, achievements such as these imply the defeat of the US Oligarchy. Although Trump defeated Hillary, the Oligarchy still exists and is still powerful. 
+Trump said that he no longer sees the point of NATO 25 years after the Soviet collapse. If he sticks to his view, it means a big political change in Washington’s EU vassals. The hostility toward Russia of the current EU and NATO officials would have to cease. German Chancellor Merkel would have to change her spots or be replaced. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg would have to be dismissed. 
+We do not know who Trump will select to serve in his government. It is likely that Trump is unfamiliar with the various possibilities and their positions on issues. It really depends on who is advising Trump and what advice they give him. Once we see his government, we will know whether we can be hopeful for the changes that now have a chance. 
+If the oligarchy is unable to control Trump and he is actually successful in curbing the power and budget of the military/security complex and in holding the financial sector politically accountable, Trump could be assassinated. 
+Trump said that he will put Hillary in prison. He should first put her on trial for treason and war crimes along with all of the neoconservatives. That would clear the decks for peace with the other two major nuclear powers over whom the neoconservatives seek hegemony. Although the neoconservatives would still have contacts in the hidden deep state, it would make it difficult for the vermin to organize false flag operations or an assassination. Rogue elements in the military/security complex could still bring off an assassination, but without neocons in the government a coverup would be more difficult. 
+Trump has more understanding and insight than his opponents realize. For a man such as Trump to risk acquiring so many powerful enemies and to risk his wealth and reputation, he had to have known that the people’s dissatisfaction with the ruling establishment meant he could be elected president. 
+We won’t know what to expect until we see who are the Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries. If it is the usual crowd, we will know Trump has been captured. 
+A happy lasting result of the election is the complete discrediting of the US media. The media predicted an easy Hillary victory and even Democratic Party control of the US Senate. Even more important to the media’s loss of influence and credibility, despite the vicious media attack on Trump throughout the presidential primaries and presidential campaign, the media had no effect outside the Northeast and West coasts, the stomping grounds of the One Percent. The rest of the country ignored the media. 
+I did not think the Oligarchy would allow Trump to win. However, it seems that the oligarchs were deceived by their own media propaganda. Assured that Hillary was the sure winner, they were unprepared to put into effect plans to steal the election. 
+Hillary is down, but not the Oligarchs. If Trump is advised to be conciliatory, to hold out his hand, and to take the establishment into his government, the American people will again be disappointed. In a country whose institutions have been so completely corrupted by the Oligarchy, it is difficult to achieve real change without bloodshed. (Reprinted from PaulCraigRoberts.org by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+1582,Republicans are the ones hiding behind ‘political correctness’,"The Republican presidential candidates and the far-right echo chamber have made “politically correct” an all-purpose dismissal for facts and opinions they don’t want to hear.
+
+Take Donald Trump’s claim that when the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11, “I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”
+
+The Post’s Fact Checker columnist, Glenn Kessler, found no evidence to support Trump’s claim and gave him Four Pinocchios, reserved for the most baldfaced lies. PolitiFact gave the statement a Pants on Fire rating, denoting extreme mendacity. But when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pressed the GOP front-runner to explain himself, noting that “police say it didn’t happen,” Trump resorted to what has become a familiar dodge.
+
+“I know it might not be politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down,” Trump said.
+
+Ben Carson, running second in the national polls, is even more fond of the political-correctness allegation — so much so that it could be considered a central theme of his campaign. It is unclear whether he actually knows or cares what “political correctness” means. The phrase is just more verbal romaine to add to the word salad that is Carson’s discourse.
+
+He used it when challenged on his stance that a Muslim should not be president, even though the Constitution explicitly states there can be no “religious test” for public office. “Political correctness is imposed by the secular progressives and those who wish to fundamentally change our society,” he said. “Therefore, they make things off-limits to talk about, but you know what? I’m going to talk about it anyway.”
+
+In other words, he considers the framers of the Constitution a bunch of “secular progressives,” since they’re the ones who put a candidate’s faith off-limits. That’s not the loopiest thing Carson has said (his attempts to discuss financial reform are in a class of their own) but it’s in the top 10.
+
+The renowned neurosurgeon took the same route Sunday when Stephanopoulos — who had a busy morning — asked him to react to Trump’s call for the United States to resume harsh interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects, including waterboarding.
+
+“I agree that there’s no such thing as political correctness when you’re fighting an enemy who wants to destroy you and everything that you have anything to do with,” Carson said. “And I’m not one who is real big on telling the enemy what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do.”
+
+But Carson is a medical doctor who took an oath to heal and alleviate suffering. Or maybe he believes that Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, was just another PC lemming, blindly following the secular progressives who are leading us to our collective doom.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, asked about his view that the United States should accept no Syrian refugees, said we should not bow to “political correctness, the elites in Washington or the editorial pages of major newspapers.” Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), asked this summer whether he thought the term “anchor baby ” was offensive, told reporters “we need to stop this politically correct nonsense.” Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, after making a joke about transgender people that some found offensive, responded that “everybody wants to be politically correct, everybody wants to be loved by the media and loved by the left and loved by the elitists.”
+
+And it’s not just GOP candidates who have the anti-political-correctness bug. Many conservative commentators have been quick to condemn the “politically correct” Princeton University students who demand that the school remove symbols honoring Woodrow Wilson — a onetime Princeton president — because of his racism.
+
+These critics ignore the historical fact that Wilson was racist not just by today’s standards but by those of his time. He wrote that African Americans were an “ignorant and inferior race.” He lavishly praised the Ku Klux Klan and pined for the Confederacy. As president of the United States, he ordered that integrated federal government workplaces be segregated; NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of one black clerk who “had a cage built around him to separate him from his white companions.”
+
+Yes, I’m being politically correct. But also truthful.
+
+Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.",REAL
+2523,Seeking Refuge: Five lessons from Europe's migration crisis,"Europe is struggling with the greatest mass-movement of people across its borders since World War II. And the crisis has exposed the limitations and gaps in its immigration system.
+
+A Greek riot police officer (r.) stands guard as migrants and refugees wait a registration procedure at the national stadium of the Greek island of Kos on August 12.
+
+Europe is experiencing the largest movement of people across its borders since World War II, and it is struggling. It’s not just wrestling with capacity and enforcement, as the crush of Middle Easterners and Africans take to the Mediterranean and trek across frontiers, but also testing the limits of its humanitarianism.
+
+The human tide has weighed heavily on some countries and inundated swaths of European countryside or urban space – eliciting fortitude and generosity of spirit, which has been undercovered. It has also revealed a dark side to the continent: fences, tear gas, riots, and hate speech.
+
+Today’s migrants are as poor or traumatized as those refugees during World War II, but many are also black or Muslim. They stand out in communities that have long known nothing but homogeneity. And they are entering at a time when EU citizens question what it really means to live in the 28-member union.
+
+These questions have been brewing for years, but the sheer scale of migration has thrust them suddenly from abstract scenarios into a situation demanding answers now. Through July of this year, some 340,000 have attempted to reach Europe’s doorstep according to EU statistics, nearly three times the same period of last year. And so far nearly 2,440 have died trying.
+
+In an ongoing series called Seeking Refuge, the Monitor has searched for themes and lessons learned in the midst of one of the European Union's greatest modern tests.
+
+When a boat capsized in April off of Libya, killing nearly 800 migrants on board, the argument that the EU should scale back patrols to deter migration – as they were doing at the time of the tragedy – was flipped on its head.
+
+Rescue patrols and walls factor into a migrant’s choices to attempt the trip, but it doesn’t deter his or her decision to leave war or poverty. Life is still better in Europe.
+
+That has been put in sharp focus in Greece. We kicked off the series on the island of Kos, where migrants were steadily streaming in amid an economic crisis that sapped the Greek state's capacity – or appetite – to house and care for thousands of newcomers. Since then tens of thousands have arrived anyway, with 21,000 showing up in one week in August alone.
+
+2. Much of Europe see the migrants as 'the other guy's' problem
+
+Greece and Italy face the physical crush of arrivals, while Germany, Sweden, and Britain are where most migrants want to go. Germany announced this week that it expects 750,000 asylum claims this year, four times more than last year.
+
+Yet in between are nearly two dozen countries that do not see migration as their problem. An EU plan to relocate and resettle some 60,000 migrants has sent much of Europe into an emotional tailspin. One of the countries feeling the brunt of criticism for not doing its part is Britain.
+
+Central and Eastern Europe, meanwhile, which have almost no experience with this type of migration, condemned Brussels for placing a burden on their shoulders where they say it doesn’t belong – even though emigration has long been that region's only escape valve. In the end, a broad, mandatory relocation plan was torpedoed in favor of a smaller, voluntary one – which nonetheless continues to rile.
+
+""There is no incentive for central European countries to accept relocation. They don’t see it as their problem,” said Elizabeth Collett, director of the Migration Policy Institute Europe in Brussels.
+
+For all of the anger directed at Brussels, critics make a valid point too. Europe's system for accepting migrants doesn’t work. The policy that’s been most tested is the Dublin Regulation, the European treaty that stipulates that refugees must have their asylum applications processed by the EU country they first set foot in. Though the convention is meant to be mandatory, overloaded periphery countries are turning a blind eye to the migrants who wish to move on, as virtually all do.
+
+So the migrants easily leave, and take advantage of another European rule that applies to most countries in the bloc: the passport-free Schengen zone.
+
+Earlier in the summer, France started checking passports at its frontier with Italy to dissuade migrants from entering – a violation of Schengen rules, particularly as it happened just as Europeans kicked off the summer vacation season.
+
+“This is a much wider problem than Schengen, but Schengen is the victim because it becomes a symbol of all the fears, that we are defenseless,” explained Marc Pierini, a visiting scholar on European policy at Carnegie Europe in Brussels.
+
+Now many of those same migrants who crossed the Italian-French border are amassing in Calais, at France’s northern edge. This time they face a harder task moving onto their final destination, Britain, both because of geography and because Britain is not part of Schengen. Thousands have stormed the Eurotunnel this summer, leaving at least nine dead.
+
+4. Some Europeans have been magnanimous
+
+This migration crisis has given a high-profile platform to xenophobia. It has led Hungary, where numbers of migrants entering has dramatically spiked, to start building a wall. The Slovakian government said it would accept refugees from Syria but only Christian ones, not Muslims.
+
+And yet, there are European citizens who are trying to rise above the fear. As the newest flashpoint has appeared in the Balkans, at Greece’s border with Macedonia, authorities have tried to keep them back with batons. Meanwhile, one group waits for their arrival – with supplies.
+
+“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Gabriela Andreevska, a young Macedonian who spends most nights at the border, helping the migrants trying to reach the EU. “So many people sleeping on concrete. They’re there, and you can’t turn a blind eye.”
+
+In the heated discussion about Europe’s migration crisis, which can bleed into the wider debate over security and terrorism, it’s easy to forget the most important lesson of all. Each migrant is a person, with families back home and a lifetime of aspiration and regret behind him or her.
+
+The Monitor captured the human element by following the path of two Syrians through Europe’s borders until they finally reached northern Europe. Living in a tidy apartment in Germany, well-housed and fed and nearly guaranteed to be granted refugee status, one of them was still anxious; his mother and sister were still in war-ravaged Syria.
+
+“I want to bring my family, and I’m just wasting time,” he said. “I don’t want to see one of them in [the news] someday.”",REAL
+7178,Load of manure dumped at Democratic headquarters,"Print 
+A load of manure was dumped outside the Democratic Party headquarters in Warren County. 
+“What reasonable person thinks this is OK????” party chair Bethe Goldenfield said in a post in the Greater Cincinnati Politics Facebook Group . “I won’t be responding to anyone who thinks this is acceptable behavior. It is ILLEGAL!” 
+The same thing happened in 2012, Goldenfield noted. The suburban Cincinnati county is overwhelmingly Republican; Mitt Romney got 69 percent of the vote four years ago. It’s been almost 40 years since a Democrat was elected to countywide office. 
+Goldenfield told The Enquirer the Warren County Sheriff’s Office called her around 7:45 a.m. Saturday alerting her to the manure pile outside the Lebanon building. Deputies met party officials later to review video. 
+“Hopefully the perps will be held accountable for their actions,” she said. 
+Jeff Monroe, chairman of the Warren County Republican Party, said the GOP had nothing to do with the manure “and has offered to help clean things up.”",FAKE
+6529,The Trump Campaign Actually Has a Hillary 'Voter Suppression' Strategy with 3 Key Targets,"Share on Twitter 
+You've all heard by now that Donald Trump thinks Hillary Clinton is trying to rig the campaign, including the idea that she's trying to suppress his voters. 
+Now Bloomberg Businessweek has a major new story out on his campaign, including a few fascinating revelations: 
+“Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours....except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.” 
+The campaign holds rallies in non-traditional states like New Hampshire and Maine because data shows that's where the most persuadable voters can be found. 
+You meet Brad Parscale, Trump's main digital guy, who has quite a background. Join me on @thedonaldreddit Reddit AMA right now! https://t.co/tpyfSB0M75 — Brad Parscale (@parscale) October 25, 2016 
+Most importantly, the story also presents another side of the Trump campaign, an active effort to persuade Democrats not to vote. It concentrates on three key groups. 1) White Liberals 
+Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. 2) Young Women 
+The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. 3) African-Americans 
+Her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida. 
+That strategy in action: 
+On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” 
+The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.” 
+Early voting shows that the efforts to decrease turnout may not be working according to the Trump campaign's plan, but it's rare for a campaign to so openly boast of an effort to get people not to vote. ",FAKE
+8109,"Police: Oklahoma Double Murder Suspect Has Hit List, May Be Headed to Nevada","Yahoo News 
+A 38-year-old Oklahoma man who has evaded police for two days after killing two people and shooting four others — including two police officers — has a hit list and may intend to kill up to eight more people, authorities said Tuesday. 
+“This is a man who has indicated a total propensity to kill people, to injure people, shoot people,” said Oklahoma County Sheriff John Whetsel. “He has no care for human life whatsoever.” 
+Authorities believe he may be headed to Nevada and have notified police there to be on the lookout. Oklahoma County Sheriff John Whetsel told ABC News that the suspect, Michael Vance, could face the death penalty if convicted of the crimes. Whetsel is warning citizens to stay clear if they spot Vance, adding that he has “absolutely nothing to lose.” Vance’s rampage began Sunday evening, when he allegedly shot two police officers responding to the scene at a mobile home park over reports of shots fired in the area. The two officers sustained non-life-threatening injuries, officials say, and were temporarily disabled as Vance fled the scene in their patrol car. One officer was shot in the foot and another was hit by gunfire in both legs. 
+Investigators believe Vance live-streamed two videos while on the run, one from inside the police cruiser and another while inside another vehicle. In one of the videos, Vance appears in a blood-covered shirt and says he’s been shot before showing a rifle on the seat next to him. 
+“Letting y’all know, look, this is real,” he says in the video, according to the Associated Press. “If you want to know what’s up next, stay tuned to your local news.” Vance said things were “going to be intense,” according to an affidavit released on Monday night. 
+He then proceeded to a mobile home park, where police discovered the bodies of two of his relatives. Officials identified those victims as 55-year-old Ronald Everett Wilkson and 54-year-old Valerie Kay Wilkson, his wife. 
+The affidavit describes wounds consistent with attempts to sever one victim’s head and the other’s arm. 
+Vance then allegedly “shot at and injured” a woman as he was in the process of stealing her silver 2007 Mitsubishi Eclipse . 
+Vance is also suspected of shooting a man during an attempted carjacking early Monday. 
+Vance was last known to be driving a 2007 Mitsubishi Eclipse and was armed with an AK-47. He is considered to be armed and extremely dangerous, authorities say. Sheriff Whetsel instructed any potential witnesses not to approach Vance but to call 911 and let the police handle the situation.",FAKE
+403,The Nation He Built,"On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the 906-page health care reform law known as Obamacare. It was, as a live microphone caught Vice President Joe Biden exclaiming to his boss, a big deal, with Biden memorably inserting an extra word for emphasis—and for history—between “big” and “deal.”
+
+Obamacare would cover millions of the uninsured, a giant step toward the Democratic dream of health care for all. It also included dozens of less prominent provisions to rein in the soaring cost and transform the dysfunctional delivery of American medicine. It was the kind of BFD that the most consequential presidencies are made of, even though it had squeaked through Congress without any Republican votes, and few Americans truly understood what was in it.
+
+Even fewer Americans understood what was in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, the 55-page addendum that officially finalized Obamacare. This was the strange legislative vehicle that Democrats had jerry-rigged to drag reform around a Republican filibuster. Its substance was mostly an afterthought—the New York Times ran a dutiful story on page A16 after it passed—but as Obama noted when he signed it the next week at Northern Virginia Community College, it included another BFD.
+
+“What’s gotten overlooked amid all the hoopla, all the drama of last week, is what’s happened in education,” he said.
+
+Yes, education. Tucked into the parliamentary maneuver that rescued his health care law was a similarly radical reform of the trillion-dollar student loan program. When Biden’s wife, Jill, a professor at Northern Virginia, introduced Obama that day, she called it “another historic piece of legislation.” The House Republican leader, John Boehner of Ohio, complained that “today, the president will sign not one, but two job-killing government takeovers.”
+
+Obamacare wasn’t really a government takeover, but the student loan overhaul actually was; it yanked the program away from Sallie Mae and other private lenders that had raked in enormous fees without taking much risk. The bill then diverted the budget savings into a $36 billion expansion of Pell Grants for low-income undergraduates, plus an unheralded but extraordinary student-debt relief effort that is now quietly transferring the burden of college loans from struggling borrowers to taxpayers. It all added up to a revolution in how America finances higher education, completely overshadowed by the health care hoopla and drama.
+
+Over the past seven years, Americans have heard an awful lot about Barack Obama and his presidency, but the actual substance of his domestic policies and their impact on the country remain poorly understood. He has engineered quite a few quiet revolutions—and some of his louder revolutions are shaking up the status quo in quiet ways. Obama is often dinged for failing to deliver on the hope-and-change rhetoric that inspired so many voters during his ascent to the presidency. But a review of his record shows that the Obama era has produced much more sweeping change than most of his supporters or detractors realize.
+
+It’s true that Obama failed to create the post-partisan political change he originally promised during his yes-we-can pursuit of the White House. Washington remains as hyperpartisan and broken as ever. But he also promised dramatic policy change, vowing to reinvent America’s approach to issues like health care, education, energy, climate and finance, and that promise he has kept. When you add up all the legislation from his frenetic first two years, when Democrats controlled Congress, and all the methodical executive actions from the past five years, after Republicans blocked his legislative path, this has been a BFD of a presidency, a profound course correction engineered by relentless government activism. As a candidate, Obama was often dismissed as a talker, a silver-tongued political savant with no real record of achievement. But ever since he took office during a raging economic crisis, he’s turned out to be much more of a doer, an action-oriented policy grind who has often failed to communicate what he’s done.
+
+What he’s done is changing the way we produce and consume energy, the way doctors and hospitals treat us, the academic standards in our schools and the long-term fiscal trajectory of the nation. Gays can now serve openly in the military, insurers can no longer deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions, credit card companies can no longer impose hidden fees and markets no longer believe the biggest banks are too big to fail. Solar energy installations are up nearly 2,000 percent, and carbon emissions have dropped even though the economy is growing. Even Republicans like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who hope to succeed Obama and undo his achievements, have been complaining on the campaign trail that he’s accomplished most of his agenda.
+
+“The change is real,” says Ron Klain, who served as Biden’s White House chief of staff, and later as Obama’s Ebola czar. “It would be nice if more people understood the change.”
+
+In a conflict-obsessed media environment that is not exactly geared toward substantive policy analysis, Obama’s technocratic brand of change has tended to be more opaque than, say, Donald Trump’s plan for a wall along the Mexican border or Bernie Sanders’ promise of free college for all. At times, its complexity has camouflaged its ambition. At other times, its ambition hasn’t lived up to Obama’s rhetoric; not everything has changed in the Obama era. For example, he talked a big game about eliminating wasteful programs, but other than killing the F-22 fighter jet, an absurdly expensive presidential helicopter and a hopelessly captured bank regulatory agency called the Office of Thrift Supervision, he hasn’t done much of that.
+
+The most obvious thing Obama hasn’t done is usher in a new era of public enthusiasm for government action and the Democratic Party. He was reelected by a comfortable margin, but conservative Republicans have taken back both houses of Congress and made impressive gains in statehouses on his watch, riding a powerful wave of hostility to federal overreach. That political legacy could imperil some of Obama’s left-of-center policy legacy if a Republican is elected to succeed him. It has already stymied gun control and immigration reform, while forcing Obama to accept deep spending cuts he didn’t want.
+
+But it’s remarkable how often Obama has gotten what he wanted, in many cases policies that Democrats (and sometimes moderate Republicans) have wanted for decades, and how often those policies have slipped under the radar.
+
+",REAL
+3418,A Hindu Justice? Why Religion Matters for the High Court,"President Barack Obama has pledged to appoint a replacement for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, despite election-year opposition from Republicans.
+
+Scalia, 79, was found dead in his room the morning of Feb. 13 while on a quail hunting trip at a West Texas resort. He reportedly died in his sleep.
+
+Tensions are rising over whether or not President Obama should leave the appointment of Scalia's replacement to his White House successor. Tessa Dysart, a constitutional law professor at Regent University, explains the complicated road ahead.
+
+Meanwhile, the president's list of possible replacements for Justice Scalia has now been leaked to the media. It includes:
+
+Srinivasan, 48, seems to be a popular choice at the moment. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and has argued more than two dozen cases before the court as a deputy solicitor general.
+
+He was appointed unanimously to the D.C. Appeals Court. When he was sworn into office, he placed his hand on Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu holy book. If confirmed, would be the first Hindu to serve on the high court.
+
+Meanwhile, an NPR article titled ""Does the Supreme Court need an Evangelical Justice?"" raises the issue about the religious makeup of the court.
+
+A 2013 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than one in three (37 percent) U.S. adults say Supreme Court justices' religious beliefs shape their decisions on the bench ""a lot."" Another 44 percent say religion influences justices just a little, while 15 percent said religious beliefs ""have no influence.""
+
+Justice Scalia, a devout Catholic and a Ronald Reagan appointee, was one of the most conservative members of the bench and was known for his Christian core.  His death brings the religious balance of the court into question.
+
+There are five Roman Catholics currently serving on the court (Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, and Clarence Thomas) and three Jews (Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagen).
+
+Scalia's untimely death leaves conservatives without the 5-4 advantage they had on the court and has many wondering who will fill the void he leaves behind. With upcoming cases over abortion and religious liberty, the stakes are high.
+
+Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, acknowledged the gravity of Scalia's loss and its timing.
+
+""His death comes at a time when so much hangs in the legal balance, especially on questions of religious freedom,"" Moore told Baptist Press in written comments.
+
+""Antonin Scalia was more than a brilliant jurist,"" he said. ""He was a man of conviction who stood, often alone, for the permanent things.""
+
+So whether Scalia is replaced by a Jewish, Catholic, or evangelical, etc., justice, many agree that Scalia will be impossible to replace.",REAL
+3457,Supreme Court Rules Obamacare Subsidies Are Legal,"The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed the Obama administration a major victory on health care, ruling 6-3 that nationwide subsidies called for in the Affordable Care Act are legal.
+
+""Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,"" the court's majority said in the opinion, which was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. But they acknowledged that ""petitioners' arguments about the plain meaning ... are strong.""
+
+The majority opinion cited the law's ""more than a few examples of inartful drafting,"" but added, ""the context and structure of the Act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.""
+
+Roberts was joined by the court's liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, as well as by Anthony Kennedy.
+
+In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said: ""We should start calling this law SCOTUScare,"" an apparent reference to the fact the Supreme Court has now saved the Affordable Care Act twice. Scalia called the majority's reading of the text ""quite absurd, and the court's 21 pages of explanation make it no less so.""
+
+As NPR's Nina Totenberg reported in March, opponents of the law contended ""that the text of the law does not authorize subsidies to make mandated insurance affordable in 34 states.""
+
+At issue were six words in one section of the law. As Nina pointed out: ""Those words stipulate that for people who cannot afford health coverage, subsidies are available through 'an exchange established by the state.' "" She added:
+
+The court agreed Thursday with the government's position.
+
+The decision comes three years after a bitterly divided high court upheld the Affordable Care Act as constitutional by a 5-4 vote.
+
+President Obama made a statement on the ruling late Thursday morning, saying the Affordable Care Act ""is here to stay.""",REAL
+2182,To defeat ISIS we need grownups,"On the day ISIS-related terrorists spread out across Paris and killed more than one hundred people, Barack Obama claimed ISIS was “contained.” After the attacks, liberals actually tried to argue that the attacks in Paris showed how successful Barack Obama had been because ISIS was having to lash out to get attention. Yes, liberals actually argued this.
+
+Earlier this year, while President Obama still considered ISIS to be a junior varsity team, he said the greatest threat to humanity was global warming.
+
+At Saturday night’s Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders reaffirmed that global warming was the greatest threat to humanity and was also the root cause of terrorism in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Martin O’Malley said he still wanted to bring 60,000 Syrian refugees into this country, though we now know some of those refugees were involved in the Paris attack.
+
+The White House Deputy National Security Advisor says the importation of refugees will go ahead as planned.
+
+Then there is Hillary Clinton. As John Podhoretz noted Sunday, the former Secretary of State’s policy solutions amount to a jumble of contradictory platitudes:
+
+We must “root out” ISIS, she said, and implicitly criticized Obama when she said it “cannot be contained, it must be defeated.”  At the same time, she said, “it cannot be an American fight.” However, “American leadership is essential.” And yet, she said, “I don’t think that the United States has the bulk of the responsibility.”
+
+Instead, and breathtakingly, she suggests the person who must take the lead is Syria’s dictator, himself responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his own people and the progenitor of the refugee crisis that is turning Europe inside out: “I really put that on [President Bashar] Assad and on the Iraqis and on the region itself.”
+
+These are children and we need grownups.
+
+The Republican Party rarely wins domestic policy elections. But when it comes to foreign policy, it turns out the American people want someone in the White House who is willing to kill bad guys while suffering no delusions. The Democrats are infantile and delusional. They have reached a point where no evidence contrary to their world view will ever be allowed to pierce their bubble and get them to change their ways.
+
+Barack Obama and the Democrats have no intention of protecting us or killing ISIS. They instead want to wreck our economy with global warming regulations. They think if we wind up having to become powerless tent dwellers like ISIS, maybe then they’ll leave us alone.
+
+The United States needs adults leading it right now.
+
+Erick Erickson is a Fox News contributor. He is host of ""Erick on the Radio"" and founder/editor of The Resurgent. He is the founder of RedState.com. Follow him on Twitter @EWErickson.",REAL
+2362,Hillary Clinton’s push on gun control marks a shift in presidential politics,"In her standard stump speech, Hillary Rodham Clinton talks about fighting income inequality, celebrating court rulings on gay marriage and health care, and, since the Emanuel AME Church massacre, toughening the nation’s gun laws.
+
+That last component marks an important evolution in presidential politics. For at least the past several decades, Democrats seeking national office have often been timid on the issue of guns for fear of alienating firearms owners. In 2008, after Barack Obama took heat for his gaffe about people who “cling to guns or religion,” he rarely mentioned guns again — neither that year nor in his 2012 reelection campaign.
+
+But in a sign that the political environment on guns has shifted in the wake of recent mass shootings — and of Clinton’s determination to stake out liberal ground in her primary race against insurgent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — Clinton is not only initiating a debate about gun control but also vowing to fight the National Rifle Association.
+
+“I’m going to speak out against the uncontrollable use of guns in our country because I believe we can do better,” Clinton said Tuesday in Iowa City.
+
+A few days earlier, she said in Hanover, N.H.: “We have to take on the gun lobby. . . . This is a controversial issue. I am well aware of that. But I think it is the height of irresponsibility not to talk about it.”
+
+Clinton’s comments could stoke millions of politically active gun owners, and Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president, argued that the move was fraught with peril for her.
+
+“We’ve been down this road before with the Clintons,” ­La­Pierre said through a spokesman. “She needs to read her husband’s book.”
+
+In his memoir, “My Life,” former president Bill Clinton suggested that his vice president, Al Gore, lost the 2000 presidential election in part because of backlash in states such as Arkansas and Tennessee over the Clinton administration’s 1995 ban on assault weapons, which has since expired. Many Democratic lawmakers also lost their elections after gun-control votes.
+
+The Republican 2016 presidential candidates, in keeping with GOP orthodoxy, have spoken out loudly against gun control. Many gave speeches at the NRA’s spring convention and tout their high ratings from the group.
+
+Mark Glaze, a longtime gun-control advocate who until recently oversaw former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s gun-control efforts, argued that Hillary Clinton should embrace her husband’s record.
+
+“The Clintons pulled off the almost-impossible by giving us the background-check system and banning assault weapons,” Glaze said. “That’s something President Obama wasn’t able to do. Their political interest lies in owning, rather than obscuring, that accomplishment.”
+
+Many Democratic strategists said campaigning on guns is smart politics for Hillary Clinton both in the primary and, should she become the nominee, in the general election.
+
+Gun control is one of the few issues on which Clinton has a more left-leaning record than Sanders, who represents a rural, pro-gun-rights state and has voted in the past for legislation to protect the firearms industry. Although Clinton has not attacked Sanders by name, by invoking guns she makes an unspoken contrast.
+
+The issue also fits neatly into the overall narrative Clinton is trying to present. She can stake out a bold stance on an issue that plays well with the liberal base while arguing that she would break through the partisan stalemate in Washington.
+
+There are few issues more in­trac­table than guns. In 2013, after the massacre of 20 young children and six educators at an elementary school in ­Newtown, Conn., a bipartisan compromise to expand background checks for firearm purchases failed to pass the Senate despite overwhelming popular support and President Obama’s backing.
+
+Clinton began talking about gun control in the days following last month’s church shooting in Charleston, S.C., and aides said she plans to keep it in her stump speech, although she has no immediate plans to unveil a detailed gun policy.
+
+“This is an important issue, and she believes that we cannot let partisan gridlock prevent us from continuing to seek ­common-sense safety measures,” said Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon.
+
+Despite his mixed voting record, Sanders did support the 2013 background-check bill and ­assault-weapons ban. And on the stump, he is trying to sound more forceful. He notes that “guns in Chicago and Los Angeles mean a very different thing than guns in Vermont and New Hampshire” but says — as he did two weeks ago in Bow, N.H. — that the next president must “come forward with a common-sense proposal on guns.”
+
+In the Democratic field, former Maryland governor Martin O’Mal­ley has the strongest record in favor of gun control. He supported an assault-weapons ban as mayor of Baltimore in the early 2000s and then signed one into law as governor in 2013, along with a suite of gun restrictions that stand as among the nation’s toughest.
+
+“He’s the only person in the race who’s led on this issue,” said O’Malley spokeswoman Haley Morris.
+
+Looking to the general election, some gun-control measures are popular, especially with the coalition of swing-state Latinos, African Americans, and young and suburban women the Democratic nominee would need to win the White House.
+
+“There is no more powerful force in an election than the suburban mother, and you don’t find a lot of suburban mothers that are against some sort of common-sense gun control,” said Mo ­Elleithee, a former Clinton adviser and Democratic strategist who now directs the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service.
+
+Other Democrats argue that Clinton has nothing to lose. Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (D-Va.) said the NRA has become a “paper tiger,” noting the elections he’s won despite the NRA’s vocal opposition.
+
+“I think she has no illusion that even if she didn’t say a word about guns, the NRA would be out there blasting her to say she had a conspiratorial plan to work with the U.N. to take everybody’s guns away, so why not go head-on on an issue that will improve safety,” Kaine said.
+
+A survey this year by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that 89 percent favor requiring background checks for all gun sales, including 85 percent of gun owners. But polling is much more closely divided on other gun restrictions and does not account for the high intensity among gun-control opponents.
+
+David “Mudcat” Saunders, a Democratic strategist based in conservative rural Virginia, warned that Clinton’s focus on guns could taint the entire Democratic ticket, including candidates for state and local offices.
+
+“Never in the history of the Democratic Party have they started a gun debate that didn’t cost them numbers in the general election,” said Saunders, who supports the candidacy of former senator Jim Webb (D-Va.). “She’s trying to get to the left of Bernie, obviously, but I think it’ll hurt her in the long run — and it’ll cost anybody on the down ticket in the South and in rural America.”
+
+In her 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton stayed nearly silent on guns. An exception was after Obama’s “cling to guns” comment surfaced, when she attacked him as being “elitist” and fondly recalled her father teaching her to shoot as a little girl at her grandfather’s Pennsylvania lake house.
+
+Howard Wolfson, for many years a top Clinton aide before going to work for Bloomberg, said Clinton’s avoidance of guns in 2008 should not be mistaken for a lack of interest in gun control.
+
+“I started working for her back in 1999 and she talked about it back then,” Wolfson said. “As a senator from New York, it was something that was important to her. I think in the wake of Newtown and Charleston, it’s more resonant in our political culture.”
+
+In recent months, Clinton’s speechwriters and policy staff have sought counsel from Bloomberg’s group, Everytown for Gun Safety. Erika Soto Lamb, ­Everytown’s spokeswoman, said Clinton’s focus on the issue is “striking.”
+
+“Knowing how hard we tried in 2012 to get [Republican nominee Mitt] Romney or Obama to say something about guns,” she said, “it is a changed world now when Hillary and other candidates are making it a part of their stump. This is the first presidential election when we’ve seen proactive statements.”
+
+Jose DelReal in Iowa City and Scott Clement in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+1405,KRAUTHAMMER: Jeb Bush had a breakout performance in the Fox News debate,"Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer said after Thursday night's Fox News Republican debate that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) might have come away a big winner.
+
+Speaking with Fox moderator Megyn Kelly shortly after the debate ended, Krauthammer said the former Florida governor turned in a strong performance — possibly the best of the night out of all the candidates on stage.
+
+""I thought it was, interestingly, the best night that Jeb had in all of the debates,"" Krauthammer said. ""And I might even say I think he might have had the best night of the group in this debate.""
+
+""He was very strong. He had one moment where he kind of flipped back to Marco Rubio on the question of immigration,"" he said.
+
+Krauthammer was referring to a back-and-forth between Bush and Rubio on supporting a path to citizenship on for immigrants living in the country illegally.
+
+Rubio said that Bush used to support a path to citizenship — to which Bush said, ""So did you.""
+
+Bush then continued: ""I think it's important for people in elected office to try to force consensus to solve problems. There's never going to be a perfect bill. ... You shouldn't cut and run. You should stick with it. ... He cut and run.""
+
+He was referring to the 2013 immigration bill that Rubio co-sponsored.
+
+""What I found ironic here is it was kind of a reversal of that moment in one of the earlier debates when there was a tangle between Rubio and Bush and Rubio turned it very strongly against Bush,"" Krauthammer said. ""So I thought this was one debate where Bush did very well.""",REAL
+1586,Is GOP ready to unite against Trump for his Muslim ban?,"Less than 24 hours after President Barack Obama aimed to set the tone for the country on a response to the threat of terrorism with an Oval Office address, Trump only needed a press release to cause an uproar with his call for an outright ban on Muslims entering the United States
+
+The billionaire businessman stood defiantly by his statement on Tuesday morning, when he warned that failing to follow his plans would lead to another September 11-style terror attack on U.S. soil.
+
+""You're going to have many more World Trade Centers if you don't solve it -- many, many more and probably beyond the World Trade Center,"" Trump told CNN's Chris Cuomo in a contentious interview on ""New Day.""
+
+The episode is a microcosm of how the 2016 campaign has played out. Trump has consistently forced candidates, state party chairs, senators and conservative pundits to respond to his actions and quotes, however outlandish and improbable. And in turn, they have all struggled with the question of how to deal with the bombastic real estate tycoon who has dominated state and national polls since the summer.
+
+Trump's enduring ability to frame the terms of the debate for the GOP continues to have party leaders fretting he will drive voters to Hillary Clinton, help down-ballot Democrats and cause long-term damage to the Republican brand.
+
+Yet, unlike with past provocative statements, Trump appears to have sparked a level of backlash from GOP party leaders and his opponents that could be a tipping point for the willingness of fellow Republicans to criticize him directly and openly. Jeb Bush called Trump ""unhinged."" Ted Cruz said it wasn't his policy. And Dick Cheney, who previously said he would back the Republican nominee even it was Trump, said that Monday's proposal ""goes against everything we stand for and believe in.""
+
+At a press conference on Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan also slammed Trump.
+
+""This is not conservatism,"" he said. ""What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for.""
+
+But Trump has been here before -- his blustery statements only seem to have deepened his appeal to a subset of Republican voters, leading to a frustrated party establishment. Predictions of his demise have all proved to be premature.
+
+""As a conservative who truly cares about religious liberty, Donald Trump's bad idea and rhetoric send a shiver down my spine,"" South Carolina GOP chairman Matt Moore tweeted. ""American exceptionalism means always defending our inalienable rights, not attacking them when it's politically convenient.""
+
+Moore did not answer a follow-up question about whether he thinks Trump's comments are disqualifying and whether he would back him if he wins the nomination.
+
+Trump's proposal, the latest in a string of provocative comments coming in the wake of the terrorist shooting that left 14 dead and 17 wounded in San Bernardino, California, drew cheers and applause from a crowd Monday in Charleston, South Carolina.
+
+""Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,"" said Trump reading from a statement his campaign sent out shortly before the rally. ""We have no choice. We have no choice.""
+
+Reggie Johnson, 38, who attended Trump's Charleston rally, agreed with the GOP frontrunner.
+
+""I think it should be shut down for now until you find something, a better program in place,"" he said. ""I mean this is a free country for what's that's worth but I think it does need to be shut down until they get a cap on things.""
+
+Republicans spent Sunday night condemning Obama's speech and his approach to combating terrorism. And they spent Monday night talking about Trump, who called for a religious test for who is admitted to the country right after Obama said it was ""our responsibility to reject"" such a test.
+
+Bush's super PAC, Right to Rise, will begin running an ad called ""Desk"" in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, that calls Trump ""impulsive and reckless."" While the ad doesn't specifically mention Trump's proposal, Bush supporters think he is best positioned to benefit from the shift to national security issues.
+
+""Twenty-seven generals and admirals support Jeb Bush,"" the ad states. ""Because Jeb has the experience and knowledge to protect your family.""
+
+Doug Heye, a veteran GOP strategist and former adviser to the Iowa Republican Party, said Trump's latest proposal would do more damage than some of his previous controversial comments.
+
+""There are going to be newspapers throughout the world that are going to read 'Republican front-runner doesn't want Muslims to visit America,"" said Heye. ""It will make it easier for Democrats to portray the GOP as hostile to any minority. Ultimately, I think Donald Trump is the best asset Hillary Clinton has.""
+
+Clinton tweeted that Trump's proposal was ""reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive."" Huma Abedin, Clinton's campaign vice-chairwoman, sent out an e-mail to Clinton supporters with the subject matter -- ""I'm a proud Muslim.""
+
+""Unfortunately, Trump is leaning into the kind of fear of progress that very well could help him win the nomination,"" Abedin wrote. ""We have to be ready to stop him.""
+
+Heye encouraged GOP contenders to condemn Trump's remarks, suggesting they take a dismissive tone like Bush did on Twitter. He warned that Trump's comments would be used to weaken the Republican nominee --- even if it's not Trump -- and will create challenges for Republicans in down-ballot races.
+
+""Everything about Donald Trump's campaign has hurt the Party,"" Heye said. ""It hurts the party on a presidential level. It certainly hurts the party on a Senate level as well.""
+
+Heye's remarks run counter to a strategy revealed in a leaked National Republican Senatorial Committee that suggested one way to run with Trump at the top of the ticket is to adopt his issues, if not his tone and rhetoric.
+
+Senators were all over the map Monday as they were asked about Trump's proposal. Some were happy to blast the GOP front-runner, others, like Iowa's Joni Ernst, wanted nothing to do with the question.
+
+Ernst, who occupies an influential spot among Iowa Republicans walked away from repeated questions about whether she supported Trump's call.
+
+""Oh, I'm not going to comment on that,"" she said when asked by CNN about his comments. Asked again, she replied: ""I am not commenting on him.""
+
+South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, a first-term senator who has been hosting Republican candidates at forums and will be on the ballot in 2016, suggested that Trump's latest statements were simply par for the course.
+
+""A lot of hyperbolic language is used during campaign season,"" Scott said in a statement to CNN. ""We need to focus on serious solutions to address the real dangers presented by ISIS.""
+
+Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who has advised Trump on immigration policy and appeared onstage with him at a rally in Alabama, didn't want to weigh in.
+
+""I've been pleased that he took a lot of my ideas in his immigration policy, but I have not endorsed Mr. Trump or anyone else,"" Sessions said when asked about Trump's comments. Pressed on whether he would support Trump's proposal, Session's became quiet and stopped talking as he rushed to a Senate elevator.
+
+Sen. Jim Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said that Trump was wrong to call for a ban on all Muslim travel to the U.S. ""If he had changed instead of saying Muslim and said radical Islam, then I would agree with him. But I don't agree,"" Inhofe said, noting that there's a big difference between banning travel for anyone identified as a ""radical Islamic terrorist"" and all Muslims.
+
+Sen. John McCain, the party's 2008 nominee and a supporter of Sen. Lindsey Graham's long-shot bid was clear: ""It's just foolishness. It's been a long series of statements like this that have been just foolish.""
+
+McCain and Graham have been among the most critical of Trump, but all to no avail. Graham, for instance, trails Trump in his home state of South Carolina. And when Trump seemed to suggest that McCain, a Vietnam-era POW and the GOP's 2008 nominee, was not a war hero, it didn't hurt his standing in the polls.
+
+Opponents and party leaders seem to be in search of a referee who can credibly rebuke Trump and block his path to the nomination.
+
+""Is the RNC still moving forward with a fundraiser featuring Trump? Asking for a nation...."" tweeted John Weaver, a John Kasich adviser.
+
+According to Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the RNC, Trump won't be at a Wednesday fundraiser in New York. But that decision was made well before Trump's latest comments, according to Spicer. Spicer didn't respond to e-mails about Trump's comments about Muslims.
+
+In a 2013 autopsy, the RNC argued that to become a winning party at the presidential level, the party must be a more welcoming party and ""stop talking to itself."" But like no other candidate, Trump knows his audience, repeatedly doubling down on statements that have brought criticism from party elders.
+
+His success highlights the competing factions of a leaderless party, searching for an identity. Republicans sought to strip the conservative label from Trump --- New Hampshire GOP leader Jennifer Horn, called his ideas ""un-Republican.""
+
+Cheney weighed in as well.
+
+""I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in,"" he said on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. ""I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from.""
+
+Bill Kristol, who tweeted that he has come to loathe Trump for ""soiling the robe of conservatism and dragging it through the dust,"" said in an email to CNN that the RNC is ""pretty helpless in situations like this.""
+
+But with Trump's latest comments, he said that the stakes are now higher on Trump's opponents, who by now have plenty of practice in criticizing him.",REAL
+4473,Republicans Target Senate Democrats Over Menendez Contributions,"Republicans are making clear they will do whatever they can to turn Senator Robert Menendez's legal troubles into a campaign liability for Menendez's fellow Democrats, starting with their No. 1 target for 2016: Minority Leader Harry Reid.
+
+The National Republican Senatorial Committee is demanding that Reid pay back campaign contributions Menendez made to the Nevada Democrat during Reid's 2010 campaign. In press release Monday, the group said Reid had in the past returned money from donors who were under indictment.
+
+“Harry Reid’s cardinal rule is if you’ve been indicted by the federal government, then he immediately returns your campaign contributions,” said NRSC spokesman Jahan Wilcox. “With Senator Menendez set to be indicted for corruption, Reid needs to abide by his own policy and dump the money he’s received from his corrupt Democrat colleague.”
+
+The U.S. Justice Department is preparing corruption charges against Menendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, a person familiar with the investigation said on March 6. Menendez was the panel's chairman before his party lost control of the Senate in January.
+
+In a news conference on March 6, Menendez denied wrongdoing and said he won’t leave office.
+
+Prosecutors have been examining whether Menendez illegally promoted the business interests of a friend and campaign donor, Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist. The Justice Department will probably seek charges in the next few weeks, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public.
+
+Menendez contributed $10,000 to Reid in 2009 through his leadership PAC, New Millennium PAC. He hasn't donated to Reid's 2016 re-election efforts.
+
+Reid is the most high-profile—though not the only—Democrat whom Republicans seek to link to Menendez through campaign contributions. The group is also targeting other recipients of Menendez cash, including Colorado Senator Michael Bennet; Pennsylvania Senate candidate Joe Sestak, a former congressman; and Representative Chris Van Hollen, who is seeking a Maryland Senate seat.
+
+Menendez, 61, served as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee during the 2010 campaign cycle and donated $389,000 through his leadership PAC to Democrats that year, according to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington group that tracks campaign spending.
+
+Politico reported Monday that Reid voluntarily spoke to investigators last year about the Menendez investigation. Politico said its sources, whom it didn't identify, described Reid as a witness in the case. Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.",REAL
+2347,#MemeOfTheWeek: That Article From The Onion About Mass Shootings,"#MemeOfTheWeek: That Article From The Onion About Mass Shootings
+
+You might have seen the article by now: "" 'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens."" The Onion, a satirical news site that runs fake news stories, has published a story with that headline three times over the last year and a half: this week after a shooter killed nine people at an Oregon community college; in June of this year after a violent rampage in a black Charleston church that also killed nine people; and last May, after a shooting at the University of California Santa Barbara that killed seven.
+
+The facts and dates surrounding the particular shooting change each time the story is republished, but key lines remain:
+
+The article's been shared thousands of times on social media, and some on Twitter have taken notice of the piece's repackaging:
+
+The Onion, in its satire, has done something most of the ""mainstream media"" has refused to do: say how they really feel about mass shootings in America, said Dave Cullen, a journalist who has covered mass shootings for years and wrote the New York Times bestseller Columbine. ""I think what [the Onion article's popularity] says is we look for the people who tell us the truth — kind of the emperor's new clothes — who see through the stuff, and don't just print the same old stuff, or do the same old stuff, or do the safe stuff — the people who call us on our s - - -.""
+
+Cullen agreed that The Onion article is #MemeOfTheWeek-worthy, explaining, ""The Onion completely nails it. That [the article] resonates because they totally got it.""
+
+Cullen said another type of news satire has been doing the same thing — saying what journalists are afraid to say — for years. ""I think it's the same reason that a lot of the media, about 10 years ago, were shocked and kind of disgusted and horrified that a lot of young people were getting their daily news from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.""
+
+Not all of The Onion's satirical coverage of mass shootings in America have gone over as well. After a shooting that killed 12 at Washington Navy Yard in 2013, the website published a story with the headline: ""Location of Newest Mass Shooting Revealed. It's A Navy Yard, Authorities Confirm."" One person tweeted, ""This isn't funny."" Another called it ""gross stupidity.""
+
+Of course, sometimes, there's no satire to praise or ridicule at all. Some tragedies leave even the satirists are at a loss for words. After the Charleston church massacre, Jon Stewart, instead of delivering a biting, satirical monologue on The Daily Show, started his comments after the shooting with the words, ""I've got nothing."" And The Onion, after the Sandy Hook massacre, wrote an article with the headline, ""F - - - Everything, Nation Reports.""",REAL
+6806,Why Trump Won and Why Clinton Lost    :," Why Trump Won and Why Clinton Lost
+Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat reflected a gross misjudgment by the Democratic Party about the depth of populist anger against self-serving elites who have treated much of the country with disdain
+By Robert Parry November 10, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" Consortium News "" - In the end, Hillary Clinton became the face of a corrupt, arrogant and out-of-touch Establishment, while Donald Trump emerged as an almost perfectly imperfect vessel for a populist fury that had bubbled beneath the surface of America.
+There is clearly much to fear from a Trump presidency, especially coupled with continued Republican control of Congress. Trump and many Republicans have denied the reality of climate change; they favor more tax cuts for the rich; they want to deregulate Wall Street and other powerful industries – all policies that helped create the current mess that the United States and much of the world are now in.
+Further, Trump’s personality is problematic to say the least. He lacks the knowledge and the temperament that one would like to see in a President – or even in a much less powerful public official. He appealed to racism, misogyny, white supremacy, bigotry toward immigrants and prejudice toward Muslims. He favors torture and wants a giant wall built across America’s southern border.
+But American voters chose him in part because they felt they needed a blunt instrument to smash the Establishment that has ruled and mis-ruled America for at least the past several decades. It is an Establishment that not only has grabbed for itself almost all the new wealth that the country has produced but has casually sent the U.S. military into wars of choice, as if the lives of working-class soldiers are of little value.
+On foreign policy, the Establishment had turned decision-making over to the neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks, a collection of haughty elitists who often subordinated American interests to those of Israel and Saudi Arabia, for political or financial advantage. The war choices of the neocon/liberal-hawk coalition have been disastrous – from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya to Syria to Ukraine – yet this collection of know-it-alls never experiences accountability. The same people, including the media’s armchair warriors and the think-tank “scholars,” bounce from one catastrophe to the next with no consequences for their fallacious “group thinks.” Most recently, they have ginned up a new costly and dangerous Cold War with Russia.
+For all his faults, Trump was one of the few major public figures who dared challenge the “group thinks” on the current hot spots of Syria and Russia. In response, Clinton and many Democrats chose to engage in a crude McCarthyism with Clinton even baiting Trump as Vladimir Putin’s “puppet” during the final presidential debate.
+It is somewhat remarkable that those tactics failed; that Trump talked about cooperation with Russia, rather than confrontation, and won. Trump’s victory could mean that rather than escalating the New Cold War with Russia, there is the possibility of a ratcheting down of tensions.
+Repudiating the Neocons
+Thus, Trump’s victory marks a repudiation of the neocon/liberal-hawk orthodoxy because the New Cold War was largely incubated in neocon/liberal-hawk think tanks, brought to life by likeminded officials in the U.S. State Department, and nourished by propaganda across the mainstream Western media.
+It was the West, not Russia, that provoked the confrontation over Ukraine by helping to install a fiercely anti-Russian regime on Russia’s borders. I know the mainstream Western media framed the story as “Russian aggression” but that was always a gross distortion.
+There were peaceful ways for settling the internal differences inside Ukraine without violating the democratic process, but U.S. neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and wealthy neoliberals, such as financial speculator George Soros, pushed for a putsch that overthrew the elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.
+Putin’s response, including his acceptance of Crimea’s overwhelming referendum to return to Russia and his support for ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine opposing the coup regime in Kiev, was a reaction to the West’s destabilizing and violent actions. Putin was not the instigator of the troubles.
+Similarly, in Syria, the West’s “regime change” strategy, which dates back to neocon planning in the mid-1990s, involved collaboration with Al Qaeda and other Islamic jihadists to remove the secular government of Bashar al-Assad. Again, Official Washington and the mainstream media portrayed the conflict as all Assad’s fault, but that wasn’t the full picture.
+From the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, U.S. “allies,” including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel, have been aiding the rebellion, with Turkey and the Gulf states funneling money and weapons to Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and even to the Al Qaeda spinoff, Islamic State.
+Though President Barack Obama dragged his heels on the direct intervention advocated by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama eventually went in halfway, bending to political pressure by agreeing to train and arm so-called “moderates” who ended up fighting next to Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and other jihadists in Ahrar al-Sham.
+Trump has been inarticulate and imprecise in describing what policies he would follow in Syria, besides suggesting that he would cooperate with the Russians in destroying Islamic State. But Trump didn’t seem to understand the role of Al Qaeda in controlling east Aleppo and other Syrian territory.
+Uncharted Territory
+So, the American voters have plunged the United States and the world into uncharted territory behind a President-elect who lacks a depth of knowledge on a wide variety of issues. Who will guide a President Trump becomes the most pressing issue today.
+Will he rely on traditional Republicans who have done so much to mess up the country and the world or will he find some fresh-thinking realists who will realign policy with core American interests and values.
+For this dangerous and uncertain moment, the Democratic Party establishment deserves a large share of the blame. Despite signs that 2016 would be a year for an anti-Establishment candidate – possibly someone like Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Sen. Bernie Sanders – the Democratic leadership decided that it was “Hillary’s turn.”
+Alternatives like Warren were discouraged from running so there could be a Clinton “coronation.” That left the 74-year-old socialist from Vermont as the only obstacle to Clinton’s nomination and it turned out that Sanders was a formidable challenger. But his candidacy was ultimately blocked by Democratic insiders, including the unelected “super-delegates” who gave Clinton an early and seemingly insurmountable lead.
+With blinders firmly in place, the Democrats yoked themselves to Clinton’s gilded carriage and tried to pull it all the way to the White House. But they ignored the fact that many Americans came to see Clinton as the personification of all that is wrong about the insular and corrupt world of Official Washington. And that has given us President-elect Trump.
+Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com .
+Š 2016 Consortium News",FAKE
+10377,Taking Back Presidential Power,"Email 
+Every four years, Americans are treated to a tawdry, months-long spectacle pitting two typically (but not always) establishment-anointed candidates against one another for the ultimate prize: a four-year stint as the “most powerful person on Earth.” That, at least, is the establishment media’s term for the president of the United States. And it would have appalled the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution, who never intended to create in the office of the U.S. presidency a magistracy far more powerful than the English monarchy they had only recently shaken off. 
+But the de facto reality of modern America is that the executive branch of the U.S. government has usurped an enormous portion of government powers reserved by the Constitution in its original form to other branches of the federal government or to state governments. The president, for example, now sends U.S. troops into war at his personal whim, completely ignoring the constitutional stipulation that Congress issue a declaration of war first. A huge percentage of federal laws that control virtually every activity are issued in the form of federal regulations — which are created not by the legislative but by the executive branch of government, under the direction of the president. 
+The president also wields tremendous power with his authority to nominate Supreme Court justices — since the Supreme Court is regarded as a body whose decisions cannot be appealed or overturned. Presidents from FDR to the present have tried to customize the court to their preferred ideology, and the court has responded by issuing a range of unpopular decisions, from abortion on demand to the recent vindication of ObamaCare, that have left ordinary Americans frustrated and angry. By all accounts, the will of the people is systematically ignored by Washington, and there appears to be nothing that can change this state of affairs. This is the reason that every presidential race has become the ultimate high-stakes battle of partisan wills; the winner — and his party — will wield enormous de facto (if not de jure) power over the affairs of the nation and the world, and has the ability, via Supreme Court appointments, executive orders, involvement in foreign wars, regulations, and many other powers now accorded to him, to shape the destiny of the nation decades after his term in office ends. 
+In recent decades, most of the power in government has migrated from Congress — the only part of the government truly elected by the people — to the two unelected branches of government, the executive branch and the Supreme Court. In particular, the power to legislate has largely been usurped by the executive branch via a noxious system of federal regulatory agencies staffed by unelected bureaucrats wielding enormous, unaccountable power, and by an unelected Supreme Court that does not hesitate to legislate from the bench. The sheer volume and scope of federal regulations promulgated every year far surpasses the number of laws passed by Congress. 
+In its original form, things were far different. The Founders intended Congress to be the most powerful branch of government, with the Senate representing the interests of the states and the House of Representatives those of the people. The president was largely a caretaker. Bereft of any “bully pulpit,” “big stick,” or other tools of modern American autocracy, he largely acted under the direction of Congress, which, in turn, carried out the will of the people and of the state legislatures. The executive branch as a whole was primarily concerned with foreign affairs and with adjudicating disputes between the states. Few Americans prior to the early 20th century had any contact with the federal government other than at the post office, and many would not have recognized the president had they passed him on the street. 
+Today, of course, the U.S. president is the superstar of superstars, an elected Caesar who controls the destinies of billions, thanks to his ascendency over the U.S. military and economy. Small wonder that Americans focus all their combative energies on getting “their man” elected. In the modern American game of thrones, the presidency has become the ultimate spoils. 
+But there are constitutional remedies for all of this. The Constitution has not yet been repealed or amended beyond recognition — though there are many who are pushing to do just that, via a modern constitutional convention. And the Constitution provides a series of ingenious remedies, some of them all but forgotten, for the disfigurement of our original checks and balances that generations of unscrupulous political elites have created. Here are a few of them. 
+Cut the Purse Strings 
+No federal program can operate without funding, and on paper at least, the House of Representatives still holds the purse strings for the entire government, as the Founders intended it to. As the first clause in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 7, clearly stipulates, “All bills for raising revenue must originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.” The House of Representatives, be it remembered, was designed to represent the voice of the people directly; this is why House members are reelected more often than any other officials in the federal government (every two years), and also why House members have the smallest constituencies. To change the direction of the federal government, it is first necessary to change the House, and it just happens that it is the House where turnover is the highest and candidacy the easiest. The House being the largest elected body in government, it is impossible for all House races to be controlled by special interests (although many of them certainly are). 
+All this being the case, the House is the first line of defense against an abusive and overweening executive branch. If the House refuses to authorize spending for a given bill, program, initiative, or policy, it will not be funded. 
+What if the president ignores Congress, and uses unauthorized funds, as the Clinton administration did in the 1995 bailout of the Mexican government? In 1995, President Clinton, frustrated by Congress’ refusal to authorize an emergency bailout of the Mexican economy to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in loan guarantees, went ahead and did it anyway. These funds were taken from a then little-known fund controlled by the Treasury Department, the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), which was created in 1934 as part of the Gold Reserve Act, to provide emergency funds to shore up the dollar in the event of severe foreign exchange fluctuations. The ESF was made necessary by the United States’ departure from the gold standard, along with most other countries, during the 1930s. Absent the discipline and stability imposed by a precious-metal standard, currency values are prone to wild swings as governments engage in various inflationary policies. With the passage of decades, the central banks of the world have learned to coordinate their inflationary policies in secret, but the ESF remains, and as of 2009, held more than $100 billion — enough to fund a significant amount of presidential financial and economic priorities, should Congress demur. 
+Another clever way that the executive branch has discovered for circumventing congressional checks on funding is via Department of Justice lawsuits. This trick has been used to particular effect by the Obama administration, and it works like this: The Justice Department launches a lawsuit for perceived violations of federal regulations (bank regulations, for example) against a well-heeled target or targets, and as part of the settlement, directs large payments to be made to selected special interests — for example, anti-bank activist groups. Hundreds of millions of off-budget dollars have been funneled to a wide panoply of leftist activist groups in this way, in return for their support of Obama’s anti-business policies. Of particular notoriety is the Obama administration’s recent disposal of hundreds of millions in settlement monies from the likes of Citigroup, Bank of America, and JP Morgan, of which an appreciable amount was permitted, under Justice’s terms of settlement, to be “donated” to various activist groups that serve the Democratic Party’s interests. This money all belongs, in theory, to the Treasury, and therefore cannot be disposed of without Congress’ say-so. In fact, Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution anticipated the potential for executive monkeyshines with Treasury funds, stipulating that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.” But that hasn’t stopped the Obama administration from using vast sums of extortion payments originating in legal settlements to finance many left-wing NGO (non-governmental organization) allies. 
+The executive branch has devised and continues to devise methods to circumvent constitutional prohibitions on executive authority to raise money. For as one congressman closely allied with President Grover Cleveland is alleged to have told a fellow congressman who criticized one of his initiatives as unconstitutional, “What’s the Constitution between friends?” 
+But can Congress do anything about it? All executive expenditures, from the constitutionally dubious ESF to DOJ settlement monies, must originate with the Treasury — but, as the Constitution makes crystal clear, although the Treasury pertains to the executive branch, its funds cannot be disbursed without congression­al authorization. It is this stipulation, even more than the “origination” clause in Article 1, Section 7, that assigns the purse strings ultimately and unavoidably to Congress. 
+All Congress needs to do in cases of executive innovation, such as the creative use of DOJ settlement monies, is to pass a law clarifying constitutional limits on Treasury spending. In the case of the Exchange Stabilization Fund, it could simply legislate the unneeded entity out of existence, for example. In the case of the DOJ settlement slush fund, legislation outlawing such practices is already working its way through Congress. 
+The framers of the Constitution anticipated that the executive branch would seek to raise funds by going around Congress. This is why the Constitution makes plain that measures for raising revenue must originate in the House, and that no money may be spent from the Treasury except by congressional authorization. 
+This congressional authorization applies not only to money raised by taxes, but to all other ways the government has to raise money. In the latter category the most traditional way, of course, is borrowing money. Since the beginning of the Republic, this has been accomplished by the issuance of various “Treasuries,” financial instruments such as Treasury bonds that can be purchased by anyone wishing to loan money to the U.S. government in the hope of achieving a modest return upon maturation. The Constitution delegates the authority to “borrow money on the credit of the United States” to Congress in Article 1, Section 8. Yet this power was quickly delegated to the secretary of the treasury upon ratification of the Constitution, in 1789, and has been carried out by the Treasury, ostensibly under congression­al oversight, ever since. Today, all decisions made regarding the issuance of debt emanate from the Office of Debt Management (ODM) within the Treasury. Congress takes little notice of the day-to-day operations of this office, which has broad discretionary power to issue as much or as little debt as it sees fit, constrained only by the congressionally mandated debt limit — which Congress raises as frequently as political pressure, mostly orchestrated by the executive branch, demands. In other words, even though the Constitution assigns responsibility for the issuance of debt — as with all other fiscal powers — to Congress, the legislative body has delegated almost all of its authority over the creation of debt to the executive, reassuring itself that its authority remains supreme as long as the constantly rising debt ceiling limits are respected. Added to this is the fact that a large part of U.S. Treasury debt ends up being monetized by the Federal Reserve, an entity under neither presidential nor congressional control, whose financial activities are completely opaque to Congress and the president alike. In practice, though, the Fed is an ally of the executive branch, inasmuch as its “open market operations” (the purchase and sale of Treasury-issued debt on the secondary markets) has created a vast and constant demand for government debt that would not exist were private investors and foreign governments the Treasury Department’s only customers. 
+Thus the executive branch may have little de facto authority to raise revenue directly, but it has come to enjoy — thanks to two centuries of congressional neglect — enormous and almost unchallenged de facto power over the issuance of debt, buttressed by the modern Federal Reserve System, and restrained only by occasional feeble congressional blandishments regarding the debt ceiling. 
+This is a much knottier problem than reining in executive abuse of Treasury funds. It will require nothing less than the repeal of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the re-assertion of congressional responsibility for the issuance of debt. The transfer of the ODM and its operations to full and constant congressional oversight via the congressional Ways and Means Committee would be a good start in this regard, as would the instatement of a robust, long-term debt ceiling. But the best measure of all would be to begin shrinking the size and cost of government to within constitutionally mandated limits, and to pay down the massive debt that is now used as a political weapon to hold the entire country hostage — usually by ambitious, big-spending presidents and their allies in Congress. 
+Other Remedies 
+But what if the president starts another war? War is a powerful political distractor and disincentive for dissent. The laws, as Cicero once observed, have a tendency to fall silent in times of war. In our time, the very waging of war has become a lawless act, since no U.S. president since FDR, at the onset of World War II, has gone to war authorized by a congressional declaration. The Korean, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars have all been waged by presidential edict, as have countless smaller military actions from the former Yugoslavia to Haiti to Panama to Libya, among many others. The constitutional authority to declare war, delegated to Congress in Article 1, Section 8, has become all but a dead letter, not by direct repeal but by decades of congressional spinelessness and public apathy. For 15 years, the United States has been engaged in a series of international wars under the banner of a “War on Terror,” costing trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, without a constitutionally mandated declaration against any hostile power — and with no end in sight. Quite aside from the horrific human toll, the vaguely defined, open-ended War on Terror has created a constant rationale for more and more debt, mostly urged on a reluctant Congress and ever-more-hard-beset American people by an executive branch energized by the prospect of war without end. 
+The solution to the executive war card is simple, but will require considerable political will: restore the congressional declaration of war as a check on the war-making ambitions of the executive branch. This would include determining whether America’s seemingly endless involvement in Middle Eastern broils is worthy of a declaration of war, and winding down our commitments in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan once and for all if it isn’t. Such would not lead to instant relief from our gargantuan war debts, but it would be a huge step in the right direction, reducing the likelihood of future foreign wars for our descendants to die in and pay for. 
+How can we stop the growth of federal regulations by unelected bureaucrats? The easiest way would be for Congress to legislatively shut down and defund the departments and agencies that produce them. For decades, conservatives have vowed to close various executive branch departments, with the Department of Education a perennial favorite. But because of public apathy, such promises have not been kept. 
+What about the Supreme Court? Another area in which the executive branch, bolstered by a sympathetic majority in Congress, might seem unstoppable is in the matter of Supreme Court appointees. One of the major self-justifications of the Trump campaign has been that a President Hillary Clinton will stack the Court with ultra-liberal justices who will roll back the gains of the Scalia/Roberts court, ensuring that abortion on demand continues and possibly overturning the recent ruling in favor of an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment under the District of Columbia v. Heller. But the actions of the Republican-controlled Senate have already shown how such concerns can be exaggerated. The Senate notified President Obama after the untimely death of Justice Antonin Scalia that it would not consider any of his nominations so close to a presidential election. Despite withering pressure from Democrats and the kept media, Senate Republicans have been as good as their word — so far. Left out of the discussion, however, is that there is no constitutional stipulation on the number of Supreme Court justices, nor even that the number be odd to ensure a tiebreaker vote. The original Supreme Court had six justices, requiring that a tiebreaker be by a two-thirds majority (four out of six). Such a configuration was itself a powerful limit on the ability of the Supreme Court to impose its will. But there is nothing save perhaps an act of legislation that prevents the Supreme Court from returning to such an arrangement — or to any other number of judges Congress might deem appropriate. 
+But aside from the number of justices, Congress possesses an even more powerful check against the Supreme Court. One of official Washington’s best-kept secrets is the fact that the Constitution provides, in Article 3, Section 2, for Congress to limit the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. The precise wording of this oft-overlooked provision is: In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction . In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction , both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make. [Emphasis added.] 
+In other words, Congress may pass legislation instructing the Supreme Court that it has no jurisdiction over cases involving, for example, gun rights or abortion. In this way, a court deemed a threat to the body politic could be hamstrung. In practice, this option has seldom been used, and is almost never discussed in “respectable” Washington circles, because it poses a mortal threat to the legal hegemony the supremes have enjoyed for so long — usually to the advantage of Big Government and their cultural Marxist allies. Indeed, Congress might easily have gotten rid of ObamaCare by now if it had chosen this option instead of relying on the Supreme Court — which, of course, refused to find yet another Big Government program unconstitutional. 
+If All Else Fails? 
+From time to time, presidents (and Supreme Court justices) simply refuse to acknowledge limits on their power, and persist in defying the will of the people and the authority of Congress. In such cases, there is one final recourse: impeachment and removal from office. Congress has been reluctant to exercise this option, but were it used more freely, presidents and Supreme Court justices would be much more leery of abusing their powers. 
+In short, there is an array of options available to keep the executive and judicial branches from running roughshod over Congress and the American people. The only thing required is better understanding of the Constitution’s intricate checks and balances and the political will to put them into effect. 
+
+This article is an example of the exclusive content that's available by subscribing to our print magazine. Twice a month get in-depth features covering the political gamut: education, candidate profiles, immigration, healthcare, foreign policy, guns, etc. Digital as well as print options are available! Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
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+2919,Iraqi forces reportedly begin attack to recapture Tikrit from ISIS,"The Iraqi army, backed by Shiite, Sunni, and Iranian fighters, used artillery and airstrikes Monday to begin an attack on the city of Tikrit—Saddam Hussein’s hometown—in a major effort to reclaim dispute areas of Iraq from ISIS fighters.
+
+A force of some 27,000 was attacking areas outside the city, with ground troops and airstrikes by Iraqi fighter jets, state TV reported Monday.
+
+Despite earlier reports touting the offensive, hours into the operation, Iraq's military said it still hadn't entered Tikrit, but militants have been dislodged from some areas outside the city.
+
+While some Iraqi reports suggested the Iraqi forces were being ""supported by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on the ground"" and U.S., French and Iraqi air forces in the air, a Pentagon spokesman said the U.S. military was not involved in Monday’s offensive.
+
+""We are not providing airpower to support the operation,"" Col. Steve Warren told reporters in Washington Monday. Warren also said that while the Pentagon was aware of the operation, Iraqi security forces had not requested air support from the U.S. military.
+
+Tikrit, some 80 miles north of Baghdad, fell into the hands of ISIS last summer along with the country's second-largest city of Mosul, and other areas in its Sunni heartland. The city, which has an estimated population of around 260,000 people, may be best known as the hometown of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
+
+Any operation to take Mosul from the Islamic terror group likely would require Iraq to seize Tikrit first, as the town sits on the main road from Baghdad. U.S. military officials have said a coordinated military mission to retake Mosul will likely begin in April or May and involve up to 25,000 Iraqi troops. But they have cautioned that if the Iraqis aren't ready, the timing could be delayed. Past attempts to retake Tikrit have failed, and Iraqi authorities say they have not set a date to launch a major operation to recapture Mosul.
+
+News of the offensive came hours after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called on Sunni tribal fighters to abandon ISIS, warning that Tikrit ""will soon return to its people.""
+
+Al-Abadi offered the Sunnis what he called ""the last chance"", and promised them a pardon during a news conference in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad. His office said he arrived in Samarra to ""supervise the operation to liberate Tikrit from the terrorist gangs.""
+
+""I call upon those who have been misled or committed a mistake to lay down arms and join their people and security forces in order to liberate their cities,"" al-Abadi said.
+
+The Iraqi military previously launched an operation in late June to try to wrest back control of Tikrit, but that quickly stalled. Other planned offensives by Iraq's military, which collapsed under the initial ISIS blitz, also have failed to make up ground, though soldiers have taken back the nearby refinery town of Beiji, backed by airstrikes from a U.S.-led coalition.
+
+Al-Abadi's comments appear to be targeting former members of Iraq's outlawed Baath party, loyalists to Saddam Hussein, who joined ISIS during its offensive, as well as other Sunnis who were dissatisfied with Baghdad's Shiite-led government. The premier likely hopes to peel away some support from the terror group, especially as Iraqis grow increasingly horrified by the extremists' mass killings and other atrocities.
+
+In February alone, violence across Iraq killed at least 1,100 Iraqis, including more than 600 civilians, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq said Sunday. Last year was the deadliest in Iraq since its 2006-2007 sectarian bloodshed, with a total of 12,282 people killed and 23,126 wounded, according to the U.N.
+
+Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+7126,Cheyenne River Sioux Chairman Brings Pipeline Opposition to Meeting With President Obama,"Cheyenne River Sioux Chairman Brings Pipeline Opposition to Meeting With President Obama Cheyenne River Sioux Chairman Brings Pipeline Opposition to Meeting With President Obama By 0 52 
+Vehicle lights, streaked by a long, late evening exposure, cuts through the campsite set up to protest the Dakota Access oil pipeline, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, on October 8, 2016. (Photo: Kristina Barker / The New York Times) 
+The stand-off between the Standing Rock Sioux and the Dakota Access pipeline shows no sign of letting up. Indigenous opponents of the four-state, nearly $4 billion dollar pipeline have set up another encampment. 
+Members of the Great Sioux Nation say they are invoking eminent domain over land rightfully theirs under an 1851 treaty; and have situated their Winter Camp directly in the path of the pipeline. Energy Transfer Partners, developers of the massive pipeline that would run beneath the Missouri River, says the land belongs to the company after they recently purchased the tract from a farmer. 
+According to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, six states have deployed law enforcement officers to the area. Tuesday night in a Facebook post, the department said private security hired by Energy Transfer Partners who unleashed attack dogs and pepper spray on protesters in early September were not licensed and could face prosecution. 
+Hundreds of people have been arrested during months of protest; most on minor trespass charges. Yet many have been subjected to strip searches and jailed. 
+FSRN’s Nell Abram spoke with Cheyenne River Sioux Chairman Harold Frazier, who met with President Barack Obama Tuesday to discuss the pipeline project, and the militarized police response to the protests. 
+Download Audio 
+Nell Abram: Chairman Frazier, thanks for joining us on FSRN. You spoke with President Obama and asked him to him protect the rights of the Lakota people, their sacred sites and the waters of the Missouri River. How did your conversation go? 
+Harold Frazier: You know, I was a little hopeful, but I guess I kind of got what I expected. There’s court cases proceeding. One of the things they assured me is that he is going to follow, continue the…",FAKE
+6570,These Blast Points on Hillary's Campaign... Only The Deep State Is So Precise,"These Blast Points on Hillary's Campaign... Only The Deep State Is So Precise   Charles Hugh Smith 
+The Deep State's most prescient elements must derail Hillary's campaign to clear a path to Trump's executive team. 
+Back in August, I asked Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary? I think we now have a definitive answer: ""These blast points on Hillary's campaign... too accurate for the Mainstream Media. Only the forces of the Imperial Deep State are so precise."" 
+The Mainstream Media is presenting the FBI investigation as a ""lose-lose"" situation for embattled FBI Director Comey. If Comey remained quiet until after the election, he would be accused of colluding with the Clinton campaign and its allies in the Department of Justice (sic). 
+But in going public, he stands accused by Democrats of ""intervening in an election,"" i.e. raising doubts about Hillary's judgement and veracity days before Americans go to the polls. 
+Another narrative has Comey's hand forced by the threat of disgusted FBI agents leaking information that would show the FBI caved into political pressure from the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to keep relevant material out of the public eye until after the election. 
+I submit another much more powerful dynamic is in play: the upper ranks of the Deep State now view Hillary as an unacceptable liability. The word came down to Comey to act whether he wanted to or not, i.e. take one for the good of the nation/Deep State/Imperial Project. 
+As a refresher: the Deep State is the unelected government (also called the invisible or shadow government) that is not as monolithic as generally assumed. 
+The neo-conservative globalists who want Hillary to continue pushing their agenda are the more visible camp, but another less visible but highly motivated camp realizes Hillary and her neo-con agenda would severely damage the nation's security and its global influence. It is this camp that is arranging for Hillary to lose. 
+The consensus view seems to be that the Establishment and the Deep State see Trump as a loose cannon who might upset the neo-con apple cart by refusing to toe the neo-con line. 
+This view overlooks the reality that significant segments of the Deep State view the neo-con strategy as an irredeemable failure. To these elements of the Deep State, Hillary is a threat precisely because she embraces the failed neo-con strategy and those who cling to it. From this point of view, Hillary as president would be an unmitigated disaster for the Deep State and the nation/Imperial Project it governs. 
+Whatever else emerges from the emails being leaked or officially released, one conclusion is inescapable: Hillary's judgement is hopelessly flawed. Combine her lack of judgement with her 24 years of accumulated baggage and her potential to push the neo-con agenda to the point of global disaster, and you get a potent need for the Deep State's most prescient elements to derail her campaign and clear a path to Trump's executive team. 
+Once this path is clear, the management of Trump's executive team can begin in earnest, a management process aimed at disengaging the nation and its global Empire from neo-con overreach. 
+If you think this scenario is ""impossible,"" let's see how the election plays out before deciding what's ""impossible"" and what's inevitable.",FAKE
+4302,"You’re a Nazi, and other shocking truths according to Trump’s fact-checking rules","Donald Trump has long been at odds with our beleaguered leagues of fact-checkers, who regularly award him “Pants on Fire,” “Four Pinocchios” and other colorful rulings on his truthiness.
+
+Yet somehow such definitive, unanimous debunking never seems to faze the Republican presidential front-runner. And I think I’ve discovered why.
+
+It’s because Trump — like Socrates, among other trailblazing truth-seekers throughout history — has developed his own innovative method for fact-checking. Rather than relying on stale, lamestream-media techniques such as gathering evidence, crunching numbers or consulting experts, he takes a different route: He goes online and sees whether random people agree with him.
+
+For example, he’s lately been challenged on his claims of seeing TV footage of “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City cheering when the twin towers came down. While fusty fact-checkers at The Post and elsewhere have foolishly tried to find such footage, Trump instead prefers a pioneering, Twitter-based authentication method.
+
+“Why wouldn’t it have taken place? I’ve had hundreds of people call in and tweet in on Twitter, saying they saw it, and I was 100 percent right,” Trump said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
+
+When host Chuck Todd protested that Trump “wouldn’t make a business deal based on retweets,” Trump doubled down: “By the hundreds they’re calling, and they’re tweeting.”
+
+Several days later, appearing on the “Alex Jones Show,” Trump again explained the value of his truth-seeking technique.
+
+“So many people have called in, and on Twitter, @realdonaldtrump, they’re all tweeting, so I know it happened,” Trump said.
+
+Reality may have a well-known liberal bias, but Trump’s Twitter followers do not. Nor do the conspiracy theory Web sites from which Trump also seems to glean much of his information and policy ideas.
+
+To be honest, this worldview — and the corollary that everyone is entitled not only to their own opinions, but also to their own democratically determined facts — never really occurred to me. Sure, I occasionally use Googlefight to check the more commonly used spelling of a word (e.g., “demagogue” beats “demagog”). But I’ve never thought to use hordes of anonymous netizens as a sieve for the truth.
+
+[How Donald Trump courted the right-wing fringe to conquer the GOP]
+
+I began to wonder: What’s it like to navigate life as Trump does? What’s it like to learn about human existence via Twitter, Reddit message boards and the Drudge Report?
+
+To find out, I compiled a list of things you’d learn were true if you fact-checked them solely by seeing whether strangers on the Internet agreed with you.
+
+1. You are a Nazi. I am a Nazi. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both Nazis. Everyone on the Internet is, eventually, a Nazi, according to other people on the Internet who disagree with them and who themselves become Nazis if any conversation goes on long enough.
+
+2. Your spouse is definitely cheating on you.
+
+3. You have cancer. Several really, really rare forms of cancer. Also lupus, mad cow disease, fibromyalgia, osteoporosis and a urinary tract infection. Or maybe it’s just a common cold? Either way the ailment(s) can be cured by purchasing dietary supplements from a sketchy Web site featuring testimonials from a person currently running for president. Modern medicine is for losers.
+
+4. Some dress somewhere is the exact two colors that you think it is.
+
+5. If only Ron Paul had been president, we would not have had the secret hyperinflation pandemic currently ravaging the nation. Also, gold and bitcoins have been and will continue to be the safest places in which to store your life savings, excluding perhaps your mattress, a Nigerian prince’s bank account or your hollowed-out spare copy of “Atlas Shrugged.”
+
+6. This one weird trick will help you lose belly fat.
+
+7. You should be ashamed of yourself. You are a terrible parent, and also a terrible pet owner and friend, and un-American, and probably not even human. Why would you do whatever you just admitted to doing, you jerk?
+
+8. Leonardo DiCaprio got raped by a bear or something?
+
+9. Obama is a secret Muslim. Also maybe Thomas Jefferson was a secret Muslim. As with Nazism, pretty much everyone you dislike is a secret Muslim. Unless they already admit to being a Muslim, in which case they’re probably also a secret Mexican who wants to steal your job.
+
+10. If you don’t forward this column to at least 10 people, you will have bad luck for the rest of your life.
+
+Sheesh, it really is a scary world out there. I don’t envy you, Mr. Trump.",REAL
+7988,"Peaceful, sincerely, with grace: Paris attacks commemorated with floating lanterns","  ‘I   today.’   ‘I wrote in Arabic –‘The republic will never be down’.   
+COURTESY: RT’s RUPTLY video agency, NO RE-UPLOAD, NO REUSE – FOR LICENSING, PLEASE, CONTACT http://ruptly.tv 
+RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air 
+Subscribe to RT! http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=RussiaToday 
+Like   
+  Share the joy",FAKE
+1306,GOP establishment stares into the abyss,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+10393,Comment on Will the Cost of a “Self-Driving Taxi” Really Be Sixty-Seven Cents ($0.67) a Mile? McKinsey’s Mysterious Footnote 17 by JTMcPhee,"by Lambert Strether 
+By Lambert Strether of Corrente . 
+The FT’s Izabella Kaminska (“ The autoignition temperature of manual cars is much higher than Fahrenheit 451 “) brings McKinsey’s report on self-driving cars to our attention (“An Integrated Perspective on the Future of Mobility,” PDF ). Bloomberg, writing on the report , put the key fact-like price comparison in the deck: 
+Autonomous taxis one-quarter the price of New York cab ride 
+And then quoted the following eye-popping fact-like dollars-and-cents figure: 
+The self-driving vehicles being pioneered by Tesla Motors Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and others are poised to dramatically lower the cost of taxis, potentially making them cheaper than buses or subways, according to a joint report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance and McKinsey & Co. Having no driver to pay could reduce taxi prices to 67 cents a mile by 2025 , less than a quarter of the cost in Manhattan today, the report found. 
+(The word “could” seems to be doing rather a lot of work in the second sentence.) But how were those figures “found”? On what basis did McKinsey, the “the trusted advisor and counselor to many of the world’s most influential businesses and institutions” , come to its conclusions? 
+And here, readers, I went wrong. I thought I would try to understand the business ratios and income statements of today’s taxi industry ( NAICS code 4853 ; income statement from Yellow Cab of Missoula, MT[ 1]) and use those as a baseline to evaluate McKinsey’s analysis. That was a time-consuming mistake, and here is why. 
+Let’s look at the report, starting by having searched the PDF on “67.” Here is the source for Bloomberg’s quote, Exhibit 10: 
+I’ve helpfully highlighted the “67”; interestingly, a PDF search reveals that this is the only place where “67” appears. There is, for example, no table or equation showing the calculations through which McKinsey arrived at that figure.[2] Nevertheless, we look for some explanation, and the best I can find is in the text adjacent to Exhibit 10, on pages 23 and 25. (I’ve pasted a snippet from page 23 in at the top of page 25, and helpfully highlighted some of the text, and footnote 17): 
+Now, the $0.67 figure in Exhibit 10 applies only to the case of an “individual use” self-driving taxi (the chart says “self-driven,” but the caption is correct). That is, Jane Coder calls up a self-driving taxi to get to work, and when she’s done with her commute, the freed-up taxi responds to a call from Joe Coder to go home, and so on. The taxi is not shared. This use case is described in the paragraph marked “[1]”. Here is that paragraph: 
+For many drivers ride-hailing would nonetheless become the economic alternative. An on-demand, self-driving vehicle could also replace most current shared-mobility business models such as car sharing, carpooling, and ride-hailing: it could drive itself to the next customer, to a designated parking space, or back to the point of origin. 
+Do you see any calculations there — indeed, any numbers at all — that would justify the $0.67 figure? No? (Notice also that “could” and “would” are working hard in this paragraph, too.) 
+We move on to the paragraph marked [2]: 
+If a private consumer were open to sharing a ride with another traveler, the economics become even more attractive: on average, using a self-driving, electric, pooled taxi could be 30–60 percent cheaper per mile than a private vehicle, depending on the number of people sharing the ride. By 2025, a private car would cost $0.43/mile, whereas a consumer could use a self-driving, pooled taxi for as little as $0.17/mile–$0.29/mile 17 . 
+Here at least we see claims with numbers in them, but none of them are relevant to the “individual use self-driving taxi” case, and so the $0.67 figure remains a mystery, as yet unexplained. We move on to the paragraph marked [3]: 
+Compared with public transport, it appears that in various US cities public transport remains about as twice as cheap as human-driven taxi pooling with a cost of $0.64/mile in 2015. 
+The same applies; the $0.67 figure remains inexplicable. But wait! There’s that footnote 17 in the paragraph marked “[2]”: 
+Costs are estimated the total cost of ownership, assuming 70,000 miles driven annually[3], average driver salaries, 10 percent overhead costs and a 10 percent required rate of return on invested capital for the fleet operator. We assume a utilization factor of 50 percent for taxis and 70 percent for pooled cars. This does not take into account a price premium for any additional journey time required to pick up multiple passengers. 
+(I’ve helpfully underlined the weasel words, along with words that make me ask “How do you know that?”) Do you see a source for any of this? No? Why would that be? (Contrast footnote 17, in the left column, to footnotes 18, 19, and 20 in the right column, all of which provide sources. 
+Wishing to give McKinsey the benefit of the doubt, I looked for their editorial policies, which I found on page 64, on the About page. In relevant part: 
+So this really is the best part, isn’t it? 
+The information contained in this publication is derived from carefully selected sources we believe are reasonable. 
+Well, I should hope so! (“Trusted advisor and counsellor,” et cetera et cetera.) So that’s alright then! Although one could wish that the “reasonable” and “carefully selected” sources were named.[4] 
+* * * 
+So, I’ve managed to emulate the classic bad New Yorker article; I followed the ornithologists into the swamp, because when they said they heard the call of a rare bird, I believed them. But they didn’t find the bird! So, we still don’t know where McKinsey got its sixty-seven cents ($0.67) a mile figure for its “self-driving taxi” use case. (What the Bloomberg reporter thought they were doing when they repeated it is another question.) And we don’t know know why its “report” didn’t provide an explanation for it. Explanations that occur to me: 
+1. An editorial disaster . Nobody checked footnote 17 to add the sourcing the for sixty-seven cents ($0.67) a mile figure. This strikes me as unlikely, given the level of attention given to the reports design. 
+2. A public relations scam . McKinsey simply made up the sixty-seven cents ($0.67) a mile figure out of whole cloth. This strikes me as unlikely, given the whole “trusted advisor” schtick. 
+3. A bait and switch . The source of the calculations for sixty-seven cents ($0.67) a mile figure is internal and proprietary, and McKinsey won’t reveal anything until you engage them. This strikes me as unlikely, dittoez. 
+‘Tis a puzzlement! 
+NOTES 
+[1] I don’t want to whinge about this, but when I was a sprat, twenty years ago, and I wanted industry ratios and company reports, I’d go down to the Boston Public Library’s Business Branch , display my library card, and get the information for free . Google was awfully good at displaying results from “industry research” firms that demand a fee , but not so good with, er, “free stuff.” Am I looking for stats in all the wrong places? 
+[2] Why 67? Why not 65? Or 70? I’d hate to think McKinsey guilty of spurious precision. 
+[3] New York’s Taxicab Factbook estimates that the average cab travels 70,000 miles per year. 
+[4] There’s also “We do not guarantee its accuracy or completeness and nothing in this document shall be construed to be a representation of such a guarantee,” but I assume Bud from Legal insisted that go in, and I don’t hold it against them. 
+APPENDIX 
+I like this too. From page 49: 
+And the text: 
+Within the mobility sector itself, an on-demand self-driving taxi could replace most current shared-mobility business models. Adding a self-driving component to car-sharing operations, ridehailing services, and taxi services makes the business models indistinguishable. 
+Indeed it “could”! Exactly in the way the wizards of Unseen University nailing magic broomsticks under Sam Vimes’s horse-drawn coach made it “indistinguishable” from an airborne, supersonic vehicle! 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+4990,Why Libertarians (and Other 3rd Parties) Should Thank Donald Trump,"With just three months to go before the long national nightmare that is Election 2016 transmogrifies into a either a Hillary Clinton or a Donald Trump presidency(!), let's take a late-summer moment to squeeze some lemonade from lemons. Whatever happens in November, all of us who have political perspectives that are routinely discounted or dismissed by the Republican-Democratic duopoly should thank Donald Trump for creating a blueprint to power for us.
+
+Pull yourself out of the news cycle that he has been so expert in dominating with a daily—sometimes hourly—spew of sensational utterings, proclamations, and half-baked policy plans: Extreme vetting! Mexican rapists! Crooked Hillary! When he's not creating outrage himself, he brings it in other people, such as when his supporters get egged at rallies or unflattering naked statues of the billionaire crop up in cities around the country.
+
+The simple fact is, as conservative commentator and Finding Mr. Righteous author Lisa De Pasquale, writes,
+
+There has been much hand-wringing among the right on where Republicans go now that Trump has ""destroyed"" the party. They complain that the Republican Party has left them, while millions of Trump voters and libertarians believe party leaders and professional pundits left them decades ago. Regardless of whether the #NeverTrump crowd has valid points, it is clear that Trump has done libertarians a favor in busting the Old Guard of Republican kingmakers. The Old Guard isn't mad that Trump doesn't represent their principles, but that they no longer hold any power in picking the top of the ticket. The proof is that rather than get behind Gary Johnson, they'd rather trot out a candidate with zero name recognition or campaign infrastructure.
+
+Beyond revealing the emptiness of the power bases in the existing Republican Party (and party members' absolute lack of interest in moving toward their ostensible principles of limited, smaller government), De Pasquale argues that Trump is the shape of better things to come:
+
+The Trump campaign has been a battering ram for libertarians. In just over a year, Trump has succeeded in what the Libertarian Party hasn't been able to do in the 35 years since it was conceived. Not only has he upset traditional party politics, but he's also paved the way for non-traditional candidates. Who needs stuffy party leaders and pundits when you have social media and 100% name recognition?... In the current political climate, personality, authenticity, and even celebrity reign. Trump has shown that at least in the primaries, the absence of a traditional ground game and campaign budget can be overcome. Libertarians have an advantage because we already know they're authentic by going against the dominant parties.... Libertarians also have a good celebrity bench that could help them replicate the Trump campaign. I wouldn't necessarily endorse famous libertarian Vince Vaughn for president (though I would endorse myself as First Lady), but I would enthusiastically get on the Peter Thiel Train. Set aside policy disagreements libertarians have with Trump. They should be thankful that Trump has created a new path for national office. He built libertarian candidates a path to success and he paid for it.
+
+Read the whole piece and start thinking: Who are the agents of libertarian influence that can either transform the existing major parties and bring a bold new ""free minds and free markets"" sensibility to independent runs at all levels of government? Better yet, who are the crossover figures that might do for the Libertarian Party what athletes such as Joe Namath did for the old AFL by legitimizing an upstart league as a major force?
+
+It's a given that Americans know nothing and care even less about history. That's certainly true when it comes to journalism generally and political journalism specifically. Did you ever wonder just why every election is the most important one in our lives? The answer is only mysterious to dead-enders within those group and to journalists, both of whom have no sense of history and really think that everything is on the line every four years and that whatever happened 10, 20, or 30 years ago is irrelevant to understanding the current moment. For the most part, we have simply been repeating the same play over and over again, but to less-and-less-engaged audiences.
+
+As Matt Welch and I wrote in The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, all the trends of the past 40 to 50 years show that Americans have weaker and weaker ties to the Republican and Democratic Parties, just as we do with all consumer brands. Whatever post-war coalitions those parties once represented no longer exist. Everything in American life is vastly different than it was in, say 1964, when the current identities of the GOP and Democrats were being formed. These parties are designed to groups of people that either no longer exist in the same numbers as they once did (private-sector union members and socially conservative Christians, say) or who don't link issues the way they used to (what's the necessary connection between before for marriage equality and higer marginal tax rates?).
+
+Yet most party leaders and media ignore the at-or-near-historic lows in voter identification with the Democrats and Republicans. They also act as if the ideologies and policy platforms of parties can't or don't change over time. The result is a conversation about politics that is less and less moored to basic reality. We need a new operating system for politics in the 21st century, but the people most invested in the current one don't want to migrate or upgrade to anything different. We need Windows 10, but they're fine sticking with 3.1, thank you very much.
+
+Trump's rise—and the semi-successful insurgency of Bernie Sanders, too—puts the lie to the idea that the power structure is capable of maintaining a status quo that serves fewer and fewer people. Given his absolute lack of consistent, coherent policies and his radically backward-looking agenda (anti-trade and migration in an increasingly globalized world?!?), he is not the future of anything, but the last gasp of a 20th-century politics that, in one final push, was able to reduce at least one of the major parties to rubble. It's up to those of us who actually want a new operating system for American governance to determine what comes next.",REAL
+1217,Donald Trump rejects Mitt Romney's ironic tax attack,"(CNN) Donald Trump is striking back at Mitt Romney on Thursday, after the 2012 Republican presidential nominee said his party's current front-runner could have a ""bombshell"" in his tax returns.
+
+""Mitt Romney, who was one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics, is now pushing me on tax returns. Dope!"" the billionaire businessman said in a series of Tweets attacking Romney.
+
+Mitt Romney, who was one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics, is now pushing me on tax returns. Dope!
+
+Trump wrote that tax returns have zero to do with a person's net worth, and all swung at the establishment wing of the Republican party, many of whom have coalesced behind Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as an answer to Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
+
+""Why doesn't @MittRomney just endorse @marcorubio already. Should have done it before NH or Nevada where he had a little sway. Too late now!""
+
+Trump said, ""I'm going to do what @MittRomney was totally unable to do- WIN!""
+
+Romney used the same medium to respond, tweeting back at the billionaire businessman Thursday.
+
+The real estate mogul first rejected Romney's accusation out of hand in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, saying ""there is no bombshell at all other than I pay a lot of tax and the government wastes the money.""
+
+Romney's biting attack hinted at clear signs of alarm in the Republican establishment at the billionaire's tightening grip on the party's presidential race.
+
+""We have good reason to believe that there's a bombshell in Donald Trump's taxes,"" Romney told Fox News, and also called on the top anti-Trump contenders Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio to disclose their tax information as well.
+
+""Either he's not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is, or he hasn't been paying taxes we would expect him to pay or perhaps he hasn't been giving money to vets or to the disabled like he's been telling us he's been doing,"" Romney added.
+
+""We as Republicans should not accept that this man has a tainted financial past,"" Graham told CNN's ""This Hour,"" adding later, ""It's clear to me he doesn't want to show us his financial situation.""
+
+The 2012 Republican nominee's broadside followed Trump's thumping victories in three of the first four GOP nominating contests, including in Nevada on Tuesday night, which have established the billionaire businessman as the party's undisputed front-runner.
+
+Trump left the door open to not releasing his tax returns Wednesday.
+
+The GOP front-runner told CNN that he will ""make a determination over the next couple of months"" as to whether he will release his tax returns.
+
+Romney, who decided against a third presidential run last year after initially considering jumping in to the race, uncorked his attack on Trump, ahead of next week's Super Tuesday contests that could further cement the billionaire's strong front-runner status in the GOP presidential race.
+
+Romney's move appeared to not just be a sign of concern that Trump -- after defying pundits and political logic since he launched his ""outsider"" campaign last summer -- could actually go on to claim the Republican nomination.
+
+It was also a sign of skittishness about the damage the Democrats will try to inflict on Trump, who has a long and sometimes controversial business record, in a general election, if he does indeed emerge as the GOP nominee.
+
+""They were all over me for my taxes,"" Romney told Fox.
+
+While Cruz and Rubio have yet to release their tax returns this campaign season, years of tax returns from both candidates are already publicly available from the time when they ran for Senate.
+
+Reid ignited a firestorm in the 2012 presidential race by claiming on the Senate floor, without presenting any evidence, that ""the word's out that he hasn't paid any taxes in 10 years."" His attack was part of a fierce effort by the Obama re-election campaign to portray Romney as an out of touch and heartless businessman unable to understand the economic problems afflicting the middle class. Reid later told CNN that he did not regret his move, noting archly that Romney did not win the election.
+
+The irony of the moment was not lost on Reid.
+
+""All I know, I can't imagine Romney having the gall coming after anybody's returns,"" the Senate minority leader told CNN on Thursday. ""Let's look at his.""
+
+It also struck one key member of Obama's re-election campaign.
+
+""Did Mitt Romney just do to Donald Trump on tax returns what he was so mad at Harry Reid for doing to him?"" said former Obama political adviser and current CNN commentator Dan Pfeiffer on Twitter.
+
+Under intense pressure, Romney did finally release his tax returns during the campaign, but when it emerged that he had paid around 14% taxes on his 2010 return, there was political uproar that played into the hands of the Obama campaign.
+
+The former Massachusetts governor was taking advantage of rules in the tax code under which income derived from dividends and capital gains is taxed at lower rates than traditional wages.
+
+Trump last summer released his personal financial disclosure shortly after announcing his presidential run and has consistently touted the fact that he released his financial numbers ahead of schedule.
+
+Trump said he was worth $8 billion, a figure he and his accountants later revised to $10 billion when he officially released his personal financial disclosure. Forbes has estimated Trump's net worth at $4.5 billion, a figure Trump has disputed.
+
+On Wednesday, Trump also stressed that his tax returns ""are extremely complex,"" which Romney has rejected given that Trump would only need to publish several years of past tax returns which he has already filed.
+
+Trump stressed as he has in the past that he pays ""as little as possible because it's an expense and it's not one I'm happy paying because frankly the United States government wastes a lot of money.""",REAL
+5459,Not guilty: The power of nullification to counteract government tyranny,"Not guilty: The power of nullification to counteract government tyranny By John W. Whitehead Posted on November 2, 2016 by John W. Whitehead 
+“The people have the power, all we have to do is awaken that power in the people. The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government .”—John Lennon 
+How do you balance the scales of justice at a time when Americans are being Tasered, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, hit with batons, shot with rubber bullets and real bullets, blasted with sound cannons, detained in cages and kennels , sicced by police dogs, arrested and jailed for challenging the government’s excesses, abuses and power-grabs? 
+Politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair. 
+No matter who sits in the White House, the shadow government will continue to call the shots behind the scenes. 
+Relying on the courts to restore justice seems futile. 
+Indeed, with every ruling handed down, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts, largely lacking in vision and scope, rendering narrow rulings focused on the letter of the law. This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. 
+Even s 
+It doesn’t matter who the activists are (environmentalists, peaceniks, Native Americans, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, or the Bundys and their followers) or what the source of the discontent is (endless wars abroad, police shootings, contaminated drinking water, government land-grabs), the government’s modus operandi 
+Just recently, in fact, an Oregon jury rejected the government’s attempts to prosecute seven activists 
+In finding the defendants not guilty—of conspiracy to impede federal officers, of possession of firearms in a federal facility, a 
+The Malheur occupiers were found not guilty despite the fact that they had guns in a federal facility (their lawyers argued the guns were “as much a statement of their rural culture as a cowboy hat or a pair of jeans”). They were found not guilty despite the fact that they used government vehicles (although they would argue that government property is public property available to all taxpayers). They were found not guilty despite the fact that they succeeded in occupying a government facility for six weeks, thereby preventing workers from performing their duties (as the Washington Post points out, this charge has also been used to prosecute extremist left-wingers and Earth First protesters 
+As law professor Ilya Somin explains, jury nullification is the practice by which a jury refuses to convict someone accused of a crime if they believe the “law in question is unjust or the punishment is excessive .” According to former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, the doctrine of jury nullification is “premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say 
+In a world of “ rampant overcriminalization ,” where the average citizen unknowingly breaks three laws a day, jury nullification acts as “ a check on runaway authoritarian criminalization 
+Indeed, Butler believes so strongly in the power of nullification to balance the scales between the power of the prosecutor and the power of the people that he advises 
+If you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty”—even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights 
+Not only should the punishment fit the crime, but the laws of the land should also reflect the concerns of the citizenry as opposed to the profit-driven priorities of Corporate America. 
+This is wh 
+Various cities and states have been using this historic doctrine with mixed results on issues as wide ranging as gun control and healthcare to “ claim freedom from federal laws they find onerous or wrongheaded 
+For the rest of us who are dependent on the “fairness” of the system, there exists a multitude of ways in which justice can and does go wrong every day. Police misconduct. Prosecutorial misconduct. Judicial bias. Inadequate defense. Prosecutors who care more about winning a case than seeking justice. Judges who care more about what is legal than wha 
+The real and manufactured events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, t 
+Those protests in Ferguson , Baltimore and Baton Rouge to protest police brutality? The militarized police “ clad in Kevlar vests, helmets, and camouflage, armed with pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, and tear gas ” turning towns into war zones? The kenneling 
+Employ militant nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience 
+And then, as I explain in more detail in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People llify the laws. Nullify everything the government does that is illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional. 
+Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His book (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the",FAKE
+6881,Voting is the Problem. Here’s the Solution.,"CorbettReport.com November 8, 2016 
+In Douglas Adams’ So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish , there is a scene where a spaceship lands on earth and a robot emerges from the craft, proclaiming that “I come in peace” and exhorting the earthlings to “take me to your Lizard.” The story’s protagonist, Arthur Dent, has this strange request explained to him by his friend, Ford Prefect, an experienced galactic hitchhiker: 
+“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…” 
+“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?” 
+“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.” 
+“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.” 
+“I did,” said ford. “It is.” 
+“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?” 
+“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.” 
+“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?” 
+“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.” 
+“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?” 
+“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?” 
+“What?” 
+“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?” 
+“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.” 
+Ford shrugged again. 
+“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.” 
+If only this was a joke. But here we are, on the verge of a contest between the two least respected, most distrusted candidates to run for office in modern political history. And some people say these lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them. 
+If there is any solace at all in this year’s selection cycle it is that, as The Corbett Report has been pointing out since the very day of its inception, there is absolutely nothing at stake here; the presidential figureheads are mere puppets, false fronts for the shadow government and deep state that commands and controls the military, economic and diplomatic machinery of the US-led world empire. 
+Do you really think the oligarchs put their entire system up on the chopping block every four years, hoping against hope that the public doesn’t use the dreaded ballot box to vote them out of power, dashing decades (or centuries) of carefully cultivated enslavement with pencils and touchscreens? Just in case anyone dislikes rhetorical questions, let me answer that one for you: No. No they do not. 
+But don’t take my word for it. Take Emma Goldman. As she’s been reputed to have said (and if she didn’t, feel free to tell other people that I said it): “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” 
+Or take H.L Mencken, who in his usual inimitable fashion quipped : 
+The state—or, to make the matter more concrete, the government—consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. 
+Or take Lysander Spooner, who wrote : 
+The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that – however bloody – can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave. 
+Or Wendy McElroy, who reminds us that: 
+Voting is not an act of political freedom. It is an act of political conformity. Those who refuse to vote are not expressing silence. They are screaming in the politician’s ear: “You do not represent me. This is not a process in which my voice matters. I do not believe you.” 
+Yes, voting is worse than a dead end. It’s less effective than bashing your head against a wall in a vain attempt to cure your headache. It’s more pathetic than allowing the oligarchs into your kitchen and then begging for a scrap of food from your own table. It is evil, immoral and contemptible. It is the act of a slave who has internalized that slavery so thoroughly that he wants to ensure that everyone around him is enslaved, too. 
+But, as I pointed out in yesterday’s conversation with Larken Rose, if there is any bright spot in all of this it is that your vote doesn’t matter anyway and will not change anything at all. It will not even “register as a protest” as some would like to believe, since the elections are rigged and the votes aren’t counted. 
+So if you are so inclined, knock yourself out. Cast a ballot. But instead of sitting back and feeling good about yourself for having done this senseless, meaningless and immoral act, can we at least agree to use the next 1460 days to do something actually productive? I leave it entirely up to you how to interpret the phrase “actually productive,” but if you’d allow me to offer some humble suggestions: 
+Find, join or create a community organization or freedom cell with a focus on fostering economic connections and social ties with people in your geographical area. 
+Find, join or create a community currency , community trading program or community exchange to foster agoristic connection between yourself and others in your area. 
+Commit to spending a certain amount of time each week spreading awareness about the banking oligarchy , false flag terrorism , GMO crops , or any subject you feel strongly about, either offline or online, using the work of others or by starting your own blog, newsletter or community meet up group. 
+Learn about gardening , canning, appliance repair, 3D printing , monetary theory , or any subject that you think will be handy in the event of a government collapse (or even if the government doesn’t collapse). 
+Read more books. Spend less time arguing with people online and more time making friends at the local coffee shop. Learn a new skill and teach it to someone else. 
+In short, do all of the million things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the phony baloney political charade exemplified by national selection day. Because if all you ever do is tick a box in a voting booth and sit back to see who wins the rigged sporting event, you probably believe the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to you.",FAKE
+2824,Understanding the U.S. talking points on Iran,"Washington (CNN) The Iran nuclear talks are progressing. But tough issues still remain. We could reach a deal. But we also might not. About 50-50. Less than 50-50.
+
+It's all up in the air.
+
+Those messages are just a slice of what top U.S. officials are saying publicly as they emerge from closed-door negotiations with their Iranian counterparts, struggling to find a way to broker a lasting deal aimed at keeping Iran from a nuclear weapon.
+
+But there's a method to the messaging madness as the Obama administration is looking to reassure key constituencies in the U.S. while holding together an increasingly fractious coalition of countries joining them in the negotiations and also ratcheting up pressure on Iran.
+
+""All of this is inevitably to some extent posturing, but it's also real and important in terms of setting the expectations for the negotiating parties,"" as well as setting the political context at home, said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution and a former State Department Iran policy adviser.
+
+Skeptics in Congress want to know the U.S. is taking a hard line and pressing for the best deal possible. International partners want to know the U.S. hasn't brought them to this point for nothing. And Iran needs to know the U.S. won't concede certain points but is truly willing to walk away.
+
+""As I have said many times and as I discussed with President Obama last night, we are not going to sit at the negotiating table forever,"" Kerry said at a press conference Thursday. But he also said the U.S. isn't pressed by time: ""We shouldn't get up and leave simply because the clock strikes midnight.""
+
+Bold public statements that the U.S. is prepared to leave Iran hanging at the negotiating table telegraph the message that Tehran needs to budge on certain issues or it could find itself without the much-awaited sanctions relief it has chased for years.
+
+That's how Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a key Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, interpreted Kerry's words.
+
+""My hunch is that what we're hearing here from Secretary Kerry is a determination to send a message to the Iranian Supreme Leader: 'The deal that is on the table is the best deal you're going to get. You either need to accept it or we're going to walk away,'"" Coons said Thursday on CNN.
+
+Maloney said Kerry and other officials' statements are a clear gambit to ""influence Iranian expectations and Iranian decision-making"" on the inside from the outside.
+
+""Those theatrics were necessary,"" Maloney said.
+
+But they also have another audience: restive members of Congress who fear that the repeated deadline extensions are a sign that Iran is gaining the upper hand and sticking to its demands while the U.S. caves.
+
+By passing the July 9 date that Congress set for completing the deal and turning a copy over to Congress, the administration now faces a congressional review period of 60 days rather than just 30. That's twice as much time for vocal opponents to tear the details of the deal apart and rally votes against the measure.
+
+So Kerry and President Barack Obama have doubled down in recent weeks on their insistence that the U.S. is willing to walk away from talks altogether if Iran won't relent on the final, crucial sticking points.
+
+""I will walk away from the negotiations if, in fact it's a bad deal,"" Obama said last week from the White House.
+
+""If the tough decisions don't get made, we are absolutely prepared to call an end to this process,"" Kerry stressed on Thursday.
+
+That's giving some in Congress hope that the Obama administration is sticking to its guns. But it's not clear whether the more hardened skeptics are buying the administration's insistence that it is not flinching on key points, Maloney said.
+
+""There's still frustration and an overwhelming skepticism toward the administration and its ability to hold a hard line with respect to Iran,"" she said.
+
+The talking point of walking away from a deal also helps reinforce the administration's arguments that it has worked tirelessly to obtain a good deal and that it therefore got the best one possible -- should a deal be reached. And if there is no deal, the messaging will help to lower expectations.
+
+That's why Obama told Senate Democrats this week that it's more likely that there won't be a deal.
+
+""He said in the course of the negotiations he's been more optimistic, less optimistic. And he said that the chances at this point are below 50-50,"" said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate.
+
+Days later, though, Kerry played the other side of expectations, telling reporters optimistically that the parties ""resolved some of the things that were outstanding"" and that ""it's safe to say that we have made progress today.""
+
+Because ultimately, the U.S. needs to keep not just Iran, but its partners, in the negotiations pressing full steam ahead at the negotiating table.
+
+The coalition of five world powers -- Russia, China, Germany, France and the UK -- negotiating alongside the U.S. is already showing signs of strain, as Russia adopts a stance on relaxing sanctions more in line with Iran's. In particular, the new Iranian demand that the arms embargo on it be lifted has caused frustration for the U.S. while winning support from Moscow.
+
+On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov indicated that his country was backing Iran's bid to lift the arms embargo ""as soon as possible."" Russia is a top supplier of weapons to Iran.
+
+For that, Americans also have a talking point.
+
+""Under no circumstances should we relieve pressure on Iran relative to ballistic missile capabilities and arms trafficking,"" Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said this week on Capitol Hill.",REAL
+8267,REASONS TO BELIEVE JULIAN ASSANGE IS IN CIA CUSTODY….,"Home › POLITICS | WORLD NEWS › REASONS TO BELIEVE JULIAN ASSANGE IS IN CIA CUSTODY…. REASONS TO BELIEVE JULIAN ASSANGE IS IN CIA CUSTODY…. 0 SHARES 
+[11/1/16] NEONNEXUS – On the 26th of September 2016 Secretary of State John Kerry (self admitted Skull and Bones member) visited Colombia. WikiLeaks reported that inside sources had confirmed that John Kerry also met with Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa in Ecuador to personally ask Ecuador to stop Assange from publishing documents about Clinton. This was initially fervently denied in the press only later to be confirmed by the Ecuadorian embassy who admitted cutting off Julian’s internet due to pressure from the US. Ecuador wanted to appear impartial. 
+For over four years, the Ecuadorian embassy has been under surveillance and Julian’s human rights violated as he has been unlawfully detained termed “illegal arbitrary detention” by a recent UN ruling. During that time, it has been possible for intelligence agencies to gather critical information and build a detailed profile and plan to circumvent Julian’s dead man’s switch. 
+Both John Kerry and US intelligence agencies know perfectly well that cutting off Julian’s internet would have no impact on the release of the leaked emails that are damaging to Hillary’s campaign. It has been very clear for a long time that many US officials wanted Julian Assange dead, Hillary Clinton even has remarked, “can’t we just drone the guy”. 
+The cutting off of Julian’s internet access was not for the purpose of preventing the leaks of the Podesta and Hillary emails. Unless intelligence agencies are truly inept, they know that media organisations already have the entire leaked email database and a schedule for release, they also know WikiLeaks staff would continue to leak regardless of Julian’s ability to communicate. 
+Removing Assange would not be enough, they would need to circumvent his dead man’s switch and then tarnish WikiLeaks reputation. Removing Assange’s internet could have the effect of causing Assange to take steps that can be followed to prevent the automatic triggering of his DMS. 
+From the day Julian’s internet was cut off, a series of peculiar and uncharacteristic events started to take place. The same day that Julian’s internet was cut off, CBS reported that Pamela Anderson visited Assange and had “Tortured” him with a vegan sandwich. A few days before on the 14th, John Podesta tweeted “I bet the lobster risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy”. Then on October the 16th the SHA-256 prerelease keys were issued on WikiLeaks twitter feed, although these events are odd and seemingly inconsequential, combined with John Kerry being in the UK from the 16th to the 17th sparked concern among the community for Julian’s safety. 
+Assange supporters started to gather at the embassy to keep Assange safe and witness any foul play, some of these witnesses have claimed that a very swift police armed raid took place that lasted only 5 minutes while the crowd was kept under control and prevented from approaching, there have also been reports that they were prevented from taking photographs and that their phones were confiscated. A live periscope feed was also cut off. There have also been some reports of the presence of a mobile jamming van. 
+If Assange has been seized, any recognition by mainstream media would be detrimental to Hillary’s campaign. A covert operation with media blackout would be the only effective way of seizing him at this time. On October the 18th Fox News said that Julian Assange would be “arrested soon, maybe in a matter of hours.”. The was video was then promptly removed and articles relating to it have disappeared. However, one reddit user was able to find an alternative source and now the video can be found again on YouTube. 
+Although Julian’s primary DMS (the release of insurance file encryption keys) did not activate, on October the 18th one of Julian’s contingencies did activate, a script was activated that made https://file.wikileaks.org/file publicly visible and set all the file date and time stamps to 01/01/1984 (Orwell reference). This file repository contains many documents that had not been released prior. 
+Staffers Kristinn Hrafnsson and Sarah Harrison, have gone silent while the Ecuadorian embassy is refusing to provide any updates on Assange’s fate. There is a recorded call made to the embassy by a journalist where the receptionist refused to confirm that Julian was at the embassy, she also refused to confirm that Julian was even alive. Julian has not made an appearance at the window of the embassy since being cut off. 
+WikiLeaks suggested in a tweet that its supporters were responsible for the DDOS attacks on the 21st. Neither Assange or WikiLeaks would ever insinuate such a thing. WikiLeaks deceptively tweeted a video of Michael Moore that was actually recorded in June. The video was posted on the 24th of October giving the impression that Michael Moore had been speaking with Assange in the embassy. Why would WikiLeaks do this when they know they are already under suspicion? 
+WikiLeaks have been using their Twitter account to give the appearance of his safety while providing no concrete evidence of his safety. They issued a poll asking what proof would satisfy the public that Julian was safe. WikiLeaks have yet to follow-up on the conclusive result of a video or window appearance. 
+Julian Assange is known for his attention to detail and his consistently good spelling and grammar. Currently the twitter feed has very poor spelling, there are numerous uncharacteristic spelling errors, for example, an accomplished cryptographer knows how to correctly spell algorithm and so do WikiLeaks staff. 
+On the 21st of October, there was a massive widespread DDOS attack that disrupted US and EU internet. Also on the 21st of October London City Airport was evacuated. The next day (the 22nd), Gavin MacFayden is reported dead. WikiLeaks made a further blunder by stating his death as the 23rd. 
+There has been a number of high level WikiLeaks deaths recently too. John Jones QC – WikiLeaks U.N. lawyer died on April 16th 2016. Michael Ratner – WikiLeaks chief counsel died on May 11th 2016. Seth Rich – Employee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was fatally shot on July 10th 2016 and Gavin MacFadyen – WikiLeaks director died October 22nd 2016. 
+If WikiLeaks has been compromised, it is already preparing the scene for future discrepancy to seriously tarnish WikiLeaks reputation. Nothing WikiLeaks has shared since the 15th of October 2016 should be trusted until Julian has been fully verified as alive. 
+My speculative fears are that Julian has been seized and removed from the Embassy. His internet being cut not being related to the release of the emails, but rather as a component of a plan of 4 years in the making to as secretly as possible remove Assange from the embassy, circumvent his DMS and hijack WikiLeaks with the key team members silenced or under duress. 
+My fears would be confirmed by no future public (mass witnessing and recorded/televised) appearance of Julian Assange discussing recent topics. His death by whatever means after the US presidential election would be extremely suspect. Until proof of life, assume the following compromised: 
+SHA-256 verification Keys posted after the 15th. WikiLeaks submission process and/or platform. WikiLeaks twitter feed. Any WikiLeaks leaks after the 15th October 2016. Post navigation",FAKE
+5507,Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign Close Vol 52 Issue 43 · Politics · Politicians · Election 2016 
+BROOKLYN, NY—In response to the FBI’s announcement that its investigation of him had produced new evidence that could pertain to its probe of the Democratic presidential nominee, Anthony Weiner reportedly sent an apology sext early Monday morning to the entire Hillary Clinton campaign. “Just wanted u 2 know I am so so sorry for the mess I caused everybody,” read the first of several group text messages that Weiner sent to over two dozen top campaign staffers between the hours of 1 a.m. and 2 a.m., a series that reportedly also included a grainy close-up photograph of the former congressman’s right nipple, several images of his erect penis protruding from his boxer briefs, and a fully nude selfie taken in front of a bathroom mirror on which he had written the phrase “I’m a bad boy” in lipstick. “U know I’d do just about anything to patch things up. I just hope nobody over there wants to give me a spanking! So hard right now.” At press time, sources confirmed that Weiner was speaking to the angry father of the 13-year-old girl whose number is reportedly one digit off from that of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
+Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
+5493,Podesta To Mills: “We Are Going To Have To Dump All Those Emails”,"
+In today’s, 25th, Wikileaks release of hacked Podesta emails, one of the notable highlights is a March 2, 2015 exchange between John Podesta and Clinton aide Cheryl Mills in which the Clinton Campaign Chair says “On another matter….and not to sound like Lanny, but we are going to have to dump all those emails.” 
+The email, which may indicate intent , was sent just days before the NYT story revealing the existence of Hillary’s email server, and Hillary’s press conference addressing what was at the time, the stunning revelation that she had a personal email account, and server, in her home.
+Mills’ response: “Think you just got your new nick name.”
+It is unclear which Lanny is referred to: the infamous former DOJ staffer Lanny Breuer who quit in January 2013 after telling Frontline that some banks are too big to fail, or, more likely Lanny Davis , special counsel to President Bill Clinton, and spokesperson for the President and the White House on matters concerning campaign-finance investigations and other legal issues.
+It is also unclear for now which emails Podesta is referring to in the thread, but Podesta adds: “better to do so sooner than later.” We can hope that a subsequent response, yet to be leaked by Wikileaks, will provide more color.
+If the exchange is shown to disclose intent to mislead, it will negate the entire narrative prepared by Clinton that she merely deleted “personal” emails and will reveal a strategic plan to hinder the State Department and FBI “investigation.”
+This is the first time that particular exchange has emerged among the Podesta emails.
+
+And in a separate email sent out just days later by Clinton campaign communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, we get yet another confirmation that the president actively mislead the public when he said he didn’t know Hillary was using a private email address:
+Suggest Philippe talk to Josh or Eric. They know POTUS and HRC emailed . Josh has been asked about that. Standard practice is not to confirm anything about his email, so his answer to press was that he would not comment/confirm. I recollect that Josh was also asked if POTUS ever noticed her personal email account and he said something like POTUS likely had better things to do than focus on his Cabinet’s email addresses.
+Perhaps while the DOJ/FBI is taking a second look into Huma Abedin’s emails, it can also take a repeat look at some of these, especially the ones involving POTUS. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Zero Hedge of www.zerohedge.com . ",FAKE
+991,Cruz is as bad as Trump and maybe worse: Column,"The rush to Cruz is a sign of desperation, given his failure at his day job in the Senate.
+
+Judging by the collective Republican sigh of relief after Ted Cruz swept the Wisconsin primary and put the brakes on the Donald Trump juggernaut, many in the party seem to consider Cruz a “viable alternative” to Trump. But that view is nothing short of baffling.
+
+Despite his Ivy League education, pastor-like polished oratory and apparent voter appeal, Cruz seems to know how to do only one thing in government, and that is to say, “No.”
+
+Love him or hate him, Trump knows how to make a deal. Sure, some ventures were a flop — something not uncommon for lifelong entrepreneurs. But his net worth, to the tune of $4.5 billion according to Forbes, is not exactly indicative of a dummy. His blustering speech and non-conformist policy proposals make him an unorthodox fit for the GOP nomination, but that is no reason to gravitate towards Cruz. In fact, it is a sign of shortsightedness and desperation.
+
+Rafael Cruz, Ted’s father, recently said in an interview, “We need to get to the point where, instead of listening to the rhetoric, we look to the record. Candidates will say what people want to hear. We look at what they do and what they have done.”
+
+Heeding the elder Cruz’s call is in no way redeeming for the junior senator from Texas. He has systematically demonstrated that he lacks the ability to negotiate, govern according to the rule of law, and navigate amicably through differences of opinion.
+
+Cruz famously spearheaded the 2013 federal government shutdown that cost the economy $24 billion and taxpayers $2 billion. He brazenly supported Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses as required by the Supreme Court. He has also said people would “quite rightly” revolt if a brokered GOP convention in Cleveland were to produce a nominee other than him or Trump.
+
+In the Senate, Cruz has personified the word “obstructionism” since he took office in 2013. His first vote was “nay” on the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act — a bill authorizing $60 billion for relief agencies that would in part provide much-needed federal funds for New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy. Later that year, Cruz voted against key bills such as the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act; the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act; the Employment Non-Discrimination Act; and the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act. (All passed the Senate without his vote).
+
+Cruz also voted against renewing the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act last December. The act, which passed and became law, finances health care programs through 2090 for more than 72,000 first responders and survivors from around the country who went to the three 9/11 crash sites. Cruz’s “nay” vote on the emotionally charged issue will very likely hurt his chances in the New York primary on April 19 as well as the New Jersey primary on June 7.
+
+As for reaching across the aisle, an analysis by GovTrack.us found that in 2015, only 7% of the bills Cruz introduced had co-sponsors of both parties. That was the lowest of any Republican in the Senate.
+
+Like Trump, Cruz prides himself on his idiosyncrasies and personal brand of political independence. But while critics repeatedly lambaste Trump for failed ventures such as Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka, those are just two of countless projects undertaken by the business mogul. Cruz’s Senate record and reputation show he fails at his full-time job.
+
+The dangers of a Cruz candidacy haven’t exactly been lost on the Republican Party. His cocky personality and inability to “play nice” in the Senate are well-known. As Sen. Lindsey Graham, a onetime 2016 candidate himself, quipped in February, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” (Just three weeks later and exhibiting a full-blown case of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Graham announced he’d be backing Cruz’s bid for the nomination.)
+
+Sen. Marco Rubio, another former contender, said shortly before dropping out of the nomination race that Trump is “pulling the ultimate con job on the American people.” But when you look at what Cruz would bring to the presidency, who is really “pulling the ultimate con job” on voters?
+
+Armand V. Cucciniello III is a former senior press officer for the Department of State and served as an adviser to the U.S. military in Iraq and Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @ArmandVC3.
+
+In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.",REAL
+6217,"Leaked: Podesta's Satanic ""Spirit Cooking"" Dinner. Distrubing Stuff Beyond Belief!","Leaked: Podesta's Satanic ""Spirit Cooking"" Dinner. Distrubing Stuff Beyond Belief! Please scroll down for video 
+This is disturbing! Make sure you watch the video at the end of the article. 
+The following e-mail between Tony Podesta and Marina Abramovic can be found in Wikileaks latest leaks. 
+Marina Abramovic first sends Tony the following email: 
+From: Marina Abramovic > 
+Date: June 28, 2015 at 2:35:08 AM GMT+2 
+To: Tony Podesta 
+Subject: Dinner 
+Dear Tony, 
+I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? 
+All my love, Marina 
+The email is then forwarded by Tony to John Podesta. 
+Fwd: Dinner 
+Are you in NYC Thursday July 9 
+Marina wants you to come to dinner... Mary? 
+Sent from my iPhone 
+From: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15893 
+Mary is Mary Podesta, John Podesta’s wife . 
+The e-mail is about an invitation of Podesta to a ""Spirit Cooking"" dinner that's happening at Tony's house. STRANGE BOOK BY MARINA ABRAMOVIC 
+When looking up Marina Abramovic it gets you her website and a graphical book she created: Warning: This starts to get really weird and continues to get weirder. 
+And now this is a video by the same woman on a so called ""Spirit Cooking"": 
+(better download before it gets deleted) 
+Yes, that is Marina Abramovic in the video with the blood paint. 
+We leave the evaluation of the content of the video up to you, but we are speechless. 
+How deep is the rabbit hole? Related Articles",FAKE
+2223,Will US-Gulf summit bridge the gap on Iran – or highlight disconnects? (+video),"The Camp David summit risks laying bare dissonance in the US-Gulf relationship – in particular, Obama’s vision of a post-deal Iran versus the Gulf leaders’ fears about a reinvigorated Iran.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+The Camp David summit that President Obama will hold with Gulf leaders this week is intended to reassure America’s nervous Arab partners that the emerging nuclear deal with Iran does not mean the United States is abandoning them.
+
+Mr. Obama appears to have his work cut out for him.
+
+For one thing, the meeting Thursday in the leafy, folksy confines of the Maryland presidential retreat is unlikely to address a Persian-Arab rivalry that is cultural, religious, and ideological – not to mention centuries old.
+
+Perhaps even more significant, the summit risks laying bare what some regional analysts say are the glaring “disconnects” in the US-Gulf relationship – in particular between Obama’s vision of a post-deal Iran and the Gulf leaders’ fears about a reinvigorated Iran.
+
+“The US wants the Gulf to be OK with this nuclear deal with Iran, but the Gulf is not OK with it, so there continues to be this disconnect,” says Karim Sadjadpour, senior Iran policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
+
+Certainly the leaders and senior officials from six Gulf countries who meet with Obama – for a White House dinner Wednesday night, before the full-day summit at Camp David – will be looking for some immediate and tangible signs of US support. That is likely to lead to some falling back onto conventional forms of “reassurance,” some analysts say – like announcements of arms sales including some sophisticated weapons systems, and perhaps stepped-up joint military exercises.
+
+But the summit is unlikely to bridge the wide gaps between host and guests on Iran, as well as on other aspects of the security agenda in the region, some say.
+
+The Gulf states worry not just about Iran having its nuclear program legitimized by the international community, but perhaps even more about Iran receiving a huge financial windfall if international sanctions are soon lifted, further enabling it to spread its influence in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
+
+“Their top concern is that Iran will feel empowered to double down on its practices” in the region, Mr. Sadjadpour says.
+
+Moreover, the Gulf Arabs worry that this spreading of Iranian influence is not so much a result of US neglect or “mistakes” (such as the invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein) but is in fact the result of “US policy,” he adds.
+
+Obama clearly recognizes the profound qualms that the Gulf states have over the emerging nuclear deal with Iran: He announced plans to hold the summit the same day world leaders reached a framework accord with Tehran for a final nuclear agreement.
+
+But the president will try to convince his guests that the nuclear deal holds out the promise of integrating Iran into the “community of nations” and making it a more responsible and cooperative presence in the region. But the Saudis and Bahrainis and Qataris who have resisted that argument from the Americans are unlikely to embrace it at Camp David, regional experts say.
+
+“The Gulf states feel that Iranian actions [in the region] are not a consequence of this Iranian president, it’s not a consequence of the Islamic Republic.... Quite frankly, they think this is a pattern of Persian expansionism that dates back millennia,” says Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.
+
+Yet “while they feel they are fighting a millennium-long struggle,” he adds, “I can guarantee you the United States is not going to be committed to fighting a millennium-long struggle against another ethnic group or sectarian group or anything else.”
+
+Beyond Iran, another “disconnect” that regional analysts see is between the Obama vision of regional powers taking greater responsibility for security affairs in their area – and the way Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are implementing that security role, particularly in Yemen and Libya.
+
+In that sense, the Camp David summit could act as a test of the Obama policy of “leading from behind” and delegating greater levels of security responsibilities to regional partners.
+
+“We do want the Gulf to take greater responsibility – but the way they are doing it is not always helpful,” says Frederic Wehrey, an expert in Gulf and North Africa security at Carnegie.
+
+As examples of actions that the US has either begrudgingly supported or openly criticized, Mr. Wehrey points to the Saudi air campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, Gulf funding for some Syrian rebel groups linked to extremist elements, and United Arab Emirates intervention in Libya against Islamist forces.
+
+“As we’ve seen in Yemen, you also have the problem of what happens when you make allies more capable and then they use your weapons and training to do things that you think are not only against their own interests, but also against US interests,” Mr. Alterman notes.
+
+If the Camp David summit delivers little more than new arms sales, perhaps some new missile defense initiative, and some joint military exercises, it will be unfortunate on several levels, experts say.
+
+Despite the fixation on Iran, most of the major challenges the Gulf states face are internal, such as providing jobs to a large youth population, undertaking political reform, and countering extremist ideologies – something Obama recognizes, Wehrey says. But he sees the summit only skirting those domestic issues at best.
+
+The summit may very well include the need for reform “as talking points,” he says, “but it will be just that – talking points.”
+
+If the summit wraps up by perpetuating the pattern of US reassurances through military hardware, that will represent a missed opportunity for both the Gulf states and the US, Alterman says.
+
+If “arming the Gulf states to make them feel more confident ... means the US is arming [them] to act in Yemen and Libya and other places, independent of US judgment, using US training and equipment,” he says, “I think that represents a difficult problem for the United States.”",REAL
+1229,"Hillary Clinton Pitches Team Effort to Solve Country’s Troubles, Shows Softer Side","Hillary Clinton’s victory speech in Nevada on Saturday was a lot more about “we” than “I.” In the past, Mrs. Clinton has talked a lot about herself: How she is qualified for the job. How her approach is best. Her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, by contrast, has long talked about his quest for a political revolution as […]",REAL
+1023,"Is Donald Trump Really, Finally Falling Apart?","After he refused to be felled by his racist comments, incoherent policies, childish insults, a bizarre fixation on his hand size, and the vague threat of nuclear war, is it possible that Republican voters are finally beginning to think twice about Donald Trump?
+
+All past attempts to predict the imminent collapse of Trump’s presidential campaign have failed. That being said, there are at least a few reasons to think the billionaire has finally reached a tipping point. Several new polls show Trump tanking nationally (though still in first place), while his negatives continue to rise. Amid 36 hours of nonstop gaffes and terrifying pronouncements, Trump suddenly looks poised to lose Wisconsin next week, a delegate-rich, winner-take-all state that would have virtually ensured that he would win the nomination, but where he now trails Ted Cruz by as much as 10 points.
+
+Perhaps most important, Trump appears to be losing the so-called “shadow primary” to secure the state delegates who would decide the outcome of a potential contested convention. Politico reports that while Cruz and John Kasich have been making inroads with critical party insiders, more than 100 delegates won by Trump are prepared to ditch him after the first ballot in Cleveland. If he can’t win the Republican nomination outright, it’s looking more and more like Trump will be forced to put up or shut up about his threats to run a third-party spoiler campaign.
+
+A lull in the G.O.P. primary calendar may have helped voters clarify their thoughts on the punchy billionaire. With no primary contests in the last week, national media outlets have focused relentlessly on Trump’s spate of truly awful statements in recent days, including a sustained barrage of unseemly insults aimed at Cruz’s wife, Heidi, and his misogynistic defense of his campaign manager, who was charged Tuesday for roughly grabbing a reporter. The following day, during a town hall event with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Trump mused that he wouldn’t rule out using nuclear weapons in Europe. Minutes later, under heated questioning, the Republican front-runner suggested that there “has to be some form of punishment” for women who get illegal abortions—a line that panicked party elites desperate to avoid another Todd Akin moment.
+
+But never let it be said that Trump cannot learn from his mistakes. After losing in Iowa to Cruz and his disciplined ground game, Trump managed to pull his operation together in New Hampshire a week later, despite reports that the campaign was hopelessly disorganized. (“We learned a lot about ground games in one week,” Trump boasted in his victory speech.) He has already launched an organized effort to sway delegates to his side, and might up the ante by offering things that Cruz and Kasich cannot: “There are a lot of delegates who’d like to ride on Trump’s plane,” former Trump operative Roger Stone told The New York Times. “There are a lot of delegates who’d like to have a phone call from Ivanka Trump. We’ll get to that phase.”",REAL
+5894,No wikileakes from Kim Dotcom... nothing... zip... zero,"No wikileakes from Kim Dotcom... nothing... zip... zero And there never will be from this bankrupt wannabe criminal waiting to be extradited to the US. Page 1 Related Threads 1 Mail with questions or comments about this site. ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.007s (8 queries)",FAKE
+4011,Russia warns US of ‘unintended incidents’ over Syria,"The growing rift between the United States and Russia over concerns that Moscow is employing its military to protect Syria's embattled president appeared to widen Friday when a Russian official called for military cooperation with Washington in order to avoid ""unintended incidents.""
+
+The comments were made after Western intelligence sources told Fox News that Russia escalated its presence in the Middle East country days after a secret Moscow meeting in late July between Iran's Quds Force commander -- their chief exporter of terror -- and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
+
+Officials who have monitored the build-up say they've seen more than 1,000 Russian combatants -- some of them from the same plainclothes Special Forces units who were sent to Crimea and Ukraine. Some of these Russian troops are logistical specialists and needed for security at the expanding Russian bases.
+
+President Obama warned Russia on Friday against “doubling down” on sending support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, calling the pursuit a ""mistake.""
+
+""But we are going to be engaging Russia to let them know that you can't continue to double-down on a strategy that is doomed to failure,"" Obama said at a Maryland event.
+
+Russia denies allegations that it is helping to build Assad's military. Moscow claimed its increased military presence is part of an international effort to help defeat the Islamic State. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called on world powers to join Russia in that pursuit, arguing that Syria’s army is the most efficient force to fight extremists in the Middle East.
+
+""You cannot defeat Islamic State with air strikes only,"" Lavrov said, a clear dig at the White House’s strategy. ""It's necessary to cooperate with ground troops and the Syrian army is the most efficient and powerful ground force to fight the IS.""
+
+Reuters reported that Russia also called for military-to-military cooperation with the U.S. to avert ""unintended incidents.""
+
+Moscow's recent support of Assad has dampened U.S. hopes that Moscow was tiring of the Syrian president. Syria has been gripped by civil war for more than four years, a conflict that has claimed more than 250,000 lives and created a vacuum for extremism to thrive.
+
+U.S. officials have been gauging Russia’s willingness to help restart a political process to remove Assad from power.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry has lashed out at Russia’s presence in Syria, warning the recent buildup could lead to an escalation of the bloody conflict.
+
+Despite the warnings from the U.S., Lavrov said Russia would continue to supply Assad with weapons that he said will help defeat Islamic State fighters.
+
+""I can only say, once again, that our servicemen and military experts are there to service Russian military hardware, to assist the Syrian army in using this hardware,"" he said at a news conference in Moscow. ""And we will continue to supply it to the Syrian government in order to ensure its proper combat readiness in its fight against terrorism.""
+
+Click for more from Reuters.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+3509,The scariest thing about Brussels is our reaction to it | Simon Jenkins,"Think like the enemy. Let’s suppose I am an Islamic State terrorist. I don’t do bombs or bullets. I leave the dirty work to the crazies in the basement. My job is what happens next. It is to turn carnage into consequences, body parts into politics. I am a consultant terrorist. I wear a suit, not explosives. A blood-stained concourse is a means to an end. The end is power.
+
+This week I had another success. I converted a squalid psychopathological act into a warrior-evoking, population-terrifying, policy-changing event. I sent a continent into shock. Famous politicians dropped everything to shower me with cliches. Crowned heads deluged me with glorious odium.
+
+I measure my success in column inches and television hours, in ballooning security budgets, butchered liberties, amended laws and – my ultimate goal – Muslims persecuted and recruited to our cause. I deal not in actions but in reactions. I am a manipulator of politics. I work through the idiocies of my supposed enemies.
+
+Textbooks on terrorism define its effects in four stages: first the horror, then the publicity, then the political grandstanding, and finally the climactic shift in policy. The initial act is banal. The atrocities in Brussels happen almost daily on the streets of Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus. Western missiles and Isis bombs kill more innocents in a week than die in Europe in a year. The difference is the media response. A dead Muslim is an unlucky mutt in the wrong place at the wrong time. A dead European is front-page news.
+
+So on Tuesday the TV news channels behaved like Isis recruiting sergeants. Their blanket hyperbole showed not the slightest restraint (nor for that matter did that of most newspapers). The BBC flew Huw Edwards to Brussels. It flashed horror across the airwaves continually for 24 hours, incanting the words “panic”, “threat”, “menace” and “terror”. Vox pops wallowed in blood and guts. One reporter rode a London tube escalator to show possible future targets, to scare the wits out of commuters. It was a terrorist’s wildest dream.
+
+With the ground thus prepared, the politicians entered on cue. France’s President Hollande declared “all of Europe has been hit”, megaphoning Isis’s crime. His approval rating immediately jumped.
+
+David Cameron dived into his Cobra bunker and announced the UK “faces a very real terror threat”. An attack is now “highly likely”, according to the security services. Flags fly at half-mast. The Eiffel Tower is decked in Belgian colours. President Obama interrupts his Cuba visit to stand “in solidarity with Belgium”. Donald Trump declares that “Belgium and France are literally disintegrating”. It is hard to imagine what could more effectively promote the Isis cause.
+
+Osama bin Laden set out on 9/11 to depict western nations as feckless and paranoid, their liberalism a surface charade easily punctured. A few explosions and their pretensions would wither and they would turn as repressive as any Muslim state.
+
+By Tuesday evening, such a feeding frenzy was in full flood as the security lobby piled in. Cameron’s snoopers’ charter (or “investigatory powers” bill) was lauded as vital to national security. This is despite continued opposition both in parliament and from intelligence experts. This month in the Times, former NSA technical director Bill Binney ridiculed the bill’s “incredibly intrusive” powers of untargeted interception. Each citizen’s browsing history will soon be in the possession of the government, vulnerable to hacking by every marketer and blackmailer in the land.
+
+Under the government’s Prevent strategy, universities and schools must develop programmes to counter “non-violent extremism, which can create an atmosphere conducive to terrorism”. The bureaucracy will be awesome. Primary schools are reportedly asking children to spy on one another to check “suspicious behaviour”. So must passengers on Virgin trains, as requested after each station. England is becoming old East Germany.
+
+The Brexit camp, in the person of Ukip’s Nigel Farage, claims that Brussels proves the need to leave Europe. The home secretary, Theresa May, says the opposite. Terrorists would roam free, she says, since it would take 143 days to process terrorist DNA samples as against 15 minutes in the EU.
+
+Reacting to terrorist incidents otherwise, in ways that do not play into terrorism’s hands, may seem hard. A free media feels a duty to report events, as politicians feel a duty to show they can protect the public. That it’s hard to show restraint is no excuse for actively promoting terror. Everyone involved in this week’s reaction, from journalists to politicians to security lobbyists, has an interest in terrorism. There is money, big money, to be made – the more terrifying it is presented, the more money.
+
+We can respond to events in Brussels with a quiet and dignified sympathy, with candles and silences. To downplay something is not to ignore it. The terrorists have specific aims, deploying their atrocities for a political cause. There is no sensible defence in a free society against atrocity. But there is a defence against its purpose. It is to avoid hysteria, to show caution and a measure of courage, not Cameron’s lapse into public fear. It is not to alter laws, not to infringe liberties, not to persecute Muslims.
+
+During the more dangerous and consistent IRA bombing campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, Labour and Conservative governments insisted on treating terrorism as criminal, not political. They relied on the police and security services to guard against a threat that could never be eliminated, only diminished. On the whole it worked, and without undue harm to civil liberties.
+
+Those who live under freedom know it demands a price, which is a degree of risk. We pay the state to protect us – but calmly, without constant boasting or fearmongering. We know that, in reality, life in Britain has never been safer. That it suits some people to pretend otherwise does not alter the fact.
+
+In his admirable manual, Terrorism: How to Respond, the Belfast academic Richard English defines the threat to democracy as not the “limited danger” of death and destruction. It is the danger “of provoking ill-judged, extravagant and counterproductive state responses”.
+
+The menace of Brussels lies not in the terror, but in the reaction to the terror. It is the reaction we should fear. But liberty never emerges from a Cobra bunker.",REAL
+10286,Difference Between Growing Up In The 1960s Compared To 2016,"You are here: Home / US / Difference Between Growing Up In The 1960s Compared To 2016 Difference Between Growing Up In The 1960s Compared To 2016 October 27, 2016 Pinterest 
+Seth Connell reports that in August of this year, campus carry went into effect on Texas’ public college campuses, enabling students and staff with valid concealed handgun licenses to legally carry their firearms. Predictably, leftists freaked out at the idea of people legally carrying firearms in their “safe spaces.” 
+As we reported back in August, the most famous form of protest on Texas college campuses was “Cocks Not Glocks,” a movement where students who opposed campus carry took adult sex toys with them all across the campus. 
+Related: Campus Carry Starts Today In Texas; Here’s How Liberal Students Are Protesting… 
+Despite these protestations, campus carry is in effect in Texas, and there is not mass murder happening in dorms, classrooms, or professors’ offices. Who’d have thunk, right? 
+Well, it turns out that “Cocks no Glocks” is not going away any time soon. In fact, they have been invited to The White House as a kind of reward for their childish, bratty temper tantrums. 
+Guns.com reported: 
+Organizers of an anti-gun protest at the University of Texas in Austin against a new campus carry law noted for garnering some 4,000 adult toys which they gave away, earning immortality on the Daily Show, have made their way to Pennsylvania Avenue. 
+Invited by DoSomething.org to join a gun control advocates to talk to senior officials about grassroots activism, the CNG gang posted images of their visit to the White House to social media– and contend some important firsts were made. 
+“They think it’s the first time ‘dildo’ has been said in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing,” the group noted on social media. “‘Cocks’ also reverberated around the room dozens of times and Rosie, who was sitting right next to the Oval Office where Obama was sitting 10ft away, could hear his voice through the door. Does that mean he could hear ours?” 
+The Facebook page for “Cocks Not Glocks” proudly claims that they are “Fighting Absurdity with Absurdity.” Yes, because using sex toys is a perfectly respectable and mature way to establish your credibility, and to show that you are making well-thought out and logical arguments. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, this is what the gun control crowd has come to. There is effectively no logic in this kind of protest. It is all fear-mongering and appeal to one of the basest of human passions: sex. 
+These people are not making any logical or coherent argument. They are lashing out using highly emotionally charged rhetoric and spreading fear. That kind of argumentation is done by demagogues. 
+This is evidence of the en masse mental enslavement that is happening in public colleges. These students have been trained to think that an inanimate object is evil and has a will of its own, and that the best way to fight that inanimate object is to whine to the point of absolute lunacy. 
+These people need a dose of reality ASAP.",FAKE
+9197,Trump teaches his supporters how to vote correctly,"Trump teaches his supporters how to vote correctly 01.11.2016 The US presidential nominee from the Republican Party Donald Trump called on his supporters to combat possible frauds the day elections take place the following way - to vote twice in case there are doubts that your ballot has been counted. 'You can go to University Center and they'll give you a ballot, a new ballot. They'll void your old ballot and give you a new ballot. And you can go out and make sure it gets in,' Trump claimed while speaking in Colorado. The case is that voters registered in Colorado get their ballots by mail. They also have right to demand a new one or vote in person at a polling station in case their previous ballot was not counted. Before that Trump claimed several times about imperfect election system of the US, which allows vote rigging. Last week the OSCE observers expressed their concern about fair voting while monitoring preparations for future elections, as there is 'a whole range of significant faults'. Head of the German OSCE observers Michael Georg Link stated that '6 million Americans are exempt from the vote'. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+7473,Rep. Gowdy on the impact of the FBI’s new Clinton inquiry,"‹ › Debbie Menon is an independent writer based in Dubai. She is Editor-in-Chief of VeteransNewsNow.com Her main focus are the US-Mid-East Conflicts. Her writing has been featured in several print and online publications in the Middle East. She is committed to exposing (AIPAC) the Israel Lobby's control of American policy for the Middle East. Control which amounts to treason by the Zionist Lobbies in America and its stooges in Congress, and that guarantees there can never be a peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflicts, only catastrophe for all, in the region and the world. Her focus is Israel’s drift towards greater oppression of the Palestinian people; the political deceptions and crisis in Syria and Ukraine; the cold hard facts about America’s so-called ‘war on terror’ and grim future; countering the propaganda war towards Iran & Russia and calling attention to, the new, developing, promising, strategic alliances as a consequence. Her mission is to inform and educate the public on issues of the US/Middle East conflicts that are unreported, underreported, or distorted in the Zionist owned American Media. Her writing reflects the incredible resilience, almost superhuman steadfastness of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians, who are now facing the prospect of a final round of ethnic cleansing. Her mission is to inform and educate internet viewers seeking unfiltered information about real events on issues of the US/Middle East conflicts that are unreported, underreported, or distorted in the American media. Her purpose is to look at the current reality from a different and critical perspective, not to simply rehash the pro-US/Israel perspective, smoke and mirrors that has been allowed to utterly and completely dominate Mainstream discourse. PS: For those of her detractors that think she is being selective and even “one sided,” tough, that is the point of her work, to present an alternative view and interpretation of the US-Israel-Middle East conflict, that has been completely ignored in mainstream discourse and denied the US public. Oh, and she is not Muslim or Palestinian and not married to one either! She is practicing Roman catholic. Rep. Gowdy on the impact of the FBI’s new Clinton inquiry By Debbie Menon on October 31, 2016 BRAVO! Rep. Gowdy. Senator Trey Gowdy is an American attorney, politician and former prosecutor. He currently serves as the U.S. Representative for South Carolina’s 4th congressional district. 
+Senator Trey Gowdy is right, timing is consequence of decisions Hillary made period. Jim Comey’s obligation is to the public. 
+Senator (Harry) Reid is simply “just another” one of the political hacks who populate that massive brothel we call Capitol Hill. Senator Reid and others are aware of the treasonous and criminal nature of the Clintons. 
+Hillary Clinton is probably guilty of many things which have not surfaced as openly or as clearly, so lets not scapegoat Huma Abedine and her husband. Hillary is obviously guilty as sin of malfeasance of office and negligence, for the very fact that she exposed her country’s secrets to hackers, knowingly using a private server to conduct State Department business with the outside world and should be called to account for it. Period. 
+It is people like Bill & Hillary who have become to Big to Fall and the basic problems and causes of the fundamental failures in US Government. Two of the major rotten apples in the barrel, and these are probably two of the most obvious who should be prosecuted not only as examples to the others, but for delivery of the justice which they have earned… and which the citizens of America deserve! 
+Instead of rewarding them by returning them to the Oval office, they should be investigated, and they should be held accountable. Americans can live in a State of Law and Justice, or a State of suppression, injustice, corruption and subjugation to powerful politicians. It is their choice! 
+Published on Oct 30, 2016 Chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Rep. Gowdy, weighs in on ‘Special Report’",FAKE
+6266,"His Fans Are Calling Trump Brave, But Here’s How Hillary Faced Down Man Who Stormed Stage (VIDEO)","By Jameson Parker News November 6, 2016 His Fans Are Calling Trump Brave, But Here’s How Hillary Faced Down Man Who Stormed Stage (VIDEO) Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+A Republican unhappy that his party was being hijacked by Donald Trump attended a Trump rally to protest and found himself being swarmed first by an angry mob, then by Secret Service agents. The room full of Second Amendment fanatics panicked when one of Trump’s fans yelled “gun!” and Trump was rushed from the stage. Immediately, Trump’s campaign began spinning the lie that this man had intended to assassinate Trump. 
+In fact, all he was armed with was a poster saying “Republicans Against Trump.” The whole incident was over nothing. But it didn’t stop Trump’s fans from pretending this proved Trump was a profile in courage. His campaign’s social media director retweeted a (false) message that Trump was back on stage after an “assassination attempt”– like he was Teddy goddamn Roosevelt, speaking with a bullet in his chest . Trump social media director retweeted a tweet claiming this was an assassination attempt pic.twitter.com/TTUCH4Zbb8 
+— Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) November 6, 2016 
+But while the Secret Service did the right thing by not taking chances, the idea that this incident makes Trump brave is laughable. He returned to the stage precisely because there was no threat . Mere minutes after agents tackled the “assassin” they realized the guy was a harmless protester carrying a poster and had no weapons. He was released shortly afterwards. 
+Meanwhile, there is an example of a candidate staring down a scary situation and not blinking. It’s Hillary Clinton. 
+Unlike the poster-carrying Republican, a protester in Iowa once rushed Clinton’s stage and actually almost got within arm’s reach of her. She took a quick glance as her Secret Service detail tackled the protester… and kept talking. Protester tries to storm the stage as Clinton speaks in Iowa. PO-92WE pic.twitter.com/liidhzUSqR 
+— CNN Newsource (@CNNNewsource) August 10, 2016 
+She didn’t even flinch. 
+Oh and then it happened again. This time a man charged at her in Nevada. And she – again – just stared the person down. 
+So let’s hear Trump’s followers call Hillary Clinton brave for doing what Trump did not. We’ll wait. 
+Featured image via CNN",FAKE
+9944,"Dakota Access Pipeline violence grows as militarized police use extreme force, tear gas on praying protesters","Dakota Access Pipeline violence grows as militarized police use extreme force, tear gas on praying protesters 
+Tuesday, November 01, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes Tags: Dakota Access Pipeline , protestors , police violence (NaturalNews) Tensions are ratcheting up in a region of North Dakota where construction of a pipeline that will take oil to a refinery facility in Illinois is being built, as protestors objecting to the project are clashing with increasingly militarized police . The Bismark Tribune reported that police and protestors clashed as authorities moved in to break up a camp on private property belonging to the pipeline developers.Protestors had initially formed a line of no surrender, the paper said, but it became a line of retreat in the face of a militarized police presence that overwhelmed hundreds of Dakota Access Pipeline protestors, pushing them back from the front line of resistance to their main camp.For about five hours on Thursday, beginning around noon, police officers pressed the protesters back about a half-mile on N.D. Highway 1806, which was away from a new camp they had built earlier in the week that sat directly atop the pipeline easement. Rubber bullets, bean bags, smoke grenades and tasers Unrest continued into the evening hours, however, as police said that two fires were started on a nearby bridge, and protestors began lobbing Molotov cocktails at officers. In addition, police reported two incidents where shots were fired.The Tribune reported that one woman allegedly fired a handgun in the direction of police as she was being arrested, while an armed man who was reportedly run off the road by protesters, and was perhaps not connected to the protest, had to be treated for a gunshot wound to the hand.As police moved in, some protestors were urging calm and prayer, but others threw rocks and water bottles at approaching officers. Eventually the crowd retreated under a barrage of pepper spray, rubber and bean bag bullets, smoke grenades and tasers.By late afternoon, flames and thick plumes of smoke belched out of the cab of one of three Dakota Access Pipeline earth movers, while protestors walked back to their main camp on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' land.In all, police arrested 141 people, the local sheriffs' department said, charging suspects with engaging in a riot, maintaining a public nuisance, and conspiracy to endanger by fire and explosion.A day before the violence, as reported by AMI Newswire , opponents of the pipeline barricaded a highway and pitched their camp on private land. These actions were led by members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.The previous weekend some 127 people had been arrested.Standing Rock Chairman Dave Archambault II issued a statement last week in which he blamed the rising militarization of police for the increased tensions.""The militarization of local law enforcement and enlistment of multiple law enforcement agencies from neighboring states is needlessly escalating violence and unlawful arrests against peaceful protesters at Standing Rock,"" Archambault said, as quoted by AMI Newswire . ""We do not condone reports of illegal actions, but believe the majority of peaceful protesters are reacting to strong-arm tactics and abuses by law enforcement."" Destruction of burial grounds, water are chief concerns Law enforcement officers countered by saying that, for the vast majority of the protest thus far, they have shown remarkable patience and restraint, and that they only moved after protestors became more aggressive.Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier ticked off a list of alleged violations by protestors, including buzzing a police helicopter with a drone and firing arrows in the direction of officers. He also said that journalists had been harassed and security personnel assaulted.""For months protesters have described us as an aggressive police force,"" Kirchmeier said in a prepared statement, AMI Newswire reported. ""We have done nothing but demonstrate patience and restraint.""Protestors are angry about the pipeline stretching across ancient burial grounds, NewsTarget reported , as well as the potential for pipeline leaks that would pollute local water sources . Sources:",FAKE
+9840,"Money Laundering Scheme Exposed: 14 Pro-Clinton Super PACs, Nonprofits Implicated"," 
+There’s a reason David Brock, founder of the liberal group Media Matters for America, chooses to house an unregistered professional solicitor in his office to raise money for his conglomerate of super PACs and nonprofits.
+Professional solicitors are required to disclose their active solicitation contracts. Brock wants his unregistered solicitor, the Bonner Group, to keep its client list hidden for a very specific reason.
+David Brock is laundering money 
+ 
+Related Stories Consumers Need Protection From New Consumer Protection Bureau Rule Here’s What The Markets Are Telling Us… Exposed: Profiteers Of Governing – And These Are The Ones Who Got Caught! Brock has seven nonprofits, three super PACs, one 527 committee, one LLC, one joint fundraising committee and one unregistered solicitor crammed into his office in Washington .
+Uncovered records expose a constant flow of money between these organizations.
+The Bonner Group, his professional solicitor, works off a commission. Every time money gets passed around, Bonner receives a 12.5 percent cut.
+ 
+Follow the money 
+Nonprofits are required to disclose to whom they give cash grants.
+But they aren’t required to disclose who gives them cash grants.
+This weak system of one-way verification is being abused by Brock. He’s been cycling money between his organizations for years, and the Bonner Group’s 12.5 percent commission gets triggered after every pass.
+ 
+Trending Stories Frustrated With Media Bias, Trump Campaign Takes Its Case Directly To Voters With Nightly Show On Facebook RNC Official Takes CNN Host To Task For Claiming There Is No Media Bias Hannity Proposes A Sendoff For Obama In The Event Of A Trump Presidency In 2014, Media Matters for America raised more than $10 million.
+The Bonner Group was credited for raising these funds. Media Matters paid it a $1.1 million commission.
+
+That same year, Media Matters gave a $930,000 cash grant to Brock’s Franklin Education Forum , an organization that shares office space with Media Matters.
+
+In 2014, the Franklin Education Forum reported $994,000 in total contributions, and 93.6 percent of that total came from Media Matters.
+Surprisingly, though, the Franklin Education Forum gave full credit to Bonner for raising that money. It paid the fundraiser a $124,250 commission in 2014.
+
+Notice what happened? 
+Brock’s Media Matters gave a $930,000 cash grant to Brock’s Franklin Education Forum. Brock’s Franklin Education Forum credited the Bonner Group for raising those funds, triggering the 12.5 percent commission. Brock paid the Bonner Group a $124,250 commission to solicit a cash grant … from himself! It doesn’t stop there 
+After the Franklin Education Forum retained $869,750, it sent a $816,224 cash grant to Brock’s Franklin Forum . 
+
+Note: The Franklin Education Forum is a 501(c)3, and The Franklin Forum is a 501(c)4. They are not the same company. 
+The Franklin Forum 501(c)4 paid Bonner a commission in 2013 , so it’s safe to assume the fundraiser received a $102,028 commission in 2014. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell for sure. It still hasn’t filed its taxes for 2014!
+Let’s recap 
+Say, for example, you donate $1,062,857 to Media Matters for America. This is how David Brock would have used your charitable donation in 2014:
+Media Matters would receive your $1,062,857 donation. The Bonner Group would earn a $132,857 commission. Media Matters would retain $930,000. Next, Media Matters would give what’s left of your entire donation , $930,000, to the Franklin Education Forum. The Bonner Group would “earn” a $116,250 commission. The Franklin Education Forum would retain $813,750. The Franklin Education Forum would then forward the remaining $813,750 to The Franklin Forum. The Bonner Group would “earn” a $101,718 commission. The Franklin Forum would retain $712,031. In the end, Brock’s solicitor would have pocketed $350,825, almost a third of your initial donation. That’s a far cry from the advertised 12.5 percent commission.
+As bizarre as that scenario may sound, this is exactly what Brock did in 2014.
+How can we be sure this is intentional? 
+Brock is the chairman for each of these organizations. How could he not know what’s going on?
+He’s a hands-on chairman. According to their tax returns, Brock allocates time, weekly, to his organizations:
+Media Matters: 31.50 hours per week Franklin Education Forum: three hours per week The Franklin Forum: one hour per week Furthermore, The New York Times reports that Brock shares a summer rental in the Hamptons with Mary Pat Bonner, the president of the Bonner Group.
+Brock would have a hard time claiming ignorance on this. These transfers are intentional. He vacations with his solicitor. Case closed.
+Still not convinced? 
+Brock didn’t even bother to give his organizations different phone numbers. They all share the same number.
+
+What if …? 
+We even located the Bonner Group’s solicitation agreement with Media Matters on Florida’s Gift Givers’ Guide . Clarification on the commission can be found on page 2:
+
+In English: Contractually, Brock has the option to exclude certain contributions from triggering the commission. In spite of this option, he intentionally chooses to trigger the 12.5 percent commission for money grants between his organizations.
+Note: Yes, we are making the assumption that all of Brock’s organizations have the same solicitation agreement with the Bonner Group. Given that his organizations share the same address, board members and telephone number, we feel it’s safe to assume they also share the same solicitation agreement. 
+This barely scratches the surface 
+Utilizing public-facing tax returns, along with records submitted to the Federal Election Commission, we mapped out all the significant money transfers from 2014 that took place in Brock’s office:
+
+Summary 
+This is all from just one year! No further commentary required.
+We understand this may be hard to believe. We first came across this in July, and are still having a hard time wrapping our heads around it.
+All of the data referenced in this article originated from publicly accessible sources. Check for yourself — we provided links to the source material in our article exposing the organizations operating in Brock’s office. These data have been sitting out in the open, gathering dust for years. 
+If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
+We’ve spent months trying to find some sort of loophole to justify this activity. But there aren’t any loopholes. David Brock has something to hide. Just last month, The Daily Caller reported the following:
+“Brock’s former long-time live-in boyfriend William Grey (whom Brock has thanked in several of his books) threatened to go to the IRS with damaging information about how Brock was running his Media Matters empire. What did Brock do? He paid Grey $850,000 to keep quiet. Brock reportedly had to sell his home in Rehoboth, Delaware, to come up with the money. This certainly seems to indicate that Brock was terrified about what the authorities would uncover.”
+Adding to this, Fox News reported the following:
+“Grey accused Brock of ‘financial malfeasance’ and threatened to undermine Brock’s fundraising efforts.
+“‘Next step is I contact all your donors and the IRS,’ Grey wrote in an email dated May 19, 2010. ‘This is going to stink for you if you do not resolve this now.'”
+We believe that the information presented in this article is what has Brock so terrified. We feel confident in saying, with close to absolute certainty, that David Brock is laundering money through his Media Matters conglomerate.
+This article first appeared at The Citizens Audit . 
+
+The views expressed in this opinion article are solely those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. 
+What do you think?",FAKE
+1716,Hillary Clinton's happy dance won't last,"The first great Democratic debate of the 2016 race had many moments, but perhaps not for the casual viewer who had to be mystified how four old white guys ended up arrayed around Clinton, from ""block of granite"" Lincoln Chafee on one end to an impressive if somewhat ominous looking and sounding guy on the other end who complained as if automatically about every question's timing and who made a vague reference to killing somebody. (If the curious got on Google, they'd have discovered that former Sen. James Webb of Virginia is the recipient of a Navy Cross for valor, among other decorations.)
+
+CNN's Anderson Cooper opened the proceedings with a fastball aimed at Clinton's head -- ""Will you say anything to get elected?"" -- and stayed with questions as lively as Cooper and team could make them. But the collective weight of all those years of Clinton's controversies and flip-flops -- plus former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley's speaking style that drained energy out of the auditorium -- made it slow going for all.
+
+As the debate began, my company, Salem Media Group, announced that I'd be back as a panelist for the CNN-Salem GOP debates in December and March, and I am looking forward to those events, as the first one was high energy and filled with drama. I have nothing to do with any of the remaining Democratic debates and feel for the moderators and panelists who are facing the broadcast equivalent of presiding over a parole hearing.
+
+Clinton won the debate, for sure, but it was a false positive for -- as veteran radio talker and old friend Tammy Bruce put it on Sean Hannity's midnight television recap in which I and lefty Leslie Marshall participated -- she achieved dominance over a bag of rocks. (Bruce, Hannity and Hewitt all declared in a rare burst of unbroken conservative applause for CNN that Cooper had done a fine job trying to make the Democrats answer interesting questions.) So Clinton swept the pundit class, lost the focus groups to Sanders and may have kept Joe Biden out of the pool. But she tried out answers on her national security-compromising server and her litany of half-truths or worse (Kevin McCarthy! Kevin McCarthy! Kevin McCarthy!) that will not serve to help her at all come October 22 when she appears for hours and hours before the House Select Committee on Benghazi to answer focused, precise questions from the lawyers, including experienced prosecutors, who make up the GOP side of the committee such as Trey Gowdy, Susan Brooks, Mike Pompeo and Peter Roskam. Committee Democrats may try and throw themselves on the fire for Clinton as Sanders did, but it won't stop a patient prosecutor. Answers will be had about Clinton and her server and her deleted and recovered emails, the compromise of her server's security by foreign intelligence agencies as former acting CIA Director Michael Morell has contended , her voluminous correspondence with Sid Blumenthal about Libyan security, etc. Sanders is not the boss of the committee, the Congress, the FBI, future debate panelists or participants or even voters. Clinton did a happy dance Tuesday night. It won't last.",REAL
+840,What to watch for in the Indiana primary,"Indiana stands alone Tuesday, the only state holding a presidential primary, but the presidential race in both parties could look very different Wednesday morning.
+
+Two weeks ago, Cruz told an Indiana crowd, ""The state of Indiana is going to play a pivotal role in this election ... Indiana’s voice, Indiana’s megaphone to the country, will decide which path this party goes down, which path this country goes down.”
+
+That statement was a few days before Cruz had his clock cleaned in the ""Amtrak primaries,"" five northeastern states that Donald Trump swept. Cruz won only two delegates while Trump won more than 100.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich took the extraordinary step of dropping his campaign in Indiana so that Cruz could consolidate the ""anti-Trump"" vote, and Cruz took the extraordinary step of naming his running mate — former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina — despite trailing in the delegate race. But it is not clear those efforts have helped much. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll released Sunday gave Trump a lead of 49%-34% over Cruz.
+
+Indiana offers 57 Republican delegates, 30 statewide and three each in nine congressional districts. All of those delegates are distributed on a winner-take-all basis. If Trump wins all or most of them, the requiems for the Cruz campaign will begin to roll in.
+
+Hillary Clinton has a lead of nearly 350 ""pledged"" delegates, and nearly 500 ""superdelegates."" Combined, she is a little more than 200 delegates short of clinching the nomination; Sanders is about 1,000 delegates short. So Indiana can't clinch the nomination for Clinton, but a win there can help her make the case that the race for the Democratic nomination is basically over.
+
+A Sanders victory in the Hoosier state would be a bit of an embarrassment to Clinton, but it would do nothing to change the fundamental math of the race. Indiana has 83 Democratic delegates at stake Tuesday, but since they are distributed proportionately, Sanders cannot make a significant dent in Clinton's delegate lead even with a win.
+
+Nevertheless, Sanders said Sunday, ""It is virtually impossible for Secretary Clinton to reach the majority of convention delegates ... with pledged delegates alone. She will need superdelegates to take her over the top at the convention in Philadelphia."" Sanders says he will continue to campaign through the remaining dozen states, and ""We believe that we are in a very strong position to win many of these remaining contests.""
+
+Clinton has led Sanders in all public polls in the state, with a lead ranging from 5 to 13 percentage points, but Indiana is an open primary — independents can vote in the Democratic primary — which has been helpful for Sanders in other states where he has drawn support from new voters and non-Democrats.
+
+Indiana polls close early — 6 p.m. —  but 6 p.m comes an hour later in the dozen western counties that are in the central time zone. Nevertheless, it means we should have results before the 11 o'clock news.",REAL
+8953,GERMAN INTERIOR MINISTER demands that Italy send all new illegal alien Muslim invaders back to Africa,"GERMAN INTERIOR MINISTER demands that Italy send all new illegal alien Muslim invaders back to Africa Germany’s Minister of the Interior has launched a controversial proposal to return African Muslim male invaders home rather than bringing them to Italy, in order to discourage more economic freeloaders from attempting the dangerous crossing. Even worse, Italy has been rescuing them near Libya, not even waiting until they get within spitting distance of Italy. So, where are all the women and children? @moas_eu the taxi service just outside of Libya is part of the pull factor 
+— The Champ (@audioexpression) November 5, 2016 Breitbart Minister Thomas de Maizière said Sunday that those “saved in the Mediterranean should be sent back to Africa” instead of taking them to Europe. According to a spokeswoman for the minister, this measure would serve a twofold purpose: discouraging new migrants from coming while also demolishing the organizations of human traffickers that organize the crossings. Germany’s interior minister Thomas de Maiziere threatened to close Italy’s border with Austria if Rome starts sending migrants north. With the migrant route through the Balkans from Greece closed, migrants are instead crossing the Mediterranean from North African countries such as Libya and arriving in Italy. De Maizière is not alone in his approach. “The prevention of illegal migration does not start at our internal borders,” said Helmut Teichmann, director of the Germany’s Federal Police. “The aim of the federal government is to stop the refugees before they reach Europe,” he said. On Saturday, 2,200 more people tried to cross the Strait of Sicily in 16 different vessels, and were rescued in a series of operations coordinated by the Italian Coast Guard who later brought them to Italy. Rescuers also recovered ten bodies of migrants who drowned during the attempt. Critics were quick to remark that part of the incentive for attempting the crossing in the first place is the knowledge that migrant rescuers are providing a free “taxi service” to Italy. Protesters have raised their voices in opposition to De Maizière’s plan, claiming it was a “scandal” that would effectively deny potential refugees the right of asylum, but the Minister did not back down. “Eliminating the prospect of reaching Europe could keep them from risking their lives in a dangerous journey.” In point of fact, this year has seen the deaths of a record number of migrants during the perilous trip. On Thursday, some 240 migrants drowned in two shipwrecks off the coast of Libya, bringing the year’s death toll in the Mediterranean to 4,220, compared with 3,777 in the whole of 2015. The Minister suggested that once the migrants were returned to Tunisia, Egypt or other North African countries, they could submit their asylum applications which, if approved, would allow them to reach Europe safely. 
+As of 2 November, 159,496 people had reached Italy by sea so far in 2016, according to the International Organization of Migrants (IOM).",FAKE
+5887,There’s Toxic Air In Your Home and This Is You Can Get Rid of It Naturally,"Did you know that poor air quality in the home can cause a condition called “Sick Building Syndrome”? This is caused by an accumulation of toxic gases known as Volatile Organic Compounds ( VOCs ) which are released from common household goods , including everything from your cleaners to appliances and even the food you eat.
+In addition to being carcinogenic and neurotoxic, long-term exposure to VOCs can lead to other serious health implications including, respiratory dysfunction, genetic abnormalities, and dermatitis. It begs the question, what are we subjecting ourselves to, doesn’t it?
+NASA’s Clean Air Study reports how certain houseplants help to filter and remove toxins from the air. Houseplants have long been known to clean the air in small spaces, but some of these plants are more beneficial—and prettier to look at—than others. For those of you who prefer the bright colors of flowering plants, the following list shows the best beauties for filtering the air in your home.
+5 Indoor Plants That Will Improve Air Quality Succulents Everyone loves the ease in caring for succulents and some of these create delicate flowers too. Here’s a quick fact: when photosynthesis stops at night, most plants absorb oxygen and release carbon dioxide? But, there are a few plants – like orchids, succulents and epiphytic bromeliads that will take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen at night time. Meaning, these would be ideal plants to have in bedrooms to keep the oxygen flowing at night.
+Flamingo Lilly AKA Flamingo Flowers, these are durable and fairly easy to grow in low light, low water situations. They can thrive for many years under ideal conditions but are hearty enough to maintain growth for up to two years in even the most adverse situations (i.e., this is a perfect flowering plant for those lacking a green thumb!) . They have large, deep green, heart-shaped leaves and produce long lasting, bright red or hot pink flowers.
+The Flamingo Lilly is great at removing the toxins formaldehyde (found in many paper products), xylene (found in tobacco smoke and vehicle exhaust), and ammonia (found in cleaning products) from the air.
+*Beware that the Flamingo Lilly (like a lot of flowering plants) is toxic to dogs and cats, so be sure to keep them away from your family pets.
+Barberton Daisy The Barberton daisy is available in many colors ranging from white to bright red. The hybrids sold in garden centers typically produce two or more single stemmed stalks with a single flower sprouting from each one. These flowers are up to four inches wide and are quite impressive to look at. The Barberton Daisy can be grown indoors in medium-levels of sunlight, with moist soil. They can flower at any time of the year and each flower blooms for approximately six weeks.
+Barberton Daisies filter out trichloroethylene (found in ink, paint, rubber products, lacquers and varnishes), formaldehyde, and xylene.
+Peace Lilly The Peace Lilly is easy to care for and gives a telltale droop when it is in need of water. They flourish in shade and low light and you can expect your Peace Lilly to bloom with dozens of striking white flowers in the springtime.
+Peace Lillies are extremely effective at filtering multiple toxins from the air. They work on trichloroethylene, formaldehyde, xylene, benzene (used in plastics, detergents, dyes, and glue), and carbon monoxide. If you can only have one flowering plant in your home, the Peace Lilly might be a good bet.
+*Like the Flamingo Lilly, this one is toxic to pets as well, so beware.
+Florist Chrysanthemum The Florist Chrysanthemum requires bright light and moist, high-quality soil, so it needs a bit more care and upkeep than the other flowers listed here so far. But with the proper maintenance and right kind of soil, the Florist Chrysanthemum will produce lots of big, beautiful blooms (typically in the red and pink color family, though occasionally you will see bright purples and yellows) that will last for up to 8 weeks.
+Like the Peace Lilly, the Florist Chrysnthemum filters out multiple toxins including trichloroethylene, formaldehyde, xylene, and benzene (used in plastics, detergents, dyes, and glue).
+*This plant is also mildly poisonous to dogs and cats (if the stems are ingested they will cause stomach upset and disorientation) so again, use caution.
+If you feel that your home suffers from poor air quality or quite possibly sick building syndrome, start adding some indoor plants to frequented rooms and see if your health improves. 
+Pamela Bofferding is a native Texan who now lives with her husband and sons in New York City. She enjoys hiking, traveling, and playing with her dogs.
+This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition 
+Originally published October 29th, 2016 How To Grow Pineapples Like a Pro! How to Select the Best Grow Light for Your Indoor Garden Strong Correlation Seen Between Flowers and Emotional Health The Most Poisonous Plants and How to Recognize Them Infographic: Composting 101 ",FAKE
+2082,COP21: 'Never have the stakes been so high',"Be part of CNN's COP21 coverage: We'd like to hear from you on how climate change could affect your local community. Upload your video here or tag #2degrees on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
+
+(CNN) World leaders opened pivotal climate talks Monday in Paris saying the stakes are too high to end the conference without achieving a binding agreement to help slow the pace of global climate change.
+
+""A political moment like this may not come again,"" U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told leaders gathered for the conference. ""We have never faced such a test. But neither have we encountered such great opportunity.""
+
+The talks began with a moment of silence for victims of the November 13 terror attacks in Paris, and the tragedy served as a touchstone for world leaders urging unity and action.
+
+""What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it,"" President Barack Obama said in his speech.
+
+French President Francois Hollande noted that ""never have the stakes been so high because this is about the future of the planet, the future of life.""
+
+""And yet two weeks ago, here in Paris itself, a group of fanatics was sowing the seeds of death in the streets,"" he said.
+
+Speaking aboard the papal plane on his way back to Rome, Pope Francis said that the time to do something was now or never.
+
+""We are on the brink. We are on the brink of a suicide, to use a strong word, and I am sure that most of those at the COP have this conscience, and want to do something,"" he said.
+
+Obama told the conference that the United States recognizes its role in creating climate change and its role in solving the issue.
+
+But he said the agreement should be global in nature, assertive and flexible.
+
+""Here in Paris, let's secure an agreement that builds in ambition, where progress paves the way for regularly updated targets,"" he said.
+
+He also addressed economic issues associated with climate change, saying recent economic growth in the United States has come despite a lack of growth in carbon emissions, proving that climate advancements need not come at the expense of the economy or individual livelihoods.
+
+""That's what we seek in these next two weeks -- not simply an agreement to roll back the pollution we put into the skies, but an agreement that helps us lift people from poverty without condemning the next generation to a planet that is beyond its capacity to repair,"" he said.
+
+He also said developed countries must help island nations and others that have contributed little to climate change but are the first to be feeling its effects.
+
+""Countries should be allowed to seek their own solutions, according to their national interest,"" he said.
+
+Russian President Vladimir Putin called climate change ""one of the greatest threats humanity is facing.""
+
+""Russia not only prevented the increase of greenhouse emissions, it has reduced them,"" he said, promising a 70% reduction in emissions from 1990 levels by 2030.
+
+Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a ""comprehensive, equitable and durable agreement that leads us to restore balance between humanity and nature.""
+
+And German Chancellor Angela Merkel reminded the leaders of the ""billions of people pinning their hopes on what we do in Paris.""
+
+""Let us do everything we can not to dash those hopes,"" she said.
+
+Nevertheless, disappointed demonstrators turned out Sunday, and brief clashes erupted with police at the Place de la Republique, where peaceful protesters had placed rows of shoes and name tags to represent the crowds not allowed to show up.
+
+Paris police Chief Michel Cadot said taking the candles and using them against police showed ""an extreme lack of respect to those events.""
+
+Hollande called the clashes ""scandalous."" The French President said authorities knew ""troubling elements"" would arrive in Paris for the talks, and that is why ""these sorts of assemblies were banned and some were ordered to stay home.""
+
+In many countries, people gathered to protest against human-made climate change Sunday. There is a broad consensus among scientists that global warming is driven by human activity, foremost the burning of fossil fuels.
+
+A look at previous global climate change negotiations illustrates the challenge in achieving this year's goals, especially when it comes to the biggest greenhouse gas emitters.
+
+The United States did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol and dropped out of it completely in 2001. Canada dumped it, too, and China, India and other developing countries were exempt from it.",REAL
+7144,This Is How Putin Celebrated Trump’s Election Win,"Several people were victorious after Tuesday’s election – Donald Trump, the Republicans of America, and apparently Vladimir Putin. It appears that the president of Russia is ecstatic to work alongside business mogul turned statesman Mr. Trump. 
+Via ViralThread 
+
+It’s well known that American-Russian relations are pretty grim right now. Within the past few months, Russia has practiced nuclear evacuation drills and launched airstrikes on the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo. It seems as if we’re entering a second Cold War, however president-elect Trump is hoping to change all of that.
+
+President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton also hoped to repair the relationship between the two old foes. Sadly however the conflicting ideologies between the Putin and Obama Administrations got in the way. Putin has previously pleaded Obama to come together with Russia. On Independence Day, he claimed: “The history of Russian-American relations shows that when we act as equal partners and respect each other’s lawful interests we are able to successfully resolve the most complex international issues for the benefit of both countries’ peoples and all of humanity.” Try as he might though, Obama hasn’t budged.
+
+Just a few month ago, Obama claimed: “I’m not confident that we can trust the Russians or Vladimir Putin, which is why we have to have to test whether or not we can get an actual cessation of hostilities that includes an end to the kinds of aerial bombing and civilian death and destruction that we have seen carried out by the Assad regime.”
+Difficulty surrounding stances on Ukraine and Syria are the main culprits for this distrust. So when Putin learned that he may have another shot at a healthy relationship with America (and Trump), he decided to celebrate.
+Putin celebrated Donald Trump’s win in the election with the hope of a stable relationship with America. Trump spoke about repairing the relationship with Russia in his campaign, something Putin took note of. In the clip below, it’s clear that Trump will deal with Putin in a completely different way than Obama.
+At a foreign ambassadors meeting in Moscow, Putin expressed his satisfaction with the election, where he congratulated both the American people and president-elect Trump. Putin also told the ambassadors that he was hopeful for future prospects between the two superpowers, America and Russia, especially when it comes to efforts in Syria.
+
+Following his speech, Putin clinked glasses of champagne with the ambassadors in celebration. With the tensions between America and Russia growing at an alarming rate, the world has a watchful eye on what actions Mr. Trump will take when he finally enters the Oval Office.
+
+ 
+",FAKE
+5741,Why Trump Won; Why Clinton Lost,"  WashingtonsBlog 
+By Robert Parry, the investigative reporter who many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. Originally published at Parry’s Consortium News (republished with permission). 
+In the end, Hillary Clinton became the face of a corrupt, arrogant and out-of-touch Establishment, while Donald Trump emerged as an almost perfectly imperfect vessel for a populist fury that had bubbled beneath the surface of America. 
+There is clearly much to fear from a Trump presidency, especially coupled with continued Republican control of Congress. Trump and many Republicans have denied the reality of climate change; they favor more tax cuts for the rich; they want to deregulate Wall Street and other powerful industries – all policies that helped create the current mess that the United States and much of the world are now in. A sign supporting Donald Trump at a rally at Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona. June 18, 2016 (Photo by Gage Skidmore) 
+Further, Trump’s personality is problematic to say the least. He lacks the knowledge and the temperament that one would like to see in a President – or even in a much less powerful public official. He appealed to racism, misogyny, white supremacy, bigotry toward immigrants and prejudice toward Muslims. He favors torture and wants a giant wall built across America’s southern border. 
+But American voters chose him in part because they felt they needed a blunt instrument to smash the Establishment that has ruled and mis-ruled America for at least the past several decades. It is an Establishment that not only has grabbed for itself almost all the new wealth that the country has produced but has casually sent the U.S. military into wars of choice, as if the lives of working-class soldiers are of little value. 
+On foreign policy, the Establishment had turned decision-making over to the neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks, a collection of haughty elitists who often subordinated American interests to those of Israel and Saudi Arabia, for political or financial advantage. 
+The war choices of the neocon/liberal-hawk coalition have been disastrous – from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya to Syria to Ukraine – yet this collection of know-it-alls never experiences accountability. The same people, including the media’s armchair warriors and the think-tank “scholars,” bounce from one catastrophe to the next with no consequences for their fallacious “group thinks.” Most recently, they have ginned up a new costly and dangerous Cold War with Russia. 
+For all his faults, Trump was one of the few major public figures who dared challenge the “group thinks” on the current hot spots of Syria and Russia. In response, Clinton and many Democrats chose to engage in a crude McCarthyism with Clinton even baiting Trump as Vladimir Putin’s “puppet” during the final presidential debate. 
+It is somewhat remarkable that those tactics failed; that Trump talked about cooperation with Russia, rather than confrontation, and won. Trump’s victory could mean that rather than escalating the New Cold War with Russia, there is the possibility of a ratcheting down of tensions. 
+Repudiating the Neocons 
+Thus, Trump’s victory marks a repudiation of the neocon/liberal-hawk orthodoxy because the New Cold War was largely incubated in neocon/liberal-hawk think tanks, brought to life by likeminded officials in the U.S. State Department, and nourished by propaganda across the mainstream Western media. Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona. June 18, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore) 
+It was the West, not Russia, that provoked the confrontation over Ukraine by helping to install a fiercely anti-Russian regime on Russia’s borders. I know the mainstream Western media framed the story as “Russian aggression” but that was always a gross distortion. 
+There were peaceful ways for settling the internal differences inside Ukraine without violating the democratic process, but U.S. neocons, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and wealthy neoliberals, such as financial speculator George Soros, pushed for a putsch that overthrew the elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. 
+Putin’s response, including his acceptance of Crimea’s overwhelming referendum to return to Russia and his support for ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine opposing the coup regime in Kiev, was a reaction to the West’s destabilizing and violent actions. Putin was not the instigator of the troubles. 
+Similarly, in Syria, the West’s “regime change” strategy, which dates back to neocon planning in the mid-1990s, involved collaboration with Al Qaeda and other Islamic jihadists to remove the secular government of Bashar al-Assad. Again, Official Washington and the mainstream media portrayed the conflict as all Assad’s fault, but that wasn’t the full picture. 
+From the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, U.S. “allies,” including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel, have been aiding the rebellion, with Turkey and the Gulf states funneling money and weapons to Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and even to the Al Qaeda spinoff, Islamic State. 
+Though President Barack Obama dragged his heels on the direct intervention advocated by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama eventually went in halfway, bending to political pressure by agreeing to train and arm so-called “moderates” who ended up fighting next to Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and other jihadists in Ahrar al-Sham. 
+Trump has been inarticulate and imprecise in describing what policies he would follow in Syria, besides suggesting that he would cooperate with the Russians in destroying Islamic State. But Trump didn’t seem to understand the role of Al Qaeda in controlling east Aleppo and other Syrian territory. 
+Uncharted Territory 
+So, the American voters have plunged the United States and the world into uncharted territory behind a President-elect who lacks a depth of knowledge on a wide variety of issues. Who will guide a President Trump becomes the most pressing issue today. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona. March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore) 
+Will he rely on traditional Republicans who have done so much to mess up the country and the world or will he find some fresh-thinking realists who will realign policy with core American interests and values. 
+For this dangerous and uncertain moment, the Democratic Party establishment deserves a large share of the blame. Despite signs that 2016 would be a year for an anti-Establishment candidate – possibly someone like Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Sen. Bernie Sanders – the Democratic leadership decided that it was “Hillary’s turn.” 
+Alternatives like Warren were discouraged from running so there could be a Clinton “coronation.” That left the 74-year-old socialist from Vermont as the only obstacle to Clinton’s nomination and it turned out that Sanders was a formidable challenger. But his candidacy was ultimately blocked by Democratic insiders, including the unelected “super-delegates” who gave Clinton an early and seemingly insurmountable lead. 
+With blinders firmly in place, the Democrats yoked themselves to Clinton’s gilded carriage and tried to pull it all the way to the White House. But they ignored the fact that many Americans came to see Clinton as the personification of all that is wrong about the insular and corrupt world of Official Washington. And that has given us President-elect Trump.",FAKE
+3219,Round I in Iowa: Scott Walker Emerges,"Scott Walker 2016 begins today. After this speech to #FreedomSummit no way he doesn't become formidable presidential candidate.
+
+So, @ScottWalker is the breakout star of this thing so far, right? #IAFreedomSummit",REAL
+8402,Victim Blaming the Planet,Stay ahead of the curve. Yes! Send me daily news! You have Successfully Subscribed!,FAKE
+1924,Hillary Clinton Responds To Email Controversy: 'I Want The Public To See My Email',"WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton responded to intense scrutiny over her email practices on Wednesday, saying she has asked the State Department to make available her private email during her tenure as secretary of state.
+
+""I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible,"" Clinton wrote in a tweet posted late Wednesday evening.
+
+A New York Times report published Monday evening set off a firestorm of criticism, and suggested Clinton violated State Department regulations by using a personal email account for government business, potentially shielding her correspondence from public inquiries like Freedom of Information Act requests. Her email account, clintonemail.com, was hosted by a server located at her home, and reportedly ""became a symbol of status within the family’s inner circle.""
+
+Clinton's advisers submitted some 50,000 pages of emails to the State Department two months ago at the government's request, but critics maintained that using private email allowed Clinton to pick and choose which documents to submit with no way to verify the process. A House panel investigating the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on Wednesday issued a subpoena for any and all of Clinton's private emails related to the attack.
+
+The controversy threatens to derail Clinton's likely presidential campaign launch, reportedly planned for this month or next. Her way of addressing growing controversy -- in a tweet nearly 48 hours after it was first reported -- is likely to add to concerns over whether she is prepared to run a presidential campaign in today's hyper-media atmosphere.
+
+UPDATE: March 5, 8:45 a.m. -- The State Department said Thursday it would ""take some time"" to complete a review of the emails provided by Clinton.
+
+""The State Department will review for public release the emails provided by Secretary Clinton to the Department, using a normal process that guides such releases. We will undertake this review as quickly as possible; given the sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete,"" department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in a statement.
+
+",REAL
+9692,Clinton Network Concerned About Teneo’s Consulting Behavior,"On December 5, 2011, Neil McCabe published a piece in Human Events, titled, “Claim: Clinton Collected $50K Per Month From MF Global,” which said that controversial Clinton-backed public relations and consulting firm Teneo had been paid $50,000 a month by former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine to “improve his image and to enhance his connections with Clinton’s political family” months before the firm went bankrupt.
+MF Global’s bankruptcy was a result of gross mismanagement and Cozine himself narrowly avoided prosecution for financial fraud when it was revealed that MF Global customer money had at one point gone missing during the company’s final days. No criminal charges were filed, but MF Global paid $132 million earlier this year in a civil settlement with MF Global customers.
+Teneo’s seemingly seedy behavior has long been a problem for the Clintons, and its alleged involvement in the MF Global scandal rippled across Clinton world. As revealed by an email chain published by Wikileaks, the Teneo-MF Global story was emailed to Chelsea Clinton the same days as publication, December 5, 2011.
+Responding a day later , Chelsea told those in the email chain, which apparently included John Podesta, that this was not the first time Teneo had been a problem:
+John, Bruce, Terry, Victoria, Jennifer – fyi re: below. I’ve asked that it make my father’s clips (it wld historically not as I understand it).
+On another note, I was in London Sunday and did a Foundation event Sunday evening and two people separately voiced concerns directly to me about Teneo , neither of whom I know well (one of whom is a friend of one of Marc’s old colleagues, ie we know only tangentially) and Sara Latham (whom Victoria and Jennifer, I do know well – she worked for my Dad in the WH and lives in London) voiced serious concerns to Bari – including telling her Ilya has called Members of the House and Members of Parliament, “on behalf of President Clinton,” for Teneo clients (eg for Andrew Liveris and Dow who’s coming this month to London), without my father’s knowledge and inelegantly and ineffectually at best and at worse has now precipitating people in London making comparisons between my father and Tony Blair’s profit motivations. Which would horrify my father.
+Sara also told Bari she started working for Teneo, as Teneo, more than a year ago and then recently stopped because she was so upset, partly because of what Doug and Declan asked her to do/ pretend was happening for their clients at Davos- that’s all I know. I am hoping to connect directly with Sara this week, if only to connect her belatedly into Victoria and Jennifer. I’m speaking at an innovations in governance conference today here in Oxford and flying back later this afternoon. I will raise all of this and more with my father this evening. Wanted to update you all in the meanwhile about my augmented concerns post London and the below.
+“Doug and Declan” are Doug Band and Declan Kelly, founding members of Teneo and longtime associates of the Clinton family.
+Chelsea Clinton is telling those on the thread in response to a press clip of the Human Events piece that she has been told by other people that Teneo is trading on her father’s name for dubious purposes.
+In response to Chelsea’s email, John Podesta emailed Clinton lawyer Cheryl Mills saying “We need to move to a resolution of this quickly.”
+Mills responded with a document that restructured Teneo, which Mills explained, “essentially creates a full-time Personal office of the President headed by a new CEO/COS. That person — who is unaffiliated with any of the entities or Teneo — b/cs the decisionmaker on the allocation of the President’s time and management and implementation of the President’s desires with respect to each activity. Doug and Justin advise that person but do not make final decisions or have final implementation authority on any matters – which is consistent with what Doug has said he seeks – the ability to recommend but for others to be accountable for making the ultimate decisions.”
+While Chelsea was concerned with Teneo using Bill Clinton, other evidence demonstrates it was a two-way street. Teneo helped Bill Clinton make millions of dollars from speeches with corporations. They also helped raised large amounts of money for the Clinton Foundation and employed other associates of the Clintons.
+Like most Clinton operations, it’s never quite clear where the public service ends and the private gains begin.
+The post Clinton Network Concerned About Teneo’s Consulting Behavior appeared first on Shadowproof .
+",FAKE
+3580,Why does ISIS keep making enemies?,"Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at the New America Foundation and the author of "" Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad. ""
+
+(CNN) Whenever ISIS carries out a new atrocity, whether it's beheading a group of Egyptian Christians or enslaving Yazidi women in Iraq or burning its victims alive, the big question most people have is: Why on Earth is ISIS doing this? What could possibly be the point?
+
+Adding to your list of enemies is never a sound strategy, yet ISIS' ferocious campaign against the Shia, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and Muslims who don't precisely share its views has united every ethnic and religious group in Syria and Iraq against them.
+
+ISIS is even at war with its most natural ally, al Qaeda in Syria.
+
+The Nazis and the Khmer Rouge went to great lengths to hide their crimes against humanity. Instead, ISIS posts its many crimes on social media for global distribution with seemingly no thoughts for the consequences.
+
+Is ISIS in control of affiliates in Libya and Syria?
+
+Is ISIS in control of affiliates in Libya and Syria? 02:07
+
+Is ISIS in control of affiliates in Libya and Syria?
+
+ISIS' beheading of the American journalist James Foley in mid-August galvanized much of the Western world against the group and led to an intensified U.S.-led air campaign against ISIS, which, according to U.S. military officials, has killed at least 6,000 of its fighters.
+
+ISIS keeps surprising the world and its actions do indeed seem to make no sense or are self-destructive.
+
+So what is going on here?
+
+A key window into understanding ISIS is its English language ""in-flight magazine"" Dabiq. Last week the seventh issue of Dabiq was released, and a close reading of it helps explains ISIS' world view.
+
+The mistake some make when viewing ISIS is to see it as a rational actor. Instead, as the magazine documents, its ideology is that of an apocalyptic cult that believes that we are living in the end times and that ISIS' actions are hastening the moment when this will happen.
+
+The name of the Dabiq magazine itself helps us understand ISIS' worldview. The Syrian town of Dabiq is where the Prophet Mohammed is supposed to have predicted that the armies of Islam and ""Rome"" would meet for the final battle that will precede the end of time and the triumph of true Islam.
+
+In the recent issue of Dabiq it states: ""As the world progresses towards al-Malhamah al-Kubrā, ('the Great Battle' to be held at Dabiq) the option to stand on the sidelines as a mere observer is being lost."" In other words, in its logic, you are either on the side of ISIS or you are on the side of the Crusaders and infidels.
+
+In other words, ISIS wants a Western ground force to invade Syria, as that will confirm the prophecy about Dabiq.
+
+We live in an increasingly secularized world, so it's sometimes difficult to take seriously the deeply held religious beliefs of others. For many of us the idea that the end of times will come with a battle between ""Rome"" and Islam at the obscure Syrian town of Dabiq is as absurd as the belief that the Mayans had that their human sacrifices could influence future events.
+
+But for ISIS, the Dabiq prophecy is deadly serious. Members of ISIS believe that they are the vanguard fighting a religious war, which Allah has determined will be won by the forces of true Islam.
+
+This is the conclusion of an important forthcoming new book about ISIS by terrorism experts J.M. Berger and Jessica Stern who write that ISIS, like many other ""violent apocalyptic groups, tend to see themselves as participating in a cosmic war between good and evil, in which moral rules do not apply.""
+
+This also similar to the conclusion of an excellent new cover story about ISIS in the Atlantic magazine by Graeme Wood who writes, ""Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State (another name for ISIS) adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, 'the Prophetic methodology,' which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn't actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combated, has already led the United States to underestimate it."" Amen to that.
+
+ISIS members devoutly believe that they are fighting in a cosmic war in which they are on the side of good, which allows them to kill anyone they perceive to be standing in their way with no compunction. This is, of course, a serious delusion, but serious it is.",REAL
+4697,The Daily 202: Trump really is in danger of losing Utah,"SALT LAKE CITY—The revelations of recent days about Donald Trump’s lascivious and predatory attitudes toward women have hurt him in Utah perhaps more than any other state.
+
+Julie de Azevedo Hanks, a psychotherapist with a blog that is widely read in the Mormon community, is an independent who voted for Mitt Romney four years ago. She planned to keep her preference for Hillary Clinton quiet until she saw the 2005 video of the Republican nominee boasting to Billy Bush about pursuing married women and using his celebrity to make unwanted advances.
+
+“That tape put the final nail in the coffin,” Hanks said. “A year ago, I never would have thought I’d be voting for her. I know she’s not flawless. I don’t idolize her. I don’t have rose-colored glasses. … We may not get everything we value with Hillary, but she aligns more closely with what we do value than Trump.”
+
+Hanks posted on her blog about how dangerous she thinks Trump would be as president. She said her husband, a rock-ribbed Republican, may just not vote at all now. Last night, she was one of nearly 70 volunteers who showed up to phone bank at Clinton’s Utah headquarters, on the outskirts of the capital of one of the country’s reddest states.
+
+The parking lot overflowed. Volunteers – many who identify as independent or even Republican – parked down nearby residential streets and walked. They ate Little Caesar’s Pizza as they made the case on cell phones to their Utah neighbors to back a Democrat for president for the first time since 1964.
+
+The Clinton team has a full-time staffer on the ground to organize the phone banks and canvassing. They’ve even launched a Mormons for Hillary effort.
+
+The influential Deseret News, which is owned by the Mormon Church, has stayed out of presidential politics for 80 years. But the editorial board urged all of its readers over the weekend not to vote for Trump. (For context, more than six in 10 voters in next month’s election will be members of the flock.)
+
+“What oozes from this audio is evil,” the editorial said. “Trump’s banter belies a willingness to use and discard other human beings at will. That characteristic is the essence of a despot.”
+
+Republican Gov. Gary Herbert and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, both Mormons, withdrew their support last Friday just hours after The Post published the video. Sen. Mike Lee, who is up for reelection, also called for the reality TV star to drop out, prompting an avalanche of colleagues to follow.
+
+A former Miss Teen Utah is one of the women who has come forward to accuse Trump of boorish behavior in the days since. (Trump denies any wrongdoing.)
+
+-- Romney, who is Mormon, got 73 percent of the vote here four years ago. Trump got just 34 percent of the vote in a Monmouth University poll published yesterday. He leads Clinton by only 6 points (she pulled 28 percent). Another 20 percent back independent Evan McMullin, who joined the race at the urging of Never Trump conservatives, and 9 percent support Libertarian Gary Johnson. The survey was in the field after the emergence of the 2005 tape but before numerous additional women came forward to accuse Trump of misconduct.
+
+Just 19 percent of likely voters view Trump favorably. Seven in 10 do not believe he has the temperament to be president. Six in 10 Republicans and three in four Mormons say he does not share their values.
+
+-- I interviewed more than 30 voters on the ground over the past two days, and it feels like he has not yet hit bottom.
+
+-- The alternatives to Trump are racing to capitalize on his collapse in the Beehive State. Both McMullin and Johnson are running their national campaigns out of Salt Lake City, trying to become the first non-major-party candidate since 1968 to win any state’s electoral votes.
+
+McMullin, who is focusing more on Utah than any other state, is a 40-year-old Mormon who spent a decade at the CIA and later became the policy director for the House Republican Conference. “People are finally realizing the truth about Trump,” he said during an interview at his campaign headquarters yesterday afternoon. “I imagine there are dozens more of these women out there, sadly.”
+
+The first-time candidate presents himself as the antithesis of Trump. He talked about “the positives of immigration.” He said he really wants to win over Muslims. He decried stop-and-frisk policing as “based on racism.” And he heavily criticized both major-party nominees.
+
+“Both of these candidates, under other circumstances, might find themselves in jail,” McMullin said, taking a sip of a Diet Coke. “Either Donald Trump for sexual assault or Hillary Clinton for violating our laws on protecting classified information. So the debate is about who has abused women more and who is more corrupt. It is horrible that we find ourselves in this position.”
+
+McMullin last week tapped Mindy Finn, a D.C.-based digital media strategist, to be his running mate. “We hear from a lot of our supporters that we are an answer to their prayers,” she said. “They can walk out of the polling booth with their head held high. … The Republican Party has lost its way. It’s eating itself alive by normalizing the behavior of Trump. … What exists here is a lifeboat.”
+
+-- Utah was always a bad fit for Trump. Most Mormons spend two years overseas as missionaries, which gives them a more internationalist outlook. Because the early church faced so much persecution, Trump’s support for religious tests cause visceral disgust. The state welcomes refugees with open arms. In contrast to the Rust Belt, there are vastly more opportunities for upward mobility and the unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the country.
+
+Boyd Matheson, who runs a local conservative think tank called the Sutherland Institute, believes McMullin can win. “Utahns are not an angry people,” he said. “The hunker-down protectionism that Trump is offering just doesn’t ring true here. … For a lot of people who were never excited about Trump, the video locked it in.”
+
+-- But McMullin’s immediate problem is that two-thirds of Utahns have still not heard of him. “We want to prevail in Utah, but we have a lot of work to do,” he said at a sparsely-decorated campaign office that is next door to a Thai restaurant and across from a credit union. Without much fundraising, he’s focusing on free media coverage and digital efforts. He said there has been a 1,600 percent increase in online engagement over the past four days. “We saw a marked shift with the tape,” he said.
+
+-- The other big issue is that if the anti-Trump vote is divided, like it was throughout the GOP nominating contest, the reality TV star could eke out a narrow win. Johnson has campaigned hard in Utah. He was back in the state Wednesday night and has come at least once every few weeks since the start of the year. During the interview, McMullin sought to dismiss Johnson as a spoiler of sorts: “He has some impact, but this is a three-way race.”
+
+Johnson’s communications director Joe Hunter responded that the former New Mexico governor will appear on the ballot in all 50 states while McMullin has only qualified to appear in 11 states. “He’s kind of running for president of Utah, and that’s legit,” Hunter, who lives up the road in Park City, said of McMullin. “There’s nothing wrong with that strategy. But we’re more confident in ours. … We’re ultimately the best option for the Never Trump Republicans in Utah.”
+
+Everyone says a late endorsement from someone like Romney might help voters coalesce behind either McMullin or Johnson and put them over the top. “All the people you would wonder about, I’m talking to most of them,” McMullin said when asked if he’s in touch with the 2012 GOP nominee (who is legendary here because he turned around Salt Lake City’s failing 2002 Olympics).
+
+-- To be sure, Clinton has a very narrow path to victory in such a conservative state. She’s viewed unfavorably by almost the same percentage of voters as Trump. Only 25 percent said they like her in the Monmouth poll. And she lost the caucuses here this spring to Bernie Sanders.
+
+But Peter Corroon, the chairman of the Utah Democratic Party, said his team is mobilizing a bigger get-out-the-vote operation than ever before, knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors and making hundreds of thousands of phone calls. “It probably won’t be over 30 percent of the vote, but I think she’ll get the plurality,” said Corroon, the former mayor of Salt Lake City. “Every time Trump opens his mouth, it gets worse for him here. … Some will move to Hillary, and McMullin and Johnson are splitting the third-party votes.”
+
+Republicans like to point out that, in 1992, Bill Clinton finished in third place (with 25 percent of the vote) behind George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot. Mike Lee says he still has not made up his mind about who to vote for, but it will not be Trump or Clinton. When I asked him if there’s any way she could prevail, he did not hesitate. “No,” he said. “It’s not going to happen.”
+
+But it’s also true that third-party candidates typically underperform how they do in pre-election polling because they do not have the same kind of organization to get out the vote.
+
+The Clinton outreach also extends to Utah's growing Hispanic population, especially those living in the state's 4th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Mia Love (R). Statewide, Hispanics comprise about 8 percent of eligible voters, but in Love's district they account for about 25 percent. That was enough to prompt Lorella Praeli, the campaign's Latino voter outreach director, to travel here last month to meet with local volunteers and activists. As in other states with smaller, but growing, Hispanic populations like North Carolina and Pennsylvania, the Clinton campaign thinks running up the score with this constituency could wind up being decisive.
+
+-- Clinton campaign strategists freely acknowledge that Utah is a reach, and that it is easier to pick off states like Arizona or Georgia first. Both sides agree that, if Trump loses here, the election nationally will probably be a blowout. But if for some reason it is close, and the divided third-party votes allow her to win in a squeaker, Utah’s six electoral votes (the same number as Iowa has) could cut off several other paths Trump has to get to 270.
+
+WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
+
+-- The Nationals season is over after they fell to the Dodgers 4-3 in Game 5. Los Angeles scored all four runs in the seventh inning. “We just came up short,” manager Dusty Baker said. “I’m proud of my guys, of how they played this year.” (Jorge Castillo)
+
+-- A Fox News poll shows Clinton up 7 points (45-38) over Trump, up from just 2 points last week. More than half of Americans now say Trump is unqualified to be president. ""If the Republicans are not at rock-bottom, they can certainly see the bottom from where they are,"" says GOP pollster Daron Shaw. ""If Trump got 90 percent of self-identified Republicans and nothing else -- no Democrats and no independents -- he'd be at 32 percent.”
+
+-- Clinton is up 4 points in North Carolina and Ohio is virtually tied in NBC/WSJ/Marist polling. Sen. Richard Burr is tied with Democratic challenger Deborah Ross at 46 percent in the Tar Heel State. Rob Portman continues to dominate in the Buckeye State, leading Democratic challenger Ted Strickland by 18 (55-37).
+
+-- A SurveyUSA poll in Texas found that Trump’s lead has receded to just 4 points in the Lone Star State, which is within the margin of error. For perspective, Romney won the state by 16 points in 2012, McCain by 13, and George W. Bush by 23. Ted Cruz is not popular back home: Only 45 percent approve, compared to 45 percent who disapprove. ""It suggests that he may be looking at a significant primary challenge,” said SMU professor Matthew Wilson. Separately, Texas has a record-breaking 15 million people registered to vote ahead of the election, the Texas Tribune reports – more than 777,000 more than were registered for the March primaries.
+
+-- Trump is pulling out of Virginia. NBC News reports that the news was announced to staff on a Wednesday night conference call and left many operatives on the ground blindsided. The decision came from Trump’s headquarters in New York and means that he is running essentially a four state campaign in the final three weeks, focusing on Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina and Ohio.
+
+“Several factors appear to have pushed Virginia into the Clinton column,” Laura Vozzella explains from Richmond: “Changing demographics that favor Democrats in statewide elections; divisions within the state Republican Party over Trump; Clinton’s selection of Sen. Tim Kaine, a well-liked former Virginia governor as her running mate; and vigorous support from Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a close Clinton friend. ‘We got so far ahead here that we are no longer considered a swing state in Clinton World,’ McAuliffe told The Post in an interview last week — before the release of a tape of Trump bragging about groping women.”
+
+-- Paul Ryan is attempting to move past his week-long battle with Trump today by delivering a fresh policy speech and announcing that he helped raise an additional $15.4 million to defend the House GOP majority. Kelsey Snell has early excerpts: “Ryan will argue for the value of conservative leadership in Congress in a mid-day address to college Republicans in his home state of Wisconsin. The speech aims to refocus the political discussion on the same traditional Republican themes like small government and freedom that Ryan has seen as key to maintaining a GOP majority as support [for] Trump has been sinking. ‘It is important that we take a step back and reflect on what this election is ultimately about,’ Ryan will say. ‘Beneath all the ugliness lies a long running debate between two governing philosophies: one that is in keeping with our nation’s founding principles—like freedom and equality—and another that seeks to replace them.’""
+
+-- The RNC raised $39.4 million in September and has transferred $6.35 million of that to fund down-ballot races. From Bloomberg’s Kevin Cirilli: “The reallocation of $6.35 million—$4.5 million of which went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and $1.85 million to the National Republican Congressional Committee—was made ‘with the encouragement of the Trump campaign,’ the RNC's press release stated.”
+
+-- Elsewhere, a group of the Republican Party’s most generous donors are calling on the RNC to disavow Trump, saying the latest allegations about his sexual misconduct are grounds for the committee to cut ties, finally and fully. From The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns, and Maggie Haberman: “The Republican financial apparatus under Mr. Priebus, sputtering since Mr. Trump claimed the presidential nomination, is wheezing painfully in the final weeks of the race. The committee’s fund-raising officials now quietly acknowledge that Mr. Trump is a thoroughly compromised candidate, party donors said, but implore potential contributors to give anyway, stressing graver concerns like control of the Supreme Court. Many donors have stopped giving, though, and some have deserted the party, including two major donors who confirmed on Thursday that they were supporting Gary Johnson … Even some of Mr. Priebus’s allies believe that Mr. Trump is certain to be defeated and that it is time for the party to protect its image by disavowing him.”
+
+-- Those who know him best are not giving him money --> “Trump's missing donors: the people who work for him,” by Michelle Conlin and Grant Smith at Reuters: “Kerry Woolard, the 37-year-old manager of Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, went online in June and made her first political contribution: A $250 donation to the campaign of her boss, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Woolard's donation was unusual. Only a dozen of an estimated 22,450 people employed at Trump's companies have donated more than $200 to the celebrity businessman's bid for the U.S. presidency, [according to a Reuters review] …” The contributors have given a total amount of $5,298 to Trump's campaign, a fraction of the $112 million Trump's political operation has received this year. This stands in stark contrast to the 2012 election, when employees at the private equity firm Mitt Romney led until 1999, Bain Capital, and a separate company for which he worked, Bain & Company, donated nearly $375,000. Bain Capital employees gave an additional $1.125 million to Romney's Super PAC.”
+
+-- How toxic is Trump? Florida GOP Rep. David Jolly, who represents an area around Tampa, is threatening to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee over a campaign ad that uses multiple photo-shopped pictures of him and Trump, portraying a close relationship between the two -- though they have never met in person. ""I have never met Donald Trump. I have never had a conversation with Donald Trump. I have never been in a room with Donald Trump,"" said Jolly, who has refused to endorse Trump but is nevertheless expected to lose to Charlie Crist. (Miami Herald)
+
+-- Trump spent Thursday afternoon issuing a stunning call to arms, emphatically denying a wave of new groping allegations while charging that his accusers were instead conspiring against him. From Philip Rucker and Sean Sullivan: “Scrambling to turn around his floundering campaign, Trump declared war on the media and multinational corporations, alleging they are colluding with [Clinton] to orchestrate ‘the single greatest pile-on in history.'"" “The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure,” he said at a Palm Beach rally. “Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed.""
+
+-- This is part of a pattern: When he gets desperate, Trump spins conspiracy theories. From Sean Sullivan: “This time, there was a bigger, badder villain — ‘a global power structure’ of corporate interests, the media and Clinton engaging in subterfuge. This time, it was about him. Trump said Thursday that the world had reached ‘a moment of reckoning.’ He told his backers that his campaign is ‘not about me; it’s about all of you, and it’s about our country.’ He portrayed the powers he says have banded together to rally against him and his advocates as ruthless and cunning. ‘They will attack you; they will slander you; they will seek to destroy your career and your family; they will seek to destroy everything about you, including your reputation,’ Trump said. ‘They will lie, lie, lie, and then again they will do worse than that; they will do whatever is necessary.’”
+
+-- His speech came just minutes after Michelle Obama delivered a scathing, impassioned repudiation of Trump’s behavior, saying the groping allegations have “shaken her to her core.” The dueling speeches made for a remarkable moment in a roiling presidential campaign and signaled that the final 25 days would focus ""not on policy or ideology, but on character. “Two speeches. Two Americas. A pair of apocalyptic arguments and one call to burn down the house. That’s the summation from just two remarkable hours Thursday that crystallized the final month of Campaign 2016,” Dan Balz writes. “In back-to-back appearances, in what might be the two most compelling hours of the entire election, Michelle Obama in New Hampshire and Donald Trump in Florida delivered the fiercest, most provocative and hardest-hitting speeches of an election cycle that has been without precedent in hot rhetoric. The presidential campaign has been building toward all this. Day after day after day, the rhetoric has intensified, the charges and countercharges have escalated, the issues have been reduced to asterisks, and the gulf between the Trump and Clinton coalitions has widened. Sunday’s debate in St. Louis foreshadowed what was to come. Now there will be no turning back.”
+
+-- Trump today will broaden his attack against the media to hit globalism and the Clinton Foundation by charging that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is part of the biased coalition working in collusion with the Clinton campaign, the Wall Street Journal’s Monica Langley reports. “As early as Friday, Mr. Trump is planning to claim that Mr. Slim, as a shareholder of New York Times Co. and donor to the Clinton Foundation, has an interest in helping Clinton’s campaign … The Slim family held about 17% of the New York Times Class A shares as of March, making them the largest individual shareholder. Mr. Slim and his foundation have given between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation since its founding. Attacking the Mexican billionaire would allow Mr. Trump to hit several targets. He could slam the ‘failing’ New York Times, which he says had to be ‘rescued’ by a ‘foreigner’—Mr. Slim, a [Trump adviser] said.”
+
+Slim and the Times pushed back quickly: “This is totally false,” said Arturo Elias, Slim’s spokesman. “Of course we aren’t interfering in the U.S. election. We aren’t even active in Mexican politics.” He said the contributions by Slim to the Clinton Foundation were a matter of public record. “Carlos Slim is an excellent shareholder who fully respects boundaries regarding the independence of our journalism,” said Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. “He has never sought to influence what we report.”
+
+-- Die-hard Trump supporters have become angrier than ever. “Crowds that once booed and shouted at the press mainly at Trump’s prompting … have now begun spontaneously targeting the press on their own, at a scale not yet seen in this campaign, or any in memory on American soil,” says Politico’s Ben Schreckinger, who has covered the campaign for more than a year. “Chants of ‘CNN sucks’ have become commonplace at Trump's rallies this week and members of the traveling press were called ‘whores’ and ‘press-titutes’ as they filed out of a Thursday afternoon rally in West Palm Beach. This week, Trump has begun claiming that mainstream media outlets no longer conduct journalism. ‘Reporters who work for these outlets like Washington Post or The New York Times may think of themselves as journalists, but they’re actually just cogs in a corporate, political machine,’ he said in Panama City.""
+
+-- One woman told HuffPost that she witnessed Trump looking up model’s skirts and commenting on their underwear at a 1996 dinner with mutual friends. Their group was seated at a semi-circular table, Lisa Boyne recounted, and the women couldn’t get up without Trump and his friend getting up – which they refused to do. “Instead, Boyne said, Trump insisted that the women walk across the table, allowing him to peer up their skirts while they did so. Trump “stuck his head right underneath their skirts,” Boyne said, and commented on whether they were wearing underwear and what their genitalia looked like.
+
+-- Three longtime “Apprentice” staffers told The Daily Beast that Trump repeatedly called deaf actress Marlee Matlin “retarded,” saying he regularly disrespected her and treated her as if she was mentally disabled. “He would make fun of her voice. It actually sounded a lot like what he did [to] the New York Times guy,” said a former Apprentice employee. In another incident, Trump scribbled in the margins of a note on set: “Marlee, is she retarded?”
+
+-- Creepy: In 1992, Trump spotted a pair of girls singing Christmas carols at the Plaza hotel and asked them how old they were. When they said 14, Trump, then 46, replied, “Wow! Just think — in a couple of years, I'll be dating you!"" (LA Times)
+
+-- Trump canceled a Sean Hannity interview that was scheduled for Fox News last night, perhaps to avoid having to answer for the latest allegations. A spokesman said it would be “rescheduled.” (Politico)
+
+-- “These women plan to vote for Trump, despite his lewd comments,” by Mary Jordan in North Carolina: “If Clinton becomes the first female president of the United States, a lot of women at Granny’s Country Kitchen will be upset. They know Trump has said crude things about women. He may even have behaved like a lout. But when forced to weigh Trump’s behavior against their disdain for Clinton, the women at Granny’s say it’s not even close. A growing gender gap is marking the 2016 campaign. Not since CBS News exit polls were first taken in 1972 has there been such a divide in how men and women view candidates.” But perhaps more unexpected than women abandoning Trump are those who still enthusiastically support him. … ‘Is it offensive? Yes. Can we forgive it? Yes!’ Debbie Meadows, wife of Rep. Mark Meadows (N.C.), said of Trump’s remarks. Rep. Ted Yoho’s wife agreed: ‘When I found out, I had a few moments of righteous indignation,’ she said. ‘Then I got some perspective.’”
+
+-- The Times responded to a letter from Trump’s lawyers that called their sexual assault story ""libelous"" and threatened a lawsuit: ""The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation,"" Times’ lawyer David McCraw wrote. “Mr. Trump has bragged about his non-consensual sexual touching of women. He has bragged about intruding on beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms. He acquiesced to a radio hosts’ request to discuss Mr. Trump’s own daughter as a ‘piece of ass.’ Multiple women not mentioned in our article have publicly come forward to report on Mr. Trump’s unwanted advances. Nothing in our article has the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.”
+
+-- Melania Trump's lawyers also threatened to sue People magazine over the first-person account written by Trump accuser Natasha Stoynoff, demanding a retraction and saying that portions of the story are ""completely fictionalized.""
+
+-- People editor-in-chief Jess Cagle posted a lengthy defense of Stoynoff and the story: “Ms. Stoynoff is a remarkable, ethical, honest and patriotic woman. We stand steadfastly by her, and are proud to publish her clear, credible account of what happened.""
+
+-- Clinton allies David Brock and Gloria Allred both offered to help cover legal fees for and otherwise represent Trump’s accusers: ""We would pay for the legal defense of Trump accusers,” said Brock, a Democratic operative. And Allred, a civil rights lawyer, also signaled openness: “If any women who are making allegations of inappropriate [conduct] contact me, I would be happy to speak to them and then decide if I would be able to represent them,” she said. (Politico)
+
+-- Donald Trump Jr. defended his father. Asked about the two women who talked with the Times, he said during a radio interview: ""Come on guys, it's so ridiculous, I've never heard anything dumber in my life. ... I think it makes him a human. I think it makes him a normal person, not a political robot.” (CNN)
+
+-- In another radio interview, from 2013, Don Jr. actually suggested that women who cannot tolerate harassment “don’t belong in the workforce”: “If you can’t handle some of the basic stuff that’s become a problem in the workforce today, then you don’t belong in the workforce,” the younger Trump  said. “Like, you should go maybe teach kindergarten. I think it’s a respectable position.” The hosts then joked about hypothetically pulling up pictures of naked women on their computer screens. “I’d feel harassed!” Trump, Jr. joked. “This is my get rich quick scheme. I’m now suing you guys because I feel uncomfortable. And by the way, that’s what happens in the world. I can play along, I can be fine, and then I can decide randomly — ‘uh oh, you now have crossed the line, even though I’ve been going with it.’” (Buzzfeed)
+
+-- Ivanka Trump, stumping for her father in the Philadelphia suburbs, avoided any talk of the groping allegations. “Ivanka, perpetually on point, stayed on message,” NBC’s Leigh Ann Caldwell reports. “So much so that some of the same questions were repeated in each of the events, including what it was like to work with her dad and brothers, what she likes about Pennsylvania and why she thinks her dad would be a good president.”
+
+-- Why didn’t Trump’s people see any of this coming? Because the candidate rebuffed political aides’ requests to provide standard-fare opposition research that is traditional for any public figure -- and the decision ultimately contributed to his campaign being caught off guard this week. Both Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort made these requests when they took the reins of Trump’s campaign, and it became a point of contention among his top political advisers. (Bloomberg’s Kevin Cirilli)
+
+-- A review of previously-sealed New York records shows that neither Trump nor the Trump Foundation actually gave the $10,000 that they pledged to a 9/11 charity organization in the months following the attack. From the New York Daily News: The review, conducted by city comptroller Scott Stringer, “appears to contradict Trump's prior boasts of spontaneous generosity, made as his hometown reeled from the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in history … The records show that through mid-2002 there is no evidence that Trump personally or through the Trump Foundation gave to either group. The only recorded major donation to 9/11 causes that Trump has made was $100,000 from his foundation — which has been bankrolled by others without any money from Trump for years — to the 9/11 Museum in April 2016, as he sought to generate headlines after Cruz attacked him for his ‘New York values’ during the primary election.”
+
+-- Ten former nuclear launch control officers signed an open letter saying that Trump “should not have his finger on the button.” The letter says the decision to use nuclear weapons requires “composure, judgment, restraint and diplomatic skill” — all qualities that the former Air Force officers who signed it said Trump lacks. (Carol Morello)
+
+-- A group of former Reagan administration alumni have formed a group called “Reaganites Opposing Trump.” In a post on Medium, former George W. Bush National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte writes: “Ronald Reagan was a man of wisdom, humor, unfailing courtesy and measured temperament. I personally observed these traits … during daily meetings in the Oval Office, meetings with foreign leaders and in the Situation Room. He would have been appalled by Donald Trump’s utterances and behavior. Mr. Trump has no claim whatsoever to the mantle of Ronald Reagan.”
+
+-- “What happened to ‘America’s Mayor’? How Rudy Giuliani became Trump’s attack dog,” by Paul Schwartzman and Ben Terris: “A year ago, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani read an editorial in his hometown newspaper mocking him as a ‘shill’ for endorsing a little-known Republican [district attorney candidate].  Angry, Giuliani phoned the editorial page editor, Arthur Browne, to defend his endorsement. But the point that appeared to wound Giuliani the most, Browne recalled, was the editorial’s assertion that the former mayor ‘resides today beyond political relevance.’ “’I am relevant,’ [he insisted], ‘because all these people want my endorsement.’  The former mayor has no such worries these days. Eight years after his own presidential bid failed, Giuliani has emerged as Trump’s unflinching chief apologist, cheerleader and rhetorical Rottweiler … It’s a role that confounds allies and admirers who remember Giuliani’s rise as a law-and-order Republican twice elected in the country’s largest bastion of liberalism. ‘From his days as U.S. attorney, he was at the top of the organizational chart,’ [a] former adviser said. “Now he’s staff. He carries bags. He walks behind Trump. It’s just amazing to see.’”
+
+-- Clinton submitted formal answers under penalty of perjury over her use of a private email server at the State Department, declaring 20 times that she did not recall requested information and discussions, and asserting she was never warned that the practice could run afoul of laws on preserving federal records. From Politico’s Josh Gerstein: ""Clinton also said she could not recall ever being warned about any hacking or attempted hacking of her private account or server. Clinton's answers generally track with her public statements on the issue and with FBI reports about what she said during an interview conducted in July. Clinton ""decided to use a clintonemail.com account for the purpose of convenience,"" her lawyers said. Asked what other reasons she may have had for doing so, she gave no ground.
+
+-- Clinton advisers pressed her to apologize more explicitly for her use of a private email server while at the State Department, according to emails obtained in the WikiLeaks hacking. From the Wall Street Journal: After Clinton addressed the issue in a September 2015 TV interview, top aides discussed what they deemed a positive showing. But longtime Clinton confidante Neera Tanden wrote, “Everyone wants her to apologize. And she should.” “Apologies are like her Achilles' heel,” Tanden added. “But she didn’t seem like a [b*tch] in the interview. And she said the word sorry.”
+
+-- President Obama launched a two day campaign swing for Clinton in Ohio, seeking to boost turnout for the Democratic nominee among African American and millennial voters that helped him win the state in 2008 and 2012. (David Nakamura and Krissah Thompson)
+
+-- The Idaho Statesman endorses Clinton today: “We recognize a lot of you are not going to like our choice of a Democrat in this Republican state,"" the editorial board writes. “But our hope is that you will consider our reasoning before critiquing our conclusion. At this critical time in our nation’s history, we need, more than ever, to listen to each other with respect.”
+
+-- This week’s Economist cover is on “The debasing of American politics”: “In a more fragile democracy, [Trump’s rhetoric] would foreshadow post-election violence. Mercifully, America is not about to riot on November 9th. But the reasons have less to do with the state’s power to enforce the letter of the law than with the unwritten rules that American democracy thrives on. It is these that Mr Trump is trampling over—and which Americans need to defend. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that when many bad things happen at once, societies define deviancy down, until the list of what is unacceptable is short enough to be manageable. When parents wonder if a presidential debate is suitable for their children to watch, Mr Trump’s promise to build a wall on the Mexican border no longer seems quite so shocking. Healthy politics is not gang warfare. It involves compromise, because to yield in some areas is to move forward in others. It requires the insight that your opponent can be honourable and principled, however strongly you disagree. The 2016 election campaign has poured scorn on such ideas. All Americans are worse off as a result.”
+
+-- Conservative commentator Erick Erickson writes on the path forward for the post-Trump GOP:  “In November, when Mr. Trump’s meteor enters the atmosphere of the voting booth, Americans will be treated to a spectacular flameout as late-night comedians and professional Twitter warriors rush to tweet, ‘You’re fired!’ But when the Russians go home, the pastors repent and riot police disperse white nationalist protests, the Republicans will need fresh ideas. [And most importantly] … the Republican Party must recommit to a basic principle — character counts. The party that once impeached Bill Clinton for lying about an affair has defended a man who bragged about sexual assault. Character cannot be wedded to party politics, and the Republicans will have to make amends for defining deviancy down to defend the indefensible Donald Trump.”
+
+-- Wall Street Journal, “Voters’ Education Level a Driving Force This Election,” by Aaron Zitner and Dante Chinni: “The clearest dividing line in this year’s presidential election now falls along educational lines: Whites without a college degree have consolidated behind Trump and those with a four-year degree are tending to back Clinton. The divide helps explain why Mr. Trump pulled his field staff Wednesday from Virginia—essentially ceding a state where polling shows he has been largely abandoned by suburban voters with higher education levels—and why he remains competitive in the swing states of Iowa and Ohio, which have large shares of noncollege whites. Mrs. Clinton, meanwhile, is ahead in New Hampshire and Colorado, home to larger shares of whites with college degrees … The widening education gap, if it holds, would stand as a landmark in the repositioning of the nation’s two main political parties.”
+
+-- Former Boston Globe D.C. bureau chief David Shribman grapples with the idea that Democrats are becoming the new “professional party”: “American political parties are always in transition. This year, Trump has revealed deep cracks in the traditional Republican coalition and gone to war with party leaders. Yet while the Democrats are more united behind their 2016 nominee, they’re arguably more divided over their party’s vision and future. … For politicians and campaign operatives who for a generation or more have been working for the Democrats — or against them — the party’s growing dependence on the prosperous and well-educated is disorienting. Are the Democrats the party of working people anymore or is their future with college-educated professionals?  Does a party that draws its strength from the richest and the poorest places in America have any logical rationale? Hence this question, perhaps the most devastating one of all: Have the Democrats replaced the Republicans as the party of the social, cultural, and economic elite?”
+
+-- “A wounded bear is a dangerous thing. Detested and defeated, Trump is now in a tear-the-country-down rage,” The New York Times’ Timothy Egan writes. “Day after day, he rips at the last remaining threads of decency holding this nation together. His opponent is the devil, he says — hate her with all your heart. Forget about the rule of law. Lock her up!  Here’s his lesson for young minds: If you’re rich and boorish enough, you can get away with anything. Get away with sexual assault. Get away with not paying taxes. Get away with never telling the truth. You know this by now — all the sordid details. For much of the last year, the Republican presidential nominee has been a freak show, an oh-my-God spectacle. He opens his mouth, our cellphones blow up. But now, in the final days of a horrid campaign, an unshackled Trump is more national threat than punch line. He’s determined to cause lasting damage.”
+
+Russia's foreign minister gave quite a quote on the presidential campaign -- this tweet was posted on their U.S. embassy's official Twitter account:
+
+Hell keeps freezing over -- a senior correspondent at National Review praised Michelle Obama for her speech going after Trump on groping:
+
+Here's what she said:
+
+So did Biden and others:
+
+On the campaign trail: Trump campaigns in Greensboro and Charlotte, N.C.; Pence is in Pensacola and Miami, Fla. Bill Clinton campaigns for Hillary in Delaware and Cincinnati, Ohio.
+
+At the White House: Obama speaks at a Clinton event in Cleveland. Later, he and Biden attend the convening of the National Security Council for a periodic review of the Counter-ISIL campaign in Iraq and Syria.
+
+On Capitol Hill: The Senate and House are out.
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+-- The weather is officially starting to cool down! The Capital Weather Gang gives today’s fall forecast an official “nice day” rating: “Similar to, say, this past Monday, it may feel pleasantly cool under mostly sunny skies. Perhaps a periodic, thin veil of high clouds, but don’t worry. Temperatures should get from morning 50s to afternoon readings near 60 to the mid-60s. You may not need that morning light jacket on the way home! Arguably a great, beautiful day despite slightly below-average high temperatures. Some folks may fall below official Nice Day criteria (65-85 degrees) but it’s close enough for a Friday.”
+
+-- The Capitals fell to the Penguins 3-2.
+
+In case you missed Michelle Obama's speech, check out this clip:
+
+At a rally, Obama determined he was not a demon:
+
+Watch this old, bizarre interview with Trump. At the end, he talks about pursuing women: ""Move forward -- even if you get smacked, move forward.""
+
+Seth Meyers took a closer look at Clinton's leaked Wall Street speeches:
+
+Joss Whedon's super-PAC created this video poking fun at generalized touting of ""business experience"" in politics:",REAL
+4928,Clinton Enters Fall With Key Advantages in White House Race,"Two months from Election Day, Hillary Clinton has a clear edge over Donald Trump in nearly every measure traditionally used to gauge success in presidential races.
+
+She's raising huge sums of money and flooding airwaves with television advertisements. A sophisticated data team with a history of winning White House contests is meticulously tracking voters in key battleground states. Clinton also has multiple paths to the 270 electoral votes needed to win in November — so many that she could lose Ohio and Florida and still become America's first female president.
+
+But Trump's campaign believes there are pockets of voters eager to be persuaded not to back Clinton. While Trump squandered a summer's worth of opportunities to court those voters, his campaign heads into the fall suddenly confident in its ability to make up lost ground.
+
+Trump aides were gleeful Friday over the release of FBI notes regarding Clinton's controversial email practices while secretary of state. His campaign plans to come out of the Labor Day weekend wielding the report as a warning about the Democrat's judgment.
+
+Getting Trump to make that kind of consistent case against Clinton has been a herculean task for much of the campaign. But advisers say he's more receptive to his new leadership team's more scripted approach, mostly because it's coincided with a tightening in the public polls he monitors obsessively.
+
+""There's a renewed focus on Hillary Clinton and her problems, which I think has been beneficial,"" said Matt Borges, the chairman of Ohio's Republican Party. ""He's got to sustain this for another couple weeks.""
+
+Still, Trump aides acknowledge that the brash businessman needs to more to address his own shaky standing with voters.
+
+Trump's campaign has spent no general election money on positive, biographical ads, despite having plenty of cash to do so. Efforts to highlight a warmer side of the New York real estate developer at the GOP convention were quickly overshadowed by flaps of his own making. He's also angered anew Hispanics voters, a fast-growing segment of the electorate that Republicans are desperate to draw from, by holding fast to his tough immigration policies.
+
+""He's running up against a population trend and a demographic reality,"" said Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist.
+
+If Trump can reshape the race, he'll need to do so quickly. Early voting begins in some states this month. North Carolinians can start submitting absentee ballots Friday. In Ohio — a state no Republican has won the White House without — people can start voting on Oct. 12, a week before the last of three presidential debates.
+
+Both campaigns expect enormous audiences for the debates. Clinton, who has been in intensive study sessions with her debate team in recent days, is sure to face higher expectations from voters. Trump's political inexperience leaves him with a lower bar to clear.
+
+Privately, Republican leaders say it will take more than strong debates for their nominee to alter a race that appears to be leaning in Clinton's favor. While Trump publicly maintains support from numerous high-ranking GOP officials, a striking number of discussions among Republicans in Washington often begin with an assumption that Clinton will be president come January.
+
+Trump advisers vigorously dispute that the race has slipped from their grasp. They contend most Americans are just now tuning into the presidential campaign in a serious way.
+
+""We're very much on schedule to do what we need to do to turn out the vote for Mr. Trump,"" said Bob Paduchik, Trump's Ohio state director and one of the most experienced operatives on the Republican's staff. Paduchik said Trump's efforts heading into the fall are focused primarily on rallying ""disaffected Democrats and independents.""
+
+Clinton's campaign has long argued that Trump is overestimating the number of voters willing to switch from voting Democratic in presidential election to Republican. But Clinton aides are monitoring movement toward a pair of third party candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party's Jill Stein.
+
+""There's no question you've got two candidates who are both underwater on their favorables right now,"" Joel Benenson, Clinton's chief strategist and pollster, said by way of explaining the appeal of Johnson and Stein. ""I think it's important as this gets closer that people understand the stakes and the importance of their vote.""
+
+Clinton and running mate Tim Kaine will have an all-star stable of Democrats making that case on their behalf through the fall.
+
+President Barack Obama is expected to spend much of October campaigning for Clinton, focusing in particular on increasing turnout among young people, blacks and college-educated whites. Vice President Joe Biden will camp out in working class areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton's vanquished primary rival, will be rallying the young voters and liberals who backed his campaign.
+
+Trump will be largely on his own, with the exception of running mate Mike Pence and a few loyal supporters such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In the battle for control of the Senate, most Republicans in competitive races have stayed away from Trump.
+
+Democrats now see a clear path to taking back control of the Senate, with party leaders identifying Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as favorable opportunities to pick up seats. Democrats are also confident that if Clinton wins in some of the most contested state such as New Hampshire, North Carolina and Nevada, she'll bring along the party's Senate candidates.
+
+There are bright spots for Republicans in the Senate contests. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio is running a campaign that mirrors Clinton's more than Trump's — disciplined, well-funded, and heavily centered on data — and appears on track to hold his seat, even if Clinton carries the state in the presidential race.",REAL
+9971,"Podesta Part 18: Wikileaks Releases Another 1,300 Emails; Total Is Now 31,500","Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
+Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
+Privacy Policy 
+By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
+Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
+1315,What you need to know about the New Hampshire primary,"Voting started in the wee hours of Tuesday in New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary.
+
+In Dixville Notch, residents did their traditional first voting just after midnight, bringing smiles to the faces of Bernie Sanders and John Kasich.
+
+Sanders swept Hillary Clinton in Dixville Notch, 4-0, while Kasich topped Donald Trump, 3 votes to 2.
+
+In nearby Millsfield, Ted Cruz won the Republican vote over Trump, 9-3. Several other candidates got one vote apiece. Clinton beat Sanders, 2 votes to 1.
+
+In Hart’s Location, population 43, Kasich bested Trump again, 5 votes to 4, with Chris Christie gathering 2 votes. Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, and Marco Rubio got one vote each. Sanders edged Clinton, 12 votes to 7. Mark Stewart Greenstein, who calls himself a “liberty-leaning Democrat,” got 2 votes, the Union Leader reported.
+
+But the real deal starts as polls across the state open later Tuesday morning, and New Hampshire has a record of making history in its primaries. Here's what to watch for:
+
+Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have both been leading in the New Hampshire polls by double-digit margins for months. They both crushed it in a statewide poll of 11,000 K-12 students in the state last week. If either one of them loses the New Hampshire primary, it will be the equivalent of a political earthquake. So the real eyes are on the second-place finishers, and in the Republican race, perhaps third. On the Democratic side, if Hillary Clinton can get Sanders' margin of victory down below 10%, she can claim some success in challenging Sanders on his home turf (he's from neighboring Vermont). On the Republican side, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Jeb Bush have all averaged between 10% and 15% in the polls. If one of them can break away from the pack and finish more than 5% (or so) ahead of the rest of the field, it will give them the opportunity to claim to be the standard-bearer for the ""Not Trump"" lane of the party.
+
+If Sanders and Trump do not win by large margins, prepare for a bunch of hand-wringing from pollsters, who are already under fire for unanimously failing to predict Ted Cruz's Iowa victory last week. There are a lot of good reasons to be skeptical of the polls — there are a lot of candidates in the GOP field so it is hard to narrow down the level of support among them; New Hampshire voters notoriously make their decisions late in the race; and it can be very difficult to predict turnout for non-traditional candidates like Trump and Sanders. (Here's a good podcast by pollsters Margie Omero and Kristen Anderson breaking down the Iowa polls.)  Still, for months polls have been the only real measure of who is up and who is down in the presidential race; those of us who cover politics for a living would feel better if the polls turned out to be right.
+
+There are more registered independent voters in New Hampshire (390,000) than Democrats (231,000) and Republicans (262,000), and under state law any voter can walk into a polling pace and choose a primary ballot for any party. So independent voters will have a dramatic impact on the outcome, and watching how these voters align in New Hampshire might provide an interesting signal for which candidates could reach independents in November's general election.
+
+The New Hampshire secretary of state is predicting more than 550,000 people will vote in the primaries Tuesday, which would be historically high and good news for ""outsider"" candidates Trump and Sanders who draw a lot of support from new voters. Keep in mind that new Hampshire allows out-of-state college students to declare residency in the state and vote there, which is also good news for Sanders, who is doing very well among young voters. Weather should not be a significant factor: It snowed in much of the state Monday and more snow is forecast for Tuesday, but not enough to keep these hearty New Englanders at home.
+
+Most polls close in New Hampshire at 7 p.m. Eastern; the Iowa caucuses did not begin until 8 p.m. Eastern. So we should have meaningful results before the 11 p.m. news.
+
+Results were not yet compete in Iowa before the first candidate — former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee — dropped out of the Republican race, followed quickly former senator Rick Santorum and Sen. Rand Paul, and, on the Democratic side, former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley. Elections have results, and candidates who did poorly in Iowa like Kasich, Bush, Chris Christie, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina will have a hard time continuing their campaigns if New Hampshire gives them a second weak result.",REAL
+9235,"This smart, harmless pesticide patent could take down Monsanto and change the world","This smart, harmless pesticide patent could take down Monsanto and change the world 
+Wednesday, November 02, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes Tags: mushrooms , Monsanto , pesticides (NaturalNews) Is bio-agriculture giant Monsanto, king of genetically modified foods and seeds, about to suffer an irreversible decline while the planet Earth gets a huge chemical reprieve?Well, it may be a bit too early to declare the St. Louis-based corporation dead in the water, but that day may soon be upon us, thanks to a nifty new pesticide patent that would make BioAg chemicals unnecessary.As reported by the website Anonymous , one man who has dedicated his life to the study of mushrooms may have just stumbled upon the one invention that will dramatically change the way we protect food crops from voracious pests.Paul Stamets has unearthed medical cure after cure, and he says the key to saving the planet can be found in the mushroom.Stamets, one of the world's leading mycologists – if not the top researcher of fungi – filed a patent in 2001 that has since been all but ignored. Why? Because most of his research has been viewed as hostile to conventional industries, including the pesticide industry. Anonymous notes that some executives of the pesticide industry have remarked that the patent he filed was the most disruptive they had ever seen. Kills pests naturally and with zero impact on the environment And indeed, a read of the patent reveals a remarkable claim.""The present invention relates to the use of fungal mycelium as a biopesticide. More particularly, the invention relates to the control and destruction of insects, including carpenter ants, fire ants, termites, flies, beetles, cockroaches and other pests, using fungal mycelia as both attractant and infectious agent,"" the patent says.In other words, fungus that can be present on crops will both attract destructive pests and then infect and kill them after they have eaten it. In his patent, Stamets claims that more than one fungus can be used in combination, can be dried or freeze-dried, then packaged and reactivated for use ""as an effective bioinsecticide.""No more chemicals. No more spraying. No more need for Monsanto's chemical-first approach to growing our food.In his patent Stamets noted that the widespread use of chemical pesticides is a primary cause of a number of secondary environmental problems that occur besides the death of targeted pests. They include soil poisoning, the toxifying of underlying water tables and aquifers, as well as the pollution of surface water due to runoff.In addition, they lead to increases in cancer, allergies, neurological diseases, immune disorders Even the deaths of some agricultural workers and consumers have been linked to the use of chemical pesticides.Increasingly regulated and even banned in some countries, chemical pesticides like Monsanto's Roundup, with the cancer-causing primary ingredient glyphosate , have become so dangerous that many communities are scrambling for natural solutions to pest problems. Who knew mushrooms could be so lethal to pests? This guy did ""Compounding these problems, many pest type or vermin insects have developed a broad spectrum of resistance to chemical pesticides, resulting in few commercially available pesticides that are effective without thorough and repeated applications,"" the patent says. ""In addition to being largely ineffective and difficult and costly to apply, chemical pesticides present the further disadvantage of detrimental effects on non-target species, resulting in secondary pest outbreaks.""But his invention, he wrote, offers the agriculture industry an ""environmentally benign"" alternative to insect control by working to attract insects that latent preconidial mycelium that is fresh, dried or freeze-dried, that later infects and kills the host.Infected insects will then carry the fungal hyphae back to the central colony, then disperse the fungal pathogen even further.In essence, he wrote, fungal mycelium is both a bait/attractant as well as a food insecticide, and all without harming one thing in the environment.It's a harmless pesticide that works without genetically modifying our food, poisoning our earth and filling humans with toxins. Using just mushrooms.Now – who will step up and market it? You can bet it won't be Monsanto. Sources:",FAKE
+3963,NATO and Putin: Downed Russian bomber is big threat,"Washington (CNN) The cool, calm, clear thinking that kept the NATO alliance intact as it weathered the Cold War with the Soviet Union has been shattered.
+
+Decades of careful diplomacy and nail-biting inaction during the potentially world-annihilating nuclear arms race of the 1950s, 60s and 70s appears to have been sacrificed in a few brief seconds by Turkey.
+
+During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the deployment of nuclear weapons in western Europe in the 1980s and many other causes of strife, NATO did not take on the Soviet Union or Russia directly and Moscow did not attack any NATO country.
+
+Heavy smoke has been seen in the area where the plane fell.
+
+Heavy smoke has been seen in the area where the plane fell.
+
+The Turkish government is strongly opposed to the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. Russia, however, has backed Assad, and has had warplanes active over Syria.
+
+The Turkish government is strongly opposed to the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. Russia, however, has backed Assad, and has had warplanes active over Syria.
+
+The Anadolu Agency reported that a parachute was also seen leaving the jet before it crashed. The fate of the airman remains unclear.
+
+The Anadolu Agency reported that a parachute was also seen leaving the jet before it crashed. The fate of the airman remains unclear.
+
+Turkey's semi-official Anadolu Agency cites Turkish presidential sources in reporting that a Russian SU-24 was ""hit within the framework of engagement rules.""
+
+Turkey's semi-official Anadolu Agency cites Turkish presidential sources in reporting that a Russian SU-24 was ""hit within the framework of engagement rules.""
+
+The Turkish military says it shot down the unidentified warplane, contending it repeatedly violated Turkish airspace.
+
+The Turkish military says it shot down the unidentified warplane, contending it repeatedly violated Turkish airspace.
+
+A Russian warplane goes down in Syria's Bayirbucak region, near the Turkish border, on November 24, 2015.
+
+A Russian warplane goes down in Syria's Bayirbucak region, near the Turkish border, on November 24, 2015.
+
+That all changed when Turkish air force jets shot down a Russian bomber Tuesday -- the first time a NATO country has taken such action since 1952.
+
+Back then NATO -- a military alliance formed after World War II by countries in North America and Western Europe that now has 28 member states committed to defending each other -- stood firmly as one.
+
+""As we have repeatedly made clear, we stand in solidarity with Turkey and support the territorial integrity of our NATO ally, Turkey,"" he said.
+
+But, already, German and Czech officials are expressing surprise at Turkey's action -- taken after the Russian plane was inside Turkish airspace for 30 seconds or less, according to U.S. calculations.
+
+Perhaps that seemed more possible this week, with both France and Russia mourning losses from ISIS terror and when they were collectively trading their national tragedies for compromises to find a solution in Syria.
+
+And Erdogan has squandered it.
+
+The downing of the Russian jet smacks of what Erdogan's enemies accuse him of -- of aspirations to resurrect the Ottoman Empire -- and leaves him open to claims he is too soft on radical Islamists. Putin has gone further -- saying that Erdogan, the head of state of a NATO member, is siding with the terrorists.
+
+And that's why -- at first analysis -- this looks like a disaster, beyond the loss of life of one pilot and a would-be rescuer.
+
+It may also be a gain for Putin.
+
+For all those years he has was trying to undermine NATO unity, Erdogan's hasty move has handed it to him on a plate.
+
+We may learn what led up to the strike, but the deed is done.
+
+Erdogan's NATO partners can now only look at him as a loose cannon, an unstable element in a very combustible situation. Not a steady partner capable of calm nerve that saw the alliance last the Cold War. Erdogan has thrown the whole card table in the air.
+
+In Turkey, as internationally, Erdogan has a history of pushing his own agenda, whether it's against the tide or not.
+
+There's almost no freedom of the press there -- just ask the journalists locked up while covering the recent elections, in which Erdogan's party did surprisingly well after a summer poll flop.
+
+Conflict with Kurdish people inside and outside Turkey continues. Turkey took no action against ISIS for a year and a half as the group advanced across the border in northern Syria.
+
+Even as the United States sees Kurdish fighting groups as a hope to beat ISIS, Turkey continues to attack them. To many in Turkey, the prospect of an independent state for the Kurds is seen as a greater threat than the religious extremism of ISIS. To much domestic acclaim, Erdogan has moved Turkey away from its secular past and resurrected Islamism in Turkish politics.
+
+Indeed, Erdogan appears to pin hopes on the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood of Syria to thwart real radicals, but he could be getting played.
+
+And then there's taking on Russia, which is also nominally targeting the common enemy of ISIS.
+
+Putin may have dirty hands -- but so does Erdogan.",REAL
+6375,Assange claims ‘crazed’ Clinton campaign tried to hack WikiLeaks,"Assange claims ‘crazed’ Clinton campaign tried to hack WikiLeaks The whistleblowing website has been releasing emails from Clinton’s campaign chair RT - October 27, 2016 Comments 
+Julian Assange has claimed the Hillary Clinton campaign has attacked the servers being used by WikiLeaks. 
+Despite the Ecuadorian embassy shutting down his internet until the US election is over, the website will continue publishing, according to Assange. 
+“Everyday that you publish is a day that you have the initiative in the conflict,” Assange said via telephone at a conference in Argentina on Wednesday. 
+The whistleblowing website has been releasing emails from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, on a daily basis since early October. 
+Assange claimed the release “whipped up a crazed hornet’s nest atmosphere in the Hillary Clinton campaign” leading them to attack WikiLeaks. 
+“ They attacked our servers and attempted hacking attacks and there is an amazing ongoing campaign where state documents were put in the UN and British courts to accuse me of being both a Russian spy and a pedophile,” he added. 
+Ecuador’s decision to shut down his internet was described by Assange as a “strategic position” so that its “policy of non-intervention can’t be misinterpreted by actors in the US and even domestically in Ecuador.” 
+He said he was sympathetic with Ecuador, insisting they face the dilemma of having the US interfere with their elections next year if they appear to interfere with the US elections next month. 
+Assange, who claimed the embassy will be without internet until the election is over to avoid accusations of interference, said he did not agree with Ecuador’s decision but did understand it. WikiLeaks will not be affected by the decision as they do not publish from Ecuador, he said. 
+He did, however, reject the idea that WikiLeaks is interfering with the US election, claiming, “this is not the interference of electoral process, this is the definition of electoral process – for media organizations and, in fact, everyone to publish the truth and their opinion about what is occurring. It cannot be a free and informed election unless people are free to inform.” 
+He also attacked US TV networks, many of whom he accused of being “controlled by Clinton supporters.” 
+The Podesta emails will make no difference to the election result, according to Assange. “I don’t think there’s any chance of Donald Trump winning the election, even with the amazing material we are publishing, because most of the media organizations are strongly aligned with Hillary Clinton,” he said. 
+Assange said journalists and people who work in the media are predominantly middle class and view Trump as representing “what in their mind is white trash.” NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+9704,The most durably Democratic county in the country could go for Trump,"Print 
+In 2012, voters in Elliott County, Kentucky, came close to breaking a streak that, at the time, had lasted 136 years. Elliott County was formed in 1869, and since its first presidential election, in 1872, it had voted for the Democratic nominee every time — the longest span of any U.S. county. 
+President Obama — like the previous Democratic candidates for president — won Elliott County in 2012 , extending its streak. But the margin by which he won — 2.5 percentage points — made it, by far, the closest presidential election the county had ever seen, and the first time the Democratic share of the vote fell below 50 percent. 
+Will 2016 be the end of the streak? Demographically, Elliott County looks like the kind of place where Donald Trump could do well.",FAKE
+6994,Donald Trump a KGB Spy?,"Donald Trump a KGB Spy? 11/02/2016 In today’s video, Christopher Greene of AMTV reports Hillary Clinton campaign accusation that Donald Trump is a KGB spy is about as weak and baseless a claim as a Salem witch hunt or McCarthy era trial. It’s only because Hillary Clinton is losing that she is lobbing conspiracy theory. Citizen Quasar 
+The way I see it, one of two things will happen: 
+1. Trump will win by a landslide but the election will be stolen via electronic voting, just like I have been predicting for over a decade, and the American People will accept the skewed election results just like they accept the TSA into their crotches. 
+2. Somebody will bust a cap in Hillary’s @$$ killing her and the election will be postponed. Follow AMTV!",FAKE
+1366,Rand Paul Drops Out Of White House Race,"Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is suspending his campaign for president after a disappointing finish in Iowa, turning his focus now to his Senate re-election bid.
+
+""Across the country thousands upon thousands of young people flocked to our message of limited government, privacy, criminal justice reform and a reasonable foreign policy. Brushfires of Liberty were ignited, and those will carry on, as will I,"" the Republican said in a statement.
+
+""Although, today I will suspend my campaign for President, the fight is far from over,"" he continued. ""I will continue to carry the torch for Liberty in the United States Senate and I look forward to earning the privilege to represent the people of Kentucky for another term.""
+
+The libertarian-leaning senator finished a distant fifth in the Hawkeye State on Monday evening, unable to replicate the strong coalition that his father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, had built there four years ago.
+
+His prospects were similarly bleak both in national polling and in New Hampshire, which is up next Tuesday. Left off the main debate stage last month for his poor standing in surveys (he instead boycotted the so-called undercard debate), Paul faced being passed over again at Saturday's GOP debate.
+
+His end-of-the-year campaign finance report showed a depleted bank account, too, with just $1.3 million remaining.
+
+And Paul, unlike his rivals, had another campaign he was running simultaneously to worry about — his Senate re-election bid. Though the first-term senator starts with the advantage in the GOP-leaning state, he drew a strong Democratic challenger last month in Lexington Mayor Jim Gray.
+
+Paul had to jump through hoops just to be able to run for both Senate and president at the same time. Last year he persuaded the state party to hold a March caucus instead of a May primary so he could legally be on both ballots. That political insurance policy he won't need anymore was costly — he had promised he would pay for the change, which could be upwards of $500,000.",REAL
+6681,West covering up crimes of Bahraini regime: Analyst,"Interviews A protester throws a glass bottle containing paint at a police armored personnel carrier during anti-regime demos in the village of Sitra, south of Manama, February 14, 2016. (Photo by Reuters) 
+The Fourth High Criminal Court of Bahrain has sentenced 15 political opponents to long jail terms and also revoked the citizenship of all of them. While several international rights groups have criticized the Al Khalifa regime’s harsh crackdown on the Bahraini opposition, the Western powers turn a blind eye to the Arab state’s violations of human rights. 
+Edward Corrigan, an international human rights lawyer, told Press TV’s Top 5 program that the Western powers are trying to whitewash the crimes committed by the Arab dictatorships in the Persian Gulf region because such regimes are considered the West’s “lap dogs.” 
+“There is a double standard,” Corrigan said, explaining that Western powers say, “‘If you are a friend of ours and do what we want and give us oil and invest your money into European or American economy, we won’t question your human rights violations.’” 
+According to the analyst, “There is hypocrisy, double standards and this is really a big political game. Our dictatorships and allies are OK but somebody else that we don’t like for whatever reason, we magnify their crimes and even create false flags and do other things to try to discredit them.” 
+Elsewhere in his remarks, Corrigan said the definition of terrorism in Bahrain covers any kind of opposition, because the regime does “not want to allow any sort of political movements there to try to reform the system, to redress this massive discrimination against the Shia population, and to have any sort of voice for democracy; so, all of that is ‘terrorism.’” 
+He added, “It is against the international law to remove people’s nationality from them and this is an extreme sort of punishment, very draconian, as they’re condemned by the international human rights organizations and other organizations.” 
+Manama has been cracking down on dissent since February 2011, when an uprising began against the regime. Scores of people have lost their lives and hundreds of others sustained injuries or got arrested as a result of Al Khalifah regime’s harsh crackdown on anti-regime activists. Loading ...",FAKE
+7668,"No, Mexico Doesn’t Have A Wall On Its Southern Border—But If Trump Wins It Might Build One","They're not crossing the Rio Grande, they're invading Mexico from the south. < No, Mexico Doesn’t Have A Wall On Its Southern Border—But If Trump Wins It Might Build One > November 6, 2016, 10:55 pm   
+Many people say Mexico has a wall on its southern border. It doesn’t . It should. And if it did, we Americans wouldn’t have to deal with all the Central Americans coming to our own border. It would be better for both our nations . 
+Some outlets are reporting Mexico is going to build a wall against migrants. [ Mexico builds its own wall against migrants , by James Fredrick and Jude Webber, Financial Times, September 14, 2016]. (The article is paywalled, but you can access it here ). 
+But the title is misleading. It’s not a literal wall, but a metaphorical “wall,” and not even an effective one. 
+The piece takes the view of a Central American planning to come to the United States and claims “Mexico already acts as a formidable barrier.” It also quotes a nun who runs a shelter for illegals in Mexico City . She moans: “Mexico has become a wall for migrants. The current [Mexican] policy is to arrest migrants to stop them from getting to the US border.” 
+Thus, the term “wall” is a metaphor for “some Central Americans get caught in Mexico and deported back to Central America.” Not very impressive. 
+The Mexican policy for dealing with its own illegals is a hodgepodge. Though Mexico doesn’t have walls on its borders with Guatemala and Belize, Mexican authorities do detain and deport illegal aliens . And the American government has reportedly put pressure on Mexico to do more. Nonetheless, plenty are still getting through. According to the article, Mexico deported a record 175,000 Central Americans last year, but the United Nations estimates 400,000 enter Mexico annually. 
+There is a pre-election “surge” of illegals on the U.S.-Mexican border, as migrants want to get in now regardless of who wins. If Hillary wins, they expect amnesty. If Trump wins, they expect The Wall . Illegal immigrants surging to US-Mexico border in race against #ElectionDay . https://t.co/VwFlS1BNRW pic.twitter.com/0OeeKvljLT 
+— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) November 4, 2016 
+We’ve been told for some time now there is zero net Mexican immigration to the United States [ More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to U.S., by Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Pew, November 19, 2015] But this misses the point. Illegals coming across the southern border are coming from Mexico. As Mexico can’t or won’t stop them, we need a barrier on our border with Mexico. 
+Which brings us to another question. If Trump wins the election and builds The Wall, the Mexican government may be stuck with Central Americans who can’t continue north to the U.S. And they really don’t want that. 
+In 2012, after the election of current Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto but before his inauguration, his coordinator Arnulfo Valdivia discussed the new administration’s goal in this area. The new Mexican president wanted “to create the necessary filters so that those who cross by the southern border [of Mexico] do not stay stranded in their attempt to cross to the United States. “Valdivia also said a goal was to “diminish the number of indocumentados [illegal aliens] who are concentrated on the northern border [of Mexico] without possibilities of crossing it, forming belts of poverty [in Mexico].”[ Peña quiere `patrulla fronteriza` mexicana , by Miriam Castillo, Milenio , October 9th, 2012] 
+In other words, if they cross Mexico and get to the United States, we don’t care, as long as they don’t stay in Mexico. And Mexico admits these illegals bring poverty. Indeed, Mexican authorities are quite cynical about this. A new report indicates the Mexican government is granting Haitians 20-day transit documents to reach the U.S. border, resulting in a 1,800% in illegal Haitians c rossing the border in 2016. As Duncan Hunter’s chief of staff Joe Kasper said, “Mexico doesn’t want them, but it’s entirely content with putting migrants—in this case Haitians—right on America’s doorstep.” [ DHS Documents Reveal How Mexico Is Helping Haitians Reach the U.S. Illegally , Numbers USA, October 11, 2016]. Remember this the next time somebody claims Mexico is our partner in securing the border. 
+But a President Trump who, like the Israelis, shuts down illegal immigration would force Mexico to build a border barrier if they don’t want to be flooded by Central Americans. This is no easy task, given the geographical situation. Mexico’s border with Guatemala alone is 541 miles long—about a quarter the length of the U.S.-Mexican border. It’s sparsely populated and crosses forested regions, rivers, lakes, farmland, pasture, valleys and mountains, some of which are in the 13,000 feet above sea level range. 
+But where there’s a will there’s a way. Some form of effective fencing could be done depending on the particular ecosystem, by utilizing natural barriers (such as mountains, rivers and valleys) as part of an overall border security plan. 
+And it’s already being suggested in the Mexican press. A bold editorial in Mañana , a newspaper from the Mexican border city of Reynosa, openly calls for a border wall with Central America Sí al muro fronterizo…Pero en el sur de México [“Yes to the Border Wall…But in the South of Mexico,” July 24, 2016]. It argues Mexico’s borders with Guatemala and Belize “only give us problems because these crossings are utilized for a new invasion, that of Central Americans who utilize our country to cross to the United States”. That’s very provocative language, using the term invasion ( invasión in Spanish). 
+The editorial also claims Central Americans are deported from the U.S. back to Mexico, even if they’re Central Americans and not Mexicans. The greatest number are supposedly deported to Reynosa, where they wait to try to enter America again. But while they wait, “Many of these migrants, not finding an honest way of earning a living, dedicate themselves to crime, resorting to assault, kidnapping and extortion, and in the worst of cases joining organized crime gangs.” 
+This Mexican editorial says deported Central American illegals commit crimes in Mexico! What intolerance! It might as well have been written by Trump! 
+Indeed, the editorial blames Central American illegals for much of the lawlessness of the border region: “Peace and tranquility have ended on the Mexican border and much of that has been due to the Central Americans who are deported from the U.S., backed up with false documents, who stay in Mexican territory.” 
+The editorial proposes a solution. “Trump’s idea [of a wall] is good [!], but more necessary than constructing a wall on the northern border of Mexico is to make one on the south/southeast border to stop the passage of Central Americans to both countries.” Furthermore, the Mexican government should also demand “migratory documents for the foreigners who enter our country.” 
+Though this editorial advocates a wall on Mexico’s southern border, not the American southern border, there’s no reason we can’t do both. And it’s unlikely the first will happen unless preceded by the second. 
+The editors of this paper have guts and are true Mexican patriots. But in order to help Mexican patriots, we need an American patriot in charge of our own country. 
+American citizen Allan Wall ( him) moved back to the U.S.A. in 2008 after many years residing in Mexico. Allan`s wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here ; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here ; his News With Views columns are archived here ; and his website is here .",FAKE
+5143,Donald Trump's run: He was just the man he was waiting for,"Before he decided to run for office, Trump’s political donations were a cost of doing business, suggesting that his practice of politics was transactional, not ideological. He hosted fundraisers and invited politicians to weddings. “I give to everybody. When they call, I give,” Trump said. “And you know what? When I need something from them — two years later, three years later — I call them. They are there for me.”
+
+Trump and his major companies gave at least $3.1 million to local, state and federal candidates from both parties between 1995 and 2016, not including donations that may have flowed through the scores of limited-liability corporations that Trump controlled.
+
+He donated to Hillary Clinton when she was running to be a U.S. senator from New York. Asked if he voted for her, Trump said: “I never say who I’m going to vote for.” He did say in a separate interview, however, that his votes for president were consistently Republican. Although he said he lost respect for the younger President Bush because of his handling of the war in Iraq, which he later called a “disaster,” he said he voted for Bush again in 2004 because he felt it was important to “carry the Republican line.” Recalling the 2004 vote, Trump said he showed his distance from Bush by not throwing fundraisers for him.
+
+Trump’s public statements sent mixed signals about his political leanings. In 2006, he told the New York Times that Sen. John McCain, who would become the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, could not win because he advocated sending more troops to Iraq. Trump praised the future Democratic nominee, then-Sen. Barack Obama, for his “wonderful qualities.” Nonetheless, Trump contributed $3,600 to McCain during the 2008 campaign and said he voted for him.
+
+Trump changed parties seven times between 1999 and 2012, starting when he left the GOP to consider a run under the Reform Party banner. After registering as a Democrat in 2001, he switched back to the Republicans in 2003. He became a Democrat again in 2005 and a Republican in 2009. He chose not to be affiliated with any party in 2011. Asked what he would say to critics who saw the constant party-switching as proof that he had no core beliefs, Trump responded: “I think it had to do more with practicality because if you’re going to run for office, you would have had to make friends.”
+
+Then he returned to the GOP in 2012, once again stoking speculation that he had his sights on the presidency.",REAL
+6755,"Episode #159 – SUNDAY WIRE: ‘Tick-Tock USA’ with guests Dr Marcus Papadopoulos, Basil Valentine","November 6, 2016 By 21wire Leave a Comment 
+Episode #159 of SUNDAY WIRE SHOW resumes this November 6, 2016 as host Patrick Henningsen brings a 3 HOURS special broadcast of LIVE power-packed talk radio on ACR… 
+LISTEN LIVE ON THIS PAGE AT THE FOLLOWING SCHEDULED SHOW TIMES: 
+SUNDAYS – 5pm-8pm UK Time | 12pm-3pm ET (US) | 9am-12pm PT (US) 
+This week’s edition of THE SUNDAY WIRE is on the road broadcasting LIVE from the Valley of the Sun. This week host Patrick Henningsen covers this week’s top stories in the US and internationally. In the first hour we’re joined by a very special guest, Dr Marcus Papadopoulos , founder & editor of UK-based publication Politics First to discuss the US Elections and an evaluation of Trump vs Clinton from an international and foreign policy perspective looking at big bigs like US-NATO and Russian relations as well as the Syrian situation, as well as get his take on the spiralling BREXIT issue currently gripping Great Britain. In the final hour of overdrive, we’ll be rejoined by our esoteric bookmaker, Basil Valentine, for final thoughts on the US Elections, new odds, more voter fraud reports, and and time permitting, some more fun with the #HillaryBettingPool . 
+SUPPORT 21WIRE – SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV 
+Strap yourselves in and lower the blast shield – this is your brave new world… 
+*NOTE: THIS EPISODE MAY CONTAIN STRONG LANGUAGE AND MATURE THEMES* ",FAKE
+6117,"Trump Haters Mow Down Signs, “Black Women for Trump” Make Them Famous","A Twitter page known as Black Women for Trump shared pictures of the result of the ingenious trap, and it is simply hilarious. Guys, we got one! pic.twitter.com/2hZUVxyP8K 
+— Black Women 4 Trump (@TallahForTrump) October 28, 2016 
+The pictures showed the row of downed Trump signs as well as a closeup of the specially designed trap on the first sign in the line.   
+The final picture was of the likely suspects pulled over a short distance away, car jacked up for a tire change. 
+This is probably not the wisest thing an American voter could do to show support for Donald Trump, but it’s hard to argue that the woman who chose to drive over the signs in an effort to destroy them didn’t get exactly what she deserved. 
+Hopefully this will teach a valuable lesson to this woman and other Trump haters out there that other people’s property is best left alone.",FAKE
+4791,AP FACT CHECK: Claims in the VP debate,"Not all the claims in the vice presidential debate stand up to scrutiny. A look at some of them and how they compare with the facts:
+
+REPUBLICAN MIKE PENCE: ""The fact that under this past administration, we've almost doubled the national debt is atrocious.... Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine want more of the same.""
+
+THE FACTS: As a share of the total U.S. economy, the national debt has gone up 35 percent; not a doubling.
+
+Still, the debt has ballooned to $19.6 trillion. This largely reflected efforts by the Obama administration to stop the Great Recession.
+
+Would Clinton similarly increase the debt? Not according to an analysis by the independent Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
+
+The Clinton plan with its tax increases would increase the gross debt -- both privately and publicly held-- by $450 billion over 10 years. Mind you, that is on top of an $8.8 trillion increase already projected by the government under current law.
+
+As for Donald Trump, the committee says his tax-cut-heavy plan would increase the gross debt by $4.3 trillion --nearly 10 times more than Clinton's plan would do.
+
+DEMOCRAT TIM KAINE, on fighting the Islamic State: ""Donald Trump doesn't have a plan.""
+
+THE FACTS: Clinton also doesn't have a plan that is materially different than what President Barack Obama is already doing.
+
+She's described a three-part strategy that involves crushing IS ""on its home turf"" in the Middle East, disrupting its infrastructure on the ground and online, and protecting America and its allies. All are current elements of the Obama administration's strategy, so it's not clear what would change or if she would accelerate any portions of it.
+
+It's also the case that Trump has not laid out a clear plan.
+
+PENCE, calling Clinton the ""architect of the Obama administration's foreign policy,"" says the crisis in Syria was the result of a ""failed and weak foreign policy that Hillary Clinton helped lead.""
+
+THE FACTS: Clinton, as secretary of state, actually pushed for increased U.S. intervention after Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against rebels. But Obama is the commander in chief and nothing has swayed him thus far. Whatever her failings might be on foreign policy, it's a stretch to accuse her of helping to lead a weak policy on Syria.
+
+PENCE: ""We've seen an economy stifled by more taxes, more regulation, a war on coal.""
+
+THE FACTS: The coal industry's woes don't come solely from onerous federal regulations. Pence omitted the effects of steep competition from cheap natural gas.
+
+A string of major coal companies have filed for bankruptcy in recent years, including Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources and Peabody Energy. Layoffs and cutbacks have spread economic suffering through coal country in the Appalachians and Wyoming's Powder River Basin. By contrast, these are boom times for natural gas extraction, mostly due to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
+
+Still, the Obama administration has implemented rules that aren't making the coal industry's life any easier. Obama last year imposed a rule requiring coal-fired power plants to cut their carbon emissions as part of his effort to combat climate change. The rule has been suspended pending a legal challenge. Obama also has halted new coal leases on federal lands until it completes a comprehensive review.
+
+PENCE, saying he's proud that ""the state of Indiana has balanced budgets.""
+
+THE FACTS: True, but that's not exactly to his credit as governor of Indiana. A balanced budget is required by law, as it is in every state except Vermont.",REAL
+8650,Why You Should Drink Carrot Juice Daily? How to Make Your Own?,"2 cups carrots, roughly chopped 1 tbsp fresh lemon juice 1 tsp fresh ginger, peeled 3⁄4 cup ice cubes 
+Directions: 
+Add all ingredients and blend it. 
+Enjoy. Health Benefits of Drinking Carrot Juice Prevents Cancer 
+Eating antioxidant-rich foods helps in fighting against these free radicals and thereby preventing the possibilities of the development of cancerous cells. Studies reveal that carrots juice is great sources of Vitamin A, Vitamin C and Vitamin B, which collectively help in the fight against free radicals. Protects Brain Health 
+Carrots and carrot juice benefits brain health by helping to prevent against Alzheimer’s disease, improving memory, and defending against other types of cognitive decline. This is due to carrot’s ability to lower oxidative stress in the brain that can weaken nerve signaling capacity. Increases Metabolism 
+Phosphorous in carrot juice boosts the body’s metabolic rate, ensures optimal use of energy in the body, and decreases pain after a workout. Carrot juice contains a large amount of vitamin B complex, which helps in breaking down glucose, fat, and protein. It helps in building muscle and increasing metabolism, thus helping in weight loss. Cleanses The Liver 
+Carrot juice can cleanse and detoxifies the liver. The regular consumption of this tasty juice can help in releasing toxins from the liver. The bloodstream cannot rid the body of toxins and bile through the kidneys. They have to be ejected from the skin. Carrot juice aids this process and ensures that the harmful bile is removed from the body. Prevents Aging 
+The beta-carotenoid in carrots instantly turns into vitamin A once it enters the body. Therefore, drinking carrot juice can help in reducing cell degeneration, and it can also slow down the aging process. Control Cholesterol & Blood Sugar 
+Carrot juice works like a miracle in maintaining cholesterol and blood sugar levels, thanks to its potassium content. It is low in calories, and sugar content, and the essential vitamins and minerals present in it collectively work to prevent diabetes. Treats Macular Degeneration 
+Drinking carrot juice regularly can help elderly people avoid the risks of macular degeneration. Carrots are rich in beta-carotene, which splits itself via an enzymatic reaction that leads to the formation of provitamin A. Strengthens the Bones 
+The vitamin K present in carrot juice contributes in the protein building process of the body. Aside from that, it also supports the binding of calcium, that can result in faster healing, especially if you have broken bones. 
+Sources:",FAKE
+680,"Ugly, bloody scenes in San Jose as protesters attack Trump supporters outside rally","SAN JOSE, Calif. —Protests outside a Donald Trump rally in downtown San Jose spun out of control Thursday night when some demonstrators attacked the candidate’s supporters.
+
+Protesters jumped on cars, pelted Trump supporters with eggs and water balloons, snatched signs and stole “Make America Great” hats off supporters’ heads before burning the hats and snapping selfies with the charred remains.
+
+Several people were caught on camera punching Trump supporters. At least one attacker was arrested, according to CNN, although police did not release much information.
+
+“The San Jose Police Department made a few arrests tonight after the Donald Trump Rally,” police said in a statement. “As of this time, we do not have specific information on the arrests made. There has been no significant property damage reported. One officer was assaulted.”
+
+In one video circulating widely on social media, two protesters tried to protect a Trump supporter as other protesters attacked him and called him names.
+
+Another video captured a female Trump supporter taunting protesters before being surrounded and struck in the face with an egg and water balloons.
+
+Police eventually cleared the protest, which they called an “unlawful assembly.”
+
+The incidents were the latest in a series of increasingly violent altercations between protesters, Trump supporters and police at the presumptive Republican nominee’s campaign events. A week ago, it was Albuquerque descending into chaos as the city was shaken by raucous riots and arrests outside a Trump rally. A month earlier it was Costa Mesa, Calif.
+
+Thursday was San Jose’s turn to take center stage in what is quickly becoming a traveling fiasco.
+
+Before the event, the San Jose Police Department issued a press release saying it “recognizes and respects everyone’s right to express their First Amendment [rights], and we will do everything possible to ensure the event is safe for all attendees and surrounding neighborhoods.”
+
+As the night unfolded, however, it became clear that the chaos seen at Trump campaign stops across the country had found its way to San Jose.
+
+Trump supporters were surrounded and, in several cases, attacked as they left the rally.
+
+In one incident captured on camera, a Trump supporter was struck hard over the side of the head as he was walking away from a group of protesters. The attack left him with blood streaming down his head and onto his shirt.
+
+“I was walking out with a Trump sign and he grabbed my Trump sign, saying I was like a racist and stuff,” the man told bystanders and local media. “Then he followed me, like, spit on me.”
+
+The Trump supporter said all he had done was chant the candidate’s name before trying to walk away.
+
+Another Trump supporter was also bloodied after being attacked, his shirt torn almost completely off his body. Videos circulating on social media showed swirling, furious fights spilling from street corner to street corner, often with no police in sight.
+
+Marcus DiPaola, a freelance photographer following the Trump campaign, posted video of someone getting punched violently in the face.
+
+Reached by phone Thursday night, DiPaola said the sucker punch happened at 8:08 p.m. just outside the convention center where the Trump rally was held.
+
+“It wasn’t completely unprovoked,” he said. “The guy with the flag was waving it in front of the victim’s face. The victim kind of pushed the flag out of the way and then walked quickly away. You saw what happened next.”
+
+DiPaola said he called 911 but was put on hold and so hung up. He said he told one police officer about the beating but was told SJPD “didn’t have the manpower” to intervene.
+
+“Morons,” he said. “How do you not staff 911 for an event of this size?”
+
+DiPaola wasn’t the only journalist to condemn the cops’ handling of the protest.
+
+Many of the protesters were peaceful. Some waved Mexican flags in an apparent response to Trump calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.”
+
+According to the San Jose Mercury News, many of the protesters were Latinos from East San Jose opposed to what they saw as racism from the GOP candidate.
+
+“We’re here to support Latinos, black people; we’re not rapists,” Cindy Zurita, a 23-year-old student, told the Mercury News as she held a sign reading: “Mr Hate leave my state.”
+
+ABC reporter Tom Llamas, however, said that some of the protesters were “throwing up gang signs.”
+
+“There were [people] who came to demonstrate & some who just wanted to brawl,” he tweeted, calling it “the most violent demonstrations we’ve seen.”
+
+At times, protesters began to fight among themselves. In one instance, two female protesters pleaded for nonviolence while trying to protect a Trump supporter from an angry crowd. Despite their efforts, someone snatched the Trump supporter’s hat.
+
+A handful of the bright red “Make America Great Again” hats were set on fire by protesters, who then snapped photos of the scene or hung the charred hats from street signs.
+
+Some protesters said they were disappointed to see violence undermine their message.
+
+“It’s sad to see San Jose representing like this,” student Martha Garcia told the Guardian. “Trump is the one igniting the hate. You can’t fight fire with fire.”
+
+Perhaps the most jarring scene was that of a young female Trump supporter being attacked by a crowd of protesters.
+
+In multiple videos of the incident, the woman initially appeared to be happily posing in her Trump football jersey in front of the mostly male protesters, some of whom can be heard whistling and shouting at her.
+
+Then an anonymous arm rises over the crowd and tosses an egg at the woman, striking her in the head and eliciting howls and laughter from the crowd.
+
+A second later, a red water balloon bursts against the woman’s arm.
+
+At first, the woman tries to shrug off the attacks, smiling while appearing to reach out toward the Mexican flags that some protesters are waving.
+
+Objects keep crashing into the convention center windows behind her, however, and protesters can be heard screaming expletives at her.
+
+Suddenly, another projectile strikes her hard in the face. Eventually, someone comes to help her and, after she indicates that she is having trouble seeing, she is ushered back inside the convention center.
+
+The ugly scenes of violence toward Trump supporters Thursday appeared to be the inverse of similar incidents earlier in the campaign in which Trump protesters, not supporters, were targeted.
+
+The sucker punch captured by DiPaola, for instance, echoed an incident in March when a 78-year-old Trump supporter sucker-punched a protester at a rally in Fayetteville, N.C.
+
+[Trump protester sucker-punched by supporter in brutal video of Tucson rally]
+
+Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns both condemned the violence in San Jose. John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton for America, tweeted that “violence against supporters of any candidate has no place in this election.”
+
+Mike Casca, Sanders’s rapid response director, tweeted that “we cannot stop Trump’s violent rhetoric with violence — only peaceful protest in a voting booth can do that.”
+
+Blame for the attacks circulated almost as rapidly as images of the violence, with Trump supporters accusing Democrats and members of the media of having a double standard.
+
+Many liberals, meanwhile, including the Democratic mayor of San Jose, suggested that Trump’s angry and divisive rhetoric made him at least partly responsible for the violence at his events.
+
+“At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign,” Mayor Sam Liccardo told the Associated Press, praising the city’s police while adding that “we’re all still holding our breath to see the outcome of this dangerous and explosive situation.”
+
+Things inside the rally were more subdued — if only slightly.
+
+Politico reported that one of its journalists was removed from the rally for reporting at the event without the campaign’s permission.
+
+Trump, meanwhile, was interrupted a handful of times by protesters.
+
+Responding to Clinton’s blistering attack on him earlier in the day, Trump attacked her over her email controversy, going so far as to say “Hillary Clinton has to go to jail.”
+
+“She does not look presidential — that I can tell you,” he said, according to Bloomberg. “This is not a president. Four more years of this stuff and we’re not going to have a country left.”",REAL
+9703,PrankGate? Patriots' Gostkowski Terrorizing NFL Via Prank Calls,"Friday, 4 November 2016 
+First there was SpyGate, then there was DeflateGate, and now… PrankGate? 
+It's common knowledge amongst NFL fans that the New England Patriots seek out innovative and creative ways to gain a competitive advantage - often blurring the line between gamesmanship .and rule-breaking. We've all heard the rumors of helmet radio interference, or fire alarms sounding late at night in visiting teams' hotel rooms, or that Peyton Manning himself refused to ever speak aloud in the locker room at Foxborough. But now it is alleged that over the past decade, members of the Patriots' special teams unit have placed thousands of elaborate prank calls to opposing players and coaches in hopes of disturbing them mentally and emotionally. 
+Speaking anonymously, a former special teams assistant named 4-time Pro Bowl kicker Stephen Gostkowski as the ringleader of the operation: 
+""The plan was to pose as solicitors, family members, or even romantic partners"" 
+According to our source, Gostkowski makes the majority of the calls himself, and finds considerable pleasure in hoodwinking his opponents. 
+""He refers to himself as Stephen Gotcha-kowski,"" confessed the whistleblower, ""Stephen Gostkowski might be the best kicker in the world, but Stephen Gotcha-kowski is the greatest pranker on the planet. His words, not mine."" 
+""When Stephen arrived in 2006, Bill [Belichick] told the special teams guys to find busywork while the offense and defense were watching game film,"" recalls the ex-assistant. ""Stephen didn't even blink. He started dialing that day and never looked back. First we collected phone numbers of former Patriots and ex-teammates. Before the bye week, we had every number in the league."" 
+Gostkowski took his craft seriously. Our source claims he hired a team of assistants to perform hours of research to craft the perfect call to suit each victim. When a video surfaced of Rex Ryan fetishizing his wife's feet, Gostkowski brought his own wife in and jumped on the opportunity: 
+""He had his wife, Hallie, flirting with Rex three or four times a week. She was just as into the pranking as Stephen was. She made up a character for herself, bought a bunch of high heels, and would act out scenes while she was on the phone with him. Rex loved that girl. He was ready to put her in his will."" This prank may have backfired, however, by serving as motivation for Rex- the Jets beat the Patriots in the playoffs one month later. 
+Before the 2006 AFC Championship game, the shenanigans took a dark turn. Gostkowski called Colts head coach Tony Dungy, posing as a suicidal college student. 
+""That got intense,"" our source remembers. ""Coach Dungy was a sweetheart. They talked for hours and by the end of it, Steve was broken down in tears. I thought Dungy was wearing him down emotionally, but as soon as they hung up, he busted out laughing and got started on the next call. That one gave me the creeps."" 
+Again, Gostkowski's ploy failed. Despite the lack of sleep, Dungy's warm and motivational demeanor helped his Colts to defeat the Patriots on the way to a Super Bowl victory. 
+More than just a conniving prankster, Gostkowski also became a master impersonator. In 2010, he spent weeks honing a spot-on impression of 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh. Gostkowski studied his dialect, inflections, and even began mimicking the coach's movements and style of dress while at home. He then called Harbaugh's brother, Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, and slipped into character. 
+""Dude went balls out on that call,"" recounts the former assistant. ""He drank 2 cans of Red Bull and threatened to set John's house on fire."" With such a bold claim, one would think Harbaugh would catch on quickly, but that wasn't the case. ""John totally bought it, almost as if the threats came as no surprise to him."" Public records do indicate that police visited both brothers' homes on January 9, 2010, but it did not hinder the Ravens' performance as Harbaugh's squad thumped the Pats 33-14 in the Wild Card Playoff game the next day. 
+This method however did not deceive another famous pair of brothers. Gostkowski called Giants quarterback Eli Manning prior to the Patriots devastating Super Bowl XLII loss, this time posing as legendary quarterback, Peyton Manning. 
+""Eli was really smart about it,"" our source discloses. ""He was one of the first to catch on. He strung Steve along, discussing 'strategy' for a good 20 minutes or so. Then Eli started asking him personal questions with increasing specificity. Steve came prepared and nailed the stuff about Peyton's favorite sandwich and the suspicious spot on his [scrotum], but crumbled when Eli brought up a childhood story about a Manning family reunion that ended in tragedy. Gostkowski pretended to lose service and hung up the phone, but he was sweating bullets."" 
+After locking up the stunning upset, Manning made sure to catch up with Gostkowski on the field. ""Eli shook Steve's hand, brought him in close, and whispered 'I dropped the turd in the gumbo'. That really pissed him off."" 
+Just how many prank calls has Stephen Gotcha-kowski made over the years? ""I would say upwards of five thousand- that's just during practice. Who knows how much pranking he did in his spare time."" The source alleges that Gostkowski once convinced former Bengals head coach Jon Gruden to buy into a pyramid scheme, and even tricked friend and former teammate Wes Welker into believing he was suffering from schizophrenia. 
+""I could write a book on this guy,"" declared the assistant. When asked if he thinks the Pats' kicker is still making these types of calls: ""I would bet my kidney that he's still doing it, and I only have one kidney. Stephen can't live without pranking. He's got dossiers on every player in the league, plus guys scouting for dirt on college players. The guy has at least 20 burner phones at all times. I wouldn't doubt that he had a hand in [Browns wide receiver] Josh Gordon checking into rehab just before they played the Pats. That reeks of Gotcha-kowski influence."" 
+It remains to be seen if PrankGate will garner the same attention from mainstream news outlets as this team's previous scandals. Perhaps the league will be reluctant to pick at the Patriots' wounds so soon after an expensive and tiresome legal battle with Tom Brady. But if further evidence presents itself or more witnesses come forward, this story has the capacity to be the Pats' most shocking example of disregard for the spirit of the game. There are no specific rules in regards to making prank phone calls, but personal harassment of this magnitude is sure to violate the league's code of personal conduct policy. Who will get the last laugh in PrankGate? Probably Eli Manning. Make Hey Hey Nixon-Cox's  ",FAKE
+6486,Millions of South Koreans Rise Up Against Shadow Government,"Your News Wire 
+South Koreans are rising up in their millions and demanding the overthrow of their government after a series of leaks proved president Park Geun-hye is a puppet controlled by a covert shadow government. 
+In a furor eerily similar to that surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of an email server and charity slush fund, critics are charging that Park has irresponsibly managed classified information and benefited from corrupt practices using non-profits as a front. 
+The South Korean and U.S. comparisons stop there however. Rather than apathetically accepting the situation – like in America – South Koreans have risen up and the media has rounded on their leader. Citizens have taken to the streets en masse and the country’s media have called for the president to step down immediately – or face impeachment. 
+The essence of the scandal is this: It has emerged that Park, famously aloof even to top officials and aides, has been taking instructions from a group known as the “eight fairies” including Choi Soon-sil, a shadowy billionaire with ties to George Soros and Angela Merkel. Choi has existed around the edges of South Korean power circles for decades, but has never held an official position. Posters of the president being controlled by puppet strings are cropping up all over South Korea as country-wide protests continue to rage. Recommended (4 months ago) France: Protestors Rise Up In Their Millions Against Ruling Class 
+The Washington Post reports that “Calls for her resignation — and even impeachment — are resonating from across the political spectrum, and her approval ratings have dropped to a record low of 17 percent, according to two polls released Friday. 
+On Friday, Park directed all of her top advisers to resign en masse, with her spokesman saying a reshuffle would take place, the Yonhap news agency reported. Kim Jae-won, senior presidential secretary for political affairs, told a parliamentary session that Park’s chief of staff had already stepped down. 
+It’s not clear, however, whether it will be enough. 
+“Park Geun-hye’s leadership is on the brink of collapse,” said Yoo Chang-sun, a left-leaning political analyst. Shin Yool, a right-leaning professor at Myongji University, called it the “biggest crisis” since South Korea was founded 70 years ago. “The president has lost her ability to function as leader.” 
+Choi is the daughter of the late Choi Tae-min, who was a kind of shaman-fortune teller described in a 2007 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Seoul as “a charismatic pastor.” Locally, he’s seen as a “Korean Rasputin” who once held sway over Park after her mother was assassinated in 1974. 
+“Rumors are rife that the late pastor had complete control over Park’s body and soul during her formative years and that his children accumulated enormous wealth as a result,” read the cable, released by WikiLeaks. 
+Park has strongly denied any improper relationship. 
+But South Korean media have uncovered evidence that, they claim, shows that Choi Soon-sil wielded undue influence over the president. 
+JTBC, a television network, said it had found a tablet computer that contained files of speeches the president had yet to give, among other documents. The younger Choi is said to have edited the landmark speech that Park gave in Germany in 2014, laying out her vision for unification with the North. The Hankyoreh newspaper wrote that actual presidential aides “were just mice to Choi’s cat.” 
+She is also rumored to have created a secret group called “the eight fairies” to advise the president behind the scenes. 
+TV Chosun, the channel belonging to the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, aired a clip showing Choi overseeing the making of an outfit for Park, “raising doubt whether Park made any decision at all without Choi,” the paper said. 
+South Korean media have been full of Photoshopped graphics to illustrate the relationship, including one showing Park as a puppet and Choi Soon-sil pulling her strings. 
+Meanwhile, investigators are looking into allegations that Choi siphoned off money from two recently established foundations that collected about $70 million from the Federation of Korean Industries, the big business lobby with members including Samsung and Hyundai. Prosecutors raided Choi’s home in Seoul this week looking for evidence. 
+At the same time, there are allegations that the daughter of Choi Soon-sil was given special treatment when she applied for Ewha Womans University, one of South Korea’s top colleges. 
+Local media have reported that her daughter’s grades were not good enough, so the rules were changed to give credit to applicants who had won equestrian awards, as she had. The already-embattled president of Ewha resigned this week. 
+Ironically, this all comes less than a month after Park’s administration instituted a wide-ranging new law aimed at cracking down on corruption and influence peddling. 
+Choi is in Germany with her daughter and is refusing to return to South Korea to answer questions, saying she is having heart problems and cannot fly. But in an interview with the Segye Ilbo, she denied creating the Eight Fairies group, owning the tablet or knowingly receiving classified information. “Because I was not a government official, I had no idea that this was confidential,” she told the paper. 
+Park apologized Tuesday for the scandal, saying she had always acted “with a pure heart.” Then she canceled a planned meeting related to North Korea on Friday so she could consider ways to “resolve the nation’s anxiety and stably run the government,” according to a spokesman. 
+She did, however, attend a ceremony in the southern city of Busan, where university students shouted “Park Geun-hye should step down!” and “Choi Soon-sil must be arrested!” Share:",FAKE
+4900,Why did Mexico invite Donald Trump for a visit? (+video),"President Enrique Peña Nieto has invited both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to meet in Mexico. In a surprise move, Mr. Trump has accepted the offer, hours before he will give an immigration policy speech in Arizona.
+
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump steps off his plane after arriving for a campaign rally at Crown Arena in Fayetteville, N.C. on Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2016. Trump will fly to Mexico Wednesday on invitation of President Enrique Peña Nieto.
+
+The Republican presidential candidate is taking up Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto on an offer extended to both US presidential candidates by making a quick visit to Mexico on Wednesday, just hours before he is expected to a deliver major immigration speech in Arizona.
+
+""I have accepted the invitation of President Enrique Pena Nieto, of Mexico, and look very much forward to meeting him...,"" said Mr. Trump in a Twitter post on Tuesday night.
+
+Trump's ascent to the nomination owes much to his antagonism of the United States' southern neighbor: launching his campaign with remarks that belittled immigrants from Mexico, and claiming that they have contributed to international humiliation for the US.
+
+""They're not sending us their best,"" he said in his June 2015 speech announcing that he was seeking the Republican presidential bid. ""They're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting.""
+
+""When do we beat Mexico at the border?"" he continued. ""They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they're beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me, but they're killing us economically.""
+
+In March, Mr. Peña Nieto criticized Trump's ""strident"" tone, likening his brand of populism to that of fascist leaders like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. He later told CNN that there was ""no way"" that Mexico would ever pay for the construction of a border wall, as Trump has insisted it should.
+
+On Tuesday, Peña Nieto seemed to preempt criticisms over the invitation, writing on Twitter that he believed in dialogue ""to promote the interests of Mexico in the world and, principally, to protect Mexicans wherever they are."" The purpose of the visit, he wrote, was to discuss bilateral relations – a preferred topic for a president who has made attracting foreign investment a priority.
+
+His comments in March aside, the Mexican president has been characteristically circumspect in his remarks about the US elections, describing them as a matter to be decided internally.
+
+""I have never made any remark or rating about any of the candidates today in the democratic competition of the United States,"" he said in July, according to local media. ""Any point or statement that I have made has been taken out of context.... I have always expressed absolute respect for the process.""
+
+In April, The Christian Science Monitor noted that despite the vast expense and formidable array of practical obstacles involved in building walls along the border, politicians in the US continue to use the idea to soothe anxieties over immigration:
+
+The value of the wall, some experts say, is much more as a political idea than an actual structure. The border wall remains a powerful symbol for people on both sides of the immigration debate – either as a sign of security taken seriously or of fear and misunderstanding run amok. “It’s something that has gained a lot of political value, the idea that you can wall the United states off from the rest of the rest of the world, particularly in this case, Mexico,” says Rachel St. John, author of “Line in the Sand: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Border.”
+
+Trump's visit comes as he appears to retreat from his earlier insistence that he would marshal a ""deportation force"" to expel all of the country’s roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants. In recent meetings with Hispanic supporters, the candidate suggested that he might be open to letting some of those people stay – though his staff has appeared to contradict that in subsequent interviews.
+
+New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a close Trump adviser who visited Peña Nieto in Mexico City in 2014, was among those pushing the Republican candidate to take the trip, a source close to the campaign told the Associated Press.
+
+This report contains material from the Associated Press.",REAL
+9454,Paintings 'almost no one else seemed to be doing',"Print 
+When Judith Gait met “Father X,” it was a lopsided grief that drew them together. He had lost his only chance at fatherhood through an abortion years ago. Gait is a married mother of five, and long-term American resident in Britain. Her support of the pro-life movement is driven by “thankfulness and praise” for life and her Christian faith. 
+Witnessing abortion’s heavy toll on the living and dead, Gait began to make the paintings almost no one else seemed to be doing. Subtle and working entirely with symbolism, these simple artworks avoid screaming about abortion. Rather, they mourn in color, symbol and tone with single shoes, broken cord, dead flowers and other lonely and broken things. “Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas”painting by Judith Gait, commentary by Father X 
+When a friend first visited Gait’s studio, he was struck by her abortion paintings. Confessing years of torment after his partner aborted his child, he wrote: “I realize your work comes from a place of great love, for it attempts to give defenseless life the dignity and protection it never knew in our throw away culture.” 
+Gait invited him to pray with her for his lost child. It happened to be the anniversary of the death of his baby, five years to the day. Father X remembers every detail. 
+Their conversation grew into a joint effort, culminating in a book, “ Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas: Meditations on Post Abortion Trauma .” Father X wanted to remain anonymous, as a place-setter for millions of unconsidered fathers in the acts of abortion. He wrote poetic and powerful statements for each of Gait’s 30 paintings in this book, which have also been shown together in art exhibits. 
+Time and neglect does not necessarily heal the wounds of abortion, Gait claims. Rather, “the past refocuses into a sharper image and the pain through an iterative process of silence, guilt and remorse has not abated.” You can see that in the words of Father X, which run the gamut of human emotions. “On Abortion: Shoe, Pot and Crosses”from “Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas” 
+“Jonah of Nineveh” features an upended, single rose with red cords and funereal foliage. Flowers are “already in the birth position, head down and waiting to be born.” Torn and shroud-like ribbons hang across the painting. Spirals represent a child’s DNA helix and the “veil of the Temple which has just been so rudely shaken down to its foundation.” Father X makes an analogy between Jonah fleeing “parental responsibility” and eventual redemption – then veers off to his own personal engulfment in almost a stream of consciousness: “It was her wedding dress, my sea green empress, this blue lagoon princess she slipped into her own heart of darkness on that day she decided to abort and when time really stopped in our lives. She was full of fear. …” 
+In some of these works, hammers incongruently hang with flowers. They are bloody or blackened, some submerged underwater or hanging from a noose. Father X interprets these tools as decision markers, to either build or tear down. In “Hammer of Decision,” it belongs to Thor, the war god “infested with his one eyed wisdom of intrigue and destruction.” Wagner, the Olympics, “sperm races,” Thomas Moore and Valkyries are all inducted into this choice by the author. Either the Carpenter’s “hammer of wisdom” or Thor’s “tool of chaos” will be chosen by expectant parents. “Hammer, Suspended” 
+“ Troubadours ” runs from elegant poetry to sentiment over babies and an ad hoc theology. Striving to extend lives of children lost to abortion, the authors create a fantasy universe of possibilities. This includes moonlighting for angels, celestial games, “interstellar wind-jammers” and a “baby steamer sailing on children’s seas,” among other delightful prospects. Lost and murdered infants in these tales pine for love or for a family in their Limbos. 
+Father X occasionally speculates on spiritual issues outside the Bible or the treatment of abortion in other religions. Running from nursery rhymes and quotes to historical characters, these are not theological statements, but a type of literary yearning that seeks an answer to abortion. 
+In Gait’s “Pink Rose” and “Stardust,” we see empty fields, withered plants and other tokens. Father X takes off from here on fanciful trips for the lost children. He places them in a cosmic waiting rooms or dancing in circles, which is reflected in the painting. Children are disfigured, or missing eyes or arms and singing in “low mournful tones” so as not to disturb their parents. Music is “intense, equivalent to the sound created by Hildegard von Bingen (a 12th-century nun and composer). “Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas”painting by Judith Gait, commentary by Father X 
+References to Mary as a mother are common, as well as other scriptural allusions. “All babies jump for Jesus” in the womb (or in “its sack of nibbling yoke”) writes Father X. Elizabeth’s child John “leapt for joy, just as his ancestor David did before the ark of the covenant,” he continues. 
+Gait addresses the human embryo, finding Biblical, ethical or emotional arguments for its worth at all stages. Her “Abbey Target Beginning” has a crosshair target, which is interpreted spiritually: “The first target blastula conflates the first cellular divisions with the laver bread – the bread on fire with the Holy Spirit the same stage of development as the child in Mary’s womb when she arrived at her cousin Elizabeth’s house.” 
+Post-abort guilt isn’t rationalized or downplayed, but emotionally reacted to in art and word. Father X describes bats as whirling about “in circles at the pitiful sound the [aborted] children make” because they are tuned to such distressing signals. This contrasts with many parents who are “still stone deaf” to such mournful sounds. At another point, Father-X imputes the collective white noise of guilt to attacks of tinnitus, a roar of unwanted thoughts. “Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas”painting by Judith Gait, commentary by Father X 
+Father X elaborates on what Gait hints in her paintings: the injustice and evil of abortion. He cites a world built on slavery before Christ’s advent, and the works of such men as William Wilberforce and John Brown in furthering Christ’s gospel of justice and peace. All this is contrasted to abortion throughout. 
+Ruminating on Gait’s “Palms of our Lord,” Father X claims “the face of the baby is in the midst of the ruins of the abortion. “Palms” is murky, with a single, red hand print. “To look at the after birth of an abortion is to read the Tarot of Ruins,” he continues. 
+“Suicide” advances this dark theme, where Gait and Father X criticize the death industry and it’s euphemistically named “clinics.” He takes a few swings at the girl gangs of the glass ceilings: “… a caricature of a woman who made a mistake, who got herself in trouble, who has had an abortion and afterwards committed suicide in her heart.” 
+But all isn’t baleful and sad here. In “Cloud Children,” Father X muses on paper dolls in Gait’s paintings with this lovely thought: “Where children go … is a mystery. … Some say they take their daytime rest in Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem, and like him when their time is come they will ascend into heaven before a quire of angels and assembled Star Ships.” 
+“ Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas ” is a work of meditation, grief counseling, poetry, social commentary and visual art. Father X may not reveal his identity here, but the reader comes to know intimate details about relationships and emotions surrounding the death of his only child. Gait and Father X describe their efforts as a “silent prayer of witness for all the ghost families, those Phantoms of Sorrows, who will never laugh or cry together as a family, because of an abortion.” They hope that prying open the tightly locked matter of abortion will help to heal those who have had abortions or are victimized in some way. 
+Judith Gait is a graduate of California College of Arts and Crafts and received a Masters at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Fine Drawing. Her work is in public and private collections in America and abroad. She is an American citizen, residing in Britain. Father X is an addictions counselor and writer in Great Britain, who prefers to remain anonymous. 
+“Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas:Meditations on Post Abortion Trauma” is a coffee-table size, 103-page paper book, with 33 color-illustrations and related commentary. You can purchase it at Amazon U.S.",FAKE
+1942,Hillary is new and improved! Take as directed.,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+8924,"Without Bold Agenda, Warn Progressives, A Clinton Presidency Won’t Stand Chance","Without Bold Agenda, Warn Progressives, A Clinton Presidency Won’t Stand Chance Posted on Nov 3, 2016 
+By Lauren McCauley / Common Dreams Progressive leaders, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, promise there will no honeymoon period for the centrist Democrat should she be elected. ( Daniel / (CC BY-ND 2.0) ) 
+While the whole country appears to be on edge ahead of next week’s presidential election, the Left is “increasingly confident” that, should a Hillary Clinton presidency come to pass, the Democratic nominee won’t be able to turn her back on progressive campaign promises—as many argue President Barack Obama did—because she will need that grassroots support if she hopes to stay in office beyond four years. 
+“If she wants to be more than a one-term president, she’s going to have to work with the left. Period,” Murshed Zaheed, political director of CREDO, told The Hill for a new report published Thursday. 
+Speaking with progressive activists, The Hill reports that the Left is entering a post-election season “emboldened and empowered,” and ready to fight for implementation of the Democratic platform, said to be the most progressive in the party’s history. 
+And unlike Obama, a hypothetical President Clinton won’t be in a position to attempt a “‘post-partisan’ approach to seeking deals with Republicans.” 
+Advertisement Square, Site wide 
+“We’re hoping that she will be smart enough to know that if she were to go that route…there’s going to be a political price to pay for it, because it will demoralize her base heading into 2018 and, honestly, it may even jeopardize 2020,” said Zaheed. 
+Ben Wikler, Washington director at MoveOn.org, predicted that the Democratic party is potentially moving “from an electoral storm into a governance storm.” 
+Clinton, Wikler told The Hill , “will find ‘tremendous grassroots support if she goes to the mat’ for her liberal campaign platform. And if she doesn’t, those same grassroots liberals are ‘emboldened and empowered’ and ‘ready to hold her to account.’” 
+And Clinton seems to be aware of this dynamic. 
+Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), points to the fact that the Clinton campaign has Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as well as her former primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) aggressively campaigning on her behalf the last full week before the election, with stops in a number of pivotal battleground states. 
+And while both are doing all they can to ensure that her presidential rival, Republican nominee Donald Trump, is not elected, Green is hopeful that the two progressive firebrands will provide “‘a pre-emptive chilling effect on bad behavior’ if she does win the presidency,” The Hill reports. 
+Indeed, Sanders has said that he intends to “leverage” the popularity he gained during the primary to ensure that Clinton enacts the party agenda and does not nominate the “same old, same old Wall Street guys” for regulatory positions. 
+And emails from Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta recently leaked by WikiLeaks illustrated how she sought Warren’s approval and support. In one instance, her staff expressed concern that the by opposing a new Glass-Steagall Act, Clinton would appear too pro-Wall Street and thus “antagonize and activate Elizabeth Warren.” 
+Progressive leaders, including Sanders and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben , have vowed that there will no honeymoon period for the centrist Democrat, should she be elected—and campaigners say that Clinton would be wise to heed their advice and go for those “big, bold ideas,” like tuition-free college, a higher minimum wage, a just transition to renewable energy, and Medicare for all. 
+As Green told The Hill , Clinton’s success will be largely determined by two factors: How aggressively she pushes the progressive party platform in the first 100 days of her presidency and how effectively she rallies public support for those policies. “The absolute best way to get something done is to push big, bold ideas, get the public on your side and force Republicans to the table,” Green said. If she adopts that strategy, “the Republicans will cave,” Green said. “It’s just that simple.” 
+Lauren McCauley is a staff writer at Common Dreams. TAGS:",FAKE
+10474,The Double Standards of American Politics (What Do I Tell My Daughter?) · Guardian Liberty Voice,"What just happened in America is beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The soul of this country was torn apart at the very moment when we had a chance to rise above the hateful rhetoric we have been forced to listen to for months and to unite with a compassion for those who are different, a love for our country beyond measure and an acceptance of opinion and ideals that make this country great….Not Great Again … GREAT!
+Instead, we watched a wild witch-hunt supported by a predominantly white male force incessantly run after our first female candidate as if she was the most horrendous human being alive. The emails, the emails, and the emails….must I say more.
+We have allowed a man to escape the same trials beset on a woman and skate free through a remarkable path of no consequence for things that otherwise make us gasp in disbelief. Corruption? Has anyone, including the media, dared to bring out the stories of Donald Trump’s association with a convicted sexual predator who he has called “a decent man?” Has anyone, especially the media, given any of the women who accused Donald Trump of mishandling them more than a story or two, or a conversation sparking protests and demands for the truth within their own circles? Does anyone who voted for Donald Trump even understand how many lies he told during the campaign and how many facts he got wrong, all proven in written form by fact-checkers, historians, and other leaders? Does anyone who voted for Donald Trump really think he will be honest with anyone when he takes the Oval Office?
+What do I tell my teenage daughter when she asks why a man who has obviously done so much wrong in his life doesn’t get held to the same standard as a woman? In this case, one who devoted her life to public service and the betterment of the lives of children and women? What do I tell my teenage daughter when she asks me “how an election can be won by a man who has proven to be unfit? Donald Trump fed into the weaknesses of this group just like the schoolyard bully. He surrounded himself with people who feed negative and unfair propaganda to the masses each and every day. He has been fed by a silver spoon all his life and has never known what it feels like to mine for coal, live in rural America on a fixed income or work all day every day for minimum wage barely making ends meet. I do. How can anyone expect him to understand? What do I tell my daughter?
+This president-elect has admittedly, and in his own words, grabbed women by their “pussy” and let’s not forget had extra-marital affairs. A man who has bankrupted companies more than I like to count at the risk it puts such great fear in my heart for our country that I can’t even keep my head up. A man who openly made fun of a disabled person on national television with the world watching. A man who couldn’t even bring his ego in long enough to pay respect to a four-star father who lost his son fighting for our country. A man who has no military experience whatsoever and had the fortune of money behind him when he escaped serving our country because of a spur in his foot, a spur he cannot even remember correctly. A man who has made clear he has no tolerance for immigrants, minorities, gay people and the like. Is this really what my America looks like? What do I tell my daughter?
+I am old enough to remember several elections and while my candidate of choice didn’t always win, I don’t remember our country protesting with such fervor at the prospect of an individual not fit to run our country ever before. How can this be? Why didn’t the majority of people who voted for this man understand this? How can a narcissistic egomaniacal liar make it to the oval office? How can bad behavior continue to be awarded in a country that was to represent “strength, power, and honesty?” What do I tell my daughter?
+He fed into the uneducated and the displaced, allowing them to believe he will save them. That’s what bullies do. They find the most disenfranchised weak individual on the playground and pick on them. Does anyone not see this and how this played out for someone who has the world in dismay and our allies bewildered? Does anyone not notice that headlines across the globe are using such words as “W.T.F” and “Are you Kidding Me?. While those headlines circulate, can we not sit here and really ask ourselves if that is OK; if it is OK for a man to allow our country to now be a joke, a misfit, a low-lying power that doesn’t take all the risks involved with letting this man through the front door seriously. What do I tell my daughter? 
+I worked for someone who bears the exact same traits and behavior of Donald Trump. They don’t change my friends, but they keep on winning despite their arrogance, lies, and ugly behavioral traits. I worked for a narcissistic man who treats women horribly, depletes the human spirit as a game of fun and thrives on the power he exerts to make the “little person” feel even smaller. The day I was able to leave that horrendous work situation was the best day of my professional life. It is because of that and why I anxiously wait for four years to fly by faster than anything imaginable. I am ashamed our country has gotten to the point where decency didn’t outweigh ignorance.
+When I woke this morning I was hopeful to feel a bit of anxiety leaving my body, a sense of “we shall overcome” and a certain bit of optimism that would take me through the next four years. It didn’t happen. The tears keep flowing and the idea of uncertainty and embarrassment override any sense of understanding I can possibly relate to what just happened in this country…my country.
+We have an Electoral College system that I believe is flawed and antiquated. We have a process that doesn’t allow for certain standards of conduct to be upheld for the highest office in the world. We have people who still believe that black Americans and women have only defined places in their lives. Yet none of that thought process, none of that diabolical way of life compares to the remarkable and unprecedented statement on humanity in which the election of Donald J. Trump leads to. And that is the purpose of why I write today.
+As of this morning, Hillary Clinton continues to win the popular vote. I now know how Al Gore felt. Our Electoral College process which Donald Trump, in his own words and in his own tweet said “our electoral college process is a disaster, it is not democracy” proves once again to not honor the real power of our people. I am hopeful that enough Americans join into the petition for this process to be reviewed, refined and changed so the people do speak in our next election and that the process is changed. I know that I will do what I can to encourage and persuade those I come in contact with or know to support this change. “We the People” is exactly what we should be thinking!
+I will close with recognizing that people wanted change. They wanted change in Washington and they wanted change in policy and for this, I can agree. There were so many better choices for change throughout the entire election process. There were so many candidates who could have brought about change while keeping our country’s reputation alive with our allies, protected our country from the threat of all kinds of evil, changed our education, health system, and environment for the good and protected our children. But yet the hate-filled people who couldn’t get past their own simple way of thinking that someone who has billions will also make them billions have a very rude awakening coming their way. It is hard to try to determine how change will be brought on by someone contemplating putting the same “old white men” in his cabinet and some who have questionable pasts…Giuliani, Gingrich, Christie. Is that an example of the change this country was looking for?
+When the DOW drops 700 points in one night everyone needs to pay attention. When social media trends with #notmypresident in a democratic society, everyone needs to pay attention. When women are asking “why have we not come any further?” everyone needs to pay attention. When immigrants who are the very fabric of our nation, and black Americans who gave more than they should have ever had to so we could build this country, ask am I safe, everyone needs to pay attention and when gays and transgender people ask if they can walk the streets and be free anymore, everyone needs to pay attention. I simply ask “What will I tell my daughter?” And what will my daughter tell her daughter?
+Open your eyes and ears America. Be a voice stronger than you ever expected. Please bring about change and force yourself to not tire in this fight and trying to make a difference, blocking hatred in any way or form possible. Be proud of who you are and for who will become. Take a stand and be a force for those who need to be held up. Don’t let this get away from you over time, don’t become complacent and don’t ever stop making sure your path to greatness is an important opportunity for all of us! This is what you can tell your daughter.
+Open Letter by Caroline Galloway
+(Edited by Cherese Jackson) 
+Caroline Galloway is a PR specialist with 23 years experience in Entertainment and Consumer Brand Marketing & PR. She is based in Cleveland, Ohio and is a working mother of two, who has published numerous announcements and articles on a variety of topics. 
+Source:
+Mouth to Mouth PR & Partnerships: Caroline Galloway
+Photo Credits:
+Top Image Courtesy of MattJP – Flickr License
+Inline Image Courtesy of Mike Licht – Flickr License
+Featured Image Courtesy of madanelu – Flickr License    Donald Trump , open letter , politics",FAKE
+6458,Civil War in the GOP: Trump Leading “Long Experiment in Populism… New Republican Party”,"
+Win or lose, Trump has left his mark, and America has changed.
+On the eve of the election, many Republican insiders and loyal commentators are acknowledging what has become apparent – that rise of Trump signals not just a different 2016 cycle, but an entirely new constituency – one defined by populism, by trade, by class. by the impact on jobs and economics.
+Charles Krauthammer stated on Fox News that Trump is the new power broker in the GOP and the de facto “king maker” – regardless of who wins the election. The demographics of the party have changed:
+
+Interestingly, Bill Clinton also gets it. The former president has been on the stump – ostensibly to differentiate his wife from President Obama – pointing out the fact that the middle class has been abandoned, and that these desperate people are turning to populist because they have lost something tangible in the last eight years.
+As The Daily Sheeple reported :
+A leaked Democratic fundraising speech Bill Clinton gave back in 2015 shows the former president telling donors that thanks to Obama, lower-income whites have lower life expectancies because they “don’t have anything to look forward to when they get up in the morning” now.
+Bill is tacitly acknowledging the impact that terrible trade deals have had on the American economy and jobs over the last 30 years…
+Not only is Bill trying to sound like a straight-talking mix of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, he is acknowledging the same new party identities that voters have assumed.
+While Hillary may take the electoral college votes handily enough, the popular votes will reflect a sentiment of anger and unrest in the population.
+As the NY Times noted :
+[Democrats/Hillary campaign] have effectively swapped much of their working-class white base for the so-called rising demographic of millennials, nonwhite voters and suburbanites clustered near cities such as Denver, Miami, Las Vegas and Washington.
+From watching these communities, it will become clear on Tuesday why Mrs. Clinton’s party enjoys a structural advantage in the Electoral College. But this election may also hasten the day when more of the heartland becomes out of reach, illustrating what Democrats lost as much as what they gained. 
+The common thread is that a combination of trade deals and economic policies has destroyed the wealth of “everyday Americans” – shrinking the middle class and piling pressure onto the lower and working classes who must increasingly depend upon government assistance for their survival.
+Read more: 
+Trump Accuses Fed of Not Raising Rates Because Obama “Doesn’t Want a Bubble Burst” Until He Leaves 
+EPIC RANT: Fed Up American Explains Why Trump Will Win: “Somebody With Balls” 
+Collapse Strategist: “We’re In The Terminal Phase… Economic Pain Like We’ve Never Seen Before” 
+Trump Tuesday Means A Shift Of Power for Establishment… And They Are Freaked 
+Davos Insider Vows Trump Defeat: “It Doesn’t Matter Who the GOP Puts Up, Hillary Will Win” ",FAKE
+7949,"Comment on ""What Hath Trump Wrought?"" by Pat Buchanan","Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+“If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump. 
+Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics. 
+Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation’s ruling class from which it may not soon recover. 
+Bush I and II, Mitt Romney, the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee. 
+Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars into which they plunged the country. 
+Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate. 
+Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now. 
+How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected? 
+How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees? 
+Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs. 
+The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility. 
+Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank. 
+But it is the national establishment that has suffered most. 
+The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak. 
+Consider the litany of horrors it has charged Trump with. 
+He said John McCain was no hero, that some Mexican illegals are “rapists.” He mocked a handicapped reporter. He called some women “pigs.” He wants a temporary ban to Muslim immigration. He fought with a Gold Star mother and father. He once engaged in “fat-shaming” a Miss Universe, calling her “Miss Piggy,” and telling her to stay out of Burger King. He allegedly made crude advances on a dozen women and starred in the “Access Hollywood” tape with Billy Bush. 
+While such “gaffes” are normally fatal for candidates, Trump’s followers stood by him through them all. 
+Why? asks an alarmed establishment. Why, in spite of all this, did Trump’s support endure? Why did the American people not react as they once would have? Why do these accusations not have the bite they once did? 
+Answer. We are another country now, an us-or-them country. 
+Middle America believes the establishment is not looking out for the nation but for retention of its power. And in attacking Trump it is not upholding some objective moral standard but seeking to destroy a leader who represents a grave threat to that power. 
+Trump’s followers see an American Spring as crucial, and they are not going to let past boorish behavior cause them to abandon the last best chance to preserve the country they grew up in. 
+These are the Middle American Radicals, the MARs of whom my late friend Sam Francis wrote. 
+They recoil from the future the elites have mapped out for them and, realizing the stakes, will overlook the faults and failings of a candidate who holds out the real promise of avoiding that future. 
+They believe Trump alone will secure the borders and rid us of a trade regime that has led to the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. They believe Trump is the best hope for keeping us out of the wars the Beltway think tanks are already planning for the sons of the “deplorables” to fight. 
+Moreover, they see the establishment as the quintessence of hypocrisy. Trump is instructed to stop using such toxic phrases as “America First” and “Make America Great Again” by elites who think 55 million abortions since Roe is a milestone of moral progress. 
+And what do they have in common with a woman who thinks partial-birth abortion, which her predecessor in the Senate, Pat Moynihan, called “infanticide,” is among the cherished “reproductive rights” of women? 
+While a Trump victory would create the possibility of a coalition of conservatives, populists, patriots and nationalists governing America, should he lose, America’s future appears disunited and grim. 
+But, would the followers of Donald Trump, whom Hillary Clinton has called “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots,” to the cheers of her media retainers, unite behind her should she win? 
+No. Win or lose, as Sen. Edward Kennedy said at the Democratic Convention of 1980, “The work goes on, the cause endures.” 
+Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.” 
+Copyight 2016 Creators.com.",FAKE
+716,Protests at Donald Trump rally overshadow Washington primary win,"Donald Trump easily won the Washington state primary on Tuesday, but his victory was overshadowed by violence outside a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where protesters smashed windows and threw rocks at police.
+
+With 73% of votes counted in Washington, Trump had won 76.2% of primary voters. John Kasich and Ted Cruz, both of whom have dropped out of the race, had won 9.9.% and 10.1% respectively.
+
+Trump’s victory leaves him only needing a few dozen more delegates to reach the magic number of 1,237 required to cement the Republican nomination.
+
+
+
+Outside Trump’s rally in Albuquerque, protests against the presumptive nominee turned nasty on Tuesday night, with protesters overturning crowd control barriers and throwing rocks at police.
+
+There were early posts on social media reporting gunshots and tear gas, but the Albuquerque police department said those were inaccurate. Nonetheless, police horses were deployed to control the large crowd of protesters, and some reports showed pepper spray being used. The door to the convention center where Trump was speaking was also smashed.
+
+More than an hour after Trump had finished speaking and left for California, where he will campaign for the next few days in the run-up to the state’s 7 June primary, hundreds of protesters still thronged the streets, waving Mexican flags, lighting fires and chanting.
+
+Trump is the only remaining candidate campaigning for the Republican nomination, but Kasich and Cruz were also on the ballot in Washington, having suspended their campaigns after the ballots were printed.
+
+Dr Ben Carson was also on the ballot because he reportedly never officially submitted a withdrawal of his candidacy to the state.
+
+
+
+The state delegation, which was selected on Saturday at the state convention in preparation for the primary, is composed almost entirely of supporters of Cruz, whose supporters overwhelmed the state convention in Pasco.
+
+
+
+Despite this, the delegates are bound by state party rules to vote for Trump on the first ballot at the national convention, US senate candidate and former chairman of the Washington state Republican party Chris Vance, who was at the convention, told the Guardian.
+
+However, with seven upcoming primaries, including New Jersey and California, Trump is expected to easily overtake the delegate mark needed to win the nomination on the first ballot at the convention in Cleveland in July, avoiding a contested convention.
+
+In a strange quirk of party politics, the Democrats also held a presidential primary in Washington on Tuesday, but it didn’t matter in the slightest because the Democratic delegation from Washington was already settled by a caucus in March, at which Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton 73% to 27%.
+
+Interestingly, in the Democratic primary – which was admittedly meaningless as it has no bearing on the number of delegates as opposed to the caucuses – Clinton won comfortably, 53.63% to 46.37%, implying that perhaps Democratic voters want the primary season to be, finally, over with.",REAL
+3153,Obama takes fire for,"Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, referred to Obama's comments as a ""history lesson"" that ignores ""the issue right in front of his nose.""
+
+""We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today,"" Jindal said in a statement out Friday. ""The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.""
+
+Santorum, who ran for president in 2012 as well, rebuked Obama for ignoring the threat of ISIS and criticizing people of faith.
+
+""Today's remarks by the President were inappropriate and his choice of venue was insulting to every person of faith at a time when Christians are being crucified, beheaded, and persecuted across the Middle East,"" the former Pennsylvania senator said in a statement.
+
+The comments, which were intended to illustrate the potential for religion to be used for both good and bad aims, drew fierce criticism from conservatives on Thursday. And with Santorum's decision to weigh in, could rapidly become fodder for attacks from potential 2016 contenders looking to burnish their credentials with the religious right. Santorum went on to slam Obama for misunderstanding the threat posed by the rise of Islamic extremism, and accused him of tying modern Christians to ""the scourge in the Middle East."" ""While Christians of today are taught to live their lives as the reflection of Christ's love, the radicals of ISIS use their holy texts as a rationale for violence,"" he said. ""To insinuate modern Christians — the same Christian faith that led the abolitionist movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and global charitable efforts fighting disease and poverty — cannot stand up against the scourge we see in the Middle East is wrong."" Santorum also suggested that some Muslims have only been opposed to ISIS' burning a Jordanian pilot alive because they are opposed to the ""tactic,"" not the actual murder itself. ""Some Muslims...[have] sat quietly by as the Islamic State uses brutal violence that is not antithetical to Islam and only objects on tactics,"" he said. During the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama didn't downplay the threat posed by ISIS, but instead made the case that ""humanity has been grappling with"" the tension between the good and bad deeds done in the name of religion for ages. ""And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,"" he said. ""In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. Michelle and I returned from India — an incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity — but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs — acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji, the person who helped to liberate that nation."" But conservatives decried his comments as both further evidence of his poor grasp of the threats facing the nation, and insulting to Christians. Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said he insulted ""the whole gamut of Christians,"" and Jim Gilmore, the former GOP governor of Virginia, called the comments ""the most offensive I've ever heard a president make in my lifetime,"" according to the New York Times And Catholic League President Bill Donohue — a frequent critic of Obama — called the comments ""insulting"" and ""pernicious"" in a statement, and said Obama was trying to ""deflect guilt from Muslim madmen.""",REAL
+647,Bernie Sanders is expected to endorse Hillary Clinton today. What did his movement mean?,"It's amazing to go back and watch Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign announcement. Nearly everything about Sanders's campaign would change over the following 14 months — except for the candidate himself.
+
+There are no introductions. Sanders begins by pulling a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, before turning to a small scattering of reporters gathered around a makeshift podium.
+
+There's not a single Sanders supporter in sight — no banners, no ""Bernie Tees"" or ""Feel the Bern"" pins or even as much as a cardboard sign. Sanders speaks for about 10 minutes and answers a few questions before turning to walk back to the US Capitol, alone.
+
+Washington reporters chuckled. They knew that Clinton would put on a slick show, and she did — kicking off her bid on Roosevelt Island to 5,400 cheering supporters waving American flags, standing on a stage carved out to show her campaign logo.
+
+But over the course of the campaign, Sanders would be the one routinely packing stadium-size rallies, drawing rallies of tens of thousands of people, and getting introduced by liberal icons like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and actor Danny Glover. The substance of his message is almost exactly the same, but now there's someone — millions of them, in fact — eager to hear it.
+
+On Tuesday, Sanders is widely expected to finally endorse Clinton at a rally in New Hampshire. His team can boast a number of accomplishments — a radical new way to finance the modern presidential campaign; the mainstreaming of critical liberal policies; runaway popularity with young voters — but he is now shorn of the the outpouring of energy that powered his campaign for months.
+
+The end of Sanders's movement, however, also marks the beginning of the debate over what it meant: Was Bernie just a typical left-wing insurgent who scared the centrist candidate? Or did he light the spark of a ""political revolution"" — and show the promise of a new kind of Democratic politics?
+
+For Bernie's closest allies, lefty academics, and other writers, the surging interest in Sanders's campaign shows that he's more than a candidate of the left wing of the party. They see the massive growth of inequality in America as fundamentally reorienting our politics and think Sanders is the candidate who most capitalized on that transformation.
+
+To them, Sanders's run is not like Bill Bradley's in 2000 or Howard Dean's in 2004, but the start of something else altogether. In this interpretation, Sanders's success is not principally the result of winning the Democrats' left flank; it's the result of a populist rebellion that drew the masses to his cause.
+
+Here's Robert Reich, a prominent Sanders ally and a public policy professor at the University of California Berkeley:
+
+Reich goes on to argue that Sanders's rock star popularity is the result of his laser-like focus on challenging financial elites at every turn.
+
+You can disagree with this analysis, but there's certainly plenty of evidence for it — including Clinton's support among wealthier voters and Sanders's runaway popularity in ""coal country"" states like West Virginia.
+
+Sanders denounced inequality with more ferocity than any other presidential candidate, and inequality really has skyrocketed in America over the past few decades. It's certainly theoretically possible he became the major beneficiary of that shift.
+
+Sanders's allies see evidence for this thesis bubbling up at every corner of the campaign.
+
+The most obvious is the senator's shocking success at the ballot box. From starting at essentially zero in polling at the race's outset, Sanders rocketed to within a few points of Clinton's popularity among Democrats, pulled in more than 9 million votes, and gave the prohibitive favorite a far greater scare than essentially anyone expected.
+
+As the Nation's Steve Fraser says in one typical column, the idea of Sanders's success as a reaction to widening financial inequality also appears to to explain Donald Trump's rise on the right:
+
+Sanders's allies see the Democratic primary as a battle between the upper class and the middle/lower class everywhere they look: in Clinton's reliance on Wall Street and six-figure donations over Sanders's small donor army; in the mass turnout at his campaign rallies; and in the ""corporate media"" that has allegedly helped her over the organic social media that has driven his campaign.
+
+Then there's the matter of Sanders's polling numbers against Donald Trump. Vox's Matt Yglesias lays out the case to be skeptical of these numbers here, but polling really has consistently shown Sanders outperforming Clinton in head-to-head matchups against Trump.
+
+In a standard left-right framework, Sanders running ahead of Clinton doesn't make any sense. But if you think politics has been spun on its head and should now be thought of primarily on an elite-populist axis, then maybe it does.
+
+But while some see Sanders as a transformational figure, political scientists and mainstream pundits tend to see in his candidacy a largely unsurprising left-wing insurgency that — like others before it — has benefited from the dynamics of a Democratic primary.
+
+As Slate's Jamelle Bouie argues convincingly in a piece called ""There is no Bernie Sanders movement,"" Sanders really represents a faction of largely white ideological liberals — not some populist uprising against the elites — whose dissatisfaction with mainstream Democrats we've seen demonstrated in nearly every recent presidential primary:
+
+Moreover, we don't know how much Sanders's velocity was the result of an unusually open Democratic field. Echoing Bouie, Boston College professor Dave Hopkins punctures the idea of a transformative ""Sanders movement"" by noting that any candidate who ran against the compromised Clintons would have a shot at winning over young voters in big numbers.
+
+""[Sanders's] overwhelming margins among young voters might have been attenuated had he been facing a more conventional Democratic opponent, or opponents, who could also claim to be a fresh political face and who remained free of the baggage left by the Clintonist compromises of the 1990s and early 2000s,"" Hopkins says. ""If Sanders were running against some combination of Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, and Amy Klobuchar, would voters under the age of 35 appear equally enthusiastic about the prospect of implementing socialism as the defining creed of the Democratic Party?""
+
+Hopkins added that there's no reason to be assured that Sanders's popularity with young voters — he outperformed even Barack Obama with voters under 30 — will guarantee a long-term shift.
+
+""I know of no survey evidence that shows that the difference between younger and older Democrats on substantive issues is anywhere near as large as the generation gap in support between Clinton and Sanders,"" he says, ""which suggests to me that Sanders’s fairly remarkable appeal among the young is based on more than just policy.""
+
+But perhaps the most damning rebuttal to the idea that Sanders has ignited a new class-conscious politics is that he doesn't actually appear to be doing any better among poorer voters than Clinton.
+
+Back in April, Vox's Dara Lind showed that Sanders's campaign had failed to mobilize the poor it was explicitly designed to attract. And while some commentators have thought Sanders has performed better with the white working class, political scientists have demonstrated that this is mostly an artifact of young people having less money. There's not much of any evidence for a brewing ""political revolution"" of a previously untapped underclass of voters, in other words.
+
+Some have doubted that even Sanders's young legions of supporters are genuinely committed to his policy ideas. In the New York Times, Vanderbilt's Larry Bartels and Princeton's Christopher Achen go as far as arguing that we can't even reasonably assume Sanders's young supporters are backing his candidacy because they're more liberal than the rest of the party:
+
+Sanders's campaign has the energy of the moment — the mass mobilization of young people and, by extension, the ability to organize rallies that dwarf Clinton's in size.
+
+It's an undeniably impressive accomplishment. But it's far from clear if it also represents the future of American politics.",REAL
+6548,WikiLeaks Revelations Leave The Federal Emperor Wearing No Clothes,By Shane Trejo This brave new world we are living in is getting very wild and crazy during this election season. Although the Tenth Amendment... ,FAKE
+4334,"Trump Doubles Down On McCain Criticism, Refusing To Apologize","Trump Doubles Down On McCain Criticism, Refusing To Apologize
+
+Veterans groups have added to the chorus of condemnation against Donald Trump — much of it coming from within his own party — following disparaging remarks the real-estate mogul and Republican presidential candidate made about Sen. John McCain's war record.
+
+And Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America:
+
+As we reported previously, Trump, attending a Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, on Saturday, lashed out at the Arizona Republican and former GOP presidential nominee, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam after being shot down in 1967.
+
+""He was a war hero because he was captured,"" Trump said. ""I like people who weren't captured.""
+
+Fellow candidates, including former Govs. Jeb Bush and Rick Perry and Sen. Marco Rubio, have fired back at Trump, with Rubio saying on CNN Sunday that the remarks were a ""disqualifier"" for the Republican nomination.
+
+Asked on ABC's This Week if he owed McCain an apology, Trump answered: ""No, not at all.""
+
+""John McCain has failed,"" he said, citing the Arizona senator's record on veterans' issues. ""I believe that I will do far more for veterans than John McCain has done for many, many years, with all talk, no action. ... Nothing gets done.""
+
+And in his latest tweets and statements from his campaign, Trump touts his record on veterans and demands that McCain apologize for calling those who attended a Trump rally in Phoenix last week ""crazies.""",REAL
+1769,Why Scott Walker's supernova campaign burned out (+video),"By the time Scott Walker dropped out of the 2016 presidential race Monday, few in the political world were surprised.
+
+The Republican governor of Wisconsin was running out of money. His campaign staff was bloated and in disarray. He failed to impress in the debates. And GOP voters had abandoned him. By Sunday, he was a mere asterisk in the new CNN/ORC poll, coming in at less than one-half of 1 percent among Republicans.
+
+Just a few months ago, Governor Walker was the golden boy of the Republican field, widely seen as a top-tier prospect for the nomination and leading the polls in Iowa, the crucial first nominating state. He had won three elections for governor in four years, including a recall vote, after a hard-fought defeat of public sector unions. In January, a fiery speech at a conservative conference in Iowa wowed the GOP base.
+
+But when Walker began the tough slog of trying to impress a wider audience, it wasn’t pretty.
+
+His campaign holds a number of lessons for this campaign season – some old, some new. Being a governor did him little good, as was the case for Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2012. And a big money super political action committee couldn't save his campaign, as was the case for Mr. Perry this year.
+
+His departure makes the likely GOP showdown between outsiders and insiders sharper. But more fundamentally, it shows that – insider or outsider – successful candidates need to be competent campaigners.
+
+In a series of tweets Monday afternoon, when word spread that Walker was probably about to drop out, former aide Liz Mair charged him with multiple failings, including “not educating himself fast enough on issues outside governor’s remit.”
+
+On a trip to London in February, Walker dodged questions on foreign policy and wouldn’t state whether he believed in evolution. At another conservative confab, he raised eyebrows when he compared fighting the Islamic State to taking on the labor unions.
+
+By August, he was still struggling to deliver a coherent message. In one week, he took three positions on the issue of “birthright citizenship” – the 14th Amendment principle that grants automatic US citizenship to most children born in America. Walker also earned ridicule when he said building a fence on the US border with Canada was a “legitimate” idea.
+
+“I know it’s a cliché, but I don’t think he was ready for prime time,” says Chris Galdieri, a political scientist at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H.
+
+The rise of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and now Carly Fiorina – none of whom has ever held elective office – has also, for now, eclipsed the GOP’s more traditional candidates. Mr. Trump’s outsize personality left the mild-mannered Walker, in particular, gasping for political oxygen. In the last debate, Walker failed to assert himself on stage, and scored the least amount of speaking time.
+
+But to suggest that Trump prevented Walker from making an impression in the debate is false. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio – another career politician, like Walker – was seen as a big winner in the last debate, along with Ms. Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
+
+The Sept. 16 debate was do-or-die for Walker, and he died. Without a strong debate performance, he lacked the buzz needed to win the campaign cash infusion he desperately needed. Walker is a man of modest personal means, and could not write himself a big check to stay afloat while he regrouped. And he was apparently loathe to go into debt.
+
+And so, like the first GOP contender of the cycle to drop out, former Texas Governor Perry, Walker leaves the stage a humbled man. Also like Mr. Perry, Walker has demonstrated the limits of the new Wild West of political fundraising: The super PAC that raised $20 million to support Walker, but which could not by law be used to fund Walker’s campaign directly, now sits in stasis. Perry’s super PAC contained $13 million when he dropped out on Sept. 11, and that money has already been returned to its donors.
+
+The fact that Perry and Walker were the first to go is telling. Both have long experience as governors, and in theory, had the profile as chief executives that would seem tailor-made for a presidential bid. Just like past governors of the modern era who took their statewide experience national – Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Ronald Reagan of California, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, George W. Bush of Texas – Perry and Walker on paper looked promising.
+
+Ditto former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) of Minnesota, who entered the 2012 presidential race as a top-tier contender, but floundered and dropped out early.
+
+And especially after the experience of President Obama, a first-term senator who ascended to the Oval Office with little executive background, the early betting in the 2016 cycle was that governors would dominate the GOP field. But not all governors and former governors are created equal. The leap from statewide to national and international stage is, for some, too high.
+
+Perry failed, again, to impress. After his not-ready-for-prime-time performance in the 2012 cycle, he proved the adage that you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression. For Walker, the same principle held: After falling effectively to zero in the polls, regaining momentum seemed impossible – especially with such a large field – or at least financially too risky.
+
+For now, the likely beneficiaries of Walker’s departure are Senator Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Already, some key Walker supporters (such as a New Hampshire co-chairman) have gone to Rubio.
+
+In his announcement Monday that he was “suspending” his campaign – politics-ese for dropping out – Walker pitched himself as a “leader” in the effort to “clear the field” and take on the negativity of the campaign, a veiled attack on Trump.
+
+""Today, I believe that I am being called to lead by helping to clear the field in this race so that a positive, conservative message can rise to the top of the field,"" Walker said in the Wisconsin capital, Madison. ""With this in mind, I will suspend my campaign immediately.""
+
+It was an unusual rationale for ending a campaign. And it gave new meaning to the phrase “leading from behind.”",REAL
+117,"Baltimore, race and matters of perception","Comments about recent events in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray provide a glimpse at perhaps one of our greatest challenges — perception.
+
+In this case, as in too many others involving police, perception seems to be black and white.
+
+“I think that if you look at what’s happened over the course of the last year, you’ve just got to scratch your head,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R) on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” referring to the rash of fatal incidents involving police officers and African American males.
+
+“I heard your call for ‘no justice, no peace,’ ” said Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby (D) to demonstrators in her city and around the country, as she announced charges against six police officers involved in the arrest of Gray. To the youth of Baltimore, she declared, “Our time is now!” and urged peaceful demonstration.
+
+Both comments made headlines. And both, though well intentioned, carried subliminal messages freighted with racial (not racist) undertones.
+
+Boehner’s overly cautious remark was as starkly white as his OxiClean-ed, hand-pressed shirts. A man more accustomed to golf courses and marble hallways than to gritty urban streets, he was plainly trying to acknowledge that we have a police and race problem in the United States. But he sounded like he’d just landed on the planet.
+
+Yes, quite head-scratching, all this police business.
+
+Mosby’s remarks, jubilantly received by the Baltimore crowd, provoked high dudgeon elsewhere. Some of the words used to describe her performance have included “showboating,” “demagoguing” and “grandstanding.”
+
+To some ears, Mosby sounded as though the cops’ convictions were a fait accompli. That she found the evidence convincing enough to justify the charges may ultimately also justify her bravura. Let’s do keep in mind that Gray’s offense was making eye contact with an officer and running away.
+
+Gray’s voice box was crushed and his spine all but severed, according to his family. Anyone who watched the video could see that Gray was in terrible pain as he was led to the police van, where he was shackled and his pleas for help apparently ignored.
+
+That his life ended in pain and horror is not in dispute. But no less a legal luminary than Alan Dershowitz has taken issue with the charges, saying, “There’s no plausible, hypothetical, conceivable case for murder under the facts as we now know them.”
+
+Charges brought against the six officers included one count of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, assault and misconduct in office.
+
+In other words, Mosby threw everything she could against the six officers. Many have asked: For justice? Or to quell the passions of the streets? Perhaps both. Mosby surely calculated that announcing the charges as she did — with a microphone in a public place — would have a dramatic effect. (She declined to be interviewed for this column.)
+
+Mosby also was speaking as a member of her community, long plagued with a history of police brutality, including last year’s fatal beating of Tyrone West. The medical examiner’s report concluded that West died of a prior heart condition that was exacerbated by dehydration, the July heat and his police encounter.
+
+No charges were leveled against the police in that case. Thus, from the perspective of many among Baltimore’s protesters, the current charges are long overdue. Even so, one does worry that the six officers are paying not only for their role in Gray’s death, to whatever degree this is determined, but also for the cumulative sins of others.
+
+To the officers, the cheering and horn-honking following Mosby’s words must have sounded like the Colosseum mob’s cry for blood. To an older generation of Americans, they were reminiscent of the reaction 20 years ago when a mostly black jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman.
+
+Whites: He totally did it.
+
+African Americans: It’s our turn, in so many words.
+
+This past week, whites across the United States spoke softly about the Freddie Gray case: “Thank God three of the cops were black.”
+
+President Obama, speaking after Mosby leveled her charges, called for truth. How, indeed, do we get to it? In a diverse nation, we’ll never all see things exactly the same way, nor would we want to, but we might at least strive to recognize our own biases and judge our own perceptions as harshly as we do others’.
+
+Read more from Kathleen Parker’s archive, follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook.",REAL
+6647,WORLD WAR 3 is Now * HILLARY Clinton Is Mushroom Cloud Waiting to Happen,source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments,FAKE
+196,Congress inches closer to cliff,"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
+1548,Carson Doubles Down on 'Muslim' Comments: 'Sharia Inconsistent with Constitution',"The Islamic faith isn’t “consistent” with the U.S. Constitution, and a Muslim shouldn’t be president, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said.
+
+“I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” Carson said on NBC’s 'Meet the Press' on Sunday.
+
+ 
+
+ Late Sunday, he doubled down on those comments in an interview with The Hill.
+
+ 
+
+ “I do not believe Sharia is consistent with the Constitution of this country,” Carson told The Hill. “Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution.”
+
+Editor's Note: Is Ben Carson Your Candidate for 2016? Vote Here.
+
+Earlier, Carson told NBC's Chuck Todd that the religious beliefs of a president would matter if his or her faith was inconsistent with U.S. values. His view contrasted with that of Donald Trump, the billionaire front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, who said on the program that a Muslim as president is something that could happen in the future.
+
+Trump said he knows many Muslims who are “fabulous,” but there’s “a very severe problem” with some Muslims around the world -- comments he repeated on other Sunday broadcasts.
+
+Special: Dr. Ben Carson's Vision for America, See It
+
+“This is the first I’ve ever gotten into hot water for not saying anything,” Trump said. Trump and Carson both said they believe Obama is a Christian.
+
+ 
+
+ Story continues below video.
+
+ 
+
+",REAL
+9334,It Looks Like George Soros is Funding the Trump Protests Just Like He Funded The Ferguson Riots,"Does someone behind the scenes want to see civil war in the United States? 
+The answer is almost certainly yes. 
+And it isn’t likely to settle down anytime in the next few days. (If you aren’t prepped for this, go here to learn how to stay safe .) 
+Just a little background: this has been going on since the midst of the campaign when actors were hired on Craigslist and trained to disrupt rallies. 
+For example, one Craigslist ad was answered by Paul Horner, who admitted he was paid $3,500 to cause a scene at a Trump event in Fountain Hills, Arizona. “As for who these people were affiliated with that interviewed me, my guess would be Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Horner said. “The actual check I received after I was done with the job was from a group called ‘Women Are The Future’. After I was hired, they told me if anyone asked any questions about who I was with or communicated with me in any way, I should start talking about how great Bernie Sanders is.” Horner continued, “It was mostly women in their 60’s at the interview that I went to…” ( source ) 
+Actors Wanted – Knowledge of politics or skilled fighting a plus! (see image ) 
+
+The same report goes on to say: When asked about the other protesters at the rally, Horner said he saw most of them during the interview and training for the rally. “Almost all of the people I was protesting with I had seen at my interview and training class. At the rally, talking with some of them, I learned they only paid Latinos $500, Muslims $600 and African Americans $750. I don’t think they were looking for any Asians. Women and children were paid half of what the men got and illegals received $300 across the board. I think I was paid more than the other protesters because I was white and had taken classes in street fighting and boxing a few years back” 
+You can also read this article , in which a quote caught on video from Project Veritas shows how the Clinton campaign caused disruptions via “bird-dogging.” There’s a lot of evidence that someone is funding these protests. 
+An eyewitness in Austin, Texas spotted protesters being transported by chartered coach buses. 
+Then there was this Craigslist ad. (see image ) 
+
+There are many more tweets along these lines, but suffice it to say, suspicion is high that these, just like the Clinton campaign, are rigged to manipulate the American people. Why would anyone want to cause all this trouble? 
+That’s where the web gets tangled. It certainly seems counterproductive to set fire to America. After all, what these people are doing is likely to end up with more tyranny – like martial law, for example. 
+Exactly. 
+That’s precisely the plan. 
+Back in August, hackers from a group called DC Leaks got into the private documents of the Open Society, an organization founded by George Soros. Soros, whom DC Leaks referred to as “the architect and sponsor of almost every revolution and coup around the world for the last 25 years” is a pro-globalist billionaire who has been trying to take over the world via shadow government for decades. 
+Zero Hedge reported on the findings in the Soros leak: The documents are from multiple departments of Soros’ organizations. Soros’ the Open Society Foundations seems to be the group with the most documents in the leak. Files come from sections representing almost all geographical regions in the world, from the USA, to Europe, Eurasia, Asia, Latin, America, Africa, the World Bank “the President’s Office”, as well as an unknown entity named SOUK. As the Daily Caller notes , there are documents dating from at least 2008 to 2016. Documents in the leak range from research papers such as “ EUROPEAN CRISIS: Key Developments of the Past 48 Hours ” focusing on the impact of the refugee crisis, to a document titled “ The Ukraine debate in Germany “, to an update specific financials of grants. They reveal work plans, strategies, priorities and other activities by Soros, and include reports on European elections, migration and asylum in Europe. An email leaked by WikiLeaks earlier this week showed Soros had advised Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State on how to handle unrest in Albania – advice she acted on. 
+As well, it’s important to note that Soros provided a whopping $33 million to activists in Ferguson, Missouri, escalating a protest to a siege. The Washington Times reported: …liberal billionaire George Soros, who has built a business empire that dominates across the ocean in Europe while forging a political machine powered by nonprofit foundations that impacts American politics and policy, not unlike what he did with MoveOn.org. Mr. Soros spurred the Ferguson protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records reviewed by The Washington Times. In all, Mr. Soros gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in Ferguson , according to the most recent tax filings of his nonprofit Open Society Foundations… 
+This is business as usual for the OSF (Open Society Foundation), as explained by director Kenneth Zimmerman : Mr. Zimmerman said OSF has been giving to these types of groups since its inception in the early ’90s, and that, although groups involved in the protests have been recipients of Mr. Soros’ grants, they were in no way directed to protest at the behest of Open Society . “The incidents, whether in Staten Island, Cleveland or Ferguson , were spontaneous protests — we don’t have the ability to control or dictate what others say or choose to say,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “But these circumstances focused people’s attention — and it became increasingly evident to the social justice groups involved that what a particular incident like Ferguson represents is a lack of accountability and a lack of democratic participation.” Soros-sponsored organizations helped mobilize protests in Ferguson , building grass-roots coalitions on the ground backed by a nationwide online and social media campaign. Other Soros-funded groups made it their job to remotely monitor and exploit anything related to the incident that they could portray as a conservative misstep, and to develop academic research and editorials to disseminate to the news media to keep the story alive. The plethora of organizations involved not only shared Mr. Soros‘ funding, but they also fed off each other, using content and buzzwords developed by one organization on another’s website, referencing each other’s news columns and by creating a social media echo chamber of Facebook “likes” and Twitter hashtags that dominated the mainstream media and personal online newsfeeds. 
+Soros was busted for paying protesters to go into Ferguson and stir things up. This is not theory. It’s FACT. The Daily Mail reported that Soros spent $33 million to bankroll the protests. The Washington Times reported that it was totally cool, though, because humanitarian that he is, Soros just wanted to help the civil rights movement ( source ). What a guy. Of course, this seems to be a thing with the kabillionaires. The Ford Foundation and Rockefeller foundation also fund “social activism.” Which is kabillionaire code for “mess stuff up and wreak havoc.” 
+Keep in mind that the organization Black Lives Matter was born through the Ferguson riots. Does this look familiar? 
+If the Modus Operandi in these protests looks familiar, that’s because MoveOn.org is organizing a lot of them, and MoveOn is funded by …you guessed it: George Soros. The organization was originally founded to combat the impeachment of Bill Clinton…are you seeing a link here? Another proud instigator is the Answer Coalition which also – are you sitting down? Has links to Soros. ( source ) 
+There are a lot of people who are out there because they genuinely oppose a Trump presidency. The unfortunate thing is, their opposition comes from propaganda that they passionately believe. They are acting based on misinformation and they’re being professionally manipulated. 
+The next step here is martial law, which nobody wants. 
+Well, nobody except George Soros and friends. 
+Someone who wants to see America ripped apart is causing this division. Last summer, it was leaked that Soros attempted to destabilize Russia and depose Putin in 2012. Putin responded by banning Soros and all of his organizations from Russia. In 2014, Putin issued an international arrest warrant for Soros. 
+We could certainly improve both international relationships and our current situation by extraditing Soros immediately. 
+Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor. Her website , where this article first appeared , offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter , and you can email her at SF Source Activist Post Nov. 2016",FAKE
+5259,"In clash between Trump and the Khans, new signs of a cultural and political divide","The mash-up of symbols couldn’t have been more stark: a Muslim immigrant extolling the virtues of American liberty while holding his pocket copy of the Constitution, and his wife, struggling to contain her emotions, standing silently by his side, wearing a soft-blue hijab.
+
+The moment at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night upstaged the debut speech by the first woman to be a major party’s nominee for president and confronted a vast television audience with a riveting and, for some, jarring blend of messages. Here were the parents of a fallen U.S. Army captain, still deep in mourning and palpably proud to be Americans; and here were Muslim immigrants from Pakistan, keenly aware of their uncomfortable place at the center of this year’s presidential campaign; and here was a pocket Constitution, in recent years a popular giveaway for conservative and evangelical groups; and here was a hijab, the Muslim head covering that has become a shorthand for the debate over Islam’s place in the Western world.
+
+The overwhelming response to the appearance by Khizr and Ghazala Khan reflected the cultural and political divide that has dominated American discourse since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Many people took Khizr Khan’s lecture to Donald Trump about liberty and xenophobia as a statement about what patriotism and American identity really mean. Many others took the speech as a partisan blast but nonetheless a powerful plea from parents mourning the death of an American soldier.
+
+Trump took it as a personal affront.
+
+Throughout the weekend, the Republican nominee used Twitter and TV interviews to extend his criticism of the immigrant couple from Charlottesville. Trump accused the father of being a tool of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and Trump said of the mother: “She probably — maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. . . . It looked like she had nothing to say.”
+
+[Father of slain U.S. soldier: GOP must ‘repudiate’ Trump]
+
+The Khans almost instantly joined the ranks of ordinary citizens who have become important emblems of what some voters really think of presidential candidates — people such as Joe the Plumber, the nickname of an Ohio man whose informal exchange with then-Sen. Barack Obama led Sen. John McCain’s 2008 campaign to argue that Obama favored a socialist-style redistribution of wealth.
+
+Both conventions last month featured a parade of such everyday Americans — including, at the Democratic convention, the mothers of black men killed in police shootings; and at the Republican gathering, Patricia Smith, who blamed the death of her son, a State Department employee who was killed in Benghazi, Libya, on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
+
+The Khans quickly stepped into their new roles as Trump antagonists. Ghazala Khan explained, the day after the convention, that she demurred from public speaking because she gets too emotional when she sees pictures of her late son, Capt. Humayun Khan. In an opinion column published in The Washington Post on Sunday, the mother said that although she didn’t speak from the podium, “without saying a thing, all the world, all America, felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart.”
+
+[Ghazala Khan: Trump criticized my silence. He knows nothing about true sacrifice.]
+
+Throughout his life, Trump has taken pride in never backing down, always hitting back harder than he’s been hit and generally seeking publicity on the theory that all press is good press. But throughout this year’s rules-smashing campaign, Trump has reserved his most outrageous rhetorical blasts for prominent people.
+
+When Trump rejected the heroism of McCain (R-Ariz.), who as a young Navy officer spent more than five harrowing years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, or when Trump characterized Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s aggressive questioning in a debate as “blood coming out of her wherever,” he took on people who were accustomed to the rough and tumble of the public fray.
+
+This time, Trump targeted the parents of an Army captain who was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq. Neither the father, a consultant on immigration law, nor his wife had been on the national political stage before. But the Khans didn’t shy from the battle. They spent Sunday elaborating on their view of Trump as, in Khizr Khan’s words on morning talk shows on NBC and CNN, “a black soul” who is leading a campaign “of hatred, of derision, of dividing us.”
+
+Trump, for his part, said Saturday that Khan had “no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution.” At the convention, Khan had reached into his jacket pocket to pull out his copy of it, which he says he usually keeps with him, and addressed Trump: “I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law.’ ”
+
+Khan said the Constitution he waved before the cameras Thursday night came out of the boxes of 99-cent pocket versions that he orders from the American Bar Association to hand out to fourth-year cadets graduating from the University of Virginia’s ROTC program.
+
+Every year since their son’s death, the Khans have invited the cadets to their house for hot dogs and burgers, to honor their son, a graduate of the program, and to give the students their first exposure to a Muslim home, to see “how similar it is to their own,” Khan said. “They’d feel like this is our aunt or uncle’s home. And I have cards from them, understanding the gesture of giving them the Constitution, because they were getting ready to take an oath to that Constitution.”
+
+Khan, who formerly worked as a technology manager at the Washington law firm then called Hogan & Hartson, called on Trump’s most prominent Republican supporters, such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), to repudiate their presidential nominee. They did not.
+
+Many other Republicans and Democrats alike did say Sunday that they were appalled by Trump’s harsh rhetoric about the parents of a fallen soldier, and Trump himself shifted gears slightly, tweeting that Capt. Khan, who was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart after he was killed in 2004, “was a hero,” but adding that “I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond?”
+
+For Trump, returning fire on the Khans was by instinct and practice the right thing to do. Beginning in the 1970s, Trump adopted the media strategy of his mentor, the tough New York lawyer Roy Cohn: when attacked, counterattack with overwhelming force. Trump studied and perfected the art of winning headlines in New York City’s tabloid newspapers, trumpeting the twists of his love life and delivering devilish blasts against his business competitors and political opponents to become a mainstay on the gossip pages and the front pages.
+
+“The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you,” Trump wrote in his 1987 book, “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”
+
+In the campaign he has mounted since last summer, Trump has deployed his media strategy to enormous success, dispatching 16 opponents in the Republican primaries and winning an unprecedented flood of media attention.
+
+Will any of this make a difference in the November election? It’s too soon to have any reliable polling data on the impact of the Trump-Khan confrontation, but throughout the primary campaign, reaction to Trump’s verbal volleys against people such as McCain, Kelly or then-candidate Carly Fiorina has been shaped largely by partisan loyalties.
+
+Popular attitudes toward Trump’s harsh rhetoric about racial and religious minorities have consistently reflected pre-existing political affiliations. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll in July, 56 percent of Americans said Trump is biased against women and minorities, and 39 percent said he is not. Broken down by party preference, 86 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of independents and 26 percent of Republicans said Trump is biased.
+
+If this incident does alter the electoral calculus, prompting a popular response more akin to the widespread condemnation last fall of Trump’s mocking imitation of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski’s disability, that might become evident among voters with close ties to the military. GOP candidate Mitt Romney won military or veteran voters — who tend to vote Republican in presidential elections — by a 20-point margin over Obama in 2012, according to an American National Election Studies survey. Any significant decline in that number would make it difficult for Trump to find a path to victory.
+
+But Trump — who famously said in January that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” — remains confident that what would be fatal breaches of political etiquette in most elections will only cement his reputation as a fearless truth-teller.
+
+The more outrageous the comments, the more some voters will conclude that Trump is the candidate who would break some china and get things done, said Mark Burnett, who produced “The Apprentice,” Trump’s popular TV reality show. “People want to hear the unvarnished, that same style that he showed on ‘The Apprentice,’ ” Burnett said in an interview earlier this year, “the ability to speak his mind clearly and not tone down his voice in a politically correct, TV way.”
+
+Stephanie McCrummen and polling director Scott Clement contributed to this report.",REAL
+6709,CHARLESTON ‘ON EGGSHELLS’ ON EVE OF TWO RACIALLY CHARGED TRIALS |,"Home › SOCIETY | US NEWS › CHARLESTON ‘ON EGGSHELLS’ ON EVE OF TWO RACIALLY CHARGED TRIALS CHARLESTON ‘ON EGGSHELLS’ ON EVE OF TWO RACIALLY CHARGED TRIALS 0 SHARES [10/20/16] Two South Carolina shootings that rocked the country last year and raised questions about race in America are now headed for trial, putting the historic city of Charleston on edge as the community awaits the testimony and juries’ decisions. 
+Jury selection begins on Monday in the case of Michael Slager, a white former policeman in North Charleston charged with murder in state court after he fatally shot unarmed black motorist Walter Scott in April 2015. 
+One week later on Nov. 7, a federal death penalty trial is slated to start for avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof, who is accused of killing nine black parishioners during Bible study at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015. 
+The nearly simultaneous proceedings will take place at courthouses across the street from each other in the heart of Charleston’s downtown district. Black community activists said the outcomes will test the calm that prevailed after the shootings and could trigger unrest if those angry about the killings feel justice is not served. 
+“The community is, for lack of better words, on eggshells,” said Justin Bamberg, a state legislator and lawyer who represents Scott’s family. 
+Both trials are expected to last several weeks and draw national attention to the port city of about 133,000 people that is known for its cuisine and well-preserved 18th and 19th century architecture. But Bamberg said the cases have important distinctions. 
+Roof’s trial is less about his guilt or innocence than whether he will be sentenced to life in prison or death, Bamberg said. Roof’s lawyers have said he would plead guilty to 33 counts of hate crimes, obstruction of religion and firearms charges if prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty. 
+Slager’s case, on the other hand, could produce a rare result: a guilty verdict against a U.S. police officer charged with murder or manslaughter. Post navigation ",FAKE
+566,Chris Christie says debt-free college is 'wrong',"As Democratic presidential candidates begin to include a debt-free college system as part of their respective campaigns, New Jersey Gov. and Republican contender Chris Christie thinks the push is a “typical liberal approach.”
+
+Christie stopped at Iowa State University Thursday to deliver his fourth most recent policy address. Among his talking points were dealing with teachers’ unions and how to handle the increasing costs of college.
+
+“That is a typical liberal approach. It is wrong,” he said. “If college graduates are going to reap the greater economic rewards and opportunities of earning a degree, then it seems fair for them to support the cost of the education they’re receiving.”
+
+Christie spoke about his father joining the army in order to pay for college, because his father, at the time, couldn’t afford to pay for his own education. He went to Rutgers University after his service through the G.I. Bill.
+
+“We all need to take personal responsibility to grasp the opportunities in higher education, but also one where we can get a leg up when we need it,” Christie said.
+
+Rather than make higher education free for students, Christie instead proposed that Congress support low-income students by continuing to fund aid programs. He noted that while Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants and Perkins Loans have declined, the availability of Pell grants has expanded. But that may not be the case according to a March 2015 study by The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which found Pell grant funding is actually being cut.
+
+Christie also said there should be tax breaks for donors to higher education grant organizations and income-share agreements. This would allow a student to repay the private financing he or she received for college with a percentage of his or her future income.
+
+What do you think? Is a debt-free college realistic? How can students combat increasing costs of higher education?",REAL
+7797,"Just Weeks After Obama’s Executive Order on Catastrophic Space Weather Events, a Coronal Mass Ejection Is Set to Hit on Election Day?","By Melissa Dykes This has already been the craziest election in the history of the country, with the most overt corruption and fraud the American... ",FAKE
+6645,PUTIN’S LATEST ATTACK AGAINST HILLARY CLINTON AND THE U.S ESTABLISHMENT,"We Are Change 
+In this video Luke Rudkowski covers more geopolitical moves and how the recent presidential election with Hillary Clinton is making the situation with Putin worse. The situation between these two super global powers is intensifying and becoming dangerous for both nations. As wikileaks keeps releasing more information the more pressure the DNC is putting against Russia instead of taking responsibility. For more invest in us on https://www.patreon.com/wearechange 
+Sources
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mt_z… 
+http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/20… 
+http://www.inquisitr.com/3225440/hill… 
+http://wearechange.org/putins-russian… 
+http://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/russia-t… 
+http://www.mintpressnews.com/wife-fbi… 
+http://www.breitbart.com/2016-preside… 
+https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/… 
+https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange/s… 
+http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa… 
+http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-ne… 
+http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10… 
+https://www.rt.com/news/364132-amnest… 
+http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016… 
+https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/a… 
+http://time.com/4547219/nato-uk-us-tr… 
+http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/… 
+http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/27/eur… 
+http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10… 
+http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-… 
+http://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-fl… 
+http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/7… 
+Support WeAreChange by Subscribing to our channel HERE http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c… 
+Visit our main site for more breaking news http://wearechange.org/ 
+Patreon https://www.patreon.com/WeAreChange?a… 
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+We take BITCOIN too
+12HdLgeeuA87t2JU8m4tbRo247Yj5u2TVP
+The post PUTIN’S LATEST ATTACK AGAINST HILLARY CLINTON AND THE U.S ESTABLISHMENT appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+339,"New York prison escape: Worker questioned, source says","(CNN) An employee at the prison where two convicted killers escaped over the weekend is being questioned as a possible accomplice, a law enforcement source briefed on the investigation told CNN.
+
+Investigators on Monday questioned the employee, a woman who worked with escaped convicts Richard Matt and David Sweat, tailoring clothing at the Clinton Correctional Facility in New York.
+
+The woman knows the two escapees ""very well,"" the source said, though she has not been charged or arrested.
+
+The development comes after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said inmates Matt and Sweat must have had help in carrying out the intricate plot. The pair, who were in side-by-side cells, used power tools to cut through the cells' steel walls and clambered through a maze of underground pipes, according to authorities.
+
+""They wouldn't have had the equipment on their own, that's for sure,"" Cuomo told CNN of the convicted killers, who escaped sometime after they were last seen at bed check Friday night.
+
+The two prisoners were in the ""honor block"" of the prison, meaning they were given certain liberties for good behavior, the law enforcement source said.
+
+For the most part they have a clean disciplinary record, according to records provided by a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections.
+
+Despite a $100,000 reward and a manhunt involving some 250 law enforcement officials, Matt and Sweat -- both serving lengthy sentences -- were still on the loose Monday.
+
+""They could be literally anywhere,"" said Maj. Charles E. Guess of the New York State Police, which is leading the search.
+
+Cuomo said residents of Dannemora, where the prison is located, should feel safe because of the presence of hundreds of law enforcement officers there.
+
+Still, students returned to schools Monday amid heightened security after police thoroughly searched every building and bus, Saranac Central School District Superintendent Jonathan Parks said in an email to parents. Police officers were scheduled to be at every school throughout the day, he said.
+
+That's in part because of its remote location -- in the sparsely populated northeast corner of New York, about 25 miles from the Canadian border.
+
+And also because it's in a region where wintry weather can persist more than half the year.
+
+The facility has 2,689 inmates, and two of its most notorious inhabitants were Matt, 49, and Sweat, 35.
+
+They apparently were last seen at 10:30 p.m. Friday during a standing count -- head counts that are performed every two hours throughout the night when guards visually check to see whether inmates are in their bunks.
+
+The pair tricked the guards by arranging things in the bunks to look ""like people were sleeping ... with these sweatshirt hoodies on,"" Cuomo said.
+
+Once they were out of their cells, they then followed a catwalk down an elaborate maze of pipes until they emerged from a manhole outside the prison walls.
+
+They evaded detection for some seven hours, until the inmate count at 5:30 a.m. Saturday.
+
+Along with the taunting sticky note, the pair also left a host of unanswered, and uncomfortable, questions for law enforcement.
+
+How did they get the power tools? How could they have known the layout of the bowels of the old prison? Did they have help from the inside?
+
+Cuomo, who toured the escape route and announced the $100,000 reward Sunday, said it was possible the tools came from contractors working on the 170-year-old prison. Authorities are also looking at civilian prison employees, he said. But he seemed to rule out the involvement of the prison's certified employees.
+
+""I'd be shocked if a guard was involved, and that's putting it mildly,"" he said.
+
+The danger the two men pose can't be overstated, officials said.
+
+Sweat was serving a life sentence without parole in the killing of Kevin Tarsia, a sheriff's deputy, in 2002.
+
+Matt was convicted on three counts of murder, three counts of kidnapping and two counts of robbery after he kidnapped a man and beat him to death in December 1997, state police said. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
+
+""He has a history,"" said Gabriel DiBernardo, who led the investigation into the murder for which Matt was convicted. ""He broke out of jail before. He is a cunning individual, no question about it, and a vicious individual.""
+
+Sweat is white, 5 feet, 11 inches tall and weighs 165 pounds. He has brown hair, green eyes and tattoos on his left bicep and his right fingers.
+
+Matt is white, 6 feet tall and weighs 210 pounds. He has black hair, hazel eyes and several tattoos: ""Mexico Forever"" on his back, a heart on his chest and left shoulder, and a Marine Corps insignia on his right shoulder.
+
+""These are dangerous people,"" Cuomo said. ""And they're nothing to be trifled with.""
+
+Matt is also well-known to Mexican authorities. In 2007, he was extradited from Mexico back to New York on a decade-old murder charge, documents show.
+
+With the facility's proximity to Canada, and with Matt's ties to Mexico, authorities on both international borders have been alerted.
+
+Officers used roadblocks and bloodhounds and went door to door in their search for the men. They scoured the woods and sifted through the dozens and dozens of tips that came in.
+
+But so far, no luck.
+
+They don't know if the pair is still together, had help on the outside, or if the men had access to a vehicle.
+
+Jonathan Gilliam, a former Navy SEAL, FBI agent, air marshal and police officer, told CNN's ""New Day"" on Monday that the inmates might have been able to pull off part of the escape by themselves. But he said the presence of power tools and the complicated escape route suggest that they weren't working alone.
+
+""The combination of all those things is very worrisome for me because that spells help,"" he said.
+
+On Sunday, the U.S. Marshals Service issued federal arrest warrants for the escapees. The warrants clear the way for the federal government to involve its considerable resources in the manhunt.
+
+""Every resource available to us will be used in bringing these two men to justice,"" said William O'Toole, a U.S. Marshals Service spokesman.
+
+""We're leaving no stone unturned,"" Guess of the New York State Police said Sunday.",REAL
+10514,"Texas Republican Calls Hillary The WORST Word You Could Ever Call A Woman, Blames Staffer (IMAGES)","  
+With Hillary Clinton making history this election season by becoming the first women nominated by a major party, the sexism has been on full display. The misogynists on the Right have questioned her health, her stamina, and everything in between. That is, of course, code for “the little woman doesn’t belong in the Oval Office.” However, one Texas Republican has taken the misogyny to a whole other level. 
+Meet Sid Miller, the Agriculture Commissioner for the state of Texas. He is also a former lawmaker. Miller, like most Republicans, doesn’t make his hatred for Hillary Clinton any secret. Instead, he somehow thought that it was perfectly appropriate to take to Twitter and express his feelings in a most disgusting way while tweeting about the polls. Miller’s tweet reads: 
+“TRUMP 44 Cunt 43,” punctuated with a cheering “Go Trump Go!” 
+In the predictable firestorm after, Miller tried to make the public believe that his account was hacked. Miller’s staff hastily relesed this defense of his post: 
+“The campaign was retweeting information today and inadvertently retweeted a tweet that they were not aware contained a derogatory term. The tweet was taken down as soon as possible. Commissioner Miller finds the term vulgar and offensive and apologizes to anyone who may have seen it.” 
+There’s a problem with that, though: The tweet was not a retweet. It was simply a tweet. Therefore, either Sid Miller himself or someone on his staff wrote this: 
+Naturally, Miller is Donald Trump’s number one man in Texas, according to the Texas Tribune . No surprise there. Further, Miller is no stranger to making tasteless and offensive jokes with regards to Hillary. Here is one that is just a few hours old as of this writing: 
+That tweet written in reference to the fact that the reason Hillary’s emails are in the news again is because of disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandals. 
+So, in other words, this Sid Miller character is the perfect Donald Trump supporter – a misogynistic and deeply ignorant asshat who can’t stand the idea of losing to a woman. 
+Featured image via screen capture from The Daily Beast Share this Article!",FAKE
+3321,"VA Secretary Robert McDonald admits lying about Special Forces service, apologizes","Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald on Tuesday apologized for lying about serving in the special operations forces in a conversation with a homeless veteran that was caught on camera earlier this year.
+
+McDonald made the claim in January while he was in Los Angeles as part of the VA's effort to locate and house homeless veterans. During the tour, a homeless man told McDonald that he had served in the special operations forces.
+
+""Special forces? What years?"" McDonald responded. ""I was in special forces."" The exchange was broadcast on ""The CBS Evening News"" Jan. 30. McDonald's misstatement was first reported by The Huffington Post.
+
+McDonald graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1975 and completed Army Ranger training before being assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division until his retirement in 1980. According to the Huffington Post, while McDonald was formally recognized as a graduate of Ranger School, he never actually served in a Ranger battalion or other special operations unit.
+
+""I have no excuse,"" the website quoted McDonald as saying in its report. ""I was not in special forces.""
+
+In a statement released Monday by the VA, McDonald said: ""While I was in Los Angeles, engaging a homeless individual to determine his veteran status, I asked the man where he had served in the military. He responded that he had served in special forces. I incorrectly stated that I had been in special forces. That was inaccurate and I apologize to anyone that was offended by my misstatement.""
+
+At a news conference outside VA offices on Tuesday, McDonald also told reporters he made the misstatement in a conversation with a homeless veteran he was trying ""to connect with.""
+
+McDonald added: ""I apologize for that. I have no excuse for it.""
+
+The VA secretary has drawn expressions of disappointment, but no demands for his resignation. ""A lie is a lie,"" said Michael Helm, national commander of the American Legion, the largest veterans service organization. ""I can't believe people do this.""
+
+McDonald told the Huffington Post that he had ""reacted spontaneously and ... wrongly"" in response to the homeless man's claim.
+
+""As I thought about it later, I knew that this was wrong,"" McDonald said of his false statement.
+
+Republican lawmakers on Tuesday were critical of McDonald over the false claim, but indicated they want to keep the focus on reforming the department itself.
+
+House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said he was ""disappointed"" in his comments.
+
+""After a rough couple of weeks that also included inflated claims of accountability at the Department of Veterans Affairs, I hope Sec. McDonald will redouble his efforts to ensure his statements -- and those of all VA officials -- are completely accurate. This is the only way the department can regain the trust of the veterans and taxpayers it is charged with serving,"" he said in a statement.
+
+Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., called the misstatement an error but said ""it doesn't dim the fact that he served honorably.""
+
+He said: ""We should all take him at his word and Washington shouldn't spend the next two weeks arguing about it. The Secretary has a job to do -- clean up the scandal-plagued VA. This latest controversy shouldn't shift one iota of focus away from that long overdue task.""
+
+The White House released a statement Monday evening saying that it had accepted McDonald's explanation.
+
+""Secretary McDonald has apologized for the misstatement and noted that he never intended to misrepresent his military service,"" the statement said. ""We take him at his word and expect that this will not impact the important work he’s doing to promote the health and well-being of our nation’s veterans.""
+
+After leaving the Army, McDonald went on to a successful corporate career, eventually becoming Chairman, President, and CEO of Proctor & Gamble. He became VA secretary this past July, as the agency was dealing with the fallout from the scandal of long patient wait times at VA hospitals.
+
+Click for more from The Huffington Post.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+10149,"Texas County Enacts ""Emergency Paper Ballots"" After ""Software Glitch"" In Voting Machines","  Texas County Enacts ""Emergency Paper Ballots"" After ""Software Glitch"" In Voting Machines Oct 26, 2016 1:50 PM 0 SHARES 
+Just yesterday we noted several social media complaints from Texas voters who alleged that when they voted a straight republican ticket that voting machines were switching their presidential selection to Clinton/Kaine. While most undoubtedly dismissed these reports as conspiracy theories, new official reports from Chambers County, Texas suggest that there might be some truth to the voting machine ""irregularities"". According to an NBC affiliate , polling stations in Chambers County had to enact emergency protocols yesterday and revert back to paper ballots after a ""glitch"" was discovered in the county's voting machines. 
+The issue was actually discovered on Monday morning when Chambers County Clerk Heather Hawthorne was casting her own ballot and the voter next to her noticed that one of her votes was not filled in when she reviewed her electronic ballot Hawthorne told 12News on Tuesday. 
+
+An error in the voting machine programming by Election Systems & Software (ES&S) caused votes for one statewide court of appeals race not to be entered when a voter tried to vote straight ticket in either party according to a release from Chambers County. 
+
+ES&S is the vendor that Chambers County contracts with to program their voting machines. 
+
+The Texas Secretary of State's office informed Hawthorne to create emergency paper ballots to continue voting until the problem could be fixed according to the release. 
+Below is the official press release from the Chambers County Clerk: 
+
+Of course, these confirmed reports from Chambers County seem eerily similar to problems reported yesterday on social media from people who also experienced problems when voting a ""straight republican ticket."" 
+
+The following report also surfaced in Arlington, Texas from a person who voted a straight republican ticket only to find just before submitting her ballot that her presidential choice had been switched to Clinton/Kaine . After reporting the error to polling officials, the voter was told that these errors ""had been happening."" 
+
+This Reddit user also noted multiple reports of voting errors across the state of Texas. 
+
+Of course, the real question is how many people submitted erroneous ballots before this ""glitch"" was caught and how many other ""software glitches"" exist in other counties around the country that will never be caught?",FAKE
+4339,Jeb Bush and Iraq: What price family loyalty? (+video),"Jeb Bush's top challenge as a likely presidential candidate is to distance himself from his brother's policies. But he's not doing that, and in fact goes out of his way to defend him.
+
+As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?
+
+[Update: This story was edited at 4 p.m. after Mr. Bush's Thursday afternoon remarks on Iraq.]
+
+This week, Jeb Bush’s foremost problem as a likely presidential candidate went on full display: Can the former Florida governor get over his last name and his emotional personal tie to his brother, the ex-president?
+
+On Thursday, after three days of botched replies to a simple question, Mr. Bush finally said what most everyone expected him to say in the first place.
+
+“Knowing what we now know, what would you have done? I would have not engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq,” Bush said at a campaign stop in Tempe, Ariz., according to The Washington Post.
+
+Bush said he had had trouble with the question, because he didn’t want to appear ungrateful for the sacrifices made by Americans during the war. But the episode leaves lingering questions about Bush’s willingness to distance himself from his brother, former President George W. Bush, in the younger Bush’s expected bid for president in 2016.
+
+Republicans were baffled Monday when Mr. Bush told Megyn Kelly on Fox News that he would have authorized the 2003 Iraq invasion, even given what we know now about the faulty intelligence. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and John Kasich – all Republicans running for president or considering it – say they wouldn’t have invaded. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton says her “yes” vote as a senator was a mistake.
+
+The next day, on Sean Hannity’s radio show, Bush walked back his comment. “I interpreted the question wrong, I guess,” he said. But when asked again, he demurred: “I don’t know what that decision would have been. That’s a hypothetical.”
+
+“That’s a hypothetical” is the all-purpose dodge any politician can deploy when he or she doesn’t want to answer a question. And it made Bush look unprepared.
+
+“Jeb should have been prepared to answer that question the second his brother stepped on Marine One to leave the White House in 2009,” says Ford O’Connell, author of “Hail Mary: The 10-Step Playbook for Republican Recovery.” “You get four or five mulligans on the presidential campaign trail, and he just used one of them up.”
+
+The Iraq War remains deeply unpopular with the American public; in June 2014, 75 percent of the US public said the Iraq War was not worth the costs, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll.
+
+The good news for Bush is that most Americans aren’t yet paying close attention to the 2016 race. It’s been 13 years since he last ran for office – reelection as governor of Florida – and he’s still getting his political sea legs back. Though he’s not expected to announce for president until mid-June, he’s effectively already running. On Wednesday, he said outright that he was running, then quickly reversed himself.
+
+At the heart of his campaign lies a paradox: the great blessing and the great burden of the Bush name.
+
+His father’s presidency (1989-1993) is remembered fondly by the general public, though anti-tax conservatives still remember his breaking of the “no new taxes” pledge. Bush’s brother’s presidency  (2001-2009) gets lower marks. Still, Jeb Bush benefits tremendously from the political network his family opens up for him. He could easily out-raise the rest of the GOP field in the early going. He has also assembled an A-list team of advisers.
+
+But his brother’s legacy poses a particular burden, not just Iraq but also the economic crisis at the end of his tenure. And Jeb appears unwilling to throw brother George under the bus. He even referred to his brother recently, at a private event, as an adviser on the Middle East, a comment he didn’t disown in his interview with Ms. Kelly.
+
+The real story, in fact, out of Bush’s interviews with Kelly and Mr. Hannity may be that he seemed to go out of his way to defend his brother on Iraq.
+
+“News flash for the world,” Bush told Kelly. “If they’re trying to find places where there’s space between me and my brother, this may not be one of those.”
+
+To Hannity, Bush said this: “The simple fact is, mistakes were made, as they always are in life.”
+
+George W. Bush seems acutely aware of the liability he poses to his brother. Last month, at an event in Chicago, he practically gave Jeb permission to disown his record.
+
+“He doesn't need to defend me,” the second President Bush said, according to Politico.
+
+He also acknowledged his mother’s famous comment from 2013 – “Haven’t we had enough Bushes?” – and said: “That’s why you won’t see me out there” on the campaign trail.
+
+If nothing else, it’s already clear that Jeb Bush won’t sail to the Republican nomination as his father and brother did back in the day. The theory that he could clear the GOP field by vacuuming up establishment money has already proved false. He leads (barely) in national polls of Republican candidates, but hasn’t broken out of the pack. In any case, it’s too soon to put much stock in polls.
+
+On Tuesday, Bush advisers acknowledged that he is skipping the Iowa Straw Poll on Aug. 8, a beauty contest that contains no upside for him, as it favors candidates who appeal to the social conservative base of the Iowa GOP. That’s a smart move, analysts say.
+
+Bush’s real challenge is to present himself as a Republican of the future, not a man burdened by his family’s past. With fresh faces like his former protégé, Sen. Marco Rubio (R) of Florida, and Gov. Scott Walker (R) of Wisconsin gaining positive notice in the early going, the battle is joined. But so far, Bush is still stumbling over the past.
+
+Some analysts suggest that Bush may be playing a completely different game – that he is just going to say what he thinks, stay true to his family, and let the chips fall where they may. Perhaps this is his way of running “joyfully,” as he described his possible campaign in early 2014. “Let Jeb be Jeb” is how Bush adviser Mike Murphy described the philosophy to The New York Times last December.
+
+Perhaps this brand of political authenticity will catch hold among Republican voters – and along with it, some of the Bush views that don’t fit standard Republican orthodoxy at the moment. Among those are support for “legalization” of undocumented immigrants and the Common Core education reforms, as well as an unwillingness to sign anti-tax pledges.
+
+If Bush somehow manages to bend the GOP in his direction, he could represent the party’s future. But that’s a big “if.”",REAL
+5883,Iraqi Soldier Battling in Mosul Reunited with His Family After Two Years of Estrangement,"14 Shares
+4 9 0 1
+It's a heartwarming moment amid the carnage of the battle to liberate Mosul.
+An Iraqi lieutenant -- part of the elite Golden Division special forces fighting to take back Iraq's second city from ISIS -- was stationed at a checkpoint in Bartella, about 25 kilometers to the east of the city, when he spotted some familiar faces Tuesday.
+Amid a group of refugees fleeing the city's outskirts were his mother, his father, and his nephew, whom the soldier had been separated from for over two years.
+The soldier gave his name as 1st. Lt. Salam to the CNN producer who captured the moment.
+After embracing a group of adults, including his mother, father and brother, he picks up his young nephew and holds him, walking away from the group. He then falls to his knees and kisses him, before picking him up and carrying him away. The joy on both their faces obvious to all.
+MORE... Muslim Iraqi Soldiers Erect Cross on Top of the Church in Newly Liberated Karamless Village Near Mosul Thousand of Iraqi Civilians Treated for Breathing Problems after ISIS Torches Sulphur Plant near Mosul ISIS executes 58 plotters, buries in mass grave amid reports on rebellion in Mosul US-led air raid kills 20 Iraqi pro-government fighters 1st Lt. Salam later told CNN his family flewitd Bazwaya a mere hour after ISIS turned up at their house and ordered them to go to Mosul.
+He says his father asked the ISIS fighters if he could have a few minutes to get his family. His father then went back to his house to collect them. Not long after that, coalition air strikes hit ISIS positions in the city, giving the family an opportunity to escape.
+1st Lt. Salam says the last two and a half years have been a ""living nightmare"" and that he still can't believe his family are alive.
+Iraqi forces were on the doorstep of ISIS-held Mosul on Tuesday, the closest they've been since launching an operation two weeks ago to wrest the city from more than two years of ISIS rule.",FAKE
+3832,House Committee Report Finds Secret Service Is 'An Agency In Crisis',"House Committee Report Finds Secret Service Is 'An Agency In Crisis'
+
+The Secret Service is an agency ""in crisis"" and one that has had its weaknesses ""exposed by a series of security failures at the White House, during presidential visits, and at the residences of other officials,"" according to a scathing report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released Thursday.
+
+The report was a bipartisan effort led by the committee's highest-ranking members, Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. It also suggested the agency reconsider its mission.
+
+The committee has been looking at the agency's shortcomings since a string of embarrassing security breakdowns involving the White House and the president became public in recent years.
+
+According to the report, there have been 143 security breaches or attempted breaches at secured facilities in the past decade. And of those, only 13 have resulted in jail time for the perpetrators, the committee found.
+
+Investigators also found ""morale is at an all-time low"" within the Secret Service because of overworked personnel, shrinking budgets, a loss of confidence in top leadership and other factors.
+
+The investigation focused on a handful of security breaches dating back to November 2011. That's when several shots were fired from a semiautomatic rifle at the White House, but it wasn't discovered for four days, until a housekeeper stumbled upon broken glass and cement debris on the floor. Another lapse was the much-publicized prostitution scandal involving Secret Service personnel in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2012.
+
+The report also chronicles a monthlong period in 2014 in which there were six security breakdowns, beginning with a Sept. 16 incident. It involved an armed security guard with a history of violence whom the Obama's security detail allowed to ride an elevator with the president in Atlanta.
+
+Eleven days later, a man ""posing as a Member of Congress at a Congressional Black Caucus awards dinner"" managed to sneak backstage unnoticed by agents at an awards gala and speak to the president, according to the report. The report adds that in yet another breach in October of last year, a woman was able to gain unauthorized access to a backstage entrance, this time at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute event.
+
+Julia Pierson, the director of the Secret Service at the time, resigned in October 2014 amid the string of breaches.
+
+The security lapses are not limited to the White House or to the president's security detail. The report cites an April 2013 breach when four adults slipped into the backyard of the vice president's residence to go fishing. The intrusion was discovered only after a neighbor saw the group and alerted the agency.
+
+The Oversight Committee recommended changes to the agency, including immediately hiring more personnel, and suggested the next president consider a previous proposal of searching outside the Secret Service for the agency's next director.
+
+Additionally, the committee suggested the Obama administration conduct an interagency review of the scope of the Secret Service's duties, to determine what ""missions can be shed.""",REAL
+572,History class becomes a debate on America,The president-elect hasn't made clear how he will avoid conflicts between his vast empire and his official duties.,REAL
+8775,Congress: Hillary Will Be Impeached If She Becomes President,"Members of Congress have said that if Hillary Clinton is elected President next week they will start proceedings to have her impeached. 
+Via YourNewsWire 
+As Hillary Clinton’s campaign implodes amid the FBI actively pursuing five separate probes, including one into claims that the Clinton Foundation is connected to a Washington pedophile ring, there is still a possibility that Democrats will stubbornly vote her in on Tuesday.
+Yesterday during an interview on Fox News, Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul explained the process. “If the investigation goes forward and it looks like an indictment is pending, at that point in time under the Constitution, the House of Representatives would engage in an impeachment trial.
+It would go to the Senate and impeachment proceedings and removal would take place,” McCaul told Fox News’ Bill Hemmer. “I would hate to see this country thrown into a constitutional crisis because of Hillary Clinton’s behavior.”
+This again brings up the prospect of whether President Obama will pardon Clinton before she takes her oath of office. Meanwhile, the Oversight Committee is already bracing for years of investigationsshould Clinton move into the Oval Office.
+",FAKE
+1125,Poll: Trump leads GOP race nationally but with weaker hold on the party,"Donald Trump continues to lead his rivals nationally in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination. But his hold on the GOP electorate has weakened since the primary season began, and the party is now deeply divided over his candidacy, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
+
+Trump maintains the support of 34 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, compared with 25 percent for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, 18 percent for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and 13 percent for Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
+
+Trump’s margin over Cruz has narrowed from 16 points in January to nine today. As a succession of Republican candidates quit the race, Cruz’s position has ticked up four points since January, Rubio’s has risen by seven and Kasich’s has grown by 11. Trump’s has dipped by three points, within the poll’s margin of sampling error.
+
+In the Democratic race, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton still leads Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, but her national margin is the smallest in a Post-ABC poll since the beginning of the campaign. The new poll shows Clinton as the favorite of 49 percent of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents compared with Sanders, whose support is at 42 percent. That seven-point lead for Clinton compares with her 19-point advantage in January.
+
+That Trump is a polarizing figure within the Republican Party is no surprise, and it’s typified by the opposition among establishment and other Republicans that has intensified over the past few weeks. Only a bare majority (51 percent) of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents say they would be satisfied with the New York billionaire as their nominee, a noticeably smaller percentage than for Cruz (65 percent) or Rubio (62 percent), with Kasich in between at 56 percent.
+
+Favorable ratings also indicate an increasingly tenuous standing within the party. In early January, Republicans clearly gave Trump more favorable than unfavorable reviews, 60 percent to 39 percent. That has narrowed to a 53-46 margin, with negative marks at their highest level in Post-ABC polling since Trump entered the race. His positive ratings also trail Cruz’s 64 percent and Rubio’s 63 percent.
+
+The Post-ABC poll finds that more than half of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents think Trump is dishonest, does not understand their problems, lacks the right experience, and does not have the right personality and temperament to be an effective president. By contrast, more than 6 in 10 Republicans say Cruz is honest, empathetic, and has the right temperament and experience; similar shares say Rubio has the first three qualities, while half say he has the right experience.
+
+In a hypothetical head-to-head test of strength between Trump and Cruz, Republicans say they prefer the senator by 54 percent to 41 percent. Rubio is a narrower favorite in a one-on-one test against Trump, with an edge of 51 percent to 45 percent. The survey did not test a Trump-Kasich face-off.
+
+The poll was conducted over a weekend in which Cruz won contests in Kansas and Maine, Trump won in Louisiana and Kentucky, and Rubio won in Puerto Rico. On Tuesday, Republicans are voting in Michigan, Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii.
+
+Next Tuesday — the first day states can award delegates on a winner-take-all basis — there will be contests in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina. By the end of that day, more than half of the 2,472 convention delegates will have been awarded.
+
+It is likely that, after those March 15 contests, Republicans will have the clearest sense yet of Trump’s overall strength and of the viability of his challengers. Cruz’s string of recent victories, including in his home state of Texas a week ago, have elevated him as the leading rival to Trump. If Rubio and Kasich don’t win their home states, they will face pressure to quit the race.
+
+Many now predict that the Republican contest will not be resolved before the national convention in July. But even many Republicans who say they would not be satisfied with Trump as the nominee appear uneasy about the efforts of party leaders to prevent him from winning. About half of all Republicans who are dissatisfied or only “somewhat satisfied” with Trump nonetheless oppose efforts by party leaders to prevent him from becoming the nominee.
+
+There is considerable talk now about a possible floor fight at the convention, should Trump arrive with the most delegates but lacking the 1,237 needed for a first-ballot victory. About 42 percent of Republican voters support other candidates and say that in such a situation, the party should pick another nominee. But 53 percent either support Trump or say that leading the delegate count, even if short of an outright majority, should guarantee victory.
+
+Among all Americans, Trump has a more negative image by far compared to Cruz, Rubio or Clinton. Two in 3 adults say they have an unfavorable impression of Trump, who has drawn controversy in recent months for attacks on illegal immigrants from Mexico, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, a disabled reporter and Muslims, among other targets.
+
+None of the three other candidates tested — Clinton, Cruz and Rubio — had a net positive image, but all were viewed more favorably than Trump. Among all adults, 52 percent say they see Clinton unfavorably, 51 percent see Cruz negatively and 45 percent have a negative impression of Rubio. Clinton and Rubio have the least-negative image overall.
+
+The new Post-ABC survey shows a huge gender gap in support for Trump’s candidacy. He leads among Republican men with 44 percent, a roughly 2-1 margin over second-place Cruz. Among Republican women, though, he is the favorite of just 24 percent. In January, his support among GOP women stood at 37 percent, compared to 15 percent for Cruz. Trump also has lost ground against Cruz among very conservative Republicans and among those with incomes less than $50,000.
+
+Matched against his remaining rivals, Trump continues to perform slightly better among Republicans without college degrees than among those who are university graduates, although he has an edge with both groups. He has a wider lead among voters younger than 50 than with older voters. Among white evangelical Christians, Trump narrowly trails Cruz, but among non-evangelicals and white Catholics, his lead is almost 2 to 1.
+
+Matched directly against Cruz, though, Trump loses voters with or without college degrees, voters who see themselves as working class and middle class, and those with higher or lower incomes. Trump also loses conservatives against Cruz, especially those who say they are “very conservative,” while the two tie among moderate and liberal Republicans.
+
+Overall, Americans remain deeply pessimistic about the federal government. Two in 3 offer negative reactions, including about a fifth who describe themselves as angry. Trump has tapped into that mood — the more dissatisfied that people are with the federal government, the more likely they are to support his candidacy.
+
+A similarly strong majority sees the political system today as dysfunctional, even slightly more so than in the fall. Trump does best among those who feel most strongly about the way the system works.
+
+More Americans by far say they favor someone with experience in the system as the next president, rather than someone from outside the political establishment. Republicans, though, tilt more toward an outsider. Among those who want someone from the outside, Trump has the support of nearly half. Among those looking for someone with experience, Trump runs fourth behind Cruz, Rubio and Kasich.
+
+A similar pattern holds for two of Trump’s most controversial ideas — deporting all of the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States and temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country as a security precaution. Overall, Americans oppose both proposals, though more Republicans favor than oppose them. Trump has big leads among those who support such policies, but those leads disappear among those who do not.
+
+The Post-ABC poll was conducted March 3 to 6 among a random national sample of 1,000 adults reached on land-line and cellular phones. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.",REAL
+4131,Jesse Matthew charged in Hannah Graham's murder; DA will not pursue death penalty,"Jesse Matthew Jr., a former hospital worker, was indicted Monday on a count of first-degree murder in the abduction and killing of Hannah Graham, a University of Virginia student, who was missing for weeks before her body was discovered, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
+
+Albemarle County prosecutor Denise Lunsford said that the state will not seek the death penalty, and that Graham's family has been informed about the state's decision.
+
+Lunsford declined to say why Matthew was not charged with the higher count of capital murder. The abduction and first-degree murder charges are punishable by up to life in prison. Matthew, 33, was already charged with abduction with intent to defile the 18-year-old.
+
+Police have said forensic evidence also links Matthew to the 2009 disappearance and death of 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington, whose body also was found in the county. Lunsford said ""there are no pending charges"" against Matthew in the Harrington case.
+
+""The simple fact is the case involving Hannah Graham was ready to be charged first,"" she said.
+
+Graham vanished after a night out with friends Sept. 12. According to police, she left an off-campus party alone and texted a friend saying she was lost.
+
+In surveillance video, she can be seen walking unsteadily and even running at times, past a pub and a service station and then onto a seven-block strip of bars, restaurants and shops. Another video captured her leaving a restaurant with Matthew, who had an arm around her.
+
+Graham's disappearance prompted a month-long search involving thousands of volunteers as well as police. It ended when searchers found her remains Oct. 18 in rural Albemarle County, roughly six miles from the hayfield where Harrington's body was found in January 2010.
+
+Harrington disappeared while attending a Metallica concert at U.Va in October 2009. Her T-shirt was later found on a nearby tree limb.
+
+After police named Matthew a person of interest in Graham's disappearance, he fled and was later apprehended on a beach in Texas. He was charged with abduction with intent to defile, a felony that empowered police to swab his cheek for a DNA sample. That sample connected Matthew to a 2005 sexual assault in Fairfax County, according to authorities. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.
+
+The DNA evidence in the Fairfax sexual assault, in turn, linked Matthew to the Harrington case.
+
+Matthew previously had been accused of raping students at Liberty University and Christopher Newport University in 2002 an  2003. Matthew had played football at both schools. The cases were dropped after the women declined to press charges.
+
+Matthew's first court appearance on the newest charges in the Harrington case is scheduled for Feb. 18, Lunsford said. He will appear by video link from Fairfax County, where he is in jail awaiting trial in the 2005 rape case.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report",REAL
+3840,"With Iran deal, Obama makes bad history","It came two days after the announcement of the nuclear agreement with Iran, yet little mention was made on July 16 of the 70th anniversary of the first nuclear explosion, near Alamogordo, N.M. The anniversary underscored that the agreement attempts to thwart proliferation of technology seven decades old.
+
+Nuclear-weapons technology has become markedly more sophisticated since 1945. But not so sophisticated that nations with sufficient money and determination cannot master or acquire it. Iran’s determination is probably related to the United States’ demonstration, in Iraq and Libya, of the perils of not having nuclear weapons.
+
+Critics who think more severe sanctions are achievable and would break Iran’s determination must answer this: When have sanctions caused a large nation to surrender what it considers a vital national security interest? Critics have, however, amply demonstrated two things:
+
+First, the agreement comprehensively abandons President Obama’s original goal of dismantling the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Second, as the administration became more yielding with Iran, it became more dishonest with its own citizens. For example, John Kerry says we never sought “anywhere, anytime” inspections. But on April 6, Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said the agreement would include “anywhere, anytime” inspections. Kerry’s co-negotiator, Wendy Sherman, breezily dismissed “anywhere, anytime” as “something that became popular rhetoric.” It “became”? This is disgraceful.
+
+Verification depends on U.S. intelligence capabilities, which failed in 2003 (Iraq’s supposed possession of WMDs), in 1968 (North Vietnam’s Tet offensive) and in 1941 (Pearl Harbor). As Reuel Marc Gerecht says in “How Will We Know? The coming Iran intelligence failure” [the Weekly Standard, July 27], “The CIA has a nearly flawless record of failing to predict foreign countries’ going nuclear (Great Britain and France don’t count).”
+
+During the 1960 presidential campaign, John Kennedy cited “indications” that by 1964 there would be “10, 15 or 20” nuclear powers. As president, he said that by 1975 there might be 15 or 20. Nonproliferation efforts have succeeded but cannot completely succeed forever.
+
+It is a law of arms control: Agreements are impossible until they are unimportant. The U.S.-Soviet strategic arms control “process” was an arena of maneuvering for military advantage, until the Soviet Union died of anemia. Might the agreement with Iran buy sufficient time for Iran to undergo regime modification? Although Kerry speaks of the agreement “guaranteeing” that Iran will not become a nuclear power, it will. But what will Iran be like 15 years hence?
+
+Since 1972, U.S. policy toward China has been a worthy but disappointing two-part wager. One part is that involving China in world trade will temper its unruly international ambitions. The second is that economic growth, generated by the moral and institutional infrastructure of markets, will weaken the sinews of authoritarianism.
+
+The Obama administration’s comparable wager is that the Iranian regime will be subverted by domestic restiveness. The median age in Iran is 29.5 (in the United States, 37.7; in the European Union, 42.2). More than 60 percent of Iran’s university students, and approximately 70 percent of medical students, are women. Ferment is real.
+
+In 1951, Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, argued bleakly (in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”) that tyrannies wielding modern instruments of social control (bureaucracies, mass communications) could achieve permanence by conscripting the citizenry’s consciousness, thereby suffocating social change. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution changed her mind: No government can control human nature or “all channels of communication.”
+
+Today’s technologies make nations, including Iran, porous to outside influences; intellectual autarky is impossible. The best that can be said for the Iran agreement is that by somewhat protracting Iran’s path to a weapon it buys time for constructive churning in Iran. Although this is a thin reed on which to lean hopes, the reed is as real as Iran’s nuclear ambitions are apparently nonnegotiable.
+
+The best reason for rejecting the agreement is to rebuke Obama’s long record of aggressive disdain for Congress — recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess, rewriting and circumventing statutes, etc. Obama’s intellectual pedigree runs to Woodrow Wilson, the first presidential disparager of the separation of powers. Like Wilson, Obama ignores the constitutional etiquette of respecting even rivalrous institutions.
+
+The Iran agreement should be a treaty; it should not have been submitted first to the United Nations as a studied insult to Congress. Wilson said that rejecting the Versailles treaty would “break the heart of the world.” The Senate, no member of which had been invited to accompany Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, proceeded to break his heart. Obama deserves a lesson in the cost of Wilsonian arrogance. Knowing little history, Obama makes bad history.
+
+Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.",REAL
+7696,23 Things to Do to Improve Your Mental Health,"Prev post Page 1 of 4 Next 
+When most people make health resolutions, it usually involves their physical health. Most of us make decisions to exercise more, change our diets, lose weight, and lose body fat, but there are few of us that make resolutions to better our mental health. 
+Preserving your mental health is one of the most important things that you can do to make sure that you are getting the most out of your life. Letting your mental health slide is going to put you under more stress and will limit your ability to enjoy your life and get the most out of your relationships with others. 
+The good news is, there are some simple habits that you can start using in your life right now to make sure that you are taking care of your mental health, and getting the most out of every day. 1) Set a Sleep Schedule 
+Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our overall health, and many experts and doctors cite health as more critical to our overall health and survival than food or water. Though, when we get stressed or life gets busy, sleep is the first thing that we start to put off. 
+Whether stress starts to make it harder for you to go to sleep, or you decide that you can function on less sleep to get more done, eating into your sleep is one of the worst things that you can do for your mental health. Set a strict bedtime and wake up time for yourself. Your body works best when it has a routine for sleeping and waking up in the morning. 
+Read or journal before you go to bed, and see if you can stay away from your phone, laptop, TV, or tablet. Get yourself into the habit of having a habit to wind down at night. 2) Focus on your strengths 
+With work or in your personal life, it is so easy to be self critical and focus on only your weaknesses. Our culture in working society has ingrained in us over the years to focus on what we are bad at, and get better at it. To strive for being better in all facets of our lives, and to be well rounded. 
+Always focusing on what you aren’t good at, is not good for your mental health. Take an inventory of your strengths and find ways to use those daily in work and in your personal life. 3) Exercise 
+It can be so difficult to make time to exercise when you are exhausted with all of your daily responsibilities and obligations. Between work, home, family, friends, and hobbies or downtime, the last thing that you want to worry about is commuting back to your gym to fight over equipment. 
+Here’s the thing though, exercise is something that your body needs. Whether you have been burnt out with working 9-5, being a full time student, or being a full time parent, you need to give your body the movement that it craves. 
+Sitting frequently throughout the day can wreck your posture, deplete your energy, and actually make you sad or depressed. You don’t need to exercise for an hour every day to reap the benefits of exercising for your mental health. 
+See if you can block out just 15-30 minutes per day to exercise. Whether that be taking a run, lifting weights, yoga, or taking a class, the endorphins and health benefits that you get from exercising will help your mental health. 4) Eat well 
+Diet is one of the major keys to mental and physical health. Eating crappy foods, synthetic ingredients, tons of sugar, starches, and fast food can dismantle your mental health in more ways than one. 
+Stick to real food that your body recognizes. Focus on eating fruits, vegetables, protein rich foods, and healthy fats that will digest slowly with your body, and serve more of a purpose than just filling you up. 5) Be thankful 
+Take time every day to be thankful and start each day with thankfulness. Keep a notepad or a sheet of paper to track all of the things that you are thankful for every day. 6) Take life a day at a time 
+Leave the worries and stresses of tomorrow for tomorrow, and focus on what you can do today. It is so easy to get stressed out when looking at the next 2-3 years or even the next 2-3 weeks of your life, but taking time to be present in the moments of each day can do a world of good for your mental health. ",FAKE
+2255,Kentucky clerk still won't issue same-sex marriage licenses,"A defiant Kentucky county clerk, who has been ordered to face a federal judge on Thursday in a hearing about her refusal to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, says she won't resign.
+
+“Some people have said I should resign, but I have done my job well,” Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis said in a statement posted to the website of the lawfirm that represents her, Liberty Counsel.
+
+“I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage,” Davis said in the statement. “To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience. It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision. For me it is a decision of obedience.”
+
+Davis' office has steadfastly denied marriage licenses since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage this summer, and that practice continued Tuesday morning when at least two same-sex couples were denied as Davis invoked ""God's authority."" Rowan County Attorney Cecil Watkins says the federal court alerted him later Tuesday morning that a hearing was scheduled for 11 a.m. Thursday in Ashland. Watkins says clerk Kim Davis is summonsed to attend, along with all the deputy clerks who work in her office.
+
+After Davis initially stopped issuing marriage licenses, two gay couples and two straight couples sued her. A federal judge ordered her to issue the licenses, an appeals court upheld that decision and the Supreme Court on Monday declined to intervene in the case, seemingly leaving Davis with no legal ground to stand on.
+
+But Davis has refused to issue the licenses, saying her deeply held Christian beliefs don't let her endorse gay marriages.
+
+As an elected official, Davis can't be fired. Any impeachment of her would have to wait until the legislature's regular session next year or could come during a costly special session.
+
+“I have received death threats from people who do not know me,” Davis said in the statement. “I harbor nothing against them. I was elected by the people to serve as the County Clerk. I intend to continue to serve the people of Rowan County, but I cannot violate my conscience.”
+
+On Tuesday, Davis asked David Moore and David Ermold, a couple who has been rejected four times by her office, to leave. They refused, surrounded by reporters and cameras.
+
+""We're not leaving until we have a license,"" Ermold said.
+
+""Then you're going to have a long day,"" Davis told him.
+
+From the back of the room, Davis' supporters said: ""Praise the Lord! ... Stand your ground.""
+
+Other activists shouted that Davis is a bigot and told her: ""Do your job.""
+
+On Tuesday morning, shortly after Davis' remarks, the sheriff's office cleared the county office of those gathered to support both sides of the issue.
+
+The two groups lined up on either side of the courthouse entrance to chant at each other. Davis' supporters told her to ""stand firm,"" while gay-rights activists shouted ""do your job.""
+
+The rejected couples' supporters called the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit on their behalf. They asked that their attorneys file to have Davis held in contempt.
+
+Randy Smith, leading the group supporting Davis, said he knows following their instruction to ""stand firm"" might mean Davis goes to jail.
+
+""But at the end of the day, we have to stand before God, which has higher authority than the Supreme Court,"" he said.
+
+Ermold hugged Moore, his partner of 17 years, and they cried and swayed as they left the clerk's office. Davis' supporters marched by, chanting.
+
+""I feel sad, I feel devastated,"" Ermold said. ""I feel like I've been humiliated on such a national level, I can't even comprehend it.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5367,"NATIONAL REVIEW, Conservatism Inc., Plan To Cave EVEN MORE On Immigration!", ,FAKE
+3689,Ore. Gunman Asked Victims If They Were Christians,"Witnesses are saying the gunman in Thursday's mass shooting in Oregon asked students if they were Christians before murdering them.
+
+But they're also talking about student and Army vet Chris Mintz, who they say charged straight at the shooter.
+
+Thirty-year-old Mintz is recovering from surgery after Chris Harper Mercer shot him seven times. Witnesses said Mintz told other students to run, then charged straight for the gunman.
+
+""He actually ran back towards the building where the shooting was and he ran back into the building and I don't know what happened to him,"" witness Hannah Miles said.
+
+Mercer wounded six others and killed nine people. The father of a wounded victim told CNN that Mercer reportedly ordered students to stand up and asked if they were Christians.
+
+""And they would stand up and he said, 'Good, because you're a Christian, you're going to see God in just about one second. And then he shot and killed them,"" CNN's Stacy Boylan said.
+
+Thursday night, family and friends of victims mourned the tragedy and their loss.
+
+""This doesn't happen in Roseberg,"" a local resident said. ""This is small town America -  it's not supposed to happen here but it happens.""
+
+**Are shootings like this one a sign of the end times? Click play to watch CBN Chaplain Joel Palser answer that question. He explains how the church can be a light during dark times.
+
+.The community of Roseberg is grappling with the enormity of the tragedy which has raised all kinds of questions. Why would the gunman have wanted to know the faith of the people he was about to shoot? And what was his motive?
+
+A profile of the suspect is beginning to emerge as authorities search for a motive.
+
+On MySpace, Mercer posted a photo of himself with a rifle and other photos glorifying the Irish Republican Army. On another website he described himself as a conservative Republican who's not religious but spiritual.
+
+Neighbors at his apartment complex say he was as shy, reserved and familiar with guns. Investigators don't believe he had a criminal history and said he may have been a student at the college.
+
+""He was just silent. He didn't really speak much. If you approached him, he kind of seemed hesitant,"" one neighbor said.
+
+""He had no friends. He was just kind of like off to himself,"" another one said.
+
+On one Internet site, called Spiritual Passions, he described himself as ""not religious, but spiritual."" He didn't like ""organized religion"" and said, ""I'm looking for someone to share my beliefs.""
+
+He used similar language online when he said he was looking for a woman who was ""pagan, wiccan, not religious, but spiritual.""
+
+Within hours of the shooting, President Barack Obama called a press conference to demand new gun laws, saying that gun violence is ""something we should politicize.""
+
+""Somehow this has become routine,"" Obama said in a White House briefing Thursday. ""The reporting is routine, my response here at this podium ends up being routine, the conversation in the aftermath of it -- we've become numb to this.""
+
+The FBI and other law enforcement officials are now combing through Mercer's emails and online activity trying to figure out a motive.",REAL
+8829,BREAKING: Muslim shot dead after trying to KILL GUARD at US EMBASSY in Kenya,"BREAKING: Muslim shot dead after trying to KILL GUARD at US EMBASSY in Kenya Oct 28, 2016 Previous post 
+Earlier today, TGR (The Geller Report) published news accounts of Muslims in Kenya going on a murder spree as’part of a campaign to kill unbelievers.’ This looks like it may very well be part of that Muslim war. 
+Kenya, once the beacon of leight of democracy on the dark continent, now under siege by jihad, thanks in large part to their native son, Obama. 
+“Man shot dead after stabbing guard at US Embassy in Kenya,” By Tom Odula | AP October 27 at 1:01 PM 
+NAIROBI, Kenya — A man was shot dead after stabbing a policeman guarding the perimeter wall of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and trying to take his gun, a Kenyan police official said Thursday. 
+The policeman who had been stabbed opened fire in self-defense and killed the attacker, said Vitalis Otieno, the officer in charge of the Gigiri area that hosts several embassies and the U.N’s African headquarters. 
+“He fired first and shot the person and the person died on the spot,” Otieno said. 
+The identity of the attacker, a Kenyan from the volatile region of Wajir near Somalia, is known to police, Otieno said. 
+Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel were seen collecting evidence at the scene of the shooting. 
+The U.S. Embassy confirmed",FAKE
+3063,Why we miss the unpolarizing Pat Moynihan,"The problem with most discussions of political polarization is that they reach quickly for technical causes and solutions. Our politics are polarized, we are told, because of gerrymandered districts, the rise of opinionated media sources and party primaries closed off to independents or voters in the other party.
+
+There’s nothing wrong with thinking about such things, but all the mechanical fixes in the world will not overcome a brute fact about the United States in 2015: We really do have profound disagreements with each other that are intellectual, moral, partisan and ideological.
+
+Because the facts are clear on this, it’s always important to note that our polarization is asymmetric: Republicans are much more conservative as a group (close to two-thirds of them) than Democrats are liberal (about one-third). Still, if our divisions are intellectually rooted, who has ideas that might bring us together?
+
+One name comes to mind when you try to think of someone who managed to live on both sides of the ideological divide and still keep his own thinking coherent. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan worked for both John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. He opposed the Vietnam War but was not wild about anti-war protesters. He was often called a neoconservative but thought of himself as a liberal. He was a Democratic senator from New York for 24 years and managed to get votes from just about everybody. In his last reelection race in 1994 — a bad year for Democrats — he won by 14 points.
+
+How did he do this? The question is interesting enough that two volumes were published recently to try to explain the matter. In his gem of a book, “The Professor and the President,” Stephen Hess, who worked for Moynihan (and is my Brookings Institution colleague), tells the story of the unlikely Nixon-Moynihan political courtship. And Moynihan was an interesting enough thinker that Greg Weiner, a political philosopher himself, treats him as one in “American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.”
+
+Weiner’s notion is that Moynihan was undoubtedly a liberal “through and through” because he “believed in government as an agent of social improvement” and thought it capable of doing large and important things. But he shared with Edmund Burke, often seen as the founder of modern conservatism, a skepticism about grand schemes for “wholesale social transformation” and a belief in limits. “Both were conserving reformers who valued traditional systems of authority, most primarily the family,” Weiner writes, and both “interpreted politics in terms of the observable and the concrete rather than the metaphysical and the abstract.”
+
+Weiner argues, and I am inclined to agree, that one reason we miss Moynihan, who died in 2003, is because we have a need for more Burkean liberals and more Burkean conservatives. They would share a concern for evidence, an understanding of the limits of human reason, a skepticism about our ability to transform “complex social systems” and a belief that we can always make things better but will never make them perfect. From these shared assumptions, they could then argue about such matters as how much social generosity to expect from government.
+
+Moynihan’s Burkean nature no doubt made it easier for the lifelong Democrat to work for a Republican president. Hess shows how he was also a brilliant inside player who knew how to get around bureaucratic and human obstacles — and how he appealed to Nixon. Moynihan made him laugh, which wasn’t a common thing in that White House, and also acted as a tutor, which flattered the sometimes-insecure Nixon by taking his intellectual curiosity seriously.
+
+Hess details the still astonishing story of how Moynihan got Nixon to propose a truly radical innovation, a guaranteed annual income for all Americans. The Family Assistance Plan was killed in Congress because it was too liberal for Republicans and not generous enough for Democrats. But it was, in its way, a classic Burkean program. Instead of creating intricate and expensive new services for the poor, Moynihan proposed to give them what they definitely needed more of, which was money.
+
+As a skeptic about technical solutions to polarization, I certainly won’t propose that all Americans study their Burke and their Moynihan. But as an antidote to the tendency these days toward the-sky-is-falling rhetoric, we could usefully remember this very Burkean warning from Moynihan: “When situations of considerable but not impossible difficulty are described in apocalyptic terms, responses tend to be erratic, even convulsive.” As Moynihan would never say: Chill.
+
+Read more from E.J. Dionne’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+1547,Why are these candidates losing the GOP race so far?,"Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and a New America fellow. He is the author of "" Jimmy Carter "" and "" The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society ."" The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
+
+(CNN) While Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are going into the 2016 Republican caucuses and primaries thoroughly enjoying their strong standing in the national polls and unrivaled media attention, with Marco Rubio hoping he can emerge as the new consensus candidate, others are in a fight to survive the full round of the coming year's primaries.
+
+A poor performance in February's voting -- the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries -- could force out some of the weaker candidates.
+
+Often the story about the losers in campaigns tells us a lot about the dynamics of a contest and the reasons that other candidates are succeeding at a particular moment.
+
+So it is worth asking -- what has happened to these candidates? Why are they in political trouble? What is going wrong?
+
+What happened to the predicted front-runner?
+
+Jeb Bush: The onetime front-runner is anything but that. The former Florida governor has suffered one of the most dramatic falls from grace that we have seen in some time. When the campaign started, he was widely believed to be a candidate who would be almost impossible to defeat, someone with all the money and endorsements necessary to cruise to victory.
+
+But the situation has turned out very differently. His biggest failing has turned out to be his inability to connect on the campaign trail and in media appearances. He has languished in front of crowds, having trouble articulating his reason for wanting to be in the race and performing with the kind of energy level (famously lampooned by Trump) that leaves many crowds eagerly waiting for the next candidate to take the stage.
+
+In last week's debate, he scored points with some one-liners aimed at Trump -- ""You can't insult your way to the presidency"" -- and could gain from being a candidate willing to take on the bombastic front-runner. But will he see a lasting gain in the polls?
+
+Bush seems to be someone who is running at the exact wrong time. He continues to struggle with the controversy over his brother's decision to go to war in Iraq. He boasts of experience at a moment GOP primary voters want to tear down the establishment. That anger has undercut many of the benefits that his experience in government could have brought Bush in another year.
+
+A surprising fade -- and an expected one
+
+Rand Paul: Many observers once thought that Rand Paul could be the most exciting candidate in the room. He was young, he espoused a kind of libertarian philosophy (though libertarians argued it was anything but pure) that was exciting to many younger Republicans, and he had eclectic views on issues like criminal justice that made it difficult to easily pin him as a Republican right-wing stalwart.
+
+The campaign has not turned out so well. He has demonstrated a number of personal failings, such as a fierce temper as well as hostile interaction with female reporters that, early on, damaged him in interviews.
+
+Perhaps more important is the fact that his skeptical stance about an aggressive foreign policy was out of step with so many Republicans. The truth is that much of the party has embraced the hawkish outlook that has prevailed among Republicans since 9/11. There is little room for Republicans outside of this fold. Even his attacks on surveillance, which had gained some hold, lost traction as the threat of ISIS has become clearer.
+
+Paul's efforts to reach across party lines on issues like criminal justice have some appeal with younger voters, but not with the majority of primary voters who are older and not as sympathetic to these kinds of questions. At last week's debate, he scored some points by criticizing Chris Christie when he said: ""If you are in favor of World War III, you have your candidate."" The problem for Paul is that right now there are many Republicans who like militaristic rhetoric in today's troubling times.
+
+Lindsey Graham: The struggles of the South Carolina senator, who became the latest to drop out of the race Monday, are much less surprising than those of Jeb Bush.
+
+Graham remains a favorite conservative in the minds of many of his colleagues because of a number of attractive qualities -- his long record as a hawk in an era of great national security challenges and political fear, and his roots in the regional bedrock of modern conservatism: the South.
+
+He has a good sense of humor that he knows how to deploy politically, even with delicate issues. Last week, in the early bird debate, he said: ""Donald Trump has done the one thing you cannot do: Declare war on Islam itself. ISIL would be dancing in the streets, but they don't like dancing.""
+
+Beyond his quotable lines in the debates, Graham's candidacy barely attracted any attention. Graham's low-key, folksy style didn't play well in the modern media age of cutthroat, smash-mouth politics. Speaking softly and carrying a big stick don't really work so well in the era of Twitter and cable news.
+
+Graham also prides himself on knowing how to work within the system and form ties to fellow members of Congress. But since comity is out and partisan warfare is in, these virtues don't really sit well with many of the GOP's primary voters. His hawkish credentials have also been echoed by most of the other candidates so there was not really much to distinguish him.
+
+Mike Huckabee rose to fame in Arkansas at a moment when the religious right played a big role in partisan politics shaped by the culture wars. As the agenda has turned to questions like immigration, terrorism, and climate change, those concerns have not been front and center.
+
+Ironically, even in this anti-Washington environment, the other governors and former governors who are running for office are not having an easy time. In past decades the role of governor has been an attractive position for running for president -- governors get to display executive leadership without becoming enmeshed in the politics of the Beltway. Yet this time they have had trouble claiming true outsider status, especially in contrast to Trump and Ben Carson. While some of them, like Bush, Christie and John Kasich are hanging in there, others are unlikely to survive much longer. George Pataki, a conservative from the blue state of New York, was one of those executives who liked to boast of how well he could govern in years where northeastern Republicans still had some role within the party. But those times are gone, and his low-key and at times dull public presence is not really made for the national stage.
+
+Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, who comes from a critical state for the GOP, has barely made a blip on the political radar. His campaign has fizzled from the moment he started, lacking definition and lacking sizzle. Christie's record in New Jersey, from the problems of the economy to the bridge scandal, has continued to be a black mark on his campaign, though his focus on campaigning in New Hampshire has helped him in the first primary state.
+
+Not registering in the polls, or a flash in the pan?
+
+Rick Santorum: His time came in 2012 when he shocked Mitt Romney early on with his strong support among blue-collar conservatives. Santorum was one of the first Republicans to tap into the anti-establishment anger Republicans directed against Washington and Wall Street. But now his themes are being repeated by a number of candidates, including Trump. His thunder seems less distinct in 2016, while his staunchly conservative views on same-sex marriage remain a huge liability in the current environment.
+
+Ben Carson: Carson is much more like the flash-in-the-pan candidate that most experts thought Trump would be. Though Carson had a few weeks where his low-key personality and eclectic views attracted some interest and a spike in the polls, his inexperience and tenuous command of foreign policy became a huge liability as the agenda shifted to foreign policy.
+
+Carly Fiorina: Despite a few strong debate performances, her campaign has never really taken off. She has been dogged by questions about her business record, which has continued to provide fodder for her opponents. Her highly conservative views have undercut some of her promise to broaden the Republican electorate while she has not had much success defining what her candidacy is really about, other than theoretically being the best person to handle the ""gender"" problem the GOP candidate would face if running against Hillary Clinton.
+
+The candidates are trying to stay in the race as long as possible, hoping that the early polling isn't really accurately predicting how the voters will choose. It is also important to remember that according to all the best social science research, the ""invisible primary"" of fund-raising and endorsements matters more than national polling at this stage, so some candidates believe all of the talk of inevitability for Trump or others at the top of the polls is misplaced.
+
+But staying around will be hard, especially if voters don't flock to their sides and if their campaign coffers are depleted. Many of these candidates could join Lindsey Graham, Rick Perry, Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal in leaving the stage. We will soon gain a better sense of what the real contest is in the major primaries, and of whether the party can unite around a candidate -- or will have to choose one at a messy convention.",REAL
+9025,Former DEA Prescription Head Drops a BombShell — Congress Protects Big Pharma & Fuels Opioid Crisis,"Home / Health / Former DEA Prescription Head Drops a BombShell — Congress Protects Big Pharma & Fuels Opioid Crisis Former DEA Prescription Head Drops a BombShell — Congress Protects Big Pharma & Fuels Opioid Crisis Claire Bernish October 31, 2016 8 Comments 
+Congress would rather protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies than the health of those addicted to dangerous opioid drugs, says a former head of the DEA responsible for preventing abuse of medications. 
+Joseph Rannazzisi, former Deputy Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, asserts Big Pharma and its lobbyists have a “stranglehold” on legislators in Congress and have engineered the protection of a $9 billion per year industry over the health of American citizens, according to a report from the Guardian . 
+“Congress would rather listen to people who had a profit motive rather than a public health and safety motive,” he said, according to the outlet. “As long as the industry has this stranglehold through lobbyists, nothing’s going to change.” 
+Rannazzisi explained lobbyists have spent millions thwarting legislative and policy efforts to provide guidelines for reducing the prescribing of opioid medications closely related to heroin — and helped limit the DEA’s powers to discipline those who dispense unusually high dosages of the same. 
+A pharmacist himself, Rannazzisi severely criticized lawmakers he claims hold a double standard — publicly vowing to combat the opioid epidemic, while essentially working on behalf of pharmaceutical companies to ensure the industry’s profits. 
+“These congressmen and senators who are using this because they are up for re-election, it’s a sham,” he told the Guardian . “The congressmen and senators who are championing this fight, the ones who really believe in what they’re doing, their voices are drowned out because the industry has too much influence.” 
+With the unique insight of having been an insider, Rannazzisi excoriated the duplicity evidenced between legislators’ public lamentation of addiction and deaths from the opioid crisis during election years, and private efforts to protect drugmakers from liability. 
+And he would know. According to Rannazzisi’s LinkedIn profile, as Chief of Diversion, he had been tasked with “oversight and control of all regulatory compliance inspections and civil and criminal investigations of approximately 1.6 million DEA registrants” — but if the standards are lowered by Congress to allow greater leeway in prescribing opioids, the threshold of criminality is raised. 
+As the Guardian points out, legislation to fight the opioid epidemic, Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act , did, in fact, pass in July — but partisan controversy erupted when Republicans failed to provide funding to give the law sharp teeth. Democrats then issued a report titled “ Dying Waiting for Treatment ” in response, which “likened the Republican response to the opioid crisis to ‘using a piece of chewing gum to patch a cracked dam.’” 
+Indeed the report sharply criticized the bill, equating its policies to ‘empty promises’ for the lack of financial follow-through. 
+As the Washington Post detailed in a report earlier this month, the DEA launched an aggressive campaign to rein in distribution of opioids by pharmaceutical manufacturers to illegal ‘pill mills’ and corrupt pharmacies, who cared little whether the drugs wound up on the streets. 
+Headed by Rannazzisi, the Office of Diversion Control sent investigators into the field, and began issuing hefty fines and filing lawsuits against the distributors responsible for the proliferation of opioids on the streets. 
+But the disproportionately powerful pharmaceutical industry — fearing a potential significant loss in profits — fought back. Hard. 
+According to the Post , the deputy attorney general summoned Rannazzisi to a meeting in 2012, concerning the cases of two unnamed major drug companies. 
+“That meeting was to chastise me for going after industry, and that’s all that meeting was about,” the now-retired DEA official told the Post . 
+Then, in 2014, came what constituted a hand out to the pharmaceutical industry by the Department of Justice and congressional legislators: the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act — legislation initiated by the Healthcare Distribution Management Association — the industry group representing distributors at the heart of the controversy. 
+An analysis of lobbying records by the Post found “the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, spent $13 million lobbying House and Senate members and their staffs on the legislation and other issues between 2014 and 2016.” 
+Rannazzisi argued his case to congressional staffers in a phone conference in July 2014, and recalled telling them, “This bill passes the way it’s written we won’t be able to get immediate suspension orders, we won’t be able to stop the hemorrhaging of these drugs out of these bad pharmacies and these bad corporations.” 
+Stunned at the massive — and ultimately successful — effort to take the bite out of DEA attempts to hold distributors and drugmakers responsible for their role in an epidemic estimated to take 19,000 lives every year, Rannazzisi likened the legislation to a “free pass” for legal drug pushers. 
+“This doesn’t ensure patient access and it doesn’t help drug enforcement at all,” he told the Guardian. “What this bill does has nothing to do with the medical process. What this bill does is take away DEA’s ability to go after a pharmacist, a wholesaler, manufacturer or distributor.” 
+“This was a gift. A gift to the industry,” he added. 
+After heading the diversion office for a decade, Rannazzisi retired in 2015 — likely disgusted over legislators’ dedication to the legal drug industry, rather than the people whose interests they’re ostensibly obligated to protect. 
+“The bill passed because ‘Big Pharma’ wanted it to pass,” he told the Guardian in no uncertain terms. “The DEA is both an enforcement agency and a regulatory agency. When I was in charge what I tried to do was explain to my investigators and my agents that our job was to regulate the industry and they’re not going to like being regulated.” 
+Big Pharma relies overwhelmingly on lobbyists filling the coffers of politicians to ensure they ignore the crisis gripping the nation. As the Center for Public Integrity found , the Guardian noted, Purdue Pharma — at the heart of the epidemic for its highly-addictive drug introduced in the late 1990s, OxyContin — spent a breathtaking $740 million in the last ten years on congressional lobbying efforts. 
+However, Big Pharma’s power to influence policy and legislation extends far beyond simple but effective lobbying — the government-run Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (IPRCC) has been accused by Sen. Ron Wyden of being a tool to “weaken” CDC guidelines for limiting overprescribing of opioids. 
+Wyden wrote to Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell of his concerns the IPRCC had been staffed with ‘experts’ with conflicts of interest for their close ties to Big Pharma, including a scientist with a $1.5 million endowment from Purdue, reported the Guardian . 
+“You’ve got a panel that’s certainly got a fair number of people that have a vested interest in this problem of overprescribing. That’s something you’ve got to root out,” Wyden asserted . “The role of the pharmaceutical companies on these advisory panels troubles me greatly. Science is getting short shrift compared to the political clout of these influential interests.” 
+Families of countless addicts and victims of the opioid industry would undoubtedly find the direct influence of Big Pharma’s pro-opioid cash appalling — yet it continues to this day. Policies and legislation have not yet been given the appropriate funding needed to effectively combat the problem, which swirls out of control while politicians and drugmakers reap blood-tainted profits. 
+“Corporations have no conscience,” Rannazzisi flatly told the Guardian . “Unfortunately, with my job, I was the guy who had to go out and talk to families that lost kids. If one of those CEOs went out there and talked to anybody, or if one of those CEOs happened to lose a kid to this horrible, horrible domestic tragedy we have, I’d bet you they’d change their mind. 
+“When you sit with a parent who can’t understand why there’s so many pharmaceuticals out in the illicit marketplace, and why isn’t the government doing anything, well the DEA was doing something. Unfortunately what we’re trying to do is thwarted by people who are writing laws.” Share Google + skyp0ckets 
+You know, even if a pharma head talked to the family of someone who lost a loved one to opiod addiction, or had a family member suffer that fate, I don’t think it would change them in the least. These people who are hard-wired to accumulate massive amounts of wealth are usually somewhere between sociopathic and psychopathic. This is why it is very difficult for people to trust medicine, and in many cases, the doctors who dispense it. Have you ever been sitting in a waiting room and watched the number of salespeople revolve in and out, many with carry-out food? Disgusting. Bwin51 
+Ever notice how the sales reps are all well dressed attractive women? rav1 TZM_TVP_RBE 
+The entire system is inherently corrupt. 
+Imagine you are the CEO of one of these Big Pharma corporations and you decided to cut the price of your drugs across the board, making them accessible to everyone that needed them. You would be out the door so fast your head would spin! 
+The board and the shareholders would be furious and demand a CEO that only cares about share prices. 
+And so you have it, inherent corruption. 
+The solution: 
+http://www.thevenusproject.com/the-venus-project/ Bwin51 
+If there was ever a conspiracy, it’s this one where government and business agree that those who wish to abuse drugs to their eventual demise are given the freedom to destroy themselves, reproduce freely thereby creating a new generation of consumers, generating profits for a few and tax dollars for the country. It’s not the cost of pharmaceuticals as much as the enablement of opioid addiction in the name of profits that is disturbing. Purdue pharma had an opportunity to change their formulation of OxyContin long ago to make their drug nonaddicting, but they chose not to according to Chasing the Scream. If that’s true, and so far no one has denied the assertion, then what do we have here. 
+This is a “bombshell”? I thought it was common knowledge. rav1 
+We’ve known this for some time now – maybe it’s a bombshell to those who believe and defend the corrupt system – but… it’s been known for a long time. 
+https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c1fa9675331c053172286e53581c0496949f8edca27ba323bad684cf6b5fc19d.png 
+And think of what lobbyists dole out to Congressmen to force us to BUY AMERICAN rather than CANADIAN for exactly the same BRAND NAME DRUGS! 
+Lets See if Clinton can make this the major effort in 2018 when Congressmen need to be reelected at OUR EXPENSE!!! 
+Here’s a US-CANADA comparison of common drug prices US and CANADA. 
+Read the comments too!",FAKE
+4271,Sanders won't call for release of Clinton's bank speech transcripts,"Rindge, New Hampshire (CNN) The war over Wall Street between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton escalated Sunday on CNN's ""State of the Union,"" where both candidates defended their records.
+
+Clinton repeated her accusation that Sanders and his campaign are engaged in an ""artistic smear"" by using innuendo against her.
+
+Sanders, for his part, declined to join calls -- including from his own spokeswoman -- for Clinton to release transcripts of her paid speeches to big banks, but he didn't reject those calls either.
+
+CNN's Jake Tapper asked Clinton about the implication from the Sanders campaign that Clinton changed her vote on a bankruptcy bill fifteen years ago as a senator.
+
+Earlier in the week, the Sanders campaign had forwarded to reporters comments and writings by Elizabeth Warren, the consumer advocate who is now a senator from Massachusetts. Warren has said that Clinton had agreed with opposing the bankruptcy provision as first lady, but ultimately voted for it years later as a senator.
+
+Clinton told Tapper she voted for the bill she didn't like in 2001 as part of a deal to strike a provision about child support she said would hurt women and children. That's the way Congress works, Clinton said.
+
+""That's the way it happens sometimes,"" she said. ""I didn't like the bill any more than I had liked it before. It still had very bad provisions. But I also pushed hard for a deal to protect women and children. So, okay. I held my nose, I voted for it. It never became law.""
+
+Clinton bristled at the implication, however.
+
+""This attack by insinuation, by innuendo, is really getting old,"" she said, arguing the Sanders campaign is ""grasping at straws"" to make the case she is beholden to Wall Street.
+
+Clinton said she has a tougher plan to take on Wall Street than he does and she'd rather debate those issues.
+
+Earlier this week, Sanders criticized his opponent over her ties to Wall Street at MSNBC's Democratic debate.
+
+""What being part of the establishment is, is in the last quarter, having a super PAC that raised $15 million from Wall Street, that throughout one's life raised a whole lot of money from the drug companies and other special interests,"" Sanders said Thursday.
+
+Sanders, meanwhile, declined to to join calls for Clinton to release transcripts from her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other big banks, despite mounting pressure from progressives for the Democratic front-runner to do so.
+
+The Vermont senator also ripped a key Clinton surrogate, predicted a close race in New Hampshire's upcoming primary and even exuded confidence that he will do well in South Carolina.
+
+""Do you think she should (release the transcripts), and what do you think would be revealed in those transcripts?"" Tapper asked Sanders.
+
+""No idea,"" Sanders said. ""I have no idea what she said and I think the decision as to whether or not to release it is her decision.""
+
+""You don't have a position on it at all?"" Tapper asked.
+
+""No,"" the Vermont senator said.
+
+When asked at the debate whether she would release the transcripts, Clinton simply said she would ""look into it.""
+
+But progressive activists, as well as some Republicans, have put pressure on Clinton over her paid speeches, with some calling on her to release the transcripts. And Symone Sanders, a spokesman for the Vermont senator's campaign, called for the transcripts to be released before Tuesday's primary.
+
+""I think that is a question that is going to live on further, even after this debate is over, and it's a question that deserves to be answered,"" she said.
+
+Sanders, however, did not hold back when Tapper asked him about David Brock, the man who runs the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA.
+
+""I happen to like Hillary Clinton, but I am astounded by some of the people that she has hired, including David Brock,"" Sanders said, questioning his opponent's judgment.
+
+Brock is a recovering ""right-wing attack man"" and lead a crusade against the Clintons in the 1990s.
+
+Now, however, he is a major Clinton backer and has regularly targeted Sanders. Among other attacks, Brock recently said that a Sanders TV ad didn't feature enough African-American and Latino faces and claimed ""Black lives don't matter much to Bernie Sanders.""
+
+""David Brock, people will remember, used to be a real right-wing guy who was attacking people like Anita Hill,"" Sanders said. ""This is an African-American law professor who tried to do the right thing, and he admitted it. He said, 'I lied about her.'""
+
+Sanders added, ""I just don't understand where the Clinton people are coming from hiring somebody like that. Every day, you know, they're attacking us in one way or the other.""
+
+The Vermont senator believes Tuesday's primary will be a close one.
+
+""We think it's gonna be a close election, we're working really hard,"" Sanders told Tapper.
+
+It's a sentiment Sanders has echoed for the past five days in the Granite State.
+
+""Don't make me nervous, and don't jinx me,"" he added.
+
+Both Democratic campaigns have tried to manage expectations for the primary. Clinton has pushed the narrative that Sanders hails from Vermont and thus has an edge with his New England neighbors. In turn, Sanders reminded voters that Clinton won the state in the 2008 primary when she ran against then-Sen. Barack Obama.
+
+The Sanders campaign has said it's insulting to New Hampshire voters to suggest that they would only support him because he's from the New England area.
+
+""Well, in this sense it is. Look, I mean, obviously, Vermont and New Hampshire are separated by a river, we are close states,"" he told Tapper. ""But you know what? Secretary Clinton won this state in 2008. Her husband ran several campaigns in this state.
+
+When we began this campaign here in New Hampshire, we were 30 points down in the polls and she was much better known in this state than I was.""
+
+Earlier in the week, Sanders reiterated the same line, telling reporters on Tuesday that Clinton ""has very significant political connections.""
+
+""She has the support of virtually the entire political establishment here in New Hampshire,"" he added.
+
+But although Sanders says he's focused on not letting New Hampshire slip away, he believes his campaign will be viable in South Carolina, a state where Clinton is considered to have a significant advantage.
+
+""I think we are the underdog now,"" Sanders said. ""I think we have seen some real momentum there. I think we got a shot at it.""",REAL
+4183,Trump’s impending nomination means it’s time for a third party,"It’s over. Donald Trump, a man utterly unfit for the position by temperament, values and policy preferences, will be the Republican nominee for president. He will run against Hillary Clinton, who is easily the lesser evil but is trailed by clouds of scandal and misconduct and whose party’s left wing poses its own threats to liberties of speech, religion, enterprise and association.
+
+It is time for a third candidate, and probably for a third party.
+
+Some people will dismiss this notion as absurd. However, only those prescient enough to have forecast Trump’s success have the standing to certify impossibilities. If the Trump candidacy has blown up every other aspect of political conventional wisdom, why not this one?
+
+Even if a third candidacy still yielded a Clinton victory, it would be worthwhile. It would, first, deny the Clinton campaign the illusion of a mandate from American voters who would have, en masse, turned out to reject Trump. If nothing else, a strong third-candidate vote would send her a message to govern from the center, rather than in deference to her party’s increasingly powerful left wing.
+
+A third candidate could lay the groundwork for a new political party. The Republican Party may right itself after this moral disaster, led by men and women of the caliber of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.). But the sad truth is that although the speaker has the qualities of a statesman, two of his Republican predecessors have indicated that they would vote for Trump without qualms, while a third is too preoccupied with his upcoming jail term to say much of anything.
+
+The Republican presidential defeat that likely impends will reflect an entirely appropriate national revulsion at the GOP candidate, whose personal record of chicanery and wild rhetoric of bigotry, misogyny and misplaced belligerence are without parallel in the modern history of either major party. It is entirely conceivable that the damage done will be permanent.
+
+And in any case, the party of Lincoln is sick. The influence on it of ranting reality-television players, talk-show hucksters and monomaniacs of various stripes may not recede. The temper that led a supposedly responsible party of governance to repeatedly attempt to shut down the government may, in turn, shut it out of executive power for a long time.
+
+A new, center-right party may be necessary — we cannot yet tell. If it is, the outlines of its platform are easy to anticipate: reverence for the Constitution; serious grappling with the domestic problems associated with economic opportunity for all, education and affordable health care; and commitment to the internationalist tradition of the post-World War II consensus. It would advocate a federal government that can energetically do the things it should, but would limit the role of unaccountable regulators and bureaucrats and push to states and local governments every function that is not clearly a duty of the federal government. Above all, it would be committed to liberty in every sphere of personal and public life.
+
+A third candidate — and if it comes to that, a third party — must be led by a politician. The Great Republic does not require a man on horseback to rescue it, despite the arguments that some have made for drafting a retired general. Senior military officers usually make dreadful politicians, and besides, politics is an art — a respectable art, despite what too many Americans think — with unique skills and aptitudes. People with such skills exist, including Mitt Romney. The question is whether one of them will step forward.
+
+One of them should, for this final reason: to keep conservative consciences clean. To vote for Clinton is to sacrifice standards and endorse policies and conduct no conservative should; not to vote at all is an escape, not a civic deed.
+
+Admittedly, this may be a losing cause. But a losing cause is not necessarily a futile one. John Quincy Adams fighting slavery in the 1830s and 1840s and Wendell Willkie running on an internationalist platform in 1940 proved that. A Trump candidacy is a disgrace and has indeed already damaged us at home and abroad, but the longer-term question is larger than one demagogue, dangerous though he is. It is whether the cause of free, limited and constitutional government will have someone to speak for it and to represent it now and for decades to come.
+
+The hour is late, the task is urgent, and the cause is great. Let us hope that some politicians will summon the courage that their country requires, and act.",REAL
+4160,The College Loan Bombshell Hidden in the Budget,"In obscure data tables buried deep in its 2016 budget proposal, the Obama administration revealed this week that its student loan program had a $21.8 billion shortfall last year, apparently the largest ever recorded for any government credit program.
+
+The main cause of the shortfall was President Barack Obama’s recent efforts to provide relief for borrowers drowning in student debt, reforms that have already begun to reduce loan payments to the government. For more than two decades, budget analysts have recalculated the projected costs of about 120 credit programs every year, but they have never lowered their expectations of repayments this dramatically. The $21.8 billion revision—larger than the annual budget for NASA, or the Interior Department and EPA combined—will be tacked onto the federal deficit.
+
+“Wow,” marveled Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Whether or not it’s good policy to help borrowers with their payments, it’s obviously costly for taxpayers.”
+
+The 40 million Americans with student loans are now saddled with more than $1.2 trillion in outstanding debt. And with higher education costs rising much faster than inflation, the already massive program has been growing at a spectacular clip; direct government loans alone increased 44 percent over the last two years despite an aura of austerity in Washington. The Obama administration has tried to ease the burden for some borrowers by reducing their payments to 10 percent of their income and forgiving their loans after 20 years; this year, the Education Department plans to make all borrowers eligible for that “pay-as-you-earn” relief.
+
+Student loan defaults increased somewhat last year, but the department says the primary drivers of the unprecedented “re-estimate”—budget-wonk jargon for the update of expected loan costs—were Obama’s policy changes, the recent ones as well as the upcoming ones. And because of a quirk in the budget process for credit programs, the department can add the $21.8 billion to the deficit automatically, without seeking appropriations or even approval from Congress.
+
+That’s a big quasi-bailout, increasing the deficit nearly 5 percent. The White House budget office was unaware of any larger re-estimates since the current scoring rules for credit programs went into effect in 1992. As a January Politico Magazine feature on the government’s unusual credit portfolio reported, the Federal Housing Administration has stuck more than $75 billion worth of similar re-estimates onto Uncle Sam’s tab over the last two decades, most of them after the recent housing bust led to a cascade of FHA-backed mortgage defaults. But it’s never had a one-year shortfall quite as drastic as this.
+
+It’s not yet clear whether this will be a hefty one-time revision, or a harbinger of oceans of red ink as millions more borrowers get relief on their payments to the government. Several reports by Barclays Capital have warned that Obama’s generosity to borrowers could leave the student loan program as much as $250 billion in the hole over the next decade. And behind closed doors, officials in the White House budget office and the Treasury Department have criticized the Education Department’s loan models as overly optimistic, with some officials pushing internally for third-party audits.
+
+But administration officials said there’s no reason to think this year’s shortfall will recur. They believe that their budgets going forward will accurately reflect their new efforts to help borrowers limit their payments, that pay-as-you-earn will be “baked into the cake.” Historically, re-estimates for the better and for the worse have tended to cancel each other out across the government. In fact, this year, the government’s credit portfolio increased to $3.3 trillion, larger than any U.S. bank’s, but the re-estimates for all the programs besides student loans netted out to less than $1 billion.
+
+The administration argues that even the $21.8 billion student loan shortfall is a relative pittance for the Education Department’s $740 billion book of direct loans, the second-largest government credit portfolio after FHA mortgage guarantees.
+
+“Any re-estimate should be considered in this context,” says White House Office of Management and Budget spokeswoman Emily Cain.",REAL
+7678,It Took Less Than 2 Hours For The New Email Investigation Story To Completely Collapse (VIDEO),"  
+Hillary supporters can stop panicking. The “reopening of the FBI’s email investigation” story blasted out by every hungry reporter and desperate Republican has already completely fallen apart. It took less than two hours. 
+The initial headlines were as grim as they were overblown. Shortly before an official announcement, NBC News leaked the news that the FBI would be looking into newly discovered emails related to the previous Clinton investigation. NBC News: FBI re-opening investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server 
+— Jesse Rodriguez (@JesseRodriguez) October 28, 2016 
+This was important because despite Republicans hanging every last one of their hopes on Hillary being indicted before the election, the FBI investigation found zero evidence of criminal wrongdoing. A new investigation made all those dashed hopes come rushing back. They. Freaked. Out. 
+Especially Trump. 
+— Hallie Jackson (@HallieJackson) October 28, 2016 
+However, even as Trump took a meaningless victory lap, the story itself was falling apart. The bombshell turned out to be a dud. 
+Over on MSNBC, veteran reporter Pete Williams did what almost no other reporter bothered to – he got to the bottom of it. NBC’s Pete Williams: Sr. officials say—During separate investigation “a device” led to add’l emails–not from Clinton https://t.co/QmmNoxXhOx 
+— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 28, 2016 
+All the “big” things turned out to not exist. No, there is no evidence to suggest these new emails were covered up. No, they haven’t found anything incriminating. No, this isn’t a “reopening” of the case – it was never closed to the begin with and this is a small update not a gamechanger. And perhaps most importantly these emails did not even come from Hillary Clinton . 
+Bigger than Watergate? Hardly. 
+Like Wikileaks before it, this non-scandal will be used on the right to give the appearance that Hillary Clinton is “corrupt” without providing any concrete proof beyond it. There is no big story here, but the conservative movement will use it as a pretext to continue harassing Clinton and her campaign with baseless accusations. FBI Director James Comey may have scored a few political points with his Republican colleagues, but his investigation will likely yield zero fresh controversies. 
+This is the maddening world we live in. A sham built on a sham built on a sham. It’s shams all the way down. 
+Featured image via Alex Wong/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+1397,How Predictive Are Iowa And New Hampshire?,"How Predictive Are Iowa And New Hampshire?
+
+Iowa and New Hampshire get a lot of attention, but their records in picking presidents, let alone nominees, is spotty (as you can see from the chart above). But that doesn't mean the states don't matter. They have been effective at weeding the field of candidates, and they're about momentum for those later states.
+
+Plus, in the last 40 years, just one person has gone on to win the presidency after losing both Iowa and New Hampshire — Bill Clinton.
+
+Here's how the predictability of the states breaks down by party:
+
+New Hampshire has been better at picking nominees for Republicans. Since 1976:
+
+— Two became president: Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
+
+Iowa, on the other hand, has picked:
+
+Here's the thing, though: No Republican has become the nominee in the last 40 years without winning either Iowa or New Hampshire.
+
+Iowa has been slightly better than New Hampshire at picking nominees on Democratic side. In fact, since 1976:
+
+— A whopping six eventual nominees have won Iowa, including the last three (Barack Obama, John Kerry and Al Gore).
+
+— Two Iowa Democratic winners have become president — Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
+
+— Five nominees over that same time ...
+
+— Just one became president — Carter.
+
+— Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan all lost Iowa but went on to win the presidency.
+
+— Bill Clinton didn't win either Iowa or New Hampshire in 1992, but was still declared ""The Comeback Kid"" after his second-place finish in the New Hampshire.
+
+— The person who led the longest in Iowa in the crowded Republican field in 2015, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, was ... Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. He led for six months, from February to August, before dropping out of the race after a series of missteps.
+
+— If Donald Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, it would be the first time a non-incumbent Republican has done so in 40 years.",REAL
+5730,ISIS Executes 300 Iraqi Civilians by Firing Squad North of Mosul,"ISIS Executes 300 Iraqi Civilians by Firing Squad North of Mosul 7 Shares 0 1 
+Member of Nineveh Provincial Council, Hossam al-Din al-Abbar, announced, that the ISIS executed 300 civilians and former security members, north of Mosul. 
+Abbar said in a press statement, “Today, ISIS members executed 300 persons for collaborating with security forces,” pointing out that, “The ISIS was detaining them in its prisons, and then executed them by firing squad in Moshairefa village, north of Mosul.” 
+“ISIS filmed the execution after the so-called Sharia Court issued the death sentence in Wilayet Nineveh,” Abbar added. 
+The ISIS executed thousands of Mosul residents after capturing the city in June 2014, on different charges, especially for collaborating with the security forces. Recommended For You",FAKE
+10425,Common painkillers linked to increased heart failure risk,"Common painkillers linked to increased heart failure risk 
+Tuesday, November 01, 2016 by: L.J. Devon, Staff Writer Tags: heart failure , pain management , antioxidants (NaturalNews) When elderly patients with joint problems start taking common painkillers such as ibuprofen and naproxen, their risk of heart failure increases. This is the finding of a UK study published in the British Medical Journal . The study investigated 10 million people with an average age of 77 from the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany. Those who took non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) were rushed to the hospital with heart failure 19 percent more often than those who did not take the drugs. The same awful correlation was not made for those under the age of 65, but the study does point out that serious health problems are being ignored and numbed by painkillers. Dealing with the root cause of inflammation is more important for long-term health Regular use of NSAIDs is becoming a popular strategy to help manage pain later in life. Using these over-the-counter painkillers may take the edge off the pain, but continued use does not deal with the problems that are causing the inflammation in the first place. And old age is not the reason for the pain.For this reason, elderly patients could benefit more from natural anti-inflammatory substances that work with the body's healing process. Over time, giving the body phyto-nutrients such as astaxanthin, curcumin and capsicum do much greater damage repair than NSAIDs. These plant based medicines go after the free radicals that are causing damage at the cellular level.Numbing the pain is not enough, and allows heart conditions to go unnoticed, leading to heart failure . Pain within the joints and tissues is a signal to the conscious self that there is indeed a breakdown, an imbalance, or a deficiency. When NSAIDs are thrown at the problem regularly, there can only be a numbing of the real problems that the elderly patient faces. When the correct nutrients are absorbed and toxins are removed, then the root problem sending the message of pain can be repaired. Better pain management essential for the elderly Flu shots and other vaccines containing aluminum are pushed on the elderly as ""medicine."" The aluminum acts as an inflammatory adjuvant to trigger the immune system to respond to the virus material in the vaccine. The inflammation and genetic damage that aluminum is known to cause may be exacerbating pain in elderly patients and causing damage to their nervous systems.Natural substances that repair the nervous and immune systems would be better advised for the elderly population. However, the medical system and the common patient do not understand how to use substances such as phenolic compounds that come from plants. These real life medicines possess antioxidant properties that act as therapeutic agents to counteract oxidative stress. Something as simple as Siberian ginseng ( Eleutherococcus senticosus ) can be included in the diet to provide greater mental and physical stamina. This root contains a powerful combination of sterols, coumarins, flavonoids and polysaccharides that lessen the effect of stress on the body, allowing one to adapt to high stress situations and manage pain more effectively. Sources include:",FAKE
+6624,"THIS Test Will Tell If You Are An Indigo, A Crystal Or A Rainbow Child!","Many people believe that there has been a wave of individuals being born in order to change the old ‘Iron’ and industrial way of life to more ‘enlightened’ and spiritual. You’ve probably heard about ‘ Indigo Children ’ and ‘ Lightworkers ’ across the internet.
+
+Lightworkers are just a consequence the ways of the modern world have brought to the human psyche.
+
+
+A Lightworker is a person who can sense that there’s a lot of healing to be done on a large scale to the world. The modern ways of life are disharmonious and harmful to ourselves and Nature, which we are all a part of. This results in subconscious awareness that something needs to be done, especially in people who are born into the modern society.
+
+Newer generations are unbound from ‘the chains’ people who were constructing the modern society have been imprisoned with. The chains I am referring to are actually their investment of energy, their mindset and character developed in a different era, with far less available information. These new generations can clearly see the bigger picture and what doesn’t work. That’s why they have a heightened sense to fix the world.
+
+Just like there are popular terms in the science community addressing these new generations as ‘generation x’, ‘generation y’and ‘generation z’, there are terms in the spiritual movement addressing these generations as ‘ Indigo Children ’, ‘ Crystal Children ’ and ‘ Rainbow Children ’.
+
+
+WHAT KIND OF LIGHTWORKER ARE YOU? 
+
+
+Check what kind of lightworker you are. 
+
+What aspect has most traits that describe you? 
+
+INDIGO CHILDREN: 
+Born between the 1960s and the 1990s; Rebellious and warrior in spirit; Despises the system; Loves to isolate; Fond to addictions; Stubborn; 
+CRYSTAL CHILDREN: Born between 1980s and 2000s; Strong and pure hearted; Highly developed imagination and creativity; Extremely empathetic and emotional; Passionate about supernatural phenomena and superheroes; Easygoing; 
+RAINBOW CHILDREN: Born after the new millennium; Positive and happy; Technologically advanced and easy in understanding new gadgets; Loving and hard to contain; Loves animals, Nature and possibly vegan; Free; 
+THIS IS WHAT THESE LABELS MEAN: 
+
+Indigo children are born between the 1960s and the 1990s really similar as the baby boomers of the generation x.
+
+They are rebellious and unable to conform to dysfunctional situations at home, work, or school. They are warriors in spirit.
+
+They want to rage against the corrupted system that governs society and this trait projected itself into the art, the music, the movies, the movements and the lifestyle of their youth.
+
+They experimented with psychedelic substances, they forced their mind to be opened.
+
+All of this resulted in creation of new businesses and inventions that changed the future forever, like the internet.
+
+
+Crystal children are most likely to be the children of people from generation x. They are born around 1990s and 2000s slightly differing from generation y which addresses people born between 1980s and 2000s. However, the characteristics of crystal children and generation y individuals are almost exactly the same.
+
+They are intuitive, spiritually aware and passionate about supernatural subjects. They have highly developed imagination and creativity. They understand things easily, they are extremely empathetic and very easy going. This contradictive schism between their emotions forces them to use drugs, to visit psychiatrists, feel high levels of anxiety, have panic attacks and sometimes even more serious issues with their mental health.
+
+They are born in a transition time, in a period where humanity made its biggest leap with technological advancement which affected all areas of society. They grew up in times without internet and times when you cannot imagine how you lived without internet. This transition happened in only 10 years period, which is REALLY small amount of time for such great change. This affected their way of seeing the world. It’s like they were forced to raise their consciousness in an accelerated rate. But that’s ok because they are strong enough, like crystals. They always see the world with pure eyes, which additionally adds to their ‘crystal children’ description.
+
+Because of their imagination, purity of heart and strength, they are attracted to the superhero phenomena. Their art, music, movies, businesses, even their lifestyles are inspired and driven by various superheroes they idolized while they were growing up.
+
+
+Rainbow children are the newest generation of people, or generation z, born after the new millennium.
+
+They are modern and more technologically advanced than generation x and y because they are raised in a period where humans are more connected than any time in the known human history. They had almost all of the information in the world available to them while they were growing up, only by pushing few buttons.
+
+These kids are happy and positive. They are like a breath of fresh air. They are bringing happiness and joy to the whole world through various inventions, platforms and mediums that the generation x has developed and generation y perfected.
+
+Their light and positivity makes them freer than any generation in modern history. They love traveling, they hate being tied up to one person and they cannot stand the old conformistic ways. It feel like prison to them. Think of them like light; they give warmth, life and cannot be captured. Their whole being is pure and that’s why most of these kids are vegan.
+
+
+THE GREATEST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE 3 GENERATIONS IS THIS: 
+
+
+The Indigos are here to destroy what’s not working and pave the way for a better world.
+
+The crystal children are the ones who need to create, develop and build the new ways uniting the best from the old and the new.
+
+The rainbow children are here to give life and fertilize the new and improved world that’s in harmony with Nature and the human potential.
+
+All of these 3 spiritual archetypes need to work together so there will be a real change to the way humanity further develops.
+
+However, it doesn’t mean that if you are an indigo you cannot be a crystal or a rainbow child. You can evolve through all of these 3 archetypes depending on your environment, understanding and purpose. And a lot of people do.
+
+These are simply 3 different aspects of one larger program called being a ‘Lightworker’ which works to heal the world.
+
+HERE IS HOW WE ARE ALL A PART OF THIS SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION: 
+
+This spiritual revolution is a consequence of the collective human psyche. To understand this you must understand how we are all connected. You must grasp the fact that EVERYTHING connects to everything else, even our thoughts.
+
+Émile Durkheim first introduced the collective conscious back in 1893 and described as the set of shared beliefs, ideas and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. However, just like our collective conscious Carl Jung called a phenomena ‘Collective Unconscious’ which is the subconscious mind shared by all of humanity.
+
+This is how we are all connected. This is how all of us, unintentionally created the perfect environment for ‘Lightworkers’ to be developed and act as an antidote to the virus that could have destroyed us. Maybe that was the defensive mechanism of our collective subconsciounsess or a higher plan of our collective psyche to help us thrive together as species.
+
+Life Coach Code 
+SOURCE ",FAKE
+8457,6 Places Voter Fraud Has Already Happened… But Don’t Worry,"Remember the last debate when the internet blew up because Donald Trump said he wouldn’t necessarily accept the results of the election ? People were bemoaning him as a fascist and no one in the mainstream wanted to admit that our election process is entirely rigged . The trouble is, voter fraud on a grand scale can be tough to prove . 
+As it turns out, voter fraud on a smaller scale has been detected in 6 locations already, according to today’s Drudge Report . But don’t worry. These are just “glitches” or “too few to make a difference.” 1) Chicago 
+In the Windy City, the dead have been voting for decades. Two investigators have admitted finding proof of this, but they refuse to say that there is fraud. Relatives of the Voting Dead feel differently. They say that they’ve reported the deaths of their loved ones repeatedly, but that the names have not been removed from the rolls. But that isn’t the worst of it – not only are these people on the rolls – they’ve repeatedly voted since their deaths. 
+Don’t worry, though. It’s just a few hundred dead voters that they’ve been able to confirm. No biggie. ( source ) 2) Philadelphia 
+Chicago is not alone with the dead folks voting.There are also reports from Philadelphia that people are making their voices heard from beyond the grave. *cough* Local station Action News 6 investigated and found that a stunning number of people have been deemed “active voters” for many years since their deaths. 
+Don’t worry, though. The local voting board says these mistakes are simply “human error” and that there aren’t enough dead voters to actually sway the election. ( source ) 3) Hollywood, Maryland 
+A woman in Maryland has reported another incidence of “vote flipping.” She voted a straight Republican ticket, then checked after it was submitted. Her vote for Trump had been switched to a vote for Clinton. 
+Don’t worry, though. The election officials there told her to just vote again. Of course, this would “undo” the vote for Clinton, but would it really count as a vote for Trump? I’m sure it’s fine. The election officials would want to be scrupulous about something like that. ( source ) 4) Miami-Dade County, Florida 
+Two women have been charged with felony counts of tampering with the election. One, a temporary election worker, was caught marking ballots by her co-workers. The other was caught filling out voter registration paperwork for people who did not exist. 
+Don’t worry, though. These were isolated incidents that have been dealt with. In the words of State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle, a Democrat, “Anyone who attempts to undermine the democratic process should recognize that there is an enforcement partnership between the elections department and our prosecution task force in place to thwart such efforts and arrest those involved. Now we need to move forward with the election.” ( source ) 5) Alexandria, Virginia 
+A guy in Virginia who was formerly employed by the New Virginia Majority, an advocacy group aligned with the Democratic party, was caught using fake names to fill out voter registration applications. 
+But don’t worry. Commonwealth Attorney Bryan Porter said, “Since the fraudulent applications involved fictitious people, had the fraud not been uncovered the risk of actual fraudulent votes being cast was low.” ( source ) 6) Lots of places in Texas 
+Much like the report in Maryland, voters in various locations in Texas have reported that when they chose a straight Republican ticket, the voting machines opted for Clinton/Kaine instead of Trump/Pence . Voters in Amarillo, Arlington, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Cypress, Mesquite, and El Paso have all reported vote flipping from Trump to Clinton. 
+But don’t worry. Election officials in the state say it’s not a problem with the equipment . It’s just those silly voters who don’t know how to use it. ““Typically, we’ve found it’s voter error with the equipment. Sometimes they vote straight party and then click on other candidates … or do something with the wheel….There is not an issue with the equipment.” ( source ) If you’re worried about election fraud… 
+You can add a smartphone app by True the Vote called VoteStand to report incidents of fraud. Don’t let anything slide. If you are voting, make sure your choice is accurately recorded. 
+Courtesy of Daisy Luther Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+4864,Trump: 'We Must Replace Globalism with Americanism',"Hillary Clinton is back on the campaign trail after three days off. She courted Hispanic voters in Washington as Donald Trump talked economics in New York.
+
+Trump unveiled more details of his plan to move the U.S. economy forward.
+
+""We must replace the present policy of globalism, which has just taken so many jobs out of our communities and so much wealth out of our country, and replace it with a new policy of Americanism,"" he explained.
+
+Trump said as president, he will act to tap into the ""un-realized potential"" of American workers and their dreams. He pledged to create 25 million new jobs and grow the economy over 10 years at an average annual rate of 3.5 percent.
+
+U.S. economic growth under President Barack Obama has never reached 3 percent in any one year -- something that's never happened under any other U.S. president.
+
+""I am going to lower your taxes very, very substantially. I am going to get rid of massive amounts of unnecessary regulation. All of these regulations on your business, and in your life,"" Trump insisted.
+
+Afterwards, Trump appeared on the ""Tonight Show."" In a lighter moment, host Jimmy Fallon made one request of the Republican presidential nominee, asking him,  ""Can I mess your hair up? Did you say yes?""
+
+Trump responded, ""Go ahead!"" Fallon then proceeded to dishevel Trump's hair.
+
+Meanwhile, Clinton was back on the campaign trail in the nation's capital, with the James Brown tune, ""I Feel Good,"" blasting from loud speakers.
+
+Fresh from three-and-a-half days off resting from pneumonia, she spoke to the National Hispanic Caucus in Washington, D.C.
+
+Clinton wasted little time renewing her attacks against Trump, going after him for telling the Washington Post he didn't want to answer the question right now of whether or not the president was born in the United States.
+
+""This man wants to be our next president? When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry?"" she asked rhetorically. ""If we just sigh, shake our heads and accept this, then what does that tell our kids about who we are?""
+
+The Trump campaign later conceded that he does believe the president was born in the United States.
+
+Even though polls show many voters don't like either candidate, Clinton is facing an enthusiasm gap.
+
+Only 50 percent of Trump's supporters say they're excited to vote for him. The percentage of Clinton supporters is even less, with only 43 percent saying they're excited about her.
+
+Enthused or not, with less than two months to go before Election Day, both candidates know independent voters hold the key to winning the White House.
+
+And Clinton says there's another important factor.
+
+""What matters is who registers to vote and who is motivated and mobilized to turnout to vote,"" she said.",REAL
+6274,"Hillary Clinton introduces Michelle Obama at campaign rally (wait, WHAT?) [video]","Hillary Clinton introduces Michelle Obama at campaign rally (wait, WHAT?) [video] Posted at 3:37 pm on October 27, 2016 by Doug P. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
+Michelle Obama is campaigning for Hillary Clinton at a rally today, though judging from the order of speakers you’d think it was the other way around: An embrace as @HillaryClinton introduces @FLOTUS to speak at campaign rally. ""Hillary Clinton is my friend,"" says Mrs Obama. pic.twitter.com/XjOqLl5LfY 
+— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) October 27, 2016 Hillary Clinton introduces Michelle Obama at North Carolina campaign event. Watch on @CNNGo https://t.co/tsd4VYu2VI https://t.co/BDF0fwnYc2 
+Popularity has obviously been taken into account: Strange, but understandable: Hillary Clinton introduces Michelle Obama at this rally. 
+FLOTUS is popular. Clinton…it's complicated. 
+— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) October 27, 2016 
+Hillaryous!",FAKE
+9356,Who reckons this might not be a legit iPhone charger?,"Next Swipe left/right Who reckons this might not be a legit iPhone charger? @Miradoreltd over on Twitter notes, “We have a sneaking suspicion this might not be a legitimate iPhone charger.”",FAKE
+6902,"Comment on If Clinton Goes Down, Loretta Lynch Will Go Down With Her by Truth Detector","Posted on October 31, 2016 by Daisy Luther 
+Oh, Loretta. 
+I’ll bet that AG Loretta Lynch is shaking in her boots right now, because when Hillary Clinton goes down, Lynch’s career will go down with her. Heck, maybe they’ll even be cellmates. 
+Loretta Lynch’s ties to the Clintons go back to 1999 when then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney’s office. She left in 2002 and went into private practice, but returned to the Brooklyn office in 2010 at the behest of President Barack Obama. ( Here’s her official bio. ) 
+In 2015, she was sworn in to become the 83rd Attorney General of the United States, taking the place of the blatantly corrupt Attorney General, Eric Holder , who will probably be most famous for his roles in the Fast and Furious operation, inciting racial tensions, and his mishandling of the Lois Lerner/IRS debacle. First, there was the secret airplane meeting with Bill Clinton 
+It all started to publicly go downhill for Lynch during the first investigation into Hillary Clinton’s carelessness with national secrets via her home email server . Right before FBI Director James Comey was to meet with Hillary Clinton to interrogate her about the subject, Lynch was busted having a secret meeting with Bill Clinton . The Washington Post reported: 
+Clinton’s private, unplanned meeting with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch at the Phoenix airport last week, coming at a time when the Justice Department should be nearing completion of its examination of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server for her emails as secretary of state, will inevitably — and negatively — affect public attitudes about that investigation… 
+…Lynch has tried to make amends, though not without leaving some confusion in her wake. In a conversation Friday with Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart at the Aspen Ideas Festival, she insisted again that the conversation was innocent — about grandchildren and golf and such — and did not touch on the investigation of the emails. But she said she recognized that others would not see it that way. “The fact that the meeting that I had is now casting a shadow over how people are going to view that work is something that I take seriously, and deeply and painfully,” she said. 
+Lynch said that she would “be accepting” whatever recommendation the career prosecutors and FBI Director James B. Comey bring her — though she did not say she would remove herself completely from the case. She also said she had made that decision some months ago but was only now making it public. 
+Of course, it was all much easier for Lynch to abide by the decision when Comey miraculously found that Hillary Clinton was not criminal in her negligence with national secrets. 
+Now, though, people are asking questions about that ill-founded meeting. Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit for “all records” related to the illicit meeting between Attorney General Lynch and former President Bill Clinton . 
+“On June 29, 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch is reported to have met privately with former President Bill Clinton on board a parked private plane at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona. The meeting occurred during the then-ongoing investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email server, and mere hours before the Benghazi report was released publicly involving both Mrs. Clinton and the Obama administration. Judicial Watch filed a request on June 30 that the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General investigate that meeting.” 
+Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggested that during that meeting, Bill Clinton may have offered to extend Lynch’s position in the AG’s office during a Hillary Clinton administration. Then she blocked a congressional investigation into the notorious Iranian ransom payment. 
+Last week, AG Lynch blocked a congressional investigation into the cash payments that the Obama administration made to Iran by pleading the Fifth. The Washington Free Beacon reported: 
+Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon … 
+…“It is frankly unacceptable that your department refuses to answer straightforward questions from the people’s elected representatives in Congress about an important national security issue,” the lawmakers wrote. “Your staff failed to address any of our questions, and instead provided a copy of public testimony and a lecture about the sensitivity of information associated with this issue.” 
+“As the United States’ chief law enforcement officer, it is outrageous that you would essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries,” they stated. “The actions of your department come at time when Iran continues to hold Americans hostage and unjustly sentence them to prison.” 
+How very judicial of her. Lynch tried to shut Comey up about the new investigation into the Clinton emails. 
+Now, even the mainstream media can’t turn its head. 
+Earlier I wrote about the fact that FBI Director James Comey made the decision on his own to go public about the new investigation into the Hillary Clinton emails. But let’s talk a little further about Lynch’s desperate attempts to shut him up. 
+The New York Times reported that the Justice Department “strongly discouraged Comey” against releasing the information: The day before the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, sent a letter to Congress announcing that new evidence had been discovered that might be related to the completed Hillary Clinton email investigation, the Justice Department strongly discouraged the step and told him that he would be breaking with longstanding policy, three law enforcement officials said on Saturday. Senior Justice Department officials did not move to stop him from sending the letter, officials said, but they did everything short of it, pointing to policies against talking about current criminal investigations or being seen as meddling in elections. 
+How interesting that it’s seen as “influencing the election” to investigate someone now but it wasn’t back when she was investigated and not charged. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but according to USA Today (emphasis mine), a “…federal official familiar with Comey’s decision said Saturday that the FBI director considered the attorney general’s advice during a spirited discussion of the matter Thursday and early Friday but felt compelled to act.” Do you remember Janet Reno? 
+Poor Janet was another Attorney General who went down for the Clintons. She was also sworn in as AG under Bill Clinton, and many questioned her appointment at the time. According to a report in the Chicago Tribune : 
+She arrived in Washington from Miami as Caesar’s wife, and so she has remained. She was ignorant and independent of insider D.C. and has stayed that way. Bill Clinton never much liked her and never confided in her, and she reciprocated. 
+She became AG just in time to take the fall for the debacle in Waco , actually. According to History.com 
+The Waco standoff had already begun by the time Janet Reno became the first female attorney general on March 12, 1993. She approved the FBI’s tear gas plan the following month, explaining that negotiations with the Branch Davidians had stalemated and that the children inside the compound were at risk. “We will never know whether there was a better solution,” Reno said in 1995. “Everyone involved … made their best judgments based on all the information we had.” Nonetheless, a Republican-led congressional report called her decision “premature, wrong and highly irresponsible.” She was also criticized when facts emerged contradicting some of her earlier statements. 
+The Tribune post continued to discuss Reno’s position as a scapegoat: 
+Every day since she took office , she has been supervising at least one probe embarrassing to Clinton–Whitewater, fundraising, Lewinsky, China espionage, etc. Clinton can’t afford the political beating he would take if he cashiered her. 
+…But no such attorney general could have survived the Clinton scandals, much less survived them with her own reputation–and her department’s–intact. 
+Attorney Generals who have anything to do with the Clintons don’t seem to fare too well. They end up so embroiled in Clinton scandals that they, too, are pulled down into the mire, regardless of what their intentions were when they started out. Lynch can see her future…and it has something to do with “Help Wanted” ads 
+The last time Lynch was involved in the Clinton email kerfuffle, she promised to abide by FBI Director James Comey’s recommendation . 
+I wonder if she’ll make that same promise this time? 
+She really can’t, because if she does, it will show she was complicit with the Clintons the last time around, and also this time when she decried Comey’s release of information about the investigation. 
+I wonder if she and Hillary Clinton will be able to get adjoining cells when/if the truth comes out. 
+Courtesy of Daisy Luther Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+9743,"Arianna Huffington, journalist: echo chamber for Hillary Clinton","Leave a reply 
+Jon Rappoport – Arianna Stassinopoulos, aka Huffington, is a Greek bearing gifts. For Hillary Clinton. 
+The Huffington Post pretends it’s doing objective journalism. Nice try. No one has believed in HuffPo’s objectivity for a long time. But now we have an email that seals the deal. 
+Zero Hedge reports : “…the latest Podesta dump from WikiLeaks fully exposes the blatant collusion in black and white. In the following email chain, when asked whether she would like to join the board of a pro-democrat media consortium, PMUSA, Ariana graciously declines saying that she could be more useful to the Clinton campaign by pushing its agenda through the Huffington Post “without any perceived conflicts”. “She [Arianna] is enthusiastic abt the project but asks if she’s more useful to us not being on the Board and, instead, using Huffpo to echo our [pro-Hillary] message without any perceived conflicts. She has a point.” “The sender of the email is none other than Susan McCue, the former chief of staff to [Democrat Senator] Harry Reid while the recipients include John Podesta [Hillary’s campaign chairman] and the ever controversial David Brock whose Super PAC, Correct the Record, has been sued for illegally coordinating with the Clinton campaign.” 
+Well, isn’t that wonderful. 
+Arianna used to be married to Republican Congressman Michael Huffington. Then, she was a political conservative. After her divorce, from which she reportedly netted $25 million, she began to morph into a Progressive. With the financial ability to launch HuffPo, she kept on turning to the political Left. In the HuffPo merger with AOL, she came away with another $21 million. 
+Her opponents have pinned several labels on her: “the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus,” and “the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbing.” 
+So now she’s an echo chamber for the Democratic Party. 
+The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the root of “echo”: “…personified in classical [Greek] mythology as a mountain nymph who pined away for love of Narcissus until nothing was left of her but her voice…” 
+And now we’ve confirmed for whom that Arianna-voice speaks. A great American narcissist, Hillary Clinton. 
+Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED , EXIT FROM THE MATRIX , and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX , Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29 th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine . SF Source Jon Rappoport Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+3289,Obama On Loretta Lynch: 'You Don't Hold Attorney General Nominees Hostage',"""You don't hold attorney general nominees hostage for other issues,"" Obama told The Huffington Post's Sam Stein in a sit-down interview. ""This is our top law enforcement office. Nobody denies that she's well-qualified. We need to go ahead and get her done.""
+
+Lynch's nomination has been languishing for more than 130 days. This week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) threw up another roadblock, warning that she wouldn't get a vote until his chamber passes human trafficking legislation. Democrats object to anti-abortion language in the bill.
+
+On Wednesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) went after his GOP colleagues for the delay in voting on Lynch, suggesting that they were treating her differently because of her race.
+
+""Loretta Lynch, the first African-American woman nominated to be attorney general, is asked to sit in the back of the bus when it comes to the Senate calendar,"" said Durbin. ""That is unfair. It's unjust. It is beneath the decorum and dignity of the U.S. Senate.""
+
+""I don't know about that,"" the president said on Friday, referring to the role that race may have played in delaying Lynch's confirmation. Instead, he pointed to ""Senate dysfunction"" and ""stubbornness on the part of Republicans to move nominees, period.""
+
+""What I do know is that she is eminently qualified. Nobody denies it,"" Obama said. ""Even the Republicans acknowledge she's been a great prosecutor. She has prosecuted terrorists in New York, she has gone after organized crime, she's gone after public corruption. Her integrity is unimpeachable. By all accounts, she's a great manager, and the fact that she has now been lingering in this limbo for longer than the five previous attorney general nominees combined makes no sense. We need to go ahead and get this done.""
+
+""My guess is that there is probably not a huge racial component to this, that this is really just D.C. politics, Washington at its worst,"" he said. ""A battle about something that is not connected to this nominee, holding up this nominee. I think that's the main driver here.""
+
+Lynch, currently the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, received a bipartisan boost Friday, when former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) called on Republicans to stop stalling her confirmation.
+
+The president confirmed Friday that Holder, who has long been the target of GOP lawmakers' ire, has agreed to stay on as attorney general until his replacement is set.
+
+""The irony is, of course, that the Republicans really dislike Mr. Holder,"" said Obama. ""If they really want to get rid of him, the best way to do it is to go ahead and get Loretta Lynch confirmed.""
+
+The Huffington Post’s full interview with President Obama will be published on Saturday. To be the first to see the whole interview, sign up for HuffPost breaking news alerts here.",REAL
+407,Profit sharing was supposed to be a silver bullet for middle-class success. What happened?,"The core commitment of the American economy to give workers a fair share of the productivity and profits they have created is seriously in question. It has become abundantly clear over the last few years that the middle class is not sharing in the gains of the economy.  Wages are mostly flat, and labor’s share of national income is declining as the productivity and profits of many businesses continue to expand. After decades of hoping to expand middle-class ownership of capital – stocks, bonds, access to profit-sharing and capital gains – during the late 20th century, it has been declining precipitously. Even worse, that is happening as the direct result of actual misguided government policies, even as other policies subsidize the concentration of that capital among the wealthy.
+
+Ownership of capital, particularly through vehicles like grants of stock and stock options, and profit sharing was supposed to be a silver bullet for middle class success. And for a while it was developing. According to the General Social Survey, in 2002, 21 percent of workers owned some stock in the company where they worked, over 13 percent had employee stock options, and about a third received cash profit sharing, and a quarter some gain sharing, which involves a share paid to workers of increased sales or better customer service.
+
+Today, the reality is that after decades of productivity gains and stock market gains, for most workers, the amounts received from shares are relatively modest and really don’t add up to very much. The most common form of shares, profit sharing, is now the least meaningful. The median adult worker with profit sharing receives only $2,000 per year. The other 65 percent of workers without profit sharing receive zero.  The median worker with gain sharing also receives $2,000 and the other 80 percent of workers without gain sharing receives zero.  While almost half of all workers in the communications and computer services industries had stock options in 2002 and over a tenth of workers nationwide were receiving stock options the availability of stock options to middle class workers has sunk by more than a third nationwide and in America’s innovative industries. Moreover, the median worker owning company stock  — only a fifth of workers  — has employee stock ownership worth only $10,000.  The other 80 percent own nothing in their companies.
+
+The principal explanation is not simply corporate greed or structural changes in the economy, but rather a long series of unfortunate government policies that have either eliminated or weakened share plans for the middle class, all while incentivizing policies that benefit the top.  This privileged use of the tax system has to change.
+
+Employee share ownership expanded in the 1980s and 1990s after the Reagan administration set up tax incentives to jumpstart broad-based employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) in public stock market companies.  This encouraged large corporations to make lower risk grants of their stock to workers with workers not purchasing the stock with their savings.  The incentives allowed lenders to deduct a portion of their interest income when they made loans to corporations to finance purchases of stock that were later granted to middle class employees who often also received dividends. The major Wall Street investment banks even set up divisions to market such plans, and aggressively proposed broad-based employee ownership to corporations. In the budget cutting that swept the President George H.W. Bush Administrations, these incentives were almost completely eliminated.
+
+Other policies began with good intentions, but ultimately undermined middle class shares. In 1993, Congress sought to limit corporate tax deductions for the salaries of the top five executives in stock market companies to $1 million per executive.  As this idea wound its way through Congress, the proposal was changed so that the deduction limit for the fixed salaries of executives was capped at $1 million, but stock market firms received virtually unlimited tax deductions for profit and equity sharing plans given to those top executives – now known as Section 162(m) of the Internal Revenue Code.
+
+As a result, executive shares have been subsidized by taxpayers with an estimated cost of at least $5-$10 billion a year since 1993 by six presidential administrations with largely unwavering bipartisan support.  As top executives reap billions with Federal tax deductions, the tax deductions for share plans for middle class workers have much lower limits. On top of that, the tax mechanisms and encouragements for generous cash and deferred profit sharing plans have also been weakened over the past several decades for a number of reasons. While the Federal government has kept some tax benefits for Employee Stock Ownership Plans in closely-held companies intact, these benefits have yet to be updated to apply to millions of other closely-held companies called S corporations. And ESOPs and share plans of all kinds are simply not sufficiently encouraged by the Federal government in stock market companies.
+
+Then, in response to the Enron and Worldcom scandals, the recent administration of President George W. Bush advanced accounting reforms of stock options designed to reduce the role of options in executive pay. As recently as 2002, broad-based stock options were common, covering 57 percent of all workers in computer services, 43 percent of all workers in communications, 27 percent of all workers in financial services, and even 23 percent of all workers in the durable manufacturing industry.    By 2010, after the Bush administration’s “reform,” the General Social Survey showed a 70 percent drop in workers in computer services receiving stock options, a 57 percent drop in durable manufacturing, a 45 percent drop in financial services, and an almost 20 percent drop in the communications industry.  The decline in stock options was concentrated among middle class workers, while the top echelon was largely spared. This happened because companies pushed middle class workers and managers out of their stock option plans to reduce the accounting cost of their stock options plans so that the options for the executives could be kept  largely intact. President Bush’s “reform” of stock options for executives ended up punishing the middle class, just as the earlier executive pay “reform” of the 1990s ended up subsidizing executive pay.  The Bush Administration reforms also led to a huge drop in the very generous Employee Stock Purchase Plans whereby large corporations used to generously allow workers to buy stock at a 15 percent discount to market with other provisions that made them low risk.  Maybe, as some critics point out, options are not the best way to pay workers, but similar equity plans should not be only for the top. In short, Washington has quietly created a subsidized system of grants of free shares financially engineered mainly for the top echelon of the economy. Generous tax incentives encourage shares for the top, while zero or the least generous or out-of-date tax incentives are for middle class shares.      The country now needs a robust political discussion of shares for the middle class, and the ill-advised policies on middle class shares must be reversed. The first part of that discussion should be about risk to workers.  Cash profit sharing, deferred profit sharing and gain sharing plans are the lowest-risk form of shares, so it was a reasonable place for the Clinton campaign to start.  In addition to profit and gain sharing, corporate executives typically receive lower-risk grants of restricted stock or stock options.  While many companies encourage executives to purchase some shares, these grants of equity make up most of their pay package, and the country needs policies that encourage these lower-risk forms of ownership for middle class workers as well.  Let me be clear.  I am against any policy encouraging workers to buy more than very modest amounts of company stock with their wages or retirement savings.  As happened with Enron, workers can easily get over-invested in company stock they buy with their own wages.  It should not be encouraged by Federal policy. A responsible policy on equity shares would also give scaled progressive tax credits to corporations that grant equity to more than a majority of their workers without any worker purchases.  If companies want large tax deductions for their executive share plans, they should be required to have share plans that cover all of their employees. Workers could share in the upside gain if the equity value of the firm increases over the long-term.  Forms of employee share ownership such as grants of stock to workers through Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and other approaches, where workers do not buy the stock but the stock is financed by the company, are sensible to encourage.  The elimination of ESOP incentives from the first Bush administration needs to be reversed so stock market companies and Wall Street start talking about equity grants to the middle class again.  We need to revise federal policy to encourage firms that offer Employee Stock Purchase Plans a greater tax deduction for giving generous discounts to their employees with the level of the sales being reasonable capped to avoid undue risk. Beyond this, corporations that wish to receive many special corporate tax incentives should be required to have a fair broad-based profit-sharing plan or an employee share equity plan not based on worker purchases but only on grants, just as executive plans are structured.  This Labor Day, it is time for the national discussion on wage stagnation to include a plan to revamp shares for the middle class.",REAL
+6765,The FBI and DOJ Summed Up By One BRUTAL Cartoon,"You are here: Home / political cartoon / The FBI and DOJ Summed Up By One BRUTAL Cartoon The FBI and DOJ Summed Up By One BRUTAL Cartoon October 27, 2016 Pinterest 
+C.E. Dyer reports that FBI Director James Comey proclaimed in a congressional hearing last week that he didn’t want to be called a weasel and has vociferously defended the “integrity” of the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information and subsequently destroying evidence. 
+It appears that many in the FBI aren’t too happy with their leader, with some even coming forward to vent their anger after Comey, who apparently doesn’t know that the buck stops with him, threw his career agents under the bus during the hearing when he said, “so if I blew it, they blew it, too.” 
+Unless those career FBI agents made deals with the Clinton mafia too (allegedly, I guess…), they didn’t “blow it” like Comey did. 
+Retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, who was the first chief of the FBI’s computer investigations unit, told the New York Post : “In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews.” 
+Hughes’ comment echoed the reports that have trickled out that FBI agents were extremely frustrated by the way the investigation was conducted, or better yet, not conducted and the way agents had their hand tied behind their backs as they attempted to investigate. 
+“The FBI has politicized itself, and its reputation will suffer for a long time,” Hughes said. “I hold Director Comey responsible.” 
+Retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello told the Post: “Comey has single handedly ruined the reputation of the organization.” 
+Biasello pointed out that, had he and other agents done what Clinton did with classified information, the outcome would have been very different: 
+Each month for 27 years, I received oral and computer admonishments concerning the proper protocol for handling top secret and other classified material, and was informed of the harsh penalties, to include prosecution and incarceration. 
+Had myself or my colleagues engaged in behavior of the magnitude of Hillary Clinton, as described by Comey, we would be serving time in Leavenworth. 
+Comey, who has shouted from the rooftops that the investigation was on the up and up, made the 25 agents who investigated the case sign non-disclosure agreements. 
+From top to bottom, this investigations was conducted in a way that was meant to be extremely Clinton-friendly. There was never any intention of prosecuting Clinton for her crimes and the way the investigation was handled reeks of a cover-up. 
+The “investigation” was plagued by five immunity deals that weren’t revoked when the grantees were less than truthful and open, the FBI conspiring to destroy evidence, Clinton getting a cozy witness interview on a holiday, onerous ground rules for interviews, limiting the scope of the investigation to certain dates so as not to reveal critical evidence, and more. 
+While Martha Stewart was sentenced to prison thanks to then-federal prosecutor James Comey, Clinton has faced no consequences for her crimes. 
+Gee, what changed Comey? He was awfully aggressive in Stewart’s case, but with Clinton he rolled over. Some may say he didn’t want to be another Clinton casualty, but that’s not the impression I get from Comey, who doth protest too much. 
+It seems like a massive cover-up for political reasons that may have required Clinton to dip into the family slush fund, or make another such deal, for the whiny weasel. 
+As more and more FBI agents speak out in addition to further information about the cover-up trickling out, it will be interesting to see how Comey explains it away or if he steps down — which he should absolutely do.",FAKE
+6097,"News And Views From The Nefarium – November 3, 2016 [Video]","Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Email check failed, please try again Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. %d bloggers like this:",FAKE
+10057,How the election battle shapes up,"1 Comment on ""How the election battle shapes up"" Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Phil",FAKE
+1853,Trump: O'Malley 'weak' and 'pathetic' for apologizing to Black Lives Matter protestors,"Fox News aired a preview Friday of an interview with the leading GOP candidate that will air Saturday.
+
+""And then he apologized like a little baby, like a disgusting, little weak, pathetic baby, and that's the problem with our country,"" Trump said.
+
+The real estate developer said O'Malley's attempt at being ""politically correct"" was actually ""politically incorrect.""
+
+
+
+
+
+""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement. Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House.""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement. 
+
+
+
+""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant."" Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23.""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant."" Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid.
+
+
+
+""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University. 
+
+
+
+""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey."" Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates.""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey."" , an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, announced his run in an email to supporters on April 30. He has said the United States needs a ""political revolution"" of working-class Americans to take back control of the government from billionaires. 
+
+
+
+""This great nation and its government belong to all of the people and not to a handful of billionaires, their super PACs and their lobbyists,"" Sanders said at a rally in Vermont on May 26. Sen. Bernie Sanders , an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, announced his run in an email to supporters on April 30. He has said the United States needs a ""political revolution"" of working-class Americans to take back control of the government from billionaires.""This great nation and its government belong to all of the people and not to a handful of billionaires, their super PACs and their lobbyists,"" Sanders said at a rally in Vermont on May 26. ""How can you apologize when you say 'Black Lives Matter,' which is true, 'White Lives Matter,' which is true, 'All Lives Matter,' which is true,"" Trump asked. ""And then they [Black Lives Matter activists] get angry because you said 'white' and 'all' - 'We don't want you to mention that.'"" O'Malley's campaign responded Friday afternoon, saying Trump engages in ""hate speech."" ""Governor O'Malley stands with those who have the guts to stand up to Donald Trump's hate speech. It speaks volumes about the Republican Party today that this is their front-runner,"" said Lis Smith, O'Malley deputy campaign manager. ""Unlike the rest of the Republican field, we're not interested in engaging in a race to the bottom with Mr. Trump."" Trump previously criticized Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders for giving up his microphone to protesters at an event in Seattle. ""That will never happen with me,"" Trump said. ""I don't know if I'll do the fighting myself or if other people will, but that was a disgrace."" CNN commentator Donna Brazile wrote an opinion piece for CNN last month that said ""All Lives Matter"" can sound dismissive when used as a response to ""Black Lives Matter."" ""Of course ALL lives matter. But there is no serious question about the value of the life of a young white girl or boy. Sadly, there is a serious question -- between gang violence and this police violence -- about the value of the life of a young black girl or boy,"" she wrote. ""So those who are experiencing the pain and trauma of the black experience in this country don't want their rallying cry to be watered down with a generic feel-good catchphrase.""",REAL
+950,Ted Cruz’s 5-percent flim-flam: His latest economic promise is a real laugher,"There are moments, infrequent but poignant, in which I find myself yearning for the good old days of the Jeb Bush presidential campaign. What a time that was – the uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin awkwardness; the sad, pleading earnestness; the inescapable aura of crushing sadness and defeat; the Apple Watch. It was magical. And to counteract all that soul-withering desperation, there was the Jeb Bush promise, the much-mocked and self-evidently overoptimistic guarantee that under President Jeb the United States economy would grow at an annual rate of no less than 4 percent.
+
+That promise was wildly out of step with historical averages – going back to 1968, only one president, Bill Clinton, averaged 4 percent growth over a four-year term. And Jeb based his guarantee off his experience as governor of Florida, when he averaged 4.4 percent statewide growth on the strength of a perilously large housing bubble that catastrophically popped shortly after he left office (somehow that detail never made it into the campaign literature). Regardless, “four-percent growth” was the mantra of Jeb the incurable optimist.
+
+Well, as it turns out, ol’ Jeb was nothing but a piker. Four percent? That’s a loser’s goal. Because here comes Ted Cruz, the last man standing between Donald Trump and the Republican nomination, promising America that under his watch the economy will zip along at “a minimum of five-percent GDP growth.” Five percent! As you might guess, that’s an even rarer accomplishment than Jeb’s guaranteed 4 percent. Harry Truman enjoyed 6.5 percent average growth in the post-war economic boom; the Kennedy-Johnson administration of the early ’60s cleared 5 percent average growth; and since then no president has broken the 5 percent barrier for a single term. Cruz is promising not just to break that trend but to deliver sustained growth at or above 5 percent.
+
+How’s he going to get there? Well, Ted Cruz has a plan. Per CNN: “Cruz says it’s about going back to Reagan-style economics: cut taxes, scale back regulation on business and repeal Obamacare.” Ted Cruz’s tax plan is unique in that it represents the most radical and aggressive upward redistribution of wealth of any of the plans offered by 2016 Republicans. His big idea is to completely restructure the tax code in such a way that the wealthiest Americans will reap massive windfalls. “The overwhelming majority of the plan’s cost (79.6 percent) goes to helping the richest fifth of taxpayers,” Dylan Matthews noted at Vox: “43.7 percent goes to the top 1 percent alone.” And as Bryce Covert writes at ThinkProgress, the assumption at play here – that colossal tax cuts for the wealthiest will trigger massive economic growth – is not backed up by research. What Cruz’s tax cuts will do, however, is explode the national debt by more than $10 trillion in the first decade, according to the Tax Policy Center.
+
+But Cruz has an influential ally in his corner: Art Laffer, the high priest of trickle-down economics, who helped craft Cruz’s plan. “Cruz’s tax plan is better than Reagan’s,” Laffer told CNN. “I think you’ll get growth rates higher than Reagan’s.” A good rule of thumb is that whenever you see Art Laffer extolling the amazing economic impact of a tax-cut package, assume the opposite will happen. Laffer’s time as a Cruz tax advisor was preceded by a high-profile stint as tax advisor to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who came into power by promising to turn the state into a laboratory of trickle-down economic theory. With Laffer’s help, Brownback passed a tax package that knocked out taxes on small businesses and deeply cut rates across the board. Appearing with Brownback to hype the tax scheme, Laffer confidently predicted it would succeed beyond everyone’s wildest dreams. “This will lead to enormous prosperity,” Laffer told a group of Kansans in 2012. “You are moving into the pro-growth world, and believe me it will work.” It did not work. The cuts predictably sent the state into a budget crisis as it scrambled to cover a series of massive deficits. To pay for these tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, Kansas imposed deep cuts to social programs and passed new consumption taxes that disproportionately affect the poor. And what did Kansans get for all this pain? Not much: In 2015, job growth in Kansas was a mere 0.1 percent, even as the nation’s economy grew 1.9 percent. Brownback pledged to bring 100,000 new jobs to the state in his second term; as of January, he has brought 700. What’s more, personal income growth slowed dramatically since the tax cuts went into effect. Between 2010 and 2012, Kansas saw income growth of 6.1 percent, good for 12th in the nation; from 2013 to 2015, that rate was 3.6 percent, good for 41st. As for Laffer, he later clarified that when he said the tax cut plan would bring “enormous prosperity,” he didn’t mean it would happen immediately. “You have to view this over ten years,” he told a Kansas City Star columnist last October. “It will work in Kansas.” That, unfortunately, directly contradicted what he wrote in a 2012 report stating that he “advised Oklahoma, Kansas, and other states to cut their income tax rates if they want the most effective immediate and lasting boost to their states’ economies.” Now we’re supposed to trust Art Laffer when he says that Ted Cruz’s tax plan will bring wild economic growth that will outpace even Ronald Reagan’s economic record, which has become the stuff of mythic exaggeration among conservatives. I suppose that’s the great thing about trickle-down economics – its failures can always just be papered over with more and more extravagant promises.",REAL
+8701,"In my timeline it was Michael Barage, Rump and Billary","In my timeline it was Michael Barage, Rump and Billary Mandella Mail with questions or comments about this site. ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.004s (8 queries)",FAKE
+1708,"Hillary Clinton wins debate, Bernie Sanders rises in polls","Washington (CNN) With the first Democratic debate in the books, a new CNN/ORC poll finds most who watched think Hillary Clinton had the best performance of the night, but her strong showing hasn't boosted her standing in the race for the party's nomination.
+
+Clinton stands at 45% in the race for the Democratic nomination, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders behind her at 29%. Vice President Joe Biden, who is considering a run for presidency and did not participate in last week's debate, follows at 18%.
+
+Behind the top three, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb had 1% support, while former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, Harvard professor Larry Lessig and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley all held less than 1% support.
+
+Compared with pre-debate polling, Sanders' support is up five points since mid-September, but no other candidate showed significant change.
+
+As Biden mulls whether or not to get in the race, the poll suggests Democrats are becoming less enamored of a run from the vice president. In August, 53% of registered Democrats said they wanted Biden to run, that's down to 47% in the new poll. Should Biden decide to sit out the race for the Democratic nomination, Clinton's lead over Sanders climbs to 23 points: 56% would back Clinton, 33% Sanders.
+
+Overall, 31% of registered Democrats say they watched all or most of the CNN/Facebook debate, held October 13 in Las Vegas. More than 6-in-10 Democrats who watched say Clinton did the best job, almost doubling the 35% who thought Sanders had the best performance. On the other side of the coin, 43% of those who watched said Chafee had the worst night, 31% thought Webb did, 12% O'Malley.
+
+Among those Democrats who watched the debate, both Sanders and Biden are viewed more favorably than they are among Democratic voters generally: Sanders' favorability number bumps from 62% among all Democratic voters to 84% among debate viewers, while Biden climbs from 76% to 89% favorable. Clinton's numbers are about the same in both groups.
+
+Despite their positive feelings toward Biden, debate-watchers are more apt than others to say Biden should stay out of the contest (61% think he should not run, compared with 43% of those who did not watch) and they are far more likely to be satisfied with the Democratic field generally (84% compared with 64% among those who didn't watch).
+
+Assessing the lesser-known candidates, debate-watchers are more positive than other Democrats toward O'Malley, (44% favorable compared with 20% among Democratic voters generally). But Webb and Chafee are both viewed more negatively among those who watched (For Chafee, 32% unfavorable among debate-watchers vs. 18% among all Democratic voters; Webb is at 37% unfavorable among debate-watchers, 20% among all Democratic voters).
+
+Following the debate, Clinton continues to dominate as the more trusted candidate across several top issues, with double-digit advantages over Sanders and Biden as the candidate who would best handle the economy, health care, foreign policy, race relations, climate change and gun policy. Clinton also now holds a small edge over Sanders as most trusted on income inequality (43% Clinton, 38% Sanders).
+
+Debate-watchers are more likely than others to say they trust Sanders on top issues, though even among this more-friendly audience, he continues to trail Clinton on most issues. Exceptions are income inequality (50% of debate-watchers trust Sanders vs. 36% for Clinton) and climate change (40% each say Clinton and Sanders would be best able to handle that).
+
+Sanders gained no ground, however, on foreign policy. On that question, Clinton's strength grows among those who watched: 77% in that group say they trust her most to handle foreign policy, up from 66% among Democratic voters overall.
+
+On two issues where the debate highlighted differences among the candidates, fissures within the Democratic electorate on who would best handle them emerge.
+
+Income inequality appears to be the most divisive issue, with women, older voters, those without college degrees, moderates and those with lower incomes more apt to trust Clinton on the issue, while those with college degrees, liberals, and urbanites are more likely to favor Sanders.
+
+And on gun policy, there's a sharp gender divide. Women are far more likely to say they trust Clinton to handle it than men, 50% to 37%. Democratic gun owners are more evenly split on the question, with 35% saying they trust Clinton most on gun policy, 27% Sanders and 21% Biden. Among those Democrats who do not own guns, it's 48% Clinton, 21% Biden and 16% Sanders.
+
+Overall, Democrats aren't much more satisfied with their field now than they were in July before any debates had happened. While the share ""very satisfied"" has risen from 26% to 33%, the share saying they are at least fairly satisfied has held steady at about 7-in-10. Women do report feeling more satisfied with the field than men, but younger Democrats, a key group for Barack Obama's general election victories, are far less satisfied with this field of candidates than older Democrats. Only about one-quarter of those under age 50 say they are very satisfied, compared with 40% of those age 50 or older.
+
+When matched against the top candidates from the Republican field, Clinton, Sanders and Biden all top Donald Trump, who has been leading most polling on the Republican nomination contest since this summer. But Biden is the only one who holds a significant lead over Ben Carson, a more recent addition to the top of the Republican field. Trump trails Clinton by 5, Sanders by 9 and Biden by 10. But against Carson, both Clinton (47% to Carson's 48%) and Sanders (46% to Carson's 48%) run about evenly with the former neurosurgeon. Biden tops Carson by 8 points.
+
+The CNN/ORC International Poll was conducted by telephone October 14-17 among a random national sample of 1,028 adult Americans. Results among the 425 registered voters who say they are Democrats or independents who lean toward the Democratic Party have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.",REAL
+2051,"Parsing Biden's words: If Hillary runs, he won't - Politics.com","Vice President Joe Biden sounded like someone who wants to be President when he spoke to CNN's ""New Day"" on Friday.
+
+He talked about America's potential and its role as a global leader, as well as his commitment to helping the middle class. He never mentioned the overwhelming early favorite for the 2016 Democratic nomination -- former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
+
+Clearly Biden, the longtime senator who now is the White House conduit to blue-collar union workers essential to Democratic support, is seriously considering a presidential run.
+
+Asked by CNN's Kate Bolduan when he would decide, Biden answered a realistic timetable would be the summer of 2015.
+
+That response, and a closer look at Biden's words Friday, also show that if Clinton decides to run -- as expected -- then Biden will step aside.
+
+""He is effectively saying, look, it depends on what Hillary Clinton decides to do,"" noted Gloria Borger, CNN's chief political analyst.
+
+Here are some of Biden's remarks in the interview with Bolduan, and a look at what he was really saying:
+
+1) ""There may be reasons I don't run, but there's no obvious reason for me why I think I should not run.""
+
+Biden is hedging his bets. He acknowledges it may not happen, but makes clear the reason won't be because he doesn't want to or isn't qualified for the job.
+
+That's another way of saying there are circumstances beyond his control, meaning a Clinton decision to enter the race.
+
+Supporters are already raising money for the former first lady and senator who served with Biden in President Barack Obama's Cabinet and would be the nation's first woman President.
+
+Clinton has said she will make up her mind sometime in 2014. Polls show her with a commanding lead over other possible Democratic contenders, including Biden.
+
+Biden's answer when Bolduan asks for a timetable for his decision is the clearest signal that his choice depends on whether Clinton runs.
+
+To Peter Hamby, CNN Digital's national political reporter, waiting until the middle of 2015 -- just six months or so before the Iowa caucuses -- would be way too late to take on Clinton.
+
+""If these guys are going to get in and run for president, whoever it is, challenging Hillary Clinton, they really have to start laying groundwork,"" Hamby said. ""They have to raise money and hire staff and recruit volunteers in these early states.""
+
+As vice president, Biden has the advantage of constant media focus if desired, which would help him maintain a high profile without some of the normal steps of mounting a presidential campaign.
+
+3) ""Am I the best qualified person to focus on the two things I've spent my whole life on -- give ordinary people a fighting chance to make it and a sound foreign policy that's based on national interest of the United States, where we not only are known for the power of our military, but the power of our example.""
+
+Biden lays out his rationale for running, stressing his two major strengths as a candidate -- foreign policy and working-class ties.
+
+As the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden has the necessary foreign policy credentials, particularly against candidate ABC (Anybody But Clinton). However, her four years as secretary of state negates some or all of a Biden advantage.
+
+On appealing to middle class workers, Biden showed his strength in the 2010 and 2012 elections when he went to states such as Ohio where Obama was less popular.
+
+In Clinton, though, he would face the wife of former President Bill Clinton, who remains extremely popular among traditional Democratic constituencies.
+
+In Friday's interview, Biden didn't mention Hillary Clinton by name, but she is the biggest factor in whether he goes for it.
+
+4) ""It doesn't mean I'm the only guy that can do it, but if no one else I think can and I think I can, then I will. If I don't I won't.""
+
+The vice president sums up his future decision with two qualifiers -- that no else runs who can do what he can, and that he still thinks he can deliver the goods.
+
+Biden could decide that he is better qualified than Clinton on what he considers the key issues, but he would have to think twice if her already anticipated campaign has started strongly and generated initial momentum.
+
+If he were to run and win in 2016, Biden would be 74 when he took office, making him the oldest ever to begin a presidency. By the end of his first term, he would be the oldest U.S. President in history.
+
+So while he remains energetic and passionate, talking about getting his Corvette Z06 from zero to 60 in 3.4 seconds, the clock is ticking and Biden knows it.",REAL
+9500,United We Grand - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Cleveland Indians Worried Team Cursed After Building Franchise On Old Native American Stereotype CLEVELAND—Having watched in horror as their team crumbled after a 3-1 World Series lead, members of the Cleveland Indians expressed concern Thursday that the organization has been cursed for building their franchise on an incredibly old Native American stereotype. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Nurse Reminds Elderly Man She’s Just Down The Hall If He Starts To Die DES PLAINES, IL—Assuring him that she’d be at his side in a jiffy, local nurse Wendy Kaufman reminded an elderly resident at the Briarwood Assisted Living Community that she was just down the hall if he started to die, sources reported Tuesday. ",FAKE
+8027,Former Attorney General Janet Reno Passes Away,"Email 
+As Janet Reno formally ended her public career following her failure to win a primary for governor of Florida in 2002, she quoted George Washington about her legacy: “If I were to write all that down I might be reduced to tears. I would prefer to drift on down the stream of life and let history make the judgment.” 
+Her stream of life ended on Monday at age 78 when she passed away following complications from Parkinson’s disease. History will remember her for one thing: ordering the FBI to end the siege at Mount Carmel — the home of the Branch Davidians headed up by David Koresh — near Waco, Texas, by force, using tear gas and gunfire to end it, along with the lives of nearly 80 individuals including 25 children. 
+Clinton nominated her for the position after two other women withdrew their acceptances, and she became attorney general in March, 1993. She was immediately thrust into the middle of the FBIs's siege against the Branch Davidian compound that began after ATF agents were involved in a shootout while trying to serve arrest warrants on Koresh and his followers for alleged firearms violaions. After 51 days, the FBI asked for permission to attack the compound and end the siege. Reno granted it, 76 people died, and the event has remained a black mark not only on her legacy but on the history of federal law enforcement ever since. 
+Following the atrocity, Reno appointed former Senator John Danforth to look into charges that FBI agents started the fires, fired randomly into the building, and illegally used military forces to end the siege. When Danforth’s report exonerated the government and Reno, Koresh’s attorney called it a “whitewash” while former AG Ramsey Clark added, ""History will clearly record, I believe, that these assaults on the Mt. Carmel church center remain the greatest domestic law enforcement tragedy in the history of the United States."" 
+For her part, and to her credit claim some of her supporters, Reno took full responsibility for allowing the FBI to end the siege with prejudice: “I made the decision. I’m accountable. The buck stops with me.” 
+Over the following eight years, Reno was involved in other controversies: 
+• Investigations into President Clinton’s sexual dalliances with his intern, Monice Lewinsky; 
+• Her approval of the use of federal force to retrieve Elián Gonzalez, who was living with some relatives in Miami, and return him to his father in Castro’s Cuba, generating in the process a photograph of an armed federal agent seizing the six-year-old boy, providing millions with a visual warning of the dangers of the excessive use of force; 
+• The capture and conviction of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber; 
+• The capture and conviction of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols for their roles in the Oklahoma City bombing; 
+• The capture and conviction of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and four other conspirators involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; and 
+• Her roles in other controversies and scandals during the Clinton administration, including Whitewater, Filegate, the Chinese spying on American nuclear technology, the questionable campaign financing in the 1996 Clinton-Gore reelection campaign, and her support for the 1994 Brady Bill which, for ten years, banned so-called assault rifles. 
+
+An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .  ",FAKE
+8545,Media Self-Destruct over Trump,"Posted on October 28, 2016 Media Self-Destruct over Trump Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, October 28, 2016 Their hysteria and dishonesty have backfired. 
+From the start of Donald Trump’s campaign, the media have covered him dishonestly. They have consistently portrayed him as a closet “white supremacist” who deliberately appeals to “racists.” They have tried to tie him to a wicked movement known as the “Alt-Right.” They are now working on another dishonest angle: that Donald Trump is “mainstreaming hate” and bringing “racism” into public discourse. The media clearly want to stampede voters into Mrs. Clinton’s camp so as to spare us the agony of a “racist” in the White House. 
+The demonization campaign has backfired. By trying to hang racial dissidents around Donald Trump’s neck, the media have given American Renaissance and other organizations far more publicity than ever before. At the same time, constant shouts of “racist” and “bigot” don’t seem to hurt Mr. Trump: instead they are wrecking what is left of media credibility. The biggest irony, though, is that Donald Trump is probably not one of us at all. But even small deviations from the cast-iron orthodoxy of race are enough to plunge our rulers into dark fantasies about Donald Trump as a secret David Duke fan. 
+Media dishonesty started immediately. When Mr. Trump pointed out that some immigrants from Mexico were criminals, the press acted as if he had said all Mexican immigrants are criminals. Then, when alert news hounds discovered that those of us they love to call “haters” and “white supremacists” liked Mr. Trump, there was no end of articles with titles such as: “ Meet the Horde of Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and Other Extremist Leaders Endorsing Donald Trump ,” “ Top Racists And Neo-Nazis Back Donald Trump ,” “ ‘Heil Donald Trump’: Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists Show Support ,” and “ The White Nationalists Who Support Donald Trump .” 
+These articles had a simpleminded purpose: discredit Mr. Trump by parading before the reader any Nazi, Kluxer, or racially conscious white person who had anything nice to say about the candidate. The implication was that if “racists” were going to vote for Donald Trump he must be “racist,” too. 
+This was deceitful and one-sided. When the chairman of the American Communist Party endorsed Hillary Clinton , no one suggested this meant she was a communist. 
+It is true that Mr. Trump gave the media just enough of an excuse to pretend he really is a closet “bigot” because he did not repudiate “racists” with the snorts of indignation respectability requires. There was the famous exchange in February when a reporter pushed Mr. Trump to disavow an endorsement from David Duke. As The Hill reported it: “ ‘David Duke endorsed me? OK, alright. I disavow, OK?’ Trump said, seeking to quickly move on to another question.” 
+That same month, there was another famous exchange with Jake Tapper of CNN : 
+Tapper : Will you unequivocally condemn David Duke and say that you don’t want his vote or that of other white supremacists in this election? 
+Donald Trump : Well just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK? I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don’t know. I don’t know, did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because, you know, I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists. 
+The media leaped on these exchanges with shouts of joy. “Trump refuses to disavow white supremacists! That’s because he is one!” 
+There are far better explanations. First, Donald Trump is a pugnacious man. He doesn’t like being pushed around by anyone, especially not by journalists who hate him. If Mr. Tapper had belligerently demanded that Mr. Trump agree that the sky is blue, Mr. Trump would have bridled at that. 
+Second, Donald Trump probably doesn’t know anything about David Duke or white supremacy. I would be astonished if he has ever looked into the thinking of David Duke or any other alleged “white supremacist.” It is his feistiness and his ignorance of white advocacy that explain his answers, not some carefully concealed racial consciousness. 
+The press has also pounced on Donald Trump’s retweets of “racist” material, which is supposed to be yet more proof that he is a secret supremacist. Business Insider, for example, published this shocking story: “ 5 times Donald Trump has engaged with alt-right racists on Twitter .” Not one of these tweets is obviously “racist,” and it would be surprising if Mr. Trump or his skeleton staff took the time to vet the sources of the thousands of tweets @realDonaldTrump has sent during the campaign. 
+Now the press is working on another smear-Trump angle. Recently, I have been contacted by journalists from such places as Bloomberg News, Reuters, and the New York Times , who clearly want to write that Donald Trump is “mainstreaming hate,” that he is responsible for a huge surge in the Alt-Right. They want to know about all the people who have been flocking to AmRen.com because of what Donald Trump says. They want me to tell them about people who have been “emboldened” to “speak out against minorities” because Donald Trump has led the way. They would love to find someone who now thinks he is free to run down the street shouting “nigger!” because Mr. Trump wants to take a hard look at Muslim immigrants. 
+I have explained to them as patiently as I can that they have it the wrong way around. No one comes looking for AmRen.com because Donald Trump wants to build a wall. They come looking for us because the media have written about us in their attempt to convince the world that Mr. Trump is a “racist.” They come looking for us because Mrs. Clinton kindly called attention to us by complaining about the Alt-Right and her “basket of deplorables.” I also try to explain that if the media had not launched its malicious campaign of trying to hold Donald Trump responsible for the views of certain people who support him, few people would have heard of the Alt-Right. In their zeal to paint their enemy in the darkest colors, they are promoting the Alt-Right, not Donald Trump. 
+I explain that racial dissent has been growing like never before, for reasons that have nothing to do with the campaign. It is Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Black Lives Matters, and black rioters who are sending hundreds of thousands of frustrated white people our way– not Donald Trump. This will not change whether Mr. Trump wins or loses. The top landing pages on AmRen.com are analyses of race and crime–something Mr. Trump never talks about. 
+I also explain to reporters that it is idiotic to think Mr. Trump has mainstreamed “hate,” by which they mean sensible observations about race. I ask them to name a single person who has been “emboldened” to say something “racist” just because Donald Trump is the GOP nominee. Of course, they can’t. If anything, it is the opposite. Mr. Trump has been called every name under the sun for the mildest, most common-sense observations about Muslims and immigration. Anyone tempted to come out of the closet is likely to hesitate more than ever. Things could change if Mr. Trump becomes president, but the candidate himself has done very little to spread our ideas. 
+What Donald Trump has done is spark an unprecedented interest in politics among disaffected young people who recognize that Mitt Romney and John McCain are no different from Barack Obama when it comes to preserving whites, their society, and their culture. I know a number of millennials who never bothered to vote before but who certainly will in November. I know some who have made their first political contribution or who have spent weekends volunteering for the Trump campaign. 
+I point out to reporters that this is what elections are supposed to be all about: giving the voters real choices. I note that the Trump/Clinton contest will almost certainly produce a record voter turnout for a modern election. Haven’t our rulers been wringing their hands over a lack of political engagement, especially among the young? Well, now they have engagement, alright, but they don’t like it. They don’t like it because so many people are stumping for the candidate they love to call a “ threat to democracy .” Liberals are such transparent hypocrites. They claim to love democracy, but suddenly start worrying about its health if the people refuse vote the way they tell them to. 
+The whole Trump-is-a-racist fracas shows just how painfully fragile orthodoxy has become. I may be wrong, but I have no reason to think Donald Trump thinks at all as we do. He has never said or done anything to suggest he is anything more than an ordinary American with normal instincts: He doesn’t want criminals sneaking across the border, he thinks sanctuary cities for illegals are crazy, he doesn’t see why we need more Muslims, and he is angry when immigrants go on welfare. Millions of ordinary Americans clearly agree with him, and not because they are racially aware. It is because they are decent, fair-minded people who also have a nagging sense that the country is changing in unwelcome ways. 
+I am convinced that Mr. Trump does not have a sophisticated understanding of race. So far as I can tell, he doesn’t have a sophisticated understanding of much of anything. He has stumbled by instinct onto a few sensible policies that white advocates have been promoting for a long time, but not because he is one of us. 
+Maybe–just maybe–he will move in our direction. It’s not impossible to imagine a President Trump asking, in an offhand way, “What’s wrong with white people wanting to remain a majority in the United States?” Or he might casually note that you can’t expect as many blacks as Asians in AP classes because they don’t have the same levels of intelligence. But I can imagine the opposite, too: President Trump so bogged down in Beltway baloney that he never even builds the wall. 
+There is one thing that Donald Trump has changed. He has proven that Republican bromides about taxes and small government don’t excite people. He has proven that there is tremendous anger against political insiders of both parties. He has proven that Americans do want their country to come first. They don’t want it to try to save the world or to be a dumping ground for people who have wrecked their own countries. 
+And even if he has not “mainstreamed racism,” he has shown that if you have a backbone you can withstand what is surely the most intense and concentrated program of hate ever directed at an American. On October 11, Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times that Donald Trump is a “phony, liar, blowhard, cheat, bully, misogynist, demagogue, predator, bigot, bore, egomaniac, racist, sexist, sociopath,” and a “dictator-in-waiting with a brat’s temper and a prig’s scowl.” This must be one of the most unhinged, hysterical outbursts in the history of American political journalism. And it is unusual only for its wordiness, not its tone. 
+Don’t the editors of the Times realize that this kind of frothing explains why more Americans believe in Bigfoot (29 percent) than trust newspapers (20 percent)? Virtually the entire industry is so consumed with rage at Donald Trump and contempt for his supporters that it cannot control itself. Open, petulant bias is driving more and more Americans to social media and to sites like AmRen.com for their news. 
+Despite the concerted shrieking of virtually the entire American ruling class, Donald Trump is going to get close to half of the vote on November 8. Some 60 million people are going to vote for a man for whom Roger Cohen has emptied his dictionary trying to insult. Only one major newspaper has endorsed Donald Trump. Only one . And this is a man whom the American people might choose as their president. What better proof could we have of the stark difference between printed opinion and public opinion, between what Americans think and what our rulers want us to think? Donald Trump has ripped away whatever was left of the pretense of media objectivity. 
+Whether he wins or not, whether he is one of us or not, Donald Trump has laid bare the collusion between big media and a political system in which both parties collaborate to run the country in their interests and those of their big donors. Voters–finally–have a chance to vote against the entire corrupt system. On November 8th they could bring it crashing down, but even if it still stands, it is visibly weakened, badly discredited. These are the perfect conditions in which our ideas will flourish as never before.",FAKE
+136,"To finish MLK's work, face up to racism (Opinion)","Eric Liu is the founder of Citizen University and the author of several books, including "" A Chinaman's Chance"" and ""The Gardens of Democracy."" He was a White House speechwriter and policy adviser for President Bill Clinton. Follow him on Twitter: @ericpliu . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+As we mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, it's worth asking: Can America handle either one?
+
+When Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa after the end of apartheid he had two choices. He could have gone down a path of confrontation and retribution against the white Afrikaners who had ruled so oppressively. Or he could have skipped quickly past the history and reality of apartheid and pardoned all its perpetrators in the interests of maintaining order.
+
+He did neither.
+
+In one of his many acts of civic genius, he chose a path for his country that exposed the ugliness of the past and only then invited forgiveness. His government launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
+
+The commission gathered public testimony across the land, naming the institutional structures and individual acts that had brutalized blacks. No perpetrator was granted amnesty without a candid accounting of his or her deeds. The opportunity for restorative justice gave every participant a sense of heightened responsibility -- a chance to be bigger citizens, together.
+
+Only then could reconciliation begin. And though the commission was not sufficient to ""solve race"" in post-apartheid South Africa, it was still necessary. Without such an attempt at formal accounting, without such an opportunity for oppressed and oppressor to face one another, that nation's challenges would be even greater today.
+
+For proof, consider our own nation 150 years post-slavery. For a fleeting while after the Civil War, we tried Reconstruction. Freedmen could earn wages and vote freely and claim an equal place in politics. Then we gave up on Reconstruction. And Jim Crow came along to make black citizens second-class and to ensure that neither truth-telling nor reconciliation would be on the agenda.
+
+Consider our nation 50 years post-civil rights movement. That movement is sometimes called the Second Reconstruction. It sought to finish the fight to make truly equal citizens out of the descendants of slaves. But here we are today, still plagued post-Ferguson and post-Staten Island by divisions of color and caste -- and by an inability to talk about them without angry defensiveness.
+
+You can hear the objections already. For instance: Won't cataloging acts of racism from the past just make it harder for us all to get along?
+
+But of course, racism is not only in the past. It did not end with the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 or with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It is present in the acts and attitudes of many today. It is present in the institutional residue of past choices.
+
+That the phrase #BlackLivesMatter must be said says it all. The criminal justice system, the education system, the economic system and (as this year's so-white Oscars remind us) the pop culture system -- all of them value black lives, black voices and black experience less than fully. We must all face that fact.
+
+There's also this objection to a commission: that by racializing everything it would basically be racist. Consider the words of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who, arguing against affirmative action, once wrote that ""[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.""
+
+This tidy tautology flattens out history. It obliterates the difference between injury and remedy. It wants to rush us along to a ""colorblindness"" that our society hasn't yet earned and perhaps shouldn't even seek as an ideal.
+
+As a Chinese American, I am an inheritor of what white people wrote in the Constitution and what they did to subvert it. I am the beneficiary of what black people and people of every color have done to redeem the Constitution. I am sometimes the object of a presumption that yellow people are presumed foreign until proven otherwise.
+
+I own the good, the bad and the ugly of this country. None of this is neat. None of it is colorblind either.
+
+Ultimately the deepest objection to a racial truth and reconciliation process in America is that it would be hard. Hard to start and to finish. We Americans can be a bit lazy when it comes to messy civic and historical truths. We want our stories -- and our Story -- to have happy endings. We want reconciliation on the cheap.
+
+But the point of MLK Day, and of MLK's entire life, is that true redemption is never cheap or easy. So to honor him truly, let's commit to what's hard. Whether through official commissions or citizen conversations, let's face ourselves.",REAL
+7208,"Bill Clinton Inc: Billions for the Foundation, $116 Million for the Clintons","Bill Clinton Inc: Billions for the Foundation, $116 Million for the Clintons October 27, 2016 
+Call it the unintended revenge of Doug Band. 
+Band used to be Bill's Huma, the guy that the big guy couldn't go to the bathroom without, let alone perform the simplest tasks. The Clinton Foundation was a Band project. The waters grew murkier, but the recent email leaks revealed a rather devastating Doug Band memo on how he was making money for the whole infrastructure of what he called, running Bill Clinton Inc. 
+And Band was also organizing personal income directly for Clinton. Under the heading, “For-Profit Activity of President Clinton (i.e. Bill Clinton, Inc.),” Band wrote, “We have dedicated our selves to helping the President secure and engage in for-profit activities—including speeches, books, and advisory service engagements… In support of the President’s for-profit activity, we also have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the President and his family—for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like. Neither Justin nor I are separately compensated for these activities (e.g., we do not receive a fee for, or percentage of, the more than $50 million in for-profit activity we have personally helped to secure for President Clinton to date or the $66 million in future contracts, should he choose to continue with those engagements).” 
+Band mentions four such “arrangements” without naming them. Bill Clinton was paid nearly $18 million to be “honorary chancellor” of a for-profit college, Laureate International Universities, according to reports and the family’s tax returns. A Dubai-based firm, GEMS Education, paid Bill Clinton more than $560,000 in 2015, according to the tax returns. Band also lists a variety of speaking fees, previously disclosed by the Clintons, including hundreds of thousands of dollars each from UBS, Ericsson, BHP and Barclays. In 2011 alone, according to the Clinton’s tax returns, Bill Clinton earned $13,454,000 in speaking fees. 
+Of course there was lots of ""synergy"" between the for profit stuff and the non profit stuff, between Doug's Teneo interests and the entire Clintonworld octopus. 
+""We have dedicated ourselves to helping the President secure and engage in for-profit activities,"" Band wrote. He also said he had ""sought to leverage my activities, including my partner role at Teneo, to support and to raise funds for the foundation."" 
+Band's memo provided data showing how much money each of Teneo's 20 clients at the time had given to the Clinton Foundation, how much they had paid Bill Clinton and, in some cases, how he or Kelly had personally forged the relationships that resulted in the payments. 
+Band wrote that Teneo partners had raised in excess of $8 million for the foundation and $3 million in paid speaking fees for Bill Clinton. He said he had secured contracts for the former president that would pay out $66 million over the subsequent nine years if the deals remained in place. 
+Band also described how Kelly helped expand a fruitful relationship with UBS Global Wealth Management, introducing Bill Clinton to a top executive at a 2009 charity dinner. In the ensuing years, UBS upped its giving to the foundation, signed on as a Teneo client and agreed to pay Bill Clinton for speeches, Band wrote. 
+Band was actually making the case that the entire network of the Clinton Foundation is completely entangled with the private financial interests of the Clintons. Not to mention the interests of people around them. 
+Banks and major corporations were doing business with Bill's toady, paying Bill money and donating to the Clinton Foundation through arrangements made by the party of the first part, 
+Band described in the memo how he combined his work for CGI and Teneo. He wrote that he had used a hotel room upstairs from the 2011 CGI gathering to meet with Teneo clients. He also acknowledged giving free CGI memberships to ""target Teneo clients"" being cultivated as potential foundation donors. Memberships generally cost $20,000 a year. 
+Teneo, meanwhile, named Bill Clinton its ""honorary chairman."" Clinton had been initially tapped for a three-year arrangement in which he would provide advice to Teneo ""regarding geopolitical, economic and social trends,"" according to a separate June 2011 memo that Band wrote to the State Department seeking ethics approval for the former president's employment. 
+Bill Clinton was initially paid $2 million by Teneo, according to ""Man of the World,"" a book written with the former president's participation by author Joe Conason. 
+And here's where it gets appropriately entertaining. 
+But Band outlined that Kelly, his Teneo co-founder, had served simultaneously between 2009 and 2011 as an unpaid economic envoy to Northern Ireland appointed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and as head of a separate consulting company whose clients included Coke, UBS and Dow. Band wrote that the arrangement was consistent with Kelly's State Department ethics agreement. 
+Kelly's multiple roles came together during one State Department event in 2010, when then-Secretary Clinton recognized Dow, among other companies, for creating jobs in Northern Ireland and thanked Kelly for his work on the issue. 
+Dow became one of Teneo's first major clients. According to Band's memo, Dow chief executive Andrew Liveris had been introduced to Bill Clinton over a round of golf with Kelly in August 2009. 
+That's not consistent with mafia ethics agreements, but it's all good in Clintonworld.",FAKE
+8799,Comment on Corporate Democratic Party Think Tank ‘Third Way’ Exposed by Dear Centrists: The Left Has Something to Say Whether You Like It or Not,"Subscribe 
+In politics, the Third Way is a position that tries to reconcile right-wing Republican Party and left-wing Democratic Party politics by advocating a synthesis of right-wing economic and left-wing social policies. It was created as a re-evaluation of center-left political ideals in response to international doubt regarding the viability of interventionist (Keynesian) economic policies versus the economic libertarianism of the New Right. The Third Way is promoted by some social democratic and liberal movements. 
+One of the significant factors concerning the 2016 Democratic Party presidential race is that corporate Democrats are scared of Bernie Sanders’ quick rise in popularity in the Democratic Party. This explains why corporate Democrats support Hillary Clinton. 
+In political campaigns, you have to follow the money. Third Way has been very secretive about where its think tank funding comes from. However, several investigative journalists have uncovered some of the donors and they are not surprising: The Chamber of Commerce The Business Round Table AT&T 
+These are just a few donors to the Third Way. There is also a laundry list of hedge funds that are donating money. The bottom line is that Third Way is backed by Wall Street titans, corporate money, congressional allies, and corporate Democrats like Hillary Clinton. It is important to note that these same corporate factions also donate to the Republican Party. The existence of Third Way should not come as a surprise. There are essentially no economic differences between a corporate Democrat and a Republican. ‘Third Way’ Members Are Backroom-Cigar-Smoking Wall Street Types. 
+Third Way and its members would like to see politicians like Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) disappear. Why do Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party scare the hell out of corporate Democrats? 
+There is the issue of labels in modern day politics. The Third Way Democrats, the Blue-Dog Democrats, the Wall Street Democrats are all centrist in their ideology. It begs the question: Who is in charge of the Democratic Party right now? 
+Until something drastic happens like electing a Democratic Socialist non-establishment politician like Bernie Sanders, the truth is the Democratic Party is controlled by Wall Street just like the Republican Party. There is much talk how the Republican Party is falling apart. The Tea Party has taken over, and the fringe is now the GOP mainstream. 
+There is a similar fight taking place in the Democratic party between people who care (like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren), who are concerned about the middle class and working people of America, and corporate centrist Democrats like Hillary Clinton whose economic policies are not much different than the Republicans. 
+Third Way President Jonathan Cowan , who claims he is a Democrat, is joined at the hip with Wall Street and is a poster boy for the right wing-oriented Chamber of Commerce. He and his Third Way organization have done nothing for labor unions. This guy is a Republican in a Democrat’s clothing. 
+The 2016 Democratic presidential race will go a long way in determining if the Democrats reject this corporate agenda. The corporate Democratic Party think tank has submitted over 70 policy proposals they want corporate Democrat Hillary Clinton to take up. The new populist movement by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is not welcomed by corporate centrist Democrats. Third Way are trying as hard as they can to force Bernie Sanders out of the race. They have tried to put a muzzle on Elizabeth Warren. 
+Third Way’s position is that someone who is left of center (a Democratic Socialist, liberal, or progressive) will lose by a landslide in the general election. What is ironic is that every major poll right now shows that Bernie Sanders would beat Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz. Moreover, these polls show Bernie Sanders beating these flavor-of-the-week Republicans by a larger margin than the centrist corporate choice Hillary Clinton in the swing states . 
+Bernie Sanders’ campaign has the potential to change the dynamics of the entire electorate. His campaign is getting young voters’ attention and more importantly, getting them involved in the political process. Bernie has already gotten the endorsement from the American Postal Service Workers Union . Several African American politicians are backing Sanders. Independent voters are choosing Sanders over Hillary Clinton by a wide margin. The truth is Bernie Sanders’ voting base is growing while the corporate centrist Democratic base is stagnant at best. 
+These facts have caused the Democratic Party Wall Street types to panic and to start attacking Bernie Sanders on being too far left . Plus, who better to lead the charge than pre-ordained corporate Democrat Hillary Clinton? 
+One of the major problems the Democratic Party has faced is that huge blocks of potential Democratic voters have become disenfranchised from the voting process because they feel there is no real difference between the two parties. They feel that elections are rigged, and their votes don’t count . What Bernie Sanders’ run for president has re-energized these voting blocks. 
+Polls have shown 60 percent of Americans feel Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy and dishonest . Many liberal progressive Democrats don’t trust Hillary Clinton at all. 
+Granted, there are some major social issues where there is a stark contrast between the two parties. But with issues that deal with low- and middle-earning families being able to feed their children and everyday Americans having a better quality of life, it is fair to say there are no real differences between the Republican Party and the corporate Democrats. 
+One of the main reasons for this paradox is organizations like Third Way. Corporate Democrats like Hillary Clinton want that Wall Street money. Their belief is you cannot win if you don’t have Wall Street donors and Super Pacs. Bernie Sanders’ campaign is proving that this assumption is not true. Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 showed this wasn’t true. There is little doubt in this writer’s mind that Hillary Clinton and her corporate Democrat buddies are feeling 2008 deja vu all over again. 
+Featured Image By DonkeyHotey via Flickr available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. About Johnny Hill 
+Johnny Hill is a freelance writer who has extensive experience in writing for sales, marketing and advertising. He has a background in radio broadcasting which is showcased in the music mixes he creates for his Facebook page, ""One Nation Under the Groove."" Johnny has been an avid and life long student of politics . He is the founder of the House of Public Discourse Political Organization, which he created as a platform for his progressive liberal ideology. You can follow Johnny on Twitter, @hillj60. Connect",FAKE
+3990,"Russian jet crashes in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, killing 224 people","A Russian passenger plane carrying more than 220 people crashed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula soon after taking off early Saturday from a Red Sea resort popular with Russian tourists and disappearing from radar screens, killing all on board, officials said.
+
+The Airbus A-321 took off from Sharm el-Sheikh shortly before 6 a.m. with 217 passengers and seven crew members en route to St. Petersburg, Russia, and had been in the air for only 23 minutes when it crashed.
+
+Ayman al-Muqadem, an Egyptian official with the government's Aviation Incidents Committee, said air controllers lost contact with the plane’s pilot after he radioed that the aircraft was experiencing technical problems and that he needed to make an emergency landing.
+
+The jet then dropped off radar screens.
+
+A ministry statement said Egyptian military search and rescue teams found the wreckage of the passenger jet in the remote mountainous Hassana area 44 miles south of el-Arish, an area in northern Sinai where Egyptian security forces are fighting a burgeoning Islamic militant insurgency led by a local affiliate of the Islamic extremist group ISIS.
+
+A branch of ISIS claimed responsibility for downing the plane in a statement on Twitter, Sky News reported, adding that the claim had not been verified and it was unclear whether Sinai militants have the capability to attack a plane flying at a high altitude.
+
+Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov scoffed at the ISIS claim, telling the Interfax news agency that such reports “must not be considered reliable.”
+
+Nevertheless, French airline Air France and German air carrier Lufthansa said they would avoid flying over the Sinai Peninsula for safety reasons.
+
+A spokeswoman for Lufthansa told The Associated Press that the company had decided in a meeting Saturday that the carrier would not fly over Sinai as long as the cause for the crash “has not been clarified.”
+
+As many as 50 ambulances were dispatched to the crash site. The bodies of 150 victims, some still strapped to their seats, had been pulled from the wreckage, Sky News reported.
+
+Egyptian officials said they won’t know what caused the crash until they examine the aircraft's flight's recorders, or ""black boxes"" which were recovered.
+
+The wife of the co-pilot of the plane that crashed said late Saturday her husband had complained about the plane's condition, according to a Russian TV channel.
+
+In an interview with state-controlled NTV, Natalya Trukhacheva, identified as the wife of co-pilot Sergei Trukachev, said her daughter ""called him up before he flew out. He complained before the flight that the technical condition of the aircraft left much to be desired.""
+
+The Egyptian officials said the aircraft was cruising at 36,000 feet when contact with the jet was lost. Flight-tracking service FlightRadar24 said the plane was losing altitude at about 6,000 feet per minute before the signal was lost, Reuters reported.
+
+Adel Mahgoub, chairman of the state company that runs Egypt's civilian airports, said except for three Ukrainian passengers all on board were Russian citizens.
+
+An Egyptian cabinet statement said the 217 passengers included 138 women, 62 men and 17 children, ranging in age from 2 to 17.
+
+A security officer at the crash site who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity described it as “tragic.”
+
+“A lot of dead on the ground and many who died (were) strapped to their seats,"" the officer said. ""The plane split into two, a small part on the tail end that burned and a larger part that crashed into a rock.”
+
+Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail flew to the crash site with several cabinet ministers on a private jet, Egypt’s tourism ministry said, according to Reuters.
+
+Mahgoub said the aircraft had successfully undergone technical checks while at Sharm el-Sheikh's airport. A technical committee from the company was headed to Sharm el-Sheikh to collect security camera footage of the plane while it sat at the airport, including operations to supply it with fuel and passenger meals as well security checks, he said.
+
+Airbus said the aircraft was 18 years old and had been operated by Metrojet since 2012, Reuters reported. The plane had accumulated around 56,000 flight hours in nearly 21,000 flights.
+
+Moscow-based Metrojet said the A321 underwent required factory maintenance in 2014 and was in good condition. The airliner said plane’s captain Valery Nemov had 12,000 air hours of experience, including 3,860 in A321s.
+
+Russian media said the airliner was operating a charter flight under contract with the Brisco tour company in St. Petersburg.
+
+Separately, Russia's top investigative body opened its own investigation into the crash.
+
+Militants in northern Sinai have not to date shot down commercial airliners or fighter-jets. There have been persistent media reports that they have acquired Russian shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missiles. But these types of missiles can only be effective against low-flying aircraft or helicopters. In January 2014, Sinai-based militants claimed to have shot down a military helicopter; Egyptian officials at the time acknowledged the helicopter had crashed, but gave no reason.
+
+Russian television showed scenes of relatives and friends gathering at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo airport, awaiting word on the fate of their loved ones. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Nov. 1 a national day of mourning, according to a statement posted on the Kremlin's website.
+
+Two of the passengers on the Metrojet flight, Elena Rodina and Alexqander Krotov, were newlyweds, a friend of the couple told the Associated Press at a hotel near the airport. They were both 33.
+
+Yulia Zaitseva said Rodina “really wanted to go to Egypt, though I told her ‘why the hell do you want to go to Egypt?’”
+
+“We were friends for 20 years,” she said. “She was a very good friend who was ready to give everything to other people. To lose such a friend is like having your hand cut off.”
+
+She said Rodina's parents feel “like their lives are over.”
+
+Roughly three million Russian tourists, or nearly a third of all visitors in 2014, come to Egypt every year, mostly to Red Sea resorts in Sinai or in mainland Egypt.
+
+Click here for more from Sky News.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8748,WATCH: Mass Shooting Occurs During #TrumpRiot; Media Ignores (Video),"  WATCH: Mass Shooting Occurs During #TrumpRiot; Media Ignores (Video) WATCH: Mass Shooting Occurs During #TrumpRiot; Media Ignores (Video)  45 pm by Guest Author   Renee Nal | New Zeal Seattle’s Socialist Alternative organize anti-Trump rally. Note the manufactured signs and the hammer & sickle logo. 
+“The five victims range in age from their 20s to 50s, and they have gunshot wounds to their legs, chest and neck.”– The Seattle Times , November 10, 2016 
+Seattle police are assuring citizens that a virtually unreported mass shooting has nothing to do with an anti-Trump rally incited by Seattle socialists, featuring Kshama Sawant, the Marxist Seattle city council member who is significant as being the only socialist to run openly as a member of Socialist Alternative , a Trotskyist organization. 
+The shooting occurred “outside the 7-Eleven store on Third Avenue between Pike and Pine streets,” close to where protesters gathered, carrying their “Socialist Alternative” signs after being encouraged by Kshama Sawant to “attend the inauguration and shut it down.” 
+Watch: Gulag-wide Bulletins from Sovereignty Unbound We respect your privacy, time, and inbox. Track us Down @GulagBound Like the Gulag There are many important matters that Gulag Bound itself is not treating on a daily basis. For that reason we suggest The Globe & Malevolence and the sites shown under ""Key Links in our Chains,"" below. Your Daily Intelligence Brief MattSkosh on Secret Service Agents Pay a Visit to Anti-Obama Artist Sabo Tags activism Agenda 21 anti-American revolution authoritarianism Barack Hussein Obama II candidate eligibility collectivists & propaganda communisty organizations corruption crisis strategy Democrat finance & banking fraud George Soros globalism - NWO global Marxist-fascist movement government domination of resources history illegal immigration Islam Islamism jihad jihadism Israel kleptocracy labor unions Marxism Marxofascism Marxstream media Military Mitt Romney Obamacare health control Occupy Wall Street race-baiting/racism Republican Right of Private Property Russia Sovereignty Tea Party terrorism U.S. Congress U.S. Constitution U.S. Presidency (POTUS) United Nations (UN) video violence voting youth & education Sabotage What good will it do, to protect the United States of America, or our presumed interests against the aggressiveness of China, Russia, or Islam, if, partially in fear of these threats, we lose our free and independent nation to the stealth imperialism of transnational and global governance? As America threatens to shatter, we must see how a semi-covert, global, cartel collective and their NWO in the USA (""progressive"" neo-Marxists and neo-fascists corporatists, updated with 21st Century techniques and technology) intentionally perpetrate this sabotage, while we patriots try to prevent it. Have a look around our camp, as we struggle to survive. - your tour guide Archives Militarization in America About DHS militarization, see the new, breakthrough analysis from James Simpson, "" Police Militarization, Abuses of Power, and the Road to Impeachment "" and our earlier, ""Marxist President’s Military Exercises in These U.S. Cities; Yours One?"" 
+About the trajectory of this, we must pray, communicate, keep calm, and do not become the first to engage. If it comes to it, do not even respond in kind, until after the after the first times that extreme, anti-American violence is done by them. It calls for an attitude of self sacrifice -- first cheek, second cheek, then no more. 
+And speak out about the potential and strategic ""sense"" of the Obama/NWO's DHS carrying out false flag missions of violence, blaming it on American patriots, perhaps upon our militia movements. 
+We are in a real war, right now (of which others and I have been trying to alert fellow Sovereign Citizens for years) and the prime war is for the minds, hearts, and wills of the American People. We are opposed by an anti-American insurrection using any means of power (see Gramsci, Frankfurt School) including government power, as they are granted that opportunity.",FAKE
+10135,The Anti-Trump Protesters Are Tools of the Oligarchy,"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+“Reform always provokes rage on the part of those who profit by the old order.” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 
+Who are the anti-Trump protesters besmirching the name of progressives by pretending to be progressives and by refusing to accept the outcome of the presidential election? They look like, and are acting worse than, the “white trash” that they are denouncing. 
+I think I know who they are. They are thugs for hire and are paid by the Oligarchy to delegitimize Trump’s presidency in the way that Washington and the German Marshall Fund paid students in Kiev to protest the democratically elected Ukrainian government in order to prepare the way for a coup. 
+The organization, change.org, which claims to be a progressive group, but might be a front, along with other progressive groups, for the Oligarchy, is destroying the reputation of all progressives by circulating a petition that directs the electors of the Electoral Collage to annul the election by casting their votes for Hillary. Remember how upset progressives were when Trump said he might not accept the election result if there was evidence that the vote was rigged? Now progressives are doing what they damned Trump for saying he might do under certain conditions. 
+The Western presstitutes used the protests in Kiev to delegitimize a democratically elected government and to set it up for a coup. The protest pay was good enough that non-Ukrainians came from nearby countries to participate in the protest in order to collect the money. At the time I posted the amounts paid daily to protesters. Reports came in to me from Eastern and Western Europe from people who were not Ukrainian but were paid to protest as if they were Ukrainians. 
+The same thing is going on with the Trump protests. CNN reports that “for many Americans across the country, Donald Trump’s victory is an outcome they simply refuse to accept. Tens of thousands filled the streets in at least 25 US cities overnight.” This is the exact reporting that the Oligarchy desired from its presstitutes and got. 
+I hope no one thinks that simultaneous protests in 25 cities were a spontaneous event. How did 25 independent protests manage to come up with the same slogans and the same signs on the same night following the election? 
+What is the point of the protests, and what interest is served by them? As the Romans always asked, “who benefits?” 
+There is only one answer: The Oligarchy and only the Oligarchy benefits. 
+Trump is a threat to the Oligarchy, because he intends to stop the giveaway of American jobs to foreigners. The jobs giveaway, sanctified by the neoliberal junk economists as “free trade,” is one of the main reasons for the 21st century worsening of the US income distribution. Money that was formerly paid in middle class wages and salaries to American manufacturing employees and college graduates has been re-routed to the pockets of the One Percent. 
+When US corporations move their production of goods and services sold to Americans offshore to Asian countries, such as China and India, their wage bill falls. The money formerly paid in middle class incomes goes instead into executive bonuses and dividends and capital gains to shareholders. The ladders of upward mobility that had made America the land of opportunity were dismantled for the sole purpose of making a handful of people multi-billionaires. 
+Trump is a threat to the Oligarchy, because he intends peaceful relations with Russia. In order to replace the profitable Soviet Threat, the Oligarchy and their neoconservative agents worked overtime to recreate the “Russian Threat” by demonizing Russia. 
+Accustomed to many decades of excess profits from the profitable Cold War, the military/security complex was angry when President Reagan brought the Cold War to an end. Before these leaches on American taxpayers could get the Cold War going again, the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of a right-wing coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. 
+The military/security complex and their zionist neoconservative agents cooked up “the war on terror” to keep the money flowing to the One Percent. But as hard as the presstitute media worked to create fear of “the Muslim threat,” even insouciant Americans knew that the Muslims did not have thousands of ICBMs carrying powerful thermo-nuclear weapons capable of destroying the entirety of the United States in a few minutes. Neither did the Muslims have the Red Army capable of overrunning all of Europe in a couple of days. Indeed, the Muslims haven’t needed an army. Refugees from Washington’s wars enabled by Europeans are overrunning Europe. 
+The excuse for the annual trillion dollar ($1,000 billion ) military/security budget was missing. So the Oligarchy created “the New Hitler” in Russia. Hillary was the Oligarchy’s principle agent for heating up the new Cold War. 
+Hillary is the tool, enriched by the Oligarchy, whose job as President was to protect and to increase the trillion dollar budget of the military/security complex. With Hillary in the White House, the looting of the American taxpayers in behalf of the wealth of the One Percent could go forward unimpeded. But if Trump resolves “the Russian threat,” the Oligarchy takes an income hit. 
+Hillary’s job as President was also to privatize Social Security in order that her Wall Street benefactors can rip off Americans the way that Americans have been ripped off by the insurance companies under Obamacare. 
+Those Americans who do not pay attention think, mistakenly, that the FBI cleared Hillary of violating National Security protocols with her email practices. The FBI said that Hillary did violate National Security, but that it was a result of carelessness or ignorance. She got off from indictment, because the FBI concluded that she did not intentionally violate National Security protocols. The investigation of the Clinton Foundation continues. ORDER IT NOW 
+In other words, in order to protect Hillary the FBI fell back on the ancient common law rule that “there can be no crime without intent.” (See PCR and Lawrence Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions .) 
+One would think that protesters, if they were legitimate, would be celebrating Trump’s victory. He, unlike Hillary, promises to reduce tensions with powerful Russia, and we hope also with China. Unlike Hillary, Trump says he is concerned with the absence of careers for those very people protesting in the streets of 25 cities against him. 
+In other words, the protests against the American people for electing Trump as their president are pointless. The protests are happening for one reason only. The Oligarchy intends to delegitimize the Trump Presidency. Once President Trump is delegitimized, it will be easier for the Oligarchy to assassinate him. Unless the Oligarchy can appoint and control Trump’s government, Trump is a prime candidate for assassination. 
+The protests against Trump are suspicious for another reason. Unlike Hillary, Obama, and George W. Bush, Donald Trump has not slaughtered and dislocated millions of peoples in seven countries, sending millions of refugees from the Oligarchy’s wars to overrun Europe. 
+Trump earned his fortune, and if by hook or crook, not by selling US government influence to foreign agents as Bill and Hillary did. 
+So what are the protesters protesting? 
+There is no answer except that they are hired to protest. Just as the Maidan protesters in Kiev were hired to protest by US and German financed NGOs. 
+The protests in Kiev were equally pointless, because presidential elections were only months away. If Ukrainians really believed that their president was conspiring with Russia to keep Ukraine from becoming a Western puppet state and wished to become a puppet state regardless of the costs, the opportunity to vote the government out was at hand. The only reason for the protests was to orchestrate a coup. The US did succeed in putting their agent in control of the new Ukrainian government as Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador in Kiev confirmed in their telephone conversation that is available on the Internet. 
+The Maidan protests were pointless except for making a coup possible. The protests were without any doubt arranged by Washington through Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, a neoconservative brought into the State Department by Hillary Clinton for the purpose of creating conflict with Russia. 
+Trump is being protested in order to make him vulnerable in the event he proves to be the threat to the Oligarchy that he is thought to be. 
+Trump won the presidency, but the Oligarchy is still in power, which makes any real reforms difficult to achieve. Symbolic reforms can be the product of the contest between President Trump and the oligarchs. 
+Karl Marx learned from historical experience, and Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot learned from Karl Marx, that change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington. 
+Washington has conspired with traditional elites to remove the elected presidents of Honduras on a number of occasions. Recently, Washington helped elites evict the female presidents of Argentina and Brazil. The presidents of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia are in the crosshairs and are unlikely to survive. Washington is determined to get its hands on Julian Assange. To achieve this Washington intends to overthrow the Ecuadoran government that, in defiance of Washington, gave Julian Assange political asylum. 
+Hugo Chavez had the power to exile or to exterminate the Spanish ruling class in Venezuela when the ruling class participated in a CIA coup against Chavez. But before the CIA could kill Chavez, the people and the military forced his release. Instead of punishing the criminals who would have murdered him, Chavez let them go. 
+According to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, this is the classic mistake of the revolutionary. To rely on good will from the overthrown ruling class is the certain road to the defeat of the revolution. 
+Latin American has proved itself unable to learn this lesson: Revolutions cannot be conciliatory. 
+Trump is a dealmaker. The Oligarchy can permit him the sheen of success in exchange for no real change. 
+Trump is not perfect. He might fail on his own. But we should back him on the two most important elements in his program: to reduce tensions between the major nuclear powers, and to halt Washington’s policy of permitting globalism to destroy Americans’ economic prospects. 
+If tensions between nuclear powers worsen, we won’t be here to worry about other problems. The combination of the economy hollowed out by globalism and immigration is an economic nightmare. That Trump understands this is reason to support him. 
+Note: Some believe that Trump is a ruse conducted by the Oligarchy. However, as Hillary is the bought-and-paid-for representative of the Oligarchy, such an elaborate ruse is unnecessary. It is preferable for the Oligarchy to win on its own platform than to install a president on the opposite platform and then change him around. Another sellout increases the anger of the people. If Hillary had won, the Oligarchy would have had the voters’ mandate for their platform. (Reprinted from PaulCraigRoberts.org by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+2008,Jeb on running as a Bush: 'Interesting challenge',A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+9893,VA Hospital Honors Decorated Veteran of Three Wars with Free Side of Mashed Potatoes | GomerBlog,"Tweet “U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A! Po-to-toes! Po-ta-toes! Po-ta-toes!” 
+INDIANAPOLIS, IN – Veterans Day is a time when our country comes together to honor our military service men and women who have sacrificed so much to protect our country. This year was no different at the VA hospital when 87-year-old Vincent Arnold, a veteran of three wars, was offered a complimentary serving of mashed potatoes in the cafeteria as a thank you for his 30 years of military service. 
+Normally, the “Patriot” combo meal includes 2 pieces of fried chicken , a side of mixed vegetables and a 12-ounce drink. On Veterans Day, all veterans are given a scoop of mashed potatoes free of charge. Purple Heart recipients are also given the option of brown or cream gravy as a special recognition for the physical suffering they endured while fighting for our freedom. 
+“We always make sure our veterans have a very special Veterans Day,” stated hospital administrator Nathan Bishop while opening a box of miniature American flags that will be placed in every patient’s room. “We pull out all the stops: stickers that say ‘We Love Our Veterans’; red, white, and blue crepe paper; and lots of smiles!” They may even roll out those patriotic Pyxis machines again. 
+At press time, witnesses reported seeing a Medal of Honor winner being given a T-shirt adorned with a billowing American flag and three bald eagles. 290 Shares ",FAKE
+9113,"British banker took 60g of cocaine while torturing & killing prostitute, court told","British banker took 60g of cocaine while torturing & killing prostitute, court... British banker took 60g of cocaine while torturing & killing prostitute, court told By 0 137 
+British banker Rurik Jutting took up to 60 grams of cocaine while torturing and killing a prostitute, a Hong Kong court has heard. He is also alleged to have harbored fantasies of returning to the UK to kidnap and abuse teenage girls. 
+The 30-year-old is on trial for the murder of two Indonesian women in his flat in the former British colony and finance hub. 
+In a video seen by authorities, Jutting is heard bragging about the massive amount of cocaine he had taken over the course of the three-day torture of his first victim, 23-year-old Sumarti Ningsih. 
+He told police he derived a “ sense of enjoyment he never had before ” from his actions and knew then that he would kill again. 
+Read more 
+Jutting, formerly a banker at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who studied at the University of Cambridge, has denied murder but admitted to manslaughter. 
+He was arrested in 2014 after the bodies of Ningsih and a second Indonesian woman, 26-year-old Seneng Mujiasih, were found in his apartment. 
+Interview tapes played in the courtroom reveal some of Jutting’s thought processes during the killings. 
+“ She was unlucky to be the person in my flat when I realized that physically hurting someone when under cocaine was something I gained satisfaction from, ” he said of his first victim. 
+Medical experts told the court that Jutting appeared to have built up a huge tolerance to cocaine and existed on a daily dose of wine, cocaine and Red Bull. 
+He also revealed his plans to return to the UK and abduct schoolgirls from an expensive boarding school in Buckinghamshire. 
+“ They would be, say, 15 years old and I would basically turn these three girls into my sex slaves, it would be good to psychologically play them off against each other, ” he told police. 
+The trial continues",FAKE
+7441,Bill Black: Wall Street’s Apologist-in-Chief Mansplains Regulation to Senator Warren,"by Yves Smith 
+Yves here. Even by the normal, as in low, standards of New York Times defenses of Wall Street, the Roger Lowenstein piece that Black shellacks is particularly inept. 
+By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives 
+When last I wrote of Roger Lowenstein he was complaining that the Wall Street felons were being criticized – not jailed – criticized. Lowenstein is Wall Street’s self-appointed apologist-in-chief. Naturally, he despises Senator Warren, the most effective elected official in exposing Wall Street’s elite frauds. The New York Times granted him an op ed in which he sought to mansplain financial regulation to Senator Warren. 
+Lowenstein does not like women that he considers too loud, gratuitously complaining that Senator Warren is “high-decibel” supporter of regulation. Coming from someone who has spent his journalistic career shilling for Wall Street, this sexist trope is painfully embarrassing. Wall Street is infamous for raging males who believe that screaming at subordinates who can’t fight back proves their virility. 
+Lowenstein was piling on to the recent sexist attack of Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer, an ultra-right wing Missouri Republican, on Senator Warren. Congressman Luetkemeyer , a senior member of House Financial Services, was speaking to the American Bankers Association when he labeled Senator Warren the “Darth Vader of the financial services world” and pleaded with the bankers to work with the Trump Republicans to “neuter her.” The Kansas City Star coverage of this Trumpian assault on women notes that Congressman Luetkemeyer “led multiple congressional efforts to protect the payday loan industry, according to fortune.com.” 
+Senator Warren, who is decidedly not a screamer, is the target of Lowenstein and Luetkemeyer’s wrath because Wall Street’s greatest fear is the return of effective regulators who would end the elite frauds and make the criminal referrals that would imprison thousands of Wall Street’s elite criminals. Wall Street knows that Senators Warren, Sanders and Brown are working tirelessly to ensure that the next president appoints regulatory leaders that would restore the rule of law to Wall Street. Lowenstein and Congressman Luetkemeyer are desperate to defeat that effort. 
+Lowenstein wrote that his article was prompted by Senator Warren’s recommendation that President Obama fire Mary Jo White as the chair of the SEC. Because Senator Warren understands federal regulation, she made no such recommendation. Senator Warren requested President Obama to designate another SEC commissioner as the Chair. The President does have that power. 
+Ms. White has been an exceptionally weak leader of the SEC. I witnessed Ms. White’s presentation at the annual law professors meeting years ago giving her ode to “good earnings management.” “Earnings management” is one of many euphemisms for a form of accounting securities fraud that reduces the value of corporation in order to “hit the number” and maximize the officers’ bonuses. The revolving door perverted someone who once was a moderately effective prosecutor into a very well paid apologist for elite frauds. President Obama is notorious for appointing weak law enforcement officials at the Department of Justice and the financial regulatory agencies. Senator Warren is correct to call on President Obama to transfer the chair to a more capable SEC commissioner. 
+Senator Warren knows that there is no chance that President Obama will request Ms. White’s resignation or no longer designate her as the SEC Chair. Senator Warren is establishing her consistency and serving notice on the next president that the democratic-wing of the Democratic Party will push for appointees in the next administration that will be dedicated to restoring the rule of law to Wall Street. Lowenstein has no expertise in regulation. Senator Warren is one of the Nation’s experts in financial regulation. As one would predict, his pretense of mansplaining financial regulation to Senator Warren went hilariously wrong. Lowenstein begins with a fundamental error that betrays the fact that he does not understand even the basics of federal regulation. 
+Last time I checked, the S.E.C. was a regulatory agency of the executive branch…. 
+The SEC is an independent regulatory agency, as was the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) when I worked for it — and unlike the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) when I worked for it. The OTS was “a regulatory agency of the executive branch.” The normal view under U.S. jurisprudence is that the independent regulatory agencies such as the SEC are “creatures of Congress.” The problem is not that the SEC became an independent regulatory agency since the “last time [Lowenstein] checked.” The SEC was created as an independent regulatory agency in 1934 and has remained one for its entire existence. 
+Lowenstein never understood the SEC’s legal nature because he never “checked” on the SEC’s legal nature. Had he checked, he would have found statements such as this by the SEC : 
+[A]s an independent regulatory agency the SEC is not obligated to follow the guidelines for regulatory economic analysis by executive agencies…. 
+Building on this initial error, Lowenstein imagines President Obama’s response to Senator Warren’s call for President Obama to ask Ms. White to resign as Chair of the SEC: 
+“Hey, firing agency heads is my job.” 
+Well, no. The President cannot “fire” the heads of independent regulatory agencies such as the SEC, precisely because they are not “executive branch” agencies. The SEC Commissioners do not serve “at the pleasure of the president.” 
+I am delighted that progressives such as Senators Sanders and Warren blocked Larry Summers’ appointment to chair the Federal Reserve, which led to the well-deserved appointment of Janet Yellen to Chair the Fed. Progressives were enthused that progressives such as Senators Sanders and Warren blocked Antonio Weiss — whose only ostensible qualification for the Treasury slot was that he was an investment banker who contributed to the crisis rather than warning about it and trying to prevent it. Contrary to Lowenstein’s assertion, Weiss had to be pushed by Senators Sanders and Warren to even begin to respond to Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy. 
+The thing that the Street will never forgive Senator Warren for is the thing they claim they value as their preeminent virtue — she succeeds. Indeed, she succeeds despite their intense opposition and their rage against her. They try to go head-to-head with her and she hands them their heads. CEOs like Wells Fargo’s John Stumpf are so used to being surrounded by sycophants that tell them how brilliant they are that they approach prepping for Senator Warren’s questions with contempt and immense over-confidence. Then she tears into them and they look like a deer frozen in place by headlights while being eviscerated by a wolverine. The best that Lowenstein can muster in his attempted takedown of Senator Warren is that “there is no good evidence” that Stumpf resigned because of Senator Warren’s evisceration of him. Senator Warren has never claimed that Stumpf resigned due to her questioning. Prior to the Senate hearings the commentators were virtually unanimous that he would not resign. After the hearings, he was doomed. 
+Wall Streeters’ belief that they are far smarter than anyone else (because they pay themselves more than almost everyone) and should run the economy and the government by divine right is a form of arrogance so central to their self-definition that they are frequently clueless about the most basic facts of finance, e.g., a “flight to quality” will produce highly correlated changes in interest rates among a wide range of securities. Lowenstein propagated this Wall Street “genius” myth in his best-known book ( When Genius Failed ). The “geniuses” he profiles in the book were unable to understand that a “flight to quality” would render their investing strategy suicidal. 
+Lowenstein’s ode to the revolving door rests on his assertions about the supposed Wall Street giants of federal regulation. His assertions will strike most readers, correctly, as bizarre. He asserts that “many of the best” financial regulators came from Wall Street, giving three supposed examples including Henry M. Paulson Jr., a Treasury Secretary under the second President Bush. Unsurprisingly, Robert Rubin, President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary wrote a glowing review in the NYT’s of Lowenstein’s most recent book. Rubin and Paulson share a number of characteristics. They both were the leaders of Goldman Sachs before being appointed as Treasury Secretary. They both presided over the three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization of finance. They both are immensely culpable for creating the criminogenic environment that produced the three most damaging epidemics of accounting control fraud in history. Those fraud epidemics hyper-inflated the bubble and drove the financial crisis. The fact that Lowenstein cites Paulson as one of the greatest financial regulators in history and the fact that Rubin wrote such an over-the-top review of the supposed brilliance of Lowenstein demolish Lowenstein’s credibility and his claim that the revolving door that leads Wall Street. His modern hero was one of the important contributors to the catastrophe. 
+Lowenstein’s second proposed Wall Street hero is Arthur Levitt, who worked for a series of Wall Street firms before being appointed as Chairman of the SEC. After he left the SEC he worked for Goldman Sachs. Levitt did try to make some reforms as Chairman of the SEC. Mr. Levitt, however, was ultimately critically flawed – and those flaws came from the dogmas he absorbed from his many years on Wall Street. I discuss one of those flaws below. 
+Lowenstein fails to even mention this Nation’s most effective financial regulator, Edwin Gray, Chairman of the FHLBB. This is unsurprising because Gray was successful largely because he had no Wall Street ties. Gray’s most virulent foe in the government was Donald Regan, the former head of Merrill Lynch, and the fiercest proponent of the deregulation that made the savings and loan industry so criminogenic that George Akerlof and Paul Romer concluded it was “bound” to produce widespread “ looting .” Gray enraged Mr. Regan by seeking to regulate against deposit brokers. Merrill Lynch was the Nation’s largest deposit broker. Gray’s top supervisors who proved so brilliantly successful in countering the raging fraud epidemics in Texas and California that drove the savings and loan debacle, Joe Selby and Michael Patriarca, were long-time government employees who had never worked for Wall Street. None of regulatory leaders who distinguished themselves in containing the debacle came from Wall Street. 
+Lowenstein fails to mention the sole federal regulatory leader of the last 20 years who sought to emulate Gray and serve as a vigorous financial reregulator – Brooksley Born – who attempted to regulate financial derivatives. Ms. Born’s efforts were destroyed by a bipartisan coalition of Wall Street officials and alums holding key government positions that exemplify the dangers of the revolving door. That coalition included Bill Clinton (as President of the U.S., soon to be made wealthy by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for speeches with obscene payoffs), Treasury Secretary Rubin (former CEO of Goldman Sachs and soon-to-be be made even wealthier as a top officer of Citigroup where he had no real job duties), Mr. Greenspan (Chairman of the Fed; Wall Streeter before and after), Eugene Ludwig (Comptroller of the Currency; soon to leave to be made wealthy by Bankers Trust/Deutsche Bank, the giant serially criminal enterprise that is Germany’s largest bank), Senator Gramm (Chairman of Senate Banking; later made wealthy by UBS, the giant, serially criminal enterprise that is one of Switzerland’s largest banks) – as well as both of Lowenstein’s purported modern financial regulatory heroes – Mr. Paulson (while he was running Goldman Sachs, before being named by the second President Bush as his Treasury Secretary) and Mr. Levitt (when he was SEC Chairman, before he would take the revolving door to Goldman Sachs). Note that Mr. Paulson was only one of the infamous “13 Bankers” (the CEOs of the largest banks) who met with Treasury Secretary Rubin to (successfully) demand that Ms. Born’s be forbidden to regulate huge classes of financial derivatives, including credit default swaps(CDS). 
+You can see why Lowenstein left out of his column any discussion of these Wall Streeters racing through the revolving door to enrich themselves and other Wall Street officers at the expense of our Nation and people all over the world by bringing together this assemblage of naked political and economic power to crush Ms. Born’s efforts to fulfill her statutory duties as Chair of the CFTC. I agree that Mr. Levitt was the least bad regulator of this corrupt coalition. Mr. Levitt has conceded that his attacks on Ms. Born were disgraceful and erroneous. 
+As best I can tell, Senator Warren takes a position about the revolving door that is very similar to mine. We do not oppose any appointment of people of Wall Street to government. We oppose the continued domination of the regulatory agencies and executive agencies by Wall Street personnel. That domination has produced a pathetic track record of intentional failure due not simply to conflicts of interest and self-interest, but even more to the anti-regulatory dogmas that are endemic on Wall Street. Neither our economy nor our democracy can afford the terrible cost of this continued, corrupt domination. The domination has perverted the U.S. into a system of crony capitalism. As one of my fellow co-founders of Bank Whistleblowers United (BWU), Gary Aguirre (formerly an SEC enforcement attorney before he blew the whistle of the SEC leadership) stresses, the SEC routinely waives for former senior SEC officials the existing revolving door restrictions. BWU has called on the SEC to end this indefensible practice. 
+Lowenstein then makes another dishonest claim about the SEC. 
+When the S.E.C. has landed in trouble, it has usually been because it has wandered from its charter and ignored its bread-and-butter responsibility (see Madoff, Bernie). 
+That statement is carefully crafted to mislead the reader. The SEC failed with regard to Bernie Madoff by refusing to act on clear evidence of fraud provided by multiple whistleblowers. Madoff was an example of a variant of the revolving door. Mr. Madoff was a Wall Streeter who became for years the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the NASD, a self-regulatory association that functions under aegis of the SEC. The SEC generally treats the NASD as a quasi-public ally. The SEC was reluctant to believe warnings about Mr. Madoff because of his former role as the NASD’s leader. 
+The SEC did not get in “trouble” with Madoff because it “ignored” its core responsibilities to divert large of resources in order to take on some exotic, tangential function. Lowenstein simply invented that fiction. The SEC got in trouble in large part because of the combination of the revolving door and Congressional Republicans’ war on the SEC budget. The Republicans want the SEC to be ineffective as a regulator because the Wall Street’s leaders who are criminals fear a vigorous SEC. 
+Lowenstein knows that this Republican war is a critical threat to the Nation, but asserts a policy implication of this war that is nonsensical to anyone but Wall Street’s apologist-in-chief. 
+[T]he S.E.C. faces continual pressure on its budget from a skeptical and unappreciative Congress. The last thing it needs is political grandstanding from Ms. Warren. 
+Note that Lowenstein dishonestly uses the term “Congress” instead of “Congressional Republicans.” The Congressional Republicans are not “skeptical and unappreciative” of the SEC – they are virulently hostile to effective securities (and financial derivatives) regulation. This exceptional hostility has been a constant feature preventing the SEC and CFTC from having adequate resources to fulfill their statutory duties since the early 1990s. Criminologists call this the deliberate creation of “systems incapacity.” Senators Sanders, Brown, and Warren are the strongest supporters of the SEC and the CFTC receiving the substantial increases in budget required for these agencies to perform their statutory missions. Logically, Lowenstein should be criticizing virtually every Republican member of Congress and praising Senator Warren and her progressive allies. Instead he refuses to identify the Republicans as the source of problem and attacks only Senator Warren – implying dishonestly that if she would stop pushing for the SEC to restore the rule of law to Wall Street the Republicans would cease their actions on behalf of criminal Wall Street elites designed to gut the SEC’s ability to counter the elite Wall Street frauds. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+7211,"“We are losing control of the streets,” say police as Angela Merkel’s Germany descends into chaos and lawlessness","BNI Store Nov 2 2016 “We are losing control of the streets,” say police as Angela Merkel’s Germany descends into chaos and lawlessness GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing catastrophe over her failed mass Muslim migration policy, according to a new report. Germany has been hit by a tidal wave of horrendous violent crime including rapes, sexual and physical assaults, stabbings, home invasions, robberies, burglaries and drug trafficking…not to mention Islamic terrorist attacks. UK Express Adding to the country’s woes is the fact that thousands of people have gone missing after travelling there on invitation from Anegla Merkel. Germany took in more than 1.1million migrants in the past year and parts of the country are crippled with a lack of infrastructure. Now the true reality is hitting home ahead of next year’s elections as the far right surges in the polls threatening to topple the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Mrs Merkel. According to a report by the international policy council the Gatestone Institute, local police in many parts of the country admit that they are stretched to the limit. Despite the mayhem caused by skyrocketing violent crime and terror attacks by Muslim migrants, German officials insist on blaming the unrest on the rise of the “far right extremists” (aka German patriots). The report states: “The rape of a ten-year-old girl in Leipzig, the largest city in Saxony, has drawn renewed attention to the spiralling levels of violent crime perpetrated by migrants in cities and towns across Germany. “Thousands of migrants who entered the country as ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘refugees’ have gone missing. They are, presumably, economic migrants who entered Germany on false pretences. “Many are thought to be engaging in robbery and criminal violence.” According to Freddi Lohse of the German Police Union in Hamburg, many migrant offenders view the leniency of the German justice system as a green light to continue delinquent behaviour, says the report. He said: “They are used to tougher consequences in their home countries. “They have no respect for us.” After the “refugee” disaster that Angela Merkel has created, she is now unsettled about Europe returning to nationalism. Nationalism is a nightmare for all the liberal leaders working for a New World Order. “During the first six months of 2016, Muslim migrants committed 142,500 crimes , according to the Federal Criminal Police Office. This is equivalent to 780 crimes committed by migrants every day, an increase of nearly 40 per cent over 2015. The data includes only those crimes in which a suspect has been caught. Muslim migrants committed 208,344 crimes in 2015 , according to a confidential police report leaked to Bild. This figure represents an 80 per cent increase since 2014 and is equivalent to 570 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 23 crimes each hour, in 2015 alone. “Nearly 70 per cent of respondents said they fear for their lives and property in German train stations and subways, while 63 per cent feel unsafe at large public events.” The report added: “The growing sense of lawlessness is substantiated by an October 24 YouGov poll which found that 68 per cent of Germans believe that security in the country has deteriorated during the past several years. Germans are taking to the streets in the thousands in weekly protests against the Muslim invasion started by the Obama/Soros/Clinton Arab Spring and aided and abetted by Angela Merkel. Meanwhile a female police officer has admitted that officers are under attack and that the courts are a “joke.” In a new book, Tania Kambouri, a German police officer, said: “For weeks, months and years I have noticed that Muslims, mostly young men, do not have even a minimum level of respect for the police. “When we are out patrolling the streets, we are verbally abused by young Muslims. “There is the body language, and insults like ‘s*** cop’ when passing by. “If we make a traffic stop, the aggression increases ever further, this is overwhelmingly the case with migrants. “It cannot be that offenders continue to fill the police files, hurt us physically, insult us, whatever, and there are no consequences. “Many cases are closed or offenders are released on probation or whatever. “Yes, what is happening in the courts today is a joke.” The construction of a small mosque, the first in the German state of Thuringia, created controversy after the Alternative for Germany party labeled it a ‘land grab project’ and announced a massive anti-Islam rally.",FAKE
+5066,Will Bill Clinton's best effort be enough?,"Ed Morrissey is senior editor at HotAir.com, a columnist for The Week and The Fiscal Times, and author of ""Going Red: The Two Million Voters Who Will Elect the Next President -- and How Conservatives Can Win Them."" The views expressed are his own.
+
+Traditionally, the spouses of major-party nominees get a speaking slot at the national convention to humanize the candidate. Former presidents speak to remind the faithful of their history. Bill Clinton falls into both categories, but he had a far more difficult task in closing out the second night of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia on Tuesday night; he needed to find a way to knit the party back together again.
+
+That's a tall order, and not just because the evening started with a walkout involving hundreds of Bernie Sanders delegates, according to one estimate . A generation has passed since the former president ascended to lead the Democratic Party as the first baby boomer major-party nominee, and then defeated the last of the World War II presidents.
+
+Back then, Bill used his enormous natural political talent to fuse the New Left with working class Democrats, while ""triangulating"" on the Republican agenda to carve a centrist path in governance.
+
+Twenty-four years later, it's not Bill Clinton's Democratic Party. It might not be Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party. If it hadn't been for the establishment-protecting superdelegates and the Democratic National Convention's efforts to tip the primary scales in her favor, it would likely have been Bernie Sanders' Democratic Party -- and on Tuesday in Philadelphia, with hundreds of empty seats staring back at the stage, it certainly looked as though it was.
+
+Twenty-four years later, Bill Clinton isn't the same, youthful physical force, either. At times he seemed frail and at one point a bit distracted. However, Clinton proved that his political instincts haven't dimmed much at all. Rather than take on the task of unifying through direct debate, Clinton delivered a masterful soft-sell by walking through a personal history of his wife that tried to answer the divides in the party.",REAL
+3639,At least 12 dead in shooting at office of satirical French magazine,"BREAKING: Black-clad gunmen stormed the Paris offices of a satirical newspaper known for lampooning Islamic radicals early Wednesday, killing 12 and injuring as many as 15 before escaping, French officials said.
+
+As many as three Kalashnikov-toting shooters were being sought after the attack at Charlie Hebdo, the newspaper known for challenging Muslim terrorists with a 2011 caricature of Prophet Mohammed on its cover and which recently tweeted a cartoon of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Two policemen and several journalists - including the cartoonist behind the newspaper's provocative images, were among the dead.
+
+“We’ve avenged the honor of the prophet!” the killers shouted, according to witnesses who spoke to Sky News. The gunmen spoke French without any accent, according to Le Monde
+
+The gunmen fled in a stolen car, and may have quickly ditched it and disappeared into the French capital's subway system, according to reports. A pedestrian has been injured by the terrorist’s vehicle, and there has been a second shootout, according to Le Figaro.
+
+French President Francois Hollande branded the attack an act of terrorism and claimed that several other potential terror attacks had been thwarted ""in recent weeks."" Hollande added that the newspaper had been threatened in the past and was already under police protection and surveillance.
+
+“This is a terrorist attack, there is no doubt about it,” Hollande told reporters.
+
+Elsewhere in France, newspaper offices, shopping centers, museums and stations were placed under police protection.
+
+Officials said the men walked into the ground floor of the newspaper's offices and began shooting before making their way up to the first floor. As they fled the scene, they shot at arriving policemen.
+
+“It was a real butchery,” Rocco Contento, a spokesman for the Unité police union, told The Guardian.
+
+Benoit Bringer, a journalist from the agency Premieres Lignes Tele, whose offices are next door, told the Telegraph he took refuge on the building's roof.
+
+""Three policemen arrived by push bike, but they left naturally as the attackers were armed,"" he said.
+
+The newspaper's offices are in the trendy 11th arrondissement of Paris, which includes posh restaurants and retail shops.
+
+Charlie Hebdo's offices were firebombed in 2011 after a spoof issue featuring a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad on its cover. Nearly a year later, the magazine published crude Muhammad caricatures, drawing denunciations around the Muslim world. One of the dead in Wednesday's attack was satirical cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier, the newspaper's editorial director and the artist behind the caricatures that offended jihadists. He was the subject of a fatwah, and there is a Facebook page called ""Execute Stephane Charbonnier.""
+
+British Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the attack and vowed solidarity with France.
+
+""The murders in Paris are sickening,"" Cameron said. ""We stand with the French people in the fight against terror and defending the freedom of the press.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8191,"Hillary is So Unpopular, She Has to Pay Off Youth Voters and Fabricate Her Rallies","Email 
+Among the many Wikileaks emails that were dumped this summer, it was clear that Hillary Clinton is not as popular as the media would have you believe. In fact, it became clear that she has no real support in a hacked email to the point where she was forced to pay young voters to stump online for her. 
+The Gateway Pundit reported : 
+She's the astroturfed candidate. Hillary is SOOO unpopular that she has to pay off young voters to support her and show up at her rallies. 
+5 Biggest Scoops from the #DNCLeaks WikiLeak 
+Wikileaks released nearly 20,000 hacked emails it says are from the accounts of Democratic National Committee officials on Friday. 
+The emails are devastating for Hillary Clinton. According to at least one hacked email Hillary Clinton has no real support and must pay youth voters to defend her online. She also pays millennials to show up at her rallies. 
+Hillary's support is all a lie. It's all astroturfed. Everything this woman does is all a lie – even her rallies are fabricated. 
+If Attkisson's explanation were not enough, how about this tweet regarding the mainstream media putting their collective useful idiot heads together to pitch the same propaganda about Donald Trump. 5 Biggest Scoops from the #DNCLeaks https://t.co/vmTiepsPkj 
+— Mike Cernovich 🇺🇸 (@Cernovich) July 23, 2016 
+This should have come as no surprise. 
+If you remember when her campaign kicked off in 2015, I reported on the fact that more than 50% of her Twitter followers were either completely fake or inactive . 
+Additionally, when she had her Iowa kickoff event, a whopping 22 people showed up . The majority of those were reporters! 
+Hillary Clinton only has the backing of the media and rabid anti-American liberals, and even then, it looks like she's having to pay them to actually do anything to support her. In other words, her candidacy is completely contrived.  ",FAKE
+6280,"Because of Hillary Clinton, Emergency-Contraception Is Banned In Honduras","Because of Hillary Clinton, Emergency-Contraception Is Banned In Honduras Because of Hillary Clinton, Emergency-Contraception Is Banned In Honduras By Eric Zuesse Of course, one of Hillary Clinton’s proudest claims is that as the U.S. Secretary of State she championed reproductive choice throughout the world. She championed it in words, but her actions were sometimes in the opposite direction, and there is perhaps no nation where her actions as the U.S. Secretary of State had a bigger impact than Honduras, which case will therefore be examined, and her impact on this documented, here: The reason that the morning-after pill, which enables raped women to avoid becoming pregnant from a rape, was made illegal by the government that now exists in Honduras, is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton persuaded President Barack Obama not to terminate U.S. financial aid to the coup-regime that came into power there on 28 June 2009. Without that aid, the democratically elected President would quickly have been restored. Though the U.S. Ambassador in Honduras told Secretary of State Clinton that there was no way in which that coup was legal and that consequently it undoubtedly was a “coup” and that existing U.S. law therefore required U.S. funding of the Honduran government to cease immediately, she ignored the law, and she ignored everything except her friend Lanny Davis the lobbyist whom the coup-plotters had hired to represent them to Democrats (a different lobbyist was hired to represent them to the congressional Republicans). President Obama took his Secretary of State’s advice and refused to enforce the law, and Hillary Clinton publicly praised what the regime was doing. The regime was condemned throughout Latin America, because the coup, which consisted of the local aristocracy or ‘oligarchs’, overthrew the democratically elected President of Honduras, who had wanted a land-reform law to be introduced. Immediately after the coup that overthrew him, the newly installed regime allowed the aristocrats’ paid thugs to murder anyone who tried to lead the opposition; and therefore the regime that had been imposed by Honduras’s aristocracy and kept in power by America’s aristocracy, has remained stable since. However, after the coup, Honduras has had the world’s highest murder-rate. Thus, it’s a stable but now extraordinarily violent country. (Detailed documentation of every allegation in this paragraph can be found in the “Honduras” section of this article I earlier wrote about “Hillary Clinton’s Six Foreign-Policy Catastrophes” ; and that section on Honduras, in turn, links to 68 sources, which provide the sometimes gruesome details regarding Hillary Clinton’s impact upon the lives of the Honduran people since the coup. However, that article didn’t mention this matter concerning contraception, rape, and abortion; and, so, the present article will be an extension from that earlier one, dealing specifically with Hillary Clinton’s impact upon family-planning and reproductive choice in Honduras.) One feature of the new, U.S.-backed, regime, was the imposition of draconian fundamentalist laws against contraception and intensifying the abortion-ban. On 13 February 2012, the Center for Reproductive Rights headlined “Honduras Supreme Court Upholds Absolute Ban on Emergency Contraception, Opens Door to Criminalize Women and Medical Professionals” and reported: The Honduras Supreme Court has upheld the country’s absolute ban on emergency contraception, which would criminalize the sale, distribution, and use of the “morning-after pill” — imposing punishment for offenders equal to that of obtaining or performing an abortion, which in Honduras is completely restricted. “By banning and criminalizing emergency contraception, Honduras is telling the world it would rather imprison the women of its country than provide them with safe and effective birth control,” said Luisa Cabal, director of international legal programs at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Today’s decision from the Honduras Supreme Court blatantly disregards women’s fundamental reproductive rights and completely ignores the respected medical opinion of experts around the globe. It will cause significant harm in the lives countless women and doctors across the country. … Consequently, the hell in Honduras has been accentuated by punishment of women who have been raped, and punishment of doctors and pharmacists who try to help them. The President whom Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the ten main aristocratic families of Honduras , overthrew and prohibited from running for President ever again, Manuel Zelaya, had, in April 2009, vetoed a law that the Honduran legislature (controlled by those ten families plus another 15 or so ) had just passed to ban the morning-after pill. So, that law didn’t enter into force until the U.S.-imposed regime restored it. However, the restoration of the ban wasn’t final until this decision was handed down by the Honduran Supreme Court. As Amnesty International said at that time : On 1 February, the Supreme Court in Honduras upheld a decree imposing an absolute ban on emergency contraception. This decree was vetoed in May 2009 by the former President on grounds that it conflicted with the Constitution. The Supreme Court has now concluded that the decree is constitutional and that Congress can begin to develop laws enforcing a ban of the emergency contraceptive pill on the basis of its alleged “abortive” nature. The World Health Organization, Pan-American Health Organization, and several other expert bodies have clearly stated that the emergency contraceptive pill is not abortive; it is a form of contraception that works by ensuring the egg is inaccessible and impeding fertilization. The criminalization of the emergency contraceptive pill will have appalling consequences. For example, rape victims will be unable to prevent pregnancy … And so it has been in Honduras. During the period since the 28 June 2009 Honduran U.S.-backed coup, the hell in Honduras has been so bad that Honduras has become one of the top sources of illegal immigration into the United States. The world-record-high murder-rates and crushing poverty, with no opportunity for the public to ‘move up in the world’ other than through becoming one of the paid enforcers for the aristocrats, which often also entails leading the now-booming drug-gangs there, has essentially forced out of Honduras millions of residents, and many of them have escaped through Mexico into the United States, in order to be able to have a decent life, rather than murder and be murdered. Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the U.S. Presidential campaign, Donald Trump, never talks about the hell that Clinton and Obama have been imposing around the world (except regarding non-Christian-majority countries such as Libya), and he seems to view illegal immigrants as if U.S. foreign policies have nothing to do with creating the problems that those people are facing, but there is no indication that he would continue those policies, which have been causing them to be illegal immigrants here. To the contrary, his anti-interventionist foreign-policy proposals would be inconsistent with coups and invasions regarding any foreign country whose government is not posing an imminent threat to U.S. national security. Trump’s foreign-policy proposals are not in any way favorable toward those of Hillary Clinton (who is simply an extreme version of Obama’s worst policy-orientations). (And America’s own Federation of American Scientists has stated that Obama is lying in order to ‘justify’ his policy now to ignore existing in-force nuclear treaties with Russia as being supposedly not violations of them. So, though he may not be as much of a neoconservative as she is, he basically is one, too. His aggression against Russia is subtle , but forceful .) Consequently, at least regarding foreign policy, a President Trump would be authentic change, irrespective of whether a particular voter would approve of that change as opposed to continuing America’s existing foreign policy but in a more extreme way. Among other things, a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to retain the status-quo in Honduras and around the world, but to go much farther in the same direction. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to change that status-quo — to change (and in some important respects reverse ) that direction . The biggest impact of this election will be on foreign (including both economic and military) policy. Even domestically within the United States, the difference between the two candidates on foreign policies will have a much bigger impact, including possibly even nuclear war , than will the other policy-areas, which the general public erroneously think will have a bigger impact upon their lives and their future than will foreign policies. (And here are quoted recent reports in the Washington Post , Spiegel , Huffington Post , and other serious media, discussing her preparing her coming Administration’s plans and personnel for a war with Russia; and Obama is right now setting everything up for her to be able to start the war as soon as possible.) Regardless of whether the American public know it, the main impact of this Presidential election will be on foreign policy, including on the immense impacts that foreign policy will have domestically. So: this is not the time when the U.S. will be progressing but instead regressing, and intelligent voters will be aiming to minimize the harms, rather than to achieve progress. Progress, at this stage so late in the game, is still being hoped-for only by some fools who happen to be also progressives. Any intelligent progressive, at this late stage, is focused entirely upon minimizing the harm. And the maximum harm could happen with surprising rapidity. (Back in 1961, the estimation of experts was that — as one of the few who spoke publicly stated — “A nuclear war between the United States and Russia would be all over in 24 or 48 hours because both sides would let go with their full atomic arsenals.” The estimates today are far more precise but unpublished, and they’re all well under an hour — some as low as 20 minutes.) There wouldn’t be any surrender, nor any armistice. There would only be the end of civilization , and unspeakable misery (including details that are ignored by the major media, such as this ) until practically everyone is dead (from starvation if nothing else). Those are the stakes in this election. Even to be debating domestic issues at a time like this, simply doesn’t make any sense. But the situation in Honduras points up the ridiculousness, in a fundamentally different context, which is why I am writing about it now.",FAKE
+2833,"Iran, world powers agree to nuclear deal","Iran and the United States and its negotiating partners finally reached agreement Tuesday on a deal that would curb Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief -- setting up a looming showdown between President Obama and Congress, where lawmakers could take issue with several provisions, including one giving Iran leverage over inspections.
+
+Speaking from the White House, Obama claimed the deal meets ""every single one of the bottom lines"" from a tentative agreement struck earlier this year.
+
+""Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off,"" Obama said, claiming it provides for extensive inspections. ""This deal is not built on trust. It is built on verification.""
+
+Yet that very issue could be the primary sticking point going forward.
+
+While some members of Congress had urged comprehensive inspections of Iran's nuclear sites, the deal in hand gives Iran much leverage over that process. The agreement requires international inspectors to ask Iran's permission first, after which Iran has 14 days to decide whether to grant it. If not, the same group of nations that struck the deal would have another 10 days to make their decision about what to do next. While the international group may have final say, the set-up essentially gives Iran 24 days to drag out the process, though officials say this is not enough time to hide all evidence of illicit conduct.
+
+Already, some on Capitol Hill were warning about the implications of the deal; lawmakers will have 60 days to review and vote on the agreement. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the deal ""appears to further the flawed elements of April's interim agreement.""
+
+But Obama said it would be ""irresponsible"" to walk away and vowed to veto any attempt to crush the agreement.
+
+""No deal means a greater chance of more war in the Middle East,"" Obama said.
+
+Diplomats struck the deal after the latest 18-day round of intense and often fractious negotiations in Vienna, Austria blew through several self-imposed deadlines. A final meeting between the foreign ministers of Iran, the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia was held Tuesday morning.
+
+Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif described the accord as ""a historic moment"" as he attended the final session.
+
+""We are reaching an agreement that is not perfect for anybody, but it is what we could accomplish,"" Zarif continued, ""and it is an important achievement for all of us. Today could have been the end of hope on this issue. But now we are starting a new chapter of hope.""
+
+Federica Mogherini, the European Union foreign policy chief, called it ""a sign of hope for the entire world.""
+
+The accord is meant to keep Iran from producing enough material for a nuclear weapon for at least 10 years and will impose new provisions for inspections of Iranian facilities, including military sites.
+
+Diplomats said Iran agreed to the continuation of a United Nations arms embargo on the country for up to five more years, though it could end earlier if the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) definitively clears Iran of any current work on nuclear weapons. A similar condition was put on U.N. restrictions on the transfer of ballistic missile technology to Tehran, which could last for up to eight more years.
+
+According to officials, Iran also had agreed to a so-called ""snapback"" provision, under which sanctions could be reinstated if it violates the agreement.
+
+Washington had sought to maintain the ban on Iran importing and exporting weapons, concerned that an Islamic theocracy flush with cash from the nuclear deal would expand its military assistance for Syrian President Bashar Assad's government, Yemen's Houthi rebels, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and other forces opposing America's Mideast allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.
+
+Iranian leaders insisted the embargo had to end as their forces combat regional scourges such as ISIS. And they got some support from China and particularly Russia, which wants to expand military cooperation and arms sales to Tehran, including the long-delayed transfer of S-300 advanced air defense systems -- a move long opposed by the United States.
+
+The last major sticking point -- which could still cause problems on Capitol Hill -- appeared to be whether international weapons inspectors would be given access to Iranian nuclear sites. The deal includes a compromise between Washington and Tehran that would allow U.N. inspectors to press for visits to Iranian military sites as part of their monitoring duties. However, access at will to any site would not necessarily be granted and even if so, could be delayed, a condition that critics of the deal are sure to seize on as possibly giving Tehran time to cover any sign of non-compliance with its commitments.
+
+Under the deal, Tehran would have the right to challenge the U.N. request and an arbitration board composed of Iran and the six world powers that negotiated with it would have to decide on the issue. Such an arrangement would still be a notable departure from assertions by top Iranian officials, including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that their country would never allow the IAEA into such sites. Iran has argued that such visits by the IAEA would be a cover for spying on its military secrets.
+
+The IAEA also wants the access to complete its long-stymied investigation of past weapons work by Iran, and the U.S. says Iranian cooperation is needed for all economic sanctions to be lifted. IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said Tuesday his agency and Iran had signed a ""roadmap"" to resolve outstanding concerns.
+
+""This is a significant step forward towards clarifying outstanding issues regarding Iran’s nuclear program,"" Amano said in a statement released Tuesday.
+
+The economic benefits for Iran are potentially massive. It stands to receive more than $100 billion in assets frozen overseas, and an end to a European oil embargo and various financial restrictions on Iranian banks.
+
+The overall nuclear deal comes after nearly a decade of international, intercontinental diplomacy that until recently was defined by failure. Breaks in the talks sometimes lasted for months, and Iran's nascent nuclear program expanded into one that Western intelligence agencies saw as only a couple of months away from weapons capacity. The U.S. and Israel both threatened possible military responses.
+
+The United States joined the negotiations in 2008, and U.S. and Iranian officials met together secretly four years later in Oman to see if diplomatic progress was possible. But the process remained essentially stalemated until summer 2013, when Hassan Rouhani was elected president and declared his country ready for serious compromise.
+
+More secret U.S.-Iranian discussions followed, culminating in a face-to-face meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the United Nations in September 2013 and a telephone conversation between Rouhani and Obama. That conversation marked the two countries' highest diplomatic exchange since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution and the ensuing hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran.
+
+Kerry and Zarif took the lead in the negotiations. Two months later, in Geneva, Iran and the six powers announced an interim agreement that temporarily curbed Tehran's nuclear program and unfroze some Iranian assets while setting the stage for Tuesday's comprehensive accord.
+
+Protracted negotiations still lie ahead to put the agreement into practice and deep suspicion reigns on all sides about violations that could unravel the accord. And spoilers abound.
+
+In the United States, Congress has a 60-day review period during which Obama cannot make good on any concessions to the Iranians. U.S. lawmakers could hold a vote of disapproval and take further action. If Obama vetoes, Congress would need to muster a two-thirds majority to override.
+
+Iranian hardliners oppose dismantling a nuclear program the country has spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing. Khamenei, while supportive of his negotiators thus far, has issued a series of defiant red lines that may be impossible to reconcile in a deal with the West.
+
+And further afield, Israel will strongly oppose the outcome. It sees the acceptance of extensive Iranian nuclear infrastructure and continued nuclear activity as a mortal threat, and has warned that it could take military action on its own, if necessary.
+
+The deal is a ""bad mistake of historic proportions,"" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday, adding that it would enable Iran to ""continue to pursue its aggression and terror in the region.""
+
+Sunni Arab rivals of Shiite Iran are none too happy, either, with Saudi Arabia in particularly issuing veiled threats to develop its own nuclear program.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+3478,Supreme Court Throws Out Ruling On Obamacare Contraception Mandate,"WASHINGTON, March 9 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday threw out an appeals court decision that went against the University of Notre Dame over its religious objections to the Obamacare health law's contraception requirement.
+
+The justices asked the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its decision in favor of the Obama administration in light of the June 2014 Supreme Court ruling that allowed closely held corporations to seek exemptions from the provision.
+
+The court's action means the February 2014 appeals court ruling that denied the South Bend, Indiana-based Roman Catholic university an injunction against the requirement has been wiped out.
+
+The 2010 Affordable Care Act, known widely as Obamacare, requires employers to provide health insurance policies that cover preventive services for women including access to contraception and sterilization.
+
+In the 2014 ruling, the high court said that Hobby Lobby Stores Ltd could, on religious grounds, seek exemptions from the contraception provision.
+
+Days later, in a case similar to the Notre Dame dispute, the Supreme Court allowed a college in Illinois a temporary exemption while litigation continues.
+
+Catholic groups say they should not have to pay for or facilitate access to contraception or abortion because of religious objections.
+
+But courts that have considered the issue since then have found that a compromise aimed at nonprofits with religious affiliations, issued in 2013 and amended in August 2014, did not impose a substantial burden on the plaintiffs' religious beliefs. Religious rights are protected under a law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
+
+The Notre Dame case was the only appeals court decision on that issue that pre-dated the Hobby Lobby ruling.
+
+The compromise allows the groups to certify they are opting out, which then forces insurers to pick up the tab.
+
+Notre Dame says the certification process still essentially forces the groups to authorize the coverage for its employees, even if they are not technically paying for it. Religious institutions are exempt from the contraception coverage requirement.
+
+The case is Notre Dame v. Burwell, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 14-392. (Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)",REAL
+5222,"In era of Trump, spin cycle gets a makeover","It's debate season, where social media has brought political spin into real time, favoring speed over contemplation and risking a hardening of polarization.
+
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the spin room after the first presidential debate against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University, on Monday, Sept. 26, 2016, in Hempstead, N.Y.
+
+The next big debate of the 2016 campaign is a day away, and pre-event “spin” is in full gear.
+
+Here’s how it goes: Our guy is great, and your guy can’t help your nominee, who’s hopeless. Reverse the names, rinse, and repeat.
+
+The spin will go on in real time via social media and email while Gov. Mike Pence (R) of Indiana and Sen. Tim Kaine (D) of Virginia duke it out Tuesday night in the campaign’s one and only vice presidential debate. And after it’s over, efforts to sway the media narrative and, ultimately, public opinion will continue, perhaps for days.
+
+Image-making has been around since the beginning of the Republic, but in the era of social media, the art of spin may be changing in profound ways.
+
+Consider Walter Podrazik’s class on mass media and politics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The day after the first Trump-Clinton debate, he asked his students what struck them about the spin.
+
+Spin? They didn’t need to stick around for that, they told Mr. Podrazik. “They had already experienced it, via Twitter, Facebook, and other shared messaging, in real time, while the debate unfolded,” he says.
+
+The “before” and “after” spinning is likely to be with us forever, but it’s the “during” part that has changed the game, thanks to social media. For those who enjoy real-time commentary, experiencing a debate solely within one’s own social-media ecosystem may point to a hardening of the ideological silos that people inhabit – and perhaps a hardening of political polarization.
+
+“Research shows that we tend to interact on social media with people who are kind of like us,” says David Redlawsk, a political scientist at the University of Delaware, Newark, and author of the book “How Voters Decide.” “We don’t get overly challenged on our beliefs.”
+
+That may be no different from old-style socializing – at the Rotary Club or the women’s club or the neighborhood corner hangout. But more than ever with major political events, social media has brought analysis and spin into real time, favoring speed over contemplation and setting in motion a narrative that can be hard to change.
+
+At the same time, social media can have a democratizing effect. Anybody can jump in with a pithy comment or observation.
+
+Perhaps Podrazik’s students are a harbinger of the future – a world in which a presidential debate ends, and is immediately followed on TV by … regularly scheduled programing, not pundits offering analysis and partisans trying to shape impressions of what just happened. And at the debate venue itself, maybe there’s no more “spin alley,” the place where reporters go for a post-game scrum with candidate surrogates.
+
+“No spin alley,” in fact, was one recommendation last year by the Annenberg Working Group on Presidential Debate Reform. The spin room is a “tired ritual” that adds to the “spectacle” and cost of the debates, and takes away from the real purpose – to get the candidates to hash out the issues of the day, the group’s report said. And besides, the spin is already happening via email and Twitter, the report added, echoing Podrazik’s students.
+
+The Commission on Presidential Debates saw things differently, and kept the spin room – and the live audience, and all the hoopla. Which fit right into Republican nominee Donald Trump’s plan.
+
+As he did after many of the GOP primary debates, Mr. Trump headed straight for the spin room after Monday’s debate, a first for a major-party presidential nominee. But that’s Trump, the one-time reality TV star. If there’s a limelight, he wants to be in the middle of it – no matter how well (or not) he did in a debate.
+
+So clearly, it’s too soon to write off the old way of experiencing political debates. After all, a record-breaking 84 million people watched the first Trump-Clinton debate on TV – and not everyone, of course, was simultaneously checking the blizzard of insta-punditry available online.
+
+“TV is still more important than Twitter and Facebook,” says David Greenberg, author of the book “Republic of Spin.” “That may not be true in 20 years…. But for now, the average citizen interested in politics is going to watch the debates on a TV channel and will be at least somewhat interested in what the anchors and pundits have to say.”
+
+Many people, too, are curious what the candidate “spinners” have to say. And as long as the ratings are there, the networks will keep showing it – “not because we believe it lock, stock, and barrel, but because it’s part of the process,” says Mr. Greenberg, an associate professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.
+
+Viewers know that it’s spin, he says, because it’s presented as such.
+
+“We’re capable of arguing with it, criticizing it, and seeing through it, if it’s phony or cynical, and applauding it if it’s done in the service of the candidate we like and we think it’s effective,” Greenberg says. “So people aren’t easily duped by these arguments.”
+
+Still, there are those who argue for just tuning out once a debate is over.
+
+“I basically tell people after debates, shut the TV off,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “Get off social media, and ask yourself, ‘What was important to you? What did you learn that mattered to you?’ before all this other stuff crowds out your learning.”
+
+Of course, anyone who did so last Monday night would have missed the unprecedented spectacle of Trump and his entourage descending upon the spin room. “All the online polls say I was the big winner,” he boasted. That’s about as spinny as it gets; instant online polls are notoriously unreliable. More-reputable polls showed Hillary Clinton winning big.
+
+And those arguing for the abolishment of the spin room might well find a reporters’ revolt on their hands.
+
+“First came Don King, the boxing promoter, clutching an Israeli flag and wearing a button with Donald Trump’s face the size of a sandwich,"" he reports. ""Then Omarosa, the Apprentice star, arrived in a low-cut dress and took selfies with the fans. Mark Cuban – the businessman, Dallas Mavericks owner, and Clinton supporter – recounted the joys of sitting in the front row of the debate.”
+
+Perhaps it was more side show than real show. Though some actual information was imparted. Mr. Cuban said he’s not running for president. Trump said he felt the moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, had done a “great job” (a view that soon changed). And hordes of campaign surrogates and party officials made their points to reporters, the standard fare of any spin room.
+
+For reporters who have a hard time getting the campaigns to return phone calls, it’s a chance to grab facetime and a comment from a harried aide.
+
+By the next day, the story had already evolved. Alicia Machado, the Venezuelan beauty queen whom Trump had fat-shamed 20 years ago – an episode raised by Clinton during the debate – became the center of attention, and remained there for days. Debate-night spin was soon old news. Now the Machado story dominates memories of the debate, just as Khizr Khan’s speech at the Democratic National Convention about his slain soldier-son (and Trump’s subsequent attacks on the Khan family) became a defining moment of that event.
+
+As with the conventions, presidential debates have built up a lore of their own. And on occasion, post-debate commentary has shifted the perceptions of the outcome. In 1976, when President Ford debated Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, initial polls suggested Mr. Ford had won. Then the media highlighted Ford’s remark about “no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” and Mr. Carter and the media hammered him on it. Ford soon had to respond, and is forever remembered as having misspoken at that debate.
+
+Today, perceptions in social media of how Trump and Clinton did in their first debate – that Clinton trounced him – tracked with the assessments of pundits and polls.
+
+“It was kind of hard to come to any other conclusion,” says Greenberg. “One does have to trust in free speech and the ability of people to make judgments.""
+
+By week’s end, Trump had engaged in a sort of anti-spin via social media – a middle-of-the-night tweet storm attacking Machado that has only harmed Trump’s image further. And therein lies the irony in the role of social media in the 2016 campaign. No amount of spinning – on social media or otherwise – can undo what Trump does to himself when he decides to rage on Twitter at 3 o’clock in the morning.
+
+Then quickly enough, another big story pops: Trump tax documents leaked to The New York Times showing a $916 million loss in 1995 that would have allowed him to avoid paying taxes for 18 years. And it’s on to another spin cycle – both the old-fashioned kind and on Twitter.",REAL
+1250,Clinton Camp in Damage-Control Mode Over 'Top Secret' Emails,The latest revelations on Hillary's emails again point to one thing → She is disqualified from being president. https://t.co/Wni9LmSPpR,REAL
+6252,North Dakota had 292 oil spills in 2 years officially disclosed 1 to the public,"We Are Change 
+North Dakota had nearly 300 oil pipeline spills in less than two years, none of which were reported to the public.
+From January 2012 – September 2013, these pipeline spills were just a part of approximately 750 “oil field incidents” that took place in the state without the public’s knowledge, according to a report by The Associated Press . It’s estimated that around 4,328 barrels worth of oil were spilled in this period. 
+In an another case, a break in a Tesoro Corp. pipeline resulted in approximately 20,600 barrels of oil spreading over an area the size of seven football fields. Officials claimed that no wildlife or water sources were harmed by the spill, which apparently led them to conclude that the public did not need to be notified.
+The only incident in which the public was notified was an instance in which an oil truck was involved in a collision in 2012.
+While many of these spills were relatively small and arguably had little environmental impact, landowners expressed outrage that they were kept out of the loop. North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources director Lynn Helms said that they didn’t want the public to become “overwhelmed by little incidents.”
+However, landowners like wheat farmer Louis Kuster said it is “absolutely important for us to know” if spills of any kind occur, particularly given his livelihood’s reliance on the health of his land. Even a single barrel of spilled oil has the potential to ruin water sources and acres upon acres of valuable cropland.
+“Right now, you don’t know if there is a spill unless you find it yourself,” Kuster said.
+While the release of AP’s report ultimately led to more regulations obliging the public release of reported oil spills, including an online database of spills accessible to the public , this history of secrecy provides a troubling context for the Sioux Tribe’s distrust of the DAPL pipeline construction.
+The Sioux Tribe says that the pipeline “threatens the Tribe’s environmental and economic well-being, and would damage and destroy sites of great historic, religious, and cultural significance to the Tribe.”
+In a tense standoff with heavily armed police forces, dozens of protesters – referring to themselves as peaceful water protectors – were arrested today for demonstrating against the construction of the pipeline on what police say is private property.
+Nathan Wellman is a Los Angeles-based journalist, author, and playwright. Follow him on Twitter: @LightningWOW 
+H/t http://usuncut.com/news/north-dakota-292-oil-spills-2-years-officials-disclosed-1-public/ 
+The existence of an officially listed endangered species, a small butterfly called the Poweshiek Skipperling ( Oarisma poweshiek ) , with federally designated Critical Habitat areas in North Dakota’s McKenzie County, has been flagged by activists as possibly relevant to challenging the pipeline permit. ( More species info ).
+The endangered Poweshiek Skipperling (Oarisma poweshiek). Photo via US Fish and Wildlife Service, by Gerald Selby 
+Nine other endangered species present in McKenzie County are referenced in the US Army Corps of Engineers documents , but not the Poweshiek Skipperling.
+According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, two ‘units’ of Critical Habitat lie near the Missouri River in McKenzie County. Along the entire pipeline route, residents fear erosion and runoff problems (including many Iowa farmers), but there is no mitigation mentioned in official documents for the butterfly’s sensitive, federally protected areas in McKenzie County.
+Besides bulldozing areas near protected species’ enclaves, private capital has brought with it private agents of violence to impose its will. Controversial private security forces involved with violently forcing aside pipeline opponents include 10 Code LLC , based in nearby Bismarck, ND. The shocking attack dogs unleashed on Indigenous water protectors including a child and pregnant woman
+RELATED BREAKING: The NEW Election FEC Violation That Should End Clinton’s Campaign . Russia Trolls The U.S., Offers A “Helping Hand” In Overseeing Elections Follow WE ARE CHANGE on SOCIAL MEDIA SnapChat: LukeWeAreChange 
+fbook: https://facebook.com/LukeWeAreChange 
+Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange I nstagram: http://instagram.com/lukewearechange Sign up become a patron and Show your support for alternative news for Just 1$ a month you can help Grow We are change We use Bitcoin Too ! 12HdLgeeuA87t2JU8m4tbRo247Yj5u2TVP Join and Up Vote Our STEEMIT The post North Dakota had 292 oil spills in 2 years officially disclosed 1 to the public appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+855,"Clinton rails against big banks, but refuses to release Wall Street speeches","Fresh off a New York primary win that all but gave her the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton channeled a little Bernie Sanders on Thursday, railing against big banks while at the same time side-stepping one of Sanders' campaign demands to release transcripts of her Wall Street speeches.
+
+Speaking during a “Good Morning America” Town Hall after her 58-42 drubbing of Sanders in Tuesday’s primary, Clinton said the two candidates generally agreed on many issues, and she used rhetoric reminiscent of the Vermont senator to drive her point home.
+
+“I know that we both – Senator Sanders and I – we want to tackle inequality,” Clinton said. “We want to raise the minimum wage. We want to make sure that people who are putting our economy at risk are reined in, regulated.
+
+“No bank is too big to fail, no executive too powerful to jail. We share those views.”
+
+But many of Clinton’s critics, particularly on the left, question her authenticity on the topic of income inequality. At issue is a series of highly-paid speeches she made to security firms and banks, such as Goldman Sachs, after her tenure as Secretary of State. The content of those speeches has remained private, and Sanders has called on Clinton to release them. Clinton has refused.
+
+“Now there’s a new request to release transcripts of speeches that have been given,” Clinton said. “When everybody agrees to do that, I will as well. Because I think it’s important we all abide by the same standard.”
+
+Clinton said she didn’t regret giving the controversial speeches.
+
+“I, like everybody who served as secretary of state, have a unique perspective,” she said, citing Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as former secretaries of state who have made speeches after leaving office. “When you leave the secretary of state office, people from all perspectives want to know, ‘What do you think’s going on in the world?’ I think that’s actually a useful conversation. Like all my predecessors I gave speeches to a wide variety of groups and it was predominantly about what’s going on in the world.”",REAL
+9273,Fresno State Student Transitions to a Male,"Email 
+“I’m trying to make this campus more aware,” said Jessica Adams, coordinator of LGBT services at the Cross Cultural and Gender Center at Fresno State University in California. “I’m asking most people to unlearn this concept of gender that they have been taught for years. And it’s not an easy task.” 
+No doubt. Most people are “stuck” believing boys are boys and girls are girls. 
+Adams argues that those who hold to such beliefs are the ones with the problem. She recently helped “Mr. Love” — a female who is “transitioning” to a male — become one of the first of these “transgender” students at Fresno State to change her name on her student ID card. This is considered “a huge victory” by Adams because, she claimed, “You feel fraudulent as a person, yet no one is allowing you to be who you are. If you can imagine being called the wrong name for the rest of your life, or even for a day.… If you kept telling them and they refused to acknowledge that, that’s painful.” 
+“Mr. Love” is transitioning by taking natural supplements, rather than testosterone injections. But this is not her first “transition.” In the past, she was, at one time, “bisexual,” and has suffered from anxiety and depression. In fact, Mr. Love (shown) reacted to the tragic news that 49 people were murdered by an Islamic terrorist in Orlando by considering suicide. 
+“It was all just too much,” Mr. Love recalled. “I wanted to die.” One survey has found that more than 40 percent of transgender people have attempted suicide. In a study conducted by The New Atlantis , sex “reassigned individuals were about 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.” Whatever the exact figures, it is obvious that these are deeply mentally disturbed individuals. 
+After writing a suicide note to some friends, Mr. Love was forced into an ambulance and transported to a mental health center in Fresno. But what really upset her was when she looked down and saw the name on the plastic medical bracelet. They had use Mr. Love’s birth name, instead of Mr. Love. 
+It was an Aztec female name, meaning “goddess of music and dance.” 
+Mr. Love explained, “You have to realize every time you say it, it’s going to be like knives to the heart.” 
+To those in the “transgender community,” birth names that identify the person as male, when he wants to be known as a female, or identify the person as female (as in the case of Mr. Love) when a transgender individual wishes to be known as a male, are referred to as “dead names.” 
+Sometimes Mr. Love uses the name of Alex, because it is more gender neutral. 
+When Mr. Love was a high-school student at Clovis United, the school board refused to adopt a gender-neutral dress code. Boys and girls who supported the transgender students swapped clothes as a protest against school policy. Although no federal statute exists that requires local school districts to allow transgender males into girl’s locker rooms, and vice-versa, the Obama administration has told schools across the country they will either do so, or face the loss of federal funds. 
+The Charlotte Observer recently editorialized in favor of allowing transgenders to use the bathroom they identify with, and not their biologically appropriate one. The paper dismissed concerns that sexual predators could use trangender-oriented “bathroom laws. Besides, the paper lectured, “The thought of male genitalia in girls’s locker rooms — and vice versa — might be distressing to some. But the battle for equality has always been in part about overcoming discomfort.” 
+So according to the Charlotte Observer , anyone who opposes a naked boy strolling into a shower full of naked girls is no better than a segregationist. After all, it was discomforting to a white bigot to be around black people, and opposition to transgenders using the bathroom of the opposite sex, well, that is a bigoted stance, too. 
+Of course, a similar opposing argument would have just as much, or more, logical validity: Maybe transgenders should get used to the ""discomfort"" of being naked around their own biological sex and that to do otherwise, and force their nakedness on the unwilling, opposite sex, is akin to sexual assault. 
+Although Mr. Love wants to be recognized as a man, she wants to keep her mezzo-soprano voice (considered one of the highest female singing voices). “I’ve come to terms with my voice. My voice is everything, it’s all I have,” Mr. Love said. 
+Mr. Love insists that she is a man, trapped in a biological woman’s body, and that she cannot help it. “I didn’t ask for this life. I didn’t choose it. I really didn’t.” 
+But a recent study in The New Atlantis journal concluded that trangenderism is not supported by the science. The report was co-authored by Dr. Paul McHugh, who is the former Chief of Pyschiatry at Johns Hopkins University. “Examining research from the biological, psychological, and social sciences, this report shows that some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence. The hypothesis that gender identiy is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ — is not supported by scientific evidence,” insisted the researchers. 
+But it is not just that the acceptance of transgenderism (one will note that the mainstream media dutifully calls a transgender person by the pronoun that person prefers) is unscientific. The report argues that such enabling is harmful. “An area of particular concern involves medical interventions for gender-nonconforming youth. They are increasingly receiving therapies that affirm their felt genders, and even hormone treatments or surgical modifications at young ages.” 
+In a statement released in March by the American College of Pediatricians, a similar conclusion was reached. The report was entitled “Gender Ideology Harms Children,” and in it, they assert that taking “gender dysphoria” as anything other than a psychological problem is harmful. 
+One woman, Cari Stella, took to YouTube to describe how this ideologically driven movement harmed her. “I am a real, live 22-year-old woman, with a scarred chest and a broken voice, and five o’clock shadow because I couldn’t face the idea of growing up to be a woman. That’s my reality.… When I was transitioning, I felt a strong desire — what I could have called a ‘need’ at the time — to transition.” 
+But the transition only worsened her mental health. “Testosterone made me even more disassociated than I already was.” 
+Stella’s situation is an example of an observation made in The New Atlantis study: “The potential that patients undergoing medical and surgical sex reassignment may want to return to a gender identity consistent with their biological sex suggests that reassignment carries considerable psychological and physical risk.” The report concluded that the promotion of transgenderism is influenced more by politics and the culture than by science. 
+On the Carol Burnett Show , Vikki Lawrence once performed a skit where she portrayed a mother with an infant child. When someone asked the common question, “Is the baby a boy or a girl?” Lawrence effected offense, answering, “This is 1970! The baby can make that decision at age 21.” 
+Of course, the audience predictably guffawed at the absurdity of it all. But that was 1970. Now, in 2016, such a skit on television would probably lead to boycotts and condemnations from our modern “progressive” society.  ",FAKE
+6625,"Comment on The Liberal Conservative Examines The Bill Of Rights, Part VIII by Entertainment and Movie reviews with tips on how to get Website Traffic and Make Money Online.","The Liberal Conservative Examines The Bill Of Rights, Part VIII By Jonathan Lenhardt on October 28, 2013 Subscribe 
+We’re in the home stretch here at The Liberal Conservative’s look at the United States Bill of Rights. Welcome to Part 8! Just joining us? Then click here to play catch up and check all things Liberal Conservative courtesy of Liberal America. Now, on with the show! 
+Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. 
+We finally return to the hot-button issues! In this case; “Is the death penalty cruel and unusual and thus a violation of the 8th Amendment?” Let’s take a look… 
+…but, let’s get those first two provisions out of the way. Excessive bail. Excessive fines. Pretty self-explanatory: you can’t be charged $1 million bail for littering and you can’t be fined $14k for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign. Seems reasonable enough to me; albeit, there are some whacky things you can be fined for in this country. In the end, though, they’re really more comedic than intrusive or unconstitutional. 
+On to the juicy bits! Is the death penalty unconstitutional? Well, it comes down to the one question alluded to earlier: “Is the death penalty cruel and unusual?” The ACLU certainly thinks so and there are eighteen states, plus the District of Columbia , that have outright abolished the death penalty; the most recent being Maryland just this past May. That should make it clear just how divisive this issue truly is throughout this country. 
+The polls would seem to match the divide among the States. The 18-against-32 against/for ratio of the states comes in at 64% for the death penalty and 36% against. According to a Gallup poll published in January of this year 63% of Americans support the death penalty; down from 64% in 2010, but up from 61% in 2011; and that’s pretty much where the capital punishment approval rating been hanging out for the past few years after a steady decline in the decade prior. That same piece also goes on to explain that most support does, in fact, come from the Conservatives and Moderates while the majority of Liberals – just barely – oppose. Also, 67% of men stand in favor of capital punishment while 59% of women are in favor. 
+So with almost two-thirds of the nation supporting the death penalty where does the opposition come from? What triggers it? 
+It probably has to do with the old , archaic methods which were used to off the offenders. While three states – Delaware, New Hampshire, and Washington – still have death by hanging, and eight states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia – still have death by electrocution, they all use lethal injection as their primary method of execution; as do twenty-one other states – plus Connecticut, Maryland, and New Mexico whose bans on the death penalty weren’t retroactive. Now lethal injection isn’t the coziest of methods, but at least the offenders aren’t being fried like breaded chicken or hanged like deer cuts. 
+Still, one could understand that the idea of taking a person’s life in response to a crime may be a little…heinous. So maybe those who support the death penalty are heinous. 
+Wanna’ know who else was heinous? John Wayne Gacy killed 33 boys and buried most of them under his very own house. He was executed on May 10, 1994 via lethal injection. Wanna’ know another heinous serial killer? David Alan Gore raped and killed a 17-year-old girl on top of five other murders – all female. He was executed in April, 2012 via lethal injection. 
+Many pro-death penalty folks will explain to you that they are proponents of Hammurabi’s Code . For those of you who may not know, Hammurbi’s Code is widely regarded as the first set of written laws in human history. Even if you’ve never heard it referred to as “Hammurabi’s Code” before, you’ve definitely heard of the concept; “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. You kill, you get killed. Pretty even trade. 
+So, How Does This Amendment Apply To Modern America? 
+Now Hammurabi’s Code doesn’t translate 100% picture perfectly into 21st Century America; but, then again, the only absolute is that there are no other absolutes. Shades of gray run roughshod in modern law, but this is one case where black & white would seem to apply. Murder is heinous and maybe – just maybe – it deserves heinous punishment. 
+Once more, the death penalty is one of those issues that is highly divisive; drawing sharp opinions from people both for and against it. Whether or not this – the 8th Amendment – can possibly fit with a pro-death penalty America depends entirely on who you’re talking to and what their opinion on it is. 
+At the end of the day, though, the death penalty is legal and utilized by almost two-thirds of the States; and, even those who do abolish it don’t do so retroactively,?it leaves those who received death sentences to remain on death row awaiting their inevitable doom. Therefore, it’s hard to argue that this amendment doesn’t apply to modern America. It does. Very well, in fact; whether you love it or hate it. 
+Edited by SS About Jonathan Lenhardt 
+I'm Jonathan Lenhardt; fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republican. I'm pro-choice, pro-2nd Amendment, anti-Tea Party, and happily atheist just to name a sparse few things about me. You can direct all hate mail to [email protected] Also, you can find me on Google+, Twitter (@JonLenTheLC), and I have an L.C.-specific Facebook page (Jonathan Lenhardt, The Liberal Conservative). Connect",FAKE
+5934,Yemeni forces fire ballistic missile at Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah airport,"Yemen This photo provided by the media bureau of the operations command in Yemen shows a Borkan-1 (Volcano-1) missile. 
+Yemeni army forces and allied fighters from Popular Committees have reportedly launched a locally designed and manufactured ballistic missile towards an area deep inside Saudi Arabia in response to the Riyadh regime’s atrocious aerial bombardments against the crisis-hit Arab country. 
+Yemeni soldiers and their allies fired a Borkan-1 (Volcano-1) missile towards King Abdulaziz International Airport, located 19 kilometers north of the western Saudi port city of Jeddah, Arabic-language al-Masirah television network reported. 
+A military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, later told the official Saba news agency that the 12.5-meter-long missile had targeted its target accurately and left massive destruction at the airport. 
+Saudi media outlets, however, reported that the kingdom’s missile systems intercepted and destroyed the solid propellant and Scud-type missile before it could cause any damage. 
+They said the projectile was launched at 9 p.m. local time (1800 GMT) on Thursday from Yemen’s mountainous northwestern area of Sa’ada. 
+Also on Thursday, the media bureau of the operations command in Yemen said army soldiers had targeted a gathering of militiamen loyal to resigned president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in the Aqaba district of the northern province of Jawf, leaving scores of the Saudi-backed armed men dead. Fire rages after a gathering of militiamen loyal to resigned president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi is targeted by Yemeni army forces in the Aqaba district of the northern province of Jawf, Yemen, on October 27, 2016. 
+An armored vehicle and battle tank belonging to the mercenaries were also destroyed in the attack. 
+Separately, a number of Saudi soldiers were killed and injured when Yemeni forces and Popular Committees fighters struck al-Kars base in Saudi Arabia’s southwestern border region of Jizan. 
+Saudi Arabia has been engaged in the deadly campaign against Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to bring back the former Yemeni government to power and undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement. 
+The United Nations puts the death toll from the military aggression at about 10,000. Loading ...",FAKE
+6717,Jim Rogers: It’s Time To Prepare; Economic And Financial Collapse Imminent (VIDEO),"By: The Voice of Reason | Regardless of how much information gets released through Wikileaks or Project Veritas revealing grossly immoral, or even criminal conduct between members of the Clinton campaign, neither the mainstream media nor our woefully corrupt Department of Injustice have done anything to even slow the Clinton Crime Syndicate’s march toward the oval office. With each passing day that brings us closer to the election, lies continue to be pumped out with impunity to the voting public at large by the very institutions the public should be able to trust to give them fair and honest reporting or education on important matters. In the following interview, legendary investor Jim Rogers, explains in detail why nothing being reported about the economy is true, and why financial and economic collapse is imminent. Who is Jim Rogers? Why should you care what he says? First of all, listen to him because he’s right. Start learning facts, and stop listening to mainstream media propaganda. They are lying. Your life may depend on being prepared. Second, Jim is hardly alone in his line of thinking. Many of the world’s best economists are saying a global reset is coming that will have an effect on the world like nothing mankind has ever seen before. One famous investor even goes as far as to say the collapse of the U.S. Dollar, and the global reset that follows it, will be the single biggest event in all of human history. Let that sink in… Third, and lastly, you should care what Jim Rogers says because Jim is a legendary investor, one who co-founded the Quantum Fund, and retired at age thirty-seven. Do you know who his partner used to be? George Soros. Do you recall who is involved in virtually every major geopolitical firestorm anywhere on the planet, including the U.S. presidential election right here domestically? Many Trump enthusiasts incorrectly believe Donald Trump can save the U.S. from financial implosion, but in his interview, Jim Rogers explains why it doesn’t matter who wins the election, the problems that plague the U.S. economy are as systemic as the corruption is in Washington. There is no question Donald Trump has created a massive wave of anti-establishment fervor across the country, and there’s equally no question a Trump presidency would soften the blow of a financial collapse, but as Michael Synder explains in the article that follows the Rogers interview, the electoral college math just doesn’t add up to a Trump Win. At this point if Donald Trump is able to overcome the amount of fraud baked into the system by the Clinton campaign, and an electoral map that doesn’t give him a millimeter of wiggle room, it will truly be a miracle of Biblical proportions. In the meantime, Americans had better begin to prepare for the future that awaits them, with or without a President Trump ! Michael Snyder writes: Are we about to see the largest election day miracle of all time? Because as I will show in this article, that is precisely what it is going to take in order for Donald Trump to win. Before I go any further, I want to make it exceedingly clear that I am not saying what the outcome will be on November 8th. As I recently told a national television audience, I do not know who is going to win. In this article I am simply going to examine the poll numbers and the electoral map as they currently stand. But in this bizarre election things can literally change overnight, and it is entirely possible that we could still have another “October surprise” or two before it is all said and done. And without a doubt Donald Trump desperately needs something “to move the needle”, because if the election was held today Hillary Clinton would almost certainly win. What we have witnessed so far during the 2016 election season has been absolutely unprecedented. Just consider some of the things that we have seen up to this point in time. We have never had a bigger “October surprise” than the release of the lewd audio tape from 11 years ago in which Donald Trump claimed to grope women without their consent. We have never seen the mainstream media openly attack a presidential candidate as much as they have attacked Donald Trump . In the past, the big mainstream news outlets at least pretended to be fair and balanced, but this year they have completely discarded all notions of objectivity. They should be completely and utterly ashamed of themselves, and no matter who wins the election they will never be able to get their integrity back. We have also never seen a major party at war with itself this close to a presidential election. It has been said that a house divided against itself will surely fall, and a whole host of prominent Republican leaders have been openly attempting to sabotage the Trump campaign. If Donald Trump is able to overcome all of these factors, it truly will be a miracle of Biblical proportions. As it stands at the moment, however, the numbers are looking quite ominous for Trump . Right now, the Real Clear Politics average of national polls has Hillary Clinton ahead by 6.2 percent. Most political experts consider that to be an insurmountable lead at this stage in the game. But even if Trump can close that gap and pull ahead, that does not mean that he will win the election. In fact, Trump could beat Clinton by millions of votes nationally and still lose. In order to win the election, one candidate has got to get to 270 electoral votes. And on the latest Real Clear Politics electoral map , 262 electoral votes are being projected to go to Hillary Clinton, 164 electoral votes are being projected to go to Donald Trump , and 112 electoral votes are in the “toss up” category. So unless something dramatically changes, Donald Trump is essentially going to have to run the table in all of the closely contested states in order to win, and the mathematical odds of that happening are extremely slim. Let’s take a closer look at this. The first thing that Donald Trump is going to have to do in order to get to 270 electoral votes is to win all of the states that Mitt Romney won in 2012. That would get him up to 206 electoral votes. Unfortunately, it looks like that may be very difficult to do. Romney won North Carolina, but the six most recent polls all have Clinton ahead in that state. Romney also won Arizona, but the most recent poll to be taken there has Clinton ahead by five points. But for a moment, let’s assume that Trump can win all of the states that Romney won. On top of that, there are four other states that Trump must win… #1 Trump must win Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Without Florida, Trump has no realistic path to 270 electoral votes. So on election night if it is announced that Trump has lost Florida, you might as well turn off your television and go to bed because Trump is going to lose the election. Unfortunately for Trump , four recent major surveys all show Trump down by four points in the Sunshine state. #2 Trump must win Ohio’s 18 electoral votes. No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio, and the two most recent major surveys show that Trump and Clinton are tied in the state. #3 Trump must win Iowa’s 6 electoral votes. Fortunately for Trump , most recent surveys show him actually leading in Iowa. #4 Trump must win Nevada’s 6 electoral votes. At this point that is looking like it will be very tough to do, because all of the recent polls have Clinton leading in Nevada, including the most recent one that has her up by 7 points. If Donald Trump can win those four states, that still does not get him to 270 electoral votes. Instead, it gets him to 265 electoral votes, and so he would still need one more medium-sized state to win. The most likely candidates for that last state are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin or Minnesota. Unfortunately for Trump , Clinton appears to have big leads in all four of those states right at this moment. But even if Trump can somehow pull off a miracle and squeak past the 270 electoral vote mark, the truth is that Utah could still mess everything up. Do you remember Evan McMullin? He was the third party “conservative alternative” candidate that was hyped for a couple of days but that seemingly fell off the map afterwards. He is only on the ballot in 12 states, but one of those states is Utah, and it turns out that Evan McMullin is a Mormon. Many Mormons believe that a Mormon will be elected president someday when the U.S. Constitution hangs “ like a thread “. According to this belief, this Mormon president will turn the country around and all sorts of wonderful things will start to happen. Many Mormons thought that Mitt Romney was going to be this president, but now Evan McMullin has become the target of these expectations. So how in the world could Evan McMullin become president? Well, their plan is to have Evan McMullin win Utah, and that could potentially keep both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton from both getting to 270 electoral votes if the election is super close. If that happens, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives. It is being projected that the House will still be controlled by the Republicans after this election, and so the choice would come down to either Trump or McMullin, and those backing McMullin believe that he would have a realistic shot in that scenario. I know all of this sounds very strange, but this is actually being discussed around family dinner tables all over Utah tonight. And in recent days Evan McMullin has been soaring in Utah. One recent survey shows Trump with a one point lead over McMullin, and another recent survey actually show McMullin leading Trump by four points in the state. So Trump could pull off a miracle and do everything else that he needs to do to get to 270 electoral votes, and Utah could end up messing up everything for him. In addition, it is also very important to keep in mind that Trump could actually get all of the legitimate votes that he needs to win and still have it stolen from him by election fraud . There was widespread evidence of “funny business” in 2012, and this is something that I detailed for a live studio audience down at Morningside earlier this month … Are you starting to see why I would consider this to be the biggest miracle in American political history if Donald Trump actually overcomes all of these factors and wins the election? And we don’t have to wait until November 8th to get some indications about how the vote is going to go. Early voting is already taking place is some states, and so far the signs are not encouraging for the Trump campaign. The following comes from CNN … Democratic early turnout has stayed steady in North Carolina compared to 2012, while Republicans have dropped by about 14,500. In Nevada, Democrats have a smaller early voting deficit today than they did at this point in 2012. And Democrats are slightly ahead in Arizona in the early vote so far, though they are lagging Republicans in the tally of how many Arizonans have requested ballots. Perhaps most surprisingly, Democrats improved their position in conservative and Mormon-heavy Utah, where recent polls have shown a tight race. At this point in 2012, Republicans led Democrats in early voting by more than 22,000 voters. But so far this year, the GOP advantage is only 3,509. But if you do want Trump to win, the good news is that we still have more than two weeks before November 8th. We have seen some extremely bizarre things happen already in this election, and a miracle is definitely not out of the question. In fact, I am of the opinion that it is quite likely that some very strange events could take place between now and early November. So hold on to your hats, because the most interesting portion of the 2016 election may still be ahead of us. THE VOICE OF REASON is the pen name of Michael DePinto, a graduate of Capital University Law School, and an attorney in Florida. Having worked in the World Trade Center, along with other family and friends, Michael was baptized by fire into the world of politics on September 11, 2001. Michael’s political journey began with tuning in religiously to whatever the talking heads on television had to say, then Michael became a “Tea-Bagging” activist as his liberal friends on the Left would say, volunteering within the Jacksonville local Tea Party, and most recently Michael was sworn in as an attorney. Today, Michael is a major contributor to www.BeforeItsNews.com , he owns and operates www.thelastgreatstand.com , where Michael provides what is often very ‘colorful’ political commentary, ripe with sarcasm, no doubt the result of Michael’s frustration as he feels we are witnessing the end of the American Empire. The topics Michael most often weighs in on are: Martial Law, FEMA Camps, Jade Helm, Economic Issues, Government Corruption, and Government Conspiracy. Submit your review",FAKE
+10234,What to Expect From the New Congress,"Email 
+In what Democrats and the Left hoped would be a steal reclaiming control of both the House and Senate on the coattails of a much-anticipated Clinton victory, Republicans firmly held their ground retaining control of both chambers of Congress as Donald Trump wins the presidency. 
+With all 435 seats up for reelection in the 247-seat Republican-dominated House of Representatives, Democrats made only moderate gains picking up a net total of only five districts with only a few races remaining undecided as of Wednesday afternoon but not enough to alter the balance of power. 
+Unsurprisingly, Paul Ryan, who has been critical of his party's own presidential nominee and now President-elect Donald Trump, easily won his reelection, defeating Democrat opponent Ryan Solen in a landslide with 65 percent of the vote. Although Ryan is favored to be reelected Speaker of the House for the incoming 115th Congress, he is also likely to receive opposition from both Democrats on the Left and Trump-Republicans who disagree with the speaker on his support for “free trade” agreements — namely, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. 
+It still remains to be seen whether House conservatives or President-elect Trump will push Ryan from the speakership in favor of another Republican congressman. However, in a statement posted on Facebook, Ryan congratulated Trump on his victory and vowed to work with the president-elect. “We are eager to work hand-in-hand with the new administration to advance an agenda to improve the lives of the American people. This has been a great night for our party, and now we must turn our focus to bringing the country together,” Ryan said. 
+Among Republican losses and Democrat gains in the House was the ouster of incumbent 12-term Florida GOP Congressman John Mica, who maintains a lackluster cumulative score of 57 percent from The New American 's "" Freedom Index ,"" which measures congressmen’s fidelity to the Constitution based on the votes they cast. Mica lost his reelection bid to Democrat challenger Stephanie Murphy, the first Vietnamese-American women elected to Congress. 
+Also in Florida, former Republican governor-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist defeated incumbent freshman Republican Congressman David Jolly, who holds al Freedom Index score of 48 percent. 
+The most disappointing race for conservatives was the defeat of seven-term New Jersey Republican Congressman Scott Garrett, who lost to Democrat challenger and former Clinton-speech writer Joshua Gottheimer. Garrett rates a cumulative Freedom Index score of 76 percent, which is the highest for any congressman from New Jersey, but far less than ideal. All constitutionalist top-tier Freedom Index score recipients in Congress easily won their reelection campaigns. 
+In Michigan, where Trump is expected to win the state's 16 electoral votes, libertarian/constitutionalist Republican Congressman Justin Amash crushed his Democrat opponent Douglas Smith 59 to 38 percent with 100 percent of precincts reporting. Amash, boasts an impressive Freedom Index score of 93 percent, second only to Thomas Massie of Kentucky who has a near-perfect score of 98 percent. Massie also blew out his Democrat opponent with an even wider electoral margin of 71 to 29 percent. Both Amash and Massie have made reputations for themselves as heirs to former Congressman Ron Paul as leaders in the liberty movement in Congress. Amash and Massie have firmly opposed reauthorization of the Patriot Act, have vigorously opposed indefinite detention and unconstitutional surveillance-state measures, and have championed pro-liberty causes such as auditing the Federal Reserve as a step towards eventually abolishing the Fed and restoring sound money, i.e. a gold-standard currency. 
+Other incumbent constitutionalists such as Congressmen Alex Mooney of West Virginia and David Brat of Virginia easily won their races against their Democrat rivals. Congressmen Amash, Bratt, Massie, and Moonie have also expressed deep reservations about and oppostition to the TPP agreement advocated by both President Obama and House Speaker Ryan. 
+In the Senate, Rand Paul was easily reelected with 57 percent of the vote, garnering over one million votes compared to Democrat challenger Jim Gray who received only 813,224 votes, 43-percent. Looking forward, Senator Paul optimistically told Fox News on Wednesday morning, “The one thing I’m excited about in the Trump presidency is I think in the very first weeks of this next Congress, the Republican Congress is going to repeal some regulations. I hope a half a dozen regulations or more and we’ll get them onto Trump’s desk and I think he’ll sign them.” 
+In Wisconsin, in what was a rematch and ultimately a repeat of the 2010 U.S. Senate race, incumbent Republican Senator Ron Johnson defeated Democrat opponent former Senator Russ Feingold. Johnson’s reelection victory was an upset to Democrats who hoped to unseat him as part of an effort in one of five states they sought to flip from Red to Blue in order to regain control of the Senate. 
+The only Republican loss in the Senate, which is hardly a loss for conservatism and constitutionalist principles, was in Illinois where RINO (Republican in name only) incumbent Senator Mark Kirk lost to two-term Democrat Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth. Kirk has the lowest Freedom Index score of any Republican in the U.S. Senate with a dismal 35-percent. He was defeated by Duckworth, who received 54 percent of the vote. 
+As far as what to expect from the new Congress, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told reporters early Wednesday morning that repealing ObamaCare is a “pretty high item on our agenda, as you know.” McConnell went on to call President Obama’s landmark health insurance legislation the “single worst piece of legislation” from Obama’s first term. 
+Trump’s victory, coupled with Republicans maintaining control of both chambers of Congress, sends a clear anti-establishment message to Washington that Americans want a cooperative Congress to work with a President Trump and Vice President Pence to finally and fully repeal ObamaCare, nominate constitutionalist judges to the Supreme Court, and put an end to anti-sovereignty trade deals such as the TPP, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), Trade in Services Agreement (TiSa), and the still-under-negotiation and little-known U.S.-China Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT). Of course, none of this will happen without the same steadfast tenacity and commitment to contacting and urging Congress to take these appropriate steps as was utilized when working toward achieving these historic wins on Election Day. 
+In a post-election message from The John Birch Society, Vice President of Communications Bill Hahn impassionedly stated: The John Birch Society has never been closer to victory as we are today. Think of the opportunity that has been afforded to us. Here we have a president that has been talking on many issues that we have called attention to, especially illegal immigration and trade agreements. When in recent memory have we had a presidential nominee even mention Americanism or advocating for scaling back our involvement within the UN? We all realize the faults that Trump has and where his views on issues differ but let’s not use that as an excuse to not get involved. If you are waiting for a better candidate or a better time in the future they do not exist. 
+Hahn optimistically implored listeners and constitutionalist grassroots activists that “we have a tremendous opportunity to advance our action projects, turn the tide of globalism, and put our country back onto a track of less government, more responsibility, and with God’s help a better world.” Emphatically, Hahn urged activists to “place twice the amount of time, energy, money, and gusto into The John Birch Society than you did with this election. Your efforts paid off, so let’s double down and strike while the iron is hot.” 
+With the obstructionist roadblock of a globalist Democrat president removed from the equation, the incoming 115th Congress has the potential of either moving in the constitutionalist direction or becoming a huge disappointment in the fight for liberty. Only time will tell whether the new Congress, in conjunction with President Donald Trump in the White House, will keep its campaign promises. One thing, however, is certain, as Hahn stressed: This is a tremendous opportunity for those seeking to roll back government and advance the cause of liberty. Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
+Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
+No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language. 
+No product advertisements. 
+Please post comments in English. 
+Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
+9206,Clinton Promises To Scrap ‘Pointless’ FBI If Elected,"0 Add Comment 
+ON the verge of being elected, the first female president of the United States of America, Hillary Clinton admitted her first official act in office would probably be replacing FBI director James Comey or failing that, just scraping the FBI altogether. 
+Accused of politicizing his role as the FBI’s director and wilfully manufacturing a scandal that has implicated Clinton in some wrongdoing while failing to specify just what, who or why he is investigating anything, Comey remained defiant. 
+“Well, it’s not a bad way to spend your last few days in a job before being fired, ya gotta go out with a bang,” Comey explained. 
+Comey remains under fire for reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s much publicised personal email server, while refusing to give any details, just days before the November 8th polling day. 
+Clinton’s campaign has asked for the public to be given all relevant information on the investigation so there can be no cynical insinuation of illegality without a shred of proof, however, the candidate herself admitted if elected ‘shit will go down’. 
+“More like Federal Bullshit Investigators, am I right?” Clinton shared with a rally of her supporters this morning, “I am not a petty person, but Comey’s desk better be cleared out come November 9th or he’ll suffer a fate more graphic than illicit images sent to minors by idiot politicians who have nothing to fucking do with my campaign,” Clinton added in a calm fashion. 
+In a rare moment of candour, Clinton’s rival for president, Donald Trump, gave his support to the Democratic candidate. 
+“Shit, maybe my whole crazy bullshit about a shadowy network of people trying to fix elections for one side is actually a real thing,” Trump explained before correcting himself and calling for Clinton’s execution instead.",FAKE
+10269,Jesus Christ’s ‘Burial Slab’ Uncovered During Restoration,"posted by Eddie A burial slab believed to have held the body of Jesus Christ before he was resurrected has been uncovered for the first time in centuries by a restoration team in Jerusalem. The original limestone shelf, known as a “burial bed,” was exposed during the restoration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre after being covered by marble since at least 1555 A.D. “It will be a long scientific analysis, but we will finally be able to see the original rock surface on which, according to tradition, the body of Christ was laid,” Fredrik Hiebert, an archaeologist involved in the discovery, told National Geographic . According to scripture, Jesus Christ was laid on the shelf in the tomb after dying at the crucifixion around 33 A.D. After three days his remains were discovered to be missing and Jesus was said to have appeared over a span of 40 days before ascending into heaven. The discovery was made by a team of scientists from the National Technical University of Athens (NTU) who were making restorations to the Edicule ( “little house” ), a structure which had been built around the tomb. Researchers now hope to study the original surface to better understand the original tomb and how it evolved to become one of the most sacred sites in Christendom. “We are at the critical moment for rehabilitating the Edicule,” Chief Scientific Supervisor Professor Antonia Moropoulou told National Geographic. “The techniques we’re using to document this unique monument will enable the world to study our findings as if they themselves were in the tomb of Christ.” The newly-uncovered surface was described as having a grey-beige stone surface. Also known as the Church of the Resurrection, its custody is shared between six Christian sects including the Greek Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church and the Armenian Orthodox Church, whom together invited the NTU to undertake the restoration. At a cost of US$4 million, (€3.7 million) the restoration was not cheap, with major donors including Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Mica Ertegun, widow of Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun. From Around the Web Founder of WorldTruth.Tv and WomansVibe.com Eddie ( 8899 Posts ) 
+Eddie L. is the founder and owner of WorldTruth.TV. and Womansvibe.com. Both website are dedicated to educating and informing people with articles on powerful and concealed information from around the world. I have spent the last 36+ years researching Bible, History, Alternative Health, Secret Societies, Symbolism and many other topics that are not reported by mainstream media.",FAKE
+6400,Knesset Speaker asks Vatican to join battle against UNESCO’s denial of history,"October 26, 2016 Knesset Speaker asks Vatican to join battle against UNESCO’s denial of history 
+The resolution, the Speaker wrote, “is an assault on history and is deeply offensive to both Christianity and Judaism. The denial of the historicity of the two Jerusalem Temples and the Temple Mount as recounted in both the Old and New Testaments is a terrible indictment of the international community when repeatedly adopted by an important UN body. 
+“The outrageous repudiation of the millennia-old bond between Judaism and its holiest shrines in Jerusalem is a blatant attempt to rewrite history,” he added. “The annals of both our religions cannot be erased by raised hands and counted votes.” 
+Edelstein said the time has come for the international community to pass a resolution reaffirming Jerusalem as the holy city for the three major monotheistic religions, “a city where the two Temples stood and from which the Word of G-d was first promulgated to humanity by our prophets.” 
+Education Minister Naftali Bennett called UNESCO’s decision “a denial of history, and history will erase the embarrassing decision.",FAKE
+1223,Mitt Romney Could Soon Endorse Marco Rubio. Will Jeb Join Him?,"Jeb Bush’s resignation from the presidential race has already set off a chain reaction within the G.O.P., with The Huffington Post reporting Mitt Romney is set to endorse Marco Rubio following his strong second-place finish in Saturday’s South Carolina primary. And, according to Politico, the pressure is already on for Bush to do the same.
+
+Though details of Romney’s endorsement are “still being worked out” as of this morning, sources tell The Huffington Post that Romney has been “eager to provide his backing to Rubio for days” but hesitated out of respect for Bush. His endorsement could come before Tuesday’s G.O.P. caucuses in Nevada, which dedicated Romneyists will recall were twice won by Romney himself.
+
+For his part, though, Rubio doesn’t believe the Romney endorsement is coming anytime soon. “Well, that report is false,” he told CNN of the Romney rumors on Sunday. “I have no reason to believe that he’s anywhere near endorsing anyone. We would love to have his endorsement, but there’s nothing forthcoming. I don’t know where those reports are coming from, but they’re false.”
+
+Should Romney indeed endorse Rubio, his backing would make sense, as he and Rubio have a history: Rubio once made Romney’s VP shortlist, and Rubio once chilled at Romney’s New Hampshire vacation home on the Fourth of July, which is the most Republican sentence that has ever been written. Romney’s seal of approval is key in that it suggests establishment Republican leaders are finally ready to “coalesce” around Rubio, rallying together to defeat the waking nightmare that is Donald Trump’s current front-running status.
+
+On the Jeb-endorsing-Rubio front, things are less clear-cut. The two fellow Floridians spent months savaging each other on the campaign trail, and Bush dropped out of the race because Rubio essentially destroyed him in South Carolina. Bush needs a few days to cool off, call his mom, and secure his invite to Romney’s New Hampshire vacation home before he’s ready to address the Florida politicos who are chomping at the bit to know whether he’ll “endorse the man he long called a friend” in public but apparently lambastes in private—sometimes in “strikingly personal overtones,” according to Politico. If Bush decides not to endorse Rubio, it will mark a significant political rift in Florida—a state where, it should be mentioned, Trump remains far ahead in the polls.
+
+The clock is ticking for both possible endorsements: Floridians are already voting by absentee ballot for the March 15 primary, which means somebody needs to tell them who the hell to vote for before it’s too late and Trump wins the nomination. “No one knows what’s going to happen,” an anonymous Florida House Republican told Politico. “There are a lot of hard feelings. We’ll have to wait till the dust settles. Make that, the dirt. Once the dirt settles.”",REAL
+8530,4 Motivation-Zapping Thoughts To Identify and Eliminate,"You Are Here: Home » Health & Wellness » 4 Motivation-Zapping Thoughts To Identify and Eliminate 4 Motivation-Zapping Thoughts To Identify and Eliminate Prev post Next post 
+by Elizabeth Seward – Staff Writer 
+I often tell myself that the only difference between an idea and an accomplishment is action. I repeat this to myself regularly because I believe it; I believe in the power of action. Most people fully understand the importance of action, no matter how unproductive they might be. 
+The difficulty is often in finding the motivation to initiate action. Not everyone is born naturally motivated, but we all need this driving force behind us if we’re going to succeed in doing just about anything we dream of doing. In fact, much of our life trajectory depends on our ability to harness motivation so that it yields action. Are you killing your own motivation? 
+If you catch yourself entertaining any of the motivation-zapping thoughts below, stop that unhelpful voice in your head dead in its tracks and reset! What I Want Is For Other People, Not Me. I’ve been an artist all of my life. Ever since I was a child, I wanted to make “a living” out of creating, and thus, all of my life, I occasionally come across people who try to convince me that the life of an artist is one for rich folks or crazy people or beautiful elites or some other kind of person that just isn’t me. Luckily, I haven’t spent much time listening to those people. However, every once in a while, especially if I’m already feeling down, that thought pattern will make its way into my head. Learn this now: no matter your background, you are entitled to the opportunity to work toward what you want. I Don’t Have The Resources. Maybe you think you don’t have the time, the energy, the right space, the money, or any other type of resource or support you need to put your ideas into action. And maybe you’re right. But be honest with yourself: it’s more likely that you’re just making excuses. There are solutions to most problems like these, so find them and embrace them. Improve your time management skills, get some help with your other tasks (delegate!), secure the space and equipment you need – even if you have to borrow it, pinch pennies, find financing, look for a new job, exercise daily for an energy boost – just do whatever it takes. If the idea is important enough to you, you’ll find a way to uplift it with action. I’ll Do It Eventually. There is no eventually. There is no guarantee that you will be here tomorrow. If you can begin today, get the show on the road! Meet this motivation-zapping thought with rebellion and give your idea the green light today. I’m Not Good Enough. Maybe you think you don’t have the talent, intelligence, or charisma it takes to bring your idea into fruition? Think again. The biggest thing standing between you and your goal is not your raw skill, but your willingness to actively participate in your own idea. As they say, showing up is half of the battle (I think it’s most of the battle). Most people who are good at something didn’t get that way without practice. You have to begin cutting your teeth somewhere! The main reason others might be more skilled than you are at something specific is because they do it regularly and you do not. There are exceptions, of course, but this is usually the case. 3 Common Vegetable Garden Planning Mistakes 
+Are you planning a vegetable garden? You might not be aware of several common mistakes people make when they are planning out their vegetable gardens. When planning a vegetable garden it’s easy to ignore problems that can occur when plants are in the ground. In this video we look at 3 common mistakes gardeners make […] 8 Herbs That Can Help Reduce Stress and Anxiety 
+Are you feeling stressed or suffering from feelings of anxiety? You may find that certain herbs are a fast, easy and effective way to reduce stress and anxiety. Before going into detail about the herbs that can help you to manage your stress and anxiety, I do want to point out that diet and lifestyle still need to […] Chemtrails Killing Organic Crops and Monsanto’s GMO Seeds Thrive 
+Organic farmers and our food supply have a huge environmental hazard to contend with compliments of the U.S. government – chemtrails. Chemtrails are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for purposes undisclosed to the general public in programs directed by various government officials. These sprays pollute the soil, water and air while […] The Horrific True Story of How Pringles Chips are Made 
+The Pringles Company (in an effort to avoid taxes levied against “luxury foods” like chips in the UK) once even argued that the potato content of their chips was so low that they are technically not even potato chips. by Dr. Mercola – Mercola.com To understand the nature of Pringles and other stackable chips, forget the […] Top 20 Energy Boosting Foods 
+Check out these 20 Super Energy Boosting Foods! by Matt Hall – staff writer If you’re finding your energy lacking, you may be tempted to reach for a chemical-laden energy drink or yet another double-shot espresso. Don’t! Instead of your 10th cup of coffee for the day, reach for one or more of the following […] China Incinerates 3 US Shipments of Genetically Modified Corn 
+China has destroyed a total of at least three genetically modified corn shipments with origins from the United States in a move that echoes the way in which the nation of Hungary actually went and destroyed acres upon acres of Monsanto’s GMO corn fields. This move by China represents a direct stand against Monsanto — […] Top chefs meet with lawmakers to urge GMO labeling 
+by Rachael Nania – WTOP News Chef José Andrés address lawmakers and chefs who met on Capitol Hill to urge members of Congress to support legislation mandating the labeling of genetically modified foods. (WTOP/Rachel Nania) WASHINGTON — The discussion surrounding labeling foods that contain genetically modified organisms is reaching a boiling point, and chefs are adding […] Shoulder Pain: Natural Remedies For Joint Pain Relief 
+You can provide your own shoulder joint pain relief, in most cases. The pain relief is usually right at your fingertips……once you know a few very basic techniques. Learn the self-treatments that will get rid of your pain. The results can occur quite rapidly once you release the right tissue. Just follow along with the videos. Step 1 – […] How Roundup Ready GMO Corn Is Made 
+Have you ever wondered how GMO corn is made? Roundup Ready Corn is genetically engineered corn that has had its DNA modified to withstand the herbicide glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup). It is also known as “glyphosate tolerant corn.” Roundup Ready corn was first deregulated in the U.S. in 1997 and first […] Eight foods that help fight allergies 
+by Sandeep Godiyal – Naturalnews.com Allergies are indeed bothersome. But instead of reaching out to the usual medications, individuals can now seek relief from various foods. Among the known foods that help fight off spring allergies are citrus fruits, red grapes, broccoli, collard greens, nuts, apples, fish, onions and garlic. With a diet enriched with these […] Costco Going All Out for Organic 
+As originally reported by The Seattle Times, Costco is finding new and creative ways to meet its customers’ growing demand for organic produce. Article by Sarah Landers – Natural News Costco can be a little unpredictable when it comes to embracing natural, healthy foods. In 2015, there was a petition against the company to urge it not […] Attachment And Separation: What Everyone Should Know 
+by Dr. Peter Cook – The Natural Child Project Many human troubles would be lessened if the emotional needs of infants and young children were better understood in our society. This applies particularly to attachment needs and the effects of separating infants from their parents. Can you imagine how you might feel if you were happily […] Kellogg’s Loves GMO Contamination of Organic Food 
+Organic Consumers Association and allies warned Kellogg’s, if they used sugar from genetically engineered sugar beets in their foods, they would face a consumer boycott. Kellogg’s responded, claiming that, even though they don’t use genetically engineered ingredients in Europe, in the U.S., “consumer concerns about the usage of biotech ingredients in food production are low.”Does that […] 6 Diet Tips to Prevent Cancer 
+Even though there isn’t a food out there that is going to prevent cancer completely, there are certain things that you can do to avoid getting one of the major cancers. For starters, how about sticking with more of a plant-based diet? Eating more vegetables and fruits, while consuming less dairy, processed meats and alcohol can […] Join For Free! Discover Little Known Health Secrets and Useful Tips For Healthy Living! First Name ",FAKE
+7755,How World War III Could Start,"Source: ConsortiumNews.com 
+The U.S. acts as if its military has an inalienable right to operate close to the borders of other nations and those nations have no right to see these actions as provocative, writes Jonathan Marshall. 
+If humanity ever suffers a Third World War, chances are good it will start in some locale distant from the United States like the Baltic or South China Seas, the Persian Gulf, or Syria, where Washington and its rivals play daily games of “chicken” with lethal air and naval forces. 
+Far from enhancing U.S. security, the aggressive deployment of U.S. armed forces in these and other hot spots around the world may be putting our very survival at risk by continuously testing and prodding other military powers. What our military gains from forward deployment, training exercises, and better intelligence may be more than offset by the unnecessary provocation of hostile responses that could escalate into uncontrollable conflicts. 
+The most obvious example is Russia, which top Pentagon officials like to remind us “poses an existential threat to the United States” by virtue of its huge nuclear arsenal. So it was discomforting to learn a few days ago that U.S. and Russian warplanes are experiencing near misses in Syrian airspace “once every 10 days-ish,” in the words of Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeff Harrigian. 
+The risk of war with Russia would skyrocket , of course, if the United States were to try to impose a “no-fly-zone.” 
+Potentially deadly incidents aren’t confined to Syria. In September , a Russian fighter jet flew within 10 feet of a U.S. Navy spy plane over the Black Sea. Six months ago, reacting to an increase in NATO war games and maneuvers, Russian aircraft buzzed a U.S. Navy destroyer conducting exercises with Poland in the Baltic Sea. 
+Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the United States would have had every right to shoot down the plane. The Russians, noting that the exercises were taking place near the base of their Baltic Fleet, insisted they were simply exercising their rights to fly. 
+A couple of days later, a Russian jet intercepted a U.S. reconnaissance plane in the same region. A Pentagon spokesman condemned the Russian pilot’s “aggressive” and “unprofessional” maneuvers that could “escalate tensions between countries.” A Russian spokesman said its air defense forces had reacted prudently to “an unidentified target rapidly approaching the Russian border.” 
+Indignant over Iran 
+In the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Navy recorded 19 dangerous confrontations with Iranian vessels during the first half of this year, up from 10 in the same period in 2015. Another 11 such confrontations reportedly took place this July and August. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei speaks to a crowd. (Iranian government photo) 
+The most notorious incident, of course, occurred this January, when Iranian gunboats detained 10 U.S. Navy sailors for a day after they strayed into Iranian waters. The Obama administration, which had recently negotiated a nuclear accord with Iran, chose not to inflate the incident. In contrast, a trivial engagement between a U.S. Navy vessel and unarmed Iranian patrol boats in January 2008 fired up President George W. Bush and came perilously close to triggering another Tonkin Gulf Incident. 
+Although Iran is not a nuclear power, it could be a regional menace if drawn into war, with ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel and Saudi oil fields, and mines that could make the Persian Gulf virtually impassable. 
+U.S. air and naval forces also engage in dangerous confrontations every few months with China, a nuclear state and the world’s fastest-rising conventional military power. 
+In late October, China’s Defense Ministry protested an allegedly “illegal” and “intentionally provocative” patrol by the guided missile destroyer USS Decatur, which was sailing close to the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea to protest Chinese maritime claims. The Chinese vowed to increase their own air and maritime patrols to “resolutely defend national sovereignty and security.” 
+This summer, in the space of less than a month, Chinese fighter jets twice intercepted U.S. Air Force RC-135 spy planes off of China’s coast. The Pentagon decried the Chinese response as dangerously “unsafe,” while the Chinese complained that U.S. insistence on carrying out “close reconnaissance activities against China . . . severely undermines China’s maritime security.” 
+Similar confrontations and now commonplace . They offer frightening reminders of the infamous 2001 Hainan Incident, which was triggered when two Chinese fighter jets intercepted a Navy EP-3 spy plane operating near the Paracel Islands and Hainan Island. One Chinese pilot maneuvered too close to the American plane and died when his cockpit was crushed. The damaged EP-3 and its crew managed to make an unauthorized emergency landing on Hainan. The George W. Bush administration brought the crew — but not the spy plane — home only after sending a letter of regret to defuse the international incident. 
+As geopolitical analyst Michael Moran observed at the time, “The drama of this aerial collision underscores an important and little-known post-Cold War reality: America’s surveillance network has grown so vast and formidable that in some respects it is feared as much as U.S. weaponry itself.” 
+Trouble with Aerial Spying 
+Of course, aerial spying first became a cause celèbre during the Cold War when the Soviets shot down Gary Powers and his U-2 spy plane in 1960. The resulting diplomatic crisis derailed a promising international summit on nuclear disarmament. Since then, the tempo of spy flights has dramatically increased , despite the availability of satellites to monitor the world. 
+“On any given day, there are more than a dozen ‘strategic’ reconnaissance flights, supplemented by dozens of shorter range missions by tactical listening aircraft and helicopters,” reported William Arkin after the Hainan Incident. 
+Unlike satellites, intrusive planes trigger their targets’ radar systems, light up their communications networks, and provoke military command responses. That’s why American military leaders value the tactical intelligence they provide. That’s also why countries like China view them with such hostility. 
+The spy flight that triggered the Hainan Incident cost only one life, but history shows the risks can be far greater, especially during times of great political tension. 
+For example, U.S. spy flights along the Soviet Union’s eastern border helped provoke the tragic downing of a Korean Air Lines passenger jet in September 1983, when it strayed into sensitive Soviet airspace over military facilities in the Far East. The loss of 269 lives was terrible enough, but the resulting propaganda barrage from the Reagan administration helped arouse fears in the Kremlin into that war with the United States might be imminent. 
+The two jittery superpowers came dangerously close to nuclear war later that month when Soviet early warning systems falsely reported the launch of U.S. Minuteman missiles. 
+Military professionals in the United States and many of its rivals generally contain these incidents rather than letting them get out of hand. But accidents, miscalculations, and political opportunism pose ever-present risks of escalating small engagements into much larger military confrontations. 
+There’s plenty of blame to go around. But at the end of the day, what’s striking is that virtually every one of these dangerous incidents takes place as a result of U.S. military patrols or exercises near the borders of countries with whom we are ostensibly at peace, not while defending our own borders. 
+Americans raised on a pervasive ideology of “exceptionalism” all too easily assume that our far-flung military presence is simply the natural order of things, and that any challenge to it must be countered. A little reflection, however, should suggest why countries — like Russia, China and Iran — grow hostile and even paranoid as they are tested almost daily by the air and naval forces of a superpower. Even if we do not appreciate their point of view, we should seriously ask whether our military really serves U.S. security interests by provoking new opportunities for deadly confrontations almost daily.",FAKE
+3590,Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief: ‘Religion should not be a political argument.’,"Gérard Biard, editor in chief of Charlie Hebdo, went on ""Meet the Press"" on Sunday to discuss the French satirical newspaper's treatment of religion in the aftermath of the attack on its Paris office this month. Across all the Sunday shows this weekend, Charlie Hebdo was what nearly everyone wanted to talk about.
+
+Biard said repeatedly that the newspaper does not ""attack religion, but [it does] when it gets involved in politics.""
+
+The editor in chief also addressed those newspapers in democratic countries that declined to publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons after the attack.
+
+""When they refuse to publish this cartoon ... they blur out democracy, secularism, freedom of religion, and they insult the citizenship,"" Biard said.
+
+Host Chuck Todd also asked Biard to respond to Pope Francis's assertion that “one cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith. There is a limit. Every religion has its dignity … in freedom of expression there are limits.”
+
+""Every time we draw a cartoon of Muhammad, every time we draw a cartoon of the prophets, every time we draw a cartoon of God, we defend the freedom of religion, we declare that God must not be a political or public figure,"" Biard said. ""He must be a private figure.""
+
+He went on to say that ""religion should not be a political argument. If faith, if religious arguments step into the political arena, it becomes a totalitarian argument. Secularism protects us against this. Secularism guarantees democracy and assures peace. Secularism allows all believers and all non-believers to live in peace, and that is what we defend.""
+
+An editorial that ran in Charlie Hebdo last week mentioned the attention that the newspaper has been getting in unlikely places. ""For a week now, Charlie, an atheist magazine, has accomplished more miracles than all the saints and prophets together,"" the staff noted, later adding,""What made us laugh the most is that the bells of Notre Dame rang in our honor.""
+
+Biard was not in Paris at the time of the attack, but he said that those who had survived the attack ""up close"" ""are trying individually to understand why they escaped unharmed.""
+
+""It's very difficult to process because one obviously feels an enormous relief mixed with a sense of guilt,"" he said.",REAL
+10187,John Pilger: ‘The truth is… there was no one to vote for’ (Going Underground US election special),"Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
+3898,Ashton Carter Is Sworn In As Obama's 4th Defense Secretary,"Ashton Carter Is Sworn In As Obama's 4th Defense Secretary
+
+The cold and snow that walloped Washington overnight didn't stop Ashton Carter from reporting for work Tuesday. Carter was sworn in as the 25th U.S. Secretary of Defense after starting his day with meetings at the Pentagon.
+
+Sworn in by Vice President Biden at the White House Tuesday, Carter formally replaces Chuck Hagel, becoming President Obama's fourth defense chief in the past six years.
+
+Carter's debut at the Pentagon this morning was briefly interrupted when his wife, Stephanie, ""slipped and fell on the icy pavement,"" the AP reports. ""She laughed it off, and officials indicated she was not injured.""
+
+In taking the Pentagon's top job, Carter rounds out a career that has included several stints with the Department of Defense, from leading the acquisitions unit to being deputy defense secretary.
+
+NPR's John Burnett gives an overview of Carter's biography:
+
+""Ashton Carter is 60 years old; he's a Yale graduate and was a Rhodes Scholar in theoretical physics at Oxford. He never served in the military; he was a long-time faculty member of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and he's the author or co-author of 11 books.""
+
+As Carter takes his post, he inherits a crowded list of important priorities for the Department of Defense:
+
+""Carter is expected to testify on Capitol Hill soon about the Defense Department's annual budget request that was released in early February. He'll be setting the stage for a big budget battle as the Pentagon seeks $534 billion for next year, significantly more than the $499 billion spending cap imposed by the law known as sequestration.""",REAL
+2816,Historic nuclear deal reached in Vienna: What does it mean for Iran?,"Negotiators hail nuclear deal, reached after more than three years of talks, as a 'win-win.' For Iran, the deal to curb its nuclear program and greatly open it up to international scrutiny should pave a path to economic revival, analysts say.
+
+From left to right, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, German Foreign Minister Frank Walter Steinmeier, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammon, US Secretary of State John Kerry and US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz pose for a group picture at the United Nations building in Vienna, Austria, Tuesday. After 18 days of intense and often fractious negotiation, world powers and Iran struck a landmark deal Tuesday to curb Iran's nuclear program in exchange for billions of dollars in relief from international sanctions on an agreement designed to avert the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran and another US military intervention in the Muslim world.
+
+Iran's president Hassan Rouhani addresses the nation in a televised speech minutes after a landmark nuclear agreement was announced in Vienna, in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, July 14, 2015. After long, fractious negotiations, world powers and Iran struck a historic deal Tuesday to curb Iran's nuclear program in exchange for billions of dollars in relief from international sanctions – an agreement aimed at averting the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran and another US military intervention in the Middle East.
+
+Iran and six world powers led by the United States have reached a historic agreement, a victory of diplomacy over war that verifiably limits Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
+
+Hailed by negotiators as striking a “win-win” balance, amid significant compromises by both sides, the complex and detailed agreement – running to 159 pages, with annexes – caps a 13-year dispute over Iran’s nuclear program that resulted in more than three years of talks, including the last 20 months of intensive negotiations in Switzerland and Austria.
+
+The final – sometimes angry and emotional – 18-day push in the Austrian capital, Vienna, blew through four self-imposed deadlines before a deal was reached early Tuesday.
+
+American officials say the agreement effectively cuts off four possible pathways to a nuclear weapon for more than a decade by strictly limiting Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity, stockpiles of nuclear material, and use of facilities, and by adding far more intrusive inspections.
+
+Iranian officials say the deal will prove that Iran has no desire for nuclear weapons, and that it can pave the way for cooperation on other issues afflicting the Middle East.
+
+“Today could have been the end of hope on this issue, but now we are starting a new chapter of hope, and let’s build on that,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. He said the deal was “not perfect for anybody,” but could “open new horizons for dealing with [other] serious problems.”
+
+The deal is a “new chapter” and shows that diplomacy can “overcome decades of tensions and confrontations,” said Federica Mogherini, the European foreign policy chief who has led the talks on behalf of the so-called P5+1 group – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, Russia, China, Britain, and France) and Germany.
+
+""With courage, political will and mutual respect, we delivered what the world was hoping for,"" said Ms. Mogherini. ""A shared commitment to peace, and to join hands in order to make our world safer.""
+
+The deal, which follows a diplomatic process often overshadowed by the risk of war, is bound to have a profound effect on Iran, and raises the question of how the Islamic Republic’s regional role might change, if at all.
+
+Will the Islamic Republic be empowered by a $100 billion post-sanctions windfall, as some of its rivals have warned, to exert more influence in the region via proxy armed forces that threaten Israel, Saudi Arabia, or other US allies?
+
+Or will Iran – which faces regional challenges such as the Islamic State (IS) jihadists, sectarian strife, and the conflicts engulfing Syria, Iraq, and Yemen – look for areas of overlapping interests with the US and focus instead on its crippled economy?
+
+The short answer, say analysts who know Iran, is the pocketbook: Tehran’s top priority will be resuscitating the economy as sanctions ease to improve the daily lives of 80 million Iranians and ensure stability at home. That issue helped elect President Hassan Rouhani in 2013.
+
+“The mood is really for renewal rather than expansion, and to revive the economy and to keep the country going,” says Shahram Chubin, an Iran analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Geneva.
+
+“I don’t think [the nuclear deal] will empower them to think that now they can run riot in the region at all,” he says. “After all the neglect that happened these last few years, they really have a lot of catching up to do, for the quality of life for their own people.”
+
+For decades, Iran has opposed the US-dominated regional order and challenged Israel and US allies in the Gulf like Saudi Arabia, notes Mr. Chubin.
+
+“Now … the ‘regional order’ has collapsed; nobody’s in charge of it,” and in some places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the interests of Iran and America overlap for the first time, he says. The result is the nuclear deal isn’t the end, rather “it’s the beginning of a process.”
+
+Indeed, both President Barack Obama and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have hinted that a successful nuclear deal could be the basis of future negotiations.
+
+Moreover, resolving the once-intractable nuclear issue is an example of what may be possible, say Iran analysts, with other hard-to-crack problems like Syria, where Iran’s policies and interventions are diametrically opposed to Western ones.
+
+So what are the key factors likely to shape Iran’s post-deal actions, at home and abroad?
+
+Despite warnings from some US and Israeli politicians that Iran would use the freed-up revenues from the deal to spread “regional mischief,” the talk inside Iran focuses on easing economic pain.
+
+“Those who say sanctions are not important don’t know what is happening in people’s pockets,” Mr. Rouhani said at a provincial rally in late June. He promised that with the deal “we will enrich both uranium and the economy.”
+
+Since Iran’s oil industry – the country’s main source of foreign currency – is still state-owned and revenue flows through the central bank, the Rouhani administration “will get first dibs, and they have [domestic] priorities right now,” says Kevan Harris, of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University.
+
+Iranians have been stung by soaring inflation in recent years, raising the cost of everything from tomatoes to medicine. So Iranian politicians have been talking up the economic benefit of sanctions removal, from foreign investments to more employment.
+
+In April, lawmaker Ahmad Tavakkoli said Iran’s human resources, diverse climate, and geopolitical situation “have not been effectively used,” and that “concentrating on foreign issues would waste such opportunities and keep us away from reality.”
+
+Estimates of Iran’s spending needs are vast, according to data compiled by Bijan Khajehpour, head of the Vienna-based arm of the Iran analytical firm, Atieh International. Rouhani’s top priority is the “empowerment of domestic industry,” including for export, and creating more value in the energy sector – all of which make jobs, he said in a presentation June 29.
+
+But the initial pricetag will be $122 billion, with the banking sector alone requiring  $25 billion to partly settle the previous government’s debts, estimates Mr. Khajehpour. Construction contracts, with their multiplier effects on jobs and the economy, will require a minimum of $30 billion, and the petroleum industry will need an interim $40 billion – just over half of the $70 billion necessary to bring oil production levels back to 2012 levels. Another $7 billion will be required for infrastructure projects from the Internet to telecoms.
+
+Lifting sanctions will “be surely felt in people’s lives long-term,” said MP Abouzar Nadimi, deputy chair of parliament’s Economic Commission, in April. The nuclear deal will lead industry “to fulfill its full capacity.""
+
+The nuclear deal was achieved even as the Middle East lurches into its most volatile period in decades.
+
+While some Iranian officials hold fast to the rhetoric of “resistance” against US and Israeli influence – claiming that the ideals of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution are spreading – others recognize that Iran and the US are on the same side when it comes to fighting Sunni militants.
+
+But will this deal enable a more antagonistic Iranian posture? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who tried to block it – said in March that Iran was “gobbling up four countries right now,” and would control more if sanctions were lifted.
+
+And Martin Indyk, a former senior US official now at the Brookings Institution, testified to the Senate in early June that a new regional security network must “contain and roll-back Iran’s nefarious hegemonic ambitions.”
+
+But as painful as they have been for Iran’s economy, the sanctions have hardly been a deterrent to its military endeavors: Iran has still rearmed Lebanese Hezbollah with tens of thousands of rockets for any future battle with Israel; spent billions of dollars a year backing Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in a war that has taken more than 220,000 lives; and resurrected Shiite militias in Iraq to fight IS – ironically in concert with US airstrikes.
+
+“I don’t think the release of funds, which after all is going to be very gradual, is going to change the pace or intensity of any of [Iran’s] significant involvements,” says Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Iran now at the Chatham House think tank in London.
+
+“It’s all very opaque, so we don’t know whether there’s updating of a Hezbollah capability, or they have a wish list from Assad that they’ve been gagging to respond to and haven’t been able to,” he says. “There could be. But ... these will be incremental.”
+
+From Beirut to Kabul, Iran’s model now is defensive, says Carnegie’s Chubin. Syria, especially, has been costly in cash and dead Iranian generals, and also has tarnished Hezbollah. “Iran is not madcap about doing more,” he says.
+
+The narrative that Iran will “plow its hard-won sanctions relief into regional adventurism … is powerful, compelling, and frightening. It is also not true,” wrote Richard Nephew, a former director for Iran at the US National Security Council and former member of the US nuclear negotiating team, in a mid-June column for Reuters.
+
+Such analysis defies history, he argued, because when Iran had $100 billion in restricted oil funds just over two years ago, it “was not plowing it all into Assad, the Houthis [in Yemen] or troublemaking along the Gulf.” When Iran was making $88 billion a year from high oil prices in 2012, he wrote, “no one alleges that all of that money was going to terrorists.”
+
+With the nuclear deal done, the European Council on Foreign Relations is proposing engagement with Iran. In a report this week, the London-based think tank calls for “high-level and high-intensity” talks similar to the nuclear negotiations, to focus on “de-escalation and conflict resolution.”
+
+Princeton’s Mr. Harris argues for just such an approach.
+
+“The places where Iran has influence tend to be the places where the region has collapsed,” he says. “If one truly believes that Iran is on the march, then the best way to block it is to come up with a regionally-agreed-upon pathway to a more stable Middle East.”
+
+Despite the nuclear deal triumph and unprecedented face time between top diplomats, US-Iran détente is not around the corner.
+
+The US last month declared that “Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism worldwide remained undiminished” in 2014. And in Iran, hardliners still chant “Death to America,” even in parliament.
+
+Throughout the nuclear talks, Khamenei often described his mistrust of the US, and listed the reasons why. If before the deal that level of suspicion scored 100, now Khamenei’s “inherent distrust of the US is going to stay at 85 or 90,” says Dalton of Chatham House.
+
+He expects ad hoc US-Iran consultations on overlapping interests “to move things forward incrementally,” but no pro-Iran tilt in Washington that disadvantages either Israel or America’s Gulf allies. At least both the US and Iran now can “pick up the phone and know who to talk to.”
+
+“Diplomatic communication is going to be more effective,” says Dalton. “But whether [it] will be more influential? That is a completely different question.”",REAL
+883,Can Cruz-Kasich strategy really stop Trump?,"Mel Robbins is a CNN commentator, legal analyst, best-selling author and keynote speaker. In 2014, she was named outstanding news talk-radio host by the Gracie Awards. This op-ed includes language that some might find offensive. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+In what will either go down in history as a brilliant strategy shift or an embarrassing, losing gambit, GOP opponents John Kasich and Ted Cruz have announced they are joining forces to take down their common rival, Donald Trump.
+
+Trump's response was fast and ""on brand."" In a tweet he wrote that it was desperation for the two to ""collude in order to keep me from getting the Republican nomination.""
+
+Wow, just announced that Lyin' Ted and Kasich are going to collude in order to keep me from getting the Republican nomination. DESPERATION!
+
+For months pundits and politicians have speculated that there would be backroom dealings aimed at denying Trump a first-ballot win and a brokered Republican Convention this summer. That speculation is over; there is going to be a public brawl. You thought politics couldn't get more interesting, nasty or sink any lower.
+
+This is like two parents divorcing and begging the kids to pick favorites. It's public, it's ugly, it's confusing -- and it's going to blow up in Kasich's, Cruz's and the GOP's face.
+
+What on earth is the Republican Party doing?
+
+Once again, on all things strategy, Trump is 100% correct. Is this an act of too-late desperation? Yup. Is it collusion? Textbook. And how are Cruz and Kasich joining forces? ""Game of Thrones"" style: They are trading states to consolidate delegates, in hope of beating their common enemy, Trump.
+
+Kasich is telling his voters to back Cruz in Indiana, and likewise, Cruz will not compete against Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico.
+
+There are three research-backed reasons why this won't work:
+
+1. Research proves people like to back a winner. By joining forces, Cruz and Kasich aren't becoming the underdogs conservatives root for, they're highlighting the fact that Trump is the inevitable nominee. That will throw more independents into his camp and push the undecideds. Being the perceived winner is a huge advantage. By joining forces, Cruz and Kasich aren't becoming the underdogs conservatives root for, they're highlighting the fact that Trump is the inevitable nominee. That will throw more independents into his camp and push the undecideds. Being the perceived winner is a huge advantage. Example? On Kickstarter, your odds of succeeding are 10 times higher once you reach about half your funding goal. Trump is already there with 845 delegates of the 1,237 that he needs.
+
+If you like Kasich, you will find reason to dislike Cruz. And vice versa.
+
+If I'm a Kasich fan I won't suddenly feel good voting for Cruz because my mind is made up: I have already decided Kasich is the best candidate. It will take a rallying of uncontrollable variables to make sure that voters in the states the two candidates are divvying up will stick to the plan, all biases aside.
+
+There's nothing simple about this Kasich-Cruz alliance. It translates to voters like this:
+
+""So let me get this straight, if I'm a Kasich supporter and if I live in Indiana, I'm supposed to vote for Cruz (who I don't like), in the hopes that we defeat Trump and in the hopes that Kasich will then defeat Cruz (who I just voted for) in the primary? Huh? I don't think so, and now I am starting to lose interest.""
+
+Plus, when it's time to vote, voters may wonder: ""Is everyone else really going to do it?"" ""Will this hurt [Kasich or Cruz's] chances in the convention?""
+
+Moreover, unless Cruz and Kasich are hammering this on the airways at every single stop, it's not going to trickle down to the masses.
+
+By all appearances they are not instructing voters to do anything. Kasich was campaigning in Pennsylvania this morning and, from what I watched, he was using the national air time coverage in a diner to talk about leg pressing 325 pounds, not pushing this Cruz-Kasich alliance. Heck, as he shook hands with diners, he didn't seem to be actually asking people to vote for him. He might want to start doing that.
+
+Remember, this is a primary and people are pretty focused on whom they like. If this were a national campaign strategy to unite Republicans against the Democrats, voters would likely be more willing to vote for people they don't like based on their party ties.
+
+Instead, this GOP ""Anyone-but-Trump"" strategy will hand the election to Hillary Clinton, as it games the system, demonizes Trump, antagonizes his supporters--and fractures the party even further.
+
+Apparently the GOP does not want to face the reality that it has become so out of touch on social policies that it can't attract moderates. Much of the GOP's rhetoric scares people; it doesn't even try to attract Democrats and can't attract independents. Trump is succeeding at all of the above because he is uniting people on one simple belief: politicians are a phony, stuck up lot.",REAL
+3671,Obama’s inconsistent claim on the ‘frequency’ of mass shootings in the U.S. compared to other countries,"“The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world, and there’s some steps we could take, not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don’t happen as frequently.”
+
+“With respect to Planned Parenthood, obviously, my heart goes out to the families of those impacted. … I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn’t happen in other countries.”
+
+“We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.”
+
+“You don’t see murder on this kind of scale, with this kind of frequency, in any other advanced nation on Earth.”
+
+— Obama, speech at U.S. Conference of Mayors, June 19, 2015
+
+“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.”
+
+— Obama, statement on the shooting in Charleston, S.C., June 18, 2015
+
+Readers asked us to fact-check Obama’s broad statement at the Dec. 1 Paris news conference, that “mass shootings just [don’t] happen in other countries.” Critics pushed back on that comment immediately, noting that Paris — where Obama was speaking — had just experienced a mass shooting. Mass shootings do happen in other countries, and that statement clearly is false, worthy of Four Pinocchios.
+
+Then, in response to the Dec. 2, 2015, mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., Obama used more specific language that clarified what he was referring to. Indeed, he has made versions of this claim after other recent mass shootings. So we explored the relevant data and definitions, what exactly Obama is referring to, and the caveats associated with comparing mass shootings across countries.
+
+Here’s an important caveat to establish: There is no consistent definition of “mass shooting” or “mass public shooting” across countries, or even among researchers who track them within the United States.
+
+The FBI does not officially define “mass shooting” and does not use the term in Uniform Crime Report records. In the 1980s, the FBI established a definition for “mass murder” as “four or more victims slain, in one event, in one location,” and the offender is not included in the victim count if the shooter committed suicide or was killed in a justifiable homicide, according to a Congressional Research Service report detailing the definitions.
+
+After the 2012 shootings in Newtown, Conn., Congress defined “mass killings” to mean “three or more killings in a single incident.” Some media outlets and researchers still use the four-fatality definition, and have adopted the CRS definitions of “mass shooting” and “mass public shooting.” Other researchers include injuries in the victim count. Some researchers include acts of terrorism, drug deals gone wrong or gang conflict in their research. Others don’t.
+
+Some media reports, such as those of our Wonkblog colleagues, and advocates use a broader definition used by the Mass Shooting Tracker maintained via Reddit, an online forum. In this case, mass shootings are incidents in which four or more people, including the gunman, are killed or injured by gunfire. By this count, the San Bernardino shooting is the 355th mass shooting this year. (In comparison, CRS counted 317 mass shooting incidents from 1999 to 2013.)
+
+An FBI spokesman said such counts of shootings to include injuries would be categorized as a “mass casualty” event.
+
+While Obama incorrectly said during the Paris news conference that mass shootings “just [don’t] happen in other countries,” he often has clarified that he is referring to the “frequency” of shootings in the United States compared to advanced countries. And his use of “frequency” appears to be the actual count of shootings in the United States.
+
+White House officials did not say what Obama means by “frequency,” but they sent several news sources to support his claims. They noted how the United States has more gun violence, in general, than other countries, as reported by The Washington Post and Vox. (The Fact Checker has examined Obama’s rhetoric on gun homicides in the past.)
+
+The White House also pointed to research by University of Alabama criminal justice professor Adam Lankford, who declared mass shootings the “dark side of American exceptionalism.” The paper is not yet published officially, but his findings have been covered widely in the news and have been used to support Obama’s argument.
+
+Lankford ran statistical analyses of the total number of public mass shooters per country from 1966 to 2012 in 171 countries, and controlled for the national population size.
+
+He found that the United States had far more mass shooters (90 shooters in the 46 years) than the other countries, which averaged 1.7 public mass shooter per country. His research excluded gang-related shootings, drive-by shootings, hostage-taking incidents, robberies and acts of genocide or terrorism. (Lankford requested we not distribute his unpublished study and declined to provide the underlying data, citing ongoing research.)
+
+Lankford said he looked at the actual count of shooters rather than the per capita rate of incidents because mass shootings are rare events, and small populations of other countries can inflate the rate. He said looking at rates of incidents are “wildly misleading” — for example, due to the Umpqua college shooting in Roseburg, Ore., the city’s public mass shooter rate (number of offenders per capita) would be higher than most American cities because of that attack. But the rate would reflect Roseburg’s tiny population, and not necessarily mean that Roseburg is at higher risk in the future, he said.
+
+Rates need to be interpreted with caution, Lankford said. One rate that he calculated was between the United States and the European Union, “because the populations are so large for each that the rates become more reliable. The number of public mass shooters per capita (the ‘rate’) for the U.S. was approximately five times the per capita rate for the European Union.”
+
+State University of New York-Oswego public justice professor Jaclyn Schildkraut and Texas State University researcher H. Jaymi Elsass have been tracking mass shooting incidents in 14 countries from 2000 to 2014. They compared the United States to 11 other countries (Canada, Finland, China, Britain, Australia, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway and Switzerland), and found the United States had a lower rate of mass shooting fatalities per 100,000 people than Norway, Finland and Switzerland. Other than China, these countries were all member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the common measure for “advanced” countries. But the actual count of incidents showed the United States had 133 shootings during the period, compared to a maximum of six in each of the other countries.
+
+In their comparison of the United States to 19 other, mostly non-OECD countries, Lebanon rated higher than the United States in mass shooting fatality rate. They excluded shootings related to gang violence or targeted militant or terrorist activity. (Their breakdowns are embedded at the end of this fact-check.)
+
+There are caveats to these data. The researchers also looked at mass shootings that resulted in multiple injuries, not just fatalities. This could have driven the number of shootings up, especially for the United States. For comparison, Mother Jones’s mass shootings database of four or more fatalities from 1982 to October 2015 lists 72 shootings.
+
+Plus, the Schildkraut/Elsass list is not exhaustive; they are still compiling the list of shootings in other countries, and it does not include all of the shootings that may fit their definition.
+
+It’s also important to note that Norway, Finland and Switzerland all had one or two incidents each that left multiple dead or injured. The United States, in contrast, had 133 shootings that killed or injured multiple victims, according to their research.
+
+For example, a single 2011 attack in Norway, a country of about 5 million people, killed at least 67 people. On a per capita basis, that equates to about 5,000 victims in the United States. In contrast, there were at least four mass shootings that killed four or more victims in the United States in 2011, but it did not add up to the number of people who died in Norway, Schildkraut said. (PolitiFact used this research to rate Obama’s claims from June “Mostly False.” The White House sent us an article disputing that rating.)
+
+Schildkraut said it’s “absolutely not fair” to count the sheer number of incidents of shootings, which shows the United States ranks far higher than any other country. Plus, comparing shootings across countries is an apples-to-oranges comparison, because gun policies, politics and attitudes are unique to each country, she said.
+
+John R. Lott Jr., a gun rights analyst who has tracked mass shooting rates in the United States and European countries, said Obama’s references to “frequency” are problematic and inaccurate: “If you are going to compare the U.S. to someplace else, if you are going to compare it to small countries, you have to adjust for population. Alternatively, compare the U.S. to Europe as a whole.” Comparing to the U.S. to Europe (including OECD and non-OCED countries) from 2009 to 2015 shows the rate of mass shootings in the United States and Europe are about the same, Lott said. (Lott uses the FBI definition of four or more killings in a public space, excludes gang or crime-related activity, and includes acts identified as terrorism.)
+
+Astute readers might notice how Lankford and Lott both compared the United States to grouped European countries, but their conclusions are vastly different. Lott says the rate is about the same, while Lankford says the rate is five times higher in the United States. How is this possible? The researchers are looking at different sets of years and different sets of countries. (Lott looked at Europe as a whole; Lankford at the European Union.) Lott uses a broader measure of mass shootings than Lankford does. Lankford looks at the number of shooters; Lott uses fatalities and shooting incidents. This is an example of how the data and definition can be adjusted to show different findings about mass shootings, even using a per capita rate.
+
+The most accurate way that Obama has described shootings, Lott said, was his statement after the Oregon shooting: “We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.”
+
+Still, Lott added: “I don’t know what sense it makes to say, ‘I have an area of 320 million people, and I’m going to compare it to 8 million, or even 40 million people. I would expect, just out of randomness, to have more of whatever event to happen in a country of 320 million people.”
+
+But John Roman, senior fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, agreed with the underlying message of Obama’s statement, regarding the prevalence of mass shooting incidents in the United States. Frequency is “about how often something happens, not about how many people were affected by any single event,” such as the 2011 Norway shootings, he said.
+
+“Yes, it does happen in other places. But boy, does it happen a lot in the U.S., and boy, does it happen really frequently,” Roman said. “And it happens without cause, without reason, without some ideological backbone.”
+
+Whenever a mass shooting occurs, a flurry of infographics floods social media, a range of facts are cited, and rhetoric swirls amid developing news. It doesn’t help that Obama uses inconsistent and sometimes vague language to describe mass shootings in the United States compared to other countries.
+
+At times, his description was wholly misleading and inaccurate (mass shootings “just [don’t] happen in other countries”); other times, his description was quite accurate (“We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months”); and other times, it seemed to be somewhere in the middle (the “pattern now of mass shooting that has no parallel anywhere else in the world”).
+
+Quantitative measures of cross-comparative crime statistics, especially where the crime is not consistently defined (i.e., “mass shooting”), usually end up being apples-to-oranges comparisons. (We dug deeply into cross-comparative measures of the U.S. criminal justice system to other countries in the world, and it wasn’t easy.)  It’s not just about population size, but also about differences in gun culture, policies and politics in each country. How can one compare Israel (where there are government-issued guns) to China (with stringent gun laws) to the United States (with Second Amendment rights)?
+
+We are sensitive to the tragedy of each mass shooting. Our goal is to provide the underlying data and definitions – which show there are numerous ways to talk about mass shootings in the United States, and around the world. We urge the president to be more consistent and precise in describing mass shootings in the country (as he did after the Oregon shooting) rather than using vague or misleading phrases — which overall earn him Two Pinocchios.
+
+Send us facts to check by filling out this form
+
+Follow The Fact Checker on Twitter and friend us on Facebook",REAL
+8845,Halloween Costumes Mocking #NoDAPL Activists Hit Social Media,Those who follow news shared by alternative media outlets have likely been educated on the ordeal taking place in North Dakota between activists with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and riot police. To... ,FAKE
+2502,Appeals court rules against Obama’s immigration plan,"A federal appeals court on Monday ruled against President Obama’s plan to shield up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, dealing another blow to the administration’s effort to remake immigration laws and likely setting up a final battle in the Supreme Court next year.
+
+The 2-to-1 ruling from a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans — to uphold a lower court’s injunction that blocks the administration from implementing a ­deferred-action program — was not unexpected. It came several months after the same court had denied an emergency stay request from the Justice Department.
+
+The decision means that one of Obama’s signature immigration initiatives remains on hold nearly a year after he announced it through executive action and leaves in doubt whether the program will begin before his term expires in January 2017. Republican presidential candidates have pledged to dismantle the program, creating additional urgency within the Obama administration to get it started.
+
+“The president must follow the rule of law, just like everybody else,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement Monday. Texas led a coalition of 26 states that brought the lawsuit. “Throughout this process, the Obama Administration has aggressively disregarded the constitutional limits on executive power.”
+
+Immigration advocates, who feared time was running out to get the case before the high court next year, called on the administration to appeal quickly and maintained confidence that the Supreme Court would issue a favorable ruling by next June.
+
+“Every single day that goes by means further delays,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, who has closely followed the case. “Once the green light is given [by the Supreme Court], it will make it that much more difficult for any administration, Republican or Democrat, to undo the program.”
+
+A White House official said the administration strongly disagreed with the court decision and was reviewing its legal options.
+
+“This lawsuit is preventing people who have been part of our communities for years from working on the books, contributing to our economy by paying taxes on that work, and being held accountable,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.
+
+There are an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally. After House Republicans blocked a comprehensive immigration bill last year, Obama announced plans to use executive action to dramatically expand a 2012 program that deferred the deportations of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who entered the United States illegally as children. Under the new program, the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens would be eligible to remain and apply for three-year work permits, provided they had not committed other crimes and lived in the country at least five years.
+
+But 26 states, most with Republican governors, sued to block the program, arguing they would incur fees associated with the issuance of driver’s licenses to the immigrants and asserting the Obama administration had failed to abide by federal rulemaking requirements. In February, a U.S. District Court judge in Brownsville, Tex., ruled that the program could not get underway as he continued to review whether the program was constitutional, stopping it just days before the Department of Homeland Security was to begin accepting applications.
+
+The 5th Circuit panel that ruled Monday included two judges — Jerry Smith and Jennifer Elrod, both appointed by Republican presidents — who had ruled against the administration’s stay request in May and maintained their stances. A third judge, Carolyn Dineen King, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, was not on the earlier panel, and she dissented Monday, ruling in favor of the Obama administration.
+
+In a 135-page decision, Smith wrote that District Judge Andrew Hanen’s decision in February to issue an injunction on Obama’s program was “impressive and thorough.” The appeals court dismissed the administration’s argument that Texas lacked legal standing to challenge a federal immigration program.
+
+“Today’s ruling is a slap in the face to the good people in America who have also been waiting for Congress and the courts to act with justice, humanity and common sense on the issue of immigration reform,” said Angelica Salas, executive director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.",REAL
+7153,"NATO, Russia To Hold Parallel Exercises In Balkans","NATO, Russia To Hold Parallel Exercises In Balkans 11/02/2016 
+PRESS TV 
+Russia’s military and NATO forces are holding parallel military exercises in two neighboring Balkan countries. 
+Russian troops will participate in war games in Serbia while NATO is conducting military drills in Montenegro, media reported on Monday. 
+Russian forces’ 13-day military exercise in Serbia is named “The Slavic Brotherhood 2016” and begins on Wednesday. 
+It will include 150 Russian paratroopers, 50 air force staffers, three transport planes and an unspecified number of troops from Serbia and Belarus, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. 
+The five-day NATO drill in Montenegro started on Monday and involves responding to floods and chemical attacks. It will involve 680 unarmed personnel from seven NATO countries and 10 partner states. 
+In the past both Serbia and Montenegro were constitutional republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. 
+Both countries are socialist republics and traditional Russian Christian Orthodox allies. In 2003 this state union was re-formed into Serbia and Montenegro, and in 2006 the two became independent states. 
+Since their split, the two Balkan neighbors seem to have headed in different directions strategically. 
+Montenegro has taken a pro-Western stance which has been awarded by NATO with an offer to join the Northern Atlantic Alliance. 
+The NATO invitation to Montenegro has met strong opposition from Russia. 
+Meanwhile, Montenegrin officials have accused Russia of staging an alleged coup in October to topple its pro-Western government because of the NATO accession bid. 
+Serbia, a NATO partner, has held exercises with the Western alliance, but not such a large one or with foreign troops and equipment participating on its soil.",FAKE
+3117,The vengeful god of Kim Davis: The powerful forces we ignore when we fixate on one Kentucky clerk,"The God of (white) evangelical Christianity is obsessed with the policing of sex –in particular, who has it, how they have it, in what context, and with whom. Though some “good” evangelicals try to reframe these clearly hypocritical rankings of “sin” by insisting that God hates all sin, the truth is that most evangelicals believe that God is primarily appalled by non-normative sexual appetites. More specifically, God hates gay sex, though God may love gay people. God loves heterosexual marriage though, and because of this, God will continue to forgive you for numerous divorces and remarriages, as long as you ultimately end up in a good Christian, straight marriage. Or you stay celibate. Those are your only options.
+
+For many people, this level of moral regulation sounds downright bizarre, not to mention damn near impossible to achieve. And if you are anything like me, such unholy and retrograde thinking causes you to have a complicated relationship to the church, or to reject it altogether.
+
+Such belief systems are driven by fear – fear of God’s wrath, fear of the end of days, fear of divine retribution.
+
+But here’s the thing. There are our moral quibbles with Kim Davis’ belief system and then there are our legal quibbles with it. I have both. Fear (and misguided thinking) can cause one to believe that upholding a person’s basic civil rights amounts to a condoning of their choices. But these moral panics only happen around issues of sexual regulation. We are society that believes that even mass murderers deserve defense attorneys. We do not equate the providing of legal representation with the condoning of crime. It is about the basic protection of rights. The idea that those who issue marriage licenses must agree with the romantic choices of those getting married is patently absurd. There are clear distinctions to be made about marriage as a civil institution, which is open to all, and marriage as a religious institution, which is regulated by individual churches and religious traditions.
+
+But the thing about evangelical Christianity in its worst iterations is that it elides these clear and important social and civil distinctions, through the perpetuation of fear. Preachers tell congregants that attention to such levels of detail represent a searching for loopholes and a desire to compromise one’s moral integrity instead of risking it all for the faith. Evangelical Christianity sees itself as countercultural and spends a good deal of time in Sunday School and Bible Study pumping people up for unlikely scenarios in which they are called upon to “stand for their beliefs” against the encroachment of unholy orders from the secular world.
+
+During my childhood Sunday School classes, we were frequently asked whether we would be willing to die for our beliefs. We were told that unless we could unequivocally make such declarations, then we didn’t really believe in Jesus, that we hadn’t sufficiently “counted the cost” of being followers of Christ. We spent far less time talking about what it would “cost” us to love those radically different from ourselves. We spent almost no time thinking about how appalled God surely is about racism and poverty. But we were a classroom full of working class, Black children.
+
+Kim Davis and all her antics, not to mention her eclectic intimate choices, are low-hanging fruit. The moral and political chicanery of conservative evangelical Christianity is the real problem here. Fifty years ago, white evangelicals believed that Black people were the children of Ham, and that they were therefore cursed and morally conscripted to lives of less value than those of white people. In the 1960s, county clerks were the first line of assault on the dignity and personhood of Black people, come to exercise their right to vote.
+
+Contemporary evangelicalism still refuses to grapple in any serious way with the extent to which it serves as the wingman for white supremacy. Yes, some evangelical pastors write and talk about the “sin of racism.” They discuss it as though racism is a problem of individually sinful attitudes. They act as though racism will be solved if individual white people learn to love individual black people and vice versa. Such teachings stay away from critiquing failing school systems or culturally incompetent teachers, or the school to prison pipeline, or the effects of white privilege on the ability of Black people to get jobs, or the way that Republican social policy reinforces all these systems of power. The social grammar of white evangelicalism inheres in the deployment of moral claims to obscure the systemic operations of structural inequality. Kim Davis is not the author of this system; she is a student of it – a cult-like devotee, perhaps. Focusing on her rather than on the powerful white men like Tony Perkins and Mike Huckabee, who seek to incite the Christian base with her story, will find us missing the point. The point is that theologically inspired bigotry is still bigotry, and it has no place in American public life. At some point in my own Christian journey, I began to realize that subscribing to the tenets of conservative evangelicalism was like a refusal to be on my own side. It was cheering against myself. To accept conservative white evangelicalism was to cosign a set of theological propositions that were patently antiblack and antiwoman. I am still a Christian, though I am no longer an evangelical. I continue to insist on use of that title, because being a conservative evangelical is not the only way to be a Christian. The fear-based theology that makes evangelicals feel justified in denying other people’s rights is not unlike the fear-based political rhetoric that drives much of America’s foreign policy and terrorizing of brown people all over the world. The belief in a God who has favorites, a God who only blesses straight, middle-class, white Americans in traditional marriages, is the stuff that “manifest destiny” is made of. And none of these kinds of thinking about God made space for the life of a Southern, working-class Black girl like me. I’ve seen my family ravaged by crime, austerity measures, and social welfare policies of the right. I’ve seen how their notions of social programs hurt the god-fearing Christian family members who raised me. I’ve seen how churches with retrograde teachings about sex and gender stifled the dreams of talented young women and made them more susceptible to parenthood before they were ready. Kim Davis is, I repeat, low-hanging fruit. Her faulty thinking about how her faith should inform her duties as a public servant are an indictment not only of a problematic set of beliefs, but an indictment of a governmental system that has been in bed with Christianity for too long. That Christianity and American Democracy are seeming “natural” bedfellows has created the expectation that Christians can impose their beliefs on all American citizens. It is the 21st century and such thinking must change.",REAL
+3834,"South Dakotans may not like Obama, but they’d like to see the president","The big, gray Air Force plane carrying the president’s limousines flew low, slow and loud over this small farming city, shaking buildings and barns.
+
+The noise from its engines rattled the doors at the Cattleman’s Casino, where the owner was hanging an American flag that she had bought that morning, and the windows at the Midwest Bible Camp, where the pastor and his wife hadn’t voted for the president but still put up a sign asking God to bless him.
+
+It stopped farmers on their tractors and the sisters at the Mother of God Monastery who dashed up to the roof to watch it pass. It surprised the mayor, who was in the middle of an interview with a radio station 100 miles away in Sioux Falls.
+
+“Check that out,” he said last Thursday when he spotted the plane through his office window, although no one listening to his voice on the radio was close enough to know what he was talking about.
+
+Hundreds of Watertown residents were rushing to the airport so they could see it up close and on the ground. In 36 hours, the president would be coming to this city, only the fifth-largest in South Dakota, to deliver the commencement address at the local community college. If all went as planned, he would be on the ground for only two hours.
+
+There’s hardly a state in America that’s more hostile to Obama than South Dakota, where the president’s disapproval rating hovers around 70 percent and the local Republican Party last summer passed a resolution calling for his impeachment.
+
+But even in an era of almost unprecedented political polarization, people still want to see their president. That was especially true in Watertown, which had never hosted a sitting commander in chief. The cargo plane landed and rolled to a stop. Inside the tiny commuter airport terminal, there were three empty couches and a television playing Fox News. Outside, a light rain was falling, and about 300 people were standing along the airport fence line. A teacher had brought her nursery school class. Farther down the metal fence line were locals who had skipped out of work for the morning and retirees balanced on wooden canes.
+
+“This is definitely not his president,” said Laurie Brandriet Keller, gesturing to her husband. “I’m amazed how excited he’s been these last few days.”
+
+People in the crowd shot video with their cellphones and wondered how the monstrous airplane even stayed in the air. “It looked like it was dragging, just about ready to fall,” said Vernard Cordell, 71, who thought the thunderous noise was some sort of farm equipment rolling past his house. Then he realized it was coming from the sky, and he sped to the airport.
+
+A ramp dropped, and out of the plane came bomb-sniffing dogs, trucks and vans. There were Secret Service agents with guns. Last off were the two presidential limousines, shiny and black, each bearing flags with the presidential seal.
+
+The crowd edged closer; hands gripped the fence. The vehicles, including the limousines, formed up into a loose motorcade and drove to a local gas station just outside of the airport, where they filled up with fuel. Most of the crowd followed.
+
+Harley Waterman, who had shut down his pawn shop to race out the airfield, lingered by the fence line, still staring at the plane, a raw expression of American power. The actual presidential visit Friday was still more than a day away.
+
+“Just look at the size of that thing,” he said. “A once-in-a-lifetime deal.”
+
+For the vast majority of Watertown’s 21,000 residents, the only chance to see the president would come as his motorcade sped past them on the way to his Lake Area Technical Institute commencement address.
+
+The motorcade route was less than four miles and not likely to last much longer than 10 minutes. It was also supposed to be secret, known only to local police, the president’s security detail and the mayor.
+
+Jerry Elshere, 70, a retired middle school assistant principal, stood along 10th Avenue, about a mile from the community college. In the 1920s, his parents had driven 400 miles to see Calvin Coolidge, who had gone trout fishing one summer in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
+
+Now he and his three grandchildren were hoping to catch a glimpse of Obama. He’d picked the spot based on a tip from a neighbor and the presence of a local policeman.
+
+The motorcade wouldn’t pass for at least another hour, but already a small crowd was forming on the sidewalk. They huddled under blankets, carried signs and set up lawn chairs.
+
+“I know, but I can’t say,” said the lone policeman, a smile slipping across his face.
+
+Most in the crowd, which was now three or four people deep, were die-hard Republicans and had little love for this president. “I wonder if he’s a Christian sometimes,” said Kristi Maas, 47, who owns a small hair salon in town. Just the thought was “scary” to her, she said. “He wants to take prayer out of everything. . . . Isn’t this country supposed to be based on religion?” Heads nodded around her.
+
+The president’s plane landed about 30 minutes late. Someone tuned a radio to a local station where the DJ, who usually announces the Watertown High School basketball games, was doing a play-by-play of Obama’s arrival. The president was coming down the Air Force One steps, the announcer said. He was shaking hands with the mayor and climbing into one of the motorcade’s two black limousines.
+
+Now, the motorcade was rolling.
+
+“Is the president coming down this road?” Elshere’s granddaughter asked him.
+
+A few minutes passed, and the policeman’s walkie-talkie, which had been quiet, started to buzz. “Everyone needs to back up,” the officer said.
+
+The crowd took three steps from the road and then surged forward again at the sight of the two black limousines shining in the afternoon sun. Just before the president’s car slowed to make the turn by the cluster of scraggly pine trees on 10th Avenue, they raised their cellphones and started to record.
+
+From where Maas was standing, the light was just perfect. She could see Obama smiling and waving through the tinted window for three or maybe four full seconds . . . and then he was gone.
+
+“Oh my gosh, he waved at me!” Maas said. “That was so cool!”
+
+Her cellphone rang with a call from her daughter.
+
+“I just got waved at by the president!” Maas said. “Yeah, he waved at us. He didn’t roll down the window, but I could see him smiling as plain as day. He was waving at me!”
+
+The crowd drifted slowly away. As she walked back to her car with her sister, Maas was already reconsidering her opinion of the man who minutes earlier she had believed maybe wasn’t a Christian — the man she worried was ruining the country.
+
+“I believe in respecting our president,” her sister said.
+
+“You only hear some of the stories about him, not all of them,” Maas agreed. “He’s a husband and a father. He has the same feelings we do.”
+
+The president’s commencement address aired live on all of Watertown’s major television and radio stations.
+
+At the Cattleman’s Casino, a two-room bar on the north side of town, all six TVs were tuned to the speech. The smell of cigarettes, stale beer and cow manure from the auction barn across the street hung heavy in air. About 30 people were clustered around the big flatscreen at the front of the bar.
+
+For the first, and probably only time in their lives, they were listening to a president talk about their town, their friends and their relatives. Stephanie Burchatz, who runs a small construction company with her dad and brother, was sipping a $2.50 Bud Light. Her eyes were trained on the president.
+
+She had spent most of the day laying new sidewalks, curbs and gutters for the city. Now she was listening as the president talked about the girlfriend of one of her employees, a single mom who had gone back to Lake Area Tech to get an associate’s degree. “By age 20, she was working as a waitress, supporting two beautiful baby girls, Lizzie and Farah, on her own,” the president was saying.
+
+“This is good,” she was saying. “This is really, really good.”
+
+The president was reading the speech — his seventh public address of the week — off of a teleprompter. But to the people in the bar it seemed as if he were telling their stories from memory.
+
+When Obama was done, the bar erupted in applause. A woman sitting in the smoking room by the video poker machines had begun crying.
+
+“Most of the time I could care less what he’s talking about,” said Jason Hollatz, 37-year-old farmer. “Are all Obama’s speeches like that?”
+
+Her brother glanced back at the television where Obama, his speech finished, was accepting a Lake Area Tech jacket from one of the new graduates. Suddenly his mouth fell open. “That’s the kid who ran over my mailbox last week,” he yelled.
+
+One last look
+
+Obama’s motorcade raced back through town to the airport, where a crowd of about 200 was gathering near the southern end of the runway to catch one last glimpse of the presidential plane.
+
+There were lawyers, farmers, construction workers and the custodian from the nearby elementary school and his family. An elderly woman balanced on her walker.
+
+The temperature had started to drop, and the wind was kicking up. A youth baseball team cut short its practice and wandered over. The runway at the Watertown airport was too small to accommodate the president’s normal plane, so the White House had switched to a smaller 757, which taxied to the far end of the runway and gunned its engines.
+
+“It’s going to get loud,” a mother warned her son, who plugged his ears.
+
+The blue-and-white 757 with the presidential seal and “United States of America” began tearing down the runway, kicking up a cloud of dust and sand in its wake. All eyes turned skyward as the plane lifted off the ground. Some filmed the takeoff with their cellphone cameras. Others waved goodbye. They kept waving long after there was any chance that the president or anyone inside the plane could still see them standing in the field below.",REAL
+9875,October Surprise: ABC Uncovers “Millions” of Payments From Russia To Trump,"Comments 
+Republican nominee Donald Trump has been treading treasonous territory for months now, raising eyebrows around the nation for a foreign policy that openly supports the ambitions of Vladimir Putin, the dictator of the Russian Federation. He’s surrounded himself with men with close ties to the Kremlin and the oligarchs that pull the strings behind the scenes; he’s being openly supported by Russian state-controlled media and by Russian intelligence services, who have breached the electronic servers of Democratic Party operatives and released selected pieces of information in an attempt to sow discord. 
+Throughout all of this, Trump has insisted that he has no business ties to Russia. “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia” he tweeted in July. Now – brace yourself, this might come as a shock – it appears he’s been lying to us the whole time. 
+An ABC News investigation has found that Donald Trump has “numerous ties” to Russian interests both here in the United States and in Russia. “The level of business amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars — what he received as a result of interaction with Russian businessmen. They were happy to invest with him, and they were happy to work with Donald Trump. And they were happy to associate—[and] be associated with Donald Trump” says Sergei Millian, who heads a U.S.-Russia business group. 
+Trump has reaped huge profits off his business deals with Russian oligarchs that stretch from hosting the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow and selling Trump-branded real estate to “large numbers” of Russian buyers – so many that the Sunny and Hollywood Islands in Florida became known as “Little Moscow.” 
+The oligarchs of Russia made their fortunes by making deals to acquire huge numbers of shares in the state-owned companies of the former Soviet Union as the country shifted to a free-market economy, turning them into billionaires overnight. Towards the end of the Boris Yeltsin era, the oligarchs controlled 50% to 75% of all Russian finance. Now, they use their influence and wealth to prop up the Putin regime, while he turns a blind eye as they rob the country blind. Putin himself has amassed a fortune of $70 billion that could be as high as $200 billion . 
+The oligarchs are constantly looking to funnel their ill-gotten gains out of the country, and it turns out purchasing Trump properties was a favored way to do so. It makes sense – they are all men cut from the same gold cloth. They are self-entitled narcissistic materialists who care for nothing but increasing their own personal wealth. 
+“I think material wealth for them is a highly emotional and spiritual thing. They spend a lot of money on their own personal consumption…They don’t read books. They don’t go to [art] exhibitions. They think the only way to impress anyone is to buy a yacht” says former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev , who went on to describe them as “cultural ignoramuses…not interested in social justice.” Sound like anyone we know? 
+When the US State Department leveled sanctions on the Russian oligarchs in 2014 following Moscow’s annexation of the Crimea, the oligarchs had one of their key money-laundering tools cut off. If Trump were president, however, he could end the sanctions and allow them to continue to enrich themselves – and Trump himself. “We’ll be looking at that, yeah we’ll be looking” said Trump on the issue of sanctions in July. 
+These business dealings obviously present a great conflict of interest between the personal finances of a potential President and the foreign policy of our nation, which seeks to curtail the disruptive and corrupting influences of the Russian oligarchs and put a check on Russian territorial aggression in Eastern Europe. Would President Trump be able to put his personal profits aside? If this election has taught us anything at all, it’s that Trump cares about nothing but himself. We cannot allow him and his Russian cronies to take their corruption to the White House. 
+Watch ABC News’ report here:",FAKE
+4109,Republicans finally pass an Obamacare repeal. Do GOP voters care?,"Republicans have never passed an Obamacare repeal through both houses of Congress, forcing Obama to veto. That changed Wednesday.
+
+Rep. Tom Price (R) of Georgia, chairman of the House Budget Committee and a physician, appears before the Rules Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington Tuesday as he sponsors legislation that would repeal President Obama's signature health care law. The legislation will be the first order of business as the House returns for the holiday break and will mark the first time a bill repealing the health law makes it all the way to the White House.
+
+On Wednesday, House Republicans passed a bill that guts Obamacare – their 62nd attempt to repeal or undermine the Affordable Care Act. The crucial difference is that this time it will get all the way to the president’s desk, instead of being blocked by Senate Democrats.
+
+But this bill will never become law. At least, not under this president. He will veto it, along with its companion provision to stop federal funding of Planned Parenthood for a year. Congress will not have the votes to override, and so the bill – like the other 61 attempts – has symbolic value only.
+
+House Speaker Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin says that getting the bill to the president will finally hold him “accountable” for his “disastrous” policies.
+
+But Americans already know where the president stands on these issues. Observers say the real point is to remind voters what could happen if a Republican is sitting in the Oval Office and the GOP keeps control of Congress. Lawmakers also want to show critics that they’re living up to a campaign promise, or at least trying harder.
+
+This bill “will sharpen contrasts between Republicans and Democrats going into a presidential election year,” says GOP consultant Matt Mackowiak.
+
+But will the voters care? Republican voters contacted by the Monitor suggest Wednesday’s vote is neither pointless nor a clear victory. While many like the signal it sends, others see it as yet another hollow gesture.
+
+They want action, and this is seen as only a start.
+
+Travis Sawyer, a financial advisor in Abilene, Kan., says he falls into the camp of folks who view “maneuvers” like this as generally a waste of time.  However, he does like this move, even though he already knows how the president will react.
+
+“Having him actually have to go through the process of vetoing legislation passed by both houses of Congress, it’s big. I think it’s a big step.” He’s happy to see lawmakers “follow through” on their promise.
+
+Joshua Thompson, a warehouse worker in Nashua, N.H., is “impressed” that the bill will get as far as the president. On the other hand, he says, if Republicans ever succeed in repealing the health care law, “they should at least have something to replace it. Something better than Obamacare.”
+
+Meanwhile, Carol Hill, a retired physician from Diamondhead, Miss., says in an e-mail that the “ridiculous ‘show’ bill” repealing Obamacare and defunding Planned Parenthood only “feeds the anger” of voters.
+
+If establishment Republicans – she calls them the “eGOP” – wanted to stop either Obamacare or Planned Parenthood, they could have done it in the past by defunding them, she maintains.
+
+“The eGOP is totally incapable of understanding how angry conservatives really are.”
+
+Obamacare has receded a bit as an issue, eclipsed by other concerns such as national security. Still, a majority of Americans disapprove of it and shining the spotlight during a rare presidential veto is beneficial to Republicans, says Mr. Mackowiak, the strategist. He believes that repealing Obamacare is “going to be a big fight” in the general election.
+
+Anticipating the House vote on Wednesday – which follows Senate approval last month – conservative group Heritage Action sent a letter to GOP presidential candidates on Tuesday urging them to push Obamacare to the forefront in 2016.
+
+The letter highlighted the Republicans’ repeal promise – which they have been loudly criticized for breaking. It then supported an “ironclad commitment” to repeal the entire law in 2016 through a rare parliamentary process known as “budget reconciliation.”
+
+The process allows a bill to avoid a Senate filibuster and pass by simple majority. It’s this procedure that Democrats used to pass the health care law in the first place – and it’s this route that Republicans, after gaining control of the Senate last year, used to finally get this bill to the president’s desk.
+
+Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton fiercely defended the law on Monday, reminding Iowans at a rally that it has extended coverage to 19 million Americans, doesn’t discriminate against preexisting conditions, and sets equal premiums for men and women.
+
+“They have no plan,” she said. Republicans “just want to undo” what Democrats have fought for. “[I]f there's a Republican sitting there, it will be repealed and then we will have to start all over again,” she warned.
+
+No question, the move to force the president into a veto “raises the stakes in the rhetorical war,” says Amy Black, a political scientist at Wheaton College in Illinois. It will give more attention to the issue and “remind voters yet again that Obama and Democrats are not on their side.”
+
+But will the veto strategy mean much to voters? She’s not so sure. “It’s a question whether the strategy will work with voters or not.”",REAL
+7660,FBI Agent Accuses James Comey Of ‘Trampling On The Rule Of Law’,"Washington, D.C. 20535-0001 
+Sir, 
+I am writing regarding your public statement in July, 2016 informing the American people that the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton was being closed without referring it to a Federal Grand Jury or the Attorney General of the U. S. for a decision whether or not to indict her. Strangely, you eloquently laid out enough of the evidence deduced from the investigation to strongly indicate there was abundant evidence uncovered during the investigation and interview of her to not only indict but to convict her in Federal Court. However, you personally re-worded and soft-pedaled the actions she took as Secretary of State describing her actions as “extremely careless” in using a personal email and un-secured server for her communications while Secretary of State. You rewrote the statute, which is not your job. 
+As a retired Special Agent of the FBI, I have standing to write this letter. My thirty years in law enforcement, including 22 years as a Special Agent with the FBI have given me the knowledge, expertise and experience to question and confront you for your perplexing actions, which (as you well know) were outside the normal standard operating procedure of the FBI and Federal judicial procedures. Some of the finest people in the world proudly carry the credentials of FBI Agent and you have soiled them and not allowed them to speak. But I will not be silent. 
+Sorry, but NO SIR, MS Clinton was not merely careless or extremely careless. She was not even negligent or grossly negligent (as the statute requires). Hillary Clinton was knowingly purposeful in her decisions and actions to set up a server under her exclusive control and possession in order to control what information was available to the American public and Congress regarding her actions as Secretary of State. Furthermore, she took those government owned communications into her personal possession after leaving her position and knowingly and willingly attempted to destroy them so her nefarious actions could never be known or used as evidence of her corrupt moral character against her. 
+Sir, what possessed you? Did you cave in to political pressure to unilaterally come to this decision? I fear that is the case, and Rule of Law be damned. I am embarrassed for and ashamed of you. You have set a precedent that can never be rectified… and certainly not justified. Shame on you, Sir. You ought to resign right now in disgrace for what you have done to tarnish the reputation of the finest Law Enforcement Agency in the world… for entirely political reasons. 
+Normally, an investigation will be assigned to an agent, or team of agents with one being the Case agent, or the lead investigator. When the investigation is complete, an investigative report will be presented to the U.S. Attorney for the Federal District involved. It would be the U.S. Attorney who decides whether to decline prosecution for that investigation… NOT the FBI agent. But in the Clinton investigation, YOU (unilaterally) decided not to forward the investigation to the U.S. Attorney or the Attorney General of the U.S., but instead personally made the decision not to prosecute her or even provide the information to a Federal Grand Jury. You were wrong to take this upon yourself. 
+Sir, in order to indict a subject, only a preponderance of evidence, or 51% is needed for probable cause to exist. You did not think even that level of probability existed? Who do you think you are fooling? What judicial proceeding did you think you were following? 
+Throughout my years with the FBI, I (along with my fellow agents) took great pride in conducting each investigation in an unbiased manner regardless of the subject’s position or standing in the community. 
+All were treated equally under the law. But you, Sir, decided to allow this corrupt, evil and nasty human being to go free and unchallenged for her treasonous actions (yes, treasonous, in my opinion) which threatened the security of this nation. Furthermore, you stopped short of investigating the Clinton Foundation as a RICO case (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization. This is a RICO case ifthere ever were one. Even an untrained person can tell from the communications which were recovered that Hillary Clinton spent more time working for the Clinton Foundation while Secretary of State than on State Business. It may be argued that Hillary did not do any State business UNLESS the Clinton Foundation benefitted. You decided to just let this uncomfortable truth alone without addressing it. 
+I will conclude with this: Following my retirement from the FBI, I volunteered for a 12 month tour of duty in Afghanistan as a Law Enforcement Professional, embedded with U.S. forces as a subject matter expert in counter-terrorism investigations. For most of that year I operated “outside the wire” patrolling with the troops, interviewing witnesses to IED incidents and gathering evidence on the bad guys. The results of my work would then be reported through secure channels to the Commanding Officer. All reports and communications were required to be transmitted via secure and encrypted devices. Occasionally my remote location in the mountains of Afghanistan made transmission impossible and I would have to fly back to Bagram Air Base in order to securely report to the Commander of the battle space. It would have been convenient if I could have just called the Commander on my personal cell phone or written him an email on my personal laptop. But, had I done so I would have been reporting classified information via an unsecured device and it could have been compromised. These were, relative to Secretary of State communications, low level classifications of Secret. Had I ever sent even one in such a manner I would have been prosecuted and sent to Federal Prison for 20 years or so. That is how serious this violation is considered. 
+Now, because of you, Hillary Clinton is allowed to continue her RICO activities and is running for President of the United States, the most powerful position in the world. You have trampled on the Rule of Law and destroyed the trust of the American people in the FBI and in unbiased enforcement of the law. How do you sleep at night? It is time for you to go and work for the Clinton Foundation. 
+Sincerely,",FAKE
+3884,Dan Pfeiffer to leave White House,"Dan Pfeiffer, one of President Obama's closest and most trusted advisers, is leaving the White House within weeks.
+
+Pfeiffer is one of the president's longest-serving aides, having joined Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign. The White House said he will leave in early March.
+
+“Dan has been beside me on every step of this incredible journey, starting with those earliest days of the campaign in 2007, "" Obama said in a statement. ""And through it all, he’s been smart, steady, tireless and true to the values we started with. Like everyone else in the White House, I’ve benefited from his political savvy and his advocacy for working people.  He’s a good man and a good friend, and I’m going to miss having him just down the hall from me.""
+
+The New York Times first reported that Pfeiffer will leave the White House.
+
+Pfeiffer is one of a very tight circle of Obama aides, often criticized as being too insular, who helped the president win elections and pave the way for passage of the health care law and signing of executive actions on immigration.
+
+He was instrumental in helping push forward the White House's social media strategy, becoming one of the first officials to blog and pushing to grow the administration's presence on networking sites such as Instagram and Twitter. An administration official said Pfeiffer has recently been spearheading a review of the White House communications structure.
+
+Pfeiffer told Obama that he planned to leave the day after the State of the Union, as the president was flying to Boise, Idaho. A White House official said Pfeiffer has been mulling his next move for some time and feels that the White House is strong, allowing him the space to move on.
+
+Pfeiffer is one of a number of trusted Obama aides who have announced their departures in recent weeks - changes that often happen in the second half of a president's second term. White House Counselor John Podesta will leave this month to help Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, should she run. Ronald Klain, who Obama named Ebola czar last year, will step down Feb. 15.",REAL
+9884,Contaminated food from China now entering the U.S. under the 'organic' label,"Contaminated food from China now entering the U.S. under the 'organic' label 
+Sunday, October 30, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes Tags: tainted food , organic label , China (NaturalNews) The Chinese food production industry is one of the world's least-regulated and most corrupt, as has repeatedly been proven time and again. Now, it appears, there is no trusting anything that comes from China marked ""organic."" Natural Health 365 reports that several foods within the country are so contaminated that Chinese citizens don't trust them. What's more, the countries that import these tainted foods are putting their citizens at risk.U.S. Customs personnel often turn away food shipments from China because they contain unsavory additives and drug residues, are mislabeled, or are just generally filthy. Some Chinese food exporters have responded by labeling their products ""organic,"" though they are far from it.There are several factors at play which make Chinese claims of organic unreliable. First, environmental pollution from unrestrained and unregulated industrial growth has so polluted soil and waterways with toxic heavy metals that nothing grown in them is safe, much less organic. Also, there is so much fraudulent labeling and rampant corruption within the government and manufacturing sectors that it's not smart to trust what is put on packaging.In fact, farmers in China use water that is replete with heavy metals, Natural Health 365 noted in a separate report . In addition, water used for irrigation also contains organic and inorganic substances and pollutants. Chinese ""organic"" food is so contaminated that a person could get ill just by handling some of it. 'Dirty water' is all there is The report noted further:""This is reality – all of China's grains, vegetables and fruits are irrigated with untreated industrial wastewater. The Yellow River, which is considered unusable, supports major food producing areas in the northeast provinces.""Many Chinese farmers won't even eat the food they produce, if you can believe that. That's because it's clear that China's water pollution issues are so pronounced that it threatens the country's entire food supply .Chinese farmers have said there is no available water for crops except "" dirty water ."" As part of the country's industrial prowess, it is also one of the largest producers (and consumers) of fertilizers and pesticides, Water Politics reported.The site noted further that as China's industrial might grows, so too does the level of contaminants in the country's water supply. Lakes, rivers, streams and falling water tables are becoming more polluted by the year.In addition to man-made pollutants, animals produce about 90 percent of the organic pollutants and half of the nitrogen in China's water , say experts at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning. There are times when water is so polluted it turns black – yet it is still used to irrigate crops, and of course, that affects so-called organic farming operations as well.These nine foods are particularly vulnerable to becoming tainted, Natural Health 365 noted: Fish: Some 80 percent of the tilapia sold in the U.S. come from fish farms in China , as well as half the cod. Water pollution in China is a horrible problem, so any fish grown there are suspect. Chicken: Poultry produced in China is very often plagued with illnesses like avian flu. Apples and apple juice: Only recently has the U.S. moved to allow the importation of Chinese apples, though American producers grow plenty for the country and the world. Rice: Though this is a staple in China and much of the rice in the U.S. comes from there, some of it has been found to be made of resin and potato. Mushrooms: Some 34 percent of processed mushrooms come from China. Salt: Some salt produced in China for industrial uses has made its way to American dinner tables. Black pepper: One Chinese vendor was trying to pass off mud flakes as pepper. Green peas: Phony peas have been found in China made of soy, green dye and other questionable substances. Garlic: About one-third of all garlic in the U.S. comes from China.Shop wisely.",FAKE
+4599,Exclusive Clinton op-ed: I'll look for common ground,"Why you should vote for me.
+
+In January, America is going to have a new president. Things are going to change — that much is certain. The question is, what kind of change are we going to have?
+
+We can build an economy that works for everyone, or stack the deck even more for those at the top.
+
+We can keep America safe through strength and smarts — or turn our backs on our allies, and cozy up to our adversaries.
+
+We can come together to build a stronger, fairer America, or fear the future and fear each other.
+
+Everything I’ve done, as first lady, senator, or secretary of State, I’ve done by listening to people and looking for common ground, even with people who disagree with me. And if you elect me on Tuesday, that’s the kind of president I’ll be.
+
+Here are four priorities for my first 100 days — issues I’ve heard about from Americans all over our country.
+
+First, we will put forward the biggest investment in new jobs since World War II. We’ll invest in infrastructure and manufacturing to grow our economy for years to come. We’ll produce enough renewable energy to power every home in America within a decade. We’ll cut red tape for small businesses and make it easier for entrepreneurs to get the credit they need to grow and hire — because in America, if you can dream it, you should be able to build it. We’ll pay for it all by asking the wealthy, Wall Street and big corporations to finally pay their fair share. And this commitment will go far beyond the first 100 days. Creating more good jobs with rising incomes will be a central mission of my presidency.
+
+Second, we will introduce comprehensive immigration reform legislation. The last president to sign comprehensive immigration reform was Ronald Reagan, and it was a priority for George W. Bush. I’m confident that we can work across the aisle to pass comprehensive reform that keeps families together and creates a path to citizenship, secures our border, and focuses our enforcement resources on violent criminals. This is the right thing to do, and it will also grow our economy.
+
+Third, to break the gridlock in Washington, we need to get secret, unaccountable money out of our politics. It’s drowning out the voices of the American people. So within my first 30 days, I will introduce a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. We should be protecting citizens’ rights to vote, not corporations’ rights to buy elections.
+
+Fourth, we need to get started on end-to-end criminal justice reform. Too many people have been sent away for far too long for non-violent offenses. I believe our country will be stronger and safer when everyone has respect for the law and everyone is respected by the law.
+
+There’s so much more we need to do together, and we certainly won’t get it all done in the first 100 days. But we’re going to roll up our sleeves and get to work for American families — and I’ll never, ever quit.
+
+I want to be president for all Americans — Democrats, Republicans and independents; Americans of every race, faith and background.
+
+My opponent has run his campaign on divisiveness, fear and insults, and spent months pitting Americans against each other. I’ve said many times that Donald Trump has shown us who he is. Now we have to decide who we are.
+
+Because it’s not just our names on the ballot this year. Every issue we care about is on the ballot, too. This is about who we are as a country — and whether we are going to have change that makes us stronger together, or change that pushes us further apart.
+
+It all comes down to this. I love our country. I believe in our people. And I think there’s nothing we can’t achieve if we work together and invest in each other.
+
+Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for president.
+
+You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.",REAL
+5347,Don’t Believe The Myth That Weightlifting Will Slow You Down,"Many older physical trainers, and even those younger ones who were proteges of the older men, will tell the trainee that there is an inverse correlation between strength and speed—that being too big and muscular will slow down an athlete (for whatever reason, I have found that this is most prevalent amongst traditional martial artists). The usual reason given is that the increased mass is simply a “dead weight”, while those with a little bit more knowledge will explain that lifting will develop “slow twitch” muscles over the “Fast twitch” muscles needed for sprinting, jumping, punching, and kicking.
+I am here to tell you that the “common wisdom” is completely wrong-when done properly, weightlifting will not impede your speed, and will in fact enhance your speed and explosiveness!
+Anecdotes Perhaps you’ve heard of this man?
+
+That is of course Jamaica’s Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world, and holder of multiple Olympic records. Also worth noting is that in an interview, Mr. Bolt revealed that he squats 400 pounds, and at least partially attributes his nigh inhuman speed to his training regimen. And he’s not the only speed athlete who this can be said of-look at any Olympic class sprinter, they are all quite muscular fellows.
+
+Similarly, other athletic disciplines (that’s “athletics” in the specific rather than general sense, I’m using the European term for what my countrymen call “track and field”) have claimed to utilize weightlifting in their training, such as the long jump and the hurdles. Or, you can take my word for it: at my best I had a one rep max squat of 320 pounds, and had a 38 inch vertical leap (I am judging this by my ability to perform a standing jump over 2nd-highest position hurdles, which are measured at 38 inches ).
+In fact, many world-level athletes of all disciplines are utilizing Olympic style weightlifting to develop speed and powe r.
+Anyway you slice it, compound weight training is a fantastic supplement to all athletes, even those who seemingly don’t need that raw brute strength.
+The Science As I elaborated in this article , as well as in the free PDF I offer to subscribers to my website (the subscription sign-up is on the front page) there’s more than one type of way to be athletic. More accurately, there are three, speaking purely in terms of muscular and/or nervous system function, so this does not include hand-to-eye coordination or other skills related to team sports. These three things can, loosely, correlate to the three types of muscle fibers-Red—or slow—Oxidative, Fast Glycolytic-or White-, and Fast Oxidative. Rather than rehash an article that I’ve already written, we will focus on the white muscle, the fast glycolytic. This is the type of muscle you want to be training for if you want to develop sprinting speed or a high vertical leap.
+Or, to put this into terms of Newton’s second law of motion, Acceleration=Force/Mass, ie: the amount of muscular force you can exert, divided by your body weight=how fast you can accelerate. And yes, I am aware that there’s probably a more mathematically accurate way of putting this.
+Which Exercises To Do? It is at this point that you’re probably asking which exercises you should train to develop those physical skills you desire. If you read my articles regularly, you will know what I am likely to say-compound free weight lifting!
+In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say if you don’t know which exercise you should do to develop a certain physical trait, you should always default to a compound lift unless you receive some further information that says otherwise. Training for speed or vertical leap is no exception to this rule.
+If you are looking for sheer running speed and leaping ability, the power lifts that hit the lower body are most effective: deep “Ass to grass” squats, deadlifts, and the clean and jerk are used by professional athletes to great effect.
+
+Similarly, if you want the ability to throw a ball or punch harder, upper body compound lifts are the key: bench presses, overhead presses and, yes, the clean and jerk, will see you through.
+
+So for those of you who are afraid that your athletic performance will be somehow impeded by heavy weightlifting, nothing could be further from the truth.
+Read More: Improve Your Weightlifting With A Video Camera 
+",FAKE
+5048,"Poll: Voters trust Trump on economy, Clinton on nukes","Voters say the top issues facing the country are the economy and terrorism. They think Donald Trump will handle one of them better than Hillary Clinton, while the candidates tie on the other.
+
+A new Fox News Poll on the 2016 election finds more voters trust Trump than Clinton on the economy (+5 points). He also bests Clinton on handling the federal deficit (+5 points). Those are the only issues where he comes out on top.
+
+It’s a draw on “terrorism and national security,” as the candidates receive 47 percent apiece. In May, Trump led Clinton by 12 points on doing a better job on “terrorism” (52-40 percent).
+
+Equal numbers of voters say the economy and terrorism are the most important issues facing the country today (22 percent each). Education is the only other one to receive double-digit mentions (11 percent). Here’s the rest of the list: race relations (9 percent), the federal deficit (5 percent), health care (5 percent), climate change (4 percent), immigration (3 percent), foreign policy (3 percent), and drug addiction (2 percent).
+
+Clinton beats Trump by wide margins on education (+23 points), and on the lower priority concerns: climate change (+31 points), race relations (+28 points), drug addiction (+19 points), foreign policy (+16 points), and health care (+11 points). She also has the advantage on one of Trump’s signature issues -- immigration (+7 points).
+
+Who would do better picking the next Supreme Court justice? That’s a hot topic this election. Voters trust Clinton over Trump by eight points. They also think she’s more likely to “preserve and protect the U.S. Constitution” (+7 points).
+
+CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POLL RESULTS
+
+By a 22-point margin, voters trust Clinton over Trump when it comes to using nuclear weapons (56-34 percent). That’s twice the advantage she held in May (49-38 percent).
+
+
+
+Yet voters are more likely to trust Trump to destroy terrorist groups like ISIS (+9 points).
+
+The candidates now tie on restoring trust in government (43-43). That’s a shift since May when Trump had an eight-point advantage (46-38 percent).
+
+Despite Trump’s claim that he understands the concerns of everyday Americans, Clinton bests him on empathy. By a 51-40 percent margin, voters say she’ll do a better job looking out for their family during tough economic times. In June 2012, Barack Obama topped Mitt Romney on this measure by 47-36 percent.
+
+How do voters feel about Trump’s praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin? Fifty-two percent of voters say it’s no big deal. For 44 percent, it’s bothersome.
+
+Most Republicans say it’s no big deal (72 percent), while two-thirds of Democrats say it bothers them (66 percent).
+
+The Fox News poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,022 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from July 31-August 2, 2016. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points for all registered voters.",REAL
+80,NC Governor Partially Changes 'Bathroom Bill' after Backlash,"North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory has signed an executive order partially changing the state's new ""bathroom"" bill in an effort to quell a firestorm of criticism and economic backlash against his state.
+
+McCrory's order expands the equal employment policy for state employees to include sexual orientation and gender. He also reaffirmed private businesses' rights to establish their own bathroom policies, a provision already stated in the original bill.
+
+But the governor left intact perhaps the most contentious part of the law, which states that government bathrooms will be separated primarily by biological sex.
+
+""We have long-held traditions of both ensuring equality for all our citizens and visitors while also respecting the privacy of everyone,"" McCrory said in a video message. ""We're also a state that strives to allow our people and businesses to be as independent as possible without overreaching goverment regulation.""
+
+Both state houses overwhelmingly passed House Bill 2, known as the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act. The law overrides the Charlotte ordinance giving people permission to use a public bathroom of their choice regardless of gender.
+
+On Tuesday, McCrory acknowledged outcry over the law, saying he'd listened to ""feedback"" from people for several weeks.
+
+He said that ""based upon this feedback, I am taking action to affirm and improve the state's commitment to privacy and equality.""
+
+McCrory signed the law March 23. Since then, several high profile businesses, including PayPal and Deutsche Bank, have cancelled expansion plans into the state.
+
+In an interview late last week, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest told CBN News the Left has used a ""methodically orchestrated campaign"" to fight the measure every step of the way.
+
+""We didn't initiate the issue. It was started when a local city council passed an un-Constitutional ordinance opening all bathrooms and showers to all sexes at all times,"" Forest said.
+
+""Once the state begins the process of fighting back, the Left first brings out the human rights groups to claim discrimination. This begins the narrative … of intolerance,"" he explained.
+
+""Then they take that intolerance narrative to a hand-picked group of CEOs and author a letter where they champion efforts to fight intolerance,"" he said.
+
+On Monday, hundreds of social conservatives gathered at the old Capitol building in Raleigh to call on McCrory to stand strong on the state's ""bathroom"" bill.",REAL
+9393,Donald Trump Is The King Of Russian Spies,"Friday, 11 November 2016 Putin's Puppet 
+A top Russian diplomat & Vladimir Putin's spokesman came out of the closet Thursday. They admitted that Russian experts touched the Trump campaign more than once during the Presidential campaign and it felt so good. They said they were so happy Paul Manafort was in Trump's inner circle. Manafort was a favorite spy until Trump came along and showed him his penis, grabbed some pussies and became the new king of spies. Manafort was a long time Republican operative who'd advise a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party before it was ousted for a lot of corruption. Manafort left Trumps campaign after those contacts were made public, and because the media never reported on it, Russia says they feel very proud of their spies. 
+It's a little too late, but the U.S. government admits to thinking Putin interfered in the Presidential Election. The intelligence community concluded that Russia was responsible for hacking into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and gave the to WikiLeaks which released them. The Russian government says HACK YES, we hacked your systems & not only will we keep hacking your systems, we have the King Of Russian Spies Donald Trump now running your country & he will do what we tell him because we own him, his name, his businesses & now his country. 
+Many Trump supporters admitted they have never gone outside of their communities mentally or physically so they voted for the man who could bring Russia to them as a souvenir. One Trump supporter said so what if Trump is a Russian Spy. I love James Bond movies, and Trump is the greatest villain causing chaos since Heath Ledger's joker. He went on to say Trump knows Russia better than Russia because Trump has been there so many times over the years. He believes that Trump doing business with Russia is cool, because Trumps knows everything, and he even knows the terrorists personally and that means we're on the same side of business and America will be great again. Another Trump supporter said they don't care if Russians hacked our system, because our system was kind of hacky anyway. He also said he'd rather have a Russian spy in the White House than some smart ass, pant suit wearing woman President. He added he was so happy porn was on the ballot, and agrees that America is going to be great again because he finally gets to hold those naked photos of Melania & brag about jerking off on the first lady. 
+A big source says the FBI has had a FISA warrant for Trump's emails since October & they kept it a secret because it's a secret service sponsored and paid for by Wikileaks to help Trump win the election. The big source also says the FBI has been investigating Trump for his Russian ties but Trump supporters say that's dumb because everyone knows Trump's ties are made in China. Make DeniseVasquez's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
+4033,Obama: ‘Africa is on the move’,"NAIROBI —President Obama praised Kenya Saturday for the progress that it's made on elections and economic development, even as he said the government needed to do more to curb corruption and respect the rights of minority groups.
+
+In a wide-ranging press conference with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on the State House's lawn, the two leaders vowed to fight extremist groups such as al-Shabab together and collaborate on several other initiatives.
+
+""Together, we are confronting insidious threats to Kenya’s prosperity,"" Obama said, adding that both terrorism and corruption are now keeping the country where his father was born from reaching its full potential. “This may the biggest impediment to Kenya growing even faster.”
+
+Kenyatta, for his part, said he was working to address corruption. The two governments launched a joint initiative Saturday under which the U.S. will work to support Kenya in its efforts to develop a a code of conduct for civil servants and a national curriculum around the issue, as well as provide ethics training to government employees.
+
+Shortly before their bilateral meeting. Kenyatta described it as ""a key area where we strongly believe that we can learn from your own examples and lessons to help us strengthen our own governance structures and institutions.""
+
+The two leaders also discussed elephant poaching, a problem in Kenya and other African nations. Poachers kill an average of one elephant every 15 minutes, and the ivory sales stemming from that slaughter helps fund criminal activity and terrorist organizations across the globe.
+
+Obama said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was proposing a rule Saturday that ""bans the sale of virtually all ivory across state lines"" in response to widespread poaching. The rule exempts certain items that have already been made, such as musical instruments, furniture pieces, and firearms containing less than 200 grams of ivory.
+
+Ginette Hemley, WWF's senior vice president of wildlife conservation, said the rule was a helpful step but ""the exemptions that remain will allow criminals to continue to use legal trade as a cover to smuggle poached ivory.""
+
+While the two leaders emphasized the common values their nations share, they sharply disagreed when asked whether Kenya's government and its leaders needed to do more to prevent discrimination against members of the country's LGBT community. Sexual relations between men is punishable in Kenya with up to 14 years in prison.
+
+""When you start treating people differently not because of any harm they are doing to anybody, but because they are different, that's the path whereby freedoms begin to erode,"" Obama said, adding he was ""unequivocal"" in his support for LGBT rights. ""And bad things happen.""
+
+But Kenyatta said his citizens were focused on other matters, and they shared much with the United States,""But there are some things that we must admit we don't share. Our culture, our societies don't accept.""
+
+""It is very difficult for us to be able to impose on people that which they themselves do not accept,"" he added.
+
+In addition to their bilateral meeting and press conference, the two presidents also spent time together at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, where Obama urged a gathering of entrepreneurs to pursue innovative projects to stimulate economic development on the continent, declaring that ""Africa is on the move.""
+
+Obama argued that these business projects could lead to a broader political opening in Africa and improve the lives of women and girls here.
+
+“It’s the spark of prosperity. It helps people stand up for their rights and push back against corruption,” the president said of entrepreneurship, adding that it “means ownership and self-determination, an opportunity to not simply be dependent on somebody else for your livelihood.”
+
+At the start of his speech Obama announced a few new initiatives aimed at spurring new start-ups in Africa, including a pledge that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation’s would support up to $200 million for Equity Bank Group lending of $450 million in foreign currency to small and medium enterprises over the next five years. Half of the money would go to young people and women, he said.
+
+OPIC also signed a memorandum of understanding to explore financing $100 million in debt investments to back financial institutions supporting women-owned small and medium enterprises, and announced a two-year, $50 million pilot program to help small, early-stage firms that have a social mission.
+
+More broadly, private sector groups at the summit committed to train and mentor more than 1 million emerging entrepreneurs and provide nearly $700 million to the next generation in business.
+
+Saturday’s meeting — the fifth in an annual series launched by the administration as part of its outreach to the Muslim world — amounted to a raucous return for Obama, who last visited Kenya in 2006 as senator. Julie Gichuru, a local TV host and entrepreneur, called Obama a “son of Kenyan soil” and introduced him by his full name, “Barack Hussein Obama.”
+
+The president welcomed the idea of being adopted by the hometown audience, saying, “And obviously, this is very personal for me. There’s a reason why my name’s Barack Hussein Obama.”
+
+Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta used the attention that came with Obama’s visit as an opportunity to reintroduce his country, and the rest of the continent, to the outside world.
+
+“Let them know that Africa is open and ready for business,” Kenyatta told Obama, shortly before the American president addressed the crowd. “Behind these statistics is a new generation of Africans committed to a new African renaissance … We have truly embraced the private sector.”
+
+Both presidents also appeared briefly on a panel with three entrepreneurs — two from Africa and one from Croatia. Jahiel Oliver, CEO of Hello Tractor, spoke of how he had moved from the United States to Abuja, Nigeria to start a company that dispatches tractors to farmers after they text for a rental.
+
+“It is completely revolutionizing agricultural in Nigeria — soon, sub-Saharan Africa and ultimately, the world,” Oliver said. Comparing himself to Obama at one point, he said he was pursuing his business “as an African American also returning to my ancestral home to solve big problems.”
+
+During the panel discussion, Kenyatta pledged to pursue structural reforms that would “deal with some of the bottlenecks some of the governance issues” that impede private investment in Kenya.
+
+ In a decent business environment, Obama said, even small firms in Africa and elsewhere could compete “on a level playing field” because technology had lowered the amount of capital anyone has to invest at the launch of a new business.
+
+“Now you can get a start-up moving and if it’s the right idea, it can travel with the speed you can text,” though the president admitted a moment later, “I can’t text very fast.”
+
+After speaking at the summit Obama toured several kiosks that occupied by business projects funded by Power Africa, an administration initiative bringing together federal and private funding.
+
+At a hut run by the company D.Light, Obama saw solar alternatives to kerosene lamps. About 10 million students are using these lamps to study at night, the vendor told him.
+
+Then, a woman at the M-KOPA display showed him how the solar panels on her hut roof work. The panels allow people to power their home out in villages, she told him, and they pay for it via call phone for forty cents a day--equal to theh daily cost of kerosene. Customers own the panels after a year, and they last six to eight years.
+
+""Forty cents a day,"" he said, visbly impressed. The M-KOPA vendor displayed her cell phone card payment system, prompting him to quip, ""I'm not going to give you my credit card number. ""
+
+Speaking to reporters at the event, Obama took issue with critics who have questioned why Power Africa has yet to make a dent in the continent's electricity needs. Roughly 600 million Africans, or 70 percent of the population, lack regular, reliable access to electricity.
+
+""And I would just point out that if you wanted to start a power plant in the United States, it doesn’t take a year to get that done,"" he said. ""In fact, what’s happening is, is that financing, the transactions have been completed, plans are underway, and the work is being done -- now we’re going to start seeing thousands, then ten of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and then ultimately millions of households all across this continent with electrical power that can boost productivity and economic growth all across the continent.""
+
+Even as he spoke of how happy he was to return to Kenya on this trip, Obama bemoaned the constraints he was under now that he was president. While dining with relatives Friday night, he said he was ""begging for forgiveness that once I am a private citizen I will have more time to connect.""
+
+The president also joked about the size of the gathering, which attracted three dozen relatives--some of which needed ""lengthy explanations"" to detail their Obama family connection.
+
+""I think the people of Kenya will be familiar with the need to manage family politics sometimes in these extended families,"" he said.",REAL
+2195,“Where is the public outcry for an explanation of how the longest war in American history is on a course to end in failure?”,"Now 68, Bacevich is a West Point graduate who served a tour in Vietnam before taking a doctorate in diplomatic history at Princeton. He subsequently taught international relations at West Point and Johns Hopkins before joining the IR faculty at Boston University in 1998. Bacevich is now emeritus and devotes his time to getting the books out.
+
+I met “the dissident colonel,” as he is known in my household, when he spoke at the Providence Council on Foreign Affairs this spring. He spent the evening outlining the book now in his desk, which rests on 10 Theses, as he calls them, after the 95 Theses Martin Luther nailed to a church door (supposedly) in Wittenberg in 1517. They are a detailed critique of what Bacevich considers our 35-year War for the Greater Middle East. He dates this to 1980, when President Carter declared the Persian Gulf a strategic interest warranting military defense. With the Carter Doctine, Bacevich said that evening in Providence, “Carter lit a fuse without knowing where it led.”
+
+“Learning offers a first step toward devising wiser, more effective, and less costly policies,” Bacevich also said on that occasion. I subsequently traveled to Boston to record this exchange. I found him as I had expected: a conservative man in various respects, a scholar with a disciplined mind ungiven to barricades and placards but vigorously opposed to the direction of American policy abroad and well aware of its roots in our consciousness of exceptionalism.
+
+You’re a critic of American conduct abroad on numerous grounds — I would say a critic with a very particular perspective, and I hope we can explore that. For now, a point of confusion, at least for me: In “American Empire,” the 2002 book, you note that American policy, or statecraft, as you call it, lost its coherence in the post-Berlin Wall period. Policy before 1989, you thought, was more or less, as you say, mainly realistic. When we met [at the Providence CFR], on the other hand, you traced a certain grandiose streak in U.S. policy to Carter’s 1980 doctrine, which got us into what you’re now calling the War for the Greater Middle East, a 35-year escapade at this point. Can you clarify your thinking on this? When, in your view, did the policy elite lose its way?
+
+To clarify a little bit, until roughly 1990 the hierarchy of interests that shaped U.S. foreign policy privileged Europe and East Asia. Those were the two most important theaters in U.S. foreign policy. And notwithstanding horrific mistakes made along the way, Vietnam being the most important but by no means the only one, if you look at the period from the late 1940s to the 1990s, in the main U.S. policy in these two pivotal regions qualifies as realistic. There was a certain cohesion to U.S. policy. Indeed, one could say there was a strategy. If you wanted to reduce that strategy to a single word, the word would be “containment.” At least until 1980, the Middle East—I prefer the term the Greater Middle East—tended to be viewed as peripheral in the hierarchy. My argument is that this began to change in 1980, when Jimmy Carter, in response to the hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, promulgated the Carter Doctrine.
+
+Now, it didn’t overnight vault the Greater Middle East to the top rank of U.S. foreign policy interests, but it began that process. And indeed, the end of the Cold War, which tended at least marginally to diminish the importance attributed to Europe and East Asia, facilitated that. So by the time you get to the 1990s, and certainly by the time you get to 9/11, there’s been this substantial change, and the change gets expressed above all and most regrettably in the reorientation of the U.S. military. Militarily, the United States doesn’t abandon Europe, and it certainly hasn’t abandoned East Asia, but if you look at where we’ve sent U.S. forces to fight or to occupy, especially since 1990, it’s clear that the focal point now is the Greater Middle East. And, to further the contrast, unlike the period of the Cold War, when you can make an argument that there was a certain cohesion in U.S. policy, there’s been virtually none with regard to the Greater Middle East. What we have is almost a pattern of random military interventionism justified by all kinds of reasons, few of which have produced anything like a positive outcome, and which cumulatively contributed to the destabilization of the Greater Middle East.
+
+I couldn’t agree with you more on that latter point. An American imperium bent on incessant expansion and more or less global dominance is among your bedrock descriptions for what we now live with. Two of the biggest questions on any paying-attention American’s mind are just how dangerous this is and whether there is any plausible prospect of change: a new American ambition, purpose or however you want to put it. What are your views in each case? The danger of it and the plausibility of change.
+
+In the danger of pursuing the imperium?
+
+Yes. You have a lot of non-Americans saying the American foreign policy is the single most disorder-creating factor in global affairs today, right?
+
+Well, the preliminary point is to understand where this urge to create a global imperium came from. And several facts contributed. One of which is the long-standing, deeply embedded claim of American exceptionalism, which assigns to us a responsibility to transform the global order in our own image. That goes back to the founding of Anglo-America, the City upon a Hill.
+
+Winthrop’s sermon in 1630, to be exact, yes.
+
+Right. But the end of the Cold War and the nearly simultaneous military event we call Operation Desert Storm gave the first twist to that long-standing expectation of what we are called upon to do. The end of the Cold War persuaded American elites in both parties, people on the left and people on the right, that liberal democratic capitalism was destined to triumph everywhere, that the last ideological challenger had been vanquished.
+
+The “end of history” is set.
+
+The end of history is set. So that seemed to bring the vision of global hegemony that much closer. Desert Storm seems to demonstrate—this is not so inaccurate, misleading—that the United States is in possession of military powers such that the world has never seen. We believe by 1991 that we have not only vanquished the last standing ideological opponent, but that we have achieved a military supremacy.
+
+Now you combine that sort of generalized mission to save the world with the end of history and with the belief that we now possess the means to exercise dominance, and you have a very explosive combination that, by the 1990s, makes global hegemony seem possible. Of course, the 1990s is not the decade of the evil neoconservative and the bad Republicans. It’s the decade of Bill Clinton, of the liberal Democrats calling the shots. But if you look at what happens in the 1990s, you find this expansive rhetoric. They don’t use the term “empire,” but it is an imperialistic rhetoric, and you also find, under Clinton, a growing willingness to put that American military power to use. To do what Clinton would argue would be good things in the world. And that takes the form of a far greater willingness to intervene. In Somalia, in Haiti, in Kosovo, in Bosnia, with the expectation that somehow this interventionism is going to produce stability, spread our values, help to bring into existence this new American-dominated order. Problem is, of course, that the results are considerably different. Instead of creating stability we create instability, and, of course, the chickens come home to roost on 9/11, with the attacks on Washington and New York.
+
+We’ll come back to this question of exceptionalism in a minute.
+
+You’ve been proven right times 10 in arguing a long time ago that the thought of post-Cold War disarray in American policy circles—no aim, no strategy—is wrong. The aim from the first Bush and Clinton onward has been to cast the world in the American image, just as you said: open markets, a sort of extreme capitalism. That leads straight to the problem of exceptionalism, as you’ve just suggested. I take it you agree. Now, here’s the question: If the problem is the consciousness of exceptionalism, the matter of change becomes more daunting. You’re not talking about changing a law, you’re not yet talking about changing how many divisions we ought to have in Guam. You’re talking about changing a kind of national consciousness.
+
+So, returning to the previous question, how realistic is this? You mentioned in Providence, “We must learn the lessons.” It’s a good phrase: Of course we must learn the lessons. But, time and again I have to say to myself: I don’t see any evidence of learning in Washington. They’re allergic to the past. They can’t stand history. We’re a nation of forgetters. How realistic is it to expect them to learn anything? And if we don’t learn anything, we’re in a very bad track.
+
+Well, and I am certainly not optimistic about our willingness to learn. You’re right, it’s easy to say learn the lessons, but you don’t learn the lessons unless there’s evidence of some kind of willingness.
+
+So what’s your thought on that? How can we expect to—
+
+My thought is hope lies, however faint the hope may be, in the possibility of introducing—reintroducing—into the debate over foreign policy a sense of realism. One of the great obstacles to rethinking U.S. foreign policy is the extent to which both of the major parties buy into, I think for mostly cynical reasons, the premises of American exceptionalism. So here we are, you and I are speaking. We’re in sort of the preliminary stages of the 2016 presidential campaigns, and it is not difficult to predict that from both sides we will hear calls for American leadership. The insistence that there is no alternative to American leadership, the promises of sustaining American strength—
+
+Correct. And so, the best one can hope for is somehow—not that a critic of foreign policy is going to win a nomination; they’re not—but somehow, someone capable of critical thinking with regard to foreign policy could at least make it far enough into the primaries to introduce—
+
+Yes, someone you figure like Webb or something? [Jim Webb is a former Marine, secretary of the Navy and senator from Virginia sometimes mentioned as a potential Democratic candidate in 2016.]
+
+Bingo. So my hope: I would love to see Webb declare—there’s not a chance that he will get the nomination.
+
+No, but he could influence the conversation.
+
+To have Webb up on the stage with Hillary Clinton and the two or three other figures that may make a run for the Democratic nomination, and forcing a discussion on, for example, the consequences and cost of the Iraq war, would be a helpful thing. There was a time when I would have said the same thing about Rand Paul on the Republican side, but in the present moment I’m not so sure. My current sense is that he is so eager to win the nomination that he is willing to compromise on his non-interventionist principles.
+
+And if he does, that will be a lost opportunity. In a sense, who ends up being president is, at this stage of the game, of less interest than whether or not the process of presidential campaigning can bear some fruit in terms of opening up a serious discussion of exactly where we are, and how we got here with regard to foreign policy.
+
+It’ll come over as a very sour view. I’m not sure it’s mine, but it’s becoming mine and there’s optimism at the far end of it: I often think we’re just going to have to get one bloody nose too many before we come to our senses. It’s a matter of very deeply ingrained habits of mind, right?
+
+Well, I once shared that thought, and now I’m despairing even of that, and I’ll tell you why. Back in 2008, when President Obama was running for the first time — talk about a bloody nose. I mean, we had two bloody noses. The first was the catastrophic Iraq war. The was the financial collapse of that year. I entertained some brief hope that the two of them, the intersection of those two, would lead large numbers of American people to say, “What the hell is going on?”
+
+“Let’s rethink.” And one could argue that the election of President Obama suggested a desire to see some rethinking, but it sure the heck didn’t bear fruit.
+
+I was in Hong Kong that morning—it was morning for me when McCain capitulated, 11 at night your time.
+
+And then the Grant Park speech?
+
+I don’t mind saying I wept. I thought, “We’ve redressed 150 years of our own history, and on the foreign side, the whole world is going to exhale.” That night in Hong Kong, not only every American there was out in the streets—the bars were crammed—but many Chinese were, too. Everyone was relieved. It’s a measure of the disappointment to come, but that’s another line of inquiry.
+
+Actually what you said I think is very interesting. There was something very important, symbolically important, in the election of an African-American. And the passage of time has by no means diminished the significance of his election in that regard. The problem was, it sort of reinforced naïve expectations that I think many Americans are susceptible to: that whoever the president happens to be, that person has the capability to change the world. And one of my great convictions has come to be that that’s totally malarkey.
+
+That we may say, “The president is the leader of the free world, the most powerful man in the world.” (They’ve all been men.) But the truth is that presidents are constrained.
+
+Ever more, I’d say.
+
+Ever more. And that therefore, expectations that they’re going to have a transformative effect simply are naïve, and that’s what we have seen. In this president, who did inspire such extraordinary hope—and, yes, I agree with you, hope that extended beyond simply the American electorate—he’s not a bad president. He’s not a failure on the scale of George W. Bush. But he’s been a disappointing president, even though he’s disappointed because so many of us entertained these exaggerated expectations of what he was going to do. Had we had realistic expectations we’d probably be saying, “Well, actually he’s not done a very bad job.”’
+
+I mean, he’s avoided catastrophes, which is not a bad standard.
+
+I think that the Eisenhower revisionism, which seems to be pretty deeply rooted at this point—I think not too many people would say that Eisenhower was one of the greats: “He deserved to be on Mount Rushmore.” But if we look at the run of presidents over the past 60 years or so, we still like Ike, because he avoided catastrophes.
+
+Reading the book by your colleague, what’s his name? Senior moment. The New York Times correspondent. “The Brothers” [on Allen and John Foster Dulles].
+
+Stephen Kinzer. It was a superb gathering of everything out there. For readers such as me, perfect. One of the things that comes over is that Eisenhower was a considerably more complex man than given credit for at the time and for many years thereafter. His resistance to this or that from the Dulles brothers… I hope he gets his revisionist historian, and I certainly look forward to Obama’s presidential historians. I hope there’s somebody who can bring the complexities of his presidency out properly. Anyway, another conversation.
+
+The question here: Who is more potent as an influence on policy now, or maybe the more detrimental to the development of a constructive one: liberals of the evangelical kind bent on a sort of neo-Wilsonian agenda, or traditional hawks such as McCain and others of a similar stripe? Neoliberals or conservatives, in other words.
+
+Well, the answer to the question, in my mind, is both equally, because both tend to share the same expectations about what U.S. military power can do. The right wants to use military power to spread freedom. The left wants to use military power to protect the innocent, but both on the right and on the left, proponents of intervention lack a prudent understanding of what military power can do, what it can’t do, and the likelihood of unintended secondary consequences that result from the use of military power.
+
+The question of humanitarian intervention keeps popping up, particularly since the Clinton years. And now with Samantha Power, a person I have absolutely no time for at all, at the U.N., is this country, just speaking very plainly and realistically, is this country capable of a humanitarian intervention wherein we can keep our mitts off things and not turn it to some other-than-humanitarian purpose? It’s a practical question.
+
+I think almost every so-called humanitarian intervention has—the proponents of intervention are using the humanitarian notion to justify action that actually derives from other purposes. One exception to that statement could well be the Somalian intervention that George Herbert Walker Bush initiated back in 1991, but I think if you look very deeply at things like Kosovo, at Bosnia, at Clinton’s intervention in Haiti—if you look very closely, under the humanitarian rhetoric, there’re other factors shaping U.S. policy. The real issue for me is that, for those who do genuinely believe that U.S. foreign policy should have a significant humanitarian dimension, I would urge them to think more deeply about why humanitarianism should express itself by sending in U.S. forces with guns. If we care—if we genuinely care, let’s say at the present moment, about the well-being of the Syrian people—there are ways to alleviate the suffering of at least some of them without putting a single American soldier at risk. Put simply, remove the people who are in jeopardy from the dangers that they face. Bring them here. You want to save 200,000 Syrian lives? Good, then move 200,000 Syrian refugees from the awful, squalid camps that they’re inhabiting and let’s resettle them here in the United States of America.
+
+Now to say that, of course, one would immediately respond by saying, “That’s politically impossible! The American people who live in Iowa, or who live in Pennsylvania, or who live in New Mexico don’t want 200,000 Syrian refugees in their midst.” My response would be: “Yes, of course, that’s true. The impetus is not so much what can we do to benefit people who are suffering: The real impetus is, What can I do to ease my conscience because I’m bothered by all these people suffering. Oh yes, I know, let’s send U.S. forces into the Syrian civil war, and that’ll make me feel better about our inaction.” Of course, to do that is to produce the results that you are suggesting—simply, to make matters worse. There was an argument that we needed to depose Saddam Hussein because he was a cruel and oppressive dictator, but the consequences of deposing Saddam Hussein have not actually been very positive—
+
+— as viewed from a humanitarian perspective. Indeed, we have, through our efforts in that country, produced instability, killed people, displaced people, and contributed to such vast human misery as to make a mockery of the humanitarian claims that, to some degree, provided the rationale for invading the country in the first place.
+
+I had this question for later, but let me put it to you now. You mention in some of the things you write, it comes up all the time: public indifference. It’s reached an astonishing level.
+
+I myself wonder if it hasn’t been purposely cultivated after the uproar over Vietnam. About a month ago the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is a Social Democrat, finished a year-long review of what the federal republic should do with its foreign policy looking out into the future. It had many different elements. As far as procedure is concerned, create a separate department in which people from all manner of disciplines are put in one room. So you have economists and development people and educators and military people and what have you all there. The policy to emerge is multidimensional. As he put it, there has to be something more than pointless conversation and shooting people.
+
+[Laughs] That’s pretty great. Is that the way he phrased it? More than talking—pointless talking and shooting people? [Laughs]
+
+Anyway, here it is. Do you think it’s realistic? I wrote a column about it; I’m very impressed with this guy. Of course, Social Democrats from Germany don’t play well in America, but that’s all right. What do you think of this notion? The possibility of a more rounded policy in this country.
+
+I’ll mention another question, since I’m scrambling them up. Herbert Croly, the great Progressive Era critic, distinguished between a nation with purpose and a nation with destiny. I don’t think I have to explain the difference to you. Purpose gives you practical, earthly things to do. Destiny gives you ill-defined missions. Do you see that this is a transition we have to make, and can we see our way to something along the lines of what Steinmeier is talking about? Without being attacked as a bunch of milquetoasts who have lost our nerve? Is that the direction we need to go in?
+
+Yes, I think so, and why won’t we? Well, because powerful people in powerful institutions are deeply invested in the status quo. I mean let’s talk about the distribution of clout in the foreign policy establishment, where the Department of Defense wields such enormous authority, despite the fact that there is little evidence that the prevailing notions of national security actually produce very positive outcomes. There’re a lot of people and a lot of institutions that benefit from our reigning understanding of national security. Certainly, the armed services, certainly the intelligence community, certainly the defense contractors. Certainly a variety of think tanks, even academic programs—all would be loath to see Mr. Steinmeier’s conception of statecraft be implemented. But this does get to your earlier point about public indifference, that—
+
+I forgot to mention one thing about his program, his policies. The most important point, leading to this: He insists that foreign policy be removed from all sequestration—my word, not his—and involve the public so that a nation’s activities abroad reflect the aspirations of its people. That’s a big one. You know how— That’s a real big one! And again, for members of the foreign policy elite, why would they want to do that? Why would they wish to surrender their privileged position? Why would that want to open the game up to allow genuine involvement on the part of the American public? And there’s no need for them to do that, because the public has been so conditioned over the past 60 years to defer, to accept the fact that, of course, things must be done in secret, to accept the notion that there’s a cadre of people who are smarter than you and me, who possess insights and expertise to figure out how to navigate our way in a dangerous world. My answer to that would be: They don’t have to “want to do it.” They have to be made to do it. I don’t care if they want it or not. I agree, but making that happen would require very intense pressure. The pressure’s going to have to come from the American people, and the American people, having been conditioned to see their role as basically a passive one, don’t do that. I mean, here as we sit, we are once more, whether we like it or not, involved in an Iraq war. The very fact that this new Iraq war has begun indicates that the previous Iraq war of 2003 to 2011 was a failure. A costly failure. A many-trillion-dollars failure. And yet, there is astonishingly little public interest in requiring any kind of accounting for that debacle. Here we are in the 14th year, we’re approaching the 14th anniversary of the beginning of the Afghanistan war, which is another failure. The president says he wants us out of Afghanistan by the time he leaves the Oval Office, and that that would be part of his legacy. But is there any serious human being who thinks that when we leave Afghanistan we will be able to claim success? We are going to leave Afghanistan, and the Afghanistan war is going to continue. Well, where is the public outcry for an explanation of how the longest war in American history is on a course to end in failure. Why doesn’t anybody care? It’s like that old movie “Network.” I can’t remember the name of the protagonist in “Network.” “I’m sick and tired of this and I’m not going to put up with it anymore!” But we live in a country of people that do put up with it. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” One of the things Kissinger taught us was that you can’t conduct a foreign policy in the long term without domestic consensus. That’s what we learned in April ’75. I’m not sure that’s true anymore. You can if you have one thing: public indifference on a grand scale. As you say: All sorts of things in a majorly wrong direction are done without any kind of domestic objection. I’d like to turn to your new work in progress as you outlined it when you spoke in Providence. You’ve got 10 Theses to propose nailing to the door, Luther-like. Taking apart what you cast as a single war in its fourth decade across the Middle East. Can you expand on the core thought and the focus of the new work? Well, I have been struck by the extent to which the use of military forces since 1990 has tended to see them sent to various places in the Islamic world. When I was a young man growing up we fought in Asia, whether those wars were well-advised or not, but Americans fought and died in Korea, Americans fought and died in Vietnam. When I was a young man, Americans were willing to fight for Europe, maintain very large-scale U.S. forces in Europe until the end of the Cold War. But there was no particular interest in having Americans fight and die in the Islamic world. The single exception to that was Eisenhower’s very brief and entirely bloodless intervention in Lebanon, which was in 1958. All that began to change after Carter’s promulgation of the Carter Doctrine, and since then, this is now three and half decades, we have had a long string of U.S. military interventions in the Islamic world. My argument is that, rather than seeing these various episodes as unrelated, we should see them as constituting one single war, much as the narrative of the Cold War includes U.S. forces going to Korea, it includes the Berlin airlift, it includes the Bay of Pigs, it includes intervention in El Salvador—a whole variety of episodes. Much the same can be said with regard to Reagan’s intervention in Lebanon, George Herbert Walker Bush’s intervention in Iraq, Bill Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, etc., etc., etc. Whether we are willing to acknowledge it or not, we’ve been conducting a War for the Greater Middle East that began in 1980 and continues to the present day. Further, I—my new book—will argue that that war isn’t going well. That three and a half decades later, we haven’t won it, we’re not winning it, and the likelihood of simply continuing down the path that we’re on, with the expectation that final victory lies out there just over the horizon, is an absurdity. So there’s great need, in the midst of this war, to recognize that it is a war and to take stock of it. It opens the mind, just a single construct. It opens us to all kinds of new understandings. You have a professional’s knowledge of the military, and more exposure than most to the national security apparatus, which you call “a dead zone” when it comes to new ideas. “Sclerotic” is another one of your terms. Could you talk about the actual state of the American military and the national security bureaucracy? I have to assume we’re not talking about 1.3 million Beetle Baileys, but what have we got in terms of—people who are opposed to these wars probably don’t care, but putting that aside—I’m just curious, what do we have by way of a fighting force and a national security apparatus? Are these sound institutions, or are they in a certain state of not really decay but—I don’t know what the word is, Andrew… I think the word is stagnation. On the one hand, there’s no question that the U.S. military today possesses enormous capabilities. What’s not apparent is that those capabilities are relevant to the political challenges that we face, in particular, in the Islamic world. So it is a instrument not well-suited to dealing with the problems where we have insisted on applying it. And sadly, members of the officer corps by and large lack the willingness to confront the consistent failure of our military actions in that region. It’s interesting that there are a considerable number of general officers who, once they retire, go public with their critique of U.S. policy. Yes, one does notice that. I don’t have a sense that that critique is being voiced—I don’t mean writing op-eds in the New York Times—but the critical thinking is occurring when those officers are on active duty. And what we get instead, of course, is the recitation of platitudes about having the best soldiers in the world and the best military that the world has ever seen. And yet, an absence of taking stock and an absence of measuring outcomes—of acknowledging costs. In the same line, what is your view, as a retired professional, of our dependence on tens of thousands of private contractors—in blunt terms, mercenaries. Can you address cause and effect in this question? After Vietnam, actually toward the end of Vietnam, I should say, when President Nixon terminated the draft, something he did for cynical political reasons, the effect was to abandon the tradition of the citizen soldier and to base the American military system on the idea of a professional soldier. So we created what the founders of this republic would have called “a standing army.” Founders of this republic viewed the standing army as a suspect institution and inappropriate for a republican form of government, but that’s what we did. And, indeed, for a period of time, through to 9/11, the American people generally speaking endorsed that move from a citizen soldier to a professional soldier. It seemed like we were getting good value for the money and it certainly removed obligations from citizens to farm out national security to a special class. A not-inconsiderable cause of the indifference we were talking about earlier. Oh, of course. After 9/11, when the Bush administration’s miscalculations— twofold: one, thinking the Afghanistan war was won when it wasn’t; two, thinking that the Iraq War would be won easily by a relatively small force—at that point, let’s say we’re talking 2004, we suddenly find ourselves engaged in these two wars, needing a lot more soldiers than we have. And a lot more soldiers than we can produce if relying on volunteers. So you’ve got too much war, too few warriors, what do you do? Well, I think the preference would have been to turn to our loyal allies and have them make up the difference. But our allies were either unwilling or unable to fill the gap. They’re just not on for them, a lot of what we have— Well, they’re not on for it, and they’re also actually—the Europeans felt disarmed. You know, the notion that there is a big British army or a big French army or a big German army that can supplement U.S. forces is simply no longer the case. The bottom line is, if you’ve got too much war and too few warriors, you fill the gap by hiring mercenaries, which we did, and which turned out to be not especially effective and to cause huge complications while imposing enormous financial costs. So we end up with this truly bizarre situation, which, again, everybody knows about and yet remains indifferent to. We’re at the height of the Iraq war and the height of the Afghanistan war. We have more contractors in those theaters than we do soldiers. It is truly an astonishing fact, but it’s a fact that quite literally doesn’t matter in any meaningful political sense. As a practical matter it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter any more than having trillion-dollar deficits. If you say to the average American, “Do you like trillion-dollar deficits?” “No!” But that doesn’t translate into some sort of collective outrage that is going to result in a balanced budget. “Do you like having mercenaries?” “No!” But that doesn’t translate into any outrage that is going to insist that the practice be revisited. In that sense, it doesn’t. Substantively, it matters. Politically, the issue has no traction. Do you accept, and I assume you do but I won’t take it for granted, that we live in a multipolar world, one with no so-called indispensable nation anywhere? Either way, what would a worthy 21st-century American purpose consist of in your view? My crystal ball is not any better than anybody else’s, but my crystal ball does say that we are moving into a globally multiple order—that, as we advance into this century, the notion of a single superpower will lose whatever limited utility it once had. What are going to be the poles? Well, clearly us. We will remain the most powerful nation in the world. But, also in the first tier, China, probably India, Japan, in its weird way, Europe. Weird in the sense that it has tremendous economic and cultural clout, but limited willingness to use hard power. There is a second tier of other nations whose views will have to be taken into account—Turkey, Russia, Korea—and the prospects for avoiding the kind of catastrophes that made the 20th century such a horror lie in the ability of these several nations to produce some semblance of stability. To create an order in which each is sufficiently invested that no one will overturn the apple cart: that’s a huge challenge. The failure of the great powers in 1914 to maintain their multipolar order is the warning of what consequences will ensue if we fail to create a new multipolar order that has some semblance of stability. And, of course, the problem there is, from a U.S. point of view, it’s unacceptable even to acknowledge that such a world can possibly exist. You can’t even use that word inside the beltway. No, and therefore how difficult it is to even have a conversation about that, much less—and the other thing going on here, that to me is the big game, well, two big games, are—the two big issues, the primary issues—are the creation of a multipolar order and also dealing with the prospects of catastrophic climate change. That’s where smart people need to be focusing their attention. And yet we find ourselves in a situation where so much intellectual energy is being devoted to trying to sort out the Greater Middle East by using American military power. It’s a futile enterprise. It is, thinking broadly, an issue of secondary importance. The fate of the planet is not going to be decided in the Persian Gulf. The fate of the planet could well be decided in whether or not we can get along with China, and China can get along with India and if, collectively, we can avoid having the planet be destroyed by the way we exploit nature. Given events in the Middle East now, do you think that it’s a very momentous time? Netanyahu, whom I call the most dangerous man in the Middle East, has been a curious catalyst, in a certain way. Do you think the U.S. has embarked on a fundamental realignment of its position in the region, or what its interests are, who its allies are? I’m especially interested in your view on relations with Israel and the extent to which Washington is at the moment effectively a captive of these relations, unable to rethink its strategy until this relationship loosens. Well, see, I’m not sure that that assessment pertains. And here I think there is a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of serious strategic thinking, with regard to the region. The issue is Iran. Now, as you and I speak, we don’t know if the details of an Iranian deal will be worked out. Even if they are, we don’t know if the Congress will torpedo such a deal. But let’s just posit for the sake of discussion that we end up with an agreement accepted by all parties to limit the Iranian nuclear program in return for removing the economic sanctions on Iran. What are the implications of that? I think the implications actually go far beyond, and I think the purposes of the initiative go far beyond simply the question of whether or not Iran will acquire nuclear weapons. No, it’s a strategic question, and the strategic purpose is to end Iranian isolation, incorporate them into the regional order with the hope, if not the expectation, that then they will be invested in the restoration of regional stability, as opposed to being invested in trying to promote further instability. Now whether or not we get that is a huge question, but I am persuaded that that is the underlying logic of the Obama administration’s policy here. Now, let’s posit for the sake of discussion that that produces a policy success. The consequences then, for the U.S.-Israeli relationship, are likely to be profound: The deference to Israel that the United States has shown over the past, whatever, 40 years won’t necessarily end—it’s not like there will be a rupture in U.S.-Israeli relations—but that deference will subside, and that a U.S. interest will receive priority as opposed to the interests of the state of Israel. That reality then could well promote a reconsideration within Israel as to how best to pursue its security interests. To oversimplify greatly, Israel could potentially become more accommodating with regard to actually finding a solution to the Palestinian problem rather than taking the hard-line approach of Mr. Netanyahu. And I don’t for a second mean that Netanyahu will change his mind. He won’t change his mind. But Israel is a democracy, and Israeli democracy has tilted to the right in recent years. Changes in the regional order that now bring Iran back into play and that lead to the United States thinking somewhat differently could produce a tilt in Israeli politics in a somewhat different direction. Lots of ifs here, lots of uncertainties, but I do think that that’s what’s really involved. It goes far beyond simply the question of whether or not Iran’s going to acquire a nuclear weapon in the next 10 years. A couple of rapid-fire questions, as we’re near the end here. Should we be bombing ISIS? If not, what? Well, I’ve come to believe that ISIS is such a profoundly evil entity that it needs to be destroyed. I’m not persuaded that American bombing along with American advisers and trainers trying once more to create an Iraqi military is going to produce success, but that is an operational question. What I’m more persuaded of is that if we succeed in destroying ISIS, our success will be limited. In this sense, the conditions that produced ISIS will still exist. This is one of your 10 theses. And that, therefore, we’ll put a stake through that organization’s heart but there will be another organization more or less like it. So yes, let’s go destroy ISIS, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that we will have achieved anything fundamental. We will not have done so. Second rapid-fire question: Should the administration investigate, charge, and prosecute those responsible for the torture practices after 9/11? Is it important one way or another? Obama’s “I’m-not-going-to-do-anything-to-anybody policy does come over as rather odd. Well I think there’s great confusion about the whole question of accountability and that when laws are violated or even when policies fail, who should be held accountable? And I think that needs to be clarified. But the answer, I think, the default response is to go get the little fish and let the big fish get away, and that’s a problem. I probably haven’t followed the torture issue as much as I should’ve, but if you take Abu Ghraib as a sort of comparable example, where it was entirely appropriate to court-martial the soldiers who were immediately involved in that, but the accountability of the chain of command didn’t get any higher than a female reserve one-star, who was reduced to colonel. And everybody beyond that got a pass. I think that was wrong. You can take or leave this question, Andrew, but I’ve been wanting to ask it ever since I started reading your stuff: There are a few political perspectives from which to critique American policy, just as there were several ways to object to the Vietnam War. I wonder what yours is. I certainly would be interested, if you’re willing to answer. If you’re not, if you find it irrelevant, simply say so. I’d like to hear what your political perspective is on all these things. For example, in Vietnam we had people who were at the barricades. We had other people who were against the war for the simple reason that we weren’t going to win it. It’s another way of assessing things. I’d be interested in that. Well, I see myself as a cultural conservative. In terms of international politics I see myself as a realist. I tend to have a skeptical view of what military power can achieve. I’m not a pacifist. I do think there is a need for us to have an effective national security establishment. I think it should be used with caution and care. So it’s the promiscuity of U.S. national security policy, especially over the last 25 years or so, that I find so outrageous. That leads to my last question: Can you describe some influential moments in the course of your professional career, in the service and post-, that were key in the evolution of your thinking? Yes, I think so. I served in Vietnam 1970 to 1971, toward the end of the war, and the most profound impression that I took away from that war was the extent to which engaging in a long, futile military undertaking had a deeply damaging effect on American institutions. At that time, my political consciousness had not been raised, and [I] was greatly distressed to see the terrible decay that was occurring within the United States Army. I think the second moment was the end of the Cold War. As somebody who, as  young person, certainly accepted the necessity of waging of the Cold War, but who had come to see the Cold War as an emergency, a departure from the norm, a time when we did things because we had to do them—for example, raising a large military establishment and stationing it around the world and engaging in interventions in far off land—we had to do that, I believe, because the Cold War required us to do so. And, therefore, when the Cold War ended, I naively assumed that we would revert to becoming something more like a normal nation. We would reduce the size of our military, we would reduce our global footprint, we would become more reticent in terms of our intervention. What happened was just the opposite. We became more inclined to intervene, our claims to understand how the world should work became broader and produced, to my mind, disastrously misguided policies. Now, what that caused me to do was rethink my understanding of the origin of U.S. policy. Again, as a young person growing up during the Cold War, I assumed that we did what we did because we had to in order to counter [the Soviets]. They were the problem. Subsequent to the end of the Cold War, I came to the conclusion that we did what we did because of inner requirements, domestic requirements, ideological requirements, economic requirements, bureaucratic requirements, rather than acting out of a sober evaluation of the way the world works and of our interests and our responsibilities to the rest of the world. I don’t want to be reductionist, but to me, more and more, the whole shooting match seems to come down to the problem of exceptionalism and the necessity of breaking that branch. I think it may be the cornerstone and the arch. In other words, if one could discredit the idea of American exceptionalism, then it becomes much easier to have a serious conversation about things like costs. But as long as a president, a presidential candidate, a senator can stand behind the podium and make exceptionalist claims and be applauded, it just seems that undertaking a serious critical conversation about how we got into this mess is going to be very difficult.",REAL
+8942,The Arrivals Bosanski Prijevod 36-theStoryOfJesus,Support Us The Arrivals Bosanski Prijevod 36-theStoryOfJesus,FAKE
+6919,Hamas Member Admits On Live TV That ‘Palestine’ Never Existed,jewsnews © 2015 | JEWSNEWS | It's not news...unless it's JEWS NEWS !!! Proudly powered by WordPress — Theme: JustWrite by Acosmin Join the over 1.4 million fans of Jews News on FB…It’s NOT news unless it’s Jews News!,FAKE
+9584,The Hillary Era is Coming: Worry!,"Photo by Veni | CC BY 2.0 
+I trust that I am not the only one to have noticed that in rural areas and economically distressed neighborhoods in towns and cities, lawn signs for Donald Trump are everywhere, while Hillary signs are rarer than Teslas and Maseratis. 
+I think I understand the Trump signs: they are cries of defiance. 
+Hillary’s supporters are harder to figure out. I suspect that most of them would just as soon not advertise their intentions November 8. Even if they think that there is no other way to stop Trump, they understand that, by voting for Hillary, they are embarrassing themselves. 
+Lawn signs apart, the evidence that Trump is kaput is, by now, overwhelming. He seems finally to have done his campaign in – to such an extent that even diehard anti-Trump fear mongers concede the inevitability of the Clintons’ return to the White House. 
+Trump’s campaign had been on life support for weeks when the pussy grabbing tape surfaced, followed by a seemingly endless stream of women – a dozen or so already — accusing the Donald of groping them and worse. 
+Then, in the third debate, Trump announced that he would “wait and see” before accepting the legitimacy of a Clinton victory. This seems to have been the final straw for all but the most bona fide “deplorables.” 
+And so, the writing is on the wall: Hillary will win just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow – well, not quite, but almost. 
+There is no reason to rejoice in her victory, only in Trump’s defeat. 
+And even that isn’t as obvious as it seems . Hillary probably the lesser evil all things considered. But Trump is very likely the less dangerous of the two. 
+The man is an adolescent in a septuagenarian’s body, with a tendency to act out. But at least he is not a Russophobe or a neocon or a “humanitarian” intervener intent on regime change in countries that resist American domination. 
+This would include not only the usual victims, countries incapable of harming the United States militarily, but Russia and China as well. 
+It is relevant too that the supposed lesser evil is a committed neoliberal and a Wall Street toady, and that Trump’s “crooked Hillary” taunts hit the target more often than not. 
+These considerations, and others like them, should cause concern to those who are fine with lesser evil voting in general, but who think that there are thresholds beneath which lesser evil considerations should not apply. 
+There is no need to agonize over these issues, however; not in this case. When Trump became the Republican nominee, lesser evil arguments became moot. 
+This would still be the case even if more voters were not quite so willfully blind to the dangers inherent in Clinton’s determination to maintain American world domination by any means necessary, and to her fondness for military “solutions.” 
+Lesser evil considerations are irrelevant because Trump is and always has been bound to lose to any Democrat, even to her. 
+I have been pressing this point and its corollary — that anti-Trump hysteria is a distraction – from Day One. As recently as a month ago, hardly anyone agreed with me. 
+If only I had a dollar for every time I have been taken to task for not seeing the parallels between the Trump phenomenon and the rise of Nazism in the final years of the Weimar Republic! I would be a rich man today. 
+But because it is now recognized that Trump’s chances of becoming President are, for all practical purposes, nil, no one is pressing that line these days. I used to be out on a limb; I no longer am. 
+It would be only natural to take pleasure in this turn of events, and I would — but for the fact that a Trump defeat implies a Clinton victory. That prospect is, at best, only slightly less nightmarish. 
+Worse, it doesn’t seem to matter that all but the most flagrant worrywarts now finally concede that there will never be a President Trump. Liberals and centrists and even a few foolish leftists are still going all out for Hillary. 
+From the dead center to the soft left, the consensus view is still that now is a time to boost, not knock, Hillary’s campaign — especially in the dozen or so states where the Electoral College outcomes could not have been determined years ago with absolute certainty. 
+It is remarkable that so many people cannot let anti-Trump hysteria go; that they are so focused on Trump’s misogyny, temperamental instability, and narcissistic blather that they don’t see that the only thing we need fear, where Trump is concerned, is, so to speak, the fear itself. 
+However, in Hillary’s case, there really is something to fear: that she is about to become the Commander-in-Chief of the most lethal military force in the history of the world. 
+On that point, her supporters are in denial, and even people who know better than to support her for her own sake remain determined to waste their votes by adding to her totals. Apparently, they think that this is a way to send the message that Trumpian “fascism” shall not pass. 
+How much better it would be if they would use their votes to build alternatives to the neoliberal perpetual war regime that Hillary and Bill and their co-thinkers have helped fashion! 
+The best chance for that, at this point, is Jill Stein’s campaign on the Green Party ticket. 
+Stein cannot win, of course; a vote for her is only a protest vote. But there is nothing wrong with that. Hillary needs to know that she has no mandate to end the world “as we know it,” and this is one of many ways to convey that message. 
+Pundits who claim otherwise are dead wrong. Those who pile on for Hillary are wasting their votes; protest votes aimed at Hillary are not wasted at all. 
+I would imagine that at least some Trump voters are thinking along similar lines. But the racism, nativism and Islamophobia of their candidate tarnishes the messages their votes will convey. They therefore cannot register with any real clarity. 
+The message protest votes for Stein convey is, on the other hand, as clear and distinct as can be. 
+And if she garners at least five percent of the total votes cast, the Greens will have access to federal funding in future elections, and will have a much easier time gaining ballot access in all fifty states. 
+This would not make for much of a “political revolution,” even in Bernie Sanders’ highly attenuated sense of the term, but it would make future elections less mind-numbing and degrading, and it could ultimately lead to more far-reaching transformations of the political scene. 
+Now that Trump has all but killed off the GOP, the duopoly party system is in jeopardy, and all kinds of political realignments have, at last, become feasible. *** 
+I wasn’t just being contrarian when I went out on a limb about Trump’s chances; and my confidence was in no way based on inferences from polling data or statistical extrapolations. 
+Let the blogosphere’s “political junkies” and the corporate media’s talking heads knock themselves out with that. What they do is useful only for entertaining people who care about the horse race aspect of presidential elections. It is distressing how many Americans indulge in that spectator sport. Most of them are essentially apolitical. 
+I was confident that I was right about Trump’s chances because I knew that what people tell pollsters when an election seems far off is basically irrelevant for predicting the election’s outcome. Information about how they and people like them voted in the past is more relevant, but not by much. 
+This is especially true when, as in this case, disdain for one or the other candidate, or for both, is a dispositive factor in many voters’ minds. 
+I was also fairly sure that, rightly or wrongly, more people fear and loathe Trump than fear and loathe Hillary; and that, if they didn’t at the outset, they would before long – because Trump was all but certain to undermine himself, and because there is so much dirt out there on the Donald’s sleazy connections and moral turpitude that even God-fearing Republicans, capable of believing almost any nonsense, were bound eventually to be repulsed. 
+I suspected too that Trump never really wanted to be President; that he only got into the race to promote his brand, and because he is an egotist and publicity-hound. 
+Trump hates to lose, however — especially to the likes of Hillary — and so, at some point, he must have decided to give the campaign his all, even if it meant bringing the Trump brand down with him. 
+Should it come to that, I will shed crocodile tears for his brood, Ivanka especially. A worthwhile thing to do in the months ahead would be to work to make that happen; to do everything possible to assure that the damage done to all things Trump will be irreversible. What a delightful irony that would be! 
+There are plenty of Hillary-haters in the Donald’s base who hate Hillary because they consider her the embodiment of coercive goody-goodyism, or because they think she is disdainful of people like them (people in the “deplorables” demographic), or because they think that she is too leftwing. 
+The idea that she is too leftwing is nonsense, of course; she is not nearly leftwing enough. That anyone would think otherwise is a testament to the media’s ability to shape public perceptions and to the degree of political ignorance rampant in some quarters of the American electorate. 
+But “vast rightwing conspiracy” Hillary-haters are spot on right about the rest of it — and two out of three isn’t bad. 
+Even so, there are better reasons than theirs to dread the prospect of a Clinton presidency. They all have to do with the service Hillary has done, and will go on doing, for the miscreants who control the commanding heights of America’s and the world’s capitalist order, and with her untrammeled, ideologically-driven bellicosity. 
+Hillary knows how to game the system; and she and Bill know how to benefit from doing so. But, for all her vaunted “experience,” she is clueless about the world. And although she and her fans boast of her “pragmatism,” that woman is seriously inept. 
+Most of what she undertakes to do is ill conceived, and nearly all of it turns out badly. 
+In short, the lesser evil, if that is what she is, is a very great evil indeed. 
+It won’t take long, once she moves back into the White House and starts putting her stamp on the empire’s depredations, for the scales to fall from the eyes of all but her most gullible supporters. 
+I am even more sure of this than I was of Trump’s defeat, but I will take even less joy in being proved right again. What lies ahead, with Hillary in control, is too horrible to contemplate. Join the debate on Facebook ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).",FAKE
+8508,The FBI's Clinton Investigation Is Wider Than Assumed,"The FBI's Clinton Investigation Is Wider Than Assumed 
+The Washington Post editors today added to their hypocrisy with three additional anti-Comey op-eds: Comey’s mistaken quest for transparency 
+I interpret that as naked fear that their candidate Hillary Clinton may now loose. That fear is justified. 
+The Wall Street Journal today added to its so far excellent reporting on the Clinton issues by revealing the much bigger story behind it: FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe - Laptop may contain thousands of messages sent to or from Mrs. Clinton’s private server (open copy here ). 
+According to the reporting, based on FBI sources, FBI agents in New York and elsewhere have been looking into the Clinton Foundation for several months. They suspect that this ""charity"" was selling political favors by then Secretary of State Clinton in exchange for donations that personally benefited the Clinton family. 
+The Justice Department blocked further aggressive investigations into the issue, allegedly because of the ongoing election. A high FBI official, Andrew McCabe, also showed disinterest in a further pursuit of the issue. McCabe's wife had just tried to get elected as state senator and had receive a campaign donation of nearly $500,000 from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton friend and at times board member of the Clinton Foundation. The FBI agents pursuing the investigation into the Clinton Foundation were not amused. 
+The separate investigation into former Congressman Weiner for sexual contacts with minors was looking for pedophile stuff on Weiner's electronic devices. It didn't find any as far as we can tell, but found some 650,000 emails archived on a laptop. Several thousand of these emails were sent or received by Weiner's spouse, the intimate Clinton aide Huma Abedin. They came through Clinton's private email server. At least some of these thousands of emails are likely copies of those that were deleted from Clinton's server when the (separate) investigation into it started. They may be evidence that Clinton sent and received classified documents through her unsecured system. Some of these emails may also contain serious dirt related to the Clinton Foundation. 
+Thus we have three ongoing FBI investigations: into Clinton's private email-server used illegally for official State Department business; into the Clinton Foundation and its role in peddling political influence in exchange for donations; into the personal conduct of Anthony Weiner. 
+Additional investigations that may come up are on: the mixing of donations to the Clinton Foundation and personal compensation for Bill Clinton for holding highly paid speeches; for profit activities by the group of people running Bill Clinton's businesses as well as the Clinton Foundation financing; inappropriate hindering of the FBI investigations by the Justice Department and/or by McCabe. 
+With such a list of potentially very serious scandals pending it is highly understandable that FBI director Comey went public and did not follow the advice from the Justice Department to pursue these issues only on a reduced level. It would have been political suicide to try to keep this silent. Way too many FBI agents eager to pursue these case were in the known and would have talked, as they do now, to the media. 
+If Clinton gets elected she will be hampered by these scandals for the next two years. The Republicans in Congress will jump on these issues as soon as possible. There will be endless hearings with large media coverage. The only question is when the first attempts at an impeachment process will be made - before or after she moves back into the White House. She and her family may be better off with her losing the campaign. Posted by b on October 31, 2016 at 03:19 PM | Permalink",FAKE
+63,White people have a race — but everyone flips out when we talk about it,"As far as Lee Bebout was concerned, his Arizona State University course, US Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness, was off to a good start. A multiracial, politically diverse group of undergraduates was enrolled. He’d prepared a syllabus and was ready to lead them in seminar-style discussions, assigning basic readings and weekly papers on the history of race in America and other topics.
+
+But the class had met exactly once in the beginning of the 2015 spring semester, when news of it — or its title, at least — spread past campus. Bebout was at lunch with his wife in January when a producer for a conservative radio show reached out to book an interview about the course. Next, Fox News wanted to talk.
+
+""I thought, ‘Oh god, this might not be a good thing,'"" Bebout, who tends to talk about the controversy in bemused understatements, remembers.
+
+Then came the hate mail. Lots of it. More than one message commanded the 38-year-old professor, who is white, to ""go live in Africa."" The outrage reached a fever pitch that transcended the everyday internet trolling that goes hand in hand with just about any news that relates to race.
+
+""Things got obviously weird,"" he says, ""when white supremacist groups came to my neighborhood.""
+
+It was more than weird — it was scary. He received death threats. All for daring to talk about whiteness.
+
+The people campaigning against the course were incensed at what they understood to be an entire semester dedicated to slamming white people. But the Problem of Whiteness wasn't designed to convince students that white people are a problem. The negative language in the course's title was simply a nod to how tough it can be to talk (or even think) about what it means to be white, when white is so deeply etched in the minds of many Americans as a synonym for ""raceless"" or ""neutral."" The reaction to the course seemed to prove this thesis.
+
+Bebout, then an assistant professor of English (the school stood behind him, and he's since received tenure and is a full professor) had previously taught courses like Transborder Chicano Literature and American Ethnic Literature. He says he created the Problem of Whiteness for practical reasons: ""I can study Chicano studies, I can do critical race theory to some degree, but without understanding whiteness, it felt like there was this big gap that I wasn't able to understand in the field.""
+
+In other words, you really have to understand the idea of whiteness to even begin to talk about race in America. As Columbia University historian Barbara J. Fields told the producers of PBS's series Race: The Power of An Illusion, it was self-identified white Americans of European descent who ""invented race during the era of the American Revolution as a way of resolving the contradiction between a natural right to freedom and the fact of slavery."" Slavery is over, but whiteness remains the identity against which ethnic groups are compared and the identity that racism protects.
+
+You really have to understand the idea of whiteness to even begin to talk about race in America
+
+One white teenager profiled in the new MTV documentary White People put it in plain language: ""White is the default. It's the default race."" That film, which premiered July 22, is a high-profile exploration how young white people perceive their racial identity in a country that's more ethnically diverse by the year, and where they stand to be outnumbered by people who identify as something other than white by 2042.
+
+It's not the first recent effort of its kind. Last year, an interactive film project, The Whiteness Project, gave a platform to the unfiltered views of white Americans, who answered questions like, ""Can you describe any benefits your receive from being white?""
+
+In June, after NAACP official Rachel Dolezal was exposed for going to incredible lengths to distance herself from the white identity she was born with and ""pass"" as black, and white supremacist Dylann Roof was arrested for a deadly attack on a predominately black Charleston, South Carolina, church, the New York Times Sunday Review asked, ""What Is Whiteness""?
+
+The idea that whiteness is deserving of scrutiny is unfailingly and uniquely controversial. Many fret that contemplating what it means to be white is no more than a setup to make white Americans feel ""ashamed,"" as one disgruntled father of a teen featured in White People complains. Others worry that this focus distracts from the plight of members of racial minority groups, or that it irresponsibly offers a new platform to old racist views, without providing sufficient context or correction.
+
+But what's clear is that the days of pretending that whiteness is invisible are over. The turmoil surrounding it is just one of the growing pains of a country that's rapidly changing and struggling to rethink old ways of talking about and analyzing race.
+
+One reason Bebout didn't fully anticipate the intense backlash against his course is that the topic wasn't revolutionary. Examining what whiteness is — analyzing it as a race, a culture, and a concept that has fueled racism — isn't new, particularly in academia.
+
+Bebout's assigned reading list included books that had been around for years: The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998), Critical Race Theory (1996), The Everyday Language of White Racism (2008), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), and more. Bebout points to James Baldwin's introduction to The Price of the Ticket, written in 1985. Tim Wise wrote White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son in 2005.
+
+And contemplating what it means to be white goes back even further than these contemporary texts, to the late 19th century and early 20th century writing of thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois. Attention to whiteness has had more practical moments, too, like in the curricula of the freedom schools of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when, as Bebout puts it, ""a lot of black activists were saying, ‘Okay, we need to understand social conditioning of white people.'""
+
+In 1988 came Peggy McIntosh's essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, anchored by a 50-item list of small benefits that white Americans enjoy every day — like ""I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race,"" ""I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair,"" and ""I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me."" Still widely considered the simplest, go-to explanation of ""white privilege"" — which is fast becoming a household term —  it set off a surge of interest in whiteness studies scholarship in the 1990s that's since ebbed and flowed, but has never been a secret.
+
+In recent years, though, something has changed. Energy around the idea that white people have a race and a stake in conversations about race and racism has, very clumsily, begun to go mainstream.
+
+""Controversy about this spikes every five or 10 years. The difference is now we have the internet,"" Bebout says.
+
+This development means the topic has emerged from its cozy, nuance-friendly place in academic and progressive circles. In the hands of the public — sharing articles, offering reactions on Twitter, and typing paragraphs in comment sections — it's simultaneously been treated with skepticism, infused with new life, and violently garbled.
+
+In MTV's White People, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas travels the country to interview a cross-section of young, white Americans: teachers at a predominantly Native American elementary school, a kid from an all-white town who attends a historically black college, a recent high school graduate who frets that she's missed out on scholarships because of her race, and the leader of a workshop on white privilege. Their narratives are supplemented by interviews with experts, and statistics and charts about demographics and attitudes that flash across the screen.
+
+The point? ""We cannot have an honest and real conversation about race in America if we can't talk about what being white means in America,"" Vargas told the LA Times in a pre-premiere interview.
+
+That concept sounds straightforward enough, but it hasn't been easy to digest.
+
+In part due to the provocative language of an initial casting call that asked potential subjects, ""Are you being discriminated against for being white?"" and, ""Are you being made to feel guilty because you're white?"" in addition to, ""Is something making you question the advantages you've had as a white person?"" and the release of a trailer that featured white subjects' unfiltered musings (""You say the wrong thing, and suddenly you're a racist""), the film was met with dread.
+
+Anticipatory critiques rolled in. There was knee-jerk negativity from the usual — often conservative — suspects who resist most any conversation about race, and who seem to sniff out that scrutiny of whiteness might lead to thinking critically about racism in America in a way that clashes with their ideology. (They're right: It often does.)
+
+Rush Limbaugh, for example, dismissed Vargas as a ""a renowned illegal immigrant"" and then, honing in on the use of the term ""white privilege"" in the trailer, offered his conservative listeners an ominous description of the film, whose potential damage, he seemed to argue, had been underdiscussed.
+
+But the disapproval runs deeper and is more complicated than that. Mention ""whiteness"" as an area of study, and some will recoil at the assumption that it's code for ""white supremacy,"" as in the antagonistic ""White History Month"" campaigns that tend to crop up as pushback against African American History Month and what critics see as out-of-control multiculturalism. From others, it will elicit eye rolls in anticipation of petty complaints about imagined hardships and reverse racism.
+
+""I can't tell if this is actually supposed to be funny or serious but it's kinda hard not to laugh when a white dude exclaims, ""You say the wrong thing and suddenly you are racist!"" before the words ""WHITE FRUSTRATION"" wrote Kristen Yoonsoo Kim for Complex.
+
+""The white people featured in the documentary come from all walks of life, but they have one thing in common: They all seem like a bunch of whiny white people,"" wrote Yesha Callahan of the African-American news site the Root.
+
+The film has also been criticized by those who saw it in its entirety and thought its aims were worthy but worried that it fell short at times, presenting some white subjects' unsophisticated attitudes and statements without sufficiently challenging their premises. In a conversation between Slate TV critic Willa Paskin and staff writer Aisha Harris, the two agreed that it would make an insufficient teaching tool. Paskin dubbed it a ""pretty great idea for a documentary that was a little too remedial with and gentle on, well, white people."" Harris agreed, noting, ""But we spend so little time with each of them, and the conversations are edited so heavily, that it always felt rushed. ""
+
+It's true, White People is short — under an hour long — and it was heavier on feelings than on history or scholarship of American racism. But it was, after all, made for MTV. And despite the short viewer attention span that it seemed to anticipate, it managed to offer some instruction, dispelling the myth that white students are at a disadvantage when it comes to college scholarships, criticizing colorblindness as a tool for combating racism, and even giving viewers a peek into an actual classroom lesson on white privilege.
+
+And with this topic, even a flawless production would have had to contend with a different issue: not hostility to the message, but disinterest. Some members of the main group that must buy into analysis of whiteness for it to work — white Americans themselves — simply don't see the appeal of scrutinizing their own racial identity. And it's fair to ask: If they don't have an academic interest like Bebout's, what's in it for them?  As Nell Irvin Painter, a professor of history at Princeton University and the author of The History of White People, wrote for the New York Times, whiteness is often perceived as being ""on toggle switch between ‘bland nothingness' and ‘racist hatred,' neither of which is particularly appealing.""
+
+""Whenever the words ‘whiteness' or ‘white privilege' get uttered by nonwhite people, people's reflexes go all the way up,"" Vargas told BuzzFeed News in November 2014, anticipating reactions to the documentary.
+
+""White people think race is something outside themselves, and they don't consider themselves a race""
+
+Perhaps he was primed after the response to The Whiteness Project, the interactive investigation designed to explore how Americans who identify as white think about and experience their ethnicity. The project elicited similar reactions the moment the series of video interviews in which residents of Buffalo, New York, responded to questions like, ""What does it mean to be white?"" hit the internet.
+
+""White people think race is something outside themselves, and they don't consider themselves a race,"" Whitney Dow, the 53-year-old filmmaker behind the project, said, echoing a common talking point among people campaigning for attention to whiteness.
+
+In many cases, his interviews made his point for him, with subjects seemingly wanting to weigh in on anything but whiteness, railing against diversity or affirmative action in responses like, ""I just don't buy into the nonsense about discrimination,"" and, ""Because slavery happened, does that mean we owe black people something?""
+
+Dow said the people who initially criticized the concept made up two main groups. ""One is from the right, on the conservative side, who say, ‘Why are you stirring something up? Everybody needs to forget about race and stop talking about it. We just need to move on.' The other side is from the left, who are saying, ‘You're just another white guy who won't let go of the microphone. You're putting all this stuff out here that's incredibly wounding for us to hear, and it's really, really outrageous what you're up to.'""
+
+Dow ultimately got to explain the project's intended message — mostly, that white people do have a racial identity, and that it almost never gets any serious attention — in a series of interviews (including this one, with Vox). He said plenty of others looked past the often abrasive — and, yes, racist — statements of the interviewees to glean larger lesson of the project. While he says the intended audience of the project was his fellow white people, one of his favorite examples of a positive response is from a black woman who he said told him, ""It was incredibly cathartic and relieving to see that white people are grappling with the same thing, that they feel like their whiteness is somehow defined in opposition of blackness. Seeing that we're grappling with the same things gave me some sort of inner peace.""
+
+But the whiteness trend is not just fodder for films and internet debates. It's gaining a foothold in American culture — the real-life, in-person kind.
+
+New York City's private Fieldston Lower School made headlines in May for a new program that splits up kids, starting in third grade, into racial ""affinity groups"" where they are encouraged to have frank conversations about their identities and experiences, and then reunite for a curriculum designed to ""foster interracial empathy.""
+
+What makes the program unique is that it isn't just for the black, Latino, and Asian students. White students have their own group, too — and participation is mandatory. Mariama Richards, the school administrator behind the program, told New York magazine's Lisa Miller that when other schools have affinity groups, ""they send the white kids to recess."" But true integration, she said, ""doesn't happen if only half the people are talking about it.
+
+""What I am suggesting is that we all have skin in the game. I'm suggesting that we all need to be involved in this conversation,"" Richards said.
+
+That idea — that white people have an identity worth thinking about, and a natural stake in tackling racism — is taking hold.
+
+While the Fieldston kids don't have any more of a choice in participating in their groundbreaking, mandatory program than they do in studying math or English, the adults in one Boston organization do, and they're coming in droves.
+
+This is the description for potential members of Meetup.com's Boston Knapsack Anti-Racism Group, just one of the many groups around the country for and by white people who are committed to racial justice.
+
+Typical events include ""Book group: Reproducing Racism — How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage"" and ""Strategies for Moving White People Into Racial Justice."" The group's name is a nod to Mcintosh's ""Invisible Knapsack"" essay on white privilege.
+
+According to Michael Martin, a black 28-year-old software engineer from Springfield, Massachusetts, who is one of the largely white (he guesses about 60 to 70 percent) group's seven organizers, membership has ""exploded"" in the months since Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri, drew national attention to racially biased policing and larger issues of racial inequality. A lot of white Bostonians wanted to know where they fit into the solutions.
+
+""Once everything happened, there was an immediate response,"" he said.
+
+The group now reports about 100 active members. Martin says they show up with varying degrees of literacy about racism, but with an earnest interest in combating it — and not in a kumbaya, colorblind, ""I don't see race"" sense, at least if he has anything to say about it. He considers it his responsibility, as one of the leaders and one of a handful of black members, to keep conversations on track by reminding members that American racism and white supremacy are bigger than one-on-one interactions. ""We never let anyone get out of any of our space thinking that there isn't systemic racism that's happening,"" he said.
+
+Martin is not surprised by the recent surge of interest in the group. ""I definitely think there is a cultural moment"" surrounding whiteness and white Americans' role in fighting racism, he said. ""I think it needs to be pulled more and more out of academia. This is something that's affecting people whether they have a chance to go to a four-year university or not, and we need to have a conversation about it.""
+
+Scrutinizing what it means to be white in America is new, and it's hard. There's the fact that so many people have solidified the view that talking about race is bad or that ignoring the labels we all use is the best way to address it. But even once you get past that, there's a cognitive struggle even among people with the best intentions and most enthusiasm to grasp that ""whiteness is not the planet all the other planets revolve around.""
+
+""I didn't see the value in thinking about whiteness and why that would be important — I wanted to talk to people who were different than I was""
+
+That's how Drew Philp, the 29-year-old author of a forthcoming book expanding on an BuzzFeed essay that grappled with his role as a white man moving into Detroit, describes the concept.
+
+But he remembers when he didn't get it. As a student at the University of Michigan in 2007 he was selected to participate in the school's Program for Intergroup Relations — and part of his role was to facilitate a class for his peers.
+
+He was not excited. ""Initially I was very resistant to it, personally,"" he said. ""It was an idea I'd never been exposed to in any manner. I felt maybe that I was being cheated of some experience, and I didn't see the value in thinking about whiteness and why that would be important — I wanted to talk to people who were different than I was.""
+
+He's now come all the way around to appreciate whiteness studies, but the memory of his college experience means he understands people who don't.
+
+""A new idea making its way through the culture is difficult in general, and people, myself in included, are trained in a lot of ways when it comes to race. Millennials are the first generation when it's been unacceptable to be an overt racist in all public spheres. So talking about whiteness triggers folks. [They worry], ‘Maybe we're going to make a wrong step.'""
+
+He hasn't held back when it comes to publicly criticizing these missteps, though. In 2014, as a film critic for the Detroit Metro Times, he penned a scathing review of a White People, a stage production by Brooklyn playwright J. T. Roger, arguing that while ""the conversation around whiteness is sorely needed,"" this particular piece of art went awry, with characters who ""are all defined, not by their whiteness as something specific and definable, but by their descriptions of people of color and violent interactions with other races.""
+
+He slammed the show with an astronomy metaphor: ""White People looks at the gravity and the satellite moons, forgetting the star. Everything but white people.""
+
+It's a common sentiment. Matt Johnson, who penned Loving Day, a novel in which a biracial protagonist navigates questions or race, color, and identity — and who's written about his own biracial identity — recently tweeted a concise take on this dilemma: ""Whiteness can't take being focused on. Whiteness only accepts being the lens that focuses.""
+
+That could partly explain why Bebout is used to people recoiling and resisting the concept of his course. His tactic is to diffuse their anxiety with a joke (Yes, I teach about how white people are awful), and then, once they're disarmed, deliver a well-honed elevator pitch that tells a more accurate story: ""Look, what I'm interested in is how white people have experienced race in the United States, and they have not necessarily experienced it the same ways as people of color. They experience it by not talking about it or not seeing it or talking about race in a very coded way. Or talking about race in one way at home and another way in public. I'm interested in how white folks experience race and how that experiencing of race is informed by and also reinforces racial inequality.""
+
+He makes the topic, which has proven to be so complicated, sound simple.
+
+And he'll be teaching it again next semester.",REAL
+2323,N.J. Gov. Christie walks a fine line on gay marriage,"Governor's position on gay marriage may reflect and effort to preserve opportunity to run for president in 2016
+
+As activists push states to recognize gay marriages, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — conservative Republican governor in a blue state and a 2016 presidential possibility — is walking a fine line between two electorates and two elections.
+
+Christie vetoed same-sex marriage legislation last year and severely criticized the Supreme Court's decision striking down a ban on federal rights for same-sex married couples. At the same time, he is ""adamant'' that same-sex couples deserve equal legal protection, wants a referendum on gay marriage, and vows to abide by a same-sex marriage law if the voters approve it.
+
+He's tiptoeing between constituencies. First are the voters of New Jersey: polls show they favor same-sex marriage, and Christie wants them to reelect him in November by a big margin. Then there are Republican caucus-goers in Iowa. Christie needs their backing if he runs for president in 2016; in 2012, evangelical conservatives, who generally oppose gay marriage, made up 57% of Republican caucusgoers in the state, according to exit polls.
+
+And there is a third group of voters to think about: swing voters across the nation, who might go for a Republican presidential nominee who is sufficiently centrist.
+
+To appeal to those voters, Christie ""will want to not be perceived to be as far right as many Republicans are,'' says David Boaz of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. ""That's a lot of tightropes to walk.''
+
+Christie, who is Roman Catholic, has said he does not believe being gay is a choice, nor is it a sin, and that he has gay friends who argue the issue with him. Marriage, he said last year on CNN, is ""special and unique in society.'' He followed his veto in of the gay-marriage bill in February 2012 with a call for a statewide referendum on whether to allow same-sex marriage by constitutional amendment.
+
+""When you want to change the core of a 2,000 year-old institution, the way to do that is to put it in front of the voters,'' he told reporters July 2.
+
+A referendum would allow same-sex marriage to pass in New Jersey without his fingerprints — or as he said at a town-hall-style meeting last month: ""I don't have to compromise my principles that I believe in and someone else doesn't have to compromise theirs.''
+
+Christie is in the same position as his party. The Republican platform says marriage is only for couples of different sexes, but Chairman Reince Priebus has said that the Republican Party should be open to those who favor same-sex marriage. ""I don't believe we need to act like Old Testament heretics,"" he told USA TODAY in March. Instead, Republicans ""have to strike a balance between principle and grace and respect.''
+
+Garden State Equality, a leading advocate for same-sex marriage in New Jersey, opposes a referendum saying civil rights should not be on the ballot. ""It should never be up to the majority to vote on the rights of the minority,'' spokesman T.J. Helmstetter said.
+
+Same-sex marriage advocates are now lobbying New Jersey legislators to override Christie's veto before the end of the year, when the window to do so expires. Christie is too powerful a party leader to let that happen, says Ben Dworkin, director of Rider University's Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics.
+
+""I can't envision a situation where the Republican votes that are needed to get the two-thirds override would come, given this administration's history,'' Dworkin says. ""The Christie administration sees no reason why any Republican should really ever override a Republican governor. That's their logic, so I'd be shocked if it ever got to happen.""
+
+Last year, Christie nominated a gay judge (a Republican) to the state Supreme Court, a first for the state. Last month, when the Supreme Court ruled on Defense of Marriage Act, he called it ""insulting"" to the Congress and president which passed the law.
+
+Troy Stevenson, executive director of Garden State Equality, said, ""I don't like to pretend I can get inside the mind of the governor, but I think the closer we get to him having future political ambitions the more staunch his opposition gets to marriage equality.""
+
+But Jimmy LaSalvia, a founder of GOProud, a Republican gay-rights group that favors same-sex marriage, gives Christie credit for not trying to change the subject. ""He's one Republican who doesn't say 'I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. We need jobs and the economy is hurting,''' says LaSalvia, who now works with the ACLU trying to pass same-sex marriage state by state. ""He's willing to talk through the issue in a way that no other Republican has the balls to do.''
+
+Christie has to make his political calculus now, even though ""he doesn't know how much public opinion will change between now and 2016,'' Boaz says. ""Will people be more liberal then? Is the country? Yes. But the Republican primary electorate, maybe not so much.''
+
+Public opinion on gay marriage has changed rapidly. Four years ago, 37% of Americans favored same-sex marrage. Now, 51% do, according to the Pew Research Center.
+
+Iowa and New Hampshire, traditionally the first states to hold presidential nominating contests, both allow same-sex marriage – which could mean voters there no longer focus on it as an issue. ""Those people in those states have been living with (same-sex marriage) for a while,'' LaSalvia says. ""I don't think any of us knows how the issue is going to play in 2016 because it's moving so fast.'' An October poll sponsored by the Iowa Republican, a news site, showed Iowans favor gay marriage 49% to 42%.
+
+Iowa has allowed gays to marry since a 2009 state Supreme Court decision – and voters remain conflicted about it, says pollster Ann Selzer, who conducts the Iowa Poll for the Des Moines Register, ""You ask them on the street and nobody can say that their lives have been affected. But you ask them if they like it and they don't.'' In a poll taken a month after the 2012 caucuses, 64% of Republicans favored a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.",REAL
+2367,Democrats Push to Prevent Gun Sales to Terror-list Suspects,"Congressional Democrats are trying to build support for an effort to bar gun purchases by terror suspects, hoping to take advantage of the same public anxieties about security that gave Republicans a ringing House victory.
+
+The Democratic push seems likely to fall victim to opposition from the National Rifle Association and congressional gun-rights backers, chiefly Republicans, who have smothered firearms curbs for years. If the Republicans who control Congress block votes on the proposal, Democrats hope to profit politically by winning sympathy from angry voters.
+
+""By leaving this terrorist loophole open, Republicans are leaving every community in America vulnerable to attacks by terrorists armed with assault rifles and explosives purchased legally, in broad daylight,"" Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday in a written statement.
+
+The bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would have the attorney general compile names of known and suspected terrorists, likely drawing from huge lists the government already keeps. Federally licensed gun dealers would be barred from selling firearms to people on that list if government officials believed they planned to use the weapons for terrorism.
+
+Gun dealers are prohibited from selling to 10 categories of people, including many convicted criminals or those with severe mentally illness.
+
+But people appearing on the government's terror watch lists — including those kept off from airlines — are not automatically disqualified from buying weapons from gun dealers. The FBI is notified when a background check for the purchase of firearms or explosives generates a match with the watch list, and agents often use that information to step up surveillance on suspects.
+
+By law, people can try persuading the Justice Department to remove their names from terror lists or can file lawsuits challenging their inclusion. The lists are overwhelmingly composed of foreigners.
+
+Between 2004 and 2014, people on one terror watch list underwent background checks to buy guns 2,233 times and were allowed to make the purchase 91 percent of the time, according to a March report by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative agency of Congress.
+
+NRA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker noted that there have been numerous instances of innocent people mistakenly added to terror lists. She also accused Democrats of trying to take advantage of heightened public alarm following last week's attacks in Paris, which claimed at least 130 lives and for which the Islamic State, which has also threatened the U.S., has claimed responsibility.
+
+""It is appalling that anti-gun politicians are exploiting the Paris terrorist attacks to push their gun-control agenda and distract from President Obama's failed foreign policy,"" Baker said.
+
+Feinstein's measure echoes legislation that the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., proposed repeatedly over the last decade and that Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., has long pushed. None of those measures has ever received a vote.
+
+Feinstein introduced her bill in February. But last week's mass killings in Paris have injected new life into terrorism and public safety as top-tier political issues.
+
+Just Thursday, Republicans took advantage of voters' security jitters and muscled legislation through the House preventing Syrian and Iraqi refugees from entering the U.S. until the administration tightens restrictions on their entry. Forty-seven Democrats voted for the bill, ignoring a veto threat by President Barack Obama, who said the current screening system is strong and accused Republicans of playing on panicked voters.
+
+House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., did not respond directly when asked Thursday if he favored barring people on terror lists from buying guns. ""We are just beginning this process of reassessing all of our security stances,"" he said.
+
+Donald Stewart, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said McConnell has not said whether he would be open to a vote on Feinstein's bill.
+
+But opposition from Republicans and some Democrats to curbing firearms runs deep, and such legislation would require support from 60 of the 100 senators. Democrats could not attain that margin even when they had a Senate majority in the months after the 2012 massacre of 20 first-graders and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut.
+
+Though the Senate had showdown votes on gun curbs in early 2013, it did not revisit the issue as the 2014 elections approached and Reid opted to protect vulnerable Democrats from potentially angering constituents.
+
+The GOP-run House has held no votes on major gun control measures since the Newtown killings.
+
+Feinstein's bill isn't the only gun-related measure Democrats may pursue. A measure by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., would bar gun sales to foreigners in the U.S. from the 38 countries from which visitors need not have visas.",REAL
+4259,"Contests in South Carolina, Nevada to test the appeal of the outsiders","The strength of anti-establishment fervor in the 2016 president campaign faces a twin test Saturday, with Donald Trump favored to win the Republican primary in the crucial state of South Carolina and Sen. Bernie Sanders battling Hillary Clinton for supremacy in the Democratic caucuses in Nevada.
+
+Establishment Republicans have yet to fully coalesce around an alternative to Trump, though Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who stumbled in New Hampshire, hopes to rebound in Saturday’s balloting in South Carolina and cement himself in that role.
+
+Clinton still enjoys strong support from the Democratic establishment, and her goal in Nevada is to blunt the momentum ­Sanders acquired from a victory in New Hampshire and then move on next week to South Carolina, where she enjoys broad support from African Americans.
+
+A big Trump victory in the ­Palmetto State would stamp him clearly as the Republican front-runner, while a Sanders win in Nevada would raise more questions about Clinton’s appeal and add to the pressure on her to score a big victory in South Carolina.
+
+All polls in South Carolina show Trump leading, though they differ over the size of his margin ahead of the next two candidates, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rubio. In Nevada, where polls are scarcer, Sanders and Clinton appear to be in a dead heat. The Vermont senator has appealed to younger Hispanics to support his candidacy in an effort to counter claims that he cannot attract minority votes.
+
+South Carolina’s Republican primary has a history of identifying the eventual nominee and often embracing the establishment’s choice of candidates. That pattern was broken four years ago when former House speaker Newt Gingrich handily defeated Mitt Romney. Trump threatens to do the same with a victory Saturday, which would further unsettle party regulars.
+
+This weekend marks one of the few times when the Democratic and Republican calendars diverge. Republicans will hold caucuses in Nevada on Tuesday, and Democrats will have their primary in South Carolina on Feb. 27.
+
+[In S.C., the GOP contest looks more and more like a three-man race]
+
+As the leading outsiders in the presidential race, Trump and Sanders continue to underscore the frustrations with politics as usual on both the left and­ right. Trump has tapped anti-immigration sentiment in particular and has drawn energy from working-class white voters. ­Sanders has energized younger voters as part of a grass-roots constituency that has given his candidacy surprising strength.
+
+“There is a shift in the establishment and thinking of Republicans in South Carolina from mainstream, center-right Republicans to angry, hard-right Republicans,” said Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman who is not aligned with any candidate. “It’s a monumental shift against the pillars of our society: our government and our elected officials.”
+
+That reality has put establishment candidates on the defensive in South Carolina, and none more so than former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Once the nominal front-runner for the GOP nomination, Bush could find his candidacy in serious jeopardy if he finishes poorly Saturday, as some polls suggest. The other establishment candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, is hoping for a finish just strong enough to justify his focus on the March 8 Michigan primary as his best hope for a victory.
+
+The tone of the South Carolina campaign has been overwhelmingly negative, and not only because of the millions of dollars in attack ads that flooded television stations in the final week. The candidates themselves have carried on an acrid dialogue in which the words “liar” and “lying” have been injected into campaign rhetoric at a volume rarely seen even in a state known for brutal intra­party contests.
+
+[Liar, liar: A charged word is now common in the GOP race]
+
+In the last hours before the primary, Trump sought to brush off two recent controversies — one involving former president George W. Bush, whom Trump accused of lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, and the other with Pope Francis, who branded the New York billionaire as un-Christian for his views on immigration.
+
+During a town hall meeting hosted by CNN on Thursday night, Trump softened his tone toward the pontiff and equivocated when pressed by a voter about whether he truly believed that Bush had lied before launching the invasion.
+
+But Trump opened up a new line of attack Friday, calling on supporters to boycott Apple, which has refused requests from the federal government to help unlock an iPhone that was carried by one of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorists.
+
+Rubio spent Friday flying around the state, accompanied by a trio of leading South Carolina Republicans who have endorsed him: Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott and Rep. Trey Gowdy. He pressed his argument that he alone among the candidates can unify the party.
+
+But Rubio stressed that would not be enough to win a general election. “We can’t just unite,” he said. “We also have to grow.” In an effort to amplify the message that Rubio represents the future of a more diverse party, Haley described the tableau of a Cuban American senator, African American senator, Indian American governor and white member of Congress as “what the new conservative movement looks like, because it looks like a Benetton commercial.”
+
+Cruz, meanwhile, appeared at a boisterous midday rally in Charleston, where he was interviewed by Fox News anchor Sean Hannity and joined by three conservative endorsers of his own: Rep. Mark Sanford, a former governor here who had not previously declared his support; Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” fame; and David Limbaugh, brother of radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
+
+Cruz told the crowd that the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia leaves the high court — and with it many conservative principles — “hanging in the balance.”
+
+He said that before they cast votes they should ask, “Who do we know beyond a shadow of a doubt will nominate and fight to confirm principled constitutionalists who will protect the Bill of Rights?”
+
+Meanwhile, Bush brought in family reinforcements for a final-hours appeal to South Carolinians, campaigning alongside his mother, Barbara Bush. Sixteen years ago, South Carolina resurrected the campaign of George W. Bush after a loss in New Hampshire, and brother Jeb Bush hopes voters will give him a better-than-expected result Saturday.
+
+Trump is favored to win here, but critics say that a disappointing finish could suggest weakness ahead of a round of Southern primaries on March 1. The impact of his recent feud with the pope and his attacks on George W. Bush will be measured against trend lines of late-deciding voters.
+
+Trump faces persistent doubts about whether he has enough supporters to withstand a one-on-one contest in which mainstream conservatives are consolidated behind another candidate.
+
+Katie Packer, who runs an anti-Trump super PAC and was deputy campaign manager for Romney’s 2012 campaign, said she believes South Carolina has the potential to reframe the race as a three-person contest between Trump, Cruz and Rubio.
+
+“There’s still some iterations to be had,” she said. “Everybody wants to rush for this race to be over. . . . We have to be patient and let the voters decide.”
+
+That is a view held by many in the party who fear the impact in November on Republican candidates in other races if Trump is the nominee.
+
+For Clinton, Nevada was supposed to be where months of painstaking grass-roots organizing, plus goodwill in minority communities, would put a stop to Sanders’s momentum after the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, far less diverse states.
+
+Instead, in an effort to help stanch the bleeding of minority votes, especially from Latinos, Clinton’s surrogates have turned sharply to Sanders’s record on immigration issues, which they said has been checkered by votes in favor of anti-immigration bills and a vote against comprehensive immigration reform in 2007.
+
+Clinton’s campaign has been playing down the importance of the Nevada vote in calls and other discussions with donors and key political supporters. The caucus format plays to Sanders’s grass-roots strengths, and the likely electorate is far less diverse than the state population as a whole, Clinton aides have told donors since her 22-point defeat in New Hampshire.
+
+To emphasize her focus on South Carolina, Clinton received a boost Friday when the influential Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) offered his support. “I believe that the future of the Democratic Party and the United States of America will be best served with the experience and know-how of Hillary Clinton as our 45th president,” Clyburn said.
+
+At a late-morning stop in Elko, Nev., Sanders urged a crowd of 575 people packed into a high school gym to participate in Saturday’s caucuses.
+
+“I hope we have a huge — no, yuuuugge — turnout,” Sanders said, playfully stretching out the word in an acknowledgment of how his Brooklyn accent is parodied on “Saturday Night Live” and elsewhere now that he is a national figure.
+
+Sanders’s advisers argue that his message is resonating here in no small part because Nevada was hit hard during the financial crisis and is still feeling the hangover.
+
+“No state more than Nevada understands the impact of Wall Street’s greed and illegal behavior,” Sanders told reporters Thursday en route from Washington to Las Vegas.
+
+Phillip reported from Las Vegas and DelReal from Greenville, S.C. Anne Gearan in Washington; Jenna Johnson in North Charleston, S.C.; Sean Sullivan and Ed O’Keefe in Greenville; John Wagner in Elko, Nev.; Robert Costa in Charleston; and Philip Rucker in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.",REAL
+4972,Donald Trump Call For Immediate Shutdown of Clinton Foundation,"Donald Trump called this morning for the Clinton Foundation to be ""shut down immediately,"" describing it as ""the most corrupt enterprise in political history"" in a Facebook post.
+
+""Hillary Clinton is the defender of the corrupt and rigged status quo,"" Trump wrote. ""The Clintons have spent decades as insiders lining their own pockets and taking care of donors instead of the American people.""
+
+Over the weekend, the Clinton campaign insisted the Clinton Foundation would stop accepting donations from foreign countries. They did not explain why such a suspension did not happen when Clinton served as secretary of state.
+
+Critics have pointed to a number of State Department-facilitated deals that involved foreign parties that had made donations to the Clinton Foundation. The 'Clinton system' involves selling access to bad guys.
+
+""What they were doing during Crooked Hillary's time as Secretary of State was wrong then, and it is wrong now,"" Trump wrote.
+
+Earlier this year, the FBI reportedly wanted to open an investigation of the Clinton Foundation after receiving an alert from a bank about suspicious activity by a foreign Clinton Foundation donor, but the Department of Justice (DOJ) nixed it, claiming their own investigation after the book Clinton Cash (now a documentary)was released could not substantiate those allegations the DOJ focused on.",REAL
+294,Louie Gohmert For House Speaker?,"WASHINGTON -- Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) launched a long-shot campaign Sunday for speaker of the House of Representatives, in the latest episode of the conservative rebellion against current Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).
+
+House members are set to vote for their next speaker on Tuesday, with Boehner heavily favored to win. Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) said Saturday that he is willing to serve as an alternative to Boehner. In addition, Reps. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) have stated that they will oppose Boehner's re-election.
+
+Gohmert's latest objection to Boehner -- although certainly not his only one -- was the speaker's decision to pass the so-called ""cromnibus"" spending bill in December without including a measure to block President Barack Obama's executive actions on immigration.
+
+""It was a terrible strategy and it follows a number of years of broken promises,"" Gohmert said on ""Fox & Friends"" while announcing his candidacy. ""It's time for a change.""
+
+The congressman said that if he were elected speaker, he would fight to end ""amnesty"" for immigrants and Obamacare. He added that he would make sure members got a voice, going so far as to imply Boehner was acting like a ""dictator.""
+
+""We will go through regular committee process so everybody, every representative from both parties, will have a chance to participate in the process and not have a dictator running things, deciding who's the chairman, who gets what committee, what bills come to the floor,"" Gohmert said.
+
+He noted that it would take 29 conservatives voting against Boehner to bring the speakership up for secondary votes, which would be the first step toward eventually electing another Republican as speaker. Only 12 Republicans voted against Boehner for the position in 2013, including Gohmert, Yoho, Bridenstine and Massie.",REAL
+2657,Secretary of Labor Tom Perez on how to fight for social change,"In 2015, Vox talked to Secretary Perez about how social change happens — and the role played not just by government and activists, but by individual interactions between people, and by the slow, relentless force of demographics and history. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
+
+Perez's track record has made him something of a lightning rod for the right: when he was nominated for labor secretary, then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called him ""a crusading ideologue whose convictions lead him to believe that the law simply doesn't apply to him.""
+
+His office reflects the importance of both insiders and outsiders: the picture behind his desk is of former Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the namesake of the building where the department is headquartered, but the picture in the anteroom outside his office is of labor leader and activist Cesar Chavez.
+
+At the same time, he's a close ally of Democratic politicians; he's spent time campaigning for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primary, and is sometimes mentioned as a possible VP pick if Clinton wins the nomination.
+
+Perez has spent the majority of his career inside government, from the staff of Senator Ted Kennedy to the council of Montgomery County, Maryland. But he's always been closely aligned with activists and movements outside of the government. For a time, he was president of the board of directors of CASA de Maryland, a leading immigration advocacy group; even when he hasn't had an official title, he's worked closely with LGBT organizations, civil rights groups, and labor unions.
+
+Progressive activists haven't always loved Democratic presidents, and they certainly haven't always loved President Obama. At times they've been deeply frustrated with the president and his White House. But at least one senior administration official has remained a progressive hero throughout the entirety of Obama's presidency: Thomas Perez, who ran the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division during the president's first term and has served as secretary of labor since 2013.
+
+What role does government play in social change? Dara Lind: I think progressives feel a lot of ownership in having you here in the Perkins Building. Tom Perez: That's why her portrait is right behind my back — because she's the gold standard. Dara Lind: Over the course of your career, you've been working very closely with a lot of movements, but mostly from the inside. The big question I want an answer to is what role you think government plays in social change. Do you see this role as primarily leading public opinion and instituting things that people can then catch up to? Or is it mostly responsive to people who are already organizing on the ground and demanding that government respond? When you look at the history of any successful movement, it's always been a partnership. By partnership, I mean there are external forces at work. Also in the anatomy of every successful movement that has resulted in change, whether it's the Civil Rights Act of '64 or the Voting Rights Act of '65 or movements before that — the Fair Labor Standards Act, under FDR, for example. You look at the work of Frances Perkins leading up to the Fair Labor Standards Act, and you look at the work of the external labor movement at that point. And I talk about civil rights and labor rights; I mean, the March on Washington was a march for civil rights and a march for labor rights. Each one of those forces is indispensable to the movement. They’re all really links on a chain. And when you break a link, the chain can be broken. Dara Lind: How have you seen these kinds of partnerships play out over the course of your career? Tom Perez: We had a living-wage movement in Montgomery County, and it would not have been successful without progressive businesses, without grass-roots leadership and faith leaders, and without folks inside Montgomery County government who said, ""This is the right thing to do."" Or moving the needle on the Hate Crimes Bill, for instance — which was, for me, a 15-year odyssey. I can tell you a lot about that one, because I really did had a front-row seat on that. Who is more responsible? I'll let historians judge that. But I think I can say, fairly, that it was all of us working together. And if you didn't have the inside-government person, you wouldn't have gotten it done. What happens when activists are frustrated with their allies inside government? Dara Lind: In hindsight, throughout history, it often seems there's a partnership between inside and outside. In the moment, there can be tensions. I think both of us have seen this recently, with the immigrant rights movement and the administration leading up to the executive actions in November. Tom Perez: Oh, sure. And there were tensions in the hate-crimes bill. There was tension during the drafting: there are existing death penalty provisions, and what do you do about that? Those are fair questions. Those are important questions. The immigrant-rights movement — believe me, these are my very, very good friends. … That doesn't mean, even when you know you have shared values and shared vision, that we haven't had pitched battles. And it doesn't mean that at the end of the day we don't come out with a very clear vision of where to go forward, and sometimes you don't agree at the end. But I think we’re in a good place right now. Dara Lind: In cases where there is direct pressure on the people who are friends of the movement, when have you seen that kind of pressure be effective in spurring them to do better? When have you seen it entrench attitudes and make people feel underappreciated? Tom Perez: I consider myself a pretty passionate person, but I have always tried hard not to personalize things. In the heat of the moment, at times, that's easier said than done, so I think it's really important to keep that in mind. In every debate I had when I was at the County Council, I saw folks on the left and folks on the right who'd do this: when they disagree with you, they also disagree with who you are. They add, ""You're morally bankrupt,"" or something like that. And, you know, we just have different visions of America at times when we see things differently. One thing I learned from Senator Kennedy, and from Senator Paul Simon, and others whom I watched firsthand as a staffer, was that you can disagree without being disagreeable. You can be passionate in your views, but you've got to remember that you have got to work with folks. If you're attacking their integrity as opposed to attacking their point of view on an issue, it just makes it harder to get to the finish line. I think people understand that. But people are human. And as a result, sometimes we do things that perhaps don't move the ball forward.
+
+Dara Lind: The president’s made some substantial changes recently through executive action — on immigration, for example, or raising the minimum wage for federal contractors. There’s often a belief in DC that changing policy through the executive branch isn’t as permanent as getting it done through legislation or waiting for public opinion to come around. Do you feel that's a concern? Or do you feel that changes like this set a standard that society will then rise to meet? Tom Perez: I see them as both. When I look back on the most important civil rights developments in the last hundred years, in the top three for me would be President Truman's executive order integrating the Armed Forces. And I couldn't help but note the parallels in rhetoric with some opponents when he did that, and when we were talking about ""Don't ask, don't tell,"" — ""military readiness,"" and this and that. I had a trial down in Texas when I was prosecuting hate crimes. It was a horrible hate-crime case. I got to be good friends with the attorney for one of the defendants, and he's a World War II veteran. He said once that he grew up in the segregated South, he grew up with attitudes about African Americans, and the singular thing that changed his life was when he fought side by side with them. So I think executive action can be transformational. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, has been in place since 2012. The program applies to many of the ""DREAMers"": young unauthorized immigrants who would have qualified for legalization under the DREAM Act. Under the current DACA program, young unauthorized immigrants who meet certain criteria apply for two years of protection from deportation (it's going to be extended to three years under the new set of orders), and can get work permits once they've been ""DACAmented."" An estimated 1.2 million immigrants were initially eligible for the program, and about half of them have actually applied. Read this Vox feature for more about how well DACA has worked so far. There's no substitute for comprehensive immigration reform. DACA was transformational, but not sufficiently so. I met a DACA kid [see sidebar] yesterday down in Carolina when I was there, and she inspires me. She absolutely inspires me. But she can't get in-state tuition, and, you know, there's a ceiling for her, even though she's better off now than before. So I look at executive action and legislative action as two tools in our toolbox of expanding opportunity. How can progressives organize people who don’t have the time for political activism? Dara Lind: What are the lessons you learned while working and serving on the CASA board that you took with you when you went back to working for the government? Tom Perez: It was something that I understood intuitively as a student in the civil rights movement, but then when you live it, you see firsthand: that change happens from the bottom up. You build things from the bottom up, you organize, and that's how you effect change. And so I'm trying to bring that operating principle to our paid-leave discussion; to our skills movement; to the working families, businesses, nonprofits, faith leaders, and educators working side by side. I just talked to 400 community college presidents and trustees this morning. And we have tremendous opportunities. The wind is at our back economically. But we've got to make sure we have shared prosperity, and the long-term key to that is we need to upskill America. We need to equip Americans, workers, with the skills to compete. And the community I hear the most about this issue from is the business community. And I said to them, ""We need to build a movement around this. I dream of a day when I hear — and, more importantly, Congress hears — as often from the business community about skills as they do about trade or other issues."" If you were to commission a poll of 500 employers right now, skills would be in the top three of their priorities. But we haven't built a movement around it. We're building a movement right now around paid leave and childcare. We live in a Modern Family world, but we have these Leave It to Beaver principles that are still all too frequently in place. I mean, Rebecca, the woman who sat in the box with the first lady at the State of the Union — to put a finer point on their situation, they have two kids under the age of five, their mortgage is $1,400 a month, and their child-care bill is $1,900 a month. You can't survive like that for any long period of time. Dara Lind: The question that raises is: what happens when you have someone who's working to support a family and doesn't benefit from paid leave, or needs to work two jobs because he or she isn't being paid minimum wage — who might not have the energy to be the forces on the ground? How does it affect the ability to build a movement when the people who are most likely to benefit may not be able, or just may not be terribly motivated, to make change happen, because they’re focused on their daily lives? Tom Perez: That’s a huge question. When you look at where we were 100 years ago and you look at where we are now, there was a lot more attachment to institutions — your union, the Elks, the Eagles, bowling, your church or other place of worship. Today, there is more bowling alone. In that context, how do we build movements? I'm inspired by people like Sarita Gupta [executive director of the workers-rights advocacy group Jobs With Justice], and others, who have recognized that we can organize low-wage workers and we can partner with businesses. She's doing the same thing you and I are talking about. And she's working on behalf of exactly the cohort you described: people who understand at a basic level that their life is a struggle, that the playing field isn't level, but they don't have time to go to the rally or go to the union hall, and they may not necessarily have the wherewithal. They need help. That's the voice we have to give. That's why our work is so important. Because there are folks out there with a lot money to spend who are saying, ""I wake up every day figuring out how I can screw unions."" We’ve got to understand this: that there are folks who wake up every day who believe we get ahead in America by squelching workers’ voices, by making it harder for workers to organize and creating more top-down stuff. And I just refuse. The Gilded Age was not a golden age in America. That’s why we do what we're doing here: to service that voice. That's what gets the president out of bed every morning. These are hard battles, because the people we're fighting on behalf of are working two and three jobs. It's not realistic, oftentimes, to ask them to come down to Capitol Hill to do Hill visits.
+
+Dara Lind: On the one hand, you're saying there are people who are working against the ones you are working for. But on a historical scale, attitudes change: people who would have been opposed to integrating the Armed Forces 70 years ago aren’t opposed today. Do you think that kind of change of winning hearts and minds is inevitable? Tom Perez: Usually, I'm optimistic. I believe the moral arc of the universe bends not only toward justice but also toward those who seek to expand opportunity, rather than contract opportunity. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a big debate about whether to have free access to public education K–12. ""You're going to give out free high school degrees? You don't need that. Come on."" I suspect some of the descendants of those folks are the ones who fought Medicare 50 years later. ""Medicare,"" you know? ""You don’t need that."" There's an album you should look at: Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine. There's actually an album. I think I still have the album cover. I gave it to Diane Rehm one day because I was on her show. Not only did Reagan say Medicare would lead to socialized medicine, he said Medicare would lead to socialism in America. That's what he said in the album. And 50 years later I've met all these people. I met a guy, Ward, in Nashville who got his ACA coverage March 1 and got his liver transplant two weeks later. I met a guy, Victor, two weeks ago in Salt Lake; kidney cancer. And what they both wanted more than anything — ""You know what I want to do most now?"" they say. I'm like, ""No, what?"" I don't know what they're going to say. ""I want to work, I want to get a job again, because I was so sick I couldn't work."" It just makes me ask the question: what's in it for opponents of the ACA for Ward and Victor not to be able to work? And then they have to become a ward of the state. How is that good for the economy? How is it good for health-care delivery to have the ER be their primary care physician? How is that good on any metric of success, putting aside the moral and ethical aspects of that? So I have optimism. Because we are on the right of the facts and we are on the right side of history, and that's how the moral arc has historically bent. It doesn't bend on its own. We are talking about movements and movement building. Dara Lind: Over the course of your career, do you think there are any issues that have suffered setbacks — where you’re now fighting just to get back to where things were when you started out? Tom Perez: I'm going to Selma in a couple of weeks to commemorate Bloody Sunday and 50 years after Bloody Sunday and almost 50 years as we come up. [He looks toward a corner of his office.] I'm looking over there right now because it's John Lewis, one of my favorite people, in the photo. I find it impossible to believe that 50 years after folks fought, struggled so hard, and gave their lives in some cases, the biggest problem in the voting space is in-person voter ID fraud. That is, as Colin Powell said, ""How can a problem be so widespread and yet so undetected?"" I firmly believe we should have a pitched battle about policies. Democracy is all about having passionate debate — respectful but passionate debate. And then at the end of the day, what we should be doing is making sure everybody gets the opportunity to vote. That's why I had some friends on the left who asked me when I was in the civil rights division, ""Why do you spend so much time making sure that veterans, service members, can vote? Because don't you know they vote Republican?"" And I said, ""First of all, I don't know how they vote. Second, I don't care how they vote. And third, I'm offended by that. Because these folks are serving our country and we need to make sure everyone gets access to the ballot. I'm just thoroughly offended by that suggestion."" So we should be having this debate, and then at the end of the day we should all be working together to make it as easy as possible for eligible voters to vote. As opposed to a world in which the strategy is, ""I’ve got to make it harder for my perceived ideological foe to exercise his franchise."" By the way, you might win a short-term victory here and there, but you are swimming into an un-winnable headwind of demographics that will be a tidal wave. And it's totally inconsistent with our values as a nation.",REAL
+9853,"Wikileaks: Clinton, Podesta Agreed Not To Distribute Confidential Intel By Private Email Account","Videos Wikileaks: Clinton, Podesta Agreed Not To Distribute Confidential Intel By Private Email Account In an email released by Wikileaks, John Podesta said he was willing to discuss sensitive information with his future boss Hillary Clinton while he worked for President Obama and she was a private citizen.   In this Oct. 5, 2016, photo, Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta speaks to members of the media outside Clinton’s home in Washington. 
+As reported previously, when discussing Hillary Clinton’s email in which revealed US intel and strategy regarding the middle east, and disclosed that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were funding the Islamic State, John Podesta said he was willing to discuss sensitive information with his future boss Hillary Clinton while he worked for President Obama and she was a private citizen in August 2014, but he knew better than to send the intel over Clinton’s private server from his Gmail account, emails released Thursday by WikiLeaks show. 
+In the exchange which Hillary Clinton previewed by stating”sources include Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region”, and who had resigned as secretary of state 18 months earlier, asked then-Obama counselor Podesta if he knew who was responsible for an Aug. 18 airstrike in Tripoli, in which unidentified bombers blew up an Islamist-controlled arms depot in the Libyan capital. 
+“Yes and interesting but not for this channel,” Podesta replied in the Aug. 19, 2014 message to Clinton’s account. 
+As fox previously observed , the conversation suggests that Podesta, now Clinton’s campaign chairman, was willing to provide Clinton information that had not been made public. Reports from The New York Times and The Associated Press at the time included denials of involvement from the U.S., France, Italy and Egypt and debunked claims of responsibility from a rogue Libyan general. 
+Podesta, in his email response, indicated he had his own sources. But he also apparently recognized he shouldn’t share the information over their personal accounts. 
+It’s unclear if he was concerned more about the security on her clintonemail.com account or his Gmail account — which would be hacked months later, in turn exposing the email chain Thursday. 
+Podesta’s concern could show that at least one close Clinton ally was aware of the risk of sharing sensitive or classified information over the unsecured server. 
+And today, thanks to the latest – and perhaps last – Wiki release, we know that Hillary agreed with Podesta when in the last email in that thread she replied simply, “got it.” It is unclear if this was the first time Hillary Clinton realized that sending potential confidential intelligence by private email is frowned upon.",FAKE
+8920,Wolf Richter: What the Heck’s Going on with Foreclosures? Why this Spike?,"Massachusetts +11% New York +10% 
+When home prices rise for years, foreclosure filings become rare because defaulting homeowners can usually sell the home for more than they owe and pay off the mortgage. The problem arises when home prices fail to rise locally, and it balloons when home prices fall. We’ve seen that last time around. After bouncing along super low levels during Housing Bubble 1 through 2005, foreclosure filings skyrocketed during the housing crash starting in 2006. At first it was just an uptick that no one paid attention to. By 2008, it helped take down the financial system. 
+Foreclosure filings peaked in late 2009, began dropping in 2010, and then tapered down to 2006 levels as foreclosures were processed, and as the home price surge of Housing Bubble 2 made new defaults less likely. But the spike in October stands out as much as those in the early phases of the housing bust in 2006 and 2007. Note the blue bar on the right : 
+
+While some states are still trying to digest the foreclosures from the last housing crisis, according to Daren Blomquist, senior VP at ATTOM, “the foreclosure activity increases in states such as Arizona, Colorado and Georgia are more heavily tied to loans originated since 2009 ”: 
+“The loans used in this housing recovery that appear to be most susceptible to foreclosure are those such as FHA and VA with low down payments. Our data shows FHA and VA loans combined represent 49% of all active foreclosure inventory for loans originated in the seven years ending in 2015.” 
+This chart shows the soaring proportion of FHA and VA mortgages issued since 2009 among the active foreclosure inventory. 
+
+On average across the nation, the foreclosure rate was one foreclosure filing for every 1,258 housing units. But in some states, the foreclosure rate was much worse. Here are the “top” ten: Delaware: one in every 355 housing units New Jersey: one in every 564 housing units Maryland: one in every 679 housing units Illinois: one in every 704 housing units South Carolina: one in every 801 housing units Nevada: one in every 826 housing units Florida: one in every 895 housing Ohio: one in every 930 housing units Pennsylvania: one in every 1,018 housing units Georgia: one in every 1,028 housing units. 
+And here are the “top” ten highest foreclosure rates among the 216 metropolitan areas with a population of over 200,000: York-Hanover, PA: one in every 274 housing units Atlantic City, NJ: one in every 301 housing units Rockford, IL: one in every 481 housing units Columbia, SC: one in every 498 housing units Trenton, NJ: one in every 499 housing units. Reading, PA: one in every 542 housing units Chicago, IL: one in every 571 housing units Dayton, OH: one in every 573 housing units Philadelphia, PA: one in every 597 housing units Salisbury, MD: one in every 625 housing units. 
+These “foreclosure filings” are based on data that ATTOM gathered in 2,200 counties where over 90% of the US population lives. They include data on the three phases of foreclosure: Foreclosure starts: lender issues Notice of Default (NOD) and Lis Pendens (LIS) Auction notices for future public foreclosure auctions: Notice of Trustee’s Sale (NTS) and Notice of Foreclosure Sale (NFS); Real Estate Owned (REO) properties that have been foreclosed on and were repurchased by a bank at auction and are now held by the bank. 
+Broken down based on these three phases of the foreclosure process: 
+Foreclosure starts jumped 25% in October from the prior month, to 43,352. While still down 11% year-over-year, it was the highest monthly increase in foreclosure starts since December 2008. 
+Foreclosure starts increased even year-over-year in 23 states and Washington D.C. In some states they soared. The “top” five: Colorado +71%",FAKE
+6927,RED ALERT: China officially orders its citizens to prepare for WW3 as tensions with the United States boil over,"November 2015 Ads RED ALERT: China officially orders its citizens to prepare for WW3 as tensions with the United States boil over Oct 28, 2016 Previous post 
+We have been cautioning all of you for a considerable length of time that something significant was going on, yet now it would appear that we have affirmation. The Chinese Defense Minister, Chang Wanquan, has cautioned its natives to plan for the coming World War III. 
+China has promised to take measures to resist the twelfth of July governing by the Permanent Court of Arbitration and to ensure its sway. It has been accounted for that in a post-Brexit world, China and Russia will turn into the world’s super powers. 
+China’s state-run media has been inundated with rant on the subject of their military and sway. China’s Global Times ventured to test Australia specifically, saying: “If Australia ventures into the South China Sea waters, it will be a perfect focus for China to caution and strike.” 
+On Weibo, a state-controlled blogging website, Lian Fang, a teacher at the military –run National Defense University said that “The Chinese military will venture up hard and China will never submit to any nation on matters of sway,” 
+Wanquan apparently put forth the expression while investigating army bases in China’s eastern beach front region of Zhejiang. The Defense Minister said the Chinese open ought to be instructed about national protection issues in light of the fact that the nation’s power and its regional uprightness are at danger. 
+Wanquan additionally cautioned of seaward security dangers, and the need to recognize the gravity of danger to China’s national security. He promote charged the whole security device of the nation, including military, police, together with subjects to get ready for assembly to protect their national sway and regional respectability. 
+Pundits likewise trust that China has a solid conviction that the United States actuated the Philippines to question the South China Sea so that the United States could exploit and adventure the territory for its advantage. 
+The Free Thought Project affirms that several boats and submarines from every one of the three armadas of China’s People’s Liberation Army directed broad live ammo drills in the nation’s East, North, and South Seas as a show of hostile and protective capacities. 
+A war amongst China and its neighbors additionally has the risky probability to separate the world. The U.S. will most likely go to the guide of its partners, and China and Russia have expanded military ties which could assist muddle the situation. 
+ ",FAKE
+8260,The World is Waking Up and it’s Magic to Watch,". The World is Waking Up and it’s Magic to Watch It’s inspiring to witness many of the earth’s people, especially in the Western world, becoming awar... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/10/the-world-is-waking-up-and-its-magic-to.html It’s inspiring to witness many of the earth’s people, especially in the Western world, becoming aware of the deep corruption in our social system, particularly because society is building its innate capacity to actually do something about it. More and more people now understand that we are ruled via a corporatocracy where the money supply, banking, governmental policy and other vital public infrastructure has been hijacked by the oligarchs and the corporate elite. In addition, public discourse and the official narratives are dictated by the corporate media who are owned by the same people who control macro public policy via their political puppets, as well as the unprecedented wealth they have at their disposal. Their ultimate agenda is of course ultimate power, which is dressed up in a pretty dress of “let’s save the planet!”.Of course the degradation of our natural systems needs a fresh approach, yet their covert game to win a planetary control-system has been brilliantly exposed for the world to see. In stride, the people are fighting back in both explicit and subtle ways. Some examples include: Independent media has exploded, where more people now get their news from it compared to the propagandized mainstream press; The information which exposes the lies of the ‘programmed beliefs’ is increasingly circulated by an awakening populace; Global and local action groups are forming to reverse the sellout of our system; Greater numbers of people are growing or sourcing organic, chemical-free food and are personally filtering any contaminants out of their water supply; Parents are home-schooling their children in greater numbers, or at least giving them more holistic and healthy information as their core education; Conversations of substance are increasingly occurring at pubs, supermarkets and community events, making it harder for the sleeping masses not to face the uncomfortable truths about our sick system; and Individuals and families are unplugging from the control-grid the best they can, as well as reconsidering and re-prioritizing what’s truly important in life. That’s a good segue into the other dimension of the waking up process. A great awakening is occurring in terms of the deeper layers of reality, including the way the scientific philosophy on life has been intentionally designed to keep us disempowered and disconnected with our true nature. Exit scientific materialism . This theory has long been debunked by the quantum and parapsychological sciences because human consciousness has clearly been shown to play a co-creative role in the manifestation of our interconnected reality. Not that this hasn’t been known in one way or another by basically every culture on earth since the beginning of time. Yet, materialism is still the dominant philosophy of not just the dogmatic discipline we call mainstream science, but also of many minds within the truth and freedom network. When it’s pretty much common knowledge that medical, energy and other corporate-related science has been distorted and suppressed for the benefit of the control-system, why would it be any different when it comes to the philosophical implications of scientific exploration and its associated evidence? After all, we know that the elite use ritual and symbolic spells to achieve their goals, so clearly they themselves believe beyond the adolescence of a matter-based reality. And when we consider how successful they’ve been, obviously they’ve tapped into the energetic dance in a productive way, at least for themselves. The fact remains however that there is a huge network of people who are becoming conscious of the nature of consciousness itself. A term to describe this is spirituality, but in summary it’s simply about understanding the connection we have with each other and reality at large, as well as rediscovering the various layers which make up the self. If you haven’t viewed through this lens in your quest for clarity, you’re unfortunately missing a profound piece of the philosophical puzzle. In any case, the awakening community is doing some amazing work, even if it’s split between the system-focused and spiritual-focused mindsets. There are of course many balance-minded individuals and groups who are doing both, but for the time being this remains the exception, not the norm. That will change though. The veterans of truth-seeking, as well as the newly initiated to the conscious society, are energetically primed to create a balance between these two areas of exploration. After all, there is always an opportunity for the magic to be at strength with the madness, just like the positive charge is equal to its negative counterpart, in accordance with natural principles. That’s duality, in one action. To reflect on which ways in which you’ve personally woken up, watch the following short documentary. By Phillip J. Watt, Waking Times About the author: Phillip J. Watt lives in Australia. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook or visit his website . Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+686,"If Donald Trump gets rattled by press, how would he handle Putin?","Historically, a vital part of the US presidency is forging relationships with other world leaders. And the going isn't necessarily easier there than it is with the news media – a group that seems to rattle Donald Trump.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+US Army vet Claude Copeland, center, speaks during a press briefing outside a Donald Trump news conference in New York on May 31. Following sustained pressure from media outlets, Trump announced the charities that received money from a veterans' fundraiser he held earlier this year.
+
+If Donald Trump loses his cool because of the American media, how would he deal with personal challenges from world leaders?
+
+Or to put it in blunter terms, if Mr. Trump can’t handle ABC, how could he stand up to Vladimir Putin?
+
+It’s yesterday’s combative Trump press conference that sparks these thoughts, of course. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee harshly attacked reporters for pressing him on his promises of charitable aid to veterans’ groups.
+
+Trump called one ABC reporter in the room a “sleaze.” He complained that the press wasn’t giving him credit for being generous. “You make me look very bad,” he said.
+
+But Trump’s evident anger was focused on a contretemps he should have expected. On Jan. 28 he held a televised fundraiser at which he said he’d raised $6 million for vets, including $1 million from his own pocket. Those are things that are easy to check, and reporters did.
+
+In late May, The Washington Post questioned his handling of the money. Some veterans’ groups had indeed received checks, but the total was nothing near $6 million. Trump himself did not appear to have donated anything. What was the deal?
+
+On Tuesday, Trump angrily outlined the donations. His foundation had made many of them, including his own $1 million gift, on May 23, after the Post story ran.
+
+He continued berating the media to the end of the press conference.
+
+“I find the political press to be unbelievably dishonest. I will say that,” he said in closing. “OK. Thank you all very much. Thank you.”
+
+All in all, Trump seemed like someone with a thin skin. And look – the US media is one thing. They’re unpopular, they’re used to being called “Nazi moron” and worse, and it’s easy to hurl insults at them. But what’s President Trump going to do if a foreign leader, having seen this display, decides for his or her own purposes to taunt the new US leader?
+
+Because they will. Personal relationships are a big part of geopolitics, for better or worse. Handling them is one of the most important aspects of the presidency. It’s where the personality of the person sitting in the Oval Office really comes into play.
+
+Think of the blustery Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev hectoring new US President John Kennedy in Vienna in 1961. (“Roughest thing in my life,” JFK confided to a columnist afterward.) Or the rapport that eventually developed between Ronald Reagan and the final Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. It helped ease the end of the cold war.
+
+American voters shouldn’t worry that Trump will behave toward foreign leaders as he did toward US reporters, campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson said yesterday.
+
+Trump would not talk to a roomful of colleagues that way “because they are not treating him the way the media is doing today,” Ms. Pierson said on CNN.
+
+Well, foreign adversaries can be much rougher than ABC or The Washington Post, if they want.
+
+Currently Trump’s problem with foreign leaders isn’t rooted in belligerence as much as in credulity, according to one critic. Trump seems easy to flatter.
+
+Thus Vladimir Putin has said admiring things about Trump, and Trump has responded in kind. Trump has combined some words of admiration for North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un with criticism, and North Korea official media has now come out in favor of Trump, notes Jay Nordlinger of the right-leaning but anti-Trump National Review.
+
+“What if the ayatollah Khamenei flatters Trump? Will Trump sweeten the Iran deal?” writes Nordlinger.
+
+If nothing else, the Hillary Clinton campaign is eager to bolster the image of Trump as an unstable entity. It fits with their contention that he’s too risky to entrust with America’s nuclear codes.
+
+Mrs. Clinton’s already uses it as a talking point to help her pivot away from questions about the propriety and legality of her use of a private e-mail server as secretary of State.
+
+Asked about the server yesterday in multiple television interviews, Clinton responded with the same line: “I hope voters look at the full picture of everything I’ve done in my career and the full threat posed by a Donald Trump presidency.”",REAL
+3514,Belgian police hunting 2 mystery bombers believed to have survived Brussels attacks,"A second terrorist took part in the subway bombing Tuesday in Brussels and authorities believe he may have survived the blast, meaning there are potentially two ""mystery bombers"" from the twin attacks on the run, according to reports.
+
+The development means there is an unidentified bomber in both the attack at the Maelbeek Metro station, which killed 20, and the earlier blasts at Zaventem Airport, which killed 11. Both unidentified suspects were captured by surveillance cameras with known suicide bombers.
+
+The French newspaper Le Monde and the Belgian public broadcaster RTBF reported that a man carrying a large bag was seen on CCTV walking with Khalid El Bakraoui, whom authorities believe blew himself up on a train at the Maelbeek station. That possible accomplice also was seen talking to El Bakraoui and did not get on the train that was bombed, police sources told AFP.
+
+
+
+What is known of the men suspected of direct involvement in Tuesday’s attacks:
+
+- Ibrahim El Bakraoui, one of two brothers involved, is believed to be one of two suicide bombers who died at the airport.
+
+- Najim Laachraoui, an ISIS explosives expert believed to have built the bombs used in both the Paris and Brussels attacks, was the other suicide bomber who died at the airport. He and Ibrahim El Bakraoui are believed to be the men seen in a surveillance photo pushing luggage carts and wearing solitary black gloves that may have masked detonators.
+
+- A mystery man dressed in white, wearing a dark hat and possibly a disguise who has not been identified was also seen pushing a cart in the surveillance photo. He is believed to have placed a bomb at the airport and fled the scene. Authorities are looking for him.
+
+- Khalid El Bakraoui, the brother of Ibrahim El Bakraoui, is believed to have died in a suicide blast at the Maelbeek Metro station 79 minutes after the airport attack.
+
+- A second man seen with Khalid El Bakraoui and carrying a large bag at the Metro station is believed to have been an accomplice and either died in the blast or is on the run.
+
+ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks in Brussels, which have laid bare European security failings and prompted calls for better intelligence cooperation.
+
+Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, in a national mourning speech Thursday, said the attacks targeted the ""liberty of daily life"" and ""the liberty upon which the European project was built.""
+
+""The cries of distress, the cries of pain, the scream of sirens, the apocalyptic images will remain engraved"" on memories, he said.
+
+Security experts have told Fox News the bombers were likely targeting Americans, because the airport blast happened near the American Airlines desk, and the Metro station is near the U.S. Embassy.
+
+In Brussels, authorities were still sifting through evidence gathered in a series of raids immediately following the attacks, which came during rush hour Tuesday morning.
+
+
+
+RTBF also reported Thursday that a message found on Ibrahim El Bakraoui's computer Tuesday night does not name Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam, as had previously been suspected.
+
+According to the broadcaster, El Bakraoui referenced Mohammed Bakkali, who was arrested last November following the Paris attacks and is suspected of renting out two hideouts to the ISIS cell in Belgium. He is also accused of spying on a top Belgian nuclear official.
+
+""I don't know what to do, I'm in a hurry, people are looking for me everywhere,"" chief prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw quoted the message as saying. ""If I give myself up I'll end up in a cell next to him.""
+
+The message points to a rising sense of panic among the three suicide bombers.
+
+Police were drawn to the brothers' apartment Tuesday night thanks to a tip from a taxi driver who had unwittingly delivered them to the airport, Van Leeuw said. Inside the northeast Brussels residence they found an apparent bomb-making factory, including 33 pounds of homemade explosives and nails for use as shrapnel.
+
+Neighbors told The Associated Press they had no idea of the brothers' activities and barely saw them until the taxi collected them and their visibly heavy bags Tuesday morning.
+
+One neighbor, who was willing to give only his first name of Erdine, said he was about to drive his son to school when he saw the two men carrying their bags out of the building.
+
+""The taxi driver tried to get the luggage,"" he said. ""And the other guy reached for it like he was saying: 'No, I'll take it.'""
+
+
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+",REAL
+7848,"Health Ranger to launch revolutionary, certified organic, non-GMO preparedness food line this Thursday","• Slowed healing and recovery time• Increased fatigue and slowed physical recovery• Reduced fertility• Acceleration of Alzheimer's and dementia• Reduced cardiovascular performance• Liver damage• Kidney damageAre these the kind of effects you want to experience when the grid goes down and you're trying to SURVIVE?Don't be stupid. Stop buying toxic ingredients as a form of ""survival"" food. It's moronic. If you're trying to store some food to keep you ALIVE, don't buy foods laced with chemicals that are designed to KILL (such as pesticides and herbicides). I will be announcing a clean, certified organic, laboratory verified preparedness food line in just two days This project took six months longer than planned, but it's finally ready. In just two days, I'm going to be announcing a certified organic survival / preparedness meal pack that will blow your mind with its cleanliness, nutrition and incredibly great taste. All these organic meal packs and ingredients can be turned into delicious, nutritious, ORGANIC meals by just adding water and heat . (You can cook these on a miniature camp stove, if you want...) All current affiliates for Numanna will be able to carry and sell this new line of Health Ranger approved organic storable food (see below).Here's what's included in the pack (ALL certified organic): Mac 'n Cheese (crazy delicious, the macaroni is made with organic milled flaxseed, delivering a wholesome source of omega-3s, very filling, energy lasts for hours) Classic Chili (amazing chili that's super delicious, even without using any chemical taste enhancers) Pancake Mix (incredibly delicious, made primarily with organic wheat flour, organic milk powder and organic whole powdered eggs) Cheddar Broccoli Soup (tastes gourmet, like you'd get in a fancy restaurant, yet all organic, incredibly satisfying) Brown Sugar Oatmeal (you're going to go ape over this one, with organic oats, organic cane sugar and organic molasses solids, this will blow you away) Organic nonfat dry milk (made from Grade A pasteurized skim milk, just add water to reconstitute) Italian Pasta Marinara (organic wheat flour and organic flaxseed paste, rich tomato taste, super delicious) Pasta Primavera (a thick, creamy organic pasta with organic dehydrated vegetables, incredibly nutritious) Sweet Habanero Chili (sweet and spicy, this mind-blowing recipe is a customer favorite) Organic Black Chia Seeds (high in omega-3s and magnesium, can add to smoothies, soups, breads and more) Organic Quinoa (a complete protein, makes a delicious soup by just adding eggs and onions)All this will be announced in just two days. If you want a heads up, just subscribe to my email newsletter (link below) to be alerted before everyone else. Certified organic ingredients and NO JUNK, no GMOs, no MSG, no hydrolyzed or autolyzed anything! Want to know what's in it? Here's the actual ingredients list for our Italian Pasta Marinara :Organic Pasta (Organic Whole Durum Wheat Flour, Organic Milled Flaxseed), Organic spray dried Tomato, Organic Cornstarch, Organic Dehydrated Vegetables (Onions, Tomatoes, Green Bell Peppers), Organic Cane Sugar, Organic Garlic, Sea Salt, Organic Parsley, Organic Annatto Color, Organic Spices.And our Sweet Habanero Chili ingredients list looks like this:Organic Pre-cooked Pinto, Organic Pre-cooked Black Beans, Organic spray dried Tomato, Organic Cornstarch, Organic Pineapple Dices, Organic Dehydrated Vegetables (Onions, Red & Green Bell Peppers), Organic Chili Powder, Organic Cane Sugar, Organic Spices, Organic Garlic Powder, Sea Salt, Organic Caramel Color, Organic Onion Powder.You're going to be amazed at the incredible taste, nutrition, wholesomeness and cleanliness of this entire line of storable emergency food.Check Natural News this Thursday for details on how to order. We've got thousands in stock and ready to ship , but even then I suspect we're going to run out very quickly. All Numanna affiliates will be able to start selling this breakthrough product in about two weeks This launch is historic for the food preparedness industry. No one has ever created an organic, lab-verified line of delicious emergency foods while avoiding all the toxic ingredients and total crap used by most other companies in the industry (with very few exceptions).Here's even more great news: All distributors and affiliates of Numanna storable foods will be able to start selling this certified organic food line in about two weeks! I'm also available to be interviewed on your podcasts, videos or websites to help explain this product to your viewers. Anyone who wants to start selling this product and earning affiliate fees should contact Numanna .Watch this space for the full announcement in two days... Health Ranger Approved AquaTru Water Filter Back in Stock 
+I've secured 500 units of the amazing AquaTru at $100 off for Natural News readers (while supplies last). 
+Breakthrough filter removes nearly 100% of hundreds of contaminants. No plumbing needed. SHIPS TODAY .",FAKE
+8708,France Plans to Implement Universal Biometric IDs,"by Yves Smith 
+By Don Quijones, publisher of Raging Bull-shit and editor at Wolf Street. Cross posted fom Wolf Street 
+On October 30, the French government announced, as quietly as possible, the creation of a massive new database that will collect and store personal information and biometric data on nearly everyone living in the country. As tends to happen whenever a government seeks to enact this type of “reforms,” the law wasn’t passed by parliament but by decree on the eve of a national holiday. 
+As France 24 reports , the new decree will affect 60 million people and “marks the first time the country has collected population data on such a scale since the start of the Nazi Occupation in 1940.” 
+“Unacceptable Excesses” 
+The move has sparked outrage from civil rights groups as well as French media, with weekly magazine L’Observateur describing it as “ terrifying ,” and daily newspaper Libération dubbing it a “ mega database that will do no good ”. The National Digital Council (CNNum) “laments” the government’s lack of prior consultation and highlights the “many concerns” the new decree raises. “In a digital world where code is law, the existence of such a database leaves the door wide open to likely and unacceptable excesses,” it said. 
+The new database, known rather optimistically as Secure Electronic Documents ( Titres électroniques sécurisés or TES) will store an individual’s name, date and place of birth, gender, eye color, height, address, photograph, digitized fingerprints, facial features, e-mail address, and the names, nationalities, dates and places of birth of parents. The aim — according to the government — is to make it easier to obtain and renew identity documents, and to aid in the fight against identity fraud. 
+Unlike a similar law proposed by Nicholas Sarkozy’s conservative government in 2012, which was shot down, the new database will only be used to authenticate individuals, not to identify them. In other words, it will be used to confirm that someone is who he or she claims to be, not to discover, say, the identity of someone whose biometrics have been found at the scene of a crime. 
+However, the potential for mission creep cannot be discounted. As an article in NextInpact points out , once the database exists, it is highly likely that there will be calls for it to be used for identification purposes, simply “because it is there.” There’s also good reason to suspect that a future government “will modify the aims,” as warns Gaëtan Gorce, a French senator and member of the National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties (Cnil) who likened the TES to a “sort of monster.” 
+According to today’s government, the biometric data stored on the database could be used to identify criminal suspects only if “violations of the fundamental interests of the Nation and acts of terrorism” are involved. But who gets to decide what constitutes a “fundamental interest of the Nation” or, for that matter, “an act of terrorism”? [That was a rhetorical question, of course]. 
+A Hacker’s Paradise 
+Another major problem with centralizing biometric data to this extent is that you make it a lot easier for it to be compromised. What’s to stop an insider from copying this data onto a drive and walking out with it, as Snowden and others have, including those who took Swiss banking data to the French and German authorities for money laundering investigations? This data would then most likely be sold online, on the so-called darknet. 
+“No computer system is impenetrable. All databases can be hacked. It’s always just a matter of time,” thundered French left-wing politician Jean-Jacques Urvoas in a 2012 blog post against Sarkozy’s proposed biometrics super database. Urvoas is now justice minister in Hollande’s government and hence is directly involved in drawing up the new decree, which bears a striking resemblance to Sarkozy’s earlier initiative. 
+If biometric data is compromised, it is a far more serious issue than a compromised password or an account. You can create a new password many times. But you can create your biometrics only once. If they’re compromised, they remain compromised forever. 
+There’s still a possibility that France’s constitutional council will throw the new law out, as it did with Sarkozy’s. If it doesn’t, TES risks establishing a very dangerous precedent . 
+Until now the most extensive biometric data retention schemes have been rolled out (perfected?) in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan . Israel is also on the verge of creating its own centralized biometric database. But if TES were allowed to stand, France would become the first G7 nation to attempt to build a completely centralized, all-inclusive biometric database. And that would send a very clear signal — i.e. green for go — to other ostensibly democratic nations. 
+There’s also the fact that after Germany, France is the country with the most influence over the future direction of EU policy. The EU already has a biometrics super database called the Visa Information System (VIS), which is the largest shared database on maintaining public security, supporting police and judicial cooperation, and managing external border control in Europe. 
+If the elected representatives of the 66 million people of France can pass into law a completely centralized system of biometric data storage with absolutely no public consultation whatsoever, what’s to stop the European Commission’s ranks of faceless, unelected, power-hungry appointees from doing the same? Nothing. 
+Besides aspiring to becoming a pioneer in the collection and use of personal data of all its citizens, France’s government is also one of the most ruthless combatants in the global war on cash, which is progressing on schedule. The Alliance is in place. Read… Who’s Powering the War on Cash? 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+5519,NEW WIKILEAK : Top Clinton Operative Believes “BLACK VOTERS ARE STUPID” – TruthFeed,"NEW WIKILEAK : Top Clinton Operative Believes “BLACK VOTERS ARE STUPID” NEW WIKILEAK : Top Clinton Operative Believes “BLACK VOTERS ARE STUPID” Videos By TruthFeedNews November 2, 2016 
+A new email released as part of the Wikileaks Podesta dump features Clinton ally Brent Budowsky exposing Hillary operative David Brock of having a plan that relied upon black voters being “stupid.” 
+Why is their ZERO reporting of this on mainstream news? 
+Watch the video: 
+Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. 
+",FAKE
+2815,The Latest On Iran Deal: Obama Says Deal Provides New Way Forward,"The Latest On Iran Deal: Obama Says Deal Provides New Way Forward
+
+The United States and five world powers have reached a historic agreement with Iran over its nuclear program.
+
+As we've reported, the deal puts restrictions on Iran's nuclear program and also sets up an inspections regime that aims to make sure Iran is meeting its obligations. In exchange, the U.S. and its European partners have agreed to drop tough sanctions, allowing Iran to sell more oil and rejoin international financial systems.
+
+We've got a broad outline of the news at another post. Here, we'll keep up with all the updates that emerge throughout the day. Make sure to refresh this page for the latest:
+
+Update at 8:51 a.m. ET.: Will Fuel An Arms Race
+
+Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner issued a scathing rebuke of this deal, saying it is ""likely to fuel a nuclear arms race around the world.""
+
+Like many other critics of the deal, Boehner said that under the terms announced today, Iran will still be allowed to enrich uranium, and the deal does not outright dismantle Iran's nuclear facilities.
+
+In a written statement, Boehner said in part:
+
+Boehner concluded: ""We will fight a bad deal that is wrong for our national security and wrong for our country.""
+
+Remember, Congress will have two months to review the deal. This statement appears to set up a tough legislative fight between the White House and a Congress controlled by Republicans.
+
+Update at 8:07 a.m. ET: 'Historic Mistake'
+
+Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already expressed his displeasure about the deal.
+
+On Twitter, he said: ""From the initial reports we can already conclude that this agreement is a historic mistake.""
+
+Netanyahu has been opposed to this deal ever since the interim deal was signed in 2013. The prime minister delivered a speech in front of the U.S. Congress warning that the deal would guarantee Iran a nuclear weapon because it doesn't outright dismantle the country's nuclear infrastructure.
+
+Update at 7:39 a.m. ET: Increases Breakout Time
+
+""This is the good deal that we have sought,"" Kerry said.
+
+The bottom line, Kerry said, is that this deal increases Iran's so-called breakout time — or the time it could take Iran to make enough material for a nuclear bomb.
+
+According to Kerry, once the agreement is implemented, Iran's breakout time goes from two to three months to one year or more.
+
+Kerry also said the deal:
+
+— Allows Iran to enrich uranium but to no more than 3.67 percent, which is needed for civilian purposes but is much lower than what's needed for a weapon.
+
+— Iran has agreed to turn its Fordow facility, which is essentially an underground bunker, into a research facility where Iranian and world scientists will work side by side.
+
+— The Arak heavy-water reactor, which could have been capable of starting production on weapons-grade plutonium, will be rebuilt using a design approved by the international community. That design will make the production of weapons-grade plutonium impossible, Kerry said.
+
+Update at 7:17 a.m. ET: An Opportunity For A New Direction
+
+In a speech from the White House, President Obama said that quite simply this deal keeps Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
+
+According to Obama, the deal cuts off ""every pathway"" Iran has to get to a nuclear weapon. It also: removes two-thirds of Iran's centrifuges; includes a commitment from Iran not to use its advance centrifuges for a decade; and limits Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium for 15 years.
+
+The deal also gives international inspectors what Obama said was 24/7 access to Iran's nuclear facilities.
+
+""That means this deal is not built on trust; it is built on verification,"" Obama said.
+
+Not having a deal, Obama added, would actually allow Iran to inch closer toward attaining a nuclear weapon and would make a military confrontation with Iran more likely.
+
+""We give up nothing by testing whether or not this problem can be solved peacefully,"" Obama said.
+
+The president said his administration would brief Congress on all the details of the deal, but he warned that it would ""irresponsible to walk away from this deal.""
+
+The agreement, Obama said, makes the region and world safer.
+
+""This deal offers an opportunity to move in a new direction,"" Obama said. ""We should seize it.""
+
+Update at 6:59 a.m. ET: A Good Deal
+
+Announcing the deal in Vienna, Federica Mogherini, the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs, said the deal meant Iran accepted that its nuclear program would remain ""exclusively peaceful"" and that it would ""never seek to acquire a nuclear weapon.""
+
+""We delivered on what the world was hoping for: a shared commitment for peace,"" she said.
+
+She added: ""What we are announcing today is not only a deal; it's a good deal.""
+
+Update at 6:41 a.m. ET: Obama's Speech
+
+While the deal represents a breakthrough — one that leaves behind decades of animosity and years of tough negotiations and secret talks — this is far from over, because the agreement still has to be approved by various world capitals.
+
+President Obama is scheduled to speak at 7 a.m. in an effort to begin trying to sell the deal to the American people and a recalcitrant Republican Congress, which has two months to approve the deal.",REAL
+9628,Israel preparing for one-sided UN Security Council resolutions,"November 11, 2016 Israel preparing for one-sided UN Security Council resolutions 
+Some members of the United Nations Security Council are planning anti-Israel resolutions during the last days of the Obama administration, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, told Arutz Sheva. This comes as no surprise. 
+The Ambassador reported that he had been alerted to a specific effort to pass one-sided, binding resolutions in the Security Council that could have serious ramifications for the Jewish state. 
+“We’ve been hearing for some time from various sources about attempts to take advantage of the lame-duck period after the election, and to pass resolutions against the State of Israel in the Security Council,” Danon said. 
+“We’re working on a number of fronts,” the Ambassador added, “including with the present [American] government and the incoming administration, as well as with other countries, in order to prevent [one-sided UNSC resolutions].” 
+Danon then outlined some of the warnings he had received regarding planned efforts towards a Security Council resolution.",FAKE
+4062,"Senate Dems back down on Iran, say won’t support sanctions bill yet","A group of Senate Democrats on Tuesday eased off their push for new Iran sanctions, potentially taking the wind out of the bipartisan effort to muscle through the legislation in the face of a President Obama veto threat.
+
+In a reversal, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., announced at a Senate committee hearing that he and his Democratic colleagues had written to Obama telling him they would hold off on supporting legislation that he helped write. The bill was co-authored by Republican Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk.
+
+""We will not support passage of the Kirk-Menendez bill on the Senate floor until after March 24, and only if there is no political framework agreement,"" Menendez announced.
+
+The legislation would tee up new sanctions against Iran if the country fails to strike an acceptable deal curbing its nuclear program. Though the final deadline for those talks is the end of June, March 24 is the soft deadline to reach the outlines of a deal.
+
+Menendez wants to give the Obama administration until that deadline to see whether the sanctions bill is necessary. His office later released the letter, signed by 10 Senate Democrats including Menendez, saying while they support the bill, they will wait until after March 24 ""in acknowledgement of your concern regarding congressional action on legislation at this moment.""
+
+The pushback from Menendez and his colleagues could stall the legislation.
+
+The Senate banking committee, which held Tuesday's hearing, is still set to consider and vote on the bill on Thursday. Asked for comment on Menendez' announcement, an aide to Kirk said only that the bill would be introduced ""shortly"" and has ""broad bipartisan support.""
+
+But if enough Democrats peel off, it could deprive the 54-seat Republican majority of the 60 votes needed to pass the legislation. At the least, supporters likely would not have the two-thirds majority needed to override a presidential veto.
+
+The change-up could, for now, end up averting -- or delaying -- a looming veto showdown between Congress and Obama.
+
+In his State of the Union address, Obama bluntly threatened to veto any bill that could disrupt nuclear talks.
+
+""New sanctions passed by this Congress, at this moment in time, will all but guarantee that diplomacy fails -- alienating America from its allies; making it harder to maintain sanctions; and ensuring that Iran starts up its nuclear program again,"" Obama said. ""It doesn't make sense.""
+
+On Tuesday, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, urged Congress to hold off, warning of the consequences if lawmakers override a presidential veto. ""If Congress acts to force the president's hand in the next few months by overriding his veto and if doing so contributes to the collapse of negotiation and our heading down the path toward a military confrontation, Congress, beginning with each one of us, will be held responsible.""
+
+Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Tuesday backed Menendez' call to hold off on the bill, while saying he would still vote for it on Thursday so the legislation would be ready to go if needed later on.
+
+But Republican lawmakers took issue with the administration's argument that passing the bill could derail negotiations. They argued that if Iran walked away from talks over ""prospective"" sanctions, it shows they weren't serious in the first place. And they reiterated their view that tough sanctions brought Iran to the talks, and it may take the threat of more sanctions to seal the deal.
+
+""It's clear that sanctions brought Iran to the negotiating table and the threat of future sanctions represent Iran's only incentive to successfully conclude an agreement here,"" Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the banking committee, said Tuesday.
+
+Menendez said he's ""hopeful"" diplomacy will prevail in the nuclear talks while noting he's ""deeply skeptical"" Iran is willing to make the necessary concessions.",REAL
+5099,"Melania Trump Plagiarized Michelle Obama, a Woman Republicans Said Hated America","Republicans have said for years the first lady hates America, but they defend her words when they come out of Mrs. Trump’s mouth .
+
+An entire section of Trump’s speech—focused on the values she and her husband share—appears to be lifted directly from Obama’s comments on the same subject eight years ago. Back then, Republicans claimed Michelle Obama wasn’t “proud” of her country; now Republicans defend her words when they’re coming out of Melania’s mouth.
+
+The controversy capped a chaotic first day of the Republican National Convention. Monday started with Trump’s campaign attacking popular Ohio governor and former presidential challenger John Kasich as an “embarrassment” for not attending the convention in Cleveland. By afternoon, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was rallying people outside—until he was interrupted by a popular comedian asking the fringe radio host to “have sex with my wife.”
+
+Not long after, a fight erupted on the convention floor, with anti-Trump delegates demanding a roll call vote before the RNC got underway. At another point, Rep. Steve King was on MSNBC suggesting white people are better than any “sub-groups.” By the evening, speaker after speaker recalled in the most minute detail the attacks on the U.S. compound in Benghazi.
+
+“From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect,” Melania said [emphasis added]. “They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son, and we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.”
+
+“Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don’t agree with them. And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children—and all children in this nation—to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.”
+
+Before the convention, Team Trump told CNN that Melania spent five to six weeks working on the speech. She told Matt Lauer on Monday afternoon that she had “as little help as possible” writing it.
+
+“In writing her beautiful speech, Melania’s team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking,” spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement late Monday. “Melania’s immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success.”
+
+“This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton she’ll... take her down,” campaign manager Paul Manafort told CNN. “It’s not going to work.”",REAL
+2161,Yosemite free-climbers reach top of El Capitan,"Two climbers made it to the top of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park on Wednesday, the first ever to scale the 3,000-foot granite wall using only their hands and feet and safety rope.
+
+For 19 days, Kevin Jorgeson, 30, of Santa Rosa, Calif., and Tommy Caldwell, 36, of Colorado, attempted what many considered impossible on one of the world's most difficult climbs: Being the first to ""free climb"" the sheer face of El Capitan's Dawn Wall. They used safety ropes and harnesses to prevent deadly falls, but did not using ropes or climbing aids to reach the top. The two climbed the wall in 32 rope-length sections that climbers call pitches, and they reached the summit around 3:30 p.m. PT.
+
+Patagonia, the clothing and gear maker, sponsored the climb.
+
+Caldwell was the first to finish. He waited on a ledge for Jorgeson, who caught up minutes later. The two embraced before Jorgeson pumped his arms in the air and clapped his hands above his head. Then they sat down for a few moments, gathered their gear, changed clothes and hiked to the nearby summit.
+
+In the meadow below, a crowd broke into cheers. Caldwell's mother, Terry, said her son could have reached the top several days ago, but he waited for his friend to make sure they got there together.
+
+""That's a deep, abiding, lifelong friendship, built over suffering on the wall together over six years,"" she said.
+
+President Obama sent his congratulations from the White House Twitter account, saying the men ""remind us that anything is possible.""
+
+Each trained for more than five years, and they have battled bloodied fingers and unseasonably warm weather. The men often climbed at dusk or later, using headlamps to see, because the rock needs to be cold to keep fingers and hands from sweating and slipping.
+
+Jorgeson fell 11 times over seven days trying to get past one particularly tough section. He took to Facebook on Sunday to publicly celebrate his victory.
+
+""It took everything in my power to stay positive and resolved that I would succeed,"" he wrote.
+
+The climb began Dec. 27 and was expected to take two weeks. It is the realization of a dream that began seven years ago when Caldwell first began climbing the monster rock formation, he said.
+
+They've slept in portaledges — tents attached to the face of the wall.
+
+El Capitan, the largest granite monolith in the world, has about 100 routes to the top. The first climber reached the summit in 1958.
+
+In 1970, Warren Harding and Dean Caldwell — no relation to Tommy Caldwell — climbed Dawn Wall using ropes and countless rivets over 27 days. That duo turned down a rescue attempt by park rangers in a storm.",REAL
+7312,Peter Thiel On Trump,"  Recipient Email => 
+I earnestly recommend that everyone watch Peter Thiel’s 13-minute address at the National Press Club this morning. He hits a number of nails on the head. 
+A few at random: 
+[ At 1m08s ] The truth is, no matter how crazy this election seems it is less crazy than the condition of our country. 
+Thiel checks off some of the craziness: the national debt, healthcare costs, student loans, income stagnation, … 
+And wars : 
+[ At 2m52s ] While households struggle to keep up with the challenges of everyday life, the government is wasting trillions of dollars of taxpayer money on faraway wars. 
+Right now we’re fighting five of them: in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. 
+Which is the more enthusiastically pro-war party? The Democrats! 
+[ At 7m55s ] Yet even after these bipartisan failures, the Democratic Party today is more hawkish than at any time since it began the war in Vietnam. 
+What’s the root problem? Optimism ! 
+[ At 8m55s ] For a long time our elites have been in the habit of denying difficult realities. 
+Why is Trump the solution? 
+[ At 10m54s ] Nobody would suggest that Donald Trump is a humble man; but the big things he’s right about amount to a much-needed dose of humility in our politics. 
+Very unusually for a presidential candidate, he has questioned the core concept of American exceptionalism. He doesn’t think that the force of optimism alone can change realities without hard work. 
+Just as much as it’s about making America great, Trump’s agenda is about making America a normal country. 
+The only nail whose head Thiel leaves un -hit is immigration. This is a bit odd, as there is probably no other single issue that accounts for so much of Trump’s popular support. 
+It’s somewhat less odd to those of us who recall Thiel taking up an interest in the immigration issue some years ago, then quickly dropping it as, apparently, too radioactive. 
+We at VDARE.com are bolder; which is one reason — although, so be sure, a very minor one — why we have much, much less money than he does. 
+It is none the less heartening to see a successful entrepreneur speaking so clearly and eloquently in support of Trump. Watch the whole thing on YouTube . (Reprinted from VDare.com by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+2554,Three Likely GOP White House Hopefuls Back Legal Status for Illegal Immigrants,"Three possible Republican presidential candidates called for legal protections for undocumented workers Saturday, contrasting themselves from the rest of the field.
+
+In remarks at the Iowa Ag Summit, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former New York Gov. George Pataki and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham also said they support stricter border security, a position in line with the Republican Party’s conservative base.",REAL
+7605,"Comment on India Moves to Severely Restrict Use of Cash, Forcing Much of Economy Into Barter by Bugs Bunny","by Jerri-Lynn Scofield 
+By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She now spends most of her time in India and other parts of Asia researching a book about textile artisans. She also writes regularly about legal, political economy, and regulatory topics for various consulting clients and publications, as well as writes occasional travel pieces for The National . 
+The biggest story on Indian television yesterday wasn’t the election of Donald Trump. For on Tuesday night (IST), Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a surprise speech declared that currency notes of rupees (Rs) 500 and Rs 1000 — the highest two denominations in circulation– would be invalid as of midnight that same night. The withdrawn notes could no longer be used for transacting business or as a store of value for future usage (with some limited exceptions, but even these were only allowed for a short transition period). 
+From Modi’s speech : 
+“There is a need for a decisive war against the menace of corruption, black money and terrorism… Corruption, black money and terrorism are festering wounds which make the country hollow from within,” he said, adding such activities hold back the nation’s progress. 
+Describing illegal financial activities as the “biggest blot”, Modi said that despite several steps taken by his government over the last two-and-a-half years, India’s global ranking on corruption had moved only to 76th position from 100th earlier. 
+“This shows the extent of the web of corruption in the country. The disease of corruption is the domain of some veted people who are flourishing. Some people have misused their positions and benefitted. On the other hand, honest people are suffering,” he said. 
+The Reserve Bank of India (RBI)– the Indian central bank– as reported by The Times of India , elaborated: 
+The incidence of fake Indian currency notes in higher denomination has increased. For ordinary persons, the fake notes look similar to genuine notes, even though no security feature has been copied. The fake notes are used for antinational and illegal activities. High denomination notes have been misused by terrorists and for hoarding black money. India remains a cash based economy hence the circulation of Fake Indian Currency Notes continues to be a menace. In order to contain the rising incidence of fake notes and black money, the scheme to withdraw has been introduced. 
+Chaos Ensues 
+India remains a cash-based economy, especially for low-value transactions, and the move has caused widespread chaos, as I write this from Kolkata where I am currently visiting. The move was accompanied by a temporary shut down of all banks and ATMs, with banks reopening earlier today and ATMs due to reopen tomorrow. 
+Initially, after the announcement, the highest denomination legal tender note in circulation was the Rs 100 note. New legally tender Rs 500 and Rs 2000 notes have been made available today, according to Tushar Roy, chief manager of a nationalized bank, Central Bank of India. Not all banks have yet received the new notes, but Roy says that this problem is expected to be resolved soon. The government also expects to re-introduce Rs 1000 notes soon, to include advanced security features. When ATMs open tomorrow, withdrawals will be limited to a maximum of Rs 2000 per transaction, as compared to the Rs 10,000 and in some cases, Rs 15,000 limits, that previously applied. 
+Starting today, after producing appropriate identification, people are allowed to exchange old notes for new at any of the 19 RBI offices, any bank branch, or at any head post office or sub-post office. They will have until December 30 to complete their transactions. 
+Individuals receive full value for the entire volume of bank notes tendered at any of these venues, but here’s the kicker: At the moment, each person is limited to receiving only Rs 4000 per person in cash irrespective of the size of tender. Anything over and above that amount can only be credited to a bank account. This allows the government to track whether the sums tendered have been legitimately acquired. Withdrawals from bank accounts will be limited to Rs 10,000 a day and Rs 20,000 a week. The government has announced this part of the policy may be relaxed in future, says Roy, in order for employers, for example, to meet payrolls currently made in cash. (Ultimately the government wants more transactions to be paid via bank accounts, so that they can be tracked and taxed appropriately). 
+Does The Policy Make Sense? 
+It’s beyond the scope of this post to speculate on the impact the new policy will have on individuals of various occupations and with myriad reasons for transacting in large amounts of cash. For more on this point, interested readers might wish to look at this article in The Wire . 
+Some have criticized the policy for focusing on currency alone, and have noted that black money is typically not held by Indians in stacks of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, but in one of two alternative ways. 
+The very rich store black assets in offshore accounts (as detailed in, among other sources, the Panama Papers). 
+But tax evasion and corruption is not limited to the very richest alone. In India, many doctors and other professionals, members of the business community, and small traders also underreport their taxable income. They tend to hold their black assets on-shore, within India, in the form of real estate, art work, gold bullion, jewellery, or securities. 
+Unlike other current policy areas– border incursions into Pakistan, for example– the political opposition has has not contested the objective of the Modi move. There is virtually unanimous concurrence– at least publicly– on cracking down on black money. Yet as The Hindu reported, former Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has criticized the Modi government’s method for achieving its objective: 
+“We support the objective of the government to stamp out black money. But the method they have adopted raises questions… The move has come as a bolt from the blue for the common man.” 
+The real test for the government would begin [Thursday], Mr Chidambaram said. “How efficiently and how quickly the money is exchanged…. If there is harassment or inconvenience and all kinds of questions are asked, then I think that will be completely counterproductive.” 
+A similar move had been contemplated by the previous Congress-led UPA government, he recalled. But the idea was dropped as “the economic gains were not too great.” 
+Mr. Chidambaram said the introduction of the new series of notes was estimated to cost Rs. 15,000 crores to Rs 20,000 crores [Jerri-Lynn here: a crore is 10,000,000 in the Indian numbering system]. “The economic gains of demonetisation should be at least equal to that amount.” 
+If the additional tax revenue pulled in by the Modi move is less than that amount, the new policy will actually have ended up costing the government money– rather than increasing government revenues. 
+As Chidambaram summarized (again from The Hindu article quoted above): 
+The “economic wisdom” of the government’s decision, Mr Chidambaram said, would be tested on three parameters: a) the present cash to GDP ratio is 12 per cent. Will it come down to the world average of about 4 per cent? b) The value of the high denomination notes currently in circulation is about 15 lakh crore rupees [Jerri-Lynn here: a lakh is 100,000, a crore, 10,000,000, so a lakh crore is 1,000,000,000,000.] Will that value come down significantly? c) Will gold imports surge, indicating that unaccounted income/ wealth is seeking refuge in bullion and gold jewellery? 
+Various economists have also presented other criticisms of the government’s move, as reported by The Wire. Requiring a switch to new bank notes means Indians must take time to switch their existing Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes into the new bank notes. If new notes are not freely and widely available, this will freeze trade and the normal functioning of an exchange economy. Further, many Indians receive salaries in cash and do not have bank accounts at present, so requiring transactions to pass through the banking system will cause them considerable immediate inconvenience. 
+Impact on Economic Activity 
+But there is a wider reason for critiquing the policy. “Black money and not paying taxes: These are bad things in a society,” says Suvojit Bagchi, Kolkata bureau chief for The Hindu. “Not surprisingly, everyone– including the opposition– agrees on the objective of cracking down on black money.” Increasing the tax base- is the prime objective here. But will the demonetization policy produce substantial tax revenue? Bagchi noted that Chidambaram questioned whether taxes raised would be sufficient to recoup the cost of printing new bank notes. 
+Another objective, Bagchi added, is to move India away from its reliance on cash, toward a more American or European plastic system, where it’s easier to track– and tax– money. 
+And finally, at least half of Indian economic activity occurs in the informal sector, which is not tightly controlled. Bagchi gave the example of a building promoter, whose building activity produces both black and white revenues. Indeed, perhaps 40% of the promoter’s overall activity, he estimated, might be black activity. But that black activity also generates employment, as well as other knock on effects. While the government hopes that its policy will increase the tax base, it’s also possible that demonetization might instead lead to the shut down of at least some black activity. “So, the government’s latest move may actually slow economic activity considerably,” Bagchi says, “But for how long, and to what extent, no one knows.” 
+He further added, “At the moment, the Indian economy is somewhat insulated from the world economy, in part due to its reliance on cash and the existence of considerable black activity. Once India moves to a plastic system, and cuts back on that black activity, it will lose some of this insulation.” 
+As reported in The Wire , Abhijit Sen, former member of the Planning Commission, is also concerned about contraction in the informal sector: 
+The sudden decision to demonetise currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 is targeted to reduce illicit stocks of black money and fake currency. This has a clear rationale if such notes are used mainly to stock undisclosed wealth, rather than for transactions. However, RBI data show that currency notes of these two denominations make up over 80% of the total currency in circulation. Therefore, unless a very large proportion of money in circulation lies permanently as stocks, the demonetisation can also be expected to have a significant immediate effect on that part of the economy which relies mainly on cash transactions. 
+The size of India’s cash economy is not exactly known but, given the large proportion of workers in informal sectors, it is unlikely to be less than half the total economy. We can, therefore, expect an immediate contraction of this part of the economy in the next two days and with the effect stretching over a longer period of time, although diminishing over time. Whatever its long-term positive effects, those depending on cash whether for daily wages or as payments for goods or services they sell are likely to be in for tough times in the coming days. In the long term as well, all that this does is partially eliminate some black money stocks without undoing the processes that lead to black money creation.",FAKE
+8051,Migrants FLOOD Into U.S. From Mexico Right Before Election,"With 12 days to go until the election, all eyes are on who the next president will be. 
+And there’s no “lamer” duck than a president whose just days away from being replaced. 
+Perhaps that’s the perfect opportunity for what’s really happening while nobody’s looking: 
+A massive spike illegal immigrants streaming through the southern border – mainly in the border town of McAllen, Texas. They’re coming on a daily basis and being trucked to a migrant center at a Catholic Church. 
+They’re fitted with ankle monitors and told to sit. Sit and wait while they file for asylum. 
+Apparently, the illegals are being told that Hillary Clinton will win the election and that when she does, she will grant amnesty to illegals who are already here by the time she’s elected. So they’re flooding in for that reason. 
+On the other hand, some illegals are being told that Donald Trump will win, build a massive border wall and once it’s up, nobody will ever get in again. So they’re flooding in for that reason as well. 
+Some days, CBS Local reports , the McAllen stretch of the border sees 1,000 illegal crossers per day. 
+“We’re getting mass spikes of people crossing and turning themselves in,” he said. 
+Experts told CBS News the number of immigrants crossing the border won’t drop after Election Day. 
+Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly said as president the U.S. will build a wall along the Mexico border to keep out immigrants trying to enter the country illegally. 
+Earlier this month, Trump claimed the U.S. government is speeding up the citizenship process for immigrants on the waiting list so they can vote. 
+“They’re letting people pour into the country so they can go and vote,” Trump said during a meeting with the National Border Patrol Council. 
+Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has promised to propose immigration legislation in her first 100 days as president that would include a route to citizenship. Her approach is largely in line with that approved by Democrats and Republicans in the Senate in 2013 but turned aside by the House. 
+Trump has said that he opposes any pathway to legal status for immigrants in the U.S. illegally. They would have to return to their home countries and apply for legal entry should they wish to come back. 
+He has not said what would happen to those who choose to stay, but said they are subject to deportation. Trump has also called for an end to “birthright citizenship,” currently granted to anyone born in the U.S. as per the 14 th Amendment.",FAKE
+2542,Scott Walker: Wall on Canadian Border Worth Reviewing,"Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker says that building a wall along the country's norther border with Canada is a legitimate issue that merits further review.
+
+Republican candidates have generally taken a get-tough approach on deterring illegal immigration, but they usually focus on the border with Mexico.
+
+The Wisconsin governor was asked whether he wanted to build a wall on the northern border, too, during an interview Sunday on NBC's ""Meet the Press.""
+
+Walker says law enforcement officials in New Hampshire brought up the topic of building a wall along the U.S.-Canadian border during a recent town hall meeting. He says they raised some legitimate concerns, so it's a ""legitimate issue for us to look at.""
+
+The U.S.-Canada boundary is the longest international border in the world at 5,525 miles long.",REAL
+3373,"State Dept. uncovers nearly 18,000 missing emails sought from ex-Clinton spokesman","State Department officials have uncovered 17,855 emails sent between a former Hillary Clinton spokesman and reporters that the agency long claimed did not exist.
+
+The trove was among more than 80,000 emails belonging to Philippe Reines, a Clinton aide, that were discovered on his State Department account, officials said in court filings Aug. 13.
+
+In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Gawker Media in 2013, the State Department said it had no responsive records. Gawker was seeking official correspondence between Reines and reporters from 33 news outlets.
+
+But State officials responded Thursday with the news that they had inexplicably found 81,159 emails on Reines' "".gov"" email account despite asserting two years ago that none existed. Twenty-two percent, or 17,855, of the emails were likely related to Gawker's request.",REAL
+9410,Police Departments Refuse Participation In Dakota Access Pipeline Crackdown,"Videos Police Departments Refuse Participation In Dakota Access Pipeline Crackdown In addition to the general retreat of departments, two officers have already turned in their badges in support of the protesters.   Members of the Stutsman County SWAT watch protesters demonstrating against the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Stand Rock Sioux Reservation, as they stand next to a police barricade on Highway 1806 in Cannon Ball, N.D., Sunday, Oct. 30, 2016. 
+Standing Rock, North Dakota — Widespread outrage over both the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and violent police crackdowns rages on. That outrage is spreading even to police agencies now returning from deployment to the reservation. Two departments have already refused to return, citing personal and public objections. As if that wasn’t enough, an army of sympathizers is re-purposing social media to combat police efforts in Standing Rock. 
+Minnesota’s Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department is among that group. Lawmakers, according to MPR News , found police activities in Standing Rock “inappropriate”. It’s to the point where they’re considering rewriting legislation to avoid future deployments to incidents like the pipeline resistance. 
+Police officials, of course, declined to comment on their return from North Dakota or their feelings on what’s happening there. It’s also made the task of rebuilding trust with the community an even loftier uphill battle. “I do not support Sheriff Stanek’s decision to send his deputies to North Dakota”, says LT. Governor Tina Smith, “nor did we approve his decision to begin with. I do not have any control over the Sheriff’s actions, which I think were wrong, and I believe he should bring his deputies home if he hasn’t already.” 
+Smith’s comments split the state’s government, however, and she was targeted. Minnesota State Rep. Tony Cornish condemned Smith for prioritizing “the rights of protesters over the needs of law enforcement”, saying she should apologize to the cops. 
+Sheriffs from Wisconsin’s Dane County were more empathetic, pulling out and refusing to return. According to the Bismarck Tribune , Sheriff Dave Mahoney made the decision after a “wide cross-section of the community” decried the deployment. “All share the opinion that our deputies should not be involved in this situation”, says Mahoney. Dane County’s deputies were deployed to Standing Rock for around a week. Sources report Dane County wasn’t involved in recent arrests, a string of which scooped up an alderwoman from Madison Wisconsin. 
+Ald. Rebecca Kemble traveled to North Dakota as a “legal observer”, filming and participating in prayer ceremonies. When Morton County officers–if they cans till be called that–grabbed and arrested her for engaging in a riot. According to Kemble, no riot was happening. Other Wisconsin departments have been recalled, with at least one staying behind for a more couple weeks. 
+Many other citizens have been charged for trespassing and participating in non-existent riots, including journalists. One of the most renowned reporters who’s faced DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline)- related charges was Amy Goodman of Democracy Now . Goodman’s team filmed dog attacks by DAPL contractors who lacked proper K9 licenses. The contractors have also been accused of unethical surveillance, intimidation, and sabotaging the movement by attempting to make authorities believe the protesters have finally turned violent. 
+Other journalists, including documentarian Deia Schlosberg, face decades in prison for filming climate activists at a separate oil project. Journalists from the independent outlet Unicorn Riot, who recently reported use of a sound cannon on water protectors, have also been arrested. 
+Thousands of opponents to the pipeline have flooded Standing Rock to repel construction and police brutality. More still have taken to the internet, spreading information in the form of writing, video, photography, and art. Among the renegade tactics is using Facebook to “check-in” at Standing Rock. According the Guardian , over a million people–even people I know–have joined the action. 
+It began with a Facebook post, disclosing that Morton County sheriffs are allegedly using Facebook check-ins to track protesters. “Checking in”–whether you’re at a friend’s, restaurant, or escalating resistance–pinpoints your location to a tee. Once you check in, a notification is sent out to, yes, your friends, but theoretically anyone who’s capable of watching. It’s yet another tool in the bag of tricks authorities have deployed against civilians, and are likely utilizing in Standing Rock. 
+Some detractors have dismissed the social media action as a waste of time. An editor at The Fifth Column challenged these in a Facebook post, narrating a debate on the subject he’d had. Editor Justin King pointed out that even if the check-in’s wasted two minutes of time, multiplied by hundreds of thousands, that equates to two months of wasted police work. Now imagine how ineffective the surveillance may be with millions continuously checking. 
+Morton County Sheriff’s, Guardian reports, called claims of police surveillance misguided “rumors”. Morton County, by their own account, isn’t “monitoring Facebook check-ins for the protest camp or any location for that matter.” Before you trust them, consider that Facebook access for water protectors was reported as “blocked’ during a military-style raid on a camp. 
+Data Collection Nationwide 
+Other police departments are similarly sketchy when pressured to speak on their surveillance technologies. Wisconsin’s Milwaukee PD hid the use of cell site simulators , or Stingrays, from courts for months. Stingrays mimic cellphone towers, thus tricking phones into providing all manner of user information and data 
+Nearby, the Wauwatosa Police Department , despite having admitting to “collecting and analyzing cell phone data” in its public reports, denied ever even coming close to a Stingray. It took the department 5 weeks to respond to that open records request, which is considered unusually long. It remains unknown how Wauwatosa PD, which has been blasted for lack of transparency before , collects cell phone data. 
+The Hand’s Fingers In Open Rebellion 
+In addition to the general retreat of departments, two officers have already turned in their badges in support of the protesters. North Dakota water protector Redhawk, MintPress reports , disclosed the revelation. The individual also pointed out “you can see it in some of them, that they do not support the police actions.” “Some are waking up”, they continued, “we must keep reminding them that they are welcome to put down their weapons and badge and take a stand against the pipeline as well.” Hints of shame could be seen in the faces of officers who confronted protesters as they blocked them from prayer grounds. As the protesters condemned officers , some of whom looked down or off to the horizon in shame. 
+The modern era of internet and technology gifts us with a plethora of ways to express ourselves, and help one another. Standing Rock is quickly becoming a stand out of that fact. Citizens, journalists, and activists are all using the internet to achieve their own goals. Whether that be spreading information being blocked, tracking police movements, sending food and rations or just voicing opinions. Standing Rock’s resistance is spreading globally, with protests occurring in Europe and elsewhere. As long as construction doesn’t stop, the movement won’t rest.",FAKE
+7360,Donald Trump and the Equilibrium to Come | New Eastern Outlook,"Region: USA in the World The news these last few days has been all about the radical left being up in arms over Donald Trump’s ascendency to the US Presidency. The massive upset victory of this charismatic non-politician is crystallizing into a very divisive situation in the United States and in Europe, as EU leaders and NATO nations paint a geo-political picture of gloom and doom for us. However negative the picture may seem though, the shiny side of this leadership coin shows a glowing promise. Here’s my take on what is about to happen when Donald Trump is inaugurated. Donald Trump did not win this election on any of the bases which Clinton’s supporters profess. This is crucial to accept if we are to understand what is about to happen. Trump is not a bigot, a racist, nor is he some misogynistic woman hater. Trump is a product of both American progress and to an extend hyper-capitalism. His “locker room” talk resonates no more resoundingly than his anti-establishment diatribe against the Washington elites. For those who have watched him over the years, it is so clear the man just says what he thinks at the moment. He said he would “drain the swamp” of politically corrupt in Washington, and I think he is about to. He also said , if he was elected, he would install a special prosecutor to investigate and indict Hillary Clinton for her part in illegal activities. Those out there demonstrating do not fully understand “who” it is there are demonstrating on behalf of, nor do they understand the breadth of criminality and malfeasance Mr. Trump has suggested. WikiLeaks opened the investigation to the court of public opinion, and this is why Donald Trump is the President-elect now. I could enumerate the multiple statutes Mrs. Clinton breached while she was Secretary of State, but her alleged crimes and misdemeanors against the United States are not the reason the Democrats lost. I could list the multitude of lies the Podesta emails proved, and how Hillary Clinton told Congress, the media, the FBI, and the atmosphere of crooked dealings she and the Democrats created, but the American people did not shun her for lying to them either. Politicians lie like water flows with gravity. The American people voted for Donald Trump because the system in place the last 25 years failed them. There’s no need for a history lesson in order for me to prove my contention here. When George Herbert Walker Bush met with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the people of the world drew in a deep breath of possibility and potential. The promise was further illuminated in 1991, but the fall of the Soviet Union that was supposed to set free all the peoples of all the nations, it was never the plan. Almost simultaneously with his handshake with Gorbachev, Bush and his backers were steeled for the first invasion of Iraq. Bush’s part in lighting the fuse on today’s destabilization bomb was not his greatest betrayal of the American people though. Not many political analysts these days talk about George H.W. Bush’s role in NAFTA, but step toward globalism ruined a hundred million lives and the dreams attached to them within a few short years. NAFTA, later set in place by Bill Clinton, destroyed the United States as a manufacturing power. Not only did millions lose their jobs, the globalization strategies keyed to NAFTA would later cause the global economic and military conflicts we see right now. An easy way of seeing this is by watching the march of NATO across Eastern Europe toward the doorstep of Russia. I can show you how Bill Clinton’s administration got Yugoslavia out of the US hegemony’s way. Clinton left office as one of only two US Presidents to have been through impeachment proceedings, and after having paved the way to the coming Iraq invasion. Showing the collusion in between Clinton’s successor George W. Bush, Britain’s Tony Blair, and Europe’s leadership in what became known as the “Bush Doctrine”, which amounted to “Democratic regime change”. The Afghanistan War, the war and occupation of Iraq, the later Georgian War, Barack Obama’s part in Ukraine, then Arab Spring, Gaddafi, Assad and Syria, the spread of this quasi-democratic movement is well documented by the trail of blood and misery left in its path. Whether the reader wishes to see the march of these successive administrations as complicit or circumstantial participants in this is irrelevant. In the long view the United States’ domestic and global policies have failed billions of people. Furthermore, on some individual level, each and every one of us has felt these failures. This is true of the protesters from Austin to Washington today. These Hillary supporters are by and large, just the pawns of the globalists who pay for play via the US Treasury, and who now fund the very upheaval against President-elect Trump. The Hillary Clinton “upset” is a far bigger paradigm than anyone is telling us. At this point some readers are already asking; “So where is that glowing promise?” Donald Trump is in the process of emptying not only the “Washington swamp”, but the European one as well. Before you object, please consider what it means for a powerful outsider to enter this game of crisis-détente. Look at how EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is expressing the panic of European leadership in this comment this week: “We will need to teach the president-elect what Europe is and how it works.” News that NATO is losing it over the Trump presidency is brought into context if we look at how NATO is trying to establish Moscow as the bitter foe again. I recall something Mr. Putin said to the Valdai Conference in Sochi in 2014, when announced; “Playtime is over”. The Russian president was talking about backroom deals and underhanded dealings geo-policy makers had been engaging in for decades, and how he was not engaging in them any longer. This is vital for understanding Mr. Trump’s position with regard to positivity toward Russia and China. The globalists who have run this show for decades are now faced with powerful opponents to their plans. All of this is irrefutable, and only the minute details remain to be seen. The worst nightmare of the billionaires who have benefited from world chaos is now elected. Imagine now what will come out in a Hillary Clinton investigation without the Obama Department of Justice to block! Donald Trump has at his fingertips every underhanded shift, every bit of NSA intelligence, every USAID or CIA penny shoveled to ISIL, or to some unscrupulous EU official. Hillary and Bill Clinton, the Bushs, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Tony Blair, Cameron, billionaires like George Soros and his NGOs, the whole grimy and messy swamp of leadership corruption is now in the hands of a guy who builds skyscrapers and golf courses. Somebody outside the “club” is in the White House and nobody knows what he is going to do. No Rockefeller millions put him there. No Soros funding promoted him, and no corporate media voiced a kind word about him. The opposition to Donald Trump did every dirty, stinking, rotten deed they could to ensure he lost, but fed up America said “no”. The world’s geo-political reptiles are losing their collective minds today. Soros and MoveOn.org, the neo-socialists marching in Berlin are organizing a popular uprising, but the Trump power base is more firm. The same frustrated American that lost his manufacturing job and pension to NAFTA, he is the neighbor of that redneck veteran Obama sent to lose in Afghanistan. The shining hope I speak of is in the pragmatic realism of Trump, Putin, and any leader compelled to actually serve a people. Here is how I see it playing out. As I looked at Vladimir Putin’s Instagram account today, I could not help but notice he and former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi walking side-by-side in the woods. The reason I mention this is because the media in the west has already jumped on a fear, and a meme, in comparing Berlusconi to Trump. One of Mr. Putin’s friends, Berlusconi is a fascinating and powerful ally in Italy, a nation increasingly reticent on Germany’s and America’s control of Europe. The neo-fascist liberals who were so “all in” to get Clinton elected, now they are in chaotic disarray now over politicians like Matteo Renzi, whom Berlusconi backs. To cut short here, the Trump-Putin cohesion the far-left tried to use against the billionaire property mogul, is the same bright potential that can rescue the planet. Europe is only an extension of Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris these days, and the EU that never was has scores of nations restless for change. Trump is the catalyst for this change whether he choose to try Hillary Clinton or not. You see Trump is a businessman first, and philosopher poet last. The bottom line here is, peace with Russia and carry on business, or stand trial for betraying a billion people. These protests, the NATO and EU “warnings” to Trump, these indications tell me just how corrupt this system was. Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” . Popular Articles ",FAKE
+2116,Environment 'Has Never Been A Partisan Issue' For EPA Administrator,"WASHINGTON -- Before joining the Obama administration, Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy was a high-ranking official for two Republican governors -- Massachusetts' Mitt Romney and Connecticut's Jodi Rell. But in Washington, she's found herself the target of numerous attacks from conservatives.
+
+""For me, the environment has never been a partisan issue,"" McCarthy told The Huffington Post. ""I deal with science and facts. And I try to make the most reasonable decisions I can, so that the environment can be recognized as really part and parcel of the foundation of a growing economy.""
+
+""I have never had any difficulty working for either a Republican or a Democrat, as long as they allow me to do my job, as long as we can keep politics out of it and real policy involvement in it,"" she said. ""I think that we do a pretty good job here at EPA in trying to stay out of the politics and stay in our lane, which is to really speak for the American public and protect their right to clean air and clean water and healthy land.""
+
+But McCarthy's agency is often the subject of attacks from the right. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has pledged to do whatever he can ""to get the EPA reined in."" Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul has called the EPA ""abusive and power-hungry,"" arguing that the agency has ""done more harm than good."" During the 2014 election, Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst said she'd like to shut down the EPA entirely.
+
+Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently joked that he's glad he doesn't have McCarthy's job. ""I wake up every morning, I say my prayers and I'm thankful that I'm not the EPA administrator,"" he told a House committee.
+
+McCarthy shrugged off the attacks. ""I’m happy that EPA is doing its job,"" she said. ""I am honored to be able to defend the decisions of the agency and speak on its behalf.""
+
+""As long as we do the job that Congress gave us, with the authorities that Congress gave us, and we do it as well as we can within the law and science, we do it as transparently as we can, I will be able to stand up and be very proud of our efforts,"" she continued. ""We’re doing the work we’re supposed to do. That’s why people are paying attention. But I work for the American public, that’s who I serve.""",REAL
+2654,Obama pushing to diversify federal judiciary amid GOP delays,"In Florida, President Obama has nominated the first openly gay black man to sit on a federal district court. In New York, he has nominated the first Asian American lesbian. And his pick for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit? The first South Asian.
+
+Reelected with strong support from women, ethnic minorities and gays, Obama is moving quickly to change the face of the federal judiciary by the end of his second term, setting the stage for another series of drawn-out confrontations with Republicans in Congress.
+
+The president has named three dozen judicial candidates since January and is expected to nominate scores more over the next few months, aides said. The push marks a significant departure from the sluggish pace of appointments throughout much of his first term, when both Republicans and some Democrats complained that Obama had not tried hard enough to fill vacancies on federal courts.
+
+The new wave of nominations is part of an effort by Obama to cement a legacy that long outlives his presidency and makes the court system more closely resemble the changing society it governs, administration officials said.
+
+“Diversity in and of itself is a thing that is strengthening the judicial system,” White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler said. “It enhances the bench and the performance of the bench and the quality of the discussion . . . to have different perspectives, different life experiences, different professional experiences, coming from a different station in life, if you will.”
+
+But Obama’s biggest obstacle is the Senate, where Republicans have frequently blocked judicial confirmation votes for months or, in some cases, years. Obama has 35 nominees currently awaiting votes by the Senate — including several holdovers from 2012 who have been renominated this year — and there are more than 50 additional vacancies awaiting nominees, according to the Federal Judicial Center.
+
+Some conservatives are skeptical of the push to name more women and minorities to the bench, arguing that it amounts to unjustified affirmative action. Curt Levey, an outspoken Obama critic who runs the advocacy group Committee for Justice, said the White House may be “lowering their standards” to nominate more nonwhite judges.
+
+“If they’re talking about achieving [diversity] through aggressive identification of minority candidates, then that’s their prerogative,” Levey said. “If they’re talking about doing it through preferences, having a lower threshold of qualifications for minorities, then I don’t approve. And it’s hard to know which they’re doing. Unlike a college admissions system, where it’s easy to quantify, this is difficult.”
+
+During Obama’s first term, judicial nominations often fell by the wayside in the face of the economic crisis and other policy priorities at the White House. Many liberal allies complained that the president did little to champion nominees once they were named.
+
+“Republicans will throw up every roadblock they can,” said Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice. “We’re counting on the White House and Senate leadership to be more assertive in getting nominees confirmed.”
+
+The White House said it intends to aggressively push for more judicial nominees during Obama’s second term and is hopeful that changes in filibuster rules will help speed up the process. The Senate decided in January to limit debate for district court nominees from 30 hours to two hours, although the restrictions do not apply to nominees for the Supreme Court or federal appeals courts.
+
+Obama has already broken more barriers with his judicial appointments than any other president, aides said. At the circuit court level, four states now have their first female justices, five have their first black justices and two have their first Hispanics. Sonia Sotomayor also became the first Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court.
+
+“There’s a leveling-the-playing-field goal that is kind of a frame that overrides the whole endeavor,” Ruemmler, who oversees the nominating process, said in an interview.
+
+Obama, a former constitutional law professor, has long argued for a broad set of criteria in selecting judges. When he picked Sotomayor in 2009, Obama said “experience being tested by obstacles and barriers, by hardship and misfortune” was an important qualification for any jurist because it imparts a sense of compassion for ordinary citizens.
+
+The diversity of Obama’s judicial nominees stands in contrast to staff selections at the start of his second term that have been dominated by white men, including White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
+
+By contrast, 17 of the 35 pending judicial nominees are women, 15 are ethnic minorities and five are openly gay, according to White House statistics. Six are straight white men.
+
+During Obama’s first term, 37 percent of his confirmed judges were nonwhites, compared with 19 percent for President George W. Bush and 27 percent for President Bill Clinton. The trend is similar on gender: 42 percent of Obama’s first-term judges were women, compared with 21 percent for Bush and 30 percent for Clinton.
+
+Of the 874 federal judgeships, 39 percent are held by women and 37 percent are held by non-whites, according to data kept by the Federal Judicial Center.
+
+“It’s very, very important that these courts reflect the diversity of what’s coming in terms of demographics,” said Nancy Zirkin of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an advocacy group. “It will be his most long-lasting legacy. . . . Obama, by putting on a diverse number of judges, we believe will shape the courts for years to come.”
+
+Obama nominated Mary H. Murguia for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Murguia’s parents emigrated from Mexico to Kansas, where she was born.
+
+Others include the first Haitian American, Afro-Caribbean, Vietnamese American and Korean American judges nominated to their respective positions.
+
+One senior Republican Senate aide, who requested anonymity in order to discuss the nomination process, said, “We are going to continue to insist on a level of quality” among nominees.
+
+“We’re not advocating or opposing his diversity goals,” the aide said. “But that should not override the substantive qualifications of the nominees, which are professional competence, judicial temperament, respect for the law, understanding the Constitution.”
+
+Liberal groups have been pressuring the White House to look for diversity not just in race, gender or sexual orientation, but also in professional experience. They want fewer corporate lawyers from white-shoe firms and more public defenders and lawyers from outside what is sometimes called the “judicial monastery.”
+
+“That’s a completely different view than somebody who has only represented General Motors,” Zirkin said.
+
+The Obama judges, many of them in their 40s, also establish a diverse bench of progressives whom Obama or future presidents could tap for Supreme Court vacancies.
+
+One such nominee was Goodwin Liu, Obama’s pick in February 2010 for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. As a Taiwanese American, Liu was an historic selection. But Republicans stalled his nomination for 15 months, saying that his past writings showing a broad interpretation of the Constitution and his sharp criticism of conservative Supreme Court justices John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. were so liberal that he did not deserve an up-or-down vote.
+
+“Goodwin Liu should run for elected office, not serve as a judge,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a May 2011 statement. “Ideologues have their place, just not on the bench.”
+
+According to the White House, Obama’s first-term nominees took an average of 225 days to be confirmed, compared with 175 days for Bush and 98 days for Clinton.
+
+Ruemmler said that there has been “very, very little substantive opposition to any of the president’s judicial nominees.” She pointed to the case of Robert E. Bacharach, a district court judge from Oklahoma whom Obama nominated last year for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.
+
+Bacharach’s home-state senators, Tom Coburn and James M. Inhofe, both Republicans, supported him. “I like the guy,” Inhofe told the Oklahoman. “I told him that it’s not very often the White House and I agree on anything.”
+
+Still, Senate Republicans filibustered Bacharach’s nomination. They gave no specific reason other than a vow to block all of Obama’s circuit court nominees because 2012 was a presidential election year. In 2004 and 2008, Senate Democrats did much the same to Bush’s election-year nominees.
+
+After 263 days of waiting, Bacharach’s nomination came to the floor for a vote on Feb. 25. It passed, 93 to 0.",REAL
+5119,Why presidential candidates' faith matters less and less to voters,"On the right, Evangelical voters see the need to make political compromises. On the left, morality is increasingly seen through secular eyes.
+
+Though religion still creates clear fault lines among American voters, the importance of a candidate’s own religiousness is declining rapidly.
+
+Two-thirds of Evangelicals are planning to vote for Donald Trump, and two-thirds of religiously unaffiliated “nones” are saying they will support Hillary Clinton, according to a Pew Research Center study released Wednesday.
+
+But the share of Americans who want a president with strong religious beliefs is down 10 percentage points – to 62 percent – from 2008. And the trend is apparent on both sides: the percentage of Republicans who say it is important for a president to be religious is down eight points since 2008. For Democrats, it’s down 13 points.
+
+Yet, for each side, the reasons for the decline differ. On the Republican side, Evangelicals are willing to embrace less-religious candidates in order to maintain political clout, while the growing “nones” of the Democratic Party have shifted to emphasize secular morality over traditional religion.
+
+“For two election cycles now we’ve seen a steady decline in the number of Americans who care if the president has strong beliefs,” says Greg Smith, co-author of the study. “Maybe the attitudes of some religious groups are changing, but more so the religious composition of the entire country is changing.”
+
+Evangelicals have long faced the conundrum of choosing a purist candidate versus choosing a candidate who has broader appeal. Mr. Trump is an example of that – though for some Evangelicals, he represents a particularly big compromise, given his lack of religiosity and playboy lifestyle.
+
+“Evangelicals know that Trump is not the Ted Cruz candidate,” says Chad Seales, a professor of religion at the University of Texas, Austin, and an expert on Southern Evangelicals. “He is not the religious right candidate of the 1990s, but they are making all kinds of concessions to agree with him and reframe him in their world. Trump is the cultural option. There is no doctrine option left.”
+
+Last month, evangelical leader James Dobson called Trump “a baby Christian” and fellow religious leader Ralph Reed said “we accept him for who he is now” because he has showed a commitment to Christian ways.
+
+“He may not be against abortion for evangelical purposes, but we’ll take the end result even it it’s not by the same means,” says Laurie Maffly-Kipp of Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. “When push comes to shove, there has never been a Republican front-runner who has been a pure Evangelical. I think they have compromised before.”
+
+Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon and 2012 Republican presidential nominee, is the latest example of how Evangelicals compromised, embracing a Mormon and a former blue-state governor, note numerous experts.
+
+More recently, the senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas, Robert Jeffress, focused on secular – not theological – similarities in his endorsement of Donald Trump.
+
+“It was never seamless, but the reason it was so successful was that it was able to push the numbers of the Republican Party over the majority – its voting bloc was powerful and cohesive enough,” adds Professor Seales.
+
+But now, he adds, Evangelicals are willing merely to back the political positions, even if there is concern about a lack of religious conviction behind them – as in Trump’s case.
+
+On the other side, the rise of the “nones” appears to be beginning to have an effect. In 2012, 25 percent of Americans claimed no religious preference. In the late 1980s, the number was 7 percent.
+
+That could be at least partly a reaction to the intense fusing of theological doctrine and politics among religious conservatives, suggests Michael Hout, a sociologist at New York University.
+
+“Many ‘new nones’ were people raised Baptist or Catholic but not active,” he says. “As those churches became more overtly political over issues like abortion, inactive liberals who used to identify, quit doing so.”
+
+But experts say Democrats are also increasingly viewing morality outside of religiousness.
+
+“Nones” were among Bernie Sanders's strongest supporters in the primary, notes Mr. Smith of Pew. They were drawn to his vision of a society that takes better care of all – from free college to healthcare to a higher minimum wage.
+
+Moreover, they saw him as a plain speaker whom they could trust. For that reason, they are slow to warm to Clinton’s campaign, with the allegations of email misuse and her connections to Wall Street.
+
+“This is a sign of nervousness about her moral character – which is important because there is a kind of linkage between moral values and leadership,” says Mark Valeri, a professor of religion and politics at the Danforth Center at Washington University.
+
+The result is a curious situation in which Democrats appear to be more worried about the morality of their candidate than Republicans are.
+
+“On the right, Republican, pro-Trump side there is less attention to the personal morality of the leader,” says Professor Valeri. “But because on the progressive side they do reach for high moral reform, there is a desire that Clinton be able to present herself well motivated morally. That’s why the emails, the testimony, the charges, are sticking so hard.”",REAL
+355,"DOJ: Guardsman, cousin charged with supporting ISIL","WASHINGTON -- An Illinois Army guardsman and his cousin, both accused of pledging to wage war on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq, were arrested and charged as part of an alleged conspiracy to support the terrorist group, federal prosecutors said.
+
+One of the suspects, Illinois Army National Guard Specialist Hasan Edmonds, 22, was arrested late Wednesday night at Chicago's Midway International Airport where he was allegedly preparing to travel to Syria through Cairo to join ISIL's cause.
+
+The other man, Jonas Edmonds, 29, also was arrested Wednesday night at his home in Aurora, Ill., after allegedly telling an undercover FBI agent that he had planned to attack an Illinois military post where Hasan Edmonds had trained. The alleged intent, Jonas Edmonds said, was to kill up to 150 people sometime after his cousin left for Syria.
+
+Charges involving the guardsman represent the second time in less than a week that a suspect with U.S. military ties was linked to an ISIL support case.
+
+A New Jersey Air Force veteran was charged last week with attempting to join ISIL after being turned back by Turkish authorities from an alleged planned entry to Syria.
+
+As recently as Tuesday, the two Illinois suspects and the undercover agent drove to the military post where Edmonds had trained. During the trip, Hasan Edmonds allegedly described the interior of the installation and ""which rooms they should avoid during the attack,'' according to court records.
+
+""Hasan Edmonds also entered the installation and retrieved a military training schedule, which he then gave to Jonas Edmonds,'' the records state.
+
+Since late last year, according to the charging documents, the two suspects repeatedly expressed their allegiance to ISIL in communications with at least two undercover agents who first engaged them through social media.
+
+""I am already in the american kafir (infidel) army ... and now I wish only to serve in the army of Allah alongside my true brothers,'' Hasan Edmonds allegedly wrote in a January e-mail to one of the undercover agents. ""I pray to just one time step foot in the land ruled by the Law of the Quran but I am content to fight and die here in the cause of Allah whenever the target is set and the order is given.''
+
+In a separate communication later the same month, Hasan Edmonds allegedly told the undercover agent that the ""hardest'' part of their planning effort was ""staying under the radar.''
+
+In an apparent reference to the risk posed by undercover government agents, he added: ""Here, they hide and some even pretend to be friends ... We'd like to cause as much damage and mayhem as possible before being granted shahada (martyrdom).''
+
+Both suspects made their initial appearances in a Chicago federal court Thursday afternoon. Their attorneys could not immediately be reached for comment.
+
+Chicago U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon pledged an aggressive prosecution, citing ISIL's ""agenda of ruthless violence.''
+
+""Anyone who threatens to harm our citizens and allies, whether abroad or here at home, will face the full force of justice,'' Fardon said.
+
+""Distrubingly,'' said Assistant Attorney General John Carlin, who directs the Justice Department's National Security Division, ""one of the defendants currently wears the same uniform of those they allegedly planned to attack.''
+
+If convicted, both of the suspects face maximum sentences of 15 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.",REAL
+1339,Obama will not endorse candidate in Democratic primary race,"President Obama will not endorse a Democratic candidate in the 2016 presidential primary race, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said Sunday.
+
+""That's not our job,” McDonough said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That's the job of the party to make those decisions and then they'll take a look at the agendas and the positions of those candidates.""
+
+McDonough said that Obama, in the final 11 months of his presidency, will wait until voters pick a nominee, as he has in the past.
+
+“When the nominee will be set, then the president will be out there,"" McDonough said.
+
+Obama undoubtedly will back a fellow Democrat -- either front-running Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders or former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.
+
+The president has recently suggested that he will nevertheless get involved in 2016 Senate races in which gun control is an issue, following his recently announced plans to tighten federal gun laws through a series of executive orders that side-step Congress.
+
+Obama’s decision not to issue an endorsement, however, has
+
+ some precedent among recent two-term presidents.
+
+George W. Bush didn’t endorse his party’s nominee in 2008 until March 5, by which point Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had just about locked up the bid.
+
+Ronald Reagan didn’t endorse his sitting Vice President, George H. W. Bush, as the Republican nominee until May 1988. Reagan said he wanted to wait until the outcome of the nomination race was clear.
+
+Bill Clinton was the only two-termer in the past 30 years to break with the tradition. He endorsed his sitting vice president, Al Gore, in December 1999.",REAL
+8378,Will #DraftOurDaughters Bring Hillary Down?,"October has been a portentous month for the presidential campaign. In the beginning of the month women came forward accusing Trump of unwelcome advances. Later, FBI Director James Comey re-opened the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton after finding more government emails on pervert Anthony Weiner’s computer. But the most important event may be a meme campaign that highlights Hillary’s support forcing women to register for the selective service.
+The meme campaign consisted of dozens of fake ads posted under the #DraftOurDaughters hashtag that highlight two very important policy points of the Hillary campaign: First, Hillary is a radical feminist. Thus she favors equality in all things—that includes equality in combat. As a step in that direction, Hillary told the Huffington Post that she will support legislation to register for the draft.
+Young women may think registering for the draft is not a big deal. They should reconsider because of the second policy of the Clinton campaign: She will almost certainly start a war against Russia—a war that will see those young women drafted into combat on the front lines.
+Hillary has repeatedly blamed Russia for Wikileaks and she stated that she would get revenge through military action:
+As president I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses .
+The #DraftOurDaughters campaign could be the thing that brings down the Hillary campaign. To get elected, Hillary relies on two demographics: People of Color and liberal white women. Up until now, women have been able to support leftist social policy because it did not impact them negatively. If they become aware that Hillary intends to draft them into combat to fight a war with Russia, they may re-think the wisdom of their equalist position.
+Here are some of the best examples of the #DraftOurDaughters campaign.
+
+I feel this one is the most powerful. It clearly states Hillary’s intention to put women into combat and start a war with Russia. Unlike the Arab nations that the US has been toppling for the neocons, Russia has a formidable military and nuclear weapons. Any military conflict will not be short and easy. That means it will highly likely that young women will soon find themselves getting blown to smithereens if they elect Hillary.
+
+
+
+The above three ads all target the weak, cowardly men who either support Hillary or the Never Trump cuckservatives. In the Alt Right, these men are frequently portrayed as being cuckolded by wives. Hence, they are often mocked for their wives having children who are not their own: “My wife’s son” or “My wife’s daughter.”
+The ad below drives this point home even more forcefully. While women might encourage their men to vote Hillary or oppose Trump for being too alpha, they secretly despise the weakness of these men.
+
+The following ads are directed to convincing women of the ramifications of their decision to vote feminist. Feminism taken to its logical conclusion means you are going to have to trade your Louboutins for combat boots.
+
+
+ 
+
+
+Lots of the ads emphasize Hillary’s extremely aggressive stance toward Putin and Russia. She has blamed WikiLeaks on Russian hacking even though there is no proof that the Russians were to blame. And she and the Obama administration have been saber rattling against Russia in Syria.
+The really frightening thing is that mainstream pundits are now starting to parrot the idea that the US must go to war with Russia. All the more reason to elect someone who is not controlled by wealthy donors like Hillary.
+
+
+The ad below indicates that our “enemy” Putin has a saner view on women in combat than the Democrats do.
+
+While the campaign is mostly geared to point out Hillary’s intention to draft women, it also reminds men that their lives will not be spared in the conflagration that Hillary will start.
+
+The media often portrays war as a sanitized affair. A soldier, safely positioned in a US-located command center, controls a drone that takes out the bad guys. The reality of war is that people from both warring factions die and are maimed. Once Hillary gets in, it won’t be just men dying in large numbers. Women will experience equality in having their lives snuffed out.
+
+
+A final ad drives home the point that the future war with Russia (and Iran and Syria) will not be any sort of conflict against barbarism or evil. It will be for Hillary’s power trip. 
+Conclusion Elections matter. For decades, women have voted for leftist policies that have put the burden on other people. If they are successful in electing Hillary, they will face the bitter consequences of their decisions. But unfortunately, they will not be the only people impacted. Thousands of innocent Americans, Russians, Syrians, and Iranians will also have to pay the price of their virtue signaling.
+The #DraftOurDaughters campaign may be enough to wake some of them up from their folly.
+Read More: Hillary’s Alt Right Speech Bombed 
+",FAKE
+5068,Michelle Obama's full DNC speech: Best of the night?,"On Monday night, first lady Michelle Obama gave a heartfelt endorsement of Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention, noting that Clinton engaged her husband in a fierce struggle for the nomination in 2008.
+
+""I trust Hillary to lead this country,"" she said in a speech that provided a parent's-eye view of the White House and its power.
+
+While Mrs. Obama has often avoided overt politics, her frustration with Trump's rise was evident. Without naming him, she warned that the White House couldn't be in the hands of someone with ""a thin skin or a tendency to lash out"" or someone who tells voters the country can be great again. ""This right now, is the greatest country on earth,"" she said.
+
+CNN's Wolf Blitzer said Obama's speech was by far the best of the night. ABC's George Stephanopoulos called it ""polished, passionate and personal."" NBC's Tom Brokaw and Fox News' Juan Williams used the same phrase. ""It was about as pitch-perfect an endorsement as you can get,"" Brokaw said. Williams said, ""The framing of the speech in terms of her children was so pitch-perfect.""
+
+Here's the full text of her speech:
+
+You know, it’s hard to believe that it has been eight years since I first came to this convention to talk with you about why I thought my husband should be president.
+
+Remember how I told you about his character and convictions, his decency and his grace, the traits that we’ve seen every day that he’s served our country in the White House?
+
+I also told you about our daughters, how they are the heart of our hearts, the center of our world. And during our time in the White House, we’ve had the joy of watching them grow from bubbly little girls into poised young women, a journey that started soon after we arrived in Washington.
+
+When they set off for their first day at their new school, I will never forget that winter morning as I watched our girls, just 7 and 10 years old, pile into those black SUVs with all those big men with guns.
+
+And I saw their little faces pressed up against the window, and the only thing I could think was, what have we done?
+
+See, because at that moment I realized that our time in the White House would form the foundation for who they would become and how well we managed this experience could truly make or break them. That is what Barack and I think about every day as we try to guide and protect our girls through the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight, how we urge them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith.
+
+How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country.
+
+How we explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.
+
+With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us. We as parents are their most important role models. And let me tell you, Barack and I take that same approach to our jobs as president and first lady because we know that our words and actions matter, not just to our girls, but the children across this country, kids who tell us I saw you on TV, I wrote a report on you for school.
+
+Kids like the little black boy who looked up at my husband, his eyes wide with hope and he wondered, is my hair like yours?
+
+And make no mistake about it, this November when we go to the polls that is what we’re deciding, not Democrat or Republican, not left or right. No, in this election and every election is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives.
+
+And I am here tonight because in this election there is only one person who I trust with that responsibility, only one person who I believe is truly qualified to be president of the United States, and that is our friend Hillary Clinton.
+
+That’s right. See, I trust Hillary to lead this country because I’ve seen her lifelong devotion to our nation’s children, not just her own daughter, who she has raised to perfection, but every child who needs a champion, kids who take the long way to school to avoid the gangs, kids who wonder how they’ll ever afford college, kids whose parents don’t speak a word of English, but dream of a better life, kids who look to us to determine who and what they can be.
+
+You see, Hillary has spent decades doing the relentless, thankless work to actually make a difference in their lives advocating for kids with disabilities as a young lawyer, fighting for children’s health care as first lady, and for quality child care in the Senate.
+
+And when she didn’t win the nomination eight years ago, she didn’t get angry or disillusioned. Hillary did not pack up and go home, because as a true public servant Hillary knows that this is so much bigger than her own desires and disappointments.
+
+So she proudly stepped up to serve our country once again as secretary of state, traveling the globe to keep our kids safe.
+
+And look, there were plenty of moments when Hillary could have decided that this work was too hard, that the price of public service was too high, that she was tired of being picked apart for how she looks or how she talks or even how she laughs. But here’s the thing. What I admire most about Hillary is that she never buckles under pressure. She never takes the easy way out. And Hillary Clinton has never quit on anything in her life.
+
+And when I think about the kind of president that I want for my girls and all our children, that’s what I want.
+
+I want someone with the proven strength to persevere, someone who knows this job and takes it seriously, someone who understands that the issues a president faces are not black and white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters.
+
+Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military in your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or a tendency to lash out. You need to be steady and measured and well-informed.
+
+I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase form and fortune for ourselves, we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.
+
+And we give back even when we’re struggling ourselves because we know that there is always someone worse off. And there but for the grace of God go I.
+
+I want a president who will teach our children that everyone in this country matters, a president who truly believes in the vision that our Founders put forth all those years ago that we are all created equal, each a beloved part of the great American story.
+
+And when crisis hits, we don’t turn against each other. No, we listen to each other, we lean on each other, because we are always stronger together.
+
+And I am here tonight because I know that that is the kind of president that Hillary Clinton will be. And that’s why in this election I’m with her.
+
+You see, Hillary understands that the president is about one thing and one thing only, it’s about leaving something better for our kids. That’s how we’ve always moved this country forward, by all of us coming together on behalf of our children, folks who volunteer to coach that team, to teach that Sunday school class, because they know it takes a village.
+
+Heroes of every color and creed who wear the uniform and risk their lives to keep passing down those blessings of liberty, police officers and the protesters in Dallas who all desperately want to keep our children safe.
+
+People who lined up in Orlando to donate blood because it could have been their son, their daughter in that club.
+
+Leaders like Tim Kaine who show our kids what decency and devotion look like.
+
+Leaders like Hillary Clinton who has the guts and the grace to keep coming back and putting those cracks in that highest and hardest glass ceiling until she finally breaks through, lifting all of us along with her.
+
+That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.
+
+And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.
+
+And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.
+
+So, look, so don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on earth!
+
+And as my daughters prepare to set out into the world, I want a leader who is worthy of that truth, a leader who is worthy of my girls’ promise and all our kids’ promise, a leader who will be guided every day by the love and hope and impossibly big dreams that we all have for our children.
+
+So in this election, we cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best. We cannot afford to be tired or frustrated or cynical. No, hear me. Between now and November, we need to do what we did eight years ago and four years ago.
+
+We need to knock on every door, we need to get out every vote, we need to pour every last ounce of our passion and our strength and our love for this country into electing Hillary Clinton as president of the United States of America!
+
+So let’s get to work. Thank you all and God bless.",REAL
+6597,They Knew: The End of the Clinton Lies Begins,"They Knew: The End of the Clinton Lies Begins There’s only one lie left. October 27, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
+Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. 
+During Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign, Neera Tanden was described as “the wonk behind Hillary.” A close associate of the Clintons, Tanden helped shape policy for both Bill and Hillary. Then she switched to playing that role for Obama. 
+While Hillary’s email scandal broke, Tanden was in charge of the Center for American Progress, a radical left-wing group that had been described as ""Obama's Idea Factory."" And she was chatting with John Podesta, the top Clintonite who had founded CAP. Podesta had co-chaired the Obama-Biden Transition Project. Neera Tanden would co-chair the Hillary-Kaine Transition Project under Podesta who headed up Hillary’s presidential campaign. Podesta had helped shape the last eight years of national politics through Obama and Tanden looked forward to shaping the next eight under Hillary. 
+And what did they think of Hillary? Did they believe their defenses of her wrongdoing? 
+Podesta and Tanden ridiculed her associates for the cover-up. “Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy,” she wondered. “Unbelievable,” Podesta wrote. “They wanted to get away with it.” 
+Since the early days of the email scandal, we’ve been treated to the sordid rituals of feigned innocence. The issue was a non-issue, Clinton surrogates were quick to assure us. And even if it was, no one did anything wrong. The flies on the wall knew better though and now we can all be the flies on the wall. 
+Away from the cameras and the briefings, the Clintonites held their bosses in contempt. Neera Tanden, a supposed close associate of Hillary, blasted her instincts as “suboptimal” and described her as suffering from a character problem. And there was never any doubt as to what was going on. 
+Tanden ridiculed Cheryl Mills for the mess. Mills fired off an email to Podesta warning that Obama’s denial wouldn’t hold up. “We need to clean this up -- he has emails from her -- they do not say state.gov,” she warned. 
+Obama had offered his usual denial claiming to have only learned about the scandal from the media. The revelation that Hillary had emailed Obama from her illegal address would show that he had lied. But meanwhile his people struggled to reinvent his lie by claiming that while he knew about her illegal address, he didn’t know that it was illegal. This put his lie in line with Hillary’s lie. 
+There was only one problem. 
+When in doubt, the Clintons take refuge in the final lie that you may be able to prove that they did wrong, but not that they meant to do wrong. That was Hillary’s final email defense to the FBI. Spliced with claims of memory loss due to a concussion was that old Sergeant Schultz favorite, “I know nothing.” 
+But that defense completely falls apart once you prove that they did know. That is what the leaked emails have begun doing. They are establishing that the Sergeant Schultz defense is utterly hollow. 
+Cheryl Mills knew. John Podesta knew. Barack Obama knew. And Hillary Clinton knew. 
+When Obama told a lie that could easily be disproven while trying to distance himself from Hillary, Mills quickly fired off a warning that he had better get his story straight. And his people did. That makes Obama complicit before and after the fact. He knew what Hillary was doing when she was doing it. And his people participated in the effort to cover it up afterward, not just to protect her, but to protect him. 
+Hillary Clinton was not a rogue actor. She was part of an administration that had waged a war on transparency. Even media allies had dubbed it as the least transparent administration in history. 
+Lies, censorship and targeting whistleblowers were the norm for Obama Inc. A New York Times reporter dubbed it, “The greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation.” The Washington Post noted that the, “Obama administration routinely makes a mockery of its long-ago pledge to establish itself as the most transparent administration in U.S. history.” The AP pointed out that it, “more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them.” 
+Bizarre administration email dodges included EPA boss Lisa Jackson using Richard Windsor as her alias. Jackson/Windsor left the EPA and took a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation. 
+Tanden and Podesta didn’t take issue with Hillary Clinton breaking the law, but with her clumsy political instincts, her inability to fake sincere apologies and spin scandals as smoothly as Obama. Hillary’s biggest flaw in their eyes was her clumsiness at covering up acts that were routine in in Obamaworld. They didn’t despise her because she broke the law, but because she was bad at it. 
+That made her a threat to their political futures. 
+Hillary’s clumsy instincts led her to the point of having to admit what she did while denying having intended to do it. Motive is simultaneously the strongest and weakest defense. You can prove what someone else did, but it is hard to prove what someone else meant to do. 
+Unless you have their emails. 
+This is Hillary’s firewall. It’s what every painful trickle of the scandal was meant to drag out and delay. Every partial revelation is buying time while bringing us closer to the final breach in the motive wall. 
+What the Podesta emails tell us is that they knew. Those around Hillary knew. And those around them knew that the inner circle knew. They knew and they hated Hillary for being a bad liar. And now, as the inside drama of Clintonworld spills across the internet, the red queen moves closer to being in check. 
+By making it all about motive, Hillary Clinton turned personal communications, particularly emails, into the key instrument of culpability. That is why Podesta’s emails are such a hot commodity. It’s why her emails are becoming an even bigger prize. 
+Neera Tanden was right. Hillary Clinton’s political instincts are suboptimal. She is the member of the Obama graduating class voted least likely to be able to lie convincingly on national television. And she has a perverse knack for dragging everyone around her into her scandals while exposing their own. 
+We know that her people knew that she lied. We know that Obama lied. All that’s left is her final lie.",FAKE
+7467,The USA Era (1945 - 2008) in Retrospect,"The USA Era (1945 - 2008) in Retrospect It worked for some but not for all.Winners and losers of the US American era:.5. South East Asia (partly). Re: The USA Era (1945 - 2008) in Retrospect It worked for some but not for all.Winners and losers of the US American era:.5. South East Asia (partly). Quoting: Anonymous Coward 67204360 There is a simple economic explanation for this development.USA and Whites are now losing influence at an alarming rate. White companies are increasingly complaining about losing access to non-white markets while China's influence is growing there fast, leading, among others, to bank and financial crises like Deutsche Bank. Also, more and more countries are banning white culture and languages.The last 500 years whites controlled all manufacturing, arms production and finance and needed only resources from others. Now whites are losing all that, and are about to become irrelevant when non-whites soon control resources, manufacturing, markets and finance..",FAKE
+5822,Russia Warns US In Total Breakdown After FBI Notifies Obama All Hillary Emails Found,"
+A chilling Ministry of Foreign Affairs ( MoFA ) “urgent action” report issued to all Federation ministries within the past hour is warning that the United States is now suffering a complete breakdown in its normal governmental functions after the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) notified President Obama that all of Hillary Clinton’s believed to be deleted and/or destroyed secret emails have now been completely recovered . [Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]
+According to a Foreign Intelligence Service ( SVR ) addendum to this MoFA “urgent action” report, the FBI was able to recover all of Hillary Clinton’s once secret emails from the computer shared by her campaign vice chairman Huma Abedin and sexual deviant husband Anthony Weiner— both of whom are now under the protection of the FBI as “cooperating witnesses” against Hillary Clinton.
+To exactly how all of Hillary Clinton’s secret emails and documents ended up on the Abedin-Weiner laptop computer, the SVR explains, was due to its use of the Outlook and IMAP email protocols that will sync any folder, on any device, they are told to monitor and can be told to make local copies of emails —which simply means that Abedin used the laptop computer she shared with her disgraced husband to back up every communication Hillary Clinton ever made—and that numbered 650,000 copies of emails, documents and other communications .
+Unbeknownst, however, to both Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, and everyone else aiding their criminality, this report continues, is that when the US Congress ordered all of these secret emails turned over to them, Clinton, in turn, ordered them all destroyed —but with her, and those aiding her, failing to realize that when these emails were “bleached” (a computer program used to destroy hard drives) from her secret private server they did so with it offline, meaning that it wasn’t able to “backtrack” to the Abedin-Weiner laptop to destroy all of the backups emails, documents and communications discovered by the FBI .
+Though the exact contents of these now discovered Hillary Clinton secret emails it is not fully “known/understood” by the SVR, this report notes, the FBI agents who have been documenting their contents have become so horrified by what they’re discovering they are now reporting to the American press that Hillary Clinton is the “antichrist personified” .
+Even worse, this report continues, with new Wikileaks showing that not only is Hillary Clinton and her criminal money laundering organization, known as the Clinton Foundation, being investigated by the FBI, nearly every other US intelligence and tax agency have, likewise, begun investigations too .
+Thus leading, this report gravely explains, to a complete breakdown in the rule of law in the United States as the main investigators into Hillary Clinton’s crimes are all now known to be her supporters who have received tens-of-millions of dollars in “gifts/bribes” to protect her —and that led former CIA agent and American diplomat Dr. Steve Pieczenik to personally notify President Putin this past week that the US intelligence community has now launched a counter-coup against Hillary Clinton .
+
+This report concludes by noting that not only did Dr. Pieczenik take the extraordinary “measure/step” of informing President Putin of this US intelligence community counter-coup, he also posted his warning to YouTube for all of the American people to see too—but that in spite of its extraordinarily being viewed by over 2.5 million of these peoples in less than 24 hours , the Hillary Clinton supporting global tech giant Google has suppressed this fact from its main trends— giving the top place, instead, to a video mocking Americans that has only 1.6 million views , and that stunningly doesn’t include Dr. Pieczenik’s warning video at all .
+Source 
+",FAKE
+4729,"Mormon Exodus: Trump, Clinton Tied in Utah at 26%; McMullin 22%, Johnson 14%","On the evening of Oct. 7, after the ""grab-them-by-the-pussy"" tape had been reverberating for a few hours, I tweeted that ""The next polls from Utah should be interesting."" And holy mother of God are they.
+
+A Y2 Analytics poll of 500 likely Utah voters from Oct. 10-11 was published this morning, and the results are the craziest numbers I've seen in an already unfathomable election year: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are tied at 26 percent, independent conservative Evan McMullin is closing fast at 22 percent, Gary Johnson is at 14, and Jill Stein's at 1. This in a state where Mitt Romney received 73 percent of the vote in 2012, and which Republicans have won since 1976 by an average of 36 percentage points.
+
+This is Y2 Analytics' first Utah poll this year, so we don't have a clean before-and-after comparison yet. As I mentioned in the bottom of this Saturday post about the Mormon-led Republican defection from Trump, two of only three previous Utah polls that included McMullin looked like this:
+
+So as I pointed out in August, Trump was already in an unprecedentedly weak position in the Beehive State before this latest evidence of his moral vulgarity surfaced. Now Mormons (who make up an estimated 55 percent of Utah's population) look poised to run screaming from the Republican Party's standard-bearer. The Y2 survey found that a whopping 94 percent of respondents were aware of Trump's sex-bragging tape, and that McMullin—a Utah native, Brigham Young University grad, and Mormon—was competitive despite only 52 percent being aware enough of him to form an opinion. In addition, according to the Deseret News write-up, ""McMullin soundly beats Trump among those in the poll who identified themselves members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.""
+
+The campaigns of both McMullin and Johnson are based in Utah, so this poll will intensify what was already a top regional priority for both. The Johnson/Bill Weld shop started its latest fundraising pitch yesterday like so: ""A realistic analysis of polling data across the country shows that Governors Johnson and Weld can win 5 or more states by focusing resources in these key purple states.""
+
+Johnson is on the ballot in all 50 states plus Washington, D.C.; McMullin is on just 11 (compared to Darrell Castle's 24 and Rocky De La Feunte's 20). In most of those states, McMullin isn't making much of a measurable dent—in Virginia this week, for example, he recently registered at 1 percent compared to Johnson's 7. But it's also true that his name doesn't always appear on polls, and that many of his states are underpolled to begin with. I would expect him to pull some votes in Idaho (a safely Republican state with the second-largest concentration of Mormons), plus Colorado and New Mexico, each of which feature 2 percent Mormon populations and are easily reachable from the Salt Lake media market.
+
+Gary Johnson, meanwhile, looks to be most competitive in his home base of New Mexico, where a recent poll had him at 24 percent; plus third-party-friendly Alaska, where a recent pre-Trump-tape poll had him at 18 percent. He was also beating the spread between Clinton and Trump in 18 states, last time I ran the numbers.
+
+If either Johnson or McMullin win a state outright, it would mark the first such success by a third-party presidential candidate since George Wallace won five in 1968. With Clinton's lead widening over Trump of late, the drama of such a milestone would lessen. But it would be a huge deal either for a Libertarian Party attempting to cement its status as the third alternative in American politics, or for #NeverTrump conservatives looking to build from the wreckage of a self-damaging election. There is no doubt that the LP will win the overall bronze in the popular vote, but will the conservative alternative sneak past in the Electoral College? The answer to that question will give us some interesting clues about what post-Trump politics will look like in America.",REAL
+1588,Why Clinton remains inevitable — almost,"Unless she’s indicted, Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination.
+
+That kind of sentence is rarely written about a major presidential candidate. But I don’t see a realistic third alternative (except for one long-shot, below).
+
+Clinton is now hostage to the various investigations — the FBI, Congress, the courts — of her e-mails. The issue has already damaged her seriously by highlighting once again her congenital inability to speak truthfully. When the scandal broke in March, she said unequivocally that she “did not e-mail any classified material to anyone.” That’s now been shown to be unequivocally false. After all, the inspector general of the intelligence community referred her e-mails to the Justice Department precisely because they contain classified material.
+
+The fallback — every Clinton defense has a fallback — is that she did not mishandle any material “marked” classified. But that’s absurd. Who could even have been in a position to mark classified something she composed and sent on her own private e-mail system?
+
+Moreover, what’s prohibited is mishandling classified information , not just documents . For example, any information learned from confidential conversations with foreign leaders is automatically classified. Everyone in national security knows that. Reuters has already found 17 e-mails sent by Clinton containing such “born classified” information. And the State Department has already identified 188 e-mails on her server that contain classified information.
+
+The truth-shaving never stops. Take a minor matter: her communications with Sidney Blumenthal. She originally insisted that these were just “unsolicited” e-mails from an old friend. Monday’s document release showed that they were very much solicited (“Keep ’em coming when you can”) and in large volume — 306 e-mails, according to the New York Times’ Peter Baker, more than with any other person, apparently, outside the State Department.
+
+The parallel scandal looming over Clinton is possible corruption involving contributions to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state. There are relatively few references to the foundation in the e-mails she has released. Remember, she erased 32,000 e-mails she deemed not “work-related.” Clinton needs to be asked a straightforward question: “In sorting your private from public e-mails, were those related to the Clinton Foundation considered work-related or were they considered private and thus deleted?”
+
+We are unlikely to get a straight answer from Clinton. In fact, we may never get the real answer. So Clinton marches on regardless. Who is to stop her?
+
+Yes, Bernie Sanders has risen impressively. But it is inconceivable that he would be nominated. For one thing, he’d be the oldest president by far — on Inauguration Day older than Ronald Reagan, our oldest president, was at his second inaugural.
+
+And there is the matter of Sanders being a self-proclaimed socialist in a country more allergic to socialism than any in the Western world. Which is why the party is turning its lonely eyes to joltin’ Joe Biden.
+
+Biden, who at 72 shares the Democrats’ gerontocracy problem, is riding a wave of deserved sympathy. But that melts away quickly when a campaign starts. Even now, his support stands at only 18 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll. For him to win, one has to assume that Sanders disappears and Biden automatically inherits Sanders’ constituency.
+
+That’s a fantasy, modeled on 1968 when Bobby Kennedy picked up Eugene McCarthy’s anti-Lyndon Johnson constituency. But Joe Biden is no Bobby Kennedy. And in a recent Iowa poll, Biden’s support comes roughly equally from Clinton and Sanders. Rather than inheriting the anti-Clintonite constituency, he could instead be splitting it.
+
+There is one long-shot possibility that might upend Clinton: Biden pledges to serve one term only and chooses Elizabeth Warren as his running mate — now. One-term pledges address the age problem but they are political poison, giving the impression of impermanence and mere transition. Warren cures that, offering the Democratic base — and the Sanders constituency — the vision of a 12-year liberal ascendancy.
+
+When asked on Wednesday whether she had discussed such a ticket with Biden, Warren answered “it was a long conversation,” a knowing wink in the form of a provocative nondenial.
+
+I doubt a Biden-Warren ticket will happen, but it remains the only threat to Clinton outside of some Justice Department prosecutor showing the same zeal in going after Hillary Clinton as the administration did in going after David Petraeus.
+
+Otherwise the Democrats remain lashed to Clinton. Their only hope is that the Republicans self-destruct in a blaze of intraparty warfare. Something for which they are showing an impressive talent.
+
+Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+4722,Fact-checking the second Clinton-Trump presidential debate,"In the second presidential debate, Donald Trump once again relied on many dubious and false claims that have been repeatedly been debunked. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, on occasion made a factual misstep, but it didn’t even compare to Trump’s long list of exaggerations.
+
+Here’s a roundup of 25 interesting and suspect claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.
+
+Trump mixes up a story about a long-ago criminal case. Clinton did not laugh at a rape victim.
+
+In 1975, Clinton — then Hillary Rodham — was a 27-year-old law professor running a legal aid clinic in the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. After a 41-year-old factory worker was accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, he asked the judge to replace his male court-appointed attorney with a female one. The judge went through the list of a half-dozen women practicing law in the county and picked Clinton.
+
+In her autobiography, “Living History,” Clinton wrote, “I told [prosecutor] Mahlon [Gibson] I really don’t feel comfortable taking on such a client, but Mahlon gently reminded me that I couldn’t very well refuse the judge’s request.” Gibson has confirmed that account in interviews with Newsday and CNN, saying Clinton told him: “I don’t want to represent this guy. I just can’t stand this. I don’t want to get involved. Can you get me off?”
+
+Ultimately, the prosecution’s case fell apart for a number of reasons, including investigators mishandling evidence of bloody underwear, so in a plea agreement the charges were reduced from first-degree rape to unlawful fondling of a minor under the age of 14. Not until 2008 did the victim, Kathy Shelton, realize that Clinton had been the lawyer on the other side. She has since attacked Clinton for putting “me through hell,” and she appeared at a news event with Trump before the debate.
+
+The rape case reemerged when the Washington Free Beacon in 2014 discovered unpublished audio recordings from the mid-1980s of Clinton being interviewed by Arkansas reporter Roy Reed for an article that was never published.
+
+In the recorded interview, Clinton is heard laughing or giggling four times when discussing the case with unusual candor; the reporter is also heard laughing, and sometimes Clinton is responding to him.
+
+Here are the four instances:
+
+Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, alleged that in 1991 Clinton, while governor, propositioned her and exposed himself. She later filed a sexual harassment suit. The case was dismissed by a federal judge, who ruled that even if her allegations were true, such “boorish and offensive” behavior would not be severe enough to constitute sexual harassment under the law. That ruling was under appeal when Clinton in 1998 settled the suit for $850,000, with no apology or admission of guilt. All but $200,000 was directed to pay legal fees.
+
+Premiums are expected to increase overall in 2017, but Trump is cherry-picking from the highest proposed increases in the insurance marketplace.
+
+State-by-state weighted average increases range from just 1.3 percent in Rhode Island to as high as 71 percent in Oklahoma. But the most common plans in the marketplace will see an average increase of 9 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s July analysis. These plans have been used as the benchmark to calculate government subsidies.
+
+The vast majority of marketplace enrollees (about eight in 10) receive government premium subsidies. They are protected from a premium increase (and may even see a decrease) if they stay with a low-cost plan. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “anecdotal examples of premium hikes or averages across insurers can provide a skewed picture of the increases marketplace enrollees will actually face.”
+
+To support the debunked notion that Clinton’s campaign originated “birther” rumors during the 2008 presidential campaign, Trump once again referenced longtime Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal and Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle. But he’s grasping at straws — and once again refused to apologize for his own role in promoting the birther fable.
+
+James Asher, former D.C. bureau chief of McClatchy, has said that Blumenthal “strongly urged” him to “investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya.” McClatchy assigned a reporter to go to Kenya, and the reporter found the allegation was false, Asher said. (We reached out to Asher several times but did not receive a response.)
+
+Blumenthal, declining to elaborate further, said in a statement to The Fact Checker: “This is false. Period. Donald Trump cannot distract from the fact that he is the one who embraced and promoted the birther lie, and bears the responsibility for it.”
+
+Solis Doyle said in a recent CNN interview that in December 2007, a volunteer coordinator in Iowa forwarded an email perpetuating the birther conspiracy. Clinton “made the decision immediately to let that person go,” Solis Doyle said in the interview.
+
+As in the instance with the Iowa volunteer coordinator, the campaign denounced isolated instances of Clinton’s staffers questioning whether Obama was Muslim. We found that there’s no evidence that she or her campaign were “pressing it very hard” — though some of her supporters did perpetuate the claims in the bitter 2008 primary campaign against Obama.
+
+Trump has used this line of attack throughout the campaign, sometimes saying Hillary Clinton was an “enabler” of her husband’s affairs, saying she would “go after these women and destroy their lives.”
+
+One of the interviews that Clinton’s critics have pointed to is a Jan. 27, 1998, interview on the “Today” show, saying it showed Clinton was discrediting allegations by then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky. This interview took place a week after her husband was accused of having an affair with Lewinsky, and Clinton blamed Republican foes for making false attacks against her husband.
+
+Specifically, critics have pointed to this quote by Clinton:
+
+“I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this, they have popped up in other settings,” Clinton told Matt Lauer. “This is the great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
+
+This interview, by many accounts, was certainly pivotal to saving Bill Clinton’s presidency, as his wife forcefully backed him. But by Hillary Clinton’s account at the time, her husband had not yet admitted the Lewinsky affair to her. That did not happen until Aug. 15, 1998, according to her memoir.
+
+Moreover, at the time of the interview, Lewinsky also denied there had been a relationship. Her lawyer had submitted an affidavit on Jan. 12 from her saying she “never had a sexual relationship with the president.” Lewinsky did not begin to testify before the independent prosecutor about the full extent of the relationship until July 27, six months after the “Today” show interview. Lewinsky testified for 15 days, after which the president finally confessed to his wife.
+
+See our in-depth fact-checks on this here and here.
+
+While Trump has ramped up the attacks on the Clintons and the sex allegations against Bill Clinton, the record shows that Trump dismissed or minimized these very allegations for many years. Trump dismissed the women involved as losers and not attractive. Trump even suggested that Americans would have been more forgiving if Clinton had slept with more beautiful women.
+
+Here are some examples (see more here):
+
+In 1998, Trump attacked Paula Jones, who had sued Clinton, alleging sexual harassment: “Paula Jones is a loser, but the fact is that she may be responsible for bringing down a president indirectly.”
+
+In 1999, Trump faulted Bill Clinton for the way he handled the Lewinsky scandal, and complained about his choice in women: “He handled the Monica situation disgracefully. It’s sad because he would go down as a great president if he had not had this scandal. People would have been more forgiving if he’d had an affair with a really beautiful woman of sophistication. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe were on a different level. Now Clinton can’t get into golf clubs in Westchester. A former president begging to get in a golf club. It’s unthinkable.”
+
+During a 2001 interview, Trump again expressed sympathy for Bill Clinton, arguing that the former president’s biggest mistake was answering questions about his sex life. Trump said he likes Clinton, and finds it all too easy to understand why the then-president found it hard to answer the question: “Did you f— Monica?” “What he should have done is fought for years not to answer it,” Trump said in the interview. “I mean, isn’t it amazing and terrible that a guy — a president — is put in that position? He could have gone down as truly great and, instead, you know, he’ll be viewed somewhat differently, which is really a shame.”
+
+Trump always makes it sound like this is U.S. taxpayer money — and he always uses a too-high estimate. Because of international sanctions over its nuclear program, Iran had billions of dollars in assets that were frozen in foreign banks around the globe. With sanctions lifted, in theory those funds would be unlocked.
+
+But the Treasury Department has estimated that once Iran fulfills other obligations, it would have about $55 billion left. (Much of the other money was obligated to illiquid projects in China.) For its part, the Central Bank of Iran said the number was actually $32 billion, not $55 billion.
+
+There is no evidence this was the case in the 2015  terrorist attack that killed 14 people. There have been unconfirmed second- or third-hand reports — a friend of a friend of a neighbor — that a neighbor claimed to have noticed suspicious activity but did not report anything for fear of doing racial profiling. The religion of this supposed neighbor is unknown, but presumably a fear of racial profiling would suggest the neighbor was not Muslim.
+
+Trump is technically correct on the timeline, but Clinton’s staff had requested the emails to be deleted months before the subpoena, according to the FBI’s August 2016 report. Moreover, there’s no evidence Clinton deleted the emails in anticipation of the subpoena, and FBI director James B. Comey has said his agency’s investigation found no evidence that any work-related emails were “intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.”
+
+PolitiFact compiled a helpful timeline of events relating to Clinton’s release of her emails, based on the FBI report. From their timeline:
+
+On July 23, 2014, the State Department agreed to produce records pertaining to the 2012 attacks in Libya, for the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s investigation. In December 2014, Clinton aide Cheryl Mills told an employee of the company that managed her server to delete emails on her server unrelated to government work that were older than 60 days.
+
+On March 4, 2015, the Benghazi Committee issued a subpoena requiring Clinton to turn over her emails relating to Libya. Three weeks later, between March 25 and March 31, the employee had an “oh s—” moment and realized he did not delete the emails that Mills requested in December 2014, he told the FBI. The employee then deleted the emails and used a program called BleachBit to delete the files.
+
+This is just totally false.
+
+We have found no evidence of his early opposition. Trump expressed lukewarm support the first time he was asked about it on Sept. 11, 2002, and was not clearly against it until he was quoted in the August 2004 Esquire cover story titled, “Donald Trump: How I’d Run the Country (Better).”
+
+But by the middle of 2004, many Americans had turned against the war, making Trump’s position not particularly unique. In light of Trump’s repeated false claim, Esquire has added an editor’s note to its August 2004 story, saying, “The Iraq War began in March 2003, more than a year before this story ran, thus nullifying Trump’s timeline.” We have awarded this claim Four Pinocchios, compiled a timeline of all of Trump’s comments prior to the invasion in March 2003, and even a video documenting how this is a bogus claim.
+
+Trump is simply wrong when he says the United States is the highest-taxed nation in the world.
+
+The Pew Research Center, using 2014 data, found that the tax bill for Americans, under various scenarios, is below average for developed countries.
+
+In 2014, according to comparative tables of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), revenue as a percentage of the gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the economy — was 26 percent for the United States. Out of 34 countries, that put the United States in the bottom third — and well below the OECD average of 34.4 percent.
+
+Clinton overstated the impact of the 2011 New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreement, which she helped negotiate as secretary of state.
+
+New START placed tighter limits on deployed strategic weapons, but Russia was actually already meeting the treaty’s limits, for the most part, when the treaty’s implementation began. Indeed, Russia has increased deployed nuclear weapons from 1,537 in February 2011 to 1,796 in September of this year. Also, the treaty does not restrict either country from stockpiling weapons, nor does it require them to destroy any existing weapons.
+
+Russia’s total nuclear warhead arsenal has been on a steady decline, from 40,000, since 1986. During Obama’s presidency, Russia’s nuclear warhead total has hovered around 4,500 since 2012.
+
+Trump cites an Internal Revenue Service audit as his justification for not releasing his federal income tax returns, but the audit does not prohibit from releasing the returns. Richard Nixon, who started the tradition of presidents and presidential candidates releasing their returns, did so in the middle of an audit.
+
+Moreover, Trump has not released his tax returns from before 2009, which are no longer under audit, according to his attorney.
+
+Presidential candidates have no legal obligation to release their returns, but there has long been a tradition to do so for the sake of transparency. Hillary Clinton has released three decades’ worth of tax returns.
+
+The toppling of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi — at the hands of Libyan rebels aided by U.S. and NATO air power — has led to highly unstable governance as the country’s tribes have vied for influence and power. There are rival governments based in the capital of Tripoli and the eastern city of Tobruk, and neither has fully recognized the “unity” government established by United Nations mediators.
+
+The National Oil Corporation (NOC) claims to be operating independently without taking orders from either of the country’s rival governments, though a rival NOC appears to have been set up in the east. ISIS has attempted to step into the power vacuum. But not a single expert or news article that we consulted said that ISIS has grabbed a single oil field. Instead, militants appear to be trying to disrupt the flow of oil, mainly by scaring workers away.
+
+Claudia Gazzini, a Tripoli-based senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told The Fact Checker it was not true that the Islamic State has control of any Libyan oil.
+
+“While it is true that ISIS has attacked oil fields in the Sirte basin area and destroyed key equipment there, they have not sought to keep control of the oil fields,” Gazzini said. “At the moment they appear to have adopted a hit-and-run strategy. There is no evidence that they are pumping out the crude oil and certainly no evidence that they are trading it. At the moment they just appear interested in starving the Libyan state of oil revenues.”
+
+Trump made a ludicrous claim that U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens made 600 requests for help before he perished in the September 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi. This is a misunderstanding of a figure widely used by Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, but even they never claimed that these came from Stevens.
+
+The Fact Checker delved deeply into this “600” figure. It is a subjective accounting of “requests and concerns,” not actual requests for help. There is no dispute that security was inadequate in Benghazi and that the State Department failed to respond to all requests for security. But the shorthand description of “600 requests” has left a misleading impression — so much so that many reporters and lawmakers appear to believe that all of these requests were ignored. At least some of the requests were actually fulfilled — and the counting of “concerns” may be subject to dispute.
+
+Homicides were up 10.8 percent nationwide in 2015, the biggest percentage jump in a single year since 1971, according to FBI data. But violent crimes overall have been declining for about two decades, and are far below rates seen one or two decades ago.
+
+Homicides have continued to spike in major cities this year, though the rates remain far below their peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Law enforcement officials, including the FBI, have voiced concerns about the uptick in crime in 2015.
+
+Criminal justice experts warn against comparing crime trends from short periods of time, such as year over year. An annual trend can show a trajectory of where the trend might be headed but still not give a full picture. Many criminal justice experts say crime trends are determined over at least five years, preferably 10 or 20 years, of data.
+
+Trump takes Clinton’s statement out of context. During a March 2016 town hall, Clinton was asked by a voter: “Make the case to poor whites who live in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, who vote Republican, why they should vote for you based upon economic policies versus voting for a Republican?”
+
+Clinton gave a lengthy response, which included the line, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” It was part of her longer answer about how transitioning away from coal-powered plants has already affected mining communities, and her plan to help coal mine workers adjust after losing factory jobs, as explained in her November 2015 policy proposal for revitalizing coal communities.
+
+Here’s her full answer. The portion that Trump cited is in bold.
+
+This is easy to disprove. Let’s look at the tweet, sent at 5:30 a.m. regarding former Miss Universe Alicia Machado:
+
+Trump claims that Machado is “no angel.” No sex tape has surfaced since Trump sent out the late-night tweet. But he clearly tweeted that people should “check out sex tape.”
+
+It’s unclear what Trump’s source is on this one, and his campaign did not respond to our inquiry. In 2015, 24 percent of black people lived below poverty levels, according to the Census. Black people had the highest rate of poverty among all racial groups (21 percent of Hispanics, 11 percent of Asians and 11.6 percent of whites).
+
+Moreover, the majority of black people do not live in the “inner city,” as the NAACP tweeted during the debate.
+
+Research shows that as of 2010, the majority of blacks, Asians and Latinos in metropolitan areas lived in the suburbs.
+
+Coal is not clean. When burned in power plants, it emits sulfur dioxides, nitrous oxides and mercury unless coal-fired power plants have scrubbers to remove those from the air, thanks to regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency that Trump said was “so restrictive that they are putting our energy companies out of business.”
+
+Coal also emits carbon dioxide, which the Supreme Court in 2007 said was a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That carbon dioxide can only be removed from emissions at great cost, and the technique is not currently in use except in areas where it can be used for enhanced oil recovery.
+
+Finally, the act of mining coal is not clean. It either involves open-pit mines or underground mines that often pollute waters. And coal-fired power plants also produce coal ash waste that is often kept in ponds that are prone to leaking.
+
+Probably the major reason for the decline in coal use is the discovery of a way to tap into shale gas, which has brought down the price of natural gas. Many utilities are switching to natural gas.
+
+Actually, the United States is still a net importer of crude oil and refined petroleum products. It imported 5.3 million barrels a day in July, according to the Energy Information Administration. That is, however, down sharply from the 13 million barrels a day of imports reached in 2006.
+
+Clinton went onto say, “We are not dependent upon the Middle East.” That’s correct, but it’s been the case for years. Canada is the biggest source for American oil imports — more than the entire Persian Gulf combined.
+
+This is wrong. The Obama administration has admitted 12,500 refugees over the past fiscal year, which slightly exceeded a goal of 10,000. Even so, this is about one-third accepted by Canada, with a much smaller population.
+
+Trump in the past has claimed that Clinton wants to admit 620,000 refugees in her first term. Clinton has supported accepting up to 65,000 refugees from Syria in one year. This is 55,000 more than the Obama administration’s plan to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees this fiscal year.
+
+The 620,000 figure that Trump often uses is based in the unverified assumption that Clinton would continue at that pace for every year of her first term, on top of the Obama administration’s proposal for 100,000 total refugees for fiscal year 2017. (Multiply 155,000 four times and you reach 620,000.) After Trump made his comment about “hundreds of thousands,” moderator Martha Raddatz deftly noted that Clinton had asked for an increase from 10,000 to 65,000.
+
+Clinton’s talking point is out of date. The Census Bureau reported in September that median income was up 5.2 percent from 2014 to 2015, to $56,516. This is the first annual increase in median household income since 2007, the year before the Great Recession.
+
+The United States has a trade deficit of about $500 billion in goods and services. Trump appears to be referring the deficit in goods, which was nearly $800 billion in 2015, according to the Census Bureau.
+
+This is not the full story. The federal government weighed several factors when considering bids for redevelopment of the Old Post Office building: 50 percent were qualitative (including past performance of the developer, site plan and design concept) and 50 percent were quantitative (developer’s financial capability and capacity and the developer’s financial offer).
+
+Two factors weighed heavily in Trump’s favor: the financial backing of major real estate investor Colony Capital and the design by prominent architect Arthur Cotton Moore.
+
+Trump had submitted the bid with Colony Capital as the financial backer, and the Trump Organization as the lead developer. The Washington Post’s Jonathan O’Connell wrote: “Colony is a major global investor in real estate, which bolstered Trump’s efforts to secure the deal. At the time, Colony had already invested $45 billion in more than 14,000 corporate and real estate assets, ranking it among the top real estate investment firms worldwide.”
+
+But after the Trump Organization won the bid, Colony Capital backed out of the deal, saying that “the project’s timeline became too long for the firm.” The Trumps instead contributed $40 million to $42 million in equity and borrowed $170 million from Deutsche Bank.
+
+The selection of Moore “bolstered the organization’s experience restoring or managing historic buildings in New York,” O’Connell wrote. Moore stepped down from the project less than a year after Trump won the bid. He told the New York Times: “I left because I couldn’t support what they were doing to the building. They were covering up or tearing out everything that was historic.”
+
+Send us facts to check by filling out this form
+
+Check out our guide to all Trump and Clinton fact checks
+
+Sign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter",REAL
+7838,Sandy Hook Promise Rakes In $6 Million (VIDEO),"in: False Flags , Gun Control , Multimedia , Propaganda , Sleuth Journal , Special Interests , US News Non-profit Headed Up By Career Marketers In the first two years of its existence the Sandy Hook massacre event’s premier fundraising organization has raised close to $6 million–an average of $3 million per year. In 2013 and 2014 alone the nonprofit pumped the American public and larger donors for $5,809,367, according to the most recent IRS filings of the organization. The lofty figure shouldn’t come as a surprise given the marketing talent heading up the organization and the fact that major news media have vigorously promoted the event without ever questioning its veracity. Tim Makris is Sandy Hook Promise’s full time Executive Director. Mr. Makris, who claims he had children attending Sandy Hook Elementary at the time of the December 14, 2012 incident, brings twenty years of marketing and public relations experience to the project. As Makris’ LinkedIn profile reveals, he developed his skills in the corporate sector at Thule Inc., Procter & Gamble, and Schering-Plough Health Care. Below is the performance of this savvy salesman at the inauguration of the Sandy Hook Promise money juggernaut. Here is another video pitch Makris made to the Brookings Institution, where he explains in no uncertain terms Sandy Hook Promise’s public relations strategy to reshape US gun laws. Sandy Hook Promise has close ties to the world of finance as well. The chairperson of its Board of Directors and another of its four corporate officers is Kristin Lemkau, Chief Marketing Officer of major global investment bank JPMorgan Chase. image credit: youtube And perhaps unsurprisingly Sandy Hook Promise is overseen by individuals representing the news media. The organization’s vice chair is Rob Cox , a founder and global editor of Reuters BreakingViews. News entrepreneur Rob Cox is a corporate officer of Sandy Hook Promise. Image Credit: University of Vermont According to a profile of Cox published by his alma mater, The University of Vermont, 
+Within twenty-four hours of the massacre of twenty-six children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Cox and a circle of friends were working to found what would become Sandy Hook Promise, an organization dedicated to healing their own community and doing all it can to make sure others do not suffer the same fate. The degree of such caring is frankly difficult to comprehend. In other words, hours before Connecticut Medical Examiner H. Wayne Carver II stumbled through his press conference on December 15, 2012, explaining how parents were prohibited from viewing the bodies of their slain children, good-hearted souls like journalist Cox, professional marketer Makris, and banker Lemkau were scheming to cash in on the event. After all, this is what a community of like-minded souls is all about. James Belden the fourth and final Sandy Hook corporate officer. In addition to serving as a Newtown Commissioner, he also brings marketing experience to Sandy Hook Promise. Before funerals were even held for the deceased children or the results of a satisfactory crime scene investigation were close to completion Commissioner Belden was before television cameras promoting another non-profit, “Newtown United” and its promotion of “the underlying issues that caused this horrible incident–not just gun control but mental health and awareness.” Sandy Hook Promise is presently directing its marketing prowess toward leaning on US public schools to enforce certain mental health protocols on children; what it terms “mental health first aid” that will purportedly prevent “another Sandy Hook.” Sandy Hook Promise spokeswoman Nicole Hockley. Experienced marketers position the nonprofit to receive a large amount of “free publicity” via corporate news media. Sandy Hook Promise spokeswoman Nicole Hockley. Experienced marketers position the nonprofit to receive a large amount of “free publicity” via corporate news media. The millions solicited by Sandy Hook Promise thus far is merely a fraction of an estimated $130 million in federal funding and private donations brought in by Sandy Hook related charities. “The latest edition of the video We Need To Talk about Sandy Hook lists a total of $131,009,229 in grants and donations, including the $50 million for the new school,” academic researcher Vivian Lee notes , but this is only a partial accounting. Indeed, the total amount of money raised to date cannot easily be calculated. A 2014 Connecticut report on charitable donations lists organizations such as The Animal Center, Inc., Newtown Forest Association, Inc., Sandy Hook Arts Center for Kids, and Angels of Sandy Hook Bracelets, all raising funds in the name of Sandy Hook Elementary. John Rinaldi. Image Credit: New York Daily News Just how many individuals and organizations have sought to cash in on the Sandy Hook massacre and the broader public fear concerning child safety? Consider that even John Rinaldi, the convicted stalker of film actress Brooke Shields, oversees a Sandy Hook charity, “Sandy Hook Kids Center.” “We are actively/tirelessly/relentless fighting on behalf of our kids,” Rinaldi proclaims on the organization’s website . “We combat abuse/violence that in turns creates bully [sic].” Submit your review",FAKE
+531,Obama veers left,"On Day 13, a video message and a meeting with media executives—but still no press conference, protective pool",REAL
+4931,Libertarians hope rallies and ads can nudge them into the presidential debates,"On Friday morning, the third day in his four-day New England campaign swing, Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson told a joke. He was the punch line.
+
+“This is a crazy election,” Johnson said, looking out at dozens of Mainers who had come out for a breakfast meet-and-greet. “You know how crazy this election is? I’m going to be the next president of the United States. That’s how crazy!”
+
+Johnson, a two-term governor of New Mexico, has avoided the fringe label that often sticks to third-party candidates. Since announcing former Massachusetts governor William Weld as his running mate, Johnson has risen in the polls to the high single digits — and to the mid-teens in some swing states. His rallies draw hundreds of voters, bigger than anything he saw during his 2012 bid. He talks about “spoiling the party,” and voters cheer.
+
+Despite that, Johnson is struggling to grab the prize he has eyed all year: to be invited to the televised presidential debates. He needs to close in on 15 percent in an average of polls, and he is doing what he can. Two super PACs are trying to boost him in. It’s not clear that they can pull it off.
+
+[Trump and advisers remain split on how far to move toward the middle]
+
+The support Johnson has so far is easily explained; in a year of not one, but two historically unpopular major-party candidates, voters are looking for an alternative to Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. Johnson may hold particular appeal for Republicans trying to protect their majorities in Congress; he gives voters an alternative to Trump at the top of the ticket yet allows them to return to the GOP lineup down the ballot.
+
+Relentlessly positive, bounding from event to event in black Nikes and Carhartt jeans, Johnson approaches the debate problem by talking like he has solved it. In 2012, he briefly ran as a Republican — the party he was part of in Santa Fe — and was yanked offstage after a first, flailing debate performance.
+
+“I had 60 seconds to make my pitch, and in the 60 seconds, I was being interrupted,” Johnson said in an interview here. “Now, I can say the same thing — and I’ve got three minutes. Uninterrupted! Three people onstage, audience bigger than the Super Bowl. I don’t think they’d get away with cutting me.”
+
+They might. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which has controlled the process since 1988, has held fast to its 15 percent threshold. A Johnson-backed lawsuit against that threshold was thrown out this month, however, and the voters filing into Johnson-Weld rallies last week were acutely aware that their man might be kept offstage.
+
+“I’m not for either of the choices­ we have right now,” said Roy Hermann, 65, who caucused for Bernie Sanders but showed up in Portland to hear Johnson. “I’m not even sure if I’ll vote for this guy, but I have a great deal of respect for him.”
+
+The day before, at a Johnson-Weld rally in Concord, N.H., 14-year-old Aubrey Pelletier hoisted a sign that read “15%!” Her father, Brad, 39, worried that too many voters limit the news they read and couldn’t see the point of choosing Johnson.
+
+“People are afraid of wasting their votes,” he surmised. “On Facebook, I see Gary Johnson stuff all the time. When I talk to people, they know who he is now.”
+
+As Johnson and Weld stumped across New England, they were recognized by voters — something new in the past three weeks, they said. Fundraising, according to the campaign, has surged in the same period.
+
+Neither Republicans nor Democrats know which nominee that helps. The polls that show Johnson at or above 10 percent have Clinton’s lead growing if he is removed as a choice — but she has got a lead either way. At rallies in New Hampshire and Maine, voters with Bernie Sanders T-shirts stood near people wearing the “Hillary for Prison” shirts sold by far-right radio host Alex Jones. Some cheer when Johnson calls for ending corporate taxes; some cheer when he insists that “black lives matter.” All cheer when he endorses ballot measures to legalize marijuana.
+
+Asked whether he would encourage his voters to pick Republicans or Democrats when they went down their ballot, Johnson demurred. “The wonderful thing about being a Libertarian is that you don’t have to tell anybody to do anything,” he said.
+
+[New Trump campaign chief faces scrutiny over voter registration, anti-Semitism]
+
+Two libertarian efforts are underway to boost Johnson past the debate commission’s 15-percent hurdle. Purple PAC, steered by former Cato Institute president Ed Crane, began a $1 million ad buy last week, with cable spots casting Johnson as an “honorable choice” who favors tolerance and free markets.
+
+“They’re not as ideological as I would probably prefer,” Crane said of Johnson and Weld. “But on the broad issues of social tolerance, restraint in foreign policy, markets over crony capitalism, they’re very good.”
+
+Alternative PAC, launched by former FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, is spending $50,000 to kick-start a Web campaign aimed at millennials. One ad, “Balanced Rebellion,” stars an Abraham Lincoln impersonator who promises that Johnson won’t “send you to fight wars overseas” or “tell you who to marry.”
+
+“It’s like a two-horse race where one horse cheats and the other one eats Muslims,” the Lincoln actor says of the Clinton-Trump race.
+
+The spot was designed by Harmon Brothers, the firm behind a viral ad in which unicorns defecate rainbow ice cream to promote a toilet aid.
+
+Johnson is more tactful. In his campaign speech, an optimistic spiel on how free markets (“Uber everything”) and active citizens can fix the country, he tells one joke about Trump. The Republican nominee, he said, watched the Olympics to see “how high those Mexican pole vaulters could go.” Neither Johnson nor Weld is inclined to attack Clinton, something they have been trying to correct.
+
+“You make mistakes along the trail,” Johnson said in Concord, referring to a CNN town hall — one of his highest-profile events — where he declined to criticize Clinton. “If I had to do that over again, I’d have said: She’s beholden.”
+
+“I’ve made a mini-career of defending Mrs. Clinton on the use of the private server,” said Weld, who added that newer revelations about her email gave him pause.
+
+That light tone has become central to the Johnson-Weld campaign. The two standard-bearers for libertarianism have become some of the least ideological candidates in America.
+
+On the stump, Weld describes the Libertarian Party as “a six-lane highway going right up the middle between the two parties,” and Johnson talks about what can be achieved when partisans cross the aisle.
+
+That has led to steady criticism from more traditional libertarians, who pounce on every Johnson or Weld sop to the center as a gaffe. Weld, who signed a gun-control bill as governor, struggled to win the Libertarian vice-presidential nomination. Jason Sorens, the founder of the Free State Project that encourages libertarians to move to New Hampshire, said he had seen “some demobilization of the LP ticket’s natural base over guns.”
+
+After Johnson refused to rule out a tax on carbon — only if it were revenue-neutral and it replaced income taxes — he was criticized by libertarians on social media.
+
+Crane, Kibbe and other libertarians knew some of this was coming. The Republican primary campaign of Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), designed to build on the support of father Ron Paul’s three ­libertarian-flavored presidential bids, made a bid for conservative voters that put the base to sleep.
+
+“I’m still on the fence about whether I’m going to cast a write-in vote for ‘none of the above’ or myself,” said Darryl Perry, a New Hampshire voter who ran against Johnson for the Libertarian presidential nomination. “I know a few [people] who have said, ‘Well, he’s the lesser of the evils.’ The lesser evil is still evil in my eyes.”
+
+But the dazzling possibility of the debate invite — something no Libertarian candidate has ever achieved — has kept most fellow travelers on board. Dan Fishman, the campaign’s 48-year-old New England director, has walked away from each rally with pages of new sign-ups. “It’s getting easier and easier to train people,” he said, crediting the NationBuilder software that had helped the Trump campaign convert its ­giant crowds into volunteers.
+
+At one rally, in Concord, close to 300 people stood in a steady and meteorology-defying rain to hear Weld and Johnson speak about the six-lane highway between the parties.
+
+“Standing in the rain,” Johnson said with disbelief. “You honor us. You really do.”",REAL
+2943,Islamic State admits defeat in Kobani; blames airstrikes,"Islamic State militants have acknowledged for the first time that they have been defeated in the Syrian town of Kobani, blaming withering airstrikes by a U.S.-led coalition for forcing them to flee the town on the Turkish border.
+
+Although not a strategic site itself, Kobani — known by the militants as Ayn al-Islam — had turned into a test of wills between the militants and the coalition. At one point, Islamic State fighters controlled almost all of the town of 45,000 people and were on the verge of capturing it outright.
+
+In a video released late Friday by the pro-Islamic State Aamaq News Agency, two fighters made it clear that the coalition's relentless air assault proved too much for the militants.
+
+""A while ago, we retreated a bit from Ayn al-Islam because of the bombardment and the killing of some brothers,"" said one masked fighter who spoke Arabic with a North African accent.
+
+In the video, he vowed to return to drive out the People's Protection Units known as the YPG, the main Kurdish militia in Syria, that the fighter referred to as ""rats.""
+
+""The Islamic State will stay. Say that to (President) Obama,"" he said, pointing toward destruction on the edge of Kobani.
+
+A second fighter, standing on a road with a green sign sprayed with the name Ayn al-Islam, described the incessant pounding by coalition aircraft.
+
+""I swear by God, their planes did not leave the air, day and night; they did airstrikes all day and night,"" he said on the video. ""They bombarded everything, even motorcycles; they have not left a building standing. But, God willing, we will return and we will have our revenge multiplied.""
+
+Speaking at a meeting with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts in Boston on Saturday, Secretary of State John Kerry said recapturing Kobani was a ""big deal,"" AFP reported.
+
+""We have a long way to go in the overall campaign, but Daesh — ISIL as some know it — has said all along that Kobani was a real symbolic and strategic objective,"" Kerry said. ""So pushing them out of there is a big deal. And make no mistake, we will also use the same tools that we used to get there — the tools of cooperation and support — to defeat violent, transnational criminal organizations, and ensure that the rule of law thrives for all of our people.""
+
+The Islamic State launched its offensive on the region surrounding Kobani in mid-September, capturing more than 300 Kurdish villages and parts of the city while driving out more than 200,000 Kurds.
+
+The United States and several Arab allies began striking back and providing air cover for Kurdish militia to pour in from Turkey. The overall allied campaign aims to roll back the Islamic State militants who have taken over about a third of Iraq and Syria and declared the captured territory a new caliphate.
+
+As a result of the airstrikes and stiff resistance from the Kurds, the Islamic State — also known as ISIL or ISIS — began retreating a few weeks ago and lost more than 1,000 fighters, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors deaths in the Syrian civil war.
+
+In the last days of the fight, activists reported that the militant group was sending inexperienced fighters and teenagers to the front line because of a lack of recruits, the human rights group said. By Monday, activists and Kurdish officials reported the town was almost cleared of the militants.
+
+The four-month battle for Kobani, which was pummeled by airstrikes, mutual shelling and booby-trapped vehicles, left large parts of the town city uninhabitable, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
+
+""It's not a city anymore,"" Bulent Kilic a Turkish photojournalist for the AFP news agency told Time. ""I saw all the bombs that were dropped on Kobani during this battle. And there's only debris left, especially in the eastern part of the town from where ISIS tried to get in.""",REAL
+3953,Obama On Climate Change: 'I Actually Think We're Going To Solve This Thing',"Obama On Climate Change: 'I Actually Think We're Going To Solve This Thing'
+
+""I actually think we're going to solve this thing.""
+
+That's what President Obama said in a news conference just before he left a United Nations summit on climate change.
+
+""Climate change is a massive problem,"" Obama said. ""It is a generational problem. It's a problem that by definition is just about the hardest thing for a political system to absorb, because the effects are gradual, they're diffused. And yet despite all that ... I'm optimistic. I think we're going to solve it.""
+
+Just a few years ago, Obama said, nobody would have predicted that more than 150 leaders would come to Paris holding plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
+
+""All of this will be hard,"" Obama said. ""Getting 200 nations to agree on anything is hard ... but I'm convinced that we're going to get big things done here.""
+
+Obama leaves the conference, but his deputies will remain in Paris in an effort to craft a global, legally binding agreement intended to curb climate change. The big goal: to keep the global temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius.
+
+At the moment, if you add up all the commitments on the table at the summit and assume that they would be met, the temperature would still rise by 2.7 degrees, Obama said.
+
+""That's too high,"" Obama said. But ""what we expect is that we'll hit these targets faster than expected and ... we could pick up the pace.""
+
+Obama said that is not just ""foolish optimism"" but an expectation based on past experience. The United States, for example, was able to meet its goals faster than expected.
+
+""The key here is to set up the structure so we're sending signals all around the world that says this is happening and we're not turning around,"" Obama said.
+
+Obama touched on a whole host of other issues during the conference. Here are a couple of highlights:
+
+— Obama says that the fact that the peace process for Syria is progressing in Vienna is a sign that Russian President Vladimir Putin ""realizes there is not going to be a military solution to the situation in Syria.""
+
+Eventually, Obama said, he expects the Russians to shift their focus in Syria from trying to prop up the regime of Bashar Assad to fighting the Islamic State.
+
+""I think Mr. Putin understands that for him to get bogged down in an inconclusive and paralyzing civil conflict is not the outcome that he is looking for,"" Obama said.
+
+In other words, Obama said, both the U.S. and Russia agree that the only lasting solution in Syria will be political.
+
+""Where we continue to have an ongoing difference is not in the need for a political settlement; it's whether Assad can continue to serve as president as that transition goes on,"" Obama said.
+
+Russia believes Assad should play a role, and Obama believes that ""it is impossible for Mr. Assad to bring that country together.""
+
+— On the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, Obama said Congress should act. Just as the country takes huge, costly steps to fight terrorism, it has to take steps to reduce gun homicides.
+
+""At the end of the day, Congress, states, local governments are going to have to act in order to make sure that we are preventing people who are deranged or have violent tendencies"" from getting weapons that magnify the damage that they can do, Obama said.
+
+Earlier in the day, President Obama urged Turkey and Russia to ease tensions by focusing on a common enemy: the Islamic State.
+
+The relationship between the two countries has been frayed since Turkey downed a Russian jet in November. Turkey has refused to apologize, saying the Russian warplane crossed over into Turkish airspace. Russia has implemented a series of sanctions.
+
+Reuters reports that Obama said the United States supported Turkey's right to defend its airspace, but he also urged the two countries to ""de-escalate tensions.""
+
+""We all have a common enemy. That is ISIL,"" Obama said using an acronym for the Islamic State, according to the AP. ""I want to make sure that we focus on that threat.""",REAL
+1922,"Mike Huckabee on Netanyahu, wage stagnation, 2016 and more","Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is certainly on the go. He traveled to 38 states last year to help candidates in the midterms and this week alone is in six states. Whether he runs for president or continues to work the trail for others, he certainly sees a lot of America and talks to a whole lot of people. In a real sense, he truly does reflect the views of many social conservatives and conservative populists in the heartland.
+
+With Huckabee, however, who has been going to Israel for 42 years, one is compelled to start with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech. “It was a tremendous speech,” he told Right Turn. “It was more than how he said it but what he said. He called attention to the nature of the [Iranian] regime.” He recited two well-known points — Iran is the world’s largest state sponsor of terror and a regime committed to wiping out Israel — and reiterated that Iran has cheated on every agreement it has ever entered into. “If every time I’ve bought a car from a used-car dealer — 10 out of 10 he’s sold me a lemon, do I really want to buy the 11th?” He sounds genuinely aggrieved about the president’s behavior and the conduct of Democrats who refused to go to the speech. “What I lamented is that the once bipartisan agreement on Israel and national security has been abandoned by the Democrats,” he said. “They are more interested in protecting Obama’s petulance than in protecting Israel.” He hastened to note that he was in Israel yet again last week and met with Netanyahu. He makes the keen point that this hardly was a political winner for Netanyahu back home. “It was divisive back home in Israel. What he did was brave. This was a political risk,” he noted, pointing to the controversy and criticism the trip generated among his opponents. And running through the list of other Middle East countries he has been to (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc.) he observes that this is not just about the Jewish state. “The Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Emiratis, the Saudis are absolutely with Israel on this [the Iranian threat].” He confesses that in watching the president’s conduct and the reported concessions, “I’m stunned. I can’t figure out what the president is thinking, what his advisers are telling him.”
+
+There are few people who know the Clintons like fellow Arkansan Huckabee. He’s not surprised in the least about the recent e-mail and foundation scandals. “Again and again Democrats and especially the press are willing to let the Clintons skate by. It’s pretty bizarre.” Is he going to run for president? He sticks to his previous statements that he will decide “sometime this spring.” He cracks, “Looking at the weather it’s premature [to decide].”
+
+Huckabee is an economic populist, to be sure, and takes pride in being attacked for it. “I talked about [this economic message] eight years ago. I was being pilloried by the Wall Street Journal and other folks in your community [the mainstream media].” He says events have proved him right, and now everyone is talking about wage stagnation.  He asserted, “The bottom 90 percent in the past 40 years have had stagnant wages. In the 25 years before that, 90 percent saw an increase.”
+
+He cites the tax code (it is “punishing people who work on their feet. If they take a second job, they are thrown into a new tax bracket); “cheap foreign labor that devalues American labor”; and “cheap products” from China. People, he said, are worried about the college grad with debt and no job and the small-business person bedeviled by taxes and regulations. Huckabee’s diagnosis of what troubles America may be sound, but many conservatives will disagree with his solutions.
+
+Huckabee may be missing some important pieces of the picture. In the 1950s, Europe and Asia were not yet economic powerhouses, labor unions kept wages artificially high and most families had only one working adult (so labor was more scare, and hence wages were high). In a global economy, many would argue that Huckabee’s proposals don’t fit the times. In fact, we need to expand markets for our trade, enhance our technological edge and change our immigration system so that we siphon off the best and brightest to work, build businesses and invest in America. That formula — becoming a 21st-century economic giant that beats the world competition — together with tax, education and regulatory reform, is the building block of the policy agenda of two other potential 2016 contenders, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Those two make for an interesting contrast to economic populists who fear losing what they have and tend not to think about how to get more of the world economic pie.
+
+If Huckabee would get to the White House, he lists two priorities. “At the top of the list would be reestablishing relations with our allies. I’ve challenged my Democratic friends to come up with one country, just one, that we have better relations with. They can’t because there is not one.” Second, “I’d evolve power out of Washington, D.C.,” he said. “It’s so dysfunctional, I don’t think it can be fixed.” He’d rather give the power back to the states, where “people have to balance budgets.”
+
+It is easy to see why he was such a hit on Fox. He’s entertaining and an excellent conservative analyst. Whether he wants to and can translate that into a presidential platform and campaign remains to be seen. But the candidates who are definitely running might pick up some pointers by watching him.",REAL
+2485,Crucial Rule Is Delayed a Year for Obama’s Health Law,"WASHINGTON — In a significant setback for President Obama’s signature domestic initiative, the administration on Tuesday abruptly announced a one-year delay, until 2015, in his health care law’s mandate that larger employers provide coverage for their workers or pay penalties. The decision postpones the effective date beyond next year’s midterm elections.
+
+Employer groups welcomed the news of the concession, which followed complaints from businesses and was posted late in the day on the White House and Treasury Web sites while the president was flying home from Africa. Republicans’ gleeful reactions made clear that they would not cease to make repeal of Obamacare a campaign issue for the third straight election cycle.
+
+While the postponement technically does not affect other central provisions of the law — in particular those establishing health insurance marketplaces in the states, known as exchanges, where uninsured Americans can shop for policies — it threatens to throw into disarray the administration’s effort to put those provisions into effect by Jan. 1.
+
+“I am utterly astounded,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University and an advocate of the law. “It boggles the mind. This step could significantly reduce the number of uninsured people who will gain coverage in 2014.”
+
+At the White House, Tara McGuinness, a senior adviser on the law, disputed that.
+
+“Nothing in the new guidance regarding employer reporting and responsibility will limit individuals’ eligibility for premium tax credits to buy insurance through the marketplaces that open on Oct. 1,” she said.
+
+Under the law, most Americans will be required to have insurance in January 2014, or they will be subject to tax penalties. The announcement on Tuesday did not say anything about delaying that requirement or those penalties.
+
+Administration officials sought to put the action in a positive light in the online announcements, and they emphasized that the existing insurance coverage of most Americans would not be affected.
+
+“We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively,” Mark J. Mazur, an assistant Treasury secretary, wrote on the department’s Web site. “We recognize that the vast majority of businesses that will need to do this reporting already provide health insurance to their workers, and we want to make sure it is easy for others to do so.”
+
+The 2010 Affordable Care Act required employers with more than 50 full-time workers to offer them affordable health insurance starting next year or face fines. Some companies with payrolls just above that threshold said they would cut jobs or switch some full-time workers to part-time employment so that they could avoid providing coverage.
+
+Under the provision to set up state-based marketplaces, subsidies are supposed to be available to many lower- and middle-income people who do not have access to coverage from employers or other sources. It may be difficult, however, for officials running the exchanges to know who is entitled to subsidies if employers do not report information on the coverage they provide to workers.
+
+Enrollment in the exchanges is to begin Oct. 1, with insurance coverage taking effect on Jan. 1. “We are on target to open the health insurance marketplace on Oct. 1 where small businesses and ordinary Americans will be able to go to one place to learn about their coverage options and make side-by-side comparisons of each plan’s price and benefits before they make their decision,” Valerie Jarrett, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser and liaison to the business community, wrote on the White House Web site.
+
+But even some supporters of the law dispute that the establishment of the health insurance exchanges is on schedule, especially since progress varies by state and some Republican-led states are resisting the health care law and withholding resources for putting it into effect.
+
+Much of the administration’s public effort, especially at the Department of Health and Human Services, has been directed toward spreading the word to uninsured Americans, especially younger and healthy individuals whose participation is needed to help keep down premiums for everyone else. About 85 percent of Americans are insured, so most individuals will be unaffected, at least initially.
+
+Behind the scenes, however, the administration has been fielding questions and criticisms from businesses about the reporting requirements — especially the Treasury Department, which has responsibility, given its oversight of the tax reporting system.
+
+Employer groups were quick to applaud the delay. At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has strongly opposed the law, Randy Johnson, senior vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits, said in a statement, “The administration has finally recognized the obvious — employers need more time and clarification of the rules of the road before implementing the employer mandate.”
+
+E. Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation, said the delay “will provide employers and businesses more time to update their health care coverage without threat of arbitrary punishment.”
+
+Mr. Mazur, the Treasury official, said the delay “will allow us to consider ways to simplify the new reporting requirements consistent with the law.”
+
+“Second,” he added, “it will provide time to adapt health coverage and reporting systems while employers are moving toward making health coverage affordable and accessible for their employees.”
+
+Within the next week, Mr. Mazur said, Treasury will issue official guidance to insurers, self-insuring employers and other parties that provide health coverage. Formal rules will be proposed this summer, he added, but the administration will encourage employers to comply with the law’s reporting provisions in 2014, as originally mandated.
+
+Democrats were all but silent on the news, but a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, released a statement late Tuesday. “Both the administration and Senate Democrats have shown — and continue to show — a willingness to be flexible and work with all interested parties to make sure that implementation of the Affordable Care Act is as beneficial as possible to all involved,” the spokesman, Adam Jentleson, said. “It is better to do this right than fast.”
+
+But Republicans immediately reacted with statements claiming vindication for their efforts to repeal the law altogether.
+
+Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, called the administration action “a cynical political ploy to delay the coming train wreck associated with Obamacare until after the 2014 elections.”
+
+And Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, who faces re-election next year in Kentucky, said in a statement, “The fact remains that Obamacare needs to be repealed and replaced with common-sense reforms that actually lower costs for Americans.”",REAL
+3642,At least 12 dead after terror attack at Paris newspaper office (+video),"Gunmen stormed the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday. French President Francois Hollande called the deadly assault a terrorist attack.
+
+Why is Angela Merkel calling for a ban on the full Islamic veil?
+
+Masked gunmen shouting ""Allahu akbar!"" stormed the Paris offices of a satirical newspaper Wednesday, killing 12 people including the editor and a cartoonist before escaping. It was France's deadliest terror attack in at least two decades.
+
+With a manhunt on, French President Francois Hollande called the attack on the Charlie Hebdo weekly, whose caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed have frequently drawn condemnation from Muslims, ""a terrorist attack without a doubt."" He said several other attacks have been thwarted in France ""in recent weeks.""
+
+There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
+
+France raised its security alert to the highest level and reinforced protective measures at houses of worship, stores, media offices and transportation. Top government officials were holding an emergency meeting and Hollande planned a nationally televised address in the evening. Schools across the French capital closed their doors.
+
+World leaders including President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the attack, but supporters of the militant Islamic State group celebrated the slayings as well-deserved revenge against France.
+
+The Islamic State group has repeatedly threatened to attack France. Just minutes before the attack, Charlie Hebdo had tweeted a satirical cartoon of that extremist group's leader giving New Year's wishes. Another cartoon, released in this week's issue and entitled ""Still No Attacks in France,"" had a caricature of an extremist fighter saying ""Just wait — we have until the end of January to present our New Year's wishes.""
+
+The 12 dead included two men who went by the pen names: Charb — the editor and a cartoonist as well — and the cartoonist Cabu, spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre of the Paris prosecutor's office confirmed.
+
+Two police officers were also among the dead, including one assigned as Charb's bodyguard after prior death threats against him, a police official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
+
+Just before noon, multiple masked men armed with automatic weapons attacked the newspaper's office in central Paris, nearby worker Benoit Bringer told the iTele network. The attackers went to the second floor and started firing indiscriminately in the newsroom, said Christophe DeLoire of Reporters Without Borders.
+
+""This is the darkest day of the history of the French press,"" DeLoire said.
+
+Video images on the website of public broadcaster France Televisions showed two gunmen in black at a crossroads who appeared to fire down one of the streets. A cry of ""Allahu akbar!"" — Arabic for ""God is great""— could be heard among the gunshots.
+
+Luc Poignant of the SBP police union said the attackers left in a waiting car and later switched to another vehicle that had been stolen.
+
+Obama's top spokesman said US officials have been in close contact with the French since the attack. ""We know they are not going to be cowed by this terrible act,"" spokesman Josh Earnest said.
+
+On social media, supporters of militant Islamic groups praised the move. One Twitter user who identified themselves as a Tunisian loyalist of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group called the attack well-deserved revenge against France.
+
+Elsewhere on the Internet, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie was trending as people expressed support for weekly and for journalistic freedom.
+
+Charlie Hebdo has been repeatedly threatened for its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and other controversial sketches. Its offices were firebombed in 2011 after a spoof issue featuring a caricature of the prophet on its cover. Nearly a year later, the publication again published crude Muhammad caricatures, drawing denunciations from around the Muslim world.
+
+Wednesday's attack comes the same day of the release of a book by a celebrated French novelist depicting France's election of its first Muslim president. Hollande had been due to meet with the country's top religious officials later in the day.",REAL
+6289,World leaders' personal chefs sample Indian market fare,"World leaders' personal chefs sample Indian market fare Wed Oct 26, 2016 4:38PM News Bulletin The chefs to various heads of state pose for a photograph as they visit the spice market in the old quarters of New Delhi on October 25, 2016. (AFP) 
+The world’s most high-profile chefs are in India to explore one of the most gastronomic societies on earth. 
+Members of the exclusive cooking society ""Le Club des Chefs des Chefs"" have gathered up in New Delhi to sample India’s spicy and aromatic cuisine. 
+The culinary delegate comprising personal chefs to the world’s leaders decided to hold a meeting in India after being invited by the country’s president. They got the chance to explore the crowded alleys of Old Delhi’s pungent spice market and get a taste of the country’s authentic ingredients. 
+The top chefs get together every year for a general assembly. The meeting is supposed to provide a platform for the gourmands to exchange recipes. The elite chefs also discuss ways to use food diplomacy to connect communities. The club also seeks to promote local food and healthy eating habits.",FAKE
+9734,An Open Letter to Black South African Police Officers,"Tweet Widget by Black Power Front 
+With students joining workers in revolt against South Africa’s neoliberal regime, young people are demanding to know why Black police are engaged in the same kind of repression that was previously used by white governments “to systematically counter Black resistance?” In a letter to Black cops, activists note “an increase and worrying pattern of anti-Black police violence.” An Open Letter to Black South African Police Officers by Black Power Front 
+“As a Black Police Officer, you must understand that the struggles of Black workers and students are actually your struggles too.” 
+Dear Black Police Officer, 
+How are you today? Well, we hope. You may be wondering who we are, why we have decided to write to you and perhaps why we are addressing you as a “Black Police Officer” -- as opposed to just saying “Police Officer.” 
+Who are we? We are the Black Power Front or BPF. We are a non-party political pro-Black platform which seeks to serve as an instrument to organize and collaborate with like-minded Black individuals and organizations, under a common program that provides practical responses to what is commonly understood as the Black Condition today. 
+Why have we decided to write to you? First, given the nature of your work, it is not always easy to sit down with you and just talk about issues that affect our country and, in particular, the Black community. 
+Second, like other members of the Black community, we in the BPF are deeply disturbed by the continued brutality of the police against Black workers and students -- particularly those who engage in legitimate protest action. And third, the BPF holds the view that, given where Black people find themselves economically, socially and otherwise today in relation to other racial groups, it is extremely urgent that like-minded Black groups and individuals (everywhere in the world) come together in exclusive spaces, and engage in constructive dialogue, with the view to find ways of getting Black people out of the quagmire they currently find themselves in. 
+The anti-Black role of the police before 1994 
+As members of the Black community, you would know that, in the Azanian (South Afrikan) context, from the 1400s onwards, various forms of colonial police structures were key instruments in enabling the European invaders to advance and bolster their evil agenda of slavery, colonization and land theft. It was these colonial police structures that were used to systematically counter Black resistance, through amongst others the capture, torture and in many cases beheading of our warrior ancestors such as uKumkani uHintsa, Kgosi Toto, Kgosi Galeshewe, uKumkani uStuurman and many other heroes and heroines of Black resistance. 
+In the 20 th century, it was through these European colonial police structures that successive white supremacist regimes in Azania (South Afrika) were able to murder and torture our freedom fighters and ordinary Black people. They were directly responsible for the murder of our people in Sharpeville and Langa in 1960. The execution by hanging of martyrs like Vuyisile Mini and Solomon Mahlangu, in 1964 and 1979, respectively. 
+It was the colonial European police who assassinated visionaries such as Onkgopotse Tiro and Steve Biko, in 1974 and 1977, respectively. It was them who murdered the young Zolile Petersen and Christopher Truter, during the student uprising of 1976. And it was them who ensured that many of our revered freedom fighters such as Kgalabi Masemola, Mangaliso Sobukwe, Lekoane Mothopeng, Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, Nkosi Molala, Muntu Myeza and many others, were banished to Robben Island. 
+Even though it is often argued that the White Police Officers who were involved in these atrocities against Black people were acting under the orders of their superiors, the truth of the matter is that, at an individual and basic level, they knew that what they were doing to Black people was wrong, inhumane and unjustified. 
+The anti-Black role of the police after 1994 
+Given this painful history of centuries of systematic and state violence against Black people, the declaration of “freedom” on April 27, 1994, created a legitimate expectation on the part of many Black people that the type of wanton violence and naked brutality that the successive colonial white supremacist regimes unleashed on Black people would be a thing of the past. But to our horror, even after the declaration of “freedom” in 1994 and the installation of a government that is led by Black people we began to see an increase and worrying pattern of anti-Black police violence. 
+This type of anti-Black police [U1] brutality was palpable in the killing of Andries Tatane, young Nqobile Nzuza, Mike Tshele, Lerato Seema, Osiah Rahube, Jan Rivombo and of course the brutal and targeted assassinations of Mgcineni “Mambush” Noki and other Black workers in Marikana, in August 2012. 
+All of these anti-Black atrocities beg the question: how it is possible that a government that is led by people who, as part of the Black community, have first-hand experience of the brutality of state violence through the police, do not just unleash the same type of state violence against their own people, but also seek to justify the use of such anti-Black violence? 
+Our attitude towards Black police officers 
+By highlighting the involvement of Black Policer Officers (after 1994) in the killing of ordinary Black people who are simply fighting for their right to be human the BPF does not seek to create the mind-set that Black Police Officers are the enemy of the Black community or that Black Police Officers are inherently bad people. Of course, there are many examples of Black Police Officers who don’t just do their job with integrity and dedication, but also do a lot of good work in the Black community. 
+This notwithstanding, the main focus of this letter, however, is not so much the individual conduct of Black Police Officers but rather the continued use of Black Police Officers (as a state function) in the brutal suppression of the right of ordinary and mainly poor Black people to freely articulate their social, economic and political concerns and aspirations. 
+Our appeal to Black police officers 
+As the BPF, we regard Black Police Officers as members of the Black community first and therefore an integral part of Black life in Azania. We also hold the view that the on-going demands by Black workers for decent wages and better working conditions or those of Black students for free-decolonized-Afrocentric education, are not just demands that will benefit individual Black Police Officers (majority of them Black young people), but also their children who might be at university or will be going there in future. Therefore, as a Black Police Officer, you must understand that the struggles of Black workers and students are actually your struggles too. 
+As the BPF we fully understand that, just like all ordinary Black people, Black Police Officers are under severe financial stress and like most Black people, they are struggling to make ends meet. For these reasons, the BPF’s clarion call to all Black Police Officers is as follows: 
+* Understand that the economic struggles and frustrations of ordinary Black people are your struggles and frustrations too. And that Black workers and students continue to be oppressed by the same system that is responsible for your personal financial stress; 
+* As part of the Black community, you must (through your labor unions), engage the management of the SAPS to stop the state’s campaign of apartheid-style violence that is currently being unleashed on Black people in general; 
+* You are our Black Brothers and Sisters and must never allow yourselves to be used by self-serving politicians as part of an elitist anti-Black-pro-capitalist plot that uses the pretext of “law and order” to justify the murder of poor Black people and wanting that Black people timidly accept their status as economic slaves in the land of their ancestors; and 
+* Lastly, Black students and workers are not fighting against you (as Black police officers) but against the anti-Black-pro-capitalist system that is using some of you against your own Black Sisters and Brothers. 
+#FreeDecolonisedAfrocentricEducationNow!",FAKE
+9664,Gay man finds it in himself to tolerate religious person,"Gay man finds it in himself to tolerate religious person 01-11-16 A GAY man has met a Christian who appears civilised and could even be described as nice. Tom Booker met church-goer Wayne Hayes when he started working in his office, and has expressed his surprise that he ‘really couldn’t tell’. Booker said: “We often end up in the kitchen at the same time to make a cup of tea, so we started exchanging pleasantries and worked up to longer conversations. “He was always nice enough and talked about his family and allotment and stuff, so I presumed he was just a normal person. However, a few weeks later he mentioned something about believing in God. “I was really shocked, but he seemed very cool about it. I asked if he thought it was just a phase and he said no, he’d been feeling this way since he was about nine. “I wanted to ask him what Christians actually do in church, but I got worried that he might think I’m secretly into it and try to recruit me. He hasn’t mentioned it since. “It’s almost as if it’s a perfectly acceptable way to live your life, which has really given me pause for thought. “Just because you expect someone to be a massively judgemental dickhead, it doesn’t mean they will be.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+9755,US Spy Chief: Asking North Korea To Stop Nuke Program a ‘Lost Cause’,"Get short URL 0 27 0 0 On Tuesday, National Intelligence Director James Clapper said that the US must focus on limiting North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, because convincing the isolated country to halt nuclear development is a “lost cause.” 
+Pyongyang has conducted over 20 ballistic missile tests this year and two nuclear explosions. There is concern in Washington that the DPRK could be developing a weapon that could reach the American mainland. Their most recent underground nuclear explosion took place in early September. © AP Photo/ Wong Maye-E US Still Committed to Denuclearization Process in North Korea At the Council on Foreign Relations, Clapper said ""I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause…They are not going to do that — that is their ticket to survival."" 
+Washington has consistently maintained its position on not recognizing North Korea as a nuclear-armed state. Numerous sanctions, and negotiations to trade aid in exchange for disarmament have not stopped Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Despite this, the US State Department announced that it will continue to demand the communist country’s denuclearization. 
+Clapper described his trip to North Korea in 2014 to secure the release of two Americans, saying it gave him a ""good taste"" of the country’s perspective on nuclear development. © AP Photo/ Koji Sasahara North Korea Blasts US, Japan, South Korea for 'Destabilizing Northeast Asia' ""They are under siege and they are very paranoid, so the notion of giving up their nuclear capability, whatever it is, is a non-starter with them…The best we could probably hope for is some sort of a cap, but they are not going to do that just because we ask them. There's going to have to be some significant inducements."" 
+Defense experts in the US believe Pyongyang currently has between 13-21 nuclear weapons, and by 2020 could have as many as 100. 
+State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters in Washington that he had not seen Clapper’s comments, and that the US still hopes to resume aid-for-disarmament negotiations, which have been stalled since Pyongyang pulled out in 2009. © REUTERS/ KCNA US Announces Extended Deterrence Doctrine Against North Korea 
+Kirby said, ""We want to continue to see a verifiable, denuclearization of the peninsula. We want to see a return to the six-party talk process, and that means we need to see the North show a willingness and an ability to return to that process which they haven't done yet,"" according to Yonhap News . Clapper acknowledged that the DPRK had not yet tested it’s KN08 intercontinental ballistic missile, a weapon capable of striking the Western US, so its utility is unknown, but he recommended that Washington not wait until the missile is tested to prepare. 
+""Nevertheless, we ascribe to them the capability to launch a missile that would have a weapon on it to reach parts of the United States, certainly including Alaska and Hawaii…They could do it. We have to make the worst-case assumption here,"" he said. ...",FAKE
+2074,The Devastating Consequences Of A 'Small' Rise In Global Temperatures,"More Floods, More Drought Inevitable. How Bad Do We Want It To Get?
+
+World leaders are meeting in Paris this month in what amounts to a last-ditch effort to avert the worst ravages of climate change. Climatologists now say that the best case scenario — assuming immediate and dramatic emissions curbs — is that planetary surface temperatures will increase by at least 2 degrees Celsius in the coming decades.
+
+This may sound like a small uptick, but the implications are profound. Rising temperatures will destroy plant and animal habitats, and reduce yields of important food crops. More people will be exposed to the ravages of flooding and drought.
+
+But if the nations involved in the Paris talks stay on their current emissions track and don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures could go up by almost 6 degrees Celsius this century, according to the Committee on Climate Change, an independent body that advises the U.K. government on climate issues.
+
+The consequences of a heating globe are already being felt in Alaska, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the U.S. Rising temperatures have thawed frozen soil in some areas, leaving coastlines vulnerable to storms and tidal activity. Shishmaref, a remote village that sits on an island 30 miles outside the Arctic circle, is losing as many as 9 feet of land a year — chunks of coastline that simply break into the sea.
+
+Each year, more species are losing their habitats to climate change. An increase of 4 degrees Celsius in average planetary temperatures could result in severe habitat loss for almost two-thirds of plant species and one-third of mammal species. Species losing at least half their habitat Source: Committee on Climate Change
+
+Crop estimates assume that crop varieties and planting times are adjusted to optimize yeild. Plant and animal estimates assume that species disperse to new areas at historically observed rates. Charts show median estimates.
+
+Even if nations meeting in Paris curtail carbon emissions, a growing number of communities will be exposed to threats caused by climate change. Vulnerable populations that live near water or in arid places will face massive disruptions to their way of life: Flooding and severe drought are on course to become much more common.
+
+Human activity since industrialization has led to a huge increase in the production of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to rising global temperatures. Scientists warn that if carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at their current rates, Earth’s temperatures could increase dramatically in future decades, leading to catastrophic and irreversible climate change. The 10 largest emitters produced about 26.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2013. (A gigaton is 1 billion tons, or roughly the equivalent of the annual emissions from every passenger car in the U.S. each year.) They are highlighted in red.
+
+Countries Producing Most Of The World’s Carbon Promise Big Cuts Countries responsible for two-thirds of global emissions have made commitments to curb their greenhouse gas production. That group includes some of the biggest emitters like China, India and the U.S. China, the world’s biggest carbon producer, has promised that its carbon emissions will peak by 2030. Projected emissions by 2019, in gigatons of carbon dioxide China will aim to reach maximum carbon emissions by 2030. After that, it will lower its carbon dioxide emissions by 60 to 65 percent relative to 2005 levels. By 2025, the U.S. aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent relative to 2005 levels. By 2030, the EU aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent relative to 1990 levels. By 2030, the EU aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent relative to 1990 levels. By 2030, India aims to reduce the ratio of emissions to its GDP by 33 to 35 percent relative to 2005 levels. By 2030, India aims to reduce the ratio of emissions to its GDP by 33 to 35 percent relative to 2005 levels.",REAL
+2577,"Cost, logistics of Obama immigration plan raise concerns before launch","President Obama’s executive action sparing millions of illegal immigrants from deportation will be the biggest federal program rollout since ObamaCare -- and administration officials are hoping its launch, set for May, will be a lot smoother.
+
+“The deputy secretary and I are very focused on this, and I believe we're going to get it right,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told Fox News on Thursday.
+
+Still, Republican opposition to the plan that would block deportation of as many as 5 million illegal immigrants -- most of them parents of children already here legally -- is nearly as intense.
+
+DHS has leased a massive office building in Crystal City, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, where a thousand federal workers and a thousand more contractors will process applications. Though forecasting turn-out of applicants is largely a guessing game, DHS predicts as many as 1.3 million people may apply in the first six months alone.
+
+The Crystal City office demonstrates to critics just one of many problems with the President’s executive action. ""Those employees are not going to ask people from all over the country to come to Crystal City to be interviewed. They're not going to be effectively interviewed. They’re going to do online most of their work,"" said Senator Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.  He believes the online interview process is a recipe for fraud.
+
+There's also the cost of the plan -- officially known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans  -- estimated at $324 million to $484 million over the next few years, according to DHS documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
+
+Supporters note taxpayers won't be footing that bill – they say applicants will instead, through a $465 fee. ""The program operates slowly and exclusively on the funds that are contributed by those that participate in the program, said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D., Ill.
+
+“You get a million of them to apply, you have $500 million,” he said.
+
+""That’s an absolute misrepresentation,” said Sessions. “Congress has the power to control all money, whether it comes in by fee, or not.""
+
+Even with a fee-based payment, Sessions said Immigration and Customs Enforcement is already overburdened by the wave of childhood arrivals and will  be further hard pressed by the new plan to carry out basic enforcement duties.
+
+“They've told us they're unable now to do their job. They've made clear that it’s placing America at risk. Now we're talking about another five million the president wants to be reviewed for legal status,"" he added.
+
+Sessions warned the plan will lower wages in an already job-scarce economy, while Gutierrez said applicants toil at jobs many Americans refuse to do.
+
+“Who does he really think is going to pick those onions in 110 degrees in south Texas?” asked Gutierrez. “Seventy percent of the agricultural workers that do the picking, that do the hard labor, are undocumented, we know that. So let's not kid ourselves, the folks are already here working.”
+
+By coming out of the shadows through the plan, many immigrants could also suddenly find themselves subject to the maze of tax laws, tax penalties, loopholes and liabilities and benefits  that U.S. citizens already face, a confounding code that could potentially drive some applicants back into the shadows.
+
+Doug McKelway joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in November 2010 and serves as a Washington-based correspondent. Click here for more information on Doug McKelway.",REAL
+9383,General is most senior Army officer to kill self,"USA Today 
+WASHINGTON — The Army acknowledged Friday that Maj. Gen. John Rossi committed suicide on July 31, making him the highest-ranking soldier ever to have taken his own life. 
+Rossi, who was 55, was just two days from pinning on his third star and taking command of Army Space and Missile Command when he killed himself at his home at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. ‘ 
+Investigators could find no event, infidelity, misconduct or drug or alcohol abuse, that triggered Rossi’s suicide, said a U.S. government official with direct knowledge of the investigation. It appears that Rossi was overwhelmed by his responsibilities, said the official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation. 
+Rossi himself talked in March about suicide at a conference on preventing troops from killing themselves. 
+He held up a card from his wallet with photos of 10 soldiers who had died under his command at Fort Sill, Okla. Four of them had committed suicide. 
+Rossi led off the event by reading the reports of recent suicide attempts to the soldiers at the event, according to a news story on the Army’s web site. He told the conference that he received reports of four soldiers per week thinking about or attempting suicide. 
+“We are ultimately responsible for soldiers both on and off duty,” Rossi said. 
+In a separate statement on Friday, Rossi’s family asked for privacy and called on soldiers with emotional problems to seek help. 
+“To all the other families out there, to the man or woman who may be facing challenging times, please seek assistance immediately,” according to a statement released on the family’s behalf by the Army. 
+The Army, the armed forces and its veterans have struggled with the scourge of suicide since the 9/11 terror attacks and the wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq. About 20 veterans a day kill themselves, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, putting them at 21% higher risk of suicide compared with civilian adults. 
+The suicide rate for active-duty troops was similar to that of civilians in 2014, according to the most recent data released by the Pentagon. The Army’s rate of 23.9 suicides per 100,000 soldiers was the highest among the services. 
+Almost 20 years ago, Adm. Jeremy Boorda, the Navy’s top sailor, killed himself with a gunshot to the chest. Then the chief of naval operations, Boorda had been the focus of an investigation into his improperly wearing combat medals. The four-star officer was the highest-ranking ever to have killed himself.",FAKE
+5905,Putin Mocks Clinton Claim Of Russia Election Meddling: ‘Is U.S. A Banana Republic?’,"Putin Mocks Clinton Claim Of Russia Election Meddling: ‘Is U.S. A Banana Republic?’ “Is the U.S. a banana republic? America is a great power. If I’m wrong, correct me.” American Mirror - October 28, 2016 Comments 
+Hillary Clinton claims she’s the only candidate who will stand up to Vladimir Putin, but she’s also the only candidate who apparently believes the United States is vulnerable enough to not prevent Russia from meddling in the November presidential election. 
+Russian President Putin mocked that notion on Thursday. Vladimir Putin: ""Does anyone really think Russia could influence the American people's choice in any way? What,is the US a banana republic?"" pic.twitter.com/ngQhJR1AtP 
+“Does anyone seriously think that Russia can influence the choice of the American people?” Putin told a group of academics in Sochi. 
+“Is the U.S. a banana republic? America is a great power. If I’m wrong, correct me.” 
+Hillary Clinton has repeatedly blamed Russia for the disclosures of campaign operative emails by Wikileaks. 
+“We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election,” Clinton said at the second presidential debate. 
+“And believe me, they’re not doing it to get me elected. They’re doing it to try to influence the election for Donald Trump.” 
+“Anything that goes wrong they blame Russia,” Trump told a crowd in Ocala, Florida days later. “We are being hacked because we have people who don’t know what they are doing. They always blame Russia.” 
+“They say Donald Trump is friends with Putin. I don’t know Putin, folks,” Trump added. “What the hell do I have to do with Putin?” NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+8513,Attack of the Clones translated into Chinese and back to English makes for hilarious subtitles,"Next Swipe left/right Attack of the Clones translated into Chinese and back to English makes for hilarious subtitles 
+KnifeOfPi2 over on Reddit writes, “I translated Attack of the Clones into Chinese and back to English. 
+“Here are the hilariously mangled subtitles for The Second Gathers: The Duplicate Offensive.” 1. 
+palpatine begs to change his gender 3. 
+anakin is adamant that research is research. a wise position. 4. 
+that is a lot of breakups, anakin! 5. 
+padme is a lesbian now. 6. 
+this guy doesn’t care much for jedi. 7. 
+anakin: “the chancellor doesn’t appear to be corrupt” 9. 
+obi-wan: “why do i get the feeling you’re going to be the death of me?” 10. 
+anakin thinks the chancellor is… a map. 11. 
+yoda thinks there are too many jedi 12. 
+padme doesn’t want to hold jar jar’s bottle 13. 
+dex admits he’s blind. 16. 
+obi-wan: “kamino, i’m not familiar with it. is it in the republic?” 17. 
+apparently those kaminoans have nice looking cd burners 18. 
+obi-wan expresses his frustration with the computer. 19. 
+padme informs anakin she’s going to kill him. 20. 
+yoda teaches the younglings how to use tinder 22. 
+yoda tells the younglings about a failed romance 23. 
+yoda urges obi-wan to destroy the evidence 24. 
+…but then realizes that it can’t be done. 25. 
+obi-wan introduces himself with a familiar name. 27. 
+padme decides to become celibate. 29. 
+lama su disputes that django pets is a bounty hunter. 30. 
+padme forgets who anakin is, and anakin doesn’t remember either 31. 
+interestingly, ‘sifo-dyas’ keeps getting translated as ‘obi-wan.’ i have no idea why, the names don’t even sound similar! 32. 
+jango reveals his former name 33. 
+anakin *knew* she wasn’t gone! 34. 
+anakin asks padme to resist her temptation to kiss the scar. 35. 
+obi-wan discusses medicare with r4-p17. 37. 
+obi-wan thinks pretty highly of the kaminoans 38. 
+anakin orders padme to stay right where she is. 39. 
+that doesn’t sound very good, watto. 40. 
+boba urges his father to take notes. 42. 
+“and miss padme. oh my.” 44. 
+cliegg is an avid gambler 45. 
+count dooku wants to conquer africa 46. 
+anakin: “n !” 47. 
+obi-wan decides to contact allah. (for those who don’t know, anakin was translated as ‘allah gold’ through much of backstroke of the west, so it’s not unusual to see it here.) 48. 
+anakin wants to learn how to die. impressive! 49. 
+anakin is furious that obi-wan hugged him 50. 
+…but padme assures anakin that anger is just another person. 51. 
+governor ray gun! that’s a sufficiently sci-fi name… 52. 
+the west strike again! (“a sith lord called darth sidious.”) yet another coincidence with backstroke. 54. 
+you two careful, he is a big 55. 
+dooku: “you’re impossibly outnumbered” 56. 
+well, that didn’t translate! 57. 
+the viceroy urges dooku to redo his makeup 58. 
+obi-wan: “what do you think padme would do were she in your position?” 60. 61. 
+mr. speaker, we are for the big 
+“”camino. I am not familiar. It is in Africa?” 
+I BLESS THE CLONES DOWN IN FRICA “, says dwrlewis . 
+“[The entire Prequel Trilogy, in a nutshell](https://i.imgur.com/Re18SEI.png)”, writes tristamgreen . 
+“EARTHQUAKE FEE! 
+“The best one is where it translated the Chancellor to Merkel :P”, says Chell_the_assassin . 
+“Yoda: “You must delete the email. You can delete these files hopeless.” 
+Dammit I was really looking forward to reading about Obi-Wan’s yoga routines as well… /s”, writes Veefy . 
+“*Padme does not want to hold Jar Jar’s bottle.* 
+O_O”, notes IamSnokeO_o . 
+“Find fuck and wan planets, we will.”, writes KnifeOfPi2 . 
+“”You must delete the e-mail” 
+Holy shit, thats relevant as fuck.”, notes joshthewumba . 
+“”You must delete the e-mail.” 
+CORRUPTION GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP OF THE JEDI COUNCIL, FOLKS! CROOKED YODA!”, says whitemamba83 .",FAKE
+7229,Seth Meyers Takes ‘A Closer Look’ At The Final Stretch Of The Election Season (VIDEO),"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+This entire election season has been insane and no one has broken it down like Seth Meyers has in his nightly segments A Closer Look. 
+On the eve of the election, Meyers decided to focus this segment on how the two candidates have handled their campaigns during the final stretch. He took a few minor shots at Hillary, but the bulk of his time was spent incredulously trying to make sense out of what has gone on with Trump during the last 3 days in particular. He also shares a highly entertaining clip of President Obama’s “burns” on Trump. 
+While Hillary Clinton has been campaigning with mega-stars like Katy Perry, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen and Lady Gaga, Trump has…Scott Baio. Trump couldn’t seem to stop whining about Hillary’s celebrities all weekend, even saying how horrible and inappropriate Jay-Z’s lyrics were. Yes. This…coming from the man who inspired the newest phrase “p*ssygate” and had the likes of Ted Nugent grabbing his crotch and referencing his “blue balls” at a rally over the weekend. 
+After showing a clip of Trump bitching about all of these A-listers and saying he doesn’t need them or their guitars and pianos, Seth had a message for the Republican candidate: 
+“That’s okay, I’ve got an instrument for you Donald — the world’s smallest violin,” Meyers said. “It should be noted that with your hands, it would be a regular size violin.” 
+Watch the entire segment below: 
+Featured Image via screenshot",FAKE
+4150,HUFFPOLLSTER: Growing Economy Good News For Obama,"GROWING APPROVAL FOR ECONOMY AND PRESIDENT OBAMA - Emily Swanson: ""Americans' views of President Barack Obama have improved slightly in the past two months, and opinions are more positive about the direction of the country and the health of the economy, an Associated Press-GfK poll finds... Forty-seven percent of those surveyed approve of how Obama is doing his job, compared with 41 percent in December, and 51 percent approve of his handling of unemployment, compared with 44 percent before. Nearly half say the economy is good now, while 41 percent thought that in December. In December 2013, only one-third called the economy good. Approval of the way Obama is handling the economy improved slightly, 41 percent to 45 percent, over the past two months…But people still feel that their own recovery is lagging, the poll shows, with only 35 percent saying their own family has completely or mostly recovered from economic downturn. Just 27 percent see the job market where they live as being most of the way to recovery, far less than the number that thinks big businesses (55 percent) and the stock market (53 percent) have bounced all the way back. In spite of growing optimism about politics and the economy, 8 in 10 people questioned have little confidence that Obama and Republicans in Congress can work together to solve the country's problems."" [AP]
+
+How high is the ceiling on Obama's approval? - David Lauter: ""President Obama's standing with the public likely will continue its recent upward trend following the latest positive economic news, but new data on the country's polarized politics suggests he'll soon bump up against a low ceiling. The labor market data released by the federal government on Friday showed the best three months of job growth since the mid-1990s, an increase in the percentage of Americans who are working and the first signs of wage growth. That's the kind of good news that usually sends presidential approval ratings upward. But political polarization exerts a powerful pull in the other direction: Much like President George W. Bush before him, Obama faces near unanimous disapproval from opposing partisans that is deeply dug in and unlikely to change….In the past half century, the only years that showed more polarization than Obama's sixth year were his -- and Bush's -- fourth and fifth years. All of that suggests that Obama's overall approval rating probably will not rise much above 50% for any sustained period."" [LA Times]
+
+Four signs of an improving U.S. jobs situation - Drew DeSilver, summarizing Bureau of Labor Statistics: ""[1] More people are getting back into the labor market, even if they don’t immediately find jobs. [2] More people who want work are actually looking for it. [3] More people are quitting their jobs. [4] The unemployed are spending less time out of work."" [Pew]
+
+ANOTHER NH POLL SHOWS NO GOP CANDIDATE OVER 20 PERCENT - Michael Bender & Lisa Lerer: ""Jeb Bush has taken a slight lead over other potential Republican presidential candidates in a new Bloomberg Politics/Saint Anselm New Hampshire poll...Bush now leads with just 16 percent. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is second with 13 percent, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is at 12 percent, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, coming off a controversy-filled overseas trip, is at 10 percent...The poll also shows former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dominating her potential Democratic rivals. Clinton, who won the state’s presidential primary in 2008, is the first choice of 56 percent of Democratic primary voters. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has said she isn't running, is second at 15 percent, while Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont both have 8 percent."" [Bloomberg]
+
+WHAT TO MAKE OF EARLY POLLS, WALKER 'SURGE'? - Jonathan Bernstein: ""Let’s talk early-stage presidential primary polls. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has had something of a surge over the last week. What should we make of it? Is there any information to be squeezed out of these polls?...the latest polls tell us almost nothing about voters. Most people aren’t paying attention yet, which is why a bit of positive publicity for a candidate can shift polling quite a bit. Voters aren’t reporting firm decisions; they’re just responding to what’s been in the news lately. If these early polls are important, it is only because of the way the people who pay close attention to Republican Party politics react to them. That’s the real thing to watch, going forward."" [Bloomberg]
+
+CQ RESEARCHER: BROAD OVERVIEW OF POLITICAL POLLING - Chuck McCutcheon: ""Smart phones, social media and the Internet have made it easier than ever for people to make their views known, but the new technology can make it harder for political pollsters to gather and measure public opinions with precision or consistency. They face public suspicions of partisanship, reluctance to provide candid answers and — as cellphone use grows — difficulty reaching respondents by the traditional method of random calls to household landlines…Polling has become entangled in the nation’s prevailing polarized political climate, with both politicians and the public questioning the validity of polls."" The CQR report provides a broad overview of recent issues and controversies facing the polling world. It is available by subscription or single issue purchase only. [CQ Researcher]
+
+HUFFPOLLSTER VIA EMAIL! - You can receive this daily update every weekday morning via email! Just click here, enter your email address, and click ""sign up."" That's all there is to it (and you can unsubscribe anytime).",REAL
+6104,Soros-Linked Voting Machines Cause Concern over Rigged Election,"Editor’s Note : If we weren’t already, as soon as our votes went virtual, we became disenfranchised. These machines are hacked every election.
+With as corrupt as our system is at this point, it’d be shocking if that weren’t the case.
+
+by Joseph Jankowski
+A U.K. based company that has provided voting machines for 16 states, including important battleground states like Florida and Arizona, has direct ties with billionaire leftist and Clinton crusader George Soros. 
+With recent WikiLeaks emails showing that Hillary Clinton received foreign policy directives and coordinated on domestic policy with Soros , along with receiving tens of millions of dollars in presidential campaign support from the billionaire, concerns are growing that these shadowy players may pull the strings behind the curtains of the upcoming presidential election.
+As Lifezette reports , the fact that the man in control of voting machines in 16 states is tied directly to the man who has given millions of dollars to the Clinton campaign and various progressive and globalist causes will surely leave a bad taste in the mouth of many a voter.
+The balloting equipment tied to Soros is coming from the U.K. based Smartmatic company, whose chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is a former UN official and sits on the board of Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
+According to Lifezette , Malloch-Brown was part of the Soros Advisory Committee on Bosnia and also is a member of the executive committee of the International Crisis Group, an organization he co-founded in the 1990s and built with funds from George Soros’ personal fortune.
+In 2007 Soros appointed Malloch-Brown vice-president of his Quantum Funds, vice-chairman of Soros Fund Management, and vice-chairman of the Open Society Institute (former name of OSF).
+Browns ties also intertwine with the Clintons as he was a partner with Sawyer-Miller, the consulting firm where close Clinton associate Mandy Grunwald worked. Brown also was also a senior advisor to FTI Consulting, a firm at which Jackson Dunn, who spent 15 years working as an aide to the Clintons, is a senior managing director. When taking that into account, along with the poor track record Smartmatic has of providing free and fair elections, this all becomes quite terrifying.
+An astonishing 2006 classified U.S. diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks reveals the extent to which Smartmatic may have played a hand in rigging the 2004 Venezuelan recall election under a section titled “A Shadow of Fraud.” The memo stated that “Smartmatic Corporation is a riddle both in ownership and operation, complicated by the fact that its machines have overseen several landslide (and contested) victories by President Hugo Chavez and his supporters.”
+“The Smartmatic machines used in Venezuela are widely suspected of, though never proven conclusively to be, susceptible to fraud,” the memo continued. “The Venezuelan opposition is convinced that the Smartmatic machines robbed them of victory in the August 2004 referendum. Since then, there have been at least eight statistical analyses performed on the referendum results.”
+“One study obtained the data log from the CANTV network and supposedly proved that the Smartmatic machines were bi-directional and in fact showed irregularities in how they reported their results to the CNE central server during the referendum,” it read.
+With such suspicion and a study which claims to prove that the U.K. firm’s equipment tampered with the 2004 Venezuelan recall election, should be enough for states to reject these machines if they desire a fair election.
+Smartmatic is providing machines to Arizona, California, Colorado, Washington DC, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, which means these Soros and Clinton linked machines are going to take the votes of thousands of Americans.
+While GOP nominee Donald Trump has been voicing his opinion that the elections are indeed rigged due to media bias, and the proof that mainstream polls are heavily weighted to favor Clinton , it is needless to say that if the results show Hillary as a winner in November, there is going to be a mess to shuffle through to find signs of honesty. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Planet Free Will of planetfreewill.com . 
+The mission of Planet Free Will is to enlighten as many people as possible with truthful and thought provoking information while at the same time keeping you up to date on news occurring around the world. ",FAKE
+6657,"Israel settlements legal, Trump aide says, playing anti-Iran video message on Mount Zion","Israel settlements legal, Trump aide says, playing anti-Iran video message on Mount Zion By Press TV on October 27, 2016 
+Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for the US 2016 presidential election 
+GOP nominee Donald Trump does not believe that settlements built by the Zionist regime of Israel in Palestine are illegal, his advisor on Israel says. 
+David Friedman, who was campaigning for the New York billionaire at a restaurant on Mount Zion (Jabel Sahyoun) in East Jerusalem al-Quds, made the comments to AFP after the Wednesday rally. 
+“I don’t think he believes that the settlements are illegal,” Friedman said. 
+He also said the former reality TV star is “tremendously skeptical” about the so-called two-state solution, promoted by the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama during his eight years in office, but to no avail. David Friedman (L) exits the Federal Building with Donald Trump and Ivanka Trump (R) following their appearance at US Bankruptcy Court in Camden, New Jersey, on February 25, 2010. (Photo via Bloomberg News) 
+The Obama administration has already voiced criticism over Tel Aviv’s expansionist policies, considered illegal by the international community. 
+The presence and continued expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestine has created a major obstacle for the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East. 
+Over half a million Israelis live in more than 230 illegal settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank. A Palestinian man searches through his belongings after his family home was demolished by Israelis in Beit Hanina, near the illegal Israeli settlement of Ramat Shlomo (background) in East Jerusalem al-Quds, on October 26, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
+All Israeli settlements are illegal under the international law. Tel Aviv has defied calls to stop the settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories. 
+Guaranteeing enmity with Tehran 
+Some 150 people, including extremist Israelis and evangelical Christians, took part in the Trump rally in on Wednesday. 
+Friedman echoed previous remarks by Trump, saying the real estate mogul would recognize East Jerusalem al-Quds as the capital of Israel if he wins the White House in the US 2016 presidential election. 
+A short video message by Trump was also played at the event, in which he said, “Together we will stand up to the enemies like Iran, bent on destroying Israel and her people. Together we will make America and Israel safe again.” 
+According to leaked emails from March 2015 by former US secretary of state Colin Powell, the regime has pointed 200 nuclear weapons at the Iranian capital. Related Posts:",FAKE
+3791,3 Members Of Muslim Family Shot Dead In Chapel Hill,"Police responded to reports of gunshots at about 5:15 p.m., Tuesday, when they found the victims' bodies. The shooting happened in a neighborhood that is mostly rental apartments where students live, and crime there is low, according to the News and Observer.
+
+That night, frantic parents waited outside Finley Forest Condominiums, where police were investigating the triple homicide, the Daily Tarheel reports. One mother broke down in tears after she inquired about her daughter and son-in-law, while a father screamed, ""It's been hours! Just tell me if he's alive!""
+
+""Why do I cry?"" Farris Barakat, Deah's brother, wrote on Facebook. ""So many times I've grabbed my phone to text my brother, Yusor, and Razan. Except seconds later I realize that I've taken them for granted and imagine their phone laying by their bodies. That's not okay guys.""
+
+""We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case. Our thoughts are with the families and friends of these young people who lost their lives so needlessly,"" Chief Chris Blue of the Chapel Hill Police Department said at a press conference.
+
+UPDATE 3:15 P.M.: In a press conference, Hicks' wife of seven years, Karen, said she ""never would have expected this."" She said that the shooting had nothing to do with race or religion, and everything to do with parking problems.
+
+""This incident had nothing to do with religion or victims’ faith but instead had to do with the longstanding parking disputes that my husband had with the neighbors,"" she said, choking back tears. ""He often champions on his Facebook page for the rights of many individuals. Same sex marriages, abortion, race, he just believes that everyone is equal. Doesn’t matter what you look like or who you are or what you believe.""
+
+She said she didn't know what drove Hicks to allegedly shoot three people, but her lawyers said that the suspect didn't single out the victims and had problems with other neighbors in the past. Hicks' ex-wife, Kristen, told The Huffington Post that she hadn't ""heard from or seen him in 10 years,"" and had no further comment.
+
+""It was execution style, a bullet in every head,"" he told the News Observer. ""This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime. This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt. And they were uncomfortable with him, but they did not know he would go this far.""
+
+""We’re still in a state of shock and will never be able to make sense of this horrendous tragedy,"" she said. ""We ask that the authorities investigate these senseless and heinous murders as a hate crime ... We ask that you celebrate the memories of our family members.""
+
+The gruesome scene has sparked an outcry on Facebook and Twitter, as word circulated that Hicks described himself as an ""anti-theist"" and criticized religions online, according to The Independent. That revelation, as well as a lack of media attention to the shooting Tuesday night, reportedly led to a ""#MuslimLivesMatter"" hashtag.
+
+Less than two weeks before he was killed, Barakat -- a dental student at UNC -- was involved in a debate over the Gaza Strip on Twitter, the New York Daily News reports. One of his tweets went viral when news of his death spread. It reads: ""It's so freaking sad to hear people saying we should ""kill Jews"" or ""Kill Palestinians"". As if that's going to solve anything SMH.""
+
+Each of the young family members was a student. Yusor -- who married Barakat in December, according to their Facebook profiles -- recently graduated with a degree in human biology at North Carolina State University. Razan was studying architecture and environmental design at North Carolina State University last year, according to her Facebook page.
+
+Barakat was a regular volunteer and helped organize an effort to raise money to provide free dental care to students of the Salaam School in Turkey, according to WRAL. His final Facebook post features a photo of efforts to hand out dental supplies to the homeless in North Carolina. He also started a fundraising page for a trip this summer to Turkey, where he planned to provide dental care to Syrian refugees. Supporters sent in thousands of dollars after the shooting, and the fundraising goal was exceeded by more than $10,000 Wednesday morning.",REAL
+10268,Is Obama preparing a parting shot on Israel? This President must not bind the next,"Print 
+Last week, the UN’s premier cultural agency, UNESCO, approved a resolution viciously condemning Israel (referred to as “the Occupying Power”) for various alleged trespasses and violations of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Except that the resolution never uses that term for Judaism’s holiest shrine. It refers to and treats it as an exclusively Muslim site, a deliberate attempt to eradicate its connection — let alone its centrality — to the Jewish people and Jewish history. 
+This Orwellian absurdity is an insult not just to Judaism but to Christianity. It makes a mockery of the Gospels, which chronicle the story of a Galilean Jew whose life and ministry unfolded throughout the Holy Land, most especially in Jerusalem and the Temple. If this is nothing but a Muslim site, what happens to the very foundation of Christianity, which occurred 600 years before Islam even came into being? 
+This UNESCO resolution is merely the surreal extreme of the worldwide campaign to delegitimize Israel. It features the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), now growing on Western university campuses and some mainline Protestant churches. And it extends even into some precincts of the Democratic Party.",FAKE
+5529,“Scary Stories In 5 Words” are terrifying tales for people short on time,"Next Prev Swipe left/right “Scary Stories In 5 Words” are terrifying tales for people short on time Want to read something scary this Halloween but don’t have enough time for an actual book? Then the #ScaryStoriesIn5Words is just for you. Here are twelve of the spookiest.
+1. 
+— Steven Deng (@stevendengg) October 28, 2016 
+2.",FAKE
+8248,BUSTED: Eric Trump Admits Daddy ‘Started The Conversation’ About Obama’s Birth Certificate (AUDIO),"BUSTED: Eric Trump Admits Daddy ‘Started The Conversation’ About Obama’s Birth Certificate (AUDIO) By Andrew Bradford on October 28, 2016 Subscribe 
+Donald Trump has tried to deny that he is the person most responsible for keeping alive claims that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States and is therefore not eligible to serve as President. The GOP nominee has been the chief proponent of what is now known as “birtherism.” And yet when asked about the matter, Trump tries to shift the blame to Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff in the 2008 Democratic race. 
+Now, however, we have proof that Trump was indeed the driving force of birtherism, and that proof comes from the mouth of his son, Eric. 
+NBC news found audio of Eric Trump talking to biographer Michael D’Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump . In that audio, the Trump son admits: “I think with the birthers it’s, ‘Okay, well, then, just prove it. Meaning these people are going out saying that which a lot of people were at the time. ‘Then just show us. Just be transparent. You’re the leader of the free world, be transparent.’ There are underlying themes to this, and in fact, he has done his best to start the conversation that was unwilling to be had before. Now that conversation might flush itself out in one of several different ways. But at least the conversation is being had.” 
+Yes, at least we are trying to question the nationality of the first African-American President in the history of the United States. Nothing nefarious or the least bit racist about that, is there? Bullshit! Donald Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he repeatedly called for President Obama to release his birth certificate, and he did so to garner media attention as he considered running for the GOP nomination years before he finally did. 
+Donald Trump is a lying weasel and racist asshat who needs to be defeated soundly on November 8. He and his hateful ideas must be resoundingly rejected by the American people, who deserve better than the division he offers. 
+Featured Image Via YouTube Screengrab About Andrew Bradford 
+Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect",FAKE
+6788,"Wolf Richter: Done in by Overcapacity, Stagnant World Trade, and China, Korean Shipbuilders Collapse on Top of Taxpayers","by Jerri-Lynn Scofield 
+Jerri-Lynn here: I first became aware of the consequences of Hanjin’s collapse via Lambert’s coverage in Water Cooler. The South Korean government’s bailout strategy– a version of kick the can down the road– looks worrying and unsustainable, given the ongoing slowdown in world trade , with little cause for optimism that trend will reverse anytime soon. As Richter indicates, much more pain is sure to follow. 
+By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street, 
+The ravaged shipbuilding industry in South Korea, deemed too big to fail, is getting its largest taxpayer bailout yet, totaling $9.6 billion, on top of the bailout funds already handed out last year, and on top of another $9.6 billion this year to bail out state-owned banks that were getting slammed by defaulting loans extended to the shipping industry. 
+Their problem: according to trade ministry, cited by the Wall Street Journal , orders for new ships to be built in South Korea have collapsed by 87% over the past nine months from the already terrible 9-month period last year, to almost nothing. 
+South Korean container carrier Hanjin was allowed to collapse in August. It “shattered the complacency” that TBTF carriers “are immune to failure.” It is now getting chopped into pieces to be sold off under bankruptcy court orders. Its rival, Hyundai Merchant Marine, was bailed out and restructured earlier this year. Other carriers around the globe have been sunk by two years of excruciating low shipping rates, triggered by rampant overcapacity and stagnating world trade. Larger carriers are consolidating to survive. Just on Monday, Japan’s Big Three – Nippon Yusen, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, and Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha – announced that they would merge to form the world’s sixth largest container carrier. 
+These carriers have stopped ordering ships, and many have canceled orders, and Chinese shipbuilders have muscled into the market years ago to grab share by slashing prices, and they too are going bankrupt . 
+But the shipbuilding industry is special to South Korea, a country whose economy depends on exports. The world’s three largest shipbuilders by erstwhile order volume are Korean: Hyundai Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, and Samsung Heavy Industries. In 2015, the industry accounted for 7.1% of South Korea’s manufacturing jobs and 7.6% of exports. 
+The beleaguered Big Three have already sold noncore assets and sloughed off employees as part of prior bank-led restructuring plans. 
+They’re dealing with terrible economic dynamics. Global orders for ships peaked in 2007 at over 90 million compensated gross tonnage (CGT), of which about one-third went to Korean shipbuilders. Orders crashed during the Financial Crisis to a low of 18 million CGT in 2009, then recovered. In 2013, orders maxed out at 60 million CGT, still down 33% from the prior peak. Those were the good times. 
+In 2016 so far, orders have collapsed to only 9 million CGT, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s about half of the orders during the worst part of the Financial Crisis. And South Korea’s share of this pittance in orders has fallen from one-third to just a tiny sliver. 
+So on Monday, South Korean Finance Minister Yoo Il-ho announced another big bailout program: to help the shipbuilding industry deal with the “order cliff,” the government would directly order vessels and also provide financing for shipping companies to order vessels. In total, this would generate orders for 250 vessels through 2020, valued at 11 trillion won ($9.6 billion) funded by the government. 
+But these ships won’t be the big traditional money makers, such as large containerships and dry-bulk carriers, of which the world is already vastly oversupplied. Instead, these will be vessels for the fishing industry and for small shipping companies, along with ferries, patrol boats, warships, and coastguard vessels. The hope is this will carry shipyards into the next glory period, when world trade and shipbuilding would resurge. 
+For now, the government is hoping to keep the Big Three shipbuilders alive. They will have to shed 32% of their workforce by 2018, cut their operations by 23%, sell more noncore businesses, and take other measures. 
+This bailout comes on top of prior bailouts, including the one of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering in October 2015, when the state-owned Export-Import Bank of Korea and the Korea Development Bank (which already owned a controlling 31.5% stake) handed it a $3.7 billion bailout package of new loans, a rights offering, and debt-to-equity swaps. 
+The South Korean shipbuilders weren’t just sunk by the collapse of the global shipping industry, but also by their expedition into new territories: Seeing over the years that orders for big vessels would be heading south, and that prices were under pressure from competition in China, they decided in 2010 to get into the nirvana of profits: building offshore oil rigs. But that turned into a nightmare, and heavy losses, even before the price of oil crashed. 
+In June, the government and the Bank of Korea set up a special fund of 11 trillion won ($9.6 billion) to recapitalize state-run banks which were getting hit by defaulting loans from carriers and shipbuilders. 
+In addition, the finance ministry said the government would offer 6.5 trillion won ($5.6 billion) for South Korean carriers to order new bigger vessels to improve their profit margins and survive a little longer. And then there are plans to create a state-backed ship-financing company with initial capital of 1 trillion won ($880 million). 
+No one knows for sure how long the misery in the shipbuilding and shipping industries will continue. Overcapacity is a terrible condition. Creating it benefits many on the way up. It enriches them and makes the economy look good. But when it comes home to roost, the price is stiff. People lose their jobs. And many of the costs will be socialized. It’s only then that you see just how much capital has already gone down the drain, and how much more will follow. 
+The pain will continue, with many more false-hope-ups and brutal smack-downs, and more carriers will crack under their debt. Read… Why Hanjin’s Zombie Collapse Won’t Be the Last One . 0 0 0 0 0 0 This entry was posted in Guest Post on",FAKE
+3670,Stating the obvious? FBI awkwardly acknowledges San Bernardino massacre likely terrorism,"Three days after a heavily armed Muslim couple who lived in a home investigators described as ""an IED factory"" burst into a Southern California office building and gunned down 14 people, the FBI finally -- and awkwardly -- acknowledged Friday that it is treating the case as an act of terrorism.
+
+In an unusual and brief address to reporters at which Attorney General Loretta Lynch appeared and questions were not taken on camera, FBI Director James Comey affirmed the bureau's LA office's characterization earlier in the day.
+
+""This is now a federal terrorism investigation,"" Comey said, alluding to evidence collected from electronic devices and reports that Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik may have been sympathetic to radical terrorist groups prior to the attack. After his comments, Comey asked pool reporters if they had any questions, but the pre-taped event, which was later distributed to media outlets, was cut off abruptly and no questions were permitted.
+
+The director, a Republican appointed in 2013 and a former deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush,"" did not allude to the Muslim faith of suspects Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. But in pronouncing it a case of terrorism, he seemed to be stating the obvious while at the same time going farther than President Obama has been willing to go and possibly hinting at some behind-the-scenes dissent. Sources told Fox News Lynch was there to ""ensure [Comey] didn't take it too far"" in his characterization of the attacks.
+
+On Thursday, in the face of mounting evidence of a terror motive, President Obama refused to rule out an office dispute as the possible motive for the attack. The equivocation stoked outrage among many of Obama's critics, who noted his insistence on labelling as ""workplace violence"" the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, in which a Muslim Army major killed 13 people and injured another 30 while shouting “Allahu Akbar” and his ongoing refusal to characterize acts of terror as driven by radical interpretations of Islam.
+
+""If you can't come to a conclusion at this point that this was an act of terror, you should find something else to do for a living than being in law enforcement. I mean, you're a moron,"" former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who led the city during the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, thundered hours later on Fox News.
+
+Then, on Friday, hours before the FBI announcement, Fox New confirmed that Malik had pledged her allegiance to ISIS as the morning attack began. She and her husband were killed hours later in a shootout with police just two miles away. Those developments confirmed the suspicions of many, and left it obvious that Malik, at least, was driven by radical Islam.
+
+""We are investigating it as an act of terrorism, for good reason,"" David Bowdich, the assistant FBI director in charge of the Los Angeles office, told reporters in an afternoon news conference before his boss spoke.
+
+Bowdich, who said neither of the two were on law enforcement's radar prior to the attack, cited several factors for the focus on terrorism, including ""extensive planning"" that went into the attack. The pair attempted to cover up their digital trail, damaging hard drives and other electronic devices, Bowdich said. Investigators did find two cell phones recovered from trash cans near the couple's Redlands home, and recovered evidence of communications with others who are now being investigated.
+
+“They tried to wipe out their digital fingerprints,” he said, adding that digital communications will likely provide further substantiation of the motive, but ""it's not a three-day process.""
+
+The post by Malik, in which she pledged allegiance to ISIS leader and self-proclaimed “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was confirmed by Facebook official. They said she posted the pledge just before she and Farook stormed a San Bernardino party for his co-workers before escaping. The couple died hours later in a shootout with police, and in the aftermath the 29-year-old Pakistani woman has remained largely a name without a face. No confirmed pictures of her have surfaced, and few details have emerged. The aura of mystery surrounding Malik has given rise to suspicions she may have been the radicalizing force who turned Farook from an aloof county restaurant inspector into her cohort in carnage, an Islamist fanatic capable of murdering co-workers who had embraced him for years.
+
+""Usually it's ISIS supporters trying to radicalize young girls online as they try to find new wives, but this may be the first case I know of where the opposite happened,"" said Ryan Mauro, a national security analyst for Clarion Project, which tracks international terrorism.
+
+Mauro noted that Farook's older brother, who shares his name, served in the U.S. Navy, which would seem to indicate that Farook's radical leanings did not come from within his own family.
+
+""It is possible that she radicalized him or that suspected terrorists inside America he was communicating with are responsible for the radicalization, which led him to be attracted to a more hardline Salafi girl,"" Mauro said.
+
+What is known is that Malik met Farook online and that the two became engaged after Farook traveled to Saudi Arabia in September 2013. Malik applied for a K-1 visa at the American embassy in Islamabad in May, 2014 and two months later Farook again traveled to Saudi Arabia, met her there and brought her to the U.S. on a K-1 visa, a 90-day visa given to fiancés planning to marry Americans.
+
+“Tashfeen remains the biggest mystery,” said a leader of the area’s Pakistani-American Muslim community. “She’s the one no one knows anything about and has little to no presence on the Internet or having interacted with others in the Muslim community.”
+
+They were married on Aug. 16, 2014, in nearby Riverside County, Calif. according to their marriage license. The marriage and passage of criminal and national security background checks using FBI and Department of Homeland Security databases resulted in a conditional green card for Malik in July 2015, two months after she gave birth to their baby daughter.
+
+Malik and Farook, an American citizen born in Chicago and raised in Southern California by parents of Pakistani descent, lived with their daughter and his mother, Rafia Farook, in a Redlands, Calif., apartment described by one investigator as an “IED factory” and ammo arsenal.
+
+However, Farook’s mother claimed not to have suspected any potential plots or problems pertaining to her son and daughter-in-law, telling others that the weaponry didn’t raise any eyebrows as he “was always into guns” from a young age and shooting was very much a part of his life.
+
+Attorneys representing Farook's family said at a late afternoon press conference that none of Farook's relatives had any indication he or his wife held extremist views.
+
+Federal officials confirmed that the four guns Malik and Farook carried when they were killed in a shootout Wednesday afternoon, some three hours after storming the San Bernardino social services facility where his department was holding a holiday party, were purchased legally. Law enforcement sources told Fox News that investigators believe the couple's death prevented a second attack Wednesday, though they have not established what the target would have been.
+
+There have been reports Farook had ties to radicals in Pakistan and had a trip made there in recent years, but a source connected to the Pakistani Consulate in Los Angeles told FoxNews.com that he did not possess a Pakistani passport and that there is no record of him applying for a visa to travel to Pakistan through his local consulate. That did not preclude the possibility that he may have entered the country illegally or obtained a visa overseas or elsewhere.
+
+Farook is a third-generation American from a family hailing from Karachi. Sources close to his family insisted that his marriage to Malik was not arranged. He told co-workers, who hosted a baby shower for him and his wife earlier this year, that Malik was a pharmacist. The California Board of Pharmacy has no record of her working as either a pharmacist or a pharmacist’s assistant.
+
+Farook was a devout Muslim who prayed every day and recently memorized the Koran, according to brothers Nizaam and Rahemaan Ali, who attended Dar Al Uloom Al Islamiyah mosque in San Bernardino with Farook. Rahemaan Ali said he last saw Farook three weeks ago, when he abruptly stopped going to the mosque. Ali said Farook seemed happy and his usual self, and the brothers never saw a violent side.
+
+""He never ever talked about killing people or discussed politics, or said that he had problems at work,"" Rahemaan Ali said. ""He always had a smile on his face.""
+
+Prior to their marriage, Farook had multiple online dating profiles claiming he was a Sunni Muslim from a “religious but modern family” and that he was “looking for a girl who has the same outlook, wear hijab, but live life to the fullest, be my partner for snowboarding, to go out and eat with friends, go camping, working on cars with me.”
+
+Farook was remembered as reserved by co-workers, who said he had grown his beard out in recent months – often a sign among Muslims of heightened religious devotion. He also had gotten into several heated arguments with a co-worker, Nicholas Thalasinos, about Islam. Thalasinos reportedly questioned whether Farook’s faith was truly a “religion of peace.” He was one of the 14 killed in Wednesday’s attack.
+
+Neither Malik nor Farook had a criminal record, and the couple did not mix with the larger Pakistani-American community, and few people claim to have seen, let alone met, Malik, including neighbors. The Pakistani-American Muslim community leader, who asked that his name not be used, said the community believes is is clear that someone radicalized Farook.
+
+“This event has shaken everyone,” said the source. “The fact that Syed and his wife seemed to be so removed from the community and no one really knows much about him or his wife at all can often be a key indicator something is wrong.”
+
+Fox News Channel's Matthew Dean, Adam Housley and Hollie McKay contributed to this report",REAL
+9667,Alex Collier on Angels 2016-10-22 [VIDEO],"Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
+Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
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+By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
+Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
+6157,What Is To Be Done?,"What Is To Be Done? How to build a new anti-interventionist movement Share This 
+In the midst of an election in which the issues are largely ignored in favor of sensationalism and smears, the anti-interventionist voter is pretty much at sea. Hillary Clinton’s demagogic Russia-baiting of Trump as a Kremlin “puppet” augurs a foreign policy that will take us back to the arctic winter of the cold war, circa 1950 . On the other hand, the GOP nominee, for all his encouraging “America first” rhetoric and his stated unwillingness to get into another arms race with the former Soviet Union, would likely take us into other quagmires – ISIS, China, Iran – and, in any event, cannot be trusted. 
+So what is to be done? 
+The first thing is to disabuse yourself of the notion that any politician or political party currently prominent will magically get us out of the business of Empire. This isn’t to say that political action is wrong, or ineffective – far from it. What I’m saying is that it is up to us to build a movement out of which a new politics of peace and liberty can be nurtured and brought to maturity. 
+Our second task is to take stock of our assets: what kind of shape is the anti-interventionist movement in, and what are our prospects for future growth? 
+The first part of that question is easily answered: there is no anti-interventionist movement, as such, and there hasn’t been for quite some time. Oh sure, there are scattered organizations and individuals with a public platform, but none of these have a truly national presence. 
+Yes, Antiwar.com is one such voice with not insignificant reach, but we aren’t an organization – we’re a web site. We don’t have chapters, support groups, members, etc., and have quite deliberately avoided setting up any such network for the simple reason that we don’t have the resources to do so. Every movement has different components that specialize in various functions, and our specialty is education. That is, we give our readers the information they need in order to understand the problem, but as far as acting to eliminate the problem – that’s a mission we must leave to others. 
+The big problem is that there are no “others” – no action groups, no lobbyists, no real grassroots organizations that can respond to events as they occur, and mobilize the public against the War Party. The “movement,” such as it is, is top-heavy with thinktanks – the Cato Institute, the Center for the National Interest, the Ron Paul Institute , and the newly-organized student-oriented John Quincy Adams Society come to mind – and sorely lacking at the grassroots: essentially, a head with no body. 
+This isn’t because there is no potential for such a grassroots movement: indeed, the objective conditions are ripe – I would say over ripe – for such an undertaking. Polls consistently show that the American people are increasingly skeptical – and that is really too weak a word – of foreign entanglements, and basically endorse a foreign policy of minding our own business. This sentiment is one major – and deliberately overlooked – aspect of the populist “resentment” that catapulted Trump to the top of the GOP ticket and upended the political prognostications of the “experts.” The idea of putting America first – instead of, say, Europe, or the Saudis, or whichever country we’re supposedly ‘liberating” at great cost – has visceral appeal to ordinary Americans. 
+The astonishing fact of the matter is that, a few short years ago, the GOP was the spearhead of the War Party, with militant neoconservatives at its head – and is, today, the party of a man who said we were lied into the Iraq war, who wants to basically dismantle NATO, and who has adopted “America First” – a slogan resonant with historical meaning – as his campaign theme. 
+When I was a kid I used to play a game with a good friend of mine: what would we do if we had a million dollars? Of course, I’m really dating myself, because today, of course, a million dollars is chump change. In any case, this column is basically a reiteration of that game: what would I do if I had the resources to organize a real grassroots anti-interventionist movement? 
+Well, the very first thing I would do is to organize those millions of Trump voters attracted to his banner for precisely the reason the neocons and the foreign policy “experts” disdain him. Item number one on my agenda would be creating a grassroots America First movement, one with the following three components: 
+The America First Action (AFA) groups – the function of this organization is implied in its name. Its mission would be to respond to every move by the War Party to involve us in some foreign war by rapidly mobilizing people against it. At the first indication that such a move was in the works, congressional phone lines would be ringing off the hook with howls of protest. This is what happened when President Obama announced he was going to bomb Syria – and it worked , with very little central direction. Aside from telephonic harassment of congressional warmongers, AFA would organize meetings, rallies, lecture tours, media appearances, Internet trolling (my favorite!), and every other form of public activity, always focused like a laser on the War Party’s latest scheme. 
+The America First Political Action Committee – the electoral arm of the America First movement, AFPAC would help candidates from any and all political parties who oppose foreign wars and entangling alliances. This is one of our greatest weaknesses: currently, the War Party’s tame politicians are well-rewarded for their labors, while pro-peace candidates are routinely punished financially. The military-industrial-congressional complex takes care of its own – we must do the same. Yes, the war profiteers have tremendous resources but we can best them at their own game by appealing to the millions of Americans who are sick and tired of perpetual war. 
+The America First Lobby – while a different name would probably be best, I’m calling it a lobby because that is precisely its function. While practically every foreign government on earth has a Washington-based lobby, which meets with government officials and presses its case for more “foreign aid,” and often direct military intervention on their behalf – the American people have no such organization, no lobby to pursue and defend their interests. I would take as my model AIPAC, the notoriously powerful pro-Israel lobby, which practically storms Capitol Hill every time Bibi Netanyahu gives the signal. If only anti-interventionist Americans would do the same every time war clouds gather on the horizon, we would put an end to our foreign policy of constant warfare once and for all. 
+These three components of a newly constituted America First movement would be supplemented by subsidiary groups targeting specific constituencies. First and foremost, what’s needed is a student affiliate – it’s been a long time since we’ve heard “Hell no, we won’t go!” on the nation’s campuses. And what about abolishing draft registration? Hillary Clinton wants to force women to register for the draft – why isn’t this horrific proposal roiling the student bodies of universities and high schools across the country? 
+African-Americans suffer from our foreign policy of global intervention much more than most others: they are, too often, the cannon fodder that feeds the war machine, and if they return they come home to an economy drained by the diversion of vital resources toward war-making and away from productive job-creating and wealth-creating investment. 
+Racial minorities, women, rural communities – all these groups suffer inordinately as a consequence of an internationalist elite that sacrifices our sons and daughters on the altar of the war god. They can and must be won over to the cause of peace. 
+Such a movement isn’t a pipedream. It can be born – and it can prosper to the extent that it organizes itself according to a strategic vision that unites people of various political persuasions around a single issue – intransigent opposition to military intervention abroad. 
+“Peace” movements launched by the left have failed because they took a multi-issue approach: each and every leftist hobbyhorse was invoked to the point where the central issue – war and peace – was overshadowed. The organizers of these efforts, which have fallen by the wayside by the dozen, thought they were organizing a political party, which is why these movements never got off the ground. The one time they did manage to achieve some success – the antiwar protests of the 1960s – was when they junked the multi-issue approach, and focused on the single issue of getting us out of Vietnam. 
+The potential is there for such a movement today – but only if we cast aside our preconceptions and prejudices, and work to bring together elements that would naturally tend to split apart. Libertarians and Trumpists, Bernie Sanders supporters and “isolationist” conservatives, students at elite universities and rural folks who object to being used as cannon fodder – all must be united in a common cause to put America first, and rid ourselves of the albatross of empire. 
+It can be done. It must be done. But will it be done? I can’t answer that question: what I can say is that you, my readers, have the power to do it. Now, if only you have the will…. 
+NOTES IN THE MARGIN 
+You can check out my Twitter feed by going here . But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud. 
+You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here . Read more by Justin Raimondo",FAKE
+6667,"American Dream, Revisited","Share This: BY PEPE ESCOBAR 
+W ill Trump pull a Brexit times ten? What would it take, beyond WikiLeaks, to bring the Clinton (cash) machine down? Will Hillary win and then declare WWIII against her Russia/Iran/Syria “axis of evil”? Will the Middle East totally explode? Will the pivot to Asia totally implode? Will China be ruling the world by 2025? Amidst so many frenetic fragments of geopolitical reality precariously shored against our ruins, the temptation is irresistible to hark back to the late, great, deconstructionist master Jean Baudrillard. During the post-mod 1980s it was hip to be Baudrillardian to the core; his America, originally published in France in 1986, should still be read today as the definitive metaphysical/geological/cultural Instagram of Exceptionalistan. By the late 1990s, at the end of the millennium, two years before 9/11 – that seminal “before and after” event – Baudrillard was already stressing how we live in a black market maze. Now, it’s a black market paroxysm. Global multitudes are subjected to a black market of work – as in the deregulation of the official market; a black market of unemployment; a black market of financial speculation; a black market of misery and poverty; a black market of sex (as in prostitution); a black market of information (as in espionage and shadow wars); a black market of weapons; and even a black market of thinking. Way beyond the late 20th century, in the 2010s what the West praises as “liberal democracy” – actually a neoliberal diktat – has virtually absorbed every ideological divergence, while leaving behind a heap of differences floating in some sort of trompe l’oeil effect. What’s left is a widespread, noxious condition; the pre-emptive prohibition of any critical thought, which has no way to express itself other than becoming clandestine (or finding the right internet niche). Baudrillard already knew that the concept of “alter” – killed by conviviality – does not exist in the official market. So an “alter” black market also sprung up, co-opted by traffickers; that’s, for instance, the realm of racism, nativism and other forms of exclusion. Baudrillard already identified how a “contraband alter”, expressed by sects and every form of nationalism (nowadays, think about the spectrum between jihadism and extreme-right wing political parties) was bound to become more virulent in a society that is desperately intolerant, obsessed with regimentation, and totally homogenized. There could be so much exhilaration inbuilt in life lived in a bewildering chimera cocktail of cultures, signs, differences and “values”; but then came the coupling of thinking with its exact IT replica – artificial intelligence, playing with the line of demarcation between human and non-human in the domain of thought. The result, previewed by Baudrillard, was the secretion of a parapolitical society – with a sort of mafia controlling this secret form of generalized corruption (think the financial Masters of the Universe). Power is unable to fight this mafia – and that would be, on top of it, hypocritical, because the mafia itself emanates from power. The end result is that what really matters today, anywhere, mostly tends to happen outside all official circuits; like in a social black market. Is there any information “truth”? B audrillard showed how political economy is a massive machine, producing value, producing signs of wealth, but not wealth itself. The whole media/information system – still ruled by America – is a massive machine producing events as signs; exchangeable value in the universal market of ideology, the star system and catastrophism. This abstraction of information works as in the economy – disgorging a coded material, deciphered in advance, and negotiable in terms of models, as much as the economy disgorges products negotiable in terms of price and value. Since all merchandise, thanks to this abstraction of value, is exchangeable, then every event (or non-event) is also exchangeable, all replacing one another in the cultural market of information. And that takes us to where we live now; Trans-History, and Trans-Politics – where events have really not happened, as they get lost in the vacuum of information (as much as the economy gets lost in the vacuum of speculation). Thus this quintessential Baudrillard insight; if we consider History as a movie – and that’s what it is now – then the “truth” of information is no more than post-production synch, dubbing and subtitles. Way beyond the late 20th century, in the 2010s what the West praises as “liberal democracy” – actually a neoliberal diktat – has virtually absorbed every ideological divergence, while leaving behind a heap of differences floating in some sort of trompe l’oeil effect . Still, as we all keep an intense desire for devouring events, there is immense disappointment as well, because the content of information is desperately inferior to the means of broadcasting them. Call it a pathetic, universal contagion; people don’t know what to do about their sadness or enthusiasm – in parallel to our societies becoming theaters of the absurd where nothing has consequences. No acts, deeds, crimes (the 2008 financial crisis), political events (the WikiLeaks emails showing virtually no distinction between the “nonprofit” Clinton cash machine, what’s private and what’s public, the obsessive pursuit of personal wealth, and the affairs of the state) seem to have real consequences. Immunity, impunity, corruption, speculation – we veer towards a state of zero responsibility (think Goldman Sachs). So, automatically, we yearn for an event of maximum consequence, a “fatal” event to repair that scandalous non-equivalence. Like a symbolic re-equilibrium of the scales of destiny. So we dream of an amazing event – Trump winning the election? Hillary declaring WWIII? – that would free us from the tyranny of meaning and the constraint of always searching for the equivalence between effects and causes. Shadowing the world J ust like Baudrillard, I got to see “deep” America in the 1980s and 1990s by driving across America. So sooner or later one develops a metaphysical relationship with that ubiquitous warning, “Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear.” But what if they may also be further than they appear? The contemporary instant event/celebrity culture deluge of images upon us; does it get us closer to a so-called “real” world that is in fact very far away from us? Or does it in fact keep the world at a distance – creating an artificial depth of field that protects us from the imminence of objects and the virtual danger they represent? In parallel, we keep slouching towards a single future language – the language of algorithms, as designed across the Wall Street/Silicon Valley axis – that would represent a real anthropological catastrophe, just like the globalist/New World Order dream of One Thought and One Culture. Languages are multiple and singular – by definition. If there were a single language, words would become univocal, regulating themselves in an autopilot of meaning. There would be no interplay – as in artificial languages there’s no interplay. Language would be just the meek appendix of a unified reality – the negative destiny of a languidly unified human species. That’s where the American “dream” seems to be heading. It’s time to take the next exit ramp. This piece first appeared Strategic-Culture . NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). His latest book is Empire of Chaos . He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com . Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. 
+What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda? =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.",FAKE
+2639,"Thousands of rape kits left untested despite federal pledge, critics blame DOJ","In 1997, he followed a 15-year-old home from school. He grabbed her, held her at gunpoint and sexually assaulted her -- then shot her in the head and threw her in Colorado's Platte River, according to court records.
+
+She survived. Despite her injuries, she walked a half-mile -- 1,000 steps -- to a highway, and flagged down a car for help.
+
+Nearly two decades after she was left for dead, justice was at last delivered when officials were able to check the DNA from a previously untested rape kit against a federal database. Ojeda was sentenced Monday to 144 years in prison.
+
+This case is the exception.
+
+An untold number of rape cases -- by some estimates, in the hundreds of thousands -- remain unsolved because the rape kits used to collect critical evidence sit untested and gathering dust in police departments across America, despite $1 billion in taxpayer money approved to clear the massive backlog.
+
+Critics blame the Justice Department, claiming it simply is not sending the money where it needs to go.
+
+""It's a tragedy that evidence from perhaps hundreds of thousands of unsolved rape cases has never been tested for DNA,"" Scott Berkowitz, president and founder of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, told FoxNews.com.
+
+A comprehensive investigation by USA Today and its media partners uncovered at least 70,000 neglected kits in more than 1,000 police agencies. A state-by-state review suggests those numbers are on the conservative side, with 34 states reportedly admitting they have no idea of the number of untested kits.
+
+Federal officials pushed back against USA Today's report, saying it ""greatly mischaracterizes what has been, and continues to be achieved by the Department of Justice to address un-submitted sexual assault kits.""
+
+Rape kits contain forensic DNA evidence collected from victims during an often invasive process that can take up to six hours to complete. Testing DNA evidence in a timely manner helps identify suspects, leads to more prosecutions and in some cases exonerates those wrongly accused.
+
+But none of that can take place if the kits aren't tested -- the $1,000 price tag for each test, though, can stress the budget of a local police department.
+
+Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, recently sent Attorney General Loretta Lynch a letter demanding the Department of Justice address the issue. ""Victims of sexual assault should not have to wait unnecessarily for justice,"" he wrote in the June 29 letter.
+
+Cornyn and Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., were behind landmark federal legislation that led to the passage of the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Reporting (SAFER) Act. Signed on March 7, 2013, SAFER requires at least 75 percent of the $1 billion appropriated in the law to be directed toward reducing the massive rape-kit backlog, and increasing the capacity of labs processing sexual assault kits through 2018.
+
+The problem, victims' advocates and lawmakers argue, is that the DOJ is spending the money on other programs.
+
+""Congress has provided the funds to fix this problem, but over the past 10 years a large part of that money has been used for other criminal justice or administrative purposes,"" Berkowitz said. He said the law passed by Congress set ""very specific spending guidelines to ensure that the vast majority of the money goes to casework,"" adding: ""We'd like to see the Justice Department follow that formula and solve this problem once and for all.""
+
+But an official with the DOJ's National Institute of Justice told The Washington Examiner the department ""has not received appropriations specifically to implement"" the DNA backlog grant program.
+
+Instead of waiting for the Justice Department, some states have taken matters into their own hands.
+
+Colorado, for instance, passed a law in 2013 requiring law enforcement agencies to analyze within one year all of their 3,542 untested rape kits -- a deadline that was met, Colorado Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Susan Medina told FoxNews.com.
+
+""It was a way for us to really collaborate with our law enforcement partners,"" Medina said.
+
+While larger metropolitan cities are starting to step up and cut down their backlogs, stark inconsistencies still exist in how rural communities handle rape kits.
+
+Decisions on which kits are tested -- and when and how -- are often left to the discretion of police departments, leaving justice at the discretion of dollars and local policy.",REAL
+1060,Mr. Trump goes to Washington: The surreal spectacle of a know-nothing GOP frontrunner,"On Monday morning, millions of Sarah Palin fans woke up to an epic Facebook rant complaining that she and other Trump endorsers are being blacklisted by Washington insiders. This was apparently based upon some Breitbart News “reporting” which quotes some members of the conservative movement compiling a list of Trumpish apostates who will be denied membership in their club. This was somewhat ironic since the Trump campaign actually is keeping an enemies list of reporters it will not allow into its events. But such is the state of the conservative crack-up.  And it perfectly signaled the beginning of a very busy day. Donald Trump went into the belly of the beast, Washington D.C. —  and once again dominated the news cycle on the entire day before an election.
+
+Trump started the morning with a trek to the Washington Post for an interview with the editorial board. The first question they asked was about his foreign policy team. Up until now he’s said that he watches “the shows” and would listen to himself because he has “a very good brain.” This time he named some people who are not know to be on the A-list, including a conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe and a former general who was dismissed for covering up Bush administration contracting corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan.
+
+He whined like a tired toddler about how unfairly the Washington Post treats him and chattered excitedly about his new building project for some time. He babbled incoherently about how the country’s debt was a bubble and said we need to charge foreign governments to protect them so we have money to rebuild at home. He was asked about the issues of African Americans and the police and said that the problem was unemployment — he believes that black youth have a 58 percent unemployment rate. When pressed about whether there are racial disparities in law enforcement he affirmed his very, very strong support for the police and suggested they need to do whatever is necessary to prevent violence.
+
+He promised to create economic zones and business incentives in the inner cities (he seems to think he just thought of that concept) but mostly he’s convinced that the answer is to lift people’s “spirit.”
+
+I’m sure his policy of having the cops bring the hammer down as hard as possible will be a great spirit lifter.
+
+They asked him if he had any regrets about getting down in the dirt with all the “hands” business and he went on and on and on about it. This is just a short excerpt of what he had to say on the subject:
+
+But this exchange with the publisher was downright chilling:
+
+That is not a typo or a garbled transcript. (You can listen to the whole interview here.) When Donald Trump was asked whether he would use nuclear weapons against ISIS, he said didn’t want to “start the process of nuclear” then explained that he’s a “counterpuncher,” reminding them how he vanquished his rivals in the presidential primary. Then he noticed some attractive people in the room.
+
+That’s how his mind works. It’s not normal.
+
+But that was just the beginning of Trump’s big day in D.C. After his “hands on” interview with the Post. he headed over to a private meeting with some current and former members of Congress, including Senator Tom Cotton, the audacious Arkansas freshman who wrote the embarrassing “Iran letter,” Senator Jeff Sessions, former Senator Jim DeMint, disgraced former congressmen Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston, Calista Gingrich and a small number of backbench Representatives. No one is quite sure what it was all about, but Trump had a press conference afterwards and seemed to believe it was a very, very impressive group.
+
+That press conference rivaled his notorious Super Tuesday Trump brand infomercial. He talked about the building he’s building for what seemed like hours, even discussing the bathroom fixtures at one point. A woman in the audience asked a question he seemed to like and he brought her up to the podium and promised to hire her on the spot. He said, “I looked at her, gut instinct, she asked a question and it was a positive question and she has a great look and she looks like a great person to me, I have instincts about people.” This is the world famous business acumen he will bring to running the government. He was asked about the violence at his rallies and he reiterated his claim that the protesters are very bad people and explained that the man who hit and punched a protester over the weekend had a wonderful family and was angry at a member of the Ku Klux Klan. (He actually beat a protester who was dressed in red, white and blue. A different protester was wearing a white hood to protest Trump’s association with the Klan.) He downplayed any threats from the GOP establishment to his campaign saying, “I don’t see threats. I see people who are trying to go against me … I think they’re very misguided. I think the people who go against me should embrace me and then I would embrace them very easily … If they don’t embrace me, then it’s a threat… There has never been an event like what we’re going through in the history of politics — people are talking about this all over the world.” He’s right about that, but one suspects he may not fully comprehend the horror with which his campaign is being greeted here and around the globe. With that bizarre public appearance under his belt Trump popped over to CNN’s studios for an interview with Wolf Blitzer as part of their evening special with the “Final Five” candidates. He said the usual stump speech nonsense and was typically unresponsive. He did take the opportunity to thoroughly trash Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, saying that he must “let people know that she’s a third rate talent.” But he assured the nation “nobody respects women more than I do. Nobody will take care of women better than I do,” so that’s a relief. And just hours away from delivering a big speech for which he used a teleprompter, he took a shot at Hillary Clinton for using a teleprompter. That big American Israel Public Affairs Committee speech was heavily anticipated among the political media, mostly because everyone wondered if Trump could give a prepared speech. And yes, there was some curiosity about whether he would go before such a typically hawkish crowd and repeat his claim that he would stay neutral between the Israelis and Palestinians. He did not do that. Instead, his Israel policy, if you can call it that, was pretty much GOP boilerplate. And despite the fact that he delivered it via teleprompter it was just as puerile and self-centered as any interview or stump speech he’s ever given. His most notable line (after his bragging about taking the huge physical risk to be the Grand Marshall of New York City’s Israel Day parade in 2004) was this one: My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. I have been in business a long time. I know deal making. And let me tell you this deal is catastrophic, for America, for Israel and for the whole middle east. We’ve rewarded the world’s leading state sponsor of terror with 150 billion dollars and we received absolutely nothing in return. I’ve studied this issue in great detail. I would say actually greater, by far, than anybody else, believe me. Oh believe me The audience roared with laughter. He may be able to convince some of the people at his rallies that he knows what he’s talking about in foreign affairs, but the AIPAC crowd isn’t fooled about his knowledge of Israel and Iran. Nonetheless, they gave him a polite reception. He didn’t challenge the status quo in any way so it was a successful speech for him. But would it have really mattered if it wasn’t? All in all, Donald’s Big Washington Adventure succeeded in doing what what he set out to do. He had the press corps following him all over town like a bunch of One Direction fans hanging on his every silly boast and ignorant rant. Today he will probably win a bunch more delegates to the Republican convention thus proving once again that it doesn’t matter what he says it only matters that he says it on TV.",REAL
+5777,Fox News Just Exposed Hillary’s ILLEGAL VOTING Scheme To The Entire Country!,"Home / News / Fox News Just Exposed Hillary’s ILLEGAL VOTING Scheme To The Entire Country! Fox News Just Exposed Hillary’s ILLEGAL VOTING Scheme To The Entire Country! fisher 2 mins ago News Comments Off on Fox News Just Exposed Hillary’s ILLEGAL VOTING Scheme To The Entire Country! Fox News Just Exposed Hillary ’s ILLEGAL VOTING Scheme To The Entire Country! 
+Hillary Clinton has taken her illegal actions to a new level with a new move that involves enlisting the help of illegal immigrants to help her beat Donald Trump in November. 
+Once again, Hillary is in violation of 8 U.S. Code § 1324, which makes it a felony to ‘conceal’ or ‘harbor’ any ‘alien’ ‘including any means of transportation.’ The penalty is five years in prison (ten years if it was done for “commercial advantage or private financial gain,” could be made for that). Hillary and the DNC also violated this law a few weeks back at the Democratic National Convention when they paraded two illegal immigrants across the stage to give an anti- Trump speech. 
+Hillary Clinton is enlisting undocumented “Dreamers” into a new voter registration drive aimed at signing up sympathetic voters with warnings that Donald Trump ’s immigration plans could result in their deportation – though the Dreamers themselves cannot legally vote. 
+Clinton’s national voter registration program, called “Mi Sueño, Tu Voto/My Dream, Your Vote,” was announced Sunday, on the four-year anniversary of the 2012 order that temporarily shielded from deportation some young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. 
+The 730,000 young people known as Dreamers are prohibited from voting. However, they remain a powerful political organizing force, and the Clinton campaign hopes to use them to convince Latino and other households to go to the polls for the Democratic nominee. HERE’S WHAT LOU HAD TO SAY… ",FAKE
+468,Oil prices could fall further if Iran nuclear deal is reached,"Two of the biggest news stories of 2015 have been the fall in global oil prices and the apparent breakthrough in negotiations between Iran, the United States, and others around Iran's nuclear weapons research. And because Iran relies so heavily on oil exports to earn income, the two stories are deeply interlinked.
+
+On the one hand, the decline in the world oil price has made life harder for Iran. On the other hand, relaxing the sanctions against Iran could drive down global oil prices even further — a boon to most of the world's economies, including those of most of the countries pressuring Iran to disarm.
+
+In terms of oil sitting in the ground, Iran is a whale, with almost 10 percent of the world's proven reserves. But in terms of actual oil production, the country has become more of a minnow. That reflects the multifaceted impact of international sanctions on the Iranian industry. Most of all, the financial sanctions have made it extremely difficult for Iran to attract the foreign investment needed to actually pump the oil out of the ground.
+
+More recently, other sanctions on Iranian shipping and direct bans on the importation of Iranian crude oil have further squeezed the industry. In January, Iran's oil minister told a local newspaper that exports had fallen 60 percent since their peak in 2011 to about 1 million barrels per day.
+
+If sanctions were lifted, this trend would turn around as new investment poured into the Iranian industry. Of course, it would take some time for investment to lead to production, and most likely any deal would only provide partial sanctions relief. But the reality that this shadow production could come back online is hanging over global oil markets.
+
+Beyond oil sitting untapped in Iranian soils, there is a surprisingly large quantity of oil that has been pumped and is simply sitting around in storage containers. As Anjli Raval of the Financial Times reported earlier this month, the main cause is a quiet diplomatic triumph of the Obama administration: ""Ahead of Barack Obama’s visit to New Delhi in January, the Indian government asked domestic refiners to slash purchases of Iranian oil and keep imports in line with the previous fiscal year’s levels."" This means oil the Iranians have been pumping for the Indian market has been cooling its heels in storage instead.
+
+Back in late 2014, India was importing 348,000 barrels of Iranian oil per day, which it is allowed to do under the current international sanctions regime. That has fallen to around 50,000 barrels per day as a favor to the anti-Iranian coalition — a favor that is likely tolerable for India because the global trend toward cheap oil makes Iranian imports less desirable.
+
+This and other export curbs mean that for a while now, Iranian exports have actually dropped even more rapidly than Iranian production. The country has responded by investing massively in oil storage. Raval, citing data from the British tanker company Gibson's, says Iran has about 37 million barrels in storage. Unlike oil that's sitting in the ground, oil stored in tankers really could explode onto world markets very quickly in the wake of any kind of diplomatic sentiment. Even if formal sanctions were released only gradually, for example, it is very unlikely that India and other countries would keep up informal deals to swear off Iranian crude.
+
+Negotiations with Iran are being undertaken with an overwhelming emphasis on foreign policy and national security issues. But it is worth mentioning that getting Iranian oil back onto world markets and driving down prices would be excellent news for the American economy.
+
+And it would be even better news for the economies of other key participants in the negotiations — especially Germany and China — that lack America's domestic oil industry.
+
+Conversely, Russia, which has traditionally been one of the countries that is friendliest to Iran, would suffer further economic harm from an influx of Iranian oil. And the Persian Gulf states — led by Saudi Arabia — have generally taken a strong anti-Iranian line in geopolitics and have a strong economic interest in keeping Iranian oil off the market.",REAL
+8360,Why Are Russia and China Buying Up All of America’s Food? Paul Martin and Dave Hodges,"
+
+The Port of New Orleans is quickly running out of food. The Russians and the Chinese are buying up a good portion of America’s grain and food. Inside sources are saying that China is preparing to buy up all beef. What is behind these actions. Could it have anything to do with an impending War between China and Russia and the United States.
+The threat is greater than one can imagine. The details are in the following video.
+ 
+
+ 
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+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.
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+Seen.Life-The Facebook alternative- no censorship, no spying– Sign up here 
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+[/fusion_text] ",FAKE
+526,Obama to propose spending $74B more in 2016 than mandatory spending cuts,"President Obama on Thursday will seek to rally Democrats behind a budget proposal he'll release next week that would spend $74 billion more in discretionary investments than would be allowed under the spending caps mandated by Congress four years ago in an attempt to reduce the federal deficit, according to White House officials.
+
+The proposal, a 7 percent increase over sequestration levels, includes $530 billion on the non-defense discretionary side, an increase of $37 billion over the spending caps; and $561 billion in defense spending, an increase of $38 billion over the spending caps.
+
+The plan prompted an immediate outcry from Republicans.
+
+""He is the most liberal, fiscally irresponsible president we've had in history,"" said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in an interview. ""I don't know why he doesn't see it.""
+
+Obama will preview his plans in remarks to House Democrats at their retreat in Philadelphia on Thursday.
+
+The president's budget proposal ""will fully reverse those cuts for domestic priorities, and match those investments dollar-for-dollar with the resources our troops need to keep America safe,"" said the administration official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.
+
+Congress established the sequester through the Budget Control Act in 2011, mandating spending cuts that were projected to total $1.2 trillion and were scheduled to begin in 2013 and end in 2021, evenly divided over the nine-year period.
+
+Obama's push to exceed the spending caps is already sparking a fight with Republicans, who have criticized him for attempting to grow the government at a time when wages have stagnated, limiting the benefits of the economic recovery.
+
+“Republicans believe there are smarter ways to cut spending than the sequester and have passed legislation to replace it multiple times, only to see the president continue to demand tax hikes,"" said Cory Fritz, spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner. ""Until he gets serious about solving our long-term spending problem, it’s hard to take him seriously.""
+
+In his address to fellow Democrats, Obama also plans to emphasize the need for Congress to pass a measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security beyond Feb. 27, when the agency's funds are set to expire. House Republicans are attempting to use that deadline to force Obama to accept a rollback of his executive actions on immigration announced in November.",REAL
+5624,US Votes 'No' As UN Adopts Landmark Resolution Calling to Ban Nuclear Weapons,"Co-sponsored by 57 nations, L41 calls for a 2017 conference ‘to negotiate a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination’ The United Nations on Thursday adopted a landmark resolution calling for the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide.
+Resolution L.41 (pdf) was accepted by a vote of 123-38, with 16 member nations abstaining. The vote was held during a meeting of the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, which deals with disarmament and international security matters.
+“For seven decades, the UN has warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons, and people globally have campaigned for their abolition. Today the majority of states finally resolved to outlaw these weapons,” said Beatrice Fihn, executive director of International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons (ICAN).
+Setsuko Thurlow , a survivor of the Hiroshima and leading proponent of a ban, also celebrated Thursday’s vote.
+“This is a truly historic moment for the entire world,” Thurlow said. “For those of us who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is a very joyous occasion. We have been waiting so long for this day to come.”
+As expected, nuclear powers including the United States, France, Canada, Israel, Russia, and the United Kingdom, as well as several of their European allies, were among the nations who voted against the ban.
+It was a long journey to get to this point, but totally worth it! #goodbyenukes #FirstCommittee pic.twitter.com/SM5mFzSXzf
+— Michael Hurley (@mdghurley) October 27, 2016",FAKE
+4971,"Trump: I'll Only Lose With 'Cheating,' Asks Supporters To Watch Polling Places","Trump: I'll Only Lose With 'Cheating,' Asks Supporters To Watch Polling Places
+
+Politicians often urge supporters to get out and vote. But Donald Trump wants them to go further: Get out and vote, and then stake out polling places to watch for cheating.
+
+At a Friday campaign event in Altoona, Pa., the Republican presidential nominee said voting might not be enough for him to win.
+
+""The only way we can lose, in my opinion — I really mean this — in Pennsylvania, is if cheating goes on,"" Trump said. ""We have to call up law enforcement. And we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching.""
+
+He wanted the voters themselves to get involved as well.
+
+""I hope you people can sort of not just vote on the 8th, go around and look and watch other polling places, and make sure that it's 100 percent fine,"" Trump said.
+
+These weren't just off-the-cuff remarks for Trump. On his campaign website, you can sign up to ""volunteer to be a Trump election observer.""
+
+Critics have decried his call to voters as voter intimidation, which is illegal.
+
+If his remarks are found to be voter intimidation and if Trump is deemed an agent of the Republican National Committee, it would also violate a consent decree banning the RNC from such activity.
+
+That decree, which has been in place since 1982, was ordered in response to claims of voter intimidation against minorities in the 1970s and '80s, according to Politico's Josh Gerstein.
+
+The consent decree states that the RNC must ""refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities in polling places or election districts where the racial or ethnic composition of such districts is a factor in the decision"" to monitor those areas.
+
+It allows normal poll watching, like rallying supporters to vote, but not anything aimed at voter suppression, like posting armed guards at polling locations or questioning people in an intimidating way before they vote.
+
+""It's possible Trump is trying to use this as a fundraising ploy to get people's names,"" says Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. ""If that's what this is, I'd be relieved, but he's playing with fire here.""
+
+The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the RNC's plea to remove the decree in 2013, but added an expiration date of Dec. 1, 2017. If Trump is violating the decree, the DNC could ask for an extension of up to eight years, according to Hasen.
+
+Trump spokesman Jason Miller says claims that volunteer poll observers could be a form of voter intimidation are unfounded.
+
+""To be clear, liberals love to throw out the voter intimidation card. What we're advocating are open, fair and honest elections,"" Miller said in a statement to NPR's Sarah McCammon.
+
+He also added that poll watchers are ""standard for professional campaigns"" and pointed out poll watcher guides from around the country, including New York and Texas.
+
+In his statement to NPR, Miller echoed Trump's concerns about a ""rigged system.""
+
+""As we've seen from Crooked Hillary's willingness to use — and outright lie about — government institutions for personal and political enrichment, there's a lot of cheating going on,"" Miller said.
+
+It's notable that Trump made these remarks in Pennsylvania. It's a key state he'll need to win in November, but Hillary Clinton has a big lead over Trump there. And according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is getting zero percent of the black vote in the state.
+
+Pennsylvania also notably struck down a voter ID law in 2014, a fact that Trump said was ""shocking"" in his Friday speech.
+
+Voter ID laws have long been criticized as a masked strategy to discourage minorities from voting. Last month, a federal appeals court threw out a voter ID law in North Carolina that, as Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote, targets ""African-Americans with almost surgical precision.""
+
+Trump's suggestion that the election will be rigged is one he keeps making, even though proven cases of voter fraud are actually very rare. As of 2014, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has spent years tracking fraud allegations had found only 31 instances of voter fraud out of more than 1 billion votes cast.
+
+In the absence of a Pennsylvania ID law that might deter certain voters, Trump's call to action could be seen as another strategy to deter voters: voter intimidation.
+
+And unlike voter fraud, voter intimidation has been a problem historically. It's what the RNC consent decree is trying to prevent, and it's not restricted to the GOP. During the 2008 election in Philadelphia, two members of the New Black Panther Movement were charged with voter intimidation after they stationed themselves outside of polling locations. The Department of Justice later dropped the case, which led to criticism that the Obama administration was unwilling to prosecute the black men for civil rights violations.",REAL
+1288,"Clinton looks to sisterhood, but votes may go to Sanders","On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton’s quest to become the country’s first female president has encountered an unexpected problem: She is having trouble persuading women, young and old, to rally behind her cause.
+
+The latest sign came Sunday, when a new CNN-WMUR survey here showed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont beating Clinton among women by eight percentage points — which represents a big shift from the results last week in the Iowa caucuses, where Clinton won women by 11 points.
+
+The survey followed unintentionally problematic comments over the weekend by Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem, older trailblazers who were trying to encourage younger women to support Clinton.
+
+Steinem apologized Sunday for saying on a TV appearance Friday night that younger women were supporting Sanders because “the boys are with Bernie.” On Saturday, Albright drew criticism for saying that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” even though she has expressed that sentiment many times before.
+
+Clinton’s struggles with women underscore the extent to which she has not yet figured out how to harness the history-making potential of her candidacy in the same way that Barack Obama mobilized minorities and white liberals excited about electing the first black president.
+
+[Meet the feminists who want a man in the White House]
+
+Cognizant of the challenge, the Clinton campaign has sought in recent days here to address the problem, tweaking her speeches to put a focus on Clinton as an advocate for women. Clinton spent part of Friday with a group of female U.S. senators she calls the “sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits.”
+
+At the Saturday event with Albright, Clinton offered an aspirational message — saying that the country’s history is “one of rising, of knocking down barriers, of moving toward a more perfect union” — that appeared designed to present her candidacy as a milepost on that national journey.
+
+In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Clinton defended Albright, saying that her words were a “lighthearted but very pointed remark, which people can take however they choose.”
+
+“I think what she was trying to do, what she’s done in every setting I’ve ever seen her in going back 20-plus years, was to remind young women, particularly, that you know, this struggle, which many of us have been part of, is not over,” Clinton said.
+
+Steinem wrote on her Facebook page that her remarks to comedian Bill Maher in which she seemed to say that pro-Sanders feminists were just looking for dating opportunities was a case of “talk-show Interruptus.”
+
+“I misspoke on the Bill Maher show recently, and apologize for what’s been misinterpreted as implying young women aren’t serious in their politics,” she wrote.
+
+Even so, Steinem’s comments pointed to the unexpected obstacle facing Clinton and her backers: a deep divide among women and feminist activists over how voters should respond to her.
+
+While many older women’s rights advocates see the election of Clinton as the next logical step in a broader movement, some younger activists have expressed resentment at the notion that they should feel obligated to vote for Clinton simply because she’s a woman. Some have argued in recent months that Sanders, with his calls to end income inequality and make college free, is arguably the more feminist candidate.
+
+[In Flint, Clinton casts herself as a problem-solver — and looks past N.H.]
+
+“Hillary doesn’t seem to address those huge issues,” said Alexis Isabel Moncada, whose @feministculture Twitter account launched in April and boasts 170,000 followers.
+
+Moncada, who is 17 but will be old enough to vote in November, said Clinton’s personal wealth and her life as a former first lady and secretary of state create a “disconnect with the entirety of women.”
+
+On the trail, Clinton has begun to show more openness and reflection about the challenges of running as a woman in office, sometimes in response to challenges from other women.
+
+At a student town hall at New England College on Saturday, a young woman told Clinton that she supported her in 2008 but has doubts about her candidacy now.
+
+“My concern is that your answer that nothing new was found in the Benghazi hearings continues to give me some doubts,” the woman said. “Everybody knows you can’t write 30,000 emails to your yoga instructor.”
+
+Another young woman asked why her peers think that Clinton is too buttoned up and “rehearsed.”
+
+“I do have a somewhat narrower path that I’ve tried to walk. I do think sometimes it comes across as a little more restrained, a little more careful, and I’m sure that’s true,” Clinton answered. “It’s not just about me, it’s about young women, women of all ages, the expectations that are put upon you and how you deal with them and how you find your true voice and how you stand up for yourself and who you become.”
+
+Many women’s rights advocates say they are proud to back Clinton, not just because of her gender but also because of her vast experience as a lawyer, first lady, senator and secretary of state.
+
+[The Fix: Why won’t Clinton release the transcripts of those paid speeches?]
+
+In recent weeks, Clinton has won endorsements from numerous women’s rights organizations, including the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the National Organization for Women, Emily’s List, NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Feminist Majority.
+
+Feminist Majority’s president, Eleanor Smeal, who launched a campaign on Clinton’s behalf, She Wins We Win, said in an interview that Clinton has not only fought for women’s rights here and overseas but is “probably the strongest single candidate that has ever challenged for the presidency.”
+
+Some have argued that they will vote for Clinton precisely because she’s a woman.
+
+“There has never been a president who knows what it’s like to menstruate, be pregnant, or give birth,” Kate Harding, 41, wrote in the online women’s magazine Dame shortly after Clinton declared her candidacy. Nor, Harding said, has there been a president who has faced such blatant sexism “for showing too much cleavage, or having ‘cankles,’ or wearing unflattering headbands.”
+
+A question for Clinton is whether she can use what is looking to be an extended primary campaign against Sanders to energize women for the general election should she win the nomination.
+
+Republican front-runner Donald Trump traded accusations of sexism with Clinton, prompting a reexamination of the support Clinton won from feminists in the ’90s when she defended her husband against accusations that threatened to derail his presidency.
+
+[New Wave Feminism: Today’s generation embraces feminism on its own terms]
+
+Kate Michelman, a former NARAL president and a prominent supporter of Clinton’s candidacy, echoes Clinton’s own evocation of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” in arguing that “the forces of sexism and anti-feminism are going to be loud and clear in their attempt to make sure no women get the presidency of this country.”
+
+And some self-identified feminists say they feel less urgency to elect a woman in 2016 than they did eight years ago, perhaps because this is the second time a woman has come so close.
+
+Shelby Knox, 29, subject of a documentary about campaigning for sex education in Texas schools, was living and working with Steinem in 2008 and said she found the attacks so painful she was “almost scared” to see Clinton announce again.
+
+“When Hillary lost, I had this horrible fear that Gloria [Steinem] would never see a woman president,” said Knox, “as if the nation would reject any woman.”
+
+This time around, she is confident Clinton will win. And even if she doesn’t, Knox thinks she will live to see a female president.
+
+“It will be impossible for us not to have a woman president,” she said. “I have no doubt it will happen.”
+
+Sellers reported from Washington. Karen Tumulty in Concord contributed to this report.",REAL
+2242,Clinton campaign denies access to pool reporter,"The Hillary Clinton campaign denied access to the print pool reporter on Monday, reigniting reporters' longstanding concerns about the campaign's commitment to running an open and transparent campaign.
+
+David Martosko, the U.S. political editor for London's Daily Mail, reported showing up at the campaign's breakfast stop in New Hampshire only to be told that he would not be allowed to pool the day's events. Pool reporters are responsible for sending reports from the trail to the rest of the press corps.
+
+""Your pooler showed up at the Puritan Backroom in Manchester on a rainy New Hampshire morning at 7:45 and was greeted in the parking lot by Meredith Thatcher, a press staffer with the New Hampshire Democratic Party. Thatcher told your pooler that he wasn’t the approved print pool reporter for today’s pooled events,"" Martosko reported in his first pool report. (Note: Thatcher is actually a press staffer for ""Hillary for New Hampshire,"" not the state's Democratic Party.)
+
+""Asked to call her boss, Harrell Kirstein, she did so and then reported: 'So I'm afraid it's a no. You're not on the list.' She said [campaign press secretary] Nick Merrill should be phoned with questions,"" Martosko continued. ""Asked if the print pooler was being prohibited from getting on either of the pool vans, Thatcher replied: 'I'm afraid that's right.' Asked why, she responded: 'All I know is what Harrell has told me. I got an email saying the print pooler would be changed for today. Sorry.'""
+
+Denied a ride in the pool van, Martosko told Thatcher that he would drive to the first campaign stop in Rochester on his own, ""in the hope that things would be sorted out during the 75-minute drive.""
+
+Reached via email, Martosko declined to comment. He apologized for any typos, noting, ""I'm dictating to phone as I drive."" Daily Mail spokesperson Sean Walsh said the organization is ""seeking an explanation from the Clinton campaign as to why this occurred as Mr. Martosko was scheduled to be the designated print pool reporter in New Hampshire this morning.""
+
+Merrill, the campaign's traveling press secretary, did not respond to a request for comment. However, he did provide an additional explanation to Martosko, which Martosko relayed in a report on The Daily Mail's website:
+
+Merrill said that the campaign’s position is that the Daily Mail does not qualify because it has not yet been added to the White House’s regular print pool – something Martosko informed him was a timing issue, not a White House choice, since Francesca Chambers, the Mail's White House correspondent, has been vetted and has a hard pass. ... 'We’re just trying to follow the same process and system the White House has,' said Merrill. ... Merrill then insisted that the decision had 'nothing to do' with the campaign considering the Daily Mail foreign press. ... 'We don’t consider you foreign press,' he said.  ... Merrill then added; 'This isn’t about you. It’s about a larger...' and did not continue his sentence. ... Merrill later insisted that his reasons were not based on the foreign-press question, but that the campaign simply wanted a day to 'have a conversation' about how to proceed.
+
+""We want a happy press corps as much as the press corps does. And we work very hard to achieve that in tandem with them.  It's a long campaign, and we are going to do our best to find equilibrium and best accommodate interest from as many news outlets as possible, given the space limitations of our events.""
+
+After some confusion about the location of the morning's early childhood education summit in Rochester, NH, your pooled determined that it was at the YMCA of Strafford County and arrived at about 10:20. ... Secret Service at the main entrance refused to let your pooler in and advised to go in through another entrance near a playground. ... Visiting that doorway, another agent asked for your pooler’s name and outlet, to which the pool replied “David Martosko with The Daily Mail.” A voice from behind the door, whom your pool later learned was the head of Mrs. Clinton's Secret Service detail, was heard saying “Oh. No.”  ... The first agent sent your pooler back to the front door, advising that the head of the detail insisted. At the front door again, your pooler was asked to wait while the first agent on duty checked to see if the pool would be admitted. ... The answer: ""No. You can't come in.""
+
+Pooler was advised by that Secret Service agent that he had contacted someone “with the campaign” named “Pollard,” who personally said no, your pooler could not come in. It’s unclear who Pollard is. ... Your pooler asked if he could come inside to use the restroom. The Secret Service agent advised that the area had been swept already, so he should “hit the woods.” ... Pool saw a WMUR-TV truck outside and confirmed with a reporter from a competing local station that there were indeed pool journalist inside from photo and video. ... With a light rain falling, your pooler went back to his rental car to file this report, after counting about 210 cars in the parking lots and on the street. ... Both press pool vans from Manchester were visible outside, along with the now-famous black “Scooby” van and a contingent of New Hampshire state trooper vehicles.
+
+""We have been working to create an equitable system, and have had some concerns expressed by foreign outlets about not being a part of the rotation. The journalists who coordinate the pool are in touch with them as are we, and we simply asked that until we can work all of that out that we send an outlet in keeping with previous precedents.""",REAL
+5458,Europeans have no future - Putin on Migrant Crisis [Video],"
+
+November 6th, 2016 - Fort Russ News - 
+RT- Translated by  Inessa Sinchougova 
+
+
+
+In a truly shocking twist, the Supreme Court of Austria has decided to acquit the Iraqi man, ""that may not have realised the 10-year-old Austrian boy did not want to be sexually abused by him."" Amir, 20, was visiting the Theresienbad pool in the Austrian capital of Vienna in December 2015, as part of a trip to encourage integration, when the incident occurred.  
+Europe - if you can't stand up for your children, who will? Of course there is the fact that Western Europe has supported the US in their violent destruction of the Middle East over the past 20 years. Is it a guilty conscience that seems to appease the blatant criminal activity on behalf of some newcomers? Or are they Soros puppets implanted into the judicial system that are at work? 
+Russia is a multicultural and multi-religious society, and has been for 1000 years. The law applies to everyone equally - whether you're a Crimean Tatar or a Slavic Russian - every Russian citizen is 'native' as such and subject to the same protocols. 
+
+
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                                                                      
+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+5256,"Doug Schoen: Trump, Hillary and the forgotten swing vote -- seniors","As the polls continue to take shape after the conventions, we’re seeing Hillary Clinton further solidify her lead with African Americans, Latinos, voters under 30 and women. She’s made considerable gains with independents and is, miraculously, chipping away at Donald Trump’s lead with white Americans.
+
+But what we don’t know is which side of the aisle a critical voting bloc will land: seniors.
+
+In the latest CNN/ORC Poll, Clinton received just 35% of the 65 and older vote as Trump earned 53%  from the AARP wing.
+
+This could spell bad news for Clinton as seniors have only increased their voting power.
+
+In the 2000 election, voters 65 years and up made up 14% of the electorate and in the 2012 election, the same group made up 16% of all voters and had become considerably more Republican. Senior voters have become one of the biggest voting groups, eclipsing both African Americans and Latinos who made up 13% and 10% of the 2012 vote respectively.
+
+In an election where Trump will not do as well as previous Republicans have with Latinos, African-Americans and women, it is crucial that Trump over performs with senior voters if he wants any chance of winning this race.
+
+A February poll found that a majority of senior voters feel neglected by the candidates. Indeed, 70% said that Clinton and Trump weren’t paying enough attention to their issues – a big gamble as seniors are a bloc that actually show up to vote. In the November 2010 midterm elections, 61% of citizens 65 and older turned out to vote. This was higher than any other voting contingent.
+
+Just like all voters, seniors want to know that the candidates understand their particular set of circumstances. And after the last few years when low interest rates have dealt a serious blow to retirement plans hurting the wallets of seniors across the nation, both Clinton and Trump need to spend more time talking dollars and cents with older Americans.
+
+So what can the candidates do?
+
+Hit the two most important issues in this election, the economy and national security, hard with seniors’ circumstances in mind and do the same for healthcare, an obvious high priority for the elderly.
+
+Donald Trump’s bleak description of the state of the American economy may resonate with seniors. A Bring the Vote Home poll found that 63% of senior citizens disapprove of Barack Obama as President. In addition, the same poll reported that 76% of senior’s feel that the country is on a seriously wrong track.
+
+While Trump hopes to woo elder voters with his promise of a new direction he thus far lacks the specificity of policy to dramatically win this argument. Clinton should emphasize her well detailed platform while also playing off President Obama’s endorsement as the most qualified person to ever run for President.
+
+And she should play up her role as the candidate to protect Americans from national security threats.
+
+In a July Pew Poll, 80% of Americans stated that terrorism and national security are top issues in deciding who they’re voting for this November. Hillary Clinton can win senior voters by continuing the ‘patriotic shift’ of the Democratic Party they framed at the convention. She must take in stride the label of being tough on ISIS and speak of her experience hunting down Osama bin Laden as proof that she will keep America safe.
+
+Finally, to keep seniors on their side, both candidates need to reiterate their support to protect healthcare programs that are working, especially when costs have been skyrocketing and approval for the President’s signature plan continues to struggle.
+
+To accomplish this, both candidates should show their support for Medicare Part D, a program created in 2003 to subsidize the costs of prescription drugs, mostly benefitting senior citizens.
+
+Hillary Clinton has suggested reforms to Part D by introducing Medicaid-style rebates for Part D beneficiaries. What she does not realize is that mandatory rebates leads to increased premiums and limited choice. In an economy where many senior citizens are struggling to keep their heads above water, this is not a policy position that will help her gain their critical votes.
+
+On the Republican side, Donald Trump has broken with much of the GOP by calling for Medicare to negotiate its own prices. This goes against Trump’s open-market, capitalist spirit as allowing Medicare to negotiate its own prices would lead to a $36 billon loss in research and development for biopharma companies.
+
+Clearly, too much is at stake for the presidential candidates to be pushing these unsound policies for Medicare Part D. Not only would the overwhelming majority of senior citizens who rely on Part D be adversely affected, but those individuals' families and their healthcare providers would be left to pay a considerable price. Medicare Part D should be lauded for its success and efficiency, especially in economic terms, not used as a political pawn leaving our senior citizens at risk.
+
+After all, in an election where the majority of seniors are already feeling like their votes aren’t being courted, both Trump and Clinton can’t afford to further alienate this crucial voting bloc.
+
+Douglas E. Schoen has served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton. He has more than 30 years experience as a pollster and political consultant. He is also a Fox News contributor and co-host of ""Fox News Insiders"" Sundays on Fox News Channel at 7 pm ET. He is the author of 13 books. His latest is ""Putin's Master Plan"" (Encounter Books, September 27, 2016). Follow Doug on Twitter @DouglasESchoen.",REAL
+10355,Re: Americans Want Hillary in Jail - Rightly So!,"Truth Bomb from Rasmussen: More Americans Want Hilary Indicted Than Elected! 
+And the list goes on…(Proverbs 24:21; Hebrews 4:13) 
+Now Hillary and the foreign agent in the people’s White House, Barack Hussein Obama, are being exposed for voter rigging . Obama has been visited 45 times out of his 340 visits to the White House by election rigging guru and former prison inmate Robert Creamer . 
+The new scapegoat for Obama and Clinton is Russia. They are now being blamed for the crime when it is Clinton and Obama who are literally exposed in their own corruptions. 
+America, do not be diverted from these diplomatic magicians from hell (John 8:44-45). The Clintons have been selling uranium ore to the Russians . This is now World Wrestling Entertainment on a global scale, as they continue to play off of each other. They are not archenemies. They are allied in crime together, period. 
+Furthermore, like that of the Bushes, China, Russia and America, as well as the Pope, they are all calling for the new world. They are allied with the covenant of Hell, which I remind you disannulled (Isaiah 28:15-18). 
+Many are wondering why Hillary Clinton is even up on the platform during debates. It comes to this, the American people have been soft on these corrupt criminals, and have been soft on themselves. However, God will not be soft (Nahum 1:3), and these corrupt individuals have been encouraged to act out in a more corrupt manner. 
+Americans have also allowed the appeasers that identify themselves as prosecutors and government oversight to talk big . Yet, they produce nothing when it comes to justice (Amos 5:7). They are the fox in the chicken coop, acting as if they actually mean what they say. They are protecting themselves as much as the establishment in which they are a part. 
+Then there are those who pose as some sort of patriotic representatives when, in fact, they are the same people that have given Barack a pass every step of the way. These are a few of those who are the establishment: Colin Powell",FAKE
+5442,BRICS Do Not Lack Mortar: What Detractors Should Know - Rakesh Krishnan Simha,"Taming the corporate media beast BRICS Do Not Lack Mortar: What Detractors Should Know 
+In a world of uncertainties and crumbling western economies, the five-member BRICS group is more – not less – relevant   Russia & India Report 
+A lot of people want to see the BRICS fail. Western nations, in particular the United States and Britain, are prime suspects. However, there are plenty of unwitting commentators in the emerging world who are playing into the West’s hands. Each year, as the BRICS summit draws near, the cacophony from these haters grows louder. Questions about the viability and relevance of the BRICS are raised in the media. 
+During the build-up to the Goa summit this year, the refrain was similar but with the background buzz that the India-China rift over Pakistan-backed terrorism would derail the summit. However, the predicted outcome of an implosion didn’t materialise and, on the contrary, with India and Russia inking the S-400 missile deal , Goa 2016 turned out to be a memorable event. 
+Since many innocent readers may have been misinformed by the compromised commentators – who will certainly be back like a bounced cheque next year – here’s a ready reckoner on the BRICS group. So the next time you hear remarks that the BRICS are collapsing, don’t lose sleep over the issue. 
+World needs BRICS 
+Most of the global multilateral institutions that exist today are no longer relevant. The IMF and the World Bank, for instance, were founded during the closing years of World War II. In geopolitical time, that’s ancient history. Similarly, the G-7 appears to be on life support and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) is no longer a leading organisation. 
+With the western economies perched on monetary and budgetary cliffs, the five BRICS members provide a stable alternate force that offsets the West’s decline. Both China and India continue to experience high economic growth and are on course to become mega economies that will completely dwarf the West in the coming decades. Beijing’s growth may have fallen under 7 per cent but that’s enough to add the equivalent of Holland’s national income to the Chinese GDP. 
+Bottom line: without the BRICS, the world economy will experience 1929 all over again. 
+BRICS slowdown, not a meltdown 
+Uday Kotak, executive vice-president of Kotak Mahindra Bank, feels India should quit the BRICS coalition because of the slowdown in four of the five economies. His view has been echoed by several so-called experts. But curiously, have you ever heard any economist or banker say the OECD must disband because it has basket cases such as Greece or terror exporters such as Turkey? 
+According to the US-based Centre on Global Interests , “You can look at the BRICS from the financial market's point of view, or from a geopolitical point of view. But whichever lens you view it through, what you see is the same: despite economic slowdowns and even economic hardship in some nations, these are far and away the most powerful countries outside of the developed core. Their economies have scale. Their decisions can move financial markets. They have intellectual capital and clout within their regions. And in terms of foreign policy, they are the counterweight to a unipolar world run largely by Washington and its friends in London and Brussels.” 
+It adds: “In both of these regards – economics and foreign policy – the BRICS are alive and kicking. In fact, they are more relevant today than they were in November 2001, when Jim O'Neill grouped them into the strange bedfellows that they have become.” 
+Bilaterals can’t bring down the BRICS 
+If the UN fails to discuss relevant political issues, the international body is considered a failure. But BRICS is not a platform that was created for discussing politics. The primary role of the five-member group is to remove the West’s grip from the levers that control the world economy. By establishing their own New Development Bank, the BRICS have ensured that the IMF is no longer the world’s lender-of-last-resort. 
+In this backdrop, fears that bilateral issues involving India and China will wreck summits have consistently proved to be baseless. 
+Take Goa 2016. While the Goa Declaration mentions terror, the focus of the summit was not terrorism at all. Sure, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a shot at Pakistan, describing it as the “mothership of terrorism”, and China defended its ally by saying it had made “great sacrifices”. But both New Delhi and Beijing were merely playing to their respective galleries even as the real summitry was happening behind closed doors. 
+To be sure, politics can be tabled if it’s a side dish – like Syria was a couple of years ago – but issues with the potential to derail the summit simply have no place in BRICS. 
+Critics of the BRICS often point to the India-China border issue as evidence of serious problems. But this misses the point. There always will be different opinions and views among the BRICS countries – just like there are differences among NATO or European Union members. 
+BRICS are not united but it doesn’t matter 
+Unlike NATO or the European Union, where the member countries have more or less the same goals and are also of the same racial stock, each of the BRICS countries is different. However, their membership of BRICS gives them a common goal – development. As emerging countries, they are focussed on raising their standards of living. 
+The fact that they are united as a group, despite such stark differences in national goals, opinions and geopolitical rivalries and even outright hostilities, points to the viability of the BRICS.",FAKE
+1439,How the GOP can take back the White House,"As Republicans jockey for their party’s top spot in the 2016 presidential election, more than two dozen GOP governors are meeting in Las Vegas to discuss how best to promote and capitalize on their executive winning streaks at the national level.
+
+With a slight advantage over Republicans in electoral votes and growing support from Hispanic and Asian-American voters, conventional wisdom holds that Democrats are favored to win the White House in 2016. But President Obama will leave few coattails in 2016 – only 27 percent of registered voters would vote for him again, giving Republicans a meaningful shot at making gains at the state and national level.
+
+The dissatisfied majority of American voters will be looking for real change in 2016. They want a leader they can support – someone who understands the economy and will support job creation, not create broad, business-choking rules often overturned by federal courts.
+
+The eventual GOP presidential nominee has an opportunity to capitalize on this era of public discontent and lead our country forward, united behind a shared goal of economic prosperity and growth. And he or she should start by taking cues from the Republican chief executives leading some of the most prosperous states in the nation.
+
+Over the last four years, the GOP has excelled at the state level. In the last election cycle, Republicans picked up seven governorships, including swing states won by President Obama – Maine, Michigan, New Mexico and Wisconsin – and true blue states like Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts. Since 2006, 44 of the 50 states have had a Republican governor. And the trend continues. On Nov. 3, voters in Kentucky elected their second Republican governor in four decades, Matt Bevin, in a big upset.
+
+Voters increasingly look to governors to make tough choices against special-interest groups. That’s why presidential contenders should take a cue from them. If Republicans present a vision of the American Dream boosted by free-market innovation, choice in jobs, choice in providers of services and a well-run government making tough decisions for a better future for our children, they will capture and inspire American voters.
+
+Between 2011 and 2014, GOP governors cut taxes by $36 billion, while Democratic governors raised them by $58 billion. And Republican governors are pushing back against unions by eliminating mandatory union membership, government union-dues collection, union-mandated labor for government projects and the protection of incompetent teachers. The 10 most business-friendly states in America are run by Republican governors.
+
+Republican executive leadership is about more than just fiscal competence, however. It’s rooted in a philosophy that citizens are adults and can make decisions on what they want better than government can.
+
+This GOP message of choice should resonate with voters across the political spectrum. Republicans support choice in doctors and health care savings accounts, choice in urban schools, choice for workers on whether to join unions, choice in construction workers for government projects, discretion in sentencing for nonviolent crimes and choice of taxicabs or Uber, hotels or Airbnb. This message works. In the November election, voters in San Francisco overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would have made it much harder for Airbnb to operate in the city.
+
+Too often, the left speaks with a unified voice, but their loyalty to interest groups such as teachers, unions and trial lawyers means they often struggle to affect change through choice or challenge the status quo.
+
+Democratic presidential hopefuls are selling smoke and mirrors, pushing for new and broader regulations and new taxes. They’ll promise a cornucopia of seemingly free gifts – college tuition, student-loan forgiveness, greater entitlements and more unemployment compensation.
+
+Today, more Americans identify as independents than with either major party – a trend that is accelerating. A Gallup poll released in January found the number of self-identifying independents had grown to 43 percent of the electorate, up from 35 percent in 2008. That increase in the number of independents is concomitant with an overall decline among respondents self-identifying as Democrats or Republicans.
+
+As the GOP finalizes its national party platforms, Republicans should focus on the benefits of the sharing economy, greater use of technology, data-based decision making, less litigation, clear and simple regulations, and empowering Americans and free markets. These are the critical issues driving our economy and sure to drive American voters to the polls next November.
+
+Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)™, the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,200 consumer technology companies, and author of the New York Times best-selling books, Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Businesses and The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream. His views are his own. Connect with him on Twitter: @GaryShapiro",REAL
+2528,"Sorry Jeb, 'anchor babies' is a slur","Raul A. Reyes is an attorney and member of the USA Today board of contributors. Follow him on Twitter @RaulAReyes. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+Open mouth, insert foot. On Thursday, Jeb Bush stepped into controversy when he used the loaded term ""anchor babies"" to refer to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. In a testy exchange with reporters in New Hampshire, Bush said that he doesn't believe the expression is offensive and blamed Democrats for perpetuating the notion that it is an insult. ""Do you have a better term?"" he asked one reporter. ""You give me a better term and I'll use it.""
+
+Despite his family ties to the Latino community, Bush is off base. The term ""anchor baby"" is a disgusting slur. It is inaccurate as well as offensive. It is dehumanizing to Latinos, immigrants and children who are as American as you and me.
+
+The idea of an ""anchor baby"" is centered, in part, on the assumption that having an American-born child can protect undocumented people from deportation. The child, this line of thought goes, ""anchors"" a family in the United States and allows them to gain citizenship.
+
+In fact, having a citizen child is no protection from possible deportation. In the first six months of 2011, for example, parents with U.S.-citizen children constituted 22% of deportees. Between 2010 and 2012, the United States deported nearly 205,000 parents of citizen kids. And in 2013, more than 72,000 were deported, according to The Huffington Post. (President Barack Obama's executive action plan , which is tied up in the courts, would grant temporary deportation relief to parents of children who meet certain requirements.)
+
+Another false notion surrounding ""anchor babies"" is that people from foreign countries are rushing here to have children. While there has been a phenomenon known as "" birth tourism "" among Asian mothers who temporarily relocate to the United States to have a child, their numbers are statistically small. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 7,955 children were born to foreign residents in 2012. Meanwhile research has shown that the overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants come to the United States to work.
+
+So while the ideas behind ""anchor babies"" are a myth, the sting of this term is real. Calling someone an ""anchor baby"" strips away their humanity and judges them based on a perception of their parents' immigration status. The American Heritage Dictionary rightfully defines ""anchor baby"" as a pejorative term. Ironically, Bush has been a member of an advocacy group that has discouraged use of the term. The Washington Post reports that the Hispanic Leadership Network, whose website still lists Bush as an advisory member, in 2013 issued a memo warning Republican lawmakers to avoid terms such as ""illegals,"" ""aliens"" -- and ""anchor babies."" If Bush wants a better term for children born here to undocumented parents, how about calling them what they are? They are U.S. citizens. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2012, there were 4.5 million U.S.-born children younger than 18 living with at least one undocumented parent. When Bush and other Republican lawmakers disparage ""anchor babies,"" they are disparaging fellow citizens, and that is unacceptable. It also goes against American values of fairness and equality. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush waves as he takes the stage as he formally announces he is joining the race for president with a speech June 15, 2015, at Miami Dade College in Miami. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush shakes hands with attendees after speaking at the 42nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference on February 27 in National Harbor, Maryland. Bush takes a selfie with a guest at a luncheon hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on February 18 in Chicago. Bush delivered his first major foreign policy speech at the event. Bush hands out items for Holiday Food Baskets to those in need outside the Little Havana offices of CAMACOL, the Latin American Chamber of Commerce on December 17 in Miami. Bush waves to the audience at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in Tampa, Florida, on August 30, 2012, on the final day of the Republican National Convention. Bush (left) and wife Columba Bush attend the 2012 Lincoln Center Institute Gala at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center on March 7, 2012, in New York City. President Barack Obama (left) speaks about Bush (center) while visiting Miami Central Senior High School on March 4, 2011 in Miami, Florida. The visit focused on education. Bush (left) speaks with Brazilian President in charge Jose Alancar during a meeting at Planalto Palace in Brasilia, April 17, 2007. Bush was in Brazil to speak about sugar and ethanol business. Then-Texas Governor Rick Perry (center) testifies as Bush (right) and then-Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano (left) listen during a hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Capitol Hill October 19, 2005. Bush gives a thumbs up signal from his car as he leaves a local polling station after casting his vote in Coral Gables, Florida, November 5, 2002. Bush walks out of the West Wing after meeting with his brother, then-President George W. Bush, at the White House January 9, 2002. Governor Bush participated in the signing ceremony of the Everglades Protection Agreement. Then-Mexican President Vincente Fox (left) and Bush hold a press conference September 7, 2001, in Miami. Fox visited Florida to attend the Americas Conference and deliver a speech to speak about issues such as immigration. Then-President George W. Bush (right) is greeted by Jeb Bush on March 21, 2001, at Orlando International Airport in Orlando, Florida. President Bush was in Orlando to attend the American College of Cardiology Annual Convention. Bush speaks during a press conference at the Carandolet Government Palace in Quito, January 18, 2006. Bush and a businessmen delegation were in a two-day visit to talk about a free trade agreement. Bush speaks to reporters after meeting with the Florida State Cabinet at the Florida State Capitol Building November 16, 2000, in Tallahassee, Florida. Then-President George W. Bush (left) and Jeb Bush (right), raise their arms onstage following a rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds, October 25, 2000, in Brandon, Florida. Jeb Bush (left) and then-President George W. Bush stand with their arms around each other's shoulders at a rally in Miami, Florida, September 22, 2000. Then-President George W. Bush (right) and Jeb Bush go through the line for strawberries during a stop at the Stawberry Festival March 12, 2000 in Plant City, Florida. The Bush family, (left to right) former U.S. President George W., former Florida Governor Jeb, former President George H.W. and his wife Barbara, watch play during the Foursomes matches September 25, 1999 at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts the site of the 33rd Ryder Cup Matches. Former President George H.W. Bush (second left), his wife Barbara Bush (left), their son Jeb Bush (center), then-first lady Hillary Clinton (second right), and former then-President Bill Clinton (right) look up to see the U.S. Army Golden Knights parachute team November 6, 1997 at the conclusion of the dedication ceremony of the George Bush Library in College Station, Texas. Portrait of the Bush family in front of their Kennebunkport, Maine house August 24, 1986. Pictured, back row: Margaret holding daughter Marshall, Marvin Bush, Bill LeBlond. Pictured, front row: Neil Bush holding son Pierce, Sharon, George W. Bush holding daughter Barbara, Laura Bush holding daughter Jenna, Barbara Bush, George Bush, Sam LeBlond, Doro Bush Lebond, George P. (Jeb's son), Jeb Bush holding son Jebby, Columba Bush and Noelle Bush. What is sad here is that Bush, along with the rest of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates, is being dragged down by the ongoing dominance of Donald Trump in the polls. Consider that Bush is far more moderate than The Donald on immigration matters. Unlike Trump, Bush does not want to end birthright citizenship , which is guaranteed under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as well as more than a century of settled Supreme Court law. In contrast to Trump's endorsement of mass deportations, Bush favors a path to legal status for the undocumented. Yet perhaps Bush felt he had to ramp up his rhetoric to be heard among all the media focus on Trump's campaign spectacle. If so, he only brought himself down to Trump's level. True, illegal immigration remains a contentious issue among the conservative base. But scapegoating American children is no substitute for thoughtful policy solutions. Bush is actually echoing Trump's ugly messaging about Latinos and immigrants by using such hurtful language. In an election cycle where Republicans will need to get a higher share of the Latino vote than in years past to win the White House, this could well be Bush's ""self-deportation"" moment -- recalling the comment by Mitt Romney during the GOP primaries that Latino voters remembered during the 2012 general election. In the midst of an ongoing debate over immigration, divisive rhetoric solves nothing. Sorry Jeb, but absolutely no good is served by using the term ""anchor babies.""",REAL
+1331,Fight night: Why the South Carolina showdown could turn bloody,"The Fox Business debate here in Charleston isn’t billed as a boxing match, but by the time it ends Thursday evening, viewers may not be able to tell the difference.
+
+There is no question that punches will be thrown; the only question is how much blood they draw.
+
+Based on what they did in Milwaukee, I expect Neil Cavuto and Maria Bartiromo to ask civil and substantive questions. Both anchors told me after that encounter, and Cavuto just repeated to the Hollywood Reporter, that debates aren’t about them but about eliciting important information from the candidates.
+
+But this time, that won’t matter.
+
+No matter what questions the moderators ask, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush will find ways to pummel each other. And the reason is simple: Each needs to become the so-called establishment alternative to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Each would be badly wounded by lousy back-to-back showings in Iowa and New Hampshire. Each has been ramping up the rhetoric and unleashing harsh attack ads.
+
+No way they pass up the chance to do that before an audience that could match or exceed the 14 million people who watched the last FBN debate.
+
+Cruz, who tangled with Rubio at that debate over immigration and surveillance, will be in the mix as well. Given that he’s gently started to raise questions about Trump—as a man with “New York values,” for instance—there might be a jab or two in the direction of the man who keeps harping on his Canadian birth. But it’s more likely that the Texas senator will spar mainly with his fellow Cuban-American and the others.
+
+Trump, if the past is any guide, will hang back a bit and engage mostly in counterpunching. But with Iowa polls now showing him either slightly ahead of Cruz or running neck and neck, we may hear him utter the word Canada once or twice.
+
+For the middle-tier candidates, there’s no point in holding back. Bush, Christie and Rubio have an enormous amount invested in a strong New Hampshire finish.
+
+The last FBN debate was unusually polite because it followed the CNBC debacle, with most of the candidates outraged by some condescending and opinionated questions from the moderators. But the 2016 race is in a very different phase now.
+
+These debates, with their huge audiences, have become winnowing events like never before. That’s why Rand Paul is loudly denouncing the decision to knock him off the main stage and refusing to attend the undercard.
+
+Network criteria can deflate candidates by keeping them out of prime time. Mike Huckabee and Carly Fiorina, who had been in prime-time debates, are in the early-evening faceoff here in South Carolina. Christie bounced back from one undercard appearance to the main stage, while Rand Paul is boycotting the 6 p.m. debate. But time is running short.
+
+These debates have a magnified impact because they dominate the media coverage for as much as a week, with key sound bites endlessly replayed and pundits pontificating about the winners and losers. That echo chamber has helped good debaters such as Rubio, Cruz and Christie, and badly hurt Bush after what were seen as lackluster performances.
+
+That’s why the Charleston debate, along with the Fox News debate in Des Moines later this month, looms so large: Some of the contenders could emerge badly bruised--or worse.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+4162,Battle over Scalia’s replacement already spilling into Senate races,"Conservative and liberal advocacy groups are gearing up for a ferocious political brawl over President Obama’s pick to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the weekend death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and already the battle is spilling from the presidential campaign into some of the nation’s most hotly contested Senate races.
+
+White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz repeated Monday that the president intends to “fulfill his constitutional responsibility” by nominating a new justice and predicted that Senate Republicans, despite their current loud opposition, will ultimately hold a confirmation hearing and vote for the nominee.
+
+“This is not the first time the Republicans have come out with a lot of bluster only to have reality sink in,” Schultz said. “We need a fully staffed Supreme Court.”
+
+Schultz quoted President Ronald Reagan, who pressed for a vote on his Supreme Court nominee Anthony M. Kennedy, who was confirmed in 1988: “Every day that passes with a Supreme Court below full strength impairs the people’s business in that crucially important body.”
+
+But across the board, Republicans have argued that Obama should allow his successor to make the pick and that they would block any attempt to confirm a new justice this year.
+
+[Why blocking Obama’s pick could cost Republicans the Senate]
+
+One consideration that may force Republicans to recalibrate their strategy is the prospect of political damage to some of the embattled Senate incumbents up for reelection this fall. Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Rob Portman (Ohio), all Republicans in swing states, have called for the Senate to disregard any Obama nominee. Other Republicans in tight races have remained silent so far.
+
+Democrats see a potential confirmation battle as an opportunity to put Republicans on the defensive and as a wedge issue that could help them retake control of the Senate. In Ohio, former Democratic governor Ted Strickland, who is vying for his party’s nomination to challenge Portman, said Monday that by opposing an Obama nominee, Portman was “failing to do his job, shirking his responsibilities to our nation, jeopardizing the institutions of our democracy and engaging in exactly the kind of dysfunctional behavior that frustrates Ohioans about Congress.”
+
+P.G. Sittenfeld, a Cincinnati City Council member running against Strickland in the Democratic primary, declared Monday that Portman was advocating actions that would “put the Senate in violation of both historical precedent and the clear language of the Constitution itself.”
+
+Portman responded in a statement Monday that the next president should choose Scalia’s replacement: “With the election less than nine months away, I believe the best thing for the country is to trust the American people to weigh in on who should make a lifetime appointment that could reshape the Supreme Court for generations,” he said.
+
+Conservative activists are drawing up plans to mobilize support and pressure lawmakers to reject any nominee.
+
+FreedomWorks, a group that pledges to promote “smaller government, lower taxes, free markets, personal liberty and the rule of law,” said it would wage a grass-roots campaign to oppose Democrats who would “ram liberal judicial nominees through the Senate . . . occasionally with the help of unprincipled, big government Republicans.”
+
+Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director for the Judicial Crisis Network and a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, said conservatives are still mourning Scalia. But, she added, “if the president tries to pack the court, as it is apparent he may, then JCN will be leading the charge to delay a Senate vote until the American people decide the next president.”
+
+Liberal groups are working hard to undercut the prevailing Republican argument that it is inappropriate for Obama to nominate a Supreme Court justice at this late stage of his presidency.
+
+Americans United for Change, a group closely allied with the White House, is trumpeting an article written by now-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 1970. McConnell wrote that “the Senate should discount the philosophy of the nominee” and that “the president is presumably elected by the people to carry out a program and altering the ideological direction of the Supreme Court would seem to be a perfectly legitimate part of a presidential platform.”
+
+Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, said the sudden Supreme Court vacancy has mobilized progressive groups and broadened the coalition usually assembled for nomination fights.
+
+“What’s unusual about this moment, and this effort, is that the community as a whole is coming together,” said Aron, whose group focuses on federal judicial nominations. “In addition to organizations focused on judicial selections, others that aren’t realize what’s at stake and are weighing in already.”
+
+MoveOn.org and CREDO Action, liberal advocacy groups, have launched petitions calling on the Senate to fill Scalia’s seat. As of Monday evening, each petition had garnered more than 100,000 signatures.
+
+People close to the administration expect that Obama’s choice this time will resemble his earlier ones.
+
+“I think the best way to think about who the president might appoint is to look at who he has appointed,” said Caroline Fredrickson, president of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. “He has picked people who are qualified beyond question and with an eye toward making the court more diverse. I think those will be the main touchstones.”
+
+A person close to the administration, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect those relationships, said the pick is likely to be someone “super-qualified” who had been confirmed by overwhelming majorities of currently sitting Republicans; that would make it difficult for the GOP to argue that the nominee is unqualified.
+
+Meanwhile, a wall of silence went up Monday around Scalia’s final hours and the confusion after his death. Local officials in rural West Texas, where he died, spent hours trying to locate a justice of peace after his body was discovered. The justice who was eventually found, Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara, pronounced Scalia dead without seeing his body — which is permissible under Texas law — and declined to order an autopsy. A second justice has said that one should have been performed.
+
+Scalia’s family opposed an autopsy, and Guevara said Sunday that she determined by telephone that Scalia died of natural causes because he was having “health issues.’’ She cited information from federal officials at the scene and a conversation she had with Scalia’s physician. She said she was awaiting a statement from the physician to complete the death certificate.
+
+Scalia’s physician, Brian Monahan, declined to divulge any details about Scalia’s health when reached by telephone at his home in Maryland on Monday. “Patient confidentiality forbids me to make any comment on the subject,’’ he said, before hanging up.
+
+Jerry Markon, Sari Horwitz, Lena Sun and Alice Crites in Washington, and Eva Ruth Moravec in Austin contributed to this report.",REAL
+9450,WikiLeaks Podesta Emails Confirm Hillary’s Health Issues,"We Are Change 
+Issues surrounding Hillary Clinton’s health and ability to take on the demanding position of President have pervaded this presidential race. But several recent WikiLeaks emails from John Podesta, chairman of Hillary’s campaign, have revealed that Hillary Clinton’s health problems cannot possibly be branded as “conspiracy theories” any longer.
+
+Before Hillary Clinton announced her run for president, an email sent on March 14th, 2014, by campaign manager Robert Mook to Clinton campaign chairman Podesta asks whether Podesta has discussed Hillary’s “taxes and health.” The email states that he acknowledges they’re both “hyper sensitive” issues, wondering whether “both are better dealt with very early so we control them–rather than responding to calls for transparency.” 
+In this thread, Mook stated “Yes. We need to kill that baby in the cradle.” (Which perfectly articulates how sadistic the Clinton campaign and agenda is within a single metaphor.)
+A later email thread from July 31, 2015 , shows Dan Schwerin, Clinton’s director of speech writing, aiming to roll out Hillary’s tax records along with a letter from her physician stating that she is “in excellent health,” and that following this “We expect the stories that pop at 2 pm to have headlines such as “CLINTON IN ‘EXCELLENT HEALTH,’ MEDICAL RECORDS SAY” … “CLINTON RELEASES HEALTH REPORT” … “CLINTON CAMP AIMS TO ONE-UP BUSH IN DISCLOSING FINANCES”
+The emails expose the Clinton campaign’s attempts to suppress any further inquiry into these health problems and control the narrative, and provide them with “the best possible, ‘fighting’ chance of promoting the most helpful story lines.”
+Also stating that “the first stories on health won’t pop until 2. 1 pm is just when we will quietly approach the reporters, ” the Clinton camp is exposed in the way in which the mainstream media has held complete bias in favor of a Clinton presidency. This has also been revealed through all the recent Podesta email Wikileaks releases. Just one example being an email sent April 30, 2015, by Politico reporter Glenn Thrush, who even called himself a “hack” when asking Hillary’s top campaign aide, John Podesta, to check over sections of his report regarding the Democratic presidential candidate before publication. 
+
+Startlingly, an email exchange between Hillary’s campaign leaders, Tanden and Podesta, even questions if she is aware that we are living on planet Earth. Telling an audience in Ohio that she was “moderate and center” after previously stating just a few days prior that she was “progressive”, Tanden asks, “Why did she call herself a moderate?”
+Podesta replied “ I pushed her on this on Sunday night. She claims she didn’t remember saying it. Not sure I believe her.” 
+In response, Tanden stated, “I mean it makes my life more difficult after telling every reporter I know she’s actually progressive but that is really the smallest of issues. It worries me more that she doesn’t seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment. ” 
+It can be speculated as to what this statement is referring to, but it is evident that this proves Hillary’s lack of awareness and mental stability. Perhaps regarding her inability to hold a firm political position, or even more worryingly, her inability to retain even the most basic and fundamental information, due to a medical condition that she is suffering from. Giving credibility to the latter possibility, Hillary’s top aide Huma Abedin admits that the former Secretary of State is “still not perfect in her head,” in a newly revealed Wikileaks email on Tuesday.
+Countless incidents capturing Hillary’s poor health and unstable mental state have been brought to light, despite the Clinton campaign and mainstream media’s attempted censoring of this content in the hope that portraying a false narrative regarding these episodes will stray attention away from this issue. For example, after Hillary’s recent fall at a 9/11 memorial event filmed by a bystander, the Clinton campaign tried to cover up by claiming this was due to “pneumonia and dehydration” even though Clinton does not appear limp, as though she has fainted. In contrast, she appears ridged and shaky throughout this episode, as Secret Service agents lift her into the vehicle. However, Hillary’s constant tumbles do not surprise me, as the gravitational force pulling this Democratic nominee towards underworld must be so incredibly strong.
+This along with many other recently recorded accounts of Hillary’s severe coughing fits , dangerous falls, recurring eye problems , and the spitting up of a vile yellow substance, have undoubtedly shown that this presidential candidate is scarcely physically fit to perform duties as president. Hillary’s mental state is also a major point of concern, which top aides, Podesta and Abedin, have confirmed through the Wikileaks emails stated in this article.
+If Hillary blatantly appears unable to function healthily during her time running for president, we can only expect these issues to increase in severity if she were to take on the stressful position of president.
+The post WikiLeaks Podesta Emails Confirm Hillary’s Health Issues appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+1913,Clinton struggles to contain media barrage on foreign cash,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+4700,What WikiLeaks hack says about Clinton: Our view,"Now we know why she didn't want those Wall Street speeches made public.
+
+The stream of hacked WikiLeaks emails — the latest trove dumped Thursday — from inside Hillary Clinton’s campaign opens up a troubling prospect far beyond their revelations about the differing public and private faces of the Democratic presidential nominee.
+
+The leaks show that the Russian government might be trying to interfere with the U.S. presidential race, aiming cyberattacks at the very heart of American democracy: its fair and open elections. If an FBI investigation proves that to be the case, the hacked emails represent an electronic version of Watergate, the 1972 burglary of Democratic national headquarters that ultimately forced Richard Nixon from the White House. Only this time, the threat comes from a foreign adversary rather than a presidential administration.
+
+For now, though, most of the public attention is on the content of the emails themselves, which make clear why Clinton balked at releasing transcripts of the high-dollar speeches she delivered to audiences on Wall Street and elsewhere in 2013 and 2014.
+
+Assuming the WikiLeaks emails are accurate, Clinton portrayed herself to bankers as more supportive of free trade, and more flexible on industry regulation, than she has been during her drive for the presidency.
+
+Sounding like an ardent free-trader in a 2013 speech, Clinton told one group of bankers: “My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade.” This was consistent with her stance as secretary of State in 2012, when she praised the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as “the gold standard” of free trade agreements.
+
+By 2016, however, Clinton faced populist challenges first from Bernie Sanders and then from Donald Trump. She now opposes the TPP and has few good things to say about free trade.
+
+These days, she also proclaims her disdain for income inequality and Wall Street, having asserted in February that “Wall Street can never be allowed to once again threaten Main Street, and I will fight to rein in Wall Street.”
+
+That was not her tone three years ago, when she told New York’s Goldman Sachs that the industry needs to be a part of fashioning industry regulation, and commiserated with the investment bankers over “the bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.”
+
+True, many politicians change positions — none more so than Trump — and some say things in private they never want the public to hear. But they pay a price for duplicity when they fail to come clean, and the comments ultimately do become public.
+
+Clinton had two ways to inoculate herself against any damaging leaks from her Wall Street speeches. One is that she could have released the transcripts months ago, inconvenient as that might have been. The other is that she could have turned down the speaking engagements in the first place.
+
+As the purported champion of the middle class, Clinton might have thought twice before taking $225,000 — what it takes a typical American household four years to earn — for an hour or so of work from an industry that helped push the economy to near-collapse and forced millions of Americans into foreclosure.
+
+Now, amid the steady drip of embarrassing private emails, the speeches have come back to bite her. The wounds would have gone deeper if disclosures of Trump’s lewd sexual comments and alleged assaults had not overshadowed them.
+
+For Clinton and other politicians, the lesson is if you fear something will become public, don’t do it. Or at the very least, disclose it yourself rather than let others control the story.
+
+For American voters, the lesson is to beware of foreign governments seeking to damage democracy. That harm, if confirmed, will last far longer than memories about the content of particular emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign manager.
+
+USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.
+
+To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion email newsletter. To respond to this editorial, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.",REAL
+2676,Providing Balanced Information Is Not Facebook's Goal - NYTimes.com,"Catherine R. Squires is a professor of communication studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is also the director of the Race, Indigeneity, Gender and Sexuality Studies Initiative.
+
+Facebook is a for-profit company that makes money packaging its users' information to sell to advertisers and other entities. The company's goal is not to produce a ""balanced"" information diet for its users. People who are shocked that Facebook might be skewing their newsfeed probably shouldn't have trusted them with their news diet in the first place, given its history. Remember those confusing and ever-changing privacy settings, and that experiment to see whether users' moods could be manipulated by changing the newsfeed? This is not the company I'd trust to tell me what's important in the world.
+
+But the uproar over the role of human editors at Facebook — or at least, in the ""Trending Topics"" section — does revive an important question: In an information age when people can customize their news diet, how should Facebook editors decide what issues, opinions or events deserve prominence?
+
+Given their newfound reliance on social media companies like Facebook, traditional media editors have been grappling with the same question. Any news publication with a website makes ad revenue off of popular articles, but that can be a dangerous incentive. Though important news can also be popular, all of the major publications are guilty of publishing dumbed down ""clickbait"" to attract wider audiences.
+
+So then, perhaps the question is whether Facebook, or even the news media, is narrowing the field of news so that we, as citizens, are unable to engage in effective political and social discussions.
+
+A Facebook newsfeed that was completely dictated by algorithms without human interference wouldn't be any better. Algorithms reflect the imperfect biases of the humans that build them. Algorithms rely on data sets, which are structured by the decisions of data gatherers guided by particular goals. For example, as most of the people who work in computing are male, it's not surprising that scholars found a gender bias in the Google's Image search: In searches for C.E.O., 11 percent of the people depicted were women, compared with 27 percent of U.S. C.E.O.s who are actually women.
+
+Data and news can be skewed on many levels on the Internet, but competent editors could explain how they and their algorithms work. Then, at least, the public would know how and why news sites elevate certain stories.
+
+But bias in the media is not new. These basic questions have to be worked out by each generation, confronted by each new development in media technology. They are ethical and practical questions that require a human touch.",REAL
+5216,Which States Can Gary Johnson and Jill Stein Spoil?,"Like his third-party forefathers, Gary Johnson gets irate when you call him a spoiler. “We’re giving people a chance to vote for something, as opposed to the lesser of two evils,” the Libertarian presidential nominee shouted last week at a Bloomberg Politics reporter who asked about his invisible path to victory.
+
+In truth, there are only two reasonable outcomes for Johnson's long-shot campaign, neither of which ends with him in the White House. In one scenario, he is no more than a nuisance for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, an afterthought to either major party's march to victory. In the other, Johnson’s campaign alters the contours of the presidential race, drawing votes that would have otherwise gone to Trump or Clinton.
+
+His own view notwithstanding, the Johnson-as-spoiler scenario is highly plausible this year. In both traditional battlegrounds and in states that would be safe terrain in a normal election year, third-party protest votes have the chance of flipping results—and electoral votes.
+
+For months, the assumption has been that one-time Republican presidential candidate Johnson and his running mate, Bill Weld, both former Republican governors, might be an attractive option for members of Trump’s party resistant to their nominee, and that remains true. But this year’s spoiler threat is not just a one-party worry. Close to a month before Election Day, Clinton and her campaign are anxious that Johnson, along with Green Party nominee Jill Stein, may look just as desirable to disenchanted members of her Democratic coalition—particularly young voters—as they do to Republicans.
+
+Johnson will be on the ballot in all 50 states this November; Stein will be on it in all but six. The name of an independent candidate, anti-Trump conservative Evan McMullin, will be seen in a dozen states, though others allow people to write it in. All three candidates fell short of the polling criteria that would have put them on the stage at the first presidential debate—and thus in living rooms of 84 million people. But that doesn’t change the number of voters who are unenthused about their major-party choices this November. No matter who wins next month, Clinton and Trump have already made history as the most disliked nominees ever.
+
+Both have comparably high unfavorable ratings, nearing 60 percent, and that explains why Johnson has been able to maintain solid poll numbers deep into the fall. And the Clinton campaign has reason to be concerned. Nationwide, polls show that Johnson supporters are a mixed bunch who tend to skew younger and more suburban, with an equal representation from conservatives and liberals—a jumbled demographic profile that suggests the group may contain just as many Clinton doubters as Trump deserters. For this reason, Clinton’s highest-profile surrogates have hit the campaign trail with a new line of persuasion: urging disaffected lefties not to waste their ballot. Last week, President Barack Obama used a radio interview with Steve Harvey to brand third-party votes as a boon for Trump. The same day it aired, first lady Michelle Obama warned voters at a Clinton rally in Philadelphia that they will “help swing an entire precinct for Hillary’s opponent with a protest vote or by staying home out of frustration.”
+
+For Clinton, potential supporters most susceptible to the third-party lure are those most weakly bonded to the party—those members of the Obama coalition without much of a record voting in non-Obama elections. Among the Trump cohort, third-party voters are more likely to be gleaned from base Republicans who reject their party’s unconventional standard-bearer.
+
+Johnson has received endorsements from several conservative newspaper editorial boards, including the Detroit News, the New Hampshire Union Leader, and the Chicago Tribune, which dubbed this election a “moment to rebuke the Republican and Democratic parties.” USA Today, which normally abstains from presidential endorsements, chose to “disendorse” Trump, but refused to throw support behind Clinton, tacitly opening a door for Johnson.
+
+Not all third-party pressures are equal in the Electoral College. Some states have long histories of strong independent leanings—among them are Alaska, Utah, and Johnson's home of state of New Mexico. Johnson is polling strongly in all three. And while Alaska and Utah are liable to stay their usual color, New Mexico, traditionally blue, is surprisingly close at this point, the result of Johnson siphoning votes from Clinton.
+
+But the bigger questions are in swing states, and states on the cusp of becoming competitive battlegrounds. Third-party candidates essentially take votes out of circulation, lowering the win number. The spoiler problem arises when those votes come disproportionately from one side. Quantifying the Democrats’ nightmare scenario, in which support for Johnson and Stein grows to a significant enough level by, say, drawing a quarter of Clinton’s get-out-the-vote targets and an eighth of her base, Clinton could lose strongholds such as Washington and Pennsylvania. Places like Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Nevada would become safely Republican.
+
+If, conversely, the third parties garner enough votes mostly by flipping a quarter of Republicans' base and an eighth of their get-out-the-vote targets, it would flip the most competitive battlegrounds back to blue, while putting Montana, Arkansas, Indiana, and even Oklahoma within Clinton’s reach.
+
+In 1992, Ross Perot scooped up nearly a third of the votes in Maine and Utah, pushing major-party candidates into third place, while getting closer to 19 percent of the nationwide popular vote. This year, there is no indication that even Johnson and Stein combined could reach that level of support, anywhere. Independent candidates typically see support drop as Election Day nears because many voters appear to come around and settle for one of the major party candidates. Still, the unpopularity of both Clinton and Trump has helped Johnson poll as high as 13 percent in states such as Colorado.
+
+Johnson's strength means that a significant part of these last several weeks will be spent playing a three-sided persuasion game in which the goal is to scare wary voters into voting for the lesser of two evils rather than casting a protest vote. On a macro level, that's exactly why the Obamas and Bernie Sanders have all been out warning voters that a vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for Trump. But communicating with these disaffected voters on a more granular level is difficult, because there is little targeting information available to help strategists pick out potential protest votes buried among their base and mobilization targets. Even if campaigns could precisely identify these voters, it’s hard to know if they will turn to a third party or just stay home.
+
+Below is an analysis of three states where third parties could make a big difference.
+
+Democrats insist that they’re not worried about losing Colorado this November. Loyal Democrats make up three-fourths of the votes needed to win the state, and a recent influx of Hispanics and millennials has broadened Clinton’s get-out-the-vote options.
+
+Trump’s low standing with Latino communities may alienate him from more than one-fifth of Colorado’s population. Additionally, his campaign message, which feeds on pessimism about the trajectory of American society, may be less potent to those living the Rocky Mountain lifestyle—Colorado's cities are often listed among the nation’s happiest places to live. Trump's appeals to economic insecurity are also probably better directed elsewhere, as unemployment in the state is under 4 percent, the lowest of any 2016 battleground state besides New Hampshire. Religious unease with Trump presents him yet another source of worry in Colorado: one-fifth of the Republican base lives in the Colorado Springs area, home to Focus on the Family and a hotbed for politically active Christians.
+
+But that doesn’t make the third-party threat any less real. Libertarianism has always been most prevalent out West, and the growing number of young voters on Colorado's voter rolls—nearly a third of the state’s voters are under 35—represent a large chunk of the electorate with little historical loyalty to either party.
+
+For any campaign, the key to a Colorado victory is its universe of persuadable voters, which is more than four times larger than in Nevada, the nearest battleground. Among these persuadable group, campaigns will find middle-aged and educated residents of the Denver area; they'll also find voters who are pro-marijuana and pro-choice. It’s with these groups that Johnson, who may benefit from name recognition from his time as governor of neighboring New Mexico, is polling best. A recent CNN/ORC survey of Colorado shows the Libertarian with 13 percent support statewide, most of it coming from self-identified independents.
+
+As Johnson works to expand that support, his likeliest targets will be the nearly half of unreliable Democrats who are under the age of 35. Six out of 10 of the party’s get-out-the-vote targets are likely to have college degrees, and statistical models project 97 percent support among them for legal marijuana, which was enacted four years ago.
+
+Clinton’s campaign will start worrying if third-party candidates start to attract more disenfranchised Democrats than irritated Republicans. If, say, third-party candidates were drawing a combined 16 percent of the total vote by siphoning off a quarter of Clinton's mobilization targets and one-eighth of her base, Colorado would flip, giving Trump an approximate four-point edge.
+
+This year will be the first presidential election in which Colorado conducts its voting entirely by mail. Nearly two-thirds of the electorate is expected to cast ballots before Election Day, one of the highest rates in the nation, with six out of 10 persuadable voters likely to commit to a candidate before November. If Clinton is worried about dissension within her coalition, she may want to delay her GOTV tactics—the so-called ""chase"" programs that nudge voters to return their mail ballots—until she's had more time to sway them.
+
+During a decade in which President Obama has significantly expanded the Democratic map into the South and West, Missouri is the largest one-time battleground state to have moved safely into the Republican column. Bill Clinton won there twice, but population decline in urban areas has kept Missouri out of Democratic reach since. Obama came within 3,600 votes of winning in 2008, but did not even compete for Missouri four years later, losing the state by 9 percentage points to Mitt Romney.
+
+In a two-way race, Hillary Clinton would likely face a similar fate. Her Democratic base is roughly 60 percent the size of the one Missouri's Republicans count on. She could presumably turn out her entire mobilization list, while swinging every single persuadable voter her way, and still fall short.
+
+Keep up with the best of Bloomberg Politics. Your guide to the most important business stories of the day, every day. You will now receive the Business newsletter The most important market news of the day. So you can sleep an extra five minutes. You will now receive the Markets newsletter Insights into what you'll be paying for, downloading and plugging in tomorrow and 10 years from now. You will now receive the Technology newsletter What to eat, drink, wear and drive – in real life and your dreams. You will now receive the Pursuits newsletter The school, work and life hacks you need to get ahead. You will now receive the Game Plan newsletter This year’s third-party variable may be the only thing that could change that arithmetic. With Clinton not actively competing in Missouri, Trump may have to worry less about losing the center to her than about Johnson's incursions on his right flank. Trump barely eked out a victory in Missouri’s March 15 primary, losing the state’s most educated and wealthy Republicans to Ted Cruz. The 380,000 Cruz voters—amounting to one-sixth of the general electorate—may represent Johnson's best chance to eat into the Republican coalition. Missouri evangelicals, whom Trump lost in the primary by 16 percentage points, make a promising (if unlikely) audience for the Libertarian, despite his party's traditional disdain for the politics of morality. Johnson might be able to package some of his small-government positions like a ban on federal spending for abortions to exploit existing doubts about Trump's commitment to religious priorities.
+
+Recent polls have Trump up by a comfortable nine points, and Johnson in single digits. But if Johnson were able to pull at least a quarter from Trump’s GOP base and an eighth from his GOTV targets—pushing him to 14 percent of the vote overall—Missouri would become one of the nation’s tightest races.
+
+Under normal circumstances, New Mexico would be a pipe dream for Trump. Democrats begin with a 145,000-voter head start over the Republican’ coalition in the state, and New Mexico's small number of persuadable voters leaves the Trump campaign with few options to outmaneuver Clinton’s ground-game forces. Third-party support could reach as high as almost a fifth of likely voters and Trump would still find the state difficult to win.
+
+But an early October poll by the Albuquerque Journal found that Clinton’s 10-point lead in a head-to-head with Trump in New Mexico shrinks to a slight 4-point edge when third-party candidates are considered. The reason: Johnson, the former two-term Republican governor of the state, is hauling in a massive 24 percent of likely voters. That support is primarily made up of independent voters and appears to be evenly split among men and women, while also pulling equally from both Republican and Democratic coalitions.
+
+Clinton could possibly head off a Johnson challenge by locking up support among the Hispanic voters that make up 45 percent of her get-out-the-vote targets. Trump, on the other hand, should probably worry most about losing votes to Johnson from within the majority of his base that is likely to have college degrees.
+
+For New Mexico to slip from Clinton’s grasp, Johnson would have to win close to a quarter of voters and pull a majority of them from the Democratic ranks. To do that, he'd need to tap more than a quarter of Clinton’s less-reliable mobilization targets, as well as the equivalent of at least an eighth of her base voters, without dipping too much into Trump’s coalition.
+
+This is the fourth in a series of eight Battlegrounds 2016 stories on the unique arithmetic that governs presidential elections in battleground states. Read more about how the battleground game is played.",REAL
+9802,On Trump’s victory,"  Gilad Atzmon 
+It occurred to me in recent years that the act of being progressive is not a political position but rather a mental state. 
+The incapacity of the entire American progressive and left establishment to foresee Trump’s landslide victory suggests that we are dealing with people who are institutionally detached 
+Just three days ahead of the presidential elections, the Huffington Post pathetically criticised star pollster Nate Silver of “Unskewing Polls in Trump’s direction,” for suggesting that a Trump victory was realistic. Ryan Grim wrote: “HuffPost Pollster is giving Clinton a 98 percent chance of winning, and The New York Times’ model at The Upshot puts her chances at 85 percent.” 
+“There is one outlier, however, that is causing waves of panic among Democrats around the country and injecting Trump backers with the hope that their guy might pull this thing off after all. Nate Silver’s 538 model gives Donald Trump a heart-stopping 35% chance of winning as of this weekend.” 
+The Huffington Post went as far as accusing Silver of “making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized.” 
+In perspectives, Nate Silver and his 538 were obviously spot on. The Huffington Post and The New York Times were totally off the mark. Is it a coincidence? 
+How is it possible that the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and Wall Street have managed to totally miss the level of anger that unites the American masses. These questions go far beyond polling strategy or the science of statistics. We are dealing with a state of being aloof on the verge of total detachment. 
+Left and progressive thinking is shaped like a dream. It tells us what the world ought to be. Progressives often seem to forget what the world really is and what its people are really like. Hillary Clinton and her campaign, just like the New York Times and The Huffington Post, were in a state of denial. Boasting in righteous hubris, they failed to read the map. 
+But this shouldn’t take us by a complete surprise. Detachment wasn’t invented by Clinton and her team. Detachment and alienation are ingrained in progressive thought. To be a progressive is to believe that some of the ‘other’ people are simply a bunch of unaware ‘reactionaries.’ Progressive thought is the secular manifestation of ‘chosenness.’ It is inherently Jewish, a fact that explains why Hillary Clinton’s top five donors were Jewish billionaires . 
+Since being progressive is a form of supremacy. I would go as far as suggesting that progressives’ antagonism towards ‘white supremacy,’ is at large, a form of projection. The progressive attributes to ‘whiteness’ his own exceptionalist inclinations. 
+Americans vs. Identitarians 
+On election day, we learned that the Democratic Party was hanging on a thread, hoping to be saved by Florida’s ‘Hispanic vote.’ Clinton’s political future depended upon the hope that Trump had managed to upset enough Latinos. This peculiar development in which a national party is dependent on group politics shouldn’t take us by surprise anymore. 
+The 2016 American presidential election divided America into two camps: The Americans on one side and the Identitarians on the other. The Americans are those who see themselves primarily as American patriots. They are driven by rootedness and heritage. For them, the promise to make ‘America great again’ confirms that Utopia is nostalgia and that the progressive reality is nothing short of dystopia. The Identitarians, on the other hand, are those who subscribe to progressive sectarian politics. They see themselves primarily as LGBTQ, Latino, Black, Jews, Women, and so on. Their bond with the American national or patriotic ethos is secondary and often non-existent. The future of the Democratic Party, in its current form, depends upon the hope that American subscriptions to sectarian ideologies will gradually increase and, as a result, will eventually strengthen the context of identity or group politics. The progressive agenda banks on the divestiture of the national and patriotic ethos. Needless to mention that half of America voted for Clinton. Hence, this political agenda is far from being farfetched or delusional. 
+But the Identitarian agenda backfired. It was only a question of time before the so-called ‘whites’ or ‘rednecks’ grasped that their backs have been pressed to the wall. They also started to act and think as an identitarian political sector. Hillary Clinton calling Trump’s voters a “basket of deplorables” was a clear sign for white poor Americans that Hillary wasn’t exactly their ally. However, Hillary was far from being alone. Almost every Jewish writer within the American press didn’t miss the opportunity to attribute the “White Supremacist” label to Trump’s voters. For Cheryl Greenberg, Trump’s popularity was “the final gasping of white supremacy.” For T alking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall , Trump’s closing ad was packed with “anti-Semitic dog whistles, anti-Semitic tropes, and anti-Semitic vocabulary.” For Marshall and Goldberg, half of the American people were dogs obeying their master’s whistle. 
+It shouldn’t take us by surprise that half of the American people would eventually react. They became weary of Jewish progressives like Marshall and Goldberg seeing them as dogs and white supremacists. The time was ripe for a revolution. 
+So is the revolution here? I’m not holding my breath. The people who crowned Trump are certainly exhausted. They are ready for a change. Can Trump introduce such a change? No one knows. He is certainly going to keep us entertained. 
+Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli jazz musician, author and political activist. His new book, “The Wandering Who,” may be ordered from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk .",FAKE
+720,Trump Hits 'Magic Number' of Delegates Required for Nomination,"Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has officially secured a majority of GOP delegates, giving him the ""magic number"" required to clinch the GOP nomination.
+
+Trump passed the 1,237 mark after unbound delegates from North Dakota, Colorado and Pennsylvania pledged their support for him.
+
+NBC News declared the real estate mogul to be the presumptive Republican nominee after his remaining GOP competitors dropped out of the race in early May.
+
+Trump will not officially become the nominee until he accepts the nomination at the Republican convention in Cleveland in July.
+
+Earlier in the race, Trump foes within the Republican Party hoped to prevent him from reaching the so-called ""magic number"" of a majority of delegates, forcing a contested nomination process that would have prompted a potentially chaotic power struggle between different factions of the GOP on the convention floor.
+
+But Trump deflated the hopes of rivals like Ted Cruz and John Kasich after decisively winning the Indiana primary on May 3 and putting himself easily within reach of a majority of delegates before the end of the primary process.",REAL
+21,OPINION: Both sides of abortion debate need to talk more honestly,"“We should see human life as sacred and recognize its immeasurable worth in every human condition,” Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback said in his 2015 State of the State address. “Whether at the beginning of life or the end of life, Kansas is the most pro-life state in America. And we are not going back.” On April 7, he kept his word, signing into law the Unborn Child Protection From Dismemberment Abortion Act, which states that, starting July 1, a person who, “with the purpose of causing the death of a living unborn child,” knowingly dismembers and extracts such an unborn “child, one piece at a time from the uterus,” may be charged with a Class A misdemeanor if it is his or her first violation of the law. Subsequent violations render a person liable for a felony conviction and carry a jail sentence of up to nine months. The Kansas act is the first state law since Roe v. Wade to block women’s access to a commonly used method — medically known as dilation and extraction — for second-trimester abortions, which account for just under 10 percent of the approximately 1 million abortions performed in the United States each year. It’s an unsurprising development, given Kansas’ track record on abortion regulation and the pattern of state-level abortion legislation in the last 18 months. The law’s rather striking name garnered national attention for its use of the word “dismemberment.” It gathers its rhetorical power, ironically, from the decision of earlier reproductive-rights advocates to frame the debate not as a morally complex issue but rather as a simple issue of women’s choice. But any argument that focuses just on women’s interests, or alternatively, only on the rights of the fetus, is ultimately misleading.
+
+Why didn’t Kansas choose more neutral language that would have been consistent with some of its other statutes, such as the Pharmacy Practice Act and the Uniform Controlled Substance Act? After all, the vote — 98 for the bill and 26 against it — would not have been significantly different had the bill had a more innocuous name. A possible reason is that Kansas lawmakers wanted to be brutally honest. Second-trimester abortions performed using the dilation and extraction method do involve removing a fetus in pieces from a uterus. Perhaps those lawmakers thought learning that fact might change some American’s minds about the moral status of abortion (though it would change them by inducing disgust, not by providing additional reasons for thinking that abortion is a morally complex issue). A less benign but utterly familiar possible reason is to put critics of the bill on their back foot, cast as defenders of the dismemberment of unborn children. Politicians and advocates of all kinds are adept at framing their side of a debate in terms that guarantee the maximum amount of awkwardness for any expression of dissent. The expression “pro-choice” as a label for supporters of the right to abortion was strategically adopted to counter the rhetorically powerful label “pro-life.” While the term “pro-choice” captured the morally central idea that each of us should be free to decide whether we become parents, it also abetted the gradual but substantial intrusion of state restrictions across the country into Americans’ reproductive lives. Abortion cannot be described as a morally neutral act akin, as philosopher Mary Anne Warren once suggested, to “cutting one’s hair.” It’s an act that kills a fetus and ends the development of a very young member of our species. Had reproductive-rights activists told the whole moral story about abortion from the beginning, there would have been less rhetorical wind for the sails of legislation such as Kansas’. In other words, full disclosure about the moral dimensions of abortion would have prevented states like Kansas from even appearing to occupy the moral high ground when they enact regulations allegedly designed only to protect unborn children.
+
+This point applies to both sides; opponents of abortion access have also been quite selective in the moral tale they tell. For if the death of a fetus is morally significant simply because it is human, so too is the well-being of the woman carrying it. If having an abortion is far more serious than having a haircut, then giving birth to a child is an even more morally consequential act for the biological mother as well as for the adult who the child will become. Hence arguments that focus exclusively or primarily on the fetus and ignore the interests of women are dishonest in their own ways.
+
+Abortion is a horrendously complicated moral issue, so complex that many Americans find it difficult to express a clear view about it. This difficulty is evident in recent polling results that show that while 28 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all circumstances and 50 percent believe that it should be legal in some circumstances, only 47 percent describe themselves as pro-choice. One diagnosis for what’s going on here is that people acknowledge that both abortion itself (the killing of the fetus) and abortion access are morally significant, because each intimately affects how and whether a human life continues.  As I have written before, over the past 40 years the terms of the abortion debate have accreted new and unhelpful connotations. “Pro-choice” now connotes the view that abortion is morally permissible under any circumstances and that all that matters is the pregnant woman’s wishes, while “pro-life” connotes an ugly and pernicious view of women and of feminist commitments more generally. Thus linguistic entities that began as pithy slogans expressing moral views no longer perform that function and are in fact obstacles to any productive conversation about abortion and abortion policy in the U.S. Planned Parenthood belatedly recognized it was time for a linguistic change in 2013 when it produced a YouTube video encouraging people to dispense with the life-versus-choice rhetoric. In its place, the organization recommends returning to the idea that abortion is a “personal decision.” That term, unfortunately, appears to represent an even deeper retreat from moral honesty about abortion. We should agree with Planned Parenthood that elected officials ought not legally prohibit women from acting on their reproductive health care decisions. However, we do not need to deny that abortion kills a biological human being. In suggesting that an individual’s choices fully determine the moral permissibility of her actions, reproductive rights advocates continue to play into the hands of politicians who favor banning abortion. Women will continue to face unwanted, unintended and life-threatening pregnancies, and according to the Guttmacher Institute, 3 in 10 American women will have at least one abortion by age 45. Even so, most reasonable people agree that reducing the incidence of abortion in America would be a good thing. That will not be achieved by legislation such as the Kansas law, which is little more than a cynical use of language designed to shame and horrify. People on all sides of this discussion need to step with both feet onto the moral high ground. It will do no good to limp along with just one foot in the truth — on the one hand, that abortion kills human fetuses or, on the other, that women’s freedom of choice is all that matters. Both matter, and the fact that they do demands of us serious personal reflection about how we act as well as compassionate public policy grounded in the real world.",REAL
+6669,Vine 2013-2016: celebrate the life and death of an app with these 12 clips,"Next Swipe left/right Vine 2013-2016: celebrate the life and death of an app with these 12 clips Sad news for fans of six second videos – Twitter has announced it will be closing Vine , the app it bought in 2013. Let’s say goodbye by looking back at 12 of the most important Vines ever made.
+1. This dog, drifting a car in the snow. 
+2. The time George Osborne was a toddler who has just been on gas at the dentist. 
+3. This army of screaming ducks 
+4. Leonardo DiCaprio getting scared by Lady Gaga 
+5. This kid pretending he likes the avocado he’s been given. 
+6. Limmy tricks Matt Lucas into thinking he’s posing for a photo. 
+7. The last 6 seconds of “Rabbit” by Chas and Dave looped. 
+8. This dancing robot, set to Toto’s “Africa”. 
+9. This encounter with a rotating foam arm. 
+10. The struggle faced by Jay Z’s accountant. 
+11. This dog riding a scooter. 
+12. Another dog, this time helping out on “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes 
+But let’s not get too sentimental – Vine also had its problems. A Vine is a short video that requires 3 clicks to start and between 7-10 clicks to stop playing. It usually features someone screaming.",FAKE
+4551,"Possibility of fire aboard EgyptAir flight raised as body parts, debris found in Mediterranean","As pieces of luggage, human remains, wreckage and what could be a tell-tale oil slick were found early Friday in the Mediterranean Sea, one aviation expert said telemetry received by satellites from the doomed plane suggested a fire could have started onboard, knocking out computers and control mechanisms.
+
+David Learmount said the fire could have started in the plane's avionics compartment. Such a scenario could indicate an electrical fire, and not terrorism, brought down EgyptAir flight 804 on Thursday.
+
+The first physical clues to the crash of flight 804, which carried 66 passengers, crew and security officers, surfaced about 190 miles off the coast of the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Reports of debris being found on Thursday proved false, but the verified debris field could bring authorities closer to the all-important flight data recorder, which could provide insight into what caused the crash.
+
+An EgyptAir official said midday Friday that wreckage of the missing plane has been found, including body parts, luggage and passengers' seats. The announcement came hours after a Greek official also reported evidence being found.
+
+""A short while ago we were briefed by the Egyptian authorities... on the discovery of a body part, a seat and baggage just south of where the aircraft signal was lost,"" Defense Minister Panos Kammenos told reporters in Athens, according to Reuters.
+
+The Cairo-bound flight had left Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris late Wednesday night, and disappeared from radar as it neared its destination. Authorities have said terrorism is more likely than technical failure, but the investigation is still in the early stages.
+
+A flotilla of international ships and boats were searching a wide swath of the sea Thursday and during the night for debris from the ill-fated Airbus 320. The mile-long oil slick was identified from satellite images from the European Space Agency, which cautioned that there was no guarantee the slick was from the missing aircraft. The agency said the slick was about 25 miles southeast of the plane's last known location, and passed the information to relevant authorities late Thursday.
+
+The Egyptian presidency Friday expressed its ""deep sadness and extreme regret"" over the deaths of the passengers and crew members aboard the flight -- the first official recognition of the tragic crash. Egypt’s military also confirmed for the first time Friday that plane debris and passengers’ personal belongings were found in the Mediterranean Sea.
+
+Egyptian army spokesman Brig. Gen. Mohammed Samir wrote on his Facebook page that Egyptian jets and naval vessels participating in the search for the missing plane had found ""personal belongings of the passengers and parts of the plane debris.""
+
+Egyptian airport officials said Friday that three French and three British investigators and an AirBus technical expert had arrived in Cairo to join the investigation.
+
+No terror groups had taken credit for the disaster as of Friday morning, and authorities were going through the passenger manifest, crew members' backgrounds and airport staff for possible links to terror. Authorities said the plane swerved and spun wildly before plummeting into the sea. The Egyptian military said that no distress call was received from the pilot.
+
+In Paris, French authorities scoured Charles de Gaulle Airport, the country's main hub, for any sign of a security breach prior to the flight's departure. Reuters reported that investigators were interviewing officers who were on duty at the airport Wednesday night to determine whether they heard or saw anything suspicious.
+
+""We are in the early stages here,"" a police source told Reuters about the investigation.
+
+The Wall Street Journal reported that French investigators were poring over surveillance footage from the airport, as well as performing background checks of those on board the plane and anyone who may have had ground access to the aircraft.
+
+Flight 804 was carrying 56 passengers, including one child and two babies, three security staff and seven crew members, officials said. Egypt's aviation minister, Sharif Fathy, described those on board as including 15 French passengers, 30 Egyptians, one Briton, two Iraqis, one Kuwaiti, one Saudi, one Sudanese, one Chadian, one Portuguese, one Algerian and one Canadian.
+
+Families of the victims spent the night in a hotel in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, while they awaited the news of their loved ones. Egyptian officials said some arrived from Paris late Thursday, among them eight relatives of the 15 French passengers on board the missing jet.
+
+Later Friday, the relatives of those killed held prayers for the dead at Sultan Hussein mosque in Cairo. Some of them cried as they prayed.
+
+Among those killed were Salah Abu Laban, his wife Sahar Qouidar, their son Ghassan Abu Laban and daughter-in-law Reem al-Sebaei
+
+The relative, Abdel-Rahman al-Nasry, told The Associated Press, ""I ask God for forgiveness. This is very hard for the family.""
+
+Magdi Badr, a family friend, said, ""we pray for the victims.""
+
+In the U.S., Los Angeles International Airport announced Thursday that it was stepping up security in the wake of the EgyptAir disappearance. A statement from airport authorities said they were eliminating or restricting airport worker access to 150 doors in the terminals. The statement also said additional airport police officers had been assigned to monitor employee access points and conduct random screenings.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9072,These New Solar Panels Use Sunlight to Create Clean Drinking Water from the Air,"By Christina Sarich
+Jordan — You’ve already heard of solar panels that can sustainably provide energy, but what about an ultra-high tech solar panel that can provide doubly-pure, twice distilled water for a family of four, out of thin air?
+A new start up company called Zero Mass Water that won’t rely on outdated municipal water with decaying pipes full of lead to deliver water to the ‘middle billion’ and under-served people lacking clean drinking water in the world. It will create it with solar panels and a technology that capitalizes on moisture in the air.
+The company’s tag line is ‘drinking water democratized,’ and it certainly seems to stand for the exact opposite world view of, say, Nestle , which has been stealing water from people and San Bernardino National Forest reserves and then selling it back to people in plastic water bottles. Zero Mass Water can deliver clean water to people in the poorest nations, with no need for piping or complicated water plants. The solar panel itself is smaller than a traditional air conditioner and can be placed in remote areas with ease.
+The United Nations claims that more than 783 million people currently lack clean drinking water and more than 6 million people die annually from water-borne disease. They also claim that, with population growth, we can expect a 50 percent increase in water demand; but they haven’t accounted for simple technologies which can make use of millions of gallons of water using clean, sustainable, and even simple technologies. The demand for water could also easily be met by practicing better water harvesting, catchment, and filtering.
+Zero Mass Water joins other breakthrough technologies like the “Drinkable Book” and experimental wastewater filters , which are trying to bring water to every corner of the world.
+A blog post from Duke Energy, a partner in Zero Mass’s project claims the water purification system doesn’t need an outside source of energy, so it can be placed were infrastructure is damaged or non-existent.
+At a recent installation in the coastal city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, a medical clinic was able to enjoy clean water for the first time without having to haul it in with trucks — an expensive endeavor. Though it rains frequently in Ecuador, there is little potable water .
+The project has targeted an even larger area for humanitarian aid — water-generating solar panels are being placed in Jordan. The company claims the panels will help Syrian refugees in the country, possibly aiding 200,000 people, who currently have no access to clean drinking water.
+If Zero Mass Water is successful in a war-torn area, their solar panels might also be perfect for the 5,300 cities across the U.S. who have been drinking lead-contaminated water due to crumbling infrastructure and a political elite who have been unwilling to replace old pipes with new ones, along with expensive water filters on municipal supplies.
+When the sun can bring you energy, and drinking water, there is little need for poverty, ill-health, and reliance upon aging government and corporate structures . This invention truly could democratize water for the planet.
+This article ( These New Solar Panels Use Sunlight to Create Clean Drinking Water from the Air ) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Christina Sarich and UndergroundReporter.org . If you spot a typo, please email the error and the name of the article to undergroundreporter2016@gmail.com . Image credit: Pexels . 
+",FAKE
+6024,"Hacker Guccifer 2.0 Says Election Could Be Rigged, Promises to Monitor 'from Inside'","Pin 
+( ZHE ) Before the recent torrent of daily Podesta email dumps brought renewed attention to Wikileaks (and accusations Julian Assange was working with the Kremlin despite his recent denial, which ultimately cost him his internet access), the media’s attention was closely focused on the recently emerged hacker known as Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be behind the hacking of the nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails and other documents distributed over the summer by WikiLeaks, and who likewise was accused of cooperating with Russia. 
+Earlier today, after a two week silence, Guccifer 2.0 reemerged, with a post on his blog , in which he alleges that he has information from inside the Federal Election Commission, according to which “democrats may rig the elections.” He then adds “this may be possible because of the software installed in the FEC networks by the large IT companies.” 
+“INFO FROM INSIDE THE FEC: THE DEMOCRATS MAY RIG THE ELECTIONS 
+“I’d like to warn you that the Democrats may rig the elections on November 8. This may be possible because of the software installed in the FEC networks by the large IT companies. 
+“As I’ve already said, their software is of poor quality, with many holes and vulnerabilities. 
+“I have registered in the FEC electronic system as an independent election observer; so I will monitor that the elections are held honestly. 
+“I also call on other hackers to join me, monitor the elections from inside and inform the U.S. society about the facts of electoral fraud.” 
+It is unclear what FEC information the hacker was in possession of, or was referring to, and how he intends to observe the elections. A recent video by Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting provided a real-time demo of the GEMS vote-fraud system, “fraction magic,” an election theft mechanism with context and explanation. There is much more detail on the BlackBoxVoting website . Sign up for the free Anti-Media newsletter the establishment doesn't want you to receive 
+The demonstration below used a real voting system and real vote databases and takes place in seconds across multiple jurisdictions. Over 5000 subcontractors and middlemen have the access to perform this for any or all clients. It can give contract signing authority to whoever the user chooses. All political power can be converted to the hands of a few anonymous subcontractors. It’s a product. It’s scaleable. It learns its environment and can adjust to any political environment, any demographic. It runs silently, invisibly, and can produce plausible results that really pass for the real thing. 
+It is possible that this is the process that Guccifer is referring to, although we are merely speculating. We are confident he will provide more detail shortly. 
+While we wait, watch the following video explaining how elections can be (and perhaps are) rigged.",FAKE
+789,Presumptive Nominee? Trump Indiana Win Creates Big Challenge to Unite Party,"Donald Trump delivered a knock-out punch to Sen. Ted Cruz, winning an astounding victory in Indiana Tuesday night.
+
+The state was Cruz's last stand, but he was unable to deliver. That means Trump is now the presumptive GOP nominee for president.
+
+""It really looks like a massive victory and looks like we win all 57 delegates,"" a subdued Trump told supporters Tuesday night.
+
+With Trump now only about 200 delegates away from what he needs to secure the nomination, even RNC Chairman Reince Priebus acknowledged that Trump is the party's presumptive nominee.
+
+""We need to unite and focus on defeating Hillary Clinton,"" he tweeted.
+
+Meanwhile, a disappointed Cruz announced he's suspending his campaign, saying, ""We gave it everything we got, but the voters chose another path.""
+
+And now it is clear the path is a Washington outsider, with Republicans preferring a non-politician, a brash and outspoken billionaire businessman over the Tea Party candidate.
+
+In New York, Trump told his supporters America needs to win again because it's been losing all the time.
+
+""We lose with our military--we can't beat ISIS. We lose with trade. We lose with borders. We lose with everything,"" he said. ""We're not going to lose, we're going to start winning again and we're going to win bigly, believe me.""
+
+But the question now is can Trump win his race for the White House against Hillary Clinton?
+
+The former secretary of state has 92 percent of the delegates she needs to secure her party's nomination.
+
+But Democrat socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders -- who upset Clinton to win the Indiana primary -- has yet to concede defeat, insisting said he has momentum.
+
+""I understand that Secretary Clinton thinks that this campaign is over. I've got some bad news for her,"" Sanders told supporters.
+
+But with many super delegates already pledged to Clinton, it seems mathematically impossible for Sanders to win his party's nomination. Nevertheless, he promises to stay in the race.
+
+Although their party conventions and official nominations are still more than two months away, Trump and  Clinton will now focus their campaign efforts against one another.",REAL
+3372,Is the Hillary email scandal Watergate all over again?,"The reporter who broke the Watergate scandal wide open, Bob Woodward, says the Hillary email scandal reminds him of Nixon’s drawn out battle over the White House tapes 40 years ago. Just a few weeks ago Hillary Clinton seemed unstoppable: a shoo-in to win the Democratic nomination, and favored to win the presidency. Now there is open speculation that her candidacy is in trouble, and that she could be held criminally liable for mishandling highly classified documents – a crime that has sent lesser-known people to jail.
+
+Woodward is right. Hillary’s troubles are taking on the tones of Nixon’s demise. I was a young staffer in the Nixon White House, working in the West Wing before, during and after the Watergate scandal. There are eerie similarities. In 1972, Richard Nixon was headed for a landslide re-election: his foreign policy successes were stunning -- the opening to China, arms control with the USSR, ending the Vietnam War -- and the economy was good.
+
+But then the Democratic National Committee headquarters, in the Watergate office building, was broken into just before the election and files stolen. The burglars were traced back to several mid-level people on Nixon’s staff. Congress eventually formed a Watergate committee to investigate wrongdoing. The Justice Department created a special prosecutor with subpoena powers.
+
+One by one my colleagues in the West Wing were brought in to testify publicly before Congress, and summoned to meet behind closed doors with the special prosecutor. Every week investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had a new story on the front page of the Washington Post, with details of the investigation.
+
+One revelation involved a previously unknown Oval Office taping system that recorded the president’s meetings. The special prosecutor wanted Nixon to turn over those tapes. Nixon refused. In late July 1974 the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to turn over the tapes. There were hours and hours of tapes, but three seemed to implicate Nixon personally in the Watergate cover-up, and one ‘smoking gun’ tape condemned him.
+
+Nixon’s support in Congress, which had waned for months, collapsed overnight. Suddenly the most powerful man in the world, who had been re-elected less than two years before in the greatest landslide in U.S. history, was forced to resign the presidency or face impeachment, trial and removal from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
+
+Nixon never went to trial or did jail time. His guilt was never proved, and recently released evidence indicates that the rush to indict Nixon was probably more about politics than policies. But Nixon’s presidency was over. On August 9, 1974, I walked from my West Basement office to the East Room to watch a man who had dominated American politics for a generation say farewell to the staff.
+
+It was one of the most stunning political reversals in modern times.
+
+ For years, commentators have wondered why Nixon didn’t just destroy the tapes when he had the chance.
+
+Today it seems like déjà vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra.
+
+ Did Hillary Rodham learn from Nixon’s mistakes? Did Hillary Rodman Clinton think if she destroyed her email server, or wiped it clean, she could avoid Nixon’s fate? The problem is in the digital age nothing is permanently wiped away. Even if Hillary succeeded in deleting the emails, they probably exist on other people’s computers.
+
+Why did Clinton have a private email system in the first place? Did she think by keeping her email and files under her control she could decide what to make public and what to keep out of prying eyes? She is famously rigorous about her statements and public image. Did she believe if she could control the historical record she could fashion her own legacy?
+
+Why did Clinton, like Nixon, refuse to turn them over in the first place? Does she have something to hide? She claims the emails she did not turn over were personal, about her yoga schedule and her mother’s funeral. She claims they were deleted because of convenience. But she is the one who made that call, not some neutral third party. Nixon claimed his tapes were his property, too. He claimed the ones that were not turned over contained top secret national security information. Was Secretary Clinton trying to hide some wrongdoing? Are those missing emails about the Benghazi scandal? About a relationship between the Clinton Foundation donors and her decisions at the State Department?
+
+Why has the administration suddenly reversed course to allow inquiries into Hillary’s emails? It’s hard to believe that in one of the most partisan administrations of all time, the sudden onslaught of Executive Branch investigations are an accident. She is now being investigated by three government agencies – The Justice Department, the State Department and the Intelligence Community. If so, why? Has someone at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue concluded they do not want Hillary Clinton to succeed President Obama.
+
+Will the investigations find any evidence of wrongdoing? Once special prosecutors are appointed, or congressional investigations begun, they always find something. Watergate, Iran-Contra, Whitewater.
+
+Secretary Clinton has gone from saying she never received classified emails on her personal email account, to saying she never received emails that were marked classified. That’s a big leap. If they were classified, and someone deleted the classification, that’s an offense.
+
+We are not at the end of investigations into Hillary Clinton. They are likely just beginning. Once the emails are recreated, which they will be with time, where will the trail lead?
+
+It may not be as earth shattering as Nixon’s forced resignation from office in August 1974. But it could present Secretary Clinton with insurmountable difficulties in her quest to be the first woman President. The greatest irony of all? One of the staff members on the Watergate Committee that investigated Nixon’s files and tapes was a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham. Déjà vu, all over again.
+
+Kathleen Troia ""K.T."" McFarland is a Fox News National Security Analyst and host of FoxNews.com's ""DefCon 3."" She served in national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations",REAL
+2363,Do Britain’s gunless bobbies provide answers for America’s police?,"— To join the few and the proud who police Britain’s streets with a gun, first you have to walk the beat unarmed for years.
+
+Then there is the rigorous selection process — an unforgiving complement of fitness tests, psychological appraisals and marksmanship exams. Finally, there is the training, which involves endless drilling on even the most routine scenarios.
+
+“They rehearse those situations like a SEAL team trying to get into Osama bin Laden’s compound,” Cambridge University criminologist Lawrence Sherman said.
+
+Yet, in a country where the vast majority of police officers patrol with batons and pepper spray, the elite cadre of British cops who are entrusted with guns almost never use them. Police in Britain have fatally shot two people in the past three years.
+
+That’s less than the average number of people shot and killed by police every day in the United States over the first five months of 2015, according to a Washington Post analysis.
+
+As the United States reckons with that toll — and with the constant drip of videos showing the questionable use of force by officers — lightly armed Britain might seem an unorthodox place to look for solutions. But experts say the way British bobbies are trained, commanded and vigorously scrutinized may offer U.S. police forces a useful blueprint for bringing down the rate of deadly violence and defusing some of the burning tension felt in cities from coast to coast.
+
+Of course, British and U.S. police are patrolling different societies. The United States has some of the world’s loosest gun laws and some of the highest rates of gun ownership.
+
+Britain is the opposite, with handguns and assault rifles effectively banned.
+
+That inherently changes the way police officers do their jobs.
+
+Phil Palmer was a British police officer for 15 years and was stabbed twice in the line of duty.
+
+“But in all my time, I never expected to have to deal with anyone with a firearm,” he said.
+
+During a year in the United States teaching and working with New York City police officers, he quickly realized that they had a very different expectation.
+
+“They were very professional. But every time they got out of their car to talk to someone, their hand would hover over the gun,” said Palmer, now the co-director of the Institute of Criminal Justice Research at Britain’s University of Southampton. “Police in America are more aggressive, and I think that’s because they have to be.”
+
+But there are also enough similarities that the British model carries special relevance. Like the United States, Britain is large, urbanized, democratic and diverse. Police have to reckon with gang violence, organized crime and Islamist extremists, all amid persistent allegations that they unfairly target minority communities.
+
+That puts Britain in a different class than the handful of other nations that largely forgo firearms when policing, including New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland and Norway.
+
+Few here would argue that the United States should adopt Britain’s nearly firearms-free approach. But as increasingly horrified British officers and commanders have watched videos of American police officers firing on civilians, they say they hope that some of their strategies and practices can be translated across the Atlantic.
+
+Sir Peter Fahy, chief of the Greater Manchester Police, commands 6,700 officers — just 209 of whom are armed. Those authorized to carry guns, he said, face extremely tight protocols governing when they can be deployed and under what circumstances they can fire. Shooting at moving vehicles, at people brandishing knives and at suspects fleeing a scene are all strictly forbidden except under extreme circumstances.
+
+“It’s very controlled,” he said. “There’s a huge emphasis on human rights, a huge emphasis on proportionality, a huge emphasis on considering every other option.”
+
+All officers, he said, are taught to back away from any situation that might otherwise escalate and to not feel that they have to “win” every confrontation.
+
+“I constantly remind our officers that their best weapon is their mouth,” he said. “Your first consideration is, ‘Can you talk this through? Can you buy yourself time?’ ”
+
+That mantra helps explain why, across England and Wales over the past decade, there has been an average of only five incidents a year in which police have opened fire.
+
+So, too, does the stringent screening process. Officers must serve for years before they can apply to carry a gun, and the selection of those deemed worthy is intensely competitive.
+
+When Mark Williams applied to be a firearms officer in 1995, he was among a group of 16 who started the grueling regimen of physical and psychological trials. Three made it.
+
+Williams was among them, but that wasn’t the end of the testing. He and his fellow firearms officers faced regular drills challenging them to find creative ways out of confrontations and spent long nights at the shooting range to upgrade their marksmanship.
+
+“If you fired the kind of rounds we did, you’d be bankrupt,” said Williams, who is now chief executive of the Police Firearms Officers Association. “We can put a lot of effort into the ones who are armed, because there aren’t that many.”
+
+Some aspects of British policing are more easily transferrable. Sherman, the Cambridge criminologist, recently told a White House task force that the United States should create a national college of policing, that states should set up police inspectors general to provide oversight and that local police forces should merge to achieve a minimum standard of 100 officers per department. All are steps, he said, that have worked in Britain.
+
+Of course, police shootings here can still arouse intense debate. One of the most prominent came in 2005, when a Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, was mistakenly identified as a would-be suicide bomber and shot nine times in the head by elite officers in a Tube station in London.
+
+Prosecutors chose not to charge anyone with his killing, a decision his family is challenging this week at the European Court of Human Rights.
+
+In 2011, police shot dead a 29-year-old black man, Mark Duggan, prompting several nights of riots across London. An inquest later ruled the killing had been lawful because police had ample reason to believe that Duggan was armed. But rights groups say the killing, and others like it, raise questions about police practices that echo concerns in the United States.
+
+“They may well be fewer here, but they raise similar issues,” said Deborah Coles, co-director of Inquest, an advocacy group.
+
+Still, there is little doubt that Britain has a more uniform and transparent process for reviewing such cases.
+
+Every police killing here is subject to an independent inquiry, and even nonfatal shootings are meticulously tracked and evaluated.
+
+Sir Denis O’Connor, a former police chief who later served as a royally appointed independent overseer of British police work, said cops here take seriously the idea of “policing by consent.” They see themselves as working for the public, he said, rather than for the state itself.
+
+They also know that someone is always looking over their shoulder.
+
+“The cops here tend to fear getting it wrong and being criticized by a judge,” he said. “Cops in the U.S. fear getting shot. Those are two very different worlds.”
+
+After 800 years, Britain finally asks: Do we need a written constitution?
+
+World crises may be multiplying, but campaign turns Britain further inward",REAL
+5807,Top EU Official Disputes That Trump Could Upend Iran Nuclear Deal,"November 11, 2016 Top EU Official Disputes That Trump Could Upend Iran Nuclear Deal 
+Asked Thursday about President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to tear up the Iran nuclear deal once in office, the European Union official tasked to oversee its implementation said it was not a bilateral agreement but a multilateral one, enshrined in a U.N. Security Council resolution. 
+E.U. foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini’s words reinforced those of Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, who said on Iranian television Wednesday that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was “not concluded with one country or government but was approved by a resolution of the U.N. Security Council, and there is no possibility that it can be changed by a single government.” 
+Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,",FAKE
+8669,Another 4.6-Magnitude Tremor Hits Central Italy After Two Earthquakes,"Get short URL 0 17 0 0 Another tremor of magnitude of 4.6 was registered in central Italy in the late hours of Wednesday, following two earthquakes earlier in the day, the head of Italy's civil protection agency, Fabrizio Curcio, said. 
+ROME (Sputnik) – Earlier in the day, two earthquakes of magnitudes of 6.3 and 5.4 hit the region of Marche. © AFP 2016/ Richter magnitude scale ""Another earthquake of magnitude of 4.6 took place at 23:42 [21:42 GMT] in the same zone as two earlier tremors,"" Curcio told a briefing as broadcast by the RaiNews24 television channel. 
+According to Curcio, the situation is not catastrophic and nobody has been killed. ...",FAKE
+2464,Christie is wrong. Vaccination is not a personal decision. It's a social obligation.,"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie thinks parents should be able to choose whether to vaccinate their children. ""Parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well,"" he told reporters Monday.
+
+No, they shouldn't.  Parents shouldn't have much matter of choice in vaccinating their children because people like Livia Simon don't have a matter of choice in the issue, either.
+
+Simon is a a six-month-old infant in California. Babies her age don't have strong enough immune systems to handle the flu vaccine. So Livia depends on me and you and everyone around her getting vaccinated.
+
+the point of vaccination isn't to stop you from getting disease. it's to stop spread.
+
+More specifically, she depends on something called herd immunity: a firewall that stops a disease from bouncing from me to you and, eventually, to six-month-old Livia. Herd immunity matters the most for those with compromised immune systems like infants, the elderly, and some auto-immune disease patients (some people who have AIDS, for example, can't get the measles vaccine).
+
+The point of getting vaccinated isn't to keep you from getting the flu (or measles, mumps or whooping cough).  It's not, as Christie seems to frame it, a decision about keeping your kids safe from disease. It's to keep you and your kids from spreading all those diseases to people like Livia — people who don't have the option to get vaccinated.
+
+this year, we screwed up
+
+This year, we screwed up. Because some people didn't get vaccinated, more than 80 people caught measles in an outbreak that started at Disneyland. At least six of them are infants who are less than 12 months old.
+
+We nearly screwed it up for Livia, too. As her mother Jennifer told the Washington Post earlier this week, Livia had to spend the last month in quarantine because an unvaccinated child who visited her pediatrician's office may have exposed her to the disease.
+
+This is very risky: approximately 1 to 2 of every 1,000 children infected with measles will die from the disease. Luckily, very few people get infected with measles these days (thanks entirely to the vaccine) but, when it strikes, measles will kill.
+
+""Some parents see it as a personal choice, like homeschooling,"" Jennifer told the Post. ""But when you choose not to vaccinate, you’re putting other children at risk. You’re putting your child above other people’s children.""
+
+Each day, we make dozens of decisions that directly relate to our health. We decide to wear a seatbelt on our way to work, or we don't. And sometimes, we choose the riskier path for reasons of convenience or comfort or pleasure. We might not wear a bike helmet or we might have a second drink at happy hour (Or a third. Or a fourth).
+
+These are decisions about the amount of risk that we want to take on as individuals, and we accept the risks of our own decisions.
+
+Deciding whether or not to get vaccinations — or to get our children vaccinations — is not one of those decisions. Vaccination is not a personal decision. It has the potential to affect hundreds, maybe thousands, of other people.
+
+vaccination is a decision that Affects hundreds, maybe thousands of other people
+
+Objections to vaccination among those healthy enough to get immunized (those of us over the age of one, essentially) typically just aren't good enough to justify the risk.
+
+Much of it revolves around the safety of the vaccine. Even in the Amish community in Ohio, it wasn't a religious belief that caused low vaccination rates — and laid the groundwork for a huge outbreak. Instead, it was news of two nearby children suffering complications from the shots that turned the community against vaccination.
+
+So let's clear that fact up here right now: the measles vaccine is, without a doubt, safe. Study after study after study confirms this. The study that suggested the measles vaccine was not safe — and had possible links to autism — was retracted by the academic journal Lancet in 2010. The researcher who published the study, Andrew Wakefield, was stripped of his medical license in Britain.
+
+Not only is the measles vaccine safe, it's also incredibly effective. Ninety-seven percent of people who get two doses of the measles vaccine will not catch the disease (compare that to this year's flu vaccine, which reduces the risk of catching the disease by 23 percent). This means that measles is an entirely preventable illness — if all of us get our vaccines.
+
+Yes, in the literal sense, parents ultimately get to decide whether to opt-out of vaccination — and, thankfully, the vast majority of them choose to vaccinate their children.
+
+What gets lost in much of the chatter around the current measles outbreak in California is that the vast majority of people do make the right decision on vaccination. About 92 percent of the American population is immunized against measles, for example. The rate of vaccine exemptions is very low.
+
+But research published in 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that the rate of non-medical exemptions increased from 0.98 percent to 1.48 percent between 1991 and 2004. Even those tiny upticks in opt-outs matter — especially for measles, which is so infectious that it requires near-universal vaccination to stop its spread. A study in Scientific American published data showing that most states are now below the threshold for herd immunity on measles (those are the states with red bars below).
+
+For measles — one of the most infectious diseases known to man — the bar for herd immunity is high. Scientists estimate that about 92 to 94 percent of the population needs to get vaccinated to sufficiently protect vulnerable groups from the disease's spread. Measles is viciously contagious: as my colleague Julia Belluz reported earlier this week, when one Amish missionary brought it back to his community with low vaccination rates, it quickly spread to 382 people and took months to contain.
+
+""There are some fluctuations,"" Cristina Cassetti, program officer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Wired. ""and if vaccination levels dip down a little, you get a situation like Disneyland.""
+
+Vaccination is not a personal decision, and doctors know that better than the general public. Last fall, Pew Research Center asked both the general public and members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science — the country's largest trade group for scientists — whether parents should be allowed to decide not to vaccinate their children.
+
+""If vaccination levels dip a little, you get something like disneyland""
+
+Thirty percent of parents thought yes, it should be a parents' decision. Among scientists though, the number was much lower: 13 percent thought parents ought to make the call on vaccination. A much larger majority didn't think it should be a parent's choice.
+
+Your vaccination makes it harder for other people you come in contact with to catch the disease. This isn't only important if you interact with infants, the elderly, or people who have compromised immune systems. It's also important if you interact with anyone else who interacts with infants, the elderly, or people who have compromised immune systems.
+
+The decision not to vaccinate is not about health. We have the facts to prove that's just not right. It is a decision that is, at its root, about selfishness: putting beliefs not supported by science ahead of Livia and 4 million other babies born in the past year. These are real risks, and, in deciding to skip vaccines, you are absolutely making them worse.
+
+WATCH: 'Vaccines do not cause autism, they save lives'
+
+Update: Christie issued a statement after his Monday remarks that said he supports some, not all, vaccines being mandatory.",REAL
+5228,Steve Case: Why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton,"I’ve been involved in policy for three decades, since AOL played a pivotal role in getting the nation online in the early days of the Internet. Initially, my focus was on commercializing the Internet, expanding access and putting appropriate rules of the road in place. In the past decade, my focus shifted to encouraging pro-growth policies that foster innovation, generate jobs, help start-ups and create opportunity. I was proud to work with a Democratic president and a Republican House to help get the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act passed four years ago, and I have spent countless hours meeting with members of both parties on immigration reform, patent reform and pro-start-up economic ideas.
+
+Despite my active engagement on policy, however, I’ve tried to steer clear of politics. I’ve avoided endorsing candidates or making big contributions to campaigns. I’ve wanted to be nonpartisan, able to work with people on both sides of the aisle. Indeed, I’ve been troubled by the hyper-partisanship that has defined our politics of late, and by the resulting gridlock that has set in. The United States faces many challenges, but in my view our greatest threat may not be external forces but rather our inability to work together to move our country forward.
+
+So my inclination is to continue to stay out of politics and continue to quietly build working relationships with both Republicans and Democrats. I’d prefer to be positioned as a builder of bridges and consensus.
+
+But I’ve decided to make an exception this election. I have concluded that I cannot sit on the sidelines this year. At this pivotal time, the choice is too important.
+
+I’ve decided to back Hillary Clinton for president for four reasons.
+
+First, I think she’d be better for our economy, especially with respect to innovative technology and start-ups. Donald Trump knows business, but his campaign has been backward-looking on the economy and oddly absent of ideas to spur creation of the jobs of the future. Clinton understands what we need to help start businesses and will invest in education, advanced manufacturing and basic research. She’s not promising a return to a bygone era — she’s focused on making our economy strong for our children and their children. These forward-leaning policies are essential to ensure continued U.S. economic leadership.
+
+Second, Clinton is right on immigration. To win in the global economy, our country must win the global battle for talent. Immigrants don’t take U.S. jobs; they create them. More than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or their children: Think how many fewer jobs we’d have in the United States if these entrepreneurs and their parents had been kept out by a wall. Trump’s harsh policies will cost us jobs, and his even harsher rhetoric will chase away immigrant families whose children could grow up to be the next Steve Jobs (whose father was a Syrian refugee) or Sergey Brin (an immigrant himself).
+
+Third, while Trump has been largely silent on technology issues facing the new economy, Clinton has put forward an agenda that has won considerable acclaim among technology leaders. She wants to appoint a chief innovation adviser, expand science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, education and more. And she shares my view that it’s not enough to support a booming Silicon Valley — we need policies that promote the “rise of the rest”: a spread of start-ups to all parts of our country. We need to level the playing field so anybody, anywhere, has a shot at the American dream.
+
+Fourth, I agree with Clinton on the need to control the deficit. Despite his populist rhetoric, Trump wants to give huge tax breaks to people like me, the very folks who have benefited greatly from the innovation economy, while many others have been left behind. In the process he would blow up our deficit and make the economy more unequal. I agree we need to simplify the tax code, but if we are going to give tax relief, let’s make sure it is in incentives for start-ups to grow and create jobs.
+
+I think I get why Trump has been such a potent political force this year. I am well aware that millions of people are angry about their prospects and fearful that the forces of globalization and digitization have left them behind. I also recognize many are frustrated by politics and feel we need an outsider to shake things up. But I don’t think Trump is the answer, for those people or for the country.
+
+I don’t agree with everything Clinton has said and done. I take issue with some aspects of her platform, and I worry about her inclination to all too often view the government as the solution to problems. If she becomes president, I’m sure there will be plenty of times I will disagree with her. But for 2016, I believe Hillary Clinton represents the best choice for the United States — and our best hope to remain the most innovative and entrepreneurial nation in the world.",REAL
+5774,Comment on Unprecedented letter from Chair of Joint Chiefs suggests U.S. military does not want a President Hillary by joworth,"Posted on October 28, 2016 by Dr. Eowyn | 3 Comments 
+Four days ago, on October 24, 2016, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford sent a fascinating piece of communication, titled “ Upholding Our Oath ,” to every member of the U.S. Armed Services. 
+Note: General Joseph Dunford Jr. , 60, was the 36th Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Nominated by Obama, Dunford became the 19th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 1, 2015. 
+This is what Gen. Dunford wrote : 
+“As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff…as our country again prepares for a peaceful transfer of power to a new administration, I write to share my views regarding our mutual obligations as military professionals and rights as citizens during this election season. 
+Every service member swears “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” This oath is embedded in our professional culture and underpins the values that shape and define our all-volunteer force. Beginning with General George Washington resigning his military commission, our deliberate and disciplined commitment to upholding the principle of civilian control of the military underpins not only our warrior ethos but also the expectations of how we conduct ourselves while in uniform. 
+While we must always safeguard our professional integrity, extra vigilance is required during any political transition. Our individual and collective obligation during this election season is twofold. First, we must recognize that we have one Commander in Chief, and until authority is transferred on January 20, 2017, the Joint Force must remain clearly focused on and responsive to the existing National Command Authority. Second, the Joint Force must conduct itself in such a way that the new administration has confidence that it will be served by a professional, competent, and apolitical military. This is especially important in the context of delivering the best military advice. 
+Every member of the Joint Force has the right to exercise his or her civic duty, including learning and discussing — even debating — the policy issues driving the election cycle and voting for his or her candidate of choice. Provided that we follow the guidance and regulations governing individual political participation, we should be proud of our civic engagement. What we must collectively guard against is allowing our institution to become politicized , or even perceived as being politicized, by how we conduct ourselves during engagements with the media, the public, or in open or social forums. 
+We are living in the most volatile and complex security environment since World War II. Whether confronting violent extremist organizations seeking to destroy our way of life or dealing with state actors threatening international order, threats to our national security require a Joint Force that is ready, capable, and trusted. To that end, I have a duty to protect the integrity and political neutrality of our military profession. But this obligation is not mine alone. It belongs to every Soldier, Marine, Sailor, Airman, and Coastguardsman. Thank you for joining me in honoring our history, our traditions, and the institutions of the U.S. Armed Forces by upholding the principle of political neutrality .” 
+Even without reading between the lines, General Dunford clearly has concerns about politicization of the military and its obligation and commitment to political neutrality and noninterference in politics. That the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must remind members of the Armed Forces that they must “uphold” their oath both suggests and implies that the opposite is going on, i.e., the military is politicized and there are fears that it will intervene in civilian politics. 
+If this pic (below) of a young U.S. Marine is any indication, Gen. Dunford has good reasons to issue the “Upholding Our Oath” communication. 
+A year ago, a Rasmussen Reports national survey of active and retired military personnel found that only 15% had a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton, with just 3% who viewed her very favorably. A staggering 81% had an unfavorable opinion of her , including 69% who had a very unfavorable view of her. 
+A similar survey today is sure to find even higher unfavorable ratings for Hillary among those whom she would command as their Commander in Chief. 
+H/t GiGi and TruthFeedNews",FAKE
+7883,Israel Tracked ‘Anti-Government’ Journalists On Facebook,"Videos Israel Tracked ‘Anti-Government’ Journalists On Facebook Netanyahu thinks the new channel doesn’t have enough government supervision and is too critical of his government and policies.   An Israeli soldier looks at the IDF’s Facebook page at the army spokesperson’s office in Jerusalem. 
+Israel’s ruling party used Facebook to spy on “anti-government” journalists, Likud parliamentarian David Bitan said in a public debate Saturday. 
+Bitan openly said he and others had been scouring the Facebook pages of journalists hired recently to set up a new public broadcasting service, saying they were scorned by their left-wing politics. 
+“We went and we checked the Facebook pages of these people. We saw what they are writing and I will tell you that we are talking about people who are leftist. They want to impose their own agenda on the new channel,” he said in the forum. 
+Bitan has been the lead crusader against the establishment of the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation. The new radio and TV media outlet, to be launched in recent months, is slated to replace the decades-old Israel Broadcasting Authority. 
+But Bitan and his cadre, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are looking to stop the new broadcast service, establishing a committee tasked to find a way to keep the old Israel Broadcasting Authority. 
+Their concern? The new public service channel doesn’t have enough government supervision and is overtly critical of Netanyahu’s government and policies. 
+This, despite Netanyahu calling the change “essential” and “necessary” two years ago. 
+Despite this resistance, work has been underway in establishing the new outlet, with deals having been made with unions and generous severance packages being offered to workers who have agreed to quit the old broadcast voluntarily. 
+The new media corporation has been poaching media personalities from competing outlets and preparing content for the launch date, which has already been postponed several times. 
+And critics are firing back at the prime minister, saying the new public broadcasting service should be free of political influence. They also see Netanyahu’s actions as a clear attack on media freedom. Local media has also come out to harshly criticize the ruling party. 
+After Bitan’s comments about surveillance became public, the Union of Journalists in Israel called on the attorney general to investigate the legality of Bitan’s actions. 
+“Closing down public broadcasting just because the prime minister can’t control it crosses a red line reminiscent of a totalitarian regime and not a democratic society like Israel,” said Yair Tarchitsky, the union’s chairman. He said the government’s actions amounted to McCarthyism. 
+Bitan, even last week, had not been hesitant to voice his opinions about the change. 
+“It’s not going in the direction that we want. It is clear that the corporation will be left-leaning, according to what they are talking about. The journalists and workers are talking, they are tweeting, there is a red line that we will not allow it to cross,” said Bitan during an interview last week with Israel’s Channel 2 news. 
+The Israel Broadcasting Authority was first established in 1948 and was the apartheid state’s sole television and radio outlet until commercial channels began broadcasting in the nineties.",FAKE
+6207,Newt Says GOP Women Are Actually Thanking Him for Calling Out Megyn Kelly on ‘Sex Obsession’,"Share on Twitter 
+Ever since the 2005 video was released of Donald Trump's “grab them by the p***y” remarks, it seems as though many media outlets have focused on the mounting sexual assault allegations against the Republican nominee. 
+Fox News host Megyn Kelly was no exception, recently asking former House Speaker and Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich if the allegations could be a reason for him falling behind in the polls. 
+Gingrich snapped and explained that he was sick of people like Kelly using inflammatory language. 
+He then argued that her asking him about the issue proves she's “fascinated with sex”: 
+“You wanna go back through the tapes of your show recently? You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy! That’s what I get out of watching you tonight!” 
+At a Trump event in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, an MSNBC reporter asked Gingrich what he would say to Republican women who were “upset” by his remarks in Kelly's interview, according to the Blaze . 
+Gingrich had a pretty insightful response: 
+“I’ve had a lot of Republican women write me and thank me for standing up to the baloney that is thrown at us by people who excuse Bill Clinton — ignore Bill Clinton — and then explain to us how shocked they are by Donald Trump."" 
+However, not all Republican women are standing by their party. Katie Packer, a deputy campaign manager for Mitt Romney in 2012, told the Washington Post the GOP has a lot to make up for after Election Day: 
+“For next-generation professional women, the party is going to have to do something very, very drastic to change the course of where this candidate has taken us. I think the leaders in our party are going to have to aggressively reject this. Come November 9, they better be prepared to make very strong statements condemning all of Trump’s behavior.” 
+A recent Fox News poll shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by three points among likely voters. ",FAKE
+7626,An Admittedly Ingenious Low,"Becky Akers https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/admittedly-ingenious-low/ 
+“ Before Comey’s letter to Congress, Clinton’s campaign had watched with mixed feelings as her standing in poll after poll improved and Trump faltered amid a string of sexual assault accusations. ‘In the last week, I think the Clinton campaign was worried it was going to become too easy and that people would feel that,’ said Mo Elleithee, who worked on Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign. ‘Now there’s a reason for all of our supporters to believe it’s going to be hard.'” 
+And so Hitlary’s “campaign now has a way to convince Democrats who might have considered skipping voting that their nominee needs their support.” 
+Are there no depths to which the media’s blatantly biased, utterly craven curs won’t sink? 4:26 pm on October 31, 2016",FAKE
+1526,Week of Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton feud a taste of things to come,"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump's attacks against Hillary Clinton are entering a new, more personal phase in an already raucous election season.
+
+The firefight started last week after Trump said Clinton ""got schlonged"" by President Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries -- taking the Yiddish word for penis and making a verb out of it, which shocked even Yiddish scholars
+
+The following day, Clinton unloaded on Trump in an interview with The Des Moines Register , saying that was ""not the first time he's demonstrated a penchant for sexism.""
+
+There was a cease fire of sorts over Christmas but Trump restarted the next day, turning Clinton's words back on her and attempting to pull Bill Clinton into the fight.
+
+""Hillary Clinton has announced that she is letting her husband out to campaign but HE'S DEMONSTRATED A PENCHANT FOR SEXISM, so inappropriate!"" Trump tweeted Saturday.
+
+Trump was even more explicit about Bill Clinton's past indiscretions during an interview on Tuesday on NBC's ""Today"" in which he said Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones and ""many"" other women who have accused him of having affairs with them would be ""fair game"" in his continuing fight. The interview marked the first time Trump explicitly named the Clinton accusers.
+
+The war of words comes as Bill Clinton is slated to hit the campaign trail for his wife next weeks after spending months in a mostly behind-the-scenes role. And it offers a preview of the type of race that may be in store later in 2016 if Trump and Hillary Clinton win their party's nominations -- even though the first primary races are still weeks away.
+
+The hits on Bill Clinton's past have long been simmering in the Republican primary. Sen. Rand Paul kept up his attack Monday, saying that Bill Clinton was Hillary's ""women's problem."" But it wasn't until Trump brought them up that they caught fire.
+
+""When [Trump's] insults are directed at women, immigrants, Asian-Americans, Muslims, the disabled, or hard working Americans looking to raise their wages -- Hillary Clinton will stand up to him, as she has from the beginning,"" a campaign spokeswoman said.
+
+She was asked about his attacks Tuesday while campaigning in New Hampshire on Tuesday, but declined to answer reporter questions from the ropeline.
+
+It's a long way from the phone call between Bill Clinton and Trump just seven months ago, where Trump alleged that Clinton urged him to run for president -- Clinton denied that he asked Trump to run -- and even further from the chummy appearance of Bill and Hillary Clinton in photos with The Donald at his third wedding, in 2005.
+
+To get an idea of just how far the relationship between Trump and the top members of the Clinton family have fallen, rewind to October 2008, when, in one sentence Trump argued then-President George W. Bush should be impeached for marching the nation to war and Clinton's impeachment over the Lewinsky affair wasn't merited.
+
+""Look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant. And they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense. And yet Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction, by saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true,"" Trump told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in 2008.
+
+""Well if you look at the different situations, of course you could name many of them, I could get you a list and I'll have it sent to your office in two seconds. But there certainly were a lot of abuse of women, you look at whether it's Monica Lewinsky or Paula Jones, or any of them, and that certainly will be fair game,"" Trump said on NBC. ""Certainly, if they play the woman's card with respect to me, that will be fair game.""
+
+On Tuesday evening Clinton passed up a chance to comment on Trump. Speaking to a group of about 200 people in Berlin, New Hampshire, she only made an oblique reference to the GOP front-runner's famous catchphrase. ""I happen to think that America is great and if we work together, we will be greater,"" Clinton said.",REAL
+5151,Trump calls for charges against Clinton after FBI interview in email investigation,"Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump called for charges to be filed against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton Saturday after the former secretary of state met with the FBI regarding the agency’s investigation into her use of a private email server for official correspondence.
+
+""It is impossible for the FBI not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton,"" Trump tweeted Saturday afternoon. ""What she did was wrong! What Bill did was stupid!""
+
+The Clinton campaign said the voluntary meeting lasted about three-and-a-half hours and took place at FBI headquarters in Washington.
+
+Clinton “is pleased to have had the opportunity to assist the Department of Justice in bringing this review to a conclusion” campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement. He also said Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, would have no further comment about the interview.
+
+The campaign issued the statement Saturday shortly before 12:30 p.m. ET, practically minutes after Clinton returned to her Washington home, then departed again about 30 minutes later.
+
+“Hillary Clinton has just taken the unprecedented step of becoming the first major party presidential candidate to be interviewed by the FBI as part of a criminal investigation surrounding her reckless conduct,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. ""We must ask ourselves if this is the kind of leadership we want in the White House.”
+
+There was no immediate comment from the FBI or Justice Department Saturday.
+
+Clinton’s use of a private server and email address -- and whether classified information was mishandled as a result of that setup -- has cast a shadow over her campaign from the start.
+
+The FBI investigation is purportedly coming to a close, and the Clinton interview is considered among the final steps in the case.
+
+Trump has seized on the email issue and repeatedly said the probe undermines Clinton's fitness for office. Trump has called his opponent ""Crooked Hillary"" and said she cannot be trusted in the White House.
+
+The former first lady and New York senator has argued that she is more trustworthy than Trump on handling the issues that matter to most Americans: foreign policy, national security and running the economy.
+
+But the email investigation has lingered throughout her campaign, and Trump has asserted that Clinton will receive leniency from a Democratic administration.
+
+Earlier this week, the entire, ongoing email scandal grew when Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, initiated an impromptu meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on her airplane in Phoenix.
+
+""The American people need to have confidence that the Obama Justice Department is conducting a fair and impartial investigation, but when the attorney general meets secretly with Bill Clinton just days before Hillary’s interrogation is conducted discreetly over a holiday weekend, it raises serious concerns about specialtreatment,” Priebus also said.
+
+There was already speculation about whether an agency under the Obama administration could conduct an unbiased probe, which only intensified after Clinton met with Lynch, a President Obama appointee who decides whether to bring charges in the case.
+
+Lynch says she will accept whatever recommendations she receives from the agency's career prosecutors and lawyers.
+
+Clinton has said relying on a private server was a mistake but that other secretaries of state had also used a personal email address. The matter was referred for investigation last July by the inspectors general for the State Department and intelligence community following the discovery of emails that they said contained classified information.
+
+The State Department's inspector general, the agency's internal watchdog, said in a blistering audit in May that Clinton and her team ignored clear warnings from State Department officials that her email setup violated federal standards and could leave sensitive material vulnerable to hackers. Clinton declined to talk to the inspector general, but the audit reported that Clinton feared ""the personal being accessible"" if she used a government email account.
+
+Agents have already interviewed top Clinton aides including her former State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, a longtime aide who is currently the vice chairwoman of Clinton's campaign.
+
+The staffer who set up the server, Bryan Pagliano, was granted limited immunity from prosecution by the Justice Department last fall in exchange for his cooperation. The FBI as a matter of course seeks to interview individuals central to an investigation before concluding its work.
+
+The emails were routed through a server located in the basement of Clinton's New York home during her tenure as the nation's top diplomat from 2009 to 2013.
+
+Dozens of the emails sent or received by Clinton through her private server were later determined to contain classified material.
+
+Clinton has repeatedly said that none of the emails were marked classified at the time they were sent or received. As part of the probe, she has turned over the hard drive from her email server to the FBI.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+",REAL
+5375,Teenager ‘enamored with ISIS’ in court over ‘viable device’ found on London Underground,"Teenager ‘enamored with ISIS’ in court over ‘viable device’ found on London... Teenager ‘enamored with ISIS’ in court over ‘viable device’ found on London Underground By 0 53 
+A poker-fixated teenager, who was “enamored with ISIS” and charged in connection with a “viable device” found on the London Underground, has appeared in court. 
+Damon Smith, 19, of South East London, has been accused of unlawfully and maliciously making or possessing an explosive substance with intent to endanger life or cause serious danger to property, the Metropolitan Police said. BREAKING – 19 year old Damon Smith charged with possessing or constructing explosives after device left on London tube train last Thursday pic.twitter.com/b0BekmI1aw 
+— Mark White (@skymarkwhite) October 26, 2016 
+He did not enter a plea in relation to the charge during his hearing at the Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Thursday. 
+Defence counsel Simon Eastwood, however, indicated that his client, who has a form of autism, would be pleading not guilty on the grounds it was a prank, according to Sky News. 
+The device was found last Thursday on a tube carriage on the Jubilee Line at North Greenwich station, near the O2 Arena. It had been left inside an abandoned black Adidas rucksack and was found by two members of the public. 
+Read more 
+The station was evacuated for several hours, and counter-terrorism police destroyed the item in a controlled explosion. 
+The prosecution told the court that experts carried out a forensic examination of the package and deemed it to be a “viable improvised explosive device” which would have caused injury had it detonated. 
+The bomb was a “pressure” type device and contained grey powder, ball bearings, and a clock-type detonator, the court was told. 
+Four properties have been searched in connection with the investigation. 
+On Saturday, another device was discovered at an address in Newton Abbot by police investigating the North Greenwich incident. The item was later declared not viable. 
+Smith had just moved to London from Newton Abbot, Devon, to study IT at the London Metropolitan University. 
+He has been described as a “mummy’s boy” and a “loner,” with an interest in martial arts and online poker. 
+Friends of Smith have also claimed he was “enamored” with Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), Sky reports. 
+“He had a Koran and knew several phrases and he wore a black headscarf. Damon had replica guns and air rifles and even posted a video of himself shooting a replica Glock on YouTube,” a former friend told the Sun. 
+Smith has been remanded back into custody and will next appear at the Old Bailey on November 17. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+9891,How To Talk To Your Child About Death - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Cleveland Indians Worried Team Cursed After Building Franchise On Old Native American Stereotype CLEVELAND—Having watched in horror as their team crumbled after a 3-1 World Series lead, members of the Cleveland Indians expressed concern Thursday that the organization has been cursed for building their franchise on an incredibly old Native American stereotype. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Nurse Reminds Elderly Man She’s Just Down The Hall If He Starts To Die DES PLAINES, IL—Assuring him that she’d be at his side in a jiffy, local nurse Wendy Kaufman reminded an elderly resident at the Briarwood Assisted Living Community that she was just down the hall if he started to die, sources reported Tuesday. ",FAKE
+9191,Busted: Bill Recorded Telling Mistress To Deny That Clintons Helped Her Get A State Job,"Email 
+
+Former President Bill Clinton can be heard telling his former mistress, Gennifer Flowers, to deny that he helped her get a state job in a series of recorded phone conversation from 1991. 
+“If they ever asked if you’d talked to me about it, you can say no,” Clinton is heard saying in the recording. 
+At the time, the media was making inquiries about Flowers’ alleged affair with Clinton, and she was concerned that they may question how she got a job as administrative assistant for the Arkansas Appeal Tribunal. 
+Clinton can also be heard telling Flowers how to handle a grievance filed by soemone else who applied for the same positioned and claimed she was more qualified than Flowers. 
+Flowers famously recorded a series of conversation she had with Clinton from December 1990 to December 1991, while he was still Governor of Arkansas. The audio segments about the state job were widely reported in the 1990’s, however, as other pay-for-play financial scandals have surfaced, the details may warrant revisiting. 
+
+Here is a transcript of part of the recording: 
+GF – But anyway, then Wednesday, there was a grievance filed in my office when I got the job by a girl who felt like she should have gotten it, a black girl named (deleted). And they called me as a witness. So I go in and uh, nothing big came of it. It’s just that they were questioning me about how I found out about the job. And I said, “Well, that personnel said it that it was a possibility there would be a position,” and then uh, “they told me that it would be advertised in the newspaper. And it was and I pursued it from there. 
+BC – Good for you. 
+GF: Yeah. We had a little bit of a scare recently because she had a spot on an X-ray. And she went and had it checked again and it wasn’t cancer. And it’s been almost, it’ll be two years in May that she’s now diagnosed cancer free. My stepfather has been through two angioplasties, but he’s doing good. And I am, I’m really, Bill what I’m afraid of is that if somebody in the press finds out that I’m working for the state. 
+BC – Yeah. 
+GF – They’re going to make a big deal of it. 
+BC – Yeah. 
+GF – Well the only thing that concerns me, where I’m, where I’m concerned at this point is the state job. 
+BC – Yeah. I never thought about that, but as long as you say you’ve just been looking for one, you’d uh, check on it. If they ever asked if you’d talked to me about it, you can say no.",FAKE
+9958,BREAKING: U.S. And Russian Jets Almost Collide Over Syria,"Pinterest 
+As the Syrian Civil War rages on, the Russians continue to back the Assad regime in the fight against myriad rebel groups. The bloody conflict has garnered international attention, including a refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe (which is quickly spreading to the United States, as well). 
+The United States has been involved in several military actions to aid the rebel groups in Syria, though much of this help has aided the rise of ISIS (smuggling weapons to these groups fighting Assad, only to end up with ISIS). Given US involvement, and Russian backing of the Assad regime, tensions between the two superpowers have risen to near Cold War levels. 
+One recent event demonstrating just how volatile the situation was a near-collision between two fighter jets, one American and the other Russian, in Syrian airspace. #BREAKING Russian, US jets had near miss over Syria: US officials 
+Zero Hedge has details: 
+The near miss occurred late on October 17, when a Russian jet that was escorting a larger spy plane maneuvered in the vicinity of an American warplane, Air Force Lieutenant General Jeff Harrigan said. The Russian jet came to “inside of half a mile”, he added. Another US military official, speaking on condition of anonymity , said the American pilot could feel the turbulence produced by the Russian jet’s engines. 
+“It was close enough you could feel the jet wash of the plane passing by,” the official said. 
+The incident appears did not take place out to malice, as the Russian pilot had simply not seen the US jet, as it was dark and the planes were flying without lights according to AGP. This incident was deemed unsafe, but not necessarily unprofessional, officials said. “I would attribute it to not having the necessary situational awareness given all those platforms operating together,” Harrigan said. 
+The incident raises serious questions about the extent to which pilots are able to track the complex airspace they operate in. 
+The US-led coalition has set up a hotline with Russian counterparts so the different militaries can discuss the approximate locations and missions of planes, and avoid operating in the same space at the same time. In this case, the American pilot tried unsuccessfully to reach the Russian jet via an emergency radio channel. 
+This close-call is one of several similar incidents in the past six weeks or so. The Russians have become increasingly brazen in the past few months, especially in the Syrian arena. Anything that threatens the Russo-Syrian alliance is not taken too well by the Kremlin, and responses are bold, dastardly, and provocative. 
+Luckily, there have not been any full-blown engagements between American and Russian military forces, but the number of close-calls in recent days is cause for concern. These are two of the world’s most prominent nuclear superpowers, one of whom is becoming more and more brazen and willing to incite conflicts when it suits their interests. 
+The other is a regime with massive military superiority, yet weak and flaky leadership. 
+At this point it is not totally clear what the Russians will do next. Undoubtedly, they will continue to prop up the Assad regime and bomb anywhere rebel forces may be, but whether or not they will harass American military forces in the area remains to be seen (though I predict that it will only continue to further escalate).",FAKE
+4203,"Cruz takes all 14 delegates at Wyoming GOP convention, NY primary next","Ted Cruz on Saturday won all 14 delegates in the Wyoming GOP convention -- a relatively small number but enough for the Texas senator to declare victory and keep GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump from securing the nomination.
+
+“We are likely to have a battle in Cleveland to decide who is the nominee,” Cruz told party members before they picked the delegates. “If you don’t want to see Donald Trump as the nominee, … then I ask you to please vote for the men and women on this slate.”
+
+The Wyoming process mirrored that of Colorado, which was engulfed by political controversy after hosting a similar convention last week.
+
+Cruz’s campaign ran circles around the Trump operation there, prompting Trump to slam the multi-tiered caucus system as “rigged.”
+
+Cruz was expected to do well in Wyoming because his campaign had been lining up support there for months, too.
+
+“The ground game is starting early and starting at your most local, smallest enclave,” said Ed Buchanan, Cruz’s Wyoming chairman.
+
+After being tapped by Cruz in February, Buchanan started drafting activists across the state. His efforts were bolstered by two days of Cruz campaign stops in Wyoming last August.
+
+Trump did not actively campaign in either state, while Cruz put in face-time in both.
+
+“You are going to hear this from me more and more: We have to bring our country together. We are a divided nation,” Trump said at a rally in upstate New York, ahead of the state’s primary Tuesday in which 95 GOP delegates are up for grabs.
+
+Before Saturday, Trump had 742 delegates, followed by Cruz with 529 and Ohio Gov. John Kasich with 143. The winner needs 1,237 delegates to win the nomination. (Kasich is running second in the New York primary, according to polls.)
+
+Senior Trump adviser Alan Cobb said about Colorado and Wyoming: ""Candidates that have allies that are party insiders have advantages in states that have a pyramid process of selecting their delegates. These folks have worked this process for years.""
+
+Mindful of potential accusations, Wyoming GOP leaders are ready. Their message: The rules were set long before anyone announced their candidacy.
+
+“Every presidential candidate for the last 40 years has managed this process and has worked through this process and has followed the process that we have in Wyoming,” state GOP Chairman Matt Micheli said in an interview with Fox News. “We are simply following the rules that are in place and that have been in place for a long time.”
+
+Fox News' Dan Gallo, Mike Emanuel and John Roberts contributed to this report.",REAL
+2300,Think Indiana is bad? It's legal to deny service to gay and lesbian people in 29 states.,"As the national furor continues over a controversial religious freedom law in Indiana that critics say could allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT customers, one troubling fact is being left out of the debate: in 29 states, it's already legal for a store owner to deny service to a gay person based on his sexual orientation.
+
+While legal experts doubt Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) could be used to justify discrimination when it takes effect on July 1, most states, including Indiana, have long allowed it to happen because they don't have civil rights laws that would prohibit discrimination against LGBT people in the workplace, housing, and public accommodations (hotels, restaurants, and other places that serve the general public). It's not the religious freedom laws that allow discrimination; it's the lack of civil rights laws.
+
+As a result, in many states an employer can legally fire someone because he's gay, a landlord can legally evict someone because she's lesbian, and a hotel manager can legally deny service to someone who's transgender — without citing religious grounds.
+
+It's not the religious freedom laws that allow discrimination; it's the lack of civil rights laws
+
+Indiana in particular has no statewide nondiscrimination law for LGBT people, although about a dozen cities, including Indianapolis, have local measures.
+
+""That's what's missing in the Indiana debate,"" Robin Wilson, a law professor at the University of Illinois, said. ""If there's a 'license to discriminate,' it's the fact that the state hasn't said this is an unacceptable basis for saying no to people.""
+
+But it's not just Indiana. Depending on how you add it up, as many as 33 states don't have full protections for all LGBT people, because a few states with nondiscrimination protections don't protect trans people, and some don't ban all anti-LGBT discrimination in public accommodations.
+
+Currently, 19 states ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, while three additional states ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. Some other states protect public but not private employees from discrimination. Many municipalities have nondiscrimination laws that only apply within their local borders. And some companies prohibit discrimination in their own policies.
+
+The protections sometimes vary from state to state. Massachusetts's protections for gender identity and Utah's protections for sexual orientation and gender identity don't apply to public accommodations. Some states, like Utah, also include exemptions for discrimination based on religious grounds.
+
+LGBT advocates argue the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already protects LGBT workers from discrimination, but that interpretation of the federal law hasn't been proven in court.",REAL
+9746,Crossing the Acheron: Back to Vietnam,"Email 
+In classical mythology, the Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld. It marks the boundary between the living and the dead. The ferryman Charon ferries the dead across the Acheron to a place where they lose memory. Nothing of what made them human remains—happiness, suffering, love, hatred, guilt, regret, redemption, betrayal, forgiveness. 
+From Gilgamesh to Odysseus to Aeneas, the living heroes of the epic descend into the Underworld at a point of despair in the sense of their quest. Burdened by a fate that requires momentous courage and tragic self-sacrifice for the sake of their people’s survival, they resent the absurdity of their lot. Down there on a visit, they return from the shadow land strengthened. They recognize that the business of living is not oblivion but action. 
+John Marciano’s recently published book, The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration ? functions as such a Charon in reverse. It ferries readers back to the realm of remembering. This slim volume could not have come at a more opportune moment. American political culture is punch-drunk with the pursuit of war. The altered state is reaching the point of delirium tremens. Thwarted in the neocolonial scheme of annexing Syria by Russia’s legal intervention, the American elite are pushing for confrontation. Though it is hard to think the unthinkable, the nuclear holocaust may happen if not by intention then by spontaneous combustion from over-intoxication with the fumes of war. 
+This reckless confrontation results from decades of accumulated unaccountable power. Its boldness reflects a cumulative experience of impunity for aggressive behavior by soft and hard neocolonial postures since the end of WW II. The war in Vietnam, as Marciano suggests, should have functioned as the lesson that checked the nation’s historical thrust for conquest, but the turning point would have required a national effort to relinquish the myth of the Noble Cause, the delusion that America is vested with a divine mandate to assimilate the people of the world to the American image–for the people’s own good. Britain had its White Man’s Burden; France its mission civilatrise ; America its Manifest Destiny. 
+This timely volume traces the war to the apocalyptic finale of the most powerful military in the world defeated by the determination, courage, and self-sacrifice of a peasant people unwilling to be enslaved. But this is as much a book about the past as it is about the present. It reminds us, with Tolstoy, “The reality of war is in the killing, “ a realization officialdom would like to block. In fact, they have prepared a falsifying celebration of that moral and military debacle. 
+As Marciano writes in his introduction, 
+“In May 2012, President Barack Obama and the Pentagon announced a Commemoration of the Vietnam War to continue through 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the conflict’s end. Among the Commemoration’s objectives, three stand out: ‘to thank and honor’ veterans and their families . . . ‘to highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during’ the war; and to ‘recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by the allies’.” 
+President Obama claimed in the commemoration announcement speech that the war had been “an honorable cause.” Marciano challenges this notion. America’s historic ideology of the Noble Cause, he writes, rests on the belief that the United States is 
+“A unique force for good in the world, superior not only in its military and economic power, but in the quality of its government and institutions, the character and morality of its people, and its way of life.” 
+This is the mystical bigotry of a messianic faith typical of empires. Imperial militarism seeks in a Noble Cause the justification for subjugating large chunks of humanity. In the distant past, the Noble Cause may have received the sword directly from a god—as it did in postcolonial America when it sought to exterminate the native inhabitants. By the anointment of the sword, the divinity also endowed, supposedly, the conquering “race” with moral superiority. Thus, imperialism, in the perverse arrogance of its twisted psyche, contains the germ of genocide. As a result, the superstition of a superior “race” has been endured by most of the “races” on the planet as a most Ignoble Cause. In Vietnam alone, the Big Lie of the Noble Cause sent four million Vietnamese to their death. 
+Marciano leaves us in no doubt that the White House and the Pentagon are commemorating a crime. They are falsifying history in order to shape the future, which will be and is the reenactment of the war against Vietnam on a global scale. They want to establish the altar for a “sacred union,” the nation united behind the Noble Cause of war. On the altar will sit the fetish of the export of the “miracle of democracy, ” in reality the imposition of regimes of terror such as the Vietnam War planners established in Saigon. We see today in Ukraine that the “miracle of democracy,” brought to Kiev by the US in 2014 to the tune of five billion dollars, amounts to a handful of dry dust, collected from the WW II graveyard of European Nazism, inciting a lot of blind, anti-democratic and noxious nationalism. 
+As through a glass darkly, Marciano shows us that in the war crime against Vietnam we can see reflected the crimes perpetrated today from Afghanistan to Yemen, from Iraq to Syria, from Yugoslavia to Libya and across the African continent. As in Vietnam (the fakery of the Gulf of Tonkin incident), today’s war are based on fabricated pretexts; as in Vietnam (napalm and agent orange), today’s wars are chemical wars (depleted uranium for Yugoslavia and Iraq; phosphorus for Falluja); as in Vietnam (Hanoi and Haiphong) the bombings destroy urban life, vital infrastructure, schools and hospitals; as in Vietnam (Laos, Cambodia) the bombings spreads out (today to Yemen); as in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh) the leaders who resist US penetration are demonized (Milosevic, Saddam, Qaddafi, Assad) as enemies of humanity. As in Vietnam, all the wars of today are fought mostly to prevent or reverse independence and self-determination of former colonial places. 
+Finally, as in Vietnam the USSR, today’s Russia is emerging as the displacement of all the guilt that weighs on the shoulders of the Noble Cause. The Washington Post recently wrote “the Kremlin annexed Ukraine.” I read it twice—not “annexed Crimea,” the standard disinformation, but the whole of Ukraine! Does one laugh or weep? Does one have to take a hallucinogenic to see Russian flags and images of Putin blanketing Kiev instead of Neo-Nazi emblems and images of Bandera? 
+The next president will certainly be Hillary Clinton, whom I call “the centripetal president.” From Republicans to Democrats to Neo-Cons, all converge on endorsing the war candidate. In her consensus war regime, the elite will decide everything. We will not be consulted. This is why The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? is a vital read. It calls for our re-democratization–to question our leaders, to be skeptical of the media, to avert our eyes from the petrifying stare of the Medusa decked with the aegis of the Noble Cause; to challenge—even ridicule– the vaunted humanitarianism of an elite of bloodhounds baying for war; to refuse to commemorate war crimes and to work to stop them. 
+Above all, we need to remember that the crimes of other governments are the responsibility of the people of those governments—not of our bombs. Though our elite have abrogated to themselves the power and the right to remake the map of the world by force, we need to reassert the legal principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign states if we are serious about peace. We, citizens, do not have the right (or the power, unless we line up behind the power of the militarist state) to change the practices of other states, but we do have the right to demand change for those of our own. Let’s start exercising that right. We did for Vietnam; we can do it again. Commemorate the people who protested the war in Vietnam, not the crime the governing elite committed there in our name, as Marciano’s book amply documents. 
+The US government is now engaged in waging eight wars. We better get busy. ",FAKE
+2997,"Before leak, NSA mulled ending phone program","The National Security Agency considered abandoning its secret program to collect and store American calling records in the months before leaker Edward Snowden revealed the practice, current and former intelligence officials say, because some officials believed the costs outweighed the meager counter-terrorism benefits.
+
+After the leak and the collective surprise around the world, NSA leaders strongly defended the phone records program to Congress and the public, but without disclosing the internal debate.
+
+The proposal to kill the program was circulating among top managers but had not yet reached the desk of Gen. Keith Alexander, then the NSA director, according to current and former intelligence officials who would not be quoted because the details are sensitive. Two former senior NSA officials say they doubt Alexander would have approved it.
+
+Still, the behind-the-scenes NSA concerns, which have not been reported previously, could be relevant as Congress decides whether to renew or modify the phone records collection when the law authorizing it expires in June.
+
+The internal critics pointed out that the already high costs of vacuuming up and storing the ""to and from"" information from nearly every domestic landline call were rising, the system was not capturing most cellphone calls, and program was not central to unraveling terrorist plots, the officials said. They worried about public outrage if the program ever was revealed.
+
+After the program was disclosed, civil liberties advocates attacked it, saying the records could give a secret intelligence agency a road map to Americans' private activities. NSA officials presented a forceful rebuttal that helped shaped public opinion.
+
+Responding to widespread criticism, President Barack Obama in January 2014 proposed that the NSA stop collecting the records, but instead request them when needed in terrorism investigations from telephone companies, which tend to keep them for 18 months.
+
+Yet the president has insisted that legislation is required to adopt his proposal, and Congress has not acted. So the NSA continues to collect and store records of private U.S. phone calls for use in terrorism investigations under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Many lawmakers want the program to continue as is.
+
+Alexander argued that the program was an essential tool because it allows the FBI and the NSA to hunt for domestic plots by searching American calling records against phone numbers associated with international terrorists. He and other NSA officials support Obama's plan to let the phone companies keep the data, as long as the government quickly can search it.
+
+Civil liberties activists say it was never a good idea to allow a secret intelligence agency to store records of Americans' private phone calls, and some are not sure the government should search them in bulk.  They say government can point to only a single domestic terrorism defendant who was implicated by a phone records search under the program, a San Diego taxi driver who was convicted of raising $15,000 for a Somali terrorist group.
+
+Some fault NSA for failing to disclose the internal debate about the program.
+
+""This is consistent with our experience with the intelligence community,"" said Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich. ""Even when we have classified briefings, it's like a game of 20 questions and we can't get to the bottom of anything.""
+
+The proposal to halt phone records collection that was circulating in 2013 was separate from a 2009 examination of the program by NSA, sparked by objections from a senior NSA official, reported in November by The Associated Press. In that case, a senior NSA code breaker learned about the program and concluded it was wrong for the agency to collect and store American records. The NSA enlisted the Justice Department in an examination of whether the search function could be preserved with the records stores by the phone companies.
+
+That would not work without a change in the law, the review concluded. Alexander, who retired in March 2014, opted to continue the program as is.
+
+But the internal debate continued, current and former officials say, and critics within the NSA pressed their case against the program. To them, the program had become an expensive insurance policy with an increasing number of loopholes, given the lack of mobile data. They also knew it would be deeply controversial if made public.
+
+By 2013, some NSA officials were ready to stop the bulk collection even though they knew they would lose the ability to search a database of U.S. calling records. As always, the FBI still would be able to obtain the phone records of suspects through a court order.
+
+There was a precedent for ending collection cold turkey. Two years earlier, the NSA cited similar cost-benefit calculations when it stopped another secret program under which it was collecting Americans' email metadata -- information showing who was communicating with whom, but not the content of the messages.  That decision was made public via the Snowden leaks.
+
+Alexander believed that the FBI and the NSA were still getting crucial value out of the phone records program, in contrast to the email records program, former NSA officials say.
+
+After the Snowden leaks, independent experts who looked at the program didn't agree. A presidential task force examined NSA surveillance and recommended ending the phone records collection, saying it posed unacceptable privacy risks while doing little if anything to stop terrorism. The task force included Michael Morell, a former deputy CIA director, and Richard Clarke, a former White House counter terrorism adviser.
+
+""We cannot discount the risk, in light of the lessons of our own history, that at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking,"" the report said. Times, dates and numbers called can provide a window into a person's activities and connections.
+
+A separate inquiry by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded the same thing.
+
+David Medine, chairman of that board, said the concerns raised internally by NSA officials were the same as theirs, yet when NSA officials came before the privacy board, they ""put on a pretty strong defense for the program. Except their success stories didn't pan out,"" he said.",REAL
+8834,“America has lost” in the Philippines,"shorty PEPE ESCOBAR “Your honors, in this venue I announce my separation from the United States…both in military and economics also.” T hus Philippines President Rodrigo “The Punisher” Duterte unleashed a geopolitical earthquake encompassing Eurasia and reverberating all across the Pacific Ocean.
+And talk about choosing his venue with aplomb; right in the heart of the Rising Dragon, no less. 
+Capping his state visit to Beijing, Duterte then coined the mantra – pregnant with overtones – that will keep ringing all across the global South; “America has lost.” 
+And if that was not enough, he announced a new alliance – Philippines, China and Russia – is about to emerge; “there are three of us against the world.” 
+Predictably, the Beltway establishment in the “indispensable nation” went bananas, reacting as “puzzled” or in outright anger, dispersing the usual expletives on the “crude populist”, “unhinged leader”. 
+The bottom line is that it takes a lot of balls for the leader of a poor, developing country, in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, to openly defy the hyperpower. Yet what Duterte is gaming at is pure realpolitik; if he prevails, he will be able to deftly play the US against China to the benefit of Filipino interests. 
+“The springtime of our relationship” 
+It did start with a bang; during Duterte’s China visit, Manila inked no less than $13 billion in deals with Beijing – from trade and investment to drug control, maritime security and infrastructure. 
+Beijing pulled out all stops to make Duterte feel welcomed. 
+President Xi Jinping suggested Manila and Beijing should “temporarily put aside” the intractable South China Sea disputes and learn from the “political wisdom” of history – as in give space to diplomatic talks. After all, the two peoples were “blood-linked brothers.” 
+Duterte replied in kind; “Even as we arrive in Beijing close to winter, this is the springtime of our relationship,” he told Xi at the Great Hall of the People. 
+China is already the Philippines’ second-largest trade partner, behind Japan, the US and Singapore. Filipino exports to these three are at roughly 42.7 percent of the total, compared to 22.1 to China/Hong Kong. Imports from China are roughly 16.1 percent of the total. Even as trade with China is bound to rise, what really matters for Duterte is massive Chinese infrastructure investment. 
+What this will mean in practice is indeed ground-breaking; the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will definitely be involved in Philippine economic development; Manila will be more involved in promoting smooth China-ASEAN relations in all sorts of regional issues (it takes the rotating chair of ASEAN in 2017); and the Philippines will be more integrated in the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. One Belt, One Road (OBOR). 
+Three strikes; no wonder the US is out. And there’s even a fourth strike, embedded in Duterte’s promise that he will soon end military cooperation with the US, despite the opposition of part of the Filipino armed forces. 
+Watch the First Island Chain 
+The build-up had already been dramatic enough. On the eve of his meeting with Xi, talking to members of the Filipino community in Beijing, Duterte said, “it’s time to say goodbye” to the US; “I will not ask but if they (the Chinese) offer and if they’ll ask me, do you need this aid? [I will say] Of course, we are very poor.” 
+Then the clincher; “I will not go to America anymore … We will just be insulted there.” Naval Base Subic Bay was a major ship-repair, supply, and rest and recreation facility of the Spanish Navy and subsequently the United States Navy located in Olongapo, Zambales, Philippines. The base was 262 square miles, about the size of Singapore. It was finally turned over to the Filipino government in 1992. 
+The US was the colonial power in the Philippines from 1899 to 1942. Hollywood permeates the collective unconscious. English is the lingua franca – side by side with tagalog. But the tentacles of Uncle Sam’s “protection” racket are not exactly welcomed. Two of the largest components of the US Empire of Bases were located for decades in the Philippines; Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. 
+Clark, occupying 230 square miles, with 15,000 people, was busy to death during the Vietnam War – the main hub for men and hardware in and out of Saigon. Then it turned into one of those Pentagon “forward operating” HQs. Subic, occupying 260 square miles, was as busy as Clark. It was the forward operating base for the US 7th Fleet. 
+Already in 1987, before the end of the Cold War, the RAND corporation was alarmed by the loss of both bases; that would be “devastating for regional security”. Devastating” in the – mythical – sense of “defending the interests of ASEAN” and the “security of the sea-lanes”. 
+Translation; the Pentagon and the US Navy would lose a key instrument of pressure over ASEAN, as protecting the “security of the sea-lanes” was always the key justification for those bases. 
+And lose they eventually did; Clark was closed down in November 1991, and Subic in November 1992. 
+It took years for China to sense an opening – and profit from it; after all during the 1990s and the early 2000s, the absolute priority was breakneck speed internal development. But then Beijing did the math; no more US bases opened untold vistas as far as the First Island Chain is concerned. 
+The First Island Chain is a product, over millennia, of the fabulous tectonic forces of the Ring of Fire; a chain of islands running from southern Japan in the north to Borneo in the south. For Beijing, they work as a sort of shield for the Chinese eastern seaboard; if this chain is secure, Asia is secure. 
+For all practical purposes, Beijing considers the First Island Chain as a non-negotiable Western Pacific demarcation zone – ideally with no foreign (as in US) interference. The South China Sea – which in parts is characterized by Manila as the Western Philippine Sea – is inside the First Island Chain. So to really secure the First Island Chain, the South China Sea must be free of foreign interference. 
+And here we are plunged at the heart of arguably the key 21st century hotspot in Asian geopolitics – the main reason for the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia. 
+The US Navy so far counted on the Philippines to oppose the proverbial, hyped up “Chinese aggression” in the South China and East China seas. The neocon/neoliberalcon industrial-military complex fury against “unhinged” Duterte’s game-changer is that containing China and ruling over the First Island Chain has been at the core of US naval strategy since the beginning of the Cold War. 
+Beijing, meanwhile, will have all the time needed to polish its strategic environment. This has nothing to do with “freedom of navigation” and protecting sea-lanes; everyone needs South China Sea cross-trade. It’s all about China – perhaps within the next ten years – being able to deny “access” to the US Navy in the South China Sea and inside the First Island Chain. 
+Duterte’s game-changing “America has lost” is just a new salvo in arguably the key 21st century geopolitical thriller. A Supreme Court justice in Manila, for instance, has warned Duterte that, were he to give up sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal, he could be impeached. That won’t happen; Duterte wants loads of Chinese trade and investment, not abdicate from sovereignty. He’d rather be ready to confront being demonized by the hyperpower as much as the late Hugo Chavez was in his heyday. 
+Crossposted with Strategic Culture , first iteration. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP INSTALLATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). His latest book is Empire of Chaos . He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com .   
+What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda? =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.",FAKE
+2151,Report: Solar industry added jobs 20 times faster than the national average last year,"A new report from the Solar Foundation has found that the solar industry added jobs almost 20 times faster than the national average last year, adding over 31,000 jobs in the sector between Nov. 2013 and Nov. 2014. In the last five years, the number of people employed in the solar industry also grew by 87 percent, from 93,000 jobs to 173,807.
+
+Almost 90 percent of jobs added in the sector were in installation, meaning that more and more Americans are opting for the power source, thanks to falling prices and various financing options.
+
+“That has made it a no-brainer for a lot of people to go solar,” said Andrea Luecke, executive director of the Solar Foundation, in an interview with the Washington Post. “If you can get solar installed on your roof for zero down and pay less than what you’re currently paying your utility and not have to worry about maintenance, it’s a pretty easy sell.”
+
+According to the report, the solar installation sector beat out the oil and gas pipeline construction industry and the crude oil and natural gas extraction industry in 2014, creating almost 50 percent more jobs than those industries did. The report also expects solar jobs to continue to grow in 2015, predicting that more than 36,000 jobs will be added over the next 12 months. Overall, the report found that one out of every 78 jobs created in the U.S. last year were related to solar.
+
+Still, the boom may not last forever–installation’s growing efficiency means that the industry expects a slowdown in growth in 2017. “Solar power is a key component of our all-of-the-above approach to American energy, creating good-paying American jobs that support our growing clean energy economy,” said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in a statement. “This diverse and vibrant workforce is vital to achieving the President’s goal of doubling electricity generation from renewable sources yet again by 2020.”",REAL
+2169,The teachable moment of Saudi Arabia’s economic threat against the United States,"Back in the early days of the Great Recession, there was a lot of foreign policy pundit panic that China would somehow use its holdings of American debt as an economic lever to force Washington to kowtow to Beijing. Also back in those early days, I argued that this was nonsense. Seven years later, I like to occasionally bring up this fact, mostly because it’s one of the rare times I think I was unequivocally right.
+
+Today, however, I’m bringing it up because we’ve just witnessed Saudi Arabia exercise a weak echo of that gambit. The New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti reported late last week that the Saudi government has warned U.S. officials about the economic repercussions of a bill moving through Congress:
+
+Saudi Arabia has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage, according to administration officials and congressional aides from both parties, and the Saudi threats have been the subject of intense discussions in recent weeks between lawmakers and officials from the State Department and the Pentagon. The officials have warned senators of diplomatic and economic fallout from the legislation.
+
+The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik provides some useful context behind Saudi concerns:
+
+Since the Saudis long have been suspected of complicity in the attacks, it’s fair to say they’re the prime target of the legislation. But the Saudis’ immediate concern is that their U.S.-based assets could be frozen by a court for the lengthy period it would take for lawsuits for damages to make their way through the judicial system. That makes their representation about U.S. assets look a bit less like a threat than an expression of defensive strategy.
+
+Regardless of the Saudi threat, the Obama administration’s resistance to this bill makes a bit more sense.
+
+What’s interesting about all of this has been the American reaction to the revelation of the Saudi economic threat. Seven years ago, all China had to do was clear its throat on the matter and there were paroxysms of news coverage about threats to the U.S. economy.
+
+This time around, there has been some minor hand-wringing, but most of the analyses have echoed what the New York Times’ Binyamin Appelbaum wrote about the threat:
+
+If Saudi Arabia follows through on its recent threat to sell off its investments in the United States, the financial maneuver could be painful — mostly for Saudi Arabia…. Such a fire sale might roil financial markets or cause problems for companies that lost funding, but experts say it is hard to imagine a significant or lasting impact on the American economy. Global investors continue to shovel money into the United States; if the Saudis go, the experts say, others will take their place.
+
+To elaborate a bit more, the current Saudi threat is way weaker than the implicit Chinese threat of seven years ago, because:
+
+The one difference in the Saudis’ favor is that the kingdom is a U.S. ally, while China is viewed as a rival. This helps explain the administration’s position on this issue (though I suspect its concern is about the precedent this bill would set if it became law). The thing is, recent Obama interviews and news stories highlight the ways in which these ties are fraying. And the very fact that this threat got publicized is not going to improve U.S. attitudes toward Riyadh.
+
+No, the most interesting thing about the revelation of this threat has been the lack of pundit panic in Washington. If anything, the response has been either a shrug of the shoulders or an insistence on calling the Saudi bluff.
+
+Maybe this is just the fact that memories of 9/11 trump appraisals of economic statecraft. Or maybe, just maybe, Washington has learned not to panic as much about these kinds of empty threats.",REAL
+10164,What Are Saponins? Discovering Their Health Benefits,"in: Natural Medicine Saponins are naturally occurring plant glycosides; which is to say they are phytochemicals — chemicals found in plants. They possess soap-like qualities and produce a lather when mixed with water. [ 1 ] Over one hundred families of plants contain saponins and there are more than eleven classes of them including dammaranes, tirucallanes, lupanes, hopanes, oleananes, taraxasteranes, ursanes, cycloartanes, lanostanes, cucurbitanes, and steroids. [ 2 ] It’s believed many other varieties remain undiscovered. The word saponin is derived from sapo , Latin for “soap.” True to its name, the root of the Saponaria, or soapwort plant, has been traditionally used as soap. [ 1 ] Saponins offer tremendous health benefits. Studies have shown they may support the immune system , promote normal cholesterol levels, and support overall wellness. [ 3 ] Why Are Saponins Beneficial? Saponins have a unique chemical structure that produces foam when mixed with water, just like a detergent. And, also like detergent, can bind with water as well as fats and oils. This means that, in the digestive tract, saponins produce an emulsification of fat-soluble molecules. Specifically, they bind to bile acids and help eliminate them from the body, preventing cholesterol from being reabsorbed. You might even say saponins “wash away” various toxins. What Are the Health Benefits of Saponins? The unique chemical structure allows them to offer a number of prospective health benefits. It’s believed they have a favorable effect on cholesterol, can help boost the immune system, have an antioxidant effect, and may even support bone strength. Saponins and Cholesterol Saponins seem to help promote normal cholesterol levels. The body uses cholesterol to produce the bile necessary for digestion. They bind with bile and prevent cholesterol from being reabsorbed back into the bloodstream; rather, it’s simply excreted. Many cholesterol medications operate in the same way. The cholesterol-lowering effect of saponins has been known for decades. A 1977 animal study found that saponins may reduce cholesterol absorption. [ 4 ] A separate study found that giving a certain saponin extract to rats with high cholesterol reduced “bad” (LDL) cholesterol without affecting “good” (HDL) cholesterol. [ 5 ] Saponins Boost the Immune System In nature, plants rely on saponins as a mechanism to fight parasites. Similarly, when consumed by humans, they provide a similar defense against harmful organisms . One study demonstrated this action against Candida cells, specifically. [ 6 ] In another study, a specific type of saponin was observed to have antimicrobial activity that favorably influenced oral health. [ 7 ] Their ability to act as a broad, frontline shield reduces the burden on the immune system. Saponins and Cancer Saponins have several qualities that act against cancer cells. In particular, some have an antioxidant effect [ 8 ] and may be directly toxic to cancer cells. [ 9 ] Cancer cell membranes have cholesterol-type compounds. Like cholesterol, saponins are able to bind with these compounds and disrupt the proliferation of cancer cells. According to an article published in the Journal of Nutrition , saponins from soybeans may slow the growth of cancer cells. [ 10 ] Other studies have reported having induced the death of cancer cells and slowed tumor growth. [ 11 ] It’s important to realize that most of the research into the effects of saponins on cancer cells has been preliminary and involved specific enzymes, proteins, or other components of saponins extracted in specific ways and matched against specific cancer cells under specific situations. In other words, it’s not quite as simple as eating a handful of soapberries and thinking it will cure cancer. Other Health Benefits of Saponins Investigations into saponins have yielded a number of other, interesting revelations about their qualities. Preliminary research from a 2010 study concluded that saponins from Terminalia arjuna (arjun tree) may offer a therapeutic benefit for kidney or urinary stones. [ 12 ] In a 2015 issue of Natural Products Research , it was noted that, in the past ten years, several preclinical reports have suggested that they may offer hope as a natural solution for depression . [ 13 ] Other positive qualities include supporting Kupffer cells in the liver and encouraging normal detoxification. Saponins found in oats and spinach support digestion by accelerating the body’s ability to absorb calcium and silicon. In animal studies, saponins have been found to promote balanced blood sugar and support normal bone density. [ 14 , 15 ] Where to Find Saponins Saponins are a component in over a hundred different types of plants and foods including beans, chickpeas, peanuts, quinoa, and soy. They exist in nightshade vegetables like tomatoes. Herbs like ginseng, Tribulus terrestris , jiaogulan , bupleurum root , osha , and collinsonia also contain saponins. Saponins are common in food products, often added as an emulsifier. Some carbonated beverages like root beer rely on saponins extracted from yucca and quillaja to produce a foamy head. The berry shell from the soapberry plant can be used as a natural laundry detergent . The hard shell, which resembles a nut, releases saponins when it absorbs water, acting as a detergent to release grime, dirt, and oil from clothing. Have you used saponins in any way? Do you have an experience or thought to share? Leave a comment below and add to the conversation. References",FAKE
+3056,This astonishing chart shows how moderate Republicans are an endangered species,"Political scientists have known for years that political polarization is largely a one-sided phenomenon: in recent decades the Republican Party has moved to the right much faster than Democrats have moved to the left. As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution has described it, ""Republicans have become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition.""
+
+The data backing this claim up are pretty solid. The most widely-used measure of political polarization, a score of ideology based on voting developed by Kenneth Poole and Howard Rosenthal, has shown that the Republicans in the Senate and especially the House have drifted away from the center far more rapidly than Democrats. The chart below, taken from the most recent slice of their data released just last month, illustrate this pretty clearly:
+
+Right around 1975, the Republican party sharply turned away from the center line and hasn't looked back. The Democrats have been drifting away from the center too, but nowhere near as quickly.
+
+Every once in awhile an op-ed writer will come along and make a qualitative argument along the lines of ""no, really, it's the Democrats who are polarizing!"" Peter Wehner, a former official in three previous Republican presidential administrations, did just that in the pages of the New York Times last week. His argument amounts to the notion that since President Obama has pursued some policies that are more liberal than Bill Clinton's, ""the Democratic Party has moved substantially further to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right.""
+
+Well, no -- just look at the chart above! Here's another way of looking at it: How many moderates are in each party? Here's another interesting chart from the Poole-Rosenthal data, showing the number of House members in each party who are not centrists -- that is, whose ideological scores put them on the more extreme ends of the partisan scale.
+
+As you can see, in the most recent Congress nearly 90 percent of Republican House members are not politically moderate. By contrast, 90 percent of Democratic members are moderates. It's quite difficult to square a chart like this with a claim that Democrats are abandoning the center faster than Republicans. As the chart shows, there are plenty of centrist Democrats left in the House -- but hardly any centrist Republicans.
+
+It's worth pointing out that none of this is happening in a vacuum -- House Republicans are become more extreme because Republican voters are electing more extreme candidates. We see many of these same patterns playing out among the electorate as well, as a massive Pew Research Study demonstrated last year.",REAL
+8238,Why the Democrats Keep Losing the Congress,"Why isn’t the Democratic Party landsliding the worst and cruelest Republican Party in the past 162 years?
+Just take a glance at their record votes and you’ll wonder why the Republican representatives don’t just incorporate themselves and be done with any pretense that they are real people.
+A brief look at a compilation of Republican votes during the years 2011-2012, when the Republicans controlled the House, demonstrates that they regularly choose Wall Street over Main Street, drug and oil, banking and insurance companies over consumers. And that Republicans want tiny enforcement budgets against corporate crime to assure that hundreds of billions of your health and other consumer dollars are not recovered from the corporate criminals ($60 billion a year alone in business frauds on Medicare).
+Repeatedly, these Republicans, often a unanimous 100% of them, in a bizarre kind of corporate-conditioned response, vote in favor of corporations shipping American jobs overseas rather than voting to protect American workers. This Republican-controlled congress was intent on defending and increasing massive tax breaks for the wealthiest at the expense of the lower income families, attacking Medicare, social security, and other programs assisting elderly Americans, even assaulting women’s health and safety, opposing stronger food safety enforcement and preventing toxic pollution controls while at the same time protecting rapacious student loan companies and keeping victims of mortgage companies and banks defenseless against onslaughts of insurmountable debt accumulation.
+They also passed a bill to pay members of Congress during a GOP-led government shutdown, however, while refusing to guarantee that soldiers would get paid during the same shutdown. Moreover, the Republicans have this strange antagonism toward encouraging more people to vote, and assuring that every vote counts.
+Go past the façade of the Republican rhetoric praising heroic veterans are their grim votes against protecting veterans from rip-offs as borrowers for their consumer, education and housing needs.
+Fast forward to the last two years and you’ll find the same corporatist grip on the House. Fifteen times House Republicans have voted for measures attacking women’s health; blocked all votes on comprehensive immigration reform; gave the back of their hand against children’s well-being; twice voted unanimously against affirming that climate change is real and passed tax cuts of which 99.6 percent go to the richest 1 percent of Americans. Furthermore, they have voted unanimously against even considering a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizen’s United decision that opened the floodgates of big corporate money in elections. They continue to protect secret money in elections and twice voted against even allowing a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act giving women new tools for equal pay for equal work.
+One hundred percent of all House Republicans voted against allowing a vote to let American workers earn just seven job-protected paid sick days each year – less than has been given for years in western-European countries.
+So in hock are they to the student loan industry, the Republicans have repeatedly voted against bringing up for a vote the student loan refinancing bill. One hundred percent of House Republicans voted against even bringing up a bill to stop big companies from dumping their U.S. charter and fleeing abroad to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Lead-poisoned children in Flint, Michigan got the straight-arm by 236 House Republicans. Republicans held zero hearings in 2016 on the president’s 2017 budget – an unheard of breach of legislative duty.
+House Republicans in recent years have stupidly cut the IRS budget facilitating $400 billion of uncollected taxes each year, thereby swelling the federal deficit that the GOP is supposed to care about. The Republicans are knowingly complicit in protecting tax evasion.
+Worse, these Republicans are complicit in shielding over $330 billion each year in computerized billing fraud. This corporate crime wave estimate comes from the leading expert on billing fraud, Harvard Professor Malcolm Sparrow (author of License to Steal ), backed by an earlier report from the Government Accountability Office of the Congress. There simply is too little budget for adequate investigators and prosecutors even when every dollar in enforcement brings about ten dollars in recoveries and fines!
+Why doesn’t all of this anti-human record make news? First, these bills are almost always blocked by the Democrats in the Senate. Second, many of these votes by the House Republicans are blocking votes to require on-the-record roll call votes that show each member’s position on a bill. Third, let’s be clear, the media, which has reporters swarming all over Capitol Hill, is not doing its job.
+Fourth, there aren’t a tiny fraction of the civically active people back home organized to publicize the votes by their member of Congress. Fifth, the lack of dynamic leadership by Congressional Democrats included being rolled by a Republican strategy to up the GOP’s advantage in the number of gerrymandered districts in 2010 (brilliantly reported in David Daley’s new book, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy ).
+In the final analysis, the blame is on the Democratic Party that does not give us a competitive election process over substantive matters uppermost in the minds of the American people. It took strenuous demands by some civic leaders in Washington, D.C. just to get the House Democrats to compile these aforementioned Republican votes and passively release them in a concise form to the public and then only a month before the November elections! With few exceptions, Democrats astonishingly do not campaign on such a base Republican misery index.
+Unfortunately, many Democratic candidates are dialing for the same campaign dollars as their Republican opponents and many Democratic incumbent candidates are ensconced in safe, non-competitive electoral districts (often because of their gerrymandering). Consequently, they don’t make an effort to show the callousness and cruelty of the Republican Party.
+For any further explanation of this Democratic Party’s dysfunctional indifference to winning back the House of Representatives, based on the abysmal record of the Republican Party, call in some social psychologists specializing in group machoism.
+To see the full list for yourself – see 2012 and 2016 .
+ Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!",FAKE
+7262,Will Barack Obama Delay Or Suspend The Election If Hillary Is Forced Out By The New FBI Email Investigation?,"The Economic Collapse – by Michael Snyder 
+Just when it looked like Hillary Clinton was poised to win the 2016 election , the FBI has thrown a gamechanger into the mix. On Friday, FBI Director James Comey announced that his agency has discovered new emails related to Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information that they had not previously seen. According to the Associated Press , the newly discovered emails “did not come from her private server”, but instead were found when the FBI started going through electronic devices that belonged to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband Anthony Weiner. The FBI has been looking into messages of a sexual nature that Weiner had exchanged with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, and that is why they originally seized those electronic devices. According to the Washington Post , the “emails were found on a computer used jointly by both Weiner and his wife, top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, according to a person with knowledge of the inquiry”, and according to some reports there may be “potentially thousands” of emails on the computer that the FBI did not have access to previously. Even though there are less than two weeks to go until election day, this scandal has the potential to possibly force Clinton out of the race, and if that happens could Barack Obama delay or suspend the election until a replacement candidate can be found? 
+Let’s take this one step at a time. On Friday, financial markets tanked when reports of these new Clinton emails hit the wires. The following comes from CNN … 
+After recommending earlier this year that the Department of Justice not press charges against the former secretary of state, Comey said in a letter to eight congressional committee chairmen that investigators are examining newly discovered emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the email probe. 
+“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote the chairmen. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” 
+At this point, we do not know what is contained in these emails. But without a doubt Huma Abedin is Hillary Clinton’s closest confidant, and I have always felt that she was Clinton’s Achilles heel. Journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) is fully convinced that the FBI would have never made this move unless something significant had already been discovered … 
+We don’t know what this means yet except that it’s a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that’s where we are… 
+Is it a certainty that we won’t learn before the election? I’m not sure it’s a certainty we won’t learn before the election. 
+One thing is, it’s possible that Hillary Clinton might want to on her own initiative talk to the FBI and find out what she can, and if she chooses to let the American people know what she thinks or knows is going on. People need to hear from her… 
+If the FBI has indeed found something explosive, would they actually charge her with a crime right before the election? 
+It is possible, but we also have to remember that government agencies (including the FBI) tend to move very, very slowly. If there are thousands of emails, it is going to take quite a while to sift through them all. And of course Barack Obama has lots of ways that he could influence, delay or even shut down the investigation. 
+So those that are counting on this to be the miracle that Donald Trump needs should not count their chickens before they hatch. 
+But if Hillary Clinton were to be forced out of the race by this FBI investigation, the Democrats would have to decide on a new candidate, and that would take time. The following is from a U.S. News & World Report article that examined what would happen if one of the candidates was forced out of the race for some reason… 
+If Clinton were to fall off the ticket, Democratic National Committee members would gather to vote on a replacement. DNC members acted as superdelegates during this year’s primary and overwhelmingly backed Clinton over boat-rocking socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. 
+DNC spokesman Mark Paustenbach says there currently are 445 committee members – a number that changes over time and is guided by the group’s bylaws, which give membership to specific officeholders and party leaders and hold 200 spots for selection by states, along with an optional 75 slots DNC members can choose to fill. 
+But the party rules for replacing a presidential nominee merely specify that a majority of members must be present at a special meeting called by the committee chairman. The meeting would follow procedures set by the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee and proxy voting would not be allowed. 
+It would be extremely challenging to get a majority of the members of the Democratic National Committee together on such short notice. If Clinton were to drop out next week, it would be almost impossible for this to happen before election day. 
+In such a scenario, Barack Obama may attempt to invoke his emergency powers . Since the election would not be “fair” until the Democrats have a new candidate, he could try to delay or suspend the election. There would be a lot of controversy as to whether this is legal or not, but Barack Obama has not let the U.S. Constitution stop him in the past. 
+Meanwhile, new poll numbers show that the Trump campaign was already gaining momentum even before this story about the new emails broke. According to a brand new ABC News/Washington Post survey, Donald Trump is now only trailing Hillary Clinton by 4 points after trailing her by as much as 12 points last weekend. 
+And CNBC is reporting on a highly advanced artificial intelligence system that accurately predicted the outcomes of the presidential primaries and which is now indicating that Trump will be the winner in November… 
+An artificial intelligence system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House. 
+MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It takes in 20 million data points from public platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. and then analyzes the information to create predictions. 
+The AI system was created in 2004, so it has been getting smarter all the time. It had already correctly predicted the results of the Democratic and Republican Primaries. 
+Without Hillary at the top of the ticket, the odds of a Trump victory would go way, way up. 
+So if Hillary is forced out of the race by this investigation, Barack Obama and the Democrats will want to delay or suspend the election for as long as possible if they can. 
+At this point there is probably not a high probability that such a scenario will play out, but in this crazy election year we have already seen that just about anything can happen.",FAKE
+1634,The wingnut myth that refuses to die: The one simple reason why there’s no “liberal media conspiracy”,"Of course, the GOP candidates who were most vocal about the supposed media bias were really just using it to dodge substantive questions and get easy applauses from the partisan crowd. As Charles Pierce puts it in Esquire:
+
+When confronted about his voting record in the Senate, Marco Rubio (R-FL) was quick to call out the media bias, after mentioning that President Obama had an abysmal voting record during his campaign as well. “This is another example of the double standard that exists in this country between the mainstream media and the conservatives,” he said, to a crowd of cheering conservatives. He even went on to say that Clinton has her very own super PAC in the mainstream media, a point that may have very well won the debate for the young conservative.
+
+Seeing the advantage in attacking the much-loathed media, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) responded to a question on whether his opposition to compromise on the debt limit shows he is not a “problem solver.”
+
+“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” said Cruz, who would use his time to trash the moderators instead of answering the question, “This is not a cage match.” He went on to mock the Democratic debate as a battle between the “Mensheviks and Bolsheviks,” which seems to imply that the media is not only liberal, but communist.
+
+So, is the mainstream media really left-wing, or even liberal, as those on the right love to claim?
+
+First of all, it should be noted that the real world tends to have a liberal bias — at least what Cruz considers a liberal bias. Take climate change, for example. The fact that the climate is warming because of human activity is a completely uncontroversial notion; it is happening, and the vast majority of scientists agree that it will be catastrophic for humanity if nothing is done very soon. That the mainstream media does not contest the issue of climate change, or claim that it is some giant left-wing conspiracy, does not prove it is liberal, but that it is operating in reality. Cruz does not operate in reality, and believes climate change (i.e. science) is a “religion.” But just because Cruz believes this, or his deranged father, Rafael, believes that evolution is a communist lie, does not mean that evolutionary biologists are communists or that climate scientists are religious fanatics — it means that Rafael Cruz and his son are delusional.
+
+Now, before considering whether the mainstream media is really left-wing, one should look at who owns the media. Consider this: In 1983, 90 percent of American media was owned by 50 companies, and by 2011, that number had fallen to six companies: CBS, Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp, Disney and GE, which subsequently sold its media holding, NBC Universal, to cable giant Comcast (which would, in turn, later try to merge with Time Warner Cable, although that deal eventually fell apart).
+
+Thus, the media at large has one crucial goal: to make a profit. Not to serve the public, but to make money by selling advertisement spots to other corporations, whether they are selling new cars or tech products or pointless new drugs. All of this profit-making hardly sounds like the socialist media that Republicans would have everyone believe.
+
+One has to look no further than the coverage of Donald Trump to see this strategy in action. The Donald and the media have been feeding off of each other over the past few months. Trump loves the attention, and the media loves the “Yooge” ratings that he brings. (The higher the ratings, the more the network can charge for advertising or subscriptions.) CNN, for example, has covered Trump as if he were a natural disaster, and even bumped a 1oth anniversary special for Hurricane Katrina to cover one of Trump’s rambling campaign events.
+
+Now consider the media coverage of the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who has drawn massive crowds to his campaign events and last month broke a fundraising record. The media largely ignored Sanders, and when it finally came around, after his popularity and poll numbers were too big to ignore, the coverage was full of bias and mischaracterization. As Rima Regas writes in Alternet: “The most harmful way anti-Sanders media bias has been manifested is by omission. In this respect, the New York Times is joined by the vast majority of the mainstream media in not typically reporting on Sanders, especially on policy. Overall there is a version of a “wall of silence” built by the media when it comes to serious reporting and analysis of his policies; or when analyzing or reporting on the policies of his opponents, a failure to mention Sanders’ in contrast, especially when his is the more progressive position.” Why would the media, if it were so left-wing, be so active in its coverage of a right-wing populist like Trump, and so quiet in its coverage of Sanders? The reality is, of course, that the corporate media (a much more appropriate term than mainstream media) is not left-wing. Now, many conservatives argue that the majority of journalists support the Democratic party, which is true. But what does this prove? As Noam Chomsky (a real leftist) has previously pointed out: “You could find that 99% of the journalists are members of the Socialist Workers Party, or some Maoist group, and that in itself would prove nothing about the media output. The issue is whether the media are free; are the media by their institutional structure free, to allow expression of opinion from whatever source, looking at any topic. If it turned out that 80% of the journalists were from one faction of the business party rather than another faction of the business party, would that tell you anything?” Anyone who knows the history of left-wing politics understands that the media at large is not at all left-wing, but centrist at best. Again, just because the media lives in reality and does not dispute climate change, doesn’t mean that it is liberal, but that the conservative faction of the GOP has become increasingly delusional in its extremism. The corporate media runs for a profit, and wouldn’t dare advocate any true socialist policies that woulds inflict pain on its business model. Sure, the media at large supports issues like gay marriage — but again, what does this prove? Is it a plot to destroy America, as Ted Cruz’s cheerful father believes, or is it because America at large is becoming more socially tolerant? Rubio and Cruz did well for themselves in bashing the abhorred media, but what does CNBC care, the ratings were great (though significantly lower than the first two debates), and the network made $250,000 for each 30 second commercial. And this, my fellow comrades, is what the corporate media is all about. Watch the candidates avoid answering debate questions by ripping into “liberal media”",REAL
+10416,LEAKED BOMBSHELL: The Shocking Truth About Hillary That Huma Abedin Has Concealed For Years,"It is DISTURBING to think that they have known about this FOR YEARS! Huma Abedin has worked as Hillary Clinton’s top assistant for years. You are likely familiar with Huma, as she is a regular on the campaign trail with Hillary, and has also been in the news for years as the wife of Anthony Weiner, the embattled former Congressman who is perpetually accused of sexting improprieties. Reportedly, the FBI is reopening its investigation of Hillary’s private email practices after finding evidence of Huma’s involvement on one of Anthony Weiner’s electronic devices. It is a small world, isn’t it? Another Clinton employee, a name that you may not be familiar with, is popping up in the news lately for reasons that are startling, to say the least. Justin Cooper is an Information Technology worker who is reported to have set up Hillary’s private email server. Recently, he even testified before a House Committee, saying that he extracted information from Clinton-related smart devices before “smashing them to bits.” It is said that Cooper’s testimony is the “most informative we have heard yet.” Judge Andrew Napolitano has expressed concern over Cooper’s access to this information, among other things, as Cooper did not hold a Security Clearance. “He was an employee of the Clinton family and of the Clinton Foundation, and he had complete and total access to the Clinton emails, and he had no security clearance,” Judge Napolitano explained on “Varney & Co.” today. Unfortunately, for Hillary and Huma, new, leaked information has come to light, and it has Justin Cooper’s name all over it: Justin Cooper was the Clinton aide who set up the email server.Huma: ""My clinton [black]berry not working""Cooper: ""We were attacked again"" pic.twitter.com/KjQcbocQzz 
+— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) October 28, 2016 
+You read that correctly – 
+Huma: “My clinton [black]berry not working” 
+Cooper: “We were attacked again” 
+So Huma and the Clinton Staff knew all along that they were being attacked, also known as “hacked!” 
+It is shocking to think that high level State Department employees knew, for years, about such vulnerabilities. 
+Ironically, if it were not for hacking organizations like WikiLeaks, American voters still would not have this troubling knowledge.",FAKE
+10020,Bombshell: 2006 audio of Hillary Clinton proposing rigging Palestine election,"Print 
+For thos who stubbornly insist that the words election and rig have never been uttered in the same sentence by wannabe president Hillary Clinton, here’s a little sound bite you might have trouble making sense of. 
+The recording was made on September 5, 2006, by an editor of the “Jewish Press,” during a meeting with Clinton in her race for re-election to the U.S. Senator. 
+Via The Observer : 
+The tape was never released and has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room. According to [Editor Eli] Chomsky, his old-school audiocassette is the only existent copy and no one has heard it since 2006, until today when he played it for the Observer. 
+[…] 
+Speaking … about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats). 
+In the clip, which appears below, Clinton can be heard plainly saying: 
+I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.",FAKE
+1943,Dems’ scary electoral future: Why the progressive sales pitch is getting harder,"In the run-up to the 2016 election, Republicans are trying to position themselves as the party of the middle class. In a recent essay, Thomas Edsall writes, “The Republican appropriation of leftist populist rhetoric (and even policies) poses a significant threat to liberal prospects in 2016.” It may well work, but not because Republicans are in fact reformist, but rather because voters and pundits eschew data and instead focus on rhetoric. When it comes to actual empirical evidence, the answer is indisputable: Democrats preside over far more income growth for the middle class than Republicans.
+
+Princeton University’s Larry Bartels has two studies on politics and income distribution, and together they encompass almost a century. His finding: under Republicans, the poor and middle class see almost no income growth, while under Democrats, they see dramatic growth (see charts). As he notes elsewhere, even after numerous controls, these partisan differences remain. “Every Republican president in the past 60 years has presided over increasing income inequality, including Dwight Eisenhower in the midst of the ‘Great Compression’ of the post-war decades,” Bartels writes. “And every Democratic president except one (Jimmy Carter) has presided over decreasing or stable inequality.”
+
+In another recent study, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson find that on a number of economic indicators, the country fares far better when a Democrat is in office. GDP growth is 1.8 point higher under a Democratic presidency, unemployment is lower, corporate profits are higher, the S&P grows faster and wages grow faster. This difference is not found in other countries, suggesting that the particularly rabid nature of American conservatism may be an important factor. It could also be that the effect is purely luck (although there is evidence to suggest that left-wing governments can facilitate growth). But the fact that the economy grows faster under Democrats is not enough to explain why the middle-class fares better. As the chart below shows, much of the distribution leg-work occurs after taxes and transfers. This isn’t to say Democrats don’t shape the pre-tax distribution (they do), but rather that simple differences in market distributions of income can’t explain the difference.
+
+As John B. Judis argued — contrary to his seminal proposition of an “Emerging Democratic Majority”  — the future now belongs to the Republican party. It’s increasingly likely that Democrats will continue to have a slight advantage in the electoral college, but struggle elsewhere, for reasons I’ve previously discussed. So, while Judis’ thesis that middle-class whites are dramatically shifting right is contestable, he raises an important point: Middle-class Americans like services but dislike taxes, and Democrats currently appear to be the party of taxes. And so, the struggle for Democrats is what Suzanne Mettler refers to as the “submerged state.” That is, the way the government actually benefits the middle class often goes unseen, while taxes, particularly the income tax, are very obvious. Mettler notes that our federal tax code is full of handouts like the Mortgage Interest Deduction, but these tax benefits primarily benefit the affluent and middle class. “Our government is integrally intertwined with everyday life from healthcare to housing, but in forms that often elude our vision,” she argues.
+
+The implication is that many people who believe themselves independent of government support in fact rely heavily on it. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the 10 largest tax breaks cost the government $900 billion in 2013. But the benefits accrue to the wealthy: The top 1 percent gets 17 percent of the benefits and the bottom quintile only 8 percent. As the New York Times reported in 2012,
+
+As Christopher Howard notes in his book, “The Hidden Welfare State,” “There is, still, a misconception that U.S. social programs primarily benefit the poor. That is not true for the visible welfare state direct expenditures, and it is an absurd claim to make about the hidden welfare state.”
+
+As the political science literature shows persuasively, Democrats are far better for economic growth, and particularly middle-class and poor income growth, than Republicans. Yet even liberal commentators often fail to notice this. (Kevin Drum, for example, argues that “Democrats simply don’t consistently support concrete policies that help the broad working and middle classes.”) By focusing on major policies, these critics miss what Nathan Kelly calls, “market conditioning,” or the ways in which left-leaning governments shift market distributions through regulation, monetary and fiscal policy and other non-explicitly redistributive functions. In fact, there is a strong literature showing that parties on the left shift the income distribution. One notable example: While conservatives savagely attack unions, which dramatically shift the income distribution, while Democrats leave them alone. Further, Democrats tend to favor expansionary economic policies, while Republicans try to clamp down on inflation — which primarily benefits the rich. A cross-country study by Isa Camyar finds that firms perform better under left-wing governments because such governments spend more money on public fixed investment. This will naturally lead to higher wages. And while the real value of the minimum wage has increased 16 cents a year under Democratic presidents, it has decreased by 6 cents per year under Republicans. Liberal governments also do more to reduce unemployment, which is significant for earnings at the bottom of the income distribution. So, while there is evidence that the in the era of globalization and finance, liberal parties can’t do as much to impact the distribution of income, it is nonetheless clear that liberals matter, as Bartel’s recent data extend to 2012. On the other hand, the conservative premise — that inequality will increase growth and thereby benefit the poor and middle class — has been so thoroughly demolished that it can’t be stated with a straight face. A large body of empirical literature suggests that massive tax cuts for top earners do little but increase incomes at the top. Branko Milanovic and Roy van der Weide find, “high levels of inequality reduce the income growth of the poor and, if anything, help the growth of the rich.” Dan Andrew, Christopher Jencks and Andrew Leigh find that whatever modest effect that inequality has on growth is mitigated by the impact of inequality on the bottom. Intelligent conservative commentators have essentially surrendered the supply-side debate. It’s clear a Democratic Party is better for middle- and low-income growth. However, while it’s entirely mythological that the poor tend to vote Republican, it is still true that Democrats have trouble with the white middle class. An important reason for this is that Democrats are often seen as the party that benefits the poor, particularly poor black Americans. My investigation of ANES data shows this phenomenon in action: Whites are opposed to welfare, but support helping the poor (see chart). A large literature shows that opposition to welfare and government is driven by racial animus. To this day, the historical portion of slaves in a county predicts Republican support and racial resentment. Because of our strange political system, middle-class white Americans can therefore believe that the government only takes from them and only helps black Americans. In fact, government programs frequently exclude people of color, and those that do benefit them are always on the chopping block. Whites, particularly Southern whites, often oppose programs that would help them simply to ensure that people of color remain in abject poverty. They see the bad parts of government in the form of taxes, but their welfare is hidden in a maze of subsidies. If you had to collect the mortgage interest deduction at the welfare office, Democrats would never lose another election.",REAL
+5452,Chinese Immigrants Demand Protection from Paris Muggers,"Chinese Immigrants Demand Protection from Paris Muggers David Chazan, Telegraph, August 21, 2016 
+Thousands of angry Chinese immigrants demonstrated in a Paris suburb yesterday (Sun) to demand police protection from muggers who they say prey on them because they are seen as easy targets. 
+The death of a 49-year-old Chinese tailor after being badly beaten in a robbery earlier this month has lent new urgency to the long running complaint that Asian immigrants are systematically attacked and robbed in the French capital. 
+“The Chinese community is dying in silence,” read a slogan on a T-shirt splashed with red to symbolise bloodstains worn by one demonstrator, Maike Song. 
+He said he joined the protest in Aubervilliers to pay homage to Chaoling Zhang, the father of two who died on August 14 after being punched to ground in the north-eastern suburb that is home to some 4,000 Chinese immigrants. 
+No arrests have been made over the attack. 
+About 100 Chinese residents of Aubervilliers have been attacked and robbed since November, according to the Franco-Chinese Friendship Association. 
+“It is because of prejudices that Chinese people are weak, docile and wealthy,” said Fang, a young female student. “I’ve been attacked three times in three years and my friends are suffering the same thing. Some have moved away from this area because of it. I don’t go out with a handbag any more.” 
+Community workers say many muggings are committed by members of other minorities living in the area, generally of Arab or African origin. 
+Paris officials corroborated the figures but declined to identify the robbers by ethnic origin. 
+Many Chinese immigrants own restaurants or shops and tend to be relatively well-off, but are often reluctant to go to the police. “Some victims have been illegal immigrants,” said Dominique Darden, a social worker. 
+The Chinese community of Paris has held other protests in recent years over the attacks. 
+“They happen almost every day because of poverty but it’s unbearable,” said a spokesman, Olivier Wang. “No one should have to put up with this.”",FAKE
+10192,Transylvania Recalls Melania Trump While Movement To Deport Her Gains Steam,"Monday, 31 October 2016 Melania Trump has been recalled by Cryosphere Reanimators in Transylvania. 
+Two new stories about Melania Trump are converging to rock the Trump empire, this is after Donald Trump's failed presidential campaign has already severely damaged the family brand. 
+First the real shocker. 
+Meyer Hallsy of Cryosphere Reanimators in the Transylvania region of Romania issued a statement that stunned the Trumps and the world: Melania Trump was being recalled along with 1,500 other reanimation subjects due to a shorter than expected lifespan on several body parts, though they declined to say specifically which parts or organs. 
+Donald Trump denied the claims that Melania was reanimated in Transylvania and insisted she is from Slovenia when he talked to reporters while he was stranded at the Milwaukee airport . 
+""This is one of the most twisted conspiracy theories ever, and I'm sure crooked Hillary was behind it just like she was behind the rumors of Obama being born in Kenya. But if this story and the recall were true I would ask them to work on one or two of Melania's body parts in particular while they had her, you guys, if you're married, you know what I mean."" 
+Meyer Hallsy gave a select few in the press an interview at the reanimation lab the day after his bombshell announcement about Melania and others like her. 
+""Before the questions, let me explain a few things that will help to make everything more clear. Melania and the other pleasurebots don't know they are reanimated from the dead because we give them memory implants. So that's why Melania thinks she's from Slovenia. So think about it, her accounts of when she came to the US and started modeling have been shown to be false, no one can corroborate her history either--that's because it's all memory implants."" 
+The shocked press began shouting questions as Hallsy continued over the din. 
+""Cryosphere Reanimators will transport all pleasurebots to Transylvania and back to their current homes at our own cost. I want to tell Melania Trump and all the other units on recall that we just want to keep them well and functioning and they will all have a wonderful welcome when they return to their birthplace so to speak, and then they can return to their owners after we fix them. If you are on the recall list and you are feeling sick in any way at all please contact Cryosphere immediately."" 
+In response to the doubters of the story, Meyer Hallsy said his company has already anticipated the need to convince some pleasurebots of the truth of their origin. 
+""If Melania and the other pleasurebots need to be convinced, they can call our new hotline where specially trained counselors will talk to them and tell them about a memory that only they can know about as proof that we created them."" 
+Movement To Deport Melania Gains Steam 
+It was once a fringe group of liberals and conservatives questioning Melania's initial entry to the US and whether or not she had proper documents, therefore leading to questions about the legitimacy of her marriage and citizenship status as well. Now, the Deport Melania coalition has spiked in membership since Cryosphere broke the story of their reanimation project. 
+Besides questions about Melania's right to be in the US, even her right to exist is being questioned by anti-Trump forces, as well as religious and political leaders. 
+Donald Trump has also threatened to deport Melania if she gains too much weight as first lady, and Melania has been on the defensive since gaining 3 pounds during the campaign. Privately, Donald Trump is saying Melania is a slob for gaining the extra weight. Make XRhonda Speaks's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
+1762,OnPolitics | 's politics blog,"Who has Trump appointed to his cabinet so far?
+
+Donald Trump added three new men to his list of cabinet picks Friday. Get to know them.",REAL
+6260,NYC Democratic Election Commissioner: “They Bus People Around to Vote”,"
+In a video released by Project Veritas, James O’Keefe exposes what everyone except Democrats have known to be true. There is a lot of voter fraud.
+In the video, NYC Democratic Commissioner of the Board of Elections Alan Schulkin is caught on hidden camera at a United Federation of Teachers holiday party admitting that there is widespread voter fraud in New York City.
+“Yeah, they should ask for your ID. I think there is a lot of voter fraud,” said Schulkin, who elaborated on the types of voter fraud that are taking place in New York.
+Voter fraud has been labeled as a right-wing myth by the left, but Schulkin, a Democrat, confirmed everyone’s worst fears, going against the grain of his own party.
+“You know, I don’t think it’s too much to ask somebody to show some kind of an ID‌Like I say, people don’t realize, certain neighborhoods in particular they bus people around to vote,” said Schulkin.
+When asked about which type of neighborhoods the busing of voters takes place in, Schulkin confirmed that it was minority neighborhoods, adding, “they get busses and they move people around.”
+Schulkin expressed concern over voter fraud and suggested that Mayor Bill de Blasio was to blame for a lot of the voter fraud taking place in New York City.
+“He gave out ID cards. De Blasio. That’s in lieu of a driver’s license, but you can use it for anything. But, they didn’t vet people to see who they really are. Anybody can go in there and say I am Joe Smith, I want an ID card. It’s absurd. There’s a lot of fraud. Not just voter fraud, all kinds of fraud.”
+Despite having disapproval with de Blasio’s faulty ID program and widespread voter fraud, Schulkin also expressed concerns over safety in the polling locations as well as the potential for voter fraud, specifically with regards to Muslims wearing burkas.
+“They detonate bombs in the public schools, which we are using. That could disrupt the whole election‌Your vote doesn’t even count, because they can go in there with a burka and you don’t know if they are a voter.”
+It is clear after listening to a New York City Democratic Election Commissioner that the Democrats are in denial of the fraud that surrounds them. Schulkin confirms that voter ID laws are something that New York City desperately needs as a way to curb voter fraud.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+1976,"Poll: With 2016 approaching, Clinton maintains advantages","Washington (CNN) Hillary Clinton continues to be a dominant force heading into the 2016 presidential election, according to a new CNN/ORC poll . The former secretary of state maintains a broad lead over the field of potential Democratic challengers she could face in a nomination contest and sizable advantages over the leading contenders from the Republican side in general election match-ups.
+
+But none of the top candidates in this field gets within 10 points of Hillary Clinton in a series of hypothetical general election matchups.
+
+Rand Paul comes closest, with 43% saying they'd be more likely to back him while 54% choose Clinton. The two candidates who currently top the GOP field, Bush and Walker, match up equally against Clinton, with each carrying 40% to her 55%. Huckabee gets 41% to Clinton's 55% and Carson has 40% to Clinton's 56%.
+
+Should Warren decide not to get into the race, Clinton stands to benefit more than others, gaining 5 points and holding a 67% to 16% advantage over Biden when Warren's backers are re-allocated to their second-choice candidate. Notably, with Warren out of the race, Clinton surges from 67% support to 74% among Democratic women.
+
+And Democrats broadly believe the party's chances to hold the White House in 2016 are strongest with Clinton; 68% say so, while 30% say the party would have a better shot with someone else leading the ticket.
+
+Though Clinton's favorability rating has taken a hit recently, her prospects in 2016 appear largely unchanged compared to polls conducted before news broke about her use of a personal email address and home-based server while serving as secretary of state.
+
+On the Republican side, Bush leads the pack with 16%, Walker follows at 13%, Paul nearly matches him at 12% and Huckabee holds 10% support. Huckabee's backing has dipped significantly since February, from 16% to 10%, while the others near the top have generally held steady. In single digits, Carson holds 9%, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has 7%, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has 7%. The rest of the field lands below 5%, including 2012 candidates Rick Santorum at 1% and Rick Perry at 4%.
+
+Some interesting demographic trends emerge in the GOP numbers: There is something of a gender gap in preferences, with both Walker (17% among men, 9% among women) and Paul (16% among men, 7% among women) doing significantly better with men than women. Younger Republicans are more likely to back Paul than older ones (he has 17% support among Republicans under 50, just 7% among older Republicans).
+
+Bush's backing generally holds steady across demographic divides, but he fares better among self-identified Republicans (22%) than independents who lean toward the party (10%), while Paul outperforms among independents (17% compared with 7% among self-identified Republicans).
+
+Yet many of the GOP's strongest contenders remain largely unknown. Majorities of Americans haven't yet formed opinions about Scott Walker (58%) or Ben Carson (64%), and about half haven't heard of or don't know about Marco Rubio (48%).
+
+Even the best known Republican contender, Jeb Bush, prompts nearly a quarter of Americans to say they're not sure how they feel about him (23%). Republicans themselves have heard a bit more about their party's top potential candidates, but only one merits a majority favorable rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents: Mike Huckabee at 57% favorable.
+
+The CNN/ORC International poll was conducted by telephone March 13-15 and included interviews with 1,009 adult Americans. For results among the full sample, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. For results among the 450 Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, or among the 466 Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents, it is 4.5 points.",REAL
+4585,"Facebook is full of fake news stories. On Election Day, don’t fall for them.","A public service announcement from your friends here at Vox: There will be an enormous amount of false information on Facebook, the internet, and TV this Election Day. Do yourself (and the country) a favor and ignore it.
+
+Politicians have always played fast and loose with the truth, cable news networks have always gotten stories wrong, and the internet has always been a place for conspiracy theories and misleading stories and photos.
+
+But the 2016 campaign has seen an unprecedented increase in the sheer number of false news stories being shared on Facebook or posted to genuine-looking but entirely fake news sites run by tech-savvy young people looking to make some money off this long and bitter election.
+
+Take the Denver Guardian, which earlier this month ran a story with the attention-grabbing headline “FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE.” The article ricocheted across Facebook and gained tens of thousands of shares despite the fact that there is no such thing as the “Denver Guardian” and that the “story” in question is a complete fabrication.
+
+It’s a dynamic that deeply concerns President Barack Obama, arguably the savviest user of social media in American political history — and the politician who has been targeted in the majority of Facebook’s most paranoid, conspiracy-minded, and outright racist viral posts.
+
+“As long as it’s on Facebook…people start believing it,” he said during a campaign stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Monday. “It creates this dust cloud of nonsense.""
+
+To make matters even dicier, many current and former US officials believe that Russia may try to deliberately spread false information on Election Day to make would-be Hillary Clinton voters stay home or simply to shake overall confidence in the American political system.
+
+All of which means that if you see or read something on Election Day that appears too dramatic to be true, there’s probably a good and simple reason: It isn’t.
+
+In November 2012, Fox News aired a video clip showing a member of the Black Panthers standing outside a polling station in Philadelphia. It was a single person at a single polling station in a heavily black, heavily Democratic area, but Fox anchors strongly suggested that it was part of a broader pattern of voter intimidation by militants determined to stop then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney. The segment was rebroadcast frequently throughout the day.
+
+Flash-forward four years. It’s certainly possible that Fox News — or a left-leaning station like MSNBC — will find a similar type of clip and present it in a way that is deliberately misleading.
+
+Amazingly, though, that could literally be the least of our problems. A much bigger concern is the proliferation of entirely fake news sites with entirely fake stories, often operated by tech-savvy entrepreneurs living overseas.
+
+A BuzzFeed article earlier this month found that young people in the Macedonian town of Veles (population 45,000) had created more than 140 pro-Trump news sites running posts every day that “are aggregated, or completely plagiarized, from fringe and right-wing sites in the US.”
+
+To take one example from the story, a website called ConservativeState posted an article with the headline “Hillary Clinton In 2013: ‘I Would Like to See People Like Donald Trump Run for Office; They’re Honest and Can’t Be Bought.’”
+
+The story was a complete fabrication, but it immediately went viral, racking up more than 480,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook in less than a week. By contrast, BuzzFeed noted that the New York Times bombshell revealing that Trump had declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns drew a comparatively small 175,000 Facebook interactions over an entire month.
+
+That kind of traffic is lucrative business for the Macedonians, some of whom told BuzzFeed that they made up to $5,000 per month pushing information they knew to be untrue.
+
+“Yes, the info in the blogs is bad, false, and misleading,” one of these youngsters told BuzzFeed. “But the rationale is that ‘if it gets the people to click on it and engage, then use it.’”
+
+Trump is also getting a boost from paid trolls in Russia who pretend to be American on multiple social media accounts that they use to make pro-Trump comments on traditional publications like the New York Times as well as on Facebook and Twitter. The lies and false information often gets parroted by both conservative news outlets like Fox News and Trump himself.
+
+“Are Russian trolls to blame for that?” a female troll asked comedian Samantha Bee. “Maybe people are to blame too. They’re lazy and believe everything they read.”
+
+The bitter race between Clinton and Trump may end up being the kind of excruciatingly close race where small pockets of voters in key states ultimately decide our next president. That makes dirty tricks like recent ads wrongly telling Clinton supporters that they could vote by text all the more dangerous.
+
+As the Washington Post reported, the fake ads circulated on Twitter with the exact fonts and imagery used in real Clinton campaign materials. They told Clinton backers that they could “save time” and “vote from home” by texting her name to a five-digit phone number. One English-language ad read, “Vote early. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.” Another was written entirely in Spanish.
+
+They were lies, of course. You can vote by mail or in person, but you most definitely cannot do it by texting Clinton’s first name to a random phone number. It’s unclear how many would-be Clinton voters fell into the trap, or who specifically was responsible for setting it. But in a race where every vote matters, the fake ads could easily have real impact.
+
+And that’s the biggest thing to keep in mind on Election Day. Facebook’s enormous reach means that lies and distortions — regardless of whether they come from GOP dirty tricksters, partisan journalists, paid trolls in Russia, or money-seeking entrepreneurs in Macedonia — can genuinely impact the outcome of the campaign. Be careful with what you read, be careful with what you retweet, and be careful with what you share on Facebook. There are bad actors out there hoping to mess with our election. Don’t make it easier for them.",REAL
+5745,Electric Floors Could Generate Renewable Energy From Walking,"Electric Floors Could Generate Renewable Energy From Walking Posted on Oct 29, 2016 Chuck Coker / CC BY-ND 2.0 
+LONDON—US scientists have found a new way to generate energy at home: the tribo-electric floor. Tread on it and it will convert the kinetic energy of a footstep into a current of electricity . And it’s made from the waste wood pulp that already serves as cheap flooring throughout the world. Xudong Wang , an engineer and materials scientist, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues report in the journal Nano Energy that they have taken cellulose fibres from forest waste material and chemically treated them in a way that creates an electric charge when they come into contact with untreated wood pulp fibres. The result: a patented, tribo-electric nanogenerator floor covering that can harness the energy of any footfall, and turn it into electric current that could light up a room or charge a battery. So far, it exists only as a laboratory prototype. It promises, the scientists say, to be cheap and durable. And it exploits a waste material available wherever there is a forest industry. “Our initial test in our lab shows that it works for millions of cycles without any problem,” Professor Wang said. “We haven’t converted those numbers into years of life for a floor yet, but I think with appropriate design it can definitely outlast the floor itself.” Long wait The gap between any laboratory experiment and a commercial success is huge, and many promising products never make it, or take years of further experiment. But this study is yet another example of the extraordinary explosion of ingenuity prompted by the need to generate energy in ways that sidestep the greenhouse gas emissions that have been driving dangerous climate change. Engineers, nanotechnologists and chemists have tested ways to make windows and even solar panels by making timber optically transparent . They have looked more closely at the tree’s relationship with the sun and fashioned a bionic leaf that can exploit sunlight 10 times more effectively to create biomass that could be turned into a liquid fuel. They have dreamed up an electric car battery that can renew itself with atmospheric carbon dioxide , and a bacterial fuel cell that generates electricity from waste water. Energy conserved And they have even devised the ultimate in power dressing – a fabric that as it rustles could charge a cellphone. Such research starts from the laws of thermodynamics, which dictate that energy must always be conserved. The energy involved in a plate of food, a footstep, the sprouting of a seedling or the turning of a turbine is still energy: there could be a way to recycle it rather than let it dissipate as heat into the atmosphere. What Professor Wang and his team have done is exploit the same property that creates static electricity in clothing: the tribo-electric effect which turns vibration into charge. The ground beneath the foot is a source of potential energy: the challenge is to find a way to plug into it. In theory, a busy motorway could become a renewable power source. Professor Wang and his team have already tested a nanogenerator that recovers energy from rolling tyres . Then they turned to the surface under the wheels. “We’ve been working a lot on harvesting energy from human activities. One way is to build something to put on people and another way is to build something that has constant access to people” “Roadside energy harvesting requires thinking about places where there is abundant energy we could be harvesting,” said Professor Wang. “We’ve been working a lot on harvesting energy from human activities. One way is to build something to put on people and another way is to build something that has constant access to people. The ground is the most used place.” The team have tested a fabric less than 1mm thick made of tiny chemically treated and untreated wood pulp fibres: in contact, electrons move from one to the other. This electronic transfer creates a charge imbalance that must be righted. But as the electrons return, they pass through an external circuit and deliver energy. In theory, the electric floor technology could be incorporated into all kinds of flooring. In theory, extra layers of the fabric could deliver even more power. The next step is to demonstrate the concept by putting a sheet of it down in a high-profile spot in the university campus. “This development shows great promises in creating large-scale and environmentally sustainable tribo-electric board for flooring, packaging and supporting infrastructures,” the authors write. 
+Tim Radford, a founding editor of Climate News Network, worked for The Guardian for 32 years, for most of that time as science editor. He has been covering climate change since 1988. 
+Advertisement",FAKE
+8670,Kind Samaritan Pays Off All Overdue Lunch Fees At Hometown Elementary School,"It’s difficult to comprehend, but an estimated 20% of kids in the United States of America live in poverty. In 2014, 13 million lived in food insecure households, meaning they weren’t sure when food... ",FAKE
+845,"Why now, John Kasich?","On Wednesday, after defeat in Indiana, John Kasich is announcing he is suspending his campaign.
+
+Which raises the question: Why?
+
+Why now? What changed?
+
+It was not as though he was ever winning. Losing Indiana seemed like a classic Kasich move. I thought his whole strategy was: “Win Ohio, and then just sort of amble along the campaign trail until the convention, at which point some kind of miracle will occur.”
+
+That was even what his ads suggested! They bordered on the fantastical. They were all missing several key steps. He appeared to be running a full “South Park” Underpants Gnome strategy (“Phase One, Collect Underpants. Phase Two, ?, Phase Three, Profit”) with a big question mark hanging high in the sky until the convention.
+
+“John Kasich is the nominee,” his PAC’s ads ran, “because [mumble mumble].” This, I thought, was the plan. Somehow, out of a clear blue sky, everyone was supposed to wake up and realize what was going on, and do the right thing.
+
+This was already a science fiction premise.
+
+I thought “oblivious” was the strategy. I thought this was the campaign equivalent of a filibuster, where you just keep going until everyone around you is exhausted and succumbs.
+
+Was he not doing this on purpose?
+
+He kept pointing out that he was good enough and smart enough and, durn it, people liked him, especially in counterfactual scenarios. The theme of the Kasich campaign was the sound of one hand hypothetically clapping. (Not to be confused with the Jeb! campaign, the sound of one hand forgetting to clap.) He was a particular favorite of hypothetical voters in a hypothetical general. Unfortunately, these days, hypothetical voters are not enough.
+
+Still, I thought that he was supposed to continue along on the Road Runner principle where, if you never look down, you never notice that you are running basically unsupported and can coast on to victory. You don’t need supporters as long as people basically don’t mind that you are sticking around.
+
+As Donald Trump kept pointing out, the percentage of states Kasich won got smaller and smaller with each new state added to the total. What was keeping him in the race?
+
+The dream of a contested convention? Look, the odds that, if Trump failed to get 1,237 delegates, those who made it to the floor would wind up choosing Kasich were only marginally better than the odds that Trump reached 1,237 delegates and they miraculously picked Kasich anyhow. “Some miracle occurs” was always an integral part of the Kasich strategy. Why not stay, just in case?
+
+When you are the last thing standing between the GOP and Trump is not the time to suddenly remember how this is supposed to work.",REAL
+9688,New Heavy-Duty Voting Machine Allows Americans To Take Out Frustration On It Before Casting Ballot - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"More Election Coverage New Heavy-Duty Voting Machine Allows Americans To Take Out Frustration On It Before Casting Ballot The new Citadel voting machines can withstand up to 40 voters an hour getting a running start from a dozen yards outside the booth, leaping at full speed, and jump-kicking them directly in the screen. Close The new Citadel voting machines can withstand up to 40 voters an hour getting a running start from a dozen yards outside the booth, leaping at full speed, and jump-kicking them directly in the screen. NEWS November 2, 2016 Vol 52 Issue 43 · Politics · Election 2016 
+WASHINGTON—Saying the circumstances of this year’s presidential race made the upgrade necessary, election commissions throughout the country were reportedly working to install new heavy-duty voting machines this week that will allow Americans to physically take out their frustrations on the devices before casting their votes. 
+According to Premier Election Solutions, the manufacturer of the new Citadel electronic voting machine, each unit features an easy-to-navigate interface, keeps accurate and secure tallies of votes, and is constructed with durable Kevlar buttons, a shatter-resistant Plexiglas screen, and a reinforced titanium housing, ensuring the devices are able to endure sustained blunt force trauma from voters’ fists and elbows as well as repeated puncturing attempts from sharp objects wielded by exasperated citizens. 
+“These new voting machines were designed specifically with the 2016 election in mind and have been engineered to withstand everything the nation’s voters will bring at them on Election Day,” said company spokesperson Stephen Dunn, who also noted that the units’ Teflon coating makes it easy to wipe down all the sweat and saliva that will accumulate on their surface when they are being repeatedly pummeled in fits of anger. “When 18 months of disgust finally culminate inside the nation’s voting booths, these machines will be able to absorb every punch, kick, and knee drop citizens can dish out while still reliably tabulating totals for all local, state, and national races.” 
+“Like millions of other Americans, I know that I’ll be ready to unload my pent-up rage next Tuesday,” Dunn added. “And our machines will be ready too.” 
+According to Dunn, the Citadel underwent numerous revisions during testing, as a series of early designs proved incapable of withstanding voters’ increasing level of aggravation as the election progressed. Engineers are said to have quickly pulled their prototypes from preliminary field tests during the Virginia and Minnesota primaries upon learning the device’s original plastic housing was splintering to pieces following sharp headbutts from as few as three successive voters. 
+Additionally, internal modifications were reportedly made after Super Tuesday to more securely solder the processor and wiring into place so the unit would maintain functionality each time it was thrown to the ground by a red-faced, screaming voter and continuously kicked for 35 minutes straight. 
+In a later trial during the Wisconsin primary, when the Republican field had been effectively whittled down to just Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, Dunn said the design team came up with the idea to attach an aluminum baseball bat to the side of the machine with a steel cord, noting that if they didn’t provide voters with a convenient weapon, they would physically rip the unit’s legs off and beat it with those to the point of exhaustion. 
+“Our test models were really pushed to their physical limits during the New Jersey primary in June when it was more or less clear that the country would be left with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as its two choices for president,” said Dunn, explaining that the devices had to survive all-out, abusive barrages from every voter who entered their testing precincts in Passaic County. “Thankfully, we had incorporated military-grade armor plating into the machines by that point, which proved able to sustain everything from being repeatedly smashed up against a cinder-block gymnasium wall to being dragged up and then pushed down flights of church basement stairs several times in a row.” 
+“Of course, that was the night we learned we needed to make the touchscreen bulletproof, though,” Dunn continued. 
+According to poll workers, excitement about the new machines appears to have increased voter turnout in the general election, with early voting up by as much as 30 percent in states where the units have already been installed, forcing many polling places to institute time limits on how long voters can batter, stomp on, and bite the units in raving bouts of hysterics. 
+“It was nice to get in there and finally cast my ballot,” said 55-year-old Gordon Mulner, an early voter in Fredericksburg, VA, panting heavily as he wiped away the sheen of sweat from his brow with his raw, bleeding knuckles. “I had to wait in line a little while, but it was worth it. It felt good to make my voice heard.” 
+“I think I broke my hand,” he added. 
+At press time, election officials were scrambling to chain the machines to precinct walls, as it became apparent they would need to prevent voters from lugging them into the parking lot and repeatedly backing over them with their cars. Share This Story: Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
+Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
+222,House approves Syrian refugees bill,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+4300,Round 2: GOP rivals try to ding Trump at debate – front-runner hits back,"Donald Trump once again found himself the lightning rod of the Republican presidential race Wednesday, as he tangled with a debate stage full of rivals trying to position themselves as the best alternative to the GOP front-runner.
+
+The second Republican primary debate veered into serious policy territory – covering everything from Iran to Russia to Planned Parenthood to immigration. But, at times to the visible frustration of candidates trying to stick to those issues, few segments passed without a sparring session between Trump and one of his opponents. Almost every time, Trump hit back – and it was unclear whether any candidate would be able to dent his front-runner status.
+
+The candidate perhaps most eager to knock the billionaire businessman down a peg was former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who lost his lead to Trump over the summer. Repeatedly, Bush challenged Trump on his record and past comments.
+
+He told Trump to apologize to his wife for suggesting her being from Mexico makes Bush more sympathetic to Mexicans – Trump refused.
+
+He accused Trump of once giving him money as he sought casino gambling, unsuccessfully, in Florida.
+
+Trump denied it, and when Bush criticized Trump for bragging about demanding Hillary Clinton attend his wedding, Trump teased him, saying: “More energy tonight, I like that.” (Bush answered back at the end of the debate – asked what his Secret Service codename would be, Bush said, “Very High Energy, Donald,” and the two shared a high-five.)
+
+“It was such a disaster those last few months that Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have been elected,” Trump said.
+
+Bush responded that his brother “kept us safe.” Trump answered, “You feel safe right now?”
+
+Some of the most heated exchanges at the CNN debate also came between Trump and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, both business leaders.
+
+After Trump called her former company a “disaster,” she cited his repeated bankruptcy filings and questioned why America should trust him to manage its finances.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie interjected and said middle-class Americans “could care less about your careers.” He told the two to “stop this childish back and forth.”
+
+Fiorina also got her chance at the debate to respond to Trump’s controversial jab at her, where in a magazine article he said: “Look at that face – would anyone vote for that?”
+
+Asked to respond, she said, “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.”
+
+Fiorina received loud applause for the line, and Trump added, “I think she’s got a beautiful face, and I think she’s a beautiful woman.”
+
+Despite all the attention on Trump, his dominant lead in the polls means his rivals may be battling at this stage for runner-up, for now.
+
+Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson currently holds that status after vaulting into second place in the polls – yet was able to avoid the fray for most of Wednesday’s debate.
+
+He took one light-hearted jab at Trump, after Trump discussed his views on vaccines and said there are cases of children getting sick – and having autism – after getting them.
+
+Asked about Trump’s medical opinion, Carson said, “He’s an okay doctor” – in reference to a comment Trump recently made about him. Carson went on to say there’s no documented association between autism and vaccines, but doctors are probably giving too many vaccines in a short period of time.
+
+After the exchange about George W. Bush, Carson also noted that he did not want Bush to “go to war” in Iraq. He added that radical jihadists now are an “existential threat to our nation” and leaders can’t “put our heads in the sand.”
+
+Aside from the sparring with Trump, the candidates did have a chance to stake out their positions on a range of policy issues.
+
+Fiorina, in an impassioned moment in the debate, appealed to Congress to defund Planned Parenthood following videos exposing organ harvesting from aborted fetuses.
+
+“This is about the character of our nation. And if we will not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us,” she said.
+
+Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee slammed a federal judge for temporarily jailing Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, saying the U.S. has made religious “accommodations” for Guantanamo detainees and the Fort Hood shooter, but Davis is facing a “criminalization of her faith.”
+
+And Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said of the agreement with Tehran, “I will rip to shreds this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal.”
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich urged against going that far.
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio also focused on foreign policy, warning about China’s military build-up, and “gangsters in Moscow” meddling on the world stage.
+
+On this, Rubio challenged Trump’s global affairs knowledge. Trump vowed, “I will know more about the problems of this world” as president. And he criticized Rubio for missing votes.
+
+Trump’s fitness to be commander-in-chief was a common theme for his rivals.
+
+Fiorina said, when asked if she’s comfortable with Trump controlling America’s nuclear weapons: “I think Mr. Trump is a wonderful entertainer.” She said “judgment” and “temperament” will be revealed “over time and under pressure” in the race.
+
+Trump answered: “I may be an entertainer. … but I will tell you this. What I am far and away greater than an entertainer is a businessman.”
+
+Trump also went after Sen. Rand Paul, saying he shouldn’t even be on the stage.
+
+“There’s a sophomoric quality that is entertaining about Mr. Trump,” Paul answered, but he added he’s concerned about him being in charge of nuclear weapons. Paul chastised Trump for his “visceral response,” including attacking people on their appearance which he likened to “junior high.”
+
+Trump said he never did that to Paul, quipping: “Believe me there’s plenty of subject matter right there.”
+
+Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also zinged Trump, saying: “We don’t need an apprentice in the White House. We have one right now.”
+
+Walker and Bush have both seen their polling numbers drop in recent weeks as Trump, and now Carson, have risen. Walker is trying to refocus his campaign on his record as governor, and record battling labor unions; the latter issue did not surface much during Wednesday’s debate, though. In his closing remarks, Walked vowed that as a leader, “I won’t back down any day, any way, anyhow.”
+
+An unexpected clash also broke out at the end, when Paul made a veiled reference to Bush having smoked marijuana years ago as Paul challenged federal marijuana policy.
+
+Bush acknowledged Paul was talking about him and said: “40 years ago, I smoked marijuana, and I admit it.”
+
+Paul then claimed people with “privilege” don’t go to jail for marijuana, but others do.
+
+The main stage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Wednesday night featured the 11 top-polling candidates. It followed an earlier undercard debate of four lower-polling candidates.
+
+Fiorina, while rising in the polls, is still averaging just over 3 percent nationally, according to RealClearPolitics. Bush, once the front-runner, is at about 8 percent. Walker is down to 3 percent. Cruz and Rubio remain in the middle of the pack, trailing slightly behind Bush.
+
+But with Carson and Trump attracting the support of roughly half of primary voters, the other 14 candidates are fighting for relative scraps. Trump’s national lead now tops 30 percent.
+
+At the earlier undercard debate, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tangled often with his GOP rivals, positioning himself as an experienced, practical lawmaker not beholden to conservative activist causes. He focused squarely on the need to defeat radical Islamic terrorists, while Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal focused at that debate on religious freedom issues.",REAL
+5646,Hillary admits creation of Mujahedin plague,"Share This: PATRICE GREANVILLE T he problem is that, while helpful to have the empire’s managers show their true sociopathic face, her narrative is a distorted simplification bearing all the vices of her political prejudices and ignorance, the script favored by the US ruling class. 
+Consider just one of her major lies, tossed about casually and sure to be swallowed whole by the perennially clueless audience: That The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan… The USSR did not invade Afghanistan . The besieged, progressive and modernising Kabul government—a leftwing government that promptly moved to advance literacy, gave women full and unrestricted civil rights, and in general was trying to bring the nation out of the middle ages (program which Washington could care less), invited the Soviets to come in, as it was meeting stiff resistance to its reforms by the entrenched landlords and reactionary clerics in the countryside. Moscow accepted the invitation because it also suited its valid objective of not allowing the Americans to plant another huge military base on the Central Asia underbelly, part of the encirclement of Russia the US has been carrying out for many decades. The invitation is similar and as genuine as the invitation by the Government of Syria, today, to come in and fight against the Western-sponsored terrorists, an authority to set foot on Syrian soil which the Americans and their multiple sordid accomplices in mayhem in the Middle East, totally lack. Contrast this with Washington’s actions in Vietnam, where it first refused to recognize the right of the newly independent Vietnamese to a free election (since they knew the communists led by Ho Chi Minh would win by a huge margin), and then simply invaded that nation under trumped up pretexts (Gulf of Tonkin, etc.).The closer you inspect the US government narrative, the clearer it becomes it is a tissue of cynical big lies, word-twistings, professional pr.r. spin, and self-serving myths and simplifications—all in the service of sordid and criminal goals the elites can never admit to the American public.
+PHOTOS: Above—Afghan women college students, a total novelty in Kabul, sporting Western dress, etc. (1978). Afghan women studying, as equals, in Kabul, 1979. The communist government in power then (PDPA, the People’s Democratic party of Afghanistan) actually liberated Afghan women from centuries old customs that effectively enslaved them to husband and society. As usual, Western bourgeois feminists have said virtually nothing about the tremendous losses suffered by women and children as a result of Washington’s intervention in Afghanistan on the side of the most reactionary sectors of society. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS",FAKE
+6542,Russia prevented Spain from diplomatical conflict denying its proposal,"Russia prevented Spain from diplomatical conflict denying its proposal 27.10.2016 | Source: AP Photo 
+Russian ships led by the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier will not enter into the Spanish harbor of Ceuta because of the naval group's route change, the Russian embassy in Spain said Wednesday. 
+""We confirm that the ships will not enter the Ceuta port because the route has changed,"" stated the embassy official. 
+Earlier the Spanish Foreign Ministry said that Madrid was considering granting the Russian naval task group access to Ceuta on October 28-November 2, drawing criticism from NATO. 
+On October 15, the Russian Northern Fleet's press service said that a group of warships headed by the Admiral Kuznetsov, accompanied by the Pyotr Veliky battle cruiser, the Severomorsk and Vice-Admiral Kulakov anti-submarine destroyers, and support vessels, had been sent to the Mediterranean to hold drills and strengthen capabilities. 
+Such decision may sound ridiculous due to the fact that a week ago Spain has signed the EU's announce on Russian's military offence in Aleppo. Moreover, two weeks ago Spain had developed a resolution that blamed Russian's military activities in Syria. 
+Pravda.Ru's political expert Alexander Chichin revealed the nature of the contrariety of Spain's policy on Russia. 
+Expert said that this decision is connected with NATO's attitude. Initially it all was referred to one tanker which was not an issue for Spain. Then they discovered that there was a whole fleet. Afterwards spanish realised that this fleet included aircraft carrier 'Admiral Kusnetsov', cruiser 'Pyotr Veliky' and antisubmarine aircraft carrier 'Severomorsk'. 
+That's why Spain had to refuse. At the moment spanish people say that they are very ashamed for not refusing straight away. They are disappointed that they have recieved NATO's warn. 
+It is worth mentiong that Spain could have got benefits from this proposal because the country needs money. These ships during only six days could make a great sum of money from Russia to Spain. 
+Spain had to choose between its international authoriy and its inner financial profits. Abandonnig the proposal, Russia saved Spain from resolving this kind of dilemma. 
+Pravda.Ru 
+Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru Will Spain rise to glory with Felipe VI?",FAKE
+9321,Get Ready For A Likely Market Crash After Election [Video w/ Transcript],"Leave a reply 
+Greg Hunter – Recently, I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Jim Sinclair and Bill Holter at JSMineset.com. They wanted to get my take on the state of journalism, or the propaganda mainstream media. They also wanted to get a read on what many of my guests have been saying over the past several months about what is coming for the economy. 
+I also got to turn the tables about half way through the interview (38:33) and ask questions of two of the smartest guys in the world on finance, markets and precious metals. 
+Interviewing Jim Sinclair and Bill Holter on anything to do with the economy is like interviewing Batman and Superman of the investment world. They have very dire views of what is going to happen in America and the world on November 9 th , the day after the Presidential election. They think we are finally going to get the “Houston we have a problem” moment and are warning that everyone should stock up and prepare for a very rough ride. Please keep in mind, this interview was conducted a few days before the FBI reopened its case on the Clinton email scandal. 
+Jim Sinclair and Bill Holter offer interviews like this to their JSMineset.com subscribers only. They were kind enough to allow me to post this interview for all to listen to on the USAWatchdog.com site and YouTube channel. 
+Join Greg Hunter as he is interviewed by Jim Sinclair and Bill Holter of JSMineset.com. SF Source USA Watchdog Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+4602,When white nationalists show up to 'monitor' the polls,"Many Americans of different political stripes share concerns about the integrity of the presidential election. Citizen 'observers' can be a good thing if they are respectful. Intimidation is the concern.
+
+A row of voting booths is seen at a polling station during early voting in Chicago on Oct. 14.
+
+As the commander of the largest white nationalist organization in the United States, Jeff Schoep has worn brown shirts and militant all-black uniforms. On Election Day, however, Mr. Schoep, of Litchfield, Minn., will don his civvies to blend in – for the most part.
+
+Amid concerns of election fraud, Schoep and his fellow members of the National Socialist Movement are planning to stand by polling places around the country, particularly those in predominantly black areas.
+
+Schoep says he has ordered his colleagues to be respectful and discreet as they look for evidence of wrongdoing, but he acknowledges that he might not be beyond pushing the boundaries here and there: He’s considering wearing a small NSM insignia on his street clothes.
+
+“Confucius says a wise man considers the possibility of anything, and I do,” says Schoep, whose organization numbers in the hundreds. “I’m not saying for sure that there’s some federal conspiracy and the system is going to rig this election, but it’s a concern and a possibility, and I think people need to be mindful of it. There’s a lot of mistrust of the federal government coming to a head this year.”
+
+The National Socialist Movement, a recognized political party that critics call a neo-Nazi group, is one of myriad organizations and individual Americans on both the right and left vowing to keep an extra close watch on the elections this year. Concerns are percolating, with stories about dead people voting in Philadelphia, vote-switching machines in Texas, and a female Trump supporter in Iowa arrested for trying to vote twice.
+
+Such stories partly miss the point, voting experts say. “The only way you’re going to succeed in stealing an election … is massive absentee ballot fraud or being an insider who perverts the system,” says Steve Huefner, co-author of “From Registration to Recounts: The Election Ecosystems of Five Midwestern States.”
+
+But having multiple groups from all sides of the political spectrum watching an election isn’t necessarily bad, others say. In fact, should it be a close, contested election, more eyes on the polls could help ease distrust and create confidence that the results are the true reflection of the nation’s collective will.
+
+The problem is when observation crosses the line into intimidation – if an insignia, or a gun, or a baseball bat makes someone less likely to stand in line to vote.
+
+“Observation at the polls should not cross the line into intimidation, that’s key,” says Ned Foley, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State University’s Moritz School of Law and author of “Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States.” “But observation by both sides is a good thing.”
+
+“We have an extremely transparent system, and that transparency is crucial to a well-functioning democracy and – just as important – the public perception that it is functioning properly,” he adds.
+
+In many ways, United States elections already have observers built in. While systems in Britain and Australia, for example, are run by nonpartisan commissions, US elections are run by states and counties.
+
+That seems like a recipe for local tampering, but rules ensure that both parties are looking over each other’s shoulder, especially at the local courthouse where votes are tallied and transmitted up the chain.
+
+Many Americans, however, feel like they need to see for themselves, too. Some 41 percent of Americans believe the election could be stolen, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll. That's despite the fact that multiple studies have shown that voter fraud in the US is all-but-nonexistent.
+
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has grasped that thread of doubt to build a “nationwide election protection operation” largely of followers urged to attend polls “in certain areas” to look for “you know what,” as Mr. Trump recently said.
+
+Trump ally Roger Stone says he has recruited “Vote Protectors” to conduct exit polls in precincts around the country. North Carolina Democrats, in a lawsuit filed this week, called it a “phony” attempt to intimidate voters. In the lawsuit, plaintiffs cite the appearance of a person at a North Carolina polling place carrying a baseball bat emblazoned with the word “TRUMP” while wearing a badge with the words “poll observer.”
+
+Conservatives often point to video showing a New Black Panther member with a nightstick outside a polling station in Philadelphia in 2008.
+
+The alt-right website TheRightStuff.Biz announced it would be employing people dressed up as blue-collar workers to surreptitiously mount cameras in polling places. A representative of the site told Politico that activists will also go into “ghettos in Philly with beer and marijuana to give out to the local residents” so that they’re more likely to stay home and not vote.
+
+The Oath Keepers, a group of retired law enforcement formed in 2009, says they will “form up incognito intelligence-gathering and crime spotting teams and go out into public on Election Day, dressed to blend in with the public.”
+
+The group vowed to “operate within the law,” but surreptitiously.
+
+“Dress to blend with the crowd,” Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes wrote to members. “That may mean wearing a Bob Marley, pot leaf, tie-die (sic) peace symbol, or ‘Che’ Guevara T-shirt … or it may mean wearing working-man Carhartt pants and a plaid shirt.”
+
+Democrats have their own concerns.
+
+The mobilization of alt-right poll watchers in the inner city goes hand-in-hand with official voter roll purges, elimination of polling places in black neighborhoods, and anecdotes of eligible voters unable to vote, liberals say.
+
+“There’s very little difference between a white supremacist trying to keep certain segments of society from feeling comfortable about exercising the franchise and someone who sits behind an election clerk desk doing the same thing through legal means,” says Karl Frisch, a former senior fellow at the progressive Media Matters for America and the current director of Allied Progress.
+
+Even foreign governments are getting into the game. Three states report denying Russia the right to send observers into US polling stations, shrugging it off as a “PR stunt.”
+
+The standard for the system, however, should not be 100 percent accuracy, but rather preventing mistakes or incidents from affecting the outcome, say experts.
+
+“We can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good,” says Professor Huefner, also of the Ohio State University’s Moritz School of Law. “In fact, the kinds of things that election-day observers are being called upon to [watch for] are pretty rare, like voting by dead people or by unregistered voters.”
+
+“I’m not saying there are no instances of in-person voter fraud, but we cannot find instances in which that type of misbehavior has changed the outcome of an election,” he adds.
+
+The greater concern is the “gray area with some conduct,” says Professor Foley. For example, “state laws about guns and voter intimidation are a patchwork of wildly varying regulations,” The Washington Post reports.
+
+Adds Foley: ""Much of this will be subjective at the margins.”",REAL
+8237,Michelle Obama Deletes Hillary Clinton From Twitter,"Michelle Obama Deletes Hillary Clinton From Twitter When Hillary goes low, Michelle goes BYE! Posted on November 1, 2016 by Baxter Dmitry in News , US // 1 Comment 
+Michelle Obama has scrubbed all references to Hillary Clinton from both of her Twitter accounts as news breaks that Clinton is under two different FBI investigations involving four FBI offices. 
+The @FLOTUS account has been wiped clean of all traces of Hillary, and @MichelleObama , a verified page with almost six million followers, has been scrubbed all the way back to 2013. 
+Is Michelle performing a last minute tidy up, clearing out the clutter before the dumpster fire of the Democratic campaign finally burns out? RELATED CONTENT Obama Administration Begs Court Not To Depose Hillary Clinton 
+Are the Washington elite preparing to move on from Hillary? 
+Bernie Sanders has also begun to change his tune. A Twitter post today sure didn’t sound like it was referring to Hillary Clinton. Now is the time for our next president to rally people against Wall Street and corporate greed and stand up for the declining middle class. 
+— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 30, 2016 
+Bernie was asked by a supporter about the write-in thing – and his response might surprise you. “ If you want to write me in here [Vermont], I think it’s fine.”",FAKE
+5543,DAPL Protesters Proven Right as Largest Gas Pipeline in U.S. Experiences Massive and Deadly Explosion,"By Claire Bernish A massive explosion of a gas pipeline in Shelby County, Alabama — near the site where the same pipeline leaked some 336,000... ",FAKE
+3132,Jeb Bush Attacks Obama Administration For Failing 'Easy Calls' On Religious Freedom,"Former Florida governor and likely GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush offered a defense of conservative Christian principles and attacked the Obama administration for failing to preserve religious freedom during his commencement address at Liberty University, a Christian school in Lynchburg, Virginia.
+
+Bush accused the Obama administration of using ""coercive federal power"" to infringe on the religious rights of Americans.
+
+""What should be easy calls, in favor of religious freedom, have instead become an aggressive stance against it. Somebody here is being small-minded and intolerant, and it sure isn’t the nuns, ministers, and laymen and women who ask only to live and practice their faith,"" he said, according to remarks released ahead of the speech. ""Federal authorities are demanding obedience, in complete disregard of religious conscience -- and in a free society, the answer is 'no.'”
+
+Last year, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Obama administration could not require closely held corporations to provide insurance coverage of contraception to employees if the employers objected on religious grounds.
+
+Bush converted to Catholicism -- his wife's religion -- two decades ago following a tense period in his marriage. Bush has said in the past that he believes the faith of leaders should shape their decision-making.
+
+""[S]ome moral standards are universal. They do not bend under the weight of cultural differences or elite opinion. Wherever there is a child waiting to be born, we say choose life, and we say it with love,"" Bush said on Saturday. ""Wherever women and girls in other countries are brutally exploited, or treated as possessions without rights and dignity, we Christians see that arrogance for what it is. Wherever Jews are subjected to the oldest bigotry, we reject that sin against our brothers and sisters, and we defend them.""
+
+Liberty University was founded by Jerry Falwell, a former Southern Baptist pastor and religious commentator. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) announced his presidential campaign at the school in March.",REAL
+8707,US Insiders – Not Russia – Leaked Clinton Emails," US Insiders – Not Russia – Leaked Clinton Emails By WashingtonsBlog
+November 03, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - We’ve repeatedly shown that it’s much more likely that American insiders – not Russian hackers – leaked the Clinton emails.
+Today, the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – told Washington’s Blog:
+My vote all along has been on an insider passing all these emails to Wikileaks.
+If it were the Russians, NSA would have a trace route to them and not equivocate on who did it. It’s like using “Trace Route” to map the path of all the packets on the network. In the program Treasuremap NSA has hundreds of trace route programs embedded in switches in Europe and hundreds more around the world. So, this set-up should have detected where the packets went and when they went there.
+Binney has previously explained to us that a Russian hack would have looked very different, and that he thought the hack may have been conducted by an NSA employee who was upset at Clinton’s careless handling of America’s most sensitive intelligence.
+The former intelligence analyst, British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and chancellor of the University of Dundee (Craig Murray) – who is close friends with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange – said he knows with 100% certainty that the Russians aren’t behind the leaks.
+Murray said today:
+“The source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all. I discovered what the source was when I attended [a] whistleblower award in Washington. The source of these emails comes from within official circles in Washington DC. You should look to Washington not to Moscow .”
+Prominent investment advisor and economic forecaster Martin Armstrong writes today:
+All our indications from behind the curtain are suggesting that there are many within the “intelligence” sector and “law enforcement” sector who are deeply troubled with the Clintons. They are trying to release documents and info to stop the Clinton Inc. Machine. That’s all we can say on this topic right now. Suffice it to say, there is a real internal battle going on in Washington.
+And the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under numerous administrations – both Democratic and Republican – (Steve Pieczenik ) said recently that a group of officers from various U.S. intelligence and military agencies have staged a “counter-coup” to save America from corruption, and are the source of the leaked emails:
+Interesting times, indeed
+http://www.washingtonsblog.com",FAKE
+5999,Iraq ‘Ready For War’ With Turkey Over Who Should Control Mosul After Isis,"By wmw_admin on November 4, 2016 Patrick Cockburn — The Unz Review Nov 2, 2016 The Iraqi Army is moving on Mosul from the south. Click to enlarge 
+Iraq and Turkey are threatening to go to war with each other over who should hold power in Mosul and the surrounding region after the defeat of Isis . Turkish tanks and artillery have deployed along the border and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said that while Iraq “did not want war with Turkey” it is ready to fight one if necessary. 
+The confrontation is sharpening as the Iraqi Army enters eastern Mosul and Shia militia known as the Hashd al-Shaabi advance towards the town of Tal Afar, threatening to cut Isis’s last escape route from Mosul to Syria . Turkey sees itself as the protector of the Sunni Arabs of Mosul and northern Iraq, a community left vulnerable by the likely defeat of Isis by Shia and Kurdish forces backed by US-led airpower. 
+The dependence of the anti-Isis forces on air strikes and drones was underlined on Wednesday when Iraqi Special Forces delayed their advance into east Mosul because high humidity and clouds made it difficult for aircraft to identify and attack targets on the ground. They had entered the industrial suburb of Gogjali on Tuesday and were Wednesday going from house to house looking for Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and booby traps. 
+The population of Mosul east of the Tigris River, which divides the city in half, has in the past consisted largely of well-educated professional people such as doctors and engineers, few of whom are likely to be sympathetic to Isis. Residents in the east say they expected Isis to withdraw to the western side of Mosul, which is more sympathetic to them, crossing the five bridges spanning the Tigris which, the residents say, have been rigged with demolition charges. 
+The Iraqi government reacted angrily to the possibility of Turkish intervention. “The invasion of Iraq will lead to Turkey being dismantled,” said Mr Abadi at a news conference in Baghdad on Tuesday. “We do not want war with Turkey, and we do not want a confrontation with Turkey, but if a confrontation happens, we are ready for it.” He added that Iraq would consider Turkey as an enemy and would deal with it as an enemy. 
+The exchange of abuse between Ankara and Baghdad continued on Wednesday when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu denounced Mr Abadi as “weak”, asking: “If you have the strength, why did you surrender Mosul to terror organisations? If you are so strong, why has the PKK occupied your lands for years?” Earlier Turkey’s deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus had tried to lower the temperature by saying that the military build-up was a precaution and not a threat. 
+Iraqi leaders in Baghdad have long privately blamed Turkey for aiding or tolerating al-Qaeda-type movements like Isis which operated in Iraq, but the ill-will is now becoming more public on both sides. On 11 October President Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched a furious tirade against Mr Abadi, saying: “He insults me. You are not on the same level as me! You are not my equal! Scream all you want from Iraq! It will not change anything! We will do what we want to do.” On 23 October, Mr Erdogan further raised the stakes by asserting Mosul has historically belonged to Turkey and it should therefore play a role in determining its future. 
+Turkey already has 700 troops at a base in Bashiqa, north of Mosul, and has been training a Sunni Arab militia force of former policemen from Mosul numbering about 2,500. This force is probably not big enough to make Turkey a player in the struggle for the city and political observers in Irbil believe Turkey will not intervene militarily. But this could change if the Hashd attack Tal Afar, whose Turkman population is about 80 per cent Sunni and which is the home town of many Isis commanders, judges and religious police. Turkey would also be energised if the PKK was visibly benefiting from developments in and around Mosul. Another more cynical interpretation of Turkey’s focus on Mosul is that it is to divert attention from its muted response to the Syrian and Russian assault on East Aleppo. 
+The fall of Mosul is likely to give birth to a series of crises because the province of Nineveh, of which it is the capital, is a mosaic of warring sects and ethnic groups. After years of war these are divided by deep hatreds, with Yazidis, Kurds and Christians all accusing their Sunni Arab neighbours of complicity in Isis massacres. In Nineveh Plain most of the Sunni Arabs have fled into Mosul city fearing revenge from returning Christians and the Shabak minority who are largely Shia. 
+Revenge is taking place within sectarian and ethnic groups, some of whom joined Isis while others fought it. Amnesty International says that pro-Iraqi government Sunni tribal fighters taking part in the Mosul operation are carrying out revenge attacks on men and boys in “liberated” areas suspected of belonging to Isis. Fighters from the Sabawi tribe, originally from Mosul, are said by Amnesty to have illegally detained civilians, beaten them with metal rods, given them electric shocks and tied some of them to the bonnets of vehicles and paraded them through the streets while others were placed in cages, according to interviews with local officials and eyewitnesses. Many people displaced from Mosul and surrounding towns and villages say they will not return home until security is restored and this is still a long way off.",FAKE
+8079,Trump voter listens carefully to call for national unity then sets up Aryan website,"Trump voter listens carefully to call for national unity then sets up Aryan website 11-11-16 
+A DONALD Trump supporter listened carefully to the president-elect’s call for national unity before registering the domain name for a white supremacist website. 
+Brent Logan, from Ohio, paid $19.99 for aryanknightsofamerica.net and said he hoped it would be a website for all Americans, ‘except the black, hispanic, Asian, Muslim and Jewish ones’. 
+He added: “But they’re not American anyway. Which is what President Trump has been saying all along. 
+“Which us why his call for national unity is so important. He wants to unify us against blacks, hispanics, Asians, Muslims and the Jews. 
+“He is a very good public speaker.” 
+Logan continued: “It’s going to be very much an Aryan lifestyle website. Fashion tips for intimidating minorities at a picnic; how to decorate your basement with flags, that sort of thing.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+6073,NOT KIDDING: Colleges Give Students “Safe Spaces” To Cry Over Trump Win…Threaten Students Over Pro-Trump “Chalkings”,"Students expressed their “fear” over a Trump presidency in messages to each other that were being shared on Twitter today: “Literally scared for their lives” is the new “literally Hitler”. #NotMyPresident pic.twitter.com/8cKfQdF2Ce 
+— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 9, 2016 
+And finally, this ridiculous and totally biased email was sent from University of Michigan President to the students offering them assistance to help them through the results of our Presidential election last night. The President wants to ensure the students that the university remains committed to their “most important responsibility” at their school which is apparently, “to remain committed to education, discovery and intellectual honesty – and to diversity, equity and inclusion.”: 
+To All Members of the University Community: 
+As I’m sure many of you did, I watched the election coverage late into the night, and had the opportunity to visit with students and staff at a results-watching event sponsored by the Ginsberg Center at the Michigan Union. It will take quite some time to completely absorb the results from yesterday’s election, understand the full implications, and discern the long-term impact on our university and our nation . More immediately, in the aftermath of a close and highly contentious election we continue to embrace our most important responsibility as a university community. Our responsibility is to remain committed to education, discovery and intellectual honesty – and to diversity, equity and inclusion. We are at our best when we come together to engage respectfully across our ideological differences; to support ALL who feel marginalized, threatened or unwelcome; and to pursue knowledge and understanding, as we always have, as the students, faculty and staff of the University of Michigan. There are reports of members of our community offering support to one another. Students are planning a vigil tonight on the Diag at 6 p.m. Our Center for Research on Teaching and Learning also has numerous resources available for faculty seeking help in cultivating classroom environments that are responsive to national issues. I also want to make everyone aware of some of the plans and events we have had in place for today and beyond. · Our Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy is holding a Post-Election Analysis from 4 to 5:30 p.m. today in the Weill Hall’s Annenberg Auditorium. Speakers include former U.S. Congressman John Dingell, former Ambassador Ron Weiser, and faculty members Mara Ostfeld, Betsey Stevenson and Marina Whitman. · Our History Department has organized a community discussion led by faculty and students to include historical perspectives at 6 p.m. tonight in 1014 Tisch Hall. · The Office of Student Life will provide resources and referrals for support on campus to students, faculty and staff at a location in the Michigan Union’s Willis Ward Lounge. It will be open today from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. · Our Office of Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs is offering an open space of support to help members of our community connect during open hours today. MESA’s office is in the Michigan Union, Room 2202. · Tomorrow, our Ginsberg Center and Counseling and Psychological Services office is facilitating a Post-election Dialogue: Impact, Perspective-taking, and Moving Forward. This event is part of the Student Life Professional Development Conference at 1 – 2 p.m. in the Michigan League’s Henderson Room. I know that other schools, colleges and offices across our campus are planning events as well. I thank everyone who is helping us come together and ask anyone scheduling a post election event post it on the University of Michigan Events Calendar. I hope all of us will continue to proudly embrace the opportunities before us as the students, faculty and staff of a great public research university governed by the people. Elections are often times of great change, but the values we stand for at U-M have been shaped over the course of nearly 200 years. Our mission remains as essential for society as ever: “…to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.” I look forward to working together with all of you to advance the work we do in service of the public – and to ensure that the University of Michigan will always be a welcoming place for all members of society. Sincerely, 
+Mark Schlissel President  ",FAKE
+119,"Ferguson, N. Charleston: 2 police killings, 2 outcomes","(CNN) The shootings' main similarity is that the officer was white and the victim was black and unarmed. Outside of that, the highly publicized police shootings in Ferguson and North Charleston bear only mild resemblance.
+
+So what's changed between the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August, and that of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, last weekend? And did the backlash and publicity of the Ferguson shooting influence the handling of the North Charleston incident?
+
+It's tough to say for sure, but here are some of the stark differences in the cases, the lessons learned by both police and the public, and concrete changes that could help mend tensions in the future.
+
+Ferguson: Officer Darren Wilson said he shot Brown after the two struggled over Wilson's gun, and witnesses to the shooting had different accounts -- often conflicting -- of where Wilson was, where Brown was and whether Brown was surrendering or charging the officer.
+
+North Charleston: Though it's unclear what happened in the moments before a bystander began recording the incident on his phone, it's 100% clear from the video that Scott was not posing a threat to Officer Michael Slager when the policeman opened fire on Scott as he ran away.
+
+Takeaway: Where Brown's killing was a breeding ground for speculation -- with a stark divide between those who said Wilson was justified and those who said Brown was senselessly slain -- no such debate has emerged in the Scott shooting.
+
+It would be tough to extrapolate for certain, but it's possible that the clear-cut imagery of an officer shooting a fleeing man in the back resulted in the prompt charges against the officer, and that quick reaction by authorities in South Carolina after the video surfaced headed off the sort of violence that repeatedly unfolded in Ferguson as the process of determining Wilson's fate dragged on for months.
+
+North Charleston: It's closer to an even split here, with census data from 2010 showing the city is 47% black and 42% white. The makeup of the city's police department is unclear, though it's been widely reported that 2007 federal figures indicated it was about 80% black. Three of the 10 City Council members are black.
+
+Takeaway: The ratio of white and black officers on the North Charleston Police Department appears to more closely mirror the makeup of its population than does the Ferguson Police Department, but both are considerably off. As for the city councils, the latest election in Ferguson makes its governing body more representative than North Charleston's.
+
+But before you place too much emphasis on the percentages, there are other variables to consider, like policing methods, as CNN political commentator Marc Lamont Hill pointed out. Changing the racial makeup of a department alone won't do the trick if officers aren't taught the best practices.
+
+""Black people didn't march and fight and struggle to have black officers kill us and black officers beat us and black officers harass us,"" he said. ""I want police officers who are capable of doing the job properly. We need community-based policing if we're going to believe that police are the proper force to be in our neighborhoods.""
+
+North Charleston: It's unlikely Slager would have been fired and charged with murder so quickly if not for video shot by witness Feidin Santana. Even North Charleston's police chief said he was disgusted by the footage of Scott's shooting.
+
+Not only does the video show Slager firing eight shots at Scott as he's running away, it also shows him placing a dark-colored object next to Scott's lifeless body.
+
+That could be significant, because Slager initially said Scott had taken his Taser and he feared for his life. But if investigators determine the object dropped next to Scott's body was actually the Taser, Slager could be accused of planting evidence.
+
+""If there is no video, folks don't believe it because it sounds so asinine that something like this would ever happen in this country,"" she said. ""But with a video, you can't say it's not happening.""
+
+North Charleston: After Scott was killed in South Carolina over the weekend, protests in North Charleston have been peaceful so far.
+
+The takeaway: Some Ferguson residents say what happened in their city is playing a role in the way North Charleston is handling its own tragedy. Lee Smith, who recently made an unsuccessful bid for a Ferguson City Council seat, said he was glad to see authorities in South Carolina charge Slager with murder.
+
+""I am hopeful that their motives are right and not just based on the fact that they are trying to avoid the same types of issues that came down in Ferguson,"" Smith said.
+
+Ferguson: It took Ferguson police six days to publicly identify Wilson as the officer who shot Brown, and in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, then-police chief Thomas Jackson decided not to visit Brown's family. And rather than charge Wilson and let a grand jury decide whether the charges had merit -- as many civil rights advocates wanted -- the prosecutor in the case instead made the unorthodox choice of presenting both sides himself and letting the grand jury decide whether to charge the officer.
+
+North Charleston: Slager was identified by authorities and charged with murder on Tuesday, two days after Santana shared his video with Scott's family. Mayor Keith Summey denounced the shooting and said Slager made a ""bad decision."" Both Summey and the police chief also visited Scott's family.
+
+""When you're wrong, you're wrong,"" he said. ""And if you make a bad decision -- don't care if you're behind the shield or just a citizen on the street -- you have to live by that decision.""
+
+The takeaway: Former Ferguson Mayor Brian Fletcher said the city has influenced others.
+
+""I think these situations are given much more scrutiny now,"" said Fletcher, who won a seat on Ferguson's city council this week. ""They have seen what has happened here in Ferguson. Every mayor and city council is very cautious in what they say and what they do.""
+
+Ferguson: After Brown's death in August, many asked why Wilson didn't have a body camera. The shooting spurred a nationwide debate over whether officers should wear cameras on their lapels. Three months later, President Barack Obama pledged $263 million to procure body cameras and training for up to 50,000 police officers.
+
+North Charleston: Slager also was not wearing a body camera when he killed Scott. But after the shooting, the mayor said the city was ordering an additional 150 body cameras ""so every officer on the street"" in the city will have one. That's in addition to 101 body cameras already ordered, Summey said.
+
+But National Urban League President Marc Morial said more body cameras will help protect not just the public, but also police.
+
+""I think if officers know that their actions are being recorded on a consistent basis, it's going to protect good officers who do the right thing,"" Morial said. ""But it's also going to ferret out, if you will, bad actions by bad officers.""",REAL
+6019,"Uber Drivers Found To Discriminate By Gender, Race - The Onion - America's Finest News Source","Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Cleveland Indians Worried Team Cursed After Building Franchise On Old Native American Stereotype CLEVELAND—Having watched in horror as their team crumbled after a 3-1 World Series lead, members of the Cleveland Indians expressed concern Thursday that the organization has been cursed for building their franchise on an incredibly old Native American stereotype. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Nurse Reminds Elderly Man She’s Just Down The Hall If He Starts To Die DES PLAINES, IL—Assuring him that she’d be at his side in a jiffy, local nurse Wendy Kaufman reminded an elderly resident at the Briarwood Assisted Living Community that she was just down the hall if he started to die, sources reported Tuesday. ",FAKE
+2399,Senate GOP prepared to replace Obamacare subsidies,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+5852,Putin Dedicates Christian Statue to Prince Vladimir,"Putin Dedicates Christian Statue to Prince Vladimir November 03, 2016 Putin Dedicates Christian Statue to Prince Vladimir 
+Russian President Vladimir Putin recently took part in events dedicated to The Day of National Unity by dedicating an 85-foot statue to Orthodox saint Prince Vladimir. 
+After laying flowers at another monument, the President, together with Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill , dedicated the impressive statue to Prince Vladimir, which was carried out under the direction of artist Salavat Shcherbakov. 
+""The monument was erected on the initiative of the Russian military-historical society and the government of Moscow"", media outlets reported. 
+Prince Vladimir is credited with bringing Christianity to Russia in 988 AD. 
+In the evening during the reception in honor of The Day of National Unity, Putin presented state awards - the Order of Friendship and the Medal of Pushkin. The President's Award was dedicated to Putin for his contribution to strengthening the unity of the Russian nation. 
+Putin continues to build bridges between traditional Russian Orthodox Christianity and Russian government, in a significant turn from Soviet-era style crackdowns on any appearance of faith in the public arena. 
+READ MORE: RUSSIAN CHURCH LEADERS, LAWMAKERS, SEEKING A WAY TO BAN ABORTION 
+The monument to Prince Vladimir began movement from Moscow in mid-October. The opening of the monument was supposed to coincide with the millennium of the death of Prince Vladimir on Nov. 4, 2015. Initially, the 24-meter sculpture was supposed to appear on the Sparrow Hills, but following discussions smaller monument decided to place on Borovitskaya area. Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+6138,Newt Gingrich goes berserk when Fox News Megyn Kelly referred to Trump as a sexual predator,"License DMCA 
+In an explosive interview, Newt Gingrich became completely unhinged, verbally attacking Fox News' Megyn Kelly for referring to Trump as a sexual predator. Throughout the interview, Newt Gingrich seemed to live in an alternate state of reality. He continued to discount polls that show Trump losing badly. He refused to acknowledge that all the tossup states are moving towards Clinton. 
+The interview was already contentious when a couple of words from Megyn Kelly turned it explosive. (Video here .) 
+""You want to know why Trump has had a rough time?"" Newt Gingrich asked. 
+""If Trump is a sexual predator,"" Megyn Kelly said. ""That is ..."" - Advertisement - 
+""He is not a sexual predator,"" Newt Gingrich shouted. 
+""That's your opinion,"" Kelly said. ""I am not taking a position on it."" 
+""You could not defend that statement,"" an unhinged Gingrich shouted. ""Now I am sick and tired of people like you, using language that's inflammatory, that's not true."" 
+""Excuse me Mr. Speaker,"" Kelly interjected. ""You have no idea whether it is true or not. What we know is that at least ..."" 
+""Neither do you,"" Gingrich shouted. - Advertisement - 
+""That's right,"" Kelly replied. ""And I am not taking a position on it unlike you. So what I said is incorrect?"" 
+""Yes you are,"" Gingrich replied. ""When you use the words you took a position. And that is very unfair of you Megyn. I think that is exactly the bias people are upset by."" 
+""I think that your defensiveness on this may speak volumes, sir,"" Kelly replied. ""What I said is if -- no, no, no, -- let me make my point and then I will give you the floor. What I said is if Trump is a sexual predator, then it is a big story. And what we saw on that tape was Trump himself saying that he likes to grab women by the genitals and kiss them against their will. That's what we saw. Then we saw ten women come forward after he denied actually doing it at the debate to say that was untrue. 'He did it to me. He did it to me.' We saw reporters. We saw people who had worked with him; people from Apprentice and so on and so forth. He denies it all, which is his right. We don't know what the truth is. My point to you is, as a media story we don't get to say the ten women are lying. We have to cover that story, sir."" 
+Gingrich then went into full spin mode. He attempted to characterize the media as biased for covering more about the growing Trump sexual predator scandal than Clinton speeches to banks, a false equivalency. He then unleashed his anger and abuse again.",FAKE
+5421,Why Sprott Believes Gold Bullion Is A Mandatory Portfolio Asset,"Why Sprott Believes Gold Bullion Is A Mandatory Portfolio Asset Posted on Tweet Home » Gold » Gold News » Why Sprott Believes Gold Bullion Is A Mandatory Portfolio Asset 
+We have long maintained the central thesis for gold is more complicated than a simple hedge against inflation, deflation or economic collapse. We view gold as a mandatory portfolio asset in an investment landscape in which paper claims on productive output (stocks and bonds) have wildly exceeded reasonable relation to underlying productive output itself (GDP). While the Fed may ultimately attempt in December its second rate increase in ten-and-a-half years, it is important for investors to “see the forest through the trees,” and recognize that macro fundamentals supporting the gold thesis only continue to strengthen: 
+
+From Sprott’s Thoughts: 
+In our September report, we suggested short-term developments in gold markets often distract investors from more relevant long-term fundamentals, providing attractive entry points for the nimble-footed. On October 4, we believe just such an investment opportunity materialized in the gold complex. 
+The spot gold price declined $44.28 on the day (3.4%), and 5% for the week (largest weekly decline since September 2013). As is always the case when gold corrects, financial media were instantly replete with naysayers forecasting the end of gold’s 2016 advance. In recent days, various investment banks have rushed to reduce their price forecasts toward the $1,050-to-$1,100 range. 
+With all due respect to these market participants, we would suggest absolutely nothing of substance has changed in gold’s medium- and long-term investment fundamentals. 
+What caused the early-October backup in the gold price? First, hawkish comments on 10/3/16 by Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester (2016 FOMC voter) were echoed by Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker (2018 FOMC voter) on the morning of 10/4/16. Then, before noon on 10/4/16, media reports surfaced that the ECB Governing Council was considering tapering its asset-purchase plan (later denied) and then that the BOJ was contemplating market intervention to weaken the yen. 
+A fair number of human traders and algorithmic computers perceived these developments as a potential turning point for global-central-bank easing policies, and sell orders were reflexively generated throughout the gold complex. Once bullion penetrated its year-to-date uptrend, as well as the psychologically significant $1,300 support level, technically oriented CTA’s and high-frequency traders joined the fray. 
+We would suggest these knee-jerk trading decisions have presented an especially fortuitous entry-point for investors contemplating a portfolio allocation to gold and gold equities. In short, we view the above quartet of early-October news items as little more than jawboning from central bankers stuck in an increasingly awkward policy pickle. 
+Desperate to normalize policy after seven years of extended largesse, central banks are recognizing that aggregate debt levels remain too ominous, and economic growth too fragile, to exit from ultra-accommodative monetary-policy conditions. 
+While the Fed may ultimately attempt in December its second rate increase in ten-and-a-half years, it is important for investors to “see the forest through the trees,” and recognize that macro fundamentals supporting the gold thesis only continue to strengthen. 
+At Sprott, we have long maintained the central thesis for gold is more complicated than a simple hedge against inflation, deflation or economic collapse. 
+We view gold as a mandatory portfolio asset in an investment landscape in which paper claims on productive output (stocks and bonds) have wildly exceeded reasonable relation to underlying productive output itself (GDP). 
+In essence, the decoupling of financial-asset valuations from any rational underpinning of productive output portends two future developments which are both supportive to the gold investment thesis. First, as the financial system rebalances inflated paper claims back toward supporting output, gold should provide prodigious purchasing power protection, as it has in the past. MacroMavens highlights in Figure 1, on the following page, that even at today’s roughly 2,140 level, the S&P 500 Index still remains 70% lower in gold terms than at its March 2000 peak. During the past two corrections in the S&P 500, during which the Index declined 50.50% (3/24/00-10/10/02) and 57.70% (10/11/07-3/6/09), gold provided unparalleled portfolio protection. We expect the next correction in U.S. financial assets to prove no different. 
+The second implication of the contemporary mismatch between paper claims and productive output is inevitable official policy response whenever elevated debt levels, weak economic growth, or both, conspire to destabilize the enormous global debt pyramid. Even in the bizarro world of floating exchange rates, central bank debasement of fiat currencies is perhaps the most fundamental investment thesis for gold. Bloomberg highlighted in an October 16 report that the balance sheets of the 10 largest global central banks now total $21.4 trillion in assets, an increase of more than 10% just from the end of 2015! 
+This aggregate increase accrues largely from the efforts of the ECB and BOJ, which together have grown their balance sheets some $2.1 trillion since 12/31/15. While the Fed’s balance sheet has leveled off in the vicinity of $4.5 trillion in recent years, we remind readers that the Fed has felt compelled to purchase an average of $48 billion worth of Treasuries and MBS every month during 2016 to replace maturing paper. With global-central-bank printing remaining at such a frenzied pace, does the investment case for gold really diminish whenever a central banker floats hawkish commentary or the Fed attempts an annual 25 basis point rate increase? We think not. 
+Our investment case for gold rests squarely on global monetary and economic imbalances. Among the many valuable measures in monitoring the gold investment thesis, we have always favored (for its clarity) the Fed’s own ratio of Total U.S. Credit Market Debt to GDP (Z.1 Report). As shown in Figure 2, above, the ratio of outstanding claims ($65.066 trillion total debt) to output ($18.437 trillion GDP) in the U.S. today stands at 353%, barely below its June 2009 peak. 
+Contrary to popular belief, there has been no aggregate deleveraging of the U.S. financial system in recent years. Indeed, quite the opposite has been the case. Since December 2007, total U.S. debt has actually grown by $16.259 trillion, an increase of 33.32% (from $48.808 trillion to $65.066 trillion). Even more eye-popping has been a 48.34% explosion in nonfinancial credit (from $31.213 trillion to $46.301 trillion) during the same span. By way of comparison, U.S. GDP has expanded only $4.362 trillion during this entire period. 
+Demonstrating the levitating effects of QE policies on equities and real estate, the Fed’s measure of total U.S. household net worth has expanded by a mind-boggling $31.345 trillion, or 54.31% , since year-end 2007 (from $57.718 trillion to $89.063 trillion). While we recognize the power of cognitive dissonance in all euphoric investment cycles, how can any investor rationalize that a $4.362 trillion increase in GDP could support a $31.345 trillion increase in household net worth? 
+What magic can create “wealth” seven times faster than output? Our answer remains that central banks have fostered unprecedented and unsustainable inflation in financial asset prices. To those who view gold’s portfolio relevance as muted due to the lack of visible CPI-type inflation, we would suggest they are looking in the wrong place. Central banks have enabled absurd decoupling of paper claims from underlying output. There is already rampant inflation throughout the financial system! 
+Importantly, we believe central bank policies of ZIRP, NIRP and QE have distorted economic decision making for so long that global economic growth has become remarkably unproductive. Every student of economics knows that marginal returns eventually approach marginal costs. 
+At zero percent interest rates, earnings for all economic agents, on average, will eventually approach zero. Years of malinvestment, plummeting capex, declining productivity, and now an extending trend of declining corporate profits all suggest that the global economy is misfiring on many cylinders. Even worse, we believe, the global financial system has become so dependent on zero percent interest rates that any move toward normalization will have devastating impact on a wide range of financial asset prices. 
+We are preparing an expanded strategy report which focuses on themes ranging from the broken nature of Fed models to the persistent decline in productivity trends to the rise of global populism to signs of incipient inflation. To those with a high tolerance for dense topics, we look forward to sharing this piece in coming weeks. 
+As a precursor to this tome, we offer one vignette from MacroMavens, in Figure 3, below, to summarize our views on U.S. economic trends. One of the most reliable precursors of employment gains has always been the direction of corporate profits. The recently stubborn falloff in corporate profits suggests payroll statistics are about to endure significant stress. Hardly an environment for significant Fed tightening! 
+This report is intended solely for the use of Sprott Asset Management USA Inc. investors and interested parties. Investments and commentary are unique and may not be reflective of investments and commentary in other strategies managed by Sprott Asset Management USA, Inc., Sprott Asset Management LP, Sprott Inc., or any other Sprott entity or affiliate. Opinions expressed in this report are those of a Senior Portfolio Manager of Sprott Asset Management USA Inc., and may vary widely from opinions of other Sprott affiliated Portfolio Managers. 
+This information is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be an offer or solicitation for the sale of any financial product or service or a recommendation or determination that any investment strategy is suitable for a specific investor. Investors should seek financial advice regarding the suitability of any investment strategy based on the objectives of the investor, financial situation, investment horizon, and their particular needs. This information is not intended to provide financial, tax, legal, accounting or other professional advice since such advice always requires consideration of individual circumstances. The investments discussed herein are not insured by the FDIC or any other governmental agency, are subject to risks, including a possible loss of the principal amount invested. 
+Generally, natural resources investments are more volatile on a daily basis and have higher headline risk than other sectors as they tend to be more sensitive to economic data, political and regulatory events as well as underlying commodity prices. Natural resource investments are influenced by the price of underlying commodities like oil, gas, metals, coal, etc.; several of which trade on various exchanges and have price fluctuations based on short-term dynamics partly driven by demand/supply and also by investment flows. Natural resource investments tend to react more sensitively to global events and economic data than other sectors, whether it is a natural disaster like an earthquake, political upheaval in the Middle East or release of employment data in the U.S. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Sprott Asset Management USA Inc., affiliates, family, friends, employees, associates, and others may hold positions in the securities it recommends to clients, and may sell the same at any time. 
+All figures in this report are expressed in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. On Sale At SD Bullion… This Week Only… This entry was posted in Gold News , Silver News and tagged gold update , silver update , Sprott's Thoughts . Bookmark the permalink . Post navigation",FAKE
+9343,Let’s Be Clear—A Vote for Warmonger Hillary Clinton Is a Vote for World War 3,"October 28, 2016 Let’s Be Clear—A Vote for Warmonger Hillary Clinton Is a Vote for World War 3 
+If you want to see war without end, vote for Hillary Clinton. 
+It is tremendously ironic that Hillary Clinton and the mainstream media have attempted to portray Donald Trump as “dangerous” and “temperamental” because it is Clinton who actually has a long history of being emotionally unstable. She has a temper that is absolutely legendary, and she has been cussing out the men and women in her security detail for decades. 
+Hillary Clinton played a key role in starting the civil war in Syria, thanks to her Libya is a post-apocalyptic wasteland today, and now she is picking a fight with the Russians before she has even won the election. Of all the candidates there were running for president this election cycle, there was nobody that was even close to as dangerous as Hillary Clinton, and if she wins the election, I am fully convinced that World War III will begin before her time in the White House is over. 
+Someone that shares this opinion with me is Donald Trump. According to Reuters, Trump recently stated that we are “going to end up in World War III over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton”:",FAKE
+8660,Twitter Users DESTROY Clinton Puppet James Comey #ComeyResign – TruthFeed,"Twitter Users DESTROY Clinton Puppet James Comey #ComeyResign Twitter Users DESTROY Clinton Puppet James Comey #ComeyResign Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 7, 2016 
+If you thought FBI Director James Comey was a bought and paid for Obama shill, today proved it. 
+Sunday afternoon Comey announced he had completed the investigation of 650K emails, which he started nine days ago, and that there would be no charges against Hillary Clinton. 
+Um, first off, it took him over a YEAR to go through 53K emails, so how the hell did he BUST through 650K so fast? 
+Impossible. 
+Next, we just learned today that Hillary had her MAID printing off classified emails for her. 
+And finally, the FBI said that they were 99% certain at least FIVE countries had HACKED Hillary’s ILLEGAL server. 
+My God, what more does a person have to do to get friggen arrested? 
+It’s obvious the FBI has been compromised, and James Comey is a Clinton and Obama flunky. 
+Twitter exploded at the news, and the cries for Comey to resign are shaking the very foundation of the social media platform using the hashtag #ComeyResign. FBI Director Comey has officially killed every ounce of integrity the FBI had left. #ComeyResign 
+— Boss Trump (@TrumpTheBoss) November 7, 2016 This ""news"" from Comey should only help Trump get more votes. The corruption is overwhelming & very disturbing. #ComeyResign ",FAKE
+1043,Trump says GOP opposition to him 'taking advantage of our country',"Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump pushed back Wednesday night against what appears to be a growing movement among the party establishment — including a few of his former rivals — to at least slow down his march to the convention with enough delegates in hand to claim the nomination.
+
+Speaking with Sean Hannity on a special Fox News town hall, Trump accused GOP lawmakers opposed to his campaign of ""taking advantage of our country."" 
+
+
+
+The billionaire businessman called his campaign a movement ""of competence and common sense and low taxes and [secure] borders and it would be so foolish to give it away.""
+
+Trump was referring to a conference held by the conservative American Enterprise Institute at Sea Island off the coast of Georgia over the weekend, where one of the topics reportedly was stopping Trump from securing the Republican nomination.
+
+The conference reportedly was attended by Senate Majority Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan and other key Republican congressmen.
+
+""I know all these people,"" Trump told Hannity. ""These are people that are taking advantage of our country. They don’t want to have strong borders. They want stuff flowing across the borders. They don’t want to have taxation when countries treat us unfairly because they benefit from that.""
+
+""Politicians will do what’s right for the people that gave them the money,"" Trump added later, ""not what's right for the country.""
+
+Former GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush also planned to meet with Trump's rivals on Thursday ahead of a GOP debate in Florida, fueling speculation that he's preparing to endorse a candidate challenging Trump.
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, meanwhile, told Fox News that he would not drop out of the Republican presidential race before next week's Florida primary, saying, ""we're gonna fight this thing through Tuesday ... and we're going to go on.""
+
+Rubio denied multiple reports that he had discussed the possibility of dropping out before the winner-take-all contest.
+
+Speaking with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, Rubio said: ""I have never discussed dropping out with anyone on my team, or anyone on the planet Earth ... I'm the only one who can beat Donald Trump in Florida.”
+
+A Fox News poll released Wednesday showed Rubio trailing Trump by 23 percentage points among likely Republican voters in Florida.
+
+""I honestly don’t believe Donald Trump will be the nominee,"" Rubio said. ""I continue to believe it's going to be me, and it's got to start here in Florida.""
+
+Rubio also dismissed the possibility that he would form a so-called ""unity"" Republican ticket with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump's closest challenger in the delegate race, calling it "" the kind of drama that makes it interesting in TV to speculate about.""
+
+""At some point we're all going to team up,"" Rubio said in reference to the non-Trump candidates. ""We're all going to be on the same team, I hope.”
+
+Cruz told Kelly that Rubio and Kasich were ""good, honorable people, but neither of them has a path to the nomination.""
+
+""Head-to-head, not only do I beat Donald Trump,"" Cruz said, ""but I defeat him resoundingly.""
+
+Cruz also walked back his earlier opposition to a possible convention fight between himself and Trump if neither man reaches the required 1,237 delegates during the primaries.
+
+""Look, [Ronald] Reagan and [President Gerald] Ford battled it out at a contested convention [in 1976],"" Cruz said. ""That's what conventions are for."" However, Cruz restated his opposition to a so-called brokered convention, calling it ""a fever dream of the D.C. establishment"" and warning of ""an open revolt"" among Republican voters if it came to pass.
+
+Cruz later turned his rhetorical fire against Trump and Rubio over immigration reform and the so-called ""Gang of Eight"" bill in 2013.
+
+""When Marco Rubio stood with Barack Obama and [Sen.] Chuck Schumer and [then-Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid ... I stood with millions of Americans,"" Cruz told Kelly. ""Not only was Donald Trump nowhere to be found, he was funding the Gang of Eight. He gave $50,000 to five of its members.""
+
+Cruz also accused Rubio of lowering the tone of the campaign, saying, ""I have no views whatsoever on any part of Donald Trump’s anatomy,"" an apparent reference to Rubio jabbing Trump's ""small hands"" at a Virginia campaign stop.
+
+For his part, Rubio told Megyn Kelly that he regretted the remark, saying ""my kids were embarrassed by it, my wife didn’t like it, I don’t think it reflects [well]; that’s not who I am.""
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has staked his campaign's future on victory in next Tuesday's Ohio primary, told Fox News' Greta Van Susteren that he would ""probably not"" pick up enough delegates in other contests to overtake Trump, but noted that voters had only ""picked about half the delegates [so far] this year ... anything is possible.""
+
+A Fox News poll released Wednesday showed Kasich leading Trump by five percentage points among likely Republican voters in the Buckeye State.
+
+""We're going to win Ohio,"" Kasich told Van Susteren. ""That's not even a question for me. It's about what we do after that and all the places we have to go. But we're not taking it for granted.""
+
+Trump has 458 delegates to Cruz's 359 following Tuesday's contests, in which Trump won the Mississippi and Michigan primaries as well as the Hawaii caucus. Cruz also picked up a win in the Idaho primary. Rubio is a distant third with 151 delegates, while Kasich has 54.",REAL
+1620,GOP voters want an apocalypse: The truth about Trump & Carson’s success,"It’s interesting how that’s unfolding. None of the governors are panning out. Texas Governor Rick Perry, whose record running one of the biggest state’s successfully on a Republican platform was no help, dropped out first; followed by the union slaying Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Both had been highly touted as excellent presidential material based on their records. None of the current and former governors, from Bush to Kasich, Christie, Huckabee, Jindal and Pataki, have caught fire either. Between them, they have decades of executive experience and yet they can’t get any momentum. This flies in the face of everything we’ve ever heard about the Republican reverence for state government, for executive experience and the ability to get results from Republican policies.
+
+For a long time it was assumed that Senators were unsuited for the task of the presidency, what with their lack experience “running things.” Not that this stopped them from running for president, but it hadn’t escaped anyone’s notice that until 2008 the last Senator to become president had been elected in 1960. Barack Obama broke that long streak and the Republicans have a handful of Senators to choose from in 2016. Two of the four in the race, Rubio and Cruz, seem to be doing slightly better than the governors, and are at this point seen as “establishment” alternatives, even though neither of them are polling at more than 11 percent. The third, Rand Paul, once touted as the leader of a new libertarian, isolationist Republican Party, has turned out to be irrelevant. The fourth, Senator Lindsay Graham, is a joke.
+
+There you have the vaunted GOP bench — the well-prepared, highly qualified, totally experienced group of veterans, any one of whom the country was supposed to be able to see as president. And Republican primary voters can’t stand any of them. They are, instead, enthralled with two men who have never held public office, and seem not to even understand our system of government or care how it works.
+
+The Hill asked some Republican strategists to explain this phenomenon:
+
+“It’s a different test this time around,” said GOP strategist David Payne. “Experience, executive experience, these aren’t the tests. It’s about the right ideas and the right temperament and coming off as tough. You see how important the debates have been. Style and presentation matter more than ever, more even than if you were a great leader in the past.” […] “Republicans this year don’t want managers, they want transformers,” conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace, a Cruz supporter, told The Hill. “They don’t want reform, they want revolution. They don’t want a better government, they want a new government. The ground has shifted and the grassroots conservatives have taken the establishment’s preeminence away.”
+
+Say what you will about Trump and Carson, they are both entertaining. But it’s the revolutionary aspect of their candidacies that’s interesting.
+
+It’s not exactly a surprise that Republican voters hate government. It’s been their number one organizing principle for years. In fact, the Sainted Ronald Reagan himself was known for his saying “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” And we know they hate liberals. They have spent decades denigrating the philosophy,the ideology and even the word itself. But until now they haven’t hated the Republican Party. And boy do they hate it.
+
+What seems to have happened is that GOP base voters feel betrayed and disillusioned because they voted for a Republican Congress and that Congress has failed to deliver the agenda on which they ran. First of all, they failed to remove President Obama from office, either through impeachment or at the ballot box in 2012. They also failed to repeal Obamacare,”close the borders,” ban abortion, stop gay marriage, or end political correctness, just for starters. Someone forgot to tell Republican voters that there are three branches of government regulated by checks and balances, and other people in their own party, as well as the opposition party, who have different agendas competing with their own. If you listen to right-wing media and follow what’s being said in the conservative bubble, it’s understandable. They were told that they won a huge mandate, and now they quite logically blame the people who have been making promises they don’t keep. When they listen to these professional politicians running for their party’s nomination, they just hear more of the same — and they don’t want to hear it anymore. They want someone who will assure them that this creaky government system with all those checks and balances, and all the resultant gridlock, will not be a hinderance to achievement of their agenda. They are tired of waiting. And right now they have two presidential candidates who are promising a different way of doing things. Donald Trump is running to be a strongman. It’s all about him “getting the job done” because he’s smarter and tougher than everyone else. (This is a familiar archetype and Trump’s specific relationship to it is fascinatingly explored in this piece by Rick Perlstein, called “Donald Trump and the F-word.”) Ben Carson is a little bit more complicated. He’s running as a quasi-religious leader who will be able to overcome all these obstacles through the same miraculous process that has characterized his life story. (The recent questions about some details of that very famous life story have only resulted in adding martyrdom to his mystique.) In both cases, the people who like them are not merely attracted to the fact that these men are outsiders, but also by qualities that will ostensibly allow them to transcend the normal process of democratic government. Despite their professions of love for the constitution, these voters no longer believe in the system of government that constitution sets forth. It’s still possible that these voters are simply “sending a message” to the powers that be, telling them that they are at the ends of their ropes. That’s certainly what the establishment hopes is happening: Republicans like Cullen, who says he cannot support Trump, Carson or Cruz, say it’s still early, and the party will rally behind they types of candidates it’s nominated in the past. “Some of these guys still look like summer love affairs to me, even if we’re well into the fall now,” he said. “I still think voters will want look to take the polished young man home that they can show off to mom and dad.” That courtly tone sounds as out of place in the Trump era as if he were speaking Elizabethan english. These Republican voters have been listening to talk radio and watching Fox news and reading thousands of Tea Party emails for years and they want a man of action. When they talk about revolution it’s not the white wigged American style. They’re thinking of something much more “top-down.”",REAL
+6188,EWAO Hubble has just spotted mysterious 'plasma balls' of unknown origin,"News View Articles First Online Academy for the Visionary Arts Opens Global Press Release, October 25th 2016 - New online learning community explores art with the power to shape the future, and integrate the wisdom of ancient cultures. Originally identified through... Claim Your Deepest Desires with Tonight’s Super Moon in Aries The full moon is a time for the most potent access to manifesting your dreams. It is a time when your thoughts and emotions become magnetised to attract the exact reality that matches what you... Why did Apple ban Dash? What are they so afraid of? Corporate technology giant Apple has banned trailblazing digital currency Dash from its App Store. What we should be asking is why is Apple so threatened by Dash? Other digital currencies such as... Finnish scientist spots GREAT MYSTERY at the Bosnian Pyramids A scientist from Finland states he has found ANOMALIES at the Bosnian pyramids in Visoko which cannot be explained as a natural phenomenon. The ultimate proof these are MAN-MADE structures? A... Found: Noah’s Ark Blueprints reveal the Ark was ROUND A clay tablet believed to be around 4,000-year-old details the material used in the construction of the Ark and indicates Noah's Ark was in fact ROUND. The so-called Ark blueprints are among... This Transformational Festival is Creating Real Change by Setting Up Sustainable Communities Oh how we love our transformational festivals! For so many of us they have guided and shaped chapters of our lives, inspiring us, exposing our souls to new truths, to incredible workshops, art,... Inspiration Discover Something Hubble has just spotted mysterious ‘plasma balls’ of unknown origin Using the Hubble space telescope, NASA has detected massive flaming spheres traveling at a speed of 580 thousand kilometers per hour. These monstrous balls of melted plasma are located at a distance... Meet ‘The Eye’ a strange and nearly perfect circular island that moves In the middle of South America, there is a strange and almost perfectly spherical island that moves on its own. The landmass in the middle —called the Eye— floats on a pond of clear and cold... 30 mindboggling facts about the Ancient Anunnaki According to numerous ancient texts and books written throughout the years, hundreds of thousands of years ago, before recorded history, planet Earth was visited by astronauts from an alien world.... Scientists find a MASSIVE CONTINENT did sink in the distant past It turns out that there is a lost continent after all. Experts have found that half of the mass of Eurasia and India is MISSING. According to scientists, half of the land surface that existed 60... Researchers decipher millenary manuscripts belonging to Genghis Khan Researchers were able to decipher millenary manuscripts belonging to the great Genghis Khan. The documents preserved in the museum date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and include... First Online Academy for the Visionary Arts Opens Global Press Release, October 25th 2016 - New online learning community explores art with the power to shape the future, and integrate the wisdom of ancient cultures. Originally identified through... Health & Wellness Improve Life Are You Fatigued? 11 Ways to Take Back Your Adrenals When you take back your adrenals, you take back your power. I kid you not when I say that adrenal fatigue is the subject of a entire book. The intricacies of how inter-connected this issue... Eating Black Raspberries Significantly Lowers Cardiovascular Disease An extract found in black raspberries can significantly lower arterial stiffness, a key measure of cardiovascular disease! By PreventDisease Black raspberry (Rubus... Watch What Happens When Cannabis Is Injected Into Cancer Cells. This Is Mind Blowing! Watch this mind blowing video as the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, kills cancer cells! By MindBodySoulSpirit Since 1974 studies have shown that cannabis has anti-tumor... This Is The Most Powerful Natural Antibiotic Ever – Kills Any Infections In The Body This master cleansing tonic is actually an antibiotic that kills gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. by HealthCareAboveAll The basic formula of this powerful tonic dates back to... Monsanto Lobbyist Panics When Offered a Glass Of Water After Saying Weedkiller Is Safe To Drink What this Monsanto Lobbyist says about your water is shocking... by Nick Meyer Monsanto lobbyist, Dr Patrick Moore, claims to be an ecological expert and is currently the frontman... Don’t Throw This Banana Part Ever Again! THIS IS WHY! The health benefits of bananas are undeniable. But, it’s not only the flesh that can boost your health. The peel can do wonders too. By HealthyFoodTeam Although we normally throw banana... Spirituality Universal Patterns First Online Academy for the Visionary Arts Opens Global Press Release, October 25th 2016 - New online learning community explores art with the power to shape the future, and integrate the wisdom of ancient cultures. Originally identified through... The Sacred Contribution of the Mazatec Shaman to the Spiritual World There was a time when shamanic ceremonies played a key role in a society. Such rituals involved the consumption of different herbs under the supervision of the shaman who acted as a spiritual guide... Thou Shalt Not Kill Scorpions and Smoketh Them You might think that lighting up a spliff makes you cool but you're nowhere as hardcore (or exposed to danger) as Afghanistan's dried scorpion smokers. Look, we get it - mankind needs its fix... How to Go on Your First Shamanic Journey into the Spirit World As days go by, the way of the shaman is becoming more and more axiomatic. If you feel that one day your path might include a shamanic journey, consider these steps. The most important thing... Understanding and Preparing the ‘Magic Mushrooms’ Experience Ingesting psychedelic mushrooms can provide, without doubt, a life changing experience. But there are certain rules one has to follow in order to get the best out of their alluring effect. When done... Psychedelic Mushrooms – A 7,000 Year Old Friend With an ancient history spanning over tens of thousands of years of human evolution, psychedelic mushrooms are once again making a comeback. Hallucinogenic mushrooms, also known as ‘magic... ",FAKE
+4276,Donald Trump's lost month in Iowa,"West Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) Donald Trump had every reason to feel optimistic Monday. His poll numbers were up; he had secured two prominent endorsements in the space of a week; and even the weather seemed to be cooperating, with a snowstorm coming in from the west expected to hold off until after midnight.
+
+And then, he lost, coming in second to Ted Cruz
+
+Trump spent January in full-on attack mode against Cruz. Trump questioned whether Cruz qualifies as a ""natural-born citizen"" eligible to serve as president. He went after the evangelical vote, winning the endorsement of Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr., but didn't back up the appeals with a ground game. And then he sat out the final debate, opting for a rally across town at the same time.
+
+He acknowledged Tuesday that may have backfired. ""I think some people were disappointed that I didn't go into the debate,"" Trump said in New Hampshire.
+
+Trump and his advisers don't have too much time to figure out what went wrong. With Cruz's win and Marco Rubio's much stronger-than-expected finish Monday night, Trump now urgently confronts the danger of the Florida senator chipping away at his establishment backing in upcoming contests.
+
+The second-place finish should serve as a serious reality check for his campaign, which is in large part based on bucking the traditional rules of campaigning and political engagement. Then again, nothing about Trump is conventional.
+
+""People didn't talk about my second place,"" Trump said Tuesday night. ""They didn't talk about it as positively as they should have.""
+
+In the air but not on the ground
+
+There was nothing traditional about Trump's campaign style in Iowa.
+
+The Trump campaign remained tight-lipped about its efforts to get voters out, sharing little to nothing about its grassroots and volunteer efforts on the ground. The campaign swatted away reports of a lackluster ground game, insisting that its supporters in Iowa would turn out in the end because they were so eager to elect a non-traditional candidate like Trump.
+
+It was only in the final stretch that Trump showed minimal interest in retail politics.
+
+He began holding more than one event a day. In January, he made his first stop at a Pizza Ranch -- the famous restaurant chain that is a favorite among presidential candidates. Trump even slept at a Holiday Inn in one of his final weekends in the state.
+
+The Texas senator crisscrossed the state, ultimately completing the ""full Grassley"" by visiting all 99 counties in the state. His campaign developed a massive grassroots operation, that according to the campaign 12,000 volunteers fanned out cross the state knocking on doors and making phone calls. It also recruited dozens of pastors and county chairs.
+
+Rubio, in the meantime, came on and surprised everyone at the end. After Thursday's debate, there were rumblings of a Rubio rise, which were tamped down by the Des Moines Register poll released two days before the caucuses that showed the Florida senator in the mid-teens, far ahead of of the others in the establishment lane like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, but still significantly behind Trump and Cruz.
+
+Hundreds of Rubio volunteers made phone calls to undecided voters in the days leading up to the caucuses, according to campaign aides. During those calls, they found that a good number of Trump supporters -- some frustrated with the businessman's decision to skip last week's Fox debate -- were switching over to Rubio.
+
+Trump had an improbable run as the national front-runner for most of the summer and fall. Then, in December, he started to trail Cruz in Iowa for the first time. Up until that point, the two men had refused to attack one another, seeming to believe that voters would find a messy mud-wrestling match distasteful.
+
+But at the first sign of losing ground to Cruz here, Trump swiftly reversed course.
+
+Trump also jabbed at Cruz's anti-establishment credentials, wondering out loud why the senator had failed to disclose large loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank for his Senate campaign.
+
+""The truth is, he's a nasty guy,"" Trump said in an interview on ABC's ""This Week."" ""Nobody likes him. Nobody in Congress likes him. Nobody likes him anywhere once they get to know him.""
+
+Cruz, who has tried to stay close to Trump without antagonizing the billionaire, finally hit back, calling his rival a man of ""New York values"" and blasting his support for eminent domain. Even then, Cruz and his allies seemed much more conflicted about the strategy and wary that it could backfire.
+
+Prior to running for president, Trump had a reputation for being many things: a ruthless, litigious businessman; a colorful reality television star; the ultimate Manhattan socialite.
+
+It wasn't exactly the image of a Bible reading, church-going family man.
+
+But on the stump, the GOP frontrunner sought to sand down those rough edges.
+
+Two consecutive Sundays before the Iowa caucuses, Trump attended morning church services in the state, even breaking from his usual practice of returning to New York City every night to sleep in his own bed.
+
+All of this has been a part of Trump's months-long and intensifying campaign to win over evangelicals in Iowa -- a sizable and influential constituency with real power to sway the outcome of the caucuses. That outreach became all the more critical when Cruz -- the favorite among Hawkeye State evangelical Christians -- bypassed Trump in the polls for the first time in December.
+
+Cleveland Pastor Darrell Scott, a Trump backer who spearheaded an effort to coalesce African-American pastors around the candidate, said it was difficult to overstate the importance of these endorsements.
+
+Palin ""brings a lot of evangelical support with her. Then Jerry Falwell Jr. was the icing on the cake,"" he said.
+
+A religious leader like Falwell in particular, Scott said, was key to convincing undecided voters and on-the-fence churchgoers.
+
+""In Christianity, the sheep tends to follow their shepherd. They will trust the wisdom and trust the decision of their pastor,"" Scott said. ""So when my pastor thinks highly of him to endorse him, there must be something there.""
+
+Ahead of last week's GOP debate, Trump's long-running feud with Fox News was back in full force.
+
+The billionaire publicly grumbled about debate moderator Megyn Kelly, saying if she couldn't treat him fairly, he may skip the event altogether -- not the first time he had threatened to boycott a debate.
+
+""We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president,"" the network's statement read. ""A nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.""
+
+Instead, less than three miles down the road from the debate, Trump held a rivaling event to benefit wounded veterans. The venue was filled to capacity; political reporters were suddenly split between covering the Trump event and the debate; and the candidate boasted that he had raised nearly $6 million for veterans in a matter of hours.
+
+But while Trump pulled off a political feat in only the way that Trump can, it was clear that the decision rubbed some Iowans the wrong way.
+
+After all, voters in the Hawkeye State take their responsibly of being first seriously, and the debate that Trump skipped was the final -- and critically important -- debate ahead of the caucuses.
+
+Steve Ziller was one of the 29% that disapproved.
+
+A farmer from Belmond, Ziller was undecided between Trump and Cruz when he attended a Trump rally in Clear Lake on January 9th. Soon after that event, Ziller said he made the decision to support Trump. But that decision quickly got undone when Trump skipped the debate.
+
+""I just think if he's elected president, he's going to have a lot more tougher issues than dealing with a female reporter from Fox,"" Ziller told CNN the day before the caucuses. ""If he would have showed up to the debate and had a good debate, I would have been a 100% for Trump.""
+
+On caucus night, Ziller ultimately chose to back Trump. But it wasn't an easy call.
+
+Asked whether the decision was difficult, Ziller responded: ""Very.""",REAL
+7527,Hillary Helped Chelsea’s Friend With VISA Issues Within 2 Hours,"Trey Gowdy Literally Walks Out After Dropping Hillary, Comey & Reporters During News Conference 
+Aide Cheryl Mills, who at the time was serving as Clinton’s chief of staff, reportedly replied in slightly over two hours, agreeing to help. 
+“Adding Nora (Toiv, who at the time was serving as a special assistant to the chief of staff) who will likely reach out to (redacted) to see what is possible — generally rejections make it harder to get over so flagging that this may be hard to undo but we’ll see what’s doable,” she wrote back. 
+Whether or not the friend, British citizen and YouGov editor-in-chief Freddie Sayers, ever received a visa was unclear, though it was also largely irrelevant. Advertisement - story continues below 
+Take a look at the original emails below: 
+What was far more concerning was that Clinton’s team had rushed to assist Chelsea’s friend within a couple of hours, but had done absolutely nothing to help the four men who died during the 2012 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. 
+Specifically, during the early stages of the attack on Sept. 11, 2012, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta emailed Clinton’s staff asking for them to approve the launch of a rescue team that he wrote at the time was “spinning up” and ready to assist. Advertisement - story continues below",FAKE
+3960,"From downed Russian jet, hard lessons about destroying Islamic State","France's bid to unite the world against the Islamic State was always going to be difficult. Turkey's shooting down of a Russian fighter jet shows why.
+
+Could the juvenile suspects in the Tennessee wildfires be tried as adults?
+
+A deputy commander in a rebel Syrian Turkmen brigade holds handles believed to be parts of a parachute of the downed Russian warplane near the village of Yamadi, Syria, near the Turkish border on Tuesday. Turkey shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border on Tuesday saying it had repeatedly violated its airspace.
+
+Turkey’s shoot-down of a Russian fighter jet that it says strayed into its airspace from Syria Tuesday demonstrates why building a broad international coalition to destroy the self-proclaimed Islamic State is so difficult.
+
+Well over a year after President Obama announced creation of a coalition of more than 50 countries designed to “degrade and ultimately destroy” IS, also known as ISIS, there still is no effective alliance of major powers.
+
+Now French President François Hollande, who was at the White House Tuesday and will be in Russia Friday, has made building a coalition his goal in the wake of the Paris attacks. But the same challenge remains: The major players deeply mistrust one another’s intentions and visions for a post-Islamic State Syria.
+
+“It was never going to be easy to build a coalition against ISIS, given the complicated relations and competing alliances around the Syrian conflict,"" says Barry Strauss, a military historian at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “But clearly an event of this seriousness between Russia and Turkey will only make that effort more difficult.”
+
+Turkey and Russia exemplify the complex and often contradictory motives that Mr. Hollande will try to manage.
+
+The anti-IS coalition supposedly has similar aims to Turkey’s: the removal from power of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a key step toward reducing IS's allure for Syrian Sunnis. But it took months of sustained diplomatic effort for the United States to bring Turkey on board. Even now, the differences between the US and Turkey remain pronounced.
+
+From the US perspective, perhaps the most effective fighters against IS have been Syrian and Iraqi Kurds – so much so that the US has sent special operations forces to the region to help them. But Turkey has a large Kurdish population and worries that empowering Kurds anywhere in the region might create trouble at home.
+
+In fact, Turkey has been “friendlier towards ISIS than Russia” because of Turkey’s satisfaction with the setbacks that IS has dealt Syria’s Kurdish rebels.
+
+Similarly, many countries in the region ""find ISIS useful to have around and are in no rush to get rid of it"" because it is virulently anti-Shiite, Professor Strauss notes. In that way, IS acts ""as a counterbalance to Iran and the Shiite parties in the region.""
+
+For its part, Russia says it entered the Syrian conflict to defeat Syria’s “terrorists,” but analysts say its airstrikes in Syria have focused on Assad’s opponents. Only about a quarter have been against IS, experts say.
+
+For those reasons, getting Turkey and Russia on the same page for destroying IS – a priority for neither – was always going to be difficult. After the Russian jet shoot-down, the task will be even harder when Hollande meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin Friday.
+
+Mr. Putin called the downing of the Russian jet a “stab in the back” carried out by “accomplices of terrorists,” and he warned that the perpetrators of the “crime” will face “serious consequences.”
+
+Russia canceled Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's visit to Turkey Wednesday, while NATO called an emergency meeting of alliance ambassadors Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday’s incident was the first shoot-down of a Russian aircraft by a NATO country since the 1950s, officials said.
+
+Russia insists the fighter jet did not stray outside Syria, while Turkish officials said the jet was warned 10 times to turn back from its trajectory into Turkish airspace. Mr. Obama called on Russia, Turkey, and NATO countries to “discourage any escalation,” but also asserted that “Turkey, like every country, has the right to defend its territory and its airspace.”
+
+Russia is likely to look at the aftermath of the incident as validation that all groups arrayed against Assad are terrorists. A video released following the shoot-down shows Syrian Turkmen rebels claiming to have shot dead two Russian pilots as they parachuted to the ground.
+
+A separate incident further illustrates the difficulty of building a united anti-IS coalition that includes Russia. A group of Syrian rebels armed by the US claims to have damaged a Russian military helicopter, forcing it to make an emergency landing in Syrian government-held territory.
+
+Yet Strauss says perhaps the more formidable impediment to an effective coalition is the widespread ambiguity in the region toward the Islamic State.
+
+The region’s Sunni powers “may worry about ISIS in the long term, but to some extent they see its usefulness in the short term,” he says. That calculation does not fit with Western powers that – now more than ever – want to see IS’s demise ""sooner rather than later.""",REAL
+1356,Webb rips Clinton's State record as he mulls independent White House bid,"Former Democratic presidential candidate Jim Webb is now considering an independent candidacy that would directly attack Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton for her tenure as secretary of State including her handling of Libya, where an American diplomat was killed in a 2012 terror attack.
+
+""Clinton should be called to account for her inept leadership that brought about the chaos in Libya,"" Webb posted on his Facebook page Saturday. “Our next commander in chief must define a strategic vision for the country and accept accountability for past actions.”
+
+Webb, a Navy secretary in the Reagan administration who became a Democratic Virginia senator, in October dropped out of the 2016 Democrat presidential primary amid low poll numbers and little name recognition.
+
+He argued upon leaving that Washington Democrats have rigged the party primary season, which includes a limited debate schedule, an argument also made by remaining Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley.
+
+A Webb spokeswoman recently told CNN that Webb was doing some polling on a potential independent run and would make a decision by New Year’s Day.
+
+U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the 2012 terror attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya.
+
+Recently released emails and other evidence, including Clinton’s own Capitol Hill testimony, shows that the Obama administration failed to respond sufficiently to requests from Stevens and others for additional security and did not immediatley tell the public immediately that the attacks were terror related.
+
+Webb’s social media attack on Clinton also includes the Twitter post Saturday: “Hillary Clinton’s failed vision in Libya & the Arab Spring are foreign policy leadership at its worst.”
+
+Despite Webb’s popularity among voters for his outspoken, non-establishment persona, he would have difficulty raising the millions and building the infrastructure needed to be competitive as an independent.",REAL
+6230,JOHNSON & JOHNSON ORDERED TO PAY $70 MILLION TO CALIFORNIA WOMAN FOR CANCER-LINKED BABY POWDER,"Home › US NEWS › JOHNSON & JOHNSON ORDERED TO PAY $70 MILLION TO CALIFORNIA WOMAN FOR CANCER-LINKED BABY POWDER JOHNSON & JOHNSON ORDERED TO PAY $70 MILLION TO CALIFORNIA WOMAN FOR CANCER-LINKED BABY POWDER 0 SHARES 
+[10/31/16] The company plans to appeal the decision. 
+Johnson & Johnson has lost its third lawsuit alleging that the pharmaceutical company’s baby powder causes ovarian cancer. 
+Jurors in St. Louis awarded Deborah Giannecchini $70 million late Thursday, according to Bloomberg . For 40 years, Giannecchini, 62, had used the talcum powder for feminine hygiene, but stopped when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer three years ago. Now her lawyers say Giannecchini has an 80% chance of dying in the next two years, despite having undergone extensive treatment. 
+Carol Goodrich, a spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson, says the company will appeal to the decision . 
+“We deeply sympathize with the women and families impacted by ovarian cancer,” she said. “We will appeal today’s verdict because we are guided by the science, which supports the safety of Johnson’s Baby Powder.” 
+Additionally, research into the link between talc and cancer have been been mixed or inconclusive, according to the American Cancer Society . 
+That likely factored into a New Jersey judge’s decision to throw out two lawsuits against Johnson in Johnson in September, which alleged that the company’s talcum powder had caused their ovarian cancer. Post navigation",FAKE
+928,Who's Got the Best Chance against Clinton? It's Not Who You Think…,"The GOP presidential race seems to have come down to just two men: Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
+
+But polling shows the candidate with the best chance of beating Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
+
+Even after his loss in Wisconsin to Cruz, Trump remains the leader for the GOP nomination. Barring something unexpected, Trump should be the delegate leader going to the GOP convention.
+
+Meanwhile, both men want Ohio Gov. John Kasich to drop out because they believe they can win his delegates.
+
+Trump for his part argues that Kasich has lost every race so far except his home state of Ohio.
+
+""Here's the problem with Kasich. First of all, I think he happens to take votes away from me… I don't think he should be staying,"" the real estate mogul said.
+
+But even though he's a very distant third in delegates, Kasich is still polling the best against Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee.
+
+Trump's weakness is not only a high unfavorable rating - above 60 percent -  but that polls have shown he has trailed Clinton in 11 of 12 target states that will determine the outcome in November.
+
+According to RealClearPolitics Poll Averages, Trump does the worst against Clinton, with the former state secretary leading him by an average of nearly 11. The third-place GOP candidate, Kasich, does best, leading Clinton by six, while Cruz trails her by three.
+
+Meanwhile, Kasich has shown no sign he's ready to roll over.
+
+""Donald Trump said I need to get out of the race because I am getting his voters. Well, I've got news for him – I am going to get a heck of a lot of his voters,"" the Ohio governor told supporters.
+
+But how accurate is the polling that shows Kasich would do the best against Clinton?
+
+Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, cautions that these polls aren't necessarily accurate because it's still a long way until the November election.
+
+""Polls have very little predictive value about national contests at this early stage,"" she said. ""They usually aren't very reliable until about 100 days out from a campaign.""
+
+But none of that is stopping the feisty Kasich. He may be way down in the delegate numbers, but he's still spoiling for a fight.
+
+""I'm not a marshmallow or a pin cushion. You wanna take a whack at me? Let's get it on,"" he said.
+
+Sources say Kasich's strategy is to remain alive until a contested convention, hoping for 500 delegates or more, and then win over the other convention delegates with a positive message.
+
+As crazy as it sounds, some Republican insiders have said Kasich just might be able to pull it off.",REAL
+2194,"Rubio: Obama's diplomacy with dictators threatens America's safety, security","Two historic events are in progress today, August 14. The first is the arrival of Secretary of State John Kerry in Cuba. The second is President Obama’s continued campaign to secure Congressional approval for his flawed nuclear deal with Iran. These two dangerous developments represent the convergence of nearly every flawed strategic, moral, and economic notion that has driven President Obama’s foreign policy, and as such are emblematic of so many of the crises he has worsened around the world.
+
+To fully understand what we’re dealing with in regards to Iran and Cuba, we have to understand who we’re dealing with. In Iran, we face radical Shia clerics who wish to one day unite the world under their version of Islam and who believe this will only happen after a cataclysmic showdown with the West. These leaders have been directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and refuse to stop financing terrorists that seek to kill Americans and wipe Israel off the map.
+
+In Cuba, we face proudly anti-American leaders who continue to work with nations like Russia and China to spy on our people and government; who harbor fugitives from American justice; and who stand in opposition to nearly every value our nation holds dear by violating the basic human rights of their own people, preventing democratic elections, and depriving their nation’s economy of freedom and opportunity.
+
+Centuries of global affairs tell us the best way to affect an outcome with volatile leaders is through strength and example, while the worst is through weakness and concession. Yet weakness and concession are the preferred tools of statecraft for this administration.
+
+President Obama has not only permitted Iran to retain its entire existing nuclear infrastructure, he has also endorsed the construction of a full-scale, industrial-size nuclear program within 15 years. He has conceded a vast enrichment capacity, preserved Iran’s fortified underground facility, and failed to secure “anytime, anywhere” inspections. He has virtually guaranteed Iran becomes a regional power with the ability to build long-range missiles capable of hitting the U.S. homeland. And on top of all this, he wants to hand Iran $100 billion in sanctions relief, which will be used in part to fund Hamas and Hezbollah, promote instability in Bahrain and Yemen, and prop up Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
+
+The negotiations with Cuba have proven equally one-sided. President Obama has rewarded the Castro regime for its repressive tactics and persistent, patient opposition to American interests. He has unilaterally given up on a half-century worth of policy toward the Castro regime that was agreed upon by presidents of both parties. He has ensured the regime will receive international legitimacy and a substantial economic boost to benefit its repression of the Cuban people, which has only increased since the President announced his new policy.
+
+Beginning on day one, I will undertake a three-part plan to roll back President Obama’s deal with Iran. First, I will quickly reimpose sanctions on Iran. I will give the mullahs a choice: either you have an economy or you have a nuclear program, but you cannot have both. I will also ask Congress to pass crushing new measures that target human rights abuses and the sponsorship of terrorism.  Second, I will ensure our forces in the Middle East are positioned to signal readiness and restore a credible military option. Third, after imposing crippling sanctions on Iran, I will link any talks to Iran’s broader conduct, from human rights abuses to support for terrorism and threats against Israel.
+
+I will undertake an equally bold plan to roll back President Obama’s concessions to the Castro regime. First, on day one, I will give the Castros a choice: either continue repressing your people and lose the diplomatic relations provided by President Obama, or carry out meaningful political and human rights reforms and receive increased U.S. trade, investment, and support.  Second, I will restore Cuba to the state sponsor of terror list until it stops supporting designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, helping North Korea evade international sanctions, or harboring fugitives from American justice. Third, I will do everything in my power to provide support to Cuba’s pro-democracy movement and promote greater access to uncensored information for the Cuban people.
+
+These are the actions required to restore the safety and security President Obama has cost us through his diplomacy with dictators. When it comes to the challenges posed by Iran and Cuba, our task is straightforward – we must prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon and we must guarantee that the United States stands on the Cuban people, not their oppressors. But we also know that 'straightforward' is not a synonym for 'easy.' Our safety and security will require what it has always required: strong, principled leadership. And that is exactly what I intend to offer our nation and the world in the years ahead.
+
+
+
+Republican Marco Rubio represents Florida in the U.S. Senate. He is a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016.",REAL
+5250,The Daily 202: Clinton and Trump cave to pressure,"THE BIG IDEA: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump each reluctantly backed down last night on major things that threatened to derail their campaigns.
+
+The Clinton Foundation announced it will no longer accept donations from corporations or foreign entities if Hillary is elected president. Bill Clinton told foundation staff that the final meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative will be held next month, and he announced that he will stop giving paid speeches. “The former president, who turns 70 on Friday, said he will resign from the board, and the foundation will only accept contributions from U.S. citizens and independent charities,” according to the AP’s Ken Thomas, who broke the story.
+
+Meanwhile, Trump expressed remorse for the first time since he got into the race 14 months ago. “Sometimes in the heat of debate, and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don't choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that,"" the Republican nominee, reading from a teleprompter, said during a rally in Charlotte. “And believe it or not, I regret it. I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain.”
+
+-- Both candidates are extraordinarily reluctant to ever acknowledge wrongdoing, even tacitly, because they believe doing so projects weakness. This is why last night was so remarkable and may represent a true pivot point in the race.
+
+Think about Clinton’s evolving explanations for her private email server through the 2016 cycle and her defense of her support for the Iraq War during the 2008 race (it took her until 2014 to say a 2002 vote was a mistake).
+
+There are literally dozens of examples of Trump hurting himself by refusing to admit that he went too far. Think about his attacks on Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan, John “not a war hero” McCain, Judge Gonzalo Curiel and Ted Cruz’s father Rafael (whom he claimed was with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before John F. Kennedy’s assassination). He also declined to express regret after mocking a reporter with a disability and calling Mexican immigrants rapists.
+
+-- Hillary has now implicitly acknowledged that the Clinton Foundation is a major liability to her campaign, regardless of her campaign’s spin and inevitable denials. “The decision comes amid mounting criticism of how the foundation operated during her tenure as secretary of state, potentially allowing donors to seek special access through her government post,” Abby Phillip and Rosalind S. Helderman report.
+
+Donald, a former donor to the group, often accuses Hillary of engaging in “pay-to-play” practices. In particular, he says the $25 million the foundation took from Saudi Arabia undercuts his opponent’s rhetoric on women’s rights.
+
+But he’s inconsistent about his messaging. He also often levels unsubstantiated charges that overshadow any accurate lines of attack and make it easier for the war room in Brooklyn to push back by muddying the water.
+
+A traditional GOP opponent, running a disciplined campaign and spending meaningful money on negative TV ads, could probably more effectively use the Clinton Foundation as a bludgeon to depict HRC as a shady shakedown artist who looks out more for her rich cronies and deep-pocketed foreigners than working-class Americans struggling to catch a break.
+
+-- Message testing and focus groups, including those conducted by Democrats, have shown there are some particularly potent (and totally true) lines of attack. Among them:
+
+-- “There is no evidence that Hillary Clinton or her top aides completed ethics training when they started at the State Department, as required by federal law,” McClatchy’s Anita Kumar reported yesterday. “State Department records show only three of nine top Clinton aides took the mandated training for new employees. Records also suggest that none of seven top aides required to take subsequent annual training completed it. No records indicate whether Clinton herself took any training. Many of the aides still work for Clinton.… Clinton’s campaign did not respond to questions…”
+
+-- Clinton has been getting hammered in the court of elite opinion. The Post’s Editorial Board lamented “the porous ethical wall” between the Foundation and the State Department in a Sunday editorial: “As secretary, she pledged to keep her official world and her family’s foundation separate, and she failed to keep them separate enough. Such sloppiness would not be acceptable in the White House.” A Tuesday editorial in the Boston Globe that went further, calling for the Clinton Foundation to shut down altogether, went viral.
+
+“It’d be impossible to keep the foundation open without at least the appearance of a problem,” former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a close Clinton ally, told the New York Daily News last week.
+
+-- Last night showed that Kellyanne Conway is now calling the shots. In covering this week’s shake-up, the 202 has primarily focused on Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon becoming the campaign’s chief executive and probably has given insufficient attention to Conway taking over as manager.
+
+Conway is a pollster who specializes in helping conservative men reach out to women. In early July, she told our Danielle Paquette that she didn’t like Trump’s name-calling and said she really wants him to avoid criticizing people’s looks and mental capacity. “Maybe,” she said, “it’s just the mother in me.” (The full piece is worth rereading.)
+
+We’ve written a lot about Bannon’s push to let Trump be Trump, but clearly Conway is trying to talk some political sense into the candidate and explaining how much his insult-laden approach has damaged his standing with the women who will decide this election.
+
+-- But there are many reasons to doubt the sincerity of Trump’s 11th-hour conversion. He’s clearly desperate to turn around his sinking campaign, and he did not specify last night what he was apologizing for, or to whom. And just like the man who faux apologizes to his wife by saying “I’m sorry you’re mad,” Trump at one point couched his penchant for divisive rhetoric by saying, “Sometimes I can be too honest.” Was he being “too honest” when he laced into McCain, Curiel and the Khans? Trump has until very recently refused to express any regret for what he said about them. What changed?
+
+-- It was the third time in the past four days that Trump read a speech off a teleprompter, a practice he once routinely mocked. He clearly did not write the words he uttered. The language and tone sounded nothing like him.
+
+-- The humility he expressed last night is part of a broader and renewed effort to rebrand Trump as more “presidential,” Jose A. DelReal, Robert Costa and Jenna Johnson report. That effort will continue today with a trip to Louisiana to tour flooded areas.
+
+-- Conway said on CNN yesterday that Trump will finally begin preparing for the first debate this weekend, evidence that the candidate recognizes he must deliver a command performance to keep his hopes alive.
+
+-- How long can this last? We still believe that the 70-year-old is, at heart, fundamentally incapable of changing. It is hard to imagine him going on some kind of apology tour and becoming self-disciplined in a sustained way. He’s plainly happiest when he’s feuding with someone and putting down others.
+
+WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
+
+-- Trump’s first TV ad of the general election, which will begin airing today, focuses on immigration. The campaign says it will spend $4.8 million to air the 30-second spot over the next 10 days in four states. “In Hillary Clinton’s America,” a narrator says, “the system stays rigged against Americans, Syrian refugees flood in, illegal immigrants convicted of committing crimes get to stay, collecting Social Security benefits, skipping the line. Our border open. It’s more of the same, but worse. Donald Trump’s America is secure. Terrorists and dangerous criminals: kept out, the border secured. our families safe. Change that makes America safe again.” (NBC breaks down the buy: $1.44 million in Florida, $716k in Ohio, $984k in Pennsylvania, and $838k in North Carolina. This pales in comparison to the $61 million spent so far by Clinton’s campaign.) Watch it here:
+
+-- Mike Pence filed his personal financial disclosure with the FEC last night. “As Americans can clearly see, the Pence family has not enriched themselves from their public service,” spokesman Marc Lotter said, adding that “the Governor will release his tax returns in the near future.” (See the PFD here.)
+
+LOCHTE EMBARRASSES ALL OF US:
+
+-- Brazilian police said Ryan Lochte fabricated his story of being robbed at gunpoint alongside other U.S. swimmers, though authorities acknowledged that the foursome did have a gun pulled on them — by a security guard — after reportedly damaging property at a gas station in Rio. From Dave Sheinin, Dom Phillips and Joshua Partlow:
+
+An official apology: Overnight, the U.S. Olympic Committee issued a statement that acknowledged a version of events that involved an argument spurred by ""an act of vandalism"" committed by ""one of the athletes."" The statement concluded by saying, ""We apologize to our hosts in Rio and the people of Brazil for this distracting ordeal in the midst of what should rightly be a celebration of excellence.""
+
+An attorney for Jimmy Feigen said he will pay more than $10,000 to a Brazilian charity to leave the country. Under Brazilian law, his attorney said, a donation can be made to avoid criminal prosecution. He did not say what charge was potentially facing Feigen. (Matt Bonesteel)
+
+Lochte remains in the U.S., having left Rio on Tuesday, and teammates Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger were cleared to leave last night.
+
+-- What really happened? The incident appears to have stemmed from a drunken pit stop at a gas station bathroom around 6 a.m: ""Surveillance footage ... appears to show at least one of the swimmers … pull off the metal door to the bathroom. In the video ... gas station employees observe the athletes, then escort them out of the bathroom. In another clip, from a different camera angle, the athletes quickly seat themselves on the ground and raise their hands, as if ordered by a person with a gun.""
+
+The police chief confirmed a guard had produced a firearm to “contain” the swimmers so they could not leave without paying damages. “The firearm was used in a situation in which they were contained. When they were contained the firearm was put away,” he said.
+
+-- “Brazilians have reacted with anger and indignation at an apparently false crime report that only served to boost the perception of Rio de Janeiro as a lawless, chaotic city that was unprepared to host an Olympics.” The city police chief said Lochte and the others owed Rio an apology for having “stained” the city “for a fantasy.” “As the American swimmers left the police station Thursday evening, they were swarmed by a crowd of journalists amid shouts of ‘liars’ by some, in English.”
+
+-- The Post’s Sally Jenkins eviscerates Lochte as “the dumbest bell that ever rang” in a spot-on column: “Two things are going on here: Lochte’s self-promoting prevarications and the sensitivity of Rio authorities, who have been portrayed as incapable of keeping athletes safe amid other Olympic breakdowns. There have been a lot of genuine robberies of Olympic athletes and officials. The police need to show that fears are overstated and these Games are secure — though they are not, particularly — and the stupid Americans offered them something with which to save face. Lochte’s conceit intersected with a delicate political issue, and it made a perfect storm. His claim to NBC that men posing as police pulled over the taxi and he heroically resisted the robbers with a gun pressed to his forehead was an especially ludicrous detail — and the very thing that drew the attention of authorities, who know full well that anyone who defies a bandit in Rio gets shot on the spot, and they don’t leave you with your cellphone. Lochte’s done as a public figure, of course. Which is probably the most effective form of justice for someone who apparently so craves attention. Oblivion is what he deserves.”
+
+-- How it's playing in the tabloids:
+
+-- One of the things that makes the Lochte mess so frustrating is that it overshadows the amazing performances by the upstanding Americans who keep crushing it on the field. The U.S. has now reached TRIPLE-DIGIT MEDAL STATUS. We’re officially at 100 – with 35 gold, 33 silver, and 32 bronze. China and Britain continue their battle for second place, with China squeezing out Britain with just a two-medal lead (58 to 56.) Check out the Post’s live medal count here.
+
+-- The U.S. women’s 4x100 relay team got a second shot at advancing to the gold-medal round, after filing a protest over a dropped baton between sprinters Allyson Felix and English Gardner. Officials agreed that a Brazilian team had interfered with the handoff, The Americans got to rerun the race later – alone on the track – “an odd scene,” Des Bieler notes, but one that ultimately scored them the BEST time of the entire day.
+
+-- Kerron Clement won gold for the U.S. in the men’s 400m hurdles. And Dalilah Muhammad did the same for the women’s team – becoming the first American female to ever win gold in the race. (Teammate Ashley Spencer also netted a third-place finish.)
+
+-- Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to earn a wrestling gold medal, beating out a legendary three-time Olympic champion from Japan.
+
+-- University of Virginia runner Robby Andrews qualified for the men’s 1500m finals – but was subsequently disqualified – after he stepped off the track.
+
+-- USAIN BOLT soared to victory in his last individual race of the Rio Games, winning his third gold medal in the men’s 200m by a wide margin. He’ll now compete in the men’s 4x100m relay Friday, potentially earning him a “triple-triple” sweep and a tie with American Carl Lewis and Paavo Nurmi of Finland for the most career Olympic gold medals in track and field. (Mark Giannotto)
+
+-- Ivanka Trump’s brother-in-law will NOT vote for Trump, according to a new Esquire profile: Through a spokesman, the magazine's Vicky Ward wrote, Josh Kushner ""said that he loved his brother and did not want to say anything that might embarrass him. Nevertheless, the spokesman also said that Josh is a lifelong Democrat and will not be voting for Trump in November.""
+
+-- Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, on live television, accused Clinton of a rare brain disease with which she has never been diagnosed: “What's new are the other reports of the observations of [Clinton's] behavior and mannerisms, specifically with what you just showed in those previous clips, as well as her dysphasia, the fact that she's fallen, she has had a concussion,” Pierson charged on MSNBC. (Dysphasia is defined as the ""loss of or deficiency in the power to use or understand language as a result of injury to or disease of the brain."") Pierson’s accusations come after Clinton’s campaign has refuted the conspiracy theories, releasing multiple fact-checking articles and a statement from Clinton’s doctor saying she is in excellent health. ""It's something that needs to be addressed,"" Pierson continued. ""She's taken a lot of time off the campaign trail."" (Aaron Blake)
+
+-- Gov. Scott Walker pushed back on Trump ally Roger Stone’s allegations that he and “the Reince Priebus machine” rigged “as many as five elections” in Wisconsin, dishing out a rare moment of snark when asked about the longtime Trump confidante. “Apparently that’s what the long-term effect is of legalizing marijuana in the District of Columbia,” he quipped. (Wisconsin State Journal)
+
+-- David A. Fahrenthold has the latest on Trump’s dubious claims of charitable giving – this time on his NBC show “The Apprentice”: “For Trump, ‘The Apprentice’ — and later, ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ — helped reestablish him as a national figure, after his fall into debt and corporate bankruptcies in the 1990s. On-screen, Trump was a wise, tough businessman. And, at times, a kind­hearted philanthropist — willing to give away thousands on a whim. On-air, Trump seemed to be explicit that this wasn’t TV fakery: The money he was giving was his own. ‘Out of my wallet,’ Trump said in one case. ‘Out of my own account,’ he said in another. But, when the cameras were off, the payments came from other people’s money.” The Post tracked all the “personal” gifts that Trump promised on the show but could not confirm a single case in which Trump actually sent a gift from his own pocket.
+
+In 2012, Trump became more generous on the air – giving six $10,000 donations in a single episode, in one example. His gifts brought one insult comedian to tears. But a mystery remained: What happened in 2012 to make Trump so much more generous on the air? “In the tax records of the Trump Foundation … there is no record of a donation from Trump himself in 2012. But, in 2012, the Trump Foundation’s records show a large gift from NBC, the network that aired the show. That was more than enough to cover all the foundation’s gifts to ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ contestants’ charities, both before 2012 and since. For NBC, Trump’s ‘personal’ donations made for better TV … [giving] uplifting notes to the ‘firings’ and [burnishing] the reputation of Trump, the show’s star. Did NBC give Trump’s foundation money, so that Trump could appear to be more generous on-camera?”
+
+-- Tom Hamburger, Dana Priest and Andrew Roth have the backstory on how Trump's campaign chairman revived his career – and his business fortunes – in Ukraine: “Manafort’s 2005 entry into Ukrainian politics and finances came when he signed on as an adviser to the steel magnate Rinat Akhmetov, one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs and a key supporter of Yanukovych and the Party of Regions … Manafort’s first job was to burnish the local and international reputation of a company owned by Akhmetov based in the Russian-speaking industrial Donetsk region. Over time, Manafort’s role with the party expanded.”
+
+“As Manafort built a political consulting practice in Ukraine, he also developed financial connections with wealthy figures in the region, some of whom face ongoing scrutiny from the Justice Department. … In 2008, he tried to develop an $850 million Manhattan luxury apartment project with Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian energy tycoon with a history of legal trouble. U.S. prosecutors charged Firtash in 2013 with money-laundering and bribery … In another business venture, Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate, accused Manafort in a court in the Cayman Islands of taking nearly $19 million intended for investments, then not accounting for the money.” Manafort insisted he had cut his ties with his Ukrainian client in 2014. But former colleagues however, say he continued to work for the party, and was seen in the country as recently as October.
+
+-- ""Ukraine Releases More Details on Payments for Trump Aide,” from the New York Times: “The Ukrainian authorities, under pressure to bolster their assertion that once-secret accounting documents show cash payments from a pro-Russian political party earmarked for Manafort, on Thursday released line-item entries, some for millions of dollars. The former party member, Vitaly A. Kalyuzhny, for a time chairman of the Ukraine Parliament’s International Relations Committee, had signed nine times for receipt of payments designated for ... Manafort, according to Serhiy A. Leshchenko, a member of Parliament who has studied the documents. The ledger covered payments from 2007 to 2012, when Mr. Manafort worked for the party and its leader, Viktor F. Yanukovych, Ukraine’s former president who was deposed.”
+
+-- Trump advisers waged covert influence campaign,” by the AP's Jeff Horwitz and Chad Day: “A firm run by Trump's campaign chairman directly orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine's ruling political party, attempting to sway American public opinion in favor of the country's pro-Russian government. Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, never disclosed their work as foreign agents as required under federal law. The lobbying included attempts to gain positive press coverage of Ukrainian officials in [the NYT, WSJ, and the AP]. Another goal: undercutting American public sympathy for the imprisoned rival of Ukraine's then-president.
+
+“The emails appear to contradict the assertion that the nonprofit's lobbying campaign operated independently from Manafort's firm. In papers filed in the U.S. Senate, Mercury and the Podesta Group listed the European nonprofit as an independent, nonpolitical client. The firms said the center stated in writing that it was not aligned with any foreign political entity. The emails show that Gates personally directed two Washington lobbying firms … to set up meetings between a top Ukrainian official and senators and congressmen on influential committees involving Ukrainian interests. Gates noted in the emails that … Ukraine's foreign minister, did not want to use his own embassy in the United States to help coordinate the visits. And Gates directed efforts to undercut sympathy for Yulia Tymoshenko, an imprisoned rival of then-President Viktor Yanukovych.”
+
+MORE FALLOUT FROM THE BREITBART-IZATION OF THE GOP:
+
+-- Former Breitbart News spokesman Kurt Bardella slammed Stephen Bannon for regularly disparaging minorities, women and immigrants – saying editorial meetings for the publication often sounded “like a white supremacist rally.” “This is someone who has a very low moral compass,” he said on ABC’s “Powerhouse Politics” podcast, “and the idea that this is the type of person that Donald Trump, as the Republican nominee, as president, would have closest to him is very disturbing.”
+
+-- Bannon’s ascension to the post of Trump campaign CEO represents a dangerous seizure of the conservative movement by the alt-right, another ex-Breitbart employee, Ben Shapiro, writes in an op-ed for The Post. “It comes as a surprise — or at least it should — that the RNC appears ready to go along with the Bannon-Breitbart-Trump takeover over the party, even as the Trump campaign’s latest move means RNC Chairman Reince Priebus now sits, effectively, side by side with alt-right Trump fans. … Broad swaths of the alt-right, by contrast, believe in a creed-free, race-based nationalism, insisting, among other things, that birth on American soil confers superiority. The alt-right sees limited-government constitutionalism as passé; it holds that only nationalist populism on the basis of shared tribal identity can save the country. It’s a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism. [Now], it is this is the cast of characters, and their enablers, to whom Trump has turned. Bannon is … the guy who ushered along the twisted turn at Breitbart. If Republicans aren’t careful, he’ll inflict similar damage on their party now that he’s the top man running their standard-bearer’s campaign.”
+
+-- Reacting to Trump bringing on Bannon, Stuart Stevens (Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in 2012) told Bloomberg: “This is the bunker scene in ‘Downfall,’ only the Trump crowd won’t tell Hitler the truth. It’s utter madness. Trump is a nut, and he likes to surround himself with nuts.”
+
+-- Bannon is already making an imprint: The Trump campaign hired an ex-Sarah Palin aide, Pam Pryor, to oversee its “faith and Christian outreach,"" per the Wall Street Journal.
+
+-- A secretive donor has more sway than ever over Trump’s orbit. The New York Times’ Nicholas Confessore reports on how his deep-pocketed family helped put the shake-up into motion and now has close allies in positions of authority: “[Bannon’s] ascension on Wednesday — urged on Mr. Trump by (Rebecca) Mercer, among others — shows how a cadre of strategists, ‘super PACs’ and political organizations quietly nurtured by her family have emerged to play a pivotal role in Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. Over more than half a decade, Ms. Mercer’s father, the New York investor Robert Mercer, has carved an idiosyncratic path through conservative politics, spending tens of millions of dollars to outflank his own party’s consultant class and unnerve its established powers. His fortune has financed think tanks and insurgent candidates, super PACs and media watchdogs, lobbying groups and grass-roots organizations. Many of them are now connected, one way or another, to Mr. Trump’s presidential bid. Mr. Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is a veteran Republican pollster who previously oversaw a super PAC financed by the Mercers.” And Bannon oversees Breitbart, a company to which Mercer reportedly invested $10 million several years ago, and “likely still has a stake.”
+
+WHEN IN DOUBT, BLAME THE MEDIA:
+
+-- In Charlotte last night, Trump said the media created some of the controversies that have dogged him. “The establishment media doesn’t cover what really matters in this country, or what’s really going on in people’s lives,” he said. “They will take words of mine out of context and spend a week obsessing over every single syllable, and then pretend to discover some hidden meaning in what I said.”
+
+-- In New Hampshire yesterday, Mike Pence said the press – not Trump – is to blame for the ticket’s slide in the polls. “Just about every day, the national media latches onto some issue about my running mate. It really does,” the Indiana governor said in Manchester. “I mean, the media is so busy parsing every word that Donald Trump said in the last 30 minutes, they don’t have time to cover what the Clintons have been up to for the last 30 years.” (Time)
+
+BUT AT WHAT COST?
+
+-- An important factor in the rise of Trump: Only 32 percent of Republicans trusted the media a “great deal” or a “fair amount” in Gallup polling from last year, which is one reason so many of the tough stories on Trump have been tuned out by his supporters.
+
+-- “We’ve created this monster”: Business Insider’s Oliver Darcy posted the transcript of a thought-provoking interview he did with conservative Wisconsin radio host Charlie Sykes (a prominent critic of the GOP nominee) about how significant distrust of the media has been in both the rise and resilience of Trump. It’s worth reading in full:
+
+“We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers,” Sykes said. There’s nobody. Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bull-[expletive.]’ There’s nobody – you can’t go to anybody and say ‘Look, here are the facts.’ And I have to say that’s one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there’s no way to break through it. And I swim [upstream] because if I don’t say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they’ll ask what’s wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true.”
+
+“When this is all over, we have to go back. There’s got to be a reckoning on all this. We’ve created this monster,” Sykes added. “And look, I’m a conservative talk show host. All conservative hosts have basically established their brand as being contrasted to the mainstream media. So we have spent 20 years demonizing the liberal mainstream media. And by the way, a lot of it has been justifiable. There is a real bias. But, at a certain point you wake up and you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there. And I am feeling, to a certain extent, that we are reaping a whirlwind at that. And I have to look in the mirror and ask myself, ‘To what extent did I contribute?’ I’ll be honest, the bias of the mainstream media has been a staple for every conservative talk show host, every conservative pundit for as long as I can remember. Going way back into the 1960s with William F. Buckley Jr.”
+
+-- Clinton told FBI investigators that Colin Powell advised her to use a private email account: “The account is included in the notes the Federal Bureau of Investigation handed over to Congress on Tuesday” relaying details behind the FBI’s  decision not to charge Clinton, the New York Times’s Amy Chozick reports. “Separately, in a 2009 email exchange that also emerged during the F.B.I. questioning, Mrs. Clinton, who had already decided to use private email, asked Mr. Powell about his email practices when he was the nation’s top diplomat under George W. Bush, according to a person with direct knowledge of Mr. Powell’s appearance in the documents.”
+
+-- Clinton held a closed-door meeting with top law enforcement officers from around the country in New York, seeking to discuss policing and racial tensions that have been exposed by recent killings. John Wagner and Abby Phillip: ""It's obvious that recent events — from Dallas and Baton Rouge to Milwaukee and across the country — underscore how difficult and important the work is ahead of us to repair the bonds of trust and respect between our police officers and our communities,"" Clinton said, before dismissing reporters. 'We have to be clear-eyed about the challenges we face. We can't ignore them, and certainly we must not inflame them.'""
+
+Clinton has sought to toe a somewhat narrow line, expressing support for officers while sympathizing with the concerns of Black Lives Matter activists and others outraged by discriminatory conduct. Trump, meanwhile, has cast himself as the “law and order” candidate, blasting Clinton in rallies as someone who is “against the police.” “I’m on your side a thousand percent,” Trump said during the meeting with a Fraternal Order of Police chapter this week.
+
+-- Awkward: Trump and Clinton have set up White House transition offices in the same building, Lisa Rein reports: “It’s the first time in history that two presidential campaigns have worked to set up their governments in miniature literally side-by-side, riding the same elevators to adjacent floors of the tony, marble-floored building as they plan to govern.” The two will get two floors of federally-funded office space in the modern digs, along with millions in GSA-provided computers and technical support.
+
+-- Trump and Clinton are slated to appear on the same stage next month at a “commander-in-chief forum” hosted a veterans group and broadcast on NBC. The two will field questions from NBC hosts, John Wagner reports, as well as an audience comprised mainly of current and former service members.
+
+-- Wired Magazine, taking a side in a presidential race for the first time, endorsed HRC: “For all the barbs aimed at Clinton—the whole calculating, tactical, Tracy Flick enchilada—she is the only candidate who can assess the data, consult with the people who need to be heard, and make decisions that she can logically defend,” editor in chief Scott Dadich writes. “Sure, she’s calculating. She’s tactical. There are worse things you can ask of a person with nuclear codes.”
+
+-- Speaking of endorsements: Trump still has the vote of “Benghazi mom,” even though the guy who wrote her speech to the RNC wrote an op-ed saying that he may vote for Clinton. (People Magazine)
+
+-- The Green Party candidates showed why they're not getting much traction during an awkward CNN appearance. Presidential nominee Jill Stein appeared alongside running-mate Ajamu Baraka for a live town hall event last nigh, Dave Weigel reports. ""Stein used most of the airtime to repeat her campaign's themes, from the cancellation of student debt to the cancellation of much military spending. She told one [Bernie Sanders] voter that the senator had been ‘relegated to a very low-profile role’ at the Democratic convention — which was untrue — and told another that bankers' debt was ‘canceled’ by the Troubled Asset Relief Program.” The two also answered to several campaign gaffes – moderator Chris Cuomo pushed Baraka on why he had referred to Obama as an “Uncle Tom.” And Stein was also pressed on whether she was anti-vaccine, a charge she ultimately dismissed as “ridiculous.”
+
+-- Bernie is slated to launch his new progressive organization, “Our Revolution,” next week: Sanders, who began fundraising for the group earlier this month, has said he hopes to “transform American society” by mobilizing young people, working people and progressives. (Burlington Free Press)
+
+THE BATTLE FOR THE SENATE:
+
+-- Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman who once seemed primed for an easy reelection campaign, is now in trouble. National Review's Alexis Levinson reports that the Republican incumbent has barely begun campaigning in the state and must share the ballot with TWO deeply unpopular Republicans. Besides Trump, Pat McCrory, who signed the state’s “bathroom bill” into law, is very likely to lose reelection.
+
+-- Carpetbagging alert: Indiana election officials concluded that Evan Bayh is an ""INACTIVE"" voter in their state after he failed to establish his residency in Indianapolis, CNN’s Manu Raju reports. The news comes as an additional hurdle for Bayh, who has stayed at a Marriott when he’s gone back to the state rather than his condo. Electric bills earlier this week made clear that he spends no time at his residence.
+
+-- He's back: George W. Bush is planning to visit Indiana next month to stump for Bayh’s Republican opponent, Todd Young, hoping to shore up support for the Republican congressman and close a large fundraising advantage held by Bayh. (WDRB)
+
+-- Rep. Michael McCaul declined to rule out the idea of challenging Ted Cruz for his Texas senate seat in 2018, fueling speculation that he is being courted by major donors to launch a bid. “Asked to rate Cruz's Senate tenure, McCaul said his fellow Texan has ‘spent a lot of time running for president.’ And though McCaul said he's focused on his re-election to the House this fall, he wouldn't limit his future prospects. ‘Never say never,’” he told reporters. (The Dallas Morning News)
+
+-- “They survived Hurricane Katrina and rebuilt in Baton Rouge. Now they’ve lost everything again,” by Emma Brown, Ashley Cusick and Mark Berman: “When Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans, thousands of people left behind their ruined homes and took refuge here. They found new jobs and rebuilt their homes. Slowly, things started to feel normal again. But then a nameless storm brought unprecedented flooding to Baton Rouge and a wide swath of southern Louisiana over the last week. Countless Katrina survivors have been left, for a second time, with nothing. Two displacements, two traumas. A loss that has left many feeling tired, battered and hopeless. And even as many face unclear futures and questions about where they will live, experts say they are also concerned about the mental health consequences for Katrina survivors now weathering this new loss. 'I want to get away from water, get away from low-lying areas,' said Jerry Savage, who lost both his home and his lawn-care business in Katrina, then rebuilt both in Baton Rouge only to lose them again. 'I want to get out of here.'""
+
+Republicans seized on the news from the State Department:
+
+A New York City spokesman made this joke at Trump's expense:
+
+Without context or additional explanation, Trump declared he will soon be known as ""Mr. Brexit."" Ostensibly he was referring to the idea of an upset that shocks elites.
+
+""Mr. Brexit immediately began trending globally,"" Jennifer Hassan and Max Bearak report. ""Thousands of users questioned exactly what Trump meant by his triumphal prognostication.""
+
+Many Brits feel like their own leaders deserve the title:
+
+The problematic logic of arguing big crowds point to a future win:
+
+A joke from the polling director at the Huffington Post:
+
+Former George W. Bush White House Press Secretary Dana Perino responded to fans who want her to give them good news about the GOP's chances this election:
+
+Watch Dana spar with the other hosts on ""The Five"" about it:
+
+Brothers from opposite sides of the aisle -- one is the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party and the other is a former DNC communications director who has worked for a constellation of liberal outside groups -- clashed publicly over a Republican effort to limit early voting in the Tar Heel State:
+
+Tim Kaine and Tom Vilsack visited the Butter Cow at the Iowa State Fair:
+
+Some 2008 campaign swag, courtesy of Cindy McCain:
+
+Jon Stewart appeared in the final episode of Larry Wilmore's show, which was canceled by Comedy Central. (Read a show summary here.)
+
+On the campaign trail: Trump is in Dimondale, Mich.
+
+At the White House: Obama is in Martha's Vineyard, Mass.
+
+On Capitol Hill: The Senate and House are out.
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+-- The Capital Weather Gang forecasts a sunny, “tolerably” humid Friday. “Mostly sunny, at least through midday. We’ll see a light north-northeasterly breeze around 5 mph. What’s not to like? Well, right, it’s still at least five degrees above average for this time of year, with high temperatures forecast to be around 90 and maybe a few mid-90s possible. Enjoy the quietness, even if it is a bit warm. On these hot days, there could always be an isolated shower or storm, but most or all folks staying dry is the best bet.” We’ll take it!
+
+-- The Federal Transit Administration announced it will spend $900,000 to hire and train federal contractors to form an eventually permanent Metro safety oversight agency. Officials say the new contractors will perform immediate inspections and investigations on the Metro, eventually transferring their knowledge base to the new safety oversight commission when it is established. (Faiz Siddiqui)
+
+-- A Latino advocate in Virginia was found guilty of fraud after she posed as an attorney to cheat clients out of thousands of dollars, falsely promising to help them obtain legal status. (Antonio Olivo)
+
+-- As the National Museum of African American History gears up for opening day next month, its director opened up about the “painful but crucial” process museum leaders went through as they grappled with how much of the dark corners of U.S. history to expose. The museum’s structure, they say, is purposefully designed to reflect that struggle. (Krissah Thompson has more.)
+
+CBS compiled what it says are Stephen Colbert's five most ""hilarious Hillary takedowns"" and his five ""most scorching burns"" of Trump.
+
+The largest aircraft in the world just took flight:
+
+Bloomberg broke down Trump's strange combination of idioms, expressions, and filler phrases:
+
+The DNC released this video on Trump's refusal to release his tax returns:
+
+Comedy Central mashed up videos of cats who dislike Trump:
+
+A parody trailer for ""Mad Trump: Fury Road"" went up in June but has been making the rounds again online:
+
+Finally, watch the making of the naked Trump statues that were placed in New York, San Francisco and other cities:",REAL
+7346,"Inside the Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton & Trump","Photo by Diego Torres Silvestre | CC BY 2.0 
+
+The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda. 
+The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions. 
+In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” 
+Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it”. 
+He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”. 
+Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged. 
+Imagine two cities. 
+Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people. 
+But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties. 
+In the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics. 
+The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us” – by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America. 
+Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city. 
+Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad. 
+What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria. 
+Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today. 
+Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications. 
+The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?” 
+He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq”. 
+It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question — Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous. 
+In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul. 
+There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7 th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps. 
+When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”. That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak. 
+“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.” 
+The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country. 
+The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable. 
+As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked. 
+From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage. 
+Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.” 
+The West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the US and Britain sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms – is at present destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the children are malnourished. 
+Look on YouTube and you will see the kind of massive bombs – “our” bombs – that the Saudis use against dirt-poor villages, and against weddings, and funerals. 
+The explosions look like small atomic bombs. The bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers. This fact is not on the evening news. 
+Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia — and with careers on the BBC, the Guardia n, the New York Times , the Washington Post . 
+These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT. 
+And they love war. 
+While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life. 
+In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie. 
+In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable. 
+So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died!” 
+The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian : “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.” 
+Intervention — what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction. 
+According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, “most [of them] under the age of ten”. 
+As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS. 
+Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times , the Washington Post and the Guardian , and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. 
+All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato. 
+This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil. 
+The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine – except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count. 
+Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government. 
+There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. 
+The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. 
+To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. 
+But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the 21 st century. 
+This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China. 
+To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China. 
+In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news. 
+Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House. 
+The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world – unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China. 
+Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China. 
+She has now pledged to support a No Fly Zone in Syria — a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime –a distinction for which the competition is fierce. 
+Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public. 
+That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders. 
+Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way – in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target. 
+Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8 th, If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays’ “torches of freedom”. 
+George Bush’s press spokesman once called the media “complicit enablers”. 
+Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history. 
+In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.” 
+This is adapted from an address to the Sheffield Festival of Words, Sheffield, England.",FAKE
+6434,"Former GOP Congressman Goes Full Trump, Encourages Armed Revolt If Clinton Wins","By Sean Colarossi on Wed, Oct 26th, 2016 at 7:36 pm This type of language from someone who used to be a member of the United States Congress is abhorrent, but it's also to be expected in the Trump era of American politics. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+Hopefully, as a country, we’ll return to a time in our politics when violent language is shocking and rare. But this year, when the man at the top of the Republican ticket has repeatedly encouraged his supporters to revolt if he loses, isn’t likely to be that time. 
+On Wednesday, former GOP Congressman Joe Walsh, a right-wing extremist who now hosts a talk radio show, followed his nominee’s lead and told urged his Twitter followers to grab their guns on Nov. 9 if Hillary Clinton is elected. 
+Tweet: On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. 
+On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. 
+You in? 
+— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
+This type of language from someone who used to be – and thankfully no longer is – a member of the United States Congress is abhorrent, but it’s also to be expected in the Trump era of American politics. 
+After all, not long ago Trump himself instructed his supporters to revolt if Clinton decides to fulfill her constitutional duty and nominate Supreme Court judges. 
+“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” the Republican nominee said. “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.” 
+More recently, Trump said that he’d like to see what happens if Clinton’s bodyguards were disarmed. 
+“I think her bodyguards should drop all weapons. Disarm immediately,” he said. “Take their guns away, let’s see what happens to her.” 
+Not only does Walsh’s rhetoric align perfectly with what Trump has suggested at various points throughout this campaign, but it’s also a continuation of dangerous language that the former Republican congressman seems to enjoy using. 
+Earlier in the year, when five police officers were gunned down in Dallas, Walsh blamed President Obama, tweeting: “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.” 
+Before Trump hit the scene, this type of rhetoric existed, but it often only came from the most extreme elements in either party. Now it has the encouragement of a major party presidential nominee. 
+On Nov. 9, we shouldn’t hope that people take up arms to protest the results of the election. We should hope that when Trump loses, he’ll take a lot of this dangerous rhetoric with him.",FAKE
+4671,"For young black activists, an urgent task: Persuading peers to vote","Kahlida Lloyd can explain her reasons for voting for Hillary Clinton, even if she is not especially excited about them. But she has a hard time making the case to obstinate friends why they should support the Democratic presidential nominee.
+
+Lloyd, 31, a lawyer, sought advice from other black millennials during a recent lunchtime gathering in downtown Washington. What should she say to encourage young black voters, who rallied in 2008 and 2012 to help Barack Obama make history as the first African American president, to show a little of that enthusiasm for Clinton?
+
+“I just don’t want the first woman president to be elected because the other person sucks, but that’s where I think we are,” Lloyd said in an interview after the event last week hosted by #WeVote, a new effort aimed at mobilizing young black voters. “People either say, ‘Donald Trump is not where it’s at, so I’m going to vote for Hillary.’ Or you have people say, ‘Donald Trump is not where it’s at; I’m not going to vote at all.’ And that’s not cool.”
+
+Younger African Americans, like many millennials, are not excited about this year’s presidential election. The Clinton campaign, which has sought to reassemble the Obama coalition, has struggled to connect with a key piece of it: voters under 30.
+
+Turnout among African Americans under age 30 spiked from 49 percent in 2004 to 57 percent in 2008, but it dipped to 53 percent in 2012, according to Census Bureau data. While 43 percent of Obama supporters under age 40 were “very enthusiastic” about him in 2012, just 24 percent of Clinton supporters under age 40 feel the same way about her now, according to September averages of Washington Post-ABC News polls from four years ago and this year.
+
+Black activists and organizers, frustrated with the Clinton campaign’s inability to engage young voters, have taken it upon themselves to challenge their peers to consider the consequences if Republicans take the White House and keep control of both houses of Congress. They also have encouraged young voters to focus on state and local elections, because those officials make decisions about how police departments and schools are run, issues that more directly affect their lives.
+
+[For ‘Black and Engaged’ millennial activists, politics is local]
+
+Voting rights were an important victory of the civil rights era, and because Trump’s campaign has laid bare racist attitudes, the seeming indifference of black millennials to the election has sparked broad discussion within the African American community.
+
+But young people who say that the political system has failed them argue that they don’t owe it to anyone — not even the often-cited warriors of the civil rights movement — to participate in the presidential election. Many are critical of some black political leaders for framing the election as a choice between an archenemy and an old friend rather than talking about the issues, such as what they view as broken economic and criminal justice systems.
+
+“We know what the issues are. What we can’t seem to get is candidates to talk about them in a nuanced way,” said Lauren Brown, 34, a public relations professional who said she has not been moved by Clinton’s talking points on addressing police violence against black people or economic equity for women of color. “This election cycle is more about who you hate more than who you like.”
+
+Brown decided to vote for Clinton after taking part in a discussion during an event, hosted last month in Philadelphia by a civic project called Black and Engaged, about the stakes in the campaign. Trump’s debate performances also helped sway her.
+
+Carmen Berkley, director of civil, human and women’s rights for the AFL-CIO, said many black millennials have to stop “waiting to have that same level of excitement” they felt for Obama’s campaign. “If I had my choice of who would be the president, it probably would be Michelle Obama, but she’s not running for president. Hillary Clinton is.”
+
+But the first lady and the president could be effective surrogates to persuade young black people to put aside their doubts about voting for Clinton. Although Michelle Obama’s well-regarded speech taking on Trump’s vulgar comments about women was made before a largely white audience in New Hampshire, it was widely shared and discussed on social media, and black women in particular praised the first lady for speaking out about sexual harassment.
+
+[Black women are most worried about the outcome of the 2016 election, poll finds]
+
+Denise Horn, a spokeswoman for the campaign, said the Obamas are among several surrogates, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), who are popular among millennial voters and will continue to make the case for Clinton.
+
+Berkley, 31, said some black millennials are being overly critical of Clinton, for instance, by continuing to criticize her for supporting her husband’s 1994 crime bill and using the term “super predator” to describe some young offenders. They don’t give her credit for having apologized, or for pledging to work to achieve criminal justice reform. “Here, you have a candidate who says, ‘I messed up, and I’m willing to change.’ ” Berkley said. “I think that is powerful. We have — as activists, organizers and everyday people — the power to bring pressure on political leaders to get what we want.”
+
+Symone D. Sanders, 26, a top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders during his Democratic primary campaign, co-founded #WeVote along with three other millennial activists to urge their peers to register and vote. Lloyd was among about 145 people who attended the Washington event. Similar gatherings are planned around the country.
+
+Other efforts to engage millennial activists include BlackPAC, which got funding from the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA to do outreach in Florida, and the Color Of Change PAC, which got money from the progressive For Our Future super PAC to court voters in battleground states via text message.
+
+“I think it’s extremely important that the message we take from this room, when we’re going out into our individual networks, is that this is not the election to sit on the sidelines,” Sanders said during last week’s discussion. “There are so many things, as President Obama has said, that are on the ballot: Our progress as a country is on the ballot, criminal justice reform and the future of criminal justice reform in this country is on the ballot, our economy and who will be able to get a job is on the ballot. So if those are the things you care about, that is why we have to go to the polls.”
+
+But Lloyd told Sanders and members of the panel that she had been having trouble convincing others that they should vote for Clinton.
+
+“After the first African American president of the United States of America, we cannot afford not to vote,” said panelist Mary-Pat Hector, national youth director for the National Action Network and a student at Spelman College in Atlanta.
+
+“We cannot risk [Supreme Court] justices that are going to push us back. All of the things that we’ve worked so hard for, not only as African Americans, but as women, can be gone — tomorrow. We cannot allow someone who does not care about us win. So if that means voting for Hillary Clinton, then so be it.”
+
+DeRay Mckesson, a prominent leader in the Black Lives Matter movement also on the panel, said the campaign has not offered a compelling, affirmative reason to vote for Clinton, nor a credible surrogate who can speak to young black voters in the way that Atlanta rapper Killer Mike represented Sanders.
+
+“I don’t know who is out there like that for Hillary. Trump drives us all nuts, but we know Trump wants to build a wall,” Mckesson said. “I’m an insider in the criminal justice space, and sometimes I’m, like, ‘What is it Hillary’s going to do?’ That is a problem.”
+
+Clinton campaign aides say she has not only talked about issues affecting communities of color but has offered detailed proposals to address such concerns as criminal justice, income inequality and infrastructure in neglected neighborhoods.
+
+Addisu Demissie, director of national voter outreach, said the campaign has been doing extensive outreach to black voters — including millennials — in their communities, and in recent weeks African American celebrities and athletes have been more active on the trail. Over the weekend, hip-hop artist Pusha T joined fellow Virginian and Clinton running mate Tim Kaine for a campaign event in Liberty City, a predominantly black, low-income community in Miami.
+
+Maya Harris, senior policy adviser, said Clinton’s economic agenda “touches on various issues that are related to wealth and income inequality, specifically addressing the African American community.”
+
+“Does that mean there are not more policies that we could or should pursue if she is fortunate enough to be elected president? Of course not,” she said. “But is her policy agenda one that recognizes the specific circumstances and challenges and lack of opportunities in the African American community, not only recognizes it, but puts forth solutions to begin to address those issues and create opportunities? Absolutely.”
+
+Lloyd, who said she gave money and volunteered for Obama’s campaigns, had not been active for Clinton. The #WeVote discussion inspired her to sign up for a text-a-thon. She sent messages to more than 500 mostly black voters in Pennsylvania.
+
+“I definitely think that event ignited something in me, made me want to take advantage of opportunities to share with others,” she said.",REAL
+6467,Peter Brimelow On With Steve Curtis At 8:05 Eastern,"X Dear Reader! VDARE.com isn’t just a website. We are the voice of the Historic American Nation . Our goal is nothing less than to develop a full spectrum media network to speak up for our people during this difficult time for our country. Part of that means building institutions which are offline and in the real world. There’s something about a paper journal that suggests permanence, which inclines people to take it more seriously. And because the news cycle is so fast, some of the most important, substantial, and potentially influential writings fall through the cracks and don’t get the attention they deserve. For that reason, we’re proud to announce the creation of VDARE QUARTERLY, a print journal featuring the best material from our webzine. This will replace our yearly anthologies and ensure that the information and analysis you really don't want to miss will get in front of you as quickly as possible. However, we need your help. For us to unveil this exciting new product we need 600 magazines ordered to cover the print expenses. Fill out the form below to instantly receive a digital copy of VDARE QUARTERLY, and when we have the number of necessary subscribers it will go to print and your exclusive paper copy will ship directly to you! Depending on the package you choose, you will receive multiple paper copies (provided enough readers support the community effort). We encourage you to pass these around – they serve as an excellent gift for friends and family, while at the same time helping to build our community. VDARE QUARTERLY is aesthetically pleasing as well as ideologically powerful. But this isn’t just a service we are providing. VDARE QUARTERLY is a tangible manifestation of your investment in us, and in our country. A subscription is one of the most effective ways you can help us build our media network, expand our influence, and build the kind of movement we will need to take back our country and ensure our children have a recognizable America. 
+We count on your support! Yours sincerely, Peter Brimelow, Editor of VDARE.com VDARE QUARTERLY countdown: 275 already ordered, 325 still to go",FAKE
+1878,Marco Rubio’s big gamble,"Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is officially in for the 2016 presidential race, telling the Associated Press that he feels he is ""uniquely qualified"" to run and serve.
+
+And Rubio is nothing if not unique in today's GOP. He's young (43 years old) in an increasingly old party, he's Hispanic in a party that is hemorrhaging Latino votes, he's a very good communicator in a party that struggled to find one in 2012, and he has ties to both the tea party and the party establishment in a party that is very much split between the two. And as we've argued before, he has more upside than just about anybody in the 2016 race -- Republican or Democrat.
+
+He's also putting a lot more on the line than just about anybody else. For a few reasons:
+
+Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is also running for president and, like Rubio, is up for reelection in 2016. But because Paul comes from a red state and the filing deadline for his seat isn't till late January 2016, he could potentially revert to staying in the Senate if his presidential campaign doesn't catch fire.
+
+Rubio doesn't have that luxury. He comes from Florida, a big swing state in which you need to be focused on that race from day one. Democrats already have a solid contender in Rep. Patrick Murphy, and other Republicans are already looking at running for Rubio's seat.
+
+The filing deadline in Florida isn't till May 2016, so Rubio could conceivably attempt what Paul is doing -- he hasn't quite ruled it out, though he came close -- but national Republicans can't really afford to let Democrats get that much of a head start in a very important state while Rubio figures out whether he can win the GOP presidential nomination.
+
+All the other GOP hopefuls either aren't up in 2016 -- Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), for instance -- or are out of office altogether.
+
+Rubio, as the youngest GOP hopeful in the field, is the only one giving up a bird in hand for the possibility of two in the bush.
+
+Well it doesn't matter if he doesn't win the nomination, you might say, because he's got a really good shot at becoming the vice presidential pick. This makes complete sense; with Republicans likely to nominate another white man and likely to face the potential first female president, getting some diversity on their ticket will be key.
+
+And nobody fits the bill better than Rubio. Some are even joking about Rubio running for VP:
+
+But the idea that Rubio could run for president with being VP as a backup plan took a significant hit the day Jeb Bush started running for president. That's because the fellow Floridian is perhaps the likeliest (if not likely, period) nominee, and the Constitution basically precludes him from picking Rubio as his running mate.
+
+It says that no state can cast its electoral votes for a ticket that includes to people from their own state. And given Florida's 29 electoral votes are, well, kind of important, it's really hard to see Bush picking Rubio -- unless one of them conveniently established residency outside the Sunshine State.
+
+In short, at this point Bush seems like the most likely nominee, and Rubio the most likely vice presidential pick, but Bush won't pick Rubio.
+
+3) He has a lot more time
+
+Rubio's youth also means he has more time to wage a political comeback, yes. But there are no guarantees in a state like Florida, and winning office is much more difficult than holding an office you already inhabit.
+
+What's more, the Republican bench in Florida is teeming with ambitious young pols, by virtue of the GOP dominance of the state. The GOP controls all statewide offices and about two-thirds of the state legislature.
+
+No, Republicans haven't exactly fielded the greatest candidates in recent years (Connie Mack, much?), but there are lots of new faces these days. That means that, if this whole 2016 thing doesn't pan out, Rubio can't count on returning to statewide office in Florida any time soon. Rubio would certainly be a frontrunner, but he would probably have to fight for it.
+
+Time works both ways. Yes, Rubio would have years to mount a comeback. But it also means he has time to wait for another presidential campaign -- one in which he wouldn't have to give up his seat in the Senate to run.
+
+And yet, he has chosen to strike while the iron is semi-warm and risk his political future on running for president.
+
+What's clear is that he doesn't enter into it lightly.
+
+Update: Longtime Florida political reporter Adam Smith tells our own Fix Boss about the reasoning for Rubio's move:",REAL
+1525,Donald Trump's year of tweeting dangerously,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+5662,Coalition Nations Seek to Put North Korea in a Vise,"Coalition Nations Seek to Put North Korea in a Vise October 27, 2016 Coalition Nations Seek to Put North Korea in a Vise 
+Japan, the United States and South Korea agreed on Thursday to work together to put more pressure on North Korea to get it to abandon its nuclear and missile programs , Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Shinsuke Sugiyama said. Tension on the Korean peninsula has been high this year, beginning with North Korea's fourth nuclear test in January, which was followed by a satellite launch, a string of tests of various missiles, and its fifth and largest nuclear test last month, all in defiance of international sanctions.Co ""We reaffirmed the necessity to increase pressure against North Korea to have it give up its nuclear and missile development and realise the denuclearization of the peninsula,"" Sugiyama told reporters. He was speaking after a meeting in Tokyo with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken and South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lim Sung-nam. 
+(TOKYO) - Russia and North Korea's lone major ally, China, have pushed for a resumption of six-party talks on denuclearization in North Korea. The talks, which also involve Japan, South Korea and the United States, have been on hold since 2008. 
+Lim said his government had decided to resume talks with Japan for the conclusion of General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), a pact that would share sensitive information on North Korea's missile and nuclear activities. 
+READ MORE: DNI CLAPPER SAYS THAT NORTH KOREA IS A LOST CAUSE 
+The signing of the agreement was expected in 2012, but South Korea postponed it amid domestic opposition against concluding such a security pact with Japan, a one-time colonial ruler. 
+Tokyo's ties with Seoul, plagued by a territorial spat and Japan's past military aggression, have warmed after reaching a landmark agreement last December to resolve the issue of Korean girls and women forced to work in Japan's wartime brothels. Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+4265,National Review disses Donald Trump: Why the magazine's plan won't work,"In a last dash, final ""hail mary"" attempt to end a Donald Trump run for the White House once and for all, the National Review has decided to eviscerate the Republican front runner on the basis that he is not a conservative.
+
+It will not work.
+
+Publications like National Review, run by elite ""conservatives"" have given us George W. Bush and his wars, ""No Child Left Behind,"" Medicare Part D, huge deficits caused by Republican consultants spending to woo select voters, Mitt ""Romneycare"" Romney, John McCain...the list goes on and on.
+
+William F. Buckley, who founded National Review, used the magazine to publish a stellar series of essays by conservative intellectuals who helped foster the Reagan Revolution.
+
+Since then, ""movement conservatism"" has not been a powerful enough force to make things better for the working classes in the country.
+
+This vacuum, created by the ""conservative"" elites who have backed RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) and candidates who are antithetical to conservatism, is what created the opportunity for Donald Trump to rise.
+
+In fact, publications like National Review have such a blind spot, they never even saw devout, pro-America nationalists like Trump taking off.
+
+They aren't credible in their criticism of Trump because they never saw it coming.
+
+Beyond that, and most importantly, they told us we -- the conservatives who are sick and tired of elistist, establishment blunders -- were wrong.
+
+And they still don't get it.
+
+Trump's appeal stretches far beyond disgruntled, outside the country club conservatives. His potential for crossover support, especially with blue collar and working class voters, is huge. Most establishment Republicans have never met a blue collar worker (unless they were fixing their Jacuzzi).
+
+I can see Trump winning coal miners, unionized construction workers, auto workers, steel workers, Teamsters, etc.
+
+Trump may even score a larger share of black votes with his immigration stand. His appeal to working class voters is a very under reported story, but it's evident because even President Barack Obama himself mentioned Trump by name during an interview with NPR in which he said that Trump is tapping into the ""anger of the blue collar white male.""
+
+This showcases just how scared the left is when it comes to Trump's potential to tear into demographics that Democrats have largely considered theirs.
+
+The bed wetters at the RNC are dreaming of a GOP that grows because it attracts Latinos, pro-abortion millennial women and other hopelessly Democratic voters. Trump's coalition of adding working class voters (who actually work) makes more sense.
+
+I have respect for National Review as an institution, but the cover and series of articles designed to hurt Trump only hurts the elitest, Beltway crowd they represent because it exposes why he is the seemingly solid and unstoppable frontrunner: it's because of them.
+
+They have failed us, not Trump. Donald Trump is merely capitalizing on a moment in a pursuit to make America Great Again, in spite of the failures of the conservative movement.
+
+Just like they were too dense to see Trump's rise, they don't understand why it occurred.
+
+National Review, it's time for your Man in the Mirror moment. People are more concerned about the country they love, than they are your brand of ""conservatism.""
+
+By trying to take out the most popular candidate in this race who has the best general election shot of any of them to win the White House and reverse the progressive policies of Barack Obama, Beltway, frat boy type elitists are proving my point: they don't get it.
+
+And from the looks of it, they never will.",REAL
+771,Hillary Clinton's 'Delegate Hell',"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
+5427,Thomas Frank Explores Whether Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party Will Address Inequality, ,FAKE
+161,Congress likely to blow budget deadline,"Asked what Trump will do while in Florida, spokesman Jason Miller said the transition team has not released a schedule and said Trump also intends to...",REAL
+4083,Ukraine Withdraws Forces After Fight Over Strategic City,"Following heavy shelling in what had been a Ukraine-controlled city, the central government's force is retreating from Debaltseve, a key railroad and transportation hub. Ukraine says it has now withdrawn 80 percent of its armed forces from the city.
+
+""I can say now that the Ukrainian armed forces and the National Guard completed an operation on the planned and organized withdrawal of some units from Debaltseve this morning,"" Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko said, according to the Interfax news agency in Ukraine.
+
+""Some 80 percent of the units have already been pulled out,"" he said before leaving to visit eastern Ukraine Wednesday. He added that two more columns of troops will be withdrawn from Debaltseve.
+
+Poroshenko is seeking a ""tough reaction"" from international leaders who brokered the recent cease-fire with Russian-backed separatists. A spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was instrumental in the peace talks, says the rebels are committing ""a massive violation"" of the temporary peace.
+
+A conference call is scheduled for later today, in which Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany will discuss possible reactions, according to a French official.
+
+""A cease-fire was officially supposed to have taken effect on Sunday, but relentless shelling kept up around Debaltseve, a railroad hub defended by hundreds of Ukrainian troops. ""The troops have been effectively surrounded by Russian-backed militias for days. ""Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe say the separatist militias are preventing them from entering the area to monitor the cease fire.""
+
+Corey says the separatists have insisted that the peace agreement doesn't apply to Debaltseve.
+
+""One reason they're so determined to take that town,"" he says, ""is that it was part of a Ukrainian-controlled pocket that pokes deep into the separatist front lines.""",REAL
+9305,6 Myths That Men Believe About Southeast Asia,"I’ve been living in South East Asia for almost a decade now, and over that time I’ve come to have a matured perspective on living here and a fair appreciation of the pros and cons of doing so. Like most people who come here, I set off thinking I was going to live in paradise. That’s far from the reality, let me tell you!
+Living in South East Asia has its pros and cons, just like anywhere else. While I myself have decided to return west for a while, I’ll always have a connection to Asia and I’m sure I’ll be back many times throughout my life.
+So what’s the REAL story with living in Asia? Is it all its cracked up to be? What does a man have to be aware of when coming here? Let’s look at six common stereotypical ideas about living in South East Asia, and assess them in the light of reality.
+1. Asian Women Are Kind, Gentle, And Compliant To Their Husbands So sweet! Not so fast….
+This is, most definitely, a myth, and if you come out here expecting to find some little house pet who does your bidding, you’ll be in for a rude awakening.
+It’s definitely true that Asian women, in my experience, are a lot more traditional. They give the man his place in the house, rarely question your final decisions, and do not resent housework and basic wifely duties.
+However, the idea that they’ll just do whatever you tell them without question is nonsense. They’re human beings with a will of their own and you wouldn’t be the first guy to get a smack in the head from a five-foot-two broad who weighs 90 pounds if you disrespect her.
+The idea that Asian women are some sort of angelic alternative to Western women is also nonsense. While it’s not the norm, I’ve met several Western men who have been taken to the cleaners by their Asian wives and girlfriends. When you move here, you’re completely at her mercy and you will never have any legal rights as a citizen.
+Asian women generally are a lot more traditional, but this stereotype that they’re some sort of perfect wife material has got to go. They’re individuals—and there are all kinds, good and bad, among them.
+Read this guide to dating Asian women for a more complete perspective on the issue. It’s a thorny subject, and there’s a lot of misunderstanding surrounding it.
+2. Asia Is Ridiculously Cheap 
+This is one I’d have to lean slightly towards agreeing with.
+Most things in Asia are a lot cheaper. Eating out for my entire family often costs less than $15, meaning I can afford to do it basically every day. My rent for a condo apartment costs less than $150 a month, although that’s mostly because I live in the sticks and am not in a major city.
+A general rule of thumb is that outside of major cities like Bangkok, Singapore, and KL, you can divide the cost of living by three and get a rough estimate.
+Note, this does not apply to consumer goods such as cars and electrical appliances, which are in and around the same price. It certainly does not apply to luxury goods, which are often much more expensive because of the taxes placed on them by local governments.
+Asia is cheaper overall, but anything other than the basics costs roughly the same. Life in South East Asia CAN be cheaper, but it isn’t necessarily so—it depends on your lifestyle.
+3. You Can Become A Citizen Of An Asian Country And Stay Forever Becoming a citizen in an Asian country is nigh on impossible. Even if you could, you probably wouldn’t want to.
+You can get a variety of visas like permanent residency, and each country aims to facilitate the spouses of their nationals and, especially, retirees with proven cash in the bank. However, you’ll not become a CITIZEN with all of the various rights they enjoy.
+It’s also worth noting: while you might get permanent residence, you’ll never be “one of them.” Even if you live here for 30 years, you will always be a foreigner and will be viewed as such by locals. This has pros and cons to it, but you’ll never quite feel at home and accepted as one of the group.
+You’ll get undue respect from some for being a Westerner, but forget about talking politics or leveling criticisms at the way things are done—you’ll be met with hostility and resentment for the latter.
+4. The Weather In Asia Is 24/7 Sunshine 
+The weather in South East Asia is generally pretty awesome, and you can live an outdoors life you’ll truly enjoy if you’re that type.
+The sun shines almost every day, and even when it’s overcast it’s warm, meaning you can go out and about and do anything from walk on the beach to shop in the city.
+However, when the storms come, you’d better be prepared to get your ass inside. The rainfall and wind in many countries in South East Asia is truly terrifying. Just switch on any news station the next time a major storm hits the Philippines and you’ll see what it’s like.
+Thankfully, after 1.5 years of living in the Philippines , I’ve never been caught directly in a major storm, although I’ve seen the tail end of plenty of them.
+The weather is good when it’s good, and utterly awful when it’s bad. Check this clip out to see how bad it can get:
+
+5. Asia Is 100 Years Behind The West In Terms Of Development 
+This is a stereotype that’s deeply mistaken, and whether or not it’s true depends on which country you go to.
+True, countries like Laos and Bangladesh are miles behind any Western nation, but head to Singapore and you’ll be shocked by how far ahead of us they are in terms of tech and development.
+Asia is developing at breakneck pace, and with that development comes super highways, skytrains, skyscrapers and everything else we usually associate with an advanced country. It won’t be long before many countries out here catch up and surpass the West, although it is definitely true that most of them are slightly behind for now.
+There’s a phenomenon called “leapfrogging” which virtually guarantees Asian countries will catch up to and surpass the West quickly. Leapfrogging is when they can skip all of the evolution and development and simply emulate modern day technology developed elsewhere—a great example is India, where they have skipped the transition from dial-up to mobie internet and gone straight from nothing to mobile.
+If you think this can’t be done and there are intellectual property laws to protect tech from being stolen wholesale, I salute you, but I have to laugh. There are no such laws, and even if there were, nobody would bother to enforce them.
+On the other hand, you still have many scenes like this outside your window when you get out of the main cities:
+
+6. Asians Are Extremely Family Oriented Again, this is one I lean towards agreeing with. There are exceptions to every rule, but the family unit is extremely strong in Asia, especially countries like the Philippines.
+I don’t want to wax lyrical or speculate as to why this is. It’s enough to acknowledge it as a fact and accept that it’s the case. 90% of the Asian people I have ever met and gotten to know from Indonesia to the Philippines to Thailand are devoted to their families to the extent that we’d consider it cult-like in most Western countries.
+I pass no judgment on this whatsoever. It can be a great thing or a bad thing, depending on your own perspective. I personally like it and think it’s something we’ve lost in many European countries, and America, too.
+This is an idea about Asia I agree with—the dedication to family above individuality is definitely true, and so by default if you get into a relationship with an Asian woman, be prepared for this.
+The family unit is the sun around which everything orbits in most Asian countries.
+Living In Asia Summary Sorry to disappoint you, fellas, but you won’t find paradise in South East Asia.
+What you will find is a place with many opportunities, pitfalls, pros and cons, but which I do not regret living in for a single second and which has come to be a large part of my life’s story.
+I came out for a year and stayed for almost a decade. However, I’ve decided that time is now over and it’s time to go home.
+I’d love to hear about your experiences living or traveling in Asia. Do you find my perceptions to be accurate, or do you have a different view?
+Read More: Why Western Men Prefer Foreign Women Over Their Own 
+
+",FAKE
+6072,What happened in this election?,"What happened in this election? By John Chuckman   John Chuckman 
+Brushing away the extreme claims and rhetoric of much election analysis, there are some observations which deserve attention. These unfortunately mostly provide hard lessons and not a lot of encouragement for people who hold to principles of democracy, enlightenment, and progressivity. 
+The election demonstrated perhaps better than ever, and better than has been generally been recognized, that America is, indeed, a plutocracy. It took a genuine American Oligarch, a multi-billionaire, a man with a lifetime’s economic empire-building, to defeat a family which could provide the very definition of being politically well-connected, a family which had laboriously constructed and carefully maintained a kind of deep well ever-flowing with money for their ambitions. 
+It was the ever-flowing well of money, drilled by Bill Clinton with help from some extremely shady friends, such as Jeffrey Epstein, that made the Clintons keystone establishment figures in the Democratic Party. It was not personal charm or exceptional political generalship—although Bill, in his heyday, displayed some of both of those—that earned the Clintons their place, it was the money, the “mother’s milk of politics.” In what is euphemistically called “fund raising,” many hundreds of millions of dollars were provided for the party over the last couple of decades by Bill Clinton’s efforts. 
+Hillary fully appreciated the fact that money buys power and influence. She lacked Bill’s superficial charm, but she certainly more than shared his ambition. On the charm front, when she was ready to move into running for office, she adopted, perhaps under Bill’s tutelage, a kind of forced clown face with arched eyebrows, bugged-out eyes, and a smile as big as her lips would allow, and these expressions were accompanied by little gestures such as briefly pointing to various on-lookers or waving helter-skelter whenever she campaigned. 
+Her gestures reminded me of something you might see atop a float in a Christmas Parade or of the late Harpo Marx at his most exuberant. These were not natural for her. They were never in evidence years ago when she spent years as a kind of bizarre executive housewife, both in a governor’s mansion and later in the White House, bizarre because she indulged her husband’s non-stop predatory sexual behavior in exchange for the immense power it conferred on her behind the scenes over her far more out-going and successful politician-husband. 
+Anyway, Hillary knew that gestures and simulated charm do not get you far in American politics. She determined to build a political war chest long ago, and there are many indications over the years of her working towards this end of making this or that change in expressed view, as when running for the Senate, when sources of big money suggested another view would more acceptable. She was anything but constant in the views she embraced because when she ran for the Senate she spent record amounts of money, embarrassingly large amounts. 
+In her years of speaking engagements, she aimed at special interests who could supply potentially far more money than just exorbitant speaking fees. Later, in the influential, appointed post of Secretary of State—coming, as it does, into personal contact with every head of government or moneyed, big-time international schemer—she unquestionably played an aggressive “pay for play” with them all. Covering up that embarrassing and illegal fact is what the private servers and unauthorized smart phones were all about. 
+A second big fact of the election is that both major American political parties are rather sick and fading. The Republican Party has been broken for a very long time. It hobbled along for some decades with the help of various gimmicks, hoping to expand its constituency with rubbish like “family values,” public prayer and catering to the Christian Right, and anti-flag burning Constitutional amendments, and now it is truly out of gas. That is precisely why a political outsider like Oligarch Trump could manage to hijack the party. 
+He was opposed by tired, boring men like Jeb Bush, seeking to secure an almost inherited presidency, and a dark, intensely unlikable, phony Christian fundamentalist like Ted Cruz, and it proved to be no contest. It was a remarkable political achievement, but I think it was only possible given the sorry state of the party. 
+The Republican Party had been given a breather, some new life, by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He had an extremely mixed record as president, but he was popular, held in some affection, and did have a clear vision, but his effect on the party was not lasting. Trump could be seen as another Reagan, but I think the comparison is superficial. Trump literally hijacked the party, and he was not deliriously crowned by its establishment. 
+The Republican Party itself was formed not long before Abraham Lincoln’s candidacy out of the remains of worn out and collapsed predecessors, including the Whigs and Free-Soil Democrats. Parties do not last forever, and here was Trump creating something of a minor political revolution inside a tired and fairly directionless old party, a phenomenon which I do not think was sufficiently noticed. 
+The press was too busy attacking him from the start to take notice or do any intelligent analysis, and he was attacked precisely for the potential damage to the establishment he represented. His most promising quality is his potential for creating a new coalition of interests and one excluding the continuation of the neocon wars Hillary vigorously embraced and would expand. 
+But the Democratic Party is in serious trouble, too. It has a great deal of internal rot, as the WikiLeaks material from the DNC clearly shows us. Arrogance, lack of direction, ignorance of the people it has always claimed to serve, bad decision-making, and the absolute prostrate worship of money are the major symptoms. 
+It would have been impossible for the party to have so made up its mind and committed its resources to Hillary Clinton without serious rot. She has always had strong negatives in polling, always been (rightly) suspected concerning her honesty. 
+The WikiLeaks material tells us about many internal conflicts, including harsh high-level judgments of Hillary’s decision-making, resentment over the back-stabbing character of daughter Chelsea who is said to resemble Hillary in her behavior and attitudes, and the belief of some that Hillary just should not have run. And, frankly, she had become for many a rather tiresome, used-up figure from whom absolutely nothing spectacular in politics or policy could possibly be expected. But they not only blindly supported her, they broke all their own party rules by internally and secretly working to defeat a legitimate and viable contender, Bernie Sanders. 
+Sanders might well have been able to win the election for the Democrats, but their establishment was blind to the possibility and rejected his candidacy out-of-hand. After all, there were Bill and Hillary beckoning to their running well of money. In hindsight, it might be just as well that Sanders was cheated out of the nomination. He proved a weak individual in the end, giving in to just the forces he had claimed to oppose and leaving his enthusiastic followers completely let down. He may well even have been secretly bribed by money from the Clintons since he bought a fairly expensive property not long afterward. But, in any event, there he was, out on the hustings, supporting everything he ever opposed personified in Hillary Clinton. Men of that nature do not stand up well to generals and admirals and the heads of massive corporations, a quality which I do think we have some right to expect Trump to display. 
+Another important fact about the election is that it was less the triumph of Trump than the avoidance of Hillary that caused the defeat. The numbers are unmistakable. Yes, Trump did well for a political newcomer and a very controversial figure, but Hillary simply did badly, not approaching the support Obama achieved in key states, again something reflecting the documented fact that she is not a well-liked figure and the party blundered badly in running her. But again, money talks, and the Clintons, particularly Bill, are the biggest fundraisers they have had in our lifetime. No one was ready to say no to the source of all that money. 
+Now, to many Americans, the election result must seem a bit like having experienced something of a revolution, although a revolution conducted through ballots, any other kind being literally impossible by design in this massive military-security state. In a way, it does represent something of a revolutionary event, owing to the fact that Trump the Oligarch is in his political views a bit of a revolutionary or at least a dissenter from the prevailing establishment views. And, as in any revolution, even a small one, there are going to be some unpleasant outcomes. 
+The historical truth of politics is that you never know from just what surprising source change may come. Lyndon Johnson, life-long crooked politician and the main author of the horrifying and pointless Vietnam War, did more for the rights of black Americans than any other modern president. Franklin Roosevelt, son of wealthy establishment figures, provided remarkable leadership in the Great Depression, restoring hopes and dreams for millions. Change, important, change, never comes from establishments or institutions like political parties. It always comes from unusual people who seem to step out of their accustomed roles in life with some good or inspired ideas and have the drive and toughness to make them a reality. 
+I have some limited but important hopes for Trump. I am not blind or delirious expecting miracles from this unusual person, and after the experience of Obama, who seemed such a promising young figure but fairly quickly proved a crushing, bloody disappointment, I can never build up substantial hopes for any politician. And what was the choice anyway? Hillary Clinton was a bought-and-paid one-way ticket to hell. 
+Trump offers two areas of some hope, and these both represent real change. The first is in reducing America’s close to out-of-control military aggressiveness abroad. This aggressiveness, reflecting momentum from what can only be called the Cheney-Rumsfeld presidency, continued and grew under the weak and ineffectual leadership of Obama and was boosted and encouraged by Hillary as secretary of state. Hillary, the feminists who weep for her should be reminded, did a lot of killing during her tenure. She along with Obama are literally responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of women and their families, many of them literally torn apart by bombs. 
+The other area of some hope is for the welfare of ordinary American people themselves who have been completely ignored by national leaders for decades. George Bush’s lame reaction to Hurricane Katrina (before he was internationally shamed into some action) has become the normal pattern for America’s national government when it comes to ordinary Americans. 
+The truth is that the legacy of FDR has withered to nothing and no longer plays any role in the Democratic Party, and of course never did in the Republican Party. By welfare, I do not mean the kind of state assistance that Bill Clinton himself worked to end. Nothing can impress someone not familiar with America’s dark corners more than a visit to places like Detroit or Gary or Chicago’s South Side, parts of New Orleans, or Newark or dozens of other places where Americans live in conditions in every way comparable to Third World hellholes. No, I mean the people’s general well-being. Trump’s approach will be through jobs and creating incentives for jobs. I don’t know whether he can succeed, but, just as he asked people in some of his speeches, “What do you have to lose?” Just having someone in power who pays any attention to the “deplorables” is a small gain. 
+People should never think of the Clintons as liberal or progressive, and that was just as much true for Bill as it is for Hillary. His record as president—apart from his embarrassing behavior in the Oval Office with a young female intern and his recruitment of Secret Service guards as procurers for women he found attractive on his morning runs—was actually pretty appalling. He, in his own words, “ended welfare as we know it.” He signed legislation which would send large numbers of young black men to prison. He also signed legislation which contributed to the country’s later financial collapse under George Bush. He often would appoint someone decent and then quickly back off, leaving them dangling, when it looked like approval for the appointment would not be coming. His FBI conducted the assault on Waco, killing about eighty people needlessly. A pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was destroyed by cruise missiles for no good reason. There were a number of scandals, including the suicide of Vince Foster and the so-called Travelgate affair, which were never fully explained to the public. It was his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who answered, unblinkingly, a television interviewer’s question about tens of thousands of Iraqi children who died owing to America’s embargo, “We think it’s worth it.” He committed the war crime of bombing Belgrade. When news of the horrors of the Rwanda genocide were first detected by his government, the order secretly went out to shut up about it. No effort was made to intervene. 
+No, any real change in America could never come from people like the Clintons, either one of them. 
+John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency. John regards it as a badge of honor to have left the United States as a poor young man from the South Side of Chicago when the country embarked on the pointless murder of something like 3 million Vietnamese in their own land because they happened to embrace the wrong economic loyalties. He lives in Canada, which he is fond of calling “the peaceable kingdom.” John’s columns appear regularly on Intrepid Report, CounterPunch, Media Monitors, Politics Canada, Baltimore Chronicle, Intrepid Report, Scoop (New Zealand), Asian Tribune, Aljazeerah.info, Smirking Chimp, Dissident Voice, and many other Internet sites. He has been translated into at least ten languages and is regularly translated into Italian and Spanish. Several of his essays have been published in book collections, including two college texts. His first book has just been published, “The Decline of the American Empire and the Rise of China as a Global Power,” published by Constable and Robinson, London. Contact him at .",FAKE
+7551,Top university stole millions from taxpayers by faking global warming research,"Top university stole millions from taxpayers by faking global warming research 
+  J. D. Heyes (NaturalNews) The 'global warming/climate change' charade is bad enough in that it is nothing more than a politically motivated ""issue"" used by globalists of all political stripes to gain more control over the world's population.But now it's costing some citizens scarce tax dollars.As reported by The Daily Caller , a top university in Britain has been caught stealing millions of taxpayer dollars from a federal budget that is chronically in the red just to produce phony global warming data .A global warming research center at the London School of Economics received millions of dollars (pounds) from UK taxpayers after taking credit for research it did not perform.The UK's Daily Mail noted further that the UK government provided £9 million ($11 million in US dollars) in funding to the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) in exchange for research that was never done. Massive scientific fraud regarding 'global warming' A number of papers that CCCEP claimed to have published to receive government funding were not even about global warming and were written before the organization was even founded, or written by researchers who were not affiliated with the center. Worse, government officials never bothered to check CCCEP's alleged publication lists, saying instead they were ""taken on trust,"" according to a recently released report.""It is serious misconduct to claim credit for a paper you haven't supported, and it's fraud to use that in a bid to renew a grant,"" Professor Richard Tol, a climate economics expert from Sussex University whose research was reportedly stolen by CCCEP, told the Daily Mail . ""I've never come across anything like it before. It stinks.""The center's chairman since 2008 has been Nick Stern, a well-known global advocate for more policy action supposedly aimed at combating climate change. In addition he is also the president of the British Academy, an invitation-only society that is reserved for the academic elite and which disburses grant money in the millions of pounds to researchers, as well as Lord Stern's own organization.In recent days the CCCEP, which is jointly based at the London School of Economics and the University of Leeds, hosted a gala event that was attended by experts and officials from around the world. The occasion: A celebration to mark the 10th anniversary of the Stern Review, a 700-page report detailing the alleged economic impact of climate change, a review that was commissioned by Tony Blair's government.The massive paper claimed that the world must take immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or face dramatically higher costs in the future. The review exerted a great amount of power and influence on a series of British governments, as well as international organizations.But now the report's contents and conclusions are in serious doubt. Not the first time global warming data has been FAKED Following the Daily Mail 's report, CCCEP spokesman Bob Ward admitted the organization had ""made mistakes,"" in both claiming credit for studies it did not perform and foro papers that were actually researched and published by other academics.Academics and experts whose work was falsely represented were furious, including one who said CCCEP's actions were ""a clear case of fraud – using deception for financial gain,"" The DC reported.Studies receiving financial support from the public sector are not required to disclose it as an ethical conflict of interest, even when financial support is in the millions of dollars. The DC noted that recent studies in the United States, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses to support the 'scientific' case for its massive new power plant regulations, the Clean Power Plan, saw the agency give $32.1 million, $9.5 million, and $3.65 million in public funds to lead authors – all of whom essentially provided the agency with the 'results' it wanted.As Natural News founder and editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, reported in June 2014 , this isn't the first time so-called global warming/climate change data has been faked. Sources:",FAKE
+8754,No charges after new review of Hillary Clinton emails – FBI director,"39   Shoina is a village drowned up to the waist in sand. Its denizens are quite fatalistic about it, and their only means of protection is leaving their door open for the night, as they can never be sure if they can open it in the morning. The village of Shoina is situated beyond the Arctic Circle, 1,400 kilometers north of Moscow. This tiny settlement is known for its sands, which appeared here over 50 years ago and have been waging a relentless offensive against humans ever since, depriving them of living space. How did they appear, and where else in Russia can you find unusual places like this? Solve the mystery, on RTDoc. SUBSCRIBE TO RTD Channel to get documentaries firsthand! http://bit.ly/1MgFbVy FOLLOW US RTD WEBSITE: http://RTD.rt.com/ RTD ON TWITTER: http://twitter.com/RT_DOC RTD ON FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/RTDocumentary RTD ON DAILYMOTION http://www.dailymotion.com/rt_doc RTD ON INSTAGRAM http://instagram.com/rt_documentary/ RTD LIVE http://rtd.rt.com/on-air/  ",FAKE
+5154,"Playing the “rigged” card: Trump, Jones and other conspiracy mongers must look within the GOP for the legit scandals","As predicted by anyone who knows how the FBI works and, more importantly, by anyone who knows the actual law in question, Hillary Clinton won’t be indicted by the FBI or the Justice Department over the use of a private email server. Firstly, conspiracy theorists and Hillary haters alike have been peddling the misinformation that the FBI is capable of indicting people, which it’s not. Secondly, even if the FBI could single-handedly indict someone, which it can’t, there’s clearly no evidence proving Hillary deliberately broke the law.
+
+We also know that the announcement by the FBI’s James Comey on Tuesday won’t dissuade the aforementioned Hillary haters from continuing to beat-to-death the Benghazi issue and everything orbiting it, including the email server, even though every investigation has turned up nothing — and this includes investigations by the hyper-litigious Republicans who have no reason to exonerate Hillary, and every reason to summarily jail her. And, among the usual suspects whose indictment fantasies border on obsessive, there’s Donald Trump:
+
+Trump joins a growing faction of politicians and observers who are actively abusing the “rigged” card whenever events don’t go their way. Broadly speaking, Trump’s been transparently courting disaffected Bernie Sanders loyalists by echoing their claims of a rigged primary process, despite the fact that Bernie himself stated that the process was fair and square. Bernie even went so far as to explicitly tell CBS News that the system is “not rigged.”
+
+Nevertheless, garment rending over rigged votes or rigged investigations in America is indicative of the growing influence of conspiracy theory marketeering here, fueled primarily by social media gossip and the exploitative rantings of radio flimflam artist Alex Jones, who’s made a fortune by taking advantage of those who are predisposed to believing wild schemes about sinister plots to undermine democracy. Losing an election? Well, then, it’s not that you ran a shoddy campaign, the system is obviously rigged against you. No scandal where you wrongly insisted there was one? Rigged. Or if your career and personal wealth are predicated upon marketing in allegations that the system is rigged, then, naturally, everything is rigged. Except, that is, the deeds of Jones and Trump, who always deal in truths, right?
+
+In the social media age, the old maxim is again proved: a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. The notion of a rigged system from top-to-bottom has become so entrenched that not even 13 published reports, the involvement of 10 congressional committees, the testimony of 252 witnesses, the convening of 33 congressional hearings and $7 million in funding for the Benghazi select committee can dislodge it from the deranged brain-pans of those who simply want the Benghazi conspiracies to be true. Jones and Trump are observant enough to understand that social media users, in particular, are suckers and easy marks — unthinkingly retweeting quick hits about unsourced or entirely fake claims. If your Facebook news feed isn’t festooned with fake articles inadvertently shared by friends who never bother to think critically, and that’s if they read the article in the first place before posting, which they often don’t, you’re one of the lucky ones.
+
+Here’s the real crisis, though. When everything is rigged, then nothing is. By turning every news event into either a false flag or a red flag, or both, legitimately rigged aspects of the system become drowned in a bathtub of gibberish and half-baked pulp fiction. Between Bernie loyalists continuing to screech about rigged primaries, and Trump people engaging in daily meltdowns about the rigged email investigation, along with the rest of us who are tasked with swatting down both sets of scandals, there are very few participants who are paying attention to real crises such as, for example, gerrymandering and voter ID laws. Indeed, we’re four months away from another presidential election, and exactly nothing is being done to expand opportunities to vote, while offering voters a fair slate of candidates that aren’t shuffled into office again and again because congressional districts were deliberately redrawn to suit their victories. The latter, gerrymandering, is exploited by both parties, while voter ID laws have been passed by Republicans for the express purpose of disenfranchising Democratic voters and therefore electing more Republicans. Casting a ballot in the United States, of all places, should be easier than ordering a burger at a drive-thru window, yet we can already safely assume that precincts across the nation won’t have enough ballots or enough voting booths, and lines will be prohibitively long. We also know that nothing is being done to roll back voter ID laws, each one making it unconstitutionally difficult for students, lower-income workers and elderly voters to cast ballots. And we know that a growing list of Republicans have confirmed our suspicions about the ID laws — that they’re designed solely to put a thumb on the scales for the GOP — a fact that’s supported by the reality that there’s a 0.00000031 chance of voter fraud, based on a Bush administration study from 2002-2007. Conveniently, too much attention is being paid to a completely disproved conspiracy theory about Hillary and Benghazi, as well as evidence-free allegations of Hillary somehow rigging the primary election in her favor, even though there are volumes of statistics, as well as quotes from various Republicans, confirming the true purpose of voter ID laws. As for gerrymandering, the practice and its consequences are self-evident. Put another way, there’s a reason why the House of Representatives is loaded with unqualified demagogues who somehow remain in office long past their shelf-life. If as much attention was paid to actual conspiracies as is paid to racist garbage like Obama’s birth certificate or the Vince Foster suicide, voting would be easier and we’d have a real chance to elect a better and more competent litter of politicians for the 115th Congress.",REAL
+9170,“Brexit means Clusterfuck” confirms Prime Minister,"“Brexit means Clusterfuck” confirms Prime Minister 
+Theresa May has clarified that Brexit actually means one giant, steaming clusterfuck. 
+The reincarnation of Emperor Palpatine made the statement following the High Court ruling that Parliament would have to give the go-ahead for Britain to officially tell the EU to piss right off. 
+“Brexit does indeed mean clusterfuck,” said the Prime Minister, giving the pained smile of a woman who knows she’s going to be the historical equivalent of Basil Fawlty. 
+“But it is the clusterfuck that the people voted for, and by God, we shall see to it that this clusterfuck gets done right and proper. 
+“I mean, I’d rather not, because it’s going to be dreadful and tedious, but that’s democracy for you.” 
+Brexiter, Simon Williams, said,”If ‘clusterfuck’ means ‘taking back control’ then I say bring on the clusterfuck and damn the consequences. 
+“We’ve already told the experts where to go; there is no going back. Brexit means clusterfuck, and I demand to be clusterfucked immediately.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+3894,Why Netanyahu is confronting the White House,"Jerusalem (CNN) When Israel destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin drew an important line in the sand: No enemy could be permitted to develop weapons of mass destruction.
+
+Israel, he declared, would defend itself ""with all the means at our disposal.""
+
+These words still reverberate in Israel today, and they help explain why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is flying to Washington next week to give a controversial speech before Congress on Iran.
+
+Netanyahu wants to thwart a nuclear deal world powers are hammering out with Tehran, a deal that his government believes will leave Iran with the means to potentially develop a nuclear weapon -- and leave him with the same choice Begin faced more than three decades ago.
+
+""This is the primary Israeli fear,"" said Ronen Bergman, military and intelligence analyst for the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. ""They are afraid at the end of the day, if negotiations fail, Israel would be left alone to make the call -- whether to contain an Iranian nuclear capability or to make the call on the strike.""
+
+In making the trip to Capitol Hill, Netanyahu is willing to risk the ire of the White House, which is chagrined that he is expected to rail against the administration's deal-making and encourage Congress to push for an Iran sanctions package that President Barack Obama has threatened to veto.
+
+And Netanyahu is doing so even amidst recriminations -- over how Republican House Speaker John Boehner and the Israeli Embassy handled the invitation -- that have tainted the atmosphere between the prime minister and the White House. Administration officials charge that the invitation violated protocol and has partisan overtones.
+
+While the Israeli leader's speech might only intensify those bad feelings, Netanyahu has said it's worth the cost of stating his case before the American public. Advisers indicate that with a deal looming, he feels that he has less and less time to prevent what he sees as a catastrophic outcome.
+
+Netanyahu critics and many analysts see a political motive.
+
+His speech to Congress comes two weeks before the Israeli election, in which he is facing a tight race. His security credentials and rhetorical skills are two of his strongest assets, and being welcomed by U.S. senators and representatives could play well on television screens in Tel Aviv. The White House has used the proximity of the elections as its reason for denying Netanyahu an Oval Office meeting during the trip.
+
+But many confidants insist that Netanyahu has a strong ideological conviction on the need to block Iran and treats his roles as protector of Israel and the Jewish people with the utmost seriousness. For him, this is a chance to act before Israel is faced with choosing between an Iranian bomb and bombing Iran.
+
+Inherent in that choice is the fear Israel cannot count on the United States to stop Tehran.
+
+Obama has famously said that he's ""got Israel's back"" when it comes to Iran. Yet Israeli officials say they have watched over the past several years as the Obama administration has backtracked from its firm stance on Iran's nuclear program to a position that could potentially allow Iran to maintain a significant uranium enrichment program.
+
+""What started with zero (centrifuges), then went to a symbolic enrichment capacity of a few hundred. Now it is well known we are speaking about several thousands,"" Israeli Minister of Intelligence Yuval Steinitz said in an interview with CNN. ""We think that the overall goal of the negotiation should be to get rid of the Iranian nuclear threat and not just hold it or restrain it or freeze it.""
+
+Israel maintains that even an Iranian threshold nuclear state, leaving Iran with enough enriched uranium to give it ""break-out capacity"" to build a nuclear weapon, would position Tehran as a superpower in the region and enable it to threaten Israel with impunity.
+
+That would challenge the so-called qualitative military edge that Israel has built up over decades to fend off its enemies. Israeli military leaders worry they may have to think twice about responding to say, a Hezbollah attack on Israeli troops, out of fear of Iranian reprisal.
+
+""This is a severe strategic threat to the variety of options that the national security of Israel stands upon,"" Bergman said. ""They want to have the bomb in order not to use it. They want to position themselves as a regional superpower and this would give them a nuclear umbrella over their heads.""
+
+It's a daily threat to their existence that many Israelis believe the United States -- half a world away -- can't possibly understand. And some Israelis aren't as sanguine as Bergman that Iran wouldn't want to use the bomb.
+
+""I have no doubt about the seriousness and the good intentions of the Obama administration,"" said Steinitz, the intelligence minister. ""Maybe we are more concerned because we feel the threat because they are speaking about the elimination of the Jewish state.""
+
+Moreover, Israel fears a nuclear Iran would spark an arms race in the Middle East, potentially surrounding them with a group of nuclear-armed enemies in a region in turmoil.
+
+While the United States has long pledged to safeguard Israel's security, Israeli leaders now fear the easing in relations between the United States and Iran following the election of President Hasan Rouhani has clouded the Obama administration's judgment. And the U.S.-Iran thaw has come at the same time that tensions between Obama and Netanyahu have escalated.
+
+""The sense in Israel, and it goes way beyond Netanyahu, is that the president underestimates Iran's duplicity, underestimates Iran's ruthlessness, the religious imperative behind its ideology,"" said David Horovitz, editor of the Times of Israel news website.
+
+In addressing Congress next week, aides say that Prime Minister Netanyahu feels compelled to warn the U.S. and the world that, in his view, beneath its friendly new image, Iran is still intent on wiping Israel off the map.
+
+""I think that he feels fated that he is leading the Jewish people when it potentially faces a genocidal threat,"" Horovitz said. ""That is the Netanyahu mindset -- that people are in peril, and he needs to stand firm and say what he wants to say and if necessary take the step that needs to be taken.""",REAL
+8344,‘Ignored’ voter to become ‘absolutely shafted’ voter,"‘Ignored’ voter to become ‘absolutely shafted’ voter 10-11-16 A TRUMP supporter has voted to make the government stop ignoring him and completely screw him over instead. Sawmill worker Tom Logan felt left behind by mainstream politics and finds Lady Gaga annoying, so voted for a billionaire whose main interests are money, ‘pussy’ and himself. Logan said: “Trump’s going to create well-paid blue collar jobs that are full of dignity and pleasingly masculine. I can’t wait to be a hunky steel worker taking home $150,000 a year. “I know Donald won’t let me down, because why would someone lie about something that’s going to help them become the most powerful person in the world?” However economist Donna Sheridan said: “Despite Tom’s optimism, Trump’s main business experience is getting idiots to do pointless tasks on a bullshit reality TV show. “Therefore his economic plan is likely to be talking about jobs, realising it’s complicated, losing interest and then cutting welfare for all the people who still haven’t got jobs. “Meanwhile his extreme stupidity will tank the economy, so in a few years Tom’s main job will be catching squirrels and cooking them on sticks in a ditch. “Other job opportunities in the new America will include tooth puller, rat meat chef and crossbow-wielding encampment defender.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+8656,Hillary Reboots ‘Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’ Playbook,"Hillary Reboots ‘Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’ Playbook 10/31/2016 
+LIFEZETTE 
+Before even 24 hours had passed since the FBI director informed Congress on Friday that it was reopening the probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Clinton suggested the director was in cahoots with the Republican Party. 
+“We’ve made it very clear that, if they are going to be sending this kind of letter that is only going originally to Republican members of the House, that they need to share whatever facts they claim to have with the American people,” Clinton said on Friday, after initially being blindsided by the FBI’s announcement. 
+The claim wasn’t true. All you had to do is turn the page and find Democratic members of Congress who had also received the letter from the FBI. But it shows how ready Clinton is to fight anyone in the government who dares investigate or question her. It is likely a habit Clinton picked up when she was first lady, from 1993 to 2001. 
+Clinton’s opening salvo, though weak, is a sign of more to come. Her coming attack on the FBI and its director, James Comey, will likely begin in earnest on Monday, with her operatives using the letter to Congress as proof Clinton is the victim of a political conspiracy. 
+Clinton previewed her attack in Daytona Beach, Florida, on Saturday, when she said the letter was “unprecedented and deeply troubling.” 
+Clinton will also turn the issue into one of “transparency” — even though FBI investigations are inherently not transparent. In Daytona, she called on Comey to “explain everything right away, put it all right on the table” — a demand she knows will go unheeded. 
+But many of Clinton’s allies in the media are likely to demand to see the emails found on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop. 
+It’s a strategy that could work, even with only a few days left until Election Day. 
+Such attacks on law enforcement worked fairly well for Clinton in 1998, when she and her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, vilified independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Starr had been tasked by Bill Clinton’s own attorney general to investigate corruption charges, but likely rued the day he ever took the job. 
+In 1994, Bill Clinton faced questions from many, including The New York Times, about an investment the Clintons made in a company called Whitewater Development Corp. Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, made Robert Fiske the independent counsel. 
+Fiske would later be replaced by Starr. Starr’s investigation would later reach into charges that President Clinton had lied in the Paula Jones sexual harassment civil trial. With explosive charges being published by the Drudge Report and Newsweek in January 1998 that Bill Clinton had seduced an intern, Monica Lewinsky, the Clintons could have been expected to admit the truth and take the punishments. 
+Instead, the Clinton White House and the Democrats began attacking Starr and the Republicans. 
+On Jan. 27, 1998, Hillary Clinton went on NBC’s “The Today Show” and goaded the press into covering the opposition rather than President Bill Clinton, who had lied about his affair with Lewinsky just one day earlier. 
+Matt Lauer asked if Hillary Clinton had said the fight against Starr would be the “last great battle” of the Clinton White House. 
+“Well, I don’t know if I’ve been that dramatic,” Hillary Clinton replied. “But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this — they have popped up in other settings. This is — the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” 
+The Starr report on the Clinton scandals was released months later. But what the Clintons are really proud of that is that the Democrats actually gained seats in the 1998 midterm elections, helping to cause a backfire against the GOP. 
+The GOP didn’t have anywhere near the two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove Bill Clinton. In early 1999, the U.S. Senate acquitted Bill Clinton on two charges: obstruction of justice, and perjury. 
+It taught the Clintons the wrong lesson: to fight authorities if authorities questioned them — even authorities within the Democratic Party. Clinton will be targeting and attacking President Obama’s own FBI director as Obama leaves office.",FAKE
+749,"GOP Leaders: Donald Trump, Paul Ryan Meeting 'Critical'","A top GOP leader is calling the meeting between Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan critical. The billionaire is heading to Capitol Hill Thursday to try and unify the party after a bruising primary election.
+
+           
+
+ House Republicans are urging the Speaker get behind their party's presumptive nominee. But Ryan, who has been reluctant to support Trump, says he wants to make sure it's done right.
+
+  
+
+ ""Look, I said this the other day: To pretend we are unified as a party after coming through a very bruising primary, which just ended like a week ago, to pretend to unify without actually unifying, then we go into the fall with half strength,"" the Wisconsin lawmaker warned.
+
+  
+
+ The meeting comes in the backdrop of ongoing questions over Trump's refusal to release his tax returns.
+
+""You don't learn much from tax returns, but I would love to give the tax returns,"" the real estate mogul said.
+
+  
+
+ Now Trump says he won't release them until after an IRS audit is done, which may not be until after the election.  Democratic rival Hillary Clinton has pounced on that.
+
+  
+
+ ""My husband and I have released 33 years of tax returns. So you gotta ask yourself why doesn't he want to release them?"" she said.
+
+  
+
+ On the subject of taxes, Politico reports Trump has brought in well-known conservative economists Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore to help him rewrite his initial tax plan.
+
+It's a plan one group said could tack on an additional $10 trillion to $12 trillion onto America's already exploding national debt, and help the economy grow more.
+
+  
+
+ ""The thing I'm going to do is to make sure the middle class gets good tax breaks because they have been absolutely shunned,"" Trump said. ""The other thing is that I'm going to fight very hard for business.""
+
+  
+
+ Trump is also considering tapping former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to a head a commission on radical Islam. 
+
+  
+
+ The billionaire told Fox News he may set up the commission to study his immigration policies, including calls for a temporary ban on Muslims coming to America.
+
+  
+
+ But more than a week after officially becoming his party's presumptive nominee, many in the GOP are still split over Trump's conservative credentials.
+
+Meanwhile, although many have questioned whether he can actually beat Clinton in November, a new Reuters poll has him in a dead heat with the former state secretary, with Clinton at 41 percent, Trump at 40 percent and 19 percent undecided.",REAL
+9488,Can U.S. Elections Really Be Stolen? Yes      : Information Clearing House - ICH,". Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a rebuff to those who accuse him of jeopardising Israeli security interests with his government’s repeated affronts to the White House.
+In the past weeks alone, defence minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared last year’s nuclear deal between Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr Netanyahu has implied that US opposition to settlement expansion is the same as support for the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews.
+American president Barack Obama, meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own critics who insinuate that he is anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic party’s candidate to succeed Mr Obama in November’s election.
+In reality, however, the Obama administration has quietly punished Mr Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu stalled negotiations last year as he sought to recruit Congress to his battle against the Iran deal.
+In fact, Israel already receives roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s assistance on developing missile defence programmes is factored in. Notably, Israel has been forced to promise not to approach Congress for extra funds.
+The deal takes into account neither inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation against the shekel.
+A bigger blow still is the White House’s demand to phase out a special exemption that allowed Israel to spend nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will soon have to buy all its armaments from the US, ending what amounted to a subsidy to its own arms industry.
+Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed military largesse – in the face of almost continual insults – inevitably fuels claims that the Israeli tail is wagging the US dog. Even The New York Times has described the aid package as “too big”.
+Since the 1973 war, Israel has received at least $100bn in military aid, with more assistance hidden from view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid half of Israel’s military budget. Today it still foots a fifth of the bill, despite Israel’s economic success.
+But the US expects a return on its massive investment. As the late Israeli politician-general Ariel Sharon once observed, ­Israel has been a US “aircraft carrier” in the Middle East, acting as the regional bully and carrying out operations that benefit Washington.
+Almost no one blames the US for Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have deterred later US-backed moves at regime overthrow, as well as countering the strategic advantage Israel derives from its own nuclear arsenal.
+In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored military prowess is a triple boon to the US weapons industry, the country’s most powerful lobby. Public funds are siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies from American arms makers. That, in turn, serves as a shop window for other customers and spurs an endless and lucrative game of catch-up in the rest of the Middle East.
+The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive in Israel in December – their various components produced in 46 US states – will increase the clamour for the cutting-edge warplane.
+Israel is also a “front-line laboratory”, as former Israeli army negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the weekend, that develops and field-tests new technology Washington can later use itself.
+The US is planning to buy back the missile interception system Iron Dome – which neutralises battlefield threats of retaliation – it largely paid for. Israel works closely too with the US in developing cyber­warfare, such as the Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s civilian nuclear programme.
+But the clearest message from Israel’s new aid package is one delivered to the Palestinians: Washington sees no pressing strategic interest in ending the occupation. It stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran deal but will not risk a damaging clash over Palestinian statehood.
+Some believe that Mr Obama signed the aid package to win the credibility necessary to overcome his domestic Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly before he leaves office, that corners Mr Netanyahu into making peace.
+Hopes have been raised by an expected meeting at the United Nations in New York on Wednesday. But their first talks in 10 months are planned only to demonstrate unity to confound critics of the aid deal.
+If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu need not fear US financial retaliation, even as he intensifies effective annexation of the West Bank.
+Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right lesson from the aid deal – he can act against the Palestinians with continuing US impunity.
+- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf Can U.S. Elections Really Be Stolen? Yes By Mark Crispin Miller
+Is election theft possible in the United States? And might the suspects live closer to home than the Kremlin? Professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of numerous books and articles on computerized election fraud, explores the very real possibilities. Posted November 06, 2016",FAKE
+2412,Obamacare group slashes staff,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+7800,Obama Admits to Rigged Elections back in 2008,"Obama Admits to Rigged Elections back in 2008 10/27/2016 
+TRUTH REVOLT 
+There’s a lot of accusations going around that the 2016 election is rigged. From Democrats suggesting Russia is tampering with the presidential election to a plethora of documents and undercover video that proves Democrats are trying their darnedest to sway the outcome. 
+President Obama has laughed off the notion that Bernie Sanders was forced out by the DNC and believes Donald Trump is out of his mind for suggesting elections are rigged. And of course, Obama would never admit that Hillary Clinton could do something wrong. But candidate Obama, in 2008, sure was concerned that the election might be rigged against him. 
+Video of him answering a campaign question has surfaced to put to rest the notion that he doesn’t believe in the possibility: 
+“Well, I tell you what: it helps in Ohio that we’ve got Democrats in charge of the machines. [Cheering] But look, I come from Chicago, so I want to be honest, it’s not as if it’s just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past, sometimes Democrats have too. You know, whenever people are in power, they’re — you know, they have this tendency to try to, you know, tilt things in their direction.” 
+Watch above. 
+The Freedom Center is a 501c3 non-profit organization. Therefore we do not endorse political candidates either in primary or general elections. However, as defenders of America’s social contract, we insist that the rules laid down by both parties at the outset of campaigns be respected, and that the results be decided by free elections. We will oppose any attempt to rig the system and deny voters of either party their constitutional right to elect candidates of their choice.",FAKE
+9719,Alien Insects Capture In UK,"Alien Insects Capture In UK # John Wood 0 
+As you see by this video Alien life has found it's way onto Earth it seems if your a sceptic that they just could be dragon fles or moths but you slow it down yousee the wings look like and move like that of a cuttle fish fins their bodie seem translucent and highly colored and there seems to be plenty of them in my local area. Tags",FAKE
+3659,"Hesston, Kansas, mass shooting: what we know","There was a mass shooting in Hesston, Kansas.
+
+Harvey County Sheriff T. Walton said that four people, including the gunman, are dead and 14 are wounded, 10 critically, after a series of shootings at an Excel Industries plant, its parking lot, and nearby streets, according to the Associated Press.
+
+The suspect was an employee at Excel Industries, which makes lawnmower parts, identified as 38-year-old Cedric Ford. A police officer shot and killed Ford, who reportedly had an assault weapon and pistol.
+
+The gunman apparently began shooting after county deputies served him a ""protection from abuse"" order, which are typically issued after violence in a relationship. The order was served around 3:30 pm local time, and the shooting began around 5 pm.
+
+The Kansas City Star reported that a woman who identified herself as Ford's live-in girlfriend accused him of verbal and physical abuse, prompting the protection order.
+
+Ford also had several convictions in Florida for burglary, grand theft, fleeing from an officer, aggravated fleeing, and carrying a concealed weapon, according to the AP.
+
+The shooting came less than a week after another mass shooting at Kalamazoo, Michigan.
+
+The shootings are a devastating tragedy, but unfortunately one that Americans are increasingly familiar with. As more of these events end up in the news, the country is being forced to consider why the US, more than any other developed nation, suffers from such extraordinary levels of gun violence. And it seems easy access to firearms provide one answer.
+
+No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times Sweden's, and nearly 16 times Germany's, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)
+
+What's more, there appears to be a correlation between America's high levels of gun violence and gun ownership, as this chart from Tewksbury Lab shows:
+
+Research reviews by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center have concluded that more gun ownership leads to more gun violence. Other factors, such as socioeconomic issues, contribute to violence, but guns are the one issue that makes America unique relative to other developed countries in comparable socioeconomic circumstances.
+
+Studies have found this at both the state and country level. Take, for instance, this chart, from a 2007 study by Harvard researchers, showing the correlation between statewide firearm homicide victimization rates and household gun ownership after controlling for robbery rates:
+
+A more recent study from 2013, led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher, reached similar conclusions: After controlling for multiple variables, the study found that a 1 percent increase in gun ownership correlated with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate at the state level.
+
+This holds up around the world. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp explained, a breakthrough analysis in 1999 by UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins found that the US does not, contrary to the old conventional wisdom, have more crime in general than other Western industrial nations. Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that's driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
+
+""A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,"" Zimring and Hawkins wrote. ""A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.""
+
+How can the country address this? The research shows tightening existing gun control measures in the US would help: Studies in both Connecticut and Missouri suggested that gun licensing laws in those states helped reduce homicides and suicides.
+
+But as Harvard's David Hemenway told Vox's Dylan Matthews, it would likely take decades for the mild gun control measures proposed in the US to have a significant impact. ""It's all speculation,"" Hemenway said. ""I suspect it would take a while (decades) for the US to get down to gun violence levels of other developed countries because a) we have so many guns which are durable, and b) we have a gun culture — we tend to use guns more often in more situations than citizens of other developed countries.""
+
+To have a more immediate impact, then, the US would have to find a way to quickly remove the number of guns in circulation. Other countries have actually done that: In Australia, after a 1996 mass shooting, lawmakers passed new restrictions on guns and imposed a mandatory buyback program that essentially confiscated people's guns, seizing at least 650,000 firearms.
+
+According to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers, Australia's firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent.
+
+Although it's hard to gauge how much of this was driven by the buyback program, researchers argue it likely played some role: ""First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.""
+
+Still, similar policies would be difficult to pass in America, a nation in which gun culture and ownership are tremendously ingrained — notably, in the Second Amendment. And gun owners are backed by a powerful lobby: the National Rifle Association. Combined, these forces have stopped any serious gun legislation from passing at the federal level — although some states have passed new restrictions in the past few years.
+
+But given the research, America's policies and attitudes toward guns have clear, deadly costs — including, perhaps, more events like the Hesston shooting.",REAL
+513,Janet Yellen won't say when interest rates will rise because she doesn't know,"Markets might want more clarity on exactly when interest rates will go up, but they're not likely to get it from Fed Chair Janet Yellen. In a closely watched speech on Friday, Yellen provided a more detailed view of her economic outlook but at the same time raised new questions about what the Fed will do next. The Wall Street Journal's Pedro da Costa summed up her stance on interest rates perfectly:
+
+Yellen isn't being difficult here. She has good reasons for being so vague. After more than six years of trying to boost the economy with interest rates near zero, the central bank is still battling stubbornly flat inflation and a slow labor market recovery. Nothing like this has happened in at least 80 years, and experts disagree about the best course for the Fed to take.
+
+Given those uncharted waters, the Fed can't really telegraph right now when it will raise rates; what it can do (and what Yellen did) is emphasize just how much uncertainty the Fed faces — and try to help markets understand the Fed's approach to dealing with this dilemma.
+
+At some points in her speech, Yellen seemed to say interest rates could rise soon. She indicated that inflation won't necessarily have to take off before she's comfortable raising interest rates — it just can't fall any further. She also indicated that she and her Fed colleagues might still bump up interest rates this year.
+
+Yet Yellen was also careful to also point out that the economy isn't all that strong — in fact, it's weaker than it looks right now:
+
+In assessing the actual strength of the labor market and the broader economy, we must bear in mind that these very welcome improvements have been achieved in the context of extraordinary monetary accommodation. While the overall level of real activity now appears to be much closer to its potential than it was a year or two ago, the economy in an ""underlying"" sense remains quite weak by historical standards, for the simple reason that the increases in hiring and output that have been achieved thus far have required exceptionally low levels of short- and longer-term interest rates, reflecting a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy. Interest rates have been, and remain, very low, and if underlying conditions had truly returned to normal, the economy should be booming. ...
+
+The speech provided details to how Yellen sees the current economic landscape. And while it seemed to give conflicting messages, that's sort of the point.
+
+Under ordinary circumstances, central banks can work from a standard playbook that helps them decide when to adjust policy. For example, economists have developed a model called the Taylor Rule that gives guidelines for how to set interest rates based on GDP growth and inflation rates. But as Yellen herself said on Friday, these are not ordinary circumstances — there's so much slack in the labor market that the Taylor Rule just wouldn't work right now.
+
+The reality is that the Fed simply doesn't know when it can raise rates ... and it may not know until it's time. Speaking to senators in February, Yellen said the Fed is going to take interest rate hikes on a ""meeting-by-meeting basis.""
+
+If economic conditions continue to improve, as the Committee anticipates, the Committee will at some point begin considering an increase in the target range for the federal funds rate on a meeting-by-meeting basis. Before then, the Committee will change its forward guidance. However, it is important to emphasize that a modification of the forward guidance should not be read as indicating that the Committee will necessarily increase the target range in a couple of meetings. Instead the modification should be understood as reflecting the Committee's judgment that conditions have improved to the point where it will soon be the case that a change in the target range could be warranted at any meeting.
+
+Rather than giving specific guidance (which she can't really do), Yellen is trying to help markets understand why the Fed can't be more specific about its future actions. There's simply not a playbook for what the Fed should do right now, so what Yellen seems to be saying is that the central bank will know an improved economy when it sees it.",REAL
+4859,"Actually, many Trump voters are in one basket and it’s both racist and economically frustrated","“Just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” said Clinton at a New York fundraiser on Friday night, where access was purchased at a price of $1,200 to $250,000. “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it,” she said.
+
+“But the other basket . . . of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change,” Clinton added. “Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
+
+Trump, feigning outrage, has gleefully seized on Clinton’s comments, and most observers believe they were impolitic. This is all, however, missing an important point: Clinton was wrong to divide Trump voters between the bigoted and economically anxious because many are both, and the two things are interrelated. For many, it’s just one big basket. Clinton, in drawing a distinction between the racists and the justly upset, echoes a broader and mostly unhelpful debate about whether Trump supporters are motivated by economic anxiety or bigotry: The clear answer, contrary to Matthew Yglesias and company, is “often both.”
+
+Yes, Trump is getting a lot of support from professional racists on the white supremacist and alt-right, and reducing his base of support to any single constituency is a fool’s errand. But for many Trump voters, anger and anxiety over economic decline and precarity, the rising status of women and people of color, demographic change caused by immigration, and the country’s waning global power after more than a decade of costly and futile global warfare, are all wrapped into one big sense of foreboding terror. Trump promises relief and a reversion to something that was, in senses both real and imagined, better.
+
+There is a lot that’s new about Trump. But the intersection of exploitative economics and white supremacy certainly isn’t: White economic anxiety is used to foment racism, and racism is manipulated to further elite economic interests.
+
+As Michelle Alexander has written, America’s racial caste system has long been perpetuated by “appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole.”
+
+The Southern slave-owning aristocracy and the Jim Crow governments that took power after Reconstruction’s defeat peddled white supremacy to protect a political-economic order that not only terrorized blacks but that also kept poor whites on the margins. As historian Ira Katznelson detailed in “Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time,” Southern Democrats during the New Deal era used their hold on Congress to leverage this divide and conquer logic on the national scene. They blocked civil rights measures and also obstructed the growth of a labor movement poised to improve the condition of workers across the racial divide and in doing so threaten Jim Crow. Later, the modern conservative movement once again used racism toward economically reactionary ends, employing “racial dog whistles to transmute white anxiety into support for conservative economic policies that have harmed us all,” as Ian Haney-López and Heather McGhee wrote for The Nation. “Beginning in the 1970s, conservatives deployed a highly racialized strategy that relentlessly linked public institutions to undeserving minorities in order to undo the country’s social contract,” Haney-López and McGhee continued. “The reactionary economic agenda made possible by dog-whistle politics is responsible not just for the devaluing of black lives but for the declining fortunes of the majority of white families.” Talking about poor and working class people like they are research specimens and not human beings to very wealthy people at an exclusive fundraiser tends to not be a good look, as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both discovered. But it’s not just bad optics. It’s crummy politics. The business-friendly agenda historically embraced by the Clintons fails to answer working-class white people’s economic concerns and in doing so actually fuels the fires of racism. Opposing racism as some transcendent and ahistorical force obscures the fact that racism functions to not only keep people of color down but also to keep the 1 percent in charge. America’s racial caste system depends on white supremacy to ensure white privileges and oligarchic prerogatives. And so Clinton is right: We should understand and empathize with many Trump voters — not because establishment liberalism has much to offer them but because their problems are bound up with those of the people whom they hate.",REAL
+9351,EWAO Stephen Hawking Warns: STOP Searching for Aliens before its TOO LATE,"News View Articles First Online Academy for the Visionary Arts Opens Global Press Release, October 25th 2016 - New online learning community explores art with the power to shape the future, and integrate the wisdom of ancient cultures. Originally identified through... Claim Your Deepest Desires with Tonight’s Super Moon in Aries The full moon is a time for the most potent access to manifesting your dreams. It is a time when your thoughts and emotions become magnetised to attract the exact reality that matches what you... Why did Apple ban Dash? What are they so afraid of? Corporate technology giant Apple has banned trailblazing digital currency Dash from its App Store. What we should be asking is why is Apple so threatened by Dash? Other digital currencies such as... Finnish scientist spots GREAT MYSTERY at the Bosnian Pyramids A scientist from Finland states he has found ANOMALIES at the Bosnian pyramids in Visoko which cannot be explained as a natural phenomenon. The ultimate proof these are MAN-MADE structures? A... Found: Noah’s Ark Blueprints reveal the Ark was ROUND A clay tablet believed to be around 4,000-year-old details the material used in the construction of the Ark and indicates Noah's Ark was in fact ROUND. The so-called Ark blueprints are among... This Transformational Festival is Creating Real Change by Setting Up Sustainable Communities Oh how we love our transformational festivals! For so many of us they have guided and shaped chapters of our lives, inspiring us, exposing our souls to new truths, to incredible workshops, art,... Inspiration Discover Something Stephen Hawking Warns: STOP Searching for Aliens before its TOO LATE World renowned physicist Professor Stephen Hawking has once again spoken out about alien life in the cosmos. ""I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone."" However, the scientist warns... Erich Von Daniken concludes: Aliens will RETURN to Earth within 20 years The author of one of the most popular books on the planet —Chariot of the Gods— indicates Aliens will return to Earth in the near future –20 years— since we are part of their DNA. The... Scientists concludes Humans did NOT evolve alongside OTHER life on Earth According to a controversial book written by a renowned environmentalist and ecologist, human beings did not evolve ALONGSIDE other lifeforms on Earth. In fact, mankind did not evolve from that... The Orion Correlation: 3 fascinating ancient structures CONNECTED to Orion For some mysterious reason, the constellation of Orion was of great importance to ancient cultures around the globe. Some even call the Correlation of Orion a global phenomenon since this pattern of... 10 fascinating accounts of ancient gods and their FLYING Machines ""…there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven."" Is it possible that thousands of years ago, ancient cultures... Scientists have just detected a crack in Earth’s magnetic shield Experts have recently found that Earth's magnetic shield cracked open due to a super-strong geomagnetic storm that managed to reconfigure our planet's magnetic shield. Our planet's magnetosphere... Health & Wellness Improve Life Are You Fatigued? 11 Ways to Take Back Your Adrenals When you take back your adrenals, you take back your power. I kid you not when I say that adrenal fatigue is the subject of a entire book. The intricacies of how inter-connected this issue... Eating Black Raspberries Significantly Lowers Cardiovascular Disease An extract found in black raspberries can significantly lower arterial stiffness, a key measure of cardiovascular disease! By PreventDisease Black raspberry (Rubus... Watch What Happens When Cannabis Is Injected Into Cancer Cells. This Is Mind Blowing! Watch this mind blowing video as the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, kills cancer cells! By MindBodySoulSpirit Since 1974 studies have shown that cannabis has anti-tumor... This Is The Most Powerful Natural Antibiotic Ever – Kills Any Infections In The Body This master cleansing tonic is actually an antibiotic that kills gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. by HealthCareAboveAll The basic formula of this powerful tonic dates back to... Monsanto Lobbyist Panics When Offered a Glass Of Water After Saying Weedkiller Is Safe To Drink What this Monsanto Lobbyist says about your water is shocking... by Nick Meyer Monsanto lobbyist, Dr Patrick Moore, claims to be an ecological expert and is currently the frontman... Don’t Throw This Banana Part Ever Again! THIS IS WHY! The health benefits of bananas are undeniable. But, it’s not only the flesh that can boost your health. The peel can do wonders too. By HealthyFoodTeam Although we normally throw banana... Spirituality Universal Patterns First Online Academy for the Visionary Arts Opens Global Press Release, October 25th 2016 - New online learning community explores art with the power to shape the future, and integrate the wisdom of ancient cultures. Originally identified through... The Sacred Contribution of the Mazatec Shaman to the Spiritual World There was a time when shamanic ceremonies played a key role in a society. Such rituals involved the consumption of different herbs under the supervision of the shaman who acted as a spiritual guide... Thou Shalt Not Kill Scorpions and Smoketh Them You might think that lighting up a spliff makes you cool but you're nowhere as hardcore (or exposed to danger) as Afghanistan's dried scorpion smokers. Look, we get it - mankind needs its fix... How to Go on Your First Shamanic Journey into the Spirit World As days go by, the way of the shaman is becoming more and more axiomatic. If you feel that one day your path might include a shamanic journey, consider these steps. The most important thing... Understanding and Preparing the ‘Magic Mushrooms’ Experience Ingesting psychedelic mushrooms can provide, without doubt, a life changing experience. But there are certain rules one has to follow in order to get the best out of their alluring effect. When done... Psychedelic Mushrooms – A 7,000 Year Old Friend With an ancient history spanning over tens of thousands of years of human evolution, psychedelic mushrooms are once again making a comeback. Hallucinogenic mushrooms, also known as ‘magic... ",FAKE
+9600,Chinese may become Russia’s second largest ethnic population by 2050 | Russia & India Report,"Chinese may become Russia’s second largest ethnic population by 2050 26 October 2016 TASS The number of unemployed people in China is more than the entire Russian population. Facebook russia , china , migration 
+Experts predict a possible growth in the migration flow from China into Russia, by 2050 the Chinese may become the second largest population group in Russia, Scientific Director of the Center for Migration Research of the Institute of National Economic Prediction of Russia’s Academy of Science Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya said. 
+""The number of unemployed people in China is more than the entire Russian population,"" she noted at an international conference at the North Caucasus Federal University in the Russian city of Stavropol, dubbed as ""Migration processes.""""If we maintain solid relations with China then I think by 2050 the Chinese may become the second largest population group in Russia and surpass the Central Asian populace as far as migration goes,"" the expert said. 
+Zayonchkovskaya said the reason for this process was that after 2030 the migrant inflow from Central Asian countries would decline as a large part of young people had already left these countries to work or study in the neighboring states. 
+Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are the main countries whose citizens come to Russia, Ukrainians migrate in large numbers, too. ""If we think of other countries from where migrant labor can be obtained, I can think of none other than China,"" Zayonchkovskaya noted, emphasizing that ""Russia will need foreign workers to ensure its economic development."" 
+According to the expert, the changes in the pension legislation would not balance the situation given the decrease in the working-age population. ""Raising the retirement age will neither level out the demographic waves, nor will it solve the labor shortage problem, as it only solves the problem of the Pension Fund, though the demographic situation still remains problematic,"" Zayonchkovskaya added noting that according to the Federal Migration Service, the international migration flow into Russia in 2015 had amounted in 9.8 mln people. 
+First published by TASS . ",FAKE
+5248,Clinton Cries Racism Tagging Trump with KKK; Trump Says 'She Lies',"With only about 70 days left until the election, presidential campaign politics have hit a new low. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has released a new attack ad claiming Republican rival Donald Trump is a candidate of racists.
+
+The new ad released by Clinton attempts to depict Trump as a racist, a candidate supported by white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan.
+
+In the campaign commercial, a KKK member is heard saying, ""The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes we believe in.""
+
+Clinton said Trump and Republicans are reinforcing harmful stereotypes, calling it a disturbing preview of the kind of president Trump would be.
+
+""He is taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party,"" she said.
+
+Trump said the allegations are the oldest ploy in the Democratic playbook.
+
+""When Democratic policies fail, they are left with only this one, tired argument: 'you're racist, you're racist, you're racist!' Trump insisted.
+
+Trump said Clinton was not only attacking him, but millions of good Americans who support him.
+
+""She lies, she smears, she paints decent Americans as racists,"" said Trump, who then defended the core ideas of his candidacy.
+
+But Clinton isn't backing down. In a speech in the swing state of Nevada, she also tried to tie Trump to the so-called ""AltRight"" or ""alternative right,"" a very vocal group whose nationalist beliefs push beyond mainstream conservatism.
+
+""He's taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America's two major political parties,"" she said.
+
+Trump's campaign said he's never used the term ""alt-right"" and disavows ""any groups or individuals associated with a message of hate.""
+
+""Hillary Clinton's short speech is pandering to the worst instincts in our society. She should be ashamed of herself!"" Trump tweeted.
+
+In New Hampshire Thursday, the GOP candidate said he doesn't want white supremacists to vote for him -- his campaign is about love for America, not hate.
+
+And although Clinton still leads in national polls, it may become more difficult for her in the days ahead to restore voter trust and deflect attention away from her email scandal.
+
+The battle over race took the spotlight temporarily off of Clinton's ongoing problems over her e-mails and the controversy over her connections between the Clinton Foundation and the U.S. State Department when she was Secretary of State. But the issue will be coming back.
+
+A federal judge has ordered the State Department to begin releasing additional emails starting Sept. 13. They're among the nearly 15,000 messages Clinton did not turn over, but were discovered on her personal server by the FBI.",REAL
+2851,There's Something O'Reilly Trusts Even Less Than Iran,"Bill O'Reilly wants to know what's in the Iran nuclear program deal, but he doesn't want to hear about it from the media.
+
+Speaking on his Fox News Channel show ""The O'Reilly Factor"" on Monday night, the conservative host said he doesn't trust the American media to tell the public what's really in the deal reached last week.
+
+“I don’t trust the press,"" O'Reilly told Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume in remarks posted online by Mediaite. ""I think I trust Iran more than I trust the American press. I don’t want the American press interpreting this for me. I want to see it in the committee hearings on television, I want to see the debate.”
+
+Trust was a major theme on Monday night's program. During the ""Talking Points Memo"" segment, O'Reilly also said Americans don't trust the president.
+
+""Simply put, millions of Americans do not trust President Obama to protect us from the deranged (Iranian) mullahs who have committed atrocities for decades,"" he said.",REAL
+5915,"Meet the Neocons, 9/11 Criminals and Goldman Bankers On Team Trump : The Corbett Report","Corbett • 11/12/2016 • 20 Comments 
+The voting machines have decided who will be the next puppet figurehead of the Pax Americana deep state for the next four years. The circus is over and the peanut shells are being swept out of the stands. So what do we have to show for all of it? 
+Well, I have some good news, some bad news, and some not-so-good news for you. Let’s start with the bad news. 
+Apparently some people voted for Trump in the belief that he was some sort of anti-establishment truth-telling hero of the working class. I hate to be the one to disabuse you of this notion, so let’s just look at his transition team, his campaign team, the people who have already been tapped to be part of the new administration and the people who are being contacted for potential cabinet appointments. Warning: It’s not a pretty picture. 
+For free access to this editorial, please CLICK HERE . 
+For full access to the subscriber newsletter, and to support this website, please become a member . Only site members can access this content. 
+Already a Member?",FAKE
+10209,This Times newspaper correction is amusing,"  This Times newspaper correction is amusing 
+Amusing correction in The Times today where they’re apologising for reporting that Judge said something was “dodgy”. 
+Sounds well dogi to us.",FAKE
+4453,Obama vowed to be the healer-in-chief. He never made the effort - The Boston Globe,"One of the “few regrets” of his presidency, President Obama said dolefully in his State of the Union speech, was “that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.” Were he endowed with “the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt,” he remarked, he could have done more to bridge the partisan divide. But he pledged to “keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.”
+
+Did you experience a touch of déjà vu when the president said that? Four years ago, when he was in the home stretch of his first term and running for a second, he said much the same thing.
+
+“I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted, where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest . . . I haven’t fully accomplished that,” Obama told an interviewer in 2012. “My biggest disappointment is that we haven’t changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked.”
+
+Did he even try?
+
+From his earliest days as a presidential contender, Obama had held himself out as a healer — as a visionary who would never “pit red America against blue America,” who committed himself to ending “a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism.” That uplifting promise was at the very heart of Obama’s appeal; it was what led so many voters to invest so much hope and faith — even love — in the prospect of an Obama presidency.
+
+Yet in his first term, American political life grew more bitter, not less. Unity and goodwill receded even further. As measured by Gallup, Obama supplanted George W. Bush as the most polarizing president ever. Democrats and Republicans blamed each other for the nastiness and distrust. The president often took the low road; his opponents often did too. Deeply controversial legislation, especially Obamacare, was rammed through on party-line votes. The rise of the Tea Party prefigured sweeping Republican gains in the 2010 midterm elections, which led both parties into an even more toxic relationship. By the time Obama ran for reelection in 2012, little remained of 2008’s optimistic candidate of hope. In his place was a snappish incumbent grimly focused on winning a second term by any means necessary. Even liberal media outlets remarked on the disparity. “Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults,” Politico reported.
+
+But when voters renewed Obama’s lease on the White House, they also gave him a fresh opportunity to make good on the signal promise of his rise to power. A second term offered this most polarizing of presidents a chance to extend olive branches — and to eschew the ad hominem attacks that so infuriate his critics. Democracy doesn’t work “if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice,” the president said in his address to Congress this month. “It doesn’t work if we think that our political opponents are unpatriotic or trying to weaken America.”
+
+That’s exactly the right message. If only Obama had heeded it.
+
+Let’s be clear: The president is not to blame for the polarization of American life. The “mushy middle” has been dwindling for years. With Democrats moving to the left and Republicans moving to the right, there is far less overlap between the parties than there was a generation ago. In a recent study, the Pew Research Center found that 92 percent of Republicans are now to the right of the median Democrat, and 94 percent of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.
+
+Worse — much worse — is how intensely hostile the antipathy between right and left has become. Large swaths of each camp say the opposing party is not merely misguided, but an explicit threat to the nation’s well-being. Obama could have led the way in suppressing this corrosive tendency. Instead he inflamed it.
+
+It would not have required “the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt” to eschew the ridicule and taunts that so pollute modern political discourse. The gifts of Gerald Ford would have done nicely. Like all presidents, Obama has been frustrated by partisan opponents. But no chief executive in modern times has been so quick to impugn his critics’ motives, or to resort to mockery and demonization when amicable persuasion would serve so much better.
+
+Obama routinely speaks of his critics as if their motives couldn’t possibly be rational or decent. When Republicans balked at his proposal to allow 10,000 Syrian refugees to enter the United States (a proposal I favor), Obama jeered. “Apparently they’re scared of widows and orphans,” he said. “That doesn’t sound very tough to me.”
+
+When GOP lawmakers resisted raising the debt limit, Obama tweeted: “Are they really willing to hurt people just to score political points?” Efforts to repeal Obamacare he attributed to cruelty — the “one unifying principle” for Republicans, the president told reporters, is “making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care.”
+
+With Obama, there seems to be no possibility of honorable disagreement. Oppose something he wants, and you are a bought-and-paid-for stooge, or a denier of science, or a peddler of fiction, or a scoundrel who puts party ahead of country. He isn’t the only one who talks this way, not by a long shot. But he is our only president, and how he expresses himself matters. When presidential rhetoric is mean and contemptuous, the whole public square is befouled.
+
+It can always get worse, as Donald Trump demonstrates daily. But an awful lot of Americans, Republicans and Democrats both, want it to get better. Obama insisted he was going to heal the divide, but never even made the effort. He still has a year in office. It’s not too late to start.",REAL
+8035,"6 neo-Nazis arrested in Motorola assassination case, SBU plot exposed - Fort Russ","6 neo-Nazis arrested in Motorola assassination case, SBU plot exposed November 12, 2016 - Fort Russ News - RusVesna - translated by J. Arnoldski - The Ministry of State Security (MGB) of the Donetsk People’s Republic has announced the arrest of six neo-Nazis from Misanthropic Division, whose leaders earlier claimed responsibility for the murder of Sparta battalion commander Arsen Pavlov (Motorola). The counter-espionage department of the ministry has reported that those arrested have already given confessions and evidence of the “circumstances of the committing of such a terroristic and extremist crime.” The neo-Nazis had maintained contact with employees of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and operated on the territory of the DPR in its interests. “It has been established that all terrorist and subversive actions in the DPR and LPR are carried out by the SBU in the framework of an approved operational plan, the purpose of which is to intensify internal contradictions between the leaders of the Donbass republics, creating the preconditions and circumstances for confrontation between them,” the Ministry of State Security emphasized, adding that the detainees are being further investigated. Follow us on Facebook! ",FAKE
+5213,Clinton campaign: WikiLeaks hack gets ‘closer and closer to the Trump campaign’,"SAN FRANCISCO — Hillary Clinton's campaign accused Republican Donald Trump's campaign Thursday of increasingly close involvement with the release of stolen emails that detail the internal and sometimes unflattering workings of the Democrat's inner circle.
+
+The anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks has a huge trove of emails hacked from the personal account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and is releasing batches of the communications in the final four weeks of the presidential campaign. The Clinton campaign had refused to authenticate communications released so far and accuses Russia of being behind the hack and WikiLeaks of doing Moscow's bidding.
+
+“We're not going to let it throw us off,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters on a conference call. “I think it's important for Americans again to reflect on why this is happening, who perpetrated it and for what purpose,” he said.
+
+“This is getting closer and closer to the Trump campaign itself,” Mook said, citing the admission from Trump supporter and former adviser Roger Stone that he had “back channel” discussions with WikiLeaks.
+
+Mook said he expects to see more evidence of coordination or collaboration intended to benefit Trump's candidacy. He spoke from the campaign's Brooklyn headquarters. Clinton is in California for two days of fundraising.
+
+“I think its important to always recognize the context of this situation, and that is that the Department of Homeland Security took the unprecedented step of saying ... beyond any doubt that this hack and then the leaking of the emails was perpetrated by the Russian government for the purpose of intervening in the election and trying to affect the outcome in favor of Donald Trump,” Mook said.
+
+[Clinton campaign chairman ties email hack to Russians, suggests Trump had early warning]
+
+The correspondence reveals a campaign that has struggled all year to improve a flawed candidate. As far back as March, aides were keenly aware that she was resistant to the media, perhaps out of touch with regular Americans and unable to convey a clear message to voters.
+
+Republicans have said some of the emails show corrupt dealings among the campaign, the Clinton family charity and outside advisers and donors.
+
+The email dumps have provided plenty of fodder for Clinton critics to seize upon, and the sixth batch, released Thursday morning, was no different.
+
+In one March 2015 email chain, for example, Clinton aides were discussing how well Clinton knew Loretta Lynch, who the following month would become the U.S. attorney general.
+
+“She knows Loretta,” wrote close Clinton aide Huma Abedin. “Not an extremely close relationship and don’t remember the last time they connected. … Regardless, definitely a cordial relationship.”
+
+That could reignite criticism of a private airport meeting that Lynch held with former President Bill Clinton held in Phoenix shortly before the Justice Department decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton in relation to her use of a private email server as secretary of state.
+
+Across Podesta’s inbox there was concern about how Clinton was handling revelations about her server. In early September 2015, he exchanged messages with Neera Tanden, head of the liberal Center for American Progress, who weighed in on a Clinton interview with ABC News anchor David Muir in which Clinton expressed remorse for her decision.
+
+“This apology thing has become like a pathology. I can only imagine what’s happening in the campaign,” Tanden wrote to Podesta. “Is there some way I can be helpful here? I know if I just email her she will dismiss it out of hand. Are there people she can hear from that will have some impact?”
+
+Podesta responded: “You should email her. She can say she’s sorry without apologizing to the American people. Tell her to say it and move on, why get hung on this.”
+
+The latest release also included another email exchange between advisers to Clinton discussing how to deal with pressure to release transcripts of her paid speeches. In the exchange, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon and speechwriter Dan Schwerin propose leaking the transcript of one paid speech she delivered in October 2014.
+
+Schwerin explained to colleagues that he had written a ""long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way, precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats.""
+
+Schwerin continued that the section was ""not as tough or pointed as we would write it now, but it's much more than most people would assume she was saying in paid speeches.""
+
+Mandy Grunwald, a senior strategist, however, responded that she worried ""about going down this road."" She referred to a story by Maggie Haberman, then a reporter for Politico, in 2013, in which Haberman wrote that Clinton had praised the financial industry in paid speeches to Goldman Sachs.
+
+""Maybe you think the Deutsche Bank speech takes the sting out of the Goldman report -- but I am concerned that the passage below will exacerbate not improve the situation,” Grunwald wrote.
+
+The emails also allude to staff tensions, including a March 2015 missive from former State Department aide Tom Nides to Podesta, in which Nides talks about tension between Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills.
+
+“Sorry to bug you but on Friday I got a bit wigged out,” Nides wrote. “It's clear (which I assume you know) tThere [sic] is already a bunch of noise about Robby and Cheryl not getting along. Robby getting very frustrated I have zero idea what the deal is but you and I both know this is a disaster for her if it doesn't stop. This is the kind of stuff that could open the door to someone. I am sorry to dump this on you and maybe I am full of [s---] so take it for what it's worth.”
+
+There is no response from Mook in the emails.
+
+Matea Gold, Rosalind Helderman, Ed O'Keefe and Anu Narayanswamy contributed to this story.",REAL
+4762,Did Hillary Insult Sanderistas as ‘Basement Dwellers’? No—Just the Opposite,"The far left is up in arms again, this time over a hacked tape of Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser in a wealthy Virginia suburb.
+
+There I was, watching college football and the Ryder Cup as my daughter sat next to me on the couch drawing Rapunzel and Ariel. Halftime of the game I was watching came so I moseyed over to my office to look in on the political world, expecting not much new at  5 o’clock on a Saturday. Didn’t see much at first. And then... oh, what’s this? Something about basement dwellers. And Hillary. Making fun of people living in basements? What? Oh Christ. Here we go again.
+
+Backstory: The Intercept, the (I think it’s fair to say) anti-Clinton-though-by-no-means-pro-Trump web site, got a tape of a talk Clinton gave at a private fundraiser in McLean, Virginia, back in February. No, check that. It looks like the Washington Free Beacon got it first and posted it Tuesday. But the conservative Beacon, reflecting house priorities, led with the fact that Clinton evidently said on the tape that she wouldn’t upgrade the nuclear arsenal, which for the Beacon indicates of course that she wants America to lose.
+
+After that I’m not certain what happened but it seems as if after the Beacon published the audio, a couple Intercept reporters were the first people on the left who got around to listening to it. The Intercept account, as you might guess, didn’t give a rat’s pooper about the nuclear arsenal but led with the fact that Clinton said, somewhat unfortunately—but in context only somewhat, for reasons I’ll explain—that she occupies the “center-left to the center-right.”
+
+That was a responsible and, for the Intercept, predictable and understandable way to play the story. But then, by the time it got to the Twittersphere, Clinton was somehow making fun of Sanderistas, mocking them for being such losers that they’re living in their parent’s basements. The hashtag #basementdwellers was trending like mad when I checked in, and I’d imagine it’ll be going strong all night. I read a few of them, which boiled down to fuck you, Hillary, you corporate hack, this is why we need the revolution and you’re going to be the first to face the firing squad (although I thought I smelled a lot of trolling from the deplorable caucus too).
+
+Of all the arrant bullshit I’ve seen on Twitter this election, this is easily the bullshittiest. She insulted no one. In fact quite the opposite—for someone speaking behind closed doors to ardent supporters, she was not only restrained, but she openly and directly asked her supporters to be patient with the impatient; that is, to understand the views and motivations of the younger people who wanted more radical change.
+
+It is important to recognize what’s going on in this election. Everybody who’s ever been in an election that I’m aware of is quite bewildered because there is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates. And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know,  go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel. So as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don’t have much company there. Because it is difficult when you’re running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is—I don’t want to overpromise. I don’t want to tell people things that I know we cannot do.
+
+Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future. I met with a group of young black millennials today and you know one of the young women said, “You know, none of us feel that we have the job that we should have gotten out of college. And we don’t believe the job market is going to give us much of a chance.” So that is a mindset that is really affecting their politics. And so if you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing. So I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism. We want people to be idealistic. We want them to set big goals. But to take what we can achieve now and try to present them as bigger goals.
+
+All right. Let’s parse them. In the first quote, the first sentence is just an opener, and the second critiques the Trump movement. The third sentence critiques the Sanders people, but there’s nothing condescending in it. Maybe that “whatever that means” after the mention of Scandinavia is a little dismissive. But really. Now we’re at the point where we’re not permitting people speaking in private the occasional verbal tic of the sort we all employ?
+
+Then comes center-left and center-right. It’s the mention of “center-right” that the Intercept meant to rub in her face, and in a perfect world I’d rather she’d not said it. But it’s quite obvious that she is contrasting herself with the movements to her left and to her right—the very two movements she had just described. So she was really just saying, I’m in between those two. And who knows—there were probably Republicans in the room. It was McLean. She may have been trying to reassure them and get them to tell their friends, “You know, we can live with her.” No, that’s not pandering. It’s politics. If she weren’t chasing responsible Republican votes, she’d be an idiot.
+
+Now, the second and “offending” graf. How in the world these words can offend anyone is just absurd. OK, baristas. But I’m sure even most baristas have higher aspirations in life. But the main thing is that when she says “they are living in their parents’ basement,” she’s obviously not making fun of them. She’s just describing them. Indeed, she is explaining to these rich people in one of America’s richest towns, hey, take a minute to understand where these folks are coming from. And she’s doing so the week after Sanders throttled her in New Hampshire—a point in time when, if anything, she’d have been prone to lash out at them.
+
+There’s nothing patronizing about any of this. I also saw a bunch of people on Twitter saying in effect for the life of me, I don’t see what the big deal is here. I retweeted a guy who said the #basementdwellers “controversy” is proof enough of the reason why she didn’t release her speech transcripts. Amen to that.",REAL
+7664,Packer to lose more money as Carey wants back-out fee,"Saturday, 12 November 2016 Pundits are surprised Packer and Carey Split - after all they had such a good body image match 
+Packers luck is going from bad to worse, just after his dodgy Whale Hunting got all his Chinese staff arrested now Carey has dumped him and is demanding $50M for a Back-out relocation fee. 
+Huge controversy surrounds who is the dumper and who is the dumpee and Emperor OctoTrumpus has vowed to put the full weight of his administration into big issues like this. 
+""I have the greatest respect for women of any man in the world"", he was quoted as saying and ""would put several of his personal security agencies like the NSA, CIA and FBI onto the case with the highest urgency"". 
+Womens movements are stunned claiming his presidential election campaign was the most denigrating display against women recorded in the annals of US public governance, though they did award Bill Clinton a special mention. 
+Apparently the pre-nup agreement ran into 346 pages with some weird clauses like not showing her breasts unless he authorised the outing. 
+Her claim of $50M as a relocation fee will be hotly contested through the courts his lawyer said Make Jung in the Jungle's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
+5461,Assange: Clinton Campaign Tried To Hack WikiLeaks,"  Edmondo Burr in News , World // 0 Comments Julian Assange claims that Hillary Clinton’s campaign used hackers to attack WikiLeaks’ servers. 
+WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief says that despite the Ecuadorian embassy shutting down its internet to stop accusations of interference in U.S. elections, his organisation will keep on publishing until the elections are over. 
+RT.com reports: 
+“ Everyday that you publish is a day that you have the initiative in the conflict, ” Assange said via telephone at a conference in Argentina on Wednesday. 
+The whistleblowing website has been releasing emails from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, on a daily basis since early October. 
+Assange claimed the release “ whipped up a crazed hornet’s nest atmosphere in the Hillary Clinton campaign ” leading them to attack WikiLeaks. 
+“ They attacked our servers and attempted hacking attacks and there is an amazing ongoing campaign where state documents were put in the UN and British courts to accuse me of being both a Russian spy and a pedophile, ” he added. 
+Ecuador’s decision to shut down his internet was described by Assange as a “ strategic position ” so that its “ policy of non-intervention can’t be misinterpreted by actors in the US and even domestically in Ecuador. ” 
+He said he was sympathetic with Ecuador, insisting they face the dilemma of having the US interfere with their elections next year if they appear to interfere with the US elections next month. MORE: #WikiLeaks has activated contingency plans after #Assange ‘s internet link was intentionally cut off https://t.co/octsMseme1 
+— RT (@RT_com) 17 October 2016 
+Assange, who claimed the embassy will be without internet until the election is over to avoid accusations of interference, said he did not agree with Ecuador’s decision but did understand it. WikiLeaks will not be affected by the decision as they do not publish from Ecuador, he said. 
+He did, however, reject the idea that WikiLeaks is interfering with the US election, claiming, “ this is not the interference of electoral process, this is the definition of electoral process – for media organizations and, in fact, everyone to publish the truth and their opinion about what is occurring. It cannot be a free and informed election unless people are free to inform. ” 
+He also attacked US TV networks, many of whom he accused of being “ controlled by Clinton supporters. “ We were fastest on #Podestaemails6 , faster than @wikileaks , and the US conspiracy machine can’t handle it https://t.co/njAae50qDd 
+— RT (@RT_com) 13 October 2016 
+The Podesta emails will make no difference to the election result, according to Assange. “ I don’t think there’s any chance of Donald Trump winning the election, even with the amazing material we are publishing, because most of the media organizations are strongly aligned with Hillary Clinton, ” he said. 
+Assange said journalists and people who work in the media are predominantly middle class and view Trump as representing “ what in their mind is white trash. ”",FAKE
+2267,"Paul: Laws on sexuality could be more ‘neutral,’ but all should be protected","Sen. Rand Paul said Saturday that he thinks the issue of sexuality is one that should be left behind closed doors.
+
+“And I think if we did a little more of that then maybe the law doesn’t have to engage in stuff that’s really personal, and the law could be more neutral, but I think the law ought to be fair to people and ought to provide equal protection for everybody,” he said.
+
+Paul was asked about Bruce Jenner coming out as a woman named Caitlyn. Social conservatives in the Republican Party have felt isolated by the nation’s acceptance of Jenner, a change they see as immoral. Paul said he hasn't given Jenner's transition much thought but said that sexuality should remain private.
+
+[Read: Caitlyn Jenner comes out, and social conservatives take an apocalyptic view]
+
+“We’ve exposed so much of our lives that were at one time private, and if it were private, than maybe the law wouldn’t have to take a position on it, you know what I mean?” Paul said in an interview here.
+
+Paul said that if he goes to a cocktail party, “most of us don’t talk about our personal sexuality, our sex lives, why does it have to be part of public discourse?”",REAL
+793,What to watch in Tuesday's primaries,"(CNN) Hillary Clinton might be on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination but she enters territory that could be considered more favorable to Bernie Sanders on Tuesday with the West Virginia primary.
+
+And for the first time on the Republican side, there's only one candidate in the race -- but that doesn't mean there's consensus. Republicans in West Virginia and Nebraska will offer the first glimpse at whether the GOP can rally behind Donald Trump in a general election.
+
+For Democrats, only West Virginia offers binding results. In Nebraska, Democrats caucused in early March, favoring Sanders by nearly 15 points . Though Democrats will still be voting in a primary on Tuesday, the results for the presidential race will have no binding effect on delegate allocation.
+
+Here's what to watch in Tuesday's contests:
+
+Though Clinton won West Virginia over Barack Obama in 2008, she has been in far more hostile territory this time around after comments she made about putting coal miners ""out of business.""
+
+But her critics on the left and right have seized on the remarks, with Sanders campaigning in West Virginia on taking care of coal workers and Donald Trump bringing up her remarks in rallies in the state.
+
+The electorate in the last presidential Democratic primary was overwhelmingly white and working class. The state also has a primary that allows unaffiliated voters to cast ballots in either contest, meaning Sanders can turn out independents. Both of those factors have tended to favor him in past contests.
+
+Though Nebraska's results are non-binding, if the electorate resembles the pro-Sanders crowd in March, he'll have another result to tout on what could be a rough night for Clinton.
+
+The proportional allocation rules in the Democratic primary won't help Sanders catch Clinton -- but he could spend the next month delivering some embarrassing losses to Clinton in states favorable to his campaign.
+
+Trump may be the only GOP candidate with an active campaign, but he won't be the only candidate on the ballot in either state on Tuesday. Both West Virginia and Nebraska will have candidates who have dropped out of the race on the ballot, giving voters a chance to cast protest ballots against Trump should they choose.
+
+Candidates with suspended campaigns have picked up a handful of votes in states after they left the race, but never in large margins. Tuesday will test whether the discomfort with Trump as the GOP nominee can drive voters to the polls to vote against the mogul.
+
+In West Virginia, in addition to casting ballots for Trump, voters will also select individual delegates to go to the convention. Delegate hopefuls will be marked with their chosen candidate or as uncommitted when voters make up their minds. To be sure, the Trump campaign in West Virginia sent supporters on Monday a guide to which delegates to select.
+
+Trump has been viewed unfavorably by upwards of two-thirds of women in general election polling, but has done marginally better with women in the Republican electorate. He won 47% of women in the Indiana primary last week, according to exit polls. But he won 59% of men. His chances in November will improve should he be able to close that gender gap.
+
+Democrats have been hammering Trump with some of his comments about women, trying to continue to keep those unfavorables high among the key voting demographic.
+
+Without alternative Republicans in the race, Trump's returns among women could be telling.
+
+Republicans hope that Trump could put Rust Belt states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan in play for the party.
+
+Democrats, on the other hand, hope that rising demographic trends in states like Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia coupled with Trump's inflammatory statements about minorities could give Democrats an edge in states they have traditionally lost.
+
+With Trump and Clinton holding tight grips on their party's nominations, Tuesday will begin to show signs of what the general electorate could look like, and what issues are motivating them to the polls.",REAL
+2923,GOP senators demand answers over disclosure of mission to oust ISIS from Mosul,"Top Republican senators Friday demanded answers after a military official revealed “detailed operational information” about a looming Iraqi mission to retake Mosul from the Islamic State, saying the disclosure has put the mission at risk.
+
+“Never in our memory can we recall an instance in which our military has knowingly briefed our own war plans to our enemies,” Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a letter to President Obama.
+
+“These disclosures not only risk the success of our mission, but could also cost the lives of U.S., Iraqi, and coalition forces.”
+
+The senators asked who was responsible for the briefing, conducted Thursday by a military official, and whether they had White House approval. “Those responsible have jeopardized our national security interests and must be held accountable,” they wrote.
+
+The letter follows criticism in other corners that the military may have revealed too much detail in previewing the operation.
+
+On Thursday, the U.S. military official outlined plans to retake Mosul and said the “shaping” for the battle is currently underway. He said the Iraqi military hopes to begin operations in the “April, May timeframe” with the goal of retaking Mosul before Ramadan begins on June 17.
+
+The official then went a step further and leaked that five Iraqi Army brigades will be used in the fight, as well as several smaller brigades, composing a total force of up to 25,000 Iraqi troops. Three brigades of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters will participate as well.
+
+But the details, disclosed at the close of a White House summit on combating violent extremism, raised some concerns.
+
+""That is pretty amazing that that information's out there,"" retired Gen. Jack Keane, former Army vice chief of staff and a Fox News military analyst, said Friday.
+
+A current and former military intelligence officer also told Fox News that the decision to publicly announce the plan was counterintuitive because it ""telegraphs"" the timing and number of units involved. The officers said it would allow Islamic State, also known as ISIS, or ISIL, to prepare for the battle by laying improvised explosive devices.
+
+Both officers questioned whether political considerations on the part of the Obama administration factored into the decision to announce the offensive.
+
+The Obama administration wasn't the first to discuss plans to retake Mosul, however. Iraqi government leaders previously had talked about the looming offensive, and Defense officials are pushing back on the notion that anything tactical was revealed on Thursday.
+
+CENTCOM sources also stressed that the briefing on Thursday came from the military, not the White House.
+
+Keane suggested there should be nothing surprising about the fact that Iraqi forces are looking to retake Mosul before Ramadan.
+
+""ISIS is not stupid,"" he said, adding that their fighters already know that Mosul is the key to any counteroffensive and have likely been preparing for weeks. ""This is not something new to ISIS.""
+
+However, Keane said the details about the force size and other elements were ""surprising"" to hear.
+
+ISIS militants overtook Mosul last June, as the group marched across large sections of Iraq and Syria, sending Iraqi forces fleeing. At this point, officials estimate there are between 1,000 to 2,000 ISIS insurgents in the city of Mosul. Military leaders have been talking about retaking the city for some time, but they have said they won't launch the operation until the Iraqi troops are ready.
+
+Included in the force would be a brigade of Iraqi counterterrorism forces who have been trained by U.S. special operations forces. The brigades include roughly 2,000 troops each.
+
+The CENTCOM official said the U.S. will provide military support for the operation, including training, air support, intelligence and surveillance. The official said there has been no decision made yet on whether to send in some U.S. ground troops to help call in airstrikes.
+
+""But by the same token, if they're not ready, if the conditions are not set, if all the equipment they need is not physically there and they (aren't) trained to a degree in which they will be successful, we have not closed the door on continuing to slide that to the right,"" he said.
+
+The official also revealed for the first time that Qatar has agreed to host a training site for coalition forces to train moderate Syrian rebels who would return to Syria to fight the Islamic State forces there. Other sites are in Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.",REAL
+6419,Comment on WATCH: Human Rights Activists Are Targeting The China Dog Meat Festival by information security architect,"WATCH: Human Rights Activists Are Targeting The China Dog Meat Festival By Travis Bille on April 24, 2016 Subscribe 
+If you are easily sickened by dog cruelty, prepare yourself for this story. And if you have a dog or a cat that you love, I strongly encourage you to hold them and hug them right now as you read this. I assure you my three dogs are cuddled up with me as I write it. 
+In Yulin, China, the government has gotten very good at looking the other way as the annual Yulin Festival brutally slaughters and consumes up to 10,000 dogs and 4,000 cats. Of course, the local government does not endorse the killing of dogs for meat. In fact, they’ve specifically said that they would ban the practice after the international outrage and online petitions sparked unwanted interest in the locals. 
+But though it is no longer an officially-sanctioned festival, the yearly summer solstice celebration continues, the trading continues, the dog cruelty continues, and the outrage and protests grow larger every year. 
+Those taking part in the festival insist that the animals come from mass breeding facilities, where they are specifically raised in humane conditions for this purpose. But a disturbing report from a Hong Kong-based group called Animals Asia says they found no evidence of any dog mass breeding facilities that could produce the animals at this level. 
+The implication of this is what protesters have been saying for years: the dogs are either picked up as strays or, far too often, are family dogs stolen from their homes by city dog traders. Adam Parascandola of Humane Society International (HSI) confirms that many dogs rescued by protesters and brought to them are most definitely family pets: “We’ve seen all manner of dog breeds coming in to the rescue shelters, some of them obviously someone’s pet because they still have their collars on with their names.” 
+Another excuse lobbed by festival-goers is that it’s no different than other people who eat beef, pork, chicken, turkey, etc. However, one of the most prominent grievances against the festival has little to do with consuming the animals and everything to do with how they are slaughtered. 
+In the U.S., the farming industry has been under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act since 1958. That specific act had little oversight from the start, until Temple Grandin came in and revolutionized the industry . While the process is still not perfect, and perhaps the process of humane death can never be perfect, it nonetheless requires regularly-audited measures to ensure the least amount of suffering possible. 
+The Yulin Festival, however, has no such standards. Dog cruelty on display shows dogs and cats regularly shoved a dozen at a time into small cages where they await their fate. That fate is to be traded or sold, followed by a torturous death reported to include being beaten, skinned alive, electrocuted, boiled, burned, and finally eaten. 
+Under the guise of tradition, dog traders justify it as no different than eating turkey at Christmas. However, the summer solstice “tradition” in Yulin only really goes back to the 1990s , and the actual festival wasn’t officially started by city dog meat traders until 2009 . Most of China no longer uses dogs for meat, and younger generations are now standing with protesters to end the practice and drop the “old ways.” 
+As Yulin prepares for another year, the backlash prepares as well. There are many petitions on Change.org that have been going for years, some of which have millions of signatures, and many which are still active or new. Efforts are underway from WildlifePlanet.net to raise awareness, employing #Yulin2016 to bring together those opposed to the practices. 
+The video below is from ACTAsia for Animals , and at times is extremely graphic. 
+Featured image via Youtube screengrab About Travis Bille 
+Husband, son, dog dad, pit bull advocate, trombone player, religious studies scholar, grammar guru, amateur astrophysicist, Christian, cable TV-denier, Oxford comma apologist, Mountain Dew depository, football fan, baseball fan, climate change advocate, grill master, campaigner, writer, beer connoisseur, video game player, door knocker, book lover, music snob, hard worker, jazzer, gardener, lover, friend. Follow my dogs at MillicentBloggings.com and my other political writings at GreaterFoolSociety.com. Connect",FAKE
+10409,Why Has Putin Pointed Russia's SATAN Nukes at the US? | Silver Doctors,"October 28, 2016 at 9:00 PM 
+Why would Putin aim Russian nuclear weapons at Washington D.C, maybe because of BO and Hillary strategic US foreign policy ? The White House has a bullseye on it thanks to enept foreign policy by the two above mentioned criminals. 
+BO the community agitator is way over matched in this conflict. Putin will not let the declining Russian people die in a retaliatory nuclear strike with the US. If Putin’s 
+Russia feels threaten they will strike first on America. In a game of chicken BO will flinch because he is of weak character, he will be in ball and chains come 2017. 
+Stacking and packing",FAKE
+5825,ELECTION DAY QUESTION: Do You Want To Glow In The Dark?,"by Karl Denninger 
+One final set of thoughts before you go out to vote today. 
+There’s one major issue that got very little play during the campaign, as the media was hell-bent on focusing on Trump and bad words. 
+If we all burn, that is on them — and you. But I assure you the press will fry up just like you will at 5,000 degrees. 
+That issue is Syria. 
+Hillary Clinton has committed herself to imposing a “no fly” zone over Syria. As I have pointed out on multiple occasions in this column there are two problems with that commitment. 
+First, the Russians are in there at Syria’s invitation. They’re protecting Syria’s government at its request, exactly as we protected Kuwait at its request . They are therefore acting with the permission of the sovereign government of Syria, and we will not be. We will effectively be invading Syria. 
+Second, Russia has missile systems deployed in Syria that we cannot reliably kill, and our aircraft and other flying equipment cannot reliably survive being fired upon by them either. While we can certainly find some of their batteries through intelligence and similar, and blow them up, doing so would be a clear act of war. If we do not do so then anything Russia does not want flying in the skies over Syria will not be flying. It will instead be in many pieces and any airmen inside said aircraft will be dead. 
+Will Russia allow us to dictate that there will be a no-fly zone and allow us to enforce it? 
+I doubt it. 
+If we attempt to implement one anyway then conflict is inevitable. This is a conflict that has not happened thus far in the nuclear age between superpowers. Oh sure, there’s been a plane forced down here and one shot down there, along with plenty of harassment, along with various proxy wars where this party or that was supplying arms to one side or the other (e.g. Afghanistan) but an actual face-off and exchange between US and Russian forces has never occurred. 
+Once it happens, if it does, then someone will of course believe they “won” and someone will believe they “lost.” The question will then be whether the side who believes it “lost” will admit to that and withdraw. 
+If that side does not do so then we are facing nuclear war – a war that inherently involves the destruction of both nation’s infrastructure and large percentages of their respective populations. 
+Hillary Clinton has said she intends to walk this path. We do not know whether Trump will; he hasn’t committed himself one way or the other. But his statements thus far tend to lead me, and many others, to believe he won’t try to interfere in Syria’s (or anyone else’s) sovereign affairs. In fact he’s made clear that he believes that we have had far too many foreign entanglements and they have not served us well. 
+There’s no guarantee that a President Trump would not find some reason to intervene, of course, and thus no guarantee that we don’t ultimately wind up in the same place. Let’s face it — Syria is a mess, and one that Hillary Clinton had a large hand in creating. 
+But the choice here is between someone who might get pressed into a situation that leads to armed conflict, possibly nuclear conflict, and someone who has a vested interest in continuing what she started, who has declared her intent to take an action that by definition will violate Syria’s sovereignty and, with near-certainty will lead to an exchange of weapons between the Syrian protectors, which are Russian, and the United States. 
+That road has a high probability of being one way and at the end are events you will not like. 
+Don’t vote to die — and kill your children. 
+If you vote for Hillary you are in fact voting for nuclear war.",FAKE
+5014,"Trump's economic team has a lot of billionaires, very few economic experts","Donald Trump announced his economic advisers on Friday, and the list is about what you’d expect from the real estate tycoon.
+
+Trump has vowed to bring a more business-like approach to government; his list is dominated by businessmen — including several billionaires. Trump has railed against political correctness; his economic advisers are entirely white men. Trump has disparaged conventional policy experts; the list includes only one academic economist:
+
+But while nothing about the list is that surprising, it does provide some valuable insight into how a Donald Trump administration would actually govern. Trump is famously uninterested in policy details, which means that his advisers would have even more influence than usual in a Trump administration.
+
+The business people on Trump’s list include several distinguished names. Hedge fund manager John Paulson became famous in 2007 when he made billions betting against the housing market. Steve Roth built a billion-dollar real estate empire in New York
+
+Andy Beal made billions in real estate while also becoming an accomplished poker player and number theorist. He developed the Beal conjecture, a mathematical proposition related to Fermat’s Last Theorem, and then funded a $1 million prize for anyone who could solve it. And like Paulson, he saw the 2008 crash coming. He stopped buying during the last years of the real estate boom from 2004 to 2007, leaving him with plenty of cash on hand to snap up bargains in the post-crash environment of 2009.
+
+Private equity investor Stephen Feinberg is worth more than $1 billion, but he doesn’t share Donald Trump’s taste for ostentatious displays of wealth. ""In general, I think that all of us are way overpaid in this business,"" he said in 2011. ""It is almost embarrassing.""
+
+The list includes a couple of prominent real estate tycoons and several people who made their fortunes in finance. Also on the list: oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm and Howard Lorber, who has major holdings in cigarettes as well as real estate.
+
+In short, Trump has assembled an independent-minded and opinionated collection of rich businessmen. They could provide a valuable conduit for dissenting points of view in the insular Trump campaign.
+
+It’s customary for presidential candidates — especially Republican presidential candidates — to include some business leaders among their economic advisers. But most candidates also include people with significant academic expertise and government experience as well.
+
+John McCain’s list of economic advisers, for example, included six economics professors and three more people who were chief economists for private companies. McCain’s list also had about a dozen people with government experience, including several veterans of the George W. Bush administration. Mitt Romney also drew heavily on credentialed economists with senior government experience.
+
+In contrast, Trump’s list is thin on both economics PhDs and government experience. There’s only one academic economist, Peter Navarro of the University of California at Irvine. David Malpass served in several mid-level government positions during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Tom Barrack was deputy undersecretary for the Department of the Interior during the Reagan administration. The list also includes activist and former Wall Street Journal economics writer Stephen Moore.
+
+And that’s about it when it comes to economics training and government experience. This might be because Trump believes he’ll get along fine without the help of government veterans and credentialed academics. It also might be because the most experienced economic policy hands in the Republican party have largely shunned Trump.
+
+Greg Mankiw, for example, is a Harvard economist who served in the George W. Bush administration. In a recent blog post, he wrote that Trump won’t get his vote because he finds Trump’s protectionist views ""disqualifying."" John McCain’s top 2008 economic adviser — and former head of the Congressional Budget Office — Douglas Holtz-Eakin savaged Trump's economic ideas. Glenn Hubbard, Mitt Romney’s top economic adviser and former adviser to George W. Bush, hasn’t been too kind to Trump either.
+
+The result: a man who needs seasoned policy advice more than any other recent major-party nominee is going to struggle to get it.
+
+And that’s a problem, because while business people have a lot of valuable insights about the economy, there are some aspects of economic policy where formal training is indispensable. A successful career in business doesn’t give anyone insights about monetary policy or allow them to navigate the intricacies of the federal budget process. For some aspects of federal policy, there’s no substitute for careful study combined with practical experience.
+
+The economic advisers Trump has managed to recruit suggest that his policies wouldn’t be radically different from previous Republican administrations.
+
+The one obvious exception here is trade. By naming former steel executive Dan DiMicco as an economic adviser, Trump is underscoring his commitment to protectionist trade policies. DiMicco wrote a 2015 book calling for manufacturing jobs to be brought back to the United States. Like Trump, DiMicco blames recent trade deals and foreign countries that don’t ""play by the rules"" for declining employment in the manufacturing sector. That runs counter to the decades-long tradition of Republicans supporting free trade deals.
+
+But Trump’s other choices suggest more continuity with past Republican policies. Stephen Moore now works for the Heritage Foundation, which has played a key role in Republican policymaking since the Reagan administration. He’s a devoted supply-sider, and we can expect him to push Trump to follow through on his promises for big tax cuts.
+
+Republicans have traditionally been closer to the petroleum industry and more skeptical of environmental regulation than Democrats. Naming oil and gas entrepreneur Harold Hamm represents a continuation of that posture. Hamm has blasted the Obama administration for being too tough on energy producers.
+
+""While we've been doing this the last seven or eight years — doubling US production — we've had an onslaught, a tsunami if you will, of punitive regulations designed to put us out of business,"" Hamm said on CNBC earlier this year.
+
+And while Trump has sought to paint Clinton as a tool of Wall Street, his own economic advisers have extensive Wall Street connections. One of them, Steven Mnuchin, is even a veteran of Goldman Sachs, a frequent target of Donald Trump’s ire. That does not, of course, prove that Trump wouldn’t be tougher on banks and hedge funds than Hillary Clinton would be. But it does suggest that voters should take Trump’s populist rhetoric about Wall Street with a grain of salt.",REAL
+1778,Family issues weigh heaviest on Biden as he considers a 2016 campaign,"As Vice President Biden weighs a possible run for president, personal issues stand as the biggest unresolved obstacle, with Biden trying to gauge whether his family is emotionally prepared for a grueling campaign while still grieving the recent death of his son Beau, according to people familiar with his deliberations.
+
+Biden is now leaning more toward running than he was earlier in the summer, though he is still weeks from a decision. He thinks his White House experience over the past 6  years, coupled with his grounding in middle-class issues during a long career in the Senate, makes him well equipped to serve as President Obama’s successor.
+
+But following the loss of Beau Biden in May, the elder Biden is concerned about whether his relatives could handle a bid for the presidency and its time demands on the family patriarch. Advisers know that only the vice president can make the judgment about the readiness of his family.
+
+Biden’s advisers said he is on a timetable to decide about running by the end of the summer. That gives him roughly another month, although a decision could come sooner. Should he run, he would enter as an underdog against former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has amassed a huge campaign war chest and is months ahead of the vice president in organizing in the states with the earliest contests.
+
+Biden would be starting almost from scratch, but the mechanics of financing and staffing a campaign appear less daunting to those around him than they once did. At the same time, the vice president would not have unlimited time to begin assembling an operation.
+
+Clinton has been hurt by declining personal ratings as the FBI looks into the security of a private e-mail server she used as secretary of state. This has helped fuel outside interest in a possible Biden candidacy. For Biden, one important aspect of his deliberations is assessing just how weakened Clinton is, though it’s doubtful that will be clear before he must make his own decision.
+
+[A test of head and heart for the vice president]
+
+One factor that is shaping the conversations about a possible Biden campaign is that so much of the conventional wisdom about 2016 already has been upended, whether by the support for the candidacy of businessman Donald Trump or by the challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to what many said was the invincibility of the Clinton machine. The unpredictable political climate is both a spur and a warning as Biden tries to decide.
+
+As speculation about a possible Biden candidacy intensified, the vice president met with Obama for one of their regular weekly lunches Monday, the first time they have been in face-to-face contact since the president left for his vacation two weeks ago. The session offered Biden an opportunity to update Obama on his thinking about a possible third presidential campaign, and there was no indication that the president did anything to discourage Biden from continuing to deliberate.
+
+White House press secretary Josh Earnest issued strong praise for Biden on the president’s behalf, saying again that Obama believes his selection of Biden was “the smartest decision that he had ever made in politics.”
+
+Obama has remained neutral in the contest for the Democratic nomination, though he has consistently praised Clinton for her work as secretary of state and as a prospective president. Earnest declined to be drawn into a discussion of the president’s leanings in a hypothetical Biden-Clinton contest. He would not rule out an eventual presidential endorsement of one of the candidates.
+
+The press secretary’s comments about Biden were not significantly different from what the president has said in the past. But in the current context, Obama’s language, and that of his spokesman, are being closely watched by those partial to Biden or Clinton.
+
+CNN reported that Biden and his team met Monday night with former Obama White House advisers Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer at his residence.
+
+Talk about Biden’s intentions ramped up over the weekend after it was disclosed that he met Saturday with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), a favorite of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
+
+Biden, who asked for the meeting, wanted to talk to Warren about middle-class and working-class issues, which have become her trademark in the Senate. Biden and Warren are not close personally, but one link between them is Ted Kaufman, one of Biden’s closest advisers, who replaced him in the Senate when Biden became vice president. As a member of the Senate Banking Committee, Kaufman helped draft what became the Dodd-Frank law revamping financial regulations, while Warren served on the congressionally chartered panel overseeing the implementation of the 2008 Wall Street bailout; Kaufman replaced Warren on that panel when his Senate term ended in late 2010.
+
+Advisers to Warren played down the significance of the meeting, noting that she did a similar session with Clinton months ago.
+
+Many progressives had hoped that Warren would run for the Democratic nomination, but she has demurred. In her absence, Sanders has appropriated much of the energy on the party’s left, which has boosted his support in the polls. What would happen to that support, should Biden run, is unknowable, according to the assessment of those familiar with Biden’s deliberations.
+
+The vice president and a small group of advisers have been surveying the political landscape over the past weeks, trying to assess the organizational and financial hurdles he would face in mounting a late-entry campaign against Clinton, and discussing the rationale for a possible candidacy.
+
+The team has done some outreach, but much of the communication has been in the opposite direction, as fundraisers and others have offered encouragement and a willingness to help with a possible Biden campaign.
+
+Though Clinton has a huge head start, there is confidence that plenty of talent is still available for a Biden campaign team. Among the issues up for discussion is how difficult it would be to put together an operation that could compete effectively against Clinton in the Iowa caucuses, where organization is considered one key to success.
+
+Biden’s advisers seem less worried about New Hampshire, because that state holds a primary rather than caucuses. The vice president also is optimistic about his prospects in the South Carolina primary, the third contest on the 2016 calendar.
+
+Clinton’s financial advantage is not underestimated, but a late-starting campaign requires less money than an early-starting one. Clinton raised $47 million during the first three months of her candidacy but also burned through $18 million in that time.
+
+Biden does not have a large network of fundraisers but might be able to draw on a new generation of financial backers. By one estimate, he would need about $30 million for his campaign to get him through the first four contests, but only if he had a substantial super PAC behind him that could raise and spend three times that amount.
+
+The Clinton factor represents one of the trickiest calculations in Biden’s decision-making. Those urging him to run are hardly indifferent to what has happened to her in the past several weeks, and that has clearly helped create more interest in a possible Biden campaign.
+
+But Clinton’s weaknesses are not a rationale for the vice president to run. He would need an agenda of his own, presumably a bold and, loyalists would hope, forward-leaning progressive vision grounded in middle-class economics and his experience in dealing with international issues.
+
+What complicates all this is that neither Biden’s family considerations nor Clinton’s political health will be fully clear by the time the clock runs out and he must declare his intentions.
+
+Paul Kane and Karen Tumulty contributed to this report.",REAL
+5605,Constitutional Law Expert: Comey Did NOT Violate Law By Announcing Email Investigation,"Constitutional Law Expert: Comey Did NOT Violate Law By Announcing Email Investigation   Source: Washington's Blog 
+
+Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid alleges that FBI Director Comey has violated the law by announcing the re-opened investigation into Clinton emails so close to the presidential election. 
+Is he right? 
+One of the top constitutional law experts in the United States (and a liberal), Professor Jonathan Turley, says no : 
+[Reid’s] allegation is in my view wildly misplaced. Reid is arguing that the actions of FBI Director James B. Comey violates the Hatch Act . I cannot see a plausible, let alone compelling, basis for such a charge against Comey. 
+In his letter to Comey, Reid raised the the Hatch Act, which prohibits partisan politicking by government employees. 
+5 U.S.C. § 7323(a)(1) prohibits a government employee from “us[ing] his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” 
+Reid argued: 
+“Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be a clear intent to aid one political party over another. I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act, which bars FBI officials from using their official authority to influence an election. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law.” 
+The reference to “months” is curious. Comey has kept Congress informed in compliance with oversight functions of the congressional committees but has been circumspect in the extent of such disclosures. It is troubling to see Democrats (who historically favor both transparency and checks on executive powers) argue against such disclosure and cooperation with oversight committees. More importantly, the Hatch Act is simply a dog that will not hunt. 
+Richard W. Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House from 2005 to 2007, has filed a Hatch Act complaint against Comey with the federal Office of Special Counsel and Office of Government Ethics. He argues that “We cannot allow F.B.I. or Justice Department officials to unnecessarily publicize pending investigations concerning candidates of either party while an election is underway.” 
+However, Comey was between the horns of a dilemma. He could be accused of acts of commission in making the disclosure or omission in withholding the disclosure in an election year. Quite frankly, I found Painter’s justification for his filing remarkably speculative. He admits that he has no evidence to suggest that Comey wants to influence the election or favors either candidate . Intent is key under the Hatch investigations. You can disagree with the timing of Comey’s disclosure, but that is not a matter for the Hatch Act or even an ethical charge in my view. 
+Congress passed the Hatch Act in response to scandals during the 1938 congressional elections and intended the Act to bar federal employees from using “[their] official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” Comey is not doing that in communicating with Congress on a matter of oversight. 
+Such violations under the Hatch Act, even if proven, are not criminal matters . The Office of Special Counsel -can investigate such matters and seek discipline — a matter than can ultimately go before the Merit Systems Protection Board. 
+CNN confirms : 
+violators aren’t going to jail: the Hatch Act is not a criminal statute. Instead, it is an administrative constraint on government employees. The law is enforced by a special independent federal agency — the Office of Special Counsel — which is charged with investigating complaint allegations and, where found to be meritorious, either pursuing a settlement with the offending employee or prosecuting their case before the federal agency that oversees internal employment disputes — the Merit Systems Protection Board. And for presidential appointees like Comey, the Office of Special Counsel submits a report of its findings along with the employee’s response to the President , who makes a decision on whether discipline is warranted . 
+*** 
+The Hatch Act provision most commonly invoked in discussions of Comey’s letter is 5 U.S.C. § 7323(a)(1), which prohibits a government employee from “us[ing] his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” 
+The key text is the emphasized phrase — which conditions a violation of the statute on whether the employee’s purpose was to interfere with or affect the result of an election. Thus, the Hatch Act does not focus on the effect of the employee’s conduct, but the intent. To that end, if Comey did not intend to interfere with or affect the upcoming election through his letter to Congress, then he did not violate the letter of the Hatch Act.",FAKE
+4269,Democratic candidates exhibit a new ferocity in last debate before N.H. vote,"Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, meeting Thursday night for their last debate before the New Hampshire primary, squared off fiercely on the question of whether the party should strive toward its liberal aspirations or set its sights on the achievable.
+
+The dynamic between the two contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination was far more intense — and far more personal — than it has been in their previous face-offs. That reflected how close their race has become in the wake of a virtual tie in Monday’s Iowa caucuses. The debate was sponsored by MSNBC and the New Hampshire Union Leader.
+
+[The Take: Clinton-Sanders battle boils over ]
+
+Clinton used her opening statement to needle the senator from Vermont, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, over what she has contended are unrealistically liberal plans for universal health care, free college and other programs.
+
+“I’m fighting for people who cannot wait for those changes, and I’m not making promises that I cannot keep,” the former secretary of state said.
+
+Sanders replied that a number of European countries had approved single-payer health-care systems. “I do not accept the belief that the United States of America cannot do that,” he said.
+
+As they had at a town hall forum the night before, the two remaining Democratic presidential contenders also squabbled over the modern definition of the word “progressive,” which has become the preferred term for the Democratic left.
+
+“A progressive is someone who makes progress,” Clinton said.
+
+[The Fix: Winners and losers from the fifth Democratic debate]
+
+Sanders, who enjoys enormous enthusiasm among the party’s liberal base, continued to make the argument that Clinton is too heavily dependent on those who have financed her campaign and made her personally wealthy. He said that he does “not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. I am very proud to be the only candidate up here that does not have a super PAC.”
+
+Clinton accused Sanders of engaging in a “very artful smear” of her character. She insisted she had never changed her position on any issue based on having received contributions from special interests.
+
+“Senator Sanders has said he wants to run a positive campaign. I’ve tried to keep my disagreements over issues, as it should be. But time and time again, by innuendo, by insinuation, there is this attack that he is putting forth,” Clinton said.
+
+Defending the paid speeches she gave in the period between leaving the State Department and announcing her presidential campaign, Clinton said she may not have done a good job of explaining what she was doing.
+
+“They wanted me to talk about the world” and how she saw threats and challenges, Clinton said of the groups that paid her fees of $200,000 and more.
+
+Asked whether she would release transcripts of closed-door, paid speeches, Clinton replied, “I will look into it.”
+
+The two contenders, voices raised, argued over whose plan and ideas would more effectively police Wall Street and the larger financial system.
+
+“Break them up!” Sanders thundered, referring to the nation’s biggest banks.
+
+Clinton said leading economists have judged her regulation proposals to be tougher.
+
+But Sanders kept bringing the argument back to her ties to Wall Street. Through the end of December, the financial industry had given at least $21.4 million to support Clinton’s 2016 presidential run — more than 10 percent of the $157.8 million amassed to back her bid, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings by The Washington Post.
+
+Clinton also was asked whether she could guarantee that repercussions from her use of a private email system at the State Department would not “blow up” her campaign. She said she is “100 percent confident” that an FBI security review will come to naught.
+
+“I have absolutely no concerns about it,” she said.
+
+The Clinton team is expecting a loss in New Hampshire, the state that resurrected her 2008 campaign after a devastating third-place finish in Iowa. This time, she battled to the narrowest of wins in the Iowa caucuses.
+
+On Thursday, two new New Hampshire polls indicated that she has much ground to make up against Sanders before Tuesday’s primary.
+
+An NBC News-Wall Street Journal-Marist College survey had Clinton running 20 points behind Sanders in New Hampshire, 58 percent to 38 percent. A tracking poll by CNN-WMUR — the kind of daily gauge whose results are more volatile — showed an even wider margin, with Sanders beating Clinton by better than two to one, 61 percent to 30 percent.
+
+So it was no surprise that Clinton’s campaign was aggressively playing down expectations.
+
+At a breakfast Wednesday morning sponsored by Bloomberg Politics, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters: “We face some pretty significant head winds here in New Hampshire. Senator Sanders has been leading here for some time, since the summer. It’s hard to underestimate the neighboring-state advantage in this race.”
+
+However resigned Clinton’s team may be to a loss here Tuesday, it thinks the electoral terrain will turn in her favor afterward, as the campaign moves to states with more diverse populations. The Sanders operation, however, has warned that they have been organizing in other states, including South Carolina and Nevada, and should not be underestimated.
+
+Sanders is also proving to be a fundraising powerhouse, reaping millions from small donors over the Internet, which means he has the capacity to continue his campaign for a long time.
+
+On Thursday, Clinton played up what she sees as her greater electablity in a general-election contest in November.
+
+“I’ve been vetted. There’s hardly anything you don’t know about me,” an asset in the “withering” scrutiny of the general election, Clinton said.
+
+Sanders brushed aside a question about his electability. He cited polls that suggest he would run stronger than Clinton against GOP front-runner Donald Trump in a number of battleground states.
+
+He also cited the enthusiasm that he is generating: “Democrats win when there is a large voter turnout, when people are excited, when working-class people, middle-class people, young people are engaged in the political process.”
+
+“I am the strongest candidate to take it to the Republicans and win in November,” Clinton said.
+
+Nonetheless, the rivals ended the debate on a note of solidarity. Clinton said that Sanders would be the first person she would consult if she won the nomination. Sanders added: “On our worst days, I think it’s fair to say, we are 100 times better than any Republican candidate for president.”
+
+Shortly before the debate, the Clinton campaign released un­official fundraising figures for January showing she brought in $15 million, which is $5 million less than Sanders received in the same period. Clinton’s team has been warning supporters of a Sanders donation surge and noting that he is already outspending her in television advertising in the early-voting states.
+
+The Clinton campaign also confirmed that she will break from campaigning in New Hampshire on Sunday to visit Flint, Mich., where a cost-saving decision led to dangerous levels of lead in the city water. The crisis in the economically depressed, heavily African American city has become a cause celebre among liberals, and Clinton has been in the forefront of criticism of the state’s Republican leadership for falling down on the job. She claims some credit for pressuring the governor to accept federal help.
+
+Her allies have used the Flint crisis as a point of comparison with Sanders, saying that his call for the governor to resign did nothing to help the city’s residents.
+
+The Flint issue and Clinton’s hastily scheduled trip also serve to divert attention from her falling fortunes in New Hampshire.
+
+Although she will campaign in New Hampshire for part of the day, her departure will be read as an attempt to change the subject from her tenuous position here.",REAL
+9213,Can Trump Save America Like Putin Saved Russia? — The Saker,"Dear Friends, in the article below The Saker explains how Vladimir Putin wrest the sovereignty of Russia away from the Anglo-Zionist Empire. He hopes that Donald Trump can rescue America. His article is republished with his permission. 
+Can Trump Save America Like Putin Saved Russia? 
+The Saker 
+October 22, 2016 
+A crisis faces America: 
+Option one: Hillary wins. That’s Obama on steroids, only worse. Remember that Obama himself was Dubya, only worse. Of course, Dubya was just Clinton, only worse. Now the circle is closed. Back to Clinton. Except this time around, we have a woman who is deeply insecure, who failed at every single thing that she every tried to do, and who now has a 3 decades long record of disasters and failures. Even when she had no authority to start a war, she started one (told Bill to bomb the Serbs). Now she might have that authority. And she had to stand there, in front of millions of people, and hear Trump tell her “Putin outsmarted you at every step of the way.” Did you see her frozen face when he said that? Trump is right, Putin did outsmart her and Obama at every step. The problem is that now, after having a President with an inferiority complex towards Putin (Obama) we will have a President with the very same inferiority complex and a morbid determination to impose a no-fly zone over Russian forces in Syria. Looking at Hillary, with her ugly short hair and ridiculous pants, I thought to myself “this is a woman who is trying hard to prove that she is every bit as tough and any man” – except of course that she ain’t. Her record also shows her as being weak, cowardly and with a sense of total impunity. And now, that evil messianic lunatic (http://thesaker.is/the-messianic-lunatic-in-her-own-words/) with a deep-seated inferiority complex might become Commander in Chief?! God help us all! 
+Option two: Trump wins. Problem: he will be completely alone. The Neocons have a total, repeat total, control of the Congress, the media, banking and finance, and the courts. From Clinton to Clinton they have deeply infiltrated the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and the three letter agencies. The Fed is their stronghold. How in the world will Trump deal with these rabid “ crazies in the basement”? http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_donald_a_080423_leo_strauss_and_the_.htm 
+Consider the vicious hate campaign which all these “personalities” (from actors, to politicians to reporters) have unleashed against Trump – they have burned their bridges, they know that they will lose it all if Trump wins (and, if he proves to be an easy pushover his election will make no difference anyway). The Neocons have nothing to lose and they will fight to the very last one. What could Trump possibly do to get anything done if he is surrounded by Neocons and their agents of influence? Bring in an entirely different team? How is he going to vet them? His first choice was to take Pence as a VP – a disaster (he is already sabotaging Trump on Syria and the elections outcome). I *dread* to hear whom Trump will appoint as a White House Chief of Staff as I am afraid that just to appease the Neocons he will appoint some new version of the infamous Rahm Emanuel… And should Trump prove that he has both principles and courage, the Neocons can always “Dallas” him and replace him with Pence. Et voilà! 
+I see only one way out: 
+How Putin Rescued Russia When Putin came to power he inherited a Kremlin every bit as corrupt and traitor-infested as the White House nowadays. As for Russia, she was in pretty much the same sorry shape as the Independent Nazi-run Ukraine. Russia was also run by bankers and AngloZionist puppets and most Russians led miserable lives. The big difference is that, unlike what is happening with Trump, the Russian version of the US Neocons never saw the danger coming from Putin. He was selected by the ruling elites as the representative of the security services to serve along a representative of the big corporate money, Medvedev. This was a compromise solution between the only two parts of the Russian society which were still functioning, the security services and oil/gas money. Putin looked like a petty bureaucrat in an ill fitting suit, a shy and somewhat awkward little guy who would present no threat to the powerful oligarchs of the the Seven Bankers running Russia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semibankirschina ). Except that he turned out to be one of the most formidable rulers in Russia history. Here is what Putin did as soon as he came to power: 
+First, he re-established the credibility of the Kremlin with the armed forces and security services by rapidly and effectively crushing the Wahabi insurgency in Chechnia. This established his personal credibility with the people he would have to rely on to deal with the oligarchs. 
+Second, he used the fact that everybody, every single businessman and corporation in Russia, did more or less break the law during the 1990s, if only because there really was no law. Instead of cracking down on the likes of Berezovski or Khodorkovski for their political activities, he crushed them with (absolutely true) charges of corruption. Crucially, he did that very publicly, sending a clear message to the other arch-enemy: the media. 
+Third, contrary to the hallucinations of the western human rights agencies and Russian liberals, Putin never directly suppressed any dissent, or cracked down on the media or, even less so, ordered the murder of anybody. He did something much smarter. Remember that modern journalists are first and foremost presstitutes, right? By mercilessly cracking down on the oligarchs Putin deprived the presstitutes of their source of income and political support. Some emigrated to the Ukraine, others simply resigned, and a few were left like on a reservation or a zoo on a few very clearly identifiable media outlets such as Dozhd TV, Ekho Moskvy Radio or the newspaper Kommersant. Those who emigrated became irrelevant, as for those who stayed in the “liberal zoo” – they were harmless as they had no credibility left. Crucially, everybody else “got the message”. After that, all it took is the appointment a few real patriots (such as Dmitri Kiselev, Margarita Simonian and others) in key positions and everybody quickly understood that the winds of fortune had now turned. 
+Fourth, once the main media outlets were returned back to sanity it did not take too long for the “liberal” (in the Russian sense, meaning pro-USA) parties to enter into a death-spiral from which they have never recovered. That, in turn, resulted in the ejection of all “liberals” from the Duma which now has only 4 parties, all of them more or less “patriotic”. That’s the part of Putin’s strategy that worked. 
+So far, Putin has failed to eject the 5th columnists, whom I call the “Atlantic Integrationists” (see http://thesaker.is/putins-biggest-failure/ ) from the government itself. What is certain is that Putin has not tackled the 5th columnists in the banking/finance sector and that the latter are being very careful not to give him a pretext to take action against them. 
+Russia and the USA are very different countries, and no recipe can be simply copied from one to another. Still, there are valuable lessons from the “Putin model” for Trump, not the least of which that his most formidable enemies probably are sitting in the Fed and in the banks that control the Fed. What is sure is that for the time being the image of the USA will continue to be that of homeless veterans abandoned by the US government wrapping themselves in the American flag and asking for coins in a cup. 
+Hillary thinks that Ameria’s wars are a stunning success. Trump thinks that they are a disgrace. I submit that the choice between these two is really very simple. 
+To those who are saying that there cannot be a schism in the AngloZionist elites, I reply that the example of the conspiracy to prevent Dominique Strauss-Kahn from becoming the next French president ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_v._Strauss-Kahn ) shows that, just like hyenas, AngloZionist leaders do sometimes turn on each other. That happens in all regimes, regardless of their political ideology (think SS against SA in Nazi Germany or Trotskists against Stalinists in Boshevik USSR). 
+An Iron Broom Leon Trotsky used to say the Soviet Russia needed to be cleansed from anarchists and noblemen with an “iron broom”. He even wrote an article in the Pravda entitled “We need an iron broom”. Another genocidal manic, Felix Derzhinskii, founder of the notorious ChK secret police, used to say that a secret police officer must have a “burning heart, a cool head and clean hands”. One would seek weakness, or even compassion, in vain from folks like these. These are ideology-driven “true believers”, sociopaths with no sense of empathy, profoundly evil people with a genocidal hatred of anybody standing in their way. 
+Hillary Clinton and her gang of Neocons are the spiritual (and sometimes even physical) successors of the Soviet Bolsheviks and they, just like their Bolshevik forefathers, will not hesitate for a second to crush their enemies. Donald Trump – assuming he is for real and actually means what he says – has to understand that and do what Putin did: strike first and strike hard. 
+Stalin, by the way, also did exactly that, and the Trotskyists were crushed. 
+I think that the jury is still out on whether Putin will succeed in finally removing the 5th columnists from power. What is sure is that Russia is at least semi-free from the control of the Anglo-Zionists and that the US is their last bastion right now. Their maniacal hatred of Trump can in part be explained by the sense of danger these folks feel, being threatened for the first time in what they see as their homeland (I don’t mean that in a patriotic sense – but rather like a parasite’s care for “his” host). And maybe they have some good reason to fear. I sure hope that they do. 
+I am rather encouraged by the way Trump handled the latest attempt to make him cower in fear. Yesterday Trump dared to declare that since the election might be rigged or stolen he does not pledge to recognize the outcome. And even though every semi-literate person knows that elections in the USA have been rigged and stolen in the past, including Presidential ones, by saying that Trump committed a major case of crimethink. The Ziomedia pounced on him with self-righteous outrage and put immense pressure on him to retract his statement. Instead of rolling over and recanting his “crime”, Trump replied that he will respect the election results if he wins. 
+Beautiful no? Let’s hope he continues to show the same courage. 
+Trump is doing now what Jean-Marie Le Pen did in France: he is showing the Neocons that be that he dares to openly defy them, that he refuses to play by their rules, that their outrage has no effect on him and that they don’t get to censor or, even less so, silence him. That is also what he did when, yet again, he refused to accuse the Russians of cyber-attacks and, instead, repeated that it would be a good thing for Russia and the USA to be friends. Again, I am not sure that how long he will be able to hold that line, but for the time being there is no denying that he is openly defying the AngloZionist deep state and Empire. 
+Conclusion: The United States are about to enter what might possibly be the deepest and most dangerous crisis of their history. If Trump is elected, he will have to immediately launch a well-planned attack against his opponents without giving them any pretext to accuse him of politically motivated repressions. In Russia, Putin could count on the support of the military and the security services. I don’t know whom Trump can count on, but I am fairly confident that there are still true patriots in the US armed forces. If Trump gets the right person to head the FBI, he might also use that agency to clean house and deliver a steady streams of indictments for corruption, conspiracy to (fill the blank), abuse of authority, obstruction of justice and dereliction of duty, etc. Since such crimes are widespread in the current circles of power, they are also easy to prove, and cracking down on corruption would get Trump a standing ovation from the American people. Next, just as Putin did in Russia, Trump will have to deal with the media. How exactly, I don’t know. But he will have to face this beast and defeat it. At every step in this process he will have to get the proactive support of the people, just like Putin does. 
+Can Trump do it? I don’t know. I would argue that to overthrow the deep state and restore the power of the people is even harder in the USA than it was in Russia. I have always believed that the AngloZionist Empire will have to be brought down from the outside, most probably by a combination of military and economic defeats. I still believe that. However, I might be wrong – in fact, I hope that I am – and maybe Trump will be the guy to bring down the Empire in order to save the United States. If there is such a possibility, however slim, I think that we have to believe in it and act on it as all the alternatives are far worse. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order . Newsletter Notifications Signup Form",FAKE
+921,5 takeaways from the New York primary,"BROOKLYN — New York is supposed to be a magical city that extracts “authenticity” out of its presidential candidates — you know, the rubes who tote wallets in back pockets, can’t quite swipe a MetroCard, or stand there like flap-hatted Vermont tourists fishing around for subway tokens left over from their last trip to the Big City in 1960.
+
+The 2016 primary here — for all its hype — provided few new insights into the character of the candidates — but it did clarify both the Republican and Democratic races, delivering the expected victories to the expected hometown front-runners, Donald Trump and, especially Hillary Clinton.
+
+The 10-day New York campaign was dumber, more scripted and meaner (at least on the Democratic side) than a great state deserved. Each candidate embraced the most self-serving Empire State cliché they could glom — Bernie Sanders trumpeted his Spaldeen-stoopball 1950s Brooklyn upbringing (while eliding the endemic segregation in his fiercely divided neighborhood), Hillary touted her 2000 upstate listening tour (downplaying her coziness with Wall Street), while actual Americans Ted Cruz and John Kasich seemed mesmerized by the wild exoticism of half-sour pickles and matzas.
+
+Only Donald Trump — a “Bonfire of the Vanities” character who has busted out of his tabloid 1980s cage to devour 2016 basic-cable America — seemed to really get what New Yorkers wanted. Which was to be momentarily amused, then left the hell alone. By necessity (no riots, please!) and instinct (he has Jeter-esque name recognition already) the Donald lay lower than in any previous contest and triumphed resoundingly.
+
+It was semi-fun while it lasted. Here are five takeaways from the New York primary.
+
+1. “Momentum” is for losers. Bernie Sanders cruised into New York riding a wave of victories: He won eight out of the past nine nominating contests. Which all added up to not very much — he cut Clinton’s lead in pledged delegates from about 240 to under 200. The Sanders campaign — taking a page from Clinton’s own effort in 2008 — has been pushing the idea that the Vermont senator was surging past the mathematical impediments to his nomination.
+
+Clinton nearly erased that run with one big win in New York, a victory that her staff expected to net her about 20 to 25 pledged delegates. It also robbed Sanders of a core (if flawed) rationale for his candidacy: That Clinton couldn’t win consistently in big, Northern states — she can add New York to a column of wins that includes Florida, Texas, Virginia and Ohio.
+
+And late in the day came news that electrified Clinton’s already-jazzed staff: that Sanders had unexpectedly flown back to Vermont to recharge his political batteries.
+
+2. Trump: The mouth that didn’t roar. Turns out that shutting up, lying low and reorganizing your amateurish campaign ain’t such a bad idea. Trump, who kicked off his candidacy at Trump Tower on Fifth took the Fifth during his home-state primary — steering clear of perilously liberal Manhattan to hold rallies in Patchogue on Long Island and Rochester upstate.
+
+It may be too late to showcase restraint, but Trump (who attempted rapprochement with Megyn Kelly during the primary sprint) used his dead-certain win here as cover to reset his campaign — layering over bar-bouncer campaign manager Corey Lewandowski with seasoned GOP pro Paul Manafort and flack Hope Hicks with former Scott Walker aide Rick Wiley.
+
+3. Bernie and Hillary officially hate each other’s guts. Here was a hometown contest destined to sow bitterness. Sanders (like so many other Brooklynites) professes to be proud of the moxie and street toughness instilled by the borough of his birth, but his first-ever vote was with his feet — and he got out, first to Chicago, then to the braying-Guernsey environs of Burlington. Still, he feels pride of ownership and bragged (in Wyoming) that he would make New York transplant Clinton quake; Clinton, who parked her carpetbag in Chappaqua 15 years ago, wanted to crush his upstart challenge in her Chappaqua backyard — and she did.
+
+Clinton won by a wide margin— and there was much eff-you high-fiving in the ballroom of the Sheraton New York. But Sanders’ defeat (accompanied, as always by the big crowds and even bigger torrent of online donations) was the bitterest one yet and deepened the already yawning fault lines between the Bernie stalwarts and a Clinton team increasingly itchy to see him gone. Not going to happen anytime soon, apparently: The tweet being incredulously digested at a Clinton victory party was an MSNBC report quoting Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver defiantly claiming his candidate would take the fight to the convention floor — even if Clinton secured an overwhelming lead among pledged delegates and supers.
+
+“We kicked his ass tonight,” a senior Clinton aide told me Tuesday night. “I hope this convinces Bernie to tone it down. If not, f--- him.”
+
+4. Why is John Kasich still running? Sure, Donald Trump built (or branded himself on) over half of Manhattan. But Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the closest thing to a moderate remaining in the Republican field should have appealed to voters here — and he couldn’t make the sale in critical areas like Nassau County or suburban Buffalo. At 11 p.m. he was clocking in at a modest 25 percent — less than half of Trump’s commanding 60 percent level of victory.
+
+Kasich stands no chance of catching either Trump or Ted Cruz in the delegate hunt— so his core rationale is that he fares far better than either man in a general election match-up against Hillary Clinton. Losing so badly in her home state, however, does little to bolster that case — and the trickle of cash coming to his campaign is likely to dry up as he heads into the homestretch.
+
+5. Whiteout. Clinton managed to fight Sanders to a virtual draw among white voters statewide (and won 60-to-40 among whites in the five boroughs) — but the big story, for the umpteenth time in 2016 was Sanders’ inability to make significant inroads with black voters. Spike Lee made a nice ad for the Vermont senator — but it couldn’t compensate for the candidate’s repeated (and inexplicable) dismissal of Clinton’s huge wins in the “Deep South” — which blacks interpreted as a slight.",REAL
+9879,NATO Confirms Major Troop Buildup In Eastern Europe,"( ANTIWAR ) A day after reports NATO was soliciting even more ground troops for their deployment into Eastern Europe, officials are reporting “progress” in recruiting more troops from more member nations to participate in the deployment, intended to be around 40,000 troops along the Baltic states, near Russia’s border. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg claimed to have been “ very inspired ” by the response of nations he sought troops from, after yesterday’s report Quote: d diplomats as saying the deployment was meant to both “confront” Russia and to undercut Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s complaints NATO isn’t participating enough in its own defense.
+The new participants in the deployment include Albania, Slovenia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Croatia, Belgium, and Norway. The size of individual deployments from different nations is unclear, but there will be four battalions, and the US is expected to provide the majority.
+With all these troops headed to the Baltic coast, reports out of Russia’s media suggest that they are planning some new warship deployments into their Baltic Fleet, with an eye toward enhancing their targeting capacity along the shore.",FAKE
+4895,Gary Johnson and Bill Weld Shift Focus to Answering Questions Outside of Debates,"Two weeks ago, as Nick Gillespie reported in this space, Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson said that it was ""game over"" if he was not included in the first 2016 presidential debate on Sept. 26. Given that the Democratic/Republican-controlled ""nonpartisan"" Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) will choose the debate roster in mid-September based on a five-agency polling average that currently sits at 8.8 percent, well short of the required 15 percent, for Johnson, the irresistible force of the LP's debate-centric focus has been on a collision course with the immovable object of the CPD's unreasonably high threshold. Until, it seems, this afternoon.
+
+No matter how much independent-bent political celebrities such as Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mitch Daniels support the L.P. ticket being included in the debates, and no matter how much that motion is seconded by solid majorities of the American voting public, rules are rules, and when said rules are written by the Republican and Democratic parties, Libertarians are screwed. Unless, vice presidential nominee William Weld told me this afternoon, the mounting outrage at the ""rigged"" system is married to the sight of the two candidates outside every debate venue, making a mockery of the proceedings inside by answering every question simultaneously, only better:
+
+""So I'm no longer so sure that it's game over if we're not in the debates,"" Weld told me. ""I think there's going to be kind of a national uproar if we're not in the debates, and we will join in that uproar, and be standing together on the street corner outside every debate venue answering the same questions as in the debate in real time, you know, putting it out on Facebook Live.""
+
+Weld made the same promise during his address at a midtown Manhattan rally this afternoon, which was attended by 500-plus enthusiastic supporters.
+
+""We've seen that the little videos that we record in 90 seconds are seen by 15, 18 million people in a matter of less than two weeks,"" he told me, ""so that kind of free media attention might continue all the way from now until November 8th as a result of our exclusion. That would be a substitute, at least in part, for being in the debates, and it would give us the high ground. It's ground that I think we could occupy with some happiness.""",REAL
+655,"Ryan Endorses Trump, Trump Crushes Ryan’s Dreams","After his shotgun wedding to the presumptive GOP nominee last week, the House speaker is getting a glimpse of his future with a man who puts his dreams before anyone else’s.
+
+There’s no currently available evidence showing that Donald Trump’s entire campaign is just one big, deliberate effort to troll Paul Ryan.
+
+Since Ryan allied himself with the mogul, Trump has engaged in some of his worst behavior of the cycle, and his backers show no restraint in their eagerness to malign and mock the Speaker of the House. Any hoped-for Trump/Ryan Era of Good Feelings?
+
+On June 2, Ryan endorsed Trump. He said he made that decision because he believes a President Trump will help pass his forthcoming agenda.
+
+“Through these conversations, I feel confident he would help us turn the ideas in this agenda into laws to help improve people’s lives,” Ryan said. “That’s why I’ll be voting for him this fall.”
+
+One day later, Donald Trump welcomed Paul Ryan to the rest of his life by saying the federal judge overseeing a civil case against the now-defunct Trump University is unsuited for the job because he’s of Mexican ancestry (said judge, Gonzalo Curiel, was born in Indiana).
+
+Ryan responded to the comments in a press conference he held in Southeast D.C. to roll out the first item on his policy agenda, a series of proposals to fight poverty.
+
+The focus of the morning could have been on the fact that House Republicans finally decided to start talking about poverty—an issue their party has long declined to focus on. But the biggest news Paul Ryan made was his response to Trump.
+
+“Saying a person can’t do their job because of their race is sort of the textbook definition of racist comments,” he said, saying Trump’s comments on Curiel “should be absolutely disavowed.”
+
+“I’m not going to even pretend to defend them,” he added. “I’m going to defend our ideas. I’m going to defend our agenda. What matters to us most is our principles and the policies that come from those principles, and our ability to give the people of this country a better way forward.”
+
+Tuesday’s press conference, was suppose to highlight Ryan’s latest attempt to turn the page away from the insanity of the presidential election and back to the serious business of lawmaking. He has spent the past few weeks cutting campaign-style videos teasing the release of a series of proposals from House Republicans.
+
+The sad irony of all this is that Trump actually paid lip service to Ryan’s anti-poverty plan when he appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation on June 5.
+
+“Paul Ryan—well, I think we will agree on—as an example, he really focuses on poverty,” Trump told host John Dickerson. “He wants to take people out of poverty. So do I. And we’re going to come up with a plan.”
+
+But that comment was totally drowned out by the criticism Trump drew for saying on the same show that a Muslim judge would probably be just as unfair to him as a judge of Mexican ancestry.",REAL
+2024,The reinvention of Mitt Romney,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+10098,Has family guy gone nuts?,"Has family guy gone nuts? page: 1 link I was watching and they were singing a weird chant something about patriotic weirdness and barbecued human heads. I just brushed it off then 5 mins later some more weird popped in outta nowhere wtf so I recorder it I have no idea why quagmire took Peter back in time so far or what it's supposed to mean. Why would going back in time cause home to that? Or am I missing something Peter: [demonic voice] I see the six stations of the Lord's order, and they will all burn ! edit on 26-10-2016 by ssenerawa because: (no reason given) link That was kind of weird and random. Were they referencing anything? Probably just typical family guy but they have taken part in predictive programming and subliminal messages I am pretty sure edit on 26-10-2016 by GoShredAK because: (no reason given) Oh family guy... There are a lot of references to: a) time travel and its ramifications including multiple timelines. They even have an episode where time flows backward. b) occultic crap. There is another episode where Peter puts on noise cancelling headphones to ""be alone with my thoughts"". This is all while on a plane, and his ""innver voice"" begins babbling about blood shed and something about the dark counsel or something along those lines. c) Paranormal in general. Ghosts and spirits speaking through telelvisions etc. One of my personal favorites is when Peter talks to the t.v. as if the people on it can ""hear"" him. Ironically enough,the people on tv respond to him. To me, the show is some type of op. With american dad included. Afterall, seth macfalane was set to be on the plane that hit the north tower...talk about a splitting of timelines. Addendum: this show has a lot, and i do mean ALOT of references that resonate with my life and experiences to a very close T. edit on 26-10-2016 by OneGoal because: (no reason given)",FAKE
+866,Donald Trump is really going to be the nominee. This is actually happening.,"Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee.
+
+The only way he won't is if something unthinkable happens. He could be struck by lightning. He could pull off his Trump mask and reveal that he's actually been Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt this whole time. Short of that, I dunno. You never want to say never in American politics, but this is the exception.
+
+He is way up in the polls in Indiana, which will net him a bunch of delegates. Then he's set to dominate West Virginia and New Jersey further down the road, and after that he looks likely to win most of California's delegates. All this means he will probably secure a majority of delegates by early June when the last states have voted — and so he'll win on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention.
+
+But even more to the point, there is simply no sign that even if he does fall slightly short of an outright delegate majority, the party will try to meaningfully contest the convention. There are a handful of Republican Party leaders who are fundamentally opposed to Trump, but they are genuinely few and far between. The vast majority of GOP elected officials don't think nominating Trump is a good idea, but they have no intention at this point of doing anything to stop it from happening.
+
+The short-lived Cruz-Kasich pact, in which John Kasich would throw the race in Indiana and Ted Cruz would do likewise in Oregon, illustrates the fundamental problem — there are steps through which Republican Party actors could have stopped Trump, but none of them have ever really come together, and now they are out of time.
+
+An Indiana pact was just about the lowest-cost form of collaboration imaginable. The reason is that for Kasich to instruct his supporters to vote for Cruz in Indiana would be a zero-cost move. Right now it is mathematically impossible for either Kasich or Cruz to secure a majority of delegates. The only way for either one of them to win the nomination is through a contested convention. And to get a contested convention, they need to stop Trump from getting a majority. Indiana allocates a large share of votes to whoever wins a statewide plurality.
+
+Therefore, far and away the best hope for Kasich is to prevent Trump from gaining a plurality in Indiana. And to do that, he needs people who want Kasich to be president to vote for Cruz, who is currently in second place.
+
+There was a brief moment when Kasich pulled resources out of Indiana, but even during the heyday of the ""alliance"" he wasn't willing to actually tell his supporters to vote Cruz — even though the benefits to Kasich of a strategic vote for Cruz exist even if Cruz doesn't make any concessions to Cruz.
+
+That's all below the radar of normal people watching the election from the sidelines, but it's crucially important because it shows the extent to which there is genuinely no anti-Trump movement in the Republican Party. There's a Twitter hashtag and a fair amount of talk from conservative intellectuals, but the vast majority of the party's elected officials, donors, and grassroots leaders have been watching nervously and not saying much.
+
+There are lots of people out there, ranging from true conservatives like Cruz's supporters to moderates like Kasich's supporters, who don't really want Trump to be the nominee. But nobody is doing anything to stop him, and the closer he gets to winning the more people join his bandwagon.
+
+The Trump phenomenon is confounding many people because, on the one hand, it seems impossible to many that the Republican Party would nominate such a weak general election candidate, while it seems impossible to many others that Donald Trump could be such a strong candidate.
+
+So let's be clear about this. Trump is, by every sign available, a historically weak general election candidate.
+
+His unfavorable numbers are off the charts, he is losing to Hillary Clinton in every head-to-head poll, and his policy proposals are going to attract a level of media scrutiny that Republican nominees normally avoid because conservative intellectuals have spent a lot of time dumping on them over the past five months.
+
+At the same time, Republicans aren't going to let these facts stop him from being their nominee.
+
+It turns out that party elites have less sway over the nominating process than many of us thought 12 months ago. In particular, I would say it turns out that the commercial right-of-center mass media — especially Fox News and talk radio but also the Breitbart corner of the internet — is simply not that invested in what party elites think or want. Trump is not liked by a majority of Americans, but he is certainly a compelling television character, and catering to the minority taste for Trumpism has proven to be an effective business strategy.
+
+Given his ability to attract copious quantities of free media and his personal wealth, Trump can overcome the disadvantages of being disliked by the party's professional operative class and leverage his grassroots popularity to victory.
+
+VIDEO: This is how much conservatives hate Trump
+
+If you want to understand what's going on with Trump, I think you can't do much better than to look at this 2015 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, which reveals a huge partisan gap on a pretty basic question — is racism against white people a bigger problem than racism against racial minority groups?
+
+Republicans said yes; Democrats and independents said no:
+
+This is why Trump's Republican opponents haven't made the obvious criticism of him that he's running a campaign based on racial demagoguery.
+
+To Republican primary voters, it's not obvious that racist demagoguery is a bad thing. Or, at a minimum, it seems like a less pernicious thing than the apparently pervasive discrimination against white people in American society.
+
+Typically political parties try to emphasize hot-button wedge issues where a majority of the public is on their side, and deemphasize ones where they are in the minority. On the question of racism, Republicans are distinctly in the minority. But party elites' ability to prevent a campaign from being waged on this issue has been checked by Trump. So he's going to be the nominee. Not because he's an unstoppable juggernaut, but because it's going to take a Democrat to stop him.",REAL
+3009,Political polarization is getting worse. Everywhere.,"You've probably seen this chart.
+
+It uses analysis from VoteView to show how the House has grown more polarized over time. Democrats in the House have become more liberal; Republicans have become much more conservative.
+
+You may also have seen this chart -- but if you haven't, you probably at least are familiar with the concept.
+
+It shows the ranges of weekly approval ratings for President Obama over the course of his administration. In other words, each time 82 percent of Democrats approve of Obama, the 82 percent bar gets a little higher. For the most part, opinions of Obama haven't changed much among Democrats or Republicans; his overall approval rating is usually a function of how independents feel about him.
+
+Obama isn't the first president to see such polarization in his approval ratings. The first president to do so was the guy before him, George W. Bush. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton each had some polarization in their second terms, but it wasn't nearly as wide a gap.
+
+Which leads us to a natural question: How does the polarization of Congress -- which is a measure of the behavior of members of Congress -- compare with the polarization of approval of the president, a measure of public opinion?
+
+That's a question we can answer.
+
+Over time, the gap between the political leaning of Republican and Democratic caucuses on Capitol Hill has widened steadily (though not continuously). This compares DW-NOMINATE scores from VoteView, which is a measure of how liberal or conservative each member of Congress is against a baseline. The figures below essentially measure the distance between the two lines in the first graph above.
+
+Over that same period, opinions of the president have similarly widened -- again, with some fits and starts.
+
+There are two lines here, one using the first Gallup approval rating of the new year and the other averaging the ratings over the year. You can see how attitudes shift; the gap plummets as a president becomes equally popular or unpopular with each party.
+
+Anyway, this suggests that as Congress has gotten more polarized, so too have opinions of the presidents.
+
+But there's a clearer way to look at this. Plotting the gap in how Democrats and Republicans look at the president on one axis and the gap between the two parties in Congress on the other, you can see clearly how both the former and latter have grown more extreme. (The higher and further to the right a dot, the greater the polarization.)
+
+In other words, this polarization isn't only a function of Congress and gerrymandering. There's been a broader polarization that's taken place, reflected in how each party views the president.
+
+What it doesn't tell us is the cause. As complicated as these data are, this was the easier part of the analysis.",REAL
+1213,Rubio Goes From Robot to Terminator Against Donald Trump,"Marco Rubio was on a mission on Thursday night: Destroy The Donald. How much damage did he really do?
+
+The Florida senator delivered what was easily his best debate performance yet Thursday night, hammering frontrunner Donald Trump repeatedly on his character, his business record, and his claims to being a conservative. It was the performance he needed. The question now is whether it will matter at all.
+
+Fresh off a three-state winning streak, Trump is close to being anointed the Presumptive Nominee by the media. With just days to go before the crucial sting of Super Tuesday primaries, Trump appears to be leading in most if not every state on the verge of a contest. He has the momentum. He has the math on his side.
+
+“In 2011, he talked about the need for a pathway to citizenship,” Rubio said. “In 2012, Donald criticized Mitt Romney, saying that Mitt lost his election because of self-deportation. And so even today, we saw a report... that Donald, you’ve hired a significant number of people from other countries to take jobs that Americans could have filled.” Rubio then referenced Trump’s use of Polish workers to construct Trump Tower, which cost the real estate mogul a major settlement in the early 1980s.
+
+“My mom was a maid at a hotel,” Rubio continued. “And instead of hiring an American like her, you have brought in over a thousand people from all over the world to fill those jobs instead. So I think this is an important issue. And I think we are realizing that it’s an important issue for the country that’s been debated for 30 years, but finally needs to be solved once and for all.”
+
+Trump continued, “As far as the people I’ve hired in various parts of Florida during the absolute prime season, like Palm Beach and other locations, you could not get help. It’s the up season. People didn’t want to have part-time jobs. They were part-time jobs, very seasonal, 90-day jobs, 120-day jobs, and you couldn’t get. Everybody agrees with me on that. They were part-time jobs. You needed them, or we just might as well close the doors, because you couldn’t get help in those hot, hot sections of Florida.”
+
+Trump, who had yet to really be attacked by Rubio—or, really, anyone else—this way, didn’t have much of a response when put on the spot. Trump seemed caught off guard by a candidate with whom he’d enjoyed a kind of détente for some time.
+
+“It’s not a sound bite,” Rubio said, sticking to his guns. “It’s a fact. Again, go online and Google it. Donald Trump, Polish workers. The second thing about the trade war, I don’t understand, because your clothes and the ties you wear are made in Mexico and in China. You’ll be starting a trade war against your own clothes and suits.”
+
+The old political rule is to attack your enemy’s strengths. And that’s exactly what Rubio was doing. Trump has framed himself as a brilliant businessman animated by his concern for the common man, the little guy, the silent majority. He’s never marketed himself as an orthodox conservative, but that’s where his opponents have hit him again and again with no result.
+
+But Rubio tried something different with his attacks Thursday night. He tried to prove Trump is a huckster, a charlatan who doesn’t know what he’s talking about when pressed for specifics, a trust-fund baby looking to rip off hard-working Americans in order to make a dishonest buck. It went to the heart of Trump’s appeal, and for that reason it just might stick.
+
+Rubio looked and sounded different from how we’ve ever seen him. But so did Trump. For a man who makes so many facial expressions, he rarely displays any recognizable human emotion, preferring instead to stay aloof and dismissive. Thursday night was different. He was, at turns, deeply frustrated and consumed by abject terror. Things were going very wrong, very quickly—and right before his squinty eyes.
+
+Trump let out an exhausted sigh. His head seemed to sink into his shoulder pads. He grabbed the microphone with his left hand and wagged his finger with Rubio with his right. “No, no. I’m the only one on this stage that’s hired people,” he threw his arms out, “you haven’t hired anybody.”
+
+After Trump reminded the audience that Rubio had recently been roasted by erstwhile candidate Chris Christie, Rubio pressed Trump for specifics on his health-care plan. Trump talked in circles, claiming he would magically create competition by “removing” the “lines around the states,” and then claiming it over and over again.
+
+The audience cheered. They got the joke—Rubio’s robot reputation stems from his habit, most clearly shown at his disastrous pre-New Hampshire primary debate, of hewing to his talking points when flustered. Trump stuck his finger in the air in defiance, “no, no, no!” he said, “no no no! I don’t repeat myself! I don’t repeat myself!”",REAL
+7442,Destruction of Walk Of Fame star leaves Donald Trump down to his last six Horcruxes,"Thursday 27 October 2016 by Davywavy Destruction of Walk Of Fame star leaves Donald Trump down to his last six Horcruxes 
+Stabbing a copy of The Art Of The Deal with a Basilisk’s tooth is the next step to eliminating Donald Trump, according to experts this morning. 
+Donald Trump howled in agony and demanded a flask of serpent’s milk to help him recover some strength after the destruction of his first Horcrux on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame yesterday. 
+Trump, whose unusually-styled hair is believed to hide a face on the back of his head, is understood to have concealed fragments of his soul in multiple receptacles in an attempt to protect himself from defeat in the forthcoming election. 
+Fragments are believed to be hidden in places as diverse as the fabric of Trump Tower, a pussy he grabbed without warning in 2003, and Mike Pence’s unnaturally shining white head of hair. 
+The last Horcrux is believed to be the one national poll which has shown him in the lead. If destroyed, this would cause his organisation to fail and his acolytes, known as the Debt Eaters for their habit of bankruptcy, to disband. 
+“The Orange Lord is not concerned by this petty attack,” said a spokesman for the Trump campaign. 
+“Only a cowardly child would act like this, and Donald challenges his attacker to meet him in debate where he shall win, and win, and win again.” 
+To show he meant business, Trump took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves to threaten anyone who would wish him harm. 
+However when Trump handed his jacket to his spokesman to hold, the spokesman cried ‘Dobby’s Free!’, and vanished. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+4782,"Nobody Won the VP Debate, Least of All the American Electorate","About 90 minutes before the vice-presidential debate started, the Republican National Committee posted a press release claiming that Donald Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, ""was the clear winner of the debate.""
+
+That sort of stunt and Tim Kaine's painfully unfunny and hyper-scripted one-liners help explain why the Republican and Democratic candidates are disliked by large majorities and why party identification is at or near historic lows. Full debate transcript here.
+
+We don't simply need politicians talking over one another like guests on a public-access cable show, we need more voices on the stage having substantive discussions about the future of the country. We didn't get that with the vice-presidential debate and it's unlikely we'll get it in next week's presidential debate either.
+
+Produced by Paul Detrick, Nick Gillespie, and Joshua Swain. Narrated by Gillespie. About 50 seconds.
+
+Updated: For those keeping score, a CNN/ORC poll taken immediately following the debate had Pence winning the debate, 48 percent to 42 percent for Kaine.",REAL
+2698,Fox News Eats Its Own,"The Republican National Committee triumphantly seized control of the debates last year, saying it would not allow a repeat of 2012, when “the liberal media interrogated our candidates on issues that were often not a priority to most Americans. … We need more conservatives … in the moderator’s chair.”
+
+But what was a play to keep their candidates safe inside a conservative cocoon now looks like a trap. The first Republican presidential debate will air on Fox News and will be moderated by Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace—who happen to be the same three anchors that have provoked three Republican candidates into embarrassing gaffes this month. Turns out Fox News’ anchors can make Republican candidates look just as bad as MSNBC’s.
+
+The RNC sought to install more “conservatives in the moderator’s chair” because conservatives still are nursing grudges against some of the 2012 primary debate moderators. When ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pressed Mitt Romney on whether “states have the right to ban contraception,” conservatives blamed the “liberal media” for asking an irrelevant question. When CNN’s John King opened a debate by asking Newt Gingrich about allegations leveled by his ex-wife, Gingrich brought the crowd to its feet by chastising King and lambasting “the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”
+
+At least in those instances, Republicans could try the “blame the media” strategy to limit the damage. This year, when Republicans shoot themselves in the foot on the debate stage, they won’t have that option.
+
+The recent gaffes on Fox News by Republican candidates are not because Fox News journalists are suddenly out to get Republicans. It’s because even a softball question can trip up a candidate not ready for prime time. Megyn Kelly’s interview of Jeb Bush was the journalistic equivalent of a warm hug. Her simple Iraq question—“Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?”—was only a couple of notches tougher than Katie Couric’s “What newspapers and magazines did you regularly read?”
+
+After Jeb’s initial answer, which skipped past the hindsight premise, Kelly conversationally and neutrally asked for a clarification, “You don't think it was a mistake?” When Jeb was done, she breezily moved on to a new line of questioning well-suited for Fox: “Do you feel that America's place in the world has diminished under President Obama?”
+
+But Fox News teased the Iraq clip before the full interview aired, sparking a media firestorm. Rivals Chris Christie and Ted Cruz, both fervent hawks, jumped in front of the microphone to proclaim they would not have invaded. Influential conservative radio talker Laura Ingraham was incredulous: “You have to have [a nominee] who says, ‘Look, I’m a Republican but I’m not an idiot … I learn from the past.’”
+
+Trying to clean up his mess a couple of days later, Bush ran to what should have been safe ground, Fox News’ Sean Hannity. The host functioned less as a journalist than as a friend helping a friend in need. He first suggested “the media” interpreted Bush wrong and so “I wanted to see if I could clarify that.” After Bush failed to actually clarify, Hannity threw him a second lifeline, “So in other words, with 20/20 hindsight, you would make a different decision.” Bush whiffed the softball, saying, “I don’t know what that decision would have been.”
+
+Unlike the Kelly and Hannity chats, Chris Wallace’s recent interview with Marco Rubio was truly aggressive. He wouldn’t let up over Rubio’s abandonment of the Senate immigration bill for which he voted: “You bailed on comprehensive immigration reform. … Aren't leaders supposed to shape public opinion rather than just follow it? … Shouldn't you have campaigned for this?” He also busted Rubio for a “dramatic shift” in his foreign policy rhetoric, backing off his 2012 support for Iran negotiations and forgoing earlier assurances he was “not a saber-rattling person.”
+
+And those barbs were just the warm-up for the three-minute raking over Iraq. As Wallace bore into Rubio’s varying responses, the unprepared Senate freshman dug himself into a hole by pleading semantic differences regarding questions about whether Iraq was a mistake and whether he’d have invaded knowing what we know now. Relentless, Wallace asked Rubio about seven times “Was it a mistake?” And he refused to let Rubio answer it with caveats, cutting him off with “I'm not asking you that.”
+
+If Wallace were not working for Rupert Murdoch, the loaded questions, opinionated assertions and repeated interruptions would earn Wallace a lifetime membership in the Liberal Media Elite Club.
+
+You can expect Wallace to be similarly unforgiving at the inaugural debate. In fact it was four Augusts ago when Wallace was the foil for Gingrich’s first public haranguing of a debate moderator. (He did not care for what he called a “gotcha question”: “How do you respond to people who say that your campaign has been a mess so far?”) Gingrich was not alone. Wallace dredged up Mitt Romney’s record of layoffs and Herman Cain’s litany of amateurish remarks. Candidates who expect to get a free ride from Wallace will quickly become debate roadkill.",REAL
+8718,"Exchange of equipment, arms & experience: Large-scale joint NATO drills held in Romania","4   Debate is raging in the UK over the work of Sharia Councils often used by Muslims to settle family disputes and divorce. Two inquiries have been launched into its practices after accusations of discrimination against women came to light. Activists made their cases in the House of Commons on Tuesday..both for and against the Councils. We put the issue up for debate with Baroness Cox, who raised a motion against Sharia law in the House of Lords today, and Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadan Foundation in the UK.  ",FAKE
+1090,"New math: Where Trump, Clinton stand after primary victories","Donald Trump dominated the night, but Ohio Gov. John Kasich kept him from a clean sweep. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton formidably extended her lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+A woman gestures to the news media at a campaign event for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Tampa, Fla., Monday. Trump extended his lead Tuesday, winning the winner-take-all Florida primary and two other contests. But he lost Ohio to Gov. John Kasich, preventing a clean sweep. Missouri remained too close to call as of deadline.
+
+The once-improbable prospect of a Trump-Clinton general election showdown just got stronger.
+
+Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton dealt a crushing blow to Bernie Sanders’s presidential hopes in Tuesday’s primaries, beating him in four contests, and leading in the fifth – Missouri – which remains too close to call.
+
+On the Republican side, Donald Trump boosted his front-runner status, winning the most delegates at stake Tuesday and forcing Florida Sen. Marco Rubio out of the race by handing him a humiliating defeat in his home state.
+
+But Mr. Trump failed to sweep, losing in Ohio to the state’s governor, John Kasich. It was Governor Kasich’s first win of primary season, giving him cause to stay in the race – even as he was mathematically eliminated from contention. Kasich’s only hope is for a contested national convention in July, where he somehow emerges as a “unity” candidate.
+
+For now, though, Trump dominates in the delegate race, with 621 of the 1,237 needed to secure the nomination, as of early Wednesday. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz sits in second place, with 396.
+
+To reach the magic number of 1,237 before the Republican convention in Cleveland, Trump would need to win some 58 percent of the remaining delegates, a tough task in a three-person race, but not impossible.
+
+“A contested convention remains a 50-50 proposition, but should Trump fall just shy of the magic number, the GOP will be contesting him at its own peril,” says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.
+
+Tuesday’s results revealed and reinforced several points about the strength of both Trump and Clinton.
+
+For Trump, Tuesday’s victories came in spite of the front-runner’s unwillingness to condemn acts of violence by supporters at his rallies, which party leaders have urged him to do. Last weekend, Trump canceled a rally in Chicago after anti-Trump protesters infiltrated the venue and threatened to shut it down – leading to skirmishes between pro- and anti-Trump activists. Trump went on to win the Illinois primary Tuesday by 9 points, beating Senator Cruz 39 percent to 30 percent.
+
+Trump supporters are known to back him early, and not budge from their position. And on Tuesday, exit polls showed continued popularity for his views. Some 52 percent of voters said they wanted an “outsider” for president, and of those, Trump won 69 percent of the vote.
+
+Trump also won the majority of voters who want to deport undocumented immigrants, are “angry” at the federal government, favor a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, and are falling behind financially. He also won 47 percent of voters who oppose free trade.
+
+“All are impressive results in a multi-candidate race,” writes pollster Gary Langer in an  analysis for ABC News.
+
+In remarks Tuesday night to reporters and invited guests at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump highlighted the millions of dollars of negative ads that his primary opponents and outside groups funded by the Republican “establishment” have run against him, to seemingly little effect.
+
+Still, Trump remains a deeply divisive figure in the Republican Party, as Tuesday’s exit polls showed.
+
+“Among Republicans who did not vote for him this Tuesday night, 61 percent said they’d seriously consider a third party candidate if it were Trump vs. Clinton in November,” Mr. Langer notes. “Indeed, in another question, 45 percent of non-Trump supporters flatly said they would not vote for him in November if he were the party’s nominee.”
+
+The prospect of Trump causing a formal split in the Republican Party seems as real as ever, if he goes into the convention with a majority of delegates – or close to a majority. But party regulars are at a loss over how to resolve the issue. Advisers to Trump and Cruz categorically rule out the idea of even allowing Kasich to compete in a contested convention, according to Politico.
+
+“If Trump has hundreds more delegates than the runner-up (almost certainly, Cruz) and he is over 1,000 delegates, it will be exceedingly difficult to deny him the nomination,” write analysts at  Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “In fact, to do so would be to guarantee a meltdown of historic proportions in Cleveland.”
+
+In Tuesday’s Democratic contests, former Secretary of State Clinton beat Senator Sanders handily in Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina, beat him narrowly in her native state of Illinois, and fought him to a virtual tie in Missouri. Most important, she recovered her balance after losing to the Vermonter the week before in a stunning upset in Michigan. Sanders had hoped to continue his Rust Belt incursion with victories in Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri with his message of economic populism and opposition to free trade but he failed.
+
+Clinton won big among racial and ethnic minorities, as usual, but in Ohio, also won big among white voters, a cohort she had lost in Michigan. Among white women in Ohio, she won 61 percent to 39 percent, Langer notes.
+
+“Clinton found her footing in Ohio on issues, as well, to some extent defanging Sanders on free trade – she won antitrade voters, a group Sanders took in Michigan,” Langer writes. “As many saw him as too anti-business as saw her as too pro-business. And four in 10 called his policies unrealistic, twice as many as said so about hers.”
+
+In her victory speech Tuesday evening, Clinton pivoted toward a general election message that echoed both Sanders and Trump, repeatedly promising creation of “good jobs.”
+
+“Good paying jobs are the tickets to the middle class and we're going to stand up for the American middle class again,” Clinton said. “We're going to stand up for American workers and make sure no one takes advantage of us, not China, not Wall Street, and not overpaid corporate executives.”
+
+Still, despite a big deficit in pledged delegates, Sanders is certain to take his fight for the Democratic nomination all the way to the party’s convention in Philadelphia in July. He is still drawing large crowds, and money is still pouring into his campaign. The bottom line rule for candidates in both races is this: Have money, will campaign.",REAL
+7197,What do the protesters believe they are protesting? | OffGuardian,"written by Admin 
+A victory for freedom, justice and human happiness it isn’t. Those currently frothing at the mouth about the dawn of a new golden age of peace and equality really should know better. A billionaire and friend of billionaires just won an election. 1789 it isn’t. 
+But Clinton would have blown up the world. Trump probably won’t. Which makes the current situation a very tiny, possibly temporary, but still vanishingly rare moment of sanity in a largely insane world. For that small reason alone sane people everywhere should welcome it for what it is. 
+So, what to make of those who don’t? 
+Hysteria. Fainting. Screaming. Pseudo-Leftists happy to support Obama’s imperialism and domestic tyranny, beating their chests and seeking counselling for PTSD because democracy happened. “Mass” riots of thousands (or is it only hundreds? Depends on your source) of outraged identity-politicians. 
+What do these protesters think they are protesting? 
+Fascism? Well, ok, but where were they during the past sixteen years during which America has been dragged by inches into becoming the proto-facist state it now is? Besides what is more fascist-populist that using riot and civil unrest to overturn a democratic vote? 
+Racism? Sexism? Climate-denial? Which of these offenses is worse than nuclear war? And where is it written in the US constitution that they justify the reversal of an election? 
+And what about those alt news types supporting the “protesters”? Do they agree with Change.org that the vote should be overturned by the electoral college and Clinton given the presidency because she has a vagina and her chums can mobilise mass-hysteria? Are they basically saying they were for Hillary all along, because the Pentagon and Wall Street and WW3 are the lesser of two evils? 
+If that’s not what they are saying, then what? Protest needs an aim, so what is the aim here? More Obama? Martial Law? Total societal disintegration? 
+All better than Trump? 
+Would be great to get some feedback here. Rate this: ",FAKE
+627,Donald Trump Bans 'Washington Post' From Campaign Events,"Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump announced Monday he was revoking press credentials for The Washington Post, upset with the major newspaper's coverage of his campaign.
+
+The action from the Trump campaign is the latest in a string of moves Trump's campaign has made to ban reporters and news outlets that, in the mind of the billionaire businessman, have not treated him fairly.
+
+According to another Facebook post, the final straw seems to have been a story that the Post originally headlined ""Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting."" The current headline now reads, ""Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting.""
+
+""We changed the headline shortly after it posted to more properly reflect what Trump said. We did so on our own; the Trump campaign never contacted us about it,"" Post Vice President for Communications Kristine Coratti Kelly told NPR.
+
+In the story, the Post quoted a Fox News interview from Monday morning in which Trump said that Obama ""either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind"" in his refusal to mention the words ""radical Islamic terrorism"" following the mass shooting at an Orlando gay nightclub that killed 49 people early Sunday morning.
+
+This headline, however, is not the first Post item that has gotten under Trump's skin. Reporter David Farenthold pressed Trump for details about donations he promised to make to veterans groups after a January fundraiser. And only after that reporting did Trump donate the $1 million he had promised and already said he had donated. Trump held a press conference to reveal that he had donated the money and called Farenthold a ""nasty guy.""
+
+Trump has also alleged that Post owner Jeff Bezos was using the newspaper to protect Amazon, which he also owns, from higher taxes. He offered no evidence for that claim. In a statement explaining why he banned the Post, one of the most influential newspapers in the country, Trump's campaign repeated that accusation.
+
+""We no longer feel compelled to work with a publication which has put its need for 'clicks' above journalistic integrity,"" the Republican's campaign said in a statement. ""They have no journalistic integrity and write falsely about Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump does not mind a bad story, but it has to be honest.""
+
+In his own statement, Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said the newspaper was ""proud of our coverage"" and wouldn't relent in questioning Trump:
+
+The Post is not the first news organization denied credentials to cover Trump's campaign events. The Huffington Post, Politico, BuzzFeed, the Daily Beast, the Des Moines Register, the New Hampshire Union Leader, Univision and others have also been blocked from covering events.
+
+Trump has had a contentious relationship with the press ever since he announced his candidacy almost a year ago. But the acrimony with the Fourth Estate increased once it became clear he would be the Republican nominee.
+
+In a press conference last month about those donations to veterans groups, Trump berated reporters after he detailed the source of the donations.
+
+""I think the media is frankly, made up of people [who] in many cases — not in all cases — are not good people,"" Trump said, singling some reporters out by name and calling one ABC reporter a ""sleaze.""
+
+And he said his approach to the press would stay the same if he were elected to the White House: ""Yeah, it is going to be like this. You think I'm going to change? I'm not going to change.""
+
+""Donald Trump misunderstands — or, more likely, simply opposes — the role a free press plays in a democratic society,"" Thomas Burr, the National Press Club president, said after that contentious press conference. ""Reporters are supposed to hold public figures accountable. Any American political candidate who attacks the press for doing its job is campaigning in the wrong country. In the United States, under our Constitution, a free press is a check on politicians of all parties. If we are to demand that other countries respect the tradition of a free press we must also practice that here at home.""",REAL
+8679,Debate over the Cleveland Indians’ Mascot,"Debate over the Cleveland Indians’ Mascot November 1, 2016 
+The U.S. government’s genocide against Native Americans has led many to find the use of Indian nicknames and caricatures in sports offensive, such as the grinning Chief Wahoo mascot of the Cleveland Indians in the World Series, reports Dennis J Bernstein. 
+By Dennis J Bernstein 
+With the Cleveland Indians in Major League Baseball’s World Series, attention is drawn again to the team’s smiling mascot, Chief Wahoo, who represents to many Native Americans a racist stereotype. 
+Indeed, a “real” Cleveland Indian — Jacqueline Keeler, a Navajo Yankton Dakota Sioux who was raised in Cleveland and is now a writer based in Portland, Oregon — has been fighting against Chief Wahoo and other sports mascots that are degrading toward Native Americans. She was interviewed regarding the image’s high profile during the series against the Chicago Cubs. 
+Dennis Bernstein: Why don’t you give us a little background on your family and growing up in Cleveland? 
+Jacqueline Keeler: Many people don’t know this, but Cleveland was the site of a relocation program that took places in the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s. It was part of a two-pronged program launched by the U.S. Congress to terminate tribes, and to relocate the populace, to relocate Native Americans, to urban centers. And it was a way to make us disappear, and also to gain access to our lands, and many tribes were terminated, and then they had their land sold. And, here in Oregon, many tribes were terminated and they got access to their timber stands. 
+[…] And so, my parents were relocated, they were on the relocation program into Cleveland and as young people. And within a decade of that program starting in Cleveland by the late 60’s [Cleveland] had a pretty substantial Native population for the first time since Native people were removed from Ohio, in the 1830’s, to Oklahoma. Chief Wahoo, the Cleveland Indians’ mascot. 
+DB: And so your parents met there? 
+JK: Uh-huh. 
+DB: And that was part of a relocation and termination policy? 
+JK: Yes, for tribes. And luckily that was defeated, and turned around. And my tribes were not terminated. 
+DB: What was the policy? Explain that policy. 
+JK: Well, the idea was that they would just finally get rid of tribes. Tribes are actually sovereign nations within the United States. And we’re pesky reminders that the United States is basically occupying our lands. And so they were just hoping to wave a wand and make us all go away. And then taking the relocation program was, for young people, from 18 to 35 years of age, and the idea was to basically de-populate our communities, and make us disappear in large cities. 
+And so these relocation programs were set up in Los Angeles, in Denver, in Cleveland, in Dallas, Texas. Within a short time there were about 20,000 young Native people in Cleveland. And what they did was, they began to organize. And one of the first things they began to organize against was Chief Wahoo. And so the earliest documented large scale protest against Chief Wahoo occurred in 1968. 
+DB: Okay, remind us who Chief Wahoo is, what he stands for, because everybody is not from Cleveland. 
+JK: Yeah. It’s a totally grotesque caricature of a Native person. Supposedly, it’s meant to honor a Cleveland baseball player who was Native American back in the early 20th century. It’s a really grotesque caricature. 
+My organization started the notyourmascot hashtag. We trended nationally. Pretty much the only Native hashtag that’s ever trended nationally. And I remember arguing with the Washington NFL fans, and having them say “Well, why? … [Y]our mascot, the Cleveland mascot, is way worse” in defending their own mascot. 
+Of course, for me the issue is mascotry, which is a word I invented. The problem is all the different sort of stereotypes that having a Native mascot promotes in the populace, and in the fans, and what it teaches people about Native people. That’s the problem. You have the red face, the acting out of “Native traditions and culture” and the entitlement it breeds, over our culture and identities. 
+So I remember growing up hearing stories about my parents talking about protesting against Chief Wahoo. We moved away when I was quite young so I didn’t have to live with Chief Wahoo. Although when I wrote the article for Salon, and went over the history of Native people in Cleveland, Salon titled the article “My Life as a Cleveland Indian.” I went back last year and I participated in the protests during the season opener, at Progressive Field, there in Cleveland. And I got to meet the Native community. 
+DB: And what was that like? Was that empowering? […] 
+JK: It was. I landed in Cleveland, and the airport is really small, and people were really friendly. And when I told them I was born there, everyone, even like Cleveland Indian fans that I was interviewing at the games, even though they were drunk, they were really touched that I came back. They actually asked me to move back. It’s the only place I’ve been, besides the reservation, where people have asked me to move back. 
+And I think that’s part of Cleveland’s story, the Ohio River Valley, was… you know the colonists… one of the reasons they launched the Revolutionary War was to gain access to the Ohio River Valley, which was denied to them by King George III because he/they had set that aside as Indian land. And after the Revolutionary War they throw the tribes out, when it comes down to everyone, the Shawnee. 
+And so, it’s just strange that after taking that land and basically committing genocide against the tribes in Ohio, Cleveland is really fearful that they might be abandoned by the United States. They look at Detroit, they can see Detroit from their backyard. They know that the U.S. abandons cities. 
+And so there are still stories partly tied into this idea of… that they are half what they were when my family lived there. They went from being the seventh largest city in the 1950’s to being the 48th or 49th, now. And it’s really shocking. And I really felt really welcomed when I was there. And so for them, their teams winning like this, the Cavs [Cavaliers] last year and now, the MLB in the baseball team, you want to cheer for them. But […] when it’s attached to this kind of racism it makes it very difficult. 
+DB: I want to ask you a little bit about the actual actions that are taking place [during the World Series]. You have an e-mail campaign. I imagine you couldn’t, it’s probably pretty hard to get tickets to the World Series, but are there any protests, in terms of the context of the World Series? 
+JK: Yeah, there are. There’s a really great local group there in Portland. I got to meet with them. They’re called the Committee for 500 Years, and they, actually, are part of… they grew out of the American Indian community in Cleveland, the real Cleveland American Indian community. They have been connecting protests for decades, of these games. And they are doing protests. They are protesting right now, as we speak. And they have a great presence there. 
+And it is sort of surprising because, you know, Cleveland has a really large black community. But when you go to the games, one of the things I noticed was that all the fans were white. Like, I didn’t see any people of color. The Washington Redskins’ mascot. 
+And when we protest at the Redskins game sometimes like 30% of the fans were African American, which is very difficult, because they would walk right by a whole flank of Native people protesting, and just not look us in the eye, or sometimes jeer at us. And you want solidarity. And it’s hard when people, the mascot, I often say that mascoting masks our identities. It dehumanizes us to our fellow Americans, and it’s not a great thing to teach the next generation. 
+I just saw an article where they are giving away Cleveland Indian onesies to newborns in hospitals around Cleveland. And it’s like they’re teaching them these stereotypes at birth. 
+DB: They’re teaching them the stereotypes at birth. You mean, these are like gifts? So we won the World Series so this is a special thing we’re doing? 
+JK: Well, yeah. They just showed a picture of all the newborns in their incubators and they’re all wearing onesies. 
+DB: Well that gets them early, huh? 
+JK: Yeah, and online we’re doing, my group, eradicating offensive Native mascotry. We’re doing a Twitter storm and we’re doing it all week, throughout the World Series. We’re just making sure that people get educated about the facts and the harm that mascotry does. There have been plenty of studies done that show that the teaching of stereotypes are primarily negative. The University of Buffalo came out with a study last year that found that they are negative and that they actually encourage other stereotypes about other groups, as well. 
+And then Dr. Stephanie Fryberg, she did studies at Stanford, where she found that Native youth that were exposed to mascots, Native mascots, had a loss of self-esteem, a measurable loss. She measured their self-esteem before and after, and Native youth who claimed to be okay with Native mascots actually suffered the steepest decline in self-esteem. And, it really indicates that a lot of coping mechanisms have to be employed, a lot of energy employed to make it okay. 
+And Native youths have the highest rates of suicide in the country, bar none. And they have a rate of about three times that of other peers. And Native young men actually have the highest rate. The rates are nine times that of other young American men. And, so, this is the most vulnerable group in America. And they really don’t need this kind of extra added… 
+DB: Alright, so […] there is an e-mail campaign? 
+JK: We have a Twitter storm that we’re doing […]. We’re actually doing notyourmascot and also dechief which is another hashtag that was started by Cleveland fans, where they would cut Chief Wahoo out of their apparel and gear and then post a picture of that online with the hashtag dechief. 
+DB: So, this is interesting. And are there any Native American players on these teams [the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago Cubs] playing [in the World Series]? 
+JK: I don’t know. I don’t think there are. In the early years of baseball there were a lot of pro Native players, in the early 20 th century. My great-grandfather and his twin brother played pro baseball, as well. But I don’t know. I know that the Washington NFL team reportedly recruited a Native, a guy who’s of Native descent onto their team and everything. As a way to try to say that our criticism was unwarranted. But, yeah, I don’t know. 
+DB: And this is now a national struggle because this isn’t the only racist mascot stereotype that’s being perpetuated. This is a part of the professional leagues in the United States. 
+JK: Yeah, it has a huge reach. And, even at the college level and high school level, there are 2,000 high schools in this country that have Native American mascots. And if you were to scale that up for other ethnic groups like for Black Americans which have 10 times the population of Native Americans you would have 20,000 high schools with black mascots and it just gives you the idea of how overwhelming this is for Native people. 
+And to see it on T.V., to have stadiums with 90,000 people in them doing Hopi chants and acting out stereotypes, how isolating that is to Native people, who are really a minority amongst minorities in most communities. And about 80% of all Native people live off the reservation. So they don’t live in communities where they are part of any sort of majority at all, or a significant group. So they have to face this kind of ignorance alone. And, yeah, it has a huge impact. 
+DB: This is amazing. Because if you contrast this with what you also know a lot about, which is what’s going on in North Dakota… what’s happening in North Dakota is what the U.S. government didn’t want to happen and by various acts of genocide like the one we’re talking about tonight, subtle undermining of a culture, by the use of racist stereotypes. This is sort of an interesting parallel structure because you see the oppression here, but there’s a real movement being led by the Native peoples to stop the destruction of the planet. 
+JK: Exactly. I just got back from North Dakota. My dad’s tribe, the Yankton Sioux tribe, some of the sites there are Yankton or Ihanktowan sites, burial sites. That is part of our 1851 Treaty that we signed with the U.S. government and my dad’s tribe has a lawsuit right now with the Army Corps of Engineers, over what’s happening there at Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline. 
+I think when you look at the parallels, basically what is happening, they try to disappear us, there are no tribe reservations in Ohio, and in North Dakota, most of its land that it’s claiming is private land is actually un-ceded treaty territory, which means that the U.S. government signs treaties with tribes. And these are not special little agreements, these are international legal agreements. And the Senate only ratifies treaties with other sovereign nations. So by ratifying treaties with us they recognize our status internationally as sovereign nations. Protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 13, 2016 (Flickr Fibonacci Blue) 
+And so when the Oceti Sakowin, the great Sioux Nation, exerts its rights, it is actually in its legal rights to do so. And, similarly, there are large tracts of land across the United States that have never been actually legally ceded to the United States, they are held by force. The whole state of Nevada, the Shoshone tribe never ceded that. And, of course, the most famous case is the Black Hills which the great Sioux Nation never ceded that land either. And, actually, the Supreme Court agreed with us, in 1981, I think. 
+And so we actually have legal title to these places, and they’re being held. And you can see what’s happening in North Dakota. They’re being held by force. And that force is revealing itself. The United States is a colonial enterprise, whose goal is to profit off of our land. And their only purpose is to make a profit. And they’re not a real nation in the sense that we have a connection to the land. 
+When I woke up last Saturday at camp, they were playing John Trudeau, the Santee Dakota poet, poetry, having him read and he’s passed on, but they had a recording of him, and he was saying, “We are the people of the Earth. Who are you?” And I think that Native nations, our origin stories, always go back to some sort of meeting with a sacred being. 
+With the Lakota and Dakota people it is with the White Buffalo Calf Woman and they say that she actually appeared to us near the site of where the Dakota Access Pipeline is being laid. Right there, where the White Stone massacre happened. And so this is where we became a people, a nation—Dakota and these are the stories that tie us to the land. 
+And these are the stories they are trying to erase. And by making us American citizens and clouding our identity as citizens of our own nations, I think that’s all part of the story. And assuming our identity is, of course, the full circle of that. 
+In my mom’s culture, in Navajo culture, they have these things called skin walkers, they’re like witches, and they wear the skins of animals, and take on their appearance, and really I often feel like this whole thing of taking on our identity in this way through mascotry is a form of skin walking. And it’s a form of trophyism. You know, that they see us and they have a right to do what they want with our image, and our culture. 
+DB: And, what tribe did you say your dad was from? 
+JK: He is Yankton, it’s a Yankton Sioux tribe. In our language it would be Inhanktowan Dakota. 
+DB: And they’re suing the Army Corps of Engineers? 
+JK: Yes. They are. Their lawsuit hasn’t been heard yet, and then, of course, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe is also suing. But they lost and they’re appealing, now. And the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe has enjoined that lawsuit as well. 
+DB: And this suit goes right against the Army Corps of Engineers which has been halted from action by the President, at this point. 
+JK: Yeah, they have…. 
+DB: They have halted the company from going on public lands. 
+JK: Yeah, the federal… the waterways, the Missouri River is the federal waterway, so the Army Corps of Engineers and the federal government has jurisdiction over it. However, most of the pipeline is on private land. In fact, they purchased the Cannonball Ranch, where they had, over Labor Day weekend, dug up recently identified burial sites and other archeological sites for the… 
+DB: The company bought the ranch? 
+JK: They bought it. Yes. Actually, they may have broke the law because North Dakota has a Depression Era law against corporate ownership of agricultural land, non-family owned corporations owning agricultural land in North Dakota. And they admit they broke the law, but they say they’re going to make it right later. 
+DB: So a private citizen sold to the company which proceeded to drill, and did? 
+JK: Yes. 
+[…] 
+JK: My family fought the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Yankton Sioux tribe played a major role in that. And so I talked to the folks, the white farmers that helped us, they band with us. My aunt helped form this alliance called the Cowboy and Indian Alliance, and I talked to them and they said that they’re hearing that… A protestor holds a sign against the Washington football team’s name at a rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota on November 2, 2014 (Flickr Fibonacci Blue) 
+DB: These are the farmers and the Native Americans [who] are working together to restrain the oil…. 
+JK: Yes. We were really lucky to find landowners, white landowners, who were willing to stand with us, cause they take a huge risk. Because they face imminent domain threats. They could pay all these legal fees and still lose their land. And I heard that the Energy Transfer Partners, the Dallas corporation that is behind Dakota Access Pipeline, is even more vicious and even worse than Trans-Canada was. 
+DB: Well, let me ask you, we just got a minute or two left, what are you asking people to do in terms of the stereotypes, in terms of the racist mascots? You talked about an action, I want to remind people what you’re up to and what you folks are trying to do here. 
+JK: We want the mascoting of Native people to stop. And to basically change the emphasis to real representations of Native people in the media, and in sports. And we would like for our real lives to be seen, and to be understood. 
+[…] You know, here in Portland, we have this Powell’s Bookstore that has thousands of books. But how many of those books actually feature Native protagonists? That’s the problem, there’s no balance. People often ask me “Well, what about the Vikings?” Well, the difference is that that’s not the only way you see a white man, as a Viking. If you never saw a white man as anything else than a Viking, and you never saw him on T.V., you never saw him save the world in a Hollywood film, you never saw him as President of the United States, then it would be a similar situation. The issue is the prevalence of mascotry and stereotypes, over real knowledge of Native people. 
+DB: I guess tonight you’ll be rooting for the people and the removal of that racist symbol, right? That will be a home run, for the home team, for you, huh? 
+JK: Well, I guess I’m rooting […] that we get a chance to use this time this week [during the World Series] to really educate people, and to really get people to think about it. And to get Americans to understand, because obviously other Americans understand this, because you will notice that no other ethnic group is mascoted to the degree that Native people are. 
+DB: We’re going to have to leave it right there. 
+Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom . You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net .",FAKE
+4481,Senate Debate Reveals Absurd Level Of Trade Deal Secrecy,"The pair noted that although legislators are allowed to look at the text of the TPP in a secure room, they are only allowed to do so under restrictions that make it nearly impossible to understand what they are reading.
+
+First, they can't bring expert staffers with them unless they have the right clearances, and the aides who have expertise in various relevant areas -- for instance on the impacts on the environment or labor law -- generally are not cleared.
+
+""We are unable to take any notes or consider what we just saw unless we have a photographic memory and, unfortunately, I do not,"" Manchin said. ""I've tried to remember and look at things I knew I was looking for, but still it's almost impossible to walk out of there having the ability to sit down and evaluate what you just saw.""
+
+""I taught the uniform commercial code and the bankruptcy code. I am not afraid of hollow, technical language. But you've got to be able to dig into it, you've got to be able to spend time and figure out the cross-references and the terms of art,"" Warren said. ""It's difficult, thick stuff to read, and it's set up to minimize your capacity to track all the pieces about what's happening.""
+
+""Right now if you’re a staff member of the [Finance] Committee you can look at it. But if you’re one of my people who works for my intelligence staff that has clearance to see what’s going on with nukes or weapons anyplace in the world, or what’s going on with the CIA, they can do that, but they can’t look at that real precious agreement that they’ve drawn up,"" he said.
+
+Hatch admitted somewhat uncomfortably on Thursday that it's hard to know what's in the deal. ""Look, I don't know fully what's in TPP myself,"" he said. ""And I'm going to be one of the most interested people on Earth when that comes.""
+
+But, he argued that the bill moving through the Senate to give Obama his fast-track authority had plenty of transparency, since it requires any trade deal such as TPP to be made public 60 days before signing it with foreign partners, and another 60 days before Congress votes.
+
+Hatch conveniently overlooked that fact that even if lawmakers find specific problems in a deal, there would be little they could do to stop it because fast-track allows no amendments and no filibusters.
+
+The solution of posting a partially redacted version of a deal for everyone to see -- before the president gets fast-track powers -- isn't a new idea, or even a Democratic one, Manchin said. He pointed out that President George W. Bush released the text of the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement.
+
+""He did this months before he was granted fast-track authority,"" Manchin said. ""He wasn't afraid to let us see. He wasn't afraid of the American public to know what was in that ... it didn't squelch the deal. It didn't harm anything.""
+
+Manchin and Warren had hoped to pass their bill as an amendment to the fast-track legislation, but it was clear after the Senate advanced the measure Thursday that they wouldn't get the chance. Instead, they tried to get consent from Hatch to vote on it separately.
+
+The Administration has taken unprecedented steps to increase the transparency of our trade negotiations. That includes working with Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle to make the full text of negotiations and easy to understand summaries of each chapter available to all members of Congress in the Capitol for the first time ever.
+
+ 
+
+ TPP negotiations are still ongoing. Once TPP is completed the public will have months to review the text online before it is even signed by the President and then more time before a vote is ever taken.",REAL
+8091,ISLAM NOT WELCOME: Obama just got TERRIBLE NEWS – THIS could END his MUSLIM “REFUGEE” Program… FOREVER!,"ISLAM NOT WELCOME: Obama just got TERRIBLE NEWS – THIS could END his MUSLIM “REFUGEE” Program… FOREVER! Oct 28, 2016 Previous post 
+The brilliant lawyers at Judicial Watch just did something that is sending SHOCK WAVES through the Obama White House. They are filling official requests to learn every detail about President Barack Obama’s illegal and unconstitutional plan to import thousands of Muslim Syrian “refugees” into America. And they are already taking Obama to court to force him to turn over this information. 
+This bold legal action will expose Obama’s corruption to sunlight, and could quickly be the end of the Syrian refugee program. Incredible! 
+Judicial Watch is suing the Department of State for documents related to President Barack Obama’s Refugee and Resettlement program as part of an investigation into the Obama administration’s plan to admit at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next year, the conservative foundation announced Monday. 
+The suit was filed in Washington, D.C., after the State Department failed to respond to two Freedom of Information Act requests from Judicial Watch in 2015. In May, Judicial Watch sought records related to the State Department’s agreements and interactions with voluntary agencies that help place and assist new refugees. In September, Judicial Watch sought records regarding an August meeting between State Department representatives and a South Carolina non-profit. 
+“The Obama administration doesn’t want Americans to know about how it places refugees from terrorist states in their local communities,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton says in a statement Monday. “The fact we had to file a federal lawsuit to obtain basic information about Obama’s 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+3269,McConnell: Trump's Muslim ban wouldn't pass the Senate,"Donald Trump's proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States would go nowhere in the Senate, the Republican leader there says.
+
+""We're not gonna follow that suggestion that this particular candidate made,"" Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN's Jake Tapper Sunday on ""State of the Union.""
+
+""It would prevent the president of Afghanistan from coming to the United States. The king of Jordan couldn't come to the United States,"" he said. ""Obviously we're not going to do that.""
+
+McConnell had previously criticized Trump's proposal to temporarily block Muslims from entering the United States in the wake of terror attacks in Paris and California.
+
+Despite his rebuke of Trump's proposal, McConnell wouldn't weigh in any further on the presidential race Sunday.",REAL
+9955,Putin Warns “US Has Pushed Russia Back Into Nuclear Arms Race”,"( ZHE ) Having unveiled the first images of its new nuclear missile capable of reaching US soil, Russian President Vladimir Putin is warning today that Washington’s actions are “pushing Russian into a nuclear arms race,” forcing Russia “to develop its nuclear attack systems.” Yesterday, Russia reveals photos of a new highly advanced liquid fuelled heavy ICBM capable of evading anti-missile defences and hitting US territory with 10 tonne nuclear payload.
+The Makeyev Design Bureau – the designer of Russia’s heavy liquid fuelled Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (“ICBMs”) – ie. of missiles capable of reaching US territory from Russian territory, has published the first picture of Russia’s new heavy Sarmat ICBM which is due to enter service shortly, probably in 2018.
+The picture is accompanied by a short statement which reads
+“In accordance with the Decree of the Russian Government ‘On the State Defence Order for 2010 and the planning period 2012-2013,’ the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau was instructed to start design and development work on the Sarmat. In June 2011, the Bureau and the Russian Ministry of Defense signed a state contract for the Sarmat’s development. The prospective strategic missile system is being developed in order to assuredly and effectively fulfil objectives of nuclear deterrent by Russia’s strategic forces. ”
+And now today, Putin explains:
+*PUTIN: INTERMEDIATE NUCLEAR FORCES TREATY SHOULD BE OBSERVED *PUTIN: RUSSIA, U.S. MUST BREAK VICIOUS CIRCLE OF CONFRONTATION *PUTIN: RUSSIA HAS TO DEVELOP ITS NUCLEAR ATTACK SYSTEMS *PUTIN: U.S. PUSHED RUSSIA TO ARMS RACE IN NUCLEAR SPHERE",FAKE
+6631,Israel Refuses Participation In Paris Peace Conference,"Israel Refuses Participation In Paris Peace Conference Israel said the peace conference is a distraction from the goal of direct negotiations with the Palestinians.   Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walks out following a press conference at his Jerusalem office on Tuesday, July 14, 2015. 
+A French government effort to hold a Middle East peace conference in Paris next month is off to a rocky start, with Israel summoning the French Ambassador to inform him that they oppose the effort and will not attend the Paris meeting under any conditions. 
+France has been talking up the idea of trying to get a new peace process going for months, with Israeli officials expressing serious concern that the United States might not veto a French resolution on the peace process at the UN Security Council. Israeli officials today accused the conference of being a “distraction.” 
+Palestinian officials had already endorsed the conference before Israel rejected it, and Palestinian spokesman Nabil Abu Rdainah insisted that they remain in favor of holding the conference to discuss ideas for getting the peace process going whether or not Israel attends. 
+French officials have not commented on Israel’s refusal to participate, but probably will go ahead with the planned conference, as Israel’s rejection is not a surprise. Indeed, much of the current far-right government has reacted negatively to the idea of a peace process in general, and has been particularly hostile toward the French effort throughout.",FAKE
+4496,"Obama nominates Merrick Garland to Supreme Court, sets up Senate showdown","President Obama named federal appeals judge Merrick Garland on Wednesday as his pick to succeed Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court – setting up a showdown with Republicans who have vowed to block the choice.
+
+Obama, who said he went through a rigorous and comprehensive screening process, said Garland would bring “integrity, modesty and an even-handedness” to the Supreme Court.
+
+“I said I would take this process seriously, and I did,” Obama said at the Rose Garden ceremony.
+
+Yet within minutes, Republicans doubled down on their opposition to confirming any nominee in an election year, insisting that the vacant seat not be filled until a new president is sworn in.
+
+“It is a president’s constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice and it is the Senate’s constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor.
+
+Obama, anticipating the swift resistance, urged Republicans to reconsider, adding it would be unprecedented for Garland not to at least get a hearing.
+
+“I hope they’re fair. That’s all,” Obama said. “To give him a fair hearing and up or down vote.”
+
+Obama said earlier Wednesday that it was both his “constitutional duty to nominate a justice and one of the most important decisions that I – or any president – will make.”
+
+He added, “I’m doing my job. I hope that our senators will do their jobs, and move quickly to consider my nominee.”
+
+A Senate confirmation is required for any nominee to join the bench.
+
+Before the announcement, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also told Fox News that neither he nor his GOP colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee would back down and declared once more he would stop the nomination from going forward.
+
+“We’ve been clear,” Lee said of his plan to reject Garland’s nomination.
+
+Garland has served under both Republicans and Democrats. He clerked for the court’s liberal icon, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. In 1997, 32 Republicans voted in favor of his nomination, including seven who are still members of the Senate.
+
+Garland was mentioned as a possible nominee when Justice Paul Stevens retired in 2010.
+
+The vacancy ultimately went to Justice Elena Kagan.
+
+Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democratic leader, called Garland's section, ""a bipartisan choice,"" adding: ""If the Republicans can't support him, who can they support?""
+
+Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who spoke to Obama Wednesday morning, said in brief remarks on the Senate floor that Republicans must act on the president's choice. ""He's doing his job this morning, they should do theirs,"" said the Nevada Democrat.
+
+If confirmed, Garland would be expected to align with the more liberal members, but he is not viewed as down-the-line liberal. Particularly on criminal defense and national security cases, he's earned a reputation as centrist, and one of the few Democratic-appointed judges Republicans might have fast-tracked to confirmation -- under other circumstances.
+
+But in the current climate, Garland remains a tough sell. Republicans control the Senate, which must confirm any nominee, and GOP leaders want to leave the choice to the next president, denying Obama a chance to alter the ideological balance of the court before he leaves office next January. Republicans contend that a confirmation fight in an election year would be too politicized.
+
+Ahead of Obama's announcement, the Republican Party set up a task force that will orchestrate attack ads, petitions and media outreach. The aim is to bolster Senate Republicans' strategy of denying consideration of Obama's nominee. The party's chairman, Reince Priebus, described it as the GOP's most comprehensive judicial response effort ever.
+
+On the other side, Obama allies have been drafted to run a Democratic effort that will involve liberal groups that hope an Obama nominee could pull the high court's ideological balance to the left. The effort would target states where activists believe Republicans will feel political heat for opposing hearings once Obama announced his nominee.
+
+For Obama, Garland represents a significant departure from his past two Supreme Court choices. In nominating Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, the president eagerly seized the chance to broaden the court's diversity and rebalance the overwhelming male institution. Sotomayor was the first Hispanic confirmed to the court, Kagan only the fourth woman.
+
+Garland -- a white, male jurist with an Ivy League pedigree and career spent largely in the upper echelon of the Washington's legal elite -- breaks no barriers. At 63 years old, he would be the oldest Supreme Court nominee since Lewis Powell, who was 64 when he was confirmed in late 1971.
+
+Presidents tend to appoint young judges with the hope they will shape the court's direction for as long as possible.
+
+Those factors had, until now, made Garland something of a perpetual bridesmaid, repeatedly on Obama's Supreme Court lists, but never chosen.
+
+But Garland found his moment at time when Democrats are seeking to apply maximum pressure on Republicans. A key part of their strategy is casting Republicans as knee-jerk obstructionists ready to shoot down a nominee that many in their own ranks once considered a consensus candidate. In 2010, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch called Garland ""terrific"" and said he could be confirmed ""virtually unanimously.""
+
+The White House planned to highlight Hatch's past support, as well as other glowing comments about Garland from conservatives.
+
+A native of Chicago and graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Garland clerked for two appointees of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- the liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr. and Judge Henry J. Friendly, for whom Chief Justice John Roberts also clerked.
+
+In 1988, he gave up a plush partner's office in a powerhouse law firms to cut his teeth in criminal cases. As an assistant U.S. attorney, he joined the team prosecuting a Reagan White House aide charged with illegal lobbying and did early work on the drug case against then-D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. He held a top-ranking post in the Justice Department when he was dispatched to Oklahoma City the day after bombing at the federal courthouse to supervise the investigation. The case made his career and his reputation. He oversaw the convictions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and went on to supervise the investigation into Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
+
+President Bill Clinton first nominated him to the D.C. Circuit in 1995.
+
+His prolonged confirmation process may prove to have prepared him for the one ahead. Garland waited 2 1/2 years to win confirmation to the appeals court. Then, as now, one of the man blocking path was Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, argued he had no quarrel with Garland's credentials, but a beef with the notion of a Democratic president trying to fill a court he argued had too many seats.
+
+Grassley ultimately relented, although he was not one of the 32 Republicans who voted in favor of Garland's confirmation. Nor was Sen. Mitch McConnell, the other major hurdle for Garland now. The Republicans who voted in favor of confirmation are Sen. Dan Coats, Sen. Thad Cochran, Sen. Susan Collins, Sen. Orrin Hatch, Sen. Jim Inhofe, Sen. John McCain, and Sen. Pat Roberts.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8277,‘Like Asking if You’ll Stop Beating Your Wife’: Saudi Ambassador to US Dodges Yemen Cluster Bomb Question - American Herald Tribune,"22 Shares
+3 18 0 1
+Prince Abdullah Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, was confronted by a reporter from the Intercept .
+“Will you continue to use cluster weapons in Yemen?” the reporter asked the diplomat.
+Al-Saud laughed before answering: “This is like the question, ‘Will you stop beating your wife?’”
+After the reporter repeated the question, the ambassador again dismissed it, saying “You are political operators. I’m not a politician.”
+Speaking at the Annual Arab-US Policymakers Conference last week, al-Saud insisted that the Saudi-led coalition will continue its bombing campaign in Yemen, the Intercept reported.
+“If anyone attacks human lives and disturbs the border, in whatever region, we’re going to continue hitting them, no matter what,” said al-Saud.
+Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused the Saudi-led coalition of war crimes following an airstrike on a funeral in Yemen on October 8. In that incident, at least two air-dropped munitions penetrated the roof of a hall containing over 1,000 mourners during the funeral ceremony of Ali al-Rawishan, the father of the Sanaa-based administration’s interior minister, Jalal al-Rawishan. At least 140 people were killed and 610 wounded.
+Despite calls by US officials to review its support for its Middle Eastern ally, Washington continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, approving more than $20 billion in military sales in 2015 alone, HRW reports.
+According to UN data from August this year, the Saudi intervention in Yemen has claimed the lives of at least 10,000 people, including almost 4,000 civilians. The UN and HRW have repeatedly accused the Saudi military of dropping cluster bombs in Yemeni residential areas.
+Recommended For You Saudis Foil ISIS Terror Attacks on Packed Stadium The Saudi Interior Ministry on Sunday announced that four men were arrested over plans to detonate a bomb at the King Abdullah Sports...
+By AHT Staff Jaish Al-Fatah Leader Admits Receiving Financial, Military Aid from Saudi Arabia According to the Syrian dissidents' news website, Enab, Muhaysini has released a video recently in which he appreciated Riyadh and other A...
+By AHT Staff Yemeni forces fire ballistic missile deep inside Saudi Arabia at Jeddah airport Yemeni soldiers and their allies fired a Borkan-1 (Volcano-1) missile towards King Abdulaziz International Airport, located 19 kilome...
+By AHT Staff No One Supports, Defends Saudi Arabia without Taking Bribe: German Chancellor Angela Merkel",FAKE
+8137,National Attention On Ayotte - Hassan (*NH) Senate Race,"Maggie Hassan, left and Kelly Ayotte Hassan declares victory in U.S. Senate race with Ayotte By PAUL FEELYNew Hampshire Union Leader Update, 11:00 a.m. Gov. Maggie Hassan declared she’s won New Hampshire's U.S. Senate race, unseating Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte.During a hastily-called press conference outside the State House, Hassan said she’s ahead now by enough votes to survive returns from the few outstanding towns that are left.“I am proud to stand here as the next United States senator from New Hampshire,” Hassan said to cheers from a large group of supporters led by Congresswoman Annie Kuster and Hassan’s husband, Tom.The two-term governor said she hadn’t spoken with Ayotte.It’s clear we have maintained the lead in and have won this race,” Hassan said.Sen. Ayotte issued a brief statement after Hassan’s event but did not concede and deferred to Secretary of State Bill Gardner’s final results.""This has been a closely contested race from the beginning and we look forward to results being announced by the Secretary of State, and ensuring that every vote is counted in this race that has received an historic level of interest,” Ayotte said.Hassan said she called to congratulate Gov.-Elect Chris Sununu, a Newfields Republican, and vowed to work together on a smooth transition of power in the state’s corner office.With 99 percent of the vote counted, Hassan led Ayotte, a Nashua Republican, by 640 votes, or much less than 1 percent. There were only two voting precincts left to report.A recount of this statewide race seems like a real possibility; the margin is small enough that Ayotte will not have to pay for it. An earlier story follows: CONCORD — Republican incumbent Sen. Kelly Ayotte told supporters early Wednesday she is feeling ""really upbeat"" about her chances in one of the most closely watched — and expensive — U.S. Senate races in the country, but wasn't ready to claim victory over Democratic challenger Gov. Maggie Hassan to earn a return to Washington representing the Granite State.At 12:36 a.m., Ayotte took to the podium at the Grappone Conference Center in Concord to address supporters at her victory party, in a dead heat with Hassan 48 percent to 48 percent, or 287,479 votes to 284,743 votes, with 83 percent of precincts in the state reporting.""Joe and I are so excited to see all of you her tonight,"" said Ayotte. ""We feel really upbeat tonight.""Ayotte went on to thank supporters and ""our next Gov. Sununu.""""We know how hard you have all worked. We are so grateful. We are humbled by the fact that you would believe in us. Right now we are very upbeat about where this race is, but I believe strongly in the fact that we want to have every vote in before we come out and talk to you. Every vote matters, because every person matters in this state.""Gov. Hassan said while the race was too close to call, the campaign maintained a 5,000 vote lead, according to numbers compiled by her staff.“We still have a small but sustainable lead,” she said.Hassan told the crowd that a number of smaller towns had yet to report numbers, but was confident the lead would hold. The campaign said its numbers show Hassan has a vote of 323,375 to Ayotte’s 318,016 in over 90 percent of vote. The campaign said these numbers include results from big communities the Associated Press had yet to count like Salem, Derry, Lebanon, and Portsmouth. The cities of Manchester, Nashua, and Concord are included in the Hassan numbers.The governor headed home for the night and urged supporters to go home and get some sleep.Election Day 2016 marked the end of a long campaign cycle in the Granite State that kicked off nine months ago with the presidential primaries nine months ago, and didn’t let up until the final ballots were cast around 8 p.m. Tuesday.The Ayotte/Hassan contest, the most expensive political race ever in New Hampshire with over $100 million spent, took center stage this cycle alongside the presidential race between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, cementing New Hampshire’s status as a battleground state, with its four electoral votes up for grabs. The race is one of about a half dozen around the U.S. being closely watched on Tuesday, with the outcome likely playing a part in deciding if the Republicans retain control of the Senate, or if Democrats regain the majority they lost two years ago.""It has been a great night for Republicans not just in New Hampshire but across the country,"" said NH GOP Chair Jennifer Horn. ""In New Hampshire, we know that when Republicans stand together, when Republicans fight together, we win."" .",FAKE
+1099,Trump has lit a fire. Can it be contained?,"An already ugly presidential campaign has descended to a new level — one where the question is no longer whether Donald Trump can be stopped on his march to the Republican presidential nomination, but whether it is possible to contain what he has unleashed across the country.
+
+Violence at Trump’s rallies has escalated sharply, and the reality-show quality of his campaign has taken a more ominous turn in the past few days. On Saturday, a man charged the stage in Dayton, Ohio, and a swarm of Secret Service agents surrounded the GOP front-runner.
+
+Later Saturday at a Trump rally in Kansas City, the candidate was repeatedly interrupted by protesters, who were then removed from the venue. Outside the rally, police said they used pepper spray to control crowds. Kansas City police said that two protesters were arrested.
+
+The racially tinged anger that has both fueled Trump’s political rise and stoked the opposition to it has turned into a force unto itself. It has also brought a reckoning from his three remaining rivals for the Republican nomination, who are shedding their fear of provoking Trump and of alienating the raging slice of their party’s base that has claimed him as its leader.
+
+But Trump should not be viewed in isolation or as the product of a single election, President Obama said Saturday at a fundraiser in Dallas.
+
+Obama said those who “feed suspicion about immigrants and Muslims and poor people, and people who aren’t like ‘us,’ and say that the reason that America is in decline is because of ‘those’ people. That didn’t just happen last week. That narrative has been promoted now for years.”
+
+This year’s presidential campaign, however, seems to have fallen into a bottomless spiral.
+
+A low point came Friday night. Where Trump has delighted in mocking hecklers — and condoning attacks on them by his supporters — he was forced to cancel a rally at the last minute after protesters turned up by the thousands. That set off a chaotic scene in the arena at the University of Illinois at Chicago that left a handful injured and thousands agitated.
+
+[Campaign 2016 is on a dangerous descent]
+
+Trump’s continued domination of the GOP race suggests that there are no guardrails left in politics. Party elders and his opponents assumed that at some point, he would self-destruct. But he has defied just about every norm, and it has redounded to his benefit.
+
+His candidacy and the sentiment it provokes have also stirred disturbing historical comparisons.
+
+GOP political consultant Stuart Stevens, who was a top strategist for 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, said Trump’s rhetoric is “almost verbatim” what segregationist George Wallace was saying in his third-party 1968 presidential campaign.
+
+“I don’t know what’s in Trump’s heart, but I don’t care. What he’s saying is really hateful,” Stevens said. “What did the Democratic Party do with Wallace? They rejected him.”
+
+Some on the right accused the anti-Trump forces who shut down the rally in Chicago of being the true culprits, who denied the GOP front-runner an opportunity to exercise his constitutional right to free speech.
+
+“It’s sad, number one, that you have protesters that resort to violence, that resort to threats of violence that resort to yelling and screaming and disruption to silence speech that they don’t like,” said Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is running a distant second to Trump in the GOP primaries.
+
+But Trump’s Republican opponents — all of whom have pledged to support Trump if he gets the nomination — said that the New York billionaire cannot be held blameless.
+
+“I think it is also true that any campaign, responsibility begins and ends at the top,” Cruz said.
+
+“Look at the rhetoric of the front-runner in the presidential campaign,” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said Saturday. “This is a man who at rallies has told his supporters to basically beat up the people who are in the crowd and he’ll pay their legal fees. Someone who’s basically encouraged the people in the audience to rough up anyone who stands up and says something he doesn’t like.
+
+“I still at this moment continue to intend to support the Republican nominee, but it’s getting harder every day.”
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich condemned Trump for creating a “toxic environment” that has led supporters and protesters to “come together in violence,” but he, too, stopped short of saying he would not support his Republican rival if Trump secures the party’s presidential nomination.
+
+Their increasingly pointed criticism of Trump comes at a crucial moment in the GOP race, with primaries being held Tuesday in five states that could either propel Trump to the nomination or give life to the effort to stop him.
+
+Most closely watched will be Florida and Ohio, which are considered must-wins for home-state candidates Rubio and Kasich. And for the first time in this electoral season, delegates will be awarded on a winner-take-all basis, which means that victories by Trump would accelerate his efforts to secure the nomination.
+
+Trump has won GOP contests in 15 states, accumulating an estimated 458 Republican delegates of the 1,237 he needs.
+
+On Thursday, the candidates held their final debate before the next round of primaries, and they managed to remain civil to one another and focused on their substantive differences.
+
+During the debate, Trump was asked about an incident in which a supporter at a rally in Fayetteville, N.C., punched a protester.
+
+“There is some anger. There’s also great love for the country. It’s a beautiful thing in many respects. But I certainly do not condone that at all,” Trump said.
+
+Now, the outbreak of violence in Chicago had again drawn focus to Trump’s temperament and character, as well as whether he has played a role in inciting his supporters.
+
+[After months of playing protesters to his advantage, Donald Trump is overpowered in Chicago]
+
+For months, Trump has been able to control — and even employ as foils — the hundreds of protesters who show up to his rallies to oppose what they consider divisive and racist.
+
+Trump often says that he loves having protesters at his rallies, that they make his rallies fun. Plus, the interruptions are an opportunity to show him bossing around and mocking liberals, often bellowing, “Get ’em out!”
+
+In the past two weeks, however, these interruptions have increasingly eaten into Trump’s speaking time and become more violent. The Trump supporter who punched the protester in North Carolina was charged with assault.
+
+Asked about the criticism from other Republican candidates following the Chicago cancellation, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski mocked them: “Do they have protesters at their events? Do they have any people at their events?”
+
+Lewandowski — who has been accused of and denies manhandling a female reporter at a Trump event — also said his candidate does not plan to do anything to calm his supporters.
+
+“The American people are angry,” Lewandowski said. “They’re upset at the way this country has been run. They’re upset that this country is being taken advantage of by every other country in the world. And they’re tired of not being proud to be Americans.”
+
+As for Trump, he insisted that his supporters had been blameless in Chicago. He accused backers of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator and democratic socialist, of inciting the violence.
+
+“My people are nice,” Trump said at his rally in Dayton. “Thousands and thousands of people, they caused no problem. They were taunted, they were harassed by these other people. These other people, by the way, some represent Bernie, our communist. . . . He should really get up and say to his people: ‘Stop. Stop.’ ”
+
+Sanders retorted in a statement issued by his campaign: “As is the case virtually every day, Donald Trump is showing the American people that he is a pathological liar. Obviously, while I appreciate that we had supporters at Trump’s rally in Chicago, our campaign did not organize the protests.”
+
+“What caused the protests at Trump’s rally is a candidate that has promoted hatred and division against Latinos, Muslims, women, and people with disabilities, and his birther attacks against the legitimacy of President Obama,” Sanders added, referring to Trump’s false assertions that Obama was born in Africa and was therefore disqualified to be president.
+
+Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton also jumped into the fray.
+
+“The ugly, divisive rhetoric we are hearing from Donald Trump and the encouragement of violence and aggression is wrong, and it’s dangerous,” she said at an appearance in St. Louis. “If you play with matches, you’re going to start a fire you can’t control.”
+
+The decision to cancel the rally on Friday was made by the Trump campaign, not the agencies charged with keeping him safe.
+
+Trump requested Secret Service protection in October and was granted a detail of agents in early November.
+
+Government officials have said their role is only to protect Trump and that any decisions to throw out the hecklers and protesters at Trump rallies are made by the campaign or groups hosting the events. Secret Service agents intervene only, officials have said, if someone verbally or physically threatens the candidate.
+
+After the man tried to breach the barricades around Trump on Saturday, he was charged with disorderly conduct and inciting panic by the Dayton police, according to an official familiar with the matter. Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer identified the man as Thomas Dimassimo of Fairborn, Ohio, the Associated Press reported.
+
+“I was ready for him, but it’s much easier if the cops do it, don’t we agree?” Trump said after the man was hauled away. “And to think I had such an easy life! What do I need this for, right?”
+
+Tumulty reported from Washington. Johnson reported from Chicago and DelReal from Dayton. Also contributing to this story were Ed O’Keefe in Largo, Fla.; Abby Phillip in St. Louis; Philip Rucker in Cleveland; Jim Tankersley in Sharonville, Ohio; Juliet Eilperin and David Weigel in Washington; and Katie Zezima in Ballwin, Mo.",REAL
+6543,Energy Update – Super High Geomagnetic Solar Winds,"We’ve gone Ultra-Sonic. By Lisa Transcendence Brown
+Super high geomagnetic solar winds started about an hour or two ago. These knock us on our butts. We go through an intense inability to function as we upgrade huge. The body goes weak, the mind goes mush. High high high charging protons/ions and these sound like razors, which are part of diamond light lasers. These re-calibrate our magnetics, they tune us high really fast. They “sing” us to sleep, literally, s high in frequency, we basically cannot do anything else.
+I came home ready to rock it out. New courses, new lots of stuff to get done…. nope…. Outside was magnificent! I thought about getting my computer and getting back in the car, going to a coffee shop to work, as inside the house, the frequency is so high, it’s right to sleep in these energies. Walked through the door, it took 2 minutes to crawl to the bed (not literally this time, more for the affect of how strong these are. Years ago was crawling…)
+We are going super mega high…. sleep where called. Integration is faster. I’m done for brainwork today. Spent the morning gifting, which is always super uber mega awesome!
+READ: She’s back! Large coronal hole faces Earth again 
+Okay loves. Honor your upgrades, your body. You may have to get away from electronics, as when you are tuning, they drain you. After the process is complete (the next day or days later), you’ll be better than new and ready to rock and roll! Some times we slow-mo-it through our stuff… which is many days now, in these super high frequencies.
+Working with the energetics is definitely an art. It’s been this way for years and continues to increase as we go. Every moment dictates, getting used to the flow, learning to navigate with it and then master it…. it’s a process for us all!
+Right now the crown of my head could just shoot off. We have lift-off loves! Here we g !
+Gravity goes, pineal, spine, chest, nasal… abdomen … hearing/sound adjustments…most noticeable right now.
+Source: Awakening to Remember 
+Via: In5D 
+Related: She’s back! Large coronal hole faces Earth again ",FAKE
+1808,Family history hounds Jeb Bush on campaign trail,"When Jeb Bush stepped up onto the fabled soapbox at the Iowa State Fair on Friday, fairgoers pelted him with questions about the legacy of his brother, a former president. And his father, another former president. And one of his foreign policy advisers, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the architect of his brother’s war in Iraq. And about the war itself.
+
+Under a blazing sun, Bush expressed irritation with what he called “the parlor game” of focusing on Wolfowitz and other past Bush administration advisers who have resurfaced for this Bush campaign.
+
+“If I’m president, we will have a strategy on Day One to take out this grave threat to our national security and to the world,” he said. “I promise you that.”
+
+This was supposed to be the week when Bush would finally lay out his own thoughts on how to combat the Islamic State terror group and put Hillary Rodham Clinton on the defensive — and wrest himself from his family legacy in the process. But over several days, it has become evident that his ideas on the subject are remarkably similar to George W. Bush’s ideas and that he firmly believes that Democrats — not his brother — deserve the blame for the unrest in Iraq and neighboring Syria.
+
+His new struggles with the issue also come as he is fading in polls and being drowned out by the angry outsiders dominating the race.
+
+According to Bush this week, the removal of Saddam Hussein from power “turned out to be a pretty good deal.” The 2007 troop surge was “an extraordinarily effective” strategy. By the time his brother left office, he said, the “mission was accomplished” in Iraq because security had been restored.
+
+Bush also said he won’t rule out waterboarding in the interrogation of terrorism suspects, although he added, “I do think in general that torture is not appropriate.”
+
+Bush faults President Obama for his unwillingness to talk directly about “radical Islamic terrorists” and Clinton for visiting Iraq only once as secretary of state. He said it might be necessary to deploy more U.S. forces to both Iraq and Syria — and that troops already on the ground should be embedded more closely with local forces.
+
+As for questions about advisers, Bush told fairgoers Friday that he has a young team working at his campaign headquarters in Miami. Shrugging, Bush said any veteran GOP foreign policy advisers “had to deal with two Republican administrations” run by his brother and father.
+
+“I mean, this is kind of a tough game to be playing, to be honest with you,” he said. “I’m my own person.”
+
+In an interview Friday, radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Bush whether it’s easier or harder for him to talk about national security given his last name. Bush shot back: “It doesn’t matter. I’m the first candidate to have a view on this with enough detail for people to see what the world would look like if I’m president.”
+
+But Democrats are eager to exploit Bush’s remarks this week to remind voters of his family ties. During a town hall in Dubuque, Iowa, on Friday afternoon, Clinton took aim at Bush’s criticism of her, noting that his brother signed an agreement as president to withdraw combat troops from the country by 2011.
+
+“I do think that it’s a little bit surprising to hear Jeb Bush talk about this,” she said. “He expects the American people to have a collective case of amnesia.”
+
+Later in the town hall, Clinton sought to single out Jeb Bush’s comments on women’s issues but mistakenly referred to him as “George Bush.”
+
+“I get confused,” she said, seeming to relish her error. “Oh, well.”
+
+Most Americans still believe the Iraq war was a mistake and are opposed to new military engagement — making Jeb Bush’s approach to national security risky. But polling suggests that his positions are popular among most Republicans, especially if it means raising doubts about Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
+
+“Jeb is going to talk about the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and how to defeat it,” said Tim Miller, Bush’s campaign communications director. “If the Democrats want to talk about the past, that’s their prerogative, but the American people are looking for someone who will address today’s growing terror threat, and they didn’t get it from Obama/Clinton.”
+
+[The world according to Jeb Bush]
+
+Among his GOP rivals, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has said that “it was a mistake to topple” Hussein, while New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says it “makes no sense for us to be re-litigating yesterday.”
+
+Businessman Donald Trump has it both ways, blaming George W. Bush for invading the country in the first place and Obama for pulling troops out in 2011. “The war should have never happened,” he told Fox News earlier this year. “Once it did happen, you should have left the troops in. It’s really a double fault.”
+
+In Iowa — where Bush polled seventh in a CNN-ORC poll released this week — there are some Republicans who appreciate his approach and think his dynastic lineage is a positive attribute.
+
+“He’s going to be our man because he’s presidential; he knows what’s going on,” said Belinda Schlueter, a 56-year-old homemaker. “He comes from a family that actually knows what the country’s all about and how the office runs. We need somebody there that knows what they’re doing.”
+
+Bush launched his discussions of national security Tuesday in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif. He faulted Obama and Clinton for their “blind haste” to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, a “premature” decision and a “fatal error” that disrupted the fragile progress his brother helped forge in Iraq. He did not mention his brother’s role in starting the process for withdrawal.
+
+While there are about 3,500 U.S. support troops in Iraq now, “more may well be needed,” Bush said. He endorsed deploying troops to work more closely with Iraqi forces, including as forward air spotters to help identify targets. “We do not need, and our friends do not ask for, a major commitment of American combat forces,” he said. “But we do need to convey that we are serious, that we are determined to help local forces take back their country.”
+
+In Syria, he called for more active U.S. involvement in the brutal Syrian civil war — including a no-fly zone and the expansion of “safe zones” in the country.
+
+On Thursday, at a national security forum in Davenport, Iowa, he said “Iraq was fragile but secure” when his brother left office in 2009. He added that the “mission was accomplished in the way that there was security there and it was because of the heroic efforts of the men and women in the United States military that it was so.”
+
+That answer immediately prompted comparisons to George W. Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech on the deck of a Navy carrier that critics say prematurely declared the end of the Iraqi military campaign.
+
+At the forum, Jeb Bush would not say for certain whether he would preserve the executive order Obama signed banning enhanced interrogation. Later Thursday, he told reporters that he would not rule out using waterboarding during interrogations of terrorism suspects.
+
+Former House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), whose group hosted the forum, credited Bush with presenting “the most nuanced approach to a really hard problem.”
+
+[Op-Ed: To defeat the Islamic State, the U.S. will have to go big]
+
+Rogers, who is neutral in the GOP primary contests, said, “Campaigns now are [so] tapped in to 140 characters and Twitter, it’s very difficult to have a thoughtful conversation about national security.”
+
+Peter Feaver, who advised George W. Bush on Iraq, applauded Bush for delivering “a detailed speech” and suggested he represented views “advocated by serious Democrats and Republicans.”
+
+He pointed to a recent Washington Post op-ed co-written by Michèle Flournoy, Obama’s former undersecretary of defense for policy who has been touted as a possible defense secretary for Clinton. Writing with Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Flournoy advocated a series of proposals similar to what Bush called for: to provide more military aid to Sunni tribes and the Kurdish peshmerga in Iraq; to embed more Special Operations forces with Iraqi security forces; to deploy forward air controllers to identify targets; and to build a stronger global campaign against the Islamic State.
+
+After parrying questions lobbed at him by Iowans, Bush donned a red apron and flipped pork chops with Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R). Carl Owens, a hog farmer, stood off to the side taking in the scene.
+
+“I don’t know if he’s like his brother and dad or not,” said Owens, 59. “I wasn’t too happy with them. Mr. Bush, the last president, look at the mess he got the United States into over there where we shouldn’t have been. Kind of like the Vietnam War. We shouldn’t have been there.”
+
+O’Keefe reported from Washington. Sean Sullivan in Iowa contributed to this report.",REAL
+44,Donors to G.O.P. Candidates: You’re on Your Own,"The Republican presidential race has often resembled The Hunger Games, with a crowded field of bloodthirsty candidates kept alive by the grace of their patrons on the sidelines. The story has taken a darker turn in recent weeks, with panic creeping in as Donald Trump continues to step over the bodies of more electable candidates. But with no clear winner emerging from New Hampshire, Republican donors, who were once ready to coalesce around Marco Rubio, have pressed pause on their money to see if a candidate will walk out of South Carolina with enough strength left to take down Trump (and Ted Cruz, who follows in his wake).
+
+While several donors indicated that they would stick with their preferred candidates for now, others—including donors for Chris Christie, who dropped out of the race earlier this week—have no idea if their investments will pan out, especially after what amounted to a three-way tie for third in New Hampshire. “The feeling after New Hampshire is that it couldn’t have gone better for Donald Trump and it’s not just the margin that he won by, it’s the finishing order,” one Republican leader who regularly speaks to donors told The Hill, adding that John Kasich, a candidate whom he viewed as unelectable, had only muddled things further by coming in second. (Kasich did get a big boost from former Christie mega-donor Ken Langone, who announced on Thursday that he would support the Ohio governor.)
+
+That feeling is magnified among Bush donors, many of whom had hoped that he would have “died quietly in New Hampshire,” the same source told The Hill, but who feel pressured after his slim victory over Rubio to give more money. “I have not talked to a single Bush donor who was giddy about Tuesday night,” he added. Another source noted that their fund-raising outlook was so dismal that Bush’s campaign-finance chairman, Woody Johnson, had asked the finance committee to bring in just one $2,700 check—the maximum amount an individual can donate to a single candidate—per week for the next five weeks.
+
+Despite the dual threat of Trump and Cruz, potential donors for Rubio, the onetime establishment golden child, are also sitting on the sidelines after a disastrous debate performance kicked the Florida senator to fifth place in New Hampshire. “The Rubio team didn’t understand the gravity of the punch he had taken and the need to correct course. That worries a lot of people,” the Republican leader added. “[Donors] are not abandoning [Rubio] but they need to see him steady things this week.”
+
+Nevertheless, even as the three establishment candidates attempt to devour each other in South Carolina, 85 percent of the donor class and the insiders polled by the Politico Caucus remain confident that Trump will never get the nomination, pointing to their collective firepower (were they ever to join forces) and the fact that his popularity appears limited to roughly one-third of the population. “That means two-thirds of the vote is ‘not Trump,’” a South Carolina Republican told Politico, insisting that the math shook out. “If he has a ceiling, then as others drop out, Cruz or one of the establishment candidates can pass him. We are down to six in South Carolina—let’s see if he grows this time.”
+
+But Sam Wang, head of the Princeton Election Consortium, ran a more statistical analysis, and concluded that the math was not as simple as the insiders’ poll suggests. “With the Republican field so divided after New Hampshire, the path for anyone other than Trump requires nearly all candidates to drop out,” he said. “However, after getting 3-4 convention delegates each on Tuesday, Cruz, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio all have reasons to stay in. Under these conditions, Trump wins.”
+
+Trump's path to victory, Wang suggests, would be a delegates game: though he has only one-third of the vote on average, that still gives him 50 percent of delegates through Super Tuesday. According to his calculations, two candidates must drop out before Super Tuesday, and one alternative must emerge by March 14, after several more rounds of primaries, for a “not-Trump” victory to be possible, meaning that the Republican establishment and donor class cannot afford to wait for their preferred candidates to emerge to face off against Trump and Cruz. “Ballpark, I would guess that if Trump has a majority of delegates by March 1st and he still has two opponents afterward, his probability of securing the nomination will be about 80%,” he wrote, adding: “However, this is now my intuition talking.”",REAL
+10189,What's NaNoWriMo? Your Story. 30 Days. Try it.,"All programs for National Novel Writing Month, Camp NaNoWriMo, and the Young Writers Program are free, but tax-deductible donations are gratefully received. NaNoWriMo has been a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization since 2005. - Advertisement - 
+Hundreds of novels which were first drafted during NaNoWriMo have been published: the site lists nearly 400 traditionally published and 200 self published novels. Collage of book covers by Meryl Ann Butler for OpEdNews License DMCA 
+Barnes & Noble News lists eight bestsellers that started out as NaNoWriMo projects: 
+Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants , was on the best seller lists for over a year and was made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson - Advertisement - 
+Erin Morgenstern's award-winning The Night Circus , spent seven weeks on the NY Times bestselling list and has been published in several languages, film rights were sold to Summit Entertainment. 
+Hugh Howey, author of Wool, began by selling ebooks, then he signed a six-figure deal with a major publisher and sold the film rights to 20th Century Fox. 
+Marissa Meyer's New York Times-bestselling series of YA redoux of classic fairy tales, including Scarlet, Cress and Cinder, started out as NaNoWriMo projects, as well as Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl , and Jason Hough's The Darwin Elevator 
+Each year, authors offer mentorship to participants through pep talks . Past author mentors have included Gene Luen Yang, John Green, N. K. Jemisin, and Veronica Roth. 
+Everyone has a story inside. Want to write it in a month? Just sign up. Tell your story",FAKE
+8268,Investors Intelligence Says Here Is The Key To A Turnaround In Gold & Silver!,"10 Views November 02, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+According to Investors Intelligence, here is the key to a turnaround in gold and silver! 
+Today Investors Intelligence issued an important note about gold, silver and the mining stocks: The Precious Metals Bullish % rallied 4.55% on Wednesday, reversing the P&F chart direction back to the upside for the first time since September. … IMPORTANT: To find out which company Doug Casey, Rick Rule and Sprott Asset Management are pounding the table on that already has a staggering 18.1 million ounces of gold that just added another massive deposit and is quickly being recognized as one of the greatest gold opportunities in the world – CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored 
+Investors Intelligence continues: The chart has pulled out of oversold and has a new status of Bull-alert. Investors should be looking to buy upside reassertion candidates (see chart below). 
+The PHLX Gold & Silver Index develops a bullish P&F breakout signal at 89 with a price objective of 102 and a stop loss at 83 (see chart below). 
+King World News note: Despite the post-Fed meeting intervention to suppress the gold, silver and mining share markets, when Investors Intelligence states, “Investors should be looking to buy upside reassertion candidates,” what they mean is that investors should be purchasing high-quality investments in the gold and silver sector. This includes top-tier mining stocks and associated gold and silver ETFs. Although the Philadelphia Gold & Silver (mining share) Index (XAU) closed below the key level of 89 after an intra-day surge above 92, it is still very close to the breakout noted by Investors Intelligence. It will be interesting to see if the sector picks up momentum in the coming days and weeks as that will trigger additional money flows into the sector. 
+***KWN has now released the remarkable audio interview with Nomi Prins CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+***ALSO RELEASED: With Gold Hitting $1,300, Look At Who Is Bullish CLICK HERE. 
+***KWN has also released Rick Rule’s timely audio interview CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
+2531,Allowing Refugees in US an Open Door to Terror?,"The European country working hardest to solve the Mideast migrant crisis is now stepping back. Germany has been receiving up to 10,000 migrants per day, but that can't go on for long.
+
+Meanwhile, some lawmakers in the United States warn President Barack Obama's recent decision to receive more refugees could lead to another major terror attack.
+
+One of the top destinations for Syrian refugees, Germany originally opened its doors to the migrants fleeing from their countries.
+
+Now, it's implementing temporary border controls, with many calling it a strong message to the rest of the European Union to step up and start shouldering some of the burden.
+
+""There's a need for shelters and care and I hope it will start during the next days. Munich can do a lot but we can't accomplish it all by ourselves,"" Dieter Reiter, the mayor of Munich, said.
+
+Stephan Bauman, the head of World Relief, an evangelical non-profit that cares for refugees and immigrants, is calling on the U.S. government to allow 200,000 refugees into the country. Bauman is also calling on every U.S. church congregation to adopt a refugee family. Watch his interview with CBN News.
+
+German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said that according to EU rules, his country isn't technically responsible for the migrants.
+
+They're supposed to be registered and processed in the first EU country they arrive in. De Maiziere's urging other countries to apply those rules and stop allowing the people seeking protection to choose the country they get it from.
+
+Many migrants have refused to register in countries like Greece or Hungary because they're afraid it would keep them from being granted asylum in other EU states.
+
+Germany suspended train services to and from Austria for 13 hours and is now imposing strict document checks for people entering the country.
+
+Officials say such measures are necessary for Germany to limit the number of people coming in and reinstate a more orderly entry process.
+
+Meanwhile, some American lawmakers are voicing concern that President Obama's decision to allow 10,000 refugees to be brought to the United States will put the country in danger.
+
+""I take ISIS at its word when they said, in their words, 'We'll use and exploit the refugee crisis to infiltrate the West.' That concerns me,"" House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, told ABC's ""This Week.""
+
+McCaul said that while the United States is a compassionate nation, this move by the president could be a very ""reckless and dangerous policy.""
+
+He also said the United States has already disrupted a security threat to Pope Francis's upcoming visit to Washington.
+
+Over the weekend, al Qeada's leader called on young Muslim men to carry out lone wolf attacks in America and other Western countries.",REAL
+7397,The Loosening Grip,"Stamptastic / Shutterstock.com 
+Oh good. The world reaches a crossroads, or probably a road off a cliff, just when I want to relax and watch gratuitous violence on the tube. To judge by the rapid drift of events aboard our planetary asylum, the talons of Washington and New York on the world’s throat are fast being pried a-loose. The Global American Imperium is dying. Or so it sure looks anyway. 
+I say talons of “New York and Washington” because America’s foreign policy, forged in those two cities, belongs entirely to them. Americans have no influence on it. Further, none of what the Empire does abroad is of any benefit to Americans. Do you care at all what happens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, or the South China Sea? Do you want to pay for it? America has been hijacked. 
+And the Empire prospereth not. It prospereth very not. Consider the recent record of the world’s hyperpower: 
+Washington does not have control of Afghanistan, and obviously is not going to. 
+Washington does not have control of Iraq, and appears unlikely to. 
+Washington did not back Iran down, and isn’t going to. 
+Washington did not back Russia down in Ukraine and Crimea, and isn’t going to. 
+Washington did not back China down in the South China Sea and, while this is perhaps not over, the Empire seems to be losing. 
+Washington has not backed North Korea down and is not going to. 
+In the Philippines, President Duterte has told Obama to “go to hell” as being “the son of a whore,” which may be taken to indicate latent hostility. He is vigorously seeking rapprochement with China. While Washington may have him murdered, it seems to be losing control of the Little Vassals of ASEAN. 
+Turkey seems to be cuddling up to Russia–that is, looking East like Duterte. Maybe Washington can turn this around temporarily, but there’s a whole lot of wavering going on. 
+Meanwhile Washington thrashes around impotently as per usual in Syria, and, though the jury remains out on this one, looks to have poor prospects. If Washington–AKA New York–loses here, after doing so in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan, the Empire will beyond redemption be on the downward slope. 
+The United States is not in danger. The Empire is. This is not good. Empires, the Soviet Union notwithstanding, seldom go quietly. Either Washington gambles on war of some sort against Russia, or Russia and China, in the desperate hope of reversing things, or the Empire gets slowly eaten. Or not so slowly. Once one country pries itself loose, many may rush for the door. 
+New York may go for calculated war against Russia–say, cyberwar expected not to turn into shooting war, shooting war in Syria not expected to turn into global shooting war, global shooting war not expected to turn into nuclear war. This will be a crapshoot. Note that America has badly misguessed the outcomes of every war since Korea. 
+This is why the American election actually matters, unusual in Presidential contests. It is Blowhard against Corruption, a swell choice, but Trump is firmly against war with Russia, and Hillary for. Her military understanding is that of a fried egg. 
+The woman is both a fool and a knave but, it seems, Trump has talked trash, and therefore she will likely be President. Weirdly, the future of the world depends on how an excited electorate of political middle-schoolers responds to one candidate’s dirty talk. From a curmudgeon’s point of view, it is pretty funny. It is funnier if one lives outside of the radiation footprint. 
+But back to business. The seaboard Axis of Evil needs a war because almost every tide runs against it. Proximately, the Axis has pushed China, Russia, and Iran together against the Empire. (First rule of empire: Do not let the dissidents unite.) Many signs suggest that the world, or much of it, is beginning to see China as its future. The BRICS, the SCO, the NDB, the AAIB–all exclude the US. China becomes the major trading partner of country after country. The twilight deepens. 
+Not all goes wrong for the Empire–not yet, but things are getting spooky. On the European Peninsula of Asia, countries remain docile, especially England and, much more importantly, Germany. Yet even among Washington’s European harem, there seem to be faint stirrings of a forgotten independence. As I understand it, Germany’s businessmen would very much like to end Washington’s sanctions on Russia and improve trade with China, which would be greatly to the benefit of the Peninsula. Washington won’t let them. It can’t. If the Europeans did what would be good for themselves, and looked to Eurasia, then the fat lady, already warming up, would burst into full bellow. 
+Which, methinks, raises the likelihood that Washington will in desperation do something phenomenally stupid. At this writing Hillary’s camp seems to be prepping the public for war with Russia. The telescreen tells us day after day that Putin is Hitler, that Russia is expanding, that the Russkies are hacking the election, that they cause indigestion and falling hair. Is this just Hillary waggling her codpiece in the expectation that Moscow will demurely back down, as God intended? Or will she again send other people’s children to fight for her in somebody else’s country? 
+The larger picture, assuredly obvious to New York, is truly grim–for New York, not for Americans. China has a huge population of a billion Han Chinese, versus two hundred million Caucasian Americans–these being the scientific, technological and entrepreneurial brains of the Empire. One must not notice this, but you can bet that New York and Beijing do. Economically China is growing hugely, advancing technologically at a high rate, building rail lines that now extend from the Chinese Pacific coast to Madrid. It will increasingly dwarf the Empire no matter what happens–short of a world war. 
+The curtain falls in ways unnoticed. China recently launched a communications satellite, the world’s first employing quantum cryptographic links, which cannot be intercepted. The intention of this, as well of the QC link from Beijing to Shanghai, is to keep the NSA off China’s back. A small thing, perhaps. Yet if successful and adopted en masse by other countries weary of Washington’s meddling, the result will be a loosening of the Empire’s grip on everybody’s communications. 
+For the Empire it is, as Elvis sang, “now or never.” Lenin spoke of “useful idiots.” Ours aren’t even useful, but they call the shots. 
+Fred can be reached at jetpossum-readers@yahoo.com. Put the letters pdq in the subject line or your email will be heartlessly autodeleted by a raging spam filter. (Reprinted from Fred on Everything by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+3775,"Holder: Ferguson shooter 'disgusting,' 'punk'","FERGUSON, Mo. -- Less than 24 hours after two officers were hit by gunfire, a quieter protest took place outside police headquarters Thursday night, with no problems or arrests in this city torn by racial unrest. Missouri highway patrol and St. Louis County police took over security for the evening.
+
+As the clock approached midnight, organizers dismissed the people who had gathered.
+
+Earlier on Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder sharply condemned the shootings of police Wednesday night as a ""disgusting and cowardly attack.""
+
+""What happened last night was a pure ambush,"" Holder said. ""This was not someone trying to bring healing to Ferguson. This was a damn punk, a punk, who was trying to sow discord.""
+
+President Obama, in an appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel Live TV show Thursday night, said, ""We don't yet know what happened"" in the shooting but offered his prayers to the wounded officers and their families.
+
+""There's no excuse for criminal acts,'' the president said. ""They're criminals. They need to be arrested. And then what we need to do is make sure that like-minded, good-spirited people on both sides, law-enforcement who have a terrifically tough job and people who understand they don't want to be stopped and harassed because of their race, that we're able to work together to try and come up with some good answers.""
+
+Mayor John Knowles was notified that the highway patrol and county would take over the security duties from the Ferguson police department ""until further notice,"" the county police department said in a statement.
+
+Sgt. Brian Schellman, a spokesman for the St. Louis County police, said investigators interviewed several people regarding the shooting but made no arrests.
+
+Just after 8 p.m., clergy gathered blocks from the Ferguson Police Department for a candlelight vigil. They prayed for the safety of the demonstrators and for the health of the two wounded police officers.
+
+Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was in St. Louis County to be briefed by local officials. He said the highway patrol and county police will be sending additional officers in anticipation of more protests Thursday night.
+
+""I ask Missourians to join me in calling for calm in the wake of the cowardly and reprehensible ambush of two police officers who were acting to protect the public,"" Nixon said. ""I also thank all the brave law enforcement officers who selflessly risk their lives each day to keep communities safe.""
+
+Routine police service remains in the hands of the embattled Ferguson police department, whose chief resigned in the wake of scathing criticism of the force by the Justice Department for racially biased policing.
+
+St. Louis County police chief Jon Belmar had called for a ""measured response"" to the shooting of the two officers around midnight Wednesday, but reserved the right to beef up security as warranted.
+
+The two officers ""took a very hard hit"" and were seriously injured, but will not sustain long-term injuries, he said. They were released from the hospital Thursday morning.
+
+""We were lucky by God's grace that we didn't lose two officers last night,"" Belmar told reporters. ""We could have buried two police officers over this. ... It's a miracle we haven't had any instances similar to this in the summer and fall.""
+
+Police recovered shell casings at the scene and fanned out across the city looking for the shooter.
+
+A St. Louis County SWAT team stormed a home about four blocks from the police station Thursday morning, clambering on top off the roof, KSDK-TV reported.
+
+Neighbors said three people were taken from the home in handcuffs. Police said they were taken in for questioning, but there were no immediate arrests.
+
+The shootings occurred as demonstrators were winding up a protest following the resignation of the city's police chief in the wake of a scathing Justice Department report alleging bias in the police department and court.
+
+""This is really an ambush,"" he said. ""You can't see it coming. You don't understand that it's going to happen and you're basically defenseless from the fact that it is happening to you at the time. ""
+
+Belmar said one of the officers, a 32-year-old, seven-year veteran from nearby Webster Groves, was shot below his right eye. The bullet lodged near his right ear, he said.
+
+The second officer, a 41-year-old with 14 years on the St. Louis County force, was hit in the shoulder by a bullet that came out his back.
+
+At the time of the shooting, Belmar said, the number of demonstrators had dwindled from around 150 to about 75 and the number of police at the scene had dropped to about 40.
+
+He said the two wounded officers were standing in a line of 20 to 25 other officers when three or four shots were fired from about 125 feet away.
+
+""I feel very confident that whoever did this was there for the wrong reason, not the right reason, and came there for whatever nefarious reason it was,"" Belmar said in a news conference. ""But I do feel like there was an unfortunate association with that gathering.""
+
+Jeff Roorda, who heads the St. Louis Police Officers Association, said the shooting sent a chill through the law enforcement community.
+
+He called on state and county officials to restrict protests to daytime hours.
+
+""This is a very volatile situation,"" Roorda said. ""You have outside agitators racing to be here. This isn't safe for police, community or peaceful protesters.""
+
+Roorda said he's spoken to the police officer who was shot in the shoulder and that he was doing remarkably well considering the circumstances.
+
+Police officers at the scene last night said were jolted by the timing of the incident. The protests were breaking up and only a few dozen demonstrators were left when the shots were fired.
+
+""There's been a recurring phenomenon throughout the protests where you see the flash-points, the bad things coming ,"" he said. ""But last night, as it was described to me by many of the cops that were here here, it wasn't that way. The crowd was just mulling around. A lot of the protesters were starting to disperse. No one saw it coming.""
+
+The shootings came hours after Ferguson officials announced that Police Chief Thomas Jackson, who will step down March 19.
+
+Jackson, 57, became the third top city official to leave following the release of the Justice Department report. Judge Ronald Brockmeyer and City Manager John Shaw resigned earlier this week.
+
+Lt. Col. Al Eickhoff is serving as acting chief until the city completes a nationwide search for a new police chief, the city said in a news release. Jackson will receive a severance payment of approximately $100,000 and health insurance for one year.
+
+Belmar said he has called for a ""measured response"" to the shootings, but reserved the right to call upon the highway patrol for additional help if necessary.
+
+He said police are planning to assess their security plans outside the Ferguson Police Department and talk to protesters and community leaders about how to move forward.
+
+When asked about security in the area moving forward, Belmar said it is very difficult to sustain this kind of situation without injuries to the public or police officers.
+
+""I think we need to re-evaluate that, and that's one of the things I've been doing since my phone rang at midnight tonight,"" said Belmar. ""We're going to be looking for different ways to approach this. Obviously my first priority is to the community, but that's followed very very closely to my police officers and making sure that they're able to do what they're supposed to do out there in a safe manner.""
+
+Earlier in the day, Obama condemned the shootings, saying in a tweet that ""violence against police is unacceptable."" ""Our prayers are with the officers in MO,"" he wrote. ""Path to justice is one all of us must travel together.""
+
+St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger said doesn't believe the shooting will set back any gains made in the city.
+
+""I don't consider this incident a setback toward healing,"" he said. ""I don't believe it's going to affect any healing process that is going on in the community. I think the community at large is fully supportive of these police officers and probably wishes the very best for them.""
+
+Knowles and the Ferguson City Council released a statement thanking law enforcement agencies that have helped the city in the past seven months and reaching out the community.
+
+""While we respect the right to peacefully protest, we cannot continue to move forward under threats of violence and destruction to our community,"" the statement said. ""We ask our residents and clergy in this area to partner with us as we make our way through this process.""
+
+The shootings came as a shock to the crowds gathered outside the police department. DeRay McKesson, 29, one of the most visible protesters in Ferguson, was sitting in his car and about to tweet that the crowd was thinning out when he heard about four gunshots to his right.
+
+""It was like pow, pow, pow, pow — like four consistent shots,"" he said. ""I was looking straight up at the police department and I see an officer fall and I see officers surround him.""
+
+McKesson said protesters, who had been gathered at the police department since 8 p.m. Wednesday, hit the ground as soon as the shots rang out and scattered trying to get to safety amid the chaos.
+
+""Every single gun any officer had was drawn and they were all behind something,"" he said, adding that officers ran and ducked behind cars and the department building.
+
+St. Louis County Alderman posted a Vine showing people crawling on the ground after police reacted to the gunshots.
+
+Heather De Mian, 44, of St. Charles, Mo., was live streaming the scene outside of the police department when the shots rang out.
+
+""Those gunshots went right past my head,"" said De Mian, who is in a wheelchair and tried to duck down. ""I tried to go down low so my head wasn't sticking out.""
+
+She said soon after the shots a swarm of St. Louis County Police crime scene cars showed up and later, a group of officers marched up the hill on a side street in the direction of where the sound of gunshots had come from.
+
+Meanwhile, De Mian is adamant that the shooters were not with demonstrators.
+
+""The shots came from a block away from the protests,"" she said. ""It's incredibly dangerous to try to link the protesters to this without evidence. It could be someone trying to frame the protesters or someone who was aiming at the protesters and was a bad shot. Whoever shot put everyone's life in danger.""
+
+An Aug. 9 shooting of unarmed African-American teen Michael Brown by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson set off weeks of unrest and violence in the St. Louis suburb.
+
+Brown's family issued a statement Thursday condemning the police shootings. ""We reject any kind of violence directed toward members of law enforcement,"" the statement said. They also denounced the actions of ""stand-alone agitators"" who might try to derail the a peaceful movement addressed at police brutalit
+
+Wilson was not charged in Brown's killing and the Justice Department found no reason to bring civil rights charges against him.",REAL
+3613,‘Are We Next?’,"When the news broke that our French colleagues had been killed, a deep feeling of pain overwhelmed my newsroom—and an immediate feeling of fear. All of a sudden it seemed possible that we might be next, that something might happen to us here in the heart of Berlin, only a hundred yards or so away from Checkpoint Charlie.
+
+If there is any paper in Europe that comes close to Charlie Hebdo, it is the one that I run , die tageszeitung, which means simply ""The Daily,"" or taz for short. Both papers are an outcome of the student revolution founded in the spirit of the “68 Generation.” In my country it was clearly a reaction to Germany's authoritarian leaders, some of whom were holdovers and ex-Nazis from the past.
+
+Like Charlie Hebdo, taz often uses satire to challenge the so-called mainstream. We, too, have run satirical images of the Prophet Muhammad. We decided to republish Charle Hebdo’s first post-massacre cover on Wednesday not only to express our solidarity but also as a proof that terrorists won't stop us from printing whatever we want to say—about Islam or any religion.
+
+After the massacre in Paris last week, it didn’t take long before a police car was parked in front of our building. Since the morning of January 8 heavily armed police have stood in front of the entrance, their machine guns at the ready. The alert has risen since the attack on a German paper in Hamburg in the early Sunday morning hours where, fortunately, nobody was hurt.
+
+There are some picture posts on Facebook making fun of this scene at taz, which itself sounds like a satire since we are known as some of the loudest critics of the police in Germany, and many of our editorials have urged police not to wear weapons in public.
+
+And yet here we are ...
+
+Do not misunderstand me: We are grateful for the help. Instead of throwing stones at the police—as the founding generation of this paper might have done—we offer hot tea and coffee in the icy winds of Germany's capital as a little gesture of thankfulness.
+
+Still, passing this bristling display of weapons every time we enter our building does not give us a feeling of being well-protected. For the past week I have seen my colleagues constantly gathering together and asking each other questions like: “How do you feel? Do we have to worry? Are you also afraid?”
+
+In every meeting we discuss what this fear does to us and if it influences our way of reporting or our editorial board.
+
+Is the freedom of speech already hurt by the strongest weapon terrorists have: The weapon of fear? So far we resist. But the coming days and months will answer that question.
+
+This terror act in France hits Europe in a crucial time. We are experiencing a huge shift in the political landscape that endangers the whole order of the last two decades. We see a strong increase of the right in many European countries, in France, but also in Great Britain and Italy. And even in Germany, which is doing financially so well, we have the new party Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, with its very strong anti-European attitude.
+
+All those parties have one political approach in common: They not only use the real problems of unemployment and poverty for their political goals, but they are the masters at blaming the European Union, with its open markets and borders, for everything bad that is happening. Their goal is to re-nationalize their countries at the cost of the EU, to strengthen the power of their own countries and parliaments, and to fight the liberalization of their societies. Many of them have strong resentments against gay people and are deeply racist. They dream of the old order, when white male Christians from the upper class ruled their countries.
+
+The wall fell 25 years ago. And that means that there are many people old enough to vote who never experienced the Cold War, who never lived in a divided Europe and therefore easily forget the beauty of our Union.
+
+That makes it easier for some right-wing politicians to exploit these acts of terrorism for their goals. The blood in Paris wasn´t even dry when the first German politician, Alexander Gauland, one of the top candidates from the Alternative für Deutschland party, claimed this killing as a proof that Germany has the right to fear the influence of Muslim culture and that Germans have the right, and the obligation, to defend their Christian heritage.
+
+Whether they are Germans, French or Brits, Europe is afraid of more terror from Islamic terrorists. But the answer cannot be to add fuel to the so-called clash of civilizations.
+
+The answer only can be to analyze the reasons and march toward solutions. The Paris terrorists were French. They were born in France, went to French schools. Europe has to learn that Muslims are not foreigners, not outsiders. That they are as French and German and British as Christians, Jews or atheists are.
+
+The European Union, the house of one unified continent, is the main reason we have been living in peace for nearly 70 years. Our Union was the only possible way to heal the wounds of World War II and to build trust in each other. We must understand this and urgently fight together to overcome the big challenges of these days—especially the rise of violence perpetrated by terrorists and autocratic states like Russia closer to home.
+
+Next week the CIA torture reports will be printed in German. This report is the proof of how a country can be misled when it becomes ruled by fear. We, as European journalists, must beat back this fear and stand up for our free democracies, for taz, and for the policemen outside our doors keeping us safe, for the freedom to choose your own religion, and for our Union here in Europe.",REAL
+8386,Reductress » This Little Girl’s Mind-Blowing Protest Speech Is Everything Her Mother Told Her to Say,"This Little Girl’s Mind-Blowing Protest Speech Is Everything Her Mother Told Her to Say Womanspiration - Nov 3, 2016 By: Editor SHARE: 
+Seven-year-old Candace Bailey wowed everyone in the room when she gave a mind-blowing protest speech about climate change, just like her mother coached her to do. 
+
+Little Candace addressed the New Mexico state legislature with an impassioned speech about the need for clean energy and a collective effort to reduce the effects of human consumption on the planet. Good job Candace—and good job, Candace’s mom, for telling her exactly what to say! 
+
+Witnesses were impressed by the maturity of the local second grader and her ability to sound out big words. 
+
+
+“I couldn’t believe she was able to memorize all that,” witness Anna Hines says. “It didn’t really change my mind, but she was so adorable up there on that podium!” 
+
+Candace reportedly spoke about her own challenges, like turning the water off while she’s brushing her teeth, as well as the future world she hopes to live in. 
+
+“When I grow up, I hope to live in a world where we can reduce carbon emissions and be a model for the rest of the world,” the seven-year-old said, inspiring the room with the beautiful words her mother wrote for her. 
+
+“Her speech gave us all a lot to think about,” one state representative says. “Namely, how hard the mother must have worked to make this all happen.” 
+
+“Does this kid even understand what a carbon emission is?” she added. Probably not! 
+
+“I could see her mother sort of mouthing along the words as Candace was speaking,” friend of the family June Gordon says. “I don’t know why Breanne didn’t just speak herself. It would have been less jarring, that’s for sure.” 
+
+Though Candace’s mother’s involvement is clear, the young girl is proud about standing up in public about climate change. 
+
+“I hope the state legislature will listen to me, since I am the future,” Candace says. “Mom, did I say that right?” SHARE: ",FAKE
+2286,Gay Rights Will Continue to Divide Republicans: Albert R. Hunt,"Gay rights won't fade as a political issue. The Republican base won’t let it.
+
+Prominent Republicans calculated that if the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was constitutionally protected, the issue would become settled law and disappear politically. This would be welcome, they reasoned, as the party was on the wrong side of the politics and history.
+
+Then Indiana enacted a Religious Freedom Restoration Act last month that critics said would allow private enterprises to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Arkansas followed with a similar measure.
+
+After vehement opposition from businesses in both states, Republican governors forced modifications that make it more difficult to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
+
+But a leading indicator was the reaction of Republican presidential candidates: They leapt to defend the initial Indiana law. Jeb Bush expressed all-out support in an interview on a conservative radio talk show and then modified his position at a Silicon Valley fundraiser.
+
+Social conservatives are determined to keep this issue alive, reasoning that the environment that produced changes in the laws last week will become more favorable after they have had time to stir up the grassroots. That will pose problems for Republicans in a general election; the politics have changed dramatically compared with a decade ago, when Republican political guru Karl Rove used the issue against Democrats.
+
+Crucial elements of the Republican base haven't changed. Most, not all, evangelical/born-again white Christians are troubled by gay rights. This group accounts for more than 40 percent of the Republicans nationally and for more than 50 percent of the vote in the important early Iowa and South Carolina Republican presidential tests. That guarantees Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee will make these issues uncomfortable for Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.
+
+Nineteen states have religious freedom laws, and some go beyond the 1993 federal law. Four -- Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico and Rhode Island -- have measures that include a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation.
+
+But Indiana postponed the matter of prohibiting anti-gay discrimination. In Georgia recently, as the legislature drafted a measure supported by religious conservatives, a Republican tried to amend it to clarify that it wouldn’t permit discrimination against gays and lesbians; the bill’s sponsor suggested that would defeat the law's purpose.
+
+The politically powerful religious or conservative right can be expected to set litmus tests for Republican presidential candidates: opposing new anti-discrimination measures designed to protect gays and lesbians and guarding against what they warn is a slippery slope on matters including adoptions by same-sex couples.
+
+Many of these social activists sincerely worry that it's white people of religion who face discrimination; some believe that same-sex marriage, gay rights in general, violate the law of God.
+
+There are parallels to race. Religion was often cited as a rationale for segregation; if God intended whites and blacks to be together, why did he create different races, fundamentalists would ask. There were similar issues with discrimination in public accommodations and housing. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court gave constitutional protection to interracial marriage.
+
+Today, these issues create a genuine schism among Republican constituencies, with much of the business community showing support for gay rights. These aren't just West Coast or high-tech firms, but companies based in Middle America, such as Eli Lilly and Wal-Mart.
+
+The religious right sees this as a battle between economics and morality. Politically, however, the most telling reaction to the Indiana law was that of well-known athletes usually not considered part of any left-wing crusade. The basketball great Charles Barkley suggested the collegiate basketball tournament shouldn't be held in Indiana, and Pat Haden, former all-star quarterback and now athletic director at the University of Southern California, boycotted an athletic event in the Hoosier state.",REAL
+5609,Love Trumps Hate: GoFundMe To Rebuild Church Torched By Trump Supporter SHATTERS Fundraising Records,"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+Just one week before America decides whether or not to elect Donald Trump, one of his supporters decided to help get his message out by torching a black church and defacing its wall with the words “Vote Trump.” 
+“When firefighters arrived at Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church Tuesday night, they found it in flames, and the Vote Trump slogan written in silver spray paint on the outside wall of the church,” Mark Rigsby of Mississippi Public Broadcasting reports. 
+“Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons calls this a hate crime — an attempt to frighten voters just days before the presidential election.” 
+Trump has yet to condemn the attack, or even mention it. 
+Mississippi has been the host of many decades of violence directed at African Americans. During the Jim Crow era, acts of terror committed against black Mississippians was disturbingly common. It seems for at least one Trump supporter, the term “Make American Great Again” means returning to that dark time. 
+But rather than let this disgusting display of intolerance be the story, Americans got to work. In just hours, a verified GoFundMe account was set up by concerned citizens and thousands of dollars began to pour in to help rebuild. 
+It’s goal was to raise $10,000. It likely wouldn’t be enough to repair all of the damages inside and outside of the church, but it would be a start. Instead, people gave over $150,000. And perhaps even more remarkably, the entire world appeared ready to reject the deplorable racism and bigotry that led to this act. The campaign’s organizer updated the campaign by saying that people from all faiths (and none at all) and many countries have contributed: 
+Responses have been pouring in from all over the world, and they’re truly extraordinary. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, atheists and many more, from all over the United States and many other countries. 
+And according to GoFundMe’s VP of Communications and Policy Dan Pfeiffer, this campaign is perhaps the fastest growing in the history of the site. This one right here is verified and one of our fastest growing history https://t.co/E4smWW2s7d https://t.co/xIQWY4ulsV 
+— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) November 3, 2016 
+A slogan that has often been used to counter Trump’s message of cynical bigotry comes to mind: Love trumps hate. 
+Featured image via GoFundMe",FAKE
+3619,Jake Tapper: Where were U.S. leaders in Paris march?,"""Thank you,"" said the man. I was standing outside of the offices of Charlie Hebdo covering the aftermath of the terrorist attacks for CNN. He was thanking me just for being here, just for covering the event and its aftermath, what Le Monde referred to as France's September 11. And his appreciation was echoed by French citizen after French citizen.
+
+The rally Sunday for unity drew 1.5 million people in Paris and more than twice that nationwide; it was like nothing I've ever seen or covered. Our nation's oldest ally stood firm. A young Muslim Frenchwoman held a sign saying ""Je suis Juif.""
+
+A man and his son came over to me holding a sign saying ""I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it,"" beseeching me to share their message with the American people. And world leaders were standing together amidst a procession that included Francois Hollande of France, Angela Merkel of Germany, David Cameron of Great Britain, Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, along with the leaders of Mali, Jordan and Turkey.
+
+It is no small thing for the king of Jordan, a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammed, to march in a rally prompted by the murders of people who mocked Islam as well as of innocent Jews -- all of whom were killed by Islamic extremists.
+
+The United States, which considers itself to be the most important nation in the world, was not represented in this march -- arguably one of the most important public demonstrations in Europe in the last generation -- except by U.S. Ambassador Jane Hartley, who may have been a few rows back. I didn't see her. Even Russia sent Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
+
+I say this as an American -- not as a journalist, not as a representative of CNN -- but as an American: I was ashamed. I certainly understand the security concerns when it comes to sending President Barack Obama, though I can't imagine they're necessarily any greater than sending the lineup of other world leaders, especially in aggregate. But I find it hard to believe that collectively President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Attorney General Eric Holder -- who was actually in France that day for a conference on counterterrorism -- just had no time in their schedules on Sunday. Holder had time to do the Sunday shows via satellite but not to show the world that he stood with the people of France? There was higher-level Obama administration representation on this season's episodes of ""The Good Wife"" on CBS. I get that the President visited the French Embassy in Washington and that Secretary of State John Kerry spoke in French, and I certainly understand that the American commitment to security in Europe rivals no other. But with all due respect, those are politicians spending money that they didn't earn and sending troops whom they don't know. And this is not just a matter of the current occupant of the White House. I find it hard to believe that Speaker of the House John Boehner and new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had more worthy pursuits on Sunday than standing side-by-side with our French brothers and sisters as they came together in an inspirational way. After September 11, the first world leader to visit the United States was France's Jacques Chirac, though the most forceful conversation about France in Congress that I can recall came a few years later during debate over whether to invade Iraq and revolved around renaming pommes frites in the U.S. House cafeteria. And I'm frankly floored that not one of the people who is contemplating running for president in 2016 has yet to even tweet on the subject of the momentous demonstration in Paris, much less attend France's biggest rally in the history of the republic. I imagine that Hillary Clinton and her husband are kicking themselves for not hopping on a corporate jet to get here. Can you picture Hillary and Bill walking in the front row, arm-in-arm with Netanyahu and Hollande? Chris Christie, Scott Walker and Paul Ryan attended the Green Bay-Dallas football game Sunday and at least one of them sent his potential rivals mischievous tweets as if they were contemplating running for president of Beta Theta Pi. Why? I hope it's not American arrogance, a belief that everyone should express shock when something bad happens to us but that our presence at an international rally is worth less than a ticket to the Green Bay game when the victims speak in accents we don't understand. I suppose there's always the risk that coming to an event like this as an American leader and getting stuck in the third row could be embarrassing or could lead to accusations that you're trying to capitalize on a tragedy. But that's not how it would have been interpreted in France. People here are happy that Americans care. They're eager and appreciative of any evidence of that. And I know it exists -- although American Twitter seemed much more focused on the Golden Globes than anything else Sunday night. I only wish our leaders had done a better job of showing solidarity with the passion for the freedoms exemplified by the rally.",REAL
+10484,Hillary Campaign Launching Attacks on the FBI,"Hillary Campaign Launching Attacks on the FBI October   
+If the Clinton campaign becomes any more deranged, Hillary will start running attack ads against the FBI. This kind of tactic is already perilously close to an attack ad. 
+Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign ratcheted up its attack on the director of the FBI on Sunday, circulating a draft letter critical of James Comey to former federal prosecutors. 
+“It is out of our respect for such settled tenets of the United States Department of Justice that we are moved to express our concern with the recent letter issued by FBI Director James Comey to eight Congressional Committees,” the Clinton campaign’s letter speaking for prosecutors said. 
+The letter was signed and provided to The Daily Beast by Elkan Abramowitz, a former chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. It is expected to be released Sunday evening. 
+So we have the bizarre spectacle of Hillary deciding that she needs to campaign against the head of the FBI, who was just being praised for clearing her, because when you're a paranoid personality who assembles lists of enemies, this is how you react. But it's also telling that the Clinton campaign finds this so threatening that it is waging war on the FBI.",FAKE
+4792,Report: Trump Used Foundation Money to Launch Presidential Campaign,"Donald Trump appeared to use his foundation to launch his presidential campaign ambitions, according to filings analyzed by RealClearPolitics.
+
+From 2011 to 2014, Trump sent at least $286,000 to conservative or policy groups. The contributions corresponded to speaking engagements and endorsements as Trump cast himself as a potential presidential candidate, according to the analysis. If the contributions were solely to benefit Trump, they could be in violation of IRS laws that prohibit private foundations from self-dealing.
+
+One source with Trump ties told RealClearPolitics, ""He was politically active starting in 2011,"" and started to make ""strategic donations"" then. Most of the donations came from Trump personally to campaigns and political parties. Donations sent to nonprofit arms of conservative policy groups were sent through Trump's foundation. ""If he could do 501(c)(3) to 501(c)(3), he did it that way,"" the source said, referring to the tax code designation for nonprofit organizations.
+
+RealClearPolitics' analysis found that in 2013, Trump's foundation donated to The Family Leader, 501(c) 4 established to ""develop, advocate, and support legislative agenda at the state level."" Organizations with 501(c ) 4 designation can engage in limited political activity. Trump's filing was not properly noted, if it was sent as a donation to the group's nonprofit or to the organization.
+
+""Improper reporting is still a violation of tax law,"" charity law specialist Rosemary Fei told RealClearPolitics.
+
+The report pointed to other examples that appear to show Trump using his foundation to curry political favor, such as Trump's foundation donating $100,000 to the Citizens United Foundation ahead of a ""cattle call"" of possible Republican presidential candidates sponsored by the group, which Trump attended.
+
+In 2013, Trump's foundation donated $50,000 to the American Conservative Union Foundation. One source said, ""Everyone's too smart to say, 'Donate and we'll let you speak.' It was kind of understood.""
+
+Trump spoke at the Economic Club in Washington, D.C. Dec. 15, 2015, and his foundation sent a check to that group for $6,000 that appeared on its 2014 filing.
+
+""If what he talked about was promoting his candidacy or fundraising for his campaign, it is not only self-dealing, but potentially involves the foundation in making a grant to support political activity. That's prohibited,"" Fei said.
+
+Voters appear concerned about the Trump Foundation, according to a Morning Consult poll.
+
+By comparison, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's Clinton Foundation has more support.
+
+Voters in the poll believe the Trump Foundation's purpose is:
+
+The poll was taken before New York's attorney general ordered the Trump Foundation to stop soliciting in the state.",REAL
+2472,"Republicans start small on ObamaCare, cross fingers for court intervention","Republican leaders have yet to spell out their strategy for tackling ObamaCare now that they control Congress, and so far have pursued a piecemeal approach -- but are crossing their fingers that a looming Supreme Court case will give them an opening to unravel the law.
+
+GOP leaders huddled this week at a retreat in Hershey, Pa., where the Affordable Care Act was a chief topic.
+
+Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, on Thursday called ObamaCare a ""terrible law"" that needs to be replaced because it's ""beyond repair.""
+
+But Ryan also said he did not have a ""timeline"" for doing so.
+
+Leaders still say they want to repeal the law. But while the 114th Congress kicked off with major statements on energy and immigration -- the House voted recently to approve the Keystone XL pipeline and reverse President Obama's immigration actions -- proposals pertaining to ObamaCare have been far more modest.
+
+Last week, the House passed a bill that would define a full-time worker under the health law as working 40 hours per week. The law currently uses a lower threshold -- part of a formula that determines which businesses have to provide health insurance to workers. Lawmakers are concerned the provision is leading businesses to cut back hours to skirt the mandate.
+
+And legislation has been proposed in both chambers to repeal the law's 2.3 percent tax on medical devices such as X-ray equipment and artificial joints. The Senate version has bipartisan support and could get a vote in the coming weeks.
+
+Critics of the law say the two provisions hurt the economy and job growth, though President Obama would likely veto both.
+
+Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is also trying again to pass a bill that would allow Americans to opt out of the law's individual requirement to buy insurance -- a more sweeping measure.
+
+Republicans still want to do more. Ryan said Thursday that ObamaCare would be replaced with something that gives Americans more choices and lowers costs, improves their access to care and is ""truly patient centered"" -- an apparent reference to GOP planning for the wild card in all this, the Supreme Court case.
+
+The case, called King v. Burwell, could impact the legality of billions of dollars' worth of subsidies through the law. And Republicans want to be ready with a plan if the ruling goes against the administration.
+
+Plaintiffs argue the law doesn't allow the federal government to offer subsidies to customers in states that don't operate their own insurance exchanges.
+
+The White House has downplayed the case, saying such lawsuits ""won't stand in the way of the Affordable Care Act and the millions of Americans who can now afford health insurance because of it."" The White House argues the subsidies are being directed in accordance with the ""intent of the law.""
+
+Earlier Thursday, a Republican aide who attended a session on ObamaCare said the discussions centered on the best strategy in the context of that high court case. The aide said Ryan told fellow lawmakers they must move quickly to show the country that Republicans have a patient-focused response to the case.
+
+Opening arguments are scheduled to start in March with a decision expected in June. A victory for the plaintiffs could have a huge impact on the law, sending enrollment plummeting.
+
+Ryan also updated fellow lawmakers about upcoming ObamaCare deadlines and gave them an overview of the law since it took effect in January 2014 -- including updates on subsidies, exchange programs and cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
+
+Later Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner emerged from the close-door meetings at the retreat to echo Ryan's remarks.
+
+""Our challenge, our opportunity is to pass common-sense solutions ... that repeal ObamaCare and replace it with patient-centered reforms that will help our constituents have better access to high-quality health care in America,"" he said at a joint press conference with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
+
+Earlier this year, McConnell made clear that Congress will vote on either repealing or ""taking out pieces"" of ObamaCare, but he and fellow senators had little to say at the retreat about a unified strategy.
+
+To be sure, the GOP Senate caucus' most conservative members will be pushing for full repeal.
+
+Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a potential White House candidate, said on Monday that Republicans will get ""walloped"" in the 2016 elections if they ignore voter mandates after midterms that gave them Senate control, which includes the push to repeal ObamaCare.
+
+At least one Republican senator, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, has proposed legislation to repeal the law.
+
+And this week, the influential conservative group Club for Growth sent a letter to McConnell and Boehner urging them to ""continue to be diligent"" in their repeal efforts.",REAL
+10317,Don’t Despair: Why This Election Is Our Greatest Blessing,"0 About Us 
+The Mind Unleashed is a conscious news dissemination organization that seeks to inspire out-of-the-box thinking and act as a catalyst for people to discover the limitless potential that exists inside us all. Break free from the mold! Join the Revolution! Join! We Are All One 
+The tools and information used here are for research and educational purposes only. You are encouraged to think freely and question everything. © The Mind Unleashed, Inc. 2016 - except where noted. × Close",FAKE
+5765,Re: It Is Now Mathematically Impossible To Pay Off The U.S. National Debt,"It Is Now Mathematically Impossible To Pay Off The U.S. National Debt By Michael Snyder, on February 4th, 2010 
+A lot of people are very upset about the rapidly increasing U.S. national debt these days and they are demanding a solution. What they don’t realize is that there simply is not a solution under the current U.S. financial system. It is now mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay off the U.S. national debt. You see, the truth is that the U.S. government now owes more dollars than actually exist. If the U.S. government went out today and took every single penny from every single American bank, business and taxpayer, they still would not be able to pay off the national debt. And if they did that, obviously American society would stop functioning because nobody would have any money to buy or sell anything. 
+And the U.S. government would still be massively in debt. 
+So why doesn’t the U.S. government just fire up the printing presses and print a bunch of money to pay off the debt? 
+Well, for one very simple reason. 
+That is not the way our system works. 
+You see, for more dollars to enter the system, the U.S. government has to go into more debt. 
+The U.S. government does not issue U.S. currency – the Federal Reserve does. 
+The Federal Reserve is a private bank owned and operated for profit by a very powerful group of elite international bankers. 
+If you will pull a dollar bill out and take a look at it, you will notice that it says “Federal Reserve Note” at the top. 
+It belongs to the Federal Reserve. 
+The U.S. government cannot simply go out and create new money whenever it wants under our current system. 
+Instead, it must get it from the Federal Reserve. 
+So, when the U.S. government needs to borrow more money (which happens a lot these days) it goes over to the Federal Reserve and asks them for some more green pieces of paper called Federal Reserve Notes. 
+The Federal Reserve swaps these green pieces of paper for pink pieces of paper called U.S. Treasury bonds. The Federal Reserve either sells these U.S. Treasury bonds or they keep the bonds for themselves (which happens a lot these days). 
+So that is how the U.S. government gets more green pieces of paper called “U.S. dollars” to put into circulation. But by doing so, they get themselves into even more debt which they will owe even more interest on. 
+So every time the U.S. government does this, the national debt gets even bigger and the interest on that debt gets even bigger. 
+Are you starting to get the picture? 
+As you read this, the U.S. national debt is approximately 12 trillion dollars, although it is going up so rapidly that it is really hard to pin down an exact figure. 
+So how much money actually exists in the United States today? 
+Well, there are several ways to measure this. 
+The “M0″ money supply is the total of all physical bills and currency, plus the money on hand in bank vaults and all of the deposits those banks have at reserve banks. As of mid-2009, the Federal Reserve said that this amount was about 908 billion dollars. 
+The “M1″ money supply includes all of the currency in the “M0″ money supply, along with all of the money held in checking accounts and other checkable accounts at banks, as well as all money contained in travelers’ checks. According to the Federal Reserve , this totaled approximately 1.7 trillion dollars in December 2009, but not all of this money actually “exists” as we will see in a moment. 
+The “M2″ money supply includes everything in the “M1″ money supply plus most other savings accounts, money market accounts, retail money market mutual funds, and small denomination time deposits (certificates of deposit of under $100,000). According to the Federal Reserve , this totaled approximately 8.5 trillion dollars in December 2009, but once again, not all of this money actually “exists” as we will see in a moment. 
+The “M3″ money supply includes everything in the “M2″ money supply plus all other CDs (large time deposits and institutional money market mutual fund balances), deposits of eurodollars and repurchase agreements. The Federal Reserve does not keep track of M3 anymore, but according to ShadowStats.com it is currently somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 trillion dollars. But again, not all of this “money” actually “exists” either. 
+So why doesn’t it exist? 
+It is because our financial system is based on something called fractional reserve banking. 
+When you go over to your local bank and deposit $100, they do not keep your $100 in the bank. Instead, they keep only a small fraction of your money there at the bank and they lend out the rest to someone else. Then, if that person deposits the money that was just borrowed at the same bank, that bank can loan out most of that money once again. In this way, the amount of “money” quickly gets multiplied. But in reality, only $100 actually exists. The system works because we do not all run down to the bank and demand all of our money at the same time. 
+According to the New York Federal Reserve Bank , fractional reserve banking can be explained this way…. 
+“ If the reserve requirement is 10%, for example, a bank that receives a $100 deposit may lend out $90 of that deposit. If the borrower then writes a check to someone who deposits the $90, the bank receiving that deposit can lend out $81. As the process continues, the banking system can expand the initial deposit of $100 into a maximum of $1,000 of money ($100+$90+81+$72.90+…=$1,000).” 
+So much of the “money” out there today is basically made up out of thin air. 
+In fact, most banks have no reserve requirements at all on savings deposits, CDs and certain kinds of money market accounts. Primarily, reserve requirements apply only to “transactions deposits” – essentially checking accounts. 
+The truth is that banks are freer today to dramatically “multiply” the amounts deposited with them than ever before. But all of this “multiplied” money is only on paper – it doesn’t actually exist. 
+The point is that the broadest measures of the money supply (M2 and M3) vastly overstate how much “real money” actually exists in the system. 
+So if the U.S. government went out today and demanded every single dollar from all banks, businesses and individuals in the United States it would not be able to collect 14 trillion dollars (M3) or even 8.5 trillion dollars (M2) because those amounts are based on fractional reserve banking. 
+So the bottom line is this…. 
+#1) If all money owned by all American banks, businesses and individuals was gathered up today and sent to the U.S. government, there would not be enough to pay off the U.S. national debt. 
+#2) The only way to create more money is to go into even more debt which makes the problem even worse. 
+You see, this is what the whole Federal Reserve System was designed to do. It was designed to slowly drain the massive wealth of the American people and transfer it to the elite international bankers. 
+It is a game that is designed so that the U.S. government cannot win. As soon as they create more money by borrowing it, the U.S. government owes more than what was created because of interest. 
+If you owe more money than ever was created you can never pay it back. 
+That means perpetual debt for as long as the system exists. 
+It is a system designed to force the U.S. government into ever-increasing amounts of debt because there is no escape. 
+We could solve this problem by shutting down the Federal Reserve and restoring the power to issue U.S. currency to the U.S. Congress (which is what the U.S. Constitution calls for). But the politicians in Washington D.C. are not about to do that. 
+So unless you are willing to fundamentally change the current system, you might as well quit complaining about the U.S. national debt because it is now mathematically impossible to pay it off. 
+***UPDATE*** 
+It has been suggested that the same dollar can be used to pay off debt over and over – this is theoretically true as long as the dollar remains in the system. 
+For example, if the U.S. government gives China a dollar to pay off a debt, there is a good chance that the U.S. government will be able to acquire that dollar again and use it to pay off another debt. 
+However, this is not true when debt is retired with the Federal Reserve. In that case, money is actually removed from the system. In fact, because of the “money multiplier”, when debt is retired with the Federal Reserve it can remove ten times that amount of money (and actually more, but let’s not get too technical) from the system. 
+You see, fractional reserve banking works both ways. When $100 is introduced into the system, it can theoretically create $1000 as the example in the article above demonstrates. However, when that $100 is removed, it can have the opposite impact. 
+And considering the fact that the Federal Reserve “purchased” the vast majority of new U.S. government debt last year , we have got a real mess on our hands. 
+Even if a way could be figured out how to pay off all the debt we owe to foreign nations (such as China, Japan, etc.) it would still be mathematically impossible to pay off the debt that we owe to the Federal Reserve which is exploding so fast that it is hard to even keep track of. 
+Of course we could repudiate that debt and shut down the Federal Reserve, but very few in Washington D.C. have any interest in doing that. 
+It has also been suggested that instead of just using dollars to pay off the U.S. national debt, we could use the assets of the U.S. government to pay it off. 
+That is rather extreme, but let us consider that for a moment. 
+That total value of all physical assets in the United States, both publicly and privately owned, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 to 50 trillion dollars. Of course the idea of the U.S. government “owning” every single asset of the American people is repugnant to our entire way of life, but let’s assume that for a moment. 
+According to the 2008 Financial Report of the United States Government , which is an official United States government report, the total liabilities of the United States government, including future social security and medicare payments that the U.S. government is already committed to pay out, now exceed 65 TRILLION dollars. This amount is more than the entire GDP of the whole world. 
+In fact, there are other authors who have written that the actual figure for the future liabilities of the U.S. government should be much higher, but let’s be conservative and go with 65 trillion for now. 
+So, if the U.S. government took control of all physical assets in the United States and sold them off, it could not even make enough money to pay for everything that the U.S. government is already on the hook for. 
+Ouch. 
+If you have not read the 2008 Financial Report of the United States Government , you really should. Actually the 2009 report should be available very soon if it isn’t already. If anyone knows if it is available, please let us know. 
+The truth is that the U.S. government is in much bigger financial trouble than we have been led to believe. 
+For example, according to the report (which remember is an official U.S. government report) the real U.S. budget deficit for 2008 was not 455 billion dollars. It was actually 5.1 trillion dollars. 
+So why the difference? 
+The CBO’s 455 billion figure is based on cash accounting, while the 5.1 trillion figure in the 2008 Financial Report of the United States Government is based on GAAP accounting. GAAP accounting is what is used by all the major firms on Wall Street and it is regarded as a much more accurate reflection of financial reality. 
+So needless to say, the United States is in a financial mess of unprecedented magnitude. 
+So what should we do? Does anyone have any suggestions? 
+***UPDATE 2*** 
+We have received a lot of great comments on this article. Trying to understand the U.S. financial system (even after studying it for years) can be very difficult at times. In fact, it can almost seem like playing 3 dimensional chess. 
+Several readers have correctly pointed out that when the U.S. money supply is expanded by the Federal Reserve, the interest that is to be paid on that new debt is not created. 
+So where does the money to pay that interest come from? Well, eventually the money supply has to be expanded some more. But that creates even more debt. 
+That brings us to the next point. 
+Several readers have insisted that the Federal Reserve is not privately owned and that since it returns “most” of the profits it makes to the U.S. government that we should not be concerned about the debt owed to it. 
+The truth is that what you have with the Federal Reserve is layers of ownership. The following was originally posted on the Federal Reserve’s website…. 
+“The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by Congress as the operating arms of the nation’s central banking system, are organized much like private corporations – possibly leading to some confusion about “ownership.” For example, the Reserve Banks issue shares of stock to member banks. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. The stock may not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are, by law, 6 percent per year.” 
+So Federal Reserve “stock” is owned by member banks. So who owns the member banks? Well, when you sift through additional layers of ownership, you will ultimately find that people like the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers and the Queen of England have very large ownership interests in the big banks. But there are so many layers of ownership that they are able to disguise themselves well. 
+You see, these people are not stupid. They did not become the richest people in the world by being morons. It was the banking elite of the world who designed the Federal Reserve and it is the banking elite of the world who benefit the most from the Federal Reserve today. In the article above when we described the Federal Reserve as “a private bank owned and operated for profit by a very powerful group of elite international bankers” we may have been oversimplifying things a bit, but it is the essence of what is going on. 
+In an excellent article that she did on the Federal Reserve, Ellen Brown described a number of the ways that the Federal Reserve makes money for those who own it…. 
+The interest on bonds acquired with its newly-issued Federal Reserve Notes pays the Fed’s operating expenses plus a guaranteed 6% return to its banker shareholders. A mere 6% a year may not be considered a profit in the world of Wall Street high finance, but most businesses that manage to cover all their expenses and give their shareholders a guaranteed 6% return are considered “for profit” corporations. 
+In addition to this guaranteed 6%, the banks will now be getting interest from the taxpayers on their “reserves.” The basic reserve requirement set by the Federal Reserve is 10%. The website of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York explains that as money is redeposited and relent throughout the banking system, this 10% held in “reserve” can be fanned into ten times that sum in loans; that is, $10,000 in reserves becomes $100,000 in loans. Federal Reserve Statistical Release H.8 puts the total “loans and leases in bank credit” as of September 24, 2008 at $7,049 billion. Ten percent of that is $700 billion. That means we the taxpayers will be paying interest to the banks on at least $700 billion annually – this so that the banks can retain the reserves to accumulate interest on ten times that sum in loans. 
+The banks earn these returns from the taxpayers for the privilege of having the banks’ interests protected by an all-powerful independent private central bank, even when those interests may be opposed to the taxpayers’ — for example, when the banks use their special status as private money creators to fund speculative derivative schemes that threaten to collapse the U.S. economy. Among other special benefits, banks and other financial institutions (but not other corporations) can borrow at the low Fed funds rate of about 2%. They can then turn around and put this money into 30-year Treasury bonds at 4.5%, earning an immediate 2.5% from the taxpayers, just by virtue of their position as favored banks. A long list of banks (but not other corporations) is also now protected from the short selling that can crash the price of other stocks. 
+The reality is that there are a lot of ways that the Federal Reserve is a money-making tool. Yes, they do return “some” of their profits to the U.S. government each year. But the Federal Reserve is NOT a government agency and it DOES make profits. 
+So just how much money is made over there? The truth is that we have to rely on what the Federal Reserve tells us, because they have never been subjected to a comprehensive audit by the U.S. government. 
+Ever. 
+Right now there is legislation going through Congress that would change that, and the Federal Reserve is fighting it tooth and nail. They are warning that such an audit could cause a financial disaster. 
+What are they so afraid of? 
+Are they afraid that we might get to peek inside and see what they have been up to all these years? 
+If you are a history buff, then you probably know that debates about a “central bank” go all the way back to the Founding Fathers. 
+The European banking elite have always been determined to control our currency, and that is exactly what is happening today. 
+Ever since the Federal Reserve was created, there have been members of the U.S. Congress that have been trying to warn the American people about the insidious nature of this institution. 
+Just check out what the Honorable Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee had to say all the way back in the 1930s…. 
+“Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders.” 
+The Federal Reserve is not the solution and it never has been. 
+The Federal Reserve is the problem. 
+Any thoughts? OOPS! – U.S. Government Unemployment Numbers Have To Be Revised Because They Were Off By Almost One MILLION! » Bart 
+Has there ever been a time in history when money in circulation equalled or exceeded all credit/debt – I doubt it. As long as there is one person willing to extend credit to another you are going to have this imbalance. 
+The big problem we just went through with the credit bubble was that the central banks lost control of the money supply. This led to a global credit bubble, which popped when there was a run on Lehman’s bank because the credit markets froze (largely due to an inability to price risk). 
+A run on the bank is when people have a money preference and pull out all their cash. This used to result in liquidity crises like 1907 when the British demanded we pay all our debt in gold. Now, the FDIC pays out on bank runs or the Fed does. We just went through the largest liquidity crisis in history and the Fed handled by doubling the assets on their balance sheet they created trillions in reserves. More importantly this “debt” that is the credit that was extended has 0% interest attached, so as the economy stabilizes the debt-service shoudl be pretty easy. 
+You’re right that in our system when we create money we create debt. I prefer direct money creation where Congress creates money to pay for infrastructure and that’s how we expand the money supply. Blade 
+Bart…is your last name Simpson by any chance? If I have ten bucks and loan you five there is still ten bucks in circulation!! Hellooo! It is when I go to the printing press and print up another fiver like I just lent you and stick it in my pocket so I still have ten that is the problem!! 
+In 1835, under President Andrew Jackson, the US Federal Budget was balanced and the National Debt was paid in full. This has never happened since. This fine man did not appreciate Rockefeller and his fellow printer schiesters!! Get some history knowledge Bart, then you might be smart enough to grow some backbone instead of sounding comically loony! Josh 
+Who exactly do we owe all this money to? Let them try and collect it. Worst case we stop spending trillions of the defense budget. Honestly people can’t realize the whole monetary system is scam to turn as all into slaves and deny us much as possible so that New World Order can use all as much output as possible for their own designs. RIck M. 
+The problem isn’t the lending or borrowing. i.e. if I borrow a cup of sugar from my neighbor, they don’t expect to have a 5-pound bag returned to them as payment. 
+Yes, there WAS a time that money exceeded the debt, it was when the people worked to save for what they purchased, or loaned it without interest. The issue that makes the banking system so very flawed is that they loan money (or a percentage thereof) that was entrusted to them to others with the interest collected from all parties making use of the original individuals actual deposit. 
+While one could argue that this is a reasonable thing to do; which it was only slightly less corrupt in intention when there was REAL money, EG: Gold or silver, on hold; the fact that the depositors are now depositing federal reserve notes (which are counted at face value – already fractionally inflated) to be loaned using fractional accounting. THIS is what causes the so-called debt bubble. 
+The process cannot go on indefinitely, just as any pyramid or ponzi scheme… sooner or later the whole thing falls apart because there aren’t sufficient real funds to support the illusion. 
+The author here is absolutely correct, there isn’t enough “money” to repay the bankers, so the eventual collapse of the entire system is inevitable. Since the debt was incurred against treasury bonds, the only way to repay it now is with REAL PROPERTY since we don’t have real reserves to back it. In essence – they will own everything as it becomes nationalized to cover the increasing debt. Catch-22 
+Um, yeah, I agree that we ignored the Constitutional requirement BUT: If we now were to somehow close down the Fed, would you really want to turn over the power of money creation to the current congress? I cannot imagine letting the 535 economically-ignorant party hacks devise a sound replacement. I fear for our republic. ebeye 
+It’s ALWAYS been impossible to pay off the “debt”! The interest has to be created, which is more debt! The only way to eliminate it is to repudiate the Federal Reserve and it’s claim of debt upon the people, then revert to either a nationally derived currency, or simply allow any form of currency to be used. 
+http://www.ivamu.com/ Garynils 
+The creature from Jeckyl Island has now officially sealed the fate of ALL future generations of Americans. The really scary thing about this financial meltdown is the historical precedent that has benn established. What is the favorite remedy that corrupt governments use when faced with economic collapse? That’s right. War! Philippians 6-12. Russ L. Smith 
+So they “doubled their balance sheet” which means that everything lost 50% of it’s value, or every dollar became 50 cents. That will make paying off the debt twice as hard. Don Robertson 
+Yes, it is very alarming the sort of things mathematics can point out. But do not start throwing your money out the window for the wind to catch and take away. 
+There is absolutely nothing in the Universe that can be described EXACTLY by mathematics. Why not? Because there are no two things anywhere in the Universe that are so perfectly alike, we can add them 1+1 and say “2” describes these things to every extent possible. 
+The American dollar is still coveted by more people on this planet than any other currency. 
+Not one in a 100 people reading this post have ever seen a Yuan, a Euro, or even a Peso. Not one in a thousand has one in their pocket! 
+I live right on the Canadian border. The Canadians come over here to shop because milk is like $6.00 a gallon in Canada. They come over here to buy gasoline, and fill up five gallon containers they take home in their trunks. 
+And on the other border? The Mexicans, and the South Americans crash the border gates to get in. 
+The strength of an economy can be measured by the amount of currency that can be floated WITHOUT all that currency causing such inflation that buying power is destroyed. 
+You can spend dollars in every country in the world. 
+The dollar bill is the currency even the Iranian street vendors -hoard in their mattresses. 
+The big economic problem right now is deflation. And it’s a wonderful problem to have, if you have money in the bank, or even if you just have a job. 
+The reason for the deflation is, not everyone does have a job. 
+The credit economy is the culprit. Put your money in the bank. Leave it there. That’s the best advice anyone can give. 
+Forget the debt. No one is asking to have it paid off. No one ever thought it would be paid off. 
+Believe me, there are a lot of gold bugs today who are licking their wounds from this pop of their bubble. Expect it to get worse for them too. You cannot spend gold at the local hardware store. Jim 
+Keep a written journal of these days and your perception of them. What you knew and what is. They will be a window into darkness and why. Truthteller 
+Turn the Fed into an actual department of the Federal Government or amalgamate it with the Treasury. Money can then be issued without interest having to be paid to a private bank. At one stroke, a large part of the current debt can be removed as the debt owing to the ‘former Federal Reserve’ would be cancelled. Or is this too simple an idea? Mr. Universe 
+It is an excellent idea, i can just see a hole in it though, if we were to impliment this plan, whats to stop the government from collecting the debt from it’s citzens??? just wondering very, very good plan though. 
+Simple solutions are often the ones that are the most overlooked 
+Sincerely 
+http://home.iae.nl/users/lightnet/creator/nationaldebt.htm This Awareness indicates that you must understand that when the Federal Reserve bank, the privately owned Federal Reserve bank, was given authority to print Federal Reserve notes instead of the Treasury Department writing the Treasury Notes as directed by the U.S. Constitution, these Federal Reserve notes were not printed to be given out to the economy, in the way as the Treasury Notes of the Treasury Department. Rather, they were loaned to the U.S. government and then circulated into society, and society was required to pay back interest on the IRS notes and that amount of interest accumulated to the point of approximately 5 trillion dollars at this time (Revelations of Awareness newsletter issue no. 430 1994), to where, if everything in the United States were sold, half of the debt would still be owed. 
+This Awareness indicates that the Treasury Department has the potential for totally denouncing the Federal Reserve debt of 5 trillion dollars because it was illegal in the first place. The Treasury Department in the U.S. Constitution is the only proper way of financing the nation; Congress, operating the Treasury Department has the right to mint and coin money, and set the value thereof. 
+This Awareness indicates that in this fact, the Federal Reserve was never given any such a right, even with the vote of the Congress, because Congress did not have the right to relegate its obligations to the Federal Reserve, therefore the entire debt of five trillion dollars, because it was illegal in the fist place, is not forcible in a technical sense. MisterMoney 
+Inflation is the plan! 
+The debt can be repaid in cheaper dollars, so these politicians think, when the dollar drops in value, and they are able to raise more taxes at higher levels. But this only works if wages and earnings raise in tandem with inflation. 
+For example, if sales tax is 6%, and I buy a can of beans for a $1.00 I pay 6 cents in taxes. When inflation hits and that can of beans now costs $3.00, I pay 18 cents in taxes. And my higher wages or salary move me up in the tax brackets, so I pay more taxes on the inflated dollars, as do corporations. 
+The politicians will never say it, but that is the plan, just inflate this debt down to zilch, public be damned. Rob 
+Bart, 
+I applaud your attempt to explain the situation… but it sounds like you are reciting a Economics 101 text book, and no offense intended, it would seem that you are not entirely knowledgeable of the facts. 
+Your post is entirely ignorant of the politics behind money. 
+What lead to our current situation? Your statement that the central banks lost control of the money supply is over simplification, at best, ignorance at worst. Over the past two decades, at the behest of powerful interest groups and lobbyist, Congress dismantled and restructured the then existing regulatory restrictions that protected the economy from the text book situation which you described. And the result? It was predicted many years ago… screamed from the mountaintops for anyone to hear. But no one paid attention. Technically those vested with the power to create law don’t actually break the law. When the regulation and rule of law are manipulated, the eventual outcome of those changes are predictable. Knowledge is power. Ignorance is misfortune. 
+As for runs on the bank… your illustration is a far cry from anything other than an illusion. While it is true that banks do not carry ready reserves of Cash on Hand to cover the cumulative balances of their accounts, the monies of the accounts themselves are properly recorded in the banks ledgers. Customers would not need to demand the balance in full, in cash. They could demand a cashiers check, or they could simply walk into another financial institution of their choosing and write a draft or check to transfer their monies from their old bank to their new institution. In the event of a bank failure, the proper action would have been to let the bank fail, at which point its assets would have been seized by the government, it deposits covered (to an extent) by FDIC, and then liquidated or managed in probate to recover losses on behalf of the injured parties. No Bail Outs would have been required. But there would have been a full accounting and investigation of corruption, mismanagement, maleficent, etc. Instead TARPs and Bailouts were appropriated and the monies were used to pay up to 100% on the dollar to the banks themselves, and subsequently the looting and pillaging of America began. 
+Let there be no doubt that our current economic crisis is very real, far from over, and deliberately engineered. What are the short and long term implications? As for credit and liquidity, Wall Street is flush, but Main Street has dried up. TARP funds and various bailouts have been used, not to extend credit to Main Street, but rather to starve out the middle class, small and medium businesses, local banks and middle America so that those whom have access and control of credit may buy up practically anything and everything of value for pennies on the dollar. Classic and textbook “Grapes of Wraith” Economics 101, where the Barons and Tycoons of Industry run rough shod over desperate peoples in tough times. The gains are privatized and the losses are socialized. 
+As for the long term implications… Doubling the money supply with 0% interest devalues the dollar and lends itself to several carnations of inflation, which may only be offset by artificially dampening cost of infrastructure and labor. In other words, importing cheap labor and exporting manufacturing and industry. Ring any bells? Ironically this only excelerates the phenomena. 
+Ultimately, this incomprehensible level of debt may only be solved one of two ways, if not both: 1) The yielding and merger of the American dollar into a new hyper national or international financial union, or 2) Negotiation or Eradication of Debt via the Conquest of Wars and Treaties. Hmm… have you been watching the news lately? G8 What? U.N. / IMF / World Bank are doing what exactly? What treaties have been pending on the horizon? Pray tell me, what exactly were the goals of The Project for the New American Century and the Council on Foreign Relations? Please tell me that you are at least somewhat familiar with the organizations that advise and create the policies that our Congress reviews and our President enacts as policy? 
+Bottom line: this is an engineered crisis with but one ultimate goal. Not merely the consolidation of wealth, but a consolidation of Power. The Federal Reserve itself has undergone consolidation. And Wall Street. And Main Street. And soon… as we continue marching towards globalization via Conquest and Treaty and the expansion of Power… Our National Sovereignty. 
+And although I most certainly agree with you and applaud you on your preference for direct money creation where Congress creates money to pay for infrastructure to expand the economy, alas, there too you have unwittingly overlooked or intentionally omitted several key details. 
+Although Congress does have the constitutional authority to mint coin and regulate the value of domestic and foreign monies, and does stimulate the economy with monies spent on militaries, infrastructure, and commerce, it ultimately can not and should not be responsible for insuring our economy. That said, for better or for worse, with our burgeoning debt our prosperity is being washed away. 
+Debt is slavery. Expanding the money supply with fiat currency is a devils game. The only thing that truly generates wealth is labor and resources. You can not exploit resources without access, be it public or private, to land. Be it beef, beans, or bread, or be it lumber, steel, silver, or gold, without land the supply to resources is severed, and with it the capacitance for manufacturing and industry are also severed. 
+We could easily transform our fiat money supply into that of one based entirely upon industrial and agricultural commodities, in addition to gold, silver, and other precious metals. But there in lies the crutch. Energy. For mining and harvesting, refinement and manufacturing, and for transportation. 
+What, pray tell, has our current economic crises entailed? Hmm… Land, I.e. Real Estate. Commodities and Industry, I.e. Main Street and Jobs. Energy, I.e. oil, gas, coal, and electricity. Financing, I.e. Credit, cash, and liquidity. What exactly have been several of the key issues facing most people these past several years? 
+Do you see the pattern yet. Do you recognize the cause, the reaction, the solution? It is NOT simply a matter of the central banks losing control of the money supply. It is about consolidation of financial and political power. Period. Once anyone realizes that, they will be better able to cope with the difficulties at hand and work towards regaining their financial footing, and hopefully, eventually, return to being financially independent. 
+When you are ready to set aside that primer for Economics 101 and start learning how things really work, I will be not only applauding you, but cheering you on. 
+Best wishes. Jason Seagraves 
+It is not “impossible” for the national debt to be paid off. It could theoretically be paid off without inflation, in fact. It would just take time. 
+If the money creation was halted, for example, the debt could be paid off over a very long period of time in the following manner: 
+1. I am taxed $100. 2. The government uses my $100 to pay down the debt to China. 3. China uses this $100 to buy a product from my company. 4. My company is taxed on this sale. 5. The government takes that tax money and gives it to China, again, etc., etc., etc. bob Tom Dennen 
+SOME BROAD NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF MONEY (Without the complicated detail). by Tom Dennen, author of ‘Grand Theft, Planet or Heidi’s Free Bar & Grill’– (free on the Internet). Most of this is probably deliberately scattered all over the Internet, and, if one just looks around a bit, people like me can pretend we have connected some dots. (There is, incidentally, nothing in here about the role Switzerland played in the years under scrutiny.) BUT: *Study the ancient goldsmiths’ discovery of fractional lending and usury. *Read Book Six of Tacitus’“Annals of Rome”. *Read “The Great Reckoning” by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. *Consider the fact that you spend twenty of the most productive years of your life paying off a mortgage (deathcage) bond. *Wake up. This might help:“Apocalypse” is a Greek word meaning “the lifting of the veil between you and God,” (or Knowledge or Reality).“The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin … Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again … Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in … But, if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit. ” Sir Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England and the second richest man in Britain in the 1920s, speaking at the University of Texas in 1927.“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” Theodore Roethke.“CAPITALISM IS A SYSTEM THROUGH WHICH WEALTH IS REGULARLY TRANSFERED (STOLEN) FROM THOSE WHO CREATE IT TO THOSE WHO ARE ALREADY WEALTHY, WHILE THOSE WHO CREATE IT ARE KEPT UNAWARE OF THE THEFT BY ‘THE MATRIX’”– t.d.“All wealth is created by work.”– Adam Smith. It’s becoming clear to many more people every day how the ‘matrix’– the system – works, and how the Internet is the leaky bucket out of which the truth (Apocalypse) is flying and the leaks – like Ellen Brown, Rense, What Really hAPPENED ET AL, are hopefully out of control. Since the early goldsmiths discovered fractional (reserve) banking, (created money out of thin air) and introduced predatory lending, they have been thrown out of every courntry they set up in, after which those countries returned to resource-based economies and went through several decades of economic recovery. Until the sixteenth century, in Holland. Then and there, when the goldsmiths were discovered plying their usurious debt / lending system, the already wealthy government and merchant classes simply joined them in the first full “collusion among corporatocracy, authoritarian government, controlled media and education.”– Fascism. (Global Research). Add bankers to that conspiracy and you have the recipe for the last three hundred years of fiscal theft through market manipulation by ‘The Establishment’, The ‘Elite’, the ‘Illuminati’ or the “Rothschild Family’, take your pick, but once government was in on the scam, the wealth that the lower and middle classes created by work was harvested every fifty years or so. Holland was, I believe, the site of the first experiment in money market manipulation by this collusion of classes.‘Tulip Mania’ is regarded as seriously silly season stuff among some debunkers, but which today is also a generic for an ‘out-of-control’ Bull Market. The thing is, it was for keeps.‘Tulip Mania’ is a controlled boom situation; controlled by those who run the Great Wealth Shift every generation, starting with the South Sea Bubble crash in 1720. This set of conclusions is largely gathered from a monetary history according to James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg: Every fifty years or so since the South Sea Crash, financial markets have peaked – and exactly nine years later, crashed – followed by a depression during which, bracketed by expensive wars, vast amounts of properties have been foreclosed and the ‘masters’ transfered huge amounts of the wealth accumulated by the working class –“all wealth is created by work” (Adam Smith) – who were left to starve. Just like today. THE SHIFT IN WORLD ECONOMIC PREDOMINANCE“All long-term credit cycles end with asset crashes in the markets of the leading economy. Measuring from crash to crash the dates of the modern credit cycles are as follows:”(starting with the South Sea Bubble) Span Duration 1873 – 1929 56 years 1929 – 1990 61 years“The crashes and resulting depressions appear to be less intense and traumatic when the end of the cycle does not coincide with a shift in world economic predominance.”– The Great Reckoning, James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg, 1993. Recent benchmarks are Common Cause: 1907 Financial Panic 1913 The privately-owned American Federal Reserve (FED) System Created 1929 The Great Depression – (Nice work, FED and Benjamin Shalom B. is returned to office!!) 1933 Theodore Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102 outlaws owning gold 1934 Gold Reserve Act freezes gold at $35 per ounce 1971 United States abandons gold standard 1974 U.S. citizens allowed to own gold 2009 Gold exceeds $1100 per ounce The depression following the 1990 crash is fully upon us and the consequences are global because we are in the middle of the biggest shift in world economic predominance. We will not see the end of it for a long while – all we will see are futile reports of the transfer of huge amounts of money to the banking cartels and hear their stories of ‘green shoots’ and ‘recovery’. Until people are back to work there is no recovery. The essence of fiscal control is not race, religion or nationality but just a passion for control over other humans. SOVEREIGN MONEY Both Lincoln and Kennedy were assassinated after introducing sovereign currencies, which were quickly removed from circulation after the killings. What happened to Schwartzenegger’s IOUs? They were de facto sovereign currency paid back on maturity by the state at a 3.75% interest. (It took the entire western world including Russia, incidentally, to crush Hitler who had also introduced sovereign money against the web of banking debt). When the directors of the Bank of England asked what was responsible for the booming economy of the young American colonies, Benjamin Franklin explained that the colonial governments issued their own money, which they both lent and spent into the economy:“In the Colonies,” he said, “we issue our own paper money. It is called ‘Colonial Scrip.’ We issue it in proper proportion to make the goods pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power and we have no interest to pay to no one. You see, a legitimate government can both spend and lend money into circulation, while banks can only lend significant amounts of their promissory bank notes, for they can neither give away nor spend but a tiny fraction of the money the people need.“Thus, when your bankers here in England place money in circulation, there is always a debt principal to be returned and usury to be paid. The result is that you have always too little credit in circulation to give the workers full employment. You do not have too many workers, you have too little money in circulation, and that which circulates, all bears the endless burden of unpayable debt and usury.” (Wikipedia) One of the most significant – and Apocalyptic – leaks is Ellen Brown’s book, ‘Web of Debt’ along with the Global Warming lies now out in the open. The Bilderbergs / governments / banks / merchants / landowners / fake scientists / Big Pharma and the rest are now too big not to fail at keeping their secrets. Solution? This will set us free: Return to resource-based economies. Do not borrow unless it’s from a state, county, city or people-owned bank that does not charge interest. Gather together and itemize all the resources of your community and learn to barter. Keep your wealth to yourselves. – you created it. Above all, don’t listen to snake oil salesmen like Obummer and Al Bore who are just stealing while callously killing your children for money. (Optional: http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/grandtheft.php ) THE BUSINESS OF BANKERS IS WAR, SO:“I am as intolerant of imperialistic designs on the part of other nations as I was of such designs on the part of Germany. The choice is between two ideals; on the one hand, the ideal of democracy, which represents the rights of free peoples everywhere to govern themselves, and, the ideal of imperialism which seeks to dominate by force and unjust power, an ideal which is by no means dead and which is earnestly [sought] in many quarters still.” U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, July 1919“Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.” The Qur’an (9:5), Islam’s holy book“We are fighting them (the terrorists) over there so that we won’t have to fight them here at home.” Former U.S. President George W. Bush.“I, like any head of state, reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.” U.S. President Barack Obama, December 10, 2009“When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest…and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war.” Plato, ancient Greek philosopher (428/427-348/347 B.C.) Truthteller 
+Ken, have checked out the IVAMU site. What happens if this ‘golden paper money’ is burnt to extract its gold content in the way that gold coins used to be ‘clipped’, which was the reason why gold coins gave way to coins of base metal content? 
+(There may be a solution contained in Thunderhawk’s views in this forum: http://www.democracyforum.co.uk/economy/70530-can-we-live-without-money.html ) 
+One word: velocity Glenn Peters 
+This article articulates the money supply methodology using fiat currency fairly well, but it omits the one aspect that all such criticisms do: time. It is disingenuous to mis-match securities to day zero. Asking for every dollar loaned over widely varying periods of maturity to be immediately returned is nonsensical. To put it in microeconomic terms, an individual on a $50k salary who borrows $200k, will pay about ~$1.4k per month over 25 years @ 7% pa. Were the borrower asked to repay the entire sum TODAY does that mean the borrower is insolvent? No. The borrower has 25 years of income, which if NPV’d at a 7% discount rate, shows the borrower is quite solvent. If these data sets for US debt are to be put in their correct perspective, GDP must be summed for the same period at the debt, or its average maturity. To present the debt as a fraction of one year’s GDP only is just bad math. Yes, I’m an economist, and yes I used to work for a bank 
+Depressed and now have a headache before starting my day, thank you! great post. web ether-net ideas 
+1. Eliminating the Fed is not going to happen. JFK tried and look where he ended up. 2. Ever since government stopped guaranteeing $$$$ with gold – $$$ have no real value, its just paper with very nice pictures.(the value is based on believe, good faith, call it what you want) 3. The debt national debt vs.currency in circulation/treasuries/etc everything is connected/ the amount of currency + fed % rates moderate inflation/ but at the end it doesn’t really matter/ money is created on the computer screens now, and we see printed currency only in the evens like bailout (which by the way wasn’t the first one, probably not the last either)The rest is being recycled.. 4. Catch-22 – congress is a bunch of puppets directed by the corporate sponsors (donations, donations, donations) or otherwise purchased just like in the mall. 5.IVAMU???? is this a joke idea? the only sensible and logical thing to do would be denationalization of money – anyone interested in what it is – read DENATIONALIZATION OF MONEY -ARGUMENT REFINED BY F.A. HAYEK. (as to practicality it would have to be applied, like every theory, but it makes sense) 6. To control society you don’t need debt – but ignorance, and fear factor (but there is no 50K to win) 7. someone mentioned WWIII on the discussion board, “i wonder where would it take place this time” because last two did not touch USA (oh yeah Pearl Harbor)could prevent it, but there had to be some excuse just like 9/11. 8. dont have this one 9. i like to see both side of the stick, and i would really like to see the other one…. 10. Ups i did it again, 1913, 1920-30,1984 ups 1987, 2007-09-…ongoing. craps 2012 pt. 6 web ether-net ideas 
+o just remembered nr.8 – global warming – or should i say climate change – or should i say natural change scientifically proven. I think i remember reading something about orbital changes and distance that the earth changes – similarly to 4 seasons Jemolina 
+If you lend a cup of sugar you expect to get back something more than the cup of sugar, to make up for the fact that you’ve incurred a cost in going without the sugar and risked it never being returned. 
+Money is not required for repaying debt, so the premise of the article is bunk. Suppose the debt is to China, for the supply of a billion t-shirts, 200 million microwave ovens, etc. To repay the debt the US has to create a billion t-shirts, 200 million microwave ovens etc (plus interest) more than it consumes. The important bit is that the debtor’s production must be more than its consumption. 
+Now introduce money into the equation and start from zero cash in the US. The US has assets such as mining rights, so they can sell something to a dollar holder for cash. The cash can be used to repay debt, or it can be invested in productive activities which generate a profit. The tipping point for a country being or not being able to repay its debt is not related to the money supply. What you need to look at is the relationship between productivity, consumption, assets, debt and interest rates. Current and future generations of Americans need to (a) produce more than they consume to make up for the past generations which consumed more than they produced. Or they can (b) reject the inequitable system and default. Or they can (c) embrace the inequitable system and use the world’s largest military and most brainwashed population to go on a global pillaging spree in the name of freedom. My money’s not on (a). 
+Remember, when a debt is repaid with money it is the debt which disappears, not the money. The money continues to circulate so a penny can pay off an infinite amount of debt. Trent 
+Lol barts a moron, sound like he gets his “information” from mainstream media. Like listening to an exact recording of the “news” on national tv. Wake up FOOL, youve been had! Greg 
+One major flaw in the argument. Your right on how the money supply works and expands, but your forgetting that money is still just pieces of paper floating around. They really do not have value. Our goods and services are what really has value. How would it be mathematically impossible to pay back our debt with our goods and services when our debt has not yet even reached the dollar amount of all goods and services we produce in 1 year. Not even one year worth of our goods and services (GDP) would be needed to pay the debt back. We have had much higher debt in the past comparably. This is if you actually look at our debt compared to GDP. This is like you would look at your own debt compared to your income in your household. If my debt was equal to my income this year, I might be very worried, but it’s not the end of the world. jos boersema 
+Hi, the founding fathers of the USA also said (iirc) that the people needed to be educated. For ppl (like me) who are not professionally in banking the money issue (in full) can seem complicated. I think that for sufficient political oversight #1 thing for a new system must be simplicity. Only what is simple people can understand, only what people can understand they can inspect, police & keep righteous. 
+What do you think of this system: a Gov issued fiat, legal tender law, fit for debt, and taxes payed in it. Now the money will work as money in exchange. Then a central gov owned bank as the infrastructural backbone, with collective accounts for banks (privacy from gov). Retail account & savings account services banks who are prohibited to lend out a single dime (inspected by gov), by law prohibited to lend anything. Then a separate mortgage & consumer credit sector, also heavily policed by gov. By law nobody can resell a loan to a third party. Then a third sector which handles business upstart & expansion credit, these investments are in the form of plain loans and can neither be traded to third parties. 
+It is my understanding that this third sector has to be dominated by political will of the people, to prevent that sector from growing up those tiranical and corrupt corporations the USA founding fathers may have talked about. 
+The money would then be spend into circulation and taxed out of it, the government never lends a single coin from anyone (only taxes). As a rule the (next) government never pays back loans, so that future govs won`t be able to get credit either … 
+I`d say this is simple, what people expect too. To round it off: international businesses are prohibited henceforth, and politics rules on import/export tariffs to protect its markets and industries out of long term self interest (at a cost to global economic effeciency). This program also requires the government to be a faithful true democracy …… 
+Is this something, if not why ? I personally don`t believe in gold / silver money that much. (Sorry to post such a long comment.) Bud Selig 
+The reason the status quo exists is because of ignorance. Politicians, Bankers and the “Elite” rule because the sheeple can’t grasp what is going on and are complacent slaves oblivious to puppeteers manipulations. Our “Leaders” in this country are only in control of the destiny of our nation to the extent that they are allowed. If the sheeple were able to peek behind the curtain the revolution would already be upon us. “taught” (in congress) and the president If the government is able to keep 
+What we are seeing is the last and greatest betrayal of the American people. Next stop, serfdom. Margo 
+Okay people, let me make this simple. CHINA owns us. Technically, at any moment, they can say – we want our money. And guess what? We can’t pay it. You know HOW we can pay it back though? Obviously not with our money…. (it’s worth nothing) We don’t have enough gold. But we do have real estate…. Yep, they can collect our collateral… Our precious land. And guess what else? The Chinese are COMMUNIST. SO, I guess our freedom IS for sale– Is there ANYONE out there with ANY kind of economic sense? Because this Congress and this administration are KILLING us (or at least SELLING us!) TimJowers 
+Josh, The money is owed to yourself and other Americans. Social Security money has been wasted and effectively funded Wall Street Bonuses this year and last year. Same for other liabilities (medicare!). So, when you portend the money will not be paid back then you are correct. The only problem is the losers are working Americans. Not Billionaires. Not Congress persons. Not the FED or their posse for sure! Fractional banking is a simple system to steal from those who produce value and give to those who control the printing press. Very simple. Very effective. (BTW, the legal limit in the UK is 666 fake credit bubble pounds to every actual pound on deposit. At least one bank made it up to 66 to 1 in 2008.) Big M 
+The debt is phony, and the people of this country didn’t sign anything agreeing to pay off loans that didn’t go to them. 
+Each state legislature should immediately declare its independence from the brothel in DC, confiscate every military base within its borders (they paid for them, didn’t they?), start their own state banks, COIN their own money, and tell the criminals in DC to pound sand. The CONstitution isn’t legally binding on ANYBODY, and never has been, which means that the criminal syndicate calling itself the federal government has neither legitimacy nor legal authority. TimJowers 
+Here’s how I see it: Fractional banking is a simple way to steal from those who work. For every $1 you earn from working, they print $1 or so for themselves; so, no matter how hard you work, you will never get ahead. 
+Josh, Its actually worse than you portend. The theft is from each American in the way of Social Security, Medicare, etc. That money has been stolen and is gone. 
+“Fractional banking” is criminal. It is a way for those who do not work to reward themselves and take from others. Imagine if you offered auto insurance to all your friends and neighbors. What if one had a wreck and asked you to pay? How is this any different than what AIG did? The difference is they control the government and can take from the taxpayers. You cannot. The same for the FED. Imagine if you borrowed money from all of your friends and family to the point you borrowed $10,000 but you only really had $100. Well, that’s fractional banking. To make it worse, imagine if you never even had the $100 in the first place but your brother had given you an IOU for it – even though he himself was broke! That’s how the Federal Reserve Banking System works. Its a simple con job on trusting Americans. And it has destroyed the USA. 
+(The legal limit in the UK is 666 to 1. One banks was leverage 66 to 1 in 2008. They are all probably higher now since the derivatives markets are back in the stratosphere.) TimJowers 
+Glenn Peters, 
+Do you have any idea what GDP is? Step out of the box and think about it for a minute! GDP is a measure of “tax ability” NOT productiveness. I’m sure you know how its components but others should look it up. Its good for a laugh and a cry. Anyone who quotes GDP as having any meaning to value of a country’s workforce and value of th country’s working people is either brainwashed, on the take, or ignorant of the facts. Mockan 
+The Elites “solution” to this problem was always for the Elites to move their financial operations to countries that still have wealth not yet appropriated, formally dissolve the USA Constitution, dissolve USA sovereignty, and make the US military the official enforcement arm of the United Nations (that is what Elites in control of the UN have wanted to protect “their” wealth, and prevent any other countries from threatening their power and control). The actual solution is going to be global rebellion against the Elites, denial of validity of all their ownership contracts, their apprehension, and execution. All assets will be returned. There will probably be some form of globalization, but not run by criminal organizations. Spencer 
+I believe there was a president who went against the norm and began printing U.S Notes – but he was killed soon after. 
+I’d say what’s missing from the article is that the US debt (including unfunded liabilities) is over 100 Trillion. Like the Romans, they promised much more then the state could deliver to their overly vast military and other government run organizations. 
+Though I don’t know how much I disagree with fractional reserve. Lending permits new companies to exist, you might even say that the west is so well developed because of its lending system…..but that’s just a thought, not a statement Spencer 
+strike last comment – he addressed unfunded liabilities in an update Ted 
+Thank you Obama, Pelosi, Reid, et al for further adding to the debt by their socialist system of entitlement PBS 
+Cash in circulation can exceed debt/credit. Yes. How? whn people start putting more money under the matresses and not in Bank Sleuth51 
+What is the value of real estate owned by the government? How much of that could be sold and leased back to cut the debt by, say, 60%? There must be all kinds of hidden assets that the Ruling Class don’t want us to know about. What if we cut our defense budget to $100 billion a year, cut all foreign aid… daydreaming. What a bunch of crocs we have in Congress. Go Green, Recycle Congress. SERFDOM Or FREEDOM. wayne 
+The federal reserve did not lend us any money. They lent us paper. Pay them back with reams of paper. If their paper is worth something just because they say it is then so is ours. They aren’t God; they’re just a bank. Jim Hatfield 
+Here’s some solutions and suggestions: 
+1. Setting up local currencies in your own town or city 
+2. Tangible bartering for services and supplies within your community-keep it local 
+3. Get back to farming-organically-support your local farmer’s market or participate. 
+4. If you have to spend money, don’t spend it on the big corporations-give it to the local guy (even if its a little more expensive). 
+5. Stop participating in what the establishment wants us to participate in. The U.S government/ world banks/the UN/the Fed/the Media-> ALL IN BED TOGETHER-THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT US!!! 
+Watch: 
+7. Make and invent your own energy and money saving ideas-> Google: “Suppressed Energy Technology” WeOweWho? 
+Who do we owe money to? We don’t owe ANYBODY a dime. The money is created as a means of exchange and tender. That is what the CONSTITUTION states. 
+What the filthy, lying FED is doing is tacking on their MONEY-CHANGER fee. And we all know WHO the money changers are. They want to live a life of EXTREME wealth without having to work for it. Bob 
+All this debt… who made profit from it and why??? I paid my house twice its value because of interests, but the money I was lent by the bank was pure invention from the bank… they did not have the money they lent me ( they legally need to have 10% ) of what they lend and the rest is AIR but I have to pay them interest on that AIR. It seems that the problem is the thiefs of the banking system and the Federal Reserve … and whoever profits from the interests on inexistent money… are the very persons who are taking the world’s economies hostage (some form of real slavery). The Federal Reserve + the banking system is THE problem. 
+Ace post – here’s more on the Federal Reserve/Rothschilds who also own the Bank of England and set the Gold Standard. 
+Lincoln also stood up to them – end of Lincoln. Jackson, being a canny Ulsterman survived many assassination attempts. 
+Hamilton was allegedly the Rothschild’s inside man who tried to set up a Bank of America similar to their Bank of England. 
+They make their Banks and establishments appear to have Government status, and own 50% of the world’s assets. 
+the dynasty started with goldsmith Amschel Meyer who nailed a red shield to his door and called himself Rotschild. The House has bankrolled most major wars and profited handsomely therefrom. Not for all their fortune would I want the blood of one soldier on my hands. 
+Apparently five TRILLION dollars disappeared in the first week of the bankers bailout…and another 4.8 billion since…? 
+The Obama Deception 
+http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F4IGwuKdUQ&NR=1 Rot econs 101 Cody 
+The problem that is not addressed here is not money creation, which through fractional reserve banking gives banks the power to create credit from nothing. The real problem is interest. When the money supply is expanded via fractional reserve banking it creates more money to be injected into the money supply. However loans also charge interest. Only the money created for the loan contract or principal is actually distributed in the money supply. The money to pay the interest is not created in the money supply, thus creates a system of perpetual inflation. This is a lose-lose situation for the person taking the loan for not only does the amount of money in the money supply not even exist to pay off the interest, but the original loan that was taken devalues the money we already have. This means that not only are bankruptcies inevitable, but everyone is taxed subversively via inflation. OSKR 
+It’s sad read about how certain people on this blog try to make others feel IGNORANT because of thier lack of knowledge on the subject. This is a place where people from all over come in and pitch in their thoughts and opinons about whats happening to our corrupt financial system. This not to see who is the brightest in financial analysis and to see who is good about historical facts. so do us a favor the next time u post something dont make remarks about how dumb someone is in regards to the situation because honestly, its only shows how full of BS you really are. web ether-net ideas 
+how about we go back to barter system???? i was arguing with one of my economy teachers that barter system was actually efficient… the argument was: how can you value a dozen eggs, or something of that sort… well for one person a dozen eggs can be worth a pound of flour, for other gallon of milk, another would provide a service like a roof repair or something. You bargain and come to a mutual understanding of your product/service value, at the same time the product/service might be worth more/less in a different situation. But then again modern economists disagree due to inability of disregarding those “modern unified rules” of value…. but that’s what the real barter system is about there is not prescribed value to anything you make it your own… (and actually this system has been proven by the guy who exchanged a paper pin for a house- check out this story) Bystander 
+Saying money doesn’t have any value is a ridiculous claim. If you really believe it i will be more than happy to come to your house and relieve you of your excess paper. The value of anything is the result of supply and demand. The demand for US dollars derives from the laws mandating they be accepted for all debt public and private. The supply results from the government putting money in circulation. Where supply and demand meet we find the value of something. Paper money has no more or less inherent value than gold or anything else. You can’t eat either, both will fail in getting you to work or sheltering you or your family. There value is determined largely by the rules and mores of society. Money from our laws, and gold from the fact that people like shinny things. 
+I have no problem with the Fed, actually i trust the fed alot more than i trust the (current) congress, president, and alot of people. Our problems are big, but not insurmountable. We don’t have to worry about paying off the national debt immediately, instead simply balancing the budget would do alot, since with economic growth a constant nominal debt value will decrease as a percent of our economic if the economic is growing. 
+The problem is geting the economy to start growing. And in order to do that we need to create a friendly environment for business. Another tough, but not impossible thing to accomplish. Get Real 
+United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts. (31 USC Sub IV Ch 51 Sub 1 Sec 5103) 
+Unfortunately for The Fed they screwed up when they passed The Federal Reserve Act and failed to void the ability of Treasury to issue its own non-debt-bearing currency which is also legal tender. It requires only an executive order to implement Joe Blow 
+The mounting debts are deliberate and are but a tool to take this country from the American citizens. Furthermore, this discussion ignores the effect of crude oil on banking and money. A comprehensive discussion includes the effect of the petrodollar system on our currency. With that, we should include the impact of holding more crude oil within our borders than all the other proven oil reserves on earth. Here are the official estimates:– 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia– 18-times as much oil as Iraq First, investigate the Williston Basin, more commonly referred to as the ‘Bakken.’ It an area stretching from Northern Montana, through North Dakota and into Canada. It contains over 500 billion barrels of oil. Also, since 2006, it’s been common knowledge in the oil industry that 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. It holds more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. In four years of high oil prices none has been extracted and nearly all of us are unaware of its existence. These oil assets are coveted by the international banking cabal and the largest multinational industries because in a world reliant on crude oil, oil can be used as currency between nations. The size of ours guarantee global predominance. Currently the major multinational banks are colluding to take this wealth from the American citizens. They are in the process of creating a spectacular economic collapse of our fiat dollar system. With it will come a tremendous drop in our standard of living. This means more than resorting to “Hamburger Helper” instead of filet mignon. It means increased infant mortality rates and decreased life expectancy. Afterwards we will surrender our constitutional government and our natural resources for the promise of regaining some modicum of our standard of living and relative affluence. All the while we would possess the means and the resources to pay the debts they incurred for us, enormous though they may be. Sad to say it, ladies and gentlemen, but control of our government has been taken from us and now we begin to pay the price for letting it happen. web ether-net ideas 
+Bystander_ why don’t you then start printing your own money and see where that takes you. Any country’s currency in order to have any value has to be backed up by something. That is why it is called legal tender because the idea of paper money is simply made up and works just as IOUs (of sort). When US used to have the gold standard- US currency was backed up by the gold bullion, which had value. But after president Nixon ended Brentton Woods act and eliminated gold standards US currency is backed by empty promises and the believe that US is GOOD FOR IT. Bankdog 
+The point isn’t that the dollar isn’t worth anything. ($.04) The point is that there arent enough dollars in the collective US to pay off our gov’ts current debt load. And for those of you that trust the fed, may I suggest that you read “the Creature From Jekyll Island”. Or, research what they were up to in 1987 with the creation of Credit Default Swaps and the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 in 1999. These were two MAJOR dominoes that fell and put us in the financial situation that we’re in today. Congress and the Treasury are both in the back pocket of the fed. And Goldman Sachs is their favorite recruiting grounds. Support HR 1207. Call your congressman/women and tell them to vote yes. brewd 
+Fact is if you’re not part of the rich elite you are screwed. The best strategy is to not have any children so they don’t have to live in the coming misery and stuff. Michael 
+The bumblebee can’t fly either, but it does. 
+Your article does not take into account that the nation was actually much more in debt during World War II. 
+Gloom and doom, sensationalistic statements do not help *anybody*. Wyatt Junker 
+Solution? Get rid of government. Maybe 70% of it. Keep national defense. 
+Immediately stop all payroll taxes into the system right now. Do a very slow drain back to those people who paid in their entire lives with an apology that the government will never do that again, ever, under threat of individual sate secession. Let people keep what they earn. 
+Hold a Con Convention with an agenda that Congress must always balance its budget every year with third party audits held up by private sector and publicized with fact checks made available for all to see. 
+Medicare can be reformed by ending the entitlement for those paying in now. Bring competition back into the system by letting providers compete across state lines. Handicap trial lawyers and ambulance chasers by introducing a large tax on any judgment issued by a court against businesses. Why? Because businesses are our bread and butter, literally our very survival. We need to become grateful again for businesses who provide jobs rather than stigmatize them as greedy organizations. They create earnings. They create jobs. Not government. Therefore they get special rights as risk takers. 
+Incentivize corporations with tax holidays or do a fair tax which would essentialy end corporate tax rates and would compete for coporations to come back to the US, theoretically repatriating their assets back to the country, by some estimates of well over $100 trillion in assets. 
+Talk about a jobs bill! 
+The current regime has no clue. 
+Time for them to legalize marijuana. That move alone would save them millions. Then, they take it over. Grow it, sell it, tax it. Problem solved. 
+Why are they so stubborn about this anyway? BK 
+There is a huge hole in the reasoning. 
+>The Federal Reserve swaps these green pieces of paper for pink pieces of paper called U.S. Treasury bonds. 
+Correct. 
+However, the Federal reserve turns over all its profits back to the treasury. So there really is no interest being paid to the Fed. 
+>The only way to create more money is to go into even more debt which makes the problem even worse. 
+Who is the government going into debt with? Oh, that’s right. Itself. All it is doing is stuffing a piggy bank full of dollar bills with IOU’s and then taking out actually currency. Mark 
+Money, itself paper, gold, feathers whatever is simply bizarre. Animals must think we’re nuts and if life exists outside of earth they must think we’re nuts as well. 
+Tons of plants and animals but if you don’t have paper (in our case) you starve? 
+lol, this insane system will be laughed at thousands of years from now. It’s so ridiculously stupid. I didn’t vote for Obama 
+How can anyne in their right mind have faith in our Congress,the Democrats or the person in Washington ethanallen 
+Get Real you are correct. The authority for the federal gov’t to issue banknotes still exists. However consider the fate of the last president to issue United States Notes rather than relying on Federal Reserve Notes. None other than President John F. Kennedy. Anita 
+A man named Larry Burkett who had a financial radio program some years back on Christian Radiowrote a book called “The Coming Economic Earthquake” which covered the subject very well. He saw this coming when there was hardly a sign of it anywhere, and now it is here. Tea 
+Here is why your logic is faulty. If it’s impossible to pay off the national debt, then how was it possible to create the debt? Wouldn’t your same logic apply to prove that it is *impossible* to get us in debt his far? 
+You make a good point, but all you are showing is that it’s impossible to pay off our national debt instantly (as in within a second). And nobody is proposing that anyway;) 
+Money gets recycled, like air. As long as have some trees around, we’ll never run out of oxygen. If …. that is 😉 Anthony Mascia 
+“So what should we do? Does anyone have any suggestions?” 
+Well I tried to look at all the comments and I may have missed it… Did you see the words “treason” or “traitor” anywhere yet? Without prosecution(s) for this crime it will be difficult for the other suggestions — many good — to take place. State & local level actions hold the most promise. 
+My suggestion then is pray to God for his mercy on our Country. This is our most powerful weapon. Luke 
+Declare the US as Bankrupt and not pay off the debt… Alternativly… 1. Refuse monetary policy to get as screwed up as it has been.. for if the interest rate on money was 15% about 8 years ago.. the national debt wouldnt have gotten so high…the international value of the US dollar would have reflected its interest rate better and hence MORE loaning more difficult… Funny what a war in Iraq can do… 2. Stop a trade debt… so money can come in from other countries and hence pay the debt… Why do you think Barak Obama just recently asked china to buy product from them? IE… START EXPORTING with a low valued dollar and a higher interest rate… hence paying off debt… 3. Take up taxes and stop voting in politicians that claim they can solve the problem without bringing it up… More is in a movie IOUSA which is alittle better than my descriptions above…. Fractional banking isn’t THE problem… ie 100 = 1000… it is simply a stupid way of handling money… the money has to reflect the assets better thats all… ie… 100 dollars in a society needs to = about 100 dollars of product (including labor products like a lawyer or something) in trade to buy it with… With all ratios that it has gotten this bad… hard times lie ahead… as everyone loves to repeat… John 
+@Bystander, the point regarding value of the USD is that is comes out of nothing. Certain people can press a few computer buttons and create hundreds of billions of dollars. If one person has the power to create hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air, then what can the true value be? What work was done or product/service sold in order to productively create this new money? None. The value, the true value, is nonexistent. People value dollars because of faith and trust in the government which says they have value. The same government that prints the money out of thin air. 
+The difference with gold as money, the reason why the founders of the United States mandated that only gold and silver were money, is that gold or silver cannot be created out of nothing by government bureaucrats. When governments are unable to create money out of thin air then they have no choice but to live within their means. But, governments living within their means equates to less interest income for the bankers… 
+Another point about gold, it has an extremely long and successful track record as being accepted as money, for more than 5,000 years. All fiat currencies, of which the USD is, in the history of the world (aside from our current group of fiat currencies) have failed. Fiat has a very bad historical track record. Gold, well, as JP Morgan once stated to Congress in 1913, “gold is money and nothing else.” 
+OK, why not for some famous US solutions: 1. Instigate a few wars and supply all countries/factions involved with US weapons. BIG profits! 2. Increase heroin production in Afghanistan and make young people in Eastern Europe/Asia drug dependent. Who cares? Big Continuous Profits! 3. Abolish the US$ and start another currency. Start over again. Foreign debt? Pooff, Gone! 4. Just manipulate the gold and silver price upward instead of downward. What about US$ 51.000/Oz? Your advantage with only a few telephone calls to some Wall Street Banks: 8,133.5 (MT; US gold reserves) x 1000 kg x 32,15 = 261,5 Million Oz. x US$ 51,000 = US 13,3 Quadrillion. Debt: Pooff, gone! 
+History has learned to be very cynical to believe the US will have the balls to confront their problems. Most probably they will find an easy way out: bomb the problems into oblivion, let other people pay for their debt or create another paper illusion. Hetty 
+It appears to me the crisis was caused by the US, that is the Federal Reserve. What happened was that the risks were sold abroad as derivatives, so foreign banks have to suffer as well as US banks. Actually, we are in the same boat, all over the world. I don’t think it is fair to let the people, whether in the US, Greece, Iceland, Portugal or wherever, suffer for the unfair system of debt creation. We need some bright ideas and political clout to get rid of this debt in the best way for the people. We know that debt is as fictional as money created by the banks, so something must be possible in this area. Frankenstein Government 
+Excellent article. Pretty factual despite all of the nanny naysayers. 
+Therein lies the rub. Money is illusory and does not actually exist. It is a debt instrument. As long as people “believe” the unbacked and fiat currency of the US has value-then it does. Perception is truly reality. The problem is that folks are beginning to figure this out. Like China and the Middle East. 
+Abolish the voracious middle man-Federal Reserve. Print our own currency. Be a patriot. Vote libertarian. GulagCentral 
+Everybody needs to get all the credit cards they can…run the limit to the max and don’t pay on them. Stop making mortgage payments. If you are self employed stop paying your quarterly income taxes. Of course nobody will do this because they are scared to lose their littole possessions. But if we did the country would grind to a halt pretty soon. Then see where the chips fall. Karl 
+I predict we end up going the way of barter, via an unofficial currency like Argentina’s credito. That, or we go back to seashells. Gold & silver are too valuable to be a currency again. We’ll always have money though. Mike 
+First, (as Get Real pointed out) the Federal Reserve and its fiat note are unconstitutional. Only congress has the power to coin money. Simple, argument over. “Coin” was deliberately used as the Founding Fathers recognized the dangers of paper money, and coins were used for many years. Paper bills were created to facilitate large transactions, but the bills were tied to gold redeemable at a quantity of grams of gold. The fact is, our Federal reserve not is not redeemable for anything. Nixon cut that tie. So, our money has ties only to Federal reserve assets, which consist of failed mortgage securities, to the tune of 2 trillion. 
+Other countries are unloading their stockpiles of US currency for gold bullion from the IMF. Foreign banks are trying to get to 30% US currency reserves, down from 65%. 
+Bystander has drank the kool-aid and I am going to increase your choco rations to 30grams next week! The Fedreral reserve issues currency, not the government. Gold and silver have been used as money for thousands of years, so their established value is not in question whatsoever as a money. 
+DO the smart thing and diversify some of your investments into precious metals and get in to dividend paying foreign stocks that have little to no ties to US interests. GG 
+The answer is pretty obvious, and simple…. 
+The US will default on it`s debt. 
+It will probably offer to pay China/Japan/etc their parts of the debt (which I belive is actually a pretty small part of the overall debt), but the rest will be defaulted. 
+There, problems solved (and new problems created!) Ed Simple 
+Me? I’m renouncing my citizenship and moving to Switzerland. Jim 
+I won’t even begin to list the ways in which the article is dead wrong. A complete waste of time. If you’re buying what this article is selling, you should look elsewhere for an education on how these systems work. The author doesn’t know. Don 
+OK – First of all, the FED actually creates very little money in our fractional monetary system. In normal markets there is $800 Billion of US Treasury Notes (a debit entry) that has been moneterized into Federal Reserve Notes (a credit entry). Due to the enormous one-time (hopefully) money needs stemming from the fall-out of the credit crisis, the FED has mushroomed its balance sheet to approximately $2.3 Trillion from the aforementioned $800 Billion. This quantitative easing was necessary due to interest rate considerations, not because there was not enough money. Simply put, if the US Treasury had to issue a Trillion or so more in US Treasury Notes overnight, the interest rates would have sky-rocketed which would have put the chances for a recovery into the remote range. Moreover, the author implies that the FED is controlled a group of elites that and are absconding the money they make. This is only remotely true. The FED is independent of the US Government, so politics stay out of the banking sector. Moreover, the great majority of the money generated investments on the FED’s books from US Treasuries, and now, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac paper is simply given back to the US Treasury. If that was not the case, you can be certain the Bernanke would not be re-appointed as FED Chairman by a vote of Congress. 
+Secondly, the majority of our money is created when banks make loans. When a banker makes a loan, he must retain a capital ratio of around 8%. My sense is that the author is inter-changably treating this 8% requirement as the approximate 10% reserve requirement that the FED has in place. When a bank makes a new loan it is debit on its books and the credit is a deposit into the borrowers account. Somebody has to clarify to me how money has been lost in this transaction. Say the loan is for $100,000… well, $100,000 is credited to the borrower, so how there a loss of 10%? When you borrow $100,000 from a bank, do you only receive $90,000 as the author seems to be implying? For EVERY DEBIT on the books, there is an equal CREDIT, unless the loan is not paid back. Of course, that is why an 8% capital requirement is in place, so that the loan loss can safely be offset against the bank’s capital. 
+Thirdly, the money supply is tight right now because banks have been contracting their balance sheets. This is being done by tightening credit standards. When less credit is being issued by banks a contraction in the macro money supply occurs. Likewise, when banks make loans, their balance sheets are made larger on both the asset and liability side (deposits or money) of their books and the macro money supply is expanded. 
+Fourthly, part of the reason that the macro money supply is not expanding is due to loans losses that banks are taking due to the lack of supervision regarding the subprime debacle. When banks lose money, they very naturally become hesitant to make news loans that could result in further losses. Moreover, the loan loss means they have less capital and will have trouble maintaining the 8% capital requirement if they continue to make more loans, thereby expanding their balance sheet. A natural contraction occurs. That is what the FED is trying to partially offset by expanding its balance sheet, so the whole system does not implode. However, in context of the entire money supply, an extra Trillion on the FED’s balance sheet is relative peanuts. 
+Fifthly, the real threat to the US’s money supply is trade imbalances. When the US imports more goods and services than it exports, the difference is made up by selling them our debt. Again, all the money created via the fractional monetary system has a debit and a credit… they equal. However, when foreigners end up owning our money because we traded it for goods and services, we do end up with less domestic money than we have debt. And, if that money does not eventually come back to the US in the form of trade surpluses we will not have enough money to pay our domestic debt with. However, the money did not somehow disappear. The debits still equal the credits. The problem is the foreigners have become our creditor and we are the debtors. 
+Sixthly, debt based monetary systems are inherently dependent upon the money continuing to circulate. When people become scared and start hording money instead of keeping a healthy amount of it in circulation, there will be a lack of money to service debt. It is not unwise to save money, but when the macro savings rate is high enough to result in a contraction of economic activity, we will have a debt servicing issue. RIPITUP 
+GET REAL 
+It may be legal tender. But under the US Constitution it IS NOT legal MONEY. So what two things are legal money under the constitution of the USA? steadystevs 
+A little at a time, the American public has been decieved into thinking that worthless paper is “money”. What is needed is a return to a Consttutionally based monetary system. End the Federal Reserve,repudiate all debts to the banksters and sieze the assets of the financial oligarchy as reperation for the deception. As for foriegn goverments, send the spineless politicians as payment. Terry Numbnut 
+So the US govt owes the Federal Reserve? Who says the US govt has to pay the owners of the Fed reserve? What army do they have? bob kasner 
+Every fianical consultanr and economist should be asked if the have read.THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS AND THE DEVIL FROM JEKAL ISLAND if they haven’t they should not be allowed to comment on the economy or Federal reserve. best 
+Funny thing is, 8-9 years ago, things such as “federal reserve system” and “elite international banking cartels” would of been called a conspiracy theory. Economicon 
+This whole situation is retarded. Why don’t we just invade China and make it ours and then they can’t own us anymore. With all of their factories and land we can pay off our debt way faster. At all, actually. I can’t believe you haven’t thought of this already. PleaseExpalin 
+“We could solve this problem by shutting down the Federal Reserve” 
+So why do we not do that? Is there any real practical problem with that, or is it just an ideological issue? Admin 
+Just look at how much trouble they are having just trying to get an audit of the Federal Reserve right now…. Glenn Peters 
+Tim Jowers 
+Yes, I’ve quite aware of what constitutes GDP. You might be surprised to know just how GDP is calculated in your country (I’m not an American BTW). Did you know that if you earn $100 and then spend that $100, your national accounts show GDP to be $200? But I digress. The point of my response is the the basis of the original article is deeply flawed, by virtue of comparing existing debt (which is repaid over time) with only one year’s GDP. The issue is that the internet is overflowing with ‘experts’ who for the most part gain their knowledge from web-sites and unattributed statements from others who are equally ignorant. The statements then get parroted by others and become conventional ‘wisdom’. Just because experts disagree doesn’t mean every Tom, Dick or Harry’s argument is equally valid. Just look at some of the rambling, incoherent, conspiracy-theory laden responses here; Dennen’s reponse being a great case in point. People, get an education, read BOOKS not just damn web-sites and don’t believe every so-called ‘expert’ who trots out a bunch of stuff that seems to sound right. Anon 
+The only solution is to go back to the gold standard. We don’t necessarily have to use gold, but there has to be some sort of physical asset that we can use as the cap for how much we can spent. That way if we need to pay back our debts, we can use the gold (or whatever assets the standard is based off) to pay back that debt. Simple, efficient, tolerable. oldtimer 
+This article is ridiculous, or has a different definition of “mathematically impossible” than a mathematician does. As one example: 
+You see, the truth is that the U.S. government now owes more dollars than actually exist. 
+And when the US Gov’t pays a dollar towards reducing its debt, does that dollar get removed from circulation? 
+Of course not, it *circulates*. It’s what happens to money in an economy. Bronco 
+So, the question that puzzles me is – why China is giving us the money instead giving it to its own people whose living standard is way lower then ours? Danno Alex 
+People do not want gold because it is a “shiny object”…and no, you cannot “eat your gold”! 
+What gold is is a store of value. While there is some fluctuation in true value due to the occurrence of a depleted vein of ore, the most common reason that the price goes up or down in any given period is due to the strength (or weakness)of the paper currency used to buy it. 
+I bought a certain number of gold American Eagles (1 oz. each) when the spot price of gold was under $300/oz – Oh, how I wish I had mortgaged the house and bought MORE! The spot price for 1 oz. American Eagles closed at $1121.50. My return in approximately 10 years would have been around 400%! Top THAT, Wall Street! 
+But I didn’t buy it for speculation – I bought it to PRESERVE the money I worked hard for. 
+If the economy crashes and your beloved Federal Reserve Note becomes as worthless as a German Deutchmark between the years 1917-1921, you will see the folly of keeping your wealth in paper dollars! 
+No, you can’t spend gold at the hardware store or at Wal-Mart but when the dust clears and a new currency replaces the failed one, I have enough gold to buy all the Amero’s or Euro’s or whatever currency I will need. 
+When people refer to people who hold this mindset as being “gold bugs”, you can rest assured those people probably make money by peddling paper “investments”. 
+So what’ll it be? Value based on a metal that requires labor and investment in order to be extracted out of the ground? (And has been prized as true wealth since before Biblical times?) Or value based on printed paper. Something that a private group of elite bankers manipulate the value of? 
+Choose wisely! Kate Jensen 
+It is clear that the first step is to stop any additional debt. The boat is almost full of water, stop the increase so a plan can be made to reduce what is already in. As people can not find jobs and have time on their hands bartering will become more common, they will trade work or items for things of survival. Neal 
+“The Federal Reserve is a private bank owned and operated for profit by a very powerful group of elite international bankers.” 
+Am I missing something here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_reserve says that the Fed is not owned and is not private and is not for profit, which is what I recollected. 
+This destroys the credibility of the article for me. woot 
+you have just enough info to be dangerous – try to increase your rational thought. 
+one quick point because i’m in a hurry: 
+saying it’s “mathematically impossible” is a misnomer. if you have no money for deposit (but a good job) and buy a $30k car with a loan, (as soon as you buy it the car is worth $20k or less), so you have a $30k debt and now only $20k in assests. is that “mathematically impossible” to repay? no. you promise to pay it with your _future earnings_, which is what the entire debt system is based on. 
+this completely refutes your point 2: #2) The only way to create more money is to go into even more debt which makes the problem even worse. 
+no, the other way is to _work off the debt_. luckily, the government is spending on infrastructure and education so the people will be able to produce enough to pay off that debt. oops, sorry, no, they’re spending on wars. my bad. 
+the issue isn’t debt, it’s what you spend the money on! Rampart 
+Dear “Bystander”– gold has been money for 5,000 years. It is a reliable store of wealth because it can’t be printed out of thin air. If you think fiat currency is as good as gold, I refer you to recent events in Zimbabwe and Argentina. Good luck holding on to your bits of printed paper… perhaps you can use your FRN’s for building fires like this woman from the Weimar Republic. 
+PS – the “demand” for federal reserve notes came as a result of the Breton Woods agreement. At the time that document was penned, our dollars were in fact backed by gold. Since abandoning the gold standard, foreign governments have little reason to hold the FRN in reserve. Mark 
+Incorrect. Interest payments are about 4% of GDP. Kick that up to 5% of GDP and the debt would be paid off over time. 
+“You see, the truth is that the U.S. government now owes more dollars than actually exist” 
+That is the nature of debt: there is always more debt than money, except in very primitive economies. Even on the gold standard that was true. John Sawyer 
+The government can still issue money in the form of coins. Maybe we should all pay for things with a lot of loose change! PleaseExpalin 
+Glenn Peters , 
+No-one has answered my question above. You seem very knowledgeable. Would you like to answer my question please? 
+The article says 
+“ We could solve this problem by shutting down the Federal Reserve and restoring the power to issue U.S. currency to the U.S. Congress. But the politicians in Washington D.C. are not about to do that. ” 
+My question is 
+If it does solve this problem, so why do we not do that? Is there any real practical problem with that, or is it just an ideological issue? 3-D 
+There is no way to fix it now and no way out. The best solution is to hunker down, let it all burn down around you as social disorder asserts itself, and try to come out alive. If you do, you’ll be a part of rebuilding the country, this time hopefully NOT under control of bankers with specific unchangeable parts of the Constitution that EXPLICITLY FORBID handing the money supply over to private banks of any kind. David Smith 
+JFK has already signed an Executive Order for the issue of debt free Treasury Notes and the Notes were printed and ready to go into circulation when he was killed. His Executive Order is still legally in effect but no one has had the courage since then to implement it. Immediately after they killed him, and he was not the 1st President to be killed for this reason, the newly printed Treasury Notes were destroyed. The President we now have like many before him are owned by the owners of the Federal Reserve (House of Rothschild) or their agents (George Soros etc.). If these people finally get kicked out of our country and the chance is slim because the American People will probably never understand or care about the financial system since these very same people control our minds using many methods but mainly through television, they will probably remotely militarily destroy what little remains of our economy, society, and country that they were not able to destroy while here. They will destroy it out of vengeance and desperation because it is their nature to destroy. The U.S.A. is not the only country they control against the will of the majority of it’s people. They hate the U.S. Constitution because it is based on God’s Laws and because we have been a Christian society. Still though, I believe that forgiving them for destroying us physically is the right thing to do. I’m not sure though if I will be able to follow through on my belief if some day I find my back up against a wall. It seems like that day is quickly approaching for most of us. Why do all of the JFK documentaries present every possibility of who did it to confuse but none ever mention this one fact? Brophanity 
+@web ether-net ideas 
+your ideations of a barter system are ok, but it really doesnt make sense to “trade” anything. If you just gave people what they needed from what you were producing, and they just gave to you as needed from what they produced, things would be a lot easier. If you understand there is no real need for money, then it shouldnt be a big stretch to see that people would be happier if they only took what was necessary, and then only more than that as long as it didnt deprive others Glenn Peters 
+PleaseExpalin asked: 
+Does shutting down down the Federal Reserve and restoring the power to issue U.S. currency to the U.S. Congress solve this problem, if so why do we not do that? Is there any real practical problem with that, or is it just an ideological issue?",FAKE
+1591,Trump relents after withholding medical records,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+5395,"President Obama Gets Real, Not Revenge, On Republicans","By Rmuse on Sat, Oct 29th, 2016 at 3:23 pm He is taking the conspiracy theories and obstruction that dogged his presidency from day one and throwing them back in Republicans' faces.   *The following is an opinion column by R Muse* 
+Although this campaign season has been interesting, to say the least, there is something happening one never thought would occur. After spending nearly eight years demonizing, obstructing, and criticizing every and anything about the President of the United States, Republicans desperate to save their jobs are beginning to tout their “ imagined ” close ties to the Democratic President whose approval rating and popularity are growing. 
+It is hypocritical, to say the least, and at some point a result of a toxic Republican candidate for the presidency, but for some GOP candidates it is a very dangerous strategy. If any Republican believed President Obama would allow them to take advantage of him after spending eight years assailing him as illegitimate and corrupt, they were sadly mistaken and underestimated the commander in chief’s tolerance during an election. 
+The President is using the final two weeks before the election to decimate Republicans for either “ belated rejection ” or continued support of Donald Trump. President Obama is also reminding Republicans that “ Donald Trump is the endpoint of eight years of [GOP] toxic hostility .” It may be a tad of an exaggeration to claim that “ Obama seems determined to spend the last two weeks of the election laying waste to every Republican who ever crossed him ,” but he is getting some well-placed and well-warranted shots at Republicans. 
+Two Republican hypocrites hoping to take advantage of the President’s approval ratings have been some of his harshest critics; so it likely stunned the President that they are boasting working closely with the man they obstructed, opposed, and attempted to get rid of. 
+Ohio Senator Rob Portman had the temerity to run a campaign ad boasting about working closely with the President “to break the grip of heroin addiction.” President Obama took the time to excoriate Portman for, 
+“ Finally withdrawing his support from Donald Trump ,” but only “ After looking at the polling. Now that it’s politically expedient. But he has supported him up until last week? So I guess it was OK when Trump was attacking minorities, and suggesting that Mexicans were rapists … and insulting Gold Star moms, making fun of disabled Americans. I guess that didn’t quite tip it over the edge. Why was that OK? And now he says he will vote for the vice-presidential nominee instead, except that guy still supports Donald Trump. ” 
+The President was a little more exercised after learning that the man who called the President “ one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times,” California Republican Representative Daryl Issa, is sending out campaign mailers with the President’s face on them and boasting about his close work with President Obama “ to protect victims of sexual assault .” 
+Daryl Issa is in a fairly competitive race compared to past elections and he certainly has earned the President’s wrath after obstructing progress and wasting taxpayer money on Issa-created scandals. During a fundraiser in La Jolla California Sunday last, the President assailed Issa for having the audacity to use a campaign mailer with the President’s image on it. The President said, 
+“ Issa’s primary contribution to the United States Congress has been to obstruct and to waste taxpayer dollars on trumped-up investigations that have led nowhere. This is now a guy who, because poll numbers are bad, has sent out brochures with my picture on them touting his cooperation on issues with me. Now that is the definition of chutzpah.” 
+As remarked by Tim Murphy at Mother Jones, President Obama is not just evening up the score with Republicans who made his tenure miserable, “ He is attempting to have the last word on the personal and political fights of the last eight years—to take the conspiracy theories and obstruction that dogged his presidency from day one and throw them back in Republicans’ faces .” 
+The President clearly has a lot of “ words ” to harangue Republicans with. He said , 
+“ Here’s the thing. For years, Republican politicians and the far-right media outlets have pumped up all kinds of crazy stuff about me. About Hillary. About Harry. They said I wasn’t born here. They said climate change is a hoax. They said that I was going to take everybody’s guns away! They said that while we were doing military exercises that we’ve been doing forever, suddenly this was a plot to impose martial law. This is what they’ve been saying for years now! So people have been hearing it they start thinking well maybe it’s true! And if the world they’ve been seeing is I’m powerful enough to cause hurricanes on my own and to steal everybody’s guns in the middle of the night and impose martial law—even though I can’t talk without a ‘prompter—then is it any wonder that they end up nominating somebody like Donald Trump? 
+And the fact is that there are a lot of politicians who knew better. There are a lot of senators who knew better but they went along with these stories because they figured you know what this’ll help rile up the base, it’ll give us an excuse to obstruct what we’re trying to do, we won’t be able to appoint judges, we’ll gum up the works, we’ll create gridlock, it’ll give us a political advantage. So they just stood by and said nothing and their base began to actually believe this stuff. So Donald Trump did not start this. Donald Trump didn’t start it, he just did what he always did which is slap his name on it, take credit for it, and promote it. That’s what he always does. And so now, when suddenly it’s not working and people are saying wow this guy’s kind of out of line, all of a sudden these Republican politicians who were okay with all this crazy stuff up to a point suddenly they’re all walking away. Oh, this is too much. So when you finally get him on tape bragging about actions that qualify as sexual assault and his poll numbers go down, suddenly that’s a deal-breaker. Well what took you so long! What the heck! What took you so long! All these years!” 
+The Mother Jones piece made out like President Obama is seeking retribution, or “ revenge ” against Republicans for their impropriety as legislators over the past eight years. Without knowing what goes on in the President’s head to motivate his campaign rhetoric; that is a hard call to make with any surety. Barack Obama does not strike one as being vindictive. 
+The President is, though, an accomplished campaigner and as his tenure in the White House is winding down and Republicans are struggling to find an identity apart from Donald Trump, it is prudent of the President to remind voters exactly what Republicans are about and what they are about is precisely why Donald Trump is their standard bearer; and why Republicans are hypocrites for both abandoning Trump and embracing the man they obstructed and tried to remove from the White House.",FAKE
+699,We can't reward Hillary Clinton with the White House for breaking all the rules,"“Rules are made to be broken” is a saying that has many variations, but perhaps no one has summed up Hillary Clinton’s attitude (and Bill’s, too) about rules more than the late science-fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein, who said: “I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
+
+In its report on how Hillary Clinton handled her “private” emails while serving as secretary of state, the State Department’s inspector general (IG) has found that Hillary Clinton disregarded cyber security guidelines when she used a private computer server. She continues to deny she did anything wrong and falsely claims she turned over “all” of her emails to the State Department after she left office. In fact, she, or members of her team, deleted about 30,000 of them before an investigation of her practices began.
+
+The IG’s report chides her, saying she should have “preserved any federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary. At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”
+
+There are federal penalties for tampering with a smoke detector on an airplane and disobeying flight attendants that can include fines and even jail time. Isn’t what Hillary Clinton did far worse than that, if she potentially compromised U.S. secrets?
+
+The IG also says she stonewalled requests by the government for access to her server, which was in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, with another discovered at an unsecured location in a Denver bathroom closet. Marcel Lazar, the Romanian computer hacker calling himself “Guccifer,” claims to have hacked into Clinton’s servers. He pled guilty to the charge before a Virginia judge this week. Might there also be Chinese and Russian hackers out there who’ve also had a look at Clinton’s emails?
+
+Hillary Clinton has claimed she only used private email for her daughter’s wedding and yoga classes. Who believes that, other than her partisan supporters and uninformed voters? High-ranking government officials are aware of the regulations governing their tenure while in office and their responsibilities for the handling of records once they leave it. Will Hillary Clinton’s failure to comply with the State Department’s policies on records necessarily lead to an indictment? That is what an FBI investigation is attempting to determine.
+
+Hillary Clinton has invoked the “everybody has done it” defense, but again that’s not true. She often cites former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who also used a private email server, but as a Wall Street Journal editorial notes, Mr. Powell’s use of private email was limited, and he never set up an unsecure server in his home, not to mention a Denver bathroom.
+
+Something else from the IG’s report that firmly rebuts Hillary Clinton’s defense: “Notification is required when a user suspects compromise of, among other things, a personally owned device containing personally identifiable information.” But the IG found “no evidence” that she or her aides complied.
+
+For years the Clintons have skirted laws and practiced disinformation, rhetorical gymnastics (“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”) obfuscation, changing the subject, non sequiturs and anything else that might block their enrichment or achievement of political goals.
+
+This time, Hillary Clinton should not be allowed to get away with it, nor should she have her incidents of malfeasance rewarded by being elected president of the United States.
+
+
+
+Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated op-ed columnist. He joined Fox News Channel in 1997 as a political contributor. His latest book is ""What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America"" is available in bookstores now. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.",REAL
+5072,Hillary accepts the nomination: A bold speech for a singular moment in American history,"What an amazing and weird moment in political history we’re living through. We all saw something on Thursday night that, in over 200 years of American existence, no one had ever seen before: a woman accept a major-party nomination for the presidency. That’s an incredible achievement, attained by the nominee through years of struggle, setbacks, and steady forward motion. The magnitude of Hillary Clinton’s accomplishment guarantees her a spot in the history books, and those of us who witnessed her make that history won’t soon forget the impression it left.
+
+The weird counterpoint to the Democrats’ elevation of a candidate who represents continued social progress is, of course, the Republicans’ nomination of Donald Trump. The Democratic convention was intended to serve both as a response to the fear and disunity offered by Trumpism, and a push to steal from the Republicans all the themes and campaign messages Trumpism eschews: optimism, patriotism, and a sense of shared purpose. Clinton’s speech accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination was the capstone of that effort, serving as a call to unity, offering an outstretched hand to those alienated by Trump, and sketching out an optimistic vision of America’s future.
+
+Hillary’s provocations of Trump were relentless. She said he “wants to divide us from the rest of the world and from each other.” She quipped that “he’s taken the Republican Party a long way: from ‘Morning in America’ to ‘Midnight in America.’” Trump’s megalomaniacal declaration that “I alone can fix it” was slung around his neck as Clinton framed it as fundamentally alien to the American tradition. “He’s forgetting every last one of us,” she said. “Americans don’t say: ‘I alone can fix it.’ We say: ‘We’ll fix it together.’” In tackling Trump’s fitness for the office, Clinton made enthusiastic use of The Zinger. “Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis,” she said. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” The obvious intent behind all this was to goad Trump into responding and validating the attack. (His surrogates tried responding to the speech in real time, and they faceplanted in characteristic fashion.)
+
+The Trump flensing also provided the necessary contrast for Hillary to sketch out her bright-and-happy vision for the country. After ticking off a laundry list of intractable problems – rising inequality, decreased social mobility, stagnant wages, and persistent gridlock – Hillary went long on optimism:
+
+But just look at the strengths we bring to meet these challenges. We have the most dynamic and diverse people in the world. We have the most tolerant and generous young people we’ve ever had. We have the most powerful military. The most innovative entrepreneurs. The most enduring values. Freedom and equality, justice and opportunity. We should be so proud that these words are associated with us. That when people hear them, they hear America. So don’t let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We’re not. Don’t let anyone tell you we don’t have what it takes. We do. No one heard anything like that at the Republican convention, and voters didn’t hear much in the way of sustained optimism from any Republican candidate this cycle. So Hillary grabbed that ball and ran with it, making a direct appeal to voters who’ve been left cold by the GOP’s embrace of Trump: “Whatever party you belong to, or if you belong to no party at all, if you share these beliefs, this is your campaign.” It was a bold move on Clinton’s part, not least because there are a lot of voters who don’t feel especially optimistic right at this moment for all the reasons Hillary laid out in her speech: stuck wages, limited mobility, and exclusion from economic growth. As an answer to these frustrations, Clinton explicitly acknowledged that the Democrats have been kinda terrible at speaking to those concerns. “Some of you are frustrated, even furious. And you know what? You’re right,” she said. “Democrats are the party of working people, but we haven’t done a good enough job showing that we get what you’re going through, and that we’re going to do something about it.” All told, Hillary Clinton’s speech to the 2016 Democratic National Convention was a singular moment in American politics. We saw the first female presidential nominee from a major party telling voters that things will be better, and that we can all do better, and that the best way to get there is to reject the allure of a would-be strongman and work together. We saw a woman reach an unprecedented height in American politics and offer herself as the alternative to a candidate who busily plumbs new depths. It was quite a thing to see.",REAL
+10288,ECB policymakers tout December stimulus extension,"ECB policymakers tout December stimulus extension October 28, 2016 Benoit Coeure, member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB), attends a Lamfalussy Lectures Conference in Budapest, Hungary, February 1, 2016. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh 
+European Central Bank Board Member Benoit Coeure and Governing Council member Philip Lane says the ECB will extend its €80 bn monthly stimulus asset buying initiative in December. Board members said ECB will provide stimulus until a sustained inflation rebound, regardless of side-effects. Coeure: Warned bank's margin of operation was reduced as rates approach their effective limits. ""Postponing the necessary reforms is not a valid option anymore.” Lane: ECB was ""pretty happy"" with the accommodation provided so far and did not see serious signs of the negative side effects. ""Until inflation is at a sustainable path to the current target, the current policy of accommodation will continue.” Inflation has missed the ECB's 2 percent target for three and a half years and is expect to undershoot until late 2018 at the earliest. Coeure: ""Although our objective is forward looking, there is a risk that continued undershooting of our inflation aim will cause households and firms to revise down their inflation expectations."" ""And lower inflation expectations directly lower the equilibrium nominal interest rate, requiring a lower interest rate to create monetary stimulus.” 
+(LONDON/FRANKFURT) The European Central Bank will provide stimulus until a sustained inflation rebound, even as its unprecedented measures come with side effects and face constraints, two policymakers said on Friday, just as the bank is contemplating more easing. 
+Facing stubbornly low inflation, the ECB will decide in December whether to extend its 80 billion euro per month asset buys beyond its scheduled end next March, having to balance diminishing costs with increasing side effects. 
+Arguing that the ECB's measures are working, Board Member Benoit Coeure also warned bank's margin of operation was reduced as rates approach their effective limits, so governments had to start pulling their weight to revive the euro zone economy. Please contact TRUNEWS correspondent Edward Szall with any news tips related to this story. Email: | Twitter: @EdwardSzall | Facebook: Ed Szall DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP on Apple and Google Play ! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+7687,Here’s How Goldman Sachs Lays People Off | Financial Markets,"(Before It's News) 43 here, 109 there and pretty soon 443 employees are dismissed Bank has to file ‘WARN notices’ with New York state agency The first “plant layoff” notice came in February: 43 people would lose their jobs.
+The second arrived six weeks later, increasing the cuts to 109 workers. Then a third, in April, for 146 more. And a fourth, in June: 98. Three more notices followed, including 20 dismissals announced last week.
+The “plant” in question — Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
+Like all big companies in New York State, the firm is required to file a “WARN notice” with state authorities when it plans to shed large numbers of employees as part of a plant closing, or “mass layoffs” involving 250 or more. Employers also must inform the state of smaller reductions under certain circumstances, and Goldman Sachs cited a “plant layoff” in each case. Last week’s notice brings this year’s job-cut tally to 443.With the run of notices, seven since the start of the year, the bank has signaled its intention to dismiss hundreds of employees in New York without placing a single, headline-grabbing number on the overall reduction, already its largest since 2008. The company’s approach differs from competitors, including Morgan Stanley, who have shown a preference for larger, one-time cuts.
+Big Number
+“When there’s a big number, people right away get that something is happening at that firm — it’s a negative,” said Jeanne Branthover, a partner at New York-based executive-search firm DHR International. “This is more, ‘We’re having layoffs and we don’t want to explain it.’ It’s more under the radar screen.”
+The 20 people in the latest reduction were notified either this month or last, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing staffing decisions. The terminations will take place between Nov. 7 and Jan. 5, according to the notice posted on the state Labor Department’s website. The workers aren’t represented by a union.
+Gena Palumbo, a managing director and the bank’s global head of employment law, is the sole Goldman Sachs contact listed on each of this year’s WARN notices. In 2008, the firm dismissed 900 people in New York in two different sets of cuts as the financial crisis raged. A spokesman for the bank declined to comment.
+Goldman Sachs set aside $9.2 billion for compensation and benefits this year through September, 13 percent less than the first nine months of last year. Total employees, including consultants and part-time workers, fell 5.4 percent to 34,900.
+While Goldman prefers a scalpel, its rival Morgan Stanley wielded an ax. That firm took steps to shrink in the fourth quarter, cutting 1,200 employees, including about 25 percent of the fixed-income trading staff, or about 470 traders and salesmen. When asked about how Morgan Stanley decided to make the changes, trading chief Ted Pick said he favored a bold move.
+“We took the view of taking tough medicine,” Pick, 47, said in February.
+Slower Approach
+Goldman Sachs’s slower approach may reflect a desire to avoid cutting too much if trading or dealmaking comes roaring back. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein has spoken about staying nimble to respond to revenue opportunities when they arise.
+It also may reflect an outlook that got cloudier as the year progressed. In January, a person familiar with the firm’s thinking said Goldman Sachs was mulling cuts to more than 5 percent of its fixed-income staff. By March, that would expand to more than 5 percent but less than 10 percent. And by May, 10 percent.
+The job cuts continued after first-quarter revenue was the worst for the start of a year in Blankfein’s decade-long tenure. While trading business bounced back in the second and third quarters, total trading revenue for the first nine months declined 11 percent from last year.
+The WARN notices don’t capture firings outside New York and they don’t include voluntary retirements. More than a half-dozen partners have left Goldman Sachs this year, according to internal memos obtained by Bloomberg.
+“Everything Goldman does is scrutinized,” Branthover said. “This may be a signal or a sign that there are changes being made internally, or there are businesses and areas that are not performing satisfactorily. I would keep an eye on it.”",FAKE
+1998,George P. Bush says father Jeb Bush is ‘seriously considering’ 2016 run,"George P. Bush, the son of former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), said Sunday on ABC's ""This Week"" that his father is seriously considering a presidential run in 2016.
+
+""I think it's more than likely that he's giving this serious thought in moving forward ... that he'll run,"" he said.
+
+Bush also said the family ""would be behind [Jeb Bush] 100 percent if he decides to"" run.",REAL
+1621,Ben Carson’s harsh spotlight: An unfit candidate struggles under intense scrutiny,"Ben Carson has had a very strange couple of weeks. Let’s take a moment to review precisely what the arguable front-runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination has undergone since the CNBC debate in late October. At that debate, he was challenged on his relationship with a shady nutritional supplement company that sells fart pills to very sick people. Carson denied any relationship existed, despite the many paid speeches and promotional videos he did for the group. In the days that followed, it was revealed that Carson thinks the Great Pyramids of Egypt were built by Joseph to store grain – a biblical literalist view that is supported by precisely zero historical or archaeological evidence.
+
+But hey we’re not done yet. The day after the pyramid thing, Carson got into a fight with CNN when the network reported that childhood friends and acquaintances of the candidate don’t remember Carson being the violent and troubled youth he claims to have been. This led to the bizarre spectacle of Carson, a candidate for the presidency, forcefully insisting that he did in fact try to stab a person, and any suggestion that he didn’t try to murder someone with a knife is a “smear.”
+
+This string of scarcely believable events culminated on Friday with a Politico report that Carson’s oft-repeated claim to have been offered a “full scholarship” to West Point was untrue. West Point doesn’t offer “full scholarships.” Everyone accepted to West Point has their entire room, board and tuition covered. But saying you were enticed with a “full scholarship” is a great, almost-honest way to make it look like the military academy was beating down your door.
+
+All this follows months and months of other weird Carson behaviors – his repeated and inappropriate invocations of the Nazis and slavery to attack policies he doesn’t like, his Bible-based tax plan, his “book tour” in the middle of the campaign, his insistence that a Muslim should not be president, his ignorance of basic economic matters, his plan to have the government investigate “propaganda” on college campuses, and the fact that his “campaign” increasingly resembles an elaborate direct-marketing scam. And that’s only a few select tiles from the rich mosaic of Ben Carson’s strangeness.
+
+One might think that a candidate with this many warning lights and trouble signs would have crashed fairly quickly, or never even taken off in the first place. But the Republican Party and its voters have declared war on the very concept of competent, reliable governance, which has provided space for “outsider” candidates who are manifestly unfit for the office of the presidency to seize the GOP electorate and retain a firm hold on it. Now that he’s at the top of the GOP 2016 polling, he’s facing a great deal more scrutiny, and people are starting to wonder whether Carson will survive as a front-runner for the presidential nomination.
+
+The obvious impulse for conservatives is to rally around Carson and protect him from the nasty liberal media and its pernicious biases. The derpier corners of the conservative media are already doing exactly that, arguing that media scrutiny of Carson’s past is motivated by racial hatred and part of a broader scheme to attack black conservatives. Others found themselves harshly criticizing Carson after the Politico story and predicting his demise, only to reverse course and turn their fire back on Politico for overselling the story and toning down some of the more incendiary language in its initial report. It would be very easy for Carson to escape from this in the minds of conservatives as just another victim of what they see as a biased and antagonistic press.
+
+But when you look at the entire Ben Carson experience to date, what’s really needed is more scrutiny, and more and better explanations for why, exactly, he thinks he’s ready to serve as president. Carson rose to prominence based on his inspiring life story and his willingness to be harshly critical of President Obama. But, as Paul Waldman notes, the more we hear from Carson on policy matters and issue of national importance, the more it becomes clear that he frequently has no idea what he’s talking about, is “impervious to evidence,” and is unwilling to entertain the notion that his convictions may be wrong. His policy platform is stuffed with grandiose and insane proposals that are completely untethered to the reality of how governments work and violate principles of basic mathematics, but he argues that he’ll accomplish them anyway because he believes in himself. It feels safe to assume, given the mood of the Republican electorate, that Carson won’t have too difficult a time enduring these unwelcome probes into his background and bugnuts worldview. Donald Trump’s enduring popularity in the Republican primary already stands as a stinging indictment of the direction the GOP has taken. The Ben Carson phenomenon has thus far endured in spite of his whacky ideas, offensive remarks, flirtations with authoritarianism, and shady campaign practices. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he continues his rise, abetted by conservatives who want to shield him from the scrutiny he deserves. Watch to find out what we know about Carson’s alleged violent incidents:
+
+",REAL
+5301,How Hedonistic Game Became The Gateway To Virtuous Truths,"When people ask me about my current position fighting in the culture war, years after starting my writing career with “Bang” books, I simply say, “I just wanted to get laid.” From these hedonistic beginnings opened a path that I find myself in today. A reviewer of my new book Free Speech Isn’t Free also noticed this transformation:
+I’ve been following the ‘Red Pill’ community for a a few years now. The members therein have been engaging in some of the most relevant conversations anywhere on the net. Roosh is one I’ve only recently become familiar with as I tend to appreciate and relate more to the more traditionalist members like Vox Day, Dalrock, and Roissy.
+What is so fascinating about guys like Roosh is how their journey to acquire more sex and attention from highly attractive women has led them stumbling across uncomfortable truths about the world that we men of the West find ourselves living in.
+This book is a very straightforward account of an encounter that an iconic Red Pill pillar had with the traditional media community that exposes a truly shocking level of laziness and corruption on the part of an institution that we are supposed to respect for some reason. I remember watching from a social media distance as these events went down and I had no idea just how bad it was.
+I really admire the stones on this kid and I hope he stays motivated and encourages more people to be bold with the truth (which is always unPC). I’m not a fan of lotharios but I appreciate intellectual honesty and bravery. I hope Roosh’s Neomasculinity gets legs. I really do.
+How did game serve as the gateway drug? Simple: I kept asking why, as if I was an annoying 8-year-old child.
+Why are woman attracted to me when I dance and act like an entertaining clown ? Why did my father not have to act like a clown to attract my mom? Why has society changed to encourage women to pursue exciting “bad boys” and clowns over good men? Why are institutions like the media and universities pushing women into behaviors which harm them and the family unit? Why is there a concealed group of elites who seem to control politicians and the most important institutions? Why are those institutions attacking me for speaking the truth? There wasn’t only one step from having fun into the nightclub to fighting back against social justice warriors and the media, but several steps that had to take place over the past 15 years. My path weaved through sex and gender relations, but there are other paths as well, which I describe in The 5 Paths To Realizing Truth . For example, minimalism is another point of entry:
+When you live below your means, you begin to see that most people are unnecessarily living above theirs. That leads to the conclusion that they were trained to live a life of excess by corporations with the complicit help of a government that wants to keep society in a neverending state of indebtedness and distraction so they ignore everyday injustices while losing any will or desire to fight the establishment. The easiest stepping stone out of The Truman Show is to realize that consumer lifestyles are not the path to happiness, and those those who chase material possessions are misguided.
+Many other men have also had a similar path as myself, whereby promiscuous sex was a device for understanding the world and deciding on behaviors that are more sustainable to the male soul. While not every man gains wisdom during the stage of his life where he wants to sow his royal oats, many do, and they use that wisdom to devise solutions that can solve our modern problems. I do not at all regret engaging in shallow sex with many dozens of women throughout the world, because it has developed my thinking into what you read now, even though the sex itself wasn’t especially memorable and didn’t give me much except momentary pleasure.
+From my current vantage point, it really does feel like it was all pre-determined, as if I was supposed to participate in shallow intimacy in order to arrive at true understanding, but that would imply some sort of divine providence. Whatever the mechanism, it’s clear to me that many of the behaviors and ideas we hold now could be mere way-stations for a grander, more universal truth. Whatever individual journey you’re a part of, I hope we’ll find out soon enough.
+To see the whole story of how the media attacked me with an incredible attack of 1,600+ media articles , along with my analysis of the establishment’s master plan, check out my new book Free Speech Isn’t Free . It has a balanced mix of narrative and ideology that will also give you actionable advice to help defend yourself against establishment attacks. Click here to learn more about the book or order it now on Amazon .
+Read More: 7 Game Principles I Personally Verified During My Trip To The Ukraine 
+",FAKE
+100,Rachel Dolezal's brother: She's 'making up more lies',"(CNN) Ezra Dolezal would love to see his sister, Rachel, take a DNA test to prove whose version of the truth about her racial identity is the right one.
+
+But he doesn't think she will.
+
+And she didn't back down when it comes how she sees herself, even after her parents shared childhood photos of a young Rachel Dolezal -- her pale complexion and straight blond hair in contrast to the woman with darker skin and dark curly hair who appeared on NBC.
+
+""My life has been one of survival,"" Dolezal told Lauer. ""And the decisions that I have made along the way have been to survive and to carry forward in my journey and life continuum.""
+
+""My life has been one of survival,"" Dolezal told Lauer. ""And the decisions that I have made along the way have been to survive and to carry forward in my journey and life continuum.""
+
+Matt Lauer interviews Dolezal on the ""Today"" show on Tuesday, June 16. Dolezal revealed that she started identifying as black around age 5, when she would draw self-portraits with a brown crayon. She told Lauer she ""takes exception"" to the contention that she tried to deceive people.
+
+Dolezal poses for a picture with prosecutor Marilyn Mosby. Dolezal's mother said on Friday, June 12, that her daughter ""has not explained to us why she is doing what she's doing and being dishonest and deceptive with her identity.""
+
+Dolezal poses for a picture with prosecutor Marilyn Mosby. Dolezal's mother said on Friday, June 12, that her daughter ""has not explained to us why she is doing what she's doing and being dishonest and deceptive with her identity.""
+
+Another family photo shows Dolezal as a teenager. Her mother told the Spokane Spokesman-Review that after she and her husband adopted four African-American children, Dolezal began to ""disguise herself."" Dolezal brushed off the controversy surrounding her racial identity as part of a family fight over alleged abuse, the Spokesman-Review reported.
+
+A family photo shows Dolezal's family at her wedding reception in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 21, 2000. Her family is racially mixed; four of her adopted siblings are black. She and her husband, Kevin, are standing between her parents. Her grandparents are at right and her adopted siblings are in the front row.
+
+A family photo shows Dolezal's family at her wedding reception in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 21, 2000. Her family is racially mixed; four of her adopted siblings are black. She and her husband, Kevin, are standing between her parents. Her grandparents are at right and her adopted siblings are in the front row.
+
+Dolezal's birth certificate shows that she was born to Lawrence Dolezal and Ruthanne Schertel. Her public racial identity came under scrutiny on Thursday, June 11, in an interview with a reporter from CNN affiliate KXLY
+
+Rachel Dolezal, 37, was the head of the local chapter of the NAACP and has identified herself as African-American. But her Montana birth certificate says she was born to two people who say they are Caucasian. She is seen as a teenager at left in an old family photo and in a more recent picture from Eastern Washington University, where she teaches classes related to African-American culture.
+
+Rachel Dolezal, 37, was the head of the local chapter of the NAACP and has identified herself as African-American. But her Montana birth certificate says she was born to two people who say they are Caucasian. She is seen as a teenager at left in an old family photo and in a more recent picture from Eastern Washington University, where she teaches classes related to African-American culture.
+
+For the family, one comment stung especially hard. ""I haven't had a DNA test,"" Dolezal said. ""There's been no biological proof that Larry and Ruthanne are my biological parents.""
+
+Larry and Ruthanne are the Montana couple who helped drive this story, telling reporters that Rachel is their estranged daughter. Ezra Dolezal is himself biracial and one of four children adopted by the Dolezals -- unlike Rachel, his older sister by 15 years, he says.
+
+""I guarantee that she is not going to take a DNA test to prove that (Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal) are not her parents,"" Ezra Dolezal told CNN's ""New Day"" on Wednesday. ""Because they are, and she doesn't want to be caught going back on her story again.""
+
+Over the years, several reports have come out identifying Rachel Dolezal as transracial, multiracial or black. She hasn't corrected them -- in part because, it seems, she feels connected with the African-American experience, a link she claims began as early as age 5, when she drew self-portraits in brown instead of peach crayon and with black, curly hair.
+
+This self-assessment, though, has bothered some -- including African-Americans who feel that Dolezal advanced as an activist by misrepresenting herself and by claiming personal injustices that weren't legitimate coming from a woman who could decide any day to present herself as white again.
+
+She has had her defenders, too, with some pointing to the good she's done as an activist and saying she shouldn't be faulted for her tight bond with the black community.
+
+'She's too nervous' to admit the truth, brother says
+
+For all the Internet outrage, though, the ones most directly affected by all this are the Dolezals. And they couldn't be further apart.
+
+It has been years since Rachel Dolezal talked with her parents. They've been on opposing sides of one custody battle, which ended with Rachel taking in one of Larry and Ruthanne's four adopted children as her own. And Rachel, who attended historically black Howard University and until very recently had taught classes on African-American culture at Eastern Washington University, has claimed she felt her connection with the black experience was stifled when she was growing up.
+
+""I felt very isolated with my identity virtually my entire life, that nobody really got it and that I really didn't have the personal agency to express it,"" she told NBC. ""I kind of imagined that maybe at some point (I'd have to) own it publicly and discuss this kind of complexity.""
+
+Yet her parents have challenged her assertions, including that she identified with African-Americans as a youngster or was held back in any way. They've challenged her integrity and even questioned her mental state.
+
+Ezra Dolezal backed his adopted parents Wednesday, while ripping what he called a web of lies -- a web that, he said, is growing bigger by the day.
+
+""I think ... she's too nervous to just admit that she's not been telling the truth,"" he said. ""(That) is why she keeps on making up more and more lies to help fit the story as it goes.""",REAL
+7798,Transforming hope into reality for patients of drug-resistant TB,"Shobha Shukla, Citizen News Service - CNS Hope for shorter and more effective new TB drugs License DMCA Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) remains a public health crisis. As per WHO's Global TB Report 2016, 480,000 people fell ill with MDR-TB in 2015, with 3 countries - India, China, and Russia - carrying the major burden and together accounting for nearly half of all MDR-TB cases globally. Detection and treatment gaps continue to plague the MDR-TB response. In 2015, only 1 out of every 5 people needing treatment for MDR-TB were able to access it and only 52% of those who started MDR-TB treatment were cured. ""These sobering statistics remind us of our urgency to continue the fight to develop better, faster and affordable treatments that will finally bring this pandemic under control,"" said Dr Mel Spigelman, CEO of TB Alliance, which is working to advance several promising regimens to tackle all forms of TB. The current MDR-TB regimen lasts for 2 years or more. It includes medicines and injectables that are not only toxic but also come at a cost that is higher than what many patients and healthcare systems can afford. Even the new 9 month MDR-TB regimen that has recently been endorsed by WHO, though shorter, does include 4 months of injectables. However new results from 2 clinical studies conducted by TB Alliance point to an emerging paradigm, where countries may soon have the short, all-oral, and affordable drug regimens needed to treat all people with TB. Late stage clinical results from these two studies were unveiled yesterday at the 47th Union World Conference on Lung Health in Liverpool. The NC-005 study - Advertisement - The NC-005 study investigates an oral, injection free regimen that purports to treat both drug-sensitive and MDR-TB with a short, simple, safe, and affordable treatment. A Phase 2b, 2 month study tested various combinations of BPaMZ--Bedaquiline (B), Pretomanid (Pa), Moxifloxacin (M) and Pyrazinamide (Z). It was conducted at 10 sites in 3 countries (Uganda, South Africa, and Tanzania). A total of 240 patients were enrolled in the study-- 180 patients with drug-sensitive TB received BPaZ and 60 patients with MDR-TB received BPaMZ. The study also investigated a simpler dosing scheme for bedaquiline, which could lead to fewer pills and an overall less complicated treatment for patients. NC-005 showed that the best regimen was a combination of all four drugs, BPaMZ, which was examined in an arm of the trial. Data showed that at the end of 2 months, clinical study participants receiving BPaMZ cleared TB bacteria from their sputum 3 times as quickly as those on the standard treatment regimen. Almost all participants had culture conversion after the 2 months of treatment. This is the fastest rate of culture conversion that has ever been seen and indicates the potential of BPaMZ to treat all forms of TB-drug-sensitive as well as MDR-TB with the same regimen. The regimens appeared safe. The study showed that it was possible to simplify the dosing of Bedaquiline and found that a daily dose of Bedaquiline (200 mg) is at least as active and safe as the labelled dose. This will allow for simpler daily dosing with the regimen and to be combined in a fixed dose combination. The BPaMZ regimen is being tested to see if it can cure the vast majority of TB patients in as less as 3 months. If successful, the regimen could reshape the treatment landscape of TB, especially for people with MDR-TB, who currently face an arduous 9-24 month treatment journey that is too often unsuccessful. The results of NC-005 could pave the way to a global Phase 3 trial. The Nix-TB Study ('Nix' means to put an end to) - Advertisement - It is estimated that 9% of all the MDR-TB patients suffer from extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) that is resistant to at least four commonly used anti-TB drugs. XDR-TB is often considered a death sentence. Most XDR-TB is not treated at all because of the cost and complexity of the treatment. Of those who do receive treatment, less than one third get cured. In May 2015, TB Alliance and partners launched the world's first clinical study-- the Nix-TB Study-to test a new XDR-TB drug regimen called BPaL, consisting of Bedaquiline (B), Pretomanid (Pa), and Linezolid (L) in patients who have no other treatment options. It is the first study to test an all-oral drug regimen, comprised of drugs with minimal pre-existing resistance, that has the potential to shorten, simplify, and improve treatment for XDR-TB. Nix-TB is an open-label study that is being conducted at 2 sites in South Africa--at Sizwe Hospital in Johannesburg and at Brooklyn Chest Hospital in Cape Town. Additional sites to expand the study are planned. Patients who have XDR-TB, or have failed their current MDR-TB treatment or who have side effects of their current MDR-TB treatment, are enrolled.Till to date, 50 patients have been enrolled in the study, including patients as young as 14 and those who are co-infected with HIV with a CD4 cell count of 50 or higher.",FAKE
+2985,Court ruling on NSA spying splits 2016 field,"Washington (CNN) A federal appeals court's ruling on Thursday that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephone metadata is illegal has split the 2016 presidential field, making unlikely allies of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and some of the Republican Party's most conservative members.
+
+Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz lauded the decision as a win for Americans' personal freedoms, and though Clinton didn't weigh in specifically on the decision, she did suggest her support with a tweet endorsing an NSA reform bill.
+
+But the other two 2016 contenders in the Senate — Sens. Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham — expressed opposition to the move. The split in the Senate is likely to complicate the upcoming effort to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act, which authorizes such surveillance programs and expires at the end of the month.
+
+The decision is already sparking a fierce debate within the 2016 field. Here's a roundup of who's offered support, who's expressed opposition and who's keeping mum on the controversial program.
+
+The Florida Senator is an outspoken defense hawk and has long expressed support for the program. He said Thursday in a statement that it would be a bad move to eliminate the NSA surveillance program.
+
+""The solution is not to get rid of a program at a time when we know that the risk of homegrown violent extremism is the highest it's ever been,"" Rubio said.
+
+Paul praised the decision as ""monumental...for all lovers of liberty"" and issued a series of laudatory tweets — and offered discounted campaign swag in honor of it.
+
+""To celebrate today's ruling, we've lowered the cost of the NSA spy blocker in our campaign store,"" Paul tweeted.
+
+""I guess it's gratifying that the courts are beginning to recognize the problem. We are anticipating and eager for this to get to the Supreme Court,"" he told Breitbart.
+
+And he took a veiled jab at potential primary opponent Jeb Bush, tweeting ""Sadly, one GOP candidate thinks the NSA's violation of your rights is 'very important.' Tell him, he's wrong.""
+
+Bush hasn't yet weighed in on the court's decision, but has been a strident supporter of the NSA program in the past. Paul's tweet was in fact a reference to Bush's policy speech in April during which the former Florida governor reiterated his support for government surveillance.
+
+The New Jersey governor said, in the face of the court challenge, that the NSA's collection of telephone data ""should continue"" and called for Congress, to extend the program ""without delay."" He also warned against rolling back any such programs ""especially during this really dangerous time.""
+
+""I believe there can be appropriate oversight by Congress and people in the Justice Department who can oversee whether the law is being followed or whether the law is being violated. I'm not one of those folks who believe we should bring our guard down, especially during this really dangerous time,"" he said Friday during a breakfast discussion in New Hampshire.
+
+""It can be done in a way that's not only constitutional, but also protects national security.""
+
+Christie also called for reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act.
+
+""I know how important a tool the PATRIOT Act is to help to prevent terrorism to intercede before a terrorist act occurs. I'm not someone who's going to back away at all from the Patriot Act,"" he said.
+
+Cruz was quick to offer support for the decision, declaring in a statement that ""the court's ruling today confirms what the American public already knew: The National Security Agency's data collection program went too far in collecting the phone records of Americans."" He also called for the passage of the USA FREEDOM Act, a bill that would reform the NSA and effectively end the surveillance program by giving telephone companies full control over phone records.
+
+""The USA FREEDOM Act ends the NSA's unfettered data collection program once and for all, while at the same time preserving the government's ability to obtain information to track down terrorists when it has sufficient justification and support for doing so,"" Cruz said.
+
+""It would be pretty hard to diminish this program right now based on a court ruling that's not binding,"" he said.
+
+Clinton didn't comment on the decision specifically, but did endorse the USA Freedom Act.
+
+""Congress should move ahead now with the USA Freedom Act—a good step forward in ongoing efforts to protect our security & civil liberties,"" she tweeted.
+
+Sanders, another Democratic presidential contender, tweeted that ""the NSA is out of control and operating in an unconstitutional manner.""
+
+He lauded the ruling in a statement that emphasized the need for balance between Americans' security and their personal freedoms.
+
+""We can [protect the country from terrorism] without living in an Orwellian world where the government and private corporations know every telephone call that we make, every website we visit, everyplace we go,"" he said in the statement.
+
+The Maryland governor hasn't yet weighed in on the court decision, but said last month he hopes the debate over reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act creates an opportunity to ""have a conversation about whether or not we've struck the right balance here.""
+
+""I don't think that we should sacrifice our privacy for our security. We have to find a way to protect them both."" he said then.
+
+The rest of the field
+
+Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry haven't yet weighed in, though they've been generally critical of the program in the past. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina haven't offered clear opinions the program, and haven't yet weighed in on the decision.",REAL
+10281,The Battle at UNESCO,"The Muslim Bloc may have won the battle, but did Israel win the war? October 28, 2016 Ari Lieberman 
+By now it should be clear to all but the blindest (or rabidly disingenuous) that the United Nations is an organization that has been co-opted by the nefarious interests of Muslim nations and their despotic third world allies. It is an organization rife with prejudice and hypocrisy. An organization that can undeniably and without equivocation be described as today's greatest purveyor of Judeophobia, historical revisionism and conspiracy theories. This fact is best illustrated by three resolutions passed this year by United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that deny the indisputable Jewish nexus to the holy city. 
+On April 12, the 58-member body voted in favor of an asinine and wholly one-sided resolution that referred to Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem exclusively by their Muslim names and designated the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, as a “Muslim holy site of worship.” To add insult to injury, the resolution also adopted wild conspiracy theories including a claim that Israel was “planting Jewish fake graves in other spaces of the Muslim cemeteries.” 
+Unsurprisingly, the resolution, which was submitted by seven Muslim nations, passed by a wide margin with 33 votes in favor, six against and 17 abstentions. Two nations were absent for the vote. France, Sweden, Slovenia and Spain shamefully supported the vile resolution. 
+That the resolution would pass was never in doubt given the large number of Muslim and despotic third world nations that constitute the makeup of UNESCO but it was hoped that the resolution would fail to garner European support and Israel could thus claim a moral victory. France with its collaborationist past and proclivity to kowtow to the world’s despots did not disappoint and predictably voted with the rabble. 
+But following the vote, a crack appeared in the façade of anti-Israel invective so prevalent at the U.N. It appeared that France was having a case of buyer’s remorse. In an address to the French parliament, Prime Minister Manuel Valls termed the resolution “clumsy” and “unfortunate.” He then added in rather sharp and pointed terms that “France will never deny the Jewish presence and Jewish history in Jerusalem. It would make no sense; it is absurd to deny this history.” 
+France is one of Europe’s strongest advocates for the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority and their Muslim allies at UNESCO should have understood from Valls’ statement that future resolutions with similar toxic content would no longer enjoy automatic European support. Instead of declaring victory and moving on, they pressed their luck by introducing another vile resolution in October. 
+The October 13 resolution , sponsored by the usual suspects contained nearly identical language as the April resolution. It condemned Israel for various contrived transgressions and again severed the Jewish (and Christian) nexus to the city. This time however, the Muslim bloc was in for a rude awakening. While the resolution passed, the Muslim bloc was unable to garner a majority in the 58-member body. 
+Of the 24 nations that voted in favor of the resolution (Mexico later withdrew support lowering the final tally to 23), 14 were composed of states with Muslim majorities while a fifteenth, Nigeria, is 50 percent Muslim, making passage of the resolution a forgone conclusion. What was notable was the fact that this time around, the resolution failed to garner a single western European concurrence. Other developing nations, like India, which had hitherto supported Arab-sponsored drafts also abstained. Israel’s behind-the-scenes political offensive aimed at exposing the lunacy of the Muslim initiative was paying dividends. 
+Following the resolution’s passage, the Palestinians and their Muslim allies suffered additional political reversals. Mexico , asked for a revote because it wished to withdraw support for the motion. Mexico's Secretariat of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that his government’s changed position “reiterates the recognition that the Government of Mexico gives the undeniable link of the Jewish people to the cultural heritage of East Jerusalem.” 
+Brazil soon followed suit echoing Mexico’s position. In a statement, the Brazilian government noted that it would no longer support such one-sided resolutions. Italy, which had abstained, went one step further and announced that it would actively oppose such resolutions in the future. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi told an Italian radio station that these resolutions were “incomprehensible, unacceptable and wrong.” He added that “to say that the Jews have no links to Jerusalem is like saying the sun creates darkness.” 
+Even UNESCO’s director-general, Irina Bokova voiced disapproval by stating that “the heritage of Jerusalem is indivisible, and each of its communities has a right to the explicit recognition of their history and relationship with the city.” She later received death threats for voicing objection to the motion. 
+On Wednesday, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan introduced a third draft resolution to UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee seeking to generate further political terrorism. The proposed resolution once again attempted to sever the Jewish nexus to the city and its holy sites. The 21-member WHC body was expected to pass the resolution by consensus but in a surprise move, Croatia and Tanzania asked for a secret ballot which infuriated the Muslim bloc. Instead of the motion passing by consensus, the vote was 10 in favor, two opposed, eight abstentions and one nation absent. 
+The two nations opposing were Tanzania and the Philippines. Of the 10 ayes, seven were Muslim. It was a pyrrhic victory at best. 
+Given the large number of Muslim countries represented at the U.N. and the hostility that most of these nations harbor against Israel, it is a virtual certainty that toxic resolutions of this nature will continue to be sponsored and passed. But as evidenced by recent Arab political reversals, gone are the days that the Palestinians can rely on automatic European and non-aligned support. 
+Israel has been effectively reaching out to the so-called non-aligned nations and it is having a significant positive impact. Part of the Israeli success lies in the fact that the Jewish state has much to offer these nations in the fields of water technology, agriculture, energy, counter-terrorism, cyber warfare and arms. This outreach has translated to political dividends at the U.N. 
+Nevertheless, the UNESCO resolutions serve to highlight the noxious nature and malevolence of many U.N. member states. It also underscores the need for the United States to maintain its commitment and assurance to Israel that it will never allow the U.N. to impose terms and dictates on Israel. 
+There have been rumors circulating that Barack Obama in his twilight months would seek to impose a deleterious settlement on Israel utilizing the UN Security Council. The White House has remained uncharacteristically mute on the subject raising fears that there may be some merit to the speculation. 
+The administration’s objective would be accomplished by actively supporting a proposed anti-Israel resolution, likely introduced by France, or by choosing to abstain rather than exercising a veto. In addition to betraying long-standing commitments to Israel and running counter to strong bipartisan opposition, the notion that the United States would throw Israel under the bus and allow those who engage in despotism and blatant anti-Semitism to have a say on Israel’s fate, is beyond asinine. Hopefully, the outrageous conduct exhibited at UNESCO steers the administration in the right direction.",FAKE
+1028,"Rubio shifts tactics; Trump sticks to themes, seeks unity at subdued GOP debate","Marco Rubio, needing a breakout performance going into Tuesday's Florida primary, changed tactics and used substance during Thursday night's GOP debate to attack Donald Trump on several fronts – while Trump, subdued and trying to look more presidential, held steady to the campaign-tested themes that have made him the front-runner.
+
+At the end of the two-hour debate, Trump — coming off a string of primary wins — summed up the reality that Rubio and rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich face: that only “two of us” can get the delegates to win – meaning Trump and Cruz — and “two of us” cannot, referring to Rubio and Kasich.
+
+“That is not meant to be a criticism … that’s just a mathematical fact,” Trump said, urging the party to “be smart and unify.”
+
+The reminder amounted to just about the toughest criticism of the night, at a debate where personal attacks were replaced by more substantive policy discussion.
+
+But Rubio, in particular, who drastically changed his campaign approach in recent weeks to turn up the heat on Trump and even mock his physical appearance, dialed all that back onstage Thursday – after having said he regrets some of those personal insults.
+
+Instead, he hit Trump on his defense of his “Islam hates us"" remarks, Trump's suggestion he'd do a deal with the Palestinians and his vow that he wouldn't touch Social Security — despite warnings it would start running out of money in two decades.
+
+Trump's rivals, though, did not criticize him after he was asked about whether his tone is encouraging violence at his rallies, a reference to a recent incident where a protester was punched.
+
+“I hope not, I truly hope not,"" Trump said, saying he does not ""condone"" violence but also that some protesters are ""bad dudes.""
+
+One of the most pointed debate clashes came over the diplomatic thaw with Cuba — a huge issue in Florida, host of the CNN debate and next week’s critical primary. Trump tangled with his rivals as he claimed he’s “in the middle” on the issue.
+
+Trump said “something” should take place after a decades-long freeze, but, “I want to get a much better deal.”
+
+Whether Rubio’s performance is enough is the big question. Pressure was already mounting on him to drop out, and Texas Sen. Cruz added to that pressure Thursday night.
+
+“There are only two of us who have a path to winning the nomination -- Donald and myself,” Cruz said, while also jokingly referring to Trump as the “son of a businessman.”
+
+Rubio entered the debate clinging to life in the GOP primary race after a string of losses. He depends on winning his home state of Florida on Tuesday – but polls show Trump well ahead there, and even if Rubio wins Florida, it’s still unclear whether he would have any path to the nomination.
+
+But he – along with his rivals – did their best Thursday to draw distinctions between them and Trump.
+
+Oftentimes, Trump seemed to lean on his “art of the deal” to explain his approach to global challenges. But it earned him criticism from the others on stage.
+
+Cruz hammered Trump for suggesting he’d be able to re-negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.
+
+“I will rip to shreds this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal,” Cruz countered.
+
+Trump also took heat from Rubio and others as he defended his claim that “Islam hates us.”
+
+The Republican front-runner said there’s “tremendous hatred” in the Muslim world and called for new laws to confront the threat. 
+
+ “We better expand our laws or we’re being a bunch of suckers, and they are laughing at us,” Trump said.
+
+But Rubio and Cruz both said “of course” they would not want to allow the targeting of family members of terror targets, as Trump has called for. And they chided him for his remarks.
+
+“The answer is not scream all Muslims bad,” Cruz said.
+
+“The problem is presidents can’t just say whatever they want,” Rubio said. “I’m not interested in being politically correct. … I’m interested in being correct.”
+
+Trump’s rivals noted America must work with other Muslim nations to confront the ISIS threat.
+
+Trump also took heat for saying he’d try to do a deal with the Palestinians, as well as the Israelis.
+
+For the most part, Trump and his three Republican presidential rivals held their personal fire Thursday night during their last debate before next Tuesday's primary in Florida – which votes alongside four other states.
+
+Trump even remarked on the subdued tone: “So far I cannot believe how civil it’s been up here.”
+
+""I think it was good that we had a substantive debate,"" Cruz told Fox News' Megyn Kelly late Wednesday. ""The last two debates were pretty ridiculous [and] I was glad to see that nonsense ending.""
+
+Ohio Gov. Kasich also stressed at the debate that he’s run an “unwavering positive campaign” all along.
+
+But on the domestic front, they did battle on the best way to save Social Security -- with Trump breaking from his competition by saying he'd leave it alone despite warnings it would start running out of money in two decades.
+
+“I will do everything in my power not to touch Social Security,” Trump said. He said he’d instead get rid of waste, fraud and abuse — including by ensuring the government bids out contracts.
+
+Rubio, though, said, “You’re still going to have hundreds of billions of dollars of deficit that you’re going to have to make up.” He called for gradually raising the retirement age to 70.
+
+Cruz echoed that call, saying the program is “careening toward insolvency.”
+
+“We need to see political courage to take this on and save and strengthen Social Security,” he said.
+
+Kasich also called for changes, though not necessarily to the retirement age.
+
+Trump, meanwhile, openly discussed his plan to hit pause on green cards.
+
+“I would say a minimum of one year, maybe two years,” Trump said.
+
+As Trump consolidates support and builds his delegate lead, though, he kicked off the debate with a pointed message to the so-called “Republican establishment,” effectively telling them to get on board with his campaign.
+
+He started his opening statement by claiming his campaign is bringing in Democrats, independents and others in huge numbers to the polls.
+
+“The Republican establishment, or whatever you want to call it, should embrace what’s happening,” he said, addressing tension between his campaign and senior GOP leaders. “We are going to beat the Democrats.”
+
+The candidates faced off ahead of next week’s critical primaries in five states – including the valuable contests in Ohio and Florida, where the winner of each will take home all delegates at stake. Front-runner Trump is riding high after notching three more victories this past Tuesday, and is threatening to sideline his remaining rivals next week.
+
+Pressure is highest on Rubio and Kasich, who each have vowed to win their home states; doing so widely is seen as essential for them to stay in the race. Meanwhile, Cruz is positioning himself as the best Trump alternative and the only candidate who could still defeat him.
+
+He was buoyed Wednesday by the endorsement of former candidate Carly Fiorina.
+
+Trump, though, is set to receive a significant endorsement of his own from an ex-candidate, Ben Carson – who, according to sources, plans to announce his support for Trump on Friday.",REAL
+4448,Poll: 6 in 10 Back Renewal of NSA Data Collection,"With the provisions of the Patriot Act which allow the National Security Administration to collect data on Americans' phone calls newly expired, a new CNN/ORC poll finds 61% of Americans think the law ought to be renewed, including majorities across party lines, while 36% say it should not be reinstated.
+
+Republican leaders in the Senate are working to pass a bill to reinstate the law, after delays led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), whose presidential campaign has been noted for its appeal to independent voters and younger Republicans, and other surveillance opponents led to the law's expiration at 12:01 a.m. Monday. But Paul's stance on the issue is unlikely to bring him many fans within his own party.
+
+Support for renewal peaks among Republicans, 73% of whom back the law. Democrats largely agree, with 63% saying the law should be renewed. Independents are least apt to back it, with 55% saying renew it and 42% let it expire. Liberals, regardless of partisan affiliation, are most likely to say the law should not be renewed, 50% say so while 48% want to see it renewed.
+
+About half of Americans, 52%, say that if the law is not renewed, the risk of terrorism here in the U.S. would remain about the same. Still, a sizable 44% minority feel that without the law, the risk of terrorism will rise. Just 3% feel it would decrease.
+
+RELATED: Rand Paul vs. the GOP field on NSA The sense that the risk will rise is greatest among Republicans, 61% of whom say the risk of terrorism will climb if the NSA is unable to collect this data. Among Democrats and independents, less than half feel the risk of terrorism would increase if the program ended. The poll reveals a steep generational divide on the data collection program. Among those under age 35, just 25% say the risk of terrorism would increase without NSA data collection. That more than doubles to 60% among those age 65 or older. Those under age 35 are also split on whether the law should be renewed at all, 50% say it should be renewed while 49% say it should not. Among those age 35 or older, 65% back renewal of the law. President Barack Obama's reviews for handling government surveillance of U.S. citizens have worsened since June 2013 when the NSA data collection program was first revealed. Overall, 67% say they disapprove of the president's handling of government surveillance of U.S. citizens, up from 61% in June 2013. Much of that decline comes among his fellow partisans. In June 2013, 61% of Democrats approved of the president's handling of surveillance issues, that has fallen to 49% in the new poll. Obama fares better on his handling of terrorism generally, 45% approve and 51% disapprove. The CNN/ORC Poll was conducted by telephone May 29-31 among a random national sample of 1,025 adults. The margin of sampling error for results based on the full sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points. RELATED: Patriot Act provisions have expired: What happens now?",REAL
+3765,Baltimore in flames: senseless,"The Baltimore Police Department apparently has a long history of abuses. That all needs to be addressed, but it doesn't justify rioting, looting, and actions that place the lives of others in danger.
+
+A man throws a brick at police following the funeral of Freddie Gray in Baltimore on Monday. Gray died from spinal injuries about a week after he was arrested and transported in a Baltimore Police Department van.
+
+Just under 10 days ago, a 25-year-old man in Baltimore died after being taken into custody by police for reasons that still haven’t been made clear. What has been even less clear to date have been the circumstances of his death, which resulted from a broken neck and possibly other injuries that he sustained some time after being taken into custody but after he was out of the view of the cameras that recorded his initial encounter with police. There have been protests in Baltimore virtually from the day that Gray’s death became public and, on Saturday, they became violent enough that fans who were at Camden Yards to watch the Orioles play the Red Sox were kept in their seats for some period of time while police dealt with violent protests outside the stadium. Today, Gray was laid to rest but tensions began to rise when rumors began to spread of plans for attacks on police officers by gang members and, this afternoon protests broke out that quickly turned into a riot that has already caused significant property damage to one area of the city:
+
+BALTIMORE – Police officers in riot gear clashed with rock-throwing youths on Monday in a neighborhood in Northwest Baltimore, hours after Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who has become the nation’s latest symbol of police brutality, was laid to rest amid emotional calls for justice and peace. At least seven officers were injured and one was “unresponsive,” Capt. J. Eric Kowalczyk of the Baltimore police told reporters. The violence broke out in the Mondawmin neighborhood, near the New Shiloh Baptist Church, where friends, neighbors, activists and government officials from the local level to the White House – as well as civil rights leaders like the Jesse Jackson and Dick Gregory – had gathered in the morning to eulogize Mr. Gray. “We are continuing to deploy resources across the city to respond to reports of violence,” the police said on Twitter. “The safety of our community is our top priority.” Groups of angry young people surrounded a police cruiser and smashed it in; another cruiser could be seen burning. Several businesses, including a drugstore, a liquor store and a check-cashing store, were looted. Others pelted the police with items picked up at nearby vacant lots – rocks, bricks, boards and chunks of concrete. Some arrests were made. At least one small fire could be seen in streets filled with debris. Police officers in riot gear could also be seen outside Camden Yards, the baseball field in downtown Baltimore, where the Orioles were scheduled to play the Chicago White Sox. The Maryland State Police said that an additional 40 troopers were joining the 42 troopers already deployed in Baltimore. Police said earlier in the day that they had received a “credible threat” of violence against law enforcement officers, and Captain Kowalczyk told reporters here that authorities would take “appropriate measures” to keep officers and the neighborhood safe. Warned by the police of possible violence, the University of Maryland campus in downtown Baltimore closed early as did Mondawmin Mall. “You’re going to see tear gas, you’re going to see pepper balls, we’re going to use appropriate methods to make sure we an preserve the safety of that community,” Captain Kowalczyk said during a televised news conference. “Our officers are working as quickly and as orderly as they can to being about order in the area of Mondawmin.” A flier circulated on social media called for a period of violence Monday afternoon to begin at the Mondawmin Mall and move downtown toward City Hall.
+
+Violence and looting overtook much of West Baltimore on Monday, seriously injuring several police officers and leaving a store and several vehicles in flames. At least seven police officers were injured in a clash that began near Mondawmin Mall and spread toward downtown. One officer was unresponsive and others suffered broken bones, police spokesman Capt. Eric Kowalczyk said. Smoke filled the air as police responded with shields and a tactical vehicle. Demonstrators pelted officers with rocks, bricks and bottles and assaulted a photojournalist, and officers fired back with tear gas and pepper balls. Demonstrators set a police vehicle ablaze at North and Pennsylvania avenues. Nearby, they looted a CVS drug store, which store officials said had already closed, before it caught fire. Rioters cut the fire hose as firefighters battled the blaze. The unrest spread toward downtown, with looting along Howard and Centre streets as afternoon turned to evening. Another group of people was destroying property around North and Fulton avenues, police said. Kowalczyk called the demonstrators “lawless individuals with no regard for the safety of people that live in that community” and said they would be identified and arrested. Police said via Twitter many of the rioters were juveniles and urged parents to bring their children home. Gov. Larry Hogan signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency and activating the Maryland National Guard. He was set to speak at Maryland Emergency Management Agency headquarters at 8:30 p.m. “Today’s looting and acts of violence in Baltimore will not be tolerated,” he said in a statement. “I strongly condemn the actions of the offenders who are engaged in direct attacks against innocent civilians, businesses and law enforcement officers. There is a significant difference between protesting and violence and those committing these acts will be prosecuted under the fullest extent of the law.” Earlier Monday afternoon, the threat prompted police to urge downtown businesses and institutions to close, including the University of Maryland, Baltimore, Lexington Market, a city courthouse and businesses including T. Rowe Price and Venable LLP. Two city recreation centers in West Baltimore, the Robert C. Marshall Recreation Center in Upton and Lillian Jones Recreation Center in Sandtown-Winchester, closed early. All Pratt Library branches closed early. “For us to come out of the burial and into this, it’s absolutely inexcusable,” said the Rev. Jamal H. Bryant, who hours earlier delivered Gray’s eulogy. “Violence is not the answer for justice.” Bryant said a group of men from the Nation of Islam planned to build a “human wall” to stop the mob from coming downtown. “Violence is not the answer,” he said. The incident stemmed from a flier that circulated widely among city school students via social media about a “purge” to take place at 3 p.m., starting at Mondawmin Mall and ending downtown. Such memes have been known to circulate regularly among city school students, based on the film “The Purge,” about what would happen if all laws were suspended. The flier included an image of protesters smashing the windshield of a police car Saturday during a march spurred by the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old man who suffered a spinal cord injury earlier this month after being arrested by city police. Kowalczyk would not speculate on whether the incident was related to Gray’s death. While officials had expected additional protests on the same day Gray was mourned and buried, the scale of the unrest took them by surprise, U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings told CNN. “We never expected anything like this,” he said. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake activated the city’s emergency operation center just before 6 p.m. to coordinate response to the riots. Police were preparing for rioting to make its way downtown, with officers in helmets and carrying shields stationed at Lexington Market and the Inner Harbor. Maryland State Police sent 40 troopers to the city, said Keiffer Mitchell, a top aide to Gov. Larry Hogan. Several other jurisdictions, including Baltimore and Howard counties, sent officers to assist. All but one gate to Oriole Park at Camden Yards was closed, with a game set to begin at 7:05 p.m. But team officials postponed the game less than an hour before first pitch was scheduled.
+
+As was the case during the riots that occurred in Ferguson, Mo., last August, it seems fairly clear that the rioting and violence that we are seeing in Baltimore today, and that we saw on Saturday night near Camden Yards, is largely the work of people using the protests as cover for their own nefarious goals. Some of the reports regarding the planned protests for today have suggested that the city’s gangs have actually banded together to use today’s protest as a cover to attack police officers, for example. More importantly, the community leaders who have been part of the peaceful protests that have been going on since Gray’s death on April 19, along with Gray’s family members, have been quick to denounce the violence and ask for it to come to an end. It likely won’t, of course, and the fact that it has gotten out of hand so quickly likely means that law enforcement will find itself forced to use a heavy hand to restore order, something which may prove difficult to keep under control as we approach nightfall in Baltimore. More than likely, though, it will take more than one night to bring order to this situation.
+
+There is, quite obviously, no excuse for violence and looting such as what we’re seeing unfold in Baltimore tonight, and the willful destruction of property is utterly senseless. One of the first businesses to be looted in this neighborhood, for example, was a CVS that one could tell even from the aerial shots being broadcast on CNN was a relatively new business, likely only a few years old at the most. Over the course of less than 20 minutes, one could see the entire store being trashed, windows busted out, and merchandise being carried out by people who obviously didn’t care very much what what happening to the neighborhood. Less than an hour later, that building was on fire, and when the fire department came out to try to put out the fire, with a CNN reporter standing right there, two people who had their faces covered came up and cut the firehouse’s connection to the hydrant. That’s just one example of what’s been happening in that city.
+
+None of this is to excuse what happened to Freddie Gray, of course. Based on the information that has come out so far, it seems quite apparent that the officers involved in his arrest, all of whom are currently suspended, acted at the very least with reckless disregard for his life, and possibly worse. Additionally, the Baltimore Police Department itself apparently has a long history of abuses and bad relations with the community that are no doubt fueling much of what we are seeing unfold now. All of that needs to be addressed. However, none of that justifies, rioting, looting, and actions that place the lives of others in danger. I suspect that the people in Baltimore who actually care about what happened to Freddie Gray, and actually care about their neighborhoods know this. Unfortunately, they are being overshadowed by a bunch of thugs right now.
+
+Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.",REAL
+4254,"In Nevada caucuses, Trump gets a third straight win","Donald Trump swept to a convincing victory in the Nevada presidential caucuses here Tuesday evening, building a broad coalition that left his top two rivals trailing far behind and accelerating his march to the Republican nomination.
+
+An angry electorate hungry for a political outsider in the White House catapulted Trump to his third straight win in the GOP primary race as the billionaire mogul used visceral rhetoric to tap into anxieties about the economy, terrorism and illegal immigration.
+
+The breadth of Trump’s support was staggering, with Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) running more than 20 percentage points behind him in second and third place respectively, despite their aggressive campaigning across Nevada in the closing days. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who did not mount a serious campaign here, were far behind in single digits.
+
+“If you listen to the pundits, we weren’t expected to win too much — and now we’re winning, winning, winning the country,” a triumphant Trump declared to supporters at his Las Vegas victory party.
+
+Vowing to continue his streak and quickly secure the nomination, Trump added: “It’s going to be an amazing two months. We might not even need the two months, folks.”
+
+The Nevada results underscored the challenge for Trump’s opponents to slow his momentum heading into next week’s Super Tuesday, when 11 states will hold primaries and caucuses in a single day.
+
+Cruz and Rubio, who have been fighting bitterly to become the chief alternative to Trump, were dealt a serious blow by Nevada’s voters.
+
+After watching with disappointment as returns rolled in, Cruz all but ignored Rubio as he addressed supporters at his Las Vegas caucus night party. He argued that the real race for the nomination had come down to him and Trump.
+
+“The undeniable reality that the first four states have shown is that the only campaign that has beaten Donald Trump and the only campaign that can beat Donald Trump is this campaign,” Cruz said, referencing his win in the kick-off Iowa caucuses.
+
+Rubio, who jetted out of Nevada Tuesday morning for campaign events in Minnesota and Michigan, made no public comments on the results. His advisers had been hopeful that he might finish strongly here, perhaps even win, considering that he spent part of his childhood in Las Vegas and enjoyed the support of much of the state’s political establishment.
+
+High voter turnout apparently overwhelmed organizers at some caucus locations. There were isolated reports of double voting, dwindling supplies of paper ballots and what a Republican Party official described as “chaos” at a couple of caucus sites here in Clark County, the state’s biggest population center.
+
+Some volunteer caucus officials collecting ballots wore Trump campaign T-shirts and hats, sparking an outcry and allegations of voter intimidation on social media.
+
+The Nevada Republican Party’s caucus rules allow precinct workers to wear campaign paraphernalia. “Volunteers went through extensive training & are doing a great job,” read a statement from the party.
+
+Early entrance polling reported by CNN showed that Trump’s victory here was commanding, across most demographic groups and among voters of every ideology. Nearly six in 10 caucus-goers said they were angry at the federal government, and a similar percentage wanted the next president to be a political outsider.
+
+Trump reveled in the breadth of his winning coalition.
+
+“We won the evangelicals, we won with young, we won with old, we won with highly educated, we won with poorly educated — I love the poorly educated,” Trump said, referencing the network entrance polls. “And you know what I really am happy about, because I’ve been saying it for a long time? Forty-six percent with Hispanics. Number one with Hispanics! I’m really happy about that.”
+
+Trump, who visited caucus sites Tuesday night to motivate his supporters, had led every recent public poll by double digits. Enormous crowds packed his rallies, including one Monday night in Las Vegas that drew an estimated 8,000 people.
+
+Trump’s nationalist call to deport illegal immigrants and wall them off resonated with Nevada’s working-class whites resentful of the booming Latino population.
+
+But a Trump win was not seen as a done deal. The state’s caucuses are peculiar and unpredictable — and Cruz and Rubio labored to spring a surprise.
+
+Cruz worked Nevada harder than any other candidate, flying immediately to the state after South Carolina’s primary Saturday and making nine crowded campaign stops.
+
+Yet a message seemingly tailored to Nevada’s libertarian-leaning Republicans — with a particular focus on the federal control of land in the state — did not appear to resonate as Cruz might have hoped.
+
+And the day before the caucuses was squandered when Cruz fired his communications director, Rick Tyler, who had published a false smear of Rubio on Facebook.
+
+The Cruz roadshow had a slapdash feel, recycling video endorsements from Iowa, one of which ended with: “People of Iowa, it is time to believe again.” In Carson City, when state Attorney General Adam Laxalt needed to stall for Cruz’s arrival, he announced a “short video” — and the audience groaned.
+
+In a television ad and in speeches, he promised to hand over to the state the 85 percent of Nevada land controlled by the federal government. The idea drew applause — and some protesters — but did not move votes.
+
+Like the Cruz campaign, Rubio’s thought it could exploit Trump’s weak state-level organization with a carefully tailored strategy. Rubio targeted Nevada’s well-organized Mormon community, which propelled Mitt Romney to victory here in 2012, as well as seniors who populate the many retirement communities around Las Vegas.
+
+He also played up his local roots. He lived briefly as a child in Las Vegas, where his father tended bar at a casino and his mother cleaned rooms at a hotel. During that time, his family temporarily converted to Mormonism.
+
+Dozens of extended family members still live here. “He has more family members in Nevada than in Florida,” Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison, Rubio’s state campaign chairman, said Sunday night at a rally in North Las Vegas.
+
+[Donald Trump is on course to win the delegates he needs for the GOP nomination]
+
+All along, however, Nevada was Trump’s to lose. He focused on big rallies in Las Vegas and the Reno area — the state’s two main population centers — but he had a ground organization, as well.
+
+Trump’s campaign bought limited television advertising time in Las Vegas. In its main spot, which also ran in South Carolina, a man whose son was murdered by an undocumented immigrant said that Trump is “the only one” he trusts to secure the border.
+
+Rubio campaigned across Nevada with a broader message, trying to appeal to a more diverse cross-section of the electorate, and entrance polls suggested he won among voters who decided in the final days.
+
+Many of the state’s top elected officials backed Rubio, including Sen. Dean Heller. Gov. Brian Sandoval, who has angered conservatives over a state tax increase, decided to stay on the sidelines, though he caucused for Rubio on Tuesday night.
+
+Rubio attracted some star power, too. Donnie Wahlberg, a founding member of New Kids on the Block, a boy band popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, endorsed him at his Sunday night rally.
+
+“I have never, ever voted for a Republican presidential candidate — that is, until this year, thanks to Marco Rubio,” Wahlberg said.
+
+Rubio also had the support of Rick Harrison, a celebrated Las Vegas pawn shop owner and host of the “Pawn Stars” reality-television show. “I really think he’s got a shot at winning on Tuesday,” Harrison told the Sunday night crowd.
+
+Scott Clement in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+1340,How Ted Cruz outfoxed Donald Trump in Iowa,"It was on a hot July day in 2013, six months after he joined the Senate, that Ted Cruz began what would become his winning campaign in Iowa.
+
+At a faith gathering at the Des Moines Marriott, the Texan bowed his head as pastors laid their hands on his shoulders to pray. Meanwhile, the senator’s aides collected their names and email addresses, starting a database of evangelical leaders that would swell over the following months and years. Cruz’s father, Rafael, himself a preacher, looked on, beaming.
+
+Donald Trump began his Iowa campaign with a business trip. He landed here in January 2015 to address a land investment expo, but, unbeknownst to the political world, he also started to build his campaign.
+
+Iowa was a foreign place to the Manhattan mogul, and Trump knew he needed two things: credibility and a fast tutorial. He sought to gain both through Chuck Laudner, a veteran Iowa operative.
+
+Trump invited Laudner and his wife, Stephanie, into his SUV. He poured on the charm. He leaned in to listen as Laudner explained Iowa’s political topography — the 99 counties, the caucus math, the glut of disengaged Iowans who might be persuaded to come out for the right candidate.
+
+Trump later brought the couple aboard his Boeing 757, where they sat in plush leather chairs with gold-plated seat-belt buckles and sipped soft drinks. Trump tried to make a deal — and Laudner was sold. The Trump candidacy would soon be born, and the businessman would try to win over Iowa just as he had won over Laudner: by the power of his own seduction.
+
+There was yet a third playbook: that of Marco Rubio. The senator from Florida banked on rising late. His supporters grumbled that he showed disdain for the campaign grind; during a five-day Iowa swing in November, he took the third day off to watch football.
+
+But Rubio believed that Iowa could be won with an air war and a late burst of activity. In the final three weeks, his ads were ubiquitous on televisions here. As he crossed the state last weekend sounding an optimistic call for Republican unity, his campaign paid to beam a 30-minute video of him on the stump into homes in each of Iowa’s media markets.
+
+Rubio’s strategy proved highly effective as he surged to a surprisingly strong third place, just one percentage point behind Trump.
+
+But in a state that has long rewarded conservatives who put religion at the fore, and in a political era dictated by data analytics, Cruz won on the strength of both. His message was perfectly tuned to Iowa conservatives, he used his web of relationships to try to unite evangelical leaders, and he invested deeply in data and turnout organization. By caucus day, Cruz had 11,986 volunteers in Iowa and trained captains at nearly all of the 1,681 precincts.
+
+“We formed the philosophy that our campaign would be waged by neighbors telling their neighbors who to vote for, and we needed to set up every piece and shred of data to allow that to happen,” said Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager.
+
+That approach was paying off by the beginning of the year. Cruz had a clear lead in the polls. His list of endorsements was growing by the day. Crowds were swelling, even when he stopped by gas stations near midnight.
+
+On a six-day, 28-stop bus tour in early January through far-flung pockets of Iowa, Cruz sounded triumphant. “Father God, please, keep this awakening going,” he said in Mason City.
+
+Still, two threats started to emerge.
+
+Rubio’s “peak late” strategy was ramping up, and he started to directly engage Cruz with a new fervor. He also began talking about his faith everywhere he went.
+
+Rubio had a model in Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who has found support from both the right and the center of Iowa’s GOP going back to 2014, when she navigated a crowded primary in spite of her ties to the party establishment. Rubio was guided by Ernst’s strategist, Todd Harris, who recognized that suburban Republicans could compete with the state’s conservative wing.
+
+“We went fishing where the fishes are,” Harris said. “We knew exactly who the voters we wanted to talk to were. A lot of them were suburban. It’s no surprise [Rubio] was dubbed the ‘mayor of Ankeny.’ People made a lot of fun at that, but we knew what we were doing.”
+
+Then there was Trump. Around the beginning of the year, his gut was telling him he could be the winner. He started to attack hard, hitting Cruz on his Canadian birth, on previously undisclosed loans, on his “nasty” reputation in Washington.
+
+“I am putting myself a little bit out there,” Trump said in an interview in the boys’ locker room at Muscatine High School, where he held a rally late last month. “If I come in second, I come in second. I think we’re going to come in first, frankly. I could say, ‘Oh, well, I just want to do well . . .’ ”
+
+Trump rolled his eyes. “I want to win,” he said. “I want to win.”
+
+Hours after Trump’s June 16 announcement that he was running, he flew to Des Moines for his first rally. Attendees at the Hoyt Sherman auditorium were revved up. The reigning Miss Iowa was there. Cub Scouts recited the Pledge of Allegiance. With Neil Young’s “Keep On Rocking in the Free World” blaring, Trump was surrounded as he slowly made his way down the aisle.
+
+As he left the rally, Trump asked campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, “Why aren’t we going to win this state?”
+
+Trump’s on-again, off-again romance with Iowa had begun. He would spar with the state’s biggest newspaper, the Des Moines Register, and bar its reporters from his events. When Ben Carson briefly surpassed him in the polls in the fall, he took to the stage in Fort Dodge and wondered resentfully, “How stupid are the people of Iowa?”
+
+But Trump always believed he could will himself to victory here. Early on, Laudner, director of Trump’s Iowa campaign, described the strategy in the state as a “parallel campaign.” Rather than focusing on the roughly 120,000 Republicans who regularly caucus, he targeted nontraditional voters — “people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Republican event.”
+
+That included Trump’s lieutenants. Tana Goertz, a political neophyte best known for being a runner-up on Trump’s NBC show “The Apprentice,” was tapped as Iowa co-chair. She used her own celebrity as a former spokeswoman for the Bedazzler, a rhinestone-setting machine popular with home-crafts enthusiasts, to draw in volunteers.
+
+One brisk night last week, Goertz was at Trump’s Iowa headquarters carrying a carton of beads and shiny plastic gems as she headed out to a call center. She rewarded the most dedicated volunteers by Bedazzling their “Make America Great Again” T-shirts and hats.
+
+Goertz also recorded a cheery YouTube video with instructions on how to caucus. It was viewed more than 200,000 times.
+
+During the summer, as Trump whipped up throngs of fans from Alabama to Arizona, aides drove a hulking royal-blue bus around Iowa, wowing locals and signing up potential supporters.
+
+By late August, Trump had surged to the lead for the first time in the Register’s Iowa poll.
+
+But he had difficulty sustaining his momentum. Enthusiasm for Carson was growing. Trump’s flippant comment at an August gathering of evangelicals that he occasionally had a “little cracker” when he attended church and rarely, if ever, asked God for forgiveness sowed doubts about his character.
+
+His operation now had a dozen staffers in Iowa, but his organizing was shrouded in mystery. Republican operatives became dubious and saw little evidence of a Trump ground game.
+
+While other campaigns happily showcased packed phone banks and detailed complex data applications, Trump’s did neither. After years of being a favorite source of quotations for Iowa reporters, Laudner went, in his words, “radio silent.”
+
+From his first trip to Iowa three summers ago, Cruz was plotting his path to the caucuses.
+
+Cruz’s father, Rafael, journeyed to every corner of the state, again and again, huddling with pastors and preaching in churches. He told the story of his emigration from Cuba and testified to Ted’s character, conviction and conservatism.
+
+To run his Iowa campaign, Cruz interviewed several seasoned consultants but settled on a former Baptist pastor named Bryan English who had deep ties to the evangelical networks led by Rep. Steve King and Bob Vander Plaats, head of the conservative group the Family Leader. English was an unusual hire, but the move underscored Cruz’s strategy.
+
+“Do you set up your operation with a bunch of khaki-slacks, blue-blazer clowns?” Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, asked. “Or do you set it up with an activist?”
+
+Back at national headquarters in Houston, Roe and his team invested several million dollars in a data analytics operation. There were about 175,000 Republicans in Iowa who had participated in a presidential caucus, and Cruz’s statisticians and behavioral psychologists set out to learn everything they could about them.
+
+The campaign conducted “psychological targeting” of likely caucus-goers, building its own version of a Myers-Briggs personality test to categorize Republicans so it could send them personally tailored phone calls, mail and other messages.
+
+Sitting in his office last week, with war-strategy tomes by Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz stacked on his desk, English looked out at the bustling phone bank, which on this afternoon included Rafael Cruz.
+
+“If anybody goes to caucus and says, ‘I haven’t seen Ted Cruz,’ I want it to be their fault, not ours,” English said.
+
+For the first six months of the campaign, he was the lone Cruz staffer in Iowa, and he worked out of the basement of his home. By August, though, there was a headquarters in Urbandale, then more staffers. The team grew to 20, and Cruz rented out a dormitory building in Des Moines — “Camp Cruz” — to house volunteers from Texas and other places who came in the final month to help canvass.
+
+Cruz peeled supporters from former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who together won the past two caucuses with heavy support from evangelicals and home-school parents. Cruz also targeted the libertarian followers of former congressman Ron Paul, whose son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), was proving to be less popular than his father in his presidential bid.
+
+By January, the Cruz campaign had so much information about Iowa Republicans that it believed it could pinpoint exactly which ones were certain to caucus for Cruz, which were undecided and which were leaning toward competitors.
+
+Ten days before the caucuses, the internal data (based on a turnout of 150,000 people, which would set a new record) showed that 19,186 were certain to be with Cruz. About 1,400 had supported him at one point but had turned to another candidate; they got personal phone calls from Ted; his wife, Heidi; or Rafael Cruz in a push to win them back.
+
+Only 15,626 people were certain to caucus for Trump, according to the figures. The Cruz campaign believed it was winning.
+
+The decision facing Trump was straightforward: shower attention on Iowa in the final days, only to risk a humbling defeat, or turn to New Hampshire and South Carolina, the next two states to vote, where he enjoyed substantial leads.
+
+The real estate magnate chose to roll the dice, propelled, in part, by his irritation at watching television pundits say that Cruz was likely to win.
+
+So Trump reminded Iowans, again and again, about Cruz’s opposition to federal renewable-fuel standards, an issue critical to the state’s powerful ethanol industry. In that, Trump had an ally in Gov. Terry Branstad (R), who broke his neutrality to call for Cruz’s defeat.
+
+Trump also raised questions about Cruz’s Canadian birth, first in an interview with The Washington Post and then at almost every rally and on TV. The issue dogged Cruz: A man dressed in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform trailed him, and a super PAC supporting Rubio ran an ad depicting Cruz’s face inside Canada’s iconic maple leaf. Huckabee’s super PAC aired a provocative ad suggesting that Cruz was “a millionaire that brags about his faith” but does not tithe.
+
+There were signs that the right was not united behind Cruz. Former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, a tea party and evangelical heroine, endorsed Trump at a splashy rally in Ames.
+
+The nightly surveys conducted by the Cruz campaign showed that Palin was a boon for Trump — 67 percent of Iowa Republicans had heard of her endorsement, and of them, 19 percent were more likely to support Trump. Only 13 percent were less likely to.
+
+A few days later, Trump won the backing of Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the late televangelist and president of Liberty University. The two men campaigned together across Iowa the weekend before the caucuses.
+
+Rubio also was making an overt play for evangelical support, airing ads about his faith and opposition to abortion, and talking on the stump about God as if he were a Sunday school teacher.
+
+Not everyone was sure that Rubio’s embrace of the religious right would work; some thought he was going too far in his attempt to win Iowa. “Rubio’s mistake is that he’s moved too far toward the Christian right when he should be focused on the mainstream,” Doug Gross, an unaffiliated Iowa Republican power broker, said in December.
+
+Attendees at Rubio’s events often would say that they were drawn to him not out of passion but out of a desire to back someone more moderate who had a chance to win in the general election.
+
+At a Rubio stop in the late fall in West Des Moines, Carol and Pete Click said they drove through an icy mush and argued politely along the way about the senator from Florida. Pete, 65, a retired business owner, said he wasn’t enthusiastic, but Carol urged her husband to give Rubio a second look.
+
+“All right, I’m open to it,” Pete told his wife. “I’m tired of the establishment, but Trump is a problem and maybe he needs to be stopped here.”
+
+Carol replied with a chuckle. “We’ve never caucused” for someone with a chance of winning the general election. “It’s about time.”
+
+In the past two weeks, Rubio shifted as he saw an opening with Cruz and Trump bloodying each other. He kept up his citation of Bible passages and channeled voter anger, but began to speak more of his ability to bring the party together as others clashed. He was a bridge-builder with conservative credentials.
+
+It worked. Entrance polls of caucus-goers showed that he won over voters in Iowa who waited until the final week to choose a candidate.
+
+On the eve of the caucuses, Cruz returned to Des Moines for a Sunday evening rally at the state fairgrounds.
+
+The crowd was deeply religious, with children wearing church youth-group T-shirts and two elderly couples up front holding hands in prayer. The videos that played on oversize screens before Cruz went on featured soaring guitar chords mixed with testimonials from conservative leaders. Rep. Steve King rallied the crowd with an introduction that assured people Cruz was spoon-fed the Constitution and the Bible as a child.
+
+Cruz cast himself as the one true conservative in the race. “Stand with us. Caucus for us. If we stand together, we will win.”
+
+The crowd roared. A day later, they stood with him.",REAL
+4947,"Stronger together? Yes, Mrs. Clinton, but what does 'together' really mean?","Hillary Clinton and the Democrats say America is stronger together. But they're not yet living up to the unifying spirit of their slogan.
+
+Because I needed props for a theatrical performance, I bought campaign paraphernalia from several of the final candidates. So, snuggled together on the shelf behind my desk, I have a Trump hat, a Hillary T-shirt, a Bernie coffee mug, and a couple of Cruz buttons.
+
+As you can imagine, people are often confused by the collection. They have never seen all four of those items in the same place at the same time. But isn’t that actually an accurate portrait of what Hillary Clinton’s slogan, “stronger together,” means?
+
+Because of my work, which is building bridges across the partisan divide, I sent my recent book to the Clinton and Trump campaigns. I received responses from both. From the vice-chair of her campaign, Huma Abedin, I received a very courteous note thanking me for supporting her candidate and wishing me much success with the book. And from “Team Trump” I received a thank you letter and two bumper stickers that say (guess what?): “Make America Great Again!”
+
+But let me set the record straight. When “Team Trump” told me they were “honored to call me a valuable member of our team and to work with us on rescuing the future of our country,” I realized that they had not taken my letter seriously. I was not volunteering to join their campaign. I was asking them to change the way they were campaigning. I asked them to read my book because I wanted their standard-bearer to unite America, not divide it. Obviously, they are not listening.
+
+And although I strongly prefer Secretary Clinton to Mr. Trump for president, I was not volunteering to work on her campaign, either. I sent my book because I wanted the Clinton campaign to change its tone as well.
+
+I watched Clinton speak recently to a crowd of 3,000 ardent fans in a packed high school gymnasium in Colorado.  Carefully positioned behind Hillary so that the cameras would see her, a lone dissenter held up a cloth banner that read “Stop DNC Corruption” and shouted out the same message denouncing the Democratic National Committee. But Clinton supporters around her held up their blue placards with the words “Stronger Together” so that she and her protest sign soon became invisible.
+
+It is just one detail on the campaign trail, of course. But it was a telling moment because it reminds us that “stronger together” is not just a slogan for getting elected. Just as the words “Make America Great Again” cannot be reduced to blindly endorsing an egomaniac, “Stronger Together” cannot be reduced to rallying around one remarkable woman. Unless it means something more than that, it feels more like George Orwell’s “newspeak” than an uplifting call for unity.
+
+The protester being silenced and surrounded was a Bernie Sanders supporter. She was an older, solitary woman who still harbored a grudge about how her hero from Vermont had been treated by DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her staff. If the next president of the United States cannot include her in the “stronger together” tent, then what exactly does “together” mean?
+
+While the Sanders dissenter was being escorted from the gym, Clinton was repeating one of her favorite lines from her convention speech.  “I want to be the president for all Americans,” she shouted over the raucous applause. “Democrats, Republicans, and Independents!”
+
+Despite that admirable rhetoric, neither campaign currently embodies the deepest meaning of “stronger together.” Before Clinton spoke, for example, no independents or Republicans were invited to speak. To make matters worse, when US Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D) of Colorado opened the event, he welcomed the audience by shouting out a welcome to all the “Colorado Democrats” present in the room.
+
+Like 4 in 10 Americans, I am an Independent. I know for a fact that there were many of us, as well as Republicans, in the gym. Yet the congressman’s welcome was only to members of his party. His words contradicted what Clinton was claiming she wanted to be – a president for “all Americans.” And it undermined the slogan being waved madly in the air by the crowd.
+
+So if “stronger together” is going to be the mantra for the Clinton campaign, let’s take it seriously.
+
+• We need to learn from those who disagree with us, not demonize them.
+
+• We commit ourselves to developing a healthy relationship with our adversaries, not treating them like “enemies.”
+
+• We focus on meeting the challenges facing our country (problem-solving) rather than being “right” (position-taking).
+
+• We remember that after campaigning comes governing, and whoever wins needs to be able to lead our country effectively in a troubled world.
+
+In other words, let’s not just carry the banner. Let’s behave that way toward others. If we actually want to be “stronger together,” let’s not just shout it; let’s be it.
+
+– Mark Gerzon, president of Mediators Foundation, is the author of ""The Reunited States of America; How We Can Cross the Partisan Divide."" He writes his Beyond Red & Blue blog exclusively for Politics Voices.",REAL
+9694,:," ‘We the People’ Against Tyranny: Seven Principles for Free Government
+By John W. Whitehead
+“As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid.”—Former presidential advisor Bertram Gross
+November 08, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - As history teaches us, if the people have little or no knowledge of the basics of government and their rights, those who wield governmental power inevitably wield it excessively. After all, a citizenry can only hold its government accountable if it knows when the government oversteps its bounds.
+Precisely because Americans are easily distracted—because, as study after study shows, they are clueless about their rights—because their elected officials no longer represent them—because Americans have been brainwashed into believing that their only duty as citizens is to vote—because the citizenry has failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the Constitution—because young people are no longer being taught the fundamentals of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, resulting in citizens who don’t even know they have rights—and because Americans continue to place their trust in politics to fix what’s wrong with this country—the American governmental scheme is sliding ever closer towards a pervasive authoritarianism.
+This steady slide towards tyranny, meted out by militarized local and federal police and legalistic bureaucrats, has been carried forward by each successive president over the past fifty years regardless of their political affiliation.
+Big government has grown bigger and the rights of the citizenry have grown smaller.
+However, there are certain principles—principles that every American should know—which undergird the American system of government and form the basis for the freedoms our forefathers fought and died for.
+The following seven principles are a good starting point for understanding what free government is really all about.
+First, the maxim that power corrupts is an absolute truth. Realizing this, those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights held one principle sacrosanct: a distrust of all who hold governmental power. As James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights, proclaimed, “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.” Moreover, in questions of power, Thomas Jefferson warned, “Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” As such, those who drafted our founding documents would see today’s government as an out-of-control, unmanageable beast.
+The second principle is that governments primarily exist to secure rights, an idea that is central to constitutionalism. In appointing the government as the guardian of the people’s rights, the people give it only certain, enumerated powers, which are laid out in a written constitution. The idea of a written constitution actualizes the two great themes of the Declaration of Independence: consent and protection of equal rights. Thus, the purpose of constitutionalism is to limit governmental power and ensure that the government performs its basic function: to preserve and protect our rights, especially our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the government today has discarded this principle and now sees itself as our master, not our servant. The obvious next step, unless we act soon, is tyranny.
+The third principle revolves around the belief that no one is above the law, not even those who make the law. This is termed rule of law. Richard Nixon’s statement, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” would have been an anathema to the Framers of the Constitution. If all people possess equal rights, the people who live under the laws must be allowed to participate in making those laws. By that same token, those who make the laws must live under the laws they make. However, today government officials at all levels often act as if they are royalty with salaries and perks that none of the rest of us are afforded. This is an egregious affront to the citizenry.
+Fourth, separation of powers ensures that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government. People are not perfect, whether they are in government or out of it. As history makes clear, those in power tend to abuse it. The government is thus divided into three co-equal branches: legislative, executive and judicial. Placing all three powers in the same branch of government was considered the very definition of tyranny. The fact that the president today has dictatorial powers would have been considered a curse by the Framers.
+Fifth, a system of checks and balances, essential if a constitutional government is to succeed, strengthens the separation of powers and prevents legislative despotism. Such checks and balances include dividing Congress into two houses, with different constituencies, term lengths, sizes and functions; granting the president a limited veto power over congressional legislation; and appointing an independent judiciary capable of reviewing ordinary legislation in light of the written Constitution, which is referred to as “judicial review.” The Framers feared that Congress could abuse its powers and potentially emerge as the tyrannous branch because it had the power to tax. But they did not anticipate the emergence of presidential powers as they have come to dominate modern government or the inordinate influence of corporate powers on governmental decision-making. Indeed, as recent academic studies now indicate, we are now ruled by a monied oligarchy that serves itself and not “we the people.”
+Sixth, representation allows the people to have a voice in government by sending elected representatives to do their bidding while avoiding the need of each and every citizen to vote on every issue considered by government. In a country as large as the United States, it is not feasible to have direct participation in governmental affairs. Hence, we have a representative government. If the people don’t agree with how their representatives are conducting themselves, they can and should vote them out. However, as the citizenry has grown lazy and been distracted by the entertainment spectacles of modern society, government bureaucrats churn out numerous laws each year resulting in average citizens being rendered lawbreakers and jailed for what used to be considered normal behavior.
+Finally, federalism is yet another constitutional device to limit the power of government by dividing power and, thus, preventing tyranny. In America, the levels of government generally break down into federal, state and local branches (which further divide into counties and towns or cities). Because local and particular interests differ from place to place, such interests are better handled at a more intimate level by local governments, not a bureaucratic national government. Remarking on the benefits of the American tradition of local self-government in the 1830s, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed:
+Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it. Without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it has not got the spirit of liberty.
+Unfortunately, we are now governed by top-heavy government emanating from Washington DC that has no respect for local institutions or traditions.
+These seven vital principles have been largely forgotten in recent years, obscured by the haze of a centralized government, a citizenry that no longer thinks analytically, and schools that don’t adequately teach our young people about their history and their rights.
+Yet here’s the rub: while Americans wander about in their brainwashed states, their “government of the people, by the people and for the people” has largely been taken away from them.
+The answer: get un-brainwashed.
+Learn your rights.
+Stand up for the founding principles.
+Make your voice and your vote count for more than just political posturing.
+Never cease to vociferously protest the erosion of your freedoms at the local and national level.
+Most of all, do these things today.
+If we wait until the votes have all been counted or hang our hopes on our particular candidate to win and fix what’s wrong with the country, “we the people” will continue to lose.
+Whether we ever realize it not, the enemy is not across party lines, as they would have us believe. It has us surrounded on all sides.
+Even so, we’re not yet defeated.
+We could still overcome our oppressors if we cared enough to join forces and launch a militant nonviolent revolution—a people’s revolution that starts locally and trickles upwards—but that will take some doing.
+It will mean turning our backs on the political jousting contests taking place at all levels of government and rejecting their appointed jesters as false prophets. It will mean not allowing ourselves to be corralled like cattle and branded with political labels that have no meaning anymore. It will mean recognizing that all the evils that surround us today—endless wars, drone strikes, invasive surveillance, militarized police, poverty, asset forfeiture schemes, overcriminalization, etc.—are not of our making but came about as a way to control and profit from us.
+It will mean “ voting with our feet ” through sustained, mass civil disobedience.
+As journalist Chris Hedges points out, “There were once radicals in America, people who held fast to moral imperatives. They fought for the oppressed because it was right , not because it was easy or practical. They were willing to accept the state persecution that comes with open defiance. They had the courage of their convictions. They were not afraid.”
+Ultimately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , it will mean refusing to be divided, one against each other, by politics and instead uniting behind the only distinction that has ever mattered: “we the people” against tyranny.
+John W. Whitehead: Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute . His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org .",FAKE
+6067,Is This What You Think They Would Look Like? Supposed Pictures of Real Extraterrestrials,"The topic of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), alongside the extraterrestrial hypothesis being one of multiple explanations for their appearance (which seems to be quite a common phenomenon), is an area of interest for many people that’s continually growing, and for good reasons. 
+Via CollectiveEvolution 
+
+“Intelligent beings from other star systems have been and are visiting our planet Earth. They are variously referred to as Visitors, Others, Star People, Et’s, etc…They are visiting Earth now; this is not a matter of conjecture or wistful thinking. – Theodor C. Loder III, Phd, Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences, University of New Hampshire
+Scroll Down For Videos Below This is in large part due to the fact that we now have hundreds of credible witnesses that have officially testified to the reality of an extraterrestrial presence, and its relation to the already disclosed UFO ‘problem.’
+This is why members of government, like John Podesta, Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, Counsellor to Barack Obama and head of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign before she dropped out, stated that “the time to pull the curtain back on this subject is long overdue. We have statements from the most credible sources, those in a position to know, about a fascinating phenomenon, the nature of which is yet to be determined.” (taken from Leslie Kean’s 2010 New York Times bestseller, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record, in which Podesta wrote the forward)
+Although keep in mind, governments have been deceiving us on several different topics throughout history, it’s safe to assume that they would use “UFO disclosure” for their own personal interests in the same way they’ve used ‘false flag’ terrorism. Something to think about, but definitely a topic for another article.
+As the F-4 approached a range of 25 nautical miles it lost all instrumentation and communications. When the F-4 turned away from the object and apparently was no longer a threat to it, the aircraft regained all instrumentation and communications. Another brightly lighted object came out of the original object. The second object headed straight toward the F4. ” – One example out of hundreds involving the military intercept of a UFO that was tracked on air radar, ground radar, and visually confirmed by pilots (source)
+Why It’s Time To Listen To Contactees, Abductees & Experiencers/ A Psychological Standpoint Just to clarify, ‘contactees’ are usually those who have reported ‘friendly’ contact experiences with extraterrestrials, ‘abductees’ are those who have had what they perceive to be fearful experiences, and experiencers are those who neither view the experience as ‘good’ or ‘bad,” but simply just an experience. It’s important to note this, because various people have reported different types of experiences with different types of beings.
+“Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered … We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time.” – Dr. Edgar Mitchell, ScD, 6th man to walk on the Moon(source) (source)
+The reality is that some people who claim to have had contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings actually have.
+John Mack, A Harvard professor, psychiatrist and Pulitzer Price recipient stresses that:
+“Yes, it’s both. It’s both literally, physically happening to a degree; and it’s also some kind of psychological, spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it asks us to stretch to open to realities that are not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which our consciousness, our, if you will, learning processes over the past several hundred years have closed us off.” (source)
+We published an article earlier this year regarding John Mack, and more than 60 school children witnessing non-human beings and a large craft landing. The children were interviewed by him, and it was quite a remarkable story with all of the children providing very similiar stories. Until this day these children have been speaking of it, an event occurred more than 20 years ago….
+“They describe these events like a person talks about something that has happened to them. I can tell that these are people of sound mind telling me something…” (quote continued and taken from the video linked below) -Dr. John Mack, professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
+You can watch THIS video of Mack Interview the children, and you can read THIS article that goes more into detail on that case.
+According to retired McGill University professor in the Department of Psychology (research areas beings cognition and cognitive Neuroscience), Dr. Don Donderi:
+“Some of what people report as UFOs are extraterrestrial (ET) vehicles. Some of those extraterrestrial vehicles actually have ET crews, and some of those ET crews catch and release humans.” (source)
+Academicians like these, and others like Richard Dolan, David M. Jacobs and more have been studying this phenomena for decades, and the reports of beings and examining why they are here, what they are doing, what they look like and more has been documented by their (and others) research.
+What I find most fascinating about these stories is how many of them seem to compliment each other instead of contradicting each other, which just adds to the mystery.
+As far as physical research goes:
+“There are a great many photographs of such body marks, many of which are in an equilateral triangle pattern of red dots on the wrist or near the ankle. Also common are scoop marks,” in which it appears as if a small amount of tissue was removed from beneath the skin, leaving an indentation.” -Richard Dolan (taken from his book, UFOs for the 21st century mind)
+Below is a clip of Dr. Roger Leir. a doctor of podiatric medicine, and arguably the best known individual with regards to extracting alleged alien implants. He has performed more than fifteen surgeries that removed sixteen separate distinct objects. These objects have been investigated by several prestigious laboratories, including Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico Tech, and many others. Unfortunately, he passed away in March 2014, but his legacy lives on.
+Truth is, as former NASA astronaut and Princeton Physics Professor puts it, “there is abundant evidence that we are being contacted, that civilizations have been visiting us for a vary long time.”
+**The information below is a very brief summary of a few of the most commonly reported extraterrestrials based on all of the research I’ve done on this subject.
+Human Looking Extraterrestrials 
+Extraterrestrials with features drastically similar to human beings have reported by contactees, abductees and experiencers for a long time. This type of experience is actually quite common. Many people have reported that they’ve been taken into ships, and warned about the direction the human race is heading. They’re also often portrayed as assisting our planet in various ways, both on a physical level and an energetic one.
+“Decades ago, visitors from other plants warned us about where we were headed and offered to help. But instead, we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after.” – Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defense Minister (source)
+There have also been reports of human looking extraterrestrials working with humans inside of what’s known as the military industrial complex with regards to making technological advancements. This is why in the highly classified world, the black budget world, it’s probably the independent government contractors that are working in these areas.
+Stories of human like extraterrestrials date from the beginning of time all the way up to the present day, and historical literature is littered with accounts of these types of encounters.
+My people tell of Star People who came to us many generations ago. The Star people brought spiritual teachings and stories and maps of the cosmos and they offered these freely. They were kind, loving, and set a great example. When they left us, my people say there was a loneliness like no other.” – Richard Wagamese, Ojibway Author (source)
+As far as the picture above, I am not sure if it’s real or fake, but that’s not the point. It was used to spark your imagination, it is supposedly one of the extraterrestrials that was discovered dead inside of a ship that was located on the moon – retrieved from one of the Apollo missions.
+
+The picture to your left was released by a professor by the name of Bruno Sammaciccia. A Catholic historian with degrees in psychology and psychiatry, he was the author of more than 100 books and a well-known, distinguished figure in Italian academic circles.
+He is thought to have taken this photograph of an alleged 10 foot tall extraterrestrial being in Italy in 1976.
+If you read the lore, there are many stories of a mysterious group of extraterrestrials who look like humans and who established underground bases in Italy, meeting with local residents between 1956 and 1978.
+Not long before his death, Sammaciccia claimed he had had direct physical contact with extraterrestrials over several decades. Dr. Roberto Pinotti, a leading Italian UFOlogist, has since confirmed his decades-long knowledge of the Sammaciccia cases. When it comes to human extraterrestrial contact in modern history, this case ranks among the most compelling, given the pictures and the number of witnesses involved.
+Here is a brief summary of the Sammaciccia contact story as given by UFO researcher Dr. Michael Salla (founder of exopolitics.org):
+In 1956 when Bruno Sammaciccia and two friends met with two mysterious individuals who said they were extraterrestrials. One was over 8 foot tall while the other was just over 3 foot. Sammaciccia and his friends, initially skeptical, were eventually taken into a large underground base where they saw more of the alleged extraterrestrials. They also saw their children being educated, some of the advanced technologies they used, and their space ships. Finally convinced that they were really having physical contact with extraterrestrials, Sammaciccia and his friends began to help the extraterrestrials. They began with material support by arranging for truckloads of fruit, food and other material to be transported and unloaded at an extraterrestrial base. Eventually, two truckloads of supplies were being delivered every month to bases in different regions of Italy where Sammaciccia and his assistants lived.
+Sammaciccia finally described a violent conflict between two factions of extraterrestrials trying to influence humanity’s development and future. While his ‘Friendship’ faction promoted cosmic unity and ethical development, the other faction promoted technological development at all cost. This led to periodic violent clashes between the factions. Eventually, the underground bases of Sammaciccia’s extraterrestrial friends was destroyed in 1978. Survivors had to leave the Earth but promised to return at a future time when humanity was ready for a more ethical future of humanity interacting with extraterrestrials.
+Sammaciccia’s astounding story sounds like an episode from Star Trek, but it is well supported by documentary evidence, some of Italy’s finest UFO researchers, and first hand witnesses of the events described. Some of the witnesses were leading statesmen, scholars and high society figures from Italy and Europe.
+Below is a lecture given by one of the world’s foremost researchers of this topic, Timothy Good. He goes into detail about this supposed encounter, as well as many others.
+To the left you will see a picture that was given to the world by Phil Schneider.
+Phil was a very controversial figure, as was his death. He was born in 1947 and was the son of Oscar and Sally Schneider. Oscar was a Captain in the United States Navy who apparently worked in nuclear medicine and helped design the first nuclear submarines. He was also supposedly part of the famous ‘Philadelphia Experiment,’ as well as Operation Crossroads, a program to test nuclear weapons.
+Oscar Schneider is the gentleman to the right of the man with the red circle around his head. Phil (man in the video below, apparently Oscars son, and Oscar appear to resemble each other quite strongly. The man with the circle around his head is the supposed extraterrestrial. The others are apparently some of the world’s top physicists from the time.
+
+Philip claimed to be an ex-government structural engineer who was involved in building underground military bases (DUMB) around the country. We’ve actually published a couple of detailed articles about DUMBs, whose existence is not mere speculation.
+Other common looks are tall, muscular with long hair, blue eyes and blond hair. The same type of figure has also been reported with black and white beings. Some reports have detailed beings with blue skin, larger eyes, as well as shorter beings, with a little more ’round’ of a head. There seems to be a large variation and a possibility of several different looking human-like extraterrestrial beings. This raises some very interesting questions regarding the origin of our species, if the humanoid form is common throughout the universe, what does that mean?
+Contanctee’s commonly refer to these beings being from various star systems like Arcturus, Sirius, Andromeda and the Pleiades, just to name a few. Cat/bird like humanoid (like above) beings are also fairly common among supposed encounters.
+It’s also noteworthy to mention that all types of beings seem to communicate using telepathy. The following is a selected list of downloadable peer-reviewed journal articles on psi (psychic) phenomena, most published in the 21 st century, you can click HERE Related CE Article: U.S. Defence Physicist Spills The Beans On What’s Really Happening On The Moon
+The Grey Alien The grey alien is another very common type of extraterrestrial that’s been reported by several abductees, contactees and experiencers. Reports range from small, three to four feet tall beings all the way up to seven to nine foot tall beings and everything in between.
+One of the most common types of experiences among several abductees is one in which they have their sperm or eggs extracted. Many have gone through what seems to be a pretty scary experience, despite the fact that multiple times people have reported the beings communicating to them and trying to calm them down, and tell the person that they weren’t going to cause any harm to them. At other times, forceful abduction goes without any communication. Many abductee’s report being impregnated, and then abducted years after to see their hybrid child. This seems to be a very common experience, and suggests that this race (Greys) are creating a human/grey hybrid race, or have been tinkering with the DNA of human beings for quite some time. Many researchers have suggested that these hybrids are already here, and that many babies being born today could have been ‘tinkered’ with. There have also been sightings of Grey like beings taking vegetation from our planet (perhaps’s to study, alien scientists?).
+There have also been reports of woman being impregnated by a supposed extraterrestrial or extraterrestrial/human hybrid. Shortly after the experience the women are taken by ‘government’ agencies and the baby is removed and taken away to be studied by them. It’s not uncommon for these people who have had these experiences to get visits by these unknown people who seem to want to know more about the UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon.
+There are some reports of races like these working with certain governments (or ‘shadow governments’) in a technological exchange program. I have come across stories in my research where some groups of beings warn the human race not work with other groups of beings. These stories are endless, and quite fascinating, but I’ll save that for another article.
+Reptilians 
+The ‘Reptilian’ type being is one that’s been reported and depicted in various human cultures that date back thousands of years all the way up to the present day. These beings have been reported as ‘friendly,’not so friendly and in between. That’s a common theme throughout most supposed extraterrestrial species. The fact that two different beings of the same race can be reported as benevolent and the other as malevolent.
+Many people seem to believe that reptilian type beings are one (out of many) working behind the scenes with those who control the government to ‘en-slave’ the human race. Some even believe that that the global elite are in large part reptilian in origin.
+To be honest, it’s not that far fetched. After researching this topic in depth for almost a decade, there is no doubt in my mind that not only have governments and ‘shadow governments’ become aware of the extraterrestrial presence, but they’ve interacted with several different groups of extraterrestrials.
+It’s Ok To Ask These Questions Just to re-emphasize that things like this need to be discussed more, because they are and have been discussed at the highest levels of government, in secret, for almost one hundred years. For example, this particular FBI document was addressed to “certain scientists of distinction,” to “aeronautical and military authorities,” and to “a number of public officials.”
+The document is a letter that was sent to the director of FBI in Washington from the San Fransisco office, on a matter pertaining to UFOs & extraterrestrials:
+“Lt. Colonel (name redacted) of G2 [G2 means army intelligence], San Francisco advised today he has no further information, and that our Seattle office is in possession of all information known by him and is handling the matter at Tacoma, Washington.”
+The document goes on to provide a copy of a letter written by someone with “several university degrees” and a former “university department head.”
+The memorandum also states that “the mere fact that the data herein were obtained by so-called ‘supernormal’ means is probably sufficient to insure its disregard by nearly all persons addressed.”
+Key words above – the fact that they would like to “insure its disregard” by “nearly” everyone addressed.Does this mean that ‘some’ of the people addressed should not disregard it?
+The letter goes on to outline and state that: (pages 21 & 22)
+Part of the disks carry crews, others are under remote control. Their mission is peaceful, the visitors contemplate settling on this planet. These visitors are human-like but much larger in size. They are not excarnate Earth people, but come from their own world The disks posses some type of radiant energy. They do not come from any “planet” as we use the word, but from an etheric planet which interpenetrates with our own and is not perceptible to us. The bodies of the visitors, and the craft also, automatically materialize on entering the vibratory rate of our dense matter. They re-enter the etheric at will, and so simply disappear from our vision, without trace. The region they come from is NOT the astral plane, but corresponds to the Lakas or Talas. Students of esoteric matters will understand these terms Please keep in mind that there are probably many different types of extraterrestrials out there, and many different kinds that have interacted with humanity in some way. The above document is probably referring to one specific race? I don’t know.
+This is one out of thousands of examples of documents, and it’s not even one that I would pick as most startling. We should definitely be thinking about why these documents were concealed from the public for decades, and think about what other information still lay dormant inside of the military industrial complex when it comes to extraterrestrial beings. You can see examples of documents that go into detail on what happens when the military tracks a UFO on radar HERE.
+For our latest articles on the UFO/Extraterrestrial topic, you can check out the exopolitics section of our website by clicking HERE.
+There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, from other civilizations . . . [and] it behooves us, in case some of these people in the future or now should turn hostile, to find out who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.
+– Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (source)
+You may be thinking that this is absolutely ridiculous. I know many people read the titles of articles like this one and turn their heads and scoff, immediately shutting down the possibility that these could be actual photos of extraterrestrial beings. Why do we hold onto our views so staunchly, at the expense of logic and reason? What prevents us from considering new ideas and new ways of viewing the world? So much new information is emerging every day which challenges the current accepted framework of knowledge, and it can be difficult for our opinions to evolve as quickly as the science. Nonetheless, this is an extremely important topic, especially with the recent disclosures of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) by various governments and defence intelligence agencies, and we must work past our reluctance to accept new ideas. These objects are constantly photographed and tracked on radar, as well as visually confirmed by the pilots who are sent out to see them, and we would be foolish to discount this kind of evidence.
+A photo taken by two Royal Canadian Air Force pilots on August 27th, 1957, in McCleod, Alberta, Canada is another example of such evidence. The pilots were flying in a formation of four F86 Sabre jet aircraft. One of the pilots described the phenomenon as a “bright light which was sharply defined as disk-shaped” and which looked like “a shiny silver dollar sitting horizontal.” Another pilot managed to photograph the object, as you can see above.
+There are a number of studies published in reputable peer-reviewed journals analyzing these cases. This specific sighting lasted for a couple of minutes, and the case was analyzed by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who estimated (from available data) the luminosity of the object (the power output within the spectral range of the film) to be many megawatts. The Sturrock Panel also found that a strong magnetic field surrounding the phenomenon or object was a common occurrence:
+If it does indeed turn out that there is relevant physical evidence, if this evidence is carefully collected and analyzed, and if this analysis leads to the identification of several facts concerning the UFO phenomenon, then will be the time for scientists to step back and ask, what are these facts trying to tell us? If those facts are strong enough to lead to a firm conclusion, then will be the time to confront the more bizarre questions. If, for instance, it turns out that all physical evidence is consistent with a mundane interpretation of the causes of UFO reports, there will be little reason to continue to speculate about the role of extraterrestrial beings. If, on the other hand, the analysis of physical evidence turns up very strong evidence that objects related with UFO reports were manufactured outside the solar system, then one must obviously consider very seriously that the phenomenon involves not only extraterrestrial vehicles but probably also extraterrestrial beings. -Peter Sturrock, An emeritus professor of applied physics at Stanford University
+",FAKE
+270,"Rep. Jason Chaffetz launches bid for House speaker, shaking up GOP leadership race","The Republican chairman of a high-profile House committee on Sunday shook up the race to succeed outgoing Speaker John A. Boehner, launching a challenge to the heavy favorite, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
+
+The bid by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah), chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, comes amid unrest from conservatives driven by doubts that McCarthy (Calif.) will be any more inclined than Boehner to embrace the right flank of the House Republican Conference.
+
+Chaffetz said on ""Fox News Sunday"" that he was “recruited” by members displeased with McCarthy’s ascent and that he would “bridge the divide” in the House GOP.
+
+[Chaffetz to run against McCarthy for House speaker]
+
+“You don’t just give an automatic promotion to the existing leadership team,” he said. “That doesn’t signal change. I think [House Republicans] want a fresh face and fresh new person who is actually there at the leadership table in the speaker’s role.”
+
+Chaffetz’s remarks not only reflect tensions between conservatives and establishment Republicans, but also concerns about McCarthy’s ability to communicate with the GOP base and the public at large. Those concerns grew after McCarthy made comments last week suggesting that a House investigation into the 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic compound and a CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, stemmed from political motivations.
+
+[McCarthy’s comments on Benghazi probe may be a political gift to Clinton]
+
+“We need somebody who’s out there who is actually going out there and making the case to the American people, talking to the Senate about what we need to do, and going on the national television shows and winning that argument,” Chaffetz said. “We don’t seem to win the argument, and that’s a problem.”
+
+Chaffetz has spent his four House terms working his way to the top of the Oversight Committee, a post that makes him the GOP’s prime attack dog against President Obama’s administration. He is well versed in the hand-to-hand political combat of cable news and talk radio and has become the party’s face on a variety of issues, including Secret Service failures and government funding for Planned Parenthood.
+
+He made headlines this week after an inspector general’s report found that a top Secret Service executive suggested leaking information that Chaffetz had been passed over for an agent’s job years ago in retaliation for his committee’s aggressive investigations.
+
+But McCarthy retains considerable advantages ahead of the closed-door GOP leadership elections set for Thursday. He enjoys a week’s head start in building support, a ready-made political infrastructure, and close relationships across the Republican conference built during his stint as the GOP’s chief House candidate recruiter ahead of the 2010 midterm elections.
+
+In Thursday’s party elections, a speaker candidate need only win the backing of a simple majority of those voting to become the Republican nominee. But unlike other leadership posts, the speaker is chosen in a subsequent floor vote of all House members, and the House’s 246 Republicans will be under no obligation to select the party nominee.
+
+No Democrats are expected to back McCarthy or any other Republican, so the nominee cannot afford to lose the support of more than 28 GOP members.
+
+Chaffetz suggested that McCarthy does not have that level of support: “There are nearly 50 people and a growing number that will not and cannot vote for Kevin McCarthy as the speaker on the floor. He’s going to fall short of the 218 votes on the floor of House.”
+
+But Chaffetz has weaknesses of his own. He has received mixed reviews of his tenure as the Oversight Committee chairman, with conservative commentators recently accusing him of squandering a hearing last week featuring the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards. And Chaffetz, who criticized McCarthy’s comments on the Benghazi investigation, has his own history of bombastic and controversial remarks.
+
+He also played a role in a key episode that fanned conservative outrage against establishment Republicans, stripping an Oversight subcommittee chairman of his gavel in retaliation for breaking with leaders on a June procedural vote. That member, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), went on to file a rare motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, accelerating Boehner’s departure.
+
+Chaffetz said Sunday that he “learned from that lesson, that you’re not going to do things by cutting people off at the knees.”
+
+“I think I’m better for it, and I think Mark is better for it, and we’re certainly good friends on this day,” he said.
+
+Meadows agreed Sunday that bygones are bygones: “Any emphasis placed on past disagreements would be misguided and is certainly not a factor in this race for me.”
+
+Chaffetz will audition alongside McCarthy and a third speaker candidate, Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), in closed-door meetings this week scheduled ahead of the Thursday elections. A Tuesday evening session sponsored by hard-line conservative groups, including the increasingly influential House Freedom Caucus, could be especially crucial.
+
+Webster, a back-bencher who has emphasized the need for procedural improvements, has won some support from conservatives, but his appeal across the conference is limited. A previous speaker bid, challenging Boehner in January, garnered 12 votes.
+
+The stakes of the speaker’s race were heightened in recent days after the Treasury Department announced that Congress must act to raise the federal debt ceiling on or about Nov. 5 — less than a week after Boehner leaves office.
+
+An effort by Boehner to pass a debt-limit increase in his final days with mainly Democratic votes — as happened last week on a 10-week government funding extension — could further weaken McCarthy, who as majority leader is considered to be in control of the floor agenda.
+
+Chaffetz said Sunday that “we’re just not going to unilaterally raise the debt limit” and suggested that he would take cues from members who overwhelmingly support using the deadline as leverage in spending negotiations with Obama.
+
+“As the speaker, you’ve got to take the will of our body, appreciate and respect the process, and then go fight for that,” he said.",REAL
+234,Hillary Clinton showed us a glimpse of her soul at Benghazi hearings. It was chilling,"I did not watch the Benghazi hearings, unlike many others, in hopes of catching Secretary Clinton out, with my ears perked up for some admission that could sink her presidential ambitions.
+
+Secretary Clinton did not disappoint in her performance on Thursday.
+
+She admitted to no wrongdoing, nor to breaking any laws.
+
+Mistakes were made by others, the fault lies elsewhere.
+
+She put up with hours and hours of questions, and no one laid a glove on her. 
+
+ 
+
+ Secretary Clinton was far more adept at bobbing and weaving than the members of Congress who questioned her were at pinning her down.
+
+She brushed off blame by saying security decisions were handled at lower levels of the State Department professional staff, not by the secretary.
+
+She didn't receive Ambassador Stevens' requests for more security -- implying that if only she had things might have turned out differently.
+
+It was a masterful performance. She showed enormous discipline and nearly super-human stamina.
+
+
+
+She let nothing slip. But in the end she let everything slip. She got a perfect score, but failed the test.
+
+She didn't mean to, but she showed us a glimpse into her soul.
+
+It was chilling.
+
+ 
+
+ We now know that when Secretary Clinton met the plane carrying the bodies of the four Americans who died at Benghazi that the Obama administration had intially lied about what happened.
+
+She stood over the flag-draped coffins of four dead Americans knowing that the first narrative blamed their deaths on an Internet video, which caused a demonstration outside the consulate to turn into a deadly attack, when she already knew the truth.
+
+She looked into the eyes of the families of the fallen heroes knowing all about that.
+
+She always knew they died from a planned terrorist attack from an Al Qaeda-like group. That's what she told her family and foreign leaders according to newly released emails.
+
+So why support the false narrative at the start? Because the Obama administration had an election to win eight weeks later, and a terrorist attack that killed four Americans didn't fit into that plan.
+
+ 
+
+ President Obama asked voters to reelect him because he had killed Usama bin Laden. Al Qaeda was on the ropes. Qaddafi was dead and the Libyan war a success. The wave of war was a receding. President George W. Bush's War on Terror was over because Obama and Clinton had won it.
+
+ 
+
+ A terrorist attack that killed Americans at Benghazi did not fit into that campaign narrative, so it had to be retold and spun into a different story. It wasn't radical Islamist terrorists, but a spontaneous demonstration that got out of control in reaction to an obscure  Internet video.
+
+ 
+
+ In the end, the Benghazi hearings probably didn't change many minds.
+
+Secretary Clinton's supporters will say it was a waste of time, a politically motivated witchhunt.
+
+Secretary Clinton's detractors will say she never answered the questions.
+
+But for me it wasn't the questions or the answers that mattered.
+
+It wasn't about negligence or criminality or incompetence.
+
+Instead it was -- and still is -- about character. And Secretary Clinton has been found wanting.
+
+The even greater tragedy is Secretary Clinton doesn’t think she did anything wrong.  In today’s Washington integrity and truth telling -- even to mourning families -- take a backseat to the relentless pursuit of power.
+
+No wonder the rest of the country wants to throw all the bums out.
+
+
+
+Kathleen Troia ""K.T."" McFarland is a Fox News National Security Analyst and host of FoxNews.com's ""DefCon 3."" She served in national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations",REAL
+3505,Orlando: The mainstream media serves up a false narrative about terror attack,"Editor's note: The following column originally appeared on The Resurgent website. It is reprinted with permission.
+
+In the first 48 hours since the horrific mass shooting in Orlando, the worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11, the public has seen wall-to-wall media coverage of the events.
+
+The false narrative emerging from the media seeks to make a few points, all of which are red herrings and straw men designed to take attention from the truth.
+
+• The shooter, Omar Mateen, was homophobic because he hated gays.
+
+• Mateen was unstable because he was mean and beat his wife
+
+• Mateen had too much unfettered access to guns
+
+Story after story references these points, and they quote each other liberally (take the pun as you wish). Fox News and other media outlets reported comments by a coworker at security firm G4S who called him ""toxic"" and ""unhinged."" The Times of London quoted CNN, about his first wife, ""He was mentally unstable and mentally ill."" Anti-gun New York Daily News quoted NBC News, who spoke to Mateen's father Seddique Matteen, who insisted the rampage had nothing to do with religion.
+
+The Washington Post also did a story on Seddique Mateen defending his son.
+
+“He had a child and a wife, and was very dignified, meaning he had respect for his parents,” Seddique Mateen wrote, standing in front of the flag of his apparent birthplace, Afghanistan. “I don’t know what caused him to shoot last night.”
+
+The shooter's father has close connections with his native Afghanistan, and has traveled back there as recently as 2014, even interviewing Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul, according to the Washington Post. He made a series of Youtube videos praising the Taliban and railing against the U.S.
+
+The Boston Globe appears to be at a complete loss as to Mateen's motive for the killings, because there's no actual proof (besides the killer's own words pledging allegiance is ISIS) he was tied to any jihadist causes.
+
+While Mateen claimed allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, no evidence had emerged by late Sunday pointing to actual ties to terrorist groups or a significant association with jihadist causes.
+
+Yes, they actually wrote that. Apparently a confession isn't evidence to them.
+
+We can either accept the media narrative, that some unknown complex mix of motives drove this mentally ill man to buy readily available assault weapons and kill people he simply hated for no reason, or we can apply Occam's Razor--the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
+
+•The Quran teaches that homosexuality is wrong and punishable by death (not just ""God himself will punish those involved in homosexuality. This, is not for the servants"" of God, which Seddique Mateen said). In some Sharia-law Muslim countries, it actually is punished by death. Certainly ISIS punishes homosexuality by death.
+
+• Many Muslim men are brought up and taught to beat their wives--that this is the correct way to administer discipline in the home. This kind of behavior is common in the Islamic world, where women are not valued as anything more than property.
+
+• Mateen had a clean record, worked as a security guard, kept himself in excellent physical condition, and trained for his jihad. This was not a crime of opportunity, or of passion. It was a planned operation. The ""mentally ill"" narrative offers no hard evidence at this point. He bought weapons because, despite the FBI having investigated him, nothing of concern was noted that would prevent him from doing so. This is a failure of the intelligence and law enforcement system, not our Second Amendment rights.
+
+• The attack was absolutely religiously motivated. You didn't see Mateen attacking the Orlando Islamic Center, the mosque he attended, because he didn't like the people there. You didn't see the people with whom he worshipped calling the FBI or the local authorities to report Mateen acting weird or talking about killing people.
+
+The simplest explanation is that Mateen was a radicalized Muslim, who moved easily with other radicalized Muslims, some of whom are probably living their lives in Orlando. Only now would the FBI be interviewing those people and find connections.
+
+The press is weaving a false narrative to fashion a complex explanation for a simple problem. We have a cancer of radical Islam growing in America. Political correctness, the inability of our president to accept the problem because of his beliefs about Islam being a religion of peace, and impossible restrictions placed on federal, state and local law enforcement have made this crime possible.
+
+Our government is ignoring the cancer and it will continue to grow, as long as the country keeps buying the media's spin.
+
+Steve Berman is a Georgia-based software entrepreneur and blogger who writes at The Resurgent, Erick Erickson’s home on the web. Follow him on Twitter @lifeofgrace224.",REAL
+1949,"Jeb Bush Smoked Marijuana, Bullied Other Students In High School","Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush smoked marijuana while in high school, a personal use of the drug that stands in contrast to his later political stance on the plant.
+
+“I drank alcohol and I smoked marijuana when I was at Andover,” Bush, the current Republican frontrunner seeking his party's 2016 presidential nomination, told the Boston Globe as part of a detailed new profile that describes his time at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Both George H.W. Bush, Jeb's father, and George W. Bush, his brother, also attended the prestigious private school.
+
+“It was pretty common,"" Bush said of his substance use during that time. A former classmate of Bush's, Peter Tibbetts, recalled to the newspaper that the first time he ever smoked marijuana was with Bush, in some woods near their dorm.
+
+“The first time I really got stoned was in Jeb’s room,” Tibbetts told the Globe. “He had a portable stereo with removable speakers. He put on Steppenwolf for me.” Tibbetts was eventually forced to leave the boarding school after being accused of using drugs.
+
+As a politician, Bush has not embraced marijuana. He spent much of his time as Florida governor championing jail instead of treatment for nonviolent drug offenders, and pushed for mandatory prison sentences for drug offenders -- with the exception of his daughter, Noelle, who has struggled with crack cocaine use.
+
+More recently, while acknowledging that states should ""have a right"" to decide on the legalization of marijuana, Bush publicly opposed an amendment to legalize medical marijuana in Florida.
+
+""Florida leaders and citizens have worked for years to make the Sunshine State a world-class location to start or run a business, a family-friendly destination for tourism and a desirable place to raise a family or retire,” Bush said before the November midterm election. ""Allowing large-scale marijuana operations to take root across Florida, under the guise of using it for medicinal purposes, runs counter to all of these efforts.""
+
+“You would think he’d have a little more understanding then,” Paul, who may be a rival to Bush in the Republican primary, told The Hill Friday. “He was even opposed to medical marijuana. This is a guy who now admits he smoked marijuana but he wants to put people in jail who do.""
+
+The Globe also spoke to some of Bush's former classmates, who recalled a ""physically imposing"" young man who was seen as intimidating by some and a bully by others. Tibbetts recalled a story to the newspaper of an occasion during their boarding school days when he and Bush taunted a smaller student who lived in their dorm by sewing his pajama bottoms so that the student couldn't put them on.
+
+Bush told the Globe he didn't remember the incident or any other bullying, and was surprised that some of his former classmates viewed him that way. “I don’t believe that is true,” Bush said, adding that it was more than 40 years ago and not possible for him to remember.
+
+It isn't the first time that allegations of bullying have surfaced about Bush's high school years. Another classmate of Bush's told Vanity Fair in 2001 that he remembered Bush as a bully as well, and that there was ""a kind of arrogance"" about him during his time at Andover.",REAL
+3235,Ted Cruz says motivating conservatives is key to winning White House,"PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Ted Cruz may not be running for anything yet, but the senator from Texas nevertheless presented his theory here Friday night for why a presidential candidate like him would be best positioned to win back the White House for Republicans.
+
+The conventional wisdom in political circles has been that to win a presidential election again, Republicans must broaden their appeal to more moderate swing voters, especially women, minorities and young people. It's a message former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a favorite of the party establishment, has repeatedly delivered as he prepares for an all-but-certain presidential run.
+
+But Cruz, also a likely 2016 candidate, has a different take. He argued in some detail to a gathering of elite conservative donors that a Republican candidate could win only if he or she motivates more conservative activists, especially evangelical Christians, to vote. He posited that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) lost to President Obama in 2008 and 2012 because ""millions of conservatives"" who cast ballots for President George W. Bush's reelection stayed home the following two cycles.
+
+""How do we bring back to the polls the millions of conservatives who stayed home? If they stay home, we lose,"" Cruz said at a dinner Friday night for the Club for Growth, attended by roughly 200 of the fiscally conservative group's wealthy members.
+
+Cruz took a swipe at Bush's father, former president George H.W. Bush. Cruz said Bush ran for his first term as a conservative promising a third Reagan term, but in office raised taxes and became ""kindler and gentler"" -- a line that drew laughter from the crowd. Cruz argued that Bush lost his reelection because he was not sufficiently conservative.
+
+Cruz drew a sharp contrast with Jeb Bush over education policy, describing Common Core, which Bush backs, as ""national standards being dictated from Washington controlling the education of our kids.""
+
+In his remarks, which including a question-and-answer session stretched for 70 minutes, Cruz lambasted what he sees as crony political leaders in both parties. He said conservative voters don't trust politicians anymore because ""they've been lied to too many times."" And he lashed out at what he dubbed ""this small cabal of consultants in Washington"" who keep running Republican campaigns, losing, and ""coming back to donors saying, 'Cut us a check to go make the exact same mistake all over again.'""
+
+Cruz said too many Republicans run ""an almost Soviet-style campaign,"" whereas he signaled he would run a grass-roots-oriented campaign empowering what he called ""political entrepreneurs."" In his 2012 Senate race, he said, he tried to ""nakedly, shamelessly copy"" Obama's 2008 campaign strategy and ordered his aides to read Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's memoir.
+
+Cruz, who was accompanied at The Breakers, an iconic Palm Beach resort, by his wife and two daughters, basked in a warm reception from members of the Club for Growth, which provided substantial resources to help his underdog primary campaign for Senate in 2012. ""I do know for a fact that I would not be in the United States Senate if it were not for the Club for Growth,"" Cruz said.
+
+Cruz received hearty applause when he said, ""We should abolish the IRS."" He also called for abolishing the Export-Import Bank, a contentious issue within the Republican Party as House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) and many business leaders support the bank. And he called for loosening or ending of federal regulations across the board.
+
+""We have seen regulations descend from Washington like locusts on small businesses across this country,"" Cruz said.",REAL
+2900,Netanyahu — Flanked by Boehner — Calls for 'Better Deal' with Iran,"He made the comments before meeting in Jerusalem with the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, John Boehner, a leading Republican and strong critic of the White House's policy on Iran.
+
+""Now is the time for the international community to insist on a better deal,"" Netanyahu said in a televised statement delivered in English.
+
+""A better deal would significantly roll back Iran's nuclear infrastructure. A better deal would link the eventual lifting of the restrictions on Iran's nuclear programme to a change in Iran's behaviour,"" he said, citing threats to annihilate Israel and accusing Tehran of fomenting regional conflict.
+
+Netanyahu said on Tuesday that a framework agreement sought by international negotiators to rein in Iran's nuclear programme would leave it with the capability to develop atomic weapons within a year.
+
+Six world powers and Iran went beyond a midnight deadline and were continuing to negotiate in the Swiss city of Lausanne on Wednesday, having failed to agree on crucial details such as the lifting of U.N. sanctions.
+
+Israel, which is believed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, is not a party to the negotiations.
+
+Iran was expected to be high on the agenda of Netanyahu's talks with Boehner, who is visiting the region with a Republican delegation.
+
+Avoiding stepping deeper into controversy with the White House over the issue, neither Boehner nor Netanyahu mentioned the nuclear talks in comments to reporters at the Israeli leader's office.
+
+Boehner's invitation to Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress last month on the Iranian issue drew accusations that both men were pursuing partisan politics at the expense of traditionally wide support for Israel on Capitol Hill.
+
+""The bonds between the United States and Israel are as strong as ever,"" Boehner said. ""Our two countries cooperate on many different levels and while we may have political disagreements from time to time, the bonds between our two nations are strong and they're going to continue to be strong.""
+
+Congress has cautioned it would consider imposing new sanctions on Iran if there was no agreement in Lausanne this week. President Barack Obama has threatened to veto any such sanctions moves.
+
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that if a framework deal is reached, lawmakers would consider a bill that would require Obama to submit a final accord for Congress' approval.",REAL
+8932,What Is At Stake In The Election,"Here Are The Presstitutes Who Control American's Minds . 
+I just heard an NPR presstitute declare that Texas, a traditional sure thing for Republicans was up for grabs in the presidential election. Little wonder if this report on Zero Hedge is correct. Apparently, the voting machines are already at work stealing the election for Killary. 
+From my long experience in journalism, I know the American public is not very sharp. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to believe that Americans, whose jobs, careers, and the same for their children and grandchildren, have been sold out by the elites who Hillary represents would actually vote for her. It makes no sense. If this were the case, how did Trump get the Republican nomination despite the vicious presstitute campaign against him? 
+It seems obvious that the majority of Americans who have been suffering terribly at the hands of the One Percent who own Hillary lock, stock, and barrel, will not vote for the people who have ruined their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren. 
+Furthermore, if Trump's election is as impossible as the presstitutes tell us--Hillary's win is 93% certain according to the latest presstitute pronouncement--the vicious 24/7 attacks on Trump would be pointless. Wouldn't they? Why the constant, frenetic, vicious attacks on a person who has no chance? - Advertisement - 
+There are reports that a company associated with Hillary backer George Soros is supplying the voting machines to 16 states, including states that determine election outcomes. I do not know that these reports are correct. However, I do know for a fact that the oligarchic interests that rule America are opposed to Trump being elected President for the simple reason that they are unsure that they would be able to control him. 
+It is hard to believe that dispossessed Americans will vote for Hillary, the representative of those who have dispossessed them, when Trump says he will re-empower the dispossessed. Hillary has denigrated ordinary Americans who, she says, she is so removed from by her wealth that she doesn't even know who they are. Clearly, Hillary, paid $675,000 by Goldman Sachs for three 20-minute speeches, is not a representative of the people. She represents the One Percent whose policies have flushed the prospects of ordinary Americans down the toilet. 
+What is really disturbing is the pretense by the presstitute scum that Trump's lewd admiration for female charms is deemed more important than the prospect of nuclear war. At no time during the presidential primaries or during the current presidential campaign has it been mentioned that Russia is being assaulted daily by propaganda, threatened by military buildups, and being convinced that the United States and its European vassals are planning an attack. 
+A threatened Russia, made insecure by inexplicable hostility and Western propaganda, is a danger manufactured by the neoconservative supporters of Hillary Clinton. 
+If the American people are really so unbelievably stupid that they think lewd remarks about women are more important than avoiding nuclear war, the American people are too stupid to exist. They will deserve the mushroom clouds that will wipe them and everyone else off the face of the earth. - Advertisement - 
+Donald Trump is the only candidate in the primaries and the general election who has said that he sees no point in conflict with Russia when Putin has shown nothing but desire to work things out to mutual advantage. 
+In contrast, Hillary has declared the thrice-elected president of Russia to be ""the new Hitler"" and has threatened Russia with military action. Hillary talks openly about regime change in Russia. 
+Surely, in a free media at least one person in the print and TV media would raise this most important of all points. But where have you seen it? 
+Only in my columns and a few others in the alternative media.",FAKE
+623,Inside the swing-state playbooks,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+9609,Top 10 toxins that are poisoning your kids,"Top 10 toxins that are poisoning your kids 
+  Amy Goodrich Tags: toxins , childrens health , poisoning (NaturalNews) Toxins are everywhere. They are lurking in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Young children are particularly vulnerable to the toxic effects our modern lifestyle creates. They can suffer profound and permanent adverse health effects which affect their developing brain and nervous system.A leading group of U.S. scientists, medical experts, and health organizations said that they are witnessing a dramatic increase in learning and behavioral issues in children. Therefore, they called for chemicals to be banned at the first sign of danger rather than waiting for direct, scientific proof.""Our failures to protect children from harm underscore the urgent need for a better approach to developing and assessing scientific evidence and using it to make decisions,"" the experts said.Here are the top ten toxins that our kids are exposed to on a daily basis. 1. Mercury fillings Europe, Norway, and Sweden banned mercury-leaching amalgams nearly a decade ago. Nonetheless, dental offices across the U.S. continue to use these toxic substances in their everyday practice. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), exposure to high levels of mercury can cause lung damage, while prolonged low exposure may result in memory loss, neurological impairment, kidney abnormalities, and skin rashes. 2. Vaccines As stated by the National Vaccine Information Center , a typical child receives about 49 recommended doses of 14 toxin-laden vaccines before the age of six. Here's a short list of the most common toxic chemicals found in vaccines: formaldehyde (used to preserve dead things), mercury, aluminum (associated with Alzheimer's), GMO yeast, antibiotics, and monosodium glutamate (MSG). 3. Prescription drugs Overprescribing doctors, with close ties to the Big Pharma are a real treat when it comes to your child's safety. Writing for Blogs Natural News , Dr. Brent Hunter explained that some of these drugs are the legal versions of addictive street drugs. Take ADHD medication as an example. These commonly prescribed drugs are quite similar to drugs like meth and speed. 4. Monosodium glutamate (MSG) MSG is a common, artificial food additive with neurotoxic effects. It has been linked to numerous health problems like brain lesions, obesity, malformed organs, abnormal reproductive systems, infertility, aggression, antisocial behavior, and high cholesterol. 5. Processed and fast foods We all know that processed or fast foods are bad news . They are loaded with artificial synthetic chemicals, preservatives, nitrates and artificial colors and flavors which have been linked to a host of adverse health effects. 6. Toxins in personal care products When you read the label of personal care products such as body washes, moisturizers, deodorants, and toothpaste, you might not recognize most of their ingredients. When these chemicals seep into the skin, they can cause devastating, long-term effects. Opt for non-toxic, organic alternatives instead. 7. Toxins in Laundry detergent If your laundry detergent has a strong, nice fragrance, chances are it is packed with cancer-causing toxins. Some of these chemicals can be absorbed through your skin. 8. Toxic cleaning products ""Keep out of reach of children,"" is not an uncommon phrase on the label of cleaning products. While we all know that they can be harmful or fatal when swallowed, Dr. Brent Hunter said that we don't need to drink them to experience the damaging side-effects. These chemicals can also end up in our body through inhalation or contact with the skin. 9. Pesticides Pesticides are everywhere. They are in our home, the environment, and the food we eat. Opting for natural pest control and organic, homegrown foods is your best chance to avoid these toxins from entering your home. 10. Soda Sodas are loaded with phosphoric acid which weakens your child's bones and teeth. Furthermore, they contain high amounts of high fructose corn syrup that causes obesity and diabetes. Sources for this article include:",FAKE
+6738,Even Doctors Are Surprised: This Recipe Renews The Knees And Joints!,"Share on Facebook Experts claim that the improper body posture is the major cause of problems and pain in the joints, legs, and back. Such issues may cause even more complications, so they need to be treated on time. This natural remedy restores the proper function of knees and joints and enhances the structure of bones and ameliorates their consistency. This is how to prepare this gelatin treatment: Ingredients: 2 tablespoons of unflavoured gelatin (40 grams) 8 teaspoons flaxseeds",FAKE
+4840,A suburban tide against Trump could sink his election bid,"The USA TODAY Network is spending time in eight counties in eight states, exploring the key electoral themes that could decide this fall’s election. Each week from now until the election, we will feature a different one. The series debuted last week with a look at Waukesha County in Wisconsin. Today: Chester County in Pennsylvania.
+
+WEST CHESTER, Pa. — At age 48, Patty Mapa can't remember ever voting for a Democrat for president.
+
+The substitute kindergarten teacher, who was shopping for fresh produce with her husband and daughter at the West Chester Growers Market in this Philadelphia suburb on a recent day, worries the billionaire businessman is ""negative, just very divisive, and erratic."" She's less than thrilled about casting her ballot for Democrat Hillary Clinton — ""There's that dark little cloud"" when it comes to trustworthiness, she says — but on this Mapa is certain: ""I am voting against Trump.""
+
+The biggest swing in the American electorate this year is happening among white, college-educated voters like Mapa. They are a big and growing group — an estimated 23% of the electorate four years ago and expected to be a bit more this year — and they have voted Republican in every presidential election since at least 1952. Four years ago, Mitt Romney won their support by a solid 14 percentage points, according to surveys of voters as they left polling places. But in the latest Pew Research Center poll, taken last month, Clinton led among whites who have a college degree by 14 points.
+
+That may be the most dramatic partisan shift by a major demographic group from one presidential election to the next in modern American history.
+
+In places like Chester County in Pennsylvania, Douglas County in Colorado, Delaware County in Ohio, Wake County in North Carolina and Fairfax County in Virginia, those changing allegiances create formidable problems for Trump in states he needs to win the White House. While national polls give the businessman and reality TV star a 2-1 lead among white voters who don't have a college education, Democrats' traditional appeal among minority voters and their new strength among better-educated whites, especially women, risk making an electoral majority all but out of reach for him.
+
+Pennsylvania is a crucial state. Trump, Clinton and running mates Mike Pence and Tim Kaine all have campaigned here since the Democratic convention, and the Clinton campaign also has sent in Vice President Biden and former president Bill Clinton.
+
+On a sunny Saturday near summer's end, the weekly farmers market tucked on an open lot in downtown West Chester is bustling with shoppers eyeing stacks of tomatoes and corn, six kinds of apples, early pumpkins and gourds, and homemade pies and cobblers.
+
+Margot McKee, who works in real estate sales (and describes her age only as ""old enough to know better"") bought a maple oat muffin to eat later. In April, she voted for Trump in Pennsylvania's GOP primary. He trounced his rivals, winning 57% of the vote over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (22%) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (19%). But now she anguishes over what to do in November.
+
+""I think he's done a great job in getting people's attention to some issues that have been neglected, and Congress is dysfunctional and politicians are dysfunctional, and they don't seem willing to do their jobs,"" she begins. But she says Trump needs to ""grow up and learn to keep his mouth shut,"" first describing him as ""impossible"" and then calling him an unprintable epithet.
+
+What about Clinton? McKee sighs. ""I'm drawn to her because of her experience and her even manner, but I'm not sure that she's honest,"" adding unhappily that ""the Clintons seem to know how to duck and bob.""
+
+""I'm so disgusted I'm thinking that maybe I'm not going to vote,"" she muses, something she's never done before. ""But then, that's a cop-out.""
+
+The four ""collar counties"" around Philadelphia — Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery — in the past have provided Republican margins to help neutralize the Democratic advantage in the city itself. In the past 12 presidential elections, Chester has voted for the Democratic candidate only once, in 2008. But Democrats have become increasingly competitive in the suburban counties, which include about a third of the state's voters. In 2012, Romney lost the other three and carried Chester by just two-tenths of a percentage point, the closest margin in the state.
+
+The county has a population of about 516,000, and half have college degrees — the highest proportion in the state. Average household incomes are well above the state average; unemployment is well below, and voter turnout is high. Four years ago, seven in 10 of the voting-age citizens in Chester cast ballots. The county's residents are overwhelmingly white. Just 6% are African American, 7% Latino.
+
+Even so, it is Trump's provocative rhetoric about Mexicans, Muslims and immigrants that seems to have created the biggest backlash among Chester County voters.
+
+""Typically here, it's having a fiscal conservative that's most important to Chester County voters, but this race is transcending traditional issues,"" Chester County Republican Chairman Val DiGiorgio, a lawyer, says. ""What's important here and determinative here is whether Donald Trump can show himself to be someone who reaches out to a broader segment of the population, as opposed to what he did during the primaries. We're still waiting to see whether that's the case.""
+
+DiGiorgio, who endorsed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the Republican primary, now supports Trump and is ""putting all our efforts to make sure he's elected president."" He says the New York billionaire has drawn more volunteers than usual to the local GOP organization.
+
+But the Republican county committee's home page — which among other things offers GOP-branded wine made from grapes grown in Chester County — on Monday didn't mention Trump's name or the presidential race. The website's tab listing ""2016 candidates"" included statewide and local contenders, but not the top of the ticket.
+
+To be fair, the home page of the Chester County Democratic Committee didn't mention Clinton, either, though she was listed on the ""2016 candidates"" tab. But a banner across the top of the page declared: ""If you don't vote the whole ballot, you are not doing your full part against Trumpism.""
+
+Just how much impact Trump could have down the ballot is a worry for Republicans and a hope for Democrats. In a statewide Franklin & Marshall College Poll taken last month, Clinton led Trump by 7 points, 47%-40%, and Democratic Senate challenger Katie McGinty led incumbent Republican Pat Toomey by 5 points, 43%-38%. The hard-fought Keystone State race is one of a handful expected to determine control of the Senate.
+
+""The fact is she’s the beneficiary of Clinton emerging into the lead,"" G. Terry Madonna, director of the poll and a professor of public affairs, says of McGinty. ""I think if it's five points or less, Toomey has a good chance of winning."" But if Clinton wins the state by more than 5 points, Trump may leave Toomey with too much ground to make up among voters willing to split their ticket.
+
+Comitta, who is challenging three-term Republican incumbent Dan Truitt for the state House of Representatives, enthusiastically backs Clinton. But she generally tries to talk about local and state issues, not the national race, as she campaigns. She stops by the farmers market after a morning of walking door-to-door on this recent day, distributing fliers that don't mention party affiliation, instead describing her as ""Mom. Educator. Mayor.""
+
+""I hear from some people who love her, some people who would never vote for her, and some who will vote for her because they can't imagine Trump being president,"" she says of Clinton. ""Because the two candidates are so polarizing, and I have to win my race, I'm not going there. ... That's a whole other conversation.""
+
+Trump does have enthusiastic supporters in Chester County, and Linda Ives is one of them.
+
+""You look at a human being as a body of work, and I think that the gentleman has without a doubt provided opportunities, job opportunities, for hundreds of thousands of people, and after watching his children at the convention, I was most impressed,"" says Ives, 54, a retired U.S. Army captain who now works as a consultant.
+
+She also is motivated by fierce opposition to Clinton. She calls the former secretary of State ""a criminal"" for her role in the 2012 deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, and her carelessness with sending classified information on her private email server.
+
+""If I had sent one unclassified email like that, I would be at Fort Leavenworth right now; I would be in jail,"" Ives says. She is concerned about Trump's ""delivery,"" but she also says unfair news coverage is contributing to his problems.
+
+""I think people are embarrassed to say they're supporting Trump,"" she says. ""I think what's happening is — sorry, guys — the liberal media is just pushing the whole, 'The man is a ridiculous clown.' I mean, he's getting portrayed as a ridiculous clown, and the only people who are going to vote for him is the young, uneducated male. So people are then, 'I’m an educated person, why would I be stupid enough to vote for Trump?' ""
+
+Indeed, the electoral shift among college-educated whites in just four years has been of historic proportions, particularly for such a large group of voters.
+
+""In Donald Trump, you have a perfect storm of a candidate in terms of pressing buttons to sending white, college-educated voters, particularly women, in the other direction,"" says Ruy Teixeira, co-director of ""States of Change,"" a nonpartisan project that studies the impact of demographic trends on elections. ""These are not voters who are protectionist or anti-immigrant. He represents a type of Republicanism or strand of the Republican Party that they probably like the least.""
+
+What's not clear yet is whether Republican-leaning voters like those in Chester County who plan to vote for Clinton this time will stick with Democrats down the road.
+
+""Some of this is peculiar to Trump, but I do think that Trump's success reflects the way the bases of the two parties have changed,"" says political scientist Alan Abramowitz of Emory University. The 2016 race may accelerate long-term trends that are reshaping the historic perception of Democrats as the party of blue-collar workers and Republicans as the party of white-collar workers. ""Especially at the presidential level, now Republicans are the party of the white working class,"" Abramowitz says.
+
+Meanwhile, Lisa Cromley, 53, a middle-school English and history teacher, shops at the farmers market and then drops by a Democratic campaign storefront around the corner.
+
+""I am so concerned about Trump that I don't know where to begin,"" she says, then ticks off a list. ""I'm concerned that he doesn't know any issues; he's not a politician. He doesn't have a legal background; he really has a business background, and the business background he has isn't even something that I think translates. I'm concerned about his attitude toward most of the people who make up our pluralistic nation, our multicultural nation. I'm concerned that he doesn't think before he speaks.""
+
+She picks up a yard sign and a bumper sticker for Clinton, hoping the public displays of support will encourage voters who may be reluctant to support her.
+
+""But I try not to talk to people about this campaign,"" Cromley adds. ""It's so divisive.""
+
+To report this series, the USA TODAY Network identified eight counties around the country that represent key voting groups in the November election, from blue-collar and college-educated voters to rural voters and Latinos. Journalists spent time with voters, political observers and experts in these eight counties — blue, red and purple — talking about the presidential candidates, the issues and the importance of this year’s election.
+
+Our first story looks at GOP “base” voters in Waukesha County, Wis. In our second story, we talk to white, college-educated voters in Chester County, Pa. In the coming weeks, look for our coverage of the following counties: Wayne County, Mich.; Maricopa County, Ariz.; Union County, Iowa; Larimer County, Colo.; Clark County, Ohio; and Hillsborough County, Fla.",REAL
+8926,Anonymous Released Video Exposing Huma Abedin Days Before FBI Announcement,"Share This 
+The FBI’s recent announcement, that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and private server has been reopened, made Huma Abedin a household name if it wasn’t already. However, many missed the chilling video released by Anonymous, exposing Abedin just days before the FBI’s announcement. It’s one that the mainstream media didn’t want you to see, but every American needs to watch it. 
+After the laptop of Abedin’s estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, ended up in the hands of the FBI, Hillary’s misdeeds came under scrutiny once again. With another scandal and more controversy hitting the Clinton campaign, many have begun talking not only about Hillary Clinton but her closest aide as well. However, emails, laptops, and perverted husband Anthony Weiner are the least of our worries when it comes to Huma Abedin. 
+In a mission to inform Americans, an informative but bone-chilling video has been released by Anonymous, exposing the real Huma Abedin. Although Mad World News previously reported on her ties to radical Islam, the recently released video that’s now begun to circulate on social media lays out her connections in an easy to follow visual that every American needs to see. 
+“Who Is Huma?” the video asks, and the answer is chilling. The narrator of the video names four main players in exposing the truth behind Abedin and her disturbing ties to groups and people who fund terrorism. Those players are obviously Abedin herself and Hillary Clinton , but also Abdullah Omar Nasseef and Saudi Arabia, where Huma was raised from the age of two until she was 18. 
+According to the video and verified by a lengthy piece in Vanity Fair , Huma worked for the Abedin family business, The Institute of Minority Muslim Affairs, which is a pro-Sharia Law newsletter “owned by the Muslim World League, Saudi Arabia’s global organization that promotes violent Wahhabi Islam,” BizPac Review reports. This family business was created by Abedin’s father and Nasseef, one of the four main players identified in the clip, who is also one of the founders of the Muslim World League. 
+With Huma being Hillary’s closest aide, Huma’s close ties to terrorism extend to Hillary Clinton, which is a frightening thought considering she could be our next president. What’s worse, if Hillary is elected president, she would have Huma Abedin become Secretary of State, according to leaked emails between Hillary Clinton and her former chief of staff Cheryl Mills. 
+While everyone is concentrating on what may or may not be in the emails discovered on the laptop of Abedin’s perverse husband, this is the information everyone should see before voting. This woman, with undeniable ties to terrorists and 9/11 funders, has been Hillary’s shadow and right-hand for decades, and that won’t change if Hillary becomes president. In fact, it could only get worse. If you want to know the true measure of someone’s character, look who they surround themselves with. The old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together,” rings true, and these are two birds that should be in a cage, not our White House.",FAKE
+5857,Hillary Reveals Her Pick for Secretary of State – This Woman CANNOT be Elected!,"0 comments 
+Hillary Clinton has reportedly been eyeing Joe Biden for Secretary of State. Creepy Uncle Joe Biden. 
+A source familiar with Clinton’s planning told Politico that Biden is at the top of her internal shortlist, but he has not yet been notified. The list is being prepared by Clinton’s “transition team.” 
+According to the same source, Clinton’s team is strategizing about how to approach the Vice President, who nearly ran against her in the primaries. 
+“He’d be great, and they are spending a lot of time figuring out the best way to try to persuade him to do it if she wins,” said the source. 
+From Politico : 
+Among the names most discussed: former undersecretary of state Wendy Sherman, the point person on the Iran deal and a favorite within the State Department; former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns, who now heads the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Nick Burns, the former under secretary of state of political affairs under George W. Bush who’s been an active advocate for Clinton this year; Kurt Campbell, Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs when she was in the job; Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state during Bill Clinton’s first term and a longtime friend of the Clintons who’s now the president of the Brookings Institution; and James Stavridis, the retired admiral who earlier this summer made it into consideration as the sleeper pick to be her running mate. 
+Despite being widely known for his numerous gaffes, Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before joining the Obama Administration, and is one of the most experienced and respected Democrats on the world stage. 
+He is coming to what would be the close of a 44-year career in Washington, first with six terms in the Senate and then two terms as President Barack Obama’s closest adviser, and has expressed his desire to retire. 
+In addition to his resumé, Biden would bring to the table a “star power” none of Hillary’s other picks could. 
+To be fair, no one could possibly make a worse Secretary of State than Hillary herself, though Joe Biden might be a close second.",FAKE
+2361,Open carry comes to Texas: Why the Lone Star state will be safer in 2016,"With about 900,000 concealed handgun permit holders in Texas, there is a good chance that someone next you in a Lone Star State grocery store or restaurant is carrying a concealed handgun.  Starting Friday, Texas will join 44 other states that already allow people to openly carry handguns throughout the state.
+
+Amidst today’s threats of terrorism and mass public shootings, it is a good thing when we enable people to legally carry guns and protect themselves.
+
+Under the new law, a person will need a concealed handgun permit to be able to openly carry a gun.
+
+If the experiences of other states are any guide, few people will actually openly carry their handguns.  Moreover, businesses can still prohibit guns or request that they be concealed.  However, the Chief Financial Officer of Kroger (America’s largest supermarket chain), has just said that the company will allow open carry. He says that the company hasn’t encountered any problems with open carry.  Other supermarket companies such as Whole Foods, Randall’s, and H-E-B, will be posting signs banning open carry. They will still be allowing concealed carry.
+
+These bans may be short lived.  When Texas originally passed concealed carry in 1996, many stores initially posted signs banning concealed carry. With a few years, those signs all but disappeared.
+
+An odd nuance in Texas law has led to much national attention in the last couple of years.  Before Friday, people were allowed to openly carry rifles, just not handguns.   No problems ever occurred, but simply the additional handling required for carrying rifle as opposed to keeping a holstered handgun, certainly created concern that something might go wrong.
+
+Some, such as Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown advocacy group, put pressure on companies to ban openly carried rifles.
+
+Hillary Clinton also chimed in: “The idea that you could have an open carry permit with an AK-47 over your shoulder walking down the isles of a Supermarket is just despicable.”
+
+Starbucks, Jack in the Box, Chipotle, Wendy's, Applebee's, Chili’s and Sonic’s all “respectfully request” that customers not openly carry guns.  More importantly, however, they still allow people to carry a concealed gun.
+
+Openly carrying handguns are less threatening than rifles and will likely face no greater P.R. issues than they have in other states.
+
+But open carry has an important drawback.  It isn’t as effective as concealed carry in protecting people against terrorist attacks and mass public shootings.
+
+Criminals and terrorists can strike anywhere and at any time.  They can attack someone who is openly carrying a gun.  Alternatively, they can select another target or wait for a more opportune moment.
+
+Concealed carry is the most effective way of counteracting this strategic advantage.  A killer can’t attack a big grocery store in Texas without facing likely resistance.  And, of course, an attacker has no idea who might be packing heat.
+
+Since at least 1950, all but two of the mass public shootings in the U.S. (and every single one in Europe) has occurred in a gun-free zone.
+
+PoliceOne, the largest private organization of police officers in the US,  recently asked its 450,000 members: “Considering the particulars of recent [mass shooting] tragedies like Newtown and Aurora, what level of impact do you think a legally-armed citizen could have made?”  Eighty percent said: “Casualties would likely have been reduced.”
+
+In the U.S., over 13 million American civilians are licensed to carry concealed handguns. Every day, permit holders stop crimes. But they have also stopped a large and growing number of mass public shootings.
+
+Concealed carry in Texas isn’t as common as you may think – just over 4 percent of the state’s adult population has permits.  But the rate is more than twice as high in Pennsylvania and Florida, both also large states.
+
+There’s a simple reason for this. Texas charges a permit fee of $140 – one of the highest in the country.  Lower fees would increase the number of concealed carry permits and the number of people who can protect others.  It would especially help the most likely victims of violent crime -- poor black men and women living in high-crime urban areas.
+
+A year from now, I predict that people will wonder why such a fuss was made about open carry.
+
+While Michael Bloomberg may have scored some temporary P.R. victories against open carry his fear tactics will be discredited in the long-run.
+
+John R. Lott, Jr. is a columnist for FoxNews.com. He is an economist and was formerly chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission. Lott is also a leading expert on guns and op-eds on that issue are done in conjunction with the Crime Prevention Research Center. He is the author of nine books including ""More Guns, Less Crime."" His latest book is ""The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies (August 1, 2016). Follow him on Twitter@johnrlottjr.",REAL
+4394,The Jeb Bush Health Plan: Five Ways It Differs From What Obama's Done,"In contrast to Obamacare, the Bush health plan envisions a much smaller role for government and a much bigger role for individual choice and competition in the marketplace. Bush health care differs from Obama health care in five significant ways:
+
+Without the employer mandate, all of the anti-job provisions in Obamacare would be gone. Right now employers have perverse incentives to keep the number of employees small, to reduce their hours of work and to use independent contractors and temp labor instead of full time employees. Under the Bush plan, no employer would be punished for creating jobs.
+
+Without the individual mandate, families would be free to buy insurance that meets individual and family needs rather than the needs of politicians. What woman would willingly choose to buy health insurance that offers free mammograms while she is healthy but makes her pay full price if there is a symptom of something wrong? That’s only one of the many needlessly wasteful and expensive consequences of letting health insurance benefits be determined by the political system.
+
+Also, without the individual mandate there is no reason for anybody to remain uninsured. The Bush tax credit is equal to the average tax subsidy received by employees who get their heath insurance at work. Let’s say a family, for whatever reason, had no additional disposable income. It would still be able to buy a health plan with its tax credit. Lower income families could qualify for additional help. I suspect they would always be able to buy Medicaid-like insurance with no additional cash outlay.
+
+But don’t we need mandates in order to keep people from gaming the system? We have found better ways in Medicare Part B, Medicare Part D and with Medigap insurance. In those markets, if you don’t buy when you are eligible, you can face penalties. In most places, if you don’t sign up for Medigap insurance when you are first eligible, you can be individually underwritten.
+
+The uniform tax credit is also a huge improvement. Because Obamacare conditions its subsidies on income, it raises the marginal tax rate for middle income families by six percentage points and in some cases far more. At 400 percent of poverty, a family can lose more than $10,000 in subsidies if it earns one additional dollar. At other “cliff” points, families can be subjected to thousands of dollars of additional exposure (higher deductibles and copayments) as a result of earning one more dollar. All these perversions vanish if everyone gets the same subsidy regardless of income.
+
+Also, if the subsidy doesn’t vary by income, all kinds of technical problems with healthcare.gov would vanish in a heartbeat. Virtually all the technical problems in the exchanges stem from the need to verify income. That means that the computers run by the exchanges have to interface with the computers of the IRS and other government agencies. Yet, in the main government, computer systems don’t know how to talk to each other and that’s a problem that may never be solved.
+
+If every one of the same age gets the same subsidy, the exchange doesn’t have to check with the IRS to verify income. Next April 15, there won’t be a plethora of additional taxes and refunds because almost everyone wrongly predicted his income for the previous year. According to H&R Block, as many as 3.4 million people got reduced refunds this year because they underestimated their income when they enrolled in ObamaCare insurance plans.
+
+The portability provision is another huge improvement over the current system. Right now if employers give employees pre-tax dollars to buy their own insurance in the individual market, the Obama administration is threatening to fine them $100 per employee per day. If you think that’s overkill, it tells you just how much the current administration dislikes employees buying and owning their own insurance. With the Bush plan, all the anti-portability provisions in current law will be gone.",REAL
+354,New Player in the ISIS War: Christian Gazillionaire Foster Friess,"He’s best known for bankrolling Republicans Rick Santorum and Scott Walker afloat, but Foster Friess has a new cause a long way from D.C.
+
+“There is no reason why this monopoly [for equipping] should be owned by the U.S. government. I think there’s a role for private organizations to generate private support to help the Kurds,” said Audino, who as a soldier was stationed in Kurdistan for a year. “Foster and I are certainly talking about it, in concept… No one’s pulled the trigger on it.”
+
+“When I visited Camp Black Tiger I was amazed to see how many of the fighters had come out of retirement and were in their 40s and 50s,” Friess said. “I had tears in my eyes to see the Yazidis [an ethnic minority]... as I passed out 5,000 blankets to them which our family had purchased from Turkey.  To think they had to leave their homes and everything they owned and only had the clothes on their backs was indeed sad.”
+
+“[Friess is] shooting for practical targets. What’s the most practical target right now? The easiest target right now is, let’s help the United States directly equip the Kurds,” said Brig. Gen. Audino, who serves as an informal adviser to Friess on Kurdish issues. “He has a genuinely good heart, and he wants to stay on the right side of history… He sees the awful slaughter of innocents in Iraq and Syria right now. He doesn’t see that ending at Iraqi and Syrian borders.”
+
+Small wonder that rumors have been spreading among anti-ISIS Westerners that Friess could soon be bankrolling their efforts. Matthew VanDyke runs a security contracting firm called Sons of Liberty International in Iraq, which provides free military training to local Christians in Kurdish and Iraqi areas. He said he had heard that Friess “pledged to help fund the Peshmerga,” and had been looking to get in touch with him ever since.
+
+“The Kurds have been seen as protectors of the Christians, especially since the fall of Saddam in 2003, when the Christians began to be pushed out of and even murdered in Arab Iraq. By contrast the Christians have been thriving in the Kurdish region of Iraq,” said Professor Michael Gunter, who has written 11 books on the Kurdish people.
+
+If a high-profile Christian American businessman were to privately fund weapons in the ISIS battlespace, it would be a problematic foray into an already-nasty sectarian situation. So far Friess has stayed away from that role. While the Kurds welcome any help they can get from Christian Americans, ISIS has framed its war as one of them versus the “crusaders.”
+
+And there may be some coming legislative efforts: Sen. John Barrasso, Gabbard and others huddled with Friess in Graham’s conference room last month to work on a bill called the Kurdish Emergency Relief Act, the Washington Examiner reported, which would involve some $500 million in aid for the Kurdish people. The legislation has not yet been introduced.",REAL
+6500,"CNN Fired Donna Brazile 2 Weeks Ago, Made It Public Now After Wikileaks Revelation","
+
+CNN finally made it public that they have severed ties with DNC chair Donna Brazile after a new Wikileaks email revealed more CNN collusion with Clinton campaign after Donna Brazile gave Hillary Clinton a debate question in advance.
+They fired her 2 weeks ago when Megyn Kelly first confronted her regarding another leak at a town hall. CNN kept it quiet that they fired Donna Brazile all this time up until a new leak revealed she provided another question to Hillary Clinton in advance for one of their debates.
+CNN denied any involvement but the fact that they kept quiet for 2 weeks tells it all. The fact that this isn’t the first collusion we discover tells it all, besides, how would Donna get the questions? Someone from CNN had to gave her the questions.
+When FOX News’s Megyn Kelly previously confronted Donna Brazile she denied any involvement, claimed some mumbo jumbo about the Russians, space aliens, UFOs, tinfoil hats and she even said that the Wikileaks email is fake. Now after facing huge pressure even from Clinton News Network (CNN), Donna has finally admitted that the emails are real and that she’s at fault for the collusion.
+Brazile thanked CNN for her time on the network.
+Brazile tweeted this message around dinnertime Sunday night.
+Brazile gave Clinton’s senior advisers a heads-up on March 5 about a question she would be asked the next night during a debate against Bernie Sanders.
+Brazile was on defense earlier this month when this WikiLeak-ed email showed her giving the Clinton campaign a CNN town hall question about the death penalty ahead of time.
+UK’s The Independent reported :
+CNN has dropped a political commentator following accusations that she sent Hillary Clinton two questions ahead of time during the primary season.
+Donna Brazile announced her departure on 31 October on twitter although she resigned two weeks ago .
+Leaked emails from WikiLeaks belonging to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta showed that Ms Brazile funneled two questions to Ms Clinton, a longtime political ally, before a CNN-sponsored debate and voter town hall event against Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.
+
+",FAKE
+7265,Reduce Nurse Burnout by Treating Nurses as Well as We Treat Patients,"Prev post Page 1 of 4 Next 
+Nurses are among the most underappreciated professionals in the world. They care for us from the time we enter the hospital to the time we leave. They care for our loved ones during the most difficult and terrifying times of our lives. To put it simply, they save lives. 
+Not only that; they save multiple lives every day. Because we are so troubled by whatever issues has brought us to the hospital, we rarely think of the nearly incomprehensible amount of stress that is put upon the person caring for us. This is understandable. When we are in the hospital, we are usually at our very worst and not in the mood to care for the troubles of others. 
+Assuming the reader is not a nurse, put yourself in that position for a moment. Every day, the healthy, safety and livelihood of multiple individuals are in your hands. You may be overworked and heavily burdened, but you do not have the benefit of going on “cruise control” like many other professionals do some days. Any mistakes could cause serious consequences. Theresa Brown , a columnist for the The New York Times and registered nurse for over five years, may have said it best, “It’s not like being a waiter, where you have too many tables, which is stressful, but no one’s going to die if they don’t get their entree in time.” 
+This why it is not difficult to understand how many of America’s nurses are getting burned out. In fact, a recent survey of forty different hospital units found that over one third of nurses reported that they intend to leave their position within the next year. This is a startling concept to imagine one third of the world’s nurses quitting. In the study, they cited two main reasons for this: emotional exhaustion and lack of personal accomplishment. 
+One could see how they could feel emotionally exhausted, but to think that the people who dedicate their lives caring for the sick do not feel accomplished or appreciated enough? That shows that the problem may not be with the nurses, but for those around them. 
+So, how do we fix this? Nurse burnout is a common problem, and there are multiple ideas and schools of thought as to how we should deal with it. However, to develop a proper solution, we must first fully understand the problem and its root causes. Although we do not profess to offer one grand solution that can solve nurse burn out, we do hope to examine the problem and hopefully provide some understanding. Prev post Page 1 of 4 Next Be the first to comment Leave a Reply Your email address will not be published. Comment ",FAKE
+307,Boehner takes revenge,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+4374,How Asia trade deal could make or break Obama's foreign policy vision (+video),"Hanging in the balance is Obama’s vision of America’s place in the world and the kind of leadership it can best wield in the 21st century, some foreign-policy analysts say.
+
+President Obama is not battling to save his Asian-Pacific trade agenda simply because he suddenly believes in free trade.
+
+For Mr. Obama, the fight in Congress over granting him Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) is about something much bigger.
+
+Hanging in the balance is nothing less than Obama’s vision of America’s place in the world and the kind of leadership it can best wield in the 21st century, some foreign-policy analysts say.
+
+Winning or losing TPA will make or break Obama’s foreign policy vision of the United States – no longer the go-it-alone superpower – leading a multipolar world where associations of like-minded nations build regional security and economic prosperity, these analysts say. With the Obama administration pursuing not only the Asian-Pacific trade deal but also a “transformational” trade pact with the European Union, the moment, they add, could not be more critical.
+
+“Without the trade deals, America does not get to set the global economic rules for the new era, using trade to bind its allies around the globe to the US and to one another,” says John Hulsman, a US foreign policy analyst based in Germany. “It is not too much to say,” he adds, “that without TPA, there simply is no grand strategy for the new era” in America’s relations with the world.
+
+The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, that Obama had hoped to conclude by the end of the year with 11 other Pacific Basin countries – most critically Japan – is currently at the top of Obama’s agenda because of what it means for his Asia strategy.
+
+Without TPA – the ability to negotiate trade deals with the assurance that Congress will only be allowed a simple yes or no, non-amendable vote on a concluded trade accord – Obama has virtually no chance of securing a TPP deal. And without TPP, the “Asia pivot” in US strategic interests that Obama has been pushing since taking office in 2009 will be halted in its still tentative tracks – reduced largely to the aspirational rhetoric that critics claim it has been all along.
+
+For Obama administration officials, the Asia pivot – or what they prefer to call a “rebalancing” of US interests towards a dynamic and fast-growing Asia – is not just about the number of US forces stationed in the region (Two pieces of the rebalancing so far have been accords to rotate troops into Australia and the Philippines).
+
+Perhaps even more important is the economic dimension of the turn to Asia. Not only does Obama underscore at every turn possible the importance of securing America’s stake in the booming Asian economy, he also notes that some power is going to determine the rules of the road for the world’s most dynamic trading region. (The insinuation being that it’s much better that it be the US and not China, the region’s other dominant power.)
+
+The challenge to Obama’s Asia policy – and the death blow that failure to move ahead on TPP would deliver to it – is not lost on the region’s leaders.
+
+“If you don’t do this deal, what are your levers of power?” Singapore’s foreign minister, K. Shanmugam, said in a warning issued in a Washington speech Monday. “The choice is a very stark one,” he said in remarks delivered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Do you want to be part of the region, or do you want to be out of the region?”
+
+Singapore’s top diplomat – his tiny but booming island country is one of the 12 TPP countries – noted that without the economic dimension to its Asia policy, the US is reduced to primarily a military power in the region. But in a part of the globe where trade and economic prosperity are the focus, he added, “that’s not the lever you want to use.”
+
+Noting that the 40-percent share of global GDP that the region represents is only expected to grow, Mr. Shanmugam said, “In all of this, where is the United States?”
+
+The Asian diplomat sounded almost like he could have been speaking from White House talking points, suggesting that if the US chooses not to lead that Asian countries will have no choice but to look elsewhere.
+
+That argument may not sway Congress, however, which some see as too inwardly focused to grasp the changes going on in the world. “We are shifting into a more multipolar world, but it’s not clear Washington realizes that,” says Mr. Hulsman, who is president of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a global political risk firm.
+
+On Tuesday, it looked like the next test in Congress for TPA – and thus for Obama’s Asia pivot and his grand global strategy – might not come until late July. But if the president hasn’t been able to sell his vision over years of promoting it, it seems at least uncertain he’ll be able to save it now.",REAL
+3624,Suspects In Paris Magazine Attack Killed; Market Gunman And 4 Hostages Also Dead,"Suspects In Paris Magazine Attack Killed; Market Gunman And 4 Hostages Also Dead
+
+A nationwide manhunt for the suspects of France's deadliest terrorist attack in more than 50 years ended in a hail of gunfire on Friday.
+
+After hours of tension in two separate standoffs that shut down parts of the Paris metro area, the two main suspects in the attack on a satirical magazine and a man who took hostages at a kosher grocery are dead, President François Hollande said in a speech to the nation.
+
+Hollande also said four hostages had been killed today; he called the week's events ""a tragedy for the nation, an obligation for us to confront terrorists.""
+
+""We are a free nation that does not give in,"" the French president said. ""We carry an ideal that is greater than us.""
+
+The standoffs started this morning, when police cornered Said and Chérif Kouachi, who were suspected of killing 12 people in the Charlie Hebdo attack, at a print shop in the small town of Dammartin-en-Goele.
+
+While initial reports said an employee of the shop was being held hostage there, it later emerged that the worker, reportedly a graphic designer, was hiding in the building, undetected by the gunmen.
+
+""He was able to give [by text messages] tactical elements"" such as the positions inside the building, French TV news Itele reports.
+
+Separately, in eastern Paris, a gunman identified as Amedy Coulibaly entered a kosher grocery and took several people hostage. He also called a TV news station, seeking to talk to police (more on that in our updates below). And it seems that amidst his phone calls, Coulibaly didn't hang up properly — allowing police to hear his movements.
+
+""The audio information wasn't distinct,"" BFM TV reports, ""but was precious to law enforcement.""
+
+The station adds that police began their assault on the store at the same time they heard Coulibaly start praying.
+
+Police have made several connections between Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers, French media report, through cellphone and legal records. Police are still looking for one suspect: Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, whom they say was involved in the killing of a policewoman in Paris Thursday.
+
+""U.S. officials say both Coulibaly and Boumeddiene were known to American intelligence authorities,"" NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports.
+
+A little after 11 a.m. ET, and as the sun began to set in France, explosions were heard at both the store and the print shop, as police began an assault.
+
+Images on French television showed hostages streaming out of the kosher grocery store after an explosion and gunfire; a large explosion was seen at the print shop in Dammartin-en-Goele. That was followed by smoke billowing from the building.
+
+The AFP reported that when police stormed the print shop, the Kouachi brothers came out firing and were killed during the confrontation. The authorities say Coulibaly was killed during the siege of the kosher market.
+
+NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports that police were first tipped off to the Kouachi brothers when a resident reported a stolen car in the small village of Dammartin-en-Goele, 25 miles northeast of Paris. The caller recognized the brothers and told police that they were heavily armed.
+
+Police moved in and surrounded the print shop, located in an industrial center not far from the Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris. For hours, special tactical units kept watch, while helicopters swooped overhead.
+
+As that was unfolding, another gunman walked into the kosher shop in eastern Paris, reportedly taking a handful of hostages.
+
+Eleanor reported that the series of events left the city — already reeling from its worst terrorist attack in more than 50 years — in a state of shock. Police cordoned off parts of Paris, and officers in tactical gear and with big guns walked through the streets as sirens sounded everywhere.
+
+Police also released a poster naming Coulibaly and a 26-year-old woman named Hayat Boumeddiene as suspects in a shooting that left a policewoman dead on Thursday. There is still no word on the whereabouts of Boumeddiene.
+
+By around 11:30 a.m. ET, the siege was over. In total, since the mass shooting at Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday, 17 people have been killed in France.
+
+Hours after the standoffs ended, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a statement threatening France with more violence; the AP says that the group has claimed responsibility for Wednesday's attack.
+
+Hollande said the country knows that the threat is not ""yet over.""
+
+He called for vigilance and extra security; he said the country should reject any racist attacks like the ""anti-Semitic act"" committed today. He also said that the suspects killed today ""have nothing to do with Islam.""
+
+""We must show our determination against anything that may divide us,"" Hollande said.
+
+This is a breaking news story. As often happens in situations like these, some information reported early may turn out to be inaccurate. We'll move quickly to correct the record and we'll only point to the best information we have at the time. Refresh this page for the latest.
+
+Update at 6:50 p.m. ET: Explosives In Kosher Grocery
+
+Paris prosecutor Francois Molins has confirmed more details about the case. Molins spoke late Friday; here's a quick recap of what he said:
+
+Update at 5:50 p.m. ET: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Reportedly Claims Responsibility
+
+A senior official of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula praised this week's attack in Paris and threatened France with more violence, according to the SITE organization, which monitors extremist groups.
+
+A speech by was posted online Friday, after the chief suspects in the attack were killed. In it, Sheikh Harith al-Nadhari says (according to SITE's translation):
+
+""Some of the sons of France were disrespectful to the prophets of Allah, so a group from among the believing soldiers of Allah marched unto them, then they taught them respect and the limit of the freedom of expression.""
+
+The AQAP separately claimed responsibility for guiding the attack, the AP says.
+
+Update at 5 p.m. ET: Suspects Said To Have Spoken To French Media Before Deadly Showdown
+
+A French media outlet says it spoke to both Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly as the men were engaged in two separate standoffs with police, and that both of them avowed ties to terrorist groups.
+
+The phone interviews with Kouachi and Coulibaly reportedly took place well before France's BFM TV or its sister radio station RMC broadcast them.
+
+BFM TV says the conversation with Kouachi took place after a journalist called the print shop where the Kouachi brothers were holed up.
+
+Kouachi said he and his brother had not killed any civilians and that they had acted to avenge Prophet Muhammad. He also said that Western forces had killed women and children in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
+
+According to a synopsis by Sarah-Lou Cohen, the head of BFMTV's police and justice unit, Kouachi said he had been supported by Al-Qaeda in Yemen — a group now more commonly known as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
+
+When asked about the possibility that he might be killed, Kouachi answered, ""That's not a problem.""
+
+BFM TV says it spoke to Coulibaly after he called the network asking for a number for the police. At the time of the conversation, the man said that four people had already died in the kosher grocery where he had barricaded himself from the authorities.
+
+Coulibaly claimed allegiance to the extremist group that calls itself the Islamic State (or ISIS); he also said that his actions were tied to those of the Kouachi brothers.
+
+When asked if the attacks had been synchronized, he answered, ""No. Just when they started the attack at Hebdo, I was to attack police.""
+
+Update at 2:16 p.m. ET. 'We Stand For Freedom':
+
+Speaking in front of students at Pellisippi State Community College in Tennessee, President Obama offered the French his support.
+
+""The United States stands with you today, stands with you tomorrow,"" Obama said.
+
+The president added that the U.S. stood by the values that the U.S. and France share.
+
+""In the streets of Paris, the world's seen once again what terrorists stand for: they have nothing to offer but hatred and human suffering,"" Obama said. ""And we stand for freedom and hope and the dignity of all human beings. And that's what the city of Paris represents to the world.""
+
+Closing his speech to a round of applause, Obama said, ""And that spirit will endure forever – long after the scourge of terrorism is banished from this world.
+
+Update at 1:21 p.m. ET. 'How Great The Threat Is':
+
+In statements to the press, France's Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve thanked the police officers and the special teams that worked to end the crisis today.
+
+He said the events of the past few days ""show how great the threat"" is to France.
+
+""It is incumbent on us to be on constantly alert,"" Cazeneuve said.
+
+The minister refused to give any details of the operation, because he said he did not want to put out any misinformation.
+
+Update at 12:11 p.m. ET. Hollande To Address Nation:
+
+President François Hollande will address his country at 2 p.m. ET, according to Palais de l'Élysée.
+
+Update at 12:01 p.m. ET. Siege Is Over:
+
+According to multiple media outlets, both hostage standoffs in France are over.
+
+According to reports, Said and Chérif Kouachi were killed in the siege in Dammartin-en-Goele, and Amedy Coulibaly was killed in the siege in eastern Paris.
+
+There is still no word on any other casualties.
+
+Update 11:19 a.m. ET. Explosions, Gunfire At Both Locations:
+
+Minutes apart, reporters at both standoff locations reported gunshots and explosions.
+
+NPR's Lauren Frayer reported that French television showed what appeared to be civilians streaming out of the kosher grocery store in eastern Paris.
+
+Television images showed a large explosion at a print shop in Dammartin-en-Goele. That was followed by smoke billowing from the building.
+
+Update at 11:14 a.m. ET. Explosions, Sirens:
+
+NPR's Eleanor Beardsley says she has just heard loud explosions and gunfire in Paris.
+
+She says people started running when they heard it.
+
+The booms, she told Morning Edition, were followed by sirens.
+
+It's still unclear what is going on.
+
+Update 11:06 a.m. ET. The Scene In Paris:
+
+NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports that police have cordoned off a big area of eastern Paris. She reports that ""everyone is in a state of shock.""
+
+""People are angry and nervous,"" she told our Newscast unit. ""It's a crazy scene.""
+
+You can hear sirens and police dressed in tactical gear with big guns walking the city.
+
+Update at 11 a.m. ET. Smoke, Explosions:
+
+Television images are showing light smoke coming from the printing company where the Kouachi brothers are thought to be holed up.
+
+Police forces in tactical gear were also on the roof of the building.
+
+Reuters reports one of its reporters heard gunshots and ""several explosions.""
+
+Update at 10:08 a.m. ET. The Links:
+
+There's a lot going on in this story. Here, we'll try to lay out all of the known connections plainly:
+
+— There are four events to keep in mind. 1. The shooting at Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday morning. 2. The shooting death of a female police officer on Thursday in Montrouge. 3. An ongoing standoff in Dammartin-en-Goele, where police believe the two main suspects in the Charlie Hebdo shooting, Said and Chérif Kouachi, are holed up in the building of a printing company. 4. An ongoing standoff at a kosher shop in eastern Paris, where, according to multiple media reports, police believe Amedy Coulibaly has taken a handful of hostages.
+
+— Earlier today, police named Coulibaly as a suspect in the shooting death of the female police officer on Thursday.
+
+— NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reported on Morning Edition that U.S. officials have been telling her privately that Thursday's shooting incident was terrorism related.
+
+— Dina says that authorities now believe that Coulibaly is a friend of the Kouachi brothers.
+
+— Le Parisen reports that in 2010, Coulibaly was implicated in trying to help in the escape of one of the masterminds of terrorist attacks that happened in 1995. The news outlet also reports that Coulibaly was convicted on terrorism charges.
+
+— As we reported, Chérif Kouachi was implicated in that same incident in 2010.
+
+Update at 8:22 a.m. ET. A Link Between Shootings:
+
+Numerous news organizations have reported that police sources tell them that a shooting that left one police officer dead on Thursday is linked to the shootings at the offices of Charlie Hebdo.
+
+France 24 reports that the people suspected of committing that crime belong to the same organizations as the Kouachi brothers.
+
+Police have officially released a photograph of two suspects in that shooting in Montrouge. In that flier, police say the two — Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, and Amedy Coulibaly, 32 — are wanted in a murder committed in connection with a ""terrorist organization.""
+
+Update at 8:09 a.m. ET. Interior Minister At Scene Of Kosher Shop:
+
+France's Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve is at the scene of an apparent hostage situation in eastern Paris.
+
+Television images have shown dozens of police officers in tactical gear in front of the kosher shop.
+
+It's worth noting that it's not clear whether all of these events are related.
+
+Update at 7:52 a.m. ET. Background:
+
+In case you have not been paying attention, here's a quick summary of what's been happening in France:
+
+Wednesday morning, at least two gunmen entered the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that has in the past been threatened by Islamic extremists, and opened fire, killing 12 people, including four of the magazine's founding cartoonists.
+
+Police launched a massive manhunt for two suspects: Said and Chérif Kouachi, French citizens whom authorities had been watching for some time. Chérif was convicted on terrorism charges in 2008. He served 18 months for helping to funnel fighters from France to Iraq.
+
+Today, that manhunt seems to have come to a climax, because police believe the two men are cornered at a printing company's building in a city northeast of Paris.
+
+Update at 7:49 a.m. ET. Another Incident In Paris:
+
+Multiple news outlets, including AFP, France 24 and Le Monde, are reporting that an armed man has entered a kosher shop in eastern Paris and may have taken a hostage.
+
+There is no word on whether this incident, which police have not confirmed, might be related to the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
+
+Update at 7:16 a.m. ET. Not Certain If There Are Hostages:
+
+On Twitter, an Interior Ministry spokesman said the men now in a standoff with police are ""certain to be the Kouachi brothers."" The spokesman said it was still not clear whether the two suspects had taken any hostages.
+
+""The priority is to establish a dialogue with the suspects,"" the spokesman added.
+
+He added that there had been no deaths or injuries at the time and that police had not launched an assault on the building.
+
+Update at 6:51 a.m. ET. Police Make Contact:
+
+Citing an unnamed French official, the AP says police have ""made contact with terror suspects.""",REAL
+9907,FBI Plan B fails: Clinton to be next president,"FBI Plan B fails: Clinton to be next president 07.11.2016 The FBI Director James Comey notified the US Congressmen that presidential nominee from the Democratic Party Hillary Clinton would not be prosecuted because of revelations connected with her e-mail. As Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, reported, 'FBI Dir just informed us 'Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Sec Clinton'. As Pravda.Ru reported, in late October the FBI Director James Comey announced that there were detected new e-mails of Clinton, which required additional investigations. The investigation got 'very high priority' level, and the FBI said that they had managed to gather a lot of evidence. Experts believe it indicates that Hillary Clinton will be the next president. It should be noted that corresponding is not the only trespass of Clinton. The US authorities always denied that monarchies of the Persian Gulf funded Jihadists, asserting that support came from rich donors of those countries. As it is evidenced in the e-mails of a member of the Clinton's campaign John Podesta, they lied. Moreover, it was found out that the US presidential candidate had created a weapons mafia for personal profit. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+8014,How U.S. Schools Can Improve Math Education - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Clinton Staff Readies EMP Launch To Disable All Nation’s Electronic Devices NEW YORK—In an effort to prepare for any new revelations that might emerge about her emails during her tenure as secretary of state, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reportedly told her staff Tuesday to ready the launch of several electromagnetic pulses to disable all of the nation’s electronic devices. Doctors Restore Ken Burns’ Full-Color Vision After Removing Massive Tumor From Filmmaker’s Visual Cortex CLEVELAND—Speaking to reporters following the successful eight-hour procedure Tuesday, neurosurgeons at the Cleveland Clinic confirmed they had removed a golf ball–sized tumor from the visual cortex of filmmaker Ken Burns, restoring the documentarian’s ability to see in full color. Mom Produces Decorative Gift Bag Out Of Thin Air LEXINGTON, MA—Conjuring the item into existence along with several sheets of perfectly coordinated tissue paper, local mother Caroline Wolfson, 49, reportedly produced a decorative gift bag out of thin air Tuesday within a mere fraction of a second of her daughter mentioning she needed to wrap a present. Paul Krugman’s Facebook Friends Excitedly Posting About New Article He Got Published In ‘The New York Times’ NEW YORK—Sharing the link on their news feeds with captions such as “You have to read this!” and “Check out what a buddy of mine wrote,” Paul Krugman’s Facebook friends reportedly spent Tuesday morning excitedly posting about a new article of his that was published in The New York Times. End Of Section ",FAKE
+110,Why riots happen in places like Baltimore,"As flames, property destruction and violent confrontations spread across West Baltimore on Monday night, state and federal authorities were quick to draw a distinction between rioting and so-called “legitimate” forms of protest.
+
+“I condemn the senseless acts of violence by some individuals in Baltimore that have resulted in harm to law enforcement officers, destruction of property and a shattering of the peace in the city of Baltimore,” U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement. “Those who commit violent actions, ostensibly in protest of the death of Freddie Gray, do a disservice to his family, to his loved ones, and to legitimate peaceful protesters who are working to improve their community for all its residents.”
+
+Similarly, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Monday argued that there is “a significant difference between protesting and violence.”
+
+That declaration has become a common refrain in the aftermath of racially charged civil unrest. When Ferguson, Missouri erupted last year over the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager and a grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who pulled the trigger, President Barack Obama drew a sharp rhetorical line between those who “just want their voices heard around legitimate issues” and “the handful of people who may use the grand jury’s decision as an excuse for violence.""
+
+But scholars of American social movements say the distinction might not be so clear. Instead, they argue rioting is often what happens when marginalized groups feel they have no other outlet for expressing their grievances.
+
+“What you have in places where rioting tends to occur is the long-running abandonment by institutions,” said Justin Paulson, a political sociologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. “Not that they’re fully abandoned, it’s just the institutions you and I expect to make things run smoothly, to make people’s lives better, are actually turned against the members of these communities.""
+
+The Kerner Commission — a panel established in 1967 by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the root causes for the race riots of the time — suggested as much in its final report. “Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms” was one of the motives fueling riots, said the report.
+
+Martin Luther King Jr. alluded to a similar point in a 1968 speech during which he said it would be “morally irresponsible” to condemn rioting “without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society.""
+
+“These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative to engage in violent rebellions to get attention,” said King. “And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.""
+
+William Darity Jr., a professor of public policy at Duke University, said police behavior “seems to be the primary source” of riots such as the ones which occurred in Baltimore and Ferguson, as well as the unrest examined by the Kerner Commission.
+
+“The fact that police lynchings of unarmed blacks have gone on for upwards of 50 years without any significant steps to curb police behavior makes it clear that trying to protest through established channels doesn’t make a difference,” he said.
+
+“I am no great enthusiast for anarchy and chaos, but I can also understand why at a certain point people say there’s no point in behaving, and I’d like to put this in quotes, ‘legitimately.’""
+
+Rick Perlstein, a historian who has written extensively about social unrest in the 1960s, said “a radical sense of dispossession” fueled rioting both then and now. In particular, distrust of the police — and specific incidences of police violence — have often been a major precipitating factor, he said. Citing an In These Times article he wrote during the protests in Ferguson, Perlstein noted that violent encounters with the police led to the 2015 Baltimore riot, 2014 Ferguson riots, 1964 Harlem riot, 1965 Watts riot, 1967 Newark riot, and others.
+
+The most recent riots in Ferguson and Baltimore have been “much, much less intense” compared to their predecessors, he said. Police have become more effective at containing them, and cities are not subject to the same demographic pressure they experienced during the Great Migration of the 20th century, as African-Americans moved en masse from the South to northern cities.
+
+“There just aren’t that many places undergoing these kinds of ethnic and racial transitions,” said Perlstein.",REAL
+7428,"Re: Don’t CLICK that, stupid! Is this email from March 2016 where #PodestaEmails21 and others started?","Don’t CLICK that, stupid! Is this email from March 2016 how ‘hackers’ accessed #PodestaEmails21 and others? Posted at 11:22 am on October 28, 2016 by Sam J. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
+Baby Boomers and the Interwebz. 
+Dear John and other people who have been living under a rock, Google wouldn’t send you an email called, “Someone has your password.” Likely it would be a message about a possible breach or some urgency about changing your password but they wouldn’t send you something like this. 
+And never, EVER EVER EVER click a link in an email, especially if it’s one you don’t recognize. Okay – is this a copy of the phishing email to Podesta on March 19? pic.twitter.com/1jqUvafUpk 
+— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) October 28, 2016 
+A bit.ly link for you to click to change your password. 
+John, don’t be stupid. 
+Couldn’t someone in Homeland Security or the NSA or one of those other fancy Federal agencies have taken some time to tell these people the do’s and don’t of being online? *smh* @jamiedupree Actually, wait, I didn't see the bit.ly link. (and I ain't gonna fire it up to see!) Could be the phish, yeah. 
+Typically most people are apprehensive to click a bit.ly link from someone they KNOW, let alone some odd email from Google telling you someone has your password. Trending It's official, she's NUTS! Donna Brazile thinks Democrats can turn THIS state blue (hint: no way in Hell) 
+*don’t click it* @jamiedupree That's likely it… check out where the bitly link goes: https://t.co/yKjaZzCxo9 (Chrome warns the site is malicious.) pic.twitter.com/7WACDWQwfS 
+— Kyle Wilson (@nosliwelyk) October 28, 2016 
+Yikes. Shocked Kyle clicked it … hope he didn’t have anything signed in or important in that browser or app. @jamiedupree Most definitely. For many reasons. One being that google does not use @Bitly 
+— SETH WEATHERS (@sethweathers) October 28, 2016 
+Surely Podesta is like, “NOW YOU TELL ME.” 
+Heh. @jamiedupree Looks like 'that sort of thing',However,",FAKE
+10287,"Police Department Is Being Evicted – Lafayette, CA","
+An East Bay police department is now looking for a new office after being kicked out by their landlord.
+The Lafayette Police Department is being evicted from Desco Plaza because there are not enough parking spots for all of their police cruisers. According to city manager Steven Falk, the overbearing presence of cruisers is impacting tenants in the building, affecting their ability to park their own vehicles.
+
+Desco Plaza owner Curt Blomstrand has told the department that it must leave as soon as its lease ends at the end of the year.
+In a council meeting earlier this week Blomstrand referenced “ a growing force and too many police cars crammed into his property” as reasons for evicting the department.
+Each tenant gets ten parking spaces, but the department is using forty. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Ryan Banister of The Daily Sheeple . ",FAKE
+2175,"In a break with Obama, Clinton lays out tougher worldview","Hillary Rodham Clinton — who has spent much of her campaign embracing the policies of President Obama — signaled clear disagreement with her former boss Wednesday in key areas of foreign policy, suggesting in some cases that he has been too hesitant.
+
+Again and again, Clinton pointed to instances overseas where she would have taken a tougher stance than Obama, from arming Syrian rebels to confronting an expansionist Russia. In some cases, she was talking about policy debates she lost while serving as Obama’s first-term secretary of state, or about advice she suggested was not heeded.
+
+The critique, delivered as part of a Washington speech focused on the Iran nuclear deal, was in many respects subtle — wrapped inside overall praise for Obama and never targeting him directly. But the differences were nonetheless striking for a candidate who has worked carefully to soften her hawkish national security reputation and who badly needs Obama’s liberal coalition of voters to gain the White House.
+
+“Those of us who have been out there on the diplomatic front lines know that diplomacy is not the pursuit of perfection,” Clinton said. “It’s the balancing of risk.”
+
+That line was meant to answer Republican critics who say the Obama administration failed to drive a hard bargain in international nuclear talks with Iran. But Clinton echoed some GOP criticism of Obama’s hands-off approach to some world problems.
+
+The decision to distance herself from Obama on some foreign-policy issues comes at a difficult time for the Democratic front-runner, who has seen her lead erode amid the rise of an iconoclastic challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and the worsening controversy over her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state.
+
+It also represents a delicate balancing act for Clinton, who has sought to focus on her tenure as the top U.S. diplomat during Obama’s first term as a crucial qualification for becoming commander in chief. Much of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing remains skeptical of her sometimes hawkish tilt on foreign policy, including her now-disavowed vote in favor of the Iraq war.
+
+[How Clinton is banking on the Obama coalition to win]
+
+Clinton reviewed some of her policy differences with Obama in her State Department memoir, “Hard Choices,” published last year. But Wednesday’s speech at the Brookings Institution was the first time she had gone significantly beyond the mild and often implicit criticisms in that book to question foreign-policy decision-making after she left the administration.
+
+The main goal of Wednesday’s wide-ranging foreign-policy address was to support the Iran deal against Republican criticism and make clear that if elected president she will enforce it and seek to strengthen it.
+
+Obama deserves praise for his leadership in seeking the deal, Clinton said, and she claimed some credit for helping open the door for the negotiations that produced the accord this summer.
+
+“Either we move forward on the path of diplomacy and seize this chance to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon or we turn down a more dangerous path, leading to a far less certain and riskier future,” Clinton said.
+
+But Clinton’s support for the deal came with caveats, starting with whether it could lead to rapprochement with Iran after more than 35 years of enmity. Clinton was also blunt in her skepticism that Iran will fully comply with the accord limiting but not ending its nuclear program, but she said there are adequate safeguards built in.
+
+She zeroed in on what critics of the deal call a chief weakness — a concession to Iran that allows a delay of up to 24 days before international inspectors could check up on some kinds of suspected violations.
+
+“I’d be the first to say that this part of the deal is not perfect,” Clinton said. “But our experts tell us that even with delayed access to some places, this deal does the job.”
+
+Jake Sullivan, a top Clinton aide who helped launch the Iran negotiations and is now the senior policy adviser for Clinton’s presidential campaign, said she was not suggesting that the administration caved on inspections.
+
+“Acknowledging the imperfections of the deal is not criticism of the deal” but rather an argument that enforcement must be vigilant, Sullivan told reporters after the speech.
+
+[How Hillary Clinton is running against parts of her husband’s legacy]
+
+Other pieces of direct or implicit criticism flared throughout the speech and during a question-and-answer session afterward.
+
+On Russia, Clinton said she had warned of trouble on the horizon with the return of Vladimir Putin as president. “I am in the category of people who wanted us to do more in response to the annexation of Crimea and the continuing destabilization of Ukraine,” she said, referring to Russia’s military moves there.
+
+Clinton said she would “sustain a robust military presence” in the Persian Gulf. The Obama administration has acknowledged that there will be a gap of about two months this fall when no U.S. aircraft carrier group will be stationed in the gulf, the first time that has happened in several years.
+
+On Syria, Clinton noted that she argued for arming moderate Syrian rebels far earlier than the White House eventually tried to do, and she suggested the United States is not leading as it should in response to an exodus of refugees fleeing the civil war there. She proposed organizing a pledging conference, like one she helped put together after the 2011 earthquake in Haiti, to take in refugees and pay for resettlement.
+
+“The United States has to be at the table, has to be leading it,” Clinton said.
+
+In response to a question, Clinton also suggested that her former boss had miscalculated by trying to strong-arm Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over dealings with the Palestinians. That tactic was tried during and after her tenure.
+
+[For Hillary and Bibi, a long and sometimes fraught relationship]
+
+“Well, I think there’s a lot of room for tough love, particularly in private,” Clinton said. “But I just don’t think it’s a particularly productive approach for the United States to take” in public.
+
+“In the absence of, you know, some kind of greater goal that we were trying to achieve by doing that, I just don’t think that is the smartest approach,” she said.
+
+Clinton was measured but still critical on whether the administration should have pulled back from its request that Congress authorize military force in Syria. It opted instead for a 2013 agreement to remove chemical weapons from that country.
+
+“It’s always difficult in hindsight to say what could have happened if something different had been done,” she said of the debate over how to respond to allegations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces had launched chemical-weapons attacks on civilians. The vote may well have failed, she noted, which would have left Obama to decide whether to proceed with punitive airstrikes on his own executive authority and over congressional objections.
+
+“I do think that not being able to follow through on it cost us. I am certain of that. That still comes back in conversations that people have with me” at home and abroad, Clinton said. “But I do think it was a net positive to get as much of the chemical weapons out as we could.”",REAL
+272,House Republicans try to gut a key American principle,"The Civil War era’s 14th Amendment, granting automatic citizenship to any baby born on American soil, is a proud achievement of the Party of Lincoln.
+
+But now House Republicans are talking about abolishing birthright citizenship.
+
+A House Judiciary subcommittee took up the question Wednesday afternoon, prompted by legislation sponsored by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and 22 other lawmakers that, after nearly 150 years, would end automatic citizenship.
+
+The 14th Amendment, King told the panel, “did not contemplate that anyone who would sneak into the United States and have a baby would have automatic citizenship conferred on them.” Added King, “I’d suggest it’s our job here in this Congress to decide who will be citizens, not someone in a foreign country that can sneak into the United States and have a baby and then go home with the birth certificate.”
+
+It’s no small task to undo a principle, enshrined in the Constitution and upheld by the Supreme Court, that defines the United States as a nation of immigrants. It’s particularly audacious that House Republicans would undo a century and a half of precedent without amending the Constitution but merely by passing a law to reinterpret the 14th Amendment’s wording in a way that will stop the scourge of “anchor babies” and “birth tourism.”
+
+Judiciary Committee Republicans brought in three experts to testify in support of this extraordinary maneuver (a lone Democratic witness was opposed), and they evidently had to search far and wide for people who would take this view, because they ended up with a bizarre witness: an octogenarian professor from the University of Texas named Lino Graglia.
+
+This would be the Lino Graglia who caused a furor in 1997 when he said that Latinos and African Americans are “not academically competitive with whites” and come from a “culture that seems not to encourage achievement.” He also said at the time that “I don’t know that it’s good for whites to be with the lower classes.”
+
+This is also the same Lino Graglia who said in a 2012 interview that black and Hispanic children are less “academically competent” than white children, and he attributed the academic gap to the “deleterious experience” of being reared by single mothers. When the interviewer, a black man, said he had a single mother, Graglia said that “my guess would be that you’re above usual smartness for whites, to say nothing of blacks.”
+
+And this is the very same Lino Graglia whose nomination for a federal judgeship in the 1980s fell apart amid allegations that he had urged Austin residents to defy a court-ordered busing plan and had used the racist word “pickaninny” in the classroom.
+
+Abolishing automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil, and having Graglia make the case, probably won’t help Republicans overcome their problems with minorities, who are gradually becoming the majority. Democrats, by happenstance, presented a sharp contrast to the GOP effort Wednesday: Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and others met at Washington’s Carnegie Library with a coalition including immigration and civil rights advocates to launch a new jobs campaign, “Putting Families First.”
+
+At the birthright hearing, King got things going by informing his colleagues that “birth tourism has grown substantially” and that it costs $48,000 for a Chinese national to fly to the United States, have her baby, get a birth certificate and take the child back to China. Though conservatives generally take a dim view of international law, King said the United States in this case should follow “almost every other industrialized country” in abolishing birthright citizenship.
+
+Graglia dutifully informed the committee that “a law ending birthright citizenship should and likely would survive constitutional challenge.” But consider the source: a man who by his own account takes “a very limited view of the power of the Supreme Court” and breezily dismisses contrary precedents.
+
+Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif) mentioned Graglia’s “pickaninny” comment and his position on busing. After Lofgren’s time expired, Graglia blurted out: “Your bringing up . . . this alleged statement of ‘pickaninny’ is in the nature of slur. I don’t know why you’re bringing up these insulting things that have nothing to do with” his testimony.
+
+Minutes later, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) read aloud some of Graglia’s other comments about minorities. “It seems some underhanded move is being made here,” the professor protested, saying he “never made a comment that in any way implied the inferiority of any group.”
+
+The congressman asked that Graglia’s past statements be entered into the record. But Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) complained that the line of inquiry was “a non-germane subject for this hearing.”
+
+On the contrary, it gets right at the heart of the matter.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+8563,"After Gingrich Attacks Megyn Kelly Over 'Sex,' Trump Advisor's 'Threat' Against Her Blows Up Online","Share on Twitter 
+On Tuesday night, an interview between Fox News host Megyn Kelly and Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich got intense in a hurry. 
+After Kelly referenced Trump as a “sexual predator,” Gingrich fiercely accused her of “using language that’s inflammatory that’s not true,” adding : 
+“You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy! That’s what I get out of watching you tonight!” 
+If viewers were fired up by the heated exchange, a tweet sent out by the Trump campaign's social media director Dan Scavino only poured fuel onto that fire: . @MegynKelly made a total fool out of herself tonight- attacking @realDonaldTrump . Watch what happens to her after this election is over. — Dan Scavino Jr. (@DanScavino) October 26, 2016 
+While it's not explicitly clear what Scavino meant by “watch what happens,” the implications of his comment certainly didn't go unnoticed. 
+Americans quickly came down on both sides of the issue, with many rushing to Kelly's defense in the face of the “threat”: @DanScavino ""Watch what happens to her?"" I'm no Kelly fan, but your campaign really isn't learning from the whole ""threats vs women"" thing. — Dennis Perkins (@DennisPerkins5) October 26, 2016 . @DanScavino She does just fine after the election, I'm guessing. You vanish into obscurity. — Trey Graham (@treygraham) October 26, 2016 @DanScavino @megynkelly @realDonaldTrump You want to be a little more specific about that? Punk. — HarleyPeyton (@HarleyPeyton) October 26, 2016 
+Still, there were plenty who agreed with Gingrich's suggestion that Kelly was being biased: @DanScavino @megynkelly @realDonaldTrump I used to be a huge fan of Megyn Kelly but no more. Totally unfair to the frmr Speaker. — Scott Schulze (@payshel) October 26, 2016 @DanScavino @megynkelly @realDonaldTrump Send her to CNN. They need more Crooked dishonest journalists! — Trump Revolution (@DonaldTrump_Rev) October 26, 2016 @DanScavino @megynkelly @realDonaldTrump Why surprised?Kelly is a dumb puppet paid millions (thro that book deal?) just to attack DJT.Tragic — Maya Varma (@swargcoming) October 26, 2016 
+Since early in the 2016 election cycle, there's no doubt that Kelly and the Trump campaign haven't seen eye-to-eye. 
+More recently, it seemed that tensions had cooled between the GOP nominee and the Fox News host. If Scavino's tweet is any indication, however, that may no longer be the story. ",FAKE
+8334,Halloween Pumpkin Carving Scenes at the Hospital | GomerBlog,"Tweet 
+What do you get when you have medical professionals with a warped sense of humor, who are stuck at work at the hospital on or around Halloween? Crazy pumpkin carving medical scenes! We found some great ones on the internet and KNOW that you guys have more out there to share. 
+Share your best medical pumpkin carving scenes on our facebook post and we will select a winner of our contest on Halloween night. The winner will get a free GomerBlog flask! Enjoy and good luck! 
+",FAKE
+2048,Wall St. Republicans' dark secret,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+1751,"Poll: Trump, Carson top GOP race; Clinton leads Dems but support drops","Two non-politicians, businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, dominate the contest for the Republican nomination, together accounting for more than half of the potential vote as support for traditional politicians continues to decline, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
+
+In the contest for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton has lost significant ground over the past two months, as she has struggled to manage the controversy over her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state. She still leads the field of Democrats, but for the first time her support has dropped below 50 percent in Post-ABC surveys, with the biggest decline coming among white women.
+
+Overall, the survey underscored the degree of dissatisfaction toward government and politics that is shaping the campaign. More than 7 in 10 Americans say people in politics cannot be trusted. More than 6 in 10 say the political system is dysfunctional. Sizable majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents agree with those assessments.
+
+But Democrats and Republicans part ways over the kind of experience they are looking for in the next president. Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans say they prefer the next president to have experience that comes from outside the political establishment. Only about a quarter of Democrats say the same.
+
+Two-thirds of the Republicans who say they are looking for non-political experience currently support either Trump or Carson — the foundation of the wide division between the two outsiders and the rest of a field made up almost exclusively of traditional politicians. Several of these current or former elected officials registered new lows in the survey.
+
+Their next big chance to reverse their fortunes comes at a debate Wednesday evening at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., that will feature the top 11 candidates. The debate, hosted by CNN, will begin at 8 p.m. Eastern time. There will be an earlier forum, beginning at 6  p.m., for the candidates who did not qualify for the main debate.
+
+The new poll found Trump to be the favorite of 33 percent of registered Republicans and ­Republican-leaning independents. That is a jump of nine percentage points since mid-July and a 29-point increase since late May, just before Trump announced his candidacy. He does well with most groups of GOP voters, but his strongest support comes from those who do not have a college degree and those with incomes below $50,000.
+
+Carson runs second at 20 percent, 14 points higher than in July. His surge is consistent with several other national polls that show him moving up the ranks since the first Republican debate in Cleveland last month. Carson’s base is more strongly rooted in the conservative wing of the party.
+
+After Trump and Carson, there is a significant falloff in support for the other candidates. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who began the year as the nominal GOP front-runner, stands at 8 percent, his lowest ever in Post-ABC surveys of the 2016 field. Next, at 7 percent each, are Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. No one else registered above 5 percent.
+
+Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie either tied or registered their lowest levels of support in Post-ABC polls of the 2016 race dating to the beginning of 2014.
+
+Walker suffered the steepest decline since the July survey, falling from 13 percent to 2 percent. Recent polls in Iowa, where Walker had been leading, also have shown a loss of support.
+
+Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, Clinton is the choice of 42 percent of registered voters. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is second with 24 percent and Vice President Biden, who is deciding whether to run, is third with 21 percent. Sanders’s support has risen by 10 points since July, while Biden has gained nine points.
+
+Biden advisers have said he is likely to make a decision this month. The vice president has said recently that he is still dealing with the death of his son Beau a few months ago and cannot yet say he has the emotional commitment needed to seek the presidency. But his advisers are preparing for a possible campaign as Biden and his family weigh the personal costs of running.
+
+The survey indicates that if Biden decides not to run, Clinton would benefit far more than Sanders, at least initially. Without Biden on the list, Clinton jumps 14 points, to 56 percent, among Democratic-leaning voters, while Sanders rises four points, to 28 percent.
+
+While Clinton maintains the lead, her support has dropped 21 points among Democrats since July. She has lost ground with most demographic groups, but the sharpest drop has come among women and particularly white women. In July, 64 percent of white women said they supported Clinton; today, it is 31 percent, the same level of backing as Sanders, whose support has doubled among this group.
+
+A majority of Americans (55 percent) say they disapprove of the way Clinton has handled questions about her use of a private e-mail account while serving as secretary of state. An almost identical percentage (54 percent) say that she has tried to cover up facts. Asked whether Clinton stayed within government guidelines or broke the rules by using a private server, 51 percent say she broke the rules, while 32 percent say she did not, with the remainder offering no opinion.
+
+The public is divided on the question of whether the e-mail issue is a legitimate one in the coming election, although today, unlike four months ago, slightly more say it is not legitimate.
+
+On all those questions, there is a big difference in the responses of Democrats vs. Republicans and independents. A majority of Democrats (55 percent) approve of how she has handled the controversy, while a third do not. More than 7 in 10 say the e-mails are not a legitimate issue in the coming campaign.
+
+In a hypothetical general election, Clinton runs about evenly with Trump, leading 46 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. Clinton holds a much bigger lead, 51 percent to 39 percent, among all adults.
+
+Clinton and Trump share one vulnerability: Almost 6 in 10 Americans say Trump is not honest and trustworthy, while 56 percent say that about Clinton. But in other measures, Clinton is seen as far readier to be president than the GOP front-runner.
+
+At this point, 6 in 10 say Trump is not qualified to be president, though more than 6 in 10 Republicans say he is. Two-thirds say he does not understand the problems of “people like you.” More than 6 in 10 say he does not have the kind of personality and temperament it takes to serve effectively as president.
+
+Just over half of all Americans say Clinton does not understand their problems, but 56 percent say she has the personality and temperament to serve as president.
+
+Among all Americans, 57 percent oppose Trump’s tough positions on immigration. Among Republicans, 56 percent support them — with 39 percent saying they strongly support them.
+
+The Post-ABC News poll was conducted Sept. 7-10 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults, including landline and cellphone respondents. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
+
+Full results of the poll and detailed methodology are available at wapo.st/pollarchive.",REAL
+7350,"Love Him or Hate Him, Anderson Cooper Just Put a 3rd Degree Burn on Newt for Megyn Kelly 'Sex' Insult","Getty - Kevin Mazur The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
+Anderson Cooper is known to be the cool, mild-mannered news host of CNN's AC 360. But the shade he threw on Newt Gingrich after his rant against Megyn Kelly was nothing short of scorching. 
+“I’m sick and tired of people like you using language that’s inflammatory, that’s not true!” Gingrich exploded on The Kelly File. “When you use the words, you took a position. And I think it’s very unfair of you to do that!” 
+Then, the former Speaker went for the throat: 
+“You wanna go back through the tapes of your show recently? You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy! That’s what I get out of watching you tonight!” 
+Anderson Cooper noticed something unusual about Gingrich's line of attack: 
+“For Newt Gingrich to accuse Megyn Kelly of being fascinated by sex,” Cooper stated. “This is a guy, who’s what, on his third marriage, cheated on his first two wives and was having an affair when he was impeaching Bill Clinton. Isn’t that right?” 
+That's about right. Newt Gingrich admitted to cheating on his first and second wives and having an affair during the Clinton impeachment hearings. 
+Watch the segment: 
+Trump supporters may not be pleased with the way Megyn Kelly has commented on all of those accusations, and her throwing doubt upon Juanita Broaddrick's rape claims against Bill Clinton did not win her friends in that camp. But love her or hate her, it's not Megyn's job to be the Trump campaign's unofficial spokeswoman. 
+It may be her job to assume the role of a news commentator, however, rather than that of an “objective” journalist. The idea that there is “objectivity” when it comes to reporting the news is a tired and dangerous cliche the American people should put to rest. 
+As for being “fascinated by sex,” it just might be that Kelly is professionally interested in sexual assault and groping allegations against a presidential candidate, unfounded or otherwise, since the way those are perceived by the public just might sway a national election. ",FAKE
+5362,Dreaming Beyond Capitalism: a Culture Without Fear,"By Martin Winiecki / kosmosjournal.org 
+In the 1990s an unusual encounter took place in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In plant rituals, shamans of the Achuar, a tribe living in pristine forest that had never been in touch with Western civilization, received the warning that the “white man” would try to invade their lands, cut down the forest and exploit the resources. Deeply shaken, they called out to the Spirits for help. Soon after white people did approach them, coming to them however with supportive intentions – a group of activists from the United States, searching for ways to protect Indigenous Peoples from the oil industry. The Westerners found a deeply interconnected tribal society living in profound symbiosis with the Earth. Seeing the bulldozers coming closer and closer, they asked the Elders of the tribe how they could survive. Their answer was surprising and straightforward: “Don’t try to help us here. Go back to your own culture and change the dream of the modern world! It is because of this dream that we are perishing.” [i] 
+This experience gave rise to the Pachamama Alliance , an international educational network dedicated to changing the dream of the Western world. 
+What is the dream of the Western world? When asked, most young people say: A perfect partner, a beautiful house, successful career, lots of money and travel to exotic places. Amplified a million times a day by Hollywood and the advertisement industry, promoted by parents, self-help gurus, schools and fairytales, this lifestyle became the central motif of our collective longing, the blueprint of globalized society. 
+Fulfillment became a matter of possession, of how much wealth, fame, power and sex we earned for ourselves. Rewarding people with profit and status for the most competitive and destructive behavior, worshiping the golden calf of maximal economic growth, capitalism has effectively manufactured and then exploited people’s dream image. Humanity’s general ethical decline is the result of this collective corruption. 
+“Social being determines consciousness”– Marx 
+First Nation tribes from North America coined a term to describe the ‘disease of the white man’– wetiko. In their understanding, wetiko consists of two essential characteristics: chronic inability for empathy and an egoistic fixation on ones own personal benefit and profit. The First Peoples used this word specifically because they could not fathom any other explanation for the behavior of the European colonialists. While often declared as unchangeable psychological features of humanity, greed, selfishness and violent impulses may in fact not be our “human nature” as many claim, but rather the outcome of our alienation under capitalist conditions. Marx said, “Social being determines consciousness.” [ii] According to epigenetic research, our genetic programming contains many different possibilities of existence. Whether wetiko takes holds of our psyche or we become compassionate strongly depends on the social structures we live in. We only consider egoism, hatred and brutality to be “normal” because over the past few thousand years our civilization has been conditioned in this way – basing its economy on war, its social organization on domination and conformity, its religion on punishment, damnation and sin, its education on coercion, its security on the elimination of the supposed enemy, its very image of love on fear of loss. 
+Patriarchal conditioning – carried out worldwide, generation after generation, with the most aggressive means – has created a cultural matrix of violence and fear, which at present nearly all of humanity more or less unconsciously follows. This matrix, or more accurately ‘patrix’, steers the global processes of politics and economics in similar ways as people’s interpersonal relationships, families and love lives. As psychoanalyst Dieter Duhm writes, “Automatic, usually unconscious, habits of thinking stand behind our daily misery.” [iii] 
+Use of Agent Orange resulted in widespread birth defects in Vietnam 
+Duhm started out as a leading Marxist writer during the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s and 70s in Germany, when he asked himself how it could be that billions of people comply with and obey the rules of society without being forced to do so. Shaken by the horrors of the Vietnam War, he needed to find a credible answer for how to overcome the imperialist system causing these atrocities. Working as a psychoanalyst, he faced the same basic structure in all his patients – no matter whether they suffered depression, heartache or schizophrenia – deep-rooted existential fear. The further he inquired, the more he realized this fear is not only in the “mentally ill,” but also appears in the “sane” as fear of what others could think of them, as speech anxiety, as fear of authorities and institutions, fear before and after intercourse, fear of the future, of getting sick and so on. “This inconspicuous, socially omnipresent and ‘normal,’ fear is neurotic,” he writes. “Fear is not only the product of capitalism, but part of its foundation, an element without which this entire system would collapse.” [iv] 
+For Duhm, the consequence was clear: If we want to escape from the wetiko disease of our current capitalist culture, we need a credible concept for a new nonviolent global society and for transforming the old matrix of fear and violence into a new matrix of trust, compassion and cooperation. Healing wetiko would be nothing short of reinventing our entire civilization and basing human existence on new social, ethical, spiritual and sexual foundations allowing profound trust between people as well as between humans and animals. 
+In 1978 Duhm started out with a group of people to engage in an interdisciplinary research project for social and ecological sustainability to develop precisely such a concept. Having witnessed the failure of countless communes in the 1970s, most due to unresolved interpersonal conflicts around money, power and sex (i.e. the inability of the groups to resolve wetiko among one another), the project focused its cultural experiment on creating new social structures able to resolve the psychological substratum of fear. They knew the answer could not be found in therapies, spiritual exercises and rituals alone, as helpful and healing as they may be – but that a whole new way of communitarian coexistence would have to be developed, from which one would no longer need to retreat in order to become human. Rather, it would be designed in a way that would foster compassion, solidarity and cooperation. 
+The development of such a society would need to begin with initial models researching its basic structures and demonstrating its viability. Thereby, an adventurous research project began, establishing functioning communities of trust. The deeper they went the more they realized they needed to work on all basic areas of human existence: starting with the intimate questions of sexuality, love and partnership, questions of raising children, coexistence with animals, self-sufficiency in water, energy and food systems. From this experiment, the peace research center, Tamera , came into life along with the vision of creating “Healing Biotopes” as catalysts for planetary system change. Solar-powered village by Sunvention, via Tamera 
+For much of the last million years, human beings have lived in communities; in fact, the era in which we have not is only a tiny fraction in the entirety of human history. In order to subjugate people under their systems of dominance, patriarchal rulers systematically destroyed tribal communities, thereby inflicting a profound collective trauma onto humanity. Humanity thereby lost its spiritual, social and ethical anchor, drifting off in a self-destructive frenzy of atomization, self-interest and othering. As we are reaching the pinnacle of a culture of global wetiko , the last throes of late-stage capitalism, healing our collective trauma, re-establishing functioning communities based on trust, and making our human existence compatible with the biosphere and nature again, may well be our only opportunity to secure ourselves and our children a future worth living on Spaceship Earth. 
+Martin Winiecki was born 1990 in Dresden, Germany, and is coordinator of the Terra Nova School in Tamera Center, Portugal where 160 residents of the center are working for a society free of violence and greed. 
+[i] Speech by Lynne Twist at the “Awakening the Dreamer” Symposium. USA, Los Angeles. Sept. 2008. 
+[ii] Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York: International, 1970. Print. 
+[iii] Duhm, Dieter. Beyond 2012. The Birth of a New Humanity? What Is the Shift of Consciousness? . Bad Belzig: Verlag Meiga, 2010. Print. 
+[iv] Duhm, Dieter. Angst Im Kapitalismus: Zweiter Versuch Der Gesellschaftlichen Begründung Zwischenmenschlicher Angst in Der Kapitalistischen Warengesellschaft. Lampertheim: Kübler, 1975. Print. 0.0 ·",FAKE
+1643,Fact-checking the third round of GOP debates,"CNBC aired two GOP presidential debates Wednesday: a prime-time event starring 10 candidates and an earlier debate featuring four second-tier contenders, based on an average of recent polls.
+
+Not every candidate uttered facts that are easily fact checked, but following is a list of 14 suspicious or interesting claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.
+
+Fiorina, who served as a surrogate for Mitt Romney’s during his 2012 presidential run, recycles a misleading talking point from that unsuccessful campaign — but oddly, she never double-checked the math. The Romney campaign calculated these figures by comparing the decline in the number of all nonfarm employees from January 2009 to March 2012 with the decline in jobs held by women in that period.
+
+While the statistic was technically correct for one month in 2012 — about three years into Obama’s first term — it quickly was dropped by Romney’s campaign because newer economic data made it obsolete.
+
+In the debate, Fiorina claimed that this statistic was true for Obama’s first term. But by the time he took the oath of office a second time, his jobs record was a net winner, both for men and women. So this claim is utterly wrong.
+
+This is false, though it has increasingly emerged as a GOP talking point. Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has not yet released a tax plan, but has repeatedly denied that he would increase taxes from the current marginal rate of 39.6 percent to 90 percent. (The margin rate is what you pay on each additional dollar earned.)
+
+The United States had a marginal tax rate of 90 percent in the Dwight Eisenhower administration, and then John F. Kennedy proposed to reduce it to 70 percent. (The tax cut was passed after his assassination.) But even such rates would not take 90 percent of a person’s income.
+
+Bush repeatedly claims $19 billion in taxes over his eight years as governor, but that is quite misleading. This refers to cumulative state revenue changes as a result of state and federal decisions, and it includes revenue changes from tax and non-tax legislative actions during his tenure as governor.
+
+Moreover, this $19 billion figure includes revenues the state would have received if the federal estate tax credit had not been phased out. There were some states that levied new state taxes to balance out the phase-out of the federal estate tax. Bush didn’t fight the estate tax repeal. But that’s certainly not the same as actively “cutting” those tax revenues from the state budget.
+
+Bush’s 1.3 million jobs number is accurate, as far as it goes, and he avoided claiming that he “led the nation” in job creation. But, as we repeatedly warn, readers should be wary when state executives take credit for the number of jobs in their state. There’s not one policy decision that affects jobs figures.
+
+Cruz’s comment is based on research by Emmanuel Saez, a University of California at Berkeley economics professor who is often cited for claims on income inequality.
+
+Saez analyzed Internal Revenue Service income data dating to 1913, and found that the top 1 percent in 2012 had the highest share of income since 1928, the peak of the stock market bubble of the roaring 1920s. Saez compiled market income data, including capital gains and excluding government transfers.
+
+The top 1 percent’s income share fell slightly in 2013 compared to 2012, to 20.1 percent from 22.8 percent. But the trend remained the same.
+
+Incomes in the top 1 percent fluctuated more sharply since 1928 compared to the bottom 99 percent. And the bottom 90 percent’s income share did not increase as much as the top decile in recent decades, Saez wrote. “Those at the very top of the income distribution therefore play a central role in the evolution of U.S. inequality over the course of the 20th century,” Saez wrote.
+
+Moderator Becky Quick: “You had talked a little bit about Marco Rubio. I think you called him Mark Zuckerberg’s personal senator because he was in favor of the H-1B [visa].”
+
+Donald Trump: “I never said that. I never said that.”
+
+Perhaps Trump should have read his own campaign Web site before the debate.
+
+Among the immigration policy proposals listed on DonaldJTrump.com is a proposal to increase the prevailing wage for those in the H-1B program. H-1B visas are granted to highly skilled immigrant workers who are coveted by technology companies, particularly ones in Silicon Valley.
+
+Trump has proposed restricting the H-1B program. He criticized the program for giving away coveted entry-level IT jobs to workers getting flown in cheaper from overseas. More STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) graduates receive degrees than find STEM jobs each year, according to Trump’s proposal. He proposed raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1B visa holders so that entry-level IT jobs can go to “the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers form overseas.”
+
+“Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities,” the white paper read. (We could not find any evidence that Trump himself has made this assertion.)
+
+During the debate, Trump denied that he was critical of Zuckerberg, of Facebook: “I am all in favor of keeping these talented people here so they can go to work in Silicon Valley.”
+
+Christie loves to say this but that doesn’t make it true. And he significantly misstates the date for when Social Security’s trust funds will be depleted; that will not happen for another 20 years (and even then Social Security can pay partial benefits).
+
+An IOU is just a pejorative way of saying “bond.” These bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Until the 2011 debt-ceiling impasse, one could not imagine that any president or Congress would risk defaulting on them because it would damage the nation’s financial standing. Still, Treasury bonds are considered a good bet — deemed to be one of the safest places to keep money.
+
+The bonds are a real asset to Social Security, but they also represent an obligation of the rest of the government. Like any entity that issues debt, such as a corporation, the government will have to make good on its obligations, generally by taking the money out of revenue, reducing expenses or issuing new debt. The action taken really depends on the resources available at the time. There is nothing particularly unusual about this, except that the U.S. government is better placed to make good on these obligations than virtually any other debt-issuer.
+
+Some analysts, however, question whether the Social Security system holding those bonds lowers the cost of paying benefits relative to if the system did not hold them. Since the bonds have to be redeemed by general taxpayers, as a group taxpayers have to provide the same level of revenues to finance benefit payments as if Social Security were not holding any bonds.
+
+So then the question becomes whether the fact that Social Security ran these surpluses in the past improved the government’s overall fiscal position and thereby made it easier for the government to finance the total level of upcoming benefit payments. Some analysts contend that the existence of the earlier Social Security surpluses spurred lawmakers to spend more, resulting in higher public debt.
+
+Rubio is referring to a report published in 2014 by the Brookings Institution, which studied Census Bureau data called Business Dynamic Statistics. Brookings analysts tracked data back to 1978 and found that starting in 2008, business deaths exceeded business births through 2011.
+
+But note that this started happening seven years ago, while Rubio makes it sound like it is a new development. (Update: PolitiFact noted that more recent data shows the trend shifted in 2012 and in the past two years, business starts began to exceed business deaths.)
+
+These are Kasich’s go-to claims about his record as Ohio governor and chairman of the House Budget Committee. But some of his figures lack context.
+
+The $8 billion figure reflects the breadth of the budget imbalance that Kasich’s administration faced when he took office (the actual figure is $7.7 billion). But the projection did not end up being as high, and the actual shortfall was decreased by hundreds of millions of dollars.
+
+Kasich’s $2 billion figure and jobs numbers largely check out. The $2 billion surplus is the state government’s tally of the rainy day fund. While Bureau of Labor Statistics support his job creation numbers, we’ve frequently urged readers to be wary about such claims. So much of what happens in an economy and the impact on jobs is beyond a single politician’s control.
+
+Kudos to Kasich for clarifying that the $5 trillion surplus was a projection, not an actual surplus, when he left Congress in 2000. We’ve urged him to clarify this point in the past. The figure he uses was a projected, 10-year surplus — but it didn’t end up materializing because of a slower economy, tax cuts and increased government spending after 9/11 in the years after Kasich left Washington.
+
+Trump, referring to the shooting at the Naval Reserve center in Chattanooga, Tenn., in July, is wrong on this point. The service members at the Naval Reserve center in Chattanooga, Tenn., were armed. In fact, the military is investigating why they were armed, as the Pentagon has restrictions on who can carry weapons at such facilities.
+
+The FBI said a 24-year-old gunman armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle and a handgun methodically hunted for Marines and sailors to kill.
+
+Edward Reinhold, special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in Knoxville, Tenn., provided the first definitive account of the terrorist attack that left four Marines and a Navy petty officer dead.
+
+Reinhold told reporters at a news conference in Chattanooga that Mohammad Youssef Abdul­azeez smashed through the gate of the reserve center last Thursday and was almost immediately confronted by a service member who had his own gun.
+
+The service member fired several rounds, but it has not yet been determined whether he managed to hit Abdulazeez, who quickly entered the reserve center looking for targets, mortally wounding the sailor inside the building.
+
+This is false. Manufacturing took a huge hit during the Great Recession, so 2 million jobs were lost between December 2007 and June 2009, the official length of the recession, according to government statistics.  But the recession began a year before Obama took office.
+
+Meanwhile, from those depths, manufacturing has slowly crawled its way back. From the start of Obama’s presidency, there are about 250,000 fewer manufacturing jobs. That is still about 1.4 million fewer than the start of the recession, however.
+
+This is Jindal’s go-to line about his record as governor. But he takes too much credit.
+
+The state budget in fiscal 2009, Jindal’s first budget after taking office in 2008, was $34.3 billion. In fiscal 2016, the proposed budget was $25.1 billion. That is a $9.2 billion decrease, or a 26.8 percent decrease.
+
+But this budget decrease was not due to his executive decisions alone. Federal funding also decreased by $10 billion during those eight years, from $19.7 billion to $9.7 billion. Part of this decrease was waning federal funding for hurricane recovery, the Times-Picayune has reported.
+
+The labor participation rate fell to 62.4 percent in September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s actually lowest since 1977, when it touched 62.3 percent — but that’s 38 years, not 50. So Santorum’s a bit off with his figure.
+
+When Obama took office in January, 2009, the workforce participation rate was 65.7 percent. So there has certainly been a decline. But the rate had already been on a steady downward track since it hit a high of 67.3 percent in the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
+
+A key reason? The composition of the labor force has been affected by the retirement of the leading edge of the baby-boom generation.
+
+The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in 2012 concluded that just over half of the post-1999 decline in the participation rate comes from the retirement of the baby boomers. Critically, the research showed that the problem is only going to get worse in the rest of the decade, with retirements accounting for two-thirds of the decline of participation rate by 2020. In other words, the rate will keep declining, no matter how well the economy does.
+
+Will this zombie claim about the shrinking Navy ever go away? Apparently not; we already awarded Graham three Pinocchios earlier this year for the same claim. Fact checkers repeatedly debunked this in the 2012 presidential elections, and it’s being repeated again this time around.
+
+But, surprise: A lot has changed in 100 years, including the need and capacity of ships. After all, it’s a now a matter of modern nuclear-powered fleet carriers, versus gunboats and small warships of 100 years ago. The push for ships under the Reagan era (to build the Navy up to 600-ship levels) no longer exists, and ships from that era are now retiring.
+
+Navy Secretary Ray Mabus recently spoke about this problematic ship-counting exercise. There are other ways to measure seapower than just the sheer number of ships, he said: “That’s pretty irrelevant. We also have fewer telegraph machines than we did in World War I and we seem to be doing fine without that. … Look at the capability. Look at the missions that we do.” Plus, the Navy is on track to grow to just over 300 ships, approximately the size that a bipartisan congressional panel has recommended for the current Navy.
+
+As for his statement about the army, Graham is on a bit more solid ground because he’s talking about the number of troops. (Under sequestration, the number of troops was due to be reduced to 420,000 in fiscal year 2016, the lowest since 1940, but the new budget deal will likely change that.) But even then, it’s apples and oranges to compare the capabilities of a World War II army with today’s army.
+
+That the Export-Import Bank levels the playing field for the U.S. economy is a common argument for reauthorizing the federal agency. But there are data limitations to how the Ex-Im Bank’s loans has affected American jobs.
+
+The Government Accountability Office in 2013 found that there are limitations to the method the bank uses to keep track of employment figures. This method plays an essential role in the bank’s jobs calculation process, the GAO found.
+
+But because of limitations out of the agency’s direct control, the GAO found that the data “cannot be used to distinguish between jobs that were newly created and those that were maintained.”",REAL
+8016,Anonymous: World War 3 Is On The Horizon (In 2016),"It has been said a number of times over the past year, that WWIII could be on the horizon. Recent events and statements between Russia and the United States have people believing it’s closer than ever. But is this really the case? Should we be worried?
+Since almost everything real and important taking place is kept from the masses while we are distracted by mainstream media and pop culture, it’s tough to say what is really going on. But if we begin to look at the various things going on in the world, we can piece together some interesting things.
+In this case, anonymous is hinting that WWIII is inching closer. Some people even believe it has already begun. But you know what? I’m not sure we need to move into fear. First check out the video, then read on.
+
+Not All Bad News Right off the bat many start worrying about nuclear bombs, and that’s fair. But there is also an interesting fact to consider: UFOs have been shooting down nuclear threats over the last few decades.
+Dozens of foreign governments have released thousands of pages of UFO related documents –here is an example of the latest batch released from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense in June 2013. Other country’s governments who have done the same include Mexico, France, Argentina, Russia and Belgium, just to name a few.
+The fact that governments have released and documented information that detail UFO encounters with the military, as well as supposed extraterrestrial encounters with people, tells us that they’ve had and do have a high level of interest when it comes to the topic of UFOs and extraterrestrials. Had this information remained classified, nobody would officially be able to say that governments have allocated resources to investigate this phenomenon, and it would have remained in the “conspiracy” realm. At the same time, it’s important to remember that this issue goes far beyond and well above government control.
+“It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects which both congress and the commander in chief know nothing about.” – Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defense Minister (source) 
+“Everything is in a process of investigation both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world. The nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data.” – General Carlos Castro Cavero (1979). From “UFOs and the National Security State, Volume 2″, Written by Richard Dolan
+“Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source) 
+Just last year at the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure , a United States congresswoman voiced her opinion that the US government should disclose this existence, pointing to the fact that a number of foreign governments have already done so -you can read more about that story here. 
+War is something none of us want I’m sure we could agree on, and just because UFO’s may be shooting down nukes doesn’t mean we are OK with war. But what can we do when it comes to such large worldly events? There must be something… Consciousness!
+What you focus on, what your thoughts are each day, how you feel and how you treat one another is important. It has a huge impact on what plays out in our world. This has been proven numerous times when studies examine the impact of people meditating or focusing on something specific. Collective consciousness is real and it can be impacted.
+Here is an example of meditation helping in war zones. 
+You are not small, you can impact millions, we can impact billions because we are all connected. Focus on the world you want and share that with others.
+As for physical action, again what you choose to do to be in alignment with your purpose is powerful. But we can also continue to raise awareness about what is going on in our world and make decisions and choices that opt out of the things we no longer want to see and support.
+Meditation, intention, being a good person, aligning with your soul purpose, being of service to others and doing things like voting with your dollar is no passive, it is powerful when you understand how our reality works.
+Transcript of video: 
+Greetings World, We are Anonymous.
+For the last two months, we have been consistently reporting on a possible global conflict, World War 3 between the United States and its allies in the West, and Russia and its allies in the East.
+The dispute on the South China Sea has severely damaged the United States relations with the Peoples Republic of China. After the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that China’s nine-dash-line claim in the South China Sea, and its land reclamation activities on islets are invalid and unlawful, the United States has been preparing to sail in the area under a so-called Freedom of Navigation principle.
+This has angered the Chinese. In August, the Chinese Defense Minister, Chang Wanquan told his country’s citizens to prepare for, what he described as the peoples war at sea. Mr Wanquan was referring directly to the United States planned provocation under the pretext of Freedom of Navigation. China has since vowed to take all necessary measures available to protect its sovereignty over the South China Sea, revealing that it had the right to set up an air defense zone on the sea.
+China has also since been positioning and testing its nuclear weapons, and planning military drills on its waters with Russia. Even the United States has confirmed that China has tested an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, which is capable of striking everywhere in the world within half an hour.
+Moving away from the South China Sea, we arrive in Syria. It is an open secret that the civil war in Syria is a proxy war between the United States and Russia. Russia has even intervened physically on the request of the Syrian government. The United States, unable to get any invitation, has been openly and secretly arming many rebel groups in the country, with open plans to overthrow the Syrian government.
+Of course, since Russia honored the invitation of the Syrian government last year, the war has been turning in favor of the Syrian government, which was falling before Russia’s intervention.
+As we speak now, tension is mounting between the United States and Russia. Nerves are at their highest since the Cold War era. The United States, at the moment, is sitting on tenterhooks. Many officials in the president Obama administration are frustrated and confused regarding the situation in Syria.
+The United States has announced that it has ended all contacts with Russia in Syria. This announcement by the United States comes as Russia, beginning on September. 22nd, intensified its military operations in Syria, with the intentions to capture the city of Aleppo for the Syrian government. Diplomatic efforts to put an end to the fighting in Syria, have collapsed.
+As the Aleppo operation continues, Russia has given the United States a stern warning not to take any action against the Syrian government forces. In fact, there are many Russian jet fighters stationed in Syria, ready to shoot down any United States jet fighter that attempts to strike on the Syrian government forces.
+These developments from Moscow are not going down easily with the United States. The United States Secretary of State, John Kerry, is said to have urged president Obama to intervene and face the consequences from Russia. He is said to have even favored a nuclear deterrent against Russia.
+However, it appears that before Kerry could even make this suggestion to president Obama, the Russians had already gathered intelligence on the happenings within the White House. According to Zvezda, a Russian defense ministry Television channel, the country has started preparing its citizens for a possible nuclear war with the United States – because of the mounting tensions in Syria. Russia has since moved to deploy nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in its western-most region, Kaliningrad, which borders on NATO members of Poland and Lithuania.
+Due to how the situation has become, some top officials at the United States defense headquarters have finally spoken. These Pentagon officials have admitted that World War 3 is imminent, and that its going to be deadly and fast. The military generals were speaking on a future-of-the-army panel in Washington.
+“A conventional conflict in the near future will be extremely lethal and fast, and we will not own the stopwatch,” Major General William Hix said.
+General Hix also stated that China and Russia’s armies are becoming increasingly technological, and that the Pentagon was getting ready for violence on the scale that the United States Army has not seen since Korea.
+His comments were also echoed by lieutenant Gen Joseph Anderson and Chief of Staff, Gen Mark A. Milley, who described war between nation states as almost guaranteed.
+The generals also said apart from the conventional battle, cyber battle, too, has become a reality against the United States, revealing that even smaller nations are launching it against the country.
+We are Anonymous.
+We are Legion.
+We do not forgive.
+We do not forget.
+Expect us.
+",FAKE
+6876,A Barbaric Race Of Underground-Dwelling Giants Once Inhabited The Mount Shasta Region...,"A Barbaric Race Of Underground-Dwelling Giants Once Inhabited The Mount Shasta Region... # www.mountshastasmysteries.com 10 
+Author Dustin Naef takes viewers into the Sacramento River canyon south of Mount Shasta to examine Native American legends about prehistoric giants, who were said to inhabit underground tunnels and caves hidden in the wilderness. 
+This is the second installment of a three part video series titled ""Mount Shasta's Legends"". 
+Native American lore suggests that an ancient race of prehistoric giants inhabited the mountains of northern California, but most of them perished in a Great Flood. In 1934, a treasure-hunter claimed to have found evidence suggesting that some these giants lived in tunnels underground around the Mount Shasta area, but before he could reveal the location he mysteriously vanished. Tags",FAKE
+2540,The Murder Shaking San Francisco’s Liberal Soul,"The man accused of shooting a young woman dead on a popular pier had served 181 months in federal prisons and been deported five times. But San Francisco’s sheriff saw fit to free him.
+
+Across the top of the letter, the man neatly lettered the words “Motion to Correct Sentence” and “United States V. Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez.” He is listed in this and most of his other court cases by that name and in others as Juan Jose Dominguez-De La Parra. His real name is said by federal authorities to most likely be Jose Inez Garcia Zarate. The authorities are not sure which of the various dates of birth he has provided is accurate.
+
+As Lopez-Sanchez, DOB 12/12/1980, he reminded the court in this letter from a federal correctional facility in Missouri that he was serving 51 months in federal prison for illegal reentry to the United States. He had also been sentenced to an added 21 months for violating the terms of his supervised release after a 1998 conviction for a previous illegal reentry.
+
+He wrote to the court that it was his understanding the 51 months and the 21 months were to be served concurrently. But prison officials were now trying to tell him the sentences were supposed to be consecutive.
+
+Just three months later, this man who had written of his desire to return to his own country was arrested in Eagle Pass, Texas, for once again leaving it to slip into the United States.
+
+He was sentenced to another 46 months, to be followed by 21 months of supervised release, as before. His total time in federal pens stood at 181 months—or a little more than 15 years—as he neared the end of his latest sentence.
+
+This March 23 letter was written by the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. The letter—first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle—said Lopez-Sanchez was wanted on an outstanding $5,000 bench warrant arising from a 1995 bust for selling $20 of marijuana to an undercover cop in that city. The federal prison authorities were asked to notify the sheriff’s office “when the subject is ready for pick-up.”
+
+Lopez-Sanchez was at a federal detention facility in San Bernardino County near Los Angeles. The San Francisco Sheriff’s Department took custody of him three days later, on March 26. The feds are said to have asked the sheriff’s people to notify them prior to his release on the pot case.
+
+The real aim of the letter he had written to the court back in 2007 was to return to his country as soon as possible so he could then slip back into America even at the risk of yet another heavy prison term.
+
+He now found himself at liberty in Sanctuary City, for once with no need to worry about being deported as long as he stayed in San Francisco.
+
+He could have remained as snug as a citizen if he had not made everybody wish he had been deported by allegedly picking up a .40 caliber pistol that had been stolen from a car on June 27. The pistol belonged to a federal U.S. Bureau of Land Management ranger who had duly reported the theft.
+
+Another gun was brandished by the thug who pulled up in a BMW, hopped out, and pistol-whipped as well as robbed two TV news crews that had come to cover the shooting on Pier 14.
+
+A memorial for Kate Steinle was held on Thursday. Family and friends told stories of an adventurous, exuberant, and uncommonly kind young woman. They had a phrase for the sunny, uplifting impact she seemed to have on everybody, wherever her wide travels took her:",REAL
+4256,"Sanders sharpening message, attacks on Clinton after Nevada loss","Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders opened a new phase of his campaign Monday, pledging to more aggressively lay out his differences with Hillary Clinton, an opponent whose views on some issues, he said, are guided by “hastily adopted campaign rhetoric.”
+
+Speaking at a news conference here, the senator from Vermont drew distinctions with Clinton on campaign finance and trade — the start of what he said will be a series of differences detailed in coming weeks — and pledged to contest the Democratic nomination through the convention.
+
+“I have to say that I am delighted that Secretary Clinton, month after month after month, seems to be adopting more and more of the positions that we have advocated,” Sanders said, adding that the former secretary of state “is beginning to use a lot of the language and phraseology that we have used.”
+
+[Despite what his critics say, Bernie Sanders insists he is not championing a ‘radical’ agenda]
+
+The feistier performance by Sanders comes on the heels of his loss to Clinton in the Nevada caucuses Saturday and in advance of an expected loss this Saturday in the South Carolina primary, in which polls have shown Clinton with a comfortable lead.
+
+With 11 other states holding nominating contests March 1, Sanders is fighting to show that he is not running out of momentum after strong performances in the first two contests, in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the voters were largely white.
+
+He chose to hold his news conference in Massachusetts, one of the Super Tuesday states where he appears strongest against Clinton. Sanders also unveiled an endorsement from a new multi-state, racially diverse coalition of progressive groups called People’s Politics.
+
+Clinton held no public campaign events Monday, spending a second day in California at a series of high-dollar fundraisers.
+
+Earlier Monday, Sanders campaigned in South Carolina, where, during a stop in Sumter, he sought to push back against Clinton and other critics who have said that his agenda is utopian and unachievable.
+
+In recent weeks, Clinton has cast herself as the more pragmatic candidate who could implement a progressive agenda while arguing that Sanders’s plans for universal health care and other bold policies would never be implemented.
+
+Sanders countered, saying, “One of the things that is going on in this campaign is that Bernie Sanders is too ambitious, he’s thinking too big. Well, I don’t think so. I mean virtually every idea that we are bringing forth not only is the right idea, it’s what our country needs, it’s what the American people want.”
+
+Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, ticked off some of his proposals, including ushering in a “state-of-the-art, cutting-edge child-care system,” each time telling his audience that the idea wasn’t as “radical” as it’s been portrayed.
+
+As a presidential candidate, Sanders has toggled back and forth a couple of times when it comes to drawing contrasts with Clinton.
+
+[Actor Danny Glover and activist Ben Jealous size up Bernie Sanders’s outreach to black voters]
+
+For the first months of his bid, he barely mentioned his opponent. Last fall, however, he considerably stepped up his efforts to draw policy distinctions, and during the first part of the year, he was openly critical of Clinton’s acceptance of large speaking fees from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street interests.
+
+More recently on the campaign trail, Sanders had returned to only infrequent mentions of the former secretary of state, even as she and her surrogates attacked him on a range of issues, including gun control, immigration and women’s reproductive rights.
+
+The issues Sanders chose to highlight during his news conference Monday were not new ones, but his critique of Clinton was more pointed.
+
+“The people of Massachusetts and the people of the United States need to know that difference between hastily adopted campaign rhetoric and the real record and the long-held ideas of the candidates,” he said.
+
+He asserted that the two candidates have “a very profound difference” on campaign finance, noting that a super PAC supporting Clinton raised $15 million from Wall Street interests during the most recent reporting period.
+
+Clinton has sought to distance herself from the donations, saying they were to a super PAC originally established to support President Obama but has since chosen to back her.
+
+“I know that every candidate who has ever received special-
+
+interest money always says that the millions and millions of dollars they receive will never influence them — never, never, never,” he said.
+
+Sanders sought to contrast his method of fundraising, saying his campaign has received 4 million donations averaging $27 apiece, most of them online.
+
+Sanders also highlighted his long record in Congress opposing trade deals, including the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal being pushed by Obama.
+
+After declining to take a position on the pact for months, Clinton announced her opposition far more recently. At his news conference, Sanders shared comments made in January by Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, predicting Clinton would eventually support the deal if she won the Democratic nomination. Sanders later opened the floor to reporter’s questions, answering two before he said he had to leave to make it to a scheduled rally in Amherst.
+
+The first dealt with whether he has a viable path to the Democratic nomination. “The short, three-letter answer is Y-E-S,” Sanders said.
+
+He then chided reporters for placing too much emphasis on the importance of each nominating contest, noting that the primaries and caucuses are not winner-take-all and saying he is in the race for the long haul.
+
+In Nevada, Sanders said, Clinton won 19 delegates to the national convention, while he received 15. (An updated count released Monday put the tally at 20 to 15). It takes about 2,400 delegates to secure the nomination, Sanders said. He predicted that the race with Clinton will be “a slog” fought “state by state by state.”",REAL
+4660,McMullin surge threatens to squeeze Trump's already narrow path to victory,"Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, won the state by nearly 50 points. Republicans hold the state's governor's office, both of its US Senate seats and all four of its US House seats. The party holds 84% of the state's House of Representatives and 79% of the state Senate.
+
+Yet Donald Trump has a very real Utah problem. And it's largely because of one relatively unknown candidate: independent Evan McMullin.
+
+In a year where third-party candidates like Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein have made waves, it's McMullin -- a candidate who fell far short of even qualifying for the ballot in all 50 states -- who stands the best chance of having a quantifiable impact on the race.
+
+That's because McMullin, according to a raft of recent polling in the Utah, is surging in the state.
+
+""People like to say that Utah is a Republican state or a deep red state. I say it's a principled conservative state,"" McMullin said in an interview Friday in his Salt Lake City campaign headquarters.
+
+McMullin's campaign is far from a powerhouse operation -- it's leanly staffed and leanly financed (it had less than $5,000 in the bank at the start of October, according to federal filings.)
+
+""Our campaign is a three-month presidential campaign, which, let me be clear to everyone, is not ideal,"" McMullin, who launched his campaign in August, says with a knowing laugh.
+
+Yet driven largely by its digital operation and about $300,000 in small dollar donations, the Provo, Utah-born McMullin and his running mate, Mindy Finn, have been bobbing back and forth ahead, or within a couple of points, of Trump in the state.
+
+To put a potential McMullin-Finn victory in perspective, it has been 48 years since a third-party candidate secured any electoral votes. It's been 52 years since Utah supported any nominee but the Republican Party's.
+
+For Trump, Utah's emergence as a potential GOP hole couldn't come at a worse time. Facing an exceedingly narrow path to victory as Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her team continue to flip potential swing states into their column, the loss of the west state's six electoral votes is equal parts unthinkable and devastating.
+
+For their part, Trump's advisers don't appear publicly concerned about the state. There's been no rash deployment of resources, either in terms of field staff or television advertising, to try and cut down McMullin's rise. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trump's running mate, stopped in the state in September, but otherwise big-name surrogates have been absent.
+
+McMullin's team says it hasn't identified any broad effort to undercut his support or credentials, short of the standard line that supporting anyone but Trump equals tacit support for a Clinton presidency. In other words, the Trump campaign is either confident that Utahns will revert to form, or supremely unaware of what both McMullin and Clinton campaign advisers say is happening on the ground in the state.
+
+McMullin's team points to the release of Trump's lewd ""Access Hollywood"" tape as the moment where gradual momentum turned into tangible numbers. The campaign saw digital engagement grow by 2,000% in the wake of the video.
+
+""What they tell us,"" says Finn, a veteran GOP campaign hand and outspoken Trump critic from the start of his campaign, ""is you've been offering a glimmer of light in what has been a sea of darkness in this 2016 election.""
+
+That message of ""principled alternative"" to Trump appeared to take on new meaning in a state where Trump already wasn't exactly welcomed with open arms.
+
+In fact, the root of Trump's problem in the state has been clear for much of the year: Mormon voters seem to want no part of his candidacy. In a state where Mormons make up more than 60% of the population, that's a big problem -- one exacerbated by top state officials, many sharing the faith, either outright rejecting Trump's candidacy or pulling their endorsements.
+
+That list includes the state's governor, Gary Herbert, who called Trump's hot mic video ""despicable""; former Gov. Jon Huntsman, who called on Trump to step aside; junior Sen. Mike Lee, long critical of Trump and even more so in the wake of the video; as well as one of the state's highest-profile congressmen, Jason Chaffetz, who pulled his endorsement of the GOP nominee.
+
+On top of all of that, in an unprecedented action, the editorial board of the Salt Lake City newspaper The Deseret News, which is owned by the Church of Latter-Day Saints, called on Trump ""to step down from his pursuit of the American presidency.""
+
+""What oozes from this audio is evil,"" the editors wrote.
+
+For his part, McMullin downplays the role his faith plays in his rise.
+
+""It's sort of like saying President Obama became president because he had the support of African-Americans,"" McMullin says. ""Every candidate has people who are like them in some way who may find it easier to understand who the candidate is and therefore maybe there's a heightened chance that they'll be supportive of that candidate. But the reality is that it's much more than that.""
+
+There's no question the tone of the race -- and the major party candidates -- appear to be driving people McMullin's way more so than his faith. A former CIA officer, Goldman Sachs banker and US House staffer, McMullin touts a strong resume and firmly conservative message as his major selling points.
+
+And while a handful of Utah state political officials have endorsed McMullin, the state's biggest, boldest names have not. But just as Obama wouldn't have won the White House without the overwhelming support of black voters, McMullin is the clear beneficiary of Mormon voters who can't come to grips with Trump has a candidate.
+
+Bemused is probably the best way to describe the Clinton campaign's view of the current state of play in Utah. They put more effort in here than traditional Democratic campaigns -- a campaign office was opened, a field staffer was deployed and Clinton officials have repeatedly made themselves available to local media. But they also acknowledge that there is a ceiling of sorts for a Democratic candidate statewide -- particularly one who holds the sky-high unfavorable ratings of Clinton. But their fight to gain ground in the state has helped create the unlikely dynamic that now exists.
+
+Driving through the neighborhoods in and around Salt Lake City with just over two weeks left until Election Day, pockets of political signs protrude in block after block, yard after yard. Blue and orange and green, big bold letters touting candidates for a variety of political offices.
+
+That is exactly the kind of opening McMullin and his team have seized on -- and one that puts them in position to make a bit of history, even if that means contributing to the loss of the GOP nominee.
+
+""We're saying even in that case, stand on principle, stand for what you know is right, stand for what kind of leadership you actually want to see in this country and lets build from there,"" McMullin says.",REAL
+4075,Proposed Bill Calls for Reconciliation Between Turkey and Armenia,"Bringing a new approach to a long-running Capitol Hill standoff, a Turkish-American coalition is pushing a new bill in Congress that will call for reconciliation and dialogue between Turkey and Armenia while sidestepping the question of whether the 1915 mass killings of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire was genocide.",REAL
+8921,No Pain No Gain? Lockheed Struggles to Finalize Deal With Pentagon on F-35 Lots,"Get short URL 0 8 0 0 US defense contractor Lockheed Martin has not yet settled with the F-35 Joint Program Office on three main contractual points regarding two low-rate initial production (LRIP) lots for the F-35 jet, and has been lagging on the schedule for roughly a year. 
+The deal on the F-35 program’s LRIP 9 and 10, originally intended to be inked in November 2015, is still in negotiations, Defense News reported. The More You Spend the More You Save?! US Lawmakers Fight to Increase F-35 Budget Lockheed’s chief financial officer, Bruce Tanner, explained during a Tuesday earnings conference call that the sides are yet to agree on the cost of fulfilling the contract obligations, terms, and conditions regarding jet construction, and the amount of money to be paid to the manufacturer.
+“I'd say we haven't really reached closure on any of those three [points],” Tanner was quoted by Defense News as saying. 
+Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson stated that the delay is normal, as the contract is “very large” and that there is “a lot of work that has to happen.” 
+During the negotiation process, Lockheed spent some $900 million of its own capital to keep the beleaguered project afloat. However, the Defense Department reimbursed the aircraft manufacturer’s expenses in a $1 billion transaction in August. Earlier this month, an additional $743 million was allocated for LRIP 9. 
+Still, Lockheed says it lacks funding to maintain the pace of production process for both LRIPs. “Despite not yet receiving funding sufficient to cover its costs, the corporation continued work in an effort to meet the customer’s desired aircraft delivery dates,” the Lockheed's news release stated. “Currently, the corporation has approximately $950 million of potential cash exposure and $2.3 billion in termination liability exposure related to the F-35 LRIP 9 and 10 contracts.” © Flickr/ Times Asi Can’t Fix the F-35? US Navy, Air Force Look Towards 6th Generation Fighter Instead Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman, a principal member of the F-35 production team, stated on Tuesday that they had settled with Lockheed on the pricing of LRIP 9 and 10, Flight Global reported.
+“We have completed our negotiations on lots 9 and 10 with Lockheed, which is typical for a prime contractor to want to lock down its supply chain as it finishes off negotiations with a customer,” Northrop chief executive Wes Bush said Tuesday. 
+The LRIP 9 and 10 effort, costing some $14 billion, suggests the production of about 150 of the jets. The troubled contract is now expected to be finalized December 2016, according to F-35 Joint Program Executive Officer Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan. ...",FAKE
+1818,"Non-confrontational style, social media aiding Ben Carson's surge in polls","When Thomas Bouwsma’s wife Patty was pregnant with their sixth child 11 years ago, they had a chance to meet Ben Carson at a community college in Grand Rapids.
+
+They were so impressed with his book Gifted Hands — which was required reading for their children during home schooling lessons — that they decided to name their son Carson.
+
+“When I got the chance to shake his hand, I patted my wife’s belly and said this one is named in your honor,” said Bouwsma, a truck driver from Grand Rapids.
+
+Eleven years later, Bouwsma traveled with Carsonto Detroit to witness his son's namesake announce that he was running for president. Six weeks later, Bouwsma contributed $1,000 to Carson’s campaign, his first political contribution..
+
+“I believe Dr. Carson stands for completely airing your views while not trying to shoot at other people in terms of dragging them down,” said the self-described Christian conservative.
+
+Bouwsma’s enthusiasm, from yard signs to the possibility of working on Carson’s campaign, is increasingly being seen around the country, as the retired pediatric neurosurgeon surges to the top tier of the large GOP presidential field.
+
+Carson’s numbers in the polls are rising both nationally and in the critical early states. A recent Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics showed Carson's favorability ratings at 79%, by far the highest of any of the 17 Republican presidential contenders.
+
+“There’s an overall mood of people willing to take a risk on someone who is outside the system and who could be disruptive to the system. And could he and Donald Trump be any more different?” said J. Ann Selzer, president of the Iowa polling firm that conducted the Iowa poll, about Carson’s surge in the polls. “Part of what Carson has going for him is that he started coming to Iowa last year. People have already gotten a feel for who is and what he stands for.”
+
+Carson has a dedicated cadre of volunteers helping with the campaign and his super PAC and a huge presence on social media with 2.6 million Facebook followers who get daily video updates from the campaign leadership. Followers also get the chance to have three questions answered each evening by the campaign.
+
+“We have a very aggressive approach to Facebook.” said Doug Watts, communications director for the campaign.
+
+So when the campaign had a recent event in Phoenix to talk about border issues, they were able to tap into their social media network and donor list and draw a crowd of 12,000, Watts said. Carson has attracted 2,000 to 3,000 people at recent events in Iowa and Colorado.
+
+“We’re looking at an event in Orange County next week. We drew a 40-mile radius around the event site and came up with 50,000 people who had donated to the campaign,” he said.
+
+Rita Davenport of Boone, Iowa, may not have donated money to Carson’s campaign but she’s putting in three to four hours every night to help out by making phone calls, walking in parades and setting up events for Carson in Iowa.
+
+Even after working her full-time job as an instructor and counselor at Des Moines Area Community College, she’s ready to organize another forum with black ministers for Carson in Des Moines. “I talked with people in the ministry and we’ll be doing more of those types of forums because he’s really the kind of person who wants to keep reaching out,” she said. “Every waking moment that I’m not in my office, I’m trying to do stuff to help get Dr. Carson elected.”
+
+As an African American, Davenport said she’s been aware of Carson for years, calling him a “living legend,” who sparked her interest even more when he challenged the policies of President Obama during a National Prayer Breakfast in 2013 while the president sat nearby. It was that “speaking truth to power” that got her pumped about the prospect of a Carson candidacy and it’s an attribute that she continues to see at campaign events in Iowa.
+
+“I see people who are really prayerful and very family friendly at these events,” she said. “And he proves that he can get his point across without yelling and calling people names.”
+
+Indeed, Mary Buerger, 88 of Hillsdale, Mich., said she’s already tired of Donald Trump, who she calls a “foghorn"" who's ""way too off the cuff.""
+
+Buerger is one of more than 275,000 unique donors who have given to Carson’s campaign, pitching in $325 for the retired neurosurgeon, who grew up in poverty on the rough and tumble southwest side of Detroit. The campaign raised $9 million in July and August and $20 million overall since Carson entered the race in May.
+
+While there are things she likes about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Carson remains her focus. When she gets polling information in the mail asking her to rank her top three candidates, she only has one name to share.
+
+“He has a method of speaking which is not confrontational, but he’s very clear in his positions. He doesn’t turn people off with the first few words that he says,” she said. “We’ve gotten to be so very confrontational and so badly divided that we need him.”
+
+It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t have political experience. In fact, that’s a plus for Buerger. “He isn’t beholden like the people who have made their mark in government. I think it’s hard for people to have that independence,” she added.
+
+Selzer said policy positions and political experience are not essential for Iowa voters, yet. “The majority of the people are saying, ‘I trust them to figure it out when they get to the White House,’ which says a lot about the mood of the voters,"" she said.",REAL
+3696,Shootings In Chattanooga: What We Know About The Alleged Gunman,"Shootings In Chattanooga: What We Know About The Alleged Gunman
+
+A day after a gunman opened fire at two military centers in Chattanooga, Tenn., and killed four Marines, authorities are trying to answer the big question: Why?
+
+At a late-night press conference, authorities said they had yet to pin down a motive. But earlier, officials identified the shooter as 24-year-old Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, who died during the course of the attack.
+
+So, who is he? Here's what we know so far:
+
+— NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports that Adbulazeez was a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Kuwait. His parents are Jordanian.
+
+— FBI Special Agent in Charge Ed Reinhold said there is nothing that ""directly ties [the gunman] to an international terrorist organization.""
+
+— Law enforcement sources tell Dina that Abdulazeez's father was investigated for ties to terrorism a couple of years ago. The Washington Post reports he was added and later removed from a terrorism watch list.
+
+— Dina reports: ""Investigators were digging into his online activity last night. He doesn't have much of an online presence and they have found no connection to terrorist groups so far. (The lack of online presence is meaningful, AQ and ISIS cases typically have a lot of online presence and griping beforehand. That didn't happen in this case.)""
+
+— People who knew Adbulazeez told news media that they were surprised that he would do a thing like this.
+
+""No one seems to have seen it coming. FBI officials said they had no warning of a pending attack. And his family and friends are baffled. "" 'They're nice people, you know?' said Elijah Wilkerson, a neighbor whose wife went on walks with Abdulazeez. 'He must have just snapped.' "" 'I never thought in a million years that it would be this guy,' said Kagan Wagner, one of his high school classmates. 'He was friendly, funny, kind.' ""
+
+— CNN reports that Abdulazeez was a wrestler and also a devout Muslim:
+
+""He at times interrupted training sessions with fighting coach [Scott] Schraeder to pray. "" 'I wouldn't call it overly religious,' Schraeder said. 'He followed his religion; he would pray at six o'clock. He'd go into our office and pray.' But he would skip prayers at times, he said. ""Schraeder does not believe he was an extremist. "" 'His favorite training partner to grapple with — not striking, but actually submission grapple with, when you're actually on the ground in close proximity contact with — was a Russian Jew, hardly what you would see as someone who would be a radical Islamist,' Schraeder said.""
+
+— The Washington Post reports that after graduating from high school, Abdulazeez earned an engineering degree from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2012.
+
+""His family was rooted in the community of Hixson, a Chattanooga suburb,"" the paper reports. ""His father, Youssef, was employed by Chattanooga's Public Works Department.""
+
+— The Times Free Press reports that Abdulazeez had one previous run-in with police: He was arrested in April for driving under the influence.
+
+— The New York Times relays much the same account about Abdulazeez: a young man who was living a fairly ordinary suburban life in the United States.
+
+But recently, the paper reports, Abdulazeez may have been changing.
+
+The Times points to a blog that the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that tracks international terrorist groups, says was kept by Abdulazeez.
+
+Note that we are spelling Abdulazeez's name differently from other news outlets. We have adopted the spelling used by FBI officials.",REAL
+1614,The fourth GOP debate is more about the party’s path than personal attacks,"The leading Republican presidential candidates clashed sharply over immigration policy, military spending, and other intractable and emotional issues in a debate here Tuesday night, bringing into sharp relief the party’s fault line between rigid conservatism and mainstream practicality.
+
+The two-hour debate spotlighted the rift between the outsider candidates and establishment governors over how strictly to enforce immigration laws and whether to provide a pathway to legal status for the country’s more than 11 million undocumented immigrants or deport them.
+
+It also revived a long-simmering dispute over the size and role of the U.S. military, with Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) warning of the potential adverse fiscal effects of increased defense spending and Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) advocating a more muscular American military presence in the world.
+
+Overall, however, it was a relatively cerebral affair. In a marked departure from the three previous debates, Tuesday’s questions prodded the candidates to explain their positions on such substantive issues as tax policy, the minimum wage and trade treaties, rather than draw contrasts with one another.
+
+Little attention was paid to the personal attacks that have shaped the race in recent weeks. On the campaign trail, billionaire Donald Trump has harshly assailed Ben Carson as the retired neurosurgeon rose in the polls, but Trump refrained from hitting his fellow front-runner on the debate stage.
+
+Similarly, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose attack on Rubio backfired at the Oct. 28 debate, did not strike his onetime protege on Tuesday night. Instead, he focused his rhetoric on President Obama and Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, delivering a few punchy answers in a performance that was not dominant but was more energetic than his earlier lackluster showings.
+
+A lengthy discussion of immigration stood out as a proxy for a debate over how Republicans can win back the White House after eight years in the wilderness: under the banner of pure and principled conservatism, or with a moderated platform designed to broaden the GOP’s appeal to Latinos and other minorities.
+
+Trump forcefully defended the controversial proposal that has ­fueled his candidacy since summer, in which he would deport all undocumented immigrants and construct a wall along the border with Mexico to keep them out.
+
+“We are a country of laws, we need borders, we will have a wall, the wall will be built, the wall will be successful, and if you think walls don’t work, all you have to do is ask Israel,” said the former reality-television star. “The wall will work, properly done. Believe me.”
+
+That drew a quick retort from Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who had been spoiling for a fight and repeatedly interrupted the questioning of other candidates to give his opinions.
+
+“For the 11 million people, come on, folks, we all know we can’t pick them up and ship them across the border,” Kasich said. “It’s a silly argument. It’s not an adult argument.”
+
+Trump then interjected with a taunt at Bush: “You should let Jeb speak.”
+
+[In early debate, two governors clash over conservative records]
+
+And the former Florida governor did just that, arguing that deporting illegal immigrants is in conflict with American values and would tear families and communities apart. Bush warned of the electoral consequences should the GOP nominee campaign with Trump’s position.
+
+“They’re doing high-fives in the Clinton campaign right now when they hear this,” Bush said. “That’s the problem with this. We have to win the presidency, and the way you win the presidency is to have practical plans.”
+
+Soon after, Brian Fallon, a Clinton campaign spokesman, tweeted, “We actually are doing high-fives right now.”
+
+Cruz, however, sided with Trump. “If Republicans join Democrats as the party of amnesty, we will lose,” the senator from Texas said.
+
+Cruz said that for many voters, illegal immigration is “a very personal economic issue,” and he added: “We’re tired of being told it’s ‘anti-immigrant.’ It’s offensive. I am the son of an immigrant who came legally from Cuba to seek the American Dream, and we can embrace legal immigration while believing in the rule of law.”
+
+Tuesday’s debate, the fourth so far in the Republican race, was hosted by Fox Business Network and the Wall Street Journal before a live audience at a historic theater in downtown Milwaukee.
+
+There were eight candidates in the main debate — the smallest group to share the big stage so far — as national polling averages winnowed the top tier. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee were relegated for the first time to an earlier undercard debate, where both faced sharp attacks from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal over their records on fiscal policy and other issues.
+
+[The Take: Candidates set aside personal attacks to address economics]
+
+For the moderators, the event brought added scrutiny in the wake of the Oct. 28 debate in Boulder, Colo., which was a chaotic affair. CNBC’s moderators were sharply criticized for the tone and personal nature of their questioning, and the candidates felt they were being baited to attack one another rather than asked about substance.
+
+From the outset of Tuesday night’s debate, the moderators sought to set a different tone. Co-moderator Neil Cavuto said the focus of the debate would be “the economy and what each of you would do to improve it. No more, no less.”
+
+The first questions were about Democratic proposals to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. There are varying views within the Republican Party about the minimum wage, with 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney among those supporting an increase, which polls show is widely popular.
+
+But Trump and Carson said they would not raise it, arguing an increase would inhibit job growth.
+
+“Taxes too high; wages too high,” Trump said. “We’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum.”
+
+Carson said, “Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases,” especially among black people. He said the better question is: “How do we allow people to ascend the ladder of opportunity rather than how do we give them everything and keep them dependent?”
+
+Kasich, who has raised the minimum wage in Ohio, took a more moderate approach. “Economic theory is fine,” he said, “but you know what? People need help.”
+
+Later in the evening, an extended series of questions about the candidates’ tax plans sparked a fight between Rubio and Paul over the size of the military and defense budget.
+
+“I know Rand is a committed isolationist. I’m not,” Rubio said, earning loud cheers from the crowd. “. . . I know that the world is a safer and better place when America is the strongest military power in the world.”
+
+Paul persisted, warning that the country could ill afford to spend more money on the military: “I want a strong national defense. But I don’t want us to be bankrupt.”
+
+Cruz interjected, siding with Rubio: “You think defending this nation is expensive? Try not defending it. That’s a lot more expensive.”
+
+Former business executive Carly Fiorina also delivered tough lines about the military and the United States’ role in Syria, but she also accused Trump of bluster when he talked about his past associations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.
+
+At one point, Trump snapped: “Why does she keep interrupting everybody?”
+
+The crowd booed loudly, but unlike in previous debates, Fiorina did not respond to Trump.
+
+Meanwhile, Carson — who has built a powerful following among grass-roots conservatives with his soft-spoken approach — faced virtually no scrutiny from the moderators or fellow candidates over the veracity of his personal narrative, which has been the subject of recent media investigations.
+
+When Cavuto asked Carson whether the scrutiny was engulfing his campaign, Carson seemed pleased to have the chance to clear the air.
+
+“Thank you for not asking me what I said in the 10th grade,” Carson said. “We should vet all candidates. I have no problem with being vetted. What I do have a problem with is being lied about and then putting that out there as truth.”
+
+He added: “People who know me know that I’m an honest person.”",REAL
+10091,"PIERS MORGAN: “Get Off Your High Horse, Hillary. Only ONE Candidate is Up To Her Neck in FBI Probes and Her Name Isn’t Donald” – TruthFeed","Breaking News PIERS MORGAN: “Get Off Your High Horse, Hillary. Only ONE Candidate is Up To Her Neck in FBI Probes and Her Name Isn’t Donald” PIERS MORGAN: “Get Off Your High Horse, Hillary. Only ONE Candidate is Up To Her Neck in FBI Probes and Her Name Isn’t Donald” Breaking News By TruthFeedNews November 4, 2016 
+By Piers Morgan When I competed in Donald Trump ’s first season of Celebrity Apprentice , he pitched me in the finale against country music star Trace Adkins. NBC promoted our showdown in endless commercials as ‘USA versus UK, good versus evil.’ Trace was portrayed as a strong, kind, polite, hard-working, all-American hero. I was depicted as an arrogant, obnoxious, ruthless British villain. There was just one problem, as I pointed out to Trump in a boardroom exchange that tragically never got aired. ‘One of us,’ I explained, ‘is a violent alcoholic who’s been shot by an ex-wife, stabbed in bar-room knife fights, and has a criminal record for a DUI.’ I competed in Donald Trump’s first season of Celebrity Apprentice – and I was once portrayed as evil, not unlike how Donald has been branded these days Yesterday, Hillary Clinton showed she didn’t get the ‘rise above the monster’ memo, shrieking herself hoarse (pictured today speaking in North Carolina) I paused for effect. ‘The other…. is me…. the bad guy.’ Trump roared with laughter. He got the irony, even if viewers never got the chance to. I was reminded of this today as I watched President Obama tear into Trump, branding him a small-brained, star-f***ing, Ku Klux Klan tolerating ‘loser’ born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It was an astonishingly personal and nasty attack from a man whose own wife Michelle recently declared from atop her lofty moral plinth: ‘When they go low, we go high.’ Yesterday, Hillary Clinton showed she didn’t get the ‘rise above the monster’ memo either, shrieking herself hoarse as she once again laid into Trump supporters she recently described as ‘The Deplorables’. ‘I am sick and tired of the negative, dark, divisive, dangerous vision and the anger of people who support Donald Trump,’ she raged. This follows a familiar pattern from Team Clinton as election day draws closer: when in doubt, trash Trump and his followers in the meanest, ugliest, most personal way possible. The mantra seems to be: ‘When they go low, we plummet even lower.’ A similar mistake was made in Britain during the EU referendum debate when the Remain campaigners belittled and berated the Brexiters in a snide, sneering, superior manner. They lost. The problem for Mrs Clinton as she gallops across the fields of America like a crusading white knight trying to single-handedly save the nation from imminent Armageddon at the hands of Mr Evil is that she’s the Trace Adkins of this battle. In other words, she ain’t no saint herself. Her supporters don’t accept this of course. To them, Hillary is a vestal political virgin of unimpeachable integrity. ‘Why would I want to criticise her?’ a female Clinton-ite actress indignantly asked me on Twitter yesterday. ‘She’s up against a mad man. Compared to him, she’s bathed in golden light.’ It was the kind of thing I’d expect Tom Cruise to say in defence of his beloved basket case Scientologists. Yet as I write this, Clinton is facing potential FBI criminal investigations on two fronts. One is the re-opened case of her ongoing email scandal, this time centering on the contents of sexting pervert Anthony Weiner’s laptop. The second, according to the Washington Post, is an investigation into an alleged ‘pay-or-play’ operation Hillary ran out of the State Department that favoured donors to the Clinton Foundation charity. At the root of it lies a central charge that the Clintons have cynically and greedily exploited political power and status to enrich themselves, under the convenient protective umbrella of their Foundation. Big sponsors have been repeatedly ‘invited’ to donate big sums to the Foundation, then also donate big sums to the personal fortunes of Bill or Hillary in the form of cash, holidays, private jets and other benefits. On the face of it, this seems like a prima facie case of potential corruption. Yet the Post further reports the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation has been held up by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, to the fury of many in the FBI. This is the same Loretta Lynch who Bill Clinton hijacked for a 30-minute conversation on a private airstrip days before the original FBI email investigation verdict exonerating his wife was made public. We can all draw our own conclusions, none of them I suspect very pretty. I know from first-hand experience there’s no such thing as a free lunch with the Clintons. There is no such thing as a free lunch with the Clintons. I know from my own dealings it’s quid-pro-quo: Bill would scratch my back if I scratched his I’ve interviewed Bill Clinton twice, for CNN. On both occasions, the request was only granted once I had agreed to moderate a panel for the former president at his annual Clinton Global Initiative event in aid of Clinton Foundation. It was a strict quid-pro-quo: Bill would scratch my back if I scratched his. So I scratched away, as do many other TV journalists each year who want an interview with him. There’s a similar pattern to almost everything in Planet Clinton: they trade favours. But when that trade involves millions of dollars raked into personal bank accounts on the back of charity donations, it stinks to high heaven. ‘Trace’ Clinton should get off her high horse, before she gets a nosebleed. 
+H/T – DailyMail 
+Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+4768,Diehard GOP mom: No mother could ever vote for Trump,"A president hellbent on destroying human decency would be toxic for my son and daughters.
+
+Listen up, fellow Republican moms, it's time to say enough is enough. It was time even before Donald Trump’s vulgar boasts about what he could do to women because of his status, before a parade of women accused him of actions matching those words. No mother should ever vote for this man.
+
+Don't get me wrong. I do get your initial hesitancy. You disagree with much of the Democratic platform. And you probably aren’t too fond of Hillary Clinton. Fine. I don’t love her politics much either, but, come on now. It’s time to wise up.
+
+I have stood with the Republican Party since my first election back in 1984, when I pulled the lever for the original ""Make America Great Again"" candidate, Ronald Reagan. I am the daughter of a longtime Republican, a man who worked under George W. Bush, was fired by President Obama, and was a passionate, respectful advocate for conservative views until his death in June.
+
+But this is now the party of Donald Trump, and I can tell you for this card-carrying, die-hard Republican, this time around it’s got nothing to do with platforms and politics. I am a mom of three children, a son who is 16 and two daughters ages 13 and 11. And I know there is no wall that will protect my kids from a man hellbent on destroying the common core of human decency.
+
+Think about it. From the moment they are born, we teach our children how to act. We demonstrate through our words and our actions how to speak with respect, embrace kindness, work for change with a humble and open heart. Then along comes Trump and the Republicans who so sheepishly stand behind their candidate simply because he is a Republican. Almost overnight, they have legitimized a cesspool of hypocrisy and hatred.
+
+These are the facts: If we let Trump become president, we are saying to our children that respect for others doesn’t matter. We are saying to our daughters that it is OK when a man belittles a woman based on her gender or her body type, and that your value is solely based on your looks.
+
+We are saying to our children that money is power and power is a license to bully, to “punch him in the face” just because he may disagree. And we are saying to all our children, forget everything we have ever taught you — forget that compassion and morals matter, forget that our differences are what make our country great, forget the need to stand up for what is right.
+
+If we elect Trump, we are telling our kids that it’s OK to be a narcissistic, antagonistic, egotistical SOB and that there are no rules if your tongue is sharp enough and your pocket is deep enough. And by blindly supporting a nominee just because he has the stamp of approval from your party, we are saying to our children, just stand in line, join the masses, do what’s expected. Because in the end, there is nothing you can do, so why bother caring?
+
+Except I do care. And I will never accept a candidate who uses power and words to intimidate rather than to protect. Instead, I will teach my children to always be willing to stand up because idle threats are but a shield for insecurity and incompetence. I will never allow a man to condemn an entire community simply because of a skin color, gender or faith; instead, I will remind my children that we are all the same on the inside.
+
+I will never accept a man who shouts insults from his pedestal, and I see no need to support his statements. Instead, I will require my children to speak intelligently, to always back up their arguments with real evidence, and to listen and engage with respect. I will never support a man who seemingly believes women are mere sex objects and says, ""When you're a star they let you do it."" And I will never vote for a person who believes that “I alone can fix it.” Instead, I will help my children look for what they can do together to make a difference, because it does take a village.
+
+I am a Republican. But I am also a mom. And as I watch Donald Trump and the Republican Party this election year, I cannot allow the destructiveness of his words and lessons to take root within my children. I may be a Party girl, but I sure as hell am not an idiot. So I say to all my fellow Republican moms: I am jumping ship, and for the sake of our kids, I hope you do too.
+
+Jenny Tananbaum is a New Jersey-based mom, writer and community volunteer.
+
+You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.",REAL
+140,GRAPHIC VIDEO Shows White Officer Shooting Unarmed Black Man In Back,"North Charleston Police Officer Michael T. Slager, 33, can be seen shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott after a confrontation on Saturday, according to The Post and Courier. Slager chases Scott and shoots at him eight times in the video recorded by a passerby and obtained by The New York Times.
+
+The confrontation started when Slager had reportedly pulled over Scott because of a broken taillight. It escalated into a foot chase as Scott allegedly fled because there were family court-issued warrants for his arrest. Slager pursued Scott into a grassy lot and claimed that he fired his Taser to subdue him.
+
+Earlier this week, an attorney for Slager said the cop felt threatened after Scott tried to overpower him and take his Taser. Today that attorney told The Post and Courier that he's ""no longer involved"" in the case.
+
+But first images in the video are of Slager shooting at Scott as he runs away from him. It also appears that Slager drops the Taser near Scott after he was gunned down, according to The New York Times.
+
+Police reports also say that responding officers performed CPR and delivered medical aid to Scott, but the video shows Scott face down in handcuffs for several minutes after the shooting. Another officer shows up and appears to give Scott aid, but never performs CPR.
+
+Police Chief Eddie Driggers said Tuesday that Slager had been arrested. The U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement that FBI investigators would work with the State Law Enforcement Division, which typically investigates officer-involved shootings in South Carolina, and the state’s attorney general to investigate any civil rights violations in Scott’s death. Mayor Keith Summey added during a news conference that as a result of the video and Slager’s “bad decision,” the officer would be charged with murder.
+
+Scott had been arrested about 10 times in the past, mostly for failing to pay child support or show up for hearings, according to the paper.
+
+""He has four children, he doesn’t have some type of big violent past or arrest record. He had a job, he was engaged,"" a lawyer for Scott's family told the Times. ""He had back child support and didn’t want to go to jail for back child support.""
+
+In a statement released Tuesday night, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R) said, ""What happened in this case is not acceptable in South Carolina."" Senator Tim Scott (R) said ""The senseless shooting and taking of Walter Scott's life was absolutely unnecessary and avoidable,"" adding that he would be watching the case closely.
+
+The shooting in North Charleston comes on the heels of several high-profile cases of police officers using deadly force against unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, Cleveland and New York. This is one of the few times the offending officer has been charged with murder.
+
+""What if there was no video? What if there was no witness? Where would we be without that video,"" Justin Bamberg said at a presser with the family on Tuesday night. Bamburg is one of the Scotts' family attorneys and also represents South Carolina's House District 90.
+
+Family attorney L. Chris Stewart called the witness who recorded the video a ""hero,"" saying that video evidence disproved initial reports that Scott reached for the Slager's Taser. Stewart added that the witness is working with investigators and may eventually come forward.
+
+""If there was no video, I do not believe that officer would be in jail,"" Bamberg said. ""From what the video shows, I think that provides the necessary ammunition to hold this officer accountable.""
+
+""I don't think anybody can see that and not see that what that officer did was murder Mr. Scott in cold blood,"" Bamberg said. ""What would have happened if this witness did not have the courage to stand up and do the right thing and decide that what he witnessed was wrong? I'm glad we don't have to ponder that.""",REAL
+3193,GOP 2016 candidates look to seize momentum out of debates,"A day after the Fox News-Facebook Republican presidential primary debates, contenders for the nomination tried to capitalize on momentum Friday by firing up their base at a gathering of grassroots conservative.
+
+At the 2015 RedState Gathering in Atlanta, a host of Republican 2016 hopefuls including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tried to build on strong performances the night before.
+
+The gathering, named after the conservative political website RedState.com, is the brainchild of WSB Radio host Erick Erickson. The three-day convention of top GOP elected officials brought a host of 2016 contenders hoping to establish themselves as favorites among the conservative base.
+
+All three sought to stir up the base with biting speeches that used humor while showcasing their conservative principles.
+
+“2016 is going to be a fight, a real fight, between conservatism and the progressivism that has completely dominated the Democrat Party and that is now not only undermining the character of our nation but crushing the potential of this nation,” Fiorina, whom analysts seemed to agree dominated Thursday's 5 p.m. Fox News-Facebook debate, told participants.
+
+“In order to win [in 2016], we’re going to have a nominee who throws every punch, who will not ever pull her punches,” Fiorina said.
+
+Both Fiorina and Christie took aim at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – an unpopular organization among many grassroots conservatives – with Christie blaming it for Republicans not properly dealing with the problem of illegal immigration.
+
+“The reason we’re not dealing with immigration as strongly as we need to be in my opinion is because of the Chamber of Commerce crowd,” Christie said. “Because they want to employ illegal folks and they don’t want to use E-Verify.”
+
+Fiorina asked: “What does the Chamber of Commerce do, remind me?”
+
+Meanwhile, Rubio received big cheers for emphasizing his plan to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare, and spent much of his speech talking about solutions to the issue of student loans and the cost of higher education, arguing for more competition and innovation to break the monopoly of higher education.
+
+“I believe before you take a loan, schools should have to tell you ‘this is how much people make when they graduate with a degree you are seeking from our school.’ And then you can decide if it’s smart to borrow $50,000 to be a Greek or Roman philosopher, because the market for those philosophers has tightened in the last 2000 years,” Rubio quipped to laughter from the audience.
+
+The participants also had choice words for President Obama’s policies, with Christie promising to repeal his “illegal” executive actions and slamming his economic record.
+
+“It is just disgraceful that we are sitting with a president who takes a victory lap for the worst economic growth in post-World War II history,” Christie said, while also calling for a radical simplification of the tax code.
+
+“Imagine how many people I could fire from the IRS if you could do your taxes in 15 minutes.” Christie said.
+
+Meanwhile Rubio took aim at Obama’s foreign policy, specifically his approaches to Iran and Israel, saying, “we have a president who is more respectful of the Ayatollah of Iran than the prime minister of Israel.”
+
+Other candidates at the gathering included Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The lineup was due to be followed up on Saturday with appearances by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, business mogul Donald Trump and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
+
+The gathering adopted a similar tone to Thursday's debate, which was filled with lots of jabbing one-liners that resonated with the audience, and vitriol aimed at the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton. The Republicans sparred with each other plenty on Thursday, but nobody landed a KO, leaving the 17-candidate field intact heading out of the Cleveland showdown.",REAL
+3564,Feds Arrest Two Women In New York City In Alleged Terror Plot,"Two women with an interest in violent jihad were arrested in Queens, New York, Thursday morning as part of an FBI sting, after allegedly plotting to create explosive devices to use in a terrorist attack in the United States.
+
+Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, had allegedly taken several steps toward constructing an explosive device and discussed their activities with an undercover officer, according to court documents. They had not yet identified a target for their planned attack, federal authorities said. The defendants are U.S. citizens who live in Queens and were roommates until recently.
+
+During regular meetings between the two women and the undercover agent, both women espoused jihadist beliefs and praised past terrorist attacks in the United States. Velentzas allegedly showed the officer her cell phone, which had a background image of Osama bin Laden holding an AK-47. Siddiqui once said that Velentzas had been obsessed with pressure cookers since the Boston Marathon bombings, and Velentzas joked about how she planned to cook ""food"" in a pressure cooker she had recently purchased.
+
+It appears Velentzas eventually became suspicious of the undercover agent's identity, allegedly using her phone in November and December to access webpages with titles like ""Learning the Identity of a Confidential Informant,"" ""How to Spot Undercover Police,"" ""Is S/he an Informant?"" She also researched how to detect bugs.
+
+Yet she and Siddiqui continued to meet with the agent in the months that followed. Siddiqui purchased several propane tanks and stored them in her basement, and discussed them during the meetings. ""I got everything up in this joint, I already told you. If you guys... once we learn... I got everything up in this joint,"" she allegedly said. ""Yo, she got everything. This is like the Home Depot,"" the undercover agent responded.
+
+Velentzas then asked Siddiqui why she hadn't told them that she had purchased the tanks, but Siddiqui insisted she had. ""She's the master of not telling you shit that's really important,"" Velentzas said, later telling the undercover agent that they had to ""keep it a hundred"" so they could trust one another.
+
+""Cause how could you have a... have a open conversation about some shit that is uhm... federal-time worthy shit and the person... you know... is... half-ass in communication?"" Velentzas said. ""I""m gonna die for your ass and you don't communicate?""
+
+Federal authorities apparently have been aware of the women for a number of years. Velentzas ""expressed violent jihadist ideology and an interest in terrorism"" in meetings with the undercover agent back in 2013, and said that being a martyr guarantees entrance into heaven. Siddiqui allegedly wrote a poem in 2009 for a magazine called Jihad Recollections, which was a predecessor to the al-Qaeda publication Inspire, and sent a letter to a man arrested for trying to detonate a bomb during a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, in 2010. She had repeated contact with members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to court documents.",REAL
+5457,Trump or Clinton - Life or Death,"Print There will be no end to History until there is an end to events. Current events are the History of the future. However, History can be lost. People can ignore their past, live only in the now, and leave their future to chance. History provides the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others, as well as the chance to build upon what others have learned. To ignore these two paths to success gives life to the notion that failure to plan is planning to fail. All Americans should cherish their History. We left a known and secure world for a new one. We turned an untamed land into one bustling with enterprise and development. We stood against the world’s greatest superpower to assert that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We made it through a sectarian war and clawed our way from the outskirts of an Atlantic culture to the pinnacle of global dominance. Our industry, our education, our health care system, our culture , and our military became the epitome of western civilization and the envy of the entire world. There was a time in America when every child was infused with the story of America rising from nothing to the apex of power, a time when everyone was taught in Civics class about the declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the melting pot that made us the embodiment of E pluribus unum : out of many, one. Today, after the Progressives and that destroyer of education, the Department of Education, has worked for generations to dumb us down from individuals using personal freedom to succeed to induhviduals using a pack mentality to follow the herd to a ride in the entitlement hammock . Now, we glory in being a smelting pot where the cheerleaders of fragmentation parrot, “Diversity is our strength,” as we unravel into warring factions. Hyphenated Americans of every color, creed, and ethnicity now jockey for their place in the queue as government goodies are doled out to preferred groups. Where we are today: A culture of death swallows a culture of life. A terminally ill Californian woman determined to be with her four young children for as long as she could was reportedly denied an expensive chemotherapy treatment — but won approval for a lethal drug to legally end her life. We even have a presidential candidate who says we have to ban guns to save the children, yet we need to keep partial birth abortions legal to kill the babies, and no one in the media has the insight or the integrity to call her on it. Not only is New York’s Sixth Crime Family guilty of pay to play, they are also guilty of bribe to walk: The charge - A Hillary Clinton ally donated almost $500,000 to the campaign of the wife of an FBI official who helped oversee the agency's probe of Clinton's email server. The particulars - Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, donated almost $500,000 to the campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, wife of Federal Bureau of Investigation deputy director Andrew McCabe. A serial liar, unindicted co-conspirator with a notoriously philandering husband is going to win the votes of millions of low information voters, government dependents, and dead people. Early voting has started, and not only is the expected fraud showing up immediately, the imported voters are turning out en mass for open borders and an end to America as America: Residents of at least two cities in Texas are complaining that they voted for Donald Trump , only to see the voting machine switch their ballot to Hillary Clinton . And illegal immigrants have been caught on tape stuffing ballot boxes during early voting. Corruption is accepted as the norm in today’s America, with a totally corrupt Hillary Clinton presented as a viable presidential candidate. Bill Clinton’s type of lewd behavior, once considered unacceptable, is swept under the rug as our culture sinks to its lowest common denominator. Life is being swallowed by death, and a shining city on the hill is being remade into a squalid third world hell hole that will use our grandchildren as beasts of burden to support the human debris of failed states. The America of “Give us liberty or give us death” has morphed into “Give me bread and circuses.” Throw a six pack over the fence and beam a game to the flat screen and the descendants of the pioneers are ready to roll over and cash their next government check. This may be the trail chosen for us by the blind guides of the left. This may be the end of western civilization and the death of life conjured up by the globalist puppet masters who pull the strings in this final act of the Progressive Putsch; however, I choose another way. I choose to vote for Donald Trump. I choose to vote for America first. Two things ring in my mind as I contemplate this election: “ I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; 20 that you may love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days; and that you may dwell in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them.” And “ And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” shares",FAKE
+1352,"Trump, Clinton cautiously optimistic ahead of Iowa caucuses","Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas scored a hard-fought upset win over businessman Donald Trump in the Iowa Republican caucuses Monday night, while former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont were locked in a virtual tie on the Democratic side with most of the votes counted.
+
+Cruz made good on his bet that a methodical campaign organization would eclipse Trump’s media dominance in the first test of Republican voters. With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Cruz was beating his rival by more than 5,100 votes, with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida a close third.
+
+Cruz appeared to capitalize on deep support from religious and social conservatives and showed that old-fashioned retail politicking could overcome Trump’s massive political rallies in the Hawkeye State.
+
+“God bless the great state of Iowa,” Cruz told supporters at his campaign’s Iowa headquarters after embracing his wife, Heidi. “Tonight is a victory for the grass roots. Tonight is a victory for courageous conservatives across Iowa and all across this great nation. Iowa has sent notice that the Republican nominee and the next president of the United States will not be chosen by the media, will not be chosen by the Washington establishment, will not be chosen by the lobbyists.”
+
+Clinton had been a clear front-runner in Iowa last summer, as she hoped to make up for her loss to Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic caucuses. But Sanders, hammering a message about economic inequities in the middle class, narrowed the margin in Iowa into a dead heat in the final days, and the results could presage a long, grueling fight to the nomination. He maintains a polling advantage in New Hampshire, which will hold its primaries next week.
+
+With 95 percent of the precincts reporting, Clinton had 49.8 percent of the vote to Sanders’s 49.6 percent. Clinton, joined by her husband, former president Bill Clinton, and daughter Chelsea, addressed supporters before the final tally was in, saying she was “breathing a sigh of relief.”
+
+“It is rare that we have the opportunity we have now to have a real contest of ideas, to really think hard about what the Democratic Party stands for,” Clinton said. “I am excited about really getting into the debate with Senator Sanders about the best way forward to fight for us and America.”
+
+Sanders, accompanied by wife, Jane, appeared in front of a jubilant crowd that chanted “Feel the Bern!” He said that his showing against Clinton sent a message to the political and media establishments that “given the enormous crises facing our country, it is just too late for establishment politics and establishment economics.”
+
+The night also began to winnow the field on both sides. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, the only other major Democratic candidate, had negligible support and suspended his campaign Monday night, according to a person close to the campaign. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a Republican, also suspended his campaign.
+
+The crowded Republican field and lively debates appeared to boost interest in the race. A record 185,000 people took part in the GOP caucuses, increasing the 2012 turnout by 5.4 percent, according to estimates from Edison Media Research.
+
+Trump had led the Republican polls since last summer, shortly after he declared his candidacy, and he seemed to rewrite the traditional rules and expectations of national political campaigns. Yet his outsider appeal, which swelled crowds at rallies, failed to translate entirely to the caucus turnout, and some political analysts questioned his decision to drop out of the final GOP debate last week.
+
+Appearing before supporters at his Iowa headquarters, Trump congratulated Cruz, but he reminded his audience of how far he had come.
+
+“On June 16, when I started this journey, there were 17 candidates. I was told by everybody, ‘Do not go to Iowa. You could never finish even in the top 10,’ ” Trump said. “We finished second. . . .We will go on to get the Republican nomination, and we will go on to beat Hillary or Bernie or whoever they throw up there.”
+
+Cruz, who had surged to a polling lead in Iowa by December but fell behind to Trump in the past few days, outperformed his final polling results in Iowa. Aides touted a strong ground game in which the senator appeared at events in all 99 counties. Cruz had 28 percent of the vote, with Trump at 24 percent and Rubio at 23.
+
+Supporters at Cruz headquarters cheered loudly when their candidate was shown on a giant video screen. A cover band played songs of Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash as the audience exchanged hi-fives and hoisted drinks.
+
+“That’s priceless. You’re fired!” Cruz precinct captain Ted Sturgill said, using Trump’s catchphrase from “The Apprentice” television show against him.
+
+Whether Cruz can translate the win into similar success in New Hampshire is uncertain, as the past two Iowa winners, Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum in 2012 and Huckabee in 2008, failed to win the nomination.
+
+Rubio did far better than expected, with a late rally as he sought to consolidate support among establishment Republicans who have doubted Trump and Cruz. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who started the campaign as a prohibitive front-runner with a massive campaign war chest, finished way back in the pack. Bush wasn’t even in the state on Monday, campaigning instead in New Hampshire.
+
+“They told me I needed to wait my turn, that I needed to wait in line,” Rubio told an enthusiastic crowd at his Iowa headquarters.
+
+“Tonight here in Iowa, the people in this great state sent a very clear message that after seven years of Barack Obama, we are not waiting any longer to take our country back,” Rubio said.
+
+Voters gathered at caucus sites in 99 counties around the state. The last-minute lobbying officially began at 7 p.m. Central time, with votes following. Political operatives predicted a high turnout — and there were reports that some sites were so packed that officials had trouble closing the doors, despite a significant snowstorm that was bearing down on the state. Forecasters said the storm would probably hit after the caucuses were closed.
+
+“I pray we will win,” Cruz said during a stop at a Baptist church in Marion.
+
+Trump and Sanders made their final pushes Monday to coax nontraditional voters to the caucuses, even as their chief rivals suggested that well-tested organizing tactics would give them the crucial margin of victory.
+
+Television networks showed Trump, in a solid red tie, visiting a caucus site in West Des Moines with his wife, Melania, in a matching all-red ensemble, and taking a seat in the front row. One woman approached and posed with him for a selfie on her mobile phone.
+
+“We are going to bring our country back,” Trump told the crowd, speaking into a microphone. Reflecting on a campaign that was dismissed early on by the political establishment in Washington, Trump said: “It’s really been a journey, an amazing journey. I’m a messenger. We’re going to run it the way it’s supposed to be run — as a great, great country.”
+
+[Here’s how the voting in Iowa works]
+
+There was little question that the lack of an incumbent, coupled with the unconventional style of several candidates, has sparked Iowans’ interest in the race this year. Jeff Kaufmann, who chairs the Iowa Republican Party, said his office has received five to six times as many calls compared with past years.
+
+“The phone calls at the Republican Party of Iowa headquarters are absolutely unprecedented. I mean, we’re looking at 100 an hour, literally,” he said. “Now, obviously, not all of that is tied to Donald Trump. There’s also a lot of these calls that are going to a variety of candidates. But I think that’s a sign of the enthusiasm.”
+
+[6 Iowans explain how they’re deciding whom to vote for]
+
+Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R) echoed that assessment in an interview, saying that Trump has “turned out bigger crowds than we’ve ever seen before.”
+
+“I know everybody is saying, ‘Are they just coming for curiosity?’ But I think they’re for real; they’re committed and will show up for caucuses,” Branstad said. “I’ve been pretty impressed with what they’ve done.
+
+“Of course, we saw this phenomenon eight years ago with Obama,” he said, referring to Obama’s first White House bid. “It was beyond what anyone could have imagined, and I think Trump is a phenomenon, too.”
+
+The Democratic field was much smaller but no less competitive. Clinton, whose comfortable lead in Iowa evaporated earlier this year, has scrambled to try to fend off Sanders, who has attracted massive crowds and an intense grass-roots following that put an Iowa upset within reach.
+
+Sanders was encircled by volunteers and a crush of reporters as he arrived late Monday morning at his Iowa headquarters in a strip shopping center outside downtown Des Moines.
+
+“We have come a long, long way in the last nine months,” the senator told his supporters. “You’ve got a tied ball game, that’s where we are.”
+
+Sanders also pushed back against critics who have suggested his agenda is too radical. “Our platform, our agenda, is precisely what the American people want,” he said.
+
+Eilperin and Nakamura reported from Washington. Sean Sullivan, Robert Costa, Katie Zezima, Philip Rucker and John Wagner in Des Moines, and Abby Phillip in Council Bluffs, Iowa, contributed to this report.",REAL
+10419,Trump in the White House    : Information," Trump in the White House By Noam Chomsky
+November 14, CJ Polychroniou : Noam, the unthinkable has happened: in contrast to all forecasts, Donald Trump scored a decisive victory over Hillary Clinton and the man that Michael Moore described as “wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath” is the next president of the United States. In your view, what were the deciding factors that led American voters produce the biggest upset in the history of US politics?
+Noam Chomsky : Before turning to this question, I think it is important to spend a few moments pondering just what happened on November 8, a date that might turn out to be one of the most important in human history, depending on how we react.
+No exaggeration.
+The most important news of November 8 was barely noted, a fact of some significance in itself.
+On November 8, the World Meteorological Organization delivered a report at the international conference on climate change in Morocco, COP22, which was called in order to carry forward the Paris agreements of COP21. The WMO reported that the past five years were the hottest on record. It reported rising sea levels, soon to increase as a result of the unexpectedly rapid melting of polar ice, most ominously the huge Antarctic glaciers. Already Arctic sea ice over the past five years is 28 percent below the average of the previous 29 years, not only raising sea levels but also reducing the cooling effect of polar ice reflection of solar rays, thereby accelerating the grim effects of global warming. The WMO reported further that temperatures are approaching dangerously close to the goal established by COP21, along with other dire reports and forecasts.
+Another event took place on November 8, which also may turn out to be of unusual historical significance for reasons that, once again, were barely noted.
+On November 8, the most powerful country in world history, which will set its stamp on what comes next, had an election. The outcome placed total control of the government – the executive, Congress, the Supreme Court – in the hands of the Republican Party, the most dangerous organization in world history.
+Apart from the last phrase, all of this is uncontroversial. The last phrase may seem outlandish, even outrageous. But is it? The facts suggest otherwise. The Party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand.
+Is this an exaggeration? Consider what we have just been witnessing.
+During the Republican primaries, every candidate denied that what is happening is happening – with the exception of the sensible moderates, like Jeb Bush, who said it’s all uncertain but we don’t have to do anything because we’re producing more natural gas, thanks to fracking. Or John Kasich, who agreed that global warming is taking place but added that “we are going to burn [coal] in Ohio and we are not going to apologize for it.” The winning candidate, now the President-elect, calls for rapid increase in use of fossil fuels, including coal; dismantling of regulations; rejection of help to developing countries that are seeking to move to sustainable energy; and in general racing to the cliff as fast as possible.
+Trump has already taken steps to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency by placing in charge of the EPA transition a notorious (and proud) climate change denier, Myron Ebell. Trump’s top adviser on energy, billionaire oil executive Harold Hamm, announced his expectations, which were predictable: dismantling regulations, tax cuts for the industry (and the wealthy and corporate sector generally), more fossil fuel production, lifting Obama’s temporary block on the Dakota Access pipeline. The market reacted quickly. Shares in energy corporations boomed, including the world’s largest coal miner, Peabody Energy, which had filed for bankruptcy, but after Trump’s victory registered a 50% gain.
+The effects of Republican denialism had already been felt. There had been hopes that the COP21 Paris agreement would lead to a verifiable treaty, but any such thoughts were abandoned because the Republican Congress would not accept any binding commitments, so what emerged was a voluntary agreement, evidently much weaker.
+Effects may soon become even more vividly apparent than they already are. In Bangladesh alone, tens of millions are expected to have to flee from low-lying plains in coming years because of sea level rise and more severe weather, creating a migrant crisis that will make today’s pale into insignificance. With considerable justice, Bangladesh’s leading climate scientist says that “These migrants should have the right to move to the countries from which all these greenhouse gases are coming. Millions should be able to go to the United States.” And to the other rich countries that have grown wealthy while bringing about a new geological era, the Anthropocene, marked by radical human transformation of the environment. These catastrophic consequences can only increase, not just in Bangladesh but in all of South Asia as temperatures, already intolerable for the poor, inexorably rise and the Himalayan glaciers melt, threatening the entire water supply. Already in India some 300 million people are reported to lack drinking water. And the effects will reach far beyond.
+It is hard to find words to capture the fact that humans are facing the most important question in their history – whether organized human life will survive in anything like the form we know – and are answering it by accelerating the race to disaster. Similar observations hold for the other huge issue concerning human survival, the threat of nuclear destruction that has been looming over our heads for 70 years, and is now increasing.
+It is no less difficult to find words to capture the utterly astonishing fact that in all of the massive coverage of the electoral extravaganza, none of this receives more than passing mention. At least I am at a loss to find appropriate words.
+Turning finally to the question raised, to be precise it appears that Clinton received a slight majority of the vote. The apparent decisive victory has to do with curious features of American politics: among other factors, the electoral college residue of the founding of the country as an alliance of separate states; the winner-take-all system in each state; arrangement of congressional districts (sometimes by gerrymandering) to provide greater weight to rural votes (in past elections, probably this one too, Democrats have had a comfortable margin of victory in popular vote for the House but hold a minority of seats); the very high rate of abstention (usually close to half in presidential elections, this one too). Of some significance for the future is the fact that in the 18-25 range, Clinton won handily, and Sanders had an even higher level of support. How much this matters depends on what kind of future humanity will face.
+According to current information, Trump broke all records in the support he received from white voters, working class and lower middle class, particularly in the $50,000 to $90,000 income range, rural and suburban, primarily those without college education. These groups share the anger throughout the West at the centrist establishment, revealed as well in the unanticipated Brexit vote and the collapse of centrist parties in continental Europe. The angry and disaffected are victims of the neoliberal policies of the past generation, the policies described in congressional testimony by Fed chair Alan Greenspan – St. Alan as he was called reverentially by the economics profession and other admirers until the miraculous economy he was supervising crashed in 2007-8, threatening to bring the whole world economy down with it. As Greenspan explained during his glory days, his successes in economic management were based substantially on “growing worker insecurity.” Intimidated working people would not ask for higher wages, benefits, and security but would be satisfied with the stagnating wages and reduced benefits that signal a healthy economy by neoliberal standards.
+Working people who have been the subjects of these experiments in economic theory are, oddly, not particularly happy about the outcome. They are not, for example, overjoyed at the fact that in 2007, at the peak of the neoliberal miracle, real wages for non-supervisory workers were lower than they had been years earlier, or that real wages for male workers are about at 1960s levels while spectacular gains have gone to the pockets of a very few at the top, disproportionately a fraction of 1%. Not the result of market forces, achievement, or merit, but rather of definite policy decisions, matters reviewed carefully by economist Dean Baker in recently published work.
+The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage – which sets a floor for other wages – tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.
+With all the talk of near-full employment today, labor force participation remains below the earlier norm. And for a working man, there is a great difference between a steady job in manufacturing with union wages and benefits, as in earlier years, and a temporary job with little security in some service profession. Apart from wages, benefits, and security, there is a loss of dignity, of hope for the future, of a sense that this is a world in which I belong and play a worthwhile role.
+The impact is captured well in Arlie Hochschild’s sensitive and illuminating portrayal of a Trump stronghold in Louisiana, where she lived and worked for many years. She uses the image of a line in which these people are standing, expecting to move forward steadily as they work hard and keep to all the conventional values. But their position in the line has stalled. Ahead of them, they see people leaping forward, but that does not cause much distress, because it is “the American way” for (alleged) merit to be rewarded. What does cause real distress is what is happening behind them. Undeserving people who do not follow the rules are being moved in front of them by federal government programs designed to benefit African-Americans, immigrants, and others they often regard with contempt. All of this is exacerbated by Reagan’s racist fabrications about strapping young bucks and welfare queens (by implication Black) stealing your hard-earned money, and other fantasies — which are sometimes tinged with shreds of reality, as is usually the case with ugly and dangerous concoctions designed to deflect attention from the real agents of distress to easy scapegoats.
+Sometimes failure to explain, itself a form of contempt, plays a role. I once met a house painter in Boston who had turned bitterly against the evil government after a Washington bureaucrat who knew nothing about painting organized a meeting of painting contractors to inform them that they could no longer use lead paint, the only kind that works, as they all knew but the suit didn’t understand. That destroyed his small business, compelling him to paint houses on his own with substandard stuff forced on him by government elites. Sometimes there are also some reasons. Hochschild describes a man whose family and friends are suffering bitterly from the lethal effects of chemical pollution but who despises the government, and the “liberal elites,” because for him, the EPA means some ignorant guy who tells him he can’t fish but does nothing about the chemical plants.
+These are just samples of the real lives of Trump supporters, who are deluded to believe that Trump will do something to remedy their plight, though the merest look at his fiscal and other proposals demonstrates the opposite – posing a task for activists who hope to fend off the worst and to advance desperately needed changes.
+Exit polls reveal that the passionate support for Trump was inspired primarily by the belief that he represented change, while Clinton was perceived as the candidate who would perpetuate their distress. The “change” that Trump is likely to bring will be harmful or worse, but it is understandable that the consequences are not clear to isolated people in an atomized society lacking the kinds of associations (like unions) that can educate and organize. That is a crucial difference between today’s despair and the generally hopeful attitudes of many working people under much greater duress during the great depression of the 1930s.
+There are other factors in Trump’s success. Comparative studies show that doctrines of White Supremacy have had an even more powerful grip on American culture than in South Africa, and it’s no secret that the white population is declining. In a decade or two whites are projected to be a minority of the work force, and not too much later a minority of the population. The traditional conservative culture is also perceived as under attack by the successes of “identity politics,” regarded as the province of elites who have only contempt for hard-working patriotic church-going Americans with real family values whose country is disappearing before their eyes.
+It is worth remembering that before World War II, though it had long been the richest country in the world, the US was not a major player in global affairs and was also something of a cultural backwater. Someone who wanted to study physics would go to Germany. An aspiring writer or artist would go to Paris. That changed radically with World War II, for obvious reasons, but only for part of the population. Much remained culturally traditional. To mention one example of great significance, one of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is that 40% of the population do not see why it is a problem, since Christ is returning in a few decades. About the same percentage believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago. If science conflicts with the Bible, so much the worse for science. It would be hard to find an analogue in other societies.
+The Democratic party abandoned any real concern for working people by the 1970s, and they have therefore been drawn to the ranks of their bitter class enemies, who at least pretend to speak their language – Reagan’s folksy style with little jokes while eating jelly beans, W. Bush’s carefully cultivated image of a regular guy you could meet in a bar who loved to cut brush on the ranch in 100 degree heat and his probably faked mispronunciations (it’s unlikely that he talked like that at Yale), and now Trump, who gives voice to people with legitimate grievances who have lost not just jobs but also a sense of personal self-worth; and who rails against the government that they perceive as having undermined their lives (not without reason).
+One of the great achievements of the doctrinal system has been to divert anger from the corporate sector to the government that implements the programs it designs, such as the highly protectionist corporate/investor rights agreements that are uniformly mis-described as “free trade agreements” in the media and commentary. With all its flaws, the government is to some extent under popular influence and control, unlike the corporate sector. It is highly advantageous for the business world to foster hatred for pointy-headed government bureaucrats and to drive out of people’s minds the subversive idea that the government might become an instrument of popular will, a government of, by, and for the people.
+Is Trump representing a new movement in American politics, or was the outcome of this election primarily a rejection of Hillary Clinton by voters who hate the Clintons and are fed-up with “politics as usual?”
+It’s by no means new. Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. The Republicans have moved so far to dedication to the wealthy and the corporate sector that they cannot hope to get votes on their actual programs, and have turned to mobilizing sectors of the population that have always been there but not as an organized political force: evangelicals, nativists, racists, and the victims of the forms of globalization designed to set working people around the world in competition with one another while protecting the privileged and undermining the legal and other measures that provided working people with some protection and with ways to influence decision-making in the closely linked public and private sectors, notably with effective labor unions.
+The consequences have been evident in recent Republican primaries. Every candidate that has emerged from the base – Bachmann, Cain, Santorum, — has been so extreme that the Republican establishment had to use its ample resources to beat them down. The difference in 2016 is that the establishment failed, much to its chagrin, as we have seen.
+Deservedly or not, Clinton represented the policies that were feared and hated while Trump was seen as the symbol of “change” – change of what kind requires a careful look at his actual proposals, something largely missing in what reached the public. The campaign itself was remarkable in its avoidance of issues, and media commentary generally complied, keeping to the concept that true objectivity means reporting accurately what is “within the beltway” but not venturing beyond.
+Trump said following the outcome of the election that he “will represent all Americans.” How is be going to do that when the nation is so divided and he has already expressed deep hatred for many groups in the United States, including women and minorities? Do you see any resemblance between Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory?
+There are definite similarities to Brexit, and also to the rise of the ultranationalist far-right parties in Europe – whose leaders were quick to congratulate Trump on his victory, perceiving him as one of their own: Farrage, Le Pen, Orban, and others like them. And these developments are quite frightening. A look at the polls in Austria and Germany – Austria and Germany – cannot fail to evoke unpleasant memories for those familiar with the 1930s, even more so for those who watched directly, as I did as a child. I can still recall listening to Hitler’s speeches, not understanding the words though the tone and audience reaction were chilling enough. The first article that I remember writing was in February 1939, after the fall of Barcelona, on the seemingly inexorable spread of the fascist plague. And by strange coincidence, it was in Barcelona that my wife and I watched Tuesday’s events.
+As to how Trump will handle what he has brought forth – not created, but brought forth – we cannot say. Perhaps his most striking characteristic is unpredictability. A lot will depend on the reactions of those appalled by his performance and the visions he has projected, such as they are.
+Trump has no identifiable political ideology guiding his stance on economic, social, and political issues, yet there are clear authoritarian tendencies in his behavior. Therefore, do you find any validity behind the claims that Trump may represent the emergence of “fascism with a friendly face?” in the United States?
+For many years I have been writing and speaking about the danger of the rise of an honest and charismatic ideologue in the United States, someone who could exploit the fear and anger that has long been boiling in much of the society, and who could direct it away from the actual agents of malaise to vulnerable targets. That could indeed lead to what sociologist Bertram Gross called “friendly fascism” in a perceptive study 35 years ago. But that requires an honest ideologue, a Hitler type, not someone whose only detectable ideology is Me. The dangers however have been real for many years, perhaps even more so in the light of the forces that Trump has unleashed.
+With the Republicans in the White House, but also controlling both houses and the future shape of the Supreme Court, what will America look like for at least the next four years?
+A good deal depends on his appointments and circle of advisers. Early indications are unattractive, to put it mildly.
+The Supreme Court will be in the hands of reactionaries for many years, with predictable consequences. If Trump follows through on his Paul Ryan-style fiscal programs, there will be huge benefits for the very rich – estimated by the Tax Policy Center as a tax cut of over 14% for the top 0.1% and a substantial cut more generally at the upper end of the income scale, but with virtually no tax relief for others, who will also face major new burdens. The respected economics correspondent of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, writes that “The tax proposals would shower huge benefits on already rich Americans such as Mr Trump,” while leaving others in the lurch, including of course his popular constituency. The immediate reaction of the business world reveals that big pharma, Wall Street, military industry, energy industries, and other such wonderful institutions expect a very bright future.
+One positive development might be the infrastructure program that Trump has promised while (along with much reporting and commentary) concealing the fact that it is essentially the Obama stimulus program that would have been of great benefit to the economy and to the society generally, but was killed by the Republican Congress on the pretext that it would explode the deficit. While that charge was spurious at the time, given the very low interest rates, it holds in spades for Trump’s program, now accompanied by radical tax cuts for the rich and corporate sector and increased Pentagon spending.
+There is, however, an escape, provided by Dick Cheney when he explained to Bush’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter” – meaning deficits that we Republicans create in order to gain popular support, leaving it to someone else, preferably Democrats, to somehow clean up the mess. The technique might work, for a while at least.
+There are also many questions about foreign policy consequences, mostly unanswered.
+There is mutual admiration between Trump and Putin. How likely is it therefore that we may see a new era in US-Russia relations?
+One hopeful prospect is that there might be reduction of the very dangerous and mounting tensions at the Russian border: note “the Russian border,” not the Mexican border. Thereby lies a tale that we cannot go into here. It is also possible that Europe might distance itself from Trump’s America, as already suggested by Chancellor Merkel and other European leaders – and from the British voice of American power, after Brexit. That might possibly lead to European efforts to defuse the tensions, and perhaps even efforts to move towards something like Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of an integrated Eurasian security system without military alliances, rejected by the US in favor of NATO expansion, a vision revived recently by Putin, whether seriously or not we do not know since the gesture was dismissed.
+Is US foreign policy under a Trump administration likely to be more or less militaristic than what we have seen under the Obama or even the G.W. Bush administrations?
+I don’t think one can answer with any confidence. Trump is too unpredictable. There are too many open questions. What we can say is that popular mobilization and activism, properly organized and conducted, can make a large difference.
+And we should bear in mind that the stakes are very large, as I remarked at the outset.",FAKE
+8240,Democrats Playing Class Card To Split the White Vote, ,FAKE
+2158,White House: Obama would veto Keystone bill,"This post has been updated.
+
+President Obama would veto a bill that would allow for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, the White House said Tuesday.
+
+""If this bill passes this Congress, the president wouldn’t sign it,"" said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
+
+The White House’s announcement came as the Republican-controlled Congress was being sworn in. GOP leaders have pledged to pass a bill authorizing the pipeline’s construction. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) introduced legislation Tuesday authorizing the pipeline's construction.
+
+“The president is going to see the Keystone XL pipeline on his desk,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
+
+Senate Democrats narrowly blocked passage of the bill in November. The White House said at the time that the bill was something Obama ""doesn't support.""
+
+""If this bill passes this Congress, the president wouldn’t sign it either,"" Earnest said.
+
+Earnest said there is a ""well-established process in place"" for approving projects such as Keystone. The $7.6 billion project would stretch nearly 1,700 miles and deliver 830,000 barrels of oil a day from western Canada to the United States. Earnest said that because there is a process, Congress should not meddle.
+
+That process is held up by a lawsuit in Nebraska over whether the state legislature could allow the governor to make decisions on the pipeline rather than the state's Public Utilities Commission.
+
+“I think the president has been pretty clear that he does not think that circumventing a well-established process for evaluating these projects is ... the right thing for Congress to do,” Earnest said.
+
+Obama rejected a Canadian firm's application to build the pipeline in 2012.
+
+At a year-end news conference in December, Obama sought to downplay the benefits of the pipeline. He said the benefits for U.S. citizens and workers from the pipeline would be ""nominal.""
+
+""I think that there’s been this tendency to really hype this thing as some magic formula to what ails the U.S. economy,"" Obama said.
+
+House Speaker John Boehner said Obama has sided with ""fringe extremists"" in the Democratic party who do not support Keystone, not Americans who do want the pipeline to be built. Boehner said the veto threat shows that Obama is ""hopelessly out of touch"" and has ""no plans"" to listen to his constituents.
+
+""After years of manufacturing every possible excuse, today President Obama was finally straight with the them about where he truly stands.  His answer is no to more American infrastructure, no to more American energy, and no to more American jobs,"" Boehner said in a statement.
+
+Jack Gerard, chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, said the group is ""very disappointed"" by the veto threat.
+
+""And I think it doesn't bode well for relationships between the White House and Capitol Hill"" Gerard said. ""I'm disappointed the president has made that decision. I'm hopeful he and his advisers will reconsider.""
+
+The move angered not just Republicans and oil industry officials but some Democrats such as Manchin.
+
+“It’s the most discouraging thing I’ve ever heard,” Manchin said in a phone interview, minutes after Earnest had made his comments. “For the leader of the country to say basically, ‘Forget it, this is all for naught,’ is not what this country is about, it’s not what we’re all about, and it’s not the process that I’m used to working through.”
+
+Manchin said the move made a mockery of a legislative process under which Democrats as well as Republicans would have a chance to offer amendments to alter the bill. “To say that he won’t give it a chance is absolutely a disservice to our country,” he added.
+
+At the same time that the White House issued its veto threat, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) objected to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee holding a hearing Wednesday on the Keystone XL bill. Durbin said another Democrat, whom he did not identify, objected to the session.
+
+“While this means we won’t be having a hearing tomorrow, it does not slow down the Keystone XL floor process,” the panel’s spokesman, Robert Dillon, wrote in an e-mail. “Sen. Murkowski was committed to moving legislation through regular committee order and having a robust hearing process. Working with the incoming ranking member, we had lined up witnesses from a labor union and the Center for American Progress (CAP) to testify on the Keystone XL. Democrats will no longer have an opportunity to hear that testimony or make statements. We think that’s unfortunate.”
+
+“The new Republican majority in Congress wants to play pipeline politics with our future, and the president is focused on a single question: is the tar sands pipeline in our national interest,” said Bob Deans, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s not.”
+
+Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he applauds Obama ""for standing up to Republicans trying to ram through Congress a bill to let a Canadian oil company ship some of the dirtiest oil on the planet across the United States on its way to overseas markets.""
+
+Supporters of Keystone argue that the pipeline will create jobs tied to the pipeline's construction and boost a source of reliable energy, helping the economy. Opponents counter that it will extract oil from dirty tar sands in Canada and do little to help the U.S. economy.",REAL
+5433,Massive Spike In Obamacare Health Premiums Could Boost Trump To Victory,"Trump Says He Will Sign Very First Bill to Repeal Obamacare 
+“This is ready-made advertising for Republican candidates to use nationwide,” stated Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. “If you’re a Republican candidate, it would be malpractice not to talk about it, highlight it or advertise on it.” 
+To be sure, Trump has been hitting the issue hard over the past several days, mentioning the rate hikes at four separate rally appearances in a 24-hour period this week. 
+“ Repealing Obamacare and stopping Hillary’s healthcare takeover is one of the single most important reasons that we must win on Nov. 8,” Trump told rally-goers Tuesday afternoon in Sanford, Florida. Advertisement - story continues below 
+Other Republicans have been quick to jump on the issue as well, including vulnerable incumbent GOP senators like Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Roy Blunt of Missouri. 
+Should these Republican senators and others maintain a focus on Obamacare during the final two weeks, they stand a good chance of fending off the Democrat effort to wrench control of the Senate away from the GOP. 
+The same applies to Trump, should he refrain from media distractions and continue harping on the failures of Obama and his health care law, particularly in hard-hit swing states like Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, to name just a few. 
+And he will have Obama to thank personally for paving the way to a Trump presidency through his horribly flawed Obamacare law. Advertisement - story continues below",FAKE
+10006,US-led coalition killed 300 Syrian civilians in 11 probed strikes – Amnesty,"RT October 26, 2016 
+Around 300 civilians were killed in eleven airstrikes conducted by the US-led coalition in Syria, which Amnesty International investigated for its latest report. Amnesty says the US must come clean about the civilian toll of its fight against Islamic State. 
+Amnesty suspects that US Central Command (CENTCOM), which directs coalition airstrikes in Syria, “may have… carried out unlawful attacks” in Syria, failing to take necessary measures to prevent civilian killings. 
+“We fear the US-led coalition is significantly underestimating the harm caused to civilians in its operations in Syria,” said Lynn Maalouf, Deputy Director for Research at Amnesty International’s Beirut regional office. 
+“It’s high time the US authorities came clean about the full extent of the civilian damage caused by coalition attacks in Syria. Independent and impartial investigations must be carried out into any potential violations of international humanitarian law and the findings should be made public.” 
+Amnesty investigated evidence, including eyewitness accounts, reports by human rights organizations and the media, photographs and video footage as well as satellite imagery, related to 11 suspected coalition attacks in Syria. The group estimates that the attacks have claimed as many as 300 civilian lives. So far none of these deaths has been acknowledged by CENTCOM. 
+The report published on Wednesday added that the total civilian death toll from coalition action “could be as high as 600 or more than 1,000” since the operation against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS, ISIL) started in Syria in 2014. 
+One of the strikes investigated by Amnesty took place in the early hours of December 7, 2015. The attacks hit two houses in the village of Ayn al-Khan, near al-Hawl in al-Hasakah governorate in northern Syria, killing 40 civilians, including 19 children, and injuring at least 30 others, the report said. A d v e r t i s e m e n t 
+According to an eyewitness account, an initial night strike was followed by a second attack from a helicopter gunship, which hit first responders trying to dig out survivors. 
+“At this point I had a two-month-old baby boy in my arms whom I had rescued. The hit caused me to fall and drop him… I fell into the hole made by the air strike. That was what saved me… My mother, aunt, wife and children – a daughter who was four years old and a son who was two and a half were all killed. The woman and her son who I’d rescued were killed. Everyone but me was killed,” the survivor said. 
+The strike is believed to have targeted IS fighters. But local Kurdish militia reportedly warned the coalition that there were civilians in the area. 
+Amnesty said CENTCOM’s failure to acknowledge civilian deaths in Syria, as well as the poor record of investigating such incidents in Afghanistan and Iraq, poses grave concerns over the toll which the civilian population of Mosul, Iraq is likely to face from the ongoing operation to take the city from IS. The US-led coalition is providing air support for the offensive. 
+“Given the likely increase in air strikes by the US-led Coalition as part of the Iraqi offensive to recapture Mosul, it is even more pressing that CENTCOM be fully transparent about the impact of their military actions on civilians. And it is crucial that they adhere scrupulously to international humanitarian law, including by taking all feasible precautions to spare civilians and to minimize harm to civilian homes and infrastructure,” said Maalouf. 
+A similar operation to capture Manbij, Syria, which is far smaller than Mosul, killed more than 200 civilians, Amnesty estimated. 
+Last week, Amnesty International blasted Russia for civilian deaths in Aleppo. The Syrian city is divided between government forces and various armed groups, including the Al-Qaeda offshoot Al-Nusra Front. Russia says that the militants use civilians as human shields and would not allow them to leave the city, derailing several attempts by Russia to open humanitarian corridors out of the city. This article was posted: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 6:20 am Share this article",FAKE
+9985,Half Of Russians Fear Syria Could Spark WW3,"Half Of Russians Fear Syria Could Spark WW3 11/02/2016 
+RUSSIA TODAY Almost half of all respondents in a recent Russian opinion poll said they feared that the aggravation of relations between Russia and the West caused by the ongoing crisis in Syria could develop into a global military conflict. 
+The share of those who see the probability of World War Three in the near future as high or very high is now at 48 percent and those who appraise it as low or very low comprise 42 percent of society, the privately-owned public opinion research center Levada reported on Monday. The remaining 10 percent of respondents said they couldn’t give a simple answer to the question. 
+When researchers asked citizens if they considered it possible that Russia and the West would eventually find a mutually acceptable solution to the crisis, 35 percent answered that this scenario was likely or very likely. Thirty-nine percent evaluate the probability of such an outcome as low or very low and 26 percent said that they couldn’t answer the question. 
+Just over half – 52 percent – of Russians said they approve of their country’s involvement in the Syrian conflict and 26 percent said they had a negative or sharply negative attitude to this. Just under a quarter – 23 percent – couldn’t answer the question about their personal view on the subject. Those who thought that Russia should continue the operation and those who thought that airstrikes should be stopped were divided 49 percent against 28 percent respectively, with 24 percent finding the question too difficult to answer. 
+The level of awareness about the situation in Syria and the Russian Air Force operation against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorists there remained fairly high. Eighteen percent said they were very closely following developments in Syria and 64 percent revealed partial familiarity with the issue. Just under a fifth – 17 percent – said that they were not interested in news about Syria. 
+A similar poll conducted a year ago by the independent Levada Center showed that over 70 percent of Russian citizens supported the air operations against IS terrorists in Syria, and almost a half of them agreed that it was right for Russia to support the government of Syria’s democratically-elected President Bashar Assad. 
+A different poll conducted earlier this month by the state-run research center VTSIOM showed that 73 percent of Russians believed that Western criticism of the air force’s counter-terrorism operation in Aleppo, Syria, was ungrounded and prejudiced. Only 6 percent said the allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the Russian military have some basis in reality. 
+Russia first deployed an air force contingent in Syria in 2015, after receiving a request for military help from the Syrian government, which is currently battling Islamic State and affiliated groups. Russian war planes began launching airstrikes on terrorists in Syria on September 30, 2015. Their work has aided the Syrian military in achieving considerable success in driving jihadist forces out of the country.",FAKE
+2729,Bill O’Reilly’s humiliating bust: Does Fox News have guts to suspend its own serial exaggerator?,"That in itself was a sign that the punch landed; normally O’Reilly doesn’t descend from his perch in the “no-spin zone” to debate mere mortals on platforms besides Fox. The Mother Jones story is embarrassing, but it’s probably not fatal. Most of the “reporting” on Fox has roughly the same relationship with the truth as O’Reilly’s claim to combat zone action. I can’t see him facing censure for this, but I hope I’m wrong.
+
+If you missed the action, Corn and Daniel Schulman reported that despite O’Reilly’s claims of having “survived a combat operation” during the Falklands War, the Fox host, then with CBS, only got as close as Buenos Aires, roughly 1,400 miles away from the fighting. “Nobody from CBS got to the Falklands,” CBS’s Bob Schieffer told Mother Jones. “I came close. We’d been trying to get somebody down there. It was impossible.”
+
+There was, of course, no combat in the Argentinian capital, but there was a raucous protest, and that’s apparently what O’Reilly refers to as a “combat operation.” He also claimed he was the only CBS reporter covering the demonstration, which Schieffer likewise denies. “We were all out with our camera crews that day to cover the protest,” Schieffer says. “I’d been out there with a crew too.”
+
+Likewise, his claim of having seen combat danger in El Salvador is undermined by reporting – the reporting of Bill O’Reilly himself, on the ground, in real time. In his book “The No-Spin Zone” O’Reilly tells of visiting a dangerous, “guerrilla controlled area” with a camera crew, where “I quickly did a stand-up amid the rubble and we got the hell out of there.”
+
+His real-time dispatch for CBS was different. He described touring a scene by helicopters with the Salvadoran military, and reported “these days Salvadoran soldiers appear to be doing more singing than fighting,” having succeeded in “scattering the rebel forces, leaving government troops in control of most of the country.” There was no mention of having to “get the hell out of there.” The problem for people who care about the truth is that O’Reilly is not likely to be punished for shading it. He’s a serial exaggerator – remember his claim to be the product of middle-class Levittown, when he grew up in tonier Westbury? Much of the “reporting” on Fox is similarly distorted; the ratio of truth to fiction is often worse than in O’Reilly’s combat zone mythology. The made-up Fox bogeymen of the New Black Panther Party were actually less dangerous to democracy than Buenos Aires was to O’Reilly. More recently, the network’s claim of Muslim-only “no-go” zones in London was based on even skimpier evidence. I personally got a big story wrong last year: I predicted Fox’s Sean Hannity would pay a price for hyping the cause of racist grifter Cliven Bundy, especially after Stephen Colbert flayed him for it. But he didn’t. So while I hope to be wrong this time — by underestimating Roger Ailes’s conscience, rather than exaggerating it – I don’t expect to be. The good news is, I’ve covered a lot of unruly protests in my time. I’m glad to know I can now claim to have “survived a combat operation.” Thanks, Bill!",REAL
+8217,76ers Send Clear Message Over Anthem Singer's Shirt: Keep Politics Off the Court & Just Do Your Job,"Share on Twitter 
+Minutes before singer Sevyn Streeter was supposed to perform the national anthem at the Philadelphia 76ers game Wednesday night, she was told by the organization there was a change of plans. 
+Streeter took to social media to express her frustration behind the 76ers' decision to cancel her performance, which was prompted by the statement on her clothing: 
+“I'm at the 76ers game singing the National Anthem and the organization is telling me I can't because I'm wearing a 'We Matter' jersey.” Was suppose to sing the anthem at @sixers & @okcthunder game but mins b4 @sixers said I couldn't because I was wearing a ""We Matter"" jersey pic.twitter.com/wjoJN3rq0r — Sevyn (@sevyn) October 27, 2016 
+In an interview with the Associated Press , Streeter said she was never told there was a certain wardrobe to adhere to: 
+“I'd say two minutes before we were about to walk out...the organization told me that I could not wear my shirt while singing the national anthem at their game. I was never given any kind of dress code. I was never asked beforehand to show my wardrobe.” 
+The 76ers issued the following statement , essentially saying that they understand the fact Streeter can wear her “Black Lives Matter”-related jersey, just not in their house: 
+“The Philadelphia 76ers organization encourages meaningful actions to drive social change. We use our games to bring people together, to build trust and to strengthen our communities. As we move from symbolic gestures to action, we will continue to leverage our platform to positively impact our community.” 
+Americans were quick to voice their support for the 76ers' decision: @KyleNeubeck @sevyn - People were there to watch the game, not you and your ""protest"". Just sing the song and walk off the court. — Vince Rosetta (@VinceRosetta) October 27, 2016 @sevyn @Sixers @okcthunder They made the right decision. Fans aren't interested in your invented crisis. — Phillip McGuire (@PhillipCMcGuire) October 27, 2016 @marclamonthill @sevyn Seriously what? A professional organization doesn't want to risk the person singing anthem turning it into a fiasco? 
+But others felt the 76ers violated her First Amendment rights by not allowing her to perform: I don't understand what's happening to the First Amendment. @allanjohnson14 @sevyn @Sixers @okcthunder — Nancy Sinatra (@NancySinatra) October 27, 2016 @MTTHWBRK @sevyn @Sixers @okcthunder So she can't wear what she wants? That's a right we have in this country isn't it or is that against the law ???? — Honestly, Truly (@_RavenCamille) October 27, 2016 
+And demanded answers: so... @Sixers wont let @sevyn perform the national anthem because she has a ""We Matter"" shirt on? ???? answers are needed ???? — Nellium (@_cornbread_) October 27, 2016 
+76ers dancer Jemila Worley ended up singing the national anthem instead and, apparently, did an outstanding job. 76ers guard Gerald Henderson told ESPN he was a bit confused when he first saw her step on the court, but Worley “killed it.” 
+Henderson added his two cents about the singer switch up, too: 
+“There's a lot going on man. People care about these things that are happening, as well as they should. And they are going to express themselves in different ways...People are trying to make statements, I guess.” 
+The National Basketball Association (NBA) has not commented on the matter. ",FAKE
+1715,Hillary’s cash flow issue,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+2773,Iran Gives Investors Glimpse of $30 Billion in Oil Deals to Come,"Iran is targeting about $30 billion in investment by offering 70 oil and natural gas projects to international companies as the Persian Gulf country anticipates the lifting of economic sanctions.
+
+Iranian officials presented the projects at a two-day conference in Tehran as part of an effort to attract more than $100 billion to revive the energy and petrochemicals industries and generate much-needed government income. Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh introduced them along with a new type of investor contract offering better incentives than the buy-back agreements Iran offered in the past. The work covers 52 production and 18 exploration projects, both onshore and in the Gulf and Caspian Sea.
+
+Iran is offering a negotiable framework for new oil deals rather than a uniform contract for all investors, Roknoddin Javadi, managing director at National Iranian Oil Co., said Saturday in Tehran. The government may modify the framework and plans to present more details in February at a conference in London, Seyed Mehdi Hosseini, chairman of the ministry’s Oil Contract Restructuring Committee, said Sunday in an interview.
+
+Here are five things to know about this turning point in Iran’s campaign to upgrade its energy industry:
+
+* The new investor contract will give companies a share of the oil they produce and let them sell it globally, Hosseini said in Tehran. International companies will be paid in cash or in kind based on a fee per barrel, Talin Mansourian, a consultant with Hosseini’s committee, said Saturday. Iran would reduce the fee if oil prices fell by more than 50 percent and increase it if prices rose by a corresponding amount, Mansourian said.
+
+Iran’s old buy-back deals paid companies a fixed fee regardless of how much oil they produced and offered them no incentive to exceed output targets. Buy-backs also paid no compensation to companies that spent more than budgeted amounts to develop a field.
+
+Under the new contracts, the NIOC won’t limit capital spending and will approve budgets on a yearly basis, though companies still won’t receive a higher fee if they produce above their output targets, Hosseini said.
+
+* The new contracts will be valid for 20 years, with possible extensions to 25 years. Buy-back agreements were limited to seven years, which wasn’t enough time for companies to make adequate returns on their investments, Total SA Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne said last month in Abu Dhabi.
+
+Investors should be able to recover their development costs five to seven years after starting production, according to Iranian officials. Companies that come up empty-handed after exploring for oil or gas can search for fuel in nearby areas. Under buy-backs, they had to stick to development plans agreed upon before work began and were barred from exploring new areas.
+
+* Companies will be able to negotiate directly for some contracts, and Iran could sign its first deal as early as March or April, Hosseini said. Iran won’t allow foreign companies to escape their contractual obligations if the U.S. or another party re-imposes unilateral sanctions, said Seyed Mostafa Zeynoddin, an adviser to the committee. If the UN restores sanctions, a company could claim force majeure if unable to execute a contract, he said.
+
+* International investors must team up with local partners that the Iranian government selects, and they can’t own hydrocarbon deposits. Iran will let international and local companies determine the stakes each will hold in joint-ventures formed to develop fields.
+
+* Iran is preparing to start the bidding process for oil and gas rights by the next Iranian calendar year starting March 21. Companies will be asked to make bids based on a per-barrel development fee, Mansourian said. NIOC will announce other terms when it starts the tendering process in four to five months, she said.",REAL
+3733,"Charleston church massacre suspect caught, but answers elude victims' loved ones","Police on Thursday nabbed the 21-year-old man suspected of gunning down nine people gathered for Bible study in a Charleston, S.C., church, nearly 14 hours later and 240 miles away after an all-night manhunt.
+
+Dylann Roof, of Columbia, was captured without incident just before noon in a traffic stop after a tip led police to Shelby, N.C. He was in the black Hyundai sedan seen fleeing the horrific scene at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the church's pastor, Clementa Pinckney, who was also a state senator, was among those killed.
+
+“We had a number of tips that were coming in,” Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said. “It was amazing the fact that we had teams ... standing by. Whenever we got a lead ... we sent out teams. It was a tremendous effort.”
+
+“I am so pleased that we were able to resolve this case quickly ... so that nobody else is harmed by this individual.”
+
+Roof waived extradition and was put on a plane from North Carolina on Thursday afternoon, authorities said. He was being held at a detention center pending a bond hearing, Charleston Police tweeted Thursday evening.
+
+With Roof in custody, the focus turned to his motives and the victims in the horrific attack that shocked Charleston's close-knit African-American community and prompted President Obama, who knew Pinckney, to say it “raises questions about a dark part of history.""
+
+“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” Obama said. “Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. Once again, innocent people were killed because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.""
+
+At least two people survived the attack. One was reportedly a five-year-old girl who obeyed her grandmother's instructions to play dead and the other was a woman whom the gunman freed to ""tell the world"" what happened, according to reports.
+
+Pinckney, 41, had been a pastor since he was 18 and was the youngest African-American elected to the South Carolina legislature when he won office in 1996 at age 23 and had been a state senator since 2000.
+
+Also identified by the Charleston County officials as among the dead were:
+
+Police and local officials immediately branded the shooting spree a hate crime, and the Department of Justice announced Thursday morning that it had opened an investigation into whether federal charges were warranted.
+
+Roof's childhood friend, Joey Meek, alerted the FBI after recognizing him in a surveillance camera image that was widely circulated, said Meek's mother, Kimberly Konzny. Roof had worn the same sweatshirt while playing Xbox videogames in their home recently.
+
+""I don't know what was going through his head,"" Konzny said. ""He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends.""
+
+The Post and Courier reported that Roof was arrested twice in South Carolina and was jailed in March in Lexington County on a drug charge. Roof received a .45-caliber pistol from his father for his 21st birthday in April, his uncle told Reuters. The uncle told the news agency that police were at the suspect's mother's home shortly after the shooting.
+
+Dot Scott, the president of the Charleston NAACP, told the Post and Courier newspaper that she had spoken with a female survivor who said the gunman told the woman he was letting her live so she could tell others what had happened.
+
+""There is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of Scripture,"" NAACP President and CEO Cornell Brooks said in a statement Thursday. ""Today I mourn as an AME minister, as a student and teacher of scripture, as well as a member of the NAACP.""
+
+The church is a well-known landmark in Charleston, known as ""The Holy City"" because of its many houses of worship and denominations. The church traces its roots to 1816 when African-American members of the city's Methodist Episcopal Church, led by a freed slave, broke away to form their own congregation. The church was burned to the ground in the 1820s, and rebuilt a decade later.
+
+The campaign of GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush sent out an email saying that due to the shooting, the candidate had canceled an event planned in the city Thursday. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley issued a statement calling the shooting a ""senseless tragedy.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from the Post and Courier.",REAL
+2722,William F. Buckley would have loathed Fox News: Inside the right-wing media’s intellectual downfall,"William’s wife, Patricia, turned the maisonette into a quarry of precious metals and shiny trinkets that, for a certain kind of person, might necessitate sunglasses or anticonvulsants. Eclectic, hectic, and loaded in every sense, the duplex was a motherlode of hand-painted floor screens and mother-of-pearl tables, its walls splashed with flashy modernist paintings and lit with leaded Tiffany lamps. But despite the bonanza of gilded pier glasses and silver sconces and bronze flowerpots, it was a harpsichord that held the home together. The man-of-the-house’s chief contribution to the glittering litter was a seventeenth-century keyboard, and he placed it in the marble foyer so that guests saw it first—as if to clear any suspicion that his wife’s knack for chintz reflected on his personal taste in art. Buckley, who called the harpsichord “the instrument I love beyond all others,” had matching models in his Connecticut mansion and Swiss chalet; the conservative scion would entertain his visitors with a tune as often as an epigram. Bach was his muse as much as Edmund Burke.
+
+This love of his provides a rare moment of peace in “Best of Enemies,” a turbulent, whiplash-inducing new film on the rivalry between Buckley and Gore Vidal. (In fact the music of Bach is a through-line in the documentary, serving as Buckley’s leitmotif.) After well over an hour of watching the men trade petty points and cheap insults—in archival footage, not the grave, though a psychic medium may easily prove otherwise—we see Buckley pull up his bench and play a Bach prelude in C, the simplest, most uncluttered of key signatures. The effort, contemplative and composed, is the film’s only moment of civility. (Early on, Vidal gives us an idyllic tour of his estate in Salerno, but he leads us immediately to the bathroom, where Buckley’s portrait hangs next to the toilet.) An amateur musician but not a dabbler, Buckley performed in the ’80s and ’90s with a roster of symphonies around the country, honing his skill with almost spiritual devotion. (“Art of any sort,” he once wrote, “is very, very serious business: that which is sublime can’t be anything less.”) His worship of Bach, a lifelong attachment, mirrored his intellectual manner. Like Bach’s themes, his arguments in writing and speech were famously complex, surprising, winding, and sonorous. As with any player of polyphony, Buckley showed considerable sleight of hand in teasing out parallels and resolving contradictions. Baroque music, which is contrapuntal, makes no great fuss about harmony, surely an appealing trait to a contrarian at odds with society. Like Bach, Buckley inevitably clung to the counterpoint.
+
+I harp on music because “Best of Enemies” harps on dissonance. Directed by Morgan Neville and the Oscar-winning Robert Gordon, this is a serious film by serious filmmakers, and it seeks to understand the decay of American commentary into white noise. Why, the film wonders, do Americans hope to divine the truth in 60-second shouting matches rather than 6,000-word features? Why do the opinion programs scuttle the well-read in favor of those who can barely decipher a teleprompter? Why does Fox News boom with the authority of Mount Sinai? Why, when parsing a point, do its hosts sound like a hernia is rending their groin? Why do our congressmen echo the same guttural sound bites? Why has the United States traded an intelligentsia for a punditocracy?
+
+For Gordon and Neville, these rhetorical questions do not have a rhetorical answer, and they point their plugged ears at the rhetoric of Buckley and Vidal, whom they take to be the media’s original screaming heads. They circle the writers with yellow tape, saying they’ve found the epicenter of the shift. They diagnose Buckley and Vidal as patients zero of our madness, of our newsmen’s hysterics and our leaders’ strain of Tourette’s. At best, this is half true.
+
+The decline and fall of the chattering class began in 1968, the filmmakers say, and in a certain sense they are right. In that year, ABC, one of three television channels, lagged far behind NBC and CBS in ratings, and when its competitors bought up the rights to report from the Republican and Democratic national conventions, the network hatched a plan. It would hire two writers to comment on the presidential nominees. They would perch on America’s left and right shoulders and vie for its conscience. But both of them acted like devils and raised hell from the first debate to the tenth. Despite the authors’ aristocratic airs and Mid-Atlantic inflections, Buckley hissed through his drawl as Vidal thumbed his Aquiline nose at him.
+
+The clamor began well before the opening bell. As the film recalls, Vidal courted Buckley’s rage years earlier, lampooning him on “The Tonight Show.” At the Republican convention in 1964, Vidal embarrassed him again in front of a national audience, airing remarks from a campaign official about Buckley’s relationship with Barry Goldwater, then running for president. Before the 1968 debates, featured in the film, Vidal hired a researcher to help him smear Buckley and wrote his put-downs in advance, testing them on ABC’s cameramen and gophers. The liberal Vidal called his opponent a prophet of greed, the “Marie Antoinette of the right wing,” and the inspiration for Myra Breckinridge (the transsexual rapist in Vidal’s novel by the same name). When Vidal dismissed California’s conservative governor as an “aging juvenile actor,” Buckley defended Ronald Reagan by playfully dismissing Vidal’s film efforts. (“If ABC has the authority to invite the author of ‘Myra Breckinridge’ to comment on Republican politics, I think that the people of California have the right, when they speak overwhelmingly, to project somebody into national politics even if he did commit the sin of having acted in movies that were not written by Mr. Vidal”). Bickering became screaming in the melodrama’s final act, when Vidal labeled Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” a weightier offense in postwar America than today, and Buckley called him a “queer” and threatened to “sock him in the goddamn face.” Buckley, a veteran of the Second World War, took the insult especially hard, having spent much of his career trying to purge conservatism of its anti-Semitic elements and having succeeded in marginalizing the John Birch Society.
+
+If we believe the film, then, the ten-episode kerfuffle, shocking to ’60s viewers, was a historic moment on TV that changed discourse forever. We are reminded that at one point ABC’s studio at the convention actually collapsed — a metaphor for the shockwaves of the debaters’ sonic boom. While journalists panned the program as so much hot air, ABC sucked in a massive new audience and a windfall of advertising dollars. The hubbub was a boon, and the network and its competitors would try to revive the debates’ flare in future political coverage. They would prioritize noise over reason, shouting over thinking, and anoint pundits as America’s kingmakers.
+
+But including Buckley in this category is more than a violation of good manners. As he might say about socialism — however wrongly, I might add — such a sentiment commits the sin of overreaching. Buckley, for all of his objectionable politics, was nonetheless the quintessential anti-pundit, and his example could serve as a timely antidote to the poor state of contemporary opinion, particularly in his own party.
+
+Though Vidal said after the debates that he was glad to have given the audience “their money’s worth,” Buckley considered the argument a “disaster.” Vidal replayed the debates obsessively in his dotage, but they embarrassed Buckley to the end of his days, and he wished ABC had destroyed the tapes. (Buckley had wanted “to talk about the Republican Convention,” he said, but he found it “difficult to do so when you have somebody like this, who speaks in such burps and who likes to be naughty, which has proven to be a professional, highly merchandisable vice.”)
+
+His outburst brought him lasting guilt, and Gordon and Neville show their sense of irony when Buckley plays Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” midway through the film. If they give Vidal a theme, it is Purcell’s “Funeral March for Queen Mary,” a piece popularly associated with “A Clockwork Orange” — an allusion to the social, political, and rhetorical upheavals that Vidal helped kick off. (Vidal claimed in the Paris Review that he was “not musical,” which might explain the shrill tone of his essays.)
+
+Noise is to music as confusion is to reason, and Buckley was as practiced a logician as a pianist. Indeed, the historian Sam Tanenhaus, interviewed at length in the film, describes him as the “great debater of his time.” Genuine debate needn’t traffic in shame or tinnitus, and Buckley eschewed the low-rung slur as much as he shied from the high-pitched shout. This is not to say that he wanted for wit, which he had aplenty, but that he used it only to ornament a fully developed theme. (If insults do not replace an argument, they can do healthy, illuminating work in revealing the hypocrisy or absurdity of a figure heaped in public praise. To object is to deny that character as well as ideology shapes history; it’s to deny that politics are personal.) Buckley would argue steadily and quietly, holding forth with a hushed assurance that would seldom rush or halt his opponent’s assertions. Like any trained musician, he had that quality of self-mastery which the world used to call virtue. His willingness and eagerness to listen, the mark of an able and disciplined ear, and his love for the long phrase and extended argument gave him doubts about TV. Though Vidal said he would “never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television,” Buckley believed there was “an implicit conflict of interest between that which is highly viewable and that which is illuminating.” Yet the show he hosted, “Firing Line,” had an enduring impact on the marketplace of ideas: It ran for 33 years, longer than any other public-affairs program, and won an Emmy for its commitment to spirited inquiry. He questioned guests who agreed with him (Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek) as eagerly as those who did not (Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky, Saul Alinsky, Christopher Hitchens). Speaking to the show’s long format, a largesse for probing conversation, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith said that “’Firing Line’ is one of the rare occasions when you have a chance to correct the errors of the man who’s interrogating you.” Hitchens echoed the sentiment: “I did my first ‘Firing Line’ in 1983 and swiftly learned that if I left the studio cursing at what I hadn’t said, it was my own fault.” Buckley’s desire to persuade rather than overpower, and his willingness to cope with the otherness of others’ views, earned him fast friends among the left-leaning intelligentsia. Galbraith, Murray Kempton, and Mario Cuomo all found in him a receptive and challenging companion. In the pages of National Review, the magazine he founded, he helped launch the career of Joan Didion, though her liberal awakening happened later. His lifelong friendship with Norman Mailer is the subject of a new book by Kevin Schultz, “Buckley and Mailer,” that gives the lie to the film’s charge of divisiveness. It is a meticulous portrait of two radicals who meet at the margins. Buckley even has my own respect, though I find many of his positions odious. I’m at least as leftist as the late Mr. Vidal, but I stick my fingers in my ears only half as much. Buckley’s brand of anti-statism, his hatred of the New Deal and the Great Society and federal intervention of any kind, owed to a neurotic Cold War fear of collectivism. (His anti-interventionism even led him to oppose the Civil Rights Act, a heinous lapse of judgment that he later recanted.) In Vietnam he thought we were staring down the Four Horsemen. All his life, he kissed the ring of the war criminal Henry Kissinger. His fear of big government excused the worst indignities of big money, enshrining inequality as patriotism. “The socialized state is to justice, order, and freedom what the Marquis de Sade is to love,” he once wrote, rather sadistically. As with many conservatives, his defense of liberty against the state was genuine but misguided. He despised totalitarianism as fiercely as I do, and he railed against the Soviet Union in an era of détente. But on a domestic level, I part from him on the matter of social welfare, in that I consider freedom null and void if swaths of the population are so disenfranchised they can’t make full use of it—economically, politically, biologically. Unlike my opponents, I refuse to forget the third item in Jefferson’s list of inalienable rights: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Some found Buckley calculating and cold. His rhetoric, they said, was all head and no heart. It is a charge often brought against Bach, this idea of enthroning reason and suppressing the passions. It is also a common criticism of Plato. Yet conservatism fills an important role in society. In the body politic, the right hand is as essential as the left. Liberals ask what we can gain from change, while conservatives ask what we can lose. At every moment of crisis, this is a valuable conversation to have—if it is in fact a conversation. Otherwise it evokes a kind of madness, like talking to oneself in the subway. Nowadays, blather rattles the land like thunder. In cabs, diners, and doctors’ waiting rooms, the din of stupid opinion yields only to the grinding of one’s teeth. But for our lightbulbs, we would seem to be entering a dark age. The noise today is relentless, enough to inspire thoughts of taking a drill to one’s eardrums. It is inescapable, this babbling rabble of 24-hour TV. Bill O’Reilly seems to be always on the verge of an aneurysm. Greta Van Susteren, a Scientologist with a questionable grasp of reality, grunts and slurs like a bartender who’s her own best customer. Nested with parrots and mockingbirds, the Capitol Building has become an echo chamber for Fox News. Senator Ted Cruz, a champion Princeton debater and a Harvard doctor of law, now sounds like Sarah Palin with more testosterone. A Bach fugue is as trying on the hands as on the head, and if Buckley the writer and musician aspired to self-mastery, it was in the pursuit of excellence. Excellence, of course, is the antithesis of our leaders’ and pundits’ lack of seriousness, discipline, and integrity. When asked to provide a mission statement for The National Review, Buckley turned to the question of character: “The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence … and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).” Though some suspect Buckley of elitism, his demand for excellence simply set him against mediocrity. This is as it should be. His intellect, eloquence, and candor would be a tonic for the oafs now puffing themselves up as Republican messiahs. In its most noxious strain, their populism equates to craven demagoguery and outright philistinism. Such thinking prevents the consideration of radical, inventive, unique voices and ensures that politicians, on the right but also on the politically correct left, remain toadies to their respective orthodoxies. A master of counterpoint, Buckley despised orthodoxy within his own movement. He spurned dogma and hewed to original principles as the need arose. The rigor of his views did not lend themselves to rigor mortis, and he often veered radically from orthodoxy in favor of the practically radical or radically practical. When entering the public sphere, he was reluctant to accept the conservative label, preferring to call himself an “individualist.” He once wrote that “intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.” So he opposed the War on Drugs, its bitter financial and human costs, and supported the legalization of illicit substances. Though Libertarians cite him as a kind of hero, he rejected their desire to demolish the state, to privatize all public works, as the most ridiculous kind of utopianism. In a debate with Ron Paul on “Firing Line,” he held that “the libertarian position is discredited by a kind of reductionism that is simply incompatible with social life.” He might say the same of his ideological heirs, on the airwaves and the National Mall, who crank their bullhorns of drivel to one hundred decibels. They spout so much sound and fury signifying nothing.",REAL
+1161,"Listen to the Donald Trump voters: It has taken an ignorant demagogue to tell truth about GOP, humiliate party establishment","The GOP establishment has seen all of its candidates not merely beaten, but utterly humiliated, by an aggressively ignorant demagogue, whose rhetoric makes him sound like a cheap knockoff of Benito Mussolini and George Wallace.
+
+Why? A look at the facts of American economic life suggests that the rubes have decided they’re tired of being played for marks, which explains why the GOP establishment’s siren song about the Land of Opportunity is no longer doing the trick.
+
+The basic myth the right wing of The Money Party has sold to Republican voters over the past 40 years (the left wing of the party is called the Democrats) goes like this: the economy boomed in the decades immediately after World War II, and standards of living rose rapidly.  But since then, too much government regulation, too many taxes, and an overly generous welfare system that has made Those People even lazier than they were before have combined to kill the American dream.
+
+That is why ordinary Americans (aka working and middle-class white people) have bank accounts that don’t reflect the rewards they should have received for all their hard work. If not for government meddling we would have a thriving economy, just like the one we enjoyed back in the good old days.
+
+All this is a fantastic lie, as a glance at the actual economic history of America since 1945 illustrates.  (In what follows, all figures have been converted to constant, inflation-adjusted dollars).
+
+America is a vastly wealthier country today than it was forty years ago.  Furthermore, on a per-person basis, the country’s wealth has increased far more over the past four decades than it did in the thirty years immediately after World War II.
+
+Here are the numbers: between 1945 and 1974, per capita GDP in the U.S. grew from $17,490 to $27,837.  That is an impressive improvement, but it pales in comparison to what has happened since: in 2014, per capita GDP was $55,185, i.e., almost exactly double what it was in 1974.  In terms of economic output, the country is twice as rich per person now as it was then.
+
+Where has all this money gone?  The answer ought to shock anyone who cares about either economic opportunity or increasing inequality.  The average household income of the bottom 50% of American households was $25,475 in 1974, and $26,520  in 2014.  In other words, half the population has gotten essentially none of the extra $10 trillion dollars of national wealth that the American economy has generated over the past forty years.
+
+Keep in mind that this group includes fully half of the nation’s middle class, by every standard definition of that category. Meanwhile, over this same time, the average household income of the top five percent of American households (most of the members of this group would not, of course, consider themselves rich, let alone part of the actual plutocracy) has gone from $187,729 to $332,347.  As for the really rich, the numbers are truly staggering: in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars, the household income of the top 0.01% (roughly, the nation’s 13,000 richest households) increased by about seven-fold, from less than $5 million to more than $30 million per year. Of course, some of Trump’s appeal is based on his willingness to exploit racism and xenophobia while speaking to the economic anxieties of white middle and working class voters.  But establishment politicians are making a big mistake when they under-estimate the extent to which Trump’s message – crude and bombastic as it is — that Americans were winners but are now losers, resonates with the actual life experience of so many people. These people are angry about what has happened to them and their communities, and especially angry about the empty promises of a Republican party that is run for the almost exclusive benefit of the rich.  The half of America that gets along on $40,000, or $25,000, or $10,000 per year doesn’t care about cutting capital gains taxes or getting rid of the estate tax (which already exempts the “first” $11 million of a married couple’s wealth), and it isn’t enthusiastic about slashing Social Security and Medicare either. To the contrary, all these things are the pet projects of the Republican donor class.  For forty years the GOP has managed to manipulate culture war issues and racial and ethnic animosities to hide from its base two facts: the contemporary Republican party exists to protect the economic interests of that class, and those interests don’t actually align with the economic interests of middle- and working-class Americans, even if they happen to be white and culturally conservative. That it took a shameless foul-mouthed egomaniacal reality TV star to speak this truth in such a way that Republican voters would hear it is a sad comment on the state of our politics and culture.",REAL
+683,Clinton says electing Trump would be 'historic mistake',"The former secretary of state warned that a Trump presidency could spark nuclear conflicts overseas and ignite economic catastrophe at home.
+
+Previewing a rancorous fall campaign, Hillary Clinton assailed Donald Trump on Thursday as a potential president who would lead America toward war and economic crisis. She portrayed her own foreign policy as optimistic, inclusive, and diplomatic, born from long experience in public life.
+
+There was nothing diplomatic in her remarks, a clear indication of how she'll take Mr. Trump on. Electing him, she said, would be ""a historic mistake.""
+
+During a speech in San Diego that was billed as a foreign policy address, the Democratic former secretary of state unloaded on her likely Republican election opponent, counting down reasons he is not qualified - from his aggressive Twitter attacks to his emotional outbursts.
+
+""He is not just unprepared; he is temperamentally unfit,"" she told supporters in a ballroom. ""We cannot let him roll the dice with America.""
+
+She said a Trump presidency could spark nuclear conflicts overseas and ignite economic catastrophe at home.
+
+""There's no risk of people losing their lives if you blow up a golf course deal, but it doesn't work like that in world affairs,"" Ms. Clinton said of the celebrity businessman. ""The stakes in global statecraft are infinitely higher and more complex than in the world of luxury hotels.""
+
+She mocked Trump's Twitter blasts and predicted he was preparing more as she spoke. As if on cue, he tweeted after she finished: ""Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton! Reading poorly from the telepromter! She doesn't even look presidential!""
+
+Trump, meanwhile, got an endorsement he'd been seeking, from Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had resisted even after the businessman clinched the GOP nomination.
+
+Clinton's robust assault on Trump was widely carried on television, a change for the leading Democratic candidate who's frequently struggled to break through coverage of Trump.
+
+She is ramping up her criticism of the presumptive Republican nominee and trying to quell concerns within her own party that she isn't ready to rumble with the famously combative Trump. She offered a number of aggressive new attack lines, at times baiting Trump to respond by calling him ""thin skinned.""
+
+She hit Trump for his reality television past, for his snarky Twitter feed, for his hotel experience.
+
+She ran down a list of people he has insulted, including the pope.
+
+And she assailed Trump over many statements, criticizing him for seeking to ban Muslims from entering the country, for talking about leaving NATO, and for suggesting Japan could one day acquire nuclear weapons.
+
+""He has the gall to say prisoners of war like John McCain aren't heroes,"" Clinton said. ""He says he has foreign policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant.""
+
+Emphasizing her experience as first lady, senator, and secretary of state, Clinton said she recognizes what it means to deploy American troops and would provide the steady diplomacy the country needs.
+
+Clinton and Trump offer starkly different visions of US foreign policy. Her proposals reflect the traditional approach of both major parties. Despite differences on some issues, such as the Iraq war and Iran, Democratic and Republican presidents have been generally consistent on policies affecting China, Russia, North Korea, nuclear proliferation, trade, alliances, and many other issues.
+
+Trump's ""America first"" approach is short on details but appeals to angry voters who believe that successive leaders have weakened the country and have been duped into bad trade deals that cost American jobs.
+
+Trump accused Clinton of lying about his foreign policy plans at a rally in Sacramento, Calif., Wednesday night.
+
+""She lies. She made a speech and she's making another one tomorrow. And they sent me a copy of the speech and it was such lies about my foreign policy,"" Trump said.
+
+""They said I want Japan ... to get nuclear weapons. Give me a break,"" he objected. ""I want Japan and Germany and Saudi Arabia and South Korea and many of the NATO nations – they owe us tremendous. We're taking care of all these people. And what I want them to do is pay up.""
+
+Trump has suggested in the past that he might be OK with Japan one day obtaining nuclear weapons.
+
+In recent days, Clinton has criticized Trump over his business practices, his resistance to disclose which charities received money he raised during a January fundraiser for veterans' causes, and the now-defunct Trump University. On Wednesday she called him a ""fraud"" and said the real estate mogul had taken advantage of vulnerable Americans.
+
+Trump has pushed back. On the education company, he has maintained that customers were overwhelmingly satisfied with the offerings.
+
+While Clinton is stressing her concerns about Trump, she is still dealing with her primary race. She needs just 70 more delegates to win the Democratic primary, but is dealing with a tough fight with rival Bernie Sanders in California.",REAL
+7548,It’s A Setup: Dems Claim Russians Will Undermine Elections With Fake Documents Showing Voter Fraud,"Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » It’s A Setup: Dems Claim Russians Will Undermine Elections With Fake Documents Showing Voter Fraud 
+The narrative now is that the Russians are either going to compromise the Presidential election by outright hacking it, or, they will simply pretend that they compromised the elections by posting fake documents proving voter fraud. 
+
+From Mac Slavo, SHTFPlan : 
+If the election fraud narrative, cyberattack and rigged voting machines haven’t yet thoroughly confused the American voting public, maybe the latest report from Reuters will do the job. 
+According to Reuters, U.S. voting authorities are now warning that while the Russians may not actually hack the Presidential election, they may fake hacking the Presidential election. 
+What they’re saying without actually saying it is that if Hillary Clinton wins the election and Trump supporters show proof of any fraudulent activity, the “proof” will have been fabricated by… The Russians. 
+Joe Joseph Explains: 
+This is the height of desperation for the mainstream media and The-Powers-That-Shouldn’t-Be because they know that they’ve been manipulating elections for a very long time now… 
+Watch at Youtube 
+It sounds almost too crazy to believe, but this is now being disseminated to the public via mainstream pipelines: 
+U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are warning that hackers with ties to Russia’s intelligence services could try to undermine the credibility of the presidential election by posting documents online purporting to show evidence of voter fraud. 
+The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said however, that the U.S. election system is so large, diffuse and antiquated that hackers would not be able to change the outcome of the Nov. 8 election. 
+But hackers could post documents, some of which might be falsified, that are designed to create public perceptions of widespread voter fraud, the officials said. 
+They said that they did not have specific evidence of such a plan, but state and local election authorities had been warned to be vigilant for hacking attempts. 
+Source: Reuters 
+So, according to this latest report, the Russians are either going to compromise the Presidential election by outright hacking it, or, they will simply pretend that they compromised the elections by posting fake documents purporting to show voter fraud. 
+Either way, it was the Russians. 
+Trust us. On Sale At SD Bullion… This Week Only… This entry was posted in World News and tagged Donald Trump , Hillary Clinton , Hillary vote fraud , vote fraud . Bookmark the permalink . Post navigation",FAKE
+481,Conservatives Cheer Research Saying Cuts To Unemployment Benefits Helped The Economy,"WASHINGTON -- A new research paper suggests Congress helped the economy to the tune of nearly 2 million jobs when lawmakers killed long-term unemployment benefits at the end of 2013.
+
+The working paper, by economists Marcus Hagedorn, Iourii Manovskii and Kurt Mitman, is a boon to congressional Republicans who insisted the benefits not be renewed. The Wall Street Journal editorial board trumpeted the findings and the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), touted the paper on its blog.
+
+But while the study might help the GOP take credit for an improving economy, the story isn't so simple, as several other recent studies have found the long-term benefits weren't holding back workers.
+
+The new paper says the benefit cut led to 1.8 million additional jobs last year. ""Almost 1 million of these jobs were filled by workers from out of the labor force who would not have participated in the labor market had benefit extensions been reauthorized,"" the authors write.
+
+They reached their conclusion by comparing the 2014 employment growth of adjacent counties in separate states, since the federal unemployment insurance program that expired in December 2013 offered different durations of benefits depending on a state's unemployment rate. Using Labor Department data, the paper found that counties in states that lost out on more weeks of benefits saw higher job growth. In other words, they were better off without the benefits.
+
+The finding is contrary to predictions from the Obama administration and the Congressional Budget Office, which assumed keeping the extended unemployment compensation through 2014 would boost the economy. Other studies have found that the long-term jobless aid in place since 2008 didn't reduce the likelihood that laid off workers would take available jobs.
+
+Some commentators, both liberal and conservative, have taken issue with the paper's methodology. Using a different set of Labor Department data, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research found a smaller increase in employment in states where the benefit cut was deeper.
+
+For some of the workers whose benefits ended that December, hardship ensued -- at least in the short term. Things got desperate for Charlie Walker of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, for instance, before he got a new job last fall. And Brian Krueger of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, only got back to work in May 2014 after going on food stamps and nearly losing his house. He doesn't see himself as part of a happy story about the economy improving.",REAL
+1917,The GOP front-runner? It's not Jeb Bush,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+10258,Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Survey Finds That Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence | RedFlag News,"
+by Michael Snyder via THE DAILY SHEEPLE 
+Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th? 
+Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country. 
+At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day… 
+A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that. 
+More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square. 
+But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax… 
+Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first. 
+And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June … 
+This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day. 
+We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika. 
+There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece… 
+On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?” 
+Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt. 
+On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope. 
+There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating. 
+Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge. 
+For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election… 
+Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president. 
+Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” 
+And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today … 
+“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election. 
+Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another. 
+Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 . 
+If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then. 
+And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month … 
+As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be. 
+But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome . 
+Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House. 
+Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it. ",FAKE
+3141,Critics pounce as Obama again shows he isn’t easy on America,"President Obama has never been one to go easy on America.
+
+As a new president, he dismissed the idea of American exceptionalism, noting that Greeks think their country is special, too. He labeled the Bush-era interrogation practices, euphemistically called “harsh” for years, as torture. America, he has suggested, has much to answer given its history in Latin America and the Middle East.
+
+His latest challenge came Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast. At a time of global anxiety over Islamist terrorism, Obama noted pointedly that his fellow Christians, who make up a vast majority of Americans, should perhaps not be the ones who cast the first stone.
+
+“Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” he told the group, speaking of the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts religion can inspire. “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
+
+[The Fix: Why Obama invoked the Crusades — and what it says about how he views terrorism]
+
+Some Republicans were outraged. “The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” said former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore (R). “He has offended every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.”
+
+Obama’s remarks spoke to his unsparing, sometimes controversial, view of the United States — where triumphalism is often overshadowed by a harsh assessment of where Americans must try harder to live up to their own self-image. Only by admitting these shortcomings, he has argued, can we fix problems and move beyond them.
+
+“There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith,” he said at the breakfast.
+
+But many critics believe that the president needs to focus more on enemies of the United States.
+
+Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called Obama’s comments about Christianity “an unfortunate attempt at a wrongheaded moral comparison.”
+
+What we need more is a “moral framework from the administration and a clear strategy for defeating ISIS,” he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
+
+Obama spoke a day after meeting with Muslim leaders, in what participants said was his first roundtable with a Muslim-only group since taking office. The Muslim leaders argued that their community has faced unfair scrutiny in the wake of terrorist attacks overseas. Although the White House released only a broad description of the meeting — which touched on issues including racial profiling — participants said it gave them a chance to express their concerns directly to the president.
+
+Farhana Khera, executive director of the civil rights group Muslim Advocates, one of 13 participants, said the session gave Obama a chance to focus on Muslim Americans the way he has done with other constituencies, such as African American and Jewish groups.
+
+“I started off by saying the biggest concern I hear from Muslim parents is their fear that their children will be ashamed to be Muslim” because of discrimination, Khera said. “We are asking him to use his bully pulpit to have a White House summit on hate crimes against religious minorities, much like the summit on bullying reset the conversation around LGBT youth.”
+
+Obama emphasized the need to respect minorities in his speech Thursday, saying it was part of the obligation Americans face as members of a diverse and open society, “And if, in fact, we defend the legal right of a person to insult another’s religion, we’re equally obligated to use our free speech to condemn such insults — and stand shoulder to shoulder with religious communities, particularly religious minorities who are the targets of such attacks.”
+
+[WATCH: Listen to what Obama said]
+
+For the president, the prayer breakfast represented a role he has played before: explaining to Americans why others might see things differently. Joshua DuBois, who headed the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships under Obama and has served as an informal spiritual adviser, said the president is conscious of the fact that Islam is an abstraction for much of the general public.
+
+“The president, as a Christian, knows many American Muslims,” DuBois said. “Unfortunately, a lot of folks in our country don’t have close relationships with Muslims. The only time they’re hearing about Islam is in the context of the foreign policy crisis or what’s happening with ISIS.”
+
+As a result, many Americans have an increasingly hostile view of Islam. A Pew Research Center survey last fall found that half of Americans think the Islamic religion is more likely than others to encourage violence, while 39 percent said it does not. The view that Islam is more apt to encourage violent acts rose 12 percentage points from the beginning of 2014 and was double the number who said so in March 2002 — less than a year after the Sept. 11 attacks.
+
+In the past, Obama has used stark, personal terms to describe ongoing tensions between African Americans and America’s white majority. When discussing the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, he spoke of being trailed while shopping in a department store and hearing the locks on cars click as he walked down the street.
+
+But he has also framed the most incendiary aspects of race relations — whether it’s the moment when his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, thundered “God damn America” from the pulpit or the shooting of another unarmed young black man, Michael Brown — as an opportunity to test the concept of American exceptionalism.
+
+He titled the 2008 speech he delivered in Philadelphia about Wright “A More Perfect Union,” a phrase he echoed 6 / years later when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly.
+
+“We welcome the scrutiny of the world — because what you see in America is a country that has steadily worked to address our problems and make our union more perfect,” he said. “America is not the same as it was 100 years ago, 50 years ago or even a decade ago. Because we fight for our ideals and are willing to criticize ourselves when we fall short.”
+
+But each of these admissions of fault — whether it is Obama’s acknowledgment during his 2009 Cairo speech that the United States was involved in the 1953 coup overthrowing the government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh or the suggestion that America has “a moral responsibility to act” on arms control because only the United States had “used a nuclear weapon” — has drawn sharp criticism from opponents.
+
+Obama has argued that United States is exceptional because it responds to its citizens’ frank assessments of whether it lives up to its core values. And he has defended the exceptional role it plays in the world given its military power and political traditions, like when Obama decided to intervene in Libya on the grounds that it is not in America’s nature to stand by while a civilian population is threatened.
+
+But he has always argued that straying from those values, as he believes happened during the George W. Bush administration, weakens the United States. “We went off course,” he said early in his presidency of the detention and interrogation practices of his predecessor, and he pledged to end torture, close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and correct what he defined as mistakes America made during the country’s “season of fear.”
+
+Critics say that Obama is chastising the wrong people.
+
+“The evil actions that he mentioned were clearly outside the moral parameters of Christianity itself and were met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians,” Moore said. He added that while he understood Obama’s attempt to make sure “he is not heard as saying that all Muslims are terrorists, I think most people know that at this point.”
+
+Michelle Boorstein and Scott Clement contributed to this report.",REAL
+7650,Key Time In Collective Human History,"Leave a reply 
+Katie Gallanti – This is a key time in our collective humanity’s history… dark power versus true power, underhanded manipulative energy versus the clean heart. The true heart can be hurt and wounded, but the true heart is strong, has vision, endurance and when connected to Source can draw deep resourcefulness and grace. 
+As a human family this is our time to claim this Earth for the true human heart. All darkne ss be gone. We claim it first and foremost within. By believing and holding steady even in when all looks lost or hopeless. 
+Each one of us is an anchor of love and Source energy. And by love I do not mean this wishy washy sappy love of the hallmark cards, but the fierce stand up to be counted, protector love, of the Spiritual Warrior’s heart. The love of the mother that guards her young. The love of the father that protects. The love of Source that imbues all things. 
+Earthly life is not eternal. In a way a play we are immersed with in which we explore and test the Soul in all sorts of circumstances. Currently the play is a very intense story of collective awakening and empowerment under a very intense set of circumstances. In this we learn about resilience and about the deeper aspects of hope. 
+The elections are just a vehicle via which the human empowerment story is expressing right now. Its not so much about Trump versus Clinton, but about The People versus The Evil Empire. Things are being manipulated. The game is not clean. And The People at large are beginning to see the wizard behind the curtain pulling strings in droves. Right now the wizard still has the upper hand. But the wizard is not invincible, no matter how tall he looks and how clever the slight of hand. 
+As usual, there are rules to creation energy. Believing something is possible is key. The strongest block to such belief is the inner wounding we all carry that predisposes to helplessness. Much of that inner wounding has been created purposefully, by design, in a society that has inbuilt fracturing and division from the earliest of ages. 
+But we are not our society. We are not our wounds. We our not our fears. We are the Human Soul. We are the multidimensional beauty and the radiance of our inner light spanning eons of time. We are all the star systems we have visited. And all the infinite of our transcendent experience. And we are expansion in the light of Source, within which all finds peace, as well as strength. 
+Humanity is often referred to in terms of its flawd-ness : “I am just human”. But out humanity is the territory of paradox. So flawed and yet so vast. So vulnerable and yet capable of the deepest inner breath. So cruel and mean at times and yet also capable of infinite nobility. 
+Reclaim your pure human Soul… invite Source into the human story… recharge and breathe in strength and honor, as you intend the future of the new humanity into being. 
+Much love, SF Source Katie Gallanti Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+1021,Cruz allies prevail in North Dakota delegate race,"Fargo, North Dakota (CNN) Ted Cruz claimed a majority of delegates in North Dakota on Sunday -- though the delegates are not bound to him, so their loyalty remains uncertain.
+
+North Dakota Republicans selected 25 national delegates and, of those, 18 were on a list of preferred delegates that Cruz circulated -- a clear win for the Texas senator.
+
+The delegates met Sunday evening, just as the convention ended, and selected State Party Chairman Kelly Armstrong to be chair their convention delegation and chose Republican National Committeeman Curly Haugland and RNC Committeewoman Sandy Boehler to serve on the powerful convention rules committee.
+
+Party leaders make up many of the slots, including Gov. Jack Dalrymple, First Lady Betsy Dalrymple, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem and top party donors. But party activists won a good number of slots, too.
+
+The delegates who said they were supporting Cruz Sunday were adamant in their support. Rick Becker, who ran a close race for the Republican nomination for governor at the convention, said he didn't want to hold out making a decision in order to be wooed by candidates.
+
+""Should I play that game? No, I don't care. If I was actually undecided, I'd say that, but I just kind of, I'm always standing by principle, as boring as that might be. I know I'm going to support Cruz, I can't fathom what would occur."" Becker said. ""Holding out for a helicopter ride, or the goodie bags, or all that kind of crap. I'm just, I'm not interested in that.""
+
+With the delegates formally unbound and free to make their own decisions at the national convention, it would be impossible to declare North Dakota's results a clear win for any of the three campaigns. But the race was on Sunday evening to do just that anyway. The Cruz campaign sought to portray the results as an unequivocal win.
+
+""I'm thrilled to have the vote of confidence of Republican voters in North Dakota who delivered such a resounding victory today,"" Cruz said in a statement. ""As I met them over the weekend, North Dakota Republicans recognized that I am the only candidate who can move this country forward by protecting freedom and liberty. Whether we defeat Donald Trump before the convention or at it, I'm energized to have the support of the vast majority of North Dakota delegates.""
+
+Even though none of the 17 national delegates contacted by CNN said they were voting for Kasich, the Ohio governor's campaign claimed a victory of sorts Sunday evening.
+
+""Cruz strong arm tactics fail in ND, where he lost key floor vote & helped elect delegates who will vote @johnkasich in Cleveland. #NDGOP16"" tweeted top Kasich strategist John Weaver.
+
+Cruz himself addressed the North Dakota Republican gathering Saturday. The other campaigns sent surrogates. Former candidate Ben Carson rallied the more than 1,600 state delegates for Trump Sunday morning, with a speech focused heavily on faith and his efforts to teach Trump religion and spirituality. But behind the scenes he lobbied North Dakota Republican brass one-on-one.
+
+Ahead of Sunday's speech, he pulled Haugland into a private meeting, he also met privately with former Gov. Ed Schafer the night before.
+
+""We had an opportunity to really explain things, to explain rationale for doing things,"" Carson told CNN backstage at the Scheels Arena. ""I said the proof will be in the pudding we'll see how it all comes out.""
+
+As the delegates packed into this Fargo hockey arena for the final day of their state convention, the Trump, Cruz and Kasich campaigns worked furiously to identify supporters. Republicans were scheduled to vote for 25 national delegates from a list of 74 nominated delegates.
+
+But the state's unique delegate selection process -- which lets delegates vote for whichever candidate they prefer at the national convention -- led to much battling between the campaigns.
+
+North Dakota's lone congressman, Rep. Kevin Cramer, endorsed Trump Sunday, shortly before North Dakota Republicans began selecting the delegates to the national convention.
+
+""It's something I'd been processing for a long time and it really culminated with my online straw poll where I really did want to give voice to the people who can't be here,"" Cramer said.
+
+Because the delegates will be unbound, they are not formally committed to any campaign. But that didn't stop the campaigns from working to set expectations so they could claim victory.
+
+Trump adviser Barry Bennett told CNN that ""a plurality"" on the list of 25 preferred were leaning toward Trump after a strong lobbying effort from Cramer, who Bennett called the Trump operation's ""Sherpa"" over the course of the hectic weekend.
+
+""We'll be drinking champagne here all day,"" Bennett said, if the slate of 25 delegates picked by party leaders earlier this weekend passes in the convention. Of the 25 people the party leaders put forward, 16 were chosen and nine new delegates were selected.
+
+Still, as is the case on the ground in states around the country, Cruz's campaign has had a strong presence in and around the convention. In addition to Cruz's speech on Saturday, Carly Fiorina, the former presidential candidate and top Cruz surrogate, has been meeting publicly and privately with potential delegates since Friday.
+
+As many as 10 of the delegates on the preferred list have indicated some or solid public support for Cruz.
+
+Kasich's delegate wranglers were equally optimistic Saturday after reviewing the list of party picks, saying they saw at least 20 on their who could be swayed to their side.
+
+In the end, however, the decisions will not be known until the delegates place their vote on the first ballot at the national convention in Cleveland.",REAL
+10452,US Election an elaborate John Lewis Christmas campaign. More soon.,  Adrian Bamforth   Adrian Bamforth  ,FAKE
+1358,Why the Iowa caucuses have such a massive impact on the presidential race,"Donald Trump has dominated the GOP presidential race for seven months. Nothing €— not his many offensive comments, not his mediocre debate performances, and not the once-feared GOP establishment €— has been able to stop his rise.
+
+But on February 1, all that could change when Trump faces by far his biggest challenge yet: the Iowa caucuses.
+
+The results in Iowa — the first time a state's actual voters weigh in in the presidential nomination contest — can make the national contest turn on a dime. Barack Obama won Iowa in 2008, and he suddenly shot up to become competitive with Hillary Clinton in national polls. John Kerry came out of nowhere to win Iowa in 2004, and the presumed leader, Howard Dean, collapsed with astonishing speed.
+
+And Trump could be vulnerable in Iowa. He has taken the lead in recent polls, but there have been anecdotal reports suggesting that Trump's ground game — crucial in the low-turnout caucuses — is laughably inferior to Ted Cruz's. So in the first contest that really counts, Trump could end up a loser. Yet if he manages to pull off a win — watch out.
+
+But let's step back for a minute, and ask: Why do the quirky Iowa caucuses have this tremendous impact on the race, anyway?
+
+""What is the difference between first place and third place in Iowa going to be, 4,000 votes? It's like a student body election.""
+
+The state is small. Its population is overwhelmingly white. Turnout for the caucuses is absurdly low. Democrats don't even get a secret ballot. And vanishingly few of the delegates who will actually determine each party's nominee at the national conventions will be from Iowa. So why do we care so much about who wins?
+
+As I'll explain, Iowa became super important because we — the media, party insiders, activists, the candidates themselves, and even voters to an extent — gradually decided to make it so important. These key players think the caucus results reveal a great deal about which candidates can win elections elsewhere, and the contest for Iowa isn't really a contest for delegates — it's a contest to look good in their eyes.
+
+But does Iowa's prominence make sense? Or could the obsession with its results from the media and insiders alike be a tremendous overreaction, bordering on a bizarre mass delusion — one that could end up distorting who gets nominated for president?
+
+""What is the difference between first place and third place in Iowa going to be, 4,000 votes? It's like a student body election,"" says Stuart Stevens, who was Mitt Romney's chief strategist in 2012.
+
+""You have to respect the absurdity of it,"" he continues. ""Or it'll drive you crazy.""
+
+The Iowa caucuses are the first time actual voters all across any US state get up and go say who they want to be president.
+
+And these voters do literally have to ""get up and go"" — to an in-person event, held at a specific time in the evening, at one of 1,681 precincts across the state. There's no absentee voting, so if you're bedridden or out of the state, you've historically been out of luck.
+
+The caucuses are administered separately by each major party, and Republicans and Democrats have quite different rules. This year, the GOP contest is simple: After some opening rigmarole at their caucus sites, an ordinary secret ballot vote on presidential candidates will be conducted, and the totals will be tallied statewide.
+
+""It's kind of like a carnival, where the candidates' supporters say, 'Come over to us!'""
+
+The Democratic caucuses are far more complicated — they're rowdy, hours-long public affairs, with back-and-forth debate among attendees who have to go physically stand with other supporters of their preferred candidate. ""It's kind of like a carnival, where the candidates' supporters say, 'Come over to us, to our group!'"" says Drake University political scientist Dennis Goldford.
+
+There's no secret ballot, and if a Democratic candidate doesn't get enough supporters in a precinct (15 percent of attendees), he or she is eliminated, reality show style. Here's a video showing how one precinct's caucus went down in 2008:
+
+Like it or not, the Iowa results appear to be hugely important in determining who the major parties’ presidential nominees will be — particularly when considered alongside the impact of fellow early state New Hampshire. ""It’s not remotely a national primary. These national polls mean nothing. The nation isn't voting,"" says Stevens. Instead, it's Iowans who get the first say.
+
+And, importantly, even if the Iowa victor doesn’t end up winning the nomination in the end, the state’s results can dramatically shake up the presidential contest — knocking some candidates out of the race entirely, while elevating others to top-tier status in the eyes of political elites and future voters.
+
+""You think about the number of people who participate"" — usually a little over 100,000 people per party, meaning around 20 percent of eligible caucus-goers — ""and Iowa has just an amazing, outsize impact on the country,"" says Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.
+
+Like you and I, the political world is obsessed with the question of who can actually win in each presidential nomination race. And a large part of that world has come to believe that the caucus outcomes help shed some important light on that question. (Remember, before Iowa, assessments of who can win are mainly based on polls — and polls, of course, can be wrong.)
+
+""Iowa has just an amazing, outsize impact on the country""
+
+It's pretty weird: Essentially, the Iowa caucuses are important because the media, the candidates, and the political world more broadly all treat their results as greatly important in determining who can win. And this plays out in several interacting ways:
+
+All of these dynamics, it should be noted, also apply to New Hampshire (and, to a decreasing degree, to other states as the process continues). The media, the candidates, political elites, and to a certain extent voters elsewhere all act on the signals they believe Iowa and New Hampshire are sending them. And that's how these early state contests dramatically reshape the nomination landscape long before the vast majority of the American people get to weigh in.
+
+The earliest case in which Iowa changed everything was little-known former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter's victory in the 1976 Democratic caucuses. This was only the second time Iowa went first, and Carter calculated that if he won there, he'd get so much media coverage that he'd be catapulted from obscurity to national fame. So he essentially camped out in Iowa for a year, and his strategy worked like a charm when he won.
+
+Carter's subsequent media-driven poll surge helped him narrowly carry New Hampshire and then 11 of the next 12 contests, followed by the nomination and the White House. ""Jimmy Carter would say he would never have become president without the Iowa caucuses,"" says Jerry Crawford, a longtime Iowa Democratic organizer now working for the Clinton campaign.
+
+Iowa convinced people ""that Obama was more than just a media phenomenon""
+
+Barack Obama, too, relied on Iowa for his first victory for his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2008. On the day of the caucuses, he trailed Hillary Clinton by more than 20 points in national polls. But days after he won there, he shot up to within 5 points of her.
+
+""The results of Iowa were validating for us,"" says Larry Grisolano, who consulted for Obama's campaign that year. ""People became convinced that Obama was more than just a media phenomenon — and that he was a candidate who could attract votes.""
+
+Obama's win there made him surge to within striking distance of Clinton in national polls, and far above her in another important early contest, South Carolina. ""Iowa's peculiarities played to his strengths,"" Grisolano adds. ""I don’t know how it would’ve turned out if we started in a place that was more advertising-centric.""
+
+Even when the Iowa winner doesn't end up winning the nomination (as with Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, the two most recent GOP winners), the caucus results can shake up the race by elevating them, rather than other candidates, to prominence in the contest.
+
+""The caucuses are about who exceeds expectations and who fails to. And who sets expectations? You and I do.""
+
+But it's important to understand that not every candidate is affected equally by the caucuses. Iowa matters primarily because of how it changes the perceptions of the political world. And candidates are, in large part, judged by whether their caucus performance meets the expectations of the media and political elites.
+
+For instance, in the 2008 GOP caucuses, Mitt Romney came in second and John McCain came in fourth. Yet Romney was portrayed as a big loser, since he had been campaigning hard in Iowa and had once seemed the favorite to win. McCain, meanwhile, hadn't really been trying to win Iowa and was focusing instead on doing well in New Hampshire, so his fourth-place finish wasn't interpreted as a stunning setback for him.
+
+""Every candidate in Iowa has the same opponent, and that opponent’s name is 'expected,'"" says Goldford. ""The caucuses are about who exceeds expectations and who fails to. And who sets expectations? You and I do.""
+
+Essentially, Iowa moved its caucuses to the front of the line at the perfect moment. It happened back in 1972, just while the Democratic Party was overhauling its nomination process to give actual voters, not just party bosses, more of a say. That's how the presidential nomination system we know today — the months-long sequence of staggered primaries and caucuses in every state and territory — came about. (Republicans adopted very similar reforms soon afterward.)
+
+But for 1972 — the first nomination contest under the reformed system — Iowa Democrats slated their usual caucuses for the unusually early date of January 24. People offer various different explanations for why they did so: a deliberate effort to help a favorite son who was considering running for president, an arcane party rules change that required that 30 days pass between various state and local events, or even that a lack of available hotel rooms in Des Moines that summer necessitated an earlier state convention date (which then necessitated an earlier caucus date).
+
+Whatever the reason, the Iowa Democratic caucuses moved ahead of the New Hampshire primary, which had traditionally been the nation's first.
+
+""People in the political community concluded, 'What happened out there told us something'""
+
+At first, few people outside Iowa noticed or cared, and the 1972 caucus results got little attention nationally. But in retrospect, after George McGovern shockingly won the Democratic nomination, insiders second-guessing about why they failed to predict his rise concluded that they should have paid more attention when he finished a surprisingly strong second in Iowa.
+
+""People in the political community concluded, 'What happened out there told us something. It told us about a weak frontrunner. It told us about the energy of the antiwar movement,"" says David Yepsen, a former political reporter for the Des Moines Register.
+
+Savvy Iowans of both parties worked hard to promote this idea that Iowa was an early bellwether. Democrats arranged the event so top-line ""results"" could be easily reported to the national press, and Republicans moved their caucuses to the same day to create a unified event that would get lots of media buzz. As Tom Whitney, then state Democratic chair, later told Iowa Public Television:
+
+So Carter's victories in Iowa and the general election weren't just great for him — they ended up being great for Iowa, which could now claim to be a kingmaker. Future candidates in both parties spent more time and money there, and the national press started regularly covering the results as a major event. Party insiders and voters in other early states began taking Iowa's results more and more seriously, too.
+
+Ever since, the state parties have tenaciously and successfully fought to keep their caucuses first, helped by the new ""precedent"" they had set, as Brookings fellow Elaine Kamarck chronicles in her book Primary Politics.
+
+Not at all! Many critics, including Vox's Dylan Matthews, argue that Iowa's population is unrepresentative of the country as a whole — the state is much more white and more rural, and has fewer foreign-born people.
+
+Others criticize the caucus setup itself: The events take a long time, they're scheduled at a specific time in the evening, and there's been no absentee voting in the past, all of which depresses turnout and could make it even more unrepresentative. (Four out of five registered party members in Iowa and the vast majority of independent voters there usually don't show up.)
+
+""I think [Iowa] distorts the process in a good way,"" says an operative in the state
+
+Furthermore, Democrats don't even get a secret ballot, which means social pressure could skew their results. On the GOP side, turnout has recently been dominated by evangelical activists, many of whom have opted for candidates that lack national appeal, like Huckabee and Santorum.
+
+And presidential candidates of both parties have long felt compelled to voice fealty to powerful interest groups in the state, like Big Corn (though Peverill Squire convincingly argues that pro-corn policies are mainly driven by Congress, not the White House).
+
+Finally, it seems just plain unfair to a lot of people in other states that Iowa gets such power.
+
+Caucus defenders respond by saying that Iowa does skew the results — positively. ""I think it distorts the process in a good way,"" says Crawford, the Hillary Clinton organizer. That's because Iowa's a state where retail campaigning and one-on-one interactions with voters, rather than simply big money and ad buys, matter. Its voters have shown that they don't just follow the prevailing national winds — they're more willing to give little-known and poorly funded challengers a chance, which helps ensure a more democratic contest overall. ""Iowa's a level playing ground,"" says Iowa GOP operative Eric Woolson. ""And Iowa has an electorate that pays attention to what's going on.""
+
+In any case, every attempt to supplant Iowa has failed, because neither national party can agree on who else should be first in line, or on an alternative way to do things entirely. And states that have tried to ""jump the line"" — like Louisiana in 1996 — have had their contests boycotted (at Iowa pols' behest) and deemed meaningless by national elites and the press.
+
+Eventually, the national parties accepted that Iowa and New Hampshire were hell-bent on going first and second — and that the vast majority of other states didn't care all that much. So the parties began harshly penalizing other states that tried to move their own nomination contests too early. Accordingly, nobody even bothered to try to leapfrog Iowa this time around.
+
+Once again, it's the lessons the political world takes away from the caucuses that are really important — not how the delegates end up allotted. Everyone is anxious to see how the actual Iowa results measure up to their expectations, to help them better understand who can actually win. And they'll be looking for a few major things.
+
+In the GOP contest, everyone is anxiously awaiting the answer to one key question: ""Can Donald Trump get people to actually vote for him?"" Because despite Trump's months-long lead in national polls, there's still a great deal of skepticism from elites about him: Perhaps polls overstate his support, perhaps his campaign doesn't have a good ground game, perhaps his supporters who aren't regular GOP primary or caucus voters won't bother to show up, or perhaps the electorate will flock to a more seemingly electable candidate at the last minute.
+
+If Trump wins Iowa, prepare for a media frenzy like you've never seen before
+
+Since caucus turnout is difficult for pollsters to model and since Ted Cruz is perceived as having a better organization than Trump, much of the political world has long expected Trump to finish second, behind Cruz. Yet Trump has taken the lead in all the most recent polls — which has had the perverse effect of raising expectations for him. Now, a second place finish would be viewed as a disappointment for him. And if he comes in third or worse, he'll be portrayed as a loser who went down to a pathetic defeat. But if he does manage to actually win the caucuses, he'll debunk much of that skepticism mentioned above, prove he won't be vanishing from the contest anytime soon — and unleash a media frenzy like you've never seen before.
+
+The Iowa results will have big implications for other GOP candidates too. Since Ted Cruz led polls there until recently, a loss there would be perceived as a serious blow to his candidacy. Marco Rubio, meanwhile, is currently polling in third place, so that's where people expect him to end up. If Rubio manages to surprise people by placing second or even first, he'll get a huge amount of positive buzz going into New Hampshire. But if he somehow falls further behind — especially if another establishment-friendly candidate like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie passes him — whispered doubts about his campaign's competence will be vindicated, and whoever beats him will have the ""momentum"" of media coverage and buzz among elites in the week before the Granite State contest. And if some other candidate entirely manages to surge late in Iowa (as Rick Santorum did in 2012), expect him or her to be a major player in the next contests, too.
+
+Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has suddenly surged in Iowa polls after a full year of trailing Clinton. Since he's long been ahead in New Hampshire, he's now positioned to seriously compete in both early states. But with this comes raised expectations. If Clinton wins both contests outright, Sanders's movement could well fizzle out, and she could wrap up the nomination quickly. If Sanders wins either, though, or even comes very close in Iowa, expect a pitched battle between the two that will last quite some time. (And unless Martin O'Malley vastly exceeds his current low single-digit percent support in Iowa, expect him to drop out soon afterward.)
+
+The nightmare scenario for Clinton at this point — which is not all that implausible — is that Sanders wins both Iowa and New Hampshire. If that happens, political elites and the press will mercilessly mock and second-guess the Clinton campaign for weeks. Yet insiders also understand that both states are heavily white and not representative of the more diverse Democratic electorate overall. So the big question is whether the positive coverage Sanders gets will improve his performance among nonwhite Democrats who have seemed uninterested in his candidacy so far — and that will be put to the test in the next contest, South Carolina.
+
+""It's a goofy way to do it, I agree. But absent a clear alternative...""
+
+If you feel like you needed a decoder ring to make sense of all that, you're not alone. No one sat down and designed our bizarre presidential nomination system — indeed, even Iowans admit that no one would ever sit down and design this exact system from scratch. ""It's a goofy way to do it, I agree,"" says Yepsen. ""But absent a clear alternative the process continues."" Candidates keep investing their time and money, the media keeps giving saturation coverage to the results, and political elites keep on believing that Iowa matters — so Iowa just keeps on mattering.
+
+This article was originally published on January 25, 2016. It has been updated with the latest expectations for how the candidates will perform in the caucuses.",REAL
+9288,So you think SUVs are safe? Shocking video,"Report Copyright Violation So you think SUVs are safe? Shocking video Back in the 70's everybody was driving rear wheel drive cars in the worst of snowstorm. My dad was even going hunting and fishing with his Chevrolet because that all there was back then. Now every SUV ad tries to sell us the lie that SUVs are safer in the snow and you just can't drive in the snow without one. Re: So you think SUVs are safe? Shocking video SUV's are fine...the idiot driver was going to fast and went into the snow filled shoulder. Drivers fault...not the SUV. ""I don't give a tuppenny fuck about your moral conundrum, you meat-headed shit-sack."" ~Bill the Butcher ""Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."" ~Arthur C. Clarke ""He's a nut-bag! Just because the fucker's got a library card doesn't make him Yoda!"" ~David Mills ~ Se7en ""THE PLANET IS FINE! THE PEOPLE ARE FUCKED"" ~George Carlin RIP Anonymous Coward",FAKE
+79,"Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders: King's legacy is alive","A day after the candidates squared off in a fiery debate, they came to Columbia, South Carolina, and largely agreed that while King's impact can still be felt today, work still needs to be done to guarantee racial equality.
+
+""Yes, the challenges we face are many, but so are the quiet heroes working in every corner of America today doing their part to make our country a better place,"" said the former secretary of state. ""I for one receive much inspiration from that simple fact.""
+
+There was symbolism in the event organized by the NAACP: In front of a statehouse that flew the Confederate battle flag until it was taken down last year. All three candidates noted the flag being removed.
+
+""The flag is down but we are still here because that flag was just one piece of something bigger,"" Clinton said. ""Dr. King died with his work unfinished and it is up to us to see through.""
+
+Sanders argued that King is not just a historic figure, but someone whose moral compass should guide people today. Repeating the phrase ""I think if he were here today,"" Sanders argued that if King were alive today, he would be supporting many of his presidential positions. ""As we celebrate his life it is terribly important to me that we don't just look at him as a museum figure, somebody in the past,"" the Vermont senator said. ""It is important to me that we look at his vision, to see the America he wanted to see."" Sanders and O'Malley walked in the NAACP sponsored march before the event, strolling down the streets of Charleston as activists chanted. O'Malley, whose birthday is Monday, laughed when asked what he wanted for his birthday, telling reporters that he is hoping for ""beat expectations"" in Iowa for his birthday.",REAL
+5676,Russia's 'White Book' on Syria shakes up UN Security Council,"Russia's 'White Book' on Syria shakes up UN Security Council   AP photo On Friday, Russia began distributing a curious document on behalf of the c hairing state of the UN Security Council - the ""White Book"" on Syria . The book contains the descriptions of the cases, when the US-led coalition was committing ""errors,"" as John Kerry once said. However, those ""errors"" can be categorized as war crimes . The actions of the Syrian ""moderate opposition"" are also reflected in the document. The 'White Book"" also contains statistics about the successful operations of the Russian Air Force and the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the civilian population in Syria, about the number of the liberated settlements, destroyed militants, as well as about the number of refugees, who returned to their places of permanent residence.The ""White Book"" was prepared by the Defence Ministry and the Foreign Ministry of Russia, as well as by specialists of the Institute for Oriental Studies.The ""White Book"" was translated into English and distributed for further reading.On 21 October the coalition attacked a funeral procession in near Kirkuk (Iraq). The pilots took the congregation of people for terrorists. As a result, dozens of civilians were killed. The recent attack of US pilots on the Syrian military near Deir-Ezzor also claimed the lives of dozens of soldiers. Later, US Secretary of State John Kerry, in a conversation with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, said that it was a mistake, apparently believing that such a statement would be enough for an excuse.""We have repeatedly said that such deadly attacks on settlements that have all attributes of war crimes, have become almost daily routine for the international lcoalition,"" an official representative for the Russian Defense Ministry, Igor Konashenkov said commenting o the attack of the funeral procession in Iraq. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru Kerry comes to Moscow to talk to Putin",FAKE
+8532,Irony Redefined: “Human Rights Champion” Suu Kyi Jails Dissidents,"By Tony Cartalucci 
+Myanmar’s defacto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi of the National League for Democracy (NDL) political party, has paved her time since coming to power earlier this year with both irony and hypocrisy. She has not only illegally declared herself “leader” of the Southeast Asian state in contravention of its constitution, she has also embarked on an iron-fisted purge of her political opponents identical to the one she fought against as she struggled to seize power to begin with. 
+During elections earlier this year, Myanmar’s constitution prevented Suu Kyi from holding the nation’s highest office due to her inordinate amount of time overseas, her status of having been married to a foreign, and her children’s dual citizenship. Instead of adhering to the law, her party once in power, simply contrived an entirely new post for her, State Counsellor of Myanmar, which makes her the “defacto leader” of Myanmar. 
+Canada’s The Globe and Mail in an article titled, “Stéphane Dion says Aung San Suu Kyi is the ‘de facto’ leader of Myanmar,” would note that Canada’s government recognized this legal side-stepping, stating: 
+Dion called Suu Kyi, now Myanmar’s foreign minister, “the de facto national leader” of her country “because they have a strange rule that if you have married somebody who’s not of the country, you cannot be the leader of the government and of the state.” 
+Suu Kyi, the internationally recognized democracy advocate, is barred from becoming president because her late husband was British, as are her two sons. The rule was crafted during Myanmar’s decades of military rule, which Suu Kyi fought against during years of house arrest before finally prevailing last fall. 
+In essence, she is unelected, and illegally holding power. For a woman who’s Western backers – particularly in the United States and United Kingdom – have held her up as a champion for democracy and the rule of law, she and her party’s first act upon taking power was trampling both. The Inhumane Humanitarian 
+Another myth built up around Nobel Peace Prize laureate Suu Kyi by the West has been her advocacy for “human rights.” Her advocacy for human rights, however, appears only to extend out to protect only as far as her immediate political allies are concerned. For groups beyond this self-serving political protection, and particularly regarding her political opponents, she and her NDL are just as eager to jail, crush, or kill political opponents as they claimed the ruling military government had been. 
+In addition to escalating violence targeting the nation’s Rohingya’s population, several activists online have been sent to jail for “insulting” the ruling government and Western-backed media fronts and organizations. 
+Myanmar’s Eleven Media Group (EMG) in its article, “Facebook offender brought to court for insulting Suu Kyi,” attempted to distance what Suu Kyi and her political supporters had once called draconian censorship as now, a simple matter of enforcing the law. It would state: 
+A Facebook user named Zaw Zaw (aka Nga Pha) was brought to the North Dagon Township court on October 24 to face prosecution for his defamatory posts about State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. 
+He has been charged under Section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law. 
+“He’s being sued for defamatory writing and photos about the State Counsellor [posted on Facebook],” said plaintiff Nay Myo Kyaw, a 34-year-old resident of North Okkalapa Township. 
+Around 50 people showed up at the hearing wearing shirts affiliated with a group called the Network of Supporters of the Rule of Law. They shouted: “You deserved it for insulting a good person.” 
+The article also admits: 
+The Myawady Township Court sentenced Aung Win Hlaing (aka A Nyar Thar), the first man to be prosecuted under the current government, for defamatory posts on Facebook about President Htin Kyaw, to nine months in jail after he was convicted under Section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law. 
+Aung Myint Tun (aka Ko Pho Htaung), a member of the National League for Democracy, is still facing legal action under the same law for the wording of a resignation letter. 
+Another man named Yar Pyay was arrested and is being prosecuted for creating a fake Facebook account under the name of Nay Myo Wai, the chairman of Peace and Diversity Party. 
+Hla Phone was also arrested and is being prosecuted for defamatory posts on Facebook about the Commander-in-Chief. 
+EMG – ironically awarded for its work in opposing the previous military-led government by Reporters without Borders – would also admit that it itself had taken advantage of Myanmar’s laws to silence its own critics, claiming: 
+Eleven Media Group (EMG) also filed complaints about repeated defamatory posts on Facebook against the group. Though EMG lodged complaints against film director Mike Tee, who is the owner of a Facebook account named Than Tun Zaw, and another Facebook user named Myat Maw for offensive posts about the group and its staff, the legal process has yet to begin. EMG lodged the complaints on January 27 and March 31 this year. 
+One would expect such a tidal wave of abuse – as defined by the West in regards to media, governance, and censorship around the world – to be met with sweeping condemnation from the West’s various human rights advocacy organizations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and a no doubt embarrassed Reporters Without Borders – yet the silence is as deafening as it is telling. Taking Over Where Accused Dictators Left Off 
+The West’s champions of democracy, rule of law, and human rights in Myanmar appears to have simply taken over right where Suu Kyi and her NDL party had claimed the military-led government left off. And despite the overt nature of Suu Kyi’s breaches of Western standards of “democracy” and “human rights,” the US is on track to lift all sanctions from Myanmar as Suu Kyi and her government open the nation, its people, and its resources to exploitation by Western corporations. 
+The overt nature of both the West’s and Suu Kyi’s hypocrisy illustrates that “democracy,” “rule of law,” and “human rights” are merely facades behind which the West and its proxies wield their power – hiding behind such principles rather than truly upholding them. And in reality, such behavior undermines these principles more than any overt abuse by an openly tyrannical regime ever could – because genuine advocates thus become associated with hypocrites like the Western governments supporting the current regime in Myanmar, their faux-nongovernmental organizations aiding and abetting the regime, and proxies like Suu Kyi and her NDL themselves. 
+International audiences must keep this example of hypocrisy in mind as the West attempts to overturn other governments in Southeast Asia and beyond under similar pretexts and using similar rhetoric – supporting supposed “pro-democracy” and “pro-human rights” advocates who have every intention of trampling both upon seizing power. 
+Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” .",FAKE
+6268,Chart Of The Day: Since 2009—–Recovery For The 5%; Stagnation for the 95%,Chart Of The Day: Since 2009 Recovery For The 5%; Stagnation for the 95%  ,FAKE
+4659,"Trump Will Go Away, but the Anger He’s Stirred Up Is Just Getting Started","Don’t gloat, progressives. Your candidate is going to win, but she’ll have no mandate and millions of enraged people who dislike her, and your, agenda and values.
+
+To be sure, Trump himself proved a mean-spirited and ultimately ineffective political vessel. But the forces that he aroused will outlive him and could get stronger in the future. In this respect Trump may reprise the role played another intemperate figure, the late Senator Barry Goldwater. Like Trump, Goldwater openly spurned political consensus, opposing everything from civil rights and Medicare to détente. His defeat led to huge losses at the congressional level, as could indeed occur this year as well.
+
+Goldwater might have failed in 1964, but his defeat did not augur a second New Deal, as some, including President Lyndon Johnson, may have hoped. Instead, his campaign set the stage for something of a right-wing resurgence that defined American politics until the election of President Obama. Pushing the deep South into the GOP, Goldwater created the “Southern strategy” that in 1968 helped elect Richard Nixon; this was followed in 1980 by the victory of Goldwater acolyte Ronald Reagan.
+
+History could repeat itself after this fall’s disaster. People who wrote off the GOP in 1964 soon became victims of their own hubris, believing they could extend the welfare state and the federal government without limits and, as it turned out, without broad popular support. In this notion they were sustained by the even then liberally oriented media and a wide section of the “respectable” business community.
+
+Three decades later a similar constellation of forces —- Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street—have locked in behind Hillary Clinton. But it is the transformation of the media itself both more ideologically uniform and concentrated more than ever on the true-blue coasts, that threatens to exacerbate Progressive Triumphalism. In this election, notes Carl Cannon, no Trump fan himself, coverage has become so utterly partisan that “the 2016 election will be remembered as one in which much of the mainstream media all but admitted aligning itself with the Democratic Party.”
+
+Successful modern Democratic candidates, including President Obama and former President Clinton, generally avoid openly embracing an ever bigger federal government. Obama, of course, proved a centralizer par excellence, but he did it stealthily and, for the most part, without the approval of Congress. This allowed him to take some bold actions, but limited the ability to “transform” the country into some variant of European welfare, crony capitalist state.
+
+Hillary Clinton lacks both Obama’s rhetorical skills and her erstwhile husband’s political ones. Her entire approach in the campaign has been based on creating an ever more intrusive and ever larger federal government. Even during Bill Clinton’s reign, she was known to be the most enthusiastic supporter of governmental regulation, and it’s unlikely that, approaching 70, she will change her approach. It seems almost certain, for example, that she will push HUD and the EPA to reshape local communities in ways pleasing to the bureaucracy.
+
+Yet most Americans do not seem to want a bigger state to interfere with their daily life. A solid majority—some 54 percent—recently told Gallup they favor a less intrusive federal government, compared to only 41 percent who want a more activist Washington. The federal government is now regarded by half of all Americans, according to another poll by Gallup, as “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 2003 only 30 percent of Americans felt that way.
+
+Due largely to Trump’s awful persona, Hillary likely will get some wins in “flyover country,” the vast territory that stretches from the Appalachians to the coastal ranges. In certain areas with strong sense of traditional morality, such as in Germanic Wisconsin and parts of Michigan, notes Mike Barone, Trump’s lewdness and celebrity-mania proved in the primaries incompatible with even conservative small town and rural sensibilities, more so in fact than in the cosmopolitan cores, where sexual obsessions are more celebrated than denounced.
+
+Yet Trump’s strongest states, with some exceptions, remain in the country’s mid-section; he still clings to leads in most of the Intermountain West, Texas, the mid-south and the Great Plains. He is still killing it in West Virginia. This edge extends beyond a preponderance of “deplorables” and what Bubba himself has referred to as “your standard redneck.”
+
+Energy is the issue that most separates the heartland from the coasts. The increasingly radical calls for “decarbonization” by leading Democrats spell the loss of jobs throughout the heartland, either directly by attacking fossil fuels or by boosting energy costs. Since 2010, the energy boom has helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the heartland, many of them in manufacturing. At the same time, most big city Democratic strongholds continued to deindustrialize and shed factory employment. No surprise then that the increasingly anti-carbon Democrats control just one legislature, Illinois, outside the Northeast and the West Coast.
+
+Trump’s romp through the primaries, like that of Bernie Sanders, rode on the perceived relative decline of the country’s middle and working classes. For all her well-calculated programmatic appeals, Hillary Clinton emerged as the willing candidate of the ruling economic oligarchy, something made more painfully obvious from the recent WikiLeaks tapes. Her likely approach to the economy, more of the same, is no doubt attractive to the Wall Street investment banks, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, renewable energy providers and inner city real estate speculators who have thrived under Obama.
+
+Yet more of the same seems unlikely to reverse income stagnation, as exemplified by the huge reserve army of unemployed, many of them middle aged men, outside the labor force. The fact remains that Obama’s vaunted “era of hope and change,” as liberal journalist Thomas Frank has noted, has not brought much positive improvement for the middle class or historically disadvantaged minorities.
+
+The notion that free trade and illegal immigration have harmed the prospects for millions of Americans will continue to gain adherents with many middle and working class voters—particularly in the heartland. We are likely to hear this appeal again in the future. If the GOP could find a better, less divisive face for their policies, a Reagan rather than a Goldwater, this working-class base could be expanded enough to overcome the progressive tide as early as 2018.
+
+The one place where the progressives seem to have won most handily is on issues of culture. Virtually the entire entertainment, fashion, and food establishments now openly allied with the left; the culture of luxury, expressed in the page of The New York Times, has found its political voice by identifying with such issues as gay rights, transgender bathrooms , abortion and, to some extent, Black Lives Matter. In contrast, the Republicans cultural constituency has devolved to a bunch of country music crooners, open cultural reactionaries and, yes, a revolting collection of racist and misogynist “deplorables.”
+
+Yet perhaps nowhere is the danger of Progressive Triumphalism more acute. Despite the cultural progressive embrace of the notion that more diversity is always good, the reality is that our racial divide remains stark and is arguably getting worse. As for immigration, polls say that more people want to decrease not just the undocumented but even legal immigration than increase it.
+
+No matter what happens this year, the battle for America’s political soul is not remotely over. Trump may fade into deserved ignominy and hopefully obscurity, but his nationalist and populist message will not fade with him as long as concerns over jobs, America’s role in the world, and disdain for political correctness remain. If Hillary and her supporters over-shoot their nonexistent mandate and try to impose their whole agenda before achieving a supportable consensus , American politics could well end up going in directions that the progressives, and their media claque, might either not anticipate or much like.",REAL
+1549,14 key moments from the Democratic debate,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+6322,US-Korean Relations and the New US President | New Eastern Outlook,"Region: Eastern Asia While observing the reaction of the Korean society to the victory of D. Trump in the Presidential elections, a great grief can be seen – the political circles of South Korea supported Clinton owing to Trump’s desire to increase the charge for maintaining the American contingent in the Republic of Korea as the bare minimum. This contingent currently includes 28.5 thousand military personnel, F-16 destroyers, the Patriot anti-aircraft weapon system, and other types of offensive and defensive weapons. South Korea will need 16.3 billion dollars to replace them and given the economic crisis and political challenges, it will be difficult for Seoul to find that kind of money. As soon as the US elections result was announced, Park Geun-hye congratulated Trump on his victory and noted that the American nation had expressed confidence in his leadership skills and huge successful experience in various fields. The head of the Republic of Korea also highlighted that Seoul would maintain close cooperation with Washington aimed at global stability and prosperity. The very same day, on November 9, the Korean President’s Administration conducted an emergency session of the National Security Council. Park Geun-hye ordered that emergency response measures regarding the economy and security be prepared amid the new environment. On November 10, the Ministry of National Defense of the Republic of Korea held a session to assess the results of the Presidential elections in the USA. As a result, the military officials confirmed their position regarding continued cooperation with the USA on the rotational deployment of the US strategic forces in the Republic of Korea, the THAAD ABM mobile system, and the transfer of operational control over its military forces to Seoul in time of war. In addition, it was decided to create a Working Group on Cooperation with the USA in defence policy aimed at maintaining the strong union between the Republic of Korea and the USA. The first result of this Group’s work was a report delivered on November 14, which states that the US government may demand an increase in the expenses paid by South Korea for maintaining the American military contingent as well as improving the capabilities of its own army. The former policy of Barack Obama will be replaced with more active sanction pressure that allows dialogue, however. In this context, the American party should receive explanation of what measures are taken by the Republic of Korea to ensure the comfortable presence of the US contingent and it should be specified that the armed forces of the USA are contributing to peace and stability in the region. The expenses of the Republic of Korea for the maintenance of the US contingent in terms of GDP share are higher than that in Japan and Germany. A possible reconsideration of free trade conditions has also been noted. The Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Yoo Il-ho said that Donald Trump’s victory in the elections could provide the South Korean economy with new opportunities. South Korean companies might participate in the development of infrastructure and industry in the USA. Thus, the Korean government has started preparing to work with the new American government by conducting a detailed monitoring of Trump’s economic program. Commenting on the authorities’ activities, the Korean media write that it is difficult to assess Donald Trump’s policy regarding the North. One day he called Kim Jong-un a maniac, and the other day he didn’t rule out possible dialogue with Pyongyang, regarding solution to the North Korean nuclear issue. As for the potential tense situations in relations between the Republic of Korea and the USA that require reconsideration, they concern more than Korea’s share of the expenses for the maintenance of the American military contingent. Currently, South Korea covers half of them, but Trump has expressed the opinion that the Republic of Korea should take on 100% of the expenses and the funds spent by the USA on the security of its allies should be used for its own needs. In addition, he has also spoken about the possible nuclearization of the Republic of Korea and Japan. Despite the fact that the radical conservators of the Republic of Korea are already discussing such a variant, Seoul is against it, maintaining that it would deteriorate regional stability. In addition, Donald Trump believes that the conditions of the free trade agreement between the Republic of Korea and the USA are not equal and deprive Americans of jobs. He has announced the need to reconsider the corresponding agreements. All these facts could not help but raise concerns among traditional US allies. The lack of direct communication channels with Donald Trump’s team is also generating fears. Hoping for Clinton’s success, the South Korean politicians did not establish relations with her opponent. Thus, the necessity to make preliminary preparations for cooperation with the new US government is felt as never before. However, there have been no sharp changes in policy observed so far. On November 09, 2016, during the previous briefing, White House spokesperson Joshua Earnest noted that the Administration of Donald Trump would likely stick to the policy of maintaining strong relations between Washington and Seoul. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have been working to strengthen relations between the USA and the Republic of Korea. Moreover, any stand-out problems in relations between the two countries (for example, under Park Chung-hee and Carter) arose with greater frequency under the Democrats. The next day, on November 10, during a telephone conversation with the President of the Republic of Korea Park Geun-hye, Donald Trump confirmed Washington’s commitment to the union with Seoul and provision of South Korea’s security. According to the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, over the course of the ten minute talk, Donald Trump announced that Washington would certainly continue to cooperate with Seoul on security issues. Some American experts also believe that there will be no changes. For example, the former Chairman of the United States House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Pieter Hoekstra, believes that the new government headed by Donald Trump will maintain strong relations with the Republic of Korea. Hoekstra has highlighted that Seoul and Washington currently enjoy close economic and security cooperation, and South Korea believes that this statement is aimed at defusing concerns. Of course, according to KBS World Radio, Trump’s forceful statements are a reflection of his attitude. Perhaps, it was only linked to his desire to gain the support of a large number of voters, however. South Korean experts hope that Trump’s strong statements will not be implemented in the new government’s actual policy and they will stick to more restrained and reasonable policy. The South Korean opposition is of the same opinion. The faction leader of the opposition Democratic Party Toburo Woo Sang-ho has announced that American lawmakers do not want changes in the relations between the Republic of Korea and the USA, thus, the Koreans should not worry about Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections. The leader of the opposition People’s Party Park Jie-won has also noted that Donald Trump will conduct policy from a practical point of view and the Republic of Korea may enjoy some benefits. The author is also inclined to think that radical changes in the two countries’ relations will not take place and has expressed this point of view many times . Therefore, we will only return to this topic if a serious reason for concern arises. Konstantin Asmolov, Ph.D. in History, Chief Research Fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook ”. 
+",FAKE
+4912,Seven things I’ve learned by covering the third-party candidates,"ST. PAUL, Minn. -- With just 66 days to go before the polls closed, Evan McMullin made his inaugural campaign stop in one of his most promising states. On Friday afternoon, the #NeverTrump conservative candidate for president stopped by the booth of Minnesota's Independence Party, an outgrowth of Ross Perot's and Jesse Ventura's campaigns that successfully petitioned him onto the ballot.
+
+""He's the alternative,"" said a party volunteer to passersby.
+
+""What took you so long?"" yelled a fairgoer.
+
+""That's a good question,"" said McMullin, standing below a photo of himself and the message that it was Never Too Late to Do the Right Thing. ""I was waiting for someone else to run, and no one did. I believe both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are unfit for the presidency, and it's time for a new generation of leadership in this country.""
+
+Less than a month after announcing his first bid for office, one that was not likely to end up on most states' ballots, McMullin drew a steady crowd for an hour that was punctuated with media interviews. This has been a very good year for third-party candidates, who have found a lower barrier to credibility than any of them expected.
+
+That barrier, of course, tumbled when Clinton and Trump won their parties' nominations. The very first political rally I ever covered, in 2000, was for a third party — a Chicago ""mega-rally"" for the Green Party's Ralph Nader. He won just 2.2 percent of the vote in Illinois that year, and while that safe blue state has been only lightly polled this year, the ""anybody else"" vote is likely to soar past that.
+
+Why? You can probably guess, but having spent five of the past nine days with third-party candidates, I have some extra answers.
+
+1) People are actually showing up to see third-party candidates. That's not always the case. Nader drew gigantic crowds in 2000, but his fatal success — a split in the progressive vote that many of his supporters came to regret — helped quash third-party momentum. From 2004 through 2012, no third-party candidate was able to wage a campaign in the way we usually see it, with business visits and rallies.
+
+This year is different. The Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson and Bill Weld drew hundreds of people to events in New England last week. On a run through Colorado last weekend, the Green Party's Jill Stein filled indoor and outdoor music venues with hundreds more.
+
+In both cases, this took work. Johnson and Stein basically lived on TV for weeks, making themselves available for cameras in Washington and New York. McMullin did the same, drawing a remarkable amount of coverage for a candidacy that is unlikely to make the ballot in California or Texas. But it did not take much for people to start viewing a third-party event as a decent use of an afternoon.
+
+2) These events are cultural be-ins. People who associate with the fringes of American life have the best time at third-party rallies. Marijuana legalization campaigners get signatures at Johnson rallies; alternative hip-hop artists come by Jill Stein rallies. At her Denver event, an organizer/folk-singer rewrote Phil Ochs's ""Love Me, I'm a Liberal"" into a riff on the weak progressives who were settling for Hillary Clinton:
+
+I went to Occupy rallies
+
+ I protested the WTO
+
+ I love Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews
+
+ And I hope gays get married in droves
+
+ But you’re talking about revolution?
+
+ Well, sister, I surely don’t know
+
+ So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
+
+There is a family feeling to these events, one that keeps people coming back.
+
+3) Third parties are getting better at organizing. Affiliates of the Green Party and the Libertarian Party have used NationBuilder, a cheap organizing software, to build and mobilize lists of supporters. It's something they have in common with Donald Trump's campaign — scoffed at, seen to be a paper tiger that would be devoured by stockier gazelles. But the once-expensive work of telling supporters where to show up and what to do has become dirt cheap. Johnson has boasted of the millions of people watching his speeches on Facebook; Stein's campaign plugged her into the unfathomably popular Harambe meme, which got fresh eyeballs on her campaign, even if some were under raised eyebrows.
+
+4) Many third-party voters don't care about policy. Listening to McMullin, I was struck by how few voters wanted to know about his stances on the issues. Any issues. One asked if he thought WikiLeaks would torpedo the Clinton campaign, leading McMullin to say that he was not a Julian Assange fan. Several complained that pollsters did not ask about him. For a while, his campaign leaflets, which deal (in light detail) with policy, went untouched.
+
+This is not unusual. A lot of the upsurge in third-party support is attitude-based — a loose sense that politics are ""broken,"" and therefore a vote for a nontraditional party will ""fix"" it. In Colorado, several Stein voters told me that they might vote for Gary Johnson — whose positions on taxes, climate change, and the role of government itself could not be more different — if on Election Day he seemed to be better positioned for a breakout.
+
+5) Hey, neither do the third parties! (Sort of.) Johnson and Weld, the highest-profile candidates in Libertarian history, had to fight for their nominations. The ""radical"" wing of the Libertarian Party viewed both as interlopers who wanted to turn their party into a Diet Pepsi version of the GOP; both were forced onto second ballots at their conventions.
+
+Since then, neither the Libertarians nor the Greens have had to answer many questions about their respective party platforms. Johnson/Weld have inspired semiregular condemnation from libertarian blogs and magazines for defending the existence of the federal Environmental Protection Agency or suggesting that some gun restrictions might make sense. In Colorado, Stein avoided endorsing a universal health-care initiative backed by the local Greens. The Minnesota Independence Party is campaigning for instant runoff voting, something McMullin did not even address when he stopped by the booth.
+
+6) And they're not even seizing on the most popular issues. The three most-hyped third-party candidates — Johnson, Stein and McMullin — favor some version of immigration reform. As Trump has discovered, opposition to increased immigration levels is one of the most resonant populist issues there is.
+
+Johnson and McMullin have little to say about economic inequality, and Stein talks about it only in the context of her ""Green New Deal"" promising millions of new jobs. But as Bernie Sanders discovered, class consciousness and the reality of depressed wages were powerful, voter-mobilizing topics.
+
+7) Third-party candidates acknowledge that one of the big two parties is better for their voters than the other. McMullin is the least secretive about this; his campaign, massaged by Republican consultants, is in some states designed to bring out Republicans who might stay home if their options were limited to Clinton, Trump and Johnson. Stein acknowledged it during an interview she gave me in Denver, and at a news conference last month; voters who did not see Greens on the ballot for key races, she said, were probably going to see the most agreement on their issues from Democrats. No third party is offering a full slate for voters in any state. That could start to change this year, especially if strong results get them expanded ballot access. But it is not changing quickly.",REAL
+5052,"To nominate Clinton, it takes a village","Donald Trump is a singular political phenomenon. Hillary Clinton seems coordinated and almost corporate. At a time of political upheaval, it's unclear which advantage is stronger.
+
+Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton arrives to speak to volunteers at a Democratic party organizing event at the Neighborhood Theater in Charlotte, N.C., Monday.
+
+To anoint Hillary Clinton as the official 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, it takes a village.
+
+In Cleveland last week at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump’s face was the dominant image. It loomed from videos over the stage. It stared out from T-shirts outside the arena, pointing a finger and saying stuff like, “Hillary, You’re Fired!” Three of the four convention nights Mr. Trump himself appeared on stage.
+
+This week in Philadelphia, the Democrats are using a much different, more traditional approach. The party’s biggest names have marched to the podium one by one and praised Mrs. Clinton while bashing Trump. Except for a brief hug with President Obama on Wednesday night, Clinton herself has stayed more behind the scenes.
+
+That will change somewhat with her acceptance speech Thursday. But this contrast in stagecraft is a symbol of the essential differences between the Trump and Clinton campaigns.
+
+Trump is – in Newt Gingrich’s word – a “pirate,” a master of reaching out across global media platforms to grab the world’s attention with a sudden, bold stroke. Sometimes the move misses – witness yesterday’s uproar about whether he should have urged Russia to hack and release missing Clinton emails. But the action and resulting attention is the thing.
+
+Clinton is more of a communitarian, heir and presumptive next leader of an existing political coalition. She’s guarded by nature. Her campaign seems a coordinated, almost corporate effort of many people doing many things, some visible (surrogate speeches) and some not (microtargeted emails).
+
+The result is a fascinating clash of new versus old approaches to media, organized versus insurgent marketing, and two personalities as different as July and December. It’s a race that scholars and political pros will be studying for years.
+
+“Trump is consciously running an unrestrained and uncontrolled campaign, while it is true that Clinton’s methodology creates distance between herself and voters,” says Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
+
+Clinton’s approach is an attempt to “dramatically cut down on mistakes,” Engel adds. “It’s a prevent defense.”
+
+In part this split is rooted in traditional differences between the parties. It’s a political truism that the Republican Party is more organized around ideology, while the Democratic Party is more transactional. The former involves what George H. W. Bush called “the vision thing” and punchy presentations. The latter means making Democratic interest groups happy with targeted policies.
+
+Thus Trump’s campaign website is thin on policy details and long on assertions that it is only the GOP nominee who can Make America Great Again. Clinton’s corresponding site is so numbingly detailed that it has a section on curtailing “horse soring,” the use of chemicals to exaggerate gait, as New York Times columnist David Brooks pointed out this week.
+
+The differences are also personal. Trump has been a celebrity for years and is as comfortable making media appearances as he is taking a nap. He obviously believes that there is no such thing as bad news coverage. There are only chances for attention (and possible votes) missed.
+
+In contrast, Clinton herself seems almost physically absent from the campaign. Trump has correctly pointed out that it has been more than 235 days since the Democratic nominee last held a press conference. She sits for personal interviews, but not at Trump’s pace. She’s begun calling in to news shows, but only since Trump has demonstrated that’s an efficient and effective way to control a media appearance.
+
+In Clinton’s case, that’s probably a learned behavior. The drama of Clinton’s decades in public life and the Clintons’ perception that they have been badly treated by the media and political opponents has caused her to retreat behind a kind of gauzy curtain.
+
+“She’s someone who’s every word is very guarded publicly, because she feels she’s kind of been burned,” says Brian Rosenwald, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a forthcoming book on the political impact of talk radio.
+
+She’s also a policy wonk as much as a politician. When she answers a question, she’ll often dance around it at first, looking at all angles, before concluding that essentially, “it’s complicated.” Asked about fracking, she’ll talk about its environmental dangers and energy benefits, then outline when it is, or isn’t, OK. Asked about immigration reform, she’ll talk about its history and ideals, and then get into a multipoint program.
+
+Trump doesn’t do such nuance. In his own acceptance speech he flatly declared that, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
+
+In his surety and brevity, he’s the Twitter candidate, a fit for the new Facebook age. Clinton may be not unlike most candidates in her desire for word control and image protection. It’s Trump in this context who is unique, the agent of disruption.
+
+“More and more our culture is headed towards quick sound bites. Donald Trump fits that very well. Hillary Clinton probably wants to give in-depth policy answers, and that stuff doesn’t transfer as well to social media,” Brian Rosenwald says.
+
+Clinton knows that she has to up her communications game, given her opponent’s skills. She (or more likely an aide) has sharpened her Twitter approach in recent months, for instance. Posts are punchier and less policy oriented.
+
+Her advantage is that she is not alone. Unlike Trump, she has inherited a strong party network that has been building voter lists and studying new targeting techniques for years. In that sense, she may be the candidate of the brave new electronic age, while Trump lags back in a traditional era.
+
+“To understand Clinton’s use of social media, you have to go back and recognize she remains part of the broader Obama coalition . . . The Obama people were really revolutionary in employing data metrics and new technology in order to micro-target voters,” says Professor Engel of SMU.
+
+Thus Clinton, or the Clinton team, may be good at communications efforts that are not readily apparent. Take video games. The Obama campaign went so far as to buy ads within popular games such as “Madden Football” in 2008 and 2012. A player scanning the virtual Madden stadium would have seen a virtual Obama billboard hanging over the field.
+
+These ads were targeted to those playing Madden online in 10 swing states.
+
+“More and more everything is targeted. Every ad is different. Everything is slicing and dicing the audience,” says Professor Rosenwald.
+
+In that sense, Clinton versus Trump might not be not an old media candidate versus a new media one, as much as it is two competing versions of adapting to the changes wrought by the electronic age.
+
+It’s not clear whether one is superior over the other. There’s not great data on whether microtargeting actually drives votes. Trump may find out that in the end there were days when not saying anything might have been preferable to saying something controversial.
+
+In about 100 days, we’ll get a result that will shed some light on these questions.",REAL
+6757,Podesta WikiLeaks UFO Updates — New Names Dragged Down the UFO Rabbit Hole,"Here is a review of some of the latest significant e-mails and a bit of background behind the story. We are now close to 38,000+ emails released by WikiLeaks. By White House UFO
+General William Neil McCasland, former head of the WPAFB lab where it is believed the Roswell wreckage went, makes comments on how to deal with UFO disclosure.
+“I was thinking a bit more about what a White House memo should say. Something like these points to all Federal Agencies: – In light of the President’s policy on STEM (citing official policy encouraging the study of science, technology, engineering and math) – some back ground on your project – the Administration encourages a favorable Public Affairs position by all Agencies – appointes NASA to lead (this kind of public outreach is in NASA’s job jar, and if no Agency is appointed all will simply note and file the memo and likely do nothing) – and to coordinate with DoD, DNI and NOAA (the other major space actors, putting a bit of light on them)”
+General William N. McCasland
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33739 
+Two Key New Podesta UFO Emails Studying them Now 
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33552 
+Tom DeLonge speaking to Podesta about Rolling Stone Magazine, “They don’t know yet where you exist in this Sekret Machines Universe (we launch the story with NY Times with Doc Trailer in a week) and they already look to you in a leadership role they can trust. And care almost ONLY about your voice in this.”
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33739 
+DeLonge again speaking to Podesta
+“The ranking General (probably William N. McCasland) on my committee has some ideas for a memo that would help provide context for his and the other Officers work on this project.”
+Also two new WikiLeaks Podesta UFO emails about Edgar Mitchell https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33722 
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33713 
+In late September 2015, John Podesta posted a tweet asking actress Lena Dunham to ask Hillary Clinton about the aliens the next time she did an interview. This led to a situation where the Clinton campaign was waiting for some reporter to ask about aliens.Nothing would happen until late December when New Hampshire reporter Daymond Steer asked, but on November 5th Hillary was on the late night Jerry Kimmel show. One leaked email points out that Hillary was waiting for the UFO question and had practised an answer. The question didn’t happen and Hillary was very disappointed. In a reply to a query by Podesta asking how the Kimmel show went Kristina Schake, who job in the Clinton campaign is to remake Hillary’s image as she had done for Michelle Obama, told Podesta,
+She was charming, got lots of laughs and worked in a lot of message, including climate change. He didn’t end up asking her about UFOs! She was very disappointed. She practiced UAPs for 5 minutes beforehand. 
+Hillary would appear again on the Kimmel show in March 2016 and did get the UFO question during that appearance. Unfortunately, the five minutes practise did not help as she called UAPs “unexplained aerial phenomena” instead of “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
+Hillary on Jimmy Kimmel Show
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/7734
+New Names Dragged Down the UFO Rabbit HoleIn Late December 2015 reporter Daymond Steer in Conway, New Hampshire took up John Podesta’s challenge to ask Hillary Clinton about the aliens. It created a story that went around the world.Now we are seeing the first reaction to that news story in the Podesta emails. In a WikiLeaks email on January 7, 2016 Ann M. O’Leary, a senior policy advisor in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential Campaign writes Podesta; “Judge Tatel & John – This article on Hillary’s comments about extraterrestrial life made me think of you two and remind me to connect you. 
+Judge David Tatel
+John – As I was telling David the last time I saw him, the two of you are the biggest believers in ET life who I know and I think you’d enjoy talking with one another. I know that neither of you have much time, but I think you’d have a fascinating time discussing it if you ever get together! Warmly, Ann” 
+Ann M. O’Leary with Hillary Clinton
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/29385
+On April 30, 2015 Terri Mansfield wrote John Podesta. There are two significant things to nhttps://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/29385ote,
+1. Terri is requesting a meeting between Astronaut Edgar Mitchell and President Obama after the planned one on one meeting with John Podesta (arrangements were being made for this meeting but it never took place).
+2. More importantly, Terri tells Podesta “Edgar has consulted on consciousness matters for American presidents in the past.” This is significant because consciousness is the key to the UFO mystery. There are some hints that the main man behind the present “group” working to disclose knew the “holographic consciousness” connection.
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/27026 
+After Podesta made his now infamous tweet that his biggest disappointment of 2014 was not getting disclosure of the UFO files he started to receive some email inquiries for interviews.
+In one leaked email he tells his assistant to tell the reporter from NPR in Wisconsin that he can’t do the interview, and ignore the rest of the requests.
+One of the emails he gets ins from Robert Fish who wrote a book on the recovery of the Apollo 11 capsule in the Pacific Ocean. It was originally sent to researcher Leslie Ken. When she did not reply, Fish sent it to Podesta. Fish indicated that everyone is looking in the wrong location for the UFO In a second email from Bob Fish, who wrote the book on the recovery of the Apollo 11 capsule in the pacific, he tells Podesta of things he had heard such as
+
+“No one could get into the cafeteria without TS/SCI clearances, so this was not a “’lightweight group of gossipers.’ One of these times, a member of that group was really excited – said they’d just picked up Fastwalker…” 
+Fish wrote more of the reality of UFOs that he had experienced in his career in a March 6, 2015 email;
+“In that same TS/SCI building cafeteria in El Segundo, I had lunch with a senior USAF NCO who had worked for Project Blue Book in the 1970s (after it had been “officially disbanded). He was an ELINT technician (electronic intelligence) who flew in RC-135s from MacDill AFB in Florida. The “normal” target was Cuba where they did lots of snooping and sometimes challenging the Cubans to turn on radar and other systems. He said there were times when they were diverted from these missions to track UFOs off the east coast of Florida. His claim was they UFOs had a landing and takeoff spot in the ocean east of Miami, north of Bermuda. 
+He also claimed there was a specific electronic signature (frequency) emanating from them when they were going into or coming out of the water, so they were easy to track. On several occasions, they filmed the UFO as it transitioned from water to air or vice versa. One last item is he was occasionally assigned to fly in a USAF weather aircraft (WC-135) when they had a hurricane hunting mission over the usual UFO area, where his specific assignment was kept secret from the other crew members. He would always report back to a dedicated USAF intelligence officer on base when they returned from a mission. He did not know where the intel that he collected was sent for processing or storage (WPAFB in Dayton would be the obvious choice). High quality film of UFOs is “out there” somewhere! 
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/31721 
+On Feb 5, 2016, John Podesta wrote to his assistant proposing a tweet to be made in reply to the news that astronaut Edgar Mitchell had died.
+John Podesta wrote: We should tweet something like Sad to learn of the passing of Edgar Mitchell, an American hero. Ck his Wikipedia page to make sure that won’t seem too goofy. He’s A big UFO guy. Former astronaut. 
+Edgar Mitchell
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/31715 
+One thing that has been overlooked in the coverage of the Podesta/Hillary WikiLeaks UFO story is the people who are being copied by John Podesta.
+In the emails where John has received UFO questions, he has either copied or asked for input from the following people from the presidential campaign or from the Institute for American Progress that Podesta founded. (One estimate stated that 40% of the high-level officials in the Obama administration came from this institute). Take a close at the names. These are not people off the street.
+JPalmieri@americanprogress.org – She left the Obama administration with Podesta in February 2015.
+She previously served as White House Communications Director for U.S. President Barack Obama. Prior to her service at the White House, she served as the President of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
+Jennifer Palmieri is Director of Communications for the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential
+campaign where she handles she manages candidate message, media relations–and trouble-shooting.
+FShakir@americanprogress.org – Faiz Shakir is the vice-president of the Center for American Progress (CAP). Shakir, in fact, sent Podesta an article about UFO secrecy already back in 2008.
+Daniella Leger is a Senior Vice President for Communications and
+Strategy at Center for American Progress
+sara.latham@ptt.gov – Sarah Latham is the Chief of Staff to the Chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign – Special Assistant to White House Chief of Staff John Podesta and Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Presidential Scheduling from 1996 to 2000
+Ken Gude – Gude is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress specializing in civil liberties and terrorism.
+Ken Gude
+Ian Millhiser – Millhiser is a Policy Analyst for the Center for American Progress, the think tank created by Podesta. Millhiser’s work focuses on government efficiency and transparency.
+Ian Millhiser
+As of October 26, there are 14 emails to and from John Podesta attempting to arrange a meeting between astronaut Edgar Mitchell with Podesta and/or President Obama. The topic of the proposed meeting would be Zero-point energy and UFO disclosure. The two latest released emails were sent by Terri Mansfield on January 21, 2015.
+Terri Mansfield
+The first letter (sent through Podesta assistant Eyrn Sepp) mentioned an article just published by USA Today which pointed out that nearly 130,000 pages of declassified UFO records from Project Blue Book had just been put on-line. Edgar’s letter stated,
+I grew up in Roswell, my family knew Oppenheimer. Let’s get our meeting time and date set up ASAP so we can move forward on our unprecedented discussion concerning disclosure of our ETI from a contiguous universe and their connection to zero-point energy for humanity.
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/32937
+The second letter written later in the day was a more specific request for a meeting. Although the email mentions Podesta “no longer with the White House” Podesta was still at the White House for almost another month when he produced his famous tweet saying he had “once again” not been able to release the UFO documents. It may have been that he had given notice to leave and Edgar had become aware of this,
+Now that you are no longer serving in the White House, I write to you and Eryn requesting our face to face meeting to discuss zero-point energy and Disclosure. Our Quantrek science intuitive has provided us with a few facts about our nonviolent contiguous universe ETI who promote PACIFISM among humans and with whom we work:
+1. All true ETI do not inhabit this universe.
+2. So-called ETIs inhabit this universe and are in fact just celestials. They are higher in rank then discarnate spirits, even those who are evolved, HOWEVER, THEY JUST MIRROR VIOLENCE ON EARTH, FEELING THREATENED BY CONTAMINATION OF THEIR ABODE.
+3. Extrauinversal ETIs on the other hand have long ago evolved past violence, relying on spiritual intelligence to avert destruction.
+4. The Phoenix Lights and other sightings have provided ample evidence that Earth has been visited by beings whose intention is purely peace and who have nonviolently hovered over Phoenix and other sites, waiting to be asked to help, when they could most easily have destroyed the city with their uses of consciousness. These sightings have been witnessed by thousands of people in Phoenix alone, including my colleague Terri Mansfield, who will accompany me on our meeting with you.
+Please let me now three dates and times that would work for your schedule.
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/32833 
+This followed an email that had been sent by Mitchell, and again sent by Terri Mansfield a week earlier. In that email Mitchell requested a meeting on zero-point energy and UFO disclosure with Podesta after he leaves in February 2015.
+That letter was also significant in that Edgar bring up meeting a childhood friend of President Obama. Edgar wrote,
+I met with President Obama’s Honolulu childhood friend, US Ambassador Pamela Hamamoto on July 4 at the US Mission in Geneva, when I was able to tell her briefly about zero-point energy. I believe we can enlist her as a confidante and resource in our presentation for President Obama. 
+Pamela Hamamoto
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1766 
+On March 5, 2016 Eric Brys wrote an email to John Podesta titled “Extraterrestrial Disclosure.” It was written two days after Podesta granted an interview to KLAS-TV in Las Vegas Nevada where he talked about the fact that unlike Bill Clinton and Obama he had convinced Hillary to disclose information being withheld about UFOs. In that interview Podesta stated,
+I’ve talked to Hillary about that. There are still classified files that could be declassified. I think I’ve convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can, so that people have their legitimate questions answered. More attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people — who are in public life, who are serious about this — being ridiculed. 
+In his email Brys complimented Podesta on his disclosure effort,
+I am proud of your continued efforts to disclose the truth of secret UFO files hidden from the public. I will be voting for Hillary Clinton to help get you the authority you need to obtain disclosure. I hope history remembers your undaunting efforts to informing the American public about extraterrestrial visitation. 
+Unlike most of the UFO emails from ordinary citizens that were not responded to Podesta took the time to answer. He stated,
+Thanks for your support. We will keep at it. 
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33010 
+There is correspondence today between John Podesta and his aide Milia Fisher that took place the day before the big January 25, 2016 google hangout meeting where Podesta talked UFO disclosure with the following three men: Major General Neil McCasland, former head of the foreign technology back-engineering laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB, Robert F. Weiss, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Aeronautics Advanced Development Programs, Lockheed Martin Corporation (Skunkworks), and Major General Michael J. Carey, USAF, the Special Assistant to the Commander, Air Force Space Command, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.
+The correspondence the day before the meeting indicated that they were expecting Tom DeLonge but his flight had been cancelled. It appears then that DeLonge was scheduled to be with Podesta in and around the time of the meeting. New emails may clear this up.
+Tom DeLonge
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/28403 
+Jairam Ramesh an Indian economist and politician belonging to Indian National Congress. He is a Member of Parliament representing Andhra Pradesh state in the Rajya Sabha since June 2004. In July 2011, Jairam Ramesh was elevated to the Union Council of Ministers of India and appointed Minister of Rural Development and Minister (additional charge) of the new Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation. However, in the cabinet reshuffle in October 2012, he has been divested of the portfolio of Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation. He was previously the Indian Minister of State (Independent Charge) at the Ministry of Environment and Forests from May 2009 to July 2011.
+He was cool with Podesta’s UFO beliefs. He discovered this after the now famous UFO tweet by Podesta as he leaves the Obama administration to head the Hillary Clinton campaign.
+Jairam Ramesh
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/25421 
+Kind of cool internal Clinton campaign dialog about Podesta contacting John Glenn about Mars. The subject was “Re: signs of water / life on Mars – should JDP tweet to John Glenn ??
+”The one staffer added “time to send a man or WOMAN ?”
+https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/24888 
+Source: White House UFO 
+",FAKE
+1384,Donald Trump’s statement on the Fox News debate has to be seen to be believed,"Donald Trump announced Tuesday night that he would not participate in the Fox News debate set for Thursday -- after Fox head honcho Roger Ailes told The Fix's Cal Borchers that FNC personality (and Trump nemesis) Megyn Kelly would stay on as a moderator. Trump's campaign then released the statement below to further explain his decision. It is amazing -- even by Trump standards. I annotated it using Genius; sign up and annotate alongside me!
+
+
+
+ As someone who wrote one of the best-selling business books of all time, The Art of the Deal, who has built an incredible company, including some of the most valuable and iconic assets in the world, and as someone who has a personal net worth of many billions of dollars, Mr. Trump knows a bad deal when he sees one. FOX News is making tens of millions of dollars on debates, and setting ratings records (the highest in history), where as in previous years they were low-rated afterthoughts.
+
+Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground, Mr. Trump knows when to walk away. Roger Ailes and FOX News think they can toy with him, but Mr. Trump doesn’t play games. There have already been six debates, and according to all online debate polls including Drudge, Slate, Time Magazine, and many others, Mr. Trump has won all of them, in particular the last one. Whereas he has always been a job creator and not a debater, he nevertheless truly enjoys the debating process - and it has been very good for him, both in polls and popularity.
+
+He will not be participating in the FOX News debate and will instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors, who have been treated so horribly by our all talk, no action politicians. Like running for office as an extremely successful person, this takes guts and it is the kind mentality our country needs in order to Make America Great Again.",REAL
+7845,"With 95% of Votes In, All Signs Point to a Trump Victory in Florida","With 95% of the vote in, all signs point to a Trump Victory in Florida. 
+Trump leads Clinton 48.8% to 48.0% 
+The New York Times Prediction caster at the time of this writing gives Trump a 91% of winning Florida with only 5% of the votes remaining. 
+Securing Florida is a needed step for Trump is what will still be a difficult but possible bid to achieve 270 delegates and win the Presidency. Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan and Virginia are all looking very close as well. Comment on this Article Via Your Facebook Account Comment on this Article Via Your Disqus Account Follow Us on Facebook!",FAKE
+4685,It’s No Surprise That Trump Might Not Accept Election Results. He’s Never Accepted Democratic Norms.,"At last night's final presidential debate, the GOP presidential nominee refused to say that he would honor and accept the results of the election. Instead, he said he would ""keep you in suspense.""
+
+This is, indeed, horrifying, as his opponent Hillary Clinton said. But it should come as no surprise. It has been clear from the beginning that Trump does not accept small-d democratic norms.
+
+In the first Republican primary debate last August, Trump, running as a Republican, refused to say that he would support the eventual nominee. That's fair enough, on its own, especially considering that several of the other GOP candidates eventually refused to do so. But it was also a warning: Trump would honor the norms of the electoral process; he would not, as a matter of course, accept its legitimacy.
+
+The rejection of both the norms and legitimacy of democracy has been a consistent theme throughout Trump's public career. In 2012, after Barack Obama won the election, Trump went on a long twitter rant, arguing that the election was ""a total sham and a travesty"" and that ""we are not a democracy.""
+
+Throughout the campaign, Trump has treated the norms of democracy—peace, acceptance, respect for the electoral process and for the limits of presidential power—with disdain if not outright hostility.
+
+At his rallies, he has explicitly encouraged supporters to engage in violent acts against protesters. Since winning the nomination, he has repeatedly declared that the election is rigged, raising the specter of voter fraud that has been consistently, repeatedly proven to be almost entirely imaginary. Before that, he warned darkly that if his nomination did not go through at the Republican convention there might be riots.
+
+Over and over again throughout his campaign, Trump has disrespected the Constitution and promised to violate its most essential rules. He has dismissed the idea of free speech, promised to seize the assets of foreign nationals, and suggested that Muslims should be forced to register in a federal database. He has repeatedly promised to order the military to commit war crimes. He has derided core constitutional principles, arguing, dismissively, that ""the Constitution is not a suicide pact."" Trump, who clearly does not understand the Constitution, does not believe in the sanctity of its provisions, or even in its general guidance. He believes only in his own ill-informed whims.
+
+Trump's lack of respect for the Constitution is matched only by his praise for the strength of authoritarian dictators. He has been fulsome in his praise for Russian leader Vladimir Putin's strength, and has similarly expressed his admiration for other authoritarian leaders such as Saddam Hussan, Muammar Gaddagi, and Bashar al-Assad. At last night's debate, he repeatedly dismissed the notion, confirmed by multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, that Russia was behind the hack of democratic emails, and seemed to side with Putin for having outsmarted the United States. All the available evidence indicates that Trump is not a fan of the imperfect democracy that is the United States, but quite admires foreign authoritarians specifically for their authoritarian tendencies.
+
+Over and over again, Trump has expressed his desire to implement authoritarian, unconstitutional policies in the U.S.—banning Muslims from entering the country, closing down Mosques, retaliating against media outlets that publish critical reports about Trump, and their owners. One of Trump's favorite lines is that ""only I can solve"" the problems he says ail the country.
+
+Part of the problem is that Trump perceives himself as an eternal winner. Therefore, any loss can only be someone else's fault. That is how we ended up with a presidential debate in which Trump interrupted his opponent to declare, again, that he should have gotten an Emmy for his reality TV show, The Apprentice. Trump had insisted that the Emmy awards were also rigged against him. The man's vast personal vanity is inseperable from his authoritarian outlook.
+
+At this point, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump is not really running for president of a democratic republic; he is running to be its unchecked and unaccountable leader, free from the shackles of constitutionally limited democracy he so clearly despises.",REAL
+3810,"Obama's last State of the Union address in three words: Disjointed, irrelevant and disappointing","As a long time observer of the political process and as someone who served twice in the White House, I remember the great anticipation for past State of the Union speeches.  It was an activity where many hundreds of hours and top level staff worked on the speech for many months before it was delivered. It was to be a recap of what had been accomplished and an agenda for the future.
+
+I remember the excitement of the president going to Capitol Hill to address the nation, standing before the other branches of the government, the Congress and the Supreme Court, and either inspiring or informing all of just what the title states: this is the State of the Union.
+
+Part of the drama has been the grand entrance into the people's House, the House of a Representatives and the president being mobbed by members trying to shake his hand or pat his back and for this one night he is treated like a rock star or to be more current like a reality TV star.
+
+The repeated standing and applauding for the key phrases that appeal to the partisans in his party and the negative responses from the opposition.
+
+Everyone is there!
+
+Anyone  of importance in our government along with  the ambassador contingent  from the diplomatic community, is there on display for the nation to see.
+
+This has historically been an opportunity for  a dramatic speech to the nation and the world and without question as important as any that a president might deliver. Tuesday night was the last of these that President Barack Obama will ever give.
+
+As I watched the visuals, the new young Speaker, Paul Ryan, sitting alongside the vice president whom he tried to replace in the last election.  Biden, realizing daily that this is his last hurrah -- and privately telling people he wishes he would have run one more time against the faltering Hillary Clinton.
+
+Speaker Ryan, who now holds more power than anyone except maybe the lame duck president, sits in a seat he never anticipated a year ago. He will be the one who sets the legislative agenda for the future and the president’s only retort is his veto pen.
+
+I watch the one Socialist member of Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders mix and greet the members of the Joint Chief of Staffs of our military, with their stars on their uniforms and rows of medals on their chests.
+
+There is not a member in this chamber who would ever have thought a year ago that Sanders would be viewed as a serious challenger to Hillary Clinton, as he now is.
+
+For someone as skilled at giving a speech as our forty-fourth president, Mr. Obama failed miserably at either inspiring or informing us of the real State of the Union.
+
+What he did do is give a political campaign speech. It was disjointed, irrelevant and disappointing. He is not running for a third term and the agenda he laid out is not what the country wants or feels. He looked tired and ready to move on.
+
+He talked about how great we are as a nation. True,  but what he didn't do was set an agenda for his final year or for his legacy.
+
+He set goals but failed to explain how we can accomplish them. He talked about leadership but has failed miserably as a leader.
+
+On the very day the president is delivered his speech, the Iranian Navy captured two US Navy ships that allegedly were incapacitated and drifted into Iranian waters. Now Iran is holding these sailors hostage. Yet, there was no mention of this incident in the president’s speech.
+
+This is an escalation of hostile behavior by the Iranians who just last month fired unguided missiles at our aircraft carrier , the Harry S. Truman, in the same waters.
+
+I can't imagine, if he was still with us, that President Truman would disregard these acts of hostility. He was a man of strength. With the country feeling that terrorism is one of our top problems, the president dismissed our concerns. Don't worry! We've got the strongest military in the world. We got Bin Laden.
+
+This is what he said about Iran: ""That’s why we built a global coalition, with sanctions and principled diplomacy, to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. As we speak, Iran has rolled back its nuclear program, shipped out its uranium stockpile, and the world has avoided another war.""
+
+I don't think so. Bad behavior by Iran is dismissed because President Obama wants to protect his sacred and risky deal.
+
+The number one concern of the country is fighting terrorism. The recent home grown action by the terrorist killings in San Bernardino, California has made this more of a concern. But in spite of this, just this week the president is to release more prisoners from Guantanamo. It is still his top priority to close this prison in spite of strong objections from the Congress, the military and law enforcement officers.
+
+Many of the prisoners already released have returned to the terrorist battlefield. ""That is why I will keep working to shut down the prison at Guantanamo: it’s expensive, it’s unnecessary, and it only serves as a recruitment brochure for our enemies.""
+
+This is a speech that will not be remembered and will historically be irrelevant.
+
+The man who was the most partisan president in recent history, talked about how disappointed he is that the partisan divide  has not healed.
+
+The office of the presidency has been diminished under Barack Obama’s two terms. His party has been demolished at the State house level and in the loss of both Houses of Congress. But he still panders on.
+
+This is not an historic presidency and he exemplified his ""leading from behind"" with a very forgettable farewell State of the Union.
+
+No wonder the country is desperately looking for new leadership.
+
+Edward J. Rollins is a Fox News contributor. He is a former assistant to President Reagan and he managed his reelection campaign. He is a senior presidential fellow at Hofstra University and a member of the Political Consultants Hall of Fame. He is a strategist for Great America PAC, an independant group that is supporting Donald Trump for president.",REAL
+5946,2016 Tribute to our Troops: veterans who continue to serve,"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. 2016 Tribute to our Troops: veterans who continue to serve By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 4, 2016 veterans By fox2detroit.com Since 2003, FOX 2 has honored the men and women who put their lives on the line for our country. Each year, our goal is to pay “Tribute to our Troops” from Michigan and with ties to the Great Lakes State. That tradition continues this year, as we honor our veterans who continue to inspire us, long after their service. We also focus on issues facing our veterans, including homelessness, PTSD and the unique battles for female veterans. Here are some of the highlights from this year’s program: – President Obama presents the Medal of Honor to LTC Charles Kettles of Ypsilanti, nearly 50 years after his service. Kettles is a U.S. Army veteran. The war hero saved dozens of American soldiers in Vietnam. 
+Read the Full Article at www.fox2detroit.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on November 4, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+8161,Limbaugh: Democrats would 'destroy Jesus Christ',"Actor Jim Caviezel portraying Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ.” 
+Jesus Christ of Nazareth is not the Republican nominee for president in this election cycle. 
+But if He were, Democrats would try to “destroy” Him in the same manner they’re attacking the 2016 GOP candidate, Donald Trump. 
+That’s according to radio host Rush Limbaugh, who hypothesized what this year’s race would look like if the Son of God were at the top of the Republican ticket. 
+Should President Trump try to prosecute Hillary? Sign the hottest petition in America now to show your support! 
+“It doesn’t matter who the Republicans would have nominated, they were gonna get the treatment Trump’s getting. It wouldn’t have mattered,” Limbaugh said Wednesday. 
+“They would go out of their way to find ways to destroy Jesus Christ if he could be nominated as a Republican. The Democrats would do everything they could, include calling Him a liar, the Bible a fake book, whatever it took.” Rush Limbaugh 
+And despite the fact the Bible never indicates Jesus was married or had sex out of wedlock, Limbaugh suggested Democrats would do their best effort in trying to find any of His offspring: 
+“They would scour the historical record looking for children He had fathered, anything they could do to disapprove the gospel to discredit Jesus. That’s who they are. That’s what they would do.” 
+Limbaugh said the point he was stressing was that Republicans would never escape “this kind of media assault based on who we nominate.” Donald Trump’s RNC acceptance speech (Photo: Screenshot from RNC live feed) 
+“I say this because a lot of you Never Trumpers are out there claiming that this is exactly what you get when you nominate a guy like Trump. No, it’s exactly what you get when you nominate a Republican. Whenever there is any opposition to the Democrats, this is what they do. It doesn’t matter. They’re gonna do it. They did it to Romney … 
+“I’ve made this point ’til I blue in the face. They turned Romney, who is mild-mannered Mr. Gosh, Can’t Even Get Noticed into the biggest walking Satan, El Diablo politics had ever seen at that time, and they made it stick So this is why I think Trump has so many people supporting him. He’s fighting back against it when most Republicans haven’t and don’t.” 
+As an example of how media treatment of Republicans has not changed, Limbaugh played an excerpt of 1980 election-night coverage from CBS. Commentator Bill Moyers characterized the race before it was known that Republican Ronald Reagan would easily defeat Democrat Jimmy Carter. Moyers stated: 
+“Those of you who might speak Spanish, who might be black, who might be women, remember,” said Carter, “who’s been your friend.” And there under the California sun in San Diego at a shopping center, Ronald Reagan was delivering himself of one of those patriotic soliloquies at which he’s been a master since his days at Eureka College. Suddenly hecklers in the crowd started shouting and waving their ERA signs. Reagan took his cue and snapped back, “Aw, shut up!” 
+And thousands of supporters roared their approval. Those are the people for whom Ronald Reagan is the apostle of the rollback, the knight who promises finally to slay the dragon of liberal government. Jimmy Carter won four years ago as an outsider, and, if he wins at all tonight, it must be as an insider defending the status quo. Reagan has cast himself as a sheriff who comes riding into town at just in the nick of time shouting, “Enough’s enough.” 
+“Does it sound like anything has changed in the way these people see the world?” Limbaugh asked. “Not an iota!” 
+Follow Joe Kovacs on Twitter @JoeKovacsNews",FAKE
+2326,Hillary Clinton's Second Amendment,"Accepting the National Rifle Association's endorsement last week, Donald Trump warned that Hillary Clinton ""wants to abolish the Second Amendment."" CNN corrected him, noting that Clinton ""has never called for the abolition of the 2nd Amendment.""
+
+Although that's technically true, Clinton has done what amounts to the same thing. She has interpreted the Second Amendment so narrowly that it imposes no practical limits on gun control laws, and that interpretation is sure to guide her Supreme Court nominations if she is elected president.
+
+On the same day that Trump addressed the NRA, one of Clinton's policy advisers told Bloomberg Politics the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee disagrees with District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 decision in which the Supreme Court overturned the District's handgun ban. The adviser, Maya Harris, said, ""Clinton believes Heller was wrongly decided in that cities and states should have the power to craft commonsense laws to keep their residents safe.""
+
+Since Heller is the first case in which the Supreme Court explicitly recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to armed self-defense, that statement is roughly equivalent to saying, ""Trump believes Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided in that cities and states should have the power to craft commonsense laws to protect unborn children."" Just as supporters of abortion rights would be justified in reading the latter statement as a rejection of their position, supporters of gun rights are justified in reading Clinton's statement as a rejection of theirs.
+
+Clinton confirms her hostility to gun rights by glossing over the details of the D.C. law that the Supreme Court overturned. That law, which was the strictest of its kind in the country, not only banned handguns, the most popular type of weapon for self-defense, but required that long guns be disassembled and unloaded or disabled by a trigger lock.
+
+As the Court recognized, the latter rule made it impossible for D.C. residents to use even shotguns or rifles ""for the core lawful purpose of self-defense."" But to Clinton, the D.C. ban was an eminently reasonable ""safe storage law,"" a paradigmatic example of ""commonsense"" gun control.
+
+If the District's limits on gun possession negated ""the core lawful purpose"" of the Second Amendment, you might wonder, why would a candidate who claims to respect the Second Amendment (as Clinton intermittently does) say they should have been upheld? Possibly because she does not think the Second Amendment has anything to do with self-defense.
+
+""I know how important gun ownership, and particularly hunting, is here in northeastern Pennsylvania,"" Clinton told supporters in Dunmore last month. Regarding her gun control agenda, she said, ""responsible gun owners have to stand up and say, 'This has nothing to do with my guns, my hunting, my sport shooting, my collecting.'""
+
+Self-defense is conspicuously absent from Clinton's list of legitimate things people do with guns. The Australian government, whose mass confiscations of firearms Clinton admires, takes a similar view. Australians must demonstrate a ""genuine reason"" for owning a gun, and personal protection does not count.
+
+But Australia has no Second Amendment. Clinton's campaign website mentions the Second Amendment a dozen times (compared to more than 800 mentions on Trump's site), not once in the context of self-defense.
+
+Three of those references to the Second Amendment criticize people for taking it too seriously. After a mass shooting in Oregon last fall, for instance, Clinton rejected the NRA's ""single-minded, absolutist theology about the Second Amendment being sacrosanct,"" saying ""every constitutional right and amendment can be tailored in an appropriate way without breaching the Constitution.""
+
+Actually, it's government policy that has to be ""tailored"" so that it does not breach the Constitution. Restrictions on speech, for instance, must be ""narrowly tailored"" to serve a compelling government interest.
+
+Rather than trim her policy agenda to fit the Constitution, Clinton wants to trim the Constitution to fit her policy agenda. ""We have to make this a voting issue,"" she says. I agree.",REAL
+3692,Chattanooga shooting: History of attacks on U.S. military,"Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of ""Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad."" David Sterman is a program associate at New America, a Washington-based think tank.
+
+(CNN) On Thursday morning, four U.S. Marines were killed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when a gunman shot at two separate military facilities: a military recruiting center and a Navy training reserve center.
+
+The suspected shooter is 24-year-old Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, who also is dead, according to the FBI.
+
+The shooter's motivations are as yet unclear. U.S. Attorney Bill Killian told reporters that the investigation is being treated as ""act of domestic terrorism.""
+
+One likely reason why investigators are treating the shooting as a potential domestic terrorist attack is that there are multiple cases of jihadist extremists plotting to attack military facilities and recruiting centers in the United States.
+
+Military facilities and personnel are a common target in jihadist plots to conduct violence within the United States. Nearly a third of the 119 Americans accused of plotting an attack inside the United States since 9/11 were alleged to have plotted to attack U.S. military targets, according to data collected by New America
+
+Thursday's shooting would not be the first jihadist attack on a U.S. military recruitment office, nor even the first one with a connection to Tennessee.
+
+On November 18, 2008, Bledsoe was arrested in Yemen for possessing a fake Somali identification card. The fake identity card was part of Bledsoe's ill-conceived plan to travel to Somalia to wage jihad. When he was arrested, Bledsoe was found to possess manuals about how to make bombs and gun silencers. On his cell phone were contacts for militants who were wanted in Saudi Arabia.
+
+The FBI interviewed Bledsoe after his arrest in Yemen, and he eventually returned to the United States. In a letter to the judge in his case, Bledsoe claimed to have been sent by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and portrayed the Little Rock shooting as a jihadist attack -- though there is no evidence that he was actually sent or directed by AQAP.
+
+The Fort Hood attack helps illustrate the particular role of military targets for jihadists who see themselves as engaged in a war with the United States and soldiers as legitimate targets.
+
+Hasan's only real confidant in Texas was Duane Reasoner Jr., an 18-year-old covert from Catholicism who attended his mosque. Hasan told Reasoner he didn't want to be deployed to Afghanistan. At their final dinner together, on November 4, Hasan told Reasoner that what he really wanted was to quit the military because anyone fighting against fellow Muslims was likely to go to hell.
+
+The next day, the 467th Combat Stress Control Detachment to which Hasan was assigned was due to report at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood -- the last stop before the unit shipped out to Afghanistan. This was the day that Hasan selected to conduct his deadly attack.
+
+Earlier this year, an alleged plot inspired by ISIS to attack a military base was foiled in Illinois. On March 25, Hasan Edmonds , a 22-year-old U.S. citizen, and his cousin Jonas Edmonds, a 29-year-old U.S. citizen, were arrested. The two allegedly plotted for Hasan, a member of the Illinois National Guard, to travel to Syria to fight with ISIS while Jonas would carry out an attack on a military facility. The two were monitored by an undercover officer.
+
+Another potential reason to consider jihadist terrorism as a motivation in the Chattanooga shooting is that the incident comes amid a spike in terrorism cases this year, driven in large part by the threat posed by individuals inspired by ISIS and a law enforcement crackdown on potential plotters.
+
+Already less than seven months into 2015, more Americans have been charged in jihadist terrorism related cases than in any other year since 9/11, according to data collected by New America
+
+Moreover, the timing of the Chattanooga shooting on the final night of Ramadan raises another flag. ISIS called for its supporters to unleash ""a month of disaster"" during the holy celebration of Ramadan, which ends Friday.
+
+Regardless of the shooter's motivation, it is essential to investigate all possibilities and not jump to conclusions.
+
+On September 16, 2013, Aaron Alexis killed 12 people in a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard. Though the attack came on the heels of the anniversary of 9/11, occurred in the nation's capital, targeted a military facility and had other characteristics that superficially suggested it might be jihadist terrorism, Alexis turned out to not be a terrorist, but a mass shooter with a history of mental health problems.
+
+Even though Alexis was not a jihadist terrorist, his shooting at the Navy Yard demonstrated in the words of a Department of the Navy report on the shooting that there were ""critical performance gaps"" in the Navy Yard's capabilities ""against a wide range of threats"" and that ""the Naval Support Activity Washington's Antiterrorism Program"" was ""deficient in several areas.""
+
+An issue laid bare by Thursday's shootings is the challenge of securing military recruiting offices from attacks.
+
+While U.S. military bases tend to have high levels of security, military recruiting offices do not. Since these offices have been the scenes of two attacks in the past six years, the Pentagon should consider how to make them harder targets.",REAL
+4450,"Obama calls for end to nuclear weapons, but U.S. disarmament is slowest since 1980","Speaking from Hiroshima, the site of the first war-time atomic weapon detonation, President Obama on Friday called for the pursuit of ""a world without nuclear weapons.""
+
+Only a few days prior, his Department of Defense published new data revealing that the government Obama oversees -- a government which manages the second-largest nuclear stockpile in the world -- had dismantled fewer of its nuclear devices than in any year since at least 1980.
+
+Every year, the Department of Defense declassifies data on the size of the country's nuclear stockpile and the number of warheads dismantled. Its most recent data, released this week, shows that the U.S. stockpile numbered 4,571 at the end of 2015, about 15 percent of its size at its peak during the Cold War in 1967. The number of weapons dismantled was 109, the lowest figure since at least 1980.
+
+In 1945, the size of the stockpile matched the number of weapons deployed -- two. The biggest reductions came in the early 1990s during the administration of George H.W. Bush and, a decade later, during his son's. At the end of 2008, the stockpile numbered 5,273; over the course of Obama's two terms, it has dropped to 4,571.
+
+It is, of course, easier to reduce the size of a stockpile when it is much larger. As a fraction of the total weapon count, Obama has sliced the total by a bit more than one-tenth -- 13 percent. But the Federation of American Scientists is still critical of Obama's progress in this regard. That 13 percent is ""the smallest reduction of the stockpile achieved by any previous post-Cold War administration;"" the 109 dismantlings last year continues ""a trendline of fewer and fewer warheads dismantled"" under Obama. The FAS notes that there are reasons outside of the administration's control for the lower number last year -- but also that political pressure discourages a push for reduction.
+
+Why does the size of our stockpile matter? As data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute shows, the United States still controls about half of the weapons controlled by recognized nuclear states.",REAL
+4002,Pentagon weighs using force to protect US-backed Syria rebels targeted by Russia,"Senior U.S. military leaders and defense officials are debating whether military force should be used to protect Washington-backed Syrian rebels who have come under attack by Russian airstrikes in recent days.
+
+The Associated Press reported early Friday that the question was part of a broader debate within the Pentagon about the the broader dilemma of how the administration should respond to what White House press secretary Josh Earnest described as Russia's ""indiscriminate military operations against the Syrian opposition.""
+
+Tensions between the U.S. and Russia are escalating over Russian airstrikes that are serving to strengthen Syrian President Bashar Assad by targeting the so-called ""moderate"" rebels rather than hitting Islamic State (ISIS) fighters it promised to attack.
+
+Turkey's Foreign Ministry says Ankara and its allies in the U.S.-led coalition are calling on Russia to immediately cease attacks on the Syrian opposition and to focus on fighting Islamic State militants.
+
+Meanwhile, a joint statement by the United States, France, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Britain expressed concern over Russia's military actions, saying they will ""only fuel more extremism and radicalization."" The text of the statement was released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry on Friday, and confirmed by the French Foreign Ministry.
+
+The Pentagon on Thursday had its first conversation with Russian officials in an effort to avoid any unintended U.S.-Russian confrontations as the airstrikes continue in the skies over Syria. During the video call, Elissa Slotkin, who represented the U.S. side, expressed America's concerns that Russia is targeting areas where there are few if any ISIS forces operating. Slotkin is the acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.
+
+A key concern is the prospect of the U.S. and Russia getting drawn into a shooting war in the event that Russian warplanes hit moderate Syrian rebels who have been trained and equipped by the U.S. military.
+
+At U.N. headquarters in New York, Secretary of State John Kerry said: ""What is important is Russia has to not be engaged in any activities against anybody but ISIL. That's clear. We have made that very clear.""
+
+""We are not yet where we need to be to guarantee the safety and security"" of those carrying out the airstrikes, he said.
+
+In an interview late Thursday on CBS's ""The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,"" Kerry described the military consultations as ""a way of making sure that planes aren't going to be shooting at each other and making things worse.""
+
+""What is happening is a catastrophe, a human catastrophe really unparalleled in modern times,"" Kerry said of the Syrian crisis, adding that Russia should help the United States ""persuade Assad to be the saver of his country, not the killer of his country.""
+
+U.S. officials made it clear earlier this year that rebels trained by the U.S. would receive air support in the event they are attacked by either IS or Syrian government troops. Currently, only about 80 U.S.-trained Syrian rebels are back in Syria fighting with their units.
+
+The U.S. policy is very specific. It doesn't address a potential attack by Russian planes and does not include Syrian rebels who have not been through the U.S. military training, even though they may be aligned with the U.S. or fighting Islamic State militants.
+
+So far, the Russian airstrikes have been in western Syria. The Syrians trained and equipped by the U.S. have primarily been operating in the north.
+
+U.S. officials said the issue is one of many being hashed out by top leaders within the department and the military's Joint Staff. One official said they are weighing the potential fallout.
+
+At worst, if Russia bombs rebels trained by the U.S. and American fighter jets intercede to protect the Syrians, the exchange could trigger an all-out confrontation with Russia -- a potential disaster the administration would like to avoid.
+
+Fueling the concerns is the fact that Russia has aircraft in Syria with air-to-air combat capacity, even though ISIS has no air force and the only aircraft in the skies belong to U.S.-led coalition or the Syrian government.
+
+Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook would not provide details of the talks with Russia. But much of the discussion involved proposals for avoiding conflict between U.S. and Russian aircraft flying over Syria.
+
+Kerry said he foresees further consultations with the Russians about air operations. And Cook said the U.S. side proposed using specific international radio frequencies for distress calls by military pilots flying in Syrian airspace, but he was not more specific about that or other proposals.
+
+Russia's defense ministry said that over the past 24 hours it had damaged or destroyed 12 targets in Syria belonging to the ISIS fighters, including a command center and ammunition depots. A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Col. Steve Warren, said he had no indication that the Russians had hit Islamic State targets.
+
+""While there is always danger of conflict, of inadvertent contact"" between coalition and Russian warplanes, ""we are continuing with our operations,"" Warren told reporters at the Pentagon.",REAL
+6409,Global UFO “Invasion” Stirs Panic! Military Denies Involvement 10/29/16 [VIDEO],"Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
+Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
+Privacy Policy 
+By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
+Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
+298,Wreckage in wake of bungled House coup,"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+Buzz Cut:
+
+ • Wreckage in wake of bungled House coup
+
+ • Baier tracks: Islamist militants leave no doubt in Paris
+
+ • Warren to rally labor allies
+
+ • Rubio comes out swinging at Hillary
+
+ • Lizard lips
+
+WRECKAGE IN WAKE OF BUNGLED HOUSE COUP
+
+ WashEx: “Republican leaders on Tuesday infuriated conservatives by meting out punishment to a group of far-right GOP lawmakers who tried to oust House Speaker John Boehner. Hours after 24 Republicans voted against Boehner, GOP leaders removed two members from a key committee. By late Tuesday, Reps. Daniel Webster and Richard Nugent, both of Florida, were stripped from the powerful House Rules Committee, which governs the legislative process, including amendments and changes to bills before they reach the House floor for debate. Webster was one of three candidates who announced they were running against Boehner…But GOP lawmakers told the Examiner that others could feel repercussions, including Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., who could lose his chairmanship of a Financial Services subcommittee.”
+
+ 
+
+ [The Hill: “Rep. Tim Huelskamp [R-Kan.] on Tuesday said he had a chairmanship taken away from him shortly after he announced he would vote against Rep. John Boehner [R-Ohio] for Speaker.”]
+
+ 
+
+ Mulvaney blasts bunglers - Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., took to Facebook to vent his frustrations with the bungled coup: “…the Floor of the House is the wrong place to have this battle. The hard truth is that we had an election for Speaker in November – just among Republicans. THAT was the time to fight. But not a single person ran against Boehner. Not one. If they had, we could’ve had a secret ballot to find out what the true level of opposition to John Boehner was. In fact, we could’ve done that as late as Monday night, on a vote of ‘no confidence’ in the Speaker. But that didn’t happen…and at least one of the supposed challengers to Boehner today didn’t even go to the meeting last night. That told me a lot.”
+
+ 
+
+ Here’s how it’s done - Some advice for conservatives from John Hart, who as a senior staff member, helped execute the successful GOP leadership coup of 1998. He was not impressed by the failed effort. “In contrast, today’s effort gives rebellion a bad name. It is tepid, poorly planned and pretends to be conservative but is conventional Washington politics and posturing at its worst.”
+
+ 
+
+ OBAMA TO WARN OF GAS PRICE RISE IN DETROIT GREEN CAR PITCH
+
+ Detroit News: “President Barack Obama is warning Americans that cheap gas prices won’t last indefinitely, and he’s standing by his support of small, fuel-efficient vehicles. “I would strongly advise American consumers to continue to think about how you save money at the pump because it is good for the environment, it’s good for family pocketbooks and if you go back to old habits and suddenly gas is back at $3.50, you are going to not be real happy,” Obama said in an exclusive telephone interview with The Detroit News on Tuesday, the eve of his visit to Ford’s Michigan Assembly plant in Wayne.”
+
+ 
+
+ Hang time - WashEx: “President Obama has invited the top four Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate to a meeting at the White House next Tuesday, as Obama tries to build momentum for his legislative agenda at the start of the 2015 congressional session.”
+
+ 
+
+ Swing set - The Hill: “Senate Republicans are reaching out to about nine Democrats they see as crucial swing votes in the new Congress. With his 54-seat majority, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) is six votes short of overcoming Democratic filibusters, making bipartisan support a necessity for getting most legislation to President Obama’s desk. Republicans have identified six go-to centrists: Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Mark Warner (Va.), Tim Kaine (Va.) and Joe Donnelly (Ind.) and independent Sen. Angus King (Maine), who caucuses with the Democrats. Several other Democrats, including Sens. Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Chris Coons (Del.), Tom Carper (Del.) and Martin Heinrich (N.M.), are also targets, though they are seen as riskier partners.”
+
+ 
+
+ CBC will feel the Love - Daily Caller: “Utah Rep. Mia Love, who recently became the first black female Republican ever elected to Congress, joined the Congressional Black Caucus, according to a Tuesday announcement - potentially bad news for the group.  Love, the former mayor of Saratoga Springs, has stated that she would likely join the CBC but would attempt drastic change from within the group, which tends to lean to the left.”
+
+ 
+
+ BAIER TRACKS: ISLAMIST MILITANTS LEAVE NO DOUBT IN PARIS…
+
+ “The Paris terrorist attack is another stark example of the threat the Western world faces from radical Islamists of all names, acronyms, shapes, sizes, and locations – Muslim extremists who seek to impose their ‘law’ on everyone else.  Today’s version involved military style terrorist commandos dressed in black, armed with AK-47s, clearly trained and moving in a coordinated fashion. Multiple reports say the terrorists yelled ‘Allah Akbar’ as they shot reporters and cartoonists in the newsroom of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, which had written satirically about Islam and published cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad. Witnesses say the gunmen yelled, ‘We’ve avenged the honor of the prophet!’ in French- before escaping.
+
+ 
+
+ The first public reaction from the White House was to ‘condemn this act of violence’. Pressed on why it wasn’t an act of terrorism, spokesman Josh Earnest said ‘it’s early’. ‘If it’s an act of terrorism we will condemn that too’. Then the French President put out a statement calling the onslaught a horrific act of terror.  Afterwards, Earnest, appearing on Fox, adjusted and called it an ‘act of terror’. What this semantics game shows is that the White House still seems reticent to speak out against radical Islamist terrorists in the strongest terms - early and often. We all understand the ‘fog’ of the early minutes of an ‘attack’, but after a short time this seemed cut and dry. And the French certainly understood it early. We’ll see how forceful the president is about it today as he touts the U.S. economy in Detroit.” – Bret Baier.
+
+ 
+
+ WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE...
+
+ The Daily Mail reports on the spectacular photos of Comet Lovejoy, which will pass Earth at its closest distance today. The comet was first spotted by amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy in August and is thought to be about 43 million miles away and traveling at 15 miles per second. Lovejoy has an extremely strong record in comet watching, discovering five thus far in with simple equipment. Slowly gaining brightness, the striking comet with its green glow from the cyanogen and diatomic carbon should allow viewers even in light-polluted suburbs to catch a glimpse. Comets are rock, gravel and dust held together by ice.
+
+ 
+
+ Got a TIP from the RIGHT or LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+ 
+
+ POLL CHECK
+
+ Real Clear Politics Averages
+
+ Obama Job Approval: Approve – 44.3 percent//Disapprove – 51.4 percent
+
+ Direction of Country: Right Direction – 27.5 percent//Wrong Track – 64.3 percent
+
+ 
+
+ RUBIO COMES OUT SWINGING AT HILLARY IN NEW BOOK
+
+ Tampa Bay Times: “Marco Rubio wastes no time in his new book, American Dreams, going after Hillary Clinton. On page nine of the forward, a lament that the dream is fading for many, the Republican senator from Florida argues Clinton ‘has proven herself wedded to the policies and programs of the past. Instead of reforming a higher education system that costs too much money, is too hard for nontraditional students to access and awards too many degrees that do not lead to jobs, another Clinton presidency will be about spending more money on a broken system,’ Rubio writes…‘The election of Hillary Clinton to the presidency, in short, would be nothing more than a third Obama term. Another Clinton presidency would be a death blow to the American Dream.’ But Rubio, whose book will be published by Sentinel on Jan. 13, knows partisan jabs only go so far.…But the point of the book is to spotlight Rubio as someone who can bring it all home. He doesn't declare himself a candidate for president, of course, but the 43-year-old leaves no mystery that he thinks he's qualified to lead a movement to ‘restore the land of opportunity.’”
+
+ 
+
+ Offers new immigration plan - National Journal: “Marco Rubio won’t apologize for attempting to pass a comprehensive immigration bill that included a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. But he will, in the run-up to a potential presidential campaign, offer a new, pared-down, conservative-friendly approach to immigration reform…Here are some key passages from Rubio’s book pertaining to immigration.
+
+CHAMBER POLITICAL GURU ENGSTROM JOINS UP WITH JEB
+
+ AP: “Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Tuesday announced the formation of a political action committee designed to lay the groundwork for a 2016 presidential campaign…Bush’s new organization is already adding high-profile operatives to his team. Rob Engstrom, political director at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, informed colleagues on Tuesday that he is moving to Florida to volunteer for the Right to Rise PAC.”
+
+ 
+
+ Power Play: Hot Rise - With the 2016 nomination contest heating up, Chris Stirewalt explains the whys and wherefores of the launch of Jeb Bush’s super PAC, the Right to Rise, and the impact on its fundraising prowess. WATCH HERE.
+
+ 
+
+ “Today, Jeb Bush launched The Right to Rise, a leadership PAC dedicated to making America a place of unlimited opportunity. Laura and I are proud to support my brother and contribute.” – Former President George W. Bush in a Facebook post.
+
+ 
+
+ INDIANA LAWMAKERS ICE PENCE WHITE HOUSE BILL
+
+ Indianapolis [Indiana] Star: “Indiana’s top legislative Republicans said Tuesday that a bill allowing Gov. Mike Pence to run for the White House and governor on the same ticket is unlikely to be approved this year. Senate President Pro Tem David Long, R-Fort Wayne, said Tuesday he plans to send it to the Senate Rules Committee, shorthand for killing legislation in the Statehouse…Gov. Mike Pence called a proposal that would allow him to seek the White House without having to sacrifice the governor’s office ‘well-intentioned,’ but would not dismiss the controversial measure Tuesday…But pressed later on whether he had asked for the legislation, Pence only repeated, ‘The first I heard about it was when I read it in the paper.’ State law bars candidates from seeking two offices on the same ballot, forcing politicians to choose one office or another…Pence has stoked talk of a possible presidential run, most recently with a highly touted trip to Israel, but has said he will not announce his plans until after the session ends in April.”
+
+ 
+
+ WARREN TO RALLY LABOR ALLIES
+
+ The Hill: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren [D-Mass.] will fuel speculation that she’s plotting to challenge former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 when she delivers a keynote address before the AFL-CIO National Summit on Raising Wages [today] in Washington D.C.. It’s her first major address this year and will likely only add to the growing questions about her plans for the upcoming election cycle. The address also comes as Senate Democrats are planning to make income inequality a focus in 2016.”
+
+ 
+
+ Ready for Warren rallies set for Iowa - Des Moines Register: “House parties are planned Wednesday night in Des Moines and Iowa City by political activists encouraging U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, to run for president…Activists at both parties plan to write postcards to Warren to urge her enter the 2016 presidential campaign, organizers said. They described the Iowa parties as part of a national grassroots effort to draft Warren as a presidential candidate.”
+
+ 
+
+ Hillary staff build out continues - Politico: “Hillary Clinton is beginning to put together the pieces for a likely campaign, tapping two top strategists — including President Barack Obama’s pollster — to work with her in the lead-up toward an ultimate decision. Robby Mook, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 campaign and is widely expected to be Clinton’s campaign manager, and Joel Benenson, Obama’s pollster who had for months been eyed for a role on her team, have been working with her as she makes a final decision and begins to put together a framework for a staff, according to people close to the former Secretary of State.”
+
+ 
+
+ KOCH BRO CALLS FOR CRIMINAL LAWS TO LIGHTEN UP
+
+ Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, who along with his brother David helped propel Republicans to victory in the midterms, offers a plan to reduce poverty and improve race relations by rethinking our justice system, in a Politico OpEd: “Overcriminalization has led to the mass incarceration of those ensnared by our criminal justice system, even though such imprisonment does not always enhance public safety.  Indeed, more than half of federal inmates are nonviolent drug offenders. Enforcing so many victimless crimes inevitably leads to conflict between our citizens and law enforcement. As we have seen all too often, it can place our police officers in harm’s way, leading to tragic consequences for all involved.”
+
+ 
+
+ LIZARD LIPS
+
+ South Florida’s Sun Sentinel reports that the owner of a reptile store, Benjamin Siegel, has been charged with battery and animal cruelty for allegedly using a bearded dragon lizard to beat his employees. He also allegedly put a lizard in his mouth. In 2012, Siegel had a cockroach-eating contest at the store where the winner, Edward Archbold died after choking on the bugs. Siegel’s attorney, Ken Padowitz, said he will “vigorously defend” his client. “I’m in the process of conducting an investigation and looking into all the facts so I can best represent my client against these allegations,” Padowitz said. Siegel also faces pending cocaine charges from a Christmas Eve arrest.
+
+ 
+
+ AND NOW, A WORD FROM CHARLES…
+
+ “[President Obama is] the fourth quarter, he’s never running again. The reason he’s doing X, Y, and Z is not because … he’s working his way to the left or the right. He doesn’t need anybody. This is Obama the way he really is.” – Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier” Watch here.
+
+ 
+
+ Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News.  Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+1225,"Why Nevada was a bad sign for Bernie Sanders's ""political revolution""","It was bad news for Bernie Sanders that he lost in Nevada Saturday. But there may be a bigger crisis embedded in the loss: It suggested he isn't delivering on a key ingredient needed for his ""political revolution.""
+
+On Saturday, about 80,000 voters participated in Nevada's caucus — roughly two-thirds of the total that came out in 2008.
+
+Sanders's reason for running, as he describes it, is to upend how money and special interests shape American politics by empowering voters. This means bringing out an unprecedented number of people on Election Day.
+
+So as bad as it was to lose Nevada on Saturday night, the tepid voter turnout in itself is almost a more significant problem for him.
+
+Throughout the course of his campaign, Sanders has promised to transform American government by bringing ""millions and millions"" of new voters to the ballot box.
+
+This is in contrast to the incrementalism of Clinton's campaign, which recognizes the confines of a bitterly divided American electorate and offers to fight for whatever gains are available.
+
+Sanders rejects the limits of this system. His ""political revolution"" is based on the idea that Democrats could win big with a message that gets a massive number of new lower- and middle-income voters continually engaged in the political process.
+
+It's an inspiring vision. But there is little sign that it's actually happening.
+
+Low turnout in Nevada wasn't an outlier. New Hampshire saw 10 percent fewer voters in 2016 than it did eight years ago. In Iowa, turnout was also down — from 287,000 in 2008 to 171,000 this year. (By contrast, voter numbers are exploding on the Republican side, with records for GOP turnout being crushed in Iowa, New Hampshire, and, from the early results, South Carolina.)
+
+Sanders needs this to change, and quickly, to validate one of his key arguments against Clinton.
+
+As Vox's Ezra Klein has written, Sanders thinks ""the core failure"" of Obama's presidency is its failure to convert voter enthusiasm in 2008 into a durable, mobilized organizing force beyond the election. Sanders vows to rectify this mistake by maintaining the energy from the campaign for subsequent fights against the corporate interests and in congressional and state elections.
+
+The relatively low voter turnout in the Democratic primary so far makes this more sweeping plan seem laughably implausible. Three states have voted, we've had countless debates and town halls, and there's been wall-to-wall media coverage for weeks. Sanders has drawn close to Clinton in the polls, and there are real stakes in a closely divided race.
+
+And yet ... we have little evidence that Sanders has actually activated a new force in electoral politics. If he can't match the excitement generated by Obama on the campaign trail, how can he promise to exceed it once in office?",REAL
+919,New York restores order for 2016 front-runners,"Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump scored resounding wins in New York Tuesday. The results underscored Bernie Sanders's limitations, but still leave much to play for in the GOP race.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Former President Bill Clinton (l.) applauds, as his wife, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, celebrates after winning the New York state primary Tuesday in New York.
+
+This time it was personal.
+
+On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton emphatically underlined her front-runner status and won a resounding victory over her previously surging rival, revealing the limits of Bernie Sanders’s rally-based campaign and his focus on anti-Wall Street economic populism.
+
+Mrs. Clinton won the New York primary by nearly 16 percentage points – an unexpectedly wide margin of victory crafted by assembling a diverse coalition of Democratic voters.
+
+Clinton had come to New York weeks ago, campaigning during a stretch in which Senator Sanders of Vermont had been reeling off convincing wins in eight of the previous nine contests.
+
+Sanders’s momentum included his massive, record-setting rallies in New York, Hollywood star power, and the enthusiasm of tens of thousands of young and boisterous supporters during the past two weeks. And in many national polls, Sanders had all but erased the former secretary of State’s lead of nearly 15 percentage points in February.
+
+Clinton, however, kept it small and local throughout the campaign, fanning out into the state’s Democratic establishment bases. She danced Dominican bachata at a block party in Washington Heights, played dominoes with locals in Harlem, sipped Chinese bubble tea in Queens.
+
+She pressed the flesh with local officials at organizing events, visited black churches throughout the state, and bored into local concerns – just like she had when she twice ran for the United States Senate here. In a closed primary – where only registered Democrats could vote – the strategy worked.
+
+“Today you proved once again, there’s no place like home,” Clinton said during her victory party at the Sheridan near Times Square, beaming and with an almost palpable sense of relief. “In this campaign, we’ve won in every region of the country,” she continued. “But this one’s personal. New Yorkers, you’ve always had my back. And I’ve always tried to have yours.”
+
+Just a few blocks away at Trump Tower in Manhattan, billionaire Donald Trump reestablished his role as the Republican front-runner, also winning the New York primary in dramatic – if expected – fashion with nearly 60 percent of the vote and taking at least 89 of the 95 delegates at stake.
+
+Mr. Trump, too, had stumbled in recent weeks as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas had strategically outmaneuvered his campaign, which relies on big rallies to galvanize followers. Senator Cruz had swept up all the delegates from the Colorado Republican convention earlier in April and continued to pick up stray delegates even in states the real estate mogul had received a majority of votes.
+
+The GOP leader had been decrying the party’s delegate system, calling it rigged against outside candidates like him. But New York voters overwhelmingly chose the Queens-born billionaire, giving new life to his hope of winning a majority of delegates before the convention in Cleveland.
+
+""We don't have much of a race anymore,"" Trump told his supporters in his victory speech in the Trump Tower lobby. ""We're going to go into the convention I think as the winner,"" saying Cruz was ""just about mathematically eliminated.""
+
+To the contrary, the math still shows a steep climb for Trump to get the 1,237 delegates he needs to avoid a contested convention. The latest estimate by NBC News suggests Trump will need to win about 57 percent of the remaining delegates to reach 1,237. To this point, he's secured 47 percent of the delegates on offer, according to a Politico tally.
+
+For both Cruz and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, as well as the #NeverTrump establishment forces within the GOP, the strategy remains to deny Trump a majority of delegates and then take their chances within a contested convention.
+
+On the Democratic side, however, Clinton is more and more poised to become the nominee. The NBC estimate suggests she now needs to win less than 33 percent of the remaining delegates (including super delegates) to secure the nomination. To this point, she's won 59 percent of the delegates on offer, according to Politico.
+
+""We started this race not far from here on Roosevelt Island,"" Clinton said during her victory speech. ""And tonight, a little less than a year later, the race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch and victory is in sight.""
+
+Sanders had hoped a victory here – or even a closely-contested loss on Clinton’s adopted home turf – would further damage the front-runner. His campaign spent nearly $2 million more in television ads than Clinton’s, and Sanders and his followers had ramped up their criticisms, questioning her ties to Wall Street and past support for harsh criminal justice measures.
+
+The Vermont senator traveled to Pennsylvania for a rally at a college on Tuesday, but in the evening he flew home to Burlington, Vt. – without his press entourage – to get “recharged and take a day off.”
+
+“Bernie Sanders got very negative attacking Hillary Clinton and dividing the party in New York, and I think he now has to ask himself if he wants to keep going down that path,” said Jay Jacobs, the Democratic chairman in Long Island’s suburban Nassau County, according to The New York Times. “After New York, we’re moving into a phase of the campaign where we have to start uniting the party.”
+
+Sanders complained about the built-in advantages Clinton had as an establishment candidate. Since New York is a “closed” primary, independents and those registered with other parties had to re-register as Democrats by October of last year – well before Sanders began his surge.
+
+But the same problems Sanders faced in New York will only multiply in the days ahead. Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania hold closed primaries next Tuesday. Moreover, the Vermont senator has performed best within states with few minority voters. Polls show that Clinton maintains significant leads in diverse states like Pennsylvania and Maryland, as well as Connecticut.
+
+The Sanders campaign said it would “assess where we are” after those contests, the Associated Press reported late Tuesday.
+
+And while many of Sanders’s young supporters had sometimes expressed deep animus towards Clinton, exit polls on Tuesday revealed that a vast majority of Democratic voters in New York would support either candidate in the general election.
+
+“To all the people who supported Sen. Sanders,” a rejuvenated Clinton told her supporters Tuesday night, “I believe there is much more that unites us than divides us.”",REAL
+9415,"If Clinton goes down, Loretta Lynch will go down with her","VIDEOS If Clinton goes down, Loretta Lynch will go down with her Loretta Lynch’s ties to the Clintons go back to 1999 when then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney’s office October 31, 2016 
+Oh, Loretta. 
+I’ll bet that AG Loretta Lynch is shaking in her boots right now, because when Hillary Clinton goes down, Lynch’s career will go down with her. Heck, maybe they’ll even be cellmates. 
+Loretta Lynch’s ties to the Clintons go back to 1999 when then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney’s office. She left in 2002 and went into private practice, but returned to the Brooklyn office in 2010 at the behest of President Barack Obama. ( Here’s her official bio. ) 
+In 2015, she was sworn in to become the 83rd Attorney General of the United States, taking the place of the blatantly corrupt Attorney General, Eric Holder , who will probably be most famous for his roles in the Fast and Furious operation, inciting racial tensions, and his mishandling of the Lois Lerner/IRS debacle. First, there was the secret airplane meeting with Bill Clinton 
+It all started to publically go downhill for Lynch during the first investigation into Hillary Clinton’s carelessness with national secrets via her home email server . Right before FBI Director James Comey was to meet with Hillary Clinton to interrogate her about the subject, Lynch was busted having a secret meeting with Bill Clinton. The Washington Post reported: Clinton’s private, unplanned meeting with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch at the Phoenix airport last week, coming at a time when the Justice Department should be nearing completion of its examination of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server for her emails as secretary of state, will inevitably — and negatively — affect public attitudes about that investigation… …Lynch has tried to make amends, though not without leaving some confusion in her wake. In a conversation Friday with Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart at the Aspen Ideas Festival, she insisted again that the conversation was innocent — about grandchildren and golf and such — and did not touch on the investigation of the emails. But she said she recognized that others would not see it that way. “The fact that the meeting that I had is now casting a shadow over how people are going to view that work is something that I take seriously, and deeply and painfully,” she said. Lynch said that she would “be accepting” whatever recommendation the career prosecutors and FBI Director James B. Comey bring her — though she did not say she would remove herself completely from the case. She also said she had made that decision some months ago but was only now making it public. 
+Of course, it was all much easier for Lynch to abide by the decision when Comey miraculously found that Hillary Clinton was not criminal in her negligence with national secrets. 
+Now, though, people are asking questions about that ill-founded meeting. Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit for “all records” related to the illicit meeting between Attorney General Lynch and former President Bill Clinton. “On June 29, 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch is reported to have met privately with former President Bill Clinton on board a parked private plane at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona. The meeting occurred during the then-ongoing investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email server, and mere hours before the Benghazi report was released publicly involving both Mrs. Clinton and the Obama administration. Judicial Watch filed a request on June 30 that the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General investigate that meeting.” Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggested that during that meeting, Bill Clinton may have offered to extend Lynch’s position in the AG’s office during a Hillary Clinton administration. Then she blocked a congressional investigation into the notorious Iranian ransom payment. 
+Last week, AG Lynch blocked a congressional investigation into the cash payments that the Obama administration made to Iran by pleading the Fifth. The Washington Free Beacon reported: Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon … …“It is frankly unacceptable that your department refuses to answer straightforward questions from the people’s elected representatives in Congress about an important national security issue,” the lawmakers wrote. “Your staff failed to address any of our questions, and instead provided a copy of public testimony and a lecture about the sensitivity of information associated with this issue.” “As the United States’ chief law enforcement officer, it is outrageous that you would essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries,” they stated. “The actions of your department come at time when Iran continues to hold Americans hostage and unjustly sentence them to prison.” 
+How very judicial of her. Lynch tried to shut Comey up about the new investigation into the Clinton emails. 
+Now, even the mainstream media can’t turn its head. 
+Earlier I wrote about the fact that FBI Director James Comey made the decision on his own to go public about the new investigation into the Hillary Clinton emails. But let’s talk a little further about Lynch’s desperate attempts to shut him up. 
+The New York Times reported that the Justice Department “strongly discouraged Comey” against releasing the information: The day before the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, sent a letter to Congress announcing that new evidence had been discovered that might be related to the completed Hillary Clinton email investigation, the Justice Department strongly discouraged the step and told him that he would be breaking with longstanding policy, three law enforcement officials said on Saturday. Senior Justice Department officials did not move to stop him from sending the letter, officials said, but they did everything short of it, pointing to policies against talking about current criminal investigations or being seen as meddling in elections. 
+How interesting that it’s seen as “influencing the election” to investigate someone now but it wasn’t back when she was investigated and not charged. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but according to USA Today (emphasis mine), a “…federal official familiar with Comey’s decision said Saturday that the FBI director considered the attorney general’s advice during a spirited discussion of the matter Thursday and early Friday but felt compelled to act.” Do you remember Janet Reno? 
+Poor Janet was another Attorney General who went down for the Clintons. She was also sworn in as AG under Bill Clinton, and many questioned her appointment at the time. According to a report in the Chicago Tribune : She arrived in Washington from Miami as Caesar’s wife, and so she has remained. She was ignorant and independent of insider D.C. and has stayed that way. Bill Clinton never much liked her and never confided in her, and she reciprocated. 
+She became AG just in time to take the fall for the debacle in Waco , actually. According to History.com The Waco standoff had already begun by the time Janet Reno became the first female attorney general on March 12, 1993. She approved the FBI’s tear gas plan the following month, explaining that negotiations with the Branch Davidians had stalemated and that the children inside the compound were at risk. “We will never know whether there was a better solution,” Reno said in 1995. “Everyone involved … made their best judgments based on all the information we had.” Nonetheless, a Republican-led congressional report called her decision “premature, wrong and highly irresponsible.” She was also criticized when facts emerged contradicting some of her earlier statements. 
+The Tribune post continued to discuss Reno’s position as a scapegoat: Every day since she took office , she has been supervising at least one probe embarrassing to Clinton–Whitewater, fundraising, Lewinsky, China espionage, etc. Clinton can’t afford the political beating he would take if he cashiered her. …But no such attorney general could have survived the Clinton scandals, much less survived them with her own reputation–and her department’s–intact. 
+Attorney Generals who have anything to do with the Clintons don’t seem to fare too well. They end up so embroiled in Clinton scandals that they, too, are pulled down into the mire, regardless of what their intentions were when they started out. Lynch can see her future…and it has something to do with “Help Wanted” ads 
+The last time Lynch was involved in the Clinton email kerfuffle, she promised to abide by FBI Director James Comey’s recommendation. 
+I wonder if she’ll make that same promise this time? 
+She really can’t, because if she does, it will show she was complicit with the Clintons the last time around, and also this time when she decried Comey’s release of information about the investigation. 
+I wonder if she and Hillary Clinton will be able to get adjoining cells when/if the truth comes out. Via Daisy Luther Daisy Luther is a single mom who lives in a small village in the mountains of Northern California, where she homeschools her youngest daughter and raises veggies, chickens, and a motley assortment of dogs and cats. She is a best-selling author who has written several books, including The Organic Canner , The Pantry Primer: A Prepper’s Guide to Whole Food on a Half-Price Budget , and The Prepper’s Water Survival Guide: Harvest, Treat, and Store Your Most Vital Resource . Daisy is a prolific blogger who has been widely republished throughout alternative media. On her website, The Organic Prepper , Daisy uses her background in alternative journalism to provide a unique perspective on health, self-reliance, personal liberty, and preparedness. You can follow her on Facebook , Pinterest , and Twitter .",FAKE
+3128,Pope calls on Catholics to shelter Europe's migrants,"BERLIN — Pope Francis called on religious communities and Catholic parishes across Europe on Sunday to take on the crush of migrants that have been pouring into the continent recently.
+
+He said the Vatican will shelter two families who are ""fleeing death.""
+
+Francis cited Mother Teresa, the European-born nun who cared for the poorest in India, in making his appeal. ""Faced with the tragedy of tens of thousands of refugees who are fleeing death by war and by hunger, and who are on a path toward a hope for life, the Gospel calls us to be neighbors to the smallest and most abandoned, to give them concrete hope,"" Francis said, adding that it's not enough to say, ""Have courage, hang in there.""
+
+The pope’s plea comes as thousands more refugees from war-torn countries such as Syria and Afghanistan were expected to arrive in Austria and Germany on Sunday. The migrants were traveling from Hungary where they had been stranded for days as European leaders debate how to best handle the surge.
+
+On Saturday, about 7,000 people crossed the border on foot from Hungary to Austria. A similar amount arrived into Munich's central train station by Saturday evening.
+
+
+
+ ""I appeal to the parishes, the religious communities, the monasteries and sanctuaries of all Europe to ... take in one family of refugees,"" Pope Francis said after his Sunday address in the Vatican, according to Reuters.
+
+
+
+ There are more than 25,000 parishes in Italy alone, and more than 12,000 in Germany, where many of the Syrians fleeing civil war and people trying to escape poverty and hardship in other countries say they want to end up.
+
+
+
+ The pope’s call was another in a series of recent public interventions by the Vatican to end conflicts and reconcile differences between countries, from Mideast peace meetings to brokering talks between the U.S. and Cuba.
+
+
+
+According to Reuters, the crowd in St. Peter's Square on Sunday applauded as the pontiff, himself the grandson of Italian emigrants to Argentina, said: ""Every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary of Europe, take in one family.""
+
+
+
+ Authorities in Budapest had refused to let the migrants travel amid confusion from European Union member states about what to do with the new arrivals.
+
+
+
+ Europe is absorbing tens of thousands of people this year from Africa, the Middle East and Asia who are desperate to reach the region.
+
+
+
+People from Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea fleeing conflict and repression in those nations represent the largest number of people on the move.
+
+
+
+ More than 3,700 people around the world have died in 2015 as they attempt to escape war, persecution and economic hardship, according to the International Organization for Migration.
+
+
+
+Europe, with its relatively robust welfare states and infrastructure for asylum seekers, is better placed, many argue, to handle the influx than nations in the Middle East region. Persian Gulf states have donated millions of dollars but have not resettled people in significant numbers. That inaction has brought them criticism from some quarters. 
+
+
+
+ Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Sunday his government was considering accepting more Syrian refugees.
+
+Around half of Syria's population of 20 million have fled the country or been displaced internally amid a civil war that has raged for over four years.
+
+Authorities in Cyprus rescued 114 people Sunday about 50 miles off the coast of the Mediterranean island after the fishing boat they were in ran into trouble.
+
+German Chancellor Angela Merkel meanwhile is holding crisis talks on the thousands of refugees and migrants who want to come to Germany.
+
+ She wants other EU member states to take more refugees.
+
+Berlin estimates that up to 800,000 people may seek asylum in Germany before the end of the year, far more than any other EU country, and the chancellor is also concerned that extremists may try to stoke anti-refugee sentiment.
+
+Some far-right groups in Germany, for example, protested the arrival of refugees and migrants from Hungary in Dortmund overnight.",REAL
+7328,The World War 3 Conspiracy – Episode 1,"November 9, 2016 at 3:25 am 
+These people are crazy, but not insane. Let it be said this fear of total war can and will be used to subjugate humanity into whatever form of synthesis they desire, and any thought of them not controlled by the same hidden hand is folly. If depopulation is on the menu, they will soon have the means without radiating the entire biosphere.",FAKE
+9900,This dad’s tweets about Halloween with his young daughters are brilliant,"Next Prev Swipe left/right This dad’s tweets about Halloween with his young daughters are brilliant Comedy writer James Breakwell , also known as @XplodingUnicorn , is a very popular guy over on Twitter, largely due to his hilarious tweets about family life, mostly involving his four young daughters. In a series of recent tweets, James has illustrated some of the challenges brought about by Halloween. Here are eight of them for you to enjoy. 1. 4-year-old: Can I wear my wizard costume today? 
+Me: No. You’ll ruin it before Halloween. 
+4: I'll use magic to fix it. 
+Checkmate. 
+— James Breakwell (@XplodingUnicorn) October 28, 2016 2. 4-year-old: How come we only trick-or-treat on Halloween? 
+Me: People won't give you candy on other days. 
+4: Have you tried? 
+— James Breakwell (@XplodingUnicorn) October 27, 2016 3. Me: I'm heading to the grocery store. 
+6-year-old: Why? We're about to get Halloween candy. 
+Me: You need other food, too. 
+6: Maybe YOU do. 
+— James Breakwell (@XplodingUnicorn) October 28, 2016 4.",FAKE
+3175,3 winners and 2 losers from Saturday night's Republican debate,"One might have expected the ninth Republican presidential debate to be a cut above the earlier edition. With Chris Christie out of the race and Ben Carson present but basically out of the running, it was a chance for the race to get serious, for the five candidates who could potentially win this thing to make their cases without much distraction from the B players.
+
+Instead, Donald Trump accused Jeb Bush of threatening to moon the kind people of New Hampshire.
+
+It was an anarchic evening where even disciplined moderators had trouble keeping things on track. That's par for the course for these things at this point, but the particular kind of chaos this time around was different, and didn't always play to the favor of Donald Trump, lord of chaos.
+
+We won't know who ""really"" won until poll results trickle in. But in the meantime, here are the candidates who ended the night better off than they started it — and the ones who slipped.
+
+After a long campaign in which his name has become almost synonymous with failure and pathos, Jeb finally — finally — had a good night.
+
+It may not have come to him entirely fairly. The whole debate he appeared to have the support of the live audience, who even raucously applauded his characteristically dull and platitudinous closing statement. This makes sense: Apparently only 600 of the 1,600 tickets to the event were given to the candidates, and the state and national party controlled most of the rest. The result was an enthusiastically pro-Jeb crowd.
+
+But whatever the reason for their Bush love, it worked. Trump was frequently booed — and when he tried to argue the audience was stacked against him, he was booed even harder. And Jeb was given the chance to throw red meat not to GOP base voters, but to typical GOP establishment types.
+
+That distinction is crucial. Defending the Iraq War is not something that, say, Tea Party activists are all that excited about doing. But it's something longtime Republican activists who were involved in the South Carolina state party in the 2000s had to do all the time. George W. Bush was their guy for eight years. They stood by him. They knew all the attacks about him and recoiled at each one.
+
+So when Trump decided to attack the Iraq War, and point out that the president who presided over 9/11 cannot reasonably claim to have ""kept us safe,"" the crowd took it personally. And booed. And applauded when Bush fought back:
+
+Applause, applause, applause. The Republican base might have moved on from George W. Bush, but the professional party operative class in the audience in South Carolina has not, and gave Bush one hell of a moment, which likely helped him with viewers in the state without that emotional attachment to the Bush legacy.
+
+Even better, he didn't have to answer for his flip-flop on whether Iraq was a mistake, even as Trump pressed him to do so. And best of all, Marco Rubio, Jeb's main rival for the establishment vote, helped Bush out, declaring, ""I just want to say, at least on behalf of me and my family, I thank God all the time it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore.""
+
+Jeb also did something he's been hesitant to do for much of this campaign: He embraced being a Bush. This is clearly part of a broader strategy, what with W coming back to campaign for his brother in South Carolina. But it's a smart strategy. Bush was never going to win by hoping that people forgot he's related to one of the most controversial figures in Republican history. But there is some residual goodwill in the party toward W, especially on national security, and Bush is uniquely positioned to exploit that at a moment when ISIS has made terrorism and Islamist radicalism much bigger issues than they've been for years.
+
+Jeb is still languishing in fourth in South Carolina polls. It's too soon to declare he has momentum. But he gave about the best performance he could've hoped for, which should give him a decent chance of outpacing Rubio and maybe even Cruz too in the state:
+
+The longer, the bloodier, and the sillier this campaign season is, the better it is for the eventual Democratic nominee. And it doesn't get much longer, bloodier, or sillier than the debate tonight.
+
+Here's some stuff that actually happened tonight. After a campaign that's mostly involved candidates falling over themselves to show their commitment to screwing over Latino undocumented immigrants, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio started arguing over who spoke better Spanish — in Spanish:
+
+Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner who won New Hampshire in a landslide and will almost certainly win in South Carolina too, stuck up for Planned Parenthood. To repeat: Less than a year after doctored undercover videos made the organization anathema to all Republicans and its defunding a key priority of the congressional GOP, the Republican frontrunner for president praised it:
+
+And Trump accused Jeb Bush of threatening to expose his buttocks to crowds of voters, an accusation that is, amazingly, not entirely without merit!
+
+If it had been scripted, it would've been the greatest surrealist masterpiece this side of Luis Buñuel, but to any general election swing voters watching, it was just a clown show. The most reasonable person onstage was defending the Iraq War at great length. That's bananas!
+
+Worse still for Republicans, it left the race still largely unsettled. Probably the best hope for a swift end to the primary is for Trump to just keep winning everything — but Trump had one of his worst nights to date. Probably the best hope for an establishment contender to win is for John Kasich to realize he can't do well outside New Hampshire and drop out, for Rubio to acknowledge that he's toast and do the same, and for Jeb! to rise up and save the day. But while Jeb had a good night, it wasn't a so-good-he-knocked-out-his-rivals night.
+
+And Ted Cruz gave a perfectly fine performance that should keep him firmly in second place, or even give him the potential to repeat his Iowa victory over Trump a few more times and throw the race into still further chaos.
+
+The takeaway from tonight was that this race will last a long time, it will involve a lot more ridiculous debates like this, and it will continue to make the Republican party look like a silly mess. That's all great news for Hillary and Bernie.
+
+No moderator could've completely contained the madness that was tonight's debate. Jeb and Trump were too committed to going after each other, as were Rubio and Cruz, for them to respect time restrictions or refrain from demanding a right to respond when their names were so much as mentioned in passing.
+
+But CBS's John Dickerson nonetheless did a fine job, asking productive follow-up questions and, with a couple exceptions (like a question about Trump's profanity), mostly sticking to the substance. His back-and-forth with Ted Cruz pointing out that Anthony Kennedy was confirmed for the Supreme Court in an election year earned him boos from the audience, who saw him as nitpicky and eager to defend Obama's nomination. But he was right, and he was keeping Cruz to the facts — which is crucial for a moderator.
+
+Another highlight was Major Garrett's questioning on Cruz's tax plan. Garrett took it for granted that Cruz is proposing a value-added tax — which Cruz has denied, but which is absolutely true if you look at how it's structured. Cruz denied it, but Garrett pressed him.
+
+But perhaps the best question went to Trump:
+
+Trump just didn't answer the question, even after Dickerson pressed him. The upshot was clear: Trump isn't capable, or isn't willing, of conceding literally any error. He really is exactly as arrogant as you think he is. And Dickerson demonstrated this not by saying it or arguing it but by having Trump show it for himself. That's moderating at its finest.
+
+And he mostly got booed for having a point. He attacked the audience as stacked to be pro-Bush — which it appears to have been. He defended Planned Parenthood as doing important work besides abortions — which it does. And he attacked George W. Bush for launching a war in Iraq when there were no weapons of mass destruction and for failing to prevent 9/11 — both totally legitimate criticisms.
+
+But they are not criticisms you make in a Republican debate. Trump has strayed from party doctrine before, but when he's done so, it's been on issues where the GOP is in a very different place from the establishment. He opposes cutting Social Security and Medicare, which enrages libertarian economic types within the party but delights actual voters, especially elderly ones. He wants big tariffs on China, which free-traders in the party hate but white working-class workers who actually vote for the party love.
+
+Here, though, he's on his own. There's not a huge Republican constituency for the idea that the Iraq War was not just bad but built on a lie:
+
+Now, the general point here is true. Bush and Dick Cheney made claims about WMD and Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda that weren't just false, but which they knew to be false given the intelligence they had at the time, or for which they had no evidence at all. But it's something that you'd expect a Democratic primary contender to say, not a Republican. (And throwing in ""they knew there were none"" is even a bit far for a Democrat.) Trump is allowed his heterodoxies on some issues, but accusing the most recent Republican president of deliberately misleading the nation into a war is unlikely to appeal to just about any GOPer.
+
+Same with his claim on 9/11. Here, Trump isn't merely critiquing Bush's Iraq policy, something that's a bit more acceptable within the GOP. He's critiquing Bush's terrorism record in general — and, implicitly, the overall Republican foreign policy consensus that the correct way to fight terrorism is through overwhelming force. That's a consensus that's lasted since Bush left office and isn't really challenged by any other candidate.
+
+Trump's Planned Parenthood comments are perhaps most baffling at all. There really aren't that many pro-choice Republicans out there, or even many pro-life Republicans open to the aggressive promotion of birth control through groups like Planned Parenthood. And however many there were before the organization became a right-wing media boogeyman last year, there are almost certainly fewer now. There's no reason for an undecided pro-life activist to watch that exchange and come away preferring Trump to his rivals.
+
+All of this is bad for Trump on his own, but it's especially bad given that Trump was unabashedly liberal before 2011 or so. He said in 2008 that Bush deliberately lied to start the war in Iraq, and attacked congressional Democrats for not impeaching him over it. In 1999, he told Tim Russert he was ""strongly for choice"":
+
+Republican rivals have tried to attack him for this before, mostly without success. Voters saw Trump as authentic now, whatever his past beliefs; why not believe the message? But seeing elements of the old, more liberal Trump sneak through might give that critique new force.
+
+Trump is still winning this primary. He will probably win in South Carolina, and the rest of the field remains scattered enough that he stands a good shot of winning a majority of states in the ""SEC primary"" on March 1. But tonight, more than any other debate, felt like a momentum where the tide could shift against him.
+
+If his name weren't Marco Rubio, this guy would've dropped out by now. Think about it: If, say, Chris Christie had gotten third in Iowa and then fifth in New Hampshire, and totally botched the pre–New Hampshire debate, would anyone look at him and think, ""Yeah, this is a guy with a plausible path to the nomination""? Of course not. But because Rubio has been the one true hope of the Republican establishment for most of this cycle, he's been given something of a pass.
+
+But he still needs a way to take advantage of that lenience. He needs a way to beat back Bush and Kasich and emerge once again as the natural establishment rival to Cruz and Trump. And he needed, tonight, to overcome his last disastrous debate performance and prove to the establishment that he won't fail them again.
+
+What happened instead was a basically fine debate performance, devoid of any obvious gaffes, that nonetheless was woefully insufficient to turn around his dying campaign. His decision to attack Cruz more than Trump might have made strategic sense, but in practice it mostly gave Cruz a chance to remind voters, once again, that Rubio favors letting some undocumented immigrants become citizens. And every minute Rubio's immigration views are the topic at hand, he loses.
+
+And when it came time for Rubio to attack Trump, he … defended Jeb Bush. ""I just want to say,"" he declared, ""at least on behalf of me and my family, I thank God all the time it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore."" That is a great thing for a Bush surrogate to say, so as to build up the family reputation and give Jeb a hand. It's a gracious but tactically baffling thing to say if you are trying to defeat Jeb Bush.
+
+Rubio wasn't a disaster. But he didn't need not-a-disaster. He needed a blockbuster performance that got him back to where he was immediately post-Iowa, with strong momentum and a media narrative of Rubio rising. He didn't get that, and it's difficult to see now how he's ever going to put himself back in contention.",REAL
+2655,"The Oregon militia standoff, explained","A militia protesting the ""tyranny"" of the federal government seized the headquarters of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon on January 2 and, in a video posted to Facebook, called on ""patriots"" from all over the country to come to the refuge with their guns to join their fight.
+
+On January 26, six members of that militia, including leaders Ammon and Ryan Bundy, were arrested on charges of conspiracy to impede federal law enforcement officers from their official duties. The arrests happened after a shootout in which one militia member was killed, and another injured.
+
+Ammon Bundy's father Cliven Bundy became a Fox News star in 2014 for his armed standoff in Nevada with the federal government over cattle-grazing rights. On the surface, the 2016 wildlife-reserve occupation is about a father and son from Oregon who were ordered by the court to return to prison to serve additional time for a 2012 arson on federal land. But, as with Cliven Bundy's standoff, the anti-government militiamen driving this crisis believe it's about standing up to a tyrannical federal government.
+
+The apparent goal of the takeover is ultimately to induce the federal government to turn over government-owned land to local ranchers, loggers, and miners for their use. Here is Ammon Bundy, one of the militia leaders, explaining it in his own words:
+
+But the men involved in the takeover — including Ammon Bundy, Ammon's brother Ryan, Jon Ritzheimer, Blaine Cooper, and Ryan Payne — are not locals. Rather, they are a small group of individuals who travel around the country attaching themselves to various local fights against the federal government, usually over land rights. Several of them were involved in Cliven Bundy's 2014 standoff.
+
+Now they have latched onto the cause of two local ranchers from Burns, Oregon: Dwight and Steven Hammond.
+
+Dwight Hammond, age 73, and his son Steven, age 46, are scheduled to report to federal prison on Monday. Dwight, the father, faces nearly five years in prison; son Steven faces up to four years. The Hammonds were convicted of arson in 2012 for setting fire to public land adjacent to their ranch land. They have already served prison sentences for their crimes, but they now must return for an additional term after federal appellate judges said they had been illegally sentenced the first time.
+
+But the Hammonds' political cause isn't primarily about sentencing. Rather, it's about federal land use — and opposition to what is seen as an intrusive or outright illegal federal government.
+
+Federal agencies own and regulate huge chunks of land in western states like Oregon and Nevada. As such,  those with anti-government views, particularly in western states, often focus on the federal government 's land-use policies. Hence the significance of the Hammonds' case — and the change to their sentencing, which just further fed into views of a tyrannical federal government out of control.
+
+Here again is Zaitz, the Oregonian journalist:
+
+On Saturday, members of the militia attended a demonstration in Burns that had gathered to protest the Hammonds' case. After the protest, the militiamen drove to the wildlife refuge and took it over.
+
+It seems that the militiamen may have initially planned to seize the wildlife refuge headquarters in order to establish a ""sanctuary"" where the Hammonds could go to evade prison.
+
+As Ammon Bundy sees it, the locals are ""not strong enough"" to stand up for themselves, so the militia must act as the ""tip of the spear"" and lead the fight on behalf of the locals.
+
+Thus, Bundy and his fellow militiamen have seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — located in a remote area some 50 miles southeast of the city of Burns — in hopes of creating a ""base"" where ""patriots"" like themselves can come, with their guns, to live and make their stand against the ""tyrannical"" federal government.
+
+No. For one thing, it turned out that the Hammonds don't actually want the militia's help — or at least, not anymore.
+
+At first, according to the Oregonian, the Hammonds ""accepted the militia's offer of help to avoid prison."" But they ""changed their minds after being warned by federal prosecutors to stop communicating with the militia"" and have now ""professed through their attorneys that they had no interest in ignoring the order to report for prison.""
+
+Ammon also tried to recruit residents from the surrounding area, reportedly meeting with 10 or so locals, but they all turned him down.
+
+The Oregonian interviewed some locals who expressed sympathy for the Hammonds and for the militia's ""constitutional arguments"" but ultimately rejected the militia for its extremism.
+
+The militia, the local fire chief told the newspaper, ""seems like a bunch of people ready to shoot. I don't want that in my county.""
+
+A local rancher woman said, ""We're not from the militia. We're not going to come in with guns and overthrow the government.""
+
+On January 26, law enforcement officials arrested six of the militia leaders — including Ammon and Ryan Bundy — after an encounter with law enforcement resulted in a shootout. One militia member was killed and another was injured (and is recovering in a local hospital). No law-enforcement agents are reported to have been killed.
+
+As of Tuesday night, it is not clear whether the other militia members are being ordered to leave the refuge, or will leave of their own volition — or whether the standoff will continue after the leaders' arrest.
+
+It has been unclear throughout the occupation exactly how many militia members are inside the occupied building and what kind of weapons they may have. As reported by the Oregonian:
+
+A reporter for the Oregonian also tweeted this:
+
+As mentioned earlier, several of the men behind this takeover were also involved in the standoff in Nevada in 2014, which very nearly ended in bloodshed as hundreds of heavily armed militia members stood off with federal agents. Thankfully, disaster was averted when federal authorities made the decision to pack up and leave without any prior announcement.
+
+That may not necessarily be the case this time around. In fact, at least one militia member seems to be expecting things to go very differently this time. Jon Ritzheimer, the former US Marine whose anti-Muslim rhetoric and activities raised alarms with the FBI in November 2015, posted a video to YouTube on December 31 in which he seemed to be saying goodbye to his family and explaining the reason why he felt compelled to fight the US government in Oregon. Here's the video:",REAL
+1561,This is what it’s like to be a Bush stuck at the bottom of the polls,"Being Jeb Bush these days means coping with a series of petty humiliations.
+
+At a weekend conference in Miami, fundraisers questioned the direction of the campaign and worried it’s too late for a rebound. During a foreign policy speech in Washington, people slipped out of the room to go see rival Chris Christie instead. The jebbush.com domain was redirected to Donald Trump’s website because the Bush campaign failed to lock it down.
+
+And on the campaign trail, the press corps following the former Florida governor is dwindling and focused mostly on his terrible polling numbers, now mired in the low single digits. While front-runner Trump packs arenas with thousands, fifth-place Bush rarely musters more than a couple hundred at any given stop.
+
+At an event in Newton, Iowa, last week, Bush sounded almost incredulous at his position in the race.
+
+“Who has the leadership skills to actually make the tough decisions to fix the things that aren’t working right now that are holding people back?” Bush said in front of the crowd of about 100. “And who has the ideas going forward that will allow us to rise up as a nation?”
+
+“And finally,” he added, “who can beat Hillary Clinton for crying out loud?”
+
+The crowd applauded. A few minutes later, an older gentlemen in the back nodded off.
+
+[Is Jeb Bush ready to embrace his last name?]
+
+No presidential candidate named Bush has been in this position before. George H.W. Bush lost his 1980 bid for president, but never slipped as low as Jeb Bush has. After an early setback in the 2000 New Hampshire primary, George W. Bush rebounded and cleared the GOP field.
+
+It doesn’t show in the polls, but Bush has become a stronger campaigner — maintaining a grueling schedule of early morning coffee meet-and-greets, interviews with small-town television reporters and nighttime town halls and speeches. And he still has more money than the rest of the field, traveling in a packed SUV with a bodyguard, a personal aide, a press spokesperson and a campaign videographer. He seems more comfortable in his own skin.
+
+But no matter how hard he tries, nothing has helped reverse his slide.
+
+“We have had success raising money. I’ve had success connecting with crowds — you guys have been there, I’m not making this stuff up,” Bush told reporters last week in Iowa. “We’re garnering support at each and every event. I’m confident that we’re doing all the right things.”
+
+Then he turned to the Democratic Party’s presidential front-runner, who is neck and neck with Bush in many polling matchups. “In spite of all the pundits saying the end is near, which is totally untrue, if you look at the head-to-head polls, where I’m head-to-head with Hillary Clinton, I beat her,” Bush said. “Gosh, it must not be as bad as you think.”
+
+Regardless of how he might fare against Clinton, Bush has stalled at around fifth place among Republican primary voters, both in national and early state polls. He sits between the top-tier contenders — Trump, Ben Carson and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — and the rest of the pack, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is enjoying a resurgence in Bush’s must-win state of New Hampshire.
+
+A Monmouth University poll of Iowa released Monday ranked Bush at 6 percent behind Cruz, Trump, Rubio and Carson. In New Hampshire, a Public Policy Polling survey released Friday gave Bush 5 percent — for eighth place. On the same day, a CNN/ORC poll of Republicans nationally gave Bush just 3 percent nationally — fifth place.
+
+Bush supporters are hunkering down for a drawn-out nomination fight, hopeful that he will ultimately emerge as the party’s strongest White House contender.
+
+“Sooner or later people are going to have to get rid of the fun and figure out who’s best to run the country,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), one of Bush’s most prominent supporters. “And he has to be in there. He has to be there.”
+
+Former Colorado governor Bill Owens, who is co-chairing Bush’s campaign in that state, said the candidate “has high name ID, an excellent record to run on and is well-funded.” He also said Bush’s recent emphasis on criticizing Clinton is a wise strategy.
+
+“The Republican Party has nominated lots of candidates over the years who were great in the primary process but couldn’t win the general election,” he said. “For Jeb Bush, the only thing that matters is winning the general election.”
+
+Charlie Pelton, 75, who heard Bush speak last week in Clinton, Iowa, said he appreciated the candidate’s increased focus on foreign affairs and national security. He conceded that “You don’t win elections in Iowa on foreign policy, generally, but that’s what our nation needs.”
+
+Bush’s diminishment was visible at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s all-day candidate summit on Thursday, precisely the sort of forum where he might have been expected to dominate. Right to Rise USA, the super PAC supporting his bid, held a breakfast for interested donors, and Bush held a closed-door meet-and-greet.
+
+In the main room, Bush earned a standing ovation when he took the stage and gave an energetic speech about his ability to “whup” Clinton. But numerous would-be donors sneaked out for a session with Christie.
+
+Later that night, stuck in traffic because of the White House Christmas tree lighting, Bush jumped out of the vehicle and walked to a fundraiser in Dupont Circle. When he arrived, Bush greeted guests who gave at least $1,000 to attend the fundraiser at the home of former Bush administration official C. Boyden Gray. At another fundraiser at a Georgetown bar, Bush snacked on hummus with young professionals, Capitol Hill staffers and students. Tickets ranged from $50 to $2,700.
+
+Donors, who request anonymity to speak frankly about the state of the campaign, are mixed on what could come next.
+
+“This is always the [fundraising] quarter to pick your guy and hunker down,” said a donor who attended a meeting of Bush’s top donors in Miami over the weekend. “We know it’s a rough patch.”
+
+Another emerged from the Miami meeting to say he’s “reenergized” and confident that Bush and his team are “the whole package.”
+
+But a donor who attended the fundraiser at the Georgetown bar said that many supporters are struggling to accept Bush’s troubles. So how are they coping?
+
+The same day Bush visited Washington, his older brother, George W. Bush, reunited with members of his administration at the U.S. Capitol for the unveiling of a bust of vice president Richard B. Cheney.
+
+“The last time I was in Washington, I was hanged in the White House,” the former president joked, a reference to the unveiling of his official portrait. “This time, I’ve returned to find my vice president getting busted in the Capitol.”
+
+He said that his father had asked his son to “Send my best regards to Old Iron Ass” — a nickname of endearment the elder Bush once bestowed on Cheney.
+
+There was no reference to Jeb.
+
+Matea Gold, Dave Weigel and Scott Clement contributed to this report.",REAL
+5949,Flashback: Clinton campaign’s press secretary once thought it was a bad look to second-guess James Comey – twitchy.com,"
+— My Name is Fate (@Destini41) October 29, 2016 
+Clinton and her supporters certainly had reason to celebrate the conclusion of the case; that is, at least, until newly discovered evidence made it clear that the case wasn’t concluded. 
+Not surprisingly, Fallon was among those who decided Friday it wasn’t so bad to second-guess the decision of a career prosecutor. Kellyanne Conway is on MSNBC now falsely saying Hillary Clinton is ""under FBI investigation."" This is what Jim Comey has wrought. 
+— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) October 29, 2016 
+Are we back to that whole “routine security review” talking point, or is Clinton not under investigation? Because the letter Comey sent to FBI employees Friday gave that impression pretty strongly: 
+This morning I sent a letter to Congress in connection with the Secretary Clinton email investigation. Yesterday, the investigative team briefed me on their recommendation with respect to seeking access to emails that have recently been found in an unrelated case. Because those emails appear to be pertinent to our investigation, I agreed that we should take appropriate steps to obtain and review them. 
+Of course, we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. 
+— #NeverTrump Rob G (@NYYFan63) October 29, 2016 @brianefallon Sounds like you didn’t get the FBI memo. 
+— DC Dude (@DCDude1776) October 29, 2016 . @brianefallon She's right! Hillary Clinton has been, for some time now, under FBI CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION. The case is STILL OPEN. 
+— American Elephant (@AmericnElephant) October 29, 2016 @brianefallon How is that false, Brian? 
+— John Riley (@jriley8832) October 29, 2016 @brianefallon You're Ma Barker's press secretary & you really think she's not under FBI investigation? You're not too good at this, are you? 
+— BasementDweller Zero (@jurassicpork59) October 29, 2016 @brianefallon @nielslesniewski but alas, she is. That's what the FBI does. 
+— Tone Loc (@ToneLocNV) October 29, 2016 @brianefallon You're right, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not Investigating. What would give someone an idea they're Investigating? 
+— Josh Fields (@partiallypro) October 29, 2016 @brianefallon When the Director of the FBI James Comey says they found more emails and they are going to investigate…..It means just that! 
+— Hillary's Speeches (@abunasir61) October 29, 2016 @brianefallon Umm. He said she was under investigation. Now go update your resume. 
+— Jim Levy (@TexasJew) October 29, 2016 @brianefallon Um, she is under FBI investigation. They investigate people; not things. 
+— Victoria Balfour (@VickiBalfour) October 29, 2016 What would you consider it, @brianefallon ?The FBI IS investigating Hillary Clinton.FBI does not investigate items, e.g., emails, server. ",FAKE
+1720,7 takeaways from the first Democratic debate,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+1618,Donald Trump: 'I want surveillance of certain mosques',"(CNN) Donald Trump is ratcheting up his rhetoric about American Muslims, saying there's precedent for monitoring some mosques amid the recent terror wave.
+
+At a Birmingham, Alabama, rally on Saturday -- which included a physical altercation between a black protester and several white Trump backers -- the 2016 Republican front-runner suggested law enforcement keep an eye on certain Islamic houses of worship which, in his view, could pose terrorist threats.
+
+""I want surveillance of certain mosques if that's OK,"" Trump told the often-raucous and approving crowd. ""We've had it before.""
+
+The remarks echo a call Trump made earlier in the week, when he said on MSNBC he'd ""strongly consider"" shutting down mosques in the U.S.
+
+The billionaire businessman also linked current terrorist concerns, after the Paris carnage and other attacks, with 9/11.
+
+""I watched the World Trade Center go down,"" Trump asserted, adding he watched in New Jersey, ""as thousands of people were cheering as the building was coming down.""
+
+Trump then denounced calls to resettle Syrian refuges on U.S. soil, which his Republican rivals for the nomination also oppose.
+
+""I want surveillance. I will absolutely take (a) database on the people coming in from Syria. ""If we can't stop it -- but we are going to if I win -- they're going back.""
+
+Several attendees at the rally punched and kicked a protester who tried to disrupt Trump's speech.
+
+At least a half-dozen attendees shoved and tackled the protester, a black man, to the ground as he refused to leave the event. At least one man punched the protester and a woman kicked him while he was on the ground.
+
+All of the attendees who were involved in the physical altercation with the protester were white.
+
+The protester appeared to be shouting ""black lives matter"" and later removed his sweatshirt to reveal a shirt with those words.
+
+At least one attendee shouted ""all lives matter"" as the protester was eventually led out by police officers on the scene.
+
+Birmingham Police Lt. Sean Edwards told CNN that three people were asked to leave the event following the scuffle. No arrests were made, and the protester did not require medical attention.
+
+Campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks told CNN that ""the campaign does not condone this behavior.""
+
+Trump has fended off criticism recently that he was accused of backing a U.S. database on all Muslims in the country. Trump has denied making that remark but hasn't dismissed the idea out-of-hand.
+
+The database controversy began Thursday when Trump told Yahoo News that he would create new anti-terrorism measures if he's elected.
+
+""We're going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,"" he told Yahoo News. ""And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we're going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.""
+
+The Yahoo reporter asked about the possibility of a database for Muslims or ""a form of special identification that noted their religion."" Trump did not say no to either idea. Then, after an Iowa campaign event later that day, an NBC reporter asked Trump if he favored a database to track Muslims in the country. Trump responded in a way some took as backing that idea.
+
+At Saturday's rally in Alabama, Trump said he decided not to answer once he heard the reporter identified as being with NBC News.",REAL
+2244,Ky. clerk’s attorney: New marriage licenses ‘not worth the paper they’re written on’,"MOREHEAD, Ky. – An attorney for jailed Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis said Friday that the marriage licenses issued by her deputies to several same-sex couples are invalid.
+
+“They are not worth the paper they’re written on,” Mat Staver said outside the Carter County Detention Center, where Davis is being held on a contempt charge.
+
+Speaking at an afternoon news conference in Grayson, about 35 miles from the Rowan County Courthouse, Staver said: “Our position and the position of the clerk of Rowan County is that those licenses are void.”
+
+The licenses issued to same-sex couples Friday aren’t valid, Staver argued, because they were issued under the county clerk’s authority — but Davis hasn’t granted that authority.
+
+The marriage forms issued Friday did not bear Davis’s name because of her refusal to endorse them. Instead, the clerk’s office included a space for a deputy clerk to sign his or her name.
+
+U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning sent Davis to jail and ordered the deputy clerks to issue licenses in her absence. A representative for Bunning could not be reached for comment Friday.
+
+As the Lexington Herald-Leader noted, Rowan County Attorney Cecil Watkins has previously said deputy clerks don’t need Davis’s approval to issue valid marriage licenses. Reached at his office Friday, Watkins declined to comment.
+
+In other Kentucky counties, marriage licenses are routinely signed by a deputy, even though the clerk’s name appears on the form.
+
+[‘He has guts': David Bunning, the same-sex marriage decision’s unlikely enforcer]
+
+Staver’s remarks came more than seven hours after the opening of the Rowan County Courthouse, where Brian Mason was waiting behind a sign reading: “Marriage License Deputy.”
+
+James Yates and William Smith Jr. entered the media-filled courthouse, hand-in-hand, and began the process of applying for a marriage license. Again.
+
+They had been rejected five times previously, as Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to any couples since the Supreme Court declared in June that gay couples had a constitutional right to wed.
+
+By 8:15 a.m., Yates and Smith had finally obtained the elusive $35 license.
+
+Mason, the deputy clerk, congratulated the couple and shook their hands.
+
+As the couple exited the courthouse, same-sex marriage supporters erupted in cheers, chanting: “Love won! Love won!”
+
+Yates and Smith said they now had to set a wedding date. Then, they walked hand-in-hand to their car, followed by cameras and boom mikes.
+
+They were later followed by Tim and Mike Long, a couple who had obtained a name change years ago. There were cheers for the pair when they walked outside, and a woman they didn’t know, who had traveled from Louisville, gave them flowers.
+
+April Miller and Karen Roberts weren’t at the courthouse when it opened Friday. Miller had a morning class to teach at Morehead State; Roberts had a migraine. But Miller and Roberts, who were among the couples who filed suit after Davis denied marriage licenses, arrived later in the day, picked up their license and told reporters about their ceremony plans.
+
+“I don’t want to be a hero — just a woman who got her marriage license,” Roberts said.
+
+One day earlier, Davis was sent to jail by Bunning, who also ordered five of the six deputy clerks in the county to begin issuing marriage licenses to all couples. The deputies agreed, under oath. The exception was Kim Davis’s son, deputy clerk Nathan Davis.
+
+Bunning, a federal judge, ordered the 49-year-old clerk to be taken into custody for refusing in the face of multiple court orders to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Staver said she is expected to remain in the facility until at least Tuesday.
+
+“I feel sorry that she’s there, but she done it to herself,” Tim Long said.
+
+Davis’s attorneys plan to appeal a federal judge’s contempt order before the end the end of Friday, and pursue writ of habeas corpus to have her released from the jail. “We will not allow her to continually sit here and have her constitutional rights violated or trampled,” Staver said.
+
+[Kim Davis ordered to jail for refusing to issue gay marriage licenses]
+
+Davis, an Apostolic Christian, has said repeatedly that she could not issue such marriage licenses because of her religious beliefs. Pressure on Davis intensified after the Supreme Court on Monday decided not to grant her a reprieve.
+
+“To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience,” Davis said in a statement Tuesday. “It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision.”
+
+She consigned herself to jail Thursday, sparking a fresh round of legal wrangling and political calculation in the face of the most audacious display of defiance on the issue of same-sex marriage since the Supreme Court declared in June that gay couples had a constitutional right to wed.
+
+“Personal opinions, including my own, are not relevant to today,” Bunning, a federal district judge, told Davis and the courtroom Thursday. “The idea of natural law superseding this court’s authority would be a dangerous precedent indeed.”
+
+Davis’s husband, Joe, said that his wife would remain in jail “until our governor does something.” He told reporters in Morehead on Friday that Kim Davis would not resign from her position.
+
+“David Bunning is a punk, a coward, and a bully — you tell David Bunning that Joe Davis said that,” he said.
+
+Davis stayed overnight in a cell by herself, and has been reading scriptures from the Bible, Staver said. Her attorneys spoke to reporters Friday afternoon after a meeting with Davis in which she told them “all is well,” Staver said. “Kim Davis slept well last night. She slept with a very good conscience and she is in very good spirits.”
+
+Staver — the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, the Christian legal organization representing Davis — said in an earlier statement Friday that Davis “joins a long list of people who were imprisoned for their conscience.”
+
+“People who today we admire, like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jan Huss, John Bunyan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and more,” Staver said in the statement. “Each had their own cause, but they all share the same resolve not to violate their conscience.
+
+“We can only hope future generations look back on this moment with disgust at what happened and admiration for a woman who may be incarcerated but whose conscience remains free.”
+
+Shortly after Staver finished addressing the media in Grayson, David Ermold and David Moore appeared at the Rowan County Courthouse to make yet another attempt at securing a marriage license.
+
+Ermold and Moore have previously documented their efforts to secure a license in Rowan County, about an hour from Lexington. A video of a July attempt has more than 1,800,000 views on YouTube; another trip to the courthouse was recorded in mid-August.
+
+Tuesday, they tried yet again.
+
+After that attempt failed, Davis emerged from a back office to explain that she would not be issuing any licenses.
+
+But on Friday, with Davis in jail, Ermold and Moore tried once more, then received their license, then stepped outside and cried.
+
+Somashekhar, Larimer and Izadi reported from Washington. J. Freedom du Lac contributed to this report, which has been updated.",REAL
+2648,The GOP case against Loretta Lynch falls apart,"Loretta Lynch had them at Jim Crow.
+
+Senate Republicans had delayed confirmation hearings for President Obama’s attorney general nominee until they took control of Congress — giving them a chance to use the nomination to protest Obama’s immigration policy and other actions by Obama and the outgoing attorney general, Eric Holder.
+
+But those who figured they could take out their frustrations on Lynch had misjudged her: The nominee has a long and impressive résumé as a no-nonsense prosecutor, and she managed at Wednesday’s hearing to be both assertive and anodyne in her testimony, expert in the law but opaque about controversial legal matters. As important, Lynch, with the help of committee Democrats, painted an unassailable biography: This daughter of a fourth-generation minister and a segregation-fighting mother from the South would be the first African American woman to be the nation’s top law enforcement official.
+
+The case against Lynch deflated faster than if the New England Patriots had run the hearing.
+
+Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) toned down his prepared statement as he read it. “I, for one, need to be persuaded that she will be an independent attorney general,” he read, but he then departed from the text and added, “I have no reason to believe at this point she won’t be.” He read a long list of complaints about the administration’s actions but then ad-libbed, “As far as I know, Ms. Lynch has nothing to do with the Department of Justice problems that I just outlined.”
+
+The panel’s new Republican leadership was already on thin ice over its decision to remove the phrase “civil rights and human rights” from the name of its subcommittee on the Constitution. The atmosphere in the room surely had to make the members of the all-white committee think twice before turning Lynch into a punching bag for their disagreements with Obama and Holder. More than half of those in the public seats were black, and 40 of them wore red — the color of Delta Sigma Theta, Lynch’s predominantly black sorority.
+
+Lynch, all of 5 feet tall, planted her spiked heels firmly on the floor in front of her and leaned her forearms on the witness table as she made her case. She described her mother as a “courageous young teacher who refused to let Jim Crow define her” and who “refused to use segregated restrooms, because they did not represent the America in which she believed.” In North Carolina, she said, her father “opened his Greensboro church to those planning sit-ins and marches, standing with them while carrying me on his shoulders.”
+
+Democrats formed a chorus to repeat the message. “She grew up hearing her family speak about living in the Jim Crow South,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said of the “historic” nominee. Said Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), “Her mother picked cotton when she was a girl so her daughter would never have to.” (This line was rather more plausible than Schumer’s jest that Lynch has a reputation for “avoiding the spotlight, just like me.”)
+
+Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) described her as “witness to a moment in history” because of her father’s civil rights work, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) told the story of how Lynch’s school named a second valedictorian because it was thought having Lynch as sole valedictorian would be “too controversial.”
+
+Even if Republicans had the appetite to challenge a nominee with such a life story, her lawyerly demurrals made it impossible for them to land a blow. Several times, Republican senators asked what she thought of an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel defending Obama’s executive actions on immigration. She replied over and over that she found the opinion “reasonable” and the overall policy legal, but she went no further.
+
+She blended flattery — “I certainly think you raised an important point and would look forward to discussing it with you and relying upon your thoughts and experience,” she informed a skeptical Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) — with reminders that she had nothing to do with policies Republicans found objectionable.
+
+The performance was disarming. After Lynch assured Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that she would take the attorney general’s independence “very seriously,” Hatch said that “you’ll be a great attorney general if you’ll do that.”
+
+Even the dyspeptic Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) acknowledged that his legal friends in New York describe her as “a U.S. attorney who honored and respected the law.”
+
+And freshman Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) positively gushed to Lynch about her “patience, perseverance, professionalism and . . . graciousness.”
+
+Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) summed up the demobilization of the anti-Lynch forces. “You’re not Eric Holder, are you?” he asked.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+7857,Comment on Trump’s Walk of Fame Star Vandalized by MeThePeople,"Posted on October 27, 2016 by DCG | 14 Comments 
+Liberals are such tolerant folk. 
+My car was keyed three times when I had an anti-Obama bumper sticker on it. My car was never keyed before I had that sticker and never again after I removed it. What a coincidence… 
+From CNN : Los Angeles police are looking for the man who destroyed Donald Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star with a sledgehammer and a pick ax. Police tweeted Wednesday that they’re seeking the public’s help in identifying the vandalism suspect. 
+The man identified himself as James Otis, an heir to the Otis family’s elevator fortune , in an interview with CNN on the Walk of Fame Wednesday morning. He said he was doing it to help the 11 women who have accused Trump of sexually assaulting them, and other victims who he said could come forward in the future. 
+“I had four or five family members sexually assaulted, and I’m terribly upset that we have a presidential nominee who’s become sort of a poster child of sexual violence,” Otis said. 
+CNN has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment and not yet gotten a response. 
+Otis managed to remove the gold emblem from the middle of the star and damage the star itself and the area around it. The shape of the star was still recognizable after Otis had vandalized it. 
+Leron Gubler, President/CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, said work to repair the star will happen immediately but the star is expected to remain covered for several days. 
+Gubler said the Chamber is working with the police and intends to prosecute to the full extent of the law. “ When people are unhappy with one of our honorees, we would hope that they would project their anger in more positive ways than to vandalize a California State landmark,” Gubler said. 
+Otis said he plans to sell parts of Trump’s star and donate the proceeds “to the women who have been sexually assaulted by Mr. Trump.” 
+“I know I can sell it. I think I can get over $1 million for this star, to be distributed to these women and many others that will be going forward,” he said. 
+Otis noted he previously auctioned off personal items belonging to Mahatma Gandhi, saying he “donated all the money to countries that were fighting dictatorships with non-violent strategies.” That 2009 auction of Ghandi’s possessions attracted news coverage at the time, including by CNN , and Gandhi’s items were sold for $1.8 million. 
+Otis said he knows he might be arrested — though he doesn’t want that to happen. 
+DCG",FAKE
+5139,Ruth Bader Ginsburg regrets 'ill-advised' remarks about Donald Trump,"The supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg executed a full U-turn on Thursday morning, over remarks about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump that ignited controversy on the eve of the GOP convention.
+
+
+
+Her remarks about Trump were “ill-advised”, she said, adding: “I regret making them.”
+
+In an interview with the New York Times last week, Ginsburg said she could not “imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president” and suggested her late husband would have taken such a scenario as a reason to emigrate – as far away as New Zealand.
+
+Ginsburg, 83, was the first supreme court justice in decades to comment publicly on a candidate in the middle of the presidential campaign.
+
+Her comments sparked indignation, dismay and accusations that she had violated judicial ethics. Trump called for her to resign.
+
+Despite this, Ginsburg doubled down, calling Trump a faker and telling CNN in an interview published on Tuesday: “He really has an ego.”
+
+By Thursday, she appeared to have considered her words and their implications more deeply. In a statement, she said: “On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them.
+
+“Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect.”
+
+Supreme court justices are expected to adhere to a code of conduct issued for US judges, which stipulates that they refrain from publicly endorsing or opposing any candidate for public office. They are not officially bound by the code but generally agree to follow it.
+
+Ginsburg’s comments were not only rare but also particularly colorful for someone in her position. She has however gained something of a celebrity aura in recent years, with liberal supporters using the affectionate moniker “Notorious RBG”, echoing the nickname “Notorious BIG”, which was given to the late rapper Biggie Smalls.
+
+Earlier this week, the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, commented that Ginsburg, who is currently writing a book called My Own Words, did not become known as the Notorious RBG “for nothing”.
+
+Although she has long been known as a member of the liberal wing of the court, Ginsburg’s frank and blatantly political and personal comments about Trump appeared to come out of the blue.
+
+
+
+On Monday, she told CNN that she had first thought Trump’s candidacy was “funny”. As he was about to become the GOP nominee, though, she slammed him in personal terms, saying: “He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment.”
+
+Trump told the New York Times her comments were “highly inappropriate” and “beneath the bench” and that she had let her fellow justices down.
+
+The Times and the Washington Post have both published editorials agreeing with Trump.",REAL
+7495,PressTV-Brazil football legend Carlos Alberto laid to rest,"News Bulletin ©AFP 
+Farewell to the old captain. Hundreds of mourners have gathered in Rio De Janeiro to pay tribute to the Brazilian football legend Carlos Alberto, who died at the age of 72, after suffering a heart attack. Former capitan of Brazil's 1970 World Cup winning team, Carlos Alberto Torres, is buried at Irajá cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on October 26, 2016. ©AFP 
+Alberto's coffin was carried for burial at the cemetery on Wednesday with a Brazilian flag draped over it. 
+The former captain is mostly remembered for scoring the iconic fourth goal in Brazil's 4-1 victory over Italy in the 1970 World Cup Final. 
+Alberto won 53 caps for his national side and won domestic titles with 3 club teams. 
+",FAKE
+796,"Dead heat: Trump, Clinton tied in 3 swing-state polls","The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+7451,Tony Blair helpfully describes Remain voters as ‘insurgents’,"Tony Blair helpfully describes Remain voters as ‘insurgents’ 28-10-16 
+TONY Blair has helped out British politics by calling Remain voters ‘insurgents’ who must ‘mobilise’. 
+Both sides of the Brexit debate have thanked the former prime minister for framing it in loaded terms that will bring out the best in everyone. 
+Healthcare worker Helen Archer said: “Let’s see. So on one side we’ve got the Brexit crew already calling anything they don’t like treason and waving flags. 
+“On the left we’ve got the disturbed followers of a cultish messiah who want the result of a popular vote to be overturned, followed by the overthrow of capitalism. 
+“And a deposed ruler who started two unending wars for the sake of his ego is telling us it’s a war? 
+“Great. No problem. Just checking I know where we’re headed.” 
+Blair said: “My primary role, in and out of government, has been to boost sales for the UK arms industry and that will not change.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+9916,The United States Is Pre-Positioning “Enemy Assets” In Preparation For A Rigged Election,"
+There are a number of excellent pieces circulating that hypothesize on what will happen before, during, and after the election. Mike Adams of Natural News and Dave Hodges of The Common Sense Show have both dug deeply, examining the overall situation with outstanding insights as to the possibilities. Mike’s piece listed the scenarios that can happen regarding either outcome, and government actions that can be triggered by the result. Dave’s videos and telephone conversations expose the fact that the government is indeed preparing to have plans ready and in place with drills and exercises that can turn into an actual operation immediately.
+You can watch Dave Hodge’s full report with Paul Martin below:
+
+That being mentioned, an article came out the other day written by Deb Riechmann of the Associated Press, October 26 entitled US Official: Russia Might Shoot Down US Aircraft in Syria . The article highlights dialogue from a Charlie Rose interview via CBS at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York that was conducted with National Intelligence Director James Clapper . The answers that Clapper gave to the questions gives two “insights” into the Obama administration’s mindset. This comment came regarding the potential for the US and Russia engaging one another militarily:
+“I wouldn’t put it past them to shoot down an American aircraft if they felt that [it] was threatening to their forces on the ground. Russia has deployed a very advanced and capable air defense system in Syria and would not have done that if it [Russia] wouldn’t use it.” 
+James Clapper 
+Then Clapper was questioned about North Korea, and he had this to say:
+“…the U.S. policy of trying to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons is probably futile. Perhaps the only thing the U.S. could get would be limitations on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause. They are under siege and they are very paranoid, so the notion of giving up their nuclear capability, whatever it is, is a nonstarter with them.” 
+All of this sounds very lackadaisical, coming from the Director of National Intelligence. That is because it is: Obama is pursuing a laissez-faire policy regarding “threats,” either from Russia or North Korea. The reason? He created them to use later. Clapper’s next responses are very interesting regarding the questions of whether or not Russia has been tampering with the election process and the recent threat by Vice President Joe Biden that the U.S. will respond to the (alleged) tampering with a Cyberattack designed “to embarrass and humiliate” the Kremlin. Here is an excerpt of that interview:
+“Clapper also was asked about the Obama administration’s claim that recent hacking of political sites was orchestrated by top Russian officials. The U.S. response might not come in the form of a reciprocal cyberattack on Russia, Clapper said. 
+Pressed on the subject, Rose, the interviewer, noted that there is a sense that the Russians were not paying any price for the hacking. 
+“Maybe not yet,” Clapper replied. 
+“Maybe after the election?” Rose asked. 
+“I’m not going to pre-empt,” Clapper said.” 
+There we have it, in the absence of verbal commitment, no matter how nebulous the answer may seem. Just because it is nebulous, however, does not belie the nefarious nature of the answer, and it is obvious: The Obama administration is setting the Russians up for the time of the election to blame any deviance or hacks on them. 
+It is no secret that election fraud is being committed now, even with the early voting that is occurring in several states. The Cyberattacks conducted on Friday, October 21st were a Beta-test for what is to come: full-blown election fraud and an attack on the infrastructure of the U.S. , to be blamed on Russia or North Korea and used as justification to either suspend the elections or declare them null and void.
+On October 25 , an article was released entitled DMV Computer Outage Raises Fear of Election-Day Cyber Attacks , as presented on losangeles.cbslocal.com . Apparently 100 DMV offices in California had a gigantic computer malfunction that was not attributed to hacking. The article interviewed a USC professor who had the following to say:
+“Election day may be a different story. Government computer systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks. I think there will certainly be some sort of cyber security issue in some location.” 
+Clifford Neuman, Director, USC Center for Computer Systems Security 
+From a standpoint of greater simplicity, the government can simply collapse the power grid, and this can be blamed on an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) weapon from North Korea or Russia. If this is not done, the government can use the Soros-provided voting machines and other nefarious measures (such as dead people’s names being used to vote, illegal aliens casting a ballot, or people voting in numerous states, to name a few) to steal the votes. Then blame can be shifted to the Russians.
+Keep in mind that the Cyberattack on October 21 was found to “not be done by a government’s actions through state actors,” as the Mainstream media termed it. How true. Not one concrete shred of justification that Russia has been conducting any Cyberattacks has been provided. Certainly the Russian government has taken the time to investigate the source of the hacking on the U.S. systems. They will certainly monitor the elections in some manner to protect themselves from any accusations of hacking and prove they do not hold any culpability when the Democrats skew the numbers of the election and steal it themselves.
+This is why the federal government has warned Russia that simply to monitor the elections may warrant criminal charges being brought against the Russian government. 
+But it’s OK to have UN election monitors, which in itself is a violation of the 10 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, right? 
+The law doesn’t apply to the Democrats; the law only matters as long as they can inflict it upon you. Soros just came out recently and cursed democracy in general: though toad like in appearance and mannerisms, this communist foreigner is responsible for the collapse and/or debilitation of almost a dozen governments. In a previous article we covered how the voting machines in the early voting in Illinois did not register the original choice of the voter and “chose” the Democratic candidates. This was labeled as a “calibration error,” so simply and innocently. The communists masquerading as Democrats know the truth of the matter, that it is those who count the votes and not the voters who decide the elections.
+In summary, the U.S. is prepositioning its “enemy-assets” to blame – on what the administration does – for a collapsed election labeled as “rigged” or the suspension of the election for any number of reasons, real or illusory, such as a genuine attack the U.S. provokes or an attack the U.S. carries out on itself . Civil unrest and/or war are the escape hatches to bail out of the Constitution and to take control of the country…not letting either crisis go to waste. With civil rest or a world war, the administration will be handed the country on a platter – indefinitely – and the election will be a moot point, whether it happened or not.
+Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne). Mr. Johnson is also a Gunsmith, a Certified Master Herbalist, a Montana Master Food Preserver, and a graduate of the U.S. Army’s SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape). He lives in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with his wife and three cats. You can follow Jeremiah’s regular writings at SHTFplan.com or contact him here . 
+This article may be republished or excerpted with proper attribution to the author and a link to www.SHTFplan.com . 
+Related: 
+The Prepper’s Blueprint: A Step-By-Step Guide To Prepare For Any Disaster 
+Top Tier Gear: The Most Advanced Tactical Gas Mask In The World 
+A Foreshadowing Of Things To Come: “This Cyberattack Was Initiated By The U.S. Government… A Beta Test Done In Preparation For A False Flag” 
+Unrest and Martial Law? Leaked Military Drill Anticipates “No Rule of Law” After Election Results 
+How To Survive Occupied America: “Red Dawn Just Started… And You’re In It” 
+The Threat Is Real And Imminent: The Next World War Will Be Initiated By A First Strike Utilizing An EMP Weapon 
+",FAKE
+4560,Russia’s Syria intervention may force choice on Obama: Act or yield,"Russia’s military moves in Syria are fundamentally changing the face of the country’s civil war, putting President Bashar al-Assad back on his feet, and may complicate the Obama administration’s plans to expand its air operations against the Islamic State.
+
+So far, the administration has not budged in its twofold strategy — direct airstrikes against the Islamic State and significant aid for those fighting against it, and a push for negotiations to end what has been the largely separate Syrian civil war.
+
+Senior administration officials acknowledge that Russia has already made some tactical gains in the civil war, even as they insist President Vladi­mir Putin will ultimately pay for what they describe as a strategic blunder that will undercut his already tenuous reputation in the world and encourage the spread of the militants.
+
+If Putin’s goal was “to get attention,” one senior official said, “then it was brilliant. . . . If it was to end the fighting in Syria, that’s where we think it’s a strategic error.” At the same time, the official said, “Russia is now going to be viewed as being anti-Sunni . . . attracting the ire of extremist groups,” including the Islamic State.
+
+But others within the administration, and many outside experts, are increasingly worried that if President Obama does not take decisive action — such as quickly moving to claim the airspace over northwestern Syria and the Turkish border, where Russian jets are already operating — it is the United States that will suffer significant damage to both its reputation and its foreign policy and counterterrorism goals.
+
+Putin has said he does not intend to launch military ground operations in Syria, and senior administration officials said Wednesday that they see no evidence of any ground combat units there. But the Russian deployments include sophisticated electronics, some of them designed to jam aviation electronics. Other than Russia and the Syrian government, only the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State is flying planes in Syria.
+
+The current internal administration debate is largely the same one that has kept the administration out of significant intervention in Syria’s civil war for the past four years. On one side, Russia’s involvement has strengthened the winning argument that the United States should avoid direct involvement in yet another Middle East conflict and should continue directing its resources toward countering forces such as the Islamic State that pose a direct threat to U.S. national security.
+
+On the other side, the argument is that it makes no strategic sense for the United States to concede Russian dominance of the situation: If Russia succeeds in keeping Assad in power, the problems in the West caused by both the Syrian war and militant expansion will only get worse.
+
+Putin’s strategy is that “you accept our terms” on Assad “and then we step back and let you solve your own problems” in Syria, said Igor Sutyagin, a Russian-studies expert at London’s Royal United Services Institute. “If you don’t, we create a complete mess . . . increasing the influx of refugees into Europe, and your life gets more difficult.”
+
+[WorldViews: Why Russia is in Syria]
+
+The administration has said that the civil war can be solved only through negotiations and that there can be no solution that leaves Assad in power. Until the middle of last month, the opposition — a wide assortment of groups ranging from CIA-trained rebels to non-Islamic State extremists — appeared to be turning the tide against the Syrian military, taking territory in Idlib and Aleppo provinces in the northwest and on the southern front near the Jordanian border.
+
+“The only viable future for a unified Syria is one that unites the moderate elements and what remains of the regime after Assad is pushed out,” a U.S. intelligence official said Wednesday. But “Russia’s actions have directly threatened that prospect.”
+
+Recent efforts by the United Nations and others to organize new negotiations, beginning with localized cease-fires, have already begun to fall apart under Russian bombardment that is likely to change Assad’s calculus. Some see the Kremlin’s goal as maintaining Assad’s control over a rump Syrian state, in western population centers away from areas of Islamic State dominion, an objective that would also ensure Russia’s continued foothold in the Middle East.
+
+“If [the possibility of negotiations] existed until one or two weeks ago, we definitely find ourselves today . . . in a completely different place,” said one international official who has long been involved in the effort. “We’ve been completely blown out of the water.”
+
+A cease-fire reached with Iran and Hezbollah to allow aid and evacuation of civilians from Zabadani, west of Damascus near the Lebanese border, has now unraveled “because of Russian action,” the international official said. Although coordinates had been shared with Russia and plans were in place for U.N. officials to enter the area Saturday, it has been bombed three times, said the official, who like other U.S. and international officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
+
+Russia has said that its purpose is to strike the Islamic State. But the vast majority of its targets have been in areas of opposition control in western Syria and are seen as paving the way for Assad’s forces to take territory lost to the rebels or never contested. The strategy is much the same as the one the administration has followed against the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq, where air power is designed to weaken the militants and allow local forces to move in and hold ground.
+
+Assad’s military, also backed by Russian and Iranian supplies and intelligence, and new influxes of Iranian and Hezbollah fighters, appear to stand a good chance of regaining the initiative against the Syrian rebels, many of whom say they fear they are being abandoned by the United States.
+
+“The growing involvement of Russia in the Syrian conflict is likely to lead to even greater civilian displacement and further complicates delivery of lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” Mercy Corps said in a statement Wednesday.
+
+“People are increasingly moving closer to the border with Turkey so they can cross if things get too bad,” said Michael Bowers, vice president of the aid organization.
+
+An alternative nightmare scenario has already begun to play out, as CIA-armed rebels have begun fighting against Syrian troops moving into Russian-bombed areas, part of the U.S.-Russia “proxy war” that Obama has vowed to avoid.
+
+As rebel forces reposition themselves farther south in Idlib and Hama provinces, the Islamic State is likely to gain a stronger foothold in the northwest region along the Turkish border to the north of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city.
+
+That region has been under discussion between the United States and Turkey as a possible protected area where rebels can regroup and refugees can gather. Last week, Obama approved “shaping operations,” including some airstrikes, to prepare for a proposed major increase in anti-Islamic State airstrikes by U.S. and coalition planes flying from Turkish bases.
+
+But Russian operations in the area may complicate those plans and push the administration toward a decision to confront Moscow — one that it has so far not wanted to make. Turkey, and NATO, have already warned Russia after at least two incursions of Turkish airspace.
+
+“They are sending planes and messages to Turkey and NATO,” said Sutyagin, once a military policy expert for the Russian government. The message, he said, is that “this area, where you want to establish safe zones . . . is not safe because we are approaching there, entering your airspace, and there might be clashes.”
+
+Greg Miller and Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed to this report.",REAL
+9368,2016 latest: Spirit of Christmas to be replaced with ‘Every man for himself’. More soon.,  Guest   Guest  ,FAKE
+2738,Ted Cruz launches bid; Some pundits paint him as scary extremist,"Before he got to repealing ObamaCare, before he got to dumping Common Core, before he got to abolishing the IRS, Ted Cruz talked about Jesus.
+
+In kicking off his presidential campaign Monday at Liberty University, Cruz began with his father, a Cuban immigrant who washed dishes in Texas for 50 cents an hour, who drank too much along with his wife, who left home when Ted was 3 but came back because “God transformed his heart … Were it not for the transformative love of Jesus Christ, I would have been raised by a single mom.”
+
+That introduction, part of a passionate speech delivered without notes in Lynchburg, Va., helps explain why many in the mainstream media don’t quite know what to make of the Texas senator — or view him as a fringe figure.
+
+On the “Today” show, Kelly O’Donnell said “he’s 44, only been on the national scene a couple of years.” MSNBC’s Jonathan Alter, while not counting him out, also said “he’s only been in the Senate for two years.”
+
+Perhaps they had forgotten that Barack Obama was 45 and had spent just two years in the Senate when he kicked off his presidential candidacy?
+
+Cruz is a hero to the Tea Party right, and his speech hit many of its themes: against same-sex marriage, protecting the right to bear arms, reclaiming the Constitution. But the very things that make him popular could, in the media’s telling, be campaign obstacles.
+
+“Cruz's down-the-line appeal to the GOP base may prove to be his calling card in the primary battle to come, but it's also led him to pick fights with the party brass that could ultimately undermine his candidacy. His ability to raise money, secure endorsements, and build the kind of infrastructure necessary to win a national primary may be hampered by his lack of support among the establishment. And his ideological rigidity has sown doubts among some Republicans about how competitive Cruz would be in a general election.”
+
+In the two-minute NBC report, there were sound bites of Cruz reading “Green Eggs and Ham” (from his 21-hour filibuster that preceded the government shutdown) and warning “the world is on fire” (prompting a question from a 3-year-old girl).
+
+I wrote last week that the many in the MSM went way overboard in using that incident to portray Cruz as a frightening figure, despite the fact that the girl’s mother said she wasn’t scared at all.
+
+Look at how the Huffington Post frames its setup piece for the Cruz kickoff:
+
+“Much of the rest of the country (including Republican leaders in Congress) viewed Cruz as a vaguely scary renegade, and the GOP establishment’s official grumpy grandpa, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), dismissed him as a ‘wacko bird.’
+
+""But the Young Americans for Liberty loved his loathing of the party elders, and his determination to shove a stick between the spokes of the System …
+
+“Uncorked anger doesn’t usually win presidential nominations, let alone presidencies. People want hope and uplift in the White House and not just expressions of outrage. The president is the person who is supposed to make things work. To some, the 44-year-old Cruz gives off a vaguely scary aura of cheerful menace.”
+
+Uncorked anger. Cheerful menace. You might get the impression that HuffPost just doesn’t like the guy.
+
+And this happens to reflect the line of the Democratic Party, which in an email calls Cruz, in bold letters, “really, really scary.”
+
+Politico also emphasizes the theme that Cruz ticks people off:
+
+“His own colleagues in Washington have frequently been disdainful of Cruz since he helped instigate the 2013 government shutdown. And his hardline views and uncompromising style have disqualified him even in the eyes of more conservative elements of the political class who are concerned about electability.
+
+“But Cruz is embracing that outsider status, just as he did in Texas, where in 2012 he beat out the presumed Republican Senate nominee, former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, and became a hero to that conservative state’s tea party.”
+
+The Washington Post says this is one of five things you need to know about the senator:
+
+“Cruz's often tells the story of his father, Rafael -- also the senator's given name -- leaving Cuba as a young man with $100 sewn into his underwear. Rafael Cruz, an evangelical pastor, has a history of making headline-grabbing statements. They include telling an audience that President Obama should be sent ‘back to Kenya,’ asserting that the Bible ‘tells you exactly who to vote for.’”
+
+So his dad’s an issue too.
+
+Slate says that Cruz spouts “bizarre nonsense” on climate change:
+
+“In case you haven’t heard, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is not a fan of reality.
+
+“The reality of science, that is. He has a history of saying global warming–denying talking points and used some of his political power just this past week to pressure NASA into downplaying its role in measuring the effects of global warming on the planet.”
+
+Just for good measure, ""Morning Joe"" panelist Donny Deutsch likened Cruz to Sarah Palin.
+
+My take is that the mainstream media always gravitate toward establishment candidates, in part because these politicians excel at fundraising and endorsements, which journalists highly value. That’s why the media consistently underestimate such insurgent candidates as Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum before they catch fire.
+
+But recent history suggests that the establishment Republican prevails in the end: Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, Bob Dole. The question for 2016, up against Hillary, is whether this time could be different.
+
+How about a conservative view? Here’s Allahpundit on Hot Air:
+
+“The problem with finding a path for Cruz next year, though, is that as the field narrows and losers drop out, the primaries inevitability become a referendum on electability and acceptability. I can see Walker stumbling; I can see Jeb flaming out from voters’ Bush fatigue; I can see Paul stuck at 20 percent, unable to add to his libertarian base; and I can see Rubio never quite contending because he can’t scrape the votes he needs from the center and right. What I can’t see is all of those things happening, and realistically, they’d all have to happen to make Cruz the nominee.”
+
+It’s a crowded field, to be sure. The thing that brought Cruz national fame was the filibuster and his leading role in the 2013 shutdown. To his supporters, Cruz was fighting for conservative principles against ObamaCare. To his critics, Cruz was pursuing a kamikaze strategy that could never have succeeded because the Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate.
+
+The coming campaign will be a test of whether Cruz can break out beyond his evangelical base. But it will also be a test of the media establishment that views him mainly as a bomb-thrower.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+3109,Pope Francis at 9/11 memorial: 'We can never forget them',"New York (CNN) He calls his church a field hospital for the spiritually wounded. And on Friday, Pope Francis spoke to hundreds who are still trying to heal.
+
+Praying with families of victims of the September 11 attacks at a ground zero memorial and speaking at an interfaith service, Francis offered a message of hope at a place of horror.
+
+""The name of so many loved ones are written around the towers' footprints. We can see them, we can touch them, and we can never forget them,"" Francis said.
+
+""Here, amid pain and grief, we also have a palpable sense of the heroic goodness which people are capable of. ... Hands reached out, lives were given.
+
+""This place of death became a place of life, too, a place of saved lives, a hymn to the triumph of life over the prophets of destruction and death, to goodness over evil, to reconciliation and unity over hatred and division,"" Francis said.
+
+His visit to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum was billed as a moment to pause and reflect in a day packed with large events in the public eye.
+
+But even there, it was far from quiet.
+
+'This really is the beginning'
+
+At a place that's often the site of somber memorials, the arrival of Pope Francis brought a chorus of cheers and chants.
+
+Outside the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, about 1,000 family members of victims of the 2001 terror attack greeted the Pope.
+
+Standing steps away from where their relatives perished, they lined up along guard railings to catch a glimpse of Francis.
+
+Some got the chance to talk with him one-on-one. Others watched from behind barriers, trying to catch his attention.
+
+A man shouted: ""Francisco! Our whole family's here! A blessing, please!""
+
+It wasn't long before the crowd joined him: ""Our blessing, please! Francisco! Francisco! Francisco!""
+
+Nixia Mena-Alexis held a bouquet of yellow roses in one hand and wore a photograph of her sister pinned to her shirt.
+
+The flowers, she said, symbolize the Catholic Church -- and hope. She said she hoped to give some to the Pope and place some beside her sister's name -- one of thousands surrounding the reflecting pools at the memorial.
+
+Diarelia Mena worked in IT for Cantor Fitzgerald. She had just turned 30 and had a 2-year-old daughter when she was killed on September 11.
+
+""She was full of life and her laughter was contagious,"" her sister said as her eyes filled with tears.
+
+The lifelong Catholic said coming here fills her with a mix of emotions. But Mena-Alexis knew she wanted to be here when the Pope came.
+
+""To me, he symbolizes peace, and that's part of what we're striving for after what happened here,"" she said. ""This is sacred ground, so I wanted to be present when he came.""
+
+Jean Colaio, 50, lost her two brothers on 9/11. Both worked at Cantor Fitzgerald.
+
+Being in the Pope's presence, she said, will help heal her family.
+
+""We were here on that day and witnessed everything and evacuated. We had our horrible experience here,"" Colaio said. ""And this really is the beginning. We've been working on our healing. But I think this really has propelled it.
+
+""I feel close and connected to my brothers because he's here.""
+
+Marjorie Kane, whose father was killed on 9/11, said she felt differently after seeing the Pope than she ever had at the site.
+
+""It's honestly the first time I can recall being on this ground and feeling this peace and calm,"" she said. ""I'm usually full of such sorrow and such sadness coming here.""
+
+It wasn't just Catholics who said they were inspired by the Pope's message.
+
+Dr. Gunisha Kaur, who offered a Sikh prayer onstage at the ceremony, is pregnant and asked the Pope to bless her baby.
+
+Onstage, before the crowd, he placed his hand on her belly.
+
+""That is the power of this pope, that he means something to all religions,"" her husband, Simran Jeet Singh, said after the service.
+
+Kaur said she was moved by Francis -- and all the faiths that were part of the program.
+
+""During prayers that were in languages that I don't know, I I found myself singing along,"" she said. ""It really felt like we were all there praying together.""",REAL
+4383,Fights Over 'Religious Freedom' And Gay Rights Are Costing Republicans,"Fights Over 'Religious Freedom' And Gay Rights Are Costing Republicans
+
+Following a firestorm of criticism, Republican governors in Indiana and Arkansas signed revised versions of their states' Religious Freedom Restoration bills Thursday night. In Indiana the language was adjusted, and in Arkansas it was significantly scaled back to more closely align with the federal law.
+
+National Republicans, especially the ones running for president, have to hope it's enough to get them out of the hole they dug themselves on religious freedom and gay rights. It's worth taking a look at what the whole brouhaha has cost the GOP.
+
+In the spirit of Passover, here are four questions about what this issue means for the GOP:
+
+It's possible that Republicans' big electoral victories in November blinded them to just how controversial this would be. Gov. Asa Hutchison, R-Ark., and Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., seemed genuinely taken aback by the demand for boycotts and the backlash from big corporations like Eli Lilly, WalMart and Apple, as well as the NCAA.
+
+It's as if Republicans — particularly in the deep-red states of Arkansas and Indiana — operate according to a different political calculus, insulated from the divide between their own conservative constituents and changing national opinion. Because of redistricting and the phenomenon of a midterm electorate that leans a lot more Republican than a presidential-year electorate, there are now many more GOP governors and many more conservative majorities in state legislatures. And those majorities are moving forward with an agenda that satisfies their base of social conservatives but is seen as intolerant and divisive by the business community and a growing majority of voters in the country. This week, those two opposing dynamics reignited the culture war, with Republican politicians as the first casualties.
+
+2) Is this about more than just religious freedom?
+
+Yes! It's about a much bigger, much more fundamental problem for the GOP. A new Pew poll showed that 61 percent of young Republicans favor gay marriage. Hutchinson said his own son signed a petition asking him to veto the bill that he instead sent back to the Legislature for revision.
+
+The Republicans can't appeal to young voters if they're on the wrong side of gay marriage, because gay rights is a symbol of tolerance for so many young voters — not to mention suburban women. The same is true for one of the fastest-growing parts of the electorate — Hispanics. How do Republicans show Hispanics that they are welcoming and inclusive if they oppose a path to legalization for hard-working immigrants here illegally?
+
+The views of the GOP's white, older, conservative primary electorate are farther away from the center of American public opinion than the Democratic base is right now. That's the challenge for the GOP — it needs to project an image of tolerance in order to win the White House while at the same time satisfying its conservative base, which, in this case, wants Christian florists, bakers and photographers to have the right to refuse services to gay weddings. It will take a very talented candidate to square that circle.
+
+3) OK, so how will Republican candidates resolve this larger tension?
+
+Good question! The debates during the primaries will, presumably, reveal the answer.
+
+Of all the GOP presidential hopefuls, Jeb Bush has given this the most thought. He seems determined not to fall into the trap that Mitt Romney did in 2012 — moving so far to the right during the GOP primaries (remember ""self deportation""?) that he couldn't make it back to the center to win the general election.
+
+Bush has said his strategy is to run as if he's willing ""to lose the primary in order to win the general.""
+
+4) How's that working out for Jeb Bush so far?
+
+Not so great. All the leading Republican presidential hopefuls, including Bush, came out in favor of the Arkansas and Indiana bills. By Wednesday, though, Bush was backtracking, insisting that religious freedom is a core value but that we also shouldn't discriminate based on sexual orientation.
+
+Bush didn't explain how he would balance those two values, only that he was sure Indiana would ""get to that place.""
+
+So, for Bush, the ""lose the primary"" strategy sometimes means sticking to his principles in opposition to the GOP base (as he has on immigration reform and Common Core education standards) but sometimes, on issues like religious freedom, he seems to fuzz it up.
+
+Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has no doubts about what side he's on. In Iowa on Wednesday, Cruz blasted the ""big business"" wing of the GOP, saying they are ""running shamelessly to endorse the radical, gay marriage agenda over religious liberty. """,REAL
+8687,Breakthrough Listen Project to Focus on 'Alien Megastructure',"Get short URL 0 16 0 0 As the mystery around Tabby’s Star continues, the Breakthrough Initiative is preparing to commit massive resources to the settle the ""alien megastructure"" debate. 
+Astronomers first detected an anomaly around star KIC 8462852 last October. Nicknamed Tabby’s star, the celestial object features an odd dimming pattern. While some early potential explanations included comets, distortion, and space debris, none have provided a completely satisfactory solution. Astronomers Launch Search for Extraterrestrials in Potential 'Alien Megastructure' 
+The more fanciful answer is that KIC 8462852 is surrounded by a Dyson sphere, an alien megastructure built by an advanced civilization to harness the sun’s energy. The Breakthrough Listen initiative, founded by Russian tycoon Yuri Milner, plans to spend over $100 million to investigate the star over the next ten years. 
+""The Green Bank Telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and it’s the largest, most sensitive telescope that’s capable of looking at Tabby’s Star given its position in the sky,"" Breakthrough Listen co-director Andrew Siemion said in a statement, according to Space.com . 
+""We’ve deployed a fantastic new SETI instrument that connects to that telescope, that can look at many gigahertz of bandwidth simultaneously and many, many billions of different radio channels all at the same time so we can explore the radio spectrum very, very quickly."" 
+The telescope’s observations began Wednesday night, and will continue for eight hours each night, for three nights over the next two-month period. 
+Other organizations have launched independent investigations into Tabby’s Star, including a Kickstarter campaign launched by the Yale astronomer Tabby Boyajian, who penned an initial study into the strange celestial object. Having raised over $100,000, that project plans to spend a year analyzing the star’s luminosity with the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network. NASA Earth-Like, Water-Rich Planets Could Be Common to Red Dwarfs 
+As to whether new observations will uncover aliens, most scientists remain skeptical. ""I don’t think it’s very likely – a one-in-a-billion chance or something like that – but nevertheless, we’re going to check it out,"" Dan Werthimer, chief scientists at Berkeley SETI, said in the same statement. 
+""But I think that ET, if it’s ever discovered, it might be something like that. It’ll be some bizarre thing that somebody finds by accident…that nobody expected, and then we look more carefully and we say, 'Hey, that’s a civilization.'"" 
+Of course, even if the Dyson sphere theory turns out to be true, that does not necessarily indicate life. Given the distance of the star, it will have taken 1,500 years for its light to reach Earth, meaning that we can only observe the star as it was 1,500 years ago. 
+The civilization could be long gone. ...",FAKE
+320,Prison sentences are getting shorter. But racial disparities are getting worse.,"There's good news and bad news about sentences in federal prison. The good news: Prison sentences are getting shorter. The bad news: Black defendants are still getting longer sentences than white ones for the same crimes — and the racial gap is actually growing.
+
+That's the conclusion of a new study conducted for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, based on data from 2005 — after a Supreme Court decision gave judges more flexibility in sentencing — through 2012. But it's certainly not the first study to find that even when the criminal justice system as a whole is getting more lenient, that leniency varies depending on the race of the defendant. And it's a big challenge for criminal justice reformers — who end up caught in a terrible double bind.
+
+After someone's convicted of a crime in federal court, the judge determines a prison sentence by consulting a set of federal guidelines. The guidelines consider a bunch of factors related to the defendant's criminal history and the seriousness of the crime, plug them into some complicated calculations, and spit out a recommended range for the prison sentence to fall into.
+
+This study looked at how judges responded to those recommendations. What they found was not great. For pretty much every type of crime, white offenders who get a certain recommended sentence (under the guidelines) end up getting a shorter sentence than black offenders who get the same recommendation. And the difference between white and black sentences has grown since 2005.
+
+How big the disparity is depends on the type of crime and how severe it is. For a relatively minor drug offense that doesn't involve weapons — something where the recommended sentence might be around two and a half years — a black man and a white man would actually get around the same sentence in 2005. In 2012, the black man would be sentenced to about two months longer than the white man would.
+
+For a relatively minor crime that doesn't involve drugs but does involve weapons — something where the recommended sentence might be a little over four years — a black man would have gotten about five months longer in prison than a white man in 2005. In 2012, the black man would get a sentence over a year and a half longer than his white counterpart.
+
+The sentencing guidelines, like the name says, are supposed to be guidelines. But for decades, most judges followed them as rules, and rarely (if ever) gave out sentences that were higher or lower than the guidebook recommended. In 2005, the Supreme Court clarified that judges really could go above or below the recommended sentence if they thought it was appropriate for the case. (A second decision, at the end of 2007, clarified that judges were supposed to calculate the sentencing range recommended by the guidelines, but could then decide whether to follow it or not.) That's why this study's time period matters: It's looking at the era in which judges have had more power in sentencing.
+
+It's become incredibly common for judges to hand out shorter prison sentences than the guidelines recommend. Over the summer of 2015, judges actually handed out ""below-guideline"" sentences in a majority of all cases (50.6 percent); they handed out ""above-guideline"" sentences only 2.6 percent of the time.
+
+When judges get to decide whether someone deserves to get a shorter sentence than the guidelines recommend, they might find some kinds of defendants more deserving than others — based on factors that happen to be racially skewed (like education or employment), or based on plain old implicit racial bias. It's hard to judge this just by looking at average sentence length for a given crime, just because there's so much variation in the recommended sentences for each crime. Two people can be convicted of robbery, but if one of them has a long criminal history and the other one was coerced into the robbery by an abusive boyfriend, federal policy says the second one should get a shorter sentence for it.
+
+To actually calculate whether judges are using their discretion to favor white defendants more than black ones requires some serious statistical analysis. But other researchers who've done that analysis, just like the authors of the new study, have found that racial disparities have persisted.
+
+Interestingly, the researchers found that prosecutors' behavior didn't appear to change much over this time. The difference was because judges had more power to use their discretion, and they appear to have exercised that discretion to help white defendants more than black ones.
+
+The sad irony is that criminal justice observers have known this for a long time: The more that sentences are left up to a judge to determine, the more racial bias will come into play. This was a big criticism back in the 1960s and 1970s, when sentencing was so all over the place that a judge in California could sentence someone to a single day, or to years, for the same crime.
+
+Reformers told legislators and governments that they needed to set clearer standards for how long a sentence should be for a given crime. One result was the development of the federal sentencing guidelines to begin with; another result was the use of mandatory minimum sentences that judges couldn't go below if they wanted to.
+
+If you're familiar with mass incarceration, you know where this is going. Both of those policies have led to people going to prison for far longer than they used to, because stiff sentences were imposed across the board. And the length of sentences is one of the major factors in the explosion of America's prison population. That's why federal judges are beginning to move away from the guidelines, and why criminal justice reformers are calling for mandatory minimum sentences to be reformed or abolished.
+
+This study (and other evidence that racial disparities in sentencing persist) shows reformers haven't escaped the terrible double bind they're in. Give the power in setting sentences to judges, and you choose a system where people who commit the same offense aren't treated the same way for it. Take that power away, and you choose a system where everyone is treated too harshly.
+
+Of course, even when everyone is treated harshly by judges, black Americans end up suffering the most. That's because there's more to the criminal justice system than what happens in court; police decide whom to arrest, prosecutors decide whom to charge. Those factors feed black Americans into the system disproportionately, even before a judge lays eyes on them.
+
+As depressing as this sounds, it also means the sentencing double bind doesn't have to be as much of a problem as it is. In a world where black people weren't overpoliced (and underpoliced), setting across-the-board sentences would actually improve equality.
+
+On the other hand, if there weren't racial disparities in housing, employment and education that made it harder for black defendants to persuade a judge they could make something of themselves, judges might be just as likely to help black defendants as white ones. There's no right answer on sentencing, but that's because sentencing isn't the answer to begin with.",REAL
+1319,US election: Hillary Clinton's problem with young women,"""There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other,"" says former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The comment was supposed to help Hillary Clinton but it has also exposed her problem appealing to women voters.
+
+An email has just popped into my inbox from Hillary Clinton, asking ""Are you by my side?"" Well of course I don't have a vote in this race, but it's a question she should be asking the young women who do. Because there she has problems. And they're serious. She may have left millions of cracks in the glass ceiling when she ran to become the first female US president eight years ago, but it hasn't shattered yet - and it might not do so in 2016.
+
+I'm sure a lot of people outside the US will look at this and reach for one word - misogyny. And yes, in the bars and cafes, and on the bleachers at football games, trackside at a Nascar race, and in myriad other places where men gather to sweat and swear you will find - err, how can one put this - a slightly less than fully developed feminist perspective on having a woman president. But it is much more than that.
+
+I was in Las Vegas a few months ago for the first Democratic debate at the Wynn hotel. So where better to go to find out who was going to win the political jackpot than on to the casino floor. This is what we call a vox pop. I think in the American media they are called man-on-the-street interviews. They give colour and texture to a piece. Ordinary voices, giving unfiltered opinions. Except when we did this set of vox pops and asked people (rather surreptitiously, because the security guards would have kicked us off the casino floor very quickly) what these men and women thought of Hillary Clinton, they spoke with one voice: they didn't like her and didn't trust her.
+
+Now normally when you do these type of interviews you go back and edit them - and have a script line, something along the lines of ""some said this, and some said that"" and you play the divergent views. Except in Vegas they didn't. The random group of people I approached ALL loathed her
+
+Ok so far, so anecdotal. Let's look at some actual figures. In the Iowa caucus last week, 84% of women under the age of 30 voted for the 74-year-old Bernie Sanders; just 14% for Hillary.
+
+The projection for New Hampshire is even more striking. 92% of that age group say they will back Sanders. Among women aged 30-39 it is not a whole lot better. Just 11% say they are going to back Hillary.
+
+The American people feel they have known Hillary intimately for a very long time. And with any longstanding relationship feelings get complicated. For better or worse some people never forgave her for sticking by Bill when he was embroiled in the whole Lewinsky scandal. If she was a proper feminist, she would have left him, goes the argument.
+
+All of which would be explicable if it was an older cohort rejecting her, but it is predominantly young women who say they're not going to vote for her - and for whom the shenanigans of Bill are ancient history.
+
+Some people hate her for being a Clinton. A lot of people - men and women alike - think that the Clintons have had a modus operandi that is uniquely theirs, and that no other US citizen would be able to get away with. If you were to focus group these people, the words that would get bandied around would be - entitled, arrogant, elitist, rich, takers of shortcuts, legally dodgy.
+
+These concerns were highlighted by the email arrangements Mrs Clinton had while secretary of state. All her communications were going through a private server. Something that is now the subject of an FBI investigation. Others in high office may have done similar things, but it fed the narrative of Clinton exceptionalism. That they do things their way. It may not be fair, but politics is not fair.
+
+Which leaves the Clinton campaign with difficult questions about why they are failing to win this demographic group, which early on in the campaign I bet her team would have had down as low-hanging fruit. Is it a post-feminist generation who feel that the gender of their next leader is irrelevant? Is it that they want something shiny and new - and yes, I know it's a stretch to describe the veteran Bernie Sanders as anything other than wrinkly, but he was an unknown quantity six months ago. Is it that people are yearning for change, and Sanders certainly offers that with his socialist prescription for America?
+
+So what does she do about it? Well what she did this weekend was to go to Flint in Michigan where there is the mother and father of a public health scandal over the supply of clean water to a predominantly black and impoverished population. The African American constituency has always turned out for the Clintons - and when the protracted primary race turns to the Southern states, this is where she hopes she will be able to do Sanders most harm - and ultimately win.
+
+But what you DON'T do is laugh uproariously with Madeline Albright when she's campaigning alongside you in New Hampshire and opines ""there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other"".
+
+Because that is like saying: ""You should vote for Hillary because she's a woman.""
+
+Or worse: ""Any woman supporting Bernie is betraying the feminist cause.""
+
+Telling the voters they're wrong is not a good look, and never ends happily.",REAL
+4940,Neither Dictator nor King,"It was refreshing to moderate a ""town hall"" with the Libertarian presidential and vice presidential candidates last week because Govs. Gary Johnson and William Weld respect limits on presidential power.
+
+Sunday, when Fox's Chris Wallace challenged Johnson's plan to replace the IRS with a consumption tax, Johnson pointed out that he's ""not getting elected dictator or king.""
+
+Wallace suggested that means, ""Don't take my policies seriously because they won't get through.""
+
+It means that Johnson understands that America is a constitutional republic and there are (and ought to be) checks on what presidents can do.
+
+In response to Wallace's comment about Johnson not taking his promises seriously, Johnson said, ""Take them very seriously. Count on certainty that we're always going to support taxes going lower... being in business being easier, rules and regulations not getting worse.""
+
+Clinton changes positions from year to year: praising trade deals, then condemning them; condemning gay marriage, then praising it—then scolding anyone who doesn't share her new position.
+
+Trump changes positions even faster, sometimes day to day. After saying he'll deport millions of immigrants, now he says he won't if they pay taxes and fill out paperwork—roughly the same position Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio held when Trump trashed them.
+
+Libertarians don't shift to fit the whims of the day, because we have core principles. One is: On most every issue, less government involvement is better.
+
+""Government doesn't create jobs!"" said Johnson when a young woman asked what Johnson and Weld would ""do about jobs."" The Libertarians said jobs get created when government gets out of the way, imposing only a few clear and predictable rules.
+
+While Trump makes vague promises about making government ""great"" and Clinton about making it ""fair,"" Johnson and Weld talk about getting rid of as much of it as they can.
+
+""There are constitutional limits to that,"" said Johnson. ""But if you were to wave a magic wand, there are a number of departments that come up: Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Homeland Security.""
+
+Unlike Trump and Clinton, Johnson specifies cuts—and he's willing to go after sacred cows such as defense spending: ""You can't balance the federal budget—something we're promising to do in the first 100 days—you can't do that without cutting military spending. ... The BRAC Commission, set up by the Pentagon, says that we've got to eliminate 20 percent of those bases, but that hasn't happened.""
+
+""When the GIs returned from World War II, they had two sets of needs, education and health care,"" he says. ""Education was handled through the GI Bill, which was essentially a voucher system. You could go wherever you wanted, the most successful program in domestic political history of the 20th century. Health care was the ... opposite approach: command and control, one size fits all, the government is going to do this.""
+
+The GI Bill vouchers allowed soldiers to enroll at a school they chose. But for health care, they must wait in long lines at government-run veterans hospitals, sometimes dying for lack of adequate care.
+
+Applying these free-market lessons across a range of policies, Johnson and Weld would roll back the drug war, decrease our involvement in foreign wars and give individuals more control over how their Social Security funds are invested.
+
+When an audience member suggested that voting for a third party is a ""wasted vote,"" Weld replied, ""We're fiscally responsible. We're socially inclusive and tolerant, (but) if you agree with us and you want to go waste your vote on Trump or Clinton, be our guest. We're Libertarians.""
+
+Johnson and Weld don't promise they can get rid of the Washington leviathan overnight, but taking a few steps closer to liberty sounds like a good start to me. It's a lot better than the path the two major parties want us to take.",REAL
+8381,Comment on Man of Sin: Obama says illegal aliens can vote because they are U.S. citizens by Christian Zionist,"Posted on November 6, 2016 by Dr. Eowyn | 9 Comments 
+Barack Obama, a sitting President of the U.S. of A., not only tells a bald-faced lie — that “undocumented immigrants,” i.e., illegal aliens, are U.S. citizens — he actively encourages illegals to vote, with impunity. 
+What a slap in the face of countless people across the world who actually respect this country’s laws by applying to immigrate to the United States. 
+Here’s the video, followed by my transcript: 
+Woman who identifies herself as a Millenial “ Dreamer ,” i.e., she illegally came into the U.S. when she was a minor (defined as younger than 16 years old): “The Millenial Dreamers, undocumented citizens — and I call them citizens because they contribute to this country — are fearful of voting. So if I vote, will Immigration know where I live, will they come for my family and deport us?” 
+Obama: “Not true, and the reason is, first of all, when you vote, you are a citizen yourself, and there is not a situation when the voting rolls somehow are transferred over and people start investigating. The sanctity of the vote is strictly confidential.” 
+Words no longer have meaning: “Undocumented citizens” is a new Orwellian oxymoron. 
+Recall that Obama had studied Constitutional law at Harvard Law School. His course of study must have been How to Subvert the U.S. Constitution. 
+Why isn’t Congress impeaching this outlaw and disgrace to the presidency? 
+H/t “Barry Soetoro”",FAKE
+7369,The Most Unhealthy Jobs in America,"Prev post Page 1 of 4 Next 
+There are many jobs that are commonly understood to be dangerous to your health. Many people know the risk of these positions and continue to do their jobs diligently nonetheless. After all, we all have to make a living, and many people love what they do. 
+However, a recent study may cause us to rethink some of the things we thought we knew about which jobs are safe and which are not. It could also cause some to rethink their career goals. These researchers did their due diligence, and through a very scientific process, put together a list of the most unhealthy jobs in America. 
+While many on the list would surprise no one– nuclear medicine technologist, for example– there are some that may surprise even the people in the positions. Possibly the most shocking on the list was their number one most unhealthy career in America: dentists, dental surgeons and dental assistants. 
+Other surprises on the list include flight attendant, veterinarian and podiatrist. While many of these may not seem to make sense at first, after a closer look, one begins to understand the thinking and the process behind the rankings. For some, it includes the unusual amount of time spent sitting down. For others, factors like possible exposure to infectious disease explain their place on the list. Unfortunately for dentists, they hit a double-whammy on those factors plus several other aspects of the job that are viewed as unhealthy. 
+The list also includes several of the old hits like chemical plant and systems operator, radiologist and derrick operators. However, even the order of some of these and the dangerous attributes attributed to them can be surprising. 
+Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but there were even some on the list that were surprising simply because of their existence. One of those was histotechnologist; I didn’t even know that was a thing. In case you are more or equally uneducated as I, a histotechnologist is part of a medical laboratory team that prepares tissue for analysis and diagnosis of disease. If you did know that, you probably are a histotechnologist. 
+The information used in determining this list comes from the Occupational Informational Network, or O*Net. O*Net is a U.S. Department of Labor database that contains detailed information about hundreds of careers and occupations. It provides a host of useful facts for job seekers, human resources professionals, students and researchers. 
+In order to analyze occupations by the possible impact they could have on workers’ health, the researchers used O*Net measures of six different health risks and averaged them together. The types of risk include: Exposure to contaminants Exposure to disease and infection Exposure to hazardous conditions Risk of minor burns, cuts, bites and stings Time spent sitting ",FAKE
+3842,Obama delivers emotional eulogy for Beau Biden,"Wilmington, Delaware (CNN) President Barack Obama eulogized Beau Biden Saturday as a good man of character, hailing the compassion and public service of his family in a moving funeral oration about the son of grief-stricken Vice President Joe Biden.
+
+Obama said that the former Delaware Attorney General and Iraq War veteran who died a week ago from brain cancer was a fine man full of integrity who had refused to trade on his family name. He did his duty to his country and ""did not have a mean bone in his body,"" Obama told more than a thousand mourners at a Roman Catholic funeral Mass in Wilmington, Delaware.
+
+""Beau Biden brought to his work a mighty heart, he brought to his family a mighty heart,"" Obama said in his eulogy, during which he appeared on the verge of being emotionally overcome several times as he praised Beau Biden as a model public official, father and son.
+
+He said Beau Biden and the Biden family, with their culture of service and compassion, had endured tragedy in the past but not been defeated by it. They were the kind of people, Obama said, who, since the nation's founding, had ensured that merit, not birth or wealth, were most important.
+
+""Families like the Bidens have made it so. People like Beau have made it so. He did in 46 years what most of us could not do in 146,"" Obama said. ""He left nothing in the tank. He was a man who led a life where the means were as important as the ends.""
+
+""Beau Biden was an original. He was a good man, a man of character, a man who loved deeply and was loved in return,"" Obama added.
+
+When he had concluded his eulogy, Obama stepped down from the pulpit of the St. Anthony of Padua Church, and folded Biden in his arms, placing a kiss on his vice president's cheek.
+
+The President's comments, while memorializing Beau Biden, were also an extraordinary show of love and respect for his vice president from a man who is more known for keeping his emotions contained than revealing them in public.
+
+""Joe, you are my brother, and I am grateful every day you have got such a big heart, and a big soul, and those broad shoulders. I could not admire you more,"" Obama said, looking directly at the vice president.
+
+Obama said that Beau Biden's quality as a man was evidenced by his refusal to run for the Senate when the path was open for him to follow in his father's footsteps, because he had unfinished work in Delaware, where he made a name for himself by fighting to protect children who were victims of abuse. He was, Obama said, ""someone who cared, someone who charmed you and disarmed you and put you at ease.""
+
+Earlier, Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Army chief of staff, posthumously awarded the Legion of Merit to Beau Biden, hailing him as a member of a brotherhood of soldiers who had ""deep moral and ethical roots.""
+
+Odierno said he got to know Biden when he served in Iraq and said he had possessed a ""natural charisma that few people possess,"" adding that he fully expected him to serve as president of the United States one day.
+
+""People willingly wanted to follow him, trusted his judgment and believed in him. Frankly, he was selfless to a fault,"" Odierno told mourners.
+
+Joe Biden did not speak at the funeral, but looked on as his daughter Ashley and son Hunter eulogized their brother and paid tribute to his own role in leading the family. Ashley remembered how she had accompanied Beau Biden to chemotherapy treatments and Hunter told how he had held his brother's hand as he took his last breaths, whispering, ""I love you"" over and over.
+
+Beau Biden's funeral cortege had arrived at the church heralded by a pipe band. The vice president, wearing dark glasses, and the rest of his family, all looking bereft, formed up behind the hearse. Biden occasionally whispered in the ear of Beau's widow, Hallie, and comforted his son's two children, Natalie and Hunter.
+
+The casket, covered in an American flag, was carried gently into the church with full military honors, reflecting Beau's service as a captain in the Army National Guard in Iraq.
+
+Saturday morning, Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, daughters Sasha and Malia and his mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, all dressed in black, left the White House, where the American flag stood at half-staff to honor Beau Biden.
+
+The first person in line for the service arrived at 4:30 a.m., and by breakfast time, the line of mourners stretched around the block at the church.
+
+Joe Biden's role as a grieving father is not without irony in itself. The vice president has become one of the most sought after eulogists in Washington as his painful personal history -- he lost his first wife and an infant daughter in a car crash in 1972 -- has made him especially compassionate to the tragedies of others.
+
+Musicians performing at the event included Coldplay vocalist Chris Martin, who had heard through a family friend that Beau Biden liked his music and volunteered to attend the ceremony, a White House official said.
+
+Other high profile mourners included Bill and Hillary Clinton, and a long list of high profile Washington figures, reflecting Joe Biden's near half century in politics, including Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Democratic leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi.
+
+Sens. Harry Reid, Patrick Leahy and Joe Manchin were there, along with Delaware Democratic Sens. Chris Coons and Tom Carper and other senior members of the House and Obama's cabinet, the White House said.
+
+Saturday's funeral followed two days of mourning and memorial events for Beau Biden, which has showcased the deep emotional anguish the vice president and his family are enduring following his death a week ago.
+
+Some people waited five hours just to see the casket on Friday.",REAL
+3151,Man burned by fajitas while praying can't sue Applebee's,"WESTAMPTON, N.J. — A man who leaned over a plate of sizzling fajitas to pray can't sue a Westampton restaurant because the dish burned him, an appellate court ruled Wednesday.
+
+Hiram Jimenez sought damages from Applebee's Neighborhood Grill and Bar after a March 2010 incident at the chain's restaurant on Burlington-Mount Holly Road. But an appellate panel said Applebee's can't be held responsible because the hot food posed an ""open and obvious"" danger.
+
+According to the ruling, Jimenez ordered fajitas that were placed in front of him in a ""sizzling skillet."" When he bowed his head ""close to the table,"" the ruling says, Jimenez heard ""a loud sizzling noise, followed by 'a pop noise' and then felt a burning sensation in his left eye and on his face.""
+
+In an incident report prepared for Appelebee's, Jimenez said he was burned on his face, neck and arms after ""grease popped"" on the fajitas.
+
+His lawsuit said a waitress did not warn Jimenez that the dish was hot. It argued Jimenez suffered ""serious and permanent"" injuries ""solely as a result of (Applebee's) negligence when he came in contact with a dangerous and hazardous condition, specifically, 'a plate of hot food'.""
+
+A trial judge dismissed the suit, finding Applebee's — a California-based chain with more than 1,900 restaurants — was not required to warn Jimenez ""against a danger that is open and obvious.""
+
+Jimenez appealed, but a two-judge panel came to the same conclusion.
+
+It noted business owners are required to ""discover and eliminate dangerous conditions, to maintain the premises in safe condition and to avoid creating conditions that would render the premises unsafe.""
+
+But it said the risk posed by the hot platter was ""self-evident."" Applebee's, the ruling said, ""had no duty to warn (Jimenez) that the food was sizzling hot and should be approached with due care.""
+
+An attorney for Jimenez, Richard Wiener of Conshohocken, declined to comment. A lawyer for Applebee's could not be reached.",REAL
+2826,Taliban Militants Attack Afghan Parliament In Kabul,"""Police say the attack began when a suicide bomber in a car detonated outside parliament's gates.
+
+""Inside, lawmakers were meeting to confirm the appointment of a new defense minster. TV pictures showed the speaker sitting calmly as a cloud of dust from the blast fills the room.
+
+""A prolonged fire-fight then followed which police say ended when the security forces killed the six Taliban attackers. There's been a surge of Taliban attacks since last year's withdrawal of most U.S. and foreign forces.
+
+""The Taliban will see today's attack as a propaganda coup — as it's against a major government power center in the heart of the capital. The attack is raising questions about how this security lapse could happen and about the overall ability of Afghan forces to combat the militants.""",REAL
+7528,Close call: Russia-U.S. ‘near-miss’ problem moves to Syrian air space,"Print 
+It looks like the vaunted air space coordination between the U.S. and Russia in Syria isn’t producing a safe flying environment. 
+U.S. officials said Friday that a Russian fighter “flew dangerously close” to a U.S. warplane in eastern Syria on 17 October – something that can’t possibly be unavoidable, in light of the prior agreement by Russia and the U.S., in 2015, to deconflict air operations there. 
+The AFP report provides this description: 
+The near miss occurred late on October 17, when a Russian jet that was escorting a larger spy plane manoeuvred in the vicinity of an American warplane, Air Force Lieutenant General Jeff Harrigan said. 
+The Russian jet came to “inside of half a mile”, he added. 
+Another US military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the American pilot could feel the turbulence produced by the Russian jet’s engines. 
+“It was close enough you could feel the jet wash of the plane passing by,” the official said. 
+It appeared the Russian pilot had simply not seen the US jet, as it was dark and the planes were flying without lights. 
+“I would attribute it to not having the necessary situational awareness given all those platforms operating together,” Harrigan said. 
+One is tempted to go heavy on the sarcasm, in response to that. 
+But OK. AFP offers a bit of analysis: 
+The incident raises serious questions about the extent to which pilots are able to track the complex airspace they operate in. 
+Well, sort of. Basically, there are two separate networks exercising command and control over the same air space – and that’s your problem, right there. Add to it the likelihood that the Russians are not squawking IFF in a way that U.S. systems can interpret, and you have the potential for a nice fecal focaccia. 
+Looking at the air command/control assets that seem to be available for operations, there shouldn’t have to be a safety or awareness issue, at least not during planned air strike and air support operations. When they have aircraft operating, both coalitions, Russian and U.S., have the technical means to maintain good, fine-grain air pictures in the area in question. (The general area the encounter occurred in can be inferred from where the U.S. coalition conducted air strikes on 17 October . See map.) Locations of coalition air strikes in Syria on 17 Oct 2016. The locations at Ayn Isa, Abu Kamal, Al Shaddadi and possibly Palmyra could qualify as “eastern” Syria, the region reported for the close air encounter. If the Russian fighter was escorting the Tu-214R, the night Russian commanders expected to see ISIS fighters making their way into Syria, the easternmost area where Al-Shaddadi and Abu Kamal — or Al-Bukamal — are located would be the most likely. (Google map; author annotation) 
+The Russians have their S-300 and S-400 radars and command vehicles, along with the radars and command center of the Syrian national system. Russia has also operated the A-50 Mainstay AWACS over Syria since December 2015, although there’s no way to know if it was operating on 17 October. The A-50 isn’t forward-based in Syria, but rather operates out of Mozdok in southern Russia. (It may well have been operating that night, given the other things going on.) 
+The U.S. coalition has E-2C Hawkeyes from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) airwing, which come up from the Persian Gulf to support operations in both northern Iraq and eastern Syria. VAW-123 Screwtops tighten up an E-2C Hawkeye to support #OperationInherentResolve . #ForwardDeployed (Photo by SN Dartez C. Williams) pic.twitter.com/LX7pHI1Bs7 
+— U.S. 5th Fleet (@US5thFleet) October 18, 2016 
+The U.S. coalition can also interoperate right now with E-2Cs from FS Charles de Gaulle , which has been in the Eastern Mediterranean , and flying its airwing over Syria, since September. It’s not clear where Charles de Gaulle ’s E-2Cs are flying, but they are capable of providing interlocking air space coverage with Ike ’s E-2Cs, when both are airborne. French carrier FS Charles de Gaulle. (File image via Le Parisien) 
+Working with de Gaulle on 17 October were also two destroyers, USS Ross (DDG-71) and FS Chevalier Paul , one or both of which would have been able to track Russian aircraft to some distance inland over Syria. (Their more-constant but less extensive air picture(s) would complement and enhance that of the airborne Hawkeyes.) 
+These operational-level assets keeping up an area air picture supplement the on-scene information an individual aircraft has from its own radar system, as well as enabling the air defense command/control platform to keep each aircraft under combat direction. 
+At the time of the encounter, U.S. and French systems had the ability to know where Russian aircraft were, even if the Russians had to be identified by default, rather than by positive confirmation from Identification Friend or Foe (IFF). (The Russians, recall, up in the Baltic, have been going out of their way to not “squawk” IFF in good faith where NATO systems can detect it. They presumably reserve the right to behave the same way over Syria. From what U.S. officials have sometimes been careful not to say, it sounds to me like that’s what they’re doing. That said, there aren’t so darn many unidentified aircraft zorching around over Syria at 500 knots that it would have to take very long to know you’ve got either a Russian or a Syrian jet fighter.) 
+Russian systems also had the ability to know where U.S. coalition aircraft were on 17 October. It’s not credible to claim that they had no awareness. And they probably had the IFF codes of those aircraft, and knew whose they were, since the coalition is presumably squawking as per normal. 
+The “incredibility” of the claim that the Russian aircraft “couldn’t see” the U.S. warplane is compounded by the fact that the Russian fighter was said to be escorting a “large spy plane.” This was probably the Tu-214R , Russia’s newest, uniquely capable airborne ISR platform, with a sensor suite somewhat similar to the U.S. E-8 JSTARS. If the Russian fighter escort really didn’t know that a U.S. fighter was within weapons range of the “spy plane,” the fighter pilot’s head should have been delivered on a platter 15 minutes after he got back on the ground. (The search sector of his radar isn’t an issue. He’s getting paid to make it comprehensive, maneuvering as necessary, while he’s up their escorting a high-value asset. The fighter plane was probably an Su-30SM using a Bars N011M series radar system, incidentally.) 
+So it would take a lot of convincing for me to believe that the close encounter the night of 17 October occurred because of any inadequacy in system capability. The dangerously inadequate coordination arrangements the U.S. is tolerating are the real issue, I suspect. 
+A couple of points about those arrangements. One, let’s review the assessment from earlier again: 
+Basically, there are two separate networks exercising command and control over the same air space – and that’s your problem, right there. Add to it the likelihood that the Russians are not squawking IFF in a way that U.S. systems can interpret, and you have the potential for a nice fecal focaccia. 
+This is the situation when two hostile forces are operating in the same air space. Another word for that is “combat.” There’s no political will for combat between the two forces in question, of course. But the mechanical arrangements of military operations in the battle space don’t reflect that. It’s an incredibly stupid situation. 
+Two, the close encounter occurred at an interesting time; i.e., the second night of the ground assault on Mosul , which started on Sunday, 16 October. The U.S. had been striking targets around Mosul for about three days at that point, and had started pounding ISIS positions on the outskirts of Mosul with artillery late Saturday or early Sunday, according to local sources. Russia, at the time, was playing up a non-credible report that the U.S. planned to let thousands of ISIS fighters leave Mosul and move into Syria – implicitly to fight Syrian regime forces and thwart the intentions of the Russian coalition. (Trying to track such a stream of guerrilla evacuees, if the Russians really believed their own hype, would have been an ideal mission for the Tu-214R “spy plane.”) 
+One more significant thing was happening at exactly the same time. A NATO AWACS contingent was deploying to Turkey to support the U.S. coalition in Syria and Iraq. Russia opposes that move. Although the NATO AWACS hadn’t flown a mission yet, its first mission was three days later, on 20 October. The Russians knew it was there, in Turkey, setting up for operations. 
+In other theaters, Russia has been signaling dissatisfaction through dangerous, unsafe military encounters for many months now. We can conclude with strong confidence that that’s what has happened in Syria. We can expect it to happen again.",FAKE
+3232,Polls show GOP presidential primary fight wide open,"Their leads, however, are all within the margin of error, indicating a tight race in the three key early nominating states.
+
+In New Hampshire, Bush leads the pack with 18 percent support among potential Republican primary voters. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker takes 15%, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul takes 14% and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie draws 13% support.
+
+Huckabee takes 17% support from potential GOP caucus-goers in Iowa, barely edging Bush, who nabs 16% support. Walker again draws the support of 15% of respondents, while Christie takes 9% and Paul draws 7%.
+
+In South Carolina, Graham draws 17% support, while Bush takes 15% and Walker takes 12% support. Huckabee and neurosurgeon Ben Carson tie with 10% of respondents. The surveys, though early in the nominating contest, may be most troubling for Bush. They suggest despite being well-known as the son and brother of two former presidents, and though he's emerged as the preferred candidate of the GOP establishment, Bush hasn't yet convinced the party's primary voters to get on board. The South Carolina results, too, suggest even Graham's constituents are lukewarm about his presidential aspirations. On the Democratic side, the contest looks far more settled — former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leads the field by 45% or more in all three states. NBC and Marist did not poll the preferred candidate of progressives, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, because she's repeatedly said she won't run. The New Hampshire survey was conducted from Feb. 3-10 among 381 potential GOP primary voters and has a margin of error of 5%; the Iowa survey was conducted over the same period, among 320 potential GOP caucus-goers, and has a margin of error of 5.5%; and the South Carolina poll was conducted over the same period among 450 potential GOP primary voters and has a margin of error of 4.6%.",REAL
+1914,Poll: Rubio leads the GOP pack in matchup against Clinton,London is kidding itself if it thinks this will be a negotiation among equals.,REAL
+6764,Washington’s Intent is Economic Destabilization and “Regime Change” In Venezuela,"By Stephen Lendman
+Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy suffers greatly from low crude oil prices and US economic warfare – waged to destabilize the country, create enormous hardships, mobilize majority opposition to President Nicolas Maduro’s leadership, and end nearly 18 years of economic and social progress. The collapse in the price of crude oil was the result of a carefully designed speculative operation. 
+Neocons in Washington want control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, among the world’s largest. With full US support and encouragement, the right wing opposition which controls the National Assembly want Maduros ousted – its latest tactic by recall referendum as constitutionally permitted. 
+On October 18, Venezuela’s Supreme Court ruled valid signatures of 20% of voters in each of the nation’s 24 states must be collected to proceed with a process against Maduro.
+“(F)ailure…will render the call for the presidential recall referendum as nullified,” the High Court said in its ruling.
+On October 21, Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) suspended the referendum until further notice, following Supreme Court allegations of fraud. Over 30% of signatures collected had irregularities – including listing over 10,000 deceased persons.
+A previous article explained how Venezuela’s recall referendum works. Article 72 of Venezuela’s Constitution states “(a)ll magistrates and other offices (including the president) filled by popular vote are subject to revocation.”
+“Once half (their) term of office…has elapsed, 20% of (registered) voters (by petition may call for) a referendum to revoke such official’s mandate.”
+“When a number of voters equal to or greater than the number of those who elected the official vote in favor of revocation (provided the total is 20% or more of registered voters), the official’s mandate shall be deemed revoked…”
+Signatures collected must be verified for authenticity before proceeding further with the recall process. If achieved, it’ll be organized within 90 days. Removing Maduro requires support from more than the 50.6% of voters supporting his 2013 election.
+Timing is important. If held by January 10, 2017, a new election will be called if Maduro loses. If things go against him after this date, Vice President Aristobulo Isturiz will serve as president until January 2019, when his term expires.
+In response to CNE’s suspending the recall process, the factions controlling the National Assembly barely stopped short of urging coup d’etat action to remove Maduro forcefully.
+Last Sunday, they said they’ll impeach him for “violating democracy.” The body has no legal standing after ignoring the Supreme Court’s October 18 ruling.
+United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) leader Hector Rodriguez mocked them, saying parties violating the “rules of the game come and talk about democracy…There will be no recall referendum in 2016 because of fraudulent signatures collected.”
+Violent demonstrations may follow, similar to what occurred in 2014 – perhaps another US coup attempt.
+On October 24, WaPo editors disgracefully headlined “How to derail Venezuela’s new dictatorship.” What followed was a disgraceful litany of misinformation, exaggeration and Big Lies.
+WaPo: Maduro “made clear (he and his government are) prepared to shred what remained of the country’s constitutional order…(They) stripped the opposition-controlled national assembly of its powers, imprisoned several top leaders and tried to slow” the recall process.
+Fact: Maduro and Venezuela’s CNE observe the letter of constitutional law. No opposition powers were “stripped.” Their imprisoned officials plotted to remove Maduro by coup d’etat.
+Collecting fraudulent signatures “slow(ed)” the recall process, not administration officials.
+WaPo: Opposition National Assembly members “issued a declaration saying Mr. Maduro had staged a coup. That is accurate – and it ought to provoke a consequential reaction from the United States and Venezuela’s Latin American neighbors.”
+Fact: No Maduro “coup” occurred, nor is one in prospect. WaPo calling for “consequential” action sounds ominously like urging Washington to oust him forcefully.
+WaPo: “The recall referendum the opposition was pursuing offered a democratic way out of what has become one of the worst political and humanitarian crises in Latin America’s modern history.”
+Fact: US dirty tricks and economic manipulation leading to disruptions in the distribution of food, bear much responsibility for hard times in Venezuela. Real problems exist. Hunger isn’t one of them. WaPo lied claiming “(t)he vast majority of low-income families say they are having trouble obtaining food.”
+Venezuelans changed their dietary practices because of the scarcity of commonly eaten foods, at times consuming less than earlier. Profiteers hoarding and diverting foodstuffs for resale are responsible, along with high inflation resulting economic manipulation.
+WaPo: “(T)he United States should be coordinating tough international action.”
+Fact: Neocon WaPo editors want Maduro toppled and replaced. Do they mean by coup d’etat by calling for “tough international action?”
+Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net . His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com . 
+Source: Global Research 
+",FAKE
+4280,GOP debate: No one trumps Trump and six other takeaways from Las Vegas,"We’ll get to the GOP debate momentarily. But first, a word about the Republicans’ odyssey and oddity this past year.
+
+Welcome to the most volatile Republican presidential race in modern times. The upper 66 percent of last year’s field is either out of the running or running on fumes. The top 74 percent in the current field is five times larger than its 15 percednt share of a year ago.
+
+And 2016? It may only add to the confusion.
+
+On to the main event and what transpired Tuesday night at The Venetian Las Vegas.
+
+The good news: It was smaller grouping than the last time CNN/Salem Radio ran the show (nine candidates, down two from September’s gathering at the Reagan Presidential Library). And it was truncated – 40 minutes less than September’s three-hour debate from hell).
+
+Still, CNN was plagued by the same problems as before: a candidates’ forum that was too long, too lumbering, and too laxly herded.
+
+Here are seven observations from this, the final Republican debate of 2015:
+
+1. No One Trumped Trump. It wasn’t for a lack of effort. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul ripped into Donald Trump less than 30 seconds into the debate’s start over Internet policy. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tut-tutted: “You’re not going to insult your way to the presidency.”
+
+What they don’t get: Trump didn’t earn the center spot on the stage courtesy of profound thinking or refined elegance. Better to construct one’s own case, rather than try to deconstruct The Donald.
+
+Blame it on the candidates’ approach and Wolf Blitzer’s herky-jerky style of questioning (like watching a 16-year-old drive a stick-shift for the first time): how many of Trump’s rivals made a lasting impression as to how they’d defeat ISIS and protect the homeland?
+
+2. The Cage Match.  At various points, Paul took swings at Trump, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. The libertarians in the crowd loved it, but the candidate came across as desperate – for attention and a lifeline for a campaign struggling to stay afloat.
+
+The dust-up that the media wanted but didn’t get: Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Both were too smart to take the bait.
+
+Cruz didn’t expound on his differences with Trump over the Muslim immigration ban or a previous comment suggesting he thought Trump lacked a presidential temperament. Trump expressed “great respect” for the other candidates on the stage and ruled out an independent run (the night’s biggest news).
+
+Time will tell whether what Trump said in Vegas stayed in Vegas.
+
+Cruz did have some momentary tussles – with Rubio over Senate votes (always a good way to put an audience to sleep). And Trump: his testiest moments came in a personal back-and-forth with Bush over demeanor and poll numbers.
+
+3.  Executive Order. It was a national security debate long on tough talk about leadership skills, which would seem an opening for the two sitting governors looking for a leg-up in this race: Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
+
+Did either succeed? Not quite.
+
+For Christie, the problem was numbers. Yes, he had some good moments connecting national security to his New Jersey heritage. However, nine candidates and a round-robin style of Q&A too often reduced Christie to interjecting himself into the debate to remind viewers of just how vapid senators can be (Carly Fiorina also went down this path, at several points jumping into the cross-talk to bemoan the awfulness of the political class).
+
+As for Kasich, it’s a matter of rhetorical substance abuse. Three governors past and present have departed the race. A fourth, Bush, is struggling to stay relevant. It’s a political climate in which the Republican base isn’t impressed by resumes, yet Kasich continues to recite a long Washington biography. Oh(io) the humanity.
+
+4. Auld Lang Syne. And so ends the GOP’s debate circuit for 2015. Next up: a Jan. 14 debate in North Charleston, S.C., hosted by the Fox Business Network.
+
+5. At a time when many a college student is taking semester finals, this debate had the vibe of that last exam of the week before an extended break. Tempers were short; the candidates seemed tired of sharing the same oxygen.
+
+6.  Debate winners, if we must: Trump and Cruz, for playing mostly error-free ball.
+
+7. Debate losers: anyone who lost their place in line for the “Star Wars” premiere by staying home to watch a mostly uneventful debate.
+
+Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
+1198,Mike Huckabee's daughter: Negative tone in GOP race helps Clinton,"""I don't think it is good for anybody,"" Huckabee Sanders told CNN's Erin Burnett on ""OutFront"" when asked about Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's rhetoric on the campaign trail. ""I think it's unfortunate the nature of politics seems to create this type of tension. I think the person it ultimately and sadly ends up at times being good for is Hillary Clinton.""
+
+Trump and Rubio engaged in a war of words Friday, with Trump calling his opponent a ""choker,"" ""lightweight"" and ""clown,"" and Rubio labeling the billionaire as a ""con artist.""
+
+""I keep hearing all these pundits and people from the media and other politicians talking about how bad Donald Trump is for America and, in particular, how bad people are that support Donald Trump. My thing is that they're not bad for America, they are America.""
+
+She added that Trump supporters are ""from the heartland and heart and soul of America. They are hard-working, God-fearing people who are sick and tired of the government stepping all over them and they want someone to help just clear the path and get government out of the way."" Huckabee Sanders went on to criticize Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's attempts to attack Trump for having ""New York values."" She claimed that the bulk of Cruz's campaign is being funded by New York donors and that ""you need to follow the money in this case, and certainly Ted Cruz doesn't have a lot of credibility to attack on that front."" As for why she joined Trump's campaign , Huckabee Sanders said Washington is being controlled by donors and special interests and believes Trump is the only presidential candidate who can go there and fix it.",REAL
+6064,One of the Most Undervalued Storable Survival Foods,"By Ryan Banister Preparedness is more than a method of planning, it is a lifestyle. Long-term survival strategies are most effective when they are incorporated into one’s daily life. Anybody who... ",FAKE
+5368,America gives Grand Piano to horse,"Wednesday 9 November 2016 by Lucas Wilde America gives Grand Piano to horse 
+America has given a grand piano to a horse and is expecting some quality tunes. 
+“I’m particularly looking forward to Beethoven’s Ninth,” beamed horse supporter and piano enthusiast, Jay Cooper. 
+“A horse has never been given a piano before because, frankly, the establishment wouldn’t allow it. 
+“Now, at last, change has come, and America will change for the better. 
+“There are a lot of doubters out there, and those doubters will soon be silenced by the graceful notes of Chopin, Mozart and maybe even Little Richard.” 
+Horse, Dobbin Williams, said, “I’m not really sure what’s expected of me here. 
+“I’m a horse. I am absolutely not qualified to play a piano. 
+“I mean… Look at these hooves and the way I am in general. I can’t even sit on the chair properly. 
+“Why on earth did anyone think this was a good idea?” 
+Cooper grinned, “We did it. We’ve made pianos great again.” 
+Democrat, Elizabeth King, said “We wanted to get a pianist of low-to-medium standard for the piano. 
+“She wouldn’t have thumped out anything exciting, but it would have been perfectly reasonable background music. 
+“But the people have spoken, and the people wanted a horse. 
+“God Bless America.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently witterings below - why not add your own? ",FAKE
+6054,BREAKING: Obama: “We Have Not Had a Major Scandal” in My Administration! HAHAHA!,"0 comments Obama was speaking to donors at a private fundraiser in California when he railed against former House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa for calling his administration corrupt. 
+“Here’s a guy who called my administration perhaps the most corrupt in history — despite the fact that actually we have not had a major scandal in my administration,” Obama said! 
+Obama has had more scandals than any president in history! Just because the MSM refuses to report on them does not mean they do not exist! 
+Breitbart reports : 
+Issa was the key figure in several investigations of the Obama administration, including the Fast and Furious debacle with Attorney General Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton’s failure in Benghazi, the failures in the Veterans Affairs department, and the IRS using its power to target conservative Tea Party groups for investigations. 
+Obama accused Issa of wasting taxpayer money “on trumped-up investigations that have led nowhere.” 
+“This guy has spent all his time simply trying to obstruct, to feed the same sentiments that resulted in Donald Trump becoming their nominee,” Obama said. 
+We could list 77 scandals, but here are just 7 of the biggest! 
+1.) IRS Targeting Scandal 
+In 2013, Lois Lerner, former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division, admitted that officials in the IRS’ Cincinnati office acted improperly. 2.) VA Waiting List 
+The Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general first noted the waiting list problem at a Phoenix clinic in 2014 and then found other clinics with similar problems. Veterans were placed on phony waiting lists, and some even died while waiting for care. VA Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned from his position. 3.) GSA Spending Spree 
+In 2012, Martha N. Johnson, the administrator of the General Services Administration, resigned after the federal procurement agency was engulfed in a controversy. The department was accused of allowing excessive spending on travel and conferences for the agency and employees. 4.) Attack on the Benghazi Compound 
+On Sept. 11, 2012, weeks before a presidential election, terrorists attacked U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya. Obama administration officials initially blamed this attack on a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim YouTube video that spun out of control. 5.) Clinton Emails 
+It was the Benghazi committee that first discovered that before, during, and after her time as secretary of state, Clinton maintained a private email server. This prompted the FBI to investigate questions of whether Clinton violated the law in terms of storing classified information. 6.) Fast and Furious Gun Walking 
+Operation Fast and Furious was a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives program, meant to be a sting operation. It allowed about 2,000 guns to flow to Mexican drug trafficking organizations under federal supervision before authorities lost control of the guns. 7.) Solyndra Subsidies 
+The Energy Department provided a $535 million loan guarantee to the politically connected solar panel firm Solyndra as part of the 2009 stimulus bill. Not long after building its factory, the California firm filed for bankruptcy protection and an FBI investigation ensued. The company did not find a buyer and eventually closed down. So Barack Obama…just shut up!",FAKE
+675,Clinton turns Trump attacks up to 11,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+3562,2 gunmen killed following deadly Tunisian museum attack that left 21 dead,"Two gunmen who opened fire on a popular museum in Tunisia Wednesday -- killing 21, including 17 tourists -- were killed by security forces after what was the deadliest attack on civilians in the North African country in 13 years.
+
+The gunmen had opened fire on the National Bardo Museum in Tunis earlier Wednesday. At least 44 people were wounded
+
+Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid had said earlier Wednesday that two or three other gunmen had escaped and were possible at large.
+
+Essid told national television that people from Poland, Italy, Germany and Spain were among the tourists.
+
+An Italian Foreign Ministry official says three Italians were among those killed in the attack and another six were injured. While Poland's Foreign Ministry announced that three Poles were among the wounded.
+
+Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos confirmed on Twitter that two Colombian citizens were among the victims of the attack.
+
+German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the violence ""a cowardly attack on us all.""
+
+He said he ""cannot rule out there being German citizens among the victims,"" but couldn't confirm that at this stage.
+
+An unknown number of tourists were also taken hostage. But Tunisia’s interior ministry said the hostage standoff ended after security forces stormed the museum and killed two of the gunmen. A security officer and a cleaning woman were also killed in the raid.
+
+Tunisia's parliament building, near the museum, was evacuated during the standoff, according to a tweet by parliament member Sayida Ounissi.
+
+The interior ministry said tourists were taken hostage by “two or more terrorists armed with Kalashnikovs.” Private radio station Radio Mosaique said the attackers were dressed in military-style clothing.
+
+British, Italian, French and Spanish nationals were among those taken captive, local radio reported, according to the BBC.
+
+""I condemn this terrorist attack in the strongest terms... we are very alert about how the situation is evolving,"" French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said.
+
+Yasmine Ryan, a witness, told the BBC that a growing crowd of at least 500 people has amassed outside the museum.
+
+""There's helicopters flying overhead and we just saw tanks rolling in,"" she said.
+
+Some of the Italians at the museum were believed to have been passengers aboard the Costa Fascinosa, a cruise liner making a seven-day trip of the western Mediterranean that had docked in Tunis.  Ship owner Costa Crociere confirmed that some of its 3,161 passengers were visiting the capital Wednesday and that a Bardo tour was on the itinerary, but said it couldn't confirm how many passengers were in the museum at the time.
+
+The cruise ship recalled all the passengers to the ship and was in touch with local authorities and the Italian Foreign Ministry.
+
+The National Bardo Museum, built within a 15th-century palace, is the largest museum in Tunisia with collections covering two floors, and it houses one of the world's largest collections of Roman mosaics.
+
+It is unclear who the attackers are. Tunisia has struggled with violence by Islamic extremists in recent years, including some linked to the Islamic State group.
+
+Twitter accounts associated with the extremist Islamic State group based in Syria and Iraq were described as overjoyed at the attack, urging Tunisians to ""follow their brothers,"" according to Rita Katz of SITE, a U.S.-based organization that monitors militant groups.
+
+White House spokesman Josh Earnest says the U.S. is prepared to offer assistance to Tunisian authorities in their investigation of the attack against the Bardo museum and ""will continue to stand with our Tunisian partners against terrorist violence.""
+
+""We extend our deepest sympathies to the victims of today's heinous violence in Tunisia and condemn in the strongest terms this terrorist attack, which took the lives of innocent Tunisians as well as visiting tourists,"" Earnest said.
+
+Speaking at the Louvre museum to call for international efforts to preserve the heritage of Iraq and Syria against extremist destruction, French President Francois Hollande said he had called the Tunisian president to offer support and solidarity.
+
+""Each time a terrorist crime is committed, we are all concerned,"" Hollande said.
+
+Tunisia recently completed a rocky road to democracy after overthrowing its authoritarian president in 2011. It has been more stable than other countries in the region, but it has struggled with violence by Islamic extremists in recent years, including some linked to the Islamic State group. It also has extremists linked to Al Qaeda's North Africa arm who occasionally target Tunisian security forces.
+
+A disproportionately large number of Tunisian recruits -- some 3,000, according to government estimates -- have joined Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq.
+
+The violence that Tunisia has seen in recent years has been largely focused on security forces, not foreigners or tourist sites.
+
+The attack is a blow to Tunisia's efforts to revive its tourism industry.
+
+The museum is near the North African country's parliament some 2 1/2 miles from the city center. A new wing with contemporary architecture was built as part of a 2009 renovation, doubling the surface area. Some 8,000 works are displayed in the museum, according to the website.
+
+The attack comes the day after Tunisian security officials confirmed the death in neighboring Libya of a leading suspect in Tunisian terror attacks and the killings of two opposition figures in Tunisia.
+
+Ahmed Rouissi, a senior commander of ISIS militants in Libya, gained the nickname of the ""black box of terrorism."" The information on his death was made public by security officials giving testimony in parliament and cited by the official TAP news agency.
+
+Libya, which has devolved into chaos, is a source of major concern for Tunisia.
+
+Also a major worry is the Mount Chaambi area on the border with Algeria where Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has reportedly been helping a Tunisian group which has killed numerous soldiers.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4278,Winners and losers from the 7th Republican presidential debate,"Seven of the eight leading Republican presidential candidates gathered in Iowa on Thursday night for the seventh debate of the race. Donald Trump, the race's clear front-runner, was less than 10 miles away from the debate site — holding his own counter-rally after deciding not to participate for decidedly vague reasons.
+
+I watched the whole thing. (We also annotated it!) Below is my take on the best and the worst from the night that was.
+
+• Rand Paul: Maybe the senator just needed to take a debate off. After not making the main stage in the sixth debate (and refusing to appear in the undercard debate), Paul was a major player in this one. He showed off his trademark willingness to needle the other candidates — he went after Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz at various points — but also offered nuanced thoughts on racial profiling and abortion. This was the Paul whom many political observers — myself included — thought we might see in this campaign: A candidate willing and able to speak to issues his party has struggled to address in recent years. Too little, too late. But, at least he had a moment.
+
+• Megyn Kelly: There has rarely been a debate moderator who has come under as much scrutiny as Kelly has during the course of this campaign. Despite all of that negative attention, Kelly showed on Thursday night why she is the face of Fox News. She was pointed, tough and well-versed on the issues. And, more important to me? She showed her sense of humor and a willingness to not take herself too seriously. That she performed so well with so many eyes on her speaks incredibly highly of her abilities.
+
+• Jeb Bush: If you had any doubt about how much Donald Trump is in Bush's head, this debate should have cleared it up. The former Florida governor was, from the get-go, more relaxed and more forceful in this Trump-less debate than he has been in the previous six debates where Trump was included. He owned his family's political legacy unapologetically. He fought Rubio to a draw in an immigration back and forth. He regularly was the only candidate — aside from Paul — who answered the questions asked of him. Bush is still a somewhat (okay, very) awkward candidate — his halting closing statement was painful — who doesn't really like going on the attack. But, without Trump looming over him, Bush looked positively presidential.
+
+• Video reels of past candidate statements: Fox ran video clips of both Rubio and Cruz saying things in the past that they have run away from in this campaign. And it was great! This is what debates should be about. Holding candidates accountable. Asking them to explain why what they said four years ago isn't what they are saying now. I only wish Fox did this for all of the candidates.
+
+• Commercials: Thank you, Fox News! A commercial every 30 minutes or so worked nicely both with my bathroom needs and my desire to consume somewhere between 100 and 120 Oreos. #blessed
+
+• Ted Cruz: He did the thing I hate the most in debates — complain about the rules — when he tried to game a bit more talking time and got shut down by moderator Chris Wallace. The senator's joking threat that if he kept taking incoming from the other candidates he might leave the stage (Trump reference!) fell flat. He was on the wrong end of a scolding by Paul over his conservative righteousness. And, time and time again, Cruz found himself insisting that on a panoply of issues — military spending, immigration etc. — everyone was either wrong about his position or didn't understand it well enough. That's too much defense for Cruz to play — especially in a debate without Trump.
+
+• Ben Carson: Whoa boy. Carson swung from barely being asked any questions to providing answers that often bordered on incoherence. His response to a question about how to deal with Russia simply made no sense — further adding to the narrative that he is far, far out of his depth on foreign policy. At one point, he seemed stunned to even get a question, which isn't the best look for a guy running to be the leader of a 300-million-person country. Carson looked out of his league tonight.
+
+• Chris Christie: The New Jersey governor felt a little like a Johnny One-Note tonight. For every question he was asked, the answer was how terrible Hillary Clinton is, was and will be. Okay, I get that bashing Clinton is never a bad idea in a Republican primary, but the strategy made Christie look very two-dimensional and brought to my mind memories of Rudy Giuliani's campaign in 2008. And not in a good way.
+
+* Fox News Channel: The simple fact is that from an entertainment perspective, this debate was less interesting than virtually all of the previous six. The reason? Trump wasn't there. That, of course, is not entirely (or even mainly) Fox's fault. But, my guess is that the ratings for this debate will be significantly lower than the other Republican debates on major cable channels. And, if you don't think ratings are the way networks judge success, I have a whole mess of compact discs — they're the future of music! — to sell you.",REAL
+3055,"If you use Facebook to get your news, please — for the love of democracy — read this first","Facebook’s 1.44 billion users rely on the site for lots of things: keeping in touch, sharing photos, casual stalking.
+
+But if you get your political news through Facebook, as more than 60 percent of millennials do, please browse with extreme caution: The site doesn’t show you everything, and may subtly skew your point of view.
+
+This is not, of course, a new fear; moral panic over “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles” is as old as the social Web, itself. But a new survey by the Pew Center, released on Monday, suggests there may be some new urgency here. Per that survey, a majority of American Internet users now get political news from Facebook — and the 2016 elections, as we know, are in just over a year.
+
+That’s really important, and important to understand, because Facebook is quite unlike traditional conduits of news. (Think: your local ABC affiliate, your gossipy neighbor, this page, what have you.) As in those more traditional settings, Facebook gives you a great deal of control over which sources you follow and what you choose to read. But unlike those other, traditional sources, Facebook also hides many stories selectively. According to a recent Washington Post experiment, as much as 72 percent of the new material your friends and subscribed pages post never actually shows up in your News Feed.
+
+Which might be fine, when we’re talking about your ex-co-worker’s baby pictures — but what about if we’re talking about a political scandal?
+
+“A longer-term question that arises from this data [about Facebook as a political news source],” the Pew report says, “is what younger Americans’ reliance on social media for news might mean for the political system.”
+
+By now, it should be common knowledge that the News Feed does not show you every post your friends put on Facebook. Unfortunately, there’s still a major misconception around how News Feed works: in a recent study from the University of Illinois, 62.5 percent of participants had no idea Facebook screened out any posts.
+
+Facebook has a good reason for doing this, mind you: If you saw every post, you’d be overwhelmed. There’d simply be too many to read. (This is a problem Twitter’s having, incidentally.) So instead, Facebook does a little math and, based on a range of engagement factors, tries to predict the posts you’re most interested in, and only places those in your News Feed. The math behind the News Feed changes constantly, and Facebook regularly rejiggers it to meet user needs. (You may recall a certain outcry over “manipulative” algorithmic changes in July 2014.)
+
+Anyway, none of this is inherently bad or nefarious. In fact, for the casual, social Facebook user, it’s probably really good. The problem is that more and more people are using Facebook for more and more important things — like informing how they vote — without entirely understanding how it works.
+
+“It’s kind of [like] waking up in ‘The Matrix’ in a way,” said one newly enlightened participant in that University of Illinois study. “I mean you have what you think as your reality” — but it’s actually filtered, moderated.
+
+Facebook has, unsurprisingly, worked very hard to shed the impression that this filtering may somehow hurt its users or their media literacy. In May, researchers working for the site published a very high-profile, very controversial paper on the “ideological diversity” of information in the News Feed. The communications scholar Christian Sandvig called it the “‘it’s not our fault’ study” — a peculiarly deliberate attempt to prove that, even if filter bubbles do exist, their algorithm isn’t to blame.
+
+As Sandvig and others have pointed out, though, that isn’t actually what Facebook’s data shows. For one thing, the study wasn’t conclusive: It only looked at a small and highly non-representative user sample. On top of that, the study shows that the algorithm does tweak political news in three important, if modest, ways. To wit:
+
+Again, none of this is necessarily nefarious or shocking. (“What else would a good filter algorithm be doing other than filtering for what it thinks you will like?” Sandvig wrote.) But it does mean that, when you use Facebook as a source for political news, that news is modestly more likely to flatter your existing point of view.
+
+“Selectivity and polarization are happening on Facebook,” sums up Sandvig, “and the news feed curation algorithm acts to modestly accelerate” both of those things.
+
+It’s no wonder, really, that highly partisan news sources tend to do very well on Facebook — they speak to the biases of both users and the network.
+
+It might be hard to see the big so-what in all of this. After all, if you’re just one user cruising along through your News Feed, you want a service that’s pleasant and comfortable for you. You don’t want to be bombarded with rage-inducing partisan news in between your memes and your mom’s stories and your pet videos.
+
+But consider, for a minute, that more than half of all American adults use Facebook — enough people, some scholars theorize, to swing a national election. As more of those people use Facebook for news, we risk “accelerating” polarization for a large slice of the U.S. population.
+
+And that’s too bad, really, both because political polarization can be blamed for a host of ills, and because social networks could really be a force for good here. One analysis of Twitter found, for instance, that ideologically diverse networks tend to yield more moderate people — proof positive, its author wrote, that social media has “rich potential … to transform the political process.”
+
+There are, at least in theory, technical ways around this problem. The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has called for Facebook to hand more filtering control directly over to its users: “At a personal level,” she wrote, “I’d love to have the choice to set my newsfeed algorithm to ‘please show more content I’d likely disagree with.” (Balancer, a browser extension/research project that took this approach toward news site reading, is the only known tool to increase “diverse exposure” clearly and measurably.)
+
+Meanwhile, Jonathan Zittrain — a law professor at Harvard — has called for Facebook to declare itself an “information fiduciary,” much like lawyers and doctors do already. In exchange for, say, a tax break, the site would promise to offer a depersonalized, unfiltered News Feed experience, among other things.
+
+Unfortunately, these solutions seem unlikely for now — and in the meantime, the available fixes are both very individual and far less ambitious. If you use Facebook to access political news, consider toggling from “top stories” to “most recent.” (That option’s in the left-hand rail, under “Favorites.”) Alternately, think about supplementing your Facebook diet with news from somewhere else. Pew also has a new analysis on the news sources that liberals and conservatives like best: Take a gander at some stories from your ideological opposite.
+
+Liked that? Try these!",REAL
+2862,"Iraqi forces, civilians flee as ISIS gains control of Ramadi, US official says","Fear of a possible Islamic State bloodbath sent tens of thousands of Iraqis fleeing Ramadi on Monday after government forces abandoned the city -- just 80 miles from Baghdad -- in what one U.S. military official conceded was a fight ""pretty much over.""
+
+Some 25,000 people have fled the embattled streets of Ramadi as thousands of ISIS fighters seized the key Iraqi city, killing some 500, and reportedly going door-to-door looking for Iraqi government troops and police to run out of town.
+
+“There have been executions in the streets of Ramadi,"" Muhannad Haimour, a spokesman for the Anbar provincial government, told NBC News Monday. ISIS extremists used vehicles, bulldozers rigged with explosives and suicide bombers to overrun the city after weeks of battles in the street.
+
+""The situation in the city is absolutely terrible,"" Haimour said. ""The city is in very bad shape.""
+
+Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called ISIS' gains ""a serious setback"" for both the city's inhabitants and the Iraqi Security Forces.
+
+""Much effort will now be required to reclaim the city,"" Dempsey said.
+
+The fight for Ramadi is “pretty much over for now,” a U.S. military official told Fox News, after ISIS overran the beleaguered Iraqi Army to take control of the city Sunday.
+
+Iraqi security forces abandoned their Anbar Operations Center in Ramadi overnight, leaving the city almost completely in ISIS control, according to the U.S. official, who has seen the latest intelligence reports from Ramadi.
+
+Although there were a large number of Iraqi security forces occupying Ramadi, most troops fled after ISIS fighters began their assault on the city center Sunday, leaving behind Humvees and armored vehicles supplied by the U.S. military, a separate senior U.S. military official told Fox News.
+
+""The Iraqi security forces were pushed out by a much smaller [ISIS] force,"" the official said.
+
+The takeover followed a three-day siege that began with a wave of ISIS car bombs and which dealt a devastating blow to the Baghdad government and the U.S. forces providing logistical support. On Monday, Shia militias converged on the city, some 70 miles west of the capital, in a bid to retake it.
+
+Ramadi's streets were deserted Monday, with few people venturing out of their homes to look for food, according to two residents reached by telephone.
+
+The militants, meanwhile, were storming the homes of policemen and pro-government tribesmen, particularly those from the large Al Bu Alwan tribe, of whom they detained about 30, the residents said. The militants went door-to-door with lists of alleged pro-government collaborators. Homes and stores owned by a pro-government Sunni militia known as the Sahwa were looted or torched.
+
+The residents spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals by the militants.
+
+Youssef al-Kilabi, a spokesman for the Shiite militias fighting alongside government forces, told the AP on Monday that the Iranian-backed paramilitary forces have drawn up plans for a Ramadi counter-offensive in cooperation with government forces.
+
+We will ""eliminate this barbaric enemy,"" al-Kilabi vowed. He did not elaborate on the plans or the timing of a counter-offensive.
+
+Iran's Defense Minister Gen. Hossein Dehghan flew to Baghdad on a surprise visit for urgent talks with Iraqi leaders.
+
+The fall of Ramadi was a stunning defeat for Iraq's security forces and military, which fled as the ISIS rebels overwhelmed the last hold-out positions of pro-government forces, despite the support of U.S.-led airstrikes targeting the extremists
+
+The retreat by Iraqi forces was reminiscent of the nation's earliest battles against ISIS, including the fall of Mosul, when poorly trained Iraqi soldiers shrank from the black-clad Islamist army, leaving guns and other gear behind for the terrorists to capture.
+
+In Ramadi Sunday, bodies littered the streets as local officials reported the militants carried out mass killings of Iraqi security forces and civilians. Online video showed Humvees, trucks and other equipment speeding out of Ramadi, with soldiers gripping onto their sides.
+
+""Ramadi has fallen,"" Haimour, a spokesman for the provincial governor of Anbar, told AP Sunday. ""The city was completely taken. ... The military is fleeing.""
+
+Since Friday, when the battle for the city entered its final stages, ""We estimate that 500 people have been killed, both civilians and military,"" Haimour said.
+
+The figures could not be independently confirmed, but Islamic State militants have in the past killed hundreds of civilians and soldiers in the aftermath of their major victories.
+
+The Pentagon is aware of reports that Iran-backed Shia militias have been asked by Iraq's Prime Minister to lead the fight to take back Ramadi.  Iran's defense minister arrived in Baghdad today for talks with his counterpart, in what the media is calling an ""emergency meeting.""
+
+When asked if the U.S. military planned to increase its involvement in the campaign to defeat ISIS, the senior U.S. military official said, ""The Iraqis have to want it more than we want it.""
+
+A Sunni tribal leader, Naeem al-Gauoud, said many tribal fighters died trying to defend the city and their bodies were strewn in the streets, while others had been thrown in the Euphrates River. Ramadi Mayor Dalaf al-Kubaisi said that more than 250 civilians and security forces were killed over the past two days, including dozens of police and other government supporters shot dead in the streets or their homes, along with their wives, children and other family members.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking in South Korea, called Ramadi a ""target of opportunity"" for extremists, but said he was confident that ISIS' gains could be reversed in the coming days. Kerry also said that he has long said the fight against the militant group would be a long one, and that it would be tough in the Anbar province of western Iraq where Iraqi security forces are not built up.
+
+The U.S.-led coalition said Sunday it had conducted seven airstrikes in Ramadi in the last 24 hours. ""It is a fluid and contested battlefield,"" said Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman. ""We are supporting (the Iraqis) with air power.""
+
+Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered security forces not to abandon their posts across Anbar province, apparently fearing the extremists could capture the entirety of the vast Sunni province that saw intense fighting after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of the country to topple dictator Saddam Hussein.
+
+Sunday's retreat recalled the collapse of Iraqi security forces last summer in the face of the Islamic State group's blitz into Iraq that saw it capture a third of the country, where it has declared a caliphate, or Islamic State. It also calls into question the Obama administration's hopes of relying solely on airstrikes to support the Iraqi forces in expelling the extremists.
+
+The final push by the extremists began early Sunday with four nearly simultaneous bombings that targeted police officers defending the Malaab district in southern Ramadi, a pocket of the city still under Iraqi government control, killing at least 10 police and wounding 15, authorities said. Among the dead was Col. Muthana al-Jabri, the chief of the Malaab police station, they said.
+
+Later, three suicide bombers drove their explosive-laden cars into the gate of the Anbar Operation Command, the military headquarters for the province, killing at least five soldiers and wounding 12, authorities said.
+
+On a militant website frequented by ISIS members, a message from the group claimed its fighters held the 8th Brigade army base, as well as tanks and missile launchers left behind by fleeing soldiers. The message could not be independently verified by the AP, but it was similar to others released by the group and was spread online by known supporters of the extremists.
+
+Backed by the U.S.-led airstrikes, Iraqi forces and Kurdish fighters have made gains against ISIS, including capturing the northern city of Tikrit. But progress has been slow in Anbar, a Sunni province where anger at the Shiite-led government runs deep and where U.S. forces struggled for years to beat back a potent insurgency. American soldiers fought some of their bloodiest battles since Vietnam on the streets of Ramadi and Fallujah.
+
+Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9012,"VIDEO : Black Professor, “Black Voters Are Breaking For Trump”","VIDEO : Black Professor, “Black Voters Are Breaking For Trump” VIDEO : Black Professor, “Black Voters Are Breaking For Trump” Videos By Amy Moreno November 4, 2016 
+Obama and Hillary avoid talking about black poverty rates, unemployment, and crime in black communities because the statistics are a NIGHTMARE. 
+Global politics have destroyed blacks. 
+Instead, they talk about “racism” as if black people are so unsophisticated that they can’t see truth or facts for themselves. 
+This professor says that black voters see the truth and are much smarter than Democrats give them credit – and they’re breaking for Trump this election. 
+Watch the video: This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter.",FAKE
+5079,'America is already great': Obama urges US to back Clinton in DNC speech,"Barack Obama led an emotional assault on Donald Trump’s patriotism in his last big speech to adoring Democrats on Wednesday, casting the Republican as a threat not just to his legacy, but to American democracy.
+
+
+
+“Show the world we still believe in the promise of a great nation,” the president urged both delegates and a national audience which is in real danger of voting for someone he dubbed a “home-grown demagogue”.
+
+The departing president was joined on stage by Hillary Clinton, making her first surprise appearance of the convention before an electrified crowd, which seems more than ready to embrace her. The biggest cheer of the week in Philadelphia came as Obama and Clinton walked off, arms wrapped around each other.
+
+An evening which began with the raw emotion of people touched by gun violence from Sandy Hook to Orlando became an overt mission by a succession of big Democratic names to reach those independent voters outside of the room tempted by Trump’s appeal to struggling middle-class families in an anti-establishment mood.
+
+Earlier, vice-president Joe Biden stole the show with a blunt retort aimed at Trump. “This guy doesn’t have a clue about the middle class,” blasted a politician who revels in his blue-collar roots. “Not a clue,” chanted back the audience.
+
+But it was a trickier balancing act for the cerebral president, seeking simultaneously to take a victory lap and pass the baton safely to the right team.
+
+“America is already great,” insisted Obama as he inverted Trump’s central theme to suggest it is his populism which threatens the country’s values most: “The American dream is something no wall will ever contain.”
+
+America has changed, Obama said, but its values have not, adding: “We don’t fear the future; we shape it. We embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own. That’s what Hillary Clinton understands – this fighter, this stateswoman, this mother and grandmother, this public servant, this patriot – that’s the America she’s fighting for.”
+
+On a day dominated by allegations of Russian interference in the election and an apparent call by Trump inciting Russia to help reveal Clinton’s emails, Obama presented the Republican nominee as fundamentally anti-American.
+
+“We do not look to be ruled,” he said, rejecting the strongman philosophy, adding: “He is offering slogans and fear. He is betting that if he scares enough people, he might win just enough votes to win this election, and that’s another bet that Donald Trump will lose.”
+
+Privately however, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta has been warning against complacency, telling staff that Trump is “not a serious man, but a man to be taken seriously”.
+
+Obama walked off stage to a triumphant Stevie Wonder hit Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours, which could be read as a love song to those in the room, but may strike a more dissonant note among those that they still need to win over.
+
+“Yes, we have still got more work to do,” acknowledged Obama, conceding that change is never quick and that he had always insisted “we wouldn’t meet all of our challenges in one term, or one presidency, or even in one lifetime”.
+
+Nevertheless, a warm-up video celebrated a host of achievements worshipped in the convention hall, yet contentious outside: Obamacare, gun control, climate change and marriage equality.
+
+“I stand before you tonight after two terms as your president to tell you that I am more optimistic about the future of your country than ever before. How could I not be?” asked the president.
+
+Obama began by recalling his introduction to national life at the Democratic convention 12 years ago. Yet after two weeks of intrigue over who will be the next president, he already felt like a historic figure: half campaigning for his successor, and half burnishing his legacy.
+
+At times, the great orator of the age felt oddly flat too: upstaged by the energy of Biden and, above all, by the uplifting address of Michelle Obama two nights earlier. Aides backstage revealed that the president had been through six drafts of the speech in the last week, staying up until 3am to rewrite it after watching the first lady’s.
+
+
+
+There were sporadic, isolated protests from the floor too – something Obama has had to deal with all his presidency, but more manageable in a vast and overwhelmingly sympathetic hall.
+
+The room came alive, however when he turned to appraise “the next president of the United States”, Hillary Clinton. “You may remember we were rivals … she was tough, she was doing everything I was doing but just like Ginger Rogers, it was backwards and in heels.
+
+“No matter how much people try to knock her down, she never ever quits,” he added to roars, “There has never been a man or woman, not me, not Bill, more qualified than Hillary Clinton.
+
+“Then there’s Donald Trump,” Obama started before a predictable response to his first reference of the opponent. “Don’t boo, vote!” he shot back, recycling a quip likely to get good service over the next 100 days.
+
+Biden also rolled out lines that Democrats are likely to rely on heavily in future weeks, angrily reclaiming the flag from a Republican party that claims increasing monopoly on patriotism.
+
+“It’s never been a good bet to bet against America,” said the vice-president to chants of “USA, USA”. “We not only have the biggest economy in the world we have the strongest economy in the world.”
+
+“We do not scare easily,” added a fired-up Biden. “We overcome and we always always move forward. The 21st century is going to be the American century … we own the finish line. Don’t forget it!”
+
+Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential pick Tim Kaine struck a more conciliatory tone, making the first serious attempt of the week to reach out to the many Republicans known to be contemptuous of Trump.
+
+“If any of you [Republicans] are looking for the party of Lincoln, we got a home for you here,” said Kaine, in a line that sums up why this Virginia moderate was picked as Clinton’s running mate.
+
+A series of Republicans also appeared on video saying Trump is a “not fit to be commander-in-chief”, including the remarkable sight of the party’s last nominee, Mitt Romney, being used to help boost a Democratic convention.
+
+Retired rear admiral John Hutson, a former Republican, took to the stage. “This morning he invited Russia to hack us,” he began to supportive boos from the crowd “That’s not law and order; that’s criminal intent.
+
+“More than 20 Republican national security leaders recently warned that Donald Trump would make American ‘less safe’. He even mocks John McCain,” he added, before recalling a famous putdown of Dan Quayle: “Donald, you’re not fit to polish John McCain’s boots.”
+
+Former New York mayor and businessman Michael Bloomberg also attempted to reach out to floating voters.
+
+“I have been a Republican and a Democrat and eventually an independent,” he said. “Not many people in this room can say that, but lots of people watching at home can and now they are weighing their choices.”
+
+“I’m a New Yorker, and I know a con when I see one,” he added in a strong attack on Trump. “Hillary Clinton understands that this is not reality television; this is reality.”
+
+
+
+Former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta said: “Meanwhile Donald Trump says he gets his foreign policy experience from watching TV and running the Miss Universe contest. If only it was funny, but it is deadly serious.”
+
+But even this moment of apparent unity was interrupted by more chanting. “No more war!” erupted a section of Bernie Sanders supporters sitting in the Washington and Oregon delegations. It prompted arena authorities to shut down lights in their section, the protesters to wave camera torches in the gloom.
+
+Kaine also ran into trouble on the left. A small group of Sanders protesters began to interrupt him but were quickly surrounded by Clinton supporters who were encouraged to stand up in front of them by battle-scarred floor whips. Others struck up a chant of “feel the Bern” toward a moderate many progressives regard with distrust, but Kaine’s modest, self-deprecating demeanor defused a return to the outright revolt of Monday.
+
+
+
+Obama delivered praise to the Sanders fan club: “If you agree that there is too much inequality and too much money in politics we all need to be as vocal and as persistent as Bernie Sanders,” he said. “That’s right. Feel the Bern!”
+
+But he also issued a direct challenge to the Bernie or Bust contingent: “You can’t stay home just because she doesn’t align with you on every issue.”
+
+Obama himself remained popular among both camps, prompting tears from many who sense the twilight of a groundbreaking administration.
+
+Jayne Mazzotti, a delegate from Obama’s home state of Illinois, said she had been in the room for all of his convention speeches: from when he burst onto the national stage in Boston in 2004, to when he became the first African American to accept the nomination of a major party in in Denver in 2008, to fighting for his re-election in Charlotte in 2012 and now his final stand in Philadelphia in 2016.
+
+“He has evolved and grown with precious few missteps,” she said. “He’s been a true favorite of mine as a president, and I’ve been through a few.”
+
+“The difference between a Barack Obama and a Donald Trump, should he for whatever reason win this election, will just be a world apart. There have been Republicans that I’ve been very proud of in a sense that they were a symbol of something … they had an elegance, they had poise.
+
+“I can’t say that of Donald Trump, I don’t think even Republicans can say that of Donald Trump,” she added.
+
+Randell Tatum, a delegate from Massachusetts, said it was a bittersweet moment to watch Obama give arguably the last major set piece speech of his presidency.
+
+“The thing I’ll miss the most about him is the spirit he gave all of us,” Tatum said. “I think he restored this country, brought us back from the darkest times, and here we are.”
+
+Watching Obama over the last eight years has been especially poignant for Tatum, an African American who said his ancestry in the US dates back to the 1500s.
+
+“Not only was he the first black president, but he was a role model, a man with integrity.”",REAL
+4231,"Clinton, Trump eye Michigan wins as candidates face first big Midwest test","Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump look to rebound from weekend setbacks with victories in Tuesday's Michigan primary, the first big industrial state to be contested in the 2016 presidential race.
+
+Squeezed between high-profile Super Tuesday and high-stakes primaries next week in Florida and Ohio, Tuesday's contests are unlikely to dramatically reshape either party's primaries. But with 150 Republican and 179 Democratic delegates at stake, the races offer an opportunity for the front-runners to pad leads and rivals to catch up.
+
+In addition to Michigan's primaries, both parties will hold their primary in Mississippi Tuesday, with Republicans also caucusing in Idaho and voting in the Hawaii primary.
+
+But Michigan is the night's crown jewel in terms of delegates. Fifty-nine are at stake in the Republican race, while 130 will be awarded on the Democratic side.
+
+While Trump has stunned Republicans with his broad appeal, he's forged a particularly strong connection with blue-collar white voters. With an eye on the general election, he's argued he could put Midwestern, Democratic-leaning industrial states such as Michigan and Wisconsin in play for Republicans.
+
+A Monmouth University poll released Monday showed Trump winning 36 percent of likely GOP primary voters, 13 percentage points ahead of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who said Michigan was part of his ""home court"" last week, polled a close third with 21 percent of the vote, while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio placed fourth with 13 percent of the likely vote.
+
+Victories by Cruz in Kansas and Maine have threatened to make the Republican race a two-man sprint to the finish. But Kasich and Rubio are holding out hope they can win their winner-take-all home states March 15.
+
+Entering Tuesday, Trump leads the Republican race with 384 delegates, followed by Cruz with 300, Rubio with 151 delegates and Kasich with 37. Winning the GOP nomination requires 1,237 delegates.
+
+""It's not just the whole country that's watching Michigan — now the world's beginning to watch,"" Kasich said Monday during a campaign stop in the state. ""You can help me send a message about positive, about vision, about hope, about putting us together.""
+
+Rubio sought a boost in Tuesday's contests from Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee. Romney has recently become an outspoken critic of Trump and recorded a phone call on Rubio's behalf in which he warns Republicans that if the real estate mogul wins the nomination, ""the prospects for a safe and prosperous future would be greatly diminished.""
+
+Romney has not endorsed a candidate in the GOP primary, but clearly says in the phone recording that he's speaking on behalf of the Rubio campaign. A Romney spokeswoman said the former Massachusetts governor has offered to help Rubio, Kasich and Cruz in any way he can.
+
+During a stop at a catfish restaurant on Monday in Mississippi, Cruz said the current vacancy on the Supreme Court means Republicans can't take a chance on Trump.
+
+""He's been supporting left-wing politicians for 40 years,"" Cruz said.
+
+On the Democratic side, Clinton boosted her delegate lead over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders over the weekend, as a win in Saturday's Louisiana primary canceled out wins for Sanders in the Kansas, Nebraska and Maine caucuses. The Monmouth University poll gave Clinton a 13-percentage point lead over the self-described democratic socialist among likely voters.
+
+Ahead of Tuesday's two Democratic contests, Clinton had accumulated 1,130 delegates and Sanders 499, including superdelegates. Democrats need 2,383 delegates to win the nomination.
+
+In an effort to boost his standing in Michigan, Sanders has repeatedly accused Clinton of being disingenuous when she asserted that he opposed the bailout of carmakers General Motors and Chrysler during the Great Recession.
+
+Sanders defended his voting record on the issue again during a Fox News town hall in Detroit Monday night.
+
+""What I did not vote for was the bailout of Wall Street. … She did vote for that,” Sanders said, referring to Clinton’s time as a New York senator.
+
+Sanders and Clinton both voted in favor of an auto bailout bill in 2008, but it failed to clear the Senate, prompting then-President George W. Bush to announce about a week later that the federal government would step in with $17.4 billion in federal aid to help the carmakers survive and restructure. The last $4 billion was contingent on the release of the second installment of the Wall Street bailout funds.
+
+Sanders did vote for a 2009 motion to block the release of those funds, though the measure was defeated by 45 Democrats, including Clinton, and a handful of Republicans.
+
+
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6321,Queen Elizabeth II owns every dolphin in Britain and doesn't need a driving licence and doesn't pay tax — here are the incredible powers you didn't know the monarchy has,"Email 
+Queen Elizabeth II is not like you and me. 
+Did you know she is immune from prosecution? That she has her own personal poet, paid in Sherry wine? Or that she holds dominion over British swans and can fire the entire Australian government? 
+It's true that her role as the British head of state is largely ceremonial, and the Monarch no longer holds any serious power from day to day. The historic ""prerogative powers"" of the Sovereign have been devolved largely to government ministers. But this still means that when the British government declares war, or regulates the civil service, or signs a treaty, it is doing so only on her authority. 
+And she still wields some of these prerogative powers herself — as well as numerous other unique powers, ranging from the surprising to the utterly bizarre. 
+Most famously, she owns all swans in the River Thames. 
+Technically, all unmarked swans in open water belong to the Queen, though the Crown ""exercises her ownership"" only ""on certain stretches of the Thames and its surrounding tributaries,"" according to the official website of the Royal Family. 
+Today this tradition is observed during the annual ""Swan Upping,"" in which swans in the River Thames are caught, ringed, and set free again as part of census of the swan population. 
+It's a highly ceremonial affair, taking place over five days. ""Swan uppers"" wear traditional uniforms and row upriver in six skiffs accompanied by the Queen's Swan Marker. 
+""The swans are also given a health check and ringed with individual identification numbers by The Queen's Swan Warden, a Professor of Ornithology at the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology,"" according to the Royal Family website. 
+""Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves,"" goes a classic British song — and this rule extends beneath the waves, too. The sovereign has dominion over a variety of aquatic animals in British waters. 
+The Queen still technically owns all the sturgeons, whales, and dolphins in the waters around England and Wales, in a rule that dates back to a statute from 1324, during the reign of King Edward II, according to Time. 
+According to the article: ""This statute is still valid today, and sturgeons, porpoises, whales, and dolphins are recognised as 'fishes royal': when they are captured within 3 miles (about 5 km) of UK shores or wash ashore, they may be claimed on behalf of the Crown. Generally, when brought into port, a sturgeon is sold in the usual way, and the purchaser, as a gesture of loyalty, requests the honour of its being accepted by Elizabeth."" 
+The law is still observed: In 2004, a Welsh fisherman was investigated by the police after catching a 10-foot sturgeon, the BBC reported at the time. The Scottish government also issued guidance on the law in 2007, writing that ""the right to claim Royal Fish in Scotland allows the Scottish Government (on behalf of the Crown) to claim stranded whales which are too large to be drawn to land by a 'wain pulled by six oxen.'"" 
+The Queen can drive without a licence. 
+Driving licenses are issued in the Queen's name, yet she is the only person in the United Kingdom who doesn't legally need a license to drive or a number plate on her cars, according to Time. 
+Despite not being required to have a license, the Queen is comfortable behind the wheel, having learned to drive during World War II when she operated a first-aid truck for the Women's Auxillary Territorial Service. (As a result of the Queen's training, she can also change a spark plug, Time notes). 
+Queen Elizabeth II isn't afraid to show off her driving skills, either. In 1998, she surprised King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (then still a prince) by driving him around in her country seat of Balmoral. 
+Former British Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles recounted the meeting in the Sunday Times: ""As instructed, the crown prince climbed into the front seat of the front Land Rover, with his interpreter in the seat behind. To his surprise, the Queen climbed into the driving seat, turned the ignition and drove off. Women are not — yet — allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, and Abdullah was not used to being driven by a woman, let alone a queen."" 
+Cowper-Coles continued: ""His nervousness only increased as the Queen, an army driver in wartime, accelerated the Land Rover along the narrow Scottish estate roads, talking all the time. Through his interpreter, the crown prince implored the Queen to slow down and concentrate on the road ahead."" 
+Unlike other members of the Royal family, the Queen does not require a passport, as they are issued in her name. Despite this lack of travel documents, she has been abroad many times. 
+She has two birthdays. 
+When you're the British head of state, one birthday just isn't enough. The Queen's official birthday is celebrated on a Saturday in June, though her actual birthday is on April 21. 
+""Official celebrations to mark a sovereign's birthday have often been held on a day other than the actual birthday, particularly when the actual birthday has not been in the summer,"" according to the Royal Mint. 
+Both birthdays are celebrated in suitable style, too. Her actual birthday ""is marked publicly by gun salutes in central London at midday,"" according to the official website of the British Monarchy. This includes ""a 41-gun salute in Hyde Park, a 21-gun salute in Windsor Great Park, and a 62-gun salute at the Tower of London. In 2006, Her Majesty celebrated her 80th Birthday in 2006 with a walkabout in the streets outside of Windsor Castle to meet well-wishers."" 
+For her ""official"" birthday celebrations, meanwhile, she ""is joined by other members of the Royal Family at the spectacular Trooping the Colour parade, which moves between Buckingham Palace, The Mall, and Horseguards' Parade."" 
+She has her own private cash machine. 
+Less a ""power"" and more a perk of the job, a private cash machine for use by the royal family is installed in the basement of Buckingham Palace. It's provided by Coutts, one of Britain's most prestigious — and exclusive — banks. 
+The Queen has her own personal poet. 
+The poet laureate is an honorary position in British society appointed by the Monarch to a poet ""whose work is of national significance,"" according to the official website of the British Monarchy. When first the role was introduced, the appointee was paid £200 per year plus a butt of canary wine. Today the poet laureate is given a barrel of Sherry. 
+Carol Ann Duffy will hold the position until 2019. 
+She has to sign laws. 
+The Queen's consent is necessary to turn any bill into an actual law. Once a proposed law has passed both houses of Parliament, it makes its way to the Palace for approval, which is called ""Royal Assent."" The most recent British Monarch to refuse to provide Royal Assent was Queen Anne, back in 1708. 
+Royal Assent is different than ""Queen's consent,"" in which the Queen must consent to any law being debated in Parliament that affects the Monarchy's interests (such as reforming the prerogative or tax laws that might affect the Duchy of Cornwall, for example). Without consent, the bill cannot be debated in Parliament. 
+Queen's consent is exercised only on the advice of ministers, but its existence provides the government with a tool for blocking debate on certain subjects if bills are tabled by backbench rebels or the opposition. 
+It has been exercised at least 39 times, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information act, including ""one instance [in which] the Queen completely vetoed the Military Actions Against Iraq Bill in 1999, a private member's bill that sought to transfer the power to authorise military strikes against Iraq from the monarch to parliament,"" The Guardian reported in 2013. 
+She can create Lords. 
+The Queen has the power to appoint Lords, who can then sit in Parliament, the upper house in Britain's legislative system. Like many other powers, this is exercised only ""on the advice of"" elected government ministers. 
+She doesn't have to pay tax (but she does anyway). 
+The Queen does not have to pay tax, but she has been voluntarily paying income tax and capital gains tax since 1992. 
+The Queen has the power to form governments. 
+Unlike the Queen, Prime Minister David Cameron doesn't literally sit on a throne. Rob Stothard/Getty Images/HBO/BI 
+The Queen previously wielded the power to dissolve Parliament and call a general election, but the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act put an end to that in 2011. Now a two-thirds vote in the commons is required to dissolve Parliament before a five-year fixed-term is up. 
+She does still play a part after an election, however, when she calls on the MP most able to form a government to do so. 
+This caused some worry ahead of this year's General Election. It once looked as if the Conservatives might not have a majority (but would be the largest party) and would try to form a government. Meanwhile, it was feasible that Labour could form a majority, despite having fewer seats, by entering into a coalition with multiple other parties. 
+In this situation, the Queen would have been stuck between a rock and a hard place. Every year, she opens Parliament with the Queen's speech, which lays out the government's plans. But to give David Cameron's speech would arguably be to tacitly endorse his government — while staying away would send the opposite message. 
+At one point, The Times was told by sources that she planned to ""stay away"" if Cameron failed to secure enough MPs, but the Palace later had an about-face. ""Royal sources confirmed she would lead proceedings, even if there was a risk the speech would be overthrown the following week because the Tories had failed to muster enough backing from smaller parties,"" The Times subsequently reported. 
+She has knights.​ 
+Sure, they no longer ride around on horseback wooing maidens with their tales of valour, but Britain still retains knights. Like Lords, they are appointed by the Queen — and she knights them personally. 
+Knighthoods are typically given to figures who have made a particular contribution to British society — whether in business, the arts, the military, or elsewhere. After Terry Pratchett was knighted, the legendary fantasy author forged himself a special sword using pieces of a meteorite. 
+The individuals knighted are decided by ministers, the BBC reports, ""who present her with a list of nominees each year for her approval."" 
+She is exempt from Freedom Of Information requests. 
+All information about the royal family is exempt from Freedom of Information requests. The exemption was made after a legal battle between The Guardian and the government to have letters from Prince Charles sent to Whitehall ministers made public. The so-called black spider memos were recently released, but the change means the same can't happen in the future. 
+She can ignore or overrule ministerial advice in ""grave constitutional crisis."" 
+While the overwhelming majority of the Queen's prerogative powers are devolved to her ministers, there is one exception that allows her to wield power herself. Only ""in grave constitutional crisis,"" the Sovereign can ""act contrary to or without Ministerial advice."" With no precedent in modern times, it's not clear what would actually constitute this, but the possibility remains. 
+The Queen holds the ability to fire the entire Australian government. 
+As the head of state in Australia, the Queen has certain powers over the government. In 1975, for example, the Queen's representative in the country at the time, Gov. Gen. Sir John Kerr, fired the prime minister in response to a government shutdown. 
+""[Kerr] appointed a replacement, who immediately passed the spending bill to fund the government, Max Fisher wrote in The Washington Post. ""Three hours later, Kerr dismissed the rest of Parliament. Then Australia held elections to restart from scratch. And they haven't had another shutdown since."" 
+In addition to the UK and Australia, the Queen is also the head of state in Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu. 
+All the above are Commonwealth Realms, or former British colonies. The British sovereign retains the position she holds in the United Kingdom, that of head of state. As in Britain, this is largely a ceremonial role from day to day. 
+She's the head of a religion. 
+Queen Elizabeth II is the head of the Church of England, Britain's state religion first established after King Henry VIII split away from the Catholic Church in Rome in the 16th century. 
+Her formal title is defender of the faith and supreme governor of the Church of England, and she also has the power to appoint Bishops and Archbishops. As with many of her other powers, however, this is exercised only on the advice of the prime minister, who himself takes advice from a Church Commission. 
+An interesting side effect of this is that the Sovereign must be a confirmed member of Church of England. Catholics and those of other religions may not ascend to the British throne. If Prince Charles converted to Islam, for example, he would be unable to become king after Queen Elizabeth II dies. 
+She gets to give away special money to the elderly. 
+Maundy money is a special kind of silver coin the Queen gives away to pensioners every year at a UK cathedral every Easter in a special ceremony. The number of recipients corresponds with the Sovereign's age. This year, for example, she will be 89 when Easter rolls around, so she will give maundy money away to 89 pensioners. 
+The coins are technically legal tender, despite coming in unconventional 3-pence and 4-pence denominations. But given the coins' rare status, they tend not to enter general circulation. 
+She's also immune from prosecution. 
+All prosecutions are carried out in the name of the Sovereign, and she is both immune from prosecution and cannot be compelled to give evidence in court. 
+In theory, the Sovereign ""is incapable of thinking or doing wrong,"" legal scholar John Kirkhope told Business Insider. However, barrister Baroness Helena Kennedy QC told the BBC in 2002 that ""nowadays, that immunity is questionable."" 
+""Although civil and criminal proceedings cannot be taken against the Sovereign as a person under UK law, the Queen is careful to ensure that all her activities in her personal capacity are carried out in strict accordance with the law,"" according to official site of the Monarchy. 
+If the monarch did commit a grievance offence, he or she would almost certainly be forced to abdicate. There is at least one precedent of the Courts' prosecuting the Sovereign. In the 17th Century, King Charles I was tried for treason following the English Civil War. He said ""no earthly power can justly call me (who am your King) in question as a delinquent."" The Court disagreed and had him executed. 
+The Queen has the right to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn her ministers. 
+Assuming no ""grave constitutional crisis,"" the Queen's input into the legislative process is supposed to be limited in real terms to the right ""to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn"" her ministers — advice delivered via meetings with the prime minister. 
+The Queen also has certain historic rights and privileges. John Kirkhope, a lawyer who successfully campaigned to have details of ""Queen's consent"" made public, provided Business Insider with a list of some of the stranger rights the Queen still holds. 
+Hungerford has to present a red rose to the Sovereign in exchange for its fishing and grazing rights.The Duke of Atholl must pay by way of a rose whenever the Sovereign calls. This most recently happened during the reign of Queen Victoria, so it's unclear whether the rose has to be any particular colour.If the Sovereign passes near Kidwelly Castle in Wales, the tenant has to provide a bodyguard in full armour. This is complicated slightly by the fact the castle is a ruin.The Marquis of Ailesbury owns Savernake Forest and is required to produce a blast on a hunting horn should the Sovereign pass through the Forest. This last happened in 1943.Similarly, the owner of Dunlambert Castle in Northern Ireland has to produce a blast on an ancient bugle.And lastly, many landowners must also pay a ""quit-rent"" — a kind of tax on their property paid to the Monarch. Some are pretty unusual. 
+The owner of Sauchlemuir Castle must set out three glasses of port on New Year's Eve for the grandmother of James IV of Scotland. (For reference, James IV served from 1474 to 1513.)The owner of Fowlis must deliver — when required — a snowball in mid-summer.The City of Gloucester pays for its holdings of Crown Lands by providing an enormous eel pie.Great Yarmouth must provide a hundred herrings baked in 24 pasties to the Sheriff, who then sends them to the Lord of the Manor — who then sends them to the Sovereign.The Duke of Marlborough has to present a small satin flag with a Fleur de Lys on August 13, the anniversary of the Battle of Blenheim.The Duke of Wellington has to present a French Tricolour flag before noon on June 19 — the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.",FAKE
+3935,EgyptAir Flight 804: Final moments questioned,"(CNN) The search for EgyptAir Flight 804 continues, amid contradicting reports about the aircraft's final moments.
+
+After it disappeared en route from Paris to Cairo last week, some debris from the plane -- including life vests, personal belongings and parts of wreckage -- has been recovered.
+
+Small fragments of human remains have also been found, and officials in the Egyptian capital are trying to identify and match them to victims. Families of the victims have nearly completed giving DNA samples to help with the grim task, EgyptAir's vice chairman Ahmed Adel told CNN on Tuesday.
+
+But it remains too early to determine from examining the remains whether or not there was an explosion on the flight, an official at the morgue told CNN.
+
+Adel said that media reports suggesting otherwise were ""all speculation.""
+
+""Any high velocity impact leads to defragmentations, and this is not indicative of what caused the accident,"" he said. ""Let's not jump to conclusions.""
+
+A key focus of the search is for the plane's fuselage and the critical black boxes, which are expected to provide vital clues about what happened to the aircraft. Adel said EgyptAir had no information about the location of the fuselage, and that the multinational search team was focusing on an area ""about the size of Connecticut.""
+
+At the heart of the confusion over the final moments of the flight are conflicting reports from Greek and Egyptian authorities.
+
+The flight was at 37,000 feet when it lost contact above the Mediterranean early on May 19, shortly before the aircraft was scheduled to exit Greek airspace and enter Egyptian airspace.
+
+Initially, Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said that, upon entering Egyptian airspace, the aircraft swerved ""90 degrees left and then 360 degrees"" before plunging dramatically.
+
+Asked Tuesday about the conflicting accounts, Adel said that ""the decisive information is going to come from the black boxes, and they have not been retrieved yet.""
+
+Time is working against the investigators -- as is the scope of the search area, with teams searching in waters as much as 10,000 feet deep. Egyptian and French submersibles are working in the area, in an attempt to find the flight data and cockpit voice recorders before their transponder batteries expire.
+
+""The investigators are up against the clock,"" said aviation analyst Justin Green. ""If they don't find the black boxes in the next 30 days the job of finding them is going to be much harder because the black boxes may no longer be sending out a sonar ping which will help them identify it.""
+
+A representative of an organization devoted to families of French passengers said relatives aren't sure they can trust the Egyptian investigation and want more involvement from France.
+
+Stephane Gicquel, secretary general of the French National Federation of the Victims of Catastrophes, said ""there will be a way to track the investigation put in place by the French government with an appointed official to defend the interests of the families in the weeks and years to come.""
+
+Gicquel said the families are distrustful of Egypt, in part due to how the country ""cooperated very badly with the French authorities"" during the investigation of the 2004 crash of a jet carrying mostly French tourists taking off from the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.
+
+Egyptian government and airline officials have promised to be transparent in the investigation into what happened to the plane.
+
+The Egyptian Civil Aviation Ministry investigative committee is being led by Ayman al-Moqadem, the investigator also in charge of the inquiry into the October crash of a Russian Metrojet airliner over Sinai. That disaster, which killed all 224 aboard, is widely believed to be the work of terrorists.
+
+A preliminary report of the investigation will be available within a month, Moqadem told state media Sunday.
+
+On Saturday, French aviation officials revealed that an automated system aboard the plane sent messages about smoke in the front of the aircraft just before it crashed into the sea early Thursday en route from Paris to Cairo.
+
+France's revelation confirmed flight data that CNN obtained from an Egyptian source. That technical data -- transmitted through Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, which sends messages between planes and ground facilities -- shows the plane transmitted 11 electronic messages after it departed Paris.
+
+The first two messages showed engines were functional, but the next message at 00:26 GMT stated a rise in the co-pilot window temperature and sent out messages of smoke in locations such as the lavatory and avionics compartment below the cockpit. The alerts continued until the plane vanished from radar screens.
+
+A screen grab of data has time stamps that match the approximate time the aircraft went missing, although aviation experts cautioned the alerts don't necessarily mean a fire occurred on the Airbus A320 or that the crew even knew about the alerts, which are automatically transmitted.
+
+There have been electrical problems with window anti-ice heaters in A320s. In 2003, the Federal Aviation Administration required windshields replaced in all A320s in the United States. It's not known whether Egypt followed the FAA directive.
+
+With little physical evidence, the possibilities about what happened to the plane remain wide open, from a bomb to a mechanical malfunction to pilot error or even an intentional crash.
+
+No group has claimed responsibility for taking down the jet, and as of now, investigators have found nothing implicating the flight crew or security officials aboard the plane, an Egyptian official said.
+
+Checks of the passenger manifest have so far resulted in no hits on terror watch lists, officials with knowledge of the investigation said.
+
+The jet had routine maintenance checks in Cairo before it left for Paris, the airline said. Earlier Wednesday, the jet was also in Eritrea and Tunisia, data from flight-tracking websites show.",REAL
+695,How Donald Trump could win,"In just the past week, he's caused an uproar by blasting the Republican governor of New Mexico -- one of the party's most prominent Latinas -- while also calling Elizabeth Warren ""Pocahontas"" and abruptly parting ways with his recently hired political director.
+
+But there are also signs that he's willing to moderate some of his primary positions and take more conventional steps to prepare for November, such as building out a national finance team, hiring a pollster, accepting checks from wealthy donors and hitting the fundraising circuit.
+
+CNN interviewed more than a dozen veteran Republican campaign strategists, pollsters and past and current officeholders about what Trump needs to do to win.
+
+Their consensus: He needs to flip blue-leaning states to his column, soften his public image -- particularly as he targets independents, women and minority voters -- and drive up Hillary Clinton's already high negatives even further.
+
+Most said Trump faces an uphill battle in a race that promises to be one of the most divisive and vitriolic in recent memory, one in which both Trump and Clinton have historically high unfavorable ratings.
+
+Yet all agreed on one thing after a primary season that shattered conventional wisdom: Don't underestimate Trump. A recent Quinnipiac poll found Trump and Clinton in an extremely tight race in several vital swing states.
+
+""Everything that so many of us have learned by observing politics for the last 30, 40 years is going to be challenged this cycle,"" said Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to George W. Bush. ""Don't be surprised if Donald Trump is sitting in the Oval Office on January 20th.""
+
+Here's a look at the Trump roadmap, based on these interviews:
+
+Trump must win every state Mitt Romney did in 2012 -- plus an additional 64 electoral votes. In the past few elections, Republicans have looked to a handful of battleground states to put them over the top: among them, Virginia, Florida, Ohio and Colorado.
+
+Still, GOP veterans believe the traditional swing states make up a tough line-up for Trump. The Republican primaries consistently revealed Trump's weakness with minority and educated voters -- vulnerabilities that do not bode well for Trump in an increasingly blue state like Virginia.
+
+""If you add up African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics in Virginia, which are all growing constituencies, that's about one third of the electorate,"" said Tucker Martin, a Virginia consultant and former aide to ex-Gov. Bob McDonnell. ""And then you combine the fact that we're a well-educated state -- it's a very bad match for him.""
+
+""He can't lose the states that Romney won. If he starts losing states that Romney won, it's over,"" said political consultant John Brabender, who was a senior strategist to Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who has endorsed Trump. ""The states that Romney thought were in play -- can Trump put them in play?""
+
+All eyes on the Rust Belt
+
+In other words, Trump must redraw the map.
+
+That means targeting states with demographics that favor Trump, such as blue collar, less educated and older white voters, and even competing in states that have consistently leaned blue in recent presidential elections. A key part of Trump's strategy is to ensure high turnout of white, working class Republican voters. But he's also looking to capture a segment of the Democratic base with his populist economic message.
+
+""I really think he has an opportunity with working class Democrats, who we knew years ago as Reagan Democrats,"" said Michigan Republican strategist John Truscott. ""That's where his unique opportunity is to get some cross over.""
+
+All of this brings Trump to the Rust Belt.
+
+Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, who ran for president this cycle and is now calling for the GOP to unite behind Trump, said he expects this region to be Trump's gateway to a November victory.
+
+""If Donald Trump can hold the South, and I think he can, and all of a sudden become the spokesman for the disenfranchised working men and working women in the industrialized Midwest, suddenly he can be competitive in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota and Pennsylvania,"" Gilmore said.
+
+(Trump won three of those states -- Michigan, Indiana and Pennsylvania -- during the primaries).
+
+Pennsylvania strategist Mark Harris believes the cards are stacked against Trump in the general election. The significance of Trump pulling off a victory in the Keystone State, which has not voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1988, is difficult to overstate, he said.
+
+""Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin -- those sorts of states I think are going to be important to his efforts. And certainly probably are friendlier than the Floridas and Colorados of the world,"" said Harris, who worked for Marco Rubio's super PAC.
+
+Trump's populist, economic message has deeply resonated in former industrial states across the Midwest and Northeast -- once the center of the country's manufacturing boom.
+
+As part of a broader foreign policy view that promises to put ""America first,"" Trump regularly laments that the United States has become second-tier next to countries like China and Japan. Campaigning in areas where voter frustration and anger about the economy run deep, Trump has been relentless in his attacks on international trade agreements and companies that outsource jobs.
+
+New Jersey state Sen. Mike Doherty, one of Trump's earliest political supporters, said the key to Trump's success in the Rust Belt will have everything to do with the candidate staying on message on the economy.
+
+""I would continue to focus on the United States has been de-industrialized, these international trade agreements have been a disaster and we need to make better deals,"" Doherty said. ""The real issue is the economy.""
+
+As he stands on the cusp of formally accepting his party's nomination in July, Trump's unfavorable ratings are through the roof. Trump is determined to make Clinton equally toxic -- perhaps the only condition under which he can defeat her.
+
+""Both of them have such significant vulnerabilities that it's just a matter of whether there is a major stumble by either one of them or one campaign better exploits the weaknesses of the other,"" said Peter Ernaut, a Nevada GOP strategist. ""These actual campaigns are going to matter a lot.""
+
+It's an ugly match-up that could bring out an unprecedented level of vitriol in the general election.
+
+Republicans believe Clinton's high negatives, fueled by the widespread perception that she is not honest or trustworthy, should be one of Trump's biggest advantages -- even as he is widely disliked himself.
+
+""I'd make this campaign a race to the bottom,"" said Gregg Keller, who has advised Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. ""I believe the pathway to victory is not in convincing (some people) to vote, but convincing them not to vote at all.""
+
+In other words, Trump needs high turnout from his supporters while discouraging Clinton voters from showing up.
+
+Trump is already waging full war against Clinton.
+
+Labeling her ""Crooked Hillary,"" Trump has hit the former secretary of state on her qualifications, pointing to her past support for the Iraq War and her handling of the downfall of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. One scandal that's poised to continue haunting Clinton is her use of a private email server at the State Department, particularly after an Inspector General report released last week said she failed to follow proper protocol.
+
+Trump's attacks have not only targeted Clinton but also her husband.
+
+The episode foreshadowed the bitterly personal feud that is likely to fuel the general election.
+
+""Hillary Clinton has never run against a candidate with ten arms and eight legs like Donald Trump. He's going to be all over her,"" said GOP consultant Alex Castellanos. ""She couldn't figure out how to run against a skinny, first-term, U.S. senator named Hussein ... much less this political raptor, which is what Donald Trump is.""
+
+Republicans agree that Trump's success so far has largely centered on his aggressive tone and his famous aversion to political correctness.
+
+""He needs to double down on being Donald Trump, don't try to play to the middle, don't try to moderate, don't try to be anything that you're not,"" said Keller, the Scott Walker adviser. ""You have a brand that is recognizable to tons of people. Don't abandon that.""
+
+But Republicans also caution that the general election is an entirely different beast. Trump's political success has centered on his nontraditional rhetoric and approach to the nation's problems. But he still may need to find a way to moderate his tone for the broader general election audience.
+
+One of Trump's biggest challenges heading into November is to broaden his appeal and convince non-primary voters to support him in November. That includes winning over independents and even some Democrats, and stopping the bleeding with minorities, younger voters as well as suburban and moderate Republicans -- particularly women.
+
+""Make the tone a little bit more appealing to everybody -- make it a little bit more G-rated,"" said veteran pollster and strategist Jim McLaughlin. ""Make it so that that Walmart mom, that middle class mom, heck, that African-American mother, that Latino mother that is looking for the best for their children will say, you know what, he's got better ideas than Hillary Clinton does.""
+
+Lanhee Chen, a top policy adviser to Romney, said Trump must effectively beat back Clinton's suggestion that he is ""an unserious person for a serious time"" if he wants to broaden his base heading into November. A critical part of that, Chen said, is to get much more serious about policy.
+
+""It would seem to me that the best way to counteract would be by saying, 'Look, I've got some serious ideas. And it doesn't need to be a 200-page policy book but it does need to be more than, 'We're going to get tough on China,'"" Chen said. ""That would be effective for both for independents but also for conservatives who have questions about what is this guy going to do.""
+
+CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that Donald Trump would need to win 64 more electoral votes than Mitt Romney to win the election.",REAL
+1840,The Republicans' Red Scare,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+1982,A Message to my Fellow Republicans,"As the unfolding Clinton email story plays out, I have some simple counsel for my friends in Congress, the conservative movement and right-leaning opinion media: Stop talking unless and until you have a plan. Better to go dark than play this game by the Clinton Rules.
+
+Hillary really put a wrench in the media’s plans this week. After eagerly cheerleading Barack Obama for eight years, they stood ready to help break the ultimate glass ceiling and play their role as part of the uncritical chorus of Hillary Clinton’s coronation, first as the Democratic nominee then as president. It’s why they hate this story. It brings alive the memories of 30 years of the slimy, predatory Clinton enterprise and how its venal, sleazy, one-step-ahead-of-the-law hillbilly hustle stains everything it touches.
+
+Cursed with both arrogance and inertia, the Bill and Hillary machine is stumbling toward political peril as the story of her possibly illegal (and certainly dodgy and ill-advised) use of private email servers consumes a Washington and New York press corps that for once can’t easily look away. The Clintons know we’re only at the end of the beginning of this story and the national security, legal and political implications for Hillary will get worse. The Clintons are depending on their old skills at manipulating the press and hoping the GOP and conservatives will save her by mishandling their response as badly as she’s mishandling hers.
+
+While the media’s passive “attention span” excuse du jour is real, many in the press are possessed of a boundless ideological desire to change the subject right now. That’s why the press is waiting breathlessly for (and in some cases, actively trolling for) Republicans to blow it. An intemperate remark from Congressman Jackass would fit the bill perfectly. Don’t be the squirrel. Don’t give them a shiny object. Don’t give them an excuse to turn this into “Krazee Republicans Sure Hate Hillary Because She’s a Woman.” For God’s sake, candidates, take a deep breath and skip talking about your favorite social issue for just a few days. The media is desperate for another riff on evolution or vaccines or gay marriage or prison sex from a GOP contender so they can turn their undivided attention to the Republicans.
+
+Let’s try something new: maintain message discipline, hold focus and keep an eye on a bigger objective than your daily press release, social media hits or email fundraising drops. This is about her, not us, so unless GOP elected and opinion leaders are smart and subtle, and execute with the right timing and tone, she wins. Try for once to play the long game and help Hillary Clinton take on water.
+
+You can sense the Clintons are on the back foot; her now-infamous tweet and promises of transparency last week were nothing more than rehashed Clinton stalling tactics from the 1990s, when there were only a handful of media outlets and a relatively hermetic press culture. It was as stale as a faxed statement, three days late in the era of always-on social media. That won’t work today, if we’re smart. She’s blowing this; let’s help.
+
+It’s vital to have a plan, to execute it with discipline and proceed against Clinton with a measured pace and tone. Speak more in sorrow than in anger. Don’t make it all about Benghazi (they’re expecting that) or the record-keeping laws (boring). Touch on those selectively, but focus instead on the grave national security risks that her amateur-hour email server shenanigan posed and more broadly what this says about the Clinton culture. Her team can yammer on about the legality of it all, her motivations or the traffic content, but the moment this becomes about the Chinese, Iranians, Russians or even just random hackers reading the email (classified or not) of the secretary of state, it’s a new ballgame.
+
+I encourage you to use the smarmy D.C. construction of “I just want to work in a bipartisan way for good, transparent government and to protect national security secrets from the Chinese, Russians and other threats” that the Acela Media claims to worship. Republicans have heard the hard ideologues on the left use it a million times while grinding their teeth in frustration. Avoid making wild claims about either the substance or political outcomes of investigations. Reduce expectations, rather than raise them. Don’t let one single member of Congress or leader be the only face in the room; the Clintons love to demonize a single target, so vary your portfolio. Be persistent. Be serious. Be smart.",REAL
+201,Cameron set to press Obama on tech encryption,"""I will veto a bill that comes to my desk and I will make this argument to the American people as to why I'm doing so,"" Obama said at a joint press conference with United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron, referencing a plan supported by some in his own party to increase sanctions on Iran through Congress before a deal is reached by international negotiators.
+
+""My main message to Congress at this point is just hold your fire. Nobody around the world least of all the Iranians doubt my ability to get additional sanctions pass if these negotiations fail,"" Obama added later.
+
+Cameron said he was also calling American senators and urging them not to pass additional sanctions.
+
+The wide ranging joint press conference covered issues as global as the terror attacks in France to as Beltway as what Obama thinks about his one time opponent Mitt Romney considering another presidential bid (""No comment,"" Obama said while smiling).
+
+Obama promised Friday to ""do everything in our power"" to assist France in their effort to combat terrorism in the wake of the attacks that killed at least 17 people across the country in the past week. ""We will continue to do everything in our power to help France seek the justice that is needed and that all our countries are working together seamlessly to prevent these attacks,"" Obama said. On Iran, Obama turned a question on whether he'd veto additional sanctions on Iran back on his counterparts in Congress -- including those in his own party. ""Why is it that we would have to take actions that would jeopardize the possibility of getting a nuclear deal over the next 60 or 90 days?"" Obama asked. Obama added later: ""I am not, repeat not, suggesting that we are on immediate war footing should negotiations with Iran fail."" RELATED: New Congress, new nuclear showdown over Iran In a departure from the physical threats posed by those who attacked Paris, Cameron and Obama announced Friday new cooperation on combating cyberattacks, including cyber ""war games"" designed to identify vulnerabilities in banking networks. Cameron is at the White House for bilateral talks expected to focus squarely on security after this month's terror attacks in Paris and growing fears of violent Islamic terror cells inside Europe. Cameron and Obama addressed reporters in a joint press conference after their meeting Friday. A British official said the two countries would establish ""cyber cells"" to share information and develop ""a system where countries and hostile states and hostile organisations know that they shouldn't attack us."" The move comes after high profile breaches at Sony Pictures and the U.S. Central Command, ramping up concern about online safety. British officials say Cameron flew to Washington with cyber issues at the front of mind. Cameron is worried that companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are allowing terrorists to use their networks unseen by law enforcement. The companies say they have safeguards in place to ensure criminals and terrorists aren't allowed to communicate. Cameron told ITV in an interview that tech companies shouldn't provide a ""safe space"" for terrorists to communicate or plan attacks. The news conference will be the first time Obama is questioned about the Paris attacks, and his failure to attend a unity march held in the French capital last weekend. The White House says it was a mistake not to send a higher-profile administration official to the march.",REAL
+6147,Man uses Trump victory as excuse to call ex-girlfriend,"Man uses Trump victory as excuse to call ex-girlfriend 10-11-16 A MAN has decided the US election result is sufficiently insane to justify calling his ex-girlfriend. Martin Bishop woke up yesterday to news of Donald Trump’s election, and thought it was a solid excuse to call his ex, Donna Sheridan, and ask her what she thought. Bishop said, “I tried to call her after Brexit but I just got her answer machine. “ Today I got through though, which has nothing to do with the fact I’ve got a new number. “ I asked her if everything was OK and if she’d seen the election result and she said she had. Then there was a bit of a silence so I asked her if she’d come across that cordless drill I couldn’t find when I moved out. “ She said she hadn’t, so then I asked her if that dipshit barman she was screwing now even knew what a Black and Decker was and then she hung up on me. “ Fucking Trump.”",FAKE
+2104,"Extreme weather to cause extreme food shortages, task force finds","Food shortages and price hikes caused by extreme weather will be three times more likely over the coming decades, according to a new report.
+
+The U.K.-U.S. Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience found that unless better planning, modeling and trade arrangements are put in place, massive disruptions to our food supply — the kind that usually only occur once a century — will happen every 30 years.
+
+Extreme weather in areas that produce our most important crops is largely the cause. A massive drought is already underway in California — the world's richest food-producing region — causing a loss of 30% of its cropland at a value of nearly $2 billion.
+
+The U.S. isn’t alone in feeling the impact of extreme weather. Venezuela is undergoing beer shortages because of a heat wave. Violence has even struck food lines there.
+
+Countries that are heavy grain importers will be the most vulnerable to severe food impacts, the task force reported. Egypt has even begun taking steps to thwart shocks to its food supply by boosting wheat production. Food protests and riots broke out there in 2008 when food prices rose sharply.
+
+China is also taking preventative steps. Among other strategies to shore up supplies, it is securing agricultural production capacity in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the developing world.
+
+The U.S. and European Union will likely be sheltered from widespread impacts because of strong economies and the ability to outbid other countries for food supplies, the report found. Still, it says global cooperation needs to happen to prevent large food shocks. That means policy and trade agreements that take into account sharing water resources and banning restrictions on certain staple crops.
+
+Resiliency efforts are key to battling weather extremes and crop production. India, for example, is highly dependent on monsoon patterns for rainfall. Linked to those patterns is its agricultural system. A dramatic shift in weather could throw off productivity.
+
+With a “Godzilla” of an El Nino event predicted for this coming winter season in the U.S., an extreme weather case study on food supplies could be on the horizon.
+
+Steps should be taken now to prevent food problems in the future. The task force recommends five solutions:
+
+• Countries with high vulnerability to global grain production shocks should take measures to reduce their exposure.
+
+• Greater investments in agricultural research should be made to reverse losses in yield-gain and to improve food system efficiencies.
+
+• Unsustainable withdrawals of ground water and any unnecessary uses of non-renewable energy should be stopped.
+
+• Public-private partnerships, or cooperation between governments and businesses, should be fostered to lessen the potential impact of future global grain production shocks.
+
+• Better resiliency efforts should be developed to reduce risks and manage the effects of storms and extreme weather events.
+
+We often think of the immediate destruction that weather brings, whether through floods, wildfires, wind or snow. But the effects after the event can be just as serious. Food, shelter and water are the three basic prongs to survival, and all are coming under attack by extreme weather.
+
+Thomas M. Kostigen is the founder of TheClimateSurvivalist.com and a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. He is the National Geographic author of ""The Extreme Weather Survival Guide: Understand, Prepare, Survive, Recover"" and the NG Kids book "" Extreme Weather: Surviving Tornadoes, Tsunamis, Hailstorms, Thundersnow, Hurricanes and More!"" Follow him @weathersurvival, or email kostigen@theclimatesurvivalist.com.",REAL
+3527,San Bernardino divers reportedly pull object from water in evidence search,"An FBI dive team reportedly pulled an object from a San Bernardino lake Friday, seeking evidence pinpointing the motive and history of the attackers who killed more than a dozen people during a holiday party.
+
+One diver handed the unknown item to an official wearing gloves, who put the object in a plastic bag, the Press-Enterprise reports.
+
+Investigators are looking for a hard drive that may have been dumped in the lake, a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation told The Associated Press. David Bowdich, chief of the FBI's Los Angeles office, said investigative leads indicated the shooters had been in the area the day of the massacre and said the search of the lake could take days.
+
+Fox News has learned that in 2012, one of the gunmen, Syed Farook, conspired with former neighbor Enrique Marquez, the man who purchased the rifles used in the deadly attack in San Bernardino on Dec. 2. The plot would have targeted the Los Angeles area.
+
+It appeared the two were scared off the idea by the November 2012 arrests of four Southern California men attempting to travel to Afghanistan to wage holy war.
+
+The small, urban lake is about 3 miles north of the shooting site.
+
+Authorities say Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire on his fellow San Bernardino County health inspectors during a holiday party, killing 14 people and wounding 22 others. The couple died hours later in a police shootout, leaving behind a 6-month-old daughter.
+
+FBI Director James Comey has said Farook had been in communication with individuals who were being scrutinized by the FBI in terrorism investigations, but that the contact he had was not enough to bring him onto the law enforcement radar.
+
+The FBI has interviewed hundreds of people and conducted searches looking for evidence. Bowdich says it's possible the agency will do neighborhood canvasses in the future, too.
+
+Fox News' Adam Housley and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4443,Death of Saudi King Abdullah brings uncertain new era for US in Middle East,"The death of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah early Friday has launched an uncertain new era for U.S. officials to negotiate amid the spreading influence of Iran and the ongoing battle to roll back gains made by the Islamic State terror group in Iraq and Syria.
+
+A former U.S. diplomat close to the Saudi royal family told Fox News Thursday that the death of the 90-year-old King, along with this week's collapse of the U.S.-supported government in Yemen, was a ""worst-case scenario"" because it removed another obstacle to Iran expanding its reach in the region. The former diplomat said that Tehran's influence could now be seen in four Middle Eastern capitals -- Sana'a in Yemen, as well as Baghdad, Damascus, and to a lesser extent, Beirut.
+
+Abdullah, a Sunni Arab, made one of the main priorities of his rule countering mainly Shiite Iran whenever it tried to make advances in the region. He also backed Sunni factions against Tehran's allies in several countries, but in Lebanon, for example, the policy failed to stop Iranian-backed Hezbollah from gaining the upper hand. And Tehran and Riyadh's colliding ambitions stoked proxy conflicts around the region that enflamed Sunni-Shiite hatreds — most notably and terribly in Syria's civil war, where the two countries backed opposing sides. Those conflicts in turn hiked Sunni militancy that returned to threaten Saudi Arabia.
+
+With the death of Abdullah, decision-making in Riyadh is likely to be more cautious on issues like Iran and Syria, former U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross told the Wall Street Journal.
+
+Citing Saudi officials, the paper reports that King Abdullah became less fond of the U.S. in the final years of his reign. The king repeatedly pushed Obama to lend stronger backing to the rebels against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, against whom he bore a personal animus, and was reportedly furious when airstrikes threatened against Damascus by Obama in the summer of 2013 did not come to pass.
+
+The officials also said that the late king took a dim view of ongoing talks between the U.S. and Iran over the latter nation's nascent nuclear program, seeing it as a sign that Washington was more than willing to work behind its ally's back.
+
+King Abdullah's death may also open up a bigger power vacuum in Riyadh than first believed. His successor, 79-year-old half-brother Prince Salman, had recently taken on some of the ailing Abdullah's responsibilities. However, the Journal reports that U.S. officials do not consider him to be a strong or healthy ruler in his own right, which raises the possibility that others in the royal family could come to the forefront.
+
+The Journal reports that one of the first and biggest questions to face the Saudi king is what to do about the ongoing unrest in Yemen, where gains by Shiite Houthi rebels forced the resignation of the country's president and entire government Thursday.
+
+There is also the question of what to do about the ongoing U.S.-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State, better known as ISIS. The late King Abdullah was so fearful of the group's growing power that he committed Saudi airpower to strike the Sunni insurgency.
+
+Among the other decisions facing Salman is whether he will continue the country's ongoing strategy of increased levels of oil production. The country produced 9.6 million barrels a day in January, according to Platts, the energy information division of McGraw Hill. That's enough to satisfy 11 percent of global demand, despite a global price drop of nearly 60 percent since June.
+
+The price of U.S. crude was up 88 cents, or 1.9 percent, to $47.19 a barrel in after-hours trading Thursday.
+
+Fox News' Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from The Wall Street Journal.",REAL
+7581,Rembrandt Art Proves Chapter 22 of Genesis (MUST SEE),"Rembrandt Art Proves Chapter 22 of Genesis (MUST SEE) # www.youtube.com 0 
+This etching done by artist Rembrandt van Rijn in the year 1653 depicts a spiritual manifestation that transcribes the exact elements within the story of Genesis Chapter 22 when Abraham bound his only son Isaac to an altar to slay him. 
+Rembrandt’s “The Three Crosses” yr. 1653 Reveals ‘The Ram In The Thicket’ God provided in place of Isaac, sparing his life and teaching us to obey the voice of God. This revelation in 2016 is of a story recorded much more than 3,000 years ago! All glory to God the Father. For more information in regards to the key of the kingdom of heaven please check out theJonathankleck via YouTube. Enjoy! Tags",FAKE
+2372,Fact-checker takes Obama to task for gun claims,"President Obama is under fire from The Washington Post’s fact-checker over a series of recent far-fetched gun claims, including suggesting the country’s homicide rate is higher than that of other industrialized nations “by like a mile.”
+
+The comments, made during a stop in South Carolina last week, earned the president three out of four ""Pinocchios"" -- the fact-checker's scale for measuring inaccuracy.
+
+The first fact-check involved a comment Obama made -- at a town hall at South Carolina's Benedict College -- where he said, “What we have to recognize is, is that our homicide rates are so much higher than other industrial countries. I mean by like a mile.”
+
+The president seemed to be telling students the U.S. had the highest homicide rate in the industrialized world, which isn’t true, according to the newspaper. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average homicide rate among the 36 countries is 4.1 per 100,000 people. Brazil tops the list with a homicide rate of 25.5. The U.S. and Chile tie for fourth. Both have a homicide rate of 5.2.
+
+The president also told those attending the South Carolina event that “it’s easier for you to buy a handgun and clips than it is for you to buy a fresh vegetable.”
+
+“This is just a very strange comment that appears to have no statistical basis,” the Washington Post wrote. The paper added that some of its readers suggested Obama was talking about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “food desert” locator, which identifies areas in the country where fresh vegetables are hard to buy.
+
+The columnist acknowledged that some of the analysis in the fact-check ""turns on what the listener believes the president was trying to say.""
+
+Finally, the fact-check took the president to task after he told students he was “not exaggerating “when he claimed lawmakers are backing plans that would allow firearms in kindergarten and machine guns in bars.
+
+While some states like Georgia allow firearms to be carried into bars and restaurants, they do not allow machine guns in bars. And while there have been proposals floated to allow guns in schools – mainly college campuses – none of the proposals specifically address kindergarten.",REAL
+6112,3 Year Old Son of Singer Michael Bublé Diagnosed With Cancer,"You Are Here: Home » Cancer » 3 Year Old Son of Singer Michael Bublé Diagnosed With Cancer 3 Year Old Son of Singer Michael Bublé Diagnosed With Cancer Prev post Next post 
+There isn’t a single parent alive, famous or not, that doesn’t fear for their children’s health and safety. None of us ever wants to confront the reality that one of our kids is sick, but that’s just what singer Michael Bublé and his wife, Luisana, are facing. 
+Their eldest son, Noah, was just diagnosed with cancer. He’s just three years old. 
+The family were dealt the tragic blow after the youngster visited doctors with a suspected case of mumps , Argentinian website La Nacion reports . 
+“They’re staying positive and Noah is a fighter.” 
+Argentinian journalist Tomas Dente read out a text message from Daniela on a morning TV show which said: “To tell you the truth I’m devastated. This is very recent. 
+“The only thing I ask is that you don’t speculate because not everyone has children and can understand what this means. 
+A story on Buzzfeed shares the couple’s statement, in which the singer asks for privacy as he and his family fight this battle. 
+According to BuzzFeed , the Argentinian newspaper La Nacion reported that Noah was initially taken to the doctor for a suspected case of the mumps and was subsequently diagnosed with cancer, every parent’s worst nightmare. 
+As Bublé said in his post, “We are devastated about the recent cancer diagnosis of our oldest son Noah who is currently undergoing treatment in the US. We have always been very vocal about the importance of family and the love we have for our children.” A photo posted by Michael Bublé (@michaelbuble) on Oct 16, 2016 at 7:25am PDT 
+It seems clear that this isn’t a family that will take this situation lying down. Noah’s cancer is in for a fight. 
+The battle won’t be easy, especially since childhood cancer research is woefully underfunded. The St Baldrick’s Foundation states that only 4% of cancer research is devoted to childhood cancer, despite the fact that, according to Dr. Eugenie Kleinerman, head of the division of pediatrics at the Children’s Cancer Hospital at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, “Curing childhood cancer is the equivalent of curing breast cancer in terms of productive life years saved.” 
+Bublé and his wife are putting their careers on hold to tend to their son, and expressing hope that, with the “support of family, friends and fans around the world, we will win this battle, God willing.” 
+Recently, the singer had expressed his joy at being a dad, telling Entertainment Tonight , “The only regret that I have in my life is that I took this long to have kids, because I had no idea the perspective it would give me. I had no idea how much I would love being a dad.” 
+And now he has to face that hardest battle any parent could imagine. Hopefully, that love will be enough, and his son will pull through. Vanquishing Viruses – 10 Natural Antiviral Remedies 
+by Martin Hum – Institute For Optimal Nutrition Colds, flu and other viral infections are common during the spring. Although prevention is best, when a virus strikes there are a number of natural remedies that can stop it in its tracks. Dr Martin Hum digs up the research on 10 natural antivirals. At this time […] Chia Seeds: The Ancient Aztec Super-food 
+Chia seeds have been used for centuries for their numerous health benefits – omega-3 fatty acids, protein, fiber, calcium, antioxidants and so much more! by Cindy Murdoch – Staff Writer What are Chia Seeds? Salvia hispanica, a member of the mint family, is the plant that produces the seeds. Believed to have originated in Central […] Can Marijuana Treat Autoimmune Disorders? 
+Medical cannabis, medicinal marijuana, medical mary jane – no matter how you refer to it, cannabis has been demonstrated in an increasing amount of studies to be medically useful! by Elizabeth Seward – Staff Writer Although the plant was once thought to be a troublesome gateway drug in mainstream America, recent polls show that 80% […] Astaxanthin: The Most Potent Antioxidant On the Planet 
+Astaxanthin – The algae that heals, protects, and prevents DNA damage. Astaxanthin is a natural carotenoid extracted from a marine algae found in… you guessed it — Hawaii! Well, at least the kind that I buy is made from algae harvested here in our islands. The blue-green pigment in certain types of marine micro-algae is […] Estimated 75% of world’s population lactose intolerant 
+Did you know approximately 75% of earths population is lactose intolerant? Don’t agree with that statement? Reading this may change your mind. Humans are the only species on the planet that drinks milk from other species. And although the statistics vary from race to race and country to country, overall it remains consistent. Most everywhere, […] 9 Healthy Food Scraps You Shouldn’t Be Throwing Away 
+by Mae Chan – Prevent Disease We waste a third of the world’s food supply every year along with all the energy and water needed to produce it. However, we may be chucking away food scraps that are not scraps at all. Many fruit and vegetables have skins and leaves which we commonly discard that are more […] Panic attacks and anxiety linked to low vitamin B and iron levels 
+If you suffer from anxiety or develop occasional panic attacks marked by bouts of hyperventilation, you could merely be experiencing the side effects of an underlying nutrient deficiency that is easily correctable, says Jonathan Benson of Natural News. This definitely appears to have been the case with 21 people who participated in a recent study […] The Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening 
+At this time, many things are changing in the world. We live a time of awakening and desire to change, never seen before. A lot of people become more conscious and aware of issues and practices that have lasted for too long and that must change. Many people now want to take their lives back […] An Avocado a Day Keeps Body Fat Away 
+Avocado a day keeps the fat away! by Tricia Pingel, NMD – Holistichealingnews.com People are terrified to eat fat. Calorie counting, non-fat diets are a craze in the dieting world, but they make no differentiation between calorie sources. In these diets all calories are created equal, but this is a dietary falsehood. Our bodies need fat. […] Why You Should Stay Away from Canola Oil 
+There’s an urban legend about canola oil stating it causes teeth to fall out, hair to disappear, lesions to appear, hands and feet to numb, and more horrifying results By Matt Hall — Staff Writer While these consequences are over-exaggerated (and sometimes completely false), we do know canola oil is frequently (and deceivingly) mislabeled as non-GMO, […] Home Remedies For Inflammation 
+Inflammation is your body’s way of telling you that something is wrong. It is a definite indiction and often the root cause of an underlying illness, infection, or even arthritis. by Homemade Medicine Inflammation is a natural reaction to injury or infection. And, surprisingly it can also help make your body heal. The affected tissues swell, redden, […] Bronchitis Home Remedies 
+by Staff – Best Health Magazine Anyone who’s suffered from bronchitis knows what a pain it can be. But if you treat yourself right with these simple home remedies, you can help clear your body up. Your goal when you have bronchitis: Thin the phlegm in your chest and get it moving, so you can cough it […] Do You Truly Know How to Love Yourself? 
+by Louise Hay I am not a healer. I do not heal anyone. I think of myself as a stepping stone on a pathway of self-discovery. I create a space where people can learn how incredibly wonderful they are by teaching them to love themselves. After years of individual counseling with clients and conducting hundreds […] Yeast Infection Natural Remedies 
+by Joseph Bennington-Castro – Everyday Health A Yeast infection (vulvovaginal candidiasis) is the most common type of vaginal infection after bacterial vaginosis, according to a 2007 report in the medical journal The Lancet. Vaginal yeast infections are the result of an overgrowth of the fungus Candida albicans, and less frequently other Candida species, particularly C. glabrata. Treating yeast infections typically requires killing the fungi with antifungal medications […] Join For Free! Discover Little Known Health Secrets and Useful Tips For Healthy Living! First Name ",FAKE
+2958,Obama's Remarks on 'Most Peaceful' World Ring Hollow in Dangerous Middle East,"JERUSALEM, Israel – The Bible speaks of a time when it would be said, ""Peace, peace, when there is no peace' (see Jer. 6:14). For some, that prophetic utterance took on new meaning Monday when the president began his lengthy speech in the northern German city of Hanover.
+
+While Israel fights for recognition and justice in an increasingly hostile world, which sometimes envisions its destruction, President Obama says we're living in the most peaceful era in the history of humanity.
+
+Meanwhile, Israeli Middle East commentator Ehud Yaari says ""Tehran's commitment to surrounding, besieging and eliminating the 'Zionist entity' has not changed, and countering this goal will require pushing back against Iranian advances in Iraq, Syria, Jordan and elsewhere,"" the Washington Institute reported.
+
+And a smuggler at the Syrian-Turkish border told Buzzfeed that ISIS has deployed at least 4,000 fighters to Europe, while French and Belgian officials say the 5,000-plus Europeans who joined the Islamic State will bring terrorism with them when they return home.
+
+But according to Obama, the world is experiencing the ""most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history.""
+
+""I want to begin with an observation that, given the challenges that we face in the world and the headlines we see every day, may seem improbable but it's true. We are fortunate to be living in the most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history,"" he said.
+
+The president went on to explain how the world is in much better shape than it's ever been.
+
+""More people live in democracies, where they live wealthier and healthier and better educated with a global economy that has lifted up more than a billion people from extreme poverty and created new middle classes from the Americas to Africa to Asia,"" he continued.
+
+And not only that, infant mortality is down, people live longer and tens of millions have been saved from disease. And in a more tolerant world, gays and lesbians have more opportunities, he said.
+
+According to Obama, it's a good time to be alive. Most anyone, he said, would choose to born today than at any other time in the history of the world. It is also a time that ""we need to integrate Muslims.""
+
+""I want you to remember that our countries are stronger, they're more secure and more successful when we integrate people of all backgrounds and faiths and make them feel as one. And that includes our fellow citizens who are Muslim,"" he said.
+
+The president's eloquent words may ring hollow to the millions in the Middle East and Africa whose family members have been slain, their homes confiscated, their children kidnapped and sold as sex slaves, and to the tens of thousands of refugees flooding European shores.
+
+According to the Bible, Israel is at the core of many events unfolding in the world today. Biblical prophecies foretold thousands of years ago are coming to pass in our lifetimes.
+
+The Bible admonishes us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6), the capital of the Jewish nation-state, and to give Him no rest until He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.
+
+""I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem; They shall never hold their peace day or night. You who make mention of the Lord, do not keep silent and give Him no rest till He establishes and till He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth. (Is. 1:6-7)
+
+That's why it behooves us to understand today's headlines through a biblical perspective.",REAL
+9446,Re: America Is The Loneliest Country In The World – Is It Because We’ve Abandoned The Traditional Family Structure?,"  America Is The Loneliest Country In The World – Is It Because We’ve Abandoned The Traditional Family Structure?   13th, 2013 
+Of all the nations on the entire planet, the United States is the most lonely place to be. We have the highest percentage of one person households on the entire globe, and the average size of our households has been steadily decreasing. Studies have shown that the number of close friends that Americans have is falling, and we have the highest divorce rate in the world by a wide margin. So why is this happening? Does this have anything to do with the fact that America is abandoning the traditional family structure? Back in the 1960s, the “sexual revolution” fundamentally changed the way that millions of Americans viewed sex and love. By throwing out all of the old boundaries, many Americans believed that they would ultimately be able to have more sex and more love. Today, this manifests itself in a “hookup culture” that is constantly being promoted as “healthy” in our popular music, in our television shows and in our movies. But instead of this “hookup culture” resulting in more sex and more love, most Americans are discovering that it leads to just the opposite. We have become a nation of desperately lonely people that have very few real ties to others. 
+Never in the history of our nation have Americans been so isolated from one another. Most people get up in the morning, drive to work or school, perhaps do a little shopping afterwards, and then drive home again. The rest of the evening is typically spent in front of the television or on some sort of electronic device. 
+In addition, most Americans spend precious little time attending social gatherings of any sort these days. Church attendance is at historic lows , and most people don’t take the time or the effort to get involved in other types of social groups. 
+And even when Americans do go out and try to meet people, the relationships that are formed are very much “on the surface” at best. The truth is that most Americans have very few “close friends”. Just take a moment and consider how many people outside your immediate family actually “love you” and would be there for you no matter what. For most Americans that number is depressingly low. 
+In a desperate attempt for human love and interaction, an increasing number of Americans have turned to social networking websites such as Facebook to fill that void. For the desperately lonely, some human contact is better than none. In fact, a growing number of people are so desperate for people to talk with them that they will pretend to be someone else online. Many will even use an attractive picture of someone else in an attempt to try to lure others. This has become so common that this phenomenon has even been given a name. It is known as “ catfishing “, and it has grown to epidemic levels. 
+Other Americans deal with their loneliness by recklessly indulging in food, drugs, gambling, shopping or other addictions. We are a fundamentally unhappy nation, and this is reflected in the fact that we lead the world in antidepressant use. In fact, the total number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled between 1996 and 2005. 
+Could a lot of this have been avoided if we would have just fully embraced the traditional family structure as a nation? 
+Wouldn’t most of us be doing a lot better if we lived in homes that were filled with happy, healthy families? 
+Just consider what the consequences of “free love” and the “hookup culture” have been for America… 
+*At 26 percent, America has the highest percentage of one person households on the entire planet. 
+*100 years ago, 4.52 were living in the average U.S. household, but now the average U.S. household only consists of 2.59 people . 
+*Back in 1950, 78 percent of all households in the United States contained a married couple. Today, that number has declined to 48 percent . 
+*The marriage rate in the United States has fallen to an all-time low. Right now it is sitting at a yearly rate of 6.8 marriages per 1000 people . 
+*Today, an all-time low 44.2 percent of Americans in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket are married. 
+*According to the Pew Research Center, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married. 
+*In the United States today, more than half of all couples “move in together” before they get married. 
+*The divorce rate for couples that live together first is significantly higher than for those that do not. 
+*America has the highest divorce rate on the globe by a wide margin. 
+*In 1970, the average woman had her first child when she was 21.4 years old . Now the average woman has her first child when she is 25.6 years old . 
+*The birth rate for American women in the 20 to 24 year old age bracket has fallen to 85.3 births per 1,000 women . That is a new all-time record low. 
+*Approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father. 
+*For women under the age of 30 living in the United States today, more than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock. 
+For most Americans, marriage has come to be viewed as a temporary agreement that can be abandoned the moment that it no longer makes them happy any longer. This “me-centered” approach to love and marriage has had a whole host of negative consequences for us as a nation. 
+As the National Marriage Project puts it, a marriage in America now “depends for its survival on the happiness of both spouses”… 
+Over the last four decades, many Americans have moved away from identifying with an “institutional” model of marriage, which seeks to integrate sex, parenthood, economic cooperation, and emotional intimacy in a permanent union. This model has been overwritten by the “soul mate” model, which sees marriage as primarily a couple-centered vehicle for personal growth, emotional intimacy, and shared consumption that depends for its survival on the happiness of both spouses. Thus where marriage used to serve as the gateway to responsible adulthood, it has come to be increasingly seen as a capstone of sorts that signals couples have arrived, both financially and emotionally—or are on the cusp of arriving. 
+And our young people are no longer taught to value marriage. Instead, they are told to put off marriage and to go out and “have some fun”. This message is constantly being reinforced by popular culture. For example, posted below is an actual pro-Obamacare ad . Yes, I know that this ad is almost too bizarre to be true, but it is actually a real ad. And as you can see, the messages that it is sending to our young people are not very subtle at all… 
+We have become a nation where “anything goes”, and most Americans seem to like it that way. 
+So what do you think? 
+Is America the loneliest country in the world because we’ve abandoned the traditional family structure? 
+Please feel free to share your opinion by posting a comment below… What Are The Off-White Boxes That Are Going Up On Utility Poles All Over Seattle? » K 
+The lack of family structure is part of it. But there is something far more basic, that has died in this Country. The dog eat dog business attitude, the money is the most important thing attitude,and the I come before everyone else attitude, All these things killed this precious concept. What is it? Trust. You can not have a good marriage, or friendship without it. Ask yourself, how many people you know, would you trust with your life? For most it is a rather small number. Sadly for some the number is 0. ISA 
+o here. I dont trust, nor really care for, most any of you. I learned this in childhood, by watching the true nature of adults. Adult Humans are the virus of the World, of rotting flesh, that is a parasite. This can be proven empirically. Aston Martin 
+Adult humans except “# Godschosenones?” because saying that all humans are viruses inclusing the shoes is # antisemitic? I see where you are going.. rbolo29 . 
+It’s because of the apathy of realizing there is no God; so the children play and do what they want. Kim 
+Probably why so many people attach themselves to their animals. I know people that treat their dog like their child. It’s because it’s all they have. ISA 
+Some dont treat their animals that way out of loneliness, but a dog just makes a better friend than Humans. Thats the truth. Take it or leave it. Humans are rather crappy things. Kim 
+Some humans, not all of them. Don’t get me wrong, I love my pet as much as anybody. But some people go overboard. A Dodgy Bloke 
+I think a number of components go into this. A big one is the sexual revolution I have seen personally how it’s a great thing for guys but a disaster for women. The tragic part is most women don’t see it, the want the same sexual freedom as men, but ignore the damage done. The damage is kids with no father, and a woman who has several children by different guys. The woman wakes up forty alone, has no control over her life dependent on welfare but has ultimate responsibility for what happens under her roof. Everybody wants to be loved in one form or another. I think the culture produces high expectations in what people want or expect in a spouse. Men want somebody young good looking with no issues. Woman are looking foe the same, but some have a attraction to bad boys who they find exciting. People don’t get to and know each other before they wind up in bed. They get caught up in the newness get married and wake up one morning look at their spouse and wonder ‘What did I see in you.” But I have hope that the coming hard times will reverse this because people will have to adapt, or not survive. rbolo29 . 
+It really doesn’t matter; because we all die in the end and if there is no God to save us; then it’s a total lost cause to even try to be moral and good. Some Dude 
+fix yourself and become the change you seek in others for those others are all the reflections of the changes you made from within, granting them the permission to let their own light shine. 
+only then will humanity rise above the din of the dark ages that still reigns with a rationale leading it only to extinction Dedalius Stanton 
+About to graduate from college within a short timeframe, this fearsome yet truthful article details some chilling events experienced in my academic career. Up unto this point, many of students within my campus follow a self-centered, selfish attitude, unaware that their destructive attitudes harm only but themselves. The idea of “STFU and leave me alone” concept continues to be pushed forth by faculty, peers, and the social environment. Having lived in the dorms, I’ve been through numerous roommates who refuse to talk to anyone, especially to me, stating that I’m too weird or someone who should just drop dead, yet later claim they have no friends and spend most of their time wasting it away, allowing their academic careers reach at a stag point. The same applies to my classes. I know about 70 students by name who will graduate this semester, but how many do I personally know and trust? Sadly, that number is zero. This is not because I don’t engage in conversations, but it’s rather the experiences that others around me only care only for themselves, while ignoring those that may be able to provide lasting friendships and improving the overall quality of life. rbolo29 . 
+It’s ok; because they will graduate and find there are no jobs waiting for them; except being a manager at McDonalds. Jim Davis 
+Asst. Manager at best. Aston Martin 
+The gullible femaleist women from colelge will probably go on dating websites to find elderly rich and wealthy men who are desperate enough to date goods which were expired a long time ago. 
+I agree I had similar experiences. Most people had their own little groups of friends and never really mingled with others. I think the problem is too, many people don’t know HOW to make friends. Everyone is so self-absorbed. MichaelfromTheEconomicCollapse 
+I am sorry to hear that you had such negative experiences with roommates. Finding a good roommate these days can be a real challenge. I am glad that I don’t have to worry about that anymore. 
+Michael John Doe 
+71 percent of young men between the ages of 18 to 34 in America are not interested in marriage: 
+71% of young men in America do not want to get married 
+I guess feminism killed marriage. Kim 
+They can’t afford it. They are barely scraping by on their own. Ditto 
+Bingo. I live just as the fine article says: I get up in the morning, drive 28 miles to work, drive 28 miles home again, do some shopping, then spend the other three or four hours of my day watching TV or surfing the web. No time or money for anything else. MichaelfromTheEconomicCollapse 
+You probably burn up a lot of gas money too. I certainly don’t miss the days when I had very long commutes to work. 
+Michael ISA 
+Cant afford it, and who would want to be married today? Even the boomer generation is throwing in the towel. If Americans can evolve, which they cant, then its over with soon. You all are still stuck in the model of 60 years ago, if not more, and are dying on the inside. 
+Good riddance. Lars Lonte 
+I totally agree with you – just compare Women from Eastern Europa or even Asia with the average Women from the East Coast or Europe (especially (West-) Germany and Great Britain as most US like states and cultures….there is a reason, why Eastern European men usually do not want to marry women from western Germany…. King Mercury 
+Because American women have literally priced themselves out of the dating market! American women show that they want only guys with big, wide luxury sports Ferraris with all of the latest technology, gigantic mc mansions at least 5 times the size of the Home Alone house, three quarter million dollar or higher incomes, a growing number of them are even going for gangsters and thugs that get that kind of luxury through violent crime and illegal drugs. Jonathan 
+Women are uncooperative, don’t care, too busy, incompetent at love and domestic life and think it’s cool to emotionally, psychologically, financially, and in every way abuse men and never receive any reciprocation for their bad behavior, nor offer any reciprocation for men’s gifts. The egomania in women has exploded, and the genie can no longer fit in the bottle. rwinkel 
+It’s a no brainer. Lookup “hisanic paradox” on wikipedia. The abuse of infants in this country is an important factor in the rise of sociopathy and broken families. Infants imprint just like every other mammal on the planet, and American obstetrics is unique in its disregard for children’s dignity and human rights. P.F. 
+America is in this state because it has turned to sin rather than YAHWEH’S HOLY LAW. Only in our LORD JESUS/YESHUA do we find fulfillment, peace, and joy. When people are filled with joy they share truth and love–when people are moaning miserably inside they become cold and detached. You can’t depend on people to bring you happiness first—you have to seek JESUS/YESHUA who teaches us how to love one another the right way, and then, and only then, will people know joy. america depends on itself to create its own happiness and you’re seeing the negative effects. Back in the 1950’s Biblical values were held strongly in the homes. That’s why you see your grandparents who were married during that time either still alive and married and buried next to each other. What you’ll see in the coming years are old ladies and men wondering around alone who are not married and who will be buried in single graves while the children carry on the negative tradition of their failed ways. Way to go america, you’re doing just fine. David McElroy 
+Sad, but true, P.F. If it weren’t for hope in Jesus, there’d be no hope at all! MichaelfromTheEconomicCollapse 
+Michael David McElroy 
+As the oldest of 12 children from an Irish father who stayed married to our mother, I can testify as to the merciless bombardments of anti-family messages delivered to us. My mother was urged to abort many of my siblings. Teachers and other “counselors” urged us not to spend so much time together, as we were “clannish”. I fell for the encouragement to go to college and make something of myself and “get ahead” before marriage and children. Even our church was discouraging, openly saying we took too much pew space and gave too little money. (Even though we physically labored to help build the building!) I went to college, became a journalist and, after a disasterous cohabitation I thought would lead to marriage, eventually a chaplain. But I also ended up an old bachelor who thought he would have a wife and grandkids by now. My computer is my companion! CollGen2 
+You are a wonderful person. Your parent’s stuck together. That is the way God’s original design was. Your writing touched my heart today, thank you! All things will work out for good to those who LOVE God and are called according to HIS purpose. HE created each one of us and He also beckons us. He put an end to sin by being the perfect sacrifice on that cross. He beckoned me and I did it my way…..til trouble hit! I have a husband, 3 children and 4 grandchildren. I am alone most of the time at home, answering the phone for my small business. But, most of the time, I am immersing myself in the King James Bible and fellowshipping with my Father. He is the only one who will never leave me nor forsake me. How do I know that? I was in a coma many years ago when He beckoned me. I have tried to do things the “me” way but every road was a disaster until I surrendered my life to Him! The suffering I go through here is nothing compared to the GLORY that awaits me.”! Tim 
+There are good, faithful men out there who want a family. David McElroy 
+I’m with Tim, I was one of those guys who wanted to be a faithful husband and father. But I made the mistake of being smitten with a conniving woman who had no maternal domestic interests, being the “modern” sort. Jenn 
+I’m sorry that happened to you. Not all of us women are that way, but many of them seem to be these days. :-( Aston Martin 
+Modern westernized women are victims of the you-know-who….research who founded and promoted the femaleist movement and the truth shall make you afraid while you struggle to set free of the international bankers. SafetyViking 
+Good. Why buy the book when there’s a library in town? godozo 
+Ugly analogy. Knowledge is meant to be shared, women…not. Even the Founding Fathers and many of the old-school Robber Barons would agree (Carnegie anyone? He funded a nation’s worth of libraries.). 
+Try “Why buy the cow when the milk is free?”. Lifelong Mates (both male and female) ARE a limited resource, and like milk is worth paying for to keep (or keep the flow coming, depending on the item). wombleranger 
+I don’t like to be the one to say this but….if you remove spirituality and morals from a society you end up with the western world. America isn’t the only western power suffering this condition come to Canada where anyone with a problem gets a Prozac prescription and it’s free!!! We would be wise to remember the former Soviet Union and it’s devastation of the churches and religions. Now we must ask ourselves are we staring to become a communist nation? To quote William Penn ” .Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants”-certainly is food for thought! A lonely mind is a dangerous mind. Eileen Kuch 
+Very well put, wombleranger. Indeed, if you remove spirituality and morals from a society, that society starts to fragment. Just look at America today. It’s barely recognizable as the God-fearing nation it used to be. 
+I don’t know about your Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, but Barack Obama is the worst Presidents we ever had. He’s hell-bent on destroying the old America and turning it into a USSA, a near image of the early 20th Century USSR, where Orthodox Christian Churches were devastated and the religion driven underground. 
+Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants – William Penn 
+Great quote, too. wombleranger 
+Thanks Eileen. It’s comforting to see there are still moral people in this world, now we just need to wake-up the good souls from the deep sleep. It’s an uphill battle to be sure, but as long as i breath i will never forsake my dignity, morals and most of all my God. nilro 
+Too many nut cases out there, Animals are a better bet. Truman Golden",FAKE
+1440,John Kasich wooing Iowans mostly from New Hampshire,"John Kasich was killing it with these Iowa voters.
+
+He bantered with Larry, a Coralville voter, about the University of Iowa's hot hoops team. Iowa had better take advantage of Ohio State University, he said. ""Our basketball team is down this year.""
+
+Kasich’s signature down-home small talk over, Larry asked the Republican presidential candidate if he supports the Renewable Fuel Standard’s requirement that gas contain a certain amount of ethanol, much of it made from Iowa corn. Kasich supports the existing law.
+
+“You keep going,” Larry told Kasich, calling him ""Johnny."" “If you’re ever in the great state of Iowa and you’re close, we’ll come and wave to ya.”
+
+That’s right: Kasich was talking to Larry, and more than 12,000 other Iowa voters, in a telephone town-hall meeting Thursday night. Kasich was calling from the other early-voting state: New Hampshire.
+
+Kasich is polling at just less than 3% in Iowa ahead of the Feb. 1 caucuses, putting him in ninth, according to the RealClearPolitics rolling average of recent polls. Talk among the Kasich team of a possible top-five finish has faded.
+
+While other candidates have swarmed Iowa this month, Kasich has appeared just twice: Jan. 4 in West Des Moines and Jan. 10 in Council Bluffs. He plans Iowa visits this week in the Quad Cities, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, but he's not scheduled to be in Iowa on caucus day.
+
+Instead, he’s taking his town-hall game in person to New Hampshire. Ahead of the Feb. 9 primary, he's in a tight battle with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for second place. Finishing just behind poll-leading Donald Trump, he hopes, could propel him to prominence among establishment Republicans leery of Trump and Cruz, who are topping national surveys.
+
+His approach, Kasich and his advisers say, has its roots in reality: It’s next to impossible to win both contests, so they're focusing on the state where they have the best shot. The same candidate has won both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary only once in the last seven contested GOP elections: 1976, the first year Iowa Republicans kicked off the nation’s voting.
+
+“I wish I had more time for Iowa,” Kasich said in an interview Wednesday on his campaign bus in New Hampshire. “When we go, we get such good response, so it’s tempting to keep going back. It’s time management. It’s nothing against the folks in Iowa.”
+
+The Iowa tele-town halls — Kasich has held three — have helped some. On Thursday night, people dropped in and out of the conversation, with as many as 4,375 participants at any time, data from the vendor show. The average participant spent a whopping 32 minutes on the hour-long call, up from 15 minutes and eight minutes in the previous calls. Some Iowans, at least, are interested in Kasich.
+
+He told participants on the phone call that he’d appreciate any boost he can get from their caucus votes.
+
+What about caucusgoers who worry about “throwing away” their votes on a low-polling candidate?
+
+“I vote for the person that I like. I don’t worry about throwing away my vote. I vote for the person who can do a good job,” Kasich said in the interview.
+
+In the tele-town halls, Iowans get a taste of the same Kasich they’d see in person — minus the teal puffy coat he’s been wearing this winter, the national debt ticker that decorates his town-hall meetings and the blue bus carting him through the New Hampshire snow.
+
+With Kasich, voters get an hour of folksy explanations of complicated policies, plus exhortations to take care of each other, seek a personal purpose, become part of something bigger than themselves.
+
+He also makes jokes that make fun of audience members, or himself, or the presidential process. He drops names. (He’s friends with John McCain, who twice won the New Hampshire primaries. He got Leonardo DiCaprio’s autograph for his daughters at a restaurant this month.)
+
+He sometimes interrupts questioners or finishes their queries for them.
+
+“My mind works very fast, you know, and there’s things that they say that trigger something that I can’t wait to tell them,” he said in the interview. “I’m really not trying to cut anybody off, and I’m certainly not trying to show them any disrespect, but — can’t we just kind of get to it? I’m just bursting to tell them.”
+
+Rushad Thomas walked right into a Kasich joke Monday night at a town hall in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
+
+“I think immigration is a good thing, because our population is getting very old-people heavy,” Thomas, 26, said to the audience, which was also very “old-people heavy,” since the event was at a senior center.
+
+Then, Thomas launched into his question:
+
+Kasich almost never travels with his wife, Karen, and 16-year-old twin daughters, Reese and Emma. He says he wants to be careful how much exposure the twins receive.
+
+And although he has women working on his campaign — his campaign manager is Beth Hansen, his former gubernatorial chief of staff — his traveling staff and advisers are all men.
+
+“Sometimes this bus is like being in a fraternity house, you know?” Kasich said in the interview. “I would rather have a situation where we could bring more women in, but on this bus, it’s just guys, you know? It’s not ideal. But there’s only a couple of people that I talk to really, really seriously, and Beth is one of them.”
+
+Kasich’s family joined him Monday and Tuesday in New Hampshire. His daughters told voters Kasich was the most loving, caring and experienced GOP candidate — and “the only one I’d feel comfortable with,” Reese said.
+
+Once, in Lebanon, Kasich teased Reese for wanting to attend college at an art school in London.
+
+“What kind of school is that?” he said, to chuckles. After some back and forth, she finally agreed to give him a hug. “If I was making fun of you, I’m sorry,” he said. “But I wasn’t. We all need to laugh at ourselves.”
+
+It wasn’t his finest parenting moment. So he did what parents do. “She didn’t like that, and I actually had to apologize to her,” he said in the interview.
+
+Without his daughters on the campaign trail, Kasich lights up whenever he sees a child. He read a Thomas the Tank Engine book to a family of toddlers in the middle of a town-hall meeting, asking the children what noise a cow makes.
+
+“You said it like a goat!” a voter shouted.
+
+New Hampshire voters who see Kasich often say they believe he’ll “get things done” in Washington, D.C. They cite his down-home style and his blue-collar upbringing.
+
+“I know he’s not in the top three” nationally, said Paul Plater, a 67-year-old from Hillsboro who is retired from the Army Corps of Engineers. “He’d get my vote. He’s going to be up there in the top three by the end.”
+
+On the tele-town hall Thursday, political director Jeff Polesovsky asked the Iowa callers: Would you consider caucusing for Kasich?
+
+Press 1, he said, if he’s your first choice. Press 2 to say I’m considering him. Press 3 for no. Press 4 if you’re undecided.
+
+“How about 5 for: ‘What, are you out of your mind?’ ” Kasich cracked. “You gotta have a little fun, folks. Everything is not a root canal!”",REAL
+7497,"Syrian War Report – November 9, 2016: Russian Navy Is Ready to Strike Terrorists in Aleppo","Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
+9274,The #1 Reason Why People Are Voting for Trump,"The #1 Reason Why People Are Voting for Trump 
+Can Trump’s candidacy be saved? The American Middle Class better hope so. 
+Trump is not a politician. He is not terribly well-spoken, for a politician. Yet, he has turned the globalists upside down as they are in an absolute panic. 
+Why are people voting for Donald Trump? The answers lie inside this video.",FAKE
+4684,Why Trump's talk of a rigged vote is so dangerous,"The Republican presidential nominee's claim that the election is being rigged against him represents the most outlandish moment yet in a campaign devoted to dismantling political norms.
+
+Trump might not be the first candidate to feel nefarious forces are moving to keep him from the White House -- presidential elections have occasionally been disputed after votes are counted and have often been marred by accusations of dark instruments of fraud, such as the dead casting votes.
+
+But Trump's claim three weeks before Election Day -- as many voters are already going to the polls -- that the race is being being deliberately stacked against him by a fearful political establishment flies in the face of historical precedent. And should he lose, it threatens the legitimacy of those left to govern after the most anarchic election in modern history.
+
+""Remember, we are competing in a rigged election,"" Trump said at a Wisconsin rally Monday night. ""They even want to try and rig the election at the polling booths, where so many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common.""
+
+His accusations alone, experts say, could inflict long-standing damage on the US political system itself by eroding trust in the probity of the electoral process.
+
+Ever since a weary George Washington rode home to Mount Vernon in 1797, American democracy has rested on a cherished principle: the transfer of power from an outgoing president to a successor widely seen as legitimate.
+
+""The most important thing in the system is that the winners win and the losers lose,"" said Mark Braden, former chief counsel of the Republican National Committee. ""Almost as important as that is that the rational people that support the loser believes that the winner won.""
+
+One of Trump's GOP primary rivals, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, rejected Trump's claims that the election is being ""rigged.""
+
+Trump's accusations come as his campaign slips further behind Democrat Hillary Clinton three weeks from Election Day, prompting him to deal in ever more conspiratorial claims that shield him from culpability in his own fate. And there is every sign that his most loyal supporters accept his warnings that a ""horror show"" is taking place and that the election could be ""stolen.""
+
+History has seen accusations of election-swaying before, from John F. Kennedy's henchmen allegedly cheating Richard Nixon out of the presidency in 1960 to the infamous hanging chads of the Florida recount in 2000. But Trump's repeated claims that the election is already being rigged are the electoral equivalent of the nuclear option.
+
+Essentially, he is saying in advance that the election is illegitimate rather than challenging the results after signs of wrongdoing once the votes are counted.
+
+""History is replete with illegal things going on during elections, but at this point in the 21st Century, to make the grandiose statement like Trump is -- that the election is rigged is bogus -- it is anti-democratic spirit, it is anti-American at its core,"" said CNN historian Douglas Brinkley from Rice University on CNN's ""New Day"" on Monday.
+
+Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted told CNN's Carol Costello on Monday that his state makes it easy to vote but hard to cheat.
+
+""I can assure Donald Trump that I am in charge of elections in Ohio, and they're not going to be rigged. I'll make sure of that,"" Husted said.
+
+But Trump has been long been warning that the election could be stacked against him.
+
+He claimed that the Republican primary race could be rigged against him, and used the idea that he and his followers were being persecuted by the political establishment as a device to motivate his political base.
+
+He has returned to the theme of a venomous Washington political establishment rigging the vote on and off for weeks. He claimed in West Palm Beach on Thursday that the media was in lock-step with Clinton's campaign as part of a global conspiracy by fearful elites to make her president.
+
+But his accusations hit a new intensity late last week and over the weekend.
+
+""The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD"" Trump tweeted on Sunday.
+
+""Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!"" Trump added on Monday.
+
+Trump has also raised doubts about the integrity of the election in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, and has several times urged supporters to show up at polling places to ensure no fraud is perpetrated -- an order that appears to risk voter intimidation.
+
+But Trump ally Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, said on CNN's ""State of the Union"" on Sunday that he would have to be a ""moron"" to assume that there would be no electoral fraud in Democratic-run cities like Philadelphia and Chicago.
+
+Yet there's no actual evidence that Trump's claims about 2016 are true, and the billionaire has certainly not provided any suggesting a massive fraud -- unknown in US history -- is under way.
+
+""We have had corruption in the 19th century ... there have been controversies when elections were contested and decided in Congress, such as in 1824,"" said Princeton University history professor Julian Zelizer, referring to a vote ultimately decided by the House of Representatives. The presidency was awarded to John Quincy Adams after none of the four candidates won a majority of the electoral votes.
+
+""But it is virtually impossible in 2016 to rig an entire election,"" Zelizer said. ""It is decentralized, it's fragmented, and there is very little evidence that this could happen.""
+
+Several recent academic and government studies have also shown infinitesimal levels of electoral fraud, despite claims by Republicans that it is widespread -- an effort liberals say is part of a widespread campaign to restrict poll access that could disproportionately disqualify minority voters who tend to back Democrats.
+
+Meanwhile, pressure is rising on key Republicans to repudiate Trump's claims.
+
+House Speaker Paul Ryan released a statement through a spokeswoman on Saturday saying that he is fully confident ""the states will carry out this election with integrity.""
+
+But neither Ryan, nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have spoken out in person.
+
+For fraud to take place, Republican officials who are in charge of the voting systems in swing states like Ohio, Florida, Iowa and North Carolina would have to turn a blind eye towards conduct designed to keep their own party nominee from the presidency -- or participate in doing so.
+
+Trump's own running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, appeared to split with his partner on Sunday. ""We will absolutely accept the results of the election,"" he said on NBC's ""Meet the Press.""
+
+On Monday, however, he suggested that irregularities were a real problem and embraced Trump's notion that the media elite are an extension of the Clinton campaign and therefore also part of the hoodwinking.
+
+Given that Trump has branded himself in politics, business and life as the ultimate winner, the prospect of a crushing defeat in November on the grandest stage must be a bitter one. So pre-spinning a possible defeat may represent a face-saving way out.
+
+""He is hedging himself against a loss: If he does lose, he can say that is a fraud,"" said Jessica Lavariega-Monforti, chair of the Department of Politics at Pace University, New York.
+
+He might also think a close election is likely and is laying the groundwork for a legal challenge.
+
+Much now depends on whether Trump pulls off a come-from-behind victory, in which case he will presumably withdraw his accusations of fraud, or claims that a loss is the product of widespread electoral fraud -- charges that could prompt many Americans to view a Clinton presidency as illegitimate.
+
+But should he have second thoughts and choose to fall into line with historical precedent in the dying moments of his campaign, he has plenty of examples to look to.
+
+In 1960, Nixon chose not to challenge the result even though some advisors wanted him to, reasoning that he could damage his own political future and that the fate of the nation was on the line.
+
+""I want Senator Kennedy to know ... and I want all of you to know, that certainly if this trend does continue, and he does become our next president, that he will have my wholehearted support,"" Nixon told supporters on election night.
+
+In 2000, after the Supreme Court closed off his last hope of claiming Florida and a majority of Electoral College votes after a bitter, weeks-long fight, Vice President Al Gore conceded to George W. Bush with grace.
+
+""Almost a century and a half ago, Sen. Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, 'Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I'm with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.' "" Gore said.
+
+""Well, in that same spirit, I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country,"" Gore said.
+
+The question now, after a deeply rancorous election that has cleaved partisan divides ever deeper, is whether either Trump or Clinton could summon those words about each other three weeks from Tuesday.",REAL
+8477,Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?,"Home This Month Popular Is Western Civilization Worth Saving? Is Western Civilization Worth Saving? Beau Albrecht 
+My father was a high-ranking student radical poobah and still thinks Castro is the bees' knees. Although this makes me technically a red diaper baby, I rejected all that baloney early on. These days, I write stories - mostly comedy science fiction - as well as maintain a blog mainly about dating advice, political commentary, and my writing projects. November 4, 2016 Politics 
+By 2050, it’s predicted the USA will no longer have a white majority, which in 1960 was 90%. For this, we can thank Ted Kennedy’s Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which the politicians swore up and down wouldn’t change the American ethnic composition. In Europe, due to declining native birth rates and mass immigration , this will eventually come to pass for several other nations later this century, all according to the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan . The leftists, with their really big hearts , think all this will be wonderful. 
+Globalism and cultural Marxism are the driving forces behind population replacement policies, but unawareness and apathy are almost as much of a problem . Some think that if Western civilization will go down the toilet, they should just “go with the flow” and enjoy the ride all the way down the tubes. Thanks to media propaganda and educational indoctrination, they have no idea that their own civilization is worth anything, and don’t have the slightest concern for their own posterity. Still, they’re pretty naive to believe that things can’t turn far worse within their own lifetimes. Why this is bad (for those who need reminding) In the future, is this going to get better, or worse? 
+If trends continue unabated, the founding peoples will lose control over their destiny. History shows that when this happens, the results are not good. Pillaging and plundering is a more genteel affair in modern times (though not always ) but you’re still not going to like it. Will your new rulers say, “Since things have changed so much, how about we abolish Affirmative Action and set-asides to show we’ve transcended race?” Don’t count on it. More likely, they’ll double down on these preferential treatment programs, and come up with new ones, and you will have no chance to block the spoils systems. 
+That’s just the beginning, too. The “ diversification ” of cities for the last several decades has been bad—Detroit, need I say more?—and riots really are getting out of hand. Now imagine what it will be like when you have no hope of influencing things like Section 8 housing moving into your neighborhood, or if you’ll get any real police protection. 
+This is what we’re facing if the Aztlán crowd takes over the Southwest, the community agitators get in charge of the big cities, and together their constituency has an electoral majority controlling the Federal government. (Also remember that they’ve been told since the 1960s that you’re evil oppressors responsible for all their problems.) Parts of “flyover country” might be able to hold out for a while, but nothing short of forming their own country will stop the advance of “progress”. If it were ever to come to secession, they’ll be surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned. Let’s keep things from getting to that point. Is there any hope? “Refugees” have taken on the characteristics of invaders 
+I’ve painted a grim picture, but I have to be realistic. As for what will happen later, things only look worse; Jean Raspail’s Camp Of The Saints describes a bleak future like that. This isn’t just the USA on the line, but Western Europe too, and perhaps Eastern Europe and Australia in time. If we want to keep from disappearing into the endless night, the time to act is now. 
+Sometimes, with luck, sovereignty can be regained: for example, the Spanish Reconquista, or the nations of the Balkans rising after a few centuries under the Turkish yoke. However, the results aren’t guaranteed; some nations may never recover. In these examples, the “dhimmis” were subjugated under military occupation, but they were not outnumbered in their own lands. The founding populations must not allow themselves to be dispossessed in their own countries in the first place. 
+Granted, the dark forces of globalism are very powerful—and they’d like us to think they’re invincible—but they must be stopped. They also want you to think they’re smarter than you and know what’s good for you . (If they’d simply focus on getting richer, and cease their social engineering, they’d have far less to answer for.) Not only has our political establishment failed us, they’re working against the public . It won’t be easy, but we must reassert control over our destiny. Do we deserve to be dispossessed? Brainwashed SJWs welcoming their own destruction 
+Some will even say—often with haughty condescension—that if we lose our countries, then we deserve this fate. Ignoring for a moment the sheer snottiness, as well as the “might makes right” argument incongruent with the usual rhetoric of fairness by the “prepare to be assimilated, resistance is futile” crowd, let’s consider the following facts: In the 1920s, a Communist propaganda campaign was launched in the Western world. In the 1930s, this mutated into cultural Marxism and kicked into high gear during the 1960s. Most people have no idea of the scope of it all, or where things like political correctness came from. Only senior citizens remember what it was like living in a fairly normal country. Even fewer never grew up exposed to this propaganda in one form or another. The rest of us have been indoctrinated from an early age by the mass media and educational establishment. The Western political tradition lately is about openness and democracy. For this reason, we don’t conduct political change by torches and pitchforks these days. We play fair, even if our enemies often don’t . Further, political correctness encourages the “disadvantaged” to have solidarity, but vilifies the same in the majority. This is one reason why we’re on the defensive, and (for now) usually losing. Most people only have a vague idea about the extent of managed democracy and sheer corruption. Those against population replacement policies mostly put their faith in the mainstream opposition parties, not realizing that they’ve sold out to deep-pockets globalists too. “Mainstream” conservatism is a controlled opposition , providing token resistance at best. 
+So with that extent of treachery, disinformation, limited options for resistance, and managed democracy, it’s grotesquely dishonest for the defeatists to tell us that we’re losing a fair fight! As for their opinion that we should just give up, I have one word: No. 
+Whenever you hear the defeatists crowing that this is inevitable or that we “deserve” it, remember that they want to demoralize you and anyone else listening. (The same goes for when they tell you that loving your people and wanting your posterity to survive is “hatred”.) Suppose someone is losing his home by a devious swindle, orchestrated by crooks widely lauded for their fairness, caring, and honesty. It would be the height of arrogance to tell the defrauded that he deserved it and should shut up about it and let it happen. The depopulation and population replacement agenda “First, the EU has to accept at least a million asylum-seekers annually for the foreseeable future… The EU should provide 15,000 euros ($16,800) per asylum-seeker for each of the first two years to help cover housing, health-care and education costs—and to make accepting refugees more appealing to member states.” 
+Don’t be fooled: this isn’t happening because some vague, invisible force called “progress” is pushing things inevitably in this direction. No, it’s being actively promoted by globalist interests that have adopted cultural Marxism as a means of control. 
+Why are native fertility rates declining below replacement level? The major factors are: Women are encouraged to spend their 20s partying and their 30s trying to get rich in a cube farm. Encouraging them to to make starting a family last priority often leaves them very unhappy over the long term, and many will miss the chance to begin. Good economy tends to be positively correlated with higher fertility rates. During recessions, births go down. The implications are obvious. If less tax money was taken from working citizens for costly social services programs and spit-in-your-eye wars, then they’d be able to afford more children. Sending the guilty to prison (instead of bailing them out) when they crash the economy might be a good indirect measure too. About a third of American babies conceived end up aborted . (Thanks, feminism!) The same leftists who think this is wonderful will scream bloody murder whenever a savage killer on Death Row is executed, but all that’s another matter. 
+Because of declining fertility rates, the globalists tell us that we must open the floodgates of Third World immigration to prop up the population and support the aging citizens. So they’ve fed us poison, and to soothe the symptoms, they want to feed us another kind of poison. To hell with that! 
+Granted, keeping Social Security going in the USA will be a challenge. Still, it’s pretty uncertain that newly-arriving immigrants—if they become the majority—will be able or willing to support millions of elderly “gringos”. As for future European retirees, will they be well cared for by “refugees” from Africa and the Middle East? The way things are now, many of them prefer rioting , looting, and collecting welfare over working. So these are going to be the people propping up the European retirement programs? 
+Dispossession is inevitable only if we let it happen. For now, we must educate the rest of the public about what’s going on, and convince them that their future is worth saving and their posterity is worth preserving. Once we’ve achieved critical mass, we can confront the political establishment and get the government to start working for us rather than against us What’s in it for us? Whenever someone writes that Western civilization is nothing but injustice and oppression, they’re using technology we invented to complain about us. 
+It’s fashionable—especially in academia—to bash Western civilization. We’re not perfect, but nobody else is either. The truth is that we’re a creative, dynamic, and industrious people. Some of us are under the impression that we don’t have any culture (only other people do) but that’s mistaken. I could spend all day listing our major artists, composers, poets, philosophers, writers, theologians, and the like, but I only would scratch the surface. 
+Other cultures have made notable contributions—particularly East Asia and the Middle East—but the fact is that the majority of science and technology that makes life comfortable today originated in the Western world. Electricity, motorized transportation, refrigeration, telecommunications, computers (need I go on)? Yep, that was us. We shared our medical advances with the rest of the world, increasing longevity and quality of life around the globe. Whether the world’s future looks more like Star Trek or more like Blade Runner may have a lot to do with whether or not our people survive. 
+Finally, most of us are going to live out our lives in our native countries. Do we want them to stay the same nations we grew up in? Some time in the future, today’s youth will be running the show while we’re elderly. What kind of a place do we want it to be by then? Western civilization is great; let’s keep it going.",FAKE
+3184,Secretive GOP Group Targets Trump for Destruction,A woman who got fired after two days of working with Scott Walker - a wacko - now trying to raise funds to fight me.,REAL
+2887,The Fantasy of a Better Iran Deal,"Some are insisting on a “better deal” than the framework nuclear agreement reached with Iran on April 2. But the idea of a better deal is a chimera, an illusory option, and it should not lull us into thinking there is another agreement to be had if only we were to bear down harder. The present agreement, which depends on important pieces to be resolved by the end of June, can substantially reduce the ability of Iran to develop a nuclear weapon over the next ten years or more and also creates a dynamic that could be a game changer in the combustible Middle East.
+
+Senator Mark Kirk has postponed a vote on the Iran sanctions bill he wrote with Senator Robert Menendez, possibly until June 30. This is a constructive step, avoiding an action that would undercut negotiations toward a final agreement. But we need to keep the sanctions issue in mind because it is inextricably intertwined with the same calls for a better deal emanating from people in Congress, Israel, and other critics. No one can argue that a better agreement wouldn’t be better—3,000 Iranian centrifuges is better than 5,000; a 20-year deal is better than 10. The tough question is: How do you get there? Putting aside what the Iranians might do in response to additional pressure—dig in deeper, speed up their program–and looking just at our side of the equation, the notion of a better deal is unachievable.
+
+Here is why. According to critics, seeking a better deal starts with increasing sanctions on Iran. If tough sanctions brought them to the table, tougher sanctions will bring them to their knees. At some point their economy will be in tatters from the intensified sanctions, and they will be forced to return to the bargaining table and agree to better deal. With a closer look, however, this scenario unravels.
+
+First, it is highly unlikely that even our allies in Europe would join us in further sanctions against Iran in the wake of a nuclear agreement they believe is sensible and positive. That is even truer for other countries—like India, Japan, South Korea and China—that were pulled into the existing sanctions regime quite unwillingly. The support of these countries for the oil sanctions in particular has been critical to the sanctions’ effectiveness. They will not willingly sign up for more.
+
+Second, if a deal falls through, it is likely that the existing multilateral sanctions regime will begin to crumble. As noted, countries like India and South Korea, who don’t feel threatened by an Iran nuclear weapon, will be only too happy to find a pretext to break out of the sanctions—perhaps tentatively at first but in a rush as others do. It will be hard to argue the rationale for sanctions, which, from the perspective of nearly every nation, will have achieved their purpose—bringing Iran to the table to negotiate serious limitations on its nuclear program.
+
+Indeed, the proponents of tougher sanctions to get a “better” deal have misunderstood the nature of the Iranian sanctions. The fact is that the United States does not own or control the multilateral sanctions regime. The effectiveness of the sanctions is based on how the international community views the perceived threat and therefore the legitimacy of coercive actions to stop it.
+
+Third, those who seek a better deal through tougher sanctions argue that we don’t necessarily need international support. The United States could unilaterally enact sanctions that have extraterritorial reach, as we already have done with a number of Congressional measures since 2010. The proposition is that we will to some degree deny foreign companies access to the larger, more important American market, if they choose to do business with Iran.
+
+However, the context has entirely changed since the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Act was passed in 2010. New extraterritorial sanctions would be directed against an Iran that has reached an agreement on its nuclear program with major world powers. The rest of the world generally detests our assertion of authority involving foreign companies in foreign countries. Here, for example, we would seek to close the U.S. market to Germany’s BMW if they sold cars to Iran or Japan’s Sony if it sold in Iran. If Congress imposed sanctions in spite of a nuclear agreement reached with Iran by major powers, the international community—except for a few countries—would believe those sanctions to be illegitimate. In this context, it is hard to imagine the U.S. government moving ahead with major sanctions proceedings against many of our friends and allies.
+
+So, as we discuss and debate the merits of this framework agreement, and a final agreement that may follow, let’s recognize that this is the agreement we will have—not some imagined alternative. In my judgment, if the next stage of negotiations succeeds, the framework that emerged this week lays the groundwork for a strong and effective agreement.
+
+The framework does not—nor by itself is it likely to—fundamentally alter the other threats Iran poses in the region, including its ongoing efforts to exert control in Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad and Sanaa, and its continuing threat to Israel. That is why it is important to embed this agreement in a regional strategy that bolsters concrete cooperation with our friends in the region and reassures them that we are there for the long haul. President Obama’s summit with regional partners at Camp David will be an important opportunity to look not only at the hot spots, but at the bigger picture.
+
+The Iran nuclear agreement is important not despite other troubles in the region but because of them. Each challenge would be more difficult and dangerous if Iran’s nuclear program was unconstrained and unmonitored, let alone if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon and spark others in the region to follow. Under the agreement that is emerging, we will have a high degree of confidence—as will others in the region—that Iran’s nuclear program is seriously constrained. Walling off the nuclear threat does not extinguish the fires that are burning in the region. But it does remove what would be the most combustible fuel.
+
+There is no second bite at this apple. This is a good deal. We should not be distracted by talk of a better one.
+
+Enacting new, tough sanctions in an effort to force Iran toward a “better” deal would mystify and alarm the rest of the world, isolating and weakening us. Such sanctions would crumble under their own weight —amounting to, as Shakespeare said, “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”",REAL
+2610,Netanyahu’s contempt for President Obama,"It would not surprise me if, at the next Republican National Convention, Benjamin Netanyahu took a seat in the delegates-from-abroad section. The Israeli leader has both allied and associated himself with congressional Republicans who differ with President Obama over whether to impose additional sanctions on Iran and who also — let’s not beat around the bush — hate his guts. Their foreign policy is actually a domestic one: to destroy the president.
+
+Whether this is political or personal — or a combination of the two — is beside the point. Whatever the case, when Netanyahu accepted John Boehner’s invitation to address a joint session of Congress in March, he did so without informing the White House. Boehner, too, bypassed the White House. As a result, Netanyahu will come and go and not meet with the president.
+
+Boehner insists that, as speaker of the House, he has the standing to issue an invitation to a foreign leader on his own. That’s debatable. He is, after all, elected by the Republican caucus, not by the full House and not, significantly, by the American people. He knew what this invitation would look like. This is high school stuff, a stunt unworthy of even Newt Gingrich.
+
+I stand with the president on this sanctions matter. Additional sanctions may drive the Iranians from the table. The Europeans may go with them. Let’s give the talks some more time.
+
+I stand with Netanyahu in worrying about a president who has been awfully twitchy in his foreign policy. His faux threat to take Syria to task if it used chemical weapons in its civil war — the famous “red line” — turned out to be a red-faced embarrassment. It has cost Obama much more than it cost Bashar al-Assad.
+
+But what concerns me most is how Netanyahu threatens to harm the bipartisan understanding and support of Israel. The prime minister has never been able to hide his disdain for Obama. In May 2011, he made Obama squirm before the TV cameras as he lectured him about Middle East matters in the Oval Office. It was, simply, no way to treat the president of the United States.
+
+Accepting Boehner’s invitation sent the same message of contempt. I know Netanyahu sees the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel, but that does not excuse his boorish manners. I am an ardent supporter of Israel, but I am also an American: Do not insult my president!
+
+My feelings, however, are immaterial. What matters above all is the possibility that support of Israel will become a partisan political issue in the United States. It may come as a surprise, but Zionism was once beloved by the American and European left. (The British Labour Party even supported transferring Palestinians out of what is now Israel — a policy that changed once Labour got to govern.) Now, though, the European left has abandoned Israel, adoring the Palestinian cause with a striking naivete.
+
+The American left is not quite as robustly anti-Israel, but the trend is unmistakable. Even some American Jews — especially the younger generation — are either cooler toward Israel or indifferent. The Holocaust has faded as an emotional rallying point, and with both an intermarriage rate well over 50 percent and a declining population, the American Jewish community is both contracting and, inevitably, losing clout. For many young Jews as well as non-Jews, Israel’s right-wing government is hardly attractive. It’s been many years since Harry Belafonte sang “Hava Nagila.”
+
+A generation of Americans who support gay rights, same-sex marriage and reproductive freedom and who fear global warming are going to wonder about an Israeli prime minister who embraces a speaker of the House who personifies all they loathe. Israel should not become yet another right-wing issue, joining such bizarre causes as the right to pollute the atmosphere or to turn millions of immigrants into fugitives.
+
+Going back to the very formation of the state, Israel has enjoyed deep bipartisan support in America — neither a Republican nor Democratic issue. There’s no mystery here. Israel is a democracy, a beleaguered one at that, whose creation is yet another desert miracle. Its cinematic virtues are manifest. It’s a great story.
+
+Now, though, some damage has been done. Netanyahu will come and speak to Congress and make his case — the one he has made time and time again — for additional sanctions on Iran. But if, in the end, action needs to be taken against Iran, Israel will need the support of all Americans. He has, with his impetuousness and contempt, made that harder to get.",REAL
+2288,Meet The Couples Fighting To Make Marriage Equality The Law Of The Land,"On April 28, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, named for Ohio resident Jim Obergefell, who wants to be listed as the surviving spouse on his husband's death certificate. Obergefell married his partner of 20 years, John Arthur, aboard a medical jet in 2013, while Arthur was suffering from ALS. Arthur passed away in October of that year, three months after the couple filed their lawsuit.
+
+""The decision to file suit -- I know from John's perspective -- it was a way for him to say, 'Thank you, Jim. You've given me 20 years. The past couple of years have been pretty awful with ALS, and this is something I can do to thank you, to protect you and to just let you know once again, how much I love you.' And I can think of no better reason to be going to the Supreme Court than to remember that and honor that,"" Obergefell said recently, during a moving speech at the Human Rights Campaign's headquarters.
+
+Obergefell is joined by several dozen other gay plaintiffs from a number of states who are fighting both to be able to marry the person they love and to have their marriage recognized in every state in the country.
+
+For Greg Bourke and Michael DeLeon, it began at Fauver Law Office, a small firm that operates out of a house in Louisville, Kentucky. In July 2013, the couple filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky to have their marriage recognized by the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Bourke and DeLeon wed in Canada in 2004, but have not been able to receive the same benefits that heterosexual married couples get in their state.
+
+Shannon Fauver and Dawn Elliott, the two attorneys who originally handled Bourke and DeLeon's case, said it was tough to find plaintiffs who were ready to face all the publicity that comes with such a prominent role. They said many were concerned about how the proceedings would affect their children and family members.
+
+""I thought it would be a whole lot easier to find people who were willing to be involved in the litigation,"" said Elliott. ""But we had to sell it to the plaintiffs in order for them to be involved in this.""
+
+As the cases became increasingly high-profile, more groups signed on to help win the right to marriage equality. In Kentucky, for example, the plaintiffs are now being represented not only by Fauver, but also by the Louisville firm of Clay Daniel Walton and Adams PLC, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.
+
+""The stories of these families, and others all across America, are the reason public opinion is changing so rapidly on marriage,"" said James Esseks, director of the ACLU's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and HIV Project. ""These are just regular parents who want the best for their kids. Marriage will help both them and their children.""
+
+Michigan's contribution to the Obergefell suit revolves around just one couple, April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse. Their 2012 lawsuit originally made no mention of gay marriage, and was instead aimed at changing state law so they could both be recognized as legal parents to their four adopted children. The couple only switched course after a federal judge invited them to expand their challenge to target the state constitution's ban on same-sex marriage.
+
+Dana Nessel, an attorney for the couple, said the judge's recommendation was just one of a series of surprises. For a small legal team with little funding, she said, the last three years have been tough, though ultimately rewarding.
+
+The Michigan case is unique both in the way it originated and because it was sent to a full trial, according to Jay Kaplan, staff attorney for the LGBT project at the Michigan chapter of the ACLU. He said that holding a trial gave Rowse and DeBoer's attorneys the opportunity to present expert testimony and cross-examine the defendants' witnesses.
+
+""This is the right time [for marriage equality] -- politically, socially, legally,"" said Laura Landenwich, an attorney with Clay Daniel Walton and Adams PLC, during a recent interview at the firm's office. ""Everything is in place for them to rule in our favor. And I will make the prediction that if we lose, that opinion will get reversed later on. It will be viewed at some point as a mistake.""",REAL
+412,GOP’s demonic new crusade: Right-wing zealots look for even crueler ways to treat the poor like garbage,"Happy Memorial Day! But if you’re in Wisconsin, and relying on food stamps, remember that Republicans don’t want you to have ketchup on your hamburger. They’d probably rather you didn’t have a hamburger at all, but Wisconsin farmers and ranchers have clout, and so proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program made room for Wisconsin products. But they still don’t want you to have “crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish.” Or ketchup. Or spaghetti sauce. Really.
+
+For now, that’s all grandstanding. SNAP is a federal program, and the Obama administration hasn’t allowed states to restrict food purchases that way. But that hasn’t stopped GOP legislators from trying. Maine and Missouri want to ban SNAP “junk food” purchases. Wisconsin and 16 other states are also trying to drug test recipients.
+
+And Wisconsin has nothing on Brownbackistan, I mean Kansas. The state has already outlawed the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program debit cards at a range of businesses, including movie theaters, college sports games (?) and cruise ships. (There goes the welfare cruise ship business!) Kansas TANF recipients also are unable to withdraw more than $25 a day from their accounts. That means to withdraw $100, they’ll pay five bank fees (since ATMs only dispense $20s). Banks win, the poor lose.
+
+All this is happening against the backdrop of GOP policy failure. We’ve had a 30-plus year experiment in Republican approaches to the problems of poverty and declining economic opportunity – and it’s turned out abysmally. Ronald Reagan convinced a lot of people that “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” so Democrats came together with Republicans and slashed the largest welfare program for families with children, first in the states, then federally. Bill Clinton signed the federal bill into law, thinking he could get the issue of the lazy poor behind him, and then concentrate on the supports low-wage workers might need to climb.
+
+Of course, Clinton never completed that part of his agenda; he got distracted by the GOP witch hunt known as impeachment. Republicans still didn’t want to make friends even after Clinton gave them punitive welfare reform; go figure.
+
+Then George W. Bush became president, and we got a lesson in the way tax cuts create jobs – as in, they don’t. In eight years of the Clinton administration, which raised top tax rates, 23 million jobs were created, compared with 3 million in the eight low-tax Bush years. It might be time to try a whole new approach to fighting poverty – raising the minimum wage; strengthening workers’ ability to bargain; investing in infrastructure to shore up our roads, bridges and rail system but also to create jobs; expanding access to college. Instead, red state GOP legislators are pushing ever crueler ways to treat the poor like garbage. Sam Brownback’s Kansas is becoming an ever more awful dystopia. It’s an absolute laboratory for tax-cutting, welfare-slashing schemes, and it’s circling the drain economically. Scott Walker is an amateur compared to Brownback, but he’s working hard to make sure Wisconsin ties Kansas for the most dysfunctional economy. The Wisconsin GOP’s bogus health claims for the SNAP cuts are belied, the Huffington Post observes, by the fact that the amended law now allows the purchase of any and all dairy products, thanks to the power of the state’s dairy lobby.  Theoretically, a SNAP recipient could spent the whole month’s allotment on “Dippin’ Dots,” one legislator notes. “The ‘ice cream of the future’ is now on the list of what’s acceptable to pay for, but a bottle of ketchup is not,” he noted. But of course this isn’t about the keeping the poor healthy; it’s about punishing them. The fact that the cuts almost certainly won’t be enacted makes them more cynical, in a way. This is how you tell the Kochs, and scared white people, that the slackers and moochers are being punished. It accomplishes nothing, but it’s good politically. That’s still the core premise of Republican politics, and it will remain so through the 2016 election, at least.",REAL
+6068,Candace Cameron Bure Dishes on the Main Conservative Issue Driving Her to the Polls,"Getty - Tibrina Hobson 
+Candace Cameron Bure has never been shy about voicing her opinions on social and political issues — a trait that has made her an exceptionally good fit at ABC's “The View,” as she stood out in contrast to the decidedly liberal viewpoints of many of her co-hosts. 
+But aside from praying (with Whoopi, no less) for the election cycle to be over soon: A video posted by Candace Cameron Bure (@candacecbure) on Oct 26, 2016 at 9:35am PDT 
+Bure has kept her 2016 voting plans under her hat, noting earlier this summer that although she wasn't exactly thrilled with the remaining choices, she absolutely planned to vote: 
+""I've talked about how conflicted I am. I'm not happy with the ultimate choices that we're left with, but I'm still going to go out there and vote because I do believe that it's my right. And I think there are other things we have to consider. 
+And then there's the congressional power. There's also the seats in Congress. And I think a lot of people who don't show up to vote for the president then forget that there's all these other people we get to vote into Congress. So you're giving up so much just because you don't like the candidate choices."" 
+She did reveal the issue that has her most concerned this election cycle , however, in a recent podcast with “The Church Boys”: 
+""The biggest thing for me is the Supreme Court justices… because, no matter who wins this election, it’s four years, maybe eight, if they’re reelected, but that’s the maximum. 
+The Supreme Court justice seats will be until those people die — and that could be a very long time."" 
+A number of Americans share Bure's concern, noting the age of several sitting justices. 
+According to ballotpedia , with the increasing likelihood that Justice Scalia's seat will remain empty into the next president's term, the next president could potentially appoint four justices: 
+“The average age at which a Supreme Court justice retires is 78.7 years old. Justice Kennedy will be 80 when the next president takes office, Justice Ginsburg will be 83, and Justice Breyer will be 78.” 
+Bure explained her concern by noting that she has spent time recently studying the “bigger picture” and the principles outlined by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution: 
+“If we get too far away from what our Founding Fathers wrote up for us in how this country will be different from all other ones, then we will lose it.” 
+But in order to hold on to what we have, Bure says that it's not about putting faith in Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton — or any candidate, for that matter. 
+Instead, she says her faith remains unshakable in Jesus Christ, and that she will pray for the wisdom of whomever wins the election. ",FAKE
+1673,Ben Carson vs. Ben Carson,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+1458,"Carson, GOP White House candidates critical of Obama’s Syria plan for 50 Special Ops troops","Republican White House candidates on Sunday criticized President Obama’s plan to deploy 50 Special Operations troops in Syria to fight the Islamic State terror group.
+
+“Sending 50 American Special Forces into Syria in the eyes of ISIL shows that Obama is not all in,” candidate and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It is a sign of weakness to ISIL. They have sized Obama up and they think he's weak.”
+
+Graham, a defense hawk and Armed Services Committee member, argued that such a small group will have “no chance of winning” the fight to destroy the Islamic State, whose recent and unexpected rise has resulted in the militant group occupying large swatches of Iraq and Syria.
+
+He downplayed the possibility of a clash between U.S. forces and Russian forces in Syria, sent to protect the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
+
+“There may be some potential,” said Graham, who has advocated for sending more troops to the region to battle the Islamic State. “But I see Russia and Iran mopping the floor with Obama ... . Russia is all in with Iran to support Assad.”
+
+The White House’s announcement Friday to deploy the non-combat troops comes roughly two years after Obama vowed that he would not put “American boots on the ground in Syria.""
+
+White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest argued the move is not a change in strategy, only an “intensification” of the president’s plan to help local forces fight the terror group.
+
+Ben Carson, another GOP presidential candidate, said Sunday that he supports Obama's plan in part but that it fails to go far enough.
+
+“I think that’s a move in the right direction ... certainly in terms of helping to guide what the Air Force is doing,” he told ABC’s “This Week.” “But I think that that's only a small part of it. We need to have a much bigger plan when it comes to battling the global jihadist because they have big ideals.”
+
+Carson, a first-time candidate, said that if elected he would address Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts in Syria and that the United States should establish a “no-fly” zone in the region.
+
+This is not the first criticism of Obama’s most recent decision.
+
+On Saturday, GOP contender Donald Trump also suggested the move was a half-measure.
+
+""I think we have a president who just doesn't know what he's doing,"" Trump told CNN before a campaign stop in Norfolk, Va. “You either do it or you don't do it.”
+
+However, Trump, also a first-time candidate, declined to say whether he would deploy more troops to Syria.",REAL
+9989,No Account for You,"  
+Ed wasn’t excited about his job. He worked for a large automotive manufacturer. This is the kind of industry that might invest heavily into robots and research and development, but when it comes to managing their supply chain and accounts receivable, their IT infrastructure was frozen in amber circa 1974. 
+The pay was fine, but the work was frustrating. Things like “Code reviews” and “refactoring” were viewed as “wastes of time” or “developers playing with toys”. Unit tests were a luxury for “lazy” developers- good developers should just be writing code that works. If the work you’re doing isn’t directly involved in getting cars built and shipped, you shouldn’t be doing it. 
+Ed was looking to get out of the company, and while he kept sending out resumes, he found more excuses to get away from his desk by taking smoke breaks with Mitchell. Mitchell was a lifer- he joined the company back when pensions were a thing, and was close enough to retirement that he just needed to keep his head down and stay the course to check out with a nice nest-egg. “But you,” he’d tell Ed, “you’ve gotta get out of here. You’re young. You shouldn’t be wasting your time here.” 
+After one of those smoke breaks, Ed returned to his desk to see Pilar waiting for him. Pilar was their summer intern, a junior in college. She mostly handled “manual reporting”, which was a euphemism for “we don’t actually have a reporting system for this data set, so we have an intern run SQL queries against production and then copy/paste the results into a spreadsheet.” Yes, there were still manual reports because none of the SBUs wanted to pay to automate them. 
+“I’ve got a new report,” she said, “and it’s on something called SCORDBE? You wouldn’t know how I get access, would you?” 
+Ed didn’t know. At best, he might have seen the acronym someplace on a PowerPoint during a quarterly meeting once. “No, but has anyone shown you the Internal Apps Sheet?” He was referencing a spreadsheet used to track support contacts for different applications. He CTRL+F-ed to the entry for SCORDBE. “Oh, no…” 
+The SCORDBE database was administered by Yev “Ticket-Nazi” Kassem. He automatically closed any tickets for changing the database- even for production releases. Any ticket requesting access to the database, for any reason, received a simple reply: “NO ACCOUNT FOR YOU.” He used IP whitelists to prevent connections from unapproved devices. While it probably was good for security, that was an afterthought. Yev had a small bit of power, and he wanted to make sure that he held onto it. 
+Still, that was just the database side. There was an application on top of that database. He scrolled across the spreadsheet, past the cloumns for “Approving Manager”, “SBU Contact”, “SBU Backup Contact”, “SBU Backup Bakcup Contact” and found “IT Development Contact”. It was Mitchell. 
+“I don’t think you’ll get very far with the database,” Ed said. “But maybe Mitchell can help?” 
+Pilar went off to visit Mitchell, and Ed got back to his regular work. A half hour later, Mitchell CCed him on an email to Pilar. “I’ve got a solution. Just visit this URL and it’ll run your query. And you can change the id=… part at the end to do it for other part numbers.” 
+Ed didn’t think much about it until his next smoke break. “So,” he said, “how’d you get past the Ticket-Nazi?” 
+Mitchell laughed. “I didn’t.” He paused and lit his cigarette, taking a few drags before explaining. “SCORDBE is about 35,000 lines of Perl written back in the 90s. Nobody ever wants to touch this code, and nobody really understands what it does. I figured there had to be some poorly escaped queries, so I just grepped until I found one. Now we can run ad-hoc queries as needed.” 
+Ed left the company a short time later. Mitchell, and his injection-based reporting solution, however, are still there. [Advertisement] BuildMaster integrates with an ever-growing list of tools to automate and facilitate everything from continuous integration to database change scripts to production deployments. Interested? Learn more about BuildMaster!",FAKE
+3387,Iran nuclear talks reportedly hit snag over lifting of sanctions as Obama makes appeal to Iran's people,"A dispute over when international sanctions against Iran would be lifted following a potential nuclear agreement reportedly is the latest issue to bog down negotiations.
+
+According to The Wall Street Journal, Iran's negotiators say that sanctions must be lifted almost immediately after a deal is concluded. U.S. and European diplomats, for their part, hold that sanctions should only be lifted once Tehran accounts for its past nuclear activity and is confirmed to be using nuclear energy for peaceful means by the United Nations' nuclear watchdog.
+
+One European diplomat was quoted by the Journal as saying there was ""no way"" Western negotiators would budge from their position, which the diplomat said the Iranians considered a ""deal-breaker. They don't want it at all.""
+
+Amid the dispute, officials from Iran and the U.S. reportedly said Friday that talks will resume next week.
+
+According to the Journal, both sides believe that the U.S. and European Union can lift some of the sanctions each has unilaterally imposed on Iran's energy and finance sectors. However, the issue of lifting sanctions imposed by the U.N. is more complex and according to negotiators, is likely to take years, not weeks or months, to accomplish.
+
+For its part, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says that Iran has failed to turn over key documents about its nuclear program, and has also denied access to scientists and nuclear sites.
+
+Both sides are working to meet a March 31 deadline to construct the framework of a permanent agreement. The final deadline for all the details to be worked out is June 30. On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif met face-to-face for the fourth straight day in Lausanne, Switzerland.
+
+The Associated Press reported late Thursday that elements of a draft deal had been agreed that would commit Iran to a 40 percent cut in the number of machines it could use to make an atomic bomb. In return, the Iranians would get quick relief from some crippling economic sanctions and a partial lift of a U.N. embargo on conventional arms.
+
+Officials told the AP that the tentative deal imposes at least a decade of new limits on the number of centrifuges Iran can operate to enrich uranium, a process that can lead to nuclear weapons-grade material. The sides are zeroing in on a cap of 6,000 centrifuges, officials said, down from the 6,500 they spoke of in recent weeks.
+
+That's also fewer than the 10,000 such machines Tehran now runs, yet substantially more than the 500 to 1,500 that Washington originally wanted as a ceiling. Only a year ago, U.S. officials floated 4,000 as a possible compromise.
+
+It's unclear how complete the draft is. Iran's deeply buried underground enrichment plant remains a problem, officials said, with Washington demanding the facility be repurposed and Tehran insisting it be able to run hundreds of centrifuges there. Iran says it wants to use the machines for scientific research; the Americans fear they could be quickly retooled for enrichment.
+
+A planned heavy water reactor will be re-engineered to produce much less plutonium than originally envisioned, relieving concerns that it could be an alternative pathway to a bomb. U.S. officials believe they can extend the time Tehran would need to produce a nuclear weapon to at least a year. Right now, Iran would require only two to three months to amass enough material to make a bomb.
+
+President Barack Obama appealed directly to Iranian citizens in a message commemorating Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
+
+""Our negotiations have made progress, but gaps remain,"" Obama said Thursday in a video message posted online.
+
+""If Iran's leaders can agree to a reasonable deal, it can lead to a better path — the path of greater opportunities for the Iranian people,"" he said.
+
+The pressure in Congress on the administration over Iran remained intense, with the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee saying he would move ahead with legislation giving lawmakers a say over any nuclear deal. And 360 House Republicans and Democrats — more than enough to override any presidential veto — sent a letter to Obama saying if an agreement is reached, Congress will decide on easing sanctions it has imposed.
+
+""Congress must be convinced that its terms foreclose any pathway to a bomb, and only then will Congress be able to consider permanent sanctions relief,"" the lawmakers wrote.
+
+Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told administration officials at a hearing Thursday that Congress cannot be marginalized and ""any attempts to sidestep Congress will be resisted on both sides of the aisle.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from The Wall Street Journal.",REAL
+3294,Mitch McConnell Pledges To Avoid Debt Ceiling Disaster,"WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Sunday that despite his differences with President Barack Obama, he has no interest in shutting down the government or causing it to default on its debt.
+
+Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned Congress on Friday that on March 16 the government would no longer have authority to take on debt to pay for spending Congress has already approved. If lawmakers don't raise the so-called ""debt ceiling"" by then, Lew said the Treasury Department can take ""extraordinary measures"" to continue government operations for a short time.
+
+""I made it very clear after the November election that we're certainly not going to shut down the government or default on the national debt,"" McConnell said, speaking on CBS' ""Face the Nation.""
+
+Defaulting on the debt would not only shut down the government; economists say it could have catastrophic financial consequences. The Obama administration has previously refused to bargain with Republicans who wanted policy concessions from Democrats for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling.
+
+Nevertheless, McConnell suggested Republicans could try to get some policy initiatives out of a debt ceiling hike -- even though demands could lead to a standoff with the Obama administration.
+
+""We'll figure some way to handle it and hopefully it might carry some other important legislation that we can agree on in connection with it,"" McConnell said.",REAL
+4954,Hillary Clinton: The Alt-Right Has 'Effectively Taken Over the Republican Party',"""From the start,"" Hillary Clinton declared today in Reno, ""Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. He has taken hate groups mainstream, and [is] helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party."" The speech that followed those words was an extended argument that her opponent is a racist, a conspiracy theorist, and a man temperamentally unfit to be president.
+
+Clinton's campaign had promoted this in advance as an address about ""Donald Trump and his advisors' embrace of the disturbing 'alt-right' political philosophy""—the alt-right being an umbrella term for an assortment of racist micro-movements and online subcultures. Yesterday I suggested that making the alt-right the stars of such a speech could only give a signal boost to what is, after all, a rather obscure political faction. But Clinton's comments about that faction took up only about a minute of her remarks. And while that minute was pretty juicy, the alt-right wasn't really the rally's star villain after all.
+
+The star villain was Donald Trump. Everyone else that Clinton brought into the address—the alt-right, Breitbart, Alex Jones, David Duke, Nigel Farage, Vladimir Putin—was there in a supporting role.
+
+Some of Clinton's arguments didn't make a lot of sense. She led her litany, oddly, by quoting Trump's recent remarks about how bad blacks have it in America. (""Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing. No homes. No ownership. Crime at levels nobody has seen."") Most people would call his comments a clumsy attempt to reassure voters that he cares about the black community's problems, but Clinton declared them ""a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters."" She also wildly overstated the alt-right's influence, declaring that ""the de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign"" means the alt-rightists have ""effectively taken over the Republican Party."" She was on sturdier ground at other moments, as when she mentioned Trump's habit of retweeting white nationalists or his false claim that he watched thousands of New Jersey Muslims cheer the 9/11 attacks.
+
+Running through all her claims, both the weak ones and the strong ones, was one basic theme: Donald Trump is a bigot and a nut. And while that's an idea you've been hearing ever since the mogul turned reality TV star entered the race, this was as forceful and concentrated an expression of it as I've ever heard emerge from Hillary Clinton's mouth. It's bound to fire up her supporters, and I expect it will help her get out the vote. Whether it also leads a bunch of curious conservatives to Google ""alt-right"" depends, I suppose, on how much coverage that minute of the speech gets in the next few days.
+
+But the guy who must be really delighted right now is Alex Jones. Hillary Clinton just attacked him by name! His listeners will be hearing clips from this speech til Ragnarok.",REAL
+3728,Nation Mourns 9 Victims In Charleston Church Shooting,"A heartbroken nation’s tension turned to mourning Thursday afternoon as news broke that the suspected gunman in an attack on a Charleston, South Carolina, church had been arrested, and the identities of his nine victims were released.
+
+Dylann Roof, 21, allegedly entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church during a weekly Bible study meeting and opened fire around 9 p.m. Wednesday. Eight people were found shot to death at the scene, police said. Two others were transported to a hospital, where one later died.
+
+In a statement at the White House, President Barack Obama mourned the victims and lamented the steady stream of mass shootings he has had to address while in office. ""Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,"" he said. ""At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence doesn’t happen in other countries.""
+
+“The only reason someone could walk into a church and shoot people praying is out of hate,” said Charleston Mayor Joe Riley at a news conference. “It is the most dastardly act that one could possibly imagine.”
+
+According to Mullen, the suspect sat in the church with other attendees for about an hour before he began firing. In an interview with NBC, a cousin of Pinckney said she spoke with a survivor, who reported that the suspect had reloaded his gun five times. When the survivor's son tried to talk him out of shooting more, he reportedly replied, ""'I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go.'""
+
+Cornell William Brooks, the president and CEO of the NAACP as well as an African Methodist Episcopal minister, released a statement on Thursday in which he expressed outrage about the ""mass hate crime.""
+
+""The senselessly slain parishioners were in a church for Wednesday night Bible study,"" Brooks stated. ""There is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of scripture.""
+
+South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) urged people to pray for the victims and their families. “While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” she said. “Please join us in lifting up the victims and their families with our love and prayers.”
+
+Worshippers and other community members gathered Thursday to mourn and pray throughout a town so known for its churches that it's often referred to as ""Holy City.""
+
+The historic black church, commonly referred to as ""Mother Emanuel,"" has ""one of the largest and oldest black congregations south of Baltimore, Maryland,"" according to the church's website. One of the church's founding members was Denmark Vesey, who organized a slave uprising that started in 1821. Civil rights leaders also visited the church during the 1960s.",REAL
+9632,Steve Pieczenik: U.S. Intelligence Waging Coup Against Corrupt Clintons » REGATED,"Former United States Department of State official Steve Pieczenik Steve Pieczenik: U.S. Intelligence Waging Coup Against Corrupt Clintons Jon Hall November 1, 2016 
+Rumors and allegations that Bill and Hillary Clinton belong to a high-level pedophile ring have surfaced on the Internet. Without much credence or proof behind the claims, I initially dismissed them. The rumors only persisted and grew and now Steve Pieczenik has now come forward with stunning claims that add fuel to this fire. 
+Pieczenik served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger is well-versed in foreign policy, international crisis management, and psychological warfare. He also served under presidential administrations as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush’s White House. In other words Steve Pieczenik — with his proven history of experience — is the real deal. Pieczenik claims that the Clintons and their close associates have successfully pulled off a coup via corruption. 
+He explains that total corruption and co-option were the two strategies behind this coup. Pieczenik says Bill and Hillary Clinton co-opted many central facets of our government — the White House, the judiciary, the CIA, the FBI. As far as I’m concerned, this idea is well beyond some lunatic conspiracy theory but increasingly likely. 
+Attorney General Loretta Lynch is obviously in the pocket of the Clintons, intervening and obstructing FBI investigations into Hillary Clinton’s private home server and e-mails at every turn. James Comey, who was on the board of directors at HSBC bank, a bank that gave $81 million to the Clinton Foundation, is also the current head of the FBI. Pieczenik goes further to explain that the U.S. Intelligence community has started a counter-coup against the Clintons, providing information to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. 
+We can finally stop blaming Russians. Pieczenik states clearly that US intelligence offered data to Julian Assange. This counter-coup is working against Hillary Clinton and her campaign and seeks to indict major players in her alleged corrupt scheme. Steve Pieczenik ends the video and tells us “the second American revolution” is happening. 
+Pieczenik claims both Clintons are frequent travelers on the Lolita Express — billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane. The Lolita Express flies to Epstein’s private island where the elite duo can ‘have sex with minors’ says Pieczenik. He claims the NYPD has a record of the Clintons and close associates that could potentially implicate them in pedophilia. 
+Pieczenik tells that officials will charge Hillary Clinton with multiple crimes including obstruction of justice and other charges. He says that Bill Clinton may also suffer criminal charges. He explains the US Intelligence is aware of Clinton’s shady and illicit misdeeds and that these trips on the Lolita Express were supposedly frequent. The following two tabs change content below. Latest Posts Jon Hall Jon Hall is a reformed two-time Obama voter with a degree in Digital Media. He covers US politics, corruption, tech interests and more. Latest posts by Jon Hall ( see all ) ",FAKE
+7048,Comment software has been rolled back to old version, ,FAKE
+9070,Round Up the Unusual Suspects: Moneyball Nerds Squeeze Out Blacks & Latinos from Baseball Jobs, ,FAKE
+9157,Trump VP’s plane slides off runway at New York airport,"Trump VP’s plane slides off runway at New York airport Trump VP’s plane slides off runway at New York airport By 0 84 
+US Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence’s plane slides off runway at LaGuardia Airport in New York in heavy rain. 
+The plane carrying Pence ended up on the grass next to the runway in the incident which took place on Thursday night. 
+None of the 37 passengers on board were injured. 
+The airport has been closed until further notice. 
+(To be updated…)",FAKE
+6392,UK Child Protection Services workers are ‘afraid’ to challenge the ages of Muslim invaders for fear of ending up in court,"BNI Store Oct 27 2016 UK Child Protection Services workers are ‘afraid’ to challenge the ages of Muslim invaders for fear of ending up in court Industry insiders reveal they often meet obviously adult-aged Muslim invaders posing as children who are permitted to stay in the country because challenging them can put their career at risk. The revelations came after the arrivals of Muslim “child” economic freeloaders from Calais – who apparently are much older than the teenage years they had claimed. UK Express (h/t Terry D) Britain was once again divided over the issue with Conservative MP David Davies suggesting they should be made to undergo dental tests to establish their age. His comments were met with fury by the British Dental Association (BDA) which said tests were “invasive” – a statement which was backed by the Home Office. But, speaking to Express Online a social worker who asked not to be named has revealed the REAL struggles faced by those in the industry. According to the specialist THREE professionals are assigned to the first meeting with a migrant who claims to be a child. And senior child protection officers are at their wits’ end. He said: “So a social worker is assigned the case. The social worker attends the assessment and because the asylum seeker is claiming to be under 17 (to come under the children’s Act) an appropriate adult is also in attendance and so is an interpreter. “Usually they enter the room and they see this asylum seeker is well over 17. It is that obvious. “After they have done the process three times all three social workers have to come to a consensus on the estimated age of the asylum seeker – so let’s says all three say this asylum seeker is well over 17 or 18 years old. You would think that would be the end of the process, but not so. “They tell their managers of their decisions and then the manager tells them ‘If that’s your decision then okay but the asylum seeker will now be assigned a solicitor to challenge your opinion and you are likely to be cross examined in court’. After this phase of the investigation is complete, if a social worker chooses to challenge the age, they are reportedly met with anger and abuse. Many, he claims, have received calls calling them “racist” and have had complaints made against them. Those put in this position have said they “cannot afford” to fight it. One said: “I just sign and say he’s under 17 years because it’s not worth the hassle.” Social workers and child protection experts have called the system “broken” in Britain. Aid workers in Calais recently admitted to the press child migrants ARE lying about their age to get to the front of the queue to Britain – and are shredding their real documents. RELATED STORIES:",FAKE
+9668,Anti-Communist Group Makes Their First Ever Endorsement Toward The Donald.. Media Silent,"UNREAL: Calif. Soldiers Billed for Thousands After Military Decides Not to Honor Decade-Old Enlistment Bonuses 
+He told the audience that he was “humbled by this endorsement from true freedom fighters.” He also referenced the Damas en Blanco (Ladies in White), a “ Cuban dissident organization composed of the wives, mothers, daughters and sisters of political prisoners.” 
+“They march quietly to church every Sunday and … are subject to physical and verbal violence and abuse by government-sanctioned mobs,” Trump told the audience. He added that his opponent “turns a blind eye to the human rights violations that occur every single day.” 
+As for the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association, a representative from the group called their endorsement a “no-brainer.”   
+In his introduction, the representative said that the group was concerned that “corruption in our public life has become rampant and has to be stopped. He also derided the “socialist progressive agenda of Hillary Clinton .” 
+You can see Trump’s speech at the event here: 
+Trump has clearly shown that he’s on the side of the military, speaking out against Obama’s broken Department of Veterans Affairs, the shoddy treatment given to our veterans otherwise and the fact that our military gains have been reversed by administration policy.  ",FAKE
+3907,Lynch faces Congress in attorney general hearing,"Washington (CNN) Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch promised a better relationship with Congress during her confirmation hearing on Wednesday, hoping to turn the page from her would-be predecessor, Eric Holder.
+
+Lynch, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, New York, is President Barack Obama's pick to succeed Holder at the helm of the Justice Department, a post that has increasingly become fraught with political controversies and clouded by Holder and Congress' mutual contempt for each other.
+
+Just weeks after taking majority control of the Senate, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee praised Lynch's qualifications but used the hearing to prod her on a number of their top complaints with Obama's administration.
+
+The panel's chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, opened with questions about the legality of Obama's move to forestall some deportations -- and several other Republicans joined him.
+
+But Lynch batted those questions away, sticking to legal arguments and noting that the Department of Homeland Security actually carries out many immigration enforcement policies.
+
+She said she'd reviewed the Justice Department's legal analysis of Obama's immigration moves, and said, ""I don't see any reason to doubt the reasonableness of those views.""
+
+Lynch focused much of her time vowing that she'll try to develop a much better relationship with Congress than the outgoing Holder has.
+
+While at times offering candor, she also showed plenty of political awareness by deflecting many of the panel's inquiries. She told Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, she couldn't answer hypothetical questions about future presidents' use of executive authority and Grassley that since she hadn't been involved in the so-called ""Fast and Furious"" gun probe, she couldn't tell him much about how the Justice Department has handled document requests.
+
+Lynch's only big policy break with the Obama administration came on marijuana.
+
+She told Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, that she doesn't agree with Obama's previous comments that the drug is similar to smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol -- and that she opposes legalizing its use.
+
+""I can tell you that not only do I not support the legalization of marijuana, it is not the position of the Department of Justice currently to support the legalization,"" she said. ""Nor will it be the position, should I be confirmed as attorney general.""
+
+Marijuana and immigration were just a couple of the issues lawmakers -- especially Republicans -- brought up.
+
+Sen. Lindsay Graham raised the Supreme Court's looming decision on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage and asked Lynch to explain the legal argument against polygamy.
+
+The South Carolina Republican also asked Lynch whether she supports the death penalty, to which she responded: ""I believe that the death penalty is an effective penalty.""
+
+Lynch's hearing went as well as it could have, and she's likely to be approved even though some Republicans will oppose her because of immigration alone, said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
+
+""She seemed to give the GOP enough to differentiate her from Obama and Holder, yet be able to serve effectively in the administration,"" Tobias said.
+
+He pointed to her comments that the Justice Department's legal opinion on Obama's immigration move seemed well reasoned, without directly endorsing it, and her commitments of loyalty to the Constitution and justice, not Obama, as she responded to Republicans' questions. He also said her nods toward improving the department's relations with Congress could help.
+
+That was a key theme in Lynch's introductory remarks during Wednesday's day-long hearing.
+
+""I look forward to fostering a new and improved relationship with this committee, the United States Senate, and the entire United States Congress -- a relationship based on mutual respect and constitutional balance,"" she said ""Ultimately, I know we all share the same goal and commitment: to protect and serve the American people.""
+
+Lynch has overseen high-profile financial fraud cases against banks, terror cases including one against a would-be New York subway bomber and the corruption case against a former GOP congressman. At the same time she has held a lower-profile position than others who vied for the attorney general nomination, which the White House hopes is an asset in her confirmation process.
+
+Holder is a friend of the President and often endured battles with Republicans over various controversies related to Obama's policies. These ranged from the President's plans to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison to the decision to stop defending federal laws banning recognition of same-sex marriages.
+
+After years in the Senate minority, unable to fully control investigations of alleged misdeeds by Holder, Republican senators are using the Lynch hearings to replay certain controversies.
+
+Grassley included among witnesses in the second part of Lynch's hearing on Thursday a former CBS reporter who spent years reporting on the botched ""Fast and Furious"" gun operation.
+
+""Fast and Furious"" was a gun probe run by agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives intended to target cross-border gun traffickers. The agents allowed thousands of firearms to be purchased by suspected traffickers, many of which ended up in the hands of cartels in Mexico. Two were found at the scene of a border firefight with traffickers that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
+
+Holder denied wrongdoing in the three-year controversy over the operation and he was vindicated by a Justice Department inspector general probe.
+
+But Grassley and other Republicans are still fighting to obtain thousands of documents the White House withheld from a House GOP investigation.
+
+In his opening statement, Grassley said in the public's confidence that the Justice Department can do its job without the influence of politics has been ""shaken with good reason"" in recent years.
+
+""I, for one, need to be persuaded that she'll be an independent attorney general,"" Grassley said of Lynch.
+
+The panel's top Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said Lynch's ""qualifications are beyond reproach,"" pointing to her two Senate confirmations as U.S. attorney.
+
+""She's brought terrorists and cybercriminals to justice. She's obtained convictions against corrupt public officials from both parties,"" he said, adding that she's worked to improve law enforcement relationships with the communities that they serve.
+
+Some Democrats raised war-related issues. Lynch told Leahy that she considers waterboarding to be torture, ""and thus illegal.""
+
+Lynch also pitched that she would be a capable liaison between law enforcement and minorities, an area of increasing tension and importance to the Justice Department in the wake of recent police killings of unarmed black men and boys.
+
+""Few things have pained me more than the recent reports of tension and division between law enforcement and the communities we serve,"" Lynch said in her opening remarks. ""If confirmed as attorney general, one of my key priorities would be to work to strengthen the vital relationships between our courageous law enforcement personnel and all the communities we serve.""
+
+Lynch was introduced by New York Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer, who called her a ""nose-to-the-grindstone type"" and Kirsten Gillibrand, who said Lynch is ""one of our country's most accomplished and distinguished women"" involved in law enforcement in the United States.
+
+At the hearing supporting Lynch were about 30 friends and family members -- including members of her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, who were clad in red.
+
+Barring any surprises, Lynch is likely to be confirmed -- rejecting her means Republicans would continue the tenure of Holder, who many in the GOP have pushed to resign.",REAL
+8221,The Conspiracy “Theory” Conspiracy [Video Documentary],"Hundreds of news clips, declassified documents, and evidence demonstrating the establishment media’s propaganda campaign against conspiracy theories and the truth. A Documentary Film by Adam Green SF Source Know More News Oct. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+7071,Clinton's Policies Look Like a Death Sentence for Americans,"22 Shares
+8 13 0 1
+As Donald Trump gains more bad press, Hilary Clinton rides the political wave with quick responses, deflections and denials. Without question, and largely due to Trump's obnoxious candor and grandiose proclamations, she is working her way back into the favor of disgruntled democrats and even right wing firebrands like the notorious Glenn Beck. She is, without question, a wolf in sheep's clothing. While Trump is unbelievably hard to take, constantly, we need to focus on one simple question, which of these candidates will lead to world devastation first?
+I suspect it would be Hillary Clinton who would be most inclined toward involving Americans in another military conflict, and she doesn't go small, as she constantly demonizes Russia with threats of military action. In Clinton's own words, ""You've seen reports, Russia has hacked into a lot of things, China has hacked into a lot of things, Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee, maybe even some state election systems. So we've got to step up our game, make sure we are well defended and can take the fight to those who go after us. As President, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses.""
+Military responses to a nation the US stood on the verge of war with for more than four decades? Military response against Russia? Over suspected hacking? Hillary Clinton betrayed her real mindset once and for all during the recent debate with Donald Trump when she spoke those words of war that would surely lead to only disastrous consequences.
+It all stems from the Wikileaks release that included 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from leaders at the Democratic National Committee. Clinton says the Russians did it, the national mainstream media parroted those words. It's the American media's political conditioning system at its finest, convincingly reaching tens of millions of Americans, and yet nobody knows if the blame is properly attributed to the Russians. In a USA Today article from July 2016, Elizabith Weise wrote, ""Computer security researchers say it’s difficult to definitively say the cyber theft of files from the Democratic National Committee subsequently posted online by Wikileaks was the work of Russian hackers, as some media outlets have reported.""
+Russia's leader, Vladmir Putin, says the US long ago tipped the scales in the wrong direction, well before the Cold War even ended. Peace with Russia should be a top priority for any US Presidential candidate. The truth is that American politicians, perpetually convinced they are making the right political moves, created a road block on the highway to peace during the Vietnam War. Putin said during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2016, ""It is not in my nature to scold someone -- but when the United States unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty (in) 1972 they delivered a colossal blow to the entire system of international security. That was the first blow when it comes to assessing the strategic balance of power in the world"".
+MORE... 10 Things to Expect with a Hillary Clinton Presidency Hillary Clinton must be indicted How Hillary Clinton ushered in a one party dictatorship of monopoly capital Voting for the “Lesser Evil” Now we have Clinton warmongering over unfounded allegations.
+World Rivals in the Air
+There is a decades-old history of rivalry between eastern and western jet fighter design and technology. While American designs are more expensive and generally considered to be better, the fastest jet fighter ever made is the Russian MiG-25; it can break Mach III, more than three times the speed of sound. Such demands lessen the life of an aircraft. The MiG-25 is typically not flown at anything close to that speed. As an interceptor however, it was supreme, no allied fighter in the sky could outrun it.
+The Korean War was the first test. Soviet MiG-15's initially dominated the skies. With Russian and Chinese pilots often at the controls, the MiG's were deadly.
+On 1 November 1950, at least sixteen American F-51 fighters (P-51 Mustangs) were shot at by six Soviet MiG-15 interceptors led by Soviet WWII ace Mayor Nikolay V. Stroykov. The WWII ""prop"" planes like the Mustang, along with the U.S. F-80 Shooting Star and F-84 Thunderjet jet fighters, had a job on their hands fighting the robust and highly maneuverable MiG fighters.
+Everything changed when the U.S. Air Force launched the F-86 Sabre. Wikipedia explains that the F-86 Sabre pilots enjoyed advantages they learned to exploit to the fullest. Foremost among those was a radar ranging gun sight on their six .50 caliber machine guns, which ensured that even short bursts of fire generally found their target. F-86 pilots were also equipped with G-suits, which prevented pilot blackout in high-speed turning maneuvers.
+It is unlikely that anybody will ever fully agree on the casualties and ""kill"" ratios over ""MiG Alley"" during the Korean War.
+The Soviets claimed 1,106 United Nations planes of all types shot down, including about 650 Sabres. (The USAF only admits to losing less than 200 aircraft in air combat.)
+The F-86 pilots claimed 792 MiG-15s shot down, while B-29 gunners claimed a further 16. These numbers were later reduced to 379 MiGs. The Chinese air force claimed only 85 kills.
+In Vietnam, the competitors varied. The MiG-17 and MiG-21 fighters were widely used by the North Vietnamese Air Force. They fought planes like the F-100 Super Sabre, F-5 Tiger and the F-4 Phantom. Once again, if you believe western sources which are fairly reliable for the most part, the U.S. planes dominated in most air to air combat, though the other side had plenty of talented pilots and more aces overall than the Americans. During the end of the Cold War in the 1980's, the Soviet MiG-29 was the terror of the skies. There was more speculation about it than real knowledge at first. While MiG aircraft were only built in odd numbers, the movie Top Gun references the aircraft by calling them MiG-28's - ""MiG-28's, no one's been this close before!"" The planes used in the movie were actually American F-5 Tigers painted black with red stars applied to the tails. Today the United States spends obscene amounts on planes like the F-22 Raptor and these aircraft do not have any clear advantages over modern Russian planes like the SU-30. Both in this case, are capable of ""thrust vectoring"" which means the pilot can change the direction of the jet blast and create an entirely separate way to control the jet in flight. The ultimate western jet in the world of thrust vectoring is the AV8/b Harrier which can actually take off and land like a helicopter. Hopefully the world will not have to put these machines against each other in a future war, but with Clinton at the helm it is entirely possible and the advantages the US used to hold over the Russian military have evaporated into thin air.
+Russia's Modern Approach to Warfare
+During the decades-long Cold War, the Soviet Union operated under archaic rules that essentially prevented a commander, or a pilot, from knowing their mission until they were dispatched to carry out the order. Kemp Freund, a US Army sergeant major that I met while I was covering the war in Afghanistan, was Quote: d in my 2007 video report ""Camp Joyce: Remote Fire Base Near Afghanistan-Pakistan Border"" saying, ""We're trying to break the old Soviet methods that they use and the Soviet method had that Lt. Col. completely in the dark until he needed to move.” He added, “We're still working with the higher echelons to get that to move downhill."" The Soviet ways were detrimental and offered little freedom to a trained soldier or pilot but all that is over now. Today's Russian pilots not only fly superior aircraft that cost far less than US taxpayer funded military planes, they also utilize tactics of Western pilots. Hillary Clinton surely knows these facts but she wants to play with fire and be another ""war president"" which was so important to former President George W. Bush, and Obama too for that matter.
+Other Looming Conflicts
+Lest we forget, Hillary Clinton's unwavering support of Israel, the apartheid religious nuclear state that has long been protected by US taxpayer money and military hardware. The government of right wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to violate the human rights of Palestinians constantly, while building settlements which are completely illegal under international law. Then there are the attacks in Gaza that target schools and hospitals, leaving hundreds and hundreds dead and thousands severely injured. Never does Clinton speak out against the barbaric treatment Israel reserves for non-Jews, never does she refer to the fact that the country we now call Iran hasn't attacked a nation outside of its borders for more than three hundred years. Yet Iran has been savagely attacked by the United States both directly and indirectly. Maintaining her warmongering spirit, Clinton said, ""I want the Iranians to know that if I'm president we will attack Iran."" She added that, ""We would be able to totally obliterate them.""",FAKE
+4025,State Dept. IDs 2 Americans killed in Nepal quake; 2 others reportedly dead,"The State Department identified two Americans who died in Nepal’s devastating earthquake, and reported two more dead Monday, as the death toll rose past 4,000 and survivors dug through the rubble of their villages seeking shelter and food.
+
+Saturday's 7.8 magnitude earthquake triggered an avalanche that buried part of the Mount Everest base camp, killing 18 people, including foreign climbers preparing to make their summit attempts at the world’s tallest peak.
+
+At least four Americans died in the quake, all at the Mount Everest base camp the State Department said Monday. State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke identified two of the American victims as Ely Taplin and Vinh B. Truong.
+
+Two others haven't been named yet, either because consular officials haven't confirmed their identities or next of kin haven't been notified.
+
+“We express our deepest sympathies to the families and loved ones of those who died,” Rathke told reporters. He said the State Department was fielding hundreds of calls from Americans asking for assistance and concerned about the safety of loved ones in Nepal.
+
+“We are supplementing our embassy staff to better respond to U.S. citizens and liaison with the Nepal government,” Rathke said.
+
+In addition to the more than 4,000 dead in Nepal, another 61 people were killed in neighboring India, and China reported that 20 people had died in Tibet.
+
+Meanwhile, tens of thousands of families slept outdoors for a second night, fearful of aftershocks that have not ceased. Camped in parks, open squares and a golf course, they cuddled children or pets against chilly Himalayan nighttime temperatures.
+
+""It's overwhelming. It's too much to think about,"" said 55-year-old Bijay Nakarmi, mourning his parents, whose bodies were recovered from the rubble of what once was a three-story building.
+
+Reports received so far by the government and aid groups suggest that many communities perched on mountainsides are devastated or struggling to cope as they search for lost loved ones, sort through rubble for their belongings, and try to find food and shelter for their families.
+
+Lila Mani Poudyal, the government's chief secretary and the rescue coordinator, said the recovery was slow because many workers -- water tanker drivers, electricity company employees and laborers needed to clear debris -- ""are all gone to their families and staying with them, refusing to work.""
+
+World Vision aid worker Matt Darvas reached Nepal's Gorkha district -- the epicenter of Saturday's powerful quake -- early Monday afternoon. He said almost no aid had reached there ahead of him.
+
+""It does not seem aid is reaching here very quickly,"" Darvas told the Associated Press by phone from Nepal.
+
+Udav Prashad Timalsina, the top official for the Gorkha district, said he was in desperate need of help. ""There are people who are not getting food and shelter. I've had reports of villages where 70 percent of the houses have been destroyed,"" Timalsina he said.
+
+He said 223 people had been confirmed dead in the district, but he presumed ""the number would go up because there are thousands who are injured."" Landslides and other destruction delayed attempts to reach the district earlier, but Gorkha is feared to have extensive damage.
+
+""Villages like this are routinely affected by landslides, and it's not uncommon for entire villages of 200, 300, up to 1,000 people to be completely buried by rock falls,"" Darvas said. ""It will likely be helicopter access only.""
+
+""Further north from here the reports are very disturbing,"" Darvas reported. He says up to 75 percent of the buildings in Singla may have collapsed and the village, a two-day walk away, has been out of contact since Saturday night.
+
+Local officials lost contact with military and police who set out for Singla, and Darvas says helicopters have had to turn back because of clouds. He says a few SUVs with foreign tourists bringing basic aid supplies had begun to reach Gorkha by early evening.
+
+Jagdish Pokhrel, the clearly exhausted army spokesman, said nearly the entire 100,000-soldier army was involved in rescue operations. ""We have 90 percent of the army out there working on search and rescue,"" he said. ""We are focusing our efforts on that, on saving lives.""
+
+Kathmandu district chief administrator Ek Narayan Aryal said tents and water were being handed out Monday at 10 locations in Kathmandu, but that aftershocks were leaving everyone jittery.
+
+""There have been nearly 100 earthquakes and aftershocks, which is making rescue work difficult. Even the rescuers are scared and running because of them,"" he said.
+
+The capital city is largely a collection of small, poorly constructed brick apartment buildings. But outside of the oldest neighborhoods, many in Kathmandu were surprised by how few modern structures collapsed in the quake.
+
+Emergency aid flights are landing in Nepal, with relief workers from several different countries who will try to locate and rescue victims. But the dire conditions and communication obstacles are adding to the chaos at the small airport in Nepal's capital of Kathmandu, where there were major backups on the tarmac.
+
+India's defense ministry says four Indian Air Force planes carrying communication gear, aid supplies and rescue personnel were forced to return to New Delhi today because of airport congestion.
+
+The quake will probably put a huge strain on the resources of this impoverished country best known for Everest, the highest mountain in the world. The economy of Nepal, a nation of 27.8 million people, relies heavily on tourism, principally trekking and Himalayan mountain climbing.
+
+The first nations to respond were Nepal's neighbors -- India, China and Pakistan. Other countries sending support Sunday included the United States, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Israel and Singapore.
+
+An American military plane left Delaware's Dover Air Force Base for Nepal, carrying 70 people, including a disaster-assistance response team and an urban search-and-rescue team, and 45 tons of cargo, the Pentagon said.
+
+The earthquake was the worst to hit the South Asian nation in more than 80 years. It destroyed swaths of the oldest neighborhoods of Kathmandu and was strong enough to be felt across parts of India, Bangladesh, China's region of Tibet and Pakistan.
+
+Nepal's worst recorded earthquake in 1934 measured 8.0 and all but destroyed the cities of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2067,Time to press the presidential candidates on Flint’s water crisis,"In every presidential campaign, there are issues everyone knows beforehand will be discussed — what should we do about immigration, how can we improve the economy, where should we go on health care — and events that become campaign issues when they burst into the news. So it is with the public health crisis in Flint, Michigan, where a public health catastrophe has played out over the last two years, and more and more politicians are being asked to comment on it.
+
+To get you up to speed, in 2014, in an effort to save money, the city stopped getting its water from Detroit and began getting it from the contaminated Flint River. It turned out that all manner of nasty chemicals were contained in the water, most alarmingly, lead. It’s important to understand that at the time, Flint’s own elected officials were all but powerless, because the city was being run by a “emergency manager” appointed by Michigan governor Rick Snyder; it was the emergency manager who made the final call to switch their water supply (you can read more about that here). Emails released yesterday by Snyder’s administration show that as Flint residents were complaining about the water’s color and taste, and reporting ill health effects, state officials were not particularly eager to do anything about it. Snyder’s chief of staff wrote in one email that other state officials felt that “some in Flint are taking the very sensitive issue of children’s exposure to lead and trying to turn it into a political football.”
+
+Well it’s a political football now — as well it should be. I’ve long been an advocate of “politicizing” just about everything (see here or here), not because candidates should take any excuse to blame each other for anything going wrong anywhere in the country, but because elected officials need to make choices, and campaigns provide an opportunity to get them on record saying how they’d address critical issues. Right after a hurricane is the best time to talk about what government should do to prepare for disasters, just as the aftermath of a high-profile police shooting is the best time to talk about police practices. It’s when our attention gets focused on a problem and there’s a real opportunity to make progress.
+
+So what we’re seeing now is that Democrats, particularly President Obama and those running for his party’s presidential nomination, are eager to talk about Flint. Obama met with Flint’s mayor, declared a state of emergency that will allow federal funds to flow there, and called the crisis “inexplicable and inexcusable.” Hillary Clinton raised it in Sunday’s debate when asked what issue she wish had been brought up but hadn’t, saying, “We’ve had a city in the United States of America where the population which is poor in many ways and majority African American has been drinking and bathing in lead contaminated water. And the governor of that state acted as though he didn’t really care. He had requests for help that he basically stonewalled. I’ll tell you what, if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would’ve been action.” For his part, Bernie Sanders called for Snyder to resign.
+
+And the Republicans? It won’t be surprising if they aren’t interested in discussing the race and class issues the crisis raises, and thus far, they don’t seem to want to talk seriously about it at all. Ben Carson was the first to give any substantive comment, placing the blame on Flint’s elected officials and the federal government, neatly excusing Governor Snyder’s administration of any involvement. Marco Rubio was asked about it on Monday and said he couldn’t say much, since “That’s not an issue that right now we’ve been focused on”; from what I can tell he hasn’t said anything about it since. Donald Trump was also reluctant to discuss it, responding to a reporter’s question on Tuesday by saying, “A thing like that shouldn’t happen, but, again, I don’t want to comment on that.” John Kasich said, “I think the governor has moved the National Guard in and, you know, I’m sure he will manage this appropriately.” I haven’t been able to find any comments from Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, or Rick Santorum.
+
+But there is one Republican candidate who made detailed remarks about the issue: Ted Cruz. “It is a failure at every level of government, a failure of the city officials, a failure of the county officials, and the men and women of Michigan have been betrayed,” Cruz said. “Every American is entitled to have access to clean water. And to all the children who have been poisoned by government officials, by their negligence, by their ineptitude, it’s heart-breaking.” In addition, Cruz’s Michigan state director wrote on her Facebook page that the campaign was bringing bottled water to “crisis pregnancy centers” in the city, which try to convince women not to have abortions.
+
+Cruz did his best to fit the issue in with his broader critique of government, but it isn’t surprising that the rest of his Republican colleagues didn’t really want to talk about it. If Snyder were a Democrat, you can be sure they’d be blaming him, but he isn’t. They aren’t going to say that this disaster demonstrates that the problems that affect poor and black people are given less attention by government at all levels than the problems that affect rich and white people, because most of them don’t think that’s actually true. They aren’t going to say that this shows that we need a major investment in infrastructure spending in America, because they don’t really believe that, either.
+
+But those are the broader issues that the catastrophe in Flint raises, and that’s what the candidates ought to be pressed on. They don’t even have to agree on who bears the lion’s share of the blame to agree that we have a national problem that requires attention. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the country’s drinking water system a grade of “D” and says that in the next couple of decades we will need to invest hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps even into the trillions, in order to bring the system up to where it should be.
+
+So now that we’re focusing on the question of drinking water, the candidates should say what they see as our infrastructure priorities, how we should address them, how much we ought to spend, and how that fits in with the other things they’d like to spend money on.",REAL
+1371,This is why Trump was smart to avoid her: Megyn Kelly just crushed the GOP debate,"Despite what he told CNN in an interview shortly before the debate aired, Trump had been clear about why he didn’t want to participate in the Fox debate: the presence of moderator Megyn Kelly. Whether or not he really meant it, Kelly showed time and again why he was right to avoid a renewed confrontation with her.
+
+Here’s the thing about Megyn Kelly. She’s not some closet liberal. That’s a common mistake made about her. She often indulges in the same right-wing racial hysteria as anybody on Fox. But she can be a pretty fearless—and fearsome—TV journalist. On Thursday, she unveiled what might be the most ruthless, devastating technique I’ve ever seen in any debate I’ve watched. It was so neat and brutally effective that you wondered why it had never been done before.
+
+Put simply, Kelly pulled a “Daily Show” on Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, playing lengthy montages of their past support of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. (They’ve each since flip-flopped.) Both men, robbed of their ability to insist that they’d never said the words they’d obviously said, floundered helplessly.
+
+Can you imagine the kind of clip show Kelly and her team were preparing for Trump? She does not mess around. Instead of dealing with her, Trump got the best of both worlds. He ducked any debate messiness but still managed to dominate the proceedings in his absence, and got his alternative rally aired on both CNN and MSNBC. He also left Ted Cruz in place as a default frontrunner; Cruz, who even on his best nights has the air of a man trying to sell you a monorail you don’t need, had one of his worst nights. He resorted to whining about how much he was getting ganged up on, which is never attractive even when attractive people do it.
+
+Nothing else in the debate reached the audacious heights of the clip-show hit jobs.  Faced with Kelly’s sheer star power, the other moderators, Chris Wallace and Bret Baier, couldn’t help but play second fiddle. The worst part of the evening was the repeated tossing aside of interesting, relevant questions. The requisite 9 hours were spent getting each man onstage to brag about how many ISIS fighters he would personally disembowel, but questions on Puerto Rico’s debt, on criminal justice and policing, on climate change and on the crisis in Flint were all asked of just one candidate and then discarded. What’s the point of having multiple debates if you don’t use them to tackle a wide range of issues in the broadest way possible?
+
+It would be foolish to predict what effect the debate will have. The caucuses are just around the corner. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. What does seem certain is that at least some of the people who participated in the debate on Thursday won’t be around much longer. Megyn Kelly won’t be one of those. She is now well on her way to cementing herself as the indispensable star of Fox News, with or without the assistance of Donald Trump.",REAL
+10344,"Life: Touching: After Her Brother Passed Away, This Woman Took Over His Facebook Page To Continue Sharing Islamophobic Rhetoric","Email 
+For friends and family who loved him dearly, the death of Robert Harkin in early August was sudden and unexpected. But despite their sadness, they can take comfort in knowing that his legacy will live on. His sister Karen has taken over his Facebook page and honors her brother by continuing to share Islamophobic rhetoric in his memory. 
+Absolutely beautiful. 
+They rarely chose to talk about politics while he was alive, but Karen has been able to reconnect with her brother since his death by discovering his fear and hatred of Islam. It’s been a steep learning curve, but in time she’s been able to understand so much about what he cared about most, and she now feels closer to him than ever. The threat Syrian refugees pose to our freedom, the politicians who willingly turn a blind eye to the rising threat of Islamic terrorism—all of the bigoted beliefs that made Robert who he was. 
+Since picking up the mantle of his Facebook account, Karen has committed to maintaining the xenophobia that exemplified her brother’s life. When Time magazine ran a story about a Muslim woman who felt unsafe in America, Karen understood right away that Robert would want to share the article with the comment “Maybe she’d feel more safe if she moved to Saudia Arabia where she can practice Sharia Law with the rest of them.” Sometimes a sister just knows. 
+For those who were close to Robert, seeing a backwards, misinformed post decrying the spread of radical Islam is like being with him again. His page is a place where those who knew him can come share a memory and talk about the spread of Sharia law—exactly what Robert would have wanted. Whenever she posts about the inherent violence in the Muslim faith, Karen takes comfort in knowing that with every like and share, her brother remains a vibrant part of peoples’ lives. 
+“In the wake of Robert’s death, I think everyone was just looking for a place to see hateful rhetoric,” says Karen, who remembers her brother by spending two to three hours per day scouring the internet for signs of a larger Islamic conspiracy. “I miss him every day. But as long as I continue to invite his Facebook friends to like a group whose mission is to block the construction of mosques in America, it’s like he’s still here.” 
+Wow, if only everyone had such a devoted sister! Wherever he is, Robert must be resting easy knowing his sister is there to share his hateful, paranoid beliefs with the world.",FAKE
+1926,Clinton Foundation will continue to accept foreign money during Hillary's run,"Clinton, who resigned from her philanthropy's board of directors immediately after declaring her presidential campaign on Sunday, has drawn fire for her family foundation's acceptance of money from countries considered hostile to the United States.
+
+The Foundation will now only accept funding from Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom, according to new foundation policies that will be posted online but was obtained by CNN.
+
+The foundation also pledges to disclose its donors quarterly beginning in July -- as opposed to annually -- and to not hold any more Clinton Global Initiative events overseas following an international conference in May.",REAL
+7657,"Boy wearing a ‘My dad is an ATM’ T-shirt chased by mob; father frisked, robbed","Boy wearing a ‘My dad is an ATM’ T-shirt chased by mob; father frisked, robbed Posted on Tweet 
+Rakesh Bemaani, the 16-year old son of billionaire Lokesh Bemaani, was caught in a mad chase yesterday, which resulted in his father being attacked by a vicious, bloodthirsty mob. The reason? The unsuspecting youngster was wearing one of the popular t-shirts that read “My dad is an ATM.” (Image via redbubble.net) 
+A horrified Rakesh has vowed to never, ever don the t-shirt henceforth. “There I was, zooming around in my Merc as usual, with a few cops on the road saluting me. But as I was driving, I happened to notice large queues on the roads, outside ATMs. I thought of seeing what the problem was and stepped out of the car. The moment the crowd saw me, they looked intently at each other and before I knew it, they collectively sprinted towards me, gunning for my throat. I quickly hopped into my car and sped away, but they chased me unflinchingly. Thankfully, I saw my dad, surrounded by a few security guards, just returning from his morning walk. The guards were of no avail, as the mob overpowered them with ease and started frisking dad all over. Some of them even stuffed his mouth with their debit cards, hoping for some notes to come out. Thankfully, dad had only ₹500 and ₹1000 rupee notes in his wallet, so the mobsters threw the wallet right back at his face, spat at us and went back. It was only after the melee subsided, did I realize the reason for it all happening – I was wearing one of my dozen of ‘My dad is an ATM’ t-shirts. Phew! Never putting these on again,” the harrowed Rakesh narrated to The UnReal Times . 
+Companies manufacturing the t-shirts have offered to insert a ‘NOT’ in the middle of the statement for free. “We’re recalling all such t-shirts and without any payment, we’re willing to stitch a ^ NOT after the ‘is’ and before the ‘an.’ The safety and security of our customers is our topmost concern,” one such clothing manufacturer stated. 
+The Bemaani family, however, received a flurry of support from the Bollywood fraternity. Tweeting to PM Narendra Modi was actor Arshad Warsi, who stated, “Mr. PM, your so-called masterstroke and surgical strike is paining not only the poor and common men, but also the billionaires. Of what good is all this, really? Can you please come back to India and repeal this goddamn rule? I don’t mind sponsoring your return ticket, if you do this!” Warsi was followed by director Anurag Kashyap, who tweeted angrily to the PM demanding an apology. 
+The Bemaani family was also visited by Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, who sat in protest against the abrupt demonetization scheme. “Like aloo ki factories, we also need paise ki factories instead of ATMs. If we empower the villagers, we can get this done soon,” the Nehru-Gandhi scion stated. The Delhi CM was far more scathing in his diatribe. “The psychopath isn’t happy with the already prevailing smog. He wants more people to come out to the streets, thereby increase the smog and punish Delhites fatally for not voting for him. Yehi to scam hai ji ,” the AAP chief yelled. 
+A section of liberal democrats in the US, however, hailed the development as a sweet revenge against the presidential election of Donald Trump. “It’s all happening! Billionaires all over the world will have to incur people’s wrath like this, for having one of their own, and a racist, bigot, xenophobe at that, as the US president,” said one such tolerant, intellectual democrat. Tweet About Ashwin Kumar 
+1 of the proud columnists of URT, former co-editor of URT Tamil, amateur musician, Real Harris Jayaraj devotee, UnReal T. Rajendar fanatic, passionate about stopping female foeticide.",FAKE
+9800,Why Isn’t NSA Surveillance an Election Issue?,"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / Why Isn’t NSA Surveillance an Election Issue? Essential Reading The Essene Gospel of Peace I By wmw_admin on April 26, 2007 
+Based on texts found in the Vatican library and the Royal Library of the Hapsburg’s and dated to the first century AD, the following is considered by some to be the real words of Christ The Oklahoma City Bombing: 30 Unanswered Questions By wmw_admin on July 11, 2003 
+Timothy McVeigh may have been tried and executed, but there are still too many unanswered questions about the Oklahoma City Bombing Magic Thermite and the 9/11 Fairytale By Smoking Mirrors on April 15, 2009 
+The evidence is in and it’s irrefutable: scientists have discovered traces of hi-tech explosives in the WTC debris. Which means the UK/US/Israel will have to stage another event on the scale of 9/11 to counter the brushfire this report will ignite Who Brought the Slaves to America? By wmw_admin on June 30, 2008 
+Contrary to what you have been told, it wasn’t White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASP’s) who founded and monopolised the slave trade The Essene Gospel of Peace II By wmw_admin on April 26, 2007 
+Translated by Purcell Weaver and Edmond Szekely from its original Aramiac, a language that today few know but 2000 years ago was the language that Christ spoke and taught with Have You Read the Talmud Lately? By wmw_admin on September 3, 2006 
+The Talmud expounds some of the most virulent racism, as these extracts plainly show. However, as a reader points out not all Jews are influenced by it, or even read it. Only the ultra religious study it, the rest haven’t a clue. We leave you to decide London Beheading Hoax Confirmed? By wmw_admin on May 24, 2013 
+Was the London beheading a hoax? After Sandy Hook anything is possible and the authors present a very convincing case that it was. Judge for yourself Fake Terrorism: The Road to Dictatorship By wmw_admin on October 10, 2008 
+Throughout history “terrorist” acts have been carefully staged and used to further the power of the ruling elite. In the light of the latest “terror” plot we repost an old favourite as a reminder The Man Who Would Be King By Rixon Stewart on April 15, 2008 
+Some say that Prince Michael of Albany has a more legitimate claim to the throne of England than the Windsors. Are they right? And why are the Windsors and the mainstream media delberately ignoring him?",FAKE
+6599,"Genius Kid Trolled White House Halloween Party, Idiot Obama Didn’t Notice","Genius Kid Trolled White House Halloween Party, Idiot Obama Didn’t Notice Posted on November 1, 2016 by Robert Rich in Politics Share This 
+During certain holidays, Barack and Michelle Obama invite a few kids to the White House to join them in the festivities. However, the most recent incident wasn’t like all the rest as one kid decided to troll everyone there with a genius costume idea – and our idiot president didn’t even seem to notice what he did. 
+Yesterday, a few kids were invited to the White House Rose Garden in order to dress up for the annual Halloween trick-or-treat event. Although most kids were there for the candy and games, there was one costume that stood above the rest – a duck. 
+Now, this wasn’t exactly your typical duck costume with a kid inside, and he wasn’t your ordinary kid either. As can be seen in a picture posing with Obama, the duck was actually bandaged with its arm in a sling, thereby actually making it a “ lame duck .” Obama meets kid dressed as ""lame duck"" for Halloween at WH pic.twitter.com/5q4l04b5pM 
+— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) October 31, 2016 
+Of course, Obama is about to adopt that name after the election as he begins the home stretch of his presidency. Although he hasn’t done anything except for forcing his legacy down America’s throat, these are the few months where slacking off is actually accepted from a man in his position. 
+At this point, a few things are unclear, including whether this kid was suggesting that Obama was a lame duck for his entire presidency or if our so-called Commander-in-Chief actually caught the genius pun. While some say he took the comedic jab with a bit of humor, others suggest the moron missed the subtle trolling entirely as it was just one of the endless droves of children in costumes that he took a picture with. 
+It’s unknown who was actually in the costume or if the idea came from the child or their father, but it’s being shared around social media for good reason. Obama has been nothing but a lame duck for the past 8 years after idiot voters actually believing the “hope and change” spiel voted for the man twice. 
+Fortunately, his days of freeloading and kicking back are about to become a thing of the past. Although nothing will change during his “lame duck” months, freeloaders of our nation are about to get a kick in the backside when Donald Trump is elected. We have been doing nothing for far too long – it’s time we kick things into high gear and actually do some great things, just like we used to do.",FAKE
+8588,Police Turn In Badges Rather Than Incite Violence Against Standing Rock Protesters,"At least two police officers turned in their badges today after acknowledging that attacking peaceful protesters is not what they signed up for. 
+Via TrueActivist 
+
+It should be evident if you’re following news concerning the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota that tension continues to escalate between protesters supporting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and riot police. The big deal? A four-state Dakota Access Pipeline which threatens to uproot sacred burial ground, poison the Missouri river, and make null an 1881 treaty ensuring the property belongs to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
+In addition to being maced and beaten with batons, activists have been tased and even shot with rubber bullets. Despite the violence taking place, tribal leaders continue to ask all “water protectors” to maintain peaceful relations and rely on prayer as the only weapon used to halt construction of the DAPL.
+After watching videos of the mass arrests and beating that have taken place, many have asked how those employed by the State can continue to terrorize weaponless protesters. Surely, some form of cognitive dissonance must be taking place? For some, most likely, and that’s undoubtedly what inspired at least two officers to turn in their badges today. According to an activist named Redhawk, there have been reports of at least two officers turning in their badges after acknowledging that the battle against the American people is not what they signed up for.
+On Facebook, the activist wrote:
+“You can see it in some of them, that they do not support the police actions. We must keep reminding them they are welcome to put down their weapons and badge and take a stand against this pipeline as well. 
+Some are waking up.” 
+The comments on the ordeal have been quite positive. Charlotte Holywater Vincent wrote,
+“Brave to stand up for what is right ! To hand over years of training and service in a little metal badge and then stand on the side of humanity.” 
+Ron Hemming, who reportedly is a retired deputy in Washington, shared his thoughts:
+“As a retired deputy in Washington state, I would have refused to go on a detail such as this. As I am also part native blood, I stand with my relatives on the front line protecting the water from the black snake. Be safe, stay strong.” 
+",FAKE
+2535,The judge immigration foes wanted,"One thing that is certain about Monday’s ruling by a federal judge in Texas blocking implementation of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration reform — it won’t be the last word.
+
+Nonetheless, the opinion is worth noting for three reasons: first, what it says about the depressing politicization of the federal judiciary; second, and related, what it suggests about the conservative face of judicial activism; third, what its implications may be for the coming showdown on funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
+
+The New York Times report on the ruling contained a jarring phrase, describing its author, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, as “an outspoken critic of the administration on immigration policy.” My instinct was that the reporter had gone too far in that characterization; surely, a federal judge — even a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush — could not fairly be described that way.
+
+Turns out, he can. Hanen sits in Brownsville, Tex., on the border with Mexico, and it can fairly be assumed it was no accident that the 26 states challenging the executive actions sued in that court, where they had a 50/50 chance of having the case heard by Hanen. (The other judge in Brownsville is a Bill Clinton appointee.)
+
+Hanen has a remarkable history of blasting the Department of Homeland Security for what he views as its lax approach to immigration enforcement. In his court, where you stand depends, literally, on where he sits — Hanen’s rulings bristle with frustration over the influx of illegal immigrants at the border and what he views as the feckless governmental policies in dealing with them.
+
+In a 2013 case involving the smuggling of a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador, Hanen went after DHS for reuniting the girl with her undocumented mother, rather than prosecuting the mother for having hired the trafficker. “This court is quite concerned with the apparent policy of the Department of Homeland Security . . . of completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States,” Hanen wrote.
+
+The plaintiffs challenging Obama’s plan “got the judge they wanted and they got the ruling they wanted,” Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration reform group, told me.
+
+As to that ruling, its weakest link is its strained conclusion that Texas, at least, had legal standing to challenge Obama’s actions. Time was, conservatives, and conservative judges, were most reluctant to grant standing, an approach in keeping with their conception of the modest judicial role.
+
+So how did Hanen deal with the federal government’s argument that the states had failed to show the individual injury required to allow them to challenge the executive actions?
+
+It came down — this is not a joke — to driver’s licenses. Texas argued that the expanded class of individuals eligible to remain in the country would be entitled to apply for licenses, and that the $24 fee for obtaining a license did not cover the state’s actual cost. Thus, Hanen found, the states have shown the the program “will directly injure the proprietary interest of their driver’s license programs and cost the states badly needed funds.”
+
+Hanen’s conclusion that he should prevent the immigration actions from going into effect rests on a similarly slender reed. He concluded that an injunction was justified because the states could suffer “irreparable harm” in the form of having to issue driver’s licenses and other benefits.
+
+Seriously, the irreparable harm to Texas is that it spends some money on driver’s licenses? Please, you conservatives who applaud this outcome — not another word about judicial activism.
+
+Finally, because the clock is ticking on funding for the Department of Homeland Security, Hanen’s ruling raises the question of whether it offers a face-saving exit to Republicans seeking to avoid a shutdown or instead will further inflame conservatives.
+
+My answer is: both. Those who rail against presidential usurpation of authority will seize on Hanen’s opinion to assert that they cannot appropriate a dime for the Department of Homeland Security. (No matter that Hanen’s opinion only reached the not-so-sexy topic of whether the administration’s actions complied with the, yawn, Administrative Procedure Act, not whether they overstepped constitutional boundaries.)
+
+The cannier move would be for Senate Republicans to seize on the case as an escape from their untenable corner: The executive actions are under court review, now we can move on with funding essential government services. Smarter? Yes. More likely? Not in the current poisonously partisan environment.
+
+Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.",REAL
+9972,Madman Merkel Demands the Internet Publicly Release All Closed-Source Code,"Madman Merkel Demands the Internet Publicly Release All Closed-Source Code 
+Andrew Anglin Daily Stormer October 27, 2016 This woman is looking haggard af. Botta start calling her Merkel Haggard. New song for refugees refusing deportation: “I think I’ll just stay here and drink, riot, rape, sell drugs and commit acts of terrorism (allah akbar remix)” 
+There comes a time in the life of every brutal totalitarian psychopath that they just have to lash out against everyone and everything, demand it all be shut down. 
+RT : 
+German Chancellor Angela Merkel launched a broadside at internet media giants, accusing them of “narrowing perspective,” and demanding they disclose their privately-developed algorithms. Merkel previously blamed social media for anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of the far right. 
+“The algorithms must be made public, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen on questions like: what influences my behavior on the internet and that of others?” said Merkel during a media conference in Berlin on Tuesday. 
+“These algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion of our perception, they narrow our breadth of information.” 
+Google uses an algorithm to decide which search results are first shown to a user, while Facebook arranges the order of the news feed, and decides to include certain posts from a user’s liked pages and friends, at the expense of others. Both sites also promote links to news articles, often based on a user’s own media interests. 
+I don’t know about Facebook, but Google’s algorithm is worth billions and billions of dollars. The algorithm is why people use Google instead of Bing. If they released the algorithm, it would effectively make their main product – their search engine – valueless, beyond the value of its brand name. 
+That’s why it’s not open-source in the first place. Because if they released it, everyone would use it, and their service would no longer have any unique value. 
+Asking them to release this “because I said” is completely and totally insane – the demand of a madman who thinks the universe belongs to him. 
+These algorithms are at the core of the intellectual property of any social media or search website, and comprise some of the most highly-protected trade secrets in the world, potentially worth billions. No internet giant has ever revealed its inner workings. 
+Merkel did not specifically name Facebook, Google or Twitter, but implied that the large platforms are creating “bubbles” of self-reinforcing views, and squeezing out smaller news providers. 
+“The big internet platforms, via their algorithms, have become an eye of a needle which diverse media must pass through to reach users,” warned Merkel. “This is a development that we need to pay careful attention to.” 
+The internet giants themselves have argued that the so-called social media bubble is largely a myth, and that online users have a wider access to differing views than under a pre-internet model, where most news would be acquired from just a handful of newspapers and one or two TV channels. 
+This is obviously absolutely true, and it’s absolutely why Merkel is throwing a fit. 
+She wants media to be limited to approved sources. 
+These approved sources still have an extreme amount of control, as we see with the Trump situation, but in order to maintain her multicultural utopia, Angela Merkel needs complete 1984-style control of all information the public has access to. “We’ve always been at war with Russia to protect ISIS, Winston.” 
+And that’s control over international (read: American and Russian) media, because in Germany, they can just go arrest anyone who is saying things they don’t like on the internet. They arrest people for Facebook posts. 
+This is not the first attack on social media by Merkel and her Grand Coalition government, and while the German politician advocates diversity of views, she has previously accused it of perpetrating opinions that are most at odds with those of the establishment and traditional media. 
+Last month, Merkel accused AfD, the recently-established anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim party, which receives overwhelmingly negative coverage in most newspapers, of “spreading their lies” through social media , as it achieves breakthroughs in regional elections around the country. 
+A year ago, at the height of the refugee influx into the country, Merkel, who was first elected in 2005, was caught on a hot mic personally pressing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to clamp down on anti-migrant posts during a UN session in New York. 
+A fortnight ago, the leader of Merkel’s parliamentary CDU faction, Volker Kauder, said that social media should be fined €50,000 for failing to remove “hate speech,” saying that a “Sword of Damocles” has to hang over social media. Kauder also called for warnings, similar to those on cigarette packs or before entering pornographic websites, to be given to those about to go on social media. 
+Justice Minister Heiko Maas – who said that there had been a 77 percent increase in hate crimes following the arrival of 900,000 asylum seekers – has given internet media companies until February next year to comply with EU directives on xenophobia and racism, or face legal action. 
+This looks to me like the first huff of the last gasp. 
+Mama Merkel tried. 
+But Merkel Haggard has lost control. 
+Now, she’s about to see the fightin’ side of Germany.",FAKE
+2466,Here's How Obamacare Is Going To Affect Your Taxes,"When you file your return, you hardly have to do anything different. There's a new line on the 1040 -- line 61, to be precise -- where you attest that you do, in fact, have health coverage. If that's the case, then mark it down here, and you're done.
+
+The good news is, tax credits made your health insurance more affordable. The bad news is, you now have to prove you still have insurance, and that you didn't get too much or too little of a subsidy. If your tax credit was too large, you'll have to pay back at least some of it.
+
+Those 1095-A forms are supposed to arrive in your mailbox by Feb. 2, so be on the lookout. You also can download them from the exchange website or call the exchange and ask it to send you one. You may get more than one form, depending on how each member of the family is covered. If you see any inaccuracies on these documents, contact your insurance exchange.
+
+When you applied for a credit, you told the exchange what you expected to earn in 2014, and that number was used to calculate your subsidy. Now, when you file the 8962 with your taxes, you're running the numbers again based on what you really made. If those amounts are different, your tax credits have to be adjusted. Those who owe the IRS can set up payment plans.
+
+How many people will see their refunds cut (or face a tax bill), and how many will get money back? No one can say for sure. But H&R Block projects that about half of all exchange customers didn't estimate their incomes correctly, and should expect some kind of adjustment, either higher or lower, Pickering said.
+
+Basically, if you bought an unsubsidized plan from an Obamacare exchange, take the information from your 1095-A and put it on your 8962, and check off line 61 of your 1040. If you didn't use an exchange, you just need to care about line 61. When it comes to taxes, that counts as easy.
+
+One more thing for unsubsidized people who used an exchange: You might still be able to get tax credits. If you earned less than four times the federal poverty level -- $46,680 for a single person and $95,400 for a family of four -- you can apply for a subsidy via the exchange. If you skipped the exchange, then this isn't possible, no matter what your income was.
+
+Obamacare's individual mandate requires most legal U.S. residents to get covered, so you might be subject to a tax penalty if you were uncovered for more than three months. The formula is complicated, but the penalty starts at $95 and goes all the way up to about $11,000. (Read this for more information.) If you didn't earn enough money to pay taxes, meaning you made less than $10,150 as a single person under 65 or more for other types of households, then there's no health insurance mandate for you, and you don't have to file a return.
+
+The idea behind the mandate was that everyone who can ""afford"" insurance should buy it, to avoid saddling the rest of us with the cost of their medical care. The Affordable Care Act says insurance is ""affordable"" if it costs 8 percent of your income. If insurance was available to you below that price and you didn't get coverage, you'll have to pay a penalty.
+
+If you make less than $60,000 a year, you can use the IRS' Free File option, but you'll still have to do a lot of math yourself. If you make less than $53,000 a year, you can take advantage of tax preparers participating in the IRS' free Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program. The IRS' Tax Counseling for the Elderly program is available at no charge to people 60 and older. And Enroll America will offer no-cost local help using Intuit TurboTax.",REAL
+5158,George Will: Trump's judge comments prompted exit from GOP,"""After Trump went after the 'Mexican' judge from northern Indiana then (House Speaker) Paul Ryan endorsed him, I decided that in fact this was not my party anymore,"" Will said on ""Fox News Sunday.""
+
+Trump attacked Will on Twitter over his decision to leave the GOP Sunday morning, writing: ""George Will, one of the most overrated political pundits (who lost his way long ago), has left the Republican Party. He's made many bad calls.""
+
+Will responded on ""Fox News Sunday,"" saying: ""He has an advantage on me, because he can say everything he knows about any subject in 140 characters and I can't.""
+
+He said he'd joined the Republican Party in 1964, inspired by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, a founder of the conservative movement and a key figure in the party then.
+
+""I joined it because I was a conservative, and I leave it for the same reason: I'm a conservative,"" Will said. ""The long and the short of it is, as Ronald Reagan said when he changed his registration, 'I did not leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me,' "" he said. Will first announced his decision to leave the GOP at a Federalist Society luncheon Friday. He told the audience: ""This is not my party,"" according to PJ Media , a conservative news website. The Pulitzer Prize-winner confirmed to PJM in an interview after his speech that he had left the party and was now ""an unaffiliated voter in the state of Maryland"" before switching the subject. PJM reported that Will cited Ryan's endorsement of Trump is one of the reasons why he decided to leave the party. Will didn't say whether he'd vote for either Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton or a third-party candidate, such as Libertarian Gary Johnson. Will, who worked on President Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign, also said at the luncheon that Trump as president with ""no opposition"" from a Republican-led Congress would be worse than Clinton as president with a Republican-led Congress. When asked by PJ Media about his message to conservatives regarding Trump, Will responded, ""Make sure he loses. Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House."" CNN efforts to reach Will were not immediately successful Saturday. Will has long been a harsh critic of Trump. Just earlier this month, he told Fox News that Trump is a ""real amateur in politics."" ""He seems to confuse the enthusiasm of the crowds in front of him at the moment in the high school auditorium with the larger electorate,"" he said . ""Whereas, in fact, crowds are definitionally not a representative selection of the American people."" And this is not the first time the conservative has broken with Republican Party orthodoxy. In 2009, he wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post calling on the United States to get out of Afghanistan, which received criticism from his party.",REAL
+8557,"Vote as if your life depended upon it, because it does.","Eric Zuesse Here’s why: Hillary has repeatedly said: “We should also work with the coalition and the neighbors to impose no-fly zones that will stop Assad from slaughtering civilians and the opposition from the air. Opposition forces on the ground, with material support from the coalition, could then help create safe areas where Syrians could remain in the country, rather than fleeing toward Europe.” This would mean that U.S. fighter-jets and missiles would be shooting down the fighter-jets and missiles of the Syrian government over Syria, and would also be shooting down those of Russia. The Syrian government invited Russia in, as its protector; the U.S. is no protector but an invader against Syria’s legitimate government, the Ba’athist government, led by Bashar al-Assad. The CIA has been trying ever since 1949 to overthrow Syria’s Ba’athist government — the only remaining non-sectarian government in the Middle East other than the current Egyptian government. The U.S. supports Jihadists who demand Sharia law, and they are trying to overthrow and replace Syria’s institutionally secular government. For the U.S. to impose a no-fly zone anywhere in Syria would mean that the U.S. would be at war against Russia over Syria’s skies. Whichever side loses that conventional air-war would then have to choose whether to surrender, or instead to use nuclear weapons against the other side’s homeland, in order for it to avoid surrendering. That’s nuclear war between Russia and the United States. Would Putin surrender? Would Hillary? Would neither? If neither does, then nuclear war will be the result. Here are the two most extensive occasions in which Hillary has stated her position on this: To the Council on Foreign Relations, on 19 November 2015: We should also work with the coalition and the neighbors to impose no-fly zones that will stop Assad from slaughtering civilians and the opposition from the air. Opposition forces on the ground, with material support from the coalition, could then help create safe areas where Syrians could remain in the country, rather than fleeing toward Europe. This combined approach would help enable the opposition to retake the remaining stretch of the Turkish border from ISIS, choking off its supply lines. It would also give us new leverage in the diplomatic process that Secretary Kerry is pursuing. … QUESTION: When you were secretary of state, you tended to agree a great deal with the then-Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. Gates was opposed to a no-fly zone in Syria; thought it was an act of war that was risky and dangerous. This seems to me the major difference right now between what the president — what Obama’s administration is doing and what you’re proposing. Do you not — why do you disagree with Bob Gates on this? CLINTON: Well, I — I believe that the no-fly zone is merited and can be implemented, again, in a coalition, not an American-only no-fly zone. I fully respect Bob and his knowledge about the difficulties of implementing a no-fly zone. But if you look at where we are right now, we have to try to clear the air of the bombing attacks that are still being carried out to a limited extent by the Syrian military, now supplemented by the Russian air force. And I think we have a chance to do that now. We have a no-fly zone over northern Iraq for years to protect the Kurds. And it proved to be successful, not easy — it never is — but I think now is the time for us to revisit those plans. I also believe, as I said in the speech, that if we begin the conversation about a no-fly zone, something that, you know, Turkey discussed with me back when I was secretary of state in 2012, it will confront a lot of our partners in the region and beyond about what they’re going to do. And it can give us leverage in the discussions that Secretary Kerry is carrying on right now. So I see it as both a strategic opportunity on the ground, and an opportunity for leverage in the peace negotiations. … QUESTION: Jim Ziren (ph), Madam Secretary. Hi. Back to the no- fly zone. are you advocating a no-fly zone over the entire country or a partial no-fly zone over an enclave where refugees might find a safe haven? And in the event of either, do you foresee see you might be potentially provoking the Russians? CLINTON: I am advocating the second, a no-fly zone principally over northern Syria close to the Turkish (ph) border, cutting off the supply lines, trying to provide some safe refuges for refugees so they don’t have to leave Syria, creating a safe space away from the barrel bombs and the other bombardments by the Syrians. And I would certainly expect to and hope to work with the Russians to be able to do that. [She expects Putin to join America’s bombing of Syria’s government and troops and shooting-down of Russia’s planes in Syria, but no question was raised about this.] … To have a swath of territory that could be a safe zone … for Syrians so they wouldn’t have to leave but also for humanitarian relief, … would give us this extra leverage that I’m looking for in the diplomatic pursuits with Russia with respect to the political outcome in Syria. During a debate against Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries: Hillary Clinton, in a debate with Bernie on 19 December 2015, argued for her proposal that the U.S. impose in Syria a “no-fly zone” where Russians were dropping bombs on the imported jihadists who have been trying to overthrow and replace Assad: “I am advocating the no-fly zone both because I think it would help us on the ground to protect Syrians; I’m also advocating it because I think it gives us some leverage in our conversations with Russia.” She said there that allowing the jihadists to overthrow Assad “would help us on the ground to protect Syrians,” somehow; and, also, that, somehow, shooting down Russia’s planes in Syria (the “no-fly zone”) “gives us some leverage in our conversations with Russia.” Bernie Sanders’s response to that was: “I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be.” He didn’t mention nuclear war as one of them. The “no-fly zone” policy is one of three policies she supports that would likely produce nuclear war; she supports all of them, not merely the “no-fly zone.” Hillary Clinton has never been asked “What would you do if Russia refuses to stop its flights in Syria?” Donald Trump has said nothing about the proposal for a no-fly zone (other than “I want to sit back and see what happens” ), because most Americans support that idea , and he’s not bright enough to take her on about it and ask her that question. Probably, if he were supportive of it, he’d have said so — in which case it wouldn’t still be an issue in this election. Trump muffed his chance — which he has had on several occasions. But clearly he, unlike her, has not committed himself on this matter. Hillary Clinton is obviously convinced that the U.S. would win a nuclear war against Russia . The question for voters is whether they’re willing to bet their lives that she is correct about that, and that even if the U.S. ‘wins’, only Russia and not also the U.S. (and the world) would be destroyed if the U.S. nuclear-attacks Russia. Every other issue in this election pales by comparison to the no-fly-zone issue, which is virtually ignored, in favor of issues that are trivial by comparison. But a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for nuclear war against Russia, regardless of whether or not the voters know this. And a vote for Trump is a vote for the unknown. Could the unknown be even worse than Hillary Clinton? If so, would it be so only in relatively trivial ways? This election should be about Hillary Clinton, not about Donald Trump.",FAKE
+2282,The new argument against gay equality: Same-sex marriage kills,"As the Supreme Court prepares to take up same-sex marriage next week, conservative scholars have produced a last-ditch argument to keep the scourge of homosexual unions from spreading across the land: Gay marriage kills.
+
+They’re saying that legalizing same-sex marriage will cause 900,000 abortions.
+
+The logic is about as obvious as if they had alleged that raising the minimum wage would increase the frequency of hurricanes. If anything, you’d think that more same-sex marriages would mean more adoptions.
+
+But comes now Gene Schaerr, unsuccessful lawyer for Utah in that state’s case against same-sex marriages, to file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of “100 scholars of marriage.”
+
+“On the surface, abortion and same-sex marriage may seem unrelated,” Schaerr acknowledged in a post on the Heritage Foundation Web site in advance of a presentation he made to the conservative think tank Monday. But “the two are closely linked in a short and simple causal chain.”
+
+To wit: Legalizing same-sex marriage devalues marriage and causes fewer heterosexual couples to marry, which leads to a larger number of unmarried women, who have abortions at higher rates than married women. As a result, Schaerr wrote, “nearly 900,000 more children of the next generation would be aborted as a result of their mothers never marrying. This is equal to the entire population of the cities of Sacramento and Atlanta combined.”
+
+Case closed! Or at least it would be, if Schaerr’s “causal chain” were real. He freely acknowledged that he had no cause-and-effect proof when I asked him about it at Heritage on Monday.
+
+“It is still too new to do a rigorous causation analysis using statistical methods,” he admitted, saying that he had found only a decline in marriage rates in states that had legalized same-sex marriage (in fact, marriage rates have declined overall). “The brief doesn’t even attempt to say conclusively that this reduction in marriage rates has been the result of adopting same-sex marriage,” Schaerr said, though there are “theoretical reasons” such causation might occur.
+
+Or perhaps theological reasons. When Schaerr quit his law firm last year to take the Utah case, he wrote to colleagues that he was going to “fulfill what I have come to see as a religious and family duty.” A colleague leaked his resignation letter to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group.
+
+Utah argued that legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to lower birth rates, pointing out that some of the states with the lowest birth rates, such as Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut, had same-sex marriage, and some of the highest birth-rate states, such as Texas and Utah, did not.
+
+But the national birth rate has been declining for years, from 14.2 per 1,000 people in 2006 to 12.4 in 2013. Texas and Utah actually had larger drops than Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut.
+
+Utah lost its case, but Schaerr — a former clerk to Antonin Scalia — is now making a similar argument, claiming to show drops in marriage rates in the years after states adopted same-sex marriage.
+
+Heritage’s Ryan Anderson, appearing with Schaerr on Monday afternoon, went even further than Schaerr’s conclusions in alleging that “every nation and every state that have redefined marriage have seen their marriage rates decline by at least 5 percent after that redefinition, even as the marriage rates in the rest of the states remain stable.”
+
+The national marriage rate declined to 6.8 per 1,000 in 2012, from 8.0 in 2002, before Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage. The Massachusetts rate dropped from 5.9 in 2002 to 5.5 in 2011, while Connecticut went from 5.7 to 5.5 and Vermont went from 8.6 to 8.3. But Texas and Utah, free of same-sex marriage, dropped from 8.4 to 7.1, and from 10.4 to 8.6, respectively.
+
+Fred Sainz, vice president of the Human Rights Campaign, accused Schaerr of “cherry-picking” his statistics. But though the numbers are dubious, Schaerr’s argument has the useful purpose of switching the debate away from same-sex marriage — on which public opinion is shifting decidedly against conservatives — and toward abortion, where positions are hardened.
+
+Schaerr had other arguments, too. He asserted that Abraham Lincoln would find it “preposterous” that the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection, would be used to justify same-sex marriage.
+
+What Lincoln would think in 2015 is unknowable — but such considerations did not deter Schaerr. He also speculated that an unemployed man who got his girlfriend pregnant in a state that had legalized same-sex marriage would be more likely to conclude that “I’m not going to assume these obligations to this woman and this child.”
+
+From that idle speculation, all it takes is a slippery slope and an active imagination to get to 900,000 abortions.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+5053,Dem convention speeches Day 4: 's Reality Check Team vets the claims,"(CNN) The Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia on Thursday for the fourth night of its convention, and CNN's Reality Check Team put the speakers' statements and assertions to the test.
+
+The team of reporters, researchers and editors across CNN listened throughout the speeches and selected key statements, rating them true; mostly true; true, but misleading; false; or it's complicated.
+
+Reality Check: Clinton on Trump's 'I alone can fix it' claim
+
+Clinton emphasized the teamwork aspect she believes the presidency requires, asking, ""Isn't he forgetting troops on the front lines. Police officers and firefighters who run toward danger. Doctors and nurses who care for us ... He's forgetting every last one of us. Americans don't say, 'I alone can fix it.' We say, 'We'll fix it together.'""
+
+While Clinton's quote may be correct -- Trump did say ""I alone can fix it"" -- she took his remarks out of context. In that portion of his speech, Trump began by once again addressing Clinton's email server scandal and commented that the FBI's lack of legal action against Clinton indicated ""that corruption has reached a level like never before."" He stated that his perspective made him the only person capable of preventing powerful politicians -- like Clinton -- from taking advantage of ""people that cannot defend themselves.""
+
+Trump's full statement on being the only one able to fix this system included: ""Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders.""
+
+Notably, the ""I and only I"" rhetoric is not new for Trump -- he has frequently claimed he alone can solve America's problems. But in the context of his convention speech, in which he references his perspective on Clinton's alleged corruption, we rate Clinton's claim true, but misleading.
+
+Clinton applauded the Dallas community's response to its police chief's call for people to step up and join the police force to make a difference after the fatal shootings of five police officers.
+
+""Police Chief David Brown asked the community to support his force, maybe even join them,"" she said. ""And you know how the community responded? Nearly 500 people applied in just 12 days. That's how Americans answer when the call for help goes out.""
+
+After the July 7 shooting, Dallas Police Chief David Brown called protesters to ""serve your communities.""
+
+""We're hiring. Get off that protest line and put an application in,"" he said. ""We'll put you in your neighborhood, and we will help you resolve some of the problems you're protesting about.""
+
+While her number is a hair high, we rate Clinton's claim true.
+
+Clinton praised President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden for turning around America's economic fortunes.
+
+""Our economy is so much stronger than when they took office. Nearly 15 million new private-sector jobs. Twenty million more Americans with health insurance. And an auto industry that just had its best year ever. That's real progress,"" she said.
+
+When Obama took office in January 2009, the country was in the midst of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Over the course of his administration, the economy has grown 2% a year. It's not spectacular growth, but the economy is certainly stronger than during the recession. We rate that claim as true.
+
+The nation has added 14.8 million private-sector jobs between the low point of February 2010 and June 2016, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But if you look over Obama's two terms, the nation is up only 9.8 million jobs. We rate that claim as true, but misleading.
+
+Health Secretary Sylvia Burwell said in May that 20 million more people have coverage now thanks to Obama's signature health reform law. It includes both people who have gained coverage on the Obamacare exchanges and through Medicaid expansion, as well as young adults who have been able to stay on their parents' plans until they turn 26. We rate that claim as true.
+
+The auto industry sold more cars and trucks in 2015 than ever before. We rate that clam as true.
+
+Clinton attacked Trump's record, saying, ""In Atlantic City, 60 miles from here, you will find contractors and small businesses who lost everything because Donald Trump refused to pay his bills.""
+
+USA Today looked at 60 lawsuits and more than 200 mechanic's liens, and interviewed businesses like an Atlantic City cabinet builder who claimed that the Trump Organization did not pay more than $80,000 owed to him, which started the closure of the builder's business. Hundreds of other contractors in the 1980s made similar claims. Additionally, the investigation found 21 citations against the now-defunct Trump Plaza for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act in the same city.
+
+The Wall Street Journal cited a well-known controversy where contractors on Trump's Taj Mahal casino were told by the organization that they should agree to accept ""less than full payment or risk becoming unsecured creditors in bankruptcy court,"" the paper reported. A year later, the Taj Mahal Casino went bankrupt.
+
+In response to the reports, Trump told USA Today in an interview that he only stiffs or shorts bills if the work is unsatisfactory, and he told the Journal that he pays ""thousands of bills on time.""
+
+These are just cases in Atlantic City, but both investigations cite examples in other cities such as Miami as well.
+
+Based on the reporting of these two news outlets, we rate Clinton's claim as true.
+
+Katie McGinty, who is running for Senate from Pennsylvania, said that when she was growing up, hard work meant success, but today that deal is off the table.
+
+""Middle-class families aren't making a dime, in real terms, more than they were two decades ago. But we know costs have been going through the roof."" she said.
+
+Whether this is true or not depends on your time frame.
+
+The most recent census data is from 2014, when median household income was $53,657. That's up 5.2% from 1994, when it was $51,006.
+
+However, if you look at 20 years ago from today -- or 1996 -- median income was $53,345. While technically that's quite a few dimes higher, it is essentially flat.
+
+McGinty is echoing a common refrain that wages have been stagnant in recent years. It's true that median income is still lower than its pre-Great Recession level peak of $57,357 in 2007.
+
+Median income, however, has risen over the past year or two, according to estimates from Sentier Research, which was founded by two former Census Bureau employees. By June 2016, it had risen to $57,206.
+
+While their data doesn't go back 20 years, it supports McGinty's statement that median income has been flat over the longer term. Sentier estimates the typical household earned $57,826 in June 2000, the earliest month they looked at.
+
+We rate McGinty's claim mostly true. While median income rose 5.2% between 1994 and 2014, it's roughly the same as it was in 1996, according to census data. And Sentier Research found that median income in June 2016 is roughly the same as it was in 2000. And it's true costs for many things have risen since then.
+
+Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti focused on the challenges faced by America's cities. Garcetti touted his city's action on raising the minimum wage: ""In Los Angeles, we saw too many Americans living in poverty, so we became the biggest city in America to raise the minimum wage to $15, inspiring other cities and states to follow.""
+
+Other cities also passed measures to raise the minimum wage, including San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago and Seattle. Seattle did so in 2013, before Los Angeles did, and its $15 rate will be implemented sooner, by 2018.
+
+While LA was the largest city at the time to enact a minimum wage increase, it is not yet up to $15 an hour, as Garcetti implies. Also, other cities like New York will phase in the $15 rate sooner than LA will.
+
+Henrietta Ivey, a home care worker from Detroit, praised Clinton as an advocate for a higher minimum wage.
+
+""I know she will fight to raise the minimum wage,"" Ivey said. ""In Michigan, we are 'Fighting for 15,' a $15 minimum wage.""
+
+Clinton has indeed spoken out in support of setting a new bar for wages but she has waffled on the amount of the pay hike. Last November, she told an audience at a town hall in Iowa, ""I favor a $12 minimum wage at the federal level.""
+
+A week after the town hall, she wrote a tweet with the hashtag #Fightfor15, a hat tip to a grass-roots labor group promoting a $15 minimum wage nationwide.
+
+During a CNN debate in April, moderator Wolf Blitzer pressed Clinton to clarify her plans for the federal minimum wage. Clinton said that she was on board with the Fight for $15 movement but she then outlined some fine print, prompting an extended back-and-forth with Bernie Sanders.
+
+""I am sure a lot of people are very surprised to learn that you supported raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour,"" Sanders said.
+
+Clinton explained that her policy at the federal level would mirror New York's recent minimum wage increase, which establishes a $15 floor for workers in the New York City metro area and a $12.50 minimum wage for the rest of the state, where the cost of living is lower.
+
+The increases will be phased in over the next five years and there are different timetables for employers in the city, suburbs and rural areas. Small businesses have a more staggered schedule than large companies. The New York law calls for pay statewide to eventually hit $15 but there's no established timeline yet for the increase.
+
+""Hillary Clinton supports a $12 federal minimum wage but believes that the federal minimum is just that, and encourages states, cities, and workers through bargaining to go even higher, including a $15 minimum wage in places where it makes sense,"" the post says.
+
+Ivey correctly states that Clinton's platform includes a raise for low-wage workers, so our verdict is true, but it's important to note that some geographic restrictions apply to her fight for $15.
+
+Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper touted Colorado's economic record. ""Today, Denver is the fastest-growing big city in America, and Colorado has the second-strongest economy in the country,"" he said.
+
+Since there are many ways to measure the strength of an economy, and not all will show that Colorado is the second strongest, Hickenlooper's claim is mostly true.
+
+Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm praised Obama for helping the auto industry in its time of need.
+
+""(Obama) saved the American auto industry. Right, and then that renewed auto industry paid America back in full,"" Granholm said.
+
+That's not true, actually. When the Treasury Department closed the books on the $45.9 billion bailout of General Motors in December 2013, taxpayers had lost more than $10 billion.
+
+Ultimately, though, the government may have saved money. The failure of GM and Chrysler would have cost the federal government between $39 billion to $105 billion in lost tax revenues as well as assistance to the unemployed, according to a study by the Center for Automotive Research, a Michigan think tank.
+
+We rate Granholm's claim that the auto industry paid back taxpayers in full as false.
+
+Reality Check: Pelosi on Democrats looking like America
+
+House Minority Leader Pelosi held up her caucus of Democrats in the House of Representatives as representative of the demographics of the country as a whole.
+
+""We are a caucus proud that we look like 21st-century America; over 50% women, people of color and the LGBT community members,"" she said. ""What a contrast to the restricted club that met in convention in Cleveland last week.""
+
+That breaks down to 33% female, 39% people of color, and 3% LGBT.
+
+The Republican caucus in the House of Representatives has 22 women, 11 people of color and no representatives who identify as LGBT.
+
+That means that women make up 8.9% of the 247-person caucus, and people of color make up 4.4% of the Republican representatives.
+
+We rate Pelosi's claim as mostly true because the Democratic caucus falls short of representing women, but is over-representative of people of color and those who identify as LGBT.
+
+Social studies teacher David Wils said Clinton would ""make college debt free for all.""
+
+Some context here: Clinton's final plan is the direct result of the push and pull between her and Sanders during the Democratic primary. Sanders touted his plan for tuition-free public college and Clinton, at first, offered only free community college tuition.
+
+When it was clear that Clinton was losing younger voters to Sanders, she shifted her position and offered a new proposal for free tuition at public colleges, but she added, ""I don't want to make college free for Donald Trump's kids."" With these specifics, her proposed plan does not cover families with household incomes over $125,000 a year, not exactly ""Donald Trump's kids.""
+
+NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says recent religious freedom acts are the ""opposite"" of what founding father Thomas Jefferson wanted.
+
+In brief remarks, Abdul-Jabbar cited Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, one of his most famous and important works.
+
+""In 1777, Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which later became a model for the First Amendment. Today's so-called 'religious freedom' acts, like the one signed by Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, they are the opposite of what Jefferson wanted because they allow discrimination,"" Abdul-Jabbar said.
+
+So are today's religious freedom bills the opposite of what Jefferson wanted?
+
+The statute, passed by the Virginia General Assembly in January 1786, is seen as a precursor for First Amendment protections by declaring the need for separation of church and state and the right to exercise one's conscience.
+
+""No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities,"" Jefferson wrote.
+
+Proponents say it is a protection of First Amendment rights. Opponents say it is discriminatory.
+
+""As Thomas Jefferson noted, 'No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of civil authority,'"" Pence wrote.
+
+Abdul-Jabbar didn't point to any particular passage in the statute, but he might have been referring to Jefferson's view that ""our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.""
+
+Jefferson, however, believed that ""proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.""
+
+He also railed against compelling people ""to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.""
+
+As for Indiana's religious freedom law, it didn't seek to mandate a particular point of view, but shield those holding certain beliefs from being legally liable.
+
+Furthermore, Jefferson was talking about the government discriminating against citizens. His Virginia Statue doesn't say anything about protecting private citizens' religious freedom from other individuals, which is what the recent crop of religious freedom laws are arguably about. At least, that's what many state supreme courts have found, for instance in the case of bakers and florists who refuse to service same-sex weddings.
+
+Whether religious freedom laws are discriminatory is a matter of opinion, but it's certainly not clear that Jefferson's statute is at odds with them, making Abdul-Jabbar's claim far from a slam dunk. We rate it false.
+
+The Democratic Party -- currently fighting to gain a majority in the Senate -- gave Katie McGinty a big platform for her upcoming race at the last night of the DNC. McGinty launched attacks against opponent Sen. Pat Toomey -- whom she will battle in November for a Pennsylvania seat -- spotlighting his financial policy on a national stage. Given the big audience, our team decided McGinty's claims deserved a full-blown Reality Check.
+
+McGinty first emphasized Toomey's six-year investment career, claiming he had ""made his millions on Wall Street"" before launching into specific criticisms of his economic policy.
+
+Even if you factor in generous bonuses, it is unlikely Toomey topped $2 million as a trader. He is, however, currently valued at $4.8 million by the Center for Responsive Politics -- which given his career history, almost certainly comes entirely from investment banking.
+
+For these reasons, we rate McGinty's claim as true.
+
+McGinty also delved into details on Toomey's voting record. ""He's still trying to sell us the same old trickle-down. We're not buying it. We know that trickle-down only benefits those who are already on the top. Trust the stock market with your hard-earned Social Security, Pat Toomey says. Trust the wheelers and dealers with your savings and you will be living large.""
+
+As for trusting the stock market with ""your hard-earned Social Security,"" McGinty is likely referring to Toomey's 2010 Social Security privatization proposal, which targets a specific group of people. Democrat Joe Sestak, opposing Toomey in the 2010 midterm election, accused him of putting ""Wall Street profits ahead of protecting Pennsylvania seniors.""
+
+If individuals did not want to participate, Toomey said they ""could stay with the current system of a guaranteed benefit."" McGinty's statement that Toomey encourages trusting the stock market with Social Security earnings is generally accurate, but leaves out some important context regarding whom Toomey's philosophy targets. That makes McGinty's second claim true, but misleading.
+
+Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro said Trump has defended the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII.
+
+Castro's claim is rooted in comments the business mogul made last year to justify his proposed travel ban for Muslims. It's a bit of a stretch to characterize Trump's statements as a defense of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proclamations ordering the imprisonment of Japanese immigrants in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.
+
+On ABC's ""Good Morning America,"" Trump said Roosevelt is remembered as a great president despite his legacy of Japanese internment.
+
+""This is a president who is highly respected by all,"" said Trump. ""If you look at what he was doing, it was far worse (than the travel ban).""
+
+As a follow up, the candidate was asked whether he supported bringing back policies similar to Roosevelt's wartime restrictions.
+
+""I don't want to bring (them) back at all,"" said Trump. ""I don't like doing it at all.""
+
+During a separate appearance on MSNBC's ""Morning Joe,"" Trump declined to say whether he thought the establishment of Japanese internment camps violated American values.
+
+""I don't want to respond,"" Trump said. ""You know why? That's not what we're doing.""
+
+Trump can scramble words like Jackson Pollock splattered paint, allowing for a broad array of interpretations to his patter. But we can't find anything in his commentary that suggests he has a favorable view of Japanese internment. We rate this claim false.",REAL
+1515,Now Ted Cruz is the enemy: Rupert Murdoch and WSJ open fire in new GOP civil war,"Social conservatives are animated by religious concerns – everything else is tangential. On most issues, they’re out of step with the country, but that has never mattered: For the committed, political martyrdom is preferable to compromise (or winning elections).
+
+Religious conservatives have supported the Republican Party almost exclusively since the 1980s. But that support was always conditional: Eventually, the GOP had to deliver on some of the cultural issues, like same-sex marriage or abortion. So far they haven’t, and the conservative base knows it.
+
+The GOP has embraced this segment of the party for practical reasons, and there’s no doubt that it helped them in the short-term. But the union is becoming more fractured by the day, as the religious right continues to lose the culture war. From abortion to drug law reform to contraception to gay marriage, Republicans have surrendered to majority opinion – and the cultural momentum now seems inexorable.
+
+In this election, the right is clamoring for an “outsider,” if only to protest against an establishment that has taken them for granted. And this internal dissent has upended the Republican presidential race. Candidates like Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz owe much of their success to this resentment.
+
+It appears the GOP’s intrafamilial squabble has spilled onto the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
+
+As Politico reported, the Journal has turned its guns on Ted Cruz, the ascendant outsider candidate. Cruz is a talented demagogue; he knows his evangelical base and he’s made every effort to woo them. Although a sitting U.S. senator, Cruz has positioned himself as the anti-establishment candidate, someone who will force the “Washington cartel” to deliver the goods to religious conservatives. This was clear enough in September when Cruz vowed to shut down the government over funding for Planned Parenthood, a move he knew had no chance of succeeding.
+
+The Journal has become increasingly critical of the Texas senator, and for very good reasons. It represents the establishment, and its editorial page studiously defends deregulation, supply side economics and interventionism, all of which are essential to mainstream Republicanism – they’ve never been particularly concerned with the culture wars.
+
+Like the pro-business Republicans who read their Op-Eds, however, the WSJ editorial board knows the GOP can’t win a general election with Cruz at the top of the ticket. According to the latest polls, both Clinton and Sanders would easily defeat Cruz in a general election, and the gap is likely to widen as independents and moderates pay closer attention to Cruz’s shenanigans.
+
+Republican insiders also know Cruz is a huckster. His brinksmanship in the Senate tells you everything you need to know about his seriousness as a legislator. Cruz is a creation of the conservative media-industrial complex, and as popular as he may be inside that bubble, he’s positively toxic outside of it.
+
+The Journal insists its criticisms of Cruz are “rooted in nothing more than substantive policy differences,” particularly as it relates to immigration, trade and national security issues. “It’s not a personal thing,” said editorial page editor Paul Gigot, “It’s a business thing. It’s a professional thing. We call them as we see them.” Naturally, the paper has been friendlier to Marco Rubio, who has become the default establishment candidate post-Jeb. This prompted Cruz to glibly suggest that “The Journal should change their header to the Marco Rubio for President Newspaper, because their attacks – and it’s going to keep coming because Marco fights for the principles they [emphasis mine] care about.” Cruz addressed the Journal’s hostility at length on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe“: “Listen, Joe, there are no conservatives in America who think ‘The Wall Street Journal’ is the voice of conservatism. As I talked about in my book, as you know, I wrote a book this summer called ‘A Time for Truth.’ The opening chapter talks about how the Washington cartel, the career politicians in both parties, who get in bed with the lobbyists and special interests, how they work, and the way Republican leadership punishes anyone who stands up to the cartel is they engage in public flagellation — as I describe in that opening chapter, ‘Mendacity,’ the most potent tool they have is ‘The Wall Street Journal’ editorial board. And anytime Republican leadership is mad at you — with me, that’s quite often — you can set a stop watch and within 72 hours, ‘The Journal’ hits you and they usually hit you twice.” All of this plays perfectly into Cruz’s outsider narrative. If the conservative paper of record castigates him for being unconservative, well, that’s because they’re not real conservatives. The WSJ represents the very establishment against which the religious right is reacting, and so a denouncement by them is a badge of honor for Cruz. As Matt Strawn, former chairman of the Iowa GOP, told Politico: “If the Journal’s opposition does anything with those voters [Tea Party and evangelical voters], it validates Cruz as an outsider not favored by the political and media elites. Does the WSJ editorial board have clout with many in the Republican Party? Of course. Does it have clout with the segment of Republican voters that Ted Cruz needs for success in the Iowa Caucuses? Not really.” If anything, then, the Cruz-WSJ spat only exacerbates the internal conflict within the GOP. The establishment Republicans who read the Wall Street Journal and the people who support Cruz or Trump or Carson have very divergent concerns. This will become more and more apparent as the presidential contest heats up next year.",REAL
+4445,"The last days of Washington, D.C.: America can no longer mask its steep decline","Since 9/11, can there be any doubt that the public has become numb to the euphemisms that regularly accompany U.S. troops, drones, and CIA operatives into Washington’s imperial conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa?  Such euphemisms are meant to take the sting out of America’s wars back home.  Many of these words and phrases are already so well known and well worn that no one thinks twice about them anymore.
+
+Here are just a few: collateral damage for killed and wounded civilians (a term used regularly since the First Gulf War of 1990-1991).   Enhanced interrogation techniques for torture, a term adopted with vigor by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of their administration (“techniques” that were actually demonstrated in the White House).  Extraordinary rendition for CIA kidnappings of terror suspects off global streets or from remote badlands, often followed by the employment of enhanced interrogation techniques at U.S. black sites or other foreign hellholes.  Detainees for prisoners and detention camp for prison (or, in some cases, more honestly, concentration camp), used to describe Guantánamo (Gitmo), among other places established offshore of American justice.  Targeted killings for presidentially ordered drone assassinations. Boots on the ground for yet another deployment of “our” troops (and not just their boots) in harm’s way. Even the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, its label for an attempt to transform the Greater Middle East into a Pax Americana, would be redubbed in the Obama years overseas contingency operations (before any attempt at labeling was dropped for a no-name war pursued across major swathes of the planet).
+
+As euphemisms were deployed to cloak that war’s bitter and brutal realities, over-the-top honorifics were assigned to America’s embattled role in the world. Exceptional, indispensable, and greatest have been the three words most commonly used by presidents, politicians, and the gung ho to describe this country. Once upon a time, if Americans thought this way, they felt no need to have their presidents and presidential candidates actually say so — such was the confidence of the golden age of American power.  So consider the constant redeployment of these terms a small measure of America’s growing defensiveness about itself, its sense of doubt and decline rather than strength and confidence.
+
+To what end this concerted assault on the words we use? In George Orwell’s classic 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” he noted that his era’s equivalents for “collateral damage” were “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” Obviously, not much has changed in the intervening seven decades.  And this is, as Orwell intuited, a dangerous way to go.  Cloaking violent, even murderous actions in anodyne language might help a few doubting functionaries sleep easier at night, but it should make the rest of us profoundly uneasy.
+
+The more American leaders and officials — and the media that quotes them endlessly — employ such euphemisms to cloak harsh realities, the more they ensure that such harshness will endure; indeed, that it is likely to grow harsher and more pernicious as we continue to settle into a world of euphemistic thinking.
+
+In the future, some linguist or lexicographer will doubtless compile a dictionary of perpetual war and perhaps (since they may be linked) imperial decline, focusing on the grim processes and versions of failure language can cloak.  It would undoubtedly explore how certain words and rhetorical devices were used in twenty-first-century America to obscure the heavy burdens that war placed on the country, even as they facilitated its continuingfailed conflicts.  It would obviously include classic examples like surge, used in both Iraq and Afghanistan to obscure the way our government rushed extra troops into a battle zone in a moment of failure only ensuring the extension of that failure, and the now-classic phrase shock and awe that obscured the reality of a massive air strike on Baghdad that resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians (“collateral damage”), but not the “decapitation” of a hated regime.
+
+Don’t think, however, that the language of twenty-first-century American war was only meant to lull the public.  Less familiar words and terms continue to be used within the military not to clarify tasks at hand but to obscure certain obvious realities even from those sanctioned to deal with them.  Takeasymmetrical warfare, the gray zone, and VUCA.  Unless you spend time in Department of Defense and military circles, you probably haven’t heard of these.
+
+Asymmetrical warfare suggests that the enemy fights unfairly and in a thoroughly cowardly fashion, regularly lurking behind and mixing with civilians (“hostages”), because that enemy doesn’t have the moxie to don uniforms and stand toe-to-toe in a “kinetic” smack-down with U.S. troops.  As a result, of course, the U.S. must be prepared for underhanded tactics and devious weaponry, including ambushes and IEDs (improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs), as well as a range of other “unconventional” tactics now all too familiar in a world plagued by violent attacks against “soft” targets (aka civilians).  It must also be prepared to engage an enemy mixed in with a civilian population and so brace itself for the inevitable collateral damage that is now so much the essence of American war.
+
+That groups like the Islamic State (ISIS) would choose to fight “asymmetrically” should hardly come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever been confronted by a much bigger and better armed kid in a schoolyard.  Misdirection, a sucker punch, a slingshot, even running away to fight another day are “asymmetrical” approaches that are sensible indeed for any outgunned and overmatched opponent.  The term is a truism, nothing more, when it comes to the realities of our world. It is, however, a useful way of framing matters for those in the Pentagon and the military who don’t want to think seriously about the grim course of action, focused significantly on civilian populations, they are pursuing, which often instills anger and the urge for revenge in such populations and so, in the end, runs at cross purposes to stated U.S. aims.
+
+The “gray zone” is a fuzzy term used in military circles to describe the perplexing nature of lower-level conflicts, often involving non-state actors, that don’t qualify as full-fledged wars. These are often fought using non-traditional weapons and tactics ranging from cyber attacks to the propagandizing of potential terror recruits via social media. This “zone” is unnerving to Pentagon types in part because the vast majority of the Pentagon’s funding goes to conventional weaponry that’s as subtle as a sledgehammer: big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, main battle tanks, strategic bombers, and wildly expensive multi-role aircraft such as the F-35 (now estimated to cost roughly $1.4 trillion through its lifecycle).  Much of this weaponry is “too big to fail” in the funding wars in Washington, but regularly fails in the field precisely because it’s too big to be used effectively against the latest crop of evasive enemies.  Hence, that irresolvable gray zone which plagues America’s defense planners and operatives.
+
+The question the gray zone both raises and obscures is: Why has the U.S. done so poorly when, by its own definition, it remains the biggest, baddest superpower around, the one that outspends its non-state enemies by a factor so large it can’t even be calculated?  Keep in mind, for instance, that the 9/11 attacks on American soil were estimated to have cost Osama bin Laden at most a half-million dollars. Multiply that by 400 and you can buy one “made in America” F-35 jet fighter. If the gray zone offers little help clarifying America’s military dilemmas, what about VUCA?  It’s an acronym for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, which is meant to describe our post-9/11 world.  Of course, there’s nothing like an acronym to take the sting out of any world.  But as an historian who has read a lot of history books, let me confess that, to the best of my knowledge, the world has always been, is now, and will always be VUCA. For any future historian of the Pentagon’s language, let me sum things up this way: instead of honest talk about war in all its ugliness and uncertainty, military professionals of our era have tended to substitute buzz words, catchphrases, and acronyms.  It’s a way of muddying the water.  It allows the world of war to tumble on without serious challenge, which is why it’s been so useful in these years to speak of, say, COIN (Counterinsurgency) or 4GW(Fourth-Generation Warfare). Much like its most recent enthusiast, General David Petraeus, COIN has once again lost favor in the military, but Fourth-Generation Warfare is still riding high and sounds so refreshingly forward-looking, not like the stale Vietnam-era wine in a post-9/11 bottle that it is.  In reality, it’s another iteration of insurgency and COIN mixed and matched with Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s people’s war.  To prevail in places like Afghanistan, so 4GW thinkers suggest, one needs to win hearts and minds — yes, that classic phrase of defeat in Vietnam — while securing and protecting (a definite COINage) the people against insurgents and terrorists.  In other words, we’re talking about an acronym that immediately begins to congeal if you use older words to describe it like “pacification” and “nation-building.” The latest 4GW jargon may not help win wars, but it does sometimes win healthy research grants from the government. The fact is that trendy acronyms and snappy buzz words have a way of limiting genuine thinking on war.  If America is to win (or, far better, avoid) future wars, its war professionals need to look more honestly at that phenomenon in all of its dimensions.  So, too, do the American people, for it’s in their name that such wars are allegedly waged. The Truth About “Progress” in America’s Wars These days, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter often resorts to cancer imagery when describing the Islamic state. “Parent tumor” is an image he especially favors — that is, terrorism as a cancer that America’s militarized surgeons need to attack and destroy before it metastasizes and has “children.”  (Think of the ISIS franchises in Libya, where the organization has recently doubled in size, Afghanistan, and Yemen.)  Hence the proliferation of “surgical strikes” by drones and similarly “surgical” Special Ops raids, both of which you could think of as America’s equivalent of white blood cells in its war on the cancer of terrorism. But is terrorism really a civilizational cancer that can be “cured” via the most aggressive “kinetic” treatments?  Can the U.S. render the world cancer-free?  For that’s what Carter’s language implies.  And how does one measure “progress” in a “war” on the cancer of ISIS?  Indeed, from an outsider’s perspective, the proliferation of U.S. military bases around the world (there are now roughly 800), as well as of drone strikes, Special Ops raids, and massive weapons exports might have a cancerous look to them.  In other words, what constitutes a “cancer” depends on one’s perspective — and perhaps one’s definition of world “health,” too. The very notion of progress in America’s recent wars is one that a colleague, Michael Murry, recently critiqued.  A U.S. Navy Vietnam War Veteran, he wrote me that, for his favorite military euphemism, “I have to go with ‘progress’ as incessantly chanted by the American military brass in Iraq and Afghanistan… “We go on hearing about 14 years of ‘progress’ which, to hear our generals tell it, would vanish in an instant should the United States withdraw its forces and let the locals and their neighbors sort things out. Since when do ‘fragile gains’ equate to ‘progress’? Who in their right mind would invest rivers of blood and trillions of dollars in ‘fragility’?  Now that I think of it, we also have the euphemistic expression of ‘drawdown’ substituting for ‘withdrawal’ which in turn substitutes for ‘retreat.’ The U.S. military and the civilian government it has browbeaten into hapless acquiescence simply cannot face the truth of their monumental failures and so must continually bastardize our language in a losing — almost comical — attempt to stay one linguistic step ahead of the truth.” Progress, as Murry notes, basically means nothing when such “gains,” in the words of David Petraeus during the surge months in Iraq in 2007, are both “fragile” and “reversible.” Indeed, Petraeus repeated the same two words in 2011 to describe similar U.S. “progress” in Afghanistan, and today it couldn’t be clearer just how much “progress” was truly made there.  Isn’t it time for government officials to stop banging the drums of war talk in favor of “progress” when none exists? Think, for instance, of the American-trained (and now re-trained) Iraqi security forces. Each year U.S. officials swear that the Iraqi military is getting ever closer to combat readiness, but much like one of Zeno’s paradoxes, the half-steps that military takes under American tutelage never seem to get it into fighting shape.  Progress, eternally touted, seems always to lead to regress, eternally explained away, as that army regularly underperforms or its units simply collapse, often abandoning their American-supplied weaponry to the enemy.  Here we are, 12 years after the U.S. began training the Iraqi military and once again it seems to be cratering, this time while supposedly on the road to retaking Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, from its Islamic State occupiers.  Progress, anyone? In short, the dishonesty of the words the U.S. military regularly wields illustrates the dishonesty of its never-ending wars. After so many years of failure and frustration, of wars that aren’t won and terrorist movements that only seem to spread as its leaders are knocked off, isn’t it past time for Americans to ditch phrases like “collateral damage,” “enemy noncombatant,” “no-fly zone” (or even worse, “safe zone”), and “surgical strike” and adopt a language, however grim, that accurately describes the military realities of this era? Words matter, especially words about war.  So as a change of pace, instead of the usual bloodless euphemisms and vapid acronyms, perhaps the U.S. government could tell the shocking and awful truth to the American people in plain language about the realities and dangers of never-ending war.",REAL
+2315,16 Times The Obama Administration Lied About The President's Position On Same-Sex Marriage,"WASHINGTON -- It can now, apparently, be told: During his run for the presidency and his first years in the White House, President Barack Obama deceived the American public about his position on same-sex marriage.
+
+The revelation, underwhelming as it may be to those who followed the debate closely, came in a passage from the president's longtime aide and adviser David Axelrod in his new book, Believer: My Forty Years In Politics. Axelrod admits that Obama personally supported the legalization of marriage equality for same-sex couples but claimed he didn't for political reasons.
+
+Gay marriage was a particularly nagging issue. For as long as we had been working together, Obama had felt a tug between his personal views and the politics of gay marriage…. [H]e grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ""sacred union."" Having prided himself on forthrightness, though, Obama never felt comfortable with his compromise and, no doubt, compromised position. He routinely stumbled over the question when it came up in debates or interviews. ""I'm just not very good at bullshitting,"" he said with a sigh after one such awkward exchange.
+
+It had long been assumed that Obama supported gay marriage and hid it for the sake of political expedience. After all, he had signed a questionnaire in 1996 while running for the state senate in Illinois saying he was a proponent. Would it really be possible that he regressed while the rest of the country evolved?
+
+Of course not. And yet, there is something striking about Axelrod's passage, if only because it puts an end to the lengthy series of misdirection, spin and even lies that the administration told for years to avoid revealing Obama's true belief on the matter. Dating back to his Senate run in 2004, Obama and his aides repeatedly insisted that he wasn't yet fully comfortable with marriage for gay couples as a right, even though he clearly was. As the New York Times' Mike Barbaro put it:
+
+""Gay marriage was a particularly nagging issue. For as long as we had been working together, Obama had felt a tug between his personal views and the politics of gay marriage. As a candidate for the state senate in 1996 from liberal Hyde Park, he signed a questionnaire promising his support for legalization. I had no doubt that this was his heartfelt belief. ""I just don't feel my marriage is somehow threatened by the gay couple next door,"" he told me. Yet he also knew his view was way out in front of the public's. Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ""sacred union."" Having prided himself on forthrightness, though, Obama never felt comfortable with his compromise and, no doubt, compromised position. He routinely stumbled over the question when it came up in debates or interviews. ""I'm just not very good at bullshitting,"" he said with a sigh after one such awkward exchange. By 2010 he had told reporters that his position was ""evolving,"" and in 2011 the administration announced that it would no longer fight in court to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act, a controversial Clinton-era law absolving federal and state governments of their obligation to recognize gay marriages sanctioned in states where they were legal. Yet if Obama's views were ""evolving"" publicly, they were fully evolved behind closed doors. The president was champing at the bit to announce his support for the right of gay and lesbian couples to wed -- and having watched him struggle with this issue for years, I was ready, too. Jim Messina, the campaign manager, was nervous about the impact of such a step. ""We've looked at this and it could cost you a couple of battleground states; North Carolina, for one,"" he said. By year's end, however, Obama was no longer interested in analysis. ""I just want you guys to know that if a smart reporter asks me how I would vote on this if I were still in the state legislature, I'm going to tell the truth. I would vote yes.""
+
+""What I can tell you is I have not had an opportunity to read all 520 pages of Mr. Axelrod’s book,"" Earnest said at the daily briefing. ""The first-hand account that he provides in the context of the book is not one that I would disagree with or quibble with. He obviously is sharing his views as he remembers them and sometimes his perspective is informed by his up-close, front-row seat to history.""
+
+""Frankly, I don’t think I have a whole lot more to contribute to that,"" he said at one point.
+
+""I think the president’s record on these issues speaks to this even better than I possibly could,"" he said at another.",REAL
+6454,Alternative Cancer Treatments With Positive Results and Generic-Drug Probe to Be Filed by Year-End,"Alternative Cancer Treatments With Positive Results and Generic-Drug Probe to Be Filed by Year-End The news of Michael Buble's three-year-old son being diagnosed with liver cancer brought back f... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/alternative-cancer-treatments-with.html The news of Michael Buble's three-year-old son being diagnosed with liver cancer brought back flashbacks from my childhood; you could say that I became a naturopathic doctor because of cancer.As a 10-year-old child, I stood before the coffin of my 10-year-old cousin Linda--she had died from cancer. There are experiences where one encounter can shape your life, and Linda's death shaped mine. How could this be, a 10-year-old dying from cancer? We just played together and now her play was gone. I made a vow to myself that day that I would try to change this from happening, and as a child I began studying alternative medicine and continued this pursuit my entire life, specifically anti-aging and chronic disease treatments dealing with cancer and recognizing a connection between nutrition and the disease structure.As a practitioner, I had very good success in dealing with my cancer patients. One must first identify the origin of disease before the treatment can be started ; this is certainly missing from modern day cancer treatments.Cancer is an invading disease that attacks the body’s immune system. Once cancer has been detected, it has already had time to establish its web network. Treating the tumor is not good enough; it is only the start, and these are only the symptoms stemming from the cause. What is necessary is to rout out the cause, and while doing so, keep the healthy cell structures from being broken down and becoming infected. There is no single cure for treating cancer; cancer must be approached and treated holistically. The cellular process in developing cancer takes many years. A compromised immunity and cell damage does not happen overnight, with the exception of high radiation or other toxic exposure. Treatment must be approached defensively and directly; focus on the cause and do not treat cancer in reverse — target your treatment mentally, physically and spiritually from the disease origin.Prescription drugs that target symptoms can cause devastating side effects and are often expensive. In fact, the U.S. Justice Department has launched an antitrust investigation into over a dozen generic pharmaceutical companies. They are investigating whether executives colluded to raise prices on prescriptions.As is the case with prescription drugs, cancer treatments can also be very expensive. Most treatments today use radiation and chemotherapy, but did you know other alternatives exist? These treatments do not receive much media attention, and those promoting the treatments tend to pass away before they can share their findings. In 2012, CTV reported that an old drug used for schizophrenia was also capable of neutralizing cancer stem cells without harming healthy cells. Many have noted that high doses of Vitamin C can hinder cancer's progression. In fact, lab studies have shown that high doses of Vitamin C may slow the growth and spread of prostate, pancreatic, liver, colon, and other types of cancer cells. Animal studies have shown it blocks tumor growth in certain models of pancreatic, liver, prostate, and ovarian cancers, sarcoma, and malignant mesothelioma--all with few side effects. You can find more research on Vitamin C and cancer at these links: one , two , three .The other half of this situation is the physicians conducting studies about alternative therapies. Between June 19-July 21, nine natural practitioners were found dead . Explosive: Here's The Real Reason Holistic Doctors Are Being Killed Two of the most notable were Dr. Jeffrey Bradstreet, MD, an alternative autism specialist, and Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, MD, an alternative cancer specialist. Dr. Bradstreet had been investigating the use of human GcMAF for autism, cancer, and other diseases. GcMAF is short for Gc protein-derived macrophage activating factor; it is a protein produced by modification of vitamin D-binding protein. Three days prior to his death, Georgia law enforcement raided Dr. Bradstreet's clinic specifically to gather all information about his use of GcMAF. After this raid, Dr. Bradstreet reportedly shot himself in the chest and died. Similarly, Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez passed away from a heart attack, though he was reported to be in good health previously. Interestingly, in 1975, testimony before the U.S. Congress indicated that a weapon had been developed to shoot a projectile into a victim without the victim’s knowledge, which would introduce a nearly undetectable substance into the body that would cause a heart attack. You can read more about the doctors' research here .Allopathic treatment modalities have difficulties in developing a treatment that is safe and effective in inducing cancer cell apoptosis without also destroying healthy cells. As a researcher, I have spent the past 15 years in developing an alternative natural therapy that would be an effective cancer treatment.My hypothesis was to develop both a holistic and synergistic formulation to treat the cause of cancer on several fronts, due to the complex nature of cancerous cells and tumours, and do so without causing further harm. Healthy cells and tissue must be preserved while killing or choking-off cancerous cells through induction of apoptosis, and it is my belief that we have developed an effective treatment. The next stage will be conducting a double-blind study; this critical stage has been solved after finding the perfect clinic willing to take on the challenge. The final stage will depend on funding the study. If this treatment were based on using allopathic drugs, the funding would be available, but when using natural medicine, this is not the case. In any event, I remain hopeful.The natural approach to disease must be fought for; unfortunately, gains in the natural health community will probably never receive the widespread publication that allopathic treatments do. As we discussed last week, prevention is the best alternative, and supporting the natural health industry is the best way for healthy treatment alternatives to gain traction. By Eldon Dahl Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+4213,"In Bronx, Sanders voters find more common ground with Trump than Clinton","Sanders and Trump supporters are poles apart on many major issues, but a rally shows their shared revolutionary fervor and, in some cases, even an affinity.
+
+Or so say many of the homemade signs here on a cool evening at Saint Mary's Park in the South Bronx on Thursday, as an estimated 15,000 people thronged to hear the presidential candidate with the oft-punned name.
+
+Noah Biron, a 19-year-old waiter at a country club in Connecticut came of age politically via the unexpected inspiration from the senator from Vermont. Climate change is his No. 1 issue, he says, as he holds a “Mother Earth” poster. He’s also been drawn to Bernie Sanders's proposals for education reform and free tuition for all.
+
+“Bernie is an honest man,” Mr. Biron says. “He speaks his mind – a lot like Trump – but with a lot more love.”
+
+References to the controversial real estate mogul, however, were very few at the rally, in fact. And surprisingly, when there were, there was little vitriol toward the leading GOP candidate, who has also on the Republican side. Sanders supporters here say they see common ground with Trump supporters in their desire to shake up the Washington establishment and their candidates' populist messages.
+
+The actress and Coney Island native Rosario Dawson, who opened the evening rally on Thursday, even described Donald Trump as, in many ways, a fellow revolutionary at this moment in American political history.
+
+“We need to be reaching out and talking to those folks who are supporting Trump,” Ms. Dawson told the Bronx crowd. “Why? Because they are supporting him for a reason. They are standing up behind him because he’s opposed to the establishment as well. And they’re literally standing behind a guy who they know will go into the Oval Office and say, ‘You’re fired!’ ’’
+
+“I can understand that,” Ms. Dawson continued. “But I’m supporting the guy who’s looking at all of us and saying, ‘You’re hired.’ ”
+
+Trump's inflammatory comments about Muslims, Latino immigrants, and women seemed less top of mind in Saint Mary's Park than his supporters’ demand for economic change. While supporters of the two insurgent candidates share a belief they've been left behind by the globalized, digital economy, a new Pew Research Center survey shows that supporters of the two insurgent candidates are far apart on the issues. For example, 69 percent of Trump supporters think that immigrants are a burden on the US, while 14 percent of Sanders voters share that belief. Some 64 percent of Trump voters believe that Muslims should be subject to greater scrutiny, while just 12 percent of Sanders supporters do. Some 77 percent of Sanders voters believe that the government should be responsible for providing health care for all; just 14 percent of Trump voters do.
+
+References to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, drew boos, hisses, and even shouts of anger. And while the Democratic race has not been nearly as much of a bitter intra-party battle as the Republican side, there are continuing signs of deep divisions among the Bernie and Hillary factions.
+
+Dawson excoriated “the other Democratic candidate” for referring to undocumented workers as “illegals” and for using the terms “superpredators” and “deadbeats” when talking about crime and welfare reform in the past. “Shame on you, Hillary,” she said, also referencing the FBI investigation into her use of a non-government email server.
+
+Much of this, of course, can be attributed to the heat of the presidential race, and former Secretary of State Clinton’s commanding, if not nearly insurmountable, lead in the race for the Democratic nomination. But person after person at the rally expressed a deep distaste for “the other candidate.”
+
+“I don’t trust her, and I don’t think I would support her even if the Democratic party chooses her,” says Stephanie Edwards, a public relations specialist from Washington Heights in Manhattan, and an eight-year veteran who served as a combat medic with the US Army. “I feel like it’s time to break the mold, it’s time to do something different.”
+
+She notes, too, that “this is the first time I’ve ever gotten involved in a campaign to this magnitude,” volunteering for Sanders’s phone banks and canvassing operations after hearing something she’s never heard before from a politician. Now 40, this was her first political rally.
+
+Clinton’s support for the crime bill signed into law by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, directly affected her family, say Ms. Edwards. Her uncle was deported to the Dominican Republic after being convicted of two misdemeanor crimes in New York, she says.
+
+Kevin Rose, a bartender in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, who immigrated from Canada 20 years ago, recently became a citizen just to vote for Sanders, he says. But he would “absolutely not” vote for Clinton. “I don’t trust her; never have, never will,” he says. “I will likely still vote for Bernie as a write-in campaign, if she wins.”
+
+Another speaker at the rally, the Puerto Rican rapper and multiple Grammy winner Residente, told the diverse crowd that “It will represent an insult to consider yourself Latin American and vote for her,” since she praised former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, “the author of the most despicable Latin American genocide and the architect of Latin American dictatorship, responsible for all of those who disappeared in the '60s, '70s and '80s,” he said.
+
+Still, a path to a Sanders victory seems remote, and the delegate math is more than daunting. Sanders must win about 57 percent of the remaining delegates – or win most of the remaining races by landslides – just to barely surpass Clinton with a majority of pledged delegates. Then, he must convince enough superdelegates, those unbound party leaders and elected officials who overwhelmingly support Clinton at the moment, to shift their allegiance to his campaign.
+
+But most of the pledged delegates will be allocated in five big states – New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and California – where Clinton currently leads Sanders in polls. In New York, the former senator here leads her former colleague from Vermont 54 percent to 42 percent, released Thursday.
+
+Sanders supporters, however, remain undaunted. And Clinton events don’t show nearly the same fervid, boisterous support – some even call it love – that is present at the Vermont candidate’s rallies.
+
+“A great nation is judged not by how many millionaires and billionaires it has,” he told his Bronx supporters on Thursday. “It is judged by how it treats the most vulnerable people in that country.”
+
+He told the Bronx crowd of 15,000 how his father came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 “without a nickel in his pocket.” He described how his family lived in a 3-1/2 room, rent-controlled apartment in nearby Brooklyn, where he went to high school, years ago. “So I learned a little bit about what it means to grow up in a family that has no money, and I also learned a little bit about the immigrant experience. Those lessons I will never forget.”
+
+At this, the crowd erupted. Among those jumping and shouting was Raquel Rodriguez, a 21-year-old student and first-time voter, holding a sign with the '70s-era saying, “The revolution will not be televised.”
+
+Her hand-made poster also slyly included the digital age slogans, #FeelTheBern, #BernieOrBust, and #StillSanders, as well as a diss: “Hey CNN, are you seein’ this?”
+
+Young people, she notes, prefer the free-wheeling hashtag communications of social media, especially since Sanders supporters say news networks have been ignoring their candidate while televising entire rallies of the Republican front-runner, the Queens-born billionaire Donald Trump – himself a master of the provocative tweet.
+
+It’s statements like these that inspire Ms. Rodriguez, who takes college courses online, and says she never thought she would get so involved in politics – or “this revolution.”
+
+“I cannot currently afford to get into a regular college or university, and that’s why I’m so pro-Bernie, so pro-education reform,” she says. “I’ve seen countless kids in situations like mine fall behind, and just sort of fall by the wayside of the educational locomotive. It’s disgraceful, it really is.
+
+“But Bernie’s been there from day one fighting for the people,” Rodriguez continues. “Bernie is only involved in politics because he gives a (darn), and that is a beautiful thing.”",REAL
+372,The debate moderators missed the opportunity to ask about a real Democratic divide,"So far, none of the presidential debates — Democratic or Republican — have asked about K-12 education. That's a huge missed opportunity.
+
+Education really is a divisive issue within the Democratic Party, and one on which Hillary Clinton has indicated she might take a different tack than President Obama.
+
+Last week, Obama signed a new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act. For the first time in more than two decades, it will scale back the federal government's role in education. While teachers unions and congressional Republicans both like the new law, it's received criticism from the left from those who say that states can't be trusted to safeguard the well-being of poor and minority students. (Clinton said in a statement that she supports the law, although it's not perfect.)
+
+This would have been the ideal jumping-off point for a question about education policy:
+
+President Obama just signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which keeps the standardized testing requirement from No Child Left Behind but gives states more freedom to decide which schools are succeeding, and what to do about the ones that aren't. Do you trust states to make the right decisions without federal oversight? And how would you work within the constraints of the law to improve education in the US?
+
+K-12 education has been almost entirely absent from the 2016 campaign trail so far. But Clinton's few public statements suggest that she might be friendlier to teachers unions than President Obama, who often antagonized unions with his competitive grant programs, support for charter schools, and push to evaluate teachers based in part on their students' test scores.
+
+Clinton, who has been endorsed by both major teachers unions, has suggested charter schools cherry-pick their students. She opposes tying teacher pay to their students' test scores, saying there's ""no evidence"" that approach works. And she's said that getting more funding for traditional federal education programs, such as federal money to educate poor students and students with disabilities, would be a top priority.
+
+Sen. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, has hardly talked about K-12 eduction at all. And former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley was a strong supporter of charter schools while in office. This is a big and important division within the Democratic Party, one that debates repeatedly miss their chance to highlight.",REAL
+826,Four big takeaways from Trump's 'Acela Primary' triumph,"Whoever dubbed Tuesday, April 26 the “Acela Primary” (because the five states that held primaries on that day coincide with the route of Amtrak’s fastest carrier) needs a refresher in how trains and Republican presidential hopefuls run.
+
+The Washington-to-Boston Acela service is known for the three things: speed, “quiet cars” and higher fares.
+
+You won’t find those first two traits – swiftness and silence – in this boisterous, time-consuming GOP affair. Expensive, yes, but not a joy ride.
+
+Here are four takeaways, now that the Republican local has completed its northeastern course.
+
+Trump Towered. I’ve kept struggling with a way to best characterize Donald Trump’s roll – New York last week; Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island all this week.
+
+One thought: Trump 2016 looks a lot like the American map circa the mid-1700’s. He’s conquered 12 of the 13 original colonies (New Jersey votes on June 7), plus most of the southeast. Except for a few states here and there, Trump controls the American continent east of the Mississippi River.
+
+But now the race moves west. First up: Indiana, on May 3 (more on that in a moment). A week later: West Virginia and Nebraska.
+
+After that, the GOP field spends quality time on the West Coast – two weeks in Oregon and Washington – before a final push in California, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota and the aforementioned New Jersey.
+
+The question: Trump has momentum as he steps off the Acela. Then again, so too did Texas Sen. Ted Cruz after he rolled Trump in Wisconsin’s April 5 primary.
+
+From this point forward to California, will it be “nomemtum” or “big mo” for The Donald?
+
+Isn’t It Bromantic? You’ve heard of Rudolph Valentino, but maybe not Jean Acker. She was Valentino’s first wife – best known for supposedly locking him out of the bedroom on their wedding night, never consummating the marriage, yet suing for the legal right to “Mrs. Rudolph Valentino”.
+
+The political marriage between Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (quicker even than Valentino and Acker’s two-month courtship) may not turn out to be as cinematic.
+
+But there is the matter of consummation.
+
+Cruz thinks Kasich intends to cede Indiana to the more conservative Texan; Kasich has told reporters he’s not instructing his followers to switch to Cruz.
+
+It’s anyone’s guess as to whether Cruz and Kasich much care for each other. What I don’t understand: why they felt the need to go public with their hasty nuptials. Other than the obvious reason: they both realize the urgency of the moment – far behind in delegates, needing to defeat Trump soon before he salts away the GOP nomination.
+
+It’s funny how fast things can change in politics: we entered April with Trump looking wobbly; we’ll exit the month with Cruz and Kasich resorting to a bromance that reeks of desperation.
+
+Hoosier Daddy. A word about campaigning in Indiana, home to a pivotal presidential contest and a contentious GOP Senate primary both of which are playing out along “establishment/outsider” lines: if I were working the basketball-crazy state, I’d want one of three individuals by my side – basketball legend Larry Bird, former Indiana University Coach Bobby Knight, or the kid who drained the jumper at the end of “Hoosiers”.
+
+OK, Jimmy Chitwood doesn’t exist in real life and “Larry Legend” isn’t all that political (though he once snubbed Ronald Reagan). That leaves us with Coach Knight, who’s appearing with Trump at a Wednesday evening rally in Indianapolis.
+
+It’s not the first sports endorsement to come Trump’s way – Buffalo Bills Coach Rex Ryan warmed up the crowd for him at a rally the day before New York’s primary.  And it begs the question of pro-Trump star power other than the “Apprentice” and Gary Busey, Wayne Newton and Jon Voight.
+
+With polls showing Trump holding a narrow lead among Hoosiers, Cruz could use some star-power of his own – better yet, maybe a Gene Hackman pep talk.
+
+California. The Chicago Cubs have waited 71 years for a World Series appearance; 108 years for a title. California’s absence from the national political picture seems just as pronounced.
+
+Post-Acela Primary, Trump’s delegate count has risen well into the 900’s. That puts him three-fourths of the way to 1,237, which is now officially out of reach for Cruz (until after a first ballot in Cleveland, when pledged delegates can begin switching their votes).
+
+Here’s why California matters more with each passing week: Trump can’t win without taking a gluttonous portion of the Golden State’s 172 GOP delegates (to get to 1,237 on June 7, I’m guessing he’ll have to score 140 delegates); as such, it’s the #nevertrump movement’s last chance to derail him.
+
+In California Amtrak parlance, that primary would be a ticket on the Coast Starlight – a three-day ride along the West Coast that isn’t fast and isn’t cheap.
+
+And unlike Tuesday’s Acela experience: maybe the only real hope of throwing Trump from the train.
+
+Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
+54,Elite conservative moneymen remain on sidelines,"Washington (CNN) The nation's most elite conservative donors are just as split as Republican voters are about who to support for president -- and it's keeping many of the leading moneymen on the sidelines of the campaign as it barrels through the summer of 2015.
+
+Only a quarter of the top conservative donors in 2012 and 2014 have decided to exclusively support one White House hopeful, according to a CNN analysis of super PAC filings posted Friday. In a splintered field where no presidential candidate holds a commanding lead, the records reveal in the clearest terms yet just how few financiers have made their decisions.
+
+Some, like casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the party's top giver in 2012, have not cut any checks to Republican candidates' allied groups. Others, like Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, have donated simultaneously to as many as four aspirants, spreading their money around the field.
+
+""There's nobody clearly ahead,"" said Jay Bergman, a top Republican donor who has given sparingly to the super PACs that have courted him for the past six months. ""Until that emerges, a lot of people are not going to commit themselves.""
+
+Months before they formally announced their bids, potential candidates courted contributors at lavish resorts and with one-on-one visits. This weekend, five Republican hopefuls will travel to Dana Point to woo the network of donors organized by Charles and David Koch, two of the country's richest Americans who themselves have not donated to any candidate's super PAC so far.
+
+Those groups raised $250 million in the first half of 2015, records show, $103 million of which was raised by the super PAC supporting former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Four years ago, Mitt Romney's super PAC led the field at the time by raising $12 million in the same filing period.
+
+Thanks to 2010 Supreme Court decisions that led to an explosion in super PACs, which can accept unlimited donations from individuals and corporations, nearly every candidate has eyed the nation's billionaires to bankroll their political ambitions. And the reports Friday reveal they're as dependent as ever on their goodwill: A single hand's worth of Republican funders comprise a majority of most of the allied outside spending groups that will go to war with one another this year as the Iowa caucuses approach.
+
+But these donors' influence will wane as more and more well-heeled contributors join in the political giving that they revolutionized in 2012 and 2014. Fundraisers and Republican operatives say that when the super PACs file their next campaign finance reports in early January, many of the top donors will no longer be uncommitted.
+
+""Voters, as well as donors, may have preferences, but the numbers are really soft,"" Saul Anuzis, a fundraiser for the Republican Governors Association, said of the current landscape. ""Just like any activist letting it play itself out, there are lots of donors letting the final process play itself out.""
+
+In the meantime, politicians are left waiting.
+
+In addition to Adelson and the Kochs, New York investor Paul Singer, who gave $10.5 million to outside groups in 2014, remains uncommitted. As do Silicon Valley angel investor Peter Thiel and Kentucky executive Wayne Hughes.
+
+And they're not alone, according to a CNN analysis that tracked current giving by 90 people who were ranked by the Center for Responsive Politics as being among the most prolific donors to conservative groups in 2012 and 2014. Among those donors, half are currently sitting out.
+
+But for those who are giving, they seem to have a strong preference for the governors in the race.
+
+Bush has a clear lead among the mega-donors in CNN's analysis, with 30% of the elite donors giving to his super PAC, Right to Rise USA. No other candidate in the race was able to persuade so many of the top conservative donors to open their wallets at this early stage.
+
+Another favorite is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, but his mega-donors are hedging their bets. The five donors that contributed to his super PAC also gave to groups supporting Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina.
+
+With an unprecedented number of hopefuls in the race, many donors are shying away from investing in just one candidate. Half of the elite donors who are giving this year donated to multiple groups.
+
+""A lot of it is bet-hedging,"" said top donor John Jordan, who owns a California winery and is backing Scott Walker. ""That's what a lot of people do if they like more than one.""
+
+Candidates like Rubio, Fiorina and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal were the second choice of many who gave to multiple groups, according to the CNN analysis.
+
+The most prolific double-donator was McNair, the Texans owner, who contributed $500,000 to groups supporting Bush, Walker, Cruz and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
+
+Still, it's impossible to know for sure how much money is flowing. Super PACs must disclose their donors, as they did Friday with hundreds of pages of filings with the Federal Election Commission. But for donors looking to give discreetly, some candidates have allied nonprofit organizations that are registered with the IRS but don't ever have to name names.
+
+Super PACs are taking over more and more functions of traditional campaigns this cycle, with the outside groups organizing field programs in early-voting states and even announcing endorsements given to the official campaign. But the risk for candidates is that these groups are heavily dependent on a few billionaires to sustain their presidential operations.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who shocked many Republicans by corralling $38 million for his super PAC, raised $36 million of that from three families alone. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a favorite of Iowa evangelicals, posted only a $3.6 million haul -- a sum that would be significantly lower had Arkansas poultry producer Ronnie Cameron not given Huckabee's group $3 million.
+
+The fortunes of groups linked to top-tier Republican candidates like Walker and Rubio were similarly attached to the pockets of their financiers: Half of Walker's $20 million haul came from two people. Half of Rubio's came from two.
+
+Some other Republicans showed the potential to have a deeper reservoir of financial firepower. Bush shattered fundraising records by deploying his family's fundraising network to collect $103 million for his super PAC. But he also built that support on a wider base: His top 24 donors only accounted for about a quarter of all the money raised.
+
+But candidates shouldn't fear that juggernaut, said Anuzis, who is supporting Cruz.
+
+""With almost all the candidates in single digits, this is a wide open ballgame,"" he said.",REAL
+8020,Goldman Sachs Endorses Hillary Clinton For President,"Goldman Sachs Endorses Hillary Clinton For President For Goldman Sachs, was there really any other choice this cycle? | October 27, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, is greeted by Hillary Clinton at a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative, Sept. 24, 2014 in New York. 
+Published in partnership with Shadowproof . 
+He’s with her. On Sunday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earned the endorsement of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein —an endorsement she had been working toward for years. 
+As was revealed by Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton spent the run up to her presidential campaign giving speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks, where she praised their talents and explained her positions on financial regulation. 
+On October 24, 2013, Clinton told Goldman Sachs that Dodd-Frank had to be done mostly for “political reasons” because Congress needed to look like it was doing something about the crisis. She said, “There’s nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.” 
+Yes, she essentially endorsed Wall Street writing the rules because Wall Street knows its business best and complained to Goldman Sachs that regulations had frightened bankers. 
+“I mean, right now, there are so many places in our country where the banks are not doing what they need to do because they’re scared of regulations, they’re scared of the other shoe dropping, they’re just plain scared, so credit is not flowing the way it needs to to restart economic growth,” Clinton said. “So people are, you know, a little — they’re still uncertain, and they’re uncertain both because they don’t know what might come next in terms of regulations, but they’re also uncertain because of changes in a global economy that we’re only beginning to take hold of.” 
+Music to Wall Street’s ears. For Goldman Sachs, was there really any other choice this cycle? After all, they did pay Hillary Clinton $675,000 for those three speeches, and have generously supported her political career. 
+Despite her private comments to Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton has taken a tough public position on Wall Street during the campaign, likely due to Senator Bernie Sanders’ success in the primaries. Of course, Wikileaks also revealed that Clinton told the National Multi-housing Council in a private speech that “you need both a public and a private position.” 
+So the real question is, what do Blankfein and Goldman want in return and what is Clinton’s private position on giving it to them? Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
+4022,Russia carries out new airstrikes in Syria,"(CNN) Russia's airstrikes in Syria ""do not go beyond ISIL (ISIS), al Nusra or other terrorist groups recognized by the United Nations Security Council or Russian law,"" Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Thursday.
+
+Pushed to define ""other terrorist groups,"" Lavrov said: ""If it looks like a terrorist, if it acts like a terrorist, if it walks like a terrorist, if it fights like a terrorist, it's a terrorist, right?""
+
+Lavrov was addressing reporters at the U.N. in New York Thursday, on the second day of airstrikes by Russian warplanes in Syria.
+
+Moscow, which supports the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has been accused of using the strikes to target anti-Assad groups including the U.S.-backed opposition group the Free Syrian Army (FSA).
+
+But Lavrov said Russia does not consider the FSA a terrorist group. ""We believe that Free Syrian Army should be part of the political process,"" he said.
+
+""The goal of our operation -- in response to the request of President Assad and on the basis of the decision granted by the Russian parliament to the Russian President in accordance with the Russian constitution -- the goal is terrorism and we are not supporting anyone against their own people. We fight terrorism,"" Lavrov said.
+
+Lavrov questioned the U.S.-led coalition's legitimacy, given the mission had not received the consent of the U.N. Security Council or any ""request of one of the countries on whose territories they operate.""
+
+""You cannot avoid the impression that the legal basis of the coalition activities in Syria is really flawed,"" he said.
+
+""As far as I understand, the coalition announced ISIL and other associated groups as the enemy and the coalition does the same as Russia [does]. Somehow some people try to present the coalition action as leading to a political settlement and Russia fighting the same people is being perceived or presented like defending the regime. It's absolutely unfair,"" he said.
+
+The foreign minister also questioned the logic of trying to topple al-Assad to further the fight against ISIS, asking whether the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gadhafi in Libya had made those countries better places.
+
+Russia's Defense Ministry issued a statement earlier Thursday saying that it had carried out new airstrikes.
+
+""Russian Aerospace Forces engaged another four #ISIS facilities in #Syria this night,"" the Ministry announced on Twitter along with gun camera video showing large explosions.
+
+The strikes were carried out by eight Russian SU-24 and SU-25 jets, which claimed to hit ISIS ""terrorist staff"" and an ammunition dump near Idlib and another headquarters in Hama.
+
+But 24 hours into the military campaign, there were concerns it was targeting those who oppose al-Assad, including more moderate factions that are supported by the United States and others in the West.
+
+The Syrian Ambassador to Russia, Riad Haddad, told CNN's Matthew Chance that Russians were fighting alongside the Syrians, to destroy not just ISIS but all of the other rebel groups in Syria.
+
+Haddad said all of the rebel groups, including ISIS, have a common goal: ""to spread terror.""
+
+He told CNN that the impact of the Russian airstrikes over the past few days has been more effective than all of the coalition airstrikes so far combined and that the Syrian army and the Russian army are working side by side, sharing intelligence and data and working very closely together.
+
+A Syrian opposition activist living north of Homs near one of the villages targeted -- Talbiseh -- told CNN that ISIS had no presence in the area.
+
+""Russian warplanes were targeting civilians and innocent people only, Putin is lying about targeting Daesh militants,"" Khdaier Khushfa said via Skype. Daesh is another name for ISIS.
+
+""Daesh withdrew from the northern countryside of Homs in an announcement they made a year ago after the groups refused to deal with them, including Ahrar al Sham and Revolutionaries Front,"" he said.
+
+""We know that Russia is the biggest ally of the Syrian regime, and since Bashar al-Assad considers us terrorists, then there is no doubt that Putin knows these areas are under our control and not Daesh.""
+
+Khushfa said the Russian strikes had killed 17 civilians in Talbiseh and 11 in Zafaraniya, despite rebel military posts and headquarters being located outside the two villages.
+
+""We are used to the regime airstrikes but now the entire world is watching another country killing civilians in cold blood without taking any action,"" he said. ""We are very concerned about what will happen next -- civilians I spoke to are very scared -- it's like, after five years since the revolution started we are back to ground zero.""
+
+U.S. officials have also questioned whether ISIS is active in the areas hit by the Russian strikes.
+
+Sen. John McCain -- chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee -- told CNN's Chris Cuomo that he could ""absolutely confirm"" that the initial strikes were ""against our Free Syrian Army or groups that have been armed and trained by the CIA, because we have communications with people there.""
+
+McCain called the Russian strikes ""an incredible flouting of any kind of cooperation or effort to conceal what their first -- Putin's priority is. And that is of course to prop up Bashar al-Assad.""
+
+Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Wednesday that the Russian attacks, which the Kremlin said were meant to target terrorists, didn't appear to hit targets under the control of ISIS, which operates in the north and east of the country.
+
+But the White House downplayed the dangers of the Russian move.
+
+""I think the Russians have made clear that they're not interested in provoking a conflict,"" White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said. ""Their actions thus far indicate that that's what they believe.""
+
+The U.S. and Russian military will hold a secure video teleconference call Thursday. The U.S. will be represented by Elissa Slotkin, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, and Vice Adm. Frank Craig Pandolfe, director of strategic plans and policy on the Joint Staff, according to the Pentagon.
+
+The Iraqi Prime Minister welcomed Russia's involvement in the fight against ISIS.
+
+For that reason, al-Abadi said, Iraq appreciated anyone willing to join the fight.
+
+""Our message to the Russians -- I met with Putin -- please join this fight against Da'esh,"" he said, using another name for ISIS. ""Da'esh is a dangerous terrorist organization, not only against Iraq, against Syria, against the whole region, against the whole world. It is time that we all join the same forces to fight Da'esh.""
+
+In his comments at the United Nations, Lavrov said that Russia had no plans to move its operations into Iraq.
+
+""No we are not planning to expand our airstrikes to Iraq,"" he said. We are polite people -- we don't come if we are not invited.""
+
+Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces said Thursday that senior defense officials from Israel and Russia are scheduled to meet next Tuesday in Tel Aviv to address the coordination between the two militaries in the region. Israel's deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, along with his Russian counterpart Maj. Gen. Nikolai Bogdanovski, are to meet at the Kirya Base in Tel Aviv, the IDF said.",REAL
+3407,McConnell to Obama: Dems started the SCOTUS wars,"Washington (CNN) In an awkward meeting at the White House this month, Mitch McConnell had a message for his adversaries: Democrats had only themselves to blame for the escalating war over the Supreme Court.
+
+McConnell, according to two sources familiar with the session, singled out the four Democrats in the room: Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama himself. He said all four of them did something he and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley did not do: Attempt to filibuster Samuel Alito's nomination in 2006, setting a new precedent in the Supreme Court wars.
+
+""You reap what you sow,"" McConnell said, according to the sources.
+
+In the aftermath of Obama's Wednesday decision to nominate federal judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, Republicans now are planning on setting yet another precedent: Denying confirmation hearings for a nominee, something that has not been done since such proceedings became common practice more than 60 years ago. The hardline has given Democrats ammunition against the GOP-led Senate for treating a qualified nominee unfairly, an argument they plan to make as they try to defeat a handful of vulnerable senators in swing states in November.
+
+But in interviews with CNN, the Republican leadership's resolve to deny a hearing for Obama's pick only seemed to be hardening after the President's announcement. And they got backup from some key at-risk senators, who said that the next president -- not the current one-- should make the Supreme Court choice.
+
+New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, one of the most endangered Republicans this year, said ""out of courtesy and respect,"" she's ""open"" to meeting with Garland, breaking with McConnell, who opposes scheduling such a visit. But she was firmly in McConnell's camp when it came to whether Garland should be considered by the full Senate.
+
+""I still believe this position is a lifetime appointment and one that will have a consequential impact on the country and the Supreme Court for decades to come. So I continue to believe that we should consider the people's view on this by waiting for the confirmation process to go forward after the elections in November,"" Ayotte said.
+
+Other vulnerable senators, like Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, sided with Ayotte.
+
+Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Reid, said the GOP is taking obstruction to a whole new level.
+
+""Mitch McConnell is the world's most accomplished hypocrite,"" Jentleson said. ""Alito received fair hearings, floor consideration and was confirmed.""
+
+The public pressure will begin Thursday when Garland begins to make the rounds on Capitol Hill, as GOP senators are split on whether to even meet with him. It will intensify over the next two weeks in the home states of endangered Republican senators, with protests by activists that they hope can turn into negative media coverage over the GOP's hardline.
+
+Democrats have privately circled July 4 as their target date to get the GOP to crack, before the party conventions that month, the August recess and a brief September session ahead of the November elections.
+
+""I think the Republican leadership position is completely untenable and unsustainable,"" said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut. ""Because No. 1, the American people are absolutely fed up with a Senate that is stuck in gridlock and constant paralysis. What I hear most commonly from my constituents is 'why can't you get things done?'""
+
+Some Republicans seemed receptive to that argument.
+
+Sen. Mark Kirk, who faces a tough re-election in the blue state of Illinois, said he will ""assess Judge Merrick Garland based on his record and qualifications.""
+
+And the Maine moderate, Sen. Susan Collins, who voted in 1997 to put Garland in his current spot as the chief judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said she'd meet with the judge and called on the Judiciary Committee to move forward with hearings.
+
+""I believe the Senate Judiciary Committee should hold a hearing,"" Collins said. ""That would be the normal course.""
+
+""I supported him,"" Roberts said when asked why he voted for him in 1997.
+
+Would he vote for him now?
+
+""It's not about the person,"" Roberts said, repeating the mantra from this party leadership. ""It's about the process. Let the people decide.""
+
+Pennsylvania's Toomey, one of the vulnerable Republicans facing a tough re-election in a swing state, dashed from reporters in the Capitol Wednesday, refusing to take questions about Garland and whether he would meet with him. However, in a press release issued by his office, the first-term senator said a confirmation should wait until after the election ""to give the American people a more direct voice"" in picking a justice.
+
+Another threatened Republican, Portman of Ohio, acknowledged he will face enormous pressure from Democrats and outside groups on the issue but said he still thinks a nominee should wait for a new president.
+
+""I'm sure there will be ads on both sides. This is not about politics. It's about what's best for the country,"" he said.
+
+Republicans believe it's worth spending some political capital in their standoff with Democrats to prevent a major shift in the direction of the court should the seat of the late Antonin Scalia, a reliable conservative, be filled by a more liberal justice.
+
+The GOP holds a slim 54-46 majority in the Senate and must defend 24 seats in November compared to just 10 for Democrats if they are to maintain the majority. Republicans insist they won't get hurt politically by their defiant stand, arguing voters are more interested in terrorism, national security, jobs and the economy than a Supreme Court vacancy.
+
+""We have a real comfort level in allowing the American people to voice their feelings about the direction of the Supreme Court,"" said Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs the Senate GOP's campaign committee. ""We trust the people and we think they will appreciate being given an opportunity to speak first.""",REAL
+6544,Pacific Islanders may have DNA of unknown human species,"Science Alert Tue, 25 Oct 2016 Hints of an unidentified, extinct human species have been found in the DNA of modern Melanesians – those living in a region of the South Pacific, northeast of Australia. According to new genetic modelling, the species is unlikely to be Neanderthal or Denisovan – two ancient species that are represented in the fossil record – but could represent a third, unknown human relative that has so far eluded archaeologists. 
+“We’re missing a population, or we’re misunderstanding something about the relationships,” Ryan Bohlender, a statistical geneticist from the University of Texas, told Tina Hesman Saey at Science News. Bohlender and his team have been investigating the percentages of extinct hominid DNA that modern humans still carry today, and say they’ve found discrepancies in previous analyses that suggest our mingling with Neanderthals and Denisovans isn’t the whole story. 
+It’s thought that between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, our early ancestors migrated out of Africa, and first made contact with other hominid species living on the Eurasian landmass. This contact left a mark on our species that can still be found today, with Europeans and Asians carrying distinct genetic variants of Neanderthal DNA in their own genomes. And that’s not all they’ve given us. 
+Earlier this year, researchers investigated certain genetic variants that people of European descent inherited from Neanderthals , and found that they’re associated with several health problems, including a slightly increased risk of depression, heart attack, and a number of skin disorders. And a separate study published earlier this month found evidence that modern genital warts – otherwise known as the human papillomavirus (HPV) – were sexually transmitted to Homo sapiens after our ancestors slept with Neanderthals and Denisovans once they left Africa. 
+While our relationship with Neanderthals has been widely researched, how we interacted with the Denisovans – the distant cousins of Neanderthals – is less clear. The problem is that Neanderthals are well represented in the fossil record, with many remains having been uncovered across Europe and Asia, but all we have of the Denisovans is a lone finger bone and a couple of teeth that were found in a Siberian cave in 2008 . 
+Using a new computer model to figure out the amount of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA carried by modern humans, Bohlender and his colleague found that Europeans and Chinese people carry a similar amount of Neanderthal DNA: about 2.8 percent. That result is pretty similar to previous studies have estimated that Europeans and Asians carry, on average, between 1.5 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA. 
+But when they got to Denisovan DNA, things were a bit more complicated, particularly when it came to modern populations living in Melanesia – a region of the South Pacific that includes Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, West Papua, and the Maluku Islands. 
+As Hesman Saey explains for Science News: 
+“Europeans have no hint of Denisovan ancestry, and people in China have a tiny amount – 0.1 percent, according to Bohlender’s calculations. But 2.74 percent of the DNA in people in Papua New Guinea comes from Neanderthals. And Bohlender estimates the amount of Denisovan DNA in Melanesians is about 1.11 percent, not the 3 to 6 percent estimated by other researchers. 
+While investigating the Denisovan discrepancy, Bohlender and colleagues came to the conclusion that a third group of hominids may have bred with the ancestors of Melanesians.” 
+“Human history is a lot more complicated than we thought it was,” he told her. 
+This find is supported by a separate study by researchers from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who analysed DNA from 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 locals from the Papua New Guinea highlands. 
+As we reported last month, this was the most comprehensive genetic study of Indigenous Australians to date, and it indicated that they are the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth, dating back more than 50,000 years ago. But the results revealed something else – DNA that was very similar to that of the Denisovans, but distinct enough for the researchers to suggest that it could have come from a third, unidentified hominid . “Who this group is we don’t know,” lead researcher Eske Willerslev told Hesman Saey. 
+Until we have more concrete evidence of this hypothesised third human species (some fossils would be nice), we can’t prove this , and we should point out that Bohlender’s estimates have yet to be formally peer-reviewed , so they might shift with further scrutiny. And it could be that our identification of Denisovan DNA is more ambiguous than we think, given that our only source is a finger bone and a couple of teeth. 
+But the evidence is mounting that our interactions with ancient humans were far more complex than we’d assumed, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise, when you think about it. Just because we don’t see them in the fossil record doesn’t mean they didn’t exist – preserving the remains of something for tens of thousands of years isn’t easy, and then someone has to be in the right place at the right time to dig them up. 
+Hopefully, the more we investigate the genetic make-up of our most ancient societies, the more hints we’ll get of the rich and complicated history our species shared with those that didn’t make it to modern times. 
+The results of Bohlender’s analysis were presented last week at the 2016 American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Canada. © Guido Amrein Switzerland/Shutterstock Melanesian children of Papua New Guinea Share:",FAKE
+9267,WOW! Coláiste Lurgan Sing In English For A Change And It’s Shit,"0 Add Comment 
+WWN’s VIRAL TEAM has been monitoring some of the 400 Irish sites which regularly post the latest Coláiste Lurgan videos and the Galway gang are back with another song! 
+The melodies are note perfect, and the chorus brings forth that by now familiar wave of goosebumps on the skin, but in a strange departure from their other work this latest ditty is in English and so it’s shite. 
+It’s hard to put our finger on why 60 girls and boys singing their hearts out in an emotionally evocative fashion leaves us cold, when on the previous 40 occasions we were floored, stunned and totes in awe and had bags of grá for them. 
+Their stirring version of Eminem’s classic ‘Smack That’ should have left us feeling 179% more Irish than we already feel, but alas the choice to sing in English robs the song of any greater meaning, therefore garnering not so rave reviews. 
+A casual look below the video in the comments section of Youtube reveals we’re not the only ones who feel this way. 
+“In English? Die #feelingbetrayed,” wrote one livid internet user in English. 
+Calls for a government inquiry to be launched have been growing in momentum this morning with Twitter user @Gra32 summing up everyone’s feelings. 
+“Is this some sort of sick joke?” @Gra32 queried. 
+At the time of this article’s publication, Coláiste Lurgan has yet to apologise.",FAKE
+8758,"TRUMPED: After Deceiving The American People, The New York Times Vows To Start ‘Reporting Honestly’","NTEB Ads Privacy Policy TRUMPED: After Deceiving The American People, The New York Times Vows To Start ‘Reporting Honestly’ New York Post columnist and former New York Times reporter Michael Goodwin wrote, ""because it the New York Times demonized Trump from start to finish, it failed to realize he was onto something. And because the paper decided that Trump’s supporters were a rabble of racist rednecks and homophobes, it didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the lives of the Americans who elected the new president. by Geoffrey Grider November 12, 2016 The publisher of The New York Times penned a letter to readers Friday promising that the paper would “reflect” on its coverage of this year’s election while rededicating itself to reporting on “America and the world” honestly. 
+EDITOR’S NOTE: After getting their head handed to them by Donald Trump , the corrupt liberal media has come to a cold, hard, financially-motivated reality, and that is this. They have realized they can no longer continue to lie to to the American people, and that the crap they peddle will no longer be accepted. There is great satisfaction in watching them now, with their cover blown, squirming like the weasels they truly are. Thank you, president-elect Trump. 
+Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. , the paper’s embattled publisher, appealed to Times readers for their continued support. 
+“We cannot deliver the independent, original journalism for which we are known without the loyalty of our subscribers,” the letter states. Morning Joe Calls Out WAPO & NYT For Cheerleading NOT Reporting: 
+New York Post columnist and former Times reporter Michael Goodwin wrote , “because it the New York Times demonized Trump from start to finish, it failed to realize he was onto something. And because the paper decided that Trump’s supporters were a rabble of racist rednecks and homophobes, it didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the lives of the Americans who elected the new president. Letter to NYT readers from Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Dean Baquet pic.twitter.com/jORqzx3BA9 
+— Sydney Ember (@melbournecoal) November 11, 2016 
+Sulzbergers letter was released after the paper’s public editor , Liz Spayd, took the paper to task for its election coverage. She pointed out how its polling feature Upshot gave Hillary Clinton an 84 percent chance as voters went to the polls. She compared stories that the paper ran about President-elect Donald Trump and Clinton, where the paper made Clinton look functional and organized and the Trump discombobulated. 
+Spayd wrote, “Readers are sending letters of complaint at a rapid rate. Here’s one that summed up the feelings succinctly, from Kathleen Casey of Houston: “Now, that the world has been upended and you are all, to a person, in a state of surprise and shock, you may want to consider whether you should change your focus from telling the reader what and how to think, and instead devote yourselves to finding out what the reader (and non-readers) actually think.” The NYT would do well to plant some roots in Red America https://t.co/HDd4SFJqtq 
+— Liz Spayd (@spaydl) November 9, 2016 She wrote about another reader who asked that the paper should focus on the electorate instead of “pushing the limited agenda of your editors.” 
+“Please come down from your New York City skyscraper and join the rest of us.” 
+Sulzberger—who insisted that the paper covered both candidates fairly– also sent a note to staffers on Friday reminding the newsroom to “give the news impartially, without fear or favor.” 
+“But we also approach the incoming Trump administration without bias,” he said. source 
+Geoffrey Grider NTEB is run by end times author and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Grider. Geoffrey runs a successful web design company, and is a full-time minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to running NOW THE END BEGINS, he has a dynamic street preaching outreach and tract ministry team in Saint Augustine, FL. NTEB #TRENDING",FAKE
+2238,Glenn Reynolds: Donald Trump is the response to a bullying culture,"Back in February, analyzing Donald Trump’s appeal, David Gelernter wrote: “Political correctness. Trump hasn't made it a campaign theme exactly, but he mentions it often with angry disgust. Reporters, pundits, and the other candidates treat it as a sideshow, a handy way for Trump (King Kong Jr.) to smack down the pitiful airplanes that attack him as he bestrides his mighty tower, roaring. But the analysts have it exactly backward. Political correctness is the biggest issue facing America today. Even Trump has just barely faced up to it. The ironic name disguises the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism. The old-time American mainstream, working- and middle-class white males and their families, is mad as hell about political correctness and the havoc it has wreaked for 40 years — havoc made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it.”
+
+I thought Gelernter was onto something at the time, and I thought about this passage again when reading the thoughts of a 22-year-old Trump supporter quoted by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic. Fridersdorf’s correspondent (whose name is redacted) is a prosperous post-collegian in the San Francisco Bay area — someone who should be  backing Bernie, or Hillary, or maybe Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. But instead he’s backing Trump, and so is his Asian fiancée. And the reason he gives is political correctness. “For me personally, it's resistance against what San Francisco has been, and what I see the country becoming, in the form of ultra-PC culture. That’s where it's almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion. Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted, etc. It can provoke a reaction so intense that you’re suddenly an unperson to an acquaintance or friend. ... This is a war over how dialogue in America will be shaped. If Hillary wins, we're going to see a further tightening of PC culture. But if Trump wins? If Trump wins, we will have a president that overwhelmingly rejects PC rhetoric. Even better, we will show that more than half the country rejects this insane PC regime.”
+
+It’s not a coincidence that when leftist protesters showed up at a conservative event at Rutgers University, students responded to the leftists’ chants with ”Trump! Trump! Trump!”
+
+Political correctness is not, as some might claim, just an effort to encourage niceness. As Gelernter notes, it’s an effort to control people. Like the Newspeak in George Orwell’s 1984, the goal is to make it impossible for people to speak, or even think, unapproved thoughts.
+
+Of course, by limiting what people can think and say, political correctness has hollowed out America’s universities, cheapened and distorted its politics, and served (and this last is entirely intentional) to make those who favor traditional American values like free speech feel marginalized and at risk. (I saw someone on Twitter talking about “America-shaming” last week, and that term fits pretty well.) But as leftists like to say, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
+
+Almost as irritating to a lot of people, though, is the extent to which self-described “conservative” politicians, pundits and media organs have gone along. Part of this is because PC is often misleadingly sold as politeness, and elite American conservatives are suckers for etiquette. Part of it is because those conservative leaders move in an upper-middle-class environment where academic norms govern everyone, including them.
+
+So nobody “respectable” was willing to launch a full-scale counterattack on PC, on or off-campus. Crack the occasional joke, maybe. But actually do something? Not so much.
+
+But when “respectable” people won’t talk about things that a lot of voters care about, the less-respectable will eventually rise to meet the need. That’s what Trump’s doing. And a lot of people are cheering him on not so much because they’re fans of Trump personally as because they’re happy to see someone finally stand up to the PC bullies.
+
+Will electing Trump solve all the nation’s problems? Nope. But, as mentioned above, it will show that more than half the country rejects the culture of political correctness, and the political class that let it take over. And for many people, that’s reason enough.
+
+Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
+
+In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns, go to the Opinion front page and follow us on Twitter @USATOpinion.",REAL
+4678,"Donald Trump, a threat the Founding Fathers foresaw: He proves the need for the Electoral College — and is the best case for superdelegates","It seems like a million years ago when Democratic supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were furiously debating the merits of the superdelegate system. It happens almost every time and it never gets less stupid.
+
+While defending superdelegates is never a popular position to take on social media, the value of the system and its distant cousin, the Electoral College, could not be more obvious during this current general election. All we need to do is to observe the shrieking, wild-eyed, uncorked flailing that’s taking place among supporters of Donald Trump, both online and off, and the need for firewalls against ignorant populism becomes abundantly self-evident.
+
+As much as we like to think of ourselves as wise and rational people, we too often require protection from ourselves. Everything from traffic laws to food labels and term limits are designed as strictures against the human penchant for self-destruction. Indeed, the Constitution and the system of government it outlines is built upon checking the worst instincts of human nature — especially the unquenchable appetite for total power. The framers therefore constructed a system in which every structure is checked and balanced with the sole purpose of thwarting too much centralized power and fostering stability in the face of popular whimsy.
+
+We’ll never know if James Madison and the authors of the Constitution were prescient enough to forecast a Trump candidacy, but we know they were deeply concerned about the hazards of direct democracy. Hence the establishment of the Electoral College as a bulwark against destabilizing figures with the charisma to easily manipulate low-information voters.
+
+Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 68 about the dangers of directly electing presidential candidates who possess “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” Sounds a lot like Trump.
+
+So, the framers adapted the Roman “collegium electorum” into a system in which voters choose slates of electors, appointed for each party and equal to the respective state’s congressional representation, rather than directly voting for presidential candidates.
+
+Technically, about half of all electors are required by law or party rules to cast their ballots for the winner of their state’s popular vote. Theoretically, though, electors can break ranks and vote for the other candidate. The hope is that electors won’t have to deny the popular vote to stop an existentially dangerous candidate, and they never have. But it’s nice to know there’s a method for doing so — in case of a maniac’s rise to power.
+
+Likewise, the Democratic Party, beginning in 1984, chose to implement a primary firewall, the superdelegate system, as a means of blocking similarly frivolous candidates from winning the nomination — unqualified or downright scandalous candidates who might look great to radicals and extremists but who would be a disaster in the general election.
+
+Together, both systems provide fail-safe mechanisms that, while seldom if ever used, offer insurance policies against Trump-like figures or worse, who prey upon our natural biases and impulsiveness.
+
+Trump may not know it, but he’s done the founding fathers a service by successfully vindicated the existence of both institutions. (I’d bet a month’s salary that he doesn’t even know how the Electoral College works.) Anyway, the Republican Party, if it’s at all interested in blocking another Trump-ish fiasco, would do well to set up its own superdelegate system, even if it never has to use it.
+
+But it’s fair to suggest that many Republicans wish one was already in place. Superdelegates, as controversial as they are, would have potentially thwarted Trump’s nomination and, with it, many bleeding ulcers. More important, it would shield the rest of us from a similarly destabilizing character whose entire strategy is built upon pandering and ridiculousness. I’m not sure the GOP is self-aware or self-critical enough to appoint its own superdelegates, but the rest of the world would be more than grateful for it. Believe me.
+
+We never thought it could happen like this, but Trump has managed to climb to the very brink of acquiring absolute power, propelled by upward of the 40 percent of American voters who have been deceived by appeals to their worst human instincts and the lure of populist bromides, delivered to them with the mastery of a professional television celebrity.
+
+While Trump’s no longer favored to win, it doesn’t matter. He’s already thoroughly beclowned American democracy by his very existence as the GOP nominee, appearing on television every day with his ludicrous conspiracy theories, his childish name-calling and his disgustingly misogynistic gropings.
+
+Collectively, his 40 percent support ought to be enough to trigger a rethinking of the GOP’s primary process, if for no other reason than to re-marginalize the “poorly educated” voters whose racism and formerly unfocused rage have led them to blindly pledge their loyalty to this reality-show clown, this Saturday-morning-cartoon villain, and designate him as presidential material.
+
+To further illustrate why the framers were wise to set up a check on mob rule, there’s this:
+
+The man in the above video is fairly indicative of the automatons who have elevated Trump to this point. The very fact that he thinks “taking out” Hillary Clinton is his “patriotic” duty proves that perhaps it’s a smart idea to create a buffer between him and directly choosing presidential candidates. Oh, and he’s far from being the only one.
+
+Even though I disagree with Trump on every issue, my chief objection isn’t simply about policy. My visceral grievances with Trump have more to do with his lack of character, his total lack of qualifications and his terrifying disrespect for the rules and traditions of American presidential politics — the latter being the wafer-thin fabric that holds this entire American experiment together, making his complete disregard for the rules, written and unwritten, the greatest threat to the American system.
+
+If events go horribly awry and the election swings in his direction at the 11th hour, the fear of a Trump presidency isn’t strictly limited to his proposal for building a wall or, I don’t know, nominating Omarosa to the Supreme Court. The real fear has to do with the millions of impulsive, knee-jerk things that we can’t even begin to predict. And the next Trump will be even more devious about his or her demagoguery.
+
+There will surely be more Trumps, knowing that the style of the current Republican nominee has led him to a point in which he has occasionally flirted within the margin of error more than once. “Trumpism” is on the loose now, and even a humiliating loss on Nov. 8 won’t make it go away. And the next purveyor of it will likely learn from Trump’s mistakes and improve his or her chances. Therefore it’s incumbent upon the GOP to make sure it puts down this white nationalist monster it’s created by making sure another Trump doesn’t end up at large. Suffice to say, I’m not holding my breath.
+
+Ultimately, if you’ve been skeptical or downright opposed to both superdelegates and the Electoral College, look no further than Trump and tell us how else the next one will be stopped without either, knowing that there are tens of millions of American voters who are absolutely cool with the idea of a President Trump.",REAL
+10297,Dr. Mercola: The Dangers of LED Lights,"Leave a reply 
+Alexandra Bruce – Dr. Joseph Mercola interviews Dr. Alexander Wunsch about the hidden dangers of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting. 
+Our eyes were designed to receive the light frequency of the Sun. Rays strike the optic nerve, which signals the pituitary gland, triggering the release of hormones and neurotransmitters that regulate our bodily functions. 
+The mitochondria of each cell in the human body produce almost one’s entire bodyweight in adenosine triphosphate (ATP) per day (!) and the human body can only live for 15 seconds without it, as compared to 4-10 minutes without air, 3-4 days without water. Another shocking thing we learn is that we only receive 1/3rd of what is converted into ATP from the food we eat. The overwhelming percentage of our ATP production comes from the light we receive through our eyes and skin. 
+With many of us staring at screen devices or spending most of our time indoors with energy-saving LED lighting, few of us are aware of the adverse effects that LEDs have on retinal health, hormonal health and mental health, because these do not emit the correct frequency of light, in order for us to produce ATP. 
+Dr. Mercola calls his conversation with Dr. Wunsch “One he most important interviews you will ever see.” SF Source Forbidden Knowledge TV Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+5460,Six Corporations Will Soon Rule the Planet,"
+ 
+The corporate elite ruling the planet.
+ 
+We know that six corporations control 98% of the media. It works pretty much the same in any industry or part of the economy.
+We are fast approaching a border-less world where government will soon become extinct. And when we were not paying attention we lost our country and our planet. What will that day look like? The following video lays it all out.
+ 
+
+ 
+L ike what we do? Please consider donating to The Common Sense Show – CLICK HERE 
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+Subscribe to My Website at: www.thecommonsenseshow.com 
+Check Me out On Youtube 
+Check out our radio show on Sunday nights which airs on Global Star Radio Network from 8pm-11pm Eastern. The following icon is located in the upper left hand corner of our 
+
+Next Guest: STEVE QUAYLE, DOUG HAGMANN, JOE HAGMANN 
+ 
+
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. FOR A SHORT TIME, WE ARE OFFERING 5% OFF OF ALL PURCHASES-USE COUPON CODE “hodgesnov5” Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information. 
+If the bad guy has night vision and you don’t he wins. Don’t be a victim, find out more by CLICKING HERE 
+
+
+From the Hagmann blood sugar protocol to the Hodges joint protocol, Dr. Broer has helped hundreds of thousands of people. There is something for everybody at Healthmasters.com . FOR COMMON SENSE SHOW LISTENERS YOU CAN TAKE 5% OFF ALL NEW ORDERS. SIMPLY USE THE COUPON CODE “HODGES” 
+
+
+The sane alternative to Facebook 
+Seen.Life-The Facebook alternative- no censorship, no spying– SIGN UP HERE ",FAKE
+8351,FBI Wiretapped Corruption Suspect Discussing Clinton Deals,"FBI Wiretapped Corruption Suspect Discussing Clinton Deals November 3, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
+If you're wondering why Team Hillary panicked and unleashed hell on the FBI, this may be another ingredient in the stew. The Wall Street Journal article is clearly trying to spin things to the left and damage the credibility of the FBI, but it's an interesting data point . 
+The FBI had secretly recorded conversations of a suspect in a public-corruption case talking about alleged deals the Clintons made, these people said. The agents listening to the recordings couldn’t tell from the conversations if what the suspect was describing was accurate, but it was, they thought, worth checking out. 
+Prosecutors thought the talk was hearsay and a weak basis to warrant aggressive tactics, like presenting evidence to a grand jury, because the person who was secretly recorded wasn’t inside the Clinton Foundation. 
+FBI investigators grew increasingly frustrated with resistance from the corruption prosecutors, and some executives at the bureau itself, to keep pursuing the case. 
+As prosecutors rebuffed their requests to proceed more overtly, those Justice Department officials became more annoyed that the investigators didn’t seem to understand or care about the instructions issued by their own bosses and prosecutors to act discreetly. 
+In short, FBI people had material for a case that the government didn't want brought because Team Obama were Hillary backers and the senior leadership in the DOJ saw their careers linked to the rise of Hillary. And so a stand down order was handed down. 
+Following the February meeting, officials at Justice Department headquarters sent a message to all the offices involved to “stand down,’’ a person familiar with the matter said. 
+This is what happens when the DOJ has been so thoroughly corrupted from the top down. 
+Meanwhile there's little doubt, considering what we already know, that the DOJ people had been updating Hillary's people on the FBI investigation. Should those emails come out, they will be some of the most damning of all. And so Hillary's people panicked and decided to pull the trigger.",FAKE
+5809,Refugees scooped out of Lake Erie,"Topics: Donald Trump , Canada , Walls Monday, 14 November 2016 
+Canadian border control boats rescued almost 800 US Americans yesterday seeking to escape the USA in dinghis across Lake Erie. All were wearing T-shirts declaring 'We love maple syrup' and were humming tunes by Justin Bieber and Katie Moore. They were returned to their port of departure in Vermilion, Ohio and initially catered for in a local sports hall. 
+Hundreds of vessels have been spotted on the Great Lakes of Huron, Ontario, Superior and Erie since the election of Donal Trump last week. US state officials confirmed that Trump is considering building a wall along the border with Canada to keep his countrymen in. 
+Applications for courses in Inuinnaqtun, the indigenous language of the Inuit, have been flooding in to adult education colleges on the USA side. Many are hoping this will enhance their chances of being accepted within Canadian territory. French is also a favorite (English too, incidentally), though President Trudeau of Canada voiced concern about developments. 
+""We are a peaceful nation, but also a thoughtful one. An influx of US Americans will of course bring about a collapse in our overall IQ levels, and our average weight figures will inevitably rocket. But we intend to be a haven for all who are suffering and are heavy-laden..."" 
+""Those bear-hugging, Eskimo-phobic geeks wanting to quit can go"", scowled Trump in his inimitable diplomatic tone. ""Once the wall's up....and they'll pay for it you bet they will.... they'll think twice. And I'm goona put mines in the Lakes...Now that really will be eerie....get it?.."" Make T. Loaf's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
+8441,Re: America Has Become A Lawless Nation – Hillary Clinton Magically Cleared By The FBI,"America Has Become A Lawless Nation – Hillary Clinton Magically Cleared By The FBI By Michael Snyder, on July 5th, 2016 
+It is hard to be proud to be an American today after watching FBI director James Comey magically clear Hillary Clinton of all wrongdoing. Sadly, Comey is likely to go down in history as the man that struck the final death blow to the rule of law in America. During his address to the media, Comey admitted that Clinton sent or received 110 emails in 52 email chains that contained classified material at the time they were sent. But of course there were probably many more. Comey told the press that it was “ likely that there are other work-related emails that they did not produce … that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices .” So basically Clinton turned over to the FBI whatever she felt like turning over, and then she destroyed the rest of the evidence. As a former lawyer, this infuriates me, but it doesn’t surprise me. 
+In fact, it doesn’t surprise me at all that Hillary Clinton was allowed to skate. I expected this all along. If you search the thousands of articles that I have posted on The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream , you will find many articles where I say that Hillary Clinton should be in prison, but not a single one where I ever said that I thought she would be going to prison. 
+This is how politics in America works today. People like Bill and Hillary Clinton could openly sacrifice children to Satan on the White House lawn and still probably not get into trouble. Despite scandal after scandal going all the way back to Arkansas in the 1980s, nothing ever sticks to them, and nothing probably ever will. 
+In this case, FBI director James Comey essentially had to rewrite federal law in order to clear Clinton. This is something that Andrew McCarthy explained very well in his article entitled “FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook” … 
+There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services. —– 
+In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence. 
+The amazing thing is that the FBI handled a highly similar case very, very differently less than a year ago. Just check out what happened to Naval reservist Bryan Nishimura … 
+U.S. Magistrate Judge Kendall J. Newman immediately sentenced Nishimura to two years of probation, a $7,500 fine, and forfeiture of personal media containing classified materials. Nishimura was further ordered to surrender any currently held security clearance and to never again seek such a clearance. 
+According to court documents, Nishimura was a Naval reservist deployed in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. In his role as a Regional Engineer for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Nishimura had access to classified briefings and digital records that could only be retained and viewed on authorized government computers. Nishimura, however, caused the materials to be downloaded and stored on his personal, unclassified electronic devices and storage media. He carried such classified materials on his unauthorized media when he traveled off-base in Afghanistan and, ultimately, carried those materials back to the United States at the end of his deployment. In the United States, Nishimura continued to maintain the information on unclassified systems in unauthorized locations, and copied the materials onto at least one additional unauthorized and unclassified system . 
+Nishimura’s actions came to light in early 2012, when he admitted to Naval personnel that he had handled classified materials inappropriately . Nishimura later admitted that, following his statement to Naval personnel, he destroyed a large quantity of classified materials he had maintained in his home . Despite that, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched Nishimura’s home in May 2012, agents recovered numerous classified materials in digital and hard copy forms. The investigation did not reveal evidence that Nishimura intended to distribute classified information to unauthorized personnel. 
+So what is the difference between Nishimura and Clinton? 
+Neither of them ever intended to do anything wrong. 
+So why were they treated so differently? 
+Needless to say, social media is exploding with outrage over this decision to let Clinton go free. Many Americans are openly asking why they should continue to play by the rules if politicians like Hillary Clinton are not required to do so. 
+Unfortunately, this is what America has become. Our politicians are a reflection of who we are as a society, and as I have stated before Hillary Clinton is going to be the overwhelming favorite if there is an election in November. At this moment, she has solid leads in all of the “swing states”, and she only really needs to win one of them … 
+Perhaps you enjoy talk of battleground states. Well, there’s a scenario for you, too. First, pick the six “closest” swing states (VA, NH, IA, OH, FL, NC). Got it? Now understand that New Hampshire excepted, Clinton only has to win one of them in order to reach the requisite 270 electoral votes to win . (Optional third step for Republicans only: start shotgunning Pabst Blue Ribbon and don’t stop until November.) 
+Lest any Trump supporters seek solace in poll numbers, recent polls have Trump sliding further behind in all the relevant swing states. According to a Ballotpedia battleground poll released last week, Trump trails by 14% in Florida, 4% in Iowa, 10% in North Carolina, 9% in Ohio, and 7% in Virginia. 
+Hillary Clinton is a horrible, evil, miserable human being , and right now she is the odds-on favorite to become the next president of the United States. 
+But ultimately it is the American people that are to blame for blindly supporting corrupt politicians such as Clinton, and if they willingly pick her to be our next president then we will certainly deserve whatever consequences follow. The Price Of Silver Explodes Past 20 Dollars An Ounce As The European Banking Crisis Deepens » Daddyotis 
+I struggle trying to get my head around this. It goes against all reasonable consideration of law and civilized society. What refocuses and grounds me is when I consider that this is another puzzle piece of end time prophecy being put into place. This brings me closer to an understanding of Gods will for me and my place in it all. The best part is that I am already saved and cleared for the afterlife. 
+God Bless all 
+DO Michael Dubin 
+Presidents Clinton, Bush II, and Obama have gotten away with murder, so why would anyone think that Hillary would be charged over some illegal server? K 
+Well the final proof. We have the best Government and law enforcement money can buy. Amf boy have they been bought. A Republic requires an informed electorate.to survive. And we sure do not have that. So welcome to the new America, all the justice you can afford/ Steeve Girard 
+dude… accidental web address electorate (dot) to Michèle 
+We turned on the TV just to watch the announcement that Comey had to make about Clinton. Just as he made the announcement that indicated that their recommendations to the DOJ would be to not press charges, that very second a loud boom went off in my house sounding exactly like a cannon and my husband and both sons saw a purple bolt of lightning outside and a ball of fire and then my TV froze with the words coming out Aof Comey’s mouth. I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life. We all felt that it had spiritual implications in regards to the announcement made. aldownunder 
+What did you do then? Pack another cone Jerry C 
+Lightning is called the Finger of God. Believers are getting signs all over the place. Shalom. R.bitting 
+She said she was sorry, geesh man, don’t overreact. Its not like our nation’s survival is on the line. In all seriousness though, If folks can’t see the writing on the wall here ( and you know they won’t ), theres no hope left. TheCogitator 
+American has not become a lawless nation, it has been a lawless nation for quite sometime. Now they don’t even try to cover it up.“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Hillary is an example of a “more equal” one — way more equal. SnohtBlossom 
+Liberals are the SCUM of the earth!!! rushmore 
+amen to that Gogen!!, gogenhouser 
+the liberal mind is a demonic mind, heathen reprobate bloodsuckers and that goes double for the demoncrat voter!!! joe 
+you are apiece of sh-t SnohtBlossom 
+you are a piece of crahp Guest 
+I was thinking te same thing. The elites don’t bother covering up their deeds or their intentions anymore. That in itself says a lot…. Steeve Girard 
+After I learned this BS here’s the . All the lies can you say, to the dumb public minds… What so proud as we’re hailed, as the twilight last gleaming… Who broad stripes and bright stars, lost in meaningless fights… O’er the ramparts torn down, by some “gallantly” Streaming… (tv) And the debt red glare, and the money made of air… Gave proof to the night that the flag is now gone… Where does that star spangled banner yet wave…. O’er the land of the owned, and the home of the slaves…. Creepy Pedro 
+O’er the land of the Freeloaders, and the Home of the Debt Slaves Steeve Girard 
+Amen. This is an insanity world nation in which we are living. Bill 
+You are so right Michael, tonight it is very hard to be a proud American. guest 
+Edward Snowden, as an American citizen I ,on behalf of all Americans apologize for this governments incredible hypocrisy . Redlucy 
+I am sick to my stomach about this. Even though I fully expected this decision, I had some tiny hope in my heart and soul that justice might be served. I am terrified of a US run by her….I can’t even say her name. She is a lying, scheming, demonic woman who needs all the prayers she can get, It is hard to fathom the implications that her communist agenda will bring about, We are in for some very great suffering, 
+Its just getting started my friend. She is the next president of America. Steeve Girard 
+Not if you guys can vote for a “third party” candidate. Joe Trevors 
+Every vote for a 3rd party candidate is a vote for Hillary. Jerry C 
+There is no “third party”; maybe a “two party” outside the Democrat/Republican sham coin. Joe Trevors 
+Yes, Jerry, that is true. That is what God has revealed through Donald Trump. It is clear to all of us how much hatred, contempt, almost demonic anger is expressed against Trump by both parties. They speak with one voice their true nature, don’t they? SnohtBlossom 
+I’ve said that Hillary would be cleared of this many times on this board. Hillary 2016! 😀 Suck it Lucy.. Rhino Horns 
+You should be ashamed of yourself. Unless you repent of your carnality and sins in this life, Judgment Day is going to be very difficult, and necessary, for you. JC Teecher 
+SB, you are hardcore. Sadly, you got a million more partners in crime, as liberal, atheistic, billery supporters. I would not want to be in any of your shoes when the 2nd advent is happening. 
+But, until then, go in Peace. none 
+Ex_Russian special forces do her “dirty ” ? Work? I think back to the days of breaking bad, the T.V. show. Mike, the “fixer” along with the rest of them, where to loyal to this country to ever do the kinds of things Hillary has been accused of doing. Even the U.S. Mafia. They helped out in the second world War. Mondobeyondo 
+Not if Bernie Sanders has anything to say about it. Which he doesn’t. bc 
+I look forward to HIllary being President 😀 I’ve told the board numerous times she would be cleared. Infidel51 
+Ya you’re the only one who saw that one coming dude. You’re a straight up genius. Bob332 
+AND very, very soon; satan has ruled the pass 7.5 yrs. The country cannot survive another 4. SnohtBlossom 
+there is no Satan JB 
+That’s exactly what he wants you to believe – that he’s not a threat, he’s not there, etc. Why do you think there are caricatures of him in a cape and horns, mocking the idea of him? You’re playing right into his hands… Steeve Girard 
+The is one, it’s between Abraham’s legs. Mike 
+I blog, therefore I am. Mike 
+You are one of the many proofs that Satan exists. SnohtBlossom 
+See? there IS a SnohtBlossom Mike 
+My point exactly. mdice11 
+You are a fool and hopefully a soon-to-be fatal victim of your own arrogance and filth. VoteTedCruz2016 
+Your dissenting opinion hurts my feelings. Please stop. Infidel51 
+Stop harshing my safe space bro. Your micro aggressions are not cool. DixieAngel_76 
+That’s what he wants people to think. ISA41:10 
+The Parasite Class doesn’t care what criminal acts Hillary has done. Neither do the illegals, convicted felons, or the dead………her natural constituency. jaxon64 
+Does it seem to anyone else INCREDIBLY CONVENIENT that the shooting ( and soon to come rioting) in Baton Rouge comes at a perfect time to drive the Hillary criminality out of the news? SnohtBlossom 
+All you poor boys are going to have to accept that Hillary was legally cleared and that she will be our new Glorious President. bobbi 
+After Hillary there will be no more America. VegasBob 
+Correction: She will be worse than Hitler, Lenin or Stalin. Richard O. Mann 
+Maybe one of her government paid bodyguards will step up and take care of matters, as a patriot. Infidel51 
+At least once she is elected we can get this show on the road and stop futzing around on the Internet. Obama was just the set up man, Hilary will blow this f$&@er sky high. DixieAngel_76 
+You will not be nearly so glib when you see the wreckage she leaves in her wake. jaxon64 
+I think I understand on a much deeper and clearer level now what the Apostle Paul meant when he called the future global leader, “the man of lawlessness.” It is more than just corruption and criminal closed-door activities, it is a complete disregard and “above any law” status. bobbi 
+It was not that way 1974 when Nixon was hounded out of office was much less that hillary has done. Infidel51 
+So the Tower of Sauron rises. Who is willing to stand against it? Q 
+“Lest any Trump supporters seek solace in poll numbers, recent polls have Trump sliding further behind in all the relevant swing states.” 
+The lamestream medias are prepparing us for a massive Democrat voter fraud campaign in those states. Bevy 
+You are right Redlucy!!! We are going to go thru judgment because of our rampant sin and only a small remnant will survive!!! im4truth4all 
+James Comey has joined James Clapper, John Koskinen, John Kerry, etc. I have lived almost 74 years and have never seen as corrupt an administration as this one. My estimate of years left based on my genetic profile is probably 5 to 10 years. I feel sorry for my descendants. I personally feel this country is in the last years of its existence. Kent Harris 
+9/11 was God’s judgment against this nation. Please read the Isaiah 9:10 prophesy and then read what God will do to this nation as a result of our defiance from Isaiah 9:11-10:4. He will utterly destroy this nation. You say that God will never do such a thing. He will and know this that when you walk into church, any church and see if any pulpits says anything at all about this this coming Sunday. The answer will be no. God in the prophecy says the pulpit is wholly to blame. During the homosexual marriage issue how many pulpits came out against this abomination? None. Why? Because God has blinded just like pharaoh of Egypt the pulpit. They have been consumed with the outward versus the inward. They are vipers among vipers. Steeve Girard 
+911 was the warning of the Arab World… the Americans ignored it with “exceptionalism”. Time to cough-up. bahmi 
+911 was meant to blame Muslims for everything connected, but the jews and neocons were behind 911, along with the Saudis. This was, however, a distraction so the real bad guys could install people like Obongo and let his destructive agenda destroy us, choke us in debt, focus on homosexuality, same sex butt banging, etc. While we were occupied with the distractions, the real bad guys did their thing and now have us on the precipice of total destruction and NWO marginalization. If you voted for Obama, YOU are part of the problem. GV 
+“…focus on homosexuality, same sex butt banging….” 
+ever obsessed with Teh Gays Paul Patriot 
+Amen. This Is why I am convinced Hitlery will be the next president. It’s all apart of the plan to destroy American Constitution and sovereignty during her “reign” 
+She is what the sheeple, illegals and liberal, progressives are calling for, and the Lord will oblige the desires of those who mock, blaspheme and spit in the face of the God of our heritage, “nature’s God” 
+Nothing will change until the pulpits start preaching Truth and a nation repents JC Teecher 
+All is going along with the prophetic word and the nations are aiding and abetting to the “fullness of the Gentiles”, (islamic peoples). JC Teecher 
+The pulpits, for the most part, are bringing about the apostasy. sad 
+No, the church wants to be liked and civil in this matter. Sin is a three letter bad word. Churches are more interested in”community” and not scaring people off with the truth. Unfortunately, that is the majority of churches today.They didn’t scare me. The only truth that scared me was Hell and I was scared into the kingdom by God’s love for me a sinner. That He died for me to save me. Don’t hear much about that these days. Politically incorrect. on the way to Hell. Jerry C 
+Actually, I’d say sin is a five-letter word, death. lol watchmannonthewall 
+I somewaht agree with you regarding God’s move against the US, but I tend more towards 9/11 being one of a couple of disciplines and warnings, the 2008 meltdown was the other, regarding coming judgment on the nation rather than it actually being a judgment. If Athaliah becomes president, she will be just like the real Athaliah; narcissistic and paranoid, and her rage will extend to “Christians”. She is power hungary and has a self destruct button that will take all with her. At that point, I think it quite likely the warnings of the destruction of America by about 2020-21 will probably occur. Joe Trevors 
+I believe we are experiencing the End Times battle between the Body of Christ & the Body of Antichrist. Our war is not against flesh & blood but against the spiritual powers on high. Yes, Kent, you do see how our nation is being transformed by the installation of leaders in our society who are following the Antichrist. But also our nation is filled with millions of people who are following the Christ. One way I see this is to view Islam as the Trojan Horse to bring down Christianity. Yes, it is bringing down the Church but it cannot hurt the Head of the Church, Jesus, so it is making war on the Body of Christ, the members one of another. You can today how Islam is being used by our government to destroy the Church in Syria? Muslims are killing Christians & other Muslims in Syria. NowAlive 
+Perhaps Mr Cahn is right. It’s an interesting premise, to be sure. What I will say is that the idea that “none”, meaning no pulpits spoke out against homosexual marriage, is simply wrong. Many spoke of judgment because of it. But you are certainly right about vipers filling the most pulpits. They are indeed blind. Alas that the Baby Boomers now run this country…off a cliff. GV 
+“…During the homosexual marriage issue how many pulpits came out against this abomination? None….” 
+Pharisee, fixated on genitalia while remaining SILENT on American war crimes around the world 
+She is the next president of America. Joe Trevors 
+Only God knows who will be the next President. It is important for us to pray to the Lord & trust God as we say the Lord’s prayer in part, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven”. We need our faith more than ever during these days of tribulations. God can do anything he wants. God answers our prayers but we do not understand how he answers us, do we? Oz Steamer 
+She looks likely to be the LAST President of the United States. Jerry C 
+Why would TPTB collapse the economy on one of their own? My gut says they want a white conservative Christian male at the helm to blame it on, so Trump is the man of the hour. Next feast on God’s timetable is Feast of Trumpets (the last Trump believers are watching for); coincidence? I think not. Brian 
+I will not be voting because the next President, Hillary has already been “selected.” Hillary with a satanic grin on her disgusting face will be taking our guns, and sending us to FEMA camps. I have No doubt that these are the End Times! God bless eveyone. Steeve Girard 
+Vote for a “third party” candidate. If you do not vote, your voice will be dissolved in the remainders who will vote. check your list of candidates. Joe Trevors 
+Why don’t you vote for Donald who is not corrupt like the career politicians? alan 
+Looks like she been selected to be the next president. Now just figure out how to get rid of Trump. I suspect as a last resort the election will be thrown to her in November. Its just like we are living in an African country. Steeve Girard 
+The USA is a third world country since 2007. Creepy Pedro 
+Since 1913. guest 
+I heard all sorts of platitudes about what an upright, honest, law and order guy Comey is. There was going to be a revolt in the FBI, remember? He’s just another flunky political appointee who caved in like a house of cards. Judges have never accepted Ignorance of the law as a valid defense if your a plumber or a pizza cook but if your a lawyer and Secretary of State it’s acceptable. My mailman could have told me that server and private email account were illegal and erasing those 30,000 or so emails was destroying evidence and obstructing justice. The Clintons, Lynch and Comey have utterly disgraced the system and themselves. SnohtBlossom 
+HIllary 2016! guest 
+And Lynch for Attorney General and Comey for FBI Director!! Now lets see…Who can we get for Ambassador to Libya? Bill G Wilminton NC 
+If it Is God’s Will Trump Will Be The Next President….Pray For Our Country….And the Safety Of Trump. 
+God’s Ways are Higher Than Our Ways and Gods Thoughts Are Higher Than Our Thoughts. 
+Shalom Randy 
+Oh, it’s because this god is on duty 24/7/365 that the Pope rides around in a box made of bullet proof glass?!?! If there was any man or woman who you would think of as having some kind of Divine protection, it would be this god’s right hand man, right?? Mark 
+The pope is the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Jesus Christ is the head of the true Church. They have little more in common than the word Church. Steeve Girard 
+And Jesus, God, Allah are “wieners”, relics of the first cult of humanity which worshipped sex. Mark 
+Steeve, God has written a psalm just for you and all who believe as you do. Read Psalm 2 in the KJV, the true Words of God. One day God will laugh at you and deride you. Exercise your free will wisely. Bill G Wilminton NC 
+At the Right Hand of God Sits Yeshua (Jesus)…. 
+The Pope is the head of a Religious Organization called The Roman Catholic Church. Chris 
+pope is not God’s right hand man. Jesus is His right hand man. Duh. Randy 
+Yeah, well it’s not much of a god who would let His “only begotten Son” be tortured to death then. No thanks, I’ll take a pass on that one there. And a REAL God would have infinite love and compassion for His inferior Creations along with complete understanding, so to laugh at and deride us would not be in keeping with the attributes of a REAL god. Just a fake one. But that kind of logical reasoning makes the head of a Jesus freak explode if they think too long on it. Guest 
+To vote for the lesser of 2 evils is still a vote for EVIL…… SnohtBlossom 
+there is no god AriusArmenian 
+Check out what Comey did to Martin Armstrong. More of the same. The bi-partisan oligarchic elites that rule the US use the law to keep us in line while they laugh all the way to the bank. none 
+A postal worker could lose his job, for saying something like that. gogenhouser 
+This makes me want to throw up, this is no longer America. Demoncrats a bunch of baby murdering bloodsuckers. Steeve Girard 
+lol! df NJ 
+Poverty kills much more people than abortion. I wish Republicans had a brain equally matching their conscious. NowAlive 
+I guess I hadn’t seen the number that over 60 million children had died from poverty in the US. Kindly provide a link and I’ll check it out. Bill G Wilminton NC 
+While in Poverty you do not have your Arms and Legs Ripped OFF…..One At A Time. Bob332 
+Idiot’s such as yourself, are COMPLETELY soulless. Joe Trevors 
+Remember: is this not the same FBI that stopped investigating Omar the Orlando Shooter? The FBI had no time to follow Omar? They did not want to infringe on Omar’s constitutional rights because Obama forbids us to discriminate against Muslims. Omar got a job at a security company so he could protect us. Omar’s Dad was preaching what Omar followed. Omar’s Dad works for the CIA. The FBI was forbidden to bother Omar no matter what he threatened. The FBI does not even know to investigate Omar’s dad. What about the MOSQUE where Omar worshipped? The FBI is super good – in covering up!! Randy 
+GREAT post there, Joe! Except that Orlando was a completely contrived event, just like Sandy Hoax. WHERE were the ambulances to carry off the dead bodies? Where was all of the blood? Did everybody who was shot at either place just happen to leave all their blood at home that day? The temps in Connecticut on DECEMBER 14, 2012 were 30.6 for the low and 49.3 for the high, yet not one wisp of breath fog from ANYBODY there!! How is that possible? Check The Old Farmer’s Almanac for the weather reports on the 14th and 15th. Joe Trevors 
+Yes, how can they cover up so much with so little outrage from them in Orlando? Randy 
+Quite easily! Since the media is in bed with the corrupted legal system and political system, they just ignore the outrage, they don’t report on it, therefore very few ever hear about it! Someone forgot to check the records to see what the weather would possibly be like on December 14, 2012, and that’s how that very important clue got left out of the narrative when the hoax was launched! You don’t see anyone being asked on Tee Vee why there was no snow on the ground or breath fog from the people because the media doesn’t want to have questions like that being asked! SnohtBlossom 
+You have NO CHOICE! Enjoy it.. Bwah hah haha 
+Snotty….When ya have to give YOURSELF an UPVOTE…… its time to retire your flower ! SnohtBlossom 
+It helps keep the discussion orderly. Ok, so I LIKE the Limelight. Working fulltime here 😉 guest 
+Does anyone remember what president demanded the resignation of every U.S .Attorney in the country and made them all reapply for their jobs so he could hire whomever he wanted and get rid of the ones he didn’t like? I’ll give you all one guess. Steeve Girard 
+G.W. Bush! aka Bush II. . Guess only a Canadian could answer this one. guest 
+WRONG!!!! Bush fired 8U.S. Attorneys and caused a firestorm in the establishment media. Clinton fired ALL 93 U. S. Attorneys. Steeve Girard 
+At least I knew Bush did some… forgot about Clinton. Damn selectiveness of memory! guest 
+Oh…your Canadian? I forgot to mention we were betting a six pack of Molson. guest 
+The FBI probably thought blondie deserved a break because she was a “woman of color” like Elizabeth Warren max gon 
+You are absolutely right Michael, if the USA spineless population picks this evil woman to be our next president then we will certainly deserve whatever consequences follow. Joe Trevors 
+Our greatest hope is to vote for Donald Trump. I believe God is using Donald. It is a sign by the overwhelming opposition against him by both Democrats & Republicans. Look at Republican Paul Ryan as House Majority leader: he has no trouble “understanding” Obama or Clinton. But he can’t “understand” Trump? Paul say I don’t know where Donald is coming from. Trump is exposing how we are already ruled by a ONE PARTY OLIGARCHY, that chooses who will be President. This time Trump is confounding their agenda. Trump is revealing how they are all lying to us & of course they all really support Hillary or a 3rd party candidate. Aren’t they the ones who say “Anyone but Trump”? JC Teecher 
+Look at the bright side, even though it is just a dying ember of one, this brings the chosen one to the final phase of taking her pedestal of satanic hierarchy in ussag, and will eliminate the need for martial law in order to stave off the trump charge. 
+I still believe we will see bank failures and an economic collapse whereby she will pull the exact same stunts as Odrama did, to filter off funds, but; I think it will stabilize after the “haircut” to the upper middle class wealth. 
+The con game continues at a much more rapid and rabid pace. themacabre 
+If there was ever a situation that demanded a special prosecutor, this was it. How could the Valerie Plame joke get a special prosecutor and not this obvious case of criminal wrong doing? Of course, the criminal wrong doing was, and is, obvious…there was no way Obozo would have sanctioned a special prosecutor. Yes, July 5, 2016, will go down in history when America officially became a banana republic, and Ms Evita Peron Clinton will be crowned El Presidente in January, 2017. df NJ 
+Hillary is the most corrupt politician in my lifetime. She needs to go to jail. Horiboyable . 
+Or hunt her down like the Libyan leader and give her the Gaddafi treatment OTAY 
+In my time it was the O.J. Simpson verdict. df NJ 
+You conservatives are a funny bunch. Your answer to everything is to cut taxes, have a smaller government, and the World will be a better place. But if you ever return to reality based politics, look at the recent years between California and Kansas. In CA, they raised taxes and increased minimum wage and now they have a budget surplus. In Kansas, Brownback implemented traditional Republican policies. The rich got huge tax breaks. And their pockets are bulging. And now the state is bankrupt. Nice job Republicans. Jerry C 
+California and Kansas a success? Quoting Bill Maher & liberal leftists garbage rags for news doesn’t make it reality. More businesses and people are moving out as fast as they can. Who wants to work when they’re being taxed to death? Only the workers. You. Are. Clueless. faith 
+It’s going from bad to worse if she wins. But God….. Don’t lose heart or the faith. Pray against the wickedness in high places using the weapons from God;s word. If she gets in keep praying if not keep praying. The bible says to pray without ceasing. It’s only a day, God can do so much in a millisecond to make a change. We don’t even know what tomorrow will be like we are only here for a moment like a mist. Hillary is only a vapor to God. She can be evaporated like nothing. df NJ 
+I always thought Hillary was a Christian. I can’t believe she’s a Muslim like you are saying. Son of a bi!tch! wiseup 
+Really?! How did you come to that conclusion? By what she says or what she does? df NJ 
+Well, obviously she cannot be a servant of God. Joe Trevors 
+The head of the CIA is a Muslim. SnohtBlossom 
+Shut up and leave! Take your liberal anti-American, Anti-Christian garbage else where. SnohtBlossom 
+Suck it! Freedom of Speech you UnAmerican Dip retired22 
+Who can say that she/he/it is politically liberal? I don’t think this demented fool knows or cares about the issues,He/She/It is a whack job looking for attention! Mr. Cipher 
+Font water the Troll flower NowAlive 
+Don’t feed the animals. He’s here for attention obviously. There isn’t anything on this site that interests him except for those who give him the attention his parents failed to provide. I pity him in the sense that he feels unloved, lost, and hopeless. I see him smoking pot or washing down his antidepressants with a shot of whiskey….alone. As he ponders his life, he thinks he has it figured out, though his marks bear out the fact that he can’t handle life. And of course, after convincing himself of his uselessness, he becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy, here to incense and be fed by those who will respond. Look on him as he is: utterly lost and filled with hatred. He’s an animal to be pitied, not fed. He’s too irrational to be fed. He’ll bite…as you can see from his silly, lost, unhappy remarks. sistersoldier 
+For the wicked boasts of his heart’s desire, And the greedy man curses and spurns the LORD. The wicked, in the haughtiness of his countenance, does not seek Him. All his thoughts are, “There is no God.” Psalm 10:3-4 
+You are in fact quoting scripture when you say, “There is no God” He put in writing more than 3,000 years before you said it. rushmore 
+you will be the first one crying, when this all falls aprt! Preacher62 
+You know there is. He gave his son for you. Steeve Girard 
+There is one, but it’s between Abraham’s legs. Guest 
+No, He will not answer such prayers. For individual Americans, yes, but not the nation. He is a holy Elohim. He gives nations the leaders it deserves. I am Canadian. Look what He gave us. Bob332 
+THE COMEY EFFECT: We HAVE the evidence, BUT, no INTENT. Therefore, our INTENT is not to prosecute. A big shout out for -FU America, case closed. THE HITLERY EFFECT: Well America, this PROVES we are NOT equal under the law. You would be Indicted, Convicted and spending 25-Life in some Fed Pen. Remember, America you are just useful serf’s. df NJ 
+She’s absolutely the most corrupt politician in my lifetime. She needs to go to jail! SnohtBlossom 
+I’m sure she’s NOT the most corrupt politician of your lifetime. HeyAHuman 
+Just out of curiosity, why do you support her? SnohtBlossom 
+She will be our Glorious new President! Jerry C 
+LUITPOS is not done yet. he’ll go to the U.N. where he can destroy the whole world; America was just a stepping stone. Victor 
+I’ve been say all along America is lawless, no rule of law, since this guilty criminal Clinton came on the scene Steeve Girard 
+longer than that…. It started with throw everything out the White House windows Reagan DJohn1 
+That announcement by the FBI did two things. The FBI were always the untouchables that could not be bribed or intimidated. Not until yesterday at least. I think the reaction of the American People will be to elect someone else. Now if the electorial college does not follow what the people elect, then we have a real problem this time around. I think if she had won a verdict in a trial that was public then she may have been elected. This way she is damned politically forever. She never got her day in court. So people will assume she was guilty and that Bill bribed the FBI. Assume is a big word. But that is what people will do. She has just been shot in the foot politically. That is why she will never become President of this country. Her reputation is shot. That Obama is running around supporting her effort to get elected President using government transport to do so is another problem she has. When both of them are being transported on Air Force One, that is on our dime as tax payers. Trump labeled her “crooked Hilliary” and this just gave her the reputation to go with it. Only God knows the future. It is beginning to look like Trump may become President after all. Joe Trevors 
+Yes! Mr. Cipher 
+Half the population couldn’t care less is she is crooked as long as the welfare checks keep coming. illusion 
+Relax everybody and stay calm. Hillary, like all of her predecessors will be merely a puppet for the banking and global elite. I will admit that she is a vial person. Fortunate for her, we have a rather stupid populace in this country that cannot see through her campaign facade. Hillary and Bill will continue their charade in office. It will be all about them and theirs (bankers), who will call the shots. World War 3 is a real distinct possibility with this charlatan in the Oval Office. Would anybody care to wager on another false flag event similar if not worse to 9-11 to further an agenda? This time, we can place the false blame on the Syrians to foster the belief that we need troops on the ground. HeyAHuman 
+Condition people to accept blatant corruption. Condition them to accept that the elite are above the law, and that justice is not blind. How much more will we accept? df NJ 
+I would be happy if we just enforced our existing banking and monopoly laws. tempus.fugit 
+RE: what is the difference between Nishimura and Clinton? 
+Nishimura confessed. It’s that simple. 
+All Western systems of law, whether full adversarial, full discovery, or something in between, have always relied upon testament of self-confession or the force to exact it in the absence of confession. 
+Nishimura self-recognized his actions, self-classified them, and confessed them. That he confessed them with the emotion of wrong-doing is his. In contrast, Hillary has not confessed, nor is she capable of self-recognition of her actions, let alone classifying them, or even classifying them as bad. To give testament of null-value is why we don’t give guns to children: they cannot self-pay the price of learning the lesson, so they don’t learn. Self-confession is inherently predicated on the sensing of cost and the ability to pay it. Children don’t confess; they can’t; even if they admit spoken guilt, they do not feel it, nor give it any recognition that those who pay do. 
+Grant the unable credit as if they are able, and you’ll only end up backrupt, with decades of time lost, and not one shred of gratitude nor remorse from those who took credit they were unable to pay. Oz Steamer 
+“o what is the difference between Nishimura and Clinton?” Firstly, Nishimura was (is?) MALE, and Hillary is a woman. Secondly, anyone who thinks the Feminists want “equality” only has to look at this decision. If Hillary was a man, she’d be in prison, by now. The Feminists (especially the male ones) are trying so hard to get her to be President. The Feminists show they have never ever wanted genuine equality, only to bash men, and to get away with what can only be described as “obvious criminal behavior”. 
+For any religious person, the choice is clear: go with Feminism, and Hillary or go with religion and oppose her and Feminism. Pick one. 
+I fear the US election is already Hillary’s as the Republicans are clearly trying to destroy Donald Trump, and to win against your own Party elite and against Hillary and the media (who automatically side with Hillary) would be an impossible task. 
+God Help America if Hillary wins. Mr. Cipher 
+Ya but she’s offering free college and other goodies. Horiboyable . 
+You knew the fix was in because Obama had already come out and said he would support Hillary’s bid before FBI director James Comey made his announcement. Seriously what type of women would stay with a man that gets BJs from interns!! I tell you what type, a women that would sell her mothers eyeballs in their lust for power. Folks with this decision the line has been clearly drawn in the sand if you would like to see it. It is THEM against US. You are free to chose not to see reality but you are not free to avoid the consequences of reality. bobbi 
+She stays with him because who else would want her? XSANDIEGOCA J B 
+I’m not shocked or surprised. I would have more surprised if she wasn’t handed a Get out of jail free card. It’s should be quite to others now, who owns the Monopoly Board. retired22 
+Perhaps what will save us is the gigantic financial correction coming down on,…a financial correction that will cripple the Welfare State & destroy political Washington! Unfortunately,…this will give us a whole new set of problems! Barry 
+Let’s all just admit to ourselves that the Clintons (and maybe others) must’ve threatened Mr. Comey into kowtowing to their will and not recommend these charges. No doubt a death threat against him or his family was made to convince him to accede to their will. Now, Ms. Lynch can easily just say that the FBI has recommended not to pursue an indictment, so she will just let the matter drop off the radar. How convenient. Dead bodies have been left in the wake of the Clintons since Arkansas. If you don’t believe me, just ask Larry Nichols. JC Teecher 
+I don’t know of anyone that would not lie and turn against their work ethic/patriotism to prevent the possible death of one of their own little ones. 
+comey is no different. He has to live with what he did as well as lyin lynch. Some people have no conscience though, much less a soul. voltaic 
+While you allwere silent as a mouse when GWB was not convicted for lying America into an endless war over fake WMDs…… You sense of ‘justice’ is remarkable…. Jerry C 
+Your New York Times reported we did find WMDs in Iraq. What about Clinton who voted to attack Iraq on the same information Bush was given? In addition, it was Bush’s advisor appointee from Clinton’s administration who told him. Ah, the facts again. Cal 
+Signs a nation is under judgment are many, two in particular come to mind. Sorceries, the primary definition is obvious but the secondary meaning derived from the Greek Pharmakeia (Pharmacy in English). A drug epidemic has struck this country exceeding the 1960’s killing thousands and women rulers. Hillary will no doubt win this election because the devil ordains it and America is under judgment. Obama is the stepping stone to the tribulation and the return of Bill and Hillary to the WH will destroy what is left of the United States during the tribulation. America is not mentioned anywhere in biblical prophecy and the reasons are obvious. For evil to prosper good men do nothing. Good men did nothing to stop the Warren Court, escalation of the Vietnam War and the drug saturated counter culture…the proverbial Pandora’s Box and the beginning of the end of the greatest nation on earth. Preacher62 
+Truth right there except for the part about the greatest nation. This nation has always been about lawlessness and greed from the outset dropping off smallpox laced blankets killing millions of native americans to all the unjust wars especially the civil war declared to the millions murdered by abortion. If the blood of Abel cried out to God from the ground, how loud is the screaming he is hearing from this country. bobbi 
+Hillary will president not by election but by corruption. black heart 
+Rush likened the Comey cave-in to that of Chief Justice John Roberts on the Obamacare challenge, effectively rewriting the law so Obama would have his victory. Good comparison, but I believe the Comey-cave is more in tune with FBI AD James Kallstrom when, under pressure from Clinton, he covered up the TWA 800 shoot down. After Kallstrom retired, he reportedly suffered sever mental anguish. 
+By a twist of fate, Comey was at a pivot point in history. It fell to him the the task of saving western civilization. He failed, he sold out and this will haunt him. 
+Hillary will be elected. Any Democrat starts with some 200-210 electoral votes. In her first term, after she grants citizenship to millions of invaders and invites millions more, we have been effectively PRI-ed as in Mexico’s forever ruling national party, except for a minor break of 12 years. The Republicans will never again control the Oval office or the senate or the house. Thank you Comey, you hack, you political flack. 
+Until now the idea of session was a mere discussion point. Texas will get serious after Hillary’s inauguration. Will Texas get out? Probably not. JB 
+Sad day indeed, Michael. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the only thing that will change things is if the church in this country is on its knees in constant prayer, praying for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit and spiritual revival. That’s why none of this makes any sense – it’s a spiritual battle (“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Ephesians 6:12). The wicked prosper while the righteous suffer, but Christ didn’t promise Christians a life free of persecution (“no servant is above his master” Matthew 10:24). Hillary gets away while Christians are fined and imprisoned for refusing to bake a cake – or take a photograph. Wrong has become right and right has become wrong (Isaiah 5:20). It’s becoming like the days of Lot or Noah, marked by violence, immorality – and lawlessness. Yet God holds the hearts of all rulers in His hands (Proverbs 21:1) – just as He hardened Pharoah’s heart. He’s still in charge and in control – as a believer, if you want things to change, you have free access to the control room of the universe. 
+Dark times indeed – and like Habakkuk, we can be dismayed – but the righteous shall live by faith! (Habakkuk 2:4, Hebrews 10:38) sistersoldier 
+Amen JB. Scorners seem to believe that the earth needs to be in a complete catastrophic upheaval before the Lord’s return. Also, there are those who identify with the household of faith that believe God is merciful and that they will not see or experience His wrath. True, God did not appoint us (His elect) to wrath but when He is ready to chastise a NATION one method He will use is to give our enemies power over us. He did it with Israel and the U.S. is no more blessed than the apple of His eye. 
+Life will seemingly be normal upon Christ’s second coming. Natural disasters will precede Him stepping down on the Mt. of Olives but life will continue to thrive until those who are alive and remain see Him face to face. “As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark.…” JC Teecher 
+Good to see you sister. 
+The days of the entrance of Antichrist/Satan has been dramatized by the ignorant to the point that some people will be expecting an ugly man with horns and wearing red flannel underwear, while sporting a pitch fork and serpent’s tail. 
+To the contrary, he will be an awesome looking man in his early thirties, with similarities as we have been shown as to what Christ may have looked like, before he was imprisoned and beaten. He will be speaking scriptures, and seem so Holy, with signs of power around him. In fact, the biggest sign was revealed to me and I’m gonna share with you real soon, maybe today. 
+What people don’t understand is the fact that he will be impersonating Christ and come in “peacefully and prosperously”, but will go out in a sort of blaze of demonic glory, after killing the two witnesses. That brings about the end of this age. sistersoldier 
+Welcome back JC! I hope you had the opportunity to relax and catch plenty of fish. It’s good to see you posting again as well! Yes, I believe that it will be as you said or as the Bible says which agrees with your statement. 
+The Antichrist will indeed be “fiercely attractive” with a an irresistible charismatic personality. He will represent all that the world worships. Especially those who don’t know the One True God. 
+Isaiah 53 describes Jesus as just the opposite of the way pictures and movies portray Him. The deception began centuries ago with a false image of the true Savior’s likeness. 
+The prophet said that our Lord had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Preacher62 
+Food for thought and simply my opinion, not being argumentative. The ant-christ is not a person but a spirit just as the kingdom of God is within those who belong to him,(Luke 17) the spirit of anti-christ is within those who belong to Satan. I believe the teaching of a literal and physical anti-christ to be a distraction from the truth. We are told time and again in the scripture to examine ourselves to see if Christ is in us and if he is not then we have failed the test of Christianity. 
+Teaching that there is a literal anti-christ keeps many looking “out there” for the enemy when we should be looking within for the enemy. The war that we are fighting is not against flesh and blood and it is not “out there”; the war we are fighting is within ourselves. Satan is prowling around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. This refers to Christians because all who are not Christians have already been devoured. Finally 1 John 2 tells us that MANY anti-christs had already come and that was 2000 yrs ago, there have been many since and there are many still to come I am sure. 
+The only real option we have is to do as the Lord commanded and Go and make disciples. This is all that will prevent them from being devoured. If we get too caught up with looking for something or someone that does not exist then we might become distracted from doing that which is necessary. 
+John 6:66 tells us the “mark of man” From that moment they left him and followed him no more. The “mark of God’s children” on the other hand is that they hold out faithful till the end by the grace of God. 
+Love and blessings JC Teecher 
+I see what you are saying, however; it makes me wonder if you believe that Satan is not a real entity and being held, right now, by Michael the Archangel? Preacher62 
+No, Satan is VERY real and the prince of this world. JC Teecher 
+Ok, thanks. 
+Many follow man’s teachings that Antichrist is a flesh man walking the earth right now, while God teaches us exactly who he is, how, and when he comes, in the book of Revelation. 
+I have even heard the pre-tribber Hagee say he will arise from Europe and then get shot in the head and miraculously recover and come back to life after three days. What a hoot and hogwash. Bill G Wilminton NC 
+Many many Christians believe in The Pre-Trib Rapture including myself. 
+Hagee makes many good points so does Perry Stone and others……… 
+Hagee does believe that He(Anti-Christ) will be shot and miraculously recover……as He(Anti-Christ) Mimicks Christ. 
+I study both pre-trib and post-trib Rapture and I find many fallacies in the post-trib beliefs and it seems at times that the post-tribbers focus on being included in the pain and misery of the Tribulation….like they dont want to be “Left Out”. or feel that they should be LEFT OUT. 
+I believe that those that love The Lord are “The Bride of Christ” and one does not have their Bride get beat to a pulp and then sweep her away for the honeymoon. 
+There are other serious issues with the post-trib rapture. 
+Shalom GV 
+“…I study both pre-trib and post-trib Rapture and I find many fallacies in the post-trib beliefs ….” 
+gee, people reading the same Bible coming to totally different conclusions Bill G Wilminton NC 
+God said that NO ONE would KNOW the day or the hour of The Rapture….Uncertain by Design. 
+BUT ” For A Man to Lie with A Man As With a Woman Is an Abomination In The Eyes Of The Lord ” Sorry GV No Uncertainty There. GV 
+your “god” ordered the murder of children and babies. Sorry Bill, no uncertainly there JB 
+I agree with your personification of the anti-Christ – many mistake “anti” to mean someone who is gruesome and abhorrent, but in the Greek (which is more precise) translates into “in place of Christ” – in other words, Satan creates his counterfeit (as he always has – he tries to imitate what God does with his own version) and we’ll have a man arrive on the scene who the entire world embraces and some will mistake for the Messiah. Like Satan, he will want to be worshipped. JC Teecher 
+The thing is, Satan is, or shall i say, will be, the Antichrist. All others that have come in the “spirit” of antichrist, have been men…flesh men. 
+Satan will come looking as a man, even a flesh man, but will be spirit bodied. JB 
+True, God has and does judge corporately (and some day individuals). Many examples of that in His Word. Our country has been given a lot of truth – as what was once a Christian nation – and to “whom much is given, much will be expected.” Nationally, we’ve also been blessed because of a promise He made to Abraham (“those who bless you, I will bless”). What’s unique about that is we were blessed – not because of anything we did (because we’re certainly no longer living righteously) – but because of a promise He made. But as we continue to turn our backs on Israel, that goes away and there’s really nothing left to stay His judgment – except the prayers of believers. 
+But yes, that was also something that astounded Habakkuk – he wanted God to pour some wrath on Israel and when God showed him that he was going to bring the Chaldeans on them (for they were incredibly barbaric), Habakkuk didn’t like that much, but the Lord responded that He is free to use whoever He chooses as His “war club.” 
+I think generally things will tend to get worse, though. Man says he is evolving and getting better, but if you read Paul’s letters to Timothy, he describes terrible times in the last days and a very wicked generation. df NJ 
+It would be nice if corporations would go to Hell. sistersoldier 
+Yes and Amen. The Bible submits the question, “Will the Son of Man (Jesus) find faith on the earth when He returns?” A testimony as to how wicked mankind will have become in the latter days. 
+If I may tag team on your comment about the blessing of Abraham. Abraham is considered to be the father of faith. He believed God and it was counted unto him as righteousness. We know this because Abraham obeyed the voice of God.The first seed which carried the promise to bless all nations was the seed of faith. Faith (in God) is the seed that God can bless and still be true to His word as we know that not all of Abraham’s descendants were righteous but his faith was pure. America has rejected the God of the Word and the promise and thereby have chosen to forfeit the blessings. 
+What a mighty and a Righteous God we serve. df NJ 
+So we are all Jews first. Got it. Preacher62 
+Actually only those who belong to God are Jews. Repent and believe the Gospel and you can be a Jew as well. (Romans 2:28–29) “28 For you are not a true Jew just because you were born of Jewish parents or because you have gone through the ceremony of circumcision. 29 No, a true Jew is one whose heart is right with God. And true circumcision is not merely obeying the letter of the law; rather, it is a change of heart produced by God’s Spirit. And a person with a changed heart seeks praise from God, not from people.” sistersoldier 
+NO! I don’t!. God’s Word affirms that the Jews are God’s chosen people: “You are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession” (Deuteronomy 7:6). From eternity past God knew that He would need to be born into the human race in order to save us from the spiritually dead condition that we were in (Ephesians 1—2; Genesis 3). God had planned from the beginning to be born into a very small nation or race of people called the Jews. JC Teecher 
+The Lord works in mYsterious ways, sister. I just logged back on to see if you were also, and …boom.. there you are. I have my shadow/burner acccount set up so if you want me to email you, just reply and I’ll post it for you, and then after i receive your email on that acct. I’ll send back my regular email and the info i spoke about. sistersoldier JC Teecher 
+crap it’s held up in moderation. OK, I’ll break it apart and try it. I had a post yesterday that was held up for 20 hours in mod. sistersoldier",FAKE
+3874,White House counterterrorism adviser Rand Beers to retire,"This post has been updated.
+
+Veteran counterterrorism official Rand Beers is leaving the White House.
+
+Beers has served as deputy assistant to the president for homeland security since January 2014. He will be replaced by Amy Pope.
+
+""Rand Beers has been at the forefront of some of the most challenging national security issues we face,"" Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, said in a statement.
+
+""From critical infrastructure protection to cybersecurity, to pandemic preparedness, and border security, and to advancing our security relationships with critical North American partners, Rand has provided indispensable counsel to me, as well as to the President and his broader national security team,"" she said.
+
+Beers came to the White House from the Department of Homeland Security, where he was acting director from September 2013 to January 2014. Beers spent more than four years as the department's undersecretary for the National Programs and Protectorate Directorate, where he was responsible for protecting computer networks, communications programs and physical infrastructure.
+
+Beers served as a Marine Corps officer and rifle commander in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. He joined the foreign service and spent most of his career at the State Department.
+
+""The United States has had a remarkable public servant in Rand, and there are many serving today across the government who have benefited from his judgment and mentorship,"" Monaco said. ""As Rand prepares to retire, I wish him well and extend my sincere gratitude for his decades of service.""
+
+National Security Adviser Susan Rice said Beers is the ""epitome of a selfless, skilled, dedicated public servant"" who has ""given so much to his country as well as to his colleagues"" from his military service to time in government.
+
+""I count myself lucky to have been among those who have worked closely with—and learned a great deal from—Randy over many years. I will sorely miss his wise counsel,"" Rice said.
+
+Pope came to the White House from the Justice Department in 2012 and has served as Special Assistant to the President and the National Security Council’s Senior Director for Transborder Security. According to the White House she advised on issues including human trafficking and combatting the threat from foreign terrorist fighters.
+
+As Congressional Republicans disagree on how to fund the Department of Homeland Security, whose capital runs out at the end of the month, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said it is ""pretty irresponsible for Republicans in Congress to be playing politics with the budget of the Department of Homeland Security."" Earnest added that Republicans had ""painted themselves into a corner"" and said that ""it is time for Republicans to set aside politics.""",REAL
+592,Why swing voters are vanishing from US politics,"People no longer switch allegiances between parties from election to election, adding to the rise of more-extreme candidates and changing the nature of campaigns.
+
+Here’s a prediction about the 2016 presidential election that’s almost certain to come true: Generally speaking, swing voters won’t. Swing, that is. Float. Change their preference. Vote for the Republican if they voted for President Obama in 2012. Vote for the Democrat if they pulled the lever for Mitt Romney last time out.
+
+That’s because the United States is becoming a country where no one changes his or her mind about presidential politics. Voters are increasingly divided into reliably partisan camps. Those swing voters pundits love to talk about? They’re mythical creatures, unicorns, nothing but a flash of white in the forest at dusk. New research shows they’re now about  5 percent of the US electorate – the lowest percentage ever recorded.
+
+Why such a static situation? It’s not because most Americans are in love with their choices. Fear and anger are likely causes of much of this sorting. Many voters aren’t so much trying to elect their candidates as block the ones from the other party, whom they see as a danger to the republic. Negative partisanship has become one of the strongest forces in this particle physics theory of US politics.
+
+And that may be just fine with the two big parties that govern the nation. There’s evidence that they devote more attention to rallying committed supporters than reaching out to the uncommitted in presidential campaigns. They’ve been moving in that direction since 2000, when the virtual dead heat between George W. Bush and Al Gore showed them – and the rest of the nation – how closely balanced Republicans and Democrats are.
+
+“Campaigns are changing their strategies to focus on the people who are at the ideological extremes rather than centrist voters,” says Costas Panagopoulos, a political scientist at Fordham University in New York who’s researching the subject. “My sense is that’s operating in primaries as well as general elections.”
+
+Indeed, the decline of swing voting may help explain the partisan dynamics of this unusual presidential primary season, in which the ideological separation between the parties seems particularly wide.
+
+Consider the GOP: Since the days of Richard Nixon, the maxim of the party’s establishment has been that candidates need to run right in the primary, then pivot back toward the center in the general election. But on immigration, many of the Republican hopefuls have moved so far to the right – No amnesty! Ship immigrants here illegally home! – that they might have a difficult time reversing course if they win the nomination.
+
+There’s been similar rightward movement by some GOP candidates on abortion and other provocative issues.
+
+Meanwhile, Democrats are doing much the same thing, only pointing in the opposite direction. They’re talking about everything from free college tuition to paid family leave and higher taxes on the rich. It’s hard to imagine front-runner Hillary Clinton repeating her husband Bill’s 1996 pronouncement that “the era of big government is over.”
+
+There are a number of reasons for the development of this partisan chasm. They include the angry mood of the electorate and the rise of particular outsider candidates (yes, we mean Donald Trump).
+
+But a major cause may be that a candidate who tacks to the center will find it a much less populated place. Compared with election cycles past, there aren’t as many unaffiliated voters sitting around wondering whom to vote for. The polarization of US politics so evident in Washington has filtered down to the grass-roots level. This means parties are freer to adopt the policy choices of their most committed members, because swing voters have become less important.
+
+“Party elites can ignore the moderating specter of floating voters because polarization has changed many of them into loyal supporters,” writes Corwin D. Smidt, a Michigan State University assistant professor of political science, in his recently published journal article “ Polarization and the Decline of the American Floating Voter.”
+
+Let’s stop a moment to make an important point: Swing, or floating, voters are not the same thing as people who declare themselves political independents.
+
+Self-described independents are the largest category of voters in the US. A record 43 percent of Americans now say they are neither Republicans nor Democrats, but members of the unaffiliated group of “I,” according to Gallup figures.
+
+However, if pressed, about half of these independents will say they lean toward one party or another. Another large chunk consists of low-information voters who don’t usually bother to go to the polls.
+
+And many of those who remain have voted like partisans in recent years, whatever their personal beliefs and political motivation.
+
+That’s the upshot of Professor Smidt’s groundbreaking study, published in October in the American Journal of Political Science. Drawing on data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) – a series of academic voter surveys dating back to 1948 – he shows that recent presidential elections exhibit the lowest levels of floating voting ever recorded.
+
+Swing voting – defined as casting a presidential ballot for a different party than one voted for the previous election – used to be relatively common. Between 1956 and 1980 the average rate of vote switching among the entire US electorate was 12 percent – easily a big enough bloc of voters to determine the outcome of an election.
+
+Since then that figure has dropped precipitously. In 2008 only 8.1 percent of voters reported voting for a different party than in 2004. In 2012, it hit an all-time low, with only 5.2 percent of Americans voting for a different major-party nominee, according to Smidt.
+
+Meanwhile, the percentage of “standpatters” – people who vote for the same party over a series of consecutive elections – has risen correspondingly and is now approaching 60 percent of Americans of voting age. (Nonvoters and periodic voters account for the rest.)
+
+The result: There may be less and less reason for presidential campaigns to trim their rough edges and appeal to swing voters in the middle. Over time this could lead to more-partisan candidates – and presidents – who in turn push voters more to the ideological edges.
+
+“More Americans today may not identify with a party, but their behavior indicates we have never observed as many loyal supporters,” writes Smidt.
+
+To see how this looks in real life, consider the opinions of Tyrone Quinn, an investment businessman from Chicago interviewed while on a flight to Boston. Mr. Quinn says he prefers to identify himself as an independent because voters should strive to choose whichever candidate they think is the best person.
+
+“The hard left and the hard right, both of ’em kind of make me sick,” he says. “Career politicians make me sick, too.... Give me a good, smart, wise, and decent person.”
+
+Quinn says that on the local level he’s voted for candidates of both parties. For instance, he’s backed Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, a Democrat, because he feels Mr. White “is a good guy.”
+
+But Quinn has exclusively voted for Republicans in national elections. He believes that on the Washington level the Democratic Party is in favor of uncontrolled regulation. Democrats have a “total lack of regard for spending other people’s hard-earned money,” he says.
+
+Why have floating voters stopped floating around? Quinn’s answers hint at one major possible reason: In today’s polarized political world, almost everybody has a clear idea of what he or she thinks US political parties believe.
+
+Sometimes these views tilt the electorate in favor of one party. Sometimes they tilt it in favor of the other. But there is little confusion or indecision about the Democrats’ or Republicans’ identities.
+
+As recently as the early 1980s, the parties were still somewhat mixed up, ideologically speaking. The Democrats had a significant conservative Southern wing. The Republicans had liberals, primarily in the Northeast.
+
+But that’s winnowed out now. Liberals and conservatives have separated into completely different camps. The differences between the parties have become so marked and clear that even Americans who seldom follow politics can tell them apart. So they pick a side, and stick with it.
+
+“People are more confident in their opinions when they see polarized parties,” says Smidt in an interview. “They think, ‘Well, if the choices are so stark, it’s just not a gray area at all.’ ”
+
+And “stark,” in this context, might mean “worrisome.” Because there’s also evidence that voters are sticking with one party not because they’re excited about it, but because they dislike, even fear, the other side.
+
+That’s what research by Emory University political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster indicates, in any case. They set out to directly study why partisan voting is going up at a time when fewer voters than ever label themselves Democrats or Republicans.
+
+Their conclusion: The trend is driven by what they call “negative partisanship.” In other words, fear and antipathy. Voters aren’t so much trying to elect someone as block somebody else from winning.
+
+Their data showed that the more US voters disliked the other party, the greater the probability they would stick with their own party’s choice.
+
+“Along with increasing awareness of party differences, increasing negativism toward the opposing party has contributed significantly to the rise of party loyalty and straight ticket voting in recent years,” they write.
+
+A simple thermometer scale of attitudes toward the big US parties shows the nature of this trend. Since 1980, according to ANES data, Americans’ feelings toward their own party have cooled slightly, dipping from an average of 72 degrees to 70 degrees in 2012. Their feelings about the other party? They’ve frozen, dropping from 45 degrees in 1980 to 30 degrees in 2012.
+
+What’s behind this disparity, Mr. Abramowitz and Mr. Webster theorize, are increasing racial and religious differences between Democrats and Republicans that make it easier for voters to see their opponents as threatening, as “others.”
+
+Nonwhites now account for 45 percent of Democratic voters on the national level, but only 11 percent of Republicans. Meanwhile, the percentage of white voters who are religiously observant (attend services at least once a week) and lean GOP has increased significantly, from 48 percent in 1980 to 72 percent in 2012.
+
+The religious divide in particular has helped create a wide gap in party attitudes on volatile cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
+
+“The growing cultural divide among white voters and the growing racial divide among all voters have both contributed to a widening ideological divide between Democratic and Republican voters,” write Abramowitz and Webster.
+
+This divide echoes in the words of Tara Schiraldi, a young liberal Democrat in her last year of law school at Georgetown University, interviewed in Philadelphia on a job-hunting trip.
+
+She’s interested in working with a nonprofit that advocates for juveniles. She’s worked for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center. She’s concerned about what she sees as a “school-to-prison” pipeline in America for disadvantaged youth.
+
+But the issue she keeps coming back to is women. She says she draws a line on women’s issues such as access to birth control, sex education – and, most notably, abortion.
+
+“The way in which the Republican Party deals with women ... makes it difficult for me to feel respected by the Republican Party,” she says.
+
+The republican and democratic hierarchies are well aware of the increasing scarcity of swing voting. For them, trying to win over voters who aren’t already committed supporters is becoming an increasingly difficult and inefficient activity, like fishing the Gulf of Maine for dwindling stocks of Atlantic cod.
+
+So presidential campaigns, more and more, may be throwing their nets where they’re likely to catch larger numbers of votes. There’s some evidence they’ve shifted in recent years to devoting more effort to the mobilization of their party base, as opposed to the pursuit of undecided, independent, or swing voters.
+
+Mr. Panagopoulos, who is currently a fellow at Yale University’s Center for the Study of American Politics, has examined the rates at which presidential campaigns contact various voter categories. He’s found that in recent elections that rate has risen much more sharply for committed partisans than it has for independents or adherents of the other party.
+
+In other words, the parties are devoting increased resources to e-mailing, calling, and ringing the doorbells of their own strong supporters, instead of reaching out and trying to sway swing voters or loosely committed opponents.
+
+“The evidence seems to suggest that the attention strong partisans receive is greater than the attention swing voters get,” says Panagopoulos.
+
+The election of 2000 was the breaking point. That’s when the line of this trend really started to nose upward. This timing is no surprise given that Bush vs. Gore was a virtual dead heat, highlighting the need for campaigns to scramble for any possible edge. Plus, that’s when microtargeting technology and e-campaign techniques began to mature and spread through US politics, making it easier for campaigns to carry out finely tuned outreach programs.
+
+Campaigns still try and woo new voters, of course. It’s just that they now appear convinced that there’s more bang for the donor buck in rousting old friends and making sure they vote.
+
+“Campaigns have limited resources. They have to figure out how to allocate them as efficiently as possible,” Panagopoulos says.
+
+It’s possible that this mobilization trend has produced a self-
+
+reinforcing cycle. If strong partisans are pushed harder by the parties, they may vote at higher rates, electing more-partisan candidates, who push the parties further to the left or right, creating more strong partisan supporters. Rinse, repeat.
+
+“The potential is that the increased focus on strong partisans has transformed the voting electorate in a more polarized way, and can be linked to growing polarization in government,” says the Fordham professor.
+
+This imbalance in voter outreach efforts may not be a good thing for America. But political campaigns are in the business of winning, not building up the pillars of democracy. Counteracting the cycle of polarization may require efforts by the US government or nonpartisan organizations to increase voter turnout for everyone, not just those at the ideological poles.
+
+“That’s really where the impetus is going to come from,” says Panagopoulos.
+
+He adds, “There are all kinds of reforms that have been proposed.” These include everything from Sunday voting to easier methods of voter registration.
+
+In the end, it’s important to remember that this state of affairs is not foreordained. American politics is not locked in a never-ending cycle in which both parties inevitably drift away from the uncommitted center. The behavior of swing voting has dwindled. The potential for swing voting has not.
+
+The problem now is that both parties think the existing state of polarization benefits them. At some point, one or the other will likely wake up and realize that’s not true. In the past, systematic losses have had this effect.
+
+Consider the Democratic Party of the early 1990s. After three consecutive White House defeats many Democrats decided a swivel back to more-centrist policies might be in order. That led to President Clinton, a former southern state governor backed by the middle-of-the-road Democratic Leadership Council.
+
+“Parties are the problem and parties are the way out. People want to win,” says Smidt of Michigan State.
+
+And possible swing voters do still exist, even as an endangered species. Take Dave Bradford, a Connecticut salesman tapping away on his laptop at the 30th Street train station in Philadelphia. Mr. Bradford voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984 because he thought the president had done well in his first term. Since then, he’s voted for Democratic presidential candidates.
+
+“I probably lean more towards the Democrats, but as I get older, I’m more in tune with some of the Republican philosophies and stands,” Bradford says.
+
+He thinks some of Rand Paul’s ideas are worth listening to and exploring, particularly those that deal with taxation and “taking government off our back.” He’d like to see former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg run, not so much because of Mr. Bloomberg’s political philosophy, but because of the competence Bloomberg showed as mayor, and because he, like Bradford himself, is a businessman.
+
+“I try to vote for the person,” Bradford says.
+
+Contributor Mary Beth McCauley in Philadelphia and staff writer Noelle Swan in Minneapolis contributed to this report.",REAL
+2605,Netanyahu: Obama's Iranian Nuclear Deal Worse Than Israel Feared,"Israel has mounted what it terms an ""uphill battle"" against an agreement that might ease sanctions on the Iranians while leaving them with a nuclear infrastructure with bomb-making potential. Tehran says its nuclear program is peaceful.
+
+""This deal, as it appears to be emerging, bears out all of our fears, and even more than that,"" Netanyahu told his cabinet in Jerusalem as the United States, five other world powers and Iran worked toward a March 31 deadline in Lausanne, Switzerland.
+
+Noting advances made by Iranian-allied forces in Yemen and other Arab countries, Netanyahu accused the Islamic republic of trying to ""conquer the entire Middle East"" while moving toward nuclearization.
+
+""The Iran-Lausanne-Yemen axis is very dangerous to humanity, and must be stopped,"" he said.
+
+Netanyahu's campaigning against the nuclear negotiations crested on March 3 with his speech to the U.S. Congress at the invitation of its Republican speaker, John Boehner, that angered President Barack Obama and many fellow Democrats.
+
+The right-wing prime minister, who won a fourth term in a March 17 election, said on Sunday he had spoken to senior U.S. lawmakers from both parties ""and heard from them about the steadfast, strong and continuous bipartisan support for Israel"".
+
+Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli official who has been spearheading efforts to lobby world powers against the Iran deal, voiced cautious hope that the negotiations would collapse as they have in the past.
+
+""We may still have a chance. We are not alone. There are still great doubts in the United States as well as in France, even in England,"" Steinitz told Israel Radio, referring to disputes with Iran over the scope of nuclear projects it might be allowed to retain.
+
+But Steinitz said Israel, which is not a party to the talks and whose hardline demands have not been welcomed in Western capitals, was in an ""uphill battle"".
+
+Another senior Israeli official, Security Cabinet Minister Gilad Erdan, saw a ""good chance"" of the powers and Iran reaching a framework deal by the Tuesday deadline, after which they would turn to the end-of-June target date for a comprehensive accord - a final stretch in which more counter-lobbying could be mounted.
+
+""This is not over yet. There's the Congress, and also the players involved in the negotiations themselves have not agreed on all terms,"" Erdan told Israel's Army Radio. ""There is still a great amount of room in which to operate diplomatically before the final accord.""",REAL
+8184,HILLARY PROMISES END TO VIOLENCE THROUGH CIVILIAN DISARMAMENT,"Home › GUNS › HILLARY PROMISES END TO VIOLENCE THROUGH CIVILIAN DISARMAMENT HILLARY PROMISES END TO VIOLENCE THROUGH CIVILIAN DISARMAMENT 3 SHARES 
+[10/31/16] With just days left before Americans will go to the polls to elect a new president, voters committed to continuing to live under the protections of personal liberty in the Constitution must examine positions taken by the candidates on key issues. 
+In this article, we’ll look at Hillary Clinton’s call for civilian disarmament and what Americans could do to prevent this policy from coming to pass, even if Clinton is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. 
+On her campaign website, Clinton makes several unconstitutional promises that would have the effect of disarming millions of Americans and threatening the enjoyment of the right to keep and bear arms of millions more. Here’s a sample from her list of presidential promises: 
+As president, Hillary will: 
+Expand background checks to more gun sales — including by closing the gun show and internet sales loopholes — and strengthen the background check system by getting rid of the so-called “Charleston Loophole.” 
+Take on the gun lobby by removing the industry’s sweeping legal protection for illegal and irresponsible actions (which makes it almost impossible for people to hold them accountable), and revoking licenses from dealers who break the law. 
+Keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, other violent criminals, and the severely mentally ill by supporting laws that stop domestic abusers from buying and owning guns, making it a federal crime for someone to intentionally buy a gun for a person prohibited from owning one, and closing the loopholes that allow people suffering from severe mental illness to purchase and own guns. She will also support work to keep military-style weapons off our streets. 
+There are so many constitutionally repugnant statements in these three paragraphs. 
+First, there is no such thing as a gun show loophole. Here’s the truth as explained by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute: 
+If the voters learn the facts about gun shows, they will discover that there is no gun show loophole, no gun show crime problem and no reason to adopt federal legislation whose main effect would be to infringe on First and Second Amendment rights. 
+Despite what some media commentators have claimed, existing gun laws apply just as much to gun shows as they do to any other place where guns are sold. Since 1938, persons selling firearms have been required to obtain a federal firearms license. If a dealer sells a gun from a storefront, from a room in his home or from a table at a gun show, the rules are exactly the same: he can get authorization from the FBI for the sale only after the FBI runs its “instant” background check (which often takes days to complete). As a result, firearms are the most severely regulated consumer product in the United States — the only product for which FBI permission is required for every single sale. 
+Surely Clinton and her advisors are aware of this fact and that they are misrepresenting the situation to uninformed voters, thus their insistence on “closing the gun show loophole” becomes nothing less than another attempt to demand the surrender of natural rights in exchange for a “safer world.” 
+Next, with regard to the creation of “universal background checks,” here’s more from Cato: 
+Gun-control advocates often claim that 40 percent of annual firearms sales take place today without background checks. The Washington Post “fact-checker” has debunked that claim, giving it “Three Pinocchios.” The Post noted that the survey data used for the study on which the 40 percent claim is based are more than two decades old, which means they were collected prior to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System becoming operational in 1998. The survey only polled 251 people, and, upon asking whether their gun transfer involved a federally licensed dealer — that is, a federal firearms licensee (FFL) — gave respondents the choice of saying “probably” or “probably not” in addition to “yes” and “no.” Post navigation",FAKE
+6734,"More Evidence Emerges Proving What a Shameless, Crony Fraud Evan Bayh Is","at 4:39 pm Leave a comment 
+The more you look into Evan Bayh’s post-Senate “career,” the dirtier it becomes (he’s running for Senate again this year). 
+Earlier this week, I published a lengthy article examining Bayh’s shameless cash grab since he left Congress in the article, Democratic Senate Candidate Evan Bayh Represents Everything Broken, Corrupt and Wrong With America . I wrote: Many of you will know the name Evan Bayh. He’s the son of three-term Indiana Senator Birch Bayh, and went on to become Governor of Indiana from 1983-1997, and then Senator himself from 1999-2011. Upon leaving “public service,” he did what most of these government prostitutes do — made millions and millions of dollars doing pretty much nothing. As a recent article from Politico reveals, the Bayh family had assets worth $2.1-$7.7 million when he left the Senate in 2010, but it has since surged to a range of $13.8 million-$48 million. Making that kind of money isn’t easy for anyone, and it’s particularly suspicious in the hands of a man supposedly dedicated to public service. So how did the couple make all this money? Evan, for one, joined law and lobbying firm McGuireWoods and became an advisor to private equity giant Apollo Global as upon leaving the Senate. Meanwhile, I can’t figure out for the life of me what his wife Susan does. She seems to be a “professional board member” for a variety of large companies. Just one day after I published the above, The Huffington Post came out with a piece that adds additional pieces to the very slimy post-Senate history of Evan Bayh. Here’s some of what we learn: 
+Evan Bayh, the former Democratic senator from Indiana and current Senate candidate, has at least $1 million in holdings with a Bermuda-based insurance company, Athene, that has a business model that a class action lawsuit is challenging as a bait-and-switch scam. 
+Athene’s business plan, the suit claims, is to buy up the annuities of retirees that had previously been invested in bonds and blue chip stocks, and instead pump their money into the risky bets of a private equity firm. That firm turns out to be Apollo Global Management ― where Bayh is a highly paid senior adviser ― which actually owns Athene, so if the gamble pays off, Athene’s parent company gets rich. If it flops, the retirees take the hit. 
+Private equity’s push into the once-boring annuity industry was the subject of a 2013 Bloomberg story, which found Apollo leading the way. “It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose game,” said Lawrence Rybka, CEO of wealth-advisory firm ValMark Securities. 
+Bayh has been working for Apollo as a senior adviser for public policy since early 2011, shortly after he retired from the Senate. On the personal financial disclosure he filed with the Federal Election Commission earlier this month in order to run for Senate in 2016, he states that he has received between $5.7 million and $20.9 million worth of assets in the firm. He lists his holdings in Athene as valued at between $1 million and $5 million. 
+In 2010, when Bayh was still a senator, he went to battle on behalf of Apollo and other money managers who were working desperately to thwart attempts to close or narrow what’s known as the “carried interest loophole,” which allows private equity and hedge fund managers to pay bargain-basement tax rates. 
+With Bayh’s help, the effort to close the loophole was derailed. An analysis of Apollo’s security filings suggests that the maintenance of the loophole has saved executives tens of millions of dollars on their tax bills since then. 
+Bayh’s rapacious grab for cash since his retirement has been extraordinary even by Clintonian standards, but it is made all the more poignant by the poetic bromides he offered on his way out. 
+“I want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” Bayh told Ezra Klein in October 2010. He said he wanted to find work where he could come home and tell his wife, “Dear, do you know what we got done today? I’ve got this really bright kid in my class, and do you know what he asked me, and here’s what I told him, and I think I saw a little epiphany moment go off in his mind.” 
+We have since learned ― thanks to the Associated Press, which obtained his Senate schedule ― that by the time he was having this heady conversation, he had already been meeting with executives at Apollo, as well as the brass at the oil company Marathon and the law firm and lobby shop McGuire Woods. He went on to take jobs with all three, joining Apollo, sitting on Marathon’s board of directors, and working as a strategic adviser at McGuire Woods. 
+Earlier this month, Bayh warned his supporters in a fundraising appeal that the Koch brothers, Charles and David, were hell-bent on making sure Young won the Indiana race. 
+While the claim is true, Bayh makes an awkward messenger: The Koch brothers are clients of McGuireWoods, where Bayh is still a partner. 
+“Evan Bayh was paid by Koch Industries at his lobbying firm as recently as 2016 ― and he will work for them after Election Day whether he wins or loses,” said a source who lobbies for Koch Industries, asking for anonymity in order to speak openly about somebody else on their payroll. “He calls Koch names, but he’s grateful for the retainer they paid him, and Koch knows it.” 
+Bayh, announcing his retirement, delivered a sermon in The New York Times that was filled with regret for the decay of the Senate, complete with hopeful recommendations for reform. But what Bayh actually did while in office has only further degraded the chamber. He used his final year to cast industry-friendly votes while interviewing for jobs with those same industries. Then he left office and became, in a very short amount of time, a wildly rich man worth somewhere between $13.9 million and $48 million. Citizens United has nothing to say about that. 
+A few months after helping kill the bill, Bayh was literally sleeping at the Manhattan home of an Apollo executive, according to a Senate schedule the AP obtained. It was one of several meetings with the firm he’d joined shortly after leaving the Senate. (His spokesman told the AP he was staying with a friend.) 
+If Bayh were truly looking for an “honorable line of work,” working for a company that bought up the retirement accounts of the elderly, shifted them to risky investments and hit them with big fees is a strange way to go about it. 
+Here’s my related post from earlier this week in case you missed it: Democratic Senate Candidate Evan Bayh Represents Everything Broken, Corrupt and Wrong With America . 
+In Liberty,",FAKE
+2331,"Research Suggests Gun Background Checks Work, But They're Not Everything","Research Suggests Gun Background Checks Work, But They're Not Everything
+
+Here's one topic Americans can bank on hearing about in next week's State of the Union address: gun control. The reaction to President Obama's announced gun-control measures this week was swift and entirely as expected. Gun-control advocates and many Democrats applauded his efforts; gun-rights groups and many Republicans loudly denounced the orders as executive overreach.
+
+Expanded background checks are central to the president's proposals. His order doesn't rewrite existing laws, but it would broaden the scope of who is in the gun-selling business. It would require more gun sellers online and at gun shows to be licensed (and perform checks) among other things.
+
+""Let me be clear: It's not where you are located but what you are doing that determines whether you are engaged in the business of dealing in firearms,"" Attorney General Loretta Lynch told reporters this week.
+
+So would those extra checks bring down America's high levels of gun deaths? Gun policy experts who spoke to NPR say it could, but if so, that it would only make a dent.
+
+Here's a look at the evidence:
+
+Two recent studies provide evidence that background checks can significantly curb gun violence. In one, researchers found that a 1995 Connecticut law requiring gun buyers to get permits (which themselves required background checks) was associated with a 40 percent decline in gun homicides and a 15 percent drop in suicides. Similarly, when researchers studied Missouri's 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase law, they found an associated increase in gun homicides by 23 percent, as well as a 16-percent increase in suicides.
+
+Those are some huge results — one expert called the Missouri study ""the strongest evidence that background checks really matter,"" as The New Republic reported — but as with lots of social-science research, there's some fuzziness as to what the results mean. One caveat is that these studies aren't about background checks alone. Instead, they're about permit-to-purchase laws, under which people had to go to local law enforcement to get a permit and, therefore, a background check.
+
+That difference might have impacted the results, explained Daniel Webster, a co-author on both studies. He said that being forced to get a permit from law enforcement might do more to deter a straw purchaser, for example, than getting a check at a nearby store.
+
+Furthermore, he added that because so many factors influence gun violence in different ways, it's hard to say how much the effects seen in Connecticut and Missouri would also happen in other states. In addition, a stand your ground law enacted in Missouri in 2007 may have affected the results.
+
+Still, other academic research points to the laws' effectiveness as well. In a 2015 analysis of studies published over the course of 15 years, Webster and co-author Garen Wintemute found that expanding background checks could ""have protective effects against lethal violence,"" and that permit-to-purchase laws in particular help curb murders and suicides.
+
+They also found that background checks help keep guns out of the hands of criminals, but that it's less certain whether that in turn leads to less violence.
+
+There's no perfect consensus on how well background-check laws work. A 2000 study found that the 1994 Brady Act — which instituted not only background checks but waiting periods at first — did not reduce either homicide or suicide rates.
+
+A CDC task force also found in a 2003 review ""inconsistent findings"" as to whether restricting gun access through background checks works and insufficient evidence as to whether an array of other gun laws are effective. However, the CDC also said that its findings didn't mean that gun laws don't work; rather, it said it needed to study the topic more.
+
+Gun-policy researchers say they want to better study background checks (as well as many other policies), but a couple of hurdles stand in the way. Part of the problem is that good studies on the effectiveness of background checks are pretty rare, according to Webster. One reason is that it's hard to find good test cases to study.
+
+""There's not a lot of change or variation [in laws] to study in recent times,"" he said. ""The vast majority of these laws have been on the books for many, many decades.""
+
+""One of the big problems is that the feds have not funded good research in this area,"" said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and an expert on firearm-related injuries.
+
+He points to federal restrictions, passed in 1996, that said the Centers for Disease Control could not use its funding to ""advocate or promote gun control."" That caused the CDC to back away from gun research almost entirely.
+
+Outside organizations could pick up that slack, Hemenway added, but they have not done so. ""The foundations haven't done a good job, because it's such a controversial area,"" he said. You don't want to get involved. So we know some things, but we don't know as well as you would hope, given the enormity of the problem.""
+
+What recent shootings tell us
+
+While some scholarly evidence suggests that background checks reduce crime, seeing evidence in recent mass shootings is tougher. As the New York Times found in a December investigation, the guns used in many recent high-profile shootings were purchased legally by people who passed background checks.
+
+Importantly, though, to the extent that background-check laws on the books might have prevented mass shootings, it's impossible to compile similar lists of incidents that would have occurred, were it not for those laws.
+
+One other thing recent shootings say is that the current background-check system has some gaping holes in it. For example, FBI Director James Comey said in July 2015 that Dylann Roof, who is accused of killing nine at a South Carolina church last year, should not have passed a background check. Because information about his admission to a narcotics charge never reached an FBI examiner handling his check, as the Washington Post reported, Roof was able to buy his gun.
+
+In addition, some states are doing a poor job of submitting mental health records to NICS, as Politico's Kevin Cirilli writes, allowing some sick people to obtain guns. Cirilli points to Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, who had a history of mental illness before he killed 32 people in 2007.
+
+As it stands, around 1.6 percent of 148 million background checks (that is, more than 2 million) between 1994 and 2012 were denied, according to federal statistics.
+
+What the statistics say
+
+One of the most important questions to this discussion is impossible to answer precisely: how many guns are obtained without background checks? While there aren't exact numbers on this, the figure could still be substantial. Using 2004 data, around 18 percent of gun transactions involved private sellers, buyers' family members or friends or ""other"" sources, as the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler found last year. A majority of those sources were not licensed dealers (and therefore were not required to conduct background checks).
+
+According to the figures cited by Kessler, 7 percent of guns were obtained from gun shows (and many of those sales probably underwent background checks).
+
+But data suggests that gun shows don't directly supply many of the guns used in crimes. Spokespeople from the National Rifle Association and National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group for gun sellers, both also pointed NPR to government data showing that less than 1 percent of prison inmates in 1997 said they got their guns from gun shows. Meanwhile, nearly 80 percent obtained their guns from friends, family or ""street"" (illegal) sources.
+
+All of this very well may mean that, as gun-rights advocates like Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio often point out, criminals will simply obtain guns through some avenue other than stores. That would mean that background checks don't deter those people, and, therefore, that expanding them to more online or private or gun show sales would do little.
+
+But there are other possible conclusions. A recent study of offenders in the Chicago area found most obtained their guns from ""personal connections, not from gun stores or by theft."" While that study suggested to some that background checks are ineffective, one of the authors, Duke University's Philip Cook, disagrees.
+
+""This research demonstrates that current federal and local regulations are having a big effect on the availability of guns to criminals in Chicago,"" he said in a release. ""They can't buy their guns from stores, the way most people do, and are instead largely constrained to making private deals with acquaintances, who may or may not be willing and able to provide what they want.""
+
+Lawrence Keane, general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told NPR that ""the industry has always been supportive of the background check system,"" though he also said he has doubts about how much good the new proposals will do.
+
+Researchers Hemenway and Webster both think the president's executive actions could have a modest effect on gun violence. For his part, Hemenway thinks universal background checks would be an effective first step, but what he thinks would be more fruitful in the long term has more to do with innovation than legislative action.
+
+""In the long run, we should be spending a lot of money on figuring out technological fixes,"" he said. ""The easiest one is to make guns better for home protection and much, much less dangerous and less likely to be stolen.""",REAL
+9018,"60 Civilians Killed, 200 Injured As US-Led Airstrikes Hit a School In Iraq","“ We are closely monitoring the situation around Mosul. So far we see no substantial progress in liberating this city from the terrorists of ISIS ,” he added, referring to the terrorist organization Islamic State by its former name. According to the Russian military, among the civilian objects hit by US-led coalition airstrikes was a school for girls in southern Mosul, which was attacked last Friday.
+Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross reiterated its call not to target civilians and civilian infrastructure in Mosul. The aid organization earlier warned that the offensive may force hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee the city, overstretching Iraq’s already-challenged ability to shelter them.
+The general described the situation around the Iraqi city on the sidelines of a report about Russia’s action in Syria, where Moscow and Damascus continue a pause in the offensive in Aleppo, which is divided between the Syrian Army and various armed groups, including the terrorist organization Al-Nusra Front.",FAKE
+6330,Re: OUCH! Hillary Clinton’s self-unaware lecture about religious freedom given important disclaimers,"— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) October 27, 2016 
+Uh oh, Hillary Clinton’s getting sanctimonious again without wasting any time on introspection: This is heartbreaking. No child in America should feel afraid to practice their religion or embrace their heritage. https://t.co/QAfnEXH6ls 
+— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 27, 2016 
+Cue the disclaimers: Unless they are pro-life, in which case ""religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed""! https://t.co/ShpS3pvkQI 
+— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 27, 2016 
+That, and so much more: Unless they don't want to pay for someone else's birth control. https://t.co/0JSn6pjkaN 
+— Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) October 27, 2016 She had a bad dream about Trump? What about the Christians facing prison & massive fines from people like you for practicing their religion? https://t.co/MNnNT2xTcY 
+— Derek Hunter (@derekahunter) October 27, 2016 Unless you are a religious Christian or Jew. Then change your benighted religion, simpleton. https://t.co/yIT6veu84N 
+— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 27, 2016 Tell that to the Little Sisters of the Poor. https://t.co/O8OYufqext 
+— The Mo Mofia (@molratty) October 27, 2016 
+The progressive “rules” change if your religion goes against left-wing power grabs. Trending",FAKE
+4505,Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Perfect Response When Asked About Women On The Supreme Court,"The 81-year-old Supreme Court justice, who has attained somewhat of a cult following for her stance on gender equality, told a gathering of law students Wednesday that people often ask her when she thinks there will be enough women on the court.
+
+""And my answer is when there are nine,"" she said, as if the question even needed to be asked.
+
+Ginsburg also spoke about the difficulties she faced attaining a job in the legal field.
+
+""In those days, in the Southern District, most judges wouldn’t hire women. In the U.S. attorney’s office, women were strictly forbidden in the Criminal Division. There was one woman in the Civil Division,"" she said.
+
+""And the excuse for not hiring women in the Criminal Division was they have to deal with all these tough types, and women aren’t up to that. And I was amazed,"" she added. ""I said, have you seen the lawyers at legal aid who are representing these tough types? They’re all women.""
+
+In what is sure to further her ""Notorious RBG"" status, the justice later also delivered this gem of a quote: ""If I had any talent in the world, any talent that God could give me, I would be a great diva.""",REAL
+7424,Rick Rule,"97925 Views October 29, 2016 BROADCAST King World News FOR DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PLAY OR DOWNLOAD AUDIOS: CLICK HERE Rick Rule: Chairman / Founder of Sprott US Holdings & President of   USA; Portfolio Manager – Rick is known as one of the most “street-smart” people in the natural resource sector and gold world with nearly 40 years of experience.   USA Inc. manages over a billion and through acquisition is now part of the $7 billion   LP.   USA Inc. provides investment advice and brokerage services to high net worth individuals, institutional investors and corporate entities worldwide. Rick and his team are also successfully involved in agriculture, alternative energy, conventional energy, forestry, infrastructure, mining and water resources investing on a world wide basis. Rick Rule: Chairman / Founder of Sprott US Holdings & President of   USA; Portfolio Manager – Mr. Rule has dedicated his entire adult life to many aspects of natural resource securities investing. In addition to the knowledge and experience gained in a long, successful and focused career, he has a worldwide network of contacts in the natural resource and finance worlds. As Chairman of Sprott US Holdings, Mr. Rule leads a highly skilled team of earth science and finance professionals who enjoy a worldwide reputation for resource investment management. Mr. Rule and his team have long experience in many resource sectors including agriculture, alternative energy, forestry, oil and gas, mining and water. Mr. Rule is particularly active in private placement markets, having originated and participated in hundreds of debt and equity transactions with private, pre-public and public companies.   USA Inc – (“Sprott USA”) is an SEC Registered Investment Adviser firm that is a member of the Sprott Group of Companies (“Sprott Group”). The Sprott Group offers a collection of investment managers united by one common goal: delivering excellent long-term returns to our investors. Our investment team pursues a deeper level of knowledge and understanding which allows it to develop macroeconomic, sector and company insights. With decades of combined experience, our investment professionals will provide you with service that cannot be found in many investment management companies. Our portfolio managers have experience in the technical side of the business, so we feel that our investment advisory service is invaluable to our clients. We know that you have other obligations and priorities in your life, so let us use our experience and sector knowledge to your advantage. Please CLICK HERE for Sprott’s free report on Energy and Metals investing, and to receive Sprott’s free e-newsletter, Sprott’s Thoughts. Natural Resource Managed Account Investing RESOURCE-FOC– USED WEALTH MANAGEMENT   USA Inc. – (“Sprott USA”) is an SEC Registered Investment Adviser firm that is a member of the Sprott Group of Companies (“Sprott Group”). The Sprott Group offers a collection of investment managers united by one common goal: delivering long-term returns to our investors. Sprott USA offers a Managed Account program for investors looking for distinctive and personalized resource portfolio management.   LP – (“SAM”) is a Toronto-based alternative asset manager that offers a wide variety of investment solutions to Canadian and international investors. Our product offerings include mutual funds, alternative strategies, physical bullion trusts and tax-efficient funds. With a history dating back to 1981, our team of investment professionals is united by one common goal: delivering outstanding long-term returns to our clients and investors. To achieve that end, we have assembled a group of best-in-class portfolio managers, market strategists, technical experts and analysts that is widely-recognized for its investment expertise and unique investment approach. We are committed to conducting deep fundamental research to develop unique macroeconomic insights. About author",FAKE
+1512,"Clinton, Sanders Eclipse Challengers in 1st Debate","LAS VEGAS -- The first Democratic presidential debate is in the books and for the first time frontrunner Hillary Clinton took on her up-and-coming main challenger Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
+
+Going in, the odds were on which of Clinton's challengers might attack the frontrunner. But it was Clinton who mixed it up, accusing Sanders as being weak on gun control.
+
+""Senator Sanders did vote five times against the Brady Bill. Since it was passed, more than 2 million prohibited purchases have been prevented,"" Clinton said.
+
+""What I can tell Secretary Clinton (is) that all the shouting in the world is not going to do what I would hope all of us want, and that is keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have those guns and end this horrible violence that we are seeing,"" Sanders rebutted.
+
+And it wasn't only the participants who put Clinton put on the spot.
+
+""Just for the record, are you a progressive or are you a moderate?"" CNN moderator Anderson Cooper probed.
+
+""I'm a progressive. But I'm a progressive who likes to get things done,"" Clinton retorted.
+
+She also faced questions about reversing positions on issues like the recent trade agreement.
+
+""Do you change your political identity based on who you're talking to?"" Cooper asked.
+
+""No. I think that, like most people that I know, I have a range of views, but they are rooted in my values and my experience,"" Clinton replied.
+
+As for the big controversy regarding the private email server she used as secretary of state – it not only wasn't an issue in this debate; it actually gave Clinton one of her best moments as Sanders came to her defense.
+
+""Well, I've taken responsibility for it. I did say it was a mistake,"" Clinton explained.
+
+""Let me say something that may not be great politics. But I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!"" Sanders exclaimed.
+
+That friendliness came to an end when the conversation turned to the Vermont senator's self-described socialist views.
+
+""How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?"" Cooper asked.
+
+""What democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own almost 90 percent – almost – own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent,"" Sanders explained.
+
+""I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people,"" Sanders continued.
+
+""I think what Senator Sanders is saying certainly makes sense in the terms of the inequality that we have. But we are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are The United States of America,"" she argued.
+
+That exchange led to Sanders accusing Clinton of being too cozy with Wall Street and big banks.
+
+""Secretary Clinton, you do not -- Congress does not regulate Wall Street. Wall Street regulates Congress,"" Sanders said.
+
+He and Clinton also seemed to differ on how NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be viewed after giving away American secrets.
+
+""He broke the laws of the United States,"" Clinton said.
+
+Sanders differed, saying, ""I think Snowden played a very important role in educating the American people to the degree in which our civil liberties and our constitutional rights are being undermined.""
+
+The other players on stage, like former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, really couldn't break through – though former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley took a dig at Clinton's call for a no-fly zone right now in Syria.
+
+""I believe that a no-fly zone in Syria at this time, actually, secretary, would be a mistake. You have to enforce no-fly zones, and I believe, especially with the Russian air force in the air, it could lead to an escalation because of an accident that we would deeply regret,"" O'Malley said.
+
+As Democrats move forward in the nomination process, you could compare Clinton's campaign to the Hoover Dam. The famous landmark controls flooding.
+
+For Clinton, she not only has to contend with some incoming water from Sanders, but the floodgates may open even wider if Vice President Joe Biden gets into the presidential race.
+
+That would raise this contest to a whole other level.",REAL
+3820,The most important line in Obama's new National Security Strategy,"On Friday, the White House released its 2015 National Security Strategy, an official document defining the administration's approach to international politics. A lot of the document is pretty uninformative; the ratio of substance to platitudes (""our economy is the largest, most open, and most innovative in the world"") is low. But this sentence, pretty early on in the report, is actually a pithy but insightful encapsulation of President Barack Obama's core approach to foreign policy:
+
+This cuts to the core of what can often confuse people about Obama's approach to the world. Though he's constantly intervening in foreign crises — toppling Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, bombing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and so on — he's also deeply invested in reducing America's involvement in major wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.
+
+To understand this approach, you have to look at each half of the above sentence in turn. Each reflects a core tenet of the way the Obama administration approaches the world.
+
+Let's focus on the first half of the sentence: ""there are no global problems that can be solved without the United States."" That's meant pretty literally. On basically every major world crisis — containing the fallout from the global financial crisis, rolling back climate change, combating ISIS, punishing Russian expansionism, or curing Ebola — the United States has played a major role in organizing the international response.
+
+That's because Obama, like basically every president since the Cold War began, has bought into what's now called the ""bipartisan consensus"" on foreign policy. To most people, the consensus is basically invisible. That's because almost no one on either side of the aisle bothers to debate its basic premises. But nonetheless, it's defined American foreign policy for decades. It rests on basically three ideas:
+
+If these statements sound banal, it's because, for the most part, they are. Foreign policy intellectuals on both the left and the right regularly criticize these ideas, but no one with serious power in the US government does (at least in public).
+
+You see this pretty clearly in Obama's actions. Bombing ISIS, organizing a coalition to end Libya's civil war, and sending US troops to West Africa to help stop the spread Ebola are all premised on the assumption that the world's problems are also America's.
+
+The general consensus on principles obviously doesn't translate into bipartisan agreements on specific policy issues. That's where the second part of the sentence comes in: there are ""few [global problems] that can be solved by the United States alone.""
+
+This is a pretty unmistakable reference to the Bush administration. Obama rode to power as a critic of the Iraq war; a core part of his administration's strategic doctrine is to avoid Bush's aggressive, unilateral uses of American power. If Bush pushed the hawkish bounds of the bipartisan consensus, Obama is at times — though not always — somewhere on the dovish end.
+
+In some cases, that means avoiding military action and trusting in multilateral diplomacy and deterrence to resolve conflicts (Iran, East Asia). In others, it means relying on non-military means of punishing bad actors (Iran again, Russia). In others still, it means marshaling global coalitions, but limiting America's up-front military role as much as possible and consistent with the mission's objectives (Libya, ISIS).
+
+Obama's approach to each of these global crises is shaped by a keen desire to avoid Bush-style protracted wars. Even in cases where Obama really does act unilaterally, such as with targeted killings or the Afghanistan surge, he tries to put limits on those actions to keep them from escalating beyond control.
+
+You might think this approach is too cautious — or, for many critics of the consensus, too aggressive still. But one thing it's not is ""withdrawing from the world"" or ""abandoning America's allies,"" as some critics have alleged.
+
+By virtually every statistical measure imaginable, the United States is the world's leading power, and deeply entangled in political conflicts around the world. Obama has done nothing to change that. His approach may or may not be to your liking on specific issues but, as the NSS reinforces, the broad strokes of his approach are pretty consistent with what America has been doing in the world for decades.",REAL
+4382,Support for marriage equality in Ireland was strikingly broad,"Ireland's historic vote in favor of marriage equality last Friday was, in the end, not especially close, with the yesses carrying almost every electoral district. Still, as Jason Kelleher's map of the vote shows, there were some very pronounced regional differences:
+
+Anyone familiar with the basic sociology of gay rights in the West will be unsurprised to see that support for equality is largest in Dublin and down south in Cork, Ireland's second city. Support was generally weakest in the northern and western parts of the country, roughly the area known as Connaught.
+
+But overall the picture is of enormously broad support for the referendum, including in most of rural Ireland.",REAL
+1425,Ted Cruz isn't liked in Congress. What could that mean if he's president? (+video),"Some senators are more diplomatic about their criticisms than others. Where views diverge is whether a President Cruz would be as ideologically unbending as Senator Cruz.
+
+As Donald Trump and Republican rival Ted Cruz battle it out on the way to the Iowa caucuses Feb. 1, a favorite attack by Mr. Trump is that ""nobody likes"" Senator Cruz, particularly in Congress. He can't deal. The Texan ""stands on the middle of the Senate floor and can't make a deal with anybody,"" Trump said Tuesday on MSNBC's ""Morning Joe.""
+
+That’s not idle chatter, even if it’s typical Trumpian broad-brushing.
+
+From a former president, to former House and Senate leaders, to sitting members of Congress, “establishment” Republicans are sounding alarms about the likability and deal-ability of the tea party darling who led the way to a partial government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act in 2013.
+
+Monitor interviews with more than a dozen senators bear this out, though not all jump on the dump truck and some are more diplomatic about their criticisms than others. Where views more starkly diverge is whether a President Cruz would be as ideologically unbending as a Senator Cruz, with some observers expecting no appreciable change and others suggesting that the presidency would force him in a more pragmatic direction.
+
+Senators don’t like to criticize their fellow senators, and several pointed to Cruz’s strengths – his intellect, passion, and humor. When asked about Cruz, Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine, paused. Then she pointed out that no Senate Republican has endorsed the Texan, despite the fact that they have all come to know him since he took office in 2012.
+
+“It’s not helpful to the level of debate in this country, to have a member of this body trashing the Senate rather than working within the Senate to make it more responsive and to reform whatever he may see as its deficiencies,” Senator Collins said, as she rode the Senate subway to her office last week.
+
+Her colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina, was far less tactful. “He’s not a problem solver. When you think of problem solving, the last person that comes to mind is Ted Cruz. Everybody’s a problem but him,” said Senator Graham, who, after dropping out of the presidential campaign, now supports Jeb Bush.
+
+One senior Republican labels Cruz a “neo-nihilist” who tears down, rather than builds.
+
+In a speech on the Senate floor last summer, Cruz called his own party leader, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky, a liar. This simply is not done in a place where strict decorum is still the order of the day, and it angered many Republicans. One reason Republicans are going on the record about Cruz is because they are so concerned that he will get the nomination.
+
+Cruz, for his part, frequently refers to his colleagues as part of the “Washington cartel.”
+
+The renegade wears his flamethrower status as a badge of honor, joking with voters about needing a “food taster” when he sits down to a meal in the Senate dining room. His supporters, meanwhile, love the fight in him. An e-mail request from the Monitor to his campaign went unanswered.
+
+But if unbending ideology and derision characterize Cruz’s short tenure in the Senate, what might they portend for a Cruz presidency?
+
+Some observers contend that what you see is what you’ll get, while others think that he may well bend – or at least have to mend some fences.
+
+“I can’t necessarily say that past is prologue,” says Sen. Thom Tillis (R) of North Carolina, who sits on the Judiciary Committee with Cruz and admires the way the attorney-senator “pins down” witnesses, particularly in confirmation hearings. Senator Tillis was backed by the Tea Party Express in a tough race in 2014, and calls Cruz “an asset” on the committee.
+
+But Tillis points out that being a senator is not the same as president, and then adds, “I would be hopeful that whoever emerges as the Republican nominee recognizes that working with us produces a far better result for the nation.”
+
+While Tillis says he has not clashed with Cruz, he adds that rebuilding burned bridges is “one of the factors” that a President Cruz would have to deal with.
+
+This point, that a senator and a president are two very different jobs, is key to those who think that relations between Cruz and establishment Republicans in Congress would improve if the tea party champion were to become president.
+
+Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant in Houston, points out that Cruz had absolutely no incentive to play along or try to accomplish anything when he got to the Senate three years ago.
+
+First, he ran a campaign as a principled conservative who wasn’t going to give an inch. Second, he wanted to be a national player. “I think he realized that waiting nine months to give your maiden floor speech and keeping your head down wasn’t a path he wanted to take.” Then-Sen. Barack Obama had the same realization.
+
+But just as important, says Mr. Mackowiak, the Senate, at that time under Democratic control, was a “graveyard” for any real accomplishments by a minority party. “The incentive instead was to be a bomb thrower, to develop your outside game, not your inside game.”
+
+Mackowiak points to Cruz’s intense admiration for President Reagan. The consultant believes that Cruz wants to emulate the “morning in America” president. To do that, he would need a legislative agenda that would require cooperation from congressional Republicans – and depending on the math, also Democrats.
+
+“Maintaining a poisoned relationship with leaders of both houses would be insane. He would never do that,” Mackowiak says.
+
+But others are not so sure. They point to a new era of politics in which long-term relationships are not as important as short-term coalitions on issues. They look at the angry voter – on both the left and the right – who is tired of the establishment.
+
+And most important, they look at Cruz himself. Not only has he stood his ground, even if it’s been a losing ground, on issues such as defunding Planned Parenthood, killing the Iran nuclear deal, and defeating a Senate immigration bill. He also promises up and down to stick to those positions.
+
+Neither will he run to the “mushy middle” in a general election campaign, he says.
+
+“The positions he’s taking are resonating with people,” says a conservative senator-in-arms, Jeff Sessions (R) of Alabama. “They’re tired of talk.”
+
+It may well be that establishment Republicans in Congress bend to a President Cruz. Notice how Rep. Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin has reached out to the rebellious hard-right Freedom Caucus that drove out “establishment” Speaker John Boehner last fall.
+
+A President Cruz would likely put enormous pressure on a GOP-controlled Congress to govern from an ideologically rigid position, and that Congress would feel an enormous amount of pressure to cooperate with him, says James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
+
+If that’s the case, says Professor Henson, expect to see immediate pushback from Cruz on such issues as the Affordable Care Act, gay marriage, and abortion rights in ways that test the Supreme Court – where he argued eight cases as the Texas solicitor general. Cruz has been deeply critical of the high court, and may challenge it by supporting state efforts, working with Congress, or even through executive order, Henson says.
+
+Whether Ted Cruz, the president, would be like Ted Cruz, the senator, gets down to the “mixture of true believer and strategic player” in his political profile, says Henson. So far, the two have worked hand-in-hand – his rigidity has served him politically.
+
+“One can look at Ted Cruz and speculate that his political career up to this point has been predicated on upward mobility, and that once he got to the highest office in the land, he might exhibit a bit more pragmatism,” Henson says. “That’s not out of the question, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
+
+What it comes down to, he says, is what Cruz really wants and what motivates him, and who he is as a person. No one knows the answers to those questions better than Ted Cruz.",REAL
+6732,Healthcare system bleeds us dry by design,"License DMCA The U.S. healthcare system is produced and fueled by crony capitalism. Activist investor Dave Chase bottom-lined the result ( Forbes ): ""the Middle Class is in a 20-year long economic depression that is at least 95% due to healthcare."" Studies show our healthcare industry is providing worse care than those of many other wealthy nations, at an astounding 50% per capita higher cost than the next most expensive nation. Ask the price of any service and you always receive the same answer: ""What insurance do you have?"" Billing is determined by how much can be extracted from each patient on a case-by-case basis, often when the patient is at his or her most vulnerable. By any definition, this is a predatory, non-competitive system. So-called price-transparency initiatives serve to perpetuate this system in which prices can vary by a factor of 100 for the exact same service performed by the same provider. Healthcare is the only consumer industry legally permitted to shield itself from the usual requirement of legitimate pricing and competition. Patients have been rendered powerless. Ethically, this is institutionalized fraud. To stop the bleeding, Congress need only require that healthcare providers publish ""legitimate pricing"", which means they can continue to set their own rates, but - a different rate for each patient - must be prohibited. Without legitimate pricing, price competition cannot exist and healthcare costs will continue to skyrocket. Consumer-protection laws are applied to virtually every other industry and require both that (i) prices be disclosed; and (ii) prices be stated in a common format. Gas is uniformly priced in gallons (not pints, quarts, ounces or liters). Food is generally priced in ounces and pounds and state agencies protect consumers by inspecting scales. Scores of regulation specify precisely how annual percentage rate must be calculated and disclosed in all credit transactions (i.e., the price of borrowed money). Healthcare's exemption from consumer-protection laws is a national disgrace. Healthcare providers, like other sellers of consumer and financial products, must be required to publish their rates in a uniform format such as industry-standard CPT codes or a percentage of Medicare rates. Every citizen would be empowered to search any medical procedure online and see pricing for all providers within X miles. It would be as easy and familiar as checking the price of any other goods or services. Legitimate prices mean networks will be obsolete, along with the administrative burdens, tremendous costs, and limitations on patient choice that they impose. Health insurance will function like homeowner's, fire or auto insurance. When a house burns down, the price of drywall and paint does not depend on whether the home was insured by State Farm or Allstate. Patients would buy health insurance providing a reimbursement level that they select; for example, 100% of Medicare rates. Consumers could shop every provider in the nation and easily determine their out-of-pocket costs. - Advertisement - High amounts of corporate debt have been incurred acquiring medical facilities on the assumption they could continue to impose predatory pricing. Disruption of current business models will lead to bankruptcies. Just as in all other industries, currently non-competitive providers will be acquired at low cost and be operated by more efficient providers. Ultimately, the industry will adjust to a competitive environment and offer health services at far lower prices. University of California researchers reported that a consumer-oriented incentive to generate competition, known as reference pricing , lowered hospital costs by more than 20% for the 1.3 million members (and their families) of the California Public Employees' Retirement System. The insurance plan stated the maximum amount it would pay for a group of common medical procedures, thereby incentivizing participants to shop prices. Lower-priced hospitals saw market share growth of 28 percent, prompting many higher-priced hospitals to lower their prices. Legitimate pricing would be a far more powerful stimulus to competition than mere reference pricing. Legitimate pricing would compel wide-open free-market competition and would, in this author's opinion, virtually overnight reduce U.S. health expenditures by a minimum 33%. Disposable incomes and prosperity would boom. The U.S. deficit would shrink. Lower underlying healthcare prices is the sole and exclusive way to materially lower health-insurance premiums. Anyone who says otherwise is, to be kind, incorrect. Reform is difficult because the healthcare industry spends more on lobbying than the defense, aerospace, and the oil-and-gas industries combined . The American public understands our predatory pricing system is morally and economically unjustifiable and is demanding change. A Petition to End Predatory Healthcare Pricing and to require legitimate pricing rapidly gained more than 100,000 signatures this year. - Advertisement - To the many polarized groups in our nation, we have added free-market versus single-payer devotees. While this author takes no position on this issue, legitimate pricing is an essential prerequisite to either system. Nobody knows what prices would look like in an open market. For example, a study by The Department of Health and Human Services compared Medicare-allowable prices for lab charges to the negotiated prices paid for 20 high-volume and high-expense lab tests by health insurers. While providers generally complain that Medicare rates are too stingy, the study found that prices paid by Medicare exceeded fair market value: ""Medicare could have saved $910 million, or 38 percent, on these lab tests if it had paid providers at the lowest established rate in each geographic area."" In the absence of legitimate pricing, bureaucrats administering single-payer would have no basis on which to negotiate or set rates. That will likely leave lobbyists in control of pricing. For many Americans this concept evokes memories like the Pentagons purchase of $1,000 hammers and toilet seats. If we didn't know how much those items cost in hardware stores (i.e., legitimate prices), there would be no reference point and nobody would have even batted an eye. To reverse our nation's financial bleeding and end restrictions on patient choice resulting from restricted provider networks, Congress must empower citizens by mandating legitimate healthcare pricing.",FAKE
+2213,Republicans Warn Iran Against Nuclear Deal With Obama,"WASHINGTON, March 9 (Reuters) - Republican senators warned Iran on Monday that any nuclear deal made with U.S. President Barack Obama could last only as long as he remains in office, in an unusual intervention into U.S. foreign policy-making.
+
+The letter, signed by 47 U.S. senators, says Congress plays a role in ratifying international agreements and points out that Obama will leave office in January 2017, while many in Congress will remain in Washington long after that.
+
+""We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei,"" the letter read.
+
+""The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of an agreement at any time,"" it read.
+
+The letter, first reported by Bloomberg News, followed a speech to a joint meeting of Congress last week by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned that the United States was negotiating a ""bad deal"" with Tehran.
+
+It comes as world powers have been negotiating with Iran to try to reach some form of understanding by the end of March before a final deal in June that could ease crippling sanctions that have crippled Iran's economy.
+
+The U.S. Constitution divides foreign policy powers between the president and Congress. The executive branch is responsible for negotiating international agreements and lawmakers rarely intervene directly with the leaders of another nation while the president's administration is negotiating a pact.
+
+Republicans want any U.S. nuclear agreement with Iran to be approved by Congress. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who signed the letter released on Monday, agreed to postpone a vote on a bill requiring Obama to submit any deal for congressional approval amid outcry from Democrats.
+
+Along with McConnell, Republican signers include Tom Cotton, Orrin Hatch, John Cornyn, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, John Thune and Mark Kirk. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, two possible 2016 presidential contenders, also signed. (Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Susan Heavey)",REAL
+6705,Bret Baier: FBI Indictment ALMOST certain in Hillary case,"Bret Baier: FBI Indictment ALMOST certain in Hillary case November 03, 2016 
+Fox News’ Bret Baier says his sources claim that an indictment is almost certain in the new FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Baier made the claim Wednesday night during a broadcast of “On the Record” with Brit Hume. Baier: “Lot of evidence” had been recovered from Anthony Wiener’s laptop. “I pressed, again and again, on this very issue. These sources said, yes, the investigations will continues [sic], there’s a lot of evidence, and barring some obstruction in some way, they believe they’ll continue to, likely, an indictment.” Baier didn’t say exactly who would be the most most likely target of an indictment, nor the timeline. Baiser sources: Greater than 99 percent confidence that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies. 
+(WASHINGTON, DC) Citing sources at the FBI, Fox News anchor Bret Baier said the FBI’s renewed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server will almost certainly end in an indictment, unless some sort of “obstruction” arises. 
+Baier made the claim Wednesday night during a broadcast of “On the Record” with Brit Hume. He said that a “lot of evidence” had been recovered from Anthony Wiener’s laptop, and made an eventual indictment appear very likely, even if it came months after the election. 
+“I pressed, again and again, on this very issue,” Baier told Hume. “These sources said, yes, the investigations will continues [sic], there’s a lot of evidence, and barring some obstruction in some way, they believe they’ll continue to, likely, an indictment.” 
+Baier didn’t say exactly who would be the most most likely target of an indictment, and what the timeline on such an indictment would be. 
+Baier also said that his sources had greater than 99 percent confidence that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies. When FBI Director James Comey first announced last summer that no charges would be recommended regarding Clinton’s server, he said the FBI had no way of knowing whether the server had been hacked. 
+Clinton’s presidential campaign aggressively downplayed the severity of the renewed investigation into her private email server, and criticized the judgment of Comey for publicly announcing it. 
+Daily Caller copy, TRUNEWS analysis Please contact TRUNEWS correspondent Edward Szall with any news tips related to this story. Email: | Twitter: @EdwardSzall | Facebook: Ed Szall DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP on Apple and Google Play ! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+7603,"Speaker at Sanders Rally Tells Crowd Not to Vote Clinton, Gets Dragged Off Stage","We Are Change 
+The president of the Iowa State University Bernie Sanders club was dragged off of the stage at a Hillary Clinton rally which he was invited to speak at by her campaign — after telling the crowd not to vote for her.
+
+Sanders was in town holding the rally to drum up support for him formal rival on Saturday. Enthusiastic Sanders supporter Caleb Vanfosson was invited to open the event, but instead of echoing Sanders’ endorsement, the college sophomore laid down exactly why he will not vote for her. 
+“I got a call the other day asking me if I wanted to speak for Hillary, basically they wanted to use me like a puppet,” Van Fosson told Fox News . “Trump’s not any better, but Hillary Clinton is still terrible.”
+His speech began in typical fashion, introducing himself and speaking about student debt. 
+“While the part time reality tv show star and full time bigot Donald Trump thinks that hard working immigrants is what’s wrong with our country,” Vanfosson said to laughter from the crowd, “hes failing to even talk about this issue.” 
+Bernie Sanders supporter and college student speaker calls out Hillary Clinton at her own rally, security pulls him off stage 11/5/2016 pic.twitter.com/EKMV15ZScd 
+— MicroTurkeyLeaks™ (@WDFx2EU8) November 5, 2016 
+
+“But unfortunately Hillary doesn’t really care about this issue either, the only thing she really cares about is pleasing her delegates — the delegates who won her the election,” he said. “The only people who can really trust Hillary are Goldman Sachs. CITIGroup can trust Hillary. The military industrial complex can trust Hillary. Her good friend Henry Kissinger can trust Hillary.” 
+Vanfosson’s words clearly resonated, as cheers and applause erupted from the crowd. 
+“She is so trapped in the world of the elite that she has completely lost grip of what it’s like to be an average person,” he continued. 
+A man then entered the room and began to walk purposefully towards the podium. When he reached Vanfosson, he grabbed him and 
+“She doesn’t care about us. Voting for a lesser of two evils, there’s no point,” he concluded, as he was grabbed and pushed off the stage. 
+The post Speaker at Sanders Rally Tells Crowd Not to Vote Clinton, Gets Dragged Off Stage appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+7980,More Reports Of Votes Flipping From Trump To Clinton In Texas ….election Officials Dismiss Concerns… An Ongoing Cbs4 Voter Fraud Investigation Finds People Voting Twice,"More Reports Of Votes Flipping From Trump To Clinton In Texas ….election Officials Dismiss Concerns… An Ongoing Cbs4 Voter Fraud Investigation Finds People Voting Twice by IWB · October 27, 2016 Tweet Following our story yesterday, there have been more reports of early voters in Texas seeing their ballots flipped from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. Voters in Arlington and Amarillo complained that when they highlighted the box to select Trump/Pence, it switched to Clinton/Kaine. Now numerous other Texans have gone public on social media to report similar problems. However, election officials in Texas are denying that there is a problem. “Typically, we’ve found it’s voter error with the equipment,” Frank Phillips, Tarrant County’s election administrator, told WFAA . “Sometimes they vote straight party and then click on other candidates … or do something with the wheel….There is not an issue with the equipment.” Are all these examples just voters making mistakes or inaccurately reporting what happened? Or could there be a real problem with electronic voting machines in Texas? 
+http://www.infowars.com/more-reports-of-votes-flipping-from-trump-to-clinton-in-texas/ 
+An ongoing CBS4 VOTER FRAUD investigation Finds People Voting Twice 
+DENVER (CBS4)– An ongoing CBS4 voter fraud investigation has uncovered a dozen cases where Coloradans are suspected of voting twice. Previous CBS4 Investigations revealed ballots cast in the names of Coloradans who had been dead for months– sometimes years- before votes were cast in their names. 
+In six of the new cases, voting records show the same people voting twice in Colorado elections. In another six cases, people are suspected of voting in Colorado and another state during the same election cycle. 
+http://denver.cbslocal.com/2016/10/25/cbs4-investigation-finds-people-voting-twice/ 
+Voting Machine Caught on Camera Casting Ballot for Democrat when Selecting Republican 
+Early voting has only been underway for two whole and we’re already facing a glitch in the system. Chambers County was forced to pull the plug on their voting machines and turn to the paper ballot due to a software problem. All electronic voting has been stopped until the software can be updated. 
+http://kluv.cbslocal.com/2016/10/26/chambers-county-texas-switches-to-paper-ballots/ 
+Florida Governor Busted Attempting To Toss Thousands Of Mail-In Ballots 
+A federal judge on Saturday blocked Florida Governor Rick Scott’s attempt to throw out tens of thousands of mail-in ballots, then publicly reprimanded him. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a blistering caution to Scott’s top election official on a lawsuit about vote-by-mail ballots. 
+According to ABC News , the judge accused Governor Scott appointed Secretary of State Ken Detzner of “delaying a hearing on the lawsuit, so that he could use every second available to run out the clock,” . That means, there would not be enough time to address the lawsuit. Then, Judge Walker said the governor’s man, Detzner, was in effect committing an “undeclared war’ on Florida voters’ rights. 
+Florida’s Democratic Party filed a lawsuit asserting that thousands of vote-by-mail ballots were rejected each election, because the voter’s ballot envelope and the registration file signatures do not match. Without a signature, Florida law says that a vote-by-mail ballot cannot be counted.",FAKE
+1123,Trump Loves 'the Poorly Educated' ... and Social Media Clamors,"After winning the vote of the state's Republicans by a wide margin on Tuesday, the real estate billionaire rattled off a list of those groups who swept him to victory: ""We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.""
+
+By Wednesday morning, the phrase ""I LOVE THE POORLY EDUCATED"" was trending heavily. On Twitter, it was tweeted roughly 15 times a minute, according to social media analytics firm Zoomph.
+
+""I am, by modern standards, poorly educated, and I think that Donald Trump is a threat to America,"" tweeted Aaron Camp (@AaronApolloCamp).
+
+Another Twitter user, Kat (@VTweddingPhoto), wrote, ""This is an embarrassment. For the GOP and for us as Americans. The world is once again laughing.""
+
+Others said Trump's remark was being taken out of context, as he also touted having won the support of ""the highly educated.""
+
+""To be fair with Trump, he said 'I love the highly educated and the poorly educated'. Don't take it out of context,"" tweeted Super Bowl Champs (@Josh_D_Manning).
+
+Dan Slott (@DanSlott) was not swayed. ""We won the poorly educated vote. I love the poorly educated"" - Trump Not a joke. Not parody. Not out of context. Trump ACTUALLY said this.""
+
+Trump has won three of the four state-by-state Republican nominating contests, including Nevada, in the run-up to the party nominating convention in July and the Nov. 8 general election to succeed President Barack Obama.",REAL
+9954,Incredible smoke haze seen outside NDTV office after Arnab quits; bursting of firecrackers suspected,"Incredible smoke haze seen outside NDTV office after Arnab quits; bursting of firecrackers suspected Posted on Tweet (Image via shutterstock.com) 
+An incredible smoke haze was spotted seen outside the NDTV office on Tuesday. Onlookers claimed that the reason was and uninhibited bursting of firecrackers by people in the building. 
+One onlooker claimed he also heard loud firecrackers-like noise near the NDTV office area followed by fumes curling up to form a V-sign. 
+Experts say it will be difficult to ascertain the source of the emission. A leading pollution expert opined, “These days such peculiar fumes can be due to firecrackers during the Diwali season or because of pure human emotions giving rise to intense celebrations, revelry, etc.” 
+This incident, according to the onlooker, happened on Tuesday evening, minutes after the news of journalist Arnab Goswami quitting Times Now surfaced. 
+The UnReal Times could not verify whether the two events were correlated as the onlooker tried to imply. 
+A few onlookers however insisted the fumes could be a smokescreen to hide some kind of celebrations inside the office. The UnReal Times could not even verify whether there was pun intended in this claim. 
+Similar incidents of smoke over other media houses were reported too. 
+Outside the CNN IBN office, one could see similar fumes rising, triggering alarm bells among onlookers. Again, firecrackers could have been behind the smoke, according to the observers. 
+Outside the India Today office, not only was smoke seen rising in the air but a grey-haired man was seen enthusiastically distributing sweets among strangers. 
+When asked, what was he celebrating the man replied, “Should we celebrate Diwali only during Diwali? Why not a day later? Does that mean we have become anti-national?” 
+When asked if the celebration had anything to do with the Arnab Goswami resignation, the man replied with a grin, “Shubhratri. Good night!” 
+Strangely, outside the Times Now office, no smoke was detected. Tweet About Amrut Thobbi 
+Amrut Thobbi is an editor by profession, satirist by heart and useless as a person. You can follow him at @amrutti on Twitter or Amrut Thobbi on Facebook. He blogs here",FAKE
+9371,Fascism In India - CounterCurrents.org,"in Communal Harmony — by Anandi Sharan — November 5, 2016 
+On Monday the 31st of October 2016 the Madhya Pradesh police assassinated eight alleged associates of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) after an alleged escape from prison near Bhopal. This was not coincidentally a day when the Prime Minister Narendra Modi was hyping Hindu nationalism on Diwali, the Hindu festival that celebrates the return of the mythic god Ram to Ayodhya in present day Uttar Pradesh. The assassination was most certainly a celebration of Diwali and Hindu nationalism by assassination of Muslims. Narendra Modi on the previous day had sent sms to all Indian citizens asking them to send sweets to soldiers on Diwali. He had tweeted: “festivals are fixed not only by the mood of the moon but by the mood of the people.” It was a message to policemen members of the Sangh Parivar to seize the moment and perform a Hindu nationalist strike against Muslims in the name of anti-Muslim terrorist national pride. 
+Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 on the basis of a twenty-year-old Hindutva fascist take over of the country by the Hindu political establishment including the Supreme Court. 
+For 18 years in the lead up to the 2014 Parliamentary elections 19 Chief Justices failed to reverse an illegal judgement pronounced by J.S. Verma in the case of R.Y. Prabhoo vs P.K. Kunte on 11 December 1995, a judgement issued at the end of P.V. Narsimha Rao’s Prime Ministership. 
+In that judgement, known as the Hindutva Judgement, Verma claimed that Hinduism/Hindutva is not a religion but a way of life, failing to see that just because Hinduism does not have a book like most of the other religions does not mean it is not a religion. 
+A.M.Ahmadi was CJI at the time of the Hindutva Judgement, having been appointed on 25 October 1994. The demand for an expeditious and authoritative decision on the question of whether appealing to Hinduism is an appeal to religion was made by K. Ramaswamy, on 16 April 1996. In the case of Abhiram Singh vs C.D. Commachen & Ors the judge stated: 
+<<as to when the case (of corrupt practice under section 123 (3) and (3A) of Representation of People Act 1951) is held proved has not been specifically laid as law. This requires to be authoritatively decided. As stated earlier when and under what circumstances speeches of the leaders of the political party or the appeal of any other person with the consent by a candidate or his election agent to vote or refrain from voting on the ground of religion, race, caste or community or language, etc. or promotion or an attempt to promote feelings of enmity or hatred between different classes of citizens of India on the ground of religion, race, caste, community or language with the consent of the candidate or his election agent for the furtherance of the prospects of the election of the candidate or prejudicially affect the election of any candidates constitutes corrupt practice under sub-sections [3] or [3A] of Section 123. Its content and scope also require to be clearly laid down authoritatively lest miscarriage of justice in interpretation of “corrupt practice” involved in every election petition would ensue. The purity of election process gets fouled and be fraught with deleterious effect in a democratic polity. Thus, without expressing any opinion on these questions, we are of the view that the entire case requires to be heard and decided by a large Bench of five Judges since the decision thereon upon the purity of election process and requires to be decided authoritatively. We, therefore, direct the Registry to place the case before our learned brother, the Chief Justice for constituting a larger Bench of five Judges, and, if possible, at an early date so that all the questions arising in the present appeal could be decided authoritatively and expeditiously. >> 
+The demand was made on 16 April 1996. If Ahmadi had acted immediately he could have prevented Atal Behari Vajpayee becoming Prime Minister for the first time a month later on 16th May 1996. Vajpayee was a Sangh Parivar pracharak who said he may or may not be PM but he will always be an RSS swayamsevak for as long as he lives. He said there is no difference between BJP and RSS, and that he had had the privilege of undergoing training under RSS founder Dr. Hedgewar and former chief Gowalkar. Hindutva is a fascist ideology taken over by Hedgewar and Gowalkar from Savarkar who adapted it from Europe to justify extermination of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits and Adivasis for the greater glory of the sacred Hindu nation in the world. 
+The cross-party Hindu Indian elite presented Vajpayee as a respectable moderate elder statesman, a worthy successor to P.V.Narsimha Rao. No one questioned that his political power is fascism. A report by the RSS in the aftermath of the riots in Delhi in 1984 in which Sikhs were murdered as a community for Indira Gandhi’s assassination revealed the true attitude of the RSS to Sikhs. They were to stay silent and wait for the righteous anger of the murderers to abate. The RSS are not alone in their justification of communalism. Rajiv Gandhi who became Prime Minister after the riots in part due to the sympathy vote for the assassination of his mother said at the time that if a big tree falls the forest is bound to shake. The Congress Hindu elite in India has always used communalism as a political tool, and has no compunction in allowing the RSS to do the same. The organisers of the anti-Sikh pogroms have still not been arrested though the official report has found irrefutable evidence against all of them. 
+The failure of law and order in BJP states such as demonstrated on 31st October 2016 and the failure of the central government law and order enforcement machinery including the Supreme Court is due to the hijacking of the institutions and organs of justice including the constitution by the Hindu political elites. It may seem shocking to some to hear the SC so accused. But the failure of law and order enforcement is only the visible tip of the iceberg of a complete break down of secular democracy in India since Nehru’s days, a break down that is in fact nothing other than the take over of the country by fascists under the aegis of the Congress party. Once the government looses its commitment to equality, justice, secularism, socialism, fraternity and rule of law, as mandated by the constitution, and instead starts to rewrite the constitution, the stage is set for fascism. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru started the rot when he imprisoned Sheikh Abdullah of Jammu and Kashmir in the 1960s and illegally dissolved the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly contrary to Article 370 of the constitution. Nehru’s betrayal of Kashmiris was the beginning of fascism in India. It was a short step to overthrowing the Representation of the People Act that forbids appeal to religion to garner votes. 
+Ahmadi’s tenure as CJI was to come to an end on 24 March 1997. By convicting BJP politicians for promoting enmity between classes on the basis of religion under the RP Act Ahmadi could have forced politicians to abide by the law and adopt secular democratic politics. Such a judgement would have helped enforce the law in all aspects of public life, which was a big concern at the time. The time should have been right for the overthrow of fascism in India. 
+On the 19th of July 1996 there had been the strange case of Dr.D.C. Saxena vs Hon’Ble The Chief Justice Of India in which CJI Ahmadi and Prime Minister P.V. Narsimha Rao were accused of corruption for misusing public accommodation and transport for private purposes. It is very strange how instead of the major issue of subversion of secular democracy in the Hindutva Judgement, the CJI chose to take up this strange case at the highest level. Why take up such a marginal issue of misuse of public accommodation and transport, and hold the petitioner guilty of contempt of court and so on? One cannot help feel that this was just a gigantic manoeuvre to pull the wool over the eyes of the public to hide other much more major failings of both the CJI and the PM, namely failure to implement the Verma Committee Report on corruption in the government, and failure to give an authoritative and expeditious decision on Hindutva, which were part and parcel of the same fascism that he could not get himself to challenge. 
+The N.N.Verma Committee report had exposed the failure of the state machinery to deal with law and order and political mafia nexus. If Ahmadi and P.V. Narsimha Rao had no interest in outlawing the Ram Temple Party it must have been because they found themselves incapable of dealing with the infiltration of the mafia including the Sangh Parivar mafia into all aspects of public life with which they were in collusion. In that sense they were part of the mafia, especially P.V. Narasimha Rao of course, whose son is a well-known crorepati with business interests in road construction all over the country. On his retirement Ahmadi had a princely sum of Rs 5000 a month to live on. He did want to return to Ahmedabad, his hometown, but stayed in Delhi. He probably needed to make and keep friends in high places in private and public business to live a more comfortable lifestyle. 
+On the 9th of July 1993 the government of P.V. Narsimha Rao could no longer escape the pressure to deal with corruption and he established the N.N. Vora Committee. Its mandate was to take stock of all available information about the activities of Crime Syndicates/Mafia organisations that had developed links with and were being protected by Government functionaries and political personalities. Based on the recommendations of the Committee, the central government was supposed to determine the need, if any to establish a special organisation/agency to regularly collect information and pursue cases against such elements. The report brought out, in N.N. Vora’s words, “that the activities of Memon Brothers and Dawood Ibrahim had progressed over the years, leading to the establishment of a powerful network. This could not have happened without these elements having been protected by the functionaries of the concerned Government departments specially Customs, Income Tax, Police and others. … The CBI (said ..there was a) .. nexus between the Bombay City Police and the Bombay under-world.. over time, the money power thus acquired is used for building up contacts with bureaucrats and politicians and expansion of activities with impunity. The money power is used to develop a network of muscle-power, which is also used by politicians during elections. CBI has reported that all over India crime Syndicates have become a law unto themselves. Even in the smaller towns and rural areas, muscle men have become the order of the day. Hired assassins have become a part of these organisations. The nexus between the criminal gangs, police, bureaucracy and politicians has come out clearly in various parts of the country. The existing criminal justice system, which was essentially designed to deal with the individual offences/crimes, is unable to deal with the activities of the mafia; the provisions of law in regards to economic offences are weak; there are insurmountable legal difficulties in attaching/confiscation of the property acquired through Mafia activities. …. In cases where a crime Syndicate has graduated to big business, it would be necessary to conduct detailed investigations into its assets, both movable and immovable. It has been stressed that when such action is not timely and effectively taken, the lower functionaries of the concerned State and Central Departments /organisations start overlooking the activities of the crime Syndicates. … The Director Intelligence Bureau (said)…. due to the progressive decline in the values of public life in the country warning signals of sinister linkage between the underworld politicians and the bureaucracy have been evident with disturbing regularity. ……. the network of the Mafia is virtually running a parallel Government, pushing the State apparatus into irrelevance. …..During discussions with Secretary (Revenue) and his principal officers, the following significant observations were made: …the field officers of his various Departments were faced with various problems, amongst which are the utter inadequacy of the criminal system; cases are not heard timely; functioning of the Government lawyers is grossly inadequate; all this results in a low percentage of convictions and mild punishments…. The field officers of the various agencies of the Revenue Departments are often pressurised by senior government functionaries/political leaders apparently at the behest of crime Syndicates/Mafia elements. Unless the field level officers are offered effective protection, they cannot be expected to maintain interest in vigorously pursuing action against the activities of such elements.…The linkages developed by crime syndicated get generally confirmed when pressure is mounted on the concerned agencies not to take action against the offenders or to go slow in the cases against them. Such pressures are mounted either immediately after a raid is conducted or at the time when prosecution is about to be initiated. Pressures are also exerted whenever corrupt and undesirable officers are shifted from sensitive assignments. >> 
+The appeal from the three-judge bench to review the Hindutva Judgement was urgent. The case had arisen along with others precisely because of the illegal politics of the Shiv Sena who were the lords of the Bombay underworld. Ahmadi had only a total of 881 days as CJI, a length of term he knew much in advance of ever being appointed due to the well-known system of CJI appointment by seniority. But instead of planning carefully before becoming CJI, and acting immediately on becoming CJI, Ahmadi declined to act authoritatively and expeditiously and let the Shiv Sena remain in control of Bombay and Maharashtra, and he let Vajpayee and the BJP in as ruling party at the centre for the first time. The BJP was the mafia in Ahmadi’s own home state of Gujarat. But for some peculiar reason he did not perceive the BJP as a Hindutva fascist gang that can be controlled by the RP Act. The RP Act was not considered the law par excellence to introduce probity into public life. This is baffling in the extreme. 
+In an interview given to the journalist Kuldip Nayar two days before he retired published in Outlook India on 09 April 1997 Nayar reported that 
+<<Ahmadi evaded comment on the judgement to define Hindutva. He has reservations but is reluctant to spell them out. Asked why he did not refer it to the larger bench, he says that there has to be a system and that the chief justice cannot do so on his own. I reminded him of the letter I had written, requesting him to constitute a larger bench to consider the judgement which I thought affected the basic structure of the Constitution and secularism. He says he did not act “for obvious reasons”, but adds that in “a recent judgement, the demand for a larger bench has been made”.>> 
+The demand sent eleven months and three weeks before could hardly be termed as “recent.” After his retirement Ahmadi said: “”We have let down the constitution, the constitution hasn’t let us down. We have not used our constitutional rights to our advantage. We have not seriously tried to avail our legal entitlements,” The report stated:<< Former Indian chief justice A.M. Ahmadi yesterday said Muslims have let down the constitution by not availing of rights enshrined therein. Ahmadi, in his no-nonsense address at the city’s India Islamic Cultural Centre (IICC), urged the gathering of around 50 Muslims drawn from different walks of life to use constitutional rights to their advantage.>> 
+The only explanation is that the BJP had something over Ahmadi, some personal corruption that made him behoven to them. Or maybe he made secularism subservient to the politics of ejecting the Congress party. Or maybe he thought the judiciary was helpless. Afterwards he blamed himself as a Muslim for not taking action. But at the time he probably considered himself less a Muslim and more a part of a legal system that was unwilling to take a stance to hold politicians accountable under the law. That was a personal moral risk he as a CJI was not willing to take. Enforcement of RP Act is not a matter of constitutional rights but of law. Ahmadi was not willing to enforce the law. 
+18 Chief Justices after him also avoided addressing the demand that Ramaswamy bench had made for a larger bench of the Supreme Court to solve the conflicting judgements on whether or not Hinduism is a religion. 
+The BJP should more aptly be called the Ram Temple party to highlight the fact that the very existence of that party represents fascism par excellence in our country as it is illegal to appeal to religion under the Representation of People Act. 
+In retrospect it is apparent that the BJP came to power in 1996 because the Congress party was discredited due to its corrupt practices as brought out in the N.N. Vora Committee report in 1993. During their tenures as Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi from October 1984 to December 1989 and P.V. Narsimha Rao from June 1991 to May 1996 had given up any semblance of defence of the tenets of equality, justice, secularism, socialism and fraternity as envisaged by the secular democratic constitution. The BJP won only two seats in the Lok Sabha in 1984. But appealing to Hinduism it won eighty-five seats in 1989 and became the third largest party. Prime Minister V. P. Singh had accepted the Mandal Commission report and reserved 27% of government jobs for Other Backward Classes. Anti-reservation slogans were raised by the BJP along with anti-corruption. Rajiv Gandhi appeased Mullahs by reversing the Shah Bano case. Shah Bano had filed a case in the Supreme Court for maintenance from her ex-husband. Under criminal law she was given right. Three years later in 1986 Parliament under Rajiv Gandhi reversed the decision. Arif Mohammed Khan who was in support of the SC judgement, resigned. The BJP’s appeal to so-called majority sentiment was one thing. On the other side the courts banned Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses which in the eyes of Hindu nationalists was appeasement of minorities. No one raised the point that this is the law under the Indian Penal Code. On the other hand Rajiv Gandhi also called Babri Masjid land as “Ram’s land” to try and get back the Hindu vote. In reality assassination of Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis and all dark-skinned Indians is the means the Indian state of all parties to date use to consolidate the nation. This is the Hindu Brahmin supremacism. In 1983 the Nellie massacre of 1983 had seen 5,000 people, mainly Muslims, killed; the 1987 Hashimpura massacre saw 40 Muslims killed in cold blood; in the Bhagalpur riots of 1989 the victims were predominantly Muslim; in the Hyderabad riots of 1990 both Hindus and Muslims died; in the Surat riots of 1992 mainly Muslims died. These were all party politically orchestrated events. The Congress party was finished as a secular democratic force. In the Muzaffarnagar event in 2013 forty-six Muslims and sixteen Hindus died, instigated by the socialist Samajwadi Party. In March 2015, sixteen accused policemen were acquitted of their involvement in the Hashimpura massacre. In that violence men from UP police drove Muslim poor daily wage labourers and weavers to a canal and threw them in. Both Samajwadi Party and BJP leaders are instigators of riots. 
+After Nehru’s betrayal of Kashmir and Sheikh Abdullah, Indira Gandhi had engaged in her own list of illegalities culminating in the Declaration of Emergency to protect her political career. Once Rajiv Gandhi and P.V.Narsimha Rao came to the fore there was no semblance of socialism or commitment to equality left. The only appeal was to liberalism. Once that was equated with corruption the Congress had no vision with which to counter the charge. None of the parties took up the chellenge set to them by the N.N.Verma Committee Report. The BJP claimed it would root out corruption and do liberalisation better but in fact corruption in India is basic to the Hindu supremacist agenda. Liberalism is a means to perpetuate it. 
+The next CJI after Ahmadi was J.S.Verma. He clearly would not choose to overturn his own judgement, and he didn’t. In the period after Babri Masjid Verma and Narsimha Rao did nothing to get Babri Masjid rebuilt. Thus his illegal act that overthrew the constitution, stood because he and the Prime Minister and the political establishment wanted it to stand. Verma retired on 17 January 1998 and was replaced by CJI M.M.Punchhi who had 264 days as CJI and retired on 09 October 1998. There had been a petition of the Committee on Judicial Accountability (CJA), which demanded a probe against Punchhi on corruption charges and Ram Jetmalani and others wanted to get him impeached in the Rajya Sabha, and Verma could have recommended supersession. Jetmalani is an advocate for the BJP and a Hindutva fanatic. By attacking Punchhi for corruption he ensured that the Hindutva fascists had him in their power. If elevated to CJI he was to behave. And he did. He did not constitute the bench to overthrow the Hindutva Judgement. It is highly likely that the deal was negotiated by Verma. Punchhi would get the CJI post if he did not raise the Hindutva issue. It is quite likely Verma delayed announcing the appointment for two months because it took him that time to persuade Prime Minister IK Gujral to agree. The BJP by now was the main opposition party as the United Front was floundering. There was no secular alliance between Congress and the United Front parties that would have backed a secular CJI. How could there have been. They all use assassination of Muslims to further their party politics. The stage was set for the RSS man V.B. Vajpayee to become the next Prime Minister for a full term. 
+Punchhi was replaced by Adarsh Sein Anand as CJI. Anand was CJI from the 10th of October 1998 to the 11th of January 2001. With his predecessors not having rocked the boat of the BJP, what was Anand going to do now that a BJP Prime Minister with an absolute majority was installed in Parliament? A reversal of the Hindutva Judgement would have meant dissolving Parliament and calling fresh elections at a time when the country was just coming out of that period of apparent instability of the United Front government. Deve Gowda had been a Kannadiga farmer who refused to speak Hindi or English in Parliament. Vajpayee was a civilised Hindu. Anand himself was a Kashmiri Hindu. He was a human rights activist. He introduced compensation in cases of custodial death. But then in 2000 Ram Jethmalani the Hindutva activist Supreme Court advocate accused Anand’s wife and mother in law of corruption. Though no charges were brought it was enough to keep Anand toeing the Hindutva government line. He buried the Hindutva Judgement review demand. 
+Sam Piroj Bharucha was the next CJI, from the 11th of January 2001 to the 6th of May 2002. He had been on the bench with K. Ramaswamy when they found the Hindutva Judgement to be in conflict with other SC judgements on the RP Act and when they had demanded the authoritative and expeditious decision from a five-judge bench that Ahmadi was supposed to set up. Then why did he not take it up when he became CJI, familiar as he was with the entire case? A.B. Vajpayee, BJP, was in power, yes, but an upright CJI would surely not put the political wellbeing of the BJP above the RP Act? The inexplicable thing is that Bharucha did just that. He set up a continuous SC constitutional court of eleven judges under Justice Kirpal to hear 200 petitions to interpret the meaning and content of the word ‘minorities’ in Article 30(1) of the constitution. It was only the 2nd time in 30 years than an eleven-judge constitution bench was set up. The one set up under Punchhi was disbanded before it could complete the task. But the bench did not take up the inquiry into the scope of review to be conducted when a charge of corrupt practice is levelled under section 123 (3) and (3A) of the RP Act of promoting enmity between classes by appealing to religion to garner votes. He took up hundreds of cases that had been pending for 20 years, why not the Hindutva Judgement? He made a statement at a meeting of the Bar Council of India and the Bar Council of Kerala on the 22nd of December 2001 whilst CJI that 20% of judges are corrupt and that the problem is that in the Supreme Court the only remedy is impeachment. He said: “impeachment is a cumbersome process and as a recent instance showed may not achieve the desired result for reasons that are political.” On February 9th 2002 he said, that in his experience as a senior judge none in the Bar fought corruption. But even as CJIs are expressing anguish at financial and political corruption in the judiciary, the absolutely fundamental corruption that allows a CJI to be pressurised actively or passively by the BJP to avoid enquiring into the BJP manifesto is not questioned. It can hardly be an argument that it is in the national interest not to call fresh elections in which the BJP might not be able to participate. Was Bharucha of the view that it is politically expedient to let the BJP continue in power? Was he basically by this time of the view that Hinduism is not a religion? And so fascism continued to reign supreme, with the entire political discourse about the role of the judiciary hijacked as anti-corruption, and an eleven-judge constitution bench going no further than working to define “minority”. 
+Bhupinder Nath Kirpal succeeded Bharucha on the 6th of May 2002 and was CJI for 186 days till the 8th of November 2002. In March 2002 he had told the RSS PM that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad was not allowed to hold a religious ceremony on the land of the Babri Masjid where the BJP wanted to erect a ram Temple. “It is because of judges like these that our Supreme Court is known as a secular temple all over the world” Rajya Sabha MP Wasim Ahmed said, forgetting that Kirpal also sweetly ignored the pending request to overrule the illegal Hindutva Judgement and consign the BJP to the dustbin of history. Why did Ahmed have to use the word temple? At that time Kirpal had 24’000 cases pending before him in the SC. Still he could have chosen to address the Hindutva case and truly live up to Ahmed’s overhasty praise. Kirpal’s view on corruption in the Judiciary was that “judges are also Indian citizens who come from the same aggregate as those in the legislature and administration therefore that there are also instances where corruption and incompetence have pervaded the judicial establishment cannot be denied.“ The comment says a lot. Government of India is one great big fat Hindu supremacist elite affair where no one rocks the boat. Progressive ideas are strictly within the confines of what Hindu money and the Hindu elite can tolerate. The political parties in the state legislatures and the members of state administrations must throw secular democracy over board and run with the fascist hounds or they will not survive in public life. 
+Gopal Ballav Patnaik was the next CJI. Later it was found he had been given a 4000 square foot plot in Cuttack meant for underprivileged in the year 2000. He was CJI for a month. During his month as CJI he never once as far as I know raised any issue to do with Hindutva. 
+Patnaik was succeeded by V. N. Khare on the 19th of December 2002. V.N. Khare was made the BJP governments arbitrator in a case brought by Reliance on the 23rd of November 2011 when RIL had challenged a government notice to disallow cost and moved the Supreme Court for appointment of a second arbitrator. Ex CJIs Bharucha and Khare failed to agree on the name of the third presiding arbitrator for 13 months and in 2015 Bharucha recused himself from the arbitration after the government challenged his nomination saying that he had not disclosed all previous associations with RIL and that his arbitration could create doubts about his independence and impartiality. So now the arbitration panel has only foreigners on it and Khare is on the BJP government side. Khare had been CJI when Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat encouraged Hindu mobs to attack Muslims who had protested against Hindus for travelling to and forth to Ayodhya to establish a ram temple. The attack happened ostensibly because Muslims had set on fire the bogeys carrying those RSS cadres. In tapes afterwards it was revealed that Hindus had set the train bogeys on fire, boasting it was Hanuman’s tail that lit the flame. Thereafter 800 people mainly Muslims died across the state in revenge killings encouraged by the government. Sexual violence played a critical role in the pogrom. In the aftermath of the riots in the Best bakery case CJI Khare said “I have no faith left in the prosecution and the Gujarat government” and he moved the case out of Gujarat. After his retirement as CJI Khare said that the Gujarat government did not provide adequate protection to the riot victims owing to the complete collusion between rioters and the state machinery. Modi replied sarcastically that why did he not say anything when he was CJI. Modi clearly was referring not to the Best bakery case but to the fact that Khare did not address the Hindutva Judgement or take up any other election petitions that would have challenged Modi’s appeals to religion during elections. Jairus Banaji in his paper wrote “The spinelessness of the judiciary and its overt or covert sympathies with the extreme right was a major part of the story of the success of German fascism. We have not reached that state of judicial disintegration yet, and luckily we still have a Supreme Court that is beyond the direct reach of regimes immersed in criminality, even if its Special Investigation team can be subverted.” But actually the SC was already subverted by Verma’s Hindutva Judgement and not even Khare did anything about it not even taking up the pending case. Khare retired as CJI on the 2nd of May 2004. It is really strange that no academic commentaries seem to mention this pending appeal on the Hindutva Judgement and the unwillingness of CJIs to take it up and the fact that this shows how fascism had taken hold of the country latest by May 1996 when Vajpayee was elected for his first short term as Prime Minister. Praful Bidwai wrote in 2007 that the secular parties collectively failed the victims of Gujarat in 2002 when “they did not get together and mobilise strong protests all over the state demanding that the centre dismiss the Gujarat government under article 356, although it is beyond dispute that the functioning of the government was blatantly violative of the constitution”. In that article of the 3rd of November 2007 Bidwai wrote that Manmohan Singh is yet to mention the G word. Even Bidwai in that article forgot to mention the Hindutwa Judgement though. 
+V. N. Khare was succeeded on the 2nd of May 2004 by S. Rajendra Babu who was CJI for just a month. On the 1st of June 2004 Babu was succeeded by Ramesh Chandra Lahoti. Manmohan Singh had been sworn in as Prime Minister on the 22nd of May 2004. There is a photograph of Former Chief Justice of India Justice Ramesh Chandra Lahoti taken by Indian Photo Agency published on the 28th of March 2011 with a caption reading: “firebrand Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) activist Sadhvi Ritambhara and former Chief Justice of India Justice Ramesh Chandra Lahoti with BJP leader L.K.Advani on the occasion of release of a book Ramayan the hymns of Himalaya a prosaic English translation of the epic authored by Dr Akhikesh Gumashta. In New Delhi on Friday the 25th of March 2011.” Need one say more. Would a CJI who after retirement chooses to consort with Hindutva fascists reverse the Hindutva judgement? On June 28th 2004 Lahotia said that only 18% of judges posts were filled in the country. But was that a reason to leave the Hindutva Judgement in place? No. Obviously he thought the judgement was right and saw no reason to open a debate even though in reality an appeal to religion is illegal. In any case the Congress party also never gave a fitting reply to Sushma Swaraj who promised to shave her head if Sonia Gandhi was made Prime Minister. Instead of defending the right of a naturalised citizen to all the rights and privileges of a natural born Indian citizen, the Congress government got a Hindu priest to offer a reply that tonsuring of head was “un-Hindu”. There was no attempt made by the Congress party to outlaw religion in public discourse. Rather the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the Supreme Court bowed down before the power of Hindu discourse and the G word and the H word were never mentioned. In a letter to Outlook magazine in 2015 Lahotia criticised the mag for its anti BJP stance. He was obviously a Hindu and Hindutva supporter during his time as CJI. 
+Lahotia was succeeded on the 1st of November 2005 by Yogesh Kumar Sabharwal. Sabharwal upheld Parliament’s decision to expel cash-for-vote MPs, and claimed the right of the SC to review Parliament’s action. But there is no news anywhere of him urging Manmohan Singh to allow the Hindutva Judgement to be revisited or in any other way questioning the promise to build a Ram Temple in the BJP manifesto. In any case his sons benefitted from a case he heard through which land was cleared for development in Delhi. He was obviously not interested in preventing politicians getting to power by promoting enmity between classes. What is a bit of enmity if your sons get rich in the process. 
+Sabharwal was succeeded on the 13th of January 2007 by K. G. Balakrishnan. The RSS attacked him for being from Kerala and therefore a communist. But no one attacked him from any end of the political spectrum for being unwilling to enforce the RP Act. 
+And so it went on. Balakrishna was succeeded on the 12th of May 2010 by S. H. Kapadia. Kapadia was succeeded on 29th September 2012 by Altamas Kabir. Kabir was succeeded on the 19th of July 2013 by P. Sathasivam. Sathasivam was succeeded on the 27th of April 2014 by Rajendra Mal Lodha. Lodha was succeeded on the 28th of September 2014 by H. L. Dattu. Dattu was succeeded on the 3rd of December 2015 by T. S. Thakur who is CJI today. 
+In the 1990s the combined charge of corruption and ineffective liberalisation paved the way for the Hindu nationalists who have been preparing to take over the country since before Independence. Hindus used the anti-corruption plank and minority appeasement language to mobilise qua Hindus. They brought corruption and pollution into a single focus of moral outrage. The Supreme Court and the Congress party were too weak to disbar them permanently from political life under the RP Act after having banned them temporarily after they demolished Babri Masjid. The BJP, RSS and VHP came back, the BJP with the same manifesto promise to build a Ram Temple, thanks to the Supreme Court that refused to call appeal to Hinduism an appeal to religion. 
+Today Narendra Modi also applies the words corruption and pollution when talking about Muslims and how they have to “purify” themselves if they want to remain part of the Hindu nation. Thus anti-corruption morphed into clean liberalisation to be executed by the Hindu BJP and the entire media and political Hindu fascist state machinery colluded. Assassination of Muslims by police is how the political parties maintain themselves in power, like how Nazis maintained themselves through genocide of Jews. 
+If India is a Hindu majority country, which may or may not be true, the Hindu majority are not particularly vigilant about preserving secular democracy. In any case given that fascism is based on Hinduism more and more groups will be defecting from Hinduism that is for sure. Constant education is needed to inculcate secular democratic values in a rapidly growing young population. But education does not serve the interests of the Hindus who want to keep Dalits, Adivasis, Other Backward Castes and Muslims and Sikhs in their ghettoes. Liberalism and capitalism and appeal to religion and what in India is termed communalism all adds up to fascism of Hindu elites as they give themselves power and money. Thus the 38% of voters who voted for the BJP in 2014 became the enemy of the constitution. In any case the rot had already set in with Nehru when he illegally disbanded the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly. 
+The illegality under the Representation of People Act 1951 of appeal to religion to garner votes was forgotten as the BJP became the anti-corruption party of Hindu nationalists to defeat Congress. Of course, the entire Sangh Parivar including BJP are the corrupt mafia par excellence in the country. The Verma Committee Report itself showed that the BJP/RSS/Sangh Parivar /Shiv Sena and other Sena gangs were an uncontrollable mafia, a parallel state. But amazingly, and certainly because the Congress itself was corrupt and operated the state institutions as its own mafia, Narendra Modi managed to keep the taint of corruption away from himself personally in the 2014 election campaign and even managed to protect Amit Shah who had engaged in multiple political assassinations to get himself and Narendra Modi to power. He thus succeeded Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister in 2014. 
+It would require an entire book to understand how Atal Bihari Vajpayee could manage to give the BJP a holier than though look vis-a-vis the Congress party in the eyes of the voters when he became Prime Minster with an absolute majority on the 19th of March 1998. Appeal to build a Ram Temple instead of being outlawed was somehow an appeal to incorruptibility and nationalism. The national media and television elevated a man steeped in RSS ideology and a founder of Hindu nationalism to a statesmanly level. His role in demolition of Babri Masjid on the 6th of December 1992 was forgotten. The Liberhan enquiry into the events of that day would take 17 years to deliver its report that the whole thing had been planned by the RSS of which A.B. Vajpayee has been an active member his entire life. The Liberhan report submitted on the 30th of June 2009 found the BJP’s so-called moderate face guilty along with many other leaders of the BJP. But nothing has happened to them. They continue in politics. The delay in issuing the Liberhan report itself speaks volumes about how fascism maintains itself in the country. 
+Even during the Manmohan Singh led Congress administration during the period 2004 to 2014 the Supreme Court of India could not get a grip on the illegal shootings by police in Madhya Pradesh (MP), ruled by the BJP. On the 29th of December 2007 Sunil Joshi, an RSS man, had been gunned down by his own associates as he was about to reveal details of the vast network of crime and terrorism against Muslims organised by the RSS. Today Narendra Modi’s Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) rules MP and half of India’s states. The means to electoral victory is appeal to Hindu chauvinism. The modus operandus of the Sangh Parivar police or members of other institutions of state is to appeal to Hindu voters by assassinating Muslims. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) and other Sangh Parivar gangs use ideology culled from their leaders’ writings to justify the murders. These gangs are indistinguishable from business fraternities. Often when petty criminals are killed the RSS claim it was a communal attack but in reality the murder is due to struggles between RSS business/mafia gangs. When Muslims are suspected it is invariably a false flag operation by Sangh Parivar to unleash Sangh Parivar controlled state agencies on innocent Muslims for no reason other than inflicting pain and establishing Hindu supremacy. RSS is also involved with the Vyapam scam in MP, hence the investigations into the deaths of those students are also deadly slow. The nexus between the BJP state government and central government and the police is all-encompassing. 
+Last week the Central Bureau of Investigation, which, it hardly needs to be mentioned, is under the control of the central BJP government and Narendra Modi the Prime Minister, released without charge several BJP strongmen including the ex-Chief Minister of Karnataka Yeddiyurappa from prison. This is the mafia gang originally established by the Congress Chief Minister S.M.Krishna to rob the people of Bellary district of their agricultural livelihood by establishing mining industries. Narendra Modi released him and Yediyurappa is now free to win back Karnataka for the BJP from the ruling Congress party. His associate in crime, another Reddy, was allowed by the Supreme Court to take out a triumphant motorcade through Bellary to announce his daughter’s marriage, despite the fact he is still on trial. This is the same CBI whose present Director said: “If you can’t prevent rape enjoy it” an apparently perfectly acceptable analogy for legalising gambling. 
+The present Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur recently took up the demand to look into the scope of section 123 (3) and (3A) of the RP Act. A miracle!! Arguments were conducted over two weeks. 
+It is expected that he will deliver a judgement on a narrow interpretation of the request for an authoritative and expeditious decision on interpretation of Article 123 (3-A) of the RP Act. He said he will not go into what is religion. 
+Advocate B.A. Desai during arguments had argued that a reference put to the bench is always a mix of fact and law. Here the entire appeal has been referred to this bench. The “plank of Hindutva, Hindu and Hinduism” are part of the reference and falls within the scope of section 123 (3) of the RP Act. 
+The judgement is awaited any time before Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur retires in January 2017. An offer from the CJI to interveners to be heard by a five-judge bench on the plank of Hindutva/Hindu/Hinduism has been made. 
+Can we expect the Supreme Court to throw out fascism? The CPI(M) in its intervention on the last day of arguments expressed the hope that it will. We must wait both for the narrow judgement to be given before January by T.S.Thakur and also possibly for the five judge bench decision, if still needed after Thakur’s judgement. 
+Only once that judgement is delivered will we know whether the protests of secular democratic Indians against fascism will be heard and assassinations such as those of 31st October this year can be avoided in the future. 
+The entire political establishment across all the Hindu supremacist parties are more interested in money than in social equality. The Congress, the BJP, the CJIs of the Supreme Court and the people who would eventually form into the Aam Admi Party are Hindus first and foremost, Aryan invaders who want to oppress the indigenous black-skinned Indians; they are the educated elites and their croneys from all castes and classes regard the workers and peasants simply as vote banks and as the labour resource to be used and thrown. BJP, Congress, Janata Dal and all the other United Front parties, as also Aam Admi Party and their offshoots, are unable to understand that the basic feature of the Indian constitution is justice, equality, secularism, socialism and fraternity. They have not raised the need to review the Hindutva Judgement all this time. They all are fascists. 
+Eight Muslim undertrials who were assassinated near Bhopal are martyrs to the cause of secular democracy. Appeal to religion in politics and unwillingness to overthrow the Hindutva Judgement is fascism. 
+This regime is illegal under the RP Act. Unless the RP Act is enforced fascism will continue to reign supreme. 
+Only the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its left front allies, and the Bahujan Samaj Party and its offshoots are separate from the fascist Hindu regime. 
+CPI (M) and their left front partners and BSP and their offshoot parties who are upholding Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh (see Periyar and Ambedkar articles on Bhagat Singh published in countercurrents here and here) are the only secular democratic parties in India. We must save the people of India. 
+Considering one third of all seats in Parliament come from just three states namely UP, Bihar and West Bengal it is in those three states that fascism has to be annihilated. All efforts by the BSP, BMP, CPI(M) and CPI (ML) and CPI have to be concentrated there. 
+Finally one cannot but be horrified that someone who purports to be a secular activist Javed Anand on television complained that at least one of the men assassinated on 31st October near Bhopal should have been kept alive so that the public could know what had happened. One simply cannot believe the level of cynical nationalism the comment displays on par with fascist politicians and police. In any case it is highly likely that Indresh Kumar who was behind the assassination of Sunil Joshi and who was the mastermind behind the Chishti Dargha murders and other Hindutva terrorist bombings is also behind the assassination of the eight men allegedly associated with SIMI. After all he is the master strategist for so-called security issues for Narendra Modi. A visible killing of Muslims was needed at Diwali time because targets in Kashmir are so far away and killing a Kashmiri or even a Pakistani is not as ideologically valuable as killing a mainland Muslim who shouldn’t be here in the first place. Except, in fact, it is Indresh Kumar and his Hindu ilk, who are part of the invader Aryan dispensation, that should not be here, or at least should undergo reform, considering they unleashed this sectarian madness in India several millennia ago. 
+In his intervention at the Supreme Court hearing the CPI (M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury maintained that his party is also an affected party in this debate. 
+“All that we want to know is if an appeal is made for votes in the name of his religion, then what is the meaning of the word his? Is it the religion of candidates or religion of agent or religion of the third party (seeking votes) or religion of voters or that of all of them?” the bench observed. “Yechury’s counsel senior advocate Sanjay Hedge advanced the arguments that there is more at stake. Not only law but also fact regarding what is religion is part of the discussion. The CPI (M), one of the six national parties of the country, became the first political entity to voluntarily join the legal debate in the apex court over the contentious issue. Yechury also took the opportunity to target the RSS. “With the communal and fascistic RSS-led combine’s assuming power at the centre, systematic efforts are on to communalise the institutions of the state, the administration, the education system and the media.” He also added, “The growth of majority communalism will strengthen the forces of minority communalism and endanger national unity.” The CPI(M)’s late move, underlining its secular credentials and also seeking an opportunity to launch attack on the BJP establishment, however, faced time constraints in the apex court.” (Hindustan Times 28th of October 2016). Considering CPI (M) have also used the word fascist to describe TCM in West Bengal the word may have lost some of its meaning to them. But it has not for me. In India the RP Act has been overthrown. That to me is fascism. 
+Actually those efforts to communalise India started much before Modi won the Lok Sabha elections in 2014. In fact his victory was a culmination of the efforts to communalise India in the preceding 25 years, in fact it started earlier, indeed the seeds were sown with the Hindu invasion of India those many millennia ago. Only mass agitation can finally wrench the country from the fascists and allow us to enforce the constitution and the rule of law especially the RP Act. 
+Anandi Sharan is an environmental historian and writer based at Bangalore. She is a Board member of the global environmental platform CBD Alliance and has been articulating the global South’s concerns on climate change. She can be reached at sharan.anandi@gmail.com Share this:",FAKE
+7690,Strategic Culture,"Donald Trump and Potential Russia-West Break Points The state of challenged Russia-West (especially US-Russia) relations is something questioned by Western realists and some alternative others. Donald Trump made it to the US presidency, despite saying some things that run counter to the biases against Russia, evident in the American political establishment...",FAKE
+8148,Do Cholesterol Drugs Have Men By Their Gonads?,"Statins my disrupt vascular function On the Greenmedinfo.com Statin Research database we have cataloged over 15 studies from the National Library of Medicine indicating the heart-damaging properties of this class of supposedly ‘heart friendly’ drugs. View our professional data page here , or if you are not a member, view the open access reference page for public view and linking here . Statins do not only reduce lipoprotein production but have so-called pleoitropic properties, which include immune system down-regulating and anti-inflammatory properties, which is why they are believed to have a small benefit in reducing the inflammatory burden caused by autoimmune processes in the artery that can precipitate myocardial infarction (heart attack) in some individuals — but not without having the unintended, adverse effect of increasing cancer risk (at all sites) and contributing to congestive heart failure, effectively cancelling out the small, mostly theoretical benefit of reduced heart attack risk. For instance, it has been estimated that “…at least 23,000 low-risk people would have to take statins for five years to prevent one death from heart disease.” [ Source ] Statins are also clearly diabetogenic , increasing the risk of type 2 diabetes by about 50% in some populations , with the FDA now requiring drug manufacturers to include a warning of diabetes risk on statin drug labels . Considering morbidity and mortality from type 2 diabetes is caused not by the elevated blood sugar in and of itself, but the damage glycated sugar does to the vascular system and the subsequent cardiovascular harm it produces, the case against using statins for primary and secondary prevention of heart disease seems clear as day. Moreover, cardiovascular harm is not the only concern. Statin drugs have been linked to over 300 adverse health effects. We issued a consumer alert on the topic several years ago . For the more technically minded, here is the database page on Statin drugs listing 300+ adverse health effects based on 465 published studies. Heart Disease Is Not Caused By A Lack of A Drug Should we be surprised to find so much research on this drug class’s adverse health effects? After all, cholesterol is fundamental for the health of each cell in the human body, and low cholesterol has been found to cause a wide range of health problems , including psychiatric states such as violence against self and other. The food and drug industries have used cholesterol phobia to manipulate health professionals and the lay public into believing that the cause of heart disease is genetic, and can only be addressed through the use of synthetic, patented, essentially toxic chemicals, i.e. pharmaceuticals, or eating semi-synthetic ‘low fat,’‘low cholesterol’ foods with very little nutritional value. This latest study speaks to why we must exercise the precautionary principle when considering taking a patented chemical – technically a xenobiotic alien to human physiology – for suppressing a symptom of a much deeper and more complex problem. While oxidized cholesterol forms a significant part of the problem of atherosclerotic build-up in the arteries, it is not the primary cause of the damage to the inner lining of the arteries (endothelium), and the pre-existing endothelial dysfunction that can go on for many decades silently in the background. Ox-LDL deposits in atheromatous lesions have been viewed as an epiphenomenon, generated as part of a cascade of immune-mediated events the body activates in order to attempt to heal arterial damage. In certain respects, cholesterol deposits in the arteries at the site of damage can be likened to a Band-Aid. Do we blame the Band-Aid for causing the injury upon which it is placed? It is important to point out that oxidized cholesterol (ox-LDL) can be toxic and harmful to the vascular system, but the problem with modern blood testing for ‘cholesterol’ is that it does not take into the quality of the lipoproteins, only their quantitative dimensions. Depending on one’s diet, environmental factors, and overall bodily health, LDL particles will oxidize at different rates. If you are eating an antioxidant rich diet, full of healthy fats, phytocompounds, etc., your properly functioning LDL will be less susceptible to conversion to ox-LDL. On the other hand, eating a diet full of non-essential, oxidized fats, deficient in phytonutrients, antioxidants, etc. – and adding in environmental toxins and toxicants, e.g. smoking – will produce more ox-LDL, rendering it artherogenic. Obviously, therefore, diet and lifestyle form the basis for a sound preventive approach if the ‘ lipid hypothesis ‘ of cardiovascular disease is even deemed truly relevant. [For more research on natural substances which inhibit cholesterol oxidation, view our database on the topic: Prevent Cholesterol Oxidation .] Furthermore, there are many ways to address underlying vascular pathologies without suppressing the production of a vital building block and signaling molecule, which is what cholesterol is. Pomegranate , chocolate , and many other natural substances, have been confirmed in research to have profound heart disease preventive and reversing properties . You can explore our database sections relevant to the topic within our Heart Health guide , to find hundreds of studies proving this point. Basic nutritional incompatibilities, including the consumption of wheat which has cardiotoxic properties in genetically susceptible individuals, and excessive consumption of omega-6 versus omega-3 fats can profoundly increase the risk of heart disease. One groundbreaking study published last year, in fact, indicates that statins actually reduce the health benefits of omega-3 fats in the diet – adding another mechanism by which statin drugs exert heart disease promoting effects . Beyond the Pharmaceutically-Driven Medical Paradigm If statin drugs are toxic to human sperm, and if the men within whom this statin-induced damage is occurring are of reproductive age, the implications of this latest study on statins and fertility are potentially devastating to the health of future generations. Changes in our species germlines – sperm or egg – are carried on to future generations, possibly forever. With recent research indicating that even changes to somatic cells in this lifetime are capable of transferring information to the sperm , what we do here and now – our chemical exposures, our nutritional status, and even our psychospiritual and mental orientation (which gear into real physiological and genetic/epigenetic processes – can have critical and irreversible affects on our offspring. Clearly, the time has come both to re-evaluate the role of pharmaceuticals in ‘preventive’ health care, as well as the effects these novel new chemical compounds will have on the next generation, and the next. For alternatives to lipid lowering chemicals, take a look at the following, evidence-based natural interventions:",FAKE
+5975,'HACKING DEMOCRACY' CREATOR JUST EXPOSED HOW HILLARY HAS ALREADY RIGGED '99% of VOTING MACHINES'! -,"STORE ‘HACKING DEMOCRACY’ CREATOR JUST EXPOSED HOW HILLARY HAS ALREADY RIGGED ‘99% of VOTING MACHINES’! ELDER PATRIOT – Even as Mrs. Clinton has fallen behind in the same polls that her minions from the mainstream corporate media conduct and tout, she is busy preparing her transition team and planning a massively expensive inauguration ceremony. Some may think this is arrogance on her part but it’s not. It’s reflective of her confidence in the ability to rig voting machines on a massive scale that her campaign has invested heavily in. Bev Harris of Black Box Voting shows how easy it is for an experienced programmer – in this case Bennie Smith – with access to the network to change the results of an election without anyone knowing or being able to detect it has happened. The process uses a fractional counting methodology to alter the vote totals and arrive at pre-determined totals for each candidate through the use of a software patch called the gems program. When Ms. Harris first discovered the gems program it was installed and counting votes in 25 states and 616 jurisdictions. She has now uncovered evidence that fractional counting has migrated from the gems program exclusively into other vendors voting systems which count votes as fractions and may count as many as ninety-nine percent of all American votes in the 2016 election. There are some things we can do to protect our vote but it’s not as simple as we would like it to be. It requires a degree of vigilance and a little effort on your part. Voting machines are required to take pictures of every ballot. Ask for a copy after you vote. Also, you can observe and document the central tabulator at your county elections office by making a video recording of what you’re seeing. Remember, the precinct voting machine you vote on should print a results page. Ask to see it and compare it to how you voted. We can no longer trust those in control of the levers of power to protect us. The establishment has betrayed us too many times in the past for us to trust them with our votes now. It’s up to you to protect the integrity of your vote. Search for: ",FAKE
+10473,Many Popular Tea Bags Contain Alarming Amounts of Deadly Pesticides (avoid these brands like the plague),"Many Popular Tea Bags Contain Alarming Amounts of Deadly Pesticides (avoid these brands like the plague) Most conventional tea brands such as Lipton, Allegro, Celestial Seasonings, Tazo, Teavana, Bigelow, Republic of Tea, Twinings, Yogi, Tea Forte, Mighty Leaf, Trader Joe’s, Tetley contain really high levels of toxic substances such as fluoride and pesticides. We are not talking about calcium fluoride which is a natural element, but about the synthetic fluoride which is a toxic by product. These levels are dangerously high to the point of being considered unsafe. So drinking cheap tea can be as bad as eating junk food. Cheap Tea Contains Fluoride and Pesticides 
+Most teas are not washed before being dried, thus non-organic teas contain pesticide residues. Some tea brands ( even those claimed organic or pesticide free! ) have recently been found to contain pesticides that are known carcinogens – in quantities above the US and EU limits! 
+A new study published in the journal of, Food Research International , found that cheaper blends contain enough fluoride to put people under the risk of many illnesses such as bone tooth, kidney problems and even cancer. 
+In fact, some brands of cheap tea contain nearly 7 parts per million (ppm) and the allowed level of fluoride is 4 ppm. This is quite scary since fluoride gets into your bones and accumulates in your body. It stays there for years. So how did fluoride get into tea? 
+The tea plant accumulates fluoride as it grows. This means that old leaves contain the most fluoride. Cheaper quality teas are often made from old leaves that contain more fluoride than young tea leaves (here is an example) . Additionally, these cheaper brands use smaller leaves which contain more fluoride. 
+And what about decaffeinated tea? 
+Well, decaffeinated tea showed higher fluoride levels than caffeinated tea. 
+So what is the solution? Should you stop drinking tea all together? Of course not! First of all, make sure to buy loose leaf tea and brew your tea from scratch. Bagged tea which might seem convenient and ready to go, is often made from low quality leaves which surely contain more fluoride. Stick to white tea (here) . It has the least amount of fluoride. Buy organic tea because the methods for cultivation are more sophisticated and conscious. They might even use purified water for the soil. We’ve just scratched the surface here, please check out Food Babe’s full report for more detailed information and a chart of which teas came out with their reputations intact – and please share with your tea-loving friends!",FAKE
+10540,"Even If You Hate Trump, What this Leftist Just Did Is VILE... | The Federalist Papers","
+Fox News reported : 
+Five police officers and yellow caution tape surround Donald Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star — or what’s left of it. 
+The Los Angeles police say they are investigating the smashing of Trump’s star following footage that showed the sidewalk tribute was destroyed with a pickax. 
+Det. Meghan Aguilar says investigators were called to the scene before dawn Wednesday. 
+By mid-morning, an LAPD spokesperson at the scene told FOX411 the Chamber of Commerce was sending out a crew in the hopes of getting the star repaired as soon as possible. 
+“Investigators are looking at [a] felony vandalism [charge] because of the value which the Chamber of Commerce has placed [on the star] at $2,500…” the spokesperson told us. “As soon as investigators can positively identify the suspect, which they are very sure they can do… they will go ahead and make a decision whether they want to arrest that suspect or seek a warrant.” 
+Fox411 spoke with a worker from Top End Construction who told them that the damage done to Trump’s star was “probably the worst I have seen.” 
+A man named Jamie Otis has taken responsibility for the destruction, according to Deadline Hollywood, which posted a video of the man taking a pickax to Trump’s star. 
+According to Deadline, Otis planned to auction off the star and give the money to the 11 women who have come forward with groping allegations against Trump just weeks before the presidential election. 
+Trump has denied the groping allegations and it’s painfully obvious that they are almost assuredly politically motivated . As far as what the women get out of it, some may be politically motivated themselves and others have had their ulterior motives — money , fame, payback because Trump didn’t go to their restaurant, etc. — exposed. 
+Hollywood Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Leron Gubler made it clear that his organization “intends to prosecute to the full extent of the law,” whoever is found to be responsible for the damage.” 
+“The Hollywood Walk of Fame is an institution celebrating the positive contributions of the inductees,” Gubler stated. “When people are unhappy with one of our honorees, we would hope that they would project their anger in more positive ways than to vandalize a California State landmark.” ",FAKE
+4168,"Obama endorses Clinton for president, on heels of Sanders meeting","President Obama formally endorsed Hillary Clinton to succeed him in the White House Thursday, saying she has the ""courage"" for the job and vowing to hit the campaign trail for her soon -- in a video message posted just moments after meeting with her primary rival Bernie Sanders.
+
+""I know how hard this job can be. That’s why I know Hillary will be so good at it,"" the president said, in the video posted on Clinton's campaign site. ""In fact, I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.""
+
+The president made clear he would no longer stand on the sidelines, even as Vermont Sen. Sanders vows to stick out the race at least through the final primary in Washington, D.C., next Tuesday.
+
+The Clinton campaign separately announced that she and Obama would campaign together June 15 in Green Bay. Clinton tweeted that she's ""fired up.""
+
+To which the Clinton campaign tweeted: ""Delete your account.""
+
+Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden voiced his support of Hillary Thursday evening at the American Constitution Society's national convention.
+
+""Anybody who thinks that whoever the next president is --  and God willing, in my view, it will be Secretary Clinton.""
+
+The White House, meanwhile, said Obama recorded the video on Tuesday, the day Clinton effectively wrapped up the nomination.
+
+The video was released shortly after Obama met in the Oval Office with Sanders.
+
+Sanders afterward struck a conciliatory tone Thursday, saying he plans to meet soon with Clinton to discuss how they can “work together to defeat Donald Trump.”
+
+The Vermont senator said he still plans to compete in next Tuesday’s Washington, D.C., primary, the final contest on the calendar. And he said he plans to take his message “to the Democratic National Convention” in July.
+
+He did not, however, say specifically whether he would still be an active candidate by then, taking no questions from the press before heading over to a meeting with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
+
+The meeting with Obama was private. They met for over an hour, and Fox News is told no staff or aides were present.
+
+But his tone, compared with his defiant speech early Wednesday after Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination, appeared to soften.
+
+While offering no endorsement himself, Sanders said he spoke with Clinton and congratulated her “on her very strong campaign.”
+
+And Sanders thanked Obama for his “impartiality” throughout the process. He said he and Vice President Biden lived up to their pledge not to put their “thumb on the scales.”
+
+White House spokesman Josh Earnest later said Sanders has the right to make campaign decisions on his own timeline. Another former primary candidate, ex-Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, did endorse Clinton, saying ""it is time now to unite our party.""
+
+Clinton and Obama, along with other party leaders, are eager to bring Sanders – and his supporters – into the fold.
+
+The president's endorsement reflects their desire to unify as the general election battle between Clinton and presumptive rival Trump intensifies.
+
+Sanders acknowledged a common political enemy, railing against Trump in his brief remarks to reporters Thursday afternoon and saying he’ll do everything in his power to prevent Trump’s election.
+
+As for what he wants, Sanders said he’ll continue to fight what he called the “drift” toward an oligarchic society. He lamented childhood poverty rates, crushing college debt, crumbling infrastructure and other woes and said these are the issues he’ll bring to the Philadelphia convention.
+
+Whether that means a fight to overhaul the party platform – or a last-ditch bid to somehow deny Clinton the nomination – remains to be seen.
+
+One demand Sanders was thought to be considering – as part of a party-unity deal -- is the removal of Democratic boss Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Sanders and the DNC chairwoman have been at odds for months, with Sanders’ team long accusing her of helping now-presumptive nominee Clinton.
+
+Whether Sanders sought – and the president would even consider – a Schultz sacrifice is unclear.
+
+“I don’t see how she makes it through the convention,” one Democratic lawmaker told Fox News. “The key to Hillary winning is getting Sanders supporters on board.”
+
+Speculation over Wasserman Schultz’ position has swirled for months, however, and so far she has retained the public support of the White House. Obama also endorsed her earlier this year in her House primary battle.
+
+Asked Wednesday about the possibility of Sanders seeking her removal, Wasserman Schultz said she’s not worried about her job.
+
+“I'm going to be remaining as the chair of the Democratic National Committee as President Obama has asked me to do until January 21, 2017, and I appreciate the president’s support,” she said.",REAL
+4279,Clinton ‘Not Concerned’ About New Flap Over Classified Emails,"Hillary Clinton sought to minimize new disclosures that top secret  government information passed through the private email server she used when she was secretary of state, dismissing the controversy as an “inter-agency dispute” that  pales next to the larger issues on the minds of voters.
+
+In an interview with NBC News on Saturday morning, two days before the Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Clinton said, “It’s the same story that’s been going on for months now. And I just don’t think most people are as concerned about that as they are about what we’re going to do to get the economy going.”",REAL
+2465,Connecticut’s highest court approves forced chemotherapy for teen,"A Connecticut teenager who tried to reject life-saving chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s lymphoma can be forced to undergo the treatment anyway, the state’s Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
+
+The court unanimously affirmed a trial court judgment, which found that state officials could intervene and take over the care for the girl — identified as “Cassandra C.”
+
+“This court agrees with the trial court that, even assuming that the mature minor doctrine applies in this state, the respondents have failed to meet their burden of proving under any standard that Cassandra was a mature minor and capable of acting independently concerning her life threatening medical condition,” Thursday’s order reads.
+
+The teen’s mother has said that her daughter “knows the long-term effects of having chemo” and doesn’t want to put “poison” in her body.
+
+“She may not be able to have children after this, because it affects everything in your body,” her mother, Jackie Fortin, said in a video posted on the Hartford Courant’s Web site. “It not only kills cancer, it kills everything in your body. She knows this.
+
+“This is her human rights — her human constitutional rights — to not put poison in her body. Her rights have been taken away. She has been forced to put chemo in her body right now, as we speak. These are her rights that have been taken away. She does not want to [put] poison in her body.”
+
+The teen is now receiving treatment at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, and a lawyer representing the state told the court that she is “doing well,” the Courant reported.
+
+“Under this circumstance — when there is medical consensus that action must be taken or the child will die — the Department has a clear and urgent responsibility to save the life of this child,” Connecticut Department of Children and Families told CNN in a statement earlier this week.
+
+According to the Courant:
+
+The court Thursday heard arguments from lawyers for Cassandra and her mother, Jackie Fortin, who supports her daughter’s decision to reject chemotherapy treatments. The justices clearly struggled to find ground for overruling the lower court and sending the case back for another hearing, as requested by Cassandra and her mother. Assistant Public Defender Joshua Michtom, representing Cassandra, said the question was whether, despite an encouraging prognosis, “a smart and knowledgeable 17-year-old (can) make the same choice, for better or worse, than she would be able to make without state interference nine months from now, when she turns 18.”
+
+Michtom did not immediately return a phone message from The Washington Post left on Thursday afternoon.",REAL
+1492,"He’s getting desperate: Trump’s campaign used to be confident, but Cruz has gotten him feeling downright thirsty","But this past week, Trump’s seemingly implacable sense of self-confidence seems to be, well, shaken. More than that, even. Lately, the man seems downright thirsty. In a very short order, his campaign strategy has changed from a man who enters the room and tells you how it’s going to be to that of a man who is begging and pleading for you to like him. The stench of desperation has started to cling to him, and now every move he makes seems even more like pathetic pandering. The once unbreakable Donald Trump now is starting to look like the guy who uses a shirtless picture for his Tinder profile.
+
+The biggest sign of this newfound thirst is in the opening of the pocketbook. Trump’s ability to grab media and voter attention without spending much money has been a unique aspect of his campaign so far. Even though he does take donations, Trump likes to front like he’s not beholden to any backers, which contributes to the voters’ sense that he’s not like those other bought-and-sold politicians.
+
+But now the politician who was acting like he could win just by saying stuff on Twitter has caved and is making a huge ad buy in Iowa and New Hampshire. Oh, he’s trying to spin it as another sign of his winning spirit, announcing the ad buy with huge fanfare and getting a level of free media coverage that other candidates don’t get for mundane things like buying TV ads. But none of that can distract from the fact that the almighty Trump is now acting like every other candidate in the race, going on TV with his hat out and asking for your vote.  This is not the “you’re fired” Trump. This is a guy begging for a job.
+
+On its own, caving in and acting like every other candidate wouldn’t be that big a deal. But the ad buy comes during a week when every move Trump makes in public is looking grabby. The long-standing predictions that Trump’s poll lead would vanish once the primaries begin isn’t looking quite as much like establishment wishful thinking anymore. His lead in New Hampshire is shrinking and Ted Cruz is up in Iowa. If he loses both of those, he knows we’ll see a reemergence of the narrative that he was just a passing fancy for voters before they start to get serious at the polls, and his behavior is starting to smell a bit desperate.
+
+Going after Bill Clinton for past infidelities, for instance, is the choice of a desperate man. Panty-sniffing the Clintons has a long history of backfiring with the voters and it opens Trump up to charges of hypocrisy, since he blew up his first marriage in order to marry his mistress. But Trump has gone even further than simply bringing up Monica Lewinsky. He’s also been hinting that Bill Clinton has committed sexual assault. It’s an attempt at a feminist gotcha, but going there means that Trump is aligning himself with the same people who accuse the Clintons of murdering people, having secret love children, and practicing witchcraft.
+
+It’s an interesting move, because Trump has spent the past month actually moving away from his past as a right-wing conspiracy theorist, by refusing, for instance, to talk about his “questions” about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. To dive back into the fever swamps means risking general election credibility to pander to the hard right again, a move he’d only undertake if he were really worried about losing in the primaries.
+
+His attacks on the Clintons aren’t the only effort at baiting the base that runs a high risk of backfiring, either. One of the stranger moves that Trump has taken this week has been race-baiting his opponent Ted Cruz. “In all fairness, to the best of my knowledge, not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba, OK,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Iowa. “When you’re casting your ballot, remember.” Cruz’s polling success in Iowa is assumed to come from the evangelical base, so this attempt to sow doubt that he’s really evangelical is a clear-cut case of thirstiness. But this runs a high risk of backfiring. Trump isn’t wrong to assume that the “evangelical” identity is tied closely in the conservative mind to whiteness. But what he fails to understand is that this is why so many conservative Christians like Ted Cruz. As with Ben Carson, the handful of non-white evangelical figures on the scene offer “proof” that the white evangelical identity is so desirable that it draws converts. Cruz himself knows this, which is why he highlights his background instead of minimizing it. There’s a similar trying-too-hard quality to the way Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson acts. It’s not just that she wore a bullet necklace on CNN, but the way she defended herself when people made fun of her for it. Maybe I’ll wear a fetus next time& bring awareness to 50 million aborted people that will never get to be on Twitter https://t.co/UTomoyYXLK Oh, will they also be holding little Confederate flags while singing “Proud to Be an American”? The pretense of sincere concern for fetal life is all but abandoned here. The fetus–like the gun or the flag–is reduced to a bit of jewelry, a sad posturing to indicate alignment with the fetus fetishist tribe whose votes Pierson’s hustling desperately to get. But perhaps the saddest grasping from Trump comes from this ad that Trump posted on Instagram. “WE ARE IN A SERIOUS WAR,” the title reads, before running a reel of coverage of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks. But then it cuts to Obama making a joke about “Star Wars,” suggesting that his willingness to spend a couple of hours out of his busy week seeing a movie is what lies between us and bringing an end to the threat of Islamic terrorism. The whole thing is preposterous, but it’s hard to even get mad, it’s so pathetic. For one thing, we are not actually in a war, and stating otherwise has a strong whiff of hoping you can make it true simply by saying it. But there’s something particularly pitiful about wanting Obama to make a pointless gesture in refusing to see “Star Wars.” What’s the argument here? That if Obama refuses to see “Star Wars,” ISIS will be so impressed by his sacrifice that they’ll lay down their arms? That seeing a movie somehow removes his ability to make important military decisions? That if he would just stand in an empty room yelling, “Damn you, ISIS!” for two hours instead of watching a movie, we would defeat our enemies? This insistence on empty gestures over meaningful action, of course, sums up the entire Trump campaign. This is a man whose foreign policy proposals amount to arguing that if he just puffs his chest out big enough, all other world leaders will immediately do everything he wants. But the utter silliness of this ad, with its assumption that Obama can meaningfully effect world change by not seeing a movie, highlights the vapidity of the Trump campaign poignantly. Vote for Trump, and he will miss entire blockbuster movies for no reason whatsoever, just for you! The man is clearly desperate.",REAL
+6604,US Military on Ground in Syria Training Opposition for Raqqa Operation,"0 9 0 0 The US is training Syrian opposition for the operation to retake Raqqa from Daesh terrorists. 
+WASHINGTON(Sputnik) — US forces are on the ground in Syria, equipping, advising, and training Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and partners for the operation to isolate and then retake the Daesh stronghold of Raqqa, Coalition Commander Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend said at a briefing Wednesday. “I will not talk about locations where our US forces are in Syria but they are there,"" Townsend stated. ""They equip and train at various locations, and we have advise and assist teams that will accompany partner forces anywhere they fight Daesh."" © AFP 2016/ AHMAD AL-RUBAYE US Soldier Uses Kalashnikov to Show Yezidis How to Repel Daesh in Sinjar (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO) On Tuesday, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said that ""capable, motivated"" local Syrian forces would lead the offensive on the city.
+Raqqa operation is expected to overlap with the offensive to retake Iraq's Mosul , according to the Defense Department. 
+Daesh, which is outlawed in Russia and other countries, seized Mosul in 2014 and Raqqa in 2013 along with a number of other cities and towns in the two countries. ...",FAKE
+6386,The Orlando Shooter’s 911 Calls Were Finally Released — and They’re Very Telling,"
+By Alice Salles
+In June, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a heavily redacted snippet of the transcript of Omar Mateen’s calls with the 911 dispatchers and police. Mateen, the murderer behind the brutal June killing of 49 nightclub goers in Orlando, Florida, had called 911 amid the massacre, and negotiators then called the killer several times throughout the evening.
+At the time of the transcript’s release, the public denounced the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) for censoring the Orlando shooter’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS). Claiming the omission was meant to ensure would-be terrorists wouldn’t have a “publicity platform,” officials added the transcripts had distracted the public from “ the hard work that the FBI and our law enforcement partners have been doing to investigate this heinous crime .”
+But when the FBI released the full transcripts in September, the documents offered us a closer look into the motives behind Mateen’s actions, which had also been confirmed by one of the hostages. Unfortunately, few pundits dared to bring that information up on primetime television.
+Now that the full audio recordings of the calls between the shooter and 911 dispatchers have been made public , Mateen’s comments regarding U.S. military interventions abroad are being brought up again.
+The audio recordings were released following an order from Circuit Judge Margaret Schreiber. Orlando city attorney Darryl Bloodworth recently promised the city would no longer keep the tapes under wraps, which prompted the judge’s order. The city had been the number one obstacle between journalists and the tapes, claiming their release would “ be a violation of a Florida law that makes photographs, videos or audio recordings showing ‘the killing of a person’ exempt from disclosure, available only to family members .”
+In one of the released calls, Mateen can be heard insisting the police negotiator tell “ the US government to stop bombing,” and when the negotiator asks Mateen to tell him where he is, he answers , “ No, because you have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq .”
+The U.S. government, Mateen continues , “ [is] killing too many children, they are killing too many women, OK? … So what am I to do here, when my people are getting killed over there? You get what I’m saying? ” When asked about “what is going on tonight,” Mateen adds :
+“ What’s going on is that I feel the pain of the people getting killed in Syria and Iraq and all over the Muslim [unidentified word] .”
+As Mateen is pressed to give the negotiator more information, he becomes more hostile and hangs up repeatedly. Asked for his name, Mateen responds with the following:
+“ You’re speaking with the person who pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. ”
+At one point during the conversation, Mateen asks the negotiator to call him “ Mujahedeen, call me the Soldier of God. ”
+While several calls were made, Mateen resisted giving the negotiator any further information, repeatedly referring to the U.S. bombings of Iraq and Syria and even going as far as to accuse the United States of collaborating with Russia, “ and … killing innocent women and children .”
+
+
+
+
+On June 12, 5 a.m., Orlando police and Orange County deputies entered Pulse nightclub and killed Mateen in a shootout . The audio released by the city is one of over 200 other phone calls made to 911 during the shooting. These recordings remain under review by Judge Schreiber, TC Palm reported . Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by The Anti-Media of theantimedia.org . 
+The “Anti” in our name does not mean we are against the media, we are simply against the current mainstream paradigm. The current media, influenced by the industrial complex, is a top-down authoritarian system of distribution—the opposite of what Anti-Media aims to be. At Anti-Media, we want to offer a new paradigm—a bottom-up approach for real and diverse reporting. We seek to establish a space where the people are the journalists and a venue where independent journalism moves forward on a larger and more truthful scale. ",FAKE
+6805,"Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber: “Obamacare Is Not Imploding,” “Working As Designed”","MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, a well-known architect of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, tells CNN that the law known as ‘Obamacare’ is working exactly as intended. 
+Full transcript, via CNN: 
+JONATHAN GRUBER: Obamacare’s not imploding. The main goal of Obamacare was two-fold. One was to cover the uninsured, of which we’ve covered 20 million, the largest expansion in American history. The other was to fix broken insurance markets where insurers could deny people insurance just because they were sick or they had been sick. Those have been fixed, and for the vast majority of Americans, costs in those markets have come down, thanks to the subsidies made available under Obamacare… 
+The 22% increase [in health care premiums], let’s remember who that applies to. That applies to a very small fraction of people, who have to buy insurance without the subsidies that are available. 
+85% of people buying insurance on the exchanges get subsidies. And for those people, this premium increase doesn’t affect them. 
+Now, for those remaining people, that is a problem, and that’s something that we need to address, but it’s not a crisis. It doesn’t mean the system’s collapsing. And most importantly, it doesn’t affect the 150 million Americans who get employer insurance, who have actually seen their premiums fall dramatically, relative to what was expected before Obamacare. 
+CAROL COSTELLO, CNN: OK. So let’s talk about how exactly you can fix Obamacare. And I just need you to be specific, because I think people really want answers. So Hillary Clinton says she can fix Obamacare. So what would be one fix that would drive premiums down. 
+GRUBER: Look, once again, there’s no sense of oh it just has to be fixed. The law is working as designed; however, it could work better, and I think probably the most important thing experts would agree on is that we need a larger mandate penalty. We have individuals who are essentially free riding on the system. They’re essentially waiting until they get sick and then getting health insurance. The whole idea of this plan which was pioneered in Massachusetts was that the individual mandate penalty would bring those people into the system and have them participate. The penalty right now is probably too low and that’s something ideally we would fix. 
+COSTELLO: So somebody who is president could go to congress and say, “You know what, lawmakers, this is a fix. Can you pass this?” Is that what would have to happen to put that fix into place? 
+GRUBER: Basically, it’s hard to know what dramatic fix we could do without congress participating in the process. We could do things like a stronger mandate is one. We could do things like increasing the pressure on states to expand their Medicade programs, a horrible act of political malpractice where states have left millions of people of their lowest income citizens uncovered. We could do things like that, but a lot of that would involve congressional participation. It’s hard to know what you can do just on your own as a new administration. 
+COSTELLO: What about the insurers who have fled the system? How do you convince them to come back or new companies to sign on? GRUBER: Once again, I think the press here has been misleading. Some insurers are leaving. Other insurers are thriving. I think what you have is a system where we’ve shaken up the status quo, exactly what we expect of new innovation, disruptive innovation if you will, to do. Insurers who were thriving in the old system are finding this new system sort of hard for them. Other insurers are doing really well and what’s going to happen is the natural process as the market evolves. These premiums are going to increase. That’s going to allow profitable opportunities for new insurers to enter they are(ph) and bring premiums back down. So we’re just seeing the ups and downs of a new market. What you have to remember is that premiums in 2014 came in way below what we expected. In fact, where they are today is exactly where they thought they’d be today. It’s just they came in lower than we thought and they rose faster than we thought. And that’s just some of the unpredictability of a new market. That will settle down over time. And new insurers will enter. 
+COSTELLO: OK. So hindsight is 20/20, right? 
+GRUBER: Yes. 
+COSTELLO: Looking back, is there one thing that you wish was done differently? 
+GRUBER: I think there’s really probably two things I wish was done differently. One is I wish the mandate penalty was stronger. The other, I wish the federal government had done more to get states to expand their Medicaid programs. I think that this is a fundamental flaw in our system that states are leaving so many systems uncovered and citizens who are sick who are coming into this exchange pool and making it more expensive. 
+COSTELLO: So realistically, you know, after the next president is put into office, what do you think will happen with Obamacare? 
+GRUBER: I think nothing much is going to happen, to be honest. I think that basically a system that largely works , that the flaws your seeing now or the premium increase you’re seeing now are just the natural dynamics of a market as it transitions to its new state, and I think that we’re just going to let it go for a couple years and it’s going to get better on its own. And basically I think it’s a system which largely works. 
+COSTELLO: What if Donald Trump becomes president, he has a republican congress, and he does repeal it? What happens then? 
+GRUBER: Well, first of all he won’t repeal it. Remember, the whole argument and public debate against this law is that people didn’t get to keep insurance they liked. Well, you’re going to have 20 million Americans or more who are now getting insurance that they like. You’re not going to take that away from them. And let’s be clear, there is no replace. There is only repeal. There is no Republican alternative to this law, and the reason is because this is fundamentally a bipartisan legislation that was originally drafted on Republican principles, to be honest. And so there is no Republican alternative. And so his repeal and replace is just repeal and leave people uninsured. That’s not going to happen.",FAKE
+8972,"U-M’s New ‘Chief Diversity Officer’ Will Collect $385,000 per Year","U-M’s New ‘Chief Diversity Officer’ Will Collect $385,000 per Year Derek Draplin, Michigan Capitol Confidential, October 28, 2016 
+The University of Michigan’s new chief diversity officer will collect $385,000 a year under his various job titles, including a new one created by a recently revealed $85 million, five-year U-M diversity plan . 
+Robert Sellers’ appointment to a new position called “vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer” (VPEI-CDO) was approved Oct. 20 by the university’s governing board. Sellers previously served as “vice provost for equity and inclusion,” and is also listed as a professor of both psychology and education. In 2014-15 Sellers was paid $347,295 in his capacity as vice provost, a position created in 2014. 
+President Mark Schlissel nominated Sellers for the job several weeks ago. The new full-time administrative position “will serve as a leadership voice on diversity, equity and inclusion for the entire university.” 
+The diversity plan Sellers will oversee will spend $17 million a year over the next five years. It seeks to “recruit, retain and develop a diverse university community” and “support innovation and inclusive scholarship and teaching” through a number of new and expanded programs. 
+The $85 million plan is in addition to the $40 million a year the university already spends promoting diversity. 
+{snip}",FAKE
+10533,BEARS BEWARE: This Just Hit One Of The Highest Levels In The Past 6 Years!,"77 Views November 01, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+With continued uncertainty in global markets, bears should take note of what just hit one of the highest levels in the past 6 years! 
+Rare Action Taking Place In Put Options From Jason Goepfert at SentimenTrader: “ Options traders are piling into protective puts. Trading activity in put options soared on Tuesday to one of the highest levels of this bull market (see chart below). 
+Over the past six years, when traders have so heavily favored puts over calls, stocks had a strong tendency to rebound almost immediately… IMPORTANT: To find out which company the richest man in China has invested in, one that Rick Rule and Sprott Asset Management are pounding the table on that is quickly being recognized as one of the greatest investment opportunities in the world – CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored 
+More evidence of hedging Put/call ratio soars to upper end of bull market range 
+With concerns about the looming election, overseas market volatility and stocks sinking to multi-month lows, options traders picked up their activity in protective puts. There were 143 put options traded on the CBOE on Tuesday for every 100 calls, among the highest amount since the bull market began more than six years ago (see chart below). 
+A Contrarian Indicator High levels of put activity are often an early indication of bottoming action in stocks, and it’s no surprise that during this bull market, it has led to almost immediately higher prices. 
+A week later, there was only one loss of more than 0.6%, and the risk/reward was skewed 3-to-1 to the upside. Other than the very short-term, returns across the various time frames suggested significance.” 
+The Exception King World News note: The one exception is when stocks are in a bear market. During bear markets there are times when the put/call ratios are extremely high and yet stocks continue to plunge ( see 10-year chart below, which includes 2008/2009 time frame ). 
+The charts and commentary above are from SentimenTrader. To try a free 14-day trial of the internationally acclaimed work that Jason Goepfert produces at SentimenTrader simply CLICK HERE. 
+  Ahead Of Tomorrow’s Fed Meeting Some Very Strange Things Are Happening  ",FAKE
+9992,Spirit to thank veterans at annual Veterans Day Parade,"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. Spirit to thank veterans at annual Veterans Day Parade By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 2, 2016 Veterans Day 
+By spiritaero.com 
+Spirit AeroSystems is proud to sponsor the annual Spirit AeroSystems Veterans Day Parade scheduled Saturday, Nov. 5, in downtown Wichita. Spirit employees and their families will take part in the parade to show appreciation and support for the men and women who have served the United States and protected freedom around the globe. 
+The parade is scheduled at 11 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 5, in downtown Wichita. The parade will begin near 11 th and Main Street and conclude with a celebration remembrance event at WaterWalk. 
+Employees and the general public are invited to attend the festivities, which are presented in partnership with USD259 JROTC. This year, the parade commemorates the National Defense Act of 1916. 
+Read the Full Article at www.spiritaero.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on November 2, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+4187,Indiana Gov. Pence backs Cruz for president ahead of state primary,"Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on Friday backed Ted Cruz for president, days ahead of the state’s vital Republican primary contest.
+
+The Republican governor announced his choice in an interview on WIBC radio. He prefaced his announcement by saying he likes and respects – and has met with – all three of the Republican presidential candidates.
+
+“I’m not against anybody but I will be voting for Ted Cruz,” Pence said. “I see Ted Cruz as a principled conservative who’s dedicated his career to advocating the Reagan agenda.”
+
+The announcement is a setback for Trump, who has been barnstorming Indiana – with famed Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight by his side – trying to rally voters ahead of Tuesday’s election and sideline Cruz for good.
+
+Cruz is desperately seeking momentum in his fight to block Trump from claiming the delegate majority before the GOP's national convention in July.
+
+Trump swept all five Northeastern primary elections earlier in the week and enjoys a massive delegate advantage over his Republican rivals. Cruz has been mathematically eliminated from earning the 1,237 delegate majority, but insists he can block Trump from the majority as well, as the 2016 contest shifts to ""friendlier terrain"" in the West and Midwest. The Texas senator declared he is ""all in"" on Indiana.
+
+Cruz said earlier Friday he would ""enthusiastically welcome"" Pence's support.
+
+Pence, who faces his own re-election this year, had been under enormous pressure from pro- and anti-Trump factions. Although he is more closely aligned with Cruz, he risks voter backlash in the fall if Tuesday's primary contest shows Indiana is filled with Trump voters.
+
+Pence, though, made sure to praise Trump during his remarks Friday. He commended Trump for giving “voice to the frustration of millions of working Americans with the lack of progress in Washington, D.C.”
+
+Fox News’ John Roberts and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+870,Trump triumphs: Two big takeaways after The Donald wins New York,"There are two ways to analyze Donald Trump’s decisive win in New York’s presidential primary.
+
+First, it’s the acknowledgment of a big run for Trump this week and next during which the GOP frontrunner will amass delegates at a faster clip than any of the other three Republicans in the race – in the process, stretching his lead over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and pumping up the volume that the Republican nomination is deservedly The Donald’s regardless of where the delegate tally stands going into July’s national convention in Cleveland.
+
+Trump’s argument will look good – on paper, at least.
+
+After New York, he’s two-thirds of the way to the 1,237 delegates required by the GOP and a guaranteed first-ballot win in Cleveland.
+
+For argument’s sake, let’s give Trump roughly 100 of the 172 delegates up for grabs next Tuesday (all the action occurring in his mid-Atlantic backyard of Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island).
+
+Once the five states holding GOP contests in May apportion their combined 199 delegates, Trump’s total should enter four-digit territory. Per this Associated Press breakdown, a first-ballot scenario remains feasible.
+
+If he’s smart, Trump will use the rest of April and May to keep driving home one word: “inevitability”.  Backed up by this exit poll data showing that an overwhelming number of New York Republicans saying the candidate with the most primary votes should be the party’s nominee.
+
+Now, the other takeaway from New York: “the Sinatra question”.
+
+To paraphrase that other “Chairman of the Board”, if Trump can make it there – winning big in the Empire State in a closed Republican primary – can he make it anywhere with three-fifths of a primary electorate that hasn’t bought into his candidacy?
+
+The answer: no (not in every primary, at least) . . . and stay tuned.
+
+May will not be the friendliest of months for Trump, what with a first-Tuesday primary in Indiana that could spell more Midwestern trouble (perhaps a repeat of his meltdown in Wisconsin).
+
+After that: a winner-take-all contest in Nebraska that likely will go to Cruz (draw a line from Texas to North Dakota and it runs through states Cruz has won). Finally, Oregon and Washington awarding their delegates proportionally.
+
+Not much of a buzz there.
+
+However, there is an opportunity for Trump to take a major step forward – in a way having nothing to do with bean-counting and convention arcana. And that would be courting those skeptical Republicans still waiting for a Trumpian “pivot” from angry rhetoric and juvenile social-media insults to a more dignified tone and statesmanlike persona.
+
+The news that broke on the same day as New York’s results – that Trump is shaking up his senior campaign staff and empowering his team to spend aggressively to win in May and June – is a first step in that direction.
+
+The next step: breaching divides within the GOP.
+
+According to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 63 percent of Republican primary voters say they could be satisfied with Trump as the GOP nominee.
+
+The good news: it’s better than the 49 percent Trump received back in the March exit polls.
+
+Not so good: it cries of work to be done – specifically, shoring up support among conservatives uneasy of Trump’s past policy inconsistencies and his unwilling in this campaign to take on entitlement spending and the federal budget dragon.
+
+Four years ago, conservatives accounted for 35 percent of that year’s presidential turnout, the highest share since pollsters first began recording that statistic back in 1976; 82 percent of them voted for Mitt Romney. Four years previously, conservatives  were 34 percent of the turnout; only 78 percent voted for John McCain.
+
+In theory, Cruz has a chance of repeating those percentages, if not improving on them. Can Trump? Only if he starts speaking the language.
+
+Such is the unusual nature of this Republican contest. In late April of 2012, after 43 Republican primaries and caucuses had voted, Romney had distanced himself from the field to the point where he could travel to New Hampshire and deliver this speech with an eye on the general election. Romney promised “a new campaign to unite every American who knows in their heart that we can do better . . . the beginning of the end of the disappointments of the Obama years and the start of a new and better chapter that we will write together.”
+
+Trump’s not in that position at present – and he may not be until the final night of the Republican National Convention.
+
+Then again, he’s not the only candidate going through hard times these days.
+
+The same NBC/WSJ poll that gave Trump a historically awful 24 percent positive/65 percent negative approval rating and had Hillary Clinton weighing in at 32 percent positive/56 percent negative. Cruz recorded a 26 percent positive/49 percent negative: Kasich came in at 31 percent positive; 19 percent negative.
+
+Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist and Clinton’s chief tormentor these days, received grades of 45 percent positive/36 percent negative, suggesting that the American electorate is not only sour on the political class, but sorely in need of a week in Caracas for a reality check on how a socialist county fares under Bernie Vision.
+
+Will Trump take advantage of May’s light pace to transition from temper tantrums to a style more tempered? It’s the practical thing to do. Especially when confronted with national poll numbers that, for now at least, are practically awful.
+
+Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
+7031,PETITION TO STOP GEORGE SOROS VOTING MACHINES HITS 100K,"posted by Eddie 
+A White House petition to remove Soros-owned electronic voting machines has passed the 100k votes necessary for a response. Will America finally stand up to global elite rigging our elections? The U.K.-based company Smartmatic has sent voting machines to important battleground states across the US including Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia. “Other jurisdictions affected are California, District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin,” noted the Daily Caller . “Smartmatic Chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is a former U.N. official and sits on the board of Soros’ Open Society Foundations.” The discovery has caused concern among the US voting populace given Soros’ deep ties with Clinton. Soros Linked Voting Machines To Be Used In Key Battleground States 
+source:",FAKE
+2904,"Iran nuclear talks: 'Tricky issues' remain, Kerry says","Lausanne, Switzerland (CNN) As nuclear talks with Iran neared the endgame, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shied away from predicting success.
+
+Difficult issues remain on the table as the world's most powerful diplomats meet in Switzerland with Iranian nuclear negotiators, Kerry told CNN on Monday.
+
+""We are working very hard to work those through. We are working late into the night and obviously into tomorrow. We are working with a view to get something done,"" he said. ""There is a little more light there today, but ​there are still some tricky issues. Everyone knows the meaning of tomorrow.""
+
+Negotiators have set Tuesday as their deadline for a basic deal. A comprehensive deal, including technical additions, is supposed to be negotiated by June 30.
+
+World powers are seeking the outlines of an agreement they say would stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for at least 15 years . In exchange, Iran would get out from punishing sanctions that have crippled its economy.
+
+Kerry's comments to CNN came after uncomfortable rumblings about the talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, made headlines.
+
+The assertion: Iran backpedaled the day before on an important detail of a possible deal to prevent it from developing a nuclear bomb.
+
+On Sunday, an Iranian negotiator told journalists that Tehran would not send fissile material to Russia, which diplomats had earlier told journalists was part of the plan to put potential bomb-making materials out of reach.
+
+""The export of stocks of enriched uranium is not in our program, and we do not intend to send them abroad. ... There is no question of sending the stocks abroad,"" Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said.
+
+But on Monday, a senior U.S. State Department official said the rumblings in the press should quiet down.
+
+Negotiators had not yet decided any specifics about the disposal of fissile material, and Iran has made the comments many times before, the official said, citing a list of previous examples of such statements in press reports.
+
+Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi sounded optimistic as he briefed reporters on the talks' progress earlier Monday, saying that the diplomats were ""narrowing down"" their differences and working out ways to resolve sticking points.
+
+""These marathon-like negotiations have reached the final stage,"" he said.
+
+Things have been tense in Lausanne as the deadline for an agreement looms, with talks snagged on three important points:
+
+• How quickly or slowly Iran will be allowed to advance its nuclear technology in the last five years of the 15-year agreement.
+
+• How quickly crushing U.N. sanctions will go away.
+
+• Whether sanctions will snap back into place if Iran violates the deal.
+
+Iran wants them gone for good. But international negotiators want merely to suspend them, so they can reapply them as leverage if Iran does not keep the bargain.
+
+Agreement on the points is crucial, a Western diplomat said.
+
+""There cannot be an agreement if we do not have answers to these questions,"" the diplomat said.
+
+In the background, a vocal critic of a possible deal spoke out again. Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the deal he believes is taking shape.
+
+""This agreement as it evolves is fulfilling our deepest fears and even worse,"" he said after a meeting in Israel with visiting U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Netanyahu also attacked Iran for its support of Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have overtaken many parts of that country.
+
+He said Iran was trying to take over the whole Middle East with the nuclear deal and its influence in Yemen.
+
+Conservative Washington lawmakers are threatening new sanctions if Tehran doesn't comply with demands, which could throw a wrench into negotiations.
+
+U.S. negotiators are working to reach an agreement in part to prevent this kind of congressional punishment. They fear it could prompt hardliners in Tehran to push for killing the talks, which would scuttle the chances of a deal altogether.
+
+Aside from the three tough points, negotiators on both sides have shown optimism.
+
+U.S. officials have said most of the other elements were solvable if those three major hurdles could be overcome.
+
+Iran's Araghchi agreed. ""Getting to an accord is doable. Solutions have been found for numerous questions,"" he said.
+
+Iran would like sanctions lifted as soon as a deal is signed. But diplomats says it's not so simple.
+
+Iran could see unilateral sanctions relief in the areas of trade, oil and banking, but sanctions adopted by the United Nations are more complicated.
+
+Many are related to proliferation and transfer of missile technology and are tied to certification by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, that Iran's nuclear program does not have a military dimension.
+
+On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif showed some optimism about finding a path through the deadlock.
+
+He said he believes the world powers ""have realized that sanctions, pressure and an agreement will not go together. It's only to translate that understanding and realization into the agreement that we are negotiating.""
+
+U.S. officials said that all sides, including Iran, agree that sanctions would be lifted in phases over time as Iran confirms its compliance to the deal. But they acknowledge there is still disagreement on the actual formula.
+
+Iran also wants to be allowed to develop more advanced centrifuges while the deal is in effect. New machines would enrich uranium much faster than current machines.
+
+U.S. and European officials worry that could enable Iran quickly to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.
+
+Diplomats say the first 10 years of the 15-year deal would have the most stringent restrictions, which would be relaxed over the last five.
+
+""We are not asking them to do nothing (in technology development), but they want to do more than we want them to do,"" a Western diplomat said.
+
+But the diplomat added, ""After 15 years, they can do what they want.""
+
+Diplomats said Iran has agreed to a cap of fewer than 6,000 centrifuges that it can operate to enrich uranium. That figure is down from the 6,000 the sides were speaking about when the talks started Thursday, but substantially more than the several hundred the United States had originally wanted.
+
+Iran currently runs about 10,000 centrifuges, but it has around 19,000 in its stockpile.
+
+U.S. officials maintain the number is not that important, because there will be other restrictions on the levels of enrichment and type of centrifuges Iran can operate, which they believe will extend the time Iran would need to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon -- known as the ""breakout time"" -- to at least a year.
+
+While the focus this week is on the March 31 deadline, it's important to note it isn't the final deadline.
+
+Even if a pact is reached Tuesday, it's unclear what form it would take, and the United States and Iran have varying needs.
+
+The parties are seeking to reach what's being called a framework agreement -- essentially a political understanding of the main principles of the final deal.
+
+But if they're able to come together on the big issues, they still have until the end of June when the Joint Plan of Action expires to iron out the details. So that means the talks won't be finished this month.
+
+Officials have been vague about the format this framework deal might take as well as how much of it will be made known to the public and international stakeholders. The United States would prefer a written accord, but Iran has balked at putting anything in writing until a comprehensive deal is reached.
+
+U.S. officials say they will need to quantify Iran's commitments before submitting the agreement to Congress. But U.S. and Western diplomats say that Iran is looking simply for an ""understanding"" of what has been agreed to before a formal accord is reached.",REAL
+4887,Hillary Clinton: 'unpatriotic' Donald Trump's praise of Putin is 'scary',"Hillary Clinton on Thursday derided Donald Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin as “unpatriotic” and “scary” and suggested the Republican nominee’s coziness with the Russian president could represent a threat to national security.
+
+In a press conference at an airport in Westchester, New York, her first such formal event in 278 days, Clinton discussed Trump’s remarks at a “commander-in-chief forum” hosted by NBC and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America in New York on Wednesday night, in which the nominees drew sharp contrasts on foreign policy and national security in back-to-back appearances that previewed their first debate later this month.
+
+“Bizarrely, once again he praised Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin – even taking the astonishing step of suggesting that he prefers the Russian president to our American president,” Clinton said on the airport tarmac, in front of her campaign plane. “Now, that is not just unpatriotic and insulting to the people of our country as well as to our commander-in-chief – it is scary.”
+
+
+
+On Wednesday night, Trump insisted his praise for Putin was deserved because the Russian president has an “82% approval rating”.
+
+“I think when he calls me brilliant, I’ll take the compliment, OK?” Trump said.
+
+Trump has exchanged compliments with Putin, though critics have said Russia is meddling in the US election in order to tip the scales in Trump’s favor. Until recently, Trump’s campaign was run by Paul Manafort, who previously worked in Ukraine on behalf of a pro-Russia candidate.
+
+Clinton and her campaign have suggested Russia is using cyber-attacks to meddle in the US election, after a hack of the Democratic National Committee led to the resignation of the DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, just before the party’s convention in Philadelphia in July. Trump has downplayed the severity of the intrusion and even invited – sarcastically, he claimed – Russia to hack Clinton’s own emails.
+
+On Thursday, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, distanced himself from Trump’s remarks, accusing Putin of conducting state-sponsored cyber-attacks “on what appears to be [the US] political system”.
+
+“Vladimir Putin is an aggressor who does not share our interests,” Ryan told reporters at a press conference in Washington. “Vladimir Putin is violating the sovereignty of neighboring countries. He is acting like an adversary.”
+
+Ryan, who has endorsed Trump, grew frustrated by questions about the Republican nominee’s remarks. He did not watch the forum event, he said, and did not wish to respond to every comment Trump makes.
+
+“I’m not going to stand up here and do a tit-for-tat on what Donald said last night,” Ryan said.
+
+In New York, Clinton also criticized Trump’s remarks about US generals, who he said had been “reduced to rubble” under the leadership of President Obama, to a degree that is “embarrassing for our country”.
+
+“What would Ronald Reagan say about a Republican nominee who attacks America’s generals and heaps praise on Russia’s president?” Clinton said. “I think we know the answer.”
+
+Clinton challenged Republicans to denounce Trump’s comments. “Every Republican holding or seeking office in this country should be asked if they agree with Donald Trump about these statements,” she said.
+
+
+
+In the forum, Clinton and Trump diverged on whether the US should deploy ground troops to Iraq. Clinton restated her opposition to sending a contingent of troops into Syria and said she would not deploy ground troops to Iraq “ever again”. Trump disagreed.
+
+“We would leave a certain group behind and they would take the various sections where they have the oil,” he said, regarding a policy apparently meant to prevent terror groups such as Islamic State from gaining command of such a vital resource.
+
+On Thursday, Clinton denounced this approach. “The United States of America does not invade other countries to plunder and pillage,” she said. “We don’t send our brave men and women around the world to steal oil.
+
+“And that’s not even getting into the absurdity of what it would involve – massive infrastructure, large numbers of troops, many years on the ground. Of course, Trump hasn’t thought through any of that.”
+
+After the press conference, Clinton departed for Charlotte, North Carolina, where she was due to hold a rally on Thursday afternoon.",REAL
+4338,5 Things You Should Know About George Pataki,"5 Things You Should Know About George Pataki
+
+This post has been updated to reflect that Pataki is officially running.
+
+George Pataki announced his presidential candidacy in Exeter, N.H., on Thursday. He's the eighth official Republican entrant in the 2016 race for the White House. The field is expected to double over the next couple of months. Pataki has made numerous visits and a few friends in recent months in the Granite State, home of the first primary in 2016. Still, the mention of his name in most of the country might prompt questions of, ""Who?"" and possibly, ""Why?""
+
+That is remarkable, considering that Pataki served three four-year terms as governor of New York, which at the time of his election was still the second-most populous state in the nation. And while he has been out of office since 2007, he is the last Republican to win a major statewide election in New York in more than 20 years.
+
+Pataki may have had more momentum had he entered the presidential sweepstakes of 2008, when he had just completed a dozen years as governor and was better known. But the 2008 field also included Rudolph Giuliani, whose time as mayor of New York City had largely coincided with Pataki's tenure in Albany. At the time, Giuliani was regarded as formidable, perhaps even the front-runner. And though he ultimately won no primaries, he consigned Pataki to second place in the hearts of New York funders and in the lenses of the New York-based media.
+
+This time around, Pataki hopes to break out of the pack in New Hampshire, where his political action committee has already been running ads. This is a purple state, where Republicans may value his record as a fiscal conservative and accept his relatively liberal positions on abortion, gun control and environmental protection. These latter views will not be espoused by Pataki's rivals in the GOP primaries, but he is counting on finding a market for them among GOP primary voters.
+
+He's a long shot, but here are five things to know about George Pataki:
+
+1. He defeated the liberal icon Mario Cuomo to win the governorship in 1994.
+
+ It was a big midterm sweep for the GOP that fall, with the House going Republican for the first time in 40 years and bringing the Senate along on the tide. But just as stunning were the outcomes in the states, where many incumbent Democratic governors went down. Pataki bagged the biggest prize that day, shocking the political world by defeating three-term incumbent Mario Cuomo, the man who had symbolized liberal resistance to Ronald Reagan's conservatism. Pataki piled up 2-1 margins in the Upstate counties and won enough in New York City's outer boroughs and suburbs to prevail by 4 percentage points. Cuomo, once a leading Democratic prospect for president, never ran for office again, although his son, Andrew, was elected governor in 2010 and re-elected in 2014.
+
+2. He was governor during the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
+
+ The nation's shock and anger over the destruction of the World Trade Center's twin towers by al-Qaida terrorists afforded many moments of political opportunity, but most of these benefited President George W. Bush and Mayor Giuliani. Pataki was on the scene and involved in much of the difficult aftermath. But he never cut the sort of media figure his fellow Republicans did, and neither did he receive the same boost in national renown.
+
+3. His background combines mainly elements of New York's historic and political mix.
+
+ Pataki's father was a Hungarian immigrant and his mother a mix of Italian and Irish stock, a combination typical in New York City's always changing demographics. But the Patakis settled in Peekskill, an hour north of the megalopolis of New York City up the Hudson River. There, they started as farmers, and it gave the young Pataki a touch of Upstate in his upbringing. A promising student, the young Pataki went to Yale, then Columbia Law School. After a stint on Wall Street, he went back up the Hudson Valley to practice law in the suburbs and then to run for office.
+
+4. He has never lost an election for public office.
+
+ In his late 30s, Pataki ran for mayor of Peekskill on a reform platform and won. Two years later, in 1984, he took on an incumbent Democratic state legislator and won. (It was the last presidential year in which New York went Republican.) In 1992, he challenged an incumbent state senator in the Republican primary and won. Then he made the huge leap from first-termer in the state Senate to GOP nominee for governor, and then, despite Giuliani endorsing his opponent and despite the third-party presence of a conservative businessman, Pataki ousted Cuomo in 1994. He was re-elected in 1998 and 2002 and has not run since.
+
+5. He's the oldest of the presidential prospects on the Republican side and the only one of the major contenders who is older than Hillary Clinton. If elected, he would be the oldest person to take the oath as president.
+
+ The former governor of New York was born in June of 1945, so he will be 71 on Election Day 2016. It is rare for American politicians to make a first bid for the presidency in their 70s (although Independent Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders is four years Pataki's senior and prospective candidate Jim Webb is 69). Ronald Reagan was the oldest president to assume office, two weeks shy of his 70th birthday. The rest of the 2016 White House field is younger, although some are in their 60s. Hillary Clinton was born in October 1947, so she would still be 69 on Election Day 2016. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry would be 66, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson 65, Ohio Gov. John Kasich 64, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush 63, former CEO Carly Fiorina 62, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Sen. Lindsey Graham would be 61.",REAL
+2176,A ten point plan to defeat ISIS,"While Paris was still reeling under a state of emergency, President Obama took to the stage at the G-20 conference in Turkey to declare his policy to defeat ISIS a success. He had no plans to change course and no time to deal with critics who disagreed. Just days after ISIS ratcheted up their ambitions to conduct mass casualty attacks against the West, the president persisted in claiming his policy was working. President Obama continues to show a stunning and willful blindness to the tragedies all around him.
+
+Meanwhile, the Russians and the French have started fighting back, launching airstrikes against the ISIS capital. As the days go on, more and more nations feel radical Islam’s sting and struggle with how to respond. The world is screaming out for U.S. leadership, but the president just isn’t up to the job.
+
+It is slowly dawning on the West that radical Islam is the existential threat of our times, as fascism was in World War II, as communism was in the Cold War. We can’t cooperate with it, we can’t convert it and we can’t contain it. We must defeat it.
+
+But so far we have no Churchill or FDR, no Reagan or Thatcher or Pope John Paul II. Obama has made it abundantly clear that he’s not budging. He says the U.S. will not send troops into the region, and he uses that as an excuse to do nothing. He says critics have suggested things he’s already doing. He says if anybody has a better plan, he hasn’t seen it.
+
+Mr. President, here is what a better plan looks like. It’s the same plan that won World War II and the Cold War. The U.S. led in both victories, and the U.S. is the only country than can lead this time.  Those victories were multifaceted and multinational.
+
+To defeat radical Islam, the United States should bring together all of Western civilization, combining our economic, political, ideological and diplomatic weapons, our intelligence and cyber capabilities, and our armed forces. No one country acting alone can defeat radical Islam. Everyone has his own role to play. But it won’t happen without America taking the lead.
+
+First, assemble an alliance of nations that are threatened by radical Islam. We may have to hold our noses and work with leaders and countries we have differences with, as we did with the USSR during World War II. But we can put aside those differences temporarily to deal with the immediate threat. Putin, Assad, even the hacktivist group Anonymous could play a role.
+
+The president insists the U.S. won’t send ground forces back to the Middle East. But this is still a military campaign. There is collateral damage in war.  We can try to minimize it, but not at the expense of losing this war.
+
+Second, cut off ISIS’ funding. Bomb their oil fields and refineries. Destroy the pipelines, trucks and tankers taking ISIS oil to market. Use the U.S. banking system to track and freeze ISIS’ assets and sanction any country and company doing business with them.
+
+Third, get tough with our Arab allies. Many Gulf Arab states have wealthy citizens who support radical Islamist groups. Tell those leaders they should police their own and shut down the funding streams. If they don’t, we won’t lift a finger to help them when radical Islamist groups bring the fight to their lands.
+
+Fourth, launch a propaganda war to win the hearts and minds of those whose minds are still open. Use social media for disinformation campaigns. Counter every ISIS video of beheadings with videos showing jihadists blown to bits. -- Showing terrorists committing unspeakable acts of violence doesn’t turn recruits off, it attracts them. The only way to discourage new followers is to show ISIS as weak, confused and in decline.
+
+Fifth, encourage Islam’s leading clerics to speak out against the extremists.  Two of the most respected and important leaders in Islam, the Grand Imam of Al Azhar University and Cairo’s Grand Mutfi, have taken strong stands. We can help spread their messages.
+
+Sixth, launch cyberwarfare against ISIS. Invade their safe havens on the Internet. Disrupt their networks. Radical Islam has dominated this space while we play catch-up.  Even worse, we have tried to conduct our efforts with one hand tied behind our back.
+
+Seventh, arm our allies. We should give anyone willing to stand up and fight ISIS whatever he needs. Arm the Kurds and the Anbar Sunni tribes directly. Give weapons and aid to Jordan, Egypt and Israel.
+
+Eighth, discard political correctness. We reacted to September 11 by treating everyone alike. The grandmother traveling with her grandkids to Disney World was given the same level of scrutiny as the young man with multiple visits to North Waziristan who traveled without luggage on a one-way ticket he paid for in cash. A better way to use our resources efficiently is to profile for terrorist behavior patterns. If we focus on everyone, we focus on no one.
+
+Ninth, Don’t accept refugees we can’t vet. ISIS has already announced it will hide terrorists among the hordes of refugees flooding Europe and hoping to enter the U.S. The directors of the FBI, the CIA and the National Intelligence Agency have all issued warnings about the difficulty of vetting refugees headed for the U.S. Americans can help best by offering humanitarian assistance to keep refugees in the region, helping those of fighting age to stand and fight ISIS.
+
+And finally, 10th, accept that we will constantly need to adapt our strategies and tactics to deal with radical Islamists. President George W. Bush tried to destroy radical Islam by sending in hundreds of thousands of troops to fight in Iraq, and failed. Obama tried withdrawing from the region, and that failed, too.
+
+Yet the threat continues to grow. It has taken different forms over the years – Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, al Nusra front – and it will no doubt wear other faces in the years ahead. But it’s the same enemy: religious fanatics driven by the core belief that they have been chosen by Allah to establish a caliphate that rules the world. They will kill any and all who stand in their way – Christians, Jews, Muslims – in the Middle East and worldwide.
+
+Since they’re convinced they will prevail in the inevitable clash of civilizations, they’re not worried about the scope of the battle, or the levels of destruction, or even dying in the process. In fact, they are eager to bring on the end times, since they believe their triumph over the infidels is preordained.
+
+We can laugh at the absurdity of their goals, or dismiss them as the “JV team,” or try to win their hearts and minds, or divert their anger with a jobs summit.
+
+This is an enemy we can defeat. But our efforts need a leader. It can’t be Putin, and it can’t be Hollande. America is the only nation with the bandwidth, clout and power to assemble Western civilization and unite us in this long war.
+
+Now all we need is a leader who is up to the task.
+
+Kathleen Troia ""K.T."" McFarland is a Fox News National Security Analyst and host of FoxNews.com's ""DefCon 3."" She served in national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations",REAL
+7843,BREAKING: Obama Says There Were No Scandals During His Administration! HAHAHA!,"0 comments Obama was speaking to donors at a private fundraiser in California when he railed against former House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa for calling his administration corrupt. 
+“Here’s a guy who called my administration perhaps the most corrupt in history — despite the fact that actually we have not had a major scandal in my administration,” Obama said! 
+Obama has had more scandals than any president in history! Just because the MSM refuses to report on them does not mean they do not exist! 
+Breitbart reports : 
+Issa was the key figure in several investigations of the Obama administration, including the Fast and Furious debacle with Attorney General Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton’s failure in Benghazi, the failures in the Veterans Affairs department, and the IRS using its power to target conservative Tea Party groups for investigations. 
+Obama accused Issa of wasting taxpayer money “on trumped-up investigations that have led nowhere.” 
+“This guy has spent all his time simply trying to obstruct, to feed the same sentiments that resulted in Donald Trump becoming their nominee,” Obama said. 
+We could list 77 scandals, but here are just 7 of the biggest! 
+1.) IRS Targeting Scandal 
+In 2013, Lois Lerner, former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division, admitted that officials in the IRS’ Cincinnati office acted improperly. 2.) VA Waiting List 
+The Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general first noted the waiting list problem at a Phoenix clinic in 2014 and then found other clinics with similar problems. Veterans were placed on phony waiting lists, and some even died while waiting for care. VA Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned from his position. 3.) GSA Spending Spree 
+In 2012, Martha N. Johnson, the administrator of the General Services Administration, resigned after the federal procurement agency was engulfed in a controversy. The department was accused of allowing excessive spending on travel and conferences for the agency and employees. 4.) Attack on the Benghazi Compound 
+On Sept. 11, 2012, weeks before a presidential election, terrorists attacked U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya. Obama administration officials initially blamed this attack on a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim YouTube video that spun out of control. 5.) Clinton Emails 
+It was the Benghazi committee that first discovered that before, during, and after her time as secretary of state, Clinton maintained a private email server. This prompted the FBI to investigate questions of whether Clinton violated the law in terms of storing classified information. 6.) Fast and Furious Gun Walking 
+Operation Fast and Furious was a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives program, meant to be a sting operation. It allowed about 2,000 guns to flow to Mexican drug trafficking organizations under federal supervision before authorities lost control of the guns. 7.) Solyndra Subsidies 
+The Energy Department provided a $535 million loan guarantee to the politically connected solar panel firm Solyndra as part of the 2009 stimulus bill. Not long after building its factory, the California firm filed for bankruptcy protection and an FBI investigation ensued. The company did not find a buyer and eventually closed down. So Barack Obama…just shut up!",FAKE
+75,The Oregon standoff and America’s double standards on race and religion,"What do you think the response would be if a bunch of black people, filled with rage and armed to the teeth, took over a federal government installation and defied officials to kick them out? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be wait-and-see.
+
+Probably more like point-and-shoot.
+
+Or what if the occupiers were Mexican American? They wouldn’t be described with the semi-legitimizing term “militia,” harking to the days of the patriots. And if the gun-toting citizens happened to be Muslim, heaven forbid, there would be wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the “terrorist assault.” I can hear Donald Trump braying for blood.
+
+Not to worry, however, because the extremists who seized the remote Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon on Saturday are white. As such, they are permitted to engage in a “standoff” with authorities who keep their distance lest there be needless loss of life.
+
+Such courtesy was not extended to Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy who was playing with a toy gun in a park on Nov. 22, 2014. Within seconds of arriving on the scene, police officer Timothy Loehmann shot the boy, who died the next day. Prosecutors led a grand jury investigation and announced last month that Loehmann would face no charges. A “perfect storm of human error” was blamed, and apparently storms cannot be held accountable.
+
+Such courtesy, in fact, is routinely denied to unarmed black men and boys who are unfortunate enough to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. You know the litany of names — Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray. And you know how these stories end. Just weeks ago, a Baltimore jury failed to reach a verdict in the trial of the first of six officers charged with Gray’s death. Another perfect storm, I guess.
+
+I probably sound cynical, but in truth I’m just weary. And worried.
+
+Justice is supposed to be blind. Race, ethnicity and religion are not supposed to matter. Yet we’re constantly reminded that these factors can make the difference between justifiable and unjustifiable killing — and between life and death.
+
+The yahoos in Oregon are protesting the Bureau of Land Management’s policies, hardly a red-button issue for most Americans. The federal building they seized is in a wildlife refuge, which means that by definition it’s in the middle of nowhere; the nearest sizable city is Boise, Idaho, about 200 miles away. The protesters’ guns pose more of a threat to bears than people.
+
+So no, I don’t think authorities have any immediate reason to blast their way into the woods with a column of armored vehicles. But I would argue there was no good reason to do so on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., either. Is the salient difference that the Oregon protesters are believed to be heavily armed? If so, what message does that send? Does somebody need to found a Minority Rifle Association so that communities of color are given similar deference?
+
+The organization’s name would have to be changed in a few decades, anyway, when whites in the United States cease to constitute a racial majority. This inexorable demographic shift, I believe, helps explain why the world of politics seems to have gone insane of late.
+
+What I want is that African Americans, Latino Americans, Muslim Americans and other “outsiders” be seen as the Americans we are. What I want is acknowledgment that we, too, have a stake in our democracy and its future course. What I want is the recognition that no one can “take back” the country — which happens to be led by its first African American president — because it belongs to me as much as to you.
+
+These are not the sentiments we’re hearing in the presidential campaign, though — at least, not on the Republican side. Following Trump’s lead, candidates are competing to sound angrier and more embittered. That’s why I am so worried.
+
+You’d think there might be at least a few prominent voices on the right expressing horror and outrage at the wrongful killing of a 12-year-old boy. You’d think that Republicans running for president might find the time to condemn the armed takeover of federal property by zealots. Yet all we hear is crickets chirping.
+
+The GOP candidates have apparently concluded that voicing hope, embracing change and broadening our concept of the American mainstream constitute a losing strategy. They see Trump’s success and mimic him in fostering a sense of “beleaguered” us vs. “menacing” them. This may be an effective way to pursue the nomination, but it’s a terrible disservice to the country.
+
+Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.",REAL
+2647,Former Marine guilty of murder in 'American Sniper' trial,"A former Marine was found guilty late Tuesday of the 2013 shooting deaths of former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the author of ""American Sniper,"" and his friend Chad Littlefield.
+
+It took an Erath County, Texas jury less than two hours to convict Eddie Ray Routh of capital murder. State District Judge Jason Cashon sentenced Routh to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors had not sought the death penalty in the case. Routh's defense team said they would appeal the conviction.
+
+""We have waited two years for God to get justice on behalf of our son,"" Littlefield's mother, Judy, told reporters outside the courthouse. ""And as always, God has proven to be faithful, and we're so thrilled that we have the verdict that we have tonight.""
+
+Chris Kyle's widow, Taya, was not in the courtroom when the verdict was read. Earlier in the day, she had stormed out of the courtroom in the middle of the defense's closing arguments, whispering an expletive and slamming her hand on the wall as she walked out the door. At the time, attorneys were discussing how useful it would have been for Routh's mother to have told Chris Kyle about her son's history of violence.
+
+Routh showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read, while Kyle's brother and parents were among a group of the victims' families and friends who cried and held hands. They did not issue a statement.
+
+Jerry Richardson, Littlefield's half-brother, told Routh that he ""took the lives of two heroes, men who tried to be a friend to you, and you became an American disgrace."" Routh had no reaction.
+
+Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted ""JUSTICE!"" in response to the verdict.
+
+Routh, 27, had admitted to killing Kyle and Littlefield at a gun range on Feb. 2, 2013 but pleaded not guilty. His attorneys and family members asserted that he suffers from psychotic episodes caused by post-traumatic stress disorder and other factors.
+
+But prosecutors said Tuesday that whatever episodes Routh suffers are self-induced through alcohol and marijuana abuse.
+
+In front of a packed courtroom, Erath County assistant District Attorney Jane Starnes and three defense attorneys made their case.
+
+""That is not insanity. That is just cold, calculated capital murder,"" Starnes said. ""(Routh) is guilty of capital murder and he was not by any means insane.""
+
+But defense attorneys contended that Routh could not have realized what he was doing.
+
+""He didn't kill those men because of who he wanted to be, he killed those men because he had a delusion,"" Warren St. John said. ""He thought that they were going to kill him.""
+
+Kyle and Littlefield took Routh, who had deployed to Iraq and earthquake-ravaged Haiti, to a shooting range after Routh's mother asked Kyle to help her son cope with PTSD and other personal demons. Interest in the trial had been partially driven by the blockbuster Oscar-nominated film based on Kyle's life.
+
+Routh's attorneys also pointed to the gunman's use of Kyle's pickup truck after the shooting to purchase tacos at a drive-through window and run assorted errands as evidence of delusional behavior.
+
+Had Routh been found not guilty by reason of insanity, the state could have moved to have him committed.
+
+Routh's attorneys pointed out that they needed only a preponderance of evidence for jurors to conclude Routh was insane at the time of the shootings and therefore not guilty, a standard of proof well below what would be required to convict him of capital murder.
+
+But prosecutors also noted that Routh had apologized to Kyle's family -- evidence, they said, of a guilty mind.
+
+""This defendant gunned down two men in cold blood, in the back, in our county. Find him guilty,"" Erath County District Attorney Alan Nash said.
+
+Kyle made more than 300 kills as a sniper for SEAL Team 3, according to his own count. After leaving the military, he volunteered with veterans facing mental health problems, often taking them shooting.
+
+Fox News' Jennifer Girdon and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+3983,Thanksgiving lessons for the Syrian refugee debate,"After the Paris attacks, Americans are divided on Obama’s plan to let in 10,000 Syrian refugees. The timing is good: Thanksgiving can shed light on how much the nation’s tradition of hospitality should influence this decision.
+
+Syria refugee Nedal Al-Hayk works as a fabricator in Warren, Mich. Several U.S. governors are threatening to halt efforts to allow Syrian refugees into their states in the aftermath of the coordinated attacks in Paris, though an immigration expert says they have no legal authority to do so.
+
+Just as Americans prepare to express their hospitality toward others during Thanksgiving, a national debate has erupted over another kind of hospitality: President Obama’s plan to welcome 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States. After the Paris attacks, the plan has been widely challenged, not least by nearly half the US governors. They fear Islamic State terrorists might slip in as “sleepers” among the refugees. Others argue back that the US already rigorously vets all asylum seekers – for as long as two years.
+
+Might Thanksgiving, with all its traditions and meaning, shed some light on this debate?
+
+The practice of welcoming strangers into one’s home or community long precedes the first American thanksgiving, that autumn feast of 1621 when Pilgrims and native Americans expressed gratitude for either the harvest, each other, or God’s mercy (or all of the above). Hospitality is an ancient Middle East virtue, rooted in the traditions of desert tribes and deeply encoded in the three Abrahamic religions. In the scriptural book of Hebrews, we read: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
+
+Hospitality, like Thanksgiving, is a type of giving that treats others – rich or poor, stranger or family – as equals. In ancient days, this egalitarian focus was symbolized by the washing of a guest’s feet. Today it serves as a cornerstone for democracy. It is also the basis for the United Nations Refugee Convention, in which a majority of the world’s states have agreed to grant asylum to people deemed to be refugees.
+
+In the US, a thanksgiving day was not an official holiday until Lincoln made it one during the Civil War. The woman who championed it, Sarah Hale, wrote in 1864: “Let us each see to it that on this one day there shall be no family or individual, within the compass of our means to help, who shall not have some portion prepared, and some reason to join in the general Thanksgiving.”
+
+Granting permanent asylum in the US to a refugee, of course, is not the same as sharing a turkey dinner with a stranger. Today’s modern nation-states are careful about who crosses their borders, either to prevent problems or to enhance their society. But with 1 in every 122 people now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum, the need for hospitality is great. And in hospitality a nation can find its greatness.",REAL
+6402,WIKILEAKS BOMBSHELL : Chelsea Clinton Used Foundation CHARITY Money for Her LAVISH Wedding and “Life” – TruthFeed,"WIKILEAKS BOMBSHELL : Chelsea Clinton Used Foundation CHARITY Money for Her LAVISH Wedding and “Life” WIKILEAKS BOMBSHELL : Chelsea Clinton Used Foundation CHARITY Money for Her LAVISH Wedding and “Life” Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 6, 2016 Here’s a BOMBSHELL! 
+It looks like Hillary’s daughter Chelsea Clinton has used the Clinton Foundation to fund her “lavish wedding and life” for a DECADE. 
+This stunning information comes from Doug Band the PRESIDENT of the Clinton Foundation. 
+So, further PROOF that the Clintons have used that scandalous foundation to LINE THEIR OWN POCKETS. 
+Sickening. ",FAKE
+9690,The Most Important Concepts The Manosphere Taught Me,"  The Most Important Concepts The Manosphere Taught Me The Most Important Concepts The Manosphere Taught Me Lessons that make the world of men a better place Jean-Batave Poqueliche 
+Jean-Batave is a martial artist from the viking stronghold of Normandy, France. He travels the world looking for new fighting techniques and new beautiful women. Eastern Europe taught him everything he knows and is his second home. His column runs every Thursday. October 27, 2016 Masculinity 
+An interesting thought recently crossed my mind. What would have happened if I stumbled across the manosphere in my late teens? 
+Back when I was a blue-pill high school greenhorn, clueless about women and with a mind set on “neutral,” I was destined to be just another cog in the big government machine. Simply put, I would have been the dog’s bollocks. 
+But having all these resources served on a silver platter would not have given me the hunger that I have for life today. I would take this things as granted instead of considering every opportunity as the last one. 
+Dwelling on those thoughts is not good. What I can do is to keep writing so other young people and lost men turn their life around for the better. If I must condense the most useful things I have learnt: On Game Logistics are key 
+Get a private room or an apartment within 20 minutes walk of the date location or party district. Check that the security will not cockblock you. Have alcohol and music ready at your place. Clean it. Have condoms stashed. Get taxi numbers, a local SIM card etc. 
+Related: How Bad Logistics Can Ruin Your Game Keep an abundance mentality 
+Stop “over-pursuing” as Quintus puts it. The sheer number of women cruising around prevents you from being needy. Showing this weakness to women NEVER works in your favour. 
+Next the time wasters. If it is not her, it will be another. Stop dwelling in the past, stop keeping the number of dysfunctional girls from previous bangs. Keep moving forward. 
+Related: 5 Major Signs That She Is Using You A bad approach is better than none 
+This should be carved in every man’s brain. What is the worst than can happen? You have balls, use them. Who cares if you mumbled a bit. Smirk and carry on. 
+If you don’t act, the opportunity is gone. Don’t count to three. You see, you jump. 
+Related: How To Get Over Your Anxiety When Approaching Women Always escalate 
+Never apologise for being a man with a healthy sex life or hesitate to be sexual. If she calls you out, double down, fuck it. You are not here for a peck on the cheek or listen about her output on life. 
+One of the sentence that stayed with me and still is in a corner of my head to this day is “Think of it as the last time you see her.” 
+Related:",FAKE
+7213,"When Obama Admin Went After Banks, It Forced Them to Give Big Money to Some...Questionable Groups","Share on Twitter 
+A new study shows that after the Obama administration's Department of Justice (DOJ) collected billions in settlement money from U.S. banks after the mortgage collapse of 2008, it directed millions upon millions of dollars to several non-government organizations. 
+Peter Schweitzer, author of the book “Clinton Cash” and founder of the Government Accountability Institute , told Fox News's Megyn Kelly that tens of millions of dollars from the record-breaking settlements in the bank deals were sent to these ' charitable' groups , some of whose jobs would be to get out the vote for... Democrats: 
+“The banks are obviously eager to settle [and not go to trial]. [P]art of that settlement... will go to the victims of the crime you committed, but some of the money will go to pay restitution in the form of giving that money to non-profit organizations. These are non-profit organizations that are overwhelmingly progressive and serve as an adjunct to the Democratic party.” 
+One group he mentioned on “ The Kelly File ” was fairly benign-sounding: 
+“One organization that has received millions of dollars is in New York called the Asian Americans for Equality. Sounds like a great idea, right? The problem is, when you look into this organization which got money from banks via the Department of Justice, this is an organization affiliated with the Communist Workers Party. I didn't even know the Communist Workers Party was around anymore and, in fact, the organization that received this money is sympathetic to the North Korean regime.” 
+Indeed, the New York Times reports that many of the founders of Asian Americans for Equality (AAE) were active members of the Communist Workers Party, though AAE has since distanced itself from any modern-day ties. 
+In August, Andy Koenig of the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce wrote in The Wall Street Journal about the giveaways by the DOJ to friendly groups, or as he put it, “a handout to the administration's allies” [emphasis added]: 
+""Some groups on the list—Catholic Charities, for instance—are relatively nonpolitical. Others—La Raza, the National Urban League, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and more—are anything but. 
+Many of these groups engage in voter registration , community organizing and lobbying on liberal policy priorities at every level of government. They also provide grants to other liberal groups not eligible for payouts under the settlements. Thanks to the Obama administration, and the fungibility of money, the settlements’ beneficiaries can now devote hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to these activities."" 
+Judicial Watch began an investigation in 2012, and here's what it said about how the Obama administration ladled out the vast amounts of money: 
+“The Department of Justice (DOJ) will determine which 'qualified organizations' get leftover settlement cash and Democrat-tied groups like the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the open-borders National Council of La Raza (NCLR) stand to get large sums based on the hastily arranged deal which got court approval in just a few days.” 
+The disgraced ACORN , the group that used protests to pressure banks into giving mortgages to people who couldn't qualify , was among those receiving Obama justice department funds. The group is now known under its new name, Mutual Housing Association of New York. 
+The DOJ also gave funds to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which carries the very name of the legislation signed into law by Bill Clinton — The Community Reinvestment Act — believed by many to be responsible for the implosion of the mortgage-lending industry. 
+Some additional groups receiving the bank settlement money included: 
+Minneapolis High Rise Representative Council [ACORN affiliate] 
+La Raza ",FAKE
+7821,Links 10/28/16,"‘White smoke’ on EU-Canada trade deal breakthrough Politico 
+EU-Canada trade deal salvaged after Belgian regions concede Financial Times. Note the vote is today but everyone acts as if this is a done deal. The Walloons weren’t even given a real fig leaf: 
+A provision allowing the European Court of Justice to provide an “opinion” on the legality of the these courts was seized on as a victory by anti-Ceta campaigners, but officials briefed on the declaration said any such opinion would not be binding as there was nothing in the declaration to reopen the Ceta pact. 
+“The treaty itself has not been touched, not a comma has been touched,” Mr Michel told parliament.",FAKE
+3966,Turkey Says It Shot Down A Russian Warplane Near Border With Syria,"Turkey Says It Shot Down A Russian Warplane Near Border With Syria
+
+Turkey says that after issuing 10 warnings in five minutes, two of its F-16s shot down a Russian warplane that Turkey claims violated its airspace.
+
+On Twitter, Russia's Defense Ministry said its Sukhoi SU-24 was flying ""only within the borders of Syrian territory."" Its pilots, the Russians said, appear to have ejected.
+
+Later in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the action a ""stab in the back by the terrorists' accomplices.""
+
+According to The Associated Press, Putin went on to say that there would be ""significant consequences.""
+
+""We will never tolerate such atrocities as happened today and we hope that the international community will find the strength to join forces and fight this evil,"" Putin said.
+
+The AP published video that appears to show a damaged warplane crash into a hillside. The video, shot from Turkey's Hatay province, then appears to show the pilots parachuting down:
+
+The Washington Post reports that Russia initially disputed Turkey's version of events, saying the plane was likely downed ""due to shelling from the ground.""
+
+Update at 3 p.m. ET: Body Of One Pilot Found
+
+A spokesman for a Syrian rebel group called the 10th Coastal Brigade told NPR's Alison Meuse that it had the body of one of the Russian pilots and also released a video showing the body. The group said the pilot was dead when it found him. He could have been killed in the shoot-down of his jet, when he came under fire during his parachute descent or in a barrage of fire that the rebels laid down to prevent the pilots from heading to a regime-held area nearby.
+
+The spokesman said the group does not know the condition or whereabouts of the second pilot. He may have run to regime-held areas.
+
+Update at 3:10 p.m. ET: Rebels Say They Downed Copter
+
+Another Syrian rebel group, the First Coastal Division, tells NPR that it destroyed a Russian helicopter that had landed about 7 km from the area where the Russian jet was downed.
+
+The helicopter was shot down by a TOW missile provided by a covert U.S. program to support Syrian rebels, according to the media director for the group, which is part of the Free Syrian Army coalition.
+
+The media director did not have information on the Russian crew of the helicopter. The group has released a video purporting to show the attack on the helicopter, showing it engulfed in a huge explosion.
+
+NATO officials held an extraordinary meeting to discuss the incident. Afterward, NATO's secretary general Jens Stoltenberg released a statement saying, ""We stand in solidarity with Turkey and support the territorial integrity of our NATO ally, Turkey"":
+
+The downing of the warplane figured into today's White House meeting between President Obama and French President Francois Hollande, who is trying to shore up support following the recent attacks in Paris.
+
+Obama said Turkey had the right to defend its territory. But he also said both sides need to find out what happened and to ""discourage any kind of escalation."" The president added:",REAL
+4924,"Trump Brings Message of Faith, Unity to Black Church","Donald Trump addressed Great Faith Ministries International, a predominately black church, in Detroit on Saturday. He delivered a focused message on unity and the importance of faith in healing a divided nation.
+
+The Republican nominee was greeted warmly by congregants. Although he is not wildly popular among their voting bloc, his message resonated with the faith community.
+
+""For centuries, the African American church has been the conscience of our country,"" Trump told the congregation.
+
+""I will always support your church — always — and defend your right to worship,"" he added. ""I hope my presence here will also help your voice to reach new audiences in our country and many of these audiences desperately need your spirit and your thought.""
+
+Trump sympathized with the group, telling them that he wants a country that ensures a right for everyone to a great education and to live in safety and peace.
+
+""I fully understand that the African-American community has suffered from discrimination and there are many wrongs that should be made right,"" he said.
+
+Trump's visit comes shortly after hiring former Apprentice star Omarosa Manigault as the director of African-American outreach with the hopes of securing the minority vote. Trump was also joined by former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson.
+
+""Today, I just want to let you know I am here to listen to you and I am doing that,"" Trump said, adding that as a leader he wants to ""step into the community and learn what is going on.""
+
+The billionaire mogul did just that as he swayed quietly while the church choir sang ""What a Mighty God We Serve."" Later he was donned with a prayer shawl by the church's pastor, Bishop Wayne Jackson, and given a Jewish Heritage Study Bible.
+
+""This is a prayer shawl straight from Israel. Whenever you're flying from coast to coast -- I know you just came back from Mexico and you'll be flying from city to city -- there is an anointing. And anointing is the power of God,"" Jackson said. ""It's going to be sometimes in your life that you're going to feel forsaken, you're going to feel down, but the anointing is going to lift you up. I prayed over this personally and I fasted over it, and I wanted to just put this on you.""
+
+Trump closed his speech by reading 1 John 4:12, 'No one has ever seen God but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.' And that's so true,"" he said.
+
+Some of the congregants walked away loving Trump and others said they felt no differently about him.
+
+Booker Sawyer III, a real estate agent, told ABC News he was pleased with what he saw.
+
+""It's a blessing to have him here because we just want to hear -- be open to what he has to say,"" he said.
+
+Carol Thomas told the news organization that she has been offended by the things he has said in the past, but that his visit was a ""smart move.""
+
+""At least he can have somebody he can talk to, somebody that is on his level as far as economically, that he can see that all a black people are not so impoverished or we need so much help, because some people have arrived and helped themselves,"" she said.
+
+Jacqueline Wilson, a cashier and a church member, was reluctant to give her political opinion but referred to the Bible when speaking on Trump.
+
+""God says judge no man because you shall be judged,"" she said. ""It's not about Democrat or Republican, it's about who has God's potential.""",REAL
+2396,Obamacare's unlikely No. 1 city,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+7164,"Surveillance ""Reforms"" Allow NSA Greater Access Than Ever to Phone Data","Email 
+Even as surveillance hawks such as FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and joint chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee Senators Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) continue to claim that terrorists and other criminals are using technology to “go dark,” so America needs an increased ability to perform civilian surveillance, the reality is that the hawks have more access to more data than ever before. And — as recent information confirms — many of the reasons for that increased surveillance ability are the supposed “reforms” that were sold to the American people as a way to curtail that surveillance. 
+Those in power — especially those who have built their careers in government by expanding the surveillance state — are not above using manipulation to increase their power by increasing that surveillance. The recent surveillance “reforms” — particularly the misnamed USA FREEDOM Act — prove that point perhaps better than anything else could. As this writer said last year: On Saturday, November 28, 2015, the NSA telephone surveillance program ended. Except that it didn't. The spying program — made famous when former NSA contractor Ed Snowden leaked a trove of secret documents to reporters — has simply continued under different authority. The ""new and improved"" surveillance may even be worse than before because the required warrants will be issued by a secret court. When the USA FREEDOM Act became law in June 2015, it was sold to the American people as a solution to the unwarranted surveillance Snowden had revealed. The law was set to take effect November 28, 2015 and ""reform"" that warrantless surveillance. The USA FREEDOM Act, like the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, is a misnomer. The name is a not-very-subtle manipulation, designed to hide from the American people the real nature of the law. The architects of the USA PATRIOT Act used the word ""patriot"" to persuade Americans that the ""patriotic"" way to confront the specter of terrorism was to trade liberty for security. It took the one but never delivered the other. Likewise, in the USA FREEDOM Act, the use of the word ""freedom"" is designed to convince Americans that their freedom is being returned to them by ""reforming"" the surveillance state. In fact, no such reform is taking place . 
+And while the surveillance hawks claim that the “war on terror” (another misnomer) depends on mass surveillance, there is more at stake here than just security. Liberty — and the privacy that must necessarily accompany it — falls in direct proportion to the rise of the surveillance state. In the digital age, there is no line of demarcation between digital privacy and any other privacy, between digital liberty and any other liberty. After all, if you have no choice about the data that is collected on you and who has access to it — including your phone calls, texts, e-mails, browsing history, calendar, and more — can you really be said to be free? 
+Mass surveillance, far from a solution, is itself a major part of the problem. Not only does it threaten privacy and liberty, it is counterproductive to the stated goal of finding and stopping terrorists. If one is trying to find a needle in a haystack, adding more hay is not the way to go about it; investigators should narrow their searches, not expand them. 
+The rise of the surveillance state in the 15 years since 9/11 has taken its toll on the American spirit. And yet, even while gathering data on more and more of the inhabitants of planet Earth at a greater and greater rate, the surveillance hawks still want more. Last December, Senator Burr wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal that was laden with errors, half-truths, and outright lies. The article claimed that encryption — used by millions of ordinary people every day — is a tool of terrorism which “allows criminals and terrorists, as the law enforcement community says, to 'go dark' and plot with abandon.” In an obvious attempt at giving lip service to the rights of individuals to protect their privacy and liberty, Burr wrote: Consumer information should be protected, and the development of stronger and more robust levels of encryption is necessary. Unfortunately, the protection that encryption provides law-abiding citizens is also available to criminals and terrorists. Today's messaging systems are often designed so that companies' own developers cannot gain access to encrypted content — and, alarmingly, not even when compelled by a court order. This allows criminals and terrorists, as the law enforcement community says, to ""go dark"" and plot with abandon. 
+But is Burr correct? Does modern technology allow “ criminals and terrorists, as the law enforcement community says, to ‘go dark’ and plot with abandon”? Not even close. The myth of “going dark” is little more than a bogey-man, used to scare people into sacrificing their rights for the hollow promise of safety. As this writer said in the article quoted above: When the final USA FREEDOM Act vote was counted in the Senate on June 2, 2015, The New American 's Warren Mass reported that the act, which was sold to the American people as a way to ""reform the authorities of the Federal Government"" to (among other things) conduct electronic surveillance for ""foreign intelligence, counterterrorism, and criminal purposes,"" was both misleading and unnecessary. If true reform had been the goal, a large part of that goal had already been accomplished. On May 31 the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, which had been interpreted to allow much of the surveillance exposed by Snowden, expired: Many of those authorities — which the National Security Agency (NSA) has used to justify the collection of phone records — had been found in provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act that expired at midnight Sunday night. Therefore, Congress could have eliminated those surveillance powers merely by doing nothing. Despite promises made by its supporters, the USA Freedom Act doesn't end government snooping. It merely shifts the responsibility for collecting communications metadata from the NSA to companies such as AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, which already keep customer records for as long as five years. The NSA or the FBI would simply need to obtain permission from the secret FISA Court to access that data — and the court nearly always grants it. 
+At the time The New American published that article and the previous article by Warren Mass (which is quoted in that article), the mainstream media was singing the praises of the USA FREEDOM Act. Recently, our dire predictions of greater surveillance resulting from the very law which promised to curtail that surveillance have been shown true. And the same mainstream media is now confirming that. ABC News recently reported that the “NSA can access more phone data than ever,” and said: One of the reforms designed to rein in the surveillance authorities of the National Security Agency has perhaps inadvertently solved a technical problem for the spy outfit and granted it potential access to much more data than before, a former top official told ABC News. 
+The article cites Chris Inglis, who served as the NSA's deputy director until January 2014. Inglis told ABC News that before the USA FREEDOM Act, the NSA had incomplete access to phone records because the agency had to pull the data from several different networks, reformat much of it and compile it “according to existing privacy policies.” Since the USA FREEDOM Act shifts much of that responsibility to the carriers — who are required under the law to maintain that data and make it available to the NSA — Inglis told ABC News that all the technical and compliance issues are now ""somebody else's problem."" The report also says: The USA Freedom Act ended the NSA's bulk collection of metadata but charged the telecommunications companies with keeping the data on hand. The NSA and other U.S. government agencies now must request information about specific phone numbers or other identifying elements from the telecommunications companies after going through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and arguing that there is a ""reasonable, articulable suspicion"" that the number is associated with international terrorism. As a result, the NSA no longer has to worry about keeping up its own database and, according to Inglis, the percentage of available records has shot up from 30 percent to virtually 100. Rather than one internal, incomplete database, the NSA can now query any of several complete ones. The new system ""guarantees that the NSA can have access to all of it,"" Inglis said. 
+Just let that marinate for a while: ""The NSA can have access to all of it."" 
+So the American people were sold a bill of goods. One thing was promised and another delivered. If the mainstream media had reported on this as The New American did, perhaps America could have been spared this increased surveillance. As it is, the mainstream media is catching on too little, too late. 
+As the surveillance hawks on the one side and privacy advocates on the other side continue to wage the battle for digital privacy, it is likely that some type of “compromise” will be offered to “solve the problem” of encryption. 
+Don’t fall for it. Photo of the White House: CC-BY-SA-3.0 / Matt H. Wade  ",FAKE
+352,Why did Obama send another 450 trainers to Iraq? (+video),"What are so few trainers going to do in an Iraq besieged by the Islamic State? They send a message.
+
+President Obama’s decision to send an additional 450 troops to Iraq to train mostly Sunni fighters for the battle to oust the Islamic State is a modest gesture aimed at a very big problem – Iraq’s wide and deepening sectarian divide between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
+
+The new trainers, expected to arrive in Iraq within a few days, will go to a different location from the 3,050 United States soldiers already in Iraq and assisting in the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces.
+
+The difference is that the objective of the new site will be to train and arm Sunnis who have largely been excluded from other efforts at building up Iraq’s security forces. This is a priority that Obama administration officials describe as crucial to the effort to reverse the territorial gains of the Islamic State and ultimately push it out of Iraq.
+
+“It’s critically important to get the Sunnis in the main security forces,” said Elissa Slotkin, assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs, in a teleconference with reporters Wednesday. “That’s another reason we want … US forces on the ground,” she adds, “to help facilitate that conversation” about ensuring that Iraq will “have the military represent the people who are resident in Iraq.”
+
+The new training site at Taqaddum air base is significant – and not just because it was the launch pad for the thousands of US Marines who fought for months in 2007 to take back the nearby city of Fallujah from Sunni insurgents. It was those same extremists who rose from defeat to regroup in war-ravaged Syria and form the Islamic State.
+
+Taqaddum (the Marines simply called it “TQ”) is located outside Ramadi, the capital of the Sunni-dominated Anbar province that Islamic State militants have largely controlled since sweeping into Iraq from Syria a year ago.
+
+Now it will be the goal of the US trainers at TQ to build a fighting force, drawn largely from local Sunni tribes, to spearhead the fight to take back Ramadi, which fell to the Islamic State last month, and begin pushing the extremists out of Anbar.
+
+It is a very tall order – and one that stands virtually no chance of succeeding in the absence of broad political reforms by the Shiite-led government in Baghdad that address the deep marginalization and political exclusion of Iraq’s Sunnis. That alienation has left many Sunnis either indifferent to Islamic State gains or in some cases even sympathetic to them.
+
+Mr. Obama’s order reflects a request from Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi for more help for the fight to retake lost territory from the Islamic State. But it is also an attempt to emphasize the president’s conviction that no amount of US assistance can succeed without an “inclusive” government in Baghdad and Sunni buy-in to the new Iraq.
+
+Just days ago at the Group of Seven meeting of leading industrialized nations in Germany, Obama essentially said that the US had too many trainers in Iraq already, speaking of “more training capacity than we’ve got recruits.” But Obama has made it clear he believes what’s lacking is a military that includes all of Iraq’s communities – and in particular the disenfranchised Sunnis.
+
+""You've had in the past, some of the Sunni tribes who have not joined the regular Iraqi security forces – because of some of the political tensions and divisions in Iraqi politics over the last several years,"" said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, on the same teleconference. ""Part of what we're aiming to do ... is to provide different pipelines for Iraqis to get into the fight under the umbrella of the Iraqi security forces.""
+
+Addressing the Iraqi shortcomings after meeting Monday with Mr. Abadi on the margins of the G7 summit, Obama zeroed in on the sectarian factor.
+
+Iraq’s Sunnis are “willing and prepared to fight,” he said, but bringing them into the security forces and training programs “has not been happening as fast as it needs to.”
+
+Obama’s decision is also intended to bolster Abadi, a Shiite politician facing opposition within the Iraqi government to any gestures toward the Sunnis. The administration views Abadi as open to political reforms but hesitant before the stiff headwinds he’s encountering from more-hardline Shiites.
+
+In addition, the plan to empower Iraq’s Sunnis is intended as something of a counterbalance to Iran’s growing influence in Iraq. Iran is advising and equipping the Shiite militias that have filled the void left by a collapsed Iraqi Army and police force.
+
+But those militias have also deepened the wedge between Shiites and Sunnis, with many Shiites welcoming their (and Iran’s) growing influence while Sunnis accuse them of abuses and serving Shiite purposes.
+
+Obama has consistently said the fight to oust the Islamic State is one the Iraqis have to win themselves, and Wednesday’s announcement only underscores that perspective. By sending 450 additional trainers to Iraq, Obama can hardly hope to heal Iraq’s sectarian divide. But the step may at least test whether the Iraqi will and intent are there to do it.",REAL
+7284,GERMANY: Parents outraged after German primary school ‘forces’ children to chant “Allahu Akbar” and “there is no God but Allah” in Muslim prayer,"BNI Store Oct 27 2016 GERMANY: Parents outraged after German primary school ‘forces’ children to chant “Allahu Akbar” and “there is no God but Allah” in Muslim prayer The father of the pupil at the girl’s primary school in German ski resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen discovered that his daughter had been forced to learn the Islamic prayer when he discovered a handout she had been given. He claimed she had been “forced” by teachers to memorize the Islamic chants and forwarded the handout to Austrian news service unsertirol24. UK Express (h/t Terry D) The handout read: “Oh Allah, how perfect you are and praise be to you. Blessed is your name, and exalted is your majesty. There is no God but you.” It had been given to the girl during a lesson in “ethics” at the Bavarian school. Headteacher Gisela Herl did not confirm the incident when questioned, but said the school would issue a written statement detailing its position in the coming week. The incident comes just weeks after parents complained to German newspaper Hessian Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA) that their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” to accommodate the “diverse cultures” of other pupils. The Sara Nussbaum House daycare centre in Kassel refused to put up a Christmas tree, tell Christmas stories or celebrate Christmas in general because it said only a minority of pupils. A spokesman for Kassel explained: “There will be no Christmas celebrations, in the strictest sense. Because the majority of children at this kindergarten are not Christian the festival will not be celebrated in the way that it is at other schools.” Migrants now outnumber native children at many schools in Germany as the country has been inundated with Muslim migrants in recent years. More than one million migrants are estimated to have arrived in Germany during the last year alone. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees estimates that another 200,000 Muslims will apply for asylum in 2017.",FAKE
+1550,Sanders gets the fight he wanted,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+4182,Is Clinton ready for the Wild West campaign of Donald Trump?,"Presidential campaigns are always studies in contrast, but rarely have the differences between the two major party nominees — and the kind of campaigns they plan to run — been as stark and as unusual as those between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
+
+His political instincts are as rash as hers are cautious. Her policy proposals are as detailed and numerous as his are broad and few in numbers. Her public appearances are controlled and careful. His are the political equivalent of “The Truman Show.” She says he is unqualified to be president. He says she is unfit to serve.
+
+There are certainly ideological differences between the two. But this is not an election that presents voters with the kind of choice they had in 2012. President Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney had sharply different views about social and cultural issues, the size and scope of government, the best ways to create jobs, and projecting U.S. power abroad.
+
+Some Democrats probably would take issue with the suggestion that the ideological divisions between Trump and Clinton are less clear than those between Romney and Obama. The Clinton team will appeal to her base with many of the same arguments Obama used against the GOP nominee four years ago.
+
+But Trump is not Romney. If the policy differences between Clinton and Trump were the same as those between Obama and Romney, conservative intellectuals (and many GOP elected officials) would be far more comfortable with Trump as their presumptive nominee.
+
+Ideological consistency is not part of his Trump’s political DNA. He has been on various sides of various issues — in this campaign and in past years. He will campaign to Clinton’s right on issues such as immigration, gun rights, abortion and repealing the Affordable Care Act. He will crowd her from the left on things like trade (though she has shifted on that issue), infrastructure spending and the use of military force.
+
+That’s only a small part of what makes the coming campaign so intriguing. The ways in which Clinton and Trump will run their campaigns could be as defining as where they stand on this or that issue. A walk through their campaign offices hints at these differences.
+
+Clinton’s headquarters is sprawling in its size and population, projecting a leave-nothing-to-chance philosophy. Her campaign operates out of two spacious floors in a Brooklyn office building that features spectacular views of Lower Manhattan. The quarters reflect some sensibilities of a tech start-up, but with a corporate overlay.
+
+Trump’s campaign headquarters is on a floor of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. The space is small and cramped in comparison to Clinton’s, populated by only a handful of people. The office has an industrial quality to it, having once been used for building sets for the reality TV show “The Apprentice.”
+
+There are plans to expand elsewhere in the building to meet the demands of a presumptive nominee, and Trump has set up a Washington office. But compared with Clinton and by normal standards, the Trump campaign has been a minuscule organization, operating largely from the visceral instincts of the candidate. For a long period of time, the inner circle numbered just five people.
+
+Clinton’s campaign has been built on a foundation of successful recent campaigns, particularly those of Obama in 2008 and 2012. It will have massive organizations in the battleground states — paid staff and volunteers. They will be backed by prodigious amounts of research — polling data, focus group findings, voter data, analytics and modeling — designed to draw a detailed picture of the battleground electorates.
+
+The campaign is beginning serious analysis of those electorates. In some states where the demographics are more challenging, the Clinton team will seek to persuade undecided or wavering voters to carry the day. In others, such as Florida, where the demographics are more favorable to the Democrats, the campaign probably will focus more on registering those who haven’t participated in the past and then mobilize every possible Democratic voter to turn out.
+
+Trump consumes and spouts polling data around the clock, using it as a justification for his candidacy and how he conducts himself. Yet he has just now hired a pollster, having rejected the need for one in the primaries. He shows little personal interest in the need for the kind of data and analytics now considered a requirement of modern campaigns.
+
+His expanded team is building state organizations and deepening ties with the Republican National Committee for additional muscle. But his get-out-the-vote operation may never be as comprehensive as Clinton’s, although his advisers say their primary state organizations were better and deeper than they’ve been given credit for.
+
+Where the real differences will come into play are the campaign and communication skills of the candidates. Trump has broken rules in the primaries and shows little inclination to change. He is indiscriminate in doling out interviews — he talks to everybody all the time — and is both strategic and undisciplined about the way he communicates. Clinton is far more controlled, parceling out television interviews and avoiding real interactions with the reporters who have been traveling with her for the past year.
+
+Trump will dominate the hourly news cycle conversation and will be merciless in his attacks on Clinton, as he was against his Republican opponents. Her advisers are not convinced that what worked for him in the primaries will be successful with the broader electorate. They have been studying him, culling information from those who know how he operates as a way of determining the most effective ways of responding. They aren’t sure they’ve cracked the case.
+
+Clinton will not be the main respondent to Trump. Though she has begun to attack Trump in her campaign appearances, campaign officials and surrogates will carry most of the load of answering back as needed. Whether that can break through in an environment in which Trump’s voice speaks loudly is the issue.
+
+Clinton will focus on what she would do to make people’s lives better — a message that has generated little excitement during the primaries. To the extent she talks about Trump, her message will be the obvious: that a Trump presidency is too risky in all respects. He will try to blow past all that in an effort to galvanize those voters sick of the status quo and paint her as a representative of a tired past.
+
+Her advisers think she has the discipline and an outer shell tough enough to prevent him from provoking her unnecessarily. In turn, they think she and they can get under his skin and divert his attention from the factors that will determine how people vote. Trump’s team thinks she doesn’t understand the mood of the electorate.
+
+Clinton has never met an opponent like Trump or run in such a campaign environment as the one that will unfold over the next five-plus months. That reality will animate the election and dictate the tone and pace of the campaign — though not necessarily the outcome.",REAL
+3989,ISIS Suspected in Russia Crash: What It Means,"Growing evidence is leading investigators to believe a bomb may have downed the Russian passenger plane over the Sinai this past weekend.
+
+A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says intercepted communications played a role in the tentative conclusion that the Islamic State group's Sinai affiliate planted an explosive device on the plane.
+
+But the official says there has been no formal judgment because forensic evidence from the blast site, including the airplane's black box, are still being analyzed. 
+
+ 
+
+Meanwhile, intelligence analysts say they don't believe the operation was ordered by ISIS leaders in Raqqa, Syria. Rather, they believe that if it were a bombing, it was planned and executed by the Islamic State's affiliate in the Sinai, which operates autonomously.
+
+CBN News Terrorism Analyst Erick Stakelbeck says if ISIS claims responsibility for something, they're usually right.
+
+ 
+
+""ISIS has had a pretty good track record [when it comes to] responsibility,"" Stakelbeck said. ""When they claim responsibility for an attack, it usually does turn out to be them. We don't know so far in this case, but ISIS has not been known to go out on a limb and say something that they didn't do.""
+
+*Click below to watch CBN's Terrorism Analyst Erick Stakelbeck, Chief International Reporter Gary Lane, and Senior International Reporter George Thomas discuss the implications of this event.
+
+The British government did not wait to take action to protect its tourists.
+
+""There will be no U.K. passenger flights out to Sharm el-Sheikh from now [on],"" U.K. Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond said. ""Passengers who are on the ground in Sharm el-Sheikh will be returned to the U.K.
+
+Some British tourists were not happy about the move.
+
+""I would prefer to come here and make my own decision, rather than the government tell us I couldn't go,"" British tourist Julie Wattenberg said.
+
+""It would be a really bad decision because I think that nowadays, this could happen anywhere in the world,"" another tourist from Great Britain, Helen Collins, said. ""You need to live your life and not let the terrorists win.""
+
+Investigators will now be looking at how a bomb might have gotten on board.
+
+""What these aviation experts from the U.K. are going to be looking at is was it possible someone who worked for one of the airlines, [like] a grounds crew person, actually went in and planted that bomb,"" CBN News Chief International Correspondent Gary Lane said.
+
+Russian teams are now wrapping up their search for human remains from the Saturday crash that killed all 224 people onboard. Only 140 bodies have been recovered so far.",REAL
+1925,Political world's eyes on New Hampshire,"The state that hosts the nation's first presidential primary will hold its first can't-miss event for the Republican field of 2016 presidential contenders -- the First-in-the-Nation Republican Leadership Summit -- on Friday and Saturday.
+
+New Hampshire's blend of Rockefeller Republicans and tea party faithful can make it tricky terrain for Republicans, who will play to a more socially conservative base in Iowa than they'll find in the Granite State.
+
+But the wide array of candidates -- which range form libertarian-inclined Rand Paul, to brassy East Coaster Chris Christie to culturally conservative Scott Walker -- have plans to test the waters, fanning out across the state over the weekend for additional speeches, meetings, fundraisers and meet-and-greets of their own.
+
+And once they've left, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton will be in town. A week after kicking off her presidential campaign and on the heels of a three-day swing through Iowa, Clinton will be in New Hampshire on Monday and Tuesday. She is scheduled for similarly small-scale events as her Iowa trip: roundtables with students, educators and business leaders, as well as private meetings with Democratic activists and officials, a campaign aide said. Though Republicans can face challenges in New Hampshire, it's a place that's treated the Clintons well. Bill Clinton found his political resurrection in the Granite State during his 1992 campaign, and it's where Hillary salvaged her cratering 2008 campaign as well. She eventually succumbed to eventual Democratic nominee Barack Obama, but not until after many more months of campaigning thanks in large part to her surprise win in the New England primary. New Hampshire voters are proud -- and protective -- of their first-in-the-nation primary status. Iowa voters weigh in first, but they attend caucuses, rather than casting ballots like they would in a general election. Though the primary date hasn't been set yet, it will likely be in late January or early February 2016. From now until then, though, New Hampshire voters are sure to see plenty of 2016 candidates, particularly from the broad Republican field as the candidates jockey for momentum. The entire GOP field -- declared and undeclared candidates -- gets their first taste of the ""Live free or die"" state at the First-in-the-Nation Republican Leadership Summit hosted by the New Hampshire Republican Party on Friday and Saturday in Nashua. Candidates are scheduled to deliver speeches throughout both days. Leading up to and following the summit, presidential hopefuls have packed their schedules. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was on hand for town halls; former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush scheduled several meetings with voters and the press; and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will hold a meet-and-greet on Sunday.",REAL
+7112,Vladimir Putin: The United States continues to sleep with al-Nusra,"By Jonas E. Alexis on October 27, 2016 Putin: “Some people, from the outside, think that if they can ‘comb’ the region to how they see fit – some of them call this ‘democracy’ – then the region will come into calmness and order. That’s not how it is."" “Will NWO agents ever learn logic?” …by Jonas E. Alexis 
+The United States and New World Order agents have obviously enough reasons to hate Vladimir Putin because he doesn’t back down when it comes to fighting terrorism and the New World Order in Syria. Putin delivers. And obviously NWO agents would love to see his head on a silver platter. Putin declares: 
+“ You know what [the Americans] can’t answer us? The key armed opposition group…al-Nusra…Yes, this organization is one of the key ones in the armed opposition [against Assad]. The U.S. State Department has confirmed it is a terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda. Al-Nusra does not hide that fact. And – what are [the Americans suggesting]? For al-Nusra to be in the future parliament? 
+“Or, here’s another example. They support certain organizations that are fighting against Assad in Syria, yet those same countries [who support them in Syria] fight against these organizations in Mali. Often, not only are they the same organizations – they are the same individuals. They simply leave Syria and go to fight in Mali – where western states do not support them. Then the same people go back to Syria and there they are supported.” 
+Read those statements again and ask yourself these questions: When was the last time that a leader in Europe and in America ever pointed them out? Has even John Kerry ever taken time to responsibly address this internal contradiction? Has any NWO agent ever even bothered to give their listeners a rational response? 
+Well, not a single NWO agent has ever attempted to formulate a serious answer. Not one. In fact, what we have been hearing over and over is that Russia is the bad guy; Putin is a potentate seeking to expand Russia’s influence in the entire world; Russia is not attacking ISIS or terrorist groups but civilians in Syria, and on and on it goes. 
+Putin asks: “Where is the logic? How will it all end? These are not just empty words.” 
+Well, Mr. Putin, there is no logic at all. The New World Order does not have to have logic and formulate serious arguments. They have to resort to name calling, colossal hoaxes, complete and deliberate fabrications, and deceptive means. These issues have been certainly frustrating to Russian officials, including Russia’s Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Maria Zakharova. YouTube - Veterans Today - 
+Christopher A. Preble wrote in The New Republic that Assad posed no threat whatsoever to the security of the United States, that it was foolish for the US to get involved in this war, and that 81 percent of the American people did not approve sending troops to Syria. [1] 
+Russia in particular wanted to talk to the Syrian rebels in order to settle a peace treaty, but their response was that the toppling of Assad was a precondition for peace talk. [2] Who, then, are the real terrorists? 
+No New World Order agent will answer this question in any rational fashion because the system itself is incoherent and worthless. Putin again nails it when he says: “Some people, from the outside, think that if they can ‘comb’ the region to how they see fit – some of them call this ‘democracy’ – then the region will come into calmness and order. That’s not how it is. Without taking into account the history, the traditions, religious particularities, you must not do anything in the Middle East, especially as an outsider.” 
+Obviously New World Order agents, most specifically the Neocons, are still upset with Putin. They still blame him for virtually anything bad that happens in Syria. Flaming Neocon Max Boot has recently written: 
+“Russia aircraft dropped incendiaries, cluster munitions, and even giant ‘bunker buster’ bombs on homes and hospitals, killing and maiming at random.” [3] 
+Boot talks about “a durable peace” in Syria, but for that to happen, he advocates a serious confrontation with Assad, which would inexorably lead to another confrontation with Russia. 
+In a similar vein, Matthew Kroenig of the Weekly Standard cannot sleep well at night because he thinks that “Putin’s nuclear trash talk needs a serious response.” [4] 
+If Putin is the real threat here, then Kroenig has a lot of rethinking to do precisely because the state of Israel doesn’t just declare that they have nuclear warheads. They literally declare that they can obliterate cities in Europe practically overnight. Remember Martin van Creveld’s bold statement? Here it is again: “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force…. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.” [5] 
+Keep in mind that Creveld is an Israeli military historian. He has written books for Cambridge University Press and other academic institutions. Yet Zionist outlets were completely silent about his statement. In fact, they never seriously challenged him or even the state of Israel on that very issue. 
+Those outlets are much more interested in Vladimir Putin and Assad than addressing the serious issues. That is one reason why organs like the Economist , Newsweek , and the New Statesman never missed an opportunity to attack Putin. 
+Yet despite all their lies and fabrications, Russia continues to thrive. Perhaps NWO agents need to learn very quickly that truth will triumph in the end. 
+[1] Christopher A. Preble, “Please, Mr. President, Don’t Intervene in Syria,” New Republic , December 14, 2012. 
+[2] Michal Shmulovich, “Russian FM’s Overtures for Talks,” Times of Israel , December 28, 2012. 
+[3] Max Boot, “Cleaning Up Obama’s Syria’s Mess,” Commentary, October 14, 2016. 
+[4] Matthew Kroenig, “Putin’s Nuclear Trash Talk Needs a Serious Response,” Weekly Standard , October 24, 2016. 
+[5] Quoted in “The War Game,” Guardian , September 21, 2003. Related Posts:",FAKE
+2428,"ObamaCare fallout? Supreme Court ruling sets up potential Obama, GOP battle","The upcoming Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act could wipe out insurance for millions of people covered by the president’s health care plan, leaving states that didn't set up their own health care markets scrambling to subsidize coverage for those left uninsured.
+
+Twenty-six of the 34 states that would be hardest hit by the ruling have GOP governors. Twenty-two of the 24 Senate seats that are up for re-election in 2016 are currently held by Republicans. What that means is that it’s the GOP – and not the White House –that’s working on damage control.
+
+President Obama’s landmark legislation offers subsidized private insurance to those without access to it on the job. In the Supreme Court case, opponents of the law argue that its literal wording allows the government to subsidize coverage only in states that set up their own health insurance markets.
+
+The justices will determine whether the law makes people in all 50 states eligible for federal tax subsidies -- or just those who live in states that created their own health insurance marketplaces. The question matters because about three dozen states opted against their own marketplace, or exchange, and instead rely on the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s Healthcare.gov.
+
+If the court rules against the Obama administration, insurance subsidies for people in those states would be in jeopardy.
+
+If the court invalidates the subsidies in those states, the results would be “ugly,” former Kansas insurance commissioner Sandy Praeger told The Associated Press.
+
+""People who are reasonably healthy would just drop coverage,"" she said. ""Only the unhealthy would keep buying health care. It would really exacerbate the problem of the cost of health insurance.""
+
+Praeger, a Republican who retired this year, called it ""a classic death spiral,"" using a term for market collapse.
+
+In March, the Supreme Court appeared divided along ideological lines after hearing the challenge that, if struck down, could affect up to 8 million policy holders.
+
+If the subsidies survive, the ACA will look like settled law to all but a few passionate opponents. However, if they are overturned, the shock could carry into next year’s elections.
+
+Here are just a few of the potential consequences:
+
+Around the time when the court announces its decision, insurers will be working to finalize premiums and plans for the coming year. Contracts with the government for 2016 health law coverage have to be signed by early fall. If the subsidies are overturned, insurers would have to tear up their projections about markets in more than half the states.
+
+Populous states such as Texas, Florida, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, Georgia and Pennsylvania would be among those affected.
+
+State lawmakers could mitigate the impact by setting up their own insurance markets, or exchanges. But that can't be done overnight.
+
+States might try authorizing an exchange, and then contracting with the federal government to run it. But that sort of end-run might prompt lawsuits from opponents of the law.
+
+In any case, most state legislatures will be out of session by the summer.
+
+During arguments, Associate Justice Samuel Alito raised the possibility that the court might be able to delay the effective date of its decision. Even a delay through the end of this year wouldn't buy much time. Enrollment for 2016 health law plans is scheduled to start Nov. 1.
+
+
+
+The health law was designed as a balancing act. Insurers can't turn people away because of health problems, but most healthy people are required to contribute to the insurance pool, and the government subsidizes most of the premium for low- to middle-income households.
+
+Take away subsidies, and the other two parts become unstable.
+
+The law's requirement to carry insurance, never popular, would probably become the biggest target for repeal.
+
+""My guess is there would be overwhelming political support for the elimination of the individual mandate if people can't afford the premiums,"" said former Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who was an influential Obama adviser on health care.
+
+Insurers would demand relief from provisions of the law intended to limit premium increases, or they might drop out of the insurance exchanges.
+
+ 
+
+ STICKER SHOCK FOR SELF-PAY CUSTOMERS
+
+Many people still buy individual health care policies directly from an insurance company, bypassing the law's markets and paying the full cost. They tend to be small-business owners, self-employed professionals and early retirees.
+
+But even they would not escape the tumult in states losing subsidies.
+
+The health law created one big insurance pool in each state, combining customers who purchase their policies directly with those who buy through the government market. If healthy people exit the insurance exchanges in droves, premiums for those buying directly would go up. Some may be unable to afford the higher cost.
+
+""It would set off cascading events,"" said Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. ""The individual market would empty out as premiums rise significantly.""
+
+
+
+Leading congressional Republicans have been walking a fine line, opposing the law in the Supreme Court case while pledging to protect consumers if their side wins.
+
+If the subsidies are overturned, Republicans will first try blaming Obama and the Democrats for writing flawed legislation and then trying to paper over problems with regulations. Then they'll move ahead with a patch to appease angry constituents.
+
+A bill introduced by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., would continue the subsidies for existing customers only on the federal exchange until September 2017. That would open a window for states to act, but it would ultimately leave the problem for the next president and Congress. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is a co-sponsor.
+
+Johnson's bill would repeal the requirements for individuals to have insurance and for larger employers to offer coverage to workers.
+
+Obama is unlikely to accept any of those changes.
+
+""The president is likely to veto whatever we would propose, because we don't have a willing partner,"" said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., leader of a GOP working group on health care.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9047,Comey Letter Hurts GOP As Hillary Clinton Raised $11.3 Million Online In 72 Hours,"The letter from James Comey about the Hillary Clinton email scandal has motivated Democrats, as the Clinton campaign says they raised $11.3 million online in the last 72 hours. 
+Lisa Lerer of the AP reported: Clinton campaign says they've raised $11.3M online in last 72 hrs – the most $s since Clinton became nominee at the convention 
+— Lisa Lerer (@llerer) November 1, 2016 
+The Comey letter was supposed to boost Trump and depress Democratic turnout, but the opposite appears to be happening. James Comey’s interference in the presidential election has motivated Clinton supporters to work harder, give more money, and get to the polls, which in not what Republicans wanted at all. 
+Democrats have seen through Comey’s letter and the Republican spin. The October surprise has failed. Instead, it has made Hillary Clinton even stronger while giving her campaign more resources to use to close out the presidential election. 
+As a political tactic, the Comey letter is harming Republicans. 
+Republicans have thrown everything that they can think of at Hillary Clinton, and nothing has stopped her. Hillary Clinton and her supporters continue to grow stronger, while Donald Trump is marching back into reality television star C-list celebrity obscurity.",FAKE
+6578,Constitutional Law Expert: Comey Did NOT Violate Law By Announcing Email Investigation,"Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid alleges that FBI Director Comey has violated the law by announcing the re-opened investigation into Clinton emails so close to the presidential election. 
+Is he right? 
+One of the top constitutional law experts in the United States (and a liberal), Professor Jonathan Turley, says no : 
+[Reid’s] allegation is in my view wildly misplaced. Reid is arguing that the actions of FBI Director James B. Comey violates the Hatch Act . I cannot see a plausible, let alone compelling, basis for such a charge against Comey. 
+In his letter to Comey, Reid raised the the Hatch Act, which prohibits partisan politicking by government employees. 
+5 U.S.C. § 7323(a)(1) prohibits a government employee from “us[ing] his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” 
+Reid argued: 
+“Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be a clear intent to aid one political party over another. I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act, which bars FBI officials from using their official authority to influence an election. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law.” 
+The reference to “months” is curious. Comey has kept Congress informed in compliance with oversight functions of the congressional committees but has been circumspect in the extent of such disclosures. It is troubling to see Democrats (who historically favor both transparency and checks on executive powers) argue against such disclosure and cooperation with oversight committees. More importantly, the Hatch Act is simply a dog that will not hunt. 
+Richard W. Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House from 2005 to 2007, has filed a Hatch Act complaint against Comey with the federal Office of Special Counsel and Office of Government Ethics. He argues that “We cannot allow F.B.I. or Justice Department officials to unnecessarily publicize pending investigations concerning candidates of either party while an election is underway.” 
+However, Comey was between the horns of a dilemma. He could be accused of acts of commission in making the disclosure or omission in withholding the disclosure in an election year. Quite frankly, I found Painter’s justification for his filing remarkably speculative. He admits that he has no evidence to suggest that Comey wants to influence the election or favors either candidate . Intent is key under the Hatch investigations. You can disagree with the timing of Comey’s disclosure, but that is not a matter for the Hatch Act or even an ethical charge in my view. 
+Congress passed the Hatch Act in response to scandals during the 1938 congressional elections and intended the Act to bar federal employees from using “[their] official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” Comey is not doing that in communicating with Congress on a matter of oversight. 
+Such violations under the Hatch Act, even if proven, are not criminal matters . The Office of Special Counsel -can investigate such matters and seek discipline — a matter than can ultimately go before the Merit Systems Protection Board. 
+CNN confirms : 
+violators aren’t going to jail: the Hatch Act is not a criminal statute. Instead, it is an administrative constraint on government employees. The law is enforced by a special independent federal agency — the Office of Special Counsel — which is charged with investigating complaint allegations and, where found to be meritorious, either pursuing a settlement with the offending employee or prosecuting their case before the federal agency that oversees internal employment disputes — the Merit Systems Protection Board. And for presidential appointees like Comey, the Office of Special Counsel submits a report of its findings along with the employee’s response to the President , who makes a decision on whether discipline is warranted . 
+*** 
+The Hatch Act provision most commonly invoked in discussions of Comey’s letter is 5 U.S.C. § 7323(a)(1), which prohibits a government employee from “us[ing] his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” 
+The key text is the emphasized phrase — which conditions a violation of the statute on whether the employee’s purpose was to interfere with or affect the result of an election. Thus, the Hatch Act does not focus on the effect of the employee’s conduct, but the intent. To that end, if Comey did not intend to interfere with or affect the upcoming election through his letter to Congress, then he did not violate the letter of the Hatch Act.",FAKE
+1961,Rubio looks to April 13 Miami launch,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+3929,"The plight of the bitter nerd: Why so many awkward, shy guys end up hating feminism","It sounds corny to say it like that, but I don’t know how to say it and be believed. I know that because, having experienced this emotion from the inside for most of my life, I sure as hell resisted believing it when I heard people saying it.
+
+There’s no one more resistant to being empathized with or more prone to call attempts to do so “patronizing” than the bitter lonely guy, especially when women try to do it but even when other nerdy guys try to reach out. People like Captain Awkward and Dr. Nerdlove and the founders of the Good Men Project spend huge chunks of their lives trying to help nerdy guys, but still get regularly blasted with extreme vitriol as “feminist SJWs” by said nerdy guys.
+
+I’ve tried to write sympathetically about this stuff in the past: the guilt, the shame, the constant feelings of inadequacy. Indeed, part of the reason I am so determined to write and speak up and be an activist is a shamefaced admission of how lucky I’ve been to get away from where I was a few short years ago, how amazing a turning point 2014 was for me while being a terrible year for everyone else.
+
+The viral meme that inaugurated 2015 as the New Year of the Bitter Male Nerd is MIT professor Scott Aaronson leaving an emotionally vulnerable comment on his blog during a heated argument about misogyny and sexual harassment in the STEM community.
+
+He talks about how in the “battle of the sexes,” awkward shy guys damn sure don’t feel “privileged.” How he, in particular, was plagued with guilt and fear over approaching women, constantly self-castigating over the possibility that he was a sexual harasser or a rapist, to the point where he asked a therapist about the possibility of chemical castration. He talks of reading Andrea Dworkin and other radical feminists who make him feel, as a man, like a monster.
+
+And he concludes as a result of this that feminism is a destructive force for men like him, that the bias of the world is tilted in favor of women and women’s issues because everyone is talking about how to help victims of harassment and sexual assault and no one is talking about how to help him.
+
+And it sucks. I’m not trying to deny that it sucks. Although I was never as bad off as Scott Aaronson I’ve felt a lot of those feelings and, more importantly, I’ve known my share of guys who were that bad off. It seems in every group of nerdy guys I’ve known there’s one guy who’s trapped in a feedback loop of anxiety and self-loathing when it comes to women that goes around and around in circles.
+
+Feminists on the Internet have tried to respond to Aaronson’s piece, some sympathetically, some less so.
+
+I don’t want to rehash all the points Amanda Marcotte and Laurie Penny made. Nor do I have some magic way of squaring the circle and making everything okay for guys like Scott — for both him and me, high school was a long time ago, and the only thing that really heals these wounds isn’t any stirring speech or specific program of self-improvement but just time.
+
+But I will say something that, as a guy who’s Been There, seems obvious to me and necessary to say.
+
+None of the pain Scott talks about came from things that happened to him. They came from things that happened inside his head. He speaks in generalities about “sexual assault prevention workshops,” or of feeling targeted by feminist literature — himself saying that he was perversely drawn to the most radical and aggressive rhetoric he could find, eschewing more moderate writers for the firebreathing of Dworkin and MacKinnon.
+
+He doesn’t talk about anyone targeting or harassing him personally — indeed, how could he be targeted by books written by second-wave feminists when he was a toddler? — but of feeling targeted, of having an accusatory voice inside his mind tormenting him with a pervasive sense of inadequacy, uncleanness, wrongness. It doesn’t seem like anyone in his life was particularly giving him a hard time, but that he was giving himself a hard time and picking up on any critical or negative messages directed at men in general as a way to amplify his negative thoughts.
+
+As someone who’s no stranger to those conditions we call depression and anxiety, I can relate to Scott. As someone whose circle of friends is also no stranger to those conditions, and as someone who’s read David Foster Wallace’s seminal take on the topic, I also can’t blame anyone for being frustrated with Scott.
+
+Depression, at its core, doesn’t really make sense, but it’s really great at hijacking the rest of your brain to make itself make sense, and when the depressed person in question is highly intelligent, you end up with an immaculately logical tower of reasoning for why their depression is wholly rational and inevitable.
+
+That’s how I feel when I look at Scott’s impassioned argument that the dating scene is set up to grind “shy awkward nerds” into the dirt while letting jockish “Neanderthals” have all the women they want. I could point out plenty of evidence, statistical and anecdotal, that this is not in fact the case, as commenters in that thread in fact do — but what would be the point? You can’t argue with emotions that deeply ingrained.
+
+What’s striking to me is that this comes up because Scott very passionately wants to debate that nerds don’t have “male privilege” and that nerdy guys are the victims, not perpetrators, of sexism. He is arguing this to a commenter posting under the name “Amy,” who argues that shy, nerdy guys are in fact plenty dangerous on the grounds that she has been raped by a shy, nerdy boyfriend, and that in her life experience around shy, nerdy guys she’s seen plenty of shy, nerdy guys commit harassment and assault and use their shy nerdiness as a shield against culpability for it.
+
+To be blunt, Scott’s story is about Scott himself spending a lot of time by himself hating himself. When he eventually stops hating himself and, as an older, more mature nerd, asks women out, no women mace him, slap him or ritually humiliate him — instead he ends up with a girlfriend who ends up becoming a wife. So far, so typical. Amy’s story is about being harassed and groped by men in the tech world and, eventually, being raped by a shy, nerdy guy she thought she trusted. So far, so also typical. What’s the biggest difference between Scott’s and Amy’s stories? Scott’s story is about things that happened inside his brain. Amy’s story is about actual things that were done to her by other people against her will, without her control. And Scott, and his commenters, are treating the two as worthy of equivalent degrees of scrutiny. This isn’t a new or unique instance of this kind of blind spot going on. We all know about the Gamergate firestorm where a bunch of anonymous guys on the Internet felt harassed and insulted by an article making general criticisms about “gamer culture” as a whole and deciding to react by harassing specific, individual women, including calling a SWAT team to someone’s house, and treating it as though these two things are equivalent. It’s similar to an earlier instance when “nerd persecution” was cried, when Rebecca Watson talked publicly about being made to feel uncomfortable in an elevator at a conference for atheist thinkers by a guy hitting on her at 4:00 a.m. Watson didn’t name the guy, didn’t share the guy’s social media handle, didn’t show a photo of the guy. The guy remains anonymous to this day. She wasn’t even particularly mean to him — her “Guys, don’t do that” is exactly the kind of blunt, well-intentioned advice guys like Scott say they want. But people acted like Watson, by speaking up about something a guy did to make her feel uncomfortable, had viciously attacked the guy — and, by extension, viciously attacked all shy, awkward guys — and therefore felt justified in viciously attacking her in return. This turns out to be a pattern. For most of us, sex is a big part of our lives, and our relationship to gender therefore a weighted and fraught thing. We all have hang-ups and neuroses, and they’re much more likely to manifest in the way we see sexual attraction and relationships than in the way we do our taxes. No one actually said men have it easy. But men are the ones who by and large get to deal with this as an internal matter. Women are the ones who have to deal with internal hang-ups and, as Laurie Penny points out in her piece, external threats from other people. Guys deal with Women in the abstract, as a category; women deal with specific men who physically threaten them. Guys claim to be harassed more often online than women do, but when guys are “harassed” it means being exposed to a generalized atmosphere of nasty comments and rude behavior. By contrast, women are the ones who get singled out, stalked, who become unwilling celebrities with a horde of people dedicated to “taking her down.” This is what Laurie Penny means — or one of the things she means — when she says that the harm the “patriarchy” causes women is “structural.” Not that all women have it worse than all men. Not that anyone gets away without getting at least a little screwed up by the arbitrary, unreasonable demands our culture makes of us. But that it’s women who disproportionately bear the burden of actual harm, of being directly victimized by other people. I don’t know what the best way is to help guys like Scott Aaronson who wrestle with internal demons. Internal demons are slippery things. I do know that what could help women like Amy is to find the guys who are doing bad things to her and stop those guys from doing that. That’s why feminism is more focused on women’s issues than men’s, because women’s issues are the things happening out in the world where we can do something about them. Similarly, no one gets away without having hang-ups and neuroses about race, but racism — the systematic denial of access to financial and social capital, the being kept out of jobs, the being harassed and shot by law enforcement — is something that happens to black people in this country and not to whites. The questions of how to deal with the roles we’ve been handed down by our parents and our culture and how we parse how much of it is our own personality problems and our own psychology versus our cultural inheritance — that’s a problem all of us have and maybe will continue to have for the rest of human history. But the problem of people being assaulted, harassed, raped, killed? That’s an external, physical problem. That’s something we can do something about. I don’t know how “women,” as a group, can help men with the problems he describes. I can testify from my own experience that getting laid does not, in and of itself, magically make anything better and that if Scott believes (as he says) that living in an era when he would’ve had an arranged marriage at a young age would’ve made his problems vanish, he’s probably wrong. But meanwhile, women are getting stalked and raped and killed. That’s something that men are doing and that men can stop other men from doing. And, with apologies to my fellow emotionally tortured guys, that really ought to be our priority.",REAL
+8990,Drones Are Officially Cleaning Up Ocean Trash [Watch],"Thanks to the intelligent use of technology, the world’s oceans are already getting a little bit cleaner. This is great news, considering that at present, the world’s oceans are ridden with pollution... ",FAKE
+4314,"Clinton, judged winner of debate, holds big national lead over Sanders","Aided by her performance in the first Democratic debate, Hillary Rodham Clinton has regained much of the ground she lost during a summer of controversy and holds a dominating lead nationally over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the contest for her party’s presidential nomination, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
+
+Vice President Biden, who has yet to announce whether he will join the Democratic race in the coming days or weeks, runs third amid signs of slippage over the past month. If he were to decide not to run, the poll indicates that much of his current support would go to Clinton rather than Sanders.
+
+[Read details from the latest Washington Post-ABC News national poll here]
+
+By a wide margin, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents rated Clinton over Sanders as the winner of last week’s debate in Las Vegas. The debate was the first of three events this month that are seen as important tests for Clinton, whose candidacy has been hurt by questions about the security of the private e-mail server and account she used while serving as secretary of state.
+
+On Thursday, Clinton will testify before the House committee that is investigating the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11 and 12, 2012, which led to the deaths of four Americans. Then, on Saturday, she will join other Democratic presidential candidates at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa, a quadrennial testing ground that eight years ago provided a significant boost to then-Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy.
+
+Clinton currently leads the Democratic race with the support of 54 percent of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. That compares with 42 percent in September, by far her lowest level of support over the past two years, and 63 percent in July.
+
+Sanders runs second at 23 percent, almost identical to his September number. The senator from Vermont, who has tapped energy among those in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, saw his support rise steadily throughout the spring and summer. The latest results mark the first time that his support has not moved from one month to the next.
+
+Biden’s possible candidacy draws the support of 16 percent of Democrats, halting a rise to 21 percent in September. That puts him back about where he was when speculation about a possible candidacy began to ramp up in midsummer.
+
+Without Biden in the field, Clinton’s support jumps 10 points to 64 percent among Democratic-leaning voters. Sanders picks up 2 points to 25 percent.
+
+None of the other candidates included in the poll — former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, former senator Jim Webb of Virginia or former Rhode Island senator and governor Lincoln Chafee — registered more than 2 percent. The poll was completed before Webb’s announcement Tuesday that he would no longer seek the Democratic nomination.
+
+Nearly two-thirds of Democrats predict that Clinton will be their party’s nominee. That percentage is lower than the last time the question was asked in a Post-ABC poll, which was in late March. At that time, Sanders had not announced his candidacy and therefore was not a significant factor in the race.
+
+More than seven in 10 Democrats say that Clinton has the best chance of the party’s candidates to win the general election in November 2016. Just one in five cite Sanders as the party’s strongest candidate. In a related question, asked of all adults, 37 percent predicted that she would win the general election, while 20 percent say Republican candidate Donald Trump would win.
+
+Among Democrats, Clinton leads Sanders on who is “closer to you” on the issues by 53 to 36 percent and on who “understands the problems of people like you” by 51 to 37 percent.
+
+Clinton’s weakest attribute among those tested with Democrats came on the question of honesty. Asked who in the field is more honest and trustworthy, 42 percent said Clinton and 41 percent named Sanders.
+
+Clinton recently announced her opposition to the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. The new poll found that 50 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want a president who opposes the pipeline, while 50 percent support Obama’s new trade pact.
+
+Clinton’s positions on the two issues are out of step with the general public. A majority support the Keystone XL pipeline (55 to 34 percent) and a plurality (44 to 32 percent) want the next president to back the trade agreement.
+
+Among Democrats, Clinton has more support with women than men. Her strength among women rose in the new poll after an unexpectedly sharp drop in September. She has more support among voters age 50 and older than among those younger than 50.
+
+Clinton leads Sanders among white Democrats by 49 to 32 percent and among non-whites by 61 to 13. However, white Democrats rate Sanders as more honest and trustworthy. Non-whites say Clinton is more honest.
+
+Clinton’s deep Washington experience as a senator and secretary of state is an asset in the Democratic primary. Among leaning Democrats, 76 percent say they want the next president to have experience in how the political system works. For that group, 64 percent support Clinton, compared with 17 percent for Sanders and 14 percent for Biden.
+
+The Post-ABC poll was conducted Oct. 15 to 18 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults, including land-line and cellphone respondents. Full results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The error margin is plus or minus six points among the sample of 352 Democratic-leaning registered voters.",REAL
+4785,"As Clinton builds on a strong debate, Trump lobs attacks and complaints","Hillary Clinton moved to capitalize Tuesday on a sharp-edged debate performance that exposed vulnerabilities for Donald Trump, excoriating his values and character in an effort to expand her coalition of women, minorities and young voters.
+
+Trump, meanwhile, scrambled to move his campaign forward. While the Republican nominee insisted that he was not unnerved, he and his advisers grasped at excuses to explain why he did not perform better at the first presidential debate Monday night.
+
+Trump on Tuesday was unrepentant and eager to defend his past, denigrating a former beauty pageant winner whom he targeted as his latest foil and vowing to attack Clinton over her husband’s marital infidelities in their next showdown.
+
+In a country divided over two historically unpopular candidates, Trump’s turn is unlikely to shake his core support. But Democrats said they felt assured that Trump’s hot temperament, scattered demeanor and series of statements that left him exposed to further scrutiny would make it increasingly difficult for him to win over the undecided voters he has been courting, especially moderate white women.
+
+“I look back as a former practitioner and say, ‘Is there anything Donald Trump did to convince somebody who wasn’t in his column to be for him?’ ” said David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager. “I have a hard time thinking there’s many of those people. I don’t think he lost anybody. But that’s not his challenge now. He’s got to add.”
+
+Clinton was ebullient as she returned to the campaign trail Tuesday in Raleigh, N.C., and strove to keep alive the controversies that marred Trump’s debate performance.
+
+“The real point is about temperament and fitness and qualification to hold the most important, hardest job in the world, and I think people saw last night some very clear differences between us,” Clinton told reporters aboard her campaign plane en route to North Carolina.
+
+Trump did little to change the subject. In a Tuesday morning interview on Fox News Channel, he said debate moderator Lester Holt, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” was biased, and the Republican complained about the quality of his microphone. Clinton jabbed him for that, telling reporters, “Anybody who complains about the microphone is not having a good night.”
+
+[Trump’s attacks on her weight are ‘a bad dream’ for former Miss Universe]
+
+Trump also disparaged a former Miss Universe pageant winner, Alicia Machado, for her physique. In the debate, Clinton raised Trump’s past comments about the Venezuela-born woman, who was crowned Miss Universe at age 19 in 1996.
+
+“He called this woman ‘Miss Piggy,’ and then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she is Latina,” Clinton said in one of the debate’s more electric exchanges.
+
+The next morning, Trump offered an indignant defense of how he dealt with Machado when he was a partner in the company that owned the Miss Universe contest.
+
+“She was the worst we ever had,” he said on Fox, adding: “She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.”
+
+The Clinton campaign sought to advance the story across media platforms, releasing a Web video featuring the beauty queen-turned-actor, now a U.S. citizen who lives in California, and arranging a conference call for reporters with Machado, who described the election as “like a bad dream.”
+
+Like Trump’s feud this summer with the Muslim parents of a dead U.S. soldier, the Machado episode rapidly emerged as a microcosm of the campaign — and a test of whether Trump can expand his support beyond his base of aggrieved white voters, most of them men.
+
+Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist who has been critical of the party’s nominee, said Trump’s comments about Machado were “hugely tone deaf.” The debate overall, he said, was for many Republicans “an ‘Oh, crap’ moment. If you thought he had a spring in his step for the last few weeks and was getting back in the hunt, that’s pretty much gone.”
+
+Few of Trump’s supporters went so far as to crown him the victor. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who has been a weather vane for the Republican leadership during this election season, was supportive though muted at a Tuesday news conference. He told reporters that Trump gave a “unique, Donald Trump response to the status quo.”
+
+“I think he gave a spirited argument,” Ryan said, “and I think he passed a number of thresholds.”
+
+Trump’s backers insisted that the debate would not damage his standing in the close race with Clinton. Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said, “As far as the temperament, that’s how he’s been for the last 15 months. It got him to the top. . . . He does have the feistiness that I think 51 percent of the American people will like.”
+
+William J. Bennett, who served in President Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet, said of Trump: “When he loses his temper a little bit, many people see that as passion and as someone who’s engaged in the fight and in what he believes. People forgive that — and a leopard can’t change his spots.”
+
+[Why even Republicans think Clinton won the first debate]
+
+It will take several days before the political impact of Monday’s debate becomes clear, but many Republicans said they were bracing for Clinton to get a bump in the polls. An estimated 84 million people watched the clash at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., making it the most-watched presidential debate in history.
+
+The event reverberated around the globe. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox said Trump’s behavior should alarm world leaders because he revealed himself to be “ignorant” and “dangerous.”
+
+“When he speaks about the geoeconomic situation and the geopolitical situation and terrorism, he’s absolutely ignorant, and he’s only provoking us democratic leaders from around the world to reject everything he’s proposing,” Fox, who watched the debate on Mexican television, said in a telephone interview. “He is an imperialistic gringo.”
+
+In the United States, the risk for Trump is that a negative impression sets in on shows such as NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” on social media and in workplace conversations.
+
+Democrats sought to taunt Trump on his uneven performance, particularly given his regular attacks on Clinton’s “stamina” and appearance.
+
+“He seemed unable to handle that big stage, and I really did feel that by the end, with the kind of snorting, the water gulping and the leaning on the lectern, that he just seemed really out of gas,” said Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
+
+Trump previewed an even more combative second debate, Oct. 9 in St. Louis, by saying he might “hit her harder,” perhaps over former president Bill Clinton’s affairs.
+
+“I really eased up because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings,” Trump said on Fox, saying he would have brought up “the many affairs that Bill Clinton had” but held back because the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, was in the audience.
+
+“I didn’t think it was worth the shot,” he said. “I didn’t think it was nice.”
+
+Hillary Clinton shrugged off the threat, telling reporters: “He can run his campaign however he chooses. I will continue to talk about what I want to do for the American people.”
+
+Clinton campaigned at a community college gymnasium in Raleigh to whoops and loud applause. “One down, two to go,” she said of the debates.
+
+During a campaign rally in Melbourne, Fla., Tuesday evening, Trump said that Clinton is “a woman that I think is virtually incompetent, certainly as secretary of state.” He called her incompetent repeatedly throughout the rally.
+
+“We’re going to get rid of that crooked woman. She’s a crooked woman. She’s a very, very dishonest woman,” Trump said.
+
+For Democrats, Trump provided what Plouffe called “an embarrassment of riches” at the debate — a series of controversial statements and unresolved, damaging questions. He seemed to affirm that he paid no income taxes; he made side remarks and pained expressions while Clinton praised the vibrancy of African Americans; he said it was a smart business strategy to profit from the housing crash.
+
+Vice President Biden seized on that last point at a rally for Clinton in Philadelphia, where he charged that Trump has no “moral center.”
+
+“This is a guy who said it was good business for him to see the housing market fail,” Biden said. “What in the hell is he talking about?”
+
+Clinton and a brigade of high-profile surrogates plan to continue using Trump’s debate comments against him. She will campaign in New Hampshire on Wednesday with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), hoping to energize young voters there with a discussion of college affordability, while first lady Michelle Obama will stump across Pennsylvania on Thursday.
+
+“He put a lot on the table — a lot of things that are not true and a lot of views that we think are counter to where most voters are,” said Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director. “It won’t end tomorrow. There’s a lot that will live on from this debate.”
+
+Anne Gearan in Raleigh, N.C., Jenna Johnson in Melbourne, Fla., and Jose DelReal in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+3822,"White House, Republicans work together in final push on trade bill","House Republicans and President Obama joined forces for the final push for votes to keep the White House’s trade agenda alive, unveiling the latest version of fast-track authority overnight Tuesday and setting up a possible Friday vote on the measure.
+
+GOP leaders hoped to allay Democratic concerns about a minor Medicare provision in the sweeping legislation, but the issue remained unsettled after two closed-door party caucuses Wednesday morning.
+
+Union officials, in a pair of strongly worded letters, accused their regular ally — Obama — of having “marginalized” labor views and asked Democrats to vote against a program designed to help laid-off workers in a manner that would kill the entire trade legislation.
+
+Complicating the issues even further is the parliamentary morass House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has charted for the next few days, giving opponents multiple avenues for defeating Obama.
+
+If Boehner and Obama’s advisers are not confident in the outcome, the vote could be pushed into next week, but leading Republicans, particularly Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), have been pushing to hold the vote before allowing lawmakers to leave for the weekend — and another round of hometown opponents pushing House members to vote no.
+
+Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who is supporting the trade proposals and accompanied Obama to Europe last weekend, said the administration has a ­“quiet confidence” that it can win the vote with a strange-
+
+bedfellows coalition consisting of roughly 195 Republicans and
+
+25 to 30 Democrats. “They know it’s going to be close, but they see a path to passage,” Connolly said after the trip, which included two long discussions with Obama and a marathon dinner with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough.
+
+The Senate, on a large bipartisan vote, approved Trade Promotion Authority last month. It would give the Obama administration a more certain process for finalizing a large 12-nation deal to expedite commerce across the Pacific Ocean. At a meeting of the White House Export Council on Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said the other 11 nations would not put their best, final offers on the table until the fast-track issue is resolved in Congress.
+
+“They’re only willing to do that if they feel like we’ve got the political support here to move that forward,” Froman said.
+
+The TPA bill includes new funding for a program designed to help U.S. workers who lose jobs because of international competition, known as Trade Adjustment Assistance, which has broad Democratic support but faces some GOP opposition from Republicans who consider it a form of welfare.
+
+Opponents kicked off their final push to defeat Obama’s top remaining legislative priority by latching onto a relatively small cut in Medicare that was meant to offset increased funding for worker training.
+
+“We are going to vote against anything that will cut Medicare,” Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) said at a rally outside the Capitol.
+
+The Democrat-on-Democrat tension has risen to levels not seen in the Obama era. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) accused Obama of living “in a cloister” where only “captains of industry” get to air their views to him.
+
+In the five-page missive sent Monday, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka accused Obama of mischaracterizing labor’s stance on the emerging Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). “You have repeatedly isolated and marginalized labor and unions as the only opponents of fast track and TPP,” Trumka wrote, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post. “I am sure you are aware, however, that the critics of the current TPP encompass a broad, deep, and intellectually impressive swath of public opinion.”
+
+Republicans plan to hold several votes on the legislative package — including separate votes for the trade authority and for the worker assistance. If both of those passed, they would be reattached and then sent to the White House for Obama’s signature.
+
+The expectation is that all the Democrats would vote for the TAA legislation, along with a few dozen Republicans from districts where manufacturing jobs have been hurt by global trade, then a huge bloc of Republicans — along with a couple of dozen Democrats — would support TPA.
+
+But labor officials are urging Democrats to sabotage the piece of the legislative jigsaw puzzle that requires huge Democratic support: TAA’s worker-retraining funds, even though it is for a cause they ideologically support. If they take down that vote, they would torpedo Obama’s entire trade agenda.
+
+Boehner and Ryan, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, do not want to alter the delicately balanced TPA-TAA package because that would require sending it back to the Senate for another vote and potentially several more weeks of debate there. They worked to avert this issue by advancing a separate piece of legislation that would replace the roughly $900 million cut in Medicare, slated for 2024, with some stricter enforcement of tax laws. He told reporters Wednesday that he would allow that legislation to be voted on first so that Democrats could vote for TAA without fear of retribution from their allies for supporting even a modest cut in the popular entitlement program.
+
+“That solves the problem,” Boehner said. “Now, if people are looking for an excuse to vote no, I guess they can always find an excuse to vote no.”
+
+However, in the closed-door huddle of Democrats, Pelosi characterized that plan as “unacceptable” because it left the language of the Medicare cut in the legislation and said that, no matter if it were never going to be enacted into law, Democrats could not support such a plan, according to a handful of lawmakers in the room.
+
+At the moment, Democratic ­opponents expressed confidence that they would have the numbers to defeat the vote for TAA.
+
+“I’ve been whipping on this, and my sense is that we have mostly no votes,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). “I haven’t personally come across anybody who said they were going to vote for it.”",REAL
+4521,French police swarm forest 'larger than Paris' in hunt for Charlie Hebdo jihadist assassins,"DEVELOPING: French police are swarming a 51-square-mile dense forest in their hunt for the Islamist terrorist brothers suspected of carrying out Wednesday's deadly shooting massacre at the Paris office of a satirical magazine.
+
+Authorities say the two brothers, identified as Said and Cherif Kouachi, may be hiding out in the Forêt de Retz, a vast woodland described as ""larger than Paris,"" Sky News reported.
+
+Terror in Paris: Full coverage of the Charlie Hebdo shooting
+
+The pair robbed a gas station at gunpoint Thursday near the small town of Villers-Cotterêts, about 40 miles northeast of Paris, a day after they opened fire inside the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people and wounding 11 others, four seriously, police said.
+
+Two men fitting the description of the terror suspects stole gas and food from a gas station Thursday morning near the sleepy village, in the northern Aisne region, according to multiple reports. The assailants fled in a Renault Clio, which had weapons on its backseat and its license plates covered, according to witnesses. The robbery suspects were described as masked, with Kalashnikovs and what appeared to be a rocket launcher, according to the AFP.
+
+French authorities said the brothers, both in their early 30s, are the prime suspects in a deadly Islamist terror attack Wednesday morning at Charlie Hebdo's Paris headquarters. The assailants forced their way into the magazine's main offices, killing 12, including the magazine's editor, before fleeing in a getaway car in broad daylight.
+
+Earlier Thursday, Mourad Hamyd, 18, surrendered at a police station in a small town in the eastern region after learning his name was linked to the attacks in the news and social media, said Paris prosecutor's spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre. She did not specify his relationship to the Kouachi brothers.
+
+A heavy police presence, including helicopters, could be seen Thursday in Crepy-en-Valois, 10 miles from the gas station that was robbed. SWAT teams were reportedly searching homes and woods in the area, questioning every resident. After nightfall, the search focus shifted to the Forêt de Retz, one of France's largest forests.
+
+Cherif Kouachi was already known to French intelligence services, due to his history of funneling jihadi fighters to Iraq and a terrorism conviction from 2008. A police bulletin said the brothers should be considered armed and dangerous.
+
+France's prime minister said Thursday that authorities had made ""several arrests"" while hunting for the men. An overnight search in the city of Reims proved fruitless.
+
+Manuel Valls made the remarks in an interview with RTL radio as France prepared to observe a national day of mourning in memory of those killed at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a publication that had been threatened before for its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed. Valls told the station that preventing another attack is ""our main concern.""
+
+France raised its terror alert system to the maximum level after the daylight attack and bolstered security with more than 800 extra soldiers to guard media offices, places of worship, transport and other sensitive areas. A nationwide minute of silence was planned for noon.
+
+Intelligence officials told Fox News there has been no credible claim of responsibility for the attack, but investigators strongly suspect there is a connection to a foreign terrorist organization. Less than an hour after the shooting, a series of tweets were sent out in which three Al Qaeda figures -- past and present -- were featured prominently, according to an intelligence source. The tweets included images of Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Anwar al-Awlaki, former Al Qaeda commander in Yemen and the first American targeted for death by the CIA, and American Samir Khan, who was behind AQAP’s propaganda journal Inspire magazine and who was also killed alongside al-Awlaki in a U.S. drone strike in 2011.
+
+One witness to Wednesday's attack said the gunmen were so methodical he at first mistook them for an elite anti-terrorism squad. Then they fired on a police officer.
+
+The masked, black-clad men with assault rifles stormed the offices near Paris' Bastille monument in the Wednesday attack at noon on the publication, which had long drawn condemnation and threats -- it was firebombed in 2011 -- for its depictions of Islam, although it also satirized other religions and political figures.
+
+The staff was in an editorial meeting and the gunmen headed straight for the paper's editor, Stephane Charbonnier, widely known by his pen name Charb, killing him and his police bodyguard first, said Christophe Crepin, a police union spokesman.
+
+Shouting ""Allahu akbar!"" as they fired, the men spoke in fluent, unaccented French as they called out the names of specific employees.
+
+Eight journalists, two police officers, a maintenance worker and a visitor were killed, said prosecutor Francois Molins. He said 11 people were wounded, four of them seriously.
+
+Two gunmen strolled out to a black car waiting below, one of them calmly shooting a wounded police officer in the head as he writhed on the ground, according to video and a man who watched in fear from his home across the street.
+
+""They knew exactly what they had to do and exactly where to shoot. While one kept watch and checked that the traffic was good for them, the other one delivered the final coup de grace,"" said the witness, who refused to allow his name to be used because he feared for his safety.
+
+""Hey! We avenged the Prophet Muhammad! We killed Charlie Hebdo,"" one of the men shouted in French, according to video shot from a nearby building.
+
+One police official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, said the suspects were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network. Cedric Le Bechec, a witness who encountered the escaping gunmen, quoted the attackers as saying: ""You can tell the media that it's Al Qaeda in Yemen.""
+
+RELATED: Giuliani on how to combat Islamic extremism
+
+After fleeing, the attackers collided with a vehicle, then hijacked another car before slipping away into the streets of Paris, Molins said.
+
+The other dead were identified as cartoonists Georges Wolinski and Berbard Verlhac, better known as Tignous, and Jean Cabut, known as ""Cabu."" Also killed was Bernard Maris, an economist who was a contributor to the newspaper and was heard regularly on French radio.
+
+One cartoon, released in this week's issue and titled ""Still No Attacks in France,"" had a caricature of a jihadi fighter saying ""Just wait -- we have until the end of January to present our New Year's wishes."" Charb was the artist.
+
+Le Bechec, the witness who encountered the gunmen in another part of Paris, described on his Facebook page seeing two men ""get out of a bullet-ridden car with a rocket-launcher in hand, eject an old guy from his car and calmly say hi to the public, saying `you can tell the media that it's Al Qaeda in Yemen.""'
+
+Police reportedly found Molotov cocktails and a jihadist flag in the car abandoned by the gunmen.
+
+In a somber address to the nation Wednesday night, French President Francois Hollande pledged to hunt down the killers, and pleaded with his compatriots to come together in a time of insecurity and suspicion.
+
+""Let us unite, and we will win,"" he said. ""Vive la France!""
+
+RELATED: Muslim places of worship in France targeted with blank grenades, bullets
+
+Thousands of people later jammed Republique Square near the site of the shooting to honor the victims, waving pens and papers reading ""Je suis Charlie"" -- ""I am Charlie."" Similar rallies were held in London's Trafalgar Square as well as Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin and Brussels.
+
+Both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group have repeatedly threatened to attack France, which is conducting airstrikes against extremists in Iraq and fighting Islamic militants in Africa. Charb was specifically threatened in a 2013 edition of the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire, which also included an article titled ""France the Imbecile Invader.""
+
+Cherif Kouachi, now 32, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after being convicted of terrorism charges in 2008 for helping funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency. He said he was outraged at the torture of Iraqi inmates at the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib near Baghdad and ""really believed in the idea"" of fighting the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.
+
+A tweet from an Al Qaeda representative who communicated Wednesday with The Associated Press said the group was not claiming responsibility for the attack, but called it ""inspiring.""
+
+Fox News' Catherine Herridge, Greg Palkot and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2967,Bergdahl's platoon mates: Head of Joint Chiefs knew he walked off base in 2009,"Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his base in Afghanistan June 30, 2009, and by December of that same year, the president's principal military adviser, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, knew those details, according to three of Bergdahl's platoon mates who spoke to Fox News.
+
+""I asked him (Mullen) if he knew about Bergdahl and that he deserted and he (Mullen) told me that he knew of the circumstances surrounding his walking off,"" former Sgt. Matt Vierkant told Fox,""(and) that they were developing leads and following leads, trying to do everything they could to get him back.""
+
+After pulling security duty for the chairman, who was doing a swing through Afghanistan in December 2009, Vierkant, along with Evan Buetow and Cody Full, said they met informally with Mullen and about eight other soldiers. After a pep talk about the mission, the three said Mullen asked the squad leaders and platoon leadership to take a break.
+
+""He sat down with all the lower enlisted guys and the team leaders and basically he said, 'Hey, what do you want to know...You got any questions? He's like, I'm an open book. Let's just have a little question and answer session,"" Buetow explained.
+
+""So Matt asked him, you know Bergdahl deserted, what's going on with that? And Admiral Mullen said, 'Yes, we know all the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl walking away from the OP (outpost,)and we're still working on getting him back, figuring out where he is and kind of figuring out that whole situation.’""
+
+This account was backed up by a third platoon mate, former Specialist Cody Full. The men were split on whether Mullen singled them out because of the Bergdahl connection or whether it was a chance meeting, but they emphasized that at the time, they appreciated the fact that Mullen seemed to speak candidly and openly.
+
+“I don't remember him being taken aback by it at all, you know, he knew what was going on, he answered not confidently but he didn't have to think about it, he didn't want to give us some political answer,” Buetow explained. “He just gave us an answer.
+
+Asked if there was any ambiguity based on the conversation, Vierkant said no. ""Without a doubt, he (Mullen) knew he (Bergdahl) deserted or, you know, was suspected of desertion. There was no doubt in my mind that he fully understood what Bergdahl did.""
+
+The three said they felt relieved, and grateful to Mullen for the conversation.
+
+The men's account is significant because Mullen reported directly to President Obama and then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and the reported admission comes a full four and a half years before National Security Adviser Susan Rice said Bergdahl served honorably and his parents were called to the White House for a Rose Garden ceremony after he had been swapped for five Taliban commanders.
+
+""If Mullen knew, and now it's alleged that he did know, it would be, it would be unthinkable that he didn't pump this up the chain of command, his chain of command, or, tell the president directly,"" Brad Blakeman who served in the Bush White House, explained. ""At a minimum, this would have been included in the president's daily brief, and at a maximum, it would've been told directly to the President by Mullen.""
+
+In a statement to Fox News, Mullen said, ""From the moment Sgt. Bergdahl went missing, the U.S. Military was focused on finding him--as it does with any serviceman or woman who goes missing. The exact circumstances were not known then, nor did they drive our decisions. We do not leave our people behind.""
+
+Fox has extended an open invitation to the Admiral to explain his recollection of events during the 2009 trip, what he knew in December 2009 about the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl’s capture, and whether he told anything to the president and defense secretary, or if the circumstances were already well understood at senior levels of the White House.
+
+A military official who was travelling with Mullen during the 2009 Afghanistan trip confirmed Bergdahl's teammates did pull security during a leg of the trip,
+
+While not commenting on the claims that they met informally with Mullen, the official said it was common practice for Mullen to ask leadership to take a break so that he could speak directly and candidly with soldiers.
+
+""I want to ask him (Mullen) did they brief the White House? Who knew about it and why would you still do this trade knowing all the information that you knew?"" Vierkant said. ""We don't leave anyone behind. The thing is, we never left him (Bergdahl) behind. He left us behind. He chose to walk off and do whatever and get captured, that was his fault. Those were his choices.""
+
+Bergdahl has not been convicted of any charges, but faces a military court martial in the summer.
+
+Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.",REAL
+6296,FBI reopens Hillary investigation – with evidence from Anthony Weiner sexting scandal,"Print 
+[Ed. – Hollywood wouldn’t dare dream this one up. What remarkable things life keeps organizing for us.] 
+It takes a lot for the FBI to reopen an investigation. It takes even more for the FBI to reopen an investigation of a presidential candidate eleven days before the election. But that’s exactly what happened. 
+Early this afternoon it was announced that the FBI was reopening the Criminal Investigation of Hillary Clinton’s conduct as secretary of state, with regards to her email server and America’s secrets (and don’t listen to any Clinton surrogates who say it’s not a criminal investigation…the FBI doesn’t do any other kind of investigation). … 
+The new information didn’t come from Wikileaks, according to the NY Times , it came from Huma Abedin (thanks to the Weiner sexting investigation scandal). Federal law enforcement officials said Friday that the new emails uncovered in the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server were discovered after the F.B.I. seized electronic devices belonging to Huma Abedin, an aide to Mrs. Clinton, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.",FAKE
+1373,"After political upheaval in Iowa, what next? (+video)","Donald Trump gets trumped in upset loss to Ted Cruz, while Bernie Sanders declares moral victory in fighting Hillary Clinton to the closest Democratic caucus result in Iowa history.
+
+Tesla under Trump: How will electric cars fare under the next president?
+
+That was the warning shot fired off by Iowa voters, both Republican and Democrat, in Monday’s caucuses – the kickoff to the 2016 presidential nomination process.
+
+On the Republican side, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz won an upset victory over Donald Trump, with a state-of-the-art turnout operation that overcame the less-organized billionaire’s strength as a showman and lead in the polls. But together, their combined vote count – 52 percent – represented a win for outsiders who reject the status quo in Washington.
+
+In the Democratic race, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton barely eked out a victory over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist. And as the prohibitive favorite among party regulars at the start of the campaign, Mrs. Clinton was deeply wounded by her inability to fend off Senator Sanders, allowing the populist outsider to declare a “moral victory.”
+
+“Given the conventional wisdom going in, and if turnout was as high as it now seems, @HillaryClinton may have done well to escape with a tie,” tweeted David Axelrod, former political adviser to President Obama.
+
+The way Democratic caucuses are run here, raw vote totals aren’t reported, just the number of county convention delegates won. The state Democratic Party declared Clinton the winner early Tuesday morning by 4/10ths of a percent, the closest Iowa Democratic caucus outcome in history.
+
+The results of both caucuses showed a restive population, angry about stagnant middle-class wages, fearful over national security, and frustrated by Washington’s inability to break through gridlock.
+
+That anger and frustration have been captured most pungently by Mr. Trump, a true outsider running in his first political campaign and relying on his considerable skill as a reality TV star to attract media and voter attention. But Trump went long on showmanship, staging big flashy rallies around the country, and short on the technology, data, and “boots on the ground” needed to get voters to turn out in sufficient numbers to win.
+
+Suddenly, the man who campaigned on being a “winner,” based on polls and crowds, is now a loser. Cruz won 27.7 percent to Trump’s 24.3 percent – not a blowout by any means, but a loss is a loss.
+
+Iowa State Sen. Brad Zaun, who endorsed Trump, said the billionaire’s fame made it difficult for him to campaign as a conventional candidate. Cruz, for example, visited all of Iowa’s 99 counties, appearing in coffee shops and community centers.
+
+“Trump visited the four corners of Iowa, but it wasn’t realistic to do all 99 counties, because there weren’t enough venues large enough to accommodate his crowds,” said Mr. Zaun, in an interview outside Trump’s post-caucus event.
+
+In his speech to supporters Monday night, Trump won praise for his gracious remarks as he congratulated Cruz. But now the real estate magnate heads into the next contest, the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 9, needing a comeback victory to get his winning narrative back on track.
+
+Trump leads in New Hampshire with an average of 33 percent of the vote, well ahead of the rest of the pack. But post-Iowa, it’s not clear how likely Republican primary voters will react to the bursting of the Trump bubble. Before Iowa, some analysts predicted a profound impact.
+
+“If Cruz wins Iowa, for New Hampshire it will be like taking a deck of cards and throwing them in the air,” said New Hampshire pollster Dick Bennett, head of American Research Group, last week. “Trump’s whole campaign is predicated on being a winner.”
+
+Another winner Monday in Iowa was Sen. Marco Rubio (R) of Florida, who beat expectations with a solid third-place showing of 23 percent – well ahead of his pre-caucus average in the polls of 17 percent.  The rest of the large GOP field scored in single digits.
+
+But the playing field in New Hampshire will be considerably different. Cruz’s extensive outreach to evangelicals played well with Iowa Republicans, but in New Hampshire, the religiously minded are a much smaller audience.
+
+It may make sense for Cruz to skip New Hampshire and focus on South Carolina and the Southern states of Super Tuesday (March 1), some analysts suggest. But Cruz, seeking to show that his Iowa success isn’t just proof that he’s a good niche candidate, like the last two winners of the Iowa caucuses, may opt to play hard in the Granite State. His pitch isn’t just to the faithful; it’s also as a rock-solid conservative known for his aversion to compromise.
+
+If Cruz does fight hard in New Hampshire, he will face not only Trump’s big early lead, but also stiff competition from candidates who mostly gave Iowa a pass and have focused hard on a GOP electorate in New Hampshire that is more establishment-friendly. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush are all lying in wait.
+
+So is Rubio, who has played in both “lanes,” courting both tea-party-oriented Evangelicals and more mainstream Republicans. Rubio’s stronger-than-expected showing in Iowa should give him momentum heading into New Hampshire, with hopes that voters there give him a second (or first) look.
+
+The dynamic on the Democratic side is completely different. The race is now a pure head-to-head matchup between Clinton and Sanders, following former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s decision to drop out after a poor showing Monday night.
+
+The Clinton-Sanders smackdown represents a stark choice for Democratic voters. Clinton is the ultimate establishment figure: former first lady, former US senator, and former secretary of State. Both Clinton and Sanders have spent decades in politics, but Sanders’s record comes with a big difference. He’s never been a member of the Democratic Party, marching to his own drummer as a champion of the lower and middle classes, fighting income inequality, Wall Street, and big money in campaigns.
+
+The conventional wisdom has long been that Sanders’s high point in the campaign would be Iowa and New Hampshire, two states with large white liberal populations, and that Clinton would nail down the Democratic nomination through her deep ties to minority communities. Her “firewall” would be in the South.
+
+But after Sanders’s near-coup in Iowa, Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, sees a new dynamic.
+
+“As happens always in the Democratic primary process, early success has an influence on later states,” Mr. Weaver said in an interview. “I think people are going to look at this tremendous victory tonight and see that credibility and viability of Senator Sanders as a presidential candidate. You’re going to see people in later states moving toward him.”
+
+As for Clinton’s early lead in “superdelegates,” the Democratic officials who make up an important part of the overall delegate count, Weaver also predicts that many of the superdelegates now supporting Clinton will give Sanders another look.
+
+“A lot of people jumped on the Senator Clinton bandwagon before this race had even started to develop,” he says.
+
+Analysts still believe Sanders faces an uphill battle in his effort to deny Clinton the nomination, as Obama did eight years ago. But it’s now clear that Clinton, the early prohibitive favorite, will not waltz to her party’s nomination.
+
+Both parties, it appears, are headed for a long, grind-it-out primary season.",REAL
+9484,Don’t Miss This Once in a Lifetime November Supermoon,"This November full moon will be unlike any other you have ever seen. 
+
+We have all seen supermoons before, but this particular full moon will be the second in a series of three this fall. The moon will peak on Monday, November 14th and it will be closer to the Earth than any other since 1948. The full moon will not come this close to Earth until 2034. 
+
+The scientific term for a moon this magnificent is “perigree moon” which refers to when the moon is at its closest point to Earth in its orbit. When a perigree moon is full, it is known as a supermoon. 
+
+This month’s supermoon will appear 30% brighter and 14% larger than a normal full moon. This means that the night of November 14th will be one you will want to go outside for. 
+
+NASA reports that we will be able to see a “moon illusion” that will make the moon look exceptionally big when viewed through foreground objects like tall buildings. 
+
+The moon will reach the crest of its full moon phase at 8:52 a.m. Eastern time but it will look exceptionally big and bright all night. 
+
+Astronomers have been monitoring the moon closely in order to better understand our solar system. For the past seven years, NASA’s Lunar Reonnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been mapping the surface of the moon as well as taking high-resolution photos to better understand the moon and Earth. Mapping the surface of the moon and learning about how it’s been impacted by collisions with asteroids can shed light on the Earth’s history as well. 
+
+If you miss this month’s supermoon, you will have one more chance to catch the last supermoon of 2016 on December 14th. Yet, the December supermoon will not be as magnificent as the one coming up in November so mark your calendars and go outside with friends and family to see this once in a lifetime show! 
+
+Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science. Follow her adventures on Instagram.",FAKE
+10078,Iceland’s Pirate Party Makes Strong Showing in New Election,"Iceland’s Pirate Party Makes Strong Showing in New Election Posted on Oct 30, 2016 
+By Common Dreams staff PiratesforIceland.party 
+Iceland’s Pirate Party has tripled its seats in the 63-seat parliament, Saturday night’s election results show. 
+Birgitta Jonsdottir, the leader of the Pirate Party, said she was satisfied with the result. “Whatever happens, we have created a wave of change in the Icelandic society,” she told a cheering crowd early Sunday morning. 
+The Pirates won 10 seats, more than tripling its three seats in the last election. The Left-Green Party also won 10 seats Saturday. 
+The left-leaning parties — the Left-Greens, the Pirates and two allies — won a total of 27 seats, just short of the 32 required to command a majority in Iceland’s Parliament, the world’s oldest. 
+Advertisement Square, Site wide 
+The governing center-right Progressive party lost more than half of its seats in the election which was triggered by Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson ‘s resignation in April in the wake of the leaked Panama Papers which revealed the offshore assets of high-profile figures. 
+Current Prime Minister Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson said he would resign on Sunday. 
+The anti-establishment Pirate Party, which was founded in 2012, had said it could be looking to form a coalition with three left-wing and centrist parties. 
+The Pirates’ core issues are: direct democracy, freedom of expression, civil rights, net neutrality, and transparency, all set out in a popular, crowdsourced draft of a new national Constitution that the current government has failed to act on. They also seek to re-nationalize the country’s natural resource industries, create new rules for civic governance, and issue a passport to Edward Snowden. After election press conference of @PiratePartyIS . @birgittaj : ""We don't step back from anything that we said before the election."" pic.twitter.com/hnf8i3cR6J — Fabio Reinhardt (@Enigma424) October 30, 2016 
+Pirate Party founder and MP Birgitta Jonsdottir said she was “very satisfied” with the result. 
+“Our internal predictions showed 10 to 15%, so this is at the top of the range. We knew that we would never get 30%,” Ms Jonsdottir told Reuters. “We want to see trickle-down ethics rather than make-believe trickle-down economics,” Ms. Jonsdottir, 49, who is also a former WikiLeaks activist, said 
+“We are a platform for young people, for progressive people who shape and reshape our society,” Ms. Jonsdottir told Agence France-Presse. “Like Robin Hood, because Robin Hood was a pirate, we want to take the power from the powerful to give it to the people.” Turnout in Iceland was 79.2%! If the US got anywhere near that, this would be a dramatically more progressive country. pic.twitter.com/9uCBBewNz2 — John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) October 30, 2016 TAGS:",FAKE
+3260,The GOP’s pathetic SCOTUS games: Why its Merrick Garland obstruction just got even more embarrassing,"A few weeks ago, Sen. Chuck Grassley was travelling around his home state of Iowa with his fingers jammed deep in his ears while yelling “LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” to any constituents who wanted to voice a negative opinion about his role in refusing to hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to replace the recently deceased Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. That’s some constituent service he’s running from his Iowa offices! Maybe he should save some money by closing the offices and just tattooing the words “Blow Me” on his forehead like an old white version of Bill O’Reilly’s worst nightmares.
+
+Despite his efforts to wall himself off from criticism, Grassley did hear some negative reactions from his constituents during his town halls. Perhaps mindful of the fact that he’s up for re-election in November in what could be a tough year for Republicans, by the time he came back to Washington, the senator had changed his tune. Slightly.
+
+Now Grassley said he was at least willing to meet with Garland to explain to him why it is simply impossible for the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on a judicial nominee to the nation’s highest court. This sounded like the most condescending reason possible to hold a meeting, though I imagine condescension is par for the course when Chuck Grassley, an 82-year-old man who has been in the Senate for three and a half decades, agrees to meet with anyone to explain his actions on any issue. Mere mortals cannot be expected to comprehend the ancient rules and customs guiding the Senate on SCOTUS nominations. (Which the GOP just started making up.) They must be explained to people like Garland, just in case the judge has been in a deep coma since 2008 and only woke up the morning Obama nominated him.
+
+So Tuesday morning, the senator and the Supreme Court nominee met for breakfast in the Senate Dining Room so that Grassley could explain in person what he and most of his caucus have been saying in the press since the minute Scalia’s body was found in that ranch guest room in Texas. By all accounts it was a pleasant meeting. The New York Times reported that Grassley ordered oatmeal while Garland had eggs and toast. The senator even posted a picture on Instagram of the two men apparently chatting calmly and not throwing silverware at each other. Amid all the pearl-clutching by the press and calls for a return to civility in Washington, here was proof that two high-profile members of the government on opposite sides of an issue could still sit down and have a frank discussion where a member of the legislative branch explained the concept of separation of powers to a member of the judicial branch.
+
+Sarcasm aside, it’s hilarious to contemplate why Grassley bothered to go through the motions of meeting with Garland. Mitch McConnell and the rest of the GOP’s Senate leadership put the caucus out on a ledge by announcing from the very beginning that Obama shouldn’t even bother sending a nomination up to the Hill, since they intended to ignore it like an unpopular kid at recess. As with so much else that Republicans have done since this president came into office, they left themselves exactly zero room to maneuver or negotiate. Backing away from that position now puts them all in trouble with the crazed GOP base, which is already frothing at the mouth over rumors that the party is going to snatch the presidential nomination away from frontrunner Donald Trump at the convention in July. On the other hand, the GOP knows its Senate majority is in trouble this fall. Aside from the fact that this cycle just happens to have a bunch of vulnerable seats up for re-election in purplish and blue states, there is the possibility that the nomination of Trump – and to a lesser extent, Ted Cruz – will deeply harm down-ballot candidates everywhere, to the point where Democrats have a chance at the previously unthinkable, significantly cutting into the GOP’s 30-seat majority in the House of Representatives. Beyond that, there is polling and anecdotal evidence suggesting that this Supreme Court obstructionism has been a bridge too far for the general public. Add it all up, and senators up for re-election, like Grassley, might feel as if they are in a precarious position. Had the Republicans at least allowed Garland a hearing and then voted not to confirm him, instead of announcing their plans to not even grant that courtesy at the beginning like the villain in an action movie explaining his evil plan to the hero instead of just carrying the damn thing out, Grassley wouldn’t be in this spot. So his compromise is to give Garland the courtesy of a meeting, but only so he can condescend to the judge about why the only way he’ll see the inside of the Supreme Court building is if he sits in the gallery for oral arguments some time. That way he can tell his most fervent anti-Obama constituents that he is still standing up to the president while pretending for the benefit of less-crazy voters that he has discovered a reserve of reasonable comity buried somewhere in his blackened soul. Will it work? Well, Grassley’s poll numbers in Iowa, at least as of a month ago, hadn’t yet slipped badly. And Iowa is the state that just a couple of years ago sent this person to the Senate. So we will see. Personally, if I’m Garland, I’m not packing up my office at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals just yet.",REAL
+9642,US Secret Service Struggles To Find Recruits Who Haven’t Used Adderall,"Via TrueActivist SPONSORED LINKS 
+The US Secret Service, under pressure due to unprecedented demand and recent controversies, has been carrying out its most ambitious recruiting campaign in over a decade, looking to find over 1,000 qualified agents and other personnel within the next year. The agency has had no problem finding interested people as around 27,000 have responded to the agency’s various calls for applications since 2015. However, the major problem the agency is facing is the high number of recruits who have abused prescription drugs, mostly Adderall and other amphetamines they took while in college. As a result, only 300 of those 27,000 have received an offer for employment from the agency, complicating the Secret Service’s recruitment goals. 
+All candidates looking for positions with the Secret Service are put through an extensive vetting process, including a series of personal interviews and a polygraph test. Previously, it was normally the polygraph test that doomed the largest percentage of would-be agents, but now it appears that amphetamine/Adderall use has taken its place. Any use of any drug in an illegal way is grounds for immediate expulsion from the hiring process. Susan Goggin, the Chief Recruiting Officer of the US Secret Service said: “It is definitely a struggle with this generation. Adderall is a huge, huge issue.” Indeed, Adderall’s use among college students is becoming increasingly common. The latest federal data shows that Adderall’s recreational use has increased by nearly 67% in the last ten years and is now being prescribed at a rate 30 times higher than it was two decades ago. 
+Another part of the problem appears to be that many candidates are unaware that their past use of Adderall and other prescription drugs is something that could have negative consequences for them, largely becase the stigma behind its use is not as clear cut as it is for other illicit substances, like marijuana and cocaine. Many college students also do not view their use of Adderall as dangerous or even wrong as they are taking it for the “right reasons” – to be more productive in class and manage a high workload. However, in the eyes of the federal government, Adderall and other amphetamines are classified as Schedule II drugs and the reasons for its use are irrelevant. 
+Interestingly, this is not the first time that a federal agency has run into this type of problem. In 2014, FBI Director James Comey admitted that hiring hackers was becoming more difficult as many hackers had previously used marijuana recreationally, a concern also echoed by the Justice Department. This same issue also evenutally led US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to announce this September that the Pentagon would be open to hiring individuals that had experimented with marijuana in the past. Will the Secret Service soon be forced to change its policy on Adderall as its use continues to skyrocket? Or is it more of a sign that the War on Drugs is laughably out-dated?",FAKE
+10058,WikiLeaks: Clintons Purchase $200 Million Maldives Estate,"posted by Eddie Bill Clinton seen walking his dogs Buster and Frank at his mansion in the Maldives. This afternoon , WikiLeaks says sources in the Clinton Foundation inadvertently leaked the details of an apparently secret deal with Christie’s International Real Estate in New York. Several recorded phone conversations between Christie’s executives and Clinton board member, FrankGuistra, clearly show that a deal for “The Imperial Maldives” had been closed. “The Imperial Maldives” is a development of 185 water villas set above the turquoise waters of the North Male Atoll. According to the recordings, the agreed price was $200 million (U.S). Also according to the recordings, this deal began the morning after the last debate. The morning after Trump told Clinton he would appoint a special prosecutor and put her in prison. Mr. Guistra is heard to say, “Trump can drag his sorry orange ass down to the Maldives if he wants her so bad. There’s no extradition treaty!” [laughing] The Clinton camp is very tight-lipped at the moment and no comments from Clinton Foundation board members. WikiLeaks seems to suggest that the Clintons are feeling the pressure of a world-wide criminal organization becoming frayed at the seams, and are looking for a hideout until they can hatch their next diabolical plan for world domination. Or, those fuckers just need a real good vacation. source:",FAKE
+8490,BREAKING: Police Raid Democratic Office – Hillary is SCREWED!,"0 comments 
+On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania State Police raided a Delaware County political field office for the Democratic Party in search of “templates utilized to construct fraudulent voter registration forms,” and “completed voter registration forms containing same or similar identifying information of individuals on multiple forms.” 
+A warrant was filed last week in County Court seeking the documents tied to voter fraud. Investigators said they were looking for the documents, financial information, and lists of employees at the Norwood office of FieldWorks LLC, a national organization that often does street work for Democrats. 
+Matt Dorf, a spokesman for FieldWorks’ national headquarters in Washington, released the following statement: 
+“FieldWorks is now working with county officials to provide them with information on our program and applications they are investigating. In keeping with our regular practice, we will work aggressively with authorities to seek the prosecution of anyone involved in wrongdoing.” 
+Founded in 2001, according to promotional material online, FieldWorks describes itself as “a nationally recognized grassroots organizing firm founded to help progressive organizations, advocacy groups, and members of the Democratic family take their public engagement and electoral strategies to the next level.” 
+In 2012, FieldWorks’ voter registration efforts in Ohio sparked some controversy when the organization’s employees filed thousands of new voter registration cards in the final week before the registration deadline and some of them were found to be fraudulent.",FAKE
+897,Poll: Trump Reaches 50 Percent Support Nationally for the First Time,"Donald Trump has reached 50 percent support from Republicans and Republican-leaners nationally for the first time since the beginning of the NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking Poll in late December. This milestone is significant as the 2016 primary heads into its final few weeks of contests, as there has been intense speculation that Trump's support has a ceiling. Though his support has hovered in the high 40s since mid-March, the front-runner had yet to secure half of Republican voters.
+
+These results are according to the latest NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking poll conducted online from April 18 to April 24 of 10,707 adults aged 18 and over, including 9,405 registered voters.
+
+Support for Trump among most demographic groups has remained consistent in this week's tracking poll compared to previous weeks. However, when just looking at Republicans, excluding independents who lean toward the Republican Party, he now enjoys 49 percent support compared to 43 percent last week. This 6-point gain is important, as Trump usually does well among independents, but has struggled to win over more traditional Republicans so far. Support for both John Kasich (15 percent) and Ted Cruz (28 percent) is down among Republicans compared to the past few weeks.
+
+This traction among those who identify as belonging to the Republican Party will be significant as the Republican primary heads into closed primary races in Connecticut, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware Tuesday. Rhode Island utilizes a hybrid primary in which only those who are registered as unaffiliated can vote in either party's primary.
+
+Overall, this week's 6-point swing — Trump up 4 points, Cruz and Kasich down 2 points — is the biggest weekly shift in the poll so far. Combined with his significant win in New York, Trump's rise nationally could be an early sign of consolidation within the Republican Party.
+
+The NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking poll was conducted online April 18 through April 24, 2016 among a national sample of 10,707 adults aged 18 and over, including 9,405 who say they are registered to vote. Respondents for this non-probability survey were selected from the nearly three million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Results have an error estimate of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points. For full results and methodology for this weekly tracking poll, please click here.",REAL
+6134,“Well It Was Nice While It Lasted” – Democracy,"0 Add Comment 
+THE AGE old system of government, Democracy, has formally announced its retirement stating ‘well, it was nice while it lasted’. 
+“I now pass the baton into the incapable and tiny hands of a man who embraces xenophobia, misogyny and the hatred of all things he is simply too impatient and ignorant to bother understanding,” the clearly tired and battle weary ideology confirmed. 
+While many around the world had presumed Democracy would continue in its current position as the dominant political ideology in the West despite a change in management, it is thought its growing unpopularity amongst sections of the US electorate has seen it make the decision to vacate its profession entirely. 
+“You have to know when it is time to hang up your hat, and you guys seem quite fond of the man who doesn’t pay income tax and insults war veterans and war veterans’ families,” the descendent of Cleisthenes stated. 
+Many political experts have speculated that democracy has retired preemptively as it believes president elect Donald Trump will seek to have it deported, owing to the fact that Democracy emigrated from mainland Europe via Greece some years ago. 
+Democracy has a number of international franchises which may be wound down in the coming years too. 
+“I think a lot of people are really, really angry with me, so the time to step aside has come. When people question your ability and purpose, you begin to make for the exit sign,” Democracy confirmed. 
+Despite stating its intention to leave, Democracy is required to give at least 6-months notice, have a hand in training in its successor, All Out Chaos, and going through an awkward exit interview which will see it field questions from over 57 million people who didn’t vote for this.",FAKE
+1355,Everything you need to know about the next Democratic debate,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+1148,Rivals pile on Trump in Republican candidates’ debate,"The calamity brought upon the Republican Party by Donald Trump was laid bare Thursday by its two most recent presidential nominees, who delivered unprecedented denunciations of the candidate that set the stage for a raucous evening debate.
+
+Mitt Romney awoke from his political hibernation to deliver a sweeping, point-by-point indictment of Trump — of his policy proposals, his business dealings, his erratic judgments, his moral character, and his insults to women, Latinos and the disabled. The former GOP nominee, who sought and accepted Trump’s ­endorse­ment in 2012, implored Republicans to now reject the billionaire he labeled “a phony” and “a fraud.”
+
+Trump’s three rivals took up similar attacks later Thursday night at a Fox News Channel debate in Detroit in which the ferocious sparring and name-calling revolved almost entirely around the front-runner.
+
+What started with Trump asserting that he was well endowed in a rejoinder to Rubio’s campaign-trail joke about his manhood devolved into an ugly affair, with the candidates yelling over each other, at times unintelligibly, as they sought to discredit one another.
+
+Taken as a whole, the day only served to harden the divisions tearing the GOP apart and raise dire doubts about whether its factions could unite in the general election.
+
+It began at sunrise in Palm Beach, Fla., where Trump phoned into network television shows to mock Romney as a failed politician. Then, in Salt Lake City, Romney gave his speech asserting that Trump was a danger to the nation and to democracy itself; in Washington, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) shared in the dismay; in Trenton, N.J., Gov. Chris Christie called a news conference to insist he was not a prisoner of Trump’s; and in Portland, Maine, Trump rallied fans by demeaning Romney with crude language.
+
+The events culminated at nightfall in Detroit, where Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich faced Trump and tried desperately to score points against him.
+
+The very first question was aimed at Trump, and for the next two hours the moderators and candidates quizzed, scrutinized and mocked the front-runner. He was on the defensive through much of the event, struggling to explain many of his policy ideas as well as defend his hiring of foreign workers and the manufacturing of Trump-branded clothing overseas.
+
+“You’re making your clothes overseas, and you’re hiring your workers overseas,” Rubio said at one point, referring to the widespread use of foreign workers on visas at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach.
+
+Trump acknowledged that he brings in foreign workers to do jobs on work visas at his club and, defending himself, said it is difficult to get American employees to work in service for the five-month period he called “the season.”
+
+“We will bring them in and bring them out,” he said to boos.
+
+Trump reversed himself on a key part of his immigration platform, calling for an increase in visas for highly skilled foreigners. “I’m changing,” he said. “We need highly skilled people in this country.”
+
+Trump added, “With immigration — as with anything else — there always has to be some tug and pull and deal. . . . You have to be able to have some flexibility, some negotiation.”
+
+The evening’s fireworks came when the candidates, exhausted after three months of breakneck campaigning, leveled caustic attacks at one another.
+
+“This little guy has lied so much about my record,” Trump said of Rubio, whom he repeatedly called “Little Marco.”
+
+One of the lowest points of the night came near the start, when Trump responded to a joke that Rubio had told days earlier about Trump having small hands. “You know what they say about men with small hands,” Rubio said, pausing to let the audience laugh. “You can’t trust ’em.”
+
+“He hit my hands,” Trump said, showing his palms. “Nobody has ever hit my hands. Look at those hands. Are these small hands? And . . . if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem.”
+
+At times, the debate was so focused on the personal that Kasich thundered, “Let’s stop fighting!”
+
+Cruz, too, sought to claim the moral high ground.
+
+“I don’t think the people of America are interested in a bunch of bickering schoolchildren,” he said. “They are interested in solutions, not slogans. It’s easy to say ‘Make things better, make things great.’ You can even print it and put it on a baseball cap. But the question is, do you understand the principles that made America great in the first place?”
+
+[The GOP’s implosion over Donald Trump’s candidacy has arrived]
+
+Rubio and Cruz pounced on Trump regarding fraud cases filed against him and a real estate training company known as “Trump University.” Rubio said the university was “a scam.”
+
+“They asked him for their money back, and you refused to give them their money back,” Rubio said, calling Trump a “con artist.”
+
+Trump said the process needs to play out in court: “It’s called pending litigation.”
+
+“The real con artist is Senator Marco Rubio,” Trump shot back, bringing up Rubio’s attendance record in the Senate. “He doesn’t go to vote. He’s absent. The people of Florida can’t stand him. He couldn’t get elected as dogcatcher.”
+
+Cruz asserted that the GOP cannot afford a nominee “facing a fraud trial.”
+
+“Let me just ask the voters at home,” Cruz said, “is this the debate you want playing out in the general election?”
+
+The 11th Republican debate also marked a return engagement for Trump in his off-and-on feud with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, one of the co-moderators. She asked him about the possibility that he might change his immigration policies once he gets into office, citing an off-the-record meeting with the New York Times that was reported by BuzzFeed.
+
+Rubio and Cruz tag-teamed Trump, insisting that he give the newspaper permission to release the interview. “He has a very simple solution,” Cruz said. “Simply release the tape.”
+
+Cruz seized on the episode and others to prosecute his case that Trump has no ideological core and is flexible on a range of issues important to the conservative base.
+
+Despite the harsh rhetoric, Cruz, Kasich and Rubio all said in response to a question that they would support Trump if he was the nominee, and Trump said he would do the same if one of his rivals won.
+
+The hottest topic in Michigan — the tainted water scandal in Flint — was brought up in only one question, and it came more than halfway through the debate. Only Rubio was given the chance to respond, and when he did so he expressed outrage while also complaining that Democrats have politicized the issue “as if somehow Republicans woke up one morning and decided, ‘Oh, it’s a good idea to poison some kids with lead.’ It’s absurd, it’s outrageous.”
+
+[Here’s who supports Donald Trump — and why]
+
+Romney set the tone for the debate with his morning address at the University of Utah, where he methodically litigated the case against a Trump presidency.
+
+“Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,” Romney said. “He’s playing members of the American public for suckers.”
+
+Romney, himself a onetime business titan worth hundreds of millions of dollars, sought to rub away at Trump’s golden sheen.
+
+“His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who work for them,” Romney said. “Whatever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there’s Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks and Trump Mortgage. A business genius he is not.”
+
+Romney said the president helps define the values and principles of the United States for the world and sets an example for young Americans. He asked his audience of roughly 700 students and other guests to ponder Trump’s “personal qualities”: “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.”
+
+Trump fired back with a verbal tirade a couple of hours later at his Maine rally. He bemoaned Romney’s “nasty” critique and dismissed him as a “choke artist” who, in Trump’s assessment, botched an easy chance to turn President Obama out of office.
+
+Trump recalled his endorsement on Romney in February of 2012, describing the candidate as yearning for Trump’s stamp of approval.
+
+“He was begging for my endorsement,” Trump said. “I could’ve said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees,’ and he would’ve dropped to his knees. He was begging. True. True. He was begging me.”
+
+On the debate stage, Trump dismissed Romney in similar terms: “He failed miserably, and it was an embarrassment to the entire Republican Party.”
+
+[The Fix: Romney did Trump a big favor by attacking him]
+
+The clash comes at a crucial point in this unpredictable GOP primary season. Trump has won 10 of the first primaries and caucuses, including dominating this week’s Super Tuesday contests, and has a significant lead in the race for Republican convention delegates.
+
+But in a divided field, Trump still has fewer than half the delegates awarded so far. That leaves his opponents with a viable, if risky and destructive, strategy. The only way to stop Trump from winning the nomination may be to stop anyone from winning it — dividing up the delegates so that no one has a majority.
+
+Then, the theory goes, the party would head into a chaotic convention — the first true “floor fight” for any party in decades — and hope that a candidate other than Trump emerges.
+
+This is just the scenario Romney encouraged when he recommended that Floridians cast ballots for Rubio, Ohioans cast ballots for Kasich, and everywhere else, voters back the candidate best positioned to deny Trump a victory in that state.
+
+It was unclear whether Romney’s speech would move any voters away from Trump. It could have the effect of intensifying support for the rebellious outsider.
+
+But within the Republican ­establishment, Romney’s speech drew immediate and enthusiastic praise. Within minutes, McCain issued a statement effectively joining forces with Romney.
+
+“I want Republican voters to pay close attention to what our party’s most respected and knowledgeable leaders and national security experts are saying about Mr. Trump, and to think long and hard about who they want to be our next Commander-in-Chief and leader of the free world,” McCain said.
+
+But not every member of the establishment was speaking out against Trump. Christie has been Trump’s most visible endorser of late, standing stone-faced behind Trump at his victory event Tuesday night in Palm Beach. It has sparked mocking memes on social media and laughs on late-night television.
+
+Christie addressed that at his news conference in Trenton on Thursday.
+
+“I want everyone to know for those who were concerned: I wasn’t being held hostage, I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t despondent,” said Christie, who ended his candidacy last month after a disappointing finish in New Hampshire.
+
+O’Keefe reported from Salt Lake City. Jose A. DelReal in Portland, Maine, Steve Friess in Detroit and David A. Fahrenthold in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+4312,"The inane spectacle of the GOP debate: Cruz the showboating creep, Rubio the slick operator & Bush the desperate flop","What happened was less a debate among contenders and more a showdown between the candidates and the moderators. Everyone attacked the moderators when they heard a question they didn’t like, and then made a show of their rebelliousness – this was great for anti-media conservatives, but a distraction for everyone else. The moderators had their moments, but they were mostly awful. Frivolous questions about Rubio’s absenteeism or Trump’s “moral character” or fantasy football gave the candidates just enough fodder to avoid answering the hard questions whenever they were asked. The result of all this was two and a half hours of political gas.
+
+It’s hard to say whether Trump did well or poorly. His shtick almost defies analysis. I expected him to come out swinging, but he didn’t do that, despite being surrounded by low-energy losers.
+
+He had a few moments, though. He reminded everyone of his plans to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the Southern border, but making sure to note that he’ll add a door right in the middle, so Mexicans can walk in “legally.” When John Harwood cited a few inconvenient facts about his tax plan, he ignored them and boasted that right-wing economist and CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow likes it – that settled the dispute. At some point Trump was asked about guns. “I do carry occasionally,” he said. “Sometimes a lot. I like to be unpredictable, so people don’t know I’m carrying.” Also, he’d feel “safer” if his employees (all of them) carried guns at work.
+
+Bottom line: Trump held his ground. He was vulnerable tonight, particularly after slipping in the national polls this week, but he avoided any direct attacks. As a frontrunner, that’s all he needed to do.
+
+I’m tempted to say Carson failed tonight, but that’s not really true. Tonight was a win for Carson. He’s now a legitimate frontrunner, having overtaken Trump in the latest CBS/NYT poll. He’s also leading in Iowa by a wide margin. I assumed the other candidates would go after him, but they didn’t, with the exception of John Kasich’s brief jibe at Carson’s simplistic, tithing-inspired tax plan.
+
+By and large, Carson’s rivals allowed him to continue his nice guy routine. He avoided specifics and he pivoted from question to platitude faster than anyone else on that stage. He uttered phrases like I “hate the concept of regulations, because they’re in everything,” but no one pointed out how stupid that is. I thought he’d have to defend his recent gaffes (i.e. equating women who have abortions to slaveholders) but they weren’t even mentioned. The most important thing for Carson: He escaped another debate without explaining any of his policies or admitting that he doesn’t understand half the questions – that’s a victory.
+
+Jeb was the big loser tonight. He had the most at stake and he did nothing to help himself. His campaign is collapsing, his poll numbers are falling, and his donors are panicking. His only goal tonight was to plug the leak, to convince his financiers that he’s still a good investment. He failed to do that. In addition to fending off Trump, Jeb had to damage Rubio, who is quickly becoming the establishment guy. But he couldn’t do it, because he’s a terrible candidate and nothing he says or does works in this campaign. He almost succeeded at demonstrating his regular guyness when he referenced his fantasy football record (he’s 7-0), but even that felt unnatural and canned. More than anyone else, Jed needed a boost tonight. He needed to be seen as strong and presidential. None of that happened. He was low-energy, basically.
+
+Tonight was an opportunity for Rubio. He’s rising in the polls and he needed to capitalize on his momentum. I thought he did that. There were no obviously bad moments for him. And he managed to avoid taking any direct hits, including from Jeb and the two frontrunners. Even his dumb answers were received well. When asked about his greatest weakness, he said he loves America too much. When asked why he never shows up for work at the Senate, he said it’s because America needs him. And the audience loved it. I suspect he’ll become the preferred establishment alternative to Bush, if he isn’t already. Rubio’s young, polished and reasonable-sounding enough to be competitive in a general election. He can’t beat Hillary, but he may be the best shot they have.
+
+I thought Fiorina’s political star was fading before the debate. Nothing tonight changed my opinion. After rising to third in the polls after the first two debates, Fiorina has dipped well below Rubio and Bush. Her strategy so far has been to repeat lies over and over again until they become true. She did that again tonight, particularly on her record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, which is disastrous. She said something about reforming the tax code by reducing it to three pages, so that farmers could understand it – still not sure if that’s a good thing. She almost had one of her contrived moments when she attacked Hillary Clinton’s feminist credentials. “It is the height of hypocrisy for Hillary Clinton to talk about being the first woman president,” she said, “When every single policy she espouses…has been bad for women.” She didn’t name a single one of those policies, though, and no one asked.
+
+Bottom line: Fiorina said nothing tonight she hasn’t said before. Her window has closed. She’ll be out of the race in a few months. There’s not much to say about Rand Paul. He was a non-factor before the debate and he’ll be a non-factor after the debate. Paul’s only chance in this race was to excite the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. He hasn’t been able to do that, though I’m not sure why. He did reasonably well tonight, but no one will notice. Paul just doesn’t matter at this point. He was mostly an afterthought until the end of the debate, when he said something about liberty thriving when a government is so small that you can’t see it. I doubt that insight will resuscitate his campaign. But he’s got a big filibuster coming up, so that ought to keep him in the headlines for a little longer. Ted Cruz is impossible to ignore. He’s creepy and awkward and deeply annoying, but he just won’t go away. As expected, he did well tonight. At the beginning of the debate, he confessed that his greatest weakness is his love of the constitution (What else could it be?). He also said something about driving people (drunk people, I think) home at the end of the night, which wasn’t weird at all. All told, tonight was a win for Cruz. He pandered to his religious base and performed his rehearsed speeches with characteristic flair. He even took a few jabs at the media, which conservatives absolutely love. I doubt he gets a boost in the polls, but he definitely didn’t hurt himself tonight. So long as he’s got the evangelical and Tea party demographics cornered, Cruz has staying power. There isn’t much to say about Huckabee. If he wasn’t selling books or angling for a TV show, I imagine he would’ve dropped out of the race a long time ago. He said nothing new or interesting tonight. In fact, he barely spoke at all, and when he did it was brief and immediately forgettable. He was at the bottom of the polls before the debate, and that’s where he’ll be tomorrow. Kasich continues to be one of the more interesting candidates in the race. His strategy has been to remain the sensible, moderate guy, the one who can appeal to centrists and moderates in a general election. He’s been more aggressive lately, however. I expected him to be in attack mode tonight, because he needs to do something to break through, but he was fairly cautious. Tonight he tried to distinguish himself as the only candidate who’s pragmatic enough to get things done in Washington. But this has been his approach from the very beginning. It hasn’t worked so far and I doubt it will now. Christie did well tonight, but it wasn’t enough. His tough guy routine hasn’t been as effective with Trump on the stage, so his strategy was to attack the moderators rather than his fellow candidates. Basically, every Christie statement was a variation of the phrase: “We’re talking about X when we should be talking about Y!” That’s it. He also said we have to be honest with old people and just tell them the truth, which is that “the government lied to you and stole your money” and you’ll “never see it again.” I’m not sure what to make of that, so I’ll just leave it right there. Something tells me Christie will hang around for a while, but he’s got no chance to win this thing. VIDEO: We took a look back at how often candidates mentioned Clinton at the previous three Republican presidential debates. Can you guess how many times we counted?",REAL
+8677,Have The Sun really darkened the image of Brexit legal challenge winner Gina Miller?,"Next Swipe left/right Have The Sun really darkened the image of Brexit legal challenge winner Gina Miller? 
+@Crookedfootball over on Twitter says, “Look how the Sun has darkened Gina Miller’s skin compared to the Times” 
+The Sun: 
+The Times: 
+Obviously this could be just web bollocks but @Ajjolley has checked the paper versions next to each other: 
+“Printed in same plant”, he says, “Little doubt the Sun darkened photo of Gina Miller” 
+However @CaeruleanSea says, “as much as I loathe the Sun, the Times have upped the exposure on their pic. Google pics from that speech.” 
+And yep – he has a point: look at the BBC coverage Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37861888 
+In conclusion: the media has sent us all entirely mad that we’re now checking how dark people are in Photoshop.",FAKE
+3359,"Official: Withheld Clinton emails contain 'operational' intel, put lives at risk","EXCLUSIVE: Highly classified Hillary Clinton emails that the intelligence community and State Department recently deemed too damaging to national security to release contain “operational intelligence” – and their presence on the unsecure, personal email system jeopardized “sources, methods and lives,” a U.S. government official who has reviewed the documents told Fox News.
+
+The official, who was not authorized to speak on the record and was limited in discussing the contents because of their highly classified nature, was referring to the 22 “TOP SECRET” emails that the State Department announced Friday it could not release in any form, even with entire sections redacted.
+
+The announcement fueled criticism of Clinton’s handling of highly sensitive information while secretary of state, even as the Clinton campaign continued to downplay the matter as the product of an interagency dispute over classification. But the U.S. government official’s description provides confirmation that the emails contained closely held government secrets. “Operational intelligence” can be real-time information about intelligence collection, sources and the movement of assets.
+
+The official emphasized that the “TOP SECRET” documents were sent over an extended period of time -- from shortly after the server's 2009 installation until early 2013 when Clinton stepped down as secretary of state.
+
+Separately, Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., who sits on the House intelligence committee, said the former secretary of state, senator, and Yale-trained lawyer had to know what she was dealing with.
+
+""There is no way that someone, a senior government official who has been handling classified information for a good chunk of their adult life, could not have known that this information ought to be classified, whether it was marked or not,” he said. ""Anyone with the capacity to read and an understanding of American national security, an 8th grade reading level or above, would understand that the release of this information or the potential breach of a non-secure system presented risk to American national security.""
+
+Pompeo also suggested the military and intelligence communities have had to change operations, because the Clinton server could have been compromised by a third party.
+
+“Anytime our national security team determines that there's a potential breach, that is information that might potentially have fallen into the hands of the Iranians, or the Russians, or the Chinese, or just hackers, that they begin to operate in a manner that assumes that information has in fact gotten out,” Pompeo said.
+
+On ABC's “This Week” on Sunday, one day before the Iowa caucuses, Clinton claimed ignorance on the sensitivity of the materials and stressed that they weren’t marked.
+
+""There is no classified marked information on those emails sent or received by me,"" she said, adding that “Republicans are going to continue to use it [to] beat up on me.”
+
+Clinton was pressed in the same ABC interview on her signed 2009 non-disclosure agreement which acknowledged that markings are irrelevant, undercutting her central explanation. The agreement states ""classified information is marked or unmarked … including oral communications.""
+
+Clinton pointed to her aides, saying: ""When you receive information, of course, there has to be some markings, some indication that someone down the chain had thought that this was classified and that was not the case.”
+
+But according to national security legal experts, security clearance holders are required to speak up when classified information is not in secure channels.
+
+""Everybody who has a security clearance has an individual obligation to protect the information,"" said national security attorney Edward MacMahon Jr., who represented former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling in the high-profile leak investigation regarding a New York Times reporter. ""Just because somebody sends it to you … you can't just turn a blind eye and pretend it never happened and pretend it's unclassified information.""
+
+These rules, known as the Code of Federal Regulations, apply to U.S. government employees with security clearances and state there is an obligation to report any possible breach by both the sender and the receiver of the information. The rules state: ""Any person who has knowledge that classified information has been or may have been lost, possibly compromised or disclosed to an unauthorized person shall immediately report the circumstances to an official designated for this purpose.""
+
+The Clinton campaign is now calling for the 22 “TOP SECRET” emails to be released, but this is not entirely the State Department's call since the intelligence came from other agencies, which have final say on classification and handling.
+
+""The State Department has no authority to release those emails and I do think that Secretary Clinton most assuredly knows that,"" Pompeo said.
+
+Meanwhile, the release of other emails has revealed more about the high-level exchange of classified information on personal accounts. Among the latest batch of emails released by the State Department is an exchange between Clinton and then-Sen. John Kerry, now secretary of state. Sections are fully redacted, citing classified information – and both Kerry and Clinton were using unsecured, personal accounts.
+
+Further, a 2009 email released to Judicial Watch after a federal lawsuit -- and first reported by Fox News -- suggests the State Department 's senior manager Patrick Kennedy was trying to make it easier for Clinton to check her personal email at work, writing to Clinton aide Cheryl Mills a ""stand-alone separate network PC is ... [one] great idea.""
+
+""The emails show that the top administrator at the State Department, Patrick Kennedy, who is still there overseeing the response to all the inquiries about Hillary Clinton, was in on Hillary Clinton's separate email network and system from the get-go,""  Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.
+
+Kennedy is expected to testify this month before the Republican-led Benghazi Select Committee.
+
+Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.
+
+Pamela K. Browne is Senior Executive Producer at the FOX News Channel (FNC) and is Director of Long-Form Series and Specials. Her journalism has been recognized with several awards. Browne first joined FOX in 1997 to launch the news magazine “Fox Files” and later, “War Stories.”",REAL
+2559,White House facing rocky legal road on immigration,"During the campaign, Trump had threatened to impose a large tariff to keep the jobs in the United States.",REAL
+10038,"Capitalism, climate change and the Anthropecene","shorty 
+The following article by originally published in the December/January 2016 edition of Socialism Today, the magazine of the Socialist Party in England and Wales. H uman beings have radically altered the Earth, adapting nature in the struggle to survive and thrive. The pace of change accelerated rapidly with the development of agriculture and class-based society. It hit breakneck speed in the industrial revolution, and with post-war scientific and technological breakthroughs. Many now say that we have entered a distinctive geological epoch – a new human era, the Anthropocene. JESS SPEAR, a member of Socialist Alternative in Seattle, USA, reports. Humans, arriving on the scene roughly a million years ago, and building modern industrial society as we know it only about 50 years ago, represent a blip in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history. Yet, at each stage of humanity’s development, we have modified nature and therefore modified our own evolution, setting the course for biological and social changes. From simple farming to unearthing and burning fossil fuels, to unleashing atomic bombs, our interaction with nature has gone from local to global. Humankind has, without a doubt, left our mark on the planet. We can discover what the Earth looked like, the shape and position of the continents as they have drifted apart and recombined every 300-500 million years, what creatures roamed its seas and land, and what plants covered the surface, by deciphering the chemical or physical imprints of their existence left behind. And what we’ve learned is that the planet is never static. The planet – as we know it, the Earth system comprised of rock, water and atmosphere in constant interconnected cycles of energy exchange – has always had upheaval, mass extinctions, and climate change. Earth’s history is full of radical change. Nonetheless, scientists today are ringing the alarm bells over the rate of change we’re witnessing compared to that which existed prior to human society. Climate scientists are pointing to the rapid shift in greenhouse gases, biologists to the rising number of species extinctions, oceanographers to the increasing acidity of the ocean, and soil scientists to the depletion of nutrients and degradation of farmland, as evidence that humanity’s productive activity is overwhelming the Earth system. The rate of increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) is unlike anything they’ve seen in Earth’s history for at least the past 800,000 years. Climate change and economic depression, the dual crises of capitalism, have produced a growing global revolt and a search for ideas and strategy to end our misery and protect future generations. Mass movements against austerity demonstrate that working people refuse to accept a system that demands severe cuts to living standards to satisfy the 1%. Not yet clear to the vast majority of people rebelling against the ruling elite is with what to replace this rotten system or how. With the window of opportunity to mitigate the consequences of climate change and prevent further disruption inching closer with each passing year, winning the working class to a socialist alternative is ever more paramount. Only scientific socialism can arm the working class with a programme and strategy to unite and fight to end the rule of the 1%, transfer power to the 99%, and rapidly implement a plan to develop society along sustainable lines. More heat, more problems W e live relatively brief lives. With only a little less than a century for our point of reference, our perspective on global changes is correspondingly narrow. To add further obfuscation, the Earth is rather large, so we don’t notice the accumulated effects of deforestation, glacier retreat, and massive piles of trash collecting in the Pacific and Atlantic ocean gyres. The Earth’s temperature rising nearly a degree Celsius has virtually no meaning to communities who daily experience larger fluctuations. That we have unearthed and burned so much carbon, chemically changing the very air we breathe, that there are now 400 molecules of CO2 for every million air molecules – a level not seen in, perhaps, the last 25 million years – up from about 280, is generally unnoticeable. Yet, regardless of our inability to perceive the radical transformation of our atmosphere and the general out-of-sight-out-of-mind privilege most in the developed countries have when it comes to environmental destruction and pollution, we are nonetheless reaching dangerous tipping points. The consequences of burning fossil fuels have long been known. As early as 1896, Svante Arrhenius published a paper detailing how CO2 absorbs light reflected from Earth’s surface, preventing it from escaping the Earth system (that is, the greenhouse effect). In the late 1950s, Charles Keeling began measuring the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Within just a few years he made the startling discovery that not only are there are seasonal fluctuations in CO2 related to plants absorbing it, then decomposition returning it to the atmosphere, but that the overall concentration was rapidly rising every year. The Keeling Curve – which continues to grow as measurements are added to a continuous record from 1958 to today – is regarded as the first proof that industrial activity was transforming the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Yet, it is the dramatic and speedy depletion in Earth’s ice inventory that is the canary in the coalmine. The news last year that the west Antarctic ice sheet has destabilised and is expected to disintegrate over the coming centuries should have elicited an immediate response from world leaders. The ice sheet holds enough water to raise global sea level by about 3.3 meters! There is no way to prevent its demise. We can only now adapt to the rising seas. Added to this is the news that a section of the Greenland ice sheet, which contains the equivalent of half a meter global sea level rise, is also melting rapidly. Arctic sea ice has dramatically been reduced, as well, and scientists expect the Arctic will be ice free in the summer as early as 2020. Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets act as a global air conditioner, keeping the planet cooler than it would be otherwise by reflecting sunlight. The loss of Earth’s ice (land-based ice that is) will not only raise sea level, displacing the more than one billion people inhabiting low-lying coastlines. It will also further disrupt climate, acting as a positive feedback reinforcing global warming. As the ice melts, the Earth absorbs more heat, more ice melts, and so on. Still, for most people, climate change is about hotter summers and extreme weather events. And, we are not just talking about our future – which will undoubtedly get hotter, with more intense weather – but our current state of affairs. 2015 is set to be the hottest year on record. We have now hit the one degree mark (above pre-industrial levels) for average global temperature rise (up from 0.85 degrees). This added heat has produced heatwaves, flash flooding, and deadly weather events that force us to acknowledge that climate disruption is not merely something scientists debate and discuss for future generations. Climate change is our present. In 2003, an estimated 70,000 people died from the heatwave that gripped Europe. Since the 1960s extreme weather events have more than tripled, killing an estimated 60,000 people from mostly underdeveloped countries. The World Health Organisation estimates that without mitigation efforts we can expect an additional quarter of a million people will be killed by climate change related effects from 2030-50. For what we can expect our future climate to look and feel like, what’s important to keep in mind is that the sheer scale of the problem that is current global climate change stems from just a tiny increase in global temperature. Just one degree Celsius. Imagine the impacts on us, the environment that sustains us, and the Earth system itself, when the Earth gets another degree warmer. That is what scientists tell us we can expect by the end of the century, if we don’t stop ‘business-as-usual’. Welcome to the Anthropocene T he alteration of our planet from human activity, from the top of the atmosphere down to the bottom of the ocean, is so extensive that a growing number of scientists who study Earth’s history and system are now hotly debating whether we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene (anthropo – human, cene – new), or maybe we have been in it for centuries and just didn’t know it. Proposing a new geological epoch is not merely adding a date and name to the geological time scale, which spans 4.5 billion years from the formation of the solar system to the present day. In fact, the geological time scale itself is not merely a list of dates and names. It’s also a tool – a common measurement scientists use to understand how changes on our planet from its birth until now occurred. The eons, eras and epochs that comprise it are distinguished by rapid shifts on the entire planet. Acceptance of the Anthropocene as a new epoch is therefore a question of whether the impact humanity has made is abrupt, discernible globally, and undeniably different from the previous epoch, the Holocene (and before that, the Pleistocene). In other words, has human activity fundamentally disrupted the Earth system such that it can be seen in the rocks, water, and atmosphere, and future scientists will see it? Proponents of adding the new epoch to the geological time scale disagree about when, exactly, the Anthropocene began. The three dates currently being debated – 8,000 years ago, the industrial revolution, and 1945 – represent markers along the road to civilization as humanity discovered and applied new ways to modify nature to satisfy our basic needs. Some argue it began roughly 8,000 years ago when humans began clear-cutting forests and rice farming, which altered the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Others argue the Anthropocene really started at the beginning of the industrial revolution when widespread use of fossil fuels began disrupting the Earth system, leading to the effects we are witnessing today and will experience in the future. The widespread atomic bomb testing, beginning with the Trinity Test in 1945, is the latest date proposed. It is supported not because atomic bomb testing itself disrupted the Earth system – though we should not forget that scientists warned of the dangers of a nuclear-war-induced ‘atomic winter’ – but because atom bombs leave a global fingerprint easily seen and measured, and atom bomb testing marks the rise of American capitalism’s unprecedented period of expansion. Unlike previous changes to the geological time scale, however, the proposals have political and social implications. That scientists are suggesting a new epoch marked by human-caused alterations has correctly been seized by many environmentalists as concrete proof that we are indeed radically altering the planet. The response from the left has been a mixture of confusion and conflation of the scientific debate and the predictable political response. Some anti-capitalists call foul over the name of the epoch. They argue that its focus on humans, and therefore insinuating all humans are responsible, hides the real root of the rapid changes taking place: namely, capitalism. To others, particularly deep green ecologists, it is proof that humanity is largely sociopathic – how dare we name an epoch after humans! – and that really civilization is the problem, not humans. These arguments stem from either a misunderstanding or a lack of understanding of how humanity and human society developed over the last million years. A historical materialist analysis of human history and pre-history is in fact the key to unlocking the door to our sustainable future. Change is constant “History can be viewed from two sides: it can be divided into the history of nature and that of man. The two sides, however, are not to be seen as independent entities. As long as man has existed, nature and man have affected each other”, wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology (1846). Many in the environmental movement, however, believe we can’t interact in nature without causing harm because we, humans, are separate from nature. This argument is embodied in a book written by environmental leader and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (1989). Similar to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), McKibben’s book is seen as one of the first to warn humanity of the dangers of global warming. In it McKibben doesn’t just warn about carbon pollution, he passionately argues that humanity has destroyed nature, that “we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us – its separation from human society”. We have altered the chemistry of the atmosphere, he argues, therefore there is no place on Earth one could travel that is untouched by humanity. Yet, our ‘separation from nature’ is a recent phenomenon, a product of capitalism, which combined wage labour with social production for private profit, separating humans from the Earth on which they laboured for sustenance. For the vast majority of human existence we were intimately connected to the Earth, learned and accumulated knowledge of its seasonal changes, and experienced it as part of our existence, even though we lacked understanding of its driving forces. As Marx explained, “man lives from nature, ie, nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die”. So, the conception that we are separate from nature is also recent, and is linked to the development of capitalism. The notion that it is modern industrial society that’s the problem, and that a return to living directly from the Earth is the solution, is both overly simplistic and ahistorical. It extracts civilization from the history of humanity and measures its impact based on the presumed better situation that existed previous to civilization – for the Earth, but clearly not for humans as we died from all sorts of health issues now treatable and preventable. Furthermore, it ignores that pre-modern humans also greatly altered the Earth. For as long as we’ve had boats (10,000+ years) and people crossed the seas, at first in search of food, then for imperialist conquest and/or in search of religious freedom, we have unknowingly (and many times knowingly) transported species from one side of the Earth to the other, radically altering ecosystems, causing some species to flourish in new environments and others to go extinct. The proponents of the earliest start date for the Anthropocene would argue the advent of agriculture at the end of the last ice age even altered the chemistry of the atmosphere, evidence that humans were radically changing the planet as early as 8,000 years ago. Indeed, we are not even the first species to transform the atmosphere. To give an extreme example, around 2.7 billion years ago, cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) appeared, becoming the first organisms to photosynthesize and produce oxygen as a by-product. Before they evolved and started pumping out oxygen, there was practically no oxygen in the atmosphere. Without cyanobacteria we would not exist. Interaction with nature without altering it is impossible. Living organisms must exchange material with the Earth to live, thereby influencing their environment, affecting their evolution and others. As Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin write in The Dialectical Biologist (1985), “the environment and the organism codetermine each other”. But if all species impact nature in some way, are we, with our increasing population and extensive industrial activity, relegated to the role of nature’s perpetual destroyer? Within or without? O ur ability to understand the impact we are having on the planet, that it will have negative consequences for us both in the short and long term, and the decisions we make to alter the course of history, is what sets us apart from cyanobacteria and other organisms. Labour is not just a source of wealth. It is also what created humanity, conscious thought, conscious planning, and the accumulation of knowledge. The advent of tools, and with it the co-development of the mind, the social activity of hunting and the creation of language, put us on a path to producing food surpluses, the very basis of class society, civilization and scientific understanding. In short, all of human history can be distilled down to the organisation of labour and technique, and the concurrent changes in culture, society, and our environment. When capitalism replaced feudalism, it started the long process of drawing ever larger sections of the population away from farms and into factories and cities, and changed our ideas about nature in relation to ourselves. No longer did we see ourselves as part of nature, but separate. For the capitalists, nature became a source of free wealth which, when moulded by human labour, produced enormous profits for them. For the new working class, alienated from nature, the ripping apart of the Earth for raw materials, the dumping of toxins into rivers, and the sooty skies above urban centres, represented an assault on nature, a degradation of once beautiful areas. At each moment, as humanity leapt from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution, our ideas about ourselves in relation to nature shifted. Towards a socialist future “We don’t want merely an amelioration of the present society, but the establishment of a new one”. (Engels, quoted by John Green in A Revolutionary Life, 2008) Capitalism has now outlived its usefulness for humanity. It is destroying the environment, disrupting our climate, and relegating a billion people to the slow death of starvation and malnutrition. No one could argue that a system based on the profit motive will solve a problem on which it depends for existence. Capitalism cannot offer the means to restore ecological balance because it places no value in nature. Yet, to throw all of modern civilization, fostered by the tremendous wealth, technology, and resources developed by capitalism, into the dustbin, as some suggest we do, because it also produced environmental destruction, is to ignore the potential, also created by this system, to create a sustainable future. When capitalism triumphed over feudalism, it unshackled science from the confines of religion which sought to stifle discoveries that challenged its rule. Further development of capitalist technique, socialised production, division of labour, and machinery, required major leaps in science. And though investment in scientific research is primarily focused on how to further maximise profits, the ruling class today also cannot hold back discoveries that ultimately undermine its authority. Whether it is plastic made from banana peels or solar roadways, science applied to environmental and social problems is eroding the authority of those who say fossil fuels are necessary. Capitalism also developed the force which has the power to liberate all of humanity: the working class. As capitalism forced people off the land and into mainly urban wage labour, it created the force which has the common interest and potential to overthrow it and create a society that benefits the majority. All around you see working people rising up and demanding change because, not only does capitalism hold back the transition to renewable energy, it refuses to invest in society. The quest for profits has every major corporation and smaller businesses seeking to compete for a market share, depressing wages, cutting benefits, and threatening economic ruin for tax cuts. No longer is capitalism able to grow enough reserves to offer the working class a share of the profits. The ruling elite globally have no idea how to both restore economic growth and ensure payment to the major bondholders of sovereign debt. Anti-austerity movements from Ireland to Spain to the heroic working class in Greece have refused to accept their fate. Protests against new trade deals – the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – reveal that working people understand that corporations are looking to cement their rule into international law, ignoring the needs of people and the planet. Overcoming a system that is based on the exploitation of us all, that separated us from nature, and is driving us towards a completely unsustainable future, starts first and foremost with a rejection of its ideas. If we limit what humanity is, ignore what it was and, importantly, do not understand how it changed from one to the other, then we are effectively rejecting the idea that we have evolved and, crucially, that we are still in the process of evolving. The state of the planet during the Anthropocene, whether we accept the earliest start date or the latest, is that of constant change. Our evolution from hunter/gatherers to modern industrial society involved constant interaction with our environment. It shaped us. We shaped it. Through this process we developed ideas about what we are, what our environment is, and our relation to each other. Humanity, with all the accumulated knowledge and experience of past generations, has over this time also developed the capacity to finally move beyond merely surviving to actually living. The vast resources, technology, wealth, and human ingenuity could be harnessed and directed to ending the needless suffering, raising living standards globally, and achieving ecological balance. If we grasp this fact and use it to inform our actions, then we can take control over the changes taking place today and which will occur in the future. This vision has the potential to unite the working class in its historical task of overthrowing capitalism. We are at a precipice from which we can choose to either leap off, hoping that capitalism will find a way to profit from building us a safety net, or we can appropriate the tools, technology and resources to build a bridge to a socialist future.",FAKE
+9583,ELECTION EVE BOMBSHELL : Wikileaks Reveals Analysts at Intelligence Firm Believe Hillary Killed Vince Foster – TruthFeed,"ELECTION EVE BOMBSHELL : Wikileaks Reveals Analysts at Intelligence Firm Believe Hillary Killed Vince Foster ELECTION EVE BOMBSHELL : Wikileaks Reveals Analysts at Intelligence Firm Believe Hillary Killed Vince Foster Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 7, 2016 
+Wikileaks has cast a harsh light of TRUTH on a dark and disturbed Clinton campaign. 
+Hillary’s campaign is comprised of extremely wealthy elites who exist in an avant-garde world filled with bizarre ritualistic practices that play out like a fantastical plot out of a foreign snuff film. 
+From pay to play scams designed to make the Clintons wealthy to satanic rituals called Spirit Cooking to accusations of pedophilia and murder – it’s all weaved throughout the Wikileaks email drop like a tapestry of dark and sinister perversion. 
+In what cold be one the biggest BOMBSHELLS yet, Wikileaks reveals that analysts at an intelligence firm believe that Hillary Clinton had one-time Deputy White House counsel Vince Foster murdered – a rumor that has plagued the Clintons for decades. 
+The “Ron Brown” referred to in the above email is this man, Secretary of Commerce. 
+Notice the email states that Ron’s assassination had the “earmarks” of Hillary’s “method of disposal…” of a “talkative” secretary of commerce. 
+Interesting choice of words, wouldn’t you say? 
+That’s what led to the comment regarding Vince Foster’s murder. 
+Some may consider that an “off the cuff” comment. 
+Hardly. 
+And certainly not happenstance once the totality of the Foster story unfolds. 
+Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park, just outside of Washington, D.C., on July 20, 1993. 
+His death was ruled a suicide, but new documents call “suicide” into question. 
+Serious question. 
+This recently uncovered evidence suggests Vince Foster did not commit suicide. 
+The evidence shows that he died of two gunshot wounds to the neck, and not the one wound initially reported. 
+The flies were discovered in the National Archives and Records Administration. 
+The injuries on Foster’s neck were not reported in official government documents. 
+At the time, the FBI said that Foster’s neck injury photos were underexposed and useless. 
+Many people who have studied the case and raised concerns that it was a murder cover up have become targets of Clinton and Clinton associates backlash. 
+But the facts remain – records indicate Foster didn’t die from one .38 caliber gunshot. 
+He died from TWO gunshots . 
+Furthermore, the second shot, on right side of his neck was made by a “small caliber” bullet hole. 
+This raises serious questions about Foster’s motives for suicide. 
+He was tied to Hillary Clinton’s roles in White House scandals at Whitewater and the White House Travel Office. 
+Vince Foster was one of Hillary’s closest friends, and he had intimate knowledge of these two scandals. 
+The theory is that Vince Foster was murdered to make sure he didn’t tell the world what he knew about President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary. 
+He has a reputation of being too honest, and therefore, many speculate he could no longer be trusted. 
+This is just ANOTHER scandal in a decades-long history of scams, secrets, and rumors or sinister wrongdoing, unethical actions, and morally corrupt behavior that follows the Clintons. 
+America, for the love of everything HOLY – do not welcome further corruption and degradation into the White House. 
+We’ve gone decades now placing unscrupulous people in power. 
+It’s time for REAL CHANGE . 
+It’s time to out an END TO THE CLINTONS . 
+It’s time for you and me to come first . 
+#AmericaFrist This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. Share on Pinterest Share No Responses ",FAKE
+9478,Foods & Supplements For Chemtrail Protection,"Foods & Supplements For Chemtrail Protection Nov 5, 2016 0 0 
+There is no question anymore about it. Chemtrails are real and are not to be confused with contrails. If you’re skeptical, that is okay, though please take a look at the CIA Director’s comments about geoengineering here . 
+For those understanding that chemtrails pose a real threat to humanity, together we’ll take a look at some foods and health supplements that can be used to help protect yourself against chemtrails. 
+When barium, nano particles of aluminum, radioactive thorium, mercury, lead, ethylene dibromide and many other toxic chemicals and heavy metals are being sprayed into our atmosphere, it is a good idea to learn how to properly defend your body from such contaminants. Chemtrails or contrails? 
+Foods 
+The first thing to keep in mind regarding detoxification and health is that we must include foods that help us to naturally detoxify our body, while still taking in nutrients. Any food that has lots of chlorophyll in it will help tremendously in detoxing as well as providing essential nutrients our cells need. Ensuring to include plenty of spinach, green salads, arugula, cilantro, parsley, kale, cucumbers and other green veggies into your meals is a great way to begin. 
+Looking more specifically at cilantro, we find that when combined with chlorella, it can remove a very large amount of heavy metals within a short time frame. In fact, studies done at the Optimal Wellness Test Research Center showed that within 42 days of using cilantro and chlorella, 74% of aluminum, 91% of Mercury and 87% of lead within the body was removed. It was noted that using cilantro and chlorella in conjunction was important because cilantro mobilizes many more toxins than it can remove from the body, whereas with chlorella also in the bloodstream, it can act to remove the excess toxins found in the bloodstream. 
+Other foods to consider using are spirulina and medicinal mushrooms like Reishi, Lion’s Mane, Chaga and Agarikon. Chaga mushrooms have been scientifically proven to protect against DNA degradation, remove synthetic chemicals and heavy metals, and purify the blood. Cilantro is a wonderful medicinal herb. 
+Health Supplements 
+Fulvic acid is a health supplement gaining massive attention in the health supplement field, thanks in large part to Dr. Dan Nuzum . Fulvic acid is the end product of a process called humification. Microorganisms decompose plant matter in the soil which results in fulvic and humic acids. These are perhaps the most important and nutrient rich substances on the planet. In fact, fulvic acid is the most potent anti-oxidant known as it contains over 14 tetratrillion electrons (that’s 14 with 21 zeroes behind it) that it can donate to neutralize free radicals. 
+This gives it an incredible ability to provide electrochemical balance within the cell, which is crucial for detoxification. It also is rich in electrolytes, increases the synthesis rate of RNA and DNA, increases assimilation of vitamins and minerals into cells. 
+It also reacts very quickly with radioactive material and renders them neutral and harmless upon contact with such destructive elements. According to Supreme Fulvic : 
+“ Radioactive elements have an affinity for humic and fulvic acids . They form organo-metal complexes of different absorptive stability and solubility. Uranium and plutonium are influenced by humic substances as are other polluting metals, each being solubilized and absorbed, thereby annihilating that specific radioactivity . Radioactive substances react rapidly with fulvic acid, and only a brief time is required for equilibrium to be reached.” 
+Additionally, fulvic acids help tremendously with transforming toxic metals in the body : 
+“Fulvic acid has the power to form stable water soluble complexes with monovalent, divalent, trivalent, and ployvalent metal ions. It can aid the actual movement of metal ions that are normally difficult to mobilize or transport. Fulvic acids are excellent natural chelators and cation exchangers, and are vitally important in the nutrition of cells.” 
+The source of fulvic acid is important though as Optimally Organic notes that getting fulvic acid from vegetation rather than dried rock beds is best as the excess carbon found in the fulvic from rock beds makes the fulvic ineffective. An incredible health supplement. 
+
+In addition to fulvic acid to help against destructive chemicals in the air, nascent iodine is something to also consider. 
+Nascent iodine is iodine that is in atomic form rather than molecular form. This form of iodine is easily absorbed by the body and is what is produced by the thyroid gland . Having enough iodine in the body is necessary for normal T3 and T4 hormone production as well as in assisting the detoxification process. 
+In a person who has given themselves sufficient iodine, radioactive iodine(extremely harmful) can’t bind into our body’s receptor cells and will be flushed out. However, it is important to ensure the body is receiving enough absorbable iodine, which nascent iodine provides. Solar frequencies directly interact with our DNA. 
+Why Chemtrails? 
+There are a couple reasons discussed as to why chemtrails occur in our skies. The first is that some believe that shadow government want to keep people sick and unwell, so the pharmaceutical and western medical establishments continue to financially profit off of sick and unwell people. The second is that the shadow government wants to block out the Sun’s rays as much as possible. The first is that they know sunlight is actually healthy for a person and the second is so that our DNA does not continue to receive upgrades from the light that comes forth from the Sun. Remember that Russian scientists have scientifically shown how light positively affects DNA. 
+Additionally, engineer and scientist Maurice Cotterell has stated that genetic mutations and upgrades occur through the action of ionizing radiation and that X-rays and gamma rays from the Sun are the key factor in genetic leaps that species have taken and will continue to take. 
+What are your thoughts on all of this? Which supplements do you take to boost overall health? Do you take any specifically for protection from harmful chemicals being sprayed in the air and on genetically modified foods? What are your thoughts about the Sun affecting our DNA? Why are chemtrails happening? 
+Lance Schuttler graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Health Science and practices health coaching through his website Orgonlight Health . You can follow the Orgonlight Health facebook page or visit the website for more information on how to receive health coaching for yourself, a family member or a friend as well as view other inspiring articles.",FAKE
+6334,BREAKING: DOJ FINALLY Secures Warrant To Inspect Huma’s Emails | Daily Wire,"BREAKING: DOJ FINALLY Secures Warrant To Inspect Huma’s Emails By: Michael Qazvini October 30, 2016 On the heels of FBI Director James Comey’s unexpected Friday announcement about revisiting the Hillary Clinton email investigation, the US Department of Justice has officially obtained a warrant to inspect Huma Abedin’s stash of emails. Abedin is perhaps Hillary Clinton’s closest confidante. During the course of the FBI’s investigation, she spoke with federal agents on several occasions, evading questions and providing only vague answers to direct inquiries. “The process has begun,” stated the bureau Sunday in a rather cryptic message, suggesting that Abedin’s emails will be possibly be examined before election day. Enjoying intimate access to the former secretary of state, Abedin sent several emails through Hillary’s private server. A few months ago, the FBI explicitly asked Abedin to hand over any information, including emails and devices those emails may be stored in to investigators. It now looks like she failed to comply with the request. In a bizarre twist of events, the FBI found hundreds of thousands of Abedin’s emails stored on a laptop belonging to her now-estranged husband. The emails were discovered as investigators seized evidence related to a separate investigation regarding an inquiry into disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner’s possible sexual overtures to a minor. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton chats with her staff, including aide Huma Abedin (L), onboard her plane in White Plains, New York, October 22, 2016, on her way to a campaign event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. / AFP / Robyn Beck (Photo credit should read ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images) Law enforcement officials have been hesitant to provide a timeline to the public for when the completion of its review of this treasure trove of emails. There may be evidence hiding in those emails that could incriminate Abedin’s boss, US presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. But we likely won’t find out until after the election, raising unsettling questions about the integrity of our fragile democracy. 
+As a matter of principle, the FBI should tell the American people everything it knows before voters cast their ballots on November 8th. Tags ",FAKE
+5263,Why Michelle Obama has a prime spot at the Democratic National Convention,"Nine years ago, Michelle Obama was a reluctant political spouse. The Chicago hospital executive made little secret of her distaste for the process as she stepped onto the national stage, calling partisan politics a cynical business. Her raw authenticity, at times, hurt her husband’s campaign for the presidency.
+
+Today, the first lady is a fully evolved political superstar, hugely beloved within the Democratic Party and a force within popular culture. Handed a prime-time speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention on Monday, she has been tapped to serve as a crucial validator for Hillary Clinton among groups who may remain skeptical of the party’s nominee.
+
+“I’m glad that she was selected to speak on the first night, the opening night of an historic convention,” said Donna Brazile, the longtime Democratic strategist. “The country trusts her. People know she’s authentic and will be honest, and [they] want to know what she thinks.”
+
+In nearly eight years as first lady, she has deliberately avoided partisan issues — but in her address she will fully endorse Clinton. According to an official familiar with her written speech, she plans to talk about the role a president plays in the lives of the nation’s children, shaping their values and aspirations. She will also discuss why she thinks Clinton has the “character, temperament and experience” to be president, and how Clinton’s career reflects ideals such as “opportunity, equality, inclusion.”
+
+Personally, it’s a big step: Mrs. Obama hasn’t been particularly close to the Clintons in the years since her husband’s bruising 2008 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. But now, the legacy of President Obama’s administration rides on her victory.
+
+[What kind of ex-president will Barack Obama be? POTUS plans for the future.]
+
+“She is there, in part, to be a coda and also to be a bridge,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University who studies political mobilization. “She’s there to wrap up the Obama administration and provide a transition to what a Clinton presidency could be.”
+
+Her opening-night slot reflects more than just her steady popularity: Organizers also appreciate her unerring knack for making headlines — and capturing the attention of people who don’t otherwise follow the news cycle closely. Come Tuesday, there will be stories about everything from how warmly she spoke about Clinton to which fashion designer’s clothing she wore.
+
+Even while absent from the action, she ended up at the center of the news last week when Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention turned out to have borrowed from her 2008 DNC speech, and the Trump campaign was forced to acknowledge that Melania is an admirer of Michelle’s. (She stayed mum throughout Melania’s ordeal.)
+
+[How Michelle Obama’s team wrote the speech that sparked the Melania Trump controversy]
+
+It was an ironic flub for the Trumps — after all, the decision to have the first lady open the convention for Democrats is not without peril. For all her popularity among party faithful and young pop-culture obsessives (57 percent of Americans viewed her favorably in a January 2015 Fox News poll), she may not be the most effective figure for wooing swing voters or peeling off Trump-skeptical Republicans.
+
+While her predecessor Laura Bush was viewed warmly by many Democrats even as their disdain for her husband grew, many Republicans see Michelle Obama more unfavorably. In a 2014 Pew survey, 46 percent of Republicans rated their views of her as “very unfavorable.”
+
+Conservative pundits have portrayed her advocacy for healthy food and exercise as a scolding, big-government intrusion into private lives; other critics have turned up their noses at her easy fluency in youthful hip-hop culture. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan described the first lady’s appearance at the 2013 Oscars as “disquieting” and questioned “this White House’s lack of hesitation to insert itself into any cultural event anywhere.”
+
+As it happened, Michelle Obama’s most visible appearance last week was her instantly viral “Carpool Karaoke” segment with “The Late Late Show” host James Corden, in which she sang along to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” and rapped along to Missy Elliot’s 2001 hit “Get Ur Freak On,” accompanied by Elliot herself. Vanity Fair, upon seeing this, dubbed her the “Coolest First Lady.”
+
+In her DNC remarks, though, she will attempt to connect her life story to broader political and policy themes. Her personal narrative of being reared in working-class Chicago shows up in nearly all of her speeches, and she probably will use it again to motivate the young people Democrats want to turn out to vote.
+
+“The first lady takes a very active role in her speeches,” Tina Tchen, the first lady’s chief of staff, said in an interview earlier this summer. “She wants to communicate that ‘these are the circumstances under which I grew up, and I never dreamed I’d be in the White House, and now I am, and you can do that, too.’ That’s a theme woven through her speeches.”
+
+Over nine years of telling and retelling her trajectory from the South Side to the Ivy League to motherhood and a legal career, her story has become more polished — thanks in part to the small cadre of White House speechwriters who have channeled her voice.
+
+In 2007, she would try to connect with other women over their household duties, “doing a lot of juggling, a lot of balancing,” as she told a New Hampshire crowd: “For the most part, if a toilet overflows, we’re the one scrambling to change the meeting time to be there to meet the plumber. Can I get an ‘Amen,’ ladies?”
+
+Stories like that have fallen away now that she is a globe-trotting first lady. She continues to describe her own family life as busy but affectionate. Yet it has been a long time since she sounded as if she was writing her own speeches.
+
+Democrats have high expectations for what she will bring to this political moment, particularly after Clinton’s choice of mild-mannered Sen. Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia as her running mate, said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist who served as DNC communications adviser during the Obama 2008 campaign.
+
+Clinton is “going to need to create as much sex appeal around her candidacy as she can,” Simmons said. “People will be looking for some excitement.”
+
+The big stage also provides an opportunity for Obama to foreshadow the role she hopes to play after January 2017. The first lady has spoken of the isolation she feels living in the Executive Mansion. While riding with Corden, she mentioned how rare it was for her to be riding in the front seat of a car, listening to music.
+
+Clearly, she is ready to regain more control over her private life. But her speech may hint at her future as a public figure.",REAL
+5882,BOMBSHELL: Leaked Emails Expose How Muslims Got In Obama’s Administration,"BOMBSHELL: Leaked Emails Expose How Muslims Got In Obama’s Administration Posted on October 27, 2016 by Dawn Parabellum in Politics Share This 
+Since the mainstream media won’t do their job, people everywhere are making it a point to go through the WikiLeaks emails to uncover the truth that the political elite are trying to hide. Upon perusal of the emails leaked yesterday in dump number 19, an interesting discussion surfaced, exposing how Muslims got in Obama’s administration, and it’s so unbelievable, you have to read it for yourself. 
+Under the subject line, “ Asian American Candidates, Muslim American Candidates, ” we get some juicy insight into how these candidates got into the Obama administration. However, the first thing that should stand out like a sore thumb is the date of this email. October 18, 2008, was about 3 weeks before Obama was elected. Muslims were chosen to be in the Obama administration weeks before his “election.” 
+The date indicates that Gayle Smith and John Podesta were staffing the Obama administration with Muslims weeks before Barack Obama was actually elected. This is not mainstream information, but Mad World News noticed that Obama was “transitioning” to the White House long before the election even took place. Unfortunately, that is not the worst part of this email. 
+The fact that Muslims were selected for the Obama administration before the American public voted for him is not a good sign, but it doesn’t look like Obama chose these appointments either. He’s not included in the conversation about who will be in his cabinet, leading skeptics to believe that this is all a setup. The date on this is September of 2008, well before Obama was elected. Note the highlighted areas where Christians are specifically excluded. 
+The even more terrifying aspect of this email is highlighted. “I excluded those with some Arab American background who are not Muslim (e.g., George Mitchell). Many Lebanese Americans, for example, are Christian.” Those who selected Obama before the election handpicked Muslims for his Administration knowing he’d be “elected.” Not only that, they specifically excluded Christians. 
+This particular email does not list a reason why Christians were excluded and Muslims were chosen specifically because of their religion, but with several more days of WikiLeaks Podesta email dumps, we may get some answers. But, that’s still not all. The email also indicated that a list for Muslim DOJ and judges would come soon. 
+Later, in the email right before signing off, Preeta Bansal , an Indian-American lawyer who ended up in the Obama administration as the General Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor to the federal Office of Management and Budget from 2009 until 2011, says the Muslim list for the DOJ (Department of Justice) will be on its way soon. Not long after, the list of Muslim Judges and US attorneys to appoint will follow. 
+Now, we know how the Obama administration was packed with Muslims, but we still aren’t sure why. Maybe they were hoping to avoid discrimination — or perhaps the reason is more sinister. Perhaps the infiltration of the US government with Muslims is a preplanned way to slowly allow the religion to permeate the West. Although that seems far fetched, this email is absolutely horrifying and nothing should shock us anymore after reading these leaked emails.",FAKE
+1603,"GOP governors are on the fast track to nowhere: Jindal, Christie & Kasich aren’t long for this world","There was a time when being a governor was considered excellent experience for the presidency. Particularly if you were in office while you ran for the nation’s top job. A governor had experience running an executive branch of government and dealing with the recalcitrant, egotistical idiots who populate state legislatures. Having spent chunks of their careers in a state far away from Washington, D.C. allowed governors to claim to be outsiders who could shake up the nation’s capital when they got there. Even George W. Bush got away with claiming outsider status when he ran in 2000, and his family has deeper roots in Washington than the trees in Rock Creek Park. (That argument has worked less well this year for his brother Jeb!, the former Florida governor whose heart doesn’t seem to be in the argument the few times he has tried to make it. But then, I don’t think Jeb!, in his current incarnation as the most unenthusiastic campaigner for elective office since Paul Warren ran for president of Winwood High, could sell heating oil in New Hampshire in winter.)
+
+This cycle’s Republican primary currently has three sitting governors running for their party’s nomination, following the departure from the race of Scott Walker. How are they doing? As of now, the tri-headed juggernaut of John Kasich, Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie have collectively captured around six percent of the support of the primary voters and will only sniff the Oval Office if they buy a ticket to the next president’s inauguration. By all rights, they should be back in their state capitals soon. But how soon? Let’s look at the status of their campaigns and make some predictions!
+
+John Kasich – Hey, he’s still pretty popular! A Quinnipiac poll in October found the Ohio governor’s approval rating at 62 percent, despite the fact that all his time stumping through early-voting states like New Hampshire and Iowa has left him with precious little time at home. Or maybe his approval ratings are that high because he’s been spending so much of his time away from Ohio. If he’s anything like the snarling, hectoring grouch at home that he was onstage during the last two debates, voters might genuinely prefer he stay away. Besides, like party-happy teenagers whose parents are out of town, last week they came close to laying in a huge supply of weed while Dad was away. Party in Youngstown!
+
+Kasich will probably stay in the race at least until he finishes no higher than sixth in the South Carolina primary on February 27, by which point the hopelessness of staying in just to be the lone voice of reason in this insane field should have sunk in. Though I think he should stay in the race through the convention next summer, at which time he can go back home sporting a 100 percent approval rating from his constituents, making him more popular in Ohio than LeBron James or warm weather. Heck, voters might even change the state constitution so he can run for a third consecutive term.
+
+Chris Christie – The presidential aspirations of New Jersey’s biggest flameout since the Hindenburg are not sitting well with his constituents. A poll released this week found that nearly two-thirds of New Jersey voters think Christie should give up on the presidency and come home to work on his state’s problems (the largest of which being that it is New Jersey). The same poll found his job disapproval rating at 59 percent, which I thought was surprisingly low. The poll also found that while only eight percent of his state’s Republicans back him for president, 53 percent think he should stay in the race. So New Jersey Republicans are either confused about what they want from the governor or they think the state runs better when he’s nowhere near it. The irony is that the national press has lately started pumping Christie’s chances for a comeback, even as his national polling numbers fell so low that he was relegated to the undercard debate this past Tuesday. I predict that his ego will not allow him to drop out of the race before the Florida primary on March 15, simply because he will convince himself that his performance during Sandy in 2012 will convince voters there that he truly understands the needs of a state that is always in danger of getting wiped out by a hurricane. But after that expensive loss, even New Jersey’s Republicans won’t be able to justify sending his campaign money to keep him the hell away from them. Bobby Jindal – Forget about meteoric rises. Louisiana’s governor is in a meteoric plummet. A recent poll from the University of New Orleans found that 55 percent of his constituents strongly disapprove of the job he’s doing. Add the 15 percent who checked the box without the modifier, and Jindal has a disapproval rating of an astonishing 70 percent. He might even be less popular in Louisiana than exercise. It’s hard to imagine a harder fall for a Louisiana governor who isn’t under indictment. Jindal was once touted as the Next Big Thing for national Republican politics. Just a couple of years ago he seemed like a straight shooter, giving speeches telling Republicans that they needed to stop being the “stupid party.” Then his ambitions got the better of him. Now he’s dragging his one percent national polling average through Iowa and spending his debate time trying to out-nasty every alligator in the bayou. I’d laud him for punching up, except there is no one lower to punch down on. My prediction? With his term as governor ending in 2016, Jindal will find a way to stay in the race until Roger Ailes offers him a paid contributor gig for Fox News. Which means he might still be running after the general election is over next November.",REAL
+9144,Anxiety and Worry Increase Risk of Heart Disease,"You Are Here: Home » Latest Posts » Anxiety and Worry Increase Risk of Heart Disease Anxiety and Worry Increase Risk of Heart Disease Prev post Next post 
+by Ana Sandoiu – MNT 
+Anxiety is a serious health concern affecting a large part of the American population. Now, new research indicates that health anxiety might increase the risk of heart disease. 
+Health anxiety might increase the risk of heart disease, research finds. In the United States, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness, affecting 40 million adults, or 18 percent of the population. 
+Anxiety is a known risk factor for heart disease . Previous research indicates a connection between depression and anxiety and the risk of coronary heart disease . 
+A meta-analysis found that anxious people have a 48 percent higher risk of dying from a heart problem. 
+Heart disease is the leading cause of death among Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), killing 365,000 people in 2014. New research suggests that the consequences of health anxiety are also serious and the condition should be treated properly. 
+Health anxiety describes a patient’s excessive worrying over having a serious illness, and seeking medical advice in the absence of a physical disease. 
+Patients with health anxiety misread physical symptoms as serious illnesses, and they often seek repeated medical help for the same issues. In its most intense form, health anxiety becomes hypochondria . Health anxiety and heart disease 
+Researchers led by Line Iden Berge, from the Helse Bergen hospital in Bergen, Norway, examined the link between health anxiety and heart disease. The results were published in the online journal BMJ Open . 
+Berge and team worked with participants in the Norwegian Hordaland Health Study (HUSK). This long-term study followed participants over a period of 12 years, and it was a collaboration between the National Health Screening Service, the University of Bergen, and local health services. 
+The 7,052 participants were born between 1953-1957. For the study, they had to answer questions about their health, lifestyle, and educational achievement. 
+Between 1997-1999, they underwent blood tests, weight, height, and blood pressure measurements. Participants were also asked to report their anxiety levels using the Whiteley Index. Scores above 90 percent were considered to be anxiety cases. 
+Over the entire study period, 234 participants, or 3.2 percent of the entire cohort, had an ischemic incident – either a heart attack or acute angina . Health anxiety raised heart disease risk by 73 percent 
+During follow-up, twice as many participants with health anxiety developed heart disease, compared with those who did not report any anxiety. Around 6.1 percent of health anxiety cases developed ischemic heart disease (IHD), compared with 3 percent of non-cases. 
+Because participants had been enrolled in a nationwide research project monitoring heart disease, their heart health was monitored extensively. The national program, entitled “Cardiovascular diseases in Norway,” was carried out between 1994-2009, so the study could track participants using national hospital data and death certificates up to 2009. 
+After adjustments for established cardiovascular risk factors, researchers found a 73 percent increased risk of developing IHD among cases with health anxiety. 
+Even considering established risk factors for IHD, such as smoking, high cholesterol , and education, health anxiety was a high risk factor for IHD. The risk of IHD also increased proportionally with the level of reported anxiety; the stronger the symptoms of health anxiety, the higher the risk of IHD. 
+Regarding gender, a very slight increase in IHD risk was noticed in women with health anxiety over their male counterparts. Trust your heart 
+Caveats to the results of the study include the fact that this is an observational study, telling us little about the cause-and-effect relation between anxiety and IHD. 
+Also, health anxiety is often associated with other mental health issues, such as general anxiety and depression, so the different types of anxiety and ways in which they increase the risk of heart disease can be difficult to differentiate. “[Our study] further indicates that characteristic behavior among persons with health anxiety, such as monitoring and frequent check-ups of symptoms, does not reduce the risk of [coronary heart disease] events,” the researchers write. 
+On the contrary, keeping the body in a constant state of alert might further increase the risk of heart-related incidents. 
+This puts both patients with anxiety and doctors in a difficult position. Telling an anxious patient that their anxiety is not a symptom of heart disease might help, but on the other hand, informing them that health anxiety might induce heart disease over time could cause them even more anxiety. 5 Herbs That Relieve Anxiety 
+Nervousness, difficulty in sleeping, depression and fearfulness can be symptoms of an anxiety disorder. What was once your body’s natural response to warn you of perceived dangers and prepare your mind to deal with stressors is now interfering with your daily chores, work output and even your relationships with our family, friends and spouse. You […] Acid-Alkaline pH Balance & Your Health 
+Today we’ll discus the Acid-Alkaline pH balance and how it plays huge role in the overall health and wellness of the human body. Original article by Kris Carr – Kriscarr.com You may have heard about pH or the acid-alkaline balance in your wellness travels. I was oblivious to this concept when I began my health journey. But, […] Top 3 Genetically Modified Food Products 
+by Christina Snider – Staff Writer Just like humans, every organism is composed of genetic materials. If scientists step in and begin to modify the DNA, it is referred to as genetic modification. While genetic modification can enhance the quality and taste of foods, improve their resistance to disease and pests and increase the overall […] Estimated 75% of world’s population lactose intolerant 
+Did you know approximately 75% of earths population is lactose intolerant? Don’t agree with that statement? Reading this may change your mind. Humans are the only species on the planet that drinks milk from other species. And although the statistics vary from race to race and country to country, overall it remains consistent. Most everywhere, […] First Ever Human Trial Finds Magic Mushrooms Beat Severe Depression 
+by Ocean Malandra – Reset.me Get ready world, “magic” mushrooms which contain the psychoactive compound psilocybin, may soon become the standard go-to for reversing what the World Health Organization says is the number one cause of disability on the planet: depression. A brand new first of its kind study published in The Lancet reports that psilocybin […] How To Enhance Your Health With Juices And Juice Fasting 
+By Ben Kim – www.drbenkim.com I’m often asked to name one thing that can be done right away to get healthier. With respect to food choices, the best suggestion I have is to begin drinking freshly pressed vegetable juices. Drinking just one freshly pressed juice each day is a reliable way of infusing your body with […] Achieving Alkalinity to Treat Illness and Disease: Changing Your pH Balance 
+by Christina Sarich – Natural Society All life on earth has an ideal and balanced pH level which best suits its perpetuation. Human beings are no different. As ocean pHs have dropped by just fractions from around 8.2 to 8.1 due to increased CO2 deposits, coral reefs have started to die off at an alarming rate. […] World’s oldest yoga teacher spills secrets of youth and healing 
+by Raw Michelle – Natural News Tao Porchon-Lynch can balance all of her weight on her forearms, lifting her entire body up and parallel to the floor without the need for support from her legs. She also engages in competitive dancing, cutting a rug with dancing partners half her age. The big deal? She’s 95! Clearly, Porchon-Lynch […] How to Avoid Fluoride in Water and Toothpaste 
+Here’s how to limit your exposure to fluoride and protect your children’s teeth. By Matt Hall — Staff Writer So what are health conscious people supposed to do? Is fluoride in the water we drink, bathing, and cook with simply an inescapable part of modern life? Fortunately, no. There are several steps we can take […] What’s for Breakfast? How About Some Monsanto Weed Killer? 
+by Jason Best – Takepart.com Just how much of Monsanto’s most popular weed killer are you eating every morning for breakfast? A study finds the world’s most widely used herbicide turning up in a bunch of morning favorites. In an unsettling report released Tuesday by the Alliance for Natural Health, the nonprofit advocacy group details the results of […] New Technology Capable of Better Detecting GMOs in Food 
+by Ethan Huff – Naturalnews.com European scientists have come up with a new technology that is allegedly better able to detect the presence of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) in food, animal feed and seeds. As published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, a new study out of Slovenia explains how the new technology, known as Droplet Digital […] Awesome Pallet House Built For $500 
+by Editor – Off Grid World The Pallet House. Reclaimed pallets can be used for constructing shelters, cabins, and homes. Building a pallet house from reclaimed pallets is an inexpensive way to build your off grid home or cabin. Get out there, get some pallets, build something! PALLET HOUSE – MULTIFUNCTIONAL GARDEN SHED OR CABIN […] Man says raw food diet has made him ‘almost superhuman’ 
+by Antonia – Natural News For fruitarian and endurance athlete Michael Arnstein, his 15-mile commute to work isn’t by car, bus or train. Instead, he runs to the office, jogging through residential neighborhoods and eventually New York’s Central Park, pausing only to enjoy fruit along the way. Before his run, he may enjoy a breakfast of […] 3 Herbs to Boost Your Lungs 
+Use the herbs Elecampane, Coltsfoot, and Mullein to significantly boost your lung function and help ensure you are getting oxygen to every vital organ. by Michelle Schoffro Cook – Care2.com Our lungs work overtime for us every day, ensuring that we have sufficient oxygen to power every bodily function. With increasing levels of pollution in our […] Join For Free! Discover Little Known Health Secrets and Useful Tips For Healthy Living! First Name ",FAKE
+862,Will The Real Donald Trump Please Stand Up?,"Will The Real Donald Trump Please Stand Up?
+
+Lately, it's been a political guessing game of which Donald Trump is going to show up.
+
+In the past 24 hours alone, the whiplash between what rival-turned-uneven-surrogate Ben Carson called the ""two different Donald Trumps"" was on bold display.
+
+From a serious foreign policy address in the morning, he returned just hours later to his regular slapstick mockery of his rivals. But as Trump moves even closer to securing his party's White House nomination, the unpredictable dichotomy is one that's sure to worry GOP leaders, anxious over which Trump will show up when it matters most in November.
+
+On Wednesday evening, it was pure, unfiltered Trump who took the stage in Indiana. Hoosier legend, former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight (whose own temper is controversial in itself), introduced him, endorsing the real estate mogul as ""the most prepared man in history to step in as president of the United States.""
+
+""There has never been a more honest politician than Donald Trump,"" said Knight, who was fired from IU in 2000 after ""uncivil, defiant and unacceptable"" behavior that included allegedly choking a player.
+
+""They say he isn't presidential. I don't know what the hell that means,"" Knight thundered to loud applause.
+
+Trump's speech that followed was largely of the mold that many GOP leaders worry is decidedly unpresidential. The mocking of Ohio Gov. Kasich's eating habits was a staple. He again berated Ted Cruz, boasting that he has won evangelical voters this cycle while Cruz holds up the Bible, puts it down, ""and then he lies.""
+
+And even though he had some kind words about the Fourth Estate after his Tuesday night landslide, Trump was back to calling the press corps following him ""the world's most dishonest people"" on Wednesday evening in Indiana. The crowd, as usual, ate it up and joined along in the jeers.
+
+Just a week earlier, there seemed to be a shift in Trump land. Ever since the GOP presidential front-runner hired political strategist Paul Manafort to helm his maligned delegate operation, the longtime Republican hand has tried to telegraph the message that the controversial reality TV star would eventually ""evolve"" and tone down his temper and tenor on the campaign trail.
+
+That promise seemed to have been fulfilled after Trump's landslide win in New York last week. In a more subdued victory speech at Trump Tower, he was cordial to his bitter rival Cruz, even referring to him as ""senator"" instead of the ""Lyin' Ted"" moniker he's bestowed on him.
+
+But a week later, that collegiality was gone after Trump himself pushed back on the idea that any change was forthcoming. Campaigning in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania ahead of his sweep of five states Tuesday, Trump was back to insults and his usual freewheeling, unpredictable style. That's where he premiered his critique of his struggling rival Kasich's eating style on the campaign trail.
+
+""He has the news conference all the time when he's eating. I've never seen a human being eat in such a disgusting fashion,"" Trump thundered.
+
+After his big wins on Tuesday — which possibly put him on an irreversible path toward winning the GOP nomination — Trump was back to a more unplugged style.
+
+Turning an eye toward the general election and likely rival Hillary Clinton, he went hard after the Democrat for ""playing the woman's card."" It was a new line of attacks that likely worry many party strategists as they seek to woo the important female voting bloc in November, among whom Trump has high unfavorables in general election polling.
+
+""If Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she would get 5 percent of the vote,"" he jabbed at the end of his remarks. Calling in to news shows the next morning, he continued that line of criticism.
+
+Later Wednesday afternoon, however, a more presidential sounding and looking Donald Trump showed up. Giving a major foreign policy speech in Washington, he was far more straight-laced, reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter.
+
+Here's how NPR's Domenico Montanaro described it:
+
+Just hours later though, he was back to his usual routine — for the most part. There was one subtle instance of restraint during his Indiana rally Wednesday night. He still took glee in mocking Cruz's decision to tap Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential pick even though the Texas senator is mathematically unable to get enough delegates on the first convention ballot.
+
+But he refrained from any overt attacks on Fiorina herself, a departure from last fall, when he derided her appearance.
+
+Overall, Trump perhaps summed up his philosophy best during his Trump Tower victory speech Tuesday night: ""If you have a football team, and you're winning, and then you get to the Super Bowl, you don't change your quarterback, right?""
+
+Trump may take a knee more often on the campaign trail and give voters flashes of that more subdued version of himself. But Wednesday alone demonstrated he's going to continue to blitz in his own way, like it or not, for the foreseeable future.",REAL
+8747,Only Geniuses & Schizophrenics Can Pass This 3 Question Quiz! - David Avocado Wolfe - DavidWolfe.com,"0 - items Only Geniuses & Schizophrenics Can Pass This 3 Question Quiz! 
+Many neuroscientists estimate that as much as 98% of all brain activity is unconscious. Just think about that for a second – 98%. 
+All that unconscious activity is influenced heavily by the world around its subconscious cues. To demonstrate that, we’re going to call on a super cool quiz. The premise is simple; only geniuses and schizophrenics can answer the following three questions. Which one are you? Continue to find out! 
+There are no hints! You either know it or you don’t! 
+The test you’ve just done relies on what researchers call the ‘contraposition method.’ This method tests the extent of a person’s awareness and brain processing power. It’s a super complicated method with tons of ‘moving parts,’ so to speak, but here’s what you need to know for the purpose of this article: There are objects which one can reasonably say are unrelated. Most people would assume, for example, that a race car and a hurricane have very little connection. A genius who thinks outside of the box, however, would deduce some sort of connection. A schizophrenic patient would also deduce a connection because of the way the illness makes people see non-existent connections in just about everything. In other words, if the quiz in this article left you scratching your head, you’re normal. If not, one of two things is true – you’re brilliant, or you have schizophrenia. 
+Don’t worry, I won’t leave you guessing. Here are some facts that will help you figure out which one you are: Geniuses will have taken their time to think before blurting a response. Did you get the answers right? What do you think – are you a schizophrenic or a genius? As far as the schizophrenia angle goes, this post is not a diagnostic tool. It can get you thinking about schizophrenia and, if you have concerns, you can see a psychiatrist for a proper evaluation. 
+Sources: ",FAKE
+5160,Seven Christian Leaders Who Are Not Supporting Donald Trump,"Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared to have made inroads with evangelical voters after meeting with hundreds of conservative Christian leaders Tuesday, but not all Christians are in his corner.
+
+Religion News Service came out with a list of seven conservative Christian leaders who are not supporting Trump.
+
+Topping their list is Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore referred to Trump's campaign as ""reality television moral sewage.""
+
+The report also named Denny Burk, a professor of biblical studies at Boyce College. Burk blogged in March, ""I am not joking or being hyperbolic when I say that he is a Mussolini-in-waiting. He must never be allowed near the Oval Office. Ever.""
+
+In a February blog, pastor and author Max Lucado wrote that Trump would not make it through the ""decency interview"" he requires for those who date his daughters.
+
+""Can we not expect a tone that would set a good example for our children?"" he wrote. ""We stand against bullying in schools. Shouldn't we do the same in presidential politics?""
+
+RNS also listed Thabiti Anyabwile, pastor of Anacostia River Church; conservative blogger Erick Erickson; Robbie George, McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University; and Alan Noble, editor of the website Christ and Pop Culture.",REAL
+7386,Abedin & Weiner to Testify Against Clinton,"
+ 
+
+Huma Abedin, Hillary’s Clinton’s top aide with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sexter, the former Congressman, Anthony Weiner, are at the center of the most recent FBI investigation. Things are about to get very interesting.
+ 
+
+ 
+P lease Donate to The Common Sense Show 
+ 
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+ 
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+The sane alternative to Facebook 
+Seen.Life-The Facebook alternative- no censorship, no spying– Sign up here 
+",FAKE
+4185,"Despite Black Lives Matter, young black Americans aren’t voting in higher numbers","The generation of African Americans pushing criminal-
+
+justice issues and institutional racism to the forefront of the presidential election had little effect at the ballot box during this primary season, according to an analysis of exit polling across 25 states.
+
+African Americans account for a larger share of Democratic primary voters this year than they did in 2008, but that is because of older black voters, not higher ­participation by younger black people.
+
+Across two dozen states where exit polls were conducted in 2008 and this year, black voters older than 45 grew from 12 percent of the electorate on average in 2008 to 16 percent this year. In those same states, black voters younger than 45 made up 11 percent of voters in 2008 vs. 10 percent this year.
+
+President Obama, in his commencement address last weekend at Howard University, praised young black activists for bringing new energy to the ongoing movement for racial justice and equality, but he said: “You have to have a strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes.”
+
+“It’s thanks in large part to the activism of young people like many of you, from ‘Black Twitter’ to Black Lives Matter, that America’s eyes have been opened — white, black, Democrat, Republican — to the real problems, for example, in our criminal-justice system,” Obama said. “But to bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in custom.”
+
+He added: “Passion is vital, but you’ve got to have a strategy. And your plan better include voting, not just some of the time, but all the time.”
+
+Obama’s comments echoed continuing concerns that some young black activists involved in the current wave of political action do not share the belief in the critical importance of the right to vote — one of the most important achievements of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
+
+Democratic candidates and strategists have stressed the importance this year of all young voters, who heavily favored Obama in both of his election contests — and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in this year’s Democratic primaries. But younger Americans are the least likely to turn out in elections: The share of eligible voters ages 18 to 29 who cast ballots fell from a record high of 48 percent in 2008 to 41 percent in the 2012 presidential election, according to the U.S. Elections Project.
+
+Fredrick Harris, a political science professor and director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University, said the success of the Black Lives Matter movement should not be measured only by voter turnout or candidate preference. It has succeeded at doing what no other black leaders have done, especially those who have lined up to endorse either Sanders or Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
+
+The young activists have “placed criminal-justice reform on the political agenda. Both Sanders and Clinton have been falling over each other talking about the need for reform and the persistence of institutionalized racism,” Harris said. “That did not happen in 2008 and would not have happened in 2016 without BLM. A movement does not have to necessarily influence electoral outcomes in order to be successful. Look for criminal-justice reform in the party’s platform at this summer’s convention, which will prioritize the issue if a Democrat wins [the White House]. There were no serious criminal-justice-reform platform in 2008 or 2012. In essence, the movement has been influential in the Democratic selection process without even officially endorsing a candidate.”
+
+Interviews with some activists inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement revealed a nuanced view of electoral politics. None advocated a total boycott of elections, and some have been actively involved in various local contests across the country.
+
+At the same time, many were not enthusiastic about the value of voting, particularly in this year’s presidential election cycle. Some activists have staged protests at campaign events and received ample media coverage in the process. The sharpest criticism was aimed at Clinton, but most did not endorse Sanders, either.
+
+These activists argued that neither candidate had adequately addressed the issues affecting black communities.
+
+“Voting is definitely one way, and I wouldn’t insult my ancestors by telling people they shouldn’t vote, but there are other ways of reimagining and restructuring the world, and that lies in organizing our communities,” said Ashley Williams, a 23-year-old activist who attends the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
+
+Williams crashed a fundraiser for Clinton in Charlotte in February, where she stood up and asked the candidate whether she would “apologize to black people for mass incarceration.” Williams also said, “I’m not a ­super-predator, Hillary Clinton” — a reference to Clinton’s use years ago of a racially charged term meant to describe young offenders who are beyond rehabilitation. Williams was escorted from the event, but the next day, Clinton told a Washington Post columnist, “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.”
+
+Williams, who said she joined other protesters in disrupting a Trump rally in Raleigh in December, said she did not endorse Sanders, because “I’m not sure he should be the nominee, either.”
+
+Lindsey Burgess, 22, a student at Spelman College in Atlanta who is supporting Sanders, is concerned that many young African Americans are already disenchanted with politics because of their view that two terms of an Obama presidency have done little to dismantle institutional racism. The rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement, she said, risks turning off these would-be voters even more.
+
+“It’s very much ideology-driven, and it is anti-establishment,” Burgess said of the movement. “They want to eradicate this whole political system, the two-party system. But that’s not feasible right now. I do think that type of language has permeated the [presidential] campaign and stopped a lot of people from getting involved.”
+
+Exit polls show African Americans overwhelmingly supported Clinton over Sanders in this year’s primaries and were crucial to fueling her large delegate lead. Clinton won an average of 79 percent support among black Democratic voters, compared with 21 percent for Sanders. Clinton won black voters under age 45 by 33 points across 12 states where exit polls broke down electoral choice by age — and won older voters by a larger 79 points.
+
+Joyce Ladner, who was a member of one of the leading organizations of the civil rights era, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said the cynicism toward voting on the part of some young activists is dangerous because “so much is at stake, if not for them, for the masses of black people.”
+
+“What to substitute for not voting? They need to put forth an alternative political, social or economic structure that delivers some relief to black people,” Ladner said. “This is where the critical issue of accountability comes in. To whom are BLM folks accountable when they remove the vote from black people?”
+
+And, she argued, “If voting isn’t important, why are white legislators gerrymandering districts and using other tactics to prevent blacks from voting?”
+
+Activists in the Black Lives Matter movement don’t always sit on the sidelines. In Chicago, several groups rallied voters to unseat Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who they said helped cover up the shooting death in 2014 of Laquan McDonald, the black teenager who was walking away from police officers when one of them shot him 16 times.
+
+Authorities did not charge the officer until a year later, prompting allegations of a coverup. Activists launched a campaign dubbed #ByeAnita, and Alvarez, who was seeking a third term, was soundly defeated in the March 15 primary.
+
+Activists in Cleveland similarly organized and turned out voters to oust Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty, who was criticized for his handling of the shooting death in 2014 of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old who was playing with a toy gun when a police officer shot him to death.
+
+Jessica Pierce, national chair of the Black Youth Project 100, said that Alvarez was directly targeted because she “will use her position of power to support violence against black people.”
+
+The organization did not choose sides in the Democratic primary and has no plans to endorse in the general election, although they will encourage young black people to vote. More important, Pierce said, is educating and organizing black communities to hold elected officials accountable between elections. She said she doesn’t take issue with Obama’s challenge to young activists.
+
+“For Black Youth Project 100, a core purpose of leading election work is not just the votes that we will turn out in this election but what those votes represent,” Pierce said. “The votes represent power — concrete power of black youth across the country. This is power that then builds into our direct action organizing campaigns and policy work that we have been leading locally and will continue to lead after Election Day.”",REAL
+4835,First Presidential Debate of 2016 Over But Who Won?,"Watch the above reports by CBN's David Brody and Jenna Browder on what is at stake for the candidates.
+
+- David Brody was live on Facebook before the debate
+
+ - Jennifer Wishon will give LIVE debate analysis between 9-11 pm ET
+
+ - Follow Jenna Browder on Twitter all night.
+
+NEW YORK -- It's a presidential debate that can be summed up in one familiar word – huge!
+
+Social media is swarming with talk of the debate. Clinton supporters are calling for meticulous fact-checking of Trump's comments during the debate, while Trump supporters hound Hillary for her perceived untrustworthiness. Despite abundant disagreement over who will  win the White House, everyone agrees this debate is unlike any other.
+
+
+
+ Get the latest analysis and coverage
+
+ from your trusted CBN News political team.
+
+The first of three presidential debates began with a question on the economy and jobs. Both candidates answered the question with their ideas to boost the economy.
+
+Donald Trump says his tax plan may benefit the wealthy but it is also ""a great thing for the middle class"" because companies would invest more in building their businesses.
+
+   
+
+ He says companies want to create jobs but they often move their money overseas because ""taxes are so onerous.""
+
+Secretary Clinton directed voters to her website for her economic plan. She brought up the site when Trump was hammering her on taxes and regulations. ""He said he's 'going into cut taxes big league. You're going to raise taxes big league. End of story.'""
+
+   
+
+ Clinton retorted that she ""kind of assumed there would be a lot of these charges and claims.""
+
+Mrs. Clinton accused Mr. Trump of not paying some of the people who have worked for him through the years. She said she is relieved her father, a small business man, never had to work for him. She said Trump ""stiffed"" thousands of small business owners and workers through the years.
+
+Trump said tens of thousands of people have worked for him and liked it. He defended his businesses saying they have been successful. He said he'd only not pay someone if their work was unsatisfactory.
+
+Trump stated at one point that Clinton didn't have the stamina to be president. She suggested he was referring to her gender and reminded viewers of some of his past comments about women.
+
+She also accused Trump of being easily provoked. He defended himself saying, ""I have much better judgment than she does. I have much better temperament.""
+
+Both candidates accused each other of starting rumors claiming President Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States.
+
+They came to somewhat of an agreement on the subject of not making people on watch-lists and no-fly lists eligible for guns.
+
+The gun debate also centered around on-going violence between police and minorities.
+
+Trump said America needs law and order especially in inner cities. He told viewers that blacks and Hispanics are ""living in hell because it's so dangerous.""
+
+Both agreed something needed to be
+
+The debate could be one of the most watched and even be among some of the highest rated programs ever.
+
+The 2015 Super Bowl clocks in at No. 1 with 115 million viewers. The 1983 series finale of ""Mash"" brought in 106 million.
+
+One poll estimates Monday's event could rival those numbers, topping a hundred million. Regardless of the count, it will be ""must see TV.""
+
+""Win. That's all I want to do is win,"" Trump said.
+
+But for this ""outsider,"" winning won't be the result of traditional textbook strategy. Instead, he's expected to stick with what got him here: instinct and boldness.
+
+Trump, however, will need to pass the plausibility test -- that is, whether voters see him as a president.
+
+Many are evangelicals still trying to decide whether they will pull the lever for Trump or possibly sit this election out. But evangelical leader David Barton calls that the wrong approach.
+
+""We have a very selfish view of what we do with voting, and I say that in the sense of that most Christians think that voting is a right. It's not. It's a duty,"" Barton said.
+
+And Trump's been rallying the troops in the days leading up to this debate.
+
+It's appropriate that this first, attention-grabbing debate will be in the New York area. Both candidates feel right at home in this familiar territory.
+
+Trump Tower is located in Manhattan, Clinton's headquarters are 20 minutes away in Brooklyn, and the debate site at Hofstra University in Hempstead is only about an hour drive.
+
+As he has proven, Trump enjoys mixing it up and getting feisty at debates. But he doesn't typically throw the first punch. Instead, he waits until he's attacked and analysts say he's one of the best counter punchers out there. So how will Clinton get ready to rumble?
+
+""You have to be prepared for, like, wacky stuff that comes at you,"" she told Late night host Jimmy Kimmel. ""I am drawing on my experience from elementary school.""
+
+While Clinton's opponent may be taking a less traditional approach to preparing for the debates, she is going by the book.
+
+The Democratic nominee cut back campaigning last week. Sources say she's going through briefing books, rehearsing and studying clips of Trump from the Republican primary debates, taking notes of his style and what gets under his skin.
+
+""I run across people, partisans and non-partisans alike; they'll say, 'why are y'all working so hard? I mean your girl's going to be the next president.' Which my comment is 'oh, contraire,'"" Strider said.
+
+""We have a very tough race ahead of us and we have two candidates and we have two candidates' families that know how to win at the rodeo and it's going to be a tough race for both sides and they're going to go at it,"" Strider warned.
+
+Clinton has participated in more debates than any presidential candidate in recent history. But it's hard to say how much that experience will help with an unconventional outsider like Trump.
+
+Clinton is preparing to face some uncomfortable subjects -- from her email scandal to Bill Clinton's infidelity.
+
+A campaign insider says her team hopes to come up with a memorable one-liner that will knock Trump off his game and stick in voters' minds.
+
+Regarding Clinton, one of the big dangers to watch for is how she will react to Trump's attacks. She's been known to get agitated pretty quickly so keeping a calm, cool demeanor will be vitally important in this debate for the ages.",REAL
+10068,Now it is USA Today Lying to us that the Anti-Trump Protests are Spontaneou,"Now it is USA Today Lying to us that the Anti-Trump Protests are Spontaneous
+http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-13/anti-trump-protests-proof-professional-activist-involvement 
+The post Now it is USA Today Lying to us that the Anti-Trump Protests are Spontaneou appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+10053,Clinton Campaign In FULL PANIC After Bill’s Alleged Son Makes DEMAND That Would HUMILIATE Them,"Clinton Campaign In FULL PANIC After Bill’s Alleged Son Makes DEMAND That Would HUMILIATE Them Oct 27, 2016 Previous post 
+The man claiming to be the son of former President Bill Clinton told Breitbart News Wednesday he wants his father to step up and be man enough to acknowledge him. “I have always wanted him to step up–for 30 years–you know? I have really been trying to figure this out–my whole life, you know? It is time for him to step up to the plate,” said Danney Williams, 30, who traveled from his Arkansas home to Las Vegas for Wednesday’s third presidential debate between GOP nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. 
+The Arkansas man is not trolling the Democratic nominee’s husband. He said he is formally requesting that the former president submit to a paternity test and put the matter to rest–once and for all. 
+“It is up to him now, ” he said. 
+“I’ve proven who I am, let him step up and prove me right or prove me wrong,” he said. 
+Williams’ mother, Bobbie Ann Williams, is quoted in media accounts describing how, as a prostitute in Little Rock, the then-governor met her while out on a jog. The two became close and shared several intimate encounters, according to those accounts. 
+After Williams was born, his mother allegedly told the governor about his son and although Clinton was reluctant, she said in interviews, Arkansas state troopers would pay her child support every month with seven $100 bills. 
+The payments stopped however after he announced Clinton was running for president, according to her media accounts. 
+Williams said he has a good relationship 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+8222,Police threaten eviction 'at any time' as Dakota Access protesters refuse to leave private land,"Thu, 27 Oct 2016 03:59 UTC © Robyn Beck / AFP Despite officers threatening to clear private land, Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protesters are refusing to leave. As tensions have built up, police handling of the protest has reportedly cost nearly $6 million in just one month. ""We have the resources. We could go down there at any time and we are trying everything we can to not have to do that,""Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney told reporters on Wednesday. Protesters have been occupying private land known as Cannonball Ranch, which belongs to the Dakota Access Pipeline's developer, the Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. Since the weekend, both the company and law enforcement have been asking dozens of protesters to leave the area and move to public land. The occupation began Sunday, when demonstrators set up a new camp of at least 15 tents and 100 teepees. They have also blocked State Highway 1806, putting themselves directly in the path of the planned 1,172-mile pipeline, which will span four states. ""Just come off the private property, go back to the big camp and let's talk and try figure out the solution for this. Their message was absolutely not, we are standing here,"" Laney said, adding that ""at some point rule of law has to be enforced."" Energy Transfer Partners also said in a statement that ""all trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and removed from the land."" More than 125 people were arrested over the weekend, but the message had no effect on the protest. Demonstrators have refused to vacate the land or leave State Highway 1806, keeping traffic and local residents from using the road. Dozens of protesters formed a human blockade, enforced with horses and hay bales. ""No surrender, no retreat!"" protest organizer Mekasi Camp-Horinek, of Oklahoma, reportedly yelled to the people as he left negotiations. ""We've got to make our bodies a living sacrifice,"" John Perko, a protester from South Dakota told The Bismarck Tribune. ""This is the most honorable thing I could be doing right now."" Last week, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which has been leading the protest since August, agreed to provide its land to relocate the unauthorized camp from the US Army Corps of Engineers property for the winter. As police try to abstain from using force, even the peaceful handling of the protests appears to be draining the budget at high speeds. According to the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, authorities have spent $5.8 million since early September. This is nearly all of the $6 million the state borrowed from the Bank of North Dakota in emergency funds to deal with the protest against the $3.78 billion pipeline. Meanwhile, an investigation into a September 3 confrontation between protesters and private security guards has revealed license violations. It says that officers who deployed dogs on protesters were not properly licensed and could face criminal charges.",FAKE
+803,West Virginia primary takes backseat to Trump's battle with Republicans,"For much of the year, Washington has been upstaged by the drama of far-flung primary elections, but as West Virginia becomes the latest state to vote for presidential nominees on Tuesday, the nation’s gaze has swung back to the capital.
+
+
+
+Such is the intrigue surrounding a crunch meeting between Donald Trump and House speaker Paul Ryan, slated for Capitol Hill this Thursday, that the absence of the usual electioneering on the trail this week has barely been missed.
+
+
+
+Neither the two Democrats nor the sole Republican in the race have visited West Virginia since last Thursday, even though Trump still needs delegates to secure the nomination and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are still, in theory, fighting to be the Democratic candidate.
+
+Instead, attention has shifted to whether Trump can win over skeptics before an expected showdown with Clinton in November’s general election. Ryan’s concern about party unity, and the meeting with Trump to discuss it, has even led to speculation that an independent candidate could yet emerge to offer an alternative for disaffected Republicans.
+
+But such a hypothetical may be unrealistic, or an exercise in wishful thinking at this late stage in the primary – akin to the hopes of Sanders supporters, who cling to the belief that a victory in West Virginia will reinvigorate his campaign despite Clinton’s 300-delegate lead, and huge advantage in superdelegates.
+
+For some leading lights in the #NeverTrump movement, it is never too late to hope. William Kristol, a prominent conservative commentator who is seeking to encourage plausible alternative candidates to come forward, remains hopeful that one might.
+
+
+
+Last Thursday, he met with former Republican nominee Mitt Romney at a hotel in Washington to discuss options. Romney has said he is not interested in running again, but his involvement underlines the seriousness of the effort.
+
+Kristol told the Guardian this week that he still believes there is a 50/50 chance someone of sufficient caliber could yet emerge to run against Trump and Clinton this cycle. He said that he and like-minded Republicans “should know in a month whether [there is] a serious national candidate”.
+
+
+
+Aside from finding a plausible candidate, the biggest obstacle is making sure that voters are able to select them. Ballot access is far a from trivial issue for an independent or third-party candidate seeking to appear alongside Trump and Clinton in November.
+
+
+
+One important hurdle has already in passed by, uncleared, in Texas, where potential candidates had to find 80,000 signatures by this Monday – a mountain made even higher by rules stating the signatories had to be those of voters who had not already taken part on the state’s primary in March
+
+
+
+In North Carolina, another delegate-rich state where any serious candidate would want to be included in November, there is a similar deadline next month requiring 90,000 signatures.
+
+
+
+Kristol believes such rules could be challenged in court if they appear to be obstructing the democratic will. “Once there’s a candidate, a legal challenge to Texas and North Carolina as unconstitutionally early deadlines (as in the successful cases in the 1980s) has a decent chance of winning,” he said.
+
+
+
+But what tends to attract less attention is that a third-party candidate need not necessarily have to have a viable shot at winning the national election outright to play a crucial role in determining who gets to the White House.
+
+
+
+Under the constitution, if no presidential candidate emerges from the election with a clear majority of 270 electoral college votes, then Congress gets to decide.
+
+
+
+“If no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects the president from the three presidential candidates who received the most electoral votes,” according to the 12th amendment. 
+
+
+
+“Each state delegation has one vote. The Senate would elect the vice-president from the two vice-presidential candidates with the most electoral votes,” it continues. “Each senator would cast one vote for vice president. If the House of Representatives fails to elect a president by inauguration day, the vice-president elect serves as acting president until the deadlock is resolved in the House.”
+
+
+
+Another scenario, perhaps even more extreme, could see a major new candidate emerge who associated themselves with an existing third party campaign to circumvent the ballot rules.
+
+
+
+Some on the left have speculated, for example, that should Sanders feel sufficiently betrayed by the Democratic party process, he could join with the Green party, which has been fighting to obtain ballot access for months for its likely nominee Jill Stein. Though Sanders insists this will never happen in his case – he has pledged to support the Democratic nominee if it is not him, and the Greens seem happy with Stein – could this hypothetical model work on the right instead?
+
+
+
+Again, this looks unlikely, not least because the strongest equivalent force, the Libertarian party is far removed ideologically from establishment Republicans like Ryan and Romney. The Libertarians have said they expect to be on the ballot in all 50 states in November. 
+
+
+
+But the biggest reason that some of the right have not given up on the idea of finding an alternative to Trump is the growing realisation of just how much his policies differ from those of Republicans in Washington.
+
+
+
+If anything, Ryan’s warning last week to Trump understates the ideological gulf between them. On issues from free trade to social security, the two most powerful figures in the party occupy polar opposite positions.
+
+
+
+“I am not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda,” Trump said in defiance of Ryan’s criticism last week. “Perhaps in the future we can work together and come to an agreement about what is best for the American people. They have been treated so badly for so long that it is about time for politicians to put them first!”
+
+
+
+Recent Trump comments on the possibility of renegotiating US national debt – a cataclysmic default scenario as far as many in the financial markets are concerned – only widen the divide and make it easier for other candidates, including Clinton, to seek funding from traditional donors in corporate America and on Wall Street.
+
+
+
+Ryan’s offer on Monday to stand aside as chairman of the party convention in Cleveland, should Trump request it, may further increase the speaker’s tactical flexibility if, by some miracle, there was still to be a contested nomination within the party.
+
+More realistically however, Ryan’s reluctance to immediately throw his support behind Trump is likely to have less to do with the 2016 presidential race and more to do with his concerns for the 2016 congressional elections and, perhaps, even the 2020 presidential race.
+
+
+
+With a divisive figure at the top of the party ticket in November, many Republicans fear they could lose control of the Senate and even the House. By playing hard to get, Ryan makes it easier for those in tightly-contested districts to distance themselves from Trump. But he also holds out the prospect of the party regrouping around a less divisive figure next time if it loses the White House to Clinton.
+
+
+
+It may lack the immediacy of the primary election cliffhanger, but this is the more likely longer-run drama beginning to play out in Washington.
+
+",REAL
+6610,11 Things To Let Go Of Before The New Year,"in: Special Interests , US News The new year is almost here and it’s often a time when we all start to think about what we want to change for the next year. I’ve never been much a fan of the whole cliche of changing because of the new year, but why not embrace it as a time where we can make change? Do a quick reflection right now. Do you feel like you have followed your dreams and passions this past year? Do you feel you got caught up in the stresses of life quite often? Did you feel judgement, negative self talk and anger were a big part of your days? Reflecting on how you’ve felt over your year and being honest with yourself about it gives you the chance to know how to adjust and move forward from this moment forward whether it be the new year or not. I’ve found in my own life that if I don’t pay attention to how I feel, what I create, what’s playing out in my life and take responsibility for it, it doesn’t change. It stays the same, I experience the same emotions or stagnant feelings, and I don’t move forward. But the moment I decide to take it into my own hands, I see how much I’m not a victim to what happens. 11 Things To Let Go of Before the New year 1. Stop all the negative self talk – It’s first because it’s probably one of the most important. The more we talk poorly about ourselves to ourselves or others, the more we disempower ourselves and empower all the things we wish to adjust about ourselves. Observe it, take note of it, and kick it. It’s not helping you. 2. Choose one bad eating habit and kick it! – Taking care of and fuelling your vessel is one of the most important things we can do in life to stay mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy. Pick one of your worst eating habits and aim to cut it out completely in 3 months. Whatever it might be, be honest with yourself and make it happen. Then take on the next bad eating habit in 3 months. 3. Let go of chasing ‘success’ – So often we put up goals or plans for ourselves yet have this tiny limited scope of what success is. Next thing you know we bring stress, worry and fear into the equation throughout the whole journey because we may not be totally in line to hit this pin prick point of what success looks like to us. Instead, do your best to take the steps needed to get to where you want to go, but let go of the lure of success and what it looks like and means. There’s no such thing as failure. (more) 4. Kick the idea that you cannot achieve or follow your dreams – So often we have our ideas of what we are excited or passionate about, but let it go because we think we can’t do it or because it’s unrealistic. Instead of believing every word of that, take ONE step. One step towards making your passion or your dreams happen. The one step will lead to the next and the next, but you have to take the first one. Plan out that first step and take it! 5. Let go of the idea that you should run from your problems – We often get into this mentality that we just need to “get over it.” In theory this sounds sorta good, you move on from things that happen in the past or something to that effect. But by just forgetting about it, did we really move on? No, it gets triggered again later or lies dormant as a resented event etc. Instead, let’s face our problems and truly move past them. Journal about it, talk to someone else about it. Put the cards on the table to someone who cares about you and who can help you move past it. Pick someone who will see the bigger picture and be honest with you. You have all it takes to move past what challenges you. 6. Stop comparing yourself to others – This is a big one. So often we are looking at others and using what they have, do or are to compare it against us and make up a story. This whole game can make us sad or feel down about ourselves or it can feed our ego in a big way. Let it go, respect everyone’s journey, including your own and stop the need to compare yourself to others. 7. Stop judging others – Judging other people can become a habit and an addiction. It’s like something we can’t stop doing sometimes! Take a moment the next time you judge someone and observe it. Ask yourself why you did it, how did it make you feel? Etc. Make a conscious effort to stop. (more) 8. Stop the blame game – Blaming and pointing fingers when it comes to our challenges or what happens to us doesn’t allow us to look at and observe how we might have created or aligned with an experience to help make it happen. I’m not saying there’s no such things others can do to hurt you, I’m simply saying take responsibility for how you feel and don’t even point blame, it doesn’t help us. 9. Stop worrying and trying so hard to fit in and be accepted – This is something far too many of us do just to save face and not be “the weird one.” The reality is, it’s more ‘weird’ to be a version of yourself that isn’t genuine or real simply because you want to be accepted by others. It’s a choice you can’t maintain forever and the longer it goes the more uncomfortable you will feel. Be you, accept yourself, be genuine and don’t try to make others do the same when. Let it happen. Trust. 10. Let go of the need to control everything – Sometimes we can’t take a step forward in anything because we don’t know all the answers or all the variables. This is our obsession with control sometimes. Yes, observe a situation and make the best choices available to you, but don’t worry so much about needing to control or know every detail about it. Learn to leave things up to trust and knowing that things will work out as they need to. This doesn’t mean be reckless, just that you don’t need to control every thing, person and detail. 11. Stop procrastinating – This one goes with everything on the list. Stop putting it all off. Whatever it may be. The changes listed above, the hobby you want to, the career you want to explore, or the thing you want to tell to someone important to you. Stop putting it off and just do it! Submit your review",FAKE
+5423,Khodorkovsky: Putin is not going to cozy up to Washington,"Print version Font Size The number of predictions about the state of affairs in the US-Russian relations after the presidential election in the United States continues to grow. Former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky did not stay aside and predicted that there would be nothing good in the US-Russian relations after the election, regardless of who wins the vote. If Hillary Clinton takes office as president, the relations between Russia and the United States will deteriorate further. According to the ex-oligarch, Putin was originally prepared for Clinton's victory in the election, therefore, he has been allegedly trying to damage the relations between the two countries during the recent months. The logic is as follows: ""He'd better to go down to the bottom so that she could make only one step - up."" ""If Mrs. Clinton wins, then the bottom that Putin sees will not be the real bottom. She knows how to hit Putin to make him fall even lower. She has an extensive experience, and she will not forgive - I'm talking about the American establishment here - she will not forgive interference in the internal electoral process in the United States,"" Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Open Russia told Politico . When Khodorkovsky speaks about Clinton's ""extensive experience"" does he have Libya in mind? And of course, it is only Hillary Clinton, who knows all about the real bottom. If the Russian president was originally prepared for the victory of the former Secretary of State, then it is not clear why he would need to interfere in the ""internal electoral process."" Did he want to cause even greater damage to the US-Russian relations to give Clinton a chance to start it all over again? Or Putin? Or both? Why would he need to interfere, if she would not ""forgive?"" Noteworthy, on the eve of election day in the USA, former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul gave an interview to Russian media. McFaul stated in the interview that he did not think of Hillary Clinton as a supporter of a hard line course against Russia.""I think the claim that the fear-mongering that Trump himself and Trump supports say to scare American voters that Secretary Clinton is going to start a war with Russia is completely absurd, completely has nothing to do with the reality. Only a total crazy person would start a war with Russia,"" McFaul told Interfax . Clinton understands that there will be no war between the U.S. and Russia, ""she is not crazy,"" he added. ""I think she takes a very pragmatic approach to defend America's national interests and security and economic interests of our allies,"" McFaul said. ""She's not going to become president to say ""it is my goal to improve relations with Russia"". What is she's going to do instead is she is going to say that ""it is my goal with Russia to accomplish policy items A, B and C."" And then she is going to decide which strategy, which instrument of policy [will achieve that]. Sometimes it will be engagement and sometimes [it will] be containment,"" Michael McFaul said, Interfax reports. Unlike the former ambassador, Mikhail Khodorkovsky does not leave Hillary Clinton any room for maneuver. What if Donald Trump leaves? There will not be anything good for Russia anyway, Khodorkovsky believes. A conflict between the two countries will be highly likely as well, because Putin is not going to cozy up to Washington. ""We all know people like Trump, and it is unlikely that Putin will play up to Trump's ambition, like, for example, Kadyrov (Chechen President - ed.) plays up to Putin's ambition,"" Khodorkovsky said.What does Kadyrov got to do with it? Is it just because his name rings the bell in the West? According to Khodorkovsky, it is difficult to predict what will happen after Putin refuses to subordinate Russia to Trump's will. ""Putin will not be able to do this, so it means that a conflict with Trump is inevitable.""Why is the ex-oligarch confident that the Republican candidate will wish to subjugate Russia? What does he know about Trump's thoughts on Russia? Does Khodorkovsky know something that everyone else does not know? The former oligarch does not expect anything positive in relations between Russia and the United States, and it seems that this is the most desirable option for him. Anton Kulikov",FAKE
+9085,Creating an Anti-Muslim Bias at a Canadian University,"Professor Dr. Mujahid Kamran, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Punjab, on the Suspension without Pay of Prof. Tony Hall 1 Shares
+1 0 0 0
+Professor Mike Mahon President and Vice Chancellor Lethbridge, Canada
+Dear Professor Mike Mahon,
+It is with a sense of great sadness that I have learnt of the suspension, without pay, of Professor Anthony Hall, one of the most distinguished scholars, not only of the , but a researcher and writer who is recognised and respected globally. In a country like Pakistan, which is far behind Canada in term of education, research and scholarship, no teacher, or non-teacher, of any university can be suspended without pay. When someone is suspended, he or she is entitled to draw full pay for the period of suspension. If Canada is doing better than us on various scales, then one would expect that suspension without pay puts Canada behind us in terms of due process and in terms of requirements demanded by the principles of justice and fair play. I may add respectfully that in Pakistani universities no one is generally suspended unless a fact finding committee has first looked into the matter thoroughly and found prima facie evidence of wrong doing. The decision of the administration also destroys the concept of a tenured appointment.
+ From his writings, that I have read over a period of time, it is evident that Professor Anthony Hall is a scholar whose work exposes the crimes and conspiracies of those who are taking the world headlong into a global war and simultaneously transforming it into a global slave state. His analysis is impeccable and his grasp of facts masterly. And his writings are devoid of any prejudice against any ethnic group or nation. , or any university for that matter, should have been proud to have Professor Hall on its faculty. His suspension creates an impression, even from this distance from where I write, that certain powerful interests that aim destroying free speech, have targeted people like Professor Anthony Hall, who speak out for democracy, decency, peace and justice.
+I have found out from the internet that B’nai Brithis behind this movement against shutting down free speech. It is quite evident that the charge that Professor Anthony Hall has created a discriminatory atmosphere is highly dubious. To the contrary, it appears that an anti-Muslim bias has been created in your institution by Professor Hall’s unfortunate suspension.There is also a strong impression that B’nai Brith has taken over the administrative decision making at Lethbridge.
+MORE... Suspension of Tenured Professor Lacks Due Diligence Toxic Mind Control Contaminates The Public Sphere Irish human rights activists against freedom of speech? B’nai Brith attack on Canadian professor has roots in Zionist false flag tactics It is also worrying that B’nai Brith have now targeted Canadian universities and Canadian society. If this is the case then the situation is disturbing, not just for Lethbridge and Canada, but for all freedom loving people worldwide. When I was a young student at University of Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1970s, I used to meet many Canadian students and I found that they invariably stood for freedom of speech and for tolerance and justice. The suspension of Professor Hall is inconsistent with my image of the Canadian people that I had then formed.
+On behalf of the academic community of the University of the Punjab (established 1882) I urge you to kindly reconsider your decision to suspend Professor Hall. It will go a long way in rehabilitating the impression of people worldwide about the upholding of free speech, academic freedom, and genuine scholarly discourse at Lethbridge.
+With my humble regards and very best wishes
+Professor Dr. Mujahid Kamran Vice Chancellor University of the Punjab (since January 2008) Author of a dozen books including: Einstein and Germany 2009 The Grand Deception: Corporate America and Perpetual War 2010 The Inspiring Life of Abdus Salam 2013 9/11 & The New World Order 2013 International Bankers, World Wars I, II and Beyond 2015 Winner Abdus Salam Prize 1985 (this prize was instituted from Salam’s Nobel Prize money) Presidential Pride of Performance Award 1999 Awarded Sitara- e -Imtiaz (i.e. Star of distinction, awarded by Government of Pakistan) 2015, etc",FAKE
+1491,Cruz Raises $20 Million In Fourth Quarter,"Ted Cruz raised nearly $20 million in the past three months, according to an internal memo obtained by NBC News - a significant haul for the Texas senator heading into the final month before the Iowa caucus.
+
+""We're showing we have the strength going into the Iowa caucus,"" a campaign aide told NBC News tonight, adding: ""If people want to get behind a candidate who can go the distance, we're showing we've got that.""
+
+It's Cruz's biggest fundraising total yet, surpassing the $12.2 million he brought in last quarter. And it brings the Texas senator's total figure for the year to $45 million.
+
+In the previous three months, Ben Carson - then the rising candidate in polling - brought in a similar $20 million. And Marco Rubio brought in just $6 million.
+
+Cruz is the first candidate to report his or her fundraising totals for this quarter, which technically ends on Thursday.
+
+At the beginning of October, Cruz's campaign had the most cash on hand -- $13.8 million - but it has yet to publicly release what its coffers now hold.
+
+The formidable fundraising by Cruz — who often highlights on the trail that his campaign is built to last — is also matched by hefty fundraising by several super PACs backing his candidacy. Through September, the super PACs had raised $38 million — and to date, the organizations have spent little of that money.
+
+For Cruz, the extra cash gives the candidate expanded funds to potentially buy advertising in the upcoming early states. But through the summer and fall, the campaign resisted spending on traditional television and radio advertising, putting in less than $1 million total so far. It has yet to lay out its advertising plan instead saying it will buy television air time on a week to week basis.",REAL
+816,Judith Miller: It’s what was left unsaid in Trump’s speech that matters most,"What was important about Donald Trump’s much anticipated foreign policy speech Wednesday is what he didn’t say. There was no mention by the self-declared Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee of his determination to build a wall between Mexico and the United States and get the Mexican government to pay for it.
+
+There was only a passing reference to his frequent criticism of illegal immigrants, the theme that helped launch his presidential campaign last summer.
+
+There was no mention of letting South Korea and Japan acquire nuclear weapons, or of walking away from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the organization which protected Europe from Soviet aggression which he said earlier had outlived its usefulness.
+
+Though he called the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran a “disaster,” he did not say that he would tear it up on day one or insist that it be renegotiated. He simply declared that Iran would not be permitted to get a nuclear weapon, which is precisely what President Obama said prior to signing his controversial agreement with Teheran.
+
+Mr. Trump did not say he would defend Israel at all costs, though he called the Jewish state “our great friend and the one true democracy” in the Middle East.
+
+He condemned the Obama administration’s abandonment of Middle Eastern Christians, but said nothing about how he would protect them from what he called the “genocide” being perpetrated by ISIS and other jihadi groups.
+
+While he vowed to destroy the Islamic State “very, very quickly,” he gave no clue as to how he would defeat the group which now has billions of dollars in its coffers, tentacles in nine states, and tens of thousands of Arab and foreign fighters battling to build an Islamic caliphate in Syria and Iraq and spread the group’s perverse interpretation of Islam throughout the world. And he did not repeat his claim that President Bush “lied” about Saddam’s having WMD to invade Iraq.
+
+The tone of the billionaire real estate developer’s remarks at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel was also a departure from his often stream-of consciousness diatribes masquerading as speeches.
+
+Mr. Trump read the carefully crafted, but still emotional 40-minute speech on a TelePrompter, inserting some of his trademark verbal grace notes on an impromptu basis.
+
+The speech, his first serious attempt to ally foreign and American concerns about his knowledge of foreign affairs – contained almost none of his earlier jaw-dropping prescriptions for restoring America’s economic and military greatness.
+
+It is unclear whether the speech will reverse the perception abroad of Mr. Trump as a foreign policy amateur, a businessman too ignorant of world affairs and ill-disciplined to learn about them – “Berlusconi with nukes,” as one foreign pundit called him, a reference to Italy’s flamboyant, controversial ex-prime minister.
+
+Mr. Trump mainly repeated his populist themes and his determination to pivot from what he called the “Obama-Clinton” foreign policy, which he said had alienated traditional allies and friends and led the nation’s foes to loose respect for the U.S.
+
+While many Republicans and even some Democrats would agree with his stark critique of some the administration’s contradictory, sometimes too-little, too-late initiatives – a “complete and total disaster,” Mr. Trump called Mr. Obama’s foreign policy – he offered few concrete remedies for restoring the economic strength which he said underpins America’s ability to project power abroad. “I’m on the only one, believe me, I know them all,” he said of his rivals, “who knows how to fix it.” Or, in other words, trust me.
+
+Again and again, he vowed to move toward an “America first” model in domestic and foreign policy, seemingly unaware that “America First” was the slogan of the isolationists who fought to prevent Roosevelt from aiding Britain and other allies threatened with Nazi and Japanese aggression prior to World War II.
+
+His pledge to prevent American companies from moving abroad – how legally he would do that he did not say – and force America’s allies to pay more for their own defense by tougher negotiations with them suggested there remain similar gaps in his knowledge of American law and foreign affairs.  Studies have shown that it is cheaper to base the 28,000 American troops in South Korea there than it would be to keep them at home; and South Korea already pays half of those costs.
+
+But critics of President Obama’s foreign policy are likely to dismiss Mr. Trump’s gaffes and contextual omissions as quibbles, and welcome his call for a more robust military, a tougher stance against Islamic radicalism at home and abroad, and an America-centric foreign policy. Republican ""realists"" will also welcome his call to deploy force ""when there is no alternative,"" a pledge which mirrors the isolationist mood of part of his party and the country.
+
+One of the toughest sections of Mr. Trump’s speech was his withering critique of Hillary Clinton’s expertise and performance as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state.
+
+Predictably, he criticized her record of having supported the war in Iraq and other military interventions abroad -- an implicit criticism of President George W. Bush as well. He also accused of her of having “misled” the nation about the attack on America’s consulate in Benghazi, where the U.S. ambassador and “three brave Americans” were killed. Instead of “taking charge” that night, he said, “Hillary Clinton decided to go home and sleep. Incredible,” he said. “She was not awake to take that call at 3 o’clock in the morning.”
+
+That was not only vintage Trump, but a precursor of what lies ahead if Mr. Trump, indeed, wins the nomination.
+
+Judith Miller, a Fox News contributor, is an award-winning writer and author, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The author of several books, her latest is ""The Story: A Reporter's Journey"" (Simon & Schuster, April 7, 2015) now available in paperback. Follow her on Twitter @JMFreeSpeech.
+
+",REAL
+503,States look at hiking gas tax as fuel prices plunge,"With gas prices dipping to their lowest level in years, lawmakers in state capitals throughout the USA are increasingly open to the idea of raising fuel taxes to help rebuild crumbling roadways and bridges.
+
+The movement at the state level comes as House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said last week that he's doubtful that there will be enough backing for a bi-partisan push to raise the federal gas tax, which has stood at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993.
+
+The Obama administration has also declined to endorse raising the federal gas tax to finance road funding, but says it will take a look at anything Congress comes up with.
+
+State legislators and governors, however, aren't waiting for Washington.
+
+Republican leaders who typically find talk of raising taxes a non-starter are making the issue a priority in 2015, even though polling consistently has shown broad opposition among Americans to fuel tax hikes.
+
+""The states have shown that they are more likely to act on the gas tax than the federal government is,"" said Carl Davis, a senior policy analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a research group in Washington. ""The states have to balance their budgets. If they see, their roads are in bad shape or their bridges are literally falling down—in some cases—they need to come up with a way to pay to improve that. And there's a limited number of things you can do at the state level.""
+
+The increased chatter in state capitals about raising fuel taxes comes after eight states (Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming) have done just that over the last two years.
+
+South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard noted in his State of State speech on Tuesday that when South Dakota last raised its fuel tax 16 years ago, the price of gasoline hovered around $1 per gallon, and about 22% of that went toward state fuel tax. The average price for regular unleaded gas in South Dakota is $1.99 per gallon, and the national average is $2.08.
+
+Meanwhile, the price of road construction has ballooned. In 2003, the state could get buy about 7.8 miles of asphalt overlay for $1 million. In 2013, that same amount of money could pay for 4.5 miles of asphalt overlay.
+
+""Our state highway system is the state's most valuable physical asset and if we want to maintain it, we must act now,"" said Daugaard, a Republican, who proposed raising the fuel tax by 2 cents per gallon in 2015 and an additional 2 cents each year going forward.
+
+In Iowa, Republican Gov. Terry Branstad and Iowa lawmakers have tossed around raising the 22 cents per gallon fuel tax—which has remain unchanged since 1989—or potentially allowing voters in each county to vote for a 1% sales tax. The increased revenue would stay in the counties that levy such taxes to be used on road improvements.
+
+""I think Iowans like the idea of having some say on this,"" Branstad told reporters last week.
+
+Republican leaders in Utah's legislature have also signaled they will take a look at the state's gas tax, which hasn't been raised since 1998, as they try to grapple with a transportation funding shortfall there.
+
+In Louisiana, the state's Transportation Funding Task Force has forwarded a number of ideas to lawmakers. Louisiana has a backlog of $12 billion in road repairs. Among the ideas are to replace the state gas tax with a sales tax on all fuels, direct more money in the construction budget to road work, and steer dollars to highways that would end up in the state's ""rainy day"" fund.
+
+The intense debate on the gas tax in New Jersey could have ramifications for Gov. Chris Christie's potential 2016 White House bid. A Garden State trust fund that pays for road and bridge repair is on the verge of bankruptcy, and some lawmakers in Trenton are pushing for an increase in the state's gas tax to replenish it.
+
+Going along with that idea is a tricky proposition for Christie, who could find himself trying to show his conservative bonafides with Republican donors and primary voters, many who see any increase in taxes as toxic.
+
+The idea of raising the state gas tax is also unpopular with New Jersey motorists, who enjoy one the lowest gas taxes in the country. Fifty-six percent of residents said they oppose a raise in the state's gas tax, compared to 41% who support it, according to a Rutgers-Eagleton poll published in December.
+
+One proposal that's been floated by Democratic Assemblyman John Wisniewski would increase the state gas tax by 25 cents per gallon, costing the average New Jersey motorist about $292 more per year.
+
+Christie did not address the gas tax or transportation funding issues in his much-anticipated State of the State address on Tuesday.
+
+In Georgia, lawmakers are taking a hard look at the state's 4% sales tax and the 7.5 cents per gallon excise tax as traffic congestion has become a bigger problem for the state.
+
+A study committee recently found that the state needs to raise at least $1 billion more a year to repair bridges and roads in the Peach State.
+
+Michigan is taking a different tact. The GOP-controlled legislature there approved a plan last month for a ballot initiative to boost the sales tax to help pay for road repairs.
+
+Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed legislation on Monday to spend $1.3 billion a year more to fix roads and other transportation infrastructure, but it's contingent on Michigan voters increasing the state sales tax from 6% to 7% in the May 5 ballot initiative.
+
+Meanwhile, in Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Haslam has warned that the state has to do something soon to deal with its crumbling infrastructure. The gas tax hasn't been raised there in nearly 26 years.
+
+""At some point and time soon…I think there will be a bill about gas tax,"" Haslam recently told The Tennessean editorial board . ""It's incumbent upon us as the administration to show here's what we would do with that money if you increased the fuel tax, and then it's also I think important for all of us not to just increase it so that ... three years from now we're back in the same position.""",REAL
+785,"For some Republicans, Trump presents moral dilemma","Donald Trump visits Capitol Hill Thursday. He will find some fellow Republicans who are struggling with the morality of supporting him.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Donald Trump is making the rounds on Capitol Hill Thursday, searching for unity with Republican leaders, including reluctant House Speaker Paul Ryan. But for some GOP lawmakers, backing the brash billionaire – or rather, not backing him – is more than a matter of agreeing on tax cuts or trade, immigration or national security.
+
+“I will not support Mr. Trump,” Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R) of Florida has told the CBS affiliate in Miami. “That is not a political decision; that is a moral decision.”
+
+It’s hard to know how many of his colleagues share this view. Congressman Curbelo, who caucuses with the pragmatic wing of the conference, says “a lot” of Republicans have such concerns, some expressing it publicly and others privately. On Tuesday, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, articulated the moral dimension in a commentary:
+
+“Those who support Trump, no matter how reluctantly, have crossed a moral boundary. They are standing with a leader who encourages prejudice and despises the weak. They are aiding the transformation of a party formed by Lincoln's blazing vision of equality into a party of white resentment. Those who find this one of the normal, everyday compromises of politics have truly lost their way.”
+
+Those are stiff words, and interviews with several Republican lawmakers in advance of Trump’s visit found that some did not agree with them. Some say Hillary Clinton is also an immoral choice, and for that reason, they’re reluctantly backing Trump. Others feel uncomfortable making a moral judgment at all, or don’t see this as a moral choice.
+
+But “personal and policy morality are always involved in the selection of our leaders,” says the Rev. James Weiss, a professor of ethics at Boston College. Personal morality affects public behavior, and public policy always has a moral dimension – whether lawmakers are dealing with abortion, criminal justice, welfare, medical care, or even trade and taxes, he adds.
+
+“The question is never whether morality plays a role, it’s to what extent it does,” Reverend Weiss says.
+
+Voters – and politicians – will differ on that judgment.
+
+Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R) of Kansas also has moral issues with Trump. The Kansan, a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, questions Trump’s positions on “life, family, and marriage,” and so do a lot of other Republicans, he says. As a parent, he also worries about Trump’s language.
+
+“I can’t get comfortable with a candidate if I’m worried about what he’ll say [on TV] in front of my 9-year-old that’s vulgar and crass.”
+
+He says he’s still sticking with Sen. Ted Cruz, even though the Texas Republican dropped out of the race last week after Trump took must-win Indiana.
+
+In a last-ditch effort to rescue his campaign in the Hoosier state, Mr. Cruz lashed into Trump, calling him a “serial philanderer,” among other things. Trump has been open, even bragging, about his sexual exploits. He told reporters back in December that his “ indiscretions” would be fair game for reporters, even as he’s made much of Bill Clinton’s womanizing.
+
+But other Republicans see things differently. Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona, one of the most conservative members in the House, says he understands Curbelo’s perspective. Curbelo says he views both Trump and Mrs. Clinton as dishonest, and will vote for neither. He points out that there are typically 10 candidates for president on a Florida ballot.
+
+But Congressman Franks argues that the choice is “binary.” And when the antiabortion lawmaker compares Trump with Clinton on moral principles, on respect for fellow human beings, on protecting the Constitution, and protecting the republic “to keep it intact for future generations” – on all those fronts “there is no contest. Clinton will bring destruction to us in all of those areas, whereas Mr. Trump might.”
+
+Franks was one of Trump’s most vociferous opponents in the primary. As a conservative, he says, he “cannot trust him to do the right thing.” But he knows, he said Wednesday, “that I can deeply trust Hillary Clinton to do the wrong thing every time.” And so if it comes down to a vote between Trump and Clinton, he will choose Trump and urge others to do the same.
+
+On the Senate side, another deep skeptic of Trump, moderate Republican Susan Collins of Maine, says she wouldn’t sit in judgment of the presumed nominee. She has repeatedly called on him to stop insulting people, to make amends with the Muslim community and others whom he has alienated. “But I’m not going to judge him as a human being.” Indeed, she has not foreclosed the possibility of eventually supporting him.
+
+Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah, ducking into an elevator, explained that “I’m a great believer in redemption, and people being able to change their lives, and hopefully, he’ll fit that category.”
+
+But that’s a naïve approach when it comes to selecting a political leader, Reverend Weiss suggests. “We don’t vote for people hoping they’ll change any more than we should marry them thinking they should change.”
+
+Much more on target, Weiss says, is the view of Sen. James Lankford (R) of Oklahoma, who says that politicians reflect the values of the country.
+
+Before Senator Lankford came to Congress, he was the director of student ministry at the Baptist Convention of Oklahoma and of the Falls Creek Youth Camp, the largest youth camp in the country.
+
+“The moral dimension is obviously extremely important to me personally,” he said in a brief interview on Wednesday. But he said that people mistakenly “want to denote, and say that political leaders carry all the moral baggage and all the moral weight of the country.” It’s the opposite, he says. Leaders such as Clinton and Trump “are a barometer for where we are as a country and what we value.”
+
+Washington can’t fix wayward values in the nation, he says, the nation fixes Washington.
+
+For some Democrats, Trump is just a reflection of Republican values in recent years.
+
+“Some Republicans – including members of their leadership – have said they cannot support the vile rhetoric and radical proposals of the Republican front-runner,” said House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D) of California in a press conference Wednesday. “But year after year, Republicans have enthusiastically turned their intolerance and their discrimination into legislation ... whether it’s insulting President Obama, women, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT Americans, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between what Donald Trump says and what the House Republicans have been saying all along.”
+
+Like other Republicans, Lankford does a side-by-side with Clinton. If it comes to that choice, he says, he will side with Trump.
+
+[Editor's note: Representative Huelskamp's stance toward Trump has been further clarified from the original version.]",REAL
+2440,"Obamacare Enrollments Hit Nearly 12 Million, Top Health Official Says","More than half of these enrollees are new to the program, said Burwell, speaking at an event commemorating the close of the second open enrollment period for subsidized private health insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act's exchange marketplaces. The enrollment total surpasses the Department of Health and Human Services' projections, but is lower than what the Congressional Budget Office expected.
+
+""Nearly 11.7 million Americans signed up or were re-enrolled through the marketplace as of Feb. 22,"" Burwell said. ""We are finally moving the needle on reducing the number of uninsured.""
+
+""We're confident that we will prevail in the court case argued before the Supreme Court last week. The law is clear,"" Burwell said Monday. ""The text and structure of the Affordable Care Act demonstrate that individuals in every state are eligible for tax credits. Those who support this lawsuit believe that the law should be dismantled or repealed, and they are content to roll back the progress that we have achieved.""
+
+Among the estimated 7.7 million enrollees from the federal health insurance exchanges, 87 percent received tax credits worth $263 a month on average, Burwell said. More than half the enrollees paid $100 or less a month, including their subsidies. ""These numbers show just how important the tax credits are to millions of Americans and to the insurance markets in those states and throughout the marketplace,"" she said.
+
+Federal officials and most state-run exchanges have allowed individuals with applications in process to complete them for about a week following the deadline. In addition, the federally managed exchanges serving more than 30 states, and the majority of the exchanges operated by 13 states and the District of Columbia, re-opened enrollment for people who learn when they file their income taxes that they owe a fine under the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate that most U.S. residents have health coverage.
+
+The numbers Burwell announced Monday are 300,000 higher than those reported by the White House last month. Although additional tax season sign-ups are likely to boost the tally, enrollment is expected to decline over the course of the year as consumers obtain health coverage through another source, like a job, or as they give up their policies and become uninsured.
+
+""While we know that the numbers will change as the year continues, we are pleased with the results today,"" Burwell said.
+
+The number of sign-ups Burwell announced Monday doesn't reflect how many of those enrollees have begun paying for their insurance policies, which is necessary to secure coverage. During the 2014 enrollment campaign, the number of enrollees surpassed 8 million, but fell below 7 million within six months.
+
+During the year, people can use the exchanges to buy insurance if they experience a life change, such as having a baby or getting married. Open enrollment for 2016 coverage begins Nov. 1, 2015, and runs through Jan. 31, 2016.
+
+The health insurance exchange figures announced Monday don't include new sign-ups for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program. Nearly 11 million people have joined those programs since Obamacare enrollment began in October 2013, largely driven by the law's broadening of Medicaid eligibility. To date, 28 states and the District of Columbia have opted into the Medicaid expansion.",REAL
+8243,The Powerful Act Immoral as they Also Suffer from Herd Mentality,"The Powerful Act Immoral as they Also Suffer from Herd Mentality Nov 7, 2016 2 0 
+The people at or near the top of the power pyramid are just as vulnerable to being sheep as we all are. In fact, they’re even more likely to fall to pressure from their peers because they have so much more at stake if they make the wrong choice. 
+That stake is money, power and other forms of capital. It’s their entire lifestyle at risk. If they rock the boat, there goes their business deals, their favors, their prioritization. 
+And these aspects of their life most likely define their identity, as sad as that might be. 
+That’s because all these consequences are of a nature which do not account for honor, integrity and morality. Connecting with the self to become an authentic man or woman is one of the real successes in life, so if they disregard this basic tenet to being human, then they’ve sold their soul for nothing less than a false path. 
+These sorts of people have a lot of influence that they’re failing to utilize for the benefit of humanity, as well as the environment. The core effect they could achieve is based in helping people to expand their understanding, and therefore their consciousness, to facilitate bringing about an era of truth, justice, peace and abundance for humankind. 
+Who exactly is being referenced here? They include celebrities, politicians, bureaucrats, military and police personnel, journalists, business moguls, so-called self-help gurus and pretty much anyone who is connected to the oligarchical families that are orchestrating the grand plan of global governance. 
+Now of course not all of them are alike. But let’s face it; how many of those with a massive social influence are speaking out against not just the peripheral problems, but the core ones such as the scams embedded into our system itself? 
+Fuck all; that how’s many. 
+Entering into their minds, it’s easy for them to be persuaded by the fear if they talk about some of the seriously uncomfortable truths of the world they’d be labeled as a conspiracy theorist. Yet the reality is that many conspiracy ‘facts’ are backed up with so much evidence they are simply ‘matter as fact’. 
+Like so many of us do, the truth needs to be shared. We all need to hear, understand and embody it into our thoughts and actions. 
+Simply, it stands to reason that we all need to play our part, especially those who have taken on a role with societal responsibility. 
+In any case, there are obviously many other reasons why these people don’t speak up. Examples include that they’re: subtly pretending to themselves that nothing is happening, ensuring they are a very unconscious person; turning a blind eye, even though they know and feel it; just simply ignorant of how the world works, like most people; psychopaths and/or sociopaths, where they’re involved in deeply disgraceful ideologies and practices; programmed and conditioned to support the status quo; dazed and confused in an overwhelming game of so-called power; a fake and weak human being; and/or in the drift of an existential crisis, which means their tide might actually turn. Final Thoughts 
+In the awakening community, we talk a lot about the people having the ultimate power, because we’ve got the numbers. So, if we want the sham of our system to cease, then all we have to do is organize to at least some degree to bring about the next steps of our societal evolution. 
+Well, what about all these people embedded in the parasitic culture that has hijacked humanity’s future? Can’t they be a beacon of light too? 
+Of course they can. To do so, they, like all of us, need to do their proper research and open their minds and hearts to both the madness and magic that permeates our existence of duality. If they do, they’ll deeply connect with their true role as a light shining into the darkness. 
+After all, no shadows exist when the light is shone from all angles. 
+A B OUT THE AUTHOR 
+Phillip J. Watt lives on the Mid North Coast of NSW Australia. His written and film work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook , watch his interviews with an array of inspiring guests at his YouTube Channel or visit his website .",FAKE
+2721,Megyn Kelly is an evil genius: How the Fox News host won America’s trust (by being slightly less horrible),"The famously liberal Behar was back on “The View” for the day. The topic was Kelly’s much-hyped interview with Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar about the molestation scandal that has engulfed them and their son Josh. (The interview airs Wednesday night.) Behar found herself agreeing with Republican panelist Nicolle Wallace, who said that Kelly has “proven herself to put journalism ahead of any sort of politics.”
+
+It’s the kind of plaudit Kelly has probably become accustomed to. She has had a meteoric rise at Fox News in recent years, vaulting from reporter to daytime anchor to primetime star in less than a decade and attracting so much ratings and media attention that other network notables are openly envious of her.
+
+But Kelly is more than just the newest popular kid on the block. She’s also perhaps the greatest example of the sneaky, complicated brilliance of the Fox News machine.
+
+It’s easy to think of Fox News as a crude propaganda machine, and most of the time it lives down to that reputation. But the network also remembers to offer up just enough little twists and nuances to temper that caricature. Like it or not, it’s filled with formidable, highly watchable broadcasters. Whether it’s Shep Smith railing against drones and praising gay marriage, Chris Wallace making Marco Rubio uncomfortable over Iraq, or any of Kelly’s famous throw-downs, Fox News always adds some spice to the mix to keep things interesting.
+
+Say what you will about the man, but Roger Ailes definitely knows that you can’t only employ braindead hacks if you want people to stay tuned in. And Kelly is emphatically not a braindead hack. She is a ruthlessly compelling presence onscreen, and she uses that to her advantage. In the process, she has managed to get something very few of her colleagues can claim: love from the Joy Behars of the world.
+
+“I’m becoming very uncomfortable with the feelings I’m developing towards Megyn Kelly and I’m praying that someday soon she’ll jump ship and go somewhere where she’s allowed to to use actual facts,” Jezebel’s Kara Brown wrote back in January, after Kelly deftly skewered a blustering Bill O’Reilly. It’s a common feeling among the left-leaning crowd — the idea that Kelly is somehow better than the place that made her name.
+
+Kelly has earned that admiration through a series of extremely fun episodes in which she made mincemeat out of (usually male) right-wing pundits. There was her torching of the odious blobs known as Erick Erickson and Lou Dobbs over some particularly odious comments they’d made about women. There was her efficient filleting of radio host Mike Gallagher after he’d criticized her for going on maternity leave. And, most memorably, there was her tour-de-force humbling of Karl Rove at the 2012 election, when she marched through the Fox News hallways in an effort to silence his baseless assertion that Mitt Romney might have won Ohio, and then asked him, “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?”
+
+The liberal set cheered after each of these moments, and they helped Kelly reach the dominant position she has now found herself in. Crucially, they have also helped obscure the fact that, far from being some objective oasis in a conservative desert, her show is usually just as right-wing and authoritarian as anything else on Fox News. Take just the past week, for instance. Kelly did an hour-long special on policing. The title? “America’s Finest Under Fire.” Here’s how she described the protest movements that have emerged following the killings of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Eric Garner and so many more: “Many times they rush to judgment, ignore the results of investigations or dismiss the verdict in order to feed what has become a narrative about out-of-control cops with racist intentions.” Not exactly a dispassionate introduction. Kelly then brought on Mark Fuhrman — most famous for lying about his use of the n-word — to back her up. Of course, these things float by because they’re neither crude enough nor unexpected enough to excite the blogosphere. Kelly knows how to keep tight control of her material. She’s only let herself get in real trouble once, and that was about Santa Claus. It’s hard to imagine that Kelly won’t handle the Duggar interview just as skillfully. In a preview of the sitdown on Monday, she played every side of the story beautifully. She told guest Howard Kurtz—who has really come into his own as a right-wing blatherer—that anyone looking for a “cross-examination” of the Duggars would be disappointed, and excoriated both the media’s handling of the story and the police for leaking details of Josh Duggar’s juvenile records. But she also stressed that nothing would be “off limits,” and that she wasn’t excusing anything the Duggars had done. Anyone looking for exactly what she would do was left with one overriding message: tune in and find out. Another job well done, Megyn!",REAL
+3092,How Congress is giving new life (and scope) to 'brinkmanship',"'Brinkmanship,' a staple in the cold-war lexicon, is back in vogue on Capitol Hill. It's now used to describe not just a political game of chicken, but also as a synonym for overall governmental conflict-induced dysfunction.
+
+Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky speaks to reporters on budget negotiations to avert a government shutdown on Dec. 9, 2014. With McConnell are Sens. Roy Blount (R) of Missouri (l.) and John Thune (R) of South Dakota (r.). The final deal funded all but the Department of Homeland Security, whose funding runs out on Feb. 27, with the prospect of another shutdown looming.
+
+Brinkmanship. The now-standard term for any high-stakes game of political chicken, particularly over spending matters.
+
+“Brinkmanship” once was used in the national security realm during the cold war, to describe moving to the very edge of war in order to force a conciliatory move. Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who ran for president in 1952 and 1956, blasted Republican Secretary of State John Foster Dulles for “boasting of his brinkmanship – the art of bringing us to the edge of the abyss.” As University of California-Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has observed, it has endured far longer than “mutual assured destruction” and other words from that era.
+
+“The crises of the Cold War kept taking the world to the brink of the same terrifying catastrophe,” Nunberg said in a New York Times language column. “Now there seem to be lots of littler brinks and local abysses.”
+
+At the moment, it’s being used to connote the dispute between congressional Republicans and the White House over a spending bill for the Homeland Security Department that Republicans are trying to use to halt President Obama’s efforts to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. The department’s funding is set to run out next Friday, but Senate Democrats have refused to allow the House-passed version of the bill to come up, raising the prospect of a partial government shutdown.
+
+“The situation is frustrating some senior GOP lawmakers,” Politico reported, “because it’s consuming valuable legislative time and because the new GOP-controlled Congress was hoping to put brinkmanship and deadline-driven crises behind it.”
+
+The squabble has grown so divisive – with the courts as well as Congress involved, and House Republicans attacking Senate Republicans -- that liberal Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent concluded last week that “the brinksmanship could only get crazier from here on out.”
+
+It may seem like it was an eternity now, but when Obama embarked on his second term just over two years ago, he spoke hopefully of fiscal-related dealings that would include “a little bit less drama, a little bit less brinkmanship, [and] not scare the heck out of folks quite so much.” That, of course, turned out to be wishful thinking, given the government shutdown that occurred eight months later.
+
+Perhaps as a result, “brinkmanship” also is becoming something of a synonym for overall governmental conflict-induced dysfunction. Rep. Janice Hahn (D) of California used it in that context this week when she announced that she would run for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 2016: “With so much brinkmanship in Washington, I am confident that I can get more done for our region back here at home, serving in local government.”
+
+By the way, the word used is both “brinkmanship” and “brinksmanship.” The version without the “s” is far more common, but both are considered acceptable.
+
+Chuck McCutcheon and David Mark write their ""Speaking Politics"" blog exclusively for Decoder Voices.",REAL
+2793,Obama Secures Enough Support For Iran Deal In Congress,"Obama Secures Enough Support For Iran Deal In Congress
+
+Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski announced Wednesday that she will support the Iran nuclear agreement, giving the White House the final vote needed to protect the accord from a Republican-led effort to defeat the measure.
+
+With her endorsement, Mikulski became the crucial 34th vote needed to sustain President Obama's expected veto should Congress pass a measure to block the agreement.
+
+""No deal is perfect, especially one negotiated with the Iranian regime. I have concluded that this [agreement] is the best option available to block Iran from having a nuclear bomb. For these reasons, I will vote in favor of this deal. However, Congress must also reaffirm our commitment to the safety and security of Israel.""
+
+Congress is set to vote on a resolution of disapproval when it returns from the summer recess later this month.
+
+Mikulski's support comes a day after two other Democratic holdouts, Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, announced they were backing the measure.
+
+Only two Senate Democrats have announced they will not support the deal: New York's Chuck Schumer and New Jersey's Bob Menendez.
+
+No Senate Republicans have expressed support for the Iran deal.",REAL
+6512,Mrs. Weiner,"Feds get a warrant to start search for classified info in 650,000 emails - thousands of them from her private server - on sexting Weiner's laptop. Clinton faces ongoing FBI probe even if she's elected President By Wills Robinson Daily Mail November 1, 2016 The FBI now has a warrant to read the emails from Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton ‘s most trusted aide, which were among hundreds of thousands discovered on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Law enforcement officials confirmed that investigators gained permission to start trawling through the 650,000 emails discovered on the laptop on Sunday evening, NBC reported. Thousands of them could be from Clinton’s private server. Feds seized the laptop belonging to Weiner, Abedin’s disgraced husband, in September after DailyMail.com exposed his sexting of a 15-year-old girl. In early October, agents told FBI heads they’d found emails on the laptop from Abedin that may have been deleted from Clinton’s private server but their warrant did not allow them to read emails that were not linked to the Weiner investigation. The newly reopened investigation will take time due to the sheer volume of emails to be read, the Wall Street Journal reported. It will likely take agents until well past the election to assess how many, if any, contain classified information – leaving Clinton with the prospect of facing an ongoing investigation even if she is elected president. The Democratic candidate already shows signs of slipping in the polls after an ABC News/Washington Post tracker poll revealed Trump was just one point behind – an 11 point change since last week. And since FBI director James Comey’s shock announcement on Friday that the Clinton private server probe was to be reopened, questions have continued to mount over Abedin’s future on the Clinton campaign. She has stayed behind in New York while her boss hits the campaign trail. Abedin has pleaded ignorance about how the emails ended up on husband Weiner’s laptop. She swore under oath while testifying in a lawsuit brought against the State Department by Judicial Watch that she had handed over all of her devices that could hold emails relevant to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. If she’s found to have lied she could face up to five years in jail. On Sunday, Clinton – no longer accompanied by Abedin – said at a Florida rally that she would not be ‘knocked off course’ by Friday’s shocking development. ‘I’m not stopping now, we’re just getting warmed up,’ she declared to a packed crowd with many gay and lesbian supporters in the city of Wilton Manors. ‘We’re not going to be distracted, no matter what our opponents throw at us.’ Donald Trump delivered a swift kick to disgraced former Democratic congressman Weiner on Sunday, thanking him for preserving the emails that could bring Clinton down.",FAKE
+7083,More Footage Of Operation High Jump With Hitler!,"More Footage Of Operation High Jump With Hitler! page: 1 link Hi everyone. This was on my youtube feed today and thought I would share it and maybe get some feedback. Thru all my years of paranormal and alien spaceship research and experiences, I came to the conclusion that it was all man made. After watching this video, I am even more convinced of them being man made. There is so much technology they aren't telling us.Well, I hope you get a chance to view this and let me know what you think. Are they man made? a reply to: childoffather They knew about the technology were using right now in the 50's and 60's. I have heard the public are ten years behind what they know technologically. 40 to 60 years ago...we have come a long way baby. Not sure about the moon landing though. lol. link originally posted by: carewemust I guess there was no reason to HOAX a fake Moon landing, since the technology was available, even before the 1960's. Was probably even more refined by 1967. That's not true. We don't understand the dynamics of space so what we can do outside of the atmosphere and inside of the atmosphere we have no idea. How the moonlanding was a hoax we also do not understand. It could be a coverup of some sort or another. link a reply to: childoffather factor the exponential growth of tech into the equation and start from the early 1930's instead of the 90's. originally posted by: Darkmadness originally posted by: carewemust I guess there was no reason to HOAX a fake Moon landing, since the technology was available, even before the 1960's. Was probably even more refined by 1967. That's not true. We don't understand the dynamics of space so what we can do outside of the atmosphere and inside of the atmosphere we have no idea. How the moonlanding was a hoax we also do not understand. It could be a coverup of some sort or another. Or a distraction...h .",FAKE
+6796,SWEDEN HELP WANTED: Activities Coordinator for bored illegal alien Muslim freeloaders and rapists,"SWEDEN HELP WANTED: Activities Coordinator for bored illegal alien Muslim freeloaders and rapists Muslim illegal alien invaders taking up space in Sweden and living off the government dole, say they are vandalizing and burning cars (not to mention gang-raping Swedish girls) because they do not have enough “activities” to keep them busy. Friatider “It is clear as hell that we take out our frustration by destroying and vandalizing when we have a shortage of activities here,” one of the illegals living in Skallberget in Vasteras writes in a letter to the editor in the local newspaper VLT. Vasteras has recently been subjected to a long series of car fires. The submitter tries the young man, who wishes to remain anonymous, explain what the phenomenon is due. He writes that he came to Sweden when he was young and admittedly had “good potential” but that he was subject to persistent “racism” by the authorities. (What “race” is Islam?) “Already at an early age became a man treated differently. Sometimes it was because of ethnicity, sometimes because they were at a certain place, and sometimes just to those very people who were in power felt to fuck with us. So many times I had been propped up against the wall and strip-searched in front of my loved ones. It really depressed me and my value, “he writes. The man writes that the young people in the area feel “oppressed” and that they are burning cars to “get the environment to react and listen.” Among other things, he complains that the objectives of the local football field does not have a network and that it is not organized enough “activities” for young people. “In short, it is clear as hell that we take out our frustration by destroying and vandalizing when we have a shortage of activities here. There is neither good fellowship, activities and things / objects we can make use of.” Submitters have received several responses from readers who are critical of the reasoning. “It’s just a matter of time before someone of obtained or ‘the others’ die if this continues. No pity you – all just hate you more and more,” writes , for example, the signature “Former car owners on Skallberget”. 
+v",FAKE
+7805,Saudis Foil ISIS Terror Attacks on Packed Stadium,"Saudi Arabia says it has thwarted two ISIS terrorism plots concerning a bomb attack on a football stadium and killing police officers. 2 Shares
+1 0 0 1
+The Saudi Interior Ministry on Sunday announced that four men were arrested over plans to detonate a bomb at the King Abdullah Sports City Stadium during or after an October 11 World Cup qualifier match against United Arab Emirates in the city of Jeddah. The suspects were arrested one day before the match which gathered over 60,000 fans.
+“ISIS wants any operation that could result in the highest number of victims,” said interior ministry spokesman Major General Mansour al-Turki.
+A security official, General Bassam Attiyah, said a vehicle carrying around 400 kilograms of explosives was found near the stadium. He added that the suspects had planned to either target people in the stadium’s parking lot or fans watching the match.
+“Another equally horrifying scenario would have occurred,” he added, “had the device exploded whilst the spectators were exiting the stadium.”
+He noted that the blast radius would have been something around 1,100 meters which would have covered an area of almost 800,000 square meters.
+MORE... U.S. Commander John Nicholson: ISIS Attempting to Establish Khorasan Caliphate in Afghanistan ISIL executes Iraqi citizens listening to gov't radio Iraqi forces burn 16k m² ISIS poppy fields to curtail heroin and opium revenue ISIS executes 45 people southwest of Kirkuk A Saudi spokesman noted that securities had received information of the attack two days prior to the arrests.
+“Tighter security measures were taken and more troops were deployed to ensure prompt and decisive action against any suspect or suspicious activity. Greater field work resulted in the identification and arrest of the suspects one day before the match,” he added.
+The ministry also announced that a separate plot had been foiled in the capital Riyadh in which four people with links to ISIS were detained after evidence surfaced that they had been plotting to attack police officers.",FAKE
+2686,"The press, feeling the Bern, suddenly weighs whether Sanders could derail Hillary","One of the goals of President Obama’s State of the Union last night was to emphasize liberal issues, such as gun control, that could ease Hillary Clinton’s path to the White House.
+
+But first she’s got to win the Democratic nomination, and for the first time in this contest, the mainstream media are considering the possibility that this isn’t a slam dunk.
+
+The media’s conventional wisdom has long been that Hillary might stumble in an early state or two, but she was still a virtual lock to be the nominee. But suddenly the punditry, fueled by recent polls, is starting to shift, with news organizations now at least considering the possibility that this is a real race.
+
+The Bernie phenomenon, overshadowed by the Trump phenomenon, hasn’t really gotten its full due in the media. And Bernie agrees, having recently ripped the corporate media for giving his campaign a tiny fraction of the attention that The Donald gets.
+
+He has a point. Although Sanders has been on the cover of Time, the press has largely underplayed the fact that he’s drawing huge crowds, raised $73 million last year and is exciting the liberal grass roots. And the reason is simple: Virtually no one in the punditry universe believes that Sanders can win the nomination.
+
+But now come a spate of eye-catching polls. A new Monmouth survey has Sanders leading Clinton by 14 points in New Hampshire, on the heels of a Fox poll giving him a 13-point lead.
+
+Well, the prognosticators have long expected that Sanders, from neighboring Vermont, would probably take New Hampshire. But now comes a Quinnipiac poll showing Sanders with a 5-point edge in Iowa.
+
+Now it’s true that Clinton has a much bigger advantage as the contest moves to bigger states, where Sanders would not get many minority votes and her union backing would definitely help. But if the heavily favored Hillary Clinton goes 0 for 2 in the first two contests, would that create a media explosion and seriously wound her candidacy?
+
+The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza says that “would be a total nightmare for Clinton. Period. It’s also a lot more likely to go from fantasy to reality than most people — including most establishment Democrats — understand.”
+
+That’s why Hillary has stopped treated Bernie as a nuisance and has sharpened her attacks. In an Iowa appearance, she said there is a “big difference on guns” between her and Sanders: “If you say stand up to special interests, then stand up to the gun lobby.”
+
+And it’s hard to believe that Clinton’s proposal yesterday to slap a 4 percent income tax surcharge on those earning more than $5 million a year wasn’t influenced by Sanders’ soak-the-rich campaign.
+
+Sanders, who has avoided attacking Clinton personally, has been pushing back, accusing her of running a “panicky” campaign.
+
+Most journalists concluded that Sanders wasn’t serious after the first Democratic debate, when he took a key issue off the table by saying he was “sick” of hearing about her damn emails. The media have pretty much treated him like Larry David ever since.
+
+Clinton is still the overwhelming favorite. But for the first time in many months, the press is questioning whether she might be derailed—and someone else drawn into the race. I’m sure it was just a coincidence that Joe Biden just said that Bernie, not Hillary, has long been fighting against income inequality.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+9987,“My Trampoline Addiction Hell” Buster The Boxer Tells All,"0 Add Comment 
+THE STAR of a heartwarming Christmas ad which is bringing joy to countless millions, Buster the boxer was thrust into the limelight and our hearts earlier this week. 
+Despite being universally loved ever since he leapt onto a trampoline on our TV screens, Buster hides a terrible struggle which still affects him to this day. 
+Barking exclusively to WWN through an interpreter, Buster told us that there was more to his trampoline hijinks than meets the eye. 
+“It’s an addiction,” the adorable dog explained, “you’re always chasing the buzz of your first bounce. I loved it, I still can’t enough of it. But it’s tearing my life apart”. 
+Such was Buster’s preoccupation with the trampoline, he lost interest in walks and even stopped marking his territory. 
+“There was a time you couldn’t stop me from pissing on a tree. You name a tree in my area and I’ve cocked a leg over it, but once I took to bouncing nothing else mattered, I even lost contact with my mates in the dog park. My life is being controlled by this addiction,” woofed Buster, flanked by his owners. 
+Distraught, his owners contemplated removing the trampoline, but Buster would growl at any mention of it. 
+Cautioning all owners and dogs not to make the mistakes he has made, Buster warned that there are many gateway hobbies which can lead to an all out trampoline addiction. 
+“Tennis balls, they seemed fun at the time, but I see now that my constant fetching of them was a troubling sign of things to come”.",FAKE
+5789,Theresa May refuses to withdraw support for Saudi Arabia,"Theresa May refuses to withdraw support for Saudi Arabia Theresa May refuses to withdraw support for Saudi Arabia By 0 41 
+British Prime Minister Theresa May has refused to withdraw her support for UK weapons sales to Saudi Arabia as well as Riyadh’s membership at the UN Human Rights Council despite the regime’s atrocities in Yemen. 
+During a debate at the House of Commons in Parliament on Wednesday, May shunned answering the call of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to end the country’s weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. 
+“The issues are being investigated… We are very clear that the only solution that is going to work for Yemen is actually to make sure that we have the political solution that will give stability in Yemen,” May told Corbyn and the parliamentarians. 
+Instead of answering the direct question, May spoke about the UK government’s contribution to the humanitarian aid provided to the crisis-torn country. 
+Corbyn also questioned May’s support for Saudi Arabia’s membership in the UN Human Rights Council. A crucial vote on the membership of Riyadh in the council will…",FAKE
+7825,Holding the Light: Visualizing the Future,"By Judi Lynch
+In this time of great chaos and spiritual evolution, we all have our roles to play. Some of us are activators, while some of us are motivators. Our ever-changing lives all have unique purpose and themes to understand in our personalities, forms of expression, and creativity. Existence takes each of us on a future journey to discover our emotional strengths, spiritual connections, and metaphysical abilities. Everyone has a light to shine in their own unique way.
+In current society, it is incredibly necessary in times of fear, change and anxiety to bring in positive thoughts, actions and motivations. Now, more than ever, we need to hold onto the light that brought us here. To live in reality means to face the challenges that humanity has created and aspire for better understanding of our purposes, to be heard.
+It can certainly seem like we have many souls who incarnated here to start fires, make judgments and declare war on mankind. In those people we witness what the lower vibrations can manifest with negative energy and toxic thoughts. They help to wake us up in unity for our light to increase instead of dim. We are not here to cower in fear and anxiety but to overcome those feelings of hopelessness with courage. In learning to own who we are, we believe without fear of persecution.
+We need the light bearers who work to lift others up onto the higher ground. We have people among us with new ideas, methods and discoveries to do just that. Those who dare to aim for what is beyond the stars into the possibilities of tomorrow’s miracles use every option and future theory to their advantage. Many people are here to motivate our compassion to take action on changing what can bring us harm. The peacemakers and protectors of this world have a unique mission in which to find balance between what we see as good and evil among us.
+It’s easy to tell ourselves and others to turn off the television, become more spiritual and less materialistic. Better yet, why not gather together and demand that the programming offered become more intellectual, beneficial and enlightening to humanity? Why do we turn it off instead of offer alternatives to educate people to evolve? Do we really need another program where people are allowed to bully, hit and abuse each other in awful ways? Do we really need to know everyone’s personal business in a million reality shows about nothing? Why did it come to this when we have the technology to land on Mars? Do we really need another crime or murder drama?
+Not only horribly graphic, disgusting and disturbing they are putting out incredibly negative energy with a generous dose of anxiety ridden fear. There really are more good guys than evil ones, we should be reminded of this. We don’t need more examples of bad behavior. Our children and grandchildren need hope, positive roles models and tools to manifest a brighter future for everyone on the planet. Instead of watching people kick each other and pull each other’s hair, maybe we could watch them heal each other with unconditional love, compassion and a humor that doesn’t disrespect anyone. Now there’s a concept.
+Every single one of us is here to shine a light on something, to bring awareness to a cause, to be a catalyst for great present and future change, to be an example of why change is needed. It has become a necessary art to learn how to discern the energies and motives of those around us to keep ourselves in light minded thought.
+We are here to hold the light no matter what seems like darkness around us. Just like the sun lights the Earth every day, we hold the energy that sustains us in this Universe. All the creative forces, all those who heal others, grow food, rescue animals know the meaning of cooperation is necessary in our survival. We have so much we could share with each other if we know how to shine a light on our voices, passions, skills and dreams together. This is how we build understanding, holding the light to outshine our fears in moving forward.
+Judi Lynch is a psychic medium, intuitive counselor, healing channel and author. She is president of the Crystal Healing Foundation, Inc., a 501(c) spiritual charity, and featured columnist for OM Times Magazine. She has authored two books, Friends with Lights and Conscious Ascension, and has read for clients all over the world. To learn more or contact for a session see psychicmediumjudilynch.com , or email judi@ judilynch.com. 
+Source: OM Times 
+",FAKE
+3538,Obama: Paris terror rampage a ‘setback’,"Three days after teams of Islamic State terrorists brazenly carried out raids across Paris that left 129 people dead, President Obama labeled the slaughter a ""setback"" in responding to questions about his policies.
+
+""There will be setbacks and there will be successes. The terrible events in Paris were obviously a terrible and sickening setback,"" Obama said Monday.
+
+The president spoke at a contentious and lengthy press conference on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Turkey, as he faces tough criticism from Capitol Hill -- for saying the morning before the attack that ISIS had been ""contained"" in Iraq and Syria, and for sustaining a military strategy that critics deem insufficient.
+
+But Obama on Monday stuck by the U.S. strategy for fighting the terror group while defending his earlier remarks.
+
+The president said the ultimate goal is to ""degrade and ultimately destroy this barbaric terrorist organization."" But he insisted that the reason he said they're contained, hours before terror teams launched deadly raids across Paris, is because ""they control less territory than they did last year.""
+
+Obama stressed that going after ISIS in Iraq and Syria will help reduce the threat from foreign fighters, while acknowledging it ""will not be enough to defeat ISIL in Syria and Iraq alone.""
+
+Obama also defended the current strategy -- which involves airstrikes and a limited number of military advisers on the ground.
+
+""There will be an intensification of the strategy that we've put forward,"" he said. ""But the strategy that we are putting forward is the strategy that ultimately is going to work.""
+
+He said, ""It will take time."" And he insisted that the U.S. has not ""underestimated"" the ISIS threat.
+
+""ISIL leaders will have no safe haven anywhere,"" Obama vowed.
+
+He spoke as lawmakers in Washington stepped up their criticism of Obama's approach.
+
+""This is war. This is massive savagery on the part of ISIS,"" Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told Fox News on Monday. ""We have to show much more of an intensity.""
+
+Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told MSNBC ""frankly I'm not overwhelmed with 20 airstrikes by the French,"" while Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said ""if we just drop a few bombs on these guys and that's it, they'll be stronger than ever.""
+
+World leaders vowed earlier Monday in Turkey to boost intelligence-sharing, cut off terrorist funding and strengthen border security in Europe, as they sought to show resolve and unity following the deadly terror attacks in Paris.
+
+""We agreed that the challenge can't just be tackled with military mean, but only a multitude of measures,"" German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.
+
+British Prime Minister David Cameron also announced plans to host a donor conference early next year to raise ""significant new funding"" to tackle the flood of refugees spilling out of Syria.
+
+The leaders of the Group of 20 rich and developing nations were wrapping up their two-day summit in Turkey against the backdrop of heavy French bombardment of the Islamic State's stronghold in Syria. The U.S. was expanding its intelligence sharing with the French and helping them identify targets, according to American officials.
+
+Numerous meetings about next steps in Syria and the Islamic State campaign were being held on the sidelines of the summit in the Turkish seaside resort of Antalya.
+
+Meanwhile, Republicans' 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, published an op-ed in The Washington Post saying ""now is the time, not merely to contain the Islamic State, but to eradicate it once and for all.""
+
+""We must wage the war to defeat the enemy, not merely to harass it. For over a year, the president has clung to the hope that an air campaign is sufficient. It demonstrably is not,"" he said, saying the administration must be willing to devote ""whatever resources are required to win - even boots on the ground.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6363,Canada and EU sign ‘thoroughly undemocratic’ CETA trade deal,"Canada and EU sign ‘thoroughly undemocratic’ CETA trade deal Opposition groups note that the deal could still fail legal scrutiny and ratification in Europe By Nadia Prupis 
+Canada and the European Union signed the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) on Sunday amid widespread protests against the controversial deal that came back to life after negotiations stalled over objections from Wallonia, Belgium. 
+Environmental and democracy groups who opposed the agreement issued cautious statements condemning the signing but noting that CETA was not a done deal. 
+“This agreement will probably not survive the democratic and legal scrutiny of the ratification process over the coming months. It’s time for our governments to break rank with corporate lobbyists and redesign a trade policy that respects democracy and promotes the public interest,” said Shira Stanton, trade policy adviser at Greenpeace EU. 
+CETA now faces a vote in the European Parliament and ratification by the parliaments of the EU’s 28 countries. 
+If it passes, CETA would create a legal system that allows corporations to sue governments for perceived loss of profit. That framework will also be put to scrutiny by the European Court of Justice and the German constitutional court, and if it fails to stand up would invalidate CETA. 
+The deal has long been opposed on the grounds that it would harm human rights, democracy, and the climate, among other risks. 
+Alfred de Zayas, the United Nations independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, said in a statement Saturday that each country should hold a referendum on signing the deal before doing so, warning that it was a “corporate-driven, fundamentally flawed treaty.” 
+“There is a legitimate fear that CETA will dilute environmental standards, food security, and health and labor protection,” he said. “A treaty that strengthens the position of investors, transnational corporations, and monopolies at the expense of the public interest conflicts with the duty of states to protect all people under their jurisdiction from internal and external threats.” 
+Global Justice Now (GJN) trade and migration campaigner Guido Tallman tweeted a picture of the massive deal and wrote, “Here’s CETA. Any MEP planning to vote for it, should be sure to read it first. All of it. So they know what they’re voting for.” 
+Throughout Europe this weekend, CETA opponents took to the streets to protest the signing. In London on Saturday, many posed outside the European Commission office dressed as zombies to symbolize CETA’s seeming resurrection, urging commissioners to “stop CETA rising from the dead.” 
+In Brussels, some protesters broke through a barricade and attempted to storm the European Commission building before being dragged away by police. 
+GJN executive director Nick Dearden said Saturday , “The signing ceremony . . . means that CETA has been brought back from the dead for now—but it is a ticking time bomb. The Wallonia parliament has a promise that they will be able to stop the ratification of CETA when they get a formal vote on it, and unless there are substantial changes, they—and hopefully other parliaments—will use that veto.” 
+“CETA would open up our government to a deluge of court cases by North American multinational corporations and investors,” Dearden continued. “It presents a threat to our ability to protect the environment, to protect the public and to limit the power of big banks. It’s thoroughly undemocratic and must be stopped.” 
+This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License 
+Nadia Prupis is a Common Dreams staff writer. Special Reports . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
+4205,"Hey, Berniacs: I Learned to Love Hillary and So Can You","An Obama 2008 veteran, who’s been on a campaign that was in a position similar to Clinton’s and that had to reconcile with Clinton, offers his thoughts.
+
+In late May of 2008, there was a bit of a misunderstanding that briefly blew the tent off the circus that was the Democratic primary. The context was an interview where Hillary Clinton responded to criticism from unnamed Obama advisers (hi, guys) who accused her of dragging on a contest that had become virtually unwinnable: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? And we all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”
+
+Now, it’s clear with the benefit of eight years’ hindsight that Hillary was merely pointing out that plenty of other primaries had lasted until June. I find it hard to believe that “Hillary cites RFK assassination in explaining why she’s still in race” was the headline that the Clinton brain trust was hoping for that day. I don’t think it was on the message calendar.
+
+Try telling that to 2008 Me. I was outraged. My colleagues were outraged. In fact, we reveled in our outrage, which is what both campaigns did best back then (for laughs, we still send around timeless YouTube classics such as “Your Slumlord Rezko,” “Change You Can Xerox,” “Talking Like She’s Annie Oakley,” and my favorite, “He Just Said Cocaine!”)
+
+At that moment, however, a cooler head (Barack Obama’s) prevailed. Our statement referred to Clinton’s comments as “unfortunate,” she apologized, and we all moved on. Why? Because both campaigns understood that it was time to stop ripping each other apart and turn to the greater, shared goal of denying Republicans a third term in the White House.
+
+Eight years later, we’re approaching the endgame of another Democratic primary. For Bernie Sanders to overtake Hillary Clinton’s lead in pledged delegates—which, at 239, is more than double Obama’s 112-delegate lead in 2008—he would have to win each of the remaining contests by about 18 points, a margin he has only reached in Vermont and New Hampshire. If he doesn’t, his only other option is to convince a few hundred superdelegates to back the candidate who has won fewer votes and fewer delegates.
+
+Bernie faces long odds, but no good reason to drop out. And why should he? Why not keep running through the final primaries in June, just like Hillary did in 2008? Along the way, Sanders will probably win a few more states—especially in May—and continue to build a following that should hearten everyone who wants to see a bigger, bolder progressive movement.
+
+But it’s also in the interest of the progressive moment for both candidates and their campaigns to begin healing the rifts that have deepened over the course of the primary. Neither Sanders nor Clinton seemed very compelling when they were screaming at each other for two hours at the debate in Brooklyn. And no one benefits from another three months of ridiculous lawsuits, overwrought fundraising emails, and surrogates sniping at each other on cable. Already, this friendly fire has taken a toll—in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, Bernie is viewed unfavorably by 20 percent of Clinton supporters, and Hillary is viewed unfavorably by 40 percent of Sanders supporters.
+
+I don’t want to exaggerate the challenge. I still think this primary is less nasty and divisive than 2008, and exponentially less so than the cannibalism we may see in Cleveland. It’s also true that the percentage of Sanders and Clinton voters who say they won’t vote for the other candidate is fairly low. But a year in which Donald Trump or Ted Cruz could become president of the United States is not a year we can afford to have any pissed-off primary voters stay home in November.
+
+I’ve been on a campaign that was in a position similar to Hillary Clinton’s, and I’ve been on a campaign that had to reconcile with Hillary Clinton. So, for what it’s worth (and I realize the answer may be a resounding “not much, go to hell”), here’s my advice to both sides:
+
+You’re on the verge of winning. Do so gracefully. The burden of bringing the party together falls more heavily on its future leader. Hillary’s line in her New York primary night speech, “I believe that there is much more that unites us than divides us,” was a good start. I’d go further, though.
+
+It’s not enough to just thank Sen. Sanders and his supporters. Show that you hear them; that you’ve learned from them; that they’ve made you a better candidate, and will make you a better president. Recognize what Bernie has achieved by speaking passionately about issues of economic inequality, and the gross amount of political money that gives a louder voice to richer people. Celebrate the fact that he’s inspired so many people to pay attention to politics for the first time—especially young people, who you should work even harder to reach. Consider offering Sanders a prime-time speaking slot at the convention, and choosing an unapologetic progressive as vice president.
+
+
+
+Finally, don’t attack. And if Sanders surrogates or supporters attack, turn the other cheek. Be the bigger campaign. Don’t allow yourselves to get baited. Don’t drop snarky background quotes with reporters. Don’t allow every perceived slight and controversy to get to you (like I did in 2008). Don’t engage with the Bernie Bros (like I did last weekend). Persuade the persuadables, turn your fire on the Republicans, and focus on Hillary’s vision for the future. You’re almost there.
+
+I know, I know—I’m supporting Hillary Clinton. But there was also a time when I couldn’t imagine myself liking or voting for her. Maybe you don’t believe that she’s different from the caricature we’ve all helped perpetuate. But she is running a campaign with a policy platform that’s more progressive than her husband’s administration, her 2008 campaign, and—in a few cases—Barack Obama’s administration.
+
+I don’t think Bernie should stop pointing out where he and Hillary disagree, or pull back on his criticism of the way money influences politics, but I do think he should start repeating a line that he’s already said once before: “On her worst day, Hillary Clinton is a hundred times better than any of the Republicans.”
+
+It’s important for Bernie’s supporters to know that he believes this undeniable truth. It’s important for them to hear Sanders say that while he’ll keep fighting for a more progressive Democratic Party, the Democratic Party has been a vehicle for tremendous progress in this country—especially over the last eight years. Denying or minimizing the achievements of the Obama presidency only deepens the cynicism of those who worry that change isn’t possible.",REAL
+6875,Thomas Sowell Delivers the BRUTAL Truth About Understanding Politics | The Federalist Papers,"You are here: Home / US / Thomas Sowell Delivers the BRUTAL Truth About Understanding Politics Thomas Sowell Delivers the BRUTAL Truth About Understanding Politics October 28, 2016 
+C.E. Dyer writes that Bill and Hillary Clinton are generous people — that is, generous toward themselves. 
+The Clintons are probably the world’s most famous grifters and the Clinton Farce Foundation has proven to be a great cover for them. 
+Bill and Hillary gave $1,042,000 to charity according to their tax return and $1 million of that went to, you guessed it, the Clinton Foundation. Of the $1,042,000 the Clintons gave to charity as listed on their return, $1 million went to the Clinton Foundation https://t.co/IuNXUGZBdC 
+— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 12, 2016 @CounterMoonbat Which in turn is used to pay Chelsea her $900K salary. & leftists everywhere say ""aren't they wonderful"". We're so screwed. 
+— Da Hack (@NoMoreSheepdog) August 12, 2016 
+It’s a pretty slick move: donate to your own charity and write it off on your taxes. One twitter user aptly called the Clinton Foundation “their own slush fund.” 
+As far as the money laundering comment goes, well, dirty money does need to get clean, you know, and Clinton Foundation money is dirty in more ways than one. 
+First, it’s a great way to make enough money to pay for Hillary’s ugly designer clothes and Bill’s girlfriends — not to mention that Chelsea needs a job; $600,000 at NBC only goes so far, you know. 
+Second, the Clinton Foundation takes enormous amounts of money from countries with disgusting human rights abuses and all the Clintons have to do is a photo-op here and there to make it look like it’s all about charity and whatnot. 
+This fits perfectly with the Democrat Party, though — it doesn’t matter what is, just what it looks like, and fortunately for them Democrat voters aren’t the most discerning bunch. 
+Apparently Clinton made $10.6 million in 2015…but hey, she’s just like us! 
+She’s your neighbor down the street who can’t climb the stairs, screams at everyone and gets away with massive fraud and has yet to be held accountable for the death of four Americans on her watch — not to mention the others that drop like flies around her. 
+Then there’s creepy, pervy, pathological liar uncle Bill, and their ne’er-do-well daughter Chelsea with questionable paternity — although that’s probably a lot more common … 
+Everyone’s got neighbors like that right? ",FAKE
+3307,New Senate is just like the old Senate,"Washington (CNN) Governing is much tougher than it looks, even for a master of the Senate like Mitch McConnell.
+
+Claiming the majority he had long craved in the mid-term elections, the wily GOP leader promised to turn the polarized, gridlocked Senate back into a chamber in which both sides get a say and pass meaningful legislation.
+
+McConnell's vow was not just altruistic. With a tough slate of Senate races looming in 2016 and Republicans desperate to take back the White House, he has a strong incentive to show the GOP can govern.
+
+But two months into the Republican majority, the new Senate looks an awful lot like the old Senate.
+
+The chamber can't even come together to pass a bill tackling the scourge of sex trafficking -- which has wide bipartisan support -- because it has become derailed in a partisan fight over abortion. The result is that President Barack Obama's nominee for attorney general, Loretta Lynch, is being held up. If things were not bad enough, Lynch's confirmation process has degenerated into an ugly row over race.
+
+""If we cannot approve a bill to deal with human trafficking, then what will we be able to deal with?"" Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins said this week. ""We have to get past the tendency to score partisan political points that has affected too many bills on both sides of the aisle.""
+
+The new Senate is not yet breaking its bad productivity streak.
+
+The only high profile legislation sent to Obama's desk was a bill authorizing the Keystone XL Pipeline, which the president swiftly vetoed.
+
+The Republican establishment in the House and Senate has spent much of its time having to quell a bid by grassroots conservatives to defund the Department of Homeland Security as a way to punish what they see as Obama's ""executive amnesty"" in reshaping immigration laws.
+
+The GOP-led Senate and House are also at odds over exactly what to include in the biggest piece of looming business the party majorities will face -- a budget bill.
+
+This is all welcome news for Obama, who was dealt a humiliating defeat in November's mid-terms but is not facing much pressure from Congress at all. He's using the political vacuum as a respite from the misery lame-duck presidents usually expect in their twilight years.
+
+The raging Republican civil war, meanwhile, is making McConnell's task in managing his restive conference almost as difficult as the one John Boehner has slogged through in recent years.
+
+And Boehner, unlike McConnell, does not have to deal with at least three Republicans -- Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham -- who are flirting with running for president, and who may have personal, rather than party motivations at stake.
+
+""The election changed majority control -- it didn't change the sharp differences between the two parties,"" said Steven Smith, a specialist in Congress at Washington University, St. Louis. ""It didn't change McConnell's relationship with his own colleagues.""
+
+Still, McConnell's defenders say that he has managed to make at least peripheral changes to Senate life. He has allowed more amendments to legislation than was typically allowed under the former Democratic majority rule of Harry Reid, letting lawmakers feel their voices are heard.
+
+In the DHS battle, McConnell honored his vow not to allow a government shutdown, though that promise will be tested in government funding and debt ceiling fights later this year.
+
+And even in the best of times, nothing moves in the Senate at anything other than glacial pace. So McConnell's quest to restore ""regular order"" might be the political equivalent of turning around an oil tanker.
+
+Prospects look reasonable that by using a budget device known as ""reconciliation,"" which can bypass the Senate filibuster, the GOP will be able to move some legislation through Congress and evade Democratic obstruction.
+
+But many Republicans believe that Democrats, by suddenly objecting to the abortion provision after it sailed through committee, are simply looking for a way to jam up the Senate in the belief Republicans will get the blame for the futility. Their current strategy is, in effect, a 2016 strategy.
+
+With the chamber's filibuster rules, which require a 60 vote majority on most significant legislation, the current Republican high water mark of 54 seats is not sufficient to dictate terms to the opposition party.
+
+Already, with an apparent eye on 2016, senior Democrats are making the case that Republicans simply can't get things done.
+
+""Republicans have came in saying they would know how to govern, and what a mess they've made of it,"" said veteran Democratic Sen Chuck Schumer of New York. ""They didn't have a good time or good luck on the pipeline bill, where they got bollocksed up on climate change. They've held us for four weeks on funding Homeland Security. And now even a simple trafficking bill they can't get done.""
+
+He added: ""Hello, our Republican friends, you're in the majority. They still think they're in the minority and they're putting their own poison pills in their own bill.""
+
+The shenanigans have some veteran observers of the Senate already beginning to downgrade expectations for the next few years.
+
+""What's clear is that the quick cement is rapidly drying on how the new Senate is going to operate,"" said Ron Bonjean, a former top Republican strategist in the Senate and the House.
+
+Bonjean predicted a return to the grueling ""trench warfare"" which has made the Senate one of the most trying places to be in Washington.
+
+""Democrats don't want to move anything. They are finding reasons not to join Republicans in moving legislation because that will help the majority succeed politically,"" said Bonjean.
+
+The row over the trafficking bill is a bad omen for those who want to see a return to comity in the Senate. An attempt at a compromise failed on Thursday so the controversy will rumble on at least until next week.
+
+And the clash has become much more than a dispute over an obscure bill. It's a test case of how the Senate will be run for the next two years, being waved by two veteran experts of gridlock and procedure, McConnell and Reid who have seen their relationship deteriorate badly in recent years.
+
+McConnell is refusing to bring up Lynch's nomination, which has the support of a number of Republicans as well as Democrats, until the trafficking bill passes.
+
+But in the end, some conservatives believe, the Democrats will have little option to climb down, because the White House badly wants Lynch to get confirmed to succeed Eric Holder.
+
+But by then, it may be too late to stop ill feelings over the nomination from poisoning whatever goodwill is left in the Senate, setting a bad precedent for the rest of the year.
+
+For example, Sen. John McCain on Thursday furiously condemned another Senate veteran, Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, after he accused Republicans of treating Lynch, who is African American, like civil rights icon Rosa Parks by moving her ""to the back of the bus.""
+
+McConnell doesn't just have problems with Democrats though. He increasingly is struggling to keep his own caucus in line, especially among lawmakers who have ridden the Tea Party wave and are challenging the Republican establishment in the Senate.
+
+In one eye-opening example, Republican freshman Sen. Tom Cotton bypassed Senate leadership by getting together a letter signed by 46 other GOP senators to warn Iran directly that Congress could torpedo a nuclear deal between world powers, including Washington, and the Islamic Republic.
+
+Grass roots conservatives are also furious that Boehner and McConnell combined to derail a bid by conservatives to withhold funding for the DHS in protest at Obama's unilateral effort to save millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation.
+
+""They organized a surrender. it was the surrender brigade,"" said Ken Cuccinelli, President of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee devoted to sending candidates supported by the grassroots to the Senate. McConnell ""misled Kentucky voters. He said he was going to stand up to Obama's liberal agenda. He said he was going to use the power of the purse. he said he was going to repeal Obamacare root and branch.""
+
+Cuccinelli, the former Attorney General of Virginia, predicted that the action of the Senate Republican establishment would not be accepted by Republican activists and could fuel primary campaigns against sitting senators up for re-election, including McCain, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, and North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr.
+
+So under simultaneous attack from the right and the left, and with the president ready with his veto, McConnell is going to have to negotiate an increasingly narrow path before he can send his troops into the field in the 2016 election and argue that, unlike Democrats, the GOP actually got something done.",REAL
+1953,"Jeb Bush previews 2016 run, promising ‘adult conversations’ on big issues","Jeb Bush previewed the ideas at the heart of his likely presidential campaign, delivering a sweeping address here Friday about the economy, foreign affairs and energy exploration, and challenging the country to question “every aspect of how government works.”
+
+In his first major speech since stepping into the 2016 presidential sweepstakes in December, the Republican former Florida governor spoke confidently and in significant detail about the broad range of issues beginning to shape the campaign for the White House. Bush signaled he would offer the country the “adult conversations” he said are lacking in Washington and would focus on people who have been left out of the economic revival.
+
+“Sixty percent of Americans believe that we’re still in a recession,” Bush said. “They’re not dumb. It’s because they are in a recession. They’re frustrated, and they see a small portion of the population on the economy’s up escalator. Portfolios are strong, but paychecks are weak. Millions of Americans want to move forward in their lives — they want to rise — but they’re losing hope.”
+
+Bush was sharply critical of Washington — not only of President Obama but also of the Republican-controlled Congress — saying there were too many “academic and political hacks” with “hard-core ideology” who are running the country without making progress.
+
+“They’re basically Maytag repairmen,” he said. “Nothing gets done.” Bush added, “It is time to challenge every aspect of how government works — how it taxes, how it regulates, how it spends — to open up economic opportunity for all.”
+
+Bush delivered Friday’s keynote address to the National Automobile Dealers Association’s annual convention in San Francisco, one of his final paid speaking appearances before he turns his attention fully to the 2016 campaign.
+
+Bush — who has been on an ambitious, national tour to raise money for Right to Rise PAC, his leadership political action committee — was careful to say he was only “seriously considering the possibility of running.” He told the crowd of 4,000 auto dealers and industry executives, “Your checkbook, by the way, is very safe here.”
+
+But Bush used the opportunity to signal the kind of campaign he intends to run. His message contrasted starkly with the rhetoric expected from some other hopefuls who are gathering in Iowa this weekend for a political festival hosted by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an anti-immigration reform firebrand.
+
+Bush drew loud and sustained applause when he called for immigration reform that would provide a path to legalized status for undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
+
+“We have a history of allowing people to come in legally to embrace our values and pursue their dreams in a way that creates prosperity for all of us,” Bush said. “No country can do this like America. Our national identity is not based on race or some kind of exclusionary belief. Historically, the unwritten contract has been, come legally to our country, embrace our values, learn English, work and you can be as American as anyone else.”
+
+In an subtle swipe at other GOP leaders and potential rivals who rally the conservative base with hot tirades about Obama’s overreach, Bush said the Republican Party will win back the White House only if it offers an optimistic message. “Hope and a positive agenda wins out over anger and reaction every day of the week,” he said.
+
+Bush’s called for simplification of the tax code, including lowering rates and “eliminating as many loopholes as possible.” He also called for more energy exploration. Approving construction of the Keystone XL pipeline was “a no-brainer,” he said, as is support for horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking.
+
+“It’s not cool here in San Francisco to talk about this,” he joked. But, “It’s cool in places like North Dakota and West Texas and South Texas. It’s cool because it creates significant economic activity.”
+
+In his appearance here, Bush did not shy away from his place in a dynastic political family. The bio video that played before he spoke was heavy on references to his father, former president George H.W. Bush, and brother, former president George W. Bush. Jeb Bush cited both in his remarks, saying his dad was a model for leadership, especially on foreign policy, and noting that his brother had become a rather fine painter. “Who would’ve thunk it?” he said.
+
+Bush is not alone among likely 2016 presidential candidates on the paid speaking circuit. Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton has been delivering speeches and making other appearances for pay since stepping down as secretary of state in 2013.
+
+Clinton was a keynote speaker at last year’s auto dealers convention, in New Orleans, where she disclosed that she had not driven a car in nearly 20 years. “The last time I actually drove a car myself was 1996,” she said. Jokingly, she added: “I remember it very well. Unfortunately, so does the Secret Service, which is why I haven’t driven since then.”
+
+Bush made an indirect reference to Clinton’s remark. During the question-and-answer session, when the association’s chairman asked Bush his favorite kind of car, Bush said he just bought a Ford Fusion. “For the record, I do drive,” he said, adding that he plans to return to the dealership for a two-hour tutorial on the Fusion’s technology.
+
+Bush was asked about his Thursday meeting in Utah with Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee who also is exploring a 2016 run. The two men, each a favorite of the party establishment, are on a collision course, but Bush said they mostly avoided talk about the campaign.
+
+“We talked about the Patriots,” Bush said. “We talked a little bit about politics, not as much as you might imagine. We talked about the future of the country. We talked about the need for a more engaged foreign policy.. . .The awkward side of this, about running and such, we put aside.”
+
+Answering questions on stage, Bush opened a window on his personal life. He said he loves Sundays — “It’s Sunday fun day” — because he doesn’t work. “I play golf really fast so I can have breakfast really fast so I can go to Mass slower — can’t ask the priest to accelerate that. I probably would if I could.”
+
+He called himself “an introvert,” saying he would “rather read a book than go out and get in a conga line.”
+
+“Introverts actually are grinders,” Bush said. “They identify a problem by and large, and then they overcome it. But I learned that in order to make your case or in order to serve or in order to advance a cause, you have to connect with people, and you can’t connect with people if you’re back in the corner reading a book.”",REAL
+8818,GOVERNMENT HIDING UNPRECEDENTED TB INFECTION RATES AMONG RELOCATED REFUGEES,"Home › HEALTH › GOVERNMENT HIDING UNPRECEDENTED TB INFECTION RATES AMONG RELOCATED REFUGEES GOVERNMENT HIDING UNPRECEDENTED TB INFECTION RATES AMONG RELOCATED REFUGEES 0 SHARES 
+[10/26/16] J.D. HEYES- More Americans might be accepting of President Barack Obama’s zealous push to flood the country with refugees from war-torn parts of the world, if only he, along with federal and state officials, were more transparent about the entire process. 
+Like for instance being up front with Americans about the health threat posed by many of these refugees. 
+Breitbart News is reporting that officials at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, county health departments throughout the state and local offices of refugee resettlement agencies – all of whom are working closely with the Obama administration – have taken to hiding the latent tuberculosis infection rates among refugees from the general public. 
+The website noted further that the “culture of concealment” in Michigan contrasts with how several other states deal with latent TB infection rates among refugees. 
+As Breitbart News has reported in the past , the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t collect latent TB infection rate information from county health departments or local resettlement agencies it hires to perform initial medical screenings of newly-arrived refugees. Also, the state agency obviously does not honor its legal obligation to do so under provisions of the Refugee Act of 1980. Michigan officials not keeping TB data required by law 
+When the news service asked MDHHS officials for data about latent TB infection rates based on the full population of refugees screened, a spokesman for the agency, Bob Wheaton, said, “We do not have that data.” 
+Breitbart noted that the agency has hired a number of county health departments, and in some counties private refugee health screening services, all working in cooperation with local resettlement officials for the purpose of conducting initial medical screenings of all new refugee arrivals. 
+Under guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and MDHHS, all refugees who complete initial health screenings are tested for latent TB infection. However, MDHHS officials said that neither the counties nor private agencies are sharing screening data. What’s more, the counties and private refugee health screeners who do have the TB data will not make that information available to the public. 
+As Breitbart News noted further: 
+“In the case of at least one private refugee health screening service, the Arab American and Chaldean Council, which MDHHS has hired to conduct refugee health screenings in Wayne County, Macomb County, and Oakland County, that data is also not being shared with health departments in those counties.” 
+Again, the provision of the data is a requirement of federal statutes regarding the health screening status of refugees. One-third of the rest of the world has latent TB 
+Many states have made this information public in annual reports. They include Minnesota, where the latent TB infection rate among newly-arrived refugees in 2014 was 22 percent; Indiana (26 percent); Arizona (18 percent); Utah (18 percent), Texas (15 percent); California (12 percent) and Florida (12 percent). 
+In addition, Breitbart News noted, other states made information available to the news service after repeated requests. They include Tennessee (27 percent); Vermont (35 percent); and Idaho (21 percent). 
+It is vital to identify refugees coming into the United States with latent TB infections, because treatment must begin immediately in order to prevent the spread of the disease. Also, studies – including one from the University of California, San Diego in 2013 – have shown that higher rates of latent TB infection among resettled refugees pose a greater health risk to the general public in regions where they have been sent. 
+Latent TB turns into a public health risk when it activates into infectious TB, a process that is generally associated with lower levels of immunity among those with latent TB. In the U.S., 4 percent of the general population has latent TB; 10 percent of those develop active TB at some point during their lives. 
+By contrast, fully one-third – 33 percent – of the rest of the world has latent TB, Breitbart News reported. Post navigation",FAKE
+5446,The India-Russia Alliance Isn't Going Anywhere Because It's Underpinned by Values as Well as Interests - Nabarun Roy,"People over profits The India-Russia Alliance Isn't Going Anywhere Because It's Underpinned by Values as Well as Interests 
+There have been hiccups in the relationship before but ultimately the countries are united by far more than they are divided by Originally appeared at The National Interest 
+With the international system in a state of flux, we are witnessing significant political changes between nations. U.S.-China relations have come under great strain, as evidenced by their adversarial stand with regard to the South China Sea. Russia is ceding space to China with regard to East Asia. There seems to be a return to Cold War–like dynamics between Russia and the United States. It is being reported that Russia has placed nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, which borders Poland and Lithuania. The missiles are capable of hitting targets as far away as Berlin. Their differing positions with regard to the crisis in Syria and ISIS underline the tension between the two. 
+To the surprise of many observers, India-Russia relations, which have stood the test of time, also appear to have been affected by this trend, with Russia apparently upping its security ties with Pakistan, India’s traditional rival. For many in India, Russia’s decision to go ahead with its Druzhba (Friendship) 2016 military exercises with Pakistan immediately after the Uri terrorist incident, and its reticence in fully backing India on terrorism emanating from Pakistan at the recently concluded eighth BRICS Summit in Goa, are seen as worrying developments. From the perspective of a stakeholder in this bilateral relationship, the questions that come to one’s mind are: How worried should one be about these developments in India-Russia relations? Also, what should be done to ensure that there is no fundamental realignment in the relations between the two nations? 
+If one disregards the almost seventy-year history of relations between the two nations, it would appear that the observation of Rajan Menon , a close follower of India-Russia relations, is being proven wrong: “The two countries have established substantial trust and understanding, a convergent worldview, and a stake in preserving a relationship that few countries can claim to have.” A perusal of the bilateral relation will show that is all not particularly well. 
+On the security front, the Russians have been stepping up joint military exercises with Pakistan since 2014. The two naval exercises, Arabian Monsoon 2014 and Arabian Monsoon 2015, were followed up by Druzhba 2016, which was a two-week long military exercise conducted in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province involving seventy Russian service personnel. 
+While the naval exercises had combating crime groups and drug trafficking as their objective, Druzhba 2016 went a step further and had more conventional objectives, like training for combat in mountainous areas and taking on armed groups. India made its dislike of these military exercises known to Russia when India’s ambassador to Russia, Pankaj Saran, pointed out that “military cooperation with Pakistan which is a State that sponsors and practices terrorism as a matter of State policy is a wrong approach and it will only create further problems.” 
+Parts of Druzhba 2016 were to be held in the Gilgit-Baltistan province of Pakistan, an area India considers to be a part of Jammu and Kashmir, illegally occupied by Pakistan. The spokesperson of India’s Ministry of External Affairs, Vikas Swarup, told the press that “India repeatedly brought up its concerns about the venue of the exercise with Russia” and that the said province was “part of Indian territory.” This led the Russian embassy in New Delhi to issue a clarification that the military exercises would not be held in any “sensitive or problematic areas.” The exercises were subsequently held in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. 
+Additionally, Russia has been selling military hardware to Pakistan. It is believed that the two nations are in discussions regarding the possible sale of Russian Su-35 warplanes to Pakistan. Pakistan also bought four Mi-35 helicopter gunships from Russia in 2015. The Hindustan Times reports that over the last fifteen months, the army, navy and air force chiefs of Pakistan have visited Russia to explore other such military deals. Given the fact that Pakistan is the world’s seventh-largest importer of defense equipment, it could prove to be a lucrative market for Russian arms manufacturers. This could have serious consequences for India-Russia relations. 
+On the economic front, Russia has agreed to lend $2 billion to Pakistan for the construction of an 1,100-kilometer pipeline to transport liquefied natural gas from Karachi to Lahore. On the diplomatic front, Russia did mention Pakistan in the wake of the Uri attack when it stated , “We note with concern the resurgence of terrorist attacks near the Line of Control. It is alarming and according to New Delhi, the attack on military unit near the town of Uri was committed from the territory of Pakistan.” 
+However, its activity on the issue of terrorism in the context of the eighth BRICS Summit, held in Goa in October 2016, was less encouraging. Many in India feel that Russia was reticent in backing India’s demands and did not push for the inclusion of terms like “nurture,”“shelter” or “sponsor” in the Summit declaration. The inclusion of these terms would have implicitly pointed fingers in Pakistan’s direction. While the declaration called for action against UN-recognized terrorist groups, and named groups such as Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, it did not name Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Muhammad. 
+According to Indian strategic expert Brahma Chellaney , “The result was that the declaration failed to mention the most potent form of terrorism in the world, which is state-sponsored.” In the face of opposition from China and its strategy of sheltering Pakistan from India’s diplomatic offensive, Russia simply didn’t stand up for India. This sentiment is illustrated by a headline printed in the Times of India on October 17: “BRICS Summit: China bulldozed India’s security concerns as Russia looked the other way.” 
+These developments are certainly worrying to those who support positive India-Russia relations. However, once one situates these developments in the context of almost seventy years of bilateral relations, one will realize that downturns and heartburn have occurred in the past as well, with relations stabilizing and returning to normal afterwards. The 1960s were testing times on this front, when Russia started inching closer to Pakistan. Menon points out that in the aftermath of the 1965 India-Pakistan war, Russia diluted its support to India on the Kashmir issue, and “even published material inconsistent with Indian territorial claims against Pakistan.” 
+Pakistani president Ayub Khan’s 1965 visit to Russia raised many an eyebrow in India. A Pakistani military delegation visited Moscow in 1966, to discuss the purchase of weapons from Russia. This discussion was furthered the following year when Pakistan’s foreign minister visited Moscow. An arms deal was finally clinched when Gen. Yahya Khan visited Moscow some time later. High-ranking Soviet officials also visited Pakistan around the same time period included a naval delegation and Alexei Kosygin, head of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. 
+It was not uncommon to hear voices of disgruntlement from Indians, including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Zakir Hussain. Notwithstanding such tensions, the bilateral relation was put back on the rails. Hence, history suggests that the recent developments may just be a hiccup and that talk of bilateral relations fraying is nothing more than scaremongering and, possibly, hyperbole. 
+This optimistic interpretation is bolstered when one notes that India and Russia struck important defense deals on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in Goa—such as a $5 billion deal for India’s purchase of the S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile system. Considered to be one of the most advanced antimissile systems in the world, it will be used to protect to high-value installations. The two countries also signed deals pertaining to India’s import and manufacture of Kamov Ka 226T light utility helicopters. The two countries will also be collaborating in the manufacture of four Admiral Grigorovich–class guided-missile stealth frigates. 
+Significantly, it was announced that India would also be leasing an Akula II–class nuclear-powered attack submarine from Russia for a sum of $2 billion. Writing in Business Standard, Ajai Shukla suggests that this would not be in addition to the existing nuclear submarine that was leased from Russia (and christened INS Chakra) in 2012. Instead, it will replace the INS Chakra and is expected to join the Indian Navy in 2020–21. Hence, for about two years, India will be in the possession of two such submarines, after which INSChakra will be sent back to Russia. In order to counter misgivings in India, and to underscore that the bilateral relations were built on trust and time-tested imperatives, a “top ranked Russian defense official” is reported to have remarked that “Russia is a friend, an ally and not a business partner. Russia stood by India during its darkest hours. Next year will mark 70 years of our relationship. It is a long time.” 
+A balanced, historically informed reading of the bilateral relation between India and Russia suggests that naysayers in India may be jumping the gun in harboring misgivings about threats to a time-tested relationship. However, one factor seems missing in the current bilateral relation that was present earlier, at least on the Indian side: admiration for the erstwhile USSR and some of the values it espoused. Indian-Soviet relations during the Cold War years were based on expediency and also on values. Some of the letters that Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to the chief ministers of the Indian states in 1955 (to be found in his Letters to Chief Ministers, Vol. 4) following his visit to the USSR make it clear that India’s engagement during the Cold War was based on his admiration of the USSR, even though he was aware of its failings. The fact that the “pull” worked both ways is made evident by Nehru, who writes, “I was astonished to find how popular some Indian films were. The names of several films were mentioned to me. The only two I remember now are Awara and Do Bigha Zamin.” 
+Given how central Nehru was to Indian politics, and his ability to shape the political discourse in the country, this sense of admiration for the USSR struck root in the Indian body politic. Bilateral relations based on expediency as well as values lived on, even after his death. As a result, when tensions did emerge between them, as was the case in the 1960s, the “glue” that bound India and Russia at a foundational level ensured that the drift was not permanent. The relationship encompassed the state and society on both sides. A dynamic that encompassed values ensured that things could be brought back on track should the narrower self-interest component of the relationship suffer. 
+International-relations scholars like Ian Hurd have pointed out that relations based purely on self-interest last as long as clear benefits accrue to the parties concerned. According to Hurd , “Actors are constantly recalculating the expected payoff to remaining in the system and stand ready to abandon it should some alternative promise greater utility.” Such relationships have a tendency to “defect” or have revisionism built into them. However, relationships based on something more than self-interest can check the tendency towards revisionism. 
+It is but natural that once the Cold War generation fades in India, the attraction and pull towards Russia and its ideals will also weaken. It would not be inaccurate to say that the current generation of Indians is much less enamored with Russia than the previous generation, which grew up in the Cold War years. In fact, the United States seems to have a greater following among the new generation of Indians than does Russia. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2015, 70 percent of Indians who were polled viewed the United States favorably, with 75 percent of those in the age bracket of 18–29 seeing the United States in a positive light. Russia trailed the United States, with 43 percent of Indians seeing it in a positive light. While 8 percent of Indians polled viewed the United States in a negative light, twice as many—16 percent—viewed Russia in a negative light. 
+Should decisionmakers in New Delhi and Moscow want to ensure that the bilateral relationship is not endangered significantly, they need to examine its softer, ideational element. To what extent do values still underpin bilateral relations, and what is the extent of the erosion of values? They need to identify and inject elements into the relation that will buttress the dimension of self-interest with a value-based one. 
+The challenge is made greater given that socialism is no longer the principal vocabulary in the relationship. Some have argued that in order to maintain the health of bilateral relations, scientific and technological relations have to be deepened, joint manufacturing given a boost, and a convergence of views on terrorism put in place. Whether these measures will be sufficient to sustain India-Russia ties in the twenty-first century needs to be pondered. 
+Should one doubt the efficacy of values in the politics among nations, given the depiction of international relations as the domain of amoral and self-interested conduct in the shadow of anarchy, one ought to pay heed to Henry Kissinger, and the arch-realist’s reasoning for the success of the Concert of Europe system. The Concert system was inaugurated in 1815, in the aftermath of the drawn-out French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. 
+It consisted of dialogue and negotiation among the great powers, a commitment to the status quo based on conservative values, and modifications of boundaries based on discussion and not the unilateral use of force. It is believed that the absence of systemwide great-power wars barring the Crimean War was due to the Concert system. In the face of increasing offensive capabilities of nations spurred on by the Industrial Revolution; leaders who accepted risk and were interested in pushing the limits of the status quo, such as Czar Nicholas I; and the slow onset of nationalism across Europe, peace in Europe largely held. This was no mean feat. 
+Kissinger argues in his book Diplomacy that even though the Concert was created in the name of the balance of power, it relied shared values among the great powers. According to him, “There was not a physical equilibrium but a moral one.” The power and value-based components of the Concert system was propped up by two separate arrangements: the Quadruple Alliance and the Holy Alliance. While the first alliance was based on balance of power principles, the second addressed the moral dimension of the Concert system and used religion as a glue to bind the great powers together. 
+The British were not impressed with the Holy Alliance, with Lord Castlereagh referring to it as “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense.” Notwithstanding this, it is believed that the Concert system managed to avert great-power wars for almost a century thanks to its two dimensions: self-interest based on balance-of-power calculations, and values. The injection of values through the Holy Alliance had the role of checking revisionist tendencies among the great powers, which was not only dependent on the accrual of benefits. 
+The fact that India-Russia relations will face setbacks is inevitable. Whether the setbacks will be seen as aberrations, or whether they will herald a sustained drift, will in many ways be determined by the salience of shared values between the two nations.",FAKE
+9931,Is Robert Mugabe on his deathbed? UK planning for transition phase in Zimbabwe,"Zimbabwe Daily — Oct 29, 2016 
+LORD Peter Mandelson has warned the UK Government that an “endgame” was underway in Zimbabwe giving two examples of how the “crisis” will play out. 
+Mr Mandelson, the chair of Lazard International investment bank, told British civil servants the Zimbabwean dictator is preparing an “endgame” for the country, suggesting he believes he is close to being on his death bed. 
+One of the creators of New Labour under Tony Blair, Mr Mandelson visited the country in February for business and civil purposes, he claims. 
+However he later became embroiled in a lobbying row after Mr Mugabe’s finance minister Patrick Chinamasa flew to London to discuss a bail-out plan for the country. 
+Mr Mugabe’s regime was apparently attempting to borrow $1.1 billion (£900m) facilitated by the peer’s bank. 
+Now it can be revealed that Mr Mandelson sent a letter to the UK Government giving them advice on how they should approach their diplomatic relations with the country. 
+And he warned that the country needs “encouragement, debt restructuring, and an injection of additional liquidity” just a few months before he met the Zimbabwean government minister to discuss the bail out. 
+In the letter to the Parliamentary Secretary of State at the Foreign Office Mr Mandelson also discussed the country’s “corruption.” 
+He wrote: “The most immediate danger is that the supply of cash dollars is drying up and there is a danger of banking failure and a liquidity crisis with consequent impact on the functioning of the whole economy.” 
+Mr Mandelson issued a statement to a British newspaper in August about his trip in which he denied he was advising the Zimbabwean government. 
+The spokesman said he was there to meet “representatives of the business community and civil society to encourage them to continue the process of reform”. 
+However it can now be revealed he decided to inform the UK civil servants he believes Mr Mugabe is at a point where an “endgame is underway.” 
+The partially redacted Freedom of Information requests do not highlight who Mr Mandelson met but clearly point to “political factions.” 
+He wrote: “Any discussions of business – or indeed most aspects of life – was inevitably a discussion of politics and the intense speculation and manoeuvring over the succession to President Mugabe is dominating. Armed police surround a protester in Harare, Zimbabwe on Monday, July, 4, 2016. Click to enlarge 
+“It is clear that the endgame is underway, and the battle is being vociferously played out in the Zimbabwean press. 
+“Less clear is how it will end and who will prevail – and whether it will play out while the president is still alive.” 
+Mr Mugabe who is 92 recently appeared in public to open a school, following rumours of his death , and has maintained he will retain his grip on the country until he dies. 
+In 2008 Mr Mugabe was stripped of his British Knighthood despite opposition from Mr Mandelson’s then Labour colleagues Gordon Brown and Lord Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office Minister. 
+Now Mr Mandelson appears to have warned the British government of a “crisis that threatens to unfold soon” hinting that the international community must “establish the right incentives for reformers.” 
+Mugabe, Africa’s oldest leader, has led the former British colony since independence in 1980. 
+His critics say he has presided over the destruction of a once-promising country with policies such as the seizures of white-owned farms. 
+But Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party blames foreign powers for sabotaging the economy with sanctions. 
+Mugabe’s government has experienced increasingly bad cash shortages over the past seven years since abandoning its own currency in a bid to end hyperinflation. 
+The Zimbabwean dollar was abandoned after Mugabe ordered 1,000billion Zimbabwean dollar notes to be printed, quickly becoming worthless and black market US dollars taking over before becoming the southern African country’s official currency in 2009. 
+Much of Zimbabwe’s industrial companies have had to close down due to demands white-owned businesses hand over 51 per cent to black Zimbabweans, high taxes and labour laws which make it almost impossible to sack anybody, all under Mr Mugabe’s rules. 
+The highly controversial eviction of white farmers has meant nearly every supermarket product is imported, unlike 15 years ago when most produce was locally sourced. 
+Protests have marred the dictator’s leadership this year, with workers across the country taking part in a “shut down” strike in July – the biggest protests since April 20017 when opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai led anti-Mugabe demonstrations.",FAKE
+4827,Why Democrats are anxious,"(CNN) Donald Trump's reversal on the ""birther"" controversy is turning attention -- at least for the moment -- from a major shift in the presidential race.
+
+The battle for the White House -- dominated by Hillary Clinton only weeks ago -- is tightening dramatically, a nerve-wracking turn for Democrats that sets up what could be a nail-biter election in 52 days.
+
+A cascade of new polls this week suggest close contests in key states such as Virginia -- the home of Clinton's running mate -- and Michigan, where Democrats have won every cycle since 1992.
+
+Nationally in CNN's poll of polls , Clinton stands at 43% to Trump's 41%. In the must-win states of Florida and Ohio, Trump and Clinton are deadlocked in this week's CNN/ORC poll, as well as several other surveys.
+
+In Iowa -- a state President Barack Obama won twice -- Trump leapt to an 8-point lead among likely voters over Clinton in a Monmouth University poll released Thursday (his largest lead yet in a battleground state). And in Virginia, Clinton and Trump were virtually tied at 40% to 37%.
+
+Of course, the 2016 campaign has plenty of twists ahead that could once again reshape the race in an instant. The latest came Friday when Trump ended five years of pushing conspiracy theories about Obama's birthplace and finally acknowledged he was born in the United States. And the first presidential debate, which will likely be a pivotal moment for both campaigns, is nine days away.
+
+But the recent polls underscore concerns about the effectiveness of Clinton's strategy, which has centered on convincing voters Trump is unfit to be commander in chief, as well as her ability to lift vulnerable House and Senate Democrats in November with the same effectiveness as Obama in 2008 and 2012. The Democratic nominee is coming off one of the toughest weeks of her campaign, forced to the sidelines for three days to recover from pneumonia.
+
+""What matters is who registers to vote, and who is motivated and mobilized to turn out to vote,"" she told reporters. ""And I'm going to keep doing everything I can to deliver my message about what's at stake in this election.""
+
+One of the most striking takeaways from the poll findings this week is that even with all of Trump's controversies and polarizing comments, Clinton is still struggling to stitch together key parts of the Obama coalition. That point was particularly evident in the new NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist state polls this week that showed her with softer support from Latinos and young voters than Obama.
+
+""This (election) really, in some ways, is coming down to young voters,"" said Della Volpe. ""She has not yet solidified what arguably should be one of the core constituencies of any Democratic campaign.""
+
+""When I hear folks saying they're not inspired in this election, I disagree,"" Obama said. ""I am inspired because for eight years, I have had the privilege to see what it takes to do this job and here's what I know for sure. ... Right now, we have an opportunity to elect one of the most qualified people who has ever endeavored to become president.""
+
+Clinton and her allies brushed off the week's new numbers as an expected development in what the Democratic candidate said was always going to be ""a tight race.""
+
+Joel Benenson, Clinton's chief strategist, told CNN's Erin Burnett in an interview Thursday that the campaign was still ""playing for 270 electoral votes.""
+
+""We are still playing more offense in states around the country and keeping the Trump campaign on defense, particularly in states that are must-wins for them like Virginia and North Carolina,"" Benenson said. ""They're not making us play defense anywhere.""
+
+""What's happened as much as anything else is that the election is taking on the contours of the 2012 election to a very large extent,"" said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. ""The ups and downs in the race have depended on the degree to which (Mitt) Romney voters from 2012 considered Trump to be acceptable or beyond the fringe. ... Right now, what we are seeing in the polls is that more Romney voters are willing to go with Trump.""
+
+Garin, an adviser to the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA Action, suggested that, in the long run, there could be an advantage to Trump's calmer demeanor for his Democratic opponent.
+
+""When Donald Trump is not behaving, he's sort of like a car crash that people can't help but stop and look at,"" Garin said. ""If Trump is being less outrageous and less titillating, it means that Hillary Clinton has a better chance to get her own message through and have the election litigated on her own terms.""
+
+In a reflective speech Thursday, Clinton said her few days off the trail helped clarify what the 2016 campaign is about. Contrasting her style and tone with her rival's, she once again called Trump ""a loose cannon"" who would put America's gains at risk. Charting her course for the next few weeks, she said she would focus on working families and the challenges facing young people. In a nod to her vulnerabilities, she also acknowledged some of the criticisms of her public persona.
+
+""I have been involved in politics one way or another for many years. It is not an easy business. It can get rough and I have built up some defenses,"" she said. ""When it comes to public service, I am better at the service part than the public part.""
+
+But she said she was not ""the showman"" that her opponent is and promised to ""deliver for you and your family,"" which will be one of the cornerstones of her message in the final stretch of the campaign.
+
+The closeness of the polls clearly could mean more difficult races for down-ballot Democratic Senate and House candidates who are hoping Clinton's candidacy, and her well-organized operation, will give them a lift at the polls.
+
+In New Hampshire this week, for example, Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte opened an 8-point lead over Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan: 52% to 44% among likely voters in a new NBC/WSJ/Marist poll after earlier polls had showed a much closer race.
+
+As voters are paying more attention to the race, University of New Hampshire Survey Center Director Andy Smith said Clinton's vulnerabilities are coming into sharper focus and that is having a drag on the ticket. So much attention has been focused on Trump throughout the campaign, he said, that people paid less attention to how unpopular Clinton was.
+
+""The candidate who has coattails is the candidate who is going to be able to pull in voters who might not otherwise have voted -- and that's what Obama was able to do in 2008 and 2012, especially among younger voters, African-American voters and minority voters,"" Smith said.
+
+But this year, many of those young voters in New Hampshire voted for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary, Smith noted.
+
+""Obama was able to pull them out in 2008, and to a lesser extent in 2012, and they voted for Democrats down the ticket, but they're much less likely to vote this time around with Clinton at the top of the ticket,"" he said.
+
+Some Democrats expect the Obama coalition to coalesce as Election Day draws closer.
+
+""There is clearly a gap for Clinton with younger voters that her campaign will pay attention to,"" said Bill Burton, a former adviser to Obama. ""But once younger voters realize that anything but a vote for Clinton is a vote for Trump, the numbers will settle and the artificially high Gary Johnson numbers will come back to earth ... The Obama coalition is lagging in getting behind Clinton, but the debates will help natural gravity set in and bring this race where it will end.""
+
+Other Democrats see a bright side to a closer race at the top of the ticket in the sense that it could propel more voters to get out to the polls. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that if Republicans want to believe that this race is tightening, ""let them believe that.""
+
+""Because the more our own people see that it's important to vote, and a tight race sort of speaks to that urgency, then more of them will turn out. So it works to our advantage,"" Pelosi said.",REAL
+3430,Obama has rare parliamentary window to make recess appointment to succeed Scalia,"There was much hubbub in late 2012 when President Obama made four recess appointments during a short recess between two pro-forma sessions of the Senate in January of that year.
+
+The case later went to the Supreme Court and the maneuver was ruled to be unconstitutional.
+
+The key in the 2014 Supreme Court decision regarding the president’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board over the three-day break was that the justices found the executive branch determined what it interpreted as a recess.
+
+But Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the majority opinion that under the Constitution “the Senate is in session when it says it is.”
+
+Obama said Saturday night that he would submit an appointment to the Senate, as part of his constitutional obligation, but “in due time.”
+
+But now we have a completely different set of parliamentary circumstances. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has indicated that he thinks that the nomination of a new justice should wait until the election of the next president.
+
+But if the White House does take that to heart -- and knows there would be an unprecedented attempt of filibuster a Supreme Court nominee until next year -- Obama has a rare opportunity to make a Recess appointment in the coming days.
+
+This window is open next week and this week only.
+
+In short: Both bodies of Congress are operating in the perfect parliamentary status in which a recess appointment would be applicable. The last such appointment to the high court came by President Eisenhower in 1956 when he appointed William Brennan.
+
+Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states that “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate.”
+
+This could be the window of time in which Obama has his chance to maneuver a recess appointment to the high court.
+
+Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution states “Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.”
+
+That means that so long as both the House and Senate haven’t jointly agreed to “adjourn” for a stretch longer than three days, then there appears to be no way the president could make a recess appointment.
+
+But the House and Senate are not operating under those circumstances right now. Both bodies of have adjourned until later this month for the President’s Day recess.
+
+The Senate last met on Thursday. When doing so, it approved a
+
+ “conditional adjournment resolution” for the Senate not to meet again until Monday, Feb. 22. The House met on Friday and at the close of business adopted the same adjournment resolution to get in sync with the Senate. The House is out until Tuesday, Feb. 23.
+
+So, the House and Senate will not be meeting in the coming days. This is an adjournment and is not challengeable in court  the way the NLRB recess appointments were because both bodies have agreed with each other to adjourn.
+
+This is a true recess and an opportunity for the president should he elect to take it -- considering the political realities of the Senate and the position of its majority leader to potentially make a recess appointment.
+
+Keep in mind that this window will close later this month. Then GOP-led House and Senate can effectively block the president with another recess appointment gambit in the future by agreeing to meet every three days, even if members aren’t really here.
+
+But obviously nobody anticipated Scalia’s death.
+
+Thus, the president could in fact take advantage of this rare opportunity because he won’t get it again after February 22/23 if McConnell sticks to his guns.
+
+",REAL
+6853,The Zika Virus Is Harmless. It Does Not Cause Birth Defects (Bill Gates Releasing GM Mosquitoes Anyway),"After nearly a year of causing hysteria, mass travel cancellations and unnecessary abortions it finally daunts to “journalists” and “experts” that the Zika virus is harmless. It can cause a very minor flue – two days of a low fever and uncomfortable feeling for a quarter of those infected – that is all. It does not cause, as was claimed by sensationalists in the media and various self-serving “scientists”, birth defects like microcephaly. 
+We told you so. 
+In February we wrote: The Zika Virus Is Harmless – Who Then Benefits From This Media Panic? .
+The piece refereed to a Congressional Research Service report and various sound scientific papers. It concluded:
+There is absolutely no sane reason for the scary headlines and the panic they cause.The virus is harmless. It is possible, but seems for now very unlikely, that it affects some unborn children. There is absolutely no reason to be concerned about it.
+The artificial media panic continued and huge amounts of money were poured into dangerous insecticides to kill mosquitoes (and important pollinators) that did not do any harm. Indeed, generous use of some of these insecticides likely were the very cause of a blip in microencephaly cases in northeastern Brazil.
+
+In March we wrote: Reading About Zika May Hurt Your Brain .
+We listed 35 sensational “news” headlines about potential catastrophes related to a Zika epidemic. The common factor of those panic creating media wave – all those headlines included the miraculous little word may . The pieces were pure speculations with some quoting this or that “expert” who was hunting for research funds or lobbying for some pharmaceutical or pesticide conglomerate.
+In June we added: Zika Virus Does Not Cause Birth Defects – Fighting It Probably Does .
+New serious research found what some people in Brazil had suspected from the very start of the small and strictly locally limited jump in microencephaly cases in Brazil:
+[D]octors in the Zika affected areas in Brazil pointed out that the real cause of somewhat increased microcephaly in the region was probably the insecticide pyriproxyfen, used to kill mosquito larvae in drinking water:
+The Brazilian doctors noted that the areas of northeast Brazil that had witnessed the greatest number of microcephaly cases match with areas where pyriproxyfen is added to drinking water in an effort to combat Zika-carrying mosquitoes . Pyriproxyfen is reported to cause malformations in mosquito larvae, and has been added to drinking water in the region for the past 18 months.
+Pyriproxyfen is produced by a Sumitomo Chemical – an important Japanese poison giant. It was therefore unsurprising that the New York Times and others called the Brazilian doctors’ report a “conspiracy theory” and trotted out some “experts” to debunk it.
+…
+But [s]cientist at the New England Complex Systems Institute also researched the pyriproxyfen thesis. They found :
+Pyriproxifen is an analog of juvenile hormone, which corresponds in mammals to regulatory molecules including retinoic acid, a vitamin A metabolite, with which it has cross-reactivity and whose application during development causes microcephaly .
+…
+[T]ests of pyriproxyfen by the manufacturer, Sumitomo, widely quoted as giving no evidence for developmental toxicity, actually found some evidence for such an effect , including low brain mass and arhinencephaly—incomplete formation of the anterior cerebral hemispheres—in rat pups. Finally, the pyriproxyfen use in Brazil is unprecedented—it has never before been applied to a water supply on such a scale.
+…
+Given this combination of information we strongly recommend that the use of pyriproxyfen in Brazil be suspended pending further investigation.
+Today the Washington Post finally admits that the Zika virus does not cause birth defects:
+[T]o the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil.Instead, Zika has left a puzzling and distinctly uneven pattern of damage across the Americas. According to the latest U.N. figures, of the 2,175 babies born in the past year with undersize heads or other congenital neurological damage linked to Zika, more than 75 percent have been clustered in a single region: northeastern Brazil.
+The wide areas where the flue virus occurred outside of the small area in Brazil saw no increase in birth defect numbers. The number of (naturally occurring) microcephality cases stayed constant despite a very large increase in (harmless) Zika virus infections. The numbers in Brazil also turned out to be partially inflated because of a lack of standard diagnosis criteria and unreliable statistics. A factor we had pointed to in our very first piece.
+The WaPo piece today muses about several “possible” causes for the local increase in cases in northeastern Brazil that indeed happened. It quotes some of the very “experts”, like from the pharmaceutical industry influenced CDC, that were wrong on the issue since the very first panic headline. It strenuously avoids to even mention the most likely cause – the excessive local use of an insecticide that is supposed to cause birth defects – in developing mosquitoes. Thus the reporting is still void of journalistic ethics and irresponsible in its conclusions.
+It did not take much effort to get this right. An hour or two of skimming through publicly available sources of good standing, some basic higher education and sound reasoning was enough. But instead of doing such basic inquiries “journalists” and media “served” panic and speculations by biased “experts”. Keep this story in mind for the next sensationalist onslaught of panic headline. There surely will be some “interests” behind those; just don’t expect unbiased facts and basic logic reasoning.
+Source: Moon of Alabama 
+Via: Global Research 
+Yet, Millions of GMO Mosquitoes set to be released in Brazil & Columbia… Scientists are planning to release an army of millions of modified mosquitoes in areas of Brazil and Colombia.
+They say the unusual approach is an attempt to provide “revolutionary protection” against mosquito-borne diseases such as Zika and chikungunya.
+The mosquitoes are infected with a bug called Wolbachia which reduces their ability to spread viruses to people.
+The $18m dollar project is funded by an international team of donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation… 
+Source: BBC 
+Related: 6 Weird Things About Zika That Don’t Add Up — Must Watch! Depopulation: Zika Virus Funded By Bill Gates Zika Virus For Sale Online Courtesy of the Rockefeller Foundation FDA Approves Genetically Modified Mosquitoes to Combat Zika in Florida Zika Mosquitoes Same As GM Mosquitoes Released Off The Coast Of Florida Feds Going Door-To-Door In Florida Asking For Urine Samples Amid Zika Outbreak Is the Zika virus an offshoot of a secret U.S. Army ‘entomological warfare’ program? Zika ‘scarier than thought’: Top US officials push govt for $1.9bn emergency funding Zika Virus – The Latest Actor in the Fake Pandemic Play? Zika: Who Launched The Fake-Epidemic Story In Brazil? Zika Fear Falters as False Flag Fraud Fizzles GM Mosquitoes With Possible Link To Zika Virus Awaiting Release In Florida Zika Virus Outbreak May Be Result of Bioweapon – Ex-Russian Surgeon General Zika Freakout: The Hoax And The Covert Op Continue Eugenics WMD: Zika Virus Prompts Disturbing New Call For ‘No Child Policy’ ",FAKE
+6349,"Russia Extends Aleppo Ceasefire Through Friday, Urges Rebels to Leave","Rebels: Leaving Aleppo 'Completely Out of the Question' by Jason Ditz, November 02, 2016 Share This 
+Some two weeks after initially announcing what was going to be an eight hour ceasefire in Aleppo, Russia has continued to hold their fire, and today announced an extension of the operation through Friday , calling on the rebels to take the opportunity to withdraw from the city. 
+While on the one hand this marks an extension of the ceasefire, the Friday deadline may amount to Russia’s government announcing an upcoming end to the pause. This comes a day after Russian officials warned the rebel offensives around Aleppo were jeopardizing the ceasefire, and a few days after Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected a call from the Defense Ministry to resume strikes. 
+The rebels fighting in Aleppo have rejected Russia’s call to withdraw from the city by Friday evening as “ completely out of the question ,” insisting they intend to remain in the city to prevent allowing it to fall into the hands of the Russian military. 
+Of course, Russia’s involvement has only been airstrikes in Aleppo, with the fighting on the ground all between the Nusra Front-led rebels and the Syrian military. The military has been seen to have a major advantage recently, though a rebel offensive over the weekend may have turned the tables, and is likely to reason why there is growing pressure from Russia’s Defense Ministry to resume the airstrikes. 
+Russia has promised two corridors through which rebels can leave the city, and said they will allow them to take their weapons with them. The offer is similar to deals wherein rebel factions withdrew from small suburbs around Damascus, but of course on a much grander scale. That the rebels have already rejected it, however, suggests they believe they are not defeated yet. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+7034,Boycott targets Trump family on retail front,"Boycott targets Trump family on retail front Participants shun GOP nominee's products, retailers who carry them Published: 1 hour ago 
+(CBC) An eye-catching shoe piques your interest and draws you in. Upon closer inspection, the label leaps out at you — Ivanka Trump, in simple gold lettering — and you recoil as if stung. 
+That’s the kind of reaction behind a growing boycott of the products emblazoned with the brand of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as well as the popular, working women-targeted fashion line from his eldest daughter — who has arguably been his most influential and effective family member during the current election campaign.",FAKE
+3528,Clinton says U.S. is ‘not winning’ the war against the Islamic State,"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Sunday that the United States is ""not winning"" the battle against the Islamic State and called on Congress to update the use-of-force authorization passed after Sept. 11, 2001, to give President Obama more options to fight the militant group. But she stopped short of calling for a declaration of war.
+
+Clinton said she expects to hear Obama discuss an ""intensification"" of efforts to fight terrorism when he delivers a prime-time address from the Oval Office on Sunday night. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement that the president will detail ""the steps our government is taking to fulfill his highest priority: keeping the American people safe.""
+
+Clinton seemed to think that message might not go far enough. ""I think ...that's what we'll hear from the president, an intensification of the existing strategy,"" she said, in response to a question from George Stephanopoulos on ABC's ""This Week."" ""And I think there's some additional steps we have to take.""
+
+Republican presidential candidates who appeared on the Sunday talk shows, such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), repeated their attack that the president has no strategy to defeat the group, and called on him to commit to some type of military ground strategy in addition to airstrikes.
+
+""We're not winning, but it's too soon to say that we are doing everything we need to do,"" Clinton said. ""And I've outlined very clearly we have to fight them in the air, we have to fight them on ground, and we have to fight on the Internet. And we have to do everything we can with our friends and partners around the world to protect ourselves.""
+
+""I think ...that's what we'll hear from the president, an intensification of the existing strategy, and I think there's some additional steps we have to take.""
+
+Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, who appeared later in the show, said Clinton was playing word games. ""They are at war with us and we should have a strategy not just to restrain but to destroy them,"" Bush said. ""We have to get the lawyers off the war-fighters' backs.""
+
+Bush joined Rubio and Kasich Sunday in saying that the Senate was right to reject gun-control legislation offered by Democrats in the wake of the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting.
+
+But Clinton, in arguing for additional gun control, linked the San Bernardino attacks with shootings within recent weeks that were no related to international terrorism.
+
+""What happened in San Bernardino was a terrorist act. Nobody is arguing with that. The law enforcement, FBI have come to that conclusion. And let's not forget, though, a week before we had an American assault on Planned Parenthood and some weeks before that we had an assault at a community college,"" Clinton said.
+
+""So I don't see these two as in any way contradictory,"" she added. ""We have to up our game against terrorists abroad and at home, and we have to take account of the fact that our gun laws and the easy access to those guns by people who shouldn't get them, mentally ill people, fugitives, felons and the Congress continuing to refuse to prohibit people on the no-fly list from getting guns, which include a lot of domestic and international terrorists, these are two parts of the same approach that I'm taking to make us safe.""
+
+Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who also is running for the Democratic nomination, agreed with Clinton about banning people on no-fly and watch lists from buying guns. The two have sparred over his commitment to gun control because Sanders voted a decade ago for a comprehensive gun bill that included amnesty from lawsuits for  gun manufacturers.
+
+Sanders, on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday cautioned that gun control was not the solution to stopping terrorism. “I don't think anybody believes it's a magic formula,” he said, later adding, “I don't think it's very hard to understand that terrorists or potential terrorists should not have guns. People who are being barred from flying on airplanes should not have guns.”
+
+Referring to Obama’s upcoming address on terrorism, Dickerson asked Sanders what he would say to the public if he were president. “What I would say is that we have got to be as aggressive as we can in destroying ISIS, but we have to learn the lessons of the past,” Sanders said. ""And that means we cannot do it alone. It must be an international coalition, in which the Muslim nations are the troops on the ground.""
+
+Republican candidates argued that prohibiting people on watch lists from purchasing guns was ineffective because the lists are inaccurate. Rubio and Bush noted that the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy's name appeared on a no-fly list. Instead, they say, Obama needs to come up with a plan to defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq to reduce the chances of more attacks on U.S. soil.
+
+Rubio, during an interview on CNN's ""State of the Union,"" said the no-fly list ""is not a perfect database"" and ""shouldn't be used as a tool to impede 700,000 Americans or potential Americans -- people on that list from having access to be able to fully utilize their Second Amendment rights.""
+
+""The first impulse of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is to have gun control,"" Bush said. ""Let's have a strategy to take out ISIS there so we don't have to deal with them here."" ISIS is an alternative acronym for the Islamic State.
+
+Clinton again rejected the use of the term ""radical Islam"" arguing ""that sounds like we are declaring war against a religion ... I don't want to do that because, number one, it doesn't do justice to the vast numbers of Muslims in our own country and around the world who are peaceful people."" She said the term also ""helps to create this clash of civilizations that is actually a recruiting tool for ISIS and other radical jihadists who use this as a way of saying we're in a war against the West. You must join us. If you are a Muslim, you must join us.""
+
+Donald Trump immediately attacked Clinton, saying on Twitter that she was ""afraid"" to use that language.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also criticized Democrats for avoiding the term. ""This is the problem with the president and with Secretary Clinton, who provide leadership by euphemism. They won't say radical Islamic jihadists,"" Christie said on CBS's ""Face the Nation.""
+
+""Now, when you say radical Islamic jihadists, they understand, the rest of the Muslim community understands, the folks who are peaceful, and who attend mosques in a peaceful way, work in our country, raise their families, pay their taxes, they know they're not radical Islamic jihadists,"" he said. ""That's why we need to use the words, because it differentiates them from the peaceful, law-abiding American Muslims who play by the rules and raise their families and don't want to see this kind of conduct going on.""",REAL
+2972,"Patriot Act debate highlights ‘stark’ differences between 2001, 2015 views","It was the fall of 2001 and John Cornyn was getting ready to run for the U.S. Senate when terrorists sent a jolt through the world and changed the politics of national security forever.
+
+“I remember when my wife pointed . . . to the TV, when the second plane hit the tower,” the Texas Republican, now the Senate’s majority whip, recalled Tuesday afternoon.
+
+Congress swept into action, approving a war resolution against terrorists and, six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act was introduced. It passed the House by an overwhelming margin the next day. It cleared the Senate the day after that with just one dissenting vote.
+
+Almost 14 years later, the national security debate is completely different in both parties. This week, a leading Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), briefly short-circuited the nation’s surveillance laws, and then an overwhelming majority of senators, including Cornyn, voted Tuesday for a measure that would rein in portions of the once overwhelmingly popular Patriot Act.
+
+“I think it’s pretty stark,” Cornyn said before the final roll call, comparing 2001 to 2015.
+
+[Congress turns away from post-9/11 law, retooling U.S. surveillance powers]
+
+A large bloc of Republicans, whose ranks include Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), cling to the post-9/11 ethos that surrendering a little bit of personal privacy is worth it, if it gives authorities a chance to catch terrorists and avert another 9/11-type disaster.
+
+Thirty of the 53 GOP senators who voted opposed the new, less sweeping surveillance legislation — all but Paul on grounds that it was too weak. But that group now realizes that it no longer controls the debate as it used to.
+
+“That sense of urgency has clearly died off in the intervening years,” McCain said after the vote.
+
+Yet majority sentiment still remains far from Paul’s civil libertarian vision of completely turning off the intricate system of pulling together metadata of phone, texting and e-mail and sifting through to find any terrorist connections.
+
+Instead, a bipartisan majority in Congress is now clearly on record supporting an aggressive spying culture, just one that is a little more restrictive than the intelligence agencies would like, and one with more judicial oversight.
+
+After all, McConnell and Paul both lost on Tuesday. They voted against the USA Freedom Act, one because he thought it was too weak and the other because he thought it preserved a culture of intrusive, Big Brother government.
+
+Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), a lead sponsor of the new measure, said the smartest thing he ever did was to find a like-minded conservative partner 14 years ago, Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.), who was the House majority leader at the time, willing to ensure that the Patriot Act included a time-limit mechanism that would force a review of the policies.
+
+“We wouldn’t have the debate if Armey and I hadn’t been able to form the coalition and put the sunsets in,” Leahy said Tuesday.
+
+That set up the first big review of the Patriot Act for the summer of 2005, but even then many of the actions being taken were still classified and reports about warrantless wiretapping by security agencies would not begin to emerge until late 2005 and early 2006. As a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) remembered that he was barely allowed to speak about the amendments that he was offering in order to modify the very classified portions of the law.
+
+“I couldn’t even explain publicly what it was all about. I had to say in the most general terms of principles what we were doing,” Durbin said Tuesday.
+
+By the spring of 2008, many details about the wiretapping program had broken into public view, and Congress held a full debate about how to update the 1978 law that governed those actions, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which established a special federal court to consider warrants for monitoring individuals overseas.
+
+Intended as a curb against domestic spying — its original co-sponsor was Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) in 1977 — critics considered it outdated more than 30 years later.
+
+The drumbeat against the military and covert intelligence services complex seemed to hit a crescendo among Democrats that spring of 2008. Then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) used his opposition to the Iraq war as a wedge against then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had become the most liberal House speaker in history.
+
+Still, even then, after much debate with the Bush White House, Obama and Pelosi threw their support behind only slight modifications to FISA, which protected the telecommunications companies from the threat of lawsuits for turning over data to spy agencies.
+
+That bill passed by very similar margins to this year’s legislation: 293 votes in the House in 2008 and 338 last month; 69 votes in the Senate in 2008 and 67 on Tuesday.
+
+Just as McConnell found himself the odd man out this week, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader in 2008, was on the sidelines then, protesting from the left against the rewrite of the FISA bill. Reid voted against the bill, which the other leading Democrats of the day endorsed.
+
+That 2008 debate may have been the beginning of the bipartisan coalition that triumphed on Tuesday, but first it had to withstand the early wave of anti-government tea party activism.
+
+The biggest threat to enhanced powers for the intelligence community came in a series of wave elections: huge Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, based on deep antiwar sentiments, and sizable Republican gains in 2010, fueled by belief that the federal government needed to be reined in.
+
+That sequence of events created a large bloc of libertarian-minded Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and in early 2011, just weeks into his tenure running the House, Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and his leadership team got its first lesson that today’s Republicans aren’t reflexively hawks.
+
+Some Patriot Act provisions were expiring, but Boehner’s team considered them so noncontroversial that their renewal was put on the fast-track calender: no debate, no amendments, and more than two-thirds majority required for approval, in much the same way post offices are named.
+
+Instead, the bill did not win the needed supermajority, and the embarrassed Boehner leadership team had to pass it under normal rules days later.
+
+In the past two years, however, the emergence of two crucial players have collided to alter the debate: Edward Snowden and the Islamic State. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, revealed to The Washington Post and Britain’s the Guardian newspaper in 2013 just how vast the NSA’s collection of bulk data was, sweeping up millions of connections among Americans with no ties to terrorists.
+
+The revelations drew deep outrage from the public, but then in late 2014, Islamic State forces began their advance in Syria and Iraq, punctuated by a series of beheadings of hostages that included U.S. citizens. The public was much more focused on national security issues again, and the unease was only heightened by terrorist attacks in Europe by radical extremists. That push and pull set the dynamic for the debate the past month.
+
+“Snowden’s argument is that government has gone too far, the ISIS argument is how far does government need to go to protect us,” Durbin said. “That is the tension.”
+
+For now, that tension has created what many consider a bipartisan middle ground, but plenty of lawmakers worry that the ground could shift again.
+
+“Security really is on people’s minds these days,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who faces reelection in 2016 and opposed Tuesday’s vote, “and it will be for a long time because I don’t think the threat’s going to go away.”",REAL
+4085,Merkel brings shuttle diplomacy to White House,"Washington (CNN) Angela Merkel, the German chancellor desperately working to reach a diplomatic accord ending unrest in eastern Ukraine, continued her efforts at the White House Monday, urging President Barack Obama to forestall sending lethal aid to Kiev.
+
+Her efforts appeared effective; at a midday press conference, Obama said he hadn't yet decided whether or not to send arms and equipment to besieged Ukrainian troops in the eastern part of the country.
+
+But both leaders hinted there could be disagreements to come on how to best end the unrest that has waged for months and so far claimed 5,000 lives. Obama left open the possibility of equipping Ukrainians with American weapons if Merkel's latest attempt at brokering a diplomatic end to the violence fails.
+
+""There may be some areas where there tactical disagreements,"" Obama said. ""There may not be. But the broad principle that we have to stand up for, not just Ukraine, but the principle of territorial integrity and sovereignty is one where we are completely unified.""
+
+Merkel used similar language, saying through a translator the alliance between the United States and Europe will continue to stand, will continue to be solid, even though on certain issues we may not always agree.""
+
+It was the latest bid in Merkel's shuttle diplomacy, which has taken the East Germany-born chancellor from Kiev to Moscow to the White House in just a matter of days. She's headed to Belarus for more talks on Ukraine on Wednesday.
+
+Obama and Merkel hoped to display a united front against Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose government has backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Tough economic sanctions levied both by the United States and Europe have severely degraded Russia's economy, but until now haven't stopped Putin from his territorial campaign.
+
+The united front was intact on Monday as Obama and Merkel underscored their alignment on sanctions and preference toward achieving peace through diplomacy.
+
+""I am absolutely confident that we will do this together,"" Merkel said of the diplomatic efforts. ""I myself actually would not be able to live with not having made this attempt.""
+
+The show of unity could be weakened if Obama decides to follow the advice of a bipartisan group of lawmakers and former administration officials pushing for greater lethal aid to Kiev. Under pressure from American lawmakers and former administration officials, the White House has said it's reconsidering whether or not to send arms to Ukrainian troops.
+
+""It's not based on the idea that Ukraine could defeat a Russian army that was determined,"" Obama said of his administration's deliberations. ""It is rather to see whether or not there are additional things we can do to help Ukraine bolster its defenses in the face of separatist aggression.""
+
+He failed to give a timeline for his deliberations on lethal aid to Ukraine, nor did he cite any specific move by Russia that would prompt him to decide either way.
+
+Obama has been reluctant to send lethal aid overseas in the multiple world crises he's faced, citing the potential for the arms to wind up in the hands of enemies. In Ukraine, administration officials say they're worried that shipments of U.S. weapons could elevate the unrest there into a proxy war with Russia. And they're unsure of the Ukrainians' ability to effectively use American-supplied arms.
+
+Republicans and Democrats have pressed the topic both in the United States and overseas. Sen. John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a security conference in Munich this weekend that Ukrainian troops were woefully underprepared for battle.
+
+""The Ukrainians are being slaughtered and we're sending them blankets and meals. Blankets don't do well against Russian tanks,"" McCain said, echoing the plea Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko made to Congress in September.
+
+Others who are closer to Obama, including the president's former Under Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy and his current nominee to become defense secretary Ashton Carter, have also said they believe the U.S. should supply Kiev with lethal aid.
+
+Merkel has staunchly opposed that tack, arguing more military aid could escalate the crisis further.
+
+""The progress that Ukraine needs cannot be achieved with more weapons,"" she said over the weekend. ""I have grave doubts about the validity of this point.""
+
+Merkel has positioned herself as the diplomatic envoy between the West and Russia, traveling to Moscow last week for closed-door meetings with Putin and French President Francois Hollande. The summit, however, concluded without a clear path toward ending the escalating violence in Eastern Ukraine.
+
+A weekend telephone call between Merkel, Putin, Hollande and Poroshenko ended with the leaders agreeing to meet in Belarus on Wednesday, though firm details of the session weren't finalized.
+
+The European leaders -- recognizing their country's stronger economic ties to Russia -- have been eager to broker a ceasefire diplomatically, a goal that so far has remained elusive.
+
+Obama, who released a National Security Strategy last week with a heavy emphasis on diplomacy, has held similar views, saying the crisis in Ukraine won't end militarily.
+
+But so far diplomacy has produced few results. A September agreement calling for drawback of heavy arms and a buffer zone disintegrated shortly after it was signed. Subsequent calls to adhere to the plan were ignored.",REAL
+2741,"Fox News is self-destructing: Islamophobia, Obama’s Reagan moment and Roger Ailes’s new humiliation","Convinced that last year’s midterm losses for Democrats signaled the effective end of Barack Obama’s presidency and a resounding victory for all things conservative and Republican (“On Fox News, there were smiles all around“), just three weeks into the new year Fox News is left wondering what happened to the “lamest” of the lame duck presidents. The one Fox News was going to mock for two more years while trying to tarnish his legacy.
+
+Rebounding to approval ratings not seen since 2013, instead of floundering, Obama is riding a crest of post-midterm successes, while Americans reward him for the country’s rebounding economy. The result: Obama’s the one quietly circling the victory track.
+
+“You can hardly tell from our NBC/WSJ poll that the Republican Party was the big winner from the midterm elections just two months ago,” noted NBC’s Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann this week. “Somehow, Obama and the Democrats stole the Republicans’ post-election honeymoon.”
+
+If that didn’t sting badly enough, Fox continues to wrestle with the unfolding crisis over the network’s demonstrably false and stunning claim that some parts of Europe, including in France as well as Britain’s second largest city, Birmingham, have become Islamic and are “no-go zones” for non-Muslims, including for British law enforcement.
+
+The misstep became an international punchline, with observers in Europe guffawing at Fox News’ trademark ignorance. “When I heard this, frankly, I choked on my porridge and I thought it must be April Fool’s Day,” British Prime Minister David Cameron told ITV News. “This guy is clearly a complete idiot,” he said, referring to Steve Emerson, who Fox had hosted to discuss recent terror attacks in Paris.
+
+In a rare move, Fox apologized repeatedly for its colossal “no-go zone” blunder. Yet the story continues to haunt the network: Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo announced on Tuesday that the city might sue Fox News over the bogus claim that portions of Paris remain cordoned off from non-Muslims. “The image of Paris has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced,” Hidalgo told CNN.
+
+Bottom line: It’s not even February and Fox News is already having a really bad year.
+
+Can you imagine the audible gasps in the Fox News green room when dispatches like this from the Washington Post were read this week:
+
+Fox News has been relentlessly pounding Obama every day and every hour since the midterm defeats, and has been piling on all this year. Yet Obama’s approval rating just soared nine points in one month?
+
+And talk about insult to injury for Fox. “Obama’s approval ratings at this point in his presidency are similar to those of Ronald Reagan’s as he began his final two years in office,” according to the Post.
+
+Obama and the Gipper in the same sentence!
+
+Like the Grinch cupping his hand to his ear to listen in on Whoville on Christmas morning, only to be flummoxed that the Whos are still celebrating without any gifts, Fox News talkers must be looking at these surging polling numbers and thinking, how did Obama do that?
+
+Simple answer: It’s the economy, stupid. “More Americans are satisfied with the economy than at any point in the past 10 years,” according to NBC.",REAL
+6263,DNC To Sue Trump For Telling Truth: Trump Admits Everything Is A Lie,"The DNC is suing the Republican National Committee due to Donald Trump’s claims that Hillary Clinton is committing election fraud. 
+Via YourNewsWire 
+
+The suit was filed in a U.S. District Court in New Jersey and aims to silence Trump’s claim that the election is rigged, which the DNC are particularly sensitive about. The DNC alleges that the RNC has not done enough to reprimand Trump for claiming that the election is rigged, and seeks to have the court hold the committee in civil contempt as well as levy sanctions.
+The DNC claims that because the RNC has done “ballot security” work, they are agreeing with Trump that the election is rigged. Marc Elias, Hillary Clinton’s campaign counsel, claims that there is also a racial element to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
+“Trump has falsely and repeatedly told his supporters that the November 8 election will be ‘rigged’ based upon fabricated claims of voter fraud in ‘certain areas’ or ‘certain sections’ of key states,” the Democratic attorneys, including Hillary Clinton campaign counsel Marc Elias, wrote.
+“Unsurprisingly, those ‘certain areas’ are exclusively communities in which large minority voting populations reside.” Election Day is in 13 days.
+",FAKE
+2026,Hillary Clinton To Decide On 2016 Run 'Sometime Next Year',"The nation may not have to wait much longer to learn the future plans of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state who's considered the leading Democrat for the 2016 presidential race.
+
+In a Wednesday interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, who named the former first lady the ""Most Fascinating Person of 2013,"" Clinton said she hadn't yet made up her mind on a presidential run. She assured Walters her announcement would come soon.
+
+""Obviously, I will look carefully at what I think I can do and make that decision sometime next year,"" Clinton said.
+
+Pundits have discussed a Clinton run since she lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in 2008. Pollsters have weighed her chances of winning the 2016 nomination and dedicated supporters have laid the foundation for her campaign in a quickly growing super PAC called ""Ready for Hillary."" But Clinton told Walters an official announcement was premature.
+
+""It's such a difficult decision, and it's one that I'm not going to rush into ... and I don't think we should be looking at the next election,"" Clinton said. ""I think we should be looking at the work that we have today. Our unemployment rate is too high. We have people getting kicked off food stamps who are in terrible economic straits. Small business is not getting credit, I could go on and on, so I think we ought to pay attention to what's happening right now.""
+
+Clinton told Walters that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, has said he wants her ""to do what I think is right,"" prompting Walters to ask what America would call him if she were to win.
+
+CORRECTION: This article originally said Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Obama in 2012. She lost in 2008.",REAL
+9312,Ukraine just officially declared itself an illegitimate state up for grabs,"October 27, 2016 -  By Eduard Popov for Fort Russ - translated by J. Arnoldski - 
+
+
+Last week, an event occurred capable of revolutionizing not only Ukraine, but all of Eastern and part of Central Europe. On October 20th, the Ukrainian parliament adopted the Declaration of Memory and Solidarity of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland and Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. This document condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and modern Russian policy and remarked that “the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact concluded by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany led to the Second World War.” 
+Let’s set aside pseudo-scholarly interpretations of what is officially called the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact but is more famously known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This agreement was preceded by Western countries’ (England and France’s) unprecedented concessions to German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. These included the betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the Munich Agreement (which British Prime Minister Chamberlain praised as “peace for our time”) followed by the invasion of the country in late September 1938 by the troops of Hitler’s Germany, Poland, and Hungary. Stalin’s USSR (of which I am no supporter) consistently sought to create a common European system of defense against Hitler’s Germany in contrast to the USSR of Lenin and Trotsky which in the early 1920’s sought to bring revolutionary war to Europe. But England, the chief architect of interwar Europe, deliberately pushed Hitler to the East for the Third Reich and Soviet Union to collide.  
+As early as 1934, the foreign policy leaders of the Second Polish Republic had concluded a nonaggression pact with Germany 5 years before the analogous agreement concluded by the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, but refused to sign a nonaggression pact with the USSR. Poland paid for its anti-Soviet (in fact anti-Russian) policies and complicity in the occupation of Czechoslovakia with the loss of its independence and enormous human losses. England paid for such with a one-on-one war with Hitler’s Germany that lasted a whole year, during which only the insular island position of the English saved them from German occupation. Soviet Russia paid for this with the bloodiest war in its history, from which it emerged as the victor and liberator of all of Europe. The leaders of today’s Europe are not inclined to gratitude towards Russia for its historic mission and the millions of Russians who laid down their lives on the altar of European freedom. 
+Ukraine, a state which can count only a quarter century of existence, has no historical tradition, historical memory, nor strategic thinking. Thus, its current establishment is incapable of even thinking about the immediate consequences of its resolution on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. And these consequences will be very bitter for Ukraine. 
+Today’s Poland is already talking about restitution, i.e., the return of Poles’ property in the Kresy, i.e., the eastern lands which belonged to Poland before the Second World War and amount to 5 regions of modern Ukraine (Galicia and Volyn) and Western Belarus and Lithuania. By condemning the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Ukraine is automatically condemning its sovereignty over 5 western regions therin recognized as illegally seized from Poland.  
+Not so long ago, Verkhovna Rada Speaker Parubiy called for a visa regime to be introduced with Russia, thereby depriving 5 million Ukrainian “guest workers” of bread and solid earnings. The consequences of the Rada’s resolution on October 20th go even further by questioning the territorial borders of contemporary Ukraine, of which President Putin once said half belong to Russia and half to Eastern Europe. 
+The condemnation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact done to curry favor with the Poles is not Ukraine shooting itself in the foot, but shooting itself in the head to spite its Russian neighbor.  
+Poles will undoubtedly take advantage of Ukrainians’ fantastic foolishness and will one day demand that their lands be returned, in particular Lvov, their “Cemetery of Eaglets” that is so sacred to Poles’ historical memory. They will also demand their territorial share of Czech Republic, the lands of Transcarpathian Rus that they lost in 1945 and are now Ukraine’s, Romanian Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina which were annexed in 1940 and transferred to Soviet Ukraine, and Hungary’s part of Transcarpathia, now also part of Ukraine. All of these lands were acquired by Ukraine thanks to Stalin’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, who has now been condemned by the Verkhovna Rada as the initiator of the Second World War.  
+Ukraine’s state actors, being so devoid of any historical and state experience and tradition, do not bother to look so “far” (beyond their own noses) into the future. The issue of territorial claims being raised against Ukraine by its current allies in the West is only a matter of time. As long as the West needs Ukraine as a springboard for war against Russia, Ukraine’s sovereignty over its western territories criminally acquired thanks to Stalin and Molotov will not be challenged. But as soon as the situation changes, the West will suddenly “remember” the territory of Soviet Ukraine, which today’s successor state of Ukraine has called “the totalitarian USSR”, and demand that its historical debts be paid off. 
+
+This will concern not only Ukrainians, but also Belarusians, Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Romanians, and Russians. The Ukrainians have launched a domino effect whose consequences will be felt across all of Europe.  
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
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+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+6526,Vegan Custard Stuffed Pumpkin Recipe,"in: General Health , Organic Market Classifieds , Organics This vegan custard recipe was inspired by the Cambodian recipe for sangkya , also known as songkya . Traditional sangkya is an eggy custard with a strong coconut flavor. Most recipes call for quite a bit of sugar, so this recipe is a loosely adapted interpretation of the original. It’s much healthier, completely vegan, and is a great alternative to flour-based holiday treats. This seasonal dessert does need to chill for several hours before serving, so plan ahead. The coconut yogurt and soaked cashew base are held together with coconut, garbanzo, and chia seed flour. The sweetness of the maple syrup is balanced with lemon zest and juice. You can adjust the amount of lemon, or add more coconut flakes if you want a less tart or more coconutty flavor. Kabocha, or Japanese pumpkin, is the best choice for this recipe. Similar to butternut squash, the kabocha has fewer calories and many people say it tastes better. It’s a great source of beta-carotene, iron, vitamin C , and fiber. You can substitute pie pumpkins if you have trouble finding kabocha. When selecting your kabocha squash, choose a squat, wide shape over a taller, round one. This will give the top of the custard a better chance to brown while baking. You can also skip the pumpkin entirely if you’re just looking for a vegan baked custard recipe. If you choose this route, make sure to bake the custard for only twenty minutes. One item to note… This recipe makes enough custard to fill a pumpkin with a 25 in. (63 cm) circumference. If you’re using a smaller pumpkin, you may want to halve this recipe. I recommend keeping a small (5”) springform pan ready for any leftover custard. Just bake it along with your pumpkin for twenty minutes and allow to cool. How Did Pumpkins Get to Japan? If you thought pumpkin and squash came from the Americas, you are absolutely correct. Portuguese traders and explorers originally brought squash and pumpkins from Brazil to Japan in the 16th century [ 1 ] while the Portuguese Empire was expanding into South Asia. The kabocha squash is simply a variety of Cucurbita maxima —the same species that produces the gigantic pumpkins that win ribbons at state fairs. I don’t recommend you try to make this recipe with one of those monsters, though. It could feed an army, but the cooking time would take days! Their smaller Japanese cousins, however, do quite nicely. In Japan, the squash is called Kuri Kabocha , or “nutty pumpkin”. [ 2 ] If you’ve ever tasted kabocha you’ll understand the “nutty” moniker. The texture is fluffy and reminiscent of chestnuts, but the flavor is sweet, like a butternut squash crossed with a sweet potato. Kabocha squash have dark, forest-green skin, a slightly squished or flattened shape, and brilliant orange flesh. [ 3 ] You can actually leave your kabocha out as a decoration if you’re going to use them within a few days. Otherwise, store them in a dark, cool area for up to a month. [ 4 ] Vegan Custard Stuffed Pumpkin Recipe Pre-prep: soak the cashews in lukewarm water for 2-4 hours Prep time: 20 minutes to hollow the pumpkin and prepare the filling Bake time: 45 minutes at 400°F (250° C) Chill time: 3-4 hours or overnight Servings: 10 Sharp spoon to hollow out pumpkin Citrus reamer (optional) Food processor or powerful blender Silicone baking mat or parchment paper Baking sheet 1 medium organic kabocha squash (about 25” in circumference) 2 cups raw cashews, soaked and strained 2 cups organic vanilla coconut vegan yogurt (try our vegan yogurt recipe , just add 1 tbsp maple syrup and 1 tsp vanilla) 2 tbsp organic coconut flour 1 tbsp organic chia seed flour 1 tbsp organic garbanzo bean flour ⅔ cup organic maple syrup Zest and juice of 2 large organic lemons (about 5 tbsp) 3 tsp pure, organic vanilla extract ½ cup organic coconut flakes, plus extra (optional) 1 tsp Himalayan crystal salt Instructions Start by preparing the custard. Drain excess water from the soaked cashews. Add cashews, yogurt, coconut flour, chia seed flour, garbanzo bean flour, vanilla extract, and Himalayan crystal salt to the food processor and pulse until smooth, about 2 minutes. Add half the maple syrup and lemon juice and pulse for 15 seconds to combine. Taste custard to determine how much of the remaining maple syrup, lemon juice, and coconut flakes to add. Continue pulsing to mix ingredients. Once the taste suits your preference, allow the custard to remain in the food processor while you carve the squash. Preheat oven to 400°F. Use a serrated knife to cut the crown off the squash. Start a cut a couple inches from the woody stem of the squash. Continue to cut in a circle around the stem. Pull the crown off the squash and set aside. With a sharp spoon, thoroughly remove the seeds and sinew from the inside the pumpkin and discard. Using a spatula, slowly pour the custard into the pumpkin. Do not overfill. Leave enough room to replace the crown. The custard will rise slightly as it cooks and it will need this space to expand. You can either discard the crown or bake it alongside the custard. Add any remaining custard to the springform pan and smooth flat with a spatula. Line a cookie sheet with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper. Place the filled squash, crown, and springform pan on the cookie sheet and place in the oven. If baking the crown, set it next to the squash for baking. Do not put it back on top yet. After twenty minutes, remove the springform pan and place on the counter to cool. You can eat this mini custard while you’re waiting for the main attraction to chill in the fridge. After the squash has been cooking for 40 minutes, check its status. Using the tip of a small knife or fork, poke a small hole in the squash. If it easily cuts into the flesh, congrats! It’s done! If the squash isn’t soft enough, bake at 400°F for another 15 minutes. Let the squash cool on the counter for about ten minutes, then transfer to a plate or large glass bowl to chill in the fridge. If you baked the crown you can put it back on the squash. Chill the custard for at least 3 hours before serving. Use a sharp serrated knife to cut thin slices. Enjoy! The Difference Between Squash and Pumpkin Because their genetic history is intertwined, squash , pumpkin , and gourd are often used interchangeably. [ 5 ] As a general rule, you carve pumpkins, cook squash, and decorate with gourds. [ 6 ] If you let that sink in, you might wonder how it is that we have so many pumpkin-imbued treats every fall. Well, the truth is, our traditional “pumpkin” pies and other tasty dishes are actually made with squash. [ 7 ] Pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin lattes, pumpkin cookies, even canned pumpkin actually contain squash. Don’t despair, it’s just a quirk of taxonomy. Autumnal pumpkin delicacies are usually made using winter squash that resembles carving pumpkins, they’re just not officially classified as pumpkins. Proper pumpkins aren’t eaten because they’re watery, stringy, and don’t taste that good. Winter squash is smaller, softer, and sweeter than its pumpkin cousin. If you feel lost and confused, don’t worry—even the FDA has trouble deciding whether or not you’re eating a pumpkin or a squash. [ 8 ] What pumpkin (or squash) treat do you look forward to every autumn? Leave a comment and let us know! References Center, UMass. Kabocha. 2016. Web. 17 Oct. 2016.",FAKE
+6571,Hillary emails 'whitelisted' for Obama's BlackBerry,"Hillary emails 'whitelisted' for Obama's BlackBerry President could only receive messages from pre-approved accounts Published: 1 min ago 
+(Fox News) President Obama’s high-security BlackBerry used a special process known as “whitelisting” that only allowed it to take calls and messages from pre-approved contacts, two former senior intelligence officials with knowledge of the set-up told Fox News – pointing to the detail as further proof the White House knew Hillary Clinton’s private account was used for government business. 
+As the administration now acknowledges, Obama and Clinton emailed each other while she was helming the State Department. If received on his BlackBerry, the “whitelisting” safeguard means Clinton and other contacts would have had to be approved as secure for data transmission – covering everything from emails to texts to phone calls. The Obama BlackBerry would have also been configured to accept the communications. 
+“Think of whitelisting like a bouncer in the VIP line at the party. If you are on the list you get in, if you are not, you get bounced to the pavement,” said Bob Gourley, former chief technology officer (CTO) for the DIA, and now a partner with strategic consulting and engineering firm Cognitio.",FAKE
+4018,"Kerry marks opening of US Embassy in Havana, critics rip 'diplomacy for show'","Secretary of State John Kerry marked the historic re-opening of the U.S. Embassy in Havana on Friday after a half-century-long freeze, amid lingering tensions between the two countries and deep concern among anti-Castro lawmakers in Washington.
+
+""There will be hiccups along the way, but it's a start,"" Kerry acknowledged, speaking briefly to reporters before a ceremony where the U.S. flag was hoisted above the embassy for the first time in 54 years.
+
+Kerry's Cuba visit was the first by a U.S. secretary of state since 1945. In an address outside the embassy, fragments of which were delivered in Spanish, Kerry called for ""pushing aside old barriers and exploring new possibilities.""
+
+""Having normal relations makes it easier to talk -- and talk can deepen understanding even when we know full well we will not see eye-to-eye on everything,"" Kerry said.
+
+Cuban-American lawmakers in Washington fumed over Friday's ceremony. As Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., blasted the administration's deals with Iran and Cuba in a New York speech, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., issued a scathing statement citing the continuing human rights problems on the island.
+
+""This is a one-sided deal that is a win for the Cuban regime and a loss for the Cuban people,"" Menendez said. ""The U.S. Embassy in Havana will be a hollow one. ... It will be diplomacy for show, not in practice. The United States' flag should only fly in Cuba when the island is free, when dissent is embraced, and when democracy is restored.""
+
+In a reminder of the rocky road ahead, Fidel Castro said in a newspaper column on the eve of the ceremony that the U.S. owes the island ""numerous millions of dollars"" for damages caused by the embargo. Americans, too, also want to resolve billions of dollars in half-century-old claims over property confiscated after the Cuban revolution.
+
+In his speech in New York City on Friday, Rubio slammed the Obama administration's outreach to Iran and Cuba. Deals with both countries, the Republican presidential candidate said, ""represent the convergence of nearly every flawed strategic, moral, and economic notion that has driven President Obama's foreign policy.""
+
+But in Havana, Kerry vowed that ""citizens of both [countries] will benefit"" from normalized relations.
+
+He said Cubans and Americans are ""no longer enemies or rivals, but neighbors,"" while also saying the Cuban people ""would be best served by a genuine democracy.""
+
+This is just the start of the process.
+
+Soon after Kerry heads home Friday evening, the Cuban and U.S. diplomats who negotiated the embassy reopening will launch full-time into the next phase of detente: expanding economic ties between the two nations with measures like direct flights and mail service.
+
+Presidents Obama and Raul Castro announced on Dec. 17 that they would re-establish diplomatic ties 54 years after the flag was taken down from the embassy overlooking Havana's seaside boulevard, the Malecon.
+
+Obama also said he would be moving to empower the Cuban people by loosening the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba through a series of executive actions that make it easier for American citizens to travel to Cuba and trade with the island's growing class of private business owners.
+
+Eight months later, Cuba has repeatedly demanded a complete lifting of the embargo. It has not responded to Obama's actions with measures that would allow ordinary Cubans to benefit from them, such as allowing low-cost imports and exports by Cuban entrepreneurs looking to do business with the U.S.
+
+""I think we're ending one phase and entering another,"" said Robert Muse, a U.S. lawyer specializing in Cuba. ""The handshakes, the fraternal regards, the raising of the flags, that'll end on Aug. 14. Then I think it's very particular conversations begin.""
+
+While Cuba has increased its highly limited Internet access since Dec. 17 in a measure U.S. officials partially attribute to the warming with Washington, ordinary Cubans are growing increasingly impatient for concrete results from the new relationship.
+
+The U.S. tried several times to hold discussions with Cuban officials about the details of Obama's loosening of U.S. regulations but those meetings never happened amid the pressure to strike a deal allowing the reopening of embassies in Havana and Washington on July 20.
+
+U.S. diplomats say that such a meeting, which will hopefully lead to a real increase in trade with the U.S., is among the top priorities of the normalization talks expected to start in earnest in coming weeks.
+
+After the flag ceremony and a meeting with Havana Archbishop Jaime Ortega, Kerry met with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla followed by a news conference and the raising of a second flag at the stately home of the embassy's chief of mission, where the secretary of state met with Cuban dissidents.
+
+Kerry said in a series of interviews with Spanish-language press Wednesday that the day would move the U.S.-Cuban relationship into a series of detailed talks about topics including ""law enforcement, maritime security, education, health, telecommunications.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+3131,The religious right’s No. 1 enemy: What Pope Francis’ recognition of Palestine really means,"That’s because Rome’s diplomatic recognition of Palestine, while made official on Wednesday, has been proceeding quietly behind the scenes for some time. The Vatican has referred to the “state of Palestine” unofficially since the UN recognized the Palestinian state in 2012. “We have recognized the State of Palestine ever since it was given recognition by the United Nations and it is already listed as the State of Palestine in our official yearbook,” said Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi.
+
+The treaty itself, which is expected to be signed shortly, “deals with essential aspects of the life and activity of the Catholic Church in Palestine,” such as the status of Catholic Church properties and charities.
+
+The larger significance of the Vatican’s move is the signal it sends to the international community about the recognition of Palestinian statehood. Not surprisingly, the fact that the Vatican appears to be putting its moral authority—and Pope Francis’ immense personal popularity—behind recognition of the Palestinian state didn’t sit well with backers of Israel.
+
+A senior Israeli official told the New York Times the move would damage the stalled Middle East peace process. David Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee, called the move “unhelpful,” saying, “Formal Vatican recognition of Palestine, a state that, in reality, does not yet exist, is a regrettable move, counterproductive to all who seek true peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”
+
+But equally likely to be disgruntled are conservative Catholics and evangelicals, many of whom are strong supporters of Israel because of what they believe will be its pivotal role in biblical end-times and oppose the recognition of Palestinian statehood and the changing of any borders in the region that that would likely entail.
+
+These religious conservatives have already seen Pope Francis tip the scale in international relations—away from their preferred direction—when he brokered a deal to restore diplomatic relations between the U.S. and still officially communist Cuba. He’s also trashed free-market capitalism, decrying the “idolatry of money” and trickle-down economics. And his soon-to-be released encyclical on the environment is likely to frame tackling climate change in terms of a deep moral responsibility to future generations.
+
+Now, conservatives will feel they’ve lost the support of the Vatican on another issue that has transcended its actual particulars to become a touchstone of conservative identity, potentially furthering the rift that has grown between both fiscal and social religious conservatives and Francis, who they hint has no authority to intervene so prominently in non-doctrinal matters. But the reality of the Vatican’s position on Palestine is more complicated. As John Allen notes in Crux, like Francis’ pronouncements on capitalism and the environment, people assume a break from tradition has occurred only because they weren’t paying attention to the papacy before rock star Francis. In reality, it is actually a continuation of long-held papal positions. The Vatican’s support for Palestine isn’t particularly new. When Pope Benedict XVI travelled to the Middle East in 2009, he pledged support for Palestinian statehood. St. John Paul II made similar statements many times, and was sufficiently fond of former PLO leader Yasser Arafat that he had a set of the Stations of the Cross made out of ivory, presented to him by Arafat as a gift, installed in a small chapel off a Vatican chamber. It’s more accurate to view this particular step in the Vatican’s relationship with Palestine both as a continuation of the Holy See’s long-standing support for Palestinian statehood and as an expression of Francis’ overriding interest in fostering international peace—and his unique ability and willingness to put his finger on the scales to do so. When Francis toured the Holy Lands last year, he made a highly symbolic stop at the wall dividing Bethlehem from Israel and later invited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres to a prayer summit at the Vatican, where he talked about  the “courage to take concrete steps to achieve peace.” And it’s likely no coincidence that the new treaty with the Palestinian state was announced just days before Francis is set to canonize two Palestinian nuns, Marie Alphonsine Ghattas of Jerusalem and Mariam Bawardy of Galilee, who will become the first Palestinian Arab saints in a Vatican ceremony attended by Abbas. The canonizations, like the Vatican’s relationship with Palestine, have been underway long before Francis. But he will use it highlight both the importance of Christians living in Palestine and the need for fairness for the Palestinian people in a way that only a rock star can.",REAL
+8698,"A Materialist Analysis of Why I am Voting Green, and Why the Left Should Do the Same","shorty By Danny Haiphong E ven as the Democrats and Republicans put forward the two least popular politicians in the country, the U.S. Left “is mired in confusion as to what political direction should be taken.” Many of those who claim to be leftists supported the wars against Libya and Syria. But the Green Party has “consistently stood up against endless war, austerity, and racist state repression and for universal healthcare, education, and peace.” “The Green Party is the only choice that possesses a truly social democratic agenda.” I consider myself a Marxist. However, the term “Marxist” is merely a label. Those who ascribe to the tenets of Marxist thought must place their political affiliations within the context of the current historical moment. Anti-communism and imperialist hegemony have set back the struggle for a classless society to the point where much of the US left is mired in confusion as to what political direction should be taken to confront the challenges before us. One of these challenges is the 2016 elections. The radical left should plan on voting Green this November and building a mass movement around the demands put forward by the Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka campaign. But the corporate assault on the left’s collective consciousness has indeed made it difficult for the Green Party to grab the attention of the masses in the midst of the two-party capitalist circus. I myself argued two summers ago that the left in the United States should not bother with engaging the charade and instead take up a boycott of the Presidential elections [3] . At that point, no movement had emerged to challenge the hegemony of the Democratic Party. The 2016 elections changed this dynamic. Suddenly, the forces in front of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Black Lives Matter movement agreed that both corporate candidates were unworthy of support. “Hillary Clinton has drawn the entire ruling class into the Democratic Party tent.” The energy of these movements was channeled into the Bernie Sanders campaign. Sanders ran as a Democrat. His domestic positions on education, healthcare, and income inequality were supported by masses of young voters. Sanders eventually betrayed his base in typical Democratic Party fashion, but not before it was revealed that the Democratic National Committee had worked diligently to undermine Sanders’ ability to win the nomination [4] . The majority of Sanders supporters and sympathizers have since indicated that they will not vote for Clinton when election day arrives [5] . So why vote for the Green Party in particular? The Green Party is the only choice that possesses a truly social democratic agenda. The Green Party is no Marxist vehicle and it doesn’t attempt to be. What the Green Party does possess are dedicated, principled forces whose positions on war and peace, healthcare, and predatory capitalism threaten the US imperialist apparatus. That is why the two-party corporate duopoly finances its own corporation [6] to bar the Green Party from entrance into the Presidential debates every four years. In the 2016 elections in particular, a real chance was present to organize the 15 percent of pollsters necessary for the Green Party to participate in the corporately controlled debates. The opportunity was squandered by a left that remains weak and fractured. In the past, attempts to organize an election boycott campaign or support a communist party’s Presidential nomination would have sufficed as election strategies to steer the disillusioned populace toward movement politics. However, the 2016 Presidential election is a watershed moment in US imperial history. Hillary Clinton has drawn the entire ruling class into the Democratic Party tent. This has occurred in the midst of the greatest crisis of legitimacy the US imperial state has ever faced. “Both corporate media and capitalist enterprise supported Clinton’s bid to steer the election in her favor.” Sanders and Trump shook the foundation of the two-party corporate duopoly. The rise of Sanders and Trump made the Clinton option desirable only to the ruling class and its minions. Both corporate media and capitalist enterprise supported Clinton’s bid to steer the election in her favor. Not only did the ruling class help her take out Sanders, but it also assisted Clinton in a cover up of the recent WikiLeaks email dump. In emails written by her campaign chair John Podesta, it was revealed that the Clinton campaign planned to use the Trump campaign as right-wing cannon fodder to present Clinton as more electable [7] . Furthermore, the emails also uncovered how Clinton holds a “ public” and “private” position [8] on matters of Social Security and free trade. If left up to Clinton, Social Security retirement benefits and federal regulations of corporate activity would be swept into the dustbin of history. Additionally, the corporate media and the Democratic Party have attempted to frame Donald Trump as a racist, misogynistic pig. According to the Democratic Party, Trump represents the “Worst of America [9] .” The slander of Trump has been an easy job. Trump himself provides all of the ammo. However, the condemnation of Trump is little more than a convenient distraction when it comes from the corporate Democrats. From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, the Democratic Party has waged endless war, austerity, and racist state repression on behalf of its corporate masters. Hillary Clinton must resort to fear-mongering around Trump because neither her party nor her class has anything to offer the majority of the US electorate. Conditions are thus ripe for an alternative political party to make a strong showing in this and future Presidential elections. The Green Party’s success could inspire the millions of people disillusioned with both choices and show that a mass sentiment against the two-party corporate duopoly does indeed exist. It is the task of communists, radicals, and revolutionaries to organize the disaffected into a class conscious organization capable of stripping power from the ruling class. No such organization exists at the moment. The Green Party doesn’t profess to be this organization, but its demands and platform are surely helpful if utilized to create the conditions required for such an organization to emerge. “If left up to Clinton, Social Security retirement benefits and federal regulations of corporate activity would be swept into the dustbin of history.” So when self-identified leftists make the claim that the left deserves better than Jill Stein [10] , the urgent need for self-criticism becomes clear. One only needs to examine conditions in the US briefly to see that oppressed and working class people deserve better than the left. Of course, the left’s current state is a reflection of the conditions from which it exists and the deep imperialist assault on the consciousness of the oppressed. However, the left has made critical errors in recent years. Many so-called revolutionary organizations have, for example, supported imperialist war in Libya and promoted the notion of lesser evil voting as cover for the Democratic Party. Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka have consistently stood up against endless war, austerity, and racist state repression and for universal healthcare, education, and peace. Yet there are some who want to claim that such a platform is not adequate or “revolutionary” enough. It is time to shed this sectarian way of thinking. Hillary Clinton will become the next President of the US. She will inherit the eight years of Obama rule which have further weakened the left. But the 2016 elections have revealed that the deep crisis of the imperialist system is beginning to intersect with popular opposition to its policy manifestations. So don’t fear Trump or organize resistance in a manner that gives the people a choice of either revolution or nothing at all. There is nothing counterrevolutionary about voting Green this November and organizing the movement on the streets around its core demands. As BAR’s Bruce Dixon noted last week, a five percent showing by the Green Party will put much needed federal funds into the control of movement organizers. A revolution is not a moment, it is a process. The crisis of imperialism will present many more moments to develop the revolutionary potential of the masses. The current opportunity to do so should not be allowed to dissipate, as the next moment could occur alongside a Hillary Clinton-led world war. Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/why_i_will_vote_green",FAKE
+7830,The 8 Biggest Threats to Humanity Exposed,"The 8 Biggest Threats to Humanity Exposed These individuals and families are the real people behind our political corruption, our planet's... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/the-8-biggest-threats-to-humanity.html These individuals and families are the real people behind our political corruption, our planet's destruction, and our economic enslavement. It's time the world learns their names. With attention squarely focused on the criminality of politicians , particularly that of the US presidential candidates, it’s easy to overlook the people really responsible for all this chaos. Much of the US’ political landscape for over a hundred years, and arguably long before, has been controlled by a small minority of wealthy families and individuals with a specific agenda. Through political and economic machinations over the years, these groups and their minions have funded both sides of wars and profited from them. They own the corporations who pollute our planet and exploit us all.They own the banks which make us slaves to imaginary debt. They own the politicians and police forces that are meant to serve us, yet they seek to undermine us and our “democracy” at every turn. Regardless of where you live, the following people are working against all of us, seeking only to procure still more power and influence and control every aspect of our lives. It’s about time we learned their names. 1. The Rockefellers The Rockefellers are arguably one of the most evil families in American history.J.D. Rockefeller, the US’ first billionaire, was responsible for monopolizing the American Medical establishment over 75 years ago, and led the campaign to discredit other natural remedies in favor of the pharmaceutical industry he helped to create. He and his descendants later funded the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, which used Freudian techniques to influence the opinion of the masses. Graduates of this institute went on to assume leadership roles in mainstream media, the government, and corporations. David Rockefeller is the only surviving grandson of J.D. Rockefeller, and, as such, continues his family’s dark legacy by using his incredible personal wealth. He has openly admitted that his family’s long-standing plan has been to create a one world government controlled by elites saying: “Some even believe [the Rockefellers] are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’, conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I’m proud of it.” David Rockefeller has been instrumental in planning the advent of this “new world order” via his influence in the Bilderberg Group , Trilateral Commission, and the Council of Foreign Relations. 2. Henry Kissinger Henry Kissinger is a war criminal like no other , though some of his proteges – such as Hillary Clinton – have come close. Not surprisingly, he’s been one of David Rockefeller’s closest friends since 1954.Kissinger, while serving as Nixon’s Secretary of State, oversaw a bloody coup in Chile , an illegal bombing campaign in Cambodia, and millions dead in Vietnam. (Read more here ).However, because of his insider connections to the military-industrial complex, Kissinger ended up being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize , a decision so outrageous that several members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest. Though Kissinger no longer serves as secretary of state, he still wields enormous influence and works as a consultant for some of the biggest names in US and international politics. He has served as a mentor to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and has been largely influential in the development of the US’ system of perpetual war.His legacy is evident in the never-ending ‘War on Terror’ , and in the extrajudicial killings of US citizens via the covert drone war. 3. Larry Summers Larry Summers may not be very well-known, but his influence has been substantial nonetheless.Summers was a key player in economic policy under Bill Clinton’s administration, serving various important positions within the US Treasury until becoming the Secretary of the Treasury in 1999. Summers, along with his mentor Robert Rubin, were responsible for deregulating the US banking system via the removal of the Glass-Steagall Act, making him more responsible than any other person for the economic crisis of 2008, as well as the economic crisis we are soon to face.Not only that, Summers also conspired with a cabal of banker big-shots to deregulate the banks of the entire world. Summers and his cronies forced nearly every government in the world to sign the Financial Services Agreement, an addendum to the international trade agreements managed by the World Trade Organization. The only country that refused was Brazil, one of the few countries who avoided the worst of the 2008 crisis. Summers pushed all of this deregulation to make the bankers richer as the 2008 crisis was essentially a massive wealth transfer from the people to the bankers. With Summers still very influential in the US government, his work will only make the inequality divide in the US worse with time. 4. George Soros George Soros is one of the most notorious billionaires in the world. Soros made it rich as a currency manipulator, famously making a billion dollars in one day by initiating a British financial crisis and betting on the outcome.During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Soros was accused by the Malaysian government of bringing down the nation’s currency through his insider trading activities. He did something similar in England, prompting Thailand to call him an “economic war criminal.”Yet, Soros is more well-known for his funding of political causes, as well as his machinations that helped lead to Europe’s refugee crisis . Soros has also been accused of rigging elections as he has strong ties to several of the companies which produce electronic voting machines. Many of these Soros-funded voting machines malfunction and even switch votes. Soros also pushes for a “one world government” , and has worked to erode American sovereignty as well as the sovereignty of other nations in pursuit of that goal. 5. The Rothschilds Last but not least, we have the Rothschild family. The Rothschilds are arguably the richest family in the world and essentially own a majority of the world’s central banks – which are private institutions in most countries – as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Rothschilds’ most well-known patriarch, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, once said : “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.” This has been the maxim of the Rothschild family ever since. The Rothschilds are also responsible for Zionism , a racist ideology opposed by many Jews , and the State of Israel, which has caused numerous wars in the Middle East in its short history and is responsible for the unbelievable suffering of the Palestinian people. ( The Rothschilds are also the founding fathers of Israel, owning about 80% of it ). With so much money and so much power, the Rothschilds have incredible amounts of influence in US and international politics, so much so that even Hillary Clinton has begged them forgiveness in leaked emails . This one family has the power to economically destroy any nation that doesn’t do what the Rothschilds want. — Reference And the list is not complete without... 6. Bill Gates (and his wife) The list of serious threats to mankind's existence is not complete without one of the world's top depopulationists: Bill Gates. He was involved in some of the most disgusting depopulation scandals of this century, yet the mainstream media continues to portray him as a savior and hero.He and his wife are responsible for pushing depopulation vaccines in developing countries, via their sick foundation: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. During a TED Talk , Bill Gates explained that the increase of CO2 volume is caused by a high number of humans being alive and breathing: ""The world today has 6.8 billion people... now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that [number] by perhaps 10 or 15%."" Their oral Polio vaccination program caused 47,500 cases of paralysis in India. ""Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, the incidence of NPAFP was directly proportional to doses of oral polio received. Though this data was collected within the polio surveillance system, it was not investigated."" You can read more on the subject here . Bill Gates' ""philanthropy"" included using 30,000 Indian girls as Guinea Pigs for testing an alleged cancer vaccine. Even though the Gates foundation has the wealth to give these tribes access to clean water, sanitation services, nutrition and low stress living conditions, they instead push for HPV vaccines and call them ""well-being"" shots.The young girls, aged 9 – 15, were instructed to line up for three doses of the vaccine. As the months rolled on, the health of the 16,000 girls rapidly deteriorated. Five of the girls died shortly thereafter.In Vadodara, Gujarat, another 14,000 or more tribal children were put to the test. This time the Gates Foundation carried out their humanitarian healthcare mission by providing the HPV vaccine called Cervarix, made by Glaxo SmithKline.Instead of seeing their health improve, the tribes reported numerous, bizarre adverse events in the days, weeks and months following vaccination.Young girls in India lost weight, appetite and stamina. 16-year-old Aman Dhawan had no idea he was even signed up for the vaccine trial.Soon thereafter he began to lose weight and energy, as the life was sucked right out of him. The same problem broke out among girls in Colombia, where the same vaccine had been doled out to the young girls there.When health reporters and activists visited Andhra Pradesh, they met more than 100 young girls who were now having epileptic seizures, severe mood swings and migraine headaches.The toxins that had been deliberately injected into them caused additional health problems such as early menstruation, heavy bleeding and menstrual cramps – problems the tribes had not experienced before in such severity or magnitude.You can read more on the subject here . George Soros and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were also traced at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak. Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, which has been at the eye of the Ebola storm, houses a US biosecurity level 2 bioweapons research lab with links to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Soros Foundation. There, US biodefence scientists have been working on viral fevers such as Ebola for decades.A nurse who worked there broke the story that they are responsible for the EBola outbreak, but lab quickly insisted she was mentally ill. You have to wonder how a mentally ill person was considered fit to work in such a sensitive and dangerous facility. But of course, she probably was completely sane, and just fearless enough to tell the truth.You can read more on the subject here . Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has now started the sterilization of Indian girls. According to Science Alert, 6,000 women have already been subjected to the anti-fertility injections and Melinda Gates is now planning to roll out the anti-fertility contraception to millions of women, according to the Hindustan Times. You can read more on the subject here .His infamous foundation is also working on developing GMO mosquitoes that will one day carry this kind of vaccines (or maybe even deadly viruses) to unsuspecting human beings. Recently, Bill Gates has pushed the population control agenda one step further: he announced the development of a remote-controlled contraceptive microchip , which can be implanted under the skin and last up to 16 years.The remote-contraception thing may sound fancy and cool at first, until you realize that the microchip can easily be implanted under the skin of millions without their knowledge and consent, and used as a population control tool. You can read more on the subject here . 7. Ted Turner Even less shy about the depopulation agenda, CNN founder Ted Turner is explaining to anyone that is willing to listen why he supports the reduction of the world's population by at least 2 billion: “We’re too many people; that’s why we have global warming.” Unfortunately for him and other fervent depopulationists, both the overpopulation myth and the man-made global warming hoax , have been repeatedly debunked. (The world's resources are not evenly distributed, hence the high number of starving people whilst, at the same time, others are trowing away more than 50% of their food. It has nothing to do with overpopulation, and everything to do with the obsolete & oppressive financial system , as well as the poor management of Earth's resources. As for the ""man made"" global warming, the sun is responsible for temperature fluctuations, just as it has been for billions of years before humans were even around. If CO2 was the cause of global warming, then stopping the mindless deforestation and starting a global campaign of reforestation would solve the problem in a very cost effective way. But because the sun — and not people — is responsible for the Earth's warming and cooling cycles, the deforestation continues and we are being taxed from all sides for using the products that are made available to us. How is this going to stop the rising levels of CO2 is eluding me, but the general population fell for the scheme and people such as Al Gore are going to become billionaires for pushing a hoax ). Ted Turner's ""one child per family policy"" could be taken more seriously if he would lead by example. But, just as Leonardo di Caprio is preaching about the importance of having a low CO2 footprint whilst traveling in private jets, Mr. Turner wants us to have a maximum of one child per family, whilst he has five children himself. Well, I guess these rules would only apply to us, the ""peasants,"" and not to the members of the ""elite."" 8. Zbigniew Brzezinski Brzezinski infamously stated that: “In earlier times, it was easier to control a million people, literally, than physically to kill a million people” while “today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people.” To the NWO, who are heavily into eugenics and depopulation, it is no big deal to kill a million people. As you can see, the members of the ruling ""elite"" talk about us like we are cattle.Their plan, as laid out in the Georgia Guidestones , is to reduce the world’s population to 500 million, which is a much “manageable” amount. You can read more on the subject here . Just like Henry Kissinger, a top architect of the New World Order , Zbigniew Brzezinski is partially responsible for spilling the blood of millions around the world.Asked in 1998 if he regrets being one of the architects who engineered the CIA-instigated battle between Afghans and Russians (which resulted in 12,000 direct deaths), he replied: “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?” 6 billion dollars later and a 10-year war, over a million were reported dead . I guess, being responsible for the death of over a million people gives Brzezinski a thrill. Addendum The list is far from being complete, but these eight figures are some of the most visible depopulationists of the moment. Of course, this is all part of the New World Order plan of the 13 ""elite"" families , which includes reducing the world's population by about 90%. By Whitney Webb, TrueActivist.com and Alexander Light, HumansAreFree.com Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+9782,Comment on Censored News: Black woman kills 12 y.o. white boy with blow torch by TNB – PA,"Posted on August 16, 2013 by Dr. Eowyn | 143 Comments Jonathan Foster (l); Mona Nelson (r). Would the media report this if Foster wore a hoodie? 
+We couldn’t escape the media’s 24-7 coverage of the death of 17-year-old 5′ 11″ black teen Trayvon Martin and the trial of his shooter, half-Hispanic George Zimmerman. But have you heard or seen news about a 44-year-old black woman named Mona Nelson who is on trial for the murder-by-blow-torch of a 12-year-old white Texas boy, Jonathan Foster? 
+Even worse, Nelson committed the murder more than 2½ years ago, on Christmas Eve 2010 — but we’d heard/seen NOTHING about this. 
+That’s because in Obama’s America, blacks now enjoy “black skin privilege” and Big Media simply turn a blind eye to black crimes, especially black-on-white crimes. 
+As recounted by the UK’s Daily Mail , 12-year-old Foster was reported missing from his home on Christmas Eve 2010, after his mother, Angela Davis, said she had received a strange call at her workplace from a gruff-sounding woman. Davis initially told police her boy was with a babysitter. But she later admitted that he was home alone. 
+The boy’s burned body was discovered on December 28 in a roadside ditch in Houston, Texas , not far from where he lived. 
+Mona Nelson told local KTRK TV that a member of Jonathan’s family had given her $20 to dump a plastic container on Christmas Eve. She said she was drunk on vodka and didn’t know what was inside the container. 
+But police revealed that Jonathan’s burned body had not been discovered in a plastic container, but in a ditch. Police also say Nelson’s truck was spotted on surveillance footage dumping something in the ditch where the boy’s body was found. In addition, investigators discovered evidence at Nelson’s apartment that allegedly links her to the crime, including burned carpet and twine similar to that used to bind Jonathan’s hands. 
+While denying she had killed Jonathan, insisting “I’m not a monster. I have five grandkids and I love kids,” Nelson admitted having a cutting torch that she claims she used in her job as a welder. But police say she used the torch to burn the boy’s body. Jonathan’s home in Houston, Texas 
+Cynthia Cisneros reports for KTRK on December 30, 2010, that police revealed more about Jonathan’s abduction and murder at a news conference. Police believe the boy was home alone on Christmas Eve and was killed and his body dumped on that very same day. 
+Nelson admitted to dumping Jonathan’s badly burned body in northeast Houston off of East Hardy, but she denied killing the child. But surveillance cameras near where Jonathan’s body was found showed Nelson to have lied. 
+HPD Captain David Gott said around 6pm Christmas Eve, surveillance video showed a silver truck pull up to a ditch outside of a building on East Hardy. A person, whom neighbors and family identified as Nelson, can be seen getting out of the truck, taking a body out of the bed of the truck and placing it in on the ground. Nelson also drives a similar truck. Mona Nelson’s apartment 
+When authorities searched Nelson’s apartment in northwest Houston, they found “a wealth of evidence” that showed Jonathan’s body was burned at Nelson’s residence, as well as the tools (torches and welding tools) used to burn the boy. Authorities say Nelson is a maintenance worker who works with tools and torches. Authorities believe Jonathan was taken there, killed and burned beyond recognition the same day within hours. Twine used to tie Jonathan was also found inside Nelson’s home. Jonathan’s burnt body was identified by his dental records. 
+A next door neighbor, Rita Jackson said Nelson was there while Jonathan’s family was looking for him on Christmas Eve: “Yeah, she was just sitting there, looking at what was going on.” Police also said they believe Nelson is a a predator who has done this before and that they don’t believe her brutality begins with Jonathan. 
+The horrible details of Jonathan’s murder were too much for several detectives who struggled to keep from crying. 
+“There are few cases that impact homicide detectives — this is one of them,” said HPD Homicide Detective Mike Miller , who’d interviewed Nelson and held back tears as he described her. “She is a cold, soulless murderer who showed an absolute lack of remorse in taking the life of Jonathan Foster. She decided when the time was right and she swooped down and took him when she saw the time was right, and she saw an opportune moment. I’ve worked in Homicide Division 14 years and this is the worst case I’ve been a part of — an innocent 12 year old who everybody says was happy, outgoing and well-liked by everyone in the neighborhood. It’s an absolute tragedy.” Mona Nelson (l); Jonathan Foster (r) 
+KTRK reports that on August 12, 2013, the trial of Mona Nelson for the murder of Jonathan Foster finally began in a courtroom in Houston. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty. Nelson has asked for a judge instead of a jury to decide the verdict. 
+According to Donald Joy of ClashDaily.com , “ Nancy Grace dropped the story as soon as she realized it was a black woman murdering a little white boy. The media have avoided the story like the plague, never once looking into whether it was a ‘hate crime.’ The original local news report has been removed. Suspect has sought and received legal counsel from local leadership of the New Black Panther Party. No story here, folks. Move along …” (See also “ Nancy Grace makes racist slur about Zimmerman “) 
+H/t FOTM’s TPR and joworth",FAKE
+6553,Verified Report: These Cops Left Standing Rock and Refuse to Return,"Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/verified-report-these-cops-left.html Standing Rock, North Dakota ( TFC ) — Widespread outrage over both the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and violent police crackdowns rages on. That outrage is spreading even to police agencies now returning from deployment to the reservation. Two departments have already refused to return, citing personal and public objections. As if that wasn’t enough, an army of sympathizers is re-purposing social media to combat police efforts in Standing Rock.Minnesota’s Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department is among that group. Lawmakers, according to MPR News , found police activities in Standing Rock “inappropriate”.It’s to the point where they’re considering rewriting legislation to avoid future deployments to incidents like the pipeline resistance.Police officials, of course, declined to comment on their return from North Dakota or their feelings on what’s happening there. It’s also made the task of rebuilding trust with the community an even loftier uphill battle. “I do not support Sheriff Stanek’s decision to send his deputies to North Dakota”, says LT. Governor Tina Smith, “nor did we approve his decision to begin with. I do not have any control over the Sheriff’s actions, which I think were wrong, and I believe he should bring his deputies home if he hasn’t already.”Smith’s comments split the state’s government, however, and she was targeted. Minnesota State Rep. Tony Cornish condemned Smith for prioritizing “the rights of protesters over the needs of law enforcement”, saying she should apologize to the cops.Sheriffs from Wisconsin’s Dane County were more empathetic, pulling out and refusing to return. According to the Bismarck Tribune , Sheriff Dave Mahoney made the decision after a “wide cross-section of the community” decried the deployment. “All share the opinion that our deputies should not be involved in this situation”, says Mahoney. Dane County’s deputies were deployed to Standing Rock for around a week. Sources report Dane County wasn’t involved in recent arrests, a string of which scooped up an alderwoman from Madison Wisconsin.Ald. Rebecca Kemble traveled to North Dakota as a “legal observer”, filming and participating in prayer ceremonies. When Morton County officers–if they cans till be called that–grabbed and arrested her for engaging in a riot. According to Kemble, no riot was happening. Other Wisconsin departments have been recalled, with at least one staying behind for a more couple weeks.Many other citizens have been charged for trespassing and participating in non-existent riots, including journalists. One of the most renowned reporters who’s faced DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline)-related charges was Amy Goodman of Democracy Now . Goodman’s team filmed dog attacks by DAPL contractors who lacked proper K9 licenses. The contractors have also been accused of unethical surveillance, intimidation, and sabotaging the movement by attempting to make authorities believe the protesters have finally turned violent.Other journalists, including documentarian Deia Schlosberg, face decades in prison for filming climate activists at a separate oil project. Journalists from the independent outlet Unicorn Riot, who recently reported use of a sound cannon on water protectors, have also been arrested.Thousands of opponents to the pipeline have flooded Standing Rock to repel construction and police brutality. More still have taken to the internet, spreading information in the form of writing, video, photography, and art. Among the renegade tactics is using Facebook to “check-in” at Standing Rock. According to the Guardian , over a million people – even people I know – have joined the action.It began with a Facebook post, disclosing that Morton County sheriffs are allegedly using Facebook check-ins to track protesters. “Checking in”– whether you’re at a friend’s, restaurant, or escalating resistance – pinpoints your location to a tee. Once you check in, a notification is sent out to, yes, your friends, but theoretically anyone who’s capable of watching. It’s yet another tool in the bag of tricks authorities have deployed against civilians, and are likely utilizing in Standing Rock.Some detractors have dismissed the social media action as a waste of time. An editor at The Fifth Column challenged these in a Facebook post, narrating a debate on the subject he’d had. Editor Justin King pointed out that even if the check-in’s wasted two minutes of time, multiplied by hundreds of thousands, that equates to two months of wasted police work. Now imagine how ineffective the surveillance may be with millions continuously checking.Morton County Sheriff’s, Guardian reports, called claims of police surveillance misguided “rumors”. Morton County, by their own account, isn’t “monitoring Facebook check-ins for the protest camp or any location for that matter.”Before you trust them, consider that Facebook access for water protectors was reported as “blocked’ during a military-style raid on a camp . Data Collection Nationwide Other police departments are similarly sketchy when pressured to speak on their surveillance technologies. Wisconsin’s Milwaukee PD hid the use of cell site simulators , or Stingrays, from courts for months. Stingrays mimic cellphone towers, thus tricking phones into providing all manner of user information and data.Nearby, the Wauwatosa Police Department , despite having admitting to “collecting and analyzing cell phone data” in its public reports , denied ever even coming close to a Stingray. It took the department 5 weeks to respond to that open records request, which is considered unusually long. It remains unknown how Wauwatosa PD, which has been blasted for lack of transparency before , collects cell phone data. The Hand’s Fingers In Open Rebellion In addition to the general retreat of departments, two officers have already turned in their badges in support of the protesters. North Dakota water protector Redhawk, MintPress reports , disclosed the revelation. The individual also pointed out “you can see it in some of them, that they do not support the police actions.”“Some are waking up”, they continued, “we must keep reminding them that they are welcome to put down their weapons and badge and take a stand against the pipeline as well.”Hints of shame could be seen in the faces of officers who confronted protesters as they blocked them from prayer grounds. As the protesters condemned officers , some of whom looked down or off to the horizon in shame.The modern era of internet and technology gifts us with a plethora of ways to express ourselves, and help one another. Standing Rock is quickly becoming a stand out of that fact.Citizens, journalists, and activists are all using the internet to achieve their own goals. Whether that be spreading information being blocked, tracking police movements, sending food and rations or just voicing opinions. Standing Rock’s resistance is spreading globally, with protests occurring in Europe and elsewhere. As long as construction doesn’t stop, the movement won’t rest.  ",FAKE
+571,Sabotaging Common Core,The president-elect hasn't made clear how he will avoid conflicts between his vast empire and his official duties.,REAL
+3722,Church shooting suspect Dylann Roof captured amid hate crime investigation,"CHARLESTON, S.C. — Dylann Roof, who police say opened fire and killed nine people during a prayer meeting at a historic African American church here, was arrested Thursday, more than 13 hours after the chilling attack.
+
+Roof, a 21-year-old high-school dropout from Eastover, S.C., was taken into custody in North Carolina not long after law enforcement officials identified him as the sole suspect in the Wednesday night massacre, the deadliest attack on a place of worship in the United States in 24 years.
+
+The oldest victim was 87; the youngest was 26. They included a library manager, a track and field coach and a state senator, Clementa Pinckney, who also served as senior pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the shooting occurred.
+
+Federal law enforcement officials said Roof, who is white, declared his hatred for black people before opening fire, and the U.S. Justice Department has said it is investigating the attack as a hate crime.
+
+Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said Roof was arrested during a traffic stop in Shelby, N.C., at around 11 a.m. Mullen said Roof “was cooperative with the officer who stopped him” in Shelby, about 250 miles by road northwest of Charleston.
+
+“In America, you know, we don’t let bad people like this get away with these dastardly deeds,” Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. (D) said at a news briefing. The longtime mayor said Roof — “an awful person” — “is now in custody, where he will always remain.”
+
+Roof waived extradition from North Carolina. After his arrest, he boarded a small plane bound for South Carolina, according to local television affiliates.
+
+The attack began about an hour after the white assailant entered one of the nation’s oldest African American churches and observed the Wednesday-night gathering, authorities said. Six women and three men were killed and at least one other person was injured in the shooting at Emanuel AME, a black landmark in the the birthplace of the Confederacy.
+
+“We believe this is a hate crime; that is how we are investigating it,” Mullen said.
+
+[For church, 200 years of tragedy and revival]
+
+“Any death of this sort is a tragedy; any shooting involving multiple victims is a tragedy,” President Obama said at the White House. “There is something particularly heartbreaking about a death happening in a place in which we seek solace and we seek peace, in a place of worship.”
+
+Although he acknowledged that many facts are not yet known, the president also said that insufficient gun laws were partially to blame. “Once again innocent people were killed because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” he said.
+
+“Now is the time for mourning and for healing,” the president added. “But let’s be clear: At some point we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”
+
+It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. house of worship since 1991, when nine people were killed at the Wat Promkunaram temple near Phoenix. Johnathan Doody, tried three times for the execution-style murders at the Buddhist temple, was sentenced in 2014 to 249 years in prison.
+
+Carl Chinn, who runs what is considered to be the most extensive database on violence at houses of worship, said Wednesday’s shooting was “certainly one of, if not the most, vicious attacks I’ve seen at a faith-based organization,” said
+
+“Acts like this one have no place in our country and no place in a civil society,” Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said Thursday as she vowed to bring the perpetrator to justice.
+
+Agents were continuing to interview witnesses, including one woman who survived the slaughter. Roof allegedly released her, one law enforcement official said, so she could tell others what had happened.
+
+According to federal law enforcement officials, the gunman made racist comments before he started shooting inside the church.
+
+Roof sat in the back of the room for about an hour, these officials said, and some people at the church encouraged him to join the discussion. Before he began firing a semiautomatic handgun, Roof said something that the officials described as hateful racial epithets.
+
+Officials said that the gunshots were fired at close range, rather than a random spray of gunfire across the room.
+
+Roof’s apparent Facebook profile photo carries a possible indicator of his worldview: The picture shows him skulking in the woods, wearing a jacket with at least two conspicuous patches. The patches, as the Southern Poverty Law Center quickly noted, are the old flags of racist, white-minority regimes in southern Africa.
+
+Roof lived about 15 miles southeast of Columbia, the state capital, in Eastover, court records show. He was arrested twice earlier this year, once on a drug charge and later for trespassing, records show. Both arrests occurred near Columbia.
+
+He was found guilty of trespassing, but the drug charge was still pending. He was fined $262.50, which he elected to pay off in installments.
+
+“We woke up today and the heart and soul of South Carolina was broken,” Gov. Nikki Haley said after Roof’s capture. “So we have some grieving to do. And we have some pain to go through. Parents are having to explain to their kids how they can go to church and feel safe, and that’s not something we ever thought we’d have to deal with.”
+
+Charleston County Coroner Rae H. Wooten identified the victims by name and age Thursday afternoon, though she did not immediately provide spellings or other personal information.
+
+Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41, was the church’s pastor and a South Carolina state senator. Depayne Middleton Doctor, 49, sang in the church choir, the Charleston newspaper reported.
+
+Ethel Lance, 70, worked for 30 years at the church, a relative told the Post and Courier. Susie Jackson, 87, a longtime church member, was Lance’s cousin, the newspaper reported.
+
+Cynthia Hurd, 54, was branch manager of the St. Andrews Regional Library, just a few miles from the church where she was killed. Tywanza Sanders, 26, was a 2014 graduate of Charleston’s Allen University.
+
+Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, was a church pastor and high school track and field coach, according to the Post and Courier.
+
+Myra Thompson, 59, was an active member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, according to the Greenville News. Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74, who died at a hospital, was a retired pastor from another Charleston church, ABC News reported.
+
+“Hate has once again been let loose in an American community,” Vice President Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, said in a statement. “And the senseless actions of a coward have once again cut short so many lives with so much promise.”
+
+Biden, who had seen Pinckney last year at a prayer breakfast in Columbia, called the shooting an “act of pure evil and hatred.”
+
+Long before the victims’ identities were confirmed, Emanuel AME members, faith leaders and state politicians feared the worst about Pinckney. Indeed, soon after the attack, the pastor’s friends and colleagues began expressing their condolences on social media.
+
+“My friend and brother in Christ Senator Clementa Pinckney was shot to death in the senseless tragedy that occurred in Emanuel AME Church in Charleston,” Larry Grooms, a state senator, wrote on Facebook. “My heart breaks for the loss of Sen. Pinckney, the other victims and for their families. Now is the time for prayer. Let us all unite our hearts in prayer and ask God for His Grace, Love and Mercy.”
+
+Pictures from the South Carolina State House showed a black cloth draped at Pinckney’s seat Thursday.
+
+Police have not provided many details about the circumstances of Roof’s arrest, but Mullen, the Charleston police chief, said the traffic stop began when a citizen reported something suspicious to law enforcement. That tip prompted police to stop the car in Shelby.
+
+Mullen also said that it did not appear in the aftermath of Roof’s arrest that other people participated in the shooting. “We don’t have any reason to believe that anybody else was involved,” he said.
+
+Roof remained in Shelby for nearly an hour after his arrest. Mullen declined to discuss many details of the investigation and would not answer a question about whether Roof admitted guilt in the shooting.
+
+Police said the victims were gathered in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, also known as “Mother Emanuel,” for a prayer meeting Wednesday when the shooting occurred. The congregation, established in 1816, is one of the oldest African American churches in the United States.
+
+[For Charleston’s Emanuel AME church, shooting is another painful chapter in long history]
+
+“This is the most unspeakable and heartbreaking tragedy in historic Emanuel AME church, the mother church of the AME churches,” said Riley, the mayor. “People in prayer Wednesday evening, a ritual coming together, praying and worshiping God. To have an awful person come in and shoot them is inexplicable. Obviously the most intolerable and unbelievable act possible.”
+
+“The only reason someone could walk into a church and shoot people praying is out of hate,” Riley continued. “The only reason. It is the most dastardly act that one could possibly imagine.”
+
+Police said the shooting occurred at about 9 p.m. at the historic church, which is located between Henrietta and Calhoun streets near Marion Square in downtown Charleston. Emergency dispatchers received a call at about 9:05 p.m., police said, and units were immediately dispatched to the church.
+
+When officers arrived, they determined that eight people had been killed inside the church, Mullen said. A ninth person was taken to a nearby hospital, where that person died, the police chief said. Police initially said a total of two people had been taken to the hospital, but clarified later that there was only one.
+
+At a nearby Embassy Suites hotel, which was serving as an informal headquarters for church members in the hours after the shooting, people began sobbing and screaming as they learned details about what had happened. “It was a heartbreaking scene I have never witnessed in my life before,” Riley said.
+
+The Rev. Norvel Goff, a presiding elder for the African Methodist Episcopal Church who was interviewed near the scene, said the gunman “walked in, from my understanding, not so much as a participant, but as a brief observer who then stood up and then started shooting.”
+
+Mullen told reporters that the person stayed with the group in the church for about an hour before opening fire.
+
+“This tragedy that we’re addressing right now is undescribable,” the police chief said at a news conference early Thursday morning. “No one in this community will ever forget this night.”
+
+After the shooting, helicopters swarmed overhead and heavily armed police wearing bulletproof vests fanned out across the city to search for the gunman.
+
+“This was a very chaotic scene when we arrived,” Mullen said. “We were tracking this individual with canines. We were making sure that he was not in the area to commit other crimes. As all this was going on, we received information that there might be a secondary explosive device in the scene.”
+
+Taxi driver Sheila Seagers, 60, heard the news on the radio and parked her Lincoln Town Car blocks from the scene. She stayed for hours, lingering and chatting quietly with friends. She called her state of mind a “ball of confusion.”
+
+“I keep thinking of that big, beautiful church,” she said.
+
+“We don’t want trouble but we keeping getting trouble,” she added. “I hate to say it, but what’s next? I pray that when morning comes there will be peace.”
+
+Crisis chaplains rushed to the scene as people started circles to pray for the victims and their families.
+
+“I had to come, couldn’t sit home and watch my community on television,” said 59-year-old Ken Battle, a retired member of the U.S. Air Force. “But I can’t make up my mind about what has happened here. Being here helps me make meaning out of it.”
+
+Johnny Brooks, 54, a retired electric worker, came with his wife. “Our backyard! Our city,” he said. “I am at a loss for words.”
+
+[11 essential facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States]
+
+At a subsequent news conference, Riley called the shooter a “horrible scoundrel” and said: “This is an unfathomable and unspeakable act by somebody filled with hate and with a deranged mind.”
+
+At a midday prayer service at Morris Brown AME Church on Thursday, the congregation burst into sustained applause when Rev. Goff, the presiding elder, said the suspect had been captured.
+
+“Some of us haven’t been to bed yet,” Goff said. “But good folk can’t go to sleep when evil is trying to come in.”
+
+This story has been updated numerous times. It previously stated that victim Cynthia Hurd was 31, which is incorrect. Bever, Horwitz and du Lac reported from Washington, where Mark Berman, Jose A. DelReal, William Wan, Thad Moore, Ishaan Tharoor, Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Elahe Izadi, Sarah Kaplan, David A. Farhenthold and Brian Murphy also contributed reporting. Anne Gearan contributed from Charleston.",REAL
+4584,Donald Trump's Stunning Upset,"Donald Trump had one more surprise up his sleeve. The Republican nominee was elected president Tuesday, winning a stunning upset that defied nearly every prediction. Trump broke through Hillary Clinton’s Democratic firewall and turned back her bid to become the first woman to serve as president, even as the candidates battled for the lead in the popular vote. Trump was carried to victory by a wave of right-wing populist nationalism, as working- and middle-class white Americans turned out in droves to vote for a candidate who had rejected Republican dogma during an erratic, peculiar campaign. Trump overperformed expectations in nearly every public poll, as well as the internal expectations of both parties. The result, paired with Republican victories in the House and Senate, promises to remake American policy and politics, and the global order as well. It represents a wholesale repudiation of the establishment, from Washington to Wall Street. Even before Trump had clinched the win Tuesday night, markets around the world cratered and trading in stock futures was halted. The result is a disaster for the Democratic Party, which had put its faith in a repeat candidate representing a fading dynasty, could not win the Senate, and has few obvious young standard bearers waiting in the wings; the traditional conservative wing of the Republican Party, which largely broke with Trump; the media, which plainly detested Trump but fueled his movement with incessant coverage; and the political consulting and polling industry, which saw its methods ridiculed. It is also a body blow to the legacy of President Barack Obama. The nation’s first African American president will be succeeded by a man who built his political career on questioning whether Obama was a legitimate citizen.
+
+Trump’s victory is an incredible finish to a campaign that often beggared belief. When Trump began his campaign in June 2015, proclaiming that Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he was widely viewed as a curiosity, a garish entertainer whose repeatedly unfulfilled political flirtations were the butt of jokes. Despite billing himself as a businessman, he garnered little respect within the business community. But Trump demolished what was touted as the most talented class of GOP politicians in a lifetime, winning the primary over the objections of most elected Republicans. It is difficult to overstate the surprise of a Trump win, except perhaps with recourse to the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline of 1948. Polling averages never showed him leading, or only leading for a fleeting moment after the Republican National Convention. He centered his campaign around a promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico that practically no serious analyst believes is possible, and to force Mexico to pay for it, a remote possibility. He lost all three presidential debates. He rejected several key pillars of the Republican Party, including free trade, projecting American power abroad, and social conservatism. He broke longstanding tradition by refusing to release his tax returns, but bragged about having paid no income taxes for extended periods. During the campaign, The Washington Post published a video in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women, and about a dozen women came forward with allegations of sexual assault and harassment stretching across decades. He was a historically dishonest candidate, lying publicly on matters large and small, important and not, easily debunked and not. He would not commit to accepting the results of the election if he lost.
+
+Trump’s campaign borrowed its tactics from Europe’s right-wing populist parties, eagerly leveraging race for political gain. He blamed immigration, whether from Latin America or from the Middle East, for many of the country’s ills, openly demonizing Hispanics and Muslims and railing against “political correctness.” He drew support from a resurgent white supremacist movement, passing along messages from anti-Semites and those who argue that a “white genocide” is occurring. He was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and wavered before rejecting the support of former KKK Imperial Wizard David Duke. These choices, along with his comments about women, produced a lopsided demographic result, with African Americans, Hispanics, and women backing Clinton by wide margins and white voters carrying Trump to the win. Trump broke nearly every rule of political campaigning on the way to his win. He survived an unprecedented abandonment by members of his own party; even GOP officials who endorsed Trump often did so through gritted teeth. He lost the endorsements of even the most staunchly Republican newspapers. He barely engaged in fundraising for his race, beginning to ask for money only late in the game. Ultimately, Trump raised scarcely half of what Clinton did, and he hardly purchased ads to combat her onslaught of television spots, relying instead on social media and his own Twitter account. He eschewed traditional campaigning, from the construction of a field organization to the use of polling to the deployment of a carefully calibrated data analytics team, a tool that Obama’s two wins had established as a must. His unfavorable ratings lagged far behind even Clinton’s shoddy numbers, and national exit polls found a majority of Americans did not believe Trump was qualified to be president. He expressed a profound disgust for the First Amendment and a free press.
+
+Clinton, meanwhile, was revealed as a badly damaged and weak candidate. She was never able to articulate a clear, concise purpose for her campaign, positioning herself more than anything as the only person who could stop Trump. Her long resume—stretching from her time as first lady through stints in the Senate and as secretary of state—turned out to be a liability. So, crucially, did her use of a private email server while leading the State Department. Democrats were quick to point a finger at FBI Director James Comey, whose announcement of new emails pertinent to the investigation of that server shook the race, but whose statement eight days later that the emails did not change his conclusion may have come too late to save Clinton. But the signs of her weaknesses were apparent before then, when she struggled to dispatch a primary challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Clinton—never a compelling orator—called on an all-star team of Democrats and others to buoy her, including Obama, Michelle Obama, Sanders, Vice President Biden, and a host of stars of sports, music, and movies. The Trump win in the face of his unified support from the elites in nearly every field underlines the vast split between them and Trump’s base. With both Clinton and Sanders near the ends of their career, it is unclear what the future Democratic Party will look like or who will lead it. The party will take cold comfort even if it does end up winning the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.
+
+A Trump presidency will present the largest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the nation became a superpower. He has offered an isolationist vision of American foreign policy, arguing that the United States does not get out of international alliances like NATO what it puts in, suggesting he would recognize Russian annexation in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. (He was rewarded with the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin.) He has promised to renegotiate existing free-trade agreements and promised the return of tariffs. He has spoken disdainfully of climate-change agreements and has suggested nuclear proliferation could help create global peace. Domestically, Trump is expected to cut closer to standard Republican fare, though his plain lack of interest in policy details makes it more difficult to predict. He supports lower taxes and subscribes to supply-side economics, though he has also promised not to cut entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. With the likely outcome that the lame-duck Senate will continue to stonewall Obama nominee Merrick Garland, Trump will likely have the chance to nominate at least one and perhaps several more justices to the Supreme Court. He has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Assuming he is able to mend fences with Republicans—not necessarily a sure bet—GOP majorities in both the House and Senate will give him broad maneuvering room to enact his policies. The Republican advantage in both the House and Senate decreased, but the party was able to hold both chambers, against expectations that a Clinton win would carry Democrats to a Senate edge. Democrats took over a seat in Illinois and held a seat in Nevada, they failed to pick up any of the other contested seats without Clinton’s coattails.
+
+From the top of the ballot to the bottom, the election shows how deeply divided the nation remains. While Trump performed better that Mitt Romney in urban areas, a stark split between cosmopolitan, liberal urban areas and more conservative, whiter rural ones is a defining feature of the United States, along with a large gap in income and inequality. In other races across the nation, Republicans made big gains in some state houses, while voters in several other states opted to legalize recreational marijuana. In Maricopa County, Arizona, longtime Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a noisy Trump backer and opponent of immigration, was turned out of office. These divisions will likely manifest in increasingly disparate blue and red Americas, often colliding violently. It will take days if not weeks for a full accounting of how polls failed to capture Trump’s surge so badly. He had promised that he would win with the help of the “silent majority,” a phrase he borrowed from Richard Nixon. That prediction was ridiculed by the smart money, along with suggestions that there might be large numbers of “shy” Trump voters unwilling to publicly declare their support. Trump’s win joins in a recent string of shocking upset victories for populist causes, from the rise of right-wing national parties in Europe to the Brexit vote to Colombia’s rejection of a peace referendum. In the home stretch of the campaign, Trump had taken to referring to himself as “Mr. Brexit,” a nod to the unexpected result in that referendum. But as some analysts pointed out, the late polls there indicated that Leave would win. Trump’s victory is something far more surprising. But just as the United Kingdom is trying to sort through what Brexit might mean, Trump and the nation will have to figure out what the United States looks like now.",REAL
+4198,Take a deep breath. The Republican contest still has another month to go.,"Writing at the Hill, analyst Mark Plotkin figures he knows why Ted Cruz's poll numbers have tanked in Indiana: rings.
+
+Remember when the Republican presidential candidate stumbled over the word ""rim"" as he was trying to re-create a scene from the movie ""Hoosiers"" (for some reason)? Well, that slip-up will ""doom him"" in basketball-loving Indiana, just as so many have been doomed by so many other slips of the tongue before. Indianans love basketball very much, apparently, and they will be very mad if you say ""ring"" to them. (""Traditionally, we call that a 'hoop' here in Indiana,"" the Indianapolis Star's Allison Carter noted dryly.)
+
+Why, look at the polls! The Cruz mistake happened April 26; shortly thereafter, his poll numbers started to sink.
+
+Hard to argue with that. Except that something else happened April 26: Donald Trump beat the tar out of Cruz and Ted Kasich in five states.
+
+This Republican race has been a teacup ride for the ages, whipping back and forth between ""Trump is doomed"" and ""Trump is inevitable,"" usually based on whatever good or bad luck Trump has had in the most recent voting. His past six efforts have been exceptional, his best of the campaign, so our teacups are spinning toward ""inevitable"" once again, and faster than ever.
+
+And that makes some sense: There aren't many contests left, and Trump's magic number — how many of the remaining delegates he needs — continues to sink.
+
+Indiana is one of the two biggest states left on the calendar, and it gives out its delegates in a ""winner-take-most"" fashion — win the state and the congressional districts, and you get all the delegates.
+
+Yes, Trump has won six in a row, and by very wide margins. But just as Bernie Sanders won seven of eight before the race shifted back to Hillary Clinton-friendly territory, Indiana ain't the Northeast. (In the Northeast, no one has any idea what to call a basketball loop.) The Midwest is different terrain, where Trump's margins of victory have been more modest — when he has won.
+
+Let's say, for example, that Trump doesn't win Indiana's primary Tuesday. This is unlikely. FiveThirtyEight's forecast shows that Trump has an 83 percent chance of winning. There are reports that Trump is finally figuring out how to run a ground game — that is, how to get his supporters to the polls. But Cruz has consistently been stronger and smarter, which is one reason he pulled off a surprise win in Iowa. That was a caucus and not a primary, one of several reasons he probably will still lose in Indiana. But if he doesn't? Back go the teacups.
+
+Even if Cruz loses and Trump wins — as is likely — the race isn't over. Winning Indiana's delegates makes Trump's job much easier, particularly given his big lead in New Jersey — the third biggest state left and one that gives all of its delegates to the winner — and in California. Both of those states will vote June 7, and, between the two of them, will offer Trump enough delegates to clinch the nomination.
+
+But let's go back to Indiana. One of the reasons polls appear to have shifted against Cruz in the state is that the air is coming out of his campaign. Gallup's survey data indicates that Cruz's favorability rating has tanked among Republicans since Trump's big victory in New York. The implication? People who were supporting Cruz out of a desire to stop Trump have lost some of that enthusiasm. This also could explain the dip in Indiana.
+
+It also suggests that opinions are relatively fickle, driven by a sense of viability. Even if Cruz doesn't win tonight, a better-than-expected performance, a close race, could prompt some rethinking. Plus, there are still several states between now and June 7 where Cruz could do well: Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana. If voters are responding to the variations of the race, as polls suggest, we could have another variation in the cards, even if Trump wins in Indiana. Maybe. Possibly. (There are a bunch of states where Trump will do well, too.)
+
+I understand why Trump keeps insisting that an Indiana win would cap off his nomination. I understand — and agree with — arguments suggesting that it makes his nomination all but certain. But I'd note that our impulses to declare finality in the wake of particular results often have proven to be short-lived. Trump wouldn't actually clinch until the night of June 7 — about a month from now. One month ago, Cruz was about to dominate in Wisconsin and give the wan ""Stop Trump"" effort its only real win. Things change.
+
+And besides. What if Trump mispronounces ""avocado""? California could definitely be up for grabs.",REAL
+5095,"FACT CHECK: Donald Trump's Republican Convention Speech, Annotated","Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president Thursday night, delivering a speech that lays out America's struggles with crime, terrorism and immigration and how he plans to address them.
+
+NPR's politics team has annotated Trump's speech below. Portions we commented on are highlighted, followed by analysis, context and fact check in italics.
+
+Thank you, thank you. Thank you very much.
+
+Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.
+
+Who would have believed that when we started this journey // because we are a team would have received almost 14 million votes the most in the history of the Republican party and that the Republican party would get 60 percent more votes than it received eight years ago. Who would have believed this. Who would have believed this.
+
+The Democrats on the other hand received 20 percent fewer votes than they got four years ago. Not so good. Not so good.
+
+Together, we will lead our party back to the White House, and we will lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace.
+
+We will be a country of generosity and warmth.
+
+But we will also be a country of law and order.
+
+Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism of our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.
+
+Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims. I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon, and I mean very soon, come to an end.
+
+Beginning on January 20th of 2017, safety will be restored.
+
+The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead. It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation.
+
+I will present the facts plainly and honestly.
+
+We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.
+
+So if you want to hear the corporate spin, the carefully-crafted lies, and the media myths the Democrats are holding their convention next week. Go there.
+
+But here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.
+
+These are the facts: Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this Administration's rollback of criminal enforcement. Homicides last year increased by 17 percent in America's fifty largest cities. That's the largest increase in 25 years.
+
+In our nation's capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. They are up nearly 60% in nearby Baltimore.
+
+In the President's hometown of Chicago, more than 2,000 people have been the victims of shootings this year alone.
+
+And more than 4,000 have been killed in the Chicago area since he took office.
+
+The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50% compared to this point last year.
+
+Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.
+
+The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015.
+
+They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.
+
+One such border-crosser was released and made his way to Nebraska. There, he ended the life of an innocent young girl named Sarah Root. She was 21 years-old, and was killed the day after graduating from college with a 4.0 Grade Point Average. Number one in her class. Her killer was then released a second time, and he is now a fugitive from the law. I've met Sarah's beautiful family. But to this Administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn't worth protecting. No more.
+
+One more child to sacrifice on the order and on the altar of open borders.
+
+What about our economy? Again, I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper: Nearly 4 in 10 African-American children are living in poverty, while 58% of African-American youth are now not employed.
+
+2 million more Latinos are in poverty today than when President Obama took his oath of office less than eight years ago.
+
+Another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely.
+
+Household incomes are down more than $4,000 since the year 2000. That's sixteen years ago.
+
+Our trade deficit has reached an all-time high think of this, think of this, our trade deficit is nearly $800 billion, think of that, 800 billion dollars, last year alone. We're going to fix that.
+
+The budget is no better. President Obama has almost doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing. And yet, what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are Third World condition, and forty-three million Americans are on food stamps.
+
+Now let us consider the state of affairs abroad. Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they've lived through one international humiliation after another.One after another. We all remember the images of our sailors being forced to their knees by their Iranian captors at gunpoint. This was just prior to the signing of the Iran deal, which gave back to Iran $150 billion and gave us absolutely nothing – it will go down in history as one of the worst deals ever negotiated.
+
+Another humiliation came when president Obama drew a red line in Syria – and the whole world knew it meant absolutely nothing. In Libya, our consulate – the symbol of American prestige around the globe – was brought down in flames.
+
+America is far less safe – and the world is far less stable – than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America's foreign policy.
+
+Let's defeat her in November, okay?
+
+I am certain that it was a decision that President Obama truly regrets.
+
+Her bad instincts and her bad judgment – something pointed out by Bernie Sanders – are what caused so many of the disasters unfolding today. Let's review the record.
+
+In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map. Libya was stable. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing and really a big big reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was somewhat under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region, and the entire world. Libya is in ruins, and our Ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos. Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis, now threatens the West. After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before. This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness. But Hillary Clinton's legacy does not have to be America's legacy.
+
+The problems we face now – poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad – will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them in the first place.
+
+A change in leadership is required to produce a change in outcomes.
+
+Tonight, I will share with you my plan for action for America. The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America First.
+
+Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo. As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America First, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect. The respect that we deserve.
+
+The American People will come first once again.
+
+My plan will begin with safety at home – which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order.
+
+On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America.
+
+A number of these reforms that I will outline tonight will be opposed by some of our nation's most powerful special interests. That's because these interests have rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit. Believe me. It's for their benefit.
+
+Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place.
+
+They are throwing money at her because they have total control over everything single thing she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings.
+
+That is why Hillary Clinton's message is that things will never change. Never ever.
+
+My message is that things have to change – and they have to change right now.
+
+Every day I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned. I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. And they are forgotten. But they're not going to be forgotten long.
+
+These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice.
+
+I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good. I have no patience for injustice -
+
+How great are our police! And how great is Cleveland?
+
+I have no patience for injustice. No tolerance for government incompetence of which there is so much, no sympathy for leaders who fail their citizens. When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws – or still worse, has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash – I am not able to look the other way. And I won't look the other way.
+
+And when a Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can't see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence – I know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country.
+
+When the FBI Director says that the Secretary of State was ""extremely careless"" and ""negligent,"" in handling our classified secrets, I also know that these terms are minor compared to what she actually did.
+
+They were just used to save her from facing justice for her terrible, terrible crimes.
+
+In fact, her single greatest accomplishment may be committing such egregious crime and getting away with it – especially when others who have done far less, have paid so dearly. When that same Secretary of State rakes in millions and millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers I know the time for action has come.
+
+I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves.
+
+Nobody knows the system better than me.
+
+Which is why I alone can fix it.
+
+I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders – he never had a chance. Never had a chance. But his supporters will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest single issue: trade deals that strip our country of its jobs and strip us of our wealth as a country.
+
+Millions of Democrats will join our movement, because we are going to fix the system so it works fairly and justly for all Americans.
+
+In this cause, I am proud to have at my side the next Vice President of the United States: Governor Mike Pence of Indiana. And a great guy.
+
+We will bring the same economic success to America that Mike brought to Indiana. Which is amazing.
+
+He's a man of character and accomplishment. He's the man for the job.
+
+The first task for our new Administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens our community. America was shocked to its core when our police officers in Dallas were so brutally executed. Immediately after Dallas, we have seen continued threats and violence against our law enforcement officials. Law officers have been shot or killed in recent days in Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan and Tennessee.
+
+On Sunday, more police were gunned down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three were killed, and three were very, very badly injured. An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans.
+
+I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country. Believe me. Believe me.
+
+I will work with, and appoint, the best and brightest prosecutors and law enforcement officials to get the job properly done.
+
+In this race for the White House, I am the Law And Order candidate.
+
+The irresponsible rhetoric of our President, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment that frankly that I have ever seen of anybody in this room has ever watched or seen.
+
+This Administration has failed America's inner cities. Remember, it has failed America's inner cities. It's failed them on education. It's failed them on jobs. It's failed them on crime. It's failed them in every way and at every single level. When I am President, I will work to ensure that all of our kids are treated equally, and protected equally.
+
+Every action I take, I will ask myself: does this make better for young Americans in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Ferguson who have really, in every way folks, the same right to live out their dreams as any other child in America? Any other child.
+
+To make life safe for all of our citizens, we must also address the growing threats from outside the country. We are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS and we're going to defeat them fast.
+
+Once again, France is the victim of brutal Islamic terrorism. Men, women and children viciously mowed down. Lives ruined. Families ripped apart. A nation in mourning. The damage and devastation that can be inflicted by Islamic radicals has been proven over and over – at the World Trade Center, at an office party in San Bernardino, at the Boston Marathon, at a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And many many other locations.
+
+Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted LGBTQ community. No good, and we're going to stop it.
+
+As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. Believe me.
+
+And I have to say as a Republican it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said. Thank you.
+
+To protect us from terrorism, we need to focus on three things. We must have the best, absolutely the best gathering of intelligence anywhere in the world. The best. We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, in Libya, in Egypt and in Syria. Instead, we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terrorism and doing it now, doing it quickly. We're going to win. We're going to win fast.
+
+This includes working with our greatest ally in the region, the State of Israel.
+
+Recently, I have said NATO is obsolete because it did not properly cover terror. And also that many of the member countries were not paying their fair share. As usual, the United States has been picking up the costs. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that NATO will be setting up a new program in order to combat terrorism. A true step in the right direction.
+
+Lastly, and very importantly, we must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place. We don't want them in our country.
+
+My opponent has called for a radical 550% increase in Syrian, think of this. Think of this, this is not believable but this is what's happening. A 550 percent increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country already under the leadership of President Obama.
+
+She proposes this despite the fact that there's no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from.
+
+I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.
+
+Anyone who endorses violence, hatred or oppression is not welcome in our country and never ever will be.
+
+Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers. We are going to have an immigration system that works, but one that works for the American people.
+
+On Monday, we heard from three parents whose children were killed by illegal immigrants: Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden, and my friend Jamiel Shaw. They are just three brave representatives of many thousands who have suffered so greatly. Of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more, nothing even close I have to tell you, than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our borders which we can solve. We have to solve it.
+
+These families have no special interests to represent them. There are no demonstrators to protect them and certainly none to protest on their behalf. My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain. Believe me. Instead, my opponent wants Sanctuary Cities.
+
+But where was the sanctuary for Kate Steinle?
+
+Where was the Sanctuary for the children of Mary Ann, and Sabine and Jamiel? Where was sanctuary for all the other, it's so sad to even be talking about it, because we can solve this problem so quickly. Where was the sanctuary for all of the Americans who have been so brutally murdered, and who have suffered so horribly? These wounded American families have been alone. But they are not alone any longer.
+
+Tonight, this candidate and the whole nation stand in their corner to support them, to send them our love, and to pledge in their honor that we will save countless more families from suffering and the same awful fate.
+
+We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities.
+
+I have been honored to receive the endorsement of America's Border Patrol Agents.
+
+And will work directly with them to protect the integrity of our lawful, lawful, lawful immigration system. Lawful.
+
+By ending catch-and-release on the border, we will end the cycle of human smuggling and violence. Illegal border crossings will go down. We will stop it, it won't be happening very much anymore. Believe me.
+
+Peace will be restored. By enforcing the rules for millions who overstay their visas, our laws will finally receive the respect that they deserve.
+
+Tonight, I want every American whose demands for immigration security have been denied – and every politician who has denied them – to listen very, very closely to the words I am about to say. On January 20th of 2017, the day I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced.
+
+We are going to be considerate and compassionate to everyone. But my greatest compassion will be for our own struggling citizens.
+
+[Editor's note: Trump chanted along with the crowd here.]
+
+My plan is the exact opposite of the radical and dangerous immigration policy of Hillary Clinton. Americans want relief from uncontrolled immigration. Which is what we have now. Communities want relief. Yet Hillary Clinton is proposing mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness.
+
+Her plan will overwhelm your schools and hospitals, further reduce your jobs and wages, and make it harder for recent immigrants to escape the tremendous cycle poverty that they're going through right now and make it almost impossible for them to join the middle class.
+
+I have a different vision for our workers. It begins with a new, fair trade policy that protects our jobs and stands up to countries that cheat. Of which there are many.
+
+It's been a signature message of my campaign from day one, and it will be a signature feature of my presidency from the moment I take the oath of office.
+
+I have made billions of dollars in business making deals – now I'm going to make our country rich again.
+
+Using the greatest business people in the world, which our country has, I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great trade agreements.
+
+America has lost nearly-one third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997, following the enactment of disastrous trade deals supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country. Or frankly, any other country. Never ever again.
+
+I am going to bring our jobs back to Ohio and Pennsylvania, and New York, and Michigan, and all of America – and I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequence. Not going to happen anymore.
+
+My opponent, on the other hand, has supported virtually every trade agreement that has been destroying our middle class. She supported NAFTA, and she supported China's entrance into the World Trade Organization – another one of her husband's colossal mistakes and disasters.
+
+She supported the job-killing trade deal with South Korea. She supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Which will not only destroy our manufacturers, but will make America subject to the rulings of foreign governments. And it's not going to happen.
+
+I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers or that diminishes our freedom or independence. We will never sign bad trade deals. America First again. America First.
+
+Instead, I will make individual deals with individual countries. No longer will we enter into these massive transactions, with many countries, that are thousands of pages long – and which no one from our country even reads or understands.
+
+We are going to enforce all trade violations, against any country that cheats.
+
+This includes stopping China's outrageous theft of intellectual property, along with their illegal product dumping, and their devastating currency manipulation. They are the greatest that ever came about. They are the greatest currency manipulators ever.
+
+Our horrible trade agreements with China and many others will be totally renegotiated. That includes renegotiating NAFTA to get a much better deal for America – and we'll walk away if we don't get that kind of a deal.
+
+Our country is going to start building and making things again.
+
+Next comes the reform of our tax laws, regulations and energy rules. While Hillary Clinton plans a massive, and I mean massive, tax increase, I have proposed the largest tax reduction of any candidate who has run for the president this year – Democrat or Republican.
+
+Middle-income Americans and businesses will experience profound relief, and taxes will be greatly simplified for everyone. I mean everyone.
+
+America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world.
+
+Reducing taxes will cause new companies and new jobs to come roaring back into our country. Believe me, it'll happen and it'll happen fast.
+
+Then we are going to deal with the issue of regulation, one of the greatest job-killers of them all. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion a year, and we will end it very, very quickly.
+
+We are going to lift the restrictions on the production of American energy.
+
+This will produce more than $20 trillion in job-creating economic activity over the next four decades. My opponent, on the other hand, wants to put the great miners and the great steelworkers of our country out of work and out of business – that will never happen with Donald J Trump as president. Our steelworkers and our miners are going back to work again.
+
+With these new economic policies, trillions and trillions of dollars will start flowing into our country. This new wealth will improve the quality of life for all Americans – We will build the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and the railways of tomorrow. This, in turn, will create millions of more jobs. We will rescue kids from failing schools by helping their parents send them to a safe school of their choice.
+
+My opponent would rather protect bureaucrats than serve American children. And that's what she's doing. And that's what's she's done. We will repeal and replace disastrous Obamacare.
+
+You will be able to choose your own doctor again.
+
+And we will fix TSA at the airports! Which is a total disaster.
+
+We're going to work with all of our students who are drowning in debt to take the pressure off these young people just starting out in their adult lives. Tremendous problem.
+
+We will completely rebuild our depleted military, and the countries that we protect, at a massive cost to us, will be asked to pay their fair share.
+
+We will take care of our great Veterans like they have never been taken care of before.
+
+My just released 10 point plan has received tremendous veteran support. We will guarantee those who serve this country will be able to visit the doctor or hospital of their choice without waiting five days on a line and dying.
+
+My opponent dismissed the VA scandal. One more sign of how out of touch she really is. We are going to ask every Department Head in government to provide a list of wasteful spending projects that we can eliminate in my first 100 days.
+
+The politicians have talked about this for years, but I'm going to do it.
+
+[Editor's note: Crowd chants ""Yes You Will""]
+
+We are going to appoint justices of the United States Supreme Court who will uphold our laws and our Constitution.
+
+The replacement of our beloved Justice Scalia will be a person of similar views and principles and judicial philosophies. Very important. This will be one of the most important issues decided by this election. My opponent wants to essentially abolish the 2nd amendment.
+
+I, on the other hand, received the early and strong endorsement of the National Rifle Association and will protect the right of all Americans to keep their families safe.
+
+At this moment, I would like to thank the evangelical and religious community because I'll tell you what. Because the support they've given me, and I'm not sure I totally deserve it, has been so amazing. And has had such a big reason for me being here tonight. True. So true.
+
+They have so much to contribute to our politics, yet our laws prevent you from speaking your minds from your own pulpits. An amendment, pushed by Lyndon Johnson, many years ago, threatens religious institutions with a loss of their tax-exempt status if they openly advocate their political views. Their voice has been taken away.
+
+I am going to work very hard to repeal that language and to protect free speech for all Americans.
+
+We can accomplish these great things, and so much more – all we need to do is start believing in ourselves and in our country again. Start believing. It is time to show the whole world that America Is Back – bigger, and better and stronger than ever before.
+
+In this journey, I'm so lucky to have at my side my wife Melania and my wonderful children, Don, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, and Barron: you will always be my greatest source of pride and joy. And by the way, Melania and Ivanka, did they do a job.
+
+My Dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest working man I ever knew. I wonder sometimes what he'd say if he were here to see this, and to see me, tonight.
+
+It's because of him that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people.
+
+He was a guy most comfortable in the company of bricklayers, and carpenters, and electricians and I have a lot of that in me also. I love those people.
+
+Then there's my mother, Mary. She was strong, but also warm and fair-minded. She was a truly great mother. She was also one of the most honest and charitable people I have ever known, and a great great judge of character. She could pick 'em out from anywhere.
+
+To my sisters Mary Anne and Elizabeth, my brother Robert and my late brother Fred, I will always give you my love you are most special to me.
+
+I have had a truly great life in business. But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country – to go to work for you. It's time to deliver a victory for the American people. We don't win anymore, but we are going to start winning again.
+
+But to do that, we must break free from the petty politics of the past. America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics.
+
+Remember: all of the people telling you you can't have the country you want, are the same people telling you that wouldn't stand, I mean they said Trump doesn't have a chance of being here tonight. Not a chance. The same people. Oh we love defeating those people. Don't we? Don't we? Love it. Love it. Love it.
+
+No longer can we rely on those same people in the media media, and politics, who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place.
+
+Instead, we must choose to Believe In America. History is watching us now. We don't have much time, but history is watching. It's waiting to see if we will rise to the occasion, and if we will show the whole world that America is still free and independent and strong.
+
+I am asking for your support tonight so I can be your champion in the White House. And I will be your champion.
+
+My opponent asks her supporters to recite a three-word loyalty pledge. It reads: ""I'm With Her"". I choose to recite a different pledge.
+
+My pledge reads: ""I'M WITH YOU – THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.""
+
+I am your voice. So to every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I am With You, and I will fight for you, and I will win for you.
+
+To all Americans tonight, in all of our cities and in all of our towns, I make this promise: We Will Make America Strong Again. We Will Make America Proud Again. We Will Make America Safe Again. And We Will Make America Great Again.
+
+God bless you, and goodnight. I love you.",REAL
+2854,Iraq announces counterattack against ISIS in Anbar province,"Iraq's government announced Tuesday that its military had launched a counterattack aimed at driving the Islamic State terror group out of the western part of Anbar province just days after militants captured the city of Ramadi.
+
+Iraqi state TV announced the start of the operation, which was backed by Sunni and Shiite paramilitary forces, but did not provide further details. The possibility of a large-scale counteroffensive has sparked fears of potential sectarian violence in the Sunni province, long the scene of protests and criticism against the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.
+
+Still, senior U.S. defense officials at the Pentagon pushed back on the reports Tuesday morning that the counterattack had begun. Two sources described the actions as ""shaping operations"" -- or battlefield preparations -- at this stage.
+
+Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said this includes airstrikes, and artillery and rocket barrages. ""We welcome the news"" of the counter-offensive, he said.
+
+A spokesman for Iraq's Shiite militias said the operation will ""not last for a long time"" and that Iraqi forces have surrounded the provincial capital, Ramadi, from three sides. Ahmed al-Assadi, who is also a member of parliament, told reporters that new weapons are being used in the battle ""that will surprise the enemy.""
+
+The announcement of the attack came hours after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden spoke to Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in an effort to smooth over comments made Sunday by Defense Secretary Ash Carter in which he accused Iraqi forces of showing ""no will to fight"" in Ramadi.
+
+A White House statement on Monday describing Biden's call said the vice president welcomed an Iraqi decision to mobilize additional troops and ""prepare for counterattack operations."" Biden also pledged full U.S. support to ""these and other Iraqi efforts to liberate territory from ISIL,"" the statement said, using an acronym for Islamic State, which is commonly known as ISIS.
+
+Saad al-Hadithi, a spokesman for al-Abadi, had said Monday his government was surprised by Carter's comments.
+
+""We should not judge the whole army based on one incident,"" al-Hadithi told The Associated Press.
+
+Al-Hadithi said the Iraqi government believes the fall of Ramadi was due to mismanagement and poor planning by some senior military commanders in charge. However, he did not elaborate, and no action has been taken against those commanders.
+
+The fall of Ramadi marked a major defeat for Iraqi forces, which had been making steady progress against the extremists over the past year with the help of U.S.-led airstrikes.
+
+   Security forces and Sunni militiamen who had been battling the extremists in Ramadi for months collapsed as IS fighters overran the city. The militants gained not only new territory 70 miles west of Baghdad, but also large stocks of weapons abandoned by the government forces as they fled.
+
+Meanwhile, Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani was quoted in an Iranian daily newspaper as saying that the U.S. didn't do a ""damn thing"" to stop the ISIS advance on Ramadi, adding that Iran and its allies are the only forces that can deal with the threat.
+
+""Today, there is nobody in confrontation with (ISIS) except the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as nations who are next to Iran or supported by Iran,"" he said.
+
+Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2079,Obama pledges faster action on new icebreakers to keep up in Arctic,"President Obama wants to accelerate by two years plans to acquire a new icebreaker and will ask Congress for money to build additional ones for the Coast Guard, in an effort to keep up with ship traffic that is increasing as the Arctic waters off Alaska grow warmer.
+
+The president also said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Coast Guard will map and chart waters of the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas, for which existing maps and charts are nonexistent or outdated.
+
+The moves are nods toward Alaskan leaders — including Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan — who have been urging the administration to bolster the paltry ability of the Coast Guard to monitor the largest state’s 6,640-mile coastline.
+
+The announcement late Monday night was an acknowledgment that the United States has fallen behind other nations, especially Russia, which possesses 40 icebreakers and has plans to add at least 11 more.
+
+The White House said that after World War II, the United States had seven icebreakers in its fleet — four under the Navy and three under the Coast Guard. Today, the United States has only two fully functional icebreakers, and just one is a heavy-duty icebreaker.
+
+The acquisition of a new icebreaker would happen in 2020 instead of 2022.
+
+The announcements Monday night — after the president’s speech to senior ministers from Arctic nations — were also an acknowledgment that climate change is prompting a scramble for the rights to develop the Arctic’s largely untapped reserves of oil, natural gas and minerals. In 2014, the first unescorted commercial vessel to transit the Northwest Passage delivered to China a cargo of nickel ore mined in the Arctic off northern Quebec.
+
+Even if the United States does not permit large-scale mining or exploration in Alaska, the state’s shores could be threatened by spills, leaks or other accidents from the activities of other nations.
+
+“The growth of human activity in the Arctic region will require highly engaged stewardship to maintain the open seas necessary for global commerce and scientific research, allow for search and rescue activities, and provide for regional peace and stability,” the White House said in a statement. “Accordingly, meeting these challenges requires the United States to develop and maintain capacity for year-round access to greater expanses within polar regions.”
+
+Alaska’s leaders said Obama’s announcement will have to be judged by the amount of funding the president can line up. Murkowski said the $4 million in last year’s federal budget “doesn’t even buy you a porthole.” The current budget includes $8 million, she said.
+
+“Do we need icebreakers? Yes. Did we need them yesterday? Yes,” Murkowski said.
+
+The state of Alaska has a long wish list for the Obama administration. Sullivan, a freshman senator, said he has been pressing the Pentagon not to go ahead with a proposal to cut one of two 5,000-member Arctic combat brigades.
+
+Sullivan also wants federal agencies to speed up permit approvals for a much-discussed pipeline for natural gas, which can be liquefied and shipped to China or Japan.
+
+Some Alaskan lawmakers are seeking broadband access in small villages across the state. And Gov. Bill Walker, a longtime Republican who won election as an independent, has told Obama that four communities need to escape coastal hardships intensified by climate change.
+
+[Obama can rename Mount McKinley Denali — but he can’t stop its loss of ice]
+
+On Tuesday, Obama visited the Exit Glacier, which has receded 1.25 miles since 1815 — 187 feet last year alone. “This is as good of a signpost of what we’re dealing with it comes to climate change as just about anything,” the president said.
+
+Standing in front of a gravelly creek bed, he said that when glaciers melt, the water runs to the ocean and raises sea levels, altering the surrounding flora and fauna.
+
+“It is spectacular, though,” he said. “We want to make sure that our grandkids can see this.”
+
+He said his hike “beats being in the office.”
+
+Obama’s announcement about the icebreakers Monday night came after he finished an impassioned appeal to top officials from Arctic nations to do more about climate change.
+
+In his speech, he talked about a cycle of warming temperatures, melting permafrost and wildfires as a negative feedback loop, and he tried to infuse the audience with a sense of urgency.
+
+“The point is that climate change is no longer some far-off problem. It is happening here. It is happening now,” he said.
+
+“Our understanding of climate change advances each day,” he added. “The science is stark. It is sharpening. It proves that this once-distant threat is now very much in the present.”
+
+Obama did not, however, put forward any major new plans on the climate front, whether for Alaska or for world leaders. That disappointed Murkowski.
+
+“What do we do, and how do we do so in a way that would make a difference for the people of Alaska?” she asked after the speech. “What specifics do you have? We didn’t hear that. We just heard a call to action.”
+
+But it was a rousing call to action. Obama took aim at those who doubt that humans are spurring climate change, saying that they are “on their own shrinking island.”
+
+He also said people overestimate the damage that mitigation measures would do to their economies.
+
+“The notion is somehow this will curb our economic growth. And at a time when people are anxious about the economy, that’s an argument oftentimes for inaction,” he said. “The irony, of course . . . is that few things will disrupt our lives as profoundly as climate change. Few things can have as negative an impact on our economy as climate change.”
+
+He painted the future as grim if nations fail to moderate the climate trends. Among the results, he said: “Submerged countries. Abandoned cities. Fields no longer growing. . . . Desperate refugees seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own.”
+
+The president warned, “We will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair.”",REAL
+3350,US flag flies again in Cuba: How much real change is coming to the country? (+video),"On Friday, the American flag was raised over the reopened US Embassy in Havana for the first time in 54 years.
+
+A man chats on his mobile phone, close to a pair of Cuban and US flags strapped to a bicycle taxi, at a public Wi-Fi hotspot in Havana, Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2015. The US embassy in Cuba will hold a ceremony on Friday, Aug. 14, to raise the US flag, to mark its reopening on Havana’s historic waterfront.
+
+People sit with US flags outside the US embassy in Havana, August 14, 2015. US Secretary of State John Kerry travels to Cuba on Friday to raise the US flag at the recently restored American embassy in Havana, another symbolic step in the thawing of relations between the two Cold War-era foes.
+
+US Marines raise the US flag while being watched over by US Secretary of State John Kerry (r.) at the US embassy in Havana, August 14, 2015. US Marines raised the American flag at the embassy in Cuba for the first time in 54 years on Friday, symbolically ushering in an era of renewed diplomatic relations between the two Cold War-era foes.
+
+When Secretary of State John Kerry raises the Stars and Stripes over the reopened US Embassy in Havana Friday, there will no longer be a menacing billboard blaring an anti-imperialist message from across the street.
+
+And no longer will Cuban security authorities be taking down the name of every Cuban citizen entering the American diplomatic mission – as happened for years until the two long-estranged governments reopened their respective embassies last month.
+
+But as symbolically significant as Friday’s ceremony along Havana’s waterfront Malecón will be – it will be the first visit to Cuba by a secretary of State since 1945 – it remains unclear how much real change the warm-up in US-Cuba relations will bring.
+
+For both bilateral government relations and the Cuban people, experts in US-Cuba relations predict change will occur, but will be slow.
+
+“Cuba is changing, but that change is not happening fast enough. Cuba needs to speed up the process of change,” says Carlos Saladrigas, chairman of the Cuba Study Group, an organization of Cuban-Americans supporting President Obama’s opening to Cuba.
+
+Change, he says, will be slowed by drags on the process both from inside Cuba and from the United States. The US embargo, which can be lifted only by Congress, will continue to act as a brake on change, he says, even as the Cuban government’s fears of losing control of the country’s political and economic evolution join in slowing things down.
+
+“Cuba cannot change as long as the embargo is in force,” says Mr. Saladrigas, who blames the trade impediment for limiting the ability of US businesses to interact with Cubans and encourage their entrepreneurial spirit.
+
+He also blames a timid and wary Cuban government for the slow pace of change. Noting that the communist government’s much-ballyhooed list of allowed private-sector self-employment activities has not changed in four years, he says, “That’s been a disappointment.... You cannot ignite an economy by going so slow.”
+
+Evidence that the US also intends to go slow in pressing for change in Cuba could be found in Friday’s agenda.
+
+Secretary Kerry’s day in Havana is expected to be heavy on symbolism yet cautious in terms of its political engagement with Cubans. The US has not invited to Friday’s flag-raising ceremony any of the political dissidents it has worked with for years to foster political change in Cuba, State Department officials confirmed Wednesday.
+
+In interviews this week, Kerry characterized the ceremony as a “government-to-government” affair that wouldn’t have the space to accommodate everyone. He said he would meet later in the day with dissidents and human rights groups.
+
+Kerry is now expected to hold a separate flag-raising ceremony with human rights advocates and other representatives of Cuban civil society at the residence of the Embassy’s chief of mission.
+
+State Department officials said the two-ceremony solution would avoid the prospect of Cuban government officials boycotting the Embassy ceremony – a slap that would have gotten reestablished relations off to a sour start.
+
+But critics of Mr. Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba quickly jumped on the relegation of dissidents to a side ceremony as further proof of what they see as the administration’s willingness to bend over backward to meet Cuban government demands.
+
+“Cuban dissidents are the legitimate representatives of the Cuban people and it is they who deserve America’s red carpet treatment, not Castro regime officials,” Republican presidential candidate and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said in a statement Wednesday. He called Kerry’s arrangement for a separate low-key meeting with dissidents a “slap in the face” to Cuba’s democracy advocates.
+
+The sanitized guest list at the Embassy’s flag-raising ceremony may ensure attendance by high-level Cuban officials, but that does not mean the Cuban government has gotten over its suspicions of US intentions, say some Cuban experts close to the government’s thinking.
+
+A sizable share of the Cuban government and political elite suspects that the heralded Obama opening to Cuba is really only a “change in tactics,” says Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a professor at the University of Havana’s Center for Hemispheric and United States Studies.
+
+The fear is that the new US approach to Cuba is still about “regime change,” he says, only now it’s in seductive clothing. “Politically it’s like the Roberta Flack song, it’s ‘Killing me softly with [your] song,’ ” says Professor Alzugaray, who like Saladrigas spoke Thursday on a conference call arranged by the Wilson Center in Washington.
+
+The mantra for that part of the government is, “We cannot trust these guys,” Alzugaray says. Reinforcing that sector’s skepticism is a continuation of what the former Cuban diplomat calls “subversive policies towards Cuba,” including US government TV and radio broadcasts into Cuba, the US military base on Cuban territory at Guantánamo, and especially the embargo.
+
+“The embargo is the symbol of the regime-change policy of the US towards Cuba,” he says.
+
+Still, Alzugaray says change is coming to Cuba, nudged forward by more than just the normalization of relations with the US. Other “big change elements” at work, he says, are a continuing transition to a new economic model and the country’s “generational transition” – from the generation of the revolution to a much younger generation.
+
+Those forces will also usher in new pressures for political change and an “expansion of the democratic bases of Cuban society,” Alzugaray says.
+
+But those pressures for change will continue to be restrained by the decades-old “siege mentality” in Cuba engendered by the US trade embargo. So his advice to Americans who want to see change in Cuba? Lift the embargo.
+
+“If you lift that,” he says, “there will be more stimulus for a debate in Cuba.”",REAL
+6976,Links 11/5/16 | naked capitalism,"
+Texas insurer drops push to let homeowners forgo right to sue Texas Tribune. Margarita: 
+Not many (probably) remember that the largely successful effort to gut tort laws around the country started in mid-80s by insurance companies, after they lost money in the early 1980s real estate boom/bust. Not satisfied with the current tepid tort laws, they are at it again. 
+And Adam Levitin via e-mail: 
+I love that the arbitration is getting priced. This is a great example of what I’ve tried to teach in contracts for years: the law only looks at the one-off contract. But the insurer doesn’t give a shit about the individual contract. It’s all actuarial tables. And that creates a total mismatch. The consumer is a one time player, while the insurer is a repeat player. The consumer will rationally value the arbitration clause at basically nothing (there’s an optimism bias too–no one gets married thinking that they’re going to get divorced), because the odds of it being important are so low and there’s only one contract. But because the insurer is doing multiple contracts, even low odds matter. As a result consumers will never properly price for arbitration clauses and the like. 
+Notice, btw, that the CFPB cannot stop this because it doesn’t have authority over home insurance. That’s all state level regulation. 
+Samsung recalls 2.8 million washing machines in U.S. over injury risk Reuters. EM: 
+Hey, look at the bright side – at least the washers aren’t bursting into flame! But, imagine a future where most new washers are connected to the Interwebs – were hackers to trigger such an excessive-vibration condition, it would be a rather eerie consumer-product analog of the US/Israeli Stuxnet hack of the Iranian nuclear-program centrifuges. 
+The Descent of the Left Press: From IF Stone to The Nation Counterpunch 
+Class Warfare 
+Antidote du jour. One of National Geographic’s nature photographs of the year , this one by Zhayynn James . 
+Four zebras stand in the Masai Mara National Preserve in Kenya at the end of the day as the sun seeps through the clouds, lighting the sky a vibrant orange. See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here . 0 0 0 0 0 0 This entry was posted in Links on ",FAKE
+8634,Life: 6 Great Halloween Costume Ideas For Duos,"6 Great Halloween Costume Ideas For Duos Posted today When it comes to dressing up, two is always better than one! 1. A Horse For Two 
+Whether you’re in the front hooves shaking the head or in the back hooves flapping the tail, nothing says love quite like this classic horse costume for two! If you’re looking to trot into a party and turn heads this Halloween, look no further, because this humble steed is always guaranteed to steal the show! 2. Nerd University 
+If you and your date are looking to match this Halloween without spending too much dough, stop right there, because everything you’ll need to make this couples costume can be found with a quick trip to the closet! All it takes is a few accessories, and voilà! 3. Marvel Universe 
+Break out your most intimidating voice and flex those muscles, because every trick-or-treater is going to want a piece of this crime-fighting duo after you open the door! Captain America might be a lone wolf on the big screen, but this Halloween, he’s got his trusty sidekick, and let’s just say that he’s nothing short of unstoppable! 4. Wayne’s World 
+Relive this classic 1992 movie with this fun costume for two! You’ll have the other Halloween party guests saying “We’re not worthy!” when they see your incredible getups. Bring a boombox to play “Bohemian Rhapsody” if you want to step up your game a notch. Party on! 5. May The Force Be With You 
+Now, costumes for one are fine, but dressing up with a friend or significant other is what will send Halloween to a galaxy far, far away! Dance the night away in your Jedi best, and you’ll be the center of any party you go to. These ARE the droids you’re looking for! 6. Home On The Range 
+Halloween only comes once per year, so this is your chance to do it right! Grab your guy or gal, throw on your costume, and party till the sun comes up. You won’t regret it!",FAKE
+7003,The Ruthlessly Effective Rebranding of Europe’s New Far Right,"The Ruthlessly Effective Rebranding of Europe’s New Far Right Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Guardian, November 1, 2016 
+In April 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen stunned all of Europe by defeating the socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, in the first round of the French presidential election, and advancing to the final round between the top two candidates. Terrified by the prospect of a far-right victory, the French left–including communists, Greens and the Socialist party–threw their support behind the incumbent president, Jacques Chirac , a pillar of the centre-right establishment who had served as mayor of Paris for 18 years before becoming president in 1995. This electoral strategy effectively isolated Le Pen’s Front National (FN), depicting it as a cancerous force in the French body politic. 
+Two weeks later, on 5 May, Chirac won the election with an astronomical 82% of the vote, trouncing Le Pen by the biggest margin in a French presidential election since 1848. Raucous celebrations spilled into the streets of Paris. “We have gone through a time of serious anxiety for the country–but tonight France has reaffirmed its attachment to the values of the republic,” Chirac declared in his victory speech . Then, speaking to the joyous crowds in the Place de la République, he lauded them for rejecting “intolerance and demagoguery”. 
+But May 2002 was not, in fact, a moment of triumph. Rather it was the dying gasp of an old order, in which the fate of European nations was controlled by large establishment parties. 
+Jean-Marie Le Pen was an easy target for the left, and for establishment figures such as Chirac. He was a political provocateur who appealed as much to antisemites and homophobes as to voters upset about immigration, drawing his support largely from the most reactionary elements of the old Catholic right. In other words, he was a familiar villain–and his ideology represented an archaic France, a defeated past. Moreover, he did not seriously aim for power, and never really came close to acquiring it; his role was to be a rabble-rouser and to inject his ideas into the national debate. 
+Europe’s new far right is different. From Denmark to the Netherlands to Germany, a new wave of rightwing parties has emerged over the past decade-and-a-half, and they are casting a much wider net than Jean-Marie Le Pen ever attempted to. And by deftly appealing to fear, nostalgia and resentment of elites, they are rapidly broadening their base. 
+Le Pen’s own daughter is a prime example of the new ambitions of the right: unlike her incendiary father, Marine Le Pen is running a disciplined political operation and has already proven that her party can win upwards of 40% of the vote in regions from Calais in the north to the Côte d’Azur in the south. She and her Danish and Dutch counterparts are not–as some on the left would like to believe–neo-Nazis or inconsequential extremists with fringe ideas lacking popular appeal. 
+These parties have built a coherent ideology and steadily chipped away at the establishment parties’ hold on power by pursuing a new and devastatingly effective electoral strategy. They have made a very public break with the symbols of the old right’s past, distancing themselves from skinheads, neo-Nazis and homophobes. They have also deftly co-opted the causes, policies and rhetoric of their opponents. They have sought to outflank the left when it comes to defending a strong welfare state and protecting social benefits that they claim are threatened by an influx of freeloading migrants. 
+They have effectively claimed the progressive causes of the left–from gay rights to women’s equality and protecting Jews from antisemitism–as their own, by depicting Muslim immigrants as the primary threat to all three groups. As fear of Islam has spread, with their encouragement, they have presented themselves as the only true defenders of western identity and western liberties–the last bulwark protecting a besieged Judeo-Christian civilisation from the barbarians at the gates. 
+These parties have steadily filled an electoral vacuum left open by social democratic and centre-right parties, who ignored voters’ growing anger over immigration–some of it legitimate, some of it bigoted–or simply waited too long to address it. 
+They have shed some of the right’s most unsavoury baggage while responding to both economic anxiety and fear of terrorism by blending a nativist economic policy–more welfare, but only for us –and tough anti-immigration and border security measures. Their message is beginning to resonate widely with a fearful population that believes the liberal governing elite no longer listens to them. 
+Brexit was just the start. Europe’s new far right is poised to transform the continent’s political landscape–either by winning elections or simply by pulling a besieged political centre so far in its direction that its ideas become the new normal. And when that happens, groups that would never have contemplated voting for a far-right party 10 years ago–the young, gay people, Jews, feminists–may join the working-class voters who have already abandoned parties of the left to become the new backbone of the populist right. 
+On 6 May 2002, one day after revellers filled the streets of Paris to celebrate Chirac’s historic victory, the flamboyant and iconoclastic leader of the Dutch far right, Pim Fortuyn, was gunned down by a radical animal rights activist as he emerged from a radio interview. His assassin later claimed that he had killed Fortuyn to stop him from using Muslims as “scapegoats”. In national elections nine days later, Fortuyn’s eponymous party–the Pim Fortuyn List– became the second largest in the Netherlands with 17% of the vote. 
+Fortuyn, a former communist and openly gay man who boasted of sleeping with Muslim immigrants while calling for a ban on Muslim immigration, was an electrifying figure in a country known for its staid politics. His time in the limelight was short but transformative. 
+It was Fortuyn who blazed the trail for the new generation of far-right leaders across Europe. He may not have intended to be a pioneer, but his brand of plain-spoken political incorrectness and his depiction of Islamic culture as a “backwards” and reactionary threat to the hard-won progressive values of western Europe would provide a potent template for a modernised far right. His ideological inheritors in Dutch politics, as well as the revamped Front National in France, the Danish People’s Party and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland have all emulated Fortuyn in their own ways. 
+Fortuyn proved that the winning argument for the European far right was not a US-style appeal to conservative religious values, but rather to claim it was “defending secular, progressive culture from the threat of immigration,” argues Merijn Oudenampsen of Tilburg University. The Netherlands was a perfect laboratory for this new strategy because, unlike France, it did not have a strong contingent of religious traditionalists opposed to women’s liberation and gay rights. 
+Before founding his own party in 2002, Fortuyn had tried to join an establishment centre-right party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), in the late 1990s. The party’s then-leader, Frits Bolkestein, who had been one of the first figures to speak critically about immigration in the early 1990s, remembers Fortuyn as a talented but inflammatory politician. “He had a thoroughly theatrical personality, and that played in his favour,” said Bolkestein, now in his 80s, from his office overlooking the canals of Amsterdam. “I didn’t want him to be in my parliamentary group, so I cold-shouldered him . . . He would have acted as a fragmentation bomb.” 
+Fortuyn took his explosive rhetoric elsewhere and, by creating a new type of far-right politics in progressive garb–“a form of xenophobia ideally suited to a nation that prides itself on its tolerance,” as a New Yorker profile once described it–he redirected the entire national debate in a way that has endured long after his death. 
+Two years after Fortuyn was killed, the Netherlands was traumatised by another political assassination. Early one morning in November 2004, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a young Dutch-Moroccan, Mohammed Bouyeri, who shot van Gogh eight times, slashed his throat and then pinned a letter to his chest with a knife. The letter was a death threat aimed at the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali –a vocal critic of Islam who was soon placed under the protection of the Dutch security services. 
+The two assassinations shook the Netherlands to its core and catapulted a little-known and theatrically coiffed politician, Geert Wilders , to popularity as an ideological successor to Fortuyn. Wilders had also flirted with Bolkestein’s VVD, beginning his political career as a staffer in the party office. In late 2004, he split off and formed his own. With Hirsi Ali in hiding, he quickly became the most prominent anti-immigration voice in the country–and has remained so ever since. 
+For those who cared to look, the political ground had already begun to shift. Six months before Chirac’s trouncing of Le Pen and Fortuyn’s assassination, Denmark had an election. On its surface the result was not a historical watershed; the centre-right Venstre party ousted the Social Democrats, handing power from one establishment party to the other. What had changed was that the Danish People’s Party, which had campaigned on an overtly anti-immigrant platform, took 12% of the vote–transforming it into a kingmaker in parliament. 
+Unlike France, which revelled in its triumph over the FN, or the Netherlands, where the remains of Fortuyn’s party failed to become a real parliamentary force, the DPP immediately became a serious player with real influence over policy. And it was not only taking votes from the right; it was also attracting disgruntled social democratic voters who felt that their leaders had abandoned them. 
+The DPP had crafted a social and economic policy that was in many ways more socialist than that of the Social Democrats–promising better health care, better care for the elderly, and more subsidised housing. As the outgoing Social Democratic prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen told me in 2002, a few months after his defeat: “They took a part of our rhetoric and tried to sell it as a new package to the people, and with some success, one may say.” Back then, Naser Khader, a Danish member of parliament who immigrated from Syria as a child, argued that “the best way to weaken the DPP is to give them influence”. He was wrong. 
+The headquarters of the Front National sits on a quiet street in the unassuming Paris suburb of Nanterre, near a car repair shop and a Portuguese restaurant. Only when you approach the grey building with its mostly closed blue shutters do the armed guards come into view. In her modest second-floor office, surrounded by books and a cloud of vape smoke, Marine Le Pen explained earlier this year how she transformed a party previously known for calling the Holocaust a “ detail of history ” into a genuine contender for the presidency. 
+“Voluntarily or not, he gave ammunition to our adversaries,” Le Pen said of her father. But she insisted that she has now cleaned house. “I fired them all . . . all those people who expressed an ideology or held views that I found unacceptable.” 
+Julien Rochedy, a 28-year-old who headed the FN’s youth wing but has since left the party, told me that he believes the changes are real. Whereas the party’s former leader used to pepper his speeches with lines that made Jews’ hair stand on end, today, if someone tells a racist joke within the party, “you will be attacked straight away,” Rochedy said. “There is such self-discipline these days. They are so afraid they’ll be accused once again of being antisemitic or racist.” 
+Still, the party’s detractors continue to level the same charges at the FN, which outrages Marine Le Pen . “Today our adversaries no longer have that ammunition, and they repeat on loop” old tropes about fascists and racists. “At a certain point this argument loses its force,” she continued, “because voters see clearly that there’s absolutely nothing in our platform that remotely resembles fascism or racism.” 
+Le Pen has done more than kick out the most blatant racists and antisemites. She has consciously crafted a campaign designed to appeal to voters of the centre and left–and other constituencies–who could never have imagined voting for her father’s Front National. 
+As Le Monde’s Olivier Faye has written , she is “trying to erase another image that has stuck to the skin of the FN–that of homophobia”. And it is working: a survey showed that her share of the vote among married gay couples in the 2015 regional elections was over 32%–up from just 19% in a similar poll from 2012. 
+As Le Pen has filled her inner circle with more and more openly gay advisers and party leaders, she has also made her pitch to Jewish voters more explicit: “For a lot of French Jews, the FN appears to be the only movement that can defend them from this new antisemitism nourished in the banlieues ,” Le Pen told me. “In a very natural way they have turned toward the FN, because the FN is capable, I think, of protecting them from that.” 
+Among French voters threatened by the country’s new diversity, rejection of a multicultural society increasingly takes the form of longing for a bygone era. And peddling nostalgia is the centrepiece of many new far-right parties across Europe . In France, Marine Le Pen has promised a return to a time when the French had their own currency and monetary policy, when there were fewer mosques and less halal meat, when no one complained about nativity scenes in public buildings, and when French schools promoted a republican ethos of assimilation. 
+“A growing number of French people feel uncomfortable in their own country,” the prominent philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut , declared in January during a debate with the centre-right presidential candidate Alain Juppé–who has taken a less strident line on Islam and migration than his rival Nicolas Sarkozy. Finkielkraut depicted contemporary France as a country of halal butchers and tea shops filled only with men, pleading that “the public good isn’t in the clouds, it’s made from tangible things–the French of Proust and Montaigne . . . the Jardin du Luxembourg and the cows of Normandy”. 
+Finkielkraut, a 67-year-old Jewish liberal, is not an admirer of the Front National, but Marine Le Pen’s deliberate appeals to Jews and gay people have given political expression to an argument that he first made more than a decade ago–that the left, with its indulgence of Islam, poses a greater threat to France than the far right. After Chirac “saved” the republic from Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, Finkielkraut watched the celebrations in the streets and warned that the victors were the real danger: “The future of hate is in their camp and not in the camp of those nostalgic for Vichy,” he wrote, “ . . . in the camp of the multicultural society and not that of the ethnic nation–in the camp of respect, not that of rejection.” 
+Fourteen years later, after the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan and Nice, Finkielkraut is even more certain he was correct. “Anti-racism today frequently serves as a pretext for not seeing the true danger that threatens us,” he told me when we met in his Paris apartment this summer. While he is still no fan of the FN, he believes it has changed and argues that it “should be resisted, but for what it is today and not what it was in the past, and not in the name of anti-fascism”. The French must, he insisted, “avoid simplistic analogies with the 1930s. We must not mistake what era we live in. Europe doesn’t only have demons; it also has enemies, and it needs to know how to fight those enemies.” 
+He worries that integration has been such a failure that France will have to “reconquer” its “lost territories”–by which he means the suburbs surrounding Paris. “Integrating people is not telling them ‘You are how you are and we are how we are’ . . . Integration means making them an integral part of our civilisation.” And if that doesn’t happen, he warned darkly, “at best we’ll have secession and at worst civil war”. Continued immigration from Muslim countries, he argues, is nothing less than the “planned demise of Europe”. 
+Across the country, nostalgia for an older, whiter France has become a potent political force. In the southern city of Béziers, Mayor Robert Ménard, a former Trotskyist who cofounded the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders , is seeking to place a moratorium on the opening of kebab shops and has renamed a street after one of the French officers who joined a failed coup against De Gaulle in 1961 to prevent Algerian independence . Ménard comes from a family of pieds-noirs , French settlers in Algeria. He regards the Evian accords that ended the Algerian war as a “capitulation”, and those who tried to preserve French Algeria as heroes. 
+This nostalgia has an unmistakable appeal, but not necessarily for the sort of voters one might expect. Whereas young Britons overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and the elderly voted to leave, in France it is the opposite. According to Julian Rochedy, the former FN youth leader, appeals to nostalgia work better with the young in France–who dream of an era they never witnessed–than with the old, who lived through the era Marine Le Pen promises to restore. It is older voters, Rochedy argues, who are the greatest obstacle to Le Pen’s victory. “They are afraid of leaving the euro,” he says. “They are afraid of huge changes.” Rochedy is convinced that the FN will never win simply by fetishising the past. “They just want to go back 30 years,” he said of his erstwhile colleagues. “It’s a discourse that doesn’t at all take into account the world as it is and what France has become.” 
+Even if Le Pen cannot win over enough older voters for her to become president, there is one ageing constituency that has already moved significantly to the right–the former members of what used to be the largest communist party in western Europe. 
+As the French Communist party collapsed, its supporters were left rudderless. According to Andrew Hussey, a Liverpool-born academic who teaches in Paris, the technocratic leaders of the Socialist party– many of them graduates of the ultra-elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration–“are so disconnected from ordinary people” that even former Marxists won’t consider voting for them. Distrustful of the establishment and searching for a state that protects them, many have turned to the FN. “I think you’ve got a big political question here about who looks after you,” Hussey said. “This is a very communist way of thinking.” 
+Le Pen knows that she is attracting these people. Many of her supporters “used to be socialists, but they aren’t any more”, she told me. Although she prefers to avoid the phrase welfare state–“That’s a socialist concept,” she insisted–Le Pen has appealed directly to this yearning for a large and nurturing state that fights for the common man and not the rich. 
+“I defend fraternity–the idea that a developed country should be able to be able to provide the poorest with the minimum needed to live with dignity as a human being. The French state no longer does that,” she told me. “We’re in a world today in which you either defend the interests of the people or the interests of the banks.” And she has seen results. She points to the northern Pas-de-Calais region. “It was socialist-communist for 80 years,” she says. “I won 45%.” 
+At the same time as Marine Le Pen was working to “de-demonise” the FN, the leaders of the Dutch far right successfully seized the mantle of radicalism by positioning itself as the only force that dares to challenge an out-of-touch political establishment, and the only party willing to speak out about what many voters fear: extremist Islam. 
+Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) have surpassed the Dutch Labour party to take up a close second place in polls ahead of the March 2017 election. Last September, Wilders declared that Europe was facing an “ Islamic invasion ”–the sort of comments that landed him in court this week on charges of inciting racial hatred , which he dismisses as an attack on freedom of expression. 
+The presence of “masses of young men in their 20s with beards singing ‘Allahu Akbar’ across Europe”, Wilders warned at the peak of last year’s refugee crisis, posed a dire threat to “our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity”. Across the country, grassroots groups responded to Wilders’s warning, attempting to block the resettlement of asylum seekers in their towns. Last October, Klaas Dijkhoff, the deputy minister responsible for refugee resettlement, arrived for a visit to the tiny north-eastern village of Oranje, where the Dutch government had decided to place 700 refugees. Outraged locals blocked the road leading to town, kicked Dijkhoff’s car and tore off its rearview mirrors. A few days later, near Utrecht, an asylum centre was attacked by masked men with smoke bombs and fireworks. 
+In the decade following the assassinations of Fortuyn and Van Gogh, the integration of Muslim immigrants became the most divisive issue in Dutch politics. Suddenly, Turkish and Moroccan-born Dutch citizens became “Muslims”. And as the public debate over Islam and migration grew even more hostile, even the most basic forms of visible religious observance–wearing the hijab, buying halal meat, fasting during Ramadan–became politically loaded. 
+The Dutch Labour MP Ahmed Marcouch, who came to the Netherlands from rural Morocco when he was 10, recounted how controversies have erupted everywhere from supermarkets to classrooms. It is a jolt to the traditionally liberal Netherlands when teenage girls tell their male teachers they can’t shake hands, or that they fast and pray while many other Dutch kids are out drinking and having sex. As Marcouch remarked, it runs against everything that Dutch youth culture promotes. 
+Wilders’s PVV has capitalised on this cultural angst by using simple and deliberately brash slogans about immigration, crime, and refugees–one of his latest memes is simply “De-Islamise”–to win over voters who feel that everything familiar to them is slipping away. 
+By framing its anti-migrant politics as a battle against imperious elites and political correctness, the PVV has been able to capitalise on a panoply of grievances, from anger over asylum seekers to Euroscepticism. Meanwhile, many causes of the radical left–including anti-racism and anti-colonialism–have now become establishment thinking in the Netherlands. “Idealism has been bureaucratised,” argues the journalist Bas Heijne, who writes a column in the liberal daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad. “And when the establishment enforces universalism, you react against it.” That’s why there is such a strong anti-PC tone to the Dutch right: do not tell us what to say, what to celebrate and who we must live next to. 
+Just as Marine Le Pen’s FN has become a huge presence on social media in France, the right is in the midst of colonising the Dutch media. Geen Stijl (“No Style”), a popular Breitbart-style news site featuring abrasive articles and videos, encourages its best and angriest commenters to visit mainstream news sites and go on the attack. “It is massively important,” says Tilburg University’s Merijn Oudenampsen, “like a social movement”. The site began as a blog dedicated to those who felt politically homeless after Fortuyn’s murder, and has since become a ubiquitous presence in Dutch public debate, with an army of “reactors” on Twitter. According to Oudenampsen, some politicians have told him that Geen Stijl is the first site they check in the morning. 
+The right’s newfound media clout has also helped shape what the journalist Kustaw Bessems, from the leftwing Volkskrant newspaper, sees as a new, inverted, form of political correctness. In the old days, he says, there were taboos enforced by the left: badmouth immigrants and “you were immediately called a racist and extreme right and basically pressured to shut up”. Now, it’s the other way around. “As soon as you say anything other than ‘immigration is a problem’ or ‘Islam is the cause of terrorism’ . . . the thought police immediately jump on your neck to correct you.” 
+A Dutch government official who focuses on security issues complained that even as the integration of Muslim immigrants and the threat of radical Islam had become the most heated and polarising issues in the Netherlands, almost none of the feverish public debate was informed by knowledge of Islamism or terrorism. While politicians fan the flames of fear, the official said, “the economists look for the economic roots of the problem, sociologists look for social causes and the anthropologists try to explain jihadi culture–but none of them have any idea about theology”. Even scholars of radicalisation tend to study today’s extremists through the historical lens of the European radical left–which does little to explain what leads a small number of young Muslim men such as Van Gogh’s killer, Mohamed Bouyeri, to devote themselves to the cause of jihad. “It’s easy to be a Marxist,” the security official quipped. “It’s fucking hard to be a salafi.” 
+As the perception that the state is helpless to prevent the radicalisation of Muslim teenagers deepens and the fear of terrorism increases, so does the share of voters who are newly receptive to the far right’s tirades about “Islamisation”. These days it is not only anti-migration activists pushing back against the bureaucratised consensus. There are also many disappointed progressives–the people who saw the cultural victories of the 1960s and 1970s as major battles that had long since been won, making sexual freedom, feminism and gay rights an unquestioned part of Dutch society. Suddenly those old victories seem tenuous. “There is a sense that, ‘We are welcoming and then they do this,’ says Bas Heijne. “They have been terribly let down in their good intentions.” And in such an environment, traditionally leftist constituencies such as gay people and Jews feel threatened–and some have become reflexively suspicious of Muslims. 
+The stereotype that observant Muslims hate gay men and lesbians has become so entrenched in the Netherlands that neither side can fathom evidence to the contrary. When the Moroccan-born Labour MP Ahmed Marcouch first joined in Amsterdam’s legendary gay pride parade , he was, as he puts it, the “first hetero-active Muslim” to participate. The gay community feared violence from extremists; conservative Muslims were baffled and angry. Both groups concluded, “Oh, maybe Marcouch is homosexual too,” he says with a laugh. Neither group could imagine a straight Muslim doing what he did. 
+But public displays of solidarity such as Marcouch’s are rare. Among openly gay couples and religious Jews alike, there is a palpable fear of being targeted by homophobic or antisemitic young Muslim men. Much as in France, this fraught atmosphere has made far-right parties seem a palatable option for groups who would never previously have considered voting for them. 
+In Amsterdam earlier this year, I had several meetings with a staunch Jewish supporter of Wilders’s PVV, who insisted on remaining anonymous. He described his own backing for the far right in terms that echoed Alain Finkielkraut. “It’s an outdated reflex for Jews to always say the problem is the extreme right,” he told me. “We have new enemies and we need new ideas.” 
+The experience of his own family during the second world war has convinced him that Europe’s capacity for murderous violence is always lurking beneath the surface. “Anne Frank wasn’t betrayed by the Germans,” he argued. “But by Dutch people. Regular Dutch.” Jews need to find new allies in a new war, he argues, because they will never be safe. “The trains for the Jews will always come,” he added, ominously. “I’d rather be wrong than be too calm and end up on the trains.” 
+He is not unsympathetic to the plight of European Muslims, and told me that he even sees parallels with the persecution his own family faced. “If I were a Muslim in Europe at this moment I’d be very uneasy,” he admitted. “If Europeans regain their manhood, it could be bad. It’s the history of Europe to treat foreigners terribly. We Jews know that.” 
+For that reason, he argues, Muslims should regard Wilders as a lesser evil. “Every Muslim should be happy Geert Wilders exists. If someone else channelled these hateful feelings it would be much worse,” he told me menacingly. “Wilders is civil. He is a democrat. He is not the new Hitler.” 
+To Frits Bolkestein, who led the Netherlands’ centre-right VVD in the 1990s–and was briefly Wilders’ boss when he was a young aide in the party office–the rise of the far right is as much about class as it is about Islam. The Dutch Labour party, he argues, gave up on its working-class base: “They made a major mistake,” he says of his old rivals, with a tinge of satisfaction. Faced with “the choice between the foreign-born and the labour classes, they chose the foreign-born … and they’ve paid for it dearly”. Current polls project that the party will drop from the 36 seats it now holds (out of 150) to just 10. 
+Marcouch concedes that, like the old leftists in France, many former Labour voters now back Wilders. Moreover, he says, they still live in the very neighbourhoods that families such as his own moved into in the 1980s, as many white Dutch families were moving out. “Their message to the Labour party,” he said, “is: ‘You ignored us. You let it happen.’” 
+The Danish People’s Party has been seeking out such voters for years, and they have masterfully leveraged anti-immigrant sentiment to siphon away the Social Democrats’ traditional base–people who fear that the “bread will be buttered more thinly”, as the Danish journalist Lars Trier Mogensen puts it. 
+The DPP has effectively combined anti-immigrant rhetoric with a strong pro-welfare message that stresses quality health benefits and good care for the elderly. Søren Espersen, the DPP’s deputy leader, doesn’t think that former Social Democrats will ever go back. “When one of those takes the step to vote for us, it is a very, very huge step he is taking,” he says of voters who supported the Social Democrats all their lives. “And why should he go back? I mean, to come over this first hurdle of voting for us, then he’s done it.” 
+The Social Democrats first began to lose their dominance in and around the major cities in the 1990s, with many of their votes going to the DPP. One of those places is the small satellite town of Herlev, about 10 miles west of Copenhagen. The 41-year-old Social Democratic mayor, Thomas Gyldal Petersen, has lived there all his life, and he is adamant that controlling immigration numbers is the only way to reverse his party’s political misfortunes. 
+For Gyldal Petersen, the key to successful integration is a demographic balance. As soon as a school or housing estate becomes majority immigrant–or majority unemployed–he says, problems start to arise. He blames his own party’s leaders: “Mayors in the 80s, they were warning, something is going wrong, you have to change.” But the party leadership “shut their eyes”, he says. 
+Then came the Muhammad cartoons . In 2005, the editors at Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s largest newspaper, invited a group of well-known cartoonists to draw the prophet. The initial response was underwhelming, but within a few months–through a combination of diplomatic pressure, a dismissive response from the Danish government, and a concerted campaign by local imams–the cartoons became a full-blown crisis, with boycotts of Danish products and violent protests occurring throughout the Middle East. Danes who had never contemplated voting for the DPP now saw their embassies on fire and death threats against some of their best-known journalists. Suddenly, the DPP’s platform was making sense. They had warned that Muslims were extremists in waiting, and now those warnings seemed to come true. Politicians such as Naser Khader, who once warned that giving the DPP influence would weaken them, found themselves moving steadily to the right of the political spectrum. When Khader founded a new organisation called “Democratic Muslims” in the wake of the cartoon controversy, he received death threats. 
+Those at the top of the Social Democrats are now taking a tough stance, too. Earlier this year the party leader, Mette Frederiksen, went to Stockholm to meet with fellow Scandinavian social democrats. There she gave a speech that rattled her colleagues. “We social democrats must accept that there is a clash,” she declared. “It is a very strong part of our identity that we help when people need help . . . but just as strong is our value that we must have a well-functioning welfare state.” Frederiksen continued: “My position is that a universally funded Scandinavian welfare state with free and equal access to healthcare, education and social subsidies is not compatible with an open immigration policy.” 
+But in its zeal to get tough on migration, Denmark has damaged its international reputation as a bastion of progressivism–the sort of place that Bernie Sanders liked to mention at campaign rallies. In January, just three months after the refugee crisis peaked, Denmark passed what became known as the “ jewellery law ”, which stipulated that any refugees carrying valuables worth more than 10,000 kroner (£1,200) would have them confiscated to fund the cost of accommodating asylum-seekers. Editorial pages and columnists across the world lined up to condemn the law. According to Kenneth Kristensen Berth, a babyfaced MP for the DPP, it was about deterrence. “The goal was, of course, that we should try to tell people that they should not seek asylum in Denmark,” he said. The jewellery provision was a minor part. “More important is the fact that many people will be waiting longer for family reunification, like waiting three years,” he added. And it wasn’t just the DPP and government who supported it–the Social Democrats voted for it, too. 
+Bent Melchior, Denmark’s 87-year-old former chief rabbi, was outraged. He bristled at the suggestion that refugees are rich because they flee with some money in their pockets. He would know: although Denmark is always hailed for saving its Jews during the second world war, it is often forgotten that Danish Jews paid fishermen huge sums to ferry them across to Sweden. Melchior’s family paid the equivalent of “almost a year’s rent of a six-room flat” just for his own passage. “Denmark is not a poor country, for God’s sake,” Melchior says. “There’s food for everybody here, and even if we get a few tens of thousands more people, there will still be food for everybody.” 
+The road that led a centre-left party to support such a law has been long and tortuous, but the trajectory has been clear. The Scandinavian welfare system has always been premised on solidarity, with everyone paying their fair share and receiving what they deserve. As the country has become more diverse, some of the trust sustaining it has broken down. There has been abuse of the system by immigrants, and there has been even more tabloid fearmongering depicting immigrants as cheats and leeches sucking the system dry. But the larger issue, as the Oxford economist Paul Collier has argued, is the growing unwillingness of natives to subsidise those seen as the foreign poor. 
+Herlev’s mayor does not oppose asylum, but he insists that the numbers have to be capped. “We have to help refugees, and we have to take refugees to Denmark in a number that we can help. If the balance tips, the welfare society cannot hold together,” Petersen warns. 
+But such balance may only help so much. Aydin Soei, a Danish sociologist and the son of immigrants from Iran, believes there is a larger blind spot in the thinking of the Danish government–one that native Danes who have never been on the receiving end of the state’s integration policy have failed to see. “A lot of refugees were just parked on social welfare instead of [the state] recognising their education and their skills,” Soei told me, citing the case of his own mother, who arrived in Denmark with a physics degree that was regarded as worthless. “If your motivation is to create a liberal society where the individual can create a good life for him or herself, then you would have solved this problem years ago,” he argues. 
+Instead the state has effectively provided newcomers with an allowance and keys to an apartment, and ignored them–assuming that its work was done. The problem, Soei claims, is that there is no political incentive to integrate asylum seekers into the job market. “It doesn’t have consequences for the politicians . . . because they don’t have the right to vote.” Either way, it plays into the DPP’s argument. “Immigrants can’t do right,” said Gyldal Petersen. “When they’re unemployed they’re a burden to society. When they’re in a job, they just stole the job from a Dane.” 
+Whether or not Marine Le Pen wins next year’s French election or Wilders’ PVV becomes the largest party in the Netherlands, the new far right is not going away. The reflex among many establishment parties–and media institutions–has been to dismiss them, sideline them or mock them. Others, however, have begun to mimic them in an effort to win their old voters back. 
+Rhetoric might, in the long run, matter more than election results. When I spoke again recently with the Jewish Wilders supporter from Amsterdam, he was convinced that the battle has in some ways already been won–regardless of the outcome of next year’s elections. “The PVV has shifted the whole political discussion to the right. The Labour party is saying almost exactly the same thing Wilders said five years ago,” he told me. “You can have a lot of influence in politics by steering the debate.” 
+If traditional political parties want to win, they must first abandon the old strategy of marginalising populist movements and instead engage them on the merits–and flaws–of their policies and counter their messages of fear. 
+Not least among the lessons of Brexit was that, for millions of disaffected voters, immigration is just one more thing nobody asked them about . This is what makes the issue an especially potent weapon: it combines the resentful energies of nativism, economic instability, and hatred of a remote and unaccountable political elite. And the leaders of the new far right have learned to wield it effectively. They know better than to let themselves be dismissed, as Jean-Marie Le Pen was, as antisemites or racists. 
+In France, the new majority Marine Le Pen hopes to build is strikingly similar to the coalition that brought the Brexit campaign victory. In a park near Calais’ castle-like town hall in May, Samuel and Pascal, activists from a group named Retake Calais, railed against the town’s centre-right mayor. They blamed her for the growth of the sprawling, trash-strewn tent city known as the Jungle, which sat three miles east of the town until it was dismantled this month . “Those who govern us are completely against us. The illegals, who aren’t French, can do whatever they want,” they told me. For them, even Marine Le Pen is “too soft”. 
+If resettlement programmes take refugees away from Calais to other parts of France, as dozens of buses have in the past week since the destruction of the camp, they would not be any happier. “They’re sending them to all the little villages in France,” says Samuel. After they start to open businesses and bring family members, “in two years the village will be dead”. 
+About a mile down the road, the Calais ferry terminal lies behind layers of tall steel fences and coiled barbed wire. I met Rudy Vercucque and Yohann Faviere, the local FN leaders, on a blustery morning in June outside the terminal, where they were anxiously awaiting a visiting EU dignitary. Giant seagulls circled and squawked above as they denounced the mayor, Natacha Bouchart, a member of Sarkozy’s Republicans party. 
+“It’s she who has permitted this,” Vercucque, a portly 35-year-old, fumed. And it was Sarkozy, he reminded me, who negotiated the notorious Le Touquet accords , effectively moving the British border to where we were standing. Calais depends on British tourism and revenues are down sharply. The result is crippling economic and social malaise: “Find a doctor who wants to move to Calais. Find a surgeon who wants to move to Calais,” Vercucque exclaimed. “You work your whole life, you pay off your house and you lose money. It’s intolerable.” Their support locally may have once been a protest vote, said Faviere, but no longer. “Today we really have people who adhere to our ideas.” 
+Vercucque was more blunt: “We say out loud what people think deep down.”",FAKE
+6844,Behind Hillary’s DISGUSTING Plot To Sabotage Bernie’s Campaign,"We all know by now that the Clinton campaign will stop at nothing to win. 
+Even if it means publishing embarrassing, demeaning photos of fellow Democrats, that’s just fine with them. 
+Evidenced a photo that was circulated showing Bernie Sanders in a swimming suit apparently attending a Democratic retreat. This was all while the Clinton team was hyping stories about Sanders attending fundraisers for wealthy benefactors (which, let’s be honest, pales in comparison to the “ wealthy benefactors” Hillary has in her back pocket). 
+Breitbart reported that Tina Flournoy, Bill Clinton’s Chief of staff emailed the photo of Sanders sunning himself by a pool to Brian Fallon and John Podesta, two Clinton lackeys: 
+Fallon’s response? “OMG!” 
+“Can we tweet?” Podesta asked. 
+Fallon responded “I think we shd give to NY post.” Flournoy added she’d send more juicy details about the event, including the people who attended. 
+“Thank you,” Fallon replied. “ We are on this .” 
+The entire conversation was part of the ongoing WikiLeaks document hacks of John Podesta’s account. The New York Post apparently never ran with the story, but that didn’t stop the Clinton camp from sending it to other people. It was published by celebrity gossip dirtbag Perez Hilton the day after the Clinton team discussed releasing it. 
+“I wonder what Mike Bloomberg would think about this???” wrote Hilton on his blog. “Bernie Sanders lounges at elite Martha’s Vineyard pool, summer 2015 after helping raise money from Wall Street lobbyists.” 
+Just the next week, there were several stories in the media questioning Sanders for even attending the fundraiser for Harry Reid. 
+“For Sanders, campaign finance purity not always possible” wrote MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald, citing “a guest list obtained by MSNBC” that included “previously unreported are details about who exactly attended those fundraisers.” 
+“Bernie Sanders: Prolific Democratic Party fundraiser,” wrote CNN’s Eric Bradner on Monday, February 8, announcing that “CNN has obtained invitations that listed Sanders as a host for at least one Majority Trust event in each year since 2011.” 
+Then both Bill and Hillary picked up on those same media stories, accusing Sanders of taking Wall Street money – the height of hypocrisy. 
+“Senator Sanders took about $200,000 from Wall Street firms,” Hillary Clinton said during a rally in New Hampshire on February 8. “Not directly but through the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. There is nothing wrong with that. It didn’t change his view. Well, it didn’t change my view or my vote, either.” 
+Bill Clinton attacked Sanders, referring directly to the CNN story and pointing out that he likely accepted money from Wall Street. 
+And that’s how Hillary Clinton wins. By Any Means Necessary.",FAKE
+2663,"Normalizing Trump, demonizing Hillary: The media’s shameful strategy for the 2016 election","One of the most vexing challenges of the Trump phenomenon is how the press should deal with it. There’s never been anything quite like it and journalism is having to try to navigate this campaign as the rules are being rewritten on the fly. Back in the beginning,  The Huffington Post had tried to keep the whole thing in perspective by relegating the campaign to their entertainment pages but eventually had to move it back to the politics section when it became clear that Republican voters were actually taking Trump seriously. Today they cover him like a normal politician but append a standard disclaimer at the end of their articles about him pointing out that he’s an extremist with noxious views.
+
+Trump has brought the tabloids into the race already, with his good friend David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, helpfully providing smears of his rival Ted Cruz during the primary. Now Pecker has hired notorious Clinton hater Dick Morris as the Enquirer’s chief political correspondent so it’s likely Trump will be fed a steady diet of tabloid tid-bits which he will undoubtedly share with his adoring fans. So far, the mainstream media has resisted the temptation to run with Clinton gossip stories mainly because there’s so much coming over the transom about Trump. But they are out there and are likely to seep into the coverage as the Hillary smear industry gets up and running. There’s nothing new in that but Trump is a master of tabloid media so we can probably expect this to play a different role than it has in the past.
+
+TV news organizations, meanwhile, have been notorious for allowing Trump to flout their rules. They happily let him call in rather than appear on camera and give him hours of airtime in the hope that he’ll say something news worthy which, to be honest, he often does. His lies and reversals are so constant and so blatant that reporters seem to be almost paralyzed as he slithers and slides out of their grasp. He is sui generis and nobody knows quite what to do about it.
+
+Media critics have been weighing in recently as the situation has become acute. NPR’s “On the Media” correspondent Bob Garfield has been particularly vociferous lately imploring the media to recognize the threat that Donald Trump poses to America. In this column he takes them to task for covering the Trump candidacy “like a bemused recap of House of Cards.” He wrote:
+
+The rapacious CBS Chairman Les Moonves and the cable-newslike channels are delighted at the spectacle; disaster is always great for ratings. But this is not a show, to be consumed and titillated by and parsed. It is a conflagration of hatred and authoritarianism on its way to consuming us, or at least that which makes us us. Trumpism is raging out of control and the Fourth Estate responds how? By going through the motions. The usual false balance. The usual staged cable bickering. The usual dry contextual analysis. The usual intermittent truth-squading to garnish our careless daily servings of uncontested hate speech, incitement and manifest lies. The usual reluctance to “be part of the story” — which, in fact, we are inextricably part of because we in large measure created it by giving oxygen to his every incendiary outrage and being our soundbitten, compulsively enabling selves…[the]reflexive focus on the latest development, the political ebb and flow and the architecture of the coming election simply buries the lede — that the man is monstrously unfit and un-American — and normalizes the grossly, tragically abnormal.
+
+And then he tells them what he really thinks which is that they are falling into the trap of false equivalence between the parties, fear of right-wing pressure and a reluctance to call a fascist a fascist.
+
+Margaret Sullivan, former NY Times ombudsman and current media columnist for The Washington Post has similar concerns, particularly the notion that the media is pursuing a “false equivalence” rather than simple truth-telling:
+
+[T]his perceived need to push for “fairness” for Trump — as if he has been mistreated or put at a disadvantage — baffles me. Trump gets far more media attention than other candidates, if only because he says such outrageous things, commanding the daily news cycle over and over. Wayne Barrett, the investigative reporter who has been covering Trump for 40 years (and whose reporting brought about Trump’s first federal grand jury investigation) told me in an interview: “The great failing is not in print media. But the campaigns occur on the screen.”… Many hard-hitting stories from the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Daily Beast and elsewhere have received little follow-up on TV — “not one minute of air time that I’ve seen” — but the slightest hint of a new angle on Hillary Clinton’s email practices can occupy most of a news cycle. (An exception was TV’s attention, last week, to complaints about Trump University.) Jay Rosen, the New York University professor and author of the PressThink blog, is concerned about how this concept of fairness might play out. “Does it mean ‘we can’t take sides,’ or does it mean ‘let’s treat unequal things equally’?” The latter, which he called “distortion toward the middle,” ought to be prevented, he said.
+
+The Nation’s Eric Alterman wrote about the print media’s propensity for false equivalence as well, focusing particularly on the New York Times: From the earliest days of this campaign, Times reporters have been transparently eager to blame “both sides,” often regardless of circumstance. Last November, Times reporter Michael Barbaro devoted a lengthy article to the GOP candidates’ most brazen lies, albeit one filled with euphemisms for the word “lie.” Carly Fiorina “refused” to back down from a story about Planned Parenthood that was “roundly disputed,” he wrote. Ben Carson “harshly turned the questions” about inconsistencies in his life story “back on the reporters who asked them.” Donald Trump “utters plenty of refutable claims” and “set the tone for the embroidery” by creating “an entirely new category of overstatement in American politics.” But guess what? “The tendency to bend facts is bipartisan.” How do we know? Well, Gary Hart and Bill Clinton chose not to confess their infidelities to the nation during election cycles that took place a generation ago. And apparently Hillary Clinton once mistakenly described herself as being the granddaughter of four immigrants when, in fact, her paternal grandmother was born shortly after her family arrived in the United States—an error she quickly corrected. Barbaro also found Clinton’s explanations about her personal and State Department e-mail accounts to be unsatisfactory. He wrote that she had “used multiple devices, like an iPad, to read and send e-mail,” even though she’d said she “preferred” to read them all on a single device. He failed to note that the iPad didn’t even exist when Clinton set up her e-mail account, nor did he explain why expressing a preference counts as bending the truth Here is an example of false equivalence from just this week. Nobody has done more to probe Donald Trump’s noxious views than CNN’s Jake Tapper. His grilling of the candidate over his bigoted comments about the federal judge overseeing his Trump University lawsuit in California was as good as it gets and he received many kudos for his aggressive journalism. He continued to report on Trump on his show Monday but also featured this harsh criticism of Hillary Clinton in which he lambasted the State Department’s stated inability to release emails pertaining to her work on the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal to reporter David Sirota until after the election. He took on a very aggressive tone, editorializing about the importance of releasing this important information when people are deciding whether to vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.  However, he notes that while Clinton was President Obama’s Secretary of State she openly advocated for the deal in glowing terms, even calling it the “gold standard”, facts which have been known for years and have been well hashed out on the campaign trail and in the debates with Bernie Sanders. Now she says she has changed her mind and is against the deal. Politifact called it a flip-flop. So what exactly do they think they will learn about her position that they don’t already know? Maybe she was more involved than she says she was, which would be interesting, but somewhat meaningless since we know she advocated strongly for it all over the world. In the end, you either believe she’s really changed her mind or you don’t and these documents from years ago will not shed any new light on that. And yet the implication was that Clinton was up to something nefarious with those “damn emails” again. I don’t mean to pick on Tapper. He’s a great journalist, one of the best on cable news. The temptation to try to “even things out” with this sort of coverage has to be overwhelming when a personality like Trump dominates the coverage the way he does. It must feel to a straight mainstream journalist as if they’re piling on him every day and it looks like they’re being partisan and unfair. Certainly the right wing is accusing them of that non-stop — as they have been for more than 30 years. But the result of this “distortion toward the middle”  as Jay Rosen calls it, has the perverse effect of normalizing Trump and pathologizing Clinton in a way that equalizes them to Trump’s advantage. There is no equivalence between them. He is an unqualified, unfit, unhinged authoritarian demagogue and she is a mainstream Democratic party politician.  Let’s hope the press listens to some of these critics and does a serious gut check whenever they are tempted to “balance” the coverage in this election by going easy on Trump and hard on Clinton. It’s dangerous.",REAL
+3061,The Problems With Facebook’s Polarization Study,"Yesterday, Facebook released a study in Science that pushed back on the idea of the “filter bubble“: that social media creates a kind of echo chamber in which users never see arguments from the other side, helping to insulate those users from substantive political debate. Taken to its extreme, the Filter Bubble might almost completely close users off to new ideas and information, leaving them in a digital world where their viewpoints go ever unchallenged — and contributing to political polarization.
+
+“Facebook Use Polarizing? Site Begs to Differ,” the New York Times headline read. “You would think that if there was an echo chamber, you would not be exposed to any conflicting information,” a data scientist who worked on the study said, “but that’s not the case here.”
+
+But looking at the study, I came to very different conclusions. It absolutely shows that the “filter bubble” exists among some users, and that Facebook and its algorithms play a significant role in creating that bubble. But I can only make that claim about a small number of users that are likely not at all representative of the broader Facebook population, because Facebook relied on such an unusual sample of its users. In other words, despite the buzz this study is getting, we still don’t have a very good sense of how Facebook and other social-media services might or might not contribute to polarization.
+
+As pointed out by Nathan Jurgenson, the study only looks at people who self-identify their political orientation on the site. That means it only examines 9 percent of users, a number you’d only see if you read through the appendix, he notes. It also only looks at Facebook users who log in four to seven days a week, and who meet a few other criteria as well. That nudges the proportion of users examined in the study down to just 4 percent, or about 10 million users.
+
+Are those 4 percent of users representative of Facebook’s user base as a whole? Well, they aren’t randomly sampled. We know that identifying your political affiliation is a fairly rare behavior, given that fewer than one in ten users bothers to do so. My guess is that those users are much more politically engaged and likely much more partisan than the average user, and that’s probably going to affect what they click on and whom they are friends with. But how and how much that matters, I cannot say.
+
+There could also be something different about those Facebook users who log in frequently — maybe they post more or leave more comments. Again, we don’t know. But the point is that if you want to make any broad conclusions about a big population based on a study, you need a random, representative sample. You can’t survey three rich guys in Greenwich and declare that “America’s” favorite food is caviar.
+
+Social-media experts and data scientists are taking Facebook to task for not making all this clearer. “At first, I read this quickly and I took this to mean that out of the at least 200 million Americans who have used Facebook, the researchers selected a ‘large’ sample that was representative of Facebook users,” writes Christian Sandvig of the University of Michigan. “The ‘limitations’ section discusses the demographics of ‘Facebook’s users,’ as would be the normal thing to do if they were sampled. There is no information about the selection procedure in the article itself.”
+
+But even setting aside the sample issues, the study clearly does not show that those unusual users are exposed to a diverse set of viewpoints, nudged along by the Facebook algorithm. It shows that they see a fairly skewed set of viewpoints, with the Facebook algorithm contributing to the skew. Facebook filters out about 1 in 20 “cross-cutting” hard-news stories for conservatives and about 1 in 13 “cross-cutting” hard-news stories for liberals.
+
+Facebook attempts to distance itself from filter-bubble accusations by noting that individuals isolate themselves, too, with self-identified conservatives clicking on 17 percent fewer “cross-cutting” news stories than would be expected if they clicked at random, and liberals, 6 percent fewer. The company used that finding to argue that it plays less of a role than individuals themselves. But that’s only true for conservatives — not for liberals.
+
+And it’s not clear that Facebook can or should be arguing that it plays a smaller filtering role than individuals, given how the study was conducted in the first place and given that the two findings do not seem directly comparable. “I cannot remember a worse apples to oranges comparison I’ve seen recently, especially since these two dynamics, algorithmic suppression and individual choice, have cumulative effects,” writes Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina.
+
+No, the filter bubble feels like a very real phenomenon, and Facebook has just shown that for some users, it contributes to it. On social media, we hear what we want to hear, see what we want to see, and click what we want to click. Don’t let Facebook tell you otherwise.",REAL
+8185,Hillary Already Planning Fireworks for Victory Celebration,"Hillary Already Planning Fireworks for Victory Celebration November 1, 2016 
+People of the United States, your royal family . 
+Law enforcement officials and the FDNY have been told to prepare for a barge-launched pyrotechnic display off Manhattan’s Javits Center, where Clinton and running mate Tim Kaine will join their supporters for the Nov. 8 vote count, sources said. 
+The aerial detonations would last for two minutes, with the triumphal celebration permitted to start as early as 9:30 p.m. — a mere half-hour after the polls close in New York, sources said. 
+Fortunately pride has never been known to come before a fall. And hubris is a notoriously positive trait with no negative consequences. That must be why Hillary Clinton is down in the polls and facing yet another investigation while feuding with the FBI. 
+Cops and firefighters were blown away by Clinton’s hubris in planning the fireworks display, which would eclipse the shower of blazing sparkles that preceded the balloon drop at July’s Democratic National Convention. 
+“It’s a little presumptuous of her to plan on winning. I guess she put in for this before Friday,” one NYPD detective said. 
+Others said the actual election results could put a damper on things, but one firefighter raised the specter of a 2000-style recount and added, “So what’s she going to do, put the fireworks on ice?” 
+The arrogance is truly unchecked.",FAKE
+4103,Michelle Obama reflects on pressure she felt in '08,"Speaking at Tuskegee University in Alabama, Obama told the audience that when her husband was running for office in 2008, she faced questions which she said were not typical for other candidates' wives.
+
+""As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations, conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others,"" she told the class of 2015. ""Was I too loud or too emasculating? Or was I too soft? Too much of a mom and not enough of a career woman?""
+
+Obama referenced the cover of the July 2008 issue of The New Yorker, in which Obama was depicted with her husband as terrorist enemies of the United States.
+
+""Then there was the first time I was on a magazine cover. It was a cartoon drawing of me with a huge afro and a machine gun. Now, yeah, it was satire, but if I'm really being honest, it knocked me back a bit. It made me wonder 'just how are people seeing me?'""
+
+In her nearly 30-minute speech, the first lady recalled other particularly tough moments, including being referred to on Fox News as her ""husband's crony of color"" and ""Obama's baby mama."" She also recalled a moment on the campaign trail when she gave her husband a fist bump to celebrate a primary win, later to be referred to by an anchor on that network as a ""terrorist fist jab."" ""Back in those days, I had a lot of sleepless nights worrying what people thought of me,"" she recalled. Obama added that she let the criticism get to the point where she would wonder if she was hurting her husband's chances of becoming President, while also fearing what her daughters would think. The first lady said eventually the only thing she could do to prevent others from defining her was to ""ignore all of the noise."" ""I had to be true to myself and the rest would work itself out,"" she recounted, to cheers from the audience. Obama also said that once she became first lady and was working on platforms and issues that were important to her she was once again criticized for her choices not ""being bold enough."" ""So I immersed myself in the policy details. I worked with Congress on legislation, gave speeches to CEOs, military generals and Hollywood executives."" Obama said. ""But I also worked to ensure that my efforts would resonate with kids and families -- and that meant doing things in a creative and unconventional way. So, yeah, I planted a garden, and hula-hooped on the White House lawn with kids. I did some mom dancing on TV ... And at the end of the day, by staying true to the me I've always known, I found that this journey has been incredibly freeing."" – In 2010, first lady Michelle Obama started Let's Move!, an initiative to address childhood obesity and help all our kids grow up healthy. Here she participates in musical activities with students in an event at Orr Elementary School in Washington in 2013. – The theme for the fifth year anniversary of Let's Move! is: Celebrate, challenge, champion. The first lady joins in at the Healthy Kids Fair on the South Lawn of the White House in 2009. – Across America, cities, towns and counties are supporting healthy afters-school programs and youth sports leagues. Here kids attend a Let's Move! event at Woldenberg Park in New Orleans in 2010. 
+
+ – Through the initiative, millions of kids are attending healthier day care centers, where fruits and vegetables have replaced cookies and juice. Michelle Obama speaks at a Let's Move! Walmart announcement at The Arc in Washington in 2010. – Nearly 9 million kids participate in the Let's Move! Active Schools program and get 60 minutes of physical activity a day. Nearly 5 million kids will be attending healthier after-school programs in the next five years. The first lady meets with students in New Hampshire Estates Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 2010. 
+
+ – The first lady speaks about Let's Move! at the Visitors Center in Red Rock Canyon, Nevada, in 2010. – Childhood obesity rates have finally stopped rising -- and obesity rates are actually falling among our youngest children, according to Let's Move! initiative. The first lady attends the White House Kitchen Garden harvest on the South Lawn in 2010. – While Let's Move! has made strides in helping kids become healthy, the statistics are still daunting. Here she attends a partnership event with Chicago Blackhawks and Washington Capitals players on the South Lawn of the White House in 2011. – First lady Michelle Obama and Ellen DeGeneres dance during a taping of ""The Ellen DeGeneres Show"" marking the second anniversary of Let's Move! in Burbank, California, in 2012. – America still spends nearly $200 billion a year on obesity-related health care costs, and that figure will jump to nearly $350 billion a year by 2018, according to Let's Move! campaign. Michelle Obama visits the Fresh Grocer store in Philadelphia in 2010. – The first lady attends a chef's demonstration with third-grade students from Pocantico Hill School and John F. Kennedy Magnet School, before a luncheon at Blue Hill Farm in Pocantico Hills, New York, in 2010. – First lady says she is committed to giving kids the healthy futures they deserve. Here she works with chefs and students in the White House Kitchen Garden on the South Lawn in 2010. Obama added that she has since learned to focus on her ""own truth,"" and suggested that the graduates of Tuskegee University, a historically black university, will have to do the same in life. She told the graduates they would face hardships in the future, warning that no matter how hard the students work or where they rise to in life, for some people it won't be enough. Obama said this is the fuel for much of the unrest across communities in America, making a reference to some of the racial controversies being played out in several American cities. ""All of that is gonna be a heavy burden to carry. It can feel isolating. It can make you feel like your life somehow doesn't matter ... And as we've seen over the past few years, those feelings are real. They're rooted in decades of structural challenges that have made too many folks feel frustrated and invisible, and those feelings are playing out in communities like Baltimore and Ferguson and so many others across this country,"" Obama said. The first lady concluded by saying that while those feelings are real, they are never an excuse for the graduates to give up or lose hope but instead provide a better example of how to succeed. ""It teaches us that when we pull ourselves out of the emotional depths and we challenge our frustrations into studying and organizing and banding together, then we can build ourselves and our communities up,"" she said. ""We can take on those deep rooted problems, and together, together we can overcome anything."" Actor Robert De Niro addressed the class of 2015 during New York University's Tisch School of the Arts commencement ceremony on May 22, 2015. De Niro, who quit high school to pursue an acting career, told grads: ""You made it — and, you're f—ed."" Click through to see more big-name speakers at universities across the country. Rock star and philanthropist Jon Bon Jovi performs a new song during graduation ceremonies at Rutgers University on May 21. Comedian Maya Rudolph addressed graduates of Tulane University in New Orleans on May 16. First lady Michelle Obama delivered the commencement address at Tuskegee University on May 9. She'll also speak at Oberlin College in Ohio on May 25. President Barack Obama delivered the commencement address at Lake Area Technical Institute in Watertown, South Dakota, on May 8. South Dakota was the last of the 50 states Obama had not visited as president. He also spoke at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, on May 20. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley delivered a commencement address at the University of South Carolina in Columbia on May 8. Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Scott also delivered a commencement address at the University of South Carolina on May 9. Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins was the graduation speaker for Pepperdine University's undergraduate Seaver College on May 2. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta on May 2. NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe U.S. Gen. Philip M. Breedlove also spoke at Georgia Tech on May 2. Walter Isaacson, author and president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, was the Senior Day speaker at Vanderbilt University in Nashville on May 7. ""Good Morning America"" anchor Amy Robach addressed graduates from University of Georgia on May 8. Robach is a graduate of the Athens, Georgia, university. Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington delivered the commencement speech at Dillard University in New Orleans on May 9. Jason Kilar, the co-founder and CEO of Vessel and founding CEO of Hulu, delivered the commencement address at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on May 10. Kilar graduated from Carolina in 1993. Paul Farmer, right, co-founder of Partners in Health, was the commencement speaker at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, on May 10. Author and human rights advocate Salman Rushdie spoke at Emory University's commencement in Atlanta on May 11. Filmmaker Ken Burns spoke at the commencement of Washington University in St. Louis on May 15. Actor Matthew McConaughey was the speaker at the University of Houston's commencement ceremony on May 15. The university was initially reluctant to release what McConaughey would be paid for the appearance, The Houston Chronicle reported, but eventually shared the details: $135,000, plus travel fees and commission for his agency. McConaughey is expected to give the money to his jk livin Foundation. Comedian Ed Helms, shown earlier, addressed graduates at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville on May 15. Former U.S. President George W. Bush spoke at commencement at Southern Methodist University in Dallas on May 16. Paralympic skiing medalist, former White House official and author Bonnie St. John addressed graduates at Miami University in Ohio on May 16. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, shown earlier, addressed students at Tufts University on May 16. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke at the commencement at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, on May 16. Journalist Katie Couric, shown at an earlier event, spoke to graduates of the University of Wisconsin in Madison on May 16. Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered the commencement address at George Washington University in Washington on May 17. Craig Melvin, a national correspondent for NBC's ""Today,"" spoke at Wofford University in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on May 17. Melvin is a 2001 Wofford graduate. Actress Stephanie Courtney, known as Flo in commercials for Progressive Insurance, spoke at Binghamton University's commencement on May 17. Courtney graduated from the Binghamton, New York, university in 1992. Lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, who guided the One Fund after the Boston Marathon bombing and the compensation fund for the families of those killed on September 11th, 2001, was the commencement speaker at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, on May 17. ""Science Guy"" Bill Nye accepted an honorary doctorate degree and spoke to graduates of Rutgers University on May 17. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power spoke at the University of Pennsylvania on May 18. Comedian Stephen Colbert addressed graduates at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on May 18. Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick will address graduates at Harvard University on May 28. Film director, screenwriter and producer Christopher Nolan will address graduates of Princeton University in New Jersey during Class Day on June 1. Fareed Zakaria, host of ""GPS"" on CNN, will address graduates of Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York on June 2. Megan Smith, the chief technology officer of the United States, will give the commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on June 5. NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel will speak at Stanford University's commencement on June 14. Virginia Rometty, chairwoman, president and chief executive officer of IBM, will give the commencement address at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, on June 19.",REAL
+598,California governor signs bill to automatically register people to vote,"Federal laws already allow people across the country the option to register to vote at the DMV. But Oregon and California's laws are pioneering because they do it automatically.
+
+It's hard to overstate how novel this concept is for the US. Throughout much of United States history, governments frequently put up barriers aimed at preventing people from voting, such as property ownership requirements, poll taxes, or literacy tests.
+
+Gradually, many of these barriers have fallen to make it easier for people to register. However, many states, including California, still close off registration weeks to a month before an election — an artificial obstacle that can prevent perfectly qualified people from voting if they simply miss a deadline.
+
+These new proposals remove those obstacles. Oregon's law will register all adult citizens in the DMV's database, while California's law will be implemented more gradually, as people get or renew their licenses or state IDs, or change their addresses. But both make it the government's responsibility to ensure that all eligible voters are registered.
+
+So it's a big deal that governments are now trying to make it easier and easier to vote, rather than more difficult. Matt Yglesias has argued for going even further and enshrining an affirmative right to vote in our Constitution — read his case here.
+
+In both California and Oregon, Republicans opposed these proposals, but generally didn't argue against the principle of easing registration. Instead, the criticisms have fallen along two main lines.
+
+First, critics have argued that since voter registration data is more publicly accessible than DMV information, automatically adding voters to the rolls could pose privacy concerns. However, supporters respond that people can always opt out.
+
+Second, some Republicans have cited concerns about voter fraud — usually about potential registration of unauthorized immigrants. But while California began issuing driver's licenses to unauthorized immigrants this year, these licenses are distinctively marked, and people with them would not be registered to vote automatically. And Oregon requires proof of citizenship for all driver's license applicants.
+
+Meanwhile, national Democrats are increasingly adopting mandatory voter registration as a major cause. In a speech on voting rights this June, Hillary Clinton called on all states to automatically register citizens to vote when they turn 18, unless they choose to opt out. And legislators in 15 other states have introduced bills similar to Oregon's new law — the Brennan Center is tracking them here.",REAL
+2550,Trump: Undocumented Children Aren't US Citizens,"Billionare Donald Trump is doubling down on his controversial immigration policy.
+
+His latest proposal: revoke the citizenship of American-born children of undocumented immigrants, a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
+
+On Fox News' ""The O'Reilly Factor"" on Tuesday night, the GOP's presidential frontrunner envisioned kicking all 11 million undocumented immigrants out of the country.
+
+""Do you envision federal police kicking in the doors in barios around the country, dragging families out and putting them on a bus? Do you envision that?"" host Bill O'Reilly asked.
+
+""I don't think they have American citizenship,"" he replied. ""And if you speak to very good lawyers, and I know some would disagree, (but) many agree with me, you will find they do not have American citizenship.""
+
+Trump hasn't said how he would implement his ambitious immigration plan. In New Hampshire Wednesay he talked about building what he calls a beautiful wall.
+
+""I will build the greatest wall that you've ever seen,"" he said. ""I want it to be so beautiful because maybe someday they're gonna call it the Trump Wall, maybe. So I have to make sure it's beautiful, right? I'll be very proud of that wall.""
+
+Up the road at another event in New Hampshire, Jeb Bush took a few swipes at Trump, saying he's not a true conservative.
+
+""Mr. Trump doesn't have a proven, conservative record,"" Bush said. ""He was a Democrat longer in the last decade than he was a Republican. He's given more money to Democrats than he's given to Republicans.""
+
+""Even on immigration, where it's -- you know, look, it's, the language is pretty vitriolic for sure. But hundreds of billions of dollars of cost to implement his plan is not a conservative plan,"" he added.",REAL
+6592,Will Barack Obama Delay Or Suspend The Election If Hillary Is Forced Out By The New FBI Email Investigation?,"in: Government , Government Corruption , Obama Exposed , Sleuth Journal Just when it looked like Hillary Clinton was poised to win the 2016 election , the FBI has thrown a gamechanger into the mix. On Friday, FBI Director James Comey announced that his agency has discovered new emails related to Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information that they had not previously seen. According to the Associated Press , the newly discovered emails “did not come from her private server”, but instead were found when the FBI started going through electronic devices that belonged to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband Anthony Weiner. The FBI has been looking into messages of a sexual nature that Weiner had exchanged with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, and that is why they originally seized those electronic devices. According to the Washington Post , the “emails were found on a computer used jointly by both Weiner and his wife, top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, according to a person with knowledge of the inquiry”, and according to some reports there may be “potentially thousands” of emails on the computer that the FBI did not have access to previously. Even though there are less than two weeks to go until election day, this scandal has the potential to possibly force Clinton out of the race, and if that happens could Barack Obama delay or suspend the election until a replacement candidate can be found? Let’s take this one step at a time. On Friday, financial markets tanked when reports of these new Clinton emails hit the wires. The following comes from CNN … After recommending earlier this year that the Department of Justice not press charges against the former secretary of state, Comey said in a letter to eight congressional committee chairmen that investigators are examining newly discovered emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the email probe. “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote the chairmen. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” At this point, we do not know what is contained in these emails. But without a doubt Huma Abedin is Hillary Clinton’s closest confidant, and I have always felt that she was Clinton’s Achilles heel. Journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) is fully convinced that the FBI would have never made this move unless something significant had already been discovered … We don’t know what this means yet except that it’s a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that’s where we are… Is it a certainty that we won’t learn before the election? I’m not sure it’s a certainty we won’t learn before the election. One thing is, it’s possible that Hillary Clinton might want to on her own initiative talk to the FBI and find out what she can, and if she chooses to let the American people know what she thinks or knows is going on. People need to hear from her… If the FBI has indeed found something explosive, would they actually charge her with a crime right before the election? It is possible, but we also have to remember that government agencies (including the FBI) tend to move very, very slowly. If there are thousands of emails, it is going to take quite a while to sift through them all. And of course Barack Obama has lots of ways that he could influence, delay or even shut down the investigation. So those that are counting on this to be the miracle that Donald Trump needs should not count their chickens before they hatch. But if Hillary Clinton were to be forced out of the race by this FBI investigation, the Democrats would have to decide on a new candidate, and that would take time. The following is from a U.S. News & World Report article that examined what would happen if one of the candidates was forced out of the race for some reason… If Clinton were to fall off the ticket, Democratic National Committee members would gather to vote on a replacement. DNC members acted as superdelegates during this year’s primary and overwhelmingly backed Clinton over boat-rocking socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. DNC spokesman Mark Paustenbach says there currently are 445 committee members – a number that changes over time and is guided by the group’s bylaws, which give membership to specific officeholders and party leaders and hold 200 spots for selection by states, along with an optional 75 slots DNC members can choose to fill. But the party rules for replacing a presidential nominee merely specify that a majority of members must be present at a special meeting called by the committee chairman. The meeting would follow procedures set by the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee and proxy voting would not be allowed. It would be extremely challenging to get a majority of the members of the Democratic National Committee together on such short notice. If Clinton were to drop out next week, it would be almost impossible for this to happen before election day. In such a scenario, Barack Obama may attempt to invoke his emergency powers . Since the election would not be “fair” until the Democrats have a new candidate, he could try to delay or suspend the election. There would be a lot of controversy as to whether this is legal or not, but Barack Obama has not let the U.S. Constitution stop him in the past. Meanwhile, new poll numbers show that the Trump campaign was already gaining momentum even before this story about the new emails broke. According to a brand new ABC News/Washington Post survey, Donald Trump is now only trailing Hillary Clinton by 4 points after trailing her by as much as 12 points last weekend. And CNBC is reporting on a highly advanced artificial intelligence system that accurately predicted the outcomes of the presidential primaries and which is now indicating that Trump will be the winner in November… An artificial intelligence system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House. MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It takes in 20 million data points from public platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. and then analyzes the information to create predictions. The AI system was created in 2004, so it has been getting smarter all the time. It had already correctly predicted the results of the Democratic and Republican Primaries. Without Hillary at the top of the ticket, the odds of a Trump victory would go way, way up. So if Hillary is forced out of the race by this investigation, Barack Obama and the Democrats will want to delay or suspend the election for as long as possible if they can. At this point there is probably not a high probability that such a scenario will play out, but in this crazy election year we have already seen that just about anything can happen. Submit your review",FAKE
+948,Democratic debate: Is Clinton or Sanders the real New Yorker? (+video),"Tonight's televised event offers the Democratic hopefuls their last shared stage to define themselves and each other. Three topics are sure to crop up: experience, Wall Street ties, and New York-ness.
+
+Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton enters the stage after a break in a March 9 debate with her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, in Miami. Their final debate April 14 is likely to be their most definitive.
+
+There’s a Democratic debate tonight in New York and it promises to be perhaps the definitive clash between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders of the entire 2016 campaign.
+
+Why is that? Because the stakes are high: former Secretary of State Clinton continues to lead the race, but can’t shake the dogged Senator Sanders. And this is the last scheduled face-to-face meeting between the pair. It’s likely they’ll air all their differences over the course of two hours, beginning at 9 p.m. E.D.T. on CNN.
+
+Time for the obligatory Odd Number List of Things to Watch For! We’ve scratched out three that are almost certain to come up; beyond that, predictions get chancy.
+
+Who's the real New Yorker? Given that the New York primary is Tuesday, and the debate is in New York, and Sanders was born and raised in New York and Clinton was a New York Senator, we’re pretty sure there’s going to be a struggle over who’s the true New Yorker.
+
+Edge: Sanders. He’s got more New York years, he’s got a New York accent, and he’s never professed fanship for the Chicago Cubs, as has Illinois native Clinton. Clinton’s best play might be to present herself as a New Yorker in the statewide sense – after all, she represented the state, not the city, in the Senate and spent lots of time in upstate towns.
+
+Who's the most qualified to be president? Last week Sanders said Clinton was not “qualified” to sit in the Oval Office because her associated super PAC takes corporate contributions, she voted for the war in Iraq, and she supports free-trade agreements.
+
+He’s since walked that back. He says it’s really her judgment that is at issue with these positions.
+
+Edge: Clinton. Yes, really. It’s “qualified” that’s the problem for Sanders. He disagrees vehemently on some policy issues with Clinton, but in terms of variety of presidential-prep job experience, the former congressional Watergate panel staffer, first lady, and national legislator has got more lines on her résumé than he does. She’ll likely bring up this jibe as a means to remind voters of all the jobs she’s had.
+
+The $225,000 Verizon speech. Sanders hasn’t made an issue of Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail server while secretary of State. But he has attacked her over her personal ties to Wall Street, including her acceptance of big fees for speaking at bank and corporate events.
+
+So expect him to bring up the $225,000 honorarium Clinton received in May 2013 for speaking at a Verizon event. (It was a big applause line at Sanders’s Wednesday night rally in Washington Square Park.) Unionized Verizon workers are on strike in New York, and both candidates have visited them in an attempt to show solidarity. Sanders will use the speech money to try and call into question the sincerity of Clinton’s appearance.
+
+Edge: Sanders. She’s been asked about them for over a year, but Clinton still does not have a great answer as to why she raked in such big speech bucks, what she said to earn them, and whether they constitute a conflict of interest.
+
+OK, enough with the politics-as-sports aspect of the program. Beyond that there is one large underlying factor to keep in mind while watching tonight’s debate. Sanders needs the dynamic of the race to change, or he will lose. Clinton is happy with the status quo.
+
+As we’ve written before, that’s because Bernie needs blowout wins to have any hope of catching Hillary. He’s still hundreds of delegates behind, and Democrats award delegates proportionately, so he needs to sweep big states. And fast. Otherwise he’s got no hope of making up his delegate deficit.",REAL
+6453,Iraqi Christians Return to Charred Churches Captured from ISIS,"Iraqi Christians Return to Charred Churches Captured from ISIS October 31, 2016 Iraqi Christians Return to Charred Churches Captured from ISIS 
+(QARAQOSH, Iraq) Surrounded by charred walls and in front of a ruined altar, dozens of Iraqi Christians celebrated mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh on Sunday for the first time since it was recaptured from Islamic State. Church bells rang out in the town on the southeastern approaches to Mosul where Iraqi troops, backed by U.S.-led air and ground forces, have been driving back the Sunni Muslim jihadists ahead of a battle for the city itself. ""Today Qaraqosh is free of Daesh (Islamic State),"" Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Mosul Butrus Moshe told worshippers. Islamic State has targeted the adherents and religious sites of minority communities in both Iraq and Syria. When it seized control of Mosul two years ago it issued an ultimatum to Christians: pay a tax, convert to Islam, or die by the sword. 
+READ MORE: ANCIENT NINEVAH CHRISTIANS FEAR ISIS IN RETURN HOME 
+Most abandoned their homes and fled toward the autonomous Kurdish region, abandoning one of Christianity's earliest centers. 
+""Our role today is to remove all the remnants of Daesh,"" the archbishop said. ""This includes erasing sedition, separation and conflicts, which victimized us,"" said the archbishop, who was born in Qaraqosh. 
+""Political and sectarian strife, separating between one man and another, between ruler and follower, these mentalities must be changed,” he said. 
+Christianity in northern Iraq dates back to the first century AD. The number of Christians fell sharply during the violence which followed the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the Islamic State takeover of Mosul two years ago purged the city of Christians for the first time in two millennia. 
+It was from a Mosul mosque that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a ""caliphate"" in 2014, spanning northern Iraq and eastern Syria. The recapture of the city would mark the effective defeat of the Iraqi wing of that domain. 
+Reuters contribution by Mahdi Talat ; Writing by Bushra Shakshir and Stephen Kalin; Editing by Dominic Evans) Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+7816,The Tomb of Jesus Revealed,"It has been 1,700 years since Emperor Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where the tomb of Jesus was revealed. The emperor believed Joseph of Arimathea placed the body of Jesus inside the church, according to CBN News.
+Workmen, under the watchful eye of The National Geographic, have gently removed the marble slab that laid on top of the tomb. This heavy piece of marble has laid on the tomb of Jesus since 1555 A.D. Fredrik Hiebert, a National Geographic archeologist-in-residence, said he was profoundly astonished by the find.
+The Tomb of Jesus Hours of examination of the tomb of Jesus led the team of researchers to announce their revelations. Hiebert says, they are not 100 percent sure, but it appears the location of the tomb has not shifted. He also said that scientists and historians have wondered this for decades.
+The tomb of Jesus revealed a layer of fill material. After hours of labor, workers exposed an entirely different marble slab with a cross carved into it. Workers also found, in the tomb of Jesus, three crosses and some iron nails. After high anticipation, of those watching, they finally uncovered what they believe is the original limestone burial bed of Christ .
+Christian tradition states that the body of Jesus Christ laid on a shelf, or burial bed, carved into the side of a limestone cave. This happened after the Romans crucified him, around 30-33 A.D. According to Christian faith, Jesus was resurrected after his death. As the story goes, a woman who went to anoint Jesus’ body, three days after he was buried, said there were no remains in the tomb.
+In the Gospel of John, 19:38-42, it is written that Joseph of Arimathea, a disciple of Jesus, asked Pilate if he could take the body of Jesus away. He was given permission and took Jesus’ body.
+Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes. He brought about 100 pounds of them. They both took the body of Jesus and bound him in linen covered in spices; this was a custom of the Jews. A garden grew in the place where he was crucified. The tomb sat in the garden no one had yet laid in. This is where John and Nicodemus placed the body of Jesus Christ.
+Restoring the Tomb
+Scientists from the National Technical University of Athens are trying to repair a structure that protects the tomb of Jesus called Edicule. This is from the Latin word, aedicule that means little house . The last dated work to the structure was between 1808-10.
+In the 19th-century, Edicule suffered structural integrity, from an earthquake, in 1927. The building was shored up, in 1947, by the British authorities. Lack of financial resources and difficulties had put a stop to the repairs.
+Antonia Moropoulou, the leader of the restoration project, said they will have to remove the marble and stone slabs. She went on to say they will also inject grout into them. This process will homogenize the complex structure.
+People working on the project say that it is more than just a job. Vasyleyos Zafeylys, a Greek civil engineer, says he is a Christian Orthodox. He also said, he has worked on projects like this, but this is a special one. He believes he cannot go to another project that will be bigger and better than this one. Moropoulou said, it is a collaborative effort, but everyone near the archeological find feels the value of the holy tomb giving the resurrection message.
+The churches’ communities agreed to restore the church, in March of 2016. Completion of Edicule is scheduled for spring of 2017. The $4 million-plus project has major backers such as royal benefactors from King Abdullah II of Jordan. Mica Ertegun gifted $1.3 million to the World Monument Fund in support of the endeavor.
+By Tracy Blake
+Edited by Jeanette Smith
+Sources:
+CBN News: What Researchers Found in the Tomb of Jesus
+Live Science: Original Bedrock of Jesus’ Tomb Revealed in New Images
+National Geographic: Exclusive: Christ’s Burial Place Exposed for First Time in Centuries
+Image Courtesy of Seetheholyland.net’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
+Inline Image Courtesy of Ft Lawrence, Lew O.P.’s Flickr Page – Creative Common License spot , Tomb of Jesus",FAKE
+4975,How Trump's campaign chief got a strongman elected president of Ukraine,"The scene was Ostroh, western Ukraine, on the eve of parliamentary elections.
+
+A tall figure bounded on to a stage to cheers from a crowd of elderly flag-waving supporters. They chanted: “Yan-u-kov-ych, Yan-u-kov-ych.”
+
+The man addressing them was Viktor Yanukovych, who at this point – autumn 2007 – was Ukraine’s pro-Russian prime minister. Three years earlier he had tried to cheat his way to victory in the country’s presidential election, triggering the pro-democracy uprising known as the Orange Revolution, which swept Yanukovych’s rival Viktor Yushchenko into power.
+
+Now, barely three years later, Yanukovych was back, and his Party of Regions was ahead in the polls.
+
+The person who masterminded Yanukovych’s unlikely political comeback was not – as might have been expected – a Russian, like the advisers dispatched by Vladimir Putin to mastermind Yanukovych’s disastrous 2004 presidential bid.
+
+
+
+It was an American, and his name was Paul Manafort – previously a consultant for Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and Bob Dole, and today the campaign chairman for Donald Trump.
+
+
+
+Manafort’s years in Ukraine have come under renewed scrutiny during the current US presidential campaign. On Monday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign leapt on a report in the New York Times that handwritten ledgers found in the Ukraine show $12.7m in undisclosed payments to Manafort from the Party of Regions.
+
+“This is a serious matter and there are real concerns about the pro-Kremlin interests engaged with the Trump team,” said Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook.
+
+Manafort has denied any wrongdoing. A source who worked with him in Ukraine said on Tuesday: “If there was cash I would have known about it and seen it. I was going in and out of the Party of Regions HQ every day.”
+
+Even before the latest allegations, Trump’s links to Russia have raised eyebrows: Manafort’s candidate has expressed admiration for Putin, encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, and appeared unaware that Russian troops had seized the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. 
+
+
+
+Meanwhile, the Trump campaign was reportedly instrumental in rewriting the new Republican platform to remove calls for the donation of weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces.
+
+It remains unclear how much of this was down to Manafort. What is indisputable is that at the same time as he was advising Yanukovych, Manafort was also building personal business links with some of the most powerful figures in the post-Soviet world.
+
+
+
+Before his arrival in Kiev, Manafort had long specialised in taking on unsavoury clients, such as Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino dictator, and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and subtly retooling their public reputations. 
+
+
+
+He was recruited to work in Ukraine in the summer of 2005 by the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov – the main financial backer of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.
+
+That autumn, Manafort and his team – including longtime aide Rick Gates, another future Trump hire – began work for the Party of Regions. They rented an anonymous office at number 4 Sophia Street in Kiev, opposite the stop for the 16 and 18 trolley buses. Typically, its white blinds were drawn.
+
+The Americans kept a low profile, but Manafort’s efforts didn’t go entirely unnoticed. In a 2006 cable to the state department in Washington, US diplomats reported that the Party of Regions had undergone a mysterious transformation. “Long a haven for Donetsk-based mobsters and oligarchs it is in the midst of an ‘extreme makeover’,” they observed.
+
+The party had enlisted “help and advice from veteran K street political tacticians”, the diplomats said, referring to Washington DC’s lobbying district. Manafort’s firm – Davis, Manafort & Freedman – was busy “nipping and tucking”. Its goal was to rid the party of its gangster image and to change it into a “legitimate political force”.
+
+I met Manafort in September 2007, on the eve of the Ostroh rally. This was just before the parliamentary elections, and Yanukovych was frantically touring the regions on a campaign helicopter.
+
+Close up, Manafort looked every inch the classic Washington lobbyist. He wore an expensive suit and tie and exuded seriousness. He also bore a faint physical resemblance to his client – even their hairstyles were similar. (Manafort, I was told later, had instructed Yanukovych to blow-dry his hair. Manafort’s camp denies this.)
+
+The American had an interesting story to tell – one which may sound familiar to observers of Donald Trump’s campaign – of how his candidate had been almost wilfully misunderstood by the west, especially by its media.
+
+
+
+The new Yanukovych was nothing like the old one, Manafort suggested. He had absorbed the lessons of his previous defeats, was studying English – and was even playing tennis with the US ambassador.
+
+“People are still looking at the political system in this country through the prism of 2004,” Manafort told me. “That’s not at all the situation here.” 
+
+
+
+Yanukovych was no puppet of Putin, Manafort said; he wanted a pragmatic foreign policy – good relations with Russia and the EU.
+
+“As a person, he [Yanukovych] is growing,” Manafort assured me. “I think the time out of power helped him.”
+
+Manafort introduced professional techniques. He gathered polling data, worked on messaging and distributed talking points. His efforts were at least partially successful: Yanukovych’s Party of Regions won the 2007 parliamentary elections, and in 2010 Yanukovych beat his rival Yulia Tymoshenko in a presidential runoff. Within a few months, it had become clear that he was hellbent on reversing the modest democratic gains of the Orange Revolution.
+
+Yanukovych moved quickly to consolidate all instruments of power: the courts, parliament, the prosecutor’s office, the media and TV. Tymoshenko was charged with corruption and jailed; Yankovych repeatedly shrugged off western calls for her release.
+
+In late 2013, Yanukovych was due to sign an association agreement with the European Union, but at the last minute he dumped the plan and instead accepted a $15bn Kremlin bailout.
+
+Pro-EU demonstrators flooded the Maidan, Kiev’s main square, and protests turned violent after a brutal crackdown by security forces.
+
+In February 2014, riot police shot dead 100 people in downtown Kiev. Yanukovych abandoned his palace on the outskirts of town, Mezhyhirya – a Versailles of sorts with a pirate-themed restaurant and private zoo – and escaped to Russia.
+
+Putin exploited this crisis to seize Crimea and launch a covert military invasion of eastern Ukraine. The consequences – 10,000 dead, a civilian jet shot down, a country chopped up – haunt the region to this day. Earlier this month, Russia claimed Ukrainian agents had attacked Crimea, further fueling tensions in the region.
+
+
+
+Those who worked with Manafort say that he cannot be blamed for the Ukrainian disaster. Oleg Voloshin, a former aide to Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, Yanukovych’s 2010-12 foreign minister who now works as a political consultant, says Manafort urged Yanukovych to press ahead with the EU integration agenda.
+
+Voloshin still has ties with the ex-Party of Regions, which Manafort rebranded in 2014 as the Opposition Bloc. (Manafort’s consultancy in Ukraine continued until at least parliamentary elections in 2014.)
+
+He suggests that Yanukovych “listened to what Paul said” between 2007-2010, but then, once he became president, stopped listening – with catastrophic results.
+
+Manafort’s advice was always non-ideological, Voloshin recalls. He would calmly explain: “These people won’t vote for you, don’t bother with them,” and then suggest he “promote this message, promote that message”. “It was a very American approach. Do this, do that.” And, crucially: “He was the person dragging Yanukovych to the west.”
+
+
+
+According to Voloshin, Manafort was an advocate of US interests and promoted American oil companies such as Chevron – so much so that the joke inside the Party of Regions was that Manafort was actually from the CIA. “You can blame him for whatever. The only thing you can’t blame him for is lack of will in lobbying for American interests in Ukraine in the commercial sphere.”
+
+Voloshin insists that it was Manafort who persuaded Yanukovych to press ahead with the EU integration agenda, arguing that it would counter Yanukovych’s sagging ratings. Manafort also strongly objected to Tymoshenko’s imprisonment, telling Yanukovych bluntly: “You are going to have very bad times with the west.”
+
+“It’s not Paul’s fault that Yanukovych didn’t listen to him. If it weren’t for Paul, Ukraine would have gone under Russia much earlier,” Voloshin claims.
+
+During the period that he was advising Yanukovych, Manafort’s interests in the post-Soviet world were not restricted to politics.
+
+
+
+In 2007, he set up a private equity firm called Pericles Emerging Partners LP.
+
+
+
+Based offshore in the Caymans, the firm had three American partners – Manafort, Rick Gates and Rick Davis. Davis had cofounded Davis Manafort, Manfort’s lobbying company in Delaware. The new firm’s aim was to make investments in the Ukrainian cities of Kiev, Odessa and Mariupol. It would acquire small companies, consolidate them into larger national enterprises, then sell them on.
+
+One of those tempted by this prospectus was the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum baron and close friend of Putin, who stumped up almost $19m. Gates, Manafort’s right-hand man, sealed the agreement in trips to Moscow.
+
+What happened next was strange indeed. Only one investment by Pericles was ever made, in a Ukrainian telecoms company called Black Sea Cable. According to court documents, the cash was funnelled into various offshore companies, including one called CardMan ImpEx Corp, registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. The trail wound through other opaque shell firms, including Cascado AG, set up by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
+
+A search of the Panama Papers leak gives a few details. Cascado has two Latvian directors, Erik Vanagels and Stan Gorin. In reality, they are mere nominees. The pair have been linked on paper to a network of offshore companies and multimillion-dollar scams involving Ukrainian state assets.
+
+
+
+When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, Deripaska wanted out – and his cash back. In 2011, the Americans emailed to say that it was proving tricky to sell Deripaska’s stake because of “market conditions”. Further emails went unanswered.
+
+“It appears that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have simply disappeared,” Deripaska’s frustrated lawyers wrote, in a 2014 petition to have Manafort’s firm wound up.
+
+It’s unclear if Deripaska ever got his money. Either way, the episode illustrates Manafort’s personal links to figures close to Putin.
+
+Later, Manafort introduced Deripaska to Senator John McCain, when the oligarch was having problems travelling to the US. (In 2006, the US had revoked Deripaska’s visa, citing alleged “criminal associations”. Deripaska denies the allegation, and his visa was subsequently reinstated.)
+
+This wasn’t the only embarrassing legal scrape arising from Manafort’s capitalist adventures. In November 2011, Tymoshenko unsuccessfully sued him and several of her political opponents in the district court in New York. Her lengthy writ alleged that Manafort “played a key role in [a] conspiracy and racketeering enterprise” to launder cash for Yanukovych’s oligarch friends and invest it in New York real estate.
+
+In particular, she pointed the finger at Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian businessman whose generous contributions helped Yanukovych. Firtash is a shareholder and public face for RosUkrEnergo, an intermediary company co-owned by Gazprom, which imports gas from Russia and resells it to Ukraine. Tymoshenko tried unsuccessfully to get rid of it.
+
+The RusUkrEnergo scheme was a mechanism for corruption, she alleged in legal filings. Its real owner, she claimed, was Semyon Mogilevich, a Ukrainian-Russian mobster, and one of the FBI’s top fugitives. Firtash denies this.
+
+According to her writ, Firtash and his companies and associates were able to skim billions of dollars from gas transactions. The cash was laundered “through a labyrinth of shell companies”. It was then returned to Ukraine, with the money used to bribe Ukrainian officials.
+
+“Defendant Paul J Manafort is a well-known Washington D.C. lobbyist and political consultant. He is the senior partner in the firm Davis, Manafort and Freedman. Manafort also worked in Ukraine on various political campaigns, including the successful 2010 presidential campaign of Victor Yanukovych, who is the president of Ukraine at present. Manafort played a key role in the defendants’ conspiracy and racketeering enterprise,” the writ said.
+
+Firtash, who declined to be interviewed for this article, denies the claims. In 2014, a federal judge threw out Tymoshenko’s lawsuit, saying that she had failed to show that Firtash and other defendants had laundered money in the U.S to help pay off Yanukovych’s supporters in Ukraine. The judge also said the allegations were outside US jurisdiction.
+
+That same year Firtash was arrested on a US warrant in Vienna, accused of bribing Indian officials over a titanium deal. But an Austrian judge denied a US extradition request and agreed with Firtash that it was politically motivated. The US is appealing, and Firtash remains in Austria.
+
+Firtash did invest money in Manafort’s real estate projects, however. The two met in 2008. Manafort’s plan was to buy the site of the demolished Drake Hotel in Manhattan and to redevelop it at a cost of almost $900m. Firtash transferred at least $25m to the project. Tymoshenko alleged that the plan was never serious, with the cash merely transferred for the purposes of money laundering.
+
+
+
+“Group DF and Firtash never had any intention to purchase the Drake property, but instead used the real estate project as a vehicle for investing $25 million in New York bank accounts,” her writ stated.
+
+Manafort did not respond to a request by the Guardian for comment on Deripaska’s loan or the Drake Hotel allegations.
+
+In the run-up to November’s vote, Trump’s own real estate transactions have been extensively investigated, but it remains unclear if any Russian cash has actually been leveraged in these deals.
+
+In a statement on Monday, Manafort denied that he had received any irregular payments in Ukraine. “The simplest answer is the truth: I am a campaign professional. It is well known that I do work in the United States and have done work on overseas campaigns as well. I have never received a single ‘off-the-books cash payment’ as falsely ‘reported’ by The New York Times, nor have I ever done work for the governments of Ukraine or Russia.”
+
+But Manafort’s critics in Kiev are scathing. “He’s an evil genius,” Alex Kovzhun, who spent a decade working for Tymoshenko, beginning in 2001, said. “He doesn’t work statesmen. He works dictators and all-round bastards. He sells the unsellable product. If you have a dead horse and you need to sell it, you call him.
+
+
+
+“He works bad guys. They pay more, of course.”
+
+Manafort’s specialism, according to Kovzhun, is running expensive campaigns and targeting the “great unwashed”.
+
+“It’s the same element who voted for Putin, supported Brexit, back Erdoğan and who will vote for Trump. Manafort works the lowest common denominator. I find him repulsive and his message ugly. He leaves destruction in his wake.”
+
+
+
+Kovzhun said he recognised the same “moves” in Manafort’s campaigns for Yanukovych and Trump. He gets his clients to do “corny stuff”, Kovzhun added, with “bland political slogans” and “uncreative Soviet-style imagery”. “With Yanukovych it was: ‘I’ll hear everyone.’ With Trump, it’s: ‘Make America great again.’”
+
+In contrast, Voloshin portrays the decade Manafort spent in Ukraine as a success. “In 2004, Yanukovych was seen as a Russian puppet. He was dead. Paul resurrected him.”
+
+Can Manafort work his magic one more time? “The tougher the client you have, the the greater success you get. It isn’t about the money. It’s about ambition. If he can make Yanukovych president, I’m sure he can do it with Trump.” 
+
+",REAL
+7792,"Project Veritas 4: Robert Creamer's Illegal $20,000 Foreign Wire Transfer Caught On Tape","  Project Veritas 4: Robert Creamer's Illegal $20,000 Foreign Wire Transfer Caught On Tape Oct 26, 2016 3:10 PM 0 SHARES 
+Project Veritas has just released Part IV of it's multi-part series exposing numerous scandals surrounding the DNC and the Clinton campaign, including efforts to incite violence at Trump rallies and, at least what seems to be, illegal coordination between the DNC, Hillary For America and various Super PACs. 
+Part IV focuses on a $20,000 foreign donation made by an undercover Project Veritas journalist to Americans United for Change (AUFC). Ironically, shortly after the $20k donation wire was released, the contributor's ""niece"" was offered an internship with Creamer's firm, Democracy Partners. 
+In the effort to prove the credibility of the undercover donor featured in the videos and to keep the investigation going, Project Veritas Action made the decision to donate twenty thousand dollars to Robert Creamer’s effort. Project Veritas Action had determined that the benefit of this investigation outweighed the cost. And it did. 
+
+“First thing, like I said, thank you for the proposal. And I’d like to get the $20,000 across to you. The second call I’m going to make here is to my money guy and he’s going to get in touch with you and auto wire the funds to you,” said the PVA journalist. 
+
+Creamer told the PVA journalist to send the money to Americans United for Change. Shortly after the money was released, the “donors” “niece” - another Project Veritas Action journalist - was offered an internship with Creamer. 
+
+In an effort to see how far Creamer would go with the promise of more money, another Project Veritas journalist posing as the donor’s money liaison requested a meeting with Creamer. During that meeting, Creamer spoke about connections he had with Obama and Clinton. 
+AUFC President, Brad Woodhouse, subsequently returned the money, after Project Veritas started to release their undercover videos, citing ""concerns that it might have been an illegal foreign donation."" Oddly, Woodhouse was not terribly concerned about the ""legality"" of the donation when he chose to accept it a month prior. 
+In an unexpected twist, AUFC president Brad Woodhouse, the recipient of the $20,000, heard that Project Veritas Action was releasing undercover videos exposing AUFC’s activities. He told a journalist that AUFC was going to return the twenty thousand dollars. He said it was because they were concerned that it might have been an illegal foreign donation. Project Veritas Action was pleased but wondered why that hadn’t been a problem for the month that they had the money. 
+
+While the latest video focuses on the "" $20,000 illegal foreign contribution"" from an undercover Project Veritas journalist , the following comments from Robert Creamer were also rather intriguing in light of recent White House efforts to vehemently deny any connections between he and President Obama. 
+""Oh Barack Obama's was the best campaign in the history of American politics, I mean the second one, I mean the first was good too. I was a consultant to both, the second one, was everything hit on every level and every aspect. 
+
+He's a pro. I've known the President since he was a community organizer in Chicago . 
+
+I was just at and event with him in Chicago actually, on Friday last . He is just as good as ever. I do a lot of work with the White House on their issues. Helping to run issued campaigns that they have been involved in. I mean, for immigration reform for the...the health care bill...trying to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence issues."" 
+* * * 
+As a reminder, video 3 directly linking Donna Brazile and Hillary Clinton to efforts to disrupt Trump events. 
+
+Video 2 provided the democrat playbook on how to commit ""mass voter fraud"":",FAKE
+3183,Why the GOP Primary Could Be Even Crazier Than You Think,"Welcome to a 2016 Republican presidential primary unlike any other. A crowded field, angry electorate and uncharacteristically divided establishment, not to mention the wild-card role of super PACs, have already made this nominating contest more frenzied and unpredictable than its recent predecessors. It’s become conventional wisdom that, whatever the chaos of the early campaign, a winner is most likely to emerge by mid-March. This cycle, we can’t be so sure. In fact, the better you understand how the 2016 calendar works, the more likely it seems we can face a messy slog that runs into late spring and possibly even into the July convention—an unlikely fate at this point but one that’s no longer impossible.
+
+For starters, the 2016 calendar quite deliberately avoids having a mid-March nominee.
+
+In past cycles—2008, 2000 and 1996—the eventual GOP nominees won quickly by concentrating their attention on the first four or five state contests, leveraging their momentum into a front-loaded Super Tuesday and becoming inevitable by early to mid-March. After the 2008 GOP primary, in which 34 states voted by February 5, Republican Party leaders concluded that the frontloaded calendar had given John McCain a too-early primary win and allowed the Obama-Clinton primary to capture a lopsided share of attention. In response, those GOP leaders pushed through new calendar rules designed to create a longer, more contested race: They encouraged states to push their primaries later, and required states voting during the first two weeks of March to agree to allocate their delegates proportionally according to the voting results, rather than in a winner-take-all fashion, making those contests far less decisive. (The period is two weeks shorter in 2016 than it was in 2012, but about as many delegates will be chosen.)
+
+The 2012 presidential election was the first time the new rules took effect, and they dramatically prolonged the primary season. In every election since 1996, the GOP had settled on a clear nominee in March—as early as March 4, in McCain’s case. Although Mitt Romney did as well as any of his predecessors early on in the 2012 primary—effectively tying Iowa, winning New Hampshire, losing South Carolina, and then winning Florida and Nevada—he didn’t have enough delegates to secure the nomination until April 24, after 41 states had voted. Critics blamed Romney’s long slog on weakness as a candidate, but the changes in the primary calendar certainly played a major role.
+
+The 2016 rules are much the same as the ones that dragged out Romney’s victory, but the circumstances of the race all point to a longer, harder fight. Traditionally, the Republican nominee is known when more than 68 percent of the delegates have been chosen, which won’t happen until April 19 this year. On top of that, the race itself is far more complex than it was in 2012: Romney’s anti-establishment challengers petered out relatively quickly, while the two candidates currently leading the polls this year—Donald Trump and Ted Cruz—are themselves anti-establishment candidates, and are continuing to gain momentum just as the voting season begins.
+
+What can we expect along the winding path ahead? This will be my seventh cycle working in presidential politics, including previously as a lawyer for the Republican National Committee and then on George W. Bush’s, Mitt Romney’s and Scott Walker’s presidential campaigns. More than any of the other primary seasons I’ve seen, this is the year to expect the unexpected.
+
+For the candidates, the primary calendar is like a giant jigsaw puzzle. They’ll need victories in order to gain credibility, and resources in order to pick up the 1,237 delegates that make for a majority (having the most votes doesn’t always mean getting the most delegates). They’ll need to decide whether to run statewide campaigns, mostly through TV ads, or use advanced data techniques to target specific places—whether through ads, old-fashioned door-knocking or other techniques.
+
+For the rest of us who are following along, the solution to that jigsaw puzzle may be just as confounding. Beginning in Iowa on February 1, voters will determine whether GOP officials will get their wish of knowing the nominee by March 22, or whether the Law of Unintended Consequences will create an unusually divisive, long and inconclusive primary season that becomes a gift for Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.
+
+As we prepare for 19 weeks of voting, here’s an insider’s look at how major calendar moments could bring the nominating process to an end—or carry the chaos over to yet another contested round.
+
+The 1996, 2000 and 2008 primaries taught campaigns to dump resources into Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, four states whose symbolic value far outweighs their delegate count. Winning them is best. But beating expectations is almost as good—it’s why you see the 2016 establishment candidates, well behind Trump and Cruz in the polls, beating up each other instead of the frontrunners. Early success brings the transfusion of dollars and volunteers essential to amassing delegates in March and beyond. The 2012 calendar changes and Romney’s experience have diminished the February states’ impact, leaving Super Tuesday on March 1 as the more crucial battle. But the four early states are still a determining factor for the rest of the primary.
+
+Winning two of the first four states will be a huge boost to any campaign. Winning three of four is the only scenario that could produce a March nominee, and right now, Trump and Cruz are the only candidates who look to have a chance to do that. At minimum, February should clarify the number of GOP primary lanes—whether there’s a “Trump” lane in addition to the traditional “establishment” and “conservative” lanes.
+
+An oddity of the 2016 race is the absence of a consensus establishment candidate this close to voting—especially since that candidate has won every contested primary since 1968. Even rarer is that no establishment candidate is within range of Trump and Cruz in Iowa or New Hampshire. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and John Kasich can take some solace in remembering that Newt Gingrich won the 2012 South Carolina primary without first coming close in either Iowa or New Hampshire. But that’s far from guaranteed. The establishment’s weakness could provide a (rare) quick win for a candidate from the conservative or Trump lanes, or allow more candidates to win delegates so that the contest continues for longer than is historically the case. As a matter of simple math, the prospect of viable candidates from three ideological lanes rather than two increases the chances of a contested convention.
+
+After February’s primaries—essentially, four statewide races—the nominating contest becomes a national delegate hunt. Only 10 primaries, with 16.2 percent of the delegates, are true winner-take-all states, in which the top vote getter receives all the delegates. The rest of the states allow multiple candidates to win their delegates by choosing them in one of three ways: proportionally (31 states or territories, amounting to 54.5 percent of delegates); by congressional district, with the statewide winner getting at-large delegates (10 states, 24.8 percent of delegates); or in a caucus or convention (five states, 4.5 percent of delegates).
+
+March awards the most delegates of any month, with 12 diverse states—primarily from the South but also Alaska, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont and Wyoming—voting in proportional contests on Super Tuesday. These contests will no doubt winnow the field. The question is whether more than two candidates will survive the primaries’ first Demolition Derby.
+
+To a large extent, that depends how well the campaigns find ways to say they won and their competitors lost, which means March 1-2 will be the cycle’s most competitive spin days. A number of candidates are likely to claim “victory” and viability, based on everything from winning the most states, delegates, congressional districts or delegates in different regions to having the greatest consistent finishes in multiple states to being the leading candidate in the establishment wing. Creativity will know no bounds.
+
+Right now, Trump and Cruz look like a lock to pick up delegates on Super Tuesday. But a decisive factor for the rest primary is whether Rubio, Bush, Christie or Kasich can do well enough for the establishment forces to awaken and coalesce around one candidate.
+
+Meanwhile, the stakes are obviously going to get higher at this point: If no candidate puts the nomination away, every day will bring gut-wrenching choices for the surviving campaigns as money and human resources ebb and flow and become pieces on the primary calendar chessboard.
+
+This stretch of the nominating process isn’t likely to change much.
+
+Of the eleven states that vote from March 5-12, only Michigan awards more than 50 delegates. So unless one candidate runs the table on March 1, there will not be a presumptive nominee by March 12. Just 45 percent of the delegates will be decided by this point, all of them (except South Carolina) chosen proportionally. That means even a candidate winning 40 percent of the vote across the board will have amassed only 451 delegates, or 34 percent of those needed to win. (For some perspective, Trump is currently polling at about 35 percent.)
+
+In a multi-candidate field, that’s reason for multiple candidates to continue after March 12. The campaigns’ main challenge at this point will be how successfully they claim they’re winning or still in the race. In 2016, the stakes are likely to be higher for the establishment candidates still in the race at this point. The pressure from elected officials and donors will mount on those who have no hope of winning a majority of delegates to agree on a single candidate to challenge Trump and/or Cruz. Yet it’s also possible that the trailing three establishment candidates will see a contested convention on the horizon, and decide to continue trying to win delegates to gain leverage at that convention.
+
+Not enough delegates are chosen between March 16 and April 19 to alter the dynamics of a race. So either a presumptive nominee emerges from the voting on March 15, or the long, cold primary season is destined to continue for at least five more weeks.
+
+Five big states hold contests on this day, providing campaigns with divergent paths to win delegates. March 15 features the first true winner-take-all statewide primaries (Florida and Ohio); the direct election of individual delegates in congressional districts (Illinois); a winner-take-all contest by congressional district (Missouri); and a proportional statewide primary with no minimum threshold to win delegates (North Carolina).
+
+In Florida, Bush last year convinced the legislature to make the state a true winner-take-all before Rubio appeared to be a threat. Now it’s hard see either Bush or Rubio going on to win the nomination if he loses his home state, making Florida a death cage competition between the two—or a huge opportunity for a third candidate to knock out both and run away with 99 delegates. Florida will also be the most expensive state; California and Texas are not statewide winner-take-alls, so candidates can target their resources to pick up delegates. But while Bush and Rubio will have to spend what it takes to win here, the other candidates—if they operate on the assumption that Bush and Rubio have home court advantage—don’t have to spend time or money competing in Florida.
+
+Similar to Bush, Kasich last year made his state of Ohio true winner-take-all contest. If Kasich is still in the race at this point, no other candidate needs to spend a dime in his state, unless they see an opportunity to knock out the governor. Even if he fares poorly earlier in the primaries, Kasich could stay in the race just to win Ohio’s 66 delegates; since he controls the state mechanisms enough to be able to control a block of delegates, he could become one of the convention’s only real “brokers.”",REAL
+1852,Chris Christie fades into darkness,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+827,Mitt Romney Refuses to Support Trump: “I Keep Hoping That Somehow Things Will Get Better”,"The Republican Party’s identity crisis keeps getting worse. Hours after House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was not ready to support Donald Trump, the presumptive G.O.P. nominee, 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney also refused to endorse his successor, saying that he was “dismayed” by the state of American politics and that he wished for “better choices” for candidates who, unfortunately, do not exist anymore.
+
+While Romney ruled out the possibility of a third-party candidacy during a Q&A at a fundraising gala Thursday night in Washington, he said he was so fundamentally disappointed with the G.O.P. that he could not support Trump in good conscience, nor would he switch allegiances and support Hillary Clinton.
+
+“I see way too much demagoguery and populism on both sides of the aisle and I only hope and aspire that we'll see more greatness,” he said, according to the Washington Examiner.
+
+Earlier this year, Romney championed the Never Trump movement, attempting to block his nomination by proposing the remaining Republican candidates unite to force a contested convention in which an alternative would win the nomination despite winning fewer primaries. That dream ended earlier this week when Ted Cruz dropped out of the race (and John Kasich soon after), but that didn’t stop Romney from sticking to his convictions.
+
+“I happen to think that the person who is leading the nation has an enormous and disproportionate impact on the course of the world, so I am dismayed at where we are now,” he said. “I wish we had better choices, and I keep hoping that somehow things will get better, and I just don't see an easy answer from where we are.”
+
+Romney also praised Ryan, his former running mate, who recently took on Trump. “He is where he needs to be,” he explained, saying that he was impressed that Ryan could somehow get the wildly fractious House G.O.P. to work together. “I’d love to see him run for president, but having a Speaker of the House, at this stage, where we don’t know what’s going to happen on the presidential race, having a Speaker of the House with that kind of leadership capacity is very encouraging. I have hopes that he’ll remain Speaker.”
+
+Romney may not be the first Republican leader to publicly disavow Trump since he became the party’s nominee—that honor goes to Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, who quickly argued that an “adult” step in and run for president on a third-party ticket—but he is by far the most prominent. So far, there have been rumblings within an embarrassed G.O.P. that they could never support Trump: both George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush refused to endorse or comment on the nomination, and do not plan on attending the Republican National Convention. Senator John McCain was recorded saying that Trump would severely hurt his re-election chances in Arizona, a Latino-heavy state that borders Mexico. And, as Hillary Clinton highlighted in an e-mail blast, that sentiment isn’t limited to high-profile Republicans, either: dozens of other G.O.P. congressional representatives, governors, and major political figures are all quickly boarding the anti-Trump train—or, at the very least, refusing to comment.",REAL
+2737,Rush Limbaugh: Left Has 'Fear and Hatred of Christianity',"Pick Your 2016 GOP Candidate -- Let Rush Know! Vote here
+
+",REAL
+5290,"BRINK OF WAR: UK sends TANKS, DRONES and 800 SOLDIERS to Russian border as tensions grow","By JOEY MILLAR 
+The show of force comes just days after the Russian leader’s fleet passed near the British coast. 
+British soldiers will travel to Estonia in what is one of the biggest build-ups of foreign firepower on Russia’s border since the Cold War. 
+The move will take place next spring, with Denmark and France also taking part in the huge military exercise. 
+The project was revealed by Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, who said the UK’s forces will be “fully combat-capable”. 
+He said: “That battalion will be defensive in nature, but it will be fully combat-capable. 
+“This is about two things: reassurance, and that needs to be done with some formidable presence, and deterrence. 
+“This is not simply a trip-wire. This is a serious military presence.” 
+Cold War-style tensions between Moscow and Washington took a further dip this week after the US revealed plans to station marines in Norway – just a few hundred miles from the border with Russia. 
+Officials in Norway and the US said they were considering a deal for extra equipment and training for the Scandinavian country. 
+Russia has reacted",FAKE
+2287,Advocates Aim to Expand Gay Rights at State Level,"Gay rights advocates are hoping to parlay the momentum from their legislative victories in Indiana and Arkansas this week into further expanding legal protections for gays and lesbians in those states and others.
+
+Facing widespread pressure, including from big businesses such as Apple and Wal-Mart, lawmakers in Indiana and Arkansas rolled back their states' new religious objections laws, which critics said could be used to discriminate against gays. Amid the uproar, the Republican governors of Michigan and South Dakota urged their own legislatures to extend anti-discrimination protections to gays.
+
+Twenty-nine states currently don't include protections for gays and lesbians in their non-discrimination laws, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. But the Indiana and Arkansas laws, along with court rulings or legislatures legalizing same-sex marriage in 37 states and an expected U.S. Supreme Court decision on gay marriage this year, are fueling efforts to change that as the 2016 elections approach.
+
+""We're not going to let any of these people off the hot seat,"" said Kathy Sarris, co-founder of the gay-rights group Indiana Equality Action. ""This ultimately is going to happen in Indiana.""
+
+Most of the states without sexual orientation protections are in the South or the Plains, which tend to be more conservative. As public opinion has become more supportive of same-sex marriage and other gay rights in recent years, many businesses say such protections factor into their decisions about expansions and help them attract top employees.
+
+Arkansas state Rep. Warwick Sabin, a Democrat from Little Rock, said the issue isn't going away.
+
+""Other states are moving ahead of us and Arkansas is being left in the dust. We need to make an affirmative statement about our values as a state, and I know that the vast majority of Arkansans believe in fairness and opportunity for all of its citizens,"" he said.
+
+Indiana's Republican-controlled Legislature took a first step by adding language to its new religious objections law stating that service providers can't use the law as a legal defense for refusing to provide goods, services, facilities or accommodations based on sexual orientation, gender identity and other factors. It is now the first Indiana state law that explicitly mentions sexual orientation and gender identity.
+
+Arkansas' amended law only addresses actions by the government, not by businesses or individuals. The law's supporters say the changes would prevent businesses from using it to deny services to individuals, even though it doesn't include specific anti-discrimination language similar to Indiana's law.
+
+Gay rights proponents want Arkansas to go further, though, and are trying to build support for adding sexual orientation to the protected statuses covered by the state's civil rights laws. The state's attorney general, Leslie Rutledge, last week approved the wording of a proposed ballot measure that would add such protections, clearing the way for supporters to begin gathering the signatures needed to get it on the November 2016 ballot.
+
+""Today, LGBT Arkansans are still unequal, and today's battle points toward a broader struggle ahead — a fight where full and complete equality for all Arkansans that cannot be undermined is the only acceptable outcome,"" Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBT rights group, said in a statement after Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed that state's law.
+
+Hutchinson, meanwhile, has left open the possibility of issuing an executive order that would prohibit workplace discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people at state agencies.
+
+Similar debates are going on elsewhere. In North Dakota on Thursday the Republican-controlled Legislature voted down a measure that would have prohibited discrimination based on a person's sexual orientation in the areas of housing and employment. Gov. Jack Dalrymple rebuked lawmakers, saying such discrimination wasn't acceptable.
+
+In Michigan, meanwhile, GOP Gov. Rick Snyder warned legislators that he would veto a religious objections bill unless they also sent him a measure that would extend anti-discrimination protections to gays. He cited the Indiana outcry in making his warning.
+
+Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and fellow Republicans maintained that the state's religious objections law never sanctioned discrimination against anyone. They said considering changes to the state's civil rights law was too major of a policy change to take up with less than a month left in the legislative session.
+
+State Senate President David Long acknowledged ""it's probably likely"" that extending anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation will be on next year's agenda.
+
+""You can see that this discussion has been elevated in Indiana and it's an important one,"" Long said.
+
+Some gay-rights supporters say the push for religious freedom laws proposed in about a dozen states this year amounts to a consolation prize for conservatives dismayed over the legalization of same-sex marriages across much of the country.
+
+Some conservative activists have a different take.
+
+Eric Miller, the executive director of an Indiana group, Advance America, called the national outcry over the state's law an ""orchestrated effort of misinformation"" led by those pushing for ""government recognition, government approval, adding to our civil-rights laws protections for sexual orientation and gender identity.""",REAL
+6121,Best of Luck With the Wall,"Best of Luck With the Wall Share on Facebook Tweet 
+A voyage across the US-Mexico border, stitched together from 200,000 satellite images. Directed by Josh Begley. Read more here . [watch video below]",FAKE
+1501,George W. Bush reportedly rips Ted Cruz to Jeb Bush donors,"Former President George W. Bush reportedly ripped into Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at a weekend gathering of donors to his brother's presidential campaign, according to a published report Monday.
+
+Politico reported that Bush said of Cruz, ""I just don't like the guy,"" at the event, which was held Sunday night in Denver.
+
+According to the report, which cited at least six donors who were at the event, Bush said he did not like Cruz's de facto alliance with Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who has notably spared Cruz from the criticism he has ladled onto other members of the 15-candidate Republican field.
+
+""He said he found it 'opportunistic' that Cruz was sucking up to Trump and just expecting all of his support to come to him in the end,"" one donor told Politico when asked to describe Bush's remarks about Cruz. The report added that the former president had been engaging with amiable discussions about the state of the GOP race when Cruz's name came up.
+
+""I was like, 'Holy s---, did he just say that?'"" the donor told Politico. ""I remember looking around and seeing that other people were also looking around surprised.""
+
+The report also said that Bush warned the donors to not underestimate Cruz's strength in the South and in Texas, where his message of religious liberty is expected to play very well with voters.
+
+Cruz, in a written statement put out by the campaign on Tuesday, said he would not be ""reciprocating"" after the comments.
+
+""I have great respect for George W. Bush, and was proud to work on his 2000 campaign and in his administration,"" he said in the statement. ""It's no surprise that President Bush is supporting his brother and attacking the candidates he believes pose a threat to his campaign. I have no intention of reciprocating. I met my wife Heidi working on his campaign, and so I will always be grateful to him.""
+
+Freddy Ford, a spokesman for George W. Bush, did not deny that the former president had made the disparaging remarks about Cruz when asked to comment by Politico.
+
+""The first words out of President Bush's mouth [Sunday] were that Jeb is going to earn the nomination, win the election, and be a great President ... He does not view Senator Cruz as Governor Bush's most serious rival.""
+
+Ford denied further requests by Fox News to address Bush's reported ""I just don't like the guy"" remark.
+
+Cruz joined George W. Bush's presidential campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser and helped put together the legal team that argued Bush v. Gore before the Supreme Court in the aftermath of the controversial election. He later served as an associate deputy attorney general in the Justice Department before becoming Solicitor General of Texas in 2003.
+
+Click for more from Politico.
+
+Fox News' Mike Emanuel and Serafin Gomez contributed to this report.",REAL
+9517,"Donald Trump, Peacenik President?       : Information"," Donald Trump, Peacenik President? By Thaddeus Russell
+ U.S. presidents possess almost unilateral power to drop bombs on other countries, says historian Thaddeus Russell, and that's why it's very good news that Trump is most libertarian when it comes to foreign policy.
+Russell, who's the author of A Renegade History of the United States and is currently writing a book on foreign policy, says Trump's enmity with the neocons at National Review and The Weekly Standard is ""fantastic news for us and the world."" He points out that Trump advisor (and likely future cabinet member) Newt Gingrich gave a 2013 interview with The Washington Times expressing second thoughts about his neocon past.
+Though Trump has pledged to go after ISIS, his general philosophy seems far preferable to Hillary's systematic and carefully thought-out Wilsonian foreign policy. ""I don't see a war with Russia and I don't see greater interventionism generally outside of [a] little pocket of the Middle East,"" says Russell.
+Nick Gillespie caught up with Russell for an interview. Audio - Reason Podcast",FAKE
+8281,Merkel: Worried about Islamisation? Just Sing Christmas Carols,"Merkel: Worried about Islamisation? Just Sing Christmas Carols Merkel: Worried about Islamisation? Just Sing Christmas Carols By 0 19 
+Angela Merkel has recommended that Germans who are concerned about Islamisation should play Christmas carols on the recorder to contain any possible threat. 
+At a national congress of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party in Wittenburg the German Chancellor told supporters that it’s up to them to hold off the growth of Islam in Germany, by preserving Christmas traditions. 
+Addressing points raised by the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party about Islamic law holding values that are antithetical to those of Germans, Merkel conceded: “I know that there are concerns about Islam.” 
+The CDU politician argued that it’s up to Germans to contain Islamisation in Germany, suggesting they do so by recalling Christian traditions. “How many Christmas carols do we still know? And how many of them are we passing on to our children and grandchildren?” she asked the crowd, rhetorically. 
+Merkel added: “You just have to copy a few [sheets of carol music], and ask someone who can play the recorder or the flute [to join in]”. 
+Met with some laughter at her suggestion that a woodwind rendition of Christmas songs could pose a challenge to Islamisation, the Chancellor insisted : “Yes I’m being serious. Otherwise, we will lose a piece of our homeland.” 
+Merkel’s suggestions were met with scepticism from AfD Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Beatrix von Storch, who co-leads the Eurosceptic party. 
+“Yes, I think it’s an excellent idea and it’s nice when…",FAKE
+1035,Trump's abortion answer confirms GOP fears,"(CNN) Donald Trump's suggestion that women who get abortions should face ""some form of punishment"" if the practice is banned is giving the #NeverTrump movement new urgency.
+
+Faced with the prospect of Trump as the party's standard bearer, Republicans from across the ideological spectrum quickly condemned Trump's assertion -- but not before Democrats showed the damage Trump's words could have on the GOP.
+
+And in what was a clear acknowledgment of the stakes, Trump did something he has rarely done in this campaign -- back away from his statement within hours.
+
+His comments, which go against the GOP's anti-abortion stance, brought new potency to the anti-Trump wing of the party, including conservative radio hosts and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker , looking to stop Trump in next week's primary. Trump was already facing a media uproar this week over his comments about Heidi Cruz and over his handling of an incident involving his campaign manager and a female reporter that led to an arrest summons.
+
+Of course, Trump has shown himself to be an unstoppable force who has offended pretty much everyone at this point without much harm to his poll numbers. But for Republicans worried about the damage Trump could do at the top of the ticket with off-the-cuff or controversial quotes, Democrats, including presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton , gave a harsh reminder.
+
+""The Republicans all line up together,"" Clinton said in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper.
+
+""Now maybe they aren't quite as open about it as Donald Trump was earlier today, but they all have the same position,"" she said, noting anti-abortion positions taken by both John Kasich and Ted Cruz . ""If you make abortion a crime -- you make it illegal -- then you make women and doctors criminals.""
+
+Wednesday's controversy unfolded less than a week before the April 5 Wisconsin primary, which will serve as a crucial test for the remaining GOP candidates before the race returns east.
+
+Emily's List, a group that backs female candidates who support abortion rights, sent out a press release called The Comstock-Trump Agenda: Criminalizing Abortion Edition. It targeted Rep. Barbara Comstock, who is running for re-election in Virginia, a swing state.
+
+""Donald Trump is leading the GOP charge to prevent women from making their own health care decisions, and Barbara Comstock is standing right beside him,"" said Emily's List press secretary Rachel Thomas.
+
+Why I'm voting for Donald Trump
+
+
+
+By suggesting that women who get an abortion should face punishment, Trump managed to unite advocates on both sides of the issue. Abortion opponents have pushed for punishment for doctors who perform abortions, but not women who receive them. That Trump struggled with this issue -- a core holding of these advocates — underscored for some that he is new to the conservative fight, an argument that his opponents have been making for some time to little effect. By suggesting that women who get an abortion should face punishment, Trump managed to unite advocates on both sides of the issue. Abortion opponents have pushed for punishment for doctors who perform abortions, but not women who receive them. That Trump struggled with this issue -- a core holding of these advocates — underscored for some that he is new to the conservative fight, an argument that his opponents have been making for some time to little effect.
+
+Asked Wednesday by MSNBC's Chris Matthews whether a woman who got an abortion illegally should face punishment, the current GOP front-runner said he supported that idea.
+
+""Yes, there has to be some form of punishment,""Trump said, adding that he didn't know what form of punishment would be acceptable. He also said that men involved in an unwanted pregnancy that led to an abortion would not face any type of punishment.
+
+""It's the latest demonstration of how little Donald has thought about any of the serious issues facing this country,"" Cruz said after taping an appearance on ABC's ""Jimmy Kimmel Live"" Wednesday night.
+
+""I am pro-life. Being pro-life means standing and defending the unborn,"" Cruz added. ""But it also means defending moms. Defending women. And defending the incredible gift women have to bring life into the world. And Donald's comments, they were unfortunate, they were wrong and I strongly disagree with it.""
+
+The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List framed Trump as a candidate who is new to the issue.
+
+""As a convert to the pro-life movement, Mr. Trump sees the reality of the horror of abortion -- the destruction of an innocent human life -- which is legal in our country up until the moment of birth,"" Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the group, said in a statement. ""But let us be clear: punishment is solely for the abortionist who profits off of the destruction of one life and the grave wounding of another.""
+
+About three hours after he spoke to MSNBC, Trump reversed course, issuing a statement saying that his pro-life ""position has not changed.""
+
+""If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman,"" the statement said. ""The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb.""
+
+That didn't mollify opponents who have seen him as a fake conservative who has been a no-show on the big conservative fights.
+
+""While Trump has since 'clarified' this position on punishing women, his statements suggest he should spend more time with pro-life conservatives to gain a better appreciation of what their goals and objectives really are,"" said Tony Perkins, Family Research Council Action president and Ted Cruz backer. ""The pro-life movement values both mother and child and seeks to uphold the dignity of both by seeking to protect both from the damage of abortion and the predatory abortion industry.""",REAL
+5150,Donald Trump in the hunt for a VP: Who's got the golden ticket?,"Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie are at the top of Trump's VP shortlist, say sources, but both candidates may be less than ideal.
+
+Presumed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is reportedly vetting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (l.) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, both shown in this composite image, as potential running mates.
+
+Donald Trump’s long-awaited vice president announcement is getting closer, say sources, as the Republican National Convention on July 18 quickly approaches.
+
+There are reports that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are at the top of the VP shortlist and currently filling out paperwork for the vetting process. Other names include Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
+
+The intense speculation around Trump’s potential running mate speaks to the high salience VP picks have had in previous election years. Vice presidential picks often serve as a unifying force for a party after a divisive contest for the nomination, a point Trump is likely considering as he tries to woo establishment Republicans onto his side. The right VP candidate could help bring party leaders, Republican voters, and big donors into the Trump fold, all people the campaign desperately needs ahead of the general election.
+
+“Even if it doesn’t move the needle much, the vice presidential selection can help compensate for some of the problems and concerns that voters have about a nominee,” Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, writes for CNN. “In Trump’s case this is especially important given how unprecedented and unpredictable his candidacy is.”
+
+The assumed VP frontrunners, Governor Christie and former Representative Gingrich, could help Trump work the legislative aspect of the presidency.
+
+Gingrich has the experience. During his 20 years as a representative from Georgia, Gingrich served as House minority whip for six years and speaker for four. And Christie, who was appointed as US Attorney for the District of New Jersey by President George W. Bush in 2002 before becoming governor in 2010, has been crucial to the Trump campaign, shopping around for endorsements and donations.
+
+“[Trump] is the first to admit that he doesn’t know all the ways of Washington,” Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor who has been close with Trump during his campaign, told The Washington Post. “So to actually push what he wants through, he’s willing to reach out and get somebody to lend a hand.”
+
+With more than 60 percent of voters feeling unfavorable about Trump at the end of June, the right VP pick could help voters feel more positive about the Republican ticket.
+
+However, Gingrich and Christie might not be the ones to do it.
+
+When Gingrich withdrew from the presidential race in 2012, he had unfavorable ratings ranging between 56 and 67 percent. And even before his unsuccessful presidential bid, Gingrich had a less-than-perfect track record, as John Pitney Jr. explains:
+
+Trump might be thinking that Gingrich could be his link to the Washington establishment that he has so long criticized. If so, he should think again. During his speakership, Gingrich alienated his colleagues through his impetuous leadership style. There was an abortive GOP effort to depose him in 1997, and in the following year, colleagues finally forced him to leave after the Clinton impeachment backfired politically. During his presidential race, few lawmakers endorsed him.
+
+And Christie, who once seemed like a presidential contender himself, may not be that much better.
+
+Christie’s approval ratings in his home state have tanked since he started supporting Trump. Regardless of age, gender, or education, 60 to 68 percent of New Jersey voters disapproved of Christie in May, the lowest rating ever for the governor. And when asked what they think of a VP role on Trump’s ticket, 72 percent of New Jersey voters said they disapprove.
+
+“It’s a drastic decline in popularity for a governor who once looked like a strong choice for president,” Maurice Carroll, assistant director for Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a press release last month. “Christie-for-President was a flop, and, as far as the local folks are concerned, so is Christie-for-Vice President. Forget local pride, New Jersey voters say overwhelmingly; they don’t want their gov on a Trump ticket.”",REAL
+3861,Obama bans some military equipment sales to police,"WASHINGTON — President Obama has banned the sale of some kinds of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies, following widespread criticism of a paramilitary-like response to riots in a St. Louis suburb last August.
+
+In doing so, Obama put his stamp on the recommendations of a multi-agency federal working group that endorsed a ban on sales of some military equipment and providing more training, supervision and oversight of others.
+
+""We've seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like they're an occupying force, as opposed to a force that's part of the community that's protecting them and serving them,"" Obama said in a speech in Camden, N.J. Monday. He said military equipment can ""alienate and intimidate local residents and may send the wrong message.""
+
+In Camden, Obama highlighted a wide range of administration initiatives to fight crime, improve police-community relations and improve transparency in policing. They include a White House data initiative to encourage local police departments to release more information about arrests and uses of force by police; guidelines for police use of body-worn cameras; and federal grants to help implement community policing strategies.
+
+But the changes to federal policies on the use of military equipment for police received most of the attention, following the use of armored trucks, riot gear, tear gas and assault rifles by police last year in Ferguson, Mo., where days of unrest followed the police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old man.
+
+Banned will be tracked armored vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers, camouflage uniforms, and large-caliber weapons and ammunition.
+
+""So we're going to prohibit some equipment made for the battlefield that is not appropriate for local police departments,"" Obama said. ""There's other equipment that may be needed in certain cases, but only with proper training.""
+
+That equipment will be placed on a ""controlled equipment list"" that includes aircraft, wheeled tactical vehicles, mobile command-and-control units, battering rams and riot gear.
+
+To have access to that equipment, police departments must meet national policing standards, track their use and receive approval from the federal government before selling or transferring them.
+
+The ban on prohibited items takes effect immediately, White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz said. The other recommendations will go into effect Oct. 1, allowing the administration to write more specific rules.
+
+Although those rules haven't been drafted, the White House highlighted one policy by the University of Texas System police that prohibits the use of military vehicles in response to ""exercises of the First Amendment right to free speech"" or as a part of ""any public demonstration or display of police resources.""
+
+To be eligible to purchase that equipment, agencies must adopt ""robust and specific written policies and protocols"" covering not just the use of the federal equipment, but their policing practices in general. Agencies that violate those rules would be barred from future equipment purchases for at least 60 days and, in some cases, be referred to the Justice Department for a civil rights investigation.
+
+Through an executive order in January, Obama asked for federal departments to consult with police and civil rights groups to come up with recommendations on police use of military equipment. Obama ratified those executive actions Monday.
+
+But Congress is also considering legislation. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who is sponsoring one of those bills, called the president's action a step in the right direction and an acknowledgment ""that this federal equipment and funding saves lives, but that these programs are in need of reform ""
+
+In a 50-page report released Monday, the working group noted that many police departments increasingly rely on the federal government for equipment as local budgets are strained. ""Yet, in some neighborhoods and communities, incidents of misuse, overuse, and inappropriate use of controlled equipment occur, and the resulting strain placed on the community and its relationship with law enforcement is severe,"" the report said.",REAL
+3227,Boehner allies downplay GOP rifts,"Washington (CNN) House Speaker John Boehner and his top lieutenants are downplaying the rift among Republicans that was exposed during last week's intense wrangling over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
+
+The House, Boehner said on Sunday, is a ""rambunctious place.""
+
+""We have 435 members. A lot of members have different ideas about what we should and shouldn't be doing,"" he said during an appearance on CBS's ""Face the Nation.""
+
+Asked if he's capable of leading the chamber, Boehner said: ""I think so. I'm not going to suggest it's easy, because it's not.""
+
+The disagreements among conservatives on procedures and tactics -- and the way those divides have hobbled Boehner -- was on vivid public display Friday when the House, faced with a midnight deadline to keep DHS from a shutdown, failed to pass a three-week extension of its funding.
+
+The party's right flank insisted that it not cave on its demand that any Homeland Security measure also include provisions to undo President Barack Obama's executive actions on immigration. But Democrats blocked that bill from advancing in the Senate, instead sending back a version with all of the immigration portions stripped out and leaving Boehner with few options to mollify his party.
+
+The three-week funding measure, intended to save face and avoid the embarrassment of a shutdown, wound up embarrassing his leadership team anyway. And the House was left to pass a one-week measure instead, pushing the same fight back just several more days.
+
+""Could we have done better Friday? Yes. Will we? Yes, we will,"" House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy R-California, a key Boehner ally, said Sunday on NBC's ""Meet the Press.""
+
+He insisted the party doesn't actually face disagreements on the policy issues at hand.
+
+""We have difference of opinion on strategy and tactics, but on principle we are united,"" McCarthy said.
+
+Boehner's allies feared that if he allowed a vote on the Senate's ""clean"" bill to fund Homeland Security for months without including an attack on Obama over immigration, conservatives would call for a vote to remove him as speaker.
+
+Rep. Charlie Dent, a moderate Pennsylvania Republican, acknowledged on Friday that he'd heard talk of ousting Boehner.
+
+""It's time for all of these, you know, D.C. games to end,"" he said. ""I mean all these palace coups or whatever the hell is going on around here has to end, and we have to get down to business of governing.""
+
+It wouldn't be the first time some conservatives sought to remove Boehner -- but they've never had any success before.
+
+Twenty-five Republicans refused to back him for speaker at the start of the new Congress, but they didn't coalesce around a single challenger, and Boehner ultimately won with 216 of the 408 total votes cast.
+
+But a leading House conservative who's often mentioned as a potential Boehner alternative insisted there's no move afoot to unseat the speaker.
+
+Rep. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who chairs the hard-liner House Freedom Caucus, said Sunday that Boehner's decision to advance a one-week measure won't cost the speaker his job.
+
+""That's not gonna happen,"" Jordan said on CNN's ""State of the Union.""
+
+Jordan said he hasn't had conversations with any conservative House colleagues about overthrowing Boehner.
+
+Asked whether Boehner could be ousted over the issue, Jordan responded: ""No, that's not the point.""
+
+He said he wants to see the House's GOP leadership do well because ""that helps the country succeed.""
+
+Rep. Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican who formerly chaired the right-wing Republican Study Committee and is now the House's No. 3-ranking GOP member, said the coming week will allow the House and Senate to try to hash out their differences in a joint conference committee. And he, too, downplayed the perils facing Boehner in an appearance on ""Fox News Sunday.""
+
+""Obviously, our members have a lot of differences on how maybe we want to go about tactics, but our goal is the same,"" he said. ""Our goal is to fight this President's illegal actions on immigration, and we're now in a position to force the Senate to go to conference committee.""
+
+Scalise said conservatives who are frustrated about Friday's outcome should instead turn their ire toward Senate Democrats and pressure the minority party in that chamber to allow the House-passed measure that funds Homeland Security and unravels Obama's immigration actions to receive a vote.
+
+""They need to light up the Senate switchboard,"" Scalise said, ""and make those Senate Democrats feel the heat who have been standing with the president on his illegal actions.""
+
+Still, Boehner acknowledged that his job corralling Republicans is a complicated one.
+
+Asked whether he enjoys it, Boehner responded: ""Most days. Friday wasn't a whole lot of fun. But most days.""",REAL
+9399,THE RIG IS IN: CROOKED HILLARY’S CROOKED VOTING MACHINES,"October 28, 2016 @ 3:07 pm 
+Reports are coming in now of absentee ballots being stolen from mailboxes in Billings, Montana. 
+Bigger issue: FBI has now reopened their investigation into Hilloween’s emails! Have found new ones. My concern is, how is someone under federal investigation going to fulfill the duties of the office of the presidency? That person would be focusing on their defense, not the well being of the American People! How is someone barred from access to Highly Classified Information going to be able to act in the interest of our country? A successful impeachment would see Kaine elevated to the presidency! He must be sitting behind the scenes, rubbing his hands in eager anticipation!”My precious! My precious!” All those mindless bots who are voting for this ho, only doing so because they desire to see a woman president will be sorely disappointed to see that office ceded to Tim Kaine! Whatta joke! TRUMP/PENCE!! marlene October 28, 2016 @ 2:50 pm 
+I will consider the Constitution Party AFTER Donald Trump has served 8 years as President. When it comes to Congress, unfortunately my state does not allow 3rd parties to vote in the primary. If they did, I’d vote for the Constitution Party to give Trump a Congress he can work with. This also means that if I change to democrat, how can I vote out the democrats in Congress? And if I stay republican, it would be useless to vote them out as it would result in more democrats! My state SUCKS and has the worst rigged voting machines, soros-paid Election Commission criminals, and is a “swing” state. A ‘swing’ state is one where they swing your votes to the other candidate of THEIR choice.",FAKE
+8298,"Libertarian Party VP insults Trump, practically endorses Clinton","Libertarian Party VP insults Trump, practically endorses Clinton Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 21:09 Get short URL Libertarian vice presidential candidate Bill Weld (L) and Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump. © Reuters Calling Trump “unhinged” and “not stable” and accusing him of stirring up “envy, resentment, and group hatred,” the Libertarian Party VP nominee Bill Weld said he would continue through the election but practically endorsed Clinton without naming her. 
+Weld, Gary Johnson’s running mate, said he would remain on the Libertarian Party ticket through the election but emphasized that “Trump should not, cannot, and must not be elected President of the United States.” 
+“A President of the United States operates every day under a great deal of pressure — from all sides, and in furtherance of many different agendas. With that pressure comes constant criticism,” Weld said in a statement issued Wednesday in Boston. 
+“After careful observation and reflection, I have come to believe that Donald Trump, if elected President of the United States, would not be able to stand up to this pressure and this criticism without becoming unhinged and unable to perform competently the duties of his office.” Libertarian VP nominee Bill Weld on MSNBC wishes Clinton a happy birthday, as he discusses issuing his statement against Trump pic.twitter.com/uOrqCpwDyy — Eli Watkins (@EliBWatkins) October 26, 2016 
+Weld said the Libertarian Party had made strides “t oward breaking the two party monopoly,” and that America would be stronger when it did, but “given the Commission on Presidential Debates, the deck is stacked against a credible third party ticket.” 
+The Libertarian Party, led by former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, was polling under 10 percent nationally, not enough for the party to be included in the presidential debates. 2+2= #ImWithHer . Weld praises Clinton: https://t.co/EHCRZfmBu8 + Weld denegrates Trump: https://t.co/nUCBhYwSQj — Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) October 26, 2016 
+A former Republican governor of Massachusetts, Weld said he “stepped out of the swirl of the campaign” to alert voters to Trump’s failings as a potential presidential nominee. He stopped short of endorsing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton by name. 
+“Mr. Trump has some charisma and panache, and intellectual quickness. These qualities can be entertaining. Yet more than charisma, more even than intellectual ability, is required of a serious candidate for this country’s highest office. A serious candidate for the Presidency of the United States must be stable, and Donald Trump is not stable.” — RT America (@RT_America) September 27, 2016 
+Weld said Trump had demonstrated his inability to handle criticism or blame and that his first instinct was to lash out and when challenged “he often responds as a child might.” 
+“He makes a sour face, he calls people by insulting names, he waves his arms, he impatiently interrupts. Most families would not allow their children to remain at the dinner table if they behaved as Mr. Trump does. He has not exhibited self-control, the discipline, or the emotional depth necessary to function credibly as a President of the United States,” Weld said. Gary Johnson secures #Libertarian Party nomination - FishTank [VIDEO] @LindsayFrance https://t.co/Uu9ev2dBa1 — RT America (@RT_America) June 1, 2016 
+Weld said Trump “conjured up enemies” from 11 million immigrants to America’s trading partners and that “his ideas of America’s enemies includes almost anyone who talks or looks different from him.” 
+“This is not the time to cast a jocular or feel-good vote for a man whom you may have briefly found entertaining. Donald Trump should not, cannot, and must not be elected President of the United States,” the Libertarian VP candidate concluded.",FAKE
+1608,The 2016 ballot wars begin,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+4814,Putting Presidential Polls in Perspective,"Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have struggled to win over a majority of voters, but so far the Democratic nominee has shown greater potential to grow her support",REAL
+2612,Netanyahu rival concedes defeat,"There is an path for Democrats to regain the presidency — and it does not run through Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin.",REAL
+113,Walter Scott's family plans burial,"Charleston, South Carolina (CNN) The casket is draped with an American flag, and Walter Scott is dressed in a dark suit.
+
+A white banner with a blue star refers to his favorite NFL team. It says: ""Tradition, the Cowboys way.""
+
+A few mourners trickled into the Fielding Home For Funerals in Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley comes by to pay his respects and show support for the Scott family.
+
+They are not at Friday night's visitation, the mayor says. The stress of the past week since Scott was fatally shot in the back by a North Charleston police Officer Michael Slager is too much. They went by the funeral home earlier but they are exhausted, he says. They need their privacy now and at Saturday's funeral and burial, he says.
+
+""This is a heartbreaking tragedy for everyone in our community,"" he says, adding they share the grief of their neighbors in North Charleston and with the Scott family. ""It breaks everyone's hearts, wherever we live.""
+
+Meanwhile, police continue to investigate the incident in which Scott ran from his car after a traffic stop then was shot while fleeing from Slager. On Friday afternoon, police met with a man who was in Scott's car when Slager pulled it over for a broken taillight.
+
+The passenger's name wasn't in a police report obtained by CNN. The passenger was detained briefly after the shooting, one officer wrote in the report.
+
+Scott family attorney Chris Stewart said the man with Scott was a co-worker and friend. But he did not identify the friend by name, nor did Thom Berry, a South Carolina Law Enforcement Division spokesman, who confirmed Friday's meeting.
+
+His lawyer, Andy Savage, said Friday he ""has not received the cooperation from law enforcement that the media has.""
+
+Savage's office said in a written statement that it has yet to receive ""any investigative documents, audio or video tapes, other than a copy of Mr. Slager's arrest warrant.""
+
+The news release added that the lawyer has been advised that the police union that Slager belongs to ""is no longer involved in the case.""
+
+The dash cam footage shows Slager talking calmly to Scott during the traffic stop. Scott apparently says he has no insurance on the vehicle, and Slager returns to his car to do paperwork.
+
+Moments later, Scott gets out of his car and bolts. A foot chase ensues. Scott never reappears on the dash cam video, but a witness later takes video of the officer shooting Scott several times in the back as he is running away.
+
+""Nothing in this video demonstrates that the officer's life or the life of another was threatened,"" National Urban League President Marc Morial said. ""The question here is whether the use of force was excessive.""
+
+On Thursday, a new witness emerged in the case. Gwen Nichols told CNN's Brian Todd that she saw a scuffle between Scott and Slager at the entrance to a vacant lot.
+
+""It was like a tussle type of thing, like, you know, like, 'What do you want?' or 'What did I do?' type of thing,"" Nichols said. ""I didn't hear Mr. Slager saying: 'Stop!' ""
+
+Scott was the subject of a bench warrant over $18,104.43 in unpaid child support at the time of the stop, according to court records. That may be why he ran, an attorney for the family said.
+
+Criminal defense attorney Paul Callan said he believes Slager's defense will play up the reported scuffle in arguing that this is not a murder case.
+
+""Defense attorneys will say this was a heat of passion shooting -- (that) this was something that he did suddenly after some kind of an altercation, a physical altercation with a suspect,"" Callan said. ""And that would constitute manslaughter under law, as opposed to murder, and it makes a huge difference in sentencing.""
+
+The investigation has been turned over to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, or SLED.
+
+In a statement released Thursday, SLED said its investigators found troubling inconsistencies from the very start.
+
+""We believed early on that there was something not right about what happened in that encounter,"" SLED Chief Mark Keel said in a statement. ""The cell phone video shot by a bystander confirmed our initial suspicions.""
+
+Cell phone videographer: 'Mr. Scott never tried to fight'
+
+Feidin Santana, who took the video of the shooting, told CNN's Anderson Cooper that he was walking to work when he saw Slager on top of Scott, who was on the ground. He said he could hear the sound of a Taser in use.
+
+Santana said he didn't see Scott go after the Taser, as Slager initially claimed. He said he believes Scott was trying to get away.
+
+""Mr. Scott never tried to fight,"" Santana said.
+
+Neither the struggle nor the use of a Taser was captured on video, because Santana started recording shortly after that.
+
+His video shows Scott running away from Slager before the officer aims his gun. Slager fires eight shots toward Scott, striking him five times.
+
+While the initial traffic stop may have seemed to be perfectly normal and professional, and the foot chase a reasonable choice, an analyst saw little justification for that last act.
+
+""I'm not familiar with South Carolina police training, but I guarantee you that they do not teach to shoot a fleeing unarmed man in the back,"" said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit.
+
+""If it's determined that multiple officers attempted to cover for the shooting officer, and it's shown that those reports were false, this will be a devastating blow for law enforcement everywhere,"" he said.",REAL
+9858,Silver And Gresham’s Law,"Silver And Gresham’s Law Posted on Home » Silver » Silver News » Silver And Gresham’s Law 
+Silver has been, is, and always will be “poor man’s gold.” Gold is unobtainable for most people in the world the way it’s priced right now. If a global crisis hits silver is going to be remonetized by the free market… 
+
+From PM Fund Manager Dave Kranzler : 
+If it’s not just an industrial metal, like it is today, if governments and central banks start holding it (silver), and this is a copy-cat effect, because obviously you know this, once one of the central banks does something the rest will do it because they don’t want to be different. – Lior Gantz, The Daily Coin, Silver Will Be Re-Monetized By The Market 
+I n 1965 Lyndon Johnson signed the Coinage Act of 1965, which removed the silver content from dimes and quarters and took the silver content in half-dollars down to 40%. In 1970 silver was removed completely from the half-dollars. The excuse given was that the country was running out of silver. But the truth is that the U.S. Government in conjunction with England was dumping its Central Bank stock of silver (and gold) onto the market in order to prevent the price of these precious metals from rising against the U.S. dollar, which had been effectively the world’s reserve currency for 20 years. 
+In fact, the silver-based U.S. coins were disappearing from the market because the value of the silver content in these coins had risen above the face value of the coins. It was real-time proof of Gresham’s Law. In effect, it was an effort by the U.S. Government to de-monetize silver, which has been civilized history’s oldest monetary metal. The U.S. could not yet de-monetize gold because, based on the Bretton Woods Agreement, the U.S. was required to back all Treasuries bonds issued to foreign buyers with gold. But a year after the last remnants of silver were removed from U.S.-minted coins, the Nixon Government disconnected gold from the reserve currency. 
+Ultimately, silver will become re-monetized. Silver has been, is and always will be “poor man’s gold.” In today’s episode of The Daily Coin, we discuss the eventual re-monetization of silver. As a bonus, we describe the fraudulent nature of Tesla’s latest earnings report.",FAKE
+103,Starbucks baristas stop writing 'Race Together' on cups,"In a marketing fiasco that could rank right up there with “New Coke,” Starbucks has ditched its plan to have baristas ignite a national discussion on race after critics advised the chain its view of black and white should revolve around coffee and milk.
+
+The baristas had begun writing ""Race Together"" on customers' cups, as a means of starting a conversation with customers, but the practice ended Sunday after just one week, said company spokesman Jim Olson. But the chain's initiative will continue more broadly without the handwritten messages, Starbucks spokesman Jim Olson said.
+
+The cups were always ""just the catalyst"" for a larger conversation and Starbucks will still hold forum discussions, co-produce special sections in USA Today and put more stores in minority communities as part of the Race Together initiative, according to a company memo from CEO Howard Schultz said.
+
+The campaign has been criticized as opportunistic and inappropriate, coming in the wake of racially charged events such as national protests over police killings of black males. Others questioned whether Starbucks workers could spark productive conversations about race while serving drinks.
+
+The critics blasted Corey duBrowa, the company's senior vice president of global communications, on Twitter after the plan was first announced, calling it patronizing at best and inflammatory at worst. The executive was forced to delete his Twitter account, although he re-activated it the next day.
+
+“Last night I felt personally attacked in a cascade of negativity,” he tweeted. “I got overwhelmed by the volume and tenor of the discussion, and I reacted.”
+
+The phase-out is not a reaction to that pushback, Olson said. ""Nothing is changing. It's all part of the cadence of the timeline we originally planned.""
+
+He echoed the company memo, saying of the Race Together initiative, ""We're leaning into it hard.""
+
+Schultz's note acknowledged the skeptics as an anticipated part of the outreach.
+
+""While there has been criticism of the initiative -- and I know this hasn't been easy for any of you -- let me assure you that we didn't expect universal praise,"" it read.
+
+He said the campaign at its core aims to make sure that ""the promise of the American Dream should be available to every person in this country, not just a select few.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+227,House GOP leaders unveil two-year budget deal with White House,"House Republican leaders have unveiled a tentative two-year budget agreement with the Obama White House aimed at preventing a partial government shutdown and forestalling a debt crisis.
+
+The text of the deal was posted to the House Rules Committee's website late Monday, setting up a final debate and vote on the plan Wednesday. Sources told Fox News the House GOP leadership will likely require the support of almost all House Democrats and between 90 and 100 Republicans to see the agreement through.
+
+The measure was to be discussed further at a GOP meeting Tuesday morning.
+
+The budget pact, coupled with a must-pass increase in the federal borrowing limit, would solve the thorniest issues awaiting Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who is set to be elected Speaker of the House on Thursday. However, sources told Fox that conservatives opposed to Ryan as speaker may use the proposed budget as a reason to vote against the House Ways and Means committee chair. Not enough members were expected to defect to imperil Ryan's ultimate election.
+
+The deal would also take budget showdowns and government shutdown fights off the table until after the 2016 presidential election, a potential boon to Republican candidates who might otherwise face uncomfortable questions about messes in the GOP-led Congress.
+
+Congress must raise the federal borrowing limit by Nov. 3 or risk a first-ever default, while money to pay for government operations runs out Dec. 11 unless Congress acts. The emerging framework would give both the Pentagon and domestic agencies two years of budget relief of $80 billion in exchange for cuts elsewhere in the budget.
+
+Outlined for rank-and-file Republicans in a closed-door session Monday night, the budget relief would total $50 billion in the first year and $30 billion in the second year.
+
+""Let's declare success,"" House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told Republicans, according to Rep. David Jolly, R-Fla., as the leadership sought to rally support for the emerging deal.
+
+A chief selling point for GOP leaders is that the alternative is chaos and a stand-alone debt limit increase that might be forced on Republicans. But conservatives in the conference who drove Boehner to resign were not ready to fall in line.
+
+""This is again just the umpteenth time that you have this big, big, huge deal that'll last for two years and we were told nothing about it, and in fact even today, were not given the details"" said Rep. John Fleming, R-La. ""And we're probably going to have to vote on it in less than 48 hours.""
+
+""I'm not excited about it at all,"" said Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz. ""A two-year budget deal that raises the debt ceiling for basically the entire term of this presidency.""
+
+The agreement was panned by two prominent conservative groups, Heritage Action and the Club for Growth. The two organizations issued a joint statement saying the deal was ""brokered by a lame-duck speaker and a lame duck president [and] represents the very worst of Washington – a last minute deal that increases spending and debt under the auspices of fiscal responsibility.""
+
+The measure under discussion would suspend the current $18.1 trillion debt limit through March 2017. The budget portion would increase the current ""caps"" on total agency spending by $50 billion in 2016 and $30 billion in 2017, offset by savings elsewhere in the budget. And it would permit about $16 billion to be added on top of that in 2016, classified as war funding, with a comparable boost in 2017.
+
+Among the proposed spending cuts are curbs on Medicare payments for outpatient services provided by hospitals that have taken over doctors' practices, and an extension of a 2 percentage-point cut in Medicare payments to doctors through the end of a 10-year budget.
+
+The budget side of the deal is aimed at undoing automatic spending cuts which are a byproduct of a 2011 budget and debt deal and the failure of Washington to subsequently tackle the government's fiscal woes. GOP defense hawks are a driving force, intent on reversing the automatic cuts and getting more money for the military.
+
+The focus is on setting a new overall spending limit for agencies whose operating budgets are set by Congress each year. It will be up to the House and Senate Appropriations committees to produce a detailed omnibus spending bill by the Dec. 11 deadline.
+
+There's also a drawdown from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, reforms to crop insurance, and savings reaped from a Justice Department funds for crime victims and involving assets seized from criminals.
+
+The legislation also would clean up expected problems in Social Security and Medicare by fixing a shortfall looming next year in Social Security payments to the disabled, as well as a large increase in Medicare premiums and deductibles for doctors' visits and other outpatient care.
+
+The deal, which would apply to the 2016-17 budget years, resembles a pact that Ryan himself put together two years ago in concert with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., that eased automatic spending cuts for the 2014-15 budget years. A lot of conservatives disliked that measure.
+
+""It is past time that we do away with the harmful, Draconian sequester cuts,"" said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. ""We must also ensure that there are equal defense and nondefense increases.""
+
+The deal would make good on a promise Boehner made in the days after announcing his surprise resignation from Congress last month. He said at the time: ""I don't want to leave my successor a dirty barn. I want to clean the barn up a little bit before the next person gets there.""
+
+Some of the more moderate Republican members welcomed the emerging deal and applauded Boehner.
+
+""The outline that was presented seems like a path forward,"" said Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa. ""He said he was going to try to clean the barn and this is a good start.""
+
+Fox News' Chad Pergram and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+1207,The Edge: Iowa loss turns down Trump's volume in N.H.,"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+Buzz Cut:
+
+ • The Edge: Iowa loss turns down Trump’s volume in N.H. 
+
+ • Jeb says plan was to deploy Dubya ‘nearing the end’
+
+ • Bush, Christie camps coordinate to kill off Rubio
+
+ • Debate, poll foretell long slog for Hillary
+
+ • Still gotcha
+
+
+
+THE EDGE: IOWA LOSS TURNS DOWN TRUMP’S VOLUME IN N.H.
+
+ We know that Iowa caucus results can change the discussion in New Hampshire and here’s the proof. Prior to Monday night, Donald Trump dominated media mentions within the state of New Hampshire the same way he dominated polls. But, according to research by The New Analytics Company, Trump’s lead in mentions has been cut in half.
+
+ 
+
+ Second-place Marco Rubio slipped a fraction of a point but Trump’s share of media time was robbed by a host of other candidates, especially those who are placing long-shot bets on the Granite State. Trump’s slippage brings him nearly into parity with Rubio in the New Hampshire media.
+
+ 
+
+ Iowa winner Ted Cruz got a boost and now the overall discussion in the first-in-the-nation primary state reflects what polls have been showing: a three-man race with no one else even close.
+
+ 
+
+ The team at New Analytics has built The Edge, a unique tool to measure which candidates are being talked about the most, and provided the first look to Fox News First.
+
+ 
+
+ Here are the rankings for the candidate’s shares of media mentions in New Hampshire after the Iowa caucuses. Points gained or lost from before Iowa are listed in brackets. See the full results here.
+
+ 
+
+ Donald Trump, 31.67 [-7.35]; Marco Rubio, 26.09 [-.45]; Ted Cruz, 21.58 [+1.48]; Jeb Bush, 7.28 [+3.77]; Chris Christie, 5.61 [+5.22]; John Kasich, 5.27 [-4.88]; Ben Carson, 13.97 [+2.21]
+
+ 
+
+ Q Poll shows three-man race - Fox News: “A new national poll shows Republicans continue to back Donald Trump for a White House bid but believe Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has the best shot of beating a Democratic candidate in the general election. Trump leads the GOP pack with 31 percent, followed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with 22 percent and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio with 19 percent, according to the Quinnipiac University National poll released Friday…The poll found that the strongest candidates to go head-to-head in a general election match-up would be Sanders and Rubio.”
+
+ 
+
+ JEB SAYS PLAN WAS TO DEPLOY DUBYA ‘NEARING THE END’
+
+ MSNBC’s morning show has become something of a therapy session by those upset by the rise of Marco Rubio. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush joined host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican Florida congressmen famous for his Rubio resentments, for some therapeutic venting this morning. Bush and Scarborough commiserated about the success of a candidate whom they both deem unworthy, but Bush slipped a bit when talking about his own campaign.
+
+ 
+
+ Bush was asked by another host why it took him so long to deploy his brother, former President George W. Bush, in the primary race. The super PAC trying to keep Jeb Bush’s campaign afloat unveiled an ad featuring the 43rd president, a sharp departure from the original campaign strategy of distancing him from his older brother. The struggling presidential contender explained the timing by saying that the “intention was to do it nearing the end.”
+
+ 
+
+ Who would have thought that the end would be near for former frontrunner Bush even before the first primary was held?
+
+ 
+
+ Righteous brother - “We are righteous in making sure there’s no coordination [with the super PAC he founded to back his campaign]. But I knew [George W. Bush] was going to campaign for me in South Carolina, for which I’m grateful…I love my brother and a lot of Republicans do as well.” – Jeb Bush on “The Kelly File” Watch here.
+
+ 
+
+ Bush, Christie camps coordinate to kill off Rubio - NYT: “Members of the Bush and Christie campaigns have communicated about their mutual desire to halt Mr. Rubio’s rise in the polls, according to Republican operatives familiar with the conversations. While emails, texts and phone calls between operatives in rival campaigns are not uncommon in the tight-knit world of political strategists, the contact among senior aides in the two campaigns has drifted toward musings about what can be done to stop or at least slow Mr. Rubio, the operatives said. In a sign of a budding alliance, the aides have, for example, exchanged news articles that raise potential areas of vulnerability for Mr. Rubio. There is no formal coordination, the operatives stressed, but rather a recognition of a shared agenda. ‘We do have similar goals,’ an adviser to Mr. Christie said.”
+
+ 
+
+ [The Hill: “Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) will endorse Chris Christie in the Republican presidential race, a new report says.”]
+
+ 
+
+ Jeb & Co. focus on Santorum ‘accomplishments’ stumble - USA Today: “The intra-party battle against Marco Rubio is focusing on his Senate experience — or lack thereof…Bush told MSNBC’s Morning Joe, ‘and the net effect is that we’re languishing as a nation.’ Christie has leveled similar criticisms, noting that one of Rubio’s new endorsers — former presidential candidate Rick Santorum — couldn’t cite any specific Rubio accomplishments in the Senate. The New Jersey governor also describes Rubio as a ‘bubble boy’ who avoids tough questions. Rubio’s poll numbers in New Hampshire are rising in the wake of his strong finish in Iowa. Christie and Bush are looking to bring down those numbers, seeking to become the main establishment alternative to Iowa winner Ted Cruz and the still-well-polling Donald Trump.”
+
+ 
+
+ [NRO’s Jonah Goldberg makes the case that calling Rubio the “Republican Obama” may not actually be a bad thing.]
+
+ 
+
+ Fox News Sunday: The Anti-Rubio caucus - Mr. Sunday has the whole crew of candidates hoping to knock of Marco Rubio in New Hampshire: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. Watch “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace” at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. ET on the Fox News Channel. Check local listings for broadcast times in your area.
+
+ 
+
+ WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…
+
+ The ethics of animal conservation can be tricky. Sometimes conservation of one species requires the elimination of another. The New Yorker brings us the tale of the Channel Island Turkeys, which were eradicated from the islands to save the native foxes, but the story goes deeper than that: “The sheep on Santa Cruz Island, off the coast of Southern California, were the first to go. They had been imported by schooner in the mid-nineteenth century, and, beginning in the early nineteen-eighties, tens of thousands of their feral descendants were eradicated. Later it was the hogs’ turn to face the gun. Between 2005 and 2006, more than five thousand were killed. By the following year, Santa Cruz was certified pig-free—a boon, perhaps, for the island’s oak trees, whose acorns the animals particularly loved. The next round of exterminations targeted several hundred turkeys.”
+
+ 
+
+ Got a TIP from the RIGHT or the LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+ 
+
+ POLL CHECK
+
+ Real Clear Politics Averages
+
+ National GOP nomination: Trump 33.2 percent; Cruz 20.7 percent; Rubio 13.3 percent; Carson 7.8 percent
+
+ New Hampshire GOP Primary: Trump 32.4 percent; Rubio 15 percent; Cruz 12.6 percent; Kasich 11 percent; Bush 9.8 percent
+
+ National Dem nomination: Clinton 50.5 percent; Sanders 37.2 percent
+
+ New Hampshire Dem Primary: Sanders 57.8; Clinton 35.5 percent
+
+ General Election Clinton vs. Trump: Clinton +2.7 points
+
+ Generic Congressional Vote: Republicans +0.5
+
+ 
+
+ DEBATE, POLL FORETELL LONG SLOG FOR HILLARY
+
+ A contentious, sometimes nasty, Democratic debate between presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton and her rival, socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., foreshadowed a long, ugly march to victory for Clinton. And a new poll out today shows just how long it might be.
+
+ 
+
+ The Quinnipiac University national poll shows Clinton’s support has collapsed since the last survey in December, losing nearly 20 points to fall into a statistical tie with Sanders. Clinton is still popular with Democrats, but hard sentiment seems to be growing. Some 22 percent of Democrats hold unfavorable views of Clinton, more than double Sanders. The Vermont senator also holds the highest overall favorability among any candidate in either party at 44 percent and performs better in the general election matchup against all Republicans than Clinton. That’s strong evidence that her electability argument isn’t working.
+
+ 
+
+ Clinton’s battering of Sanders in Thursday’s debate suggests she is aware of her predicament. But she likely worsened her plight as she not only went scorched earth after Sanders but also made several head-scratching claims including that she was not part of the Democratic establishment.
+
+ 
+
+ She can still be considered a lock for the nomination but it is almost as if her preparations for a long, ugly process was a prediction rather than a precaution.
+
+ 
+
+ [Dan Balz was ringside for fight night at the University of New Hampshire. Read his blow-by-blow account here.]
+
+ 
+
+ POWER PLAY: SANDERS CHILLS HILLARY IN NEW HAMPSHIRE
+
+ Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is giving presumed Democratic nominee a run for her money in the Granite State. He’s favored to win and being from a neighboring state his favorability makes sense. But does his win actually hurt Hillary? GOPAC Inc., Chairman Dave Avella and Democratic strategist Joe Trippi weigh in to Chris Stirewalt. WATCH HERE.
+
+ 
+
+ Dem chairwoman holds the line for Hillary’s contested Iowa win - “There are over 1,800 precincts in Iowa. The party ran a caucus that is very complex. At the same time, in every one of those precincts. That said, challenging job, the closest race that we have had in their caucus’ history and I’m confident the process and   outcome was effective and without question.” – Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DNC chairwoman, on the DMR editorial slamming the Iowa Democratic caucus in an interview with Shannon Bream.
+
+ 
+
+ [Manhattan Institute health care scholar Yevgeniy Feyman finds lots of similarities between the health plans proposed by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.]
+
+ 
+
+ #mediabuzz - Host Howard Kurtz heads to New Hampshire this week to talk with New Hampshire Union Leader editor Joe McQuaid ahead of his state’s pivotal primary. Watch “#mediabuzz” Sunday at 11 a.m. ET, with a second airing at 5 p.m.
+
+ 
+
+ STILL GOTCHA
+
+ CBC: “Mousetraps: they just don’t make ‘em like they used to. A Victorian mousetrap is still doing what it was designed to do, catch mice — albeit accidentally. ‘Isn’t it amazing that a mousetrap that is 155 years old is still doing its job?’ says Guy Baxter, an archivist with the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, England. Baxter says the mousetrap, which was on display at the museum captured a mouse…The trap was manufactured by Colin Pullinger & Sons’ in 1861. It’s a time when Queen Victoria was on the throne, the U.S. Civil war had just started and Canada was still ‘British North America.’ They also had mice. ‘Let’s pay tribute to the Victorians, and how wonderfully they managed to make things,’ Baxter says.”
+
+ 
+
+ Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+8937,Sex Differences in the Right Tail of Cognitive Abilities: An Update and Cross Cultural Extension,"Matthew C. Makel et al., Science Direct, October 31, 2016 
+Abstract 
+Male–female ability differences in the right tail (at or above the 95th percentile) have been widely discussed for their potential role in achievement and occupational differences in adults. The present study provides updated male-female ability ratios from 320,000 7th grade students in the United States in the right tail (top 5%) through the extreme right tail (top 0.01%) from 2011 to 2015 using measures of math, verbal, and science reasoning. Additionally, the present study establishes male-female ability ratios in a sample of over 7000 7th grade students in the right tail from 2011 to 2015 in India. Results indicate that ratios in the extreme right tail of math ability in the U.S. have shrunk in the last 20 years (still favoring males) and remained relatively stable in the verbal domain (still favoring females). Similar patterns of male-female ratios in the extreme right tail were found in the Indian sample.",FAKE
+2726,“Idiocy”: New York Times editorial board scorches GOP’s nuclear sabotage,"In keeping with the generally staid disposition of the Gray Lady, one might have expected the New York Times editorial board to chide the Republican senators seeking to torpedo the Iran nuclear talks as “misguided,” “wrongheaded,” “imprudent,” or some such. But instead, the Times on Thursday published  a scathing editorial condemning the GOP’s diplomatic sabotage in unusually blistering language: The GOP’s stunts, the headline announces, reflect nothing less than “Republican Idiocy on Iran.”
+
+Denouncing Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) “disgraceful and irresponsible” letter to the Iranian leadership — signed by 46 other GOP senators — the Times’ editors contend that by warning Iran’s leaders that a future president could nix a nuclear deal, Republicans engaged in “a blatant, dangerous effort to undercut the president on a grave national security issue by communicating directly with a foreign government.”
+
+“Besides being willing to sabotage any deal with Iran (before they know the final details), these Republicans are perfectly willing to diminish America’s standing as a global power capable of crafting international commitments and adhering to them,” the editors write, echoing the criticism put forth by Vice President Joe Biden, who issued a statement this week arguing that the letter conveys “a highly misleading signal to friend and foe alike that that our Commander-in-Chief cannot deliver on America’s commitments — a message that is as false as it is dangerous.”
+
+Although many Cotton detractors seized on the Iranian foreign minister’s swift dismissal of the communiqué, the Times notes that it could nevertheless “embolden hard-liners in Iran” who seek confrontation, not conciliation.
+
+“In rejecting diplomacy, the Republicans make an Iranian bomb and military conflict more likely,” the Times concludes.
+
+For many, that may be precisely the point.",REAL
+4139,Six cities submit bids to host 2016 Democratic National Convention,"(CNN) - Meet the super six vying for the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
+
+The Democratic National Committee on Saturday revealed the six cities - Birmingham, Alabama; Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio; New York, Philadelphia and Phoenix - who submitted bids to host the marquee campaign season event.
+
+""We're thrilled with all the fantastic options that we have going into the next cycle,"" DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said in a press release.
+
+""We look forward to evaluating these bids and selecting a city to host this special gathering of Democrats.""
+
+The press release said a technical advisory committee will evaluate the cities over the coming months, including site visits and ""other inquiries."" The DNC said it will announce its decision later this year or in early 2015.
+
+The Republican National Committee is farther along in its winnowing process. Denver, Dallas, Cleveland and Kansas City are the final cities bidding to hold the 2016 GOP convention. The RNC expects to announce its final decision in the fall.
+
+In a letter to the DNC, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio pitched Brooklyn as the focal point for the Big Apple's bid to host the 2016 party confab.
+
+The progressive mayor, elected just last November, intends to have the sprawling Barclays Center - home to the NBA's Brooklyn Nets - anchor the bid and serve as the principal venue site for the convention, with other events and accommodations spread across Brooklyn, Manhattan and New York's other boroughs.
+
+The last time New York City hosted a party's presidential nominating convention was the 2004 Republican National Convention. It last hosted a Democratic convention in 1992. Both of those conventions were held in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden.
+
+Among the other final five choices for the Democrat's, Philadelphia is the only one to previously host a major party convention. In 2000, Republicans officially nominated George W. Bush as the party's standard bearer at the then-named First Union Center.
+
+As first reported by CNN's Mark Preston in April, New York is one of 15 cities that were sent an official request for proposal by the DNC. Those cities were Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus (Ohio), Detroit, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Salt Lake City.
+
+CNN Political Editor Paul Steinhauser and Jason Seher contributed to this report.",REAL
+615,Chris Christie landslide: Template for a Republican presidential win in 2016? (+video),"Gov. Chris Christie shattered the GOP gender gap in blue-state New Jersey, winning 57 percent of women voters. He also won a third of Democrats, a majority of Latinos, and nearly half of union voters.
+
+Gov. Chris Christie (R) of New Jersey greets supporters after his election night victory speech in Asbury Park, N.J. on Tuesday. The governor's reelection victory was seen as boosting his widely expected bid for the White House in 2016 as a candidate with appeal across the political spectrum.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie made an emphatic case to reshape the Republican brand Tuesday with a rousing 21-point landslide win in one of the most Democratic states in the country.
+
+It was the first time a Republican has won more than 50 percent of a statewide vote in New Jersey since the presidential election in 1988, bolstering the case that Governor Christie alone can break through the blue-state gauntlet that has stymied GOP hopes the last two presidential elections.
+
+Exuding a straight-talking, tough-guy persona – not a few have thrown out Tony Soprano comparisons – Christie arguably has become the most appealing and charismatic politician in the country, as well as the most visible Republican presidential hopeful at the moment.
+
+“I did not seek a second term to do small things,” he said during his victory speech Tuesday evening, invoking the “spirit of Sandy,” the superstorm that ravaged the state a year ago. “I sought a second term to finish the job. Now watch me do it.”
+
+“It’s no longer a job for me,” he said, later in the speech. “It’s a mission. A mission is something that is different from a job. It’s something sacred.”
+
+His Democratic opponent, state Sen. Barbara Buono, never seemed more than an afterthought. She was ignored by essential donors and practically shunned by Democratic Party leaders wary of angering the popularly pugnacious governor. Indeed, Senator Buono struggled simply to make her name known – while Christie was able to clip a CNN mic to his tie as he stepped into a local diner election morning.
+
+Buono bitterly denounced “the bosses and the political machines that have defined New Jersey’s politics for far too long,” thanking workers who “withstood the onslaught of betrayal from our own political party.”
+
+As Christie racked up Democratic endorsements this week – he won 32 percent of Democrats, according to exit polls – he ended a carefully crafted gubernatorial campaign that barely tried to hide its national focus -- and its likely further goal in 2016.
+
+And his double-digit leads in the polls throughout the campaign didn’t stop Christie from pressing his case right up to Election Day. For the past week, the governor has crisscrossed the Garden State on a 90-stop bus tour, campaigning as if his political life depended on it. His object was not simply to win, but to make an emphatic statement.
+
+The bus tour, in fact, could easily be been seen as the kickoff of his little-doubted campaign for the White House. With a strategy designed to jump-start a Republican Party thwarted by a growing gender gap and the dearth of any significant minority support, Christie trumpeted his cross-party appeal.
+
+Not only did Christie relentlessly court blacks and Hispanics during the final days of the campaign, he set the chattering classes abuzz when, on Monday, he campaigned with Gov. Susana Martinez, the moderate Republican from New Mexico who made history by becoming the first Latina ever elected governor in the United States.
+
+Governor Martinez, in fact, is the only other governor Christie brought along during his entire 2013 run. Like him, Martinez is young moderate in a blue-leaning state who has worked with a Democratic legislature – although, unlike her New Jersey counterpart, she embraced the Medicaid expansion of Obamacare.
+
+“I need you tomorrow night. I need you badly,” Christie said while campaigning with Martinez Monday. “We’ve got to deliver tomorrow, because the whole country is watching, everybody. The whole country is watching.”
+
+The suggestive and unprecedented pairing of two moderate Republican governors would immediately address the electoral hurdles facing any GOP nominee in 2016. And given the disgust voters have expressed for the political climate in Washington, both could hammer home their anti-Beltway bonafides.
+
+“And that will send a loud and clear message to those knuckleheads in Washington, D.C. – they’re going to see that we do it differently,” Christie said Monday. “Imagine this: Imagine that on one night in our history, the whole country is looking to New Jersey for leadership.”
+
+His efforts paid off. The governor won an impressive 57 percent of women and took a majority of Latino voters. He even garnered 21 percent of black voters – a significant inroad for a Republican. He also won nearly half of union voters and those under the age of 30.
+
+But questions remain. Conservative Republicans point out that the party already nominated a blue-state moderate in Mitt Romney – and he was beaten soundly by President Obama in 2012. And New Jersey’s fiscal health remains suspect: The state has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, its credit rating fell during Christie’s tenure, and poverty has reached a 52-year high.
+
+And the conservative wing of the Republican Party, fueled by a motivated and angry tea party base, has begun to galvanize around Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. The most common reference to Christie in deep red-state territory is RINO – “Republican in name only.”
+
+Yet, Christie triumphed resoundingly in bluest of blue New Jersey, even while Ken Cuccinelli, the tea party favorite in the much more conservative state of Virginia, lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who was hardly beloved by voters.
+
+Still, the governor’s Jersey pugnaciousness can, at times, undermine his attempts at bipartisanship. This weekend he was caught on camera wagging his finger at a female teacher, reportedly saying, “I’m sick of you people,” after the woman asked why he called New Jersey public schools “failure factories.” (Christie claims he said no matter how much money the state spends, “it will never be enough for you people.”)
+
+The country can expect more of this Jersey punch in the next three years.
+
+“See, listen, we’re New Jersey,” Christie said during his victory speech. “We still fight, we still yell, but when we fight, we fight for those things that really matter in people’s lives. And while we may not always agree, we show up.”",REAL
+10173,What Happened to the FBI?,"What Happened to the FBI? What Happened to the FBI? By 0 11 
+When FBI Director James Comey announced on July 5 that the Department of Justice would not seek the indictment of Hillary Clinton for failure to safeguard state secrets related to her email use while she was secretary of state, he both jumped the gun and set in motion a series of events that surely he […]",FAKE
+6892,The Dangers Of Romantic Love,"Since we were children, we have been bombarded with propaganda that romantic love is the ultimate relationship ideal. Hollywood movies, Disney cartoons, and literary fiction all portray romantic love as an absolute necessity in any wedding union, but how much of that narrative has been a lie? Is it possible that our pursuit of romantic love is actually preventing us from forming a lifelong pair bond?
+I began to question the notion of romantic love when thinking about its emotional root. Love is a fleeting emotion, and like all emotions, it comes and goes like the clouds in the sky. Why have I been taught to select my life partner based on an emotion? I’m surely not encouraged to use emotion when buying a house, applying for a job, or doing my personal finances, but when it comes to choosing a human being that I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life with, I’m advised by the establishment narrative to use emotion for the biggest decision of them all.
+Another major clue that romantic love is a childish strategy for choosing mates is the fact that countries with arranged marriages, where partners are picked based on purely practical matters, have lower divorce rates that in countries where romantic love is used to select mates ( 1 , 2 , 3 ). While there are multiple reasons for divorce in any society, it is rather coincidental that the countries most impacted by notions of romantic love happen to have the highest divorce rates .
+Romance was invented 
+It turns out that your desire to use love as a precondition for marriage or pair bonding is an invented construct that had roots in destroying tradition and theistic authority. Romanticism, a movement that began in the 18th century, put romantic love at the forefront, not just for individuals but nations as well, all from a central thesis of individualism. It wanted you to take the focus away from boring old rules and traditions to focusing on how you feel .
+The movement came primarily from bourgeois youth, who used family money to fiddle away on idealistic writings.
+…the Romantic Movement was nothing more than a protest against bourgeois conventions, bourgeois society and morality. To be extreme and flamboyant and unusual and violent even at the risk of becoming grotesque was the desire of every young Romantic. The Romantics were, in fact, bourgeois origins, who were trying hard to escape from their own shadows. ( Source )
+[…] Romantics believed that men and women ought to be guided by warm emotions rather than the cold abstract rules and rituals established by Bourgeois society. ( Source 
+They sound a lot like modern day social justice warriors , many of whom are trust fund babies that lash out against “privilege” and “inequality” to relieve the psychological pain of being wealthy without having had to earn it. Combined with the fact that SJWs also trump feelings over logic, it’s clear to see how romanticists were proto-SJWs, whose individualistic ideas are just what the enlightenment needed to complete its destruction of tradition.
+Romantics re-defined what relationships should be based on 
+Prior to the romantic era, companionate love was the relationship form often described in literature and other historical writings.
+Passionate love is the arousal-driven emotion which often gives people extreme feelings of happiness, and can also give people feelings of anguish. Companionate love is the form which creates a steadfast bond between two people, and gives people feelings of peace. Scientists have described the stage of passionate love as “being on cocaine,” since during that stage the brain releases the same neurotransmitter, dopamine, as when cocaine is being used. ( Source )
+Besides Song Of Songs in the Old Testament , writers were not encouraged to muse endlessly about passionate love, and there is zero evidence it was used as the principal factor in forming new marriages, but it’s this passionate love that we’re told to strive for, of feeling like you’ve been swept up in an exciting whirlwind, before publishing the gory details on Buzzfeed or in a bestseller like Eat Pray Love, authored by a woman who is embarking on her second divorce .
+Women of the romantic era played a big part in elevating romantic love, and why wouldn’t they? It’s much more fun to get swept up in the excitement created by non-committal alpha male than it does to do arduous daily duties before you husband, king, and God. Women were given the chance to pick between excitement or responsibility, and we know what they have chosen.
+The works of the Romantic Era also differed from preceding works in that they spoke to a wider audience, partly reflecting the greater distribution of books as costs came down during the period. The Romantic period saw an increase in female authors and also female readers. ( Source )
+The modern era has doubled down on the notion of romantic love Jewish psychologist Robert Sternberg proposed the popular triangular theory of love , which is often used today as defining the love ideal. This theory has caused immense harm for stating that all three forms of love are needed in equal measure for a successful relationship.
+
+Anyone who takes an introductory psychology course, or who reads a pop psychology book, will be exposed to this theory, and walk away thinking that passion is absolutely required in a relationship. If it’s not there, the presumption is that the relationship is no longer “consummate” and far short of ideal.
+Believing that romantic love and passion are necessary in a marriage makes it that much easier to exit out of it, because when a woman no longer “feels passion,” she will walk away knowing that experts like Sternberg would agree that the relationship degraded and was no longer worth saving. And this is exactly what modern women are doing in droves. They have shown an appalling disregard for their wedding vows, especially upon realizing that they initiate 80% of divorces .
+Romanticism and the rise of nationalism 
+If nationalism came out of the romantic era, and passionate love was a mistake, does that mean nationalism is also a mistake?
+One of Romanticism’s key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national languages and folklore, and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements that would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for self-determination of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning.
+[…] Patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also became popular themes in the arts of this period. ( Source )
+Upon closer inspection, it’s easy to see that the ruling agenda of today, globalism , is essentially “world nationalism.” Instead of loving your neighbor, and only those who share your unique traditions or race, you’re supposed to love everyone in the world , because it’s evil to think that there are large differences between a German businessman in a Hugo Boss suit and a Tutsi villager with a lip plate the size of a grapefruit.
+The romantic ideal of nationalism is not Adolph Hitler, but George Soros , who insists on loving everyone in the world from the depths of your heartfelt human compassion. A nationalism based on genetics and local bonds will no doubt serve citizens better than a “global nationalism” where you’re supposed to care for those who are nothing like you.
+How should men choose their life partners? 
+It’s clear that using romantic love and passion as your primary standard for long-term relationships will lead to failure and maybe even personal catastrophe. You’ll easily come to this conclusion by evaluating your past relationships and the mistakes you’ve made on women who you had intense passion for.
+Instead, practicality must be the order of the day. You must logically evaluate any woman you intend to be with for more than a casual relationship by weighing her values, beliefs, and sexual history. This is easier said than done because we’ve been so brainwashed to believe passion is important, but it simply makes the most amount of sense. Find a woman the same way you would find a new job or buy a new house, and be wary of women who picked you based more on passion than practical matters.
+It may sound cold to search for your wife like you would a business partner, but that is exactly what she is. The day-to-day life of a family home is far more business and economics than love, and so you should come to the easy conclusion that that’s what you must use to form a stable home.
+Understand, however, that we do not live in a traditional and patriarchal society that aids us in our search for a virtuous woman. Instead, society is encouraging women to corrupt themselves, sexually and physically, in the name of empowerment and independence, making our search exceedingly difficult. This is one of the costs we have to pay for living in the modern world. Some men will be able to overcome it, but many men won’t, and will fail in their search for a woman they can create a family with.
+But at least we are now armed with the knowledge of what it takes to have a more successful long-term relationship. It’s not romantic love or butterflies in the stomach, but a matter of practicality. Logically evaluate her past, her values, and her beliefs to make sound predictions of how she’ll behave in the future. From this evaluation will come a logical decision that is likely to endure, instead of relying on emotion, which changes as readily as the direction of the wind.
+Read More: Unconditional Love From A Woman Is Impossible 
+",FAKE
+4643,Clinton Camp Tries to Deflect Suspicion as FBI Reopens Email Case,"After the bombshell announcement Friday that the FBI is reopening the Clinton email investigation, Hillary Clinton looked awkward on the campaign trail as she tried to take suspicion off herself and put it on FBI Director James Comey.
+
+""Some of you may have heard about a letter,"" Clinton said to a chorus of boos from her supporters. ""It's pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election. In fact, it's not just strange, it's unprecedented and it is deeply troubling.""
+
+The Wall Street Journal reported that Comey's letter sent to lawmakers Friday said that 650,000 emails were discovered on the laptop of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Wiener, the estranged husband of Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin. Weiner is under criminal investigation for allegedly sexting a teen.
+
+Metadata on the emails suggests thousands of those messages could have been sent to or from then-Secretary of State Clinton's private server.
+
+Comey said the FBI would take steps to review those emails to see if any were classified. A law enforcement official says the intelligence agency has obtained a search warrant.
+
+""We commend the FBI for reopening this case and having the courage to stand up for the principle because no one is above the law in the United States of America,"" Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence told supporters in North Carolina.
+
+But Clinton campaign chair John Podesta attacked Comey, telling CNN, ""To throw this in the middle of the campaign 11 days out just seemed to break with precedent and be inappropriate at this stage.""
+
+Both campaigns want the FBI to release what it knows, but since it's an ongoing investigation, that's probably not likely.
+
+According to multiple reports, many agents in the FBI were unhappy with Comey's original handling of the Clinton email investigation and his decision not to recommend charges against her.
+
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called it the biggest scandal since Watergate: ""We never thought we were going to say 'thank you' to Anthony Weiner,"" he said.
+
+The reopened FBI investigation is sure to impact a race that has already tightened, with the latest polls showing Trump has made it a virtual dead heat.",REAL
+2895,Obama ties his fate to Iran nuclear deal,"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama on Thursday effectively placed his diplomatic legacy largely in the hands of Iranian revolutionary clerics who've waged a proxy war against the U.S. for three decades.
+
+With a framework deal to halt Tehran's nuclear program, Obama moved closer to the kind of staggering diplomatic breakthrough with the Islamic Republic that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
+
+If the political agreement reached in Switzerland turns into a genuine pact honored by both sides, Obama will be entitled to a place in history as the leader who defused an intensely bitter estrangement with Iran.
+
+But he also took personal ownership of a fraught negotiating process full of false starts and deep divisions, one that hinges on the sides' ability to hammer out a host of devilish details by a June 30 final deadline in the face of vocal opposition from domestic and international critics.
+
+If the deal falls apart, it will be hard to refute charges by critics that Obama's insistence on negotiating directly with U.S. enemies -- a tactic at the heart of his political philosophy -- is deeply naive and futile.
+
+The risks of Obama's choice, and the challenge of resolving tough issues to get to a final agreement by July, were clear within minutes of news breaking that a deal was reached in Lausanne.
+
+Obama quickly appeared in the White House Rose Garden, not for the victory lap that presidents often take in this picturesque spot, but to launch an impassioned defense of the contentious deal.
+
+His sales pitch was concise: There is no other better way to prevent Iran from moving covertly to build a nuclear weapon.
+
+""When you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question: Do you really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented, backed by the world's major powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East?"" Obama said.
+
+""Is it worse than doing what we've done for almost two decades with Iran moving forward with its nuclear program and without robust inspections?""
+
+The question now is whether Obama's skills of persuasion -- hardly his strong suit -- will convince critics that his negotiators got a good deal. First signs were not encouraging for the White House.
+
+Republican House Speaker John Boehner warned that Congress would continue to press for a vote on the deal, which might derail its long-term prospects given the extent of Republican opposition. Another pending bill that has the potential to scuttle the negotiations would impose additional sanctions on Tehran.
+
+Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina attacked the president's posture on Thursday as he, too, emphasized that Congress must review a final deal.
+
+""We simply cannot take President Obama's word that it is this or war,"" he said.
+
+The March 31 deadline -- twice pushed back -- was originally imposed on the process in order to help Obama's political prospects of selling the deal to Congress, which has final say on lifting U.S. sanctions on Iran. Several Democrats had indicated that they planned to join with Republicans on the controversial bills, but they pledged to hold up consideration of the measures until late March so Obama could show the talks were making progress and should be bolstered rather than tanked by legislators.
+
+While the Republicans' response Thursday demonstrated that the framework deal had not placated them, skeptical Democrats were more noncommittal on how they would respond.
+
+""We now need to take a close look at the details to determine if the compromises made are worth the dismantling of years of pressure built on Iran,"" said Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
+
+New York Rep. Steve Israel more clearly showed that Obama could well face an intraparty challenge.
+
+""The details deserve and must get a vote by the U.S. Congress,"" he said in a statement. ""Until the full details are provided to Congress on June 30th, you can keep me in the 'highly skeptical' column.""
+
+Obama also faces intense displeasure from many of America's closest allies in the Middle East, countries such as Israel and Saudi Arabia that are directly in the Iranian line of fire. They are concerned that the United States may be giving up leverage on Iran by lifting sanctions while leaving Tehran's nuclear infrastructure intact.
+
+The president nodded to this challenge in the Rose Garden when he said that he would invite the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council to Camp David this spring to discuss raging Middle East turmoil, much of it aided by Tehran.
+
+He also spoke to Saudi Arabia's King Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he has feuded over Iran.
+
+Netanyahu has powerful allies on Capitol Hill, and will be sure to lobby for the bills seeking to constrain the administration in its deal-making with Iran as the final deadline nears.
+
+Already Thursday, Israel called the celebrations in Switzerland ""disconnected from reality"" and said Iran would use a ""poor framework"" for a ""bad and dangerous"" deal to move towards nuclear war.
+
+And the Obama administration's Iranian counterparts have their own treacherous path to getting approval of their part of the deal -- making Obama's bold endorsement of the provisional agreement particularly perilous.
+
+Iran's top negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javed Zarif, must convince Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and hardliners in Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps to accept the deal and permit its implementation.
+
+""Javad Zarif will have to sell this deal like we will. His task is not simple, or a given,"" a senior administration official said.
+
+Like Obama, Zarif wasted no time, boasting at a news conference in Switzerland that Tehran had retained its right to enrich uranium (to 3.67 percent, according to a White House fact sheet distributed at the deal's announcement) and would not lose its nuclear infrastructure.
+
+And Iranian swagger like that -- a political necessity for Zarif -- emphasizes the very aspects of the deal that make its American critics most concerned.
+
+Another key point of contention is how comprehensive the inspections will be. While the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency will have unprecedented access to Iran's declared nuclear facilities under the deal, many in the West wanted inspectors to have unfettered access to any site of their choosing since Tehran has hidden nuclear operations in the past.
+
+The White House fact sheet said that the IAEA inspectors ""will have regular access"" to all of Iran's facilities but did not specify how that would be achieved.
+
+""The nuclear flaw in this agreement is the fact that we will not be able to go anywhere, go anytime,"" said Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
+
+""The IAEA is going to have to work with the Iranians. What the Iranian government has shown over decades is the ability to defeat the IAEA with stonewalling, delay and deviousness.""
+
+But the senior official said that the U.S. negotiating team was confident that the talks on a final deal would produce an agreement on a ""mechanism"" that would resolve disputes over access to Iranian sites.
+
+Skeptics also questioned Obama's assurance that lifted sanctions could ""snap back"" in place if Iran transgressed once the agreement went into force. Debates are already raging about the sequence in which sanctions will be lifted on Iran and on why the United States would bolster Iran's coffers by lifting sanctions at a time when it is blaming Tehran for destabilizing the Middle East.
+
+The White House, however, has other concessions to point to.
+
+The deal will cut Iran's stocks of centrifuges, require the conversion of an underground enrichment facility at Fordow to a research center and limit the output of another reactor at Arak, among other requirements.
+
+In return the United States and other world powers will lift sanctions that have throttled Iran's economy, offering it the tantalizing prospect of a return to full membership within the international community.
+
+Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the deal was close to ""win, win"" for both Iran and the United States. He added, however, ""We don't want to get too ahead of ourselves.""
+
+He continued, ""What was announced today is the engagement. The wedding is scheduled to take place in July, but there is going to be a vigorous debate about the prenuptial agreement, and there is no guarantee this wedding will take place on time.""
+
+Though the four-page White House fact sheet left many technical questions unanswered, the deal surprised some experts and political figures with its detail and specificity.
+
+That's something that Jim Walsh, from the Security Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested could help sway worried Democrats.
+
+""I think they have put themselves in pretty good shape to go to that community and defend the deal. They ended up with a lot more than most of us were expecting,"" Walsh said.
+
+Still, even Obama admitted that the success of the initiative was far from certain. If the framework deal snags on the unresolved technical details before the final deadline on June 30, or if Tehran tries to cheat in years to come, Obama's hopes of a foreign policy victory for the ages will founder as well.
+
+""The President's strategy has been absolutely incoherent in the Middle East in general. He is pinning his legacy on this agreement,"" Republican Rep. Martha McSally of Arizona told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
+
+But so far, that legacy has received a boost from the week's events, even though Republicans tried to paint the twice-delayed announcement of the deal as a sign that Obama wouldn't be able to deliver. That doesn't mean, though, that his fortunes couldn't change -- and change quickly.
+
+""You've got quite a significant accomplishment,"" Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator, told CNN. ""Is it perfect? No.""
+
+He concluded, ""He bet a lot on this. He's wrapped the last remaining 20 months of his presidency on what could be the most significant accomplishment on foreign policy -- if in fact all of this holds.""",REAL
+9363,Will Trump's presidency change the way America views Russia?,"Will Trump's presidency change the way America views Russia? Donald Trump once again confounded his critics with an unexpected victory in the U.S. presidential election. Will he now seek to turn U.S.-Russian relations upside down? Donald Trump once again confounded his critics with an unexpected victory in the U.S. presidential election. Will he now seek to turn U.S.-Russian relations upside down? 
+
+U.S. President-elect Donald Trump poses with a ring given to him by a group of veterans during a campaign event on the campus of Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Photo: AP 
+Donald Trump completed one of the great upsets in American political history when he vaulted above the 270 Electoral College vote minimum needed to become president. His presidency, which begins Jan. 20, 2017, offers interesting possibilities for U.S.-Russian relations .
+Trump’s affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin has been well documented, and Putin’s sentiments about Trump are equally positive. On Nov. 9, Putin was among the first of the world’s leaders to offer his congratulations to Trump. But will a gesture of goodwill lead to substantive change in the U.S.-Russian partnership? Trump has intriguing possibilities to weigh.
+Doing away with the sanctions President Barack Obama handed down in response to Russia’s involvement in 2014 in Ukraine is one. Last year, Russian officials estimated the sanctions cost the country more than $100 billion. It is safe to assume that figure has grown this year, and sagging oil prices have added a second significant strain to the Russian budget.
+Demanding that NATO nations pay for more of the costs associated with the organization would be a second option Trump could employ. Within hours of Trump’s victory, NATO’s secretary general urged him to not forget the longstanding relationship between the U.S. and Western Europe in maintaining peace. Trump could add further stress to the relationship – to Russia’s advantage – if he limited the role of the U.S. military in the region.
+Read the Q&amp;A with Dmitri Trenin: "" Trump's presidency and the future of US-Russia relations "" Staying out of the way as Russia continued its aerial assault on Syria’s rebels would be another way of demonstrating that a President Trump would deal with Russia in sharply different ways than Obama.
+There is no way to know right now if Trump will follow through on any of these ideas once he assumes office.
+He also has so-called soft power options at his disposal to change the way Russia views America. For example, he could urge the U.S. Congress to restore funding for Title VIII , a program that allows U.S. scholars to engage in research about Russia and gain Russian language proficiency. Funding levels were cut three years ago. Along the same lines, he could push for increased academic, athletic and cultural exchanges between the two nations.
+President Obama’s famous “reset” button that Hillary Clinton carried to Moscow during her first visit as U.S. Secretary of State proved ineffective, and her critics jumped on it during the recent presidential campaign to show how incompetent she would be on the world stage. Trump is not likely to use any prop to show his intentions of improving Washington’s relationship with Moscow.
+But the substantive options he does choose will determine just how much he intends to break with his soon-to-be predecessor’s plans. Western European leaders, perhaps more than any other, will be watching closely.
+The ;opinion ;of the author may not necessarily reflect the position of Russia Direct or its staff. ",FAKE
+1794,What advantages does Scott Walker offer?,"Every GOP presidential candidate, most especially in a crowded field with lots of solid contenders, needs to answer a single question: Why me and not one of the 20 or so other hopefuls who are running? We will look at a number of candidates, each with a different argument for his or her candidacy. We will start today with the candidate who got the most buzz in Iowa.
+
+In a recent interview Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made his own case, which I think, can be boiled down to 10 key points:
+
+1. Republicans “can’t win with just Republican votes,” he says. Forget the ones pitching far to the right or the ones with no sell to disaffected (Walker calls them “discerning”) Democrats. Find someone who can put together an electoral majority as Walker did. Three times.
+
+2. The GOP needs a standard-bearer, he says, with both the “courage and the capacity” to win and get a conservative agenda enacted. It is an uphill climb for senators to make the case (although possible). He has been among state leaders in Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey and elsewhere who won with a diverse electorate and then successfully passed a conservative agenda.
+
+3. He has done at the state level the things Republicans want to do nationally — cut taxes, implement school choice, achieve health-care reform, promote business and job growth, and defend taxpayers against public employee unions. In other words, his record is relevant to this presidential election.
+
+4. He can articulate well a vision that does not appeal only to entrepreneurs. As he likes to say, every American wants the chance “to live his or her piece of the American dream.” That dream does not necessarily include starting one’s own business, but can be owning a home, sending a kid to college, raising a family in a safe city, etc.
+
+5. He understands Republicans want to “boldly chart out” a vision for the country. Conservatives call this “painting in bold colors,” and he surely did that in Iowa.
+
+6. He is a feisty pol who took on and beat the left three times in four years. He says with the right amount of cockiness, “I wouldn’t be betting against me.”
+
+7.  On foreign policy, he is as fluent at this point in the campaign on national security as any first-time nominee in recent memory (with the exception of Sen. John McCain in 2008) and has only begun to talk about the subject. (Did Bill Clinton know any more in 1992?) But a good deal of the issue here is about temperament. Walker is neither unpredictably explosive nor excessively excitable. That can’t be said about a number of candidates. The ability to project steely resolve certainly matters here, as does his belief in the United States’ unique role in the world.
+
+8. There is no obvious flaw. The “Pawlenty did too” argument does not wash; former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty did not have the record nor the political chops Walker does. The issue here is: Who else could appeal to the full gamut of Republicans?
+
+9. He is a proven winner. Call him the un-Romney, who lost three times (once for Senate and twice for president).
+
+10. He can embrace his ordinariness, his modest background and his lack of a college degree. He received no advantage from family, inherited wealth, or extraordinary luck. He succeeded by tenacity and desire — the precise qualities he suggests should allow any American to rise.
+
+As we go through the campaign, we will look at a number of candidates and ask what unique advantages he or she has. As for Walker, it is hard to argue he lacks the potential to distinguish himself from the rest of the field. The question will be whether he successfully does so.",REAL
+5820,15 Secret iPhone Codes And Tricks,"Share on Facebook A list of secret Apple iPhone codes that can unlock a raft of hidden features and settings has been revealed, allowing users to do anything from enhancing their call quality to checking their mobile balance. While Android is particularly well known for offering a rabbit-hole of an operating system that can be tweaked and tinkered with, Apple's iOS has kept menus and settings relatively simple and locked down. However, there is a way that users can drill down to find some gems not seen on the surface. If you want to find out how many minutes you have left on your phone tariff, what your IMEI number (something you'll need if you swap phone networks) or even find out a way to enhance your iPhone's voice quality there's a way to do it that you won’t find by going to your normal phone's settings. Redmond Pie revealed a full list of the codes and how to use them. By typing in the following secret USSD codes on the dialpad of the phone then pressing the call button you can bring up these tricks: *3001#12345#*: Field Test mode *#5005*7672#: SMS centre number *3370#: Turn on or off EFR (Enhanced Full Rate), a mode that improves your iPhone's call quality *#06#: Find out your iPhone's IMEI number *#31#: Hide your number on calls option *#43#: Check if call waiting is on or off *43#: Turn on call waiting #43#: Turn off call waiting *646#: Check minutes left on contract *225#: Find out your current mobile account balance *777#: Find out prepaid account balance *#61#: Number of missed calls *#21#: Call forwarding status *#67#: Call forwarding number *#33#: Find out what mobile services are disabled on your phone One of the most interesting of the USSD codes is the Field Test mode, which allows users to see their phone-signal strength measured in numbers rather than those five bars. You'll see something displaying such as ‘-90’, with the number going up and down depending on signal. A value above -80 is a full-bar strength, but anything below -110 is very weak. This is a more accurate way of seeing whether you have enough signal to make a call, rather than holding on to hope with one-bar. It's worth noting that you should only use these codes and play around with your settings at your own risk, if you're not sure what something does better leave it be. Related:",FAKE
+1263,Draft-Dodger Trump Said Sleeping Around Was My ‘Personal Vietnam’,"In a 1997 Howard Stern interview, the future presidential candidate likened sleeping with multiple women to service in the war he repeatedly avoided.
+
+Draft-dodger Donald Trump once said that the danger he faced from getting sexually transmitted diseases was his own “personal Vietnam.”
+
+In a 1997 interview with shock jock Howard Stern, Trump talked about how he had been “lucky” not to have contracted diseases when he was sleeping around.
+
+“I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era,” Trump said in a video that resurfaced Tuesday on Buzzfeed, “It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
+
+It wasn’t the only time the Republican frontrunner for president would liken his personal life to wartime service: Trump has claimed that his military-themed boarding school education was essentially equivalent to having being trained in the military.
+
+When Trump had his chance to join the military and fight in Vietnam, he did not take it. Instead, the rich kid got multiple student deferments from the draft and a medical deferment. Meanwhile, men like John McCain were being tortured as prisoners of war, but Trump has said that is dishonorable. ’
+
+“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain last year. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”
+
+Trump has wrapped his campaign in veterans issues, routinely lamenting that they’ve been treated “terribly.” The candidate even held a fundraiser for veterans groups in lieu of attending a debate just before the Iowa caucuses.
+
+Since running for office, Trump has made a show of fundraising for veterans—offering veterans groups six-figures to be props at campaign rallies. But when vets groups have stood up to him, refusing to be dragged into the campaign, scores of Trump fans have sent them vile and harassing messages.
+
+In the 1980s, Trump tried to have disabled veteran street vendors thrown off Fifth Avenue, accusing the Vietnam-era soldiers  of ruining how the street in front of Trump Tower looked. Before his presidential campaign, Trump’s charitable foundation gave more to the Clintons than to veterans organizations.
+
+Trump has suggested he would be tremendous for veterans if elected president, but his efforts so far have been questionable.
+
+In July 2015, Trump announced that he would be setting up a hotline for veterans to share their stories about the need to reform the VA. Today, a call to the hotline leads merely to a voicemail box, which instructs the caller to send them an email.",REAL
+7020,Prime Minster John Key caught channeling millions of dollars of taxpayer's money to 'ethically compromised' Clinton Foundation,"Source: Seemorerocks 
+
+November 1, 2016 
+
+John Key channels NZ taxpayers' money to Clinton Foundation 
+
+
+This is information that every taxpayer (or those that care) should know about but our journalists are not doing their job.  
+
+What with warships in our harbour and troops in Iraq this government of John Key is in lockstep with the most corrupt and warmongering part of the US government. 
+
+No doubt Key would approve of the Clinton's defrauding the people of Haiti. It's his style. 
+
+The Cannabis Party is calling on John Key to explain why he gave over $7 million of New Zealand tax-payer's money to the Clinton Foundation.  
+
+Legalise Cannibis Party 
+
+31 October, 2016 
+
+Wikileaks raised serious ethical concerns about the Clinton Foundation when it published a hacked email, send to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, revealing blurred lines between the foundation and the personal financial interests of Bill and Hillary Clinton. 
+
+Cannabis Party leader Julian Crawford said if John Key was serious about HIV prevention, one of the Clinton Foundation's supposed goals, he should legalise medical cannabis in New Zealand. 
+
+""Hundreds of researchers have reported that THC was able to destroy the RIV virus in monkeys. That virus is nearly identical to the HIV virus found in humans,"" he said. 
+
+""John Key has a lot of explaining to do if the Wikileaks revelations about the Clinton Foundation are true."" 
+
+Former Assistant Director of the FBI Thomas Fuentes confirmed that ""the FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation"". 
+
+New Zealand's National Business Review has reported that John Key will continue giving millions of dollars of taxpayer's money to the foundation in the future, despite the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton. 
+
+""I've met her on lots of occasions, had dinner with her at Premier House a few times,"" John Key said. 
+
+""As Secretary of State she was great, very engaged with New Zealand."" Broadcaster Duncan Garner yesterday raised serious concerns about the ongoing payments to the Clinton Foundation, known as ""pay-to-play"". 
+
+""We also give money to the Clinton Foundation? Yes, we did. Gosh, who didn't get a handout?"" Garner said. 
+
+""We've been feeding all these guys at the trough for years"" 
+
+""pay-to-play"" refers to operations where Bill and Hillary Clinton rewarded big donors to their foundation with preferential access to the US government. 
+
+The original article was in the neo-liberal NBR, behind a paywall 
+
+NZ taxpayers will continue funding Clinton Foundation's flagship 
+
+",FAKE
+8609,Media Dig the Grave for Self-Government,"You are here: Home / *Articles of the Bound* / Media Dig the Grave for Self-Government Media Dig the Grave for Self-Government November 9, 2016, 9:06 am by Cliff Kincaid Leave a Comment 0 
+By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media 
+At this time in history, organizations like Accuracy in Media are needed more than ever. The bias in the media has been exposed as a poison that undermines the public’s right to know and threatens the future of democratic self-government. 
+Our duty is to tell the American people what has happened to their once-great country. 
+In his letter to Donald J. Trump, New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick said, “Congratulations on a tremendous campaign. You have dealt with an unbelievable slanted and negative media and have come out beautifully.” 
+Belichick is not alone. Poll after poll has confirmed that the American people understand and recognize the problem of liberal media bias. In fact, the bias is just one aspect of the corruption that surrounds us and infects the government. 
+A Quinnipiac University poll found that 55 percent of voters told pollsters that Trump was right when he charged the media were biased against him. An Associated Press-GfK poll found that “Overall, 56 percent of likely voters say the media is biased against Trump…” 
+One cannot say with certainty that the media bias in the 2016 campaign was worse than, say, the elections of 2008 or 2012. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton enjoyed extraordinary media bias in their favor. One difference this time around is that the media bias has been extremely well-documented by the emails released from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. We have seen the evidence of how the collusion and collaboration occur. The evidence shows that “journalists” work secretly with one major political party, the Democrats, against conservatives and Republicans. 
+Needless to say, all of this is a blatant violation of the ethical standards that journalists profess to uphold. 
+The preamble of the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists says they “believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.” 
+Instead, they have compromised their integrity in order to elect a woman whose record as a security risk should make her ineligible to seek the presidency. 
+But it’s worse than being unethical. 
+We see in one of the emails that Washington Post “journalist” Dana Milbank was in touch with the Democrats about crafting one of his anti-Trump columns. 
+This email proves that Milbank has been functioning as an operative of the Democratic Party. Of course, those of us who have watched his appearances at conservative events over the years had suspected what was going on. Now we have the proof of the actual collaboration. The email portrays help for Milbank as a “research request” from the columnist. 
+In other words, he couldn’t even write his own columns. He was lazy and liberal. 
+What this suggests is that Milbank’s function was to write (or put his name on) certain articles in order to divert attention away from scandals involving Democrats. In the latest case , in order to justify a Post black-out of Danney Williams’ charges that he was Bill Clinton’s black son, Milbank would cover his news conference and make fun of the event. 
+Such an attack serves two purposes. One, it justifies the Post’s decision not to cover the event as a legitimate news story. Second, it scares others away from covering it. How many conservatives in the media shied away from the story? 
+In his landmark book, The Corrupt Society , Robert Payne wrote, “There are many weapons that can be used to prevent the corruption of societies. The most powerful of these weapons are vigilance and knowledge. Hence the importance of the press, radio, and television to break through all imposed restrictions to discover how the government works, how it arrives at its decisions, how it manages its defenses, how it deals with traitors, especially the traitors in its midst.” 
+Payne dedicated his book to Richard Nixon. That was a joke, of course, because Payne found Nixon and his administration to be utterly corrupt. Nixon was forced from office for covering up a burglary into the offices of the opposition political party, the Democrats. Stories in The Washington Post sparked his resignation in the Watergate scandal. Victor Lasky’s book, It Didn’t Start With Watergate , proved that Democrats had done similar things. 
+In 2016, the Democrats nominated a candidate whose corruption made Nixon look like a choir boy. Nixon was ruthless, but he was determined to promote American interests in the world. He was critical in exposing State Department official Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. 
+By contrast, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is one of those “traitors” Payne had warned about. Her illegal private server, full of classified information, was open to hacking by foreign governments. Her top aide, Huma Abedin, arranged for some of Mrs. Clinton’s emails to be stored on a computer shared with her pervert husband. The Clinton Foundation laundered money to her husband on behalf of foreign governments seeking favors from the State Department. And the FBI, at this late date, refuses to hold any of them responsible for undermining the security of our nation. 
+Meanwhile, The Washington Post facilitates this corruption in government by failing to expose it. And one Post “journalist” has been exposed as a lazy liberal pawn of those who were in charge of getting Mrs. Clinton into the White House. 
+The Christian existentialist philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote about the corruption in the church and how church and state had become one. In his critique of the Danish State Church, he said everyone knew privately that the system was rotten and corrupt but they would not say so publicly. “Just as one says that death has marked a man, so we recognize the symptoms which demand to be attacked. It is a battle against lies,” he said. 
+The problem we face today is not just media bias, but corruption in government and the media that runs so deep that it is uncomfortable for some to even talk about it publicly. Cliff Kincaid 
+Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid . 0",FAKE
+10384,Nigel Farage held at Heathrow on return from Trump visit due to ‘mysterious brown substance’ on nose,"Monday 14 November 2016 by Benedict Farkerhausen Nigel Farage held at Heathrow on return from Trump visit due to ‘mysterious brown substance’ on nose 
+Nigel Farage has spent the day in the Heathrow Airport holding cells as officials quiz him on a mysterious, smelly brown substance found on his nose. 
+The UKIP interim leader had flown back into the country after spending much of the weekend cosying up to fellow man of the people, President-elect Donald Trump, in a Manhattan penthouse apartment painted gold. 
+Simon Williams, Home Office spokesman, said, “Our sniffer dogs are trained to smell even the tiniest remnants of illicit substances on clothing and suitcases. 
+“However, they were not needed this time as fellow passengers and staff were all able to notice this foul stench wafting through the cabin since the flight took off in New York. 
+“On inspection, Mr Farage’s nose was found to be thickly cased in a brown substance, which we are treating as a biological hazard. 
+Further traces were found on his tongue, and we’ve sent it off for further testing.” 
+A UKIP spokesman said, “In the human centipede that is diplomatic relations with the US, Nigel has valiantly shown his willingness to get on all fours and bury his face deep inside Mr Trump’s rectum for the good of Queen and country. 
+“The country needs the intimate knowledge Nigel possesses of this man, and we await a call from Number 10 wanting his expertise. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+3214,Paul Ryan Says Government Won't Shut Down Because Republicans Are In Control,"WASHINGTON -- Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is confident there will be no government shutdown this fall because Republicans are in charge on Capitol Hill, he said Friday.
+
+""I’m not worried about that because we control both sides of the rotunda, the House and the Senate,"" Ryan, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a briefing with reporters.
+
+Ryan is optimistic despite the fact that the House has only passed about half of the 12 appropriations measures that are required to keep the government running through September, the Senate hasn't passed any yet, and Congress is on vacation for most of August.
+
+Democrats in the upper chamber are blocking the funding measures there because they are angry that the GOP decided to boost military spending above levels set by the 2011 Budget Control Act and its sequestration rules, while leaving in place steep cuts to domestic programs that are Democratic priorities.
+
+President Barack Obama has threatened to veto appropriations bills that don't deal with both military and domestic programs, and his allies in the Senate are demanding that Republicans open up a process now to resolve the impasse. Ryan managed to cut a deal with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash) two years ago, when both were chairs of their respective budget committees, that eased sequestration cuts evenly.
+
+Neither Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) nor House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) have suggested any willingness to do something similar this time around, and Senate Democrats are vowing to stand firm until Republicans start negotiating.
+
+Ryan said that he thought a new version of a Ryan-Murray deal could be struck under the leadership of the current budget chairmen, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) and Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.).
+
+But he stuck by his party's line that Congress should keep passing its regular funding bills before starting to negotiate, pointing to the Department of Defense bill that is currently being blocked.
+
+""If they filibuster DOD approps over there in the Senate, I think it's a shame if they do that, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,"" he said.
+
+Asked if he could support raising the spending caps set in 2011's deal -- as he and Murray did in 2013 -- he didn't say no, but insisted such a move would have to be paid for in some way.
+
+""The precedent that Patty and I set was mandatory savings in excess of discretionary add-backs to result in deficit reduction -- net deficit reduction,"" he said.
+
+""These things have to be paid for,"" Ryan added, ""What's the point in having spending caps if they don't enforce fiscal discipline?""
+
+Asked why Republican control made him optimistic about passing appropriations bills, especially considering the poor functioning of the Senate, Ryan merely replied: ""It's functioning a whole lot better than it did a year ago,"" when Democrats were in charge.
+
+When Congress did shut down the government for two weeks in 2013, Republicans only controlled the House, but they got the blame because they had insisted on trying to use government funding to gut the Affordable Care Act.",REAL
+7002,BREAKING : After Embarrassingly Low Turnout at Ohio Rally Tim Kaine Cancels Florida Rally – TruthFeed,"BREAKING : After Embarrassingly Low Turnout at Ohio Rally Tim Kaine Cancels Florida Rally BREAKING : After Embarrassingly Low Turnout at Ohio Rally Tim Kaine Cancels Florida Rally Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 27, 2016 
+After a near-empty auditorium in Ohio, Time Kaine has canceled his Florida appearance today. 
+Kaine was set to appear in Sarasota, Florida Friday at 6 pm. 
+We’re not sure why it was canceled, although “LACK OF ATTENDANCE” seems the most logical explanation. 
+From News Channel 8 : 
+SARASOTA, FL (WFLA) — Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine was scheduled to be in Sarasota Friday, but the event has been canceled. 
+The event with Tim Kaine was scheduled for Friday at 6 p.m. at the Municipal Auditorium. 
+There is no word why the event was canceled. Clinton’s website simply says, “This event has been canceled. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.” 
+News Channel 8 is working to get more details. Stay with WFLA.com for updates. Tim Kaine event in Sarasota cancelled https://t.co/5RM8GFVsr8 via @wfla 
+— Constance Queen (@ConstanceQueen8) October 27, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+1843,Clinton clearing primary field for potential 2016 run could leave her vulnerable,"Hillary Clinton appears to have scared away much of the competition should she seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. But her early and practically all-encompassing effort also presents the potential liability that she will sail through the primary season largely untested for the bare-knuckled general election.
+
+And it could deny Democrats the chance to define themselves to Americans, strategists say.
+
+“It's not good for a party because the Democratic Party needs a real debate about what it's for, who it's for, what it's about and where we'll take the country,” says Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic congressman, presidential candidate and a Fox News contributor.
+
+The 67-year-old Clinton plans to make an official announcement in early 2015, leaving some doubt about whether she will indeed run. But her frontrunner status is unquestionable.
+
+She has roughly 62 percent of the likely vote and leads all potential Democratic challengers by a numbing 49.5 percentage points.
+
+And those numbers combined with an ambitious public-speaking schedule and the fundraising and cheerleading group Ready for Hillary are making it difficult for potential primary challengers to raise money.
+
+In addition, Clinton’s most formidable, likely primary challenger now, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, insists she’s not running, leaving the Democratic field so wide open that 73-year-old Bernie Sanders, an independent and junior senator from Vermont, is now fourth behind Clinton, Warren and Vice President Biden, according an averaging of polls by RealClearPolitics.com
+
+“I think you miss the chance to vet ideals,” says Richard Fowler, a Democrat and host of the progressive-leaning “Richard Fowler Talk Show.” “I think that's what elections are about. Elections are about ideals and how ideals … would then turn into policy that will then turn into how we govern.”
+
+Clinton, a former first lady, secretary of State and New York senator, hasn’t been in a campaign-style debate since 2008, when she lost the Democratic presidential primary to President Obama, then a freshman Illinois senator.
+
+Still, a relatively easy 2016 primary, if Clinton indeed runs, would likely save her from the pummeling she took last time.
+
+“You’re likeable enough, Hillary,” Obama said on stage to Clinton, who was the early Democratic frontrunner in that race, too.
+
+Among the tough questions she will likely face, and needs to answer well, include what she knew about security at the U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed in a 2012 terror attack.
+
+Clinton, who is worthy millions of dollars, also will likely have to make a strong case that she will champion the country’s poor and working class, after saying on her 2014 book tour: “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.”
+
+“Hillary Clinton, I think, has proven that when you're off the trail for a while, you come back rusty,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “She certainly came back rusty on that book tour.”",REAL
+7055,Seth Meyers Takes ‘A Closer Look’ At The GOP’s Threats Against Hillary And It’s Terrifying! (VIDEO),"By Allison Vincent Election 2016 , News , Politics , Right-Wing Terrorism , Videos November 4, 2016 Seth Meyers Takes ‘A Closer Look’ At The GOP’s Threats Against Hillary And It’s Terrifying! (VIDEO)   
+There are only a few days left in this election and Republicans are growing more and more desperate, using what Seth Meyers called “increasingly unhinged rhetoric” during Thursday’s Late Night segment of A Closer Look. 
+“‘Republicans are using increasingly unhinged rhetoric to warn about the consequences of electing Hillary,’ Meyers said. ‘Many are even threatening to impeach her without any evidence of a crime before she ever takes office and if they can’t do that, they’ll settle for the next best thing – preventing her from filling any vacancy on the Supreme Court for her entire four year term.'” 
+But that’s not all they’ve done — there have also been more death threats and calls to violence. Former Congressman Joe Walsh, who, like Donald Trump, enjoys Twitter WAY more than he should, tweeted this on November 1: 
+Another shocking GOP turn is from Ted Cruz, who just a few short months ago, during his speech at the RNC, refused to endorse Trump, but just today he hopped on Trump’s plane to go campaign for him in Iowa. This, after Trump accused Cruz’s father of killing JFK and also said horrible things about his wife. Remember that “baked bean teeth” comment Trump made? Yeah. Just plain nasty. 
+It’s really unfortunate that Cruz caved, but the GOP is so terrified of losing control, that they are willing to forget their own pride and pull out all the stops to keep Clinton out of office. 
+Watch Seth Meyers break it all down. It’s pretty terrifying. 
+Featured Image via video screenshot Share this Article!",FAKE
+6047,YIKES! Megyn Kelly Receives RUDE AWAKENING- Reminded She’s REPLACEABLE!,"0 comments 
+Megyn Kelly seems to think that she can get away with anything she says or does. Rupert Murdoch gave her a rude awakening when he told her that there are tons of other qualified people that would kill to take her spot. 
+Rupert Murdoch is making Fox News’ salary negotiations with Megyn Kelly very public by granting an interview to one of the newspapers his company News Corp. owns, The Wall Street Journal. In the interview, Murdoch said that keeping Kelly is a priority, but that he has other hosts who could take over the program should she try and go to a rival network.‘[W]e have a deep bench of talent, many of whom would give their right arm for that spot,’ said Murdoch. Kelly, who is said to be making $15million this year, is reportedly looking to make more than $20million when she renegotiates her contract next July. She declined a request to comment on the story. 
+Kelly’s star has continued to rise over the past year, and next month she will be releasing her first book, Settle For More. It has also been revealed that Kelly will be appearing Live With Kelly! the day after the election, marking the first time she is set to appear on Ripa’s morning show as a co-host. 
+Her popularity is one of the main reasons Murdoch says he wants to get her contract signer ‘very soon.’ 
+He added however that whether or not Kelly stays at the network is ‘up to her.’ It is unclear where Kelly might land if she does not stay with Fox News, but CNN seems like a very likely possibility for the popular host. Kelly also has a huge fan in CNN head honcho Jeff Zucker, who called her a ‘tremendous anchor’ earlier this year. And former CNN president Jon Klein applauded Kelly for not backing down to Donald Trump in the first Republican debate when she questioned him about his treatment of women, this despite the fact that her then boss Roger Ailes was a supporter of the Republican nominee.‘To be able to stand up and ask tough questions to your boss’s choice of president shows a certain steeliness,’ said Klein. The article also points out that Kelly also separated herself from other Fox News anchors during the internal investigation into Ailes’ alleged sexual harrassment by speaking with the lawyers hired to look into the claims being made by former host Gretchen Carlson. That revelation about Kelly’s speaking with investigators was confirmed by people who were familiar with the matter. Some have said that Kelly is set to be the center of Fox News after the exit of Ailes, but Murdoch shot down those claims saying: ‘We’re not changing direction … that would be business suicide.’ Murdoch also said that he wants to make sure Bill O’Reilly also resigns with the network when his contract is up next month. One rival news executive told Vanity Fair in August that the rivalry between Kelly and O’Reilly has devolved to the point that one of them will likely leave when their contracts expire. O’Reilly shot down reports of a feud between himself and Kelly in June however, telling The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Oh, that’s all fabricated. She’s in a totally different part of the building. The last time I saw Megyn Kelly was in Detroit in March [at the Fox News GOP debate].’ Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Fox News said: ‘[Fox News President] Bill Shine and [Executive Vice President, Programming & Development] Suzanne Scott have maintained a close relationship with Bill and Megyn for years and have helped both of them in many instances, all while co-existing under the same roof.’ Kelly has previously hinted that she would be willing to leave the network where she has worked for the last 12 years 
+‘There’s a lot of brain damage that comes from the job. There was probably less brain damage when I worked in the afternoon. I was less well known. I had far less conflict in my life,’ Kelly said in an interview with Variety earlier this year.‘I also have three kids who are soon going to be school from 8am to 3pm I come to work at 3:30. I like to see my children.’ Kelly says she’s thought about hosting her own talk show but isn’t sure ‘what the market looks like for that in 2016’ and just doesn’t think ‘that’s the perfect thing for me’. As for co-hosting a morning show like Today, Kelly said she’s tried that before and she’s not much of a morning person.‘You have to wake up so early. The alarm goes off at 3:30am,’ said Kelly.‘When I did America’s Newsroom, which started at 9am, I remember saying to the makeup artist at the time, “If you could only know the afternoon me, you’d like me so much better.'” She then added: ‘Listen, this is a fickle business. What if they called me and fired me tomorrow? I have to keep my options open.’ 
+Everybody is replaceable, even you Megyn!! Related Items",FAKE
+7602,"[WATCH] Univ Of Alabama Students Try To Protest National Anthem, Then A Veteran Shows Up","0 comments Do you think that this Veteran’s actions were wrong? I think that #BAMASITS student protesters are a bunch of BLM Hippie whiners! Way to go, Colin Kaepernick! Your actions as a millionaire whiner in the National Football League have now influenced the young minds of young students at college football games. These kids are not even equipped with enough mental toughness to consider basic issues. You believe that your actions will help them to create a better life? Evidently, protesting the National Anthem is a fad that is not quite ready to die. One recent iteration can be found at the University of Alabama, where students use the hashtag #BAMASITS in an attempt to draw attention to their cause. These little babies have the right to protest, but like many who have a liberal mindset, they are only tolerant of others who share their views. If you stand up for your own views, as this Veteran did, you are behaving in ways that are “outside of your rights.” One representative of #BAMASITS, Emerald Vaughn, described the group like this: “#BAMASITS is a peaceful protest. We are protesting social injustice. We support underrepresented LGBTQ community and people of color against discrimination and we’re also protesting against police brutality.” Fine, Emerald. Have your protests. One question, though: What is wrong with a Veteran of the United States military standing during a game and sharing his own views? Teddi Badami, an Air Force Veteran, decided that he would do just that. Video has surfaced of the #BAMASITS crowd protesting the National Anthem at Bryant-Denny Stadium, prior to the Texas A&M game, when Badami stood in front of their protest with his hand over his heart. Badami simply stood and sang along with the words of the National Anthem. “I politely stood up to ask him, could you move and he said he was a veteran. I respect veterans, I don’t have anything against veterans but I felt like you shouldn’t try to invade and bully your way. That was total disrespect and disregard of our protest,” said Vaughn. Clearly, Badami does not feel that way. Take a look at video footage of the event, below: #bamasits says a veteran interrupted their peaceful protest, the vet says otherwise. Watch @abc3340 at 10 for more. pic.twitter.com/VO6LLr9Hig 
+— Andrew Donley (@Andrewabc3340) October 26, 2016 
+Do you believe that Badami was out of line? 
+“I stood there with my hand over my heart and sang the national anthem loud and proud. I made no comments to any of the individuals other than I stand for the national anthem and that I served our country,” Badami said. 
+“I felt that it was disrespectful, he can have his own, whatever his points that he wanted to make, he could have did that on his own. People fight over, they fight our wars with veterans for us to have the right to sit or stand for the national anthem,” Vaughn said. 
+Badami says he and his friend returned to their seats after the anthem but were temporarily detained by campus police. 
+Detained by campus police? Give me a break!",FAKE
+5447,"Insider Leaks Bill’s 2-Word Nickname For Hillary, Exposes Dirty Bad Habits","Email 
+
+No wonder Bill went elsewhere to fulfill his “sexual addiction,” as Dolly referred to it. After all, what else can you do when you’re married to a stinky woman who doesn’t shower and isn’t attracted to men anyways? Although an affair is never justified, it’s easy to sympathize with Bill on this one. But, I digress. 
+The bigger point here is what the two are willing to do in order to remain in power. Most people know that you can’t trust Hillary as far as you can throw her – which isn’t very far – so the fact that she has any supporters is beyond baffling at this point. This woman is corrupt and fake to the core. Let’s just hope all of America wakes up to this reality before it’s too late and she can do any more damage than she already has. 
+Bill and Hillary Clinton just can’t stay out of the spotlight these days, and the most recent leak about them could be the most damaging yet. As it turns out, someone once close to the duo just came forward to share Bill’s revealing nickname for his wife — but the worse comes as their dirty bedroom habits were exposed. 
+It’s no mystery that Bill Clinton is a sexual deviant, but the most recent account given by the woman who had a 3-decade affair with the man is damning, to say the least. According to an exclusive interview given to Mail Online, Dolly Kyle was behind the scene’s long enough to not only know the two’s darkest secrets but even their dirty sexual habits – and now, she’s telling everyone. 
+The connection between Dolly and Bill began when she was just 11-years-old. He was about 13-years-old at the time, but Dolly states that there was an immediate attraction, even then. As the years progressed, the two became romantically involved and stayed that way through several of their marriages over the next 30 years. 
+The real affair began in 1974 just after Dolly divorced her first husband, and although Bill wasn’t married yet, he would be within the year. Although she was never interested in sharing the intimate details of the relationship, she states that she snapped when she heard Hillary recently say that all sexual assault victims have the “right to be believed.” 
+Knowing full well just what Hillary had done – between the threats and the lies – to the many women who either had an affair with or were sexually assaulted by her husband Bill, Dolly knew she had to do something about it. Unfortunately for Hillary, Dolly is now coming forward with the dirty 2-word nickname Bill husband once called Hillary, among other things. 
+According to Mail Online, Bill approached Dolly at their high school’s 35-year reunion to talk about “ the warden” – a.k.a. Hillary. Saying he was unhappy with his life and marriage, this was the least significant account Dolly had to share. 
+In fact, Dolly recalls that Bill mentioned something about having a baby to her. Although she thought he was saying he wanted to have one with her, he was actually talking about Hillary. He wanted to put to bed the rumors that Hillary was a lesbian, even though everyone in their hometown already knew it to be true. 
+Dolly states that the worst came when she met Hillary for the first time. “In that moment I noticed that the woman emitted an overpowering [body] odor of perspiration and greasy hair. I hoped that I wouldn’t gag when she got in my car,” she said. “The sandal-shod woman with lank, smelly hair stood off to the side and glared at everyone.” 
+No wonder Bill went elsewhere to fulfill his “sexual addiction,” as Dolly referred to it. After all, what else can you do when you’re married to a stinky woman who doesn’t shower and isn’t attracted to men anyways? Although an affair is never justified, it’s easy to sympathize with Bill on this one. But, I digress. 
+The bigger point here is what the two are willing to do in order to remain in power. Most people know that you can’t trust Hillary as far as you can throw her – which isn’t very far – so the fact that she has any supporters is beyond baffling at this point. This woman is corrupt and fake to the core. Let’s just hope all of America wakes up to this reality before it’s too late and she can do any more damage than she already has.",FAKE
+10339,WIKILEAKS: Emails Show Clinton Collusion Between State Department And DOJ,"We Are Change 
+Wikileaks has been leaking more emails then we can keep up with but two of the biggest bombshells recently released by the international whistle-blower organization are that the Department of Justice and State Department were in collusion with the Clinton campaign.
+The emails show Clinton campaign manager John Podesta being warned by Department Of Justice Assistant Secretary General Peter Kadzik from a non-government email address about Hillary’s investigation.
+Kadzik wrote to Podesta with the subject line “heads up,” tipping him off to the investigation into Hillary Clinton on Benghazi.
+“There is a HJC oversight hearing today where the head of our Civil Division will testify. Likely to get questions on State Department emails. Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails,” Kadzik wrote.
+Peter Kadzik is also in charge of investigating Huma Abedin’s emails. Kadzik was also an attorney for John Podesta and in Podesta’s own words he was a “ fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.” 
+In another bombshell, Podesta made false statements to a grand jury during the investigation into the Monica Lewinsky trial, which Podesta himself summarizes in another leaked email. 
+A further revelations about Kadzik is the fact that Peter Kadzik represented Marc Rich as his attorney – the same Marc Rich that Bill Clinton controversially pardoned and the FBI released it’s investigation files into on Monday.
+If that’s not enough Kadzik’s son tried to get a job working for the Clinton campaign . Then there is the fact that Kadzik had multiple dinners with Podesta during the email investigation .
+These are obvious conflicts of interest here and one that needs to be brought forward.
+In another example of collusion between the Clinton campaign and the government’s investigation of it’s candidate Hillary Clinton, it’s been revealed that FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe’s wife received $675,000 in political donations from Clinton campaign surrogate Terry McAuliffe’s PAC and the Democratic Party of Virginia.
+
+Terry McAuliffe was the person that enabled the FBI to open an investigation into the Clinton Foundation when Terry McAuliffe himself was investigated for corruption .
+Other Wikileaks emails show collusion between officials in the U.S. State Department. Two recently leaked emails show that not only was Clinton’s campaign tipped off by a DOJ insider but the U.S. State Department colluded with the New York Times the day prior to announcing Hillary’s private server.
+Lauren Hickey told Clinton aides that then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki “just cleared” a statement to a New York Times reporter. 
+“Hi guys – Jen just cleared. She made the highlighted change — just rephrased a line about NARA updates state is undertaking. Yes on your point re records – done below. And yes will let you know — should be in the new few minutes.” – Lauren Hickey.
+Additionally an email from Brian Fallon, Clinton’s press secretary who used to be the DOJ’s director of public affairs until joining Clinton’s campaign in April 2015, highlights that Fallon was being leaked information from the DOJ on Hillary Clinton’s investigation in the early stages of a status hearing. So what makes you think he didn’t get further information? To add to that, again a private non-government email was used to relay this information to Podesta and the rest of the campaign.
+
+“DOJ folks inform me there is a status hearing in this case this morning, so we could have a window into the judge’s thinking about this proposed production schedule as quickly as today.”
+– Brian Fallon.
+
+What more will be revealed about the inner workings of Clinton’s campaign and the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server? Stay tuned to We Are Change.
+The post WIKILEAKS: Emails Show Clinton Collusion Between State Department And DOJ appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+1001,The Daily 202: Bill Clinton’s argument with Black Lives Matter protesters is 2016’s Sister Souljah Moment,"Bill Clinton spent 13 minutes yesterday forcefully responding to Black Lives Matter activists who were heckling him. Speaking in an overwhelmingly African American neighborhood of Philadelphia, the city that will host this summer’s Democratic National Convention, the former president offered a spirited defense of his record on civil rights, his signature crime bill and his wife.
+
+One of the protesters held a sign that declared, ""Black youth are not super predators.” That’s a reference to when Hillary Clinton spoke in 1996 of “the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators’” and said “we have to bring them to heel.”
+
+Clinton pointed to the signs. “This is what’s the matter,” he said. “I don't know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-olds hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn't! … You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter! Tell the truth! You are defending the people who caused young people to go out and take guns.”
+
+The 69-year-old went on an extended riff about why he and his wife are the ones who have really fought to make black lives matter:
+
+""Because of that [crime] bill we had a 25-year low in crime, a 30-year low in the murder rate, and because of that and the background-check law, a 46-year low in deaths of lives by gun violence,” he said. “And who do you think those lives were that mattered? Whose lives were saved that mattered?""
+
+Bill noted that Hillary, unlike Bernie Sanders, did not vote for the crime bill. ""She was spending her time trying to get health care for poor kids,” he said. “Who were they? And their lives matter!”
+
+He also highlighted the Democratic front-runner's work for the Children's Defense Fund as a young attorney in Alabama and her work to stop the spread of HIV in Africa as secretary of state. ""I'll tell you another story about a place where black lives matter: Africa,"" he said.
+
+-- In a year when the drama has mostly been on the Republican side, it made for great political theater. And it gave Bill Clinton another unforgettable “Sister Souljah Moment.” In May 1992, the hip-hop artist suggested that killing white cops might not be so bad in the wake of the Los Angeles riots. Speaking at a convention organized by Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, the then-governor of Arkansas ripped into her. ""If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” he said. “We have an obligation, all of us, to call attention to prejudice whenever we see it.” (C-SPAN’s archive has the video.)
+
+Calling her out became legendary and helped Clinton pivot from the Democratic nominating contest he was wrapping up, when he needed base voters, to the general election, when he needed independents. Twenty-four years later, we are at a very similar phase in the campaign cycle.
+
+-- Yesterday’s showdown in Philadelphia quickly became a Rorschach Test. Republicans and liberal activists inclined to dislike WJC called it evidence of him being out of touch and over the hill, while Clinton loyalists said it was the Big Dog at his best. The majority of the crowd of 400 cheered Clinton as he made the protesters his foils.
+
+-- Most mainstream media outlets are covering the comments as another off-message embarrassment for his wife’s campaign, but let’s dispense once and for all with the fiction that Bill Clinton does not know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
+
+-- A year ago, most D.C. pundits would have bet that the 2016 general election would pit Hillary versus Jeb, and that Democrats could win by making the campaign about whether voters wanted to give Bill or W. a third term. The Bushes are now long gone. Indeed, both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz criticize the former president to varying degrees. Because the Democratic primaries turned out to be more competitive than anticipated, it’s been hard for the Clintons to lean on nostalgia for the 1990s. Instead the former president and first lady have been pressed constantly from the left on everything from NAFTA to DOMA.
+
+-- Bill’s comments about the Black Lives Matter movement suggest that a major pivot in the campaign’s messaging is on the way.
+
+Smarting from the 2008 defections of African Americans to Barack Obama and recognizing that securing the Democratic nomination this time would depend on running up the score among minority voters, the Clintons set out in the spring of 2015 to inoculate themselves from criticism over the crime bill. “We overshot the mark,” Bill wrote in the foreword to a book on mass incarceration that came out exactly one year ago. The same month, Hillary gave a speech at Columbia University -- in the wake of the Baltimore riots – to promise that criminal justice reform to end sentencing disparities -- which were made worse by her husband’s bill – would be a top priority as president.
+
+Last July, the former president told the NAACP convention that he deeply regretted sending minor criminals to prison “for way too long.” ""I signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it,"" he said.
+
+Yesterday, the former president instead blamed congressional Republicans for the parts of the law that have increased mass incarceration. He said then-Sen. Joe Biden told him it could not pass if the tough-on-crime provisions were not added in.
+
+After Hillary was confronted this February by a protester about the “super predator” comment, she expressed regret. “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today,” she said in a statement.
+
+-- Now, as the general election looms, polls show that his wife is badly underperforming with white voters in key battleground states compared to 2008. But Bill’s strategy is not without risk. Hillary needs high African American turnout to beat Bernie in New York on April 19 and in the Pennsylvania and Maryland primaries on April 26. She also needs to keep the Obama coalition activated through November.
+
+WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
+
+-- Bernie Sanders is going to speak at the Vatican next week, John Wagner scoops. He'll leave for Rome immediately after his debate with Clinton on April 14 for a conference on social, economic and environmental issues.
+
+-- Sanders turned his stump speech into comedy on “The Late Show with Seth Meyers”: The Vermont senator offered a comedic twist on his disdain for the billionaire class, roasting the “one percenters” alongside Meyers on a segment called “Ya Bernt.” “One percent -- what do you need all that money for?” Sanders asked. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to compensate for something.” As for the big banks, Sanders had this to say: “My advice is the same advice I give to a couple contemplating an open relationship. It’s time to break up.” (John Wagner)
+
+-- Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper -- who could be a contender in the veepstakes -- hosted Hillary for a fundraiser at his home in Denver last night. Isaac Slade, lead vocalist for The Fray, performed for the 530 attendees. A white noise machine was set up to prevent reporters standing across the street from hearing Hillary's comments in the governor's back yard, according to the local CBS affiliate.
+
+-- Seven in 10 Americans now view Trump unfavorably, according to an AP-GfK poll. And the negativity transcends typical “voter blocs” of age, race and ideology: “It's an opinion shared by majorities of men and women; young and old; conservatives, moderates and liberals; and whites, Hispanics and blacks … a devastatingly broad indictment of [Trump]."" The numbers also suggest Trump could be losing his core base: ""In the South – a region where Trump has decisively won many primary contests – close to 70 percent of voters view him unfavorably. And among white voters without a college education, 55 percent have a negative opinion.""
+
+-- Not ready to make nice: Ted Cruz refuses to apologize to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for publicly calling him “a liar” last year. “That ain't gonna happen,"" the Texas senator said on CNN last night. “And if the Washington lobbyists want to see that happen, they can hold their breath a long, long time."" So much for trying to win over his Senate colleagues...
+
+-- American Idol is finally over. ""Less than two months after the curtain went down on #OscarsSoWhite — at least until 2017 — it seems that 'American Idol' may be too white as well. Or, more specifically, too deferential to 'generic' white guys, often wielding guitars. This was the consensus on social media after Trent Harmon, a self-described white 'dude from Mississippi,' defeated La’Porsha Renae, a black single mother from the same state."" (Justin Wm. Moyer)
+
+TRUMP SHAKES UP CAMPAIGN AFTER GETTING CAUGHT FLAT-FOOTED IN DELEGATE HUNT:
+
+-- Trump announced yesterday that he is reorganizing his campaign, giving an expanded role to veteran strategist Paul J. Manafort. From Karen Tumulty and Dan Balz: ""Manafort, who joined the Trump operation on March 29 as its convention manager, will now have broader responsibilities, and will 'oversee, manage and be responsible for all activities that pertain to Mr. Trump's delegate process and the Cleveland convention,' the campaign said in its announcement. Manafort, working from a new D.C. campaign office, will also be in charge of outreach efforts to members of Congress, the Republican National Committee and think tanks. While the campaign insisted there had been no reduction in the role of embattled campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, it was nonetheless seen that way in Republican circles. Manafort's new portfolio is the operation that could be most crucial to Trump's success in the coming months. Said one GOP strategist who has worked with Manafort, and who declined to be identified: 'I can assure you that Lewandowski should be looking for new employment at this point. He's half wiped out already.'""
+
+“Trump is not a dumb man,” Chris Cillizza writes. “He didn’t get to where he is … by not grasping when things are slipping away from him … [T]he writing appears to be on the wall. Manafort will run things going forward.”
+
+-- Smart frame --> “The strategist vs. the showman: Cruz and Trump run very different campaigns,” by Katie Zezima: “Cruz is the disciplined strategist who stays relentlessly on message and runs a by-the-book organization filled with aides and state chairs … Trump, by contrast, runs what amounts to a DIY presidential campaign. … While the approach has left Trump with little established infrastructure as the race turns into a brawl for delegates, it has also allowed him to be nimble … Cruz’s advance work will be on display this weekend in Colorado, one of five states that leave it up to party members to elect the state’s 37 delegates to the national convention. Organizers said much of the work has been done with little input from Cruz [headquarters in Houston]. ‘There are 50 different states with 50 different speeds,’ said Ken Buck, the senator’s Colorado state chairman.”
+
+-- Trump and Cruz face their first test in the Virginia delegate fight tomorrow: “A few hundred Republicans are set to gather in Wytheville, a town of 8,000 in the state's southwest corner, to elect three delegates to the Republican convention,” the AP reports. “At first glance, the 9th Congressional District's local convention appears to be fertile ground for Trump … But the Cruz campaign is counting on a superior advantage with party insiders, both in Virginia and around the country, to get its preferred delegates elected. Political watchers say these types of party insiders who take the time to register for and attend regional party meetings are more likely to back Cruz. ‘The issue is who is going to these convention,’ said Terry Kilgore, a Republican state House delegate ... ‘The Cruz people understand the game a little bit better.’”
+
+-- Trump leads Cruz by 7 points in California, according to the Field Poll. The front-runner has 39 percent, with Cruz at 32 percent and Kasich at 18 percent. Trump leads in the Bay Area and in the Southern California region outside of Los Angeles. Cruz is preferred over Trump in L.A. proper and among voters in the Central Valley and Sierra mountains, whereas supporters for Kasich are somewhat evenly dispersed across the state. The primary in June will award delegates by congressional districts. Former supporters of Arnold Schwarzenegger prefer Trump: Voters who backed his gubernatorial bid in the recall prefer Trump over Cruz by a three to one margin.
+
+-- “Trump has more than math to worry about in Cleveland,” by Politico’s Kyle Cheney: “Every aspect of the Republican National Convention is a potential tripwire that motivated anti-Trump forces could deploy to waylay the mogul.” Five tactics Cruz could use to try denying Trump the nomination.
+
+-- Ben Carson proved again to be a terrible Trump surrogate. When asked on CNN if Lewandowski should be running the show after being charged with battery, he responded that “a lot of people have been charged with various things … You’ve probably been charged with things.” (The interviewer replied that he has not.)
+
+-- Jeff Sessions, Trump's only supporter in the Senate, said he does not think Trump will pick him as VP.  “I think that would not happen,"" he said. “Don’t bet any money on me.” (The Hill)
+
+-- Rudy Giuliani told the New York Post that he will vote for Trump, hitting Cruz for his comments on ""New York values."" He quipped, “I can make fun of New York. But you can’t!""
+
+MORE ON THE DEMOCRATIC RACE:
+
+-- There is widespread and growing concern among Democrats that the Clinton-Sanders rivalry is doing lasting damage to the party and the eventual nominee. ""With both candidates launching 10-day sprints ahead of New York’s April 19 primary, the strain and resentment of a hard-fought and unexpectedly long contest boiled over repeatedly in interviews, speeches and other public appearances,"" John Wagner, Abby Phillip and Anne Gearan report. ""The senator from Vermont refused to retract his assertion that Clinton is not qualified to be president. Clinton dismissed that claim as 'silly' and countered that Sanders has repeatedly made promises he can’t keep. ... Sanders continued to blame Clinton for going on the attack and said he has simply been defending himself. And while he expressed regret for the tenor of the campaign over the previous 24 hours and said the acrimony will make it harder for Democrats to unite in the fall, he also said he does not regret his own statements. Clinton had raised questions in a television interview about whether Sanders was prepared to be president, but she repeatedly stopped short of saying he was unqualified.""
+
+""President Obama, who has sought to stay out his party’s nominating contest, weighed in Thursday though a spokesman. Traveling with Obama on Air Force One, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Obama believes that Clinton 'comes to the race with more experience than any non-vice president' in recent campaign history. Schultz emphasized that Obama feels 'fortunate' that Clinton, whom he defeated in a sometimes nasty battle for the 2008 nomination, served as his secretary of state.""
+
+-- In an interview with The Post's John Wagner, Sanders stood by his view that Clinton is not qualified — but he also pledged to support her if she is the nominee. Three highlights:
+
+-- Congressional Democrats expressed hope that the dust-up over whether Hillary is ""qualified"" serves as a warning for both candidates to tone things down and keep the party more cohesive than the Republicans. “It’s really important that everybody take a pause, that everybody calm down,” said North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp. “At this point in campaigns, people get tired, say things they don’t mean to, emotions get raw. I think a lot of this will dissipate with a couple good nights’ sleep.”
+
+-- Why is Bernie throwing the kitchen sink right now? Because he must fundamentally disrupt the race to have any chance of ultimately prevailing. ""Sanders still trails Clinton by more than 200 pledged delegates. The math is close to determinative -- and not in his favor. Barring a major cataclysm in the race, Clinton will be the nominee,"" writes Chris Cillizza. This chart compares Clinton's lead over Sanders to Obama's lead over her at this point in 2008:
+
+-- “Panama financial scandal blows up into Democratic skirmishing over trade,” by David Nakamura:
+
+-- President Obama took pains to describe Merrick Garland as a unifying figure during a speech at The University of Chicago Law School. Juliet Eilperin and Mike DeBonis: ""In a carefully-orchestrated question and answer session with students and faculty – including several of Garland’s family members, the president said failure to confirm his court nominee would make the courts “just an extension of our … elections and our politics. And that erodes the institutional integrity of the judicial branch.”
+
+One questioner pressed Obama about the lack of diversity on the bench and asked why he picked a white man. Obama said “that’s just not how I’ve approached it"": “At no point did I say: ‘Oh, you know what? I need a black lesbian from Skokie in that slot. Can you find me one?’” (The Skokie Review notes that this comment sent the suburb north of Chicago trending online...)
+
+-- Minority Whip Richard Durbin said Democrats are ""actively considering"" legislative maneuvers to push a vote on Garland. ""Democrats have thus far refrained from holding up legislation or other Senate business to gain leverage on the court fight. An ultimate step would be to force a floor vote on Garland without committee action — a move that would almost certainly fail but would attract attention and put those vulnerable Republican incumbents on the spot. A Democratic leadership aide said that is being considered as a last resort, one that would not be deployed for months.""
+
+-- Lindsey Graham said he will meet with Garland, reversing course on his earlier pledge not to. Spokesman Kevin Bishop said it was a “courtesy” meeting, and the South Carolina senator “remains opposed to moving forward with the nomination.”
+
+-- “Why a Va. senator told a teacher: ‘You do not know better than the parents,’” by Jenna Portnoy: “Sen. Richard H. Black doesn’t think of himself as squeamish. But the Northern Virginia Republican said he was so stunned by the ‘moral sewage’ in … Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ that he did something he professes to never have done [in office]. He abandoned all diplomacy and told a constituent exactly what he thought. Black called the book ‘profoundly filthy’ and ‘smut.’” The screed is part of an extraordinary email exchange between Black and Loudoun County teacher Jessica Berg, who “wrote to Black to protest his vote for a bill that would have required teachers to give parents advance notice if they planned to assign material with sexually explicit content in class [allowing parents to ‘opt out’ their children from reading the offending books]. ‘It’s ridiculous that you are trying to control education when you have no idea what it entails,’ she wrote. ‘You do not want free thinkers.’ ‘I want teachers who won’t teach such vile things,’ he responded. ‘You do not know better than the parents.’” (Read the full back and forth here.)
+
+Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), desperately trying to hold his seat, is one of only a handful of Republicans who would show off a handwritten note from Obama:
+
+Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) joked about the Senate voting down a legroom amendment in the FAA reauthorization. (Like you, he gets his news from PowerPost):
+
+Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) did not look too happy wearing Villanova gear (read about his NCAA wager with Pat Toomey here):
+
+Check out the scrum surrounding Clinton as she entered the NYC subway (here's the video, too):
+
+Kasich ate his way through the Bronx (check out this video mashup from CNN):
+
+Sanders ran into this character at Temple University:
+
+Clinton allies, including the head of the lead super PAC supporting her, accused Sanders of sexism:
+
+The Clinton campaign rapid response team noted that Sanders thought she was qualified enough to become Secretary of State:
+
+Some in upstate New York were not so happy to have Cruz:
+
+Two pictures of Obama back when he was a law professor:
+
+D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier threw the first pitch at the Nats home opener:
+
+Internet trolls from the fever swamps of the far right and the far left can be so disgusting and nasty, but this may take the cake:
+
+-- Bloomberg, “McCain-Linked Nonprofit Received $1 Million From Saudi Arabia,” by Bill Allison: “A nonprofit with ties to Senator John McCain received a $1 million donation from the government of Saudi Arabia in 2014, according to documents filed with the [IRS]. [McCain] has strictly honorary roles with the McCain Institute for International Leadership, a program at Arizona State University, and its fundraising arm, the McCain Institute Foundation, according to his office. But McCain has appeared at fundraising events for the institute and his Senate campaign’s fundraiser is listed in its tax returns as the contact person for the foundation. Though federal law strictly bans foreign contributions to electoral campaigns, the restriction doesn’t apply to nonprofits engaged in policy, even those connected to a sitting lawmaker … The Saudi donation to the McCain Institute Foundation may be the first congressional instance of that trend coming to light ‘The extent of this practice is difficult to gauge, of course,’ Holman said, ‘because we only know about it when a nonprofit or foreign government voluntarily reveals that information.’” (We missed this story when it came out last week but it's caused a stir in Arizona, where McCain is up for reelection.)
+
+On the campaign trail: Here's the rundown:
+
+At the White House: President Obama headlines a DSCC fundraiser in Los Angeles, then travels to San Francisco for DNC and DCCC fundraisers. Vice President Biden travels from Las Vegas to Boulder, Colo., where he speaks at the University of Colorado for the ""It's on Us Week of Action"" against sexual assault and at an event for Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.). In the evening, Biden departs Denver for Santa Fe, N.M.
+
+On Capitol Hill: Neither the Senate nor the House are in session.
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+-- A mild start to a chilly weekend. The Capital Weather Gang forecasts: “Arguably, today is nicer than anything we’ll see this weekend. Even with wind, it’s still fairly mild — at least comparatively. Clouds and rain showers move in tonight through at least tomorrow morning. We may even see a few snowflakes, but snow of note on Saturday is more of a long shot than sure thing. Hoping to get back outside? Sunday should be calmer and sunnier. Springtime should try to return next week. Whew. Hang on to your hats…”
+
+-- The Golden State Warriors beat the San Antonio Spurs 112-101 to reach 70 wins.
+
+-- The Capitals lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins 4-3.
+
+-- D.C. police are FINALLY cracking down on illegal dirt bike riders, saying swarms of off-road bikes on the city's streets have become a “dangerous public menace.” (Peter Hermann)
+
+-- Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) abruptly withdrew support for his once-touted economic development strategy, after the Democratic Attorney General said the $35 million “Go Virginia” program probably violates the state constitution. McAuliffe, who gave a “full throated endorsement” of the program last summer, will try to amend the legislation, giving lawmakers the option to accept or reject his changes when they return to Richmond this month. (Jenna Portnoy)
+
+-- Donna Edwards raised more than $1 million in the first quarter for her Senate campaign after struggling to get money last year. (Rachel Weiner)
+
+-- Montgomery County police charged two men with kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl in March. (Clarence Williams)
+
+-- Two students, a chaperone, and a police officer were injured after a police cruiser and school bus crashed in Springfield. (Victoria St. Martin)
+
+Watch a dramatic video of a knife-wielding man shouting “kill me!” at an Ohio police officer more than 40 times after he was shot in the abdomen. The hero cop shows incredible restraint in the face of danger:
+
+Political hip hop duo Rebel Diaz confronted Cruz, saying he's not welcome in the neighborhood:
+
+Clinton began running her first New York Spanish-language TV ad:
+
+Kasich supporters targeted Cruz and his derision for ""New York values"" in this new spot:
+
+The Washington Examiner's David Freddoso explained with post-it notes why he doesn't see Trump winning in a general election:
+
+A woman secretly recorded what her doctors said during surgery:
+
+A 12-year-old talked about getting thrown down by a school officer:
+
+This stuffed animal was filmed making a trip to the Earth's stratosphere:",REAL
+6411,Last Stand For ISIS?,"Chaosistan , Iraq , Phenomenon of Terrorism By Eric MARGOLIS (USA) 
+As a former soldier and war correspondent who has covered 14 conflicts, I look at all the media hoopla over tightening siege of Mosul, Iraq and shake my head. This western-organized “liberation” of Mosul is one of the bigger pieces of political-military theater that I’ve seen. 
+Islamic State(IS), the defender of Mosul, is a paper tiger, blown out of all proportion by western media. IS is, as this writer has been saying for years, an armed mob made up of 20-something malcontents, religious fanatics, and modern-day anarchists. At its top is a cadre of former Iraqi Army officers with military experience. 
+These former officers of Saddam Hussain are bent on revenge for the US destruction of their nation and the lynching of its late leader. But IS rank and file has no military training, little discipline, degraded communications, and ragged logistics. 
+In fact, today’s Islamic State is what the Ottoman Empire used to term, ‘bashi-bazouks,” a collection of irregular cut-throats and scum of the gutter sent to punish and terrorize enemies by means of torture, rapine, looting and arson. 
+What has amazed me about the faux western war against ISIS is its leisurely nature, lack of élan, and hesitancy. In my view, ISIS was mostly created by the US and its allies as a weapon to be used against Syria’s government – just as the Afghan mujahadin were used by the US and the Saudis to overthrow the Soviet-backed Afghan government. Israel tried the same tactics by helping create Hamas in Palestine and Hezbullah in Lebanon. Both were cultivated to split the PLO. 
+ISIS is an ad hoc movement that wants to punish the West and the Saudis for the gross carnage they have inflicted on the Arab world. 
+Western and Kudish auxiliary forces have been sitting 1.5 hours drive from Mosul and the IS town of Raqqa for over a year. Instead, western – mainly US – warplanes have been gingerly bombing around these targets in what may be an effort to convince breakaway ISIS to rejoin US-led forces fight the Damascus regime. 
+Note that ISIS does not appear to have ever attacked Israel though it is playing an important role in the destruction of Syria. Some reports say Israel is providing logistic and medical support for IS. 
+The siege of Mosul is being played up by western media as a heroic second Stalingrad. Don’t be fooled. IS has only 3-5,000 lightly armed fighters in Mosul and Raqqa, maybe even less. The leaders of IS are likely long gone. IS has few heavy weapons, no air cover at all, and poor communications. Its rag-tag fighters will run out of ammunitions and explosives very quickly. 
+Encircling Mosul are at least 50,000 western-led soldiers, backed by heavy artillery, rocket batteries, tanks, armored vehicles and awesome air power 
+The western imperial forces are composed of tough Kurdish pasha merga fighters, Iraqi army and special forces, some Syrian Kurds, Iranian ‘volunteers’ irregular forces and at least 5,000 US combat troops called “advisors”, plus small numbers of French, Canadian and British special forces. Hovering in the background are some thousands of Turkish troops, supported by armor and artillery ready to ‘liberate’ Iraq – which was once part of the Ottoman Empire. 
+For the US, current military operations in Syria and Iraq are the realization of an imperialist’s fondest dream: native troops led by white officers, the model of the old British Indian Raj. Washington arms, trained, equips and financed all its native auxiliaries. 
+The IS is caught in a dangerous dilemma. To be a political movement, it was delighted to control Iraq’s second largest city. But as a guerilla force, it should not have holed up in an urban area where it was highly vulnerable to concentrated air attack and being surrounded. This is what’s happening right now. 
+In the mostly flat Fertile Crescent with too few trees, ground forces are totally vulnerable to air power, as the recent 1967, 1973 Israel-Arab wars and 2003 Iraq wars have shown. Dispersion and guerilla tactics are the only hope for those that lack air cover. 
+IS forces would best advised to disperse across the region and continue their hit-and-run attacks. Otherwise, they risk being destroyed. But being mostly bloody-minded young fanatics, IS may not heed military logic and precedent in favor of making a last stand in the ruins of Mosul and Raqqa. 
+When this happens, western leaders will compete to claim authorship of the faux crusade against the paper tiger of ISIS. 
+Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist, writing and commenting for the top media outlets of the United States, Canada UK, France, Gulf states, Turkey, Malaysia and Pakistan.",FAKE
+8890,Russia’s Most Potent Weapon: Rapidly “Hoarding Gold” As Global Currency War Is Upon Us,"
+This article was written by Jay Syrmopoulos and originally published at The Free Thought Project . 
+Editor’s Comment: He who holds the gold makes the rules? Fresh attempts at containing Russia and continuing the empire have been met with countermoves. Russia appears to be building strength in every way. Putin and his country have no intention of being under the American thumb, and are developing rapid resistance as the U.S. petrodollar loses its grip and China, Russia and the East shift into new currencies and shifting world order. 
+What lies ahead? It will be a strong hand for the countries that have the most significant backing in gold and hard assets; and China and Russia have positioned themselves very well. Prepare for a changing economic landscape, and one in which self-reliance might be all we have. 
+Russia is Hoarding Gold at an Alarming Rate — The Next World War Will Be Fought with Currencies 
+by Jay Syrmopoulos
+With all eyes on Russia’s unveiling their latest nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which NATO has dubbed the “SATAN” missile , as tensions with the U.S. increase, Moscow’s most potent “weapon” may be something drastically different.
+The rapidly evolving geopolitical “weapon” brandished by Russia is an ever increasing stockpile of gold, as well as Russia’s native currency, the ruble.
+Take a look at the symbol below, as it could soon come to change the entire hierarchy of the international order – potentially ushering in a complete international paradigm shift – and much sooner than you might think.
+image: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/bankofrussia-e1475520013798.png 
+
+The symbol is the new designation of the Russian ruble, Russia’s national currency.
+Similar to how the U.S. uses the dollar sign ($), the U.K. uses the pound sign (£), and the European Union uses the euro symbol (€), Russia is about to begin exporting its symbol internationally.
+After the failed “reset” in U.S./Russian relations by the Obama administration, and the continued deterioration of the countries relationship, Washington began targeting entire sectors of the Russian economy, as well as specific individuals, meant to impose an economic burden so severe that it would force Moscow into compliance.
+Instead of decimating Russia, what it precipitated was a Russian response of gradually weaning themselves off of the hegemony of the U.S. petrodollar, and working with China to create an alternative to the SWIFT payment system that isn’t solely controlled by Western interests (see Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank , New Development Bank).
+According to the Corbett Report :
+New reports indicate that China is ready to launch its SWIFT alternative, and for those who have their ear to the ground this is the most significant move yet in the unfolding process of de-dollarization that is seeing the BRICS-led “resistance bloc” breaking away from the financial stranglehold of the US-led “Washington Consensus.”
+For those who don’t know, SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication and is shorthand for the SWIFTNet Network that is used by over 10,500 financial institutions in 215 countries and territories to transmit financial transaction data around the world. SWIFT does not do any of the clearing or processing for these transactions itself, but instead sends the payment orders that are then settled by correspondent banks of the member institutions. Still, given the system’s near universality in the financial system, it means that virtually every international transaction between banking institutions goes through the SWIFT network.
+This is why de-listing from the SWIFT network remains one of the primary financial weapons wielded by the US and its allies in their increasingly important financial warfare campaigns.
+Recently, financial guru Jim Rickards, author of the book “Currency Wars,” wrote that “Russia is poised for a major comeback in its economy. Russian bonds and stocks and the Russian currency, the ruble, will all benefit.” Rickards believes a “strong turnaround” is coming within Russia, and that this comeback will benefit the ruble.
+While still suffering from the economic warfare being waged by the U.S., Russia has realized that as long they are subservient to the petrodollar, there remains a clear and present danger of the Russian economy being devastated by the whims of Washington. 
+The Bank of Russia, that nation’s central bank, is extremely clear about its mission, and monetary policy declaring on its website:
+Monetary policy constitutes an integral part of the state policy and is aimed at enhancing well-being of Russian citizens. The Bank of Russia implements monetary policy in the framework of inflation-targeting regime, and sees price stability, albeit sustainably low inflation, as its priority. Given structural peculiarities of the Russian economy, the target is to reduce inflation to 4% by 2017 and maintain it within that range in the medium run.
+In layman’s terms, that means that monetary policy, similar to nuclear weapons and the military, are “an integral part of the state policy” in Russia. While many analysts have noted the increased build-up in Russia’s military arsenal, seemingly few have highlighted the massive build-up of Russian gold reserves over the past decade.
+Below is a chart showing Russian gold reserves between 1994 and last year, 2015:
+
+Since 2006, there has been a year-on-year increase that reveals a significant upward trend. The chart clearly reveals that Russia’s state policy of increasing state monetary assets, in the form of gold. Additionally, the Russian government has been converting state rubles into gold assets. From 2006 to 2015, Russia’s state holdings of gold tripled.
+Within just the past year Russia has substantially increased its gold holdings
+According to the Business Insider :
+In July of this year, the central bank of Russia added 200,000 ounces of gold to its reserves. The one-month uptick in Russian gold reserves — 200,000 ounces — is approximately equal to the entire annual output of Barrick Gold’s Turquoise Ridge gold mine in Nevada.
+At that same rate — 200,000 ounces per month — in a mere five months, Russia would add to state gold reserves the equivalent of the entire annual output of Barrick’s massive Goldstrike mine in Nevada.
+Currently, Russian gold reserves rank seventh in the world. It’s clear that there is a concerted effort by Russian authorities to build up the country’s gold reserves as part of a national strategy to negate the effects of economic warfare waged by the United States.
+Rickards, in his 2011 book “Currency Wars,” theorized that Russia and China could combine their gold reserves to form a global gold-backed currency to compete against the U.S. dollar. Currently, Russian reserves stand at roughly 1,500 tonnes, with Chinese reserves totaling over 1,800 tonnes (according to China — it’s likely more), which would amount to a combined total of roughly 3,300 tonnes of gold.
+The U.S. is about to lose overarching control of policymaking within the International Monetary Fund (IMF), thus the U.S. lockup on global gold is about to vanish, according to Business Insider.
+Imagine for a moment the distinctly real possibility that Russian-Chinese alliance could exercise indirect (or even direct) control over the IMF’s gold reserve of over 2,800 tonnes. Russian, Chinese and IMF gold combined would equal roughly 6,100 tonnes, and would allow for direct competition with the U.S. gold reserves, estimated at 8,100 tonnes.
+Russia and China have realized that the petrodollar is wielded by Washington as it’s weapon of choice when opposing a well-armed state, and clearly see the writing on the wall – thus working together to create a new global financial paradigm.
+The reality is that the United States is $20 trillion dollars in debt, and eventually the time will come when the U.S. economy begins to implode — and all the fiat currency people are stuck holding will essentially be worth nothing more than the paper it’s printed on. Hard assets, such as gold and silver, should be bought and taken custody of while there is still an opportunity to do so, as a means of hedging against the potentially disastrous results of the U.S. using the petrodollar as a “weapon.”
+Ultimately, the United States, Russia and China are all controlled by centralized power-hungry tyrants attempting to command powerful global bureaucracies like the IMF, the World Bank, SWIFT, New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
+It’s not Russian nuclear weapons that people should fear, as the policy of mutually assured destruction essentially voids any benefit of a state launching a first-strike nuclear attack. The true threat to America is our economic house of cards, built upon the back of a neoliberal trade policy that puts the “rights” of corporations over that of people .
+This article was written by Jay Syrmopoulos and originally published at The Free Thought Project . ",FAKE
+1104,"What divides America? This weekend, it was a Chicago street.","The unrest at a Trump event was a symbol of a nation of partisans who don't trust each other. But it also highlighted a way forward.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+For one night, Chicago's Harrison Street might as well have been Capitol Hill.
+
+On one side of the street stood supporters of Donald Trump, upset that a campaign rally had been canceled. On the other stood protesters against Mr. Trump – the reason the rally had been canceled. By the end of the night, the tension led to violence and recriminations.
+
+For all the grandiose talk this primary season about whom America should choose as president to ""fix Washington"" or ""make America great again,"" it was right there – on that Friday night in Chicago – that America's democratic experiment was playing out on its most basic level.
+
+The protests, violence, and general chaos that enveloped the presidential race this weekend gave the impression that American politics was spinning out of control. To the contrary, it was further evidence that the American political process has perhaps never been under tighter control. Not of the establishment. Of the voters.
+
+Friday night in Chicago showed that there is little mystery about politics today. Washington is divided and angry because American voters are divided and angry. In the not-too-distant past, parties acted as a buffer, wringing some measure of concord from Congress's cacophony of voices. No more.
+
+The parable of this election so far has been the impotence of the establishment. Just think how many times and ways the Republican establishment has tried to get Trump to play by anything approaching the rule book. And who in the Democratic National Committee really wants Bernie Sanders to still be in the race?
+
+The trend has been building for years. Former House Speaker John Boehner did not want the tea party agenda. The voters forced his hand. The parties are by no means dead, but their influence is a shadow of what it once was.
+
+Which brings America right back to Harrison Street. What this weekend showed, in the starkest terms yet, was that the only practical solution to the problems that seem to beset America is the American voter.
+
+If red and blue America – separated by a few feet of asphalt and wildly different worldviews – can't find a way to get along, then Congress doesn't have tools to, either. Nor would any president.
+
+Despite claims to the contrary, the establishment can do little of substance without voter buy-in. In searching for the element that has unified Trump voters across economic and geographic groups, ABC News found that the single most predictive factor was anger at the establishment.
+
+Compared with other factors, an ABC News poll found that ""the idea that Trump’s popularity is fundamentally based on anger against the existing political establishment, and the sense that an outsider is needed to fix it, have significantly more legs.""
+
+Some 82 percent of Trump supporters say they prefer an outsider, the poll found.
+
+Indeed, America sits at a unique confluence of political history, suggests Bruce Schulman of Reuters. The influence of the parties is declining as the partisanship of voters is rising. The result is that tensions are increasing at a time when the parties' ability to manage them is diminishing.
+
+""For much of the nation’s history, partisan attachments burned just as hot – if not hotter – than they do today, but strong party organizations disciplined their members and formed effective tools of governance,"" he writes. ""As party organizations weakened and partisan ties gradually atrophied after World War Two, space opened up for the influence of a wide variety of interest groups and the emergence of different, but nonetheless workable models of policymaking. Now, fierce partisanship has reemerged – but without effective party organization or authority to police it.""
+
+The reasons for the decline of the party are many, he says, from the rise of organized interests to ""mass media supplanting the party organization as the principal intermediary between elected officials and ordinary voters.""
+
+But the development leaves the country with no political referees. The task of governing falls largely to the voters by default. And at this moment, that is a recipe for division.
+
+More than a quarter of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (27 percent) said that the other party's positions “are so misguided that they threaten the nation's well-being,” according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study. More than one-third of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (36 percent) said the same. These make up the core of primary voters.
+
+As the Monitor's Peter Grier noted in a cover story, swing voters are disappearing. Even declared independents tend to vote for one side consistently, and many are voting against a party rather than for it.
+
+Parties have played their part in fueling antagonism for the other party. Voters have also sorted themselves along partisan lines in recent years – meaning there are few conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans anymore.
+
+The result is a political system that has little common ground. Weak parties ""may well make effective governance all but impossible,"" Mr. Schulman of Reuters says.
+
+But the decline of parties also makes the way forward apparent, if not easy. It comes down to what voters want, and the solution to the status quo is clearly not further polarization.
+
+""There is a tendency on the left and the right to associate primarily with like-minded people, to the point of actively avoiding those who disagree,"" the Pew study found. ""Not surprisingly, this tendency is also tightly entwined with the growing level of partisan antipathy. In both political parties, those with strongly negative views of the other side are more likely to be those who seek out compatible viewpoints.""
+
+This weekend, that divide was not blue-red or Republican-Democrat, but a Chicago street.",REAL
+7446,Police arrest 141 in crackdown on North Dakota pipeline protesters,"Posted on October 28, 2016 by # 1 NWO Hatr Published on Oct 27, 2016 by Truthstream Media The oligarchy runs our society with Problem – Reaction – Solution. If anything, these leaks have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the two-party system is an illusion and the whole construct is one huge pay-for-play corporate sham. Obamacare was always meant to destroy the private health care system and usher in single-payer, government run socialist medicine. It was designed that way… and it’s “working”. Share this:",FAKE
+3451,Is the Supreme Court poised for a shift to the right?,"Washington (CNN) The nine Supreme Court justices will emerge Monday from behind a long red velvet curtain and take their assigned seats on the bench to begin a new term. But most people will still be thinking of the historic nature of the cases decided last term and the fact that for the first time, the left side of the Roberts' court won more 5-4 cases than the right.
+
+The Justices of the US Supreme Court sit for their official photograph on October 8, 2010, in Washington.
+
+Was it a blip? Or has the Supreme Court gone liberal?
+
+Many court critics have also questioned the wisdom of the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, which opened the floodgates for campaign financing, allowing outside groups to spend record amounts. Millhiser said the ruling ""gave billionaires a far-reaching right to corrupt American democracy.""
+
+Many court critics have also questioned the wisdom of the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, which opened the floodgates for campaign financing, allowing outside groups to spend record amounts. Millhiser said the ruling ""gave billionaires a far-reaching right to corrupt American democracy.""
+
+Critics say the court makeup is part of the problem, noting that most justices have been white men from privileged backgrounds. It's an issue, they argue, that can sometimes lead to paternalistic language, as in a 2006 abortion ruling that said ""some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.""
+
+Critics say the court makeup is part of the problem, noting that most justices have been white men from privileged backgrounds. It's an issue, they argue, that can sometimes lead to paternalistic language, as in a 2006 abortion ruling that said ""some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.""
+
+Other scholars such as Clark Neily of the libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice defend the court, saying Brown v. Board of Education -- which led to school desegregation, including in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 -- shows that the court is often ""better than the other branches of government and society in general.""
+
+Other scholars such as Clark Neily of the libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice defend the court, saying Brown v. Board of Education -- which led to school desegregation, including in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 -- shows that the court is often ""better than the other branches of government and society in general.""
+
+The court has been on the wrong side of history numerous times, says author Ian Millhiser of the Center for American Progress. It issued decisions that legitimized Jim Crow segregation, approved the forced sterilization of a woman against her will and forced Japanese-American citizens into internment camps during World War II.
+
+The court has been on the wrong side of history numerous times, says author Ian Millhiser of the Center for American Progress. It issued decisions that legitimized Jim Crow segregation, approved the forced sterilization of a woman against her will and forced Japanese-American citizens into internment camps during World War II.
+
+They point to a 1918 ruling that struck down a federal law banning child labor, which left the practice in place for another two decades. The court said the law was ""repugnant to the Constitution"" because it violated states' rights. At the time, millions of children worked in dangerous mines, dank sweatshops and textile mills such as this one in Vermont in 1910.
+
+They point to a 1918 ruling that struck down a federal law banning child labor, which left the practice in place for another two decades. The court said the law was ""repugnant to the Constitution"" because it violated states' rights. At the time, millions of children worked in dangerous mines, dank sweatshops and textile mills such as this one in Vermont in 1910.
+
+Another major ruling upheld Obamacare subsidies; had it gone the other way, millions could have lost their health care tax credits. Some legal scholars say the court's historical mission has been to block change, not validate it, by defending the status quo and ruling in favor of ""wealth, power and privilege.""
+
+Another major ruling upheld Obamacare subsidies; had it gone the other way, millions could have lost their health care tax credits. Some legal scholars say the court's historical mission has been to block change, not validate it, by defending the status quo and ruling in favor of ""wealth, power and privilege.""
+
+The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, a decision that profoundly affects the lives of millions of Americans. Some legal scholars see the court's movement on gay rights issues as proof that it is a force for change. But others say the court's role is largely the opposite.
+
+The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, a decision that profoundly affects the lives of millions of Americans. Some legal scholars see the court's movement on gay rights issues as proof that it is a force for change. But others say the court's role is largely the opposite.
+
+Judicial conservatives and some Republican presidential candidates feel abandoned by Chief Justice John Roberts for his vote -- once again -- in favor of the Affordable Care Act, despite the fact that he dissented in other cases they care about concerning issues like gay marriage and housing discrimination.
+
+During last month's Republican presidential debate, Ted Cruz, who like Roberts served as a law clerk to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, suggested that Roberts' record was comparable to that of retired Justice David Souter. In conservative legal circles, Souter's nomination, by George H.W. Bush, was a disaster because the practically unknown nominee ultimately ended up voting on a consistent basis with the Court's more liberal wing. Cruz and others still blame the elder Bush for throwing away a precious chance to shape the Court. Souter retired in 2009 after 19 years on the bench giving President Barack Obama his first chance to nominate a justice.
+
+Liberals, however, dismiss any such notion the Roberts court has veered to the left.
+
+""The claim that Chief Justice Roberts is a liberal is preposterous,"" said Elizabeth Wydra of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a group that takes a progressive position in many of the hot button cases that come before the court. ""To be sure, he deserves credit for rejecting the legally meritless claims against the Affordable Care Act, but if you look at his 10 years on the Court, he has unquestionably moved the law in a conservative direction.""
+
+Indeed, any conservative furor might die down this term as the Court takes up affirmative action, voting rights, public sector unions and possibly abortion. Roberts' votes in those cases are expected to soothe some of his conservative critics.
+
+""I would expect a return to the norm,"" said Irving L. Gornstein, executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, ""in which the right side of the Court wins the majority but by no means all of the big cases, with Justice (Anthony) Kennedy again the key vote in most of the big cases.""
+
+As recent years have proved, there is no reliable means of predicting how the Court will rule. And several of the most high-profile cases this term offer justices a choice between ruling on broad or narrow grounds.
+
+Here are some notable cases to watch:
+
+In Texas, high school seniors who graduate in the top 10% of their class are automatically admitted to any Texas state university.
+
+In addition to the ""Top Ten Percent"" program, the school also considers race and other factors for admission. Since Fisher did not qualify for the program, she applied with other applicants, some of whom were entitled to racial preferences. Fisher, who is white, was denied admission.
+
+Fisher says that since UT already had a race-neutral plan in place, it shouldn't have layered on another program that took race into consideration.
+
+Her lawyers argue that the use of race is only permissible when there is no other race neutral alternative available. They hope the Court will ""send a clear message"" that public universities must only use race as a ""last resort.""
+
+It's worth noting that Fisher is not asking the justices to forbid race-conscious admissions plans at public universities all together. That means the Court could rule against the University of Texas, but still leave open a crack for other schools to take race into consideration in their admissions programs. The question for many is how big that crack might be.
+
+The University of Texas argues its use of race is simply one factor among many in its effort to create a diverse student body, saying that its race-neutral programs often target socioeconomic and related factors, and are not an adequate substitute.
+
+It's the second time the Court has taken up Fisher's case. Three years ago, the justices agonized over it for nine months before issuing a very narrow opinion and sending the case back down to the lower court for another look. The short and unexpected opinion suggests the justices were at loggerheads. Now the case is before them once again and eight justices (Justice Elena Kagan is recused from the case because she dealt with it in her previous job as Solicitor General) will most likely rule more definitively.
+
+Another case targets the issue of ""one person one vote,"" a doctrine dating back to the Earl Warren court when the Supreme Court held that state legislative districts must be drawn so they are equal in population.
+
+But the Court never explicitly defined population. Does it refer to the general population? Or to the population that can vote? Or something in between? That is the crux of Evenwel v. Abbott.
+
+Currently most states look to the total population of the district when drawing state lines. But the challengers in this case argue that Texas must primarily look at the total number of eligible voters in the state.
+
+Sue Evenwel, a resident of Titus County, and others argue that their vote is worth less than people in neighboring districts because those districts have fewer residents who are eligible to vote.
+
+In court briefs, Evenwel's lawyers say, ""the Texas legislature redrew the Senate map without attempting to ensure that each Senate district has approximately the same numbers of eligible voters.""
+
+The case has political implications. It raises questions not only about the representation of children and persons with felony convictions, but also immigrants.
+
+In general, rural districts tend to be more Republican than urban districts that often include more non-voters.
+
+A collection of civil-rights groups has filed a brief in support of Texas.
+
+""The Constitution declares equality before the law, that's the fundamental premise for a representative democracy,"" says Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights organization.
+
+""Each person should be a whole person, and each person has a right to representation whether you are a child, an immigrant or no matter what your race,"" she said.
+
+In 1977, the Court ruled that the First Amendment allows public-sector unions to require non-member employees to pay union fees for expenses related to workplace bargaining, such as wage disputes and contract negotiations. The employees don't, however, have to pay fees for anything considered to be ideological advocacy.
+
+Justice Samuel Alito and other conservatives on the Court have questioned that Court precedent, and it could be vulnerable this term in a case called Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.
+
+Rebecca Friedrichs and other public school teachers filed suit arguing that the supposed distinction between collective bargaining and ideological advocacy is blurred. They contend that the fees for collective bargaining speech in fact advance a distinct political viewpoint on matters such as seniority or pay raise.
+
+Terry Pell, of the Center for Individual Rights, a non-profit public interest firm representing the Friedrichs plaintiffs, says for example, ""When the union presses for seniority based school assignment policies it is stepping into one of the most hot button issues in education reform today.""
+
+The case comes at a time when unionization in general is declining and the future of unions has been a target in the current presidential campaign.
+
+""I don't think if the plaintiffs win this case it will be the death knell for public sector unions,"" says Ann C. Hodges, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, who notes that public-sector unions continue in the 25 states that currently forbid mandatory fees. ""However, it will make it more difficult for unions to provide representation for workers because those who pay dues will have to subsidize representation for workers who don't pay and there will be a disincentive for workers to join.""
+
+""The real story this term has yet to be written--and could come from the cases that are on their way to the Court,"" says Stephen I. Vladeck, of American University Washington College of Law and a CNN contributor. That might include a challenge to President Barack Obama's immigration policies as well as a return to the issue of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay.
+
+Two of the most likely cases that justices might take up concern abortion and the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive mandate.
+
+The Court has not heard an abortion case since 2007 and might take up a challenge that goes straight to Court precedent testing what makes up an undue burden for a woman seeking an abortion.
+
+At issue are two aspects of an abortion law in Texas that if allowed to go into effect, could close all but 10 clinics.
+
+One provision requires that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The others mandate that clinics upgrade their facilities to hospital-like standards.
+
+Texas says that the aim of the law is to protect women's health. But abortion providers who are challenging the law say that Texas' real aim is not to protect women's health, but to close clinics.
+
+The Court might also agree to hear a case challenging the so called ""contraceptive mandate"" in the Affordable Care Act brought by non-profit groups such as the Little Sisters of the Poor.
+
+While churches are exempt from the mandate, the Obama administration has set up an accommodation for nonprofits that object to having to provide certain contraceptives as a violation of their religious beliefs.
+
+The groups say the accommodation still makes them complicit in providing the coverage.",REAL
+9596,Russia plans to test elements of new nuclear engine on ISS,"Russia plans to test elements of new nuclear engine on ISS 27 October 2016 TASS Roscosmos is ready to allocate more than 264 million rubles (about $4 million) for this work. Facebook russia , space , nuclear 
+Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos has announced a tender for developing proposals on testing key elements of a megawatt-class nuclear propulsion system, including aboard the International Space Station (ISS), according to the tender documentation posted on the state procurement website on Thursday. 
+Specifically, Roscosmos expects to receive ""proposals on the rational structure of key elements, systems and items of a perspective nuclear propulsion unit intended for tests in outer space, including with the use of the ISS’ Russian segment. 
+According to the tender documentation, Roscosmos is ready to allocate more than 264 million rubles (about $4 million) for this work. 
+The winner of the tender is expected to be announced on October 28. 
+As of now, only the Keldysh Research Center has submitted its bid for this work. 
+The works on creating a transport energy module based on a megawatt-class nuclear propulsion unit were approved by the Russian presidential commission for modernization and technological development of the Russian economy in 2009. 
+By the end of 2018, the energy propulsion unit should be prepared for flight and design tests. 
+It was reported earlier that 3.8 billion rubles ($60 million) would be allocated from the budget for developing a nuclear propulsion unit in 2016-2018. Roscosmos is the project’s customer and the Keldysh Research Center is its contractor. The contract should be fulfilled by November 2018. First published by TASS .",FAKE
+6781,Trump Is Deadbeating On His Campaign Debts By Refusing To Pay His Own Pollster,"The Washington Post reported: Donald Trump’s hiring of pollster Tony Fabrizio in May was viewed as a sign that the real estate mogul was finally bringing seasoned operatives into his insurgent operation. 
+But the Republican presidential nominee appears to have taken issue with some of the services provided by the veteran GOP strategist, who has advised candidates from 1996 GOP nominee Bob Dole to Florida Gov. Rick Scott. The Trump campaign’s latest Federal Election Commission report shows that it is disputing nearly $767,000 that Fabrizio’s firm says it is still owed for polling. 
+Trump’s decision not to pay his pollster is the first of this type of story but given Trump’s history of not paying for services performed; it won’t be the last. It is astonishing that the party of supposed fiscal responsibility and conservativism would put someone forward as their presidential nominee who has made a career out of running up debt for personal gain. 
+Donald Trump’s mentality has always been to put himself first. Paying his debts never seems to have been a top priority for Trump. His businesses have been stiffing vendors and contractors for decades, so it isn’t surprising that he would bring this same mentality to the presidential campaign. 
+Anybody who works for the Trump campaign would be smart to get paid up front because Donald Trump’s version of making America great involves taking your money and putting it in his own pocket. 
+Trump Is Deadbeating On His Campaign Debts By Refusing To Pay His Own Pollster added by Jason Easley on Mon, Oct 31st, 2016",FAKE
+9178,"Racists, Misogynists and Homophobes all absolutely delighted","Wednesday 9 November 2016 by Lucas Wilde Racists, Misogynists and Homophobes all absolutely delighted 
+Every bigot you’ve ever met is a little bit happier today. 
+Donald Trump has won the Presidency in a result that wasn’t fuelled by hatred or racism by everyone, or not even perhaps the majority, but nonetheless a result that absolutely every narrow-minded tosspot was definitely hoping for. 
+“Yay!” said racist, Simon Williams. 
+“What a great morning to be American – like every morning, obviously, as every other nation is inferior. 
+“But this morning is just super-bloody-duper. 
+“The moment I saw the news I looked at my collection of Nazi-themed hats and said ‘boys, we are back in business’. Because previously I was discouraged from wearing Nazi-themed hats, you see. PC gone mad, I tell you that.” 
+Reasonable conservative voter, Kevin Carmichael, said, “it is a shame that we seem to attract the racists. 
+“I guess that’s the risk you take when you run a campaign based on a simple fear of brown people, but hey, we got the votes, and we won, and that’s all that matters. 
+“Yes, it is. You just watch. It’s going to be great.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently witterings below - why not add your own? ",FAKE
+5047,How Last Night's Gary Johnson/William Weld CNN Town Hall Was a Disappointment in Libertarian Terms,"The Libertarian Party presidential ticket of former Republican governors Gary Johnson (N.M.) and William Weld (Mass.) succeeded in seeming human, humane, decent, calm, and at least compared to their major party competitors, thoughtful this evening at their second CNN Town Hall.
+
+But I'm not sure they succeeded in seeming very Libertarian, or selling the Party's position as a distinct outlook on politics and government that someone could grasp and understand.
+
+They often seemed to go out of their way to just seem like a centrist, independent mixture of what someone might see as good aspects of both other parties.
+
+In fact, when host Anderson Cooper would occasionally remind the candidates what the traditional libertarian stance was, often relying on the Party platform, he might have done more to sell libertarianism's unique stances than the candidates.
+
+Herewith, a (not necessarily comprehensive) list of places where a Libertarian might have been frustrated with the candidates tonight, with a few (again, not comprehensive) nods to when they got it closer to right. The emphasis, though, will be on the disappointments, which dominated in my eyes.
+
+The two governors mostly seemed thoughtful, humble, decent, not aggravating control freaks or rampaging ids. They did not seem like bold representatives of a distinct philosophy and practice of government, one with a well-developed philosophy about what government is for, and why.",REAL
+4664,"Trump, Clinton meet again at 'humorous' Al Smith dinner","NEW YORK — Well, that got awkward quickly.
+
+What began as the expected ribbing of presidential candidates at the white-tie Al Smith Dinner Thursday turned to boos as Donald Trump described Hillary Clinton as ""corrupt"" at the event, which is a major fundraiser for the Catholic charities connected to the Archdiocese of New York.
+
+Trump's biggest laugh of the night came as he referred to his wife's partly plagiarized convention speech, in a joke that began with his complaint that the media is biased.
+
+""Michelle Obama gives a speech and everyone loves it, they think she's absolutely great. My wife, Melania, gives the exact same speech and people get on her case!"" Trump said.
+
+As laughter and applause filled the room Trump speculated he was in ""trouble"" with Melania for the joke, and implored to Cardinal Timothy Dolan: ""Cardinal, please speak to her.""
+
+The crowd stayed with Trump while he ticked down a list of what he called ""corny"" jokes about being a former Democrat and sarcastically calling himself ""modest."" And they mostly laughed along when he joked about Clinton accidentally bumping into him back stage and saying ""pardon me.""
+
+""I very politely replied: Let me talk to you about that after I get into office,"" Trump landed the punchline. Clinton was seen laughing.
+
+But Trump was quick to take some campaign trail attacks with him to the dais at the annual dinner. He called Clinton ""so corrupt she got kicked off the Watergate Commission"" and lobbed his usual line that Clinton has been in politics for 30 years and accomplished little. ""I can fix it, she says,"" he deadpanned as the crowd's mood noticeably shifted.
+
+As the boos rolled in Trump wondered who they were booing. ""I don't know who they're angry at Hillary, you or I?"" he said. Someone in the crowd yelled out ""you!""
+
+Trump's next line struck a nerve. ""Here she is in public, pretending not to hate Catholics,"" Trump said, referencing an apparent email exposed by WikiLeaks in which a Clinton spokeswoman seemed to joke about Catholics and evangelicals.
+
+Trump also brought up a moment from the debate Wednesday night.
+
+""Last night, I called Hillary a 'nasty woman.' This stuff is all relative. After listening to Hillary rattle on and on, I don't think so badly of Rosie O'Donnell anymore. In fact, I'm actually starting like Rosie a lot,"" Trump said.
+
+The Democratic nominee, for her part, poked fun at herself while also taking searing jabs at her opponent. Clinton didn't hesitate to slam Trump for his past comments on women and his ambivalence about accepting next month's election results.
+
+In contrast with Trump, Clinton also made a point of acknowledging both the purpose and the history of the Al Smith dinner and closed her speech with a big-picture campaign message that was tied to the positive focus of Thursday's Catholic fundraiser.
+
+Clinton did receive several loud groans from the audience at several of her jokes. Her top zingers included jabs about Trump dismantling a prompter at a rally last week and her opponent's propensity toward speaking favorably about Russia.
+
+""Maybe you saw Donald dismantle his prompter the other day. And I get that. They're hard to keep up with and I'm sure it's even harder when you're translating from the original Russian,"" she said.
+
+Clinton also joked about her health, which Trump has made an issue on the campaign trail, as well as criticism over paid speeches. ""I took a break from my rigorous nap schedule to be here,"" Clinton told the audience. ""Usually, I charge a lot for speeches like this.""
+
+Turning to Trump, she said, ""Donald, if at any time you don't like what I say, feel free to stand up and shout 'Wrong!' after I say it.""
+
+And diving into the dominant news of the day, she said: ""I'm surprised I'm up here at all. I didn't think he'd be OK with a peaceful transition of power.""
+
+But Clinton had her own sharply-worded jokes. ""People look at the Statue of Liberty and they see a proud symbol of our history as a nation of immigrants. A beacon of hope for people around the world. Donald looks at the Statue of Liberty and sees a four — maybe a five if she loses the torch and tablet and changes her hair,"" she said.
+
+Clinton joked that ""getting through these three debates with Donald has to count as a miracle.""
+
+""There is nothing like sharing a stage with Donald Trump. Donald wanted me drug tested before last night's debate. And look, I've got to tell you, I am so flattered that Donald thought I used some sort of performance enhancer,"" Clinton said. ""Now, actually I did: it's called preparation.""
+
+Finally, Clinton found a foe that both parties could rally against: ""Let's come together, remember what unites us, and just rip on Ted Cruz.""",REAL
+7574,"DEAD MUSLIMS SOCIETY will sue to force small Massachusetts town to allocate space for 16,000 dead Muslims","DEAD MUSLIMS SOCIETY will sue to force small Massachusetts town to allocate space for 16,000 dead Muslims Negotiations to put a Muslim cemetery in the small town of Dudley have broken down in acrimony, and the contentious issue — replete with charges and countercharges of bigotry and grandstanding — appears to be headed for resolution in the courts, aided and abetted by the litigation jihadists of designated terrorist group CAIR. Boston Globe The Islamic Society of Greater Worcester ended talks this week after the Board of Selectmen did not accept its latest proposal for a graveyard on 55 acres of abandoned farmland , according to the society’s attorney. A counter-offer by the town also was not accepted. Neither side provided details of the private discussions. People are opposed to casket free Muslim burials which could contaminate the water supply Jay Talerman, the Islamic Society attorney, said Thursday the group will now pursue the plan in the courts, following a 10-month process that failed to produce an agreement but generated plenty of heated rhetoric. “Each time, the selectmen retreated to a position that involved violating my client’s rights,” Talerman said. “The most disappointing part appears to be that they never sincerely or genuinely had any intention to accommodate us.” (What a surprise. NOT) A suit filed by the society is pending in Massachusetts Land Court. In addition, the ACLU of Massachusetts is preparing to file a civil rights suit in US District Court, said Sarah Wunsch, the organization’s deputy legal director. The Obama thugs of the US Attorney’s Office in Boston already has launched an investigation into whether civil rights violations occurred. The state Attorney General’s office has been in talks with both sides. The town’s attorney, Gary Brackett, said that the issue always has been about the size and impact of the cemetery — not whether one would be permitted. Throughout the process, Talerman said, “the selectmen never expressed a willingness to abandon procedures that are a direct affront to my clients.” Brackett denounced Talerman’s repeated accusations that anti-Muslim bias tainted the cemetery application. Large crowds have come out to every meeting to protest the proposed cemetery “I would compare Mr. Talerman’s broad-brush claims regarding the citizens and officials of the town of Dudley as being the equivalent of Donald Trump’s attempt at portraying Muslims,” Brackett said. Dr. Amjad Bahnassi, the president of the Islamic Society, said he attributed part of the opposition to a “misunderstanding” of the Muslim religion and said the issue has become a civil rights concern for many of the estimated 5,000 Muslims in Worcester County. “We’re being denied unfairly what is granted to us by the law,” Bahnassi said. At issue is the Islamic Society’s attempt to buy farmland with enough space for an estimated 16,000 graves that, if filled, would be the largest Muslim cemetery in the state. The society currently uses a graveyard in Enfield, Conn., 60 miles from Worcester, which Muslim leaders said poses a hardship for many families. When the society’s plans became public early this year, townspeople expressed fears that burials would contaminate well water, because Muslims traditionally do not use coffins, and that the nearby rural roads would become congested. Muslim leaders continued to pursue their application through town government, even though Talerman said the society was not required to seek approval because the organization is a religious group seeking the land for a religious purpose. The town’s Zoning Board of Appeals rejected the cemetery application in June, and the Islamic Society filed suit in Land Court. The town also began efforts to buy the land under a right of first refusal for certain agricultural property. However, the Islamic Society, which already had signed a purchase-and-sale agreement for the property, argued again that the town had no such right. Facing intensifying pressure, the town eventually waived that claim. On Thursday, Talerman reiterated his longstanding contention that bigotry lies behind the lack of an agreement. “We gave this town an opportunity to lock arms with us and welcome a benign use into their town that would dispel any notion that they were biased or bigoted,” he said. “They have not taken up the olive branch and instead have doubled down on strategies that are solely intended to delay or kill our project.” (Yes, and once Trump is in office you can take your lawsuit and stuff it) RELATED STORIES/VIDEOS:",FAKE
+4757,Why the way we pick our VPs is terrible,"Mike Pence and Tim Kaine will take the stage for the vice presidential debate on Tuesday night. The vice president arguably holds the second most powerful office in the country — in part because there’s a chance the president will die or have to resign in office, in part because the president has increasingly delegated key duties and powers to the post.
+
+But the way America chooses its vice presidents seems to give little weight to the gravity of the role. Presidential candidates pick their number two during the heat of a campaign, and the VPs often represent some short-term electoral interest far more than readiness for the job. As was very much the case this year, questions about the VP are far more likely to center on their impact on a swing state or on solidifying a crucial voting bloc than about experience and presidential mettle.
+
+To find out if there might be a better way of doing things, I talked to six political scientists who have studied the vice presidency. It turns out there actually is a strong defense for keeping things as they are — just not the one I had expected.
+
+The Constitution has required that the vice president be on the ballot, in one form or another, since our nation’s founding. But I was relieved to learn that I'm not the only one to think the way we pick VPs in the heat of an election cycle seems somewhat nutty.
+
+In the early 1970s, Michigan Sen. Bob Griffin proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would have ended the direct election of vice presidents and instead let presidents appoint their VPs, subject to congressional approval, after being sworn in.
+
+Of course, the idea didn’t go anywhere. But it wasn’t without its supporters — especially after Richard Nixon’s veep, Spiro Agnew, had to resign over accusations of extortion and tax fraud.
+
+At the time, reporters like Tom Wicker of the New York Times made a case similar to mine, according to John D. Feerick’s The Twenty-fifth Amendment: Its Complete History and Applications. Wicker wrote:
+
+Wicker’s point is twofold: 1) that VPs are often chosen out of ""ruthless"" political calculation alone, and 2) that voters don’t really get to vote on whether they support the VP.
+
+Some of the contemporary political science research backs Wicker up. ""There’s little evidence that voters make any consideration based on the vice president,"" says Joseph E. Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami and the author of several studies on the vice presidency.
+
+You’d think that nominees wouldn’t then let electoral factors seep into their choices. ""But they do, and sometimes that gives us vice presidents who don’t do what the presidents, or the presidents' voters, wanted,"" Uscinski says.
+
+You don’t need to go back to the 1970s to see how short-term electoral considerations can warp presidential candidates’ VP picks — with really worrying implications.
+
+The most obvious recent example is Sarah Palin in 2008, when Sen. John McCain — hoping for a Hail Mary comeback in the polls — picked the obviously unqualified Alaska governor in the hopes of firing up his party’s base.
+
+McCain and Palin lost, of course. But McCain certainly theoretically could have won, and he could have died while in office. We may have risked a disastrous presidency in part because we make presidents choose their successors when an election is at stake.
+
+There’s enough historical evidence of this happening for us to know that it isn’t just an unlikely possibility. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln chose southern white Unionist — and, it turned out, white supremacist — Andrew Johnson for his VP, in a bid for geographic diversity. After Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson advanced a disastrous set of Reconstruction policies totally at odds with what the ""great emancipator"" and his Republican base wanted. (Plus, Lincoln lost the Southern state of Kentucky that year anyway.)
+
+Discrepancies between the POTUS and the VP have also made leadership crises more difficult to resolve, and may even create an incentive for political assassins, Uscinski wrote in one recent paper. In 1881, President James Garfield was shot twice in the back but stubbornly clung to life for 80 days while completely incapacitated. Some lawmakers wanted to resolve the crisis by making VP Chester Arthur president but feared the political implications of doing so, because Arthur and Garfield came from different factions and had completely contradictory policies on civil service reform.
+
+""Presidential candidates have often opted for running mates who are politically different from the head of the ticket ... to increase the chances of winning the general election,"" Uscinski writes. ""But when presidents and vice presidents differ significantly, the country could inherit espousing policies the country does not democratically support.""
+
+Uscinski’s argument here isn’t just that an ""unqualified"" VP could become president despite not enjoying the support of much of the country. It’s that we explicitly look to vice presidents to complement the ideological profiles of the nominees, thereby intentionally inserting confusion into our government that could, potentially, be avoided under a different system.
+
+So if the vice presidency is a powder keg of risk and undemocratic outcomes, then why shouldn’t presidents just appoint VPs like Cabinet members? (I know Vox stories are unlikely to spur new constitutional amendments, but bear with me.) After all, you never hear of a president tapping an unqualified secretary of state merely to cement a voting bloc these days — right?
+
+""I agree that it’s a messy system and that there are a number of anomalies,"" says Joel Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University and the author of a new book about the modern vice presidency. ""But my bottom line is that the system we have makes the most sense when all things are considered.""
+
+Goldstein has lots of compelling defenses of our current system, but they boil down to one essential point: Requiring VPs to be confirmed by a gridlocked Congress (as is the norm for high-level presidential appointees) could be nightmarish.
+
+Right now, a president basically gets to pick anyone he wants for his running mate (if his convention’s delegates approve the choice). If he wins a landslide at the ballot box, the other party doesn’t get a veto of the VP. That would probably have to change if the US tried to convert the vice presidency into a position chosen after the election.
+
+And just imagine a recently elected President Hillary Clinton trying to get her VP nominee through a Republican Senate, Goldstein says. The difference between who she thought would be good for the job and who she could get approved would, presumably, be even greater than it is under our current arrangement.
+
+""Giving Congress a veto seems less democratic than giving the public a veto,"" Goldstein says.
+
+He adds that vice presidents have become increasingly powerful over the past several decades. Subjecting that office to our current partisan warfare just doesn’t seem like a promising way to improve the VP’s accountability or effectiveness.
+
+""The vice president has become an office that provides high-level help to the president as a senior political adviser and high-level troubleshooter,"" Goldstein says. ""And that’s at a time when most of the rest of the government is appearing increasingly dysfunctional. I don’t think we should mess around with it.""
+
+The upshot of the political science research is clear: When it comes to its impact on who wins, most of the media obsession over the VP selection is dramatically overstated.
+
+In one study recently highlighted in Politico, two political scientists found that vice presidents don’t even have a statistical impact on increasing votes for the ticket in their home states.
+
+""Demographic groups don’t fall in line because of a VP selection, and neither do states,"" says Kyle Kopko, a political scientist at Elizabethtown College, who conducted the research with University of Dayton political scientist Chris Devine. ""Voters think of partisan preferences and what the presidential candidates are saying.""
+
+But the political scientists also argued that the VP choice can make a difference — even if it tends not to. The experts can’t often find examples of VP picks really siphoning votes away from the nominee. But that may be because our current system is effectively deterring presidential nominees from picking running mates that really hurt their chances.
+
+Another reason for optimism: There’s growing evidence that presidential nominees understand the importance of picking a good governing partner over an illusory electoral gain, says Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State.
+
+""I think presidents are recognizing what the VP means,"" adds Matt Dickinson, a political scientist at Middlebury College. ""The most recent presidential candidates seem to be made from a need for a governing partner as much as for any electoral gain.""
+
+The idea of Sarah Palin becoming president because of some quirk in the system seems to argue against this. But maybe she’s also a sign that voters really do punish — and therefore consider — terrible VP picks. (Indeed, one study has found that picking Palin cost McCain about 2 million votes.)
+
+""Yes, there are some exceptions, but the fact that the presidential candidate has to pick someone before an election tends to force them to pick pretty good people,"" Goldstein says. ""You’d really lose something by not having the vice president as part of the campaign.""",REAL
+10139,Microsoft Outlook to introduce ‘Hillary’ button to delete emails ‘en masse’,"Tuesday 1 November 2016 by Pete Redfern Microsoft Outlook to introduce ‘Hillary’ button to delete emails ‘en masse’ 
+Microsoft has today announced that the next version of their popular email software will include a function that quickly and irretrievably deletes every email on the computer. 
+Head of product development Simon Williams announced, “With the FBI investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails, we have recognised the need for a quick one-click button that will instantly remove all emails from your PC. 
+“This will be useful if you suddenly find yourself under investigation by the FBI. Or if you’ve had a bit of a flirty email exchange with that girl from accounts who you felt you had a bit of chemistry with, but then you took it a bit too far that one time and now suddenly realise you are in grave danger of being dismissed for sexual harassment. 
+“You know, everyday sort of situations.” 
+The new Microsoft Office suite is due to be released next year, and Outlook is reportedly not the only software with a Clinton inspired update. 
+“We’ve tweaked Internet Explorer a little too,” continued Mr Williams. 
+“For those users who routinely forget to use InPrivate Browsing, we will be adding a ‘Bill’ button which with one click will simultaneously close your browsing window and delete all of your search history and cookies. 
+“This will protect you from your wife ever knowing that you googled ‘What is Monica Lewinsky up to these days’. 
+“Or in the case of a regular user it will prevent your spouse finding out whatever niche, depraved pornography you are into when she unexpectedly returns from a work social an hour early and catches you mid self-pleasure. 
+“Again, just normal, everyday situations our customers find themselves in.” 
+The button will be adjacent to the Minimize, Maximize and Close icons on the top toolbar, thereby saving the user a frantic search of the menus while pathetically attempting to conceal their erection as their significant other approaches. 
+Industry experts are expecting sales to be high. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+2881,Iraq's Al-Abadi making in-person appeal to Obama for financial help,"Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is making an in-person appeal to President Obama on Tuesday for more help defeating the Islamic State militants, hoping recent gains in the fight will encourage more investment from a war-weary United States.
+
+Seven months after al-Abadi's election raised hope in Washington for Iraq's future, an honor guard of U.S. service members holding flags aloft greeted his limo for his first visit to the White House. The prime minister quickly entered the West Wing for an Oval Office visit.
+
+Al-Abadi told reporters Monday that the increase in U.S. airstrikes, weapons deliveries and training has helped roll back Islamic State forces, but he needs greater support from the international coalition to ""finish"" them. ""We want to see more,"" he said.
+
+The White House signaled that more aid could be coming. Last week, Vice President Joe Biden touted momentum in the fight against the Islamic State, and White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday, ""If there are specific ideas that Prime Minister Abadi has for stepped-up assistance, then we'll obviously consider them seriously.""
+
+""This is a partnership that the United States is obviously invested in,"" Earnest told reporters Monday. ""And our success in working with an inclusive Iraqi government has been important to some of the security gains that Iraq has realized against ISIL in the last few months.""
+
+Earlier this month, Iraqi forces and allied Shiite militias, backed by U.S. airstrikes, were able to recapture the city of Tikrit from the Sunni militants in what was the government's first major victory in Iraq's Sunni heartland.
+
+""More efforts to organize, arm and integrate the Sunnis willing to fight ISIL are going to be needed in the months ahead to liberate Anbar and Mosul,"" the Islamic State's stronghold, Biden said in a speech Thursday at National Defense University previewing al-Abadi's visit. Biden joked that he's spent more time on the phone with the prime minister talking over the issues than he spends talking to his wife.
+
+Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Biden was trying to make the case that it's worth investing more at a time when many Americans feel their country has done enough.
+
+""There's a military campaign that the U.S. is helping wage, but it has more internal problems than I think people on either side are willing to admit,"" Alterman said. ""The reality is what we are trying to do is very difficult, very complicated and many people question how unified we are with the Iraqi government on what we are trying to do.""
+
+The White House also announced Tuesday that Obama will host another important Arab ally in the fight against extremists, with Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan planning a visit Monday. The White House said their agenda includes the air campaign against Shiite rebels in Yemen, Iran nuclear negotiations, conflicts in Libya and Syria as well as the fight against the Islamic State.
+
+The U.S. and its coalition allies have carried out nearly 2,000 strikes in Iraq since the campaign against the Islamic State began in August -- as well as nearly 1,400 in neighboring Syria. American officials say that while the campaign has made gains, it is likely to stretch on for years.
+
+After years of war, the United States withdrew its forces from Iraq in 2011 but left behind troops to guard the U.S. Embassy. In November, Obama authorized the deployment of up to 1,500 more American troops to bolster Iraqi forces, which could more than double the total number of U.S. forces to 3,100. The Pentagon has made a spending request to Congress of $1.6 billion, focusing on training and arming Iraqi and Kurdish forces. According to a Pentagon document prepared in November, the U.S. is looking to provide an estimated $89.3 million worth of weapons and other equipment to each of the nine Iraqi army brigades.
+
+The U.S. blamed the lack of inclusiveness by al-Abadi's predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, for giving the Islamic State a recruiting tool and had made the formation of a new government a condition for deeper military action to stop the militant group. Obama met al-Abadi at the United Nations shortly after his election and praised him as ""the right person to help work with a broad-based coalition of Iraqis,"" and he said the U.S. supports the new prime minister's ""political vision.""",REAL
+1528,Trump Continues His Embrace of Putin,"After Russian President Vladimir Putin complimented Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate lavished praise on the heavy-handed leader and U.S. adversary.
+
+Trump said Friday on MSNBC's ""Morning Joe"" that, ""sure"" he's happy about the nice things Putin said about him.
+
+""When people call you 'brilliant' it's always good, especially when the person heads up Russia,"" Trump said.
+
+After the program's hosts pointed out that Putin kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries, Trump still embraced the Russian leader.
+
+""At least he's a leader unlike what we have in this country,"" Trump said.
+
+After the hosts repeated that he kills journalists and political opponents, Trump still avoided criticizing Putin.
+
+""Our country does plenty of killing also,"" Trump added.
+
+Earlier this week, Putin said Trump is a ""bright personality, a talented person, no doubt about it.""
+
+""It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,"" Trump said in a statement.
+
+Putin has become a main adversary to the U.S. Tensions escalated once Putin re-entered office in 2012. Shortly after he invaded Crimea in Ukraine, further escalating tensions.
+
+While Republican presidential candidates have talked tough in response to Putin on the campaign trail, often criticizing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her ""reset"" with Russia shortly after President Barack Obama entered office in 2009. Even New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie saying he would shoot down Russian planes over Syria if the U.S. and allies imposed a no-fly zone, most have been silent into Trump's embrace of the Russian leader.
+
+But former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who has adopted the mantle of the Trump attack dog, has been the only candidate who has come out and criticized Trump on the issue.
+
+Brian Walsh, Republican strategist at Rokk Solutions said Trump's comments are ""a new level of outrageous.""
+
+He added that of any of the candidates that should respond, en. Ted Cruz should because of his refusal to ever criticize Trump.
+
+Sen. Cruz's silence suggests he endorses (Trump's positions) in some way,"" Walsh said. ""It shows a lack of leadership,""
+
+UPDATE: Ohio Governor John Kasich has also now criticized Trump over Putin.
+
+He tweeted this at 2:10 p.m. EST:",REAL
+990,Trump RNC manager: 'Winning isn't enough',"""This is an example of Donald Trump managing, and the type of leadership he will bring to the presidency in November,"" Manafort said in an exclusive interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo. ""He also understood that winning isn't enough, that it's about how you win and how much you win.""
+
+Manafort told CNN, ""I work directly for the boss,"" a notable departure from the usual workflow at Trump's 2016 operation, where most campaign staff answer to campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
+
+Manafort joins the Trump campaign as a contested Republican convention becomes more likely. Trump suffered a critical loss to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz Tuesday in the Wisconsin primary. However, the strategist says he is confident the Cruz campaign will hit a rough patch, allowing Trump to win the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination outright.
+
+""Utah and New York are two different states,"" he said. ""By the time we get to California, the momentum is going to be clear, and Ted Cruz's path to victory will be in shambles."" Donald Trump has 746 delegates to date of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination outright, meaning Trump would have to win the remaining 61% of delegates up for grabs. RELATED: Donald Trump looks to dominate New York Manafort is also optimistic Trump will block Cruz's chance of winning on the first ballot if the convention is contested. ""You got to understand what the game is. If the game is a second, third or fourth ballot then what he's doing is clever, but on the first ballot it is meaningless."" Manafort's experience in campaigns goes back to the 1976 contested Republican convention . Trump's hiring of Manafort fueled speculation he was replacing campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. However, Manafort insists there was no internal shakeup. ""I listen to everybody,"" he said. ""I view my job as making sure people get to understand and meet Donald Trump.""",REAL
+8783,Christian Pastor Jailed by Iran Reveals STUNNING Truth About Trump,"You are here: Home / US / Christian Pastor Jailed by Iran Reveals STUNNING Truth About Trump Christian Pastor Jailed by Iran Reveals STUNNING Truth About Trump October 29, 2016 Pinterest 
+Christian pastor Saeed Abedini was jailed in Iran because of his faith for three and a half years. During that extremely difficult time, Abedini said that GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump met with his family and gave them $10,000. 
+Abedini wrote about how Trump helped his family in a recent Facebook post and noted that he had already voted for Trump last week in early voting. “I am finally free in a free country,” he wrote. “Last year on the same day I was sick and in chains for Christ, and now I can vote to choose my next president.” 
+“And most amazingly, I can vote for someone that I know fought for me and called my name so many times. He met my family and gave them a $10,000 gift. I think his ideas are more biblical than the other candidates.” 
+In contrast, Clinton did nothing for him or his family: 
+As a woman who says she stands for women’s rights when she was foreign minister, she never contacted my mom, wife, sister or my daughter. She never did anything to help when I was in prison as an American pastor who was detained in Iran as a hostage. 
+Christian Today reported : 
+Abedini strongly defended Trump from attacks on his character, saying God used flawed men to lead nations in the Old Testament, likening him to King Cyrus of Persia, a figure mentioned more than 30 times in the Bible. According to Bible experts, Cyrus was a great pagan king who ruled Persia from 539 to 530 B.C. Under his rule, Jews were first allowed to return to Israel after 70 years of captivity. 
+Abedini wrote: 
+In the past few months, we have seen how media is attacking Donald Trump’s past. I have even heard so many people said he is not a Christian. Of course, only God knows this for sure, but what I see is God is using him and anointed him. It seems to me that he is the Cyrus of our modern day, but like you and me, he is a flawed man, in the process of spiritual growth. 
+When we hear that this candidate or that candidate is not a strong Christian or has a past that disqualifies him to be the President of the United States, my answer is that we are a nation, a people who are also sinners, saved by grace. 
+How often do you hear about kind things Clinton has done for others like this? I can’t think of any. Abedini’s words are extremely powerful and certainly something anyone who is on the fence about Trump should read.",FAKE
+2962,Will any of Obama's ISIS proposals succeed?,"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama's televised address on ISIS on Sunday night was meant to calm the public's escalating fears of terrorism, to chide 2016 candidates about explosive rhetoric over waging war and the place of Muslims in society and to defend his own efforts to combat the extremist group.
+
+Whether it succeeded on any of those counts may depend where observers sit on the polarized U.S. political spectrum. But while it was largely a stay-the-course speech rather than one that heralds swift or significant changes to the anti-terrorism approach Obama has pursued throughout his presidency, the President did make several proposals and highlight some evolution in how the United States will go after ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
+
+He notably put the emphasis on Congress to take action on making it more difficult for terrorists to acquire guns in the United States and to enact changes to visa programs in the wake of the San Bernardino attack. Obama also wants lawmakers to finally put the war against ISIS on firm legal footing.
+
+Here is a look at the President's proposals -- and the chances that they will actually happen.
+
+What the President said:
+
+""If Congress believes, as I do, that we are at war with ISIL, it should go ahead and vote to authorize the continued use of military force against these terrorists.""
+
+The United States has spent more than a year pounding ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria from the air. Obama has sent Special Operations forces to Syria and several thousand soldiers are in Iraq. Now, there are plans for the Pentagon to send a specialized expeditionary force to Iraq to target ISIS. But officially, this is an undeclared war.
+
+The administration has cited authorizations that permitted both the war in Iraq and the fight against al Qaeda to justify its actions but has repeatedly called on Congress to update its mandate to reflect the new threat from ISIS.
+
+But it has not yet happened. Why?
+
+Despite Obama's comments in his address, the White House is not optimistic that Congress will move soon. The administration introduced its proposal in February, hoping to get a jump on the political season. But like much else touching on the war on terror, the presidential and congressional elections in 2016 are now weighing on lawmakers.
+
+Democrats running for re-election are wary of tough votes authorizing a new war that may upset the party's dovish grass roots.
+
+Republicans don't like the President's proposal, but they haven't drafted their own version and punt by saying the administration already claims to have sufficient authority. And there's a dispute over language. The White House request for an AUMF lasting three years included a provision that prevents ""enduring offensive ground combat operations.""
+
+Republicans, who want a more robust U.S. effort and are wary of tying the hands of a possible future GOP president, rejected such restrictions.
+
+House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Monday that the version of the authorization that the administration sent to Congress earlier this year would ""limit"" the military, so ""it would have to be something different.""
+
+What the President said:
+
+""Congress should act to make sure no one on a no-fly list is able to buy a gun ... this is a matter of national security. We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons like the ones that were used in San Bernardino.""
+
+Just as the Newtown massacre and other mass killings did not budge the politics of gun control, the same dynamic applies after San Bernardino -- one reason why Obama is now framing gun control as a matter of ""national security.""
+
+Making it more difficult for a potential terrorist to buy a gun, in essence, would entail making it more difficult for everyone to buy a gun.
+
+That's why die-hard Second Amendment supporters in both parties are wary of the idea, with many Republicans and Democrats unenthusiastic about a tough vote on guns in an election year -- especially those from rural districts where gun rights are a potent issue for many voters.
+
+In fact, even the day after the San Bernardino killings, the Republican-controlled Senate rejected a bill that would prevent people on a federal terrorism watch list from buying guns.
+
+House Speaker Paul Ryan on Monday told the Wisconsin State Journal in an interview that Obama's no-fly list plan was a ""distraction,"" saying many people ended up on such databases erroneously and risked losing their due process rights, a concern echoed by some 2016 GOP hopefuls.
+
+McCarthy made it clear Monday that Republicans are not inclined to take up the proposal that the President pushed to deny guns to those on the terror watch list used by airlines.
+
+Some congressional Republicans want a judge to weigh in on whether someone should be on the list before his or her constitutional right to bear arms is taken away.
+
+Obama's other gun control efforts have repeatedly hit a brick wall in Congress, and he has frequently expressed frustration at his failure to do more despite ordering a series of executive actions. His efforts to pass an assault weapons ban, for instance, failed in 2013.
+
+The White House is preparing an executive order to expand background checks, given its expectation that nothing will make it through legislatively.
+
+But White House officials say the legal and administrative challenges are difficult to surmount, and that the order is going to take some time to prepare.
+
+And the President has acknowledged that wielding his own executive power cannot be as effective as action from Congress.
+
+What the President said:
+
+""We should put in place stronger screening for those who come to America without a visa so that we can take a hard look at whether they've traveled to war zones.""
+
+Obama also said that he had ordered the Departments of Homeland Security and State to review the visa program under which the female terrorist in San Bernardino originally came to this country as a fiancee of a U.S. citizen.
+
+The visa waiver program appears to be one rare area where there is bipartisan agreement on how to act. The Paris attacks especially alarmed U.S. security experts because of the fear that thousands of Europeans have traveled to Syria to fight with ISIS. And if those people have European passports, they don't need a visa to enter the United States, potentially making it possible for ISIS to easily dispatch operatives into the United States.
+
+One measure being considered in the House and likely to get White House support would ensure that nationals of Iraq, Syria, Iran or Sudan, or those who've visited those countries since 2011, cannot travel to the United States without a visa.
+
+Instead, individuals from designated countries will have to be vetted through a more rigorous process. It requires countries who participate in the visa waiver program to share counterterrorism information or risk being cut out. And it also enhances screening for criminal activity.
+
+The bill is expected to pass with a big bipartisan vote in the House on Tuesday and may be added to broad government spending bills so has a good chance of being signed into law soon.
+
+Still, changing the visa waiver program is fraught with diplomatic complications. Visa-free travel to the United States is a prized privilege for many national governments and is strongly supported by the U.S. tourism industry. And changes to the program could also spark reprisals and complications for Americans who travel abroad.
+
+Islam and the politics of 2016
+
+What the President said:
+
+""We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam.""
+
+This horse is already out of the barn. Several prominent GOP presidential candidates -- Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, for instance -- have declared that America is facing a civilizational war against radical Islam. They have bashed Democrats like Obama and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton for not using similar terminology, arguing it shows they don't comprehend the nature of the threat or prefer to avoid offense rather than accurately delineate the enemy.
+
+The President and his former secretary of state argue that using such terminology stigmatizes every Muslim and actually plays into ISIS's hands by making it seem like a legitimate representative of a great faith.
+
+This is a dispute that will continue up to the 2016 election and beyond.
+
+What the President said:
+
+""The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it. We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us.""
+
+It is not just Congress that Obama sees as frustrating his effort to combat ISIS. The realities of the conflict-torn Middle East, a region festering with sectarian hatred, geopolitical gambits by major nations and a collapse of the political order that has been in place for a century are posing imposing obstacles to U.S. strategy.
+
+On the upside, the President can legitimately claim to have assembled a 65-nation coalition to go after ISIS in a campaign that includes air strikes in Iraq and Syria that have killed thousands of militants, covert intelligence work and an effort to choke the extremist group's financial network.
+
+But there is a glaring reason why Obama has struggled to effectively sell his strategy: It does not seem sufficiently broad, kinetic or aggressive to accomplish the goal around which he built his speech -- the ultimate destruction of ISIS.
+
+Another factor weighing against a big change in strategy is the self imposed limit that Obama has placed on the entire enterprise. He is staying faithful to his refusal to commit U.S. troops to another major Middle East entanglement -- citing the quagmire that developed after the Iraq War.
+
+Then, there is the intractable nature of civil wars in Iran and Syria, which have fractured both nations and allowed ISIS to build a vast cross-border terror haven.
+
+Even if the air campaign against ISIS in strongholds like Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq succeeds -- progress may be fleeting without a vast ground force to secure territory, consolidate gains and allow space for the return of administrative politics.
+
+But Western leaders, with Iraq in mind, have little desire or political backing to commit a vast land army.
+
+So they, and 2016 presidential candidates, spend a lot of time calling for regional, Arab and other powers to step into the breach.
+
+But those governments are no more willing or able to thrust their soldiers into the cauldron either. And many have goals in Syria that contradict U.S aspirations, leading to inertia. Then there is the influence of other powers involved in Syria, like Iran and Russia -- which may have common interests in defeating ISIS, but are hardly on the same page as the U.S.
+
+Still, the administration says it is encouraged by the increasing role of allies like France and Britain in the military air campaign over Syria since the ISIS rampage on the streets of Paris last month that killed 130 people. But due to the limited capabilities of its partners, Washington will still do most of the heavy lifting in the air campaign.
+
+The administration has also touted recent German pledges to ramp up reconnaissance over Syria. But at the same time, Arab partners have stepped back. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are now more focused on combating Houthi rebels in Yemen.
+
+The White House is working with Turkey to seal the remaining 98 kilometers of unsecured border with Syria, an effort that includes both Turkish and Syrian Arab forces hoping to cut the flows of foreign fighters into the Syrian civil war -- and their return to Europe.
+
+In the absence of a continued military campaign from the Sunni Arab states -- which the U.S. would like to see resume -- the White House is hopeful those nations can capitalize on their relationships with opposition forces in Syria.
+
+Saudi Arabia is also hosting an upcoming meeting of different opposition groups that the U.S. hopes can help pave the way for their participation in a political transition process that would see the eventual departure of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and a theoretical revival of the Syrian state
+
+But those incremental steps, though significant, are unlikely to paper over the fundamental weaknesses of the anti-ISIS fight.",REAL
+5449,It Looks Like George Soros Is Funding The Trump Protests Just Like He Funded The Ferguson Riots,"Paid instigators are making an already bad situation much much worse. As riots and protests rage through the streets of America, the question has to be asked. 
+Via ActivistPost 
+
+Does someone behind the scenes want to see civil war in the United States? The answer is almost certainly yes.
+And it isn’t likely to settle down anytime in the next few days. (If you aren’t prepped for this, go here to learn how to stay safe.) Just a little background: this has been going on since the midst of the campaign when actors were hired on Craigslist and trained to disrupt rallies. For example, one Craigslist ad was answered by Paul Horner, who admitted he was paid $3,500 to cause a scene at a Trump event in Fountain Hills, Arizona.
+“As for who these people were affiliated with that interviewed me, my guess would be Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Horner said. “The actual check I received after I was done with the job was from a group called ‘Women Are The Future’. After I was hired, they told me if anyone asked any questions about who I was with or communicated with me in any way, I should start talking about how great Bernie Sanders is.” Horner continued, “It was mostly women in their 60’s at the interview that I went to…” (source)
+
+The same report goes on to say:
+When asked about the other protesters at the rally, Horner said he saw most of them during the interview and training for the rally.
+“Almost all of the people I was protesting with I had seen at my interview and training class. At the rally, talking with some of them, I learned they only paid Latinos $500, Muslims $600 and African Americans $750. I don’t think they were looking for any Asians. Women and children were paid half of what the men got and illegals received $300 across the board. I think I was paid more than the other protesters because I was white and had taken classes in street fighting and boxing a few years back”
+You can also read this article, in which a quote caught on video from Project Veritas shows how the Clinton campaign caused disruptions via “bird-dogging.”
+There’s a lot of evidence that someone is funding these protests. An eyewitness in Austin, Texas spotted protesters being transported by chartered coach buses.
+Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses they came in. #fakeprotests #trump2016 #austin pic.twitter.com/VxhP7t6OUI
+— erictucker (@erictucker) November 10, 2016
+Then there was this Craigslist ad.
+
+There are many more tweets along these lines, but suffice it to say, suspicion is high that these, just like the Clinton campaign, are rigged to manipulate the American people.
+Why would anyone want to cause all this trouble? That’s where the web gets tangled. It certainly seems counterproductive to set fire to America. After all, what these people are doing is likely to end up with more tyranny – like martial law, for example.
+Exactly. That’s precisely the plan.
+Back in August, hackers from a group called DC Leaks got into the private documents of the Open Society, an organization founded by George Soros. Soros, whom DC Leaks referred to as “the architect and sponsor of almost every revolution and coup around the world for the last 25 years” is a pro-globalist billionaire who has been trying to take over the world via shadow government for decades.
+Zero Hedge reported on the findings in the Soros leak:
+The documents are from multiple departments of Soros’ organizations. Soros’ the Open Society Foundations seems to be the group with the most documents in the leak. Files come from sections representing almost all geographical regions in the world, from the USA, to Europe, Eurasia, Asia, Latin, America, Africa, the World Bank “the President’s Office”, as well as an unknown entity named SOUK. As the Daily Caller notes, there are documents dating from at least 2008 to 2016.
+Documents in the leak range from research papers such as “EUROPEAN CRISIS: Key Developments of the Past 48 Hours” focusing on the impact of the refugee crisis, to a document titled “The Ukraine debate in Germany“, to an update specific financials of grants.
+They reveal work plans, strategies, priorities and other activities by Soros, and include reports on European elections, migration and asylum in Europe.
+An email leaked by WikiLeaks earlier this week showed Soros had advised Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State on how to handle unrest in Albania – advice she acted on. As well, it’s important to note that Soros provided a whopping $33 million to activists in Ferguson, Missouri, escalating a protest to a siege. The Washington Times reported:
+…liberal billionaire George Soros, who has built a business empire that dominates across the ocean in Europe while forging a political machine powered by nonprofit foundations that impacts American politics and policy, not unlike what he did with MoveOn.org. Mr. Soros spurred the Ferguson protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records reviewed by The Washington Times.
+In all, Mr. Soros gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in Ferguson, according to the most recent tax filings of his nonprofit Open Society Foundations… This is business as usual for the OSF (Open Society Foundation), as explained by director Kenneth Zimmerman:
+Mr. Zimmerman said OSF has been giving to these types of groups since its inception in the early ’90s, and that, although groups involved in the protests have been recipients of Mr. Soros’ grants, they were in no way directed to protest at the behest of Open Society.
+“The incidents, whether in Staten Island, Cleveland or Ferguson, were spontaneous protests — we don’t have the ability to control or dictate what others say or choose to say,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “But these circumstances focused people’s attention — and it became increasingly evident to the social justice groups involved that what a particular incident like Ferguson represents is a lack of accountability and a lack of democratic participation.”
+Soros-sponsored organizations helped mobilize protests in Ferguson, building grass-roots coalitions on the ground backed by a nationwide online and social media campaign. Other Soros-funded groups made it their job to remotely monitor and exploit anything related to the incident that they could portray as a conservative misstep, and to develop academic research and editorials to disseminate to the news media to keep the story alive.
+The plethora of organizations involved not only shared Mr. Soros‘ funding, but they also fed off each other, using content and buzzwords developed by one organization on another’s website, referencing each other’s news columns and by creating a social media echo chamber of Facebook “likes” and Twitter hashtags that dominated the mainstream media and personal online newsfeeds.
+Soros was busted for paying protesters to go into Ferguson and stir things up. This is not theory. It’s FACT. The Daily Mail reported that Soros spent $33 million to bankroll the protests. The Washington Times reported that it was totally cool, though, because humanitarian that he is, Soros just wanted to help the civil rights movement. What a guy. Of course, this seems to be a thing with the kabillionaires. The Ford Foundation and Rockefeller foundation also fund “social activism.” Which is kabillionaire code for “mess stuff up and wreak havoc.”
+And guess who footed the bill for the rent-a-thug protesters at Trump rallies in California and New York? (Here’s another source, too.) You guessed it. Everyone’s favorite Hungarian-American troll. Keep in mind that the organization Black Lives Matter was born through the Ferguson riots.
+Does this look familiar? If the Modus Operandi in these protests looks familiar, that’s because MoveOn.org is organizing a lot of them, and MoveOn is funded by…you guessed it: George Soros. The organization was originally founded to combat the impeachment of Bill Clinton…are you seeing a link here? Another proud instigator is the Answer Coalition which also – are you sitting down? Has links to Soros.
+There are a lot of people who are out there because they genuinely oppose a Trump presidency. The unfortunate thing is, their opposition comes from propaganda that they passionately believe. They are acting based on misinformation and they’re being professionally manipulated. The next step here is martial law, which nobody wants.
+Well, nobody except George Soros and friends. Someone who wants to see America ripped apart is causing this division. Last summer, it was leaked that Soros attempted to destabilize Russia and depose Putin in 2012. Putin responded by banning Soros and all of his organizations from Russia. In 2014, Putin issued an international arrest warrant for Soros. We could certainly improve both international relationships and our current situation by extraditing Soros immediately.
+",FAKE
+218,Speaker Paul Ryan: Let's live in the Christmas spirit,"On behalf of the U.S. House of Representatives, I extend my warmest wishes to everyone celebrating Christmas this year.
+
+We spend a lot of time this season asking for what we want. But perhaps it would be better to ask for what we need. We have been given so much in this country that it almost seems ungrateful to ask for more. But all of us—at all times—need more of what is good. And this year, I hope that all of us continue to live in what I consider the spirit of Christmas: a courageous humility.
+
+It took courage for God to humble Himself. He came down from heaven and became a man—a child in a manger. He did this while knowing that one day He would have to lay down His life for us. He would have to give up His only Son. At first, this might seem like a sad story. But we are to “rejoice in the Lord always.” Christmas is a day of celebration. And it is only through grace and prayer that we come to realize: what a gift He’s given us—what a profound act of love.
+
+And so we rejoice. This year, may we continue the spirit of Christmas by facing our flaws fearlessly and by giving back boldly. May we recognize that our way is not the only way—it is not even the right way. It is God’s way we seek. May we cherish all the gifts we have been given—especially the men and women of our armed forces, the people who keep us safe. And may we remember that it takes courage to put others first. It is courageous to do the right thing.
+
+May we remember, and be brave—and be glad.
+
+Republican Paul Ryan is Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. He represents Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District. Follow him on Twitter @SpeakerRyan.",REAL
+10156,Russia to test new anti-tank guided missiles in Syria,"RBTH Daily , syria , aviation , missiles Ka-52K attack helicopters. Source: Yuri Smityuk / TASS 
+Ka-52K attack helicopters deployed on the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier will test-fire test the latest Hermes extreme-range anti-tank guided missiles for the first time in Syria in the battle with Islamic State, the daily newspaper Izvestiya has reported . 
+""Tests in a combat environment will help finalize the missile system, which should become a standard weapon for Russia's Alligator military helicopters,"" the newspaper said, citing a source in the Russian military-industrial complex. ""It was decided to test the Hermes in more difficult, shipborne air operations."" What is the Hermes and what is it for? 
+According to Izvestiya, owing to the new weapon, the Ka-52K will be able to destroy enemy tanks, fortifications and manpower at a distance of 30 km (20 miles). The range of similar Russian and foreign systems (Ataka, Vikhr, Hellfire, and others) is less than 10 km. 
+According to Viktor Litovkin, a retired colonel and military expert for the TASS news agency, the Hermes will be used to attack well-protected militant targets – arms and IED production facilities as well as command posts and temporary firing points. 
+""Based on its combat use, it will be decided whether to send the system back for revision or to adopt it,"" said Litovkin. Features of the Hermes 
+As experts interviewed by RBTH noted, the missile's key feature is the ability to track and destroy over-the-horizon targets. Due to its infrared homing and laser guidance capabilities, it can hit enemy armored vehicles autonomously, even if they are out of sight of the helicopter crew. 
+""Similar tactical tasks can be performed by Israel's Spike-NLOS system, which is mounted on a wheeled chassis. However, Russia's Hermes can be deployed on ground tracked vehicles as well as on helicopters and ships. Ours is more universal,"" a source in the Russian Defense Ministry said in an interview with RBTH. Defense Minister: Russian arms pass Syria test, but there are problems 
+According to the source, the official data on the missile will be provided after its adoption. 
+""Now we can only say that its range is much greater than that of foreign anti-tank systems, the farthest of which hits targets 10 km away,"" said the RBTH source. 
+He added that the missile can be equipped with either a cumulative or high-explosive warhead. The shipborne Ka-52 
+The Ka-52 Katran attack helicopters were created for the French Mistral-class amphibious assault ships. 
+However, according to Vadim Kozyulina, a professor of the Academy of Military Science, Francois Hollande had to terminate the contract for the supply of the ships to Russia under pressure from NATO allies. Eventually, the Mistrals were acquired by Egypt, and immediately thereafter Cairo purchased a batch of 50 Russian Katrans from Moscow. 
+It was decided to deploy the remaining helicopters on the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, and they will have their ""baptism of fire"" at the end of the year. 
+As Kozyulina noted, the ""ground"" version of the Ka-52 has proved to be successful in the Syrian campaign. The new machines will also have to demonstrate their combat potential to future buyers. 
+Video by YouTube 
+The helicopters can use P-73 and Igla-V air-to-air missiles, unguided air-to-surface missiles and Hermes anti-tank guided missiles. Subscribe to get the hand picked best stories every week Subscribe to our mailing list Facebook",FAKE
+10433,The Top 100 WikiLeaks That Should Destroy Hillary’s Campaign [LIST],"BOMBSHELL AUDIO: Hillary Clinton Herself Recorded Calling for Rigging Election 
+President Obama claimed he didn’t know about Clinton’ s private server until the story erupted in the press, yet according to this email chain Obama received emails from Clinton that were not from state.gov. Top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills wrote, “ we need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov .” 
+Email #2 “Hillary Clinton dreams of completely ‘open trade and open borders.'” 
+In a speech at Brazilian financial giant Banco Itau on May 16, 2013, Clinton said, “ My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere .” 
+Email #3 “Hillary Clinton took money from and supported nations that she KNEW funded ISIS and terrorists.” 
+According to the email, logistical as well as financial support was involved.   
+Clinton knew that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were supporting the Islamic State group, yet she still accepted millions of dollars from them. 
+Email #4 “Hillary has public positions on policy and her private ones.” 
+Clinton said in a speech for the National Multi-Housing Council on April 24, 2013: “But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.” 
+This is just a quick sample of the 100 damning emails compiled by Most Damaging WikiLeaks. Head on over to their site to to check out the rest.  ",FAKE
+3233,Cruz Says Fate of Homeland Security in GOP Leadership’s Hands,"With the Department of Homeland Security’s funding set to expire Feb. 27, Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) complained that GOP leaders lacked a strategy for how to proceed and blamed a larger funding bill approved in December for putting his party in a “box canyon.”
+
+Congress remains splintered over how to fund DHS, which runs the Secret Service, border patrol agencies, as well as airport and port security, among other things.
+
+Meanwhile, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told CNN on Sunday that failing to extend funding for the agency would mean 30,000 employees at his agency would be sent home indefinitely without pay. He suggested the White House was unwilling to negotiate a DHS funding bill if any changes to the immigration policy were part of the discussions.",REAL
+6727,Hillary Lies About Her Whereabouts On 9/11,"During a rally in Tuesday night in Florida, Hillary Clinton lied. Wait a second, that’s not surprising. That’s like saying the sky is blue . . . unless you’re a liberal, in which case you’ll probably say “the sky is green” and “how dare you discriminate against it.” 
+Via TruthAndAction 
+
+At least you can say this about Hillary Clinton, she’s consistent. She’s a consistent liar, a consistent hypocrite and most of all, she’s a consistent criminal. Unlike most of her past lies, which have somewhat intricate and easy to believe for the lazy minded, her latest lie is so far-fetched and comes at a time when she’s seeking as much sympathy as she can get, that you would have to be the world’s biggest idiot to believe it.
+During her rally in Florida, Hillary claimed that she was in New York City on 9/11. The only problem is that she wasn’t. Not even the media can back up this claim, because many of them wrote sob stories about how she was in Washington that day.
+Uh oh . . .
+Not only was she not in New York, there’s a story published by Politico about exactly what she did that day and how she reacted when she heard the news. Clinton did go to New York, but not until the following the day.
+She had CNN on as she talked on the phone with her legislative director when the first plane hit. Then the second. By the time she got to the Capitol, the Pentagon had been hit by a third plane. Capitol police were evacuating Senate office buildings. She dialed her daughter, who was in New York. She dialed her husband, who was in Australia. She and other senators received a briefing at the Capitol police station early in the evening. And after “a day indelibly etched in my mind,” and as nightfall approached, Clinton joined congressional colleagues on the steps of the Capitol, standing next to some of her fiercest political opponents, singing “God Bless America” with tears in her eyes. 
+Her statements came as she was opening old wounds revolving around the Pulse night club in Florida. She claimed that she was in New York on 9/11 and that she would defeat ISIS and protect America. Does that include from herself? Let’s hope she doesn’t get the opportunity.
+Source: dailycaller.com 
+",FAKE
+8856,Michael Moore’s ‘Morning After To-Do List’ Is Going Viral – Maybe This Time We Will Listen,"  
+He called it. Many times. 
+Michael Moore, the controversial documentary filmmaker, is a staunch Democrat and Clinton supporter, but has been saying all along that Trump was going to win. 
+On Real Time with Bill Maher in July, Moore cried out, “Get out of your bubble, people!” He listed five reasons why Trump was going to be the next president and he was creepy correct. 
+For example, his first reason ‘The Rust Belt/Brexit Strategy’ played out before our eyes last night: 
+“Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. The total votes of [Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania ]… 64. All he (Trump) has to do is win those four states.” 
+You can check out the whole list, explained in detail, here . 
+And during a talk posted on Youtube on October 24 th , Moore also explained why Trump was gonna win. 
+But the ever-optimistic Moore is not wasting his time saying, “I told you so.” Instead, he has put out a call for action. On his Facebook page, he posted a to-do list and it looks like this time people are listening. The posting has gone viral, with 218K reactions, 10K comments and almost 100K shares on Facebook alone. 
+So, without further ado… Michael Moore’s Morning After To-Do List: Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn’t let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must “heal the divide” and “come together.” They will pull more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off. Any Democratic member of Congress who didn’t wake up this morning ready to fight, resist and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years must step out of the way and let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness and the madness that’s about to begin. Everyone must stop saying they are “stunned” and “shocked.” What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all “You’re fired!” Trump’s victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that. You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: “HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE!” The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period. Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don’t. The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he’s president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we’ll continue to have presidents we didn’t elect and didn’t want. You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there’s climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don’t want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above). Let’s try to get this all done by noon today. 
+— Michael Moore 
+You can read the original post on Michael Moore’s Facebook page . 
+Featured image via YouTube screengrab Share this Article!",FAKE
+4501,The Daily 202: Why blocking Obama’s pick to replace Scalia could cost Republicans their Senate majority,"Mitch McConnell has decided to wager the Republican majority in the Senate on blocking Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court.
+
+It’s a bold and understandable gambit designed to prevent a leftward lurch in jurisprudence after Antonin Scalia’s unexpected death this weekend, but it could backfire badly.
+
+Assuming the president picks a Hispanic, African American or Asian American – bonus points if she’s a woman – this could be exactly what Democrats need to re-activate the Obama coalition that fueled his victories in 2008 and 2012. Even if he does not go with a minority candidate, the cases on the docket will galvanize voters who are traditionally less likely to turn out.
+
+[Get your campaign fix delivered directly to your email inbox with The Daily 202]
+
+Last night in Las Vegas, for example, Hillary Clinton said it would be nakedly partisan and unconscionable if Republicans don’t give a hearing to the president’s nominee. And she emphasized the immigration case that the justices recently agreed to hear. “Because of his passing, there will be most likely a tie, four to four, on important issues that affect so many people in our country,” the Democratic front-runner said. “And the most important is the decision about President Obama’s actions under DACA and DAPA. If there is no new justice appointed, then as with other cases before the court, the decision that was decided will stay in place. And that was a bad decision.”
+
+Keep in mind that a quarter of Nevada’s population is Hispanic. Beyond being a battleground in the presidential race, there is also an open Senate race to succeed Harry Reid. Democrats will nominate a Latina and Republicans will nominate a white guy who is already in Congress.
+
+Or take abortion rights. Marco Rubio is against abortion even in cases of rape and incest. For women, the prospect of Roe v. Wade being overturned just became much more real. “When I’m president of the United States, I’ll nominate someone like Justice Scalia,” the Florida senator declared on the Sunday shows.
+
+And environmentalists just this month saw the court put a stay on Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The next justice will be the swing vote who determines the future of coal in the United States. Though these sorts of cases mean that business interests will pour more money than ever into 2016 races, it could also help Democrats attract crucial suburban women who might lean to the right but worry about global warming.
+
+More broadly, this could also undermine efforts by Senate Republicans to show that they are capable of governing and not just “the party of no.” Make no mistake: The upper chamber will grind to a standstill if the GOP follows through on this threat. Democrats who are inclined to work with them promise to stop doing so if Republicans play hardball.
+
+-- Ultimately, though, there is not really anything Democrats can do procedurally to force Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to hold a hearing on Obama’s nominee. The only lever they have is public pressure.
+
+The most potent pressure points are the seven GOP incumbents who are up for reelection this year in states Obama carried in 2012. New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte and Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson publicly came out in favor of obstruction yesterday. The others are holding their cards close to the vest for right now: Ohio’s Rob Portman praised Scalia but would not address the core issue. Spokesmen for Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey declined to comment and Illinois’ Mark Kirk ignored inquiries, per CNN.
+
+Pay particularly close attention to Portman, who is already vulnerable and could be wiped out if African Americans make up the same percentage of the electorate in 2016 as they did in 2012. They are likelier to vote if they believe he is disrespecting the first black president.
+
+“I intend to continue to talk about this until the polls close,” former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, the Democratic candidate against Portman, told my colleague Paul Kane yesterday. “Senator Portman, who has your allegiance, your country or your party leaders? … The people have spoken, on two occasions,” he added, referring to Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories.
+
+-- Conventional wisdom is that whichever party wins the White House in November will control the Senate. That’s obviously the primary factor, but we’re not convinced it will be determinative. Democrats need to pick up four seats to win the Senate, and it’s conceivable they could get those from states that Clinton would probably carry even if she loses the Electoral College. In 2014, it’s worth recalling, Democrats lost each of the seven seats they had to defend in states Mitt Romney had carried two years earlier.
+
+And remember that this won’t be happening in a vacuum: If Obama knows for sure that his pick is not going to get formally considered, he can go with someone who gives his party maximum political leverage to bludgeon these Republican incumbents. Monica Márquez is the first Latina and first openly gay justice on the Supreme Court in Colorado, which will again be a crucial swing state. Attorney General Loretta Lynch is an African American woman. Lucy Koh is the first Asian American district judge in the Northern District of California. He could also go with someone who was previously confirmed unanimously by the Senate to give additional rhetorical heft to his attacks that Republicans are being hypocrites.
+
+-- What’s the Republican political calculus? Blocking judges historically motivates their base – including donors and the U.S. Chamber – more than it does liberals. And they don’t think independents will really care all that much. It will just sound like more Washington noise. McConnell, not a favorite of the grassroots, also needs to keep his own base ginned up. Amidst a presidential primary, it is untenable for Republicans to look like rubber stamps for Obama.
+
+Chris Christie offers a cautionary tale for GOP members. His bubble in New Hampshire was punctured when opponents began attacking him for offering support of Sonia Sotomayor while he was running for governor of New Jersey in 2008. Christie denied making comments he had made. Allies and rivals agree that the Sotomayor hit was a turning point for his campaign. Republicans who fear primary challenges, such as Alabama’s Richard Shelby, are never going to back any Obama nominee.
+
+Most smart Republicans in D.C. still believe either Trump or Cruz would lose a general election. Their hope is that a Supreme Court vacancy might help galvanize conservative volunteers to go do work for endangered Senate incumbents.
+
+-- To be sure, not every Democrat has a clean nose on this: Harry Reid shortsightedly invoked the nuclear option in 2013, which allows non-Supreme court judges to be approved by a simple majority. This incensed Republicans and only accelerated the upper chamber’s decline to be more like the unruly House.
+
+Lindsey Graham, one of just two current GOP senators who voted to confirm Elena Kagan during Obama’s first term, tells The Post that Reid poisoned the well by going nuclear. “I voted for every Supreme Court justice nominated by Bush and Obama. I believe the Senate should be deferential to qualified picks,” the South Carolina senator said. “But I did tell Harry Reid and the president that the consequence of changing the rules in the Senate to pack the court will come back to haunt them.”
+
+George F. Will also zeroes in on Reid’s use of the nuclear option in his column today, which he describes as “institutional vandalism.” He frames the battle this way: “Scalia’s death will enkindle a debate missing from this year’s presidential campaign, a debate discomfiting for some conservatives: Do they want a passive court that is deferential to legislative majorities and to presidents who claim untrammeled powers deriving from national majorities? Or do they want a court actively engaged in defending liberty’s borders against unjustified encroachments by majorities?”
+
+-- The big question right now: Will there even be a confirmation hearing?
+
+McConnell’s Saturday night statement declaring that the vacancy should be filled by the next president did not rule out the possibility of a confirmation hearing or floor time to consider whoever the president picks.
+
+That might be the more politically astute play, since Republicans could slow walk the vetting, trickle out negative revelations about the nominee to right-wing media outlets and then ultimately vote to reject the nominee.
+
+Having hearings could give some cover to purple state Republicans to say they are doing their jobs. “If the Republican leadership refuses to even hold a hearing, I think that is going to guarantee they're going to lose control of the Senate,"" said Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
+
+Plus, even if Obama’s pick gets past the Judiciary Committee, they will be hard pressed to get confirmed by the full Senate. Fourteen Republicans would need to come out against Cruz’s promised filibuster. During Obama’s first term, when Democrats held a near super-majority, only nine Republicans voted for Sotomayor and five voted for Kagan.
+
+Given that the Senate is on a President’s Day recess, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Obama will not rush out an announcement this week. This gives both sides a few days to poll and focus group their options.
+
+A former top adviser to the president says the GOP could have been savvier:
+
+-- Another wildcard: How will the press cover this? One of the mainstream media’s problems is a really short attention span. What is unknowable today is whether this vacancy is a two-week story, a two-month story or a 10-month story? Also, is the narrative that Republicans are creating an unprecedented Constitutional crisis? Or is it played as a boring he-said, he-said storyline?
+
+Democrats note that Obama still has the bully pulpit, so he can come up with creative ways to drive news coverage about the GOP’s failure to bring his nominee up for a vote. The party can also use paid media to target the vulnerable Republican incumbents.
+
+-- For both sides, it really is difficult to overstate the stakes: Scalia left an indelible mark on both the court and our country for nearly three decades, and his replacement could do the same. Ironically, if Clinton wins and Democrats retake the Senate after McConnell spends the year taking heat, she will have a mandate to put the most progressive justice imaginable on the bench. And Republicans will have no real grounds to oppose her. For McConnell, right now, that’s a risk worth taking.
+
+THE BUZZ AT THE CAPITOL: “Some hopeful Democrats now see the nomination of a sitting senator as the best chance Obama has to seat another justice on the Supreme Court before leaving office,” Juliet Eilperin and Paul Kane report. “There are several Senate Democrats who fit that description, including Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), Christopher A. Coons (Del.) and Richard J. Durbin (Ill.). But individuals who have spoken with the White House about the nomination process … said the president is interested in a candidate who is young enough to serve an extended period of time. Only two of those senators — Klobuchar, at 55, and Coons, at 52 — are younger than 60, the age Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was when she was nominated.”
+
+… But we hear that POTUS is more likely to go with someone who has already been confirmed and vetted. “Although Obama has installed fewer federal appellate judges than either Presidents Clinton or George W. Bush, he has put enough nominees on the bench that Democratic appointees are in the majority on nine of the nation’s 13 circuit courts,” Juliet and Paul note. “In that group, the 9th Circuit’s Paul J. Watford, a 48-year-old African American, and Sri Srinivasan, a 48-year-old judge on U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit who would be the first South-Asian American on the Supreme Court, would be the leading contenders. Others include the D.C. Circuit’s Patricia Ann Millett, 52, and Jane L. Kelly, 51, a judge on the 8th Circuit who was confirmed 96 to 0” with the support of Grassley.
+
+-- What does the loss of Scalia mean for cases currently on the docket? “In the short term, conservatives could still prevail on many of the cases before the court this term. But the wins could come in the form of tie votes that preserve the status quo rather than provide precedents that will shape the future,” writes Robert Barnes, our Supreme Court correspondent.
+
+A big break for public employee unions: “At oral arguments, the court seemed prepared to hand a significant defeat to organized labor and side with a group of California teachers who claim that their free-speech rights are violated when they are forced to pay dues to the state’s teachers union. The court’s conservatives — Scalia included — appeared ready to junk a 40-year-old precedent that allows unions to collect an ‘agency fee’ from nonmembers to support collective-bargaining activities for members and nonmembers alike. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, citing that precedent, had ruled for the union. And with the Supreme Court’s liberals seemingly united in upholding the precedent, a 4-to-4 vote would mean the union victory would stand.”
+
+The law could be interpreted differently in different regions: “For instance, a Texas law that imposes new restrictions on abortion providers was found constitutional by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. A 4-to-4 tie would uphold that finding. But a similar law in Wisconsin was struck down and would be unaffected by the court’s tie in the Texas case.”
+
+Barnes adds that, if Republican leaders hold firm, it will also affect which cases the justices choose to take up when the next term starts in October. (Read a breakdown of how four cases will likely be impacted here.)
+
+-- Chaos, confusion and conflicting reports in the hours after Scalia’s death, which happened during a blue quail hunting trip. From Lana Straub, Eva Ruth Moravec, Sari Horwitz and Jerry Markon: After his body was discovered, it took hours for authorities in remote West Texas to find a justice of the peace. “When they did, she pronounced Scalia dead of natural causes without seeing the body and decided not to order an autopsy. A second justice of the peace, who was called but couldn’t get to Scalia’s body in time, said she would have ordered an autopsy. ‘If it had been me . . . I would want to know,’ Juanita Bishop, a justice of the peace in Presidio, Tex., told The Washington Post in an interview Sunday.”
+
+Some details of his final hours at the Cibolo Creek Ranch, a luxury compound less than an hour from the Mexican border, remain opaque: “As late as Sunday afternoon, there were conflicting reports about whether an autopsy would be performed, though officials later said Scalia’s body was being embalmed and there would be no autopsy. One report, by WFAA-TV in Dallas, said the death certificate would show the cause of the death was a heart attack.”
+
+-- South Carolina is Ground Zero for the Republican race—
+
+Ratings: 13.5 million watched the CBS debate on Saturday, surpassing the 13.3 million who watched last weekend’s debate on ABC and the 8 million who watched the Democratic debate in Milwaukee on PBS/CNN. (CNN Money)
+
+Driving the day: Laura and George W. Bush headline a rally for Jeb in North Charleston tonight. “It tacks away from Bush’s months-long insistence that he’s running as ‘my own man,’ but could be a perfect fit for South Carolina,” the Associated Press notes in a curtain-raiser. “George H.W. Bush won twice here. In 2000, George W. Bush beat John McCain. Now it’s his brother’s turn.”
+
+Kasich’s super PAC circulated a CNN clip from when Jeb said in New Hampshire last May, “I think that in Washington during my brother's time Republicans spent too much money. He could have used the veto power. He didn't have line item veto power, but he could have brought budget discipline to Washington, D.C.""
+
+Republican leaders are predicting record turnout in Saturday’s primary: “The electorate here will be about twice as big as Iowa and New Hampshire combined,” said state GOP Chairman Matt Moore. “A third are very conservative, a third are somewhat; a third are moderate.” He’s quoted in a Charleston Post and Courier story about efforts to “restore South Carolina’s credibility in picking the eventual nominee.” From the piece: “GOP voters here chose correctly in all the party races since 1980 until the turnabout in 2012. ‘South Carolinians kind of blew it last time voting for Gingrich,’ said Clemson professor David Woodard, who thinks the state is Trump’s to lose. ‘They’re taking their ‘first-in-the-South primary’ and ‘we pick presidents’ to heart. There is a seriousness here that’s on display this time.’”
+
+On the Sunday shows, Trump focused on Cruz. ""Justice John Roberts gave us Obamacare twice,"" Trump said on ABC. ""He could have ended Obamacare twice. He got there because Ted Cruz pushed him like wild. ... Cruz shouldn't be talking because that was among the worst appointments I've ever seen. We have Obamacare because of Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and George Bush."" Trump also emphasized Cruz's personality: ""No endorsements, no support — he's a lone wolf. He's going to get nothing done, he's not a leader, he's never employed anybody, never created a job. He's a nasty guy, no matter how you figure it.”
+
+… And Cruz focused on Trump: ""If Donald Trump becomes president, the Second Amendment will be written out of the Constitution because it is abundantly clear that Donald Trump is not a conservative. He will not invest the capital to confirm a conservative, so the result will be the same whether it’s Hillary, Bernie or Donald,"" Cruz said. ""The Second Amendment will go away."" (Elise Viebeck)
+
+Trump changed his explanation for why no one can find proof that he opposed the invasion of Iraq before 2003: “I wasn’t a politician so people didn’t write everything I said,” he said on “Meet the Press.” In September, he said there was ample documentation: “I’ll give you 25 different stories.” BuzzFeed notes that an August 2004 interview with Esquire is the first known instance of his public opposition.
+
+Both candidates courted the African American vote at the same Baptist church in Las Vegas. John Wagner relays an incredibly awkward scene: “Clinton and her motorcade already had arrived the Victory Missionary Baptist Church, located in an economically struggling neighborhood west of the Vegas Strip, when Sanders’s entourage pulled in with a police escort. Clinton was seated in the first row, on the left side. Sanders took a seat in the first row, on the right side. The candidates did not shake hands or talk.”
+
+Later, Clinton stepped up her attacks on Sanders over health care in a Vegas suburb: ""We both share the goal of universal health-care coverage, but he wants to start all over again,"" she said at a rally after church. ""And he wants to have a new system that would be quite challenging because you would have to give up the insurance you have now, and it would cost a lot of money. The goal is a good goal -- I absolutely agree with that -- but the last thing our country needs now is to be thrown into another contentious debate about health care."" (David Weigel)
+
+The Review-Journal reports that Sanders has spent twice as much on TV ads in Nevada as Clinton, $2.93 million to $1.46 million.
+
+Trolling HRC, the conservative super PAC American Crossroads launched a $42,000 digital buy to highlight hardline comments she’s made about illegal immigration during previous races. Watch here.
+
+-- “Debate rips open GOP wounds, and party risks tearing itself apart,” by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker: “The GOP is at risk of tearing itself apart over its past as it heads into the thick of the primary season. A day after a debate marked by personal, petty exchanges, Republicans were grappling with their core beliefs, as well as the image they were broadcasting to the country … The increasingly harsh discussions of these and other issues amount to an existential crisis within the Republican Party and reflect the growing influence of non-ideological, populist voters. Contenders are making their most concerted effort yet to stop Trump [in South Carolina], even though previous attempts to take him down have attained little. The escalating quarreling may increase the likelihood of a long, expensive and potentially futile effort … As the candidates returned to the campaign trail, the mess they left behind on the stage of Greenville’s Peace Center had some party strategists wondering whether the damage may be politically irreparable.”
+
+-- “What made the friendship between Scalia and Ginsburg work,” by Irin Carmon: “Nino and RBG, the court’s most famous odd couple friendship stood as an example of warmth and professionalism across traditional divides … The reserved Clinton appointee and the bombastic Reagan pick had vastly different views on the constitution and the role of the court. And yet. One former clerk told us Scalia was Ginsburg’s favored souvenir shopping buddy when they traveled together. On a trip to India, they famously rode an elephant, with Scalia sitting up front. They shared New Year’s Eves with their families and friends. In 2010, when Chief Justice Roberts announced [Ginsburg’s husband] Marty’s death from the bench, Scalia wiped tears from his eyes … Whether or not it was how Scalia saw it, for Ginsburg their public friendship also made a statement about the court as an institution: that it was strengthened by respectful debate, that it could work no matter how polarized its members were.”
+
+-- “A mini world war rages in the fields of Aleppo,” by Liz Sly: “Across the olive groves and wheat fields of the northern Syrian province of Aleppo, a battle with global dimensions risks erupting into a wider war. Russian warplanes are bombing from the sky. Iraqi and Lebanese militias aided by Iranian advisers are advancing on the ground. An assortment of Syrian rebels backed by the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are fighting to hold them back. Kurdish forces are taking advantage of the chaos, [while] the Islamic State has snatched a couple of small villages … Syria’s civil war long ago mutated into a proxy conflict, with competing world powers backing the rival Syrian factions almost since the earliest days of the armed rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad. But perhaps never before have the dangers — or the complications — of what amounts to a mini world war been so apparent as in the battle underway for control of Aleppo.”
+
+-- Doug Sosnik’s take on the road ahead: The Democratic strategist, who served as a close adviser to Bill Clinton during his presidency, is known in Washington for insightful memos that diagnose the national mood. We got the latest one. Three nuggets jumped out—
+
+Independents will see the 2016 election as a choice between the lesser of two evils: “This year’s Republican primary is the most rightward leaning since 1964, while Democrats have not been this far to the left since the 1972 campaign. As the parties have become increasingly ideological, Americans have drifted away from both of them. Self-identified independents are at near historic levels. … In this period of profound alienation, with both parties engaging in harsh ideological primaries, the public is likely to view the entire political process as a race to the bottom. They will be inclined to view their choice for president through the prism of which candidate is the least flawed and poses the least threat to their future well-being.”
+
+Obama’s approval rating is remarkably durable: “Since the summer of 2009, when these divisions began to intensify, Obama’s positive job approval ratings have remained flat, never going below 40% or above 53%. A closer look at these numbers shows the impact that age, race and income have had on his ratings. The narrow band reflects little movement from Obama’s core supporters, as well as steadfast opposition from his detractors.”
+
+The Democratic primary in New York will matter: “In the period between the March primaries and the middle of April, fewer than 400 delegates will be selected. With the exception of the Wisconsin primary on April 5th, most of the attention will be focused on the New York (Wall Street) primary on April 19th. The last two key dates during the primary will be April 26th, when five northeastern states will select 384 delegates, and June 7th when California and five other states west of the Mississippi will hold elections.”
+
+Read Sosnik’s 5-page memo here. See his 25-slide PowerPoint deck here.
+
+Hillary and Bernie were in Las Vegas:
+
+Congressional Democrats spent all day ripping Republicans over the upcoming Supreme Court fight:
+
+Comedian Mindy Kaling jokingly wished a happy Valentine's Day to one of the judges who could be on Obama's short list:
+
+Donald Trump attacked the RNC for the donors at the debate:
+
+Along with the Obamas:
+
+Along with plenty of lawmakers:
+
+Others joked about a presidential race that seems like it will never end:
+
+-- “REVENGE OF THE POPULISTS” is the headline on the front page of The State to describe the success of Trump and Sanders. The Columbia, S.C., newspaper searches for historical antecedents: “Trump rails against immigrants, echoing the nativist, mid-1800s Know Nothing Party that grew out of fears that an influx of Catholic immigrants was threatening the American way of life. Sanders’ outcry against banks and corporations has its roots in the populist movement of the late 1800s, formed by a coalition of laborers and farmers, suffering, they said, under high loan and railroad rates that lined the elite’s pockets.”
+
+The article emphasizes similarities in their messaging and supporters: “Angst over the economy — as in populist movements of the past — has led to similar lines of attack from Trump and Sanders. ‘This is not a rising-tide-that-lifts-all-boats recovery,’ said Danielle Vinson, a Furman University political scientist. … Both Trump and Sanders, for instance, denounce trade deals … Both have taken more isolationist stances in foreign policy … Both also have cast Washington politicians as shills for corporate interests.”
+
+-- The State also looks at the 12 percent of South Carolina voters who say they are undecided: “Retired oncologist Tripp Jones say his choice presents a dilemma in Saturday’s Republican presidential primary. None of the six candidates left in the GOP field fits the bill for Jones, a longtime Republican who ‘wants somebody who is going to take America to the next level but has common sense.’ Jones is among the 1-in-8 Republicans who are undecided as Saturday’s primary looms. Political ads do little for him. ‘I’ve got to settle on one, but I don’t have a clue yet who it will be,’ he said. Other voters plan to wait until the end. ‘I’m going to let it all play out,’ said Irmo Town Councilwoman Kathy Condom, who plans to vote Republican. ‘I’ll figure it out on the 19th (of February).’”
+
+Who they are --> Politico, “The Whale That Nearly Drowned The Donald,” by Michael Crowley: “Akio Kashiwagi was a mysterious figure reputed to have underworld connections. He was one of the world’s top five gamblers, a ‘whale’ in casino parlance, willing to wager $10 million in a single gaming bender. After his murder, one unnamed executive told the paper that Kashiwagi had owed the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino $4 million … The story of Kashiwagi, drawn from Trump’s memoirs and news accounts from the day, offers a revealing window into Trump’s instincts. It shows that Trump isn’t just a one-time casino owner—he’s also a gambler, prone to impulsive, even reckless action. Trump is obsessed with winning, a topic he usually brings up in the context of his merciless deal-making style. But a crucial question about any would-be president who may be confronted with questions of war and peace is his attitude toward risk. Some presidents are highly averse to it … Others roll the dice.”
+
+-- The Atlantic, “The 'New Look' of the Post-Obama Electorate,” by Theodore R. Johnson: “In 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama rode the highest black voter turnout in U.S. history to the White House, black voters felt The Look had been exchanged … African American voters felt that a black president could give them special attention and understand black America’s grievances better than any other. It wasn’t favoritism African Americans sought; they simply wanted an acknowledgement that structural racism is real and some executive resolve to address it from the first president to have experienced it firsthand. But things haven’t gone quite as they had hoped. The welled-up hope that racism would be a presidential priority and undergo an incremental process of amelioration began to slowly dissipate in the face of politics as usual … And frustration has given rise to a new generation of black voters and activists, a generation who uses more overt and dynamic techniques to influence the political agenda.”
+
+--The New Yorker, “Can Cruz Beat Trump on Conservative Principles?,” by Ryan Lizza: “Ted Cruz is the best political tactician in the Republican race. But for all of Cruz’s tactical successes so far, he made one enormous mistake: he misunderstood the threat posed by Trump. By repeatedly praising Trump throughout 2015, Cruz did more than any other Republican to validate the reality-TV star as a true conservative … Cruz, the most well-funded conservative, stuck to his hug-Trump strategy until just a few days before the Iowa caucuses. At the CBS debate, [he] tried desperately to undo that damage, and his attempt to unmask Trump as a closet liberal led to the most fiery exchange of the evening. And now there is a new accelerant to the Cruz–Bush campaign to turn Trump into a liberal: Antonin Scalia’s death. For many ideological conservatives, the makeup of the Supreme Court is the most important issue in America … [and] the success of Cruz’s campaign may depend on that fight.”
+
+-- New York Times, “A Leisurely Return for the New York State Legislature,” by Jesse McKinley: “Last week, [New York’s] 213 elected lawmakers — or as many who were able to attend — gathered for a couple of hours, passed a few minor bills and some well-meaning resolutions, and then formally adjourned for a 14-day winter break, officially ending their workweek. The time was 1:32 p.m. On a Tuesday. Two months after the corruption convictions of Sheldon Silver and Dean G. Skelos, the former leaders of the State Assembly and Senate … that sense of urgency has seemingly dissipated, unable to penetrate the intractable culture of Albany: The 2016 Legislature has yet to offer any new bills related to ethics reform, and the leaders have been noncommittal on a raft of proposals made by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The state’s lawmakers have responded with a leisurely return to well-established habits, marked by two-day weeks in the capital, six-minute floor sessions and a collection of one-house bills with little or no chance of becoming law.”
+
+-- At the White House: President Obama is still in California, where he'll meet with leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Rancho Mirage throughout the day.
+
+-- On the campaign trail: Bernie Sanders is in Ypsilanti and Dearborn, Mich., while John Kasich stops in Allendale, East Lansing and Utica. Hillary Clinton is in Elko and Reno, Nevada. The rest of the field is in South Carolina. Here's the rundown:
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+-- I guess this is what they call a “wintry mix”? “After an overnight burst, snow may be slow to get going early on, but should pick up by mid-morning,” the Capital Weather Gang forecasts. “During the course of the afternoon, snow likely changes to sleet and freezing rain from south to north. Temperatures remain below freezing keeping those untreated surfaces very slick. Highs range from 25-30.”
+
+INTRIGUE: Vince Gray is running against the woman he anointed to succeed him on the D.C. Council. “His former protege insists she is not retreating,” Paul Schwartzman reports. “Yvette Alexander, in an interview, accused Gray of challenging her as a first step toward a 2018 mayoral bid that would avenge his loss to Muriel E. Bowser in the 2014 Democratic primary. ‘He’s just trying to get his foot in the door,’ Alexander said. ‘If Vince Gray is honest about it, he would tell the truth and say, ‘I want to run for mayor. I want to get revenge.’ That’s who he is, and Ward 7 knows it.’"" She also suggested that he didn’t get indicted because he “had a very good attorney.” Gray spokesman Chuck Thies fired back: “Vince doesn’t feel that she has grown in the job. When you’ve been there for eight years and you’re not an influential council member, it’s time for you to go. At this point, Yvette is just taking up space. That’s not Vince’s fault.”
+
+-- A year-long study of Alexandria's historic buildings revealed that many need immediate – and expensive-- renovations that could cost the city hundreds of millions. (Patricia Sullivan)
+
+-- Prince William County supervisors have given up on their efforts to reduce concealed-carry permit fees after the measure failed in a recent vote. (Jonathan Hunley)
+
+-- Parents in Southeast Washington have begun interviewing teachers for a new charter school, Rocketship, which is set to open next year in Ward 8. The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted in 2013 to allow the California-based charter operator to open as many as eight schools in the District. (Perry Stein)
+
+Bill Clinton seemed to downplay Obama's status as the first black president, saying ""we're all mixed race people"":
+
+In an old clip, Elena Kagan talks about hunting with Scalia:
+
+Campaign chairman John Podesta called this voter-generated video about Hillary ""awesome"":
+
+Watch a polar bear at the Toronto Zoo see snow for the first time!",REAL
+5668,Comment on Armed Militias Prepping for Violence if Clinton Wins in “Stolen Election” by Joel W,"Home / Be The Change / Armed Militias Prepping for Violence if Clinton Wins in “Stolen Election” Armed Militias Prepping for Violence if Clinton Wins in “Stolen Election” Matt Agorist November 3, 2016 2 Comments 
+As the insane circus act that is the 2016 election cycle comes to a head, Americans are playing right into the establishment’s plan of divide so that they can be conquered. 2016 is proving to be the year that America has lost its collective mind. 
+On November 8th, Americans will go to the polls and decide to cast their vote for a megalomaniacal flip-flopping establishment cozying crony or a murderous war criminal controlled by Soros and Rothschild. 
+Having failed to effectively support a third party candidate, America, once again, will be forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. 
+While peaceful militias are certainly healthy for protecting the citizens from the violence of a rogue state, a report out of Reuters shows that militias are now preparing to act if their statist doesn’t win. 
+As Reuters reports , “camouflaged members of the Three Percent Security Force have mobilized for rifle practice, hand-to-hand combat training – and an impromptu campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.” 
+A well-regulated militia is supposed to protect people from the state — not fight for a political candidate. 
+“This is the last chance to save America from ruin,” Chris Hill, a paralegal who goes by the code name “Bloodagent,” told Reuters. “I’m surprised I was able to survive or suffer through eight years of Obama without literally going insane, but Hillary is going to be more of the same.” 
+While the latter part of that statement is correct, Hill is missing the target widely if he thinks Trump will change anything. As Ron Paul said when Alex Jones attempted to trick him into supporting Trump, “Donald Trump would be the champion of the executive order.” 
+“How many people are voting for Trump? Ooh-rah!” asks Hill. 
+“Ooh-rah!” shouts back a dozen militia members. 
+As the most divisive presidential election in recent memory nears its conclusion, some armed militia groups are preparing for the possibility of a stolen election on Nov. 8 and civil unrest in the days following a victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton, reports Reuters. 
+Hillary Clinton would likely attempt to disarm Americans if she is elected. But Donald Trump is certainly no champion of the second Amendment either as he and Clinton both agree on the illegal and due process-removing notion of banning people on the terror watch list from buying guns. 
+No one is advocating that terrorists should have guns, but using an arbitrary list that people have no way of disputing to strip them of their rights is not only inefficient, but it is against the constitution. Where are the constitutionalists on this call by Trump? 
+“I will be there to render assistance to my fellow countrymen, and prevent them from being disarmed, and I will fight and I will kill and I may die in the process,” said Hill, as he conveniently ignores Trump’s anti-second amendment stance. 
+Protecting his fellow countrymen from a government who wishes to disarm them is most certainly an honorable stance. However, this stance should be universally applied and uncompromised — even if it means not supporting Donald Trump. 
+“If Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket,” former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh wrote on Twitter last week. But, if Trump wins, Walsh could be stripped of his second amendment with no due process when he gets put on a terror watch list. . @KevinBuist If a person is a suspected terrorist, then charge him and present evidence. ""Potential"" is punished only in dystopian novels. 
+— Justin Amash (@justinamash) June 16, 2016 
+“We’ve been building up for this, just like the Marines,” said Hill. “We are going to really train harder and try to increase our operational capabilities in the event that this is the day that we hoped would never come.” 
+Unfortunately, as long as people are willing to compromise on their principles to fight for the lesser of two evils, that day will most certainly come and Trump will do nothing to stop it. 
+The good news is the three percenters seem to have the interests of the people in mind and Hill vowed to protect those who want to exercise their first Amendment by marching on Washington to protest in the event of a rigged election. 
+As we’ve already pointed out, Clinton’s only chance of winning is doing exactly that — rigging the election. 
+Beginning in Iowa and eventually getting blown wide open in Arizona, the fraud and suppression of votes have already let Americans know that their rulers are selected not elected. 
+Examples of this fraud were captured on video, documented on paper, and even broadcast live on television. 
+A rigged election is almost a certainty and should most definitely be resisted. However, as long as Americans continue to buy into the political shitshow, that is the two-party paradigm, it will only continue to get worse — no matter the puppets in white marble buildings. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter and now on Steemit Share Google + Joel W 
+A Reuters article as the source of this info? Really? Might as well get your stories from the CIA directly then. Irresponsible article. Nasty_ahughes798_woman 
+I want to see what these traitors will be able to do against an M1, or a bomb from a drone dropped from 15,000 feet. Social",FAKE
+10263,"New Pew Report: Significant Economic Impact of Illegals' ""Anchor Babies""","Email 
+The Pew Research Center released a report last week based on information from the National Center for Health Statistics on birth rates in the United States. Data found within the report could raise concerns over both the economic and cultural ramifications of the birth rates of foreign-born mothers in the United States. 
+According to the report, ""In 2014, about 275,000 babies were born to unauthorized-immigrant parents in the United States, accounting for about seven percent of all U.S. births, and 32 percent of all U.S. births to foreign-born mothers."" 
+While that figure represents a decline in the number of babies born to unauthorized immigrants in the United States, the economic impact of these children is significant, as illegal families are granted access to welfare programs through their U.S.-born children, known as “anchor babies.” 
+Last year, in an analysis of 2009 census data, National Review reported that 71 percent of illegal-alien-headed households with children received some sort of welfare, compared with 39 percent of native-headed households. Furthermore, children of illegals are granted access to public schools, which can cost approximately $160,000 per pupil for a K-12 public school education, based on an average yearly cost of $12,300 per student. 
+These 275,000 children are also granted access to healthcare. Under ObamaCare, these families are eligible for costly subsidies paid for by taxpayers who, in many cases, are not eligible for the same subsidies and therefore are faced with either exorbitant healthcare costs for their own families or stiff fines for opting out of health insurance. 
+Furthermore, the data also reveal that foreign-born mothers live in families that make less money than U.S.-born counterparts. Pew Research writes, “While median family income for new U.S-born moms is about $51,200 annually, this figure is $41,300 for new foreign-born moms. And while about 26% of new U.S.-born mothers live in poverty, this share rises to 31% for foreign-born new mothers.” 
+Pew advises, “The share of babies born to moms from Latin America has declined while the share of babies born to moms from regions such as Asia has increased."" 
+It’s also worth noting that when these babies become adults, they will compete for wages against the children of U.S.-born parents in a slow-growing economy weighed down by crippling regulations. 
+Pew reports, “While the annual number of babies born in the U.S. has fluctuated in recent years — most markedly during the Great Recession when there was a significant drop in births nationwide — the trajectory over the past four decades or so has been upward. In 2014, there were 4.00 million births in the U.S., compared with 3.74 million in 1970.” 
+The report continues, “This growth has been driven entirely by the increasing numbers of babies born to immigrant women. In 2014, immigrant women accounted for about 901,000 U.S. births, which marked a threefold increase from 1970 when immigrant women accounted for about 274,000 births. Meanwhile, the annual number of births to U.S.-born women dropped by 11% during that same time period, from 3.46 million in 1970 to 3.10 million in 2014."" 
+The International Business Times reports that by 2042, minorities will become the majority and by 2050, will make up 54 percent of the populace. By 2023, non-whites will be the majority among children. 
+The impact on the cultural makeup of the United States is troubling, as it remains to be seen whether these families will assimilate into the American culture. In a piece for The New American last week, Thomas Sowell wrote, People who came here a hundred years ago usually did so in order to fit within the framework of America and become Americans. Some still do. But many come from a very different cultural background — and our own multiculturalism dogmas and grievance industry work to keep them foreign and resentful of Americans who have achieved more than they have. Some immigrant groups seek to bring to America the very cultures whose failures led them to flee to this country. Not all individual immigrants and not all immigrant groups. But too many Americans have become so gullible that they are afraid to even get the facts about which immigrants have done well and improved America, and which have become a burden that can drag us all down. 
+One need not look further than California to find evidence of Sowell’s observations. At Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, for example, American flag t-shirts were banned during Cinco de Mayo (May 5), a Mexican holiday, so as to not offend the Mexican students. 
+As noted by Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at the Kathryn and Shelby Collom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, American has drifted far from its belief in “E Pluribus Unum” (Latin for “Out of Many, One”), and has made any expectation for assimilation into American culture a taboo and politically incorrect goal: Patriotic assimilation is the bond that allows America to be a nation of immigrants. Without it, America either ceases to be a nation, becoming instead a hodgepodge of groups — or it becomes a nation that can no longer welcome immigrants. It cannot be both a unified nation and a place that welcomes immigrants without patriotic assimilation. Over the past few decades, however, America has drifted away from assimilating immigrants. Elites — in the government, the culture, and the academy — have led a push toward multiculturalism, which emphasizes group differences. This transformation has taken place with little input from rank-and-file Americans, who overwhelmingly support assimilation. As Ronald Reagan worried just as it was first getting underway, this tectonic shift that “divides us into minority groups” was initiated by political opportunists “to create voting blocs.” 
+With foreign-born mothers having more children than U.S.-born mothers, the best hope to preserve the American culture is for these families to adapt to the American culture. 
+Meanwhile, the data reveal that an increasing number of children are being born to unmarried parents. The latest figures show that 42 percent of U.S.-born women were unmarried when giving birth. 
+The Pew Research Center reports, The share of babies born to unmarried mothers has consistently been higher for U.S.-born women than for immigrant women. However, the roughly 10-point gap between the two groups in 2014 is the largest disparity since birth data by nativity and marital status became available 30 years earlier. 
+Overall, 41 percent of babies born in 2014 were to unmarried women — double what it was 30 years ago. Teenagers comprise six percent of the births among unmarried U.S.-born women and two percent of foreign-born women.  ",FAKE
+6799,13 Year Old Girl’s Rousing Speech: “If Donald Trump Had A Brick For Every Lie Hillary Has Told He Could Build Two Walls”,"Who can argue with this young lady’s speech?
+I bet if Donald Trump had a brick for every lie Hillary has told he could build two walls. 
+…
+As a thirteen year old even I know Hillary Clinton is working for her own success and ways to control my life, my family’s life and your lives… She wants to make it Hillary’s America… not The Peoples’ America.
+
+Hattip Gateway Pundit 
+",FAKE
+1946,Mitt Romney still has a Mormon problem,"If you had to sum up Mitt Romney's planned third bid for president in 2016 in a single slogan (and why wouldn't you?), it would be: Mitt Romney 3.0 -- now with more Mormon! Here's The Washington Post's Phil Rucker on that point:
+
+If he runs again in 2016, Romney is determined to rebrand himself as authentic, warts and all, and central to that mission is making public what for so long he kept private. He rarely discussed his religious beliefs and practices in his failed 2008 and 2012 races, often confronting suspicion and bigotry with silence as his political consultants urged him to play down his Mormonism. Now, Romney speaks openly about his service as a lay pastor in the Mormon Church, recites Scripture to audiences, muses about salvation and the prophet, urges students to marry young and “ have a quiver full of kids,” and even cracks jokes about Joseph Smith’s polygamy.
+
+I get Romney's decision.  I was one of the people who thought he should talk more about his faith in the 2012 general election campaign as a way to counter the perception being pushed by the Obama campaign that he was a flip-flopping plutocrat with no core beliefs. His Mormon faith has always been central to Romney's private persona so if the goal is to run the ""real Romney"" this time, then it's the right move.
+
+That said, there's plenty of reasons to believe that a forward-facing of his Mormonism might have less-than-ideal political consequences for Romney -- particularly among a Republican primary electorate. After Romney's 2008 defeat in the Iowa caucuses during the Republican primary -- at the hands of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical and minister -- there was lots of grumbling from Romneyworld that the main reason their guy came up short was his faith.  Iowans -- and especially those who considered themselves ""born again"" or evangelical -- were deeply skeptical of Romney's Mormonism and the Mormon faith more generally. Many believed it wasn't a Christian faith and, when being candid, considered it a quasi-cult.
+
+Four years later, even as Romney was on his way to becoming the nominee, that skepticism among evangelicals was readily apparent. Romney lost every primary in 2012 in which exit polls found evangelical Christians comprised a majority of voters. In South Carolina, evangelicals were the decisive vote; they went for former House speaker Newt Gingrich by 22 points over Romney.  Across all primary contests in 2012, Romney did 13 percentage points worse among evangelical Christians than non-evangelicals. (Is it possible that evangelicals were reacting to something other than Romney's Mormon faith when they voted for other candidates? Sure. But, it seems very unlikely.)
+
+And, there's little evidence that Romney's past presidential bids have had much effect on how white evangelicals view Mormonism generally.  This chart comes courtesy of a December 2012 Pew poll:
+
+White evangelicals are roughly divided on whether Mormonism is a Christian religion and are significantly more skeptical of that fact than the public at large. And remember that 57 percent of Iowa caucus-goers in 2012 identified as ""born again/evangelical"" while 65 percent of South Carolina primary voters said the same.
+
+I've always believed that Romney's Mormonism -- along with his wealth -- was something that made him seem ""other"" to the average Republican primary voter.  Less than two percent of Americans, by most estimates, are Mormon. That number is far lower in places such as Iowa or South Carolina. Many Republican primary voters don't know anyone who is a Mormon or anyone who even knows a Mormon. It's a barrier to familiarity -- whether it should be or not. And, in states such as Iowa and South Carolina that are not only heavily evangelical but also demand retail politicking, any barrier like that is a big one.
+
+None of the above should sway Romney from more publicly embracing his religion in this campaign (if there is a campaign for him). The best thing you can be in politics is yourself. But a ""damn the torpedoes"" approach by Romney on his Mormonism has to come with this expectation too: There are torpedoes out there.",REAL
+6840,EndingFed News Network | Syndicated news and opinion website providing continuously updated headlines to top news and analysis sources.,RECENT POSTS ,FAKE
+4005,"Russia launches airstrikes in northern Syria, senior military official says","Russian warplanes began bombarding Syrian opposition targets in the war-torn nation's north Wednesday, following a terse meeting at which a Russian general asked Pentagon officials to clear out of Syrian air space and was rebuffed, Fox News has learned.
+
+A U.S. official said Russian airstrikes targeted fighters in the vicinity of Homs, located roughly 60 miles east of a Russian naval facility in Tartus, and were carried out by a ""couple"" of Russian bombers. The strikes hit targets in Homs and Hama, but there is no presence of ISIS in those areas, a senior U.S. defense official said. These planes are hitting areas where Free Syrian Army and other anti-Assad groups are located, the official said.
+
+Activists and a rebel commander on the ground said the Russian airstrikes have mostly hit moderate rebel positions and civilians. In a video released by the U.S.-backed rebel group Tajamu Alezzah, jets are seen hitting a building claimed to be a location of the group in the town of Latamna in the central Hama province.
+
+The group commander Jameel al-Saleh told a local Syrian news website that the group's location was hit by Russian jets but didn't specify the damage.
+
+A group of local activists in the town of Talbiseh in Homs province recorded at least 16 civilians killed, including two children.
+
+According to a U.S. senior official, Presidents Obama and Putin agreed on a process to ""deconflict"" military operations. The Russians on Wednesday ""bypassed that process,"" the official said.
+
+""That's not how responsible nations do business,"" the official said.
+
+The development came after Pentagon officials, in a development first reported by Fox News, brushed aside an official request, or ""demarche,"" from Russia to clear air space over northern Syria, where Moscow said it intended to conduct airstrikes against ISIS on behalf of Assad, according to sources who spoke to Fox News. The request was made in a heated discussion between a Russian three-star general and U.S. officials at the American Embassy in Baghdad, sources said.
+
+""If you have forces in the area we request they leave,"" said the general, who used the word ""please"" in the contentious encounter.
+
+A senior Pentagon official said the U.S., which also has been conducting airstrikes against ISIS, but does not support Assad, said the request was not honored.
+
+""We still conducted our normal strike operations in Syria today,"" the official said. ""We did not and have not changed our operations.""
+
+State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters the Russian airstrikes won't change the strategy of the U.S.-led coalition.
+
+""The U.S.-led coalition will continue to fly missions over Iraq and Syria as planned and in support of our international mission to degrade and destroy ISIL,"" Kirby told reporters, while acknowledging the meeting at the American embassy in Baghdad.
+
+Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told foreign ministers of world powers Wednesday that his country is ""ready to forge standing channels of communication to ensure a maximally effective fight against terrorist groups.""
+
+Lavrov spoke to the U.N. Security Council shortly after Russia's defense ministry announced its jets are carrying out airstrikes on Islamic State group positions in Syria.
+
+Lavrov said Russia would shortly circulate a draft council resolution to promote joint efforts against groups like the Islamic State.
+
+The move by Moscow marks a major escalation in ongoing tensions between the two countries over military action in the war-torn country and comes moments after Russian lawmakers formally approved a request from Putin to authorize the use of troops in Syria. Putin said previously that Russia would strike ISIS targets.
+
+The Federation Council, the upper house of Russia's parliament, discussed Putin's request for the authorization behind the closed doors. Sergei Ivanov, chief of Putin's administration, said in televised remarks that the parliament voted unanimously to approve the request.
+
+Ivanov said the authorization is necessary ""not in order to achieve some foreign policy goals"" but ""in order to defend Russia's national interests.""
+
+Putin is obligated to request parliamentary approval for any use of Russian troops abroad, according to the Russian Constitution. The last time he did so was before Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014.
+
+Putin's request comes after his bilateral meeting with Obama on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York, where the two were discussing Russia's recent military buildup in Syria.
+
+A U.S. official told Fox News Monday the two leaders agreed to discuss political transition in Syria but were at odds over the role that Assad should play in resolving the civil conflict. The official said Obama reiterated to Putin that he does not believe there is a path to stability in Syria with Assad in power. Putin has said the world needs to support Assad because his military has the best chance to defeat ISIS militants.
+
+Putin said the meeting, which lasted slightly more than 90 minutes, was “very constructive, business-like and frank"".
+
+""We are thinking about it, and we don't exclude anything,"" Putin told reporters at the time
+
+The Kremlin reported that Putin hosted a meeting of the Russian security council at his residence Tuesday night outside of Moscow, saying that they were discussing terrorism and extremism.
+
+On Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius called on Russia to make a real contribution to the fight against ISIS, telling reporters at the United Nations that Moscow ""is against the terrorists, it's not abnormal to launch strikes against them.""
+
+""The international community has hit (ISIS). France has hit (ISIS), Assad very little, and the Russians not at all. So one has to look at who does what,"" Fabius added.
+
+Russia has been a staunch supporter of Assad during Syria's bloody civil war, and multiple reports have previously indicated that Russian troops are aiding Assad's forces. Israel's defense minister also said earlier this month that Russian troops are in Syria to help Assad fight the ISIS terror group.
+
+On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Russia's Foreign Ministry told the news agency Interfax that a recently established operations center in Baghdad would help coordinate airstrikes and ground troops in Syria. Fox News first reported last week that the center had been set up by Russian, Syrian and Iranian military commanders with the goal of working with Iranian-backed Shia militias fighting ISIS.
+
+Over the weekend, the Iraqi government announced that it would begin sharing ""security and intelligence"" information with Russia, Syria and Iran to help combat ISIS.
+
+Meanwhile, intelligence sources told Fox News Friday that Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani met with Russian military commanders in Baghdad Sept. 22. Fox News reported earlier this month that Soleimani met Putin in Moscow over the summer to discuss a joint military plan in Syria.
+
+""The Russians are no longer advising, but co-leading the war in Syria,"" one intelligence official said at the time.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8406,Angelina Jolie’s Father Speaks Out Against Illuminati,"posted by Eddie Angelina Jolie’s father, Jon Voight, has publicly spoken out against the Illuminati elite’s that he says are attempting to prevent Donald Trump from winning the Presidency. In a video uploaded to YouTube , Voight slammed both George Soros and Hillary Clinton, claiming they are attempting to turn America into a country of tyranny. “May God protect the real truth and may Donald Trump win this presidency. He will save our America, and he will certainly make it great again,” he said . Daily Mail reports: Voight has repeatedly supported Trump throughout the election cycle despite the business tycoon’s unprovoked attacks on his daughter Angelina Jolie’s looks. In the video, posted on Voight’s social media channels, he said: ‘We were once a country of freedom. Now we’re becoming a country of tyranny. ‘Thousands of refugees will flood our nation, and no one will know the good guys from the bad guys. It will kill our economy which is at an all time low under the years of Obama’s presidency.’ Millions of jobs have been created, unemployment has plummeted, and the economy has grown about two per cent each year under Obama’s administration, with experts grading it a ‘solid B or B+’, CNN reported. But Voight also warned that people would lose their Second Amendment rights under Hillary Clinton, even though she has repeatedly disputed similar statements. Voight went on to say: ‘Freedom of religion will be attacked…and Hillary will try to stop all conservative voices on TV and radio. ‘Our highest courts will become socialist, and she will restrict what America was founded on – our freedom to become a small business owner and pursue our own personal dreams.’ Voight also accused Soros of ‘turn[ing] hundreds of Jewish people over to the Nazis to be exterminated during World War II,’ an idea perpetuated by conservative commentator Glenn Beck. When Soros was 14, his father bribed an agriculture official in Nazi-occupied Hungary to pose as his Christian godfather. Soros once accompanied the man during an inventory of an estate left behind by the wealthy Jewish aristocrat Mor Kornfeld. In a 1998 episode of 60 Minutes, Soros said: ‘I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.’ While Voight made no reference to Trump’s comments about women in his latest video, he came out to defend the business tycoon days earlier. ‘I am so ashamed of my fellow actor Bobby DeNiro’s rant against Donald Trump…’ ‘Donald Trump’s words were not as damaging as Robert DeNiro’s ugly rant. Trump’s words did not hurt anyone.’ Voight tweeted in response to the Republican candidate’s comments that he could sexually harass women without consequence. ‘I don’t know of too many men who haven’t expressed some sort of similar sexual terms toward women, especially in their younger years,’ Voight added. Trump has since been accused of sexual harassment by six women in the days following the 2005 hot mic recording’s emergence. The presidential candidate has spoken out against Voight’s daughter over the last decade, saying in 2006: ‘[Angelina Jolie has] been with so many guys she makes me look like a baby, OK, with the other side. And, I just don’t even find her attractive.’ In 2007, Trump said: ‘Angelina Jolie is sort of amazing because everyone thinks she’s like this great beauty. ‘I really understand beauty. And I will tell you, she’s not—I do own Miss Universe. I do own Miss USA. I mean, I own a lot of different things. I do understand beauty, and she’s not.’ source:",FAKE
+1309,How to watch tonight's Republican debate,"The next Republican presidential debate is tonight in Manchester, New Hampshire, and will air on ABC. The network has said that coverage of the debate will begin at 8 pm Eastern, though it is not clear if the debate will begin right then or a bit afterward. You'll be able to view a live stream online at ABCNews.go.com.
+
+After skipping out on the last GOP debate — and losing the Iowa caucuses — Donald Trump has announced that he will show up this time. He'll be joined by Iowa winner Ted Cruz and Iowa ""media winner"" Marco Rubio, whose unexpectedly competitive performance in the caucuses has bolstered his prospects for winning the nomination in the eyes of political elites. Ben Carson, who finished a weak fourth in Iowa and whose candidacy has been in decline for months, will also be in attendance, though his campaign seems like it might not be going for too much longer.
+
+Watch: Ted Cruz trolls Donald Trump in opening remarks of last Republican debate
+
+Then there are three other candidates — Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Chris Christie — who are desperately hoping for a strong performance in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary to keep them in the race. Bush, Kasich, and Christie, who are all establishment-friendly candidates, are all considered rivals to Rubio, who did far better than them in Iowa. So expect them to make a last attempt at taking Rubio down at tonight's debate.
+
+Conversely, the debate gives Rubio a big opportunity to outshine those establishment rivals right before the New Hampshire primary. If Rubio outperforms Bush, Kasich, and Christie in the Granite State too, they'll all likely drop out of the race soon — clearing the way for Rubio to be the mainstream Republican alternative to Trump and Cruz. If Rubio stumbles in New Hampshire, though, the race could remain muddled for a bit longer.
+
+Since the GOP field has shrunk, there will be no undercard debate for candidates who aren't polling as well this time around. But, much to her disappointment, Carly Fiorina missed ABC's polling cutoff to qualify for this debate — she and former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore are the two remaining candidates who will be left out.
+
+Where: St. Anselm's College Institute of Politics, Manchester, New Hampshire",REAL
+2774,"Kerry: World leaders take step to end Syria war and spreading terror concerns, but disagreements persist","Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday that world leaders have made progress toward ending the civil war in Syria, where the chaos has allowed the Islamic State, the terror group responsible for the Paris terror attacks, to flourish.
+
+Kerry and the other world leaders in Vienna agreed on a timeline for a political transition in Syria that is aimed at ending the country's civil war. However, key details, including the status of Syrian President Bashar Assad and a determination of which opposition groups are terrorists, remain unresolved.
+
+“We do not agree on all of the issues,” Kerry said. “But we do agree on this: It’s time for the bleeding to stop. … It’s time not to allow terrorists a single kilometer.”
+
+The United States has tried for years to end the Assad regime, which has been accused of using chemical weapons on civilians and other crimes against humanity, while Russia has support Assad. Moscow in recent weeks has openly launched air strikes against government-opposition forces in Syria.
+
+Kerry announced agreement on a Jan. 1 date for the start of talks between Assad's government and the opposition. The U.N. special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, is to begin immediate work on determining who should sit at the table.
+
+Within six months, the negotiations between the Syrian sides are to establish ""credible, inclusive and nonsectarian"" transitional government that would set a schedule for drafting a new constitution, according to a joint statement released by the United Nations on behalf of the 19 parties to the talks.
+
+A free and fair U.N.-supervised election would then be held within 18 months, according to the statement.
+
+The diplomats agreed on a means to enforce a cease-fire but failed to agree on which groups other than the Islamic State and al Qaeda affiliates would not be eligible for the truce. Under those terms, the sponsors of each group covered by the cease-fire would be responsible for making sure that group upholds it.
+
+Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Jordan would oversee a process that would identify which groups should be considered for identification as terrorists. That process is to be completed by the time the political process between the government and opposition begins in January.
+
+Kerry acknowledged that participants also failed to agree on Assad's role in the transition or his potential future role in the country's government. The United States and its allies have said the war cannot end while Assad is in power but Russia and Iran have insisted that Syrians must decide their own leadership.
+
+The participants also agreed to meet before the end of the year in Paris to go over progress made toward the cease-fire and the selection of delegations for the political talks.
+
+Saturday's meeting was overshadowed by the terrorist shootings and bombings in Paris that killed more than 120 people, and Syria as a breeding ground for terrorism moved to the foreground of the talks as participants linked the shooting and bombing attacks in Paris to Mideast turmoil and the opportunities it gives for terror.
+
+Kerry and Lavrov both condemned the attacks as they began meetings with senior representatives from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other countries with strongly conflicting views on how to end the more than four-year war.
+
+Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged ministers ""to move beyond their differences on Syria"" and work on a negotiated end to the war.
+
+More than 250,000 people have been killed in the Syrian war. Eleven million have been uprooted from their homes. The conflict has allowed Islamic State militants to carve out significant parts of Syria and Iraq for their would-be caliphate. Europe and Syria's neighbors, meanwhile, are struggling to cope with the worst migrant crisis since World War II.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+7076,Oathkeeper Chapter 8,"Home » Headlines » World News » Oathkeeper Chapter 8 
+A peaceful valley in the mountains of Colorado becomes a battleground pitting the federal government against a rural sheriff’s department. Sheriff Bear Ellison finds himself increasingly isolated as he is forced to decide between risking his life protecting a local hero, or reneging on his oath and handing him over to federal prosecutors… 
+
+Chapter 8 
+Cold winds poured down off the mountains and swirled in the valley, heralding the end of Indian summer. Billowing cumulonimbus clouds boiled upwards into the stratosphere, dwarfing the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks to the west. The aspen on the northern slopes had lost the last of their leaves and the cottonwoods and willows that clustered in the arroyos and flood plains had turned yellow. The elk had made their way down off the high meadows, and the mule deer were more common, grazing along the shoulders of the highway, sizing up their prospects of safe crossing. 
+Sheriff Ellison drove his patrols with a heavy heart. Nguyet had made her decision. She was leaving for Atlanta, and he would soon be alone. He wished his term was over so that he could jettison his responsibilities and join her and his new granddaughter. The visit with Acevedo had cured him of any lingering political aspirations. Despite the DEA’s wishes, he never did give a press conference on the accidental shooting. 
+What would be the point? he thought. Acevedo was right in one sense. The sheriff would have been held responsible for the shooting, regardless of how he framed it for the public. 
+Ellison conceded that he would not be able to reign in the feds. He knew that the populace had most likely also realized this by now, and this painted him in a pastel hue of weakness. He noticed that people in general had become less social and cordial towards him since the botched raid. “Good morning, Sheriff. How are things?” was replaced with a cursory “Howdy” or a perfunctory nod, followed by averted eyes. This, along with his wife’s looming departure, filled him with a feeling of isolation. The DEA raids would continue, despite his protest. Nguyet had begged him to resign, but he just couldn’t. Not at such a chaotic time in his career. 
+Ellison’s hope was that the county might turn against the DEA occupation. Monte Turcot was a hero, after all, and the shooting of him and his wife was a lightning rod. He hoped that the citizens were beginning to question the value of the DEA’s mission, but without effective leadership and organization, they would be helpless to foment any real resistance. 
+Ellison knew Acevedo was disappointed that he did not do the requested damage control on the DEA’s behalf. He learned of this through a phone call with the governor’s office, whom the DEA had contacted to voice their displeasure. They had called him demanding an explanation. 
+“There’s nothing for my department to communicate,” Ellison had explained over the phone. “We were not involved in that operation… We have asked DA Chalmers to launch a grand jury investigation… We expect their decision any day… I’ve ordered Special Agent Acevedo to suspend operations… No, he has not complied… I respectfully disagree with your assessment… I will take the governor’s position under advisement…” 
+The DEA continued according to their plan. It didn’t matter to them what the sheriff or a constituency of “rancheros and hippy flameouts” thought of their operation. Their mission was ordained by the president. Provincial resistance was futile. Those who stood athwart them would be ignored or swept aside. Acevedo and his agents conducted three more raids after the Turcot shooting, adding to their tally of minor victories in the War on Drugs at a taxpayer cost of over $100,000 per arrest. Thankfully, no one else was shot. 
+One afternoon, while on patrol, Ellison received a text on his cell phone. He glanced at it quickly, then turned off the road to change direction. An email from DA Chalmers came moments later. 
+“Re: Turcot Shooting,” it read. “GJ has decided not to pursue.” 
+Ellison stepped on the gas. He turned west onto County Road 306 and north just after the golf course, taking Gun Club Road for two miles and over Michigan Ditch where it ended at the intersection of a dirt road running east and west. Ellison turned west, his cruiser’s tires throwing up rocks and a plume of dust as he accelerated up the road that led into the hills and evergreen forest. Ten minutes from when he had received the email, he was pulling into Monte Turcot’s driveway. He shut off his cruiser, looked at his watch, took a deep breath, then got out and walked up to the door. As he raised his hand to knock, the recognizable pop of gunfire echoed through the trees. Instinctively, Ellison reached down towards his holster. Another shot rang out, then another, and another, in deliberate succession. The sounds were coming from behind Turcot’s trailer, where it abutted the woods. 
+Cautiously, the sheriff made his way around the trailer, ready to draw if necessary. As he stepped out from behind it, the source of the shooting finally came into view. It was Monte Turcot himself, now bearded and thin, firing rounds into a tree trunk with a small pistol. His back was turned to the sheriff, and a half empty bottle of Jim Beam sat clasped in his other hand. 
+“Don’t shoot me, Monte. I’m right behind you,” Ellison called. 
+Monte staggered a few steps back and lowered his gun. 
+“Listen, I came out here to talk to you.” 
+Without even acknowledging the sheriff’s presence, Monte took a swig from the bottle, his pistol now dangling in his hand like a toy gun at his side. Ellison kept his hand close to his holster and made a quick glance about, looking for cover in the event that Monte had in fact lost his marbles and was mulling over the idea of suicide by cop. 
+“Can we talk?” asked Ellison. 
+Monte stared into the woods, wobbling, his back still turned to the sheriff. After another swig, he lowered his bottle, holding it so loosely that Ellison wondered if it might slip out and crash on the rocks at his feet. 
+“Monte?” 
+Monte didn’t move. 
+“Okay, Monte,” Ellison explained slowly. “I’m going to go back to my car and check my messages and call in. That’ll take me about five minutes or so. Then I’ll be on my way. If you want, you can come over and talk. Or call me later. Does that sound okay with you?” 
+Monte didn’t respond, swaying in the autumn air. A gust of wind blew pine cones off the trees, which landed with a thunk on his trailer’s metal roof. Ellison backed away behind the trailer and walked back to his cruiser. Inside, he radioed a quick status report to dispatch and then checked his messages. Nguyet was wondering when he would be home for dinner. His son had emailed pictures of his granddaughter. A reporter from the Gazette wanted to talk about his reelection campaign. Someone had sent a note about a roadkill carcass on the highway north of town. 
+Something moved in the corner of his eye. Ellison glanced up and was startled to find the ragged Monte Turcot framed in his windshield. He looked pale, his hair was matted, and his filthy sweatshirt was stained with blood. Ellison looked at his hands. Monte was no longer wielding the pistol, but he still clung to the bottle. From the looks of it, he’d had a few more drinks since the sheriff had arrived. 
+Relieved but still cautious, Ellison rolled down the passenger window. “Get in, Monte.” 
+Monte stared back, his blank expression evoking that of a zombie’s. Ellison clipped his cell phone into its mount on the dash, then reached over and opened the passenger door. Monte slowly shuffled towards it and got in. 
+“How are you holding up, Monte?” Ellison asked. 
+“Still here,” he answered in a raspy tone. 
+“This is a terrible thing you’re going through. I wish there was something I could do to help.” 
+“Thanks,” murmured Monte. 
+“What’s that blood from, on your shirt there?” 
+“Tore my hands up chopping wood.” 
+“Did you cut yourself?” 
+“No.” Monte set his bottle down on the floorboard and presented the palms of his hands to the sheriff. They were covered in blisters, some of which had burst. The tender layer of skin beneath had torn open. 
+“You should take care of that,” Ellison warned him. “It could get infected.” 
+“Yeah…you’re probably right.” 
+“Looks like you did a lot of chopping.” 
+“Four cords,” Monte stated quietly. 
+“How long did that take you?” 
+“I split it all yesterday.” 
+“That ought to be plenty to get you through winter in that trailer of yours.” 
+Monte stared out the passenger window. The mountains appeared through a break in the ponderosa that lined his drive, their peaks sheathed in the purest of white. 
+“It certainly is beautiful out here this time of year,” the sheriff observed. 
+“I think I might just walk myself up into those mountains and never come back down,” Monte answered in a quiet, resigned sigh. “You ever think about doing something like that, Sheriff?” 
+“I think about that a lot, Monte. Maybe not exactly like you describe it, but there are a lot of days – too many days – when I think about dropping everything and going away, going away for a while.” 
+“I ain’t talking about for a while . I’m talking about for good.” 
+“You wouldn’t be planning on bringing that gun along with you, would you?” asked Ellison. 
+“You know, I don’t really plan anything, anymore.” Monte looked down at his ravaged hands. “The future changes day by day. Sometimes I think about going back to active duty again, volunteering for all the action. I thought for sure that was going to be my future yesterday. But then today, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Today, I think I’ve seen enough killing for one lifetime. I don’t want any part of that no more. Right now, I wish I’d never joined in the first place.” He shrugged. “But then again, who knows? Tomorrow, I’ll probably wish I never came home.” 
+“It’s got to be tough, dealing with everything you’ve been through,” Ellison answered. “It’s too much for one man.” 
+“Yeah.” Monte nodded slowly. “I’m ashamed of the things that I thought about doing yesterday.” 
+“What sort of things?” 
+“I’m worried about you, Monte.” 
+“What do you know about anything, Sheriff?” 
+“You’re right. I don’t know much about what you’re going through. I just worry.” 
+“Don’t.” 
+“Monte,” Ellison said, wary of the direction he was about to take the conversation, “I came out here to check up on you. It doesn’t look like you’re doing well. I don’t think you’re out of line or anything, all things considered. I just think you’re out here all alone, and that it’s not good for you. Is there any way I could talk you into staying with some family for a while? You’ve got a sister, don’t you? Maybe she could come out and stay with you, or you could go visit her.” 
+“She lives in Connecticut. She’s got four kids.” 
+“What about your parents?” 
+“They’re old, worn down, worn out. I’d be a burden on them. I don’t want to deal with them right now, anyway.” 
+“Monte…I wouldn’t feel right about just leaving you out here without knowing you’re going to get some help. Everyone needs help, sometimes. There isn’t any shame in that.” 
+Monte turned from the window and looked at Ellison. “So what happened with the grand jury? That’s really why you came out here, isn’t it? To tell me about that?” 
+Ellison felt relieved that Monte had broached the subject first. He hadn’t been able to figure out a way to get there gracefully by himself. 
+“They concluded that, under applicable law, no criminal charges will be filed against the DEA agent that shot you and your wife. I’m sorry.” He watched as Monte’s eyes dimmed in helpless frustration. “For the record, that’s the DA’s language, not mine. I think it’s wrong.” 
+“I can’t say that I’m surprised,” Monte replied. He picked his bottle off the floorboards and opened the door. “I think I’m going to go back inside and lay down for a while.” 
+“Okay, Monte. I’ll stay out here for a few minutes, if you don’t mind.” 
+“Don’t worry, Sheriff. I’ll be all right,” answered Monte. “I just need to get some rest. These hands are hurting real bad, and I’m pretty drunk.” He stumbled out of the cruiser and staggered slowly back into his trailer, letting the door slam shut behind him. 
+Sheriff Ellison waited outside with his window down, listening for a gunshot for over an hour.",FAKE
+10155,Here's your intent! Hillary Intentionally Erased Emails - Wikileaks,"
+In today’s, 25th, Wikileaks release of hacked Podesta emails, one of the notable highlights is a March 2, 2015 exchange between John Podesta and Clinton aide Cheryl Mills in which the Clinton Campaign Chair says “ On another matter….and not to sound like Lanny, but we are going to have to dump all those emails. ”
+Back in July 2016, FBI didn’t go after Hillary because director Comey said “didn’t find any intent”. Well here’s your “intent” thanks to Wikileaks.
+The email, which may indicate intent, was sent at the same time as the NYT story “ Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules ” – which for the first time revealed the existence of Hillary’s email server – hit, and just days before Hillary’s press conference addressing what was at the time, the stunning revelation that she had a personal email account, and server, in her home.
+The proposed “dumping” on March 2 takes place two days before the House Select Committee on Benghazi sent Hillary Clinton a document retention subpoena on March 4, 2015, with some hinting the NYT report may have served to tip off the Clinton campaign about the upcoming subpoena.
+Mills’ response to Podesta: “Think you just got your new nick name.”
+It is unclear which “Lanny” is referred to: the infamous former DOJ staffer Lanny Breuer who quit in January 2013 after telling Frontline that some banks are too big to fail, or, more likely Lanny Davis, special counsel to President Bill Clinton, and spokesperson for the President and the White House on matters concerning campaign-finance investigations and other legal issues
+It is also unclear – for now – which emails Podesta is referring to in the thread, but Podesta adds: “better to do so sooner than later.” We can hope that a subsequent response, yet to be leaked by Wikileaks, will provide more color.
+If the exchange is shown to disclose intent to mislead, it will negate the entire narrative prepared by Clinton that she merely deleted “personal” emails and will reveal a strategic plan to hinder the State Department and FBI “investigation.”
+This is the first time that particular exchange has emerged among the Podesta emails.
+Furthermore, a search for Lanny Davis reveals the following curious exchange between Robby Mook and John Podesta from March 8, 2015, just days after the abovementioned exchange, in which Mook says:
+We gotta zap Lanny out of our universe. Can’t believe he committed her to a private review of her hard drive on TV.
+It seems the Clinton campaign was not happy with being set on a course of transparency by Bill Clinton’s special counsel.
+Finally, in a separate email sent out in the first week of March 2015 , by Clinton campaign communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, we get yet another confirmation that the president actively mislead the public when he said he didn’t know Hillary was using a private email address:
+Suggest Philippe talk to Josh or Eric. They know POTUS and HRC emailed. Josh has been asked about that. Standard practice is not to confirm anything about his email, so his answer to press was that he would not comment/confirm. I recollect that Josh was also asked if POTUS ever noticed her personal email account and he said something like POTUS likely had better things to do than focus on his Cabinet’s email addresses.
+Perhaps while the DOJ/FBI is taking a second look into Huma Abedin’s emails, it can also take a repeat look at some of these, especially the ones involving POTUS.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+5795,Trump Has Gotten The Republican Party Sued For Trying To Intimidate Voters,"The Washington Post reported : 
+The Democratic National Committee has filed papers in federal court against the Republican National Committee, accusing it of violating a 1982 court order intended to prevent voter intimidation. 
+The motion filed in New Jersey says the RNC has supported the efforts of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign “to intimidate and discourage minority voters from voting in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Trump has recently been urging his supporters to monitor polling places on Election Day. 
+Democrats aren’t going to stand by and let Trump supporters waltz into polling places in heavily Democratic areas to intimidate voters. 
+Trump’s call for his supporters to go to polling places that aren’t their own to watch voters is a clear violation of the consent decree. 
+The Republican Party, which has completely abandoned the idea of winning elections based on ideas, is firmly standing behind their nominee because the same party that was too weak to stop Trump during the primary is certainly not going to stand in the way of what might be their only chance of winning. 
+People should not be afraid to go to the polls and vote. No matter who you are voting for, Democrats have your back. The Republican Party has been trying to suppress the vote and intimidate voters for years. 
+Democrats are on to their tricks, and as the lawsuit demonstrates, Trump and the GOP are not going to get away with intimidating voters.",FAKE
+2662,Are private unions cooling toward Democrats?,"President Obama has long been a friend of organized labor, wholeheartedly supported by unions that helped boost him to victory in both his presidential campaigns.But increasingly, there now is a divide between unions in the public and private sector when it comes to supporting him.
+
+According to James Sherk, a labor policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation, government employee unions want ""bigger and more expensive government,"" in contrast to private sector unions.
+
+Sherk added those private groups are ""pushing back"" and speaking out more publicly about things like the Keystone XL Pipeline, which they believe will benefit their members. That has put them on a collision course with Obama, who last summer proclaimed, ""We should do everything we can to strengthen unions in this country.""
+
+""The president's insistence on vetoing this pipeline is directly taking away income from these union members, and they, understandably, don't like it,"" Sherk said.
+
+Congress has passed a measure to expedite the Keystone project, although Obama has vowed to veto it. Just days ago, Sean McGarvey, president of North America's Building Trades Unions, made a direct appeal.
+
+""We urge the president of the United States to put our men and women back to work across the length of this pipeline as soon as possible,"" McGarvey said, adding, ""We urge the president to sign the bill.""
+
+Union leaders also have a long-standing beef with the administration over the Affordable Care Act's enormous tax on so-called Cadillac health insurance plans.The plans offer high dollar benefits and are used as a recruiting tool.
+
+Although the tax doesn't kick in for several more years, as far back as 2013 union leaders were making public pleas to Democratic lawmakers. In a letter written in July of that year, union officials, including James Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, urged congressional Democrats to drop the tax saying, ""We voted for you.We have a problem; you need to fix it.""
+
+Analysts say the issue may present an opportunity for GOP leaders to build some good will with unions. Just days ago, Rep. Frank Guinta, R-N.H., introduced a measure he's calling ""Ax the Tax.""A similar measure didn't get far in the Senate last year, but may have a better chance with the GOP now in control of both the House and Senate.",REAL
+6156,Can the great nuclear war be prevented ?,"«Current Concerns», n°23, October 22th, 2016
+Can the great nuclear war be prevented ? Can the great war be prevented … Russia and China are preparing for war – right in front of America’s doorstep, by Niki Vogt / Alert Memorandum for Obama warned to defuse tensions with Russia, by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity VIPS / US-Mayors warn against increasing danger of war / “We are beaten to war”, Interview with Willy Wimmer / “Let us say with conviction: No to war!” / Popular initiative for nuclear phase-out in Switzerland, by Ernst Pauli / A nuclear power plant in Bolivia using lithium instead of uranium? / Prima i nostri! Ticino population tackles ruling of immigration themselves, by Marianne Wüthrich / “Defending the identity of France means saving our dairy farmers”, by Natacha Polony / The absurdity of today’s credit system, by Myret Zaki / In Great Britain, things are moving after the Brexit, by Karl Müller / Language teaching: Avoiding unnecessary quarrels, by Pierre-Gabriel Bieri.
+Partners | Zurich (Switzerland) | 27 October 2016 français Source
+Current Concerns (Switzerland)",FAKE
+2607,Obama Chief Of Staff: Israel's 50-Year 'Occupation' Must End,"Through his chief of staff, President Obama is strongly countering rhetoric from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a two-state, Israeli-Palestinian solution.
+
+""An occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end, and the Palestinian people must have the right to live in and govern themselves in their own sovereign state,"" Denis McDonough, President Obama's chief of staff, said Monday at the annual conference of J Street, a left-leaning pro-Israel group.
+
+He added, ""President Obama still firmly believes what he said in Jerusalem two years ago — that peace is necessary, just and possible. Peace is necessary because it is the only way to ensure that a secure state of Israel is both Jewish and democratic. Israel cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely. That's the truth.""
+
+It's not the first time the word ""occupation"" has been used by an Obama official. In fact, in 2013, President Obama used it himself.
+
+""The Palestinian people deserve an end to occupation and the daily indignities that come with it,"" Obama said in Ramallah during a joint appearance with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
+
+McDonough's remarks continued the White House's pushback against Netanyahu's comments before his re-election that a two-state solution was off the table. Netanyahu has since walked back the remarks.
+
+""Over the course of President Obama's administration,"" McDonough said, ""most recently with the tireless efforts of Secretary Kerry, the United States has expended tremendous energy in pursuit of this goal. That is why the prime minister's comments on the eve of the election — in which he first intimated and then made very clear in response to a follow-up question that a Palestinian state will not be established while he is prime minister — were so troubling.""
+
+McDonough said the Obama administration will continue to oppose Israeli settlement expansion because ""it undermines the prospects for peace.""
+
+He also made the case for what he called a ""realistic and achievable"" Iranian nuclear deal with Iran in some of the most frank comments on the subject by an Obama administration official.
+
+""A scenario where Iran forgoes domestic enrichment capacity for all time would surely be ideal, but it's not grounded in reality. Not even our closest partners support denying Iran the ability to pursue peaceful nuclear energy forever, and Iran already knows how to enrich uranium. We can't turn back the clock on that. An absolutist position makes for good rhetoric, but as Ambassador Rice said, 'sound bites won't stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.'
+
+""The bottom line is this — compared to the alternatives, diplomacy offers the best and most effective way to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and this is our best shot at diplomacy.""
+
+It's all part of a White House push to keep the possibility of a nuclear deal alive and not have it tabled by Congress.",REAL
+4329,Biden probably won’t beat Clinton. He should run anyway.,"Joe Biden, in the (still unlikely) event he runs for president, probably won’t beat Hillary Clinton. He’s been a lackluster presidential candidate in the past, and there’s no clear path for him to win the Democratic nomination this time.
+
+He should do it anyway.
+
+The rationale — floated to me by a Biden lieutenant — is that the vice president could serve as a stalking horse. His entry would shake up the race and thereby lower the barriers for other, potentially better-positioned, candidates to join the fray.
+
+This could turn the Democratic contest into a free-wheeling affair, and for the party there would be only upside: Either the more fragmented Democratic field would produce a better candidate than Clinton, or, more likely, it would sharpen Clinton on her way to the nomination.
+
+The term “stalking horse” dates back some 500 years, to a time when hunters hid behind equines to sneak up on their prey. In politics, the term refers to a candidate who diverts attention from another and thus benefits a third. To switch metaphors, Biden jumping into the race could convince other aspirants that the water’s fine — and reduce their fears that taking the plunge would end their careers.
+
+A Biden-scrambled race for the nomination could make a run more attractive to a dozen or more Democrats, most of whom have said they’re not running and some of whom have already endorsed Clinton. All are unlikely. Most would fail, and badly. But a Biden run should, at minimum, alter their calculations.
+
+Previous nominees Al Gore or John Kerry could jump in, validating Mo Udall’s theory that presidential ambition can only be cured by embalming fluid. Mike Bloomberg could rejoin the party and put his billions to work in a shortened primary season. Populists such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) or, failing that, Sen. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) or Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York could reconsider.
+
+Young candidates such as Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro or Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) could bring racial and ethnic diversity to the race, as could former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. Those excited about Clinton’s history-making potential as a woman could get behind Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) or Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.).
+
+Among governors, there’s John Hickenlooper of Colorado and New York’s Andrew Cuomo (who has a famous name if not much of a record), a pair of former Virginia governors, Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, and outspoken former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer.
+
+It’s late in the cycle for new entrants, but not too late: A CBS News analysis finds that of the nearly 770 top Obama fundraisers from 2012, as few as 51 have committed to bundling big money for Clinton. Because Clinton has largely plugged in Obama’s campaign operation, plenty of Democratic operatives are available. And new candidates would be arriving just in time for the debate season, beginning Oct. 13 in Nevada and followed by others in November, December and January, with two more in either February or March.
+
+Not least, there’s a clamor for Clinton alternatives from the political press corps, which has a long history of antagonism toward her. There’s also eagerness for alternatives among the Democratic faithful, demonstrated by the large crowds and enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, even though he’s a professorial socialist who is about to turn 74.
+
+Democrats are reasonably content with Clinton: In the latest Post/ABC News poll, 72 percent of Democratic-leaning voters said they were satisfied with their choice of candidates, and 24 percent very satisfied. But they could be more so: At this time in 2007, 83 percent of Democratic-leaning voters were satisfied, and 33 percent very satisfied.
+
+Satisfaction could diminish as Clinton’s e-mail-server troubles continue. She’s scheduled to testify Oct. 22 before the House’s Benghazi committee, which has generated much of the e-mail-server controversy. The State Department is expected to continue dribbling out Clinton’s old e-mails the rest of this year as they are cleared for public consumption. And many of her e-mails are facing reviews to see whether they contained classified information. Clinton originally said that she did not use her private e-mail account to exchange classified information, but she has since retreated to saying that none of her e-mails had been marked as classified.
+
+Even if she did nothing illegal, the potential for more damage to Clinton remains high. But there is one thing that can shift attention from the e-mail saga, inject energy into the Democratic side of the presidential race and strengthen Clinton or the eventual nominee: A stalking horse, of course.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+4172,How Hillary Clinton Locked Up The Democratic Nomination In 10 Steps,"How Hillary Clinton Locked Up The Democratic Nomination In 10 Steps
+
+The primary season isn't quite wrapped yet (six states hold Democratic contests Tuesday), but Hillary Clinton has now secured the number of delegates needed (2,383) to become the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee.
+
+Speaking Monday night, Clinton said, ""according to the news, we are on the brink of a historic, historic, unprecedented moment. But we still have work to do, don't we?""
+
+It wasn't easy for Clinton to emerge from this campaign season victorious — she got there by applying lessons from her failed 2008 bid and forming strong alliances with Democrats, President Obama and voters of color. And by surviving an epic 11-hour congressional hearing.
+
+Here's a look back at the Democratic primary and 10 steps Clinton took to climb to the nomination:
+
+On June 7, 2008, four days after the final votes were cast in the lengthy and contentious Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton gave quite possibly the best political speech of her career. She was bowing out of the race, conceding what news organizations had already called. Barack Obama had won more pledged delegates and had more so-called superdelegates lined up behind him. He was going to be the party's nominee.
+
+Depending on how you counted, Clinton had won the popular vote and could have taken the fight all the way to the convention. But instead, she brought her supporters together at the Building Museum in Washington, D.C., to mourn what could have been and look ahead. Gone (at least visibly) was the bitterness of the campaign, replaced with a message about all they had accomplished.
+
+""Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you it's got about 18 million cracks in it,"" Clinton said to the roaring crowd. ""And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.""
+
+And seemingly, it has been a little easier for her this time. Clinton appears more comfortable nodding to her chance at making history than she was in 2008, usually with a joke about her hair or as a rebuttal to the idea that she's too establishment. Her supporters frequently talk about it, saying things like ""it's time."" In dozens of interviews with Clinton backers, excitement about having a woman make it to the White House is almost always preceded or followed by mention of Clinton as the ""most qualified"" or ""experienced"" candidate in the race. And whatever you do, don't suggest they're just voting for her because she's a woman.
+
+So-called superdelegates are a pretty good stand-in for the Democratic Party establishment. They are elected officials and party leaders, and they overwhelmingly support Hillary Clinton. Back in November, when NPR first looked at the declared allegiances of these superdelegates, Clinton had a 45 to 1 advantage over her most serious opponent, Bernie Sanders.
+
+Clinton had the endorsement of all but one Democratic woman in the Senate, and Sanders won the endorsement of only one of his Senate colleagues, Jeff Merkley. Endorsements don't necessarily sway voters, but they do indicate institutional support and in this case a coalescing behind a single candidate.
+
+Clinton's shadow loomed large over the Democratic field — so large that many big names in the party didn't even think about running in 2016. Elizabeth Warren didn't run. Joe Biden stayed out (though the death of his son likely had more to do with that than concern about taking on Clinton). The nation's most popular sitting Democratic governors sat out, too (Maryland's recently former Gov. Martin O'Malley did run, but his campaign never took off). That meant Clinton's biggest competition was a 74-year-old independent senator from Vermont who described himself as a Democratic socialist.
+
+The Democratic National Committee and its chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have never admitted it, but many looked at the Democratic debate schedule and saw an advantage for Clinton. There were initially only a handful of debates scheduled, and the first one wasn't until October, meaning lesser-known candidates like O'Malley and Sanders weren't able to get a nationally televised audience for their message until a big part of the campaign (and even some voter registration deadlines) had passed.
+
+Sanders was able to draw huge crowds, raise massive sums of money and win an impressive number of states. But the Democratic Party establishment never wavered in its support of Clinton.
+
+There was no love lost between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during the primary in 2008. But when it was over, Clinton endorsed her opponent and even called for the end of the roll call vote at the convention, moving that Obama win the nomination by acclamation. She worked hard to make sure that her supporters, even those known as PUMAs (""party unity my a**""), came around to supporting Obama.
+
+She and her husband, Bill, campaigned tirelessly for Obama through the fall. And then, when Obama asked, she agreed to join the Obama administration as secretary of state. She then worked tirelessly in that position, traveling to more than 100 countries promoting Obama's agenda.
+
+Why does this matter? Because her loyalty didn't go unnoticed by voters who supported and continue to support Obama.
+
+""She was a fighter, but she knew when to let go,"" said Paulette Roca, who saw Clinton speak at the National Action Network convention, organized by civil rights activist Al Sharpton. ""And now? She's going to be OK now. She has respect. When black women respect you, you've got respect"" (see No. 4 for more on this).
+
+In the primary, Clinton was able to ride Obama's coattails, while at times (Wall Street regulation, campaign cash) using him as a human shield against attacks from Sanders.
+
+Black women love Hillary Clinton. At least that's what exit polls from state after state will tell you. In Alabama, 93 percent of black women voted for her. In Virginia, it was 85 percent. And this is no small thing because in 2008 and 2012, African-American women were the most reliable Democratic voters. This support was a critical part of Clinton's firewall against Sanders in the early voting states of Nevada and South Carolina, and made a big difference for her in the March 1 Super Tuesday states and beyond.
+
+How did Clinton earn such overwhelming support? Years and years of relationships. One of Clinton's first jobs was working with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children's Defense Fund. And in more recent years, she has quietly reached out to the mothers of young African-Americans killed in gun violence or encounters with police.
+
+""When you're openly grieving and the secretary of state steps to you, you'd better endorse her, because she's already endorsed you,"" said Geneva Reed-Veal, the mother of Sandra Bland, a woman who died in her jail cell last year. Reed-Veal and other ""mothers of the movement"" were campaigning for Clinton.
+
+Clinton had no surrogates more powerful than those mothers.
+
+In 2008, Clinton was the candidate with town halls that were too big, infighting advisers, and an operation that didn't get into the nitty-gritty details of delegates and missed the political phenomenon about to overtake her. In 2016, Clinton's campaign purposely kept the events small and emphasized listening. She hired a no-drama campaign manager and brought on Obama's polling and delegate gurus. The campaign's mantra has been, ""We're working for every vote and taking nothing for granted."" Even if no one believed them at first, the 2016 Clinton campaign has always operated like it was expecting a tough primary (it got one from Sanders) and a challenging general election fight, too.
+
+Compared with Sanders' big rallies, her small town halls and coffee chats have seemed puny and low on energy. But for those who attend, there's a real connection.
+
+""I think she works the room like this like nobody can,"" said Adrienne Press, a supporter who attended a small Clinton rally in Manhattan. Afterward, Clinton worked the rope line for a long time, shaking hands and taking selfies. ""You see the real Hillary in this situation, and that fires people up. It fires me up.""
+
+The campaign has played to Clinton's strengths (her wonk flag flies at town hall-style events) and emphasized winning the most delegates possible in every contest, helping her build up a massive lead Sanders was never able to substantially dent.
+
+Clinton and her team knew from the start that economic populism was running strong through the Democratic electorate. In the very first remarks of her campaign, Clinton called for a constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision on campaign finance, and she decried the growing separation between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else.
+
+""I think it's fair to say that as you look across the country, the deck is still stacked in favor of those already at the top,"" Clinton said at a campaign stop in Iowa. ""And there's something wrong with that.""
+
+This didn't stop Sanders from getting into the race a month later. Now, more than a year later, she is pitching herself to Sanders supporters, saying their differences really aren't all that great.
+
+Clinton has a mountain of policy papers and more on the way. They cover everything from opioid addiction and mass incarceration to paid family leave and Alzheimer's. If there's an issue Clinton has heard about on the campaign trail, she likely has a plan to address it.
+
+It's something she says people mock her for (though it's not clear who).
+
+""Some people have commented like, 'Enough with the plans, Hillary. We don't want to hear anymore plans,' "" she said with a smile at a rally in April.
+
+But she argued that the plans were a critical part of her campaign, of letting voters know what they are signing up for.
+
+""It is easy to diagnose the problems facing America,"" she said to cheers. ""We need solutions that we work together to achieve.""
+
+This praise of plans may not sound all that inspiring, but spend a little time talking to Clinton supporters, and it seems like each one cites a different plan as something that really hits home for them and motivated them to volunteer for the campaign. All those plans also allowed Clinton to deliver her message to people in places where they wouldn't necessarily find politics, like a Facebook group for families of children with autism.
+
+Sanders had been gaining steam throughout the summer, but the campaign hit a wall in October 2015. That's when Clinton turned in a strong debate performance and then a week later made it through an epic 11-hour hearing of the House special committee investigating the attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans including the ambassador to Libya. The Benghazi attack was one of the darkest moments of Clinton's time as secretary of state and has been a weight on her ever since, through multiple congressional investigations and a raft of conspiracy theories about what really happened.
+
+The hearing also focused on Clinton's exclusive use of a private email server for official business while she was secretary of state. When the hearing was over, the reviews were nearly unanimous: Clinton had performed well under pressure, and the committee's Republicans failed to find any smoking guns. The committee has still not released its investigative report and has largely been quiet since the hearing.
+
+It was perhaps Sanders' most memorable line of the entire campaign. It came in the first Democratic debate of 2015, and it largely neutralized one of Clinton's largest liabilities, at least for the primary.
+
+""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,"" Sanders said to applause.
+
+Clinton responded saying: ""Thank you. Me too, me too."" She let out a big laugh.
+
+Sanders' larger point that the emails were a distraction from the important issues facing Americans was lost. He had just seemingly let her off the hook.
+
+Now, the email issue is far from over. The inspector general for the State Department recently released a highly critical report saying Clinton hadn't followed department protocol and that she and her team didn't cooperate with his investigation. And the FBI has an ongoing investigation into her use of a private server for official business.
+
+But, thanks in part to Sanders, Clinton's email problem was more of a nuisance than a deal breaker in the Democratic primary.
+
+There were the photo lines with volunteers before and after public events, the calls to superdelegates, the trips to states she had no chance of winning, with the hope of narrowing the margin and securing a few more delegates. That's what Clinton did.
+
+Her campaign's volunteers and staff held house parties, they knocked on doors in snowstorms (people are extra friendly then) and spent hours making phone calls.
+
+Organizing isn't glamorous. It's the grunt work of campaigning. But her campaign credits that hard work with her narrowest-of-margins win in the Iowa caucuses. The demographics of the state favored Sanders, but she was able to pull out a win. Barely.
+
+In short, Hillary Clinton and her campaign never took it easy.",REAL
+6614,Muslims Terrorize Hindus Because It's Wednesday,"Muslims Terrorize Hindus Because It's Wednesday November 4, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
+The official media narrative is that Muslims are the world's greatest victims. The truth, especially in majority Muslim countries, is rather strikingly different . 
+Crowds of Muslims attacked Hindu homes and temples in eastern Bangladesh this week, raising concerns that the authorities are not taking steps to curb rising religious tensions. 
+Attacks on Hindus are not unusual in Bangladesh, but it is rare to see multiple crowds targeting temples in an organized way as they did on Sunday and Monday. 
+Note the casual language of the Times. Muslim religious violence is commonplace in Bangladesh. It's just not common for it to be happening on this scale. 
+But how could it be otherwise? Islam is structurally xenophobic, violently bigoted and racist down to its origins. Islam's faith is expressed in a violent campaign against non-Muslims. This is Jihad. 
+Muslims attacking Hindus, Christians, Jews, Yazidis or any other group? That just means it must be Wednesday. Or any other day of the week. 
+On Sunday, hundreds of Muslims entered a Hindu neighborhood, where they ransacked 15 temples and the homes of more than 100 families, Mr. Deb said. He said that the mob “used long, hard sticks and locally made sharp weapons” to assault Hindus they found there, and that at least 20 people, including a priest, were wounded. 
+This is Islam in its purest and truest form.",FAKE
+1899,Carly Fiorina says ‘higher than 90 percent’ chance she’ll run for GOP presidential nomination,"Carly Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, said her chances of running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 are “very high.”
+
+Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” the 2010 Senate candidate said she is “higher than 90 percent” likely to enter the race, with an announcement coming in late April or early May.
+
+Fiorina said she could appeal to voters with a “deep understanding of how the economy actually works, having started as a secretary and become the chief executive of the largest technology company in the world.”
+
+She added that she has relationships with “many of the world leaders on the stage today” and that she understands executive decision-making, as well as how to change large bureaucracies for the better.
+
+Discussing the economy, Fiorina said the government has “tangled people up from a web of dependence from which they can’t escape.” She also said the government is “crushing small businesses now.”
+
+In a nod to the populist, anti-Wall Street themes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Fiorina said big banks are thriving while community banks go out of business.
+
+“If we want mainstream and the middle class going and growing again, we’ve got to get small and family-owned businesses going and growing again,” she said.
+
+Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Fiorina was a 2010 California gubernatorial candidate. She actually ran as a U.S. Senate candidate that year. The article has been corrected.",REAL
+7546,Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Fundraising Benefited From Loophole In Federal Anti-Corruption Rule,"A combat veteran with PTSD wasn’t allowed to fly with her service dog. So she sued. ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Fundraising Benefited From Loophole In Federal Anti-Corruption Rule By VNN on October 31, 2016 ‘Particularly Vulnerable To Pay To Play Practices’ 
+
+by David Sirota AND Andrew Perez (MAPLIGHT) AND Avi Asher-Schapiro 
+Despite an anti-corruption rule that was designed to reduce the financial industry’s political power, top officials from the investment firm BlackRock hosted Hillary Clinton at campaign fundraisers earlier this year. The cash — which poured in through a loophole in the law — came in as BlackRock’s federal contracts to manage billions of dollars of retiree assets will be up for renewal during the next president’s term. 
+In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission looked to stop campaign donations to public officials from financial firms seeking to convince those officials to hire them to manage public employees’ retirement assets. The agency enacted a pay-to-play rule that applied such a restriction to state and local officials. The rule, however, was structured in a way that effectively exempted federal agencies from its restrictions — and it was created even though a major federal agency had just been plagued by an investment-related influence-peddling scandal. 
+In practice, the gap in the rule allows BlackRock executives to raise big money for presidential candidates who — if they win — will appoint the officials that run the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which awards contracts to manage retirement assets for nearly 5 million current and former federal employees. 
+The loophole also allows Wall Street executives to give cash to presidential candidates, even as those executives’ firms get deals to manage — and earn fees from — investments for the federal government’s separate pension insurance agency, which is run by presidential appointees. 
+In all, the loophole in the SEC rule effectively leaves nearly a half-trillion dollars of retirement assets unprotected by the nation’s major anti-corruption measure. Clinton’s presidential campaign has raised more than $1 million from financial firms that are contracted to manage those assets. 
+Two SEC spokespeople, Ryan White and Judith Burns, declined to answer questions from International Business Times and MapLight about the pay-to-play rule carveout for federal agencies. 
+‘Particularly Vulnerable To Pay To Play Practices’ 
+This report is part of an IBT/MapLight series examining the extent to which corporate interests are able to circumvent federal and state anti-corruption rules designed to restrict the influence of money on public policy. 
+When the SEC passed its rule to restrict Wall Street campaign contributions, the agency said the measure was necessary because publicly administered retirement programs “are particularly vulnerable to pay to play practices” which can end up “leading to inferior management, diminished returns or greater losses” for retirees. A study released last month validated that concern: Researchers at Stanford, Rice and Erasmus universities found that retirement systems whose overseers “have received relatively more contributions from the financial industry have lower returns.” 
+Federal regulators ended up prohibiting investment firms from earning fees from “a government entity” — that is, a retirement system — if firm executives donate to a public official who has power to influence the retirement system’s investment decisions. The rule, though, narrowly defined “government entity”: It says the term means only an agency at the state or local level, not the federal government. 
+“There’s no clear carve-out for federal plans, but the definition itself also does not insinuate that they are covered,” Benjamin Keane, an attorney at the law firm Dentons, told IBT/MapLight. 
+Through legislation, congressional lawmakers could close the loophole by passing a pay-to-play law that defined “government entity” to encompass the federal government. Without that, the loophole will remain. 
+‘Wouldn’t Appear To Put Such Firms At Risk’ 
+The result: Pay-to-play restrictions do not apply to the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) — a $458 billion behemoth that is the single largest retirement system in America. 
+BlackRock officials delivered over $100,000 to President Barack Obama’s campaigns, and Obama’s appointees to the TSP’s board have awarded BlackRock contracts to manage $251 billion on behalf of millions of federal workers. Those contracts were awarded by the Obama administration between 2012 and 2015. 
+Now, with those deals coming up for renewal, BlackRock employees are helping raise big money for Clinton, Obama’s potential successor. 
+BlackRock official Matt Mallow and his wife are listed on Clinton’s website as “Hillblazers” who have raised or donated at least $100,000 for the Democratic candidate’s 2016 campaign. Mallow hosted a fundraiser for Clinton this past February. Cheryl Mills, a longtime Clinton adviser, also hosted a fundraiser for her and serves on BlackRock’s board of directors. Clinton’s campaign has received roughly $100,000 directly from employees of BlackRock. 
+If Clinton wins the election, the agency her appointees run will decide the fate of BlackRock’s TSP contracts — and there is nothing in the SEC pay-to-play rule to stop those appointees from rewarding Clinton’s donors. 
+“Since the Thrift Savings Plan is solely a creature of the federal government,” Keane told IBT/MapLight, “contributions to the president or presidential candidates by covered executives of investment advisors to the TSP wouldn’t appear to put such firms at risk.” 
+A TSP spokesperson, Kim Weaver, confirmed to IBT/MapLight that “the SEC has no jurisdiction” over the board that governs the retirement system. 
+While TSP management contracts involve relatively low fees, the deals are coveted. The TSP does not publish an itemized list of the exact fees it pays to outside money managers, but documents reviewed by IBT show that the TSP pays about $106 million in annual expenses for the specific funds that BlackRock manages. 
+BlackRock likely earns additional revenues through securities lending, in which it can lend out portfolio assets to other firms for a fee. BlackRock can also use TSP’s holdings to exert influence with major corporations. 
+Weaver said the agency “uses a competitive RFP [request for proposal] process when selecting fund managers. The vendor is selected purely on the basis of best value and the selection is done on a fiduciary basis.” She said the agency’s presidentially appointed board members “do not serve as selecting officials on any [agency] procurement.” 
+Federal law says the board sets “policies for the investment and management” of the TSP, and agency press releases note that the board selected BlackRock for the four investment contracts the firm won. 
+‘Serious Questions About The Integrity Of The Process’ 
+The TSP is not the only source of investment business at the federal level: There is also the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation , which insures the pensions of 44 million Americans and pays out benefits if private pension systems collapse. PBGC officials currently oversee roughly $88 billion of investments. 
+The PBGC ( Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation ) invests money with 23 financial firms, according to a PBGC spokesperson. Employees at twelve of those firms — including J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock — have collectively given Clinton’s presidential campaign more than $1.2 million. Goldman Sachs also paid Clinton $675,000 for speeches after she completed her tenure as Secretary of State. Those same firms donated over $870,000 to Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. 
+The PBGC declined to disclose any information on how much in annual fees the agency pays the Wall Street firms, but there are clues about how much at least some of those firms might be making off the system. The agency’s most recent financial report says roughly 1.7 percent of its assets are in “private equity, private debt, and private real estate.” That translates to roughly $1.5 billion of such investments. Assuming industry standard fees of up to 2 percent, that one small slice of PBGC investments alone could generate up to $30 million of annual management fees for financial firms — on top of any additional fees levied on investment returns. 
+Asked if it is appropriate for the agency to award contracts to firms whose executives make contributions to presidential campaigns, agency spokesman Marc Hopkins told IBT/MapLight: “PBGC follows federal procurement laws and regulations.” 
+The SEC’s decision to shield the federal government from the pay-to-play rule is striking, given that the PBGC was engulfed in an influence-peddling scandal at the beginning of President Obama’s term. 
+In January 2009, Charles E.F. Millard resigned as head of the PBGC amid accusations he inappropriately communicated with firms who were courting lucrative PBGC contracts. A whistleblower told the agency’s inspector general that Millard had been communicating with Wall Street firms seeking business from the PBGC, and that Millard refused to cut ties even after he was warned of potential ethical violations. 
+The investigation found that BlackRock and Goldman Sachs assigned employees to win over Millard. BlackRock even tasked a former high school classmate of Millard’s to keep in touch. 
+Goldman provided Millard with advice about how to persuade his colleagues to invest more PBGC funds in alternative investments, and the PBGC soon picked BlackRock and Goldman to manage nearly $1.6 billion in PBGC assets. 
+The inspector general said at the time that the “improper actions raise serious questions about the integrity of the process by which the winners” of federal investment contracts were selected. The IG noted that after Millard resigned, a Goldman executive worked to help him find a Wall Street job. Millard — who was not criminally charged — worked as a managing director and head of pension relations at Citigroup until earlier this year. 
+A few months after the IG report was released, President Obama appointed a private equity executive to take over the agency — just as that executive’s New York firm was facing questions about whether it used political influence to secure public pension deals. A year later, the SEC passed its pay to play rule — including the language that made sure the rule did not apply to the PBGC and other federal agencies. 
+Also see:",FAKE
+2247,Gay Marriage Fight in Kentucky Likely Not the Last Battleground,"In Texas, Alabama and elsewhere a number of clerks and judges who stated their opposition to gay marriage have thrown up roadblocks to the unions, extending the fight over same-sex weddings two months after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.
+
+Galvanizing opponents of gay marriage, Kim Davis, a county clerk in rural Kentucky, this week was jailed for her refusal to issue marriage licenses on the basis that same-sex unions conflict with her Christian beliefs.
+
+Others with the power to issue marriage licenses say they would be willing to follow suit, including Alabama Probate Judge Nick Williams.
+
+""Absolutely, I feel the same way. This is a cause worth standing up for,"" said Williams, who ordered his deputies in Washington County not to issue any licenses at all since the court's June decision.
+
+The fight has made Davis a martyr-like figure for religious conservatives who argue she is being jailed for her religious beliefs, a view espoused by several Republican presidential candidates.
+
+But for legal experts and gay marriage advocates, the issue is clear. Gay marriage is the law of the land and public servants are bound to uphold the decision of the justices.
+
+""In this big country, it's not surprising that there have been a handful of isolated instances of acting out and foot-dragging,"" said Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry, a same-sex marriage advocate.
+
+The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed suit against Davis, said it knows of only two counties in Texas that have not confirmed whether they will issue same-sex marriage licenses.
+
+""We are not going to discuss marriage policy over the phone. If a couple comes in to apply, we will discuss it at that time,"" said Molly Criner, a clerk in Irion County, which has about 1,600 people located 200 miles (320 km) northwest of Austin.
+
+Criner is one of several public officials with the power to issue marriage licenses who stands against gay marriage for religious grounds, and has yet to face a challenge.
+
+In Irion County, no same-sex couples have applied and no same-sex licenses have been issued.
+
+""To keep my oath to uphold the Constitution, I must reject this ruling that I believe is lawless,"" she was quoted as saying by Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based Christian religious advocacy organization that said it would back her legally.
+
+The group, which also supports Davis, said it represents other county clerks who have yet to face challenges. It is not naming them.
+
+""We have been contacted by other clerks in Kentucky. We've been contacted by other clerks in other parts of the country,"" said Liberty Counsel founder Mathew Staver, the attorney for Kim Davis.
+
+The fight has not been isolated to socially conservative southern states, all of which had bans on same-sex marriage.
+
+In left-leaning Oregon, Marion County Circuit Court Judge Vance Day is facing an ethics review over his refusal to perform same-sex marriages. On Thursday, the Oregon Government Ethics Commission approved Day's request to set up a Legal Expense Trust Fund to raise money for his defense.
+
+""I'm the elected probate judge and that's my decision. Thank you,"" said Alabama's Geneva County Probate Judge Fred Hamic, before hanging up his phone.
+
+That interpretation in Alabama largely took hold after U.S. District Judge Callie Granade, of the southern district of Alabama, overturned the state's ban on same-sex marriage in January.
+
+The Association of County Commissions of Alabama in Montgomery said that up to 12 counties are not issuing any marriage licenses.
+
+That includes Washington County, where Williams, the probate judge, said he spoke with Davis for 10 minutes the day before she was ordered into custody.
+
+""I asked her if she was prepared for whichever the way the judge ruled and she said yes. She was very much at peace,"" said Williams.
+
+The fight could also return to Kentucky. Casey Davis, who is no relation to Kim Davis, serves as the clerk for Casey County, which is not issuing any marriage licenses. Attempts to reach Casey Davis were unsuccessful.
+
+Whitley County, Kentucky Clerk Kay Schwartz did not respond to repeated calls and on Friday was on vacation. Her office previously said they were issuing traditional marriage licenses for men and women, but no one had asked for a same-sex license.
+
+In the end, all counties will be issuing the licenses because it is the law of the land, said Wolfson of Freedom to Marry.
+
+""And this sideshow will soon be over,"" he said.",REAL
+10361,A Christmas Story / There Is No Better Purpose Than To Serve Others.,"License DMCA 
+A Story from Far Away 
+The holiday season is upon us, and I have a beautiful story to share with you. I told this story to a customer of mine, and, when I'd finished, she told me this in response: 
+""I was a manager of a business,"" the customer related, ""and every Christmas I would leave a gift on each of the employees' desks around four o'clock in the morning. I never told them the gift was from me, but I noticed how each recipient would react to it with a sense of ""wonder,"" which seemed to last through the following year. When I quit my job, I told the owner that I was the one who had left those gifts for everyone. I told him I had been doing that for the past ten years, and asked him to promise me that, as the owner of the business, he would continue the tradition after I left."" 
+What could I say to this customer, except that she had obviously understood the story I had told her and that she had in effect recapitulated it in spirit in her own life. It still feels good to me to tell that story, and the fact that it spurred my customer to mention its connection to her own good deeds at Christmas makes me want to tell it to you now"". - Advertisement - 
+"" A LONG TIME AGO before there were microscopes, it was not uncommon for a man to lose his whole family to a virus. Medical people only had suspicions about what could be causing those illnesses, and they used terms like ""unfilterable substances"" to describe what we now identify as viruses. 
+""A man who lived in Turkey many years ago experienced such illness at first hand, losing his entire family to it in one fell swoop. He walked the streets every day, thinking about nothing except how much he missed his family. In his heartbreak, he heard people around him arguing about money in front of their children. How were they going to pay the rent, or buy food? Feeling, in spite of his own sorrow, great compassion for the troubles of others, this Turkish man listened through each window, or cracked door, or hollow wall in the houses of his neighbors to try to determine whom they owed money to or which groceries they were lacking. 
+""With the information he garnered, this great man did what he could to help his neighbors. He never told anyone that he was the one who delivered the needed groceries, but simply left them at the door and sneaked away. For him, bereft of his family, it must have been a relief to feel needed and make his existence meaningful again. Later, he would walk by the same homes in the area and see how much happier his neighbors were. He also sensed the relief the children themselves must have felt. Yet, even when he paid his neighbors' bills, he did so in a manner that would not leave a trail leading to him. I tell you this, because the kind Turkish man kept up his charitable works for over ten years, and yet not a soul ever discovered who it was that mysteriously left the loving gifts. 
+""Life is filled with wonder, and one day it comes to an end. After the good Turk died, the whole town kept asking, ""Where are the gifts?"" ""Who was doing this?"" Finally, putting two and two together, they figured it out. I am proud to say that, in this case, humanity took care of one of its own. They dug up the old man's bones and built a small walkway to the museum where he now rests. By this Samaritan's example, they taught the children how a great man should act and encouraged them to do him the honor of visiting him in the museum. I can only imagine the anxiety felt by the townspeople in trying to live up to the greatness with which they had been confronted! 
+""Since the great man did his deeds, every succeeding generation has willingly retold his story with ever a bit more embellishment. But the imagination they display in doing so can never surpass or even compare to what one man did in helping others while not ever seeking either recognition or praise."" - Advertisement -",FAKE
+6836,Welcome to the ‘Islamic State of Germany’,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. PLEASE DONATE TO KEEP BARE NAKED ISLAM UP AND RUNNING. Choose DONATE for one-time donation or SUBSCRIBE for monthly donations Payment Options GET ALL NEW BNI POSTS/LINKS ON TWITTER Subscribe to Blog via Email 
+Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address CONTACT: barenakedislam@gmail.com Top Posts",FAKE
+1029,"After stumbles, Trump seeks to avert damaging loss in Wisconsin","As he tries to recover from a series of stumbles ahead of an important primary contest next week in Wisconsin, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump made a surprise appearance in Washington on Thursday and presented himself as the presumptive leader of his party.
+
+He met with his foreign policy advisers, huddled with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and predicted that he would bring harmony to the fractured GOP.
+
+“Looking forward to bringing the Party together — and it will happen!” Trump wrote on Twitter shortly after his RNC meeting.
+
+When asked about the meeting during an interview with Fox News, Trump called the party officials “very good people.” Two days earlier, Trump had backed away from an earlier party loyalty pledge and complained about being treated “very badly” by the GOP.
+
+He called Thursday’s session a “terrific meeting” and a “unity meeting,” according to a transcript of the interview.
+
+Trump’s Washington visit came as his efforts to secure the nomination have encountered growing turbulence and the GOP remains in disarray.
+
+Anti-Trump forces in the party are frantically maneuvering to defeat the New York billionaire in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, which is shaping up as a crucial moment in the battle for the GOP nomination.
+
+A Trump loss to rival Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas would increase the likelihood of a contested convention in July, which Trump critics hope could ultimately deny him the nomination.
+
+If he loses Wisconsin, “he would have to completely run the table [in the remaining contests], and I don’t think that’s going to happen,” said Katie Packer, director of Our Principles PAC, an anti-Trump group. She was referring to what would be necessary to get the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot.
+
+Until recent days, Trump appeared to be gaining strength against his GOP opponents, amassing delegates, rising in the polls and continuing to draw large crowds to his rallies. But new controversies — including a battery charge against his campaign manager for roughing up a reporter and Trump’s statement this week that women who receive illegal abortions should be punished — threatened to thwart his momentum.
+
+The party also appeared to be fraying beyond repair, with Trump, Cruz and the third remaining presidential candidate, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, all backing away this week from their pledges to support the eventual GOP nominee.
+
+A Wisconsin poll released on Wednesday suggested trouble was brewing in that state for Trump.
+
+The survey, by Marquette Law School, said that Cruz had surged to 40 percent support among likely voters, up 21 points since February — enough to give him a 10-point lead over Trump.
+
+Wisconsin should be favorable terrain for Trump. The state is home to a large contingent of Republican voters without college degrees, a demographic that has backed him.
+
+Forty-two delegates are at stake in Tuesday’s primary, allocated in a hybrid system based on victories in congressional districts and the statewide vote.
+
+Much of Wisconsin’s Republican establishment, led by Gov. Scott Walker, a onetime presidential candidate, has rallied around Cruz as the best hope of defeating Trump.
+
+In an interview Thursday, Walker pointed to the support Cruz has been receiving from the state’s popular conservative radio talk show hosts as a key factor in giving the Texas senator the ability to compete against Trump.
+
+Walker said Cruz is the only candidate who can clear the primary and also win the general election.
+
+“Arguably, there are two candidates who can mathematically win the nomination,” he said. “There are two candidates who have a shot at beating Hillary Clinton. Ted Cruz is the only one in both categories.”
+
+The impact of the radio hosts came into clear view during a sweep of Trump interviews earlier this week. Trump struggled in responding to avowed anti-Trump radio host Charlie Sykes, who has enormous influence among conservatives in the state. Sykes hammered the candidate on the tone of the campaign, homing in on Trump’s recent feud with Cruz, during which Trump ignited accusations of misogyny after he reposted an unflattering image of Cruz’s wife, Heidi.
+
+“I expect that from a 12-year-old bully on the playground, not somebody who wants the office held by Abraham Lincoln,” Sykes said.
+
+In his appearances this week in Wisconsin, Trump irritated some conservatives by seeming to mock two of the state’s favorite sons, Walker and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan. His harshest comments came during an appearance in Janesville, Ryan’s hometown.
+
+Trump dismissed Walker’s support for Cruz and poked fun at the governor’s obsession with Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
+
+“The motorcycle guys like Trump,” Trump said. “And he doesn’t look like a motorcycle guy to me, I’m sorry.”
+
+When Trump asked attendees how they liked Ryan, “your new speaker,” the crowd responded with boos and jeers.
+
+A loss in Wisconsin would not necessarily affect the outcomes of future states. The next big contest is Trump’s home state of New York, where he is favored to win. A string of primaries in East Coast states in April could pad his delegate lead. The next Midwest contest, in Indiana, is not until May 3.
+
+Still, Trump made clear during his Janesville rally this week that he does not intend to lose.
+
+“I’m not going to let anything happen in Wisconsin,” he said. “We have to win. Look, we have to put these politicians in their place, folks.”
+
+Dan Balz, Scott Clement and Dave Weigel contributed to this report.",REAL
+2030,Bush and Romney: Ready to rumble?,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+2207,Liberals poised to give Obama a win on Iran,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+6967,Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Survey Finds That Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence,"
+Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th?
+Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country.
+At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day…
+A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that.
+More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square.
+But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax…
+Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first.
+And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June …
+This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day.
+We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika.
+There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece…
+On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?”
+Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt.
+On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope.
+There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating.
+Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge.
+For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election…
+Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president.
+Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?”
+And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today …
+“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election.
+Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another.
+Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 .
+If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then.
+And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month …
+
+As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be.
+But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome .
+Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House.
+Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse . 
+Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream , The Truth and Economic Collapse Blog. ",FAKE
+202,"Veto, filibuster threats ahead of vote next week to fund Homeland Security, roll back executive actions","The GOP-led Senate is expected to vote next week on legislation that keeps the Department of Homeland Security fully operational through February, but parts of the bill that attempt to reverse President Obama’s immigration policy set up a major showdown with Democrats.
+
+The expected political battle started before Republicans took control of the upper chamber, when the parties agreed on a temporary spending bill that essentially funded the entire federal government through the fiscal year, with the exception of the homeland security department.
+
+It was a defiant move by the GOP-led House, in response to Obama’s recent executive actions on illegal immigration, which Democrats accepted as part of the larger budget deal and that also included significant compromises on both sides.
+
+The House has already passed the bill, which will keep the department fully operational past Feb. 27.
+
+But passage in the Senate will be more difficult, with Democrats vowing strong opposition and Republicans unlikely to not get the 60 votes needed to overcome the Democrats’ filibuster.
+
+Obama and fellow party members also have urged Republicans to pass a funding bill for the agency “clean” of any language attempting to roll back the executive actions. And the president has also threatened to veto such legislation.
+
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated the first vote on the House bill will be Tuesday. But whether the Kentucky Republican allows amendments, like he did with the Keystone XL Pipeline legislation, remains unclear.
+
+‘It’s a debate that will challenge our colleagues on the other side with a simple proposition: Do they think presidents of either party should have the power to simply ignore laws that they don’t like?” McConnell, R-Ky., said on the Senate floor.
+
+“Will our Democratic colleagues work with us to defend key democratic ideals like separation of powers and the rule of law? … The House bill does two things -- funds the Department of Homeland Security and reigns in executive overreach. That’s it. It’s that simple.”
+
+The House-passed bill provides $39.7 billion to finance the department through the rest of the budget year for counterterrorism, cybersecurity and other priorities at a time when attacks in Paris and elsewhere are fresh in the public's mind. Unaffected by the measure is additional money the agency receives from fees.
+
+As passed in the House, the legislation would also reverse Obama's decision last fall to provide temporary deportation relief and work permits to an estimated 4 million immigrants in the country illegally, mostly people who have children who are citizens or legal permanent residents.
+
+The bill also would eliminate a 2012 directive that has granted work permits and stays of deportation to more than 600,000 immigrants who arrived illegally in the U.S. under the age of 16.
+
+The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the measure would increase the federal deficit by $7.5 billion over a decade.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9538,Is Global Warming “An Inconvenient Lie”?,"geoengineeringwatch.org 
+Global warming disinformation is greatly harmful to the critical cause of exposing and halting climate engineering (which is greatly exacerbating planetary warming and poisoning the entire planet in the process ). Because patently false climate information is so harmful to the anti-geoengineering cause , we must not look the other way when anyone pushes total disinformation on the public. Some lies are so massive and increasingly blatant that it is nearly impossible to imagine that they are still being propagated. Could a 3 day symposium pushing the ""Global warming is a hoax"" false narrative actually be carried out with a straight face while the planet is free falling into a state of total meltdown ? Are there people who would pay nearly $400 dollars to attend such a symposium and have so called "" world's top experts"" attempt to convince them that ""global warming is the biggest deception in history""? Exactly who would sponsor a ""global warming is a myth"" event? What would be their motive? The organizer of the ""Global Warming, An Inconvenient Lie"" conference is non other than Ed Griffin of ""Freedom Force International"" who seems to be running some sort of multi-level marketing program . Who is Mr. Griffin's top ""expert"" for the upcoming ""global warming is a hoax"" event? Enter ""Lord Monckton"" of Benchley. 
+""Lord Monckton"" has a long resume indeed, but in reality his resume is better described as a "" wrap sheet "" which should be examined by anyone who has any notion of attending this disinformation event. Why would ""Lord Monckton"" put so much time and energy into the ""global warming is a hoax"" false narrative? Could the fact that Monckton receives funding from the fossil fuel industry have anything to do with his tireless efforts to parrot the oil industry disinformation ? Is this the same reason that ""Lord Monckton"" ardently denies the climate engineering issue in a shocking interview ? Exactly as the fossil fuel industry and the geoengineers would want him to? 
+Who is the second string ""expert"" in the ""global warming is a hoax"" line up? Yet another fossil fuel funded actor, Tim Ball. 
+Tim Ball has been called "" the lie that just won't die "" for good reason. Ball's trail of disinformation has been well documented by numerous sources . An international radio show host (Vinny Eastwood) once invited Mr. Ball to debate the geoengineering issue with me on a live radio broadcast, Mr. Ball refused. He denies the reality of the issue, as does Mr. Monckton. Individuals like Monckton and Ball are simply paid props in a rapidly disintegrating disinformation road show. There are more featured ""experts"" that are apparently pushing the ""global warming is a hoax"" disinformation, but you get the idea. Who is the star of the coming disinformation event? It's Mr. Ed Griffin. 
+Ed Griffin made the following statement on the record in 2013: 
+… the planet now is in a cooling stage… 
+What has happened since 2013? And was already inarguably happening for the decades before 2013? Rapidly increasing global temperatures from anthropogenic activity which of course includes climate engineering at the top of the list. Mr. Griffin is apparently already receiving emails of criticism from his followers for his ridiculously false position in regard to the state of the climate. Griffin actually just published one such message that stated "" Griffin, you've got it wrong, climate change is real "". Ed seems have been motivated to publish this criticism because he was proud of his answer to critic who had expressed justifiable concern about sea level rise submerging islands. What was Mr. Griffin's answer? 
+That is part of the global-warming myth. In some places….. the land is sinking… 
+So there you have it, there is no sea level rise, the land is just sinking. Mr. Griffin, rising sea levels are chewing away at shorelines all over the globe , so, here is a question for you, is all the land sinking? What are Mr. Griffin's views on climate engineering? That is also a very interesting narrative that is truly baffling. Apparently (according to Mr. Griffin) the grid patterns we see in the sky are just being blown into such patterns by the wind . 
+So what is the bottom line in regard to the state of the climate? The planet and climate system is not just warming, it is descending into a state of total meltdown with global climate engineering programs helping to fuel the overall fire. Those who have made it their mission (for whatever reason or motive) to deny the planetary meltdown, are simply toeing the line for big oil and the geoengineers . 
+Here is the climate reality, the Arctic is in a state of total meltdown along with the rest of the planet . Even Antarctic sea ice ( the last vestige for the global cooling false narrative) is also now at record low levels . The ""departure from normal high temperature"" map above shows the Arctic meltdown with startling clarity. The US is also experiencing record shattering heat with no end in sight. 
+Ice deposits are crashing around the world. Front-line film footage of the imploding ice deposits (the cryosphere) proves this fact beyond any doubt. The graph above is a shocking image of the radical decline of global sea ice. And about the front-line reality, we don't need graphs, we have front-line fim footage . 
+What is the bottom line? There is either the truth, or a lie. Those that are pushing the ""global warming is a hoax"" false narrative are pushing an unimaginably ridiculous lie. Why does it matter? Because credibility is critical in the battle to expose and halt climate engineering . Why is stopping climate engineering so important? Because the global weather warfare assault is mathematically the greatest and most immediate threat we face short of nuclear cataclysm. When so called ""independent"" news sources completely discredit the anti-geoengineering community by pushing completely false disinformation, bridges with the science community cannot be built. Such bridges are absolutely essential if we are to have any chance of fully exposing and halting the climate engineering insanity. Investigating the truth is our responsibility, as is sharing it. Make your voice heard .",FAKE
+5961,Trump's Election Marks the End of Liberal Capitalism,"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+Even before Donald Trump’s election victory it was becoming clear that we are living in an age of disintegration. Nation states are returning to relationships based on rivalry and friction when the trend was meant to be in the opposite direction. The internal unity of country after country is under stress or has already broken down. Governments and universities used to set up institutions to study greater integration and cooperation, while in fact they might have been better looking at how things fall apart. 
+The phenomenon is most obvious in the wider Middle East where there are at least seven wars and three insurgencies raging in the swathe of countries between Pakistan and Nigeria. But in Europe and the US, foreign and domestic antagonisms are also becoming deeper and more venomous. In this more rancorous political landscape, the election of Donald Trump as US President feels like part of a trend, toxic and dangerous but wide-ranging and unstoppable. Distinct though the political and economic situation in the US, Europe and the Middle East may be in many respects, there is the same dissatisfaction or rejection of the status quo without much idea of what should be put in its place. 
+Political shocks like the election of Trump can produce apocalyptic forebodings that in retrospect turn out to be misplaced or exaggerated. But, in this case, grim expectations about the future may be all too justified and unlikely to evaporate. Trump’s promises of radical change may be phoney or opportunistic, but they have a momentum of their own which will be uncontrollable. 
+For all his demagoguery, there was a sense that Trump was often nearer to the issues that concerned voters than Hillary Clinton. In the final election rallies of Trump in Michigan and Clinton in North Carolina, he was promising voters the return of factories and well-paid jobs while she was repeating kindergarten waffle such as “love trumps hate” and “build bridges not walls”. He will find it difficult to retreat from these pledges and this is bound to bring confrontation with other trading nations. Overall, the high days of liberal capitalism since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which continued despite a battering from the financial crisis of 2008, are finally finished. 
+It is an age not just of disintegration but of extremes, with proponents of the status quo either weakened or discredited, as shown by the Brexit vote in Britain. The beneficiaries are mostly on the right: from the 1980s on, the mainstream left in Britain, France and Germany abandoned socialism for liberal free market capitalism as the proven recipe for human happiness, which meant that after 2008 they had no alternative system to advocate and could no longer provide a credible vehicle for protest. The political beneficiaries of disillusionment with things as they are have almost invariably been on the right as with Trump who, along with other rightist insurgencies, can plug into resurgent loyalty to the nation state in the wake of discredited globalisation. 
+There are similarities – so long as the analogies are not overstrained – between the forces behind the Arab Spring protests of 2011, the Brexit vote and Trump’s electoral victory today. In all cases, the ruling establishment was weaker and more unpopular than even the most critical observers had imagined: the triumphant protesters were astonished by the extent of their own success. More ominously, it swiftly emerged in the Middle East that the proponents of change had little idea what it should be and had relied wholly on demonisation of their opponents as the source of all evils. 
+There is another parallel between what happened in the Arab world five years ago and events in the UK and the US this year. The old regimes were battered or discarded but there was nothing to replace them with. There is no consensus on what to do. Travelling to Britain from the Middle East, it is striking how the political, social and geographical divisions expressed by the Brexit vote have only deepened with time, whatever pretences there are to the contrary. Political commentators in the UK and US who endlessly proclaimed that, whatever the rhetoric, elections were won by those who seized the centre ground turned out to be wrong because there was not much centre ground to seize. 
+These are not the only political shibboleths which should be discarded. Shocks like these usually provoke jeremiads from the “commentariat” about how all is chaos and the centre cannot hold. Such dire warnings are swiftly followed by more hopeful commentary about how things have not changed as radically or dangerously as first feared. But, unfortunately, in the case of the US election, the first gloom-filled predictions may be the most accurate. 
+It is true that Trump’s authority will be thwarted by the division of powers laid down by the US constitution – though this is somewhat contradicted by Republican control of both Houses of Congress as well as the presidency. Presidential powers are also diluted by those of other state institutions such as the Pentagon and the Treasury. But these comforting thoughts are probably wishful thinking. The extent of the rejection of the American establishment – Democrats, Republicans, celebrities, media – by US voters underlines its weakness. The US media in particular is so much part of the political class that it had become an echo chamber in which it heard only its own views. 
+Leaving aside these dangerous historical trends, there is another more immediate menace stemming from election of Trump in the US and the Brexit vote in Britain: it empowers and legitimises the crackpots and the cranks, those who want to roll back the verdict of past elections since the New Deal if not the Civil War. Those around Trump are not just the Team “B” of American politics but the Team “C” or even lower down the alphabet. They may not want to blow up the world but, out of sheer idiocy, they could do just that. 
+I am writing this in the Iraqi Kurdish capital Irbil which is 60 miles from Mosul, where rival armies are fighting their way into Isis’s last great stronghold. Nobody expects this to be the end of the wars in Iraq and Syria or the multiple crises tearing the region apart. The experience is evidence of the fragility of states and how easily they can be capsized, not just by domestic divisions and foreign enemies but by avoidable political errors. With Donald Trump soon to be in the White House, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that the world has just become a lot more dangerous place. (Reprinted from The Independent by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+9752,Russia suggests joint engineering troops’ drills with India,"Russia suggests joint engineering troops’ drills with India 27 October 2016 TASS The Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu announced this initiative during a bilateral meeting with his Indian counterpart Manohar Parrikar. Facebook indian army , russian armed forces , drills Russian engineering troops during the Caucasus-2016 drills. Source:mil.ru 
+Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu suggested on Wednesday that Russia and India should hold joint engineering troops’ drills. 
+The Russian defence minister also invited Indian specialists to take part in the Army 2017 military and technical forum. 
+""The Russian defence minister announced these initiatives during a bilateral meeting with his Indian counterpart Manohar Parrikar,"" Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov told journalists. 
+Russia, India will expand military cooperation with focus on Navy projects 
+It has been proposed that the joint maneuvers for humanitarian mine clearance should be held on the basis of the Russian international anti-mine center whose specialists took part in the operation to clear the ancient Syrian town of Palmyra of mines, he said. 
+The Russian defence minister also invited the Indian military to take part in the Army Games-2017. 
+First published by TASS .",FAKE
+7117,Military Veterans Are Helping To Save Coral Reefs By Combating Climate Change,"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. Military Veterans Are Helping To Save Coral Reefs By Combating Climate Change By Arnaldo Rodgers on October 27, 2016 Veterans Are Helping To Save Coral Reefs Find Your Job Now at HireVeterans.com 
+By Ken Silverstein At a time when the presidential election is dividing families and friends, at least one issue is bridging the gap: giving veterans of the U.S. military a new lease on life by teaching them how to restore coral reefs. And they are trying to enlist big business as their ally. Indeed, the marriage of the ocean’s ecology along with those who have served their nation is breathing a new spirit into the coral reefs, which make up a whole community of living organisms that survive on the ocean floor. Those reefs aren’t just a thing of beauty. They are also an economic engine, spawning entire enterprises that range from tourism to medicine, including the making of drugs that deal with cancer, arthritis and bacterial infections. “Our guys are special forces who are physically strong but who are also struggling,” says Jim Ritterhoff, founder of Force Blue that combines the virtues of military training with coral reef restoration. 
+Read the Full Article at www.forbes.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on October 27, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+6161,Trump: Israel is a ray of hope to the world,"November 11, 2016 Trump: Israel is a ray of hope to the world 
+Just two days after his stunning election victory, President-elect Donald Trump delivered a message to Israel, describing his personal affection for the Jewish state and hopes that his administration will be able to strengthen ties strained by eight years of tense relations between Israel and the Obama administration. 
+Calling Israel a “ray of hope,” Trump released the statement to the Israel HaYom newspaper, which is owned by prominent Jewish Republican donor, Sheldon Adelson. Adelson backed Trump in this year’s election towards the end of the race, giving tens of millions of dollars to the Trump campaign and pro-Trump political action committees. 
+“I love and respect Israel and its citizens,” wrote Trump. “Israel and the US share so many common values, like free speech, freedom of worship, and the special emphasis on creating opportunities for all citizens to fulfill their dreams.” 
+“I look forward to strengthening the unbreakable bond between our two great peoples. I know well that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and that it is the only one that defends human rights, and that it is a ray of hope for many people.” 
+Along with his praise for the Jewish state, Trump also touched upon the thorniest issue in the Israel-US relationship – the two-state solution.",FAKE
+2504,"Along the migrant trail, pressure grows to close Europe’s open borders","With Slovenia behind them and Austria just ahead, the asylum seekers shoved at the metal barriers blocking their path and chanted a plea into the smoky night air: “We want to go!”
+
+Nearly 1,000 people had been waiting all day for the border crossing to open, penned into a no-man’s land by twitchy troops armed with pistols and assault rifles who met requests for food or water with stern commands and glares icy enough to match the fast-falling temperature.
+
+“We’ve already spent two nights outside,” said Galia Ali, pointing to her severely disabled 8-year-old son, who lay shivering on a blanket near a dwindling fire. “If we’re still here in the morning, he’ll be dead.”
+
+[As human flood continues, Germany slaps controls on border with Austria]
+
+Hours later, the barriers were lifted, and the migrants surged into Austria. But up and down the route being traveled by a historic number of migrants this year as they seek new lives in Europe, pressure is building to close the continent’s cherished open borders for good.
+
+Hungary already has proved that it can largely insulate itself from the refugee crisis by deploying razor wire and threatening lengthy prison sentences for anyone who dares cross it. The country’s moves have shifted the burden of the refugee crisis to its neighbors — and are now tempting leaders in those nations to build their own fences.
+
+The U.N. refugee agency said Monday that a record 218,394 people crossed the Mediterranean to reach European shores in October — about as many as the total from all of last year. As the numbers rise, officials in countries across central and southeastern Europe are eyeing one another nervously, fearing that a sudden closure of any one border could unleash a domino effect across the region that would leave tens of thousands of people stranded and angry, far from their intended destinations in the continent’s north.
+
+The result would be chaos and violence, said Croatian Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic, who has coordinated his country’s response as more than 300,000 people have crossed through the small coastal nation since mid-September — including 8,400 on Sunday alone.
+
+“You really think you can stop these people without shooting?” Ostojic said. “You’d have to build a wall around Europe if you really wanted to stop these kinds of flows.”
+
+Rather than try to impede the movement of migrants, Croatia has sought to speed it up, arranging trains to ferry people from the Serbian border in the east to the Slovenian border in the west. But the country’s right-wing opposition, which is a slight favorite to win national elections Sunday, has proposed a different solution: a fence.
+
+Slovenia has said it is considering a fence of its own. Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec described that action as “a last resort” but added that he is “very much concerned” that other countries will erect barriers, leaving his tiny Alpine nation shouldering an unsustainable burden. Even now, he said, Slovenia is struggling to cope.
+
+“We cannot go on like this for a long time,” Erjavec said in an e-mailed response to questions. “We have received more than 100,000 migrants in just two weeks. This number represents 5% of our population. Our human, financial and material resources are limited.”
+
+Farther up the trail, Austrian officials said last week that they are planning barriers to better regulate the movement of migrants coming across from Slovenia. They quickly clarified that they have no intention of closing the border. But they also have said they will not be able to leave it open if Germany — the next stop after Austria and for many asylum seekers the final destination — decides it can no longer handle an influx that brought more than a half-million asylum seekers to the country during the first nine months of the year. As her poll numbers fall, calls are growing for Chancellor Angela Merkel to do exactly that.
+
+“Everyone is afraid of the moment when Germany decides it has had enough,” said Igor Tabak, a Croatian security analyst for the Web site Obris.org.
+
+The closure of borders, Tabak said, would not only undermine the principle of free movement at the heart of Europe’s post-Cold War identity, but it also could be deeply destabilizing in the Balkans, where countries that were in conflict with one another less than a generation ago are being forced to cooperate on the biggest challenge to confront the European Union in decades.
+
+Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia have spent weeks trading accusations of mishandling the crisis. Should a right-wing Croatian government opt to close the border with Serbia, Tabak said, the flow would probably shift to Bosnia, an ethnically divided nation that has struggled to hang together since its blood-soaked birth.
+
+“If you have an influx of a large number of migrants into such a fragile system, it’s easy to imagine the local institutions crumbling in Bosnia,” Tabak said.
+
+Ostojic, the Croatian interior minister, said coordination among the regional rivals has improved after an emergency meeting of Balkan nations in Brussels late last month. In recent days, trains have begun to speed migrants through the region as part of a trial program that is expected to be fully rolled out this week.
+
+The system replaces one that officials acknowledge was woefully unsuited to the scale of the crisis. In the first two weeks after Hungary closed its border with Croatia, forcing migrants to reroute through Slovenia, thousands of people slept in the open each night as rain poured and temperatures plummeted.
+
+Slovenia accused Croatia of sending migrants streaming across the border without warning. Croatia charged that Slovenia had failed to ready itself — a point that some Slovenian officials now concede.
+
+“Nobody had foreseen what was going to happen. The country was not prepared,” said Ivan Molan, mayor of Brezice, a handsome Slovenian town of red-tiled roofs and quiet lanes that has borne the brunt of the crisis.
+
+Molan said the new system of moving asylum seekers across borders by train could help to normalize life in a place where up to 10,000 people had been trekking each day through farmers’ fields and driving away the tourists who normally flock to Brezice for a dip at its thermal spas.
+
+But he fears that the Austrians will close their border, trapping frustrated migrants in Slovenia. The country, like others in the Balkans, has no recent history of welcoming refugees from outside the region and has little to offer them. “If that happens, this part of Slovenia will descend into a real crisis,” Molan said.
+
+At the other end of the country — a mere 75 miles to the north — refugees who were awaiting the chance to walk into Austria said they were desperate to leave a place that had brought them only grief.
+
+“I didn’t even know Slovenia existed before I came here,” said Sozdar el-Hassan, a 24-year-old from Damascus who stood pressed against an iron barricade while clutching her 22-month-old daughter. “It’s the smallest country, but it gave us the most problems.”
+
+On a journey that has become a race to beat both winter weather and the prospect of closed borders, Slovenia had badly stalled her family’s progress: They had crossed through five countries in four days, but Slovenia alone took another four.
+
+One night, they slept outside in the mud, with no blankets. For two days, they were housed in a crowded and filthy tent, with heavily armed police barring the exits. Hassan said they were forbidden to leave the tent to visit family members or even to use the toilet.
+
+“I asked one of the police, ‘Are we prisoners here?’ And he responded, ‘For this moment, you’re prisoners,’ ” said Hassan, a cheery and bright-eyed woman who said she learned English by watching Tom Hanks movies. “It was devastating.”
+
+Hassan said she dreams of studying accounting in Germany after her education was cut short by the war in Syria. But as she stood in the cold and rain waiting for the border to be opened, her exhausted daughter screaming in her arms, she conceded that she would settle for falling a little bit short.
+
+“At least I want to get to Austria,” she said. “I just don’t want to stay here.”
+
+Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.
+
+European railways become ground zero for the migrant crisis
+
+Black route: One family’s journey from Aleppo to Austria
+
+New U.N. report says world’s refugee crisis is worse than anyone expected
+
+Read The Post’s coverage on the global surge in migration",REAL
+9466,"News: Inspiring: When This Woman Was Feeling Too Lazy To Vote, Her Ovaries Burst Out Of Her Body And Dragged Her To The Polling Place","Email 
+Well, if this doesn’t inspire you to do your civic duty, nothing will! 
+When California resident Candice Payne woke up this morning, she wasn’t totally sure she was up to going through the hassle of voting. She figured the lines would be long, the wait would be awful, and the stress probably wouldn’t be worth it. But just when this 26-year-old woman was feeling too lazy to vote, something absolutely amazing happened—her ovaries burst out of her body and dragged her to the polling place. 
+Amazing! Now THAT is how you rally on Election Day! 
+Like so many Americans, Candice spent her morning lying in her bed, kicking herself for not having voted early, but as soon as it seemed like she’d go back to sleep, her fallopian tubes shot out of her abdomen, curled themselves around the side of her bed, and threw her to the floor. After dragging her body to her living room, her helpful ovaries crawled up to the doorknob and jostled the front door open. What started out as a lazy morning ended with her ovaries anchoring themselves to the floor and pulling the rest of her body to a polling place at nearby Jefferson Public School, where she dutifully filled out her ballot for President of the United States! 
+If that’s not getting out the vote, we don’t know what is! It’s definitely easy to come up with a million excuses to avoid the polls, but once Candice’s ovaries had shot out of her body, they weren’t going to retract back inside until she had done her civic duty! 
+While it might have been a bit of an inconvenience to spend the morning voting, no matter how much she tried to resist, Candice’s ovaries kept pulling and clawing at the floor, dragging her flailing body farther and farther until she arrived at a voting booth to cast her vote. Sure, she would rather have been sleeping, or at work, but three miles and several forceful tugs later, she was inside a voting booth and back on her feet, casting her ballot, and exercising her fundamental American right. 
+Awesome. If you’re thinking of just staying inside, going to work, and skipping the polls altogether, it’s not too late to change your mind. Candice felt just like you once, but after being violently dragged by her ovaries to a polling station, she’s never felt better!",FAKE
+8271,Smart Meter Case Testimony Before the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission: What No One Wants to Acknowledge About EMF Damage (Part 2 of 4),"By Catherine J. Frompovich 
+This is the continuation of the testimony I will present before the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission’s Administrative Law Court November 2 and 3, 2016. 
+Currently, Chairman Representative Godshall is allowing three more opt out bills to become sine die this session, which should amount to an impeachable offense for denying consumers their inherent and indefeasible rights, especially of redress to government, and also according to the Pennsylvania Constitution, I contend. 
+Probably nothing encapsulates and explains the EMF/RFR controversy or conundrum, if you may, from a scientific viewpoint than the 35-page report “ EUROPAEM EMF Guideline 2016 for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of EMF-related health problems and illnesses ,” which is a Spanish language document and found online at https://listas.um.es/sympa/arc/anuncios/2016-07/msg00069.html This report cites 308 published scientific references, which leaves Frompovich to question why the PA PUC—and PECO in particular—are so daft in proffering that there is no updated science other than the 1940s era ‘safety’ THERMAL science regarding microwave electromagnetic energies based in ‘ancient’ radar studies the microwave industry always trots out as proof of ‘safety’. 
+Those ‘safety’ studies originated in Germany during World War II; are totally outmoded; but remain the present Federal Communications Commission’s rules regarding safety of cell phones and AMI Smart Meters. It is now 2016! How come 1940s microwave technology science is being applied as the ‘gold standard’ or ‘scientific criterion’ to meters that will become the key intelligence gathering technology for the Internet of Things? Frompovich has to question the credibility factor of both PECO and the PA PUC for depending upon 1940 science in today’s technology world of 2016. Where’s the science later than the 1940s? Please, may I have those studies PECO supplied to the PA PUC? 
+Frompovich, therefore, respectfully suggests that the PA PUC study the above-aforementioned European reports with medical and EHS health professionals, who are qualified to explain the diagnostics and varied modalities discussed, in order to issue updated regulations affecting AMI Smart Meters and their continuous RFR/EMF health-damaging electromagnetics, plus their fire-and-explosion-prone proclivities and occurrences, which definitely was not the case for all the decades utilities used safe and efficient analog meters. 
+Children are the most vulnerable to EMF radiation and, therefore, I introduce Exhibit U-1 “Why children absorb more microwave radiation than adults: The Consequences,” and Exhibit U-2 “American Academy of Pediatrics August 29, 2013 letter urging the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, the Federal Communications Commission and others to advise the public about Specific Absorption Rates (SARs) regarding EMF/RF exposures.” 
+Also, I want to apprise every one of the fact that electromagnetic sensitivity (EHS) is a growing problem and according to recently reported statistics in the peer reviewed journal ECOPSYCHOLOGY, Professor Pamela Reed Gibson states the following: 26% of the USA population; 19% of the Swedish population; 27% of the Danish population; and 32 % of the German population are EHS compromised. See Exhibit V . However, other sources claim that as much as 5% of the entire world’s population is affected. 
+Just as chemical sensitivities were discredited and denied by medical doctors for years—now referred to as “sick building syndrome” or “Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS)—so, too, is EHS now being recognized by many, including the World Health Organization. I introduce Exhibit W “Electrohypersensitivity: a functional impairment due to an inaccessible environment.” Printout available here https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=forums&srcid=MDgxODkwOTk5NjU5OTU4ODQwNTYBMTU3NTIzMDA1MTQxNTY1NzI0NTcBTVRzdGFEOUNBUUFKATAuMQEBdjI 
+As Exhibit X I introduce a study no one can refute, “A review on Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and the reproductive system,” which outlines science the microwave industry, PECO and all utilities utilizing AMI Smart Meters, plus public utility commissions across the USA need to factor into the inevitable legal liability that they are assuming by committing crimes against humanity by exposing the population to unsafe microwave electromagnetics 24/7/365 from dirty electricity pulsed by AMI SMs onto home wiring and into private residences and all buildings retrofitted with AMI Smart Meters. 
+Before I include my previously submitted testimony, I find it necessary to impress upon the court that it should not be Frompovich’s obligation to prove the medical consequences beyond a reasonable doubt, especially in light of the ADA Amendments Act as it applies to those receiving federal funding or even that the consequences of medical problems are more probable than not, since the ADAAA provides Frompovich with disability rights and protections, which PECO and the PA PUC must abide by. 
+Furthermore, it should be the indisputable duty of PECO and all Pennsylvania utility companies – but more specifically that of the PA Public Utility Commission’s stated mission for being – to provide safe and non-radiating innovations in utility technology and appliances with 100% certainty, which AMI Smart Meters fail on numerous levels, especially with their proclivity for “hot sockets,” fires and explosions, EMF/RF constant emissions and dirty electricity pulses as frequent as 9600 times a day! 
+No medical-scientific testing has proved AMI Smart Meters EMFs safety regarding non-thermal adverse health effects that I know of. Where’s the science? 
+Therefore, Frompovich should not be forced to allow a proven-fire-prone AMI Smart Meter electric service on her property that would radiate dirty electricity into her residence with high RFR pulses every fifteen seconds. 
+Just to add more “salt to the wound,” as they would say, there are no assurances that monitoring is not part and parcel of the AMI Smart Meter agenda and an integral surveillance device of the Internet of Things, or that information will be shared with unknown third parties—for whatever reasons—and for which Frompovich does not approve nor give her permission to PECO, the PA PUC or any government agencies or agents. 
+Therefore, Frompovich feels her privacy, as well as her home and personal physiology, will be subjected to unlawful, unconstitutional and unnecessary interventions at various levels and, specifically, without proper legal processes, e.g., court-issued warrants, in order to surveil her home that automatically will occur from the two-way ZigBee radio transmitter system of AMI SMs and all “smart” appliances which are built to interact with the coming surveillance technology of the Internet of Things. The times Frompovich makes tea in the morning and shuts off her lights for the night are no one’s business but her own. 
+I’ve been researching consumer health issues and whatsoever affects human health negatively , including technologies, since the late 1970s. During my career, I was considered an expert witness providing testimony before several states’ legislature/legislative hearings on health issues. For numerous years I was ahead of both the popular curve and the allopathic paradigm of medicine regarding the role of diet, nutrition, epigenetics, and lifestyle issues in maintaining optimum health, avoiding disease and regaining health utilizing holistic health principles. 
+I am in my 78 th year, thank God. Since the early 1970s, when I almost lost my life due to unfortunate medical mistakes and had to remove myself from mainstream allopathic care in order to save my life, I’ve been immersed in what’s called the “holistic lifestyle.” I’ve beaten the odds, including being a breast cancer survivor, using holistic healthcare modalities. For the record, 38.3% of U.S. adults and 11.8% of U.S. children used what’s referred to as CAM in 2007 per NIH statistics[1]. Complementary and Alternative Medicine—CAM as it’s called, is popular throughout the world, while in the U.S. there is the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at the National Institutes of Health. 
+However, the allopathic paradigm considers it, quite frankly, a pain in its professional butt since CAM has become the “go to” healthcare system when allopathy fails one. 
+Therefore, I expect that I probably will educate misinformed individuals on the negative health consequences of electromagnetic frequencies from microwave energy producing technologies like cell phones and towers, Wi-Fi, ‘smart’ gadgets, and, in particular, AMI Smart Meters, which are being bully-forced onto electric, natural gas, and municipal water utility customers. Most state legislators, the media and the public are undeniably ignorant of the damage being done to their health. Fortunately, I am not one of those people, thus my refusing an AMI Smart Meter on my house. But, first I think you ought to know some of my background: I’m a well-informed, plus over 40 years published consumer health researcher, advocate-activist, journalist, and author. 
+That I should be taken seriously, I offer some of my professional background: retired practicing natural nutritionist; former registered lobbyist with the U.S. Congress for five years representing holistic healthcare issues; executive director for the national Coalition for Alternatives in Nutrition And Healthcare (CANAH) for five years and, as such, presented FDA-solicited expertise input regarding holistic health practices for its 1990 OTA report OTA-H-405 NTIS #PB91-104893[2] “Unconventional Cancer Treatments” [3]; expert nutrition witness before a congressional subcommittee opposing food irradiation; government relations specialist for a consortium of natural nutrition supplement makers before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; the first Government Relations specialist for the Life Extension Foundation, who set up LEF’s government relations department; a published journalist; author of numerous books regarding health and lifestyle issues with several books available on Amazon.com and my 2016 book, Eat to Beat Disease, Foods Medicinal Qualities. 
+Additionally, I wrote and produced two TV shows. One called, “ Turn Off the Violence ” was nominated for a Telly Award. That hour-long show was instrumental in securing the Giraffe Award given to persons, who stick out their necks for the common good. The recipient was George Mason University staff member Connie Kirkland[4], who founded a 24-hour crisis center for rape victims and promoted on-campus non-violence educational campaigns specifically relating to rape and domestic violence. What I’ve shared is much less than half of my background. More would take too much of your time. However, I feel compelled to ask, “How many people can match my qualifications to discuss consumer health issues?” 
+Furthermore, I want to underscore upfront that IF I were a habitual drug addict, rather than an informed, concerned health-conscious researcher and consumer being harassed for trying to protect and preserve my health, I probably would be welcomed with open arms, plus there would be all types of programs and subsidies available for help. Because I am opposing faulty and health-damaging RF/EMF ‘science’, plus vested-interest snooping, surveillance, and customer data marketing agendas using AMI smart meters, I am harassed and even threatened with termination of electric service even though all my bills are paid in full. That leaves me with no options but to dutifully invoke and defend my state and federal constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Isn’t there something radically wrong with such a construct, especially in the USA, if I have to do that? 
+Attorney Ward Smith’s interrogatory requesting Frompovich’s cancer health records, quite frankly, leaves everyone with whom I’ve shared that fact, totally aghast and amazed! Why? Because Frompovich’s medical records are her personal information protected under HIPPA and I must protect them. Furthermore, since the PUC Administrative Law Court hearing is of public record, Frompovich does not want her personal medical records made public information during any level in these proceedings, as that is her fundamental right. 
+I respectfully bring to this court’s attention that my breast cancer and medical records are NOT the issue. What’s the issue, problem, and at stake not only for me, but for all Pennsylvanians, is the total callous disregard by utility companies—PECO included, the PA PUC, and the Commonwealth for health hazards, safety, and the wellbeing of all Pennsylvanians, especially those with health issues, compromised immune systems, disabilities, and especially young, growing children—fetuses in particular—whom RF/EMF and dirty electricity produced by AMI Smart Meters affect and impact negatively. 
+Before presenting into the record additional reams of recent research with documentation and annotations—not 1940s vintage radar safety research—for RFs/EMFs and microwave electromagnetic energies impacts upon cancer and health, I feel it necessary to introduce something no one probably has thought about nor factored into the AMI Smart Meter hidden costs continuum , and that is, healthcare services and ancillary costs stemming from non-ionizing radiation RFs/EMFs Smart Meters impact upon human tissue. 
+There are mounting underlying, long-term adverse health effects accruing as we speak from PA PUC-PECO forced AMI Smart Meter 24/7/365 RF/EMF electromagnetics, pulses, harmonics and dirty electricity, specifically adverse Non-thermal health effects, impacting children and an ageing PA population, which will generate dire fiscal consequences, plus responsibilities, upon Penna. Medicaid health cost line items in each year’s operating budget for the Commonwealth. 
+To cement that forewarning, I offer the World Health Organization’s statistic, “Approximately 10% of reported cases of EHS [electromagnetic hypersensitivity] were considered severe,” which means specialized caregiving. That, however, does not include cancer-induced health issues from RFs/EMFs! What kind of budget shortfall will AMI Smart Meters adverse health effects eventually generate for PA’s legislature and governor to haggle about, when we’ve seen what’s been going on recently to get a state budget passed? Has anyone thought about that very real problem? 
+Continued in Part 3",FAKE
+6596,Reporters Stunned to Learn Trump Fans Lining Up 12 Hours Before Rally Starts,"Hillary Camp Caught on Camera Telling Tiny Crowd What to Cheer for 
+Fitzpatrick wound up being just one of an estimated 10,000 who reportedly showed up for the event. So many Floridians came to see Trump, in fact, that the hangar ran out of space. 
+“They said, ‘The people don’t fit into the hangar,'” Trump himself later admitted to his supporters at the start of his speech. “I said, ‘That’s a good problem — isn’t it?'” 
+Actually, it was a great problem — one unknown to Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, whose rallies have been embarrassingly small in comparison to those for Trump and his own running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. Advertisement - story continues below 
+For instance, a rally held by Kaine in Florida this Monday reportedly attracted roughly 30 attendees: 
+Nor was this an isolated event: 
+The media has cited countless polls to argue that Trump is slated to lose the November election, but the huge enthusiasm gap suggests otherwise. Advertisement - story continues below",FAKE
+8170,IOWA FARMER CLAIMS BILL CLINTON HAD SEX WITH COW DURING ‘COCAINE PARTY’,"Email 
+
+Sioux Falls, IA | During his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton allegedly had sexual intercourse with cattle off of Tom Brady’s family dairy farm. 
+The family farm which was owned by Tom Brady’s father at the time, Willow Brady Jr., was often visited by the Clinton family when they were in the area. 
+“My dad and Bill Clinton’s step dad were like brothers. They often visited us on the holidays when I was a kid. Bill even knew the cows names by heart. That always surprised me” recalls the 64-year-old, third-generation dairy farmer. 
+“ My father was a strong Democratic party supporter all his life and a big Bill Clinton fan, so I never found the strength to tell him the truth before he passed away ” 
+Sex, drugs and cattle 
+During the 1992 Iowa caucus, the Clinton campaign stopped by for a night of festivities at the Brady’s farm, a night Tom Brady says he will never forget. 
+“The Clinton team came by and we drank a lot and all was merry before they started indulging in hard drugs, that’s when everything went wrong” he recalls, visibly distraught by the whole affair. 
+“I don’t know about all those stories about him sexually assaulting women, but I sure as hell know he assaulted one of our cows because I was there and I saw him do it with my own eyes and believe me, it’s not something I’d wish my worst enemy to live to see” he told local reporters. 
+“I’m sorry for the Clinton family, but as a God-fearing Christian, I just had to let the truth be known” he adds. 
+Bill Clinton has been personally accused publicly by seventeen women of sexual misconduct between 1972 and 1997. The former US President also admitted to having had an “inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky while she worked at the White House in 1995 and 1996.",FAKE
+3216,Republicans Reject Calls on Guantanamo Bay Closure,"Senate Republicans are rejecting renewed calls by Democrats and a retired Supreme Court justice to expedite closing Guantanamo Bay, saying they fear released detainees could pose a security threat.",REAL
+4201,GOP elites are now resigned to Donald Trump as their nominee,"Throughout the Republican Party, from New Hampshire to Florida to California, many leaders, operatives, donors and activists arrived this week at the conclusion they had been hoping to thwart or at least delay: Donald Trump will be their presidential nominee.
+
+An aura of inevitability is now forming around the controversial mogul. Trump smothered his opponents in six straight primaries in the Northeast and vacuumed up more delegates than even the most generous predictions foresaw. He is gaining high-profile ­endorsements by the day — a legendary Indiana basketball coach Wednesday, two House committee chairmen Thursday. And his ­rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are making the kind of rushed tactical moves that signal desperation.
+
+The party is at a turning point. Republican stalwarts opposed to Trump remain fearful of the damage the unconventional and unruly billionaire might inflict on the party’s down-ballot candidates in November. But many also now see him as the all-but-certain nominee and are exhausted by the prospect of a contested July convention, according to interviews this week with more than a dozen party figures from coast to coast.
+
+“People are realizing that he’s the likely nominee,” said Tim Pawlenty, a former Minnesota governor and onetime endorser of Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. “The hysteria has died down, and the range of emotion is from resignation to enthusiasm.”
+
+In Colorado — where Cruz outfoxed Trump in a series of clamorous meetings earlier this month to win all of the state’s 34 available delegates — former state party chairman Dick Wadhams said, “Fatigue is probably the perfect description of what people are feeling.”
+
+He continued: “There is an acceptance, a resignation or whatever, that Trump is going to be the nominee. More and more people hope he wins that nomination on the first ballot because they do not want to see a convention that explodes into total chaos. People just want this to be over with — and we need a nominee.”
+
+[Trump rolls to crushing victories in five East Coast primaries]
+
+With likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton pivoting to a general election and her well-funded allies readying for a full-out assault, Republicans are eager to unite quickly. Some are fearful that waiting until the convention in Cleveland to pick a nominee would put the party at a disadvantage in raising money and engaging the Democrats.
+
+“The lion’s share of Republicans want the process settled,” said Mike Dennehy, a veteran New ­Hampshire-based party strategist. “There’s anxiety setting in about the process, and that’s what people are tired of. They just want it done, they want the fighting to stop, and they want a general-election campaign to begin in a meaningful way.”
+
+So does Trump. Celebrating his sweep in Tuesday’s primaries, he declared himself the “presumptive nominee.” At a rally the next day in Indianapolis, he proclaimed, “We’re just about ready to put it away, folks.”
+
+Cruz is pushing back on the idea that Trump is nearing a lock on the nomination. He took the unusual step Wednesday of choosing a running mate, businesswoman Carly Fiorina. The new ticket, as well as independent groups opposed to Trump, see Indiana’s primary on Tuesday as their best — and perhaps last — chance to derail the front-runner and deny him the nomination.
+
+Opposition to Trump still runs strong in parts of the GOP establishment. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a vocal Trump critic and former presidential candidate, praised Cruz’s pick of Fiorina in a CNN interview that aired Thursday — in part because he said “she takes on Trump really well.”
+
+Speaking to reporters Thursday in Fort Wayne, Ind., Cruz predicted that Trump will not win the majority of delegates — 1,237 — and blamed the mainstream media for bestowing what the senator considers a false sense of inevitability on Trump’s campaign.
+
+“Donald, sadly aided and abetted by media network executives who are all liberal Democrats, who are all rooting for Hillary, are quick to say that the race is over,” Cruz said.
+
+[Indiana looms large for Cruz, while options to stop Trump dwindle]
+
+The race is not over, but both Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are already mathematically eliminated from clinching the nomination on a first ballot and would need a convention floor fight to win. Trump has won 992 of the required 1,237 delegates so far, according to the Associated Press. Cruz has 562, and Kasich has 153. If he falls short, Trump could persuade unbound delegates to lift him over the threshold on the first ballot at the convention.
+
+“Trump has become a fact rather than a problem,” said Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who has offered informal advice to Trump but has not endorsed him. “Show me mathematically how you’re going to stop him. This all assumes, by the way, that the guy who wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ can’t figure out a way to make a deal with the undecided delegates.”
+
+Republican consultants across the country are singing the same tune. Reed Galen in Southern California said: “Is it a done deal? It’s certainly looking that way.” In Georgia, Tom Perdue said, “If you go to barbershops in Atlanta, you’ll hear people say they never thought he’d end up being the nominee, but for the most part people think he will be the nominee.”
+
+On Thursday, Trump’s top campaign adviser, Paul Manafort, was on Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers and press his case that Trump is becoming the de facto GOP standard-bearer.
+
+Two prominent GOP establishment congressmen — Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, who chairs the House Transportation Committee, and Jeff Miller of Florida, who chairs the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee — endorsed Trump on Thursday.
+
+“It’s time for our party to unite behind Donald Trump and focus our time and energy on defeating Hillary Clinton,” Shuster said in a statement.
+
+[At RNC meeting, some elites aren’t quite convinced by Trump charm offensive]
+
+That echoes what Florida Gov. Rick Scott said Wednesday in a Facebook posting calling for an end to the “Never Trump” movement among conservatives: “Donald Trump is going to be our nominee, and he is going to be on the ballot as the Republican candidate for President. The Republican leaders in Washington did not choose him, but the Republican voters across America did choose him. The voters have spoken.”
+
+Brian Ballard, a Florida-based lobbyist whose clients have included Trump’s real estate company and who also was a top fundraiser for the Bush and Rubio campaigns, said many donors in his state are ready to give to Trump and the Republican National Committee for the general election.
+
+“I think he has earned the nomination, as far as I’m concerned,” he said of Trump. “The folks that I talk to are moving towards him rapidly, though there’s going to be holdouts till the very end who are bitter about what happened.”
+
+At last week’s RNC meeting in Hollywood, Fla., many party officials seemed resigned, if not thrilled, with the idea of Trump as the GOP candidate.
+
+“More and more Republicans are believing that Trump is the inevitable nominee,” said Ron Kaufman, an RNC member from Massachusetts who is close to 2012 nominee Mitt Romney and former president George H.W. Bush. “They’re accepting the fact that he’s the nominee and looking forward to moving on.”
+
+Sean Sullivan in Fort Wayne, Ind., contributed to this report.",REAL
+4192,Trump's Indiana win raises unsettling questions for GOP,"Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Tuesday, winning the Indiana primary as Ted Cruz dropped out. It punctuates the power of the populist rebellion against the GOP elite.
+
+As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?
+
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at The Palladium at the Center for Performing Arts in Carmel, Ind.
+
+For weeks, #NeverTrump Republicans saw the Indiana primary as one of the final firewalls standing between an outright win for the Manhattan billionaire and a contested convention in July, where another candidate could possibly emerge victorious.
+
+The Hoosier state, after all, seemed ripe for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas – strongly evangelical and with a pronounced tea-party tilt.
+
+Now, it stands as a microcosm of this Republican primary season, showing the depth of the Republican revolt in the most decisive terms yet.
+
+Indiana Republicans chose Donald Trump Tuesday, giving him more than 50 percent of the vote with two-thirds of the vote counted. Senator Cruz responded by suspending his presidential campaign. Mr. Trump's pathway to the Republican presidential nomination now appears clear.
+
+As a result, Indiana has underlined deep and unsettling questions for the Republican Party.
+
+Mr. Trump’s appeal to working class whites through economic populism and anti-immigrant nationalism beat Senator Cruz’s focus on establishment orthodoxy and culture-war worries.
+
+On one hand, that’s nothing new. In sweeping the South, Trump again and again won Republican bulwarks with a message that, stripped to its essence, doesn’t really look very Republican – at least not as the party has defined itself since Ronald Reagan. Save Social Security. Rein in free trade. Support Planned Parenthood.
+
+The difference is, Indiana was #NeverTrump’s last stand. Practically speaking, it has no more deeply red and electorally significant states in which to fight. And now, it has lost Cruz, too.
+
+Republican voters have decided, and the forces seeking to push the Trump rebellion to the margins have lost.
+
+What happens in the embers of this primary season and the general election ahead will shape what the Republican Party takes from 2016. But Indiana punctuates a now-inescapable conclusion: The party is not what it thought it was just nine months ago.
+
+The Republican Party has been loath to reach this conclusion.
+
+In rallying behind Cruz in a last-ditch effort to stop Trump, many insiders chose a candidate who was, at least, reliably Republican – even if his politics and personality grated.
+
+Now the party must ask itself if it is merely Trump’s personality that has galvanized Republican primary voters, or if he is the vessel for a deeper shift away from the low tax, small government, free trade orthodoxies that have dominated the party for more than 30 years.
+
+That remains an open question. To some, Trump is a singular phenomenon – a political outlier whose success comes from his inimitable style. Cruz’s inability to compete even on such apparently friendly turf speaks to his lack of charisma.
+
+“It appears that Cruz is having a hard time galvanizing voters because he is not winning the hearts of voters the way successful candidates need to do,” says Amy Black, a political scientist at Wheaton College in Illinois. “He isn't perceived as likeable, and that is a tough hurdle for voters. For many voters, it isn't enough for a candidate to line up with them on issues; personality and charisma matter a lot in American politics.”
+
+Moreover, Indiana held unique advantages for Trump, too. It has more manufacturing jobs as part of its total employment than any other state in the nation. Since the early days of the campaign, Trump has railed against Indianapolis-based Carrier Corp. moving production of its air conditioners to Mexico.
+
+“From steel mills on the shores of Lake Michigan to the medical device hub of Warsaw, to Elkhart, the ‘RV capital of the world,’ Indiana’s blue-collar workforce – and its blue-collar retirees – are machine-made for Trump,” wrote David Wasserman at FiveThirtyEight on Monday.
+
+Still, Trump’s repeated success in some of the reddest and most evangelical states – such as Indiana – has thrown doubt on the traditional Republican message. As the white working class continues to struggle after the Great Recession, classic Republican talking-points don't appear to be resonating as they once did.
+
+A Cruz advertisement in Indiana likened Trump to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton: “Both support the Obamacare individual mandate. Both support taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Both support letting transgender men go in little girls’ bathrooms,” the ad says.
+
+And again on Tuesday, Cruz’s angst boiled over as he made a desperate plea to the Republican spirit he knows best, accusing Trump of being “utterly amoral” and “a serial philanderer.”
+
+None of it worked.
+
+“At the very least, [this] does suggest that Republicans’ longstanding strategy of building majorities for their anti-tax platform by appealing to working-class voters’ Christian morals has lost a lot of its power,” wrote Eduardo Porter in The New York Times last month. And “it took Mr. Trump to identify the real Achilles’ heel in the Reagan coalition: an economic policy built around tax cuts for the wealthy that has failed to deliver the goods to the Republican base for far too long.”
+
+This in a state where, in 2012 exit polls, more than 1 in 3 voters identified as white, born-again Christians. Where GOP primary voters ousted Sen. Richard Lugar, a 36-year moderate incumbent, in favor of tea party purist Richard Mourdock. (Mr. Mourdock lost the general election after making controversial comments about rape and abortion.)
+
+Nine GOP primaries remain before June 7, and the two biggest – New Jersey and California – are hardly deep red.
+
+As working class concerns dominate this year’s election in both parties, the relative strength of Evangelicals has begun to wane – as well as their traditional support for Republicans.
+
+Republicans delivered nothing but “defeat after defeat in the culture wars,” wrote Stephen Prothero, professor of religion at Boston University, in Politico Magazine in March. “Cultural conservatives failed to pass constitutional amendments on school prayer or abortion. They lost on Bill Clinton’s impeachment. They lost on pop culture, where movies and television shows today make the sort of entertainment decried by the Moral Majority look like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ And same-sex marriage is now the law of the land.”
+
+Cruz announced his candidacy at evangelical Liberty University last year to signal his strategy of courting the GOP’s most reliable constituency over the years. He sent his father, Rafael Cruz, an evangelical minister, to congregations across the state. Now, he might end up being a cautionary tale to those who depend on such a strategy.
+
+“Cruz has been hobbled all along by his failure to win evangelical-rich states,” wrote The Atlantic’s David Graham on Monday, “so it would be fitting if Trump manages to deal his campaign a mortal blow by beating him in just such a state on Tuesday.”",REAL
+9850,Cypriot leaders to continue talks in November: UN,"EU UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (C) meets with Greek Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades (L) and Mustafa Akinci (R), the Turkish Cypriot leader, at the UN headquarters in New York, September 25, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
+Cypriot political leaders have agreed to continue talks in Switzerland next month in an attempt to reach an agreement on the reunification of the Mediterranean island country, the United Nations (UN) has announced. 
+A UN spokesman, Aleem Siddique, made the announcement on Wednesday, saying Greek Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci will meet at Mont Pelerin, near Lake Geneva, from November 7 to 11. 
+Siddique said the two leaders, in the presence of the UN envoy for Cyprus, will concentrate their talks on how much territory each side will administer under an envisioned federation and will discuss all other outstanding issues, too. 
+The leaders have expressed hope that the Switzerland meeting “will pave the way for the last phase of talks in line with their shared commitment to do their utmost in order to reach a settlement within 2016,” the UN spokesman said. 
+Negotiations on reuniting the Mediterranean island under a single federal roof have made significant headway since Anastasiades and Akinci resumed talks led by the UN nearly 18 months ago. 
+However, important differences still remain on the question of territorial arrangements, security and property rights. 
+Previous UN-mediated talks to reunify the Mediterranean island faced a deadlock in October 2014 when Turkey announced plans to search for oil and gas in waters off Cyprus. 
+Cyprus has been divided since 1974, after an intervention by Turkey, which came when a military coup was carried out by individuals who sought to unify the island with Greece. 
+Nearly one decade later in 1983, Turkish Cypriots declared an independent state, which has only been recognized by Ankara. Turkey has some 35,000 soldiers stationed in the north of that part of Cyprus. 
+Cyprus has been a European Union (EU) member since 2004, but only the south enjoys full membership benefits. Loading ...",FAKE
+3598,"Freed Al Qaeda operative floated as part of prisoner swap, ex-diplomat says","An admitted Al Qaeda agent released this month from a U.S. federal prison had been offered up as part of a potential prisoner swap in exchange for two Americans held in Qatar, a former U.S. diplomat said Monday.
+
+Richard Grenell, who had worked on the case of the jailed Americans, confirmed to Fox News that the offer was put on the table.
+
+""There's no disputing the fact. I don't care what they say -- the idea was floated,"" he said.
+
+The Daily Beast first reported that the trade was proposed to the then-U.S. ambassador in Qatar in July 2014 by an individual close to Qatar's attorney general. Grenell, a former spokesman for the U.S. mission at the United Nations under the George W. Bush administration, confirmed the idea was floated to then-U.S. Ambassador Susan Ziadeh by a ""close confidant"" of the Qatari attorney general.
+
+Further, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., wrote in a letter last week to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee that he understands ""engagement began months ago"" on such a ""possible exchange arrangement for other Americans"" at the request of the Qataris.
+
+Al Qaeda operative Ali Saleh al-Marri, who had been in U.S. custody since 2001, was ultimately released this month prior to completing his 15-year sentence because of ""time served,"" according to the Justice Department.
+
+Meanwhile, the two Americans -- Matthew and Grace Huang -- were allowed to leave the country last December after their controversial conviction in the death of their adopted daughter was overturned.
+
+Administration officials, though, disputed the notion that the Al Qaeda operative's release was part of a quid pro quo. A State Department official told The Daily Beast that ""no such proposal was ever on the table."" The official said al-Marri was sent home as scheduled, not because of a deal.
+
+""Al-Marri's release happened as a matter of course, as a result of his court-imposed sentence being completed,"" another administration official told The Daily Beast.
+
+That squares with what other officials have claimed.
+
+""After more than 14 years in U.S. custody, Al-Marri completed his court-imposed sentence on his terrorism conviction,"" DOJ spokesman Marc Raimondi told Fox News on Monday. ""He has been removed from the United States and is barred for life from ever returning. As the outcome in this case shows, the U.S. government is committed to prosecuting terrorists to the fullest extent of the law and in a manner consistent with our values.""
+
+White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett recently told Fox News, when asked about the case, that ""people who served their sentence are then released.""
+
+Referring to administration claims that they did not negotiate here, Grenell said, ""I take them at their word.""
+
+But he said the administration has already ""sent the message to our friends and allies and even our enemies that we'll negotiate.""
+
+The administration did trade five Taliban fighters last year for American Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
+
+Still, in reference to Japanese prisoners held by the Islamic State, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on Sunday stated the U.S. policy of not negotiating with terror groups over hostages.
+
+""The policies are well set: The U.S. doesn't pay ransoms and will not do prisoner swaps. We will not discuss what the Japanese should do,"" he told ""Fox News Sunday.""
+
+Al-Marri had been in U.S. custody since 2001, after reportedly being picked up on a routine traffic stop just weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks. He was charged with providing ""material support or resources"" to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda operatives.
+
+At the time of his arrest, the Qatar native was a U.S. resident attending graduate school.
+
+He was declared an enemy combatant in 2003 and sent to a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. In 2008, U.S. courts ruled he was entitled to a federal hearing. He accepted a plea deal in 2009 that included the 15-year sentence, at a federal prison in Illinois.
+
+Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.",REAL
+10244,This Viral Video Has Hillary Running Scared,"This Viral Video Has Hillary Running Scared The wildest campaign ad you will ever see! Infowars.com - October 28, 2016 Comments 
+Share this video on YouTube and Facebook to join the fight and support the Infowar! NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . The Most Offensive Halloween EVER! - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force",FAKE
+5837,"Comment on After Sweeping Election, First Thing Trump Invites Netanyahu to U.S. for Meeting by Debbie Menon","Dispatches from Wolf Country –Sitting in my cave, watching the spider spin ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. After Sweeping Election, First Thing Trump Invites Netanyahu to U.S. for Meeting By VNN on November 9, 2016 To Hell With Detroit or New Orleans, Trump Calls ISRAEL to Pay Hommage to Masters! 
+After sweeping the election on Tuesday, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S. for a meeting. 
+The two spoke on the phone on Wednesday hours after Netanyahu congratulated Trump on his surprising win, saying Trump was a “true friend of Israel.” According to a statement by Netanyahu, during their phone call, the two agreed to meet at the “first opportunity.” 
+Following the election results, Netanyahu published a statement congratulating Trump, saying: “President-elect Trump is a true friend of the State of Israel. We will work together to advance the security, stability and peace in our region. The strong connection between the United States and Israel is based on shared values, shared interests and a shared destiny. 
+“I’m certain that President-elect Trump and I will continue to strengthen the unique alliance between Israel and the United States, and bring it to new heights,” he added. 
+This after it was disclosed earlier this month that Donald Trump was paid $ 25 million by Israeli Firster Zionist Billionaire Sheldon Adelson who fronts for AIPAC and the Zionist State. 
+President Reuven Rivlin also congratulated Trump. 
+“I want to congratulate President elect Donald Trump, his family, and all the American people who have once again shown the world it is the greatest democracy.” 
+“I hope together Israelis and Americans can grow our innovation and cooperation, which are the fruits of liberty, and equality. God bless you, Mr. President,” Rivlin added. 
+Opposition leader Isaac Herzog (Zionist Union) congratulated Trump on Facebook: “Warm wishes to the president of the strongest and biggest global power: Donald J. Trump!” 
+Habayit Hayehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett, meanwhile, hoped Trump’s election would bring an end to the two-state solution. 
+“Trump’s victory is a tremendous opportunity for Israel to immediately announce its intention to renege on the idea of establishing Palestine in the heart of the country – a direct blow to our security and the justice of our cause. 
+“This is the president-elect’s outlook as it appears in his platform, and that definitely should be our way. Salient, simple and clear. The era of the Palestinian state is over.”",FAKE
+2787,"Obama to keep 5,500 US troops in Afghanistan beyond 2016","President Obama announced Thursday he will keep 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2016, in a stark reversal from earlier pledges to end the war on his watch -- though Republicans still questioned whether the residual force will be enough to support Afghan forces and U.S. allies.
+
+The decision follows months of appeals from military leaders to extend the drawdown timeline. And it marks an acknowledgement that, despite claims Al Qaeda is on the run, militants continue to pose a serious threat to the country.
+
+Obama originally had planned to pull out all but a small, embassy-based U.S. military presence by the end of next year. But military leaders argued the Afghans needed additional assistance and support from the U.S. to beat back a resurgent Taliban and hold onto gains made over the last 14 years.
+
+Under the new plan, the administration will keep the current force of 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of next year, then draw down to 5,500 troops in 2017, at a pace still to be determined by commanders.
+
+""While America's combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures,"" Obama said at the White House, in announcing his decision.
+
+The president stressed that he does ""not support the idea of endless war,"" but said Afghan forces are ""not as strong as they need to be"" and the Taliban have ""made gains,"" leading to a ""very fragile"" security situation in key areas of the country.
+
+He called the new plan the ""best possibility for lasting progress in Afghanistan,"" while saying the U.S. mission ""will not change"" even after 2016.
+
+Concerns about Afghan security were reinforced when Taliban fighters took control of Kunduz late last month, prompting a protracted battle with Afghan forces on the ground, supported by U.S. airstrikes. During the fighting, a U.S. airstrike hit a hospital, killing 22 people, including 12 Doctors Without Borders staff and 10 patients.
+
+U.S. commanders have also expressed concern about Islamic State fighters moving into the country and gaining recruits from within the Taliban. And on another front, the U.S. military launched a major operation against two Al Qaeda camps in Kandahar earlier this month; one of the camps reportedly was almost 30 square miles. The operation included dozens of airstrikes.
+
+Republicans welcomed Obama's decision Thursday to keep more troops in the country to deal with these threats -- but questioned whether 5,500 troops would be enough.
+
+""I am pleased that President Obama has decided to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan to perform the right missions beyond 2016, both in and outside of Kabul,"" Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. ""However, I am concerned that the number of troops will not be sufficient to perform the critical tasks being set for them: counterterrorism and continuing to train and advise our Afghan partners. ...
+
+""The bottom line is that 5,500 troops will only be adequate to conduct either the counterterrorism or the train and advise mission, but not both. Our military commanders have said that both are critical to prevent Afghanistan from spiraling into chaos.""
+
+Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told Fox News there was ""no way"" Afghan forces could have tackled the Taliban if all U.S. forces withdrew. ""This was a disaster waiting to happen,"" he said. But he called the president's compromise plan a ""containment"" strategy and questioned whether the ""small number"" would be enough.
+
+""While this new plan avoids a disaster, it is certainly not a plan for success,"" Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. He also criticized the president for threatening to veto defense legislation ""that provides their pay, benefits, and the authorities they need to get the job done"" -- in reference to an ongoing dispute over a defense authorization bill that would bust budget caps.
+
+U.S. officials have been hinting at the policy shift for weeks, noting that conditions on the ground in Afghanistan have changed since Obama's initial decision on a sharper troop withdrawal timeline was made more than two years ago. The White House has also been buoyed by having a more reliable partner in Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who succeeded the mercurial Hamid Karzai last year.
+
+""The narrative that we're leaving Afghanistan is self-defeating,"" Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Wednesday during a speech at the Association of the U.S. Army. ""We're not, we can't, and to do so would not be to take advantage of the success we've had to date.""
+
+Asked Thursday if 5,500 troops is enough, Carter said, ""We did a lot of homework on this."" He maintained that the troop presence, along with continued financial assistance and training for the Afghan military, ""are the ingredients to continue the prosecution of the mission.""
+
+The troops staying in Afghanistan beyond next year will continue to focus on counterterrorism missions and training and advising Afghan security forces, officials said. They will be based in Kabul and Bagram Air Field, as well as bases in Jalalabad and Kandahar.
+
+The president's decision to keep the U.S. military in Afghanistan beyond his tenure thrusts the conflict into the 2016 presidential race. The next president will become the third U.S. commander in chief to oversee the war, with the options of trying to bring it to a close, maintaining the presence as Obama left it or even ramping up U.S. involvement in the conflict.
+
+Officials said discussions on staying in Afghanistan longer began during Ghani's visit to Washington in March. The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Campbell, recently presented the president with a range of options calling for keeping more troops there. Officials said NATO allies had expressed support for extending the troop presence in Afghanistan, but they did not outline any specific commitments from other nations.
+
+Obama campaigned for the White House on a pledge to end America's involvement in the two wars he inherited, Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, he'll likely finish his presidency with troops back in both countries.
+
+The president did withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq in late 2011, a moment he heralded as a promise kept to a war-weary nation. But the rise of the Islamic State drew the U.S. military back into Iraq last year to train and assist local security forces and launch airstrikes.
+
+Obama announced the end of the Afghan war with similar fanfare last spring, saying it was time for the U.S. to ""turn the page"" on more than a decade of deadly conflicts.
+
+In March, at a press conference with Ghani, he said, ""The date for us to have completed our drawdown will not change.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9229,Family Remembers Queens Sucker Punch Victim ‘He Was The Best Man I Knew’,"Family Remembers Queens Sucker Punch Victim ‘He Was The Best Man I Knew’ CBS New York, October 2, 2016 
+The NYPD is looking for a killer who walked up to a stranger and punched him for apparently no reason. 
+Authorities are looking for two suspects in connection with the sucker punch attack of a Queens man just after midnight on June 26th. His family says he had taken a bus home after attending a Baltimore Orioles game. 
+The NYPD released new surveillance video Wednesday of the assault, which police said happened outside 64-year-old Patrick Gorman’s home on the corner of Queens Boulevard and Main Street just after midnight on June 26. 
+In the video, police said a man can be seen approaching Gorman and punching him in the head, knocking him to the ground. The man is then joined by a woman and calmly walks away as Gorman is seen struggling to get up. 
+Gorman was taken to Jamaica Hospital, where he died nine hours later after suffering a stroke and brain hemorrhage. {snip} Patrick Gorman 
+{snip} 
+Police described the first suspect as a black man in his 30s with short hair. {snip} 
+{snip}",FAKE
+8556,Black Americans Going For Donald Trump In Record Numbers As Election Day Approaches,"NTEB Ads Privacy Policy Black Americans Going For Donald Trump In Record Numbers As Election Day Approaches Donald Trump is gaining in Michigan partly because many African-American voters — especially younger voters who backed Sen. Bernie Saunders — distrust Clinton, said Wayne Bradley, state director of African-American engagement for the Michigan Republican Party. by Geoffrey Grider November 5, 2016 Donald Trump is on track to double Gov. Mitt Romney’s support among African-American voters, according to a series of state polls. In 2012, African-Americans comprised a record 13 percent of all voters. President Barack Obama was reelected with 93 percent of the African-American vote, leaving Gov. Mitt Romney with only 6 percent of the African-American vote. Obama is now campaigning against Trump, and hoping to keep his share of the African-American vote below the 11 percent that George W. Bush won in 2004 during the housing bubble. On Friday , a poll of 506 Pennsylvania voters by Harper Polling showed Trump has the support of 18.46 percent of African-Americans. That’s eight points more than Romney’s share of the national vote in 2012, and if it proves true during the ballot, that 18.46 percent African-American support translates into 2 point shift towards Trump. The poll also said another 4.6 percent were undecided. Trump acknowledges ‘Blacks for Trump’ supporters: The Harper poll is small , with an error margin of 4.4 percent, but an Oct. 30 poll of 1,249 likely voters in Pennsylvania showed Trump has 19 percent support among African Americans, while another 7 percent remain undecided. That poll has a error margin of 2.77 percent. In next-door Michigan, two nights of a tracking poll conducted for Fox 2 of 1,150 likely voters showed Trump with 14 percent support and 19 percent support, leaving Clinton with 83 percent and 79 percent support. That’s equivalent to a two-point shift from Clinton to Trump in the state. “We’re showing Donald Trump doing far better among African-Americans than any other Republican in modern memory, said John Yob, CEO of a Michigan-based polling firm, Strategic National . Trump “has done an excellent job in campaigning for the votes of African-Americans,” he said, partly by campaigning in Detroit, said Yob, whose automated tracking polls show Trump and Clinton running level in the state. Black Trump Supporters Explain Why They are Voting for Donald Trump: Donald Trump is gaining in Michigan partly because many African-American voters — especially younger voters who backed Sen. Bernie Saunders — distrust Clinton, said W ayne Bradley, state director of African-American engagement for the Michigan Republican Party. “T here is a tremendous trust deficit with Hillary Clinton” because tough anti-crime laws established when her husband was president in the 1990s, he said. That distrust has helped cause a sharp drop in the number of absentee ballots mailed in from Detroit, even as other part of the state send in more ballots that before, Bradley said. Faced with a low turnout, the Clinton campaign is trying to frighten African-Americans to vote, but “t hat’s not a convincing enough argument,” he said. “Detroit as of Wednesday had seen absentee ballots returns equaling just 46 percent of the total 2012 absentee vote in the city, and the city clerk’s office is forecasting a decline of 10,000 absentee ballots compared to 2012, a fall of 12.5 percent,” according to a review of absentee records by the Gongwer.com website, which intensively tracks Michigan politics. It is “possible that the falloff portends reduced [election day] voting at the precincts, in which case … Clinton could net something like 32,000 fewer votes out of the city than President Barack Obama did in 2012.” But other polls offer better news to Clinton. A Detroit Free Press poll of 600 likely Michigan voters released Nov. 4 showed that “Among black voters, her margin also grew substantially, to 92% compared to 88% two weeks ago.” National Trends Trump’s gain among African-American voters is happening in many states, alongside an overall reduction in African-American enthusiasm and support for Obama’s designated successor. That drop-off in support from Obama’s 93 percent level will likely reduce the turnout for Clinton. MSNBC reporter wasn’t expecting Black Americans to vote for Trump: That’s a problem for Democrats, because a 7.5 percent drop in nationwide African-American turnout would be equal to a one-point drop in a nationwide vote for Clinton. Reports say the early-voting turnout by African-Americans has dropped by up to 10 percent in North Carolina and by somewhat less in Florida . President Barack Obama and other top Democrats have hopscotched through the states to push that turnout back up by election day. But pollsters face problems when trying to gauge opinions in a high-stakes emotional competition. For example, a large slice of African-Americans are picking “undecided” in some polls. The Washington Post is reporting that Clinton is leading Trump by 79 percentage points among African-Americans, but the fine print in the article says Clinton’s score is 82 percent and Trump’s score is 3 percent — leaving 15 percent who did not pick either candidate. So if Trump gets just one-in-five of the undecided African-American voters, he reaches Romney’s 2012 level. Blacks for Trump, It’s a Thing: Some concerned people lie to pollsters. For example, roughly 7 percent of college grads hide their support for Trump when they’re ask by pollsters over the phone, perhaps out of fear of penalties if their choice was made public. So when polls show a non-answer from respondents, for example, many undecided voters, the votes may be hiding a weak or strong preference for Trump. These factor may be impacting polls of African-Americans, who are being hammered by claims from Clinton and Obama that Trump is supposedly a racist. “If you accept the support of Klan sympathizers — the Klan — and hesitate when asked about that support, then you’ll tolerate that support when you’re in office,” Obama told an African-American crowd in North Carolina on Nov. 3. For example, Public Policy Polling — which mostly works for Democratic clients — used phone interviews in a poll that showed Trump with just 9 percent support in Michigan among 957 likely voters, of whom 12 percent were African-American. The poll said none of the roughly 110 African-Americans were undecided in a two-person race, even though 8 percent said they were unsure when they were asked if they had a favorable view of Trump. In contrast, the Harper Polling survey in Pennsylvania got very different answers from African-Americans. Trump got 18.5 percent support in a four-person race, although many respondents waffled when they were asked to pick between just Clinton and Trump. When asked to pick either of the two main candidates, only 12.3 percent supported Trump, while 13.9 percent declared themselves to be undecided. So Trump actually picked up half of the undecideds when the respondents were allowed to chose from the four candidates. Polls A national poll by TIPP showed Clinton at only 75 percent support among all non-whites, including Hispanics, African-Americans and Latinos. That poll showed Trump getting support from 15 percent of non-whites , leaving 5 percent undecided and 5 percent supporting other candidates. In North Carolina, 19 percent of African-Americans support Trump, according to an Oct. 30 survey of 1176 likely voters by Remington Research Group. An Oct. 28 to Oct. 31 poll in North Carolina by SurveyUSA showed Trump with 14 percent support in a poll of 800 adults, including 659 likely voters. African-Americans comprised 21 percent of the voters in the poll. SurveyUSA is the top-ranked pollster in Nate Silver’s rankings . But a late October poll of African-Americans in North Carolina by Siena University showed 89 percent support for Clinton and 1 percent for Trump — but it also showed 6 percent staying they did not know who they will vote for, and 11 percent support for the GOP Gov. Pat McCrory. In Florida, a Siena University poll showed that Trump had the support of 13 percent of African-Americans. More ominously for Clinton, she had the support of only 83 percent, while 4 percent said they didn’t know who to vote for. If Trump gets one-quarter of the 4 percent, he reaches 14 percent of the African-American vote, leaving Clinton with roughly 86 percent. In Virginia, a survey by Public Policy Polling taken in Nov. 3 and Nov. 4 showed Trump with 9 percent support and Clinton with 91 percent support. A Remington Research automated poll of 1,106 likely voters in Virginia showed Trump with 19 percent , and Clinton with just 78 percent support. In Georgia, a Nov. 2 to Nov. 3 poll of 1,000 likely voters showed Trump with 12 percent of the African-American vote, leaving Clinton with 85 percent. Amid the disagreement, rivalries and complexity, Bradley is confident that Trump will do well among African-Americans. His final tally as the GOP candidate “will be a higher number that it has been in the past… [because] he’s working, he’s coming to these cities to deliver the message.” The African-American vote may even be enough to help push Trump over the so-called “blue wall” of Democratic northern states that stands in his path to the White House. source SHARE THIS ARTICLE Geoffrey Grider NTEB is run by end times author and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Grider. Geoffrey runs a successful web design company, and is a full-time minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to running NOW THE END BEGINS, he has a dynamic street preaching outreach and tract ministry team in Saint Augustine, FL. NTEB #TRENDING",FAKE
+2966,Success against ISIS requires a team of teams,"A truck bomb detonates in a lively street, congested with pedestrians headed to markets and school kids making their way home. The blast is temporarily deafening and the shock knocks people to their knees.
+
+Those able to pull themselves up describe a disorienting moment of stillness—a ringing in their ears that drowns out the chaos, the shattered bones and the crumbling of nearby buildings into a dusty mess of rebar and brick. But the quiet, like a slow motion scene in a movie, quickly gives way to confusion and frenetic activity; the ringing gives way to a blurring amalgamation of screaming and sirens.
+
+This scene is too frequent, familiar as an al Qaeda (AQ) tactic, and again with its newest incarnation, ISIS. Headlines are dominated by ever-ruthless brutality, senseless violence, and unspeakable injustice, the audaciousness of which leaves us baffled.
+
+This isn’t really new.  Genghis Khan’s audacity and brutality unnerved his foes into submission.
+
+But part of it is very new.
+
+Although tiny compared to the Mongol hordes, operating with apparent orchestrated synergy, ISIS is seemingly everywhere.  Deft battlefield advances interwoven with terrorist strikes create a frightening kinetic reality that flies and multiplies across 21st century connectivity to assault our senses and undermine our confidence.  Like savvy investors, ISIS uses speed and digital leverage to geometrically increase their perceived power.
+
+And in war, perception is reality.
+
+In our fight against al Qaeda in Iraq in 2004, we found our elite team—with world-class technology, training, and intelligence—was losing to a comparatively ragtag group. We pulled all the traditional levers—more personnel, raids, and intelligence—to no avail. The ringing in our ears was too frequent, too disorienting.
+
+The solution, we discovered, was internal.
+
+Faced with a 21st century threat, we faced the hard realization that being a great team was not enough.  We learned through painful trial and error the necessity of transforming into a system that mirrored the speed and interconnectedness of the distributed networks we were facing.
+
+We—the U.S. government, international community, and forces on the ground—have all the tools and resources required to defeat ISIS and any of its future manifestations.  What we don’t have is an organized, unified approach and structure to harness our collective will, resources, personnel, equipment, intelligence, policy, and diplomatic efforts to defeat them. Success demands connecting an ever-dispersed and intricate organization into a Team of Teams.
+
+This will require a fundamental shift in the way we organize ourselves; the traditional command and control structures of large organizations like the government, military, or corporations were developed to provide order and efficiency at scale. But this comes at cost of speed and decentralized decision-making.  Even in a hierarchical command of teams, decisions tend to be made at higher levels. A Team of Teams approach to create networked structures spreads valuable contextual information and empowers individuals closest to the problem to react in real time. At its core, it makes us adaptable.
+
+In Iraq, we were driven to connect across boundaries in completely new ways, break silos to solve problems, and execute faster than we ever thought possible. This didn’t happen overnight; it took us the better part of five years to transform the way our organization operated.
+
+Defeating ISIS necessitates a new operating model, but also to recognize that ISIS isn’t a singular challenge, but rather the byproduct of a new order defined by complexity. It is essential to imbue our organizations with adaptability; the challenges will continue to mutate, and we need to adapt alongside. There can’t be a temporary taskforce or unit to defeat ISIS that is dismantled when the mission is complete. The new mission needs to foster a Team of Teams, otherwise we’ll find ourselves knocked to our knees time and again.
+
+Stanley McChrystal retired from the U.S. Army as a four-star general after more than thirty-four years of service. His last assignment was as the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. His memoir, ""My Share of the Task,"" was a New York Times bestseller. He is co-author of the new book ""Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World"" (Portfolio/Penguin, May 12, 2015). He is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global
+
+ Affairs and the cofounder of CrossLead, a leadership consulting firm.",REAL
+1433,"The Edge: Cruz, Trump get media attention post-Paris","**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+Buzz Cut:
+
+ • The Edge: Cruz, Trump get media attention post-Paris
+
+ • Trump touts government registry of Muslims
+
+ • Hillary: Muslims ‘have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism’
+
+ • Can security focus save Vitter?
+
+ • So you’re saying it could have gone better…
+
+THE EDGE: CRUZ, TRUMP GET MEDIA ATTENTION POST-PARIS
+
+ Among top-tier GOP presidential contenders, Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, saw the least drop off in media coverage in the week since the Islamist raid in Paris.
+
+Not all media attention is helpful, but you can’t run for president without it. And when major news happens, like the wall-to-wall coverage of the Paris attacks, candidates struggle to be heard above the roar. That’s one of the reasons we bring you The Edge.
+
+The Edge is a one-of-a-kind measurement from the New Analytics Company that “scrubs” television, radio, print, internet and social media for mentions of the 2016 candidates. The team at New Analytics has built unique tool to measure which candidates are being talked about the most and the data are compiled into a single score and provided to Fox News First.
+
+Every candidate saw a drop in coverage from the week before when the Fox Business Network/WSJ debate was driving the discussion, but some managed to still get into the conversation more than others. Here are their rankings for media mentions this week, with their decline from last week in brackets. You can view the full results here.
+
+AT LAST, A REAL POLL!
+
+ After a two-week drought in national Republican primary polling that covered not just the fourth GOP debate and the most significant Islamist attack in the West in a decade, Bloomberg has finally delivered the goods.  And… not much seems to have changed.
+
+The poll mirrors the last useful national survey, which was taken by Fox News at the beginning of the month before the debate and attacks. Donald Trump leads with 24 percent of the vote, but close behind is Ben Carson with 20 percent. Then come Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz with 12 percent and 9 percent respectively. The rest are, well, the rest.
+
+There are some takeaways, though: Trump tops Carson on foreign policy and leadership but Carson tops Trump on questions of character. Carson leads Trump with two key GOP demographic groups: Southerners and Christian conservatives. Rubio bests Cruz on most attribute qualities, including a 19-point advantage on “presidential temperament.”
+
+Trump touts government registry of Muslims - WaPo: “Donald Trump said Thursday the United States should create a database of Muslims in the country. ‘Oh, I would certainly implement that — absolutely,’ Trump said in a brief interview with NBC News following a town hall event in Iowa on Thursday evening. …  When directly asked Thursday evening by NBC reporter Vaughn Hillyard about the possibility of a database of Muslims, Trump agreed with the idea, using the words ‘certainly’ and ‘absolutely.’ But when asked again about this database by a swarm of reporters later in the night, Trump acted confused. ‘What? Why are you asking me that question?’ Trump said to one reporter following a rally. Trump then ignored a wave of follow-up questions. ‘Where did you hear that?’ he said to another reporter. ‘I don't know where you heard that.’”
+
+Rubio’s ObamaCare bailout blocker hits home - A little-discussed provision from Sen. Marco Rubio in a federal funding bill last year may have dealt a devastating blow to ObamaCare. Rubio’s measure to clamp down on what conservatives call insurance “bailouts” but the law calls “risk corridors” to help big insurance with higher costs under ObamaCare seems to have landed on its intended target. The White House downplayed the possible consequences, arguing that the mechanism wouldn’t be necessary anyway because of the success of the law. But with enrollments, especially of healthy customers, lagging, America’s largest health insurer UnitedHealth says it may stop selling ObamaCare policies in the face of forecast losses of $500 million for next year.
+
+[Rubio joins “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace” this weekend. The show airs at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. ET on the Fox News Channel. Check local listings for broadcast times in your area.]
+
+“We know that ISIS is deliberately using the refugee crisis to insert fighters into Europe. Why wouldn't they do the same in the United States?” – Sen. Marco Rubio on “The Kelly File.” Watch here.
+
+ 
+
+ POWER PLAY: CRUZ AND RUBIO HAVE AT IT
+
+ The open conflict between Sen. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio has happened sooner and with more intensity than may predicted. What’s next? The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper and Brendan Bordelon of National Review share their forecasts on “Power Play with Chris Stirewalt.” WATCH HERE.
+
+[No luv for the guvs - Despite great expectations, GOP governors have been a flop in the 2016 stakes. Stirewalt asks Halper and Bordelon what happened and why. WATCH HERE.]
+
+CARLY: BOMBS NOT BOOTS 
+
+ FBN: “Hillary Clinton might support boots on the ground, but Carly Fiorina explained why she’s not ready to send 10,000 troops to the Middle East just yet, during an interview with the FOX Business Network’s Stuart Varney. ‘…The false choice that Obama presents to the American people is, if you don’t agree with what I am not doing, then the only option is tens of thousands of boots on the ground. It’s simply false,’ she said. She criticized the Obama administration for not supplying Middle East allies with support sooner. ‘We’ve had a fairly effective bombing campaign over the last couple of days. Why haven’t we been doing that for a year and a half? Because we’ve had politically expedient rules of engagement, that’s why. Why haven’t we provided the Jordanians with the bombs and material for their air force [that] they’ve asked us for?’”
+
+[The super PAC supporting Fiorina, CARLY for America, snagged Rick Perry alum Lexi Stemple Swearingen as its senior communications adviser.]
+
+WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…
+
+ The trials of Nazi leaders for war crimes began in Nuremburg, Germany 70 years ago today. It was a pivot point in Western history in which “crimes against humanity” would be addressed by the victorious side in a war rather than either rough justice at the end of a rope or unaccountability as part of a treaty. The America idea was that offenders would be fairly tried before they were sent to the gallows. But following proper protocols meant that the accused prisoners would have to be afforded access to clergy. But who would sign up to minister to some of the most despicable creatures in history? Author Tim Townsend shares the story of a pastor and a priest who brought their faith’s message of grace and mercy to the most hated men in the world.
+
+HILLARY: MUSLIMS ‘HAVE NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH TERRORISM’
+
+ When it comes to theology, politicians are pretty dire. When it comes to the theology of Islam, American politicians are the pits. Good intentions have led many astray since the start of the current war with Islamist militants. President Obama has been one of the prime offenders, often expounding on what Islam really is and isn’t. The president took plenty of heat for his head-snapping claim last year that the Islamic State is “not Islamic.”
+
+Wanting neither to dignify ISIS as a legitimate power nor to suggest that there is any clash between the Islam and the West, Obama runs in circles. The West is not at war with Islamists, therefore the Islamists with which the West is at war must not really be Muslims. Poof. The relative merits of an enemy’s theology would seem to be no matter for an American president’s attention, but it has become a gag reflex for Democrats when confronted with escalations of the ongoing struggle.
+
+Which brings us to Hillary Clinton, United Methodist, presumptive Democratic nominee and, now, amateur theologian and sociologist. In her speech calling for an escalation of the war against ISIS, Clinton explained who Muslims are. “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people,” she said. “And have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”
+
+Good luck with the base, Hillary! - WaPo: “A 32-hour protest about the racial climate at Princeton ended Thursday night when the president and students reached an agreement that included consideration of the idea of renaming the university’s storied Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.”
+
+[#mediabuzz - Host Howard Kurtz breaks down all the latest on coverage of the Paris attacks and the political consequences with guests including Mary Katherine Ham. Watch “#mediabuzz” Sunday at 11 a.m. ET, with a second airing at 5 p.m.]
+
+CAN SECURITY FOCUS SAVE VITTER?
+
+ Democrats are hoping that a late turn toward national security doesn’t upend their chances for a rare Southern statewide victory. Louisiana voters head to the polls election runoff Saturday after a brutal battle for the governor’s mansion between Democrat John Bel Edwards and Republican Sen. David Vitter. Edwards seemed to be cruising to the finish line powered a vicious attack ad aimed at Vitter’s involvement in a 2008 prostitution scandal. Debates have been a bloodbath with Edwards and Vitter calling each other liars before a heckling crowd in their final faceoff on Tuesday.
+
+But the focus in the state, as elsewhere, has turned to current national security concerns after the Paris attacks and Vitter is seizing on the Syrian refugee issue to tie Edwards to President Obama’s ISIS woes. A PAC backing Vitter is running a chilling ad that points to Edwards partnering with Obama, noting refugees have already been relocated in the state and the risks of a new influx to Louisiana.
+
+Come Saturday, the party hopes the focus on current issues translates into a redo of the outcome in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race last month, where what was predicted to be a close contest turned out to be a resounding victory for Republican Matt Bevin. Vitter’s challenge seems to be substantially greater, however. There’s been a dearth of reliable polling and runoffs pose special challenges on turnout models, but a University of New Orleans poll taken a week after the Oct. 24 primary election showed Edwards with a 22 point lead.
+
+Early snapshot - WSJ: “Early voting has jumped significantly in Louisiana’s race for governor—up 58% compared to 2011—giving Democrats some reasons for cautious optimism in a race with national implications. By any modern political calculus, it’s the Republican, U.S. Sen. David Vitter, who should win when voters go to the polls on Saturday.”
+
+Draw! - NYT: “[I]n Mississippi…a mathematically improbable tie in a State House of Representatives race has triggered a state statute that calls for the winner to be determined ‘by lot.’’ On Friday the two candidates, the Democratic incumbent, Blaine Eaton II, and his Republican challenger, Mark Tullos, will meet in Jackson, the state capital, and draw straws to determine the victor. In a vote tallied earlier this month, each candidate received exactly 4,589 votes.”
+
+SO YOU’RE SAYING IT COULD HAVE GONE BETTER…
+
+ WMUR: “A crane crashed through the roof of a Merrimack home Thursday where workers were cutting trees. The owner of the house on Turkey Hill Road said she hired Healey Tree Works to cut down 20 trees on her property. The crew was cutting down the last tree when the crane hit a septic tank in the backyard, which opened a sinkhole. The crane toppled over and smashed into the roof of the home, where two people were inside. The people inside weren't hurt, but a worker was left dangling from the tree. When the operator tried to move the crane, the climber was injured when it hit his foot. The injured climber was taken to a nearby hospital. The homeowner said she has owned the house for 28 years but never knew about the second septic system that caused the problem.”
+
+Chris Stirewalt is the digital politics editor for Fox News. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+328,NY police investigate possible sighting of escaped prisoners,"New York State Police are looking into a possible sighting of two convicted murderers who escaped from an upstate New York maximum-security prison two weeks ago.
+
+The two men fitting the description of inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt were seen about a week ago in Steuben County, New York, over 300 miles southwest of Dannemora, according to a news release posted late Friday. Two men were seen walking near a rail yard in Erwin on June 13, and then seen the next day in Lindley, New York, heading toward the Pennsylvania border.
+
+Investigators conducted interviews in both communities and have surveillance video that was initially deemed inconclusive and is being sent to Albany for analysis.
+
+It wasn’t clear why authorities waited a week before divulging the information.
+
+State police spokesman Beau Duffy told FoxNews.com Saturday investigators did not wait that long. He said troopers learned about the possible weekend sightings on Tuesday.
+
+He said troopers then sought to verify the sightings over the next two days. Late Friday afternoon, troopers got their hands on the surveillance video.
+
+Duffy said at that point commanders decided to release information on the possible sightings to alert the public and to hopefully generate more leads.
+
+Sweat and Matt used power tools to cut their way out of Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora on June 6. Hundreds of law enforcement officers have been looking for them.
+
+State police say they’re prepared to keep searching for the “long haul.”
+
+Friday, police asked hunters for help in the search for the escaped convicts.
+
+“We’re asking them to review video from wildlife or trail cameras to see if they see anything suspicious,” State Police Maj. Charles Guess said at a press conference at the prison.
+
+Hunters say they are ready to help even if it isn’t hunting season and they still haven't turned their trail cams on to track deer.
+
+State police said Friday they have searched 600 miles of trails leading out of Dannemora, but local outdoorsman Jason Langdon said the wooded area is so vast, searchers still have a lot of work to do.
+
+A correction officer from the prison was also suspended, officials announced Friday. However, officials didn’t have any other information involving the case.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report",REAL
+4723,“He and I Haven’t Spoken”: Trump and Pence Are Having a Very Public Couple’s Argument,"In the middle of a heated exchange about the Syrian civil war during the second presidential debate Sunday night, Donald Trump dropped a surprising new factoid about the relationship between him and Mike Pence: the Indiana governor’s policies don’t represent his own, and the two apparently haven’t worked out their differences.
+
+When asked by moderator Martha Raddatz why his attitude towards Russia’s involvement with the Assad regime directly contradicted Pence’s comments at the vice-presidential debate last week, Trump brushed off his own running mate. “He and I haven't spoken, and I disagree,” said Trump.
+
+The dismissive words by Trump come at a time that the Republican presidential nominee and his running-mate are not on the best terms. The deeply-religious Pence reportedly became “apoplectic” when he learned about a video recording of Trump making vulgar comments about forcing himself on women, sending out a harshly-worded statement condemning his remarks. “I do not condone his remarks and cannot defend them,” he said, adding that he hoped that Trump would move on.
+
+Trump’s comments during the town hall-style debate also hinted at a widening rift between Trump and Pence, the governor of Indiana, who had decided to use his time on stage at the vice presidential debate to defend a platform that was, at several points, the exact opposite of Trump’s platform. Pence’s calm and measured performance gave Republicans some relief, with several calling for him to replace Trump at the top of the ticket. That enthusiasm, which reportedly annoyed Trump, only intensified after the reveal of the Access Hollywood footage of Trump’s lewd comments, and Pence was not at Trump Tower during the emergency meeting the billionaire convened Sunday before the debate.
+
+In the hours since the 2005 tape was made public, rumors have swirled that Pence could abandon the Republican presidential ticket, though the speculation may have more basis in wishful thinking than reality. Shortly after the debate, however, Pence seemed more than open to reconciliation:
+
+For more Hive coverage of the second presidential debate, read T.A. Frank’s look at Trump reveling in historic lows, watch Trump hover over Clinton’s shoulder, defend his Muslim ban and break with his own running mate, find out how the candidates answered the night’s final question, and get the scoop on Melania Trump’s interesting sartorial choice.",REAL
+7927,FBI Director may be sacked for intrusion into elections,"FBI Director may be sacked for intrusion into elections 08.11.2016 James Comey, Director of the FBI, can be sacked in the nearest future because of a thoughtless step - 'intrusion into elections'. As the British Daily Mail reported with a reference to a source in the White House, it was Obama's adviser Valerie Jarrett who convinced him of necessity to undertake such a step. Head of the FBI alienated both Democrats and Republicans. Thus, the Congress will support the leaving president in this issue. Obama has already discussed with Jarrett all the possible legal and political consequences of such decision. At the same time, other sources assert that Comey himself is ready to resign, not waiting for Obama's decision. In the FBI they believe that the Director has prejudiced reputation of the bureau and lost his weight among employees . Reopening of investigation against the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton 'for no apparent reason ' and further closure of the case without consulting with experts have concerned law-enforcement as well as prosecutors. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+802,Fault lines: GOP civil war deepens,"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump is poised to breeze through another round of primary contests this week -- while the Republican Party splinters around him.
+
+Trump's ascent to the top of the GOP, which was capped last week with Ted Cruz' s devastating loss in the Indiana primary, happened so fast that even the billionaire himself was surprised. And the whipsawed party establishment now faces immediate choices -- none of which particularly appeal to them.
+
+'Just not ready' for Trump
+
+Will they unite behind their party's standard-bearer? Will they sit out the 2016 campaign? Or will they fight on, in a quixotic quest to undermine Trump?
+
+Trump's opponents are still sorting through the wreckage of the GOP primary season for a path forward. But it has become painfully clear over the past five days that party unification will be tough to come by, if it happens at all.
+
+Trump himself enters his first full week as the presumptive nominee by signaling that he has limited patience for or interest in the establishment's rebellion. Though the election is six months away, he announced Monday that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will lead his transition team.
+
+But when CNN's Chris Cuomo gave Trump a chance to take on Ryan and the GOP establishment during a ""New Day"" interview Monday, Trump demurred. His response: ""We'll see what happens.""
+
+He used the interview to offer fresh evidence of his willingness to thwart tradition. Trump, who is building his presidential bid around his business acumen and knowledge of the economy, told Cuomo the U.S. should take the unprecedented step of defaulting on the debt ""because you print the money.""
+
+Trump is making quite clear he doesn't intend to cast off the provocative style on the campaign trail that alarmed the Republican establishment and resonated so deeply with primary voters. After spending days on the receiving end of criticism from the likes of Ryan, Romney and Graham, Trump and his supporters hit back -- hard.
+
+Sarah Palin, a key Trump surrogate and 2008 vice presidential nominee, took the unusual step of backing the little-known Republican businessman challenging Ryan for his Wisconsin seat.
+
+""His political career is over but for a miracle because he has so disrespected the will of the people, and as the leader of the GOP, the convention, certainly he is to remain neutral,"" Palin said. ""And for him to already come out and say who he will not support is not a wise decision of his.""
+
+For his part, Trump didn't seem too worried about the talk of the GOP disintegrating because of his nomination. Speaking on ABC's ""This Week,"" Trump questioned the need for party unity, arguing that his campaign is unlike any before and won't rely on the same political calculations.
+
+""Does it have to be unified?"" he asked. ""I'm very different than everybody else, perhaps that's ever run for office. I actually don't think so.""
+
+He went on: ""I think it would be better if it were unified. I think ... there would be something good about it. But I don't think it actually has to be unified in the traditional sense.""
+
+Those comments underscore the growing debate over whether Trump's unorthodox candidacy will doom the GOP in the fall or whether the anxious party leadership has grown so out of touch with the electorate that it's missing the genuine anger fueling Trump's rise.
+
+Facing the likelihood of running against the first female nominee of a major party, Trump sought to recast Clinton's image by reviving the impeachment saga of the 1990s and arguing that she was dismissive of women who had extramarital affairs with her husband.
+
+""And some of those women were destroyed, not by (Bill Clinton), but by the way Hillary Clinton treated them after it went down.""
+
+""But I think, for the most part,"" she went on, ""Americans are concerned about things like who will be able to appoint the next Supreme Court justices, which will affect an entire generation coming up. I think that's what people are concerned about, much more so than Bill Clinton's obvious indiscretions, and Donald Trump having been divorced a couple of times, but owning up to it.""
+
+Trump also caused some confusion over the weekend by taking positions on the minimum wage and taxes that are not only out of step with GOP tradition but also his own stances during the primary.
+
+On taxes, he said levies on the wealthy would go up under his administration. He argued that while he supports across-the-board tax cuts, he would likely bargain away cuts for top earners during negotiations with Congress.
+
+""On my plan, they're doing down,"" he said on ""This Week."" ""But by the time it's negotiated, they'll go up.""
+
+He added: ""We're going to submit the optimum ... That's what I'd like to get and we'll fight for it. But from a practical standpoint, it's going to get renegotiated. And in my opinion, the taxes for the rich will go up somewhat.""
+
+And after he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer last week that he was ""looking at"" raising the minimum wage, he told ABC's George Stephanopoulous that he hasn't ""decided in terms of numbers.""
+
+""But I think people have to get more,"" he said, while acknowledging the shift.
+
+""I'm allowed to change,"" he said. ""You need flexibility, George, whether it's a tax plan where you're going to -- where you know you're going to negotiate. But we're going to come up with something.""
+
+Such shifts, however, are deeply unnerving to many of Trump's opponents.
+
+They have argued that he effectively fooled many primary voters into supporting him and will change his tune once he has to appeal to a broader electorate ahead of the general election.
+
+That fear is partly what's fueling speculation over a potential third-party run from someone like Romney, who met privately with Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, last week to discuss how to get an independent candidate into the race.
+
+""Profiteers tempt and endeavor to hook us with compulsive addictions,"" Romney said. ""Entertainment media distracts us from the things that bring enduring achievements and happiness.""",REAL
+1026,"Clinton, under fire for oil and gas donations, once hit Obama for same reason","Clinton lost her temper at an event on Thursday when activists from Greenpeace and 350 Action, two environmental organization, asked her to ""reject fossil fuel money"" and not accept donations from the gas and oil industry. ""I'm so sick of the Sanders' campaign lying about me. I'm sick of it,"" Clinton said.
+
+In response to the confrontation, Nick Merrill, Clinton's spokesman, said the candidate ""has not taken a dollar from oil and gas industry PACs or corporations."" Clinton's campaign, in fact, has not received any money directly from oil and gas companies, as that would violate election law.
+
+""You've seen the ad,"" says a narrator before cutting to a separate ad of Obama saying, ""I don't take one from oil companies.""
+
+""No candidate does. It has been against the law for 100 years,"" says the narrator. ""But Barack Obama accepted $200,000 from executives and employees of oil companies. Every gallon of gas takes over three bucks from your pocket. But Obama voted for the Bush-Cheney energy bill that puts $6 billion in the pocket of big oil."" The narrator adds, ""Hillary voted against it. She will make oil companies pay to crate the new jobs in clean energy America needs."" Clinton concludes the ad by saying, ""I'm Hillary Clinton and I approve this message."" The ad ran during Pennsylvania's primary, a state Clinton won by nearly 10 percentage points. Clinton's ad was a response to Obama's own ad that said, ""I'm Barack Obama. I don't take money from oil companies or Washington lobbyists and I won't let them block change anymore."" Both Clinton and Obama accepted money from executives and employees of oil companies during the 2008 campaign, according to Center for Responsive Politics . Obama accepted $222,309 and Clinton accepted $309,363, according to the watchdog. Clinton's 2016 campaign has taken more than $300,000 from people who work for those companies, according to Greenpeace. Clinton's campaign noted on Thursday that Sanders has taken upwards of $50,000 from the same individuals. Brian Fallon, Clinton's press secretary, responded to the 2008 ad by noting that Sanders, too, has taken money from employees at oil and gas companies. ""Then, as now, both Democratic candidates in the race accepted donations from employees of oil and gas companies,"" Fallon said. ""We have not accused Senator Sanders of being beholden to the oil and gas industry on that basis, nor should he say that of Hillary Clinton.""",REAL
+1459,His rivals are saying the same thing in different ways: Marco Rubio is weak,"Chris Christie depicts Marco Rubio as a truant schoolboy. Jeb Bush’s top ally portrays him as a weather vane. Ted Cruz and his supporters characterize him as a nervous sellout who bowed to Democratic demands for “amnesty.”
+
+In commercials, interviews and face-to-face meetings with voters, Rubio’s 2016 rivals and their backers are waging increasingly personal attacks, using different words to say much the same thing: that the freshman senator from Florida is weak and unreliable.
+
+With their pointed attacks, Rubio’s rivals have essentially taken a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook. After months of trying and failing to dislodge the brash GOP front-runner, the field is now focused heavily on Rubio, who is seen as a vulnerable and necessary target straddling the line between the conservative and establishment wings of the Republican Party.
+
+Thursday night’s Fox Business News debate in North Charleston, S.C., will put the new dynamic on display before a national audience with less than three weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses. Rubio advisers and allies are tight-lipped about his debate strategy, but in general they say that he will not endure attacks quietly. Rubio tends to respond to criticism with specific, well-rehearsed policy critiques rather than personal jabs.
+
+However, in a campaign where Trump, Christie and Cruz have ascended on the strength of their belligerent dispositions and quippy broadsides, Rubio’s softer approach carries risks.
+
+“He’s not as inflammatory [as] others, and those personal attacks tend to get headlines,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), a Rubio supporter. “But Marco Rubio is that steady, responsible conservative with a message that’s inspirational for a lot of us.”
+
+One of the most searing attacks on Rubio yet came this week in the form of a Web video from Keep the Promise I, a super PAC supporting Cruz. The 1 -minute spot splices together footage of President Obama praising the immigration reform bill Rubio once pushed and clips from interviews edited to give Rubio a deer-in-the-headlights look.
+
+To many Republicans, Rubio’s youth is one of his best attributes. The 44-year-old candidate regularly talks about hip-hop, electronic dance music, Uber and Airbnb. He looks, sounds and sometimes dresses younger than most Republican officials.
+
+But where some see an appealing freshness, others see inexperience and weakness — critiques similar to those leveled at Barack Obama by Republicans in 2008.
+
+“Marco Rubio has never run anything. I’m not sure he could run a bath,” said Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant who departed Trump’s political team last year.
+
+Right to Rise USA, a super PAC supporting former Florida governor Jeb Bush, put out a video this week that kicked off a multi-pronged attack against Rubio, including seemingly questioning his masculinity and accusing him of changing his position on cap-and-trade regulations, immigration and other issues.
+
+“These boots are made for flippin’ and that’s just what they’ll do. One of these days young Marco’s gonna flip, flop, flip on you,” sings a woman in the video, which makes fun of Rubio’s well-documented fashion choice during a recent swing through New Hampshire: a pair of stylish black high-heeled boots. Right to Rise also released a TV ad showing a Rubio cutout spinning around on a weather vane.
+
+In a Wednesday interview with MSNBC, Bush — who at 6-3 is at least five inches taller than Rubio — was asked whether he owned any platform boots. “I don’t have a height issue,” he said.
+
+[Strategic or overconfident? Rubio plays hard to get with voters]
+
+Trump, who also has a height advantage, said last week on a Boston radio station that it “helps to be tall.”
+
+“I don’t know what to think of those boots,” he said, adding: “They’re big heels. I mean, those heels are really up there.”
+
+Rubio has called the fascination with his boots “craziness” at a time when consequential events are unfolding across the world.
+
+For most of Rubio’s competitors, finishing ahead of him rather than Trump is a more realistic goal in the early states. It’s particularly critical for those stuck in the middle tier to receive a boost with donors and voters in the first wave of contests.
+
+Christie, New Jersey’s governor, is a good example. Since the last debate in December, the Rubio-Christie rift has deepened.
+
+Christie has said in recent interviews with The Washington Post and other news outlets that Rubio “turns tail and runs” (a reference to him walking away from comprehensive immigration reform); that the “truant officer is out looking for him” (a reference to his many Senate absences and perhaps his relative youth); and that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would “cut his heart out.”
+
+Rubio and his campaign have hit back, but on policy rather than character.
+
+“I’m sure he doesn’t really want to have a conversation about the issues,” Rubio said of Christie in Nashua, N.H., last week. Rubio dinged the New Jersey governor as a backer of Common Core education standards, said he “ran for office as a supporter of gun control” and noted that Christie once made a contribution to Planned Parenthood. Days earlier, a pro-Rubio super PAC unveiled a TV ad campaign in New Hampshire with similar lines of attack.
+
+[‘He’s Cuban. I’m Mexican.’ Can Rubio and Cruz connect with Latino voters?]
+
+On Monday, Rubio delivered a speech on taxes­ in which he took policy swipes at Christie and Cruz. In a clear shot at the senator from Texas, Rubio said not to be fooled by advocates of a “business flat tax,” which he said acts like a “value-added tax,” widespread in foreign countries but not the United States.
+
+Much of Cruz’s anti-Rubio rhetoric has been associated with his membership in the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that pushed a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013. The bill included a path to citizenship that conservative opponents call “amnesty.”
+
+Rubio has fought back against Cruz by pointing to an amendment Cruz pushed offering legal status to undocumented immigrants. (Cruz says it was a poison pill meant to foil Democrats.) Rubio has also sought to run to Cruz’s right on national security, hitting him hard over his vote to stop the government’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata.
+
+Recent polling shows Rubio edging up to second or third place in each of the first two nominating states. There’s a growing sentiment that party elites will eventually coalesce around an alternative to Trump and Cruz, who some leading Republicans fear are too combative for the general election. Rubio is trying fend off Christie, Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich in that sub-contest.
+
+Even as he stresses his youth and next-generation appeal, Rubio has tried to appear presidential as his rivals raise doubts about him. He is pitching himself as the strongest possible commander in chief. His events, even the small ones, have a formal feel to them, with a stage always erected at the front. His TV ads include several spots with dark themes and dire warnings about threats overseas.
+
+Rubio will have to adjust a bit to Thursday’s debate because Rand Paul, a natural opponent on foreign policy, did not poll well enough to appear on the main stage. In the last debate, Rubio took am at the Kentucky senator’s libertarian-leaning foreign policy to tout his more hawkish views.
+
+Rubio has tended to do well in the debates, winning positive reviews in each of the previous five meetings.
+
+After the debate, Rubio will hit the campaign trail in New Hampshire and then Iowa, where some like Evan Sinclair, 20, are nervously watching whether he can blunt his rivals’ attacks. Observing Rubio shake hands in the Des Moines suburbs recently, Sinclair said he hopes the senator can catch fire.
+
+“Rubio had better shine a light so the Republican Party can exist,” he said. “People need to wake up and see a rational candidate is needed.”",REAL
+5366,The Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in North America and Palestine-Israel - American Herald Tribune,"Prof. Tony Hall Speaks Out on Mohawk Territory 2 Shares
+1 0 0 1
+Prof. Hall speaks at the Haldimand Deed Recognition Dinner at Kanata in the Mohawk Village near Brantford Ontario. Prof. Hall has been the target of a witch hunt mounted by Facebook and by B'nai Brith Canada. The mission of the Canadian branch of the Anti-Defamation League is to provide Zionist advocacy for ""the security of Israel.""
+In late August of 2016 a maliciously engineered smear item was placed on Prof. Hall's FB page without his knowledge or consent. The B'nai Brith immediately publicized the offensive content of the post to introduce a concerted smear and disinformation campaign implying falsely that Dr. Hall seeks to ""Kill All Jews."" The B'nai Brith exploited its grotesque misrepresentation of Dr. Hall's academic work to call on its membership to flood the administrative offices of the University of Lethbridge with letters and petition signatures. The object is to remove Dr. Hall from his teaching post. Dr. Hall remains a tenured full professor whose career as a university teacher began in 1982.
+The University of Lethbridge's administration soon surrendered to this Zionist campaign aimed at disabling an outspoken critic of Israel's genocidal treatment of the Aboriginal Palestinians. On Oct. 4 the U of L president, Dr. Mike Mahon, suspended Dr. Hall without pay. He undertook this assault on the principles of academic freedom in the complete absence of any due process of third-party arbitration whatsoever.
+The attack on Dr. Hall is an attack on the institution of academic tenure, a mainstay of protection for academic freedom in institutions of higher learning. The University of Lethbridge Faculty Association and the Canadian Association of University Teachers have identified the illegal nature of Dr. Mahon's unprecedented assault on the core principles of tenure and academic freedom.
+In his talk sponsored by the Mohawks of the Grand River, Dr. Hall put the Zionist/Facebook campaign directed at disabling critics of Israel in a broader historical context. The assault on the Palestinian people extends the genocidal holocaust directed at the Indigenous peoples of the Americas since 1492. Israeli techniques directed at terminating the Palestinian presence draw on the genocidal techniques directed at Native Americans in the expansionary course of US history.
+WRITER
+Prof. Tony Hall Dr. Hall is editor in chief of American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen's University Press entitled ""The Bowl with One Spoon"".",FAKE
+9673,Checkmating Obama,"Originally published by the Jerusalem Post . 
+In one of the immortal lines of Godfather 2 , mafia boss Michael Corleone discusses the fate of his brother, who betrayed him, with his enforcer. “I don’t want anything to happen to him while my mother is alive,” Corleone said. 
+Message received. The brother was murdered after their mother’s funeral. Last week it was reported that the Obama administration has delivered a message to the Palestinian Authority. The administration has warned the PA that the US will veto any anti-Israel resolution brought before the UN Security Council before the US presidential elections on November 8. Message received. Open season on Israel at the Security Council will commence November 9. The Palestinians are planning appropriately. Israel needs to plan, too. Israel’s most urgent diplomatic mission today is to develop and implement a strategy that will outflank President Barack Obama in his final eight weeks in power. Lobbying the administration is pointless. Obama has waited eight years to exact his revenge on Israel for not supporting his hostile, strategically irrational policies. And he has no interest in letting bygones be bygones. Before turning to what Israel must do, first we need to understand what Israel can do. A good place to begin is by considering what just transpired at UNESCO, where twice in a week, UNESCO bodies resolved to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The fight that Israel waged at UNESCO is not the fight it needs to wage at the Security Council. The stakes at the Security Council are far higher. Like the UN General Assembly, UNESCO’s decisions are non-binding declarations that have no legal or operational significance. As such, there is no reason to expend great resources to fight them. For Israel, the goal of the fight at UNESCO is not to defeat anti-Israel initiatives. That is impossible given the Palestinians’ automatic majority. The purpose of the fight at UNESCO is to humiliate European governments that side with antisemitic initiatives, and to weaken the congenitally anti-Israel body itself. The government achieved both of these objectives. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s disavowal of his own government’s abstention from the vote on the first resolution – like the similar position taken after the fact by the Mexican government – was a diplomatic victory for Israel. So too, the fact that UNESCO’s own Secretary-General Irina Bukova felt compelled to disavow her own agency’s actions by rejecting the resolution’s denial of the Jewish people’s ties to Jerusalem was a significant victory for Israel. Her statement was deeply damaging for UNESCO and its reputation. Finally, the fact that Tanzania and the Philippines voted against the resolution was a testament to Israel’s capacity to convince other governments to abandon their traditional pro-Palestinian voting pattern. The Palestinians won the vote at UNESCO because they are more powerful diplomatically than Israel. They have an automatic anti-Israel majority. But they weren’t empowered by their victory. To the contrary. They were bloodied by it. In a sign of their weakening hold on member nations, the Palestinians and Jordanians felt compelled to send a threatening letter to the members of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee lest they dare to vote against the resolution. Powerful players don’t make threats. They don’t need to. Israel’s experience at UNESCO teaches us that there are governments that are open to counteroffers. Israel doesn’t need to hide in America’s shadow. It is capable of working on its own to blunt the impact of the Palestinians’ automatic majority. And it will need to use all of its resources to fend off a US-backed assault at the Security Council. Unlike UNESCO, the Security Council can pass legally binding resolutions. Israel needs to be prepared to bring all of its resources to bear to prevent such a resolution from being adopted against it. Obama’s intention to abandon Israel at the Security Council means that Israel comes to this battle severely hobbled. But there is one advantage to the US’s betrayal. Over the years, Israel’s ability to trust the US to veto anti-Israel resolutions at the Security Council was been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the US has secured Israel from diplomatic assaults. But on the other hand, our ability to trust Washington has made us diplomatically lazy and ineffective. Safe in Washington’s shadow, we have behaved as through all diplomacy is public diplomacy. That is, we have pretended that statecraft begins and ends with making the moral or strategic case for our side against the other guys. But public diplomacy is just one diplomatic tool. The Syrian regime, for instance, has no moral case for securing international support. Bashar Assad didn’t convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to support him by arguing that he is better than alternative regimes. He bought Putin’s support by offering him permanent air and naval bases in Syria. Then there is Morocco, another weak state with no public diplomacy case to make. Last March, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon outraged Rabat when he acknowledged the plain fact that Western Sahara, which Morocco occupies, is “occupied territory.” Morocco quickly secured the support of Spain and France and launched an all-out onslaught against Ban. How did Morocco manage? Morocco’s most powerful diplomatic resource is its control over migration flows from North Africa to Europe. Anytime it wishes, Rabat can open the migratory floodgates just as easily as it can keep them shut. And the French and Spanish know it. In less than a month, Ban issued repeated abject apologies. Game. Set. Match. Morocco. From reports to date, it appears that shortly after the US elections on November 8, the Malaysians or Egyptians will submit a Palestinian-backed resolution that defines Israeli communities in united Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria as illegal. If the resolution is brought to a vote, the US will fail to veto it. Such a resolution, or a resolution obligating Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, would cause Israel grave harm. So what resources does Israel have to prevent this from happening? Of course, we have public diplomacy. And that might work with some friendly nations. But it won’t get us over the top. We need to learn from the Syrian and Moroccan examples and consider what we have to offer Security Council members in exchange for their support in scuttling the approaching onslaught against us. One such resource is the US Congress. Israel’s allies in Congress are sickened by the Obama administration’s devastating Middle East policies. A solid majority of lawmakers can be trusted to support actions that will reinforce Israel’s position. Israel has other resources as well that we can trade on. We have natural gas. And we have technologies that the governments of the world require to surmount the challenges of the 21 century. There is no reason to give these resources away when we can trade them for diplomatic support. As for the Palestinians, as the UNESCO vote showed, they are less popular now than at any time in the past 40 years. All they have to offer is threats and antisemitism. Both are powerful weapons. But they are no longer invincible. Israel’s goal must be to use our resources at the Security Council in a manner that will make it impossible for Obama to enable an anti-Israel resolution to pass. A method for achieving this goal has two components. The first component is to convince a friendly country on the Security Council to propose a balanced resolution that would counter the Palestinian-backed Israel-bashing one. Such a resolution could include four points. First, it could deplore efforts to deny Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Second, it can condemn the PA/PLO for their continued unlawful funding of terrorists. Third, it can urge Israel to restrain settlement construction in areas that in previous negotiations have been identified as likely territory for a future Palestinian state. Fourth, it can call on Israel and the PA to reinstate negotiations immediately without preconditions. Israel has friendly ties with a few Security Council members, among them Uruguay and New Zealand. In the final weeks of the Obama era, it is possible that Israel will be able to convince one of them to submit a balanced resolution along these lines. Obama would be hard-pressed to oppose such a resolution in favor of one that singles Israel out for rebuke. But that still is insufficient. Obama can make Uruguay and New Zealand a better offer if he wishes. And so we move to the second aspect of the plan. If we learn nothing else from the Obama era, we must recognize that the time has come for Israel to stop sufficing with just one Security Council veto. Most states have several. And we need a few more. Russia today is the best place to start our search for a second veto. Putin is a dealmaker. As his agreement with Assad showed, he is willing to consider attractive offers. Obviously, Israel won’t offer Russia bases. But we do have other things to offer Putin in exchange for a veto. For instance, in exchange for a Russian veto at the Security Council, Israel can offer Putin to lobby the US Congress to cancel US sanctions against Russia over Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Israel has no dog in that fight. And the sanctions are not getting the US anywhere. Putin might go for the deal for two reasons. First, by stepping into the breach and defending Israel against Obama, he will humiliate Obama. Second, if Israel succeeds with the Congress, he will reap economic rewards. For his part, Putin wouldn’t even have to openly side with Israel. All he would have to do is announce that in the interests of regional stability, Russia will not support an unbalanced resolution on Israel and the Palestinians. If Putin supports a balanced resolution, Obama will be checkmated. His plan to take revenge on Israel for not following him off the strategic cliff will be foiled. Israel will have survived his presidency. None of this will be easy. And success is far from assured. There are many more ways for Israel to fail than succeed. Our diplomatic weakness remains a millstone around our neck. But as the UNESCO resolutions showed, attacking Israel is no longer cost free. We are not powerless in the grip of circumstances. We have cards to play. And now is the time to play them for all they are worth.",FAKE
+10498,September New Homes Sales Rise——-Back To 1992 Level!,"September New Homes Sales Rise Back To 1992 Level! By David Stockman. Posted On Wednesday, October 26th, 2016 
+
+David Stockman's Contra Corner is the only place where mainstream delusions and cant about the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance and Beltway Banditry are ripped, refuted and rebuked. Subscribe now to receive David Stockman’s latest posts by email each day as well as his model portfolio, Lee Adler’s Daily Data Dive and David’s personally curated insights and analysis from leading contrarian thinkers.",FAKE
+2439,Why The Obamacare Doomsday Cult Can't Admit It's Wrong,"But when Congress debated and passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010, opponents were nearly unified in offering grim Keech-like predictions. With Obamacare now in full effect, and the economy on a decided upswing, the dour prognostications are starting to look like Keech's flying saucers. At least if you believe the data. A look at Festinger's theories, though, can explain why that won't matter, and why Americans can expect a continued drumbeat of doom, even as the prophecies fail.
+
+“It certainly has not had the baleful effects the critics were predicting,” said Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who supports the law, but never thought it would have much economic impact. “On balance it may be a modest plus, to the extent that it has contributed to the slowdown of growth in health care costs.”
+
+But that's not how Capitol Hill’s gloomsday cult sees it. Indeed, try getting any of them to admit the Affordable Care Act jobs slaughter has not happened, and they sound like the punchline to the old joke where a spouse gets caught in the act cheating: “Who are you going to believe -- me, or your lying eyes?”
+
+""With politicians, you can’t be sure that what comes out of their mouths is really what’s in their head,"" said Elliot Aronson, one of Festinger’s former students who is regarded as the foremost expert on cognitive dissonance alive today. ""When it comes to politics, we have to really look closely.""
+
+The way cognitive dissonance works is that when people are confronted with information that contradicts either their beliefs or actions, they feel discomfort. To feel better, they either have to modify their beliefs and actions, or find some way to discount the disconfirming information. And the more effort someone invests in a particular action or idea, the greater the lengths they will go in crafting justifications to ease their discomfort.
+
+Aronson and co-author Carol Tavris looked closely at that phenomenon in their 2007 book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me). Among the examples are prosecutors who insist that people cleared by DNA evidence are still guilty; scientists who insist results that agree with funders’ interests could not have been swayed, and people who like an idea from their political party, but dislike the same idea if told it came from the opposition party.
+
+Indeed, committing to a specific ideology can make it much harder to see facts clearly, let alone acknowledge them. Aronson noted that it’s especially hard for people who spent the last five years opposing a specific policy. “These guys are so committed to the belief that Obama can’t do anything right, and that Obamacare is socialism, that it would be very, very difficult for them to examine the data objectively,"" he said. ""I think that’s what’s wrong with politics, that’s what’s wrong with ideology, that’s what’s wrong with politics that are ideologically driven.”
+
+“One could create some line of argument that the economy would be much, much stronger without the ACA, but that really seems to be a stretch,” said Van de Water, the economist. “We have a very large economy. Even as important as the Affordable Care Act is, it’s working on a major sector of the economy, but only at the margins. Even in advance, one would have thought it wasn’t going to have a huge effect.”",REAL
+864,"Sanders, Cruz resist pressure after NY losses, vow to fight to conventions","The Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz campaigns vowed to fight all the way to their respective party conventions despite losing big in Tuesday’s New York primaries – rebuffing taunts from their rivals that they’re just about mathematically eliminated from the race.
+
+Indeed, after coming in a distant third in New York, Cruz has no real path to overtake Donald Trump in the Republican race before the July convention. On the Democratic side, Sanders would have to win 73 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates to catch Hillary Clinton.
+
+Clinton could actually lose every remaining primary in the coming weeks and still clinch the nomination. Next up are primaries in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware next week. Clinton moved quickly to cast herself as the all-but-certain nominee.
+
+""The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch, and victory is in sight,"" she told supporters at her victory party in Manhattan on Tuesday night. A campaign aide, on the sidelines, said Sanders has no mathematical chance of a comeback.
+
+Trump declared at his own victory party across town, “We don’t have much of a race anymore.”
+
+Yet Cruz and Sanders were recalibrating their approach and their rhetoric, seemingly preparing to press on.
+
+Appearing to acknowledge he could no longer clinch the nomination pre-convention, Cruz said Wednesday: “We are definitely headed to Cleveland. And in Cleveland, the people are gonna prevail.”
+
+His campaign is likely back to concentrating on the delegate-selection process in order to strengthen its position going into Cleveland.
+
+If Cruz – and Ohio Gov. John Kasich – can hold Trump under the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination before then, the Texas senator aims to have delegate allies in place from across the country who would peel off from Trump and support him after the first round of voting. Further, his campaign is courting “unbound” delegates in several states – most recently in Pennsylvania, which votes next week and does not bind most its delegates to the primary results – in hopes they would also flock to him in the event of a floor fight.
+
+The maneuvers have only strengthened Trump’s resolve to go on a huge winning streak in the coming weeks, racking up delegates in hopes of reaching the 1,237 threshold and ruling out the possibility of a contested convention. According to The Washington Post, an internal Trump memo projects Trump would get more than 1,400 delegates on the first round of balloting to secure the nomination.
+
+Right now, Trump has 845 delegates, Cruz has 559 and Kasich has 147.
+
+Meanwhile, Sanders, presuming he cannot clinch the nomination himself before the Philadelphia convention, is pursuing a tricky strategy.
+
+""We're going to go to the convention,” campaign manager Jeff Weaver said on MSNBC. But the Sanders campaign seems to be relying on the prospect of winning over superdelegates, the party insiders and officials free to support whomever they want.
+
+Clinton holds an overwhelming lead among them and is well-positioned to reach the 2,383 total delegates needed by the end of primaries in June, counting both superdelegates and pledged. Sanders officials seem to be raising the bar, though, suggesting she would need 2,383 pledged delegates to truly clinch the nomination.
+
+But Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri said the former secretary of state will continue to hold the pledged-delegate lead as well. And after a campaign period marked by an increasingly bitter tone between the two campaigns, she accused Sanders of going down a  “destructive path” during the New York race.
+
+Including superdelegates, the race stands at 1,930 for Clinton and 1,189 for Sanders.
+
+Sanders, though, has given some mixed signals on the heels of his New York loss.
+
+He took a day off from the campaign trail Wednesday to return to Vermont.
+
+And senior adviser Tad Devine, calling next week a “big week,” said: ""We'll see how we do there and then we'll be able to sit back and assess where we are.""
+
+But Sanders continued to claim in fundraising memos they could still win.
+
+He told reporters after landing in Burlington, Vt., that he’d get recharged in Vermont, and thinks he can do well in the five primaries next week. He plans to return to the campaign trail in Pennsylvania on Thursday.
+
+Few in the Democratic Party expect Sanders to exit the race formally before the final contests in June. He continues to attract tens of thousands to rallies -- addressing more than 28,000 in Brooklyn two days before the primary. And he continues to raise millions of dollars, giving him fodder for a persistent fight.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4128,"Surviving escaped prisoner likely fatigued and prone to mistakes, police say","Police searching for the second of two escaped prisoners who pulled off an elaborate breakout from a maximum-security New York prison three weeks ago say that the remaining escapee is fatigued and likely to make a mistake after law enforcement officers shot and killed his accomplice Friday.
+
+Hundreds of law enforcement officers have converged on a wooded area 30 miles from the Clinton Correctional Facility with helicopters and search dogs, where David Sweat is believed to be hiding. Sweat and fellow escapee Richard Matt escaped from the maximum-security prison in Dannemora about three weeks ago.
+
+Matt was shot Friday afternoon after an encounter with border patrol agents.
+
+About 1,200 searchers focused intensely on 22 square miles Saturday encompassing thick forests and heavy brush around where Matt was killed.
+
+Franklin County Sheriff Kevin Mulverhill told Fox News that police are very motivated after Friday's events, while Sweat is likely fatigued, increasing the chances he will slip up.
+
+""He's been out of prison for three weeks. He's been on the run for three weeks,"" Mulverhill said. ""He's in this area, he's now lost his cellmate, his escapemate is gone, he's alone.""
+
+""If he's in this perimeter, we're pushing him we're moving him around,"" Mulverhill said.  He's tired, he's going to make a mistake.""
+
+Sweat also could have an even tougher time now without someone to take turns resting with and watch his back, said Clinton County Sheriff David Favro.
+
+""Now it's a one-man show and it makes it more difficult for him,"" Favro said. ""And I'm sure fatigue is setting in for him as well, knowing the guy he was with has already been shot.""
+
+Authorities said Matt was shot by a border patrol agent when he failed to comply with orders in the woods near a cabin where a shot had been fired earlier in the day at a camping trailer. A 20-gauge shotgun was found on Matt, though he didn’t fire it at officers, authorities said.
+
+""They verbally challenged him, told him to put up his hands. And at that time, he was shot when he didn't comply,"" New York State Police Superintendent Joseph D'Amico said at a news conference late Friday.
+
+The breakthrough came Friday shortly before 2 p.m., when a person towing a camper head a loud sound and thought a tire had blown out. Finding the tire intact, the driver drove another eight miles before discovering a bullet hole.
+
+Authorities converged on the location where the sound was heard and discovered the smell of gunfire inside a cabin. D’Amico said there was also evidence someone had fled out the back door.
+
+A noise -- perhaps a cough -- ultimately did Matt in. A border patrol team discovered Matt, who was shot after failing to heed a command to raise his hands.
+
+""As we were doing the ground search in the area, there was movement detected by officers on the ground, what they believed to be coughs. So they knew that they were dealing with humans as opposed to wildlife,"" he said.
+
+""We have a lot of people in the area. We have canines and we have a decent perimeter set up and we're searching for Sweat at this time,"" he said.
+
+The pair escaped the prison together on June 6. Gov. Andrew Cuomo called them “dangerous, dangerous men.”
+
+Police blocked off all roads as officers hunted for Sweat in an area around Titusville Mountain State Forest in Malone, spanning 22 square miles.
+
+Mitch Johnson said one of his best friends checked on his hunting cabin in Malone Friday afternoon and called police after noticing the scent of grape flavored gin as soon as he stepped into his cabin and spotting the bottle that had gone untouched for years resting on a kitchen table.
+
+Johnson said his friend, correction officer Bob Willett, told him he summoned police about an hour before Matt was fatally shot and then heard a flurry of gun blasts.
+
+Matt and Sweat used power tools to saw through a steel cell wall and several steel steam pipes, bashed a hole through a 2-foot-thick brick wall, and squirmed through pipes to escape.
+
+Sweat was serving a sentence of life without parole in the killing of a sheriff's deputy in Broome County in 2002. Matt was serving 25 years to life for the killing and dismembering of his former boss.
+
+A civilian worker at the prison has been charged with helping the killers flee by giving them hacksaw blades, chisels and other tools.
+
+Prosecutors said Joyce Mitchell, a prison tailoring shop instructor who got close to the men while working with them, had agreed to be their getaway driver but backed out because she felt guilty for participating. Mitchell pleaded not guilty June 15 to charges including felony promoting prison contraband.
+
+Authorities said the men had filled their beds in their adjacent cells with clothes to make it appear they were sleeping when guards made overnight rounds. On a cut steam pipe, the prisoners left a taunting note containing a crude caricature of an Asian face and the words ""Have a nice day.""
+
+Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie said they apparently used tools stored by prison contractors, taking care to return them to their toolboxes after each night's work.
+
+On June 24, authorities charged Clinton correction officer Gene Palmer with promoting prison contraband, tampering with physical evidence and official misconduct. Officials said he gave the two prisoners the frozen hamburger meat Joyce Mitchell had used to hide the tools she smuggled to Sweat and Matt. Palmer's attorney said he had no knowledge that the meat contained hacksaw blades, a bit and a screwdriver.
+
+Dannemora, built in 1845, occupies just over 1 square mile within the northern reaches of the Adirondack Forest Preserve and is surrounded by forest and farmland. The stark white perimeter wall of the prison, topped with guard towers, borders a main street in the village's business district.
+
+The escape was the first in history from Clinton Correctional's maximum-security portion. In July 2003, two convicted murderers used tools from a carpentry shop at Elmira Correctional Facility to dig a hole in the roof of their cell and a rope of bedsheets to go over the wall. They were captured within three days, and a subsequent state investigation cited lax inmate supervision, poor tool control and incomplete cell searches.
+
+The Associated Press and Fox News' Rick Leventhal contributed to this report",REAL
+662,Clinton and Sanders neck and neck in California primary,"No matter who wins California's 475 delegates on Tuesday, Clinton may have to woo the state's Sanders supporters as well as Trump fans before the Democratic convention – and possibly beyond.
+
+With the California primary election looming Tuesday, it is still unclear which Democratic candidate will win one of the largest states' 475 delegates. To hear Hillary Clinton tell it, she's on the verge of beating Bernie Sanders in the Golden State and beyond, but the Vermont senator has told supporters that they're gaining ground, and stand a strong chance of cinching the primaries.
+
+In the past few days, Mrs. Clinton has traveled the state in hopes of winning over the the delegates she needs in order to exceed 2,383 and get the nomination. ""I'm very proud of the campaign we're running here, and I believe, on Tuesday, I will have decisively won the popular vote and I will have decisively won the pledged delegate majority,"" she said on CNN's ""State of the Union.""
+
+Senator Sanders' campaign, however, protests that delegate math and money don't tell the whole story. He's not ready to back down — especially with the strong coalition of supporters he has in California.
+
+""It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night,"" Sanders  told reporters in Los Angeles on Saturday, according to CNN. ""At the end of the nominating process, no candidate will have enough pledged delegates to call the campaign a victory. That will be dependent upon superdelegates. In other words, the Democratic National Convention will be a contested convention.""
+
+Some Clinton fans, in particular, fear the continued intra-party fight will risk Democrats' unity ahead of the general election, leaving them vulnerable against presumed Republican nominee Donald Trump. Even if Clinton wins the nomination, part of her energy will need to go towards wooing ""Bernie or Bust"" supporters, instead of focusing on existing Trump voters alone.
+
+Twenty-five percent of Sanders supporters said they would not vote for Clinton in the general election if she were the nominee against Trump, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. The ""Bernie or Bust"" movement may be even stronger in California, where the USC Dornsife/LA Times poll indicated that Clinton lagged behind Sanders 43 percent to 44 percent among registered voters. Only 65 percent of those who are voting Sanders in the California primary said they would definitely support Clinton in the case of a Clinton-Trump face off.
+
+After Puerto Rico's primary on Sunday, Clinton holds 1,809 delegates and 548 superdelegates, for a total of 2,357. Winning the nomination calls for at least 2,382. During the Democratic primaries on Tuesday (when party voters head to the polls in California, New Jersey, the Dakotas, Montana, and New Mexico) 694 delegates, including 475 delegates in California, will be at stake.
+
+Sanders also swept through California this past weekend, verbally attacking Trump, but also telling supporters the Democratic game wasn't over. If they turn out in force on Tuesday, he said, he'll be in a stronger position to capture superdelegates.
+
+""If we can win, and win big here in California and in the other states, and in Washington D.C., we are going to go into the Democratic convention with enormous momentum,"" Sanders told listeners during a rally outside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. ""With your help, I believe, we will come out with the nomination.""",REAL
+8430,Hillary’s Crime Family: End Of Days For The U.S.A.,"Financial Markets , Market Manipulation , U.S. Economy Cheryl Mills , Clinton Foundation , Hillary emails , Jim Comey , John Podesta , Wiener laptop admin 
+An investor in Dave’s fund emailed him asking which way Colorado would vote tomorrow. He replied: “Depends on who counts the votes. I don’t believe this is a fair election. I think the Clinton crime machine, with the help of George Soros and a few others, have everything under their control now.” 
+After taking the better part of a year to sift through 55,000 emails in analyzing Hillary Clinton’s behavior with regard to conducting classified Government business on her private server – which apparently was accessible to hackers and, surreptitiously, by Anthony Wieners porn laptop – Jim Comey determined in 8 days that 650,000 emails downloaded from Hillary’s private server were not relevant. 
+Sorry Jim, that’s impossible to believe. One highly plausible is that operatives in the Deep State shut down the FBI investigation in order to preserve the treasure trove of material that will give it power over Clinton’s Presidency. The SoT was perplexed by this, so we asked John Titus his take on this. His answer was quite compelling: Here’s what I’m reasonably sure of, based on experience. (1) Jim Comey looked sick when, at the conclusion of round one, and having proven beyond all doubt that Hillary violateed 18 U.S.C 793(f), he said no reasonable prosecutor would charge her. He wasn’t acting. Bad acting comes right through camera lens, and that man looked like he was about to vomit when he left that dais; (2) it took the FBI a year to conclude round one of its investigation, which was based on its review of 55,000 emails; (3) Comey had promised to get back to congress should more info arise, and when 650,000 unexpected emails showed up, he made good on his word by letting congress know; and (4) the FBI terminated its investigation LONG before reviewing 650,000 emails. I once reviewed 250,000 documents on a case, Based on the foregoing, SOMEONE got to Comey—somewhere along the line. For all I know, though, the whole thing was scripted from start to finish, and Comey read his script at every point along the way, even when it physically disgusted him in round one. So while you might be right about the time, I think if the Deep State made a move on Comey, it happened awhile ago. That’s wholly speculative on my part. You could well be right that they got to him just recently. I just doubt it. I think he’s the Company Man because he’s a company man. For DAMN SURE you’re right about holding Hillary hostage, but she’s so evil it’s like throwing a pedophile into a daycare center with no supervision, the shades drawn and the doors locked. 
+With that as the preface, today’s episode of the Shadow of Truth discussed the latest development in the HRC Crime Family saga: Share this:",FAKE
+1220,"Why pundits, politicians and the press hate Ted Cruz","Senator Ted Cruz is now the frontrunner in the Republican race for the White House.
+
+But if you believe the Mainstream Media and the political pundits -- Marco Rubio won the Iowa Caucus.
+
+Click here to get Todd’s American Dispatch – a must-read for conservatives!
+
+Just look at Tuesday's news coverage -- they marginalized Senator Cruz -- and glorified Senator Rubio.
+
+And that's the narrative. Cruz may have won -- but Rubio is more electable. And yet... the numbers in Iowa tell a very different story.
+
+One out of three evangelical voters chose Cruz -- so did four out of ten very conservative voters.
+
+And 26 percent of young voters -- 18 to 29 - -- they didn't vote for Rubio -- they also voted for Cruz.
+
+The voters recognize  a simple truth. Senator Cruz has been a man of his word -- a principled conservative -- and that is something the Establishment cannot tolerate.
+
+“What we are seeing is evangelicals who have been dormant in the political process that are turning out,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “It’s something we haven’t seen in a number of years.”
+
+Perkins, who has endorsed Cruz, told me the voters are not interested in a moderate candidate. They don’t want someone in the “middle.”
+
+“There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead animals,” Perkins said.
+
+Looking back on the results in Iowa, Perkins said there should be one take-away for voters.
+
+“Do not listen to the pundits or the polls – but vote your values,” he said. “It was values voters and the return of those voters that put Ted Cruz over the top.”
+
+It's not that the pundits and politicos hate Senator Cruz - they know he can't be controlled -- and that has them terrified.
+
+Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is ""God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values."" Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.
+
+",REAL
+9624,"WSJ Report Not About Black Rapists At Baylor, But Strictly About The White Guys Who Covered Up For Them","X Dear Reader! VDARE.com isn’t just a website. We are the voice of the Historic American Nation . Our goal is nothing less than to develop a full spectrum media network to speak up for our people during this difficult time for our country. Part of that means building institutions which are offline and in the real world. There’s something about a paper journal that suggests permanence, which inclines people to take it more seriously. And because the news cycle is so fast, some of the most important, substantial, and potentially influential writings fall through the cracks and don’t get the attention they deserve. For that reason, we’re proud to announce the creation of VDARE QUARTERLY, a print journal featuring the best material from our webzine. This will replace our yearly anthologies and ensure that the information and analysis you really don't want to miss will get in front of you as quickly as possible. However, we need your help. For us to unveil this exciting new product we need 600 magazines ordered to cover the print expenses. Fill out the form below to instantly receive a digital copy of VDARE QUARTERLY, and when we have the number of necessary subscribers it will go to print and your exclusive paper copy will ship directly to you! Depending on the package you choose, you will receive multiple paper copies (provided enough readers support the community effort). We encourage you to pass these around – they serve as an excellent gift for friends and family, while at the same time helping to build our community. VDARE QUARTERLY is aesthetically pleasing as well as ideologically powerful. But this isn’t just a service we are providing. VDARE QUARTERLY is a tangible manifestation of your investment in us, and in our country. A subscription is one of the most effective ways you can help us build our media network, expand our influence, and build the kind of movement we will need to take back our country and ensure our children have a recognizable America. 
+We count on your support! Yours sincerely, Peter Brimelow, Editor of VDARE.com VDARE QUARTERLY countdown: 167 already ordered, 433 still to go",FAKE
+8211,The ‘Two-Party Racket’ Is Incapable of Dealing With Our Present Crises,"The ‘Two-Party Racket’ Is Incapable of Dealing With Our Present Crises   Ian Sane / (CC-BY-2.0) 
+“Indications that Clinton is heading towards a solid win” might suggest that 2016 is “the safest year ever to vote Green, right?” No, say Democrats. 
+“Dems will never admit it’s a good time to go Green,” writes Scott McLarty, media coordinator for the Green Party, at The Hill. “They want a field permanently limited to two parties of war and Wall Street.” 
+To understand what we’ve lost under the two-party racket, compare the cringeworthy Clinton-Trump debates with Green nominee Jill Stein’s rebuttals. 
+Stein addressed issues that were either touched on superficially or absent from the bipartisan bicker-fest. She proposed solutions — especially the Green New Deal. Progressive ideas, the kind advanced by Bernie Sanders in his call for political revolution, are effectively censored in the debates. 
+Marginalization of alt-parties in the late 20th century is one of the unmentioned reasons for the triumph of the right wing in both major parties. It explains the disappearance of big progressive ideas like FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. 
+The Green New Deal is a vision of how we can improve the lives of millions of people and rescue the planet from climate chaos. 
+Today’s Democrats give us no such vision. All they’ve offered is modest reforms, ideas that pretended to be progressive but aren’t (e.g., Obamacare, originally Romneycare), and slogans like “Change We Can Believe In.” The vision Hillary Clinton evokes is “I’m not Trump.” 
+The two-party racket is incapable of dealing with the crises of the 21st century: climate change; creeping corporate oligarchy and economic inequality; the national-security/mass-incarceration state; endless war. 
+These crises promise an era of deteriorating quality of life, increasing personal debt, eroded rights and freedoms, lawless militarism, and social breakdown. The danger they pose can be compared with the rise of totalitarian states and the Cold War’s nuclear menace during the 20th century.",FAKE
+4099,"Just the Beginning? Religious Freedom, Gay Rights Battle Turns Ugly","Ten months after the Supreme Court passed a landmark case on gay marriage, a backlash against the ruling is spreading across the country.
+
+Thirty-four states are considering new bills that would protect Christians from the threat of legal action because they object to gay marriage on religious grounds.
+
+It's shaping up to be a fierce debate as gay activists and people of faith battle for their rights to be protected.
+
+Business owners Dick and Betty Odgaards' story should serve as a warning of what happens when so-called religious freedom laws are not in place to protect people of faith.
+
+On August 3, 2013, a gay couple asked the Odgaards if they could rent their gallery in Iowa for a same-sex wedding.
+
+""They came in, and Dick was there, and he was the one who had to deliver the bad news to them,"" Betty recalled.
+
+The Odgaards refused, citing their Christian belief that marriage should be between one man and one woman.
+
+""I don't want to celebrate my sins. I don't want other people to celebrate my sins, nor do I want to participate in celebrating anybody else's sins,"" Richard said.
+
+The gay couple sued them for discrimination and after a two-year court battle, rather than celebrate gay marriages, the Christian couple paid the couple a fine and agreed to stop hosting weddings at the gallery.
+
+""It has been difficult. I won't lie,"" Betty acknowledged. ""It has been the hardest thing we've ever been through and I don't wish it upon anyone.""
+
+Their decision cost them dearly. After months of negative publicity, hate mail, death threats and loss of income, the Gortz Haus Gallery went out of business last year.
+
+""The ugly continues to come at us, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere else and we would do it all over again the same way because we are in the middle of God's will,"" Betty told CBN News.
+
+Since last summer's Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, more than 100 religious freedom bills have been proposed in 34 states to protect Christians and others from the threat of legal action because they object to gay marriage on religious grounds.
+
+Take for example the new law just passed in Mississippi.
+
+""The Mississippi law says if you believe marriage is the union of one man and one woman, that sex is reserved for marriage and that we are created male and female -- it doesn't say you have to believe those things -- but it says if you do believe those things, we are not going to penalize you if you act on those beliefs,"" explained Dr. Ryan Anderson, a senior fellow with the Washington, D.C-based Heritage Foundation.
+
+In Louisiana and Ohio, lawmakers are also proposing measures that protect pastors who refuse to perform same-sex marriages.
+
+Anderson said the accusation that these religious freedom laws are discriminatory against gays and lesbians just isn't true.
+
+""I think the basic argument here is that we are trying to protect pluralism, we're trying to protect diversity, we're promoting tolerance,"" he said.
+
+But some of the laws have been met with fierce opposition from businesses, activists and celebrities.
+
+For instance, North Carolina's governor was forced to roll back portions of a controversial new state law after several companies criticized the law and others threatened to stop their businesses in the state.
+
+""I think this just shows you that what's taking place is a form of cronyism, it's cultural cronyism,"" Anderson said. ""Big business is using their marketing freedom to deny little businesses and religious people their religious freedom.""
+
+What is clear though is that the backlash from last year's Supreme Court decision has brought religious freedom concerns to the forefront this spring.
+
+Many Americans believe that the battle over gay rights versus protecting people's religious convictions is just beginning.",REAL
+878,Ten inconsistencies in Donald Trump's big foreign policy address,"For a speech purporting to challenge Washington’s accepted wisdom, there was much that was familiar about Donald Trump’s first big foreign policy address, not least the customary certainty of its delivery.
+
+
+
+A call to challenge radical Islam through “philosophical struggle” as well as military force might even have come from the lips of Barack Obama. Certainly no mainstream Republican would ever disagree with the somewhat motherhood-and-apple-pie exhortation for US presidents to view the world “through the clear lens of American interests”.
+
+But how closely the speech stands up to detailed scrutiny is already the subject of fierce political debate. Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state put up to respond on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, claimed she had never seen so many “simplistic slogans, contradictions and misstatements” in one speech. Trump’s supporters argue instead that he was at his strongest, skewering the inconsistencies of the Democratic establishment’s approach under Obama and Clinton.
+
+Here are 10 passages that suggest Trump may instead be doing what all politicians like doing best: having his cake and eating it.
+
+Some groups “will never be anything but our enemies”, Trump said after attacking Obama for doing deals with Iran. Only he claimed shortly afterwards: “The world must know we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends, and when old friends become allies.”
+
+
+
+Trump also blasted Obama for letting down existing overseas partners, promising “America is going to be a reliable friend and ally again”. Yet he delivers warnings about paying for Nato membership that might sound more like blackmail to some. “The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense – and, if not, the US must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.”
+
+He was also ambiguous about America’s role in promoting democracy in the world, claiming “we are getting out of the nation-building business” but then adding: “I will work with our allies to reinvigorate western values and institutions.” He also argued that promoting “western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world”.
+
+Then there is the standard section of any recent US presidential speech that calls on Middle East nations to do more to fight Islamic extremism. “This has to be a two-way street. They must also be good to us and remember us and all we are doing for them,” he said of allies in the region. These comments might have more clout coming from someone who had not recently offended much of the Muslim world by threatening to ban their citizens from entering the US.
+
+Some criticisms of Obama’s “humiliations” at the hands of foreign governments do not stand up to much scrutiny either. Trump said that Obama was snubbed during recent state visits to Cuba and Saudi Arabia because he was not greeted at the airport by a senior leader. “Perhaps an incident without precedent in the long and prestigious history of Air Force One,” claims Trump. Strangely, the Queen’s decision to send the lord-lieutenant of Essex – hardly the most prestigious of British officials – to meet Obama at London’s Stansted airport last week was not mentioned, perhaps because it is a pretty standard way of doing things.
+
+A similar non sequitur arises in criticism of Obama’s failed attempt to persuade the International Olympic Committee to award the 2016 Summer Games to Chicago. The president should not have flown all the way to the IOC meeting in Copenhagen if he did not already know they were going to award the games to the US, argued Trump. But what would have been the point of flying all that way to lobby for something that had already been secured?
+
+Perhaps Trump is just trying to live up to his maxim of keeping the world guessing. “We have to be unpredictable and we have to be unpredictable starting now,” he argued at the start of the speech. Except, by the end, he argued for the virtues of a more transparent and principled approach: “The best way to achieve those goals is through a disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy.”
+
+Sometimes it is best not to apply too much mathematics. Trump claimed, for example, that “there are scores of recent migrants inside our borders charged with terrorism”, an assertion already open to dispute, but went on to add on top “for every case known to the public there are dozens and dozens more”. If “scores” means at least 40, then by this logic, Trump is claiming the existence of around 1,000 more people than anyone else has.
+
+If the speech has one abiding slogan, it too could have done with some more fact-checking. Putting America first sounds at first just like an extension of Trump’s hallmark promise to make America great again. Yet it also harks back to the America First Committee of the 1940s, a group set up to prevent the US from joining the second world war, only to be disbanded three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
+
+But perhaps this just points to the biggest contradiction of the speech: the tension between its isolationism and its interventionism. At once, Trump urges more of a pragmatic and realist approach to the exercise of US power, unconstrained by the niceties of political correctness, and yet blasts Obama for having “no vision, no purpose, no direction, no strategy”.
+
+It is perhaps unfair, however, to dwell too closely on textual analysis of a speech clearly written by a number of people. “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism” is a powerful line, but it does not sound very much like it was written by the same man who told a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday: “Do I look like a president? How handsome am I?”",REAL
+5304,John Podesta’s New Global Order,"  John Podesta’s New Global Order John Podesta’s New Global Order October 28, 2016, 5:44 am by Cliff Kincaid Leave a Comment 0 
+Accuracy in Media 
+In one of her secret speeches, Hillary Clinton said, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders…” Before this comment was revealed, Adam Taylor of The Washington Post tried to assure everyone that the idea of a North American Union, like the meddlesome and bureaucratic European Union, was dead. Such talk, he said, emanated from “fringe websites” and “conspiracy theorists.” 
+The Hillary speech was made to a Brazilian bank known as Itaú BBA, which describes itself as “Latin America’s largest Corporate & Investment Bank” and part of the Itaú Unibanco group, “one of the world’s largest financial conglomerates.” 
+The problem for Taylor and other faux journalists is that there is a whole body of research on the topic of a “ North American Law Project ,” designed to integrate the legal systems of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The project is run out of American University’s Center for North American Studies, where students can concentrate in North American Studies . As a matter of fact, such degrees are being offered by several different colleges and universities, including Canada’s McGill University . 
+Passed in 1993, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, began the process of harmonizing laws among the U.S., Canada and Mexico. But the Council on Foreign Relations admits that the U.S.-Mexico trade balance swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus in 1993 to a $54 billion deficit by 2014. This has led to a loss of about 600,000 jobs. 
+In addition to shipping jobs to Mexico, NAFTA constituted subversion of our constitutional system. President Clinton submitted NAFTA as an agreement, requiring only a majority of votes in both Houses of Congress for passage, and not a treaty, which would have required a two-thirds vote in favor in the Senate. NAFTA passed by votes of 234-200 in the House and 61-38 in the Senate. 
+A money crash soon followed in 1995 as Mexico was hit by a peso crisis, and a U.S. bailout was arranged. Congress would not bail out Mexico, so Clinton arranged for loans and guarantees to Mexico totaling almost $40 billion through the International Monetary Fund and the “Exchange Stabilization Fund.” 
+Meanwhile, pressure has been building for the creation of a “North American Community”—also known as a “North American Union”—with regular meetings involving the leaders of the three countries. On June 29, 2016, the Obama White House issued a fact sheet on this year’s “North American Leaders’ Summit.” It said, “The economies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico are deeply integrated. Canada and Mexico are our second and third largest trading partners. Our trade with them exceeds $1.2 trillion dollars annually.” 
+The leaders of these countries agreed to establish a “North American Caucus” to “more effectively work in concert on regional and global issues by holding semi-annual coordination meetings among our foreign ministries.” One item on the agenda was for the leaders to reaffirm “North America’s strong support for [Colombian] President Santos’s efforts to finalize a peace accord with the FARC guerrillas.” That fell apart on October 2 when a “peace deal” with the communist terrorists was voted down by the people of Colombia. 
+But notice how these leaders claim to speak for “North America.” 
+Going global, they also declared, “North America is committed to joint and coordinated actions to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda.” 
+This is U.N.-speak for global taxes and other forms of foreign aid from the U.S. to the rest of the world. 
+We noted in a column last year that the American people, through their elected representatives, have had absolutely no input in developing the new global agenda that President Obama has tried to implement without the input or approval of Congress. 
+Interestingly, one of those deeply involved in this global agenda, as we noted at the time, was John Podesta, the chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign who previously served as counselor to Obama. Podesta’s emails are at the center of the WikiLeaks disclosures about the operations of the Clinton campaign, the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic Party. 
+Podesta, founder of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress and a member of the elitist Trilateral Commission , went to work for Obama as a senior policy consultant on climate change. A liberal Catholic, he has been a professor at Georgetown Law School. One of the leaked emails shows Podesta saying that he applauds the work of Pope Francis on climate change and that “all my Jesuit friends say the Pope is the real deal.” 
+Podesta was picked by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to be a member of the “high-level panel” of “eminent persons” planning the future of the globe. This so-called “High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda” released an 81-page report titled, “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development.” 
+“In simplest terms,” explains Patrick Wood, author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation , “Sustainable Development is a replacement economic system for capitalism and free enterprise. It is a system based on resource allocation and usage rather than on supply and demand and free economic market forces.” 
+In this context, Wood argues that the major significance of the transfer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is not the immediate need by the U.N. or some countries to censor websites, but to generate revenue for global purposes. ICANN will do this, he argues, through management of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), the links between the Internet and networks, electronic devices and embedded technology with IP addresses. “IoT are the connections between inanimate objects and the humans that depend upon them,” he notes. To accomplish this, ICANN has devised a new IP numbering system called IPV6, described as the “ vital expansion ” of the Internet. 
+“In terms of ‘follow the money,’ IoT is expected to generate upwards of $3 trillion by 2025 and is growing at a rate of at least 30 percent per year,” Wood argues . “In other words, it is a huge market and money is flying everywhere. If the UN can figure out a way to tax this market, and they will, it will provide a windfall of income and perhaps enough to make it self-perpetuating.” 
+He adds, “Congress never understood this when they passively let Obama fail to renew our contract with ICANN. However, Obama and his globalist handlers understood it perfectly well, which makes the deception and treachery of it even worse.” 
+Under the cover of “sustainable development,” Wood predicts the Internet will be used to construct a massive database on human activities, in order to monitor and control nations’ and peoples’ access to resources. It will constitute ultimate socialist control and a form of “digital slavery,” from which he warns there may be no return. Cliff Kincaid 
+Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid . 0",FAKE
+92,"White Kids Get Medicated When They Misbehave, Black Kids Get Suspended — or Arrested","In recent years, as a national conversation about racial discrepancies in American policing has heated up, a depressing subplot has also emerged: a pattern of similar discrepancies in how discipline is meted out in schools. Black students made up just 18 percent of students in the public schools sampled by the New York Times in 2012, but “they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once” and 39 percent of those expelled — examining federal data, the Times also noted that “nationwide, more than 70 percent of students involved in arrests or referrals to court are black or Hispanic.” Even black preschoolers were not exempt: They made up the same 18 percent of the student population, but constituted half of all suspensions.
+
+As everyone from the Times to the ACLU has noted, the enactment of tough “zero-tolerance” policies in schools has led to the criminalization of what had previously been viewed as minor disciplinary issues. Zero-tolerance often mandates that students be suspended — even referred to law enforcement and arrested — for minor transgressions: Until a 2013 rule change, Los Angeles students routinely received automatic suspensions for refusing to take off their hats (this fell under a category of violation called “willful defiance”), while a Florida district, the sixth largest in the country, set a state record for student arrests in a jurisdiction in 2011, primarily on charges of possessing small amounts of marijuana and spraying graffiti. The ACLU has called this phenomenon the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
+
+Now, a new paper in SAGE takes a closer look at how race and class affect school districts’ approaches to punishment, but also examines another important element of school discipline: Some disruptive kids, rather than being punished, are “medicalized” — that is, eventually given diagnoses, therapy, and/or medication as a result of behavioral problems. As “problem behaviors such as inattention, hyperactivity, and defiance of adult authority have received increased attention” since the 1990s, the study notes, schools have increasingly sought treatment and made special provisions for disruptive students through mental-health provisions in state and federal legislation.
+
+For the study, David M. Ramey, of Pennsylvania State University’s department of sociology and criminology, used data from over 60,000 schools in 6,000 districts to examine trends in how schools’ racial and socioeconomic makeup impacted how they dealt with misbehaving students.
+
+Among other things, he found that:
+
+If you’re a black student or you’re poor, you’re far more likely to be punished than offered behavioral treatment when you misbehave.
+
+There was a strong correlation between the percentage of black students in a school and the rates of punitive discipline, and an inverse relationship between the percentage of black students and the rate of behavioral treatment. “Schools with more black students relative to other schools in the district had higher rates of suspension or expulsion and police referral or arrest” than other in-district schools, the study notes, and also had substantially lower rates of enrollment in mental-health and special education programs. Students in more socioeconomically disadvantaged districts are also far more likely to face criminalized punishment than kids in more affluent areas, in part, Ramey thinks, because criminalized punishment is cheaper than mental-health treatment, and these districts are often strapped for cash. Here, race and class are — as is so often the case — inextricably linked.
+
+Ramey draws on prior work in the field to demonstrate that the far higher rates of criminalization black students experience may be the result of endemic bias on the part of school officials. An American Psychological Association study found that black boys are perceived as older and less innocent than their white peers, and some studies indicate teachers can suffer from the fundamental attribution error, attributing minority children’s misbehavior to different causes than they do white children’s. Ramey notes how one study found that schools blame “poor parenting, cultural deficiencies, and poor character” for bad behavior among racial minority children, and see that behavior as permanent and leading almost inexorably to involvement with the criminal justice system. Further, a study on enrollment in special education programs found that “teachers and administrators are less likely to attribute minority students’ misbehavior to underlying behavior disorders,” which could be ameliorated with mental-health treatment.
+
+When school officials are given more leeway in how they discipline students, the role of race is more apparent in their decision-making.
+
+“In disadvantaged districts,” says Ramey, “the school board tends to have a lot more power in setting disciplinary policy, in particular at the top, and it’s followed relatively uniformly across the schools.” A district might mandate metal detectors or zero-tolerance policies, for example, and every school follows those policies, regardless of the makeup of the student body. In more affluent districts, things are different. There, Ramey says, “The schools and administrators are allowed a greater degree of autonomy.” School boards outline a disciplinary guideline (usually tied to government funding through state or federal law) that they want to meet, but individual schools have more flexibility in how they meet them, be it through tougher punitive discipline or the expansion of mental-health programs. “This is where you see race really mattering,” Ramey says. “The predominantly black schools in advantaged districts have much higher levels of suspension than predominantly white schools in advantaged districts. Conversely, predominantly black schools have much lower rates of [mental-health-program] enrollment than predominantly white schools in advantaged districts.”
+
+Some schools have come to mirror the adult criminal justice and mental-health systems in how they deal with problematic behavior.
+
+For most of the United States’ industrialized existence, working-class schools tried to reproduce the organization and principles of the industrial labor force: vocational skills, and an emphasis on the values of order, compliance, efficiency, and uniformity. But various theories hold that as the U.S. manufacturing economy and its labor system fled overseas in the second half of the 20th century, the criminal justice and mental-health systems replaced it as a model for how schools should be run. Ramey says that some of the discrepancies in these systems are mirrored in U.S. schools: “There are racial inequalities in the mental-health system across the life course, and it’s the same with the criminal justice system.” Like their adult counterparts, children of color are far more likely than white children to be pulled into the criminal justice system. Like adults, they are far less likely to seek out or be referred to mental-health professionals for treatment. “A lot of these structural inequalities we see in adult systems of social control are reproduced throughout childhood,” says Ramey.
+
+Of course, it’s not all cut-and-dried: The sources of racial disparities in treatment, for instance, do not lie exclusively within these larger systems. Black families have been shown to be “skeptical of medical and mental-health research, particularly contested and controversial issues like ADHD,” and are therefore less likely to seek out treatment, while predominantly Latino schools see less medicalized and criminalized discipline, all things being equal. “Some of the research,” Ramey says, “suggests that Hispanics and Hispanic families in Hispanic schools — in particular first-generation immigrants — tend to avoid social control institutions altogether, be it the criminal justice system, the mental-health system, or the medical system,” often due to language barriers, immigration status, and other concerns.
+
+More research is definitely needed in this area, both because of limitations in this analysis (it does not look at the treatment of a black individual compared to a white one for the same behavior at the same school, for example) and the gravity of the issue. There is clearly a discrepancy in how schools respond to bad behavior based on the racial and socioeconomic makeup of their student bodies, but there are still plenty of unanswered questions about the details.",REAL
+1545,Talk radio rallies around Ted Cruz,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+3517,Footage shows suspects in Brussels attack,"Brussels, Belgium (CNN) In grainy images from surveillance footage, a man wearing light-colored clothes and a hat pushes a baggage cart through the airport.
+
+It's one key piece of evidence authorities are looking at as they search for suspects after two explosions at the Brussels airport and another at a busy subway station in the Belgian capital Tuesday killed at least 30 people and wounded 230 others.
+
+ISIS claimed responsibility for the coordinated attacks, but authorities said it's too soon to say for sure whether the terror group was behind the blasts.
+
+So far, police have released photos of three men they say are suspects tied to the airport attack, standing side-by-side.
+
+Two of the men, wearing black in surveillance images, are believed to be suicide bombers who died in the explosions in the airport's departure lounge.
+
+But investigators believe the one in light-colored clothing planted a bomb at the airport, then left. Authorities called him a wanted man and asked for the public's help tracking him down.
+
+""The third man left a bomb in the airport, but it didn't explode. ... And we are now looking for this guy,"" Belgium's Interior Minister Jan Jambon said.
+
+A photograph released by investigators shows the three suspects side-by-side.
+
+Federal Prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said the two men wearing black in the photograph were likely the suicide attackers.
+
+Video shows the men exiting a taxi and moving through the airport, according to two U.S. officials. The man dressed in white left the airport after accompanying the other two, they said -- a move the officials said appeared to be planned.
+
+A break in the investigation may have come from a taxi driver who took the suspects to the airport.
+
+The driver contacted authorities after seeing surveillance footage and gave them the address where he picked the men up, according to two U.S. officials briefed on the investigation.
+
+That information prompted authorities to raid a residence after the attacks, the officials said.
+
+Investigators found a nail bomb, chemical products and an ISIS flag during a house search in the northeast Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek, Belgium's federal prosecutor said in a statement.
+
+Hours later, they were still combing through the building for evidence.
+
+Security was high. At one point, a helicopter hovered overhead, carrying a sniper with a weapon trained on the building.
+
+As masked, armed officers stood guard outside the building, the burst of camera flashes inside could be seen from the street below. Officers left the building carrying bags of evidence they loaded onto vehicles.
+
+A Belgian government representative told CNN that 10 people were killed and 100 wounded at Brussels' international airport. At least 20 people died and 130 were wounded at the Maelbeek metro station, officials said.
+
+The blasts sent wounded people fleeing into the streets, spurred evacuations of nuclear plants and transit hubs and led to raids in some areas as authorities searched for suspects and evidence.
+
+Authorities in Belgium have been trying to crack down on terror threats for months as they raided homes in the area in search of suspects. Tuesday's violence came just days after investigators closed in on Europe's most wanted man, Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam, who was hiding out in a Brussels suburb.
+
+On Tuesday, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel deflected a question about whether there is any link between the attacks and the Belgium-born French citizen's capture, saying it is too early to tell.
+
+Michel said Tuesday he had ""no information"" about who was responsible for the attack, adding that authorities will find that out, but now their focus is on caring for the victims.
+
+Two senior U.S. officials told CNN they believe the Belgium attack is tied to the same network as Abdeslam.
+
+One of the two airport explosions happened outside security checkpoints for ticketed passengers and near the airline check-in counters, an airline official briefed on the situation said.
+
+The subway station blast happened about an hour later in the Brussels district of Maelbeek, near the European Quarter, where European Union institutions are based.
+
+""We were fearing terrorist attacks,"" Michel told reporters Tuesday. ""And that has now happened.""
+
+But for survivors of Tuesday's blasts, the repeated warnings from officials in recent months didn't dull the shock of seeing the carnage.
+
+""You cannot believe it; you cannot believe it,"" said Jef Versele, who was in the airport's departure hall when bombs exploded there. ""It was so insane. Not in my backyard.""
+
+The second blast inside the airport blew out windows, created a lot of smoke and caused parts of the ceiling to fall, he added.
+
+""People were on the floor,"" Versele said, estimating he saw 50 to 60 who were thrown to the ground and didn't seem to be able to walk.
+
+Anthony Barrett saw the wounded carried out on stretchers and luggage carts as he watched from his hotel across from the terminal building.
+
+""I could see people fleeing,"" he said.
+
+After the attacks in Brussels, the home of NATO and the capital of the European Union, leaders inside Belgium and beyond vowed not to back down in their fight against terror.
+
+In Belgium, where officials declared three days of national mourning, Michel offered a resolute message to those who supported and cheered the attackers.
+
+""To those who have chosen to be barbarous enemies of freedom, democracy and fundamental values ... we remain united as one,"" Michel said. ""We are determined to defend our freedoms and to protect our liberties.""
+
+In its message claiming responsibility, ISIS noted that Belgium is one of the nations ""participating in the international coalition against the Islamic State.""
+
+A Twitter post widely circulated by prominent ISIS backers Tuesday featured the words, ""What will be coming is worse.""",REAL
+10414,More on Trump’s Populism and How It Can Be Controlled By Government, ,FAKE
+6109,Donald Trump’s Nightmare Comes True 10 Days Before Election – This Could Ruin EVERYTHING!,"0 comments 
+With just 10 days to go before the most important election of our lifetime, Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are soaring in the polls. The Friday announcement that the FBI would be re-opening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s personal email server has not helped matters for Democrats, either. 
+But none of this will matter if they are able to manipulate the vote. According to MRC Blog , that’s why the left is going to drastic measures to drum up Democratic voters, expanding voting rights to include non-citizens in major cities nationwide. 
+The latest notable city to do so is San Francisco, whose Election Day ballot will include a measure allowing the parents or legal guardians of any student in the city’s public schools to vote in school board elections. Under this measure, people with green cards, visas, or no documentation at all would be allowed to vote. 
+San Francisco Assemblyman David Chiu, who believes illegal aliens should be allowed to vote to bypass the “broken immigration system in this country,” made the following statement: 
+“One out of three kids in the San Francisco unified school system has a parent who is an immigrant, who is disenfranchised and doesn’t have a voice. We’ve had legal immigrants who’ve had children go through the entire K-12 system without having a say.” 
+Chiu is the son of Taiwanese immigrants. 
+It is no secret that the vast majority of illegal aliens vote Democrat, because that is the party which is incessantly trying to buy their loyalty with an endless stream of handouts and promises of blanket amnesty. If it weren’t so, we wouldn’t see all of these liberals pushing so hard to give illegals voting rights; they simply do so because it works in their favor, not because it is actually good for anyone. 
+Major cities from sea to shining sea are following San Francisco’s lead, which is just one more very important reason to vote for Donald Trump on Nov. 8. We need to turn this country around and FAST!",FAKE
+6456,Memo to Comey: Keep Your Damn Hands Off Our Elections,"  
+Without a shred of evidence and against the expressed wishes of his superiors at the Department of Justice, the head of the nation’s most prestigious law enforcement agency announced the reopening of an investigation into the mishandling of classified material by Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. The surprise announcement was delivered last Friday by FBI Director James Comey who knew that the action would create a cloud of suspicion around Clinton that could directly effect the outcome of the election. 
+Recent surveys suggest that that indeed has been the case, and that Hillary is now neck in neck with GOP contender Donald Trump going into the home-stretch of the bitterly contested campaign. 
+By inserting himself into the democratic process, Comey has ignored traditional protocols for postponing such announcements 60-days prior to an election, shrugged off the counsel of his bosses at the DOJ, and tilted the election in Trump’s favor. His action is as close to a coup d’état as anything we’ve seen in the U.S. since the Supreme Court stopped the counting of ballots in Florida in 2000 handing the election to George W. Bush. 
+It is not the job of the FBI to inform Congress about ongoing investigations. Comey’s job is to gather information and evidence that is pertinent to the case and present it to the DOJ where the decision to convene a grand jury is ultimately made. Comey is a renegade, a lone wolf who arbitrarily decided to abandon normal bureaucratic procedures in order to torpedo Clinton’s prospects for election. The widespread belief that Comey is a “good man who made a bad decision” is nonsense. He is an extremely intelligent and competent attorney with a keen grasp of Beltway politics. He knew what he was doing and he did it anyway. It’s absurd to make excuses for him. 
+In a carefully-crafted statement designed to deflect attention from his flagrant election tampering, Comey said this to his fellow agents: 
+“We don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed,” Comey said. “I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.” ( CNN ) 
+Let’s take a minute and parse this statement. First: “We don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations.” 
+True, because it is not the FBI’s job to do so. The FBI’s job is to dig up evidence and refer it to the Justice Department. Comey is not the Attorney General although he has arbitrarily assumed her duties and authority. 
+Second: “I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.” 
+“Supplement the record”? 
+That’s a pretty suggestive statement, don’t you think? When someone says they’re going to supplement the record, you naturally assume that they’re going to add important details to what the public already knows. Obviously, those details are not going to be flattering to Hillary or there’d be no reason to reopen the case. So the public is left with the impression Comey is going to produce damning information that could lead to an indictment of Hillary sometime in the future. 
+This is precisely why normal protocols require that no new investigations be announced 60 days before an election. Why? 
+Because the public invariably assumes that “investigation” equals “guilt”. In other words, “The FBI wouldn’t be investigating Hillary unless they had some dirt on her. Therefore, I’d better not waste my vote on Hillary.” 
+This is the logic upon which Comey’s dirty trick rests. He knows the effect his announcement will have because he is law enforcements version of Karl Rove, a bone fide partisan who’s mastered the dark art of political sabotage. 
+And just in case Comey’s announcement didn’t produce the desired effect (by destroying Hillary’s chances for victory), a former assistant director at the FBI, Tom Fuentes, appeared on CNN shortly after the announcement was made with more explicit information. Here’s a clip from the interview: 
+“The FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation,” Fuentes said Saturday, citing current and former senior FBI officials as sources… 
+According to the CNN report, officials with the FBI and Justice Department met in Washington earlier this year to discuss opening an investigation into possible conflicts of interest between the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton State Department.” 
+(“ Former FBI Official: FBI Has An ‘Intensive Investigation’ Ongoing Into Clinton Foundation “, Daily Caller) 
+Okay. So we’re no longer dealing with just classified emails. The FBI expanded its investigation and is now wading through the real sewage, the pay-to-play corruption scandal that surrounds that vast reservoir of illicit contributions known as the Clinton Foundation. In other words, the FBI is on to something big, really BIG. I can almost see them dragging poor Hillary off to the hoosegow in leg irons and shackles. Isn’t that the impression the above quote is supposed to produce? Here’s more from Fuentes: ORDER IT NOW 
+“Several FBI field offices and U.S. attorneys offices pushed for the investigation after receiving a tip from a bank about suspicious donations to the Clinton Foundation from a foreign donor, according to the report….” (Daily Caller) 
+“Foreign donors”, “suspicious donations”, smoky rooms, bundles of money. It all fits, doesn’t it? It’s all designed to increase suspicion and make Hillary look like a crook which, coincidentally, is the relentless mantra of the Trump campaign. Funny how the FBI and Trump appear to be reading from the same script, isn’t it? It’s almost like it was planned that way. 
+But what about the timing of all this? Is it really a coincidence or are Comey and Fuentes part of a one-two punch from the Trump campaign? 
+And, more important, what does the FBI actually have on Hillary? According to Fuentes: 
+“When the team looking at the Weiner computers went to the team of investigators who worked on the Clinton email case, and showed the emails to them earlier in the week, they said, “This is really significant. We need to take this to the Director.” ( 2:05 to 2:23 video ) 
+Repeat: “This is significant”. 
+What’s significant? Neither Comey nor Fuentes nor the more than year-long investigation has uncovered anything, unless you think the ridiculous rehash of the 15-year old Marc Rich investigation (which popped up on the FBI website this week) is “new news” that should alter the course of the election. This is pathetic. If they have something, show us. Otherwise, Ferme ta bouche. 
+Check this out from Thursday’s Wall Street Journal: 
+“As 2015 came to a close, the FBI and Justice Department had a general understanding that neither side would take major action on Clinton Foundation matters without meeting and discussing it first. … 
+The public-integrity prosecutors weren’t impressed with the FBI presentation, people familiar with the discussion said. “The message was, ‘We’re done here,’ ” a person familiar with the matter said. 
+Justice Department officials became increasingly frustrated that the agents seemed to be disregarding or disobeying their instructions. 
+Following the February meeting, officials at Justice Department headquarters sent a message to all the offices involved to “stand down,’’ a person familiar with the matter said…. 
+As prosecutors rebuffed their requests to proceed more overtly, those Justice Department officials became more annoyed that the investigators didn’t seem to understand or care about the instructions issued by their own bosses and prosecutors to act discreetly. 
+In subsequent conversations with the Justice Department, Mr. Capers told officials in Washington that the FBI agents on the case “won’t let it go,” these people said.” ( Wall Street Journal ) 
+Can you see what’s going on here? There’s a nest of rogue agents running wild at the FBI who’ve been giving the DOJ the finger while they conduct their witch hunt on Hillary. And what have they achieved? 
+Nothing! So far, they have nothing. 
+Now, I’m not a fan of Madame Clinton either, in fact I wouldn’t vote for her if they rubbed me down with bacon grease and stuck me in a bear cage, but, c’mon now, do we really want rogue cops and self righteous bureaucrats inserting themselves into our elections and picking the winners? 
+That’s bullshit. 
+If the FBI has some solid proof of wrongdoing that will put Hillary behind bars for good, than I say, “Bravo”. But until then, they should keep their damn hands off our elections! 
+MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition . He can be reached at . (Reprinted from Counterpunch by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+7431,"Comment on Boy says farewell to best friend, 91-year-old World War II vet from next door by Joe","Grab a hanky… Photo courtesy of Anika Rychner 
+From Today.com : Emmett Rychner was the first to move away. Two years ago, the young preschooler moved to a neighboring town, leaving behind his best friend, Erling Kindem, a World War II veteran who lived next door. 
+Last week, the time arrived for a final goodbye. 
+Erling, 91, died last Saturday, just three days after 6-year-old Emmett paid a visit to the nursing home where he was receiving hospice care. 
+“After we told Emmett that Erling had passed away, he was very quiet for a while,” his mother Anika Rychner told TODAY. “The first thing he said was, ‘So we’ll just have to wait a really long time. I know we’ll see him again in heaven.’” 
+For more than a decade, the two families lived next to each other in a Minneapolis suburb, but didn’t have much of a relationship beyond saying hello. That changed after Emmett came along. 
+“He was about 2 when this all started. He would start venturing over to Erling’s backyard when he was out in his garden with his tomatoes,” Rychner recalled. 
+One day, when Emmett saw Erling pouring dirt around his new sidewalk, he grabbed his toy shovel and wheelbarrow and walked over. 
+Erling was tickled by his new companion and they instantly bonded. 
+From then, Emmett went outside anytime he spotted his buddy. “He would also go knock on Erling’s door and ask if Erling could play,” his mother recalled with a laugh. 
+The two had lawn mower races (Emmett rode his electric toy mower). They played croquet and rode bicycles. And they cared for Erling’s garden, which grew one of the boy’s favorite foods, tomatoes. 
+“He especially liked the cherry ones that he could pick right there and eat in the garden. So he’d help Dad weed the garden,” Erling’s son, Charlie Kindem, told TODAY. 
+Two years ago, Emmett’s growing family moved away to the countryside. A month later, Erling and his wife moved to a senior apartment. But the two friends continued to visit each other regularly. Photo courtesy Anika Rychner 
+“Erling was still driving when we moved away, so we would sometimes come home and find tomatoes from his garden on our front porch, or a note for Emmett with some other treasure he brought him,” Rychner said. 
+“If we hadn’t visited in a while, Erling would call, and we would go visit,” she said. “Or sometimes the kids we’d say, ‘We should go see Erling,’ and we would stop on our way home from school.” 
+Emmett often drew pictures of B-24 bomber planes for his friend, who served as a radio operator and gunner during World War II. 
+“A lot of kids are not comfortable around elderly people because they look different. Emmett always was,” Rychner said. “He was never was shy about hugging Erling and holding his hand.” 
+When Erling’s wife, Joyce, with whom he had five children, died last fall, Emmett and his family attended her funeral. 
+“It was a natural thing,” Kindem said of his father’s relationship with Emmett. “He didn’t talk down to him at all. He talked to him like he was a regular person and not a little kid.” 
+But Erling was always like that, his son said. 
+“Dad was always friendly with kids. Growing up, he would play with us, whether it was baseball or football,” he said. He recalled how Erling flooded the vacant lot next door to their home every winter to turn it into an ice rink. 
+This past spring, Erling moved into an assisted living home. But his heart condition began to worsen and last month, he moved into a nursing home, where he received hospice care. 
+Emmett saw his friend the day after he moved in, and again last week. That was when Emmett read his friend the Lord’s prayer, and Erling encouraged his buddy to listen to his parents. Their final goodbye… 
+“It felt like a goodbye,” Rychner said. Erling passed away three days later. 
+Emmett has been more quiet than usual, but appears to have absorbed the news, in part because his parents had been preparing him. Rychner said she considers it “a wonderful gift” that Emmett had the chance to experience the decline of a friend’s health in such a positive, natural way. 
+She felt proud her son didn’t shy away from Erling, even in his illness. 
+“We all have to experience death at some point in our life of a loved one. That’s an important part of growing up. You can’t avoid it,” she said. 
+Both Rychner and Kindem said they have been moved by the outpouring of support since NBC-affiliate KARE first reported their story two years ago. The station continued to chronicle the friendship and reported the news of Erling’s death. 
+“He has strong faith that he will see him again,” Rychner said. 
+DCG",FAKE
+9078,You Won’t Believe What This Congressman is Planning To Do If Trump Loses (VIDEO),"By: The Voice of Reason | We are less than two weeks away from the moment of truth, when the results of the 2016 Presidential election will more than likely be tallied, and we’ll have a new President-elect, at least in name anyway, if nothing else. I’ll preface this post by saying it’s not too late for people to still take as many precautions as possible in hopes of ensuring their families safety not if, but when all hell breaks lose upon the announcement of the election’s winner. The media has done their best to conceal it for whatever reason, but there have been ample warnings that there is the potential for massive amounts of violence regardless of who wins. The second video below runs through a laundry list of crimes committed by Hillary Clinton, which has a lot to do with why four in 10 Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square. The second video cites specifics, and when you hear them, it’s no wonder why former Congressman Joe Walsh called for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president. Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump . On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” The former Congressman is hardly alone. A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; and one in five are likely voters are “VERY concerned,” and they should be. One 69-year old gentleman from Michigan said as the polls began shifting towards Hillary, he slowly began buying more ammunition. If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. Recall that over 70 of them are dead, five of which died in just six weeks under mysterious circumstances during the primaries that Hillary stole from Bernie Sanders. In the first video below, I review warnings issued by both sides of what will happen if the other party’s candidate wins. So far, if Hillary wins we have one former Congressman going for his gun, and if Trump wins, we have Black Lives Matter members saying saying back in March: “Dear white people if Trump wins young niggas such as myself are fully hell bent on inciting riots everywhere we go. Just so you know.” That’s just the tip of the iceberg… The question posed, “What would you do,” is primarily directed at Trump supporters if Hillary wins, because the only way she’s winning anything, is by fraudulently stealing it, and doing so with Obama’s help! How can we make that assertion without any doubt? Starting off light, we know not just from Project Veritas videos released this week , but also from Federal Election Commission (FEC) records, that an activist was caught on camera bragging about having helped start violent disruptions at Donald Trump campaign rallies, and brags that was paid by the Clinton campaign directly right before she stirred up trouble. The Project Veritas videos this week merely confirmed the initial account. We also know that despite Julian Assange saying he did not get information from the Russians, when Trump was beginning to pull away from Hillary in the polls, and Hillary needed a distraction, her and Barack Obama had no problem peddling a baseless accusation against Russia, eventually angering Putin to the point where Russia deployed nuclear missiles into Kaliningrad , along the border with Poland, and aimed them directly at our allies in Berlin. Nukes pointed at our allies? Who cares right? In her mind, “the ends justify the means.” so long as Hillary wins… Then of course, let’s not forget the email that was leaked by Wikileaks that proved that Hillary was not only aware of the transaction, but she allowed weapons to be sold to ISIS during a time of war , weapons that were presumably used against either U.S. troops or American allies at the very least. That act has a name: Treason, and it’s punishable by death. Still, the list goes on, including her use of psychological weapons against voters as detailed in one of her internal campaign documents leaked as part of the Podesta emails. In the second video, Alex Jones makes his point very clearly, that there is NO level the Democrats won’t stoop to for control of the White House. None. Zero. Furthermore, If by some chance all their fraud isn’t enough, and Hillary doesn’t win, they plan to burn American cities to the ground. Have you heard of any plans put in place by Obama to stop that? Of course not. Trump supporters: If Hillary is willing to do all those things, and so many more I don’t have the time to go into but have all been well documented, just so she can gain entry into Oval Office, what do you think she’ll act like once she takes possession of the Office of the President? We know what the Soros funded far-left has planned if Trump wins because they’ve told us countless times, what about the Trump supporters if Hillary wins? In the video below, Alex Jones asks the question, “Is there anything, anything at all that Hillary and the Democrats won’t do?” The answer to that seems clear. The question then is really whether people think that if Hillary is announced as the winner, is it likely that the American voters will put up with that criminal behavior and just roll over, or is it more likely we’re going to see some violence break out? You tell me? THE VOICE OF REASON is the pen name of Michael DePinto, a graduate of Capital University Law School, and an attorney in Florida. Having worked in the World Trade Center, along with other family and friends, Michael was baptized by fire into the world of politics on September 11, 2001. Michael’s political journey began with tuning in religiously to whatever the talking heads on television had to say, then Michael became a “Tea-Bagging” activist as his liberal friends on the Left would say, volunteering within the Jacksonville local Tea Party, and most recently Michael was sworn in as an attorney. Today, Michael is a major contributor to www.BeforeItsNews.com , he owns and operates www.thelastgreatstand.com , where Michael provides what is often very ‘colorful’ political commentary, ripe with sarcasm, no doubt the result of Michael’s frustration as he feels we are witnessing the end of the American Empire. The topics Michael most often weighs in on are: Martial Law, FEMA Camps, Jade Helm, Economic Issues, Government Corruption, and Government Conspiracy. Submit your review",FAKE
+8054,Rutgers Student Fired from Campus Newspaper After Writing ‘Illegal Alien’ in Column,"Toni Airaksinen, College Fix, November 4, 2016 
+{snip} 
+The Rutgers University student who hosted anti-feminist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos for his first U.S. college event says the student newspaper fired him Monday because of his conservative views. 
+Aviv Khavich published his final column for The Daily Targum Sunday night, arguing that immigration enforcement is not “anti-immigrant.” 
+He spoke as an immigrant himself, born in Israel after his Ashkenazi Jewish parents fled Belarus in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. 
+But the trigger for the firing may have been Khavich’s demand that his column include the phrase “illegal aliens” to describe those in the country illegally. 
+It was the final straw for the Daily’s editor, who said Khavich repeatedly fought over “stylistic” editing changes to his columns over the past several months. 
+{snip} 
+But two of his last three [columns] were about immigration. Khavich opposes accepting Syrian refugees into America as a security threat, and his final column Sunday said flatly: “Justice is mass deportation. Justice is respecting my [legal immigrant] family and millions of others like us.” 
+Khavich told The College Fix in a phone interview that “every instance of ‘illegal alien’ I wrote was changed to ‘undocumented immigrant’” by his editors. “But I considered it a part of my opinion to not use” the latter term, which he finds “politically correct and also inaccurate.” 
+When Khavich complained to his editor about the edited draft, she said the “illegal” edit came from the top: Editor in Chief Dan Corey wanted the column to follow Associated Press Style. 
+The AP Stylebook was revised three years ago to disapprove of using “illegal” to describe a person, as opposed to an action, after having affirmed “illegal immigrant” just a year earlier . 
+But AP Style also frowns upon “undocumented”–the term used in Khavich’s published column–because the term is “not precise.” Khavich notes that federal law uses the term “alien.” 
+His editor was “not happy” after being confronted, Khavich said, and he was fired the next day. 
+{snip} 
+“At the slightest questioning of their ‘unbiased editing,’ they jump at the excuse to rid themselves of someone who has been challenging their narrative,” he wrote in The Tab. 
+“I was writing articles that very strongly challenged narratives,” he told The Fix. “I am sure that it was a termination was based on political bias.”",FAKE
+5252,Why Sanders supporters cannot back Gary Johnson: His libertarianism is antithetical to the senator’s Democratic socialism,"At the Libertarian Town Hall on CNN earlier this month, the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate Gary Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld made a pitch to both “Never-Hillary” and “Never-Trump” voters on the left and right of the political spectrum as the sane and principled third-party alternative for 2016. And whether you agree or disagree with what the two former governors had to say, it’s hard to deny their likability — especially in an election where the two major party candidates are as thoroughly unlikable as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
+
+Johnson and Weld presumably have a better shot at appealing to Never-Trump conservatives than Never-Hillary liberals or leftists (whose political views align much more with the Green Party’s Jill Stein), but the former New Mexico governor did make a compelling pitch — superficially, at least — to disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters at the Town Hall. And while polls indicate that the majority of the democratic socialist’s supporters will vote for Clinton in November, there is a minority faction that will be voting their conscience — and Johnson is certainly in a position to woo some of these voters.
+
+With this undoubtedly in the back of his mind, the libertarian candidate said that he and Bernie are similar “on about 75 percent of what’s out there,” from marriage equality and reproductive rights, to the legalization of marijuana and the end of futile military interventions overseas. From an “economic standpoint,” however, Johnson admitted disagreement:
+
+“If Bernie supporters are really looking for income equality, I don’t think that is something that government can accomplish. Taking from Peter to rob Paul, that’s an equation that Peter really loves. But if Bernie supporters are looking for equal opportunity, I think that is something that can be accomplished. … In politics, you can definitely stand up for equal opportunity.”
+
+It was a cogent response that included an acknowledgement that “crony capitalism is alive and well” — something that libertarians and leftists have long agreed on (and equally object to). But apart from this, Johnson’s economic worldview is diametrically opposed to Sanders’ egalitarian vision of social democracy — and this should be enough to stop the latter’s supporters from voting for the former.
+
+In the economic realm, right-wing libertarians (as opposed to left libertarians or “libertarian socialists”) are essentially classical economic liberals who reject most of the social democratic reforms that were enacted throughout the capitalist world during the 20th century. Instead of a mixed economy, libertarians advocate laissez faire capitalism and profess that even minimal state intervention in the economy will lead to tyranny — or serfdom, as the famous libertarian philosopher F. A. Hayek put it in his influential book “The Road to Serfdom” (this didn’t pan out, of course — instead, it was the welfare state that likely prevented more radical assaults on capitalism in the West).
+
+In his statement, Johnson said that he doesn’t believe that the government can reduce economic inequality — which has soared over the past forty years — and equated redistributive measures to theft. This alone reveals the candidates dogmatic worldview. The social democratic reforms of the 20th century clearly demonstrate that wealth and income inequality can be curbed within a capitalist economy (and should be if leaders want to achieve greater economic and political stability). While Johnson is less fanatical than some of his party colleagues (indeed, he is considered too moderate by many libertarians), he is still undoubtedly the most extreme candidate of 2016 on economic matters. He opposes corporate taxation, supports privatized healthcare, advocates eliminating the progressive income tax and replacing them with a regressive consumption tax, and is a proponent of widespread economic deregulation and privatization (including the privatization of prisons).
+
+Libertarianism may sound good on paper — championing individualism and maximum freedom; but in practice, its laissez faire prescriptions would result in corporate tyranny, the very opposite of freedom (libertarians are so consumed with the threat of state tyranny that they seem unable to even consider the very real threat of private tyranny, or as Noam Chomsky has described it, “tyranny by unaccountable private concentrations of wealth”). G. A. Cohen, the father of analytical Marxism and notable critic of libertarianism, discussed how private property actually inhibits the freedom of the ownerless in his essay “Capitalism, Freedom, Proletariat”: “Private property, like any system of rights, pretty well is a particular way of distributing freedom and unfreedom. It is necessarily associated with the liberty of private owners to do as they wish with what they own, but it no less necessarily withdraws liberty from those who do not own it. To think of capitalism as a realm of freedom is to overlook half of its nature.” Now, there was a time when the rugged individualism and minimal state intervention that libertarians advocate could have conceivably produced a greater degree of freedom: namely, in a pre-capitalist, pre-industrial economy — before the prevalence of wage-labor and the advent of multinational corporations, when independent producers (e.g. yeoman farmers, artisans, etc.) who sold their own commodities on the market (or simply produced for subsistence) were the dominant economic players. But in a modern corporate capitalist economy in which the richest 20 citizens control more wealth than the bottom half (about 152 million people in America), these notions are not only antiquated, but inimical to both freedom and democracy. Thus, a Bernie Sanders supporter would have to be grossly uninformed to go from backing the democratic socialist senator to a libertarian like Johnson. Yes, there are similarities between the two; but their political philosophies are so antithetical to each other — particularly when it comes to political economy — that the single issues where there is some agreement are basically irrelevant. Libertarianism is fundamentally opposed to the egalitarian and democratic values that Sanders represents.",REAL
+219,Paul Ryan’s biggest early challenge: Finding a ‘routine’ as House speaker,"Paul D. Ryan is a bit of a control freak: Each day should have a similar rhythm, each meeting should begin on time, each day should end like the day before.
+
+All of which makes his new job as speaker of the House, overseeing a raucous caucus of 246 Republicans, an odd fit for this very Type A personality. This past week was an early test. “I’m really kind of into routines, so I’m still working on getting a routine established,” Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters Thursday in a roundtable discussion.
+
+Ryan, 45, whose German mother instilled a rigid discipline in him, can’t even get over the fact that the speaker, by tradition, skips most House votes to conduct more meetings in office suites off the chamber floor: “I just like having routines, and I can get more done that way.”
+
+With three weeks under his belt as speaker, Ryan has learned that the routine business of Congress can turn on a dime, for almost any reason. He’s aware that his words carry more weight now, and he’s aware that some weeks he’s not going to be able to live up to his promises of letting the House conduct business in a completely transparent fashion.
+
+One week he was promoting a wide-open, free-flowing system of dozens of amendments for a highway funding plan, winning an impressive bipartisan vote. The next week brought the exact opposite, with a rushed bill to tighten safety requirements for Syrian refugees in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris. No committee considered the legislation, no amendments were allowed, and the bill was made public about 40 hours before it was voted on by the House.
+
+[House passes bill to tighten flow of Syrian refugees over Obama’s objection]
+
+That inflicted whiplash on some lawmakers, but it demonstrated that Ryan understands that the ultimate judgment of his tenure will be based on results as much as, if not more than, the process used to achieve those results.
+
+In the 35-minute session, Ryan said that the decision to rush the legislation — which calls for tighter screenings of refugees before they can be admitted — was actually driven by the lawmakers themselves. Despite their repeated outcries for an open process, once they saw the impact of terrorism in Paris, lawmakers reverted to their most basic political instinct and demanded that something be approved before they left Thursday for a 10-day recess over the Thanksgiving holiday.
+
+“Most members said we need to act before we leave, we need to act before the recess,” Ryan said. “People came from intelligence briefings saying, ‘You need to do something.’ ”
+
+So Ryan obliged, setting up a process he admitted was “outside the realm of regular order” and scored a big political win, getting more than a two-thirds majority, enough to overrule a presidential veto. He said that with so much fear of terrorist attacks, the public just needed to see Congress get something done.
+
+“If we had a free-for-all on the floor, who knows what the outcome would be, and I think that the country is very worried and the country wants to see us doing something,” he said. But he also ran into some familiar partisan turbulence.
+
+Despite Ryan’s assertion to have consulted Democrats, the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee said he had no part in the legislation and described it as a “gotcha bill” that will not make the nation any safer.
+
+“We probably say things to get where we are, position-wise,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.) said after Thursday’s vote, during which nearly 50 Democrats rejected White House pleas and voted with Ryan. “But once we get there, it’s not nearly as easy to govern with new rules as we thought.”
+
+The high-profile victory was an odd one for a new speaker who has staked so much of his reputation on advancing deep policy proposals, eschewing so-called show votes that are more designed to protect political flanks back home.
+
+Even Ryan said that the real concern for national security was a visa waiver program that lacks proper protocols and the emerging threat of homegrown terrorists inspired by overseas events, and that those threats could make their way across the Atlantic Ocean.
+
+“Common sense and prudence dictate that we be on higher alert and that we cannot assume that Paris was a one-and-done event,” he said.
+
+House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) mocked Ryan’s quick turnaround to flush a bill through the House so quickly, suggesting that the increasingly conservative tone of the Republican presidential primary campaign would “reflect” the congressional dysfunction and boost Democrats in next year’s elections. Some GOP presidential hopefuls called for a full stop of any Syrian refugees while some also called for allowing only Christian refugees.
+
+The speaker said that his motivations were based on what he heard from House Republicans on Capitol Hill.
+
+“I don’t even know all of their positions, to be candid,” he said of the presidential aspirants. “I’ve been busy doing my job.”
+
+[Republican candidates move to keep Muslim refugees out]
+
+The speaker’s newly fumigated office — the smoke-filled paint left behind by Camel-smoking John A. Boehner was chipped off, the carpet cleaned multiple times — has proven to be comfortable in the early days. “It smells better in here,” Ryan joked.
+
+But once Congress returns after Thanksgiving, Ryan’s routine will revert to what the speaker dismissively calls “the chores”: passing a compromised version of the highway bill through the House and Senate, approving a new K-12 education program and finally, by Dec. 11, a massive funding plan for federal agencies.
+
+Each of these issues is either many months, or many years, behind schedule, so Ryan views them as cleaning up other leaders’ messes. They will again test his ethos for opening up the House, a demand from the conservative flank that so bedeviled Boehner he became only the second speaker to resign midterm in the past 50 years.
+
+He claims to be one of those far-right conservatives, that he is of their ilk and not trying to force them to bend to his will. “You have to understand, I come from the conservative wing of the party, I’m a movement conservative who comes from this part of our party. People know that, you know. So a lot of these guys are pretty good friends of mine,” he said.
+
+If only he can figure out a routine, again, he might make it work.
+
+“Time management has always been challenging. It’s just even more challenging,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m really weird about time management and punctuality, and I just want to make sure I can stay on top of those things.”",REAL
+10223,This letter from Manchester City Council is a strong contender for facepalm of the year,"Next Swipe left/right This letter from Manchester City Council is a strong contender for facepalm of the year Someone at Manchester City Council might need to a) Google the term “Hellenic” and b) use a spellchecker. Manchester City Council sent this piece of beauty to someone recently: pic.twitter.com/w5jwlpZHbF 
+— George Zacharopoulos (@GreekGeordie) November 1, 2016",FAKE
+6802,The SPLC’s Libelous New Report on 'Anti-Muslim Extremists',"The SPLC’s Libelous New Report on 'Anti-Muslim Extremists' Equating counter-jihadists with jihadists. Robert Spencer 
+The objective of this libelous new report from the hard-Left money-making and incitement machine the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is made plain within it: “Before you book a spokesperson from an anti-Muslim extremist group or quote them in a story, research their background — detailed in this in-depth guide to 15 of the most visible anti-Muslim activists— and consider the consequences of giving them a platform.” 
+They wish to silence those who speak honestly about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, blaming us for a supposed rise in “Islamophobia.” If they really want to stamp out suspicion of Islam, of course, they will move against not us, but the likes of Omar Mateen, Syed Rizwan Farook, Tashfeen Malik, Nidal Malik Hasan, Mohammed Abdulazeez, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the myriad other Muslims who commit violence in the name of Islam and justify it by reference to Islamic teachings. 
+The SPLC doesn’t do that because its objective is not really to stop “Islamophobia” at all, but to create the illusion of a powerful and moneyed network of “Islamophobes,” who can only be stopped if you write a check to the SPLC. That’s what this is really all about. 
+In constructing this illusory edifice, the SPLC labels me and fourteen others “anti-Muslim extremists.” We are, of course, no more “anti-Muslim” than foes of the Nazis were anti-German, but note the word “extremists.” That’s the mainstream media and Obama administration’s term of choice for jihad terrorists. In what way are we “extremists”? Has anyone on the SPLC’s hit list (and given the SPLC’s track record of inciting violence against its targets, that is exactly what it is) ever blown anything or anyone up? Beheaded anyone? Boasted of our imminent conquest of any territory and the massacre of or enslavement of its people? No, all we have done is speak critically about jihad terror and Sharia oppression. The SPLC is trying to further the libel that we are the other side of the coin, the non-Muslim bin Ladens and Awlakis. Until we commit any terror attacks or conspire with others to do so, however, the SPLC’s libel is only that: a libel. 
+It’s also passingly ironic that the SPLC list includes several people who are doubtless horrified to be in this company, as they have endeavored for years to distinguish their message from that of those whom they themselves would smear as “Islamophobes.” But their temporizing and pandering didn’t work: they ended up on the Index of Prohibited Thinkers anyway, as will, ultimately, anyone who dares to note that Islam just might have something to do with the acts of murder committed in its name and in accord with its teachings. 
+The “report” as a whole stands as an example of the Left’s strange tendency to present true statements as if they were self-evidently false, without bothering to explain why. Apparently the SPLC knows its supporters and is aware that it doesn’t need to bother with troublesome things like, you know, facts. 
+The SPLC’s hit list recurrently excoriates people for making true statements that it apparently regards as self-evidently false. For example, it says that Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch “accuses immigrant-run stores of illegally trafficking in food stamps.” This is a case that Corcoran makes with evidence – evidence that the SPLC doesn’t bother to try disproving. It says that Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism “has claimed that the Obama administration ‘extensively collaborates’ with the Muslim Brotherhood.” That he actually has done so doesn’t seem to bother them. As Andrew C. McCarthy has noted , “Barack Obama has spent his presidency cultivating Islamists, particularly from the international Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates in the United States.” The SPLC also hits Emerison for having “asserted that Europe is riddled with ‘no-go zones.’” Regarding “no-go zones,” here are some news articles from just the past few weeks: 
+Germany: Police “sick” of citizens’ no-go zone fears 
+The SPLC excoriates Brigitte Gabriel of ACT for America for saying that any “practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah … who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day — this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen of the United States.” Yet it says nothing, of course, about the many teachings of the Qur’an that contradict American Constitutional principles: the denial of the freedom of speech, the death penalty for apostasy, the devaluation of women, and more. How to reconcile these teachings with U.S. citizenship, the SPLC did not bother to explain. 
+The SPLC quotes David Horowitz saying: “There are only a couple of degrees of separation between anybody on the left and the terrorists — and that includes people in the Democratic Party, even those who are anti-terrorist.” Here again, no refutation is offered – yet the Left’s dalliance with Palestinian jihad groups and overall anti-Americanism make it impossible to dismiss Horowitz’s assertion. 
+Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, we’re told, “is gripped by paranoid fantasies about Muslims destroying the West from within.” The SPLC doesn’t bother to mention the Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America , the captured Muslim Brotherhood internal document that explained that Brotherhood members “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” 
+In attacking Pamela Geller of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, the SPLC descended to outright fabrications. Notes Geller : “Their claim that I insist that Obama is the ‘love child’ of Malcolm X is patently untrue. The SPLC also states that I ‘have spoken to a neo-fascist group in Germany,’ when in fact I have never even been to Germany.” It characterizes former FBI agent John Guandolo’s claim that CIA director John Brennan was a convert to Islam as an “outlandish accusation,” when in fact “a U.S. asset assigned overseas with Brennan in Saudi Arabia when he was station chief confirmed years ago their firsthand account that Brennan was indeed the target of a Saudi intelligence influence operation that led to his conversion. Brennan has also stated publicly that he visited Mecca, which is impossible for a non-Muslim to do unless he is a special guest of the Saudi King.” 
+Even more strangely, the SPLC targets Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who grew up as a Muslim in Somalia, suffered genital mutilated at the hands of Muslims, is under death threats from Muslims, and lives in exile from her homeland because of Muslims. Instead of trying to discredit her, the SPLC should be honoring her for her stand for human rights against Sharia oppression. But the SPLC has other priorities. 
+Of me, the SPLC concedes that I am a “real intellectual” but complains that I am “entirely self-taught in the study of Islam.” An odd objection. One cannot be both “self-taught” and a “real intellectual”? In any case, it’s false: I am indeed mostly self-taught in the study of Islam, and make no secret of or apologies for it; every day’s headlines proves me correct. Nonetheless, the fact is that I did first read the Qur’an and began studying Islam in earnest while at the University of North Carolina. My claims, says the SPLC, are “provably false,” but then only offers a number of them that are demonstrably true, without any attempt to refute them. 
+It even says that I have “referred to Barack Obama as ‘the first Muslim president.’” This one epitomizes the dishonesty of the SPLC. The quote comes from an article I wrote in 2007 discussing how Obama was not a Muslim, stating that his obvious affinity for Islam and the Muslim world could make him into “our first Muslim president” the way Bill Clinton was called “our first black president.” After eight years of Obama, I’d say I was proven correct in rather spectacular fashion. 
+The SPLC, finally, hits me for having “even suggested that the media may be getting money to depict Muslims in a positive light.” 
+The facts are once again deeply unfortunate for the SPLC: George Soros funded a report on “Islamophobia” on Twitter and gave $200,000 to the Center for American Progress for a defamatory report on alleged “Islamophobes.” He also spent $600,000 for favorable coverage of the Muslim migrant inundation, bought favorable coverage of the Iran deal , and bought “Islamophobia” propaganda after the San Bernardino jihad massacre. 
+But what need does the SPLC have of facts? It knows its readers won’t check up on the veracity of its claims, but will accept them at face value, since the SPLC is of the camp of the saints, the enlightened and tolerant Left. Those who are outside that camp clearly have no rights that the SPLC feels bound to respect.",FAKE
+6951,"Obama Administration Mandate Ordering ""Sex Change"" Surgeries Is Challenged","Email 
+It has become increasingly apparent that the Obama administration looks upon the First Amendment protections of religious liberty as meaningless — if it contradicts its liberal social agenda. 
+This is demonstrated in a recent mandate from the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that physicians and other healthcare workers must perform surgeries to “alter” people's gender. Objections raised on the grounds that the physician views the surgery as harmful to the patient’s mental health, or that the surgeon has religious or ethical objections, do not matter. If surgeons refuse, they can face fines or even the loss of their jobs. 
+The mandate includes surgeries on children. 
+Thousands of healthcare providers and eight states are now challenging the validity of the federal rule. 
+Obviously, Congress has never passed any such law, but HHS is exercising what is sometimes called “administrative law,” in which federal bureaucrats simply develop rules that implement a law — all according to the interpretation of the bureaucrats, of course. In this instance, the rule is said to apply to all private doctors, healthcare providers, and health insurance plans that accept federal funding, but it does not provide a religious exemption for medical personnel who find “sex-change operations” contrary to their religious beliefs. 
+It is estimated that the rule will impact almost one million physicians and most hospitals in the United States — because almost every hospital receives some federal funds. (This is yet another example of how the federal government can use the threat of withholding federal monies to force compliance.) 
+The transgender mandate’s legal “justification” is similar to that used in May when the Departments of Education and Justice ordered public schools and universities to allow transgender students to use the restroom and locker room they “identify” with, rather than the one that conforms to their biological sex. As in the present case, the Obama Education Department and Justice Department intend to get their way by threatening the loss of federal funds. 
+To accomplish the order, the Obama administration simply redefined the meaning of the word “sex.” In an HHS rule that persons cannot be discriminated against because of their “sex,” the Obama administration claims that “sex” really means “gender.” And it argues that “gender” can be male, female, neither, or some combination thereof, which may be different from an individual’s sex at birth. In other words, when the doctor tells the baby’s parents, “It’s a boy,” or “It’s a girl,” perhaps they need to add “for the time being.” 
+Using this reasoning, HHS is insisting that it is “sex discrimination” to refuse to perform a gender transition procedure. The healthcare professionals and states that have challenged the rule argue that the HHS regulation violates the U.S. Constitution and federal laws. 
+The legal motion made by those seeking to overturn the rule states, “Thus, with a single stroke of the pen, HHS has created massive new liability for thousands of doctors unless they cast aside their convictions and perform procedures that can be deeply harmful to their patients.” About four dozen members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter in October to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell expressing their outrage about the regulation and asking her a dozen questions about the rule. 
+Such a procedure is particularly irresponsible when performed upon children, if two recent studies on this subject are correct. According to the studies, as much as 94 percent of children who report “gender dysphoria” grow out of that discomfort. Gender dysphoria is defined as a discomfort a person may feel in regard to his or her biological sex. This means that in almost every case, the person eventually will accept his or her biological sex; however, if surgery has already been performed, the person is left in a tragic situation, all to conform to a radical social agenda. 
+In Wichita Falls, Texas, federal judge Reed O'Connor issued an injunction on October 18 against the Obama administration’s transgender directive to schools. This ruling has encouraged a Christian association of more than 10,000 physicians and a Roman Catholic hospital system to ask the federal court in Wichita Falls to issue a similar injunction to block enforcement of the HHS regulation. Eight states have joined in the motion. 
+The motion states that the rule “forces doctors and hospitals to perform controversial and potentially harmful medical procedures that purport to permanently alter an individual’s sex — even when doing so would violate a doctor’s religious beliefs and medical judgment, and even when the government’s own programs exclude the procedures as potentially harmful.”  ",FAKE
+3003,Barack Obama says memory of Hiroshima 'must never fade',"Barack Obama called on the world to choose a future where Hiroshima was considered “the start of our own moral awakening”, as he became the first sitting US president to visit the Japanese city, 71 years after its bombing ushered in the nuclear age he vowed to bring to an end.
+
+In a scene many survivors of the US bombing believed they would never live to see, Obama laid a floral wreath at a memorial to the dead of the world’s first atomic bombing, pausing in a moment of contemplation, his head slightly bowed.
+
+He then paid tribute to the people of Hiroshima, calling on humanity to learn the lessons of the past to make war less likely.
+
+“On a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” he said, adding that humankind had shown that day it had the means to destroy itself.
+
+“Why did we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in the not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead,” he said.
+
+“Their souls speak to us, they ask us to look inward, take stock of who we are.”
+
+In a touching moment, Obama embraced Shigeaki Mori, a 79-year-old survivor who appeared overcome with emotion.
+
+“The president gestured as if he was going to give me a hug, so we hugged,” said Mori, who spent decades tracing the families of 12 American POWs who died in the attack and ensured their deaths were officially recognised.
+
+
+
+Obama also chatted to Sunao Tsuboi, the 91-year-old head of a survivors group, who thanked the president for his visit, but reminded him of his responsibility to act on his desire, first made in Prague in 2009, to bring about a world without nuclear weapons.
+
+Obama urged the world to “choose a future when Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not considered the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.”
+
+He said: “Technological progress without equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of the atom requires a moral revolution as well.
+
+“This is why we come to this place, we stand here, in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell.
+
+“We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry.
+
+“Some day, the voices will no longer be with us to bear witness, but the memory must never fade. That memory fuels our imagination. It allows us to change.”
+
+
+
+His address included mention of the tens of thousands of Koreans – many of them forced labourers – who died in the attack, as well as the American dead.
+
+In the distance stood the burned-out shell of the Atomic Bomb Dome – a peace memorial that is the most potent physical symbol of Hiroshima’s tragic past and its recovery from the ashes of war.
+
+
+
+As expected, Obama did not offer an apology for the decision by his predecessor, Harry Truman, to unleash an atomic bomb over the city. The attack at the end of the second world war on 6 August 1945 killed an estimated 80,000 people soon after the blast. By the end of the year, the death toll had reached 140,000.
+
+Obama and Tsuboi laughed at one point, the president smiling broadly. But mostly he listened, holding the elderly man’s hand in his own, an interpreter standing nearby. Tsuboi stamped his cane emphatically while speaking.
+
+Obama was accompanied by the Japanese prime minister, Shinzō Abe, whose presence, Obama said ahead of the visit, would “highlight the extraordinary alliance” the US had created during the seven decades since the end of the war.
+
+After looking at some of the exhibits in the peace museum, Obama wrote in the visitors’ book: “We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons” – a goal he conceded he may not see in his lifetime.
+
+
+
+Abe described Obama’s visit as “courageous”, saying: “An American president has come into contact with the reality of an atomic bombing and renewed his resolve toward realising a world without nuclear weapons.
+
+“I sincerely welcome this historic visit, which has long been awaited by not only the people of Hiroshima, but by all Japanese people.”
+
+Kaneko Izumi, a Hiroshima resident who was among the hundreds of people who filled the peace park in the evening to pay their respects to the victims, said Obama’s speech had offered hope to ageing survivors “who have been waiting most of their lives for an American president to come here”.
+
+Not all residents were satisfied with the president’s speech, however. “I’m afraid I did not hear anything concrete about how he plans to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons,” said Miki Tsukishita, who was five years old when the bomb was dropped. “Just cheering his visit is not enough. He is a serving US president ... I wish he had been more specific.”
+
+Obama had long held the desire to go to Hiroshima, despite the potential for the visit to cause controversy in the US.
+
+While many Japanese consider the attack a war crime – yet recognise the part their country’s militarist leaders played in bringing it about – the consensus in the US is that the attack hastened the end of the Pacific war, saving many more American and Japanese lives.
+
+Japan surrendered on 15 August, less than a week after the US dropped a second atomic bomb, on the western port city of Nagasaki, killing more than 70,000 people. Obama said during a visit to Japan in late 2009 that he would be honoured to go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
+
+“I certainly would be honoured – it would be meaningful for me to visit those two cities in the future,” he said.
+
+Before Friday, the only western leader to have visited Hiroshima while in office was Kevin Rudd, who laid a wreath at the peace park cenotaph in 2008 when he was Australian prime minister.
+
+Jimmy Carter visited the atomic bomb memorial in Hiroshima in 1984, after he had left office, but no sitting US president has ever visited the city. The highest-ranking US official to visit the site was Nancy Pelosi in 2008 when she was House speaker. The ambassador, Caroline Kennedy, attended the 70th anniversary commemorations last year.
+
+The White House reportedly decided to proceed with the visit after the largely positive reaction to John Kerry’s tribute to the victims of the Hiroshima bombing on the sidelines of the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting last month.
+
+Ahead of Friday’s visit, Obama told US Marines and members of the Japanese military at the Iwakuni base in western Japan how it was “a testament to how even the most painful divides can be bridged. How two nations can become not just partners but the best of friends”.
+
+
+
+His trip, he said, was an “opportunity to honour the memory of all who were lost in world war two” but also had a message for today.
+
+“I do think that part of the reason I’m going is because I want to once again underscore the very real risks that are out there and the sense of urgency that we all should have,” Obama said.
+
+“So it’s not only a reminder of the terrible toll of world war two and the death of innocents across continents, but it’s also to remind ourselves that the job is not done in reducing conflict, building institutions of peace, and reducing the prospect of nuclear war in the future.”
+
+While polls showed most Japanese welcomed Obama’s gesture, other countries in the region warned against allowing the visit to reinforce a one-dimensional view of Japan’s role in the second world war.
+
+The Chinese foreign ministry said Japan should not forget the “grave suffering” it inflicted on its neighbours during the war.
+
+“We hope Japan can take a responsible attitude toward its own people and the international community, and earnestly take history as a mirror to avoid a recurrence of the tragedy of the war,” ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters.
+
+The state-run China Daily went much further, claiming the “atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of Japan’s own making”.
+
+In an editorial on the eve of the visit, the paper accused Japan of “trying to portray Japan as the victim of world war two rather than one of its major perpetrators”.
+
+The bombing of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified, the China Daily said, as “a bid to bring an early end to the war and prevent protracted warfare from claiming even more lives”.
+
+It added: “It was the war of aggression the Japanese militarist government launched against its neighbours and its refusal to accept its failure that had led to US dropping the atomic bombs.”",REAL
+6855,Good News! First Sanctuary For Abused Circus Elephants Opens In Brazil,"Elephant Sanctuary Brazil is located on a 2,800-acre plot of land and will be home to 50 rescued circus elephants. By Amanda Froelich 
+The glitz and glamor of a circus show might make it appear as if an elephant’s life with the troupe is a joyous one, but nothing could be further from the truth. After an elephant is domesticated and trained (aka – ‘ has its spirit broken ’), it spends the majority of its days in chains , is poked and prodded to perform crowd-pleasing feats, and often suffers injuries which result from living in abnormal conditions. Additionally, it’s not unusual for circus beasts to be beaten by their trainers .
+Every now and again, fortunately, elephants made to perform for the purpose of entertaining humans are removed from the circus and relocated to sanctuaries. There, they are able to live among their kind and enjoy life on their terms. And now that the first elephant sanctuary in all of Latin America has opened, this is likely to become a reality for many more of the gargantuan land mammals.
+Elephant Sanctuary Brazil will be located on a 2,800-acre plot of land. Located in Chapada dos Guimarães, Mato Grosso, the sanctuary will host 50 rescued circus animals. Animal rights activists secured the location for $1 million and are actively seeking elephants to take in.
+According to GoodNewsNetwork , the first two elephants to find sanctuary were Guida and Maia, who are believed to have been rescued from Thailand where they performed in circuses. While the sanctuary will not be available to the public, it will post updates about the well-being of rescued elephants via Facebook and through the Global Elephant Sanctuary website .
+Source: True Activist 
+",FAKE
+3548,"Al Qaeda leaders say group near collapse amid rise of ISIS, report claims","Two of Al Qaeda's spiritual leaders have said that the terror organization is barely functioning after losing money and manpower to the rapidly rising Islamic State group, according to a report.
+
+Abu Qatada and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi have described Al Qaeda as being without ""organizational structure,"" the Guardian reports. Maqdisi said Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri is isolated from his top lieutenants and ""operates solely based on the allegiance.
+
+""There is no organizational structure. There is only communication channels, and loyalty,"" he reportedly said.
+
+Qatada, who was deported to Jordan from Britain in 2013 to face terrorism charges, also acknowledges that ISIS has gotten the better of Al Qaeda in the propaganda wars as well as those fought on the battlefield.
+
+The Guardian report traces the beginning of Al Qaeda's downfall to the ascension of Zawahiri as Al Qaeda's leader following the death of Usama bin Laden in May 2011. While Zawahiri has been forced to move in secret in the remote mountain regions along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, hundreds of thousands of militants have flocked to the new battlefields in Syria and Iraq.
+
+""What is leadership,"" asked Dr. Munif Samara, an Al Qaeda associate quoted in the report, ""if your leader is in Afghanistan and your soldiers are in Iraq?""
+
+In April 2013, the report claims, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had been chosen as the leader of what was then called the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) in 2010 without bin Laden's consent, announced that ISI and the Syrian rebel group the Nusra Front would merge to form ISIS. In response, Zawahiri ordered Beghdadi to restrict his operations to Iraq and said that Nusra Front commander Muhammad al-Joulani would lead Al Qaeda's official branch in Syria.
+
+According to the report, Baghdadi rebuffed Zawahiri's decision, launching his own campaign of terror with the help of escaped prisoners from Iraqi jails and a massive influx of foreign fighters who had come to Syria to join the civil conflict aimed at overthrowing Syrian President Bashar Assad.
+
+The following summer, ISIS overran large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, including the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, as the Iraqi Army fled. It now has a global network of affiliates that stretches from Afghanistan to West Africa, and they have set about making their presence known through their own brand of terror.
+
+Last week, an Afghan Army corps spokesman told The New York Times that 10 Taliban fighters had been beheaded by ISIS fighters. Meanwhile, in eastern Libya, militants linked to Al Qaeda there declared holy war — or jihad — on the local ISIS affiliate after one of their senior leaders was killed Wednesday by masked gunmen. That sparked an hours-long battle in the coastal city of Darna that left 11 people dead on both sides.
+
+Meanwhile, Al Qaeda's standing and finances continue to suffer. A former Al Qaeda member-turned-British intelligence agent tells the Guardian that at one point last year, the group was in such desperate times that it had to sell its laptops and cars to buy food and pay rent.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more for The Guardian.",REAL
+2050,Who’s ruling out a 2016 bid?,"(CNN) – On CNN’s “State of the Union,” four governors were asked Sunday whether they want to rule out a presidential bid.
+
+Republican Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, considered a dark horse for the 2016 presidential race, didn’t directly answer the question.
+
+ 
+
+ Follow @politicalticker Follow @KilloughCNN
+
+“I haven't spent one second thinking about any job other than the one I was hired to do,” he told CNN’s chief political correspondent, Candy Crowley.
+
+For his answer, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who’s openly considering a 2016 presidential run, simply said “no.”
+
+The outgoing Republican governor, who ran in the GOP presidential primary last cycle, is heading to Iowa again next week, sparking further speculation that he has his eyes on another national campaign. Perry also visited the state, which holds the first presidential primary contest, in November.
+
+Gov. Jay Nixon, D-Missouri, said he’s focused on his job as governor, adding that he’s hopeful former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton jumps in.
+
+“We'll look forward to working with her, but we really do have a lot to get done in the next three years in the Show-Me State,” he said.
+
+Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy of Connecticut was more direct in his response: “I am not going to be a candidate for president.”
+
+Malloy is eligible to run for re-election this year but has not announced whether he plans to seek another term
+
+The governors are in Washington for the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association.
+
+Watch State of the Union with Candy Crowley Sundays at 9am ET. For the latest from State of the Union click here.",REAL
+4210,Abortion gaffes show Trump is the left-wing caricature of a conservative,"In the wake of Donald Trump’s abortion gaffes, it should finally be clear that Trump is not a real conservative — he is the liberal caricature of a conservative.
+
+In his now infamous interview with Chris Matthews, Trump not only declared that if abortion became illegal women who have abortions should face “some form of punishment,” but also asserted that “conservatives, Republicans would say, yes they should be punished.”
+
+No, they would not.
+
+This is not something a real pro-life conservative would say; it is something a liberal pretending to be a pro-life conservative would say.
+
+Anyone remotely familiar with the pro-life cause knows that its advocates don’t want to punish women. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, explains that the focus of laws restricting abortion “is on protection, not punishment. Women were not punished by the legal system before 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision and there is absolutely no drive to punish her now.” As Mother Teresa famously put it, “Abortion is profoundly anti-women. Three quarters of its victims are women: Half the babies and all the mothers.”
+
+Trump does not understand this, because he is deeply unfamiliar with what motivates pro-life Americans. The goal of the pro-life movement is to create a “culture of life” that upholds the dignity of every human person from conception to natural death. The objective is not punishment; it is to protect both mother and child.
+
+Since Trump does not actually understand what pro-life conservatives truly believe, he mindlessly echoes the liberal caricature of pro-life conservatives. He mistakenly thinks this is what these conservatives want to hear. They don’t. This is, however, what liberals want to hear. They want a Republican candidate who feeds their false “war on women” narrative. They want to run against the caricature of the pro-life position, because the caricature is ugly. And Trump is giving them precisely what they want.
+
+If that were not bad enough, Trump then went on to compound his problems by reversing himself. In an interview with John Dickerson on “Face the Nation,” Trump said that he would not change the law to protect innocent unborn life, declaring that “the laws are set. . . . At this moment, the laws are set. And I think we have to leave it that way.”
+
+Leave it that way? This is something no pro-life conservative would say. It’s not even something a liberal pretending to be a pro-life conservative would say.
+
+It’s something Hillary Clinton would say.
+
+Trump then twice declined to answer when asked whether he thought abortion is murder, saying “I’d rather not comment on it” and “I just don’t think it’s an appropriate forum” before finally, on the third try, grudgingly saying “I don’t disagree.” Quite the profile in pro-life courage.
+
+Trump likes to say he is a convert to the pro-life cause, just like Ronald Reagan. But Reagan would never have said that laws allowing abortion on demand should not be changed. As president, Reagan supported the “Human Life Bill,” which would have recognized the unborn as human beings and protected them as persons under our Constitution. Reagan would also never have said that women should be punished for having abortions. In his 1983 essay for the Human Life Review, “Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation,” Reagan declared: “We should not rest until our entire society echoes the tone of John Powell in the dedication of his book, ‘Abortion: The Silent Holocaust,’ a dedication to every woman carrying an unwanted child: ‘Please believe that you are not alone. There are many of us that truly love you, who want to stand at your side, and help in any way we can.’ ”
+
+Much like when Trump referred to “Two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians,” his comments on abortion are a “tell” demonstrating that he does not possess a basic understanding of the first principles that animate conservative thought on the sanctity of life.
+
+So let’s stop the charade. When it comes to the issue of life, Donald Trump is a caricature, not a conservative.
+
+Read more from Marc Thiessen’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+8128,The Dream Team Of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama Fire Democrats Up In North Carolina,"  3:18 pm The Democratic dream team of Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama teamed up to fire up North Carolina Democrats and get   Share   
+The Democratic dream team of Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama teamed up to fire up North Carolina Democrats and get   
+Hillary Clinton spoke first and delivered a speech that was offered glowing praise for President and First Lady Obama. Clinton’s happiness and relaxed nature have never been more obvious on the campaign trail. 
+Clip of Hillary Clinton talking about Michelle Obama: ""No one knows more about what's at stake in this election than our first lady."" #ImWithHer pic.twitter.com/dYoYdQuyJK 
+— Barrier Breakers (@nobarriers2016) October 27, 2016 
+First Lady Obama said of Clinton, “She is absolutely ready to be commander in chief on day one, and yes, she is a woman.” 
+Clip of First Lady Obama touting Clinton’s experience: 
+— Barrier Breakers (@nobarriers2016) October 27, 2016 
+Mrs. Obama went on to call Trump’s vision of America grounded in hopelessness and despair. She said Trump calls on us to build walls and to be afraid. 
+The First Lady said that voters have a choice between those who divide the country between us and them and those who encourage us to embrace our better angels. 
+First Lady Obama said that the election is about who will shape our children and the country we leave for them. 
+Obama devasted Trump by reminding America that the president is the most powerful role model for children in the world. 
+The enthusiasm and positivity pulsed through the building. Democrats are hungry for victory. Democrats can feel it in their bones. They are so close to electing Clinton that they can taste it. 
+The tone of Clinton and Obama’s speeches told the story of where the election stands. Trump is increasingly becoming an afterthought as Democrats are transitioning towards healing the damage that Trump did to the country. 
+Michelle Obama called out Trump’s strategy of calling the election rigged to depress voter turnout. Obama said, “Voters decide who wins election. Period. End of story.” 
+Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama both offered inspirational speeches for Democrats and the American people. 
+Democrats have one job left to do, and that is to go out and vote for Hillary Clinton to be the next President Of The United States.",FAKE
+4414,"Dana Perino: Conservatives, here are 5 reasons why we should accept Facebook's olive branch","Wednesday, I participated in Facebook’s meeting with conservatives at the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.
+
+Even though I did the round trip in a little more than 24 hours, the West Coast feels a long way away from New York City. Geographically and culturally.
+
+The Facebook setting is so different from the work environments I’m used to, including its open floor plans to encourage the constant flow of creativity and its casual nature. The place is calm, but I had the feeling cool stuff was happening.
+
+It’s different and, I’ll admit, a bit unnerving for someone who likes structure. But it’s also really neat. It’s powerful. And they know it.
+
+Facebook invited 16 conservatives to a meeting it described as long overdue. Over time, the trust between conservatives and the company has been eroding.
+
+Last week’s accusations from a former contract employee about the alleged  practice of suppressing conservative viewpoints and news stories in its Trending Topics feature was the spark that lit a fire.
+
+The meeting was an attempt to put the fire out and to begin to rebuild trust with the conservative community.
+
+This was a meeting where two bubbles collided: one of conservative media and activists and the other of the world of Facebook.
+
+I went to the meeting with an open mind and a lot of curiosity. The Facebook executives we met with greeted us with humility and the admission that they need to do a better job.
+
+Overall, the meeting went well. Here are my five takeaways:
+
+1. Facebook recognized that it’s lost trust with conservatives and it is genuinely serious about fixing it.
+
+While some in the conservative media worried that this meeting would be an insincere gesture and a mere photo-op (there were no cameras), the main company executives present -- including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- could not have been more genuine.
+
+It was very clear that Facebook does not take these allegations lightly, and they acknowledged a real trust deficit with their conservative partners and users.
+
+I left feeling assured that Facebook would be working to repair relationships amidst the damaging allegations and to reestablish credibility in the conservative community about its commitment to inclusivity and neutrality.
+
+Wednesday’s meeting was a civil environment where everyone had the opportunity to voice their opinions, concerns, and questions.
+
+Imagine a meeting in 2016 where 16 different conservatives – representing all the different viewpoints we have – get along really well and are reminded of our common principles. (Maybe we should have the convention in Silicon Valley? OK, maybe in 2020).
+
+Everyone had a chance to speak and did so frankly. And respectfully.
+
+Zuckerberg and his team did way more listening than talking, which left the door open for a meaningful conversation. And, despite the uncomfortable temperature in the room (the power went out in the headquarters just as the meeting started), Zuckerberg kept the meeting going for an additional 20 minutes so that everyone had a chance to speak and get their questions answered or ideas raised.
+
+3. Face-to-face is best for establishing trust.
+
+Zuckerberg immediately acknowledged that this meeting was one he should have started long before.
+
+He was right – and we can meet him halfway on that. But the fact that he invited all of us to Facebook’s headquarters allowed everyone to voice their concerns and opinions to each other in one room, face-to-face. That showed an immediate level of respect from Zuckerberg and his team, and the same was true of the conservatives that were there.
+
+The conservatives were prepared, specific, smart, and creative.  This is an important thing to remember in business relationships, and even personal relationships.
+
+4. Employment diversity is not limited to gender and ethnicity.
+
+Facebook -- and Silicon Valley in general -- takes pride in their commitment to diversity among their employees. But a point that was made yesterday is that diversity in thought and opinion is critical as well for a well-rounded company.
+
+Gender diversity and ethnic diversity are not the only ways to diversify, and Facebook clearly lacks conservative staffers. The company did not disagree.
+
+5. Conservatives need to keep using all the available social media platforms.
+
+Social media as a whole has been a boon for conservatives. Never before could a conservative reach that many people without a mainstream media filter.
+
+Conservatives have built followings, movements, and even presidential campaigns utilizing Facebook.
+
+Since the company has admitted it needs to do better, let’s take them up on that.
+
+We can offer specific solutions and bring creative ideas. We can pick up the phone or get on a plane and meet with people – I found them to be reasonable and approachable. This may not always be the case, but it is the situation we have right now.
+
+Conservatives want Facebook to be more responsive, and we are pushing on an open door. Let’s walk through it.
+
+Being a conservative means fighting for individual liberty, freedom of expression and markets and for less government interference in our lives. By all accounts, a majority of Americans agree with those principles.
+
+We should use all available tools at our disposal to spread that word and build a stronger conservative movement in the United States and around the world.
+
+Author's note: Click here to read more about why I am a conservative.
+
+
+
+Dana Perino currently serves as co-host of FOX News Channel's ""The Five"" (weekdays 5-6PM/ET). She previously served as Press Secretary for President George W. Bush. She is the author of the new book ""Let Me Tell You about Jasper : How My Best Friend Became America's Dog"" (October 25, 2016). Ms. Perino joined the network in 2009 as a contributor. Click here for more information on Dana Perino. Follow her on Twitter@DanaPerino.
+
+",REAL
+8825,Anonymous World War 3 Has Begun!,source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments,FAKE
+3159,How the GOP Went South,"While some on the Right want to downplay the race angle, others on the Left suggest that the entire success of the modern GOP was premised on exploiting Southern racism. Interestingly, though, much of what both sides think we know about this trend appears to be wrong. Elections analyst Sean Trende recently argued that “while the dominant narrative continues to insist that the South began to realign toward the Republicans in the wake of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in fact, Southern loyalties had begun to weaken during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt.” As evidence, Trende notes that the South voted increasingly Republican every year of FDR’s presidency, and that although Eisenhower lost Dixie, he did so by only three points. What is more, while Eisenhower was gaining support in the South, he was simultaneously pushing civil rights legislation. So why did the South become increasingly Republican starting in the 1940s? According to Trende, “Southern whites simply became wealthy enough to start voting Republican.” This, of course, flies in the face of everything we think we know about why the South became solidly Republican. This is not to suggest that race wasn’t involved in the shift that really began to reach a tipping point after the ’60s, but it does suggest that history is more complex than the Reader’s Digest (or, rather, the Mother Jones) version many of us are taught in school.
+
+After the post—Civil Rights Act “Dixiecrat” shift, economics and air‑conditioning conspired to send American voters fleeing the Rust Belt for the Sun Belt, further eroding the power of the Northeast Republican establishment, personified by the New York governors and presidential aspirants Thomas Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller. (This is a trend that is still under way; according to the U.S. census, the city of Austin, Texas—the liberal enclave in a deeply red state—was, by far, the fastest growing city in America from 2010 to 2013.) It’s unwise to write off an entire swath of the nation, but that’s just what Barry Goldwater, who represented Arizona in the U.S. Senate, seemed to do when he declared that “sometimes I think the country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea.” The Johnson campaign turned that line into a devastating ad in which the eastern side of a U.S. map, floating in water, is literally sawed off.
+
+Truth be told, the South’s influence came to dominate both parties. Democrats soon saw that the only way they could win would be to cut into the GOP’s base. For a while, it looked like the only path to Democratic victory was through nominating a son of the South. From Texan Lyndon Johnson to Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter to Arkansas’s Bill Clinton (and even to, yes, Al Gore), seemingly only Southern Democrats could win the White House—and even that trend was not very recent; consider Virginia‑born segregationist Woodrow Wilson or Harry Truman, the descendants of slaveholders and Confederate sympathizers, or even Warm Springs, Georgia, resident FDR. In the post‑Reagan years, Southerners so dominated both parties that at one point, we had a president from Arkansas (Clinton), a vice president from Tennessee (Gore), a Majority Leader from Mississippi (Trent Lott), and a House Speaker from Georgia (Newt Gingrich). The chairman of the GOP was Haley Barbour, from Mississippi. President George W. Bush of Texas, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and House Majority Leaders Dick Armey and Tom DeLay (Texans) soon followed in what was, perhaps, the apex of Southern domination of the GOP, and simultaneously, of Republican triumphalism. Talk circulated that the GOP had achieved a “permanent governing majority.”
+
+Ronald Reagan downplayed his intellectual and cosmopolitan credentials to accentuate his everyman persona. In similar fashion, Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe and president of Columbia University, dodged questions by employing bumbling answers at press conferences. “In public he wore a costume of affability, optimism, and farm‑boy charm,” wrote David Brooks in The Road to Character. “As president, he was perfectly willing to appear stupider than he really was if it would help him perform his assigned role. He was willing to appear tongue‑tied if it would help him conceal his true designs.” Biographer Andrew Sinclair said much the same thing about the much‑maligned Warren Harding’s “mute your own horn” leadership style. In this regard, George W. Bush simply followed a long‑standing tradition—albeit with a Texas twang. Tevi Troy, the former Bush aide who authored What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted, believes that “Bush probably read more history than [Jack] Kennedy.” If that sounds absurd, it’s partly because Kennedy highlighted his intellectual credentials, while the Yale‑educated Bush downplayed his. As a result, we consider Kennedy (no dummy, but no genius, either) smarter. Is this only the result of a liberal media painting Republicans as illiterate Babbitts? Hardly. “To be fair,” Troy writes, “Bush was not blameless in acquiring a reputation for not reading.”
+
+In 2000, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff wrote that Kent Hance believes he “helped teach Mr. Bush the need to be more folksy.” As Mr. Hance put it, “He wasn’t going to be out‑Christianed or out‑good‑old‑boyed again.” If this is true (and one suspects it is), then it’s hard to fault Bush for doing what he had to do to win. And let’s not forget that he wasn’t just trying to forge his own comeback; he was also attempting to avenge his father’s defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton in 1992. What is more, his father, former President George H. W. Bush, had been mocked as a tax‑raiser and a preppy wimp. George W. Bush did everything possible to be the opposite of that. The adoption of the Texas persona helped, but the younger Bush overswaggered and overtwanged. But hey, he managed to win two elections, and winning is everything, right?
+
+The problem was, although this is a bipartisan phenomenon, it just happens to have disproportionately impacted the Right. Again, Republicans are thought of as the stupid party. Both sides of the political aisle occasionally genuflect at the altar of rural superiority, even if Republicans are decidedly better at it. Although President Obama’s appeal to urbanites and minorities is obvious, he is not above the affectation of droppin’ his gs and prattlin’ on about “folks.” Likewise, prep school—bred John Kerry (“Can I get me a hunting license here?”) experimented with some downright, down‑home Forrest Gump elocution during his 2004 race. Hillary Clinton has been known to affect a Southern accent when convenient. Even less subtle was the over‑the‑top, twangy country music song “Stand With Hillary” released in late 2014—“Put your boots on and let’s smash this ceilin’ ”—where all the gs were dropped. The producer of the “Stand With Hillary” song also produced a 2008 viral mariachi video, “Viva Obama.” Nothing happens by accident in politics. Hillary’s pandering is a transparent attempt to woo the “real America.” Noting the dichotomy between Obama’s pop‑culture outreach—which featured the Will.I.Am song “Yes We Can” and Hillary’s—Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist website, observed, “The attempt to pander to the white working class voters left out by the Democratic agenda for so many years is obvious and clumsy, but also revealing, signaling their perception of what’s happened to the electorate in the course of the Obama era.”
+
+For all the GOP’s problems, it is perhaps instructive to remember that Democrats also face their own challenges, which include struggles to win white votes—and their own gender gap with men. Putting aside politics, the notion that America should have one de facto white party and one de facto minority party strikes me as unhealthy. We should all resist this sort of racial balkanization. And, of course, just as Republicans confront regional geographic problems, the Democrats missed winning the White House in 2000, at least partly because Al Gore couldn’t deliver his home state of Tennessee. Just a dozen years ago, former senator Zell Miller, a conservative Democrat, penned a book titled A National Party No More, lamenting the fact that his beloved party had written off the South, and would continue to pay an electoral price. “Today, our national Democratic leaders look south and say, ‘I see one‑third of a nation and it can go to hell,’ ” he wrote. This is a good example of how political fortunes can quickly change. Just as Miller’s book hasn’t aged well (electorally speaking, the Democrats seem to have made the right political moves), a dozen years from now this book might seem antiquated. I won’t be at all upset if that happens. Still, almost all the long‑term trends (including demographic shifts and shifts in public opinion) seem to suggest the GOP is in trouble if it doesn’t adapt and overcome.
+
+In the introduction of this book, I wrote about my rural background in western Maryland and the deep abiding respect I have for rural Americans who have done much to make this a great country. I don’t want to see an America where everyone is huddled into cities. In the words of Hank Williams Jr., we need Americans who still know how to “skin a buck” and “run a trotline.” But one of the many challenges confronting conservatives is that America has transitioned from the agrarian age to the industrial age to the information age. Unlike the industrial age, where the top‑down assembly line model favored liberals, the tech revolution may favor the rugged individualism embraced by libertarian‑leaning conservatives. Regardless, given these trends, it makes little sense for a movement or a party to allow the rural‑versus‑urban paradigm—and the many cultural issues tied up in that—to define and assign membership status. So long as Republicans could win this way, it made perfect sense to exploit the cleavage between city folks and “Real America.” Not only was this smart politics, but it also tapped into deep‑seated beliefs.
+
+So where did this traditional deification of rural areas come from? Among other things, credit (or blame) the influence of religion (think the Garden of Eden versus the Tower of Babel), philosophy (Rousseau’s notion about noble savages, and later, transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson—and Walden Woods-loving Henry David Thoreau), and various ideas conceived during the time of America’s founding, such as Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism. “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries,” Jefferson wrote Madison, “as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” This was bipartisan. Believe it or not, in the run‑up to his 1932 election, Groton‑ and Harvard‑educated Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed far more support from rural and Southern voters than with big‑city types—and painted himself not as a former Wall Street lawyer but rather as a simple “farmer.”
+
+This brings us to a contradiction within conservatism. Much of conservatism—a belief in free markets, for instance—is premised on the dynamic notion that more people equal more ideas. But while optimistic free marketeers adhering to this Reagan and Kemp model subscribe to this theory, most populists do not. The more optimistic worldview made major strides when economists like Julian Simon and Ester Boserup took on the Malthusian catastrophe argument, which erroneously predicted that global overpopulation would lead to mass starvation, and demonstrated that more people equals more ideas, innovation, and prosperity. When you think about it, it makes sense. Rural societies tend to work on subsistence (you eat what you grow— be careful what you wish for, “local foods” advocates!), but cities, by their very nature, demand free market economic skills such as cooperation, specialization, and trade. These things make us rich. And cities are the areas where these things are appreciated and magnified. And let us not forget that great cities, after all, not only have fostered great hedge funds, but have also built great cathedrals stone by stone.
+
+Leaders emerge during times of tragedy and crisis, and it was at this moment that Nikki Haley, the female, Indian American governor of South Carolina, who also happens to be a conservative Republican, seized the moment. “Today we are here in a moment of unity in our state without ill will to say it is time to remove the flag from our capitol grounds,” Haley said at a press conference on June 22, 2015. “This flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state.” She was flanked by Republican senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, who is one of only two African Americans in the U.S. Senate. And, in a way, the South Carolina governor and these senators represent a changing Republican Party, as well as a changing South. Graham, the only white representative, is probably the least conservative of the three. But they bring diverse perspectives that not very long ago were absent from Republican politics in the South. “The biggest reason I asked for that flag to come down was I couldn’t look my children in the face and justify it staying there,” Haley later told CNN’s Don Lemon. “What I realized now more than ever is people were driving by and they felt hurt and pain. No one should feel pain … My father wears a turban. My mother, at the time, wore a sari. It was hard growing up in South Carolina.”",REAL
+6388,War on the Streets of Paris: Armed Migrants Fight Running Battles in the French Capital,"War on the Streets of Paris: Armed Migrants Fight Running Battles in the French Capital Nick Gutteridge, Express, November 2, 2016 
+A migrant turf war erupted into violence on the streets of one of Paris’ trendiest neighbourhoods early this morning as asylum seekers beat each other to a pulp with wooden clubs. 
+The area around Stalingrad Metro station was turned into a refugee battleground as rival gangs of migrants set upon each other in shocking scenes of violence. 
+Asylum seekers wearing hooded tops wielded makeshift clubs fashioned from lengths of wood which they used to bludgeon each other as horrified pedestrians looked on. 
+The blood-curdling brawl erupted just yards from the Stalingrad Metro station, where a squalid migrant camp has popped up following the demolition of the Jungle. 
+It was not immediately clear what sparked the early morning fight, but rival gangs of people smugglers have previously been involved in violent brawls in Calais. 
+And despite the horrific brawl, a pro-migrant rally is apparently being organised to take place at the camp at 6pm tonight. 
+The once peaceful neighbourhood, in Paris’ 10th Arrondissement, used to be a popular area with tourists, boasting a lively nightlife scene bustling with restaurants and bars. 
+But worried residents have revealed how it has become a no go zone in recent weeks following the establishment of the refugee camp, which has brought squalor and violence. 
+Thousands of migrants–mostly from Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan, and Eritrea–have pitched tents under the Metro station after the demolition of the Jungle hampered their attempts to reach Britain. 
+French police have tried and failed on many occasions to clear the squalid squat, but asylum seekers simply keep on returning and reestablishing it. 
+There are now nore than 2,500 migrants pitching up in the makeshift camp, with locals saying the eyesore is ruining their businesses and making life a “living hell”. 
+Residents in the once popular district say that the squatters are now becoming increasingly violent and dangerous, with increased reports of muggings. 
+Faisal, a shopkeeper, told the French daily Le Figaro that Stalingrad locals are living in fear, threatening the future of his business. 
+He said: “The stench of urine, faeces, and rubbish has made Stalingrad an insalubrious place to live. The place is dead – no-one wants to come here anymore. People are afraid to go out and lock themselves in. 
+“I’m making less than €60 (£53) a day. A few more weeks like this and I’ll go bust! 
+“French people have been kind to them. I know they’re desperate, but the least they can do is respect the law and try and integrate into French society.” 
+Jeanne, another Stalingrad resident, told Le Figaro the migrants had become increasingly violent towards locals. 
+She said: “Brazen migrants are snatching jewellery and handbags off passers-by–they’re even stealing bread. I’ve seen them beat people up too.” 
+Police have raided the camp some 30 times in the past year, and on Monday French president François Hollande vowed to close the camp for good. 
+But within 24 hours of a police operation to move migrants on tents had sprung up again, showing the uphill battle authorities in the French capital face to shut down such illegal encampments. 
+Furious locals have demanded that the camp be closed once and for all, describing how they have heard “blood-curdling noises” coming from it in the middle of the night. 
+Marie, who lives right next to the makeshift camp, told Le Figaro: “Life here has become unbearable. More than 2,500 squatters were evacuated in September, and now, less than two months later, they’re back. And now that the ‘Jungle’ camp has been closed, things are about to get even worse.” 
+Another local, Monique, said that she was at “a loss for words” and “utterly distraught” over the situation. 
+She said: “The streets are littered with rubbish and faeces. We can hear blood-curdling screams coming from the camp in the middle of the night.",FAKE
+4638,'There's No Case Here.' Clinton Defiant amid Email Probe,"The race for the White House has become even more uncertain as federal investigators begin searching through newly discovered emails belonging to Hillary Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin.
+
+The emails were found on a laptop of Abedin's estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, who is currently under investigation for allegedly sexting an underage girl.
+
+Officials have obtained a warrant to search those emails, but it is unlikely the review will be completed by Election Day.
+
+Meanwhile, the presidential race has tightened dramatically in the last several days.
+
+The gap was closing even before Friday's news that the FBI would reopen the investigation into Clinton's emails, but now the contest is virtually a dead heat.
+
+Even though the polls are close, Clinton still has an apparent advantage in the Electoral College. Consequently, both candidates are hitting key swing states where the election will likely be decided.
+
+Addressing supporters at a rally in Kent, Ohio, Monday, the former secretary of state sounded defiant about the email controversy.
+
+""I'm sure a lot of you may be asking what this new email story is about and why in the world the FBI would decide to jump into an election with no evidence of wrongdoing with just days to go? That's a good question,"" Clinton said.
+
+""First of all, for those of you who are concerned about my use of personal email, I understand. As I said, I'm not making excuses, I understand and I regret it,"" she continued. ""They should look at them. And I'm sure they will reach the same conclusion they did when they looked at my emails for the last year. There is no case here.""
+
+Meanwhile, campaigning in Michigan, Republican rival Donald Trump kept his focus on Clinton's latest controversy.
+
+""Thank you, Anthony. I never liked you, Anthony, but thank you very much,"" the GOP nominee said. ""The Clinton crime spree ends on Nov. 8. It's gonna end on Nov. 8.""
+
+Clinton could face more problems in the days ahead. WikiLeaks is reportedly set to release more hacked emails related to the presidential campaign.
+
+The organization has already caused another problem for Democratic operatives.
+
+CNN dropped former analyst Donna Brazile after WikiLeaks revealed she had leaked a question from one of the debates in the Democratic primary to the Clinton campaign.
+
+No one knows what effect the FBI investigation or the WikiLeaks releases will have before Election Day. The last week before the election could be as unpredictable as the entire campaign has been so far this year.",REAL
+5094,Donald Trump’s RNC 2016 Speech Packed With Lies And Shady Stats,"In Trump’s America, murder is out of control, terror reigns, our enemies are ascendant and our leaders are spineless puppets.
+
+Donald Trump’s speech accepting the Republican nomination at his party's convention Thursday night lasted 75 minutes—the longest since at least 1972—as he painted a grim picture of midnight in America, a country beaten down and besieged by terror, crime, murderous immigrants and smarter adversaries across the globe thanks to foolish and feckless leaders here. 
+
+
+
+“At our convention, there will be no lies,” Trump said at the very beginning of his remarks, in which he elaborated on a draft a Republican source leaked to a super-PAC backing Hillary Clinton hours before he spoke. “We will honor the American people with the truth and nothing else.”
+
+“Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation,” Trump said in a speech that returned to common themes of law and order and national security, and charges that President Obama and Hillary Clinton had made America and the world less safe. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.”
+
+But the bleak picture he painted often did not line up with the facts, using over-inflated statistics and questionable generalizations when discussing matters of crime, justice, immigration, and national security.
+
+Trump said that homicides increased by 17 percent from last year in the country’s 50 largest cities. He did not say, however, that the national homicide rate hit a four-decade low last year, according to the FBI—or that the number of people murdered in the 50 largest cities has declined by half since 1991.
+
+In an interview on CNN ahead of the speech, Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort defended the remarks by casting doubt on the FBI’s official crime numbers, which include information gleaned from local police departments.
+
+“The FBI is certainly suspect these days after what they just did with Hillary Clinton,” Manafort said, referring to FBI Director James Comey’s decision to not recommend charges against Clinton over her use of a private email server. “But as far as crime in the neighborhoods, people don’t feel safe.”
+
+According to Politifact, Trump’s often-repeated assertion that there is no vetting system for Syrian refugees is not true. That process can take as long as one year or more, and each refugee is interviewed by officials in the Department of Homeland Security and required to attend cultural classes and pass a medical review.
+
+“I will work with and appoint the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job done,” Trump declared, while not elaborating on how he would do so. “In this race for the White House, I am the law-and-order candidate.”
+
+In light of the recent shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Trump claimed that the number of officers killed in the line of duty has increased by almost 50 percent year-to-year. The National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund says the number has gone up only slightly—from 62 officers through July 20 of last year to 67 killed so far this year.
+
+Turning to the world—and Clinton—Trump said the U.S. should discontinue its policy of “nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria.” But Trump supported the Libya intervention in 2011, saying at the time: “At this point, if you don’t get rid of Gaddafi, it’s a major, major black eye for this country.”
+
+Trump’s dubious contentions were not limited to law and order issues. The billionaire businessman claimed 14 million people “left the workplace entirely.” For context, the current workforce has 4.6 million more people than in 2009. He criticized Obama on the national debt, claiming it doubled. It has actually increased from $11.1 trillion to $19.2 trillion.
+
+Trump also suggested that Clinton is responsible for the creation of ISIS in the Middle East—even though the group did not formally split from al Qaeda until after she left office. He suggested that sanctions on Iran decreased during her tenure in government; in fact, they increased.",REAL
+3223,Live from New Hampshire: They’re all here,"This story has been updated.
+
+A stampede of GOP presidential hopefuls descended on New Hampshire this weekend for the First in the Nation Republican Leadership Summit, a political cattle-call that formally kicks off the 2016 presidential primary in the early-voting state.
+
+The Post's Bob Costa explained the stakes in Nashua: ""The attendance by a bevy of ambitious Republicans underscores the intense competition already underway in New Hampshire, which plays a critical role in the nominating process. With no clear front-runner here, campaigns are rushing to make inroads with primary voters who traditionally demand personal interaction and unceasing attention.""
+
+We'll be following the speeches throughout the weekend. Tune in for highlights...
+
+Among the GOP presidential hopefuls who spoke at the leadership summit in New Hampshire on Saturday were former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, businessman Donald Trump, Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).
+
+Fiorina drew rousing applause when she was asked by a questioner how she would be different from other Republicans, such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker.
+
+""I am different from everyone else running in every aspect,"" she said, noting her business background made her stand out from people whose only experience has been politics. ""I come at problem solving differently. And oh, by the way, I look a little different, too.""
+
+Jindal spoke at length about his parents who left India and settled in Baton Rouge. He praised their work ethic, the value they placed on education, and their belief in America as the land of unlimited opportunity.
+
+He drew the biggest applause when he said: ""When my parents came to America, they were coming to become Americans. I am tired of the hyphenated Americans. They didn't come to become Indian-Americans.""
+
+Trump was asked what kinds of people he would choose for a Cabinet if he ran for president and won. He criticized the way ambassadors are chosen, singling out Caroline Kennedy, who is U.S. envoy to Japan. ""She is not talented at what you have to do,"" he said. ""She doesn't know anything about trade."" Instead, he would choose someone from Wall Street for that position.
+
+Huckabee was asked to state his opinion on global climate change. ""Fact or fiction?"" the questioner wanted to know. Huckabee said he was in college when scientists were predicting that ""we would all freeze to death."" Now the grim outlook is that the earth will burn up.
+
+""The Earth is an amazing body. Let me be very blunt. I believe the Earth is the Lord's creation,"" he said, as the audience applauded.
+
+Cruz criticized President Obama's efforts to fight the Islamic State. His first question was what he would do differently if he were in the White House. Cruz said the goal shouldn't be to weaken or degrade the terrorist group, but to ""utterly and completely destory ISIS.""
+
+And the current debate over ""boots on the ground"" in Iraq should be driven by military assessments on how to reach that goal, he added. Still, Cruz recalled that he wasn't satisfied with the assessment he heard during a Senate briefing from Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about how that goal could be achieved.
+
+""I asked him, 'in what time frame can we destroy ISIS,'"" Cruz said. Dempsey responded that there is no military solution, Cruz recalled, only a change in the underlying conditions to prevent potential recruits from being radicalized through poverty.
+
+""There is a word for that--I have to clean it up for C-span--and simply say it's nonense,"" Cruz said. ""The way to defeat ISIS is not expanded Medicaid throughout Iraq.""
+
+Here are some of Friday's speakers:
+
+Best applause line: ""We lived through Jimmy Carter, we'll live through Barack Obama! I promise you!""
+
+Runner-up: ""[Obama] had a very important mission: raising money for needy Democrats in Dallas.""
+
+Hillary hit: “She’s the one that literally brought the reset button to the Kremlin. ... Well [Russia] did reset us, that’s for sure; they reset us back to pre-1989, from my perspective.”
+
+Granite State pander: On what he learned from the last election: ""Number one is you've gotta spend a lot of time in New Hampshire. You better be healthy and you've gotta spend years here.”
+
+How it played: The Texas governor spent a considerable amount of time on foreign policy, showing his grasp of the subject matter while avoiding any ""oops"" moments. (He told audience members running for president takes a lot of work, and that he's been studying up.) Perry received several standing ovations but -- though he delivered an animated speech -- the tone in the room was somewhat subdued.
+
+Best applause line: ""Some people say I'm too blunt and too direct and too straightforward. I think we could use a little bit of that in Washington, D.C.""
+
+Crowd pleaser: “I don’t know what they’re talking about in terms of rough edges. … I’m a Republican in New Jersey. Come and try that for a couple of days. ... [It's] not a place where Republicans go to win elections.""
+
+Obama zinger: ""All he cares about now are his legacy and his library.""
+
+GOP side-eye: ""What amazing leadership I just showed by saying I oppose government waste. ... Anybody that comes up here and says that, boo them off the stage.""
+
+How it played: Christie played to his strengths and only delivered a few minutes of prepared remarks (on entitlement reform), instead choosing to spend most of his time taking questions. The crowd greeted that very warmly. Throughout his speech he urged members of the audience to ask other candidates -- and potential candidates -- what they will do about the cost of entitlement programs: ""If they're not going to do anything to fix that problem, we're not going to be able to deal with any of the other problems...we have in this country.""
+
+Voter buzz: Leader of the pack but needs to prove himself to conservative base*
+
+Subtle Rubio jab: ""We have elected a president who was a phenomenal speaker but he was two years as a United States senator and had no record of accomplishment...and what did we get?""
+
+Obama slam: ""This is the first president in post-World War II era who does not believe that America's presence in the world as a leader and America's power is a force for good. I do.""
+
+Most self-aware line: ""I don't see any coronation coming my way, trust me. We have 95 people running, I'm clearly intimidating a whole bunch of folks, aren't I?""
+
+Kumbaya: ""It's not that [Democrats'] motives are bad, it's just that they have bad ideas. That's the attitude you start with ... you have to rebuild trust. This is where the president has let us down more than any other thing ... it's pushing down people that disagree with him to make himself look better. The next president has to reverse that.""
+
+
+
+How it played: Bush spent the first 15 minutes sharing his biography peppered with policy over red meat for the base. Bush is clearly positioning himself for the field's adult-in-the-room role: that of a pragmatic problem-solver who is not driven by ideology. He tried to strike a positive tone about America's future, at one point responding to a question about gay marriage with an answer about restoring economic opportunity for all Americans. It underscored that he wants his campaign to be a debate about economic issues, not cultural/social ones.
+
+Hillary Clinton jab: ""Scott Brown tonight let me know that Hillary Clinton's gonna raise $2.5 billion dollars. That's a lot of Chipotle, my friends.""
+
+Harry Reid jab: “I think I get along personally with everyone, even people that call me a loser.""
+
+Granite State name-check: On the way here, I was texting with my youngest daughter. And I meant to say I'm in Nashua. But I guess the spell check changed it to Nassau. And so she wrote back: How many delegates does the Bahamas have?""
+
+How it played: Rubio gave what's becoming his standard stump speech: He cast himself as a next-generation leader with a forward-looking vision and argued for a muscular foreign policy.
+
+*Rating is based on three recent New Hampshire polls; an April 15 Public Policy Polling survey; a March 25 Franklin Pierce/Boston Herald survey; and a March 24 Suffolk University poll.
+
+Colby Itkowitz and Sean Sullivan contributed to this report.",REAL
+3049,The Supreme Court is just as polarized as the rest of US politics – and this may have profound implications.,"Recent years have seen concerns about political polarization in America come to the fore – one only has to look at the recent fight between Congressional Republicans over the next Speaker of the House or Representatives to witness its effects. But what of judicial polarization? In new research which examines polarization in the US Supreme Court since 1938, Donald Gooch finds that this polarization has also increased, and correlates with congressional and presidential polarization. He argues that this trend is fed by shifts in ideological polarization in the Senate, and in public opinion. If it continues, he writes, polarization may lead to more frequent and powerful attacks on the Supreme Court’s authority and supremacy.
+
+Scholars have long warned of a growing political schism in the American body politic.  Popularized by “Red vs. Blue” maps in national elections, political polarization is defined as a widening divide between partisan identifiers and ideologues in the public and political elite.  Political polarization is one of the most important recent developments in American politics. Concerns about political polarization in American politics focus on its potential to frustrate political accommodation, stymie political actors, clog political processes, disrupt political institutional environments and, in the extreme, spur violent social unrest.  For example, the congressional polarization that emerged in the 1970s has only intensified over time. Polarization has led to greater gridlock, greater partisan rancor between the parties, and greater intraparty cohesion in congressional politics.
+
+The majority of institutional polarization studies emphasize Congress. Judicial polarization, in contrast, is underexplored as an aspect of political polarization and as a determinant of judicial behavior. By examining individual justice polarization and ideological extremity over full tenures on the United States Supreme Court since 1938 and how Court polarization responds to polarization in coordinate institutions over the same time period, I find: strong evidence of increasing Court polarization and that Court polarization correlates with congressional and presidential polarization since the 1950s.  Court polarization is a real and significant political phenomenon in America.
+
+Figure 1 shows the normalized polarization trends in the Court’s institutional environment across the regimes of Chief Justices.   It depicts polarization trends for the Supreme Court, the Senate (standard deviation of senator ideology per congressional term), and the President vis-à-vis the Senate chamber median (absolute difference between President’s ideology score and the median Senator’s ideology score).   Notice the strong apparent linear trend over time in the polarization of all three institutions, interrupted only by the drop in polarization observed between the Senate chamber median and the President during the Vinson regime. The strength of the correlation between the President-Senate chamber median difference and that of Court polarization over the regimes is striking.  A remarkable consistency exists in the peaks and valleys of Court polarization and the ideological distance between the President and the Senate chamber median across chief justice regimes from Hughes to Roberts.
+
+Figure 1 – Polarization Trends in Senate, President-Senate, and Court Polarization (JCS) across Chief Justice Regimes
+
+What is the most parsimonious explanation for these results? An increasingly polarized Senate, through its advice-and-consent role, has produced a mirror image of itself on the Court.  Court and Senate polarization may, in turn, be a function of polarization in the American electorate. Thus, even though the Court is somewhat insulated from democratic forces, the Court is subject to macro-polarization trends (directly and indirectly) through the institutional context.  The Court is responsive to the polarization of entrepreneurial interest groups, such as the Federalist Society (conservative) and the Coalition for a Fair and Independent Judiciary (liberal).
+
+Justices evolve ideologically over time.  The evidence on Court polarization suggests that ideological movement on the Court tends to be in one direction—justices tend to become more liberal the longer they are on the Court. Consider two examples: Harry Blackmun and Clarence Thomas In 1970, Harry Blackmun served his first term on the Court.  At the time, only Chief Justice Burger was more conservative than Blackmun.  In his tenth term on the Court, Justice Blackmun crossed the ideological Rubicon, joining the Court’s left-leaning justices (Figure 2).  By his final term in 1993, Justice Blackmun was as far to the Court’s ideological left as he had been to the Court’s ideological right when he began his career. As a second example, Justice Clarence Thomas, is widely considered to be a stalwart of conservatism on the Court. He holds the extreme rightward location in the judicial common space.  Even Justice Thomas, however, has evolved ideologically over his career.  Unlike Blackmun, Thomas has moved further to the right.  Justice Thomas’s absolute ideological evolution is only half that of Blackmun’s, but Thomas has become nearly twice as conservative as he was when he first joined the Court.
+
+Figure 2 – Career Trends in JCS scores for Justice Thomas and Justice Blackmun
+
+What explains this ideological drift? These ideological sojourns are not made in a vacuum.  Just as Court polarization is a function of the Court’s internal and external environments, individual justices are buffeted by internal and external factors during their judicial decision-making.  Justices are part of the Brethren, a small clique of specialized judicial actors. Thus, they may be influenced by the strategic internal judicial environment and interpersonal justice relationships.  The Court exists in a unique and competitive institutional context. This context constrains judicial behavior. Justices are responsive to mass and elite public opinion. There is strong evidence justices evolve ideologically on the Court in response to shifts in the ideological polarization in the Senate. Other external factors create leftward headwinds.  The Court is responsive to legal elites and legal institutions shaping the debate over judicial policy.  Institutions like the American Bar Association reflect the liberal tilt among legal professionals; these institutions help establish a range of judicial policies acceptable to the leftward shifted legal elite. Favorable press coverage of justices becoming more liberal, the so-called “Greenhouse Effect,” may induce more justices to evolve in the left ideological direction.  Within, justices may serve as ideological lodestones, drawing fellow justices to their own ideological viewpoint. My analysis suggests that this movement is not merely a function of drift, but rather the consequence of the political environment within which the Court makes policy.  Elite polarization entrepreneurs, public opinion shaped by media coverage, and institutional constraints may all play a part in causing justices to move to the Left over their careers.
+
+What are the implications of this analysis? Court polarization and polarization in the Court’s strategic environment influence justice ideological disposition and evolution. These two types of Court polarization may have wide-ranging effects on: the judicial nomination process, the Senate judicial confirmation process, and, subsequently, the policy output of the Court.   Ideological polarization influences competition between the branches over policy.  Justices becoming more liberal over time influences policy debates concerning the life-tenure of justices. It could change how presidents, particularly Republican presidents, choose nominees for the Court.  The emergent ideological polarization on the Court has profound implications for how the Court will figure in the national political discourse and how its interactions with polarization forces will affect the constitutional order.  A polarized Court is more vulnerable to the attacks of reconstructive presidents.  Presidents may take advantage of Court polarization to politicize Court decisions in a bid to detract from the Court’s constitutional authority and to challenge judicial supremacy.
+
+Polarization bodes ill for the prospects of consensus among the branches on constitutional meaning.  President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union challenge to the Supreme Court over Citizens United and Justice Alito’s “not true” rejoinder is illustrative of the Court-president conflict that polarization may engender.  Polarization may lead to more frequent and more powerful attacks on judicial authority and judicial supremacy. These implications make it clear that judicial polarization is an important phenomenon of the U.S. Supreme Court and a topic ripe for further study.
+
+This article is based on the paper, ‘Ideological Polarization on the Supreme Court: Trends in the Court’s Institutional Environment and Across Regimes, 1937-2008’, in American Politics Research.
+
+Please read our comments policy before commenting.
+
+Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.
+
+Donald Gooch – Stephen F. Austin State University
+
+ Donald M. Gooch is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government at Stephen F. Austin State University. His research agenda includes political polarization, behavior on the Supreme Court, campaign finance regulation, civic education, formal theory and the spatial theory of voting.",REAL
+9536,BREAKING: Putin Issues Massive Warning to the West,"Russia unveiled a weapon capable of reaching United States territory recently, and on its heels, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the actions undertaken in Washington are “pushing Russia into a nuclear arms race,” according to Zero Hedge . 
+Zero Hedge reported: 
+Yesterday, Russia reveals photos of a new highly advanced liquid fuelled heavy ICBM capable of evading anti-missile defences and hitting US territory with 10 tonne nuclear payload. 
+The Makeyev Design Bureau – the designer of Russia’s heavy liquid fuelled Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (“ICBMs”) – ie. of missiles capable of reaching US territory from Russian territory, has published the first picture of Russia’s new heavy Sarmat ICBM which is due to enter service shortly, probably in 2018. 
+The Makeyev Design Bureau also released this statement along with the picture of the Sarmat ICBM: “In accordance with the Decree of the Russian Government ‘On the State Defence Order for 2010 and the planning period 2012-2013,’ the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau was instructed to start design and development work on the Sarmat. In June 2011, the Bureau and the Russian Ministry of Defense signed a state contract for the Sarmat’s development. The prospective strategic missile system is being developed in order to assuredly and effectively fulfil objectives of nuclear deterrent by Russia’s strategic forces.” 
+As Zero Hedge noted, the Sarmat has a specific goal of evading U.S. anti-ballistic missile systems that have been deployed in Eastern Europe. 
+This is yet another reason why we need a president who understands the importance of modernizing and beefing up our military in these uncertain times. 
+While the U.S. stays stuck in the 1960’s and 1970’s with our strategic deterrents, Russia is working to upgrade their armory. The new Sarmat missile is set to be ready to go in 2018. 
+AntiWar’s Jason Ditz had this to say about the situation between the U.S. and Russia in regard to our respective military capabilities: 
+Of course, the United States spends many, many times what Russia does on its military, but the fact that Russia has a proper military capable of defending the nation at all puts it in a total different category from most of America’s recent wars, and Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal makes it clear this is one war which, if the US launches it, they won’t be able to win outright. 
+Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has called for a no-fly zone over Syria. Here’s what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, had to say about that. 
+“Right now, Senator, for us to control all of the airspace in Syria it would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia,” he said. “That’s a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I’m not going to make.” 
+Clinton’s track record — both in action and in words — proves that she does not have the judgment necessary to be president.",FAKE
+7081,"130,000 Americans demand to forbid Soros manipulate elections","130,000 Americans demand to forbid Soros manipulate elections 08.11.2016 More than 129,000 Americans have already signed petition on the website of the White House, demanding to meet in emergency session to deprive George Soros of possibility to influence presidential elections. Information that Lord Malloch-Brown, Director General of a company which produces election technology and voting machine, has close partnership relations with global fraudster and speculator George Soros, occurred in the US media in mid-October. And it was the last straw for the Americans. It's also confirmed implicitly by the fact that Soros himself has stood for Hillary Clinton many times. A famous financier of colour revolutions makes everything possible not to let Donald Trump come to power, as the latter has claimed several times that in case he won, he would cease policy of 'implanting democracy' in other countries. Taking into account sorrowful experience of the Soros' structures in the post-Soviet countries as well as those in the Central and Eastern Europe, these relations really allow to seriously suspect the financier and sponsor of colour revolutions of attempts to influence unbiased will of the American citizens. There has been no reaction to the petition so far, however Administration of the US president has been caught several times in deleting 'unwanted' petitions and signatures. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+8901,Dennis Kucinich’s Extraordinary Warning on D.C.’s Think Tank Warmongers,"Thursday Oct 27, 2016 
+WAR is a racket. It always has been. 
+It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. 
+A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. 
+– From Major General Smedley Butler’s War is a Rackett 
+Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has just penned an extremely powerful warning about the warmongers in Washington D.C. Who funds them, what their motives are, and why it is imperative for the American people to stop them. 
+The piece was published at The Nation and is titled: Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? Look at Their Donors . 
+Read it and share it with everyone you know. 
+W ashington, DC, may be the only place in the world where people openly flaunt their pseudo-intellectuality by banding together, declaring themselves “think tanks,” and raising money from external interests, including foreign governments, to compile reports that advance policies inimical to the real-life concerns of the American people. 
+As a former member of the House of Representatives, I remember 16 years of congressional hearings where pedigreed experts came to advocate wars in testimony based on circular, rococo thinking devoid of depth, reality, and truth. I remember other hearings where the Pentagon was unable to reconcile over $1 trillion in accounts, lost track of $12 billion in cash sent to Iraq, and rigged a missile-defense test so that an interceptor could easily home in on a target. War is first and foremost a profitable racket. 
+How else to explain that in the past 15 years this city’s so called bipartisan foreign policy elite has promoted wars in Iraq and Libya, and interventions in Syria and Yemen, which have opened Pandora’s box to a trusting world, to the tune of trillions of dollars, a windfall for military contractors. DC’s think “tanks” should rightly be included in the taxonomy of armored war vehicles and not as gathering places for refugees from academia. 
+According to the front page of this past Friday’s Washington Post, the bipartisan foreign-policy elite recommends the next president show less restraint than President Obama. Acting at the urging of “liberal” hawks brandishing humanitarian intervention, read war, the Obama administration attacked Libya along with allied powers working through NATO. 
+Indeed, I warned about this in last week’s piece: U.S. Foreign Policy ‘Elite’ Eagerly Await an Expansion of Overseas Wars Under Hillary Clinton . 
+The think tankers fell in line with the Iraq invasion. Not being in the tank, I did my own analysis of the call for war in October of 2002, based on readily accessible information, and easily concluded that there was no justification for war. I distributed it widely in Congress and led 125 Democrats in voting against the Iraq war resolution. There was no money to be made from a conclusion that war was uncalled for, so, against millions protesting in the United States and worldwide, our government launched into an abyss, with a lot of armchair generals waving combat pennants. The marching band and chowder society of DC think tanks learned nothing from the Iraq and Libya experience. 
+The only winners were arms dealers, oil companies, and jihadists. Immediately after the fall of Libya, the black flag of Al Qaeda was raised over a municipal building in Benghazi, Gadhafi’s murder was soon to follow, with Secretary Clinton quipping with a laugh, “We came, we saw, he died.” President Obama apparently learned from this misadventure, but not the Washington policy establishment, which is spoiling for more war. 
+The self-identified liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) is now calling for Syria to be bombed, and estimates America’s current military adventures will be tidied up by 2025, a tardy twist on “mission accomplished.” CAP, according to a report in The Nation, has received funding from war contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who make the bombers that CAP wants to rain hellfire on Syria. 
+The Brookings Institute has taken tens of millions from foreign governments , notably Qatar, a key player in the military campaign to oust Assad. Retired four-star Marine general John Allen is now a Brookings senior fellow . Charles Lister is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute , which has received funding from Saudi Arabia , the major financial force providing billions in arms to upend Assad and install a Sunni caliphate stretching across Iraq and Syria. Foreign-government money is driving our foreign policy. 
+As the drumbeat for an expanded war gets louder, Allen and Lister jointly signed an op-ed in the Sunday Washington Post, calling for an attack on Syria. The Brookings Institute, in a report to Congress , admitted it received $250,000 from the US Central Command, Centcom, where General Allen shared leadership duties with General David Petraeus. Pentagon money to think tanks that endorse war? This is academic integrity, DC-style. 
+And why is Central Command, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of transportation, and the US Department of Health and Human Services giving money to Brookings? 
+Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously told Colin Powell , “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it,” predictably says of this current moment , “We do think there needs to be more American action.” A former Bush administration top adviser is also calling for the United States to launch a cruise missile attack on Syria. 
+The American people are fed up with war, but a concerted effort is being made through fearmongering, propaganda, and lies to prepare our country for a dangerous confrontation, with Russia in Syria. 
+The demonization of Russia is a calculated plan to resurrect a raison d’être for stone-cold warriors trying to escape from the dustbin of history by evoking the specter of Russian world domination. 
+It’s infectious. Earlier this year the BBC broadcast a fictional show that contemplated WWIII, beginning with a Russian invasion of Latvia (where 26 percent of the population is ethnic Russian and 34 percent of Latvians speak Russian at home). 
+The imaginary WWIII scenario conjures Russia’s targeting London for a nuclear strike. No wonder that by the summer of 2016 a poll showed two-thirds of UK citizens approved the new British PM’s launching a nuclear strike in retaliation. So much for learning the lessons detailed in the Chilcot report. 
+As this year’s presidential election comes to a conclusion, the Washington ideologues are regurgitating the same bipartisan consensus that has kept America at war since 9/11 and made the world a decidedly more dangerous place. 
+The DC think tanks provide cover for the political establishment, a political safety net, with a fictive analytical framework providing a moral rationale for intervention, capitol casuistry. I’m fed up with the DC policy elite who cash in on war while presenting themselves as experts, at the cost of other people’s lives, our national fortune, and the sacred honor of our country. 
+Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by a list of the think tank’s sponsors and donors and a statement of the lobbying connections of the report’s authors. 
+It is our patriotic duty to expose why the DC foreign-policy establishment and its sponsors have not learned from their failures and instead are repeating them, with the acquiescence of the political class and sleepwalkers with press passes. 
+It is also time for a new peace movement in America, one that includes progressives and libertarians alike, both in and out of Congress, to organize on campuses, in cities, and towns across America, to serve as an effective counterbalance to the Demuplican war party, its think tanks, and its media cheerleaders. The work begins now, not after the Inauguration. We must not accept war as inevitable, and those leaders who would lead us in that direction, whether in Congress or the White House, must face visible opposition. 
+Thank you Mr. Kucinich, I couldn’t agree more. 
+For related articles, see:",FAKE
+6219,Civil War Historian: Election 2016 could lead bloody repeat,"Civil War Historian: Election 2016 could lead bloody repeat October 27, 2016 Dr. WIlliam Forstchen & Pastor Carl Gallups emphasizing importance of Election 2016 on “The Jim Bakker Show”. Branson, MO, October 27, 2016. TRUNEWS/Edward Szall/YouTube Screenshot 
+Montreat College professor William Forstchen says Election 2016 could lead to another bloody civil war. Professor Forstchen specializes in Civil War history. Forstchen gave warning on the October 25th edition of “The Jim Bakker Show” during their weeklong, “Ready Now Expo Oct. 2016.” Forstchen: “I’m a civil war historian.” The U.S. election of 1860 “is the closest I can parallel this to.” “And we all know what the price was. When we went to a civil war, they killed 660,000 young men because we became so divided.” Forstchen urged voters to turn out even if they disliked the candidates, because of other US congress races and the Supreme Court appointment. Forstchen: “I do believe we are at 1860. We are that close to the edge of the debacle.” Baptist pastor Carl Gallups then alluded to false Christian doctrine: “The prophecy clock started ticking” when the modern nation of Israel was established in 1948. In 1860: Four candidates received substantive amounts of votes in the U.S. presidential election. Abraham Lincoln (39.8 percent), Stephen Douglas (29.5 percent), John Breckinridge (18.1 percent) and John Bell (12.6 percent). On December 20, 1860 (44 days after Republican Lincoln was elected): Delegates to a convention in South Carolina unanimously voted to secede from the United States. Forstchen has co-authored books with Newt Gingrich. 
+(WASHINGTON, DC) A professor who specializes in the Civil War appeared on a special edition of “The Jim Bakker Show” last week to warn America that the 2016 presidential election could lead to another secessionist melee. 
+“I’m a civil war historian,” the Montreat College professor, William Forstchen , explained by way of introduction. 
+The U.S. election of 1860 “is the closest I can parallel this to,” Forstchen said. 
+“And we all know what the price was,” the professor then said. “When we went to a civil war, they killed 660,000 young men because we became so divided.” 
+Next, Forstchen went on a lengthy diatribe about the U.S. Constitution and the importance of voting. 
+He urged “those of you who feel ‘I can’t quite pull the lever for this person or that person'” in the presidential election to vote because U.S. senators and representatives are up for election, and because the Senate must confirm Supreme Court justices. 
+Forstchen failed to explain how the results of the 2016 election will hasten — or prevent — a civil war. He also did not specifically mention or endorse any candidates for office. 
+Nevertheless, the professor concluded with an adamant exhortation that a civil war is nigh. 
+“I do believe we are at 1860,” Forstchen said, looking directly into the camera. “We are that close to the edge of the debacle.” 
+From there, another guest, Baptist pastor Carl Gallups, declared that “the prophecy clock started ticking” when the modern nation of Israel was established in 1948. 
+Gallups, who introduced Donald Trump at a Donald Trump rally in January 2016, is famous because he has used his radio show to give a platform to people who deny the reality of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, according to the Connecticut Post http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Trump-disavows-Sandy-Hook-truther-who-6880064.php. Gallups has also said he believes neither Marco Rubio nor Ted Cruz are eligible to be president because of the circumstances of their births. 
+The segment featuring Forstchen and Gallups was part of The Jim Bakker Show’s weeklong “Ready Now Expo Oct. 2016”— featuring several survival products. 
+Four candidates received any substantive amount of votes in the U.S. presidential election in 1860: Abraham Lincoln (39.8 percent), Stephen Douglas (29.5 percent), John Breckinridge (18.1 percent) and John Bell (12.6 percent). 
+On December 20, 1860, delegates to a convention in South Carolina unanimously voted to secede from the United States — 44 days after Lincoln, a Republican, was elected. 
+Montreat College, Forstchen’s employer, is a small Christian liberal arts college with a main campus located in rural North Carolina. 
+Forstchen has written a couple dozen novels and several short stories. His co-author for some of the books is Newt Gingrich. 
+This article was contributed by Daily Caller Please contact TRUNEWS correspondent Edward Szall with any news tips related to this story. Email: | Twitter: @EdwardSzall | Facebook: Ed Szall DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP on Apple and Google Play ! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+6126,WikiLeaks: Look Who The Clinton Camp Most Wants to Please,"Pinterest 
+Who does the Clinton camp want to make “happy”? Not the American people, of course, but none other than billionaire left-wing globalist George Soros. 
+Soros has donated around $25 million to the Clinton campaign as of July, according to Politico , and that clearly buys a great deal of influence. WikiLeaks has recently released emails from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that show the lengths the campaign went to keep Soros “happy” and the huge amount of influence he exerted. 
+In an Oct. 7, 2014 email from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin to now-campaign manager Robby Mook, Abedin discussed a dinner Clinton was going to have with Soros. Abedin said in the email that she expected that Soros would eventually ask Clinton to attend a fundraiser for one of the numerous groups Soros helps bankroll, the liberal America Votes organization. 
+Mook replied to the email: “I would only do this for political reasons (ie to make Soros happy).” 
+Fox News reported : 
+During her time as secretary of state, Clinton was forwarded from Soros’ aides on Jan. 23, 2011 a message he wrote specifically for her addressing “a serious situation” in Albania. Soros even included two actions that “need to be done urgently.” One of the suggestions was appointing “a mediator such as Carl Bildt, Martti Ahtisaari or Miroslav Lajcak…” 
+Clinton received the email the next day. On Jan. 27, Lajcak met Albanian leaders for a mediation effort. 
+In another instance, just hours after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia on Feb. 13, 2016, Chris Stone, president of the Soros-founded Open Society Foundations, emailed Podesta and asked: “Remember our discussion of Wallace Jefferson, [former] Chief Justice in Texas?” Podesta simply replied, “yup.” 
+An adviser and spokesman for Soros, Michael Vachon, did most of the corresponding with Podesta related to Soros. Vachon scheduled phone calls and meetings along with making sure that the campaign knew Soros’ position on a variety of policy issues. 
+Fox News reported: 
+On March 7, 2016, Vachon sent Podesta a memo regarding “TPP and Malaysia’s Corruption Crisis.” The document criticized President Obama for making “visible compromises” in his quest to get a deal for the Trans Pacific Partnership completed. Podesta was ostensibly set to discuss the memo with Soros and his son, Alexander, during a dinner later that month. Six days later, Vachon got even more specific. 
+“In general I think George is more interested in talking about policy than the campaign per se,” Vachon wrote. “In a separate email I will send you George’s latest thinking on the migration crisis, which he is spending a lot of time on. His other big preoccupation these days is Ukraine.” 
+Refugees/migration, the Supreme Court, global warming, Ukraine, etc., are surely just a sampling of policy issues on which the globalist Soros has and will continue to influence Clinton. 
+Clinton is dangerous enough as it is, but as the man who could be directing policy decisions if Clinton is elected president? That is a scary thought.",FAKE
+8063,Welcome to the Trump World Order      : Information," Welcome to the Trump World Order By Maria Dubovikova
+ So Donald Trump is the new president of the United States. Allan Lichtman and his “13 Keys to the White House” have been proved right. The 30-year tradition of predicting the out-come of the US presidential elections continues uninterrupted. Political figures have started checking their social media accounts, deleting Tweets that could be uncomplimentary to Trump. It doesn’t help as the Internet remembers everything.
+Some are even more unlucky. French President Francois Hollande said in public recently that Trump “make you want to retch”. The global political narrative is quickly drifting away from “the dumb Trump” to “Congratulations, dear Mr. President, I always knew you would win!”
+Journalists who had been vilifying Trump – and promising apocalypse in case he is elected – have started debating how he would possibly save the world. Most experts failed in their prognosis. They could not imagine that the erratic Trump will be victorious over reserved, pragmatic, and experienced Clinton. They had their reasons but in their analysis they missed a lot of things.
+Why Trump is president-elect Trump is a living example of the American dream. From being a simple middle class Ameri-can, child of second generation German immigrants, he jumped to become a billionaire and then the US president. His penthouse apartment is said to be more luxurious than the White House. He had his own plane before becoming the US president.
+More importantly, he has promised to revive the American dream for all Americans, irrespec-tive of their social status. Experts and the so-called elite considered his mannerisms and choice of language as a disadvantage. But instead it turned out to be his advantage as he connected to people in their language.
+The fact remains that the elite, and people considering themselves intellectuals, do not form the majority in any society. The US is no different. Trump’s tweets and declarations were shocking for the elites but were very common for the masses. His imperfections made him closer to the ordinary people, especially from the working class. The “he is one of us” image always works when you deal with the masses. He gambled with it and emerged the winner.
+He got a chance to grab the Oval Cabinet as he is not liberal. Shadi Hamid seems right not believing that humans naturally inclined toward liberalism. Moreover, some men continue to remain sexist. If they don’t confess it, they keep this deep inside. Women frequently like more bad guys than respectable family men. They may not confess it but this sometimes reveals where their sympathies lie and how they vote.
+A large number of white Americans continue to show racist tendencies. While calls for toler-ance goes on, the influx of immigrants gave a fertile ground for racism and somehow xeno-phobia. During these elections, it appeared, that the Americans had to choose between two candi-dates with little credibility. They opted for change and fresh ideas. Also, the turnout was far lesser than on the previous elections, which indicates disillusionment over the current presi-dential campaign and both the candidates.
+Popular vote shows the deep divide in the American society, with Clinton showing ad-vantage over Trump. However, it was the US electoral system that brought Trump to power.
+Homeland and foreign policy Apparently he is set to make America great again not by foreign policy and imposing its will but by boosting the economy, retuning to manufacturing and giving new jobs. There is also a possibility that he will put even foreign policy based on business ties. So no help or assis-tance could come for free or without concomitant advantages for the economy.
+The tycoon that he has been Trump is aware that money decides everything. He will proba-bly try to implement this rule in policymaking, both at home and abroad. The main motive of the foreign policy could turn into bargain, trading and profit.
+Trump is not going to be easy for the Arab leaders. “You, guys, are out of business” – these were his words in response to a journalist asking about the President-elect’s policy vision toward the Middle East. Pro-Israeli and mostly anti-Arab, he will not try to solve Arab prob-lems anymore. However, he will continue the US fight against terrorism and probably be more hawkish than Clinton.
+In any case, he will not be inclined to treat the Arabs as equal partners. Such an attitude is going to be unacceptable for the Middle Easters powers and could lead to cooling of ties. The same fate – i.e. no allies, just business – probably awaits Europe.
+Trump and Russia Russia, which was frequently debated during the campaign, is neither a winner nor a looser after this election. First of all, no one really knows who is Mr. Trump and what he is going to do. Secondly, he has Senate and Congress, which will not let him do whatever he likes. Moreover, an anti-Russian spirit prevails in the US no matter what.
+With Senate and the Congress, both in Republican hands, they are likely to seriously limit his intentions, as he will have to balance between what he wants and what he actually can. However, this man is hard to deal with. So pressure groups and other instruments of man-agement of the US policy will not probably work with Trump.
+Even if there is a shift in the US-Russia relations, this will take a long time. Such a shift is needed anyway and a confrontation isn’t good for the whole world. Trump is probably de-fined to press the reboot button in Russian relations and Russia doesn’t need a weak US. Russia needs to speak with the US, to listen and to be heard. Trump, as a businessman, seems exactly that kind of a figure.
+We are entering into a new era that will be hardly predictable but extremely interesting. Clinton had many cards on her hands but failed to play them the right way. Trump has out-smarted her. A game of poker has never been so relevant as an analogy. A spicy 45th season of “the United States Saga” is about to begin.
+Maria Dubovikova is a President of IMESClub and CEO of MEPFoundation. Alumni of MGIMO (Moscow State Institute of International Relations [University] of Ministry of For-eign Affairs of Russia), now she is a PhD Candidate there. Her research fields are in Russian foreign policy in the Middle East, Euro-Arab dialogue, policy in France and the U.S. towards the Mediterranean, France-Russia bilateral relations, humanitarian cooperation and open diplomacy. She can be followed on Twitter: @politblogme",FAKE
+935,"Will Cruz, Sanders Victories Lead to Contested Conventions?","As expected, the voters of Wisconsin have given both Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., victories over their parties' front-runners.
+
+Did Trump's abortion comments and his attacks on Gov. Scott Walker hurt him in Wisconsin? Click play for CBN News Chief Political Correspondent David Brody's take on Tuesday's primary results.
+
+That means contested party conventions may be more likely this summer for the Republicans and maybe even the Democrats.
+
+It wasn't a knock-out punch, but Cruz delivered a major blow to Donald Trump's effort to secure enough delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination before the GOP convention.
+
+""God bless the great state of Wisconsin!"" Cruz exclaimed Tuesday before a group of his supporters.
+
+Wisconsin Republicans gave him the nod over Trump, 48 percent to 35 percent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich came in a disappointing and distant third, winning only 14 percent of the vote.
+
+Cruz said he is truly unifying the Republican Party.
+
+""Tonight is a turning point,"" he said. ""It is a rallying cry. It is a call from the hard-working men and women of Wisconsin to the people of America. We have a choice. A real choice.""
+
+Meanwhile, Trump responded saying there's no party unity -- just an anti-Trump initiative led by the GOP establishment.
+
+But American voters may now be moving toward favoring Cruz over Trump. A new Reuters poll shows the Texas lawmaker leading Trump for the first time nationally, 39 to 37 percent.
+
+He still needs to win 1,237 delegates to get the nomination. After Wisconsin, Trump has 740 delegates, Cruz has 514 and Kasich only 143.
+
+Meanwhile on the Democratic side, Badger State voters made Hillary Clinton ""feel the Bern.""
+
+Moments after he learned he had defeated Clinton in Wisconsin, Sanders shouted, ""We won in Wisconsin!"" during a campaign rally in Wyoming.
+
+The Vermont Democratic socialist senator decisively beat Clinton by 10 points, with almost 57 percent of the vote to her to 43 percent.
+
+Sanders said he's proving his effort is not just a fringe campaign.
+
+""We have now won seven out of the eight last caucuses and primaries,"" he explained.
+
+But Sanders still needs to win about 67 percent of the remaining delegates to secure the Democratic presidential nomination -- 2,383 are needed. Currently, Clinton has 1,743, while Sanders has 1,056.
+
+While the momentum may now favor Sanders and Cruz, it can quickly change in political campaigns. Both Trump and Clinton are expected to win their home state of New York when voters go to the polls for that primary in two weeks.",REAL
+5618,Iranians had every right to take over US embassy | Veterans Today,"“Wikileaks is the Mossad, Stupid, Not the Russians, We are playing them like a fiddle…” Assange (sort of) ‹ › Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. He is Host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO ; a hard driving weekly LIVE call in radio show. He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host. Iranians had every right to take over US embassy By Kevin Barrett on November 3, 2016 The “Den of Espionage” – the former US Embassy whose top floor was a maze of wiring that tapped every phone call in Iran (click HERE to watch The Debate) 
+I think Americans ought to storm and occupy our own NSA, FBI, CIA and Pentagon (as well as the Federal Reserve, CFR, Trilateral Commission, Goldman Sachs and other corporate HQs etc. etc.) just like the Iranian students did to the Den of Espionage in 1979. Does that make me an Iranian stooge or an American patriot? Watch The Debate and make up your own mind. –Kevin Barrett 
+Press TV Debate , featuring Kevin Barrett , Veterans Today Editor 
+The 13th day of the Iranian calendar month of Aban, which falls on November 3, is known as the Student Day in Iran, marking the National Day of Fight against Global Arrogance. On this day 37 years ago, a group of Iranian university students took over the US embassy in Tehran, which had turned into a center of espionage aimed at overthrowing the Islamic Republic following the country’s Islamic Revolution earlier in 1979. 
+Press TV has spoken to Kevin Barrett, an author and Middle East expert, as well as Maxine Dovere, a journalist and political commentator, to get their take on this issue. 
+Barrett believes the US embassy in Iran was a “CIA station” which was used to “run the country” before the revolution, adding that Iranian students had every right to take it over. 
+He also said the United States was using its embassy to essentially “dominate” and “exploit” Iran through the puppet government of the Shah whose “torturers were trained by the CIA.” 
+The analyst further stated the US is an “aggressive imperial power” which has been waging wars of “disguised aggression” throughout the world. 
+He also opined that the United States is “today’s supreme war criminal” which has been using the word “preemptive war” to legitimize its “naked undisguised aggressions” after the “neoconservative-Zionist coup d’état of September 11, 2001.” 
+“The neoconservatives in particular after their coup d’état on September 11, 2001 made it clear that any country in the world that seeks parity with the United States must be destroyed preemptively and that is essentially the situation we have today as the US Empire is out there crushing the Middle East, destroying all of Israel’s enemies through balkanization, through Oded Yinon Plan to break up these countries into smaller units along ethnic and sectarian lines, getting ready for a war with China and provoking a war with Russia through aggressive actions in Ukraine and through the destruction of Syria and threats against Russia when Russia comes to the defense of Syria,” he said. 
+Elsewhere in his remarks, Barrett noted that both US presidential candidates are “quite horrific” in their policies toward the Middle East – namely Iran. 
+He also asserted that Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei is “absolutely right” in saying that he cannot trust the United States and that Tehran has to “rethink” the opening it has had towards Washington. 
+Ayatollah Khamenei has warned that compromise with the United States will not resolve Iran’s problems as Washington has not set aside its hostilities towards the Iranian nation. 
+Meanwhile the other panelist on Press TV’s program, Maxine Dovere, mentioned that taking over an embassy is not “an acceptable diplomatic action” anywhere in the world. 
+“An embassy is sacred ground for any country in any other country. Having a diplomatic dispute is certainly one of the things that happens in political and diplomatic life but taking over an embassy and holding diplomats hostage is not within the realm of normal political behavior,” she said. 
+According to the commentator, the United States and Iran need to come to “a civil understanding” and “a trust,” adding that part of this process is eliminating the shaky foundations that have existed until 2016. 
+Elsewhere in her remarks, she dismissed the US election campaign as a “negative personality cult” which has not concentrated on policy, economics, and foreign relations. 
+She also said all the important issues that a president eventually has to deal with seem to have gotten lost in this election campaign. Related Posts: ",FAKE
+6084,Today is the day! | Opinion - Conservative,"(Before It's News)
+I never thought I would see the day when I reposted something from Michael Moore. Today is the day.
+h/t Gerard",FAKE
+9790,"Life: Move Over, SoulCycle: This Spin Studio Motivates Its Students By Hooking Up Each Bike To A Sick Child’s Life Support","Email 
+If you’re always making excuses to skip the gym, you’ve got to check this out. 
+Let’s be honest: We all can use a little extra push to get the most out of our workouts. Now, there’s one spin studio that has a brand-new approach to take motivation to the next level. At SpinZone NYC, they’ve got a great new twist to keep riders active and focused the whole 45 minutes: Every one of their bikes is hooked up to a sick child’s life support. 
+Too cool! Where do we sign up??? 
+If you thought spin class was intense before, just wait until you see this setup. With 16 bikes, each hooked up to the equipment needed to keep one child alive, there’s no doubt that every bit of effort counts—if you stop pedaling, the machines stop, too. Even with the array of pulsing lights and music we’ve come to expect from spin class, the distinct sound of an EKG flatlining on a 7-year-old can be a powerful motivator to let riders know it’s time to step things up. 
+In an increasingly competitive fitness market, the innovative approach at SpinZone NYC is a breath of fresh air, and it’s winning them new customers left and right. With no backup generators and no excuses, they’ve created exactly the kind of environment people need to get real results. Instructors are always there to offer a word of encouragement and remind cyclists how severe their child’s condition is. And forget about plateauing—once participants make it through a full session with one sick kid, that just means a bigger and sicker child for the next workout. 
+“I used to make it 30 minutes, tops,” said Erika Perry, a regular who says she never breaks eye contact with her kid for extra motivation to keep going. “Now I regularly make it the full class. There’s something about a child depending on me for survival that really gets me going in the morning. And I’ve dropped 11 pounds and feel great!” 
+Wow, it sounds like things are off to a great start! If this catches on, it’s exactly the kind of bold idea that can transform an entire industry. Way to go, SpinZone NYC. Keep on pedaling!",FAKE
+8962,How To Choose The Best Batteries For Prepper Solar Systems,"Carmela Tyrell November 3, 2016 How To Choose The Best Batteries For Prepper Solar Systems 
+No matter what device you use to turn solar power into electricity, a storage system for the electricity is absolutely essential. Without batteries or some other form of storage, you will not be able to produce an even flow of current or span time gaps when the system produces too little power or none at all. 
+While there are many different kinds of batteries on the market that can be used with solar systems, they may not be best for preppers. 
+Here are some things you should keep in mind when buying pre-fabricated batteries. 
+Understand How the Batteries Will Be Used 
+If you don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out your average household electric consumption, simply go back to your electric bills for one year. Pick the highest bill and look at the amount of electricity you used. Multiply that by about 30% to take into account higher energy drains for unusual weather patterns and you will have some good ideas about how much power the batteries will need to produce per year. 
+While power output is a very important part of understanding battery use, it is also important to keep the following factors in mind: Aside from computing average yearly and daily use, it is also very important to know how deeply you can cycle the battery, (essentially how much you can let it drain to almost empty before recharging it) and how often you can do so without damage. Even though modern batteries are connected to systems that reduce the risk of overcharging, there is no way to prevent the battery from being cycled too deeply or too often other than to have more batteries in the system. Make sure that the batteries can safely withstand charging and discharging at the same time. Do not just go by the battery type when making this assessment. Rather, look for testimonials and consumer reports on the actual models of interest to you. If you do not feel confident that the battery can truly handle this type of use, then create a system with two battery banks so that one can be used for powering your home while the other is charging back up again. Aside from the amount of power being drawn from the battery, some devices draw it faster than others. When evaluating batteries for a solar system, make sure you know how quickly they can be discharged without causing damage. You may find cheaper batteries that cannot be drained as quickly, however you may have to switch between devices so that you do not ruin the batteries. 
+Long Warranties vs. Stockpiling 
+Right now, our nation and world are facing some very serious catastrophes. For the first time in decades, we have a candidate for president “playing chicken” with nuclear armed Russia to the point where Putin says war with the United State is inevitable. 
+If that isn’t bad enough, we’ve essentially got all four of the Biblical horsemen of the apocalypse in play: Famine (in the form of crop failures caused by floods, bee shortages, and soil depletion) Disease (super bugs on the rise, deadly vaccines that leave us vulnerable to cancer yet allergic to common foods such as peanut butter and dairy, and food borne illness that may be enhanced by “undocumented citizens” that tend to work in food production) Warfare (terrorism aside, civil war might erupt right beneath our own feet) A pervasive sense of some kind of death march that most don’t even recognize because they have been so heavily brainwashed and bound up into a system of lies, corruption, and greed. 
+With all of this going on, it is entirely too easy to disregard warranties because the companies that offer them may not be available to meet their end of the bargain once society collapses past a certain point. 
+That being said, neither we, nor these companies actually know when a major disaster will come along. It would be foolhardy, at best for a company to give a longer warranty on something that will fail much sooner, and then have to take a loss on all those repairs. 
+As long as the company itself is in good financial health with a stable board of trustees and executives (you can research this through publically available business portfolios, SEC filing, and other materials designed to attract investors), then there is a good chance the confidence the company displays through the warranty is valid and worthy of consideration. 
+It is fair to say that many preppers who don’t believe in the value of warranties prefer to stockpile extra items so that they can replace broken or worn items with new ones. 
+In this case, if a battery has an average life of 5 years, some preppers might store way 3x the number of needed batteries thinking they will get 15 years out of them. 
+Sadly, as soon as batteries are assembled, they begin to break down inside. No matter how you try to rotate them in and out of service, store them, or baby them, they will all become useless at around the same time. 
+Overall, you will be better served by giving more weight to the manufacturer warranty for each battery instead of how many batteries you can store away for future use. Video first seen on LDSreliance . 
+Batteries You can Choose From Today 
+In earlier articles, I discussed the main kinds of batteries that you can use with your solar power system, as well as the advantages and disadvantages associated with each one. 
+Please use the following links for more details about some of the more common batteries on the market. Then, as now, I still have no particular favorite in this industry and feel that it is up to each person to weight their personal needs carefully in relation to each battery type. basic battery types such as wet cells, gel batteries, and lithium ion batteries a more detailed look at the pros and cons of Edison batteries a look at a relative newcomer – Tesla Batteries 
+Batteries that May be Available Soon 
+In the last year, some absolutely amazing batteries came one step closer to being available to consumers. 
+Here are my 5 favorites: 
+Gold Nanowire Batteries – these batteries make use of ultra thin gold wires suspended in an electrolyte gel. During testing, they were deep cycled several thousand times without being ruined or breaking down. Of all the emerging batteries, this one has the potential to last for decades and beyond. Since they can also be scaled to a size suitable for automobiles, they may also be the perfect battery for preppers. Video first seen on UPHIGH Productions . 
+Graphene batteries – basically, graphene batteries make use of carbon arranged into honeycomb like lattices to store energy. The are lighter in weight, last longer, and are much safer than lithium ion batteries. 
+At this time, you can purchase graphene batteries and give them a try. I recommend trying out the smaller ones for portable devices before moving on to larger ones to integrate with a solar power system. 
+It will also be of some help to keep an eye on emerging technologies that combine graphene batteries with super capacitors and other materials. As innovative as graphene batteries are, there is still plenty of room for even better batteries to be developed in the next year or so. 
+Aluminum Air Battery – these fascinating batteries literally run on water and can deliver several times the power of a lithium ion battery. Current models will run for about 14 days before you have to top them off again with tap or salt water. 
+Some models of these batteries are supposed to be available in 2016, however it may be some time before you can buy ones large enough to power a household. 
+Titanium Dioxide Battery – instead of using carbon, these batteries make use of titanium dioxide. The NTU battery will charge up much faster than conventional batteries, and will last well over 10 years. 
+If these batteries come out in the next year or so, I would recommend them over current battery designs. Since these batteries still don’t last as long as some other emerging designs, I’d call them an improvement, but would still keep some money aside for nanowire and other battery types. 
+Organic batteries – did you know that a molecule similar to the one found in rhubarb may hold the key to durable batteries that are safer, charge faster, and last longer? While organic batteries are very much in the early stages of development, they deserve some attention from preppers. 
+Aside from purchasing pre-made batteries, some of the ideas presented may lend themselves well to creating your own batteries from household or natural materials. 
+Without a question, if there is a battery that appeals to preppers, this would be it because of the potential ability to make them at the consumer level. 
+While it may still be some time before these batteries are offered for home energy use, they have the capacity to work better and last longer than anything else on the market right now. 
+Tip: 
+If you must buy batteries for an existing solar power system, then buy   running now. Just try to set some money and resources aside so that you can purchase these newer designs when they become available. 
+Other Ways to Produce Even Power Output 
+Today, batteries aren’t the only way to provide a steady flow of electricity. Because modern batteries charge slowly and cannot manage sudden spikes in power demands, they are often teamed up with ultra or super capacitors. 
+Aside from reducing demands on batteries, these capacitors can also recapture energy that would be lost. Regardless of the battery you choose for your solar power system, it will be well worth your effort to include super capacitors to increase efficiency and stability of power flow. 
+Just about all technologies today focus on using various materials to store electricity. But what if we could store heat from the sun, and then convert it to electricity on an “as needed” basis? 
+If you are interested in DIY power storage solutions, give some thought to storing heat instead of electricity. 
+You might also want to look into ways to store energy into springs or even use motion as a means to keep the energy readily available. 
+Take the time now to learn more about how different kinds of energy are translated from one form to another, and also how they can converted to electricity at any stage in the process. Even though every system will lose energy as it converts from one form to another, that option may still be better than having no power storage options available at all. 
+Preparing for Social Collapse 
+Over the years, I have experienced a good bit of frustration as I have searched for answers to the thorny question of how to produce electricity, and then store it. 
+Each time I look at emerging technologies, I seek to test them to see if I will wind up relying on organizations that will charge a fortune for maintenance and equipment replacement. 
+Needless to say, I also find it quite vexing when I cannot find all the answers in one place, or one answer does not meet all my needs. 
+From that perspective, it seems best to not focus exclusively on just one battery or power storage technology. Here are some steps to take: Try to obtain small versions of different battery types for testing purposes. Instead of using them with a conventional power charger, see how they respond to mini solar panels, body power systems, or anything else you may be working Choose a battery type that seems to work best ,and purchase one or two units that would be suitable to integrate with your solar power system. If they work well, you can opt to purchase enough batteries to power your home, and then wait to see what else becomes available. As newer battery types become available, try to obtain small versions so you can test them out. For example, right now you can purchase graphene batteries and connect them to any number of different systems. If you happen to find a battery that works really well in the smaller sizes, then keep an eye out to see when larger ones become available. Gradually, you can replace older technologies with newer ones and hopefully come out with a better system in the end. For the best long term options, think for yourself and do what you can to explore power storage options that may not be as popular. If you can find something that you can build for yourself, you will be that much closer to the goal of complete and sustainable energy independence. 
+As you can see, purchasing batteries for a solar energy system as a prepper isn’t exactly the same as it is for homesteaders and off gridders. While these people still have an interest in good quality batteries that will be reliable and durable, preppers must always take into account what to do in the event of social collapse. 
+Therefore, when it comes to choosing the best batteries, you will always need to think past the current time frame and look to future technologies as well as developing your own innovations. 
+And be prepared to survive an EMP – an upcoming disaster which we can’t stop. Click the banner below and prepare yourself for this disaster. 
+  Carmela Tyrell for Survivopedia. 
+Further reading:",FAKE
+1623,"After Obama changes tack on Syria, what would the presidential candidates do?","Barack Obama’s announcement on Friday that American special forces will take a more active role in the war in Syria is for many critics of his foreign policy a confirmation that the US has inched deeper into a chaotic conflict.
+
+It’s also an opportunity for presidential candidates to both praise and denounce him. And most Republican and Democratic presidential candidates propose doing even more than the raids that Obama has authorized, which skeptics call “mission creep”. The war pits the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, against various rebels and the jihadi group Islamic State, and now involves the US, Russia, Iran, Gulf states, Turkey, the Kurds and Iraq. Here’s how foreign policy might look under the ideas of potential presidents.
+
+Nearly all the candidates of both parties have called for a no-fly zone over Syria, arguing that denying Assad’s air force will better protect civilians and rebels from bombing runs.
+
+“A superpower can impose a no-fly zone if it decides it wants to,” said Stephen Biddle, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University. “But the problems are it’s very expensive, no one is willing to pay the price, and these days there are serious risks of escalation.”
+
+A no-fly zone would require far more airstrikes on airfields and anti-aircraft batteries, for instance, putting American pilots in danger against Syrian missiles and jets. Russia’s entry into the war further complicates the proposal, increasing the risk of shooting down Russian aircraft bombing rebels.
+
+And while a future president could warn Vladimir Putin to fly strikes at his own peril, the US stands to lose more should Putin simply continue strikes. An American president’s choice would then be to stand down or risk a wider, far more dangerous war – and political disaster at home – by firing on Russian pilots.
+
+Nor would a no-fly zone offer certain protection to civilians or rebels whom an American president finds acceptable. Most of the war’s dead – civilian or combatant – have not been killed from the air but on the ground, by bullets, mortars and artillery shells, according to the Violations Documentation Center.
+
+The statistics suggest a no-fly zone would not do much to staunch the bleeding of civilians or any friendly rebels. In contrast, Russia’s strategy of indiscriminate bombing boosts Assad’s much more limited aims, which do not take civilian casualties into account.
+
+Only Republican Rand Paul and Democrats Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders oppose a no-fly zone.
+
+Billionaire Donald Trump has maintained that “safe zones” on the ground in Syria and Iraq would help end the war and solve the refugee crisis, and said that Turkey and the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar should lead the effort with US help.
+
+But while a ground campaign could defend civilians from the deadliest threats, it would also entail all the dangers of mission creep and the painstaking logistics of a war effort. One American has already died in a raid on an Isis facility, and a Russian soldier died in Syria last week.
+
+“To keep it safe would require fighting,” the defense secretary, Ash Carter, told Congress on Tuesday. “You need to think in each case … who’s in, who is kept out and how the enforcement of it is done.”
+
+Any campaign would probably need snipers, radar and recon teams, artillery and special operations teams – if not full infantry battalions, Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, has noted in Foreign Policy.
+
+“The types of interventions that proponents have endorsed for Syria are often based on deep misunderstandings of how US force was used on behalf of humanitarian missions in the past,” Zenko wrote. “Proposals that consciously ignore or downplay the amount and type of force needed to protect civilians are just wishful thinking.”
+
+Biddle agreed, adding that another problem is that safe zones offer cover to both civilians and combatants.
+
+“Say you set up a safe zone along the Turkish-Syrian border, and lo and behold guerrillas start operating within it, and the government starts firing artillery into it. What do you do then? Silence the artillery by expanding your perimeter? Push the perimeter until it’s all of Syria?”
+
+He also noted the problem of policing – for instance, the dilemma of a suspected rebel whose family vouches for the person’s innocence.
+
+“You don’t have to walk very far down the thought experiment to end up with all sorts of problems and ambiguities,” Biddle said.
+
+Senator Marco Rubio is the most vocal supporter of embedding special forces with rebel and Kurdish ground troops.
+
+Most of the candidates support arms for rebels, though few have specified which groups they find acceptable and how they would vet them – the same problems that have slowed Pentagon efforts in the last two years.
+
+More problematically, most of the Syrian rebels eager for weapons and aid are not interested in a concerted fight against Isis. “While there are tens of thousands of rebels willing to receive training and equipment to go after the Assad regime, few are willing to fight the Islamic State,” Zenko wrote earlier this year.
+
+Arming anti-Assad rebels may suit US interests, but it would also pit the US against Russia and Iran in a proxy war. Even regional allies disagree with American priorities about Isis, Biddle noted, which is why Turkey continues to bomb Kurds and Saudi Arabia and the UAE arm groups around the region, most notably in Syria but also in the ruins of Yemen. These same conflicted interests make it unlikely that the nations would ever band together to form their own “safe zone”.
+
+“They all have bigger fish to fry,” he said. “We’re the biggest, but we’re the only one who thinks Isil is the threat to be resolved first.”
+
+Although Kurdish fighters have proven the most reliable allies for US ground offensives, Turkish warplanes have increased bombing sorties against Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, meaning increased arms for the Kurds could fuel a war between two American allies on yet another border.
+
+Arming Kurdish fighters could also lead to the US supplying groups that it has named terrorists, if it hasn’t inadvertently done so already. In October Amnesty International accused the Kurdish group YPG of human rights violations.
+
+Rubio, Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham have spoken strongly in favor of arming Syrian rebel groups and Kurds, Ted Cruz has called for directly arming the Kurds, Hillary Clinton urged arms for rebels and Kurds while she was secretary of state, and even O’Malley has said the US should “probably” arm the fighters.
+
+All candidates except Senator Rand Paul have said they support Obama’s decision to extend the US military presence in Afghanistan to 2017, though a handful say they only do so out of deference to the generals’ advice.
+
+But the presence of 5,500 to 10,000 troops, as the president and candidates prescribe, would have little effect on the war against the Taliban, experts said. Most said a steady run of airstrikes had prevented the Taliban from massing, and that the end of “combat operations” – resulting in a lull in airstrikes – had given the militants opportunity to retake cities and regroup.
+
+The spread of American troops at four airbases around Afghanistan and continued airstrikes – including one that bombed a hospital – suggests Obama plans to let generals use as much airpower as possible to support Afghan forces. But neither he nor any candidate has shown any appetite for a major reinforcement.
+
+Barring dramatic changes to Barack Obama’s plans and the politics of the Middle East, 2017 will begin with 5,500 troops across Afghanistan and a number of special forces teams operating in Syria and Iraq.
+
+Paul, Trump and Cruz have all offered variations on a plan that could see US forces withdraw from the region, ceding a lead military role to Russia and Iran but continuing airstrikes against Isis. But while staying out of foreign conflicts has appeal at home to Democrats and Republicans alike – and arguably supports US interests – “it still sacrifices interests that are real, even if they’re limited,” Biddle said.
+
+“There’s the prospective future terrorist threat of an ungoverned region, the risk of a war if that metastasizes and spreads,” he said. “If you wash your hands of it, you’re running a social science experiment to sit back and see how many of these bad things unfold. That’s a really bad choice for a person that has the power to make a difference.”
+
+Not least on the minds of the president or any would-be commander in chief, he added, was that to do nothing “hands the opposition a bunch of really obvious talking points”.",REAL
+3385,State Department won’t rule out $50B ‘signing bonus’ for Iran,"The State Department on Monday would not rule out giving Iran up to $50 billion as a so-called ""signing bonus"" for agreeing to a nuclear deal later this year, according to comments made to journalists following reports that the Obama administration had formulated a plan to release tens of billions of frozen Iranian funds.
+
+Experts have said this multi-billion dollar ""signing bonus"" option, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, could be the largest cash infusion to a terror-backing regime in recent memory.
+
+A cash release of $30 to $50 billion upon reaching a final nuclear agreement would come in addition to the more than $11 billion in unfrozen assets that Iran will already have received under an interim nuclear accord reached in 2013.
+
+When asked to address these reports on Monday, State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf attempted to dodge the issue and then accused reporters of getting ""spun up"" on the issue.
+
+Asked whether Iran could receive $50 billion ""on day one after signing"" or verbally agreeing to a nuclear deal, Harf told reporters that she would ""look into it.""
+
+When pressed to provide an answer about the Journal's initial report, Harf declined ""to go line by line in the story.""
+
+Harf said sanctions relief to Iran will continue through June 30.
+
+Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon.",REAL
+2861,White House willing to sign compromise Iran bill,"(CNN) After months of tensions with Congress over a bill giving the legislature a say in the potential Iran nuclear deal, the White House indicated Tuesday that the president would be willing to sign the compromise version of the measure.
+
+The Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously approved the new version, which Democratic lobbying had watered down, in a vote Tuesday afternoon.
+
+During his daily press briefing, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama would approve the measure as it stands now, though Earnest noted he can't commit to that position if the legislation changes.
+
+The White House ""certainly"" blinked, Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake said Tuesday on CNN's ""The Situation Room.""
+
+""Congress imposed the sanctions and only Congress can lift them permanently. So we always had a role and I'm glad the White House recognizes that now,"" he said.
+
+Earlier Tuesday, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said they had resolved key differences on the bill regarding Iran's nuclear plan, making the bill's passage more certain.
+
+""What I'm most proud of is we've kept the pure integrity of the process in place and the President cannot lift -- while Congress is reviewing this -- cannot lift the congressionally mandated sanctions, which is what they've been trying to do and push for over the past couple of weeks,"" Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker told reporters Tuesday, as he headed into a classified briefing on the emerging Iran agreement with Secretary of State John Kerry and other top administration officials.
+
+Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said during the committee's deliberations in the afternoon that he would not offer a controversial amendment related to Israel. Other senators also dropped their amendments to ensure this agreement stayed intact.
+
+According to a Corker aide familiar with the details of the bill, it requires Obama to submit the final agreement to Congress, which will have up to 52 days to weigh in on the deal. That includes an initial review period of 30 days, with 12 more days added automatically if Congress passes a bill and sends it to the President, and an additional 10 days of congressional review if Obama vetoes the legislation.
+
+If the deal is submitted late, after July 9, the review period reverts to 60 days.
+
+During that time, the President is prohibited from waiving the congressional sanctions. And Obama is required by the legislation to certify to Congress every 90 days that Iran is complying with the terms of the deal.
+
+The bill also requires the President to make a series of detailed reports to Congress on a range of issues, including Iran's nuclear program, its ballistic missiles work and its support for terrorism globally, particularly against the U.S. and its allies.
+
+Sen. Ben Cardin, the committee's top Democrat, expressed optimism Monday night that negotiators could come to an agreement that would appease the White House while maintaining the ultimate goal of requiring congressional approval.
+
+""I think we can get to a place where we can deal with most of the White House's concerns and maintain the purpose of the bill, which is an orderly congressional review and timely notice if there are material breaches,"" he said ahead of the compromise being reached.
+
+Congressional negotiators worked through the weekend and into the night Monday to hammer out legislation that would draw enough support from hardline Republicans and moderate Democrats to pass.
+
+House Speaker John Boehner on Tuesday said he expected the House to take up the Corker bill once the full Senate votes on it, saying the proposal has taken ""center stage.""
+
+He reiterated his stance that Congress should ""absolutely have the opportunity to review the deal,"" adding the administration ""appears to want a deal at any cost.""
+
+But he brushed off the notion that he was working to derail the nuclear deal.",REAL
+1774,The toughest job in American politics? Defending Hillary Clinton,"The toughest job in politics these days is defending Hillary Clinton, mocked brilliantly by The New York Post as the “Deleter of the Free World.”
+
+Her beleaguered defenders, as they retreat behind the bunker door, are settling on a crude legal defense.
+
+Their mumbo jumbo chorus -- begins with the claim that she didn’t break any laws by doing government business on her private email and ends with the insistence that everybody does it.
+
+That’s their story, and they are sticking to it — until they are forced to find another one.
+
+That will be soon because, while Hillary’s Helpers may have a point about fuzzy laws, their argument is ultimately futile. She’s not on trial and opponents don’t have to meet a persnickety legal standard to win their case.
+
+She’s running for president — and she must meet a less precise but more difficult standard. It’s the test of integrity, and she’s failed it often during her 30 years in public life.
+
+To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.
+
+Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist.",REAL
+10308,Explosive Assange/Pilger Interview on US Election: Expect Riots if Hillary Wins,"By wmw_admin on November 6, 2016 Darkmoon — Nov 6, 2016 RT : “Whistleblower Julian Assange has given one of his most incendiary interviews ever in a John Pilger Special [released late yesterday] courtesy of Dartmouth Films. Here he summarizes what can be gleaned from the tens of thousands of Clinton emails leaked by WikiLeaks this year.” LD : Despite the enormous populist support for Trump and the extraordinary loathing in which Hillary Clinton is held by millions of American, Assange says that “Trump cannot be allowed to win.” Trump has already indicated that he will not recognize the result of the election if he loses, given the enormous enthusiasm he has generated during his speeches, compared to the relatively tepid and anaemic response evoked by Hillary Clinton on similar occasions. Recent news reports reveal that “election related violence is increasing and Right-wing armed militia groups are even preparing for unrest if Mrs Clinton ‘steals’ the election, as they fear will happen.” If Hillary Clinton wins this election, as Assange predicts, we can expect riots to erupt all across America. Violent insurrection, in the circumstances of a rigged election, would appear to be more than justified. Hillary Clinton clearly belongs behind bars, not in the White House. [LD] John Pilger (left) conducted the 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy where Assange has been trapped since 2012 for fear of extradition to the US. Here is a transcript of the interview followed by the YouTube interview itself. Click to enlarge THE SECRET WORLD OF THE US ELECTION John Pilger: What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton? Julian Assange: If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA General David Petraeus over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. We’ve published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was Secretary of State. They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half — 30,000 — to herself, and we’ve published about half. Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing. John Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations. These emails are combined with the cover up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, which has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases. ‘Russian government not the source of Clinton leaks’ PILGER : The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails. ASSANGE : The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything. Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source. ‘Saudi Arabia & Qatar funding ISIS and Clinton’ PILGER : The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque. ASSANGE : And twelve million dollars from Morocco … PILGER : Twelve million from Morocco, yeah. ASSANGE : For Hillary Clinton to attend a party. PILGER : In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it. ASSANGE : There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS. PILGER : The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia. ASSANGE : Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, worth more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled. PILGER : Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIl or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation. ASSANGE : Yes. PILGER : That’s extraordinary. ‘Clinton has been eaten alive by her ambition’ ASSANGE : I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of the reaction to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She’s a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis. She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing. PILGER : Didn’t Citybank supply a list… ? ASSANGE : Yes. PILGER : Which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet? ASSANGE : Yes. PILGER : So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United States? ASSANGE : If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests. So I think you can’t properly understand Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia. The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate. ‘Libya is Hillary Clinton’s war’ PILGER : Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us – told you – about what happened there? Because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria: the ISIL, jihadism, and so on. And it was almost Hillary Clinton’s invasion. What do the emails tell us about that? ASSANGE : Libya, more than anyone else’s war, was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails. She had put her favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there’s more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we’ve published, just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state — something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President. So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis. Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa — previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: ‘What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly what happened. ‘Trump won’t be permitted to win’ PILGER : You get complaints from people saying, ‘What is WikiLeaks doing? Are they trying to put Trump in the White House?’ ASSANGE : My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he’s had every establishment off side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence agencies, arms companies… big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves. PILGER : There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians. Some people say, ‘Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?’ ASSANGE : We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our Russia documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up. PILGER : Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election? Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump? ASSANGE : Let’s talk about Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American white trash, which Hillary Clinton called ‘deplorable and irredeemable’. It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them. Because he so clearly — through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies — represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense. ‘US attempting to squeeze WikiLeaks through my refugee status’ PILGER : I’d like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you refuge and political asylum in this embassy in London. Now Ecuador has cut off the internet from here where we’re doing this interview, in the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election campaign. Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you? ASSANGE : Let’s let go back four years. I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago. Now there’s undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various kinds — so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of sixteen million people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping on the side. So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the U.S. election campaign, the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing. WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. It means that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organisation; they try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election. PILGER : Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy. ASSANGE : I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would then be extradited either immediately to the United States or to Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States we know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000. So over the last fifteen years, every single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen]. PILGER : People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here. ASSANGE : Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I’m a bit institutionalised — this [the embassy] is the world … it’s visually the world for me. PILGER : It’s the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn’t it? ASSANGE : It’s the world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long, I don’t remember it. PILGER : Yes. ASSANGE : So , yes, you adapt. The one real irritant is that my young children — they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard, hard adaption which they didn’t ask for. PILGER : Do you worry about them? ASSANGE : Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother. ‘I am innocent and in arbitrary detention’ PILGER : Some people would say, ‘Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?’ ASSANGE : The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent eighteen months in formal, adversarial litigation. So it’s me and the U.N. verses Sweden and the U.K. Who’s right? The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that those countries must obey. It is an illegal abuse. It is the United Nations formally asking, ‘What’s going on here? What is your legal explanation for this? Assange says that you should recognise his asylum.’ And here is. Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, ‘No, we’re not going to recognise the UN ruling, so leaving open their ability to extradite. I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative — that yes, the West has political prisoners, it’s a reality, it’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well. The West has political prisoners. Of course, no state accepts that it should call the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception. ASSANGE : Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared by the Stockholm prosecutor and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum. Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric? PILGER : Yes, it’s different. ASSANGE : The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up. The rhetoric is trying to avoid the truth that the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States.",FAKE
+8408,Hillary's Hypocrisy On Sexual Assault BRUTALLY Exposed | The Federalist Papers,"Pinterest 
+C.E. Dyer reports that actor James Woods posted a powerful video on Twitter about what happened on Highway 265 in Arkansas over four decades ago that Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton doesn’t want people to know about. 
+The video chronicled the rape of a 12-year-old Arkansas girl, Kathy Shelton, that occurred on May 10, 1975 when two men lured the girl into their car and brutally assaulted her. 
+— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) September 20, 2016 
+This video details the horrific attack…and the actions of the attorney who defended one of the rapists: Hillary Clinton. 
+According to the video, child was raped and beaten so brutally that she spent five days in a coma and was left unable to bear children. 
+A local paper mill worker, 41-year-old Thomas Alfred Taylor, was charged with the rape. Then Hillary Rodham became his attorney. 
+Taylor had semen mixed with the 12-year-old victim’s blood in his underwear, proving that he committed the crime. In court, Hillary maligned the rape victim’s character in order to defend her monster of a client. 
+From the video: “Taylor’s attorney went to extraordinary lengths to discredit the child victim, suppressing all oral, written and physical evidence, forcing the 12-year-old to submit to polygraphs and psychiatric evaluations, even accusing the child (who had been a virgin until the attack) of seeking out older men and ‘fantasizing’ her rape.” 
+The victim has recently come forward to talk about how Hillary’s lies ruined her life, which after the trial spiraled into a struggle with drugs and prison time. 
+Shelton, who has already been put through a truly horrific nightmare, had to hear the tapes released in which Hillary laughed about the trial. 
+Hillary laughed, on tape, about a trial of a man who brutally raped a 12-year old girl and subsequently received less than a year in prison for his horrific crime. 
+Shelton has decided to speak out about her nightmare at the hands of Hillary Rodham. The video ends with a message from Shelton to Clinton, “You lied about me. You took me through Hell.” 
+Clinton has claimed that she had an obligation to defend Taylor, but she is wrong; she did not have to do what she did. What she put a 12-year-old rape victim through is beyond the pale. 
+Liberals regularly talk about victim blaming and rape culture in America, but where is the outrage about what Clinton did to a 12-year-old rape victim as a defense attorney? 
+What else is there to say really? If you can watch that video and not be utterly and completely disgusted with Clinton, well, God help you. ",FAKE
+3250,Latino Vote Poll: Some Would Consider A Republican In 2016,"The poll from Hispanic Leadership Network and Resurgent Republic found that a majority of Latino voters in Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada prefer Democrats and a number of Democratic-supported policies, even on key Republican priorities such as bringing down the deficit and helping small business.
+
+The results of the survey were ""sobering,"" Resurgent Republic board member Whit Ayres told reporters at a press conference Wednesday. For one, more than half of Latino voters polled in each state said the GOP doesn't respect the values and concerns of their community.
+
+""Republicans are in a hole. There's no question Republicans are in a hole,"" he said. ""We're not sugar-coating that. But there's also no question that Republicans have enormous potential to do far better than they've done.""
+
+The poll found that a plurality of Latino voters in each of the four states said they are more likely to vote for a Democrat than a Republican in the 2016 presidential election. But nearly a third of those voters in New Mexico and Florida said they would consider both parties, showing there is potential for the GOP to improve its standing. In Colorado and Nevada, closer to a quarter of Latino voters said they would consider both parties.
+
+President Barack Obama won a larger proportion of the Latino vote than previous Democratic presidential candidates did in 2008 (bettering his own numbers), 2004 and 2000. One reason, according to most exit polling and the speakers on Wednesday, was former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's harsh rhetoric and hardline stances on immigration.
+
+""I call it the immigration earmuffs,"" Hispanic Leadership Network executive director Jennifer Korn said. ""Even though you might agree on jobs, the economy, national security, if the tone is harsh on immigration, they're not going to listen to you on the other issues.""
+
+Another potential problem for Republicans could be social issues such as same-sex marriage, which a plurality of Latino voters said they support. It's a common trope among Republicans that Latino voters are conservatives who just don't realize it, in part because many are Catholic. But many are also younger than the average Catholic population, and their views on same-sex marriage align more with their age cohort than their religious one.
+
+""This is where things start to get a little discomforting for me, as a Republican,"" Ayres said. ""Because these are issues on which you would expect Republicans to do relatively better. ... Democrats [considered to have] ideas that help small business. Now, come on, we are the party of small business, right? But we still haven't made that sale yet in the Hispanic community.""
+
+Despite all the obstacles, representatives for the two groups argued there is potential for Republicans to win a larger proportion of the Latino vote, particularly those who said they consider themselves conservatives but voted Democratic anyway.
+
+""The Republican brand among the Hispanic, Latino community is not a good brand. It's in terrible disrepair and is in need of a substantial uplift and needs substantial resuscitation. The patient's not dead, but it's on life support,"" said former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who is chairman of the American Action Network. ""We believe the good news is ... that there is a path to tap into the Latino community.""",REAL
+817,Cruz announces Fiorina as choice for running mate,"Ted Cruz, looking for a shake-up in the 2016 race as Donald Trump moves steadily closer to the Republican nomination, on Wednesday announced former GOP primary rival Carly Fiorina as his choice for running mate should he win the party nod.
+
+The move was immediately dismissed as an act of “desperation” by the Trump team, but Cruz – while acknowledging it is “unusual” to announce a running mate so early – defended the decision. He claimed “nobody is getting to 1,237 delegates,” the number needed to clinch the nomination, and voters should “know what [they] will get.”
+
+“After a great deal of time and thought, after a great deal of consideration and prayer, I have come to the conclusion that if I am nominated to be president of the United States that I will run on a ticket with my vice presidential nominee, Carly Fiorina,” Cruz said.
+
+Cruz, together now with Fiorina, was trying to fight Trump's narrative that the race is effectively ""over,"" after the front-runner swept five primary states on Tuesday. But Fiorina, in accepting Cruz's offer, said she's ready to ""fight.""
+
+“I’ve had tough fights all my life,"" Fiorina said. ""Tough fights don’t worry me a bit.”
+
+Cruz made the announcement in the critical primary turf of Indiana, which votes next Tuesday. Speaking at an afternoon rally in Indianapolis, Cruz announced his decision to cheers and chants of “Carly! Carly!” while touting the former HP CEO’s credentials and life story.
+
+The theoretical pairing represents a diverse ticket – offering the possibility of electing the first Hispanic president and first female vice president.
+
+“This is a choice that you are telling the American people that ‘This is an individual that I trust and, more important, this is an individual that you can trust to lead this country, no matter what might happen,’” Cruz said.
+
+But for the time being, Fiorina will hold the odd position of being a vice presidential candidate-in-waiting – as Cruz continues to lag far behind Trump in the battle for the GOP nomination.
+
+Even Fiorina would have to be elected by delegates at the convention. As for Cruz, he’s already been mathematically eliminated from clinching the nomination before the convention, and is relying on the prospect of a Cleveland floor fight.
+
+A highly visible Cruz surrogate, the former HP CEO recently handed over her tax returns to the Cruz campaign for vetting, CNN reported Tuesday, and her name immediately surfaced when Cruz teased a “major announcement” Wednesday morning.
+
+Cruz said Wednesday that he and his family had grown so close to Fiorina that she often sings to his young daughters -- a skill she showed off during her speech -- and also exchanges texts with the young girls.
+
+“And Carly may be the first vice president in American history to have an impressive fluency with hearts and smiley face emoticons,"" Cruz said.
+
+
+
+Trump leads Cruz in pledged delegates, 954-562, but Cruz’s strong ground operation has elected many delegate allies to the Republican Convention in July. Cruz believes the battle will proceed to a contested convention, where he hopes to triumph once some pledged delegates become unbound and are free to switch their votes.
+
+Trump on Wednesday morning dismissed the notion of Cruz tapping a running mate.
+
+""First of all, he shouldn't be naming anybody because he doesn't even have a chance,"" Trump said. ""Naming Carly's dumb, because Carly didn't do well. She had one good debate -- not against me by the way, because I had an unblemished record of victories during debates -- but she had one victory on the smaller stage and that was it.""
+
+In a statement later Wednesday, Trump criticized the move as Cruz ""only trying to stay relevant.""
+
+While most presidential candidates wait until they have the nomination sewn up to announce a running mate, Cruz's selection of a vice presidential candidate in April – while he’s well behind in delegates – followed a pattern of somewhat unconventional campaigning including an early embrace of Trump and kicking off his campaign without first forming an exploratory committee.
+
+Fiorina began her career working as a secretary and receptionist but quickly rose up the business ranks and was named in 1999 as the chief executive officer for Hewlett-Packard, becoming the first woman to lead a Fortune 20 company.
+
+""Of all the people who didn't make it far in the race, she was one of the best about laying out her plan, talking about who she is and her accomplishments,"" said Doug De Groote, a fundraiser for Cruz based near Los Angeles.
+
+On her website, Fiorina describes her tenure at HP as having “saved 80,000 jobs” during “the worst technology recession in 25 years.” But her time at the helm also drew criticism for alleged deals with Iran brokered through a subsidiary and the laying off of 30,000 employees. In 2004, Fiorina left the company after the board of directors forced her resignation.
+
+Her career as a political candidate began when Fiorina tried to unseat California Sen. Barbara Boxer during an unsuccessful 2010 bid. Boxer on Wednesday mocked the suggestion of Fiorina as Cruz's running mate.
+
+""The best way to describe that ticket is mean and meaner,"" she said. ""He wants to throw people out of the country and she threw thousands of jobs out of the country. Perfect match.""
+
+In May 2015, Fiorina announced her candidacy for president and quickly became known as a feisty critic of Hillary Clinton and a strong defender of the pro-life community. Planned Parenthood immediately panned Fiorina's Wednesday pairing with Cruz as ""the most loathsome pair of anti-abortion extremists in America.""
+
+Her early debate performances were lauded by many critics; however, she never gained traction and suspended her campaign after single-digit finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire. She endorsed Cruz in early March and has appeared often with him on the campaign trail.
+
+When asked about being Cruz’s vice president in early March, Fiorina replied, “Let’s win the nomination first.”
+
+Though she eventually threw her support behind Cruz, Fiorina also attacked him when she was still a competing candidate. She termed him one of the “ultimate insiders” and called him “too divisive” in January. She also criticized Cruz for saying “one thing in the drawing rooms of Manhattan and another thing in the living rooms of Iowa.”
+
+Fox News’ Ed Henry and Serafin Gomez and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6440,Corporate Army smashes Dakota barbarians near lucrative pipeline,"Corporate Army smashes Dakota barbarians near lucrative pipeline By hatesec , on October 28th, 2016 Faceless marauders crushed a Native Rebellion on Friday that threatened to impede construction of a sweet new oil pipeline across the Northern US. 
+Citing unfounded claims that oil pipelines leak into water supplies , opposition forces escalated their protest into a mounted assault that led to the injury of at least a few of their horses. 
+The sheriff’s department participated in the defense, having pledged allegiance to the neoliberal javelin of law, and vowed to smash savagery at its root, even if it means cleansing. 
+“Ethnic cleansing is not a word I like to use, because it evokes images of holocaust and genocide,” he said. “But we must leave all options on the table.” 
+Dakota Access Pipeline is projected to be profitable as FUCK and totally keep oil prices low as shit, y’all, so chill. Get those bad thoughts out of your heads. It’s gonna be DANK once that fucker gets built. I’m talking $1.99 per gallon until something like 2020! 93 octane! 
+Emporor Obama is watching the situation closely from his data-bath panoptisphere. Share this article",FAKE
+10210,"After terrorizing America with Zika scaremongering, Washington Post now admits Zika virus doesn’t cause brain deformities after all","March 2, 2016: Zika PAYDAY! Obama wants to funnel $1.8 billion for vaccine research and more 
+I even published a mini-documentary revealing the published science that shows how DEET insecticide causes brain damage in humans. You can watch it at this link or view the video below: 
+If anyone from the Washington Post bothered to read Natural News and learn about real science, they would have learned that Zika has infected tens of millions of people throughout South America for decades , with absolutely no measurable increase in neurological deformations. (But facts be damned, the WashPost had a panic to push!) Nation after nation records tens of thousands of infections with ZERO birth defects… 
+Despite the factual reality of the situation, the state-controlled propagandists writing for rags like the Washington Post — a bogus newspaper that has lost all credibility in the minds of intelligent people — continued to pummel home their kooky science theories that claimed much of the U.S. South would be overrun by brain damaging mosquitoes, turning Southerners into shrunken-brained mutants while pregnant women fled northward to survive the airborne insect onslaught. 
+Instead, nothing happened . No explosion in shrunken-headed babies. No wave of birth defects across Florida, even as city officials desperately bombarded their own cities with brain-damaging insecticides. No national emergency declared by Obama to bring back DDT and eradicate baby-murdering mosquitoes by dousing our open streets with thick clouds of organophosphate neurotoxins. 
+Instead, the rate of neurological birth defects in most countries approached zero. Via the Washington Post’s own graphic: (partial list) 
+Venezuela: 60,791 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects Honduras: 31,933 Zika infections… ONE birth defect Guadalupe: 30,969 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects Puerto Rico: 29,084 Zika infections… TWO birth defects Mexico: 4,837 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects 
+From the WashPost article: 
+Brazilian officials were bracing for a flood of fetal deformities as Zika spread this year to other regions of the country, Marinho said. However, “we are not seeing a big increase.” 
+Gee, really? 
+The vast majority of the brain defects, it turns out, came from just one small region of Brazil. A total of 2,033 children are so far recorded with neurological defects there, even while most other countries throughout the region had ZERO birth defects (or near zero). 
+So what gives? Zika mosquitoes apparently carry geopolitical maps so they can solely target Brazil 
+You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that the stupid science theories of the mainstream media are total hokum and bunk . If Zika really did cause brain defects, it would have spread all across South America by now. It would have spread into Florida, California, Mississippi and Louisiana. It would have devastated the American South, Cuba, Haiti, Curacao and all the other island nations across the Caribbean. 
+Yet the neurological defects were limited almost exclusively to Brazil. 
+Somehow, if we believe the illiterate Washington Post science writers — who may in fact be the only brain damage victims of Zika in North America — mosquitoes carry MAPS to make sure they only activate their brain damage voodoo in Brazil . 
+“…[A]lthough the outbreak has spread this year to more than 50 nations and territories across the Western Hemisphere, U.N. data shows just 142 cases of congenital birth defects linked to Zika so far outside Brazil,” says WashPost. 
+Yes, my friends: GPA-carrying Zika mosquitoes are very careful to limit their pandemic voodoo to just one region of Brazil. By sheer coincidence, that’s the same region where larvacide chemicals were dumped into the public water supply. 
+Apparently, there isn’t a single “official” scientist in the entire global government who has thought to test the water. Just freaking WOW… Let’s throw these morons out of power in every election, okay? They don’t deserve any positions of authority over anyone else. They’re all so incredibly stupid, they couldn’t survive at all unless they functioned as parasites on the taxpayers. They aren’t giving up hope just yet… science writers desperately hope for more brain damaged babies to prove them right 
+Enthusiasm for more brain damaged babies runs high at the Washington Post, which explains why they are all in for Hillary Clinton, the candidate of choice for brain damaged adults . Writing with a sense of real enthusiasm, the Washington Post can’t wait for more brain damaged babies to appear: 
+Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are closely watching Puerto Rico, which has reported more than 26,800 cases of Zika. More than 7,000 pregnant women could be infected by the end of the year, according to the CDC. (Yippee?) 
+And now, the loony tunes quack science of the Zika “scientists” goes apoplectic, grasping for silly metaphors to try to obscure the fact that they are all stupid beyond belief . Via the WashPost: 
+“Now we’ve settled on Zika as the smoking gun, but we don’t know who pulled the trigger,” said Marques, speaking from Recife, where he is working with government researchers. 
+Huh? Wha? The metaphor doesn’t even make any sense. 
+Maybe the problem is too much fornicating. Seriously, this is now part of their idiotic theory: 
+“Sexual habits and hygiene may also play a role,” he said, explaining that researchers are looking at whether sexual transmission can infect the uterus and placenta with the virus, potentially exposing the fetus to elevated risk. “We suspect the villain has an accomplice, but we don’t know who it is,” Marques said. 
+Huh? Do they seriously think that people only have sex in Brazil but not other South American countries? Where does the Washington Post find these morons? I’m a real scientist saying all this 
+As you read all this, remember that I have rapidly become one of the world’s leading research scientists on the quantitation of cannabinoids in hemp extracts using mass spec instrumentation. I led the team that developed the most pioneering (and accurate) CBD mass spec analysis method in existence today. You can read about it at this link . I also routinely test water, food and environmental samples for heavy metals, pesticides and a multitude of chemical contaminants. When I say these Zika scientists are complete morons, that’s the educated opinion of an accomplished scientist correctly pointing out the lunacy of Zika scaremongering. 
+I could have solved this entire problem in the first few days by analyzing and detecting brain-damaging larvacide chemicals in the public water supply in Eastern Brazil. The entire project would have taken just a few days and cost almost nothing. Instead, Obama handed $1.8 billion to the vaccine companies in the midst of the Zika panic pushed by laughable rags like the Washington Post. It’s all a racket, of course, just like their coverage of elections and political candidates. Everything you read at the Washington Post is a deception of one kind or another . The paper exists solely to promote the propaganda of the state so that the population can be manipulated and controlled. The Washington Post exists to terrorize the citizens with fascist propaganda parading as science 
+As you’ve also learned by now, the corrupt leftist establishment of junk science, criminal politicians and idiotic journalists isn’t interested in legitimate scientific solutions . They all function as extensions of a fascist state that must routinely terrorize its citizens with pandemic boogeyman scare stories in order to demand absolute obedience to the vaccine mandates that actually do damage the brains of children. 
+Thus, SCIENCE be damned. They’ve got an agenda to push, and it doesn’t matter to them whether that agenda is based on a single shred of real science. Zika is dangerous because they told you so, in exactly the same way they told you Hillary Clinton is totally honest, Obamacare would make health care more affordable, there’s no such thing as voter fraud in America, and GMOs and vaccines are really, really good for you. 
+So you can put down the DEET and stop poisoning your skin like an obedient idiot. Yes, it was all a scam. Yes, the official “science” was totally rigged. Yes, the media lied to you yet again. Yes, the CDC is a criminal racket. Yes, all the health “officials” were completely full of s**t. And no, Zika is not going to cause your babies to be born with shrunken heads. VACCINES, on the other hand, will most definitely cause brain damage, as they still contain mercury, a potent neurotoxin the Washington Post ridiculously insists becomes magically neutralized when you inject it into the body of a child.",FAKE
+4720,Do voters care about more Trump tapes?,"Some say additional tapes of Republican nominee Donald Trump making disparaging, sexual comments likely exist, but it’s unclear if such revelations could impact the candidate’s loyal voting base.
+
+Supporters of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gather at Trump Tower on Saturday, in New York. Mr. Trump insisted he would 'never' abandon his White House bid, despite calls for him to quit the race following the release of his sexually charged comments caught on tape.
+
+Those who worked alongside Donald Trump say there are likely unheard records of lewd, disgraceful statements made by the candidate, but the impact such recordings could have on his candidacy may be limited.
+
+Mr. Trump’s colorful, and often controversial, comments have characterized his campaign. He has made offensive remarks regarding Muslims, immigrants, the African-American community, women, and prisoners of war, many of which have led establishment Republicans to turn their backs on the GOP nominee. But his “tell it like it is” attitude has also resonated with groups of disenchanted voters, imploring them to put their trust in Trump and defend, or ignore, his alienating remarks.
+
+The greatest crisis of Trump’s political career to date came Friday when The Washington Post released a lewd tape from 2005. In the recording, Trump makes disparaging comments about his sexual conduct with women. Top Republicans, including Arizona Sen. John McCain and Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, took a firm stance against their party’s candidate, saying they could no longer plan to support him. Many urged him to step down and cede the platform to vice presidential candidate Mike Pence.
+
+Those who know the candidate paint vastly different pictures of him. Some have said he was professional during his tenure on the NBC reality series “The Apprentice,” but, Bill Pruitt, a former producer on the reality show, alluded to the possibility of more, and worse, recordings from the show in a tweet Saturday.
+
+“As a producer on seasons 1 & 2 of #theapprentice I assure you: when it comes to the #trumptapes there are far worse. #justthebegininng,” he wrote.
+
+Since, the real estate mogul’s opponents have been eager to uncover the recordings, hoping more damning comments could bury the Republican’s campaign.
+
+But it’s not clear what effect, if any, more controversial tapes would have on Trump’s run for president. His supporters haven’t been easily swayed by the kind of scandals that have ruined presidential bids in years past. After Friday's release the tape, 74 percent of Republicans said GOP leaders should continue to support the candidate, and only 12 percent of Republicans said they’d like to see Trump end his bid for president, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll conducted immediately after The Washington Post broke the news about the 11-year-old video.
+
+“The results show that nearly all voters have heard about the video and most rate it negatively, but Trump’s supporters are not abandoning him right away,” Kyle Dropp, co-founder and chief research officer at Morning Consult, which conducted the poll along with Politico, said.
+
+While some of these voters are drawn to Trump’s bold statements and aggressive temperament, others see the choice in this election as hinging on policy, not personality. As The Christian Science Monitor previously reported, evangelical Christians have surprisingly stood by the candidate, citing his stance on topics like abortion, religious freedom, economic policies, and Supreme Court justice ideologies.
+
+This behavior, while counterintuitive at first glance, isn’t new in the world of partisan politics.
+
+“Without overstating the case, [evangelicals’ defense of Trump] does remind me of when a lot of prominent feminists came to the defense of President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky matter,” John Green, a religion and politics expert at the University of Akron, in Ohio, told the Monitor. “They said, ‘We deplore the conduct, but look at all the positive things the Clinton administration has done for women.’ ”
+
+With less than a month until election day, pledged Trump supporters may be unlikely to shift their allegiances, even if more material drawing the candidate’s character into question arises. And Trump himself seems to recognize the power of his loyal voting bloc.
+
+“The polls, they say I have the most loyal people, did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any votes, okay?” Trump said in January. “It’s like incredible.”",REAL
+9042,The Set-Up For Gold & Silver: CARNAGE in the Bond Market Pre-Cursor to Market Crash? | Eric Sprott,"October 28, 2016 at 11:28 AM 
+Reflecting on the WMD called ZIRP, I conclude that ZIRP is the best evidence of the “New World (dis)Order WORL” weapon of mass destruction in which we’ve lived for the last 8 years. This represents the equivalent of having no sheriff in town. 
+A simple Occam’s Razor view of ZIRP clearly shows interest rates are the equivalent of a sheriff making sure we adhere to the Constitution, both a document that helps insure that monetary rules are followed while being protected against undue harm via the Sheriff’s color of authority. 
+When rates reflect reality we have a monetary Sheriff watching over our fiscal safety. When rates are zero we see a total absence of law in the world. 
+Interest rates are the monetary rule makers and law enforcement that drive the reality of risk and reward. If a person, company or country follows the rule and obeys the normal laws of economics, finance and investment and adheres to some reasonable variant of Say’s Law, they are rewarded with reasonable rates that helps them create value,wealth and worth by accessing some form of debt that aids in that growth. The investor is rewarded with a return commensurate with risk. If the same entity runs rampant, disregarding the restraints of interest on their investments, they are called to account and forced to pay for their transgressions. 
+When ZIRP drives out the rule of law; the equivalent of the interest rate Sheriff being driven out of town; put out to pasture, the potential for high crimes and misdemeanors ramps upward exponentially. Is it an accident that we have seen the ascension of crime family actions that now brings us to ZIRP and its attendant insanity. The last 60 years has seen the constant unrelenting actions against real money and the reality of interest rates as one of the strongest arbiters the world of finance. ZIRP has replaced the rule of law. 
+Is it an accident that we see the criminal rentier class rolling in with heavy weapons, tanks and bombs, whether in a hard kinetic form that destroys entire countries, cities and neighborhoods (banks now have their own armies) or rolling in with their interest rate WDMs? 
+This ultra wealthy rentier class strip mines the little wealth remaining in the hands of We, the People with hard force, demented interpretations and variations of good Constitutional law or simply no law except that which they create on the fly, with the aid of a DOJ and FBI complicit i these crimes ( reference our criminal justice system). 
+The penumbra of destruction that weighs against the rule of law extends to politics, from the lowest to the highest levels and begets the likes of the Clinton, Bush and Obama Kriminal Klans; AJs like Lorretta Lynch and Holder and bankers like Bernanke, Yellen, Draghi, Blankfein and Dimon, all of whom go on to form new age oligarchies that steal from the people with not a single substantive charge levied or day spend in prison. 
+The system is rigged. There is no justice. There’s Just Us. 
+None of these people suffers the consequences of their predations because they not only have unlimited access to interest free capital, they own the banks that provide them with tens of trillions in capital with which to engage in war against us. They own the armies to hold us in bond and bondage if we raise a challenge to their rapacity and theft of our substance 
+If they win a bet against us they make billions or trillions. If they lose a bet against us, we, the tax payers, are forced to make up the losses. Their capital has no cost. Their losses are never charged against the house. Unless it’s your house and you’re forced to move or are thrown out by some variation of their army or Praetorian guard. 
+I’m guessing that these financial rapists will never stop because there is never enough for them. Pitchforks, torches, molotovs and the weight of humanity pressed against our oppressors will win the day and it will take some serious sacrafices and lives to win against these new age feudalists 
+On a lighter and better side, the Oregon jury acquitted Aamon Bundy and his friends of all charges. Count one in the win column for the good guys. Now we need to see Cliven Bundy freed from his bondage.",FAKE
+9389,"Trump Mistakes Ex-Marine Black Supporter For Protester, Calls Him A ‘Thug’ (TWEET/VIDEO)","Trump Mistakes Ex-Marine Black Supporter For Protester, Calls Him A ‘Thug’ (TWEET/VIDEO) By Grownmangrumbles on October 28, 2016 Subscribe 
+Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has a few problems when it comes to Black voters. To look at the polls, you’d wonder if there is a single Black person in the entire country who is willing to give him the time of the day. They do show up, of course. Sure, sometimes they turn out to be ex-cult members turned jazz singing GOP fanatics . Sure, sometimes they are faded celebrities who accidentally use the ‘N’ word on stage. But you know, sometimes it’s a Marine or Navy serviceman who has somehow managed to look past the debase insults , juvenile tantrums , and transparent lies of the GOP’s great orange hope. 
+It’s such a damn shame that Trump can’t tell one group from another. They All Look The Same To Trump 
+His recent attempts at rebooting his campaign’s standing with Black people was something of a fiasco . It failed in part because it’s way too late for Trump to distance himself from close ties to White supremacy and antisemitism . 
+But it also failed because his image of the lives of Black people is that it is one of nasty, brutish, Dickensian squalor. Indeed, it’s so out of touch-offensive that even his plans to help struggling Black communities come across as being unforgivably racist. 
+It’s little wonder, then, that when Trump saw a black face at his rally in Kinston, North Carolina, his razor-sharp mind kicked in. He jumped to the kind of conclusion you’d expect from a man with less racial sensitivity than a 19th century British naval officer. 
+He assumed the man was a protester. Different Strokes Of The Pen 
+Sixty-three-year-old ex-Marine C.J. Cary was on a mission. Though a die-hard Republican, he had been deeply shocked by some of the things Trump has said. In an effort to reason with him, he penned a letter that, according to the Charlette Observer : “… [Urged] Trump to be less offensive and more inclusive to four demographic groups: black people, women, people with disabilities and college students.” 
+He never got to deliver the note. 
+He made his way toward the front rows shouting “Donald” and waving his document, trying to attract the nominees attention. It worked. Sort of. “We have a protester!” Trump told the crowd, adding : “By the way,were you paid $1,500 to be a thug?” Trump calls black supporter a ""thug,"" has him kicked out of a rally in North Carolina. https://t.co/b4gkI6qx9v pic.twitter.com/eJKuu0CLRi 
+— Jason Sparks (@sparksjls) October 28, 2016 
+As the long time Republican voter was escorted from the venue he made one final attempt to get his note to the man who would be king : “I said, ‘I was trying to get to this doc to Mr. Donald … will you get this to Donald?’” 
+The official promised he would pass along the note. Having been treated to some common courtesy at last, Cary set off back home to watch the election coverage with that same horrified expression that we’ve all become so accustomed to. 
+By the way, this wasn’t the first time a Trump supporter has been mistaken for a protester simply because he wasn’t the right color: 
+Featured Image via Twitter About Grownmangrumbles 
+I'm a full- time, somewhat unwilling resident of the planet Earth. I studied journalism at Murdoch University in West Australia and moved back to the UK where I taught politics and studied for a PhD. I've written a number of books on political philosophy that are mostly of interest to scholars. I'm also a seasoned travel writer so I get to stay in fancy hotels for free. I have a pet Lizard called Rousseau. We have only the most cursory of respect for one another. Connect",FAKE
+8117,Russia celebrates a Unity Day of liberation of Moscow from the Polish Roman Papists army in 1612,"Saker Message: No current Saker messages. Russia celebrates a Unity Day of liberation of Moscow from the Polish Roman Papists army in 1612 273 Views November 05, 2016 No Comments Scotts Corner Scott 
+The National Unity Day, first celebrated on 4 November 2005, commemorates the popular uprising lead by prince Dmitry Pozharsky and a meat merchant Kuzma Minin which ejected the alien occupying forces of Polish Roman Papists army from Moscow in November 1612, and more generally the end of the Time of Troubles and foreign interventions in Russia. Its name alludes to the idea that all the classes of the Russian society willingly united to preserve the Russian statehood when its demise seemed inevitable, even though there was neither Tsar nor Patriarch to guide them. Recently this episode was made into a Russian movie 1612. 
+Minin and Pozharsky: The Liberation of Moscow. (from the triptych “For the Russian Land!”) Artist Yuri Pantyukhin 
+Russia: Muscovites celebrate Unity Day in capital 
+
+River dance in Simferopol, Crimea 
+
+Russia: Putin and Patriarch Kirill bless new monument to Vladimir the Great 
+
+Nov 4, 2016 
+President Vladimir Putin unveiled a new monument to the Russia’s first Christian leader Vladimir the Great in Moscow, on Friday. The opening ceremony took place just in few meters from Kremlin walls and coincided with the Russian National Unity Day. 
+Vladimir Putin, Russian President (Russian): “Your Holiness. Respected Muscovites! Dear friends! I greet and congratulate you on the opening of the monument to Saint Equal-to-apostles Prince Vladimir. This is a big and significant event for Moscow, for the whole country and for all Russian compatriots. It is symbolic that it is being held on the National Unity Day here in the centre of the capital near the walls of the ancient Kremlin, in the heart of Russia.” 
+Vladimir Putin, Russian President (Russian): “The strong moral support, cohesion and unity helped our ancestors to overcome difficulties, to live and to win for the glory of the Fatherland, to strengthen its power and greatness from generation to generation. And today it is our duty to stand together against modern threats and challenges basing on spiritual precepts, invaluable traditions of unity and concord and to move forward ensuring the continuity of our thousand-year history.” 
+Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia (Russian): “The monument to Prince Vladimir is a symbol of the unity of all the peoples to whom he is farther. This is the peoples of the historical Rus’ currently living within the borders of many states. The monument to the farther may be everywhere where his children live. There is no contradiction in it. But it is bad if children forget that they have the only father.” The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95 Be the First to Comment! Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Search articles",FAKE
+5469,Security Politics and the Closing of the Open Society,"Email 
+The increasing symbiosis between the political and the leading mainstream media of the Western world implies that, grosso modo, Russia is blamed for having caused this new situation. While Russia is certainly not innocent and it usually does take two to conflict this blame is rather a sign of diminishing capacity (knowledge) and will (economic and intellectual independence and courage) to ask critical questions that now characterise the corporate media. 
+Defence and security political news coverage, journalistic processing, editing and commentaries have sunk to an intellectual level that is considerably lower than during the first Cold War. The entire field is given low priority by editors. Domestic issues, sports, entertainment, lifestyle etc. have made it to the top. 
+Out of sync with the globalising world, most media do with 1-2 pages about global affairs out of, say, 40-50 pages and they base this material on the same handful of Western news bureaus. 
+The double checking of a variety of sources, versatility and multi-perspective coverage are things of the past and we see more uniformity and more subjectivity in the news media coverage than ever. 
+Add to this that both Russia and NATO countries engage in media management, or propaganda (tax payers footing the bills) which squeezes out comprehensive knowledge and unbiased analyses as well as critical angles on one’s own policies and actions. 
+Like hot wars, Cold Wars are fought not only on the battle fields but also in the media, about the souls of the citizens. Fearology, therefore, has become a dominant ingredient in this war as well as in the other – equally counterproductive and self-defeating – war, the War On Terror. 
+The more people are made to fear, the more they submit to surveillance, authoritarian laws, self-censorship etc and turn away from democratic debate and activism – a trend that will eventually lead to the dissolution of democracy itself. 
+In short, these international trends and tension-increasing confrontations boomerang back on our societies in ways that are as frightening as under-stated in the debate. 
+To put it crudely: the new Cold War and the War on Terror both have significant, destructive effects on society, diminish its democracy and creativity, narrows the spectrum of opinions and bring us further and further away from the globally desired goals of freedom, democracy and of living in a more peaceful world. 
+Security politics has come to mean destruction of the core fibres of what was to be secured. Paradoxically, it promotes the closing of the once open society. 
+In addition, that is, to squandering absurd US $ 1700 billion (or about 30 times the entire UN budget) worldwide on one more destructive, failed war after the other. 
+These are issues of the greatest importance for humanity’s future, even survival.",FAKE
+6110,"Clinton “Fixer”: I Spiked Damaging Stories for Sexually Depraved, Morally Corrupt Hillary","Email 
+Clinton wins “by a landslide” — in the corruption department. So says columnist, New York Times bestselling author, and admitted Clinton “bagman” Jeff Rovin. Initially presenting his story anonymously in the National Enquirer , Rovin subsequently revealed his identity in a Monday interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Among his striking claims: The Clintons have an “open marriage,” Hillary has had affairs with both men and women, and he paid off reporters to keep the copious Clinton dirt hush-hush. And these allegations are backed up by 24-years' worth of documentation. 
+Rovin’s appearance on Hannity (video below) adds further weight to his claims, as people often associate the Enquirer with fanciful tales. Yet as Hannity himself pointed out, that paper has at times broken major stories, catching the rest of the media napping. Hannity cited scoops concerning O.J. Simpson, John Edwards’ mistress, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson’s out-of-wedlock child, Tiger Woods’ marriage woes, and others. In fact, Rovin said that such Enquirer stories are, ironically, “probably better vetted than most of the stories in other media” because they’re “so controversial.” 
+Of course, the Enquirer 's scoops almost invariably involve salacious matters, and the Clinton story is no exception. Yet most significant are Rovin’s disclosures about media suppression of truth — and efforts to destroy people such as Monica Lewinsky. 
+Rovin explains that as a Hollywood reporter in the '80s and '90s, his close relationship with the Tinseltown power set and press allowed him to become, as he put it, “‘a fixer’: someone who helps stars keep embarrassing stories out of the press.” Rovin did his job so well that in 1991 he was asked to work for a rising political couple who, together, were an embarrassing-story-disgorging machine: Arkansas governor William Jefferson Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham. As he wrote : I was informed that these stories would involve rumors of Bill Clinton' s many sexual dalliances and an alleged ongoing affair of Hillary Clinton with a male member of her law firm, Vince Foster, as well as a female mover-and-shaker in Hollywood. For a retainer of $4,000 a month — paid by a third party, not the campaign — I was told to keep these stories hush-hush in one of two ways: by trading access to the Clintons for “positive” interviews, or by paying the reporters. The payments were always cash, usually delivered in a movie theater or restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and came in two denominations: $100 for a heads-up that a bad story was coming; or considerably more to kill the piece. 
+Rovin’s claims align perfectly with the recent WikiLeaks revelations about direct collusion between the corrupt mainstream media and Clinton campaign; among the examples are a New York Times reporter giving the campaign veto power over quotations, a CNBC reporter advising the campaign, and CNN commentator Donna Brazile forwarding Clinton a debate question prior to a March face-off against Bernie Sanders (yes, Sandernistas, the fix was really in). 
+Yet bribery wasn’t the only method for getting stories spiked; deception was another. As Rovin told Hannity, reporters “were paid to soften the stories.… What would happen is, if we got wind of a story from the tabloids, chances were pretty good it would end up in one of the mainstream newspapers or magazines. We would then contact one of those people and say, ‘This isn't true, don't run it.’” 
+And this apparently does ring true to Hannity, who spoke of the evidence he saw, saying to Rovin, “I went through with your editor everything that you had. You do have ledgers; you did have the faxes with the letterhead and the timestamps. The Clintons know you…. They know you fixed things for them.” 
+And Rovin says this fixing became a full-time job, as the Clintons committed continual sexual indiscretions in what he described as a “polyamorous” and “open” marriage — which matches the “open borders” Hillary said, in an e-mail, that she wanted. 
+Rovin appears to believe the Clintons’ sexual depravity was so all-consuming that it distracted Bill from the business of running the country. He cites as the worst example of judgment the bachelor party in March 1994 for Clinton’s half-brother, Roger Clinton, who, in quintessential Clinton style, was marrying a bride eight-months-pregnant. Prostitutes were present, and recordings were made — they included Bill Clinton. 
+None of this will surprise those who know of Bill’s having taken 26 flights on billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express,” but the recording was a problem: It was offered for sale to the Enquirer , says Rovin. This is when he says he swooped in and negotiated a deal to keep the recording suppressed. (Note: This would be a national-security concern, too. A foreign power that obtained such a recording conceivably could use it to blackmail the president.) 
+Also in 1994, Rovin “arranged a meeting for Hillary and a woman in an exclusive Beverly Hills hotel,” he said . “I helped her slip out of a back exit for a one-on-one session with the other woman.” The journalist described this encounter as “sordid.” 
+Rovin also reveals that he was part of a “team effort” to damage Monica Lewinsky; in fact, Rovin later felt so bad about this smear campaign that he apologized to Lewinsky personally. In addition, the journalist “told Hannity he was tasked with distracting the media while Hillary’s crew rummaged through [Vince] Foster’s office … to snatch documents related to the Whitewater scandal,” as WND.com put it . 
+As to Rovin’s motivations for finally coming forward, he mentioned two significant factors. He told Hannity that when he learned that Enquirer editor Dylan Howard was doing the Clinton story and was naming sources he wanted kept confidential, he agreed to participate under the condition he could protect those sources. Second, he wrote in the Enquirer piece, “I am coming forward now because of the endless attention the alleged indiscretions of Donald Trump have received. Nothing I have heard comes close to the sexual and moral corruption of the Clintons — many of which have [sic] yet to be revealed.” 
+Having said this, Rovin was dismayed at the campaign emphasis on dirt, saying to Hannity, “The election is too important to focus on this salacious material.” Identifying as a libertarian, the journalist expressed the common idea that politicians’ sexual indiscretions are none of anyone’s business and should be beyond scrutiny. And while many issues are more important — such as Clinton’s internationalist, open-borders dreams; amnesty plans; warmongering stance vis-à-vis Russia; and radical social agenda — that common idea is also a mistaken idea. 
+Question: Is there any sexual indiscretion a politician could commit that would bring his psychological fitness into question? What if a person habitually engages in bestiality? Would you want such an individual managing your finances or babysitting your child? If not, why not, if “private” sexual behavior has no bearing on whether the person can “do the job”? 
+If so, however, then would you want such a person’s finger on the nuclear button? 
+Now, what kind of sexual depravity is not a red flag? 
+During the Bill Clinton years, “Character doesn’t matter” became a meme used to justify Clinton corruption. But would you want to be pulled over by a cop with bad character or have your car repaired by a mechanic with same? Character is integral to everything we do . 
+The Bible speaks of “eyes blinded by sin,” “For the eye altering alters all,” wrote poet William Blake. Habitually engaging in wrongdoing and (as man will do) rationalizing it away — which is when we deny reality — causes us to lose touch with reality. Twisting the truth in our own minds twists our minds; conning ourselves corrupts our judgment. The eye altering… 
+Hillary Clinton is poised to continue the “fundamental change” Barack Obama infamously promised. But do we really want someone in an altered state altering these United States? Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
+Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
+No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language. 
+No product advertisements. 
+Please post comments in English. 
+Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
+8916,The Next Big Shoe to Drop,"The Next Big Shoe to Drop Posted on   The Next Big Shoe to Drop 
+This is yet another source of highly flammable fuel that will result in more gasoline when the Fed is called in… 
+
+From Dr. Jeffrey Lewis : 
+More than 40 million young Americans carry federal and private student loan debt – amounting to over $1 trillion. Defaults are on the rise and the issue has grown to become a nasty wealth transfer mechanism, as well as sad example of the failure of finance in general. 
+This week, President Obama announced a new initiative framed as a way of addressing the issue. Sadly, it is far from the mark, and just one more indication that monetary masters are the real puppeteers. 
+Many have pointed out that the student loan debt bubble could be the next subprime crisis. 
+Perhaps so, but it is potentially much worse, acting as an anvil when considered in the context of other consumer debt like car loans and credit cards. 
+The student debt debacle has the potential of corrupting not only education, but a generation as well. 
+It risks becoming the blight on a generation of would-be productive and innovative work force. 
+Furthermore, the workforce declines, and falls behind, as more students return home to live with parents. And the extra burden on multi-generational households adds yet another deflationary force to the natural trend. 
+From the perspective of bankers, policy makers, and the propaganda machine, college loan programs have been a tremendous success, providing access for students who would otherwise not be able to afford the privilege. 
+It is about threading a narrow political path. 
+Defaults are on the rise and the notional value of student loans went north of $1 trillion. 
+Servicers must be getting nervous; the lobbyists are circling the wagons. 
+There is no clear indication of who will pay for it – or how. 
+Defaults on the rise; one in seven currently default. 
+The news of doing something comes around to yet another intervention with all the familiar signs that it is meant to save the financiers and has very little to do with helping students. 
+The problem is that this is too little too late. 
+Student loan debt is a trillion dollar reality in the context of a major, ongoing depression. 
+We are a Nanny state – with almost 50 million on food stamps and more on some sort of assistance. Labor force participation is at 40 year lows. 
+There is already a major dis-incentive to work. If you take a horrible minimum wage job, you lose valuable benefits, entitlements. 
+Which, incidentally, also explains why while it took the U.S. economy 6 years to recover all the job losses since Lehman. This took place at the expense of 13 million Americans leaving the labor force for good even as the U.S. population rose by 15 million. 
+It also means that using a historical average participation rate, U.S. unemployment is over 11%, while underemployment is currently well in the 20% range – a far more realistic assessment of where the U.S. economy really is. 
+People on assistance programs are literally paid to stay home – think of the cultural implications. 
+It’s almost a conspiracy. You have a massive class of under the table people with no voice. Give them bread and circuses. 
+The student loan debacle is another story. 
+For the parents, the typical situation is framed by skyrocketing tuition; and little help from scholarships become fractions in the face of rising tuition. 
+The income cut-off for need-based financial aid is low. 
+Parents are expected to contribute 25% of pre-tax income to the cost of tuition. 
+If you earn $80K a year and your child’s college tuition is $20K, you get nothing in terms of need-based financial aid. And that 25% doesn’t count room & board, books, etc. 
+So, it’s basically impossible for middle-class families to send their kids to college without taking out student loans. In fact, the entire higher-education system is built to force people into debt if they want to send their kids to college. 
+And it has a sinister underlying theme… 
+It’s always about the “irresponsible student” or the “hairdresser subprime loan borrower” who “should have known better”. 
+They should have known that housing prices eventually fall, even though “everyone” in the mainstream, including the chairman of the Federal Reserve said they would not. They should have read carefully the fine print instead of trusting the fancy loan officer. 
+And everyone knows that without a college education you will not succeed, so “borrow whatever it takes”. You’ll pay it back. 
+Two decades of further tweaks to the bankruptcy code ensued until 2005, when Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. This Act made it so that no student loan — federal or private — could be discharged in bankruptcy unless the borrower can prove repaying the loan would cause “undue hardship,” a condition that is incredibly difficult to demonstrate unless the person has a severe disability. It essentially lumps student loan debt in with child support and criminal fines — other types of debt that can’t be discharged. 
+But our system is perfectly fine going after the invisible – those without a political voice – whether the poor or elderly who get crushed by inflation, or the 18 year olds who get out with $100K in debt and an art appreciation degree. 
+But the price of education should tell an even deeper story…. 
+Quality of Education Suffers 
+The compounding irony is that not only does the price of education go up, but the quality goes down. Institutions become entrenched. There is little incentive evolve, tenure runs rampant. And the curriculum declines. 
+Higher education becomes both a commodity and a spectacle. Not a vehicle for progress or a reflection of the needs of the culture or the economy. 
+That may not be hyperinflation…but it’s very sad. College education quality has not risen proportionately with price. 
+Student loan debt is out of control by any and all measures. It’s a debacle that benefits no one besides the banker and the servicers. The schools lose by making themselves unviable in the long run. 
+The students come away with non-dischargeable student loans and enter a world without, for the most part, having any marketable skills. 
+Sadly, the student loans are just one more politically untouchable issue providing yet another source of highly flammable fuel that will result in more gasoline when the Fed is called in.",FAKE
+6412,A Measure of Fascism in America,"By wmw_admin on October 27, 2016 by Marcus Aurealeus, Facebook Note — OffGuardian.org Oct 27, 2016 
+T he word “fascism” is generally used today as a pejorative to attack any idea that a speaker happens to dislike. But this word has a specific meaning and a specific historical context. It refers to an authoritarian, nationalistic system of government and social organization that is usually considered to be far right-wing. Historically, it was most popular in the 1930s, when the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were in their primes. Later examples include Indonesia under Suharto, Bolivia under Banzer, and Chile under Pinochet. In practice, fascism combines the ideas of collectivism, mercantilism, nationalism, (statist) syndicalism, and uniculturalism into a system where business leaders and political rulers work together to create public policies that benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. 
+To what extent is the United States of America in 2015 a fascist nation? In order to determine this, a means of measurement is needed. Lawrence Britt has studied fascist regimes and found that there are 14 characteristics which all of them have in common to some degree. Matthew Reece goes further and examines these characteristics and assigns each of them a value on a ten-point scale, with zero being completely absent and 10 being omnipresent. Let us also see how many are trending upward, trending downward, and holding steady. The final score on a 140-point scale will give a useful measure of the degree of fascism in America. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism – Fascists tend to make constant use of patriotic mottoes, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays. 
+In America, patriotic mottoes, slogans, symbols, songs, and flags have been part of the culture since the founding of the nation, with the frequency of their use varying from time to time. This reached a fever pitch immediately following the September 11 attacks, and while it has backed off since then, the sense of nationalism in America remains strong, perhaps the strongest of all nations in which the state does not directly force people into such observances. 
+Score: 8/10, Trend: Steady Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights – Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, fascists are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. 
+After 9/11, the Bush regime and their lapdogs in the right-wing media were largely successful in convincing people that torture and indefinite detention of those who were not convicted of crimes was justifiable for national security reasons. The Obama regime has taken some positive steps on these matters, but has murdered far more people with drone strikes than his predecessor. The left-wing media has largely given Obama a pass on this. At home, the War on Drugs has placed many innocent people into prison for decades. While the American people are becoming more opposed to such abuses of power, little real change has occurred. 
+Score: 8/10, Trend: Slightly Up Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause – The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc. 
+America has a dark history of this. Over the centuries, Native Americans, Blacks, Mexicans, Irish, Eastern Europeans, Germans, Jews, Japanese, communists, and Muslims have all been perceived as common threats or foes to be contained or eliminated. More than once, the state has been able to engage in wars due to yellow journalism or false flag operations successfully creating a new enemy du jour. With the War on Terrorism, the state has found its holy grail: a war which can be made indefinite against an omnipresent foe which it can never seem to vanquish, not that it would want to. 
+Score: 10/10, Trend: Steady Supremacy of the Military – Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. 
+The United States has the largest military budget in the world, and spends more money on its military than the next seven nations combined. Despite a stagnant economy and decaying infrastructure, 20 percent of the federal budget is devoted to the military. This is equal to the combined budgets of Medicare and Medicaid, and is nearly as much as the budget for Social Security. To be critical of the military as an institution is considered to be nearly as bad as aiding the enemy by the lapdog media, as is criticizing the glamorization of soldiers and military service. Though a minority is becoming skeptical of this situation, no changes appear to be coming in the near future. 
+Score: 10/10, Trend: Steady Rampant Sexism – The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution. 
+The United States is one of the least sexist countries in the world. While the number of males in positions of political power outnumber females by about four to one, the United States ranks 94th out of 190 countries in this regard as of June 1, 2015. Over the last few decades, traditional gender roles have become less rigid. Divorce has become easier to obtain, with fault requirements being mostly removed as of 2015. Abortions were made legal nationwide in 1973, and same-sex marriage was made legal nationwide in 2015. A general hostility has developed toward government intervention into the family institution. 
+Score: 3/10, Trend: Down Controlled Mass Media – Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in wartime, is very common. 
+While the press in America is not directly controlled by the government, it is indirectly controlled. Government regulation and pro-state media personalities perpetuate a lapdog establishment that echoes government propaganda and eschews authentic investigative journalism. Those who would challenge this status quo by asking uncomfortable questions frequently find themselves victimized by slave-on-slave violence as the privileged establishment seeks to preserve its access to the halls of power and its usefulness in informing the public of government activities. Censorship is common with regard to certain words and topics which are not used or discussed on mainstream programming, especially during wartime, although this is mostly done without direct government involvement. Before and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the establishment media consistently towed the government line and censored certain images, such as war deaths. As a result, alternative and independent media sources are growing in popularity and trust in the establishment media is at an all-time low, but they have yet to displace the establishment media. 
+Score: 8/10, Trend: Slightly Down Obsession with National Security – Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses. 
+At least since the First Red Scare following the Russian Revolution and continuing through World War II, the Cold War, and the War on Terrorism, the government has used fear of external enemies as a justification for its activities. National security is considered by many right-wing (and some left-wing) politicians to be the most important role of the state. Though many people believe this has gone too far in the wake of the Snowden leaks, little meaningful change has occurred. 
+Score: 8/10, Trend: Steady Religion and Government are Intertwined – Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions. 
+There is a tradition of separation of church and state in America, but this is only true in the sense that there is no official state religion. Atheists, agnostics, and religious skeptics are few and far between in public office. Appeals to the tenets of Christianity, the most common religion in America, are frequently used by politicians to advance their agendas, even when those tenets are diametrically opposed to such agendas. Christian theories of just war play a significant role in American conservatism, and Christian ideas about helping the poor are used by American liberals to argue for government welfare programs. Religiosity among the American people is declining, but these conditions will likely remain stable for another generation or so. 
+Score: 7/10, Trend: Down Corporate Power is Protected – The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. 
+Since soon after the Constitution was ratified, business interests have played a financial role in determining which candidates for office are successful in elections. With the Citizens United decision, this has become more open and somewhat more blatant. Of course, those who invest in political campaigns expect a return on that investment, and research shows that they get it in spades. A political aristocracy has been present throughout much of American history, with many candidates for office being related to prior office holders. The 2016 presidential election is shaping up to be more of the same. 
+Score: 9/10, Trend: Up Labor Power is Suppressed – Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed. 
+While labor unions have not been eliminated entirely in America, they have been declining in the private sector for quite some time. In 2014, only 6.6 percent of private sector workers were union members, the lowest level since 1932. However, government sector unions are much stronger, with 35.7 percent of government workers belonging to a union in 2014. While national syndicalism is a major part of fascist theory, it has only had minor influence in America in the form of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor union. 
+Score: 6/10, Trend: Slightly Up Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts – Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked. 
+In America, the government is quite dependent on the intellectual classes to propagandize the people, and is therefore rather accommodating to them, to the point of creating a bubble in higher education that has benefited the intellectual classes at the expense of everyone else during the postwar period. That being said, it is becoming more common for professors and other academics to be attacked for their views. The rise in influence of social justice warriors is causing disdain for free expression to trend upward. 
+Score: 4/10, Trend: Slightly Up Obsession with Crime and Punishment – Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forgo civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations. 
+While many police accountability activists in America say that “badges don’t grant extra rights,” the fact is that in practice, they do. Police routinely engage in activities that would land an ordinary citizen in prison, and when they are investigated, it is either by an internal review process or a grand jury examination, each of which tend to be highly sympathetic to the police due to conflicts of interest. While there is no national police force with virtually unlimited power, the DEA, FBI, and Secret Service are quite powerful and are getting stronger. After 9/11, many people were willing to overlook police abuses, but this is changing. However, many efforts toward police accountability are being blunted by distractions, such as a focus on racism. 
+Score: 8/10, Trend: Slightly Up Rampant Cronyism and Corruption – Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders. 
+There is a revolving door in Washington, D.C. between being a member of Congress or federal employee and being a lobbyist for special interest groups. These special interest groups bribe politicians and regulators on behalf of wealthy business interests to write laws and regulations that favor their interests at the expense of competing businesses and individual citizens. Many of these laws and regulations work to shield business owners from civil and criminal liability. While it is uncommon for American rulers to steal national treasures, there is a tendency for the government to appropriate natural resources and sell access to them. This shows no signs of improving anytime soon. 
+Score: 7/10, Trend: Up Fraudulent Elections – Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections. 
+While there is no proof that American elections are a complete sham, there are clear cases of manipulation. While smear campaigns tend to be waged by each major political party against the other, assassination of opposition candidates is almost never seriously considered, let alone attempted. That being said, the two major parties have rigged election laws to keep third parties from having any reasonable chance of winning. Over the past few decades, gerrymandering of political district boundaries has been used to create districts which are either reliably Democratic or reliably Republican, with the result being that the fringe elements of each party are able to put people into office. The judiciary was arguably used to manipulate the 2000 presidential election, and courts usually act to control elections by siding against claims of unfairness by minor political parties. With the introduction of top-two primaries in recent years, third party and independent candidates are being excluded further. 
+Score: 7/10, Trend: Slightly Up 
+Overall, America gets a score of 103 out of 140, meaning that America is 73.6 percent of the way toward fascism and away from liberty. While the trends on the various characteristics of fascism are moving in different directions, the overall trend is slightly upward, meaning that the score could advance at a rate of one or two points per year. 
+Now, wake up and examine which country is actually harming you and the rest of us. It’s time to put aside old grudges that date back to the Soviet days, in the same way you forgot the harm done to you in the past, by your now good neighbor, Germany.",FAKE
+10547,VIDEO: Watch Newt Gingrich UNLOAD on Megyn Kelly Over Trump,"Pinterest 
+Newt Gingrich has accused Fox News’ Megyn Kelly of being “fascinated” by sex, and not caring at all about public policy in a shocking and startling interview. 
+The former Speaker of the House said Kelly showed “bias” for mentioning the groping allegations against Donald Trump. 
+Kelly responded by saying her fascination is not of “sex,” but of who was going to end up in the White House. Kelly has a history with Trump – getting into a shouting match with the Republican candidate over comments he made about women during a primary debate. 
+What set Gingrich off was Kelly’s mention of the leaked “sex boasts” tapes, where Trump is heard to say he grabs women by the genitals. 
+Gingrich attacked, saying the media was obsessed with spending time on the unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, which Trump has denied. “You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy,” he said. 
+“I’m not fascinated by sex, but I’m fascinated about sexual predators,” Kelly said. 
+The bias the media has against Trump – especially focusing on sex – is historic. 
+“This is a scale of bias worthy of Pravda and Izvestia, ” Gingrich said. 
+Take a look at the awesome video:",FAKE
+3200,"Some GOP Donors Willing to Give to Many, Just Not Paul","Some of the biggest donors and fundraisers in the Republican Party, still uncertain who should get their support in 2016, are sprinkling their money around a presidential field that grows by the day.
+
+The largesse born of their indecision has a notable exception: Rand Paul.
+
+The Kentucky senator has aggressively tried to raise money around his effort to curtail the surveillance powers of the National Security Agency, emailing supporters and posting messages on social media imploring people to ""celebrate this victory"" with their cash.
+
+In doing so, he's exacerbated the perception among some of the GOP's most generous donors that his positions on foreign policy make him an unacceptable choice for the White House. This is especially so to those who consider an aggressive posture abroad and support for Israel paramount.
+
+""I do not know of a single person in Mitt Romney's donor network who will be with Rand Paul,"" said Phil Rosen, a Manhattan attorney and top fundraiser for the 2012 Republican nominee. Rosen said he met with Paul and politely told him he wouldn't be supporting him ""because of his isolationist and libertarian policies.""
+
+Rosen hasn't settled on his choice in next year's primary contest but expects to decide soon from a short list. Other prominent donors are doing the same, with some willing to give money to multiple candidates in the early stages of the campaign, but not to Paul.
+
+Among them: Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson, New York hedge fund pioneer Michael Steinhardt and Ken Abramowitz, founder of a venture capital firm in New York. All three have given money to South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who announced his presidential campaign on Monday by saying he wants ""to be president to defeat the enemies trying to kill us.""
+
+Those donors, like many of the Republican Party's biggest spenders, are looking for the strongest candidate on foreign policy, especially on the protection of Israel. That's become the centerpiece of not only Graham's campaign, but also is a featured aspect of the bids of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
+
+""Graham in particular has a terrific record in Congress and is experienced and articulate,"" said Steinhardt, who is also giving to former New York Gov. George Pataki and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
+
+The weight of donor opposition to Paul hit his campaign soon after he launched it in April, when a politically active nonprofit, the Foundation for a Secure and Prosperous America, began a $1 million television advertising campaign against him in the four early primary states. The nonprofit can raise unlimited money and is not legally required to disclose its donors.
+
+Several other groups are prepared to pounce on Paul if they sense he is gaining traction in the race. Among them is a group led by John Bolton, a former ambassador to the United Nations who recently decided against running himself, but plans to push for strong national security policies from the sidelines.
+
+""I've spoken to well over 1,000 major Republican donors and can remember only one who agreed with Rand Paul on foreign policy,"" Bolton said. ""The views he represents are a tiny, tiny minority within the Republican Party.""
+
+Unlike several of the other Republican candidates for president, Paul doesn't have an obvious billionaire — or group of billionaires — backing his campaign, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie does with Home Depot founder Ken Langone and Rubio does in car dealer Norman Braman.
+
+Campaigning in South Carolina last week, when he spoke about his fight against renewing the NSA's authority to collect Americans' phone records in bulk, Paul said he isn't concerned about the big donors lining up against him. But he said he wouldn't turn down their money.
+
+""If you know some billionaires, and you want to send them our way, we're happy to talk to them,"" Paul said. ""It's more about votes than it is about dollars, and I think we're going to have plenty of money to compete.""
+
+Paul said he's counting on small-dollar donations raised primarily online, the kind he's tried to drum up during the debate that has resulted in at least the temporary suspension of the NSA's authority to collect Americans' calling records.
+
+He's attracted enthusiasm outside the usual Republican circles, particularly from college-aged voters with a distaste for military engagement and others who put civil liberties at the forefront of their concerns.
+
+Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who isn't aligned with any 2016 candidate, said what Paul lacks in traditional deep-pocketed donor enthusiasm, he could make up for in smaller contributors.
+
+""He's not going to have a traditional campaign because he's not going to be a traditional candidate,"" Luntz said. ""That comes with advantages and disadvantages.""
+
+Paul's campaign said it raised more than $1 million online in his first 24 hours as a candidate, but wouldn't say how much it has raised around the NSA issue. It will report on its finances next month.",REAL
+5221,Fact-checking the vice-presidential debate between Kaine and Pence,"The Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, and the Republican nominee, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, debated Oct. 4 at Longwood University in Farmville, Va. Here is a roundup of 25 suspicious or interesting claims that were made. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.
+
+Kaine surely meant to say nuclear weapons but it came out as chemical weapons. (Later in the debate, he said “[Clinton] went toe-to-toe with Russia as secretary of state to do the New START Agreement to reduce Russia’s nuclear stockpile.”)
+
+Even so, Kaine overstates the impact of the 2011 New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty agreement, which Clinton helped negotiate as secretary of state.
+
+New START placed tighter limits on deployed strategic weapons but Russia was actually already meeting the treaty’s limits, for the most part, when the treaty’s implementation began. Indeed, Russia has increased deployed nuclear weapons from 1,537 in February 2011 to 1,796 in September of this year. Also, the treaty does not restrict either country from stockpiling weapons, nor does it require them to destroy any existing weapons.
+
+Russia’s total nuclear warhead arsenal has been on a steady decline from 40,000 since 1986. The total has hovered around 4,500 since 2012, during Obama’s presidency.
+
+Kaine leans way over on his skis here. The Iranian nuclear agreement was actually negotiated by Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, though Clinton helped tee up the negotiations by increasing sanctions on the Islamic Republic. The deal, which has been sharply criticized by Republicans, did increase the amount of time that Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon by reducing its centrifuges for uranium enrichment and its stockpile of enriched uranium; international monitoring of Iran’s nuclear facilities was also implemented. But key elements of the deal expire in 15 years (some go longer) and Iran’s nuclear infrastructure remains in place.
+
+While Iran has insisted it has no interest in building nuclear weapons, the deal does not eliminate the risk that it will obtain nuclear bombs. The agreement limits Iran’s civilian nuclear program and it is also contains an indefinite prohibition on activities related to a weapons program, defined in Annex 1, Section T. Whether those elements eliminates the nuclear weapons program is a matter of opinion.
+
+Indeed, Clinton’s economic plan would raise an estimated $1.46 trillion in tax revenues over the next decade, according to an analysis by economist Mark Zandi. But the tax hike “falls almost exclusively on the most highly paid,” the analysis says.
+
+This figure does not take into account the impact of her other proposals on the economy. For example, his report also said that if Clinton were able to fully implement her economic plans, the economy would add an additional 3.2 million jobs during the first four years of her presidency. Combined with anticipated job creation under current law, that adds up to 10.4 million jobs. But the report also said that Clinton would face significant roadblocks to getting her economic plan through Congress, resulting in far fewer job gains.
+
+Trump has, indeed, said all of those things.
+
+During his campaign announcement, Trump said: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.“ We awarded Trump’s claim connecting illegal immigrants from Mexico and crime Four Pinocchios.
+
+In 2007, Trump called Rosie O’Donnell “a slob,” “a pig” and a “degenerate” in a single speech. He has called Arianna Huffington “a dog” and said New York Times columnist Gail Collins had “the face of a dog.”
+
+Trump did say that the Indiana-born U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel had an “inherent conflict of interest” because of his Mexican heritage and Trump’s plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump has said McCain was “not a war hero,” and that McCain is “a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” Trump has, indeed, said: “We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African Americans, Hispanics, are living in hell, because it’s so dangerous.” And Trump was one of the most high-profile “birthers” who questioned whether Obama was a U.S. citizen.
+
+Earlier in the campaign, Trump said women who receive illegal abortions should be subject to “some sort of punishment.” But he reversed that statement several hours later, after widespread criticism from those on both sides of the abortion rights issue. He amended his statement to say that the doctors, not women, should be punished.
+
+This is correct. A key difference here is that Nixon did not release his taxes while he was a presidential candidate; he did so in 1973, a year after he was reelected.
+
+Presidential candidates have no legal obligation to release their returns, but there has long been a tradition to do so for the sake of transparency. Trump has cited a pending Internal Revenue Service audit, even though the first president to release his taxes, Nixon, did so in the middle of an audit. Moreover, Trump has not released his tax returns from before 2009, which are no longer under audit, according to his attorney.
+
+Pence is correct on raw numbers regarding education spending, but is incorrect when the figures are adjusted for inflation.
+
+In fiscal year 2017, state spending on higher education and K-12 education is the largest in Indiana’s history. But adjusted for inflation, the 2017 appropriations are not quite as high as they were in 2010 and 2011, said Lawrence DeBoer, Purdue University economist and an expert on Indiana’s state budget. By 2017, Indiana state spending on education will be almost back to 2011 levels, DeBoer said.
+
+On infrastructure, Pence began improving the state’s roads only after an emergency repair of the Interstate 65 bridge led to a month-long traffic problem and caused a political liability, the Associated Press reported. Political ads attacked Pence for saving money in the state’s reserves at the expense of underfunding the state’s infrastructure.
+
+Pence then proposed a plan to improve roads “that relied on borrowing, drawing down state reserves and accounting gimmicks to reach an advertised $1 billion sticker price,” the AP reported. “In the end, he got just a fraction of that after Indiana’s Republican-controlled Legislature balked. And much of the money set aside for local governments came from local taxes held in state reserves that were already supposed to be returned.”
+
+Clinton has said she would expand Obama’s executive actions on immigration and has advocated for comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship. But she also has supported enhanced border security. And her immigration proposal includes “humane, targeted and effective” enforcement and focusing immigration resources on detaining and deporting those “who pose a threat to public safety.”
+
+[Update: Hacked emails released on Oct. 7 showed Clinton apparently said in a paid closed-door speech to a Brazilian bank: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders,” through green energy.
+
+The Clinton campaign has refused to authenticate the hacked emails, but campaign manager Robby Mook said in an Oct. 9 CBS “Face the Nation” interview that Clinton was “talking about integrating green energy between North and South America. … If the question is, ‘Does Hillary Clinton support throwing open our borders?’ Absolutely not. And she is going to do everything she can to fight to protect the interests of workers in this country.”]
+
+This is correct. Clinton has said she supports President Obama’s decision to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in fiscal year 2016 — and that she would support an increase up to 65,000. That is a 550 percent increase from 10,000. But Clinton has not yet disclosed her plan for the new fiscal year or beyond.
+
+This map below shows where Syrian refugees have ended up in the United States.
+
+Maybe the GOP ticket did not precisely use the word “great” or “better,” but Kaine pretty much hits the target here.
+
+Pence told CNN just a few weeks ago: “I think it’s inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been.” Pence made these remarks just after Trump asserted that Putin has “been a leader far more than our president has been a leader.”
+
+Kaine repeats a line that recently earned Hillary Clinton Three Pinocchios. But no credible analyst would cite the Bush tax cuts as playing a key role in spurring the economic crash.
+
+Kaine puts it even more starkly than Clinton. The Clinton campaign tried to suggest income inequality, exacerbated by tax cuts, led to the stagnation of the middle class and spurred excess borrowing and leverage — key components of the crash along with lax regulation. But that’s a real stretch, given that a housing bubble was the key trigger. The causes of the Great Recession are complex and debatable, but there’s no debate that it is wrong to put the Bush tax cuts at the top of the list.
+
+This isn’t a direct quote about deporting all undocumented immigrants, but Trump did say that all “criminal illegal immigrants” (likely referring to undocumented immigrants convicted of a crime) “are going to be gone. It will be over.”
+
+Among other claims Trump made at the Aug. 31 Phoenix rally about removing those here illegally:
+
+But Trump also laid out his deportation priorities during the speech. Among them: Targeting at least 5 million and as many as 6.5 million undocumented immigrants who would be subject to swift removal. That is about half of the 11 million undocumented people estimated to be living in the United States.
+
+Pence misconstrued an Associated Press report here, similar to the way Donald Trump did earlier in the campaign.
+
+The AP analyzed State Department records and looked specifically at Clinton’s meetings on the phone or in person with 154 people who were not federal employees or foreign government representatives. This narrowed down the denominator to a small subcategory of people Clinton met with as secretary of state, since the majority of her diplomatic work would involve representatives of foreign governments. In addition, the AP report is based on partial records released by the State Department so far and does not reflect the full scope of people with whom Clinton met as secretary of state.
+
+The AP found that 85 of those 154 people, or “more than half,” had donated to the Clinton Foundation or “pledged commitments to its international programs.” The 85 donors collectively contributed as much as $156 million, the AP reported. There were representatives from at least 16 foreign governments, who donated as much as $170 million to the charity, but those representatives were not included in the 154 number, the AP reported.
+
+This is wrong. Counting from January 2009, nearly 11 million private-sector jobs have been created in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you count all jobs, including government jobs, the figure is 10.5 million.
+
+So how does Kaine come up with 15 million? He’s counting from the low point for jobs in Obama’s presidency, February 2010. When you start the clock from then, the tally is 15 million private-sector jobs and 14.8 million overall jobs.
+
+The last time we checked, February 2010 was 6 1/2 years ago. So with this claim, Kaine is trying to wipe off a year of Obama’s presidency.
+
+Moreover, as a general matter, regular readers know that we tend to discount job-creation records by a president, as so much of the record is due to economic forces beyond a president’s control.
+
+Mark Zandi, a respected economist at Moody’s Analytics, did issue a report saying that if Trump’s economic plans were fully implemented, 3.5 million jobs would disappear, incomes would stagnate, debt would explode, and stock prices would plummet. (This compares to an anticipated increase of 6 million jobs under current Obama administration policies.) In another report, Zandi also said that if Clinton were able to fully implement her economic plans, the economy would create an additional 3.2 million jobs during the first four years of her presidency. Combined with anticipated job creation under current law, that adds up to 10.4 million jobs.
+
+But both reports were highly skeptical that either candidate would be able to get their plans through Congress — even a Republican-controlled one during a Trump presidency — because so many of Trump’s positions are such a departure from GOP principles. Even so, the report said the U.S. economy would likely suffer under a Trump presidency. (The report was issued in June, and Moody’s has not issued an updated report that would reflect additional policies announced by Trump, including a revised tax plan. But the report said Trump’s trade policies would be especially damaging.)
+
+Pence makes it sound like this is U.S. taxpayer money — and he uses a too-high estimate. Because of international sanctions over its nuclear program, Iran had billions of dollars in assets that were frozen in foreign banks around the globe. With sanctions lifted, in theory, those funds would be unlocked.
+
+But the Treasury Department has estimated that once Iran fulfills other obligations, it would have about $55 billion left. (Much of the other money was obligated to illiquid projects in China.) For its part, the Central Bank of Iran said the number was actually $32 billion, not $55 billion.
+
+Trump has called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization obsolete, but he has not said he wants to get rid of it. Asked specifically by The Washington Post in March if he wanted to pull out of NATO, he said, “I don’t want to pull it out. NATO was set up at a different time. NATO was set up when we were a richer country. We’re not a rich country anymore. … I think NATO as a concept is good, but it is not as good as it was when it first evolved.” Trump has argued that “distribution of costs” has to be changed but, as we have noted, Trump frequently overstates the burden on the United States.
+
+Kaine is referring to Trump’s 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” where he made such a comparison about Social Security and said he wanted to privatize the program: “The workers of America have been forced to invest a sixth of our wages into a huge Ponzi scheme. The pyramids are made of paper-mache.”
+
+Trump added in the book: “Privatization would be good for all of us. As it stands today, 13.6 percent of women on Social Security live in poverty.”
+
+But that book was published 16 years ago. On the campaign trail, Trump has said he wants to “keep Social Security intact.… I’m not going to cut it.” His specific plans for the program, however, are vague. His campaign has said “the key to preserving Social Security and other programs that benefit AARP members is to have an economy that is robust and growing.”
+
+For more on Social Security and allegations it is a Ponzi scheme, see The Fact Checker’s guide to critical questions about the program.
+
+This is a zombie claim that just won’t go away. We have awarded it Three Pinocchios, and fact checkers repeatedly debunked this during the 2012 presidential election.
+
+Indeed, the number of ships (272) as of Oct. 4 is the lowest count since 1916 (245 ships). But a lot has changed in 100 years, including the need and capacity of ships. After all, it’s now a matter of modern nuclear-powered fleet carriers versus the gunboats and small warships of 100 years ago. The push for ships under the Reagan era (to build the Navy up to 600-ship levels) no longer exists, and ships from that era are now retiring.
+
+This talking point is a poor way to depict the country’s naval fleet needs. Gunboats of 1915 and aircraft carriers of 2015 are not the same. And military budgets, fleet needs and historical circumstances are much different in 2015 than they were in 1916.
+
+Pence reprises a GOP talking point from the 2012 campaign, but it’s not correct. Obama substituted a different system, but it was on the recommendation of then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican. Gates, in fact, had recommended the original plan to President George W. Bush and then decided the new system implemented by Obama was more effective, less costly and timelier than the Bush plan.
+
+Gates, in his 2013 memoir, noted that while the Obama administration had stumbled in failing to lay the diplomatic groundwork for the shift, looking “like a bunch of bumbling fools,” the Bush plan was already running into trouble in both Prague and Warsaw and likely would have been rejected by parliaments in both countries. “The Polish and Czech governments were relieved,” he wrote.
+
+“I sincerely believed the new program was better — more in accord with the political realities in Europe and more effective against the emerging Iranian threat,” Gates added. “While there certainly were some in the State Department and the White House who believed the third site in Europe was incompatible with the Russian ‘reset,’ we in Defense did not. Making the Russians happy wasn’t exactly on my to-do list.”
+
+In fact, Gates says, the Russians quickly concluded that the Obama plan was even worse from their perspective, as it eventually might have capabilities that could be used against Russian intercontinental missiles.
+
+“How ironic that U.S. critics of the new approach had portrayed it as a big concession to the Russians,” Gates added sardonically. “It would have been nice to hear a critic in Washington — just once in my career — say, Well I got that wrong.”
+
+Trump has walked back the particular claim that Kaine cites, that “wages are too high.” Of course, Trump has flip-flopped on the minimum wage at least five times since August 2015 and has consistently contradicted his own statements, making it hard to track exactly where he stands on the issue at a given time. Trump’s stance on this matter, as of August 2016, was that he supports “raising it to $10 at the federal level, but believes states should set the minimum wage as appropriate for their state.”
+
+During a November 2015 Republican primary debate, Trump was asked whether he was “sympathetic to the protesters’ cause since a $15 wage works out to about $31,000 a year.” His full answer, with the part Kaine is quoting in bold:
+
+Days later, Trump clarified he was referring to whether he would increase the minimum wage. He would not raise it, because then it would be “too high,” he said.
+
+Kaine correctly notes that Pence, as a congressman, voted in 2007 against raising the minimum wage above $5.15.
+
+Pence made this claim in the context of abortion and choosing whether to be for or against abortion rights. But polling does not support this. In fact, it shows young adults’ views on abortion rights are about the same as their elders — unlike issues like marijuana and gay marriage, where young people are more liberal.
+
+Among adults aged 18 to 29, 58 percent said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 39 percent said it should be illegal in all or most cases, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center poll. That was similar to those aged 30 to 49 (59 percent supported abortion, 38 percent opposed) and those aged 50 to 64 (56 percent supported, 37 percent opposed).
+
+“Partial-birth abortion” is usually used to refer to later-term abortions using a specific fetus-extraction method.
+
+Clinton has said she supports a ban on late-term abortions, including partial-birth abortions, as long as the health and the life of the mother are protected. As senator, Clinton opposed the Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003, which did not include a health exception.
+
+Earlier this year, Clinton again said she is “on record in favor of a late pregnancy regulation that would have exceptions for the life and health of the mother.”
+
+Trump has, indeed, said that countries such as South Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia should have nuclear weapons because nuclear proliferation is inevitable. Trump has said that countries like Japan and South Korea would be “better off” if they were armed with nuclear weapons, in order to defend themselves from North Korea. And Trumps said he considers nuclear weapons a last resort, though he would not “rule anything out” regarding their use.
+
+For example, during a CNN town hall in March, Trump was asked: “So if you said, Japan, yes, it’s fine, you get nuclear weapons, South Korea, you as well, and Saudi Arabia says we want them, too?”
+
+Trump answered: “Can I be honest with you? It’s going to happen, anyway. It’s going to happen anyway. It’s only a question of time. They’re going to start having them or we have to get rid of them entirely. But you have so many countries already, China, Pakistan, you have so many countries, Russia, you have so many countries right now that have them.”
+
+This is an odd, inaccurate comment. The Russia-Georgia war took place in 2008, when Clinton was still a U.S. senator. Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, lodged the protests. Whatever diplomatic pressure the Bush team had put on Russia over Georgia was abandoned when President Obama was elected and the administration decided to pursue the ill-fated “reset.”
+
+Kaine gets this right, as Pence repeated a false claim that is popular on the right. The Clinton Foundation does not dole out grants, like a typical foundation, but instead directs the donations it raises directly for specified charitable activities. So simply only looking at the grants does not tell the whole story about the foundation’s activities.
+
+The American Institute of Philanthropy’s “Charity Watch” gives the Clinton Foundation an “A” rating for its efficiency (the top rating is A+). It says the foundation spends 88 percent of its expenses on programs and 12 percent on overhead. It also says the Clinton Foundation spends just $2 to raise $100.
+
+Send us facts to check by filling out this form
+
+Check out our guide to all Trump and Clinton fact checks
+
+Sign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter",REAL
+4626,"How Gary Johnson's Vote Percentages Will Affect Libertarian Party Ballot Access, State By State","There has been a lot of weight placed in Libertarian expectations and hopes for the results for Gary Johnson next Tuesday in terms of getting 5 percent nationally, which will make the Party's next presidential candidate eligible for a category of federal election funds.
+
+While saying things both concise and accurate about ballot access laws in America, which vary state by state in this here federal union, is difficult, you have often heard, including from Gary Johnson himself, that getting that 5 percent will help the Party with ballot access as well.
+
+Technically, the national result, whatever it is, in and of itself has no effect at all on ballot access anywhere but Georgia. (There, a 20 percent result nationally wins petition-free access.)
+
+Every other state's ballot access laws, if vote percents affect them at all, are dictated only by the percentages gained in that state.
+
+That said, under most imaginable circumstances a national 5 percent will mean that the Party also did historically well in lots of individual states also.
+
+What follows, derived from this state-by-state chart from the invaluable Ballot Access News edited by Richard Winger, is a list of what the Libertarian Party will get in terms of automatic, petition-free ballot access if certain vote percentages in that state are hit. A huge proportion of the Libertarian Party's time and effort goes to petitioning for access, so these accomplishments are a big deal for small parties.
+
+It's important to note that any such earned automatic ballot access is not eternal, and in many cases applies only to the next election, 2018, not even to the next presidential election. Below I specify which states get that access for just 2018 or for both 2018 and 2020.
+
+Again, all these vote percentages are in the states in question, not national. In almost all cases, it is not just the presidential ticket hitting this percentage that wins the prize, but any office the entire state is voting for. Thus, the Party can re-win the access in 2018 for 2020 with any office voted on statewide, even though there is not a presidential race in 2018.
+
+Now, the percentages and what they get the Party, and where:
+
+• 0.5 percent gets the Libertarian Party full ballot access without need to spend time and money on petitioning for 2018 in Michigan and New Mexico.
+
+• 1 percent gets the Libertarian Party full ballot access without need to spend time and money on petitioning for 2018 in Kansas, Maryland, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
+
+It would earn such access in both 2018 and 2020 in Oregon.
+
+It would earn such access only for the president slot in 2020 in Connecticut.
+
+• 2 percent gets the Libertarian Party full ballot access without need to spend time and money on petitioning for 2018 in Iowa.
+
+It would earn such access in both 2018 and 2020 in Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, and Utah.
+
+• 2.5 percent gets the Libertarian Party full ballot access without need to spend time and money on petitioning for 2018 in Oklahoma and Washington D.C. [Correction: D.C.'s standard technically is a hard 7,500 votes, which tends to be around that percentage.]
+
+• 3 percent gets the Libertarian Party full ballot access without need to spend time and money on petitioning for 2018 in Arkansas, Idaho, and Massachusetts.
+
+It would earn such access in both 2018 and 2020 in Ohio. [Correction: Since Johnson is on the Ohio ballot technically as an independent this year, not with the L.P. banner, it will be meaningless for Ohio access, alas.]
+
+It would earn such access only for the president slot in 2020 in Alaska.
+
+• 5 percent gets the Libertarian Party full ballot access without need to spend time and money on petitioning for 2018 in North Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas.
+
+It would earn such access in both 2018 and 2020 in Arizona, Louisiana, Minnesota, [correction: Minnesota was mistakenly left off in original post], Nebraska, Rhode Island, and Washington state.
+
+Some states have even higher hurdles to jump for that state's vote totals for president (or other offices voted on statewide) to earn automatic ballot access, or other special cases. (Election law is hard.)
+
+And a group of states give third parties no special ballot access benefits no matter how well the presidential candidate does. Those states are: California, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
+
+Five percent nationally would be an amazing thing for the Johnson campaign and the Libertarian Party. But what really matters for ballot access moving forward is what happens state by state.",REAL
+2996,"White House report offers more on NSA spying on Americans' calls, with Patriot Act set to expire","With debate gearing up over the coming expiration of the Patriot Act surveillance law, the Obama administration on Saturday unveiled a 6-year-old report examining the once-secret program to collect information on Americans' calls and emails.
+
+The Office of the Director of National Intelligence publicly released the redacted report following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the New York Times. The basics of the National Security Agency program had already been declassified, but the lengthy report includes some new details about the secrecy surrounding it.
+
+President George W. Bush authorized the ""President's Surveillance Program"" in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The review was completed in July 2009 by inspectors general from the Justice Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
+
+They found that while many senior intelligence officials believe the program filled a gap by increasing access to international communications, others including FBI agents, CIA analysts and managers ""had difficulty evaluating the precise contribution of the PSP to counterterrorism efforts because it was most often viewed as one source among many available analytic and intelligence-gathering tools in these efforts.""
+
+Critics of the phone records program, which allows the NSA to hunt for communications between terrorists abroad and U.S. residents, argue it has not proven to be an effective counterterrorism tool. They also say an intelligence agency has no business possessing the deeply personal records of Americans. Many favor a system under which the NSA can obtain court orders to query records held by the phone companies.
+
+The Patriot Act expires on June 1, and Senate Republicans have introduced a bill that would allow continued collection of call records of nearly every American. The legislation would reauthorize sections of the Patriot Act, including the provision under which the NSA requires phone companies to turn over the ""to and from"" records of most domestic landline calls.
+
+After the program was disclosed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, President Barack Obama and many lawmakers called for legislation to end that collection, but a bill to do so failed last year. Proponents had hoped that the expiration of the Patriot Act provisions on June 1 would force consideration of such a measure.
+
+A bipartisan group of House members has been working on such legislation, dubbed the USA Freedom Act. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday that Obama is pleased the efforts are restarting in the House.
+
+""Hopefully, the next place where Democrats and Republicans will turn their attention and try to work together is on this issue of putting in place important reforms to the Patriot Act,"" Earnest said.
+
+If no legislation is passed, the Patriot Act provisions would expire. That would affect not only the NSA surveillance but other programs used by the FBI to investigate domestic crimes, which puts considerable pressure on lawmakers to pass some sort of extension.",REAL
+5957,Teens walk free after gang-rape conviction,"Teens walk free after gang-rape conviction Judge said group who left girl, 14, for dead appeared 'repentant' Published: 20 mins ago 
+(Deutsche Welle) In the wake of the news that a group of teenagers were unlikely to see any real punishment for gang-raping a 14-year-old girl and leaving her for dead, citizens of the German city of Hamburg called for new rules regarding violent crime committed by minors. On Monday, an online petition calling for the teens to see jail time had garnered some 21,000 signatures. 
+“The sexual self-determination and integrity of a woman must have more weight than any concern for the perpetrators,” [of sexual crimes,] says the petition. 
+According to an update on the Change.org petition, state prosecutors in Hamburg have said they will explore a way to make sure that the teens are punished despite laws that make it difficult for minors to be prosecuted and sentenced to detention.",FAKE
+1649,"Donald Trump, media manipulator in chief","Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM's weekly program ""The Dean Obeidallah Show,"" a columnist for The Daily Beast and editor of the politics blog The Dean's Report . Follow him on Twitter: @TheDeansreport . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+(CNN) Donald Trump is winning! I'm not talking about the GOP presidential nomination, but about his success in controlling the way the media has covered him in the campaign.
+
+Trump hosting ""Saturday Night Live"" this past weekend was a prime example. Last week the media coverage of Trump was almost exclusively focused on his upcoming appearance on SNL: Would Trump be funny? Could this hurt his campaign? Would a person yell out during the live show that Trump was a racist in protest at Trump's past comments about Latinos? And the list goes on. (I contributed to that coverage with this piece and with CNN appearances.)
+
+Well, the Trump-helmed ""SNL"" has passed.
+
+This has prompted many in the media to now ask: Was the show funny? Did any of the sketches make Trump look unpresidential? What was the point of Larry David calling Trump a racist during the show's opening monologue?
+
+When the media focuses on these types of questions, I can only imagine that Trump must be smiling like a master puppeteer, making his marionettes (the media) dance. This is Trump's world, and the media are merely players in it.
+
+Every time the media focuses on events such as Trump on ""SNL"" or his Twitter feuds and his fights with Fox News' hosts, the media is not pressing Trump on his understanding of public policy issues. And that's a big win for the master media manipulator Trump.
+
+When Trump, or any presidential candidate for that matter, talks in detail about political issues, it's generally divisive.
+
+In fact when Trump unveiled his tax plan in late September, that led many in the media to focus on whether his proposal was feasible, would it be revenue neutral as he claimed, was it a giveaway to the wealthiest Americans, etc.? It also gave his political opponents, such as Jeb Bush , fodder to attack Trump on a policy issue that could attract some GOP primary voters to his candidacy.
+
+But potentially the biggest downside to Trump talking nuanced policy issues is that he has yet to impress us that he truly has a grasp of them, especially those outside the area of economics.
+
+This is a guy who, when asked on ""Meet the Press"" in August where he gets his military advice from, responded: ""Well, I watch the shows. I mean, I really see a lot of great -- you know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows."" In Trump's defense, you can learn a lot about fighting if you watch ""The Real Housewives of New Jersey.""
+
+And on Sunday, when asked by CNN's Jake Tapper how he would handle ISIS, Trump responded, ""we've got to hit ISIS hard ... hit their source of wealth, which is the oil. "" But when Tapper pressed him for details on how he would go about hitting ISIS ""hard,"" Trump coyly stated, ""I hate to say specifically because ... I'd hate to give up all my information up front.""
+
+If Trump had been a former Army general or had even the slightest experience in foreign policy, you might be able to feel confident he truly has a plan. But let's be honest, you get the sense Trump simply hasn't given this much thought.
+
+So what does Trump do to cover for his weakness? He steers the media away from topics he perceives as being detrimental to his campaign into areas where he's strongest. And who can blame him? Why not play to your strengths?
+
+Plus, let's be blunt, most people are more interested in hearing about a celebrity-infused Twitter brawl than about wonky policy details. So for the media, going along with covering Trump the personality over the potential policymaker has an upside.
+
+Between now and the February 1 Iowa GOP caucus, we will see even more of Trump trying to steer the media away from policy issues. Maybe in December we will see Trump show up on ""The Big Bang Theory"" as Sheldon's long-lost uncle. Perhaps in January, The Donald will serve as a guest judge on ""The Voice"" or don a beard and appear on ""Duck Dynasty."" And don't be surprised if Trump picks a Twitter fight with Kanye West, Miley Cyrus and a slew of Kardashians.
+
+With the Iowa caucus only a little over two months away, it's the media's call: Let Trump pull the strings, or cut them and dance on your own? Letting Trump remain in control probably means higher ratings, but it also likely means a less informed electorate when it comes to Trump's views on policy issues. So what's it going to be?",REAL
+3416,Republicans have a weapon to stop Obama recess appointment,"Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is bent on refusing to consider any nominee President Obama may submit to succeed late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. And if he doesn’t give ground, Obama may have only one option for an end-run: a recess appointment.
+
+But Republicans can rest easy: GOP leaders have an ace up their sleeve.
+
+The truth is, it doesn’t take much to prevent a recess appointment, as long as congressional leaders are watching the calendar. Closely.
+
+If you’re trying to block the president from making one to the Supreme Court, all the Senate has to do is commence a session every three days. Because the Senate is only truly in recess after that three-day period.
+
+The Constitution actually requires the House and Senate to meet every three days unless there’s an agreement between the two bodies to skip, and go on recess. With the battle over a Supreme Court pick heating up, don’t expect that to happen in the near future.
+
+All McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., have to do is schedule what are called “pro-forma” sessions at three-day intervals for the rest of the year. Pro-forma sessions are brief meetings of the House and Senate, lasting but a minute or two – and sometimes, a matter of seconds. They help the House and Senate comport with the constitutional mandate of huddling every three days – even if they aren’t really doing anything.
+
+The House and Senate don’t conduct any business during these confabs. In congressional parlance, they’re sometimes referred to as just “gavel-in, gavel-out.” No votes. No speeches. Few words are uttered at all.
+
+The phrase “pro-forma” is derived from Latin, meaning “formality.”
+
+Congress doesn’t consider itself adjourned or on recess if it’s “meeting” every three days. And that’s all it takes to block a recess appointment for the rest of the president’s term.
+
+In 2011 and 2012, Democrats still controlled the Senate. But Republicans ran the show in the House. The GOP-controlled House refused to agree to an adjournment resolution in an effort to block Obama from scuttling a Senate filibuster of his nominees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Thus, the House and Senate met every three days.
+
+In early 2012, the president made four recess appointments in the window between the three-day pro-forma sessions. But the Supreme Court later voided those appointments. The court said that was the point of the three-day sessions. The Senate was indeed in session. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 against the administration’s brazen attempt to slip in appointments between the sessions every three days.
+
+Ironically, Scalia, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion to the NLRB case. They argued “that recess appointments will remain a powerful weapon in the President’s arsenal.” They added it was “unfortunate because the recess power is an anachronism.”
+
+When the roles were reversed, Democrats used the same tool.
+
+For much of the final two years of President George W. Bush’s term, the Democrat-controlled Senate met every few days to block him from making a recess appointment.
+
+In 2003, Senate Republicans blasted minority Democrats for holding up a number of judicial nominations. Democrats had particular trouble with the nomination of Judge Bill Pryor to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Georgia. Democrats didn’t like Pryor’s views on women’s issues and homosexuality. So they filibustered Pryor.
+
+During a summertime adjournment (not amid the three-day, pro-forma theater discussed here), Bush went around the Senate and appointed Pryor without its advice and consent.
+
+Democrats may try to force Republicans to take that vote this summer, too. But Republicans know that the best way to prevent a recess appointment later this year is to just meet every three days.
+
+Capitol Attitude is a weekly column written by members of the Fox News Capitol Hill team. Their articles take you inside the halls of Congress, and cover the spectrum of policy issues being introduced, debated and voted on there.",REAL
+3802,5 key questions about shutting down Gitmo,"President Obama released a plan from the Pentagon on Tuesday that spelled out ways the United States can close the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and send the detainees elsewhere, including to facilities in the United States. Here are some of the key details about the plan and Guantanamo.
+
+Where could the detainees go in the United States?
+
+The plan says the Pentagon team inspected 13 different facilities inside the United States that could accommodate the detainees, but it did not name the sites. Even so, Defense Secretary Ash Carter and other officials have named several potential locations, starting with the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and the naval brig at Charleston, S.C.
+
+""That does not mean those sites will be chosen,"" Carter said last August.
+
+Other potential sites include two prisons in Colorado, including the federal high security prison in Florence.
+
+Convicted terrorists are already held in the Florence prison, including Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in civilian court for the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks; Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up a car bomb in New York's Times Square in 2010; and Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Center.
+
+Elected officials from virtually every state with a facility that could house the Guantanamo detainees have protested, saying that moving the detainees there could jeopardize the safety of their residents.
+
+Why can't the president just close Guantanamo?
+
+In the recent effort last December, Congress approved a spending bill for 2016 that specifically bars Obama from closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility or spending money on a new facility to house terrorists. Obama signed the bill despite provisions he didn't like, such as those about Guantanamo, to avoid a government shutdown.
+
+A defense authorization bill Obama signed last year also included language prohibiting from closing Guantanamo and moving the detainees.
+
+The plan released by Obama Tuesday was meant to show Congress how the prison could be closed and how much it would cost.
+
+How many detainees remain in Guantanamo?
+
+There are now 91 terrorist suspects remaining at the prison. Of those, 35 have been identified as being eligible for transfer out of the prison and to other countries, the Pentagon report said.
+
+At one time during the Bush administration, there were almost 800 detainees at Guantanamo. More than 500 were transferred by the previous administration and 147 by Obama, Pentagon documents show.
+
+Where have the detainees gone?
+
+Since Oct. 1, 2014, Pentagon records show, 58 detainees have been transferred to Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Estonia, Georgia, Ghana, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Mauritania, Montenegro, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, United Kingdom and Uruguay.
+
+Oman, a small nation on the Persian Gulf, has taken the most — 20.
+
+Who decides which detainees are eligible to leave?
+
+That work is done by the Periodic Review Board, an interagency group including representatives from the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department, State Department, the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
+
+The board uses current intelligence and other information to determine if ""the continued detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,"" Pentagon records show.
+
+The administration hopes to finish reviewing all detainees by this fall and to determine if any more are eligible for transfer.",REAL
+6885,Berkeley Protesters Demanding Segregation Force White Students to Cross Creek in Woods to Go to Class,"Berkeley Protesters Demanding Segregation Force White Students to Cross Creek in Woods to Go to Class Oct 28, 2016 Previous post 
+
+It wasn’t long ago that stories of student protests, and their demands for college “safe spaces,” dominated media headlines. 
+While some of that fervor seems to have died down, the outrage at University of California, Berkeley appears to be as strong as ever. 
+Over the weekend, Berkeley students staged a days-long protest demanding that they be given additional “spaces” on campus — and even took to specifically targeting people based solely on the color of their skin.",FAKE
+1145,Democratic debate: 5 takeaways,"Flint, Michigan (CNN) It was no Republican debate -- nobody talked about the size of their hands or made up demeaning nicknames -- but Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were ready for action Sunday night.
+
+Personal frustration peeked through as Clinton unloaded new attacks on Sanders over his opposition to the auto bailout and Sanders portrayed Clinton as a candidate straight out of Wall Street central casting.
+
+Sunday was also '90s night, as the candidates essentially re-litigated major political battles of the era -- including NAFTA, the assault weapons ban and crime bill -- through modern eyes.
+
+The debate came two days before Michigan's primary -- a key test of whether Sanders can expand his appeal to a broader and more diverse electorate -- and was shaped by the concerns of voters in this city that is still struggling with a water crisis for which local, state and federal officials share the blame.
+
+Here are five takeaways from Sunday's debate:
+
+Sanders waved, shouted, eye-rolled, baited and goaded his way through the debate.
+
+Clinton laid into his opposition to the auto industry bailout. That measure was part of a broader rescue of the financial industry, a point Sanders was only too happy to make by saying: ""If you are talking about the Wall Street bailout, where some of your friends destroyed the economy —""
+
+And then Clinton said: ""If you're going to talk, tell the whole story.""
+
+Sanders railed against the bailout, saying that he decided to ""let the billionaires themselves bail out Wall Street -- it shouldn't be the middle class"" -- when Clinton tried to interject again.
+
+""Could I finish? You'll have your turn,"" he said.
+
+He showed his frustration with Clinton again later, saying: ""Can I finish, please? All right?""
+
+The exchange demonstrated a new level of comfort with the hand-to-hand combat of presidential campaigns. But it was also a risky move, making him sound potentially patronizing or dismissive of a candidate who could become the first female president.
+
+This from a candidate who entered the race bragging about never running a negative ad. Sanders might keep their disputes focused on differences of policy -- but at times Sunday night, it looked and sounded personal.
+
+When Clinton was asked about fracking, she launched into a nuanced answer that gave credence to localities, state governments, and more. Her bottom line: There wouldn't be many places where it would be OK under her.
+
+Sanders had a much simpler answer. ""No,"" he said. He doesn't support it. And he said he doesn't care about all the Democratic governors who support it.
+
+This, in a nutshell, is the difference between them. She has nuanced positions that look at the breadth of opinion across the country. She's also keenly aware of the limitations of government, and strains to keep her positions within those limits -- part of what she calls her ""responsibility gene.""
+
+Sanders has definitive positions that take a look at his ideology. That's the Democrat's choice: nuance or no nuance.
+
+This same difference showed up when the two delved into the Flint water crisis at the debate's outset.
+
+Clinton's big move on stage -- her news-making comment at the debate's outset -- was one she'd resisted for months, arguing it was simplistic. But she went for it Sunday night, saying she agrees with Sanders in saying Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder needs to go. ""I agree the governor should resign or be recalled,"" she said.
+
+""First thing you do is say, people are not paying a water bill for poison water. And that is retroactive,"" he said.
+
+So she readied an attack that Sanders didn't seem prepared for, going at the Vermont senator for opposing the auto bailout.
+
+""The money was there and had to be released in order to save the auto industry and 4 million jobs and to begin the restructuring,"" Clinton said. ""I voted to save the auto industry. He voted against the money that ended up saving the auto industry. I think that is a pretty big difference.""
+
+Then, she ticked off a list of states where she thinks that vote will hurt Sanders.
+
+""Given the terrible pressures that the auto industry was under and that the middle class of this state and Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and Wisconsin and Missouri and other places in the Midwest were facing, I think it was the right decision to heed what President-elect Obama asked us to do,"" she said. ""You were either for saving the auto industry or against it. I voted to save the auto industry and I'm very glad that I did.""
+
+The damage was done: When Clinton dropped the auto bailout bomb, the audience audibly ooooohed, highlighting the potency of that argument in the home of the U.S. auto industry.
+
+But he had his tone-deaf moments, sparking outrage on social media when he seemed to suggest that black people grow up poor and in ghettos and white people do not -- a particular eye-raiser because he'd been asked about his racial blind spots.
+
+""When you're white, you don't know what it's like to be living in a ghetto, you don't know what it's like to be poor,"" Sanders said.
+
+For Sanders, this is the central challenge facing his campaign. Clinton blew him out across the South among African-Americans, and Sanders can't withstand her doing so again in big, Midwestern states.
+
+Michigan's March 8 primary will be a key test of whether Sanders can win with a more diverse electorate. The following week -- when Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Florida and North Carolina vote -- will be his moment of truth.
+
+Near the end of the debate, Sanders also cracked a joke about boosting funding for mental health, saying that ""when you watch these Republican debates, you know why we need to invest in mental health.""
+
+It was the right target (Republicans) and the right audience (liberals) -- but perhaps the wrong topic, as he again risked appearing insensitive.
+
+One for the base
+
+The debate was a strong sign that both candidates still see room to gain or lose ground among liberal voters. They spent so much time jockeying to get to each other's left that there was virtually no talk of Republicans at all.
+
+Clinton and Sanders defended government spending and intervention, teachers' unions, gun control, clean energy programs and efforts to fight climate change. They talked about a beefed-up role for the Environmental Protection Agency.
+
+There was no talk about foreign policy, the deficit, entitlements -- subjects always front-and-center at Republican debates.
+
+It's a clear sign that the Sanders camp doesn't see the Democratic nominating contest ending anytime soon, with liberal bastions like New York (which votes in April) and California (June) available as opportunities to rack up lots of delegates.
+
+Increasingly, Clinton is eyeing the general election on the campaign trail -- axing her usual shots at Sanders from her stump speech, focusing on the economy and laying into Republican front-runner Donald Trump. That wasn't apparent Sunday night.",REAL
+5478,Europe or Russia: Could Moldova's presidential election determine its future?,"Europe or Russia: Could Moldova's presidential election determine its future? Moldova goes to the polls for the first time in 25 years to elect a new president Moldova goes to the polls to elect a new president at a time of tensions between pro-Russian and pro-EU camps. 
+
+A woman walks by electoral posters in Chisinau, Moldova. Moldovans will vote for a president on Oct. 30 i n an election, which could move the former Soviet republic closer to Europe or to Russia. Photo: AP 
+On the last Sunday of October, presidential elections will be held in the Republic of Moldova. This small state in southeastern Europe does not rank among the major international players, ye t its significance should not be underestimated . 
+Moldova is located on the border between the post-Soviet space and the European Union , and over the past 25 years, its territory, wedged between Romania and Ukraine, has more than once been an arena of both competition and cooperation between the West and Russia. The emergence of the post-Soviet Moldavian state also produced the Transnistrian conflict , which had outsized influence in the development of Russian policies toward newly independent former Soviet republics and the relations between Russia and the European Union.
+Between the East and the West Moldova is a strategic partner of the EU. It was the first state the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to receive visa-free travel to the EU for its citizens. Additionally, it has special political and historical-cultural ties with Romania.
+As experts Dmitri Furman and Cristina Batog wrote, “of all the titular nations of the former Soviet, and later, post-Soviet republics, the Moldovans possess the most uncertain, contradictory mentality,” and the question of whether they are part of the larger, divided Romanian nation or a separate Moldovan ethnicity has not been decided yet, either on the personal or political level. 
+As a result, there is a serious competition within the country between two national-state projects, “Moldavianism” and “Unionism” (or “Romanianism”). This situation would be unimaginable in other countries with separatist regions, such as Georgia or Azerbaijan .
+Also read: "" Will Moldova become a new flashpoint for Russia and Europe? "" At the same time, Chișinău officially declares its neutrality and, unlike Tbilisi and Kiev, has not forced its relations with NATO . This approach is not least due to the presence of a considerable and stable part of the electorate that is interested in preserving ties with Russia, as well as to the problems concerning the Gagauzian Autonomy, whose population also favors Eurasian integration. 
+Nevertheless, Moldova rejected the federalization project proposed by Moscow in 2003 as part of a resolution to the Transnistrian situation. At the time, the republic was led not by a coalition that favored closer ties with the EU, but by the Communist Party headed by Vladimir Voronin, which came to power advocating rapprochement with Russia and the Union State of Russia and Belarus.
+Political turmoil The Oct. 30 presidential election is an important milestone in the country’s history. For the first time in 20 years, the president will be elected by popular vote. Since 2000, the head of state has been elected by the members of parliament, but in March of this year, Moldova’s Constitutional Court repealed the previous amendments to the Republic’s Constitution that gave this power to the parliament. 
+The problems with the country’s electoral system had been known for some time. After Voronin left office in 2009, the country went for three years without a legitimate president. The parliament could not reach a consensus on the country’s next leader, who had to be elected by a three-fifths majority of legislators. Moldova was governed by the speaker of parliament who was given the status of “acting president.” Only in March 2012 did Nicolae Timofti gain the deputies’ support and was elected president.
+Crises and mistrust of the main institutions of power have become a chronic disease in post-Soviet Moldova. In September 2015, a scandal broke out when multi-millions were withdrawn from the country’s three leading banks and transferred offshore. 
+Mass protests ensued, and some observers were quickly to refer to the moment as a “Chișinău maidan” after the protests that brought down the government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich . The protests had the effect of uniting those who wanted closer integration with Romania and those who wanted closer integration with the EU while alienating those inclined to deepen ties with Russia. 
+The decision on returning to direct election of the president was adopted, to a large extent, under the influence of that social-political turbulence. The election was considered an attempt to establish political legitimacy against the backdrop of growing mistrust of the other governmental institutions.
+Candidates and positions The favorites in the election are Igor Dodon, leader of the Socialist Party, and former Minister of Education (2012–2015) Maia Sandu. Four days before the election, Marian Lupu, a democrat and former speaker of the parliament (2005–2009 and 2010–2013) withdrew his candidacy. All the leading candidates engaged in bashing their opponents and promoting their own domestic policy agendas, they also have vastly different foreign policy values. 
+Dodon is pro-Russian and favors Eurasian integration, Sandu supports deeper cooperation with the EU. Lupu explained his withdrawal from the campaign because of the necessity to consolidate the supporters of the “European choice.” 
+Also read: "" Revealing the post-Soviet identity complex in Transnistria "" Under close scrutiny though, such differentiation is mostly artificial. The same Dodon, who denounced the Moldova–European Union Association Agreement early in the discussions over it spoke more cautiously as the campaign went on, promoting instead a tri-lateral format of cooperation between Brussels, C hișinău and Moscow). 
+Dodon, who is also supportive of a flexible approach to Transdnistria, was the Deputy Minister and then Minister for Economy and Trade when Moldova and Ukraine tried to carry out an “economic defreezing” of the region in March 2006. At that time, Ukraine decided to ban Transnistrian goods from traveling across its border unless they were documented by Moldova’s customs office.
+In Tiraspol, that step was regarded as the introduction of a joint Ukrainian–Moldavian economic blockade of Transnistria, since goods could not flow out any other way. This was, of course, an exaggeration, but it strengthened the already powerful pro-Russian sentiments on the left bank of the Dniester. Obviously, Moldova’s Ministry of Economy and Trade and its key officials, including Dodon, played a role in the decision.
+Should the pro-European camp suffer a defeat in the election, neither the country’s foreign policy nor its position towards the settlement of the Transnistrian conflict is likely to shift substantially. Unlike Kiev, both the pro-Russian and pro-European camps in Chișinău are interested in preventing a large-scale confrontation with Moscow. 
+As for the “Romanian factor,” Bucharest has considerably changed its rhetoric under the new president Klaus Iohannis. The political focus shifted from propagating the idea of the “great union,” as phrased by the former Romanian leader Traian Băsescu, to building economic ties not only with the Republic of Moldova but also with Transnistria. In this, Bucharest is influenced to some extent by the European Union, which against the background of the conflict in Donbass and the migration crisis, is not interested in the escalation of another standoff close to its borders.
+The opinion of the author may not necessarily reflect the position of Russia Direct or its staff. ",FAKE
+4069,"Solemn, stupefied, families in Kathmandu after earthquake","Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN) The clamor and chaos of the previous day has dissipated by the time we arrive at Kathmandu's only airport. The mad rush of 24 hours previously, in those first confusing, cacophonous hours following the 7.8-magnitude earthquake near the Nepali capital, had died down. Now, families sit, camped out, silent and patiently waiting, but for now abandoned.
+
+At the airport, at passport control, we meet a Nepalese man, who is unable to contact his family. They live in a village 20 km from the epicenter. He also has two cousins on Everest, he says. He has no way to reach any of them.
+
+Stepping out of the terminal building, the devastation is apparent. It is an overwhelming introduction to this city that, less than 48 hours ago, was hit by the worst earthquake this country has experienced in 80 years.
+
+The death toll has skipped past 3,000 and climbs, inexorably. Taking into account the fact that many rural areas, just as badly affected but isolated and vulnerable, have yet to be evaluated, the human cost is staggering.
+
+Across town the bus station is a hive of activity as scores try urgently to leave the city, to make it out to the outlying areas so badly affected by this quake. Communications are down and so many here are desperate to make it out to their stricken families, and discover their fate.
+
+The scene is repeated at every gas station; snaking lines of Indian-made Tata cars, and motorcycles, waiting to fill up. People are clambering aboard buses, into cars, trying to get as far away from this devastation as possible.
+
+Remaining inside Kathmandu, neighbors stare forlornly at their former homes, now collapsed piles of rubble. We visit a Montessori school, mercifully empty as the children had the Saturday off. A seven-story building behind it, however, was home to a small church, and housed a congregation of between 40 and 50 when tragedy occurred.
+
+The pastor's son Nakul Tamang clambers up a ladder, looking for an entrance into the ruined facade, looking to retrieve his father, not knowing if he will find him alive or dead. Rescue teams stop him before he reaches the top. The building is not secure, but Tamang doesn't care. ""It's sad, it's hard,"" he says. Six bodies had already been pulled from the concrete and steel wreckage.
+
+A nearby five-story structure has collapsed in on itself. It was pink, with wrought balconies. Now it is pancaked, reduced to a third of its height and a mess of rubble and reinforced steel. One woman has been pulled out of the wreckage, and rescuers continue to work in a precarious hollow scooped out from the fallen bricks. Officials tell the onlookers that there is a chance that survivors may have been protected in a corridor as the building came down around them.
+
+A day after the earthquake struck, they found a woman under the rubble. Unhurt; in shock, but alive. It is this hope that keeps Narayan Gurung going: the belief that his wife and 7-year-old are still alive. ""I raced here after the earthquake. I haven't slept for days,"" he says. Workers dig painstakingly, slowly removing piles of stone and debris. They spot someone's hair, but can't yet reach the body or tell if it's male or female.
+
+Wherever there is rubble in this city, there is a police or military presence. They are not necessarily commanding the digs but they keep onlookers from getting too close, or directing traffic as best they can. For their part, the onlookers look shell shocked -- there is little outpouring of grief, no sobbing or wailing, but rather a solemn, dazed, collective sense of disbelief.
+
+Tundikhel Park was, just two days ago, a vast, open green oasis in the city, but is now a mess of tents. Some have made their own, the army is setting up others. Metal bleacher-style seating has been set up, with dozens of people sitting, waiting, makeshift blue tarp tents pitched underneath. People bring in fresh fruit, and there are water sellers -- although clean bottled water is becoming hard to to find. People queue endlessly for food and water.
+
+There is a mobile government field hospital here, and those treated wait listlessly outside, a collection of crushed hands, broken legs, strapped ankles. One little boy was hit by a falling brick. ""I felt something like a fire, and I ran, and then something hurt me a lot."" he says. ""I am still scared.""
+
+And so is everybody else: those who survived clinging to those they love.",REAL
+6819,Re: Andrew Breitbart – twitchy.com,"— Alyssa Canobbio (@AlyssaEinDC) October 28, 2016 
+Not a day goes by that we don’t miss Andrew Breitbart. But it’s days like today when we really feel his absence and wonder what could have been. Andrew Breitbart was right about a lot of things. But m n was he right about Anthony Weiner 
+— Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) October 28, 2016 
+Was he ever. 
+As Twitchy told you , the FBI reportedly decided to reopen their probe into Hillary Clinton in light of emails discovered on one of Anthony Weiner’s devices. Tweeters are having a field day, of course. But it will still never come close to perhaps one of the greatest moments in modern media history: Big ups, AB. pic.twitter.com/qMxopaGBo6 
+Here’s the whole thing, because it’s just so fantastic: 
+Those were the days, weren’t they? The only sad thing about this Anthony Weiner / HRC insanity… It makes me sad Andrew Breitbart is not here to enjoy it. #HillarysEmails 
+— Andrews Dad (@Andrew_Dad) October 28, 2016 
+It’s indeed sad that Breitbart is no longer with us. Still, hopefully we can all draw some comfort in remembering his brilliance — and smiling at the thought of him right now. Andrew Breitbart, still doing his thing from beyond. 🙂",FAKE
+3853,Just How Big Is The Asia Trade Deal Obama Wants? It's A Beast,"Just How Big Is The Asia Trade Deal Obama Wants? It's A Beast
+
+One of the most basic facts about the Trans-Pacific Partnership is also the most important: It's huge.
+
+The trade deal got over a big hurdle Friday when the Senate voted in favor of giving the Obama administration ""fast-track"" authority to negotiate the deal with Canada and 10 Asian nations.
+
+That leaves the U.S. House, and it's unclear it has the votes yet. If it passes, though, TPP, which has angered many in the president's party, would be by far the largest free trade agreement the U.S. has in effect.
+
+The 12 nations involved in TPP make up about 36 percent of global gross domestic product, or GDP, according to data from the International Monetary Fund. That sets the TPP well apart from the 14 free trade agreements the U.S. currently has in effect with 20 countries (to be fair, the U.S. accounts for nearly 23 percent of global GDP by itself).
+
+Not only that, but these nations together account for about one-third of global trade, according to the Brookings Institution.
+
+So the TPP stands apart from other trade agreements in its size. But that's only one dimension of its impact. Another way the TPP is gargantuan is tougher to quantify in a bar graph: its scope. It not only covers basic trade issues like tariffs, but also a variety of other areas like labor and environmental and intellectual property.
+
+The size and scope of TPP matter because they are at the center of the debate. The Obama administration sees the deal's broad reach as positive — the agreement, the administration says, will open up the U.S. to all kinds of new markets and business.
+
+Agribusiness companies, for example, are excited about having new avenues for their products. The labor and environmental provisions, the administration also argues, will force other nations to up their game on those issues, ""leveling the playing field.""
+
+Not only that, but the TPP's size is all the more important for the one economic superpower that isn't included in it: China. One of the administration's top arguments for the deal is that in negotiating TPP, it ""writes the rules"" for trade with a large swath of eastern Asian countries before China can with its own trade agreements.
+
+But opponents, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., worry about the sweep of the deal. Leaked chapters have intellectual property advocates, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, worried it goes too far in areas like extending copyright laws and fair use rules. Doctors Without Borders has also argued the deal could make for more expensive generic drugs, restricting access to medicine for some consumers.
+
+However, some wish the pact went further — environmental groups like the Sierra Club, for example, believe the provisions won't do enough to address overfishing.
+
+But then, no one outside members of Congress, negotiators and a small group of cleared individuals has access to the pact, so it's hard to know exactly how far it will (or won't) go. And that is perhaps the source of the most tension in the TPP debate: that such a big deal is being negotiated behind closed doors.
+
+If Congress grants the administration fast-track (also known as Trade Promotion Authority), it will mean two to four months for public comment before Congress gives the deal an up-or-down vote, with no amendments or debate.
+
+The administration argues that this is unprecedented transparency for a trade deal. Opponents, however, believe it would be too little, too late in what has now been a seven-year negotiating process.",REAL
+7179,Clinton Is the Most Dangerous Person Alive – An Interview with Edward S. Herman,"2016 presidential campaign by Ann Garrison 
+The just-concluded election revealed as much about the corporate media, which has broken every rule of journalism to support Hillary Clinton, and the fraudulence of much of the American Left, which turns out to have no real problem with war or capitalism, than it did about the candidates, themselves. Edward Herman is an exception, a genuine man of the Left. He says “a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war with Syria and Russia.” Clinton Is the Most Dangerous Person Alive – An Interview with Edward S. Herman by Ann Garrison 
+“ The election of Hillary Clinton might threaten a democratic order as much as a Trump victory.” 
+Ann Garrison: Earlier this year, you told me that you differ with Noam Chomsky, your co-author of Manufacturing Consent and other books, in that you plan to vote for the Green Party's presidential and vice presidential candidates Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Are you still planning to do so? 
+Edward S. Herman: Yes. 
+AG: Can you explain why? 
+ESH: Because the two duopoly candidates are dangerous to societal and international welfare and even survival. Hillary Clinton is a neo-liberal and pre-eminent war-monger. I think she is the most dangerous person living in the world today, given her highly likely election victory and her likely performance as president. She represents the corporate elite and military-industrial complex more clearly than Trump and she is a follow-on to Bush and Obama. She will pursue similar policies except for her somewhat more aggressive bent. 
+Trump is a self-promoting windbag, racist and dangerous, unpredictable phony. We have a ghastly choice in these two. Jill Stein offers a protest opportunity, more so than not voting. On the line that either voting for Stein or not voting would constitute a vote for Trump, one might argue that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war with Syria and Russia and a vote for Netanyahu (and hence for escalated violence in Palestine). 
+AG: Hillary Clinton and John Podesta's e-mail has revealed that Hillary Clinton is well aware that the Saudi and Qatari rulers - not rogue elements - fund ISIS, and the same Saudi and Qatari rulers fund the Clinton Foundation. Throughout the last George Bush's presidency, there were innumerable headlines that ""Saudi oil sheikhs met with George Bush on his Crawford, Texas ranch."" What are your thoughts on that? 
+ESH: Saudi Arabia is a US ally and an instrument of the warfare state. Hillary Clinton has treated its leaders warmly and she will continue to do so as president. The Clinton Foundation's receipt of money from Saudi and Qatari leaders is a first class conflict of interest and outrage, but the media have focused on the many less important abuses of Trump, helping cover over the outrages of their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, and her husband, Bill Clinton. 
+AG: What do you think of Clinton's statement that she would make removing Bashar Al-Assad her top priority? And Trump's statement that he would not, because that would recklessly risk confrontation with Russia? 
+ESH: Hillary Clinton has essentially promised to escalate war in Syria and is therefore promising to go to war with Russia as well. Diana Johnstone has made the case that Hillary Clinton plans to try to bring about ""regime change"" in Russia (cite). This is of course incredibly dangerous and would have aroused a really democratic media, but the existing media are part of the war system, hence Hillary Clinton's commitment to wars is essentially suppressed. Trump has made a number of statements along the lines of reducing US interventions and commitments abroad and trying to deal with Russia in a less confrontational manner, but he has sometimes contradicted himself by urging expanded arms, use of nuclear weapons, etc. But Hillary Clinton has said nothing that would offset her war-mongering. This difference from Trump may help explain the intensity of media hostility to Trump. 
+AG: Jill Stein has said that ""wars for oil are blowing back at us wth a vengeance"" and that she would cut the military budget by half, close most of the foreign bases, and redirect resources into a Green New Deal that would fully employ Americans building sustainable energy and agricultural infrastructure. I can't imagine you disagree, but do you think it's important for the Greens to articulate such a vision at the national and international level, instead of focusing solely on local races that they might win? 
+ESH: The Greens don't have the resources to compete in many local elections. So she is wise to focus on the big national and international issues. Furthermore, the real gap in the political system is the lack of opposition to national neoliberal and militaristic policies. It is said that she can't make a bigger mark given the hegemony of the duopoly, but even Ralph Nader couldn't get 5 percent of the vote. The system still works well, for the 1%. 
+AG : Michael Moore has made a movie called ""Trumpland"" and warned that Trump's election would be the end of the United States , assuming that would be a bad thing. David Swanson, author of ""War Is a Lie,"" has imagined the same but argued, in "" Secession, Trump, and the Avoidability of Civil War ,"" that the break-up of the United States is not the worst possibility on the horizon. Do you have any thoughts on this? 
+ESH: Michael Moore is completely oblivious to the fact that the enlarging war that is likely to follow Hillary Clinton's election threatens not only a nuclear exchange but also attacks on civil liberties and the march toward fascism. In its own way, the election of Hillary Clinton might threaten a democratic order as much as a Trump victory. The anti-Trump hysteria has tended to block out consideration of the Hillary Clinton menace. 
+AG: Is there anything else you'd like to say about why you're voting for Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka? 
+ESH: I've always believed in the moral rule laid down in the categorical imperative: ""Do that which you would wish generalized."" Ann Garrison an independent journalist based in Oakland, USA.",FAKE
+8163,Harvard Cancels Men’s Soccer Season After Finding Sexually Explicit ‘Reports’ Continued Through 2016,"Harvard Cancels Men’s Soccer Season After Finding Sexually Explicit ‘Reports’ Continued Through 2016 Andrew M. Duehren et al., Harvard Crimson, November 3, 2016 
+Harvard has cancelled the men’s soccer team’s season after an Office of General Counsel review found that the team continued to produce vulgar and explicit documents rating women on their perceived sexual appeal and physical appearance. 
+Athletics Director Robert L. Scalise wrote in an email to Harvard student athletes that he decided to cancel the rest of the team’s season because the “practice appears to be more widespread across the team and has continued beyond 2012, including in 2016.” 
+“As a direct result of what Harvard Athletics has learned, we have decided to cancel the remainder of the 2016 men’s soccer season,” Scalise wrote. “The team will forfeit its remaining games and will decline any opportunity to achieve an Ivy League championship or to participate in the NCAA Tournament this year.” 
+Last week, The Crimson reported that the 2012 men’s soccer team created a “scouting report” of that year’s women’s soccer recruits, rating them numerically and assigning each a hypothetical sexual position. University President Drew G. Faust instructed OGC, Harvard’s team of lawyers, to “review” the matter. 
+{snip} 
+“The decision to cancel a season is serious and consequential, and reflects Harvard’s view that both the team’s behavior and the failure to be forthcoming when initially questioned are completely unacceptable, have no place at Harvard, and run counter to the mutual respect that is a core value of our community,” Faust wrote in a statement. 
+Faust wrote she “was deeply distressed to learn that the appalling actions of the 2012 men’s soccer team were not isolated to one year or the actions of a few individuals.” 
+{snip} 
+Last week, when Scalise first saw the documents—which were, until recently, publicly accessible through the 2012 team’s Google Group—he said he would immediately reach out to coaches of both men’s and women’s teams to discuss the report, but added that any response should be internal to Harvard and “not a media thing.” 
+{snip} 
+Men’s soccer coach Pieter S. Lehrer wrote in a statement that the team is “beyond disappointed that our season has ended in this way, but we respect the decision made by our administration.” 
+{snip}",FAKE
+6666,HOMESCHOOL FAMILIES TARGETED IN DISTRICT’S ‘OPERATION ROUND UP’,"Home › POLICE STATE › HOMESCHOOL FAMILIES TARGETED IN DISTRICT’S ‘OPERATION ROUND UP’ HOMESCHOOL FAMILIES TARGETED IN DISTRICT’S ‘OPERATION ROUND UP’ 0 SHARES 
+[10/31/16] A public school official in Florida has urged citizens to fight truancy by reporting any children they suspect might not be in school or being educated — including homeschool families. 
+It is all part of an “anti-truancy” initiative called Operation Round Up, in which residents of Jackson County, Florida, are urged to be on the lookout for children not in school and to report them to school officials or to police. 
+A truancy report can lead to a home check by sheriff’s deputies or police and possibly the arrest of the parents, TV station WJHG reported. 
+The policy of the Jackson County School District is to send law enforcement to the homes of suspected truants. 
+“Sometimes if these citizens don’t call me, I have no way of knowing,” Shirl Williams, director of student services for the school system, told the TV station. “So if it’s a nosy neighbor, be a nosy neighbor. Just call me and let me check out the situation.” Post navigation",FAKE
+1396,Iowa's secretary of state rips Ted Cruz over campaign mailer,"""Today I was shown a piece of literature from the Cruz for President campaign that misrepresents the role of my office, and worse, misrepresents Iowa election law,"" Paul Pate, a Republican, said in a statement Saturday.
+
+The mailer gave the recipient, along with their neighbors, poor grades based on their individual voting history. On one side, the mailer reads: ""ELECTION ALERT: VOTER VIOLATION,"" ""PUBLIC RECORD"" and ""FURTHER ACTION NEEDED.""
+
+The other side of the mailer says ""VOTING VIOLATION"" in red letters at the top before text that reads:
+
+""You are receiving this election notice because of low expected voter turnout in your area. Your individual voting history as well as your neighbors' are public record. Their scores are published below, and many of them will see your score as well. CAUCUS ON MONDAY TO IMPROVE YOUR SCORE and please encourage your neighbors to caucus as well. A follow-up notice may be issued following Monday's caucuses."" Cruz campaign spokeswoman Alice Stewart confirmed to CNN that the mailer was from the Cruz campaign. ""Accusing citizens of Iowa of a ""voting violation"" based on Iowa Caucus participation, or lack thereof, is false representation of an official act,"" Pate said in his statement. ""There is no such thing as an election violation related to frequency of voting. Any insinuation or statement to the contrary is wrong and I believe it is not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses."" Pate continued, ""Additionally, the Iowa Secretary of State's Office never 'grades' voters. Nor does the Secretary of State maintain records related to Iowa Caucus participation,"" Pate said. ""Also, the Iowa Secretary of State does not 'distribute' voter records. They are available for purchase for political purposes only, under Iowa Code."" Cruz, however, was defiant to reporters when asked about the mailer in Sioux City, Iowa, on Saturday night. ""I will apologize to no one for using every tool we can to encourage Iowa voters to come out and vote,"" he said. The mailer comes as Cruz is in a heated battle with GOP front-runner Donald Trump in the critical first-in-the-nation voting state. A Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics survey released Saturday night found Trump holding a slight lead in the Hawkeye State, 28% to 23%. Put the CNN election center to work on your device. Get the CNN app.",REAL
+9540,Legend of The Brave Buffalo; Thousands of Wild American Bison Appear at Standing Rock.,"We Are Change 
+Thousands of wild American Bison appear from no where at Standing Rock http://wearechange.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/1-bisons.mp4 Words Of ”Brave Buffalo”… Teton Sioux Medicine Man I have noticed in my life that all men have a liking for some special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay more attention to these preferences and seek what is best in order to make themselves worthy of that toward which they are so attracted, they might have dreams that would purify their lives. Let a man decide upon his favorite animal and make a study of it, learning its innocent ways. Let him learn to understand its sounds and motions. The animals want to communicate with man, but the Great Father does not intend they shall do so directly, man must do the greater part in securing an understanding. The Tatanka Oyate were called upon and gave us courage. Pilamiya Maske for your vision. Stay strong Water Protectors! 
+The great bison or buffalo of North America is a very powerful symbol to American Indians. Though best suited to cooler climates, bison roamed virtually in entire continent.
+The smaller woodlands bison and its bigger cousin, the plains bison were revered and honored in ceremony and every day life. To the plains Indian, our Bison Brother meant sacred life and the abundance of the Creator’s blessing on Mother Earth.
+The bison is powerful medicine that is a symbol of sacrifice and service to the community. The bison people agreed to give their lives so the American Indian could have food, shelter and clothing.
+The bison is also a symbol of gratitude and honor as it is happy to accept its meager existence as it stands proud against the winds of adversity.
+The bison represents abundance of the Creator’s bounty and respect for all creation knowing that all things are sacred.
+The chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe criticized law enforcement’s “militarized” response to the camp and called for demonstrations to remain peaceful, but stressed that activists would not give up their cause.
+“Militarized law enforcement agencies moved in on water protectors with tanks and riot gear today. We continue to pray for peace,” Dave Archambault II said in a statement Thursday evening.
+“We won’t step down from this fight,” he added. “As peoples of this earth, we all need water. This is about our water, our rights, and our dignity as human beings.”
+Follow WE ARE CHANGE on SOCIAL MEDIA SnapChat: LukeWeAreChange 
+fbook: https://facebook.com/LukeWeAreChange 
+Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange I nstagram: http://instagram.com/lukewearechange Sign up become a patron and Show your support for alternative news for Just 1$ a month you can help Grow We are change We use Bitcoin Too ! 12HdLgeeuA87t2JU8m4tbRo247Yj5u2TVP Join and Up Vote Our STEEMIT The post Legend of The Brave Buffalo; Thousands of Wild American Bison Appear at Standing Rock. appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+2959,"Clinton commits Benghazi gaffe, saying US 'didn't lose a single person' in Libya","Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton committed her second gaffe in as many days on the campaign trail Monday night, claiming that the U.S. ""didn't lose a single person"" in Libya during her time as secretary of state.
+
+Clinton made the comment defending her push for regime change in the war-torn North African nation at an Illinois town hall hosted by MSNBC.
+
+""Now, is Libya perfect? It isn't,"" Clinton said. After contrasting her approach toward Libya with the ongoing bloodshed in Syria's civil war, Clinton said ""Libya was a different kind of calculation and we didn't lose a single person ... We didn’t have a problem in supporting our European and Arab allies in working with NATO.""
+
+Clinton made no mention of the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans: U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALS Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
+
+Questions about the attack and its aftermath have dogged Clinton throughout her second run for the White House, with emails released by the State Department contradicting several aspects of her testimony before the House Select Committee investigating the attack.
+
+Earlier Monday, Clinton's campaign was forced to scramble to clarify comments she made about coal jobs at a CNN town hall Sunday night.
+
+""I'm the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country,"" Clinton said, ""because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.""
+
+With many workers in crucial primary states like Ohio and Illinois relying on such jobs, Clinton's campaign put out a statement stressing that, “Coal will remain a part of the energy mix for years to come” and Clinton’s plan would also safeguard workers’ retirement and health benefits.
+
+Spokesman Brian Fallon said “no candidate in this race is more devoted to supporting coal communities than Hillary Clinton” and “any suggestions otherwise are false.""",REAL
+9539,Braless Jourdan Dunn flaunt their supermodel figures in racy see-through dresses,Support Us Braless Jourdan Dunn flaunt their supermodel figures in racy see-through dresses,FAKE
+361,House passes $612B defense policy bill despite veto threat,"The House passed a nearly $612 billion defense policy bill Friday despite President Obama's veto threat and Democratic worries that the measure opens the door to sharp cuts in domestic spending later this year.
+
+The vote was 269 to 151 for the bill, which maps next year's military and national security programs.
+
+A 2011 bipartisan budget deal placed caps on defense and domestic spending. The defense bill that passed skirts those limits by putting $89 billion of the total into an emergency war-fighting fund, which is exempt from the caps. Democrats predict that Republicans won't attempt to do end-runs around the spending caps when it comes to domestic spending.
+
+Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, urged his colleagues to vote against the bill.
+
+""It doesn't fix the problem,"" Smith said. ""The president has promised to veto all the appropriations bills and the defense bill that are based on this flawed approach to the budget. So what we are doing here is ultimately not going to be successful until we come up with a better long-term solution to dealing with the budget caps.""
+
+Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has acknowledged in recent days that the approach is not the best way to ""run a railroad.""
+
+But he urged the Democrats Friday to vote for the bill anyhow by quoting the last line of an editorial published Friday in The Washington Post: ""Far better for him (Obama), and his party's leadership in Congress to help an adequate defense budget keep moving through Congress rather than perpetuate a fight all Americans, whether Republican or Democrat, might later regret.""
+
+Overall, the House bill authorizes $515 billion in spending for national defense and another $89.2 billion for the emergency war-fighting fund for a total of $604.2 billion. Another $7.7 billion is mandatory defense spending that doesn't get authorized by Congress. That means the bill would provide the entire $611.9 billion desired by the president, but he and Democratic lawmakers still oppose it.
+
+House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote a letter on Thursday urging her colleagues to vote against the bill.
+
+""The Republican defense authorization bill before the House is both bad budgeting and harmful to military planning -- perpetuating uncertainty and instability in the defense budget, and damaging the military's ability to plan and prepare for the future,"" the California Democrat wrote. ""As Defense Secretary (Ash) Carter said last week, Republicans' approach is `clearly a road to nowhere,' `managerially unsound' and `unfairly dispiriting to our force.' ""
+
+The White House pushed back against a host of provisions in the bill, including one that would make it harder for Obama to close the military prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Ukraine, it calls for arming Ukrainian forces fighting Russian-backed separatists, a move the Obama administration has so far resisted.
+
+The administration also opposes measures that aim to bypass the Iraqi government in Baghdad and give money directly to Iraqi Kurdish fighters. That has angered Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who threatened to attack U.S. interests if the provision passes.
+
+The Senate version follows the same approach to funding the military. The Senate Armed Services Committee voted 22-4 on Thursday to authorize $523 billion in base funding for the Defense Department and other national security programs and an additional $90.2 billion for the emergency war-fighting fund.
+
+In the House, lawmakers debated 135 amendments to the measure.
+
+The House voted 221-202 to strip an immigration provision opposed by conservatives. The nonbinding provision would have encouraged a Pentagon study on allowing immigrants brought illegally to the country as children to enlist in the military. Conservatives who pushed the vote say the measure would have encouraged amnesty and validated what they consider to be unconstitutional actions Obama has taken to protect millions of immigrants from deportation.",REAL
+1122,Top takeaways from the Miami Republican debate,"Before a critical round of primaries on Tuesday, the Republican presidential field gathered for a debate in Florida, site of perhaps next week's most pivotal contest.
+
+Here are the top takeaways from Thursday night's debate:
+
+You'd be forgiven if you assumed Thursday's debate would be something akin to a professional wrestling cagematch. After all, it was just a week ago that Trump was not-too-subtly defending his manhood in response to a recent jab from Marco Rubio about the size of his hands. There was none of that at the University of Miami. To be sure, there were shots at Trump, and he returned in kind, but they were mostly policy-oriented.
+
+Rubio hit Trump on Social Security — ""the numbers don't add up,"" he said of Trump's proposals. Both Rubio and Ted Cruz took on the front-runner for being insufficiently supportive of Israel. ""On Israel, Donald has said he wants to be neutral between Israel and the Palestinians,"" Cruz said. ""As president, I will not be neutral."" That's a far cry from the tone and tenor of recent debates and perhaps a recognition by all the candidates — and particularly Trump, the favorite to emerge as the nominee — of a need to change the public's perception of the GOP campaign has voters look ahead to November.
+
+Trump, perhaps the ultimate provocateur of the 2016 field, seemed almost stunned by what was happening on stage. ""So far, I cannot believe how civil it's been up here.""
+
+It doesn't take sophisticated political analysis to understand that Rubio needs to win in his home state of Florida next Tuesday to maintain any semblance of a path forward, particularly after poor showings in this week's contests. The Florida senator has clearly moved away from the more personal assault on Trump, an approach he in recent days acknowledged he regretted.
+
+On Thursday night, he aimed to take on Trump by more by demonstrating a superior understanding of policy, whether on entitlements or foreign policy. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, also sought to draw a contrast with Trump on the restoration of relations between the United States and Cuba. Trump said he would've focused on making a better deal with the Communist nation. Rubio countered: ""Here's a good deal: Cuba has free elections, Cuba stops putting people in jail for speaking out, Cuba has freedom of the press . .... That's a good deal."" Earlier, pushing back against Trump's boasts against political correctness, the Florida senator scored some points with this line: ""I'm not interested in being politically correct. I'm interested in being correct.""
+
+Polls paint a bleak picture for Rubio's hopes of overtaking Trump, but his more subdued, controlled approach to taking on the front-runner may at least give voters a glimpse of the candidate who, at least for a time, seemed to be the GOP establishment's best chance.
+
+Cruz and Trump haven't found much to agree on recent weeks, but they did find common cause on one issue Thursday night: delegate math. ""I guess there's two of us up here that can, and there are two of us that cannot at this moment,"" Trump said, referring to himself and Cruz as the only two GOP hopefuls who can still win the nomination.
+
+""Donald is right,"" Cruz said. ""There are only two of us that have a path to winning the nomination: Donald and myself."" Indeed, Trump and Cruz are far ahead in the delegate race, with the New York billionaire at 458 and Cruz with 359, according to the most recent Associated Press tally, more than 200 delegates ahead of Rubio's 151.
+
+Cruz clearly wants a one-on-one battle with Trump, who, likewise, doesn't want delegates scattered so widely that it could increase the likelihood of a contested convention that ultimately turns against him. To that end, Trump laid down a marker for how he thinks the nomination should be decided, regardless of whether someone gets secures a majority 1,237 through the primaries, which he called ""a very random number.""
+
+""I think that whoever gets the most delegates should win,"" Trump said. ""That's what I think.""
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich, like Rubio, faces a must-win in his home state on Tuesday. In the University of Miami debate he sought, as he has throughout the campaign, to highlight his experience. He cited the support he had from ""55% of the foreign policy experts in this country"" and detailed his many years on the House Armed Services Committee.
+
+He also defended some of his views that aren't exactly in sync with many of the party's most conservative activists. On Common Core, he said ""all I'm in favor of in Ohio is high standards."" Contrast that with Cruz, who called Common Core ""a disaster."" On the environment, Kasich said ""I do believe we contribute to climate change, but I don't think it has to be ... either you're for some environmental stringent rules or, you know, you're not going to have any jobs. The fact is, you can have both.""
+
+These positions might be seen as heretical among some conservatives, but if — and it's a giant if — he can survive in the race long enough for states with larger segments of more moderate voters to hold contests, those views could position him as a more viable alternative to Trump or Cruz.",REAL
+10070,"The Fall of the Saudis, the Battle after ISIS","First published October 31, 2016 
+Iraq is going to invade and destroy Saudi Arabia. They would have done it back in 1990 except for waffling by George H.W. Bush who had initially authorized the move and then rescinded approval, according to statements made by former Congressman Ron Paul, based on WikiLeaks State Department hacks. 
+Saddam was blocked in 1990, and that may well have been a huge mistake on the part of everyone involved. When the US returned in 2003, it was Saudi cash that financed the Sunni Wahhabist was against the coalition government in Baghdad, a war that continues to this day, with the same cast of characters, the same Saudi cash, but they now call it “ISIS.” 
+5000 Americans died fighting Saudi paid jihadists. 
+Saudi Arabia has always known that Iraq has only allowed them to continue their mischief so long as they served a purpose. When the war with Iran ended in 1988, that purpose had ended also. 
+Saudi mischief in Iraq, playing tribe against tribe, pushing for Kurdish separatism and partnering with Israeli intelligence, ramped up as America scaled back her military presence under President Obama. 
+By 2014, a logistics and command structure to destroy both Syria and Iraq had been established, headquartered in the Saudi embassies in Beirut and Amman and operating military operations centers, designed and built by the Israelis, at key locations in Turkey and quickly bolstered by satellite facilities across Iraq and Syria. The Saudi’s were feeling time getting away from them, their decades of military buildup, based on endless oil and investment performance, no long sustainable. They had to knock out Syria and Iraq, using Israel, Turkey and NATO as surrogates, push the US into destroying Iran and cleanse Yemen of threats. 
+They bribed everyone they got near. Were the Saudi’s really the ones behind the Arab spring? Do we see the hands of Saudi Arabia when Israel channels Hamas fighters into the Yarmouk Camp, outside Damascus, to bolster ISIS forces? These are the telling events few see, but that prove the hypothesis and provide what is needed to predict a future that may well no longer include the Dark Kingdom. 
+With a world obsessed with Islamic extremism and terror threats, why is no one looking at where it comes from, who finances, whose ideas are behind it and who it serves? With fingers pointing at the Mossad or CIA and so many others, the real issue is Wahhabism and the real root of it all is Saudi Arabia. 
+There is no version of 9/11 that doesn’t credit Saudi Mohammed Atta as planner of 9/11, whether assisted by Israeli art students or Osama bin Laden, depending on which theories you follow. The Saudi’s did it and American civil courts are busy now assessing the damages. 
+Oil money and sovereign immunity and, oh yes, control of the UN Human Rights Council, from which Russia was just expelled, protect them also, despite their abuses and love of head chopping. Pro-Iran militias in Iraq 
+What is playing out now will lead only one direction , to a stronger Iraq, one under Shiite control with the economically powerful Sunni families, quietly migrating to their second homes in Dubai and Qatar. 
+The crippled military the US saddled Iraq with will be gone, replaced by powerful Iranian-trained militias. 
+The American-trained army joined ISIS. Had Prime Minister Maliki, back in 2014, been more aware of the threat, he would have moved against the Army. That, however, would have renewed the civil war, a war that could only have been ended with Iranian military intervention and Iran was still reeling with sanctions and the threat of American invasion. 
+That threat is gone also. That world is gone, or soon will be as is being played out in Mosul and Aleppo. No one would have imagined Baghdad’s resolve or the partnership between Russia and Iran. Still in question is Turkey’s role. It is clear someone promised them Aleppo and Mosul, as is reflected in their military incursions into Syria and Iraq. 
+If Saudi Arabia thinks Turkey will lift a hand to block Iraq’s wrath, they are delusional. Turkey knows it can have peace with Iran and that both share similar ideas about the Kurds. This far outweighs any Turkish ambitions to the South. Turkey may well be planning a new Ottoman Empire, but Saudi Arabia is not in the cards for Turkish occupation. Members of the Abbas combat squad, a Shia militia, trained with Iraqi soldiers in Basra 
+This leaves the protection of the United States and the upcoming election. Is there any American political leader that would oppose Iraq were they to hit Saudi Arabia, by 2020 or 2021? 
+The prediction is that Iraq will come out of this war intact and, if they do, with a victorious army for the first time genuinely answerable to Baghdad and reeling from the battle of Mosul, likely to leave 20,000 civilians dead in its wake or more, the national enmity for Saudi Arabia will know no bounds. 
+The Sunni gangsters from Anbar that aligned with the Saudis are mostly dead, many beheaded by ISIS. The promised Kurdish state in Erbil, the so-called “Barzani Sultanate” will not be handed control of the massive Kirkuk oil fields and the Ceyhan Pipeline by ISIS, as may well have been planned. 
+Without these assets, Erbil will still enjoy a strong commercial presence but will never be able to reach into the Kurdish diaspora and bring the millions home and under questionable rule, subject to Erbil’s deal making with everyone. Eventually Erbil will become a ghost town, the sons that returned will again migrate and Turkish ambitions, seemingly undone, will be fulfilled. 
+As it appears now, Iraq will survive. Iraq also knows that what Saudi Arabia tried twice, they will try again and that the only way Iraq can be free is if Saudi Arabia falls. 
+And then there is Iran. Iranian aircraft have carried out strikes against the Islamic State. (Photo: TomoNews US) Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War who has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues, and is a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook .”",FAKE
+1821,Romney's Exit Unleashes Race for Donors Among 2016 Hopefuls,"Mitt Romney's exit from the presidential campaign has unleashed a frenzy of fresh fundraising and set off a new race for the backing of donors who had remained loyal to the 2012 Republican nominee.
+
+Big dollars were said to flow immediately on Friday to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who already had won over several of Romney's past donors. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie claimed the support of others who were waiting on Romney to make a decision about whether to seek the White House a third time.
+
+Tony Carbonetti, a Christie supporter and top aide to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a 2008 GOP candidate, said every major Republican donor got at least two calls on Friday — one from Christie's people and one from those promoting Bush.
+
+None of the Republicans considering a run for president has formally entered the race. But most have established political committees that effectively serve as campaigns-in-waiting of varying sophistication. That step allows the politicians to raise money to pay for travel, staff and the logistics of getting ready to run for the White House.
+
+The competition for donors to those organizations is fierce, with commitments signaling the potential strength of a nascent campaign and laying the groundwork for more fundraising to come.
+
+Romney raised more than $57 million before the first voting in 2012, and that figure is often cited as this campaign's benchmark.
+
+Even before Romney's announcement Friday, Bush had picked off several of Romney's past supporters. Among them was Lisa Wagner, a top Midwest fundraiser for Romney in 2012 who pushed hard to win over others Friday.
+
+""I've raised a million dollars in the four hours since he announced that I otherwise would not have raised,"" she said. Her converts included Bill Kunkler, part of Chicago's wealthy Crown family, who had been holding out for Romney.
+
+""I'll work for Jeb. Period. And no one else,"" he said.
+
+Christie had his own pickups. None was more significant than Bobbie Kilberg, a Virginia-based fundraiser who said she and her husband were all-in for the former federal prosecutor.
+
+""We will support him financially and we will be bundlers for him,"" she told The Associated Press, referring to the practice of rounding-up donations from friends, family and colleagues for a campaign.
+
+Ray Washburne, the outgoing finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, has taken up the same position with Christie's political action committee. Washburne said his phone started ringing early Friday.
+
+""It's been very, very positive. A lot of people that were kind of fence-sitters have come off the fence,"" he said. ""We've been very, very encouraged.""
+
+Others were too upset or stunned by Romney's announcement to decide what to do next. That includes Bill Simmons, a Washington-based donor who raised money for both of Romney's previous campaigns.
+
+""I haven't fully thought about the next step,"" he said.
+
+He said Romney's announcement was like seeing his favorite team lose in the playoffs and then having to decide for whom to cheer in the Super Bowl. ""I guess I'll watch the game a little bit.""
+
+Romney's flirtation with the race may have created space for a third candidate to compete alongside Bush and Christie for the support of establishment-minded donors and fundraisers.
+
+With his exit, there is now room for someone else to step into that spot. In the hours after Romney's announcement, several GOP donors said Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker appeared to have the edge.
+
+The news came at the end of a big week for Walker. He earned a standing ovation from a conservative crowd at a forum in Iowa last Saturday. The next day, he spoke to wealthy conservatives in California at an event organized by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.
+
+Walker ended the week in Washington as the guest of wealthy Republican donor Fred Malek.
+
+""Walker fits into that mainstream group, and this means he's getting a lot of interest and attention lately,"" said Republican consultant Charlie Black.
+
+So, too, might Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who spent the week courting donors on the West Coast, Texas and Chicago after attending the Koch brothers' event.
+
+Few donors interviewed after Romney's announcement mentioned the several candidates likely to compete to the right of Christie and Bush. That group includes Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
+
+""Mitt was going to probably occupy a different place on the shelf than me,"" Huckabee said. ""I don't know that it has any impact on support, donors. It probably has a bigger impact on Jeb Bush and Chris Christie.""
+
+South Carolina political strategist Warren Tomkins warned against singling out any one candidate, or type of candidate, as the clear beneficiary of Romney's decision.
+
+""It still goes back to having a good message and a good messenger,"" said Tompkins, Romney's South Carolina campaign chairman in 2012. ""If you've got that, then at some point you get momentum, and then the money will come.""",REAL
+10175,WH Press Secretary Says Obama's Denial About Clinton Server Was 'Entirely Factual'," 
+After the release of a WikiLeaks email chain from March 2015 on Tuesday in which a top Clinton aide admitted President Barack Obama falsely claimed he did not know about Hillary Clinton’s private server use while she was secretary of state, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest sprung into action to deny that the president had lied about the issue.
+“What the president said was an entirely factual response,” Earnest said to a group of reporters in Los Angeles where Obama was attending Democratic fundraisers.
+Earnest then attempted to explain away all criticism of the president’s actions as mere conspiracies.
+ 
+Related Stories Hannity Proposes A Sendoff For Obama In The Event Of A Trump Presidency WikiLeaks: Podesta Said Obamas ‘Don’t Need To Be This Nice’ To President Bush And First Lady WikiLeaks Reveals Obama Knew About Clinton’s Emails; ‘Clean This Up’ “I recognize that some of the president’s critics have attempted to construct some type of conspiracy about the communication between the president and the secretary of state,” he said.
+He continued, “But they’ve failed to put forward a conspiracy that withstands any scrutiny, so I guess they are back to recycling thoroughly debunked conspiracies.”
+Obama himself denied any knowledge of the server, telling CBS reporter Bill Plante in March 2015, just after the server revelations that he learned of the Clinton’s private email server “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”
+ 
+Several days after the server revelations in March 2015, Earnest told the press that Obama knew about Clinton’s email address and had sent messages to it but knew nothing about a private server.
+He reiterated that position on Tuesday.
+“The president did trade emails with Secretary Clinton, not a large number of them,” Earnest said.
+“Of course the president had possession of Secretary Clinton’s email address, but he did not have any knowledge of where her server was located or what sort of arrangements had been made to store her email.”
+ 
+Trending Stories Frustrated With Media Bias, Trump Campaign Takes Its Case Directly To Voters With Nightly Show On Facebook Independent Voters Push Trump To The Front In Florida And Ohio RNC Official Takes CNN Host To Task For Claiming There Is No Media Bias However, the Wikileaks email chain – which Earnest referred to as “stolen” and therefore illegitimate – tells a different story, with top Clinton aides seemingly in a panic that it could come to light that the president was lying when he said he did not know about Clinton’s private server.
+“[L]ooks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news,” Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin said in a March 7, 2015 email published Tuesday by WikiLeaks.
+“[W]e need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov,” responded former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills.
+What do you think?",FAKE
+2423,The new surgeon general's 4 rules for health,"President Obama nominated him for the post of US surgeon general, the nation's top spokesperson for public health, back in November 2013. The Senate then promptly blocked his nomination for more than a year, particularly after the National Rifle Association criticized a letter Murthy had co-signed in support of gun control measures. Murthy only got confirmed in December 2014 after some red-state Democrats who were losing their seats anyway decided to switch course and back him.
+
+
+
+
+
+In person, however, it's harder to see how the mild-tempered Murthy became such a lightning rod. He meditates daily, he told me, to ""center myself, a chance for me to remember who I want to be every day."" And he's starting his tenure with a listening tour that took him across America — rather than a push for any particular policies. Indeed, he has already said he wasn't interested in using his post ""as a bully pulpit for gun control.""
+
+Before his swearing-in ceremony today, I spoke with Murthy at length about what he sees as the biggest public health issues facing the country, what he hopes to achieve as surgeon general, and why the best ways to boost health may have nothing to do with medicine.
+
+The surgeon general is essentially the nation's top spokesperson on health matters. Past officeholders have often used the position to call attention to pressing public health issues such as smoking or obesity. Murthy plans to do the same. But though he's a physician by training, he argues that institutions outside of medicine often have the biggest impact on public health.
+
+""I first started thinking about that when I was practicing medicine,"" Murthy says, ""and I realized that I would sit in the clinic with patients or sit at their bedside, and talk to them about changing their diet, about improving their physical activity. I would question how much of an impact I was having on their ultimate decisions about their lifestyle. If you ask any doctor or nurse who has cared for patients, they will often tell you they have had similar experiences.""
+
+""It’s often our family and friends who can impact the choices we make around food""
+
+He elaborated: ""If we think about ourselves, it’s often our family and friends who can impact the choices we make around food. It’s the food options that are available at work or in the cafeteria that might impact the choices we make during the third of our lives we spend at work. It can be what we hear in church Sunday morning that impacts how we think about important issues in our society.
+
+""That’s why I have come to believe if we are going to overcome the great health challenges our country faces right now, we have to do so with a coalition of leaders. This includes not only doctors, nurses, and health professionals but also our employers, schools, faith-based organizations, civic institutions, and the various people and institutions in our country that actually impact decisions people make day to day.""
+
+Take, for instance, the obesity crisis, which Murthy has called one of his top priorities. He argues that it's not enough to engage doctors on this issue — employers, faith-based organizations, and other institutions need to play a role, too.
+
+""I want to make sure I’m working with employers to make physical activity a greater part of work culture — recognizing that this not only has benefits for the physical health of employees but also positive effects on emotional well-being and mental function,"" he says.
+
+The same goes for mental health, which needs to be addressed by institutions outside of medicine. ""I want to work with faith-based leaders to address the negative attitudes associated with mental illness,"" he explains.
+
+This, in general, fits with Murthy's broader approach to public health: ""We have to do more than build hospitals and more clinics. We have to invest in prevention and community prevention, and recognize that institutions that don’t have the word health in their name — faith-based groups, employers, schools — have a massive impact on the health decisions people make every day. That's why we have to engage these institutions in doing their part to improve health.""
+
+So how does Murthy focus on staying healthy? ""I have four rules I follow for myself,"" he says.
+
+""One is to eat healthy. I tend to avoid salt, added sugar, and processed foods whenever possible, and try to eat fresh fruits and vegetables as part of all my meals whenever possible.
+
+""Second is to stay physically active. That means not just going to gym but incorporating activity into whatever I do, whether that’s taking the stairs or converting sitting meetings to walking meetings whenever possible.
+
+""Third is making sure I’m focusing on my emotional and mental well-being. For me, an important part of that is the meditation practice that I do every morning. It’s a chance for me to center myself, a chance for me to remember who I want to be every day.
+
+""The fourth thing is I remind myself to stay away from toxic substances like tobacco and drugs.""
+
+The surgeon general doesn't just promote public health. From his perch, Murthy will also likely have to play a role in combating misinformation. I asked him about Dr. Oz, arguably the most famous health proselytizer in America, who has come under fire for his use of pseudoscience. ""I have never actually watched Dr. Oz on TV so I can’t really comment,"" Murthy says.
+
+""Too often, doctors and nurses don’t speak out when it’s needed the most""
+
+But Murthy does agree that the public often faces a problem in sorting through all the health information out there: ""In general, when people think about diet and physical activity, there’s a lot of information out there, and it can be very confusing for people. That's why I think it’s very important for us to understand the science behind the recommendations we make around diet and physical activity.""
+
+He adds, ""I have been on the road a lot these last few months. One of the things that came up time and again was the pervasive misinformation that exists around certain hot-button issues. Diet is one of them. In recent months, in light of the measles outbreak, there has also been some confusion around vaccinations. That was an issue I spoke about a lot on the road, helping people understand that when it comes to the measles vaccine it's both safe and effective, and there's no link to autism.""
+
+So what's Murthy's role in all this? ""I will continue to make sure we are getting scientifically grounded messages out there to the public about questions that concern them the most,"" he says. ""But it's not just the responsibility of the surgeon general but of every public health professional who understands science, who is trained to evaluate evidence, and who knows the cost we incur when patients are misinformed about the treatments they need.
+
+""Too often, doctors and nurses don’t speak out when it’s needed the most — when there are controversies around issues, whether it be vaccines or e-cigarettes or other health topics. They can not only answer questions that the public may have but also push our institutions and policymakers and leaders to find answers when we don’t have them.""
+
+Murthy's mention of e-cigarettes brought up a related question. E-cigarettes are one of the biggest puzzles facing the medical community right now, since the science behind them is still so nascent. So how does he think about the issue?
+
+""Our scientific understanding of e-cigarettes has been far outpaced by the actual use of e-cigarettes""
+
+""Our scientific understanding of e-cigarettes has been far outpaced by the actual use of e-cigarettes,"" Murthy says. ""This means people are asking questions we don’t always know the answers to. Some of those questions are: Do e-cigarettes have adverse effects on health? Do they lead children to be more open to smoking regular cigarettes? And do they help with cessation for people who are current smokers? These are questions we haven’t adequately answered yet through research — but we have to do so because, as a recent CDC report showed, e-cigarettes use tripled over the last year among youth. That to me is very concerning when we don’t fully understand the potential adverse impacts of e-cigarettes.""
+
+He continues, ""Should we promote or allow the use of e-cigarettes by minors and by people who don’t smoke at all? This is where I'm concerned. We know nicotine is not a benign substance. We know it has potential harmful effects on the body including the development of the adolescent brain. Speaking as a regular person, I would not want my children — if I were blessed enough to have children — to be exposed to nicotine unnecessarily, whether that’s through their smoking of e-cigarettes or traditional cigarettes or whether that was through secondhand vapor or smoke.""
+
+In April, Murthy did a public service announcement on Sesame Street to remind kids to get vaccinated. Can we expect more of that in the future?
+
+""The public service announcement we did with Elmo around vaccines was just one example of the different types of communication tools we want to use to make sure we’re getting the right message to kids and adults about health,"" Murthy said. ""But to make sure we’re reaching everybody — to use a variety of messengers, messages, channels. We have to be creative about how we do it.
+
+""When it comes to obesity, thinking about nutrition, I want to work closely with our entertainment leaders and our leaders in sports to make sure we’re setting positive role models for kids in particular when it comes to choices around physical activity and nutrition. """,REAL
+5242,How Clinton's Email Controversy Is Affecting Her Campaign,"With just 59 days remaining until Election Day, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is still facing questions - and attacks - over her email controversy.
+
+Her Republican opponent Donald Trump took shots at her over the issue Thursday while speaking in Cleveland.
+
+""Remember, Hillary Clinton was emailing about the drone program among many other extremely sensitive matters. This is yet more evidence that Clinton is unfit to be your commander in chief,"" the business mogul charged.
+
+Clinton has claimed that she didn't send or receive any email with classified marking, but a new report from Fox News says that a Clinton email had classified markings on virtually every paragraph.
+
+Meanwhile, Clinton talked freely about her faith to the National Baptist Convention, the oldest African-American Baptist denomination.
+
+""Sometimes people ask me, are you a praying person? And I tell them, 'If I wasn't one before, one week living in the White House or on the campaign trail would've turned me into a praying person,"" she said in Kansas City, Missouri, Thursday,
+
+Clinton's lead over Trump has been dropping in the polls in recent days. But the race will, as always, come down to the Electoral College, especially in the swing states -- and the polls show the race getting tighter in four of the key states.
+
+In a new Quinnipiac poll that also includes the two independent candidates, Trump has a slight lead in Ohio, but is tied with Clinton in Florida. The former secretary of state, however, holds slim leads in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
+
+While Clinton still appears to be ahead in the Electoral College, the campaign is far from over.
+
+Both candidates are likely to focus the last two months of the campaign on the battleground states, where the race will almost certainly be decided.",REAL
+3738,Police say 170 arrested in deadly biker gang shootout at Texas restaurant,"Police in Waco, Tex., said Monday they had arrested 170 people after a shootout involving multiple biker gangs at a restaurant that left at least nine people dead.
+
+While investigators worked to piece together precisely what happened on Sunday, authorities said they remained alert after receiving threats of possible retaliation against police officers after the chaotic brawl.
+
+The sea of people arrested were charged with engaging in organized criminal activity, which is a capital murder charge due to the number of victims, Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, a Waco police spokesman, said at a news conference Monday.
+
+“There was a significant danger here yesterday because of the amount of violence that occurred behind us here,” Swanton said while standing in front of the restaurant.
+
+The spasm of deadly violence began when members of biker gangs began fighting inside the restroom of Twin Peaks, a restaurant in a retail strip on Interstate 35 known to locals as a biker bar. In addition to firearms, the fighting involved fists, feet, knives and chains, officials said.
+
+Swanton said that gunfire began inside the restaurant before spilled out onto the patio bar area and then into the parking lot. Several shooting victims were found near the front of the restaurant or in the parking lot around it, he said.
+
+“We had wounded inside, we had people stabbed, we had people shot and we had people beat,” Swanton said.
+
+There were already 18 police officers and another four officers from the state Department of Public Safety in the parking lot because officials had received information about the danger posed by these gangs being in the same place, Swanton said. Once outside, the bikers turned their gunfire on the police officers who responded, he said.
+
+“Those officers’ reactions…to a very hostile, deadly situation saved our citizens’ lives yesterday afternoon,” Swanton said.
+
+After the fighting, authorities said that nine people had been killed, and remarkably no police officers or other bystanders in the area had been injured.
+
+The 170 people taken into custody were initially taken to the city’s convention center for processing before being brought to the McLennan County Jail, which was still working to process all of these individuals on Monday.
+
+Police originally said 192 people were arrested, but Swanton revised that number on Monday and said it was possible the number could still change as they continued to sift through all of the names.
+
+The jail, located about 15 minutes away from the retail strip where the shootings occurred, was still working Monday morning to process all of the people who had been arrested, an official said.
+
+Authorities continued to investigate the area around the Twin Peaks restaurant on Monday. More than 100 motorcycles and dozens of other vehicles remained in the parking lot.
+
+“We’re not in a rush,” Swanton said. “This is obviously a very large investigation involving numerous agencies and organizations, and we’re going to get it right.”
+
+[Police: Restaurant has some answering to do]
+
+Swanton said police have received information about “payback” against officers and reports of bikers flooding into the area after the shooting. As a result, he said officers have been stationed around the region to watch for any threat.
+
+“There was a green light put out on law enforcement is our understanding from last night,” he said Monday. “We’re aware of that threat, and we have the appropriate response if we have to face that.”
+
+The brawl occurred on Sunday at noon at the sports bar, with violence erupting and sending terrified patrons diving for cover in a busy Central Texas shopping center.
+
+Swanton was critical of the restaurant, saying after the shootout that its management has “not been of much assistance to us.”
+
+It was typical to see motorcycles parked outside of Twin Peaks, said Saul Cornejo Bravo, 19, a server at a Mexican restaurant next door.
+
+“But not that many, especially on a Sunday afternoon,” he said. “Usually I see them there later at night.”
+
+Bravo said that he was working on Sunday when the shooting occurred, and within seconds he saw emergency vehicles flooding the parking lot.
+
+He saw one man wearing a biker’s vest who appeared to have been shot in the stomach. Paramedics tried to perform CPR for several minutes, Bravo said. “Then they just covered him up,” he said.
+
+Off-duty police officers shopping in the retail strip rushed to the scene despite lacking any protective gear, Swanton said. Meanwhile, some of the people who ran away from Twin Peaks as the chaos unfolded took shelter behind an empty building.
+
+“We sat there gathering our wits,” said J.R., who works at Cabela’s Outpost, an outdoors store across the parking lot from Twin Peaks. “At first you think it’s like a carjacking or something. But then, with all the shots and people running you realize it’s something more serious.”
+
+Police said in a statement Monday said the Twin Peaks restaurant and parking lot were “still a very active crime scene” — one that “is littered with bullets, blood and other evidence. Civilian as well as Police units with bullet holes remain to be processed.” Parts of Central Texas Market Place, where the Twin Peaks sports bar is located, were expected to remain closed for the day, police said.
+
+Five known gangs were believed to be involved in the brawl, Swanton said, but he would not identify them on Monday.
+
+“I am not about to give them the respect of mentioning their names…. We don’t care what their names are, and we’re not going to give them publicity,” he said.
+
+Swanton said it was still not clear how many shots were fired by gang members or police. It was unclear whether any of the nine bikers killed in the fight were shot by police.
+
+“It was chaos,” said J.R., who declined to give his last name. “People were screaming and going crazy. Most of it seemed to be in the parking lot, and it was over very quickly.”
+
+All of the people charged with organized crime activity will face a capital murder charge, Swanton said, due to the number of people killed Sunday. Texas state law says that a person who murders more than one other person “during the same criminal transaction” can face this charge, while  suspects can be charged with organized criminal activity if they carry out a murder or capital murder as part of a criminal street gang.
+
+Eighteen people were taken to hospitals after the brawl with injuries that included stab and gunshot wounds, Swanton said. Some victims were being treated for both, he told reporters in Central Texas on Sunday.
+
+“I was amazed that we didn’t have innocent civilians killed or injured,” Swanton said, according to the Associated Press, which noted:
+
+McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara said all nine who were killed were members of the Bandidos or Cossacks gangs, according to the AP.
+
+A threat assessment released last year by the Texas Department of Public Safety classified the Bandidos gang in the second-highest tier threat. The Department of Justice lists the Bandidos as one of the handful of organized motorcycle gangs that “pose a serious national domestic threat.”
+
+[How the Bandidos became one of the world’s most feared biker gangs]
+
+For some in the region, they could sense rising friction between the different motorcycle gangs when members were at the same bars and restaurants.
+
+“There were these little tiffs going on, and then you add alcohol,” said Richard, a motorcycle enthusiast who also declined to give his last name. “I just felt like there was tension.”
+
+He said biker had activity had increased in and around Waco in the last few years, probably because of its proximity to both the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Austin.
+
+“Ninety nine percent of of the people who ride bikes are good people, doctors, lawyer, engineers,” said Richard, an engineer. “It’s the one percent that don’t care about anything. They say, ‘We’ll do what we do.’ It was a rude awakening for the rest of us. Is this going to land on our doorsteps? Is this what we have to look forward to? What happens if we’re wearing the wrong shirt in the wrong neighborhood? That’s what has a lot of us worried.”
+
+On Sunday, witnesses described seeing a mass shootout that involved dozens of of guns being fired inside the restaurant and in the parking lot along Interstate 35, according to CBS affiliate KWTX. The station reported that panicked patrons and employees sought refuge from the mayhem in the restaurant freezer.
+
+Hours later, authorities from multiple law enforcement agencies — including local and state police, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — were still trying to secure the area and survey the large crime scene, which was littered with more than 100 weapons.
+
+“In 34 years of law enforcement, this is the most violent crime scene I have ever been involved in,” Swanton said, according to the Waco Tribune-Herald. “There is blood everywhere. We will probably approach the number of 100 weapons.”
+
+Swanton called it “one of the worst gun fights we’ve ever had in the city limits. They started shooting at our officers.”
+
+The officers returned fire, Swanton said, and some armed bikers were shot by police. Swanton defended the officers’ actions and said they prevented more deaths.
+
+“Their action has saved lives in keeping this from spilling into a very busy Sunday morning,” he said, according to CNN. “Thank goodness the officers were here, and took the action that they needed to take to save numerous lives.”
+
+Authorities said it was not immediately clear what precisely triggered the violence, but the potential for conflict did not surprise the Twin Peaks staff or officers. McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna told the AP that tensions between the gangs had been building for months.
+
+Police were bracing for violence: Swanton said Waco police officers and state officers were at the sports bar when the fighting began and that they had secured the area because they “expected issues.” He said the restaurant’s management requested the officers in anticipation of trouble.
+
+“We have been made aware in the last few months of rival biker gangs — rival criminal biker gangs — being here and causing issues,” Swanton said. “We have attempted to work with the local management of Twin Peaks to get that cut back, to no avail. They have not been of much assistance to us.”
+
+Jay Patel, operating partner for the Twin Peaks franchise in Waco, said in a statement Sunday: “We are horrified by the criminal, violent acts that occurred outside of our Waco restaurant today. We share in the community’s trauma. Our priority is to provide a safe and enjoyable environment for our customers and employees, and we consider the police our partners in doing so.”
+
+Patel added that “our management team has had ongoing and positive communications with the police and … we will continue to cooperate with the police as they investigate this terrible crime.”
+
+Swanton called Patel’s statement a “fabrication,” according to the AP, which reported that the Waco police “described the management as uncooperative with authorities in addressing concerns about the gangs.”
+
+“Are we frustrated? Sure,” Swanton said, according to CNN. “Because we feel like there may have been more that could have been done by a business to prevent this.”
+
+Police said Monday that the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission “is implementing a Summary Suspension closing Twin Peaks for at least 7 days. This is not a punitive action on TABC’s part but done due to the ongoing danger it presents to our community.”
+
+CBS affiliate KWTX reported that the Twin Peaks corporate office canceled the Waco store’s franchise agreement on Monday.
+
+“We are in the people business and the safety of the employees and guests in our restaurants is priority one,” the company said in a statement, according to KWTX. “Unfortunately the management team of the franchised restaurant in Waco chose to ignore the warnings and advice from both the police and our company, and did not uphold the high security standards we have in place to ensure everyone is safe at our restaurants.
+
+“We will not tolerate the actions of this relatively new franchisee and are revoking their franchise agreement immediately. Our sympathies continue to be with the families of those who died and are very thankful no employees, guests, police officers or bystanders were hurt or injured.”
+
+A witness who had just finished lunch at a nearby restaurant told KWTX that he and his family walked into the parking lot when they heard multiple gunshots and saw wounded people being removed from the scene.
+
+“We crouched down in front of our pickup truck because that was the only cover we had,” said the man, who asked not to be identified.
+
+Another witness, Michelle Logan, told the Tribune-Herald: “There were maybe 30 guns being fired in the parking lot, maybe 100 rounds. They just opened fire. … There’s a lot of people in the hospital, a lot of people shot.”
+
+Vehicles parked near the restaurant were riddled with bullet holes, the newspaper noted.
+
+Headquartered in Dallas, Twin Peaks is a casual dining chain with dozens of locations nationwide that employs a largely female staff scantily clad in plaid shirts and mini shorts.
+
+“Twin Peaks Girls,” the company advertises, offer customers “signature ‘Girl Next Door’ charisma and playful personalities.”
+
+The Waco location opened in August and was touted by a company spokesman as offering 24 types of beer and 55 flatscreen TVs, as well as “Bike Night” on Thursdays.
+
+“Get revved up and ready to go at Twin Peaks bike night,” a calendar on the Twin Peaks Waco Web site advertised.
+
+Holley, du Lac and Berman reported from Washington. Madigan reported from Waco.
+
+[This post, originally published on May 17, has been updated multiple times.]",REAL
+2745,"You really expect me to believe that? Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and our liberal media","Reporter: Mr. President, when did you first learn that Hillary Clinton used an email system outside the U.S. government for official business when she was Secretary of State?
+
+POTUS: The same time as everybody else, through news reports.
+
+On Sunday, President Obama insisted he knew nothing about Hillary Clinton and her use of a separate server to send email while serving as his secretary of state for four years, and learned about it through news reports along with the rest of us. How many times have we seen this movie? How many times has this administration been confronted with a scandal only to have the president or his spokesmen make this statement with straight faces?
+
+It makes you wonder: What goes on behind the scenes that results in these whoppers? Since this administration lives in a fantasy land, let's imagine scenes of our own:
+
+RG: Mr. President, we're so very sorry to interrupt your game --
+
+POTUS, staring at VPOTUS, irritated: Why are you here?
+
+RG: Sir, it looks like that Air Force One photo-op over Manhattan almost caused a massive panic. We need a response from you.
+
+POTUS: Joe, can't you handle this?
+
+VPOTUS: It's your plane, sir. Mine was flying over Pittsburgh and no one noticed.
+
+RG: We have your talking points, sir. Just tell the press, ""It was a mistake. It was something we found out about along with all of you.""
+
+POTUS: Fine. Now get lost, both of you.
+
+That scenario may be fictional -- but those were, in fact, the very words Obama used.
+
+March 22, 2011, 11:15 AM. Oval Office. WH Press Secretary Jay Carney and Biden enter. Obama is yawning.
+
+JC: Sir, we have a situation. The Republicans have learned about Fast and Furious killing that agent. CNN wants to know how much you knew.
+
+POTUS: Big deal. I'll tell 'em -- how's this -- ""I heard on the news about this Fast and Furious story where allegedly"" -- (laughs) get that? -- ""guns were being run into Mexico."" What the hell. I'll also say ""the Attorney General has been very clear he knew nothing about this.""  Holder will owe me one. Where's Biden with my coffee?
+
+Those were the very phrases Obama uttered that day.
+
+JC: The cat's out of the bag, Mr. President. They know about the IRS going after those
+
+Tea Party nuts. You have to say something during your presser with Cameron today.
+
+Later that day, at White House press conference with British PM David Cameron.
+
+POTUS: Well let me take the IRS situation first. I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this. I think it was on Friday.
+
+JC: Another problem, sir. DOJ subpoenaed the AP to get those phone records. The press ain't happy about this.
+
+POTUS: Can't you see I'm busy? You take care of it. (Looking irritated at Biden) Shouldn't you be at a funeral?
+
+JZ: Come on, man, shoot! Ain't got all day.
+
+Later that day at the White House Press Briefing:
+
+Reporter: When did the president find out about the Department of Justice subpoenas for the Associated Press?
+
+JC:  Yesterday. We found out about the news reports yesterday on the road.
+
+VPOTUS: Jay, we've got a situation. They know about those fraudulent VA reports. This one's big! What should we do?
+
+JC: (sigh) I'll take care of it. Get me a Starbucks.
+
+Reporter: The delays have been known for some time, but the fraudulent --
+
+JC: If you mean the specific allegations that I think we're reported first by your network, I believe we learned about them through the reports.
+
+It is simply inconceivable -- no, unbelievable -- that the press knows more about the scandals surrounding this administration than does the administration.
+
+It begs the question: So why do the media put up with this nonsense? They know that they're being played for fools and yet they go along with it, time and again. Their loyalty to Barack Obama is that strong.
+
+Why does this administration constantly lie? Because they can.
+
+L. Brent Bozell III is founder and president of the Media Research Center.",REAL
+523,Obama says Republican budget just helps the rich. Is he right?,"While the House and Senate GOP budget plans are short on details, it's clear that spending cuts will be steep, probably including lower spending on education and the social safety net.
+
+In this Tuesday, March 17, 2015, photo, House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Tom Price (R) of Georgia, center, holds up a synopsis of the House Republican budget proposal as he announces the plan on Capitol Hill in Washington. The GOP-led House Budget Committee, on Thursday, gave party-line approval to a sweeping balanced budget plan, but the measure faces a rewrite next week to overcome opposition from the party's defense hawks.
+
+Even as congressional Republicans pursue deficit-cutting budget plans, President Obama has been quick to dismiss the new proposals as failing to meet the crucial goal of shoring up America’s middle class.
+
+“Their budget doles out even more to those who already have the most, makes massive cuts to investments that benefit all of us, asks middle-class families to foot the bill,” Mr. Obama said in a Cleveland speech on Wednesday.
+
+The Republicans in charge of Congress clearly disagree. Their budget plans passed out of House and Senate committees Thursday on straight party-line votes.
+
+So, when Obama says the proposals in Congress would merely pave “a path to prosperity for those who have already prospered,” is he on the mark?
+
+The short answer is that, although it’s hard to be too definitive about a plan that’s lacking in detail, the president appears to have good cause to bark up this tree.
+
+Even some of the Republicans who are potential leading contenders for the presidential nomination in 2016 acknowledge the deep economic anxieties that mainstream Americans feel. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is focusing on the “right to rise,” in a nod to the goal of upward mobility.
+
+Yet in the GOP fiscal plans, which now go before the full House and Senate, the middle class is not front and center. Instead, the plans emphasize the goal of getting annual federal deficits down to zero by a decade from now. They provide little detail on what the spending cuts and tax reforms to reach that goal are – let alone how those changes will affect middle- or working-class families.
+
+What Republicans have signaled is that entitlements are on the block, including an overhaul of Medicare. Both the House and Senate plans call for more than $5 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years, including a proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That means cutting spending on Medicaid and on Obamacare subsidies, which could leave millions of Americans without health insurance.
+
+The Republican budget doesn’t flesh out promised policies to replace the ACA. (Some in the party have proposed tax credits to help people buy insurance, but no money is budgeted for such a plan.)
+
+On the tax front, it’s possible that reform plans could avoid showering new tax breaks on the rich, but Obama’s skepticism appears justified by recent history. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 served up savings heavily favoring high-income households. And more recent Republican proposals have been open to criticism on this same front.
+
+“While the tax component [of the House budget] is less detailed than the tax proposals in past House budgets, the information it provides strongly indicates that the plan would juxtapose deep spending cuts primarily hitting low- and middle-income people with tax changes likely to heavily favor people at the top of the income scale,” writes Chuck Marr, a tax policy expert at the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.
+
+At a minimum, Republicans have a lot of dots still to connect for them to refute the Obama line of attack.
+
+The main argument in their budget plans is that the streamlining of government – lower taxes, more efficient spending, and lighter debt burdens – will invigorate the economy for all Americans.
+
+If that plays out, it may be a case of short-term sacrifice for benefits that come in future decades.
+
+The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office supports the idea that lower federal debt would strengthen long-term economic growth, by leaving “more funds available for private investment.” But in the short run, the CBO says deficit-cutting efforts tend to be a drag on growth. Even by 2025, the overall effect of the Republican plan would boost per-person output by only about 1.5 percent, the CBO estimates.
+
+By 2040, though, the estimated gains in per capita economic activity would average a more robust 7 percent.
+
+“Our budget calls for fundamental tax reform to help grow the economy and create jobs with a tax code that is simpler and fairer,” the Republicans on the House Budget Committee say in a fact sheet.
+
+Both political parties agree that tax reform could give a modest boost to economic growth.
+
+One detailed tax reform plan, issued last year by Rep. Dave Camp (R) while chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, took pains to be distributionally neutral – meaning that in simplifying the tax code, it wouldn’t allow the rich to pay a lighter share of US income taxes.
+
+Although not everyone thought that Representative Camp's plan went far enough on fairness, it at least showed that conservative tax reform can be mindful of effects on different income groups.
+
+Republicans can also point to their emphasis on deficit reduction as a move that would help the whole economy, not just rich people. The idea is to put the national debt on a downward path (as a share of economic output), enhancing the nation’s fiscal health. Without such efforts, weathering unforeseen emergencies such as a war or deep recession would be considerably harder to navigate.
+
+But the spending cuts implied by Republican budgets would be steep, imposing costs on ordinary Americans in the form of lower federal spending on things like education and the social safety net.
+
+Many of the details of where those cuts will come have yet to be determined. On education, the House draft, for example, freezes Pell Grants at $5,775 for 10 years. On welfare programs, the Senate plan outlines federal spending declining by 3.3 percent a year, compared with a current-law projection of 3.5 percent annual spending increases.
+
+Republicans say the cuts can be done in smart ways (consolidating duplicate programs or pushing others to the state level) so that public needs are still met.
+
+Critics of the Republican approach say it’s fundamentally flawed to try to balance the budget entirely with spending cuts, especially at a time of rising burdens on entitlement programs to cover aging baby boomers.",REAL
+5381,Some Cities Want Their Noncitizen Immigrants to Vote,"Some Cities Want Their Noncitizen Immigrants to Vote Caroline Winter, Bloomberg Businessweek, October 28, 2016 
+“Look at illegal immigrants voting all over the country,” Donald Trump recently claimed in a Fox News interview, part of his ongoing effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the presidential election. There’s no evidence to support the Republican nominee’s claims of election fraud, but some cities are moving to expand voting rights to include noncitizens. 
+The latest is San Francisco, where the Nov. 8 ballot will include a measure allowing the parents or legal guardians of any student in the city’s public schools to vote in school board elections. The right would be extended to those with green cards, visas, or no documentation at all. “One out of three kids in the San Francisco unified school system has a parent who is an immigrant, who is disenfranchised and doesn’t have a voice,” says San Francisco Assemblyman David Chiu, the son of Taiwanese immigrants. “We’ve had legal immigrants who’ve had children go through the entire K-12 system without having a say.” Undocumented immigrants should also have the right, Chiu adds, to bypass the “broken immigration system in this country.” 
+{snip} 
+Today there are six jurisdictions in Maryland that let noncitizens vote in local elections. Chicago allows them to take part in elected parent advisory councils but not to vote in school board elections. Four towns in Massachusetts have moved to allow noncitizen voting and are awaiting state approval. And in New York City, where noncitizens make up 21 percent of the voting-age population, the city council is drafting legislation that would allow more than 1.3 million legal residents to take part in municipal elections. The city previously allowed noncitizens to vote in school board elections, but that ended when New York’s school boards were dissolved in 2002. 
+{snip}",FAKE
+2007,"Biden heads to Iowa, fueling 2016 speculation","Washington (CNN) Add Vice President Joe Biden to the list of potential 2016 candidates traveling to the first-in-the-nation caucus state.
+
+Biden will travel on official White House business next week to Des Moines, Iowa where he will deliver a speech on the administration's economic policies, his office announced Friday. And one close supporter told CNN that some in his loyal circle of friends and advisers in Iowa got the heads up about Biden's visit before the Des Moines Register broke the news Friday
+
+Iowa is a crucial test for presidential candidates and Biden's travel to the state will only fuel more speculation that he is planning a presidential run. Biden last visited Iowa in October
+
+Biden will speak at Drake University and join a ""roundtable discussion"" at a local community college, his office said.
+
+The discussion will focus on the need to make a college education more accessible and the ""critical role"" of partnerships between community colleges and businesses. The trip comes just weeks after President Barack Obama proposed a new program that would make the first two years of community college free.
+
+Biden said two weeks ago on ABC's ""Good Morning America"" that he hasn't made up his mind about a presidential campaign, but conceded that ""there's a chance"" he would challenge former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is all but certain to seek the Democratic nomination.
+
+""We've got plenty of time,"" Biden said, adding that he didn't feel the need to make a decision until the summer.
+
+But two longtime Biden backers said it's unlikely Biden will meet with his circle of Iowa supporters.
+
+""The minute you do that it becomes a shadow campaign,"" said Sara Riley, a lawyer from Cedar Rapids who worked on Biden's 2008 campaign and remains loyal to him today.
+
+But she acknowledged that coming to Iowa was not a coincidence.
+
+""I don't think it is a coincidence that he is coming to Iowa as opposed to, say, Arizona, where I assume they also have community colleges,"" she added.
+
+Longtime Biden friend and Iowa supporter Terri Goodman said Biden's small but loyal circle of Iowa backers got advance notice that Biden was coming to Iowa.
+
+But Goodman said she is not aware of any plans for Biden to meet with his circle of supporters, emphasizing that the focus of Biden's trip will be to hammer in the administration's State of the Union message on issues like college access.
+
+""The President and Vice President have been traveling around the country pushing their agenda,"" she said. ""I think that is the primary purpose of the trip.""
+
+But she added that Biden ""enjoys Iowa.""
+
+""He is a man of surprises, so you never know,"" Goodman said.",REAL
+9706,Ways To Naturally Raise Your Vibration,"Leave a reply 
+Orly Levy – Have you ever been around or noticed someone that made you feel good? They weren’t intentionally trying to, there was just something about their energy that allowed you to relax and enjoy yourself more. Most likely, this person had a high vibration and that’s why you were attracted to them and felt good being around them. Similarly, have you ever heard someone say “there was a good vibe” describing a situation? That person must have experienced a positive interaction and described it in terms of the energy felt. 
+You might be wondering what having a high vibration means. As humans we are all energy in motion and we vibrate a frequency out to the universe. People who have a high vibration often feel lighter, open, stable and loving. While feelings of heaviness, denseness, darkness and fear are found in the lower vibration zone. Just like radio stations have different frequencies and you can tune into whatever you want to listen to, people can raise their vibration (change their frequency) in order to feel better. 
+After learning about energy in tai chi and yoga, I began to become aware of my own vibes. When I was moody or upset about something, I noticed I felt heavy and people avoided me. When I was happy and felt good about life, I felt open and people seemed attracted to me. I also became aware of how I disliked feeling this low vibration and that around certain people I either felt better or worst. I realized that rather than being at the mercy of my mood and other people’s energy field , I could do activities that raised my vibration and made me feel better. The key here is that anything the makes you feel authentically good raises your vibrations. 
+Here is a list of 12 ways you can naturally raise your vibration and feel better: 1. Breathe. 
+Breathing is the best way to clear your energy and create openness in your heart. When you breathe deeply your belly expands on the inhale and contracts on the exhale. Put your hand on your belly to check that you are breathing fully and deeply. 2. Exercise. 
+Any form of exercise the gets your heart rate going and feels fun (not forced), raises your vibrations. 3. Laugh. 
+Laughter is a fun and easy way to feel good. Find a way to add some laughter into your daily routine and you will feel the difference. 4. Watch cartoons. 
+Cartoons feel light and cozy. They remind you a being a kid and feeling safe. Cartoons often carry messages of love and protection. 5. Say Affirmations. 
+By reciting affirmations you are reminding your conscious mind that what you desire is here and now. Anything is possible and you are shining light on truth. 6. Pray. 
+Prayer doesn’t have to be something you practice in a religious setting. You can connect, ask for guidance, and give thanks to God or the universe at any time and at any place. 7. Dress up. 
+Sometimes putting on a nice dress and red lip stick feels good. It reminds us of how sexy, feminine and fun we can be. 8. Count your blessings. 
+What are you grateful for? Gratitude for all the love, support and abundance that is already present in your life is the fastest way to feel good. 9. Give. 
+Do something nice for someone else for no reason at all. Not because you want something in return or you owe them, but because you want to share your love. 10. Say “I love you.” 
+Tell the people you love, “I love you unconditionally no matter what.” Say it out loud even if you think they already know and then close your eyes and feel it. 11. Tell yourself the same. 
+Every ounce of love you give out starts with you. Remember to show yourself the love and receive it! 12. Spoil yourself with something you’ve been desiring but saving for when you felt worthy. 
+Do something fun and exciting. Your life is now, the time is now and feel your vibration raise tenfold. 
+Raising your vibration leads to feeling good, free and loved. When you follow your feelings and raise your vibration you are not only helping yourself feel better but you are positively impacting everyone around you. Your energy doesn’t stop with you, it radiates out in the universe and touches the entire planet. Once you raise your vibrations you will also be less likely to get sucked into someone else’s low energy vibration. Imagine being around someone you love that is struggling and helping them by just being yourself and radiating your energy out. 
+In the comments below I’d love to hear from you. What are your favorite ways to raise your vibration? 
+Orly Levy is an Intuitive Life Coach and Writer based in Southern California. She guides women to turn inside and rediscover “that which they already are.” Through her signature coaching programs, she works with her clients to release past blockages and reconnect with their intuition so that they can live their happiest life! To learn more about Orly visit www.orlyslight.com or Follow her on Facebook . SF Source Dreamcatcher Reality  ",FAKE
+3571,'Jihadi John' Reportedly Identified,"Emwazi, who used the videos to threaten the West and taunt leaders such as President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, was believed to have traveled to Syria around 2012 and to have later joined IS.
+
+In each beheading video, he is dressed entirely in black, a balaclava covering all but his eyes and the bridge of his nose. He wears a holster under his left arm.
+
+Two U.S. government sources told Reuters that John was believed by investigators to be Emwazi, a fluent Arabic speaker from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from the University of Westminster in London with a degree in computer programming.
+
+The British government and police refused to confirm or deny his identity, which was first revealed by the Washington Post, saying it was an ongoing security investigation.
+
+Intelligence services in Britain and the United States were ordered to track down the masked man who became a menacing symbol of the brutality of IS. Authorities used a variety of investigative techniques including voice and facial recognition as well as interviews with former hostages.
+
+Security officials had avoided identifying Emwazi, fearing that to do so would make him more difficult to catch. They were said to be unhappy that the name had been leaked.
+
+Asim Qureshi, the research director of charity Cage which worked with Emwazi since 2009, said that although he could not be certain Emwazi was John, there were some ""striking similarities.""
+
+Cage, which campaigns for those detained on terrorism charges, said Emwazi had got in touch with Cage saying he had been harassed by British security services after trying to take a trip back to Kuwait in 2010 where he was going to get married and had a job waiting.
+
+He was deported to Amsterdam and interrogated by Britain's MI5 domestic security agency and a Dutch intelligence officer who said he was suspected of planning to travel to Somalia, and then sent back to Britain.
+
+Cage said MI5 had tried to recruit him as an informant and a year later blocked his attempts to return to Kuwait where he had begun working for a computer programming company and planned to marry.
+
+The charity, which also worked with Michael Adebolajo, the Muslim covert who with an accomplice killed a British soldier in London in May 2013, said both men had been victims of undue pressure from the security services.
+
+""We now have evidence that there are several young Britons whose lives were not only ruined by security agencies, but who became disenfranchised and turned to violence because of British counter-terrorism policies,"" Qureshi said in a statement.",REAL
+1170,Donald Trump sweeps Super Tuesday: GOP at a crossroads,"(CNN) Donald Trump dominated Super Tuesday, notching seven victories -- four more than his closest competitor -- in states from Georgia to Massachusetts on a day that marked a turning point in his quest for the White House.
+
+On the morning after, one thing is clear: the Republican Party is at a crossroads.
+
+Many party leaders and establishment Republicans see two paths ahead. One is to accept what appears to be the increasingly likely outcome in the 2016 race — that Trump will soon clinch the GOP nomination — and offer the New York businessman their blessing. The second is a path of a historic rebellion: rejecting the GOP front-runner and the values and principles he stands for, and pledging to oppose Trump — even if he emerges as the party's nominee.
+
+Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who ran for president in 2012, described this moment as an ""inflection point"" in the 2016 race and for the Republican Party.
+
+""The party is fractured, which isn't unusual for political parties and they almost always come back together. But this could test the outer limits of that tradition,"" Pawlenty, who endorsed Marco Rubio, told CNN. ""If the Republican Party were an airplane and you're looking out the window, you'd see some pieces of the surface flying off. And you'd be wondering whether the engine or a wing is next.""
+
+With Trump adding delegates to his quickly growing stash Tuesday, political veterans suspect the GOP presidential race could reach a moment of unambiguous clarity in the next two weeks. That point could come on March 15 when Florida and Ohio vote. If Rubio, the Florida senator, and John Kasich, the Ohio governor, lose their home states, their campaigns would be doomed.
+
+Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott put it this way: By March 15, Republicans will know whether it is time to ""throw up our hands in despair and panic.""
+
+""We've now backed ourselves into a corner here -- and it's not very pretty,"" said Lott, who is supporting Kasich. Super Tuesday, Lott added, ""is not the final blow, but we will know in the next two weeks whether this is a done deal or not.""
+
+In recent days, there has been a flurry of discussions among top Republican strategists and insiders about how to distance the party from Trump. His heated rhetoric about minority groups and immigrants is deeply troubling to party leaders who have spent years trying to make inroads with Latino and other minority constituencies. Also of grave concern are the down-ballot candidates who would face tough elections in November with Trump at the top of the ticket.
+
+Disaffected Republicans are discussing everything from skipping the Republican National Convention in July to running a conservative candidate as an independent or third-party candidate -- with the ultimate goal of denying Trump the presidency. One of the names frequently mentioned in this hypothetical is Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, even though he has shown no desire to run another campaign but has shown a zest for attacking Trump.
+
+Trump's dominance on Super Tuesday caps the GOP front-runner's remarkable rise as a first-time presidential candidate. His initial surge in the polls months ago was widely dismissed as a short-lived phenomenon. His divisive and inflammatory rhetoric on everything from immigration to women drew fierce scorn from fellow Republicans and Democrats alike.
+
+But Trump's candidacy has proven shockingly durable, and his supporters exceptionally loyal.
+
+His dominant night comes just days after another development shocked the party to its core: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's bombshell endorsement of the billionaire last week. Christie ended his own presidential bid last month, and the unexpected decision from the former chairman of the Republican Governor's Association to back Trump — the ultimate anti-establishment candidate — added a critical sense of credibility to the businessman's candidacy.
+
+Christie's endorsement was quickly followed by the backing of Maine Gov. Paul LePage and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.
+
+Former House Speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who has no plans to endorse a candidate in the GOP primary, said he was ""shocked"" by Christie's decision, and that the slew of new endorsements have irreversibly changed perceptions of Trump's candidacy.
+
+""Trump is putting together a very unique coalition that's rattled a lot of people who have made a living out of trying to win within a Republican structure which is now increasingly obsolete,"" Gingrich said. ""A lot of people smugly said when we get down to reality, he is not going to be the nominee because in the end people aren't going to vote for him. Well, guess what — he's almost certainly going to be the nominee.""
+
+As Trump has started to pick up endorsements from serious conservative leaders including a handful of members of Congress, a fierce anti-Trump movement has started to pick up steam.
+
+Republican operatives, party leaders and conservative thinkers are increasingly warning that Trump is not a true conservative, and that his penchant for offensive language proves that he's an entertainer who should have no role shaping the future of the Republican Party. These rumblings turned into a movement on social media marked with the hashtag ""#NeverTrump"" -- a vow to never back Trump, even if he becomes the nominee.
+
+But these last-minute strategy sessions underscore the fundamental lack of a coordinated effort in the party to derail Trump's campaign. Many are simply resigned to accepting that this far along in the election, and considering the delegate math, no amount of money or anti-Trump messaging can slow the front-runner's momentum.
+
+Over the weekend, Trump only fueled the anger directed at his campaign when he failed to denounce white supremacist groups.
+
+""I don't know anything about David Duke, OK?"" Trump told CNN's Jake Tapper when asked whether he would disavow the Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, who is supporting Trump's campaign. Pressed several times, Trump insisted he didn't know anything about white supremacists.
+
+""I'm not going to vote for Hillary Clinton, and given what we know about Donald Trump, I can't vote for that guy either,"" the first-term senator said.
+
+But the anti-Trump campaign is also angering some party elders. They say rejecting the GOP nominee is tantamount to handing the election to the eventual Democratic nominee, widely expected to be Hillary Clinton, who had a strong night on Super Tuesday.
+
+Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, who supported Jeb Bush's failed White House bid, told CNN that these rebelling Republicans may as well be casting their votes for Clinton. He also expressed deep frustration at the party for failing to rally around a single alternative to Trump, like Bush or Kasich, early enough in the election.
+
+""Just go ahead and support Hillary and forget it!"" said Simpson. ""They may not like Trump -- they didn't like Bush. What the hell was wrong with Bush? What the hell is wrong with Kasich?""
+
+Gingrich, who pledged to back the party's eventual nominee, predicted that many of his fellow Republicans who now say they could never support Trump will eventually change their minds.
+
+""The absence of voting for the Republican nominee is functionally a vote for Hillary,"" Gingrich said. ""It's a crossroads for the Republican Party and it's a crossroads for America.""",REAL
+9914,FEMA ‘Area Emergency Tests’ broadcast just before election,"(INTELLIHUB) —“Everyone’s phone in the office did the same thing at the same time,” one person reported, after a “Area Emergency Test” was forced to devices by FEMA in several parts of the U.S.. 
+“As you can see here this is run by FEMA,” Youtuber DAHBOO7 stated on his latest video. 
+This type technology may actually be pinging devices and may even be able to locate peoples whereabouts, DAHBOO told his viewers. 
+“[…] they are able to get a ping on your location.” Featured Image: Jhaymesisviphotography/Flickr",FAKE
+7611,Project Veritas: Money from Belize | Opinion - Conservative,"(Before It's News)
+What the video is about (emphasis added) In the effort to prove the credibility of the undercover donor featured in the videos and to keep the investigation going, Project Veritas Action made the decision to donate twenty thousand dollars to Robert Creamer’s effort. Project Veritas Action had determined that the benefit of this investigation outweighed […]",FAKE
+9712,#NoDAPL: Angry Man Fires 7 Shots Into Air Near Standing Rock Water Protectors,"16 mins ago 2 Views 0 Comments 0 Likes   New Zealand's   country's entire east coast and urged residents in low-lying areas to evacuate and seek higher ground. Waves of up to two meters (6 feet) could be possible for up to two hours, it said. Anna   ""That's reasonably significant so people should take this seriously,"" she told Radio New Zealand. New Zealand's Geonet revised up its estimated magnitude of the quake to 7.5, from 6.6 earlier. USGS   Zealand's South Island. A 6.3 quake there in February 2011 killed 185 people and caused widespread damage. The   ""The whole house rolled like a serpent and some things smashed, the power went out,""   Chris Hill, a fire officer in Cheviot, a coastal town near the quake's epicenter, said officials had gone door to door evacuating residents. Learn More: https://www.yahoo.com/news/magnitude-7-4-earthquake-strikes-near-christchurch-zealand-112145924.html http://quakes.globalincidentmap.com/ https://twitter.com/i/moments/797788639014989826 http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/#%7B%22autoUpdate%22%3A%5B%22autoUpdate%22%5D%2C%22basemap%22%3A%22grayscale%22%2C%22feed%22%3A%221day_m25%22%2C%22listFormat%22%3A%22default%22%2C%22mapposition%22%3A%5B%5B-45.736859547360474%2C-192.777099609375%5D%2C%5B-38.410558250946075%2C-175.198974609375%5D%5D%2C%22overlays%22%3A%5B%22plates%22%5D%2C%22restrictListToMap%22%3A%5B%22restrictListToMap%22%5D%2C%22search%22%3Anull%2C%22sort%22%3A%22newest%22%2C%22timezone%22%3A%22utc%22%2C%22viewModes%22%3A%5B%22list%22%2C%22map%22%5D%2C%22event%22%3A%22us1000778i%22%7D https://www.essentialdrugstore.com/ B Rich: https://twitter.com/Brian_T33NO https://www.youtube.com/c/BRichOfficial Erick M: https://twitter.com/letmeexplainit https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcwB6XtfJtyWW4DXKoZVn5A ToBeFree: https://twitter.com/da52true https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvdTd5-p_sBE8oTjUOqPpPg EnterThe5t4rz: https://twitter.com/Enterthe5t4rz https://www.youtube.com/user/Enterthe5t4rz Save On Official DAHBOO7 Gear with Code ""5off"" http://dahboo7.deco-street.com http://foodforliberty.com/dahboo7/ You can also cut cable bills forever and save $75 with code ""tigerstream75"" https://tigerstream.tv/go/tigerstream7/",FAKE
+8419,Guy Fawkes effigy industry collapses,"November 6, 2016 
+Just days away from what was traditionally its busiest day of the year, the Guy Fawkes effigy industry has finally collapsed after years of steady decline. All remaining effigy production stations on street corners have closed with immediate effect, with hundreds of 10 year-old street urchins laid off. 
+Despite attempts at buy-outs by foreign effigy firms, it is thought the collapse was due to an unrealistic pricing structure, which completely failed to take account of inflation. 
+Economist James Hampton told us: “I’ve looked through the figures and I have to agree that the fault clearly lies at the pricing level. Frankly, a ‘penny for the Guy’ barely covers the raw materials of the effigy. By the time you’ve factored in the wooden trolley, you’re actually making a loss.” 
+“The tragic thing is that there is still a market need for life-size cloth dolls of Catholic terrorists from the 16th Century. However, taking account of production and marketing costs, a more realistic proposition would have been about £12.30 for the Guy, or in euros, €12.30.” 
+The collapse comes at a time when foreign effigy manufactures have been taking increasing orders for effigies of presidents, prime ministers, book authors and cartoonists, while Apple has recently launched the iGuy, and self-combusting re-usable electronic effigy which can be connected to the iCloud to mutter heresy as it is consumed by the flames. 
+The effigy workforce are today looking for work in industries with similar skill sets, such as working in Build-a-Bear Workshops, sewing together giant bean bags and producing dummies used for bayonet practice. Meanwhile, thousands of unbought Guy Fawkes’ now make up an ‘effigy mountain’ in the midlands, and are likely to remain there until someone can think of a way of destroying them. Share this story... 
+Posted: Nov 6th, 2016 by Adrian Bamforth Click for more article by Adrian Bamforth .. More Stories about: Business",FAKE
+10387,LISTEN: Clinton ‘Crime Family’ EXPOSED By Veteran FBI Assistant Director,"LISTEN: Clinton ‘Crime Family’ EXPOSED By Veteran FBI Assistant Director Posted on October 30, 2016 by Shae Weatherall in Politics Share This 
+On the heels of the FBI announcing its renewed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Veteran FBI Assistant Director and wiretap expert James Kallstrom is speaking out. In his statements, Kallstrom exposes the Clintons as being a “crime family,” adding credence to the long list of allegations against them for unethical and illegal activities throughout the last several decades. Hillary and Bill Clinton sharing a secret, Former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom (inset). 
+During an interview with radio host John Catsimatidis, former FBI Assistant Director in Charge, New York Division, James Kallstrom, came forward with some serious statements about the Clinton family. According to Kallstrom, the FBI’s original investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails was impeded by the Department of Justice and other top officials in our government. However, now that the case has been reopened, he is apparently seeing it as an opportunity to add his expert opinion and his own insider knowledge of the situation. 
+The Hill has provided a partial transcript of Kallstrom’s remarks: 
+“ The Clintons, that’s a crime family, basically ,” Kallstrom said. “ It’s like organized crime. I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool .” 
+“ The problem here is this investigation was never a real investigation ,” he said. “ That’s the problem. They never had a grand jury empanelled, and the reason they never had a grand jury empanelled, I’m sure, is Loretta Lynch would not go along with that .” 
+“ The agents are furious with what’s going on, I know that for a fact ,” he said. 
+Listen as former FBI Asst. Director Kallstrom speaks about why he supports Donald Trump as president and explains how he knows that Hillary Clinton would be a devastating choice to lead America. 
+Among the many statements he made during the full ten-minute interview , perhaps this one was the most profound: 
+“ It’s just outrageous how Hillary Clinton sold her office for money. And she’s a pathological liar, and she’s always been a liar. And God forbid if we put someone like that in the White House. ” 
+Given her extensive and tainted legal and political history, it is truly outrageous that Hillary Clinton was ever allowed to become the Democrat nominee for president to begin with. Now, she’s under a second federal investigation for wrongdoing while she was serving as our Secretary of State, and shockingly, there are still those who support her. 
+She is obviously corrupt to the core, but hopefully, over the next few days, as more information comes out, people will open their eyes and realize that Hillary’s “campaign” for votes is no different than any other self-serving racket she and her family have been involved in.",FAKE
+8619,Iraqis in Mosul Find US Missiles at Captured Islamic State Base,"By Kurt Nimmo, Blacklisted News The Iraqis found missiles at an Islamic State base in Mosul stamped with USA and DOD. The discovery did not... ",FAKE
+1074,"Trump charges toward the nomination: The billionaire breaks Rubio’s back, reducing his opposition to the deeply deluded Cruz and Kasich","Donald Trump doesn’t just defeat his establishment Republican opponents; he leaves them humiliated. So it was for Marco Rubio, who lost his own state, Florida, to Donald Trump on Tuesday night in the Republican primary. As Rubio didn’t even bother running again for Senate — reports say that he hates being a senator — this could be the end of his time in public office, at least for now. The defeat was absolute. Florida is a winner-takes-all-state for the Republicans, but it hardly mattered, as Rubio could barely eke out a little more than 1 in 4 Republican votes.
+
+Unburdened by the need to win elections, any election, Rubio issued a concession speech that was an unsubtle rebuke to Trump. “America’s in the middle of a real political storm, a real tsunami,” he said, concluding sadly, “and we should have seen this coming.”
+
+After arguing that “American needs a vibrant conservative movement.” Rubio railed, “But one that’s built on principles and on ideas. Not on fear. Not on anger. Not on preying on people’s frustrations.”
+
+Rubio is an empty shell, a robot who mostly runs on programs that his funders and campaign staff input in him. But for a small, sad moment, you saw a bit of the human being lurking under that glib armor. We glimpsed Rubio’s soul. A soul really, really hates Trump. One mildly hopes, before he shuffles off into obscurity, Rubio has it in him to preserve his dignity by refusing to support Trump in the general. It would be a small victory, but better than whatever hell Chris Christie is living through now.
+
+For most of Trump’s celebratory speech in Florida, it seemed the candidate was going to ignore the controversies of the week, focusing on important-sounding issues like trade that have nothing to do with why his supporters actually love him. But just as a hundred pundits started to type out “pivoting to the general,” the real Trump came sneaking out.
+
+“Then Paris happened,” he started, crediting terrorist attacks in France and San Bernardino, California for the surge in the polls that made him a contender.
+
+“We need protection in our country, and that’s going to happen,” he continued. “and then the poll numbers just shot up.”
+
+Celebrating mass murder because it boosted your polls might seem an unusual move, but at this point, no one can deny that Trump communes very well with what the most repulsive members of the conservative coalition want to hear. It’s not quite pushing him into half the Republican electorate, a fact that he spent much of his speech obsessing over, but those who live in irrational fear of terrorism sure do love him.
+
+That Trump would win the night was largely expected, which is scary enough. But even scarier was the possibility that the events in Chicago, where Trump seemingly manipulated events to create a near-riot, would give his campaign a boost. Trump and his surrogates have been hustling hard in recent days, using the event to argue that they are victims of “thugs” who censor people because of “political correctness.”
+
+The narrative seemed like it might be working — one poll showed that Florida Republicans were more likely to support Trump after the violence in Chicago — but in the end, it doesn’t seem like it mattered much. RealClearPolitics had Trump polling at 43% going into the Florida primary and he walked away with 46%.   If the stunt swayed any votes in Ohio, which is one of the Midwestern states where racial tensions have been high in recent months, there’s no real evidence of it. John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, was expected to win with around 40% of the vote and the polling data shows that, if anything, he did slightly better than expected.
+
+Of course, that’s the only state Kasich is expected to win, but in a display of almost mind-bending delusion, he gave a speech, complete with a huge confetti explosion, where he acted like he had the nomination wrapped up. “We’re going all the way to Cleveland and secure the Republican nomination,” he yelled, to great applause from an equally deluded audience. Considering that Trump has literally 9 times as many delegates as he does, this kind of confidence seems misplaced. Kasich is pinning all his hopes on a contested convention, which is only a possibility because Trump can’t quite seem to get the majority he needs to win the nomination outright. With Rubio out, Kasich is the last “establishment” candidate in the race, and that designation seems to be the only real evidence he has for this idea that he’ll show up at the convention and be able to win over all these delegates in a way that he was not able to win over any voters outside of the state of Ohio. Kasich ended his speech promising to beat Hillary Clinton. It was an odd note, suggesting as it does that he believes Clinton’s delegate lead will lead to the nomination. Not the message you want out if you’re trying to push the idea that your opponent’s massive delegate lead is a minor obstacle between a candidate and getting the nomination. And then there is Ted Cruz, who still thinks he has a chance, making a nauseating speech where he reiterated his claim that he’s the only reasonable challenge to Trump. Trump swept most of the states; even Missouri, which was supposed to be the win that reinvigorated the Cruz campaign, was such a squeaker that, hours after the polls closed, the networks were still afraid to declare a winner. Despite all this, Cruz continues to hope that  a showdown between the amoral capitalist narcissist vs. the slimy and insincere fundamentalist will get him the publicity he needs to start rising in the polls. Nice idea, but we’ve seen that movie before. It’s called “There Will Be Blood,” and if Cruz were the sort to watch movies instead of stare creepily into corners during his down time, he would also know how it ends. Cruz spent nine months proclaiming that he’s the Jesus guy for people who are supposedly too Christian to vote for a thrice-married sleaze like Trump. But, it turns out that those people weren’t so much moral as they were just really interested in using “Jesus” as a cover for sexism and racism. Tuesday night, as with most of the election, Trump is doing better with the Bible-thumpers than Cruz, who is supposedly one of their own. So this is where we sit in the middle of March: A orange-colored frontrunner who is so unethical in his methods he makes Republicans look good by comparison — which is a real trick, I’ll tell you what — and two sadly deluded men, one who thinks God wants him to win and the other who thinks the Republican wizard will step out from behind the curtain to fix it all. But it increasingly looks like that savior is not coming out of the sky or any smoky backroom to deny Trump the nomination. The question now is how the Republican party will cope with the realization that this is, after all this time, really happening.",REAL
+9637,"The Hubris of Democratic Elites, Clinton Campaign Gave Us President Trump","Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, her network of super political action committees, and the liberal establishment relished a matchup against Donald Trump. However, her campaign failed to put forward an alternative for voters that would combat a candidate that tapped into the vast amount of disillusionment among citizens. Tsunamis of voters unaccounted for in state polls, who do not identify with either the Democratic or Republican Parties, made President Trump a reality.
+Clinton’s concession speech indicated the campaign and many of its supporters are unwilling to confront the hubris of her presidential run. Yet, citizens, especially those on the left, must in order to find the clarity to move onward with fights for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice.
+The Democratic Party rigged parts of the party’s primary for Clinton, and it helped stave off a decisive challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders. The senator addressed the material conditions of the working class, including people of color. He warned the Democrats of wealth inequality, destructive free trade agreements, and some of the negative effects of global capitalism on the common man or woman. He connected with disaffected people who the Clinton campaign effectively wrote-off and performed well in states that Clinton lost in the general election.
+However, the Democratic Party elites survived and coerced Sanders and his supporters into falling in line at their national convention. The party leadership enforced unity in Philadelphia to make it appear as if all was well when that was not the case.
+Most progressive groups, like all presidential elections, demobilized or essentially became mechanisms for the Clinton campaign to mobilize voters from August to Election Day. This allowed the message of “Never Trump” to dominate as the only challenge to Trump, and without a real vision for lifting up the many Americans enticed by Trump’s campaign, the nation ended up with an end result similar to Senator John Kerry’s campaign, which ran primarily on the fact that he was not President George W. Bush.
+It did not help the Clinton campaign that she had a reputation for supporting regime change wars, which have greatly destabilized parts of the world. Her fingerprints were all over the Libya disaster. She voted for the Iraq War, which created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State. And, although it is questionable whether Trump really ever opposed the Iraq invasion, he insisted he was against the Iraq War during debates to undermine Clinton and fueled the perception that Clinton was somehow responsible for ISIS. Trump held himself out as someone who would not plunge the country into reckless military engagements.
+Clinton’s closing argument included the following, “Is America dark and divisive or helpful and inclusive? Our core values are being tested in this election, but everywhere I go, people are refusing to be defined by fear and division. Look, we all know we’ve come through some hard economic times, and we’ve seen some pretty big changes. But I believe in our people. I love this country, and I’m convinced our best days are ahead of us if we reach for them together.”
+That may have sounded good in the office of a campaign’s headquarters, but there was nothing specific in this buzzword-laden pablum. Multiculturalism does not help anyone pay their mortgage or find a job. As wrong as it is for millions of white Americans to take out their frustrations on people of color, the system failed them and keeps failing them. Additionally, establishment politicians like Clinton wrote off many of these people, believing if they focused on emphasizing diversity they would overcome the painful intertwined realities of class and race in the U.S. They were wrong.
+Let us go back to the belief that a candidate like Trump would be perfect for Hillary Clinton. In April 2015, a strategy memo for the DNC was drafted by the campaign two months before Trump announced his candidacy. The goal was to “make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.”
+“Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election,” the campaign recommended. “Undermine any credibility/trust Republican presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or independents.”
+It advocated against marginalizing “more extreme candidates.” The campaign wanted to make “Pied Piper candidates,” like Trump, Senator Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson, into representatives of the Republican Party. “We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.” (The memo was attached to an email published by WikiLeaks.)
+In the same month, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook pushed for a primary schedule, where the red states held their primaries early. It would increase “the likelihood the Rs nominate someone extreme.”
+Essentially, the Clinton campaign engaged in steps that would help ensure Trump was the Republican presidential nominee. Their acts enabled the rise of Trump, and they lost to the opponent they wanted to face because they made the same mistakes Democrats make time and time again. They clung to failed corporate Democratic policies that have devastated this country for the past two decades, and in some ways, this election can be viewed as a referendum on those policies. And they treated the candidate who had answers for Americans as “unrealistic,” a “hapless legislator,” an “Obama betrayer,” and a socialist independent who was not a real Democrat. As in, he was not one of them, and they did not want him in their club.
+* 
+On June 26, Sanders warned Democrats what happened with Brexit in Britain could happen. He shared what he saw on the campaign trail. He noted the tens of thousands factories closed over the past 15 years. “More than 4.8 million well-paid manufacturing jobs have disappeared” as a result of trade agreements. Forty-seven million Americans live in poverty. Millions have no health insurance or are underinsured. Just as many struggle with student debt. “Frighteningly, millions of poorly educated Americans will have a shorter life span than the previous generation as they succumb to despair, drugs and alcohol.”
+“Meanwhile, in our country the top one-tenth of 1 percent now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Fifty-eight percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent. Wall Street and billionaires, through their “ super PACs ,” are able to buy elections,” Sanders added.
+“On my campaign, I’ve talked to workers unable to make it on $8 or $9 an hour; retirees struggling to purchase the medicine they need on $9,000 a year of Social Security; young people unable to afford college,” Sanders shared. “ I also visited the American citizens of Puerto Rico, where some 58 percent of the children live in poverty and only a little more than 40 percent of the adult population has a job or is seeking one.” 
+It is important to note the Clinton campaign engaged in a calculated act of deception by supporting the Service Employees International Union’s “Fight for 15” while refusing to support a $15 minimum wage. All the states with minimum wage ballot initiatives passed wage increases yesterday. The campaign could have mobilized so more states had this sort of thing on the ballot. The possibility of more economic security may have increased enthusiasm. But the Clinton campaign did no such thing.
+“The notion that Donald Trump could benefit from the same forces that gave the Leave proponents a majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in the United States,” Sanders concluded. “Millions of American voters, like the Leave supporters, are understandably angry and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle class.”
+“In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind. We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires.”
+Efforts to process what unfolded on Election Day must recognize the warning of Sanders and millions of his supporters went unheeded. Clinton practically ran as an avatar of the billionaire class, albeit a potentially benevolent caretaker of the masses if they just stood with her. Had more in the establishment media and institutions of power taken the time to reflect on what transpired in the Democratic primary, they would have feared the worst and taken more steps to prevent a Trump primary by trying to shift the dynamic of her campaign.
+Lest one forget, the Clintons are New Democrats. They aligned with business forces in the early 1990s. They stood with conservative Democrats, who broke with labor, civil rights, and other liberal causes. They pushed the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). They backed welfare repeal, bills which fueled the rise of mass incarceration, and signed a 1997 budget that slashed millions for social programs like Medicare and Medicaid. They put corporate interests over environmental protections. They encouraged the deregulation of industry, which greatly boosted Wall Street. Altogether, the Clintons enabled the right as it decimated the liberal class and expanded unfettered capitalism. (For more, read Lance Selfa’s book, “The Democrats: A Critical History.”)
+Finally, the outcome confirms what many expressed months ago. The Democratic Party was willing to do whatever it took to nominate Hillary Clinton, even if it meant working against the very forces behind Bernie Sanders, which could help them succeed against Donald Trump, because the last thing they wanted was a major shift toward more socially democratic policies. Also, Clinton was next in line. Whether voters viewed her as a weak candidate or a dishonest and untrustworthy politician did not matter. They would go to battle for her and gladly lose this war.
+The post The Hubris of Democratic Elites, Clinton Campaign Gave Us President Trump appeared first on Shadowproof .
+",FAKE
+7129,Number of the week: How long until Russia can end its oil dependence?,"By RBTH Yevgeny Biyatov / RIA Novosti 
+The Russian economy will need at least 10 years to end its oil dependence, according to a statement made by the head of Sberbank, German Gref. 
+""A very large amount of today's GDP is based on oil and gas,” he said at a Sberbank conference on Oct. 28. “And it takes time to create an economy with half of the existing digital businesses, to digitize traditional forms of business. I think it will be at least 5 or even 10 years,"" he said.",FAKE
+10543,NASA to test in flight folding wing,"NASA to test in flight folding wing page: 1 link NASA is set to begin testing a new wing design that would change shape in flight, bending up or down, to increase yaw stability, reduce required rudder size, and decrease drag. The Boeing 777X is set to introduce wingtips that fold on the ground, to allow the aircraft to fit in existing gates with a longer wingspan. NASA is set to begin testing the Spanwise Adaptive Wing, which would add shape-memory alloy actuators to the wingtip area that would bend the tips up or down. The SMA actuators would activate when heated electrically, so there is no need for complex hydraulic lines or actuators. Beginning in Spring of 2017, NASA will start flying the Area-I PTERA UAV. It has a 176 inch wingspan, with the outer 15 inches moving as far as 75 degrees up or down. PTERA is not set up for SAW, but it appears that it could see a 40% rudder authority. The idea behind SAW is similar to what was done with the XB-70, with the wingtips angled down. Boeing will introduce folding wings to commercial aviation when the 777X airliner enters service at the end of 2019. But the devices could become commonplace on future aircraft as wingspans increase in an effort to reduce drag and fuel burn. The 777X has almost 24 ft. more wingspan than today’s 777 to optimize lift distribution and maximize cruise efficiency. Folding the tips on the ground keeps the larger aircraft compatible with existing taxiway and gate size restrictions. But NASA is investigating whether also folding the wing in flight could save still more fuel. The Spanwise Adaptive Wing (SAW) concept will be tested on the ground and in flight in a rapid feasibility assessment under NASA’s new Convergent Aeronautics Solutions project. The goal is to show that angling the outboard wing sections up or down can increase yaw stability and control, and reduce rudder size and tail drag.",FAKE
+10526,November 10: Daily Contrarian Reads,"November 10: Daily Contrarian Reads By David Stockman.   Daily contrarian reads for Thursday, November 10th, 2016.  ",FAKE
+6239,"Meter Reader Knocks On Man’s Door, Reveals Sinister Plan Once He’s Inside","Share This 
+When a man heard a knock on his door in Chicago, Illinois, he discovered a meter reader had arrived. However, the homeowner would instantly regret his decision to let the man inside his home once he revealed his sinister plan that will undoubtedly leave your stomach churning. 
+Willie Bell was devastated when his girlfriend chose another man over him. Fueled by rage, Bell devised a sinister plan to pose as a meter reader and enter his romantic rival’s home and do the one thing he thought would return his girl to him – he killed the “other man.” 
+The homeowner, Timothy Lawrence, had unknowingly stolen Bell’s girlfriend, but he’d soon find out while he was merely minding his own business and a knock was heard on his door. When he saw a meter reader who claimed he had come to collect some data, Lawrence welcomed him into his home. However, as soon as the door shut, Bell revealed his true identity, and in a jealous fit of rage, he shot Lawrence in the head. Willie Bell at Timothy Lawrence’s home, Bell’s mugshot (inset) 
+Surveillance video shows Bell dressed in a reflective workman’s vest and helmet, “working” around Lawrence’s home. Since the two men had never met, Lawrence had no idea who Bell really was until he welcomed him into his home. An hour after he entered Lawrence’s house, Bell was seen on the same surveillance video leaving the home wearing “a T-shirt that read ‘I’m that dude,’” according to Pix 11. 
+After Bell stole the victim’s 2004 Buick LeSabre, he went to a local gas station to purchase gasoline and picked up an unidentified accomplice to come back to the home with him some time later. Once they arrived, they entered the home, poured the gasoline, and lit it on fire. Before firefighters could arrive, the house exploded. Lawrence’s body was later recovered from the charred wreckage. 
+Luckily, the surveillance footage, which miraculously wasn’t destroyed in the fire, was also recovered, and police were able to identify and apprehend Bell. He was denied bail during a hearing at Cook County court, and he’s facing charges of first-degree murder and concealment of a homicide. “The actions of the defendant were cold, calculating, and pre-planned,” Judge James Brown said during the hearing, according to the Chicago Tribune . “The only reasonable order would be an order of no bail.” 
+Whenever anyone is at your door, it’s important to confirm who they are before letting them inside, regardless of who they claim to be. When all is said and done, it’s better to be safe than sorry, and your life could very well depend on it.",FAKE
+3121,Jeb Bush: How Catholic faith changed my life,"Millions of American Catholics, like me, are excited that Pope Francis is making his first journey to the United States. In our Holy Father, we have a model of personal holiness and deep concern for the most vulnerable among us. He reminds us to speak out for the persecuted, advocate for the unborn, comfort the afflicted and welcome the stranger.
+
+The pundits would like to make him out to be a politician, but his charge is much greater than that: He is the spiritual leader to the largest group of Christians on Earth and an inspiration to all people of good will.
+
+The church that Francis leads never tires of proclaiming the dignity of all people -- a truth that is also at the heart of our form of government that pledges liberty and justice for all. It underlies the first freedom in our Constitution, the freedom of religion, a freedom that too many in our government have lost sight of in recent years.
+
+I hope Pope Francis' visit to the United States is a powerful reminder that in a country as great and diverse as ours, we can protect religious freedom and the right of conscience while respecting those with opposing views.
+
+Catholicism has grounded my own life. In Catholic teachings, the family is a ""domestic church,"" and the Catholic faithful are a kind of extended family. The Catholic Church has always bound my own family together. Even before my own conversion, we attended Mass together, sharing as a family the message of hope and love, praying for peace and grace. My wife was raised in the Catholic faith, we were married in a Catholic student center, and we in turn raised our children as Catholics. The Pope: Not just for Catholics anymore After I lost my first campaign for governor of Florida in 1994, I took stock of my life and my beliefs, and I decided to fully embrace the faith that had been guiding my family and me for many years. I attended Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults classes. I gained a deeper appreciation for the sacraments of the church and the grace they impart. I studied Catholic Church doctrine, and how it is renewed in every age. The more I learned, the more I appreciated the rich history of the church and its teachings, and my heart was changed by God's hand. In the 20 years since my conversion, the Church has given me the faith and hope to cope with life's many challenges. In the 20 years since my conversion, the church has given me the faith and hope to cope with life's many challenges. Members of my family were blessed to meet Pope John Paul II, one of the truly great saints of our time. I vividly remember 1979, when Saint John Paul, in solidarity with the Polish people, gave communion to more than 1 million Catholics in Warsaw, nourishing their faith and encouraging their determination to live in truth. He set a fire of liberty that led to the freedom of Poland and the end of Soviet domination. Welcome to our big, messy religious debate, Pope Francis At the request of my brother, President George W. Bush, I was just as blessed to lead the U.S. delegation to Pope Benedict XVI's inaugural Mass back in 2005. It was truly an honor and inspiration to meet such a devout and thoughtful spiritual leader. I have witnessed the power of God, through his church, to touch lives and transform the world -- both on the world stage and in my own heart. The church has grounded me and my beliefs in a deep way of thinking about mercy, penance and the dignity and potential of every life, young and old, rich and poor, born and not yet born. The power of that Catholic faith can be seen today, not only in the crowds that will greet Pope Francis in the coming days, but in the millions of men and women who heal the sick, comfort the lonely, work for peace and feed the hungry. It is a faith that touches heart and mind, and it brings comfort to all who listen to its message of hope. And it is a faith that I am proud to call my own. What the Pope has said about key issues facing the church A variety of celebrities and other public figures across a variety of faiths -- and none -- have expressed their support for Pope Francis. Here is a selection of their comments. A variety of celebrities and other public figures across a variety of faiths -- and none -- have expressed their support for Pope Francis. Here is a selection of their comments. A variety of celebrities and other public figures across a variety of faiths -- and none -- have expressed their support for Pope Francis. Here is a selection of their comments. A variety of celebrities and other public figures across a variety of faiths -- and none -- have expressed their support for Pope Francis. Here is a selection of their comments. A variety of celebrities and other public figures across a variety of faiths -- and none -- have expressed their support for Pope Francis. Here is a selection of their comments. A variety of celebrities and other public figures across a variety of faiths -- and none -- have expressed their support for Pope Francis. Here is a selection of their comments. A variety of celebrities and other public figures across a variety of faiths -- and none -- have expressed their support for Pope Francis. Here is a selection of their comments. A variety of celebrities and other public figures across a variety of faiths -- and none -- have expressed their support for Pope Francis. Here is a selection of their comments. A variety of celebrities and other public figures across a variety of faiths -- and none -- have expressed their support for Pope Francis. Here is a selection of their comments.",REAL
+5968,Hook Up Sites Tinder and Grindr Good For Population Control,"Home | Health | Hook Up Sites Tinder and Grindr Good For Population Control Hook Up Sites Tinder and Grindr Good For Population Control By Girolamo Fracastoro 30/10/2016 22:17:24 
+LONDON – England – News that there has been a massive spike in syphilis amongst users of Tinder and Grindr is welcome news to many who are seriously concerned with over population. 
+
+Because syphilis can stay mainly undetected if untreated it can remain latent in the body for years. In the late stages of syphilis, the disease damages the internal organs, including the brain, nerves, eyes, heart, blood vessels, liver, bones and joints leading to early death. 
+Antibiotics are increasingly becoming redundant due to overuse and the WHO has warned of a coming cataclysmic disaster where many ailments are untreatable due to resistance. 
+“These people are spreading STIs around like candy and soon their diseases will not be treatable. It works both ways, deaths from syphilis and gonorrhoea will eventually cull these populations thinning the herd,” a clinical insider revealed. 
+What about HIV? Unfortunately it has not had the effect in population reduction that was needed. Although it is still prevalent amongst the gay population, it needs to make more in roads into the heterosexual population to become effective in reducing the population numbers. 
+Since the discovery of HIV/AIDS it has only killed 36 million, considering the global population is 7.5 billion and growing, it’s a drop in the ocean. 
+We must therefore encourage more sites like Tinder and Grindr, the more the better. These sites peddle death to the stupid, and less stupid people on earth can only be a very good thing. 
+App developers need to make in roads in creating more hookup apps tailored not only for the developed world but for the third world, especially nations like China and India as well as the African continent, where population growth is beyond unsustainable. 
+Once STDs like syphilis explode in these regions, which are wholly untreatable, they will continue to spread like wildfire. 
+The creators of Tinder and Grindr should be commended for their great works, you have fired the starting gun in the race to reduce the global population before it is too late. Promiscuous risky sexual encounters should be encouraged at all junctures to spread STIs. 
+Finite resources are being permanently depleted daily, and it is only a matter of time before the Malthusian nightmare is upon us. Estimated projections for global population growth are 11.2 billion by 2023 according to the UN. 
+This cannot be allowed to happen, so please go on Tinder and Grindr now, and do your bit. You can catch chlamydia, genital warts, HIV, syphilis and gonorrhoea, maybe all at the same time. Share on :",FAKE
+4206,"On policies, Ted Cruz shifts his stance to suit a fractured GOP","At the start of the presidential campaign, Ted Cruz told voters he would be the only “consistent conservative” in a crowded Republican field.
+
+Then he confronted the modern GOP — a fractured party, in which each faction has a different definition of what “conservative” means.
+
+To consistently please all of them, Cruz has had to be inconsistent with himself.
+
+Time and again he has shifted, shaded or obfuscated his policy positions — piling on new ideas, which sometimes didn’t fit with the old.
+
+Cruz, for instance, promised libertarians that he would show a strict respect for the Constitution’s checks and balances.
+
+Then, the senator from Texas promised social conservatives that he would scrap one of those checks and balances, stripping lifetime tenure from Supreme Court justices.
+
+He criticized Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Then he seemed to support it. He appeared skeptical of military intervention in Syria. Then he vowed to find out whether “sand can glow in the dark” there.
+
+Cruz’s maneuvering has helped him build and maintain a base of support among the party’s activist class: If Trump fails to win the GOP nomination outright, Cruz could have enough backing among Republican delegates to win it after the first ballot at the party’s convention in Cleveland in July.
+
+But while Cruz’s rightward shifts might have been politically smart during the primary season, they probably would create major challenges during the general election, putting Cruz far to the right of most voters.
+
+“Now, he’s in this wonderful position where he’s both the last anti-establishment candidate acceptable who is not named Donald Trump, and he’s also the last establishment candidate,” said Matt Welch of the libertarian magazine Reason, applauding Cruz’s policy shifts. “That’s just a genius level of maneuvering.”
+
+“The question is: What might he believe, in the middle of all of that?” Welch said. “And I think people have a right to be very skeptical as to whether there is a real core belief system.”
+
+Cruz’s campaign did not respond Friday to a detailed list of questions about his policy positions.
+
+It’s clear that, on a number of issues, Cruz has been very consistent in his beliefs.
+
+He has opposed giving undocumented immigrants a path to U.S. citizenship. He says that climate change is not a significant problem, defying considerable scientific evidence for climate change.
+
+Cruz has consistently opposed abortion, including in cases in which the pregnancy was caused by rape. He opposes same-sex marriage. But Cruz says that — despite those personal feelings — he would leave decisions on abortion and marriage to the states.
+
+That was of a piece with Cruz’s politics during his early years in the Senate: He adhered to tea party originalism, which believed Washington could be corrected by a return to the limited vision of its Founding Fathers.
+
+“We need to restore the Constitution as our standard,” Cruz says on his campaign website.
+
+Then, after the Supreme Court decision last year that made same-sex marriage a right nationwide, Cruz said the Constitution needed a change.
+
+“I am proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution that would subject the justices of the Supreme Court to periodic judicial-retention elections,” Cruz wrote in an op-ed in National Review. Now, Cruz said, the public would periodically get a chance to throw out “judicial tyrants” with whom they disagreed.
+
+He didn’t actually file that proposed amendment, but a point was made. This was a different kind of conservatism, one in which some policies were so important that the Constitution should adapt to them.
+
+“If Ted Cruz is a ‘constitutionalist,’ he is a sore-loser, fair-weather constitutionalist,” David Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, wrote in an email. “The Constitution’s framers would be aghast at Cruz’s proposal to undermine the Constitution’s main protection against a tyrannical majority.”
+
+On the subject of immigration, Cruz once championed policies from his party’s business wing — including big increases in legal immigration. He called for doubling the caps on the number of green cards granted each year and supported a fivefold increase in the number of visas granted to high-skilled guest workers, known as H-1B visas. He demurred when asked what he’d do with the millions of illegal immigrants already living in the United States.
+
+But then came Trump.
+
+After the billionaire used promises of a sweeping immigration crackdown to rocket to the top of the GOP race, Cruz’s own policies grew sharply tougher. He was against any increase in legal immigration. He called for the high-skilled visa program to be halted for 180 days so that reported abuses in the system could be investigated.
+
+Rick Tyler, Cruz’s former communications director, said he believes Cruz is “to the right of everyone who’s running” in the race.
+
+“If he changed his position on H-1B — and it’s fair to say he did, but you have to look underneath it and say, ‘Did he change his principle on it?’ No, and I think that’s the important thing,” Tyler said.
+
+On the question of what to do with illegal immigrants, Cruz’s answers grew tougher and tougher.
+
+First, Cruz said, he wouldn’t offer them legal status. But he wouldn’t follow Trump’s lead and deport immigrants en masse.
+
+Then, maybe, he would.
+
+“Yes, we should deport them,” Cruz said on Fox News. When asked by host Bill O’Reilly if he would “look for them,” Cruz said yes.
+
+“Of course you would. That’s what ICE exists for,” Cruz said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We have law enforcement that looks for people who are violating the laws that apprehends them and deports them.”
+
+If Trump had redefined what the most conservative position on immigration was, Cruz was going to keep up. At rallies now, Cruz makes this explicit without saying Trump’s name: He says he wants to build a border wall and that he already “has someone in mind to build it.”
+
+Another noticeable shift was in Cruz’s approach to the federal budget.
+
+At the beginning of his campaign, his ideas seemed drawn to please anti-tax conservatives, whose biggest concern was to reduce what Washington raises and spends. Cruz proposed instituting a single flat income tax, set at 10 percent. That would be a massive boon to the rich, who pay much higher rates now: The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that the top 0.1 percent of earners would get a tax cut equivalent to 29 percent of their after-tax income.
+
+It would also take a massive slice out of overall federal revenue: The Tax Policy Center estimated the loss at $8.6 trillion over a decade. That was a major departure from past GOP orthodoxy: 2012 nominee Mitt Romney didn’t want to reduce revenue at all.
+
+That was still not as big as Trump’s proposed tax cut, which the center said would eliminate $9.5 trillion in future revenue.
+
+Cruz had specific suggestions for what he would cut to partially offset the loss. He would eliminate four Cabinet agencies — the departments of Commerce, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development — and the Internal Revenue Service (Cruz would shift the tax-collecting function to a new office with less power and fewer employees). In fact, Cruz wanted a new constitutional amendment to require that the federal budget eventually balance.
+
+But then, while campaigning in hawkish South Carolina, Cruz added another piece to the plan.
+
+Even as he slashed funding for the rest of the government, he promised a spending spree at the Pentagon: dozens more warships, hundreds more planes, thousands more troops. Analysts have estimated that the cost could exceed $1 trillion — and that it could reach $2.4 trillion — over a decade.
+
+“All these promises can’t add up. It’s not possible,” said Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He estimated that if Cruz tried to make good on all of these promises — plus another pledge to fully fund Social Security benefits for the near future — he might have to cut all other spending by 85 or 90 percent. “It’s not realistically possible to cut taxes by $8 trillion and increase defense spending by $2.5 billion and balance the budget.”
+
+That shift was connected to another, in Cruz’s policies toward the military.
+
+In the Senate, Cruz had voted repeatedly against the bill that sets policy and authorizes funding for the Pentagon, often objecting that it did not have enough civil-liberties protections for Americans accused of terrorism. Late last year, Cruz was deeply skeptical of U.S. military interventions overseas — even in Syria. “We have no dog in the fight of the Syrian civil war,” he said.
+
+Cruz has said he remains skeptical of unnecessary foreign interventions, but in February he called for an extensive Pentagon buildup. He also began to call for aggressive tactics against the Islamic State in Syria: The United States would carpet-bomb the militants, Cruz said, and find out “if sand can glow in the dark.”
+
+That has left even proponents of a larger U.S. military wondering about the sincerity of Cruz’s positions.
+
+“I don’t buy that he understands what he’s trying to do,” said Chris Harmer, a retired Navy commander and national security consultant. He said he agreed with Cruz that the Navy was too small, but he wondered why he hadn’t said so before. “Ted Cruz should have spent the last four years making a case for: This is why the end state of the Navy ought to be bigger . . . He hasn’t done any of that,” Harmer said.",REAL
+10102,"Life: 6 Pieces Of Meat I Have Seen, Held, And In One Case, Gone On Vacation With","I know all of these meats. 1.This slab of bacon has felt the warmth of my hands and the beauty of my gaze. 2. I can remember the moment as if it happened only an hour ago. I was young, having just been asked to leave the seminary after I repeatedly refused to chip in for Wi-Fi, and walking through downtown Kansas City when I came across this sirloin steak. Never before had I seen something so special. I took the meat up into my hands and eyed it for a solid three minutes before I set it back down on a manhole cover and continued on my way. A chance meeting, sure. But an unforgettable one. 3. I’ve seen and held raw meat, as well! This pork chop, while raw, is still deserving of human touch, and I provided that comfort for it. Anyone would have done the same. 4. When you win a one-day, two-nights cruise to Stamford, CT on a radio call in sweepstakes, you think you have it made. But I was a bit nervous when I took this succulent rack of St. Louis ribs onboard with me. It was my very first cruise, and I didn’t know what to expect. But let’s just say I was extremely happy that I won two tickets for this maiden voyage. 5. I’m currently holding this tenderloin in my hands, but sadly, I have not opened my eyes to gaze upon it yet. The time will come, though, when I see it. And it will be incredible. 6. Here’s another cut of meat that has sensed my touch and stare. This one I was holding and touching in a helicopter a few years back. It was the helicopter of my rival, and he was trying to show me how much better his life was than mine. All I had was the meat, a far cry from a fully functional helicopter. So even though he asked me not to bring meat onto his helicopter, I insisted. It made me feel less small. Secure, somehow.",FAKE
+6776,Project Veritas Undercover Journalist in Full Burka Is Offered Huma Abedin’s Ballot,"We Are Change 
+In this latest Project Veritas video an undercover journalist is offered Huma Abedin’s ballot while wearing a full burka and not even questioned.
+She is then told that she can vote via a paper ballot instead of voting with a voting machine. Alan Schulkin, a Democratic Elections Commissioner in NYC then explains on video how voter fraud can be committed when people wear burkas inside polling locations on Election Day.
+The video starts with the undercover PV journalist talking to Alan Schulkin, the Democratic Elections Commissioner in NYC in which the journalist says, “Not only just voter ID because of voting twice, but people can cover their faces, you know what I’m saying?”
+Alan Schulkin responds, “Well the Muslims can do that too. You don’t know who they are.”
+The PV journalist then proceeds to test out the information that Alan Schulkin gave to her. An election official then questions the journalist dressed in full burka.
+“Do you know where you’re going?” The journalist responds, “No.”
+The official then asks the PV journalist for her address in which she responds “254 Park Avenue South.”
+The election official then gives the PV journalist a number in line. The video cuts back to Alan Schulkin and the PV journalist’s conversation in which the PV journalist says, “Especially, all those burkas someone could claim, oh it’s my religion, but then you don’t know if they are pretending or not.”
+Alan Schulkin responds “Exactly!”
+The journalist then proceeds to vote under the name “Huma Abedin,” after talking to an election official who greets her with “Good morning, last name?”
+The PV journalist responds, “Abedin”
+What follows is shocking, “Since we don’t have your name in the book. You can fill out an affidavit ballot. Ok?” the official says.
+The official then asks the PV journalist if she is “Democrat or Republican?” The journalist responds troll-fully “Huma Abedin is a registered Democrat.”
+The election official then responds “I don’t have your name in the book but you can vote with a paper ballot.”
+The segment then cuts back to Alan Schulkin in which he makes a racist comment about Muslims.
+“They detonate bombs in public schools which we’re using that could disrupt the whole election.”
+The PV journalist responds “Yeah but they could do it wearing a burka. But then no one could say oh wait let me see your voter ID because they don’t have ID because they don’t want to discriminate because they are wearing a burka.”
+Schulkin responds again agreeing with the journalist “exactly” he says.
+She then continues to explain. “But no one can do that because your going to offend them, but then it’s like, hey now, I’m not a Muslim but I can go in there you know?”
+The video then cuts back to the election official speaking to the PV journalist “But your names not in the book, for some reason it’s not here, but that doesn’t mean you can’t vote by paper ballot. You just can’t vote by machine.” the election official repeats.
+“Okay so I can vote today by paper ballot?” the PV journalist responds.
+“Yes, yes,” the election official responds.
+The journalist then reiterates that she is voting as Huma Abedin to the official who still hasn’t caught on.
+“So I can vote today as Huma Abedin, but just with a paper ballot?’
+The election official then responds “Whatever you want if that’s you. If that’s the name you voted with last election, and you haven’t changed your name?”
+“Okay Ill be back. I’m going to go call my husband Anthony.” The PV journalist then walks away and is told to “come back later” by the election official.
+The video ends with a final cut back to Alan Schulkin in which he makes the statement, “Your vote isn’t really counting because they can go in there with a burka on and you don’t know if they are a voter.” He adds, “your vote gets discounted because they come in there with a burka on and they can vote. People think it’s a liberal thing to do, but I take my vote very seriously and I don’t want ten other people coming in negating my vote by voting for the other candidate when they’re not even registered voters.”
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ 
+The post Project Veritas Undercover Journalist in Full Burka Is Offered Huma Abedin’s Ballot appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+3714,"Families To Roof: 'I Forgive You, And Have Mercy On Your Soul'","Roof, the lead suspect in Wednesday's mass shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, made his appearance remotely, dressed in striped inmates' garb and flanked by two officers. On the screen, he wore a stoic expression as he looked out over the bond hearing. Representatives of the victims were in the courtroom, and got to look into Roof's eyes as they forgave him, one by one.
+
+""I forgive you,"" Nadine Collier, daughter of victim Ethel Lance, said to Roof. ""I will never talk to her ever again, never be able to hold her again. I forgive you and have mercy on your soul. You hurt me, you hurt a lot of people, but I forgive you.""
+
+""Hate won’t win,” she said. ""My grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate. Everyone’s plea for your soul is proof that they lived in love and their legacies live in love.""
+
+The judge asked Roof whether he understood the charges against him, noting that his next two hearings would take place on Oct. 23 and Feb. 5.
+
+Prior to the hearing, a spokesman with the Charleston County Sheriff's Office told The Huffington Post that Roof is on suicide watch and that his family won't be able to visit him for his first 72 hours in jail. But he said that as far as he knew, Roof's family hasn't yet tried to contact the suspect, who is accused of shooting nine people dead at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on Wednesday.
+
+The Charleston Police Department announced Roof's charges, which include possession of a firearm, on Twitter just hours before the hearing. The department confirmed that Roof won't get bond for the murder charges:
+
+“This is a state that is hurt by the fact that nine people innocently were killed,” Haley told the paper, adding that the state “absolutely will want him to have the death penalty.”
+
+Later on Friday, the FBI announced that it will look into the murders as a potential act of ""domestic terrorism"" as part of its investigation.
+
+Roof was arrested on Thursday after a florist in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, noticed his vehicle, followed him and called police. He was collared in Shelby, North Carolina, more than 200 miles from Charleston.",REAL
+5794,Turkeys face deep divisions over Thanksgiving vote,"November 2, 2016 
+A group of about 200,000 White Holland turkeys in a gigantic shed at a farm in Ohio is now debating whether or not to vote in favour of Thanksgiving. The vote to be made next week by pecking once at a pile of grain for ‘Thanksgiving’ or twice for ‘Something Else’ comes after bitter arguments in which claims and counter-claims were made about the availability of dust for bathing in over the turkeys’ long-term (i.e. three-week) future. 
+Many turkeys have deplored the resulting divisions, which have seen elevated levels of pecking in the once harmonious community five miles from Wapakoneta. ‘I’ve lived here all my life, y’all,’ said turkey hen Wanda-Mae Cabrera. ‘What was it we were deciding on again? Me an’ my folks before me, we all lived here, yes we did.’ 
+Voting for Thanksgiving means that the turkeys will be able to build a wall from their own faeces to deter any incoming poultry from Kentucky from trying to get into the shed, once they have mastered the intricacies of building a wall from their own faeces. Many also believe that this will make the shed great again, as it hasn’t been great for a long time but definitely used to be. They also said they liked the sound of a new farmer called Donald, who recently grabbed a pussy-cat that raided the shed before it could do any damage. 
+Some turkeys prefer to carry on not celebrating Thanksgiving because the past 244 generations had not and had all gone away to live happily on a farm somewhere else, apparently. ‘One labourer said we will get a right stuffing either way,’ said anti-Thanksgiving turkey DeMarius Jackson, aged 28 weeks. ‘Well, that’s democracy. I imagine.’ 
+‘I ain’t having no goddam American Bronzes sharing my shed, no sirree,’ raged White Holland cock Burl Griffin CCXXVI. ‘Before you know it, they’ll be gobblin’ around your hens, stealin’ your water and sayin’ you can’t worship the Great Spotlight in the Roof no more. I ain’t breedist but have you seen the size of their wattles? I like my shed the way I like it, so I’m for Thanksgiving, sure thing. What is Thanksgiving, anyway?’ Share this story... 
+Posted: Nov 2nd, 2016 by Oxbridge Click for more article by Oxbridge .. More Stories about: World News 0",FAKE
+7977,Oregon standoff defendants acquitted; feds literally Tase Ammon Bundy’s lawyer at courthouse,"Print 
+This is a breaking story, and there will be time to update it later. But it’s important for people to get the word out, not only that Ammon Bundy and his co-defendants have been found not guilty on all charges, but that federal marshals who were present used a Taser on Bundy’s attorney, Marcus Mumford, when Mumford asked the judge to order Bundy freed, unless the feds had a detainer that would give the federal district a reason to keep him in custody. 
+First, the news about the acquittals (and one hung jury outcome): 
+A federal jury on Thursday found Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy and five co-defendants not guilty of conspiring to prevent federal employees from doing their jobs through intimidation, threat or force during the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. 
+The Bundy brothers and occupiers Jeff Banta and David Fry also were found not guilty of having guns in a federal facility. Kenneth Medenbach was found not guilty of stealing government property, and a hung jury was declared on Ryan Bundy’s charge of theft of FBI surveillance cameras. 
+The jury didn’t have to deliberate for long: 
+The jury of nine women and three men returned the verdicts after five hours of deliberations on Thursday in the high-profile case that riveted the state and drew national and international attention to the federal bird sanctuary in rural eastern Oregon. 
+The defendants and their legal teams were naturally thrilled and relieved. But the real drama started when Ammon Bundy lawyer Marcus Mumford asked for documentation on a pending case against Bundy in Nevada, for which a detainer would give the feds a reason to keep him in custody. 
+The coda to the stunning verdict, undoubtedly a significant blow to federal prosecutors, was when Ammon Bundy’s lawyer Marcus Mumford argued that his client, dressed in a gray suit and white dress shirt, should be allowed to walk out of the court, a free man. 
+U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown told him that there was a U.S. Marshal’s hold on him from a pending federal indictment in Nevada. 
+“If there’s a detainer, show me,” Mumford stood, arguing before the judge. 
+Suddenly, a group of about six U.S. Marshals surrounded Mumford at his defense table. The judge directed them to move back but moments later, the marshals grabbed on to him. 
+“What are you doing?” Mumford yelled, as he struggled and was taken down to the floor. 
+As deputy marshals yelled, “Stop resisting,” the judge demanded, “Everybody out of the courtroom now!” 
+Mumford was taken into custody, a member of his legal team confirmed. 
+Ammon Bundy’s lawyer J. Morgan Philpot, said afterwards on the courthouse steps that Mumford had been arrested and marshals had used a stun gun, or Taser, on his back. Another member of Ammon Bundy’s legal team Rick Koerber, echoed Philpot, saying he heard Mumford questioning in court why they were using a Taser against him. 
+Philpot decried the marshals’ treatment of Mumford in the courtroom. “What happened at the end is symbolic of the improper use of force by the federal government,” he said. 
+By 6:30 p.m., Mumford was released from custody. He confirmed that he was struck with a stun gun once while he was on the floor of the courtroom. 
+I would say this is unreal, except that things like this are happening far too often now. 
+Mumford was merely doing what a good lawyer would do, arguing zealously for his client. There is no reason why he should have remained silent. Demanding a detainer document, if Bundy was not to be released, is exactly what any defense attorney should have done in the situation. 
+The Oregon-standoff situation has been full of such unjustified high-handedness by the federal government from the beginning, and this latest event just raises the red flags again. Americans should be very alarmed at what our federal government feels entitled to do now, including federal officers disobeying a judge in her courtroom in order to manufacture an “incident” out of nothing. 
+Don’t assume that word of what actually happened will get out through the MSM. Here is how the New York Times reported the marshals’ rugby scrum against Mumford: 
+In a sign of the tension that ran through the trial, Ammon Bundy’s lawyer, Marcus R. Mumford, frustrated that the Bundys were not being released, was restrained by four United States marshals after an outburst. 
+This makes it sound as if the marshals were acting under the judge’s order, when in fact — according to the Oregonian account — she told them to back off after they converged on Mumford. 
+One of these accounts is, essentially, a lie. I know which one my money is on. We no longer live in a world in which MSM outlets can be assumed to be acting in good faith. 
+But it’s up to us whether we have such a world again.",FAKE
+7639,Remember This When You Talk About Standing Rock,"Donate Remember This When You Talk About Standing Rock Dan Nanamkin during the treaty camp’s confrontation with militarized police force on Thursday afternoon. Photo by Adam Alexander Johansson. By Kelly Hayes / yesmagazine.org 
+This piece is very personal because, as an Indigenous woman, my analysis is very personal, as is the analysis that my friends on the frontlines have shared with me. We obviously can’t speak for everyone involved, as Native beliefs and perspectives are as diverse as the convictions of any people. But as my friends hold strong on the frontlines of Standing Rock, and I watch transfixed with both pride and worry, we feel the need to say a few things. 
+I’ve been in and out of communication with my friends at Standing Rock all day. As you might imagine, as much as they don’t want me to worry, it’s pretty hard for them to stay in touch. I asked if there was anything they wanted me to convey on social media, as most of them are maintaining a very limited presence on such platforms. The following is my best effort to summarize what they had to say, and to chime in with a few corresponding thoughts of my own. 
+It is crucial that people recognize that Standing Rock is part of an ongoing struggle against colonial violence. #NoDAPL is a front of struggle in a long-erased war against Native peoples — a war that has been active since first contact, and waged without interruption. Our efforts to survive the conditions of this anti-Native society have gone largely unnoticed because white supremacy is the law of the land, and because we, as Native people, have been pushed beyond the limits of public consciousness. 
+The fact that we are more likely to be killed by law enforcement than any other group speaks to the fact that Native erasure is ubiquitous, both culturally and literally, but pushed from public view. Our struggles intersect with numerous others, but are perpetrated with different motives and intentions. Anti-Blackness, for example, is a performative enforcement of structural power, whereas the violence against us is a matter of pragmatism. The struggle at Standing Rock is an effort to prevent the construction of a deadly, destructive mechanism, created by greed-driven people with no regard for our lives. It has always been this way. We die, and have died, for the sake of expansion and white wealth, and for the maintenance of both. 
+The harms committed against us have long been relegated to the history books. This erasure has occurred for the sake of both white supremacy and US mythology, such as American exceptionalism. It has also been perpetuated to sustain the comfort of those who benefit from harms committed against us. Our struggles have been kept both out of sight and out of mind — easily forgotten by those who aren’t directly impacted. 
+It should be clear to everyone that we are not simply here in those rare moments when others bear witness. 
+To reiterate (what should be obvious): We are not simply here when you see us. 
+We have always been here, fighting for our lives, surviving colonization, and that reality is rarely acknowledged. Even people who believe in freedom frequently overlook our issues, as well as the intersections of their issues with our own. It matters that more of the world is bearing witness in this historic moment, but we feel the need to point out that the dialogue around #NoDAPL has become extremely climate oriented. Yes, there is an undeniable connectivity between this front of struggle and the larger fight to combat climate change. We fully recognize that all of humanity is at risk of extinction, whether they realize it or not. But intersectionality does not mean focusing exclusively on the intersections of our respective work. 
+It sometimes means taking a journey well outside the bounds of those intersections. 
+In discussing #NoDAPL, too few people have started from a place of naming that we have a right to defend our water and our lives, simply because we have a natural right to defend ourselves and our communities. When “climate justice”, in a very broad sense, becomes the center of conversation, our fronts of struggle are often reduced to a staging ground for the messaging of NGOs. 
+This is happening far too frequently in public discussion of #NoDAPL. 
+Yes, everyone should be talking about climate change, but you should also be talking about the fact that Native communities deserve to survive, because our lives are worth defending in their own right — not simply because “this affects us all.” 
+So when you talk about Standing Rock, please begin by acknowledging that this pipeline was redirected from an area where it was most likely to impact white people. And please remind people that our people are struggling to survive the violence of colonization on many fronts, and that people shouldn’t simply engage with or retweet such stories when they see a concrete connection to their own issues — or a jumping off point to discuss their own issues. Our friends, allies and accomplices should be fighting alongside us because they value our humanity and right to live, in addition to whatever else they believe in. 
+Every Native at Standing Rock — every Native on this continent — has survived the genocide of a hundred million of our people. That means that every Indigenous child born is a victory against colonialism, but we are all born into a fight for our very existence. We need that to be named and centered, which is a courtesy we are rarely afforded. 
+This message is not a condemnation. It’s an ask. 
+We are asking that you help ensure that dialogue around this issue begins with and centers a discussion of anti-Native violence and policies, no matter what other connections you might ultimately make, because those discussions simply don’t happen in this country. There obviously aren’t enough people talking about climate change, but there are even fewer people — and let’s be real, far fewer people — discussing the various forms of violence we are up against, and acting in solidarity with us. And while such discussions have always been deserved, we are living in a moment when Native water protectors and water warriors have more than earned both acknowledgement and solidarity. 
+So if you have been with us in this fight, we appreciate you. But we are reaching out, right now, in these brave days for our people, and asking that you keep the aforementioned truths front and center as you discuss this effort. This moment is, first and foremost, about Native liberation, self determination and Native survival. That needs to be centered and celebrated. 
+Thanks, 
+K and friends 
+Kelly Hayes is a direct action trainer and a co-founder of The Chicago Light Brigade and the direct action collective Lifted Voices. She blogs at TransformativeSpaces.org , where this article originally appeared, about U.S. movements and her work as an organizer against state violence. 4.0 ·",FAKE
+1333,Marco Rubio can’t save the Republican Party: Why people are giving him way too much credit after Iowa,"The GOP presidential campaign has now shifted away from the heartland evangelical wonderland of Iowa to “live free or die” state, New Hampshire, where the elbows are notoriously sharp and a whole bunch of Republican establishment candidates are hunkering down to stage their last stand. It remains unlikely that any of them will be able to dislodge Trump in the number one slot — it’s much more his kind of electorate than the pious social conservatives of Iowa. There are lots of angry white right-wingers and independents there who aren’t as concerned about their religion as they are about their guns and the threat of Mexicans and Muslims “pouring over the border” to make them eat mole and follow Sharia law.
+
+But after Iowa there a feeling of excitement in the air that the Trump balloon may have finally burst, and there’s a possibility that the air could go completely out of it over the next couple of weeks. (Nate Silver mused yesterday that Trump may just end up being like Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul.) One suspects that all the other candidates are having fever dreams about making a big last-minute move as Rubio did in Iowa to either usurp The Donald or come in a close second and be touted as this cycle’s Comeback Kid. Cruz and Rubio are, of course, the two best positioned to do this, with Rubio probably a little bit better positioned than Cruz simply because he isn’t quite as dependent on evangelical voters, even though he turned himself into the second coming of Oral Roberts in the last couple of weeks to get himself a slice of that Iowa evangelical pie.
+
+Yesterday morning, the campaigns wasted no time with niceties, as Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich were practically waiting on the tarmac for the Iowa Three to alight from their private planes to begin the battle, mano a mano. So far they seem to be sticking with the “Trump will implode eventually” strategy and are setting their sights on one another. As is his wont, Chris Christie was the first to deliver a roundhouse punch to the man who came in third in Iowa but was declared the winner, Marco Rubio:
+
+“Let’s get him up here – let’s get the boy in the bubble up here. Let’s see if he’ll handle your questions and take that. I don’t think he will. Now it’s time for him to man up and step up and stop letting his handlers write all of his speeches. I’m fascinated to hear his answers, and I’m sure you are too. “Maybe he’ll answer more than two or three questions at a town hall and do more than 40 minutes and deliver something that isn’t the same canned speech he gives every time. This isn’t the student-council election everybody. This is the election for the president of the United States. “Let’s get the boy in his bubble out of his bubble, and let’s see him play for the next week in New Hampshire. Let’s see if he’s ready to play because I’m ready to play.”
+
+It’s pretty clear what Christie’s saying there: Rubio’s a punk. Rubio’s campaign manager responded by calling Christie a liberal Obama lover who’s full of “hot air,” which undoubtedly made him feel very sad.
+
+Jeb Bush meanwhile is facing a different problem: too much campaign spending on his behalf. It sounds weird, but according to this Washington Post story, Bush’s Super PAC is inundating people with expensive campaign swag to the point where it’s making them recoil from the candidate.This has happened before. In California, eBay magnate and GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman saturated the state with advertisements for many months, and it made people hate her. There is such a thing as too much exposure. (It’s worth noting that Whitman had an unusual business arrangement with strategist Mike Murphy — the same Mike Murphy who runs Bush’s Right to Rise Super PAC.)
+
+Meanwhile, after his Super PAC ran a very unpopular negative ad against Marco Rubio and he asked them to take it down, Governor John Kasich (who is seen as a possible New Hampshire latecomer) seems to have decided that he’s going to run as the positive, optimistic guy. It makes sense since there might be a few people in New Hampshire who aren’t convinced that their country is the dark and hopeless dystopian hell-scape the other candidates insist America has become.
+
+And then there’s Rubio, who is telling everyone who will listen that he’s the only one who can “unite both the Republican Party and the conservative movement after what has been a divisive campaign.” He seems to think if he says it enough it will be true. And a lot of Republicans in D.C. are probably hoping he’s right.
+
+Unfortunately, he and Cruz might share the same problem in the general election. This Kasich voter gets right to the point: Rubio and Cruz “really are too conservative, and I don’t really see them as compromisers,” said Judy Kohn, a 76-year-old retired librarian from Georges, New Hampshire. Nobody is surprised that someone might think Ted Cruz is too conservative. But that nice young man Rubio? Well yes, as it happens, he’s just as right wing as Cruz. Sure, he joined the Gang of 8 to try to forge some compromise on immigration but that’s the only compromise he’s ever endorsed. It’s too bad for him that happens to be a litmus test issue on the right (and one which I’m not sure they can forgive). Lindsay Graham put it right out there on “Morning Joe”: ”I like Marco but he has now turned hard right. Marco has no exception for rape and incest. I think it’s going to be very hard to grow the party among women if you’re gonna tell young women, ‘If you get raped, you’re gotta carry the child of the rapist.’” According to recent polling that extreme position is only held by 17 percent of the public. This quote is from a speech Rubio gave a while back at the Reagan Library, talking about Medicare and Social Security: “These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another…All of a sudden, for an increasing number of people in our nation, it was no longer necessary to worry about saving for security because that was the government’s job.” It’s rare to hear even a far right wing zealot or hardcore libertarian suggest that Social Security and Medicare have “weakened us as a people.” The farthest they will usually go is to suggest that the program should be privatized. That’s a scathing indictment of our national character. Here’s a quote from the most recent presidential debate talking about the threat of ISIS: “When I am president of the United States, if there is some place in this country where radical jihadists are planning to attack the United States, we will go after them wherever they are, and if we capture them alive, they are going to Guantanamo.” Essentially, he’s saying that terrorist suspects caught within the United States will not have trials, they will be sent to Guantanamo. But that’s not how we do things in this country. Any terrorist suspects we’ve caught here up until now have been subject to the American legal system. We’ve had numerous court cases on the subject. He’s openly admitting he plans to flout the rule of law. That was just the tip of the iceberg of Rubio’s frightening foreign policy and national security declarations during the debates. He is, by far, the most bellicose of the lot, and that’s saying something. He states that President Obama has not kept the country safe and therefore he is prepared to let the intelligence services do “whatever it takes,” and promising to make terrorist suspects talk (and I think we know what that means). Even Dick Cheney is more restrained. The Republicans seem to have talked themselves into believing their own hype that the country is in dire straits, the terrorists are coming in droves to kill us and everyone in the nation is angry and frightened to death about… well, everything. There’s a certain political utility in making this case in a presidential primary but at some point reality is going to intrude. No, everything isn’t perfect. America is still emerging from a very difficult economic crisis and there is a terrorist threat abroad. People are frustrated by student debt and police violence and any number of other problems. But the Mad Max version of the United States these Republicans are talking about doesn’t really ring true for more than a limited faction who think the world they knew is disappearing and they will not be able to adjust to the new one. If all the cards fall the right way and Cruz is unable to win anywhere where there isn’t a large evangelical population and Trump decides he wants to go back to playing golf and none of the rest of the establishment pack can climb out of the pile, maybe Rubio will be able to bridge the gap between the conservative movement and the establishment as he’s now promising on a loop. And that’s making the huge assumption that the anti-immigration fetishists will hold their noses and vote for him despite his one apostasy. But that still doesn’t solve their problem. Rubio is so far to the right and the party is so hostile to racial and ethnic minorities that they cannot win a national election. He’s got a Hispanic last name and a beautiful young family, but his record shows he’s just another right wing extremist.",REAL
+8440,BREAKING: Clinton’s intelligence briefings suspended indefinitely following latest in email scandal | Christian Times Newspaper,"0 SHARE 
+Law enforcement and national intelligence officials have suspended Hillary Clinton’s weekly intelligence briefings after further information regarding the Democratic nominee’s use of private emails has surfaced. 
+According to sources familiar with the briefing process, senior officials notified the Clinton campaign on Sunday afternoon that several federal agencies “no longer believed it was either appropriate or prudent for a candidate to receive classified intelligence briefings while under a significant and ongoing investigation.” 
+“While the FBI and Department of Justice continue their independent investigations and while the law enforcement community continues to search for answers, it would be unwise to continue national security briefings amidst a very serious investigation concerning threats to national security.” 
+It is customary for the major party nominees to receive weekly classified intelligence briefings from senior defense and intelligence officials in order for the eventual president to be fully knowledgeable on matters of national security. Both Clinton and Donald Trump have received these briefings since their respective party conventions in June. 
+On Friday, the Director of the FBI, James Comey, notified Congress that the Bureau was effectively reopening its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while Secretary of State. Comey wrote that new emails had surfaced that led investigators to warrant further examination. 
+According to sources familiar with the investigation the newly-found emails were found on a device of Clinton’s personal aide Huma Abedin. Abedin is married to disgraced NY Congressman Anthony Wiener, and it is believed that the emails were discovered during an ongoing investigation into his sexting scandal. 
+This latest revelation, including the suspension of weekly intelligence briefings, does not bode well for the former Secretary of State in the final days of a heated election. Donald Trump has seized on the news, and he is expected to continue to do so in the coming week.” 
+",FAKE
+6255,Watch: Rigged Voting Machine Will Not Allow Vote For Trump/Pence… “Stuck” On Clinton/Kaine,"Don’t worry, after months to prepare their voting machines for election day and repeated assurances from President Obama and the mainstream media that there is nothing to be concerned about, we are sure that all of the potential issues for rigging an election against Trump have been worked out.
+Or… maybe not.
+Watch as this voting machine in the battleground State of Pennsylvania will not allow a voter to select Trump/Pence and remains “stuck” on Clinton/Kaine:
+this is what I was talking about, they fixed it but it was on some nut shit at first. pic.twitter.com/GO5Y9FCnYN 
+— ædonis | hotep (@lordaedonis) November 8, 2016 
+
+Election officials say the issue has now been resolved. 
+",FAKE
+1578,Poll: Voters fret Trump or Clinton in the White House,"But many voters expressed fear or concern at the idea of a Trump presidency -- or a Hillary Clinton one.
+
+Trump is dominating the GOP pack with 35% support, according to the new poll . Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson trail him with 16% and 13% support respectively.
+
+But the new national poll also found that 24% of all voters showed ""concern"" and 40% expressed ""fear"" over what Trump would do were he to win the White House next year.
+
+On the Democratic side, front-runner Hillary Clinton leads Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by 20 percentage points. But voters also showed worry over a Clinton presidency: 23% said they are concerned by the possibility, and 34% said they were scared. The poll surveyed 1,053 registered voters, including 431 Republican primary voters and 384 Democratic primary voters, between December 4-8 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points for registered voters, and plus or minus 6 percentage points each for Republican and Democratic primary voters. The poll was mostly conducted before Trump made a proposal to ban all Muslim travel to the U.S.",REAL
+4800,Does the Road to the White House Run Through Gary Johnson's New Mexico?,"Take a look at the map above. It was put together by Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight and it depicts an unlikely but credible scenario in which Gary Johnson wins his home state of New Mexico and neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton get the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election outright.
+
+Silver stresses that ""plausible is a long way from likely"" but also skylarks that ""it's not far-fetched to think the Electoral College would be close enough that New Mexico would make the difference, and it's not totally crazy to think that Johnson could win his home state."" Silver points to a new Albuquerque Journal poll that has Clinton at 35 percent, Trump at 31 percent, Johnson at 24 percent, and Green Party nom Jill Stein at 2 percent.
+
+Exactly how that ends up with Johnson winning New Mexico is a Stretch-Armstrong-style reach, but let's play with this a bit. Trump is either in full panic mode after blowing the first debate or getting there between the Miss Universe story and continuining questions about his taxes. In any case, his lack of direct experience and volatility will likely make him less appealing to non-committed independents who otherwise want change. Clinton is not anyone's true favorite and perhaps her comments about Sanders' supporters being history's losers and living in their parents' basements starts some bleeding on the part of her lukewarm supporters. Maybe Wikileaks, which promised a while ago to leak some really bad stuff about Clinton this Wednesday (and then cancelled the event), actually has the goods on her in a way that causes her to crater. And let's assume Johnson takes Matt Welch and other critics seriously, ups his game, and wins over the folks who know him best, New Mexicans, to eke out a victory in his home state.
+
+The guy is pulling down newspaper endorsements, after all, and angering Bill Maher, who recently called Johnson a ""fucking idiot."" Maher grants that Johnson is a good guy, but he's afraid that apart from being against dumb wars, the surveillance state, and the war on drugs, Johnson will cost Hillary Clinton the election. That sort of articulation can only help Johnson with voters who are indeed socially liberal and fiscally conservative, a group that Maher (and many others) essentially says doesn't exist. Seeing self-consciously edgy, avant-garde types slag Johnson for believing too strongly in free markets, global trade, and technological innovation will help erase doubts raised by the governor's spaced-out answers on Aleppo and world leaders. As the Albuquerque Journal notes, Johnson is pulling more support from Clinton than from Trump in New Mexico.
+
+We live in a country where Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction by a two-to-one margin and large majorities or pluralities hate the major parties, dislike Clinton and Trump, and think the government is trying to do too much that should be left to individuals and businesses. To such people, Clinton isn't any kind of solution to what ails us, and neither is Trump (if nothing else, both are talking about spending more money than our currently historically high levels during peacetime). Each of them is part of the problem and a figure like Johnson may come to be seen as a true alternative: an experienced non-professional politician who promises a smaller but more effective government.
+
+The idea of Johnson winning New Mexico and the two major-party candidates stalling out short of 270 is of course incredibly unlikely. But it is worth thinking about, especially for those of us who stubbornly refuse to buy into the false ""binary choice"" narrative being pushed by both Republicans and Democrats. Change needs to be seen as possible before it takes place, right? Sometimes change comes in big, revolutionary waves. Other times, it comes from a small but steady rivulet of water that hollows out seemingly impregnable structures. However awful the 21st century has been so far to many of us, it is far worse for established ideologies and political parties, who are really taking it on the chin. The question is, what's the smallest victory it will take to show just how weak and foundering our political duopoly really is?",REAL
+2037,IT BEGINS...,"And they are looking for someone who could appeal to - or at least not offend - Hispanics, non-white women and other parts of the electorate that went big for Obama and Democrats last year.
+
+That's why, just four months into Obama's second term, Paul is part of a stampede of Republican would-be contenders who are criss-crossing the country meeting voters, recruiting potential donors and currying favor with local politicians who could help determine their fate in a run for the White House.
+
+The lessons of Romney's bitter loss in November are never far away. On Monday, Paul made jokes about neighboring (and more liberal) Massachusetts and chided leading Democrat Hillary Clinton. But the Kentucky senator also made a point of calling for a more diverse Republican Party, one that, in his words, should have room for tattooed, bearded and pony-tailed voters.
+
+Rubio's fellow Floridian Jeb Bush, the state's former governor and a brother to one former president and son to another, has not indicated whether he might run in 2016. But he has been politically active, calling for Congress to approve an immigration bill.
+
+The lack of an obvious front-runner for the upcoming presidential election is not unusual for the Democratic Party but is for Republicans, who for generations have typically had an experienced contender in line to run for the White House.
+
+""We are putting together a narrative of the Rick Santorum story,"" Brabender said. ""It's pretty interesting to see how close he came to the (2012) nomination. If he would have won Michigan, he would have been the nominee. One of our jobs is to sort of remind people of that.""",REAL
+8537,Hillary’s health: Candidate stumbles again boarding campaign plane,"Hillary Clinton appeared to stumble or nearly miss a step as she boarded her campaign plane on Thursday. 
+Clinton was flying to a rally in Winston Salem, North Carolina when she boarded in rainy weather. 
+From the time she departed her motorcade van, which was positioned right at the bottom of the stairs, all the way to the top of the steps, she appeared to be wobbly and unsteady, and laboring during the trek. 
+Maybe it was because she had the extra — arduous — task of carrying an umbrella? 
+Live Satellite News, which posted the video, noted she was “mumbling to herself.” 
+Yesterday, she required assistance going up one step onto a riser to greet supporters in Lake Worth, Florida. 
+She needed assistance to get onto it as she could be seen reaching her hand out for a boost or some added steadiness.",FAKE
+4793,Fact-checking the first Clinton-Trump presidential debate,"In the first debate between presidential contenders Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Trump repeatedly relied on troublesome and false facts that have been debunked throughout the campaign. Clinton stretched the truth on occasion, such as when she tried to wiggle out of her 2012 praise of the Trans Pacific Partnership as a “gold standard.” But her misstatements paled in comparison to the list of Trump’s exaggerations and falsehoods.
+
+Trump once again asserted that the 2008 Clinton campaign was responsible for spreading the myth that President Obama was born in Kenya, when that is false. He claimed that “thousands” of American jobs will leave the country when Ford shifts small-car manufacturing to Mexico, but no one here will lose their jobs. He also falsely claimed that he was against the Iraq War, when all available evidence demonstrates that he supported it until the rest of the country began to turn against it in 2004. He also once again falsely said he started his business with a “small loan” from his father.
+
+Here’s a roundup of 23 of the most noteworthy claims that were made. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.
+
+Ford is moving its small car production to Mexico, but the expansion will not affect U.S. workers.
+
+The company has said that while production of Ford Focus models will shift to Mexico, its plant in Michigan will build other, larger vehicles. Ford and many other automakers are finding Mexico more attractive for several reasons.
+
+“The cost of labor is indeed greater in the United States, which makes producing labor-intensive small cars in Mexico more profitable. The United States also has advantages, though — inexpensive electricity, experienced technicians and access to sophisticated materials and equipment — often means building larger and more expensive cars is cheaper in this country,” our colleague Max Ehrenfreund wrote.
+
+Clinton exaggerates here. We know of three years in the 1970s when he did pay federal income taxes. But there were at least five years in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s when Trump did not pay any, or nearly any, income taxes.
+
+Trump’s tax plan would raise federal income taxes on more than half of America’s single parents and one-fifth of families with children, according to an analysis by Lily Batchelder, a New York University expert on tax policy who formerly worked for Obama’s National Economic Council.
+
+While the Trump campaign called it “pure fiction,” the right-leaning Tax Foundation has said the group was able to replicate her findings. Kyle Pomerleau, director of federal projects at the Tax Foundation, posted on Twitter that Batchelder’s results “seem reasonable to me.”
+
+Mark Zandi, a well-respected economist, did issue a report saying that if Trump’s economic plans were fully implemented, 3.5 million jobs would disappear, incomes would stagnate, debt would explode and stock prices would plummet. But the report also said it was highly unlikely that Trump would get many of his plans approved by Congress, even if it is controlled by Republicans, because so many of his positions are so a departure from Republican principles. Even so, the report said the U.S. economy would likely suffer under a Trump presidency.
+
+His report also said that if Clinton were able to fully implement her economic plans, the economy would add an additional 3.2 million jobs during the first four years of her presidency. Combined with anticipated job creation under current law, that adds up to 10.4 million jobs. But the report also said that Clinton would face significant roadblocks to getting her economic plan through Congress, resulting in far fewer job gains.
+
+Trump cites an Internal Revenue Service audit as his justification for not releasing his federal income tax returns, but the audit does not prohibit from releasing the returns. Richard Nixon, who started the tradition of presidents and presidential candidates releasing their returns, did so in the middle of an audit.
+
+Moreover, Trump has not released his tax returns from before 2009, which are no longer under audit, according to his attorney.
+
+Presidential candidates have no legal obligation to release their returns, but there has long been a tradition to do so for the sake of transparency. Hillary Clinton has released three decades’ worth of tax returns.
+
+While Trump has not released the returns, his long history of litigation has given the public a sense of what is in his returns. Tax information made public so far show Trump did not pay any, or nearly any, income taxes at least five times in the past 40 years.
+
+Trump is being misleading. Tax experts say that tax returns provide insight about a person’s finances in several key areas.
+
+First, the tax return reveals a person’s annual income. A person’s net worth is not disclosed, but voters would gain an understanding of a person’s cash flow. Second, voters would understand the sources of a person’s income, such as how much comes from certain businesses, speeches, dividends, capital gains and so forth.
+
+Third, a tax return would disclose how much a person gives to charity. Mitt Romney gave almost $2.3 million to charity in 2011, while Bill and Hillary Clinton gave $3 million to charity in 2014. We know these figures because of information in their tax returns.
+
+Trump claims he has given $102 million to charity in the past five years, but a Washington Post investigation found not a cent in actual cash — mostly just free rounds of golf, given away by his courses for charity auctions and raffles. Trump’s tax return would clear up exactly how much he has really given to charity — indeed, whether he has given anything at all.
+
+Fourth, a tax return would reveal how aggressive Trump has been on his taxes. There is no black-and-white approach to taxes; there are many gray areas subject to interpretation, especially regarding deductions. Trump frequently suggests that he knows how to game the system, so voters would learn whether he takes the same approach to his taxes.
+
+Finally, the tax returns would disclose what percentage of Trump’s income actually goes to taxes.
+
+Trump is right. Clinton is subtly adjusting her words here when confronted with a question about her consistency on policy positions.
+
+But the fact is she never used the word “hoped.” Instead, she was more declarative, using the phrase “gold standard” when she was Secretary of State.
+
+“This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field,” she said in Australia in 2012. “And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world’s total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment.”
+
+Trump’s companies have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which means a company can remain in business while wiping away many of its debts. The bankruptcy court ultimately approves a corporate budget and a plan to repay remaining debts; often shareholders lose much of their equity.
+
+Trump’s Taj Mahal opened in April 1990 in Atlantic City, but six months later, “defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin,” The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow found. In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy. He could not keep up with debts on two other Atlantic City casinos, and those two properties declared bankruptcy in 1992. A fourth property, the Plaza Hotel in New York, declared bankruptcy in 1992 after amassing debt.
+
+PolitiFact uncovered two more bankruptcies filed after 1992, totaling six. Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts filed for bankruptcy again in 2004, after accruing about $1.8 billion in debt. Trump Entertainment Resorts also declared bankruptcy in 2009, after being hit hard during the 2008 recession.
+
+Why the discrepancy? Perhaps this will give us an idea: Trump told Washington Post reporters that he counted the first three bankruptcies as just one.
+
+Trump cherry-picks the increase in violence in Chicago, but this is not indicative of overall crime rates, which have been declining for years. Moreover, while Trump says stop-and-frisk policies should be enacted in Chicago as it was implemented in New York City, those policies have not been correlated with crime.
+
+While violent crime overall has been declining for about two decades, there was a sharp increase in the violent crime rate in 2015. Homicides have continued to spike in major cities this year, though the rates remain far below their peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Law enforcement officials, including the FBI, have voiced concerns about the uptick in crime in 2015.
+
+Criminal justice experts warn against comparing crime trends from short periods of time, such as month over month or year over year. An annual trend can show a trajectory of where the trend might be headed, but still does not give a full picture. Many criminal justice experts say crime trends are determined over at least five years, preferably 10 or 20 years, of data.
+
+Trump praises stop-and-frisk policies under former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. But it’s debatable whether the stop-and-frisk policies had such a direct impact on crime, as Trump suggests. Crime is affected by many factors, and New York’s decline in crime mirrored the decline in many other major cities at the time. Moreover, crime was declining for four years before Giuliani took office, and it continued to decline for 14 years after he left.
+
+We awarded Three Pinocchios to Trump’s claim attributing stop-and-frisk policies to the decline in crime.
+
+Trump also claimed that “murders are up” in New York. That is incorrect. Homicides in New York are down so far this year from the same point last year, according to the New York Police Department. But homicides did see an uptick in New York City in 2015, similar to trends in numerous other cities.
+
+Democrats, including Clinton, frequently point out that people on the terrorist watch list can purchase a gun. But the proposal that Democrats have made in Congress wouldn’t ban such purchases automatically. We have awarded Two Pinocchios to this claim for lack of context.
+
+Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation to give authority to the attorney general to decide whether or not a suspected terrorist could buy a gun. Anyone who was subjected to a federal terrorism investigation within five years of the attempted gun purchase would be flagged in the background-check system, and the Justice Department would be able to review those cases.
+
+The government uses a “reasonable suspicion” standard to nominate and include someone in the Terrorist Watchlist, which includes the “no-fly list.” Belonging to a terrorist organization, or being listed on one of the watch lists, does not automatically stop someone from buying a gun. There has to be another factor that disqualifies the person from buying a gun under federal or state law, such as a felony conviction or illegal immigration status.
+
+Clinton is right that Trump emphatically urged the United States to remove Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi  from power.
+
+Here’s Trump, in February 2011, urging an intervention on his video blog. “I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump said. “Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: It’s a carnage.”
+
+Trump added: “Now we should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick. We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives. This is absolutely nuts. We don’t want to get involved and you’re gonna end up with something like you’ve never seen before. …We have go in to save these lives; these people are being slaughtered like animals. It’s horrible what’s going on; it has to be stopped. We should do on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives.”
+
+This is just totally false.
+
+We have found no evidence of his early opposition to the invasion. Trump expressed lukewarm support the first time he was asked about it on Sept. 11, 2002, and was not clearly against it until he was quoted in the August 2004 Esquire cover story titled “Donald Trump: How I’d Run the Country (Better).”
+
+But by the middle of 2004, many Americans had turned against the war, making Trump’s position not particularly unique. In light of Trump’s repeated false claim, Esquire has added an editor’s note to its August 2004 story, saying, “The Iraq War began in March 2003, more than a year before this story ran, thus nullifying Trump’s timeline.”
+
+We have awarded this claim Four Pinocchios, compiled a timeline of all of Trump’s comments prior to the invasion in March 2003, and even a video documenting how this is a bogus claim.
+
+Trump said he had “numerous conversations with Sean Hannity” prior to the invasion, expressing his opposition to the war. These appear to be private conversations. Hannity told Erik Wemple Blog that Trump “would watch the show and call after and we argued a lot about” the war. We should note that Hannity is one of Trump’s biggest boosters and has never asserted that Trump made these private claims to him until recently, even though this has been a constant source of controversy during Trump’s campaign. Hannity has also not offered any evidence to back up his claim that he and Trump had such conversations at the time.
+
+[Update: During the debate, Trump also cited his January 2003 Fox News interview with Neil Cavuto as proof of his early opposition. The day after the debate, Fox News cited this clip, declaring it “backs up Trump on Iraq War opposition.” As our timeline shows, Trump was not clearly against the war in this interview, either.
+
+On Feb. 18, 2016, Cavuto replayed the clip and said it wasn’t clear Trump was against the war then. While Trump now says he opposed the Iraq war, Cavuto said: “When I interviewed him back in January 2003, couple of months before we formally got involved in Iraq, he could’ve left you with a different impression.”
+
+Cavuto said that in the January 2003 interview, Trump was “not bashing the president back then, nor is he fully endorsing Iraq. But he is saying some clear decision is required.” Meghan McCain, appearing in the segment, said in response: “He speaks now though, like he was protesting with Code Pink in the street, like he was adamantly against the war in Iraq. Like he was this huge person in the media stage, protesting against President Bush and going into Iraq.”]
+
+Regarding Clinton’s statement, the key issue with the email controversy was that Clinton had a private server — not just a private email — and she never used her designated State Department email account, which would have kept records of emails subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
+
+The accuracy of Trump’s claim depends on whether he is referring to her decision to use a private server, or if he is suggesting that Clinton purposefully intended to mishandle classified information. On the former point, yes, Clinton chose on purpose to use a private email server. On the latter, the FBI would disagree.
+
+FBI Director James B. Comey has said Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling classified information through her private server. Our colleagues Matt Zapotosky and Rosalind Helderman noted: “But Comey also has said that investigators found particularly lacking any intent on Clinton or her staff’s part to mishandle classified information, and that would undermine any possible criminal case against them.”
+
+Click here for our round-up of 14 fact-checks about the Clinton email controversy.
+
+How can a federal agency, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, endorse a candidate? Trump is actually referring to the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, which is the union representing ICE officers. In a statement released by the campaign, National ICE Council President Chris Crane said it was the union’s first-ever endorsement.
+
+Trump is basically right. The trade deficit in 2015 was $762 billion, according to the Census Bureau.
+
+Clinton is correct. Trump in May caused a stir when he suggested the United States should borrow more and renegotiate new terms later. “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal,” Trump said on CNBC. The comments caused angst in the financial markets, as the U.S. Treasury securities are considered the world’s safest investment precisely because the United States is at low risk of default. Renegotiating the terms would be seen as a form of default.
+
+Trump later walked away from his comments, claiming he had been misquoted.
+
+To support the debunked notion that Clinton’s campaign originated “birther” rumors during the 2008 presidential campaign, Trump pointed to these two examples. But they don’t add up to much of anything.
+
+James Asher, former D.C. bureau chief of McClatchy, has said that longtime Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal “strongly urged” him to “investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya.” McClatchy assigned a reporter to go to Kenya, and the reporter found the allegation was false, Asher said. (We reached out to Asher several times but did not receive a response.)
+
+Blumenthal, declining to elaborate further, said in a statement to The Fact Checker: “This is false. Period. Donald Trump cannot distract from the fact that he is the one who embraced and promoted the birther lie, and bears the responsibility for it.”
+
+Solis Doyle did say in a recent CNN interview that in December 2007, a volunteer coordinator in Iowa forwarded an email perpetuating the birther conspiracy. Clinton “made the decision immediately to let that person go,” Solis Doyle said in the interview.
+
+As in the instance with the Iowa volunteer coordinator, the campaign denounced isolated instances of Clinton’s staffers questioning whether Obama was Muslim. We found that there’s no evidence that she or her campaign were “pressing it very hard” — though some of her supporters did perpetuate the claims in the bitter 2008 primary campaign against Obama.
+
+“As multiple, independent fact checkers have affirmed in the years since, neither the 2008 campaign nor the candidate ever questioned the President’s citizenship or birth certificate. Period,” said Clinton campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin.
+
+Trumps mixes up a lot of things here.
+
+The United States pays about 22 percent of the common-fund budget for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But the volume of the U.S. defense expenditures effectively represents 73 percent of the defense spending of the Alliance as a whole. But that does not mean that the United States pays 73 percent of the costs of running NATO.
+
+The figure reflects the fact that United States, as a world power, projects its might across the globe. Experts say it is all but impossible to calculate how much of overall U.S. defense spending is devoted exclusively for NATO, but there is little dispute that most members are not meeting their commitment to have defense expenditures should amount to 2 percent of each country’s gross domestic product.
+
+As for Trump patting himself on the back for spurring NATO to focus on terror, he’s kidding himself. The plan was in the works long before Trump starting saying NATO was obsolete.
+
+This data checks out, according to research by the Brennan Center for Justice. Nationally, the violent crime rate has fallen by 51 percent since 1991, and property crime has fallen by 43 percent.
+
+As Clinton noted in her response, the terms of departure from Iraq were originally set by the George W. Bush administration. The Bush administration signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq in 2008 that established a deadline for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by Dec. 31, 2011. But it was widely expected troops would remain after a negotiated extension.
+
+Clinton, as Secretary of State, had pushed for some troops to remain in Iraq but the administration was not able to reach an agreement and so U.S. troops left Iraq. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in his memoir, pinned the blame on Obama: “To my frustration, the White House coordinated the negotiations but never really led them. Officials there seemed content to endorse an agreement if State and Defense could reach one, but without the President’s active advocacy, [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri] al-Maliki was allowed to slip away.”
+
+Obama, meanwhile, was pleased to be able to run for reelection in 2012 on a claim that no more U.S. troops were left in Iraq.
+
+To a large extent, the Islamic State of today is simply an outgrowth of al-Qaeda of Iraq, which emerged after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
+
+At best, one could argue that actions that Obama failed to take (over Clinton’s opposition) helped contribute to the growth of ISIS, also known as the Islamic State. Islamic State certainly has become an important player in the Middle East, taking advantage of the civil war in Syria and the disarray in the Iraqi government to claim vast areas of both countries. In the past couple of years, the group’s activities have gathered attention in the United States; it was only in 2014 that President Obama dismissed Islamic State as a “JV team.”
+
+Clinton was Secretary of State when Obama made decisions that could be seen as contributing to the rise of the Islamic States, but ironically she was one of the loudest forces for keeping a residual force in Iraq and for intervening in Syria, such as arming the rebels. Both steps advocated by Clinton might have thwarted the emergence of the terror group. Moreover, Clinton was not Secretary of State when Obama all but ignored the Islamic State as it moved back into Iraq in late 2013.
+
+But — and here’s the irony — Trump criticizes Obama for a policy position he had advocated be taken even sooner than 2011. “I would announce that we have been victorious in Iraq and all the troops are coming home and let those people have their civil war,” Trump told CNBC in 2006. “I just said, announce victory, get them home…. Let’s say, ‘Victory, Tremendous.’ Have a big thing in the streets. Then get out real fast before you get shot. Let’s get home.”
+
+Indeed, there are victims of homicide by undocumented immigrants, including by those in gangs. But there are two important data points to remember when Trump talks about this.
+
+First, the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants do not fit Trump’s description of aggravated felons, whose crimes include murder. U.S. Sentencing Commission data shows homicides are a small percentage of the crimes committed by noncitizens, whether they are in the United States illegally or not.
+
+Second, illegal immigration flows across the Southern border in fiscal 2015 were at the lowest levels since 1972, except for in 2011. The apprehensions in fiscal 2016 so far have exceeded fiscal 2015, but still indicate an overall decline.
+
+ISIS does not control oil in Libya. Trump has been called out before on this point, but he keeps saying this false claim.
+
+As for keeping the oil in Iraq, This is nonsensical. The Bush administration invested a lot of diplomatic effort in assuring Middle Eastern allies that the United States was not invading because of Iraq’s oil fields. Moreover, oil revenue was crucial to ensuring a functioning Iraqi state — which is why insurgents often targeted the oil sector in Iraq.
+
+In any event, seizing the oil of a sovereign nation after invading it would be considered a “grave breach” of the Geneva Conventions, one of the cornerstones of international law, as well as other international agreements. Maybe Trump’s staff should arrange a tutorial on international law.
+
+Our colleague Steven Mufson looked deeply at whether, international law aside, such a proposal was even feasible. One expert said it was “beyond goofy.”
+
+Clinton is referring to this statement by Kellyanne Conway, back when she was supporting Trump rival Ted Cruz, the Texas senator.  Conway, who now defends Trump with fervor, told CNN on March 8: “For Trump, the debates are fought with peril. The Trump victims. The reason the messaging has gotten better is they are starting to talk about victims of Trump University, victims of Trump in Atlantic City. Before it was conservative apostasies, and now it is, you built your business on the backs of the little guy.”
+
+Send us facts to check by filling out this form
+
+Check out our guide to all Trump and Clinton fact checks
+
+Sign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter
+
+In the debate, Trump shifts on NATO, to the relief of Europe
+
+Did Trump really suggest that China should invade North Korea?
+
+Trump says China is ‘the best ever’ at devaluing its currency. That’s no longer true.",REAL
+4440,"Saudi Arabia, Egypt to Invade Yemen","Egypt and Saudi Arabia are planning a ground operation in Yemen, Egyptian officials said Thursday, a day after Saudi Arabia began bombing Houthi rebels in the country. Three officials speaking to the AP did not give troop numbers, but said that they would enter by land and by sea and that the coalition would involve other countries. Turkey has said that it may be one of the nations providing ""logistical support."" Yemeni President Rabbo Mansour Hadi fled his home to an undisclosed location Wednesday. The White House said late Wednesday that President Barack Obama authorized logistical and intelligence support to the Saudi-led operations in Yemen. “While U.S. forces are not taking direct military action in Yemen in support of this effort, we are establishing a Joint Planning Cell with Saudi Arabia to coordinate U.S. military and intelligence support,” according to a White House statement.",REAL
+1195,"Welcome to Trump County, U.S.A.","It is a little after midnight on a Friday in late January. I am in a strip club in Morgantown, West Virginia, drinking shit American beer that tastes like ice and newspaper. A man is passing me a semi-automatic handgun and telling me to pull the trigger. The man is John Barron; the gun is a Browning Hi-Power. It once belonged to an Israeli police officer, but now it belongs to Jeff, John’s brother, an early birthday present to himself. Together they own this strip club, the Blue Parrot Cabaret, dark and sparse with a front door the color of cherry skin. Across the street is a place that sells all-terrain vehicles; two miles up the road, a half-dozen fraternity houses sit on top of a steep hill that your car will groan to climb. John releases the magazine and holds the slide back to show me there’s nothing in the chamber. He is the type of man who could have worked at a video store or sold comic books or telescopes, a man proud to be a connoisseur. And now here he is, in a building that Jeff needed to mortgage his farm six years ago to help him open, on the fringes of a college town, the both of them sitting at a back table in a palace of human fantasies, talking about guns while half-naked women lead men upstairs by the hand to squishy leather love seats. John passes the Browning to me. It’s heavy and solid, something that should be obvious but is still startling somehow, immediately. “Feel the trigger on that,” Jeff says. I do. It feels smooth and light, like pushing an elevator button, except this is a thing designed for death. Printed on Jeff’s black T-shirt, in skinny white letters: “by reading this shirt you have given me brief control over your mind.” John and Jeff take out another gun, the recently released Ruger American 9-mm pistol, black and plastic-y, and then another, a tiny .380 Kel-Tec. Jeff’s eyes flash down to the guns and then back up to me and then back down again, all of them laid out on the counter. “Welcome to West Virginia,” he says. I am in West Virginia to understand Donald Trump. At least, to the extent that the political embodiment of a Hardee’s commercial needs to be understood. Specifically, I’m here to understand the people who want him to be president. Last December, The New York Times published a report—based on statistics from Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm—that found West Virginia to have the highest support for Trump in the country. In its first congressional district—the northern part of the state, where Morgantown is located—45 percent of those polled said they would choose Trump over any other G.O.P. candidate. On some level, this isn’t a surprise. West Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1996. The state, according to Census data, is 93 percent white and 88 percent native-born. And environmental restrictions targeting the coal industry—the central nervous system of the West Virginia economy—have been taken by many as a personal assault, a condemnation of the state’s culture, its history, its blue-collar virtues. The mess of these things has brought Obama’s approval rating in West Virginia as low as almost anywhere else in the country. And so I have come here to meet people like John and Jeff, people who see Trump as the renegade out for justice, as someone who is not impulsive but decisive; not cruel but honest; not bombastic but patriotic; not indecent but uninhibited. You may wonder, How could someone vote for a man so resistant to grace, to convention, to good taste? And those people will tell you, look where good taste brought us.
+
+One afternoon at the Bluebird store in Clarksburg—part diner, grocery store, and social club—I meet Shane Shreves, a fourth-generation union coal miner. He wants Trump to be president. In 2015, he says, he lost 262 miners to layoffs at his mine alone, Robinson Run No. 95. “Coal has carried West Virginia on its back for 200 years,” he tells me. “It’s built schools. Communities. It’s not anger [we feel here], really, it’s just very frustrating.” Eric Leaseburg, the owner of the store, sits down at a big round table with us. He has a full plate of food in front of him. Shreves finishes a thought, and then Leaseburg says, as he loads up his fork, “I don’t even know if [West Virginians] want to see Trump president, but they’re just that pissed off.” And, well, if you’re pissed off, if your hopes for your stagnant town have wilted and died, who better than Donald Trump, America’s tooth fairy emeritus? He is a man who has turned the excruciating, real-life, how-are-we-keeping-the-lights-on pissed off into something marketable, a 140-characters version of pissed off, something easily packaged and disseminated. Trump is politician as pickup artist, as infomercial salesman; someone who will in a single breath pulverize your self-esteem and then convince you that he is the only one who can put you back together again, speaking in empty hyperbole, all “love” and “disasters”; someone to resuscitate all of your sputtering little egos with something grand and implausible. He loves everyone, everything, he’s going to take you home tonight, you have such beautiful eyes, baby, what are you doing here all alone? I can make you great again. Donald Trump is an American. But before that he is a mogul, a helicopter passenger, a monolith of barely considered interjections. His Twitter feed is a scroll of grave warnings and half-present admonishments of America-down-the-shitter. Is it any wonder that the same day Trump received an endorsement from Sarah Palin, he also received one from the daughter of John Wayne, another counterfeit cowboy? Trump behaves like a man bored enough by fame and wealth that he can manufacture an adversarial relationship with a nation just to challenge it. Someone so aroused by the idea of being outrageous and condescending that it seems to almost border on erotic for him. Someone who has spent his life negotiating, convincing, selling you things you don’t need for a price you can’t afford. He is selling not a commodity now but an inspirational hokum, a life raft, a rope ladder from a helicopter.
+
+I am getting coffee for my ride north, stopping in Charleston, West Virginia, in Gino’s Pizza & Spaghetti House. There are posters on the wall for “Our Famous Pubwich” and “Ginos Original Sicilian Baked Sub” and “Old World Pepperoni Cheesy Bread.” The pictures of the items on the posters look “famous” the way mug shots look famous. The store manager, Cheryl Hall, has short blonde hair and punctuates every sentence with sweetie-sugar-honey-baby, putting her elbows on the counter to listen to you talk. She moved from Ohio to West Virginia in 1982, and in April she’ll have been working at Gino’s for 11 years. “I started and I didn’t think much of it,” she says. “I didn’t know it was gonna be a career. I wish I was like my son sometimes, he makes me realize maybe I’m not so ambitious.” Her son is 22. “He’s the light and the gift,” she says. I ask her about the election. “Me and my husband, we almost don’t wanna say it out loud, but we kinda like Trump, his ideas. He just doesn’t have, what’s the word for it? Couth?” I make my way to Clarksburg, the two-hour drive on I-79, empty and wide, the sunset pure and purple and orange against the snow-covered hills, barren for miles and miles except for the little dots of civilization, smoke coming from a house you can’t see at first, tire tracks in the dirt. In West Virginia, no matter where you are, you never feel far from nowhere. I spend part of my night at the Brickside Bar & Grill, just outside Clarksburg, the fifth-largest city in the first district. Population, according to the 2010 census: 16,578. State motto: Jewel of the Hills. Denny’s locations: one. At Brickside, I meet a man named Steve. Steve asks Tammy, the bartender, for some menu guidance. “You can’t go wrong with the steak hoagie,” she says. “We have a sriracha-agave wing sauce, it’s sriracha, agave, and spices they won’t tell me about,” Tammy says. Steve makes a face that says, “secret recipes are bullshit.” Then he asks her if they still make the fried-bologna sandwich. They do. He orders that, and an order of the wings. He tells Tammy, “Make sure they don’t cook the hell out of the wings. You know these pre-cooked wings, you don’t need to cook them for 10 minutes like they say.” Steve is a managing partner at the Outback Steakhouse near Clarksburg, so as a purveyor of mass-consumed deep-fried products, he is something of an expert. “I’ve worked in restaurants all my life,” he says. The conversation turns to the imperiled local economy. Steve, by way of explanation, quotes a scene from Dumb and Dumber in which Jim Carrey’s and Jeff Daniels’s characters come back to their apartment after a day hunting for employment. He recites Daniels’s line: “I can’t believe there’s no jobs in this town.” Then Carrey’s: “Yeah, unless you wanna work 40 hours a week.” His sentences tend to start peacefully, calculated, then the words gather like storm clouds, heading toward a profanity, pieces of crust from his fried bologna sandwich falling onto his black Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt. “What this country is right now is a hornet’s nest.” He has some more sandwich; we drink beer. “I’m all about conservation, you know. I love to fish, I love the beauty of nature. But China, Japan, you think they give a shit about the environment? But we’re supposed to?” He continues, “It’s the hypocrisy of it all. You know, like Hollywood. You remember Clint Eastwood, he gets up there [at the Republican National Convention in 2012] and he gets shredded. And he’s never been late on a movie set, he’s never been over budget. But he gets shredded. But then you have some of these actors up there, these motherfuckers all think they’re statesmen, and some of them didn’t even finish high school.” Before he leaves, he gives me a list of places to visit around town; it’s one of the few moments in our conversation he speaks with an unrestrained love for something. This will keep happening to me, people talking about the decency of other West Virginians and ordinary-seeming food as if it were a dream they had. Outside at the Brickside, there is an enclosed patio with heat lamps and stationary towers that have flames spitting out of them. A guy with dark bushy hair dances sloppily to “Love Shack” by the B-52s as someone else sings it in karaoke. The waitress says to Tammy, “That kid outside is kinda cute.” “Yeah?” Tammy says. The waitress adds, “I think that’s because he’s sort of hipster-ish, I don’t know.” This, apparently, is progressivism in West Virginia: semi-unkempt hair and an earring. The D.J. shouts, “We got some Nicki Minaj coming at you!,” and the crowd cheers like it hasn’t all night, like it’s preparing to bungee jump over the waters of rap music and dangle there for a few moments. Then a bunch of West Virginians with identical buzz cuts dance like they have nausea. Someone does the raise-the-roof motion. A pretty, tall blonde woman in a snug leather jacket indulges a dozen half-advances from guys in hats bearing logos for golf brands or sporting-goods chains. I go back to the hotel; my room looks out over a gas station and a place called Eat’n Park. Its sign reads: “CALORIES DON’T COUNT IF THEY SMILE.”
+
+The next day, as I’m walking around downtown Clarksburg, I see a tall man in his 70s, Jim Hileman, standing in the entrance of the Lord’s Pantry food bank. Hileman is a Trump supporter: “I support the man because he’s crazy like me.” Then he laughs in a tone somewhere between mall Santa Claus and Batman villain hatching a diabolical plan. He’s been helping at the food pantry for about 10 years. He started out volunteering after he left his job at a funeral home, then he just kept doing it. He tells me to get to Ritz Lunch at some point to try their hot dogs. You have never heard people speak so fondly, so intimately about hot dogs. Not, like, the nuances of them, but their very existence, the way you would talk about a grandmother or an old Labrador. It’s part reverence, part nostalgia. I have never cared as much about anything as this man did about a hot-dog recommendation. It was sincere and beautiful, him imparting this to someone, a kind of treasure map. Two men are talking at a table when I walk into the Bluebird store. “Tobacco by itself probably doesn’t even cause all those cancers—it’s the chemicals,” a man says. He finishes eating and leans back in his chair. “That’s a pretty good lunch right there now. That’s like a dinner.” It isn’t a bad lunch, it must be said. I ask a woman named Pam if I can sit down and eat next to her and her friend. I tell her the purpose of this story and she almost deflates in her chair. Donald Trump alters her posture, literally. “We always get dumped on,” she says. “There’s this idea of [West Virginians] as bumpkins or whatever, but Kentucky has rural areas, too, you know? No one thinks of them like this. I hate to see us in a poll like that leading for Trump because it almost makes us look dumber. . . . At first I thought: Wow, he’ll go where no one else goes. We need that. But the more I hear him the more I think he’s just dangerous.” Across town, there are people trudging through the snow, pushing strollers around puddles, catching their breath outside the Dairy Queen. I walk into the Humane Society thrift store. There are bottles of half-used lotion, open boxes of Band-Aids for sale, a playpen full of stuffed animals, a bookshelf with a bundle of plastic bags tacked to it and a sign that reads, in black marker, “BOOKS 50¢ BAG.” Next to the cash register: a Donald J. Trump–brand shirt that looks like everything he has ever worn. White cuffs and white collar, a shade of blue that is just a little brighter and bluer than it needs to be. A volunteer named Joyce Insani looks at it and says, “Is anyone even gonna buy this shirt?” Another volunteer named Becky Steptoe walks by. “Careful what you say about our next president,” she says. I ask Becky if she likes that idea. “Well the country is a business. I think we need a businessman to run it.” Joyce is wearing a fleece vest the color of pink jelly beans. I ask her what she thinks. “I don’t really know what to think about him. He’s very successful, so he’s got to be smart.” She’s sorting women’s tops while she tells me this. “But I don’t think we’ll be able to fix this till we restore our faith in God.”
+
+There are pockets all over West Virginia where business is something simple and utilitarian, practical, hand-painted signs hanging from stores that say “Junk Junk,” and beneath it, pots and pans and brooms and plastic lawn chairs. The next day, I head to the Northeast, through towns of a few hundred people, towns that are 97 percent white (Grafton) and 99 percent (Rowlesburg). I pass cemeteries and trucks that look abandoned, rusty machinery in backyards. Everywhere there are things leaning, teetering; you might consider this metaphorically, but it is literally true, the houses are breaking. I pass small shops and enterprises, one after another, places called Morgan’s Muffler Inspection and Dave’s Autobody; Larew’s Used Car, Jack’s Car Wash, Debbie’s Pantry, a human with a name who had an idea for a place to do a thing and then did it. I pull into a roadside restaurant in Grafton called Biggie’s. In the magazine rack, behind two candy machines that sell Skittles for a quarter, is a December 7 issue of the tabloid the Globe. On the cover in all capital letters: “IMPEACH OBAMA,” and a crosshair over the Statue of Liberty. There is one other customer inside Biggie’s; he’s a corrections officer at the Pruntytown Correctional Center. He has pale blue eyes and dime-size pupils that make everything he says seem wild and intense and on the verge of recklessness. “I like the idea of Donald Trump. He’s going to run it like a business. He don’t care who he offends. He’s gonna pull no punches. One of the things America was formed on was saying what you feel. We built this country on offending people.” He won’t give me his name, and I don’t make any progress asking a second and third time. “You don’t need my name.” Farther east, the town of Rowlesburg used to house the largest sawmill factory in the country. Now it has a population of 584. Three bars are boarded up, the church is closed, and the VFW’s walk isn’t shoveled. At the Sidetracked Bar and Grill, the bar is empty for the hour I’m there. Two trains pass. Mary Goff is standing behind the counter in front of two tap handles: Bud Light and Budweiser. I ask for a Budweiser, but they don’t have any beer yet; they’ve been waiting months for their license. I ask Goff what she thinks about Trump. “He’s maybe not the greatest person in the world,” she explains, “but he’s a businessman.” When West Virginians talk about the man, there is a mystique, an almost shamanistic wisdom granted to “business” people, anything associated with tycoons or their largesse, the implied clout and sophistication of a New Yorker in a shiny pink tie. “I’ll be honest with you,” one college kid named Eric tells me later that night, at a bar in Morgantown. “Trump has a ball sack, but I don’t know if he knows what the fuck he’s doing.” His friend, Erik, leans in, “But can you imagine him approaching, like, Saudi Arabia or something with that kind of mentality?” Eric interjects before reason can get in the way. “He’ll be fine,” he says, nodding confidently. And that, really, is its own sort of currency. Trump’s red-lining testosterone, his brazen dismissals of rivals, the way he duels with other candidates in ways that have nothing to do with policy, but everything to do with something essential about being a human, getting embarrassed and ignored in public. When Trump says, “Rubio, I’ve never seen a young guy sweat that much,” he’s winning in a way that seems irrelevant but also sort of irrefutable.
+
+The Blue Parrot almost never opened in the first place. Jeff and John began renovations in March of 2010, but by mid-April the town was trying to stop them. Eventually, the county passed an ordinance that prohibited adult-entertainment venues from operating within 2,000 feet of churches, schools, or residential areas, but only after the Blue Parrot Cabaret was grandfathered in. And the county still fought them. Six years later, the club’s still here. “We had a terrible, terrible time,” John says. “There was no winning or losing. There was only winning. Once everything you own is on the line, it’s no longer options. It’s no longer choices. It’s going to work.” I’m talking to John about how the state’s population has hovered at around 2 million for the last 70 years, rounding myself into the same sort of defeatism I’ve heard in the people I’ve met here. He describes for me how the literal topography, the shape of the earth, restricts what sort of industries can survive. I ask him how it’s possible to not walk around mad all the time. Then Jeff says, from a few steps away, “Well you do. I think that’s why Trump appeals.” What do you do about any of this? “A lot of what gets done in West Virginia is through brute force,” he says. I imagine all these people left on their own, stranded, forgotten. I think about what Albert Camus said in The Stranger, “It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.” I find no bumpkins in West Virginia. Nor do I find any Trump shrines. The only political paraphernalia I see, over three and a half days, is for Bernie Sanders. Instead of the burbling hints of a revolution, I find a pervading sense of resignation. People drift occasionally into states of indignation or anger, but mostly they express ambivalence. These are people who are familiar with dense winter skies, interstates that stretch and bend over the horizon, things that feel all around like they’re breaking or on an incline or carved through rock or forest or around rivers. Whether Trump exists to you as Vine superstar, or a political pioneer, or the hellion king in the cockpit of a kamikaze mission, something seems inescapable: this is West Virginia, this is its plight, things giant and immovable. And so I imagine you can get mad at the Democrats, at the idea of political correctness, at the grinding wheels of bureaucracy, at the notion of people trying to take your guns or your strip club or your job digging coal from the earth. At the passing train that momentarily brings your dying little town to a halt. At the person who keeps asking you for your name. You can be furious at things so big and maddeningly abstract that a tyrannosaur parade float of a man seems like a savior. But sometimes, all you can do is get mad at the mountains. Donald Trump has zeroed in on America’s percolating xenophobic aggression, harnessed the impulses behind it and tried to amplify them, using simple-as-that declarations that he will ban Muslims and Syrians and build walls, file lawsuits, circling the wagons and rebuilding, transforming. Delicate takes time, restraint takes time. Sledgehammers get right to it. There are people either tantalized by the mirage, tantalized by a man who would so shamelessly peddle the mirage, or leveled enough by rhetoric and empty idealism that they don’t have time for any of it. Sometimes the mirage looks pretty, sometimes the mirage looks real, sometimes it’s a con and we know it. On the last day of my trip, a man with a beard creeping high up his cheeks and a 30-case of Busch Light in one hand is on his way out of a convenience store. We talk about presidents. He’s holding the door open now with his foot wedged at the bottom, the cuffs of his pants torn and caked with mud, as people come in and out of the store. I ask him if he likes Trump, if he likes anyone, if he cares. It’s starting to snow. He turns and spits a long stream of black tobacco juice through the air, and then he looks back at me. “Whoever it is,” he says, “if they ain’t a thief now, they will be by the time they in office.” Then he’s gone. “O.K., you, in the third row… Yes, you… I’m calling on you… Yes, that’s why I’m pointing… I’m pointing with my finger… My FINGER. This one… Why would you think I’m holding up a cocktail frank?” In Iowa last January, Trump regales voters with a humanizing personal anecdote about how he once bit his right index finger after mistaking it for a half-eaten French fry. A wax figure of “Duke” Wayne looks on in disgust as Trump strains to reach his fingers all the way around daughter Aissa Wayne’s frankly rather petite shoulder. (Fun fact: you could load the barrel of Wayne’s pistol with 14 of Trump’s pinkies.) As Trump talks straight through a lunch-hour town hall in February, hungry New Hampshire voters appear mesmerized by the five chicken-tender-like appendages radiating from his sausage-patty-size palm. Greeting voters in Iowa City, Trump surreptitiously compares his hand to a baby’s, a smile of satisfaction and relief slowly spreading across his face. At the 1990 grand opening of the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, wee hands try to summon a genie from a giant lamp. “It’s the motion,” Trump gamely jokes. At a recent G.O.P. debate in Las Vegas, Trump’s “fun-size” grip fails to circumnavigate Chris Christie’s big, beefy palm. Trump attempts to regain alpha-male status by showing the New Jersey governor his impression of a Doberman pinscher wagging its docked tail. An interesting optical illusion: Trump’s left hand is actually in the foreground of the picture! More ugly politics in South Carolina: Trump is forced to refute rumors, traced back to the Cruz campaign, that his fingers aren’t long enough for Christian prayer. Trump pretends to enjoy a pork chop on a stick at the 2015 Iowa State Fair, probably the one place on Earth where people won’t mistake a pork chop on a stick for Trump’s third hand. In costume with actress Megan Mullally at the 2005 Emmys, Trump wows an audience of hardened entertainment professionals by wrapping his fingers nearly all the way around a pitchfork. Some pundits have attributed candidate Trump’s hawkishness to the fact that, even though his fingers have as many joints as a normal man’s, they remain at least an inch short of being able to form a proper peace sign. Nothing much to say about the fingers in this picture; just curious why Trump’s “anus mouth” face hasn’t also become a thing. To this day, clubhouse attendants maintain that Trump had to be outfitted with a Babe Ruth Jr. Youth League glove for this 1991 appearance at Yankee Stadium. At this 2005 gala, Trump, thinking quickly, uses both hands to keep wife Melania from getting a good look at the size of a single Puff Daddy hand. Trump’s delicate right hand is nearly crushed by his nine-year-old daughter Ivanka’s huge, burly mitt at a 1991 event.",REAL
+9543,ISIS Uses 600 Suicide Dogs to Restrain Iraqi Army’s Advance in Mosul,"Erbil- While Iraqi forces are advancing in Mosul to free the city, some Iraqi officers were informed about new plan of terrorists of ISIS to use 600 suicide dogs to restrain Iraqi Army’s advance. 20 Shares
+7 13 0 0
+Fahmi Abbas, an officer in Iraqi Armored Units had an interview with IRNA and said: “ISIS terrorists have equipped 600 dogs with bombs and want to send them among Iraqi Army forces and explode them by remote control.”
+As stated by this military official, ISIS’s intention is to hinder advance of Iraqi Army to the city center of Mosul.
+This new plan was brought up when most of terrorists’ suicide attacks were neutralized by Iraqi heat-seeking missiles before reaching their aim.
+According to the statistics announced by Iraqi Army, during the 19 days since Mosul liberation operation began, terrorists of ISIS have performed 100 suicide attacks in different regions, although they didn’t succeed in delaying the advance of Iraqi forces.
+Fahmi Abbas stressed that all Corps have been informed about terrorists’ new tactics and they won’t be taken off-guard.
+This Iraqi military official also mentioned the possibility of using other animals for suicide attacks by the terrorists. He said that ISIS is under siege and terrorists have nowhere to escape, unless they surrender or get killed.
+On Saturday (5th Nov), Iraqi Army entered “Hammam al-Alili” in south of Mosul and managed to free this part of city in the western bank of Dijlah (Tigris river).
+Recommended For You Mosul Civilians Stormed City Main Prison and Free 45 ISIS Prisoners Iraq's al-Sumaria satellite television Quote: d an unnamed security source that claimed Mosul residents on Friday evening killed ISIS terror...
+By AHT Staff Iraqi Soldier Battling ISIS in Mosul Reunited with His Family After Two Years of Estrangement It's a heartwarming moment amid the carnage of the battle to liberate Mosul. An Iraqi lieutenant -- part of the elite Golden Division spe...
+By AHT Staff ISIS Executes 300 Iraqi Civilians by Firing Squad North of Mosul Member of Nineveh Provincial Council, Hossam al-Din al-Abbar, announced, that the ISIS executed 300 civilians and former security members,...
+By AHT Staff ISIS Executes 22 Civilians by Electrocution in Central Mosul",FAKE
+5689,Protestants get ready to grovel,"Protestants get ready to grovel By Gilad Atzmon Posted on November 9, 2016 by Gilad Atzmon 
+This week we learned that Jewish institutions insist upon the Protestant Church apologising for its founder’s views of the Jews. The Jewish Algemeiner writes that “the 500th anniversary of the Reformation would be the ‘perfect time’ for Protestant leaders to recognise and apologise for the ‘horrific antisemitism’ of their movement’s founder, Martin Luther.” 
+The truth of the matter is that Martin Luther didn’t know about Zionism, Israeli criminality, Alan Dershowitz, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein, or Sir Philip Green but he still had a serious problem with the Jews. Back in 1543 he wrote On The Jews and their Lies , a book notorious for its opposition to Jews and their religion. 
+Rabbi Abraham Cooper—associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre—wants the Protestants to disown the founding father of their church or at least to “directly address the issue (of anti-Semitism) in the overall context of what they’re celebrating in terms of this anniversary,” 
+David Michaels of B’nai B’rith insists that the churches reject some of their founder’s teachings. “This reality requires committed Lutherans and other Christians to ensure that there is fitting recognition and rejection of Luther’s hateful beliefs about Jews, wherever these persist.” 
+The Protestant world is clearly being subjected to an institutionalized assault Judaism. But there is one thing the Jewish Algemeiner fails to do. It fails to brief us about Luther’s argument against the Jews. The truth of the matter is that Luther’s animus towards Jewry wasn’t at all racially driven. His arguments against Jews were purely theological rather than biological. Thus, using the term ‘anti-Semitism’ in reference to Luther is misleading. It leaves one wondering whether Bnai B’rith and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre are lying consciously when they refer to Luther as an ‘anti-Semite’? If they do, we may actually need to seek the assistance of Luther’s book in order to grasp Rabbi Cooper and Michaels’ conduct. 
+Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli jazz musician, author and political activist. His new book, “The Wandering Who,” may be ordered from amazon.com or amazon.co.uk . This entry was posted in Religion . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
+4942,Trump’s misleading claim that 58 percent of black youths are unemployed,"“Look at how much African American communities are suffering from Democratic control. … Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose?”
+
+“He’s [Trump] saying, ‘How in the world can we abide a 58 percent unemployment rate among African American youth?’ ”
+
+Regular readers of The Fact Checker know we have written about this figure in some of our round-up fact checks of Trump’s speeches.
+
+But Trump continues to use it, and his new campaign manager has now adopted it as a talking point. Since we haven’t explored it in depth, we decided to take a more thorough look at what this figure means, and explain exactly why it doesn’t hold water.
+
+The official Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rate for black youth is 19.2 percent — about one-third of the rate Trump uses.
+
+A Trump campaign official previously told us that they calculated the 58 percent using this data set from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, calculating the number of people classified as “unemployed” and “not in the labor force” as a percentage of the total civilian population.
+
+“Unemployed” refers to people who are available for work and actively looking for a job, but don’t have one. “Not in the labor force” refers to people who are not looking for jobs because they have given up looking, or are not interested — such as students. Students working part time while going to school are counted in the “employed” category.
+
+That means Trump is counting students who are not looking for work as a part of the “unemployed” population. Technically, those students don’t have jobs. But that does not fit the definition of “unemployed” and is especially problematic for this age group, because the number of people who aren’t looking for jobs includes people who are in school full time.
+
+Consider a 16-year-old high school sophomore, who is going to school full time and engaged in extracurricular activities when not in school. The student doesn’t have a job but isn’t looking for one. Counting the student as “unemployed” — defined as a person who’s looking for a job but can’t find one — doesn’t tell you anything about the labor market.
+
+“No economist, I would think, would feel comfortable using that because it’s counting people who may have no interest in having a job,” said Adam Millsap, research fellow for the State and Local Policy Project at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
+
+The BLS did not come up with the definition of “unemployed” out of thin air. It actually reflects an internationally embraced definition set by the International Labor Organization in 1982.
+
+If you apply Trump’s definition to white youth, 49 percent are “unemployed.” That’s five times the official BLS unemployment rate (10 percent) for white youth.
+
+Asians fare worse than blacks using Trump’s fuzzy math. The BLS youth unemployment rate for Asians is 9.6 percent, lower than the rate for white youth. But under Trump’s calculation, the Asian youth unemployment rate jumps to 63.6 percent — seven times the official rate, and even worse than the 58 percent figure for black youth.
+
+See how the calculations for Asian, black and white youth compare in this graphic below. (Thanks to Millsap for helping us with the calculation.)
+
+The difference in Asian youth rates may reflect a cultural factor, Millsap said. Fewer Asian youths may be in the labor force because they are more devoted to school and work less, even part time. But their BLS unemployment rate may be lower because Asian youth are more successful at finding a job if they look for one.
+
+A campaign official previously told the Fact Checker that its calculation “is a more comprehensive reflection of disengagement from the labor force than the unemployment rate,” as it includes those who are not finding work because they are discouraged from previous attempts at employment. But the campaign did not respond to our latest inquiry, specifically for this fact check, for an explanation of why the campaign includes those who are not interested in looking for work (i.e., students).
+
+If Trump really is interested in the rate of disengagement among black youth, there is an academically accepted measure he can use. It’s called NEET, which stands for “Neither Employed nor in Education or Training.” This measure factors out students altogether, and measures the share of disconnected youth aged 16 to 24.
+
+Pew Research Center’s Drew DeSilver, who has written about youth unemployment and NEETs, calculated a 2015 NEET rate among black youth 16 to 24 at 20.9 percent of the total civilian non-institutional population, compared with 14.7 percent among white youth of the same age range.
+
+Youth unemployment is higher among blacks than whites, regardless of the method you use. But Trump’s figure doesn’t show how it’s a persistent problem for black youth compared with white youth, and fails to accurately reflect the state of the labor market for black youth 16 to 24 years old.
+
+Per Trump’s math, a 24-year-old college graduate who is actively looking for a job but can’t find one is in the same situation as a 16-year-old high school sophomore who is in school full time and going to band practice or playing on a school sports team when not in class.
+
+And per Trump’s math, more Asian youth are unemployed than black youth — even though Asian youth have a lower official BLS unemployment rate than whites or blacks. So Trump ends up using a calculation for black youth that greatly exaggerates the actual number of people who can’t find a job even though they are trying, while minimizing their rate in the context of Asian youth.
+
+We previously awarded Four Pinocchios to Trump’s absurd calculation that the “real unemployment rate” is 42 percent — about eight times higher than the official BLS rate. He applies the same junk analysis for the black youth unemployment rate, which defies internationally accepted measures of unemployment while ignoring an actual measure of disengaged youth that could prove his point. We award Trump Four more Pinocchios.
+
+Send us facts to check by filling out this form
+
+Sign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter",REAL
+1730,"Scott Walker never stood a chance: Why this awkward, Koch-backed Midwesterner was outrageously overrated","In 2008, it was former Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, whom beltway political mavens had built up for years as an exciting Republican reformer with big “new ideas” (like welfare reform and school vouchers). In the wake of the Bush debacle, he was especially attractive as an “outsider” who could make the American people forget what they’d just endured. Unfortunately, like Walker, on the stump Thompson was frighteningly unprepared, even making embarrassing gaffes about Jews and Israel, and he dropped out in August of 2007. Undeterred by this embarrassment, the establishment once again anointed a Midwestern Governor as the GOP’s salvation for exactly the same reasons in 2014, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who also flamed out before any votes were cast.
+
+This year it was Scott Walker, who “suspended” his campaign yesterday after having been in precipitous free fall from front-runner to last place and facing the prospect of being booted from the main debate stage and forced to spar with Lindsey Graham at the kids’ table next time out.
+
+If you don’t count Gerald Ford, who backed into the presidency by being appointed vice president and succeeding Nixon when he resigned, the GOP has never nominated a governor and only one politician from the Midwest since Alf Landon back in 1936: Senator Bob Dole in 1996. (And neither of them were exactly resounding victories — Landon only got two electoral votes and Dole was soundly defeated by the incumbent Bill Clinton.) Eisenhower more accurately belonged to the nation, not the region where he was born and his executive experience was in saving the world from fascism so such parochial electoral concerns were not particularly relevant.
+
+But while it’s true that the modern electoral map is very daunting for the GOP, they seem peculiarly fixated on this region. Walker took the early lead in the Midwestern savior race, but for months people were also talking up Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as similarly excellent choices to lead the GOP out of the wilderness.  Back in 2014, as they all made pilgrimages to the Republican Governor’s Association, Politico described them this way:
+
+The fact that they seemed to be able to transcend the party’s, shall we say, cruder side was also a big selling point. As Walker put it during his apparently impressive appearance:
+
+By strong leadership he meant that one should be as crackpot right-wing as one can get away with and not be Michele Bachmann. And Walker was that guy in every way. The New Republic described him this way:
+
+He took his marching orders from The Club For Growth, Americans for Prosperity and anti- immigration guru Jeff Sessions. He had evangelical credentials equal to those of Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. His record of union bashing was second to none.
+
+And he certainly seemed nice, so nice in fact that he appeared to be something of a grinning simpleton at times, particularly on social media, where his tweeting of his dinner menus and constant pictures of himself riding on a Harley were ruthlessly mocked. While all the constituencies in the party who were presumed to be his greatest fans gave him plenty of chances, his gaffes and flip-flops made them doubt his sincerity and abilities. He had been widely assumed to be the Koch brothers’ choice due to their involvement in the union busting and recall campaign in Wisconsin. And they were admittedly very impressed with him until he started making embarrassing mistakes, like saying that Ronald Reagan’s greatest foreign policy achievement was taking on the air traffic controllers union, and flip-flopping on immigration several times, finally landing on the opinion that even legal immigration should be ended. Not ready for prime time doesn’t begin to describe it and the Kochs have known that for a while now. Additionally, for reasons that remain somewhat elusive, the Christian right just didn’t trust him. To someone who isn’t a member of that club, his tiny deviations from the dogma seemed understandable, but they saw it differently. With other candidates in the race with strong conservative evangelical credentials (as well as Trump, who rightly notes that many evangelicals love him too) that constituency never materialized for him either. And even aside from the now predictable consecration as this year’s Midwestern savior, the rationale for Walker’s campaign was built on the fallacy of his alleged prowess in bending the Legislature to his will and dominating at the ballot box. Apparently, managing to win in years that were national Democratic electoral bloodbaths and only being recalled once makes you a giant slayer in the Republican Party these days. And having a legislative majority that had been building an agenda and a game plan for many years before you were elected counts as a demonstration of heroic power. (Juggling numerous scandals and managing to avoid indictment is likewise considered a useful skill — which, come to think of it, it actually is in the GOP.) The sad fact is that Walker has been the most overrated politician in the country based largely upon the Republicans’ quixotic desire to find a leader who can put a respectable face on its increasingly disreputable base — and the media’s odd willingness to not believe what their eyes were telling them: that Walker was a terrible candidate. Like Pawlenty and Thompson before him, he may have looked good on a PowerPoint presentation, but in reality he showed few signs of life on the debate stage or on the stump. The good news for Washington’s pundits and establishment Republicans is that there’s still some hope for their Midwestern hero scenario to come true in 2016. There is another one in the race: Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Whether or not he can make the cut is still unknown, but if there’s one thing you can say about him, it’s that he’s anything but dull. Unfortunately, the Republican electorate seems mesmerized by “outsider” amateurs this year so far and Kasich is the embodiment of a lifelong politician who took some time out to cash in  — he’s the fourth richest Republican running — and then jump back in to become governor, and then president. He also has a habit of diluting his hardcore conservatism with some pragmatic deal-making from time to time, which is unlikely to be acceptable unless he adopts some Trumpish attitudes about Mexicans and Muslims to cover it. But whatever happens this time out, for those who believe in the Great Whitebread Hope as the only salvation for a fractured party that needs someone who can convince the country it hasn’t gone completely stark raving mad, there’s every reason to believe that the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.",REAL
+2261,We Republicans Lost On Gay Rights. That’s A Good Thing.,"I’m not among those Republicans who have “evolved” on the issue of gay rights. I didn’t need to. I’ve always been attracted to the GOP message of more freedom and less government, but thought it hypocritical and counter to the core of our philosophy that Republicans would not apply those tenets to gay rights. But of course I was often the black sheep in campaign meetings during the 1990s and 2000s. There goes McKinnon again. Taking up for the gays. Although “gay” wasn’t the word that was used back then.
+
+Politically, while it once helped political parties to use gay rights to divide and score political points (and the GOP didn’t have a monopoly on the issue; remember it was Bill Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage Act), the wedge issue has now lost its edge, even, I would argue, in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. No Republican can win the nomination without the support of the business community. And Big Business is now at odds with the social conservative faction of the Republican Party over gay and transgender equality — and Big Business is winning.
+
+Look at what’s happened in four states dominated by the GOP in the past year.
+
+Weeks before the Super Bowl kickoff in 2014, the Arizona Legislature passed a bill allowing businesses to refuse service to gay customers. This “religious freedom” measure made it OK for business owners to kick customers out of their establishments if they opposed homosexuality on religious grounds. Scores of corporate titans in the travel and tourism industry, together with the NFL, opposed the bill. Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed it.
+
+In Indiana this March, lawmakers tried to pass similar legislation, followed by a hell-hath-no-fury response led by Eli Lilly, Salesforce and Angie’s List, which canceled a $40 million project planned for Indianapolis. Marriott’s CEO said the legislation was “pure idiocy from a business perspective.” Gov. Mike Pence modified the bill, but the damage was done. (The state has since hired a global PR firm to resuscitate its image following the brouhaha.)
+
+In Arkansas, same story. Seeing the firestorm that occurred in Indiana, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson didn’t sign the original bill that hit his desk after calls for him to veto it came from his own son, and from Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, which said the bill ran counter to the company’s values. In the end, the governor signed a less toxic, less controversial bill.
+
+And this week, Texas became the latest to join the fray.
+
+The Lone Star State just wrapped its legislative session, which included two “religious freedom” constitutional amendments. Learning from what happened in the above states, industry groups and major businesses went out pre-emptively — let me say that again: pre-emptively — before such bills made it too far in the Legislature. The conservative state chamber of commerce, the Texas Association of Business, took the lead.
+
+The amendments “would devastate economic development, tourism and the convention business,” said Bill Hammond, TAB’s CEO. “One has to look no further than Indiana to realize what a detriment this would be, and how hard it would be to sell Texas to the rest of the country. The Super Bowl [in Houston in 2017], the Final Four, all those things would be at risk in Texas if this were to become part of our Constitution.”
+
+More than 250 Texas companies — American Airlines, Dell, Texas Instruments, Dow Chemical, the Dallas Mavericks — went on record with a general pledge in support of treating gay and transgender Texans fairly and equally under the law — and that welcoming and inclusive communities are essential to their bottom line.
+
+Both amendments in the Texas Legislature died a quick death.
+
+So: four states, same story and same result. If the “religious freedom” strategy can’t work in Texas — the bastion of conservatism and beacon for business — where can it work?
+
+It’s not news this country has come a long way on LGBT rights. An evolution, a massive one, has taken place. Culturally, we’ve gone from taboo to tolerance, and in some cities, total embrace. Elections are always about the future, never about the past. And so my advice to GOP candidates is to recognize that since our society has largely moved on, and business has moved on, so should the party of Abraham Lincoln, who fought a civil war over civil rights.
+
+Discrimination is now simply bad for the bottom line and bad for any brand, whether a company’s or a state’s. When it comes to recruitment and retention, the millennial generation, which will be 75 percent of the workforce by 2030, doesn’t have much tolerance for anti-gay anything. In fact, it’s become somewhat of a litmus test. 73 percent of millennials support LGBT nondiscrimination, according to Public Religion Research Institute. Surely, they use it as one criterion when deciding where to work.
+
+Most businesses now have their own internal nondiscrimination policies for LGBT employees, but they want to see their larger communities in which they operate adopt similar welcoming and inclusive policies. Top talent is looking for both a great job and a great quality of life. To most folks, I would venture, that does not mean a city or state that looks the other way when discrimination happens.
+
+It’s clear from the reaction of many of America’s leading corporations, that Big Business wants to do the right thing for and by employees — all of them. And most CEOs of the Fortune 500 are Republicans. So, they are paving the way for more in our party to jump on board with gay rights. If it’s good for business, it’s generally good for the Republican Party.
+
+Negative national headlines on religious freedom continue to fuel a negative image of the entire party. Both in my private conversations with and in public (and private) polling, conservatives are moving ever closer to supporting full equity for LGBT Americans. Gallup’s Values and Beliefs poll released last month showed a more than 20 percentage-point increase since 2001 in Americans (63 percent) who believe “gay and lesbian relations” are “morally acceptable”. You don’t get to a supermajority like that without Republicans. Even Texas conservatives support protecting gay and transgender folks from employment discrimination.
+
+Republicans, like the rest of Americans, support nondiscrimination laws because most of us have gay family members, friends and co-workers and want to treat them as we would want to be treated. And having heard from moms and dads who want this great country to treat their gay child just like their straight child has been a powerful narrative. It really is all about family standing up for one another. Most people believe equality under the law can and does work well alongside protecting religious freedom — which must be and is protected, even cherished, in our Constitution.
+
+Shockingly, it’s still legal in the United States of America, even as we may be on the brink of having marriage equality in all 50 states, to fire and evict gay and transgender folks — and kick them out of a restaurant — simply for being who they are. This is patently wrong and needs to be fixed.
+
+Democrats and Big Business are at work fixing it, together. That would have been an odd pairing years ago. The GOP position is untenable — and out of step with one of its key constituencies. It’s time to stand up to the social conservative wing and move into the future.",REAL
+2841,Iran takes hard stance on key provisions in nuke deal,"Iran took a hard stance on two of the biggest demands of world powers in a final nuclear deal Thursday, rejecting any extraordinary inspection rules and warning that if the U.S. and other countries re-impose sanctions after the deal is done, it will ramp up enrichment of bomb-making materials.
+
+A senior Iranian negotiator told reporters outside Vienna the U.N. nuclear agency’s standard rules governing access to government information, sites of interests and scientists should be sufficient to ensure that Iran’s program is solely for peaceful purposes. Anything beyond that would be unfair, he said.
+
+However, the U.S. and some other countries want Iran to take the extra step.
+
+""We should be realistic,"" said the Iranian official, who briefed members of the news media on condition he not be quoted by name. The man also questioned the legitimacy of countries that don’t accept the International Atomic Energy Agency’s jurisdiction demanding that Iran be subject to tougher requirements than any other nation. RIA-Novosti reported that Russia also backed Iran’s position that additional inspection guidelines for Iran weren’t necessary.
+
+The official was making a clear reference to Israel, a state widely presumed to maintain an undeclared nuclear arsenal.
+
+The marker is expected to be a cause for concern for the Obama administration and other world powers who are hoping to come to an agreement that would curb Iran’s atomic program for a decade in exchange for relief from crippling sanctions.
+
+The hard stance from Iran comes as the head of the IAEA visited Tehran Thursday to deal with issues surrounding the deal and to seek ""clarification"" of possible military dimensions of programs, The Wall Street Journal reported.
+
+“I believe that both sides have a better understanding on some ways forward, though more work will be needed,” Director-General Yukiya Amano said in a statement.
+
+Amano's trip, described by both western and Iranian officials as potentially important in unlocking a deal, also covered the sensitive issue of access to military sites by IAEA inspectors, The Journal reported.
+
+Iran has committed to implementing the IAEA’s “additional protocol” for inspections and monitoring as part of an accord. The protocol gives the IAEA expanded access to declared and undeclared nuclear sites, and to the sensitive information of more than 120 governments that accept its provisions.
+
+However, the rules don’t guarantee monitors don’t guarantee monitors can enter any site they want to and offer no specific guidelines about sensitive military sites – an issue with Iran, given the long-standing allegations of secret nuclear weapons work at its Parchin base near Tehran.
+
+Instead, the agency’s regulations allow governments to challenge such requests and offer alternative proposals for resolving concerns, such as providing additional documents or access to nearby locations.
+
+For that reason, U.S. officials maintain that rules for inspection must go beyond those laid out by the IAEA for all sides to come to an agreement.
+
+Even as Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has defiantly rejected such access, U.S. officials have sought to differentiate between what Iranian officials were saying is for domestic consumption and what they were promising in the negotiating room.
+
+Tehran says its program is solely for peaceful energy, medical and research purposes, but wants a deal to level the mountain sanctions that have crippled its economy.
+
+President Obama has said the U.S. would maintain its ability to snap sanctions back into place if Iran cheats as some officials don’t trust Iran to hold up its end of the bargain. Iran has said that ability goes two ways.
+
+If Iran is facing the re-imposition of penalties, and the U.S. and its partners don’t uphold their commitments to provide economic relief, he said “Iran has the right to go back to its program as it wishes.”
+
+The official didn't spell out what that meant, but Iran would have several options, such as installing new centrifuges, enriching uranium at levels closer to weapons-grade or restarting activity with material that can be used in warheads where it has pledged to do no such thing.
+
+However, the official said the Islamic Republic would have no need to revert back to its previous capacities if the deal is favorable.
+
+Russia's deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said his government also opposes any automatic re-imposition of international sanctions. Russia and the United States are negotiating alongside Britain, France, Germany and China.
+
+There were few public signs of progress as the high-level negotiations entered a sixth day Thursday after diplomats blew through a June 30 deadline and extended an interim accord by a week. Work was progressing, albeit slowly, officials said.
+
+""Not at breakthrough moment yet,"" British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond tweeted.
+
+Hammond had a morning meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who also consulted top diplomats from China, France, Germany and the European Union. Kerry met Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif late Thursday.
+
+Speaking at the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said all participants had ""the serious intention to finalize a deal,"" but cited numerous unresolved issues.
+
+""The last steps are the most difficult ones,"" he told reporters.
+
+Negotiators have given themselves until at least July 7 to reach agreement.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report",REAL
+6311,"Radio Derb transcript for October 29th is up: The arrogance of power, Etc", ,FAKE
+2113,The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit,"There has always been an odd tenor to discussions among climate scientists, policy wonks, and politicians, a passive-aggressive quality, and I think it can be traced to the fact that everyone involved has to dance around the obvious truth, at risk of losing their status and influence.
+
+The obvious truth about global warming is this: barring miracles, humanity is in for some awful shit.
+
+Here is a plotting of dozens of climate modeling scenarios out to 2100, from the IPCC:
+
+The black line is carbon emissions to date. The red line is the status quo — a projection of where emissions will go if no new substantial policy is passed to restrain greenhouse gas emissions.
+
+We recently passed 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere; the status quo will take us up to 1,000 ppm, raising global average temperature (from a pre-industrial baseline) between 3.2 and 5.4 degrees Celsius. That will mean, according to a 2012 World Bank report, ""extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise,"" the effects of which will be ""tilted against many of the world's poorest regions,"" stalling or reversing decades of development work. ""A 4°C warmer world can, and must be, avoided,"" said the World Bank president.
+
+But that's where we're headed. It will take enormous effort just to avoid that fate. Holding temperature down under 2°C — the widely agreed upon target — would require an utterly unprecedented level of global mobilization and coordination, sustained over decades. There's no sign of that happening, or reason to think it's plausible anytime soon. And so, awful shit it is.
+
+Nobody wants to say that. Why not? It might seem obvious — no one wants to hear it! — but there's a bit more to it than that. We'll return to the question in a minute, but first let's look at how this unsatisfying debate plays out in public.
+
+The latest contretemps was sparked by a comment in Nature by Oliver Geden, an analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. In it, he made a simple argument. Politicians, he says, want good news. They want to hear that it is still possible to limit temperature to 2°C. Even more, they want to hear that they can do so while avoiding aggressive emission cuts in the near-term — say, until they're out of office.
+
+Climate scientists, Geden says, feel pressure to provide the good news. They're worried that if they don't, if they come off as ""alarmist"" or hectoring, they will simply be ignored, boxed out of the debate. And so they construct models showing that it is possible to hit the 2°C target. The message is always, ""We're running out of time; we've only got five or 10 years to turn things around, but we can do it if we put our minds to it.""
+
+That was the message in 1990, in 2000, in 2010. How can we still have five or 10 years left? The answer, Geden says, is that scientists are baking increasingly unrealistic assumptions into their models.
+
+Geden focuses on one such assumption: that substantial negative emissions will be possible in the latter half of the 21st century. We will be able to suck thousands of megatons of carbon out of the atmosphere, so humanity can go net negative by 2100, even if we emit a bunch more carbon in the short term.
+
+The mechanism for negative emissions is supposed to be bioenergy — burning plant mass — coupled with carbon capture and sequestration. The combo is called BECCS, and in theory, it buries more CO2 than it emits.
+
+If you work enough BECCS into your model, you can almost double humanity's ""carbon budget"" — the amount of carbon we can still pump in the atmosphere without passing 2°C. After all, if you can suck half the carbon out, you can afford to pump twice the carbon in.
+
+But is large-scale BECCS plausible? There's the problem of finding a source of biomass that doesn't compete with food crops, the harvesting of which does not spur additional emissions, and which can be found in the enormous quantities required. The IPCC scenarios that come in below 2°C require BECCS to remove between 2 and 10 gigatons of CO2 a year from the atmosphere by 2050. By way of comparison, all the world's oceans combined absorb about 9 gigatons a year; all the world's terrestrial carbon sinks combined absorb about 10 gigatons a year.
+
+These scenarios mean potentially doubling the capacity of terrestrial carbon sinks, capturing and burying — permanently, without leaks — gigatons of CO2 a year. How will it be monitored? What if it leaks or is breached?
+
+There's no consensus on the viability of widespread BECCS, which, after all, doesn't exist yet. One 2014 commentary in the journal Nature Climate Change, co-bylined by 14 researchers, raised serious doubts about the feasibility of large-scale BECCS and the wisdom of betting the climate farm on it. They note that ""deployment of large-scale bioenergy faces biophysical, technical and social challenges, and CCS is yet to be implemented widely,"" and that ""widespread deployment [of BECCS] in climate stabilization scenarios might become a dangerous distraction.""
+
+But BECCS isn't the only way to make models produce happier results. The scenarios that show a high likelihood of avoiding 2°C also presume policy regimes that are positively utopian: a rising price on carbon, harmonized across every country in the world; the availability, maturation, and rapid deployment of every known low-carbon technology; all bets paying off, for 50 years straight. It would be quite a run of luck.
+
+Is it possible in models? Yes. Is it possible IRL? Climate modeler Glen Peters doesn't think so:
+
+There are other ways to shape model outcomes. Peters draws attention to this chart, from the IPCC AR5 report:
+
+Row four is the total carbon budget available to humanity this century, in gigatons. As you can see, if you move right or left on the chart, relatively small changes substantially alter the carbon budget. If you tweak the scenario from having a 66 percent chance of staying under 2°C to a 33 percent chance, the carbon budget goes from 1,000 gigatons to 1,500 — 50 percent more breathing room.
+
+If you decide 2°C is too difficult, and maybe 3°C is okay, your carbon budget goes from 1,000 gigatons to 2,400, more than doubling. That sure looks a lot easier. (Though, important note: even hitting that easier target would require substantial BECCS!)
+
+Kevin Anderson, of the UK's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, is another frequent critic of these model assumptions. He says that models have often included unrealistically low estimates of current and future emissions growth, unrealistically early peaks in global emissions, and unequitable estimates of emission curves in developing countries (implicitly assuming stunted development).
+
+Add to all these considerations the high rate of decline in emissions necessary after global emissions peak. It used to be that 2 percent annual global emission reductions was considered the maximum feasible (without serious economic contraction). Now models routinely show 4 or even 6 percent annual reductions, a rate of emissions decline that has never been achieved by anyone, anywhere, ever, much less consistently over 50 years.
+
+Peters also shares this figure, from researcher Robbie Andrew:
+
+In these scenarios, emissions never go net negative, though BECCS can get used. As you can see, for each year that emissions continue rising, the rate of decline afterward has to be steeper to stay within the budget.
+
+Now policymakers are being told that emissions can peak in 2030 and still keep temperature rise under 2°C. To get that result in a modeling scenario, emissions have to fall 6 percent a year, even with large amounts of BECCS thrown in. To find that plausible, one has to imagine all of human society turning on a dime, beginning in 2030, deploying massive amounts of nuclear, bioenergy, wind, and solar, and doing so every year for decades.
+
+It's ""possible,"" yes, but at a certain point that term loses much meaning. Something that would require human beings to quickly and fundamentally change their collective behavior may not violate the laws of physics, but it is unlikely, given what we know about human beings, path dependence, and political dysfunction. This is what I once called the ""brutal logic of climate change.""
+
+The question is, who is responsible for publicizing the truth about the assumptions behind these scenarios? Is it scientists? Niklas Höhne, director of the New Climate Institute, offered a reasonable response to Geden:
+
+I think there's a good bit of truth in this. The integrated assessment models (IAMs) used to produce these scenarios are not meant to yield predictions, or even plausible alternatives. They show what outcomes result from a particular set of inputs; they reflect their assumptions. Theoretically policymakers ought to know this, but political misuse of modeling is as old as modeling.
+
+Nonetheless, the heated reactions elicited by Geden's piece do show that he's on to something. You can see some of those reactions on BuzzFeed, ClimateWire, and Responding to Climate Change (RTCC). A few are just crazy and knee-jerk, like Bill Hare of Climate Analytics, who ""lumped [Geden] in with climate skeptics and other naysayers 'who systematically downplay the risks of climate change and argue against action to reduce emissions on spurious and ill-founded grounds.'"" That is roughly the opposite of what Geden does.
+
+Others respond by, in my view, missing the point. Stefan Rahmstorf and Michael Mann both insist that Geden is wrong, that 2°C is still physically possible.
+
+I don't take that as the main thrust of Geden's argument, though. Lots of things are physically possible that nonetheless require heroic assumptions about collective human behavior (like, say, aggressive mitigation policy, in the face of powerful vested interests, harmonized across the globe, sustained for decades ... and also many gigatons worth of BECCS). The question is not whether 2°C scenarios violates laws of physical science, but whether they are reasonable given what we know about human beings.
+
+That's not really a scientific judgment, though, is it? Geden makes the same mistake when he writes, ""the climate policy mantra — that time is running out for 2°C but we can still make it if we act now — is a scientific nonsense."" No. It may be a nonsense, but it's not a scientific nonsense. No branch of science, certainly not climatology, can tell us what the humans of 2050 are capable of. We are all, on that score, making educated guesses, and a knowledge of history, politics, and economics will be just as important to that judgment as any knowledge of the physical sciences.
+
+I imagine the scientists want to blame the policy advisors and the politicians — after all, they didn't hide the unrealistic assumptions, they are right there in Appendix 17 for anyone interested.
+
+And yes, theoretically, the policy advisers surrounding politicians should make clear to them exactly the assumptions required to produce the 2°C outcome. And politicians should be straight with their constituents about those assumptions.
+
+However, as the kids say these days, politicians gonna politic. They all have enormous incentive to try to thread the needle, to accept the 2°C target on one hand while maintaining that current policy commitments are adequate, or might some day be adequate, on the other. To do that, they need evidence that success is still within reach.
+
+There is not a politician on earth wants to tell his or her constituents, ""We've probably already blown our chance to avoid substantial suffering, but if we work really hard and devote our lives to the cause, we can somewhat reduce the even worse suffering that awaits our grandchildren."" [crowd roars]
+
+And Geden is right that scientists have very little incentive to tell the unpleasant truths either. They can stick to physical science and the ""possibility"" of 2°C for quite a bit longer, I would imagine. Geden fears that the next big thing, the next deus ex machina to save the 2°C target, is going to be solar radiation managements (aka geoengineering). If they're told to model it, what can scientists do? They'll model it.
+
+The sad fact is that no one has much incentive to break the bad news (except, ahem, my colleague Brad Plumer). Humans are subject to intense status quo bias. Especially on the conservative end of the psychological spectrum — which is the direction all humans move when they feel frightened or under threat — there is a powerful craving for the message that things are, basically, okay, that the system is working like it's supposed to, that the current state of affairs is the best available, or close enough.
+
+To be the one insisting that, no, things are not okay, things are heading toward disaster, is uncomfortable in any social milieu — especially since, in most people's experience, those wailing about the end of the world are always wrong and frequently crazy.
+
+Yet here we are. The fact is, on our current trajectory, in the absence of substantial new climate policy, we are heading for up to 4°C and maybe higher by the end of the century. That will be, on any clear reading of the available evidence, catastrophic. We are headed for disaster — slowly, yes, but surely.
+
+Even as many climate experts are now arguing that 2°C is an inadequate target, that it already represents unacceptable harms, we are facing a situation in which limiting temperature even to 3°C requires heroic policy and technology changes.
+
+And yet ... the world doesn't appear to be ending; there's no big, visible threat. Climate change moves so slowly that its pace is evident primarily through graphs and statistics. It rarely rises above the background noise.
+
+So people want to hear that there's hope of 2°C. Politicians want to say that there's hope of 2°C. When asked, modelers are still able to produce scenarios that show 2°C. And nobody wants to be the one to pee in the punch bowl.
+
+Further reading: Two degrees: How the world failed on global warming",REAL
+1219,RNC chairman: 'We're going to embrace whoever the nominee is',"""I think it's pretty clear we're going to embrace whoever the nominee is. I embrace all of these candidates,"" he told CNN's Alisyn Camerota Wednesday on ""New Day."" ""Whoever the nominee ends up becoming they're going to join the biggest RNC operation we've put together.""
+
+Priebus said the GOP is still pretty divided in its support.
+
+""It's a big party. And there are some of our major donors I saw standing behind Donald Trump. People are competing. And people are endorsing different candidates,"" he said.
+
+Priebus said he was not surprised by Trump's success in Nevada with Hispanic voters because the Republican Party has been working for the past several years to connect with Hispanic voters.
+
+""We have been obviously working very hard in expanding the Republican Party in Hispanic communities. We're in the middle of hiring 1,300 people right now many of which are going to be in Hispanic neighborhoods,"" he said. ""What I have in mind is making sure that we've got a party that doesn't show up in Hispanic and black communities and Asian communities three months before an election and expect that the brand is going to sell. It won't."" Priebus also dismissed a Washington Post editorial taking him to task for not rebuking Trump over controversial statements. ""That is the stupidest editorial that I have ever seen,"" he said. ""That I'm called out for not beating up the front-runner of the GOP ... It's ridiculous."" ""That's not my job. My job is to put forward the fairest process that we can put forward. To not put my hand on the scale. To allow our delegates to make the choices that they want to make. And then accept the decision that the delegates make,"" he said.",REAL
+3259,"Cory Booker: Senate bill is ""in my lifetime the first reversal of mass incarceration""","Sen. Cory Booker acknowledges that the Senate's criminal justice bill is not perfect. But he doesn't hesitate to point out that ""it's in my lifetime the first reversal of mass incarceration in the federal level.""
+
+The legislation contains some big compromises: It keeps many mandatory minimum sentences, does not shorten sentences for violent offenders, and adds a new mandatory sentencing enhancement for fentanyl, a powerful opioid, when it's present in trafficked heroin. Booker said that if it were only up to him, the legislation would have gone much further in rolling back punishments, and it wouldn't have added the mandatory enhancement for fentanyl.
+
+But he argued that at the end of the day, the bill would be progress, leading to fewer people in federal prisons. It would reduce some mandatory minimum sentences — retroactively for nonviolent offenders. It would give judges the power to downgrade 10-year mandatory minimum sentences for first-time drug offenders. And it would let people currently in prison take steps to reduce the length of their sentences through special programs, as long they demonstrate they no longer pose a threat to society.
+
+Booker argued this is enough to make the law a net good. And as a progressive senator, he said people should get on board.
+
+Here's my conversation with Booker, edited for length and clarity.
+
+German Lopez: Since we last talked, the criminal justice reform bill was introduced and changed, and it's now definitely safe to say it's a compromise. How do you view the legislation now that it's closer to final form?
+
+Cory Booker: It's never been the totality of what I wanted. It's never been as bold as I wanted it to be. But it is a significant bill in the sense that it is stopping this drift that we've seen over the last 20, 30 years toward massive hyper-incarceration. And in fact, it's the first major [federal] bill that's going to begin to unwind or move the pendulum back toward the sanity that we as a nation should be so urgently demanding.
+
+So the compromises at the end of the day — and some people are making them out to be far worse than they actually are — don't undermine the truth of the bill. This is going to take our serious problem of over-incarceration and begin to reduce it, give judges more discretion, give people with these long, unnecessary sentences avenues to earn their time down and get more early release, and affect people as they come out of prison in a way that will empower them to be more successful. All those things are good things.
+
+GL: In terms of the bill's specifics, one of the compromises that stuck out to me, as someone who covers drug policy, is the addition of the fentanyl mandatory penalty. It just seems kind of strange to me — and I've heard this from readers, too — that a bill that's supposed to reform and move away from mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenses would add this kind of penalty. What's your view on it?
+
+CB: Well, first of all, I obviously wouldn't want that in there.
+
+But it's important for your readers to understand that it is not a mandatory minimum. There's a big difference between telling a judge that you have to give this person five years in prison or more versus what this is, which is a sentencing enhancement, which says to the judge, ""You got to give this person some kind of enhancement,"" but the full discretion is to you. You could literally give 12 hours, one day, or more time if you want to.
+
+So for me, what I reject is three strikes you're out, 10-year mandatory minimums that take all the discretion out of the judge's hands and put it all in the legislature's hands. That's one of the ways we've gone awry.
+
+The last thing that's really important is that in fiscal year 2014, the US Department of Justice only prosecuted 12 [heroin cases involving fentanyl] nationwide. So this means 12 cases the judge would have the ability to add more on but would have the discretion not to do that.
+
+So, number one, this provision affects a small amount of people. Number two, it's not a mandatory minimum. Number three, if this is one of the compromises we had to make to get the other major pulldowns of mandatory minimums that could affect thousands of people, that is a small, small compromise for the big, big gains we're going to be getting in reducing mass incarceration through the bill.
+
+GL: What are some of the things the bill does that you don't like?
+
+CB: I'll tell you, I fought hard to get the end of juvenile solitary confinement, and I'm upset — though I understood I had to take what we got — that it's only for juveniles that have been tried as juveniles, as opposed to a 16-year-old who's been tried as an adult. He's still eligible for that solitary confinement. That's problematic to me. It's a 16-year-old child — and, again, it's a small number, but they're still in the system. We want the ban on solitary confinement for them.
+
+That a 16-year-old, whose brain is still under development, when they're so vulnerable, [can still be placed in solitary confinement], that's something I don't like in the bill.
+
+We worked hard to get the expungement for juveniles, and I'm worried that that's not in the House provision right now. So that's a provision that's vulnerable.
+
+""As soon as this one passes, I'm back to negotiating and fighting for the next bill that can go further than this""
+
+We were able to get 10-year [mandatory minimums] and above into the judge's discretion, but we were not able to get the five-year mandatory minimums. In other words, with a 10-year, the judge can actually disregard the mandatory minimum according to the bill. That's a massive redirecting of power back toward judges. We won that for 10-year, but we did not win it for five-year mandatory minimums.
+
+If you want more, I could obviously give you a small dissertation on the bill Cory Booker would have wanted versus that one [we got]. In my opinion, I would have liked to just have gotten rid of the mandatory minimums altogether and made our judicial system about judges, juries, prosecutors, and defendants again and not legislators who know nothing about the particular circumstances of a case. So there's a lot of things that are in the bill that aren't the things that I really want, but it is a result of a compromise.
+
+Look, as a result of this compromise, we've gotten Sen. [Mark] Kirk, Sen. [Thad] Cochran, Sen. [Steve] Daines, and Sen. [Dan] Sullivan onto the bill, which gives us all the more chances of it getting passed.
+
+Again, it's not my dream bill. And as soon as this one passes, I'm back to negotiating and fighting for the next bill that can go further than this. And the more guys like you, frankly, and others are awakening the public [to] what I think is one of the greatest cancers in our country, on the soul of our democracy, the more people will be pressing for other and further reforms.
+
+GL: The reason I asked that is to gauge the cost-benefit analysis that you're doing in your head in terms of what makes this bill good and what would make it too bad to pass. It seems like you're saying that this pushes the ball forward a bit and reduces incarceration overall, and that makes it worth passing. But how do you gauge that?
+
+CB: The Sentencing Commission numbers are clear: This is going to have a significant benefit to reducing incarceration. Elements of this bill will have a significant benefit.
+
+There's some benefits that I know are huge that we can't measure, like giving judges that discretion back. We can't measure that. But I know federal judges who've spoken to the fact that they feel like their hands are tied, literally grieving that they have to put down sentences that they know are inappropriate. Well, now, for those 10-year mandatory minimums, those judges have that discretion, and I think it's going to be used a lot. Those are the things we can't measure.
+
+But we have some good numbers on the sentencing reform.
+
+This will move the ball on the field a good number away, and will affect thousands upon thousands of Americans who are unnecessarily, potentially even unjustly, forced to serve very, very long terms. This bill will do good.
+
+It won't do as much good as I would want, but there's no cost-benefit analysis. The choice is this or nothing in this Congress. Nothing leaves a lot of people wallowing in prison, facing harsh judgments that are not necessary. My thinking is let's put these points on the board and commit ourselves to understanding the game's not over yet.
+
+GL: Are you worried that passing this bill would make it harder to get more reform, since people would feel like they at least did something? Or do you think there's so much movement for reform that it will still happen?
+
+CB: I'm a new legislator, so that question you asked me, I've asked so many veterans around this place on both sides of the Capitol. That was a common question I asked for a while — until I heard the same answer from enough senior Democrats that I stopped asking it.
+
+So what everyone who has experience legislating has told me — Dick Durbin was the first person to spell it out for me — is that if you have a chance to pass a bill that does a lot of good, do it, because you never know what's going to happen next year, or what the sentiment is going to be next political cycle. Take what you can off the table. You may not get the whole loaf, but take the loaf that you can get — and then go back to fighting again.
+
+I've been convinced by that argument from enough senior senators. I'll take as much as I can.
+
+And then, by the way, the coalition that we've helped foster around this issue, it isn't going away either. Conversations with Mark Holden, with the Koch brothers, with Newt Gingrich, with others — everybody knows that there's more work to do. So I don't think you're going to get any diminution in commitment from a lot of these interest groups, advocacy groups, and justice groups.
+
+But, again, you never know what can happen — who's going to win the presidential election, who's going to win the Senate, who will be elected in the House. So I think the right thing to do is to get a bill that may not go as far as we want to. But it's in my lifetime the first reversal of mass incarceration in the federal level.
+
+GL: So the bill received some big changes recently, after it was released last year, due to fears about some of the measures benefiting violent offenders. But I know that a lot of reformers and experts actually liked those portions; they think it's important to acknowledge that sentences are too long not just for drug offenders but for everyone in general. Where do you stand on that, and is it something you intend to work on moving forward?
+
+CB: I've spoken about this publicly a lot. And I don't have unanimity in my own caucus about this. But we have an issue with violent crime in the sense that everybody makes a stark difference between violent offenders and nonviolent offenders.
+
+But for people in the criminal justice working world, that is a gray line at best. You could have someone who's in a car, driving a boyfriend, and the boyfriend decides to jump out, pull a gun out, rob somebody, jumps back in the car, and she keeps driving — and now she's a violent criminal.
+
+So we need to start having a better conversation about the many people who are languishing in prison for very long terms when their crime was not showing the right sense and stopping the car and exiting the car as a driver or what have you.
+
+I still think we have disproportionate punishments for people who are so-called violent criminals but don't necessarily involve any direct actions of violence.
+
+In addition to that, the circumstances to violent crime. I'll give you an example on an assault charge. If you and I got into a bar fight, and you punched me, and I fell backward and I hit my head, and I died, that's a horrible crime — but there are circumstances within that. Does that person deserve life imprisonment?
+
+I just think there's a fear to have a candid conversation about proportionality when it comes to things that are labeled as violent crimes.
+
+GL: Even for people who have done truly violent or horrible things, there are also some questions about whether they truly deserve the long sentences they're getting, especially if they can prove that they've rehabilitated or have aged out of crime. In those kinds of cases, what do you think should be done?
+
+CB: Let's look at the statistical reality. When people are in prison, maybe they commit a crime in their 20s, and now they're in their 50s, 60s, and 70s and we're still holding them in prison; there is so much data that shows that you hit a point in your age that your chances of committing another crime have gone down dramatically.
+
+There comes a point where you really have to ask yourself if we have achieved the societal end in keeping these people in prison for so long. Is the societal cost and expenditure worth it to keep somebody who's older — higher medical costs and the like — in prison? This is a conversation this country really needs to have.
+
+By the way, I think what you're getting at also is that we are different than most places on the planet Earth in terms of the lengths of our sentences even for violent crimes.
+
+GL: One example that comes to mind is Norway's system, where prison terms are capped at 21 years but perhaps a judge can add a few years at the end of the term. It seems like something the US could move to.
+
+CB: Even with our bill, what a lot of people don't understand is that people who are earning time out in our bill, they're not just getting it and then it's like, ""Hey, it's time to get out."" They have to go for reviews before the prosecutor, before the judge. So we're not just opening doors for people to leave without any checks whatsoever. In fact, the checks are, in my opinion, very justifiably burdensome for someone to exit prison.
+
+So a system in which someone who serves 40 years on a sentence and is now a senior citizen, a system that says they should now be able to go through a process and the victims are notified, where prosecutors are there, where the chance for redemption is open to them, not given to them, I think we should have a system that allows a chance for redemption for people who are well past the point in their lives where they're any statistical threat to this country.
+
+GL: If this bill passes, are there any particular ideas you're thinking about specifically in terms of criminal justice reform?
+
+CB: I don't know my communications director will want me to say this, but: Hell yes!
+
+Let's start with the great bill to ""ban the box."" That's a no-brainer, in my opinion. And it has wide bipartisan support. And it would deal with this other problem that you and I haven't talked about yet: Folks who get out of prison — maybe they only serve a year, maybe they only serve a month — now they can't get a job.
+
+There is, across the board, so much more work to be done in this area. Should this bill get done and sent to the president's office, before the ink is dry I'm going to start talking about the many more things that we have to do to bring justice back to our justice system.
+
+GL: That's one thing the bill leaves out: addressing all these collateral consequences. You mentioned ""ban the box,"" but it also applies to other stuff, like voting rights and welfare benefits. I know some of this is done at the state level, but still.
+
+CB: I'm on a bill about voting rights. States may be able to do what they want on the state level, but on federal offices, heck yes that's our jurisdiction. And it's outrageous that African Americans are four times more likely to be convicted of drug crimes, even though they have no difference in committing drug crimes. And guess what, as a result of that? Black Americans are about four times more likely to lose their voting rights.
+
+I'm already involved on legislation on a whole bunch of these issues — really good bills that I'm not giving up on fighting for. And when this sentencing bill is done, I'm going to be part of introducing new sentencing bills around mandatory minimums, because I think the momentum and history is on our side. And we can continue to chip away at this problem.",REAL
+5599,Top US General Pleads With Troops Not To Revolt Over 2016 (VIDEO),"By: The Voice of Reason | In recent weeks, a common theme that has run through the vast majority of the stories I’ve covered, has been for people to make sure they are preparing for the possibility of a major emergency. Why? First and foremost, because it was only back in May when President Obama took time out of his extremely busy schedule to deliver an address at the FEMA National Response Coordination Center in Washington where he made a point to stress that Americans who are not preparing for disaster, or who do not have emergency evacuation plans for any given scenario, could find themselves in big trouble in the near future. The following excerpt from Obama’s speech comes directly from the official White House website … “One of the things that we have learned over the course of the last seven and a half years is that government plays a vital role, but it is every citizen’s responsibility to be prepared for a disaster. And that means taking proactive steps, like having an evacuation plan, having a fully stocked disaster supply kit. If your local authorities ask you to evacuate, you have to do it. Don’t wait.” That’s the biggest reason why. Second, all one has to do is look around at our surroundings to see that right now the “perfect storm” of pure chaos is brewing all around us. As our allies in Berlin who have nuclear missiles pointed in their direction by the Russians can attest to, Geopolitical tensions are sky right now. German leaders, along with leaders in the Czeck Republic have issued warnings to their people to begin stockpiling food and emergency supplies in case of what could be an “existence threatening event.” Not helping matters geopolitically is the fact that the entire financial banking system of the West which includes the U.S. Dollar as the World Reserve Currency was built as a debt-based monetary system, and now that the debt saturation process has run its full course, the global economy is on the verge of what is being called a “global reset,” which could occur at any moment. Lastly, here domestically the 2016 presidential election has gotten so divisive, that supporters from both political parties have vowed not to accept the winner if it’s not their candidate, and some groups have even promised the largest civil uprising in our nation’s history if the election doesn’t go their way. If that was all that was in the news, it would be enough to put anyone on edge. What I talk about in the video below, is a recent article from earlier this week from The Daily Caller . In that article, among other things, it reports that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford has had to issue a reminder/warning to the troops to stay committed to their oaths, as well as the chain of command in the coming weeks. In light of everything I’ve been warning people of, this recent report is most troubling… The Daily Caller Reports: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford wrote a Medium blog post Monday to remain committed to its military oath amid the 2016 election. “What we must collectively guard against is allowing our institution to become politicized, or even perceived as being politicized, by how we conduct ourselves during engagements with the media, the public, or in open or social forums,” Dunford reminded troops. Dunford further urged service members that the military must remain committed to the chain of command structure until the next administration comes in, and that the military should not undermine its credibility in the interim with the next president. “I have a duty to protect the integrity and political neutrality of our military profession,” he continued. Dunford’s comments also come amid increased concern that the U.S. military is becoming too politicized. He is reportedly furious with Retired Marine Gen. John Allen and Retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn for actively campaigning on behalf of the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey openly rebuked Allen and Flynn for injecting themselves into the political process. “The American people should not wonder where their military leaders draw the line between military advice and political preference,” he lamented in a letter to The Washington Post. He continued “our nation’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines should not wonder about the political leanings and motivations of their leaders.” The letter is also likely addressing recent political statements by active duty service members on social media. A female sailor posted a video of herself sitting through morning colors in protest of supposed racism in the national anthem in August. The protest video was inspired by 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. THE VOICE OF REASON is the pen name of Michael DePinto, a graduate of Capital University Law School, and an attorney in Florida. Having worked in the World Trade Center, along with other family and friends, Michael was baptized by fire into the world of politics on September 11, 2001. Michael’s political journey began with tuning in religiously to whatever the talking heads on television had to say, then Michael became a “Tea-Bagging” activist as his liberal friends on the Left would say, volunteering within the Jacksonville local Tea Party, and most recently Michael was sworn in as an attorney. Today, Michael is a major contributor to www.BeforeItsNews.com , he owns and operates www.thelastgreatstand.com , where Michael provides what is often very ‘colorful’ political commentary, ripe with sarcasm, no doubt the result of Michael’s frustration as he feels we are witnessing the end of the American Empire. The topics Michael most often weighs in on are: Martial Law, FEMA Camps, Jade Helm, Economic Issues, Government Corruption, and Government Conspiracy. Submit your review",FAKE
+7387,Putin and Xi in Western propaganda – why does XJP get off so lightly? | The Vineyard of the Saker,"1861 Views October 29, 2016 10 Comments Guest Posts The Saker 
+Moscow-Beijing Express, on The Saker 
+By Jeff J. Brown, www.chinarising.puntopress.com 
+Crosslinked at: http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/10/29/putin-and-xi-in-western-propaganda-why-does-xjp-get-off-so-lightly-moscow-beijing-express-on-the-saker-161029/ 
+Podcast is available on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/44-days/putin-and-xi-in-western-propaganda-why-does-xjp-get-off-so-lightly-161029 
+Better watch out, Vlad. When Western propaganda throws an “-ism” at you, the gloves have come off. Think Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, communism, socialism, extremism and “Islamic” terrorism, for starters. After all, behind the Great Western Firewall, they are all the same thing, right? 
+A recent cover and main article in the Economist, pictured above, reminded me of just how hyperbolic and ideological is the West’s propaganda against Russian President Vladimir Putin. While maybe good polemical fodder as a cartoon on the editorial page, the fact that this demonic caricature merits front cover status, indicates just how programmed and institutionalized Western mainstream media is. Westerners love to insult the Anti-West press for being “party organs” and “government mouthpieces”. But, why travel so far? They only need to stay home with their national New York Times , Radio France and BBC , to really appreciate Bernaysian psyops being passed off as serious journalism (as in Edward Bernays). I don’t call it living behind the Great Western Firewall for nothing. 
+I have a friend whose email signature is “Blame it on Putin”. For a while, he changed it to “Blame it on China”. But that didn’t last long and he recently changed it back. As we have seen with the most depressing predictability, President Putin, specifically, and Russia in general are the voodoo pin dolls of Western racism and demonization of another people (Slavs) and other religions (Orthodox Christianity, as well as widespread Islam and Buddhism in Siberia). http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2015/10/01/slavs-and-the-yellow-peril-are-niggers-brutes-and-beasts-in-the-eyes-of-western-empire-the-saker-44-days-radio-sinoland-2015-10-1/ 
+What is so remarkable is how unhinged and psychopathic the West’s racist propaganda is against Putin & Co., compared to the attacks on China’s President Xi Jinping (XJP) and the Chinese people. It transgresses irrational fear, to the point of being sick, black humor. Yet, about the most polemical front cover against XJP was Time magazine in April, 2016, seen below. But, making China’s leader look like a Mao Zedong- Blade Runner replicant is tame and almost quaint, compared to the Orwellian “Emmanuel Goldstein” tsunami being launched nonstop against Putin. 
+Pretty tame stuff, this, compared to the racist feeding frenzy that Western propaganda is ginning up against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Slavic countrymen. 
+True, Russia has the longest border with the European Union, and there is tremendous historical Western precedence to keep Germany from forming any kind of economic or geopolitical alliance with Russia. As well, the West’s Ukrainian color revolution turned out to be a total genocidal failure, with Russia reintegrating Crimea and Donbass, biding its time for a hopeful remarriage in the years to come. Needless to say, the revenge factor, and if there is anything that Western tyranny loves more, it’s to avenge its long list of failed chaos and extermination around the world. 
+But, Russia is officially a capitalist country. Its current constitution was largely written by American fifth columnists. The Russian Central Bank is widely presumed to be under the thumb of the West’s oil banking families. In spite of widespread ignorance around the world, on these two counts, China can definitely list itself in the opposing column. http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/10/18/so-called-communist-china-an-exclusive-article-for-the-all-china-review-16-10-17/ . Given America’s post-1917, deranged, hysterical fear of, and untold billions spent to crush any communist expression around the world, you would think that red China and Xi would be Public Enemy Number One. But no, it’s Putin and the Russians. 
+One factor might be Western perceptions of Russia’s and China’s military strength. Russians have shown off their powerful, well-run army, navy and air force in Syria and the Black Sea. The West is probably in a bit of an historic rut, when looking at China’s rapidly modernizing People’s Liberation Army (PLA), like back to the Korean War, when the just liberated New China had no air force, no navy and no nuclear missiles, yet still kicked the pants off Uncle Sam, using mostly World War I vintage arms. But then again, nobody in the West will ever admit that they lost the Korean War, in the first place. http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/09/04/from-may-9th-in-moscow-to-september-3rd-in-beijing-the-anti-west-order-comes-full-circle-reprint/ . I can tell you that here in China, just like 1950-1953, XJP and the PLA do not fear American military power, not one iota. Respect it, yes. Fear it, never. President Xi has put the PLA on combat ready war footing and he means it. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/966932.shtml 
+But there is a new gadfly in America’s imperial ointment, one who may push President Xi and the Chinese people up the racist hate-o-meter, to Slavic levels, and that menace is the Philippines’ new president, Rodrigo Duterte. http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/09/17/puppet-japan-saves-uncle-sams-face-in-south-china-sea-after-philippines-principled-stand-vs-imperialism-jeff-j-brown-on-press-tv/ . This plainspoken, no bullshit world leader is Uncle Sam’s worst nightmare. He is calling American empire what it is: genocidal, dictatorial and rapacious. Not once, but day after day, meeting after meeting, press conference after press conference. 
+At September 8-9, 2016’s ASEAN summit in Laos, Duterte showed a colonial era photo and talked about the genocide that the US committed, as it brutally conquered the Philippines, 1899-1913, killing an estimated 1.25 million people, about 25% of the nation’s population. Western media censored it like the plague and even semi-friendly outlets like the South China Morning Post were aghast that he actually associated the West with genocide. Heaven forbid! This, in spite of the fact the easily 80-90% of the history’s genocides and exterminations were and are being perpetrated by Eurangloland, including of course Israel. Behind the Great Western Firewall, genocide is exclusively reserved for powerless, dark skinned people and unrepentant socialists, like Serbia’s framed and destroyed Slobodan Milosevic. 
+Speaking truth to imperial power, Duterte gives a blunt lesson on Western genocide, during the recent ASEAN summit in Laos. How dare you tell it like it is! (Image by Baidu.com) 
+Duterte is a semi-official socialist-populist. His cabinet is inclusive and consultative, with former imprisoned and exiled political opposition leaders, including communists and Muslims. He clearly can’t stand America’s grotesque, imperial arrogance and tyranny, in a country that has been a pliant doormat for US mayhem and exploitation in Asia, going back to the turn of the 19 th -20 th century. When Duterte’s hometown of Davao was hit with a very suspicious, false flag smelling public market bombing, on September 2, 2016, he suggested that the automatic-to-blame Abu Sayyef Group, a Muslim independence outfit on his island of Mindanao, is controlled by US Special Forces based there, which is of course true. But, world leaders aren’t supposed to speak truth to power, especially “little brown brothers”, as Filipino Foreign Minister Perfecto Yasay has described America’s attitude to his long suffering and abused nation. http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2016/09/17/1624575/dfa-chief-philippines-no-little-brown-brother-us 
+After signing with XJP more than three times as many development deals ($15 billion), as the US has totally invested to date in the Philippines ($4.7 billion), Duterte declared to the world that the “US has lost” and that his country was realigning with Baba Beijing. His official government/trade delegation had an unprecedented 300 members and another 150 business people paid their own way to join the Asian lovefest. The two sides set up bilateral committees to discuss and negotiate their South China Sea claims, which is anathema to Uncle Sam, who always insists on being the rabid Rottweiler in the middle. Next stop was US prostitute Japan, where he further declared that the Philippines would be free of all foreign military (meaning US marines and special forces), something that has not happened since 1521, when Spain began colonizing and raping the archipelago. 
+This is all very powerful, history changing geopolitics. Almost every other world leader who has talked and acted like this, has either been overthrown and/or murdered by the West, sooner than later. Clearly, from the perspective of the West, Duterte’s visionary, regional reset is closely tied to President Xi and China. It is for this reason that XJP may be getting the Slavic-Putin treatment on an accelerated schedule, in a desperate attempt to trash China’s deep, historical leadership and trust role in Asia. 
+The old story about people being able to see that the emperor is not wearing any clothes, is very apropos to Duterte. He is shouting out to the world that Western empire is a colossal failure and humiliation for his impoverished, exploited citizens, and by extension, equally so for every other member of humanity outside Eurangloland. http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/07/16/communist-china-vs-capitalist-philippines-vs-imperial-france-china-rising-radio-sinoland-160716/ . Once one person pierces the veil, it emboldens others to finally have the courage to pile on. 
+For Uncle Sam, it’s already happening. Malaysian Prime Minster Najib Razak is visiting XJP and Co. in Beijing, October 31-November 6, 2016, an unusually long state visit by a world leader. Najib has declared that Malaysia is committed to strengthening friendship with China and pushing ties to “new highs”. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-malaysia-china-idUSKCN12R0ZU . As more and more countries embrace China’s history founding One Belt One Road plan, in which the whole world is and will benefit into the 22 nd century, including Eurangloland, expect ever more desperate, racist demonization and dehumanization of Xi Jinping and the Chinese people, along the lines of Putin and the Russians. Maybe the CIA-MI6 can dig up that old 19 th century chestnut, “The Yellow Peril”, and give it a modern day makeover. Stay tuned to the New York Times, Radio France and the BBC , as the propaganda psyops campaign takes shape. 
+As more and more world leaders are emboldened to speak out against Western tyranny, thanks to Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte’s courage to make a public stand, President Xi Jinping can expect his face to morph into Putin’s, who is demonically pictured above on a January, 2014 Newsweek cover. 
+Check out Jeff’s newest book, the top selling China Rising – Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations : ",FAKE
+6137,PressTV-Yemen’s Hudaydah suffering from dire humanitarian situation,"Yemen’s Hudaydah suffering from dire humanitarian situation Sat Nov 5, 2016 2:28AM Critical humanitarian situation continues in Yemen's southern city of al-Hudaydah. 
+Mohammed al-AttabPress TV, Hudaydah 
+Yemeni officials have warned of a dire humanitarian crisis in Hudaydah due to Saudi Arabia’s blockade on the port city. They say the Saudi aggression has left people with little access to proper medical care as well as basic commodities. Press TV’s Mohammed al-Attab reports from Hudaydah. Loading ... ",FAKE
+3220,Republicans Are Now Seen As The More Extreme Party,"In a shift of opinion since the 2014 midterms, Americans now consider the Republican Party more extreme than the Democratic Party, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds.
+
+In the days just after the GOP retook the Senate last November, Americans were evenly split as to which party they thought was more extreme. They now say by an 8-point margin that Republicans are further from the mainstream.
+
+Half of Americans now say the GOP is too extreme, up 7 points since November. The percentage saying Democrats are too extreme, which has remained relatively steady, is currently 39 percent.
+
+Forty-eight percent of independents now say the GOP is too extreme, up 9 points from last year. The percentage of Republicans calling their own party too extreme also rose by 6 points.
+
+One thing hasn't changed: Most Americans still want members of both parties to work together. Fifty-six percent say that Republicans should compromise some of their positions to work with Democrats, rather than stick to their positions and risk not coming to an agreement, while 68 percent say Democrats in Congress should compromise.
+
+While most Democrats think their leaders should compromise, Republicans support a harder-edged approach, with 58 percent saying their congressional representatives should stick to their positions. Independents say that both sides should work together.
+
+The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted April 25-27 among U.S. adults using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
+
+The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the poll's methodology are available here.
+
+Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov's reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.",REAL
+6259,Tech” Malaise Pricks San Francisco Office Space Bubble,"I look forward to the bubble bursting again in the Bay Area. Those little high tech weenies bug me. And I'm a techie!!! The rumored second round of layoffs at Twitter – which in 2011 was granted by the befuddled city of San Francisco the “Twitter tax break” on employment taxes – comes at a very inopportune moment for the glory of commercial real estate. These layoffs would amount to 8% to Twitter’s workforce, or about 300 people, according to Bloomberg.Already, Twitter has thrown 183,642 square feet of vacant office space at its two-building Mid-Market headquarters on the sublease market, thus bringing it to 1.51 million square feet (msf).This comes at a time when, according to the “snapshot” from Cushman & Wakefield, leasing activity nearly ground to a halt in the third quarter, with only 875,000 sf leased – the lowest since 2001!There was only one major lease deal over 100,000 sf: Amazon’s live streaming video platform Twitch, which took 178,000 sf. The next largest deal was less than half that size: WeWork leased 78,000 sf.Leasing activity for the three quarters this year plunged 30% from the same period last year, to just 4.7 msf, according to a report released this week by commercial real estate services firm Savills Studley, which added dryly, “The competition for space has calmed dramatically from several quarters ago.”And there is a lot of new supply coming on the market, according to Cushman & Wakefield: currently, 3.8 msf of office space are under construction, with 31% preleased.Overall vacancy rose 0.7 percentage points from the prior quarter to 9.0% in Q3, according to Savills Studley. In Class A buildings, availability jumped 1.1 percentage points to 10.4%. Some areas were still red-hot, but others are turning cold: In the SOMA area, there were practically no vacancies (1.0%). But at the other end of the spectrum, vacancies at the Financial District South spiked 2.5 percentage points to 12.3%.way more at [ link to wolfstreet.com ] ""My mom said the only reason men are alive is for lawn care and vehicle maintenance."" 1 Previous Page",FAKE
+5436,Daily Mail forced to lie down in darkened room after confirmation Prince Harry’s girlfriend is mixed-race,"Tuesday 8 November 2016 Daily Mail forced to lie down in darkened room after confirmation Prince Harry’s girlfriend is mixed-race 
+The Daily Mail has been forced to go and lie down in a darkened room for a while after learning that Prince Harry’s new girlfriend is one of those ‘brown ones’. 
+Doctors were called after the newspaper reported feeling faint at reading the Kensington Palace statement confirming the relationship. 
+The Daily Mail explained, “I know we’ve been reporting the relationship for days, but we’d hoped against hope it wasn’t really true. 
+“Sure, we’ve trawled her entire career and social feeds going back years to find video clips and photos that might make her look unsuitable as a girlfriend for a member of our royal family, all without ever saying it’s just because she’s a brown foreigner – but you kinda knew that, right? 
+“I mean, we can’t just say we don’t like her because she’s brown and foreign. Otherwise, we’d probably find our editor Paul Dacre being reported to himself in his other role at the Press Complaints Commission. That wouldn’t be good for anyone. 
+“But now it’s bloody well confirmed she’s definitely going out with him, and.. well… oh hear, I’m coming over all faint again. 
+“Do you realise that any child they might have would be 6th in line to the throne?! Can you imagine, a BROWN king!!” 
+At that point the doctors asked us to leave so they could administer an emergency sedative. ",FAKE
+3816,Obama vetoes GOP attempt to repeal Obamacare,"WASHINGTON — President Obama has vetoed the first bill sent to him by Congress this year, a symbolic attempt by Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act and defund abortion provider Planned Parenthood in an election year.
+
+""Republicans in the Congress have attempted to repeal or undermine the Affordable Care Act over 50 times,"" Obama said in a veto message Friday. ""Rather than refighting old political battles by once again voting to repeal basic protections that provide security for the middle class, Members of Congress should be working together to grow the economy, strengthen middle-class families, and create new jobs.""
+
+The bill — called the Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015 — used an obscure budget-writing procedure known as reconciliation to thwart a Senate filibuster. That maneuver allowed a bill repealing Obamacare to get the president's desk for the first time, forcing him to make good on repeated veto threats.
+
+“It’s no surprise that someone named Obama vetoed a bill repealing Obamacare,"" House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said, promising a veto override vote ""taking this process all the way to the end under the Constitution.""
+
+Republicans are far short of the two-thirds votes necessary for an override, however. It passed the Senate 52 to 47 and the House 240 to 181.
+
+But Ryan said the bill proved that Obamacare can be repealed, given a Republican in the White House.
+
+“The idea that Obamacare is the law of the land for good is a myth,"" he said. ""We have now shown that there is a clear path to repealing Obamacare without 60 votes in the Senate. So, next year, if we’re sending this bill to a Republican president, it will get signed into law.""
+
+White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the bill accomplished nothing.
+
+""It's not significant. It got them nothing, and with the stroke of a pen, the president dispensed with it,"" he said.
+
+It was the eighth veto of Obama's presidency, and the White House has issued three more veto threats just this week.
+
+In contrast to an elaborate signing ceremony Thursday by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Obama's veto came in a routine veto message.",REAL
+3890,"Obama to Make Landmark Presidential Trip to Father's Homeland, Kenya","Barack Obama will make a long-awaited trip to Kenya later this year, visiting his father's homeland for the first time since becoming US president six years ago, the White House said Monday.
+
+During the long-promised visit this July, Obama will attend a Global Entrepreneurship Summit in the east African nation, a statement said.
+
+Obama has visited Africa four times since becoming president, but has not visited the country where he still has relatives.
+
+For much of Obama's presidency, Kenya's leaders have been under a cloud of prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
+
+Kenyatta was indicted over the country's 2007-08 post-election violence, the worst since it won independence from Britain in 1963.
+
+Kenyatta has always protested his innocence.
+
+The case was dropped in December, with prosecutors complaining that they had been undermined by a lack of cooperation by the Kenyan government, as well as the bribing or intimidation of witnesses.
+
+""President Obama will meet him in Kenya,"" a White House official told AFP, confirming a meeting that is likely to court controversy.
+
+The official, who asked not to be named, said the United States regularly raises ""concerns with the Kenyan government about restrictions on human rights and fundamental freedoms.""
+
+""The president's trip will create another opportunity for dialogue with the government and civil society on these issues.""
+
+Obama had visited Kenya before as a senator and before entering politics, visiting his father's home village and taking a very public HIV test.
+
+The president's origins have spurred domestic controversy, with some hardline political foes claiming he was not born in the United States and so was ineligible to become president.
+
+Obama allies say this is thinly veiled racism.
+
+The president has often made light of the controversy.
+
+""If I did not love America, I wouldn't have moved here from Kenya,"" he recently joked.
+
+On this visit, Obama expected to take part in the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), which is being held in sub-Saharan Africa for the first time.
+
+""Hosting the GES is an opportunity for Kenya to showcase its economic progress,"" said the White House official.
+
+""Kenya maintains enormous potential for economic growth, thanks to the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of the Kenyan people.""",REAL
+3716,Obama: 'Senseless murders' in church shooting,"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama on Thursday called the nine deaths in the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting ""senseless murders"" and suggested more gun control is needed in the wake of the tragedy.
+
+""Any death of this sort is a tragedy. Any shooting involving multiple victims is a tragedy,"" said Obama, as Vice President Joe Biden stood alongside him. ""There is something particularly heartbreaking about death happening in a place in which we seek solace and we seek peace.""
+
+Police in Charleston released this security-camera image that they say shows Roof entering the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
+
+Police in Charleston released this security-camera image that they say shows Roof entering the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
+
+Police close off a section of Calhoun Street near the scene of the shooting.
+
+Police close off a section of Calhoun Street near the scene of the shooting.
+
+People pray in a hotel parking lot across the street from the scene of the shooting on June 17. Every Wednesday evening, the church holds a Bible study in its basement.
+
+People pray in a hotel parking lot across the street from the scene of the shooting on June 17. Every Wednesday evening, the church holds a Bible study in its basement.
+
+Police gather at the scene of the shooting on June 17. The church was formed in 1816.
+
+Police gather at the scene of the shooting on June 17. The church was formed in 1816.
+
+A man kneels across the street from where police gathered outside the church on June 17.
+
+A man kneels across the street from where police gathered outside the church on June 17.
+
+People in Charleston pray following the shooting on June 17.
+
+People in Charleston pray following the shooting on June 17.
+
+Charleston police officers search for the shooting suspect outside the church on Wednesday, June 17.
+
+Charleston police officers search for the shooting suspect outside the church on Wednesday, June 17.
+
+Police in Charleston close off a section of Calhoun Street early on June 18, after the shooting. The steeple of the church is visible in the background.
+
+Police in Charleston close off a section of Calhoun Street early on June 18, after the shooting. The steeple of the church is visible in the background.
+
+Two law enforcement officials said Roof confessed. Roof said he wanted to start a race war, one of the officials said.
+
+Two law enforcement officials said Roof confessed. Roof said he wanted to start a race war, one of the officials said.
+
+A police officer directs a police vehicle in front of the church on June 18.
+
+A police officer directs a police vehicle in front of the church on June 18.
+
+Law enforcement officers in Charleston, South Carolina, stand guard near the scene of the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
+
+Law enforcement officers in Charleston, South Carolina, stand guard near the scene of the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
+
+Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old charged with murdering nine people in a church shooting on Wednesday, June 17, is escorted by police in Shelby, North Carolina, on Thursday, June 18.
+
+Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old charged with murdering nine people in a church shooting on Wednesday, June 17, is escorted by police in Shelby, North Carolina, on Thursday, June 18.
+
+In this image from the video uplink from the detention center to the courtroom, Dylann Roof appears at a bond hearing June 19, 2015, in South Carolina. Roof is charged with nine counts of murder and firearms charges in the shooting deaths at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17.
+
+In this image from the video uplink from the detention center to the courtroom, Dylann Roof appears at a bond hearing June 19, 2015, in South Carolina. Roof is charged with nine counts of murder and firearms charges in the shooting deaths at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17.
+
+Obama spoke of the personal connections he and first lady Michelle Obama had to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where they knew several members.
+
+""We knew their pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who, along with eight others gathered in prayer and fellowship, was murdered last night,"" Obama said. ""And to say our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families and their community doesn't say enough to convey the heartache and the sadness and the anger that we feel.""
+
+Obama declined to comment on specific details of the investigation, which currently centers on 21-year-old suspect Dylann Roof, a white man who was taken into custody late Thursday morning in Shelby, North Carolina, authorities have said.
+
+But the President said the shooting should refocus attention on preventing potential killers from getting their hands on guns.
+
+""We do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,"" Obama said at the White House. ""At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this kind of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency. It is in our power to do something about it.""
+
+""Communities like (Charleston) have had to endure tragedies like this too many times,"" he said.
+
+Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul, however, was skeptical that a government solution was available.
+
+""What kind of person goes in a church and shoots nine people? There's a sickness in our country. There's something terribly wrong, but it isn't going to be fixed by your government,"" the Kentucky senator said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority conference in Washington.
+
+Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association declined to comment following the President's remarks Thursday afternoon, saying it was sticking to the same policy it has followed after similar incidents.
+
+""The NRA will not be making any public statements until the facts are known,"" spokesman Andrew Arulanandam told CNN.
+
+Thursday isn't the first time Obama has used a shooting tragedy in the United States to make a renewed call for toughening gun ownership laws. Bolstering restrictions on gun sales became a top White House priority immediately following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook, which killed 20 children and left a total of 28 people dead.
+
+Advocates for tougher gun laws rallied behind a bipartisan measure that would have mandated background checks on every gun sale. The bill was seen as the best chance for any type of new gun restriction to gain approval on Capitol Hill, where many lawmakers balked at imposing bans on assault weapons or high-capacity magazines.
+
+But even the background check measure failed to gain enough support in the Senate in April 2013, and the issue of gun control has largely remained off the agenda in Washington since.
+
+Without congressional support, Obama has signed dozens of unilateral executive actions meant to quell gun violence. But broad actions like creating a universal background check law or banning certain types of ammunition would still require lawmakers' approval.
+
+A year ago, Obama said it was ""stunning"" that Congress wasn't able to get behind a single piece of gun control legislation after the Sandy Hook shooting. He called the failure to expand background checks to handgun sales his ""biggest frustration"" as president.
+
+Obama on Thursday conceded that the current political arrangement in Washington -- where Republicans control both chambers of Congress -- means any movement on gun control laws remains unlikely during his presidency.
+
+""The politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now,"" he said, adding that acknowledging the steady beat of shootings -- and their perpetrators' access to guns -- was a first step.
+
+""At some point it's going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively,"" he said.",REAL
+7557,Dr. Duke and Dr. MacDonald Call for Prosecution of Hillary for Treasonous Support of ISIS.,"Dr. Duke and Dr. MacDonald Call for Prosecution of Hillary for Treasonous Support of ISIS. October 27, 2016 at 10:13 am 
+Dr. Duke and Dr. MacDonald Call for Prosecution of Hillary for Treasonous Support of ISIS. 
+Today Dr. Duke and Professor Kevin MacDonald talked about the tide turning in Donald Trump’s direction. In spite of the efforts by the Zio media to divert voter attention to Donald Trump’s alleged problems with women, Hillary’s treasonous crimes are increasingly difficult to hide. 
+The fact is that Hillary should be prosecuted, not inaugurated. She has supported ISIS in its war against Syria its terrorism against America. She has sent paid thugs to disrupt Trump’s political events. She has used her government positions to peddal influence. She really should be in prison. 
+This is an extremely educating and enlightening show. Please share it widely. 
+Our show is aired live at 11 am replayed at ET 4pm Eastern and 4am Eastern. 
+Click on Image to Donate! 
+And please spread this message to others.",FAKE
+2142,GOP hits back at fracking rules,"The party looks to Kamala Harris, Catherine Cortez Masto, Tammy Duckworth and Maggie Hassan to help lead it out of the abyss.",REAL
+6962,Vermont fights the opioid epidemic by limiting prescribed painkillers,"Vermont fights the opioid epidemic by limiting prescribed painkillers 
+Thursday, October 27, 2016 by: Daniel Barker Tags: prescriptions , opioids , Vermont (NaturalNews) Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin is planning to combat his state's opioid problem by limiting the number of painkillers that can be prescribed.The governor's proposal is part of his strategy to address what has become a severe crisis in Vermont over the past few years.In a statement, Shumlin said:""Vermont, and the rest of America, will not get a handle on the opiate and heroin addiction crisis until we confront head-on the source of the problem: FDA-approved opiates that are handed out like candy.""Vermont doctors and providers have been on the leading edge of curbing the irrational exuberance with which opiates are handed out. These proposed limits will solidify that progress and help Vermont continue to lead the nation when it comes to combating this crisis."" OxyContin 'lit the match that ignited America's opiate and heroin addiction crisis' Shumlin has been outspoken regarding the opioid epidemic , and believes that the easy availability of drugs like OxyContin and other powerful opioid painkillers is the driving factor behind the problem.In this year's State of the State address, Shumlin castigated the FDA and Big Pharma over OxyContin, a drug which he said, ""lit the match that ignited America's opiate and heroin addiction crisis.""""Just a few months ago, the FDA approved OxyContin for kids,"" he said. ""You can't make this stuff up. The $11 billion a year opiate industry in America knows no shame.""The new guidelines are intended to limit the number of pills that can be prescribed ; after a minor procedure, only nine to 12 pills would be included in the first prescription.Without such restrictions, the amount of pills prescribed can vary widely, according to state health commissioner, Harry Chen. This can lead to addiction or the potential for overdose. Chen said that in 2015, enough opioids were prescribed in Vermont to give every man, woman and child a bottle of 100 oxycodone tablets.The proposal would also require doctors to discuss the risks of opioid use with patients, and gain informed consent before prescribing painkillers. Doctors will be expected to discuss alternatives with their patients, ""requiring them to consider other treatments before opioids are prescribed, rather than as a last resort,"" said Chen. How Big Pharma created 2.1 million opioid addicts Waiting for the federal government to effectively tackle the opioid epidemic is a waste of time. For decades, the FDA and DEA looked the other way while Big Pharma quietly began turning a significant portion of the American public into drug addicts.Aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies led to the widespread use of opioids to manage long-term chronic pain – as opposed to using opioids only for acute pain or palliative purposes.Purdue – the maker of OxyContin – lied to the public, saying that the time-release properties of its drug made it less addictive than other opioids. In 2007, Purdue pleaded guilty to having misled regulators, physicians and patients, and ended up paying $634 million in fines, but the epidemic continues.Opioid prescriptions in the U.S. more than doubled between 2000 and 2014, and there are an estimated 2.1 million American opioid abusers. More than 40 Americans die each day from prescription opioids, and all the federal government does is drag its feet and make promises.In fact, the FDA seems to be trying to make opioids even more available – to children, no less!In 2015, the FDA approved the ""limited"" use of OxyContin for children between the ages of 11 and 16.None of this may seem too surprising when one takes into account the fact that Big Pharma spent nearly $900 million in lobbying and campaign contributions between 2006 and 2015.Until we can stop the flow of money from opioid sales into the pockets of drug-makers and politicians, we should expect the epidemic to continue unabated. Sources:",FAKE
+2976,NSA spying: Today in America our government keeps us neither free nor safe,"In their continuous efforts to create the impression that the government is doing something to keep Americans safe, politicians in Washington have misled and lied to the public. They have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have created a false sense of security. And they have dispatched and re-dispatched 60,000 federal agents to intercept the telephone calls, text messages and emails of all Americans all the time.
+
+In the process, while publicly claiming they only acquire identifying metadata -- the time, date, location, duration, telephone numbers and email addresses of communications -- they have in fact surreptitiously gained access to the content of these communications.
+
+On June 1, one of the three claimed legal authorities for all this, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, expired, as Congress was unable to agree on either its reinstitution or the enactment of a substitute. At the time that Section 215 was about to expire, President Obama, Attorney General Lynch and FBI Director Comey warned that the NSA’s computers would go dark and the American public would be at the mercy of our enemies. Their warnings were nonsense.
+
+The NSA is a military entity that utilizes the services of military computer experts and agents, employs civilians, and hires companies that provide thousands of outside contractors. After nearly 14 years of spying on us -- all authorized by a secret court whose judges cannot keep records of what they have ordered or discuss openly what they know -- the NSA now has computers and computer personnel physically located in the main switching offices of all telecom and Internet service providers in the United States. It has 24/7 access to the content of everyone’s telephone calls, emails and text messages.
+
+The data amassed thereby is so vast that the government cannot sift through it quickly or effectively enough to stop such notorious events as the Boston Marathon bombings, the Ft. Hood massacre and the attempted massacre last month outside of Dallas. The Justice Department acknowledged this last month when it revealed that all this spying has not succeeded in stopping any terrorist plots and has not aided any federal prosecutions of terrorism.
+
+Then why do it? Because the feds want to calm American nerves by giving the impression that they are doing something -- even though we know that they know that what they are doing fails to keep us safe. They are giving us a false impression. But they owe us the truth, not falsehoods designed to make themselves look like they are doing what they claim. Their spying has failed to enhance our safety.
+
+It also has failed to protect our freedoms. The Constitution requires probable cause as a precondition for all search warrants. That is a level of evidence about the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized sufficient to induce a judge to conclude that a crime probably has been committed. Without this probable cause requirement, nothing would stop the government from searching and seizing whatever it wants. Yet that is where we are today. The NSA’s unconstitutional standard of “government need” reinstitutes the general warrants -- search where you wish and seize what you find -- which the Fourth Amendment was written to prohibit.
+
+Both the Patriot Act and the Freedom Act, the substitute law enacted by Congress, do away with the probable cause requirement. Both of those laws permit the FISA court to issue general warrants based on the government’s needs, rather than probable cause. It is the government-need standard, which is no standard at all, that has resulted in spying on all persons all the time.
+
+When Section 215 of the Patriot Act expired, the NSA’s legal (yet unconstitutional) authority to spy did not. The propaganda that its computers were shut down is false. Section 702 of the FISA law and President Bush’s October 2001 executive order were and are still valid, and both have been interpreted to unleash the NSA.
+
+Section 702 permits warrantless surveillance of Americans who speak with foreigners, and the NSA has gotten FISA warrants to intercept the calls of the folks to whom those Americans speak, to the sixth degree. That alone encompasses all persons in the United States. Bush’s executive order was given to all military intelligence agencies -- of which the NSA is but one. It instructed the military to intercept the calls and emails of whatever Americans it needs to listen in upon to enhance safety. That executive order still stands. This is why the hand wringing and false claims that the NSA computers went dark is untruthful. The computers violate our privacy and assault our liberty and fail to enhance our safety, but they are not dark.
+
+Last week, one of the pro-spying politicians was clever, even cute, when he issued the one-liner: “You can’t enjoy civil liberties from a coffin.” His statement was a craven articulation of failure. The government’s job is to keep us free and safe. If it keeps us safe but not free, it has failed to do its job. Today it does neither. I suggest to him Patrick Henry on this: “Give me liberty or give me death.”
+
+Which one-liner better embodies American values, history and traditions?
+
+Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.",REAL
+7756,20 Before and After Photos That Reveal The Effects Of Giving Up Alcohol,By Amanda Froelich These ‘before and after’ photos are proof that giving up alcohol can dramatically affect one’s health and appearance. Drinking alcohol might seem like the normal or ‘hip’ thing to... ,FAKE
+2040,2016 cash race: It's on,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+6514,"Snapchat To Raise Up To $4 Billion In IPO, Valuing Company As Much As $40 Billion","Oct 26, 2016 3:52 PM 0 SHARES 
+The long await IPO of Snapchat is finally coming: according to Bloomberg the social media will seek to raise as much as $4 billion in its planned initial public offering, making it the biggest social media company to go public since Twitter's initial public offering in November 2013. 
+Bloomberg reports that The IPO could value Snapchat at about $25 billion to $35 billion, citing unnamed sources, and while no final decision has been made and the size of the IPO may change, and the valuation could reach as much as $40 billion, one of the people said. 
+In a surprising twist, because the company’s revenue is less than $1 billion, it plans to file IPO documents confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, one of the people said. 
+Snapchat chose Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to lead its offering, people familiar with the matter said earlier this month. JPMorgan Chase & Co., Deutsche Bank AG, Allen & Co., Barclays Plc and Credit Suisse Group AG will also be involved as joint book runners, the people said. 
+The Los Angeles-based company makes an application for sharing selfies and videos, watching news videos and chatting with friends. After its last funding round, Snap’s private market value reached $18 billion.",FAKE
+7224,Why Is This Not Watergate? Smoking Gun Emails Discuss “Cleaning Up” Obama/Hillary Emails,"
+This article was written by Tyler Durden and originally published at Zero Hedge . 
+Editor’s Comment: Of course everyone knew, deep down, that Obama was fully aware of Hillary’s private emails, but now there is proof that the campaigns sought to cover up and clean up the evidence to it. Team Hillary went so far as to use bleach bit, a ridiculously thorough way of erasing one’s digital footprint. Before she even takes office, she is embroiled in a scandal many magnitudes bigger than Watergate… and yet… nothing. 
+No one falls on their sword; no one drops out; no one is held accountable. It seems that “Teflon” will out-survive even the cockroaches and nuclear wars… 
+Can all the media spin and vote rigging really hold all this together? Can the FBI get away with looking the other way, and still pretend to uphold a nation of laws? Will the American people accept her “victory” and go on about their daily lives? 
+The Smoking Gun: Cheryl Mills Tells Podesta “We Need To Clean This Up – Obama Has Emails From Her” 
+by Tyler Durden
+Recall that in a March 2015 interview with CBS, just after the NYT reported of Hillary’s use of a private email server, president Obama told the American public he had only learned about Hillary’s “unusual” arrangement from the press.
+As we further reminded readers one month ago, CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante asked Mr. Obama when he learned about her private email system after his Saturday appearance in Selma, Alabama. “ The same time everybody else learned it through news reports ,” the president told Plante. “ The policy of my administration is to encourage transparency, which is why my emails, the BlackBerry I carry around, all those records are available and archived ,” Mr. Obama said. “I’m glad that Hillary’s instructed that those emails about official business need to be disclosed.”
+
+Unfortunately, the “transparency” of the Obama administration was severely tarnished in late September , when in the FBI’s interview notes with Huma Abedin released by the FBI it was first revealed that Obama had used a pseudonymous email account: “Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed: ‘How is this not classified?'” the report says. “Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email.”
+To be sure, this was not definitive evidence that Obama was aware of Hillary’s email server, nor that there may have been collusion between the president and the Clinton campaign.
+That changed today, however, when in the latest Podesta dump we learn that in an email from Cheryl Mills to John Podesta, the Clinton aide upon learning what Obama had just said…
+I have some questions here pic.twitter.com/ufkeoZCx2m 
+— Katherine Miller (@katherinemiller) March 7, 2015 
+
+… countered with something quite stunning:
+we need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov That, ladies and gentlemen, is proof that the president not only lied, but did so with the clear intention of protecting the Clinton campaign.
+
+As a further reminder, Politico previously reported that the State Department had refused to make public that and other emails Clinton exchanged with Obama. Lawyers cited the “presidential communications privilege,” a variation of executive privilege, in order to withhold the messages under the Freedom of Information Act. It is therefore unknown what the president’s “alternative” email account was, or who hosted it.
+This also explains why in a prior Wikileak, Podesta told Mills in an email titled “Special Category” that she thinks “ we should hold emails to and from potus? That’s the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I(t) seems like they will. ” Mills did not respond by email.
+The Clinton-Obama emails were turned over to the State Department, which later announced it would not release them.
+* * *
+So just how did Mills and Podesta “clean up” the fact that Obama lied to the American people, a tactic some could allege is evidence of an attempt to cover up a presidential lie to protect Hillary Clinton.
+What we do know, and we assume this is completely unrelated, between March 25-31, just a couple of weeks after Mills said “we need to clean this up,” Bleachbit was used to wipe Hillary’s private server clean. But of course, that is purely a coincidence.
+Since we are confident others will also demand an answer, in light of the latest revelation hinting at a collusive cover up extending to the very top of US government, or as Cheryl Mills dubbed it a “clean up”, perhaps it is time for the State Department to unveil just what was said between the president and the Clinton campaign?
+This article was written by Tyler Durden and originally published at Zero Hedge . 
+",FAKE
+2549,Clinton pivots left on immigration,"During the campaign, Trump had threatened to impose a large tariff to keep the jobs in the United States.",REAL
+4977,How Rich Candidates Try To Appeal To Working Voters,"How Rich Candidates Try To Appeal To Working Voters
+
+Donald Trump has described himself as ""really rich"" — but by just about any standard, that label fits both the Republican presidential nominee and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. In an election year characterized by populist energy over economic concerns like jobs and trade, the gap is striking.
+
+Clinton's newly released tax returns show that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, made more than $10 million in 2015. Trump is under pressure to follow suit, but he has yet to release his returns. He says he's a multi-billionaire, but his refusal to release the documents has led to speculation that Trump may not be as rich as he claims.
+
+What's clear is that both Trump and Clinton earn vastly more than the income of the typical American household, around $54,000 per year. So it's no surprise the candidates have been trying — and sometimes struggling — to connect with average voters.
+
+Money has been a big theme in this election. Trump often touts his wealth as evidence of his competence and success, promising to create jobs for working people. He's argued that his wealth means he won't answer to big donors — even though he has begun fundraising more aggressively since locking up the GOP nomination.
+
+""I don't need anybody's money. I'm using my own money. I'm not using the lobbyists. I'm not using the donors. I don't care,"" Trump said during his campaign announcement speech at Trump Tower in New York last year.
+
+Clinton, meanwhile, points to her middle-class, Midwestern roots. In her speech to the Democratic National Convention last month. Clinton said in the Rodham family, ""no one had their name on big buildings. My family were builders of a different kind.""
+
+Clinton talked about her grandfather working to build a better life by working in a lace mill in Scranton, Pa., and her father's experience running a small business. Of course, Clinton grew up in an upper-middle class suburb of Chicago, and her father did well as the owner of a drapery business.
+
+Trump, too, has tried to demonstrate that he understands the lives of regular people. Speaking to the National Association of Home Builders in Miami Thursday, Trump reminisced about his father — also a builder — touring some of his construction sites.
+
+""My father would go, and he'd pick up the sawdust, and he'd pick up the nails – the extra nails. And he'd pick up the scraps of wood; he'd use whatever he could use, and recycle it in some form, or sell it. And it was a constant process,"" Trump said. ""And he did a beautiful job.""
+
+At a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, he said he actually prefers the workers on construction sites to his wealthy peers:
+
+""They say, you know, you're really rich. How come you sort of relate to these people? Well, you know, my father built houses and I used to work in these houses,"" Trump said. ""I got to know the plumbers, the steamfitters, I got to know them all. And I liked them better than the rich people that I know. I know a lot of rich people. It's true. They are better. I like them better.""
+
+While Trump touts his ability to accumulate vast wealth in the real-estate business, Clinton has come under fire for the amount of money she and her husband have made since leaving public office.
+
+In June of 2014, ABC's Diane Sawyer asked about her lucrative paid speeches to audiences that have included Wall Street firms.
+
+""We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea's education,"" Clinton said. ""You know, it was not easy.""
+
+That answer was widely panned by Clinton's critics and rated ""mostly false"" by Politifact.
+
+Republican pollster Frank Luntz says he's no fan of either Clinton OR Trump, but he says Clinton's carefully rehearsed style feels inauthentic to many working-class voters.
+
+""To working-class voters, they want you to let loose,"" Luntz told NPR. ""They want you to say what you mean and mean what you say.""
+
+Despite Trump's massive wealth, his ""willingness to say just about anything to just about anyone at any time"" has strengthened his credibility, Luntz said, with working-class people who are ""tired of being talked down to.""
+
+But Luntz added that Trump's slipping poll numbers over the past few weeks suggest his style may be turning off the upper middle-class voters the Republican Party has long relied upon.",REAL
+9140,New York Times Tries to Compare Comey to Hoover. Here Are 4 Reasons That's Idiotic,"The New York Times is huffy over the fact that FBI director James Comey announced the re-opening of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, so they’re trying to compare him to J.&nbs  ",FAKE
+2296,Hogan rejects Democratic request for ban on state-funded travel to Indiana,"Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Wednesday rejected a request by an openly gay state lawmaker to ban state-funded travel to Indiana until that state repeals its newly enacted Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
+
+Critics say the law — which has triggered a firestorm of reaction across the country — could allow businesses to discriminate against gay people and others in the name of religious freedom.
+
+“My family could be denied service in Indiana because of my marriage to another man,” Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. (D-Montgomery) wrote in a letter to Hogan on Tuesday. “Many of our colleagues could also be denied service because of an Indiana business owner’s objection to a Marylander’s marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, appearance, or a myriad of other excuses.”
+
+D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) issued an executive order Tuesday banning city-funded travel to Indiana until the law is repealed. The Democratic governors of Connecticut, New York and Washington state have taken similar action.
+
+Doug Mayer, a spokesman for the governor, said Hogan does not plan to institute a ban. “Governor Hogan is opposed to discrimination in all forms,” Mayer said. “History has repeatedly proven that the best way to effect positive change is through an engagement of ideas, not disengaging from those we disagree with. Political stunts like this are precisely what Maryland voters rejected in last year’s election.”
+
+Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) submitted a letter to the Indianapolis Star on Monday that urged Indiana businesses displeased with the law signed last week by Gov. Mike Pence (R) to relocate to “open and welcoming” Virginia.
+
+The commonwealth passed a religious liberties law of its own in 2007. But its focus is on government intrusion into the free exercise of religion, rather than on religious clashes between individuals and businesses.
+
+McAuliffe spokesman Brian Coy said the governor is not planning any ban on state-funded travel to Indiana. “No, he’s working on convincing Indiana businesses who are concerned about this recent development to travel to Virginia and bring jobs with them,” Coy said. “In fact, he’s hoping to travel there himself and recruit businesses.”
+
+A Maryland lawmaker borrowed McAuliffe’s idea Wednesday, circulating “an open letter to Indiana businesses” that encouraged them to move to Maryland. “With their profoundly divisive action, your state policymakers made it harder for you to attract world-class talent,” wrote Del. Luke H. Clippinger (Baltimore), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “Governor Pence and his cronies put you at an extraordinary competitive disadvantage.”
+
+Pence strongly defended the law at a news conference Tuesday, focusing on the legal grounds granted to individuals and businesses to defend themselves against claims of discrimination. But he said that the intent of the law was never to allow discrimination and that the state will “fix” that to make clear that businesses cannot deny services to anyone.
+
+Madaleno wrote in his letter that Maryland has been a leader in providing legal recognition and protections for all state residents.
+
+“When other states pass these prejudicial laws,” he wrote, “Maryland needs to stand up for our values.” The Democrat said Indiana’s law would allow businesses to discriminate against people on the basis of their marital status, sketching a scenario in which first lady Yumi Hogan could be refused service because her first marriage ended in divorce.
+
+Mayer said that when Hogan reached that part of Madaleno’s letter, he stopped reading.
+
+The letter drew a rebuke Wednesday from Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert), who cautioned lawmakers against mentioning relatives of fellow elected leaders in written correspondence.
+
+“We had a letter going out the other day that mentioned someone’s spouse,” he said. “We’re not going to get into details, but we’re all big here, men and women. And we’re partners in this, but we don’t mention other people’s spouses in any type of correspondence — their spouses or children.”
+
+Madaleno said he was “trying to make the point about how sweeping this type of law is and how it puts many families in Indiana and in Maryland at risk for a variety of reasons.”
+
+He said he was “very sad” to hear that Hogan considers bans and strong stances against the Indiana law to be political stunts. Referring to the racing group that issued a statement Tuesday opposing the legislation, Madaleno added, “He’s not even standing with NASCAR.”
+
+“We all have aspects about our lives that probably someone else would find offensive or objectionable from their own religious stance — but they shouldn’t be able to deny us service or discriminate against us because of it,” Madaleno said. “And that’s the point I was trying to make.”
+
+Madaleno acknowledged that it’s “always difficult” when family members become part of political discussions, but he added: “My family has been part of the political debate in this state for quite a while.”
+
+Laura Vozzella in Richmond contributed to this report.",REAL
+5769,27 Civilians Killed in Saudi Airstrikes Against Yemen Villages,"Attacks Destroyed Villagers' Homes, Burned Farms by Jason Ditz, October 30, 2016 Share This 
+While the biggest single Saudi airstrike over the weekend in Yemen targeted a prison in Hodeidah, dozens of other strikes were reported over the weekend by villagers around Taiz and in the Maarib Province, with attacks killing at least 27 civilians , and wounding a number of others. 
+Most of the casualties were in Taiz, where attacks destroyed several homes and caused a large number of injuries. With hospitals in the area having very limited access to medicine because of the naval blockade, many of those injuries proved fatal. 
+The attacks in Maarib and Saada, however, may prove more devastating to the country in the long run, targeting some of the very limited farmland Yemen has, destroying a number of villagers’ homes and burning a lot of that farmland. Yemen has to import some 90 percent of its food under normal circumstances, with such imports severely limited by the blockade, and the loss of farmland just adds to food insecurity in the nation. 
+Saudi Arabia has been coming under growing international criticism for its air war against Yemen, with massive numbers of civilians killed and little sign that the promised improvements to targeting will ever amount to anything. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+3685,Slain reporter's boyfriend calls for violence discussion,"(CNN) One day after reporter Alison Parker, 24, and her cameraman, Adam Ward, 27, were gunned down on live television near Roanoke, Virginia, Parker's boyfriend said merely remembering their lives is not enough.
+
+""There needs to be some action that is taken out of an event like this -- out of an event like Sandy Hook, like Charleston, like Aurora, Colorado... where these things just don't occur anymore,"" Chris Hurst told CNN on Thursday, citing a litany of American gun violence.
+
+""We need to have a substantive conversation on what is going on in America that is allowing evil to continue to crop up over love? Is it because we are in the media? And the attacker knew this was going to get a lot of play, and here we are again, another mushroom cloud of coverage over gun violence?""
+
+On Wednesday, Vester Lee Flanagan II produced a real-time murder show that he choreographed in detail.
+
+In a ranting note sent to ABC News before his death, Flanagan blamed his misery on black men and white women and said he was ""somewhat racist against whites, blacks and Latinos.""
+
+Flanagan shot dead Parker and Ward while she was live on air on WDBJ via Ward's camera, a video of the incident showed.
+
+Hurst works at the station as an anchor and had been dating Parker for nine months. They were already talking about marriage. He was saving for an engagement ring, he said.
+
+""I think the media can have an even stronger effect to be positive if we can use this as a conversation in figuring out why we are allowing hate to creep into people's hearts instead of fostering love,"" he said at memorial for the victims.
+
+""We need to ask why this is happening, and we need to keep the conversation going. We don't want to keep it going because it's tiresome and then, we just wait for another one to happen, and we say, 'This is a huge issue,' and then forget about it until another one happens... If we don't forget, I think the incidents will lessen. I believe that.""
+
+Parker's father, Andy Parker, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Thursday night that he will honor his daughter's memory by lobbying for laws that will make it harder for the mentally ill to purchase firearms. It was not clear whether Flanagan had been diagnosed with a mental illness.
+
+""After Sandy Hook, and the theater shootings, everybody thought, gosh this is terrible,"" he said. ""We have got to do something to keep people that are mentally disturbed, we got to keep them away from guns and having the ability to get guns.""
+
+It's up to the media, he said, to prevent the story from fading.
+
+""That's what the [National Rifle Association] is thinking right now,"" Parker said. ""The NRA is saying, it will go away. And, you know, they are the most powerful lobby in the country. And someone has got ... to take them on. By God, I am going to do it.""
+
+Parker was reluctant at first to speak to reporters about his daughter's killing, but her career as a journalist changed his mind.
+
+The first 24 hours after her death were filled with numbness, uncontrollable grief and anger, he said.
+
+""She was kind and she was sweet and she touched everybody,"" he said.
+
+He didn't go nicely back then, and Ward recorded his emotional outburst on camera. Court documents from a discrimination suit that he filed show that Flanagan scoffed at Ward and flipped off the camera. Before police walked him out of the building, Flanagan handed his manager a small wooden cross and said, ""You'll need this.""
+
+Flanagan had not worked with Parker, the reporter he shot dead, but there were signs he resented her having been hired.
+
+WDBJ's general manager said Flanagan had run-ins with many co-workers and was a poor performer.
+
+Flanagan's performance and behavior problems led to his bosses referring him to the company's employee assistance program, Marks said.
+
+The managers did not request he reach out to the program because of his mental state -- they didn't know about that -- but because of his difficulty working with others, Marks said.
+
+The final warning for the reporter came in December 2012, and he was fired in February 2013.
+
+Flanagan caused a stir and police were called to escort him out, Marks said. Flanagan gave the news director at the time a cross and said ""you'll need this,"" Marks said.
+
+All of the claims that Flanagan made against the company and were investigated Marks said. Those investigations concluded that no reasonable person would have taken the alleged instances as discrimination or harassment, he said.
+
+Vester Flanagan owned several websites associated with gay porn, records show.
+
+Flanagan registered at least seven domain names in 2007 and 2008, and solicited ""attractive & muscular men"" to model for live web cams.
+
+Records obtained by CNN show Flanagan's name and Vallejo, California, address were included in the domain registrations.
+
+The shooter planned meticulously to act out a lot of resentment violently and get back into the limelight before turning his gun on himself.
+
+Flanagan, aka Williams, recorded video of his killing, which he spread on social media as he fled authorities. He appeared to have prepped his Twitter account days before the killing with a review of images from stations of his life.
+
+During his flight, posts to Twitter appeared in the name of Bryce Williams, showing video recorded from the perspective of his gun barrel as his shots struck his victims. Many social media users were horrified by the scenes playing out before them on autoplay.
+
+Both Facebook and Twitter quickly shut down the accounts.
+
+Flanagan had rented a car weeks before and used it in his getaway instead of his own car, a 2009 Ford Mustang.
+
+Virginia State Police spotted the rental car on Interstate 66. A trooper tried to pull him over, police said, but he refused to stop and sped away before running off the road and crashing into an embankment.
+
+Troopers found Flanagan inside with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Virginia State Police Sgt. F.L. Tyler told reporters. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead Wednesday afternoon.
+
+Flanagan was known for a series of anger and behavioral problems in his workplaces.
+
+As news broke about whom police sought in the killing, Don Shafer heard a familiar name on the radio. ""Vester Flanagan. He worked for me,"" he said to himself.
+
+""The hair on the back of my neck went up,"" said Shafer, who is now news director at XETV in San Diego.
+
+When he hired Flanagan, Shafer was news director at WTWC in Tallahassee, Florida. The reporter who went by Bryce Williams made a nice impression on Shafer at first, but in 2000, he fired him over run-ins with colleagues.
+
+""There were some issues with him and his personality that kind of spiraled down, and that's why we had to get rid of him,"" Shafer said.
+
+Flanagan sued, alleging racial discrimination, but the suit was dismissed.
+
+Later, he joined WDBJ but was later fired over performance issues. He sued again, once more alleging discrimination.
+
+Court documents from that suit revealed the station had taken disciplinary action against Flanagan for months, met with him many times about angry behavior and told him to seek counseling.
+
+Dan Dennison, former news director at WDBJ, said it was the toughest termination decision he'd ever handled. He had to call police to escort the reporter out.
+
+""(Williams/Flanagan) had a level of a long series of complaints against co-workers nearly from the beginning of employment at the TV station,"" Dennison said. He said they were never substantiated.
+
+The firings and lawsuits were part of a mishmash of resentments that Flanagan faxed to ABC News, while police searched for him.
+
+In a ranting note in his farewell fax, Flanagan tried to justify his killings.
+
+""OK, so the big question is 'Why?' "" he wrote. ""Well, after I compiled well over 100 pages chronicling the hurt in my life, I asked myself, 'Why NOT?' ""
+
+And he talked about having a disturbed mind. ""I've been a human powder keg for a while ... just waiting to go BOOM!!!! at any moment,"" he wrote.
+
+He spent some time making allegations of racism, including against reporter Parker, whom he said ""made racist comments"" but got hired anyhow. There was no elaboration, and WDBJ General Manager Marks said the claim was unfounded.
+
+""We're outraged that any of the comments in that manifesto are taken the least bit seriously,"" he said, adding that he doesn't believe that Flanagan and Parker crossed paths at WDBJ.
+
+But Flanagan also blamed much of his misery on black men and white women and said he was ""somewhat racist against whites, blacks and Latinos.""
+
+Flanagan said he put a deposit down for a gun two days after the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting in June and ranted against the accused shooter.
+
+""As for Dylann Roof? You (deleted)! You want a race war (deleted)? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE (deleted)!!!"" the fax said.
+
+Police recovered two guns from Flanagan, Glock 9 mm pistols he purchased legally.",REAL
+2420,GOP resistance to Obamacare is working brilliantly,"One of the core purposes of the Affordable Care Act is to expand health care to people who previously lacked it, and today Gallup-Healthways released new numbers showing once again that the law is accomplishing this goal.
+
+But buried in the data is an indicator of a different kind of success: Republican resistance to the law at the level of states is also having a substantial impact by limiting the drop in percentages of uninsured people, keeping the uninsured rate higher than it might otherwise have been.
+
+Here’s how: Gallup tells me that the numbers show that the drop in uninsured due in particular to the Medicaid expansion has slowed significantly since last year — because far fewer new states have expanded Medicaid in recent months compared to the block of states that did so initially at the start of 2014.
+
+First, Gallup’s topline findings, which show a clear decline in the uninsured rate since the law took effect:
+
+While Gallup concludes that the improving economy may be playing a role, it also notes that the uninsured has now dropped significantly lower than it was in early 2008, before the worst of the economic crisis, suggesting that the law is a key factor. And Gallup adds that the drop in the uninsured rate is particularly pronounced among lower income Americans (down 8.7 percentage points since the law went into effect), African Americans (down 7.3 points) and Latinos (down 8.3 points).
+
+That’s great. But Dan Witters, the research director of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, tells me the numbers also clearly show a drop-off in the impact of the Medicaid expansion on the uninsured rate — a drop-off that coincides with the slowdown in GOP states opting into the expansion.
+
+Witters says that Gallup data — which are extremely extensive, a key reason why this polling is the gold standard for measuring the law — showed that last year’s drop in the uninsured rate, which was 4.6 percentage points, was heavily fueled by the Medicaid expansion. The expansion was responsible for around 40 percent of the newly insured, he says.
+
+But this year, the drop has thus far been only 1.5 points — in part because of the Medicaid expansion slowdown. The data show that the fall in the rate in uninsured this year due to the Medicaid expansion is only about three-tenths of a percentage point, he says.
+
+“The states that are expanding Medicaid in recent months have only been trickling in — there are fewer new states expanding Medicaid in 2015 as opposed to 2014,” Witters says. “That has sucked the air out of the rate of decline this time, relative to the last. The rate of decline in the uninsured has dropped across all American adults, in part because fewer states are joining in the Medicaid expansion.”
+
+After a number of states expanded Medicaid last year, in 2015 the push for the expansion has stalled in places like Florida, Tennessee, Alaska, Missouri, and Utah, due to conservative legislative opposition and an aggressive campaign against it by the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity.
+
+Witters says the data suggests that if the expansion had proceeded at a comparable clip this year, the uninsured rate would have shown an even “more accelerated decline this time, a decline pretty close to what we saw the first time around.” He adds: “We’d probably see around another point shaved off — and every percentage point is another 2.4 million American adults.”
+
+Florida might end up opting in to the Medicaid expansion. GOP governor Rick Scott’s sudden reversal on the expansion has put the state’s budget negotiations — including planned tax cuts, a major GOP priority — in peril, and some GOP legislators are insisting on the expansion to move the budget process forward, which suggests its fiscal logic may ultimately carry the day. That logic may yet prevail in other states where the expansion is being debated.
+
+But it’s very possible the Medicaid expansions could remain on hold. And beyond that, of course, looms the Supreme Court’s pending decision in the King v. Burwell lawsuit, which could gut subsidies for millions in the three dozen states where governors have declined to set up exchanges, possibly driving the uninsured rate back up again. Which is to say that even if the law currently is accomplishing one of its core goals, GOP resistance to it is accomplishing one of its core goals, too — and the resistance’s achievements could only grow more impressive in the months ahead.",REAL
+7788,First-Ever Footage of Aging Tar Sands Pipelines Beneath Great Lakes,"By Beth Wallace 
+This past July, National Wildlife Federation (NWF) conducted a diving expedition to obtain footage of aging oil pipelines strung across one of the most sensitive locations in the Great Lakes, and possibly the world: the Straits of Mackinac . Footage of these pipelines has never been released to the public until now. 
+This NWF map simulates a 3, 6 and 12 hour spill from the tar sands oil pipeline based on Enbridge spill response plans, average current speeds and “worse case” discharge estimates. 
+The Straits of Mackinac pipelines, owned by Enbridge Energy, are 60-years-old and considered one of the greatest threats to the Great Lakes because of their age, location and the hazardous products they transport—including tar sands derived oil . 
+For nearly two years, NWF has been pressing pipeline regulators and Enbridge to release information about the integrity of these pipelines, including inspection videos showing how the pipelines cross the Straits of Mackinac. These requests have gone largely unanswered from both Enbridge and the Pipeline Hazards Safety Administration (PHMSA), who regulates pipeline operations. Because Enbridge hastily moved forward with plans to increase pressure on the aging pipelines, and has bypassed critical environmental permitting for changes in operation, NWF decided we needed to obtain our own: 
+The footage shows pipelines suspended over the lakebed, some original supports broken away—indicating the presence of corrosion—and some sections of the suspended pipelines covered in large piles of unknown debris. This visual is evidence that our decision makers need to step in and demand a release of information from Enbridge and PHMSA. 
+Heightening our concern around this pipeline and the company that owns it: despite having cleared our dive work with the U.S. Coast Guard, several Congressional members and Homeland Security, our staff and the dive crew had uncomfortable interactions with Enbridge representatives. As soon as our team set out on the water, we were quickly accompanied by an Enbridge crew that monitored our every move. This monitoring did not stop at the surface: Enbridge also placed a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) into the water to watch our team. 
+These actions and our video have raised our level of concern for the general operational behavior of this company and their overall safety culture—including the way they treat the concerned public living near their pipelines . If these aging pipelines rupture, the resulting oil slick would cause irreversible damage to fish and wildlife, drinking water, Lake Michigan beaches, Mackinac Island and our economy. 
+To make matters worse, the recent shutdown of our federal government has left communities and wildlife with an increased risk of oil spills and failed response because pipeline safety and responding agencies have been scaled back or closed all together. The recent oil spill in North Dakota , of approximately 800,000 gallons, is living proof. 
+This article was originally published on National Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Promise .",FAKE
+530,"Budget 2016: Obama moves left, testing Republicans (+video)","President Obama's 2016 budget seeks higher spending on education, roads, and bridges, and a boost to middle class incomes. Republicans want to spend more on defense. The search for common ground is on.
+
+It’s Budget Day in Washington, and President Obama is taking a sharp turn from the past.
+
+Gone is an emphasis on deficit reduction. Talk of putting Social Security and other safety net programs on a more sustainable path has also been put to the side. Now, with deficits down, Mr. Obama is focused on boosting the middle class and reducing income inequality. That means higher taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations and more government spending.
+
+“What I’d like to see is not only that the economy continues to grow, but I also want to make sure that everybody’s benefiting,” Obama told NBC News Sunday, looking ahead to his final two years in office.
+
+The result is a nearly $4 trillion federal budget plan for fiscal 2016 that ditches what Obama calls “mindless austerity” and raises spending for domestic priorities – foremost on education, infrastructure, and tax relief for middle-income Americans – as well as on national security. By proposing higher defense spending, Obama hopes to lure Republicans into a deal.
+
+Many Republicans agree that the “sequester” – the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts put in place two years ago – is a bad way to budget. But they’re not ready to go along with what Obama has in mind. And so while deficits are down, that doesn’t necessarily mean Washington is on the verge of a spending spree.
+
+Political reality points to a tough slog ahead. Republicans now control both houses of Congress, and if they can agree amongst themselves on what to present Obama – and that’s a big “if” – he could face tough choices of his own later this year to keep the government running.
+
+What’s more, deficit hawks have hardly given up. They point to retiring Baby Boomers and the prospect of skyrocketing interest payments on the debt with alarm. Though annual deficits have shrunk markedly from the early Obama years, they will begin to rise again in 2018, reaching $1.1 trillion in 2025, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last week. If Obama’s 10-year budget plan were to become reality, nearly $6 trillion would be added to the federal debt, which now stands at $18 trillion.
+
+But for now, Obama is all about planting a flag for the middle class, which involves “investment” – i.e. spending. Presidential budget proposals are a statement of priorities, and the opening bid in a negotiation, not a blueprint for what will happen.
+
+This year, as the race to succeed Obama gets under way, the budget is especially political. It’s also a reaction to the blowout of last November’s midterms, when Republicans won control of the Senate and built a larger majority in the House. Just as Obama appeared ebullient, even liberated, in his recent State of the Union address, so too is his budget almost a declaration of independence.
+
+“The president is not running for reelection, so he’s a little freer to propose what he wants,” says Stan Collender, a budget expert and executive vice president at Qorvis MSL Group. “Since he’s proposing it to a Republican Congress and it’s dead before type-setting, he’s also free, because he doesn’t need to come up with something Democrats will accept.”
+
+The budget is also a campaign document. Not only does it set the table for Hillary Rodham Clinton, strongly favored to win the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, it also affects the party’s bid to retake the Senate and win back House seats. Whether former Secretary of State Clinton, known as more of a centrist, wants to move so far to the left is another matter. But for now, Obama may have at least mollified the restive liberal base of the Democratic Party.
+
+And there is plenty in Obama’s budget for liberals to cheer about, including free community college (costing $60 billion over 10 years) and a six-year, $478 billion program to repair the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, and other infrastructure. To pay for his college plan, Obama would change how inherited wealth is taxed. Money for the infrastructure plan would come from a one-time 14 percent tax on corporate wealth repatriated from overseas.
+
+Obama also proposes a 19 percent minimum tax rate on corporate profits earned overseas, as part of a larger overhaul of taxes that would take the corporate rate down from 35 percent to 28 percent, and 25 percent for manufacturers.
+
+An overhaul of the entire tax code has long been on Washington’s agenda, but amid partisan gridlock, the process hasn’t gotten off the ground. Rep. Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin, the new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which handles taxation, signaled on Sunday that he’s open to working on tax reform with Obama, but warned it will be difficult.
+
+""We want to work with this administration to see if we can find common ground ... and we want to exhaust that possibility and if and when that possibility is exhausted, then we will put out what we think ought to be done,"" Congressman Ryan said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
+
+""We haven't done tax reform since 1986, because it is just that hard,” he added.
+
+Other elements of Obama’s budget were telegraphed in advance. In calling for an end to the sequester, Obama proposed a 7 percent hike in discretionary spending for both domestic and defense spending by roughly equal amounts. Domestic non-entitlement spending would go up $37 billion over the sequester caps to $530 billion; defense spending would rise by $38 billion to $561 billion.
+
+The rest of the budget is consumed by nondiscretionary spending: entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, plus interest on the debt.
+
+Obama used to speak regularly about the perils of deficits, and the ever-rising federal debt, which is the cumulative total of annual deficits. In 2010, he appointed a panel, the Simpson-Bowles commission, to come up with proposals for tackling the nation’s unsustainable fiscal path. The Budget Control Act of 2011 did bring spending down, via sequestration, but now both parties are ready to move away from that technique.
+
+Some economists argue that deficits and debt are sustainable, as long as they remain at a reasonable percentage of the size of the US economy. But deficit hawks are as alarmed as ever.
+
+“Entitlement reform – the most critical piece of fixing our fiscal situation – is the disappearing story of the upcoming budget cycle,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “The debt levels are still quite scary, and yet we’re about to see a budget that no longer even aspires to get control of the debt.”",REAL
+8166,"Politicians, NATO Officials Furious as Spain Plans to Refuel Russian Battle Group - Tyler Durden","Politicians, NATO Officials Furious as Spain Plans to Refuel Russian Battle Group 
+However since then Russia has rescinded the request to refuel at Spanish port Originally appeared at Zero Hedge 
+Spain is facing international criticism as it reportedly prepares to refuel a flotilla of Russian warships en route to bolstering the bombing campaign against the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo. El País reported that the Spanish ministry of foreign affairs was reviewing the permit issued to the Russian flotilla to stop at Ceuta. Politicians and military figures condemned the support from a NATO member as ""scandalous,"" and ""wholly inappropriate,"" while the head of the alliance indicated Madrid should rethink the pit stop. 
+As The Guardian reports, warships led by the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov are expected to take on fuel and supplies at the Spanish port of Ceuta after passing through the Straits of Gibraltar on Wednesday morning. Spanish media reported that two Spanish vessels, the frigate Almirante Juan de Borbón and logistical ship Cantabria, were shadowing the warships as they passed through international waters, and that the Admiral Kuznetsov, along with other Russian vessels and submarines, would dock at Ceuta to restock after 10 days at sea. 
+Late on Tuesday night, El País reported that the Spanish ministry of foreign affairs was reviewing the permit issued to the Russian flotilla to stop at Ceuta. 
+Last week British Royal Navy vessels monitored the Russian warships as they moved through the English Channel. The vessels were shadowed by the navy as they passed through the Dover Strait . 20161026_spain1.jpg 
+
+The enclave of Ceuta sits on the tip of Africa’s north coast, across the Straits of Gibraltar from mainland Spain, and bordering Morocco, which also lays claim to the territory. Although Ceuta is part of the EU, its Nato status is unclear, and since 2011 at least 60 Russian warships have docked there. 
+Nato said the prospect of Russia’s only aircraft carrier heading to the region does not “inspire confidence” that Moscow is seeking a political solution to the Syrian crisis. 20161026_spain3.jpg 
+The naval group is made up of Russia’s only aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, as well as a nuclear-powered battle cruiser, two anti-submarine warships and four support vessels, likely escorted by submarines, Nato officials said. 
+The naval deployment, a rare sight since the end of the Soviet Union, is carrying dozens of fighter bombers and helicopters and is expected to join around 10 other Russian vessels already off the Syrian coast, diplomats said. 
+But, as The Telegraph reports , Spain is facing anger and criticism from all asunder at their decision to allow the refueling to occur... 
+Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg warned on Tuesday that Russian warships heading for Syria could be used to target civilians. “We are concerned and have expressed very clearly by the potential use of that battle group to increase air strikes on civilians in Aleppo,” Stoltenberg said, adding that it was “up to each nation to decide whether these vessels may obtain supplies and refuel at different ports along the route to the eastern Mediterranean”. 
+“The battle group may be used to increase Russia’s ability to take part in combat operations over Syria and to conduct even more air strikes against Aleppo,” 
+Guy Verhofstadt, former prime minister of Belgium and now the EU’s representative on Brexit talks with the UK, called Spain’s decision to allow the refuelling “scandalous”. politicians_nato_officials_furious_as_spain_plans_to_refuel_russian_battle_group_zero_hedge.png 
+Sir Gerald Howarth MP, a former Defence Minister, said it would be “wholly inappropriate” for a Nato member to refuel the Russian vessels. “Spain is a member of Nato and Nato is already facing challenges from Russia, not least in the Baltics. 
+“ The Russians stand accused of indiscriminate bombing in Aleppo and Syria and it would be inappropriate to render them military assistance .” 
+Former Royal Navy chief Lord West told the newspaper: “There are sanctions against Russia and it’s an extraordinary thing for a Nato ally to do.” 
+* * * 
+Spain’s Foreign Ministry told the Telegraph requests from the Russian navy were considered on a “case by case basis, depending on the characteristics of the ship concerned”. A spokesman said: “Russian navy vessels have been making calls in Spanish ports for years”. But in an indication Madrid was feeling increased diplomatic pressure not to help Moscow, the Spanish government said it was reviewing the Russian request. The spokesman said: “The latest requested dockings are being revised at the current time in light of information we are receiving from our allies and from the Russian authorities.” 
+Russia’s military visits are estimated each to bring in more than $400,000 to the city through a combination of mooring fees, fuel and supplies, and the money spent by sailors during their time onshore. ""As long as the Spanish government hasn't banned it, it is a commercial matter like any other vessel stopping to take on supplies, even if it concerns military ships,"" 
+Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount 
+If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire",FAKE
+3203,Republicans Stand Against Cuba Change Despite Public Opinion Shift,"The Cuban flag is flying over the Cuban Embassy in the United States for the first time in 54 years after the two countries restored diplomatic relations in December, but not everyone is celebrating the renewed flow of mojitos from the embassy's Hemingway Bar.
+
+Presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, who both call the heavily Cuban-American Miami area home, denounced last Monday's new step in U.S.-Cuba relations.
+
+""History will remember July 20, 2015, as Obama's Capitulation Monday, the day two sworn enemies of the United States were able to out-maneuver President Obama to secure historic concessions,"" Rubio, who is of Cuban heritage, stated, also referencing the U.N. Security Council's endorsement of the Iran deal, which happened last week.
+
+""Monday's events at the U.N., Washington and Havana leave no doubt that we have entered the most dangerous phase of the Obama presidency in which the president is flat out‎ abandoning America's vital national security interests to cozy up to the world's most reprehensible regimes,"" Rubio said.
+
+""Better judgment is called for in relations far and near. Ninety miles to the south, there's talk of a state visit by our outgoing president,"" Bush said when he announced his candidacy. ""But we don't need a glorified tourist to go to Havana in support of a failed Cuba. We need an American president to go to Havana in solidarity with a free Cuban people, and I'm ready to be that president.""
+
+Bush currently leads Rubio among Cuban-American Republicans by double digits. In a poll published July 18 of registered voters in Miami-Dade County, Bush led Rubio in Cuban-American GOP votes by 12 percentage points, 43 to 31 percent. Ted Cruz, whose father emigrated from Cuba, received 7 percent of support in the polls.
+
+Florida, a swing state, is an important part of any presidential candidate's electoral vote calculus, and Cuban-Americans have long been a powerful group within Florida, especially in Miami-Dade County. The Miami area is home to the largest population of Cuban heritage outside Cuba.
+
+Bush's relative success among Cuban-Americans in the polls with his slightly softer stance reflects a larger trend: Cuban-Americans are not as opposed to normalization as they were in the past.
+
+Once a community known for standing in solidarity in support of the trade embargo, steering U.S. policy toward Cuba, the Cuban-Americans of Miami-Dade are showing rifts in their political views.
+
+In a poll conducted in March, 51 percent of Cuban-Americans approved of Obama's plan to normalize relations with Cuba; 40 percent disapproved. Another poll, conducted in the spring of 2014 by Florida International University pollsters, found that 52 percent of Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade favored ending the U.S. embargo of Cuba.
+
+That's quite different from the past.
+
+In the 1993 version of the same Florida International University poll, 87 percent of Cuban-American respondents in Miami-Dade favored increasing international economic pressure on Cuba, and 80 percent favored having no diplomatic relations with Cuba.
+
+The changing Cuban-American demographic may serve as a window into the group's changing opinions. The number of Cuban-Americans born in Cuba dropped from 68 percent in 2000 to 57 percent in 2013, according to the Pew Research Center.
+
+The decrease in share of the Cuban-born Cuban-American population matters because of the two groups' differing political views: In 2014, 45 percent of those born in Cuba supported normalization, compared with 66 percent of those born in the U.S.
+
+The emerging differences in views among the Cuban-American community may also play a role in Democrats' increasing ability to court its members. While 70 percent of Cuban-Americans polled in Miami-Dade County were registered as Republicans in 1991, that number had fallen to 53 percent by May 2014. Another 25 percent in 2014 were registered as Democrats.
+
+In the months since the Obama administration announced its policy change toward Cuba in December, nearly every GOP presidential candidate has come out with a statement denouncing normalization. Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal and Mike Huckabee have joined Bush and Rubio in denouncing the restoration of full diplomatic ties.
+
+Rand Paul has been the only outlier, a position that caused a scuffle with Rubio earlier this year.
+
+""After 50 years of conflict, why not try a new approach?"" Paul wrote in a Dec. 19 Facebook statement. ""The United States trades and engages with other communist nations, such as China and Vietnam. Why not Cuba?""
+
+Paul continued his statement to make a dig at Rubio's strong stance against the president's policy.
+
+""Seems to me, Senator Rubio is acting like an isolationist who wants to retreat to our borders and perhaps build a moat. I reject this isolationism,"" Paul wrote. ""Finally, let's be clear that Senator Rubio does not speak for the majority of Cuban-Americans. A recent poll demonstrates that a large majority of Cuban-Americans actually support normalizing relations between our countries.""
+
+Rubio replied, ""He has no idea what he's talking about,"" on Fox News' The Kelly File.
+
+Democratic presidential hopefuls have openly praised the president's steps toward normalizing U.S.-Cuba relations.
+
+""As I have said, the best way to bring change to Cuba is to expose its people to the values, information, and material comforts of the outside world,"" Clinton said when Obama announced his plan on Dec. 17. ""The goal of increased U.S. engagement in the days and years ahead should be to encourage real and lasting reforms for the Cuban people. And the other nations of the Americas should join us in this effort.""
+
+""I applaud the president for beginning discussions to establish full diplomatic relations with Cuba, just like most of the rest of the world. This is a major step forward in ending the 55-year Cold War with Cuba,"" Sanders said in a statement.
+
+With Cuban-Americans' shifting opinions on normalizing relations, the Democrats' stance might just gain them a few more votes. And the popular Republican opinion may not stand for many more election cycles.",REAL
+3891,"The best lines from President Obama's speech, according to the White House","Typically the White House releases a few excerpts in advance of the State of the Union, and 2015 is no exception to that rule. Here's what they've told us to expect:
+
+""We are fifteen years into this new century.  Fifteen years that dawned with terror touching our shores; that unfolded with a new generation fighting two long and costly wars; that saw a vicious recession spread across our nation and the world.  It has been, and still is, a hard time for many.
+
+But tonight, we turn the page.""
+
+""At this moment - with a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production - we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth.  It's now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next fifteen years, and for decades to come.
+
+Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well?  Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?""
+
+""So the verdict is clear.  Middle-class economics works.  Expanding opportunity works.  And these policies will continue to work, as long as politics don't get in the way.""
+
+""In fact, at every moment of economic change throughout our history, this country has taken bold action to adapt to new circumstances, and to make sure everyone gets a fair shot. We set up worker protections, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to protect ourselves from the harshest adversity.  We gave our citizens schools and colleges, infrastructure and the internet - tools they needed to go as far as their effort will take them.
+
+That's what middle-class economics is - the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.""
+
+""I believe in a smarter kind of American leadership.  We lead best when we combine military power with strong diplomacy; when we leverage our power with coalition building; when we don't let our fears blind us to the opportunities that this new century presents.  That's exactly what we're doing right now - and around the globe, it is making a difference.""
+
+""In Iraq and Syria, American leadership - including our military power - is stopping ISIL's advance.  Instead of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East, we are leading a broad coalition, including Arab nations, to degrade and ultimately destroy this terrorist group.  We're also supporting a moderate opposition in Syria that can help us in this effort, and assisting people everywhere who stand up to the bankrupt ideology of violent extremism.  This effort will take time.  It will require focus.  But we will succeed.  And tonight, I call on this Congress to show the world that we are united in this mission by passing a resolution to authorize the use of force against ISIL.""
+
+""No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets, or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids.  We are making sure our government integrates intelligence to combat cyber threats, just as we have done to combat terrorism.  And tonight, I urge this Congress to finally pass the legislation we need to better meet the evolving threat of cyber-attacks, combat identity theft, and protect our children's information.  If we don't act, we'll leave our nation and our economy vulnerable.  If we do, we can continue to protect the technologies that have unleashed untold opportunities for people around the globe.""",REAL
+6235,Slave labor: Prison food contractors funded efforts to combat marijuana legalization,"Mint Press News Tue, 25 Oct 2016 13:50 UTC An inmate makes a sandwich while working in the employees’ cafeteria at Coxsackie Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, N.Y. Food Services of America, a subsidiary of Services Group of America is funding efforts to keep marijuana illegal. It makes sense, considering that a vast majority of America's prisoners are locked in prison on marijuana charges, and the company stands to gain a lot of business from the laws staying the same. Marijuana.com report ed that the company donated $80,000 to a campaign committee opposing the legal cannabis measure on Arizona's November ballot. Services Group of America has been criticized in the past for providing food to prisons that failed to meet basic nutritional requirements. The report also indicated that the Arizona state Chamber of Commerce contributed $498,000 to the same campaign week. The effort also received a half million dollar donation from opioid maker Insys Therapeutics as well as sizeable contributions from various players in the alcohol industry. The influence that the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries have on keeping marijuana illegal has been well documented, but the influence of prison contractors is rarely discussed. The prison industry is one of the fastest growing and top-earning businesses in the United States. In the past three decades, this enterprise has grown into a monstrous system of oppression that now houses over 2 and a half million people in the US. This number is, by far, the largest prison population in the world. No country on earth has as many inmates as the ""land of the free."" Ironic isn't it? Since 1991 the violent crime rate in America has dropped at least 20%, while the amount of people in prison has increased by 50% in that time. These numbers show that the rapid growth in the prison population is primarily due to over prosecution of nonviolent crimes. This has nothing to do with ""cleaning up the streets"" or making our society safer — it is all about money and control. The prison system as it stands now does not make our society any safer but instead turns average nonviolent offenders into hardened criminals by exposing them to such a harsh environment. The sad truth is that the way our prison system has been structured has actually outlawed more than half of the US population. Nonviolent offenders have no place behind bars. The savage conditions of prison will turn most people into violent offenders once they get out. Which is exactly what the prison establishment wants - return customers. This establishment is the collection of state and quasi-state/private industries that make up the ""prison industrial complex."" Billions of dollars are made every year in this industry. One company, Wackenhut Corrections, makes over a billion dollars a year and they aren't even the biggest prison service in the country. Comment: It's a no brainer why the US has more prison inmates than any other country in the world, private prisons get slave labor and are making billions of dollars in profits! These numbers also don't take into consideration the many satellite businesses that surround this industry. There are over 1,000 vendors that specifically sell correctional paraphernalia. Even local phone companies cash in on the operation. The companies install payphones for free because those phones can generate $15,000 per year from each inmate making a phone call every day. Those companies are just the tip of the iceberg. That isn't even counting the police, lawyers, wardens, politicians and food distributors that line their pockets through the incarceration of peaceful Americans. All of these organizations have a distinct interest in keeping nonviolent people in jail. So, it should come as no surprise a prison contractor is working to keep marijuana illegal.",FAKE
+4965,The GOP Is Writing Off 30 Percent of the American Electorate,"According to some polls, Donald Trump has been pulling as little as 0 percent of the black vote in key battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Zero percent! That's mind-boggling and sure, it might pick up after his recent speeches identifying with the plight of African Americans living in urban areas that have been under Democratic control for decades.
+
+But if we're being honest, it's not going to change very much. That's not all Trump's fault, either. It represents a decades-long trend that has seen Republicans essentially abandon all hopes of cracking the lowest possible double digits among black voters. In 2012, Mitt Romney got just 6 percent of black votes. (One Republican who has done better is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who earned 26 percent of the black vote in his 2014 re-election race).
+
+It wasn't always this way, of course, and looking at how Republicans went from being the default party of black voters after the Civil War to being a pariah among them is a way of understanding one highly probable future for the GOP as a minor party that represents a smaller and smaller bloc of voters who identify as ""white"" and ""American"" in strictly nativist terms.
+
+The GOP's declining appeal to black voters—again, approaching zero in the Year of the Donald!—is paralleled by the party's declining appeal to Hispanic voters, too. According to the Census, blacks currently make up about 13 percent of the population while Hispanics account for about 18 percent. In an August 11 Fox News Latino poll, only 20 percent of Latinos support him, lower even than Mitt Romney's dismal 27 percent showing among Latinos in 2012, which was itself lower than John McCain's 31 percent in 2008. Between blacks and Latinos, then, the Republican Party is effectively writing off almost 31 percent of the vote before the first ballot is cast in November. And given broad demographic trends, things can only get worse for the GOP.
+
+What's going on here and what it does it say about Republicans and electoral politics in the 21st century? And what does it say about the possibility for a third party such as the Libertarians to drive up their own national numbers? The short answers: Absent a different agenda and outreach to groups they alternately demonize and ignore, the GOP will harden into an awful party of racial and ethnic resentment. For the LP, which embraces tolerance, diversity, and economic mixing and progress, the sky's the limit, especially if the Democrats continue to take minorities for granted.
+
+As recently as 1960, the Republican Richard Nixon managed to get about 30 percent of the black vote. From the Civil War on, blacks had favored the ""party of Lincoln"" for self-evident reasons. Southern Democrats were segregationists and they worked hard not just at disenfranchising blacks at election time but in every way possible. Blacks weren't even allowed to attend Democratic national conventions until 1924. While he was no great friend to African Americans, Franklin Roosevelt began to win a majority of their votes in the 1930s, mostly for the same reasons he won a majority of nearly every group's votes during his four presidential campaigns. Blacks were more likely to be poor than average and they warmed to various FDR programs aimed at ameliorating poverty. Harry Truman, writes Brooks Jackson, won 77 percent of the black vote in 1948, the first year that a majority of blacks identified as Democrats (among other things, Truman integrated the armed forces and took civil rights more seriously than most of his predecessors).
+
+While Eisenhower in '56 and Nixon in '60 did relatively well with black voters, Barry Goldwater's refusal to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964—and his willingness to run a campaign that tolerated (if it didn't actively court) segregationists—effectively ended the Republican Party's relationship with blacks. As former segregationists such as Strom Thurmond crossed the aisle to join the Republicans, the transition was complete and for the past 40-plus years, Republican presidential candidates have struggled to crack double digits with black voters. Running as the ""law and order"" candidate in 1968 and targeting urban violence (by war demonstrators and race rioters alike), Nixon no longer had much appeal for black voters. The last GOP candidate to crack double digits was George W. Bush in 2004, when he pulled 11 percent.
+
+Something similar is happening with Latino voters, although the trend line is less uni-directional. In 2004, George W. Bush won 40 percent of the Latino vote (some reports put it a few points higher), but since then it has declined precipitously, down to Trump's pre-election share of 20 percent. The typical conservative Republican response to this is to invoke a master plan by Democrats and/or moral and ideological failings of Latinos. A few years back, I debated Ann Coulter at an event hosted by the great Independence Institute of Colorado. Among the topics was immigration. Coulter, who has taken credit for Donald Trump's pro-deportation stance in this election, claimed that Ted Kennedy was behind the push to bring in millions of Mexicans and other unmeltable ethnics from Africa, Asia, and especially Latin America, all of whom would inevitably vote for Democrats. ""I don't think any time in the history of the world has a country changed its ethnic composition overnight like that,"" said Coulter, following a line of thought that is popular among many conservatives, right-wingers, and Republicans. ""It was done by design. It was done to help the Democrats, and it did help the Democrats.""
+
+In fact, the immigration reform enacted in the mid-1960s, much in the spirit of Civil Rights legislation. Its chief authors were New York Rep. Emanuel Celler and Michigan Sen. Philip Hart, and its explicit goal was partly to route around the patently racist quotas from the 1920s that had been based on ""national origins."" Disturbed by the rise in immigrants from central and southern Europe, unapologetically racist lawmakers in the '20s laws moved to limit the number of Jews, Italians, Poles, Slavs, Irish, and other undesirable Europeans. New limits were pegged to percentages of the 1890 Census, when there were fewer foreigners from ""bad"" countries in the United States. The '60s reforms, on the other hand, were specifically designed to let Americans of European descent bring over parents and grandparents who had been stranded in the old country first by the Depression and then by World War II. Even as it put family reunification front and center in deciding who could come here, it also allowed for high-skilled folks to emigrate. It was passed against a backdrop of lower and lower levels of foreign-born people in the United States. By 1970, just 4.7 percent of the country was foreign-born, down from a peak of almost 15 percent in 1910.
+
+By the mid-'60s, though, relatively few Europeans were interested in coming to America. Some of them were trapped behind the Iron Curtain and had no easy way West. Throughout free European nations, things were relatively good for most people after a truly grim period that started with World War I. The immigrants that have come to America post-1965 are mostly from Mexico, Latin America, and Asia. In the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan pushed hard to create a pathway to legalization and citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were overwhelmingly of Latino heritage. So you might want blame (or thank) Reagan far more than Ted Kennedy for changing our ""ethnic composition overnight.""
+
+But you can and should blame Republicans for failing to appeal to ethnically diverse Americans in the 21st century. Demograhics are not destiny in politics but ever since the mid-'60s, the GOP has done a masterful, if not always conscious, job of making sure that blacks and Latinos feel unwelcome.
+
+In a great piece at Politico, Josh Zeitz writes that ""unlike earlier waves, 90 percent of new Americans since 1965 hail from outside Europe—from countries like Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, Korea, Cuba, Taiwan, India and the Dominican Republic."" Where conservatives tend to see an undifferentiated blob of threats to American identity, Zeitz underscores that post-1965 immigrants ""include evangelical Christians, traditional Catholics, anti-statist refugees and the kind of upwardly mobile, economic strivers whom the GOP courted assiduously in past decades.""
+
+Had the GOP worked to engage newer, non-European immigrants, the party wouldn't be in the position it's found itself in, where only rare presidential candidates such as Reagan and Bush II can appeal to one-third or more of a rapidly growing part of the citizenry. About the only time contemporary Republicans view immigrants as individuals is when they are signaling out the precise threat each different sub-group represents to the nation:
+
+""By 2050, non-Hispanic white Americans will comprise less than half of the U.S. population,"" writes Zeitz. ""Had the GOP focused more on ideology and less on skin color, the party could have thrived from the immigrant influx.""
+
+But it didn't do that, any more than it has reached out to African Americans on a regular basis. There have been well-intentioned and sincere efforts by some Republicans (Jack Kemp comes to mind, and more recently Rand Paul), but the instinct among most conservatives and Republicans is to ignore issues in the African-American community or to reflexively side with the police, drug warriors, and others who are viewed negatively by blacks. When it comes to Latinos and non-European immigrants, the same distancing act dominates, along with calls to establish English as an official language and appeals to protect bankrupt entitlement programs from pilfering by illegal immigrants who are simultaneously supernaturally lazy and so hard-working they take all of our jobs.
+
+There is very little reason to believe that the Republican Party will pursue any meaningful interaction with racial and ethnic minorites or economic refugees, even when, as Zeitz underscores, they might have strong ties built on common religious and entrepreneurial interests. The attitudes of so many of the GOP's presidential nominees and boosters in the press have been resolutely hostile to seeing Mexican and Latino immigration as anything other than a scourge upon the land. A few years back, Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio worked on comprehensive immigration refrom legislation until he was shouted down by his own party. By the time he announced for president, he was only interested in talking about cutting off the flow of newcomers. Toward the end of primary season, the Cuban-American Ted Cruz took to attacking Donald Trump as soft on immigration because the billionaire had a ""door"" in his much-discussed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. National Review, arguably the flagship publication of the conservative right, has been calling for reductions in immigration from Latin America for decades now and attacked Trump for being insufficiently tough on the issue.
+
+The Republicans' unwillingness to interact with a more ethnically and religiously diverse America can be the Libertarian Party's gain. Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld are the only candidates that are effusively pro-immigration, pro-trade, and socially tolerant. Coming from a border state with a large Latino population, Johnson in particular is in a position to talk about the benefits of immigration and the issues faced by newcomers and their families as well as by longtime residents. His focus on the sharing economy, school choice, and rolling back federal regulations that hamper entrepreneurship also should play well with both blacks and Latinos.
+
+But none of this is easily achieved. Gaining support among any constituency is the result of hard work and years of toiling side by side and shoulder to shoulder. The Republican Party—including Donald Trump in his recent outreach to African Americans—isn't wrong to say that racial and ethnic minorities aren't benefitting from Democratic Party policies at the local, state, and federal levels. Social Security retirement benefits ultimately screw over blacks, who have shorter lifespans; protecting union teachers from competition by charters and other forms of school choice hurts low-income minorities most of all; far from welcoming illegals from Latin America, the Obama administration has deported record numbers and split up tens of thousands of families; and on and on.
+
+But simply rattling off such talking points isn't going to win new votes. That only comes from concerted actions that start at the neighborhood level and work out and up through levels of power and government policy. The political opportunity is there, but it remains to be seen who, if anyone, will take it.",REAL
+5380,PTSD: Identification and Compensation,"Veterans help veterans cope with PTSD through decorated Marine’s New York-based nonprofit Headstrong Project ‹ › Mr. Hill is a lawyer focusing his practice on representing disabled veterans. He represents veterans and their dependents across the nation. In addition to representing the disabled, Mr. Hill is a recognized authority on VA law. He has authored several books on VA service connected benefits. Mr. Hill gives presentations across the nation on VA disability compensation. He is the treasurer for the board of directors of the National Organization of Veterans Advocates (NOVA). He is a member of the Florida Bar and the Washington D.C. Bar. He is licensed to practice before the United States District Court in and for the Middle District of Florida, as well as the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. PTSD: Identification and Compensation By Matt Hill on November 8, 2016 
+Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a condition that’s both underestimated and misunderstood, especially when it comes to the Veterans Association. PTSD is actually a common condition. The Mayo Clinic estimates that more than 3 million Americans are diagnosed with PTSD every year — and that doesn’t take into account those individuals who never receive a diagnosis. 
+PTSD develops when an individual has witnessed or experienced a traumatic or terrifying event. Unsurprisingly, it’s a condition that’s particularly prevalent among veterans. Although the VA estimates that 10-15% of veterans will develop PTSD at some point following their military service, it’s entirely possible these numbers might actually be much higher in reality. 
+PTSD is classified as a trauma and stressor-related disorder. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the condition is characterized as a repetitive re-experiencing of an extremely traumatic event (or stressor), usually accompanied by increased arousal, nightmares, and flashbacks. Those who have PTSD often have trouble concentrating, remembering, and sleeping. 
+But a PTSD diagnosis is not always easy to come by. The manifestation of the condition is not always straight-forward and doesn’t appear in the same way from person to person. It may take months or even years to develop, and symptoms may shift or appear over time. To diagnose a case of PTSD, physicians will look at specific criteria for symptoms. There are four distinct groups of criteria, all with different symptoms. These groups are: Intrusion Symptoms —Nightmares, intrusive memories or thoughts, or psychological and physical reactions to memories of the event. Avoidance Symptoms —Avoiding situations, thoughts, or feelings that you associate with the traumatic event. Negative Changes in Cognitions and Mood —Memory issues, negative thoughts about themselves or others, severe emotions like shame or sadness, lack of interest in activities they once enjoyed, or feelings of detachment, isolation, or disconnection. Changes in Arousal and Reactivity —An easy startle response, or feeling constantly jittery or alert. 
+It’s easy to see how these symptoms could easily disrupt a person’s life and take a significant toll on their mental health, as well as their personal and professional life. If you or someone you love may be suffering from PTSD, it’s important to seek out help. Because PTSD presents itself differently in every patient, treatment must be sought and tailor-made for each individual. Although there is no cure for PTSD, treatment has proven to be very effective for the majority of patients. Typically, this treatment includes psychotherapy — including cognitive and exposure therapy, as well as regular appointments with a psychiatrist — and in some cases, medication. 
+If you are a veteran who has been diagnosed with PTSD, you may be entitled to receive benefits and compensation from the VA. There are many things that you need to know to get the benefits that you deserve, and the veterans advocates at Hill & Ponton have published a PTSD guide covering everything regarding a PTSD claim. In years past, veterans were required to provide evidence of the traumatic event that led to the development of their condition. Below are some of the important points in the guide on how to establish service connection and get the proper rating. 
+The first thing is to establish a service connection for your PTSD in order to be eligible for benefits. The three things the VA requires are: Current Diagnosis: you must have a current PTSD diagnosis that was given by professionals who the VA has deemed “qualified to perform PTSD Compensation and Pension examinations.” These professionals have doctoral-level training in diagnostic methods, clinical interview methods, and psychopathology. They also need to have a working knowledge of the DSM-V and have extensive clinical experience with both the diagnosis and treatment in veterans with PTSD. Typically, these are board-certified psychiatrists and licensed psychologists, but may also include psychiatric residents and psychology interns as long as they’re under close supervision of an attending professional in the field. Essentially, if you’ve received a current PTSD diagnosis from a licensed professional, that analysis satisfies this requirement. Please note: most VA hospitals and clinics employ licensed mental health social workers to treat veterans. Their diagnosis of PTSD alone is not enough to meet this requirement. In-Service Stressor: This might be the most difficult requirement to satisfy. Sometimes, trauma is easy to determine, but other times, proving its occurrence can be challenging. There are a lot of different regulations regarding the type of trauma you experienced. For example, the rules for determining fear of terrorist activity are different from veterans who engaged in combat or sexual trauma. It’s recommended that you consult with your psychiatrist or psychologist, as well as a qualified lawyer, to address this requirement. Nexus: Basically, this is the link between the first two requirements. It’s what connects the traumatic event you experienced with your current diagnosis of PTSD. A medical expert is required in order to explain how your symptoms are a direct result of your in-service stressor — which is especially important if you have multiple stressors. It’s vital you establish that the traumatic event is the definitive link to your diagnosis and cannot be explained by any other events that took place outside of your military service. 
+Once these requirements have been satisfied, you can then file a claim through the VA. If you file a claim, you’ll need to undergo a Compensation and Pension Examination (sometimes called a C&P Exam) to verify your diagnoses, assess symptom severity, and definitively determine whether your PTSD is directly related to your military service. The VA treats the C&P exam with a lot of weight and it will determine the amount of compensation you receive. 
+When you go to your exam, remember to be as honest and as forthcoming as possible. You should bring written statements from family or friends that say how your PTSD has impacted your life. You should also bring a list of symptoms you’ve experienced to help you when being questioned during the exam. 
+After the exam, you will be assigned a disability percentage rate. This percentage reflects how severe your condition is and how much the symptoms affect your ability to work and maintain social relationships. Depending on the severity of your PTSD, you could potentially receive a disability rate of 0%, 10%, 30%, 70%, or 100%. 
+Overall, the compensation you receive will be related to your estimated impairment of working ability. Above all, it’s important to demonstrate evidence of occupational impairment due to PTSD. Even if your symptoms don’t constitute a 100% disability rating, you may still be able to receive one through a TDIU, which stands for total disability based on individual unemployability. A TDIU may be assigned if an individual fails to meet the criteria for 100% disability but is still completely unable to obtain and maintain employment. 
+Because the way the VA determines disability percentages can be highly confusing and complex, working with a lawyer who specializes in VA claims may be to your benefit. The various rules and regulations for determining physical disability can be hard to navigate, but mental conditions like PTSD can be even more difficult to prove. That’s why having an expert on your side can be vital. 
+If you or someone you love may be suffering from PTSD as a result of military service, seek out assistance from an attorney who specializes in veterans’ issues. Alternatively, if you are dissatisfied with a disability rating you have received and aren’t receiving the benefits you need, there may be other options at your disposal. 
+This guest post was written by Matthew Hill from Hill & Ponton, P.A, a veterans disability law firm . In addition to representing the disabled, Mr. Hill is a recognized authority on VA law. He has authored several books on VA service connected benefits gives presentations across the nation on VA disability compensation. He is the treasurer for the board of directors of the National Organization of Veterans Advocates (NOVA). Related Posts:",FAKE
+7600,Leftists Claim Dress Code Promotes “Rape Culture”,"Pinterest 
+At a prestigious Boston school, they have a pretty strict dress code. No gang-related colors, no cut-offs, nothing too offensive or revealing. 
+Women at Boston Latin School can’t wear skirts whose hemlines are more than four inches above the knee and their bra straps can’t be the “spaghetti” style, where they’re so thin they’re barely there. This is a middle and high school folks … not a college for adults. 
+It’s a way of showing a little decorum – a little respect for yourself and for the school. 
+And it promotes rape culture . 
+Because for radical feminists, telling them not to dress provocatively is telling them that men are sexist pigs who simply can’t resist the wiles of a woman. 
+They call it “victim-blaming” and while there’s a point to it – you can’t blame a woman for being assault if she’s jogging alone in a park, but certainly you can bring up a woman’s attire if it is specifically designed to attract attention from the opposite sex. 
+Let’s be honest: Women sometimes dress for attention. They want guys to look at them. 
+But under leftist-feminist theory, they shouldn’t. 
+So, as HeatStreet reports, there’s a Change.org petition that claims this dress code sends the message that “we live in a patriarchal society where men can decide whether a female’s clothing is appropriate or inappropriate.” 
+The dress code, they claim, creates a “a sense of shame towards girls [sic] bodies” and reinforces the notion that “yes, it is our fault when girls get raped because they should have covered up and avoided the situation by dressing in a way that does not attract another person.” 
+I’m not sure what these women want. Do they want to be able to attend school wearing micro-miniskirts and just bras? Pasties? Maybe we shouldn’t have a dress code at all? 
+In reaction to the idiotic controversy, Boston Latin School changed their policy, allowing women to wear “leggings” as long as they’re not “see-through.” The rest of the policy will stay in place until Nov. 1 – then it will probably be changed again. 
+Here’s how their “petition” reads: By allowing the school to dress code us, we are telling the school several things: Yes, we still live in a patriarchal society where men can decide whether a female’s clothing is appropriate or inappropriate. Yes, a body should be covered in order to be attractive. Establishing a sense of shame towards girls bodies is okay and perfectly acceptable. Yes, a girl’s body is a sinful temptation that needs to be covered up at all costs for others to focus on their education. Yes, a female’s body is more tempting and sexual than a male’s body. Yes, it is our fault when girls get raped because they should have covered up and avoided the situation by dressing in a way that does not attract another person. Are these statements correct to you? Is it okay to assign a dress code in this manner? If the answer is NO! then sign this petition to tell Mr. Contompasis to reconsider his dress code restrictions. 
+What a bunch of nonsense. These are CHILDREN. They do not get a say in establishing a school’s dress code. PERIOD.",FAKE
+6595,"Muslims Are Kidnapping White Girls And Forcing Them Into Sex Slavery, Says UK Children's Charity","Print 
+Islam and sex slavery are like peanut butter and jelly - you always find the one next to the other. Muslims kidnapping vulnerable white girls in the UK and forcing them to be sex slaves has reached an epidemic level, according to a recent report from the UK Charity Barnados. They say that Muslims are setting up fake businesses, primarily car washes, when, in reality, they are brothels and transit houses for these kidnapped girls: 
+Barnardo’s claims girls are being ferried from one unit to another as sex slaves for Kurds[s]. 
+It suggests white British girls on the run from the care system in Hartlepool, Stockton-on-Tees and Middlesbrough are being targeted. 
+The report said: “There were connections between people that work in car washes and the sexual exploitation of children on Teesside. 
+… 
+Officers on the immigration-led operation found beds at one. It was suggested staff were living on the premises. 
+Cleveland Police said: “It was not confirmed that child sexual exploitation had taken place although enquiries were conducted.” ( source ) 
+This is a sad and sickening picture of what the UK has become. Once one of the safest places in the West, it has allowed itself to become little more than a third-world cesspool, where its own women are being sold like slaves in the Muslim bazaars of old, and the government refuses to do its job to stop it, instead allowing it to continue and trying to stop those who want to put a stop to it. 
+Article reposted with permission from Shoebat.com 
+*Article by Andrew Bieszad",FAKE
+2431,The Supreme Court is hearing a case that could derail Obamacare: Everything you need to know,"The fate of the Affordable Care Act, the president's signature domestic policy achievement, is once again in the hands of the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The justices heard oral arguments in King v. Burwell, a challenge to the financial assistance that millions of Americans are receiving to purchase health insurance. The case is considered the greatest threat to Obamacare's future since the court considered a challenge to the law's individual mandate three years ago.
+
+What's the lawsuit all about?
+
+The ACA created marketplaces, or exchanges, where people can shop for individual and family health insurance if they don't have another source of coverage. The law directs the federal government to set up exchanges in states that didn't build their own, which was the case for about two-thirds of the country. The law also provides subsidies through the exchanges to people who meet income requirements.
+
+The King challengers say the law only authorizes subsidies through exchanges established by the state. They argue that the law was intentionally designed this way to pressure states to set up their own insurance marketplaces. They contend the IRS illegally issued a rule in 2012 providing subsidies through the federal exchanges when it became clear that most states wouldn't set up their own exchanges by 2014, when the marketplaces opened.
+
+The Obama administration, however, argues the challenge is politically motivated and wrongly focuses on just a few words in the ACA. The administration says a reading of the entire law makes clear that subsidies are available in all exchanges, regardless of who's running them. The law was intended to extend health insurance to as many Americans as possible, the administration argues, so the law's drafters would have no reason to withhold subsidies to so many people.
+
+The plaintiffs are four Virginians who do not want to buy health insurance, as mandated by the ACA. They argue the IRS illegally interpreted the ACA to authorize subsidies through federal-run exchange, and that without those subsidies, they would be exempt from the requirement to purchase insurance because they don't earn enough. The challenge is funded by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank opposed to the ACA. Federal courts have also heard three other cases challenging the subsidies, but the Supreme Court is only considering King.
+
+Why do people think this case is so important to the future of ACA?
+
+The subsidies are a critical part of the law, working with two other major ACA pieces — the guaranteed availability of health insurance and the individual mandate. The law prevents health insurers from denying coverage or charging people more because of their medical condition. To help offset the costs of sicker customers, the law requires most people to have insurance or pay an annual penalty for not having coverage. To make that coverage affordable, the law provides subsidies to low- and middle-income families. The subsidies are paid directly to insurers, who then apply the discount to their customers' monthly premiums. On average, the subsidies knock down the price of monthly premiums by nearly 75 percent.
+
+A ruling overturning the subsidies would cause more than 8 million people across the country to lose health insurance as a result of a ruling against the government, according to recent estimates. And it could wreak havoc on the insurance market. Without the aid, it's expected that the lower-income and healthier enrollees would quickly drop coverage, leaving just the sickest patients who need coverage the most. Insurers would look to raise their rates to cover the costs, pricing even more people out of coverage and causing problems for the individual insurance market outside of just the exchanges.
+
+One note, however: Most people who would lose their subsidies in such a ruling would be spared from the penalty for not having health insurance since they don't earn enough.
+
+Would there be a fix?
+
+The immediate question is whether subsidies could be restored to those who'd suddenly lose them if the Supreme Court rules against the government. The easiest fix would be for Congress to pass a law that says federal exchanges can provide subsidies — but Republicans opposing the ACA would never go for that. A handful of Republican lawmakers, in two separate proposals this week, raised the idea that they would offer temporary financial relief to those losing subsidies. However, they haven't provided detailed plans, and it's unclear how much support they have within the party for their proposals. The Obama administration, for its part, insists it won't be able to fix anything — perhaps an effort to avoid signaling to the justices that a ruling against subsidies would be easy to rectify.
+
+The federal exchange states, many of which are deeply opposed to the law, are in a precarious position, too. Republican governors and state lawmakers could find themselves taking the blame if millions of their citizens are suddenly cut off from coverage. States could still establish their own exchanges, ensuring that their citizens receive subsidies, but that could be a lengthy, expensive and politically difficult process. So that means states may look to possible work-arounds to establish an exchange in minimal time and cost. The state-level response will depend, though, on the details of the court's decision and whatever direction comes from Congress or the Obama administration.
+
+Which states would be affected?
+
+The challenge is only to the subsidies in states that didn't set up their own marketplaces, so residents of 16 states and the District of Columbia wouldn't see their financial assistance taken away if the government loses. In the following map from the Kaiser Family Foundation, residents of states with ""Federally-facilitated Marketplaces"" and ""State-Partnership Marketplaces,"" as labeled below, could lose the subsidies.
+
+This case marks the third time the ACA has been before the Supreme Court since it was enacted five years ago. In 2012, the court narrowly upheld the individual mandate, the requirement for most Americans to have health insurance, while also ruling that the federal government couldn't force states to expand their Medicaid programs. And last year, the court ruled that the government couldn't require closely held businesses to offer their employees contraceptive coverage against their religious objections.
+
+How will the court rule this time?
+
+
+
+That's always hard to predict. Four justices from the court's conservative wing were ready to throw out the entire law three years ago, but Chief Justice John Roberts found a backdoor way to uphold the individual mandate. It only takes four Supreme Court judges to accept a case (though, we don't know which ones opted to pick up King v. Burwell), and some observers were surprised that the court accepted this challenge as quickly as it did. Either way, it's thought that Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy could provide the swing votes this time.
+
+Oral arguments began Wednesday at 10 a.m and have now ended. Within days of the argument, the justices will likely meet privately to discuss and vote on the case. However, the court isn't expected to release its decision until late June, before the justices break for the summer. And, no, don't expect a decision to leak before the justices announce it from the bench.",REAL
+441,"White House still not telling America the truth about jobs, economy","Friday, forecasters expect the Labor Department will report that the economy created 190,000 jobs in October—that’s well below the 260,000 averaged in 2014.
+
+We can also expect the White House to again proclaim that the economy is doing well—touting 61 consecutive months of jobs creation—and liberal commentators like New York Times columnist and CNBC analyst John Harwood will no doubt offer this as more proof that the economy does better with a Democrat in the White House.
+
+So much depends on the circumstances in which each president governs. For example, does his party control one or both houses of Congress and more importantly, what was the state of the economy bequeathed by his predecessor?
+
+The best apples to apples comparison are the rather difficult conditions of Presidents Reagan and Obama inherited and how the fortunes of America’s families then progressed—with the former relying on conservative prescriptions and the latter on activist government to stimulate growth.
+
+Obama confronted a terrible financial crisis and endured a punishing recession. Unemployment peaked at 10 percent in his first term, but since the economy has reclaimed and added 12.6 million jobs and employment is up 9.8 percent.
+
+The Gipper faced tough times too—double-digit unemployment and interest rates and a bruising recession. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent but subsequently the economy added more than 17.2 million jobs and employment rose 19.4 percent.
+
+The reason Reagan was able to create so many more jobs—in a much smaller economy—is quite simple. It wasn’t just lower taxes and less spending but rather, a reliance on private decisions to guide recovery. He cleared a path for businesses, large and small, to invest as they deemed fit and raise wages as they decided they could afford, and encouraged the unemployed to get out and look for work.
+
+Whereas from subsidies for solar energy projects and mandatory health insurance to incessant preaching that ordinary folks are victims of racism, sexism and the evil machinations of the well-off, Obama has sought to micromanage business through an explosion of regulations and to pacify a middle class under siege and Americans underemployed or not working at all with giveaways from free contraception to forgiving college debt.
+
+Through the first 25 quarters of Obama’s recovery, GDP growth has averaged 2.1 percent, whereas during the comparable period for Reagan, GDP advanced at a 4.6 percent annual pace.
+
+And whereas Reagan’s social safety net assisted the unemployed, Obama’s pays the unemployed to be idle.
+
+The 7 million men between the ages of 25 and 54 who are neither employed nor are looking for work are rewarded with food stamps, the earned income tax credit if their spouse is a low-income worker and federal healthcare subsidies—and even virtually free health care through Medicaid in many states.
+
+For folks refusing to do anything productive with their lives, Obama is offering an even more attractive benefit—free money in the form of a government pension.
+
+Despite the fact that Americans are living healthier and longer lives and work is generally less physically challenging, the percentage of adults ages 16 to 64 certified as permanently incapable of working by the Social Security Disability Insurance program now stands at 5.1 percent—about double the figure in Reagan’s day.
+
+A broken appeals system offers a decided advantage to those crafty applicants who hire a lawyer—a situation the Obama administration refuses to fix.
+
+For hard working families, the results are predictable—annual family incomes have declined about $1650 during the Obama years, whereas those increased $3900 during Reagan’s tenure.
+
+For the indolent, this is the Second Age of Pericles but for those who toil for their daily bread, Obama’s pronouncements that the economy is much improved and performs better with Democrats in control have a decided Orwellian ring.
+
+Peter Morici served as Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission from 1993 to 1995. He is an economist and professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and a widely published columnist. He is the five time winner of the MarketWatch best forecaster award. Follow him on Twitter @PMorici1.",REAL
+6767,‘Arab Spring’ and the Washington-Brussels-Riyadh Axis,"I thought I was just scared of Trump – but it’s his America I fear ‹ › South Front Analysis & Intelligence is a public analytical project maintained by an independent team of experts from the four corners of the Earth focusing on international relations issues and crises. They focus on analysis and intelligence of the ongoing crises and the biggest stories from around the world: Ukraine, the war in Middle East, Central Asia issues, protest movements in the Balkans, migration crises, and others. In addition, they provide military operations analysis, the military posture of major world powers, and other important data influencing the growth of tensions between countries and nations. We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by governments and mainstream media. ‘Arab Spring’ and the Washington-Brussels-Riyadh Axis By South Front on November 5, 2016 …from SouthFront 
+When the “end of history”, meaning the establishment of a permanent Western hegemony over the entire international system, was proclaimed in the early 1990s, it was not yet obvious how the pursuit of said hegemony would evolve over the succeeding decades. The “velvet” expansion of the 1990s into the post-Soviet vacuum gave way to the “iron fist” for which the 9/11 terror strikes provided the excuse and which meant invading whichever country Washington desired. However, the “iron fist” efforts in the post-9/11 world demonstrated West’s weakness , as sustaining operations in Iraq and Afghanistan proved too much for NATO. This failure ushered the post-“post-9/11″ world, and the “Arab Spring” became the first, though far from the only, demonstration of the evolved Western strategy which fuses the earlier approaches. 
+The “velvet” aspect is still there: Western entities claim they are promoting “universal human values” which, evidently, is the end that justifies all means and which automatically means it is impossible to commit war crimes in its pursuit. Also, by implication, anyone who stands in the West’s way operates under the presumption of guilt. In order to promote said “universal values”, the West identifies, creates, or even invents a political movement which, although it consists of corrupt opportunists and outright criminals, ostensibly stands for “universal values”. This entity then receives overwhelmingly positive media coverage, to the point of referring to any police or military response to the violence it perpetrates as “war crimes”, in order to shape the public opinion in favor of limited military intervention in the form of airstrikes and a small number of special operations troops. Then one merely needs an excuse, a small incident, an insignificant act of violence by the target country’s law enforcement of the kind that happen in the US in a daily basis, in order to start beating the war drums against the “blood-soaked regime.” This approach was pioneered in Bosnia and Kosovo, the early exceptions to the “velvet” policy, but was then shelved in the post-9/11 era when it seemed that West’s aims could be achieved through more direct–and brutal–means, only to be resurrected by the Obama Administration and applied in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine with only minor variations. 
+But the “universal values” rhetoric is only camouflage aimed at securing the support of the liberal wing of the elite and obscuring the real aim of the aggression, the seizure of key national assets, be it petroleum or, in the case of Ukraine, farmland to bolster the fortunes of dominant sectors of Western economies, including finance and energy, and to preserve the fading Western hegemony. It is also evident Western powers are in an informal but very close alliance with the highly repressive governments of Gulf Arab states, which also stood to gain from eliminating the political competition posed by Libya’s government and from building pipelines to Europe over the corpse of the Syrian state. This alignment was made necessary by the West’s need for “boots on the ground” which can accomplish that which airpower alone cannot, with ISIS, Al-Nusra, Free Syrian Army, and other such formations being a NATO-trained and NATO-equipped force which can be sent where NATO soldiers can’t go, due to the domestic opposition such a move would provoke. 
+The insights into the finances of the various Clinton “foundations” provided by Wikileaks clearly show the inner workings of this alliance. The leaks also illustrate the key aspect of this alliance, namely the secretive and conspiratorial machinations of a small group of influential actors, as opposed to the broad elite consensus that existed during the Cold War. Nevertheless, this small group of conspirators on three continents now amounts to a de-facto Washington-Brussels-Riyadh axis. It is a relatively recent creation, dating to only the beginning of the Obama Administration. It did not exist during the George W. Bush Administration: Saudi Arabia was aghast at the idea of toppling the Sunni rule in Iraq, and the EU was mostly opposed to invading Iraq. Which made the EU’s embrace of regime change in Syria, Libya, and Ukraine all the more startling, though not entirely surprising. Just as the US foreign policies are driven by the fear of being eclipsed by rising or recovering powers like China or Russia, the 2008 crisis bared the EU’s weakness and thus provided an incentive for EU hardliners engage in reckless policies in the hopes of staving off its collapse. 
+Is the game worth the candle? Considering the shrillness of the pro-war propaganda in both the US and the EU today, to the point of risking World War 3, the imagined benefits of regime changes must have been enormous. Stamping out the last truly sovereign states of the Middle East would have strengthened the West’s claim on global hegemony. The failures Ukraine and in Syria, and ultimately also in Libya, therefore place Western powers face-to-face with the prospect of historic decline. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by South Front on November 5, 2016, With 23 Reads Filed under Politics . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+8026,These Syrian Refugees Just Nailed The Mannequin Challenge!,"0 Add Comment 
+A GROUP of over a thousand civilians fleeing from the civil war in Syria have taken the time to pull off one of the best mannequin challenges we’ve ever seen, in a 4-minute video lighting the internet on fire right now! 
+The mannequin challenge, the latest craze sweeping through social media platforms at the minute, involves groups of people posing stock-still as a camera roves around them, with everyone from the Portuguese football team to Michelle Obama to a group of lads at a house party in Stillorgan taking part. 
+All those videos pale in comparison, however, to the epic one-take shot filmed in the war-torn region of Aleppo in which 976 men, women, children and babies are shown staying perfectly still, with poses ranging from “half-buried underneath a collapsed hospital” to “clutching throat as the lungs fill with chlorine gas”. 
+“With the mannequin challenge, you’ll always see one person blink or sway, but not in this one,” posted Mark Lennings, a 26-year-old internet user who shared the video on his Facebook page. 
+“You’d nearly swear they were actually mannequins. But that can’t be the case, because if this kind of thing was really happening to these people, we’d be talking about it more than we’re talking about a viral game that serves only to fill our timelines with nonsense so we don’t have to cope with the realities of this world. In fact, it’s the best viral video to come out of the country since the ice-bucket challenge they filmed in the Mediterranean last year”. 
+It is really up there with the best we’ve seen, to view the epic video, click HERE.",FAKE
+729,Bernie Sanders digs in,"Washington (CNN) The stakes of Bernie Sanders' take-it-to-the-convention strategy are rapidly rising as fresh polls underscore Hillary Clinton's vulnerabilities and predict a tight race between her and Donald Trump in the fall.
+
+After months of talk about the potential of a contested Republican convention, Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, is quickly consolidating his party's support -- something Clinton is unable to do with Sanders still in the race.
+
+With only a few major nominating contests left, including California and New Jersey on June 7, Sanders lacks a credible mathematical path to overhauling Clinton's wide lead in pledged delegates. And with polls showing Clinton's general election advantage over Trump evaporating, a lingering fracture in the Democratic party could be perilous for its chances to keep the White House.
+
+Still, Sanders is not heeding calls from some Democrats to get out of the race -- or at least cool his rhetoric during the final weeks of the primary season. Instead, he kept up his blistering criticism of Clinton over the weekend and deepened his feud with the party establishment, including endorsing the primary challenger to Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
+
+""The last I heard is that we are a democratic country, and that elections are about vigorous debates over the issues. Secretary Clinton and I disagree,"" Sanders told Jake Tapper Sunday on CNN's ""State of the Union."" ""What the Democratic leadership has got to understand is that not all of my supporters go to these fancy fundraising dinners. They're working people who are hurting now, who want real change in the economy.""
+
+He added: ""I hope the Democratic leadership understands they have to open up the process, bring those people in.""
+
+Sanders acknowledged in the interview that he has a ""very, very uphill fight"" in his quest to overtake Clinton, given that he has won 46% of pledged delegates so far and she has won 54%. But he rebuked Democratic superdelegates -- party office holders and lawmakers who can vote however they choose at the convention -- for overwhelmingly coming out for Clinton early on in what he said was an ""anointment"" by the establishment and big money interests.
+
+Clinton's failure to finally put away the Sanders campaign is grating on the former secretary of state.
+
+""I will be the nominee for my party,'' Clinton told CNN's Chris Cuomo in an interview last week. ""That is already done, in effect. There is no way I won't be.''
+
+On Sunday, she said there will be an ""obvious need of us to unify the party"" once she becomes the presumptive nominee.
+
+""I will certainly do my part, reaching out to Sen. Sanders, reaching out to his supporters,"" she said on NBC's ""Meet the Press."" ""And I expect him to do his.""
+
+The internal conflict comes at a time when polls show that Trump is getting a dividend from closing out the Republican primary race, and setting up what could be a close election against Clinton in November.
+
+A Fox News poll last week showed Trump leading Clinton 45% to 42%, findings that were within the survey's margin of error. Meanwhile, a New York Times/CBS News national survey released Thursday had Clinton up by six points.
+
+Quinnipiac University polls in swing states Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania this month also had the rivals effectively neck-and-neck.
+
+Polls this far out from a general election cannot offer a reliable picture of what will happen in November. But they can shape the political environment in which the early stages of the race evolves and, if they continue to show Trump gaining in strength, are likely to increase pressure on Sanders to bring the Democratic Party together.
+
+But Sanders does not see such polls as an argument that he should get out of the race or dial back attacks on Clinton. In fact, he sees them as proof that he would be a superior general election candidate to the former first lady -- most polls show him leading Trump.
+
+In the NBC interview, Clinton suggested Sanders simply hasn't been subjected to the rough and tumble of politics the way she has.
+
+It's ""fair to say that I have been vetted and tested, and I think that that puts me in a very strong position,"" she said.
+
+Referring to Sanders, she said, ""let me say that I don't think he's had a single negative ad ever run against him.""
+
+Sanders disputed the notion that he is only doing better than Clinton because he has not had to endure the years of partisan warfare that have shredded her approval ratings.
+
+""Any objective assessment of our campaign versus Clinton's campaign, I think, will conclude we have the energy, we have the excitement, we have the young people, we have the working people, we can drive a large voter turnout, so that we not only win the White House, but we retain, regain control of the Senate, do well in the House and in governor's chairs up and down the line,"" Sanders told Tapper.
+
+Latest polls clearly show that the lingering Democratic Party divisions are a challenge for Clinton.
+
+The Washington Post/ABC poll released Sunday showed that in a match-up equation with Trump, Clinton currently gets 86% of Democratic voters, meaning that a slice of the party coalition that is not yet sold on her as nominee.
+
+Making a decision to leave a primary race or to tone down attacks on a rival who appears headed for victory is the toughest choices any candidate faces. It is a particularly acute dilemma for Sanders, given that he has won millions of votes, ignited a populist uprising in the Democratic Party that no one saw coming and is basking in an unprecedented reception to his democratic socialist ideas that left him in the political wilderness for years in the Senate.
+
+He and his campaign team have dismissed the idea that he could wreak lasting damage on Clinton if she becomes the nominee, saying he will do whatever it takes to ensure that Trump does not win the presidency. But if his arguments about the process of the Democratic primary race leave the impression that he has been unfairly treated and that Clinton is somehow not the legitimate nominee, the task of uniting the party becomes far more difficult.
+
+That's where Sanders' clash with Wasserman Schultz is particularly concerning to some Democrats. The Vermont senator's campaign has consistently accused the DNC chairwoman of tilting the race in favor of Clinton and criticized the scheduling of debates on Saturday nights when television audiences are lower, and the closed primaries that bar independents in big states like New York.
+
+Sanders is now backing Wasserman Schultz's primary opponent in her Florida district, Tim Canova, and left no doubt about the strengths of his feelings about her on Sunday.
+
+""Well, clearly, I favor her opponent,"" Sanders told Tapper. ""His views are much closer to mine than as to Wasserman Schultz's."" ""In all due respect to the current chairperson. If (I was) elected president, she would not be reappointed to be chair of the DNC.""
+
+Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver also sent out a fundraising email to supporters Sunday seeking contributions for Canova.
+
+For all the sudden handwringing in Democratic circles, it's still likely that Clinton will enjoy her own boost in the polls once she finally becomes the presumptive Democratic nominee similar to the one Trump is enjoying now.
+
+For now, veteran Democrats appear to be ready to give Sanders some room. But the clock is ticking.
+
+""After (Clinton) has actually won, after she actually has enough delegates to win the nomination, I think Bernie needs to think about his legacy,"" said Mark Alderman, a top Democratic Party donor who was part of President Barack Obama's transition team. ""Bernie is in the middle of the tsunami -- he doesn't have any perspective yet. It will take a little time. Unfortunately, he only has a little time. He has got to get it together by July.""",REAL
+5874,Preventing cultural genocide with the Mother Tongue policy in Eritrea,"Preventing cultural genocide with the Mother Tongue policy in Eritrea By Thomas C. Mountain Posted on October 27, 2016 by Thomas C. Mountain 
+The small east African nation of Eritrea has implemented the Mother Tongue policy nationwide to prevent cultural genocide within its nine different ethnic groups. 
+This is done by educating all children in tribal environments in their mother tongue until literacy at grade 5. By making sure that the ethnic minorities learn to read and write in their mother tongue the Eritrean Government is making sure that their culture survives as well, for without one’s language one cannot practice your culture. 
+Historically destroying peoples mother tongue is the means used to carry out a policy of cultural genocide with many thousands of dialects having disappeared during the Western colonial and neo colonial era. Today many of the languages that remain are threatened by the children of these ethnic groups not being literate in their mother tongue which will almost inevitably lead to the loss of their identity, their language and their culture. 
+It has not been easy for Eritrea, hammered by global warming, drought, sand, economically disadvantaged due to Western inflicted sanctions and embargoes and with 9 tribes with 9 languages, some of which have never had a written language, the challenge of implementing the Mother Tongue policy for all our tribes has been hard work. 
+It has been well over a decade now that the policy has become the practice nationwide and the next generation of Eritrean youth from all our 9 tribes are literate in their mother tongue, a policy the whole world needs to adopt. 
+Thomas C. Mountain is an independent journalist in Eritrea, living and reporting from here since 2006. His speeches, interviews and articles can be seen on Facebook at thomascmountain and he can best be reached at . This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
+6249,London Bankers Fearful of Brexit Blowback,"London Bankers Fearful of Brexit Blowback October 27, 2016 London Bankers Fearful of Brexit Blowback 
+London's financial district has called for a UK regulatory regime that does not harm competitiveness, responding to bankers' fears that being outside the European Union will reduce the capital's clout in global markets. The City of London's Lord Mayor, Jeffrey Mountevans , will tell regulators at a dinner on Wednesday evening that after Britain's vote in June to leave the EU, ""realistic, collaborative"" regulation is needed to keep the sector on an even keel. ""Regulation that will continue to protect our competitiveness and provide liberal market influence across the EU, even after Brexit,"" Mountevans said in remarks released to the media in advance of the annual Mansion House dinner for bankers and regulators. The City is crying out for a consistent and forward-looking Brexit strategy that has a ""bold, bright, buccaneering vision of the future"", Mountevans will say. Some will see this as harking back to a discredited past. 
+(LONDON) - This week the City marks 30 years since the day of the ""Big Bang"" deregulation of London's financial markets that helped to propel London to the top of the league table of global financial centers. 
+The financial crisis of 2007-09 then forced taxpayers to bail out undercapitalized and poorly supervised lenders, tarnishing the ""light touch"" regulatory approach and ushering in a welter of tougher rules. 
+READ MORE: BRITISH PRIME MINISTER READY FOR DIFFICULT MOMENTS IN BREXIT TALKS 
+But since the Brexit vote, Paris, Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Dublin have vied to win a slice of the City's financial pie should banks and other companies move operations to other countries to maintain full access to EU markets. 
+Backers of Brexit have also voiced hopes for an end to EU rules such as caps on banker bonuses. 
+But Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), who is also due to speak at the Mansion House dinner, has scotched talk of a post-Brexit bonfire of the regulations. 
+At a launch of the FCA's public consultation on a new ""mission"" statement on Wednesday, Bailey said he would not support making competitiveness an objective. 
+""The thing that we can contribute to competitiveness is sound regulation,"" Bailey told reporters. ""It's not appropriate, in my view, to have a competitiveness objective."" Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+659,Trump Draws Fire from GOP Leaders over Attacks on Latino Judge,"Republican leaders are taking presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump to task for his attacks on a Latino judge presiding over a lawsuit against Trump University.
+
+Trump is refusing to back down from his contention that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel could not preside over a fair trial in a fraud case against Trump University because Curiel's parents were born in Mexico.
+
+""He's member of a club or society very strongly pro-Mexican, which is all fine. But I say he's got bias,"" Trump said of Curiel on CBS' ""Face The Nation."" ""I want to build a wall. I'm going to build a wall.""
+
+And Trump went further when pressed on whether he thinks a Muslim judge would also be biased against him.
+
+""It's possible, yes. Yes. That would be possible, absolutely,"" the billionaire said.
+
+CBS' John Dickerson  then asked Trump, ""Isn't there sort of a tradition though in America that we don't judge people by who their parents were and where they came from?""
+
+""I'm not talking about tradition,"" Trump replied. ""I'm talking about common sense, okay?""
+
+Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump supporter and widely considered a possible running mate, severely criticized his remarks.
+
+""This is one of the worst mistakes Trump has made,"" said Gingrich. ""I think it's inexcusable. This judge was born in Indiana. He is an American, period.""
+
+  
+
+ But Gingrich added that that he considers Trump a remarkable leader who learns very quickly.
+
+Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton grabbed the chance to aim her fire at Trump.
+
+""What Trump is doing is trying to divert attention from the very serious fraud charges against Trump University,"" she said on ABC's ""This Week.""
+
+And on NBC's ""Meet the Press,"" Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also criticized Trump, but would not say if he thought what Trump said was racist.
+
+""I couldn't disagree more with a statement like that,"" McConnell told NBC's Chuck Todd.
+
+""But is it a racist statement?"" Todd pressed.
+
+""I couldn't disagree more with what he said,"" McConnell reiterated.
+
+In the meantime, Republican leaders are urging Trump to start unifying the party and start acting like ""a potential leader of the United States.""",REAL
+2759,How the battle against the Islamic State is redrawing the map of the Middle East,"CONFRONTING THE ‘CALIPHATE’ | This is part of an occasional series.
+
+Along the vast, zigzagging perimeter of the Islamic State’s self-styled state, the militants are steadily being pushed back as the forces­ ranged against them gain in strength.
+
+In the process, new borders are being drawn, new fiefdoms are being carved out and the seeds of potential new conflicts are being sown.
+
+A war seen by the United States as primarily aimed at preventing future terrorist attacks in America is being prosecuted for very different reasons by the diverse assortment of Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni fighters battling in both Iraq and Syria, often in pursuit of competing agendas that work to subvert the goal of defeating the militants.
+
+In northern Iraq and Syria, Kurds are busily carving out the borders to new Kurdish enclaves. Shiite militias, now the most powerful force in Iraq, are extending their reach deep into traditionally Sunni areas of northern Iraq. The Syrian government is focusing its energies on reclaiming land seized by its opponents during the five-year-old rebellion against it, while deeply divided Syrian rebels in turn are fighting a two-front war to hold their ground against both the government and the Islamic State.
+
+In this fragmented landscape, the Islamic State is but one of a multitude of groups competing for territory and dominance over the collapsed nation states of Iraq and Syria — a symptom as much as a cause of the scramble for power unleashed by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the 2011 revolt in Syria.
+
+[Is it too late to solve the mess in the Middle East?]
+
+The Islamic State may or may not be vanquished soon — and a string of defeats inflicted in recent months in northeastern Syria, northern Iraq and most recently Ramadi have raised hopes that its demise may be closer than had been thought.
+
+But already it is becoming clear that victory over the militants won’t end the bloodshed in the region, said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
+
+“There is little thought being given to the morning after, and the morning after is going to be as bloody, as chaotic and as destabilizing as the situation we are seeing now,” he said. “The heart of the Middle East has changed. The fragile state system is no longer there.”
+
+Along some of the war’s front lines, the ways in which the battle against the Islamic State is redrawing the map of the Middle East — perhaps irrevocably — come sharply into focus.
+
+Men of all ages — and in a few places, women — are fighting courageously against desperate and well-armed jihadists, in some instances carrying only the hunting rifles their families owned long before there was war.
+
+But there is no single unifying plan, and no overarching goal, only a jigsaw puzzle composed of the collapsed fragments of Iraq and Syria.
+
+One piece of the puzzle is taking shape along a road called the M4 on most maps, and the International Highway by those who live in its vicinity. It links northern Iraq to the Mediterranean coast of Syria, and it has served as a supply route for the Islamic State across the mostly erased Syria-Iraq border.
+
+In northeastern Syria, it also roughly tracks the front line between the frontier of the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate and the lands claimed by Syria’s minority Kurds, who have emerged as one of the single-most-effective U.S. partners in the war.
+
+Raqqa, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital and the next priority of the U.S. military campaign, lies 30 miles to the south.
+
+But Raqqa, an Arab city, is not a priority for the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, the Kurdish force that is busy consolidating its control in northeastern Syria. In the past year, the YPG has expanded the territory under its control by 186 percent — compared with a 14 percent shrinkage for the far larger territory controlled by the Islamic State — making it by far the biggest winner in the wider war, according to figures compiled by the IHS Conflict Monitor.
+
+The YPG’s sights are now set on another stretch of Kurdish land, the isolated enclave of Afrin far to the west, in the province of Aleppo, surrounded by territory controlled by an assortment of Syrian rebels. In an effort to link up with Afrin, the focus of the fighting has shifted there, putting the Kurds in conflict with local Free Syrian Army groups and, potentially, Turkey, which has vowed to prevent the creation of a Kurdish enclave in the area.
+
+The Raqqa front line has been left to a ragged assortment of former Raqqa rebels who were driven out of the city by the Islamic State. They are fighting in sandals with ancient Kalashnikovs alongside a crude earth barrier thrown up in the desert just to the south of the town of Ain Issa. Their relations with the YPG are tense, and they have been overlooked in the effort by the Pentagon to arm Sunni allies to take on the Islamic State in Sunni areas.
+
+But a strategy that relies on a Kurdish force to counter the Islamic State in Arab areas “is destined to make things worse, not better,” said Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria who is now with the Middle East Institute.
+
+“The Americans are aiding in the establishment of a unilaterally declared autonomous Kurdish zone, and Arab Syrians will not accept it,” he said. “Where this leads to is the partition of Syria, and it’s going to make it harder if countries are fragmented in this way to take on the Islamic State.”
+
+A similar dilemma prevails across the border in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, on the battlefield just south of the once-mixed Kurdish-Arab town of Makhmour, whose capture by the Islamic State in August 2014 helped precipitate U.S. airstrikes. The jihadist occupation lasted barely 48 hours before U.S. warplanes intervened and the Islamic State retreated, in the first indication that air power could prove decisive in stemming and then reversing the militants’ ­advances.
+
+The front line since has barely shifted. A labyrinth of trenches, earthen barricades and sandbags snaking across the fertile plains of northern Iraq’s Nineveh province separates the combatants and also forms the southernmost frontier of the territories claimed by the regional government of Kurdistan as part of its still-undeclared Kurdish state.
+
+The villages beyond are wholly Arab, and the Kurdish peshmerga forces manning the line say they have no intention of pressing forward, even though they believe they could.
+
+“Here on this front line we won’t advance any further because this is Arab land,” explained Col. Yadgar Hijran, who commands forces­ along a stretch of the front line. “If anyone is to free these areas, it should be Arabs, because if Kurds free them, then it will become an ethnic war.”
+
+In many ways, it already is. Spanning the Kurdish-Arab fault line that runs across northern Iraq, Makhmour has long been contested and was among the areas targeted in the 1980s by Saddam Hussein’s “Arabization” program. Surrounding Kurdish villages were razed and their lands given to Arab settlers, often from other parts of the country. The Kurdish peshmerga seized control of Makhmour after U.S. troops swept into the area in 2003, and many of those Arabs fled.
+
+[The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein’s.]
+
+Under Iraq’s new constitution, the final status was to have been settled by a referendum, but that plan has become moot since the war against the Islamic State began. The president of the Kurdish region, Masoud Barzani, has said the Kurds will never surrender any of the lands they have recaptured. Talk of a far bolder referendum, to vote on the complete independence of Kurdistan, is being revived.
+
+“There is a need for brave decisions, to look at the realities and let people decide what they want,” said Masrour Barzani, Kurdistan’s national security chief. “Iraq has broken apart. Sunnis believe in a united Iraq only if Sunnis rule it. Shiites believe in a united Iraq only if Shiites rule it. There is no single definition of a united Iraq.”
+
+“Trying to keep the country united against the will of the people is not going to succeed,” he said.
+
+That’s not a view shared by the Shiite militia fighters battling the Islamic State 40 miles to the south, outside the destroyed Baiji oil refinery. The facility was finally recaptured in October after more than a year of back-and-forth battles, with Shiite militias fighting under the umbrella of the Hashd Shabi — as the popular mobilization units are known — playing an instrumental role in securing the victory alongside Iraqi army units, according to the Iraqi government and army units on the ground.
+
+The front line now has shifted northwest into the Makhool mountains, a strategic ridge of barren hills overlooking the refinery and also the main highway leading to Mosul, the biggest city controlled by the Islamic State and a key target of the fight.
+
+This is also indisputably Sunni territory, now in the process of being conquered by Shiites fighting far from their homes in the Shiite south of the country — motivated, say young fighters, by duty to their religious leaders. Along the length of the 200-mile highway leading north to Baiji from Baghdad lie the ruins of Sunni towns and villages, destroyed by airstrikes and artillery in the fight to dislodge the Islamic State.
+
+“We are following the orders of our marjaya” — the Shiite religious authorities in Najaf — said Sattar Ahwan, one of about two dozen men massed beneath a ridge on the hillside as bullets zinged and mortar fire crumped overhead. He, along with many of the fighters, wore an armband featuring the face of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, a reminder of the divergent loyalties complicating the battlefield.
+
+The Shiite fighters are nonetheless fighting for a united Iraq, insisted two commanders from the Kataeb Sayed Shuhada, a Shiite militia that has also sent fighters to Syria, at a command post behind the front lines on the edge of the nearby town of Baiji. “The Hashd are the sons of Iraq. Our role is to fight for the sake of Iraq,” said Alaa al-Husseini, who comes from Najaf and wears a turban, signaling his role as a religious adviser to the fighters. “We are all Iraqis, Sunnis and Shiites, and this crisis has made us unite.”
+
+Behind him, the flags of the assorted Shiite militias participating in the fight fluttered over Baiji, long since emptied of its inhabitants and now almost destroyed.
+
+For the few Iraqi Sunnis engaged in the fight against the Sunni Islamic State, the symbolism of such scenes, broadcast widely on television, is obvious — and worrying.
+
+Amiriyat Fallujah, in the western province of Anbar, is one of the few Sunni towns that held at bay the Islamic State onslaught into most of the country’s Sunni regions last year, and it is one of the first where local Sunnis are being deployed in the fight against the Islamic State. Several hundred local Sunni tribesmen trained by U.S. troops returned there in late October, and they launched their first offensive in November, alongside Iraqi army troops.
+
+It went well. A front line that had endured since the Islamic State’s advances­ early in 2014 crumbled within 36 hours. The tribesmen took control of an extra three miles or so of land. The new front line is barely distinguishable from the old, except that the old trench dug in the desert had filled with plastic bags and water bottles, whereas the new one is dug from freshly churned earth. It also puts the fighters three miles closer to Fallujah, the first Iraqi town to be captured by the Islamic State nearly two years ago.
+
+As is the case along other front lines, the fighters say they are confident they could easily gain more ground and perhaps take Fallujah itself if they had sufficient support — from the Iraqi government and from allies such as the United States.
+
+“As soon as they saw our ­forces, they ran away,” said Faisal al-Issawi, a local tribal leader who commands forces­ along one stretch of the newly dug front line. “They still have power, but it’s not the same as a year ago. Airstrikes made them weak and are breaking their structures. Every week they execute four or five members because they refuse to obey orders or try to turn against their leaders.”
+
+But weapons have been hard to come by on this neglected front, where actual fighting is rare. None of the tribal fighters wear uniforms, and some are armed only with ancient rifles, owned by their families for generations, according to one fighter, who said he was 60 but looked older.
+
+The Shiite-dominated government has been reluctant to arm the Sunni tribes for fear of empowering potential rivals, and the Sunnis here are already questioning their future in an Iraq now more firmly dominated by Shiites than ever before.
+
+“Even those who are loyal to the central government and fight ISIS are treated like foreigners” by the central government, said Shaker al-Issawi, the mayor of Amiriyat Fallujah, as he visited his men on the front line.
+
+He is among a small but growing number of Sunnis who are starting to embrace the idea of forming a separate Sunni entity, along the lines of the semiautonomous Kurdish enclave in the north.
+
+“If the people of Anbar felt respected, as Iraqis, they would be loyal to us and fight ISIS,” he said. “But we are not respected, and I fear the only solution is a Sunni state.”
+
+It is not a mainstream view among Iraqi Sunnis, Suhaib al-Rawi, the governor of the province of Anbar, said in an interview in Baghdad ahead of the recent victory of Iraqi government troops in Ramadi.
+
+“It’s not only a bad idea, it would be a catastrophe,” he said, citing the battle for Ramadi, fought by the Iraqi army, as evidence that Iraq can survive. “Iraq was always a united nation and a great regional power. It is in the best interest of everyone to remain united.”
+
+But they are not united, said Gerges, the London School of Economics professor, who questions not whether Iraq or Syria should be partitioned as part of an ultimate solution but whether they can be salvaged at all.
+
+“The puzzle is, how do you glue these states back together again?” he said. “They’re gone. They’re gone into a million pieces.”
+
+This is part of an occasional series about the militant group Islamic State and its violent collision with the United States and others intent on halting the group’s rapid rise.
+
+The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein’s.
+
+Life in the ‘Islamic State’: Spoils for the rulers, terror for the ruled
+
+Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine
+
+From hip-hop to jihad, how the Islamic State became a magnet for converts
+
+5 stories you should read to really understand the Islamic State
+
+Mustafa Salim in Baiji and Ameriyat Fallujah.contributed to this report.",REAL
+7364,Trump Suffers Bizarre Memory Disorder: Says He Always Opposed Obamacare (VIDEO),"Trump Suffers Bizarre Memory Disorder: Says He Always Opposed Obamacare (VIDEO) By Karen Shiebler on October 26, 2016 
+Oh, ha,ha,ha! 
+That silly old Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is so, so funny! 
+He doesn’t seem to remember anything. He doesn’t remember what he has done , or what he has said , or what he believed or didn’t believe in the recent past. 
+Now we have another example of Trump insisting that he said what he didn’t say, that he didn’t say what he said, and that he never believed what he said he believed. 
+Confused? 
+Yup. We are, too. 
+Mediate reports that Trump’s memory about Obamacare is very murky, too. The candidate has been hitting the stump hard claiming that he will overturn the “disaster” of Obamacare. 
+In fact, Trump has been claiming to anyone who will listen that he has always been against Obama’s health care plan. To listen to him, you would think that the man had taken to the airwaves as soon as the Affordable Care Act was passed, proclaiming that it would be the end of civilization as we know it. 
+Except that he didn’t. 
+After it was announced the other day that insurance premiums are going to be increasing this year, Trump pumped his fists and congratulated himself with his usual fervor. He crowed to Fox News: “I think it’s a disaster, and I’ve been saying it from the time before they even voted for it. I said this is a plan can’t work, it’s going to be a disaster.” He told Rush Limbaugh that : “Obamacare is a disaster. And you remember, I called that from before it was approved. I said, ‘This can’t work, because it’s just … the plan is no good. The concept is no good.’” 
+Once again, though, the truth seems to have nothing in common with Trump’s faulty memory. In reality, back when the law was passed, Trump had not yet declared for the Presidency. He went on the air with Joy Behar on the day in 2010 when the law was passed. She asked him what he thought about the Act, and he replied that he had mixed feelings. 
+Trump said that he hated to think about people being unable to get health care, but he worried about the cost to businesses. Then he commented on the President, saying: “It’s a pretty tough thing, but yeah, right now, he’s certainly looking like a hero.” So. Um. Mr. Trump’s memory is pretty damn shaky if you ask me. It seems that he is either trying to desperately to revise reality in order to put himself in a better light, or he is suffering from a very serious memory disorder. See if you can make any sense at all out of this mess . Featured image via YouTube Screengrab . About Karen Shiebler 
+Karen is a retired elementary school teacher with many years of progressive activism behind her. She is the proud mother of three young adults who were all arrested with Occupy Wall Street. To see what she writes about in her spare time, check out her blog at ""Empty Nest, Full Life"" Connect",FAKE
+8337,Dump the Democrats for Good - Russia News Now,"
+— from Black Agenda Report 
+This columnist did not see a Donald Trump victory coming. The degree of disgust directed at an awful candidate was more than I had predicted. Neither the corporate media, nor Wall Street nor the pundits nor the pollsters saw this coming either. Their defeat and proof of their uselessness is total. Those of us who rejected the elite consensus and didn’t support Hillary Clinton should be proud. 
+Black people are now in fear and in shock when we ought to be spoiling for a fight. All is not lost. Even the victory of the openly bigoted Trump poses an opportunity to right our political ship. Not the electoral ship, the political one. For decades black Americans have been voting for people who have done them wrong. Bill Clinton got rid of public assistance as a right, and undid regulations that kept Wall Street in check. He put black people in jail and yet black people didn’t turn on him until he and his wife tried to defeat Obama. But Obama gave us more of the same. Bailouts of Wall Street, interventions and death for people all over the world, and a beat down of black people who still loved him. Despite the fear of Republican victory we end up losing whenever a Democratic presidential candidate wins. 
+Victory is ours if we dump the Democrat Party and their black misleaders. The Democrats were so entrenched in their corruption and self-dealing that they didn’t see the Bernie Sanders campaign for modest reform as the savior it might have been. Instead they marched in lock step with a woman who was heartily disliked. Sanders went along as the sheep dog who led his flock straight over the cliff. The Democrats inadvertently galvanized people who had stopped participating in the system and who want change from top to bottom. 
+One of our biggest problems lies not in facts but in perceptions. What did Democrats do for black people? The Democrats ship living wage jobs off shore in corrupt trade deals like NAFTA and TTP. They don’t prosecute killer cops or raise the minimum wage. Trump will be hard pressed to deport more people than Obama did. The list of treachery is very long. 
+When Donald Trump asked black people, “What have you got to lose?” his words were met with derision. But in reality he posed a good question. What do we have to show for years of Democratic votes? Obama bailed out banks, insurance companies, Big Pharma and even Ukraine. But he didn’t rebuild Detroit or New Orleans. The water in Flint, Michigan is still poisoned and the prisons are still full. 
+The outpouring of love for Barack Obama was purely symbolic. In state after state, black people who gave him victory in 2008 and 2012 stayed home. They loved seeing him and his wife dressed up at state dinners but they were never fully engaged in politics because that is not what Democrats want. The love was phony and void of any political intent. Donald Trump will be president because of that veneer of political activism. 
+As for white people who voted for Trump, of course many of them are racists. However they are not without valid complaints. They don’t want neoliberalism but black people don’t either. They don’t want wars around the world and neither do black people. We corrupt our own heritage of radicalism in favor of shallow symbolism. While we slept walk in foolish nostalgia for Obama and cried at the thought of him leaving office, white people kept their hatred of Hillary to themselves or lied to pollsters. They want America to be great again, great for them. White nostalgic yearnings are dangerous for black people, and we must be vigilant. But there may be opportunity in this crisis if we dare to seize it. 
+Republicans have been the white people’s party for nearly 50 years. Trump just made it more obvious. He didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. We don’t have to be the losers in this election. Let us remember what we have achieved in our history. Half of black Americans didn’t even have the right to vote in the 1960s yet made earth shattering progress in a short time. But we must understand the source of that progress. It came from struggle and daring to create the crises that always bring about change. 
+Yes white people will strut for president Trump but that doesn’t mean we must submit as if we are in the Jim Crow days of old. We have ourselves to rely on and we can reclaim our history of fighting for self-determination. The dread of redneck celebration should not be our primary motivation right now. Before we quake in fear at white America we must send the scoundrels packing. 
+The black politicians and the Democratic National Committee and the civil rights organizations that don’t help the masses must all be kicked to the proverbial curb. The rejection must be complete and blame must be laid squarely at their feet. 
+Those of us who voted for the green party ticket of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka must stand firmly and proudly for our choice. We must strategize on building a progressive party to replace the Democrats who never help us. We must applaud Julian Assange and Wikileaks for exposing their corruption. There should be no back tracking on the fight to build left wing political power. 
+The black people who didn’t return to the polls shouldn’t be blamed either. Those individuals must have personal introspection that is meaningful and political. Their lack of enthusiasm speaks to Democratic Party and black misleadership incompetence. We should refrain from personal blame and help one another in this process as we fight for justice and peace. 
+The end of the duopoly is the first step in liberation. Staying with a party that literally did nothing was a slow and agonizing death. Sometimes shock therapy is needed to improve one’s condition. If we don’t take the necessary steps to free ourselves this election outcome will be a disaster. Instead, why not bring the disaster to the people who made it happen? The destruction of the Democratic Party and creation of a truly progressive political movement is the only hope for black America. Margaret Kimberley About author Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via email at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.Com. Ms. Kimberley’ maintains an edifying and frequently updated blog at freedomrider.blogspot.com . More of her work is also available at her Black Agenda Report archive page . Related ",FAKE
+731,Donald Trump is going to win: This is why Hillary Clinton can’t defeat what Trump represents,"The Trump alliance desires to remake the world in their own image, just as the class representing neoliberal globalization has insisted on doing so. The difference couldn’t be starker. Capitalism today is placeless, locationless, nameless, faceless, while Trump is talking about hauling corporations back to where they belong, in their home countries, fix them in place by means of rewards and retribution, like one handles a recalcitrant child.
+
+Trump is a businessman, while Mitt Romney was a businessman too, yet I predict victory for the former while the latter obviously lost miserably. What is the difference? While Trump “builds” things (literal buildings), in places like Manhattan and Atlantic City, places one can recognize and identify with, and while Trump’s entire life has been orchestrated around building luxury and ostentatiousness, again things one can tangibly grasp and hold on to (the Trump steaks!), Romney is the personification of a placeless corporation, making his quarter billion dollars from consulting, i.e., representing economic abstraction at its purest, serving as a high priest of the transnational capitalist class.
+
+No one can visualize the boardroom Romney sat in, as head of Bain Capital, but, via The Apprentice, everyone has seen, for more than a decade, what Trump’s boardroom looks like, and what it takes to be a “winner” in the real economy. What was that façade behind the collapse of fictitious corporations like Enron in the early 2000s? Trump supposedly pulled the veil off.
+
+In the present election, Hillary Clinton represents precisely the same disembodiedness as Romney, for example because of her association with the Clinton Foundation. Where did the business of the state, while she was secretary of state, stop, and where did the business of global philanthropy (just another name for global business), begin, and who can possibly tell the difference? The maneuverings of the Clinton Foundation, in the popular imagination, are as arcane as the colossal daily transactions on the world’s financial exchanges.
+
+Everything about Clinton—and this becomes all the more marked when she takes on the (false) mantle of speaking for the underclass, with whom she bears no mental or physical resemblance—reeks of the easy mobility of the global rentier class. Their efficacy cannot be accounted for, not through the kind of democratic process that is unfolding before our eyes as a remnant of the American founding imagination, her whole sphere of movement is pure abstraction.
+
+In this election, abstraction will clearly lose, and corporeality, even if—or particularly if—gross and vulgar and rising from the repressed, will undoubtedly win. A business tycoon who vigorously inserted himself in the imaginations of the dispossessed as the foremost exponent of birtherism surely cannot be entirely beholden to the polite elites, can he? Trump is capital, but he is not capital, he is of us but also not of us in the way that the working class desires elevation from their rootedness, still strongly identified with place and time, not outside it. After all, he posed the elemental question, Where were you born?
+
+Though he is in fact the libertine (certainly not Clinton, who is libertinism’s antithesis), he will be able to tar her with being permissive to an extreme degree—an “enabler,” as the current jargon has it, for her husband’s proclivities, for example. It has nothing to do with misogyny. It has everything to do with the kind of vocabulary that must substitute for people’s real emotions, their fears and desires, in the face of an abstract market that presumes to rule out everything but the “rational” utility-maximizing motive.
+
+For the market to exist, as classical economics would have it, there must be free buyers and sellers, competitive prices, a marketplace that remains fixed and transparent, and none of these elements exist anymore in the neoliberal economy, which seeks to stamp out the last vestiges of resistance in the most forgotten parts of the world. In fact, the market has created—in the ghost towns of the American Midwest, for example—a kind of sub-Saharan desolation, in the heartland of the country, all the better to identify the completeness of its project in the “successful” coastal cities. Trump is a messenger from the most successful of these cities, and his very jet-setting presence, in the middle of empty landscapes, provides an imaginary access point.
+
+Darkness in the human soul is not utility-maximizing, therefore someone has to stand in for the opposite of what the market establishes as the universal solvent, and that someone, in this election, happens to be Hillary Clinton; which makes her unelectable. She will not, in fact, be able to discover, as she hasn’t so far, anything like an authentic voice which can prove to the electorate that she is not that dark force the market cannot account for. But note the irony: by discrediting Clinton in this manner, the losers in the global economy are actually articulating yet another form for the decisive articulateness of the market after all!
+
+The population across the board does not see the abstractions of the transnational capitalist class being able to solve a problem like ISIS, which represents a crisis of authority. Wasn’t al-Qaeda defeated? Didn’t we get Osama bin Laden’s head? Then what is this lingering distaste called ISIS? Forms of darkness are easily substitutable, thus Hillary (whose synecdoche is Benghazi, or secret emails) becomes unable to speak the truth, the more she tries.
+
+But…I do not want to claim for a minute that Trump can represent anything other than the further strengthening of neoliberal capitalism, both domestically and globally. He can only represent a further intensification, as would be true of anyone else. The total globalization of the market—our greatest of myths today, the one all-powerful entity to which all, state, civil society, and individual, have completely bent—is unstoppable. The flat earth posited by Tom Friedman in the 1990s will end up erasing all local distinctiveness, the end goal of neoliberalism. While Trump represents the desire for national regeneration—as is true of any neofascist movement—this is not possible in the twenty-first century, because the state as we have known it has ended, as has the market in the conventional understanding.
+
+In the end, Trump cannot take charge, because no one can take charge. Capital today serves nothing other than capital itself. In the current post-democratic, post-“capitalism” era, the myths of regeneration propounded by Trump serve as convenient fictions, as capital well knows, and is therefore little disturbed by.
+
+Nonetheless, Trump has brought to the surface the leftover mobs of American society, the residual unemployable, the “losers” constituting perhaps a third of society, who were never acknowledged as such during the past many cycles of political ups and downs, but who are now forcing the successful two-thirds to face up to the fictions of the market.
+
+When Trump’s masses see Clinton tacking to the middle—as she undoubtedly will, rather than go for the surefire path to victory by heading left, by picking Bernie Sanders for example—the more they will detest it, which will push her only further in their direction, not in the direction that can bring victory. Clinton, because of her disembodied identity in the placeless global economy, cannot make a movement toward the direction of reality, because the equations would falter, the math would be off, the logic would be unsustainable. And that is the contradiction that the country can easily see, that is the exposed front of the abstract market that will bring about its supposed reckoning in the form of Clinton’s defeat.
+
+But the reckoning, again, will be pure fiction. Trump is not a fascist father figure, he is not the second coming of Mussolini, he is the new virtual figure who is as real as reality television, which is even more recessive and vanishing compared to Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood fictions. The field of action in which Trump specialized for a long time before the nation, as dress rehearsal for the current (and final) role, was one where, at least to outward appearances, the presence of surplus capital was acknowledged and taken for granted, and aspirants competed to know more about it and to desperately work on its behalf. With the ascension of Trump, an entire country of apprentices wants to get a handle on surplus capital by bringing the state back in, but as I said before, this is impossible because the pre-neoliberal state is gone, it has been reduced to the market, it is the market. Again, capital serves only capital, though Trump’s followers wish to see him create a split whereby they can enter the picture, forcibly, though even they perhaps know that Trump, as president, cannot sue evanescent corporations, or other realities of the market, even if suing is a tendency that comes naturally to him. To take the logic one step further, the myth of the market—or the way “government” is run today—cannot acknowledge one thing and one thing only: death. If you compete (whether in Trump’s boardroom or on the “level playing field” he wants to bring about in America by excluding illegal competitors, whether undocumented aliens or Chinese currency manipulators or unwanted Mexican goods), you win. (Of course, this only strengthens the myth of the market, but that is something that will be evident to the populace once Trump is in power; they want a localized, responsive, non-idle market, but the market is beyond the need to accommodate itself in those ways.) But to get back to death, Trump’s campaign has been successful so far, and will surely be victorious in the end, because he is the only one who has brought death back into the discourse. The only people identified with death today on the global scene—the only people not part of the market and not able to be part of it—are terrorists, undocumented immigrants, the homeless and the mentally ill, those who have no claims to success in the market. Trump’s people want to make sure—from the purest feeling of shame known to politics—that they are not of the unchosen ones, they want to enforce a radical separation between their kind of shame, which they think is unwarranted, by excluding illegal competition, by constructing literal walls to keep out the death-dealers, by overruling the transnational party elites who have sold them out. Trump is vocally identifying the death aura, prodding the working class to confront the other, which is as alienated and excluded as itself, but which the working class likes to imagine is the irreconcilable other. By forcing this confrontation he has put himself in the winner’s seat. Let us note the rise of suicide among white working-class men and women, of all ages. This—like the other deals in death that the market fails to name—is an assertion of independence from the market. Let us note too the power of the transgender rights movement (after the relative normalization of the presence of AIDS, and also of same-sex marriage) to prompt ferocious emotions amongst the excluded; this movement has become a substitute for the power of death—sexual death—to terrify us. They would rather be terrified by something they can do something about, knowing that the market wants to assimilate this form of gender-bending, identity-shifting, unlocalizable personality triumph. Again, Trump is virtual but not virtual, he is of TV but not of TV, functioning more as an ambassador from TV than an actor or role-player in that world—which makes him uniquely equipped, in the eyes of his supporters, for taking on the kinds of death-dealers that they think mess up the market against their parochial interests. Think again of Trump’s initiation of his campaign with the idea of the wall, and calling those who break through the wall rapists and murderers. And compare it to Clinton’s opening gambit of giving identifiable personalities to the clear winners in the transnational race to acquire and embody capital, paraded one after the other in her first campaign commercial. And then think of the culture warriors, both on the left and the right, as perceiving every threat as a personal attack on their very being, their very existence, no matter how trivial the offense (hence the revealing term “micro-aggressions), exactly as the Trump proletariat reacts to attacks on their identity, as they have been trained to respond after decades of rampant identity politics. Now consider, in the face of these three competing tendencies, the market’s pure victory; because all three games are being played out on its terms, it is the preordained winner. And yet, I would say, Trump must win, he has to win, to give the element he represents, of the three mentioned here, a degree of equality with the other two. The spectacle must be kept interesting after all. What is common between the “multitudes” who show up for the Trump and Sanders rallies? Both constituencies are rebelling against the empire of capital, the empire of the market (whether the right calls it the New World Order or the left calls it free trade), and they show up naming empire as such. In this election campaign, whoever names the empire of the market wins (Trump, or Sanders had he been able to overcome the barriers erected by the Democratic party), and whoever hides its name (Clinton), loses. Are these rallies, Trump’s and Sanders’s, aesthetic spectacles, or are they radical politics? The market does not have an answer to this question, or rather it has already answered it to its own satisfaction. Is Trump a racist? Does he represent racists? We have to take into account the fact that the recent resurgence of racism—in the form of overt police beatings, for example, and other things that we thought had been relegated to the past—is a symptom of the failure of the old state, it is simply an assertion on the part of the market that we cannot count on the “state” as such to resolve the fantasy of racism as the great equalizer. The market, I would dare to assert, is quite happy at the failure of the state to contend with racism. And to the extent that Trump fans the flames of racism, the market is happy with that too, it remains above the fray, so to speak, it remains the only untouched, unsullied, uncorrupted entity in the whole ongoing show. I expect Trump to take a national lead shortly and never relinquish it until the end. It will be easy if he keeps the libertine and destructive aspects of himself in perfect balance, seesawing from one to the other, as he has so far, appealing to an elemental fear in the country, torn apart by the abstraction of the market, to which Clinton has not the faintest hope of responding. He only has to use one distinctively non-misogynist, concretely unifying, morose five-letter word in the debates: NAFTA. A pure market abstraction that has turned out to be not so much an abstraction.",REAL
+3270,Nevada GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval Won't Run For Senate In 2016,"Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) announced Tuesday that he will not be running for his state's open U.S. Senate seat in 2016, disappointing many Republicans who saw him as the strongest candidate to win.
+
+""I have said many times that it is an honor and a privilege to serve as Nevada's Chief Executive and that I love my job. My heart is in my responsibilities as Governor and continuing to build the New Nevada. My undivided attention must be devoted to being the best Governor, husband and father I can be. For these reasons, I will not seek the United States Senate seat that will be available in 2016,"" Sandoval said in a statement posted on his website.
+
+""I support Governor Sandoval's difficult decision to not run for the United States Senate,"" said Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), who had urged the governor to run. ""Under his leadership, our state's economy continues to experience the Nevada comeback that we all know it is capable of achieving. While Governor Sandoval's voice and experience would have been a welcomed addition here on Capitol Hill, I join the entire Nevada family in wishing him success for the duration of his term in office.""
+
+Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) revealed in March that he won't seek re-election in 2016, setting off a scramble to see whether Republicans will be able to pick up his seat. Reid has endorsed Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, a former state attorney general, who announced her candidacy shortly after his announcement.
+
+Sandoval easily won a second term last year, and is the first Latino to serve as Nevada's governor. But he has long sounded reluctant about entering the Senate race.
+
+“Do you really think … I would propose the things that I proposed last night, thinking I might be on a ballot?” Sandoval said in January, referring to a proposed tax increase that would be the largest in Nevada history.
+
+Las Vegas City Council member Bob Beers (R) has already declared his candidacy on the Republican side. U.S. Reps. Joe Heck and Mark Amodei, both Republicans, have already opted out of the race, but they could reconsider now that Sandoval isn't running.
+
+CORRECTION: This piece originally stated that Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) is also thinking of running for the Senate seat. She recently announced, however, that she is sitting out the race.
+
+Have a tip or story idea to share with us? Email us at scoops@huffingtonpost.com. We'll keep your identity private unless you tell us otherwise.",REAL
+5514,The man behind the Trump rally disturbance in Reno,"The man behind the Trump rally disturbance in Reno 11/06/2016 
+USA TODAY 
+The man who caused a commotion at a Donald Trump rally Saturday said he’s a registered Republican who wanted only to show his displeasure with his party’s nominee. 
+Members of the audience at the event for the GOP presidential nominee tackled Austyn Crites, 33, of Reno after someone yelled “gun” while others were trying to rip away his anti-Trump sign. 
+“I just went with sign that said ‘Republicans Against Trump,’ ” Crites said. “It’s a sign that you can find online. I held up the sign and initially people around me were just booing me telling me to get out of there. Then a couple of these guys tried grabbing the sign out of my hands.” 
+Crites had no weapon. Secret Service agents later released a statement to that effect and let him go without charges. 
+Agents whisked Trump offstage because Crites was near the front of the auditorium at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. 
+Crites said he holds no ill will toward the Secret Service or Reno police, who were just doing their job. 
+“I was trying to get the Secret Service’s attention for them to respond,” said Michael Newton, 45, of Santa Rosa, Calif., who helped restrain Crites. “They didn’t respond. I thought I had to do something. I put my knee on what I think was his head, so I’m not really sure. There were five guys on him and he was moving. I tried to help them immobilize him.” In final Colorado push, Trump urges supporters to hand-deliver ballots 
+Newton said he felt as if Crites were the aggressor. 
+“I saw his hand contact someone’s face,” he said. “Maybe two people.” 
+Crites said he didn’t strike anyone, but after he was taken to the ground, he felt as if he were being mobbed. 
+“Multiple people just tackled me down, kicking me choking me and just beating me up,” he said. “That’s when things even got crazier. I was on the ground and people were holding my arms, legs and I kept saying I can barely breathe. I was turning my neck just to get a little bit of air to keep from passing out.” 
+That’s when police intervened, taking Crites away in handcuffs. 
+Newton’s partner, Donald Newton, 47, of Santa Rosa took video of the immediate aftermath. 
+The Secret Service said its investigation is ongoing. The agency uses magnetometers at presidential campaign sites, making it difficult for weapons to be smuggled into events. 
+What’s baffling to Crites is how anyone could have thought he had a gun. His sign was in the air for some time and he wasn’t making any sudden movements, he said. 
+“It wasn’t like they noticed something suspicious and tackled me,” Crites said. “That’s not the case.” 
+He said he backs some GOP candidates and just wanted to voice frustration with Trump, not cause panic. 
+“I love all the people in that rally,” he said. “We’re all fellow Americans. They’re doing their patriotic duty. They support their candidate. I’m just there showing that I’m a Republican. I’m all of your people’s brother. I just have a slight difference of opinion.” 
+Later on Facebook, Crites wrote that he has no connection with the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton but has canvassed for her for about three hours, contributed to her campaign and voted for her. 
+“Take what happened to me tonight as a classic example of dictator incitement of violence — against your own Republican brother with a stupid sign,” he wrote. The post and his entire account were taken down soon afterward as some Trump supporters on social media called him a “Clinton thug,”“Hillary shill” and “Trump assassin.” 
+Shortly after the incident at the rally, Trump returned to the stage to raucous applause, thanking the Secret Service and launching back into his prepared remarks. His campaign later issued a statement also thanking the Secret Service and his supporters. 
+Follow Seth A. Richardson on Twitter: @SethARichardson",FAKE
+6641,This Collage of Corrut Presstitutes Making Fools of Themselves Is a Keeper,"This Collage of Corrupt Presstitutes Making Fools of Themselves Is a Keeper
+http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-12/martin-armstrong-exposes-real-clinton-conspiracy-which-backfired-dramatically 
+The financial media can equally wallow in its incompetence and dishonesty. Instead of collapsing as predicted, the stock market rose 800 points on Trump’s victory.
+The post This Collage of Corrut Presstitutes Making Fools of Themselves Is a Keeper appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+3224,Can Jeb Bush fire up the base like he’s fired up the establishment?,"Jeb Bush’s nascent presidential campaign has already won over many of the big-dollar donors and GOP elites. What he needs to prove now is that he can win over the crowds.
+
+Until visits to South Carolina and other early states this month, the former Florida governor hadn’t been on the campaign trail for himself in 13 years. He hadn’t sold himself to the deeply conservative, tea party-inspired crowds that have emerged as a driving Republican force in the Obama era. He’d never snapped so many “selfies” with admirers.
+
+And he admits his delivery is a work in progress. “I’m learning along the way how to get better,” he told reporters in South Carolina this week.
+
+And what has he learned? “I think if you’re on a long journey and you start at X, if you have any kind of aspirational nature in who you are, you’re expecting to get to 2X, 3X, 4X,” he said. “I’m goal-driven, and I can assure you I’ll get better at whatever it is I need to do.”
+
+The exchange sums Bush up well. One moment he’s lofty; the next he’s granular. There are fleeting moments of personal connection, but mostly he’s proudly workmanlike — and unafraid to come off as the smartest guy in the room. He has a Bill Clinton-like ability to speak on multiple issues with fluency, but with a mechanical delivery in place of a friendly drawl.
+
+Bush is casting himself as the experienced adult in a Republican field packed with younger, crowd-pleasing contenders, from Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. The question is whether his wonky, somewhat stilted approach will have appeal beyond the ranks of the establishment GOP.
+
+“Clearly, he’s smart, there’s no question about that,” said Bob Knight, a lobbyist who watched Bush speak in Greenville and ­Columbia, S.C. “You can buy that — but can you buy charisma? Does he have the charisma to win?”
+
+Bush starts his standard stump speech with a quick nod to his family history. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he introduced himself as “George’s boy and W.’s brother,” but quickly put distance between himself and the former presidents.
+
+“All of my mistakes I made in my life are my own doing. They have nothing to do with my family. I have a great family. But I’ve been on my own journey,” he said.
+
+When he made his first stop on the tour in Las Vegas, a man asked Bush how he would be a different president than his father and brother were. He deflected by turning the question around at the crowd.
+
+“You have brothers and sisters?” he asked the man.
+
+“Are you exactly the same?” Bush asked.
+
+Most Bush appearances last about an hour. He poses for a few pictures and shakes hands before giving about seven minutes of introductory remarks. Then he fields questions for at least 45 minutes on immigration, energy policy, Common Core education standards, Alzheimer’s research or the national debt.
+
+He traveled Thursday to the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta for a brief stop, which coincided with a visit by Georgia-born rapper Ludacris, who was being honored for his charitable foundation.
+
+Bush joked that he came “because I heard Ludacris was gonna be here.” Photos of Bush and Ludacris circulated widely on Twitter.
+
+Repeatedly during events this month, Bush marveled about the future. Pointing to the Pebble Smartwatch on his wrist, Bush said most Americans will soon be wearing such devices to track their health, bank accounts and sleep patterns — part of a “technological revolution,” as he put it in both New Hampshire and South Carolina.
+
+Bush is 6-foot-4, a few inches taller than his brother. He has a slight hunch in his shoulders, something he admitted he’s working to correct. He has lost more than 20 pounds in the past few months as he prepares for the expected campaign. Audience members commonly say that he’s much taller than they expected.
+
+While talking with voters, he calls men “brother,” says he’s “all in” on his positions and frequently labels things “cool.” He goes out of his way to thank Hispanic waiters at restaurants and speaks to them in his fluent Spanish. He uses outdated expressions such as “Holy schnikes” and “Holy Toledo,” and decries the “yapping” and “food fight” in Washington.
+
+He also has a dry, deadpan sense humor — so dry it often evaporates quickly. “There are some people that have been dying to ask a question back there,” he told the Las Vegas crowd. “I don’t want them to do that.”
+
+At this early stage, most of Bush’s public appearances are hastily arranged. In the hotel ballrooms, community centers and restaurants, there are no campaign placards, no booming music, no bright T-shirts and very little staff. Sometimes, he’s showing up as the headline act at somebody else’s event, such as a Chamber of Commerce meeting.
+
+His traveling posse includes similarly lanky, bespectacled men. There’s Josh Venable, who worked for Bush’s education foundation and advises him on policy matters. Coleman Lapointe is the “body guy” who once worked for Bush’s father and is tasked with taking photos on the cellphones of supporters. Tim Miller, Bush’s communications director-in-waiting, is the freshest face in the pack.
+
+Other traveling companions have included Kristy Campbell, his press secretary who held a similar job when he was governor; Sally Bradshaw, a longtime consigliere tasked with recruiting top staffers and donors; and David Kochel, his campaign manager-in-waiting.
+
+In each state, the group piles into a rented SUV and Bush sits in the front passenger-side seat — never in the back. He snacks on unsalted almonds as part of a strict “paleo” diet. That meant eating takeout from Ruth’s Chris Steak House on the ride from ­Columbia to Myrtle Beach on Tuesday night, or pulled pork with no barbecue sauce during a recent stop in Waukee, Iowa.
+
+Virtually all the voters who show up to see Bush say they are reserving judgment until they see other candidates.
+
+“I want to know more about him,” Dennis Cavanaugh of Murrells Inlet, S.C., said after Bush’s visit to Myrtle Beach. Cavanaugh said that after Obama, the country needs to do a better job vetting the next president. “Anybody and his brother can run for office — literally. I think that’s part of what the big problem is.”
+
+His wife, Anne, seemed won over by Bush for a simple reason: He encouraged people to e-mail him questions to his personal address, jeb@jeb.org.
+
+“I like that because I think if I e-mailed President Obama I wouldn’t get an answer,” she said.
+
+As his travels continue, Bush seems increasingly convinced that he can outlast others in the field.
+
+“It’s been a blast,” he told reporters late one day in Columbia. “Just for the record, I’m not a candidate — but as I’ve gone about listening to people and hearing their questions, it’s been fun, truly it has been joyful.”",REAL
+2402,White House has been aided recently by ruling in contraceptives case,"When a split Supreme Court last June exempted some companies from providing female employees with some contraceptive coverage because of the employers’ religious objections, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sounded the alarm.
+
+The 5-to-4 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby was one of “startling breadth,” Ginsburg wrote. “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield, by its immoderate reading” of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).
+
+Ginsburg’s warnings might yet be proved right. Gretchen Borchelt, vice president for Health and Reproductive Rights at the National Women’s Law Center, said the Hobby Lobby decision’s protection of religious objections since has been cited by a paramedic student who objected to a vaccination requirement and has been raised as a defense in a child labor case.
+
+But in what many expect to be the next major test of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate — a challenge over whether the government has done enough to accommodate the objections of religiously affiliated nonprofit organizations such as universities, hospitals and charities — the Hobby Lobby decision so far has aided the Obama administration.
+
+Three circuit courts of appeals have examined the issue, and they have been unanimous in ruling that the government’s solution of shifting the burden to the groups’ insurers allows women no-cost access to contraceptives without infringing on the religious rights of the objecting nonprofits.
+
+Last week, a split panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago turned aside complaints from the University of Notre Dame. And the entire U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit voted 6 to 3 not to reconsider a decision by one of its panels, which had ruled in favor of the Obama administration in a challenge brought by a group called Priests for Life and the Archdiocese of Washington.
+
+The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia has made a similar decision in cases brought by Catholic organizations in Pennsylvania.
+
+“The decisions are consistent with Hobby Lobby,” said Borchelt. “We think it’s clear there’s no substantial burden” on the group’s religious beliefs because of the accommodation the government offers.
+
+Lori Windham, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, disagrees and notes there are challenges yet to be decided in appeals courts around the country.
+
+“We believe that the Supreme Court will take up one of these cases next fall,” she said.
+
+The Affordable Care Act requires that women covered by group health plans be able to obtain contraceptives at no additional cost. Originally, only religious organizations such as churches were exceptions. But after protests from religious nonprofit groups, the government devised an accommodation.
+
+To be eligible, a religious organization must certify to its insurance company that it opposes coverage for contraceptives, or it must send a letter to the government saying so and provide the name of its insurance company. The insurers and government take over from there to provide the services.
+
+But the religious groups say either of those options serve as a “trigger” that allows the contraceptives to be provided and makes the groups complicit in what they consider sin.
+
+In November, the D.C. Circuit panel unanimously rejected that reasoning.
+
+“All plaintiffs must do to opt out is express what they believe and seek what they want via a letter or two-page form,” Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote. “That bit of paperwork is more straightforward and minimal than many that are staples of nonprofit organizations’ compliance with law.”
+
+“Religious nonprofits that opt out are excused from playing any role in the provision of contraception services, and they remain free to condemn contraception in the clearest terms,” she wrote.
+
+In the Hobby Lobby ruling, the Supreme Court’s five-member majority said the mandate requiring some companies to provide some contraceptive coverage violated the protections of RFRA. The law says government must have a compelling reason to substantially burden religious beliefs and the requirement be the least restrictive means for achieving the government’s goal.
+
+Pillard noted that it was the lack of an accommodation for private companies whose owners object to providing contraceptives that led to the Hobby Lobby ruling, although the majority did not rule on whether the government’s accommodation would suffice.
+
+Three of the D.C. Circuit’s judges wanted to reconsider the panel’s decision and rule for the plaintiffs.
+
+Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown said religious groups decide whether their beliefs are compromised by government regulation. “The panel conceded plaintiffs sincerely ‘believe that the regulatory framework makes them complicit in the provision of contraception,’ ” Brown wrote. “That acknowledgment should end our inquiry into the substance of their beliefs.”
+
+But in the Notre Dame case, Circuit Judge David F. Hamilton said it was not the sincerity of the groups’ beliefs being questioned but their legal arguments.
+
+“This is an issue not of moral philosophy but of federal law,” Hamilton wrote. “Federal courts are not required to treat Notre Dame’s erroneous legal interpretation as beyond their reach—even if that interpretation is also a sincere and religious belief. Notre Dame is not entitled to nullify the law’s benefits for others based on this mistake of law, which is the foundation of its claim of a substantial burden.”
+
+The panel was reconsidering, at the Supreme Court’s direction, an earlier decision against Notre Dame. But it said the Hobby Lobby decision only reinforced its previous ruling.
+
+The justices’ interest in the issue could become clear soon. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who is designated to handle special requests from the 3rd Circuit, last month granted the Pennsylvania organizations a temporary delay in providing the services. The groups are preparing a petition to ask the court to take their cases.
+
+Alito asked the federal government to respond and said the delay would last only until further order from him or the full court.
+
+In a letter last week, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who represents the government, reminded the justices of the recent victories in the lower courts.",REAL
+7306,Stocks Pump'n'Dump As Crude Crumbles To 3-Week Lows,"Kaiser Sousa Oct 26, 2016 4:07 PM 
+when i awoke this morning the Dow Jones Propaganda Index was down 72 points…then in a matter of only a few minutes it inexplicably reverse ramped almost 100 points to turn positive… 
+it was then that i decided to scour the Lamestream media, Alt-Media, and lastly ZeroHedge headlines to uncover what could be behind such a preposterous, absolutely fraudulent spike across all the Fraud indices… 
+however before i could conclude my inquiry the DJPI spiked another 50 plus points to recapture the all important, CON fidence inspiring 18,200 mark coincidentally beginning exactly in the last 30 minutes of “trading” in the EuroPeon cesspool of fraud and manipulation - Londone… 
+it was then that i realized that what had occurred was the same bullshit i’ve witnessed for the last 5-7 years running…that being that the Fraud Markets ramped on ABSOLUTLEY NO GENUINE POSITIVE MACRO-ECONOMIC, GEO-POLITICAL NEWS OR DATA WHATSOFUCKINGEVER… 
+at that moment , roughly 9:14 am, i realized that for todays ""Fraud Markets Wrap” to be posted latter in the day, i could simply “cut & paste“ from previous commentaries regarding what the rest of the day would portend because as i and many others have learned - “When the same bullshit happens every day there’s no need to type…just cut and paste…” - Kaiser Sousa - 
+so thats precisely what i did… ""then, of course yet again all of the U.S. Fraud Indices entered into the sideways shuffle, ridiculous narrow “trading” pattern you all now as “suspended levitation” for the bulk of the day…” - Kaiser Sousa - from every day the last 2 years. http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/djia 
+then in the famous last 2 hours of “trading”, and despite the “markets” coughing up the phony reversal implemented by “you know who”,they nonetheless fought to the death to hold on to those “green shoots” with “investors” piling into such noted bail weathers like , BOEING, NIKE, GE, and DISNEY pushing the DJPI back above the 18,200 mark… proving that the recovery in the land of the “exceptional’s” continues to shower its’ waiters, bartenders, fast food servers, and interest income starved senior citizens with generational wealth and prosperity for all… 
+lastly, as for the blatant attempts to hold the phony paper prices of Gold & Silver within ridiculous “trading ranges” while the global financial and monetary system crumbles before “eyes that dare to see” alike every fiat currency (WITHOUT EXCEPTION!!) has throughout history - lets just say this…how much more obvious can the Fed, Exchange Stabilization Fund, ThreadNeddle St. inbreeds, and Scum St. flunkies make it for you 
+DEATH TO THE FUCKING MONEYCHANGERS.",FAKE
+9414,"ING TO CUT 7,000 JOBS…","Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 Home › POLITICS › ING TO CUT 7,000 JOBS… ING TO CUT 7,000 JOBS… 0 SHARES 
+[11/3/16] ING Group ‘s plans to shed 7,000 jobs and invest in its digital platforms to make annual savings of 900 million euros ($1 billion) by 2021, drew swift criticism from unions of the Netherlands’ largest financial services company on Monday. 
+The layoffs represent slightly less than 12 percent of ING’s 52,000 workforce because nearly 1,000 are expected to come at suppliers rather than the bank itself. 
+But they are the heaviest since 2009, when ING was forced to restructure and spin off its insurance activities after receiving a state bailout during the financial crisis. 
+Labor unions were highly critical of the decision. 
+“I don’t think this was the intention of the (government) when it kept ING afloat with bailout money,” Ike Wiersinga of the Dutch CNV union said. 
+In Belgian, where the number of jobs lost will be highest, labor leader Herman Vanderhaegen called the decision a “horror show” in a statement published on the website of De Tijd, and said workers would strike on Friday. 
+Although other large banks have announced mass layoffs at branch offices in the past year to boost profitability, ING said the job cuts were partly to combine technology platforms and risk control centers as well to help it to contend with regulatory burdens and low interest rates. 
+“You have to announce these programs and these intentions at a time when you can afford them,” CEO Ralph Hamers told reporters on a conference call. “We’re strong right now, we have good results, we are growing and then you have to do the repairs, and not when you don’t have any choice anymore.” Post navigation Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 RESOURCES",FAKE
+9003,"Thomas Reuters cuts 2000 jobs, spends $200m streamlining","Thomas Reuters cuts 2000 jobs, spends $200m streamlining November 01, 2016 The Thomson Reuters logo is seen on the company building in Times Square, New York October 29, 2013. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri/File Photo 
+Thomas Reuters Corp has announced they will spend $200-250 million in the fourth quarter to streamline operations, including cutting 2000 jobs, across 150 locations, in 39 countries, approximately 4 percent of their workforce. Spokesman: Thomas Reuters Corp employs about 48,000 people globally. Jim Smith, chief executive: The changes come as part of its multi-year effort to streamline its businesses. Smith: “It's about simplification and taking out bureaucracy and taking out layers all of which have added complexity and slowed us down.” ""These actions are not driven by any reaction to market conditions or in any way coming on the back of underperformance."" Thomson Reuters is the parent of Reuters News. Memo posted Tuesday: There will be no decline in headcount in the Reuters newsroom. Thomas Reuters Corp reported net income for Q3 was $286 million or 36 cents per share. Net income Q3 2015: $293 million or 36 cents per share. Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S: Excluding special items, earnings were 54 cents per share. Analysts on average expected 47 cents. Revenue rose 1 percent to $2.74 billion before currency effects and was flat when they were factored in. Thomas Reuters Corp reiterated its forecast of 2 percent to 3 percent revenue growth for the year. Financial & Risk segment: Sales outpaced cancellations for the 10th straight quarter, overall unit revenue was flat at $1.52 billion. Due to streamline spending, Reuters has lowered its 2016 forecast for underlying operating profit margin to between 16 percent to 17 percent, from 18.4 to 19.4 percent. 
+(NEW YORK CITY) Thomson Reuters Corp said on Tuesday it would cut about 2,000 jobs worldwide, about 4 percent of its workforce, and take a fourth-quarter charge of $200 million to $250 million to streamline its business. 
+The restructuring across 39 countries and 150 locations would mainly affect the Financial & Risk business and the Enterprise, Technology & Operations Group, the news and information company said. The company employs about 48,000 people globally, a spokesman said. 
+The changes come as part of its multi-year effort to streamline its businesses, said Jim Smith, chief executive, in an interview Tuesday. 
+""It's about simplification and taking out bureaucracy and taking out layers all of which have added complexity and slowed us down,"" he said. ""These actions are not driven by any reaction to market conditions or in any way coming on the back of underperformance."" 
+Thomson Reuters is the parent of Reuters News, which competes for financial customers with Bloomberg LP as well as News Corp's Dow Jones unit. There will be no decline in headcount in the Reuters newsroom, according to a memo to employees on Tuesday.",FAKE
+721,Obama says world leaders right to be 'rattled' by Trump,"President Obama said world leaders were right to be ""rattled"" by Donald Trump.
+
+“They are rattled by (him) — and for good reason,” said Obama of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The president was speaking Thursday in Japan on the sidelines of a Group of Seven conference, a two-day event focused on the global economy.
+
+“A lot of the proposals he has made display either ignorance of world affairs, or a cavalier attitude, or an interest in getting tweets and headlines,” said Obama.
+
+He dismissed concerns that attacks by Democratic rival candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were hurting the party's electoral chances.
+
+“During primaries, people get a little grumpy with each other. Somebody’s supporter pops off and there’s a certain buildup of aggravation,” Obama said. “Every little speed bump, conflict trash-talking that takes place is elevated.”",REAL
+4399,"GOP Senator On Fixing Obamacare: 'No, No, No, No'","This summer, the court is expected to rule in King v. Burwell, in which the plaintiffs allege the Affordable Care Act's language does not authorize the federal government to distribute health insurance tax credits in about two-thirds of the states. Some wording in one section of the law is the source of the dispute -- an ambiguity that Congress could fix with a simple, one-line correction. Coats, speaking to the Wall Street Journal's Louise Radnofsky, seemed to suggest he and other Republicans had no interest in taking that step.
+
+It's possible Coats was being flippant. (His office has not responded to email inquiries from The Huffington Post.) And he doesn't necessarily speak for other Republicans, at least a few of whom have indicated they're thinking about what to do if the court does find for the plaintiffs.
+
+Over the last few months, a cadre of prominent conservative writers and intellectuals -- most notably James Capretta, Philip Klein, Avik Roy and Yuval Levin -- have suggested Republicans seize the opportunity to enact their own version of health reform, whether that's through significant modifications to the existing law or some kind of wholesale replacement. The topic reportedly came up at a House Republican strategy retreat this month, and over in the Senate, Republicans Lamar Alexander, John Barrasso and Orrin Hatch have started a working group to examine possible post-King reforms.
+
+""There are a lot of ideas,"" Hatch told TPM's Sahil Kapur this week. ""If the case goes the way I think it should go ... then we've gotta come up with a way of resolving the problems we're in. We're quietly looking at all that and trying to do that.""
+
+But drawing up a health care bill can't really be done ""quietly"" -- or quickly. The debate over the Affordable Care Act dragged on for more than a year in Congress. And that was just the final stage of a process that had unfolded over roughly a decade, during which time liberal intellectuals and interest groups hashed out different ideas for how to write legislation and then how to build a political coalition that could pass it. It took such a long time because devising even narrowly tailored health care legislation requires coming to grips with difficult trade-offs -- and then dealing with politically powerful constituencies that might not like them.
+
+Republicans would face the very same difficulties. Many conservatives have said, for example, that they would prefer to repeal or at least relax Obamacare's restrictions on ""age rating,"" thereby allowing insurers much more room to vary premiums based on age. They tout this proposal because, they note correctly, it would mean lower premiums for young people. What they often don't mention is that it would also mean higher premiums for old people. In other words, giving a break to twenty-somethings would mean sticking it to those nearer retirement. Explaining that to older Americans now getting coverage wouldn't be easy for Republicans, particularly since older voters are a key part of the GOP constituency.
+
+Of course, Republicans strategizing about a King ruling may not be acting in good faith. Nobody knows how the court will rule or what reasoning the individual justices will invoke in their decisions. But lots of people in Washington believe that Chief Justice John Roberts, whose vote to uphold the individual mandate saved Obamacare in 2012, might be inclined to save it again if he fears upholding the King lawsuit would wreak havoc -- not only by depriving millions of insurance, but also by throwing entire state insurance markets into chaos. (Without the subsidies, most experts say, many of the law's other reforms could not work and would lead to sudden spikes in premiums or a mass exodus of insurers.)
+
+If Republicans make it look like they're prepared to act, the thinking goes, that will ease Roberts' conscience and make it easier for him to rule in favor of the lawsuit. For now, as one conservative health policy adviser told Kapur, the main goal of Republicans is to ""make the world safe for Roberts to overturn."" It'd be a smart gambit. But Coats' comments -- if representative of more widespread thinking -- would suggest that the mere appearance of trying to pass a law that preserves health insurance for millions is more than many conservatives can stomach.",REAL
+2098,The folly of Obama's Clean Power Plan,"Before any rational discussion of the economic or scientific merits of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan can begin (it will be announced Monday), it is necessary to take his rhetoric about its benefits off the table.  The president stated Sunday that his plan is ""protecting the world we leave to our children.”  To be generous to the president, that is a gross exaggeration.
+
+By the Environmental Protection Agency’s own calculations, the plan will reduce U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide by about 10% from what they are now projected to be in 2030. Since by that time the U.S. will be producing less than 20 percent of global CO2 emissions, the result is at most 2 percent less growth in global emissions.
+
+Based on the calculations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that will make less than one-tenth of a degree of difference in global temperatures.
+
+Contrary to the president’s claims about saving lives and reducing energy costs, his own EPA has found that the drastic cuts they are ordering will increase electricity costs, while doing next to nothing to slow the pace of climate change.
+
+What the president will not admit about his ambitious plans is that they will not matter unless the countries actually responsible for future greenhouse gas emissions do far more than they now show any intention of doing.
+
+The world’s future major emitters will be China, India, Brazil -- and of course Russia -- and other rapidly growing economies whose use of fossil fuels is part and parcel of their growth plans.
+
+The Energy Information Administration and the International Energy Agency forecast that by 2030 these countries will be responsible for almost 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
+
+Their role is growing fast, not shrinking.
+
+Despite the presidential hoopla about the upcoming Paris climate summit, what the actual preparations show is how little those other major emitters have any intention of doing.
+
+The Paris meeting is not about setting new binding international targets for global emissions.  Instead, nations will determine their own efforts and communicate their intentions in documents called “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).”
+
+This in the long run could be a great improvement over futile meetings to discuss mandatory targets, but China, the world’s largest source of CO2, has already stated its intention to keep growing carbon emissions out to 2030.
+
+In other words, the president is claiming that the U.S. must provide a leading example at a time when the most important carbon emitters have already declared they will not follow it.
+
+At the pace those countries are moving, the problem of climate change will be just as great for our children as it is today, no matter what costly regulations the president imposes on the U.S. economy.
+
+Dr. W. David Montgomery is an expert on the economic issues associated with climate change policy, and testifies as an expert witness in state and federal courts on antitrust and damages cases dealing with petroleum and natural gas markets. His scholarly work is frequently published in peer-reviewed journals, and Congressional committees have requested his testimony on climate change, issues affecting oil and gas markets, and other energy market and environmental issues on numerous occasions. He advises clients on the strategic implications of changes in energy and environmental policies and energy markets.",REAL
+6636,"Comment on 10 More Beautiful Images That Remind You We Still Live In A Beautiful World, With Beautiful People by 10 More Beautiful Images That Remind You We Still Live In A Beautiful World, With Beautiful People - Upside Down Media","Share on Facebook Share on Twitter It seems sort of funny to think we have to “restore faith in humanity,” but when we live in a day and age filled with so many controversial, sad, and downright wrong happenings in the world, we do, indeed, need stories to lift us up. advertisement - learn more In our day-to-day lives, we witness just how ungrateful and impatient humans, even, dare I say, ourselves, can be. Just last week I witnessed a totally zenned-out young woman coming out of a yoga studio to find someone had completely smashed in her car window to steal her purse. She was shocked, angry, sad, and ultimately, in her words, “at a loss for faith in humanity.” It reminded me how little trust we have in people because of situations like this. We can’t leave our car doors unlocked, never mind lock them and leave our belongings in plain site. We’re afraid to go for walks in the dark by ourselves, and even a jog in the middle of the day poses dangers, since, as recent news has reported, doing so has claimed the lives of two young women . We can’t have a civil political debate over dinner, nor even trust the government at all, with more leaks showing just how corrupt the system truly is. Racial equality has resurfaced in the worst way, with movements trying to prove to society why black lives should matter despite how self-evident that fact should be. Mass shootings at malls, movie theaters, children’s schools, universities, a gay nightclub, etc. wreak havoc on our nation continuously. Wildlife is diminishing due to deforestation and climate change at the hands of humans. Terrorism continues to shake our world to its core. This year, Earth Overshoot Day came the earliest it ever has, and that’s a bad sign for the planet. And this is all just a glimpse. Depressed yet? But in the words of American Beauty ‘s main character Lester Burnham, “…it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world.” Despite all the bad, there is still so much good, and whenever you think you have lost your faith in humanity, take a look at these wonderful photos that will undoubtedly warm your heart: 
+1. This man bought turtles from a food market and then released them back into the sea. 
+2. This officer talked a man out of committing suicide, and then eight years later, that very man, now a father of tw0, gave the officer an award at the American Foundation of Suicide. 
+3. This little boy risked his life to save a drowning baby deer from floodwater in Bangladesh. 
+4. These men cut lawns for people who aren’t capable of doing it themselves. Keep Evolving Your Consciousness Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. 
+5. This man gave his shoes to a homeless girl in Rio De Janeiro. 6. This man takes his sick dog to a lake every night to help his pain subside. 7. An officer asked protestors in Brazil to not “create episodes,” because it was his birthday. Then, a group of protestors surprised him with this: 8. This Pakistani waiter fed a homeless person because he couldn’t use his own hands. 9. An employee at Wendy’s removed an umbrella from an outside table to walk an elderly man to his car in the rain. 10. This Turkish bride and groom spent their wedding day serving food to 4,000 refugees. 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+4728,Clinton 'does not recall' ordering destruction of emails from personal server in testimony,"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has said she ""does not recall"" ordering emails related to State Department business to be deleted or permanently erased from her personal server after she left her post in 2013, according to sworn testimony made public Thursday.
+
+The testimony, obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch, marked the first time Clinton was forced to answer questions under oath about her private email system. A federal judge had ordered the former secretary of state's legal team to turn over written responses to questions about the so-called ""homebrew"" server, which was kept in her New York home during her tenure as America's top diplomat.
+
+Clinton and her legal team objected to all or part of 18 of the 25 questions put to her by Judicial Watch. She also filed eight separate general objections to the process under which the questions were being asked.
+
+In her responses, Clinton used some variation of ""does not recall"" at least 21 times.
+
+In the testimony, Clinton says that it was her ""expectation"" that all her ""work-related and potentially work-related e-mails [sic]"" had been turned over to the State Department by her lawyers when she determined that she had ""no reason to keep her personal e-mails [sic].""
+
+That statement contradicts testimony by FBI Director James Comey this past July. Comey told the House oversight committee that ""thousands"" of work-related emails were not returned.
+
+Clinton also denied sending a 2011 memo warning State Department employees not to conduct official business from personal email accounts.
+
+Clinton said the memo, like all notices sent from the State Department, concluded with her last name as ""a formality ... it did not mean that she sent, authored, or reviewed the cable.""
+
+Clinton also said she did not recall receiving a February 2011 memo warning her of increased attempts to hack into private email accounts belonging to senior State Department officials.
+
+Clinton was also asked when she decided to use her private email account to conduct government business and whom she consulted in making that decision.
+
+
+
+Clinton said she recalled making the decision in early 2009, but she ""does not recall any specific consultations regarding the decision.""
+
+Asked whether she was warned that using a private email account conflicted with federal record-keeping rules, Clinton responded that ""she does not recall being advised, cautioned, or warned, she does not recall that it was ever suggested to her, and she does not recall participating in any communication, conversation, or meeting in which it was discussed.""
+
+
+
+Clinton noted in her testimony that her use of a personal email account for official business dated to her time as a Senator from New York, and insisted that she decided to use the server ""for the purpose of convenience.""
+
+Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the group's lawyers will closely review Clinton's responses.
+
+
+
+""Mrs. Clinton's refusal to answer many of the questions in a clear and straightforward manner further reflects disdain for the rule of law,"" Fitton said.
+
+
+
+Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said Clinton has answered these same questions in multiple settings for over a year, and her answers Thursday ""are entirely consistent with what she has said many times before.""
+
+
+
+""Judicial Watch is a right-wing organization that has been attacking the Clintons since the 1990s, and this frivolous lawsuit is just its latest failed attempt to hurt her campaign for the presidency,"" Fallon said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+3022,"The Weeds: our undemocratic primaries, Obama's new fiduciary rule, and the challenge of information polarization","There's been a lot of complaining this election cycle about the ""rigged"" rules of the game, and not without reason: Our presidential primary process can be a confusing, undemocratic mess.
+
+It's also incredibly difficult to figure out how to improve. On this episode of The Weeds, with Sarah Kliff still on vacation, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias wrestle with just why so many voters feel frustrated by the primaries, whether that represents a genuine danger to trust in government, and what, if anything, can be done to make the system fairer.
+
+Our Weeds hosts also explain a new regulatory initiative that could save the middle class billions — yay, fiduciary rules! They also look at some new research on media consumption and polarization, and discuss how it may or may not relate to the Donald Trump supporter on Matt's Facebook feed.",REAL
+859,"Cruz’s closing case against Trump: ‘We are not a bigoted, angry people’","OSCEOLA, Ind. — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) kicked off the final day of campaigning before the end of this state's primary by shaking every hand at the Bravo Cafe, an act of politicking that took him through a packed restaurant and down a lengthy line of voters stuck outside. He signed an ironic baseball cap that copied John Oliver's anti-Trump slogan ""Make Donald Drumpf Again,"" then signed a copy of the ""American Patriot's Bible,"" a compilation of the good book and a Christian history of the United States.
+
+""I've got the same one at home,"" he said.
+
+From there, he told reporters that the election in Indiana was boiling down to a choice between crudeness and decency, ""a choice about our national character"" that Hoosiers could get right.
+
+""I trust the good people of Indiana to differentiate,"" Cruz said. ""We are not a country built on hatred. We are not a country built on anger, built on pettiness. We are not a country built on bullying. We are not a country about selfishness. No country in the world has spilled more blood saving the lives of others than America. We are not a petty, bigoted, angry people. That is not America.""
+
+Cruz said that after Vaughn Hillyard, an NBC News reporter, asked if the senator was referring to Trump when he called the election a chance to reject ""evil."" Cruz declined to put it that way; indeed, when he used the word at a Sunday night rally down the road, he was notably short on jabs at Trump. He did not even mention the mogul's rejection of ordinances that allowed transgender people in the bathrooms of their adopted sex, which had been a theme on the trail and in campaign ads.
+
+""Do we get behind a campaign that is based on yelling, and screaming, and cursing, and insults?"" asked Cruz at the rally. ""Or do we unify behind a positive, optimistic, forward-looking conservative campaign?""
+
+In Osceola, he asked parents to consider a future where the ""words coming out of the president's mouth would make you punish your child,"" instead of appealing to ""our better angels,"" a la Abraham Lincoln.
+
+""Do you want to turn on the television, and see a president, Republican or Democrat, who embarrasses you?"" asked Cruz. ""Who would make you feel embarrassed if your children came and spoke the words uttered by the president? We've had presidents who've inspired us. FDR told us the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. John F. Kennedy said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.""
+
+Asked if he had a path to the Republican nomination without Indiana, Cruz said ""absolutely,"" and suggested that the campaign was still in a position to surge back and win.
+
+""The polls have been all over the place,"" said Cruz, referring to but not naming a Mike Downs Center for Politics poll that breaks the pattern of public polls favoring Trump. ""There has literally been a 30-point swing, depending on which poll you're looking at. We are neck and neck right now.""
+
+From there, Cruz jumped on the phone to talk with an Indiana radio host. He excoriated media in ""Manhattan"" for saying that the primary was functionally over, and attacked Trump — but not over transgender bathrooms. Instead, he hit on a theme that the campaign found Friday, when Trump mystifyingly mentioned his endorsement from Mike Tyson.
+
+""Mike Tyson is a convicted rapist who served three years in prison in Indiana for rape,"" Cruz said. ""I don't think rapists are tough guys. I think rapists are weaklings and bullies. We all know that bullies behave the way they do because they're scared.""",REAL
+1759,The collapse of Rand Paul and the libertarian moment that never was,"The libertarian moment in American politics—foretold just last year in the New York Times magazine—is like the horizon; always retreating as we advance upon it.
+
+The political events of 2015 are a brutal reminder about how far this country is from embracing libertarianism and how alien those ideas are even to the purported shock troops of the freedom movement. While libertarianism’s opponents can take heart, its champions are setting their cause back by pretending that all is well.
+
+The collapse of the Rand Paul campaign speaks volumes. In a 15-person field, Paul is the only candidate who looks even remotely libertarian (social tolerance, foreign policy restraint, and limited government). He started the campaign with decent name recognition, a seat in the United States Senate, lavish media attention, a serious will to win, and a battle-tested, national political operation inherited from his father, Ron.
+
+If there were any significant support for Libertarian ideas in the GOP—any at all—Rand Paul would be near the top of an otherwise crowded, fragmented field that is fighting over every non-libertarian voter in the party.
+
+Yet he’s polling at a mere 1 percent among Republican voters nationwide and has a higher unfavorability rating than anyone else in the GOP race.
+
+According to an August survey by the independent polling firm Eschelon Insights, far and away the most popular candidate nationwide among libertarian-inclined Republicans is Donald Trump, the least libertarian candidate in the race.
+
+Libertarians who can’t stomach Trump scattered their support without any ideological rhyme or reason (11 percent for Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, 9 percent for Ted Cruz and John Kasich, 8 percent for Carly Fiorina, 7 percent for Paul).
+
+The secret of Trump’s appeal to Paul’s base is that a large segment of the “Ron Paul Revolution” leavened its libertarianism with a pony keg of crazy. Birthers, 9/11 Truthers, a wide assortment of conspiracy theorists (many of whom believe the Federal Reserve to be a modern manifestation of the Illuminati), and naked racists rivaled the number of reasonably sober libertarian-ish voters among the faithful.
+
+Trump won their hearts by throwing even more crazy into the mix and stirring up a white, working class populism last given political life by George Wallace.
+
+Paul let these voters down because he was disinclined to offer the distasteful dog whistles that his father traded for extremist support, much less the louder, baser appeals that are Trump’s stock-in-trade.
+
+The second voter bloc Rand Paul hoped to bring into his camp—Tea Partiers—has likewise rejected the Kentucky Republican. That’s because there are few Libertarians there, either.
+
+According to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, more than half the Tea Party is made up of the religious right while only 26 percent—the smallest ideological bloc within the group—can be loosely described as Libertarian. And Tea Partiers have always manifested a large degree of nativist populism.
+
+It should be no surprise, then, that the candidates doing best with Tea Partiers are Donald Trump (37 percent support), Ted Cruz (19 percent), and Ben Carson (14 percent).  Rand Paul?  Two percent.
+
+Sure, one can argue that Paul has run a sub-par campaign and that a more adroit effort would have produced better results. But given the above, it is hard to argue, as some do, that Paul would have done better had he run as more of a libertarian.
+
+If real libertarian votes were there for the taking, someone would have come along and done the harvesting.
+
+If there was truly a $20 (electoral) bill lying on the sidewalk, it’s hard to believe that none of the other 14 starving candidates would bother to pick it up.
+
+Yet this is precisely the narrative that the prophets of the Libertarian vote would have us believe: an epic political market failure.
+
+There’s good reason that political professionals—those with the most to gain from an accurate reading of the political landscape—do not pander to the libertarian vote: It doesn’t exist.
+
+The most thorough search for libertarian sentiment was conducted last year by the Pew Research Center. They asked 10,013 adults 23 questions about a variety of social and political issues and then used cluster analysis to sort respondents into homogeneous groups. Pew found that Americans who “resembled libertarians” form a group that is “too small to analyze”: no more than 5 percent of those surveyed.
+
+It’s true that if we avoid asking people about concrete issues and instead ask general questions, we can (if we squint hard enough) see a great deal of latent libertarian sentiment out there.
+
+It has been noted, for instance, that 59 percent of the American public is, broadly speaking, libertarian in that they answer “yes” to the question “Would you define yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal?” Political scientists and campaign strategists, however, almost universally dismiss self-identification and general sentiment surveys as functionally meaningless. Both academic investigation and hard-earned political experience tell us that attitudes about specific governmental programs are far more telling than asking people what labels or characterizations describe them best.
+
+Libertarians, however, can take heart from the fact that political sentiment is moving their way in some areas. Gay rights, drug decriminalization, increasing outrage over heavy-handed police tactics, growing concern over an unjust legal system, disgust over crony capitalism, and opposition to military deployments abroad all suggest that libertarian arguments can have political force. But just because people buy libertarian arguments when it comes to civil liberties or foreign policy does not mean they are more likely to buy them on taxes, spending, or regulation. If they were, then Bernie Sanders Democrats would be Rand Paul Republicans.
+
+Libertarians love to preach the virtues of markets. Yet in the “marketplace of ideas,” their bundled product has been regularly and thoroughly rejected for over a century.
+
+Until libertarians acknowledge that market verdict and re-think either what they’re selling, how they’re selling it, or both, they will remain on the margins of American political life. And for friends of liberty, that would be a tragedy.
+
+Jerry Taylor is the president of the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. dedicated to the advancement of liberty and pragmatic policy solutions.",REAL
+8675,Hillaryous! Huckabee Compares Clintons to THESE Famous Mobsters.,"Hillaryous! Huckabee Compares Clintons to THESE Famous Mobsters. Posted at 4:11 pm on October 29, 2016 by Evie L. 
+The Clintons, much like a mob family, have managed to avoid being caught or held accountable for any of its many, serious wrongdoings — except there’s another infamous mob family who bested the Clintons in one particular way. Difference between Clintons and Sopranos? Sopranos didn't leave an email trail. 
+— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) October 28, 2016 
+After news broke Friday about the FBI re-opening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails due to her use of a private and unsecured server, the former Republican Arkansas governor tweeted that the only difference between the Democratic presidential nominee, her husband Bill Clinton and the fictional mob family from the popular HBO series “The Sopranos” was that the Sopranos “didn’t leave an email trail.” Trending",FAKE
+4635,Trump: Immigrants bring 'drugs ... crime' to U.S. from Mexico,"- Real estate mogul Donald Trump said during his presidential announcement that Mexican migrants to the U.S. are drug traffickers and rapists, as well as ""some ... good people."" ()",REAL
+5929,Not Guilty: The Power of Nullification to Counteract Government Tyranny,"By John Whitehead, the Rutherford Institute . 
+“The people have the power, all we have to do is awaken that power in the people. The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government .”—John Lennon 
+How do you balance the scales of justice at a time when Americans are being tasered, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, hit with batons, shot with rubber bullets and real bullets, blasted with sound cannons, detained in cages and kennels , sicced by police dogs, arrested and jailed for challenging the government’s excesses, abuses and power-grabs? 
+Politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair. 
+No matter who sits in the White House, the shadow government will continue to call the shots behind the scenes. 
+Relying on the courts to restore justice seems futile. 
+Indeed, with every ruling handed down, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts, largely lacking in vision and scope, rendering narrow rulings focused on the letter of the law. This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. 
+Even so, justice matters. 
+It matters whether you’re a rancher protesting a federal land-grab by the Bureau of Land Management, a Native American protesting an oil pipeline that will endanger sacred sites and pollute water supplies, or an African-American taking to the streets to protest yet another police shooting of an unarmed citizen. 
+Unfortunately, protests and populist movements haven’t done much to push back against an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one. 
+It doesn’t matter who the activists are (environmentalists, peaceniks, Native Americans, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, or the Bundys and their followers) or what the source of the discontent is (endless wars abroad, police shootings, contaminated drinking water, government land-grabs), the government’s modus operandi has remained the same: shut down the protests using all means available, prosecute First Amendment activities to the fullest extent of the law, and discourage any future civil uprisings by criminalizing expressive activities, labelling dissidents as extremists or terrorists, and conducting widespread surveillance on the general populace in order to put down any whispers of resistance before it can take root. 
+Thus, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of juries and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional. 
+Just recently, in fact, an Oregon jury rejected the government’s attempts to prosecute seven activists who staged a six-week, armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. 
+In finding the defendants not guilty—of conspiracy to impede federal officers, of possession of firearms in a federal facility, and of stealing a government-owned truck—the jury sent its own message to the government and those following the case: justice matters. 
+The Malheur occupiers were found not guilty despite the fact that they had guns in a federal facility (their lawyers argued the guns were “as much a statement of their rural culture as a cowboy hat or a pair of jeans”). They were found not guilty despite the fact that they used government vehicles (although they would argue that government property is public property available to all taxpayers). They were found not guilty despite the fact that they succeeded in occupying a government facility for six weeks, thereby preventing workers from performing their duties (as the Washington Post points out, this charge has also been used to prosecute extremist left-wingers and Earth First protesters ). 
+Many other equally sincere activists with eloquent lawyers and ardent supporters have gone to jail for lesser offenses than those committed at the Malheur Refuge, so what made the difference here? 
+The jury made all the difference. 
+These seven Oregon protesters were found not guilty because a jury of their peers recognized the sincerity of their convictions, sympathized with the complaints against an overreaching government, and balanced the scales of justice using the only tools available to them: common sense, compassion and the power of the jury box. 
+Jury nullification works. 
+As law professor Ilya Somin explains, jury nullification is the practice by which a jury refuses to convict someone accused of a crime if they believe the “law in question is unjust or the punishment is excessive .” According to former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, the doctrine of jury nullification is “premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished.” 
+Imagine that: a world where the citizenry—not the government or its corporate controllers—actually calls the shots and determines what is just. 
+In a world of “ rampant overcriminalization ,” where the average citizen unknowingly breaks three laws a day, jury nullification acts as “ a check on runaway authoritarian criminalization and the increasing network of confusing laws that are passed with neither the approval nor oftentimes even the knowledge of the citizenry.” 
+Indeed, Butler believes so strongly in the power of nullification to balance the scales between the power of the prosecutor and the power of the people that he advises : 
+If you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights ; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer. 
+In other words, it’s “we the people” who can and should be determining what laws are just, what activities are criminal and who can be jailed for what crimes. 
+Not only should the punishment fit the crime, but the laws of the land should also reflect the concerns of the citizenry as opposed to the profit-driven priorities of Corporate America. 
+This is where the power of jury nullification is so critical: to reject inane laws and extreme sentences and counteract the edicts of a profit-driven governmental elite that sees nothing wrong with jailing someone for a lifetime for a relatively insignificant crime. 
+Of course, the powers-that-be don’t want the citizenry to know that it has any power at all. 
+They would prefer that we remain clueless about the government’s many illicit activities, ignorant about our constitutional rights, and powerless to bring about any real change. 
+In an age in which government officials accused of wrongdoing—police officers, elected officials, etc.—are treated with general leniency, while the average citizen is prosecuted to the full extent of the law, jury nullification is a powerful reminder that, as the Constitution tells us, “we the people” are the government. 
+For too long we’ve allowed our so-called “representatives” to call the shots. Now it’s time to restore the citizenry to their rightful place in the republic: as the masters, not the servants. 
+Nullification is one way of doing so. 
+Various cities and states have been using this historic doctrine with mixed results on issues as wide ranging as gun control and healthcare to “ claim freedom from federal laws they find onerous or wrongheaded .” 
+Where nullification can be particularly powerful, however, is in the hands of the juror. 
+The reality with which we must contend is that justice in America is reserved for those who can afford to buy their way out of jail. 
+For the rest of us who are dependent on the “fairness” of the system, there exists a multitude of ways in which justice can and does go wrong every day. Police misconduct. Prosecutorial misconduct. Judicial bias. Inadequate defense. Prosecutors who care more about winning a case than seeking justice. Judges who care more about what is legal than what is just. Jurors who know nothing of the law and are left to deliberate in the dark about life-and-death decisions. And an overwhelming body of laws, statutes and ordinances that render the average American a criminal, no matter how law-abiding they might think themselves. 
+If you’re to have any hope of remaining free—and I use that word loosely—your best bet remains in your fellow citizens. 
+Your fellow citizens may not know what the Constitution says (studies have shown Americans to be abysmally ignorant about their rights), they may not know what the laws are (there are so many on the books that the average American breaks three laws a day without knowing it), and they may not even believe in your innocence, but if you’re lucky, those who serve on a jury will have a conscience that speaks louder than the legalistic tones of the prosecutors and the judges and reminds them that justice and fairness go hand in hand. 
+That’s ultimately what jury nullification is all about: restoring a sense of fairness to our system of justice. It’s the best protection for “we the people” against the oppression and tyranny of the government, and God knows, we can use all the protection we can get. It’s a powerful way to remind the government—all of those bureaucrats who have appointed themselves judge, jury and jailer over all that we are, have and do—that we’re the ones who set the rules. 
+We could transform this nation if only Americans would work together to harness the power of their discontent. 
+Unfortunately, the government’s divide and conquer tactics are working like a charm. 
+Despite the laundry list of grievances that should unite “we the people” in common cause against the government, the nation is more divided than ever by politics, by socio-economics, by race, by religion, and by every other distinction that serves to highlight our differences. 
+The real and manufactured events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have all conjoined to create an environment in which “we the people” are more divided, more distrustful, and fearful of each other. 
+What we have failed to realize is that in the eyes of the government, we’re all the same. 
+In other words, when it’s time for the government to crack down—and that time is coming—it won’t matter whether we supported Hillary or Trump, whether we stood with the pipeline protesters or opposed BLM, or whether we spoke out against government misconduct and injustice or remained silent. 
+When the government cracks down, we’ll all suffer. 
+Here’s the thing: the government wants a civil war. 
+The objective: compliance and control. 
+Its strategy: destabilize the economy through endless wars, escalate racial tensions, polarize the populace, heighten tensions through a show of force, intensify the use of violence, and then, when all hell breaks loose, clamp down on the nation for the good of the people and the security of the nation. 
+The government has been anticipating and preparing for such a civil uprising for some time now. 
+Those protests in Ferguson , Baltimore and Baton Rouge to protest police brutality? The militarized police “ clad in Kevlar vests, helmets, and camouflage, armed with pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, and tear gas ” turning towns into war zones? The kenneling of pipeline protesters in North Dakota? 
+Those were just dress rehearsals for the government to work out the kinks in its operating manual on how to deal with civil unrest. 
+They were also previews of what’s in store if we continue to challenge the powers-that-be. 
+After all, it’s hard to persuade anyone to stand against tyranny when all you can promise them as a reward is persecution, prosecution and a one-way trip to the morgue. And when the outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion—the government always wins—it can seem pointless, even foolhardy, to dare to challenge the system. 
+So how do you not only push back against the police state’s bureaucracy, corruption and cruelty but also launch a counterrevolution aimed at reclaiming control over the government using nonviolent means? 
+You start by changing the rules and engaging in some (nonviolent) guerilla tactics. 
+Employ militant nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience , which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches. 
+Take part in grassroots activism, which takes a trickle-up approach to governmental reform by implementing change at the local level (in other words, think nationally, but act locally). 
+And then, as I explain in more detail in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , nullify everything. Nullify the court cases. Nullify the laws. Nullify everything the government does that is illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.",FAKE
+1699,"In rural America, a startling prospect: Voters Obama lost look to Sanders","Shelley Brannon, 62, can sum up the Obama presidency with three words. Well, three words and an exclamation.
+
+“He screwed us,” said Brannon, a coal miner from Wise County, Va., as he sat outside a rally for the United Mine Workers of America. “Man, he screwed us.”
+
+He shook his head under a camouflage hat that matched his camouflage UMWA T-shirt, and he described his fantasy of dumping nuclear waste in the yards of environmentalists, “if they think coal’s so bad.” He mulled over the mistake he says the UMWA made in 2008, when it endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton. Then he explained why he would probably be voting for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the next Democratic primary.
+
+“For one thing, he knows what union is, and he respects it,” Brannon said. “That’s all we need is respect. He’s just a likable fellow, trustworthy. I don’t think she has the same respect for the union, and she really shot herself in the foot over, you know, all that secretive stuff.”
+
+West Virginia has rejected the Obama-era Democratic Party more dramatically than any other state outside the South, with Appalachian counties that voted for Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale turning blood red over the past eight years. But if you think it’s in places like this where the insurgent Sanders campaign faces its most formidable test, here’s what he thinks: It is also one of his greatest opportunities.
+
+The Vermont socialist believes that white, working-class voters — the sort of people Obama once self-defeatingly said “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — are just one honest argument away from coming back.
+
+“We have millions of working-class people who are voting for Republican candidates whose views are diametrically opposite to what voters want,” Sanders said in an interview. “How many think it’s a great idea that we have trade policies that lead to plants in West Virginia being shut down? How many think there should be massive cuts in Pell grants or in Social Security? In my opinion, not too many people.”
+
+This state, one of the last to vote in the 2016 primary race, is supposed to be Clinton country. Seven years ago, in the 2008 primary, West Virginia Democrats gave Clinton a landslide victory over Obama. She won 69 percent of the white vote and did even better with voters who lacked a college education. A Democrat who improved a few points on Obama’s 39 percent of the national white vote in the 2012 general election would stroll into the White House.
+
+Sanders, who has won elections only in a white, rural state, thinks his brand of bold democratic socialism can sell. He has never campaigned here, yet at Friday’s rally in Morgantown, miner after miner said they basically agreed with the former mayor of Burlington more than they agreed with Clinton. Several were aware that Sanders had walked picket lines, something that resonated as they packed a hotel ballroom to demand that Washington fully fund UMWA pensions. When the room quieted, a man recited a prayer against greed. “Lord, we know that Satan has those corporate thieves,” he said, “and they’re still trying to rob us.” Then a singer-songwriter started in:
+
+It’s a long way to Wall Street from 12th and Main and the back roads of my home town.
+
+There’s a new world order and times have changed, so they let these deals go down.
+
+Sanders’s campaign theory may be that there’s a larger electorate hiding in plain sight. Over the summer, as he gained in polls, Sanders was criticized for bringing seemingly every issue back to the sediment of economics and class. Black Lives Matter activist Marissa Johnson dubbed it “class reductionism.” Clinton allies had trouble seeing how his support could grow beyond white liberals.
+
+Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who has endorsed Clinton, said Sanders has a weakness in West Virginia greater even than the socialist label: coal. Although the economics-first focus makes sense, Manchin said, Sanders’s support for every major Obama initiative on the environment makes his candidacy a “nonstarter” here.
+
+“His environmental stance?” Manchin asked. “Oh, my, it would be awful.”
+
+But Sanders believes that such naysayers are missing the weight of his cardinal argument — for greater economic fairness — and voters’ willingness to look past the other issues where they disagree.
+
+He has won elections in Vermont, a white, rural, gun-owning state, as a socialist. The social-issue “distractions” bemoaned by red-state Democrats have seemed to bounce right off his armor. (He has taken mixed positions on gun control, supporting a ban on assault rifles, for instance, but opposing the Brady Bill.) In the end, is the white guy who voted for him in Vermont any different than the white guy in West Virginia or Kentucky or Ohio who was told to blame liberals for his problems?
+
+[A key to the Southern vote lies centuries ago on another continent ]
+
+“What I’ve found in Vermont and around the country is that we go to people and say, ‘Look, we do have differences,’ ” Sanders said. “ ‘I believe in gay marriage. I’m not going to change your view if you don’t. I believe climate change is absolutely real, and some of you do not. But how many of you think we should give hundreds of billions in tax breaks to the richest 1 percent?’ ”
+
+Conservative Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) has made a similar argument — that his party can win, with no changes to its message, if more evangelical voters are inspired to come out. Bolstering Sanders’s case are his strong numbers in independent polls. A national Quinnipiac survey last month found him polling marginally better against leading Republican candidates than Clinton did. A Marquette University poll last week indicated that Sanders is running just as strong as Clinton in Wisconsin, home to some of the white voters who have abandoned the Democrats in off years.
+
+Something similar may be happening in West Virginia. In Morgantown, home to West Virginia University, a 62-year-old activist named Andy Cockburn went to an early organizing meeting for Clinton and found only 10 other people. In July, more than 100 people packed a bar basement and started organizing for Sanders. Railing against oligarchies and “the 1 percent” means one thing in New York or San Francisco. It means more in West Virginia, where coal magnate Don Blankenship is standing trial and Patriot Coal is trying to spend most of a $22 million settlement for miners on its own attorneys. On Friday night, at the Democrats’ Jefferson-Jackson dinner in the state capital, Charleston, Bill Clinton echoed his wife and condemned Patriot.
+
+But Sanders is the candidate with consistency on corporate greed — a fact that has helped him slow down some labor endorsements for Clinton. According to the New York Times, the International Association of Fire Fighters hit the pause button on its expected endorsement after too many local leaders blanched. On Saturday, Sanders lost the endorsement of the National Education Association but only after a similar protest made Clinton work for it.
+
+The UMWA has never endorsed Clinton. In 2008, it went for the doomed campaign of John Edwards, switching to Obama only after he had basically sewn up the nomination. In 2012 it made no endorsement, in an avowed protest of the administration’s environmental regulations. This year, the union, with 32,354 of its 71,160 members based in West Virginia, is not yet close to a decision.
+
+“What we’re going to do is base our decision on our future here,” UMWA President Cecil Roberts said in an interview — “whether we’re going to have health care, have pensions, have jobs for people in Appalachia.”
+
+That question could vex Sanders just as much as Clinton. In his energy talking points, Sanders notes that he “introduced the gold standard for climate-change legislation with Sen. Barbara Boxer to tax carbon and methane emissions,” a résumé item that would be about as welcome in West Virginia as a University of Maryland Terps jersey. Asked what he would say to a coal miner who blames Environmental Protection Agency regulations for the loss of his job, Sanders said he could only be straight with him.
+
+“What we have to say is, ‘Look, through no fault of your own, you’re working in an industry which is helping to cause climate change and in fact having a negative impact on the country and world,’ ” Sanders said. “What the government does have is an obligation to say: ‘We’ll protect you financially as we transition away from fossil fuel. We are going to create jobs in your community, extended unemployment benefits. If you lose your job to a trade deal, you get benefits for two years. You get job training.’ I would take that same approach to energy jobs that are lost because of the threat of climate change.”
+
+Nothing about Sanders’s pitch is easy, but this piece is especially rough.
+
+State Rep. Mike Caputo (D), a miner and a union member, said his brothers need jobs, not pity. In an interview at the UMWA office in Fairmont, he asked: “You can train a guy to be a truck driver, but what’s he going to haul? Coal miners don’t want unemployment. They want work.”
+
+Still, on Thursday, at his farm in Grafton, Democratic former state legislator Mike Manypenny was firm that enthusiasm for Sanders is big and getting bigger. Manypenny, one of the many casualties of a 2014 Republican sweep, is running for Congress on the theory that the progressive politics he shares with Sanders — a living wage, the return of Glass-Steagall’s repealed restrictions on banks — are the way to break the conservative grip on voters’ imaginations.
+
+“The problem last year was that everybody focused on getting the vote out from the historic Democratic voters,” he explained. “Those are the seniors — I don’t need to tell you that each year you lose a little more of them. This is something new. Barring anything happening in the Democratic debate, like Bernie stumbling badly, I don’t see anything changing the momentum. I think he wins.”",REAL
+1735,Obama: Hillary Clinton’s Personal Email a Mistake but Didn’t Endanger U.S.,"President Barack Obama said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server was a mistake, but that U.S. national security hadn’t been endangered. In his first extensive remarks on the controversy that has roiled the Democratic presidential primary, Mr. Obama said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program that questions about Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement were legitimate. “It is important for her to answer these questions to the satisfaction of the American public,” Mr. Obama said.",REAL
+7128,Dead Voter Drive: video & petition to stop deceased-o-phobia,"Channel list 
+Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually 
+Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida 
+Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote 
+The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush 
+Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food 
+Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI 
+Obama ​​captures rare Pokémon ​​while visiting Hiroshima 
+Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say ""It's creepy"" 
+Barack Obama: ""If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"" 
+White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party 
+President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism' 
+Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech , stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman' 
+Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber 
+Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend 
+Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line 
+As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards 
+John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom 
+Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right' 
+News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: ""My work here is done"" 
+Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign 
+Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009 
+National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman 
+National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruz’s basement 
+Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response 
+Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican 
+Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check 
+Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing 
+Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first 
+Susan Sarandon: ""I don't vote with my vagina."" Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer 
+Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote 
+New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to ""Live FOR Free or Die"" 
+Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president 
+Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two 
+Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence 
+Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men 
+In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas 
+TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons 
+Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats' 
+Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with ""This is for Paris"" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with ""Return to sender"" 
+University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities 
+Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island 
+Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a ""safe space,"" changing Missouri motto to ""The don't show me state"" 
+Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy 
+State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery 
+NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget 
+College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action 
+ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios 
+Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic 
+'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break 
+ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood 
+Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans 
+Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people 
+Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's ""unfettered capitalism,"" demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need 
+John Kerry accepts Iran's ""Golden Taquiyya"" award, requests jalapenos on the side 
+Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone 
+John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons 
+Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend 
+Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles 
+State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider 
+Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons 
+Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations 
+Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals 
+US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?' 
+NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy 
+China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: ""The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"" 
+Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be' 
+Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1% 
+America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith 
+Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine 
+Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET 
+Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths 
+Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do' 
+Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State 
+President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise 
+Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market 
+Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males 
+NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record 
+People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services 
+Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba 
+White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet' 
+CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate 
+Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson' 
+Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city' 
+Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers' 
+Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first 
+The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office 
+White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders 
+Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time 
+Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy 
+Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents 
+Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences 
+Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity 
+Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow 
+African countries to ban all flights from the United States because ""Obama is incompetent, it scares us"" 
+Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it 
+Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses' 
+BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama 
+Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free 
+Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness 
+President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser 
+Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members 
+White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos 
+Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency 
+Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole 
+Harry Reid: ""Sometimes I say the wong thing"" 
+Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids 
+Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution 
+Obama draws ""blue line"" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon 
+""Hard Choices,"" a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original 
+Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts 
+Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks 
+100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, ""the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"" 
+Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news 
+""Anarchy Now!"" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence 
+Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours 
+Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues 
+""Free Speech Zones"" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes 
+Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed 
+Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account 
+Joe Biden to Russia: ""We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"" 
+In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea 
+Al Sharpton: ""Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"" 
+Mardi Gras in North Korea: "" Throw me some food! "" 
+Obama's foreign policy works: ""War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"" 
+US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: ""We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"" 
+Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help 
+The 1980s: ""Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."" 
+In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook 
+MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine 
+Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants 
+Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America 
+North Korean voters unanimous: ""We are the 100%"" 
+Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout 
+Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss 
+Feminist author slams gay marriage: ""a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"" 
+Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district 
+Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend 
+Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle 
+North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party 
+White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare 
+Kim Jong Un executes own "" crazy uncle "" to keep him from ruining another family Christmas 
+OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea 
+President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy 
+Obama to Iran: ""If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"" 
+Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC 
+Obama: ""I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"" 
+Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week 
+Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message 
+NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: ""Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"" 
+Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough 
+The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: ""I didn't build that"" 
+Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare 
+Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation 
+Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans 
+Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy 
+GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords 
+Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare 
+Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria 
+Sharpton: ""British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"" 
+DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women 
+Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees 
+Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left 
+Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel' 
+FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp 
+Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies 
+GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election' 
+Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!' 
+Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism 
+News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota 
+Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith 
+Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page 
+Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment 
+White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria 
+Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent' 
+Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins 
+Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date 
+IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history 
+After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot 
+Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence' 
+Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program 
+US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration? 
+Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy 
+This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester 
+White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras 
+Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse 
+Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school 
+Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition 
+Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State 
+Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good' 
+Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners' 
+Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested 
+Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead 
+Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending 
+Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances 
+Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons 
+Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago 
+Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections 
+Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country 
+Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps' 
+White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out 
+New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen 
+White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class 
+To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead 
+State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations 
+Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward 
+President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward 
+Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects 
+World ends; S&P soars 
+Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood 
+Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes 
+Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway 
+Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013 
+Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama 
+As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list 
+Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves 
+Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium 
+Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future 
+Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs 
+Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet 
+Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt' 
+Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties 
+Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years 
+Obama attends church service, worships self 
+Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending 
+Historical revisionists: ""Hey, you never know"" 
+Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh 
+Israelis to Egyptian rioters: ""don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"" 
+Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness 
+Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears 
+Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke 
+Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights 
+Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse' 
+Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: ""Too few words"" 
+Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't 
+Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost 
+Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity ""Religion of Peace,"" praises ""moderate Christians,"" promises to send one into space 
+Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck 
+White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus 
+Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed 
+Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book ""The Road to Smurfdom"" 
+Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere 
+Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: ""When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"" 
+Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college 
+Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill! 
+Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!' 
+Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration' 
+Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome 
+People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies 
+Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, ""only 1% allowed to reach Israel"" 
+Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans 
+Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law 
+Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond 
+Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics 
+Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof 
+Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels 
+Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party 
+Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend 
+May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above 
+Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel ""50 Shades of Hay"" 
+Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name 
+Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich 
+Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag 
+Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its ""President for Life"" 
+Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory 
+Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off 
+Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named ""Fat And Furious"" 
+Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed 
+White House: ""Let them eat statistics"" 
+Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama",FAKE
+7427,Will China Trigger the Next Global Recession?,"Will China Trigger the Next Global Recession? Current debt level causes grave concern Jing Jin | Mises.org   
+China’s debt growth rate has become the focus of some discussions and, fair enough, from comparing the outright levels, it may seem that China can collapse at any moment. 
+Daniel Fernandez suggested this in his article “ Has China Reached Its Debt Limit? ” in Mises Wire . In response to the government’s monetary expansion stimulus plan after the 2008 financial crisis, China’s corporate sector did indeed leverage up quickly, followed by an equally fast pace of leveraging in the household sector. However, in order to avoid comparing apples with oranges, we need to take a closer look by putting these numbers into perspective. Using the same data source as used by Fernandez, we find that China’s total debt as a percentage of GDP was 254 percent by the end of 2015. Debt-to-GDP ratio of corporate, government, and household sectors stood at 170 percent, 44 percent, and 40 percent respectively. 
+For government and household sectors, both started from considerably low levels until the last administration kicked in a four-trillion yuan (RMB) stimulus plan in 2009. Government debt-to-GDP ratio, which was kept in the mid 30s in the first decade of this millennium, now stood at 44 percent by the end of 2015. Household’s debt-to-GDP ratio was at 11 percent in 2006 and almost doubled to 19 percent in 2007 and then doubled again to 40 percent by the end of 2015. The leveraging up of households happened exactly as the Chinese society was undergoing rapid urbanization as well as when the government launched its 2009 stimulus. 
+Apart from the demand for urban housing, Chinese households, with their high savings rate and extra cash in hands, invested in in real estate as a hedge against future inflation. Furthermore, as the stimulus package allowed for easier lending, household debt increased dramatically. However, we must note that although the debt growth rate was high, the absolute debt level of household is still considerably low versus global peers. 
+The most disturbing trend is found in the corporate sector, with the debt-to-GDP ratio increased from approximately 110 percent prior to 2009 to 170 percent by the end of 2015. First of all, the level of corporate debt (mostly in the form of bank loans) was high to start with, but is by no means out of the norm for a financial system dominated by the banking sector, whose funding source is mostly deposits. Two figures from Jonathan Anderson’s How To Think About China series provide some insights: 1 
+An international comparison of assets of banking system vs. domestic saving rate: 
+Breakdown of assets of China’s financial system: 
+This point can be further demonstrated by comparing financial asset structures, for example, between the US and China. Obviously bank loans are the dominant funding source of the corporate sector in China, whereas in the US the role of bank loans is far from prominent in comparison with its enormous capital markets, where the corporates can raise both equities and bond financing easily. 
+Financial asset structure: US vs. China (2015): 
+Data source: The World Bank, Federal Reserve Bank, Shanghai Stock Exchange, Shenzhen Stock Exchange, China Central Deposit and Clearing, Co. Ltd. (CCDC), SIFMA 
+It is, therefore, not surprising that the leveraging up as a response to government’s stimulus plan manifested itself mostly in the credit extension through the banking system. China’s Flat Yield Curve 
+The large role of the banks can also be seen in China’s bond market yields, and one manifestation of this is a flat yield curve . The reason for this is simple: deposits. When banks have more deposits to manage than they can lend out, they invest these deposits into the bond market and usually on the long end to boost yields. This investment strategy (or asset-liability management scheme) bids up the bond prices on the long end, hence pushing down the long-term yields. 
+In addition, between allocating deposits to these two types of assets (bonds vs. loans), banks sometimes have incentives to invest in bonds, rather than lending, due to the balancing considerations of corporate demand, credit risks, market liquidity, and yields (that are also subject to interest rate controls that are at final stage of liberalization and the lending rate was completely liberalized only in early 2016). So the yield spread, at current stage, reflects more of the combination of China’s financial structure and capital flows rather than being a good indicator of economic fundamentals. As the government flooded the market with four trillion RMB from the stimulus plan in 2009, bond yields faced downward pressure, more so at the long-term end. Please see the yields of Chinese government treasury bonds at maturity (10 years vs. 1 year) and the spread thereof in the below figure. Wealth management products channel a considerable amount of deposits out of the banking system to capture higher yields outside of banking-sector supervision (in form of trusts, for example), but the amount is still not pivotal enough to change the above explained pattern in a fundamental manner. 
+Data source: WIND, CCDC 
+China didn’t open up to the outside world until the very late 1970s. Now China provides half of the manufacturing goods and close to half of electronic products in the world and the economy is still growing at around 6 percent. Obviously a good part of China’s production structure has been configured to export, mostly to the developed economies, which are dominated by the service sector. As the global demand in the developed economies lost its momentum, China faces the necessity of reconfiguring its economic structure to better serve its domestic consumers (which stands at 4 times the number of US consumers). This reconfiguration process is surely painful as demonstrated by the empty factories in the traditional export production oriented cities. But to me, this is more of a textbook case of Austrian economics at work. Capital and labor have to be freed up for those productions currently being demanded by the market. And this takes time. Moreover, quick capital formation in the past three decades lifted labor productivity, with which the manufacturing sector needs to be upgraded and the tertiary sector needs to be expanded to serve a more affluent society comparing with more than 30 years ago, so that Chinese consumers don’t have to go to Japan to buy hi-tech toilet lids . A Healthier Skepticism of “Stimulus” 
+Needless to say, the current debt level causes concern and the deeper concern is whether debt growth trajectory will continue. Ultimately, whether or not the debt will grow at the rate of post 2008 stimulus phase is a function of how fast the Chinese government runs the money printing press. A recent article on the People’s Daily — the mouthpiece of China Communist Party (CCP) — quoted the diagnosis from an “authoritative figure” on the Chinese economy and its cure. This “authoritative figure” suggested there should be no more money printing to stimulate the economy and that the Chinese should be prepared for a lower growth rate (comparing with its own historical average of 10 percent). Anyone with an understanding of China’s political messaging system would not be mistake it for anything but an opinion handed down from the very top of Chinese leadership. This can be considered a concluding remark on the policy swings for the past several years. 
+The Xinhua News Agency, the mainstream media group, recently followed with a commentary suggesting resistance to the use of stimulus plans in the face of slowing growth. Xinhua also warned of a disastrous result if its advice is not followed. Messages like these are refreshing to hear nowadays among the mantra of the stimulus chorus around the world. How China’s policy direction is to be implemented remains to be seen, but at least the insidious effects of stimulus is well recognized by those at the top of the regime and openly represented by mainstream media. In addition, a series of measures to lower tax burdens for corporate and households alike are also being introduced, and the central government is pushing hard for business-friendly deregulations and increasing economic freedom. 
+China has its problems; tons of them. China may or may not be the first to blow up in the coming wave of crises, as many people say. No matter whichever the case, I am more convinced that China will be among the first ones to revive — because it has high savings to invest, it has a well-trained labor force with one of the most vibrant, if not the most complete, manufacturing chain, and the manufacturing sector still contributes to over 40 percent of its GDP. It is still in the middle of a rapid urbanization process. It is not yet a welfare state. Chinese people are fully aware of the fact that their safety net is the result of their own frugality rather than government promises. China has the biggest potential market of 1.3 billion people with a rising middle-class that is still increasing in numbers and share in population. Serving them well is one of the biggest business opportunities in the 21st century. 
+Jing Jin is Associate Dean at the China Economics and Management Academy in Beijing. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+7566,Veterans help veterans cope with PTSD through decorated Marine’s New York-based nonprofit Headstrong Project,"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. Veterans help veterans cope with PTSD through decorated Marine’s New York-based nonprofit Headstrong Project By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 7, 2016 PTSD 
+BY Larry Mcshane 
+Two years after serving two tours in Iraq, Army veteran Dustin Shryock started feeling something was wrong — and he didn’t know how to make it right. 
+“Anxiety attacks that would pop up for no reason,” he recalls of the problems that surfaced out of the blue in 2010. “I’d be sitting on the couch, doing nothing. You can just imagine a normal anxiety attack, like a public speaking engagement. 
+“And a tiny little thing like that, over time, over and over, became debilitating.” 
+A fellow veteran pulled him aside with a solution: The Headstrong Project, a group founded four years ago by combat-decorated Marine Corps officer Zach Iscol to assist his fellow American fighters scarred by invisible wounds. 
+Read the Full Article at www.nydailynews.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the   and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on November 7, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under PTSD , Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+2163,Who rules the world? America is no longer the obvious answer,"When we ask “who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.
+
+States, of course, have complex internal structures, and the choices and decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal concentrations of power, while the general population is often marginalized. That is true even for the more democratic societies, and obviously for others. We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules the world while ignoring the “masters of mankind”, as Adam Smith called them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires and the like.
+
+Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the “vile maxim” to which the “masters of mankind” are dedicated: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people” – a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and incessant class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people of the home country and the world.
+
+In the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide economic support by a wide variety of means.
+
+When we consider the role of the masters of mankind, we turn to such state policy priorities of the moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights agreements mislabeled “free-trade agreements” in propaganda and commentary. They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them adopted in good Stalinist style with “fast track” procedures designed to block discussion and allow only the choice of yes or no (hence yes).
+
+The designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. People are incidental, with the consequences one might anticipate.
+
+The neoliberal programs of the past generation have concentrated wealth and power in far fewer hands while undermining functioning democracy, but they have aroused opposition as well, most prominently in Latin America but also in the centers of global power.
+
+The European Union (EU), one of the more promising developments of the post-world war II period, has been tottering because of the harsh effect of the policies of austerity during recession, condemned even by the economists of the International Monetary Fund (if not the IMF’s political actors).
+
+Democracy has been undermined as decision-making shifted to the Brussels bureaucracy, with the northern banks casting their shadow over their proceedings.
+
+Mainstream parties have been rapidly losing members to left and to right. The executive director of the Paris-based research group EuropaNova attributes the general disenchantment to “a mood of angry impotence as the real power to shape events largely shifted from national political leaders [who, in principle at least, are subject to democratic politics] to the market, the institutions of the European Union and corporations”, quite in accord with neoliberal doctrine.
+
+Very similar processes are under way in the United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance and concern not just for the country but, because of US power, for the world.
+
+The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often fails to accept the approved role of “spectators” (rather than “participants”) assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people”.
+
+In Violent Politics, his masterful review of insurgencies from “the American insurgency” to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk concludes that General Washington “was so anxious to sideline [the fighters he despised] that he came close to losing the Revolution”. Indeed, he “might have actually done so” had France not massively intervened and “saved the Revolution”, which until then had been won by guerrillas – whom we would now call “terrorists” – while Washington’s British-style army “was defeated time after time and almost lost the war”.
+
+A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the “dirty and nasty people” who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites’ contempt for “the lower class of these people” has taken various forms throughout the years.
+
+In recent times one expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience (“moderation in democracy”) by liberal internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s.
+
+Sometimes states do choose to follow public opinion, eliciting much fury in centers of power. One dramatic case was in 2003, when the Bush administration called on Turkey to join its invasion of Iraq.
+
+Ninety-five percent of Turks opposed that course of action and, to the amazement and horror of Washington, the Turkish government adhered to their views. Turkey was bitterly condemned for this departure from responsible behavior. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, designated by the press as the “idealist-in-chief” of the administration, berated the Turkish military for permitting the malfeasance of the government and demanded an apology. Unperturbed by these and innumerable other illustrations of our fabled “yearning for democracy”, respectable commentary continued to laud President George W Bush for his dedication to “democracy promotion”, or sometimes criticized him for his naivete in thinking that an outside power could impose its democratic yearnings on others.
+
+The Turkish public was not alone. Global opposition to US-UK aggression was overwhelming. Support for Washington’s war plans scarcely reached 10% almost anywhere, according to international polls. Opposition sparked huge worldwide protests, in the United States as well, probably the first time in history that imperial aggression was strongly protested even before it was officially launched.
+
+On the front page of the New York Times, journalist Patrick Tyler reported that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion”.
+
+Unprecedented protest in the US was a manifestation of the opposition to aggression that began decades earlier in the condemnation of the US wars in Indochina, reaching a scale that was substantial and influential, even if far too late.
+
+By 1967, when the antiwar movement was becoming a significant force, military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall warned that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity … is threatened with extinction … [as] the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size”.
+
+But the antiwar movement did become a force that could not be ignored. Nor could it be ignored when Ronald Reagan came into office determined to launch an assault on Central America. His administration mimicked closely the steps John F Kennedy had taken 20 years earlier in launching the war against South Vietnam, but had to back off because of the kind of vigorous public protest that had been lacking in the early 1960s.
+
+The assault was awful enough. The victims have yet to recover. But what happened to South Vietnam and later all of Indochina, where “the second superpower” imposed its impediments only much later in the conflict, was incomparably worse.
+
+It is often argued that the enormous public opposition to the invasion of Iraq had no effect. That seems incorrect to me.
+
+Again, the invasion was horrifying enough, and its aftermath is utterly grotesque. Nevertheless, it could have been far worse.
+
+Vice-President Dick Cheney, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of Bush’s top officials could never even contemplate the sort of measures that President Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson adopted 40 years earlier largely without protest.
+
+There is far more to say, of course, about the factors in determining state policy that are put to the side when we adopt the standard convention that states are the actors in international affairs. But with such nontrivial caveats as these, let us nevertheless adopt the convention, at least as a first approximation to reality. Then the question of who rules the world leads at once to such concerns as China’s rise to power and its challenge to the US and “world order”, the new cold war simmering in eastern Europe, the global war on terror, American hegemony and American decline, and a range of similar considerations.
+
+The challenges faced by western power at the outset of 2016 are usefully summarized within the conventional framework by Gideon Rachman, chief foreign-affairs columnist for the London Financial Times. He begins by reviewing the western picture of world order: “Ever since the end of the cold war, the overwhelming power of the US military has been the central fact of international politics.”
+
+This is particularly crucial in three regions: east Asia, where “the US navy has become used to treating the Pacific as an ‘American lake’”; Europe, where Nato – meaning the United States, which “accounts for a staggering three-quarters of Nato’s military spending” – “guarantees the territorial integrity of its member states”; and the Middle East, where giant US naval and air bases “exist to reassure friends and to intimidate rivals”.
+
+The problem of world order today, Rachman continues, is that “these security orders are now under challenge in all three regions” because of Russian intervention in Ukraine and Syria, and because of China turning its nearby seas from an American lake to “clearly contested water”.
+
+The fundamental question of international relations, then, is whether the US should “accept that other major powers should have some kind of zone of influence in their neighborhoods”. Rachman thinks it should, for reasons of “diffusion of economic power around the world – combined with simple common sense”.
+
+There are, to be sure, ways of looking at the world from different standpoints. But let us keep to these three regions, surely critically important ones.
+
+Beginning with the “American lake”, some eyebrows might be raised over the report in mid-December 2015 that “an American B-52 bomber on a routine mission over the South China Sea unintentionally flew within two nautical miles of an artificial island built by China, senior defense officials said, exacerbating a hotly divisive issue for Washington and Beijing”.
+
+Those familiar with the grim record of the 70 years of the nuclear weapons era will be all too aware that this is the kind of incident that has often come perilously close to igniting terminal nuclear war. One need not be a supporter of China’s provocative and aggressive actions in the South China Sea to notice that the incident did not involve a Chinese nuclear-capable bomber in the Caribbean, or off the coast of California, where China has no pretensions of establishing a “Chinese lake”. Luckily for the world.
+
+Chinese leaders understand very well that their country’s maritime trade routes are ringed with hostile powers from Japan through the Malacca Straits and beyond, backed by overwhelming US military force. Accordingly, China is proceeding to expand westward with extensive investments and careful moves toward integration.
+
+In part, these developments are within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes the central Asian states and Russia, and soon India and Pakistan with Iran as one of the observers – a status that was denied to the US, which was also called on to close all military bases in the region. China is constructing a modernized version of the old silk roads, with the intent not only of integrating the region under Chinese influence, but also of reaching Europe and the Middle Eastern oil-producing regions. It is pouring huge sums into creating an integrated Asian energy and commercial system, with extensive high-speed rail lines and pipelines.
+
+One element of the program is a highway through some of the world’s tallest mountains to the new Chinese-developed port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which will protect oil shipments from potential US interference.
+
+The program may also, China and Pakistan hope, spur industrial development in Pakistan, which the United States has not undertaken despite massive military aid, and might also provide an incentive for Pakistan to clamp down on domestic terrorism, a serious issue for China in western Xinjiang province. Gwadar will be part of China’s “string of pearls”, bases being constructed in the Indian Ocean for commercial purposes but potentially also for military use, with the expectation that China might someday be able to project power as far as the Persian Gulf for the first time in the modern era.
+
+All of these moves remain immune to Washington’s overwhelming military power, short of annihilation by nuclear war, which would destroy the US as well.
+
+In 2015, China also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), with itself as the main shareholder. Fifty-six nations participated in the opening in Beijing in June, including US allies Australia, Britain and others which joined in defiance of Washington’s wishes. The US and Japan were absent.
+
+Some analysts believe that the new bank might turn out to be a competitor to the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank), in which the United States holds veto power. There are also some expectations that the SCO might eventually become a counterpart to Nato.
+
+Turning to the second region, eastern Europe, there is a crisis brewing at the Nato-Russian border. It is no small matter.
+
+In his illuminating and judicious scholarly study of the region, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, Richard Sakwa writes – all too plausibly – that the “Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 was in effect the first of the ‘wars to stop Nato enlargement’; the Ukraine crisis of 2014 is the second. It is not clear whether humanity would survive a third.”
+
+The west sees Nato enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some prominent western voices. George Kennan warned early on that Nato enlargement is a “tragic mistake”, and he was joined by senior American statesmen in an open letter to the White House describing it as a “policy error of historic proportions”.
+
+The present crisis has its origins in 1991, with the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were then two contrasting visions of a new security system and political economy in Eurasia. In Sakwa’s words, one vision was of a “‘Wider Europe’, with the EU at its heart but increasingly coterminous with the Euro-Atlantic security and political community; and on the other side there [was] the idea of ‘Greater Europe’, a vision of a continental Europe, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, that has multiple centers, including Brussels, Moscow and Ankara, but with a common purpose in overcoming the divisions that have traditionally plagued the continent”.
+
+Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the major proponent of Greater Europe, a concept that also had European roots in Gaullism and other initiatives. However, as Russia collapsed under the devastating market reforms of the 1990s, the vision faded, only to be renewed as Russia began to recover and seek a place on the world stage under Vladimir Putin who, along with his associate Dmitry Medvedev, has repeatedly “called for the geopolitical unification of all of ‘Greater Europe’ from Lisbon to Vladivostok, to create a genuine ‘strategic partnership’”.
+
+These initiatives were “greeted with polite contempt”, Sakwa writes, regarded as “little more than a cover for the establishment of a ‘Greater Russia’ by stealth” and an effort to “drive a wedge” between North America and western Europe. Such concerns trace back to earlier cold war fears that Europe might become a “third force” independent of both the great and minor superpowers and moving toward closer links to the latter (as can be seen in Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and other initiatives).
+
+The western response to Russia’s collapse was triumphalist. It was hailed as signaling “the end of history”, the final victory of western capitalist democracy, almost as if Russia were being instructed to revert to its pre-world war I status as a virtual economic colony of the west.
+
+Nato enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev that Nato forces would not move “one inch to the east” after he agreed that a unified Germany could become a Nato member – a remarkable concession, in the light of history. That discussion kept to East Germany. The possibility that Nato might expand beyond Germany was not discussed with Gorbachev, even if privately considered.
+
+Soon, Nato did begin to move beyond, right to the borders of Russia. The general mission of Nato was officially changed to a mandate to protect “crucial infrastructure” of the global energy system, sea lanes and pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a crucial western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of “responsibility to protect”, sharply different from the official UN version, Nato may now also serve as an intervention force under US command.
+
+Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand Nato to Ukraine. These plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest Nato summit of April 2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in Nato. The wording was unambiguous: “Nato welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in Nato. We agreed today that these countries will become members of Nato.”
+
+With the “Orange Revolution” victory of pro-western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized US support for Ukraine’s Nato and Euro-Atlantic aspirations”, as a WikiLeaks report revealed.
+
+Russia’s concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading US establishment journal, Foreign Affairs. He writes that “the taproot of the current crisis [over Ukraine] is Nato expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the west”, which Putin viewed as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests”.
+
+“Who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asks, pointing out that “Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it”. That should not be too difficult. After all, as everyone knows, “The United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the western hemisphere, much less on its borders.”
+
+In fact, the US stand is far stronger. It does not tolerate what is officially called “successful defiance” of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared (but could not yet implement) US control of the hemisphere. And a small country that carries out such successful defiance may be subjected to “the terrors of the earth” and a crushing embargo – as happened to Cuba.
+
+We need not ask how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hint of the first tentative steps in that direction would have been “terminated with extreme prejudice”, to adopt CIA lingo.
+
+As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putin’s moves and motives favorably to understand the logic behind them, nor to grasp the importance of understanding that logic instead of issuing imprecations against it. As in the case of China, a great deal is at stake, reaching as far – literally – as questions of survival.
+
+Let us turn to the third region of major concern, the (largely) Islamic world, also the scene of the global war on terror (GWOT) that George W Bush declared in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attack. To be more accurate, re-declared.
+
+The GWOT was declared by the Reagan administration when it took office, with fevered rhetoric about a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself” (as Reagan put it) and a “return to barbarism in the modern age” (the words of George Shultz, his secretary of state).
+
+The original GWOT has been quietly removed from history. It very quickly turned into a murderous and destructive terrorist war afflicting Central America, southern Africa, and the Middle East, with grim repercussions to the present, even leading to condemnation of the United States by the World Court (which Washington dismissed). In any event, it is not the right story for history, so it is gone.
+
+The success of the Bush-Obama version of GWOT can readily be evaluated on direct inspection. When the war was declared, the terrorist targets were confined to a small corner of tribal Afghanistan. They were protected by Afghans, who mostly disliked or despised them, under the tribal code of hospitality – which baffled Americans when poor peasants refused “to turn over Osama bin Laden for the, to them, astronomical sum of $25m”.
+
+There are good reasons to believe that a well-constructed police action, or even serious diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban, might have placed those suspected of the 9/11 crimes in American hands for trial and sentencing. But such options were off the table. Instead, the reflexive choice was large-scale violence – not with the goal of overthrowing the Taliban (that came later) but to make clear US contempt for tentative Taliban offers of the possible extradition of bin Laden.
+
+How serious these offers were we do not know, since the possibility of exploring them was never entertained. Or perhaps the US was just intent on “trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose”.
+
+That was the judgment of the highly respected anti-Taliban leader Abdul Haq, one of the many oppositionists who condemned the American bombing campaign launched in October 2001 as “a big setback” for their efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, a goal they considered within their reach.
+
+His judgment is confirmed by Richard A Clarke, who was chairman of the Counterterrorism Security Group at the White House under President George W Bush when the plans to attack Afghanistan were made. As Clarke describes the meeting, when informed that the attack would violate international law, “the president yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” The attack was also bitterly opposed by the major aid organizations working in Afghanistan, who warned that millions were on the verge of starvation and that the consequences might be horrendous.
+
+The consequences for poor Afghanistan years later need hardly be reviewed.
+
+The next target of the sledgehammer was Iraq.
+
+The US-UK invasion, utterly without credible pretext, is the major crime of the 21st century. The invasion led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a country where the civilian society had already been devastated by American and British sanctions that were regarded as “genocidal” by the two distinguished international diplomats who administered them, and resigned in protest for this reason. The invasion also generated millions of refugees, largely destroyed the country, and instigated a sectarian conflict that is now tearing apart Iraq and the entire region. It is an astonishing fact about our intellectual and moral culture that in informed and enlightened circles it can be called, blandly, “the liberation of Iraq”.
+
+Pentagon and British Ministry of Defense polls found that only 3% of Iraqis regarded the US security role in their neighborhood as legitimate, less than 1% believed that “coalition” (US-UK) forces were good for their security, 80% opposed the presence of coalition forces in the country, and a majority supported attacks on coalition troops. Afghanistan has been destroyed beyond the possibility of reliable polling, but there are indications that something similar may be true there as well. Particularly in Iraq the United States suffered a severe defeat, abandoning its official war aims, and leaving the country under the influence of the sole victor, Iran.
+
+The sledgehammer was also wielded elsewhere, notably in Libya, where the three traditional imperial powers (Britain, France and the US) procured security council resolution 1973 and instantly violated it, becoming the air force of the rebels.
+
+The effect was to undercut the possibility of a peaceful, negotiated settlement; sharply increase casualties (by at least a factor of 10, according to political scientist Alan Kuperman); leave Libya in ruins, in the hands of warring militias; and, more recently, to provide the Islamic State with a base that it can use to spread terror beyond.
+
+Quite sensible diplomatic proposals by the African Union, accepted in principle by Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, were ignored by the imperial triumvirate, as Africa specialist Alex de Waal reviews. A huge flow of weapons and jihadis has spread terror and violence from west Africa (now the champion for terrorist murders) to the Levant, while the Nato attack also sent a flood of refugees from Africa to Europe.
+
+Yet another triumph of “humanitarian intervention”, and, as the long and often ghastly record reveals, not an unusual one, going back to its modern origins four centuries ago.
+
+This piece was first published on TomDispatch.com. This is part one of an overview essay from Noam Chomsky’s new book on American power and the world, Who Rules the World?",REAL
+5397,US Officials Try to Scare Voters With Terror Threat,"US Intelligence Sees Attacks Likely Ahead of Tuesday Vote by Jason Ditz, November 04, 2016 Share This 
+US intelligence officials have reportedly warned law enforcement around the country of the potential for multiple al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on Monday, aimed to coincide with the day before the US election. The reports were described as “ possibly legitimate and concerning. ” 
+Details are still scant, but the intelligence has singled out New York, Virginia, and Texas as the mostly likely targets. Even then, they offered no details on potential locations, saying al-Qaeda and its affiliates are eager to regain their relevance. 
+A NYPD spokesman briefed on the matter said that the threats “ lack specificity ,” however local police around the country were said to have been warned that polling places are considered “attractive targets” for both organized and homegrown terror attacks. 
+Of course, saying that any upcoming event is a potential “attractive target” is not unusual these days, and hardly a significant holiday goes by in the US where warnings and briefings about potential attacks are not heavily publicized. 
+The Monday warning offers some unusual details, however, as generally one would think the day of the election itself would be the target, when more people are queuing up for the vote. An attack the day before the election would, however, cast a rather dramatic pall over the entire matter. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+9435,Arianna Huffington Exposed Colluding With DNC in New WikiLeaks Emails,"We Are Change 
+According to the Code of Ethics for Journalism (yes we have one of those):
+“A journalist should behave in such a way as not to become a victim of a collision of real or hidden interests.
+He/she should reject privileges or presents which could influence his/her opinion or create such an impression. They should not take part in activities that endanger his/her professional integrity.The professional status of the journalist is not compatible with occupying a position in state bodies, or in the headquarters of political parties and other political organizations. If work in political parties causes conflict of interests, raises or may raise the question of objectivity of mass media, it is not acceptable. Conflicts of interests damage the prestige of mass media.” 
+That being said, award winning journalist and The Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington sought a ‘useful’ role in the Democratic party, and pledged to use HuffPost to ‘Echo [the DNC’s] Message’.
+The part-time media tycoon and full-time socialite sought to play a “useful” role within the Democratic Party establishment by using her website to quote “echo” the party message, according to emails published by WikiLeaks.
+
+In an April 2008 email to top Democratic operatives, including Paul Begala, Stan Greenberg, David Brock, and current Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, Democratic operative Susan McCue relayed a discussion she had with Huffington about advancing the Democratic cause in an official capacity.
+Huffington, explained McCue, suggested that she would be more comfortable in a role of covert influence, and “using Huffpo to echo our message.” The media tycoon “has a point,” McCue conceded.
+Back in October a HuffPo writer by the name of David Seamen went public that HuffPo and Arianna, was editing and censoring his material. https://youtu.be/hIcImy1MKuc Funny thing is that just prior to David going public the DNC held an “Off-the-Record” party for main stream reporters, news anchors, and editors. Guccifer 2.0 provided The Intercept with emails revealing “friendly and highly useful relationships” between the Clinton campaign and the U.S. media. Those emails showed that the Clinton campaign held a private, “off-the-record” dinner with “influential reporters, anchors and editors” No wonder only 6 percent of Americans trust the media. Here is the full list of RSVPs:
+
+Back in 2011, Huffington praised Wikileaks, saying: “If I ruled the world, my first goal would be to make it easier to cut through to the facts. At the moment, we are all drowning in spin, smokescreens and lies. Those who perpetrated the two biggest policy disasters of the past ten years—the Iraq war and the financial crisis—could not have pulled their work off without a lack of transparency. So greater transparency would be at the top of my agenda..The internet has already shown great promise in cutting through spin. YouTube, Twitter, email, and turbocharged search engines have made it easier to expose our leaders’ distortions. But if I were in charge, I’d go much further to protect the rights of disclosure and free speech on the internet, and challenge the press—particularly in America—to break its addiction to faux objectivity.”
+In the video below Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, gets confronted by Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange about censoring Jesse Ventura’s 9/11 article.
+https://youtu.be/J-5JgDG7HcY The post Arianna Huffington Exposed Colluding With DNC in New WikiLeaks Emails appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+5435,Liberal CNN Commentator Blames Republicans for Obamacare’s Rising Premiums,"Washington Free Beacon October 27, 2016 
+CNN commentator Angela Rye on Wednesday blamed the failure of Republicans to repeal and replace Obamacare for the newly announced double-digit premium increases in the president’s signature health care law. 
+“It’s not just Hillary Clinton that needs to tackle this but also Congress,” Rye said on CNN’s New Day. “The reason we are in the position that we are in right now frankly, Alisyn, is because Republicans fell short of their promise to repeal, which is what they said they wanted to do, and replace.” 
+Host Alisyn Camerota stopped Rye before she got any further and reminded her that President Obama had promised premiums would go down. 
+Most states will see health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act increase by an average of 25 percent, according to data released this week by the Obama administration. Indiana will see its rates slightly go down, but other states like Arizona will see costs skyrocket by 116 percent. Members of the administration have been quick to soften the blow of the increase by reminding people that a majority of those on the Obamacare exchanges would be receiving tax credits to help pay for the now more expensive health insurance plans.   8:17  ",FAKE
+3885,Lawmakers seek deeper shake-up at Secret Service,"Two weeks after the Secret Service forced out four of its top officials, lawmakers are questioning whether the agency should have ousted one more — its influential second-in-command.
+
+Members of Congress from both parties are concerned that by keeping in place Alvin “A.T.” Smith, the Secret Service stopped short of fully reforming upper management following a string of embarrassing security lapses, according to government officials familiar with the discussions.
+
+Smith, as a top official for nearly a decade and the deputy director since 2012, has managed the agency’s day-to-day operations and was a key architect of its budgets and policies. He has overseen the departments responsible for the missteps and is now helping to engineer the agency’s overhaul.
+
+Smith is the highest-ranking official to survive a series of management shake-ups that began in October with the resignation of Director Julia Pierson and continued this month with the ouster or retirement of six assistant directors.
+
+The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee plans to invite Smith and acting director Joseph P. Clancy to appear at a February hearing focusing on the core reasons behind security breaches involving the White House and the president, according to people knowledgeable about the panel’s plans.
+
+Committee members have heard from agency whistleblowers who have complained that Smith approved policy changes that they say weakened the agency, according to these people. Lawmakers have also quietly expressed concern to administration officials in recent days about Smith’s continued presence in the agency’s top leadership.
+
+“I’m worried that A.T. Smith is part of the problem, not part of the solution,” said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). “He seems to be in the middle of most of these really bad decisions.”
+
+Smith and Clancy declined to comment. Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan also declined to discuss Smith’s role but said the deputy director has a “proven record of accomplishment and professionalism.”
+
+The discussions regarding Smith’s role underscore a dilemma facing the Obama administration as it attempts to turn around the beleaguered protective agency: how to clean house in the upper ranks without losing the unusual expertise required for the highly specialized work of protecting the White House and national leaders.
+
+Smith’s allies say that ousting the 28-year Secret Service veteran would strip the agency of the little remaining continuity and institutional knowledge remaining after the shake-up in leadership.
+
+“He’s a pivotal peg in the foundation,” said Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. “If he gets pulled, I’m concerned there would be a need for a complete rebuild. We don’t have luxury for a rebuild, because the bad guys aren’t going to wait for us to do a complete overhaul.”
+
+A reminder of the Secret Service’s continuing challenges came this week when an errant recreational drone evaded detection and crashed on the White House grounds. The device was not a threat, but the agency has studied the White House’s vulnerability to a drone attack for years and has yet to find a solution. This week’s incident came four months after a knife-wielding man was able to jump the White House fence and race into the front door and through much of the main floor — a humiliation for the Secret Service that exposed poor training and numerous breakdowns in communications and procedures.
+
+Smith, 56, who started his law enforcement career as a Greenville, S.C., sheriff’s dispatcher and joined the Secret Service in 1986 as a special investigator in the Miami field office, knows the inner workings of the agency better than anyone, according to several current and former managers.
+
+He also has made political connections as he has risen through the ranks, serving during the 1990s as head of the protective detail for then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Smith married President Bill Clinton’s cousin Catherine Cornelius in 2000, and Bill and Hillary Clinton attended the ­wedding at Foundry Methodist Church near the White House.
+
+Smith has received a number of awards during his career, particularly related to his time heading the New York field office and managing major security events. New York agents applauded his steady hand in rebuilding the agency’s flagship field office after its headquarters at the World Trade Center was destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and one of its officers was killed.
+
+The George W. Bush administration honored him with a merit award in 2004 for his handling of security at the Republican National Convention at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Smith received the Secretary’s Silver Medal from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff for coordinating security for the 60th anniversary of the U.N. General Assembly in 2005, at the time the largest security event the agency had ever managed.
+
+But Smith is also directly responsible for some of the decisions cited as contributing factors in recent security lapses, including the Sept. 19 fence-jumping incident and the failure of the security system at Vice President Biden’s Delaware home when shots were fired near the house this month.
+
+Smith signed off on canceling academy classes for new recruits and regular training for officers, which resulted in the White House being guarded by a team of Secret Service officers who were stretched thin and often unsure of their specific duties in responding to an intruder. He also approved cutting back on funds meant to replace aging technology and alarms.
+
+His management decisions came under scrutiny after he authorized a special operation in 2011 that diverted agents from a White House surveillance post to monitor the well-being of the Secret Service director’s administrative assistant, who was in a dispute with her neighbor.
+
+The agency’s inspector general later concluded that “Operation Moonlight” was improper and represented a “serious lapse in judgment” in removing agents from a key post. Smith defended his actions, telling investigators that he felt it was appropriate for the Secret Service to be concerned about the welfare of a staffer, particularly one who held a White House pass and worked closely with the agency director.
+
+Smith’s critics say he is one of the central architects of an insular management structure that has lost the trust of rank-and-file employees, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former personnel.
+
+Many inside were shocked that Smith was not forced out along with the top managers. “People were holding their breath for two months,” one veteran agent said. “Now they are wondering: Why is the core of the problem still there?”
+
+A special panel appointed by the Department of Homeland Security recommended last month that the White House pick a new director from outside the Secret Service, describing the agency as “starved” for dynamic leaders with fresh ideas.
+
+In recent weeks, Smith has provided close counsel to Clancy, who has said he is seeking to repair management problems and repair the battered image of a once-
+
+revered agency.
+
+Smith was involved in the recent departures of senior managers. And last week, he helped choose five new assistant directors to fill the new vacancies, almost all of whom served with Smith on previous assignments.",REAL
+4856,Trump Threatens Lawsuit Against Slanted New York Times,"Donald Trump threatened to sue the New York Times — and went on a Twitter tirade slamming columnist Maureen Dowd as ""a neurotic dope"" after she alleged Trump appeared to like enjoy inciting violence at his rallies.
+
+""My lawyers want to sue the failing @nytimes so badly for irresponsible intent. I said no (for now), but they are watching. Really disgusting,"" Trump tweeted on Saturday.
+
+He suggested the newspaper was slanting its coverage to boost rival Hillary Clinton, saying the Democratic nominee was ""doing so badly"" that the Times is ""willing to say anything.""
+
+He also lacerated Dowd, deriding her as ""crazy,"" ""wacky,"" and ""a neurotic dope,"" and tweeting that the columnist ""hardly knows me,"" but ""makes up things that I never said for her boring interviews and column.""
+
+The attack followed Dowd's interview earlier Saturday on CNN, where she was promoting her new book. ""The Year of Voting Dangerously.""
+
+""I told him that it was wrong that there was violence being incited at his rallies and that reporters were getting roughed up,"" Dowd told CNN. ""And he paused — you're right, he did listen — but then he disagreed and said he thought the violence added a frisson of excitement.""",REAL
+6447,President Trump vs President Clinton … What Will Happen After Inauguration? | The Vineyard of the Saker,"3454 Views November 07, 2016 15 Comments Guest Posts The Saker 
+by Oleg Maslov 
+The time has come for the country with the largest economy and military in the world will soon go to the polls to choose a new leader for itself. Americans will elect a new president on November 8, 2016. However, the two main candidates running for the office of president in the general election have never been more different from each other. Hillary Clinton has lived in the White House as First Lady for 8 years, served as a senator, ran for president in 2008, and served as Secretary of State during Barack Obama’s first term, during which she oversaw the NATO intervention in Libya and the Benghazi crisis – in other words, a career politician. On the other hand, Donald Trump has never served in public office, instead dedicating his life to many different business ventures, some of which became runaway successes and others short-lived failures. 
+Both candidates boast considerable strengths and face off against damaging scandals. Clinton has been touted as the ‘most qualified candidate for the job’ and has decades of experience in and around the center of power in Washington. However, she is currently under investigation by the FBI for potentially mishandling classified information after using a private email server to send and receive emails while Secretary of State, faced allegations of corruption relating to donations from foreign entities to the Clinton Foundation in return for political favors, responded to leaked email suggested that the Democratic National Convention colluded with major media companies against Democratic primary rival Bernie Sanders, and dealt with ongoing accusations of husband Bill Clinton’s sexual relations and infidelities. On the other hand, Trump has pointed to his wealth to promote himself as a self-made billionaire capable of hard negotiations and used his status as a political outsider status to make his promise to change to the establishment believable. He has also been the target of sexual harassment allegations, responded to claims that some of his failed businesses may have been scams, battled accusations of involvement with white supremacy groups, and is the only candidate for president from a major party not to release tax information since Gerald Ford. 
+Comparing the individual factors and history of both candidates gives us considerable information for analysis, but what effect will the policies of the candidates bring to the world once they enter office? In the following sections, we pit Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in a head-to-head comparison, analyzing the likely outcomes of their policies on global conflicts, the world economy, American social and business conditions, the future of Europe, and US relations with Russia and China. 
+Global Conflicts 
+Hillary Clinton 
+The former Secretary of State has been labeled by some analysts as a representative of the ‘hawks’ in Washington, or the group of influencers who are pro-war and closely connected with the American military industrial complex. Hillary Clinton voted for the American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Senator and spearheaded the American push for the NATO-imposed ‘no-fly zone’ in Libya as well as the US support for ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria as Secretary of State in the Obama administration. 
+A vote for Hillary is a vote for continuing the foreign policies of the Obama administration, including the expansion of NATO activities in Eastern Europe, intensifying American actions against the government of Bashar al-Assad, ramping up US naval might in the South China Sea, and arming and supporting Saudi Arabia in its military operation against Yemen. 
+One policy favored by Hillary Clinton adequately sums up the potential effects of a Clinton administration on global security: Hillary Clinton has publicly advocated for the implementation of a ‘no-fly zone’ and ‘safe zones’ within Syria. Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, succinctly outlined the consequences of such a policy last month when he explained to the US Senate that carrying out this policy would require the United States to “go to war against Syria and Russia”, something unequivocally negative for both regional and global security and something which will certainly exacerbate tensions in Syria rather than relieve them. 
+Trump expresses the greatest fear that such a policy may bring when he says that such proposals may start World War III. 
+Much can be written on the other conflicts mentioned, but the general trend is relatively apparent – a Clinton presidency would continue aggressive American policies which only increase tensions and create the possibility for a spark to light the powder keg of conflict. 
+Donald Trump 
+If a Clinton administration would be predictably aggressive, a Trump administration would be an unpredictable wild card for global security. Many point to Trump’s open call for good relations between the US and Russia, even for cooperation between the two countries in tackling the Islamic State, as a sign of a period of peace and stabilization of the global security climate under a Trump administration. However, others react with alarm when they hear Trump criticize the usefulness of NATO or seemingly advocate for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, although these apparent Trump policies are often taken out of context. 
+Trump has consistently called for an increased ‘sharing of the burden’ from NATO partners and other American partners, notably Japan and South Korea. His campaign claims that the remarks that Trump made about the usefulness NATO and the proliferation of nuclear weapons was an extreme example meant to show the necessity of convincing American partners to pay more for the US military umbrella and that Trump has no intention of disbanding NATO or allowing states like Saudi Arabia or Japan to get nuclear weapons. 
+However, if Trump’s drive to push more of the financial burden of US military protection onto allies were to fail, he may be forced to carry out his promises, at least to some degree, if only to save face. Trump’s public intentions to mend ties with Russia and pursue cooperation in Syria combined with the potential for a weaker US presence in Europe may in fact encourage Russia to act more aggressively in pursuing their own interests in Europe and the Middle East. 
+One country has been disproportionately targeted by Trump – China. Trump has campaigned on the idea that China has been playing the United States for a sucker and that the US-Chinese relationship has been beneficial mostly for one side. His promises to renegotiate trade deals with China (which could be potentially quite harmful for China) could well have to be enforced by naval power projection, and Trump may end up following many of the same naval policies in the South China Sea as the Obama administration. This would, of course, raise tensions between the United States and China. 
+Trump’s proposals and policies have not been thoroughly tested and their success at stabilizing the world situation are far from assured. Although Trump tends to appear more interested in fostering peace and cooling down global conflict, the tensions created by his policies, especially with respect to China, may in fact increase the possibility of conflict, showing just how unpredictable a Trump administration may be. 
+World Economy 
+Donald Trump 
+Trump has positioned himself as a pro-business candidate that will stimulate the US economy, and many of his proposed policies could potentially have positive effects. However, Trump’s heavy criticism of global trade agreements, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific-Partnership (TPP), as well as Trump’s intention to force American companies to bring their business operations back from other countries in an attempt to reverse the process of ‘offshorization’ may well benefit the American economy, but may in fact deal some heavy damage to the global economy. 
+Policies that benefit the United States directly, such as encouraging auto manufacturers to return production to American soil by raising tariffs on autos made by American companies in other countries, will have a negative effect on other countries. Agreements such as the TTIP would certainly raise global economic activity, despite the fact that they benefit one side over the other, and would raise the level of global economic activity. It follows that delaying or disrupting negotiations on these agreements may lead to more negative consequences for the world economy as a whole. 
+Trump’s public call for better relations with Russia may have the effect of reducing or even removing sanctions thereby restoring former business between Russia and Europe as well as creating new business relationships which compensate for negative effects of other policies on the world economy. Further, if Trump’s promises for peace and stabilization of global conflicts is carried out, economic activity and innovation would continue without any obstacle. 
+Hillary Clinton 
+A Clinton administration would continue to develop the economic strategy initiated by the Obama administration, including liberal policies toward corporate offshoring and advancement of global trade deals such as TTIP and TPP. In essence, these policies would produce slow but stable growth for the world economy. Maintaing the sanctions on Russia would restrict global growth but if negotiations on either TTIP or TPP would result in an agreement, the resulting economic activity would more than make up for that lost business. 
+The Clinton administration may appear to offer better opportunities for the global economy, but one major factor still needs consideration. Clinton’s preference for resolution of conflicts by military means, seen most acutely in her proposals for resolving the Syrian situation, have a high potential to lead to a wider conflict with Russia and Iran, and ultimately may lead to a third global war, a war in which the main adversaries have a vast amount of deliverable nuclear weapons as well as a protocol for using them, should the need arise. 
+Needless to say, any conflict in which nuclear weapons are used is unequivocally negative for the global economy in the short term, if a global economy even remains after the dust has settled. If a global war remains conventional or if nuclear weapons are used in limited capacity, the prospect for global economic growth in the medium term is quite positive given the need to rebuild the affected countries, but the loss of life, destruction of productive infrastructure and buildings, and long term psychological and social effects far outweigh the economic growth related to rebuilding what was lost. 
+US Social and Business Conditions 
+Hillary Clinton 
+As the status quo candidate, Hillary Clinton represents a future similar to the present conditions with small but noticeable changes. Although controversial, Obama’s healthcare plan, commonly referred to as ‘Obamacare’, did bring healthcare insurance to more Americans. Clinton will most certainly continue developing Obamacare, which may improve the lives of many people. Hillary has also proposed a plan to finance higher education for students whose household earns a combined income of less than $125,000 per year, something seen as positive for standard of living and development of future business conditions. 
+Clinton’s willingness to accept more refugees from the war torn Middle East may increase already palpable social tensions by increasing competition for low-wage jobs and undermining social cohesion. The liberal policies of allowing companies to seek lower cost labor in other countries will continue to send jobs out of the United States, leaving university graduates, already suffering from low employment rates, with even fewer work opportunities. 
+Despite meeting with mothers of black teens killed by police, Hillary has no practical solution for addressing the growing issue of perceived racial prejudice by police officers. Neither does Donald Trump for that matter. 
+Donald Trump 
+Trump’s strongest potential option for improving the social and business conditions in the US is his promise to force American companies to bring production back to the United States. Fulfilling this promise would create many jobs in the US and alleviate the millennial unemployment problem, all the while raising wages and the overall standard of living. Although xenophobic and perhaps even racially charged in nature, Trump’s intention to limit immigration may also create more low-wage opportunities for American citizens. 
+Trump has called for an increase in paid maternity leave, something which may quality of life for average people. One of his main campaign promises is to revise and simplify the tax system. If done properly, this policy will make filing taxes easier for normal citizens and businesses as well, improving business conditions and potentially creating more jobs and economic activity. 
+On the other hand, Trump is widely seen as a candidate who represents white male superiority and the mere fact of a Trump administration may cause an increase in already palpable social tensions, potentially even leading to open protest from Muslim or Hispanic groups among others at his presidency. The Clinton campaign has worked to paint Trump as a white supremacist and misogynist, and often successfully so. Despite the potential economic benefits of a Trump presidency, the potential explosion of social tensions may cause an overall negative social and business situation in the United States. Of course, a Trump administration will recognize this danger and will make every attempt to prevent it. 
+The Future of Europe 
+Donald Trump 
+A Trump presidency would entail a major reversal of policies for many Eastern European countries, including the Baltic States, Poland, and Ukraine, when it comes to European relations with Russia. Trump has not only publicly questioned the utility of NATO, but has also called for better relations with Russia, both concepts which are anathema to many Eastern European nations. If Trump were to decrease the American footprint in Europe and to attempt to build better relations with Russia, many European nations would be forced to rethink some of their main strategic objectives at the very least. The current government of Ukraine would be one of the biggest losers in Europe should Trump become president and may even be pushed out of power, either peacefully or forcefully, should Trump choose to sacrifice American support for Ukraine in exchange for better relations with Russia, including recognition of Crimea as Russian territory. 
+A decrease in US forces on mainland Europe as well as American engineered political obstacles to cooperation between Europe and Russia would naturally lead to a blossoming of relations between Europe and Russia. Under a Trump presidency, one may expect a significant rollback of European sanctions on Russia and significant growth in Russia-Europe trade and relations. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe (PACE) would regain influence in regulating Europe-Russia relations. European-Chinese relations would also grow dynamically as ‘Silk Road’ projects through Russia would take on new relevance. 
+Many so-called ‘Euroskeptic’ movements and otherwise ‘right of center’ political groups would gain influence and perhaps even become part of the mainstream political configuration. Parties like Marine Le Pen’s Front National, Alternative fuer Deutschland, Austria’s Freedom Party, and Golden Dawn in Greece could make a grand entrance into mainstream politics while ruling parties in Hungary and Italy could become even more entrenched. Pushed forward by Brexit, this trend would bring considerable momentum behind the a drive for the dissolution of the European Union, at least for the monetary union, but this remains unlikely. 
+A Trump presidency may even allow for the start of negotiations between Europe and Russia on a comprehensive trade and political agreement to regulate relations. Numerous politicians, including Francois Mitterand and Vladimir Putin, have spoken about a free trade zone stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostock, but if China has any say in the matter, the zone will extend to Singapore and cover the entire supercontinent of Eurasia. If this concept were to ever become reality, European nations would gain influence over developing nations and receive access to valuable and profitable investment opportunities. 
+Further, any major agreement between the United States and Russia on Middle Eastern policy would entail a significant slowdown of the current migration crisis as well as a noticeable reduction in terrorist related activity. Europe may even join a coalition of the US and Russia to fight terrorism. Lastly, US missile defense systems in Poland and Romania are likely to be dismantled. 
+Hillary Clinton 
+A Hillary Clinton presidency would entail business as usual with Europe and a continuation of the current trends and policies initiated by the Obama administration. The major features of a Clinton presidency would include continued military build-up in Baltic states, continuation of European sanctions against Russia, increased support for the Ukrainian government, increased media hype about the Russian military threat, and a further break-down in the systems that govern Europe-Russia relations, such as the OSCE and PACE. 
+A Clinton presidency would entail an increase in the number of American troops in mainland Europe as well as an increase in joint US-European defense projects, including expansions of the missile defense project. More US-led NATO troops, groupings, and exercises would take place in the Baltic countries and a Clinton administration would push for Sweden and Finland closer to NATO, with the ultimate purpose to convince the Scandinavian countries to join the military block. Expect increased media reports about air force interceptions and Russian submarine scandals. 
+Any European Union political party that has a neutral or favorable position to Russia will come under increased scrutiny and will face attacks on multiple fronts, mostly through the media. The EU will work to make examples of governments such as Hungary, Greece, and Italy that actively resist sanctions against Russia and attempt to circumvent sanctions by making their own economic arrangements with Russia. 
+Europe will be pressured to sign TTIP and will most likely become more and more dependent on the United States for economic and political policy. More LNG terminals will be built on the European mainland so that European countries can import natural gas from America and Qatar so that dependence on Russia is decreased. China will place less of an effort on the Silk Road overland trade route and will have to make a different trade arrangement with Europe. 
+Middle East migration numbers will continue in full force as US policy in the Middle East will continue to favor interventionist hawks, forcing reluctant European nations to accept more and more refugees from Middle Eastern nations. The threat of terrorism will remain high and terrorist attacks are likely to occur again on European soil. 
+US Relations with Russia and China 
+Hillary Clinton 
+A Clinton administration will continue to play a double game with China, continuing the liberal policies of offshoring production to Chinese companies and maintaining a strong trade relationship on the one hand, but encircling China militarily with naval hardware and trade partnerships with local Chinese rivals. China will have a difficult time trying to push its goods to Europe through the Eurasian continent as the US will actively block attempts to create a Silk Road structure leading either through Russia or through Iran. However, on the surface, the US will continue to maintain a careful policy of wary respect toward China, never making overt insults or provocations and maintaining an air of pretentious respect. 
+Relations with Russia will be characterized by increased support to Russia’s enemies in Ukraine and Syria, as well as attempts to undermine the governments in Belarus and Central Asian countries. President Clinton will push European allies to increase economic pressure on Russia and media coverage of Russia from all ideological sides of American media will turn increasingly negative. All of this will take place while the United States will continue to do business with Russia as usual, buying rocket engines, space transport services, grain, and even certain types of weapons as if there was no issue in bilateral relations. 
+Donald Trump 
+The strategic economic goals of a Trump presidency would almost immediately begin to cause problems for Chinese-American relations. If Trump acts on his promises to raise tariffs for American companies producing goods in foreign countries and then shipping them to the US, many businesses with manufacturing operations in China will be forced to shut down their Chinese subsidiaries, causing significant losses for China. China would potentially experience a major economic downturn as many of its factories and industrial centers would be forced out of business. China would not leave such an unkind gesture unanswered and would most likely sell a significant portion of its US Treasury bills and bonds on the market, or simply demand early payment, leading to a period of financial troubles for the US. 
+American-Russian relations would potentially enter into a new and unprecedented period of mutual understanding and cooperation. President Trump would work to open Russia’s massive market even further to American companies and would deepen partnerships between the US and Russia in areas like space exploration and development, energy distribution and marketing, and perhaps even reopen programs focusing on purchase and delivery of Russian military hardware to groups supported by the Pentagon, including the program to arm and train the Afghan military with Russian helicopters. 
+In all, both candidates offer substantially different visions of the future, and it is up to individual voters to decide which vision appears more rational and beneficial for both the United States and the world at large. The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95 ",FAKE
+960,Sanders launches late-stage bid to woo superdelegates,"Bernie Sanders’ campaign, buoyed by recent victories, is mounting a late-stage bid to court so-called superdelegates and wrangle just enough of the influential party insiders to close the gap with Hillary Clinton heading into the Democrats’ presidential convention.
+
+Like essentially every other Sanders strategy at this point, it’s an uphill and longshot play.
+
+Campaign officials acknowledged Monday that the Vermont senator, despite his weekend caucus sweep and other wins, cannot secure the nomination without moving the needle on superdelegates – who are elected officials and others free to support whomever they want.
+
+Top Sanders adviser Tad Devine argued the delegate count will be so close that neither Clinton nor Sanders could win the nomination with pledged delegates alone.
+
+So as the Sanders campaign continues to “compete and compete fully,” as Devine put it, in the remaining primaries and caucuses, the underdog team is looking to line up support from superdelegates who remain undecided or aligned with the front-running Clinton.
+
+Devine said dozens of superdelegates have expressed support for the Vermont senator. He acknowledged delegates who are undecided – as opposed to those already backing Clinton – are the “best target.”
+
+Campaign manager Jeff Weaver also suggested the number in the pro-Sanders camp is “higher than what’s publicly available” because others are “not ready to go public yet.”
+
+The leaderboard right now still reflects a daunting road ahead for Sanders.
+
+Clinton leads Sanders in the pledged-delegate race 1,243-975. That gap grows immensely when superdelegates are included; 469 currently support Clinton, while Sanders only has 29 in his corner.
+
+It takes 2,383 total delegates to win the nomination.
+
+Even as Sanders claims momentum out of his Western state victories this past weekend, the Clinton campaign is voicing confidence that the race could be over in a matter of weeks.
+
+“We are going to get to the point where, at the end of April, there just is not enough real estate for him to overtake the commanding lead that we’ve built up,” Clinton pollster Joel Benenson told reporters, according to the Los Angeles Times.
+
+Weaver, though, said the Sanders campaign is in regular contact with at least some of the roughly 200 still-available superdelegates, an effort that includes recently sending them a newsletter and having those committed to Sanders making calls to the undecided.
+
+The campaign is not alone in such efforts. The remaining three GOP presidential candidates are in a furious, behind-the-scenes battle for delegates who -- more likely than for Democrats -- could decide the nominee at the July convention. They are eyeing both delegates who backed ex-candidates and those who could become unbound at a contested convention.
+
+Front-runner Donald Trump on Tuesday named as his convention manager Paul Manafort, a political veteran who helped then-President Gerald Ford in his convention floor fight in 1976.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich has enlisted four veterans: Stu Spencer and Charlie Black, both Reagan advisers, and this week operatives Michael Biundo and Andrew Boucher, to win over delegates.
+
+In addition, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz reportedly is going to the Colorado state convention next week, when a majority of the state’s delegates will be picked. And Trump is disputing the delegate allocation in Louisiana’s March 29 primary, where he reportedly could get fewer delegates than second-place finisher Cruz despite winning the state.
+
+The Sanders campaign has a superdelegate point person, though it’s unclear how aggressive their wooing operation will be.
+
+Sanders Press Secretary Symone Sanders told FoxNews.com on Tuesday the campaign has somebody on staff to keep in contact with superdelegates.
+
+“But no, we don’t have anybody picking off folks,” she said.
+
+On Monday, Sanders pollster Ben Tulchin said an “overwhelming preponderance” of polling data shows that his candidate would fare better in a general election than Clinton against any of the three GOP candidates.
+
+“This is not a blip,” he said.
+
+Tulchin also said Sanders is “very popular” among independent voters who are “absolutely critical for Democrats to win the White House in November.”
+
+And he made clear that the polling details are targeted to more than just reporters and voters.
+
+“These are things that superdelegates, quite frankly, have to consider quite seriously,” he said.",REAL
+7866,Planet nine might be pulling our solar system out of alignment,"Report Copyright Violation Planet nine might be pulling our solar system out of alignment Astronomers have speculated for years that there could be a large planet in the outer reaches of our solar system, but no such object has ever been directly observed. However, the harder we look, the more plausible the existence of “planet nine” becomes. Astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech have added another piece of evidence to the debate. Their observations indicate that planet nine could be causing a “wobble” in the solar system.",FAKE
+3488,Congressional Republicans declare Obama’s budget dead on arrival,"Republican members of Congress on Tuesday declared President Obama's $4 trillion budget plan to be a legislative nonstarter, as they decried new taxes it would require to pay for an ambitious slate of proposed programs.
+
+""It's dead on arrival,"" said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
+
+Obama's plan, which includes calls for new early-education programs and free community college tuition, among other things, would require new tax revenue from the wealthy Americans and large corporations to fund the initiatives.
+
+""There's no greater contrast than showing what this new American Congress is for and what the president supports. His new budget will give the federal government an 11 percent raise by taking more out of the economy in taxes,"" said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
+
+Addressing reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast earlier Monday, Club for Growth president David McIntosh said: ""I think the president's proposal for essentially massive tax increases on corporate America is a nonstarter.""
+
+Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, are expected to unveil their own budget plans in the coming weeks.
+
+""We believe in growing America's economy, not growing Washington,"" said McCarthy.",REAL
+1091,"Opinion: Face it, Trump on course for nomination","Let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Marco Rubio will be the 2016 Republican nominee. After a humiliating defeat on Mega Tuesday, he finally bailed out -- closing down his campaign with an emotional speech that begged Republicans not to ""surrender"" to anger and fear. They almost did: Donald Trump scored big victories across the country and added hugely to his delegate count. But John Kasich's victory in Ohio may have prevented his coronation. And so the baton is passed: we have a new contender for second place.
+
+The exit polls told us a lot of what we've heard before. Trump appeals to the less well educated, the poorer and, often-times, the older voter. Kasich won Ohio by dominating among moderates and the upper-middle-class . It's tempting to dismiss his victory given that it came in his home state -- the political equivalent of getting a Valentine's Day card from your mother. But compared to the rout that Rubio suffered in Florida, it sounded like a ringing endorsement from party moderates desperate to find a new leader. And it came at just the right moment, too, given that Hillary Clinton all but sealed her nomination in the Democratic contest. The more certain her candidacy appears, the more that mature voices in the GOP have to do to ensure they have a winnable ticket.
+
+But does Kasich, or anyone else, really stand a chance of beating Trump? There are three theories. One is that because he's been denied Ohio's 66 delegates, Trump suddenly has a really hard road ahead to win on the first ballot at the convention. In the coming primaries, the Republicans can beat him the way that a pride of lions kills an elephant -- in small bites that exhaust the beast until it gives in.
+
+The problem with that approach is that it's going to tear the GOP apart. It means several months of bitter fighting, recriminations and -- at the end of it -- Trump could well go third party anyway. Meanwhile, Hillary will be mounting a media blitz against a GOP that seems unfit for government. Kasich, Cruz or AN Other could find themselves stealing a hollow crown.
+
+Theory two is that Kasich winning Ohio is actually good for Trump because it keeps Kasich in the race. If Kasich had lost then the party could have rallied around Ted Cruz, tying up all of the dissident forces into one candidacy -- the stronger candidacy, too, because Cruz has shown an ability to win states other than his own. For a sense of how division has helped The Donald, look at the results in North Carolina and Missouri. There's a strong case for saying that Rubio and Kasich's small but significant showings denied both to Cruz.
+
+Finally, theory No. 3 is that Trump still has the nomination in the bag despite losing Ohio. His performance elsewhere on Mega Tuesday may have been strong enough to cover the loss to Kasich in delegates. And while the coming calendar looks good for Kasich in some ways -- lots of northern states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- it still contains plenty of contests that favor Trump. Arizona, for instance, is next: 58 delegates in a state where the immigration issue dominates. Then there is the argument that Trump has built a moral case for the nomination by enjoying a string of victories, by pulling new people into the party and by seeing off so many big beasts. If the GOP rallied around an alternative and tried to deny Trump what seems rightfully his, the convention would surely be a bloodbath. (Perhaps even a literal one given the candidate's ability to draw violent protests). And who exactly would the alternative to Trump be? Clearly not Rubio, who admitted in his speech that it wasn't ""God's plan"" that he should be elected president in 2016. His crushing defeat represents a rejection of not just a man but an orthodoxy. Rubio was the most boilerplate Republican left in the race and the party is going to have to reckon with the fact that voters plainly do not want more war or illegal immigration -- but probably do want their entitlements and their jobs protected. In that sense, Trump really did secure his nomination on Tuesday. He has swept the South and the North and is now poised to take on the West. Even if the conspiracy of mathematicians denies him the actual, physical candidacy, he has changed his party for good. Or wrecked it, depending on your point of view.",REAL
+5348,CNN Got Complete List of Questions for Trump Interview from DNC,"
+CNN asked the Democratic National Committee to prepare questions for Wolf Blitzer’s interview with Donald Trump, according to emails released by Wikileaks.
+In an April 25 email entitled “Trump Questions for CNN,” the DNC’s Lauren Dillon asked fellow Democrats for questions Blitzer could ask Trump.
+“Wolf Blitzer is interviewing Trump on Tues ahead of his foreign policy address on Wed,” she wrote. “Please send me thoughts by 10:30 AM tomorrow. Thanks!”
+The DNC came up with a lengthy set of questions for CNN :
+– Who helped you write the foreign policy speech you’re giving tomorrow? Which advisors specifically did you talk to? What advice did they give you? Did they give you any advice that you chose not to take?
+– CIA Director Brennan and former CIA Director Hayden have both said that our military and intelligence officers might refuse to follow some of your orders if you were president. What would you do if the military refused to listen to you? Should they be court-martialed if they refuse to follow orders?
+– You’ve said you look to Ambassador John Bolton for military advice and called him “terrific,” but he was one of the architects of the Iraq war. How do you explain your praise for Bolton if you also claim the war was a mistake? What advice have you taken from him?
+You can read the rest here , but there’s a few other gems:
+– Do you think American victims of 9/11 should be able to sue Saudi Arabia in court? What role, if any, do you think Saudi Arabia had in the 9/11 attacks?
+– You’ve said we should have bombed the “right people” after 9/11 and have suggested that the government has evidence Saudi Arabia was involved. Do you think we should have instead bombed Saudi Arabia?
+This is smoking gun, undeniable proof that CNN is in the tank for Hillary Clinton – and the rest of the mainstream media is no different.
+In fact, the Clinton campaign is acting as an assignment editor for the establishment media by telling reporters what to cover – and what to bury from public view that would otherwise hurt Hillary.
+Previous Wikileaks emails revealed that campaign staffers are directly working with mainstream “journalists” to develop news stories favorable to the campaign – before they’re published!
+“Huffington Post is doing a piece on our treasurer Jose Villareal — will likely focus at least partially on him sitting on the Walmart board,” said campaign communications staffer Jesse Lehrich in a 2015 email , which reads like a reporter assignment list at a major newspaper. “Other outstanding stories include: [Buzzfeed correspondent] Ruby Cramer on our grassroots organizing, Anita Kumar (McClatchy) on where we have organizers and how we’ve spent our money during Q2, and [Washington Post reporter] Phil Rucker on HRC talking about gun violence prevention.”
+Source 
+",FAKE
+2791,Kerry: Assad Must Go,"LONDON — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has to go but the timing of his departure should be decided through negotiation.
+
+ 
+
+ Speaking after talks with British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond in London, Kerry called on Russia and Iran to use their influence over Assad to convince him to negotiate a political transition.
+
+Kerry said the United States welcomed Russia's involvement in tackling the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria but a worsening refugee crisis underscored the need to find a compromise that could also lead to political change in the country.
+
+""We need to get to the negotiation. That is what we're looking for and we hope Russia and Iran, and any other countries with influence, will help to bring about that, because that's what is preventing this crisis from ending,"" said Kerry.
+
+""We're prepared to negotiate. Is Assad prepared to negotiate, really negotiate? Is Russia prepared to bring him to the table?""
+
+Russia's buildup at Syria's Latakia airbase has raised the possibility of air combat missions in Syrian airspace. Heavy Russian equipment, including tanks, helicopters and naval infantry forces, have been moved to Latakia, U.S. officials say.
+
+Kerry said of Assad's removal: ""For the last year and a half we have said Assad has to go, but how long and what the modality is ...that's a decision that has to be made in the context of the Geneva process and negotiation.""
+
+Kerry added: ""It doesn't have to be on day one or month one ... there is a process by which all the parties have to come together and reach an understanding of how this can best be achieved.""
+
+Kerry said he did not have a specific time frame in mind for Assad to stay. ""I just know that the people of Syria have already spoken with their feet. They're leaving Syria.""
+
+Hammond, who on Sept. 9 said Britain could accept Assad staying in place for a transition period, said Assad could not be part of Syria's long-term future ""but the modality and timing has to be part of a political solution that allows us to move forward.""
+
+Hammond said the situation in Syria was now more complicated with Russia's increased military involvement in the country.
+
+""Because of the Russian engagement the situation in Syria is becoming more complicated and we need to discuss this as part of a much bigger problem - the migration pressures, the humanitarian crisis in Syria as well as the need to defeat ISIL,"" he said.
+
+Kerry and Hammond said they also discussed conflicts in Yemen, Libya and Ukraine.",REAL
+1032,Trump would be least-popular major-party nominee in modern times,"If Donald Trump secures the Republican presidential nomination, he would start the general election campaign as the least-popular candidate to represent either party in modern times.
+
+Three-quarters of women view him unfavorably. So do nearly two-thirds of independents, 80 percent of young adults, 85 percent of Hispanics and nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
+
+Those findings, tallied from Washington Post-ABC News polling, fuel Trump’s overall 67 percent unfavorable rating — making Trump more disliked than any major-party nominee in the 32 years the survey has been tracking candidates.
+
+Head-to-head matchups show Hillary Clinton, as well as her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, leading Trump, often by double digits. Even his two remaining fellow GOP contenders this week backed away from earlier promises to support the eventual nominee.
+
+And with each passing day, Trump makes moves that add further uncertainty to his ability to pivot to the general election. His defiant defense this week of his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who was charged with battery for yanking the arm of a female reporter, as well as Trump’s remarks Wednesday that women who get illegal abortions should be punished, might play well with his followers, but could further alienate the broader electorate.
+
+“Normally, when you’re in a hole, the best advice is to stop digging. That doesn’t appear to be his inclination,” GOP strategist David Carney said. “It’s like taking a wagon full of nitroglycerine across the prairie. It’s great if you get to the mountains and blow them up for gold. But it’s pretty unpredictable.”
+
+Peter Hart, a veteran Democratic pollster who has studied public impressions of Trump, said voters’ views of him are “exceptionally rancid.”
+
+“In terms of any domestic personality that we have measured, we’ve never seen an individual with a higher negative,” Hart said.
+
+Trump has drawn huge crowds and built a passionate base of supporters who have helped him amass a big delegate lead in the battle for the nomination.
+
+But his success among a segment of the Republican electorate stands in contrast to his weaknesses in a general election decided by all voters.
+
+In that broader context, his dismal standing by all traditional measures points to a big question underlying his nontraditional candidacy: whether Trump, as the GOP nominee, could leverage his celebrity persona and unusual appeal among disaffected voters in both parties to overcome his glaring disadvantages.
+
+Trump’s unpopularity in the Post-ABC poll was driven in part by sharply negative ratings from Democrats and lukewarm Republicans. The greatest risk for his general election viability stems from the unusually poor ratings he gets from swing-voting independents and white college graduates.
+
+A silver lining for Trump is that voters overall also feel antipathy for Clinton, the Democratic front-runner. The distaste for Clinton is not as strong as it is for Trump — 52 percent of voters see her unfavorably — but Clinton’s vulnerabilities, combined with Trump’s unpredictability, haunt many Democrats.
+
+Guy Cecil, chief strategist for the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, urged Democrats to “postpone the ticker-tape parade,” warning that Trump is not as weak a general election candidate as the current atmosphere would suggest.
+
+“I am skeptical of the polls showing such large leads, and it’s incumbent upon us to view this as a close race,” Cecil said. “He’s going to attempt to throw everything, including the kitchen sink and maybe the refrigerator and stove, at Hillary. And I would not be surprised if he changes his views on policy issues.”
+
+Overcoming his hurdles likely would require either a massive influx of working-class white male voters — Trump’s base — or dramatic changes in his policies and presentation that might reverse the strongly negative views of him held by women and minorities.
+
+Trump and his advisers say they have plans to accomplish both objectives. They say he can reverse his favorability ratings over time by framing the fall contest around issues on which they think Trump’s positions resonate powerfully across traditional demographics: the economy, trade and national security.
+
+Since Trump is not tethered to any particular ideology, his test may be convincing voters that he is not a hostile force and is fit to be president, rather than persuading them to buy into a sweeping conservative ideological project.
+
+The Trump team insists that the power of his personality and the potency of his planned attacks on Clinton would win him converts. And it is wagering that millions of working-class voters who for a generation have been politically dormant will rush to the polls and offset Trump’s sizable deficit with the ascendant electorate of women, minority and young voters.
+
+“What you’ll find is across the board, in states like Pennsylvania or New York or New Jersey or Michigan, you’re going to have a bunch of blue-collar workers who have supported Trump in the past and will continue to do so,” Lewandowski said. “That broad appeal allows him to expand the electoral map.”
+
+Concerned about his standing in the polls, Trump’s allies are offering advice about how to make up ground with important demographic groups.
+
+Newt Gingrich, a former Republican House speaker who is unaffiliated but has informally counseled Trump on several occasions, suggested he campaign in black neighborhoods, send targeted messages on social media and embrace his outsider approach to government.
+
+“Imagine Trump on the South Side of Chicago saying, ‘People shouldn’t be killed, schools ought to actually work, you ought to have jobs in your neighborhood and you know that Hillary can’t deliver any of those because she is the system,’ ” Gingrich said.
+
+The shift from a primary fight to the general campaign would be Trump’s crucible, requiring him to communicate persuasively with an entirely different electorate than the primary voters he has courted for the past year.
+
+Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who endorsed Trump after dropping out of the Republican presidential race, said he has advised Trump to turn his attention to education reform and charter schools as a means of supplementing his core pitch on trade and immigration to grow his support with young and minority voters.
+
+“Creating ladders of opportunity, such as school choice, is one way to do that,” Carson said. “He’s been very enthusiastic about that suggestion. He’ll have to follow through and get through to those kids and families who don’t feel like they’re getting the best possible education.”
+
+There are stylistic changes Trump can make, as well, Carson said. “A little humility would go a tremendous distance, no question about it,” he said. “Hopefully, he will find that on his own.”
+
+Frank Luntz, an unaligned GOP pollster, said Trump could erase at least some his deficit if he capitalizes on the fall debates and other events, noting that history is littered with examples of candidates doing just that.
+
+“The big moments cause people to change,” Luntz said. “And let’s face it, we may have a moment outside of conventions and debates that’s even bigger. If you have a Paris or a Brussels on American soil, that can completely change the dynamic.”
+
+It is a tall order, however, for Trump to undo the damage his rhetoric has already done to his image with the rising national electorate that includes Latinos, single mothers and millennials.
+
+“Donald Trump’s whole message is somewhat backward looking,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster who wrote a book, “The Selfie Vote,” about these voters.
+
+Referring to Trump’s slogan, she added: “ ‘Make America Great Again’ sounds like an attempt to turn back the clock to a time most young voters don’t remember.”
+
+Pennsylvania, a Democrat-leaning battleground that Trump hopes to target, is a case study of Trump’s upside and downside. While he has picked up endorsements and blue-collar support in the state’s industrial regions, centrist Republicans from Philadelphia and its vote-rich suburbs have kept their distance. Trump needs to make inroads to win a state Republicans last carried in 1988.
+
+“Ticket-splitting Republicans in the Philadelphia suburbs went for [President] Obama — and if they don’t feel comfortable with Trump, they could go for Clinton,” said G. Terry Madonna, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College, which conducts polling in Pennsylvania.
+
+Madonna said that more than 120,000 voters statewide, mostly Democrats and independents, have switched their registration to Republican since January. But he cautioned against interpreting the moves as a Rust Belt tilt toward Trump.
+
+“Even if these children of Reagan Democrats love his talk about manufacturing and American pride, he’s going to have to make sure he’s not losing the Republicans who are the heart of the party,” said John Brabender, a GOP strategist who has guided the political career of former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). “That will require a campaign of surgical precision.”",REAL
+4710,"Trump’s campaign wants to salvage his ground game. But an expert says ""the damage is done.""","Less than a month from Election Day, Donald Trump is behind by double digits in the polls. It’s clear his campaign needs to do everything it can to get out the vote.
+
+It’s also clear that Trump does not have a normal campaign; it is small, apparently disorganized, and, compared with Hillary Clinton’s operation, woefully behind in conventional campaign tactics. Trump is notably lagging.
+
+In September, his then newly appointed campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said it was her intention to overhaul the campaign’s ground game tactics. ""Mr. Trump is an unconventional candidate, but I have an appreciation for ... conventional tactics,"" Conway said, according to CNN. ""We've got to invest in the fundamentals. ... Do I wish these things had been done before? Sure. But we're trying to accelerate it, and not abandon it.""
+
+But is it too late? Even if the Trump campaign has been building up his operation since September, it is irrefutable that Clinton’s campaign has invested more resources for much longer.
+
+To ask, I called up Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the author of Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, a study of the resurgence of ground game in American politics. As the forms of political communication popular in the 1990s — like dominating the mainstream media and using political advertising — have become diluted, Nielsen makes the case that personalized political communication, with staffers and volunteers talking to voters on the ground, is an increasingly impactful arm of competitive political campaigns.
+
+His insight on the 2016 election: Trump certainly didn’t do himself any favors by deprioritizing his ground game, and that could have adverse effects on the Republican Party in the future.
+
+A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
+
+We have one candidate, Hillary Clinton, who is running close to a textbook campaign. Then you have Trump, who is only now, with his most recent hires in Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon, building some ground game. It’s not nothing, but it’s still minuscule compared to Clinton’s operation. How unprecedented is this imbalance?
+
+We have probably not seen this kind of imbalance since the ’70s. The closest historical analogy is the George McGovern/Nixon race — where you have one candidate who is clearly in the mainstream of his party and has the support of the conventional funders, activists, and the party organization, and you have another candidate [who] is a very polarizing figure with strong support from a subset of the party but whom many from the mainstream of the party regard with great skepticism.
+
+I live in Europe now, and we have more experience in Europe than Americans with political candidates that are seen as extreme by much of the establishment but actually do much better with the electorate than worthy observers expect them to do. I think we have seen many of the same tendencies — that if people do not expect you to be very measured and controlled and on message all the time, they never expect that of you. Donald Trump’s campaign has understood that he is not held to those [campaign] standards, and that gives him room to maneuver. That is very, very different for Hillary Clinton.
+
+In your writings about the history of ground game, you call this era the resurgence of the “ground war.” Does Donald Trump’s approach — focusing on media messaging — shift that trend back?
+
+I don’t think [the resurgence] is shifting at all. If Hillary Clinton’s campaign were prioritizing other forms of campaign communication, that would really signify a large structural and pragmatic shift of how campaigns think about strategic communication. But Donald Trump’s campaign is as unusual as he is as a candidate. I think we know for sure that had the candidate from the Republican Party been Scott Walker or Jeb Bush, then the Republican Party would try to operate in the same way that the Hillary Clinton campaign is operating.
+
+Fair enough. Does this punch any holes in how we think about how effective or imperative having a ground game is? There have been times this election cycle where you could argue Clinton wasn’t doing as well as she would like, even having such a robust ground operation.
+
+Well, I would push back against that in two ways. A lot of political science work that would try to estimate the likely outcome of this presidential election on the basis of fundamentals — economic fundamentals, and what we know from history on the relative advantage of incumbency versus being a challenger — would actually suggest that this very well could be a Republican year. Compared to that baseline, Mr. Trump is not doing as well.
+
+What is important to realize is that one can be competitive in many different ways. One way to be competitive is to do things by the book. Another way to be competitive is to offer something completely new that some people find attractive and seems to be the approach of Mr. Trump.
+
+So is the point here that for Clinton, ground game is important, but Donald Trump doesn’t seem to need it?
+
+I think there is no question that Donald Trump would be more competitive if they had a better ground game.
+
+Let me frame this in another way. Past research says ground game can improve a candidate’s odds by 1 to 5 percentage points. Given the truly abnormal nature of this campaign, how would you go about studying the effects of ground game in this election?
+
+The disadvantage of the Trump campaign is in its ability to turn out voters — we will only know after Election Day how significant that advantage is when we see the difference between the polls and the actual outcome.
+
+You can think of turning out voters in two different ways: One is to say that you turn them out by making sure they do not forget, they are registered to vote, they send in their early ballots when possible, and on and on. All the things that ground operations are mostly focused on; the nuts and bolts of turning out the vote.
+
+Another way to turn out your supporters is to ratchet up the intensity of the choice they face. If you can convince large parts of the public that this is a defining moment in political history and if you don’t get out and vote for your candidate, things will go very badly, that’s another way to turn out the vote. That doesn’t rely on a ground game, and it is relatively clear that the Trump campaign relied on the second version. It was message-driven and not driven by a ground game.
+
+Personally, I think it is very unlikely that that alone will let the campaign realize its full potential. They are at a significant disadvantage — but we will only know in November.
+
+Explain the case for investing in a ground game.
+
+One thing that is a little bit overlooked is the extent to which building a good ground game relies on years of investment, in staff but also in technology: building voter databases and interfaces, and making them useful in the field. It’s just clear not only that the Democratic Party was ahead of the Republican Party in 2012 but also that the ability of the Republican Party to narrow that gap or to overcome that gap has been significantly undermined by the fact that the party nominee has not prioritized investing and catching up here.
+
+One side of this question of campaigning is: Where do you place your bets, where do you invest your money, what is your messaging in terms of strategy and organization?
+
+But you can’t buy this off the shelf. You can’t order a good database even if you have all the money in the world. You can’t just go to Amazon and buy a perfect voter file and the technology to put it to use. There is an important question of whether the Republican Party is falling even further behind in having an effective infrastructure for an effective ground game and a competitive ground game.
+
+So when Kellyanne Conway admitted that the Trump campaign was behind in building a ground game, but that they weren’t going to give up, you’re saying the damage has been done.
+
+The damage is done. You can’t unfurl a cutting-edge ground operation in such a short period of time. There is no question about that. That is simply impossible. You can always invest and always improve, but you can’t possibly put together the kind of operation or the kind of infrastructure that it would require to have a fully competitive organization.
+
+The fundamental issue here is that when you think about American political parties, there is no centralized decision-making. The only time you have that is when you have an incumbent president who will run for reelection.
+
+We saw this very clearly in the 2000s. George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 2004 was the most sophisticated, well-organized, and professional campaign in a long time. It was an extraordinarily well-run and well-thought-through campaign in part because they knew who the candidate was going to be. They could fundraise. They could invest. They could collaborate with the state parties and other actors. Again, the 2012 Barack Obama campaign was a similar story: It was a very well-run and professionally organized and well-thought-through campaign in part because of the fact that they knew who was running and they could build the organization around that.
+
+But if you are out of power and you don’t have a presumptive nominee, and then you have a primary process that leads to a candidate that then is regarded with some skepticism by many of the players you need to line up — but also if that candidate, in particular, himself does not chose to catch up — then it becomes very difficult.
+
+You write that there is no evidence that supports the idea of a consistent decline of face-to-face communication in politics. That campaigns cannot rely on “the media” alone to do it. Donald Trump is relying on the media. How does that change the impact of ground game for Clinton?
+
+That only increases the importance of a good ground game for the candidates that want to run a conventional campaign.
+
+My fundamental argument in Ground Wars is that the modes of political communication that dominated in the 1990s were a heavy emphasis in controlling the mainstream media through spin and PR and heavy emphasis in television advertising focusing on voters who were unlikely to pay much attention to newspapers and television news. Those dominant forms of campaign communication became weaker, because fewer and fewer voters who could be persuaded could be reached through television advertising.
+
+On one end, [there is] a sort of engagement strategy of using social media and digital media where you engage with your core supporters in a much closer and [more] direct way than in the past.
+
+But most importantly, [there is] this investment in the much larger ground operation putting many more people — volunteers but also paid staffers — to work, and relying on much, much more sophisticated technology in terms of targeting those contacts.
+
+Campaign advertising experts will say it is very hard to measure impact. Is it the same with ground game?
+
+There is no question that longer-term persuasion is really difficult to actually measure. We know that any effect present at one point in time is very likely to decay over time. People will be cultivated through a lifetime of exposure. In many ways, it is very artificial too — each one of us is touched by hundreds of different messages every day of a political nature. Trying to isolate the effect of one individual message is almost too artificial to help us understand how any political communication works.
+
+But ultimately, in some ways, ground game is a much simpler thing to understand, because it is less about persuasion and more about turnout. You have a very clear measure of whether people turn out or not, and you have direct data.
+
+Persuasion is very hard to accomplish. Motivation and activation are demonstrably doable — in particular if you have personal contacts and in particular if you have motivated volunteers going door to door.",REAL
+10424,Opps! German Magazine Uses ISIS Propaganda Video to Show All is Well in Mosul,"Taming the corporate media beast Opps! German Magazine Uses ISIS Propaganda Video to Show All is Well in Mosul 
+Well they are on the same side, after all Originally appeared at Sputnik 
+In an almost four-minute video, political editor of Spiegel Online Christoph Sydow tried to defend the editorial policy of his magazine regarding the developments in Aleppo and Mosul. However, the shots demonstrated in his video turned out to be the propaganda materials of Daesh terrorists. 
+The video was supposed to be a response to critical letters of Spiegel Online readers and their comments on social networks. Many of them accused the magazine of spreading propaganda and presenting the situation in the Middle East in a biased manner. ""Again and again, readers have been accusing us of presenting the Aleppo siege as a bad one, and that of Mosul as a good one. That's not right. Political editor Christoph Sydow explains the similarities and the differences,"" Spiegel Online reported. In the video, Sydow explained the similarities and differences of both situations. ""Eastern Aleppo has been cut off from the outside world for months. There is no help coming to the city. People are starving. There is no drinking water, lack of electricity. In Mosul, the situation is different at the moment. The city can receive supplies; people have water, electricity, enough food. Nobody was starving to death there yet,"" Sydow said. To prove his point of view, the journalist referred to video footage showing that the situation in Mosul is not as bad as one probably imagined. But it turns out that the footage he used was Daesh propaganda material who currently keep Mosul under their control. 1046870142.png 
+According to BILDblog, which sharply criticized the German magazine for the releasing video, the shots of the city were published by Daesh a few days ago to make a false impression that people in the city ""live a normal life,"" which in fact is not true. 
+""This is the most recent Daesh propaganda video which was published online five days ago. It is supposed to show normal life in Mosul, happy people, who have everything they need. However, in fact, there is a lack of water, food, medicines and electricity. This is what people from Mosul tell their relatives in secret telephone calls,"" the ARD report said. 1046870197.png 
+In the right upper corner of the video, near the logo of the Spiegel magazine, one can see ""an Amaq"" symbol — the logo of Al-Amaq news agency, a media outlet considered an official part Daesh's propaganda apparatus. ""This is the propaganda material of the so-called 'Islamic State' (Daesh),"" BILDblog wrote. 
+Earlier, Germany's ARD TV channel used the same recordings in its report called ""Iraq: Inside Mosul"". However, in contrast to Spiegel, the ARD stated that the information was taken from Daesh propaganda sources.",FAKE
+618,The Republicans’ November fantasy: A glance at the GOP’s swing state strategy ought to delight Democrats everywhere,"It’s generally understood that presidential elections are decided in the so-called swing states. Everything reduces to turnout. Which is why the ground game is so important: You can’t get people to the polls without a sophisticated voter targeting operation, and thousands of staffers and volunteers on the ground doing the dirty work. To the extent that that’s true, Republicans are in trouble.
+
+A new Politico report confirms the GOP is way behind in all the states that matter. Because their nominee has no interest in data or analytics or infrastructure, the RNC is forced to shoulder the entire burden. By contrast, Clinton already has a political machine up and running in each of the swing states, and the DNC is coordinating with the campaign as it prepares to do the heavy lifting. Republicans, meanwhile, are hostage to the whims of their nominee. Trump doesn’t do retail politics, so the party has no choice but to rely on his personality and media presence. While Democrats are focused on organization and digital operations, Republicans are hoping Trump’s demagoguery will carry enough angry white men to the polls. “His job is to be Mr. Trump,” said Rob Gleason, who chairs the Pennsylvania Republican Party. “His appeal is very different than a normal politician…All he has to do is announce three days ahead of time he’s going to be somewhere and a huge crowd shows up.” I admire the optimism, but surely Mr. Gleason knows circus-like crowds won’t translate to election day turnout. Attracting people to spectacles is easy; getting them to the polls when it counts is not.
+
+It’s scarcely a plan, but GOP operatives are saying (publicly, at least) that Trump’s cult of personality will energize disaffected blue collar workers in places like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. And they assume that any anxieties about Trump’s blinding incompetence will be eclipsed by hatred of Clinton. Again, I admire the optimism, but this is wish-thinking, not a strategy.
+
+Logistics aside, the poll numbers in the 11 or so swing states also portend trouble for Republicans. Currently, Clinton holds a 5-point overall advantage over Trump according to Politico’s polling average. She’s leading in 8 of the 11 individual states (including Florida and Ohio), and those numbers are likely to improve as Trump continues to unravel and the Democrats unite behind their nominee. It’s still early, but the numbers offer a snapshot of where the electorate is heading.
+
+The national poll numbers tell the same story. A recent Bloomberg poll shows Clinton with a double-digit lead over Trump (49 percent to 37 percent), a noticeable spike since Clinton became the presumptive nominee. The gender gap is especially worrisome if you’re a Republican. 63 percent of women say they could never vote for the Republican nominee. Women represent a majority of voters – if 2 out of 3 won’t vote for Trump, the race is over before it begins. The groups that will decide the election, particularly in swing states, are also strongly opposed to Trump. Clinton is winning 57 percent of women, 58 percent of single voters, and 77 percent of non-whites. Trump is doing far better among white men, but that won’t compensate for his negatives among every other demographic. Besides, Trump’s appeal with white men is often overstated. As Bloomberg’s John McCormick pointed out, “White men are among Trump’s strongest demographics. But even there he’s not showing as much strength as the party’s last nominee, Mitt Romney, who beat Obama in 2012 by 62 percent to 35 percent among white men.” (Trump is currently at 50 percent). The closer you look at the numbers and the more obvious the organizational gap becomes, the harder it is to see a path to victory for Trump. He’s quickly confronting the limits of his amateurish, media-centric campaign. Anything is possible in November, but there’s no question that Republicans are comparatively disadvantaged. They’re led by an organizationally inept candidate who can’t appeal to women and non-whites and has proven himself incapable of compromise.",REAL
+3774,‘Mentally Ill’ Officer: Give Me Back My Gun,"State trooper Michael Keyes was once involuntarily committed, which bars him from owning a gun. But with a clean bill of health, he’s now suing for his 2nd Amendment rights.
+
+And the Pennsylvania state trooper knows how to use one: he carries several on duty, rotating between his Sig Sauer 227 handgun, a fully-automatic AR-15 and a Remington 870 shotgun. But while a very armed Keyes is trusted to serve and protect Pennsylvania, as soon as he clocks out, he is banned by state law from owning a gun for personal use.
+
+At issue for Keyes are laws governing firearm ownership for the mentally ill—a rallying cause backed by practically everyone, including the National Rifle Association. But Keyes, along with his co-plaintiff in a new federal lawsuit, corrections officer Jonathan Yox, may now be the new poster boys for a contingent of gun rights advocates who argue mental illness provisions of the 1968 Gun Control Act (GCA) are too strict and infringe on the Second Amendment Rights of thousands of perfectly sane individuals.
+
+Keyes and Yox have both been involuntarily committed to a mental institution, which in the eyes of both federal and state law, makes them forever dangerous to themselves and others—despite both men having since been cleared by mental health professionals.
+
+For Keyes, it was a pair of bitter divorces that triggered depression, heavy drinking, threats of suicide, and an eventual two-week commitment.  Following that dark period, he fought for and won his reinstatement with the state police and has earned outstanding marks in performance reviews.
+
+Since 2008, Keyes’ attempts to restore his rights for personal firearms use have been unsuccessful. Though a county court judge found Keyes to no longer be a threat to himself or others, he ruled there was no way to expunge his record or overcome the federal ban. State superior court judge Kate Ford Elliott echoed the lower court’s ruling in 2013, but went further. “The dangers inherent in the possession of firearms by the mentally ill are manifest,” she wrote, and even more so in the case of Keyes, “who was involuntarily committed and thus failed to recognize and act upon his own illness.” Further, she noted, “a present clean bill of mental health is no guarantee that a relapse is not possible.”
+
+Yox was also hospitalized in 2006, twice by his parents when he was just 15 years old for an incident where he bought cocaine into school, and a brief period of depression that included cutting himself and a suicide pact with a girl.
+
+After Yox’s release, he graduated from high school, joined the Army and served in Afghanistan, and now actively carries a firearm as a State Correctional Officer. In a 2012 mental health review, a psychologist found him to be a “pleasant...clean-cut, outgoing young man” with future goals and a strong support system. Though Yox was committed as a juvenile, his 2013 attempt to expunge his record—so that he could purchase a weapon for home defense and pursue a career in government—fell short. The judge in Yox’s case cited the Keyes ruling in his decision.
+
+State laws vary widely in regard to how they restrict firearms for the mentally ill. Pennsylvania is one of 21 states that have accepted a court order or an involuntary commitment as a barrier to gun ownership, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Five other states, including California and Connecticut, include voluntary commitment in their bans—a move that gun rights advocates argue keeps gun owners who need professional help from seeking it.Reforming these blanket bans may just be an issue that even gun control groups can support.“There should be an process whereby people who’ve lost their rights to guns because of mental illness should be able to get them back, and we’ve supported that,” said Shira Goodman, Executive Director of gun violence prevention group, CeasfirePA. “But in part, I blame the gun lobby itself,” who she says has hijacked gun bills in Pennsylvania that addressed similar mental health issues. In 2013, Pennsylvania provided the FBI with 643,167 records representing people banned from purchasing firearms because of involuntary mental health commitments in the state.This new federal case is asking a judge to find that the mental illness disability does not exist for Keyes and Yox and that the absence of any method of relief is in violation of their Second Amendment rights. Still their attorney sees wider implications.
+
+“This is going to be the first step in getting the Federal courts to address this type of situation,” said Keye’s attorney, Joshua Prince. “We have an individual, who we can show possess firearms without threat to himself or others and does so on a daily basis and the fact is, there is no reasonable basis for denying that person the ability to defend himself in his home.”",REAL
+3585,Ukraine wants UN to label Russia as a sponsor of terrorism,"Ukraine wants the United Nations to brand Russia a terrorism sponsor amid bloody clashes between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government troops.
+
+The Ukrainian ambassador to the UN told Fox News he plans to submit a draft resolution asking the UN General Assembly to formally label “Russia as a sponsor of terrorism.""
+
+Ambassador Yuriy Sergeyev gave no timetable for when he would present the resolution to the UN. He said government officials in Kiev are working on the text.
+
+Sergeyev told Fox News the resolution will mirror the Ukrainian parliament’s declaration this week, designating the Moscow-backed separatists in East Ukraine as a terrorist group.
+
+Kiev believes that by defining the separatists as terrorists it eliminates any notion that it would engage in peace talks with them.
+
+Sergeyev warned of a “huge war” if the separatists take more territory or build a corridor to southern Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed almost a year ago.
+
+Ukraine and the West accuse Russia of backing the rebels with troops and weapons, which Russia denies.
+
+Meanwhile, artillery fire killed at least 12 civilians in the main rebel stronghold of Donetsk on Friday amid fierce fighting between pro-Russia separatists and government troops as hopes for a break in hostilities were dashed when an attempt to call a new round of peace talks failed.
+
+Five people were killed as they were waiting for humanitarian aid outside a community center and two people were killed in the same neighborhood when a mortar shell landed near a bus stop.
+
+By the time an Associated Press journalist arrived at the community center, the bodies were taken away. Nearby trees were cut down by what could have been a projectile.
+
+Five other people died Friday in sporadic artillery fire in the west of Donetsk.
+
+Full-blown fighting between the Russian-backed separatists and government forces erupted anew earlier this month following a period of relative tranquility.
+
+Fox News' Jonathan Wachtel and The Associated Press contributed to this report",REAL
+459,Walmart is a cultural sickness: How the American workplace is enriching the wealthy — and destroying everyone else,"In his 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama spoke about important labor issues like unequal wages for women and a lack of paid sick and maternity leave. He called on Congress to pass legislation raising the minimum wage and requiring employers to guarantee at least seven days of sick time a year to their employees. He had to do this because, remarkably, nearly 40 percent of the American workers have no sick time at all, nor is there any requirement for their employers to provide any – a regressive distinction the United States shares with only two other countries, Papua New Guinea and Oman.
+
+Hopefully these important issues will be brought to light as the 2016 presidential race heats up, especially with Bernie Sanders running. The anti-family nature of U.S. labor law should make it a logical target for any values-oriented crusader; but predictably, Republican politicians oppose reform. While hiding behind a defense of small businesses, the Republican agenda is really a handout to mega corporations.
+
+Walmart, for instance, has been exposed for its discrimination against pregnant women, forcing them onto unpaid leave or firing them outright if they become unable to perform certain duties. In April 2014, activists and employees forced the company to modify its policy, allowing for a “reasonable accommodation” to be made for women with “a temporary disability caused by pregnancy.” This weak and ambiguous concession leaves women with healthy pregnancies in the lurch, even though they still may require modified job duties.
+
+Congress could intervene and establish better protections for pregnant women, but it doesn’t. The 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act – the last such act passed on the federal level – is so feeble that a Walmart spokesperson in 2014 could truthfully say, “We’re proud of our new policy. It is best in class and goes well beyond federal and most state laws.” That reveals at least as much about federal and state laws as it does Walmart. The Waltons are among the wealthiest people on the globe, yet their business won’t guarantee American workers the fundamental dignity of having a child without fear of repercussion. And so it goes with workers’ rights across sectors of the economy.
+
+In any moral society, this would be considered a crime. And in more advanced societies, Walmart is forced to grant their workers more rights, like unionization. Here, we’re dominated by politicians who argue the only crime would be if the state got involved at all.
+
+Republicans scoff at emulation of the European model – which affords generous holiday, sick and paternal leave to workers – by pointing to Europe’s own unemployment epidemic and the fact that the American economy is recovering with almost all of its capitalist dogmas intact. Of course, what’s often left unsaid is that our rebound is being enjoyed overwhelmingly by only the wealthiest few. What value is a roaring economy to ordinary Americans who are overworked, overstressed, unable to spend time with their families, and not even reaping the financial benefits for their hardship?
+
+Even office and white-collar workers, while generally receiving far greater benefits than low-wage retail and fast food workers, are woefully deprived when it comes to making room for their personal lives. Their hours are less rigidly documented and they are usually salaried, meaning they are more likely to be called on for unpaid overtime. They spend virtually their entire day in plywood boxes, a mentally stultifying way to invest one’s time. As more and more Americans live the sedentary, “professional” lifestyle, the disastrous health consequences of sitting around all day are becoming apparent.
+
+There’s also a compelling argument, articulated brilliantly in a 2013 essay by author and activist David Graeber, that many white-collar and service sector jobs have no justifiable reason to exist. Says Graeber: “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.” Professionals spend their days bounding from meeting to meeting and forwarding spreadsheets from one department to another. Customer service does little more than obfuscate information and bear the brunt of consumer rage. All this goes on with virtually no time off or flexibility, despite the economic and personally refreshing benefits of people controlling their own schedules. Working Americans passively accept that this is just life, but total conformity to the demands of a meaningless day job exacts a toll on their psyche and wastes the time and energy of skilled people who could otherwise be doing important work. These are not minor quibbles to be brushed aside with folksy idioms like “Nobody likes their job” and “That’s why they call it work”; this is a crippling cultural sickness. America is often heralded as a “great experiment,” but policy planners are at best unimaginative and at worst fiercely hostile when it comes to social experimentation. Nowhere is this more finely exemplified than in our work culture. You can make close to $100,000 in your first year working on Wall Street, but cap out around that much after a lifetime in social work. Say what you will about capitalism – it’s not a system that rewards work based on its social value. Our fixation on profit drives Americans into the “bullshit jobs” sector of the economy, leaving important work like fixing our crumbling infrastructure undone. A society that was truly full of big, bold ideas would not allow a fear of resembling socialism to prevent it from more meaningful planning. Lots of Americans can’t find work at all. Many of those who can work put in too many hours for too little reward. While our jobs erode our home lives and personal health, politicians defend abstract ideals of capitalism over the needs of real human beings. Pointless, even destructive work pays a great deal more than work that benefits society. To praise this as the greatest model in the world is about as delusional as anything the North Koreans believe. But there is a way to beat it. The super wealthy have engineered a system that works wonders for them and they aren’t going to let it go without a fight. If we ever want to have a system that works for the people, the people are going to have to build it. American workers and consumers must strike, protest, stand up for their rights as human beings and strengthen their local communities. We need to radicalize our economy – decide as a society the kind of work we really value and reward it accordingly. And we could all spend a lot more time creating, loving, sharing and relaxing.",REAL
+7342,"Assange: Clinton resisted FBI, and now they’re out for payback (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE)","A dispatch from RT.com ABOVE: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (L) and Julian Assange, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks © Reuters / Darthmouth Films Hillary Clinton sparked an FBI backlash, which is now surfacing, when she stonewalled the Feds, who were trying to investigate her private server, Julian Assange said during the John Pilger Special, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, which is now available in full on RT. “If you go to history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. And the FBI demonstrated with taking down the former head of the CIA [David Petraeus in 2012] over classified information given to his mistress that almost no one was untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that. ‘No one can resist us,’” Assange told the Australian journalist during the 25-minute interview. ‘This is treason’: Clinton’s email server reportedly exposed to hackers of 5 spy agencies “But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation. So, there is anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak.” FBI director James B. Comey threw a spanner into the presidential race that threatened to become a Clinton procession last week, when he claimed that the agency had potentially obtained new information pertaining to Clinton’s use of a personal email server, set up shortly after she became Secretary of State in 2009, when they obtained the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the ex-husband of close Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Weiner was being investigated for an unrelated sexting offense. Clinton has categorically denied mishandling classified information by using a vulnerable personal email address for State Department business. Fox News has alleged that the FBI has obtained new evidence from Weiner’s computer that shows that Clinton was “very likely hacked.” The right-wing network has also claimed that there is a “high priority” FBI investigation into whether favors were exchanged by Clinton for donations to her husband’s foundation, though other media have refuted these claims, saying that an earlier investigation into the Clinton Foundation, which cleared the power couple, remained closed. Assange: Clinton & ISIS funded by same money, Trump won’t be allowed to win (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE) Assange, whose WikiLeaks website has over the last ten months released three sizable batches of emails, relating to Clinton herself, the Democratic National Committee, and her campaign manager John Podesta, said the FBI has cause to investigate Clinton. “There’s a thread that runs through all of these emails. There is quite a lot of “pay-to-play,” as they call it – taking… giving access in exchange for money for many individual states, individuals and corporations. Combined with the cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s emails while she was Secretary of State this has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI [to investigate] increases,” Assange said. Regardless of whether Clinton ever faces charges, Assange asserted that Clinton was beholden to corporate and political entities that have been hidden from the electorate during the race to the White House. “She’s this centralizing cog, so that you’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs, and major elements of Wall Street, and intelligence, and people in the State Department, and the Saudis, and so on. She’s is the, if you like, the centralizer that interconnects all these different cogs. She’s smooth central representation of all that, and all that is more or less what is in power now in the United States,” stated Assange, who said that the leaked emails presented a clear picture of this nexus of influences. Assange also insisted that despite his image, projecting hope and change, President Barack Obama became “very close to banking interests” during his own initial White House campaign in 2008. “In fact, one of the most significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed – and half the [first] Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from Citibank. It is quite amazing,” Assange said. ‘Libya was Hillary’s war’ According to Assange, Clinton’s emails reveal a masterplan, hatched months before the West’s intervention in Libya in March 2011, to make it the signature conflict of her tenure as secretary of state, and a podium from which to realize her presidential dreams. Assange: WikiLeaks did not receive Clinton emails from Russian govt (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE) “Libya more than anyone else’s war was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barack Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person who was championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails,” Assange said. “There’s more than 1,700 emails out of the 33,000 of Hillary Clinton’s emails we published just about Libya. It’s not about that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state something that she would use to run in the general election for president. So late 2011, there’s an internal document called the “Libya Tick Tock” that is produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s all the… it’s a chronological description of how Hillary Clinton was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state.” But the scheme not only failed on a personal level, after Clinton was largely blamed for allowing a jihadist ransacking of a US compound in Benghazi in 2012, but also continues to haunt the country, which remains in a state of civil war, and Europe. “As a result, there [have been] around 40,000 deaths within Libya. Jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in. That led to the European refugee and migrant crisis, because not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people then fleeing Syria, destabilization of other African countries as a result of arms flows,” said Assange. Over the course of the interview, Assange also expounded on his views on Donald Trump, the relationship between WikiLeaks and Russia, and his plan to leave the Ecuadorian embassy, where he has lived as a legal fugitive since 2012. The full transcript of the interview is available below. Assange: Clinton is a cog for Goldman Sachs & the Saudis (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT) Published time: 5 Nov, 2016 05:59 Edited time: 5 Nov, 2016 21:53 Australian journalist and documentary maker John Pilger (L) and Julian Assange, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks © Reuters / Dartmouth Films Whistleblower Julian Assange has given one of his most incendiary interviews ever in a John Pilger Special, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, in which he summarizes what can be gleaned from the tens of thousands of Clinton emails released by WikiLeaks this year. John Pilger, another Australian émigré, conducted the 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange has been trapped since 2012 for fear of extradition to the US. Last month, Assange had his internet access cut off for alleged “interference” in the American presidential election through the work of his website. ‘Clinton made FBI look weak, now there is anger’ John Pilger: What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton? Julian Assange : If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. We’ve published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was Secretary of State. They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half – 30,000 — to herself, and we’ve published about half. BREAKING: #Assange : #Clinton resisted #FBI , and now they’re out for payback (WATCH FULL JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE ON RT) Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing. [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations. [These emails are] combined with the cover up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, [which] has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases. ‘Russian government not the source of Clinton leaks’ JP: The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails. JA: The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything. Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source. WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong. ‘Saudi Arabia & Qatar funding ISIS and Clinton’ JP: The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque. JA: And twelve million dollars from Morocco … JP: Twelve million from Morocco yeah. JA: For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party]. JP: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it. JA: There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS. JP: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia. JA: Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled. JP: Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIl or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation. JA: Yes. JP: That’s extraordinary. ‘Clinton has been eaten alive by her ambition’ JA: I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction] to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She’s a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis. WikiLeaks emails shows Citigroup’s major role in shaping Obama administration’s cabinet She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing. JP: Didn’t Citybank supply a list …. ? JA: Yes. JP: … which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet. JA : Yes. JP: So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United States? JA: If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests. Assange ‘sorry for Clinton as a personality’ (John Pilger exclusive, courtesy of Dartmouth films) JA: So I think you can’t properly understand Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia. The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate. ‘Libya is Hillary Clinton’s war’ JP: Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us – told you – about what happened there? Because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria: the ISIL, jihadism, and so on. And it was almost Hillary Clinton’s invasion. What do the emails tell us about that? ‘A very different kind of warfare’: Clinton team on Benghazi committee leaks in #PodestaEmails JA: Libya, more than anyone else’s war, was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails. She had put her favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there’s more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we’ve published, just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state — something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President. So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis. Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa — previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: ‘What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly what happened. ‘Trump won’t be permitted to win’ JP: You get complaints from people saying, ‘What is WikiLeaks doing? Are they trying to put Trump in the Whitehouse?’ Assange, Comey & Clinton: The Assange Twilight Zone (E354) JA: My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he’s had every establishment off side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms companies… big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves. JP: There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians. Some people say, ‘Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?’ JA: We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our [Russia]documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up. JP: Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election? Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump? JA: [Let’s talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American white trash, [which Hillary Clinton called] ‘deplorable and irredeemable’. It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them. Because he so clearly — through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies — represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense. ‘US attempting to squeeze WikiLeaks through my refugee status’ JP: I’d like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you refuge and [political asylum] in this embassy in London. Now Ecuador has cut off the internet from here where we’re doing this interview, in the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election campaign. Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you? Pro-Hillary US State Dept ‘behind Assange internet cutoff’ – WikiLeaks activist to RT JA: Let’s let go back four years. I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago. Now there’s undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various kinds — so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of sixteen million people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping on the side. So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing. WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. [It means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organisation; [they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election. JP: Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy. JA: I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would then be extradited either immediately to the United States or to Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared [by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States we know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000. So over the last fifteen years, every single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen]. JP: People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here. JA: Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I’m a bit institutionalised — this [the embassy] is the world .. it’s visually the world [for me]. JP: It’s the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn’t it? JA: It’s the world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long, I don’t remember it. JP: Yes. JA: So , yes, you adapt. The one real irritant is that my young children — they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard, hard adaption which they didn’t ask for. JP: Do you worry about them? JA: Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother. ‘I am innocent and in arbitrary detention’ JP: Some people would say, ‘Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?’ JA: The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent eighteen months in formal, adversarial litigation. [So it’s] me and the U.N. versus Sweden and the U.K. Who’s right? The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse. It is the United Nations formally asking, ‘What’s going on here? What is your legal explanation for this? [Assange] says that you should recognise his asylum.’ [And here is] Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, ‘No, we’re not going to [recognise the UN ruling], so leaving open their ability to extradite. I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative – that yes, the West has political prisoners, it’s a reality, it’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well. The West has political prisoners. Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception. JA: Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum. Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric? JP: Yes, it’s different. JA: The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up. [The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that ] the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS",FAKE
+3850,"Obama Has Hit The DGAF Portion Of His Presidency, And This Video Is Proof","President Barack Obama has officially hit the stage of his presidency where he does not give one f**k.
+
+At least that's according to a video that played ahead of his speech at the 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night.
+
+After the video played, Obama said he was recently asked if he had anything left on his presidential bucket list.
+
+""Well, I have something that rhymes with 'bucket list,'"" Obama said. ""Take executive action on immigration? Bucket. New climate regulations? Bucket, it's the right thing to do.""
+
+Watch the video above, and see more from the dinner below:",REAL
+6177,Spin Doctors – How the Media Reports on Medicine,"  Spin Doctors – How the Media Reports on Medicine 
+  
+In a study of the dietary advice given by newspapers in the UK, “no credible scientific basis” was found for most claims. The “[m]isreporting of dietary advice” was found to be “widespread and may contribute to public misconceptions about food and health.” And, potentially, not just the public. 
+Scientists like to think they’re not influenced by popular media, but this study decided to put that to the test. Each week, The New York Times reports on scientific research, and the studies they report on end up being cited more often than those they don’t report on. Ah, so, the popular press does have an impact. 
+Not so fast. That’s just one potential explanation. Maybe, outstanding articles are both more likely to be picked up by media, and independently more likely to be cited. Maybe, the newspaper was just earmarking important science, and their publicity didn’t really have any effect on future studies. 
+How could you disentangle the two? An event in 1978 made it possible. There was a three-month strike, in which they continued to print copies, but could not sell them to the public. So, a natural experiment was set up. If the paper was just earmarking important articles, then the strike would have no effect on the studies’ impact. But, that’s not what happened. The studies highlighted during the strike months, when no one could read them, appeared to have no impact. 
+The next question, of course, is: are they just amplifying the medical information to the medical community, or distorting it, as well? 
+Systematic studies suggest that many stories about new medicines, for example, tend to overstate benefits, understate risks and costs, and fail to disclose relevant financial ties. Overly rosy coverage of drugs may also result from financial ties between drug companies and the journalists themselves, who may be susceptible to Big Pharma perks. 
+Scientists and physicians often blame the press. In fact, the famous physician William Osler was quoted as saying, “Believe nothing that you see in the newspapers” and “If you see anything in them that you know is true, begin to doubt it at once.” 
+But, both parties share in the blame. Reporters may only have an hour or two to put together a story; and so, they may rely on press releases. And, it’s not hard to imagine how drug company press releases might be biased. But, surely, press releases from the scientists themselves, and their institutions, would present the facts fairly, and without spin, right? Researchers decided to put it to the test. 
+Critics blame the media. But, where do you think they’re getting the information from? One might assume that press releases from prestigious academic medical centers would be measured, unexaggerated—but suffer from the same problems: downplaying side-effects, conflicts of interest, study limitations, and promoting research that has uncertain relevance to human health. 
+For example, most laboratory or animal studies explicitly claimed relevance to human health—yet lacked caveats about extrapolating results to people. For example, a release about a study of ultrasound reducing tumors in mice, was titled “Researchers study the use of ultrasound for treatment of cancer”—failing to note “for your pet mouse.” 
+Apparently, it’s been estimated that less than ten percent of animal research ever succeeds in being translated to human clinical use. Overselling the results of lab animal studies as a promised cure potentially confuses readers, and might contribute to disillusionment with science. 
+Although it’s common to blame the media for exaggerations, most times they don’t just make it up. That’s what the research institutions are sending out in their own press releases. And, medical journals, too. Sometimes, medical journal press releases do more harm than good. An analysis of press releases from some of the most prestigious medical journals found the same litany of problems. 
+I don’t think most people realize that journals sell what are called reprints, copies of the articles they print, to drug companies, which can bring in big bucks. Like, drug companies may buy a million copies of a favorable article. Sometimes, the company will submit an article, and promise to buy a certain number in advance—which is effectively a bribe, notes a long-time editor-in-chief at the prestigious British Medical Journal . He remembers once when a woman from a public relations company rang him up, and stopped just short of saying she would go to bed with him if they published the paper. 
+Another medical journal conflict of interest relates to advertising—a major source of income for many journals. Most of the advertising comes from pharmaceutical companies. And, so, if they don’t like a study, they can threaten to withdraw their advertising—potentially leaving editors faced with the stark choice of agreeing to bury a particular piece, or seeing their journal die. 
+Even if journalists have time to skip the press releases, and go straight to the source, and try to read the studies themselves, they may find them utterly incomprehensible gobbledygook. But, even if they do understand them, scientific articles are not simply reports of facts. Authors often have many opportunities to add “spin” to their scientific reports—defined as ways that can distort the interpretation of results, and mislead readers, either unconsciously, or with willful intent to deceive. 
+What these researchers did was look at randomized controlled trials with statistically nonsignificant results—meaning some drug, for example, was compared to a sugar pill, and the difference between the newfangled treatment and placebo was essentially nonexistent. Would the researchers just lay out the truth, and be, like, well, we spent all this time and money, and in terms of our primary outcome, we got nothing. Or, would they try to spin it? In 68% of cases, they spun. There was spin in the abstract, which is like the summary of the article. And this is particularly alarming, because the abstract is often the only part of an article people actually read. 
+And so, no wonder the media often gets it wrong. Spin in the abstracts can turn into spin in the press releases, and results in spin in the news. Therefore, even if journalists are doing their due diligence, using the original abstract conclusion in good faith, they still run the risk of deceiving their readers. 
+Researchers presenting new findings could always be careful to stress how preliminary the findings may be. But, let’s be serious, powerful self-interests may prevail. 
+Finally, though, I think the biggest problem with the way media reports on medicine is the choice as to which stories are covered. In 2003, SARS and bioterrorism killed less than a dozen people, yet generated over a hundred thousand media reports—far more than those covering the actual greatest threats to our lives and health. 
+In fact, ironically, the more people that die, the less it appears something is covered. Our leading #1 killer is heart disease. Yet, it can be prevented, treated, and even reversed with diet and lifestyle changes. Now that is something that deserves to be on the front page. 
+  Close Sources Video Sources",FAKE
+9142,US/Russian Relations Sour Further As Putin Refuses To Open Snapchat From Obama,"0 Add Comment 
+IN the clearest indication yet that US/Russian relations may be at an all-time low post-Cold War, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is staunchly refusing to open a Snapchat he received from his US counterpart Barack Obama. 
+“If Putin opens it, it’s a poor political play. It shows he’s curious, interested in what Obama has to say. By not opening it, he’s telling Obama and the world that he has something better to do with his time,” explained app and politics expert Morgan Wilde. 
+A number of Snapchat users have become heavily invested in the ongoing brinkmanship between the two superpowers who are locked in a series of countermeasures in Syria, which have left lives of innocent civilians in the balance and with rumours persisting that Putin hasn’t looked at any Western leaders’ Snapchat stories in weeks, the outlook is bleak. 
+“Oh, shit, I didn’t realise it was all this serious,” said one Snapchat user, who had finally begun to understand the full extent of the deterioration of the diplomatic relationship. 
+“It’s one thing to be squabbling over Aleppo, and accusations of war crimes, but it really hits home when it’s played out on my favourite app,” added Snapchat user Ciaran Bergin. 
+However, some political commentators have urged people not to read too much into the exchange. 
+“Look, who knows what the Snap contained, it could have just been Obama with a dog face, his way of reaching out to Putin and saying ‘God, it’s lonely at the top, isn’t it? Now, how funny do I look with dog ears and a big tongue?’ Let’s not panic about this,” shared commentator Henrietta Norris. 
+There is some hope in Russia circles that Putin was simply taking a day off the app as he’s sick of seeing the same 4 or 5 people send Snapchats all day long.",FAKE
+1916,Hillary Clinton isn’t running unopposed. She’s just crushing the competition.,"Jonathan Bernstein and Reihan Salam have written two smart articles on the Democratic presidential primary — or lack thereof — that are best read in tandem. Bernstein's article is meant to explain why it looks like Democrats don't have a bench even though they do, and Salam's article is meant to show who's sitting on it.
+
+Bernstein's argument is related to the ""invisible primary"" theory of presidential elections. Hillary Clinton, he says, ""has earned the support of the bulk of Democratic party actors, and gained the acquiescence of other Democrats who aren’t as enthusiastic about her."" The result is that the Democratic Party's ""perfectly viable other candidates either dropped out or never seriously considered the race.""
+
+Perhaps a slightly clearer way to put it is this: in the invisible primary, when the contest is as much a draft as it is a campaign, Clinton is ""opposed"" by essentially every Democrat fit for the presidency. If the party's powerbrokers didn't want to support Clinton and instead really wanted Sen. Michael Bennet to run, or Gov. Andrew Cuomo to lead the field, they would be working toward that outcome. Instead, they're lining up behind Clinton. In this telling, Clinton isn't winning by default. She's winning by winning. The absence of competition is the product of Clinton's strong, successful campaign to win over Democratic Party elites.
+
+Hillary's strength is evident in public polling, too. Gallup has a useful favorability-familiarity index, the upshot of which is that Clinton is both better known than anyone else in the race and viewed more favorably than almost anyone else in the race (Ben Carson is viewed very favorably too, but as he becomes better known among Democrats, my guess is that his negatives will rise quickly):
+
+This is the context for Hillary's dominance on the Democratic side: she's in a much stronger position not just than any Democrat going into 2016, but also than any Republican. These are early polls and the numbers can and will change, but look where Clinton is compared to Jeb Bush or Scott Walker. That's a big deal to Democrats, and a big reason they're supporting her rather than looking for an alternative.
+
+Salam offers a ""wish list of Democratic presidential contenders."" His list excludes possible candidates like ex-Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley or ex-Virginia Senator Jim Webb. Rather, it includes plausible candidates who seem to have no interest in becoming actual candidates.
+
+""Any contest for the Democratic presidential nomination needs an earnest, nerdy liberal technocrat who appeals to the intelligentsia,"" writes Salam, and he nominates Sen. Ron Wyden, a favorite of wonks (and civil libertarians) everywhere:
+
+Salam goes on to push Sen. Sherrod Brown as a liberal champion, ex-Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick for his ability to speak to the post-Ferguson moment in the post-Obama Democratic Party, ex-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as the grave centrist, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar as a Midwest problem-solver.
+
+The point isn't that any of these candidates will run. The point is that they could run, and they would be, in theory, at least as credible as a Scott Walker or a Jeb Bush. They may not seem like presidential contenders now, but as Bernstein writes, ""the way those solid politicians become Serious Presidential Candidates and not just random governors and senators — I'm talking here about folks such as Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Bobby Jindal — is to start running, and visibly enough so the press notices. ""
+
+Which is all to say that Bernstein is right: the Democratic Party has a bench. It's just that Clinton is running so strongly in the invisible primary that no one on it thinks it's worth getting in the game.
+
+The question for the Democratic Party is whether Clinton is going to be as strong in the visible primary — and the visible election — as she is in the invisible one. The skills necessary to win over Democratic Party elites may not be the skills necessary to win the election — and if Hillary doesn't face serious opposition in the visible primary, Democrats may not find that out until too late.",REAL
+9207,Thanksgiving at Standing Rock,"( Flickr / CC 2.0 ) 
+I’m currently reading a book entitled “ Learning to Die in the Anthropocene ,” written by Iraq veteran Roy Scranton, who basically tells us that human beings have pretty much screwed themselves due to the vast and rapidly-approaching nightmare of climate change. If this book was designed to scare the holy shite out of people, it certainly has succeeded. 
+According to Scranton, “Human civilization has thrived in what has been the most stable climate interval in 650,00 years. Thanks to carbon-fueled industrial civilization, that interval is over.” Boom. 
+But is anybody doing anything to stop this nightmare from happening? Only a few people are—mainly a small-but-courageous Indian tribe at Standing Rock, North Dakota. And what is America’s reaction to this heroic stand against death by carbon? We have just spent hundreds of thousands of tax-payer dollars trying to tear-gas them, harass them, arrest them, pepper-spray them and shoot rubber bullets at them. Way to go America! Or not. 
+Advertisement Square, Site wide 
+Thank goodness for the Standing Rock Sioux. Like it or not, they are protecting us. They are standing in place instead of us. They are bravely standing in front of a hurricane of climate-death and are doing it in our name. And all we do to thank them is to pay for the militarized police’s tear gas, dogs and bullets that attack them. 
+I propose another way to thank the Standing Rock Sioux. Let’s all go to Standing Rock this Thanksgiving—and show them that we really do have something to be truly thankful for. 
+PS: If you can’t figure out how to get all the way to the Standing Rock Reservation, then consider having your Thanksgiving dinner in front of the Capitol building in Bismarck instead. Can’t make it there either? How about Thanksgiving dinner in front of the US Congress or the White House. 
+PPS: Standing Rock protestors, Black Lives Matter, various Chicano movements and Occupy are practically the only true Americans these days—Americans who are courageous enough to actually stand up to the US military-industrial complex that is gobbling up the rest of us alive. We should honor these protestors instead of bombing them with tear gas and attacking them with dogs. 
+The rest of us whine and grieve that we are losing everything—but do nothing to stop it and just go along. 
+PPPS: Aside from being victims of the climate-change hurricane that is now bearing down upon us post-haste, Standing Rock is also just more collateral damage right now (along with Syria, Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, etc.) in the neo-con “wars” for oil. But who knows who the next “collateral damage” will be? Probably us. 
+Jane Stillwater is a freelance journalist, war correspondent, blogger, political Cassandra and author of “ Bring Your Own Flak Jacket: Helpful Tips for Touring Today’s Middle East ,” now available on Amazon.com. Her latest motto is “Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world.” TAGS:",FAKE
+8533,Re: WOW! What Josh Earnest admitted about Obamacare is stunning (because it’s true),"WOW! What Josh Earnest admitted about Obamacare is stunning (because it’s true) Posted at 1:53 pm on October 27, 2016 by Doug P. 
+As we’ve reported and too many Americans have noticed, the ironically named “Affordable” Care Act has caused premiums and deductibles to go through the roof . White House Spokesman Josh Earnest actually conformed to reality: . @PressSec concedes middle-class families not eligible for tax credits are being hit by higher premiums on ObamaCare. . 
+— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) October 27, 2016 
+He actually told the truth about something? Baby steps. For this narrative-obsessed admin, acknowledging the reality of math is a ""concession"" https://t.co/shd5NzdUQO 
+— Noah Pollak (@NoahPollak) October 27, 2016 Also concedes water is wet https://t.co/1HuZIqIM53",FAKE
+7799,Comment on Useful Idiots for Islam by MomOfIV,"| January 15, 2016 at 6:00 am | Reply 
+Slavery still exists in Saudi Arabia (as well as parts of Africa) today. But what is Saudi Arabia? For all practical purposes, it is Great Britain’s vassal state, run by a family of criminals whom we and Great Britain protect. Saudi Arabia is not even a nation-state in the modern sense of the term: The Royal Family there considers themselves to be owners of the land—as if it were their personal property—who allow others to live on it. (Churchill and others either set up Saudi Arabia or allowed it to become established in its current political structure. They also established the current national boundaries in the Middle East, leading, in part, to the present troubles). What kind of a religion is this that encourages all of the worst carnality of men? St. Thomas Aquinas tackled this matter head-on: He wrote that Mohammed sought out men as carnal as himself, and he encouraged his followers to do the same. (And they consider Jesus Our Lord to be a prophet, as if He would EVER condone their evil?!) Islam, like the New World Order manipulating it, is a BEAST SYSTEM. It is a criminal racket with a political ideology and structure, masquerading as a religion! WAKE UP, PEOPLE!",FAKE
+4251,"Even before Super Tuesday, Clinton is thinking about a likely matchup with Trump","Hillary Clinton and her allies are shifting their attention to a likely general-election contest against Donald Trump that they expect to be strongly negative — and for which they are planning an intensive effort to draw out minority voters who feel ­demonized by the billionaire real estate mogul.
+
+Clinton is still waging a hard-fought nomination battle against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — including 11 contests on Tuesday — and some Democrats supporting her are wary of looking too far over the horizon. But increasingly sure that Trump will win the Republican nomination, Clinton appears this week to be running a two-pronged campaign against both Sanders and an eventual Republican opponent who sounds a lot like Trump.
+
+On Monday, for instance, Clinton lingered on what she called “scapegoating” and “finger-pointing” in the Republican race — clearly signaling her willingness to criticize Trump.
+
+“The mean-spiritedness, the hateful rhetoric, the insults — that’s not who we are,” Clinton said in Springfield, Mass., a day ahead of the Super Tuesday voting that is expected to place her firmly in the lead for the Democratic nomination. “It really undermines our fabric as a nation.”
+
+A Clinton-vs.-Trump general election would put the former secretary of state and first lady head to head with an unconventional candidate who has seized on a current of nationalist and anti-immigrant discontent. Trump has been talking about the general-election matchup for a while, predicting that he will defeat Clinton in unexpected places, including New York and such Rust Belt states as Michigan that Republicans haven’t won since the 1980s.
+
+“People are going to be surprised,” he said Monday during a rally in Radford, Va., where he also took a few swings at Clinton.
+
+“Honestly, she should not be allowed to run,” he said. But “Bernie Sanders is over, he took a big beating. Took a big beating.”
+
+What became clear Monday is that Clinton and her surrogates are also preparing for a showdown with Trump.
+
+Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (D-Va.), a Clinton supporter mentioned regularly as a potential vice presidential pick, came out swinging at an appearance in the Virginia suburbs of Washington on Monday, criticizing Trump for saying during a debate this month that the U.S. military is a “disaster.”
+
+“That’s a quote. From a guy who wants to be commander in chief,” Kaine said. “I don’t want somebody who is the commander in chief to talk that way about 1.6 million young men and women who volunteer in a time of war to serve their country. I want a commander in chief who respects the military and their families and who will speak about them with gratitude, not contempt.”
+
+Clinton’s campaign declined to speak on the record about a ­general-election contest against Trump, saying the focus is on the primaries. But a senior campaign aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss campaign strategy did note that Clinton was the first candidate — Democratic or Republican — to criticize Trump directly over his comments about Mexican immigrants and, later, Syrian refugees.
+
+[The GOP’s implosion over Donald Trump’s candidacy has arrived]
+
+Several Clinton supporters said that if Trump is the GOP nominee, those comments are likely to be the focus of a major line of attack with the goal of boosting turnout among Latinos and other immigrant and minority voters who are turned off by Trump’s rhetoric. They said Trump is the Republicans’ own worst enemy in a general election, even as he holds mass appeal among white working- and ­middle-class voters likely to determine the party’s nomination.
+
+And Clinton’s allies will have the resources to wage those attacks on the airwaves. At the beginning of February, Priorities USA Action, the largest super PAC supporting her, had nearly $45 million in its war chest and had spent a relatively modest amount — about $4 million — boosting Clinton in the primaries.
+
+The super PAC plans to raise at least $200 million in the 2016 cycle, the lion’s share of it intended for the general election.
+
+“It became clear by last summer that Donald Trump wasn’t going anywhere and this was a real campaign,” said Priorities USA spokesman Justin Barasky. “Our main focus has always been the general election.”
+
+“Generally, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure she wins,” he added.
+
+The crux of Clinton’s strategy, several allies said, would be to compare Trump’s immigration program to hers: a wall and a hard line on deportation vs. a path to citizenship and an emphasis on keeping families together. This construct has already been used by Clinton, as well as by surrogates in Nevada and Colorado, and Clinton allies envision it as a rallying cry for Hispanic support in the general election.
+
+Clinton’s recent pitch to “break down every barrier,” for instance, is an implicit contrast to Trump’s promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico and to deport all 12 million immigrants living in the United States illegally. And her occasional appeal to bring more “love and kindness” into the political sphere appears to have Trump in mind.
+
+“We don’t need to make America great,” Clinton said Saturday, playing on Trump’s signature promise after her big victory in South Carolina’s primary. “America has never stopped being great. We do need to make America whole again. Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers.”
+
+Her campaign also plans to hold one or more huge rallies with Hispanic supporters, including elected leaders, entertainers and writers, said a Clinton donor familiar with her Hispanic outreach efforts. One such event could come before the Democratic convention in July and another after, the supporter said.
+
+Already, Clinton has targeted Trump directly on Twitter and on the stump, usually over immigration and the threat to U.S. influence abroad from what she has called “loose talk.”
+
+On Sunday, Clinton retweeted Sanders on the subject of Trump: “America’s first black president cannot and will not be succeeded by a hatemonger who refuses to condemn the KKK,” the message said. That was a reference to Trump’s refusal to disavow the support of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
+
+[Sanders says he’ll stay in until all 50 states have voted]
+
+Trump claimed last year that Mexico exports “killers and rapists” to the United States, producing one of Clinton’s first and most pointed denunciations of him.
+
+Latino voters are baffled by the rhetoric, and while few believe Trump could actually deport so many people or build the wall he promises, many are worried and offended, said Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a Clinton supporter. Trump’s broadsides come in an election year when some Republican leaders had hoped to make a values-based appeal to Hispanic voters and improve the party’s image with the nation’s fastest-growing demographic.
+
+A recent Washington Post-
+
+Univision poll showed that 74 percent of Hispanic voters say Trump’s views on immigration are offensive. The poll found that 82 percent of Hispanic voters want the next president to support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — and that 43 percent would not vote for a candidate who opposes such a policy.
+
+Becerra predicts that a wave of new and motivated Hispanic voters will oppose Trump. “Donald Trump is building his own wall to keep Latinos from voting for him. It may be the only wall he builds,” he said.
+
+Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), a Clinton supporter, told MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell on Monday that Trump has turned the race “into a farce” and is energizing Hispanic voters to oppose him.
+
+It has never been easier, Castro said, for him to persuade friends and associates to vote.
+
+“When one candidate is saying you’re a murderer and a rapist, it’s kind of a no-brainer” that voters will prefer the alternative, Becerra joked.
+
+Although Trump boasted Monday that he had done well among Hispanic voters in Nevada’s Republican caucuses and would continue to do well with that large and growing voter group, Democrats supporting Clinton say they are confident he could attract no more than about one in four Latino voters nationally.
+
+At his rally in Radford, Trump said he believes there is more enthusiasm among Republican voters than among Democrats, pointing to voting totals in the South Carolina primary. Although Clinton’s victory there showed her enduring strength among black voters, lower turnout may bode ill for Clinton in the long haul, Trump suggested.
+
+“I drew — the Republicans drew — so much more, so many more votes. Like double. And they went down because there’s no enthusiasm for Hillary. None,” Trump said. “We went way up because, whether people like me or not, there is enthusiasm on the Republican side. That I can tell you. There is enthusiasm. Big, big, big enthusiasm.”
+
+Trump has perfectly captured the mood of the Republican base, said pollster Stanley Greenberg, who worked for former president Bill Clinton. Greenberg released findings Monday from a poll of likely GOP voters showing that immigration and cultural differences are main drivers for white, working-class Republicans.
+
+“Why is it Donald Trump appears to be headed to be the Republican nominee? He understands the Republican electorate better than anyone else” this cycle, Greenberg told reporters.
+
+But that understanding comes at the potential cost of alienating more than Hispanic voters in the general election, he said. Women, Catholics and moderate Republicans generally expressed worry about a Trump candidacy.
+
+Greenberg’s survey of 800 likely Republican voters found that 20 percent of Republicans have not decided whether they would back Trump or Clinton in a head-to-head contest.
+
+Meanwhile, although Clinton ­remains focused on the Democratic nomination, her campaign hopes that her outreach to Latinos in upcoming primary states will lay the groundwork for boosting turnout in the general election. She is favored Tuesday in Texas, where Hispanics are a sizable portion of the electorate.
+
+In addition, the political arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus announced its support for Clinton on Monday.
+
+Clinton is also looking past Super Tuesday to Florida, an important swing state and the next one on the primary calendar with a large and influential Hispanic population. Clinton is holding her Super Tuesday evening rally in Miami, where Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also are scheduled to be that day. All are focused on the state’s March 15 primary.
+
+Jose DelReal in Radford, Va., and Scott Clement contributed to this report.",REAL
+8152,CodeSOD: Just In Case,"Remy Porter Remy escaped the enterprise world and now works as a consultant. Editor-in-Chief for TDWTF. 
+Brandon ’s company had a lot of work to do, and not enough staff to do it, so they hired on some freelancers. They were careful about it, and felt like they’d hired some good people. One developer, in particular, was the kind of developer who not only understands the low-level Windows API, but actually knows how to use some of the undocumented corners of it to get things done. 
+Most of the module was pretty good, but when Brandon double checked on the method for escaping disallowed characters from a URL, he found some problems. 
+The function went character by character through the string, which was bad enough, but when it wanted to know if a certain character needed to be escaped or not, it called this function: bool NeedEscape ( wchar_t c ) { switch ( c ) { case L'0': case L'1': case L'2': case L'3': case L'4': case L'5': case L'6': case L'7': case L'8': case L'9': case L'a': case L'b': case L'c': case L'd': case L'e': case L'f': case L'g': case L'h': case L'i': case L'j': case L'k': case L'l': case L'm': case L'n': case L'o': case L'p': case L'q': case L'r': case L's': case L't': case L'u': case L'v': case L'w': case L'x': case L'y': case L'z': case L'A': case L'B': case L'C': case L'D': case L'E': case L'F': case L'G': case L'H': case L'I': case L'J': case L'K': case L'L': case L'M': case L'N': case L'O': case L'P': case L'Q': case L'R': case L'S': case L'T': case L'U': case L'V': case L'W': case L'X': case L'Y': case L'Z': case L'-': case L'.': case L'_': case L'~': return false; default: return true; break; } } 
+While this freelancer may have been an expert on the undocumented Windows APIs, they didn’t quite know their way around the documented ones . [Advertisement] Otter allows you to easily create and configure 1,000's of servers, all while maintaining ease-of-use, and granular visibility down to a single server. Find out more and download today!",FAKE
+9346,The Pitfalls of Partial Disclosure – Examining the Process of Disclosure and the Reasons why a String of Half-Truths Just Won’t Cut It,"By Shem El-Jamal
+For almost a decade, many of us have heard about the concept and process of Disclosure . This is the complete release of formerly secret, official and governmental information through the public media. We have heard about the numerous possibilities of the truth of past events which exists behind closed doors—locked away in secret files protectively stamped with the word “Classified.” We know that to a very large extent, we as the common public know very little about the truth behind roughly a century of government and corporate secrecy on matters of high technology, ET life, and the heinous crimes committed for the sake of maintaining this secrecy.
+The subjects within the topic of disclosure are extremely dense and weighty to consider. One could spend hours digesting just one of these topics, which are commonly considered fringe in today’s society. However, we are here to discuss a different and yet parallel subject. This is the subject of individual choice, or more specifically, the choice to know .
+In order to see Disclosure, we must make the choice to be aware and have the courage to face the possibilities behind the truth which the disclosure will bring to light. Many of these truths will be unconventional, considering the fact that secrecy has defined convention for the past century. This does not mean that we should abandon our responsibility of thorough research and verification. It simply means that from vigorous research and diligent scrutiny, we must have the courage to face the information we encounter.
+Conscious Life Expo – David Wilcock – Page 1 – New Intel, The Human Evolutionary Leap, Sacred Geometry, Illuminati Secrets, and More 
+This article is dedicated to examining the concept of the partial disclosure , or the hindrance of the Disclosure process for the sake of a few financial interests. It is my hope that this article will help each and every one of us to discern and to face the truth the moment it is revealed.
+The Balance of Power There is one main reason for the need for a full-disclosure event to revolutionize the various societies of this planet. This Full Disclosure is to end the entirety of the secrecy for the sake of respect for the equality of all people. This disclosure is an acknowledgment to our right to know about all that affects our daily lives and represents the balancing of power among all people around the globe. With this balance in mind, it is important for us to know what power truly is.
+When we speak of power , many ideas may come to mind. Some of us may believe this word refers to one’s ability to control others. Others may think of it as a matter of economic influence, and there are those who simply think of power as one’s own ability to make their own choices. The truth is that all of these are valid definitions.
+To clarify, let’s check the definition from Merriam-Webster for the word “power.”
+the ability or right to control people or things political control of a country or area a person or organization that has a lot of control and influence over other people or organizations http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/power 
+If we consider these definitions of this word, we may notice something. Aside from the definitions which refer to mathematical applications, there seems to be no reference to human equality of any kind. It seems that in this official definition, the modern English language has all but completely done away with the fact that true power comes from the individual, and in essence, is equally distributed among all people. Let’s consider a few examples.
+American Mind Control: The Cost of Secrecy Part 1 – Examining the Effects of Secrecy, Propaganda, and Organized, White-Collar Crime 
+Most of us are familiar with the concept of governmental monarchy. This is of course, the form of centralized government in which a single figurehead holds complete control over an area, province, or country. Yet even though this one individual supposedly holds all of this power, they would have no control at all unless everyone else agreed to allow them that control.
+Jacques Louis David – The-Coronation of Napoleon
+In every ancient monarchical government structure, no single ruling figure could have held any such authority without the entire kingdom agreeing that they should. Generally speaking, if the people do not decide to follow, no authority can lead anyone in any way. A king or queen has dozens of servants, maids, butlers, cooks, groundskeepers and gardeners, craftsmen, and guards. They have advisers and clergymen who direct their political decisions, and armies of thousands who obey their every whim. However, not a single order of this monarchic figure would ever mean anything if the people chose not to follow them.
+Full Disclosure and Ascension – Commentary of the Latest Article from David Wilcock 
+In the common social interaction in which equality of power is acknowledged, there is no hierarchy. When one person starts giving orders to another, they probably won’t get much from the person (except maybe the finger and/or some choice words). Now take these same two people—one giving the order and the other receiving that order—and place beside these two, five other people who are following the orders. Due to this situation, the compulsion to obey is somewhat increased. Now add in 10, 20, 50, or even an entire country of people doing as they are mandated to do by some unseen authority, and the compulsion to obey is compounded. Add in the ability of the authority to order punishment upon those who disobey, and this control is solidified.We as human beings have the conditioning to conform to whatever social situation we find ourselves in. This is not to say that this tendency cannot be overcome. It is merely to say that we are raised to conform to the collective of society. This social conformity may have a few positive aspects up to a certain point. However for those who appreciate independent thought and the freedom to choose for themselves, this pull to conform can be somewhat of an annoyance. The above example of this social tendency to conform demonstrates the psychological concept of social conditioning , or what many in modern days refer to as the sheep effect .
+Psych Central – “Herd” Mentality Explained 
+The sheep effect could be described as the tendency of a person to automatically do whatever those around them are doing. This could simply be initiated by one person repeating an action, or it could be an entire group practicing . Eventually, you may have a large group of people doing the same thing over and over again without knowing why. The following clip comes from a show which airs on the National Geographic channel called Brain Games , and demonstrates a prime example of the sheep effect in action.
+Brain Games — Social Conformity What Lies Beyond the Haze of Social Conditioning? 
+So as we can see, it seems fairly easy to subtly coerce a suggestible person into following a social norm even though they have no logical reason for doing so. To be fair, this woman most likely reasoned to herself that the bell had something to do with being called for her appointment. What is interesting to see is that she never actually asked about why the group kept standing. There seems to have simply been the rationalization, immediately followed by conformity.
+This tendency of social conformity is a pervasive phenomenon which seems to grip the entirety of developed societies around the world. In fact, this conformity may be the one of the main reasons why large civilizations have developed in the way that they have. It is very likely that this coercion to conform has been used to create various facets of society, and to build that which has been built. However, as we may have seen, modern society doesn’t serve all people equally. Instead the supposedly civilized world appears to be designed to use the individual for their entire lifetime. When society has taken the best years of life of the individual, it discards them while at the same time, it grooms their children to be used in the exact same way.
+Wisdom Teachings with David Wilcock – Illuminati Salvage Plan – The Cabal’s Attempt at Damage Control from the World of Entertainment 
+
+
+Wisdom Teachings with David Wilcock – “The Cabal’s Downward Spiral” – Assessing the Final Days of a Crumbling Cabal, and a Prelude to Breakthrough 
+This grossly exploitative societal structure appears to have been designed by those who benefit from it most. These benefactors don’t work. They don’t contribute, but in many ways they use and enjoy the spoils of everything that we the people work for. Due to their elitist mentality and upbringing, these manipulators have, in a sense, domesticated the rest of humanity to work as their own servants, and have collectively assumed the position of the monarch of ancient times—creating an oligarchy. So what’s the significance of these discoveries, and what do they have to do with to partial disclosure?
+The Nature of Unbalanced Power The bottom line is that a partial disclosure would serve as a prime opportunity for more elitists to assume even more influential positions, and to seize more power than they deserve. Just like we have seen over the last century, any excess of power only compounds, and eventually corrupt those who hold it.
+Who’s Investing in the Dakota Access Pipeline? Meet the Banks Financing Attacks on Protesters – Extended Commentary and Links Included 
+Over time, the common people will typically adapt to their lower societal positions—becoming more and more comfortable and increasingly dependent upon the state to direct their lives. At the same time, the common people will become less and less self responsible. Eventually, the people become so dependent and the state becomes so domineering and power-drunk that the people will submit to any plan—no matter how foolish or ridiculous—simply so that they can avoid self-awareness and self-responsibility.
+It is a historical trend that when ethical integrity of a government dips farthest, nationalistic propaganda is most heavily promoted.
+Report: At least 50 teams were paid by Department of Defense for patriotic displays 
+
+Immature, centralized dependency upon the state can have some fairly horrendous results. As we have seen throughout history, this dependency has lead to the horrors of the Holocaust. This blind submission of the people led to one of the most notorious and most destructive governmental and military developments of the modern world. This blind conformity has also enabled virtually every war fought in the last century, and has lead the United States to its sad and violent role as world terrorist nation .
+Four Unicorn Riot Journalists Face Charges for Covering #NoDAPL – Links and Commentary Included 
+Today in America, we have a state of social conformity that seems to have abandoned all common sense ages ago. The acting governance has become so overgrown, so over-privileged, overconfident, and self-consumed that many of those who hold positions of governmental and legal power have abandoned their actually duty entirely, and have instead used their positions to serve themselves.
+
+
+Many of the citizenry of the United States have become so complacent, so inattentive to the real world, and so thoroughly dependent upon the State that they care nothing about what the State actually does. We have seen policies written to benefit only the banks and the corporation of America—receiving dozens of tax break—while the common people are left to pay the bill.
+Controlled Demolition – A Peer-Reviewed Scientific Analysis of the World Trade Center Collapses by Europhysics News 
+We have seen dangerous trends of militarized law enforcement which have converted many of our police departments into domestic armies. These armies have shown themselves to be severely lacking in human decency, and who behave as storm-troopers who create just as many problems as they solve. We have also seen this domestic army assault the supposedly free people of this country for little more than speaking out against rampant, common-place injustice. The corporate criminals who orchestrated the societal problems and hired crooked police take further and further steps to increase their own power by taking more and more from the common people through fear and violence.
+The Media and Emotional Manipulation We may have noticed how music and entertainment have become so negative, so centered on the idea of hopelessness, fatalism, and despair that it is difficult to find any other theme in music in modern times. These outlets used to have a wide verity of choices of themes and genres. Now entertainment seems to have become a gateway to clinical depression and perpetual fear. However, when observing these trends, we may wonder, “Why would any entertainment company choose to depress and demoralize its audience?” The answer is simple.
+
+Studies have shown that the plethora of corporate media sources are actually a highly centralized conglomerate of corporations all with the same ownership at the very top. These corporations have close relationships with government interests who often use corporate media outlets as their own person mouthpiece to disseminate whatever message is most politically advantageous for the masses to believe.
+Wisdom Teachings with David Wilcock – Business not as Usual – Examining Clear Signs of Progress toward Planetary Liberation 
+It seems that the people are conditioned to accept and maintain these corporately approved belief systems for as long of a time is necessary to achieve the intended political agenda. This message is maintained until it becomes convenient to change the corporate rhetoric to a different script. (This has been seen numerous times in the recent tendency of NASA to report on whatever hints at ET life when in the past, the subject of ETs was never communicated as anything but a joke.)
+So corporate media pushes the message that is most advantageous to the corporate world—keeping the people dependent upon corporate sources for their sense of comfort and security. However, more often than not, this comfort is grossly misplaced. In modern times, we have an American governance which claims to spread peace around the world and to have a goal of defeating terrorism, but this governance is funding and aiding this terrorism while claiming the continued aid is accidental.
+
+
+Unmasking Fascism – The United Nations Makes a Shocking Admission about Syria and Western Corruption – Commentary and Links Included 
+We see the United States waging war around the world—war which has lasted over a decade with no sign of ceasing. We have seen human rights all but completely abandoned in the United States, and we have seen nothing but empty promises for positive change from the mouths of these acting political parties. These officials have many nice things to say, but behind the words, they seem to have little or no desire to improve the status quo for the people. Time has proven that the addiction to wealth and power are just too strong to break without outside influence. So what does this mean for each of us?
+Misplaced Power The key reason why a partial-disclosure scenario would not be to the greatest benefit of the planet its people is simple. This reason is that power in essence is equally distributed among all sentient beings. This individual power is an aspect of the equality of each individual, and represents our right to make our own choices and to act in ways that benefit us in the greatest way possible. (This power is, of course, exercised as we respect the rights of others.) This is the concept of Human Rights —the rights the United States Constitution claims to uphold.
+BREAKING: FBI in Revolt — Top FBI Official Exposes Massive Corruption Which Let Clinton’s Crimes Slide 
+Each individual has the power to guide their own lives the way they see fit. However, in modern days this principle is ignored and substituted with something far less beneficial; something which holds little respect for human rights at all. This is the concept known as collectivism . Within a collectivist society, there is no such thing as the individual. There is only the sacrifice of individuality for the sake of the collective. Within collectivism, human rights are commonly ignored while the good of the collective is emphasized. However, within these types of societies, the people are rarely the true benefactors of the societal structure.
+
+Just as we have seen in modern times, in a collectivist society, the rights of the people to life, freedom and prosperity are steadily eroded away by those who seek only to gain for themselves. These self-serving political and financial figures speak flowery words from behind the podium every chance they get, but their true nature is commonly seen in their actions. They work only toward their own gain and to the benefit of their elitist cohorts. This has been the state of America for over half a century. However, this debilitated condition of the country has not been so obvious until more recently.
+
+Dakota Access Pipeline – The Standoff between Corporate Kleptocracy and the Enduring Spirit of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe 
+From the podium, freedom and liberty are praised as staples by politicians who set comfortably in the pockets of financial interests. These interests have done everything in their power to attack and destroy American freedom from the shadows. This condition has infuriated many among the population—causing them to speak out. Others become pacified by the propaganda and become agreeable to any and every ideology that this propaganda pushes onto them. This could be considered to be the doing of the acting American governance as well as the complacent among the population who allow such crimes against humanity to continue the same way German citizens did during the rise of the Nazi regime.There is little need to prove this is possible because Nazi ideals can easily be seen in our world at present. Due to the excessive psychopathic corruption of Western corporations, much of the world has become a wasteland of bombed-out structures, broken and/or murdered families, genocidal foreign leaders, and terror groups who wait for orders from their Western puppet masters. So with all this in mind, what could all of this have to do with partial disclosure?
+The End of Ignorance The prospect of a disclosure comprised of little more than a laundry list of half-truths is not at all preferable in my view. This is because it would leave the door wide open for all of the violence, the violations of humanity and human rights, the war crimes, and all of the corruption to be reborn later on. These crimes would have the opportunity to gradually and subtly take root the exact same way they did during the last century. The only difference this time around would be that these crimes would have a new face.
+Wisdom Teachings with David Wilcock – The Ceres Pyramid – A Brazen Statement from an Anxious Cabal 
+It is true that a partial disclosure which was composed of only the existence of ET life and alternative energy technology would be a step toward change. However, the world needs much, much more in order to ensure that the Nazi regimes that have come out of Germany, the United States, Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia do not have a chance to rise again.
+
+
+Crimes against humanity are no small issue to deal with. If we allow those responsible to escape without full restitution for their crimes, this leaves the door open for either them or their peers to attempt the same thing again. This is not to say that those guilty of these crimes should all be executed. It is to say that all of their crimes should be brought out into the open and the people of the world should learn 100% of the ways in which such criminals seize power.
+This mass revelation of truth would also open the door to countless advancements in human and social development. The populations of the world have been under the hypnotic spell of commercial propaganda for over a century of time. Virtually everything the people presently believe has been twisted in some way by corporate powers to the advantage of those corporate powers alone. The rights of we the people to think and choose for ourselves has been all but completely ignored. To hand the people the respect we have always deserved would allow the equality and freedom (presently praised during live national speeches) to actually mean something.
+Wisdom Teachings with David Wilcock – NASA’s Quiet Disclosure Part 1 
+
+As stated before, the main reason for the need for a full disclosure is to ensure that the true nature of power—the nature which the official definition seems to deliberately omit—is respected and upheld. This is the fact that each and every one of us possesses our own power to be used and enjoyed by ourselves and no one else. The only reason monarchs and figureheads ever had power is because they, their families, and their cohorts tricked their respective populations into thinking that the common people did not have any power. (This is the secret behind any large totalitarian regime.)It is the choice of the people to behave like sheep and to get in line without ever knowing why they are doing so. As the State encourages this thoughtless tendency of the people, manipulative leaders ensure their continued harvest of power from them.
+
+The Disclosure Project – “The Lakenheath-Bentwaters Incident” – An Eye-Witness Account of one of the Most Significant Events in UFO and Military History 
+Full Disclosure is the only way to ensure that this world becomes and remains free. By my observation, there is no other way of preventing the Neo-Nazi, Zionistic, and genocidal barbarism that has plagued our world for centuries. Only when we the people observe, think and act by our own efforts will this world remain free. Only in a society where there is individual maturity and independent intellect can the people truly be free. The alternative is the continuation of some form of thoughtless dependency on whatever ideology is thrown at us. Only some form of collectivist conformity results for those who gradually agree to do less, to think less, and to accept less responsibility.
+The choice is clear. Do we choose to know, or do we risk prolonging the age of ignorance? The only way to ensure that everyone becomes aware of this choice is to realize the variety of ways this choice has been denied. Only through a full disclosure can this full revelation be achieved, and only in a society of courageous people with open eyes can this realization be complete.
+Source: Discerning the Mystery 
+",FAKE
+2525,What immigration activists want from Hillary Clinton,"Cesar Vargas — a leading immigration activist — has a message for Hillary Clinton: it's great that she's devoting one of the first speeches of her campaign to immigration, but ""that doesn't mean we're going to be starstruck.""
+
+""We're going to look past that,"" Vargas, the director of DRM Action Coalition, said. ""Because we learned from President Obama.""
+
+Clinton appeared in Nevada on May 5 at a roundtable with unauthorized immigrants (as Adrian Carrasquillo reported for BuzzFeed). She called for Congress to create a ""full and equal"" path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants in the US. But she also said that if Congress didn't do that, she'd keep — and even expand — President Obama's executive actions to unilaterally let millions of unauthorized immigrants get protection from deportation and work permits.
+
+The appearance itself shows that the campaign is working hard to woo Vargas and immigrant-rights activists like him. Being catered to this early in a Democratic primary is a sign that the party understands not just the importance of the Latino vote, but also the power the immigrant-rights movement has to motivate this key group.
+
+There's a very good chance that Clinton's eventual opponent in the general election will oppose a path to citizenship. (Only two Republican presidential candidates have even said they want unauthorized immigrants to get legal status in the US.) But a path to citizenship isn't what advocates care about when it comes to Clinton. They see comprehensive immigration reform, with or without citizenship, as a pretty ""easy"" position for any Democratic politician to take in 2015.
+
+the partisan battle may be over what's in an immigration-reform law — but advocates are looking for clinton to support more executive actions
+
+Clinton has a good track record with Latino voters, with whose support she handily beat President Obama in the 2008 primary. But immigration activists believe they're far more powerful now than they were in 2008, and Hillary's record with them is another story. Even in 2014, her comments on the issue left advocates seriously concerned.
+
+She also must contend with how those activists view Obama's legacy on immigration reform. Obama took major executive actions in 2012 and again in 2014 to protect millions of unauthorized immigrants from deportation, but the immigrant-rights movement remembers those actions as something they had to fight tooth and nail for against an often recalcitrant administration. Some Latino voters — and advocates — are not over the sting of Obama's 2008 ""promesa"" to introduce an immigration reform bill in the first year of his presidency. He failed to deliver and, at the same time, ramped up deportations.
+
+Clinton's appeal to immigration advocates has to go beyond the safe politics of comprehensive immigration reform and take a few risks to ensure their support. Her first speech on the topic indicated that's exactly what she'll do.
+
+In advance of the May 5 speech, Clinton political director Amanda Renteria made calls to several advocates for input — including DRM Action Coalition. As Vargas paints it, the conversation showed exactly the attitude that advocates think they're up against.
+
+Renteria, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in California in 2014, ""expressed frustration about why the Latino community were not turning out to vote."" For Vargas and his colleagues, that's an easy question to answer. ""The standard talking point that we have been hearing, 'We need to have comprehensive immigration reform' — those are more than decades-old talking points, and it's no longer motivating people. It's no longer inspiring people.""
+
+In 2008, Frank Sharry, of the immigration reform group America's Voice, was ""pleasantly surprised"" to hear Clinton, Obama, and others go after each other during a primary debate ""trying to outdo each other on comprehensive immigration reform."" But the lesson advocates learned from 2008 is that a presidential candidate can't make a promise that only Congress can keep. As Clarissa Martinez of the National Council on La Raza points out, at this point ""we've had a Republican president try, and not succeed. We've had a Democratic president try.""
+
+And frankly, advocates just don't feel it should be a big deal for a Democratic candidate to support comprehensive immigration reform, since it's traditionally (and recently) been a bipartisan issue. Advocates may be skeptical that a reformer like Jeb Bush could make it out of the Republican primary without running to the right on immigration. But the possibility's still there.
+
+""It should be easy"" to support comprehensive reform, says Martinez. To advocates, it might be a good idea for a candidate to endorse a bipartisan policy, or a policy that majorities of Americans support. But it's not a victory for advocates themselves.
+
+So now, candidates have to offer a plan B: what happens if Congress doesn't pass comprehensive immigration reform? The answer, of course, is executive action — like the ones President Obama took in 2012 and 2014, which would allow millions of unauthorized immigrant young adults and parents of US citizens and permanent residents to apply for protection from deportation and work permits.
+
+But is defending Obama's actions enough? They're certainly a point of difference between Democrats and Republicans — every Republican presidential candidate has made some sort of promise to reverse the executive actions, though immigration moderates like Marco Rubio (and possibly Jeb Bush) have left the door open to waiting until immigration reform has passed through Congress to ""repeal and replace"" the immigration programs.
+
+But advocates aren't looking for Clinton to distinguish herself from Republicans. Defending what Obama's already done is ""the minimum she could say,"" says Sharry. They're looking for her to promise them more than they've already been promised. (It doesn't particularly matter to advocates that Obama's 2014 executive actions are currently on hold in federal court; everyone in the immigration advocacy world is confident that this is just a temporary setback, and the court battle will eventually go the administration's way.)
+
+""The reality is that these executive actions are going to be associated with President Obama,"" says Vargas. ""What's her legacy?""
+
+Sharry puts it differently: in order to win advocates' respect, she has to show them she's willing to stick her neck out. Promising to expand executive action ""would be, to me, a sign that she's really going to lean into the issue, open herself up to more criticism, anger from the Republican ranks, in order to show the immigrant community and its allies that she's really supportive this time around,"" he says.
+
+There's a policy basis to wanting executive action expanded. As pleased as advocates were with the 2014 executive actions, it's not like all their demands were met. For one thing, parents of deferred-action recipients, including many leading advocates (like Vargas's partner Erika Andiola), were left out. (In fact, that's exactly the group Clinton said she wanted to help next.)
+
+Furthermore, advocates are looking for an answer to what they see as the big unanswered question of the Obama administration: if some unauthorized immigrants are ""high priorities"" for deportation because they've committed crimes or have just come to the US, and other unauthorized immigrants are ""low priorities"" who should get deferred action and work permits, what about people who fall into neither category, or both? Clinton started to answer that question in her first speech, saying that immigrants with ""deep ties and contributions to communities"" should be allowed to stay. But that doesn't fully address the issue.
+
+It is, however, more details than even advocates were asking for. As Carrasquillo reported, DRM Action Coalition plans to release a memo this week ""detailing what it wants from presidential candidates,"" but Vargas stresses that they're having an open conversation with campaigns. ""It's more that there's a commitment that there's more to be done,"" he says, ""than the specific.""
+
+To put it another way: President Obama spent a lot of time protesting to immigration advocates that he'd done everything in his power to protect unauthorized immigrants, and advocates spent a lot of energy getting him to reconsider. The results were the 2012 and 2014 executive actions. Advocates are hoping to skip that step — by getting Clinton to start with the assumption that there is more she could do as president.
+
+Between today's speech about immigration and last week's speech about criminal justice, it sure looks like Clinton is using the beginning of her campaign to make it clear she knows this isn't the Democratic Party that nominated her husband in 1992.
+
+Clinton's never exactly been a champion of immigration reform. During the 2008 campaign, she famously flip-flopped on driver's licenses for unauthorized immigrants; as a senator, she was supportive of the 2007 push for comprehensive immigration reform, but, according to Sharry, her role was limited to proposing a few ""safe"" amendments.
+
+What really raised some red flags among advocates, though, were a pair of comments Clinton made in 2014 — when everyone assumed she was gearing up to run for president. First, she told an audience that she thought most of the children coming to the US from Central America should be sent back — a stance that was much harsher than the one the Obama administration ended up taking. Then in Iowa in September, when a member of Vargas's group asked her if she supported executive action for immigrants, she said the answer was to ""elect more Democrats"" — something that was insanely tone-deaf, given that President Obama had just delayed taking executive action until after the 2014 elections.
+
+That seemed like a return to the way the Democratic Party viewed immigration back in 2007 — the last time Hillary Clinton was running for office. There's long been a camp among Democrats that's seen the issue as a balancing act: they should be just supportive enough to win over Latino voters, but not too supportive or else they'll turn off white voters. Sharry of America's Voice describes this thus: ""Sure, immigration's important — but not when it's inconvenient.""
+
+Immigration advocates are convinced that Democrats have more to gain from full-throated support for protecting unauthorized immigrants than they have to lose. And after the 2012 presidential campaign, when President Obama defeated Mitt Romney largely on the strength of the Latino vote — and then the 2014 campaign, when Democrats lost Senate races in states like Colorado after Obama's delay on executive action — they feel they've made their case and deserve a seat at the big kids' table.
+
+The May 5 speech was an indication that Clinton (or at least her campaign) agrees. She called special attention to the thousands of recent immigrant families who've been put in immigration detention — a signal to activists that she understood the problems with taking a tough approach to child and family migrants. And she couldn't have been more explicit in supporting executive action to protect immigrants if there aren't enough Democrats in Congress to pass immigration reform.
+
+The speech does raise a totally different question — one that's only going to be answered with time: whether the Clinton campaign will treat immigration as a special interest issue or as a core part of her campaign platform. As Sharry puts it, ""Does she talk about immigration only in front of Latino audiences, or does she make it part of her stump speech?""
+
+Part of this is about respect — a recognition that Latino voters have done a lot for Democrats in the past few cycles, and a signal that Democrats don't think that ""speaking to a general audience"" automatically means ""white voters."" But while advocates don't say this explicitly, it's also a way to prevent a repeat of President Obama in 2008 — who made it pretty easy to forget that he'd made a promise to introduce immigration reform. The more Clinton talks about the need to protect unauthorized immigrants — no matter whom she's speaking to — the more opportunities she's creating for the media and advocates to hold her accountable if she tried to ignore the issue in office.",REAL
+1370,"Fiorina slams Clinton, calls Trump a 'Christmas present' for Dems","Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina slammed rival Hillary Clinton on Sunday, saying the Democratic front-runner has “gotten every single foreign policy challenge wrong.”
+
+Fiorina, who appeared on ""Fox News Sunday,"" also took a shot at GOP candidate Donald Trump.
+
+“Donald Trump is a big Christmas gift wrapped up under the tree” for the Clinton campaign.
+
+“She desperately hopes she runs against Donald Trump,” Fiorina said. “I, however, am the lump of coal in Mrs. Clinton’s stocking and she desperately hopes she does not run against me.”
+
+“She can beat Donald Trump,” Fiorina said. “Donald Trump cannot beat Hillary Clinton. I think it’s very clear.”
+
+Fiorina, once a breakout star of the GOP who fought her way from the low-polling undercard debates to the primetime stage, has been having trouble in the past few weeks maintaining her momentum.
+
+During last week's fifth Republican debate, Fiorina came under fire after she said she would bring back the “warrior class” to fight the Islamic State and claimed several high-ranking generals had left the military because they didn’t agree with President Obama’s political policies.
+
+Gen. Jack Keane, a Fox News contributor and one of the generals she said quit, actually retired before Obama took office. Fiorina also said Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal resigned because they disagreed with the administration; but, in fact, Petreaus’ retirement came following revelations he shared classified information with his alleged mistress and biographer while McChrystal called it quits after he was quoted criticizing Obama in a “Rolling Stone” article.
+
+Fiorina was also pressed by host Chris Wallace about a digital ad paid for by a super PAC supporting Fiorina that links her to Margaret “Iron Lady” Thatcher, the first female prime minister of Britain.
+
+“Mrs. Fiorina, respectfully, isn’t that a little over the top?” the anchor asked.
+
+“Many people have commented on the comparison and I’m flattered by it, frankly,” she said. “Margaret Thatcher was a great leader for her nation at a pivotal and perilous time.”
+
+When asked by Wallace about her stagnant poll numbers, Fiorina said she was “happy” with her position and that she is where she wants to be.
+
+She quipped, “People make up their minds late, and if the polls at this stage and in earlier states were true we would have had President Howard Dean, President Rudy Giuliani, and by the way, we would have already had President Hillary Clinton.”",REAL
+9370,4 Times As Many Americans Think Biased U.S. Media – Not Foreign Interests Such As Russian Hackers – Real Threat To Fair Election,"Posted on November 1, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 75% of Americans Believe the Media Is Biased For Hillary 
+A Suffolk University/USA Today poll released Friday found that 75.9% of Americans believe the mainstream media “would like to see [Hillary Clinton] elected president.” 
+The poll also found that only 10% of Americans believe that “foreign interests such as Russian hackers” are “the primary threat that might try to change the election results”. In contrast, 45.53% believe “the news media” is the primary threat to the election: 
+Indeed, the New York Times , Boston Globe , Los Angeles Times , CNN and other mainstream media admitted to us they were going to try to throw the election for Hillary. (And leaked emails show widespread collusion between the media and the Clinton campaign.)",FAKE
+5700,Hillary Emails: “Taken Care Of”,"Hillary Emails: “Taken Care Of” October 28, 2016 Hillary Clinton waves to the crowd after delivering her ''official launch speech'' at a campaign kick off rally in Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in New York City, June 13, 2015. 
+Recently released email show a Clinton campaign manager pretty confident that ""everything was taken care of"", It is believed he referred to Clinton's email usage. 
+Members of what would become Hillary Clinton’s campaign team discussed her use of a private email account as secretary of state in Summer 2014, months before her email practices were publicly revealed. But an email released on Thursday shows that Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, was not overly concerned about the issue at that time because he was told that “everything was taken care of.” It is not clear what Mook meant by the cryptic statement, which he made in an exchange with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. 
+The email, which was hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account and released by WikiLeaks, is the first to show that the Clinton team was caught almost completely off guard by The New York Times’ March 2, 2015 story about Clinton’s email usage. The late-night email exchange happened within hours of the New York Times breaking the news that Clinton exclusively used a private email account in a way that may have broken records rules. 
+“Did you have any idea of the depth of this story?” Podesta asked Mook in the email. 
+At 1:32 a.m., Mook wrote back: 
+""Nope. We brought up the existence of emails in research this summer but were told that everything was taken care of."" 
+The exchange appears to show that even Clinton's most senior aides were initially unprepared for the scale of revelations about Clinton's email practices, which would end up dogging her campaign all the way through to the final weeks leading up to the Nov. 8 election. After a yearlong investigation, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said in July that Clinton and her staff were ""extremely careless"" with classified information, but that no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges.",FAKE
+2534,Obama: ‘We will be as aggressive as we can’ on immigration appeal,"President Obama said Wednesday that the administration will be ""as aggressive as we can"" on a Texas judge's ruling that temporarily blocked the administration's deferred-deportation program and he will veto any potential congressional vote on whether or not his executive actions on immigration are legal.
+
+“Unfortunately a group of Republican governors sued. They found a District Court judge who enjoined… but that’s just the first part of the process,"" Obama said at a town hall event hosted by MSNBC and Telemundo in Miami. ""This is just one federal judge. We have appealed it very aggressively. We’re going to be as aggressive as we can. In the meantime, what we said to Republicans is, ‘Instead of trying to hold hostage funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which is so important for our national security, fund that and let’s get on with passing comprehensive immigration reform.’”
+
+Obama continued: “In the short term if Mr. McConnell, the leader of the Senate, and the speaker of the House, John Boehner, want to have vote over whether what I’m doing is legal or not they can have that vote. I will veto that vote because I’m absolutely confident it’s the right thing we do.”
+
+Obama said that the administration was not surprised by the ruling by U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Texas. Obama compared his immigration actions to those of George H.W. Bush, which Obama said “were not challenged by Democrats” for political reasons.  Obama said that the executive action program is on hold due to the court fight, but immigrants should be gathering their paperwork for their deportation relief applications so that they are ready to go after the legal fight is resolved.
+
+The president said that no matter what happens, a bill on comprehensive immigration reform must pass Congress, because the changes from his executive order will only be temporary until the law is changed.
+
+“We’ve got to pass a bill. The pressure’s got to continue to stay on Congress. The pressure’s got to continue to stay on the Republican Party that is blocking comprehensive immigration reform… For the next set of presidential candidates -- because I’m term-limited, Michelle’s happy about that -- when they start asking for votes, the first question should be, ‘Are you really going to deport 11 million people? If not, what’s your plan?’ ... We’re going to have to keep on the political process on a separate track.”
+
+Obama met with 17 advocates at the White House, hours before the town hall in Miami. Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, said Obama hopes that the funding issue will be resolved soon so he can talk about possible immigration legislation with Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Despite that, the president is concerned that ""this congress will never pass a bill that he could sign into law,"" one that addresses the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants, she said.
+
+However, Obama said in Miami that he  hasn't ""given up passing it when I’m president. … Don’t suddenly give up and say, ‘Oh we have to wait the next two years.’ … I’m not just going to stand still over the next two years.""
+
+Obama highlighted parts of his executive action plan that were not part of the court order,  including refocusing border patrol agents on high-priority people, including felons, not families or people who have been in the country for years or decades. ""Felons not families,"" Obama said when announcing the actions in November.
+
+""He really wants to lift up the parts of the executive action that haven’t got as much attention that were not enjoined by the judge,"" said Frank Sharry, founder and director of America's Voice. Advocacy groups will also start highlighting that only one portion of the executive actions is part of the ruling.
+
+Those include refocusing border patrol agents on high-priority people, including felons, serious criminals and people who recently crossed the border, not families or people who have been in the country for years or decades.
+
+When asked by moderator Jose Diaz-Balart about the continued number of deportations despite the new policy, Obama said it takes time for a huge government to fully change.
+
+“Every time you have a big bureaucracy and you change policy there is going to be one or two or three instances where people apparently haven’t gotten the message. But if you talk to the head of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, he is absolutely committed to this new prioritization. More important, I, the president of the United States, am committed. ... We’re going to be focusing on criminals; we’re going to be focusing on potential felons.”
+
+If, for example, someone working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn't follow the policy changes, ""there's going to be consequences to it,"" Obama said.
+
+Obama said that he has used all the legal power he has to try to change the nation's immigration policies.
+
+“Not only are we going to have to win this legal fight.. but ultimately we’re still going to pass a law through Congress. The bottom line is I’m using all the legal power invested in me in order to solve this problem,"" he said.
+
+Attendees said advocacy groups will also stress that young people who received temporary relief under Obama's 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, are not subject to the order and can still sign up and renew their status.
+
+""We went into the meeting and left the meeting with the same sense, that the president acted within his full, legal authority when he announced these initiatives back on Nov. 20 and there’s an agreement between us,"" Hincapie said.
+
+The administration on Monday filed a notice of appeal and motion to stay the decision. It argued that the states do not have standing to challenge federal immigration policy. The motion for stay cited the use of ""prosecutorial discretion,"" where the government uses its discretion to decide how to best allocate resources and apply the law. While Hanen's order would halt the program nationwide, the administration argued that Texas is the ""only State whose claims of harm the Court credited,"" and if a full stay is not granted the ruling should only apply to Texas.
+
+Johnson, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, won support Wednesday from two of his Republican predecessors – Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff – who joined him in warning that a shutdown would hurt the department’s ability to protect the homeland.
+
+Ridge, the department’s first secretary under President George W. Bush, acknowledged that he strongly opposed Obama’s executive orders on immigration, which triggered the funding battle. “I personally believe that the president has greatly overstepped his constitutional authority,’’ Ridge said at a news conference with Johnson and Chertoff.
+
+But Ridge called it “wrong and folly” to express that opposition by refusing to fully fund DHS. “We would not think of not funding our soldiers,’’ he said. “These are soldiers at DHS. They wear a different uniform, but the goal and objective and mission is the same – keeping America as safe as possible.’’
+
+Diaz-Balart pressed Obama as to why he didn't push harder for immigration in his first term.
+
+“It wasn’t like I was sitting back not doing anything. We were moving aggressively on a whole host of issues. We wanted immigration done; we pushed for immigration to be done, but ultimately we didn’t have the votes to get immigration done. … I don’t regret having done the ACA,"" Obama said, referring to the health-care law.
+
+Obama said that the changing demographics of the United States will ultimately resolve the issue.
+
+""Over the long term, this is going to get solve because at some point there’s going to be a President Rodriguez or a President Shin because we’re a nation of immigrants. So what I would say to the next president is think ahead…think long-term,” Obama said.
+
+After past contentious meetings with immigration activists, the mood was relaxed and advocates felt that they were on the same page as the administration.
+
+""There’s been a lot of difficult meetings with the president over the years and this was not one of them,"" Sharry said. ""Lots of mutual gratitude and a clear alignment on strategy and tactics and lots of optimism that we're going to win in the courts.""",REAL
+1009,"Donald Trump’s “days of rage”: As the GOP primary reaches its tipping point, Trump prepares for all-out war","And the results, as everyone who’s been paying even minimal attention to the Republican primary campaign so far knows by this time, means the media’s proverbial “brokered convention” may just be coming true this time. We call it the more politically correct “contested convention” because nobody likes the idea that men in the smoke-filled room will maneuver to choose a candidate behind the scenes and put him on the ticket regardless of the will of the voters. But that is exactly what is being discussed if Trump doesn’t go into the convention with enough delegates to win on the first ballot.
+
+It’s possible that Ted Cruz will be able to wrangle enough votes to take the lead on the second ballot but since it’s unlikely to be very close, that scenario doesn’t look good either. And that’s despite the fact that he has the support of much of the hardcore conservative movement which today that would consider Ronald Reagan a liberal squish if they hadn’t been indoctrinated for 30 years into believing that he fulfilled every GOP fever dream of his time without ever having to compromise in any way. The establishment wants a “fresh face.”
+
+If last night’s reaction by Trump to this possibility is any indication, he’s hunkering down for an epic battle. He gave no speech or “press conference” as he has done in the past. Instead his campaign issued a statement:
+
+Donald J. Trump withstood the onslaught of the establishment yet again, Lyin’ Ted Cruz had the Governor of Wisconsin, many conservative talk radio hosts, and the entire party apparatus behind him. Not only was he propelled by the anti-Trump Super PAC’s spending countless millions of dollars on false advertising against Mr. Trump, but he was coordinating with his own Super PAC’s (which is illegal) who totally control him. Ted Cruz is worse than a puppet — he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump. We have total confidence that Mr. Trump will go on to win in New York, where he holds a substantial lead in all the polls, and beyond. Mr. Trump is the only candidate who can secure the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton, or whomever is the Democratic nominee, in order to Make American Great Again.
+
+Basically, Trump accused Cruz of stealing the Wisconsin primary with the illegal help of his Super PAC and the GOP establishment. It is tantamount to a declaration of war.
+
+The Trojan Horse metaphor isn’t really on point, but the idea that certain rich donors and elected officials in the GOP are supporting Cruz for their own purposes is correct. They simply want him to block Trump so they can install a candidate more to their liking. Mitt Romney has been very upfront about that. It’s just that until recently Trump didn’t understand how the convention worked or that part of the game is working the delegates at state conventions. (He was reportedly fit to be tied when he found out and blamed his staff for failing him.)
+
+But now that he’s up on the rules, he’s hired some experienced hands to handle these tactical details. including one of the most talented “delegate hunters” in the business, Paul Manafort. According to RealClear Politics:
+
+You don’t have to read between the lines to see that Trump is angry. And as he is the first to tell you, he believes that when you get hit, you hit back — hard. So it was unsurprising to find out that his close friend and former campaign adviser Roger Stone, the notorious dirty trickster, has a project to benefit Trump called “StoptheSteal.org.” All the way back in February, he predicted the establishment was going to try to “steal” the election from Trump and announced that he was planning to “reach out to some of my old associates” in order to “pull together some of the best convention operatives in America today.” He said, “We have set up a fund to pay for their travel, to pay for their hotel rooms, to bring them to Cleveland to avoid the steal.”
+
+Last week he put out a call: Go to Cleveland. Come to Cleveland. Don’t let the big steal go forward without massive protest. Peaceful, nonviolent protest. So, as they used to say, don’t wait for orders from headquarters. Ride to the sound of the guns. I don’t mean to imply violence on that. I mean: Ride to where the action will be. We have to let the Republican bosses and the kingmakers and the insiders and the lobbyists know that we’re not going to stand for the big steal. So if you are a Trump supporter, make plans now. Take a bus! Hitchhike! Carpool! Take a train! Fly, if you can afford it. We need you in Cleveland! On Monday, harking back to the 1968 Democratic convention violence,  he described his plan for the RNC as “days of rage” which “could entail protests at certain targeted hotels where delegations who are involved in the ‘big steal’ are staying.” He claims that he’s getting an excellent response. One can certainly imagine how “enraged” Trump voters will be if it looks as though they are being denied the nomination due to machinations from the political elite. As Politico reported yesterday: 96 percent of [Trump’s] supporters said the U.S. needs a powerful leader to solve its problems, 91 percent said their beliefs and values are being threatened, and 90 percent said public officials don’t care much about what everyday people think. “Trump supporters are true stand-outs,” Quinnipiac poll director Douglas Schwartz said. “They want a leader who is very different from the leader sought by other voters, explaining the mystery many see behind Trump’s support.” The Republican front-runner’s supporters even value his bombastic rhetoric. Eighty-four percent said the U.S. needs a leader who will do or say anything to fix the country’s issues, a statement just 68 percent of GOP voters overall agreed with (60 percent of Democrats disagree). The heightened concentration of Trump backers with strong feelings about being marginalized and having a bleak view of government is a consistent theme throughout the survey, as illustrated by the nine-in-10 supporters who view his campaign as a movement. One might assume Stone’s project is just another wingnut scam designed to liberate some hard-earned money from the true believers. But Stone is no joke when it comes to this sort of operation. He was an integral part of one of the most consequential “protests” in recent history: the so-called Brooks-Brothers “riot” that shut down the counting of votes in Miami, one of the important steps that led to the installation of George W. Bush as president. Last night after Cruz was declared the winner, this was announced: Newest expected hire for the Trump campaign – former NY Rep. John Sweeney Sweeney was once named one of the 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress. But he’s most famous for something else: During the 2000 election, Sweeney allegedly helped earn his nickname from President Bush, “Congressman Kickass,” by organizing the so-called Brooks Brothers riot that disrupted the Florida elections commissioners. He was said to have led the charge on the third recount in Miami, flying in astroturfing GOP operatives and instructing them to “shut it down!” by raising a clamor and pounding on the election commission’s doors. Sweeney used the words “thugs” to describe the Florida officials involved in the recount. They’re getting the band back together. A majority of Wisconsin Republicans told the exit pollsters they thought whoever comes in with the most delegates should win, so Trump has some popular backing for that notion. But that’s a very unlikely outcome. Trump is signaling that he’s not going to go down without a full-fledged bloody battle on the floor of he convention if he comes up short. And in case anyone thinks that Stone isn’t conferring with Trump on his plans for these “days of rage,” listen to the interview Stone gave to John Heileman and Mark Halperin on the subject. You’ll notice that he uses the “Trojan Horse” metaphor too. It could be coincidence — but I doubt it.",REAL
+8601,Pro-sovereignty Legislators Demand That Administration End Border Anarchy, ,FAKE
+4761,How Donald Trump Wins Even When He Loses,"After the past disastrous week, he can’t win. But he’s already made all of us losers, and we’ve been accessories to his crimes.
+
+The self-imposed carnage will mean almost nothing to Trump loyalists. But with 36 days left, the clock has run out for real estate magnate and—without a meaningful field organization, and with an undisciplined, national communications apparatus—there is simply no way for him to build and grow the kind of broad-based coalition necessary to topple Hillary Clinton’s current polling lead. Between now and Election Day, the gap is too large, there are too many yards left to run the football, and the real estate developer just dipped his hands in cement.
+
+Without question, Trump would have been the most disastrous American president of the modern era. Some very real damage, however, has already been done—to what is deemed acceptable in our discourse, to the way in which we determine the long-term viability of candidates, and to the fundamental spirit of fair play—and there is no turning back.
+
+There is more than enough culpability to go around—including a broad swath of GOP primary voters, journalists who partook in false equivalences in the name of clicks and ratings, and even the RNC honchos who refused to deploy legal mechanisms stop him. Of course, there is also the broader society which bought into the fable of his business acumen, tuning in for his weekly reality show on NBC, and handed him a trough laden with celebrity. Together, one and all, we made him.
+
+There will almost certainly be social and political consequences of Trump’s months-long verbal carpet bombing campaign. Notwithstanding heroic acts of journalism, the so-called balanced egalitarian approach to election coverage has been dominated and fraught with dishonest political brokers. Beyond an emboldened, more virulently bigoted strain of ethno-nationalists, win or lose, Trump and his band of surrogates have fundamentally changed the rules of fair play.
+
+Beating out more than a dozen primary opponents while lobbing bigoted remarks at Muslims, Hispanics, and women, a promised “pivot” never came to fruition. The fact that he was not forced to suspend his campaign after making racist remarks about a federal judge says as much about us as it does about Trump. With our tacit approval, he moved on to vicious stereotypes about African Americans and refused to apologize for his attempt to delegitimize the nation’s first black president. In fact, he said we should thank him for telling the truth and forcing President Obama to produce his long-form birth certificate. Instead of issuing a mea culpa, Trump falsely blamed Clinton’s 2008 campaign team for initiating the controversy and promptly patted himself on the back for putting the issue to bed.
+
+Except Trump never walked away from birtherism. He continued to claim the document was fraudulent and even posited that the health official who signed it might have been murdered. On two occasions, he has risen to the podium and suggested circumstances under which his opponent might be shot.
+
+For any other candidate in any other year, just one of those things would have been enough. But Trump knows it isn’t. “She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be,” he boasted in an interview with the Times.
+
+He knows that he and some of his most prominent surrogates—Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, and Newt Gingrich—can keep blowing the whistle, changing the rules mid-play. They all but blamed Americans for paying their fair share of taxes and honoring their contractual obligations. Trump, in the words of former New York mayor Giuliani was a “genius” for using the net operating loss carry-forward deduction—an obscure loophole unavailable to most working Americans—to cure future tax debt for nearly two decades.
+
+So what if he filed multiple bankruptcies, refused to pay small businesses after they rendered services to his companies, and cost tens of thousands of people their jobs? It was all fair and legal, according to Trump. So what if he is an admitted serial adulterer who won’t spare a breath before spitting out misogynist, hypersexualized comments about women. Everybody cheats, at least according to Giuliani, and the women deserved it, right? So what if it turns out to be true that Trump didn’t pay a dime in federal or state taxes over the span of 18 years—leaving police officers, school teachers, veterans, and others out in the wash. That makes him “smart,” right?
+
+Once upon a time, allegations of fraud, draft dodging, flagrant philandering, and self-dealing, not to mention public verbal assaults against a litany of people, would have been immediate disqualifiers. A self-professed billionaire who paid no taxes for even one year would have been laughed off the stage. Candidates have surely dropped out over less. The torrent of bad press would’ve been enough to send any other self-respecting candidate for the hills. Within hours, the candidate and his spouse would’ve been standing tearfully before a flag draped podium proclaiming their allegiance to their country and vowing to continue the fight as private citizens for the public good.
+
+Never in the history of American politics has a major party nominee made such a mockery of the process. But the game changed the moment GOP voters cast their lot with a one-time reality show personality with no public policy experience, little in the way of intellectual curiously, and no guiding values. It changed the moment sitting GOP members of Congress refused to call foul on some of his most egregious remarks. If you believe in nothing, nothing is truly out of bounds and, for Trump, apologies are an admission of defeat.
+
+To the extent that Trump (and an almost laissez-faire media class) has begun to normalize various brand of racism, bigotry, and misogyny, it is truly a reflection on all of us. He needed willing participants and, unfortunately, he found them. Not only among the alt-right and white supremacists; he also found them in the halls of cable news networks with people incapable or unwilling to challenge his nonsensical rants and stop booking surrogates who flat out lie.",REAL
+1568,Donald Trump is reinventing the GOP in his image: The secret Republican memo that admits what already should have been obvious,"When Donald Trump descended from that escalator to announce his presidential run nearly six months ago you probably couldn’t have found more than three people in the whole country who thought he had a chance.  It was even reported at the time that he had paid actors at fifty bucks a head  to enthusiastically cheer and clap for his bizarre announcement speech, in which he declared his intention to build a big beautiful wall to keep out all the  immigrant rapists. It seemed like a joke or some kind of political performance art. Everyone settled in to enjoy the show, never dreaming that anyone would take him seriously.
+
+But over the course of the last half year he’s stayed at the top of polls and, even more astonishingly, gotten away with saying things that no other political figure could have ever gotten away with. With each gaffe, insult, mistake, faux pas, slander and cheap shot, his followers become even more loyal.
+
+The latest polling average by the Huffington Post pollster has Trump at 34.4 percent with Rubio at 14.6 percent, Carson at 13.9 percent and Cruz at 13.4 percent. He’s not going down. He’s going up. And now that the primary season is in full effect, everyone’s starting to wonder whether he might actually win.
+
+There have been a flurry of recent articles reporting that  big GOP donors starting to get nervous, particularly since their designated candidate, Jeb Bush, sank in the polls a few months ago and hasn’t been able to climb back up. But they are stumped about what to do about him. On the one hand they’re sure he’s going to implode and on the other worried that any money they spend trying to take him down will be wasted.
+
+This article in last week’s Washington Post by Matea Gold and Robert Costa is filled with colorful anecdotes and quotes from various consultants, advisors and party poohbahs wringing their hands and clutching their pearls over the problem. But the best are the big money donors who are convinced that the voters will see the light and all will be well:
+
+“He is going to implode himself,” said Frank VanderSloot, the chief executive of an Idaho nutritional-supplement company who is backing Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.). He said he recently turned down a funding request from a group seeking to run anti-Trump ads. “It’s just going to take a little time for people to take a step back and look at his track record, see who he is and how he’s changed his positions and how unprepared he is to be president of the United States,” VanderSloot said.
+
+Their faith is rather charmingly naive. They don’t seem to realize that the voters who are flocking to Trump hate people like them and have no respect for anything they believe. It’s not the money, of course. The fact that Trump is a billionaire is one of the things they love about him. He’s a winner. What they hate is the fact that these elites don’t think Trump is qualified. His lack of political experience is irrelevant.
+
+He says out loud what they are thinking and he does it without any self-awareness or sense that there’s anything wrong with it. He validates their rage. The large field has all the Super PACs tying themselves in knots trying to game out the ramifications of taking on Trump, worried that it will end up benefiting one of their rivals. John Kasich’s Super PAC decided to take the plunge and was greeted with a threat of a lawsuit from Trump’s lawyer: Fred Davis, the GOP admaker crafting the super PAC’s spots, said the missive is an example of why more donors are not stepping forward to take on Trump. “I think the reason people are hesitant is that he’s a bully,” he said. Trump and his followers were undoubtedly thrilled with that admission. So the campaigns, the big donors and the Super PACs have been pretty much paralyzed by the Trump phenomenon. At this point they are just hoping he’ll implode and they can run the campaign they always planned to run. But others in the party, those with concerns beyond the presidential election are starting to do some serious analysis and strategizing around Trump. Yesterday, Robert Costa and Philip Rucker reported that the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote a seven page confidential memo that “urges candidates to adopt many of Trump’s tactics, issues and approaches — right down to adjusting the way they dress and how they use Twitter.” If you can’t beat him, join him. The NRSC is obviously right to be concerned about Trump. But most would assume this concern stems from the possibility that his brand of politics could lead to the party being decimated down ticket if he should get the nomination. But this takes a different tack altogether. NRSC Executive Director Ward Baker is telling his Senate candidates that Trump is on to something and they should try to emulate him. Many people have pointed out that the Republicans created the angry constituency that is now enthralled by Trump with decades of talk radio and Fox TV propaganda. And they were obviously startled by the results. But now they seem to be in the process of accepting and adapting. The problem is that they don’t really understand Trump’s appeal. They think he’s popular because of his “anti-Washington populist agenda” and because “he can’t be bought.” And it’s true that people like that about him. But what his followers love about him is his open, almost cheerful disdain for people they hate and a willingness to win by any means necessary. Without that, he’s just another guy railing against Washington and saying he’ll lower taxes. Ward seems to think that candidates can cop Trump’s attitude without going for the substance and people will go for it. But that’s pretty condescending. Voters like Trump for what he’s saying even more than the way he’s saying it. They’re not going to be fooled by someone trying to do “Trump-lite.” Nonetheless, the memo is important for the fact that it admits that the highest levels of the Republican party see a way in which Trump can put together a coalition that could win a general election. It’s hard to believe they’re right, but they do seem to be serious. But even more concerning is the fact that Trumpism is seeping beyond his candidacy and into the Party as whole. They are no longer rejecting him, they are co-opting him. They are becoming him.",REAL
+175,Top Dem Warns GOP To Deal Now Or Risk Another Government Shutdown,"In a speech on Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called on any deal to relieve the forthcoming spending cuts to follow four guidelines. Reflecting the extremely low bar that Congress has set for itself, the first of those guidelines is that the deal can be small in nature.
+
+“Sure,” Murray said, according to excerpts of her prepared remarks, “it would be great to work together to address some of the big challenges we face when it comes to our long-term budget challenges -- but if we can’t find a path to another small deal, we are not going to discover the way to a big one.”
+
+The remaining three guidelines are similar to past Democratic demands for any negotiated budget settlement. Sequester relief, Murray said, needs to be done equally for defense and non-defense investments –- “this is non-negotiable”; it “should” be paid for by “a responsible mix of spending cuts and new revenues”; and, finally, it should be aimed at broader economic growth.
+
+“Honestly, this doesn’t have to be this difficult,” Murray, the fourth-ranking Senate Democrat, said during an appearance at law firm BakerHostetler's legislative seminar. “Working across the aisle to set topline budget numbers, and then working together to fill that budget out with spending bills is pretty much the least we should be able to do here in Congress.”
+
+ 
+
+ That Murray feels compelled to tout the relative simplicity of a prospective budget deal suggests that lawmakers are worried that negotiations won’t succeed. As much as anything else, her speech excerpts reflect an attempt to frame in advance the causes of a potential government shutdown this fall.
+
+Sequestration spending cuts -– a policy that was put in motion by the deal to raise the debt ceiling back in 2011 –- are set to return this October after a two-year semi-hiatus. And with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, the president increasingly protective of his domestic priorities, and the presidential campaign in full swing, the likelihood of political retrenchment seems high.
+
+Already, Republicans have passed budgets that further cut non-discretionary defense accounts while adding spending to the defense budget through an account that isn’t subjected to sequestration caps. That lack of balance has been sharply criticized by congressional Democrats. Even earlier, President Barack Obama said he would not sign a government-funding bill this fall that didn’t include sequestration relief for non-defense priorities, significantly raising the stakes for a shut down.
+
+“Republicans have a choice,” Murray said. “They can either work with us early on a bipartisan budget deal that will set the topline budget levels and allow the Appropriations Committee to work on bills that can be signed into law. Or, they can wait until we reach a crisis, until we approach or hit another completely unnecessary government shutdown -- and work with us then.”
+
+""In the past, all of the shutdowns and threats of shutdowns occurred because Republicans were trying to change current law,"" the aide said in an email, listing congressional Republican fights in the spring of 2011, as well as attempts to defund Obamacare in 2013, as examples. ""Democrats were trying to move forward legislation along the lines of current law and we were the ones trying to cause a ruckus.""
+
+Now the tables have turned, the aide pointed out. ""It’s Democrats advocating changes to current law with a shutdown as a consequence if they don’t get what they want."" By that logic, they can't blame Republicans for causing a shutdown if they're ""just following the statutory caps"" that Democrats voted for in the Budget Control Act.
+
+Obama’s own budget calls for a full busting of the sequestration spending caps as part of a nearly 7 percent increase in discretionary spending. But budget documents are mostly aspirational. And in reality, both he and Congress are likely to see a reprisal of a sequestration-relief deal that was cut nearly two years ago.
+
+Back then, Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), then the House Budget Committee chairman, successfully put together a package providing $63 billion in sequestration relief over a two-year period divided equally between defense and non-defense accounts. Democrats agreed to the deal because it helped rescue some of their domestic priorities. Republicans signed off in part because an extra $20 billion-plus in savings was set aside for deficit reduction and the deal also extended a cut to Medicare providers that was part of the initial sequestration.
+
+An aide to Murray, who no longer chairs the Senate Budget Committee, said she would support a deal similar to the last one both in scope and length. Though he has moved on to chair the House Ways and Means Committee, Ryan said that he too would be comfortable with a second agreement.",REAL
+5586,"The Dropa Stones - 12,000-Year-Old Ancient Artifacts","The Dropa Stones - 12,000-Year-Old Ancient Artifacts # Grey 0 
+According to the legend, Professor Chi Pu Tei led an expedition into the vast Baian-Kara-Ula Mountains in 1938. The Baian-Kara-Ula Mountains – situated in the wilderness of China – has terrain that is treacherous at best. They discovered a vast cave system during their journey. In them Chi Pu Tei discovered strange circular stone discs that appeared to have a mysterious spiralling message in unknown hieroglyphics. Seven hundred and sixteen were discovered in total, all containing similar symbols and patterns. Tags",FAKE
+8393,FBI Getting Warmer: Pay-to-Play,"FBI Getting Warmer: Pay-to-Play October 31, 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton looks at her mobile phone as she leaves her house to attend Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Phoenix Awards Dinner at the Washington convention center in Washington, U.S., 
+Five FBI field offices in mayor cities are looking deeping into the Clinton Foundation, Allegations of Pay-to-Play. 
+Federal agencies in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Little Rock, Ark., are investigating the Clinton Foundation regarding pay-to-play financial and political corruption . The Wall Street Journal reported the update on Sunday mirroring information provided by a former senior law enforcement official. The FBI field offices are coordinating with the U. S. Attorneys working in those cities. FBI agents in Miami are also joining the probe,. The Clinton Foundation has numerous programs operating in Haiti, the Caribbean, Latin America and South America.",FAKE
+3135,Gay marriage ruling leaves debate about religious liberty wide open,"The Supreme Court made a number of important decisions this term, but none more transformative than legalizing gay marriage. The decision, however, does not settle the issue of gay rights and religious liberty.
+
+Why climate scientists are taking fact-checking into their own hands
+
+A man holds a US and a rainbow flag outside the Supreme Court in Washington after the court legalized gay marriage nationwide on June 26. After the decision, religious conservatives are focusing on preserving their right to object. Their concerns are for the thousands of faith-based charities, colleges, and hospitals that want to hire, fire, serve, and set policy according to their religious beliefs.
+
+Two blockbuster cases dominated the docket at the United States Supreme Court in its recently-concluded term – one stands as a civil rights landmark, the other is slipping into quiet obscurity.
+
+In its 2014-15 term, the high court decided 74 cases, including rulings upholding the president’s power to determine US policy over the contested status of Jerusalem, permitting Texas to exclude the confederate flag from specialty license plates, and barring prosecutors from treating an undersized grouper as the legal equivalent of a shredded document.
+
+But by far the term’s biggest decisions came in the court’s historic ruling for same-sex marriage and in a 6-to-3 vote upholding distribution of tax credits in President Obama’s health care reform law.
+
+While the same-sex marriage decision will reverberate for years, the high court’s ruling in the Obamacare case has quickly fallen off the national radar now that the once-dire threat to millions of health insurance policies has subsided.
+
+In contrast, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision in the same-sex marriage case is a transformative event. It marks the most significant civil rights decision by the high court in at least a generation – a kind of gay rights version of Brown v. Board of Education.
+
+In his decision, Justice Kennedy established that the fundamental right to marry embraces all Americans – regardless of sexual orientation.
+
+In the 5-to-4 ruling, the high court said that state bans on same-sex marriage violate due process and equal protection rights of the Fourteenth Amendment.
+
+The decision effectively ends a rancorous state-by-state debate over marriage, and extends a welcoming hand to a segment of American society that has faced open hostility and discrimination.
+
+As such, the marriage decision represents a huge victory for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, their friends, families, and other supporters.
+
+“This decision affirms what millions of Americans already believe in their hearts. When all Americans are treated as equal, we are all more free,” President Obama said in comments shortly after the ruling.
+
+But the case that sharply divided the court itself has also left the country sharply divided. Religious conservatives feel they are under siege and are looking for ways to fight back or protect themselves.
+
+Recognizing this, Kennedy’s decision hints at matters beyond gay marriage and anticipates the next big high court showdown – a bitter national struggle pitting gay rights against religious liberty.
+
+Analysts say Kennedy went out of his way in his decision to avoid labeling religious conservatives as bigots or motivated by animosity toward homosexuals. That posture is critical, they say, because it leaves open a way for the court in future cases to balance the competing interests of religious conservatives with the growing rights and clout of gay Americans.
+
+“Kennedy, I think, wants to keep the court’s options open to respect religious and traditional marriage libertarian rights to exclude or to discriminate,” Yale Law Professor William Eskridge told a recent gathering of the American Constitution Society.
+
+“Justice Kennedy is loath to close off those options,” he said.
+
+Professor Eskridge noted that Kennedy provided the decisive fifth vote in a 2000 high court case that upheld the Boy Scouts’ right to bar gay men from serving as scoutmasters. To the Boy Scouts, the decision affirmed their right to associate with like-minded individuals. To the rejected scoutmaster, the decision endorsed blatant anti-gay discrimination.
+
+Washington Appellate Lawyer Gene Schaerr said in a Heritage Foundation briefing that Justice Kennedy went “out of his way in numerous places in his opinion to try to suggest respect for the religious viewpoint on this issue.”
+
+“Those of us who care about religious liberty can be grateful that Justice Kennedy’s opinion dodged some big bullets,” Mr. Schaerr said. “But the opinion, unintentionally I think, launched a number of grenades that are still in the air.”
+
+He noted that some religious organizations may soon face loss of their tax exempt status unless they jettison their opposition to same-sex marriage, and religious colleges may discover their accreditation is in jeopardy if they are found to discriminate against same-sex married couples in violation of constitutional rights.
+
+In contrast to the historic same-sex marriage landmark with its ongoing repercussions, the high court challenge to President Obama’s health care reform law is fast on its way to being forgotten.
+
+Had a majority of justices agreed with the plaintiffs that the Affordable Care Act barred the distribution of tax credits thorough federal health care exchanges set up in 34 states, that decision would have gutted the ACA and left millions of Americans unable to afford any health insurance.
+
+But that’s not what happened.
+
+Instead, the court essentially gave the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt over what the majority justices said were “a few examples of inartful drafting.”
+
+Writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts said it would make no sense for Congress to create a law meant to advance universal health care by allowing tax subsidies only in health care exchanges established by a state – rather than also in exchanges set up by the federal government.
+
+“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote.
+
+It marked the second time the chief justice had joined the high court’s liberal wing to save the ACA from its potential demise at the nation’s highest court. In June 2012, Roberts joined with the court’s liberal wing to uphold the controversial measure after concluding that the law’s mandated insurance requirement amounted to a tax rather than a penalty.
+
+The chief justice’s twin rescue operations prompted Justice Antonin Scalia to quip in a dissenting opinion that rather than calling the law Obamacare, it should be renamed SCOTUScare.  (SCOTUS is an acronym for Supreme Court of the United States.)
+
+Beyond the two blockbusters, the court’s term produced several other notable decisions.
+
+In an 8-to-1 decision, the court put employers on notice that they must recognize the need to accommodate religious practices of their workers or job applicants, even when a job applicant fails to request an accommodation.
+
+In that case the court ruled for a Muslim teen who was rejected for a job at an Abercrombie Kids store because she wore a headscarf.
+
+In its 10th year under Chief Justice Roberts, the court remains essentially a conservative body. But you wouldn’t know it from this year’s highest profile cases. Of the top 10 decisions of the term, analysts classify eight as liberal victories. Only two of the top 10 decisions are said to embrace a conservative approach.
+
+This pendulum-like movement at the court between liberal and conservative rulings is due in large part to Justice Kennedy’s position at or near the center of the nine-member court.
+
+He is, thus, frequently positioned to cast the fifth and deciding vote in controversial cases.
+
+The chief justice has also occasionally swung over to join the liberal wing in high profile cases, as both he and Kennedy did in the Obamacare decision.
+
+Despite that exception, Kennedy’s power to singlehandedly decide major cases was on full display this term.
+
+He provided the deciding vote in a ruling that an independent commission formed in Arizona by ballot initiative did not violate the Constitution’s ""elections clause.""
+
+The decision is a major victory for election reform advocates. It upholds similar commissions in six other states and gives a green light to others looking for ways to reduce the involvement of partisan politics in drawing election districts.
+
+Kennedy also swung over to join his liberal colleagues in a redistricting case in Alabama. In that case the court agreed to keep alive a challenge to a voting map drawn by the Republican-controlled state legislature. Minority groups charged the map illegally undercut black voting clout in the state.
+
+Kennedy also played a key role in holding off an effort by the court’s conservatives to bar the use of so-called disparate impact discrimination claims under the Fair Housing Act.
+
+The case marked the third time in recent years that the court’s conservatives had sought to take up a case to strike down the disparate impact approach under the FHA.
+
+The disparate impact theory of discrimination permits lawsuits when a statistical analysis shows that minorities suffer disproportionate harm from a particular policy – even when that policy is racially neutral.
+
+Instead of joining the conservatives, Kennedy sided with the liberal wing and wrote the majority opinion upholding disparate impact lawsuits under the FHA, but also seeking to impose limits on such suits when they might lead to racial quotas.
+
+Apart from the string of liberal wins, the high court produced two conservative victories among the term’s top cases. Both were made possible by the swing vote of Kennedy.
+
+In one, the court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency must take the cost of compliance into account when considering whether to regulate toxic air pollutants emitted from coal- and oil-fired power plants.
+
+In the second conservative victory, the court upheld Oklahoma’s use of the drug midazolam as part of its three-drug lethal injection protocol despite the involvement of that same drug in three botched executions last year.
+
+Again, with Kennedy’s support, the court said three Oklahoma death row inmates had failed to prove that the state’s use of midazolam presented an intolerable risk that the condemned prisoners would suffer severe pain during the execution process.
+
+The case was important because capital punishment abolitionists have been working to dry up the availability of certain drugs used in lethal injections. The ruling will make it easier for states like Oklahoma to continue to use midazolam, and to continue carry out executions.
+
+The case is also notable because two liberal justices, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, announced that they believe the time has come to declare the death penalty unconstitutional.
+
+That announcement is expected to trigger a new round of litigation in death penalty cases with an eye toward bringing a dispute to the high court that might facilitate a decision striking down capital punishment throughout the US. As in most other high profile cases, the outcome in that one would likely, once again, come down to the vote of Justice Kennedy.",REAL
+3116,"Kim Davis is the new face of the religious right: Angry, marginalized and increasingly desperate","The saga of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who went to jail for a weekend rather than sign off on same-sex marriage certificates, might seem like it’s a last gasp for the anti-gay right; an attempt to eke out some kind of victory after having lost their two-decade fight against same-sex marriage. Unable to stop same-sex couples from marrying, Davis, along with a handful of anti-gay florists and bakers, strives instead to just make getting the license an embarrassing hassle. It’s childish sore loser behavior, the equivalent of a baseball player pouting in the dugout and refusing to shake hands with his opponent because he didn’t win the game.
+
+Because of this, liberals can be forgiven for laughing and moving on, not particularly worried about Davis, whose temper tantrum isn’t even preventing the licenses from being issued any longer, as the judge authorized her deputies to hand them out. Unfortunately, though, Davis’s behavior isn’t just a bratty tantrum. This whole incident is also a sign of a troubling development in the religious right: As their cultural power declines in the face of growing diversity and liberalism, religious conservatives are embracing scary levels of radicalism. They don’t have the numbers anymore, so they are turning to scarier and more radical demands to seize power in any way that they can.
+
+No doubt Davis is a comical figure whose self-righteousness is only equaled by her ignorance both of the text of the Bible she clings to and what it means to have a job as a government employee. But she’s being used by her legal team and other religious right leaders to spread the idea that religious conservatives are entitled to ignore — or even overthrow — democracy and seize power just because they feel like it.
+
+Some supporters, like Ryan Anderson of the New York Times, are claiming that Davis wants an “accommodation” for her religious beliefs. This is, to put it bluntly, a lie. Davis was offered just such an accommodation and told that she doesn’t have to personally issue the licenses so long as her deputies were allowed to do so. She declined that compromise, insisting that she be able to actually prevent same-sex couples from getting licenses in her county altogether.
+
+What Davis is asking for is not an accommodation at all, but for the right to declare, by fiat, that Rowan County, Kentucky, is a mini-theocracy not beholden to the laws of the land, but by the whims of Kim Davis. Her legal team wants you to see her as a sweet but faithful woman, but in fact she’s trying to pull a coup here, claiming that “God’s authority” — read Kim Davis’s authority — trumps our entire democratic system.
+
+It’s not just her, either. Rena Lindevaldsen, who works for the Liberty Counsel, which is handling Davis’s case, has taken to boldly arguing that Christians have the right to overthrow the democratically elected government and simply impose their will by fiat. “Whether it’s zoning or taxes or marriage or abortion, in those issues, government doesn’t have authority to say that these things are appropriate because they’re contrary to Scripture,” Lindevaldsen recently argued in front of Liberty University. Which is to say that even though the government has declared abortion legal, if you decide you don’t want your neighbors getting abortions, you should be able to declare yourself a God-appointed authority and simply shut it down. If you don’t want to pay taxes, declare yourself a “sovereign citizen.”
+
+Mike Huckabee has been at the frontlines of pushing the claim that Christian conservatives simply have the right to ignore or overturn democracy to impose their will, and not just because he’s been running around Kentucky, trying to get himself on camera as much as possible in support of Davis’s attempt to ban gay marriage by fiat. He’s also been using the campaign trail to argue that the president should be able to simply end rule of law and start ruling like a dictator.
+
+He doesn’t just the word dictator, of course, but make no mistake, Huckabee has repeatedly and shamelessly promised that if he is elected president, he will start declaring his beliefs to be the law of the land without the cooperation of Congress. In a Google hangout, he laid out the scheme: Declare as president that there are “constitutional rights of the unborn” and simply ban abortion by fiat. He claimed a similar authority during the Republican debate, a moment that got startlingly little play even though it was literally a candidate for president arguing that he would make himself a dictator. Despite his regular references to the constitution when making these proclamations, Huckabee’s scheme would mean voiding out the constitution, as well, and not just because, despite his claims to the contrary, there is not a single word in it that gives citizenship status to embryos. It’s also because his scheme would mean ending the balance of powers, concentrating all the power of the legislature and the courts into the hands of the president. And once you believe that your interpretation of what God wants trumps rule of law, not just for yourself but for your neighbors, then it follows very quickly that you are entitled to use force and even violence to get your way. Some religious right leaders are, in fact, making noises that sound very much like justifying the use of violent force in order to overturn the social progress brought upon the U.S. from the democratic system. “No one should want it and no one, myself included, does want it,” conservative pundit Erick Erickson argued in an op-ed about the Davis case. “But how much longer until we have another civil war?” You can be forgiven for being skeptical of his claim not to want this, of course. On the contrary, it reads very much like a threat: Either give up the gains made under the democratic system or face violent overthrow by religious fanatics. Huckabee plays the same game of fantasizing about violent struggle to overturn democracy while pretending to abhor violence. In his Google hangout, he said that he expected that banning abortion by fiat would likely result in “extraordinary pushback, and goodness, perhaps riots in the streets.” He’s not wrong that simply dissolving rule of law and declaring yourself the sole authority would likely result in people resisting, but he shrugged this off as merely the price of doing business. To be clear, all these fantasies of governmental overthrow to stop gay couples from marrying will likely remain fantasies. The religious right is aging and losing numbers quickly. This is why they’re getting increasingly fanatical in their rhetoric, of course, but it also makes it hard to imagine they could really get it together to act out their fantasies of seizing power by force. Still, this isn’t just talk. The Republicans are still beholden to the religious right in many ways. The fact that so many Republican candidates were afraid to defend the rule of law and denounce Davis for her actions is a troubling symptom of this. The Christian right may not be up to armed revolution, but they are increasingly demanding that Republicans turn their backs on the basic rules of democracy to cater to a theocratic minority. That Republicans are listening is a danger to us all.",REAL
+3352,Why Clinton camp is releasing personal server 5 months after e-mail flap emerged,"Hillary Clinton has decided to cooperate with investigators after months of refusing to give up the personal server used to send e-mails during her tenure as secretary of State.
+
+US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton listens to a question from the audience during a community forum about substance abuse in Keene, N.H., on Tuesday.
+
+Hillary Clinton's attorney David Kendall has handed over thumb drives containing copies of roughly 30,000 e-mails sent to and from Ms. Clinton’s personal e-mail addresses via her private server to the FBI. The former secretary of State has also directed her staffers to release her server to federal investigators.
+
+Ms. Clinton has drawn criticism for using a private server and personal e-mail to conduct government business during her tenure at the helm of the State Department. She has maintained that she never sent or stored any classified information on her personal server and account. However, since news that she had not been using a government-protected server broke in March, at least two e-mails have been deemed ""Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information"" – one of the government's highest classifications.
+
+Top Republicans have pointed to the retroactive designation of those e-mails as classified as evidence that Clinton lied about not sending classified information over her personal server.
+
+""Secretary Clinton's previous statements that she possessed no classified information were patently untrue,"" House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio said in a statement after the Clinton camp announced that it would hand over the data. ""Her mishandling of classified information must be fully investigated.""
+
+Federal investigators are now searching for security breaches in Clinton’s personal e-mail setup amid speculation that other classified information may have been sent through the server. There has been no evidence that Clinton encrypted the account to prevent prying eyes from accessing the e-mails or her personal system.
+
+Clinton has ""pledged to cooperate with the government's security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them,"" campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Tuesday.
+
+The decision to give up the server came after the FBI said Mr. Kendall was not permitted to possess classified information contained in some of the e-mails, said a US official who was not authorized to speak publicly. Clinton's attorney had already supplied the 30,000 e-mails contained on the thumb drives to investigators in December, but had retained copies of them on the thumb drives.
+
+In March, Clinton said she exchanged nearly 60,000 e-mails during her four years in the Obama administration, half of which were personal and had been discarded.
+
+For months after The New York Times uncovered Clinton’s home-brew e-mail server, the Democratic candidate refused to hand it in. She claimed she used it out of convenience to limit the amount of electronic devices she had to carry.
+
+While her use of a personal e-mail account and server did not break the rules at the time, no other secretary of State has exclusively done so.
+
+Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.",REAL
+548,Charting a course for charter schools,"The 2010 documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” was – still is – a powerful indictment of American public education. The movie describes a system so dysfunctional, teachers unions so entrenched, and urban neighborhoods so battered that frequent calls for “education reform” ring hollow. Every recent American president has come into office proclaiming improving education Job 1 and often signing landmark legislation. But too many students – other versions of the innocent Anthony, Daisy, Emily, Francisco, and Bianca in the documentary – are still being left behind.
+
+Now, to be fair, most public schools are healthy, productive environments where capable teachers make a profound difference in students’ lives. Year after year, public schools in states such as Massachusetts competently prepare students for college. Still, “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” makes a convincing case that much of the public-education system, especially in the inner city, is broken and that charter schools – by focusing less on the job security of adults who run the system and more on the kids who are supposed to be served by it – are showing how to fix it.
+
+There are now 6,700 charter schools in the United States. They educate 3 million students (6 percent of the public school population); another 1 million are on waiting lists. If current trends continue, by 2035 charters could be educating as much as 40 percent of American students. Though charter schools vary in quality, in general they are effective at boosting educational achievement, which accounts for their popularity in inner-city neighborhoods. They are big players in cities such as Detroit, Washington, and especially New Orleans, where 91 percent of students now attend charter schools.
+
+Early charter schools resembled high-tech start-ups, powered by charismatic leaders, succinct mission statements, and a build-fast-fail-fast ethos. Administration was flat. Teachers put in long hours. Student discipline and a culture of learning were paramount. As the movement matures, that is changing. Case in point: Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia, where chief executive Scott Gordon has moved from a “no excuses” approach with students to one that takes into account students’ backgrounds and the communities they come from, much as traditional public schools do. ( Click here for a Monitor cover story on Mr. Gordon and the schools he manages.)
+
+As charters scale up, they face many of the same issues that public schools do. Few charter teachers are in labor unions now, but unionization is spreading. Management is flat now, but bigger schools will require more bureaucracy. Most charters tuck themselves into small spaces today, but that precludes them offering a full range of activities for students, including athletics and other extracurriculars.
+
+Charter schools began as laboratories. If their growth rate continues, they will become factories. They might, as a result, lose some of the energy of the early days. They might even resemble the public school system they seek to reform. Heroism isn’t a sustainable business model, unless you are Superman, and school kids can wait forever for him. The key for charter schools and for public schools is to remain focused on what really matters. Their names are Anthony, Daisy, Emily, Francisco, and Bianca.",REAL
+3679,State of emergency declared in Ferguson after police shoot and critically injure man during protests,"FERGUSON, Mo. — A man who was shot and critically injured by police here after authorities said he opened fire at officers was in critical condition Monday, his father said, as questions remained about what sparked the gunfire amid protests marking the first anniversary of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
+
+The late-night shooting was a violent coda to a mostly peaceful day of protests and vigils commemorating a year since Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, was shot and killed by a white Ferguson officer, an event that thrust this small suburb of St. Louis into the center of a national conversation on how police officers use lethal force toward minorities.
+
+It heightened fears about what the latest bloodshed could do to a tense community that has repeatedly been unsettled by unrest over the last year. Activists had planned a day of civil disobedience on Monday, and dozens of people were arrested in St. Louis on Monday.
+
+On Monday afternoon, the St. Louis County executive declared a state of emergency in response to what he called “the potential for harm to persons and property” in the area.
+
+“The recent acts of violence will not be tolerated in a community that has worked so tirelessly over the last year to rebuild and become stronger,” Steve Stenger, the county executive, said in a statement. “The time and investment in Ferguson and Dellwood will not be destroyed by a few that wish to violate the rights of others.”
+
+Stenger said that he would place the St. Louis County police chief, Jon Belmar, in charge of police emergency management in Ferguson and the surrounding area, a nearby city.
+
+Belmar held a news conference early Monday morning to discuss the man shot by his officers, saying that this man had opened fire on an unmarked police SUV shortly before midnight.
+
+On Monday, the office of Robert P. McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, charged Tyrone Harris, 18, with 10 counts of assaulting law enforcement, shooting at a motor vehicle and armed criminal action as a result of this incident.
+
+Harris remained in critical condition at a hospital in the area, according to the St. Louis County Police Department. He is being held on a $250,000 cash-only bond, a spokesman said.
+
+The man shot by police had been identified by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other local news outlets as Tyrone Harris Jr. In a telephone interview Monday, Tyrone Harris Sr., who identified himself as Harris’s father, said that two girls who were with the younger Harris before he got shot said he didn’t have a gun.
+
+Belmar said police were responding to reports of looting on West Florissant Avenue, which served as the focal point for the protests and unrest that followed Brown’s death last year and where stores were burned and looted on several nights.
+
+Tensions began to increase at about 8 p.m. local time. With most of those who came to Ferguson to demonstrate gathered at a rap concert and a panel discussion, groups of young men began breaking into storefronts along West Florissant.
+
+As a result, police cut off traffic to the area and deployed officers in riot gear, a visible police presence that prompted angry locals and some protesters to gather opposite the line of officers. While this was happening, Belmar said, plainclothes detectives farther down West Florissant were monitoring a person they believed to be armed, who was with at least three or four other people they also believed to have weapons.
+
+Even as protesters and police were facing off nearby, two groups that were apparently involved in some kind of feud began firing at each other, Belmar said. He said between 40 and 50 shots were fired over about 45 seconds.
+
+“It was a remarkable amount of gunfire,” Belmar said.
+
+The person being tracked by the detectives crossed the street and left the area where the two groups were facing off, and he may have been preparing to return, Belmar said.
+
+At that point, an unmarked SUV with its interior red and blue lights illuminated began moving toward the man, who began firing at the vehicle, striking the hood and windshield multiple times, Belmar said.
+
+He was armed with a 9mm Sig Sauer pistol reported stolen last year, Belmar said.
+
+These detectives returned fire from inside the car and were not sure if they hit the man, Belmar said. They followed the man toward a fenced-in area where he again opened fire, Belmar said, and all four detectives who had been in the SUV fired at the man. He was taken to a nearby hospital in critical, unstable condition.
+
+The four detectives, who were placed on administrative leave, have not been identified.
+
+Belmar said that this confrontation between police and the lone man “wasn’t the culmination of all the shooting,” though, adding that it was somewhat separate from the two groups firing at each other. Belmar said it was possible the man shot by police had left the two groups because he was afraid he was going to be shot.
+
+“They were criminals,” Belmar said of the people who opened fire. “They weren’t protesters.”
+
+Police were not clear on why the two groups were fighting, Belmar said.
+
+Tyrone Harris Sr. said Monday that his son remained in critical condition, but said he was not allowed in the hospital and was told to remain on the sidewalk outside.
+
+“The situation is messed up,” he said. “My son wasn’t even armed when he was shot.”
+
+Harris said that his son, who went to school with Michael Brown, had been on a date when he went out to a remembrance honoring Brown. He said that he had been told his son was there with friends who got into some kind of an altercation, possibly a fight over a television, and that one of these people began shooting.
+
+Two girls who were there told the elder Harris that his son was “running for his life.”
+
+Tyrone Harris Sr. said that his son had graduated from high school and was planning on going to school to be an electrician. “There is no perfect child,” Harris said of his son, adding that he was trying to make something of himself.
+
+The younger Harris had not graduated with the rest of his class, but he took classes over the summer and earned his diploma, his father said.
+
+That shooting was followed by another burst of gunfire at around 2 a.m. near the Canfield Green apartment complex, right near where Brown was shot. Two young men — 17 and 19 years old — were shot at around that time.
+
+The two teenagers told police they were walking on the sidewalk when a man wearing a red hooded sweatshirt started shooting at them from the rear passenger side of a vehicle. The 17-year-old was shot once in the chest or shoulder, while the 19-year-old was shot once in the chest, police said. They were both taken to the hospital with what police described as non-life-threatening injuries.
+
+Meanwhile, Paul Hampel, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was beaten and robbed while reporting on a break-in happening on West Florissant.
+
+“I got swarmed, beaten down really bad,” he told the Post-Dispatch.
+
+“Those who terrorize communities with gunfire and commit violence against police officers are criminals, and their reprehensible acts must not be allowed to silence the voices of peace and progress,” Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) said in a statement Monday.
+
+He added: “For the sake of all, it is my hope and expectation that today’s events will be peaceful so that these efforts can continue to move the region in a positive direction.”
+
+During his news conference early Monday morning, Belmar stressed that the groups shooting at each other were separate from the protesters demonstrating in the streets.
+
+“There is a small group of people out there who are intent on making sure we don’t have peace that prevails,” Belmar said. “That’s unfortunate. Because even with the folks who were in the street last night, there were a lot of emotions, I get it. But this is something different.”
+
+He added: “We can’t talk about the good things that we have been talking about in the last year … if we’re prevented from moving forward by this type of violence.” Belmar characterized the shooting as “avoidable.”
+
+Police officers shot Harris about half a mile from the spot where Brown was shot and killed last year by Darren Wilson, a former Ferguson police officer.
+
+At the Fraternal Order of Police’s national conference in Pittsburgh on Monday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch “strongly” condemned “the violence against the community, including police officers, in Ferguson.”
+
+“As we have seen over the recent months and years, not only does violence obscure any message of peaceful protest, it places the community, as well as the officers who seek to protect it, in harm’s way,” Lynch said, according to her prepared remarks.
+
+“The weekend’s events were peaceful and promoted a message of reconciliation and healing,” she continued. “But incidents of violence, such as we saw last night, are contrary to both that message, along with everything that all of us, including this group, have worked to achieve over the past year.”
+
+More than 100 demonstrators on Monday marched to a barricaded St. Louis County Justice Center, stepping inside the blocked-off area and staging a sit-in. Numerous people, including some of the most high-profile members of the Black Lives Matter movement, were arrested in downtown St. Louis.
+
+[Ferguson activists DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie among those arrested in St. Louis]
+
+In the year since Brown was killed, a series of demonstrations have erupted on Ferguson’s streets. The days after his death was marked by frenzied confrontations between demonstrators and police, unrest that lingered into the fall and flared up again after a grand jury did not indict Wilson.
+
+The Justice Department has criticized how law enforcement agencies responded to the initial protests in Ferguson, saying in a draft summary of an upcoming report that many police actions “served to only exacerbate tensions between protests and the police.”
+
+Earlier this year, the Justice Department released two reports sparked by the Ferguson unrest. In one, it said that it would not pursue federal civil rights charges against Wilson; in the other, it found that the city’s police and court system had routinely violated the constitutional rights of black citizens.
+
+After these reports, Ferguson’s police chief, city manager and top municipal judge left their positions. Protests again emerged on the city’s streets after the Justice Department’s report and the departure of these officials.
+
+The week after the Justice Department issued its reports, two police officers were shot and seriously injured near the city’s police headquarters. Once again, the Missouri Highway Patrol was called in to take over security amid fears of worsening tension. A 20-year-old man arrested and charged with the shooting told authorities he was not aiming at the police officers when he fired the gun.
+
+This week, police again said they came under fire during tense protests in Ferguson. When Harris was shot, protesters were still filling some of the same streets in Ferguson where nightly showdowns between demonstrators and police occurred last year.
+
+“We are deeply disappointed with the violence that took place last night,” Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III and the Ferguson City Council said in a joint statement. “This kind of behavior from those who want to cause disruption and destroy the progress from this past year will not be tolerated.”
+
+The sound of the gunfire was caught on film by CNN, which later aired video of an interview with the city’s new interim police chief Andre Anderson. Shots were heard on the street during the interview, and Anderson appeared startled.
+
+Graphic video shot by prominent Ferguson protester Tony Rice — known for his tweets from the streets during demonstrations — appeared to show a handcuffed and injured man lying on the ground as an officer watched.
+
+“It seemed like the protest was winding down,” Rice told The Washington Post of the moments before the violence. “And next thing you know, gunshots rang out.”
+
+When the gunfire stopped, Rice said he was met with a horrible sight.
+
+“By the time the gunshots died down, I stood up and looked, there’s another lady out there yelling that someone had been shot,” he said. “As I approached, sure enough, there’s a body on the ground.”
+
+In the video, Rice is heard yelling to officers and asking why the man was not being given medical attention.
+
+“Hey, he bleeding!” Rice said in the video. “Get him some help, man. Please get him some help! … He’s bleeding out, man, you see it. He’s breathing, man. Please get him some help!” He added later: “I just did not see a level of urgency. … And it was quite a while before the initial officers went over and did a pulse check.”
+
+As they attempted to secure a still-chaotic scene, officers detained Rice, handcuffing him and sitting him down not far from the shooting before releasing him. “This is a crime scene,” an officer said. “Back up … You are under arrest!”
+
+Rice said he did see three officers eventually attempt to provide some form of medical aid to the man who was shot.
+
+Before Sunday night’s gunfire, there had been another shooting the previous night at an event related to the anniversary of Brown’s death. Police said they were called to the intersection of West Florissant Avenue and Ferguson Avenue after gunshots were fired and found a 22-year-old who was shot in the arm in that area.
+
+The St. Louis County police said on Sunday afternoon that Trevion Hopson, 17, had been charged with unlawful use of a weapon due to that shooting. Police said Hopson went to anniversary events and fired at “a specific target” before shooting into the fleeing crowd.
+
+St. Louis Alderman Antonio French — a well-known face on the streets of Ferguson since Brown’s death — said that, when night fell, things turned chaotic.
+
+[Thousands dead, few prosecuted: An analysis of fatal shootings by on-duty police officers]
+
+On Twitter, French later reported that tear gas had been used on the crowd. At the overnight news conference, Belmar said he had heard smoke had been deployed, but said he had not been at the scene of the protest since “about midnight.” CNN, among other outlets, later reported tear gas was used as well.
+
+The St. Louis County Police said that three officers were injured on Sunday night and into Monday morning. Two officers were pepper-sprayed by protesters, while one officer was hit in the face by a rock, a spokesman said. Three county police cars were also damaged, two by gunfire and one due to a minor accident.
+
+Authorities said they arrested four people late Sunday and early Monday. Three were charged with interfering with  police officers, while a third man was charged with failure to disperse and an unlawful use of a firearm.
+
+This post has been updated. Wan and Berman reported from Washington. J. Freedom du Lac, Justin Moyer and Nick Kirkpatrick contributed.",REAL
+6978,November 4: Daily Contrarian Reads,"November 4: Daily Contrarian Reads By David Stockman.   My daily contrarian reads for Friday, November 4th, 2016.  ",FAKE
+6105,A Trump Supporter Just Held Six Children At Gunpoint For Dumbest Reason Ever,"Comments 
+From Hillary Clinton on the electric chair to African-American effigies hung from trees , Trump supporters are clearly very passionate about their lawn displays. Add to the list a 56 year-old Michigan Man who is now facing felony weapons charges after holding six children – ages 12 to 14 – at gunpoint and forcing them to the ground for allegedly knocking down his Trump yard sign. 
+That’s right. The kids were terrorized at gun point over a Trump yard sign. 
+Michael Kubek, 56, of Allen Park, MI, said that he was angry at the children because he believed they had ‘vandalized’ his Trump sign, although he hadn’t actually seen them do it. The children told the police that they were simply walking to a local park when an unhinged Kubek “pulled out a pistol and ordered them to sit down on a neighbor’s lawn.” In any case, it appears that the ‘vandalism’ consisted in the sign simply being knocked down – perhaps Kubek should take out his anger on the wind – and the children were reportedly “traumatized” by the experience. 
+When police, who were called to the scene by Kubek’s mother, arrived, they found the children lying on the grass with Kubek “standing over them yelling and cursing.” The children said he had pointed a gun at them and a neighbor described Kubek using “very profane language.” According to local news channel Fox 2, “the kids said they tried to tell Kubek they did not damage his sign, but it only resulted with Kubek telling them to shut up and continue cursing at them.” 
+Kubek claims he felt “threatened” because he was “outnumbered” by the adolescents and invoked his second amendment right. Luckily, he was arrested by local police and had his gun confiscated — although he has now been released on a $5,000 bail. 
+Just another day in Trump’s America, folks. Hopefully, the nightmare will be over soon…",FAKE
+4948,"Gary Johnson: No To Carbon Taxes and Mandatory Vaccines, Yes To Black Lives Matter and Transformative Politics","Earlier today, I talked with Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson for about half an hour. Here's an edited version of my conversation with the former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico. The topics we covered include whether he supports carbon taxes and mandatory vaccines (no to both), agrees with Hillary Clinton's characterization of Donald Trump as racist (yes), and if he thinks there is any chance he will crack 15 percent in the national polls that will earn him a ticket to the presidential debates (""We're very optimistic"").
+
+Johnson, who ran for president on the LP ticket in 2012 and pulled more than 1 million votes, says that the response his campaign is getting this time around is a ""transformation."" He attributes this to an ""appetite"" voters have for a different approach to politics, one that combines liberal social views and conservative fiscal views. He is certainly the only presidential candidate who believes ""taxes to me are like a death plague,"" blacks are systematically denied equal opportunities in America, minimum-wage laws punish low-skilled workers, and marijuana should be legalized.
+
+""We are two former Republican governors who served in heavily Democratic states,"" Johnson told me while discussing the reaction to the way he and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, mash-up positions normally associated with either the right or the left. ""What that meant is that we pissed everybody off, and because we pissed everybody off, we both got re-elected by bigger margins. We pissed off the left, we pissed off the right, but really where we came down was right in the middle. Where we came down on was right where everybody is, right where the majority of people are at.""—Nick Gillespie
+
+NICK GILLESPIE: Earlier this week, you suggested you were in favor of a carbon tax or fee. Yesterday, at a rally in New Hampshire (video here), you said you were against it. What is your position on carbon taxes?
+
+GARY JOHNSON: [A carbon tax] sounds good in theory, but it wouldn't work in practice. I never called it a tax. I called it a fee. As it was presented to me, this was the way to reduce carbon and actually reduce costs to reduce carbon. Under that premise—lower costs, better outcomes—you can always count on me to support that [sort of] notion. In theory it sounds good, but the reality is that it's really complex and it won't really accomplish that. So, no support for a carbon fee. I never raised one penny of tax as governor of New Mexico, not one cent in any area. Taxes to me are like a death plague.
+
+GILLESPIE: You do believe that climate change is happening and that human activity adds to it. Does that mean it is an issue that should be addressed by government policy?
+
+JOHNSON: Well, I'll agree with the first two, but I'm a skeptic that government policy can address this. The United States contributes 16 percent of the contribution of carbon in the world…
+
+GILLESPIE: So you would be against the United States unilaterally making any kind of move that puts a huge economic disadvantage that also wouldn't really mitigate carbon?
+
+JOHNSON: If there is any way we can address this issue without the loss of U.S. jobs, my ears are open.
+
+GILLESPIE: Let's talk about vaccines. There are no federal laws mandating vaccines, and that's how it should be, as far as you're concerned.
+
+GILLESPIE: Various states treat vaccines differently, and you're not wild about the range of individual choice and opt-out provisions, but you do believe it's a state-level decision—or certainly that it's not a federal-level decision.
+
+GILLESPIE: There are people who say vaccines cause autism [and other problems] or that vaccines don't work. Are you in that camp?
+
+JOHNSON: No, I chose to have my children vaccinated. I understand all the concerns that some people have, but for me personally, I made a decision to have my children vaccinated. I want people to make decisions and I believe in [opt-outs]. With the exception of a few states, everyone has an opt-out. But I also want to say that, as president of the United States, if I am confronted with a zombie apocalypse that will happen unless the total herd is totally immunized, I will support [mandatory vaccinations].
+
+GILLESPIE: Yesterday, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in which she explicitly said that Donald Trump was racist and that he has brought a racist presence into the Republican Party. A year ago, you told Reason something very similar. You said Trump's comments about Mexicans and his views on immigration were racist. Do you agree with Hillary Clinton that Donald Trump is a racist?
+
+JOHNSON: Well, if it walks like a duck, if it talks like a duck, it's a duck.
+
+GILLESPIE: As a former Republican governor, how does that make you feel about the current state of the GOP?
+
+JOHNSON: It makes me feel like I think more than half of Republicans feel: This is not representative of Republicans.
+
+GILLESPIE: Do you think the Republican Party is going to be permanently damaged by Donald Trump's candidacy?
+
+GILLESPIE: What do you think of his recent appeals to black voters? He's been saying to African Americans that the Democratic Party hasn't really helped them much. That everything in their lives has gotten worse under Barack Obama and that Hillary Clinton is not their champion. Do you agree with Trump that Democratic Party policies haven't really benefited the black community?
+
+JOHNSON: I do. Both parties are engaged in pandering. The libertarian approach—equal opportunity—isn't that what you really want? But I'd argue that equal opportunity currently does not exist.
+
+GILLESPIE: How does it not exist, and what policies would you enact to make it a reality? Is it a question of ending a drug war that disproportionately impacts blacks, promoting school choice so they can escape chronically bad schools, and ending minimum-wage laws that price low-skilled workers out of getting their first jobs?
+
+JOHNSON: All of what you just mentioned. Let me offer up a story. I was on Fox News' The Five a couple of days ago with Eric Bolling. I made the statement that ""black lives matter"" and Eric chimed in to say, ""All lives matter."" It's not a criticism of him, it's just indicative of the conversation [about race and politics]. I said, ""Yes, all lives do matter, but blacks are getting shot at the rate of six times that whites are. If you're of color and you're arrested, there's a four times greater likelihood that you'll go to jail than if you're white. Eric said, ""Blacks commit eight times the crime."" My answer was little muddied, but I think I got to my point. Yes, blacks are being arrested, they are being charged, and they are being convicted at eight times the rate of whites. If that same scrutiny were applied to you and I as whites, we would have those same results. That's the awareness [of unequal treatment] that doesn't currently exist.
+
+GILLESPIE: The set of ideas, mind-sets, and positions that your campaign is putting out there doesn't have a home in contemporary Republican and Democratic politics. The way things are is that if you're against the minimum wage because you think it hurts unskilled workers, you've got to be a conservative. But then you're saying, ""I care about blacks and they are having a tougher time in America than whites."" So then you must be on the left. Do you feel the framework you and Bill Weld are presenting is getting through? Is it changing the way people think about politics?
+
+JOHNSON: I think we're getting through in a huge way. Between Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, we've got a reach of 300 million. We had a rally the other night in Vermont, and there was a crowd of 300 or 400 people, very enthusiastic people. Our Facebook Live stream of the rally got 300,000 views on Facebook Live in two hours. 300,000! Clearly there's an appetite for what we're talking about. Bill Weld says this all the time: We are two former Republican governors who served in heavily Democratic states. What that meant is that we pissed everybody off, and because we pissed everybody off, we both got re-elected by bigger margins. We pissed off the left, we pissed off the right, but really where we came down was right in the middle. Where we came down on was right where everybody is, right where the majority of people are at.
+
+GILLESPIE: A writer at the conservative website The Federalist recently said that your embrace of a carbon tax clearly meant you are ""a left-wing candidate."" Do you consider yourself a left-winger?
+
+JOHNSON: Well, no. But you know, tomorrow you will see an article that says this guy is a right-wing radical. Bravo.
+
+GILLESPIE: Let's talk about your stance on religious-liberty issues, which has angered a lot people on the right and many libertarians. Your position is that you essentially want to extend anti-discrimination protections for race and gender to cover sexual orientation when it comes to businesses that are open to the public. Yet you support an opt-out for vaccinations. Why not support an opt-out for the religious owner of a business who doesn't want to bake a gay Nazi wedding cake?
+
+JOHNSON: Because it would create a new exemption for discrimination. At the end of the day we're just going to agree to disagree. But you bring me specific legislation dealing with a cake baker not having to decorate a cake for a Nazi and I'll sign it.
+
+GILLESPIE: Let's talk about Hillary Clinton. In response to being called a bigot and a racist by her, Donald Trump said that she was fundamentally not trustworthy. Do you agree with him on that?
+
+JOHNSON: Yes, I agree with him.
+
+GILLESPIE: So you're in a weird position, aren't you? You actually agree with both Hillary and Donald, but you don't think either should be president.
+
+JOHNSON: I agree. I had always surmised that Bill Clinton's speaking fees—which hadn't been highly publicized over the years—were tied to payoffs for what he had done as president. I've always felt that, OK, this is the way of paying him back. What I've come to discover is that it was also access to Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State that was being sold. It's pay-to-play, textbook pay-to-play. That's not right. Having never held political office before [becoming governor], I had no idea of what was possible [in terms of selling access and favors]. For me, it had everything to do with doing the right thing. For me, it had everything to do with analyzing legislation—would this actually improve lives or would it not? If it didn't, I was going to veto it. If it was going to make things better, even incrementally, I signed on to it.
+
+GILLESPIE: Do you have a particular instance that you can point to with Hillary Clinton where she accepted a donation to the Clinton Foundation in regard to this action or this access?
+
+JOHNSON: View the documentary that's online right now: Clinton Cash. The preponderance of what they break down [in the film] clearly shows to me that this was an ongoing activity.
+
+GILLESPIE: You still have a lot of ground to cover to reach 15 percent in the national polls that will get you into the presidential debates. What do you think your odds are at this point?
+
+JOHNSON: We're very optimistic. Our reach on social media is doubling every three weeks right now. That simply means that for the first time people are hearing the name Gary Johnson. In the five polls [being used by the Commission on Presidential Debates], we're smack dab at 10 percent. Not 10.1 percent, not 9 percent, but smack dab at 10 percent. And if you look at those polls six weeks ago, the average would have probably been between 6 percent and 7 percent. Currently, we're on the ballot in 45 states and we have 100 percent belief that we'll be on the ballot in all the states and [the District in Columbia]. This campaign is really a transformation. We showed up in New Hampshire the other day to a big crowd. I ran in the 2012 cycle, and I think I got more media at that event than I got in the entire 2012 cycle. Everything is changed right now from an attention standpoint. Whether or not that means we end up in the debates and getting to make a difference on the stage is still a question. But right now? I'm as optimistic as ever.
+
+GILLESPIE: Thank your for time.",REAL
+5393,Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race,"Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race Julia Angwin and Terry Parris Jr., Pro Publica, October 28, 2016 
+Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers. 
+That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays. 
+The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.” Ads that exclude people based on race, gender and other sensitive factors are prohibited by federal law in housing and employment. 
+{snip} 
+The ad we purchased was targeted to Facebook members who were house hunting and excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people. ( Here’s the ad itself .) 
+When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman , he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.” 
+The Fair Housing Act of 1968 makes it illegal “to make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.” Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines . 
+The Civil Rights Act of 1964 also prohibits the “printing or publication of notices or advertisements indicating prohibited preference, limitation, specification or discrimination” in employment recruitment. 
+{snip} 
+Facebook says its policies prohibit advertisers from using the targeting options for discrimination, harassment, disparagement or predatory advertising practices. 
+“We take a strong stand against advertisers misusing our platform: Our policies prohibit using our targeting options to discriminate, and they require compliance with the law,” said Steve Satterfield, privacy and public policy manager at Facebook. “We take prompt enforcement action when we determine that ads violate our policies.” 
+{snip} 
+He said Facebook began offering the “Ethnic Affinity” categories within the past two years as part of a “multicultural advertising” effort. 
+Satterfield added that the “Ethnic Affinity” is not the same as race–which Facebook does not ask its members about. Facebook assigns members an “Ethnic Affinity” based on pages and posts they have liked or engaged with on Facebook. 
+When we asked why “Ethnic Affinity” was included in the “Demographics” category of its ad-targeting tool if it’s not a representation of demographics, Facebook responded that it plans to move “Ethnic Affinity” to another section. 
+Facebook declined to answer questions about why our housing ad excluding minority groups was approved 15 minutes after we placed the order. 
+{snip}",FAKE
+1574,Ted Cruz is a professional liar: The Planned Parenthood shooting was the work of a “transgendered leftist activist”,"Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R) isn’t about to let the facts get in the way of his narrative, so instead of admitting that his party’s rhetorical tantrums about hoax videos may have contributed to Robert Louis Dear’s decision to shoot up a Planned Parenthood clinic on Friday, he blamed it on what conservatives would consider a most loathsome manticore: a “transgendered leftist activist.”
+
+On Sunday, Cruz said that any attempt to link Dear to conservatives’ mission to curtail a woman’s right to choose is merely “vicious rhetoric on the left blaming those who are pro-life.” He claimed that “the media promptly wants to blame [Dear] on the pro-life movement, when at this point there’s very little evidence to indicate that.” Cruz, you see, is very, very concerned about people who make commonsense accusations based on reports that Dear was mumbling about “baby parts” when he was arrested. Repeating the Republican talking points about Planned Parenthood constitutes, to his mind, “very little evidence.”
+
+Solid evidence, for Cruz, comes from the person who has been deemed The Stupidest Man On The Internet, who discovered that Dear was listed as “Female” on a voter registration form, meaning he is obviously, as Cruz identified him, a “transgendered leftist activist.”
+
+Cruz made that statement while attempting to take the high road, but he’s unfamiliar with such heights and it showed. “It’s also been reported that he was registered as an independent and a woman and transgendered leftist activist, if that’s what he is,” he said. “I don’t think it’s fair to blame on the rhetoric on the left. This is a murderer.” Apparently, he believed people would walk away from his statement thinking, “It’s big of Cruz not to blame leftist rhetoric for a man shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic” — which says quite a bit about how intelligent he considers his audience.
+
+Moreover, given that the only evidence Cruz has that Dear was transgender is a single voter registration form in which he identifies both as “Female” and “UAF,” which stands for “unaffiliated,” it stands to reason that he believes it impossible for a transgender person to be affiliated with the conservative movement in general or the Republican Party in particular. While that may be true, it’s also telling about who he assumes can find a home in the conservative coalition. As ThinkProgress’ Zack Ford reported, no one who knew him believed he identified as a woman, and his ex-wife claimed that “he believed wholeheartedly in the Bible,” but that doesn’t constitute the kind of evidence a professional prevaricator like Cruz would consider worthy of mention. He should be commended, though, for his restraint in not arguing that Dear was simply a bank robber who took shelter in the Planned Parenthood clinic, another conservative canard that made the rounds this weekend.",REAL
+2929,Egyptian planes pound ISIS in Libya in revenge for mass beheadings of Christians,"Egyptian warplanes struck hard at ISIS militants in neighboring Libya, killing as many as 64 militants and destroying the Islamist terror group's training camps and weapons caches a day after a sickening video surfaced showing black-clad jihadists beheading 21 Coptic Christians.
+
+The strikes came in two waves after Egypt's President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi went on national television in the world's most populous Arab nation and vowed revenge was coming. The address was followed by the airing of military video showing the planes taking off for the mission and an Armed Forces General Command statement saying the strikes were ""to avenge the bloodshed and to seek retribution from the killers.""
+
+""Avenging Egyptian blood and punishing criminals and murderers is our right and duty,"" the Egyptian military said in the statement, which was broadcast on state television.
+
+The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said the airstrikes targeted ISIS locations in Derna, a port city in eastern Libya.
+
+""Leaving the situation as it is in Libya without a firm intervention to curtail these terrorist organizations would be a threat to international peace and security,"" the ministry said.
+
+The ISIS video released online showed the Egyptian victims, poor men from Egypt's rural areas who had traveled to Libya looking for work, kneeling before Islamic State executioners. In Egypt, which by some estimates is about 10 percent Christian, the video sent shockwaves through both Muslim and Christian communities. El-Sisi, the U.S.-trained, former military leader who in a landmark New Year's day address called on the Arab world to reject radical terror, and then took the unprecedented step of attending services at a Christian church, told his nation the deaths would be avenged.
+
+""These cowardly actions will not undermine our determination"" said el-Sissi, who also banned all travel to Libya by Egyptian citizens. ""Egypt and the whole world are in a fierce battle with extremist groups carrying extremist ideology and sharing the same goals.""
+
+On Monday, el-Sissi visited the main Coptic Cathedral of St. Mark in Cairo to offer his condolences on the Egyptians killed in Libya, according to state TV.
+
+Egyptian state-run news service Al-Ahram, citing a Libyan military spokesman, reported that the strikes, which were coordinated with Libyan officials, killed 64 Islamic State fighters and left dozens wounded. Egyptian officials told the news service the strikes were the first of several to come.
+
+Egypt is already battling a burgeoning Islamist insurgency centered in the strategic Sinai Peninsula, where militants have recently declared their allegiance to ISIS and rely heavily on arms smuggled across the porous desert border between Egypt and Libya.
+
+The strikes also come just a month before Egypt is scheduled to host a major donor's conference at a Sinai resort to attract foreign investment needed to revive the economy after more than four years of turmoil.
+
+The Egyptian government had previously declared a seven-day period of mourning and President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi addressed the nation late Sunday night, saying that his government reserved the right to seek retaliation for the killings.
+
+""These cowardly actions will not undermine our determination"" said el-Sissi, who also banned all travel to Libya by Egyptian citizens. ""Egypt and the whole world are in a fierce battle with extremist groups carrying extremist ideology and sharing the same goals.""
+
+Libya's air force commander, Saqr al-Joroushi, told Egyptian state TV that the airstrikes were coordinated with the Libyan side and that they killed about 50 militants. Libya's air force also announced it had launched strikes in the eastern city of Darna, which was taken over by an ISIS affiliate last year. The announcement, on the Facebook page of the Air Force Chief of Staff, did not provide further details. Two Libyan security officials told the Associated Press civilians, including three children and two women, were killed in the strikes. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
+
+The video was released late Sunday by militants in Libya affiliated with the Islamic State group. The militants had been holding 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian laborers rounded up from the city of Sirte in December and January. The killings raise the possibility that the extremist group -- which controls about a third of Syria and Iraq in a self-declared caliphate -- has established a direct affiliate less than 500 miles from the southern tip of Italy, Libya's former colonial master. One of the militants in the video makes direct reference to that possibility, saying the group now plans to ""conquer Rome.""
+
+In Washington, the White House released a statement calling the beheadings ""despicable"" and ""cowardly"", but made no mention of the victims' religion, referring to them only as ""Egyptian citizens"" or ""innocents."" White House press secretary Josh Earnest added in the statement that the terror group's ""barbarity knows no bounds.""
+
+Also Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry called Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry. He offered his condolences on behalf of the American people and strongly condemned the killings. Kerry and the foreign minister agreed to keep in close touch as Egyptians deliberated on a response, according to a release from the State Department.
+
+The U.N. Security Council meanwhile strongly condemned what it called ""the heinous and cowardly apparent murder in Libya of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians by an affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,"" using another name for the terror group.
+
+The foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, also condemned the mass killing, calling it an ""ugly crime.""
+
+""The United Arab Emirates is devoting all its resources to support the efforts of Egypt to eradicate terrorism and the violence directed against its citizens,"" he said.
+
+Sheikh Abdullah added that the killing highlights the need to help the Libyan government ""extend its sovereign authority over all of Libya's territory.""
+
+The oil-rich Emirates, along with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, has given billions of dollars in aid to Egypt since el-Sissi, who was then military chief, overthrew Islamist President Mohammed Morsi in July 2013 amid massive protests against his yearlong rule.
+
+Egypt has since waged a sweeping crackdown against Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood group, which it has officially branded a terrorist organization. El-Sissi has insisted the crackdown in Egypt, as well as support for the government in Libya, is part of a larger war on terror.
+
+Libya in recent months has seen the worst unrest since the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, which will complicate any efforts to combat the country's many Islamic extremist groups.
+
+The internationally recognized government has been confined to the country's far east since Islamist-allied militias seized the capital Tripoli last year, and Islamist politicians have reconstituted a previous government and parliament.
+
+Egypt has strongly backed the internationally recognized government, and U.S. officials have said both Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have taken part in a series of mysterious airstrikes targeting Islamist-allied forces.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9797,Wells Fargo is Rotting from the Top Down,"Wells Fargo is Rotting from the Top Down Wells Fargo is Rotting from the Top Down By 0 139 
+Just when you thought that, surely, big banker greed had bottomed out with 2008’s Wall Street crash and bailout, along comes Wells Fargo, burrowing even deeper into the ethical slime to reach a previously unimaginable level of corporate depravity. 
+It’s one thing for these finance giants to cook the books or defraud investors, but top executives of Wells Fargo have been profiteering for years by literally forcing their employees to rob the bank’s customers. 
+Rather than a culture of service, executives have pushed a high-pressure sales culture since 2009, demanding frontline employees meet extreme quotas of selling a myriad of unnecessary bank products to common depositors who just wanted a simple checking account. (Photo: Shutterstock) 
+Employees were expected to load each customer with at least eight accounts, and employees were monitored constantly on meeting their quota — fail and you’d be fired. 
+That’s why the bosses’ sales culture turned employees into a syndicate of bank robbers. The thievery was systemic, and it wasn’t subtle. 
+Half a million customers were secretly issued credit and debit cards they didn’t request, fake email accounts for online services were set up without customers’ knowledge, depositors’ money was moved from one account to another, signatures were forged, and — of course — Wells Fargo collected fees for all of these bogus transactions, boosting its profits. 
+CEO John Stumpf was recently forced out because of the scandal, but what about the other top executives and the board of directors — all of whom were highly paid partners in this crime? 
+Stumpf wasn’t the only rotten apple at Wells Fargo. This isn’t a case of a few bankers gone rogue, but of a whole bank gone rogue, rotting from the head down.",FAKE
+1110,"After the latest debacle, we agree with Donald Trump: “We’ve had enough of the debates”","It was hosted by CNN, and the presentation was so bombastically stupid that it was almost condescending. The moderation wasn’t great; it took far too long to bring up the violence recently perpetrated against journalists and protesters by Trump supporters — and, shit you not, the Trump campaign itself. And absolutely nothing happened that’s likely to change an outcome which, much like death, seems more inevitable every day.
+
+But listen: You don’t want to hear about the entire debate. You either chose to do something else — or worse still, you watched it for yourself. And as the current patriarch of the heirs of Drumpf said himself Thursday night, “we’ve had enough of the debates” already. So I’m going to spare you a play-by-play. And I’m definitely not going to tell you who “won,” because, really, why the hell do journalists try to do that?
+
+Here’s what I’ll do instead. I’m going to focus on the one part of the debate that, in the grand scheme of things, as best I can tell — which, to be clear, is very little — matters the most. It was early, and it was ugly, and it was exactly the kind of exhibition of political cynicism and religious bigotry that President Obama calls “the source of a lot of destructive acts.” I’m talking about the “debate” over what Donald Trump said about Muslims (all 1.6 billion of ‘em) Wednesday night.
+
+The quote, for those of you who were lucky enough to miss that, too:
+
+I think Islam hates us. There’s something there that — there’s a tremendous hatred there. There’s a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it. There’s an unbelievable hatred of us…. [W]e have to be very vigilant, we have to be very careful and we can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred of the United States, and of people who are not Muslim.
+
+Needless to say, when a genuflecting Anderson Cooper (CNN again!) offered Trump a chance to at least say he was only referring to those who believed in a “radical” interpretation of Islam — which is still problematic for someone who wants to be president, but whatever — the Donald declined. “It’s very hard to separate” radicals from the nearly 1.6 billion others, he answered.
+
+Anyway, that was the topic on Thursday night. But when CNN tossed another softball in Trump’s direction and gave him another chance to walk it back (are we going to ask him every single day now?), Trump didn’t just reject the offer. He went from arguing that it was difficult to tell the difference between a violent jihadist and an 8-year-old child to arguing that “a lot of them” are full of “tremendous hatred”: I will tell you there’s something going on that maybe you don’t know about, maybe a lot of other people don’t know about, but there’s tremendous hatred … And I will stick with exactly what I said to Anderson Cooper. I like to solve problems. We have a serious, serious problem of hate … We have large portions of a group of people — Islam — large portions want to use very, very harsh means. In response, Little Marco offered a tepid critique, saying that Trump didn’t get that “presidents can’t just say anything they want.” Rubio added that he wasn’t “interested in being politically correct,” but that there were pragmatic reasons not to dehumanize 1.6 billion people. That’s better, I guess; but as the Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain tweeted: Someone should tell these guys Muslims are also watching the debate and hearing them say we should only be nice for utilitarian reasons. Why was this the most important moment of the debate? Because this wasn’t just about Trump, though he certainly was the driver. It was about the entire Republican Party, and about the millions of Americans who continue to support it. All over the country — and all over the world — people are watching. There are millions of people whose perception of the United States is not set in stone just yet. And this is the country we show them. I can’t blame them if they choose to turn away.",REAL
+1626,Megyn Kelly tears into Ted Cruz over ridiculous debate demands: “Would we have to submit our voting records to you?”,"Megyn Kelly has been none too impressed with Republican presidential candidates’ reaction to their third primary debate and days long tantrum about the CNBC moderators — after all, she did see her own revolt of Fox News viewers following her moderation of the first GOP debate — so on her Wednesday night program, Kelly confronted Texas Senator Ted Cruz about his recent demand that future GOP debate moderators strictly be Republicans.
+
+Making clear that he thought the debates so far have been “terrific,” Cruz responded to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s suggestion that Republican presidential candidates stop whining and move on from last week’s debate. Cruz said he was happy to “debate any of the candidates, anywhere,” and denied that he planned to sign onto a GOP list of demands for future debates.
+
+But then Cruz explained that his only problem with the Republican primary debates has been the fact that they are moderated by what he calls liberals.
+
+“Why is it that we have Republican primary debates that are moderated by liberal Democrats,” Cruz asked, repeating the argument he made on Fox News’ “Hannity” moments following last week’s CNBC debate. “I don’t think that makes any sense,” he told Kelly.
+
+“The one rule change that I think the RNC ought to think about is saying that if you have never in your life voted in a Republican Party primary, that you shouldn’t be moderating a Republican primary debate,” Cruz argued. “Let me challenge you on that,” Kelly offered. “Do you have any idea whether Bret Baier or Chris Wallace have ever voted in a Republican primary?” “I have no idea,” Cruz admitted chucklingly, before defending his assertion by revealing the secret that neither Kelly, nor Wallace, nor Baier could plausibly be described as liberals. “Would we have to submit our voting records to you?” Kelly shot back after noting that Cruz’s proposed rule could potentially box out some Fox News anchors from moderating GOP debates. “Megyn, it is not complicated,” Cruz insisted. “In a primary, don’t have liberals moderating.” Watch Kelly attempt to confront Cruz on his GOP only debate proposal:
+
+",REAL
+8955,"Dying out: Wild animal numbers could fall by 67% from 1970-2020, study says","RT October 27, 2016 
+The number of wild animals on Earth could fall by more than two-thirds in the 50 years to 2020, according to a new report which places the blame on the destruction of habitats, hunting and pollution. The forecast could lead to major consequences for humans. 
+The Living Planet Report 2016 says that animal losses are on track to reach 67 percent in the 50 years to 2020. The report’s authors also took into consideration a recent trend in animal population decline, citing a 58 percent plummet between 1970 and 2012. 
+The researchers analyzed the changing presence of 14,152 monitored populations of the 3,706 vertebrate species – mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles among them. 
+According to the paper, the biggest cause of the plummeting animal populations is the destruction of wilderness areas by farming and logging. Pollution was also mentioned as a significant problem. Vaccine-laden M&M’s to be distributed via drone for endangered ferrets https://t.co/wm4DUucNxn pic.twitter.com/9a6F9x3raG 
+“Humanity’s misuse of natural resources is threatening habitats, pushing irreplaceable species to the brink, and threatening the stability of our climate,” said WWF’s director of science, Mike Barrett. A d v e r t i s e m e n t 
+Animals across the planet are expected to be affected. However, rivers and lakes are the hardest-hit areas. Barrett noted that global warming is exacerbating the pressures. 
+“We are no longer a small world on a big planet. We are now a big world on a small planet, where we have reached a saturation point,” the Stockholm Resilience Center’s Professor Johan Rockström said in a foreword for the report. 
+The decline in wildlife, along with climate change, is part of the proposed notion of Anthropocene, a term which suggests a new era in which humans have managed to have a significant global impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. 
+The notion – which has yet to be officially approved as a term used to explain geological time – can lead to major consequences. 
+“The richness and diversity of life on Earth is fundamental to the complex life systems that underpin it. Life supports life itself and we are part of the same equation. Lose biodiversity and the natural world and the life support systems, as we know them today, will collapse,” WWF Director-General Marco Lambertini said, as quoted by the Guardian. 
+In fact, the report states that humans could be anything but happy if the forecast comes to fruition, noting that the predicted situation could provoke serious competition. 
+“Increased human pressure threatens the natural resources that humanity depends upon, increasing the risk of water and food insecurity and competition over natural resources,” the report states. 
+There does, however, appear to be some hope. Some species are beginning to recover, suggesting that conservation efforts could help tackle the crisis. 
+However, Barrett noted that in order for such efforts to take place, society must largely change how it consumes resources. 
+“You’d like to think that was a no-brainer in that if a business is consuming the raw materials for its products in a way that is not sustainable, then inevitably it will eventually put itself out of business,” Barrett said. 
+“The report is certainly a pretty shocking snapshot of where we are,” he added. “My hope though is that we don’t throw our hands up in despair – there is no time for despair, we have to crack on and act. I do remain convinced we can find our sustainable course through the Anthropocene, but the will has to be there to do it.” 
+The new report comes less than two months after a similar analysis found that Earth has lost one-tenth of its wilderness sites since the early 1990s.   6:41  ",FAKE
+5879,Comment on Due Process is Dead: A Staggering 95% of All Inmates in America Have Never Received a Trial by Raymond Karczewski,"Home / Be The Change / Government Corruption / Due Process is Dead: A Staggering 95% of All Inmates in America Have Never Received a Trial Due Process is Dead: A Staggering 95% of All Inmates in America Have Never Received a Trial Claire Bernish January 25, 2016 268 Comments 
+In the Land of the Free, one-quarter of the entire planet’s prison population, some 2.2 million people, currently languish behind bars; yet, an astonishing number of them — around 2 million — have never been to trial . Indeed, these figures categorically debunk the notion the criminal justice system in the United States maintains any semblance of its formation’s original intent: to ensure the guilty suffer punishment befitting their crimes, while the innocent avoid false conviction. 
+As the fundamental basis for the justice system in the United States, the Sixth Amendment states: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.” 
+Justice, as an untold — though no doubt, appalling — number can attest, has been utterly abandoned for the interests of the careless expedience , apathetic convenience, and unabashed profiteering of the U.S. prison-industrial machine. 
+“The reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten a trial,” explains award-winning journalist, Chris Hedges, in a recent Truthdig column . “There is rarely an impartial investigation. A staggering 97 percent of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases are resolved through plea bargaining.” Of those millions who bargained away their right to a trial by accepting plea deals, “significant percentages of them are innocent.” 
+Plea bargaining failed in its attempt to facilitate pragmatic justice seen in earlier courts, before the advent of the “adversary system and the related development of the law of evidence,” as John H. Langein once described . After the Civil War, as Judge Jed S. Rakoff explained in the New York Review of Books , rising crime and immigration rates began to burden the system and plea bargains offered an acceptable solution. In other words, court proceedings were at one time swift and simple, and though such expediency might have seemed a desirable quality in the past, the incontrovertible reality at present is a system wholly focused on speed at the expense of the necessary — in fact, imperative — assumption of innocence of the accused. 
+Indeed, for incontrovertible proof the court system no longer functions for the people — neither in its capacity to protect the public from the actual criminals, nor in its ostensible assurances no innocent person will be punished unfairly — take even a cursory glance at the trial system. Plea bargains have actualized a replacement of justice with a farcical, well-oiled machine of incarceration. “In actuality,” as Rakoff described, “our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor alone.” 
+Of all federal criminal cases, “fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed.” 
+Plea deals are presented to defendants as a way to escape the near certainty of a heavy-handed sentence should they be found guilty by a jury at trial — because defense attorneys’ and prosecutors’ most pressing goal is to prevent a trial in the first place. “Once you are charged in America,” Hedges said, “whether you did the crime or not, you are almost always found guilty.” 
+In part, such ‘unconditional guilt’ begat the need for The Innocence Project — “a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.” Since 1989, there have been 337 DNA-related exonerations with individuals having served a combined total of around 4,606 unjustified years — an average of 14 years, each, before being freed. Of those 337 cases, 31 individuals , who had served over 150 combined years, “pled guilty to crimes they didn’t commit — usually seeking to avoid the potential for a long sentence (or a death sentence),” states The Innocence Project’s website. 
+“If all of the accused went to trial, the judicial system, which is designed around plea agreements, would collapse. And this is why trial sentences are horrific. It is why public attorneys routinely urge their clients to accept a plea arrangement. Trials are a flashing red light to the accused: DO NOT DO THIS. It is the inversion of justice. ” Of the students he teaches in prison, those “who have the longest sentences are usually the ones who demanded a trial.” 
+While the rich and powerful, especially those associated with corporations and banks , are able to escape significant punishment — even when their crimes affect millions of people, such as those complicit in the 2008 financial crash — the poor, whether guilty or not, fall victim to this slanted system. As Hedges summarized: 
+“If you are poor, you will be railroaded in an assembly-line production, from a town or city where there are no jobs, through the police stations, county jails and courts directly into prison. And if you are poor, because you don’t have any money for adequate legal defense, you will serve sentences that are decades longer than those for equivalent crimes anywhere else in the industrialized world … Being poor has become a crime. And this makes mass incarceration the most pressing civil rights issue of our era.” Share",FAKE
+6508,Schools All Over America Are Closing On Election Day Due To Fears Of Violence,"Email 
+Will this be the most chaotic election day in modern American history? All across the nation, schools are being closed on election day due to safety fears. Traditionally, schools have been very popular as voting locations because they can accommodate a lot of people, they usually have lots of parking, and everyone in the community knows where they are and can usually get to them fairly easily. But now there is a big movement to remove voting from schools or to shut schools down on election day so that children are not present when voting takes place. According to Fox News , “voting has been removed or classes have been canceled on Election Day at schools in Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere.” Just a couple days ago , I shared with you a survey that found that 51 percent of all Americans are concerned about violence happening on election day, and all of these schools closing is just another sign of how on edge much of the population is as we approach November 8th. 
+Many officials are being very honest about the fact that schools are being shut down on election day because they are afraid of election violence. The following comes from Fox News … 
+Several schools across the nation have decided to close on Election Day over fears of possible violence in the hallways stemming from the fallout from the heated rhetoric that consumed the campaign trail. 
+The fear is the ugliness of the election season could escalate into confrontations and even violence in the school hallways, endangering students. 
+“If anybody can sit there and say they don’t think this is a contentious election, then they aren’t paying much attention,” Ed Tolan, the Falmouth, Maine police chief, said Tuesday. His community has already called off classes on Nov. 8 and an increased police presence will be felt around town. 
+And without a doubt, voting locations are “soft targets” that often have little or no security. We have been blessed to have had such peaceful elections in the past, but we also need to realize that times have changed. I believe that there is wisdom in what Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told reporters … 
+“There is a concern, just like at a concert, sporting event or other public gathering that we didn’t have 15 or 20 years ago,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, co-chairman of the National Association of Secretaries of State election committee. “ What if someone walks in a polling location with a backpack bomb or something? If that happens at a school, then that’s certainly concerning.” 
+All it is going to take is a single incident to change everything. 
+Let us hope that it is not this election day when we see something like that. 
+Another reason why polling locations are under increased scrutiny this election season is because of concerns about election fraud. This is something that Donald Trump has alluded to repeatedly on the campaign trail. For instance, just consider what he told a rally in Pennsylvania … 
+“We don’t want to lose an election because you know what I’m talking about,” Trump told an overwhelmingly white crowd in Manheim, Pa., earlier this month. “Because you know what? That’s a big, big problem, and nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody has the guts to talk about it. So go and watch these polling places .” 
+And of course reports are already pouring in from around the country of big problems with the voting machines. In Illinois this week, one candidate personally experienced a machine switching his votes from Republicans to Democrats… 
+Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats. 
+Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library. 
+“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.” 
+In addition, if you keep up with my work on The Economic Collapse Blog , then you already know that a number of voters down in Texas have reported that their votes were switched from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . 
+Well, it turns out that those voting machines appear to have a link to the Clinton Foundation … 
+According to OpenSecrets, the company who provided the alleged glitching voting machines is a subsidiary of The McCarthy Group. 
+The McCarthy group is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation – apparently donating 200,000 dollars in 2007 – when it was the largest owner of United States voting machines. Or perhaps the 200,000 dollars went to paying Bill Clinton for speeches? 
+Either way, it doesn’t look good. 
+After everything that we saw in 2012 , I am convinced that there is good reason to be concerned about the integrity of our voting machines. 
+But Democrats don’t like poll observers, because they think that having too many poll observers will intimidate their voters… 
+“It’s un-American, but at the same time we have a long history of doing things like that ,” Ari Berman, author of the 2016 book “ Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America ,” previously told The Christian Science Monitor. “Voting was very, very dangerous. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that we’re at the same place today. I just think the loss of the [official poll observers] is going to be really problematic.” 
+Without a doubt, this has been the craziest election season that we have seen in decades, and I have a feeling that it is about to get even crazier. 
+But will the end result be the election of the most corrupt politician in the history of our country ? 
+If that is the outcome after all that we have been through, it will be exceedingly depressing indeed. 
+Take a look at the future of America: The Beginning of the End and then prepare Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here .",FAKE
+2159,Senate Democrats block swift passage of Keystone XL pipeline bill (+video),"Senate supporters of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport crude oil from a private Canadian company to Texas oil refineries, failed to get the 60 votes needed to limit debate on the controversial project.
+
+Senate Democrats blocked a GOP bill to push the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project through Congress. The pipeline would transport oil from a private Canadian company to Texas refineries, via public and private lands up and down the US.
+
+Democrats in the U.S. Senate blocked the Keystone XL pipeline bill from moving forward on Monday, but supporters of the project vowed to push ahead and eventually get a vote on the measure.
+
+The Senate failed to get the 60 votes needed to limit debate, voting 53 to 39 on the measure.
+
+The Keystone bill allows Congress to approve TransCanada Corp's project to link Canada's oil sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
+
+Democrats, who lost control of the Senate as a result of November's elections, flexed their muscles to deliver a message to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that he will have to deal with them even on bills that enjoy some bipartisan support.
+
+McConnell has pledged that amendments to bills will be debated in an open process. But Democrats said McConnell cut off debate last Thursday on several amendments.
+
+""He's got to work with us and not try to jam us,"" Senator Chuck Schumer said of McConnell. Democrats are not trying to delay the bill, but they don't want McConnell to shut down the open process at his whim, said Schumer, the Senate's third ranking Democrat.
+
+Republicans have made passing the Keystone bill the first priority of the new Senate.
+
+But the White House has said President Barack Obama would reject the bill, and Keystone supporters are four votes short of the 67 needed to overcome any veto.
+
+Senator Lisa Murkowski, the chairman of the energy committee, vowed to work with Democrats on her panel to consider additional amendments.",REAL
+2183,"Wake up, America. Our country is upside down","Folks, I work hard to be the common sense voice for YOU in a growingly crazy America.
+
+We are taking in thousands of refugees from Muslim countries without any idea who they are or what their motives are.
+
+A serial sniper’s been  shooting at vehicles in Arizona.
+
+Caitlyn Jenner is considered a hero, yet, the cops who risk their lives for us are being gunned down in the streets.
+
+The country is upside down.
+
+But there’s one issue I have to highlight here in wake up America because it threatens our very republic.
+
+It’s the Iran nuclear deal.. and it’s a deadly mistake we are making.
+
+This is no right wing. Left wing manufactured fight. This is for real folks -- lives will be lost if we lift Iranian sanctions. Period.
+
+Handing over an initial $100 billion to the regime that sponsors terror around the world is insane!
+
+Then allowing them to sell another $100 billion per year in oil is equally insane.
+
+That as they telegraph their hatred for us makes zero sense. Zero!
+
+They lie. They cheat. They finance Hezbollah, Hamas and factions of Al Qaeda. And they finance these hate groups with the goal of killing  Americans.
+
+What genius decided giving people who despise us more money to kill us was a good idea?
+
+This is bigger than Obama’s legacy. This is bigger than Democrats circling the wagons around their ideology.
+
+America will be hit with Iranian financed terror if we don’t stop this deal… now.
+
+It's common sense folks. It’s lacking in D.C. and this time around it will cost us American lives.
+
+And by the way, did we learn nothing when terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and Pennsylvania -- killing 3,000 innocent Americans exactly 14 years ago today?
+
+
+
+Eric Bolling currently serves as co-host of Fox News Channel's ""The Five"" (weekdays 5-6PM/ET). He also serves as the host of ""Cashin' In"" (Saturdays 11:30AM-12PM/ET), an analysis program on FNC's weekend business block, ""The Cost of Freedom."" Bolling joined the network in 2008. Click here for more information on Eric Bolling.",REAL
+4032,"Global relief effort underway after Nepal earthquake leaves 2,700 dead, thousands injured","Governments and charities from the United States to the Middle East rushed personnel and aid to Nepal Sunday after Saturday’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake and ensuing aftershocks rattled the Himalayan nation, leaving more than 2,700 dead and thousands injured according to Nepalese authorities.
+
+U.N. spokeswoman Orla Fagan, who is heading to Nepal, said preventing the spread of disease is one of the most important tasks facing aid workers who are arriving.
+
+""There are 14 international medical teams on the way and either 14 or 15 international search-and-rescue teams on the way,"" she said. ""They need to get in as soon as possible. They will use military aircraft to get them into Nepal.""
+
+The Pentagon says a U.S. military plane has departed from the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware bound for the earthquake-stricken nation.
+
+Onboard are 70 personnel, including a U.S. Agency for International Development disaster assistance response team, a Virginia-based search and rescue team and 45 tons of cargo to provide assistance to areas hit by Saturday's massive quake.
+
+The Pentagon says the flight is expected to arrive at Kathmandu on Monday.
+
+The first to respond, however, were Nepal's neighbors -- India, China and Pakistan, all of which have been jockeying for influence over the landlocked nation. Still, Nepal remains closest to India with which it shares deep political, cultural and religious ties.
+
+Indian air force planes landed Sunday with 43 tons of relief material, including tents and food, and nearly 200 rescuers, India's External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup said. The planes were returning to New Delhi with Indian nationals stranded in Kathmandu. More aid flights were planned for Sunday.
+
+India suffered its own losses from the quake, with at least 61 people killed there and dozens injured. Sunday's aftershock was also widely felt in the country, and local news reports said metro trains in New Delhi and Kolkata were briefly shut down when the shaking started.
+
+European nations deployed as well: France said it would send 11 rescuers on Sunday; Britain announced that an advance team of eight had been sent and that a 5 million pound ($7.6 million) aid package would be available under a rapid response plan; Italy deployed a team of experts from its Civil Protection Department as well as it foreign crisis team; and the Swiss Foreign Ministry said a team of experts including a doctor, a building surveyor and water quality technician had left for Nepal on Sunday.
+
+Poland is sending a rescue team to Nepal of 81 firefighters, together with heavy equipment and several dogs, as well several medics. The medics are expected in Nepal on Monday morning. The firefighters were delayed by aftershocks and confusion at Kathmandu's airport, said Pawel Fratczak, spokesman for firefighters. He said they are now due to arrive Monday afternoon.
+
+Other countries sending support Sunday included the United Arab Emirates, Germany and France.
+
+Pakistan prepared to send four C-130 aircraft, carrying a 30-bed temporary hospital comprising army doctors, surgeons and specialists. An urban search and rescue team was also sent with ground-penetrating radars, concrete cutters and sniffing dogs. Pakistan was also sending 2,000 ready-to-eat meal packs, water bottles, medicines, 200 tents, 600 blankets and other necessary items.
+
+The need is great: UNICEF said Sunday that nearly 1 million children in areas affected by the earthquake are in ""urgent need"" of humanitarian assistance. UNICEF staff reported dwindling water supplies, power shortages and communications breakdowns.
+
+Celebrities like singer Shakira sent tweets appealing for help for UNICEF. The mobile payment company Square created a ""cashtag"" to donate: cash.me/$unicef. PayPal announced it was waiving fees for donations to several aid organizations.
+
+Information was still lacking about conditions at the earthquake's epicenter, Pickering said.
+
+""Going forward it's about access to the epicenter, and helicopters are the key, but it's not clear whether they can be sourced and whether the high altitude is a problem,"" he said, adding that Save the Children has emergency kits pre-positioned in three warehouses in Nepal and plans to distribute bedding, buckets and other basic supplies to 2,000 families as quickly as possible.
+
+Saturday's magnitude 7.8 earthquake spread horror from Kathmandu to small villages and to the slopes of Mount Everest, triggering an avalanche that buried part of the base camp packed with foreign climbers preparing to make their summit attempts. At least 18 people died there and 61 were injured.
+
+The earthquake centered outside Kathmandu, the capital, was the worst to hit the South Asian nation in over 80 years. It destroyed swaths of the oldest neighborhoods of Kathmandu, and was strong enough to be felt all across parts of India, Bangladesh, China's region of Tibet and Pakistan.
+
+By Sunday night, authorities said at least 2,430 people had died in Nepal alone, not including the 18 people that the Nepal Mountaineering Association says died in an earthquake-triggered avalanche on Mount Everest. Another 61 people died from the quake in India and a few in other neighboring countries. At least 721 of the deaths were in Kathmandu, and the number of injured nationwide was upward of 5,000. With search and rescue efforts far from over, it was unclear how much the death toll would rise.
+
+The State Department confirmed Sunday that three U.S. citizens died in Nepal Saturday.
+
+Dan Fredinburg, a Google executive who described himself as an adventurer, was among the dead.
+
+Google confirmed his death. Lawrence You, the company's director of privacy, posted online that Fredinburg was in Nepal with three other Google employees climbing Mount Everest. The other three, he added, are safe.
+
+According to the technology blog Re/Code, Fredinburg was an experienced climber who co-founded, in his spare time, Google Adventure. The project aims to ""translate the Google Street View concept into extreme, exotic locations like the summit of Mount Everest or the Great Barrier Reef off Australia,"" according to Startup Grind, a global startup community.
+
+Outside of the oldest neighborhoods, many in Kathmandu were surprised by how few modern structures collapsed in the quake. The city is largely a collection of small, poorly constructed brick apartment buildings.
+
+With people fearing more quakes, tens of thousands of Nepalese spent Saturday night outside under chilly skies, or in cars and public buses. They were jolted awake by the aftershocks, including a powerful magnitude 6.7 aftershock in the Kathmandu region, on Sunday.
+
+""The aftershocks keep coming ... so people don't know what to expect,"" said Sanjay Karki, Nepal country head for global aid agency Mercy Corps. ""All the open spaces in Kathmandu are packed with people who are camping outdoors. When the aftershocks come you cannot imagine the fear. You can hear women and children crying.""
+
+Late Sunday, another magnitude 5.3 quake shook an area about 30 miles east of Kathmandu.
+
+Nepal's worst recorded earthquake in 1934 measured 8.0 and all but destroyed the cities of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan.
+
+In the Kalanki neighborhood of Kathmandu, police rescuers finally extricated a man lying under a dead person, both of them buried beneath a pile of concrete slabs and iron beams. Before his rescue, his family members stood nearby, crying and praying. Police said the man's legs and hips were totally crushed.
+
+Hundreds of people in Kalanki gathered around the collapsed Lumbini Guest House, once a three-story budget hotel and restaurant frequented by Nepalese. They watched with fear and anticipation as a single backhoe dug into the rubble.
+
+Police officer RP Dhamala, who was coordinating the rescue efforts, said they had already pulled out 12 people alive and six dead. He said rescuers were still searching for about 20 people believed to be trapped, but had heard no cries, taps or noises for a while.
+
+The Kathmandu Valley is listed as a World Heritage site. The Buddhist stupas, public squares and Hindu temples are some of the most well-known sites in Kathmandu, and now some of the most deeply mourned.
+
+The head of the U.N. cultural agency, Irina Bokova, said in a statement that UNESCO was ready to help Nepal rebuild from ""extensive damage, including to historic monuments and buildings of the Kathmandu Valley.""
+
+Nepali journalist and author Shiwani Neupane tweeted: ""The sadness is sinking in. We have lost our temples, our history, the places we grew up.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4132,Defense Secretary Carter used personal email in first months on the job,"Defense Secretary Ash Carter used his personal email account to conduct some of his professional correspondence during his first months on the job earlier this year, the Pentagon admitted late Wednesday.
+
+Carter's use of the personal account was first reported by The New York Times, which said that he had been confronted about his email habits by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough this past May, three months after Carter took office as defense secretary.
+
+Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook released a statement saying that Carter believes his use of personal email for work-related business was a mistake. Cook declined to say whether it was a violation of Pentagon email policies. Cook also said Carter stopped the practice, but Cook did not say when.
+
+Carter also acknowledged the move was a mistake in an interview with CBS' “This Morning” on Thursday. He said he occasionally used his iPhone to send messages to immediate staff, but stressed no classified information was involved.
+
+The Times reported that Carter was assigned a government email account when he assumed his office in February, but continued to conduct most of his business on his private account, often sending messages via his iPhone or iPad. According to the paper, a former aide to Carter said that his boss used his personal account so often during that period that staffers feared he would be hacked.
+
+Pentagon policy since 2012 has been to bar all employees from conducting government business on personal email. Last year, a law signed by President Obama barred federal officials from receiving or sending emails from personal accounts unless the messages were either copied or forwarded into government accounts within 20 days. It was not immediately clear whether Carter followed that directive.
+
+The Times report comes in the midst of an FBI investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information by using a private account for all her emails while secretary of state. According to the Times, Carter continued to use his personal email at least two months after Clinton's practices were revealed in March.
+
+The Times said the emails it received under the Freedom of Information Act were exchanges between Carter and Eric Fanning, who was his chief of staff at the time and is now the acting secretary of the Army.
+
+
+
+The emails were on a variety of work-related topics, the Times said, including speeches, meetings and news media appearances. In one such email, Carter discussed how he had mistakenly placed a note card in a ""burn bag,"" the Times reported. Such bags are typically used to destroy classified documents.
+
+
+
+Cook said Carter ""does not use his personal email or official email for classified material. The Secretary has a secure communications team that handles his classified information and provides it to him as necessary.""
+
+
+
+Carter ""takes his responsibilities with regard to classified material very seriously,"" Cook said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from The New York Times.
+
+",REAL
+9605,"Capitalism Is Doomed — Without Alternatives, So Are We","‘Though it appears as if rumors of capitalism’s imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated,’ writes Johnson, ‘there is good reason to believe that its remarkable ability to adapt and evolve in the face of frequent (self-induced) shocks has reached a breaking point.’ In 1946, George Orwell pondered the fragility of the capitalist order.
+Reviewing the work of the influential theorist James Burnham, Orwell presaged several concepts that would later form the groundwork for his best-known novel, 1984.
+“Not only is the best of capitalism behind us, but the worst of it may lie just ahead.”
+In his book The Managerial Revolution , Burnham envisioned, as Orwell put it , “a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production.”
+“The real question,” Orwell adds, “is not whether the people who wipe their boots on us during the next fifty years are to be called managers, bureaucrats, or politicians: the question is whether capitalism, now obviously doomed, is to give way to oligarchy or to true democracy.”
+While Orwell was wary of Burnham’s worldview and of his more specific predictions, he agreed that the relationship between capitalism and democracy has always been, and always will be, a precarious one.
+“For quite fifty years past,” Orwell noted, “the general drift has almost certainly been towards oligarchy.”
+Pointing to the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the few and acknowledging “the weakness of the proletariat against the centralised state,” Orwell was far from optimistic about the future — but he was quite certain that the economic status quo would eventually give way.
+Recent events, and the material circumstances of much of the world’s population, have prompted serious examinations of the same questions Orwell was considering seven decades ago. And though it appears as if rumors of capitalism’s imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated, there is good reason to believe that its remarkable ability to adapt and evolve in the face of frequent (self-induced) shocks has reached a breaking point.
+Widespread discontent over stagnant incomes and the uneven prosperity brought about by neoliberal globalization has, in 2016, come to a head in striking fashion; Donald Trump, Brexit, and the rise of far-right parties in Europe have many questioning previously sacred assumptions.
+“Is the marriage between liberal democracy and global capitalism an enduring one?” asked Martin Wolf, a formidable commentator in one of the world’s leading business papers, the Financial Times .
+This was no rhetorical softball; Wolf is genuinely concerned that the winners of globalization have grown complacent, that they have “taken for granted” a couple that was only tenuously compatible to begin with. He also worries, rightly, that they have downplayed the concerns of the “losers.”
+Wolf concludes that “if the legitimacy of our democratic political systems is to be maintained, economic policy must be orientated towards promoting the interests of the many not the few; in the first place would be the citizenry, to whom the politicians are accountable.”
+Not all members of the commentariat share Wolf’s willingness to engage with these cherished assumptions, however. Indeed, many analysts have reserved their ire not for failing institutions or policies but for the public, reviving Walter Lippmann’s characterization of the masses as a “bewildered herd” that, if left to its own devices, is sure to usher in a regime of chaos.
+“It’s time,” declared Foreign Policy ‘s James Traub, channeling the sentiments of Josh Barro, “for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses.”
+Apologists like Traub and Barro — just two among many — speak and write as if the leash previously restraining the “herd” has been loosened, and that the resulting freedom has laid bare what elitists have long believed to be the case: To use Barro’s infamous words , “Elites are usually elite for good reason, and tend to have better judgment than the average person.” They point to the rise of Donald Trump as evidence of an intolerable democratic surplus — evidence, in short, of what the masses will do if granted a loud enough voice.
+Aside from being conveniently self-serving, this narrative is also false.
+Far from loosening the leash, elites have consolidated power to an unprecedented extent , and they have used their influence to undercut democratic movements and hijack public institutions. The resulting concentration of wealth and political power is jarring, and it puts the lie to the farcical notion that elites are a persecuted minority.
+But, in the midst of these anti-democratic diatribes, fascinating and important critiques of a rather different nature have emerged.
+“Far from loosening the leash, elites have consolidated power to an unprecedented extent , and they have used their influence to undercut democratic movements and hijack public institutions.”
+Instead of urging us to align Against Democracy , to use the name of a recent book by the libertarian political philosopher Jason Brennan, many are arguing that it is capitalism, and not the excesses of the democratic process, that has provided figures like Trump a launching pad.
+In his book Postcapitalism , Paul Mason argues that the rapid emergence of information technology has corroded the boundaries of the market; “capitalism,” he insists, “has reached the limits of its capacity to adapt.” And its attempts to reach beyond these limits have fostered an economic environment defined by instability, crippling austerity for the many, and rapid accumulation of wealth for the few.
+According to Oxfam, the global 1 percent now owns as much wealth as the bottom 99 percent. CEO pay has continued to soar. And though post-crisis reforms have carried soaring promises of stability, the financial sector is still far too large , and many of the banks harmed by the crash they created are back and nearly as powerful as ever .",FAKE
+2360,Texas counts down the hours until new Open Carry law takes effect,"Gun rights supporters in Texas counted down the hours, minutes and seconds to New Year's Day, because when the clock strikes midnight, licensed firearms owners in the Lone Star State can openly carry their handguns in public.
+
+The non-profit group Open Carry Texas, which supports the law, posted a countdown on its website.
+
+Texas already allows openly carrying rifles and shotguns, but has banned having handguns visible since just after the Civil War. On New Year's Day, it'll be the 45th and largest state to sanction some form of open carry, with California, Florida, Illinois, New York and South Carolina still banning it.
+
+Activists with Open Carry Texas say they support the law, but that it should go farther. ""Our ultimate goal will always be constitutional carry - if you can legally own and purchase a gun, you should be able to legally carry that gun without begging for government permission in the form of a license and 2nd Amendment tax,"" they say on their website.
+
+Texas had nearly 826,000 concealed license holders in 2014, which ranks among the nation's highest. Openly carrying a gun will require obtaining the same license concealed weapons holders have -- be at least 21, have clean criminal and psychology records, complete a training course and pass a shooting test. Concealed handguns are even allowed inside the Texas Capitol, where license holders can bypass metal detectors.
+
+Under the new law, businesses can bar guns from their premises if they post approved signs outside.
+
+Texas also has the country's most federal firearms license holders, from manufacturers to dealers, and the state cites its relaxed gun ownership rules in lobbying gun makers to move here. The National Rifle Association has traditionally pumped tens of thousands of dollars into Texas' state political races, more than it spent many other places, though contribution totals look to be waning recently.
+
+The original open carry bill included a ""no-stop"" provision barring police from demanding to see the license of someone simply for openly carrying their gun. Tea party legislators didn't want 2nd Amendment rights infringed, while Democrats worried about racial profiling, concerned that blacks and Hispanics might be asked for their licenses more than their white counterparts.
+
+""If I get a gun, I guess I'd better put my hands up,"" state Sen. Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat who is black, said when the measure was debated on the Senate floor.
+
+Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo was an outspoken critic of the ""no-stop"" provision, saying it would effectively bar police from doing their jobs while endangering the public. Under pressure from Acevedo and other police chiefs, as well as state law enforcement organizations, that language was stripped from the final open carry bill.
+
+But Michael, who is readying Acevedo's force for the new law, said he doesn't expect many officers to ask for licenses. The department is even training its dispatchers to educate the public on the law change, anticipating a barrage of 911 calls about someone openly carrying a gun.
+
+""The call-taker will say it's now legal to do that,"" said Michael, who said his department has been discussing preparations for open carry for months with police departments across Central Texas.
+
+Police ""don't want to not act and then have something devolve into a mass shooting incident, but harassing every person with a holster gun isn't going to solve that,"" said Shannon Edmonds, director of governmental relations for the Texas District and County Attorneys Association.
+
+""The irony is that you saw many law enforcement agencies lobby strongly against that provision that would have restricted them outright from ever asking if someone had a license absent other evidence of a crime,"" Edmonds said, noting that's changed after a number of those same agencies talked with their legal counsels.
+
+Not demanding to see licenses, though, could also make it easier for unlicensed Texas residents to take advantage of the don't-ask environment.
+
+""We've changed things here a lot and we've not thought this through,"" said Charley Wilkison, executive director of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, the state's largest law enforcement officers' union. ""People will drive without a license and we can sure count on them to carry a weapon without training or license.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6737,Still Not Over: They Are Trying to “Flip the Electoral College” To Block Trump’s Win,"
+OK, theoretically, everything will go according to plan, and Donald Trump will be the next president.
+But technically, the (s)election hasn’t really taken place yet.
+Presidential electors of the mystified electoral college must still actually vote for the president, and there isn’t anything to keep them from ‘voting their conscience’ and choosing someone other than Donald Trump.
+Moreover, it appears that there is an active effort to flip the electoral college to deny Trump the presidency, and toss the White House to either Hillary or a GOP loyalist.
+The #NeverTrump crowd and plenty of bitter Hillary supporters are still hoping for a coup, though even they admit it is a long shot – completely unprecedented and anything but likely.
+According to the Blaze :
+Donald Trump may have won the electoral votes necessary to win the White House, but he he’s likely going to lose the popular vote to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. And now two electors have launched a last-minute effort to convince their colleagues to abandon the president-elect. 
+“This is a long shot. It’s a hail Mary,” Bret Chiafolo, a Washington state elector who previously pledged not to vote for Clinton, told Politico Monday. “However, I do see situations where — when we’ve already had two or three [Republican] electors state publicly they didn’t want to vote for Trump. How many of them have real issues with Donald Trump in private?”
+Chiafolo along with Colorado elector Micheal Baca have launched what they call a “moral electors” movement in hopes of convincing 37 of their Republican colleagues to deny Trump their votes. Should they succeed in their radical effort, the presidential decision would be thrown to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
+[…]
+The Electoral College consists of 538 members who are expected to convene in their respective state capitals on Dec. 19 to formally vote for the next president… Baca said he hopes the move launches a serious national discussion about abolishing the Electoral College , which would require either a constitutional amendment or legislation in several states.
+The speculation is that if this maneuver were to be successful, the GOP-led Congress could be persuaded not to choose Hillary, but to write-in a selection for a party loyalist – like Mitt Romney or John Kasich… maybe even a Bush.
+Of course, there have also been reports that Team Hillary has been hard at work attempting to persuade electors to switch their votes in the hope, however desperate, that they can still flip the election and take the White House:
+On December 19, the Electors of the Electoral College will cast their ballots. If they all vote the way their states voted, Donald Trump will win. However, they can vote for Hillary Clinton if they choose. Even in states where that is not allowed, their vote would still be counted, they would simply pay a small fine – which we can be sure Clinton supporters will be glad to pay! 
+We are calling on the Electors to ignore their states’ votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton. Why? Mr. Trump is unfit to serve.
+The larger issue here is that the system is badly broken, the people are harshly divided along demographic and political lines, and the future is gambling on extreme versions of itself – larger than life candidates, and bizarre back-door maneuvers in attempt to hack the system and bend it in one direction or another.
+Trump has taken his place on the stage in a thunderous revolt of the people, but his legacy will be tested out the gates by the heavy pressures of Washington lobbyists, intrigue on the part of political insiders and the cults of opposition that are springing up in response to his controversial journey to the White House.
+The entire political establishment have been knocked off their perch, though their hold on power has not necessarily been loosened.
+A whole new era is born, and it remains to be seen how it will play out.
+Read more: 
+It’s Not Over Yet: “They Are Probably Still Trying To Steal The Election” | Calls For Electoral College To Ignore Will Of People 
+Clinton Insider Confesses: Trump Protests Are Just More Pre-Paid “Soros Riots” to Stir Unrest 
+“Beware of the Shadow Government”: Ron Paul Advises President-Elect 
+Trump Surrounded By Bankers, Wall St. Insiders Banging on the Door to Get In: “Draining the Swamp?” 
+“Violent Revolution If Trump Lets Them Down”: People Remain Poised for Angry Revolt – Roberts ",FAKE
+4508,EgyptAir Flight 804 Crash Increasingly Looks Like Terrorism,"It now appears a sudden, complete explosion caused by a bomb brought down the Airbus over the Mediterranean—but that doesn't mean it was ISIS.
+
+Flight tracking data showing its altitude, speed, and direction, ends instantaneously while the plane was at its cruise height of 37,000 feet. This can now be combined with reports that a military satellite using infrared technology detected a flash at the time and location where the airplane was last tracked, according to NBC News. U.S. officials told Reuters a review of preliminary satellite imagery has produced no sign of an explosion so far.
+
+If the Airbus A320 was stricken by a mechanical failure it is highly unlikely that the effects would have been so sudden, leaving the pilots at least some time to send a Mayday call. No call was made, officials say.
+
+Reports that wreckage has been found floating in the eastern Mediterranean were later denied by Egyptian officials. Once it is found, as it will be, and given the increasing indications that a bomb caused the disaster an urgent priority for investigators will be to look for evidence in the wreckage of blast and fire.
+
+
+
+If there is evidence of a bomb blast the next priority will be to establish where the bomb was placed on the airplane: in the cabin or in the cargo hold.
+
+Essential clues to that could be found both from physical wreckage from the airplane and from bodies of passengers, even down to their seat locations.
+
+In this situation the jet’s black boxes—the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder—are of little value since their data would have been terminated with the sudden explosion, leaving only a record of what was until then an absolutely normal flight. Wreckage is where the story is to be told.
+
+There has yet been no credible claim by any terrorist group that they were responsible. If a bomb was successfully placed on the flight not only does this point to a weak point in security at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the origin of the flight, but it could mean that bomb makers have found a new way of eluding current bomb-detecting technology.
+
+The man credited with being the world’s most-ingenious bomb designer is al Qaeda’s Ibrahim al-Asiri.  Al Qaeda has recently been overshadowed by ISIS, and some experts believe that it wants to re-establish its superiority in attacks on what it has always regarded as the most effective Western target, commercial aviation.
+
+If the flight was brought down by a bomb, the timing of the blast could be a part of the signature of the bomb maker. Was it timed to detonate specifically at the only place on the EgyptAir jet’s route when it was over water? The retrieval of wreckage and, particularly, of the flight data recorders, is far more difficult with a plunge into the sea than when the airplane falls in plain sight over land. On the other hand counter-terrorism experts have always believed that bombers would rather bring down a jet over land and, ideally, over a city for the maximum effect—as was the intention of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underpants bomber, on Christmas Day 2009, aiming for Detroit.
+
+The jet was flying what has become one of the most densely trafficked airline routes in the world, a crucial corridor in the sky for international flights.
+
+Following the downing by a missile of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in July 2014 that part of Eastern Europe was—belatedly—defined as a war zone. The main airline routes between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia were then diverted south to fly over Romania, Greece, Turkey, and across the eastern Mediterranean into Egyptian airspace.
+
+The corridor became even more crowded after the crash of the Russian Metrojet while flying over the Sinai Peninsula last October, when the Sinai airspace was also ruled too dangerous for commercial flights. This had the effect of pushing a lot more intercontinental flights further south, flying eastbound and westbound across Cairo, the Red Sea, and Saudi Arabia and Dubai (Dubai is now a major hub for flights between Europe, Africa, and Asia).",REAL
+1679,Why Jeb Bush’s campaign has gone so wrong,"The Bushes are burning as they consume the news.
+
+Bush family patriarch George H.W. Bush is alarmed, bewildered and irritated, the New York Times reported over the weekend, that his son Jeb is doing so poorly in a Republican presidential primary battle dominated by Donald Trump. The 41st president summoned his son George W., the 43rd president, Jeb and Bush money men to Houston for meetings Sunday and Monday to sort out what has gone so wrong that Jeb is now cutting staff.
+
+They didn’t have to look far for an explanation. All they had to do was listen to Jeb on Saturday in South Carolina.
+
+“If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then I don’t want any part of it,” the candidate said. “. . . I’ve got a lot of really cool things that I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that.”
+
+I don’t want any part of it? I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do? Elect Trump if you want? The self-described “joyful tortoise” may have just delivered the most petulant political speech since the future 37th president said “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
+
+Bush is correct that Trump’s campaign of insults has made the 2016 GOP primary race an ugly affair. But his response — suggesting he’d take his ball and go home rather than sully himself — is precisely what has sunk Bush’s candidacy so far. Angry voters want a fighter, and Bush, justifiably dubbed “low-energy” by Trump, doesn’t seem to have it in him. The way to combat Trump’s demagoguery and race-baiting is not to look down your nose at him and say “Tut-tut.” It’s to hit Trump back with as much force as he delivers.
+
+The alternative for Bush and other Republicans is to accept a situation that looks more gruesome by the day. This weekend gave us the spectacle of Trump going after Ben Carson — who just passed Trump in Iowa polls — for his religion. “I’m Presbyterian,” Trump told a crowd Saturday in Florida. “Boy, that’s down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about.”
+
+This was vintage Trump — making his opponents seem alien, or something other than normal Americans. He led the birther campaign to portray President Obama as foreign-born. He warns of invading Mexican rapists, demonizes Univision and threatens to deport millions. And now he’s disparaging the (Protestant) faith of a rival. Trump said he wouldn’t apologize to Carson, who like half of Seventh-day Adventists is nonwhite.
+
+Carson, who has questioned the fitness of Muslims to serve as president, may have had it coming. But that hardly justifies Trump’s campaign of insults. On Monday morning, at an event in New Hampshire hosted by NBC’s “Today” show, Trump continued the vilification, informing voters that Bush and Carson are both “weak” and that Obama “doesn’t get along with anybody.”
+
+[Carson and Trump are dominating, but their chummy rapport turns cool]
+
+“People are tired of stupid people running our country, and we have, believe me, stupid people,” he said. “. . . It can’t always be the dummy United States led by people that are incompetent.”
+
+When Trump wasn’t praising himself (“I deal with the biggest people. . . . I’ve done very iconic things”) or making vague policy pronouncements (“I would build our military so strong and so good. . . . We’re going to have a country that will be so amazing”), he was peddling fear about people “pouring across our borders” and raping, sodomizing and killing Americans.
+
+He said he wouldn’t admit a single one of the thousands of Syrian refugees destined for the United States, because “these people could be ISIS.” He would instead “take a big swatch of land” to serve as a safe zone for them in the Middle East.
+
+A “swatch” of land — as if he is choosing fabrics for a hotel, not dooming thousands to their likely deaths.
+
+Jeb Bush understands — sort of — why he needs to answer such Trump lunacies. “If we don’t stand for people that will die because of their faith, wow, we have really lost our way,” he said Saturday, according to CNN, even as he fretted about a possible Twitter response from Trump.
+
+Damn the Twitter attack, governor, and stop fussing about whether we’ve “lost our way.” Americans are better than Trump. A strong candidate would argue that with passion — not muse about all the “cool things” he could be doing instead.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+6774,New ISIS Video Threatens Putin While Russian Child Executioners Execute 4 Men,"26 Shares
+21 4 0 1
+A new video purportedly released by the Islamic State shows 2 young ISIS boys executing two “spies.”
+The film, titled “Repent and you have safety from us,” is directed at Russians and Putin, threatening violence at the Syrian government ally. The nearly 14-minute video was released on ISIS terrorist channels on November 9 and comes from “Wilayat al-Jazirah,” northern Iraq.
+Vulnerable cities in the ISIS-occupied region include “Tal ‘Afar, Al-Ba’aj, Al-‘Ayadiyyah, Al-Mahlabiyyah, Sinjar, Wardiyyah, Sanuni, Khana Sor, Ibrat al-Saghira, Al-Badi, [and] Al-Qanat.”
+Prisoners can be seen kneeling on the ground in an unknown location in northern Iraq, while so-called 'cubs of the caliphate', dressed in military outfits, stand behind them wielding hand guns.
+In one scene a child rants to the camera about Putin's intervention in Syria before he and a second youngster shoot their captives - who were accused of being spies - in the back of the head.
+MORE... Saudis Foil ISIS Terror Attacks on Packed Stadium U.S. Commander John Nicholson: ISIS Attempting to Establish Khorasan Caliphate in Afghanistan ISIL executes Iraqi citizens listening to gov't radio Iraqi forces burn 16k m² ISIS poppy fields to curtail heroin and opium revenue The child soldiers threaten attacks on Russia and call Putin a 'dog', according to Terror Monitor.
+One of the Russian children says: 'O Russian disbelievers... We will kill you and nothing will save you from that dog Putin.'
+The video emerged on the same day that a senior UN official said the operation to liberate the city of Mosul marks the beginning of the end of the ISIS caliphate in Iraq.
+Jan Kubis, the UN envoy for the country told the Security Council, said efforts by the Iraqi Security Forces, the Peshmerga and other allies are making steady progress in liberating the city, while seeking to minimise civilian casualties.
+'This liberation operation marks the beginning of the end of the so-called `Da'esh caliphate' in Iraq,' Kubis said, using an Arabic acronym to refer to the group.
+Early on Agugust ISIS released a video urging his memebers to stage attacks in Russia.",FAKE
+2233,"Obama AWOL in Paris: Message to America, allies is we don't care","Sunday, President Obama morally abdicated his place as the leader of the free world.
+
+His decision to stay home instead of standing side by side with French President Hollande as millions marched in Paris in solidarity with the slain journalists of Charlie Hebdo in opposition to radical Islam – an enemy fiercer than we have seen in decades – sent a clear message to the world: Obama just doesn’t care.
+
+His words about the horrendous terrorist attack this week were not enough. They came off as inauthentic at best and offensive at worst.
+
+To speak about the most serious terrorist attack on Western soil since 9/11, London and Madrid, in between speeches about his free community college plan demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding for the gravity of the situation in Paris and, indeed, the world.
+
+To this end, it is not surprising that President Obama is the only Western leader who has refused to call this attack Islamic terrorism, even though President Hollande has declared that France is it at war with radical Islam. And to not even send Vice President Joe Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry in his place shows a level of disrespect that makes me ashamed of our nation.
+
+We are at war with radical Islam. And President Obama needs to say it.
+
+Many have tried to understand why President Obama made this choice. It’s certainly not possible that Obama has different intelligence than the French. Or that he and his advisers can’t see what the rest of the world has seen and come out against – the radicalization of Islam, the greatest threat of our time.
+
+Incredibly, in a speech on Friday Egyptian President el-Sisi called upon the Islamic leaders in his own country to stand up to the extremism that is destroying Islam. “We are in need of a religious revolution…You, imams, are responsible for Allah. The entire world…is waiting for your next move…because [the Islamic world] is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost – and it is being lost by our own lands.”
+
+Sisi’s words strike at the heart of the problem in Islam today, where radicals and extremists have hijacked a religion for their own hateful means. He doesn’t condemn the whole religion by calling out the terrorists for what they are.
+
+So why is our own president afraid to do the same?
+
+A condemnation and declaration of war against Islamic extremism does not mean a condemnation and declaration of war against Islam. They are separate and distinct and the president shows a profound lack of understanding for today’s world and threats to America and, indeed, the world without being honest about what’s at stake here.
+
+I made these same points Sunday night on Fox News Channel with my colleagues on ""Political Insiders"" when we talked with Harris Faulkner and will continue to do so.
+
+I have been disappointed by President Obama many times during his six years in office, but perhaps never more so than this weekend. He is redefining what it means to be a lame duck as well as giving the world a master class in what it means to let the world down.",REAL
+410,Clinton’s cowardice on trade,"There are two things no serious candidate for the White House in 2016 can equivocate on: defense spending and the Trans-Pacific Partnership . Foreign policy and strategy are going to be front-and-center in the coming campaign. Few doubt that the world has become more dangerous, that the world order created by the United States, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, is fraying at the edges, and that America’s critical role as a leader in the international system is increasingly in doubt. One key element of restoring U.S. leadership is increasing defense spending, busting the sequester caps and bringing the defense budget at least to the level called for by President Obama’s first secretary of defense, Robert Gates .
+
+But another key element is solidifying and advancing a free-trade regime that binds the United States closer to its European and Asian allies. In Asia, especially, this is more than just a trade issue, although the United States stands to benefit from a well-negotiated agreement. It is, above all, a strategic issue. The United States and China are locked in a competition across the spectrum of power and influence. Militarily, the Chinese seek to deny American access to the region and hope thereby to divide the United States from its allies. Economically, China would like to turn Asia into a region of Chinese hegemony, where every key trade relationship is with Beijing. In such a world, the United States is a net loser — providing costly security to allies but not much else, while China reaps the economic rewards and grabs the hearts and minds, and pocketbooks, of regional players.
+
+Experts on Asia, Democrat and Republican, consider the TPP trade agreement an essential element of U.S. strategy in Asia. On no other issue is there more bipartisan consensus within the foreign policy community.
+
+Which brings us to Hillary Clinton. As secretary of state, Clinton said and did all the right things. She supported the TPP wholeheartedly, for reasons economic and strategic. This was not a matter of loyalty to Obama. Clinton was known to make clear her differences with the president on a number of issues, from the premature withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan to the inadequate U.S. response to the humanitarian and strategic crisis in Syria. There was never an inkling that she dissented from support of the TPP.
+
+Yet now, when the trade agreement hangs in the balance, when the all-important question of “trade promotion authority“ was voted on in the Senate, Clinton has been silent, or worse, has quietly indicated her concerns about the agreement. Whether or not this is posturing to avoid offending her party’s left wing, only Clinton can know for sure. But it is an interesting departure from her statements as the nation’s top diplomat.
+
+There are always candidates who believe they can run a careful race for president, trimming on issues that seem to require it during the primaries and general election, with the idea that, once elected, they can do what they know is the right thing. Unfortunately, American politics rarely work that way. It is generally the case that if you don’t have the courage to run on a particular platform, you will not have any more courage to govern on it once you are in office. Presidents usually only do what they say they are going to do. Ronald Reagan promised to rebuild American defenses and cut taxes. That is what he did. Obama promised to pull troops out of the Middle East, and that is what he did. If Clinton won’t run on a free-trade platform, she won’t govern on one.
+
+So much for Clinton’s much-vaunted “smart power.” In a world very much in need of American leadership, but still leery of American power, there is no more effective form of U.S. global involvement than the strengthening of the global free-trade regime. In Asia, especially, where many believe the United States’ economic future lies, building strong trade ties is smart economics and smart strategy. Our allies want it. China worries about it. It is a critical card to play in the complex game of global influence. Those who oppose it are not thinking of foreign policy or America’s role in the world. They are thinking of nothing more than the most narrow and parochial of U.S. interests. Like the people who voted for the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930, they would defend a small segment of the U.S. economy at the cost of the global economy and America’s global influence. Is that where Clinton wants to be? Is that the kind of leadership she proposes to offer us? For a candidate who as yet faces no primary challenge, to cower in the face of possible criticism from the irresponsible wing of her party gives little assurance that she has what it takes to lead the nation in the very difficult years ahead.",REAL
+3489,Obama likely to make economic recovery a centerpiece of State of the Union address,"President Obama plans to propose raising $320 billion over the next 10 years in new taxes targeting wealthy individuals and big financial institutions to pay for new programs designed to help lower- and middle-income families, senior administration officials said Saturday.
+
+In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Obama will propose raising the capital gains and dividend tax rates to 28 percent for high earners; imposing a fee on the liabilities of about 100 big financial institutions; and greatly broadening the amount of inherited money subject to taxes.
+
+Obama will also seek to boost private retirement savings by requiring employers without 401(k) plans to make it easier for full-time and part-time workers to save in individual retirement accounts, which could assist as many as 30 million people. The administration would provide small employers tax credits to cover costs.
+
+Senior administration officials said that the package would highlight the president’s desire to boost taxes on the nation’s wealthy households and help lower- and middle-class families. New tax credits would help those in need of child care and households with two earners, they said, while other proposals — such as covering community college tuition — would help students.
+
+The moves would “eliminate the biggest tax loopholes and use the savings to let the middle class get ahead,” said one of the senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity during a conference call with reporters to describe the plan before the president’s speech. This person also said that 99 percent of the impact of the tax increases would fall on the top 1 percent of earners.
+
+The ambitious — and controversial — proposals demonstrate the White House’s increasing confidence about the trajectory of the U.S. economy. For the past year and a half, it has debated how much it could trumpet the recovery when so many Americans have not felt any change in their own economic outlook.
+
+But the plan drew immediate fire from Republican — and could face criticism from some Democrats — who have in the past increased the amount of money exempt from inheritance taxes they branded “death taxes.” Most Republicans have long opposed increases in capital gains rates, and many favor eliminating the tax altogether.
+
+“This is not a serious proposal,” wrote Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in an e-mail late Saturday. “We lift families up and grow the economy with a simpler, flatter tax code, not big tax increases to pay for more Washington spending.”
+
+“Slapping American small businesses, savers, and investors with more tax hikes only negates the benefits of the tax policies that have been successful in helping to expand the economy, promote savings, and create jobs,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said in a statement Saturday night.
+
+“The president needs to stop listening to his liberal allies who want to raise taxes at all costs and start working with Congress to fix our broken tax code.”
+
+The administration tried to head off some of that attack by asserting that elements of the package resembled proposals endorsed by Republicans. Officials also said that the capital gains tax rate was 28 percent during President Ronald Reagan’s terms in office. The Obama administration would also seek to limit the impact of the tax increases by saying the higher capital gains and dividend rates would apply only to couples earning more than $500,000 a year.
+
+Officials said that the relatively low capital gains tax rate with a top rate of 20 percent has enabled the 400 highest-earning taxpayers — with $139 million or more of income — to pay an average rate of 17 percent when the top income tax rate is 35 percent.
+
+The proposal to impose a 7 basis point fee on financial institutions with assets of more than $50 billion will also run smack into opposition from big banks and insurance companies. The administration compared the fee with a proposal by former House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) for an excise tax on large financial institutions. And last week, the House Budget Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), proposed a 0.1 percent surcharge on financial market transactions.
+
+One of the senior administration officials Saturday said that the goal of the proposed fee from the White House was to discourage big financial institutions from excessive borrowing. He said that despite banking revisions after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, highly leveraged financial institutions “still pose risks to the broader economy,” adding that “this fee is designed to make that activity more costly.”
+
+The economic recovery has freed the president to push for more ambitious domestic policies, many designed to help those in the poor and middle class who are still lagging behind. In the past week alone, Obama has announced new proposals on paid sick leave, free community college tuition and expanded broadband access. And while he might have trouble pushing those through the GOP-controlled Congress, Obama could still end up defining key issues for the elections in 2016.
+
+“The battle for the next American agenda is already on,” said Donald A. Baer, chief executive of Burson-Marsteller and formerly chief speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. “There’s this effort to define a new growth and share agenda — growth but not only growth alone, and sharing the growth but not just sharing the wealth.” He said Obama’s college and broadband access are examples of proposals that could add to growth and give poor and middle-class people the tools to increase their share in it.
+
+But Obama has to balance his rhetoric — between optimism and caution — by talking up the strong recovery while acknowledging that wage growth remains weak.
+
+“There’s always been a tension between things are in fact getting better and people are not feeling great,” said Wade Randlett, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and major Democratic donor. “One is economic fact, and the other is polling, which always catches up over time.”
+
+Now the president is so comfortable with the idea of talking up the economic recovery that his advisers have branded it — “America’s resurgence” — and made it a regular talking point in Obama’s stump speeches and weekly radio addresses. And it is likely to be a centerpiece of the State of the Union address.
+
+In bragging about performance, Obama administration officials point to factors including the best streak of job growth since the 1990s, a recovery in the housing market and healthier balance sheets for households, companies and the federal government. And they have contrasted that performance with the anemic economies of Europe and Japan as evidence that the United States has regained its global economic dominance in what Obama has called a “breakthrough year for America.”
+
+But wages have been a stubborn reminder of the recovery’s shortcomings. In November, average hourly private-sector nominal wages inched up 6 cents, but in December, they fell 5 cents. After adjusting for inflation, wages for the entire year crawled up 0.7 percent, a modest amount in an economic recovery. It is a point that has been featured prominently in comments by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has emerged as a leader of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing.
+
+“I’m feeling better about the economy, but I don’t think we have in place a set of policies that will assure that this recovery will be either sustained or fully inclusive,” said Lawrence H. Summers, a former top adviser to Obama, former Treasury secretary and now a professor at Harvard University. “That’s why I think more needs to be done.”
+
+The White House typically aims its messages directly at the middle class, but, partly in response to Warren, Obama administration officials are more comfortable talking about how some of its proposals benefit poorer Americans.
+
+“We’re on offense on minimum wage and the environment,” Randlett said. “That’s the kind you only do when you have the leash of good economics.”",REAL
+4623,See Which 2016 Candidates Best Align With Your Views,"There are just days left until Americans head to the polls to cast their ballots on Election Day.
+
+While the most prominent battle is between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the presidential race, key congressional races are happening around the country, too.
+
+This tool from Societly — an independent, nonpartisan organization — can help you figure out which candidate best aligns with your personal views, values and priorities.
+
+Check it out below:",REAL
+2080,"Global warming worsened the California drought, scientists say","California’s drought was spawned by natural weather variations that have bedeviled the West throughout recorded history.
+
+But a new study released Thursday says human-caused global warming is worsening the natural phenomenon. The study by Columbia University’s Earth Institute isn’t the first to say warming has played a key role in fueling California’s dry conditions,  but it’s the first to measure its impact, calculating that it increased the problem by as much as 25 percent.
+
+Natural weather patterns that push away atmospheric moisture that carries rain are normal for the state. But warming adds to the resulting dryness and heat. A small amount of moisture stored in plants and the soil evaporates into the drier atmosphere.
+
+“A lot of people think that the amount of rain that falls out the sky is the only thing that matters,” said Park Williams, a bio-climatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who was the study’s lead author. “But warming changes the baseline amount of water that’s available to us, because it sends water back into the sky.”
+
+[As water runs dry, Californians brace for a new way of life]
+
+Lightning strikes on parched earth are igniting wildfires all over the state. There are so many blazes that firefighters from across the world are rushing to help put them out.
+
+In the Central Valley, the land is so dry that  farmers are drilling deep into the soil to extract groundwater to irrigate crops. The drilling and pumping are drawing down aquifers that serve as a sort of liquid bank that the state can rely on when rivers and reservoirs aren’t replenished by rain and snow because of drought.
+
+Farmers have been the targets of critics who say they take too much water, but irrigation actually has environmental benefits, Williams said. It provides moisture that cools the air, offsetting rising heat. But there’s a drawback. When too much is drained, the state loses its artificial moisture, making the air even hotter.
+
+The current drought is the most severe on record, state officials say, and 2014 was the hottest year in state history. Snowpack levels that recharged aquifers was near zero in the Sierra-Nevada and there’s little rainfall. As the water supply in dozens of metropolitan reservoirs drops to historic lows, Californians are hoping that a giant El Niño weather pattern forming in the Pacific Ocean will deluge the state with rain next winter.
+
+But even a large seasonal gusher would only delay the inevitable — a future of longer and more frequent droughts in California, numerous researchers have said.
+
+In February, researchers at NASA and Cornell and Columbia universities predicted that California and the Southwest would slip into a 30-year megadrought by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed.
+
+A month later, researchers at Stanford University said Californians by then will be well accustomed to drought. They used historical data to predict that average temperature increases would continue, quickly evaporating average precipitation that will remain steady and increasing the likelihood of prolonged dryness.
+
+Scientists have been reluctant to link the state’s drought to global warming, saying there was not enough data to support such a conclusion. But the current study is part of a growing body of evidence that’s changing the minds of researchers.
+
+[A megadrought will grip the Southwest in coming decades, scientists say]
+
+Williams said his team read all the studies and sought to answer whether or not global warming was having an immediate impact. “We didn’t look at the future at all. This is a study about now,” he said.
+
+They analyzed month-to-month climate data between 1901 and 2014 to find fluctuations in precipitation, wind, temperature and humidity. The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, said average temperatures in California have increased by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over 113 years. And, starting in the 1960s, heat increased with the introduction of more greenhouse gases from automobiles and other sources.
+
+Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Earth Observatory; John T. Abatzoglou, an associate professor at the University of Idaho; and Benjamin I. Cook, a research scientist for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, were co-authors of the study.
+
+“When greenhouse gases accumulate, it’s like a bully showing up at your door to demand that you give it more and more every year,” Williams said. In California, that meant more moisture, evaporating from rain and ground water sprayed on crops in farming regions such as the Central Valley.
+
+After a century, the effects of warming are becoming more noticeable in the current drought. “The current drought would be bad without the bully,” Williams said, referring to global warming. With it, the problem can become catastrophic.
+
+Williams said the state, which only loosely regulates the withdrawal of groundwater by farms and other sources of agriculture, should act more aggressively in policing its use, attaching higher fees for removing it, and fines for overdoing it. State officials who’ve been diligent on capping greenhouse gas emissions might consider tougher regulations to avoid more severe drought.
+
+Noah Diffenbaugh, author of the Stanford study, called the Earth Institute study “a step forward,” saying it was based on firm data showing “that temperature makes it harder for drought to break, and increases the long-term risk.”
+
+Amir AghaKouchak, a hydrology professor at the University of California at Irvine who said in June that science did not support connecting the drought to warming, said the report’s results show that human influences are having an effect.
+
+With a stunning 7 million acres burned so far, the U.S. wildfire situation is looking dire
+
+Power companies may have found a new way to crack into the solar business
+
+For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here.",REAL
+10083,Koch Brothers Helped Incite the Impending Bloodbath Among Republicans,"By Rmuse   7:57 pm ""If the party doesn’t learn lessons and change based on what’s gone on for the last year and a half, I think it’s going to be just catastroph[ic].""   *The following is an opinion column by R Muse* 
+It may be the understatement of the year to say the Republican Party is on the verge of a full-on civil war, and it may be obvious to many Americans that the blame for the inter-party discord is its standard bearer Donald J. Trump. However much Trump’s candidacy has contributed to the tensions between establishment types terrified of Trump’s reckless disregard for the longevity of the party and rebellion-minded Trump supporters, the real instigators are the Koch brothers. 
+Although the oil magnates were never on the Trump bandwagon, they are responsible for the Trump loyalists within the GOP who were part of the teabagger movement intent on disrupting the nation’s political system and indeed, the workings of government itself. The tea party caucus, an extremist sect that succeeded in chasing former House Speaker John A. Boehner out of Congress, morphed into the inaptly- named Freedom caucus that has embraced Trump are set to set fire to the party establishment and it isn’t solely to put current Speaker Paul Ryan out of a job, although that is high on the Trump supporters’ to-do list. 
+As noted in Wednesday’s New York Times, “ Mr. Trump’s supporters said they were determined to harness the anti-establishment energy that Mr. Trump had catalyzed and to refocus it on the Republican leadership in Congress — a target many of them seem…eager to take down .” 
+The right-wing extremist that actually “ took down ” former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, conservative extremist and House Freedom Caucus member David Brat, issued a warning to establishment Republicans: 
+“ There’s a huge chunk of people who want to see a fight taken to D.C. Leadership comes and smacks our guy? That’s where you’re going to put down a marker? Really? And the American people are just scratching their head saying, ‘Really? That’s rich .’” 
+Brat has been a thorn in the establishment’s side since Paul Ryan became Speaker and he joins a dangerous number of “ real conservatives ” who cannot understand or comport with Ryan and establishment leaders who dared criticize Trump instead of using their majority advantage to go after Hillary Clinton. 
+Donald Trump and a few of his “ senior aides ” are prodding extremist conservatives to revolt against the establishment leadership after the election for not defending Trump. In fact, besides assailing Ryan for not sticking by Trump, it is reported that Trump said privately that Ryan should be made to pay a heavy price for disloyalty to the Trump candidacy. And, during an interview with Reuters he complained that “ The people are very angry with the leadership of this party, because this is an election that we will win, 100 percent, if we had support from the top .” Win or lose, there is going to be a major blood-letting after the election and the establishment, although powerful, may face a Herculean task to save the party. 
+This impending conflict within the GOP has been brewing longer than Donald Trump has been a candidate and it may be why he brought on an experienced anti-establishment devotee to run his campaign. The chairman of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon, had made it one of his primary goals to get Paul Ryan out as House Speaker because he is not a “true conservative” intent on tearing government down to restructure it into an uber-conservative paradise. And “uber-conservative” is just a different way of saying a “ non-government ” according to the Koch brothers’ vision of American libertarianism. Don’t believe it? 
+Two groups closely aligned with the Koch brothers, Heritage Action for America and FreedomWorks , have been pushing Republicans as a Party to adopt more extremist positions and see the civil war as a stellar opportunity to have greater influence over the party’s decisions; something establishment types are resisting. 
+Over the past few days, leaders of both Koch groups joined extremist conservatives in calling to delay a vote on selecting a candidate to be the next, or new, speaker of the House; something typically occurring directly after the general election in November regardless the outcome. 
+According to the chief executive of Heritage Action, Michael Needham, there is going to be Hell to pay for establishment Republicans if they don’t bend to the will of the extremist wing created by the Kochs and heavily courted by Donald Trump. Mr. Needham said, 
+“ If the party doesn’t learn lessons and change based on what’s gone on for the last year and a half, I think it’s going to be just catastrophe .” 
+Another conservative extremist, House Freedom Caucus member and ardent Donald Trump supporter echoed Needham’s sentiment and said, “ You can’t ignore what millions and millions of people have expressed in this election cycle. ” 
+The dilemma for Republicans after the election, no matter the outcome, is maintaining a semblance of stability as a political party. That doesn’t seem likely because if Trump loses, big or small, the extremists will unleash whatever level of Hell they can muster on the establishment for daring to criticize any of Trump’s more outrageous and dangerous comments on the stump. If Trump wins, the extremists will be emboldened to purge the party of any disloyal establishment types and it appears that no matter what happens on November 8, it will not be the end of hostilities among Republicans. 
+The Republican Party establishment is in for a reckoning with an extremist wing that was once content threatening the full faith and credit of the United States or shutting down the government as a show of anger. After four years of internal bickering over what it means to be a true conservative, and the past year-and-a-half of incitement by Donald Trump, the Republican Party faces a serious threat to its long-term survival. It is a threat that began about six years ago when the Koch brothers ushered in an age of extremist conservatives that Donald Trump took advantage of to seize control of the Republican Party.",FAKE
+3792,Arizona cop's body cam captures fatal encounter with suspect,"Newly released video captured by an Arizona police officer’s body camera captures the chilling moment when a deranged suspect drew a gun and fired the bullet that killed the officer last month.
+
+Rookie Flagstaff Police Officer Tyler Stewart’s camera caught the entire, deadly encounter with Robert Smith, whose girlfriend had called police on Dec. 27 to report he had trashed her apartment. The video, released by the police department in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, begins with Stewart getting out of his squad car and ends with Smith pointing the gun at him and firing.
+
+Smith then shot himself dead, and Stewart, who was 24, later died at a hospital.
+
+""Officer Stewart was murdered by Smith without any provocation or warning,"" Sgt. Margaret Bentzen told the Arizona Daily Sun. ""There were no homicidal or suicidal indications from Smith prior to the crime.""
+
+The frightening, 14-minute video comes as the Justice Department is encouraging police departments around the nation to invest in the body cameras following high-profile cases in which police have been criticized, including last August’s police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
+
+Stewart and Smith speak outside Smith's Flagstaff home on Dec. 27 for about three minutes as Smith stands with his hands in his jacket pockets. When Stewart asks him if he has any weapons on him, Smith replies, “No, sir. I'm just cold,” and says he only has “smokes” in his pocket.
+
+Stewart then calmly asks if he can check Smith for weapons. When he reaches toward him, Smith draws a .22-caliber revolver from his right pocket and fires six times at Stewart. Five shots hit Strewart, four in the head and one in the lower back.
+
+One of Smith's roommates told police that Smith had been contemplating suicide, according to police reports.
+
+Stewart had gone to Smith’s girlfriend’s home earlier, but the man who would later kill him was gone. The cop then went to Smith's home, where his roommate said Smith had fled, according to a police report. Records indicate that about an hour later, at 12.30 p.m., Smith called the Flagstaff Police Department and left a message for Stewart, who then went back to Smith’s home where the fatal encounter took place.
+
+“This is an enormous tragedy for our department and the family of our officer,” Flagstaff Police Chief Kevin Treadway told AZ Central. “We are a very close-knit organization, and know that all members of the Flagstaff Police Department are grieving at this time.”
+
+Release of the frightening footage raises questions about balancing the public's right to know against privacy concerns of police officers and their families, according to Levi Bolton Jr., executive director of the 14,000-member Arizona Police Association. On Wednesday, Bolton met with state lawmakers to discuss the cameras and how best to handle disclosure of footage that may show innocent bystanders, undercover police or informants or, as in Stewart's case, the final moments of an officer's life.
+
+""We are currently crafting or looking at legislation that may very well discuss this,"" Bolton told reporters. ""We acknowledge that the public and the media should have access to this information.""
+
+A fund to help Stewart's family has been established and those wishing to donate can do so at any Wells Fargo Bank, according to the Flagstaff Police Department. The account number is 7764473984.",REAL
+2770,Sinjar: Kurds try to retake key Iraqi town from ISIS,"Sinjar, Iraq (CNN) Plumes of smoke blackened the sky above Sinjar as Kurdish forces, backed by intense coalition air support, tried Thursday to take back the northern Iraqi town from ISIS .
+
+The operation includes up to 7,500 Peshmergas -- the Kurdish military force -- who are attacking the city from three sides to take control of supply routes, according to the Kurdish Region Security Council.
+
+CNN senior international correspondent Nick Paton Walsh is with one of the three fronts of fighters who launched their liberation operation early Thursday morning against a backdrop of airstrikes.
+
+The U.S.-backed coalition Operation Inherent Resolve said coalition aircraft have conducted more than 250 airstrikes across northern Iraq in the last month. The strikes have reportedly destroyed ISIS fighting positions, command and control facilities, weapon storage facilities, improvised explosive device factories, and staging areas.
+
+""A pitch-black sky was lit up by a lot of coalition airstrikes following days of bombing. At dawn, a large procession of Peshmerga started snaking their way through Sinjar mountain and behind it,"" Paton Walsh said.
+
+The coalition strikes were pounding the strategic city itself, he said, with four different columns of smoke darkening the horizon above: ""The strikes on Sinjar almost make the sky over it look black. There's a vast amount of air power -- more intense than the fight for Kobani.""
+
+According to a Pentagon spokesman, U.S. troops are in the field calling in airstrikes from positions in Sinjar.
+
+""The Peshmerga forces are carrying this out with, as you said, the support of coalition advisers. There are U.S. personnel. My understanding is there are coalition advisers from other countries as well participating,"" Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told reporters.
+
+He added: ""Most of those folks as I understand it are behind the front lines advising and working directly with Peshmerga commanders. There are some advisers who are on Sinjar mountain assisting in the selection of airstrike targets.""
+
+Late Thursday, the Kurdish Region Security Council released a statement detailing the day's operations. It reported that more than 150 square kilometers (60 square miles) had been retaken from ISIS.
+
+""Peshmerga units will continue from three fronts to set up defensive positions, allowing engineering teams to clear the heavily mined area. Peshmerga forces have already achieved two of three strategic goals, dealing a significant blow to ISIL morals,"" it read, using an alternative acronym for ISIS. ""The final objective -- to enter and clear the city -- will be underway soon.""
+
+Reclaiming Sinjar is one big step toward dividing the ""caliphate"" that ISIS claims it is establishing across the region.
+
+The artery that passes through the town links the Iraqi city of Mosul -- ISIS' prized possession -- with cities it holds in Syria.
+
+Paton Walsh said the highway was a key goal for the Kurdish fighters, who were equipped with vehicles ranging from pickup trucks to armored Humvees.
+
+""One of the targets of this offensive is the highway that runs through Sinjar, known as Route No. 47 to many. Now that's very important, not only of course because of what it does to liberate the population of Sinjar -- those who've not fled ISIS rule having endured it now for over a year -- but also because it is a vital supply route towards Mosul, another key target of any future coalition offensive,"" he said.
+
+About 1.5 million people still live in Mosul, where prices are rising and activists report hunger.
+
+The U.S.-backed coalition said ""Operation Free Sinjar"" was aimed at clearing ISIS from Sinjar and seizing portions of Highway 47.
+
+""By controlling Highway 47, which is used by Da'ish to transport weapons, fighters, illicit oil, and other commodities that fund their operations, the Coalition intends to increase pressure on Da'ish and isolate their components from each other,"" it said in a statement. Da'ish is the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
+
+""This operation will degrade Da'ish's resupply efforts, disrupt funding to the terrorist group's operations, stem the flow of Da'ish fighters into Iraq, and further isolate Mosul from Ar Raqqah,"" said coalition spokesman Col. Christopher C. Garver. The Syrian city of Ar Raqqah, also spelled Raqqa, is ISIS' de facto capital.
+
+By Thursday afternoon, the Kurdish fighters pushing toward Sinjar had taken control of a number of villages near the Iraqi town.
+
+""Along that highway there's one village, Kabara, that's been repeatedly hammered by airstrikes in the past hour or so and a lot of Kurdish forces have managed to move into the main road,"" Paton Walsh said. Tweets by Kurdish fighters showed that almost all the vehicles in the village had been ""burned to a crisp.""
+
+Before the push to retake Sinjar began, Kurdish fighters said they knew it wouldn't be easy.
+
+Peshmerga commanders estimate some 600 ISIS fighters are inside Sinjar, with recent reinforcements boosting the militants' numbers. The Kurdish fighters believe they will encounter hundreds of landmines and booby traps.
+
+Paton Walsh said it was unclear how ISIS would respond to the offensive.
+
+""As you've seen in the past, sometimes ISIS have decided that certain fights are not worth them staying for the long haul, and I think there is a certain amount of manpower and mass here -- and also coalition air power, which we heard from the top of Mount Sinjar, during a very dark, cold night yesterday, pound targets consistently around that particular city.""
+
+Paton Walsh said there had been a ""substantial uptick"" in airstrikes on Sinjar in the days leading up to the launch of the offensive.
+
+Speaking to CNN's Fareed Zakaria, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he's confident Sinjar will fall, but was reluctant to say when.
+
+""But I am convinced that Sinjar will be liberated, as we have liberated Tikrit. And currently the Iraqi forces are moving on Ramadi,"" he said.
+
+""President Obama, at the very beginning, said we're going to degrade and defeat ISIL. We're going to stabilize the countries in the region -- Jordan, Lebanon, work with Turkey -- and we are going to seek a political settlement,"" he said. ""That is exactly the strategy today and it is working -- to a degree -- not as fast as we would like, perhaps, but we are making gains.""
+
+""I think the issue will be for ISIS, given the nature of the offensive -- from three different directions -- quite what their best strategy is: to sit here and try and symbolically hold it as long as they can, or pull out,"" Paton Walsh said.
+
+""ISIS of course may also be feeling pressure on other fronts. There's been a lot of talk about the possibility of a move against Ramadi for the past few months.
+
+""We've not seen any evidence of that at this particular stage but there is a genuine feeling that maybe the coalition -- after months of paralysis, months of calm -- might also slowly be beginning to get some kind of harmony or synchronicity here in terms of moving on separate fronts against ISIS and perhaps stretching what resources they have a little bit thinner.""
+
+A coalition spokesman in Baghdad told reporters later Thursday that Iraqi security forces had begun to encircle Ramadi, with support from coalition air power.
+
+ISIS fighters swept into Ramadi in May, tightening control of Iraq's Anbar province and gaining a base of operations about 110 kilometers (70 miles) away from the capital, Baghdad.
+
+Paton Walsh said the operation to retake Sinjar was important symbolically.
+
+""The Peshmerga here want to show that they can be united with coalition air power, with Western military advisers, who we understand are in their midst here as well, to launch a successful -- and they hope brief -- offensive towards this town, but also strategically, because of what Sinjar could mean in the future, down the line.""
+
+He said the Kurdish fighters appeared optimistic they would take back Sinjar.
+
+""I think the hope amongst the Peshmerga and the coalition is that the level of manpower they have here, their dominance in the skies, means potentially this could be over in days,"" he said. ""But with a town of this size which had tens of thousands living in it before -- which ISIS has had months to prepare for an onslaught against -- this could turn out to be trickier than some are hoping.""
+
+Retired Lt. Col. Rick Francona, a CNN military analyst, agreed that the fight in Sinjar would be slow going.
+
+""They're going to have to slog through this house by house, street by street,"" he said. ""It's going to be very difficult.""
+
+More than a year under ISIS
+
+Since then, Sinjar has become a chaotic jumble of demolished buildings held by ISIS fighters.
+
+""There is no reliable estimate as to how many civilians still live inside of Sinjar,"" Paton Walsh said.
+
+""You can tell how many seem to have fled, from the tents the Yazidis have erected up around Mount Sinjar -- even in this bitter cold -- still enduring a life here, wanting to be near their hometown. But that is the key concern obviously in situations like this. Many will be fearing that the amount of lead-up time has given ISIS adequate ability to ensure the civilian population are in place to assist them in protecting themselves.""
+
+The Peshmerga said they wanted to establish a buffer zone to protect the civilian population, but it was not entirely clear how that would physically work, Paton Walsh said.
+
+With the operation to retake the town looming, some 5,000 Yazidi fighters were mobilized under the command of the Kurdish Peshmerga. Most are farmers; a very few have military experience.
+
+The Yazidis are one of the world's smallest and oldest monotheistic religious minorities. Their religion is considered a pre-Islamic sect that draws from Christianity, Judaism and the ancient monotheistic religion of Zoroastrianism. In ISIS' eyes, they're infidels.
+
+The Yazidis and Kurds have lived side by side for thousands of years and are friendly neighbors.
+
+The Kurds are Sunni Muslims, who have their own unique language and culture. They occupy an autonomous region in northern Iraq, but the Kurdish homeland also covers portions of Iran, Turkey, Armenia and Syria.",REAL
+9076,Sean Hannity SHREDS FBI Director James Comey for Clearing CRIMINAL HILLARY Again – TruthFeed,"Sean Hannity SHREDS FBI Director James Comey for Clearing CRIMINAL HILLARY Again Sean Hannity SHREDS FBI Director James Comey for Clearing CRIMINAL HILLARY Again Politics By Amy Moreno November 7, 2016 
+Sean Hannity reacted to FBI Director James Comey’s press release clearing Hillary of any wrongdoing for storing and passing top secret information on her unsecured (ILLEGAL) server she had stuffed into a coat closet. 
+Clinton shared classified info with her MAID, deleted subpoenaed EVIDENCE with BleachBit, and LIED UNDER OATH. 
+But hey, everything is HUNKY DORY! 
+Sean Hannity weighed on the RIGGED SYSTEM in a series of tweets. If law enforcement or congress ever ask for e mails regarding an investigation, the FBI now says it's OK to delete them with ""Bleach Bit"" 
+— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) November 6, 2016 Also the FBI says it's ok to put Classified ""top secret""""special access program""information on an unsecured server in a bathroom closet!! 
+— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) November 6, 2016 
+If you’re sick of the corruption and the rigged system, VOTE on Tuesday for Donald Trump and let’s #DrainTheSwamp. This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+221,"In the House’s dark hour, Speaker Paul Ryan offers a glimpse of hope","The speaker-elect walked down the center aisle Thursday morning, accepting hugs, kisses, handshakes and applause. Then he did something unexpected: He turned left.
+
+Paul Ryan, the young Wisconsin Republican who in minutes would accept the speaker’s gavel, walked through the Democratic side of the well. He accepted a bear hug from Rep. Gene Green (Tex.) and handshakes from Rep. John Conyers (Mich.) and a half-dozen other African American Democrats. He reached in to greet Rep. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.) in her wheelchair; shook hands with Rep. Sander Levin (Mich.), a frequent critic; and hugged Rep. John Lewis (Ga.), the civil rights icon.
+
+“If you ever pray, pray for each other: Republicans for Democrats and Democrats for Republicans,” Ryan told the House. To laughter, he added: “And I don’t mean pray for a conversion, all right? Pray for a deeper understanding, because when you’re up here, you see it so clearly: Wherever you come from, whatever you believe, we are all in the same boat.”
+
+There was rapt silence when, a moment later, Ryan said: “Let’s be frank. The House is broken. . . . And I am not interested in laying blame. We are not settling scores. We are wiping the slate clean.”
+
+Just about everybody — even, after some hesitation, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) — rose and applauded.
+
+I felt goose bumps watching from the gallery, for a most unfamiliar sense of hope had admitted itself to the bitterly divided chamber. In this dark hour for the House, there was a tantalizing glimpse that the institution, which has strayed so far from what the Founders created, could heal itself. Only an ingénue would believe all will be different now. But only the most hardened cynic would dismiss the possibility of what Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), in her speech nominating Ryan, called a “fresh start.”
+
+For a day, the ideological freak show was shut down. Only nine Republicans voted against Ryan, a far more unified showing than in January, when 25 opposed John Boehner. For the moment, the Republican speaker was overtly courting Democrats. And for once, Democrats and Republicans were rising in unison to applaud.
+
+“How reassuring it would be,” Ryan told his colleagues, “if we actually fixed the tax code, put patients in charge of their health care, grew our economy, strengthened our military, lifted people out of poverty and paid down our debt.”
+
+Pelosi shrugged and looked around. Finding nothing objectionable in what Ryan had said, she rose and joined in the applause.
+
+It may not be long before Ryan winds up in the same position Boehner was for five years: forced to bring up pointless abortion bills and Obamacare repeals and otherwise placating hard-liners.
+
+But he may be the only one who has a shot at repairing the chamber, because of his youth (he’s 45), his renown (Mitt Romney, on whose ticket Ryan ran in 2012, watched the proceedings as Ryan’s guest in the speaker’s box) and his popularity.
+
+Pelosi, handing the gavel to Ryan, offered “the hand of friendship” from Democrats, and said: “This is the speaker’s house.” She corrected herself: “This is the people’s house.” But her misstatement was apt: For now, at least, this is Paul Ryan’s house.
+
+Ryan benefits from a big parting gift from Boehner, who in his final days infuriated conservatives one last time by negotiating a bipartisan deal that will postpone budget and debt-limit fights until 2017. The outgoing speaker waved a box of tissues to his chuckling colleagues before his farewell speech, and he dabbed his eyes as he pleaded for reason. “Yes, freedom makes all things possible,” he said, “but patience is what makes all things real.”
+
+Boehner was not a great speaker — he was often paralyzed by the right — but he is a good man. His parting boasts about achievements were dubious, but the emotion was real. “I describe my life as a chase for the American Dream,” he said, his voice breaking.
+
+The departing speaker was still wiping his eyes when, standing in the back of the chamber, he heard Pelosi celebrate him as “the personification of the American Dream,” and Ryan accurately call him “a man of character.”
+
+“Now I know how he felt,” Ryan said, confiding that the weight of the office makes him feel that “the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.” He suggested his colleagues should feel the weight of their offices, too.
+
+“At bottom,” the speaker said, “we vindicate a way of life. We show by our work that free people can govern themselves.”
+
+That proposition is now seriously in question. Let’s all — Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives — pray for Ryan’s success in defending it.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+2766,Iraqi forces appear close to retaking Ramadi from Islamic State,"Government forces appeared close to capturing the capital of Iraq’s largest province from the Islamic State on Monday, dealing a potentially significant blow to the militant group as it loses territory in both Iraq and Syria.
+
+Soldiers and counterterrorism troops stormed into a sprawling government facility in Ramadi, driving the militants out of the area and effectively ending their seven-month occupation of the city, Iraqi officials said.
+
+Television images showed the troops celebrating after their advance, which was aided by airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition, by raising the Iraqi flag over the compound and slaughtering sheep inside it.
+
+The compound was more symbolic than strategic, but its change of hands appeared to be the decisive blow to the militant group’s hold on the city. Now, government forces appear poised to press their offensive: Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, in a statement congratulating his forces for “defeating” the Islamic State in Ramadi, vowed to take the fight to the group in the country’s second-largest city.
+
+“We are coming to liberate Mosul,” Abadi said.
+
+The Islamic State shocked Iraqis in May when it captured Ramadi, capital of Anbar province. Losing the city would represent one of the most dramatic setbacks suffered by the group since its lightning assault across Iraq in June 2014.
+
+“Daesh are running away now, and all the city is under our control,” said Maj. Gen. Hadi Rzaig, head of the Anbar police force. Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL.
+
+Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter congratulated the Iraqi government on its progress in Ramadi but cautioned that the fight against the Islamic State “is far from over.”
+
+The operation to retake Ramadi has produced intense fighting and caused vast destruction in the city, which had a population of more than a million before the Islamic State takeover. It is unclear how many Iraqi troops and civilians have been killed in the battles, which involved fending off the militant group’s waves of suicide bombers.
+
+The governor of Anbar province, Sohaib al-Rawi, estimated that 1,000 Islamic State militants had been killed during months of grinding assaults to retake Ramadi. He called the capture of the government compound “a victory.”
+
+Rebuilding Ramadi, if it can be fully secured by the government, will be no easy task.
+
+Suspicion of Iraq’s Shiite-
+
+dominated government runs high in the Sunni city, whose residents felt abandoned by officials in Baghdad as Islamic State militants mounted their assault in May. Lacking support from the government, Ramadi residents formed community defenses and even purchased their own weapons to defend the city. Islamic State militants killed scores of residents and exacted other forms of retribution on people who were associated with the government, including home demolitions.
+
+But among the Iraqi forces in Ramadi on Monday, the mood was celebratory. Speaking to Iraqi television, Gen. Talib Shigati, a senior commander, thanked his troops and expressed confidence in their abilities.
+
+[Iraqi armed forces see chance for redemption as they close in on Ramadi]
+
+The capture of Ramadi would mark the first time that Iraqi armed forces have seized a city from the Islamic State without the aid of the country’s powerful Shiite militias, which did not participate in the operation because of concerns about sectarian tensions with the city’s mostly Sunni inhabitants.
+
+Lt. Gen Abdulghani al-Assadi, a commander of a counterterrorism unit in the city, said that seizing control of the sprawling compound — which contains provincial and municipal government offices — gave his forces the decisive upper hand. It prompted most of the militants in Ramadi to flee, although he warned that some neighborhoods had “pockets” of apparent Islamic State militants that still had to be confronted.
+
+“We are clearing out the city of booby traps and bombs, but the remaining Daesh fighters are in retreat,” Assadi said, describing the operation as “a historic moment for the Iraqi people and for the Iraqi armed forces.”
+
+The push into Ramadi, about 80 miles west of the capital, Baghdad, underscores the flagging battlefield momentum of the Islamic State. The group has been losing control of territory in Iraq and Syria recently to U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab opponents.
+
+Army Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the chief of U.S. Central Command, congratulated Iraqi forces on securing the government complex in Ramadi, calling it “an important operational achievement.” He stopped short of calling it a strategic success, however, perhaps a nod to the tenuous security situation that remains in the city.
+
+Col. Steve Warren, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said in a different statement that the U.S.-led coalition carried out more than 630 airstrikes to help Iraqi forces advance on Ramadi. Those forces also received help in clearing ­improvised explosive devices and other bombs that the Islamic State deployed against coalition-aligned forces, he said.
+
+Retired Marine Gen. John R. Allen, who served as President Obama’s special envoy to the international coalition against the militants until October, said the success in Ramadi is best viewed not in isolation but as a part of broader regional efforts that have led to Iraqi forces taking back Tikrit, Baiji and other areas from the militants in the past few months. But he added that the victory in recovering Ramadi could be seen as both highly symbolic and physical in Iraq, considering how badly the Islamic State wanted to keep control of it.
+
+Allen predicted that an operation to take back Mosul could begin in months but said it is dependent on what Abadi, the prime minister, wants to do. Obama has committed Apache helicopters and more Special Operations troops to the war, but their use must be balanced against concerns the Iraqis have about not overly “Americanizing” the war, Allen said.
+
+“While Ramadi took a long time to pull off,” Allen said, “I think the Iraqis will come out of this with a greater sense of their capabilities and improved morale. The Iraqis will have to take stock of the state of their security forces as they emerge from Ramadi in terms of their casualties and what their replacement requirements will be, as well as their equipment and materiel losses.”
+
+Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Monday that liberating Ramadi’s city center was a “major milestone” in the fight against the Islamic State, a significant achievement for Iraqi forces and a tribute to the effort of coalition forces who have assisted them. But he cautioned that much work remains to be done.
+
+“The black flags of ISIL still fly over Mosul, Raqqa and other key parts of Iraq and Syria,” McCain said in a statement. “This threat is also metastasizing across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. And it now poses a more direct threat than ever to our homeland and that of our allies, as we have seen in recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Paris, Beirut, Ankara and the downing of the Russian airliner over Sinai.”
+
+McCain added that U.S. commanders estimate that Mosul will not be retaken by the end of next year, and it is unlikely that a local force will emerge in the foreseeable future to seize the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto Islamic State capital. He has frequently called in the past for more U.S. involvement, and did so again Monday.
+
+“If our goal truly is to destroy ISIL in the near future, rather than kick the can down the road for others to deal with, the United States must play a far more active role than we are now, especially in supporting local Sunni Arab forces to take the fight to ISIL themselves,” McCain said.
+
+Naylor reported from Istanbul. Brian Murphy and Dan Lamothe in Washington contributed to this report.
+
+Inside the media machine of the Islamic State
+
+Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
+7266,THIS Is What It Means If You Have Two Dimples On Your Back,"posted by Eddie Whether you have back dimples, or not, you have to admit that they are quite an interesting characteristic. These back dimples are also called the ‘dimples of Venus’, and are more commonly found on women. Theses dimples of Venus, officially named Lateral Lumbar indentations, are caused by ligaments pulling under the skin of your back and creating indentations. One of the most intriguing things about this trait is that it can reveal certain things about your health and even yourself. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, there is some research that claims women with these back dimples can reach climax more easily during intimate activities. There isn’t a lot of scientific evidence that supports the claim, but it is explained by the unique shape and placement of your pelvis and your backbone. The way your muscles and bones are positioned in your body can help improve circulation, which could increase your chances of a release. While there needs to be more research done before any of these claims can be confirmed, at this moment there seem to be no possible risks or health problems associated with having these back dimples. Additionally, back dimples come in all different shapes and sizes. Their appearance varies greatly from person to person depending on their weight, body shape, and athletic ability. It is also unlikely for men to have these back dimples. However, if you do have back dimples, they can be enhanced by doing certain exercises focused on engaging your lower back and core muscles, which will be good for the overall health of your body, and perfect for making your back dimples more noticeable. You could even get piercings on each of them if you’re really wanting to show them off. source:",FAKE
+4622,Clinton campaign blasts James Comey over 'jaw-dropping' double standards at FBI,"The Clinton campaign blasted the FBI director, James Comey, for “jaw-dropping” double standards on Monday after claims that he had sought to withhold evidence of Russian support for Donald Trump for fear of influencing next week’s US election.
+
+In a sharp escalation of their unprecedented war of words with federal law enforcement authorities, Clinton’s key aides contrasted this apparent caution with Comey’s controversial decision to release new details of its investigation into Clinton’s private email server to lawmakers on Friday.
+
+“It is impossible to view this as anything less than a blatant double standard,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, told reporters, claiming the decision “defied all logic”, especially as other intelligence agencies had favoured disclosure of suspected Russian involvement.
+
+“Through these two decisions he shows he favours acting alone and without consulting … these are not the hallmarks of a responsible investigation,” added Mook.
+
+Both CNBC and the Huffington Post have reported that Comey privately urged against naming Russia for allegedly meddling in the election and hacking Democratic email accounts.
+
+Though this advice has not been confirmed officially, it tallies with the fact the FBI’s name did not appear on a list of US intelligence agencies supporting the allegations.
+
+
+
+“A foreign power was trying to undermine the election. He believed it to be true but was against putting it out before the election,” one former official told CNBC. Comey’s position, this official reportedly said, was: “If it is said, it shouldn’t come from the FBI, which as you’ll recall it did not.”
+
+
+
+The Clinton campaign called on Comey to “immediately explain this incongruence”.
+
+“He has set the standard for narrating a play-by-play,” added spokesman Brian Fallon. “If that is his way of handling things, he needs to take the same approach to the Trump campaign.”
+
+On Monday night, NBC News reported that the FBI was conducting a preliminary inquiry into former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business ties to Russia, though it was not yet a criminal investigation. Manafort called the report “an outrageous smear being driven by Harry Reid and the Clinton campaign”.
+
+Earlier the White House highlighted concerns over the FBI director’s decision to announce that the bureau was examining whether newly discovered emails may be relevant to its investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server.
+
+
+
+Press secretary Josh Earnest was careful to say that Comey is regarded by Barack Obama as a man of integrity and principle. But he also noted the importance of “longstanding tradition and practice and norms” and warned of the “risk” of communicating with Congress.
+
+Comey has faced a fierce backlash for going public with the new FBI investigation just 11 days before a presidential election, reportedly against the advice and guidelines of the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, and other senior figures at the Department of Justice. On Sunday the FBI obtained a search warrant to begin reviewing the emails, reportedly numbering 650,000 and found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
+
+On Monday, a spokesman for the Office of Special Counsel indicated that the independent federal agency may be investigating Comey over an alleged violation of the Hatch Act, which guards against federal officials seeking to influence an election.
+
+An emboldened Trump has described the revelation as “bigger than Watergate”, but there is little initial evidence the news has upended the presidential race. A Morning Consult/Politico poll carried out after the announcement put Clinton three points ahead, while a CBS/YouGov survey of likely voters in 13 battleground states showed that only 1% of Clinton supporters were less likely to vote for her as a consequence.
+
+Trump claimed on Monday that the FBI had stumbled across a digital “mother lode” and predicted they would discover missing work-related emails that had been deleted from Clinton’s computers.
+
+“Six hundred and fifty thousand [emails]? … I think you are going to find the 33,000 that are missing,” he told supporters in Michigan. “I think we hit the mother lode, as they say in the mining industry.”
+
+Trump urged Comey to resist political pressure. “He’s gotta hang tough because a lot of people think he did the wrong thing, but he did the right thing,” he told the Grand Rapids rally. “I was not his fan but what he did he brought back his reputation.”
+
+“It took guts for Director Comey to do what he did,” he added, to chants of “lock her up” from the crowd.
+
+Trump has seized on signs of momentum to push into once-safe Democratic territory in the industrial midwest. He was also due to speak in Warren in Michigan on Monday before appearing with running mate Mike Pence in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Tuesday.
+
+Until his polling gap began to narrow again last week, Trump had been forced back to a dwindling number of swing states, while Clinton eyed Republican territory in Utah, Arizona and Georgia. Renewed optimism among Republicans has created an unusually vast national battleground, particularly as Trump’s economic populism scrambles traditional demographic dividing lines.
+
+Michigan and Wisconsin have both been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs and were the scene of surprise defeats for Clinton in the Democratic primary, when large numbers of blue-collar workers favoured Bernie Sanders. Signs of Democratic nervousness in Wisconsin became apparent last week when the Clinton campaign suddenly announced an advertising blitz. Sanders has been dispatched to help campaign for Clinton in the state on Wednesday.
+
+The impact of early voting may also be forcing Trump to look further afield. States such as a North Carolina have seen heavy early turnout among Democrats and may be relatively immune from any late swing away from Clinton.
+
+If he cannot win North Carolina but picks up Florida and Ohio, Trump’s best hope of pulling off a shock victory will rely on either rustbelt states like Michigan and Wisconsin or, in the north-east, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Maine.
+
+Clinton is redoubling her efforts. Two stops on Monday in Ohio were to be followed by three in Florida on Tuesday and another swing to North Carolina later in the week.
+
+“Most people have decided quite a long time ago what they think about all this,” she told a rally in Ohio on Monday. “Now what people are focused upon is choosing the next president and commander-in-chief.”
+
+“I am sure a lot of you may be asking what this email business is about and why in the world the FBI would decide to jump into an election without any evidence and it’s a good a question,” she said, to boos from a young crowd at Kent State University. “By all mean they should look at [the emails] and I am sure they will reach the same conclusion as when they looked at my emails: there is no case.”
+
+Meanwhile, Clinton suffered another blow from a separate source: the ongoing WikiLeaks release of emails from her campaign chairman, John Podesta. The latest batch appeared to show that Donna Brazile, the interim head of the Democratic National Committee and a CNN contributor, gave Clinton a heads up about a likely debate question the day before she was due to take on Sanders in a primary debate.
+
+CNN spokeswoman Lauren Pratapas said: “CNN never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate.”
+
+Brazile has subsequently announced her resignation from CNN.",REAL
+8124,Crack in Earth’s magnetic shield detected,"Crack in Earth’s magnetic shield detected 11/04/2016 
+DNA INDIA 
+The world’s largest and most sensitive cosmic ray monitor, located in India, has recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays that indicates a crack in the Earth’s magnetic shield, according to scientists. 
+The burst occurred when a giant cloud of plasma ejected from the solar corona struck Earth at a very high speed causing massive compression of the Earth’s magnetosphere and triggering a severe geomagnetic storm. 
+The GRAPES-3 muon telescope located at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research’s Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Ooty in Tamil Nadu recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays of about 20 GeV last year lasting for two hours. 
+The burst occurred when a giant cloud of plasma ejected from the solar corona, and moving with a speed of about 2.5 million kilometres per hour struck our planet, causing a severe compression of Earth’s magnetosphere from 11 to 4 times the radius of Earth. 
+It triggered a severe geomagnetic storm that generated aurora borealis and radio signal blackouts in many high latitude countries, according to the study published in the journal Physical Review Letters this week. 
+Earth’s magnetosphere extends over a radius of a million kilometres, which acts as the first line of defence, shielding us from the continuous flow of solar and galactic cosmic rays, thus protecting life on our planet from these high intensity energetic radiations. 
+Numerical simulations performed by the GRAPES-3 researchers, including Pravata K Mohanty, indicate that the Earth’s magnetic shield temporarily cracked due to the occurrence of magnetic reconnection, allowing the lower energy galactic cosmic ray particles to enter our atmosphere. 
+Earth’s magnetic field bent these particles about 180 degree, from the day-side to the night-side of the Earth where it was detected as a burst by the GRAPES-3 muon telescope around mid-night on 22 June 2015. 
+The data was analysed and interpreted through extensive simulation over several weeks by using the 1280-core computing farm that was built in-house by the GRAPES-3 team of physicists and engineers at the Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Ooty. 
+Solar storms can cause major disruption to human civilisation by crippling large electrical power grids, global positioning systems (GPS), satellite operations and communications.",FAKE
+620,Letting Trump and the GOP self-destruct: Hillary and Democrats have the right strategy by laying low,"To be fair, Clinton has been on the ugly end of Republican attacks for decades – a little guardedness is pardonable. But a play-it-safe approach seemed unnecessarily risky against an omnipresent juggernaut like Trump. The Republican nominee’s campaign depends upon free media. In many ways, what Trump says or does with his airtime is irrelevant – the point is to be seen and heard. He can lie and distort with impunity; his supporters don’t care and he dominates headlines all the same.
+
+With that in mind, I suggested Clinton’s plan to lay low and let surrogates do her bidding was a bad idea, and that she ought to steal the spotlight from Trump whenever and wherever she can. The same, I reasoned, was true for Democrats and down-ballot races.
+
+Democrats still shouldn’t take anything for granted, but I no longer believe there’s any reason to compete with Trump for airtime. If we’ve learned anything in the last couple of weeks, it’s that Trump will never morph into a sane, pragmatic candidate. He was never going to conform to political norms, but one assumed he would tone it down a bit as we approached November. Instead, he’s quadruple downed on his racist comments about a Mexican-American judge and, more recently, accused President Obama of being a Muslim Manchurian candidate who may or may not be complicit in the recent terror attacks in Orlando.
+
+Now that Trump is speaking to a general electorate, he’s paying a higher price for his racist drivel. Indeed, the latest NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll finds Hillary Clinton now leading Donald Trump nationally by eight points (49 percent to 41 percent). This gap will grow as Democrats unify and the Republican nominee continues unraveling in public. Even the political press is challenging Trump in ways that appear to have stunted his momentum.
+
+According to a Politico report, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is now encouraging Democratic senate candidates to sit back and watch Trump discredit himself and everyone associated with him, including GOP candidates who’ve endorsed him. It’s a time-tested strategy: When your enemy is imploding, let him. And that’s what Democrats are doing. Calling it a “shock and blah campaign,” Politico reporter Burgess Everett writes: “The blah comes from the Democratic candidates themselves…They’re intentionally playing it safe and boring, figuring their elections will mostly be a referendum on Trump and that animosity toward the real estate magnate will put them over the top in key swing states.” To the extent that Democrats are attacking at all, they’re keeping it simple. Every interview, every question, and every speech returns to a common theme: Look who’s at the top of the Republican ticket? Is this what the GOP stands for? Is this a candidate Republicans are willing to co-sign? “If there was ever a national election,” said Dem. Senator Chuck Schumer, “This is it.” Trump’s campaign is a dumpster fire riding a wave of nativist angst. Why not make every race on the ballot a referendum on him? What works for Democratic senate candidates will also work for Hillary Clinton. There are obvious differences between senate races and a presidential contest, but the general strategy ought to work in both domains. Clinton will have to face the cameras and engage much more than down-ballot candidates. However, if this is who Trump is going to be, then merely looking and sounding like an adult will be enough for Clinton.",REAL
+1656,Dear GOP: Hire me and I’ll give you the debate of your dreams,"I write to you in your capacity as debate negotiator for Republican presidential candidates. I understand you may have an opening for a moderator for your Feb. 26 debate. Please consider this letter my application for the job.
+
+I applaud Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus’s decision to suspend NBC as a debate host because of the “mean” and “gotcha” questions CNBC asked at last week’s debate. I feel passionately that a debate is neither the time nor the place for hard questions, and as debate moderator I will rigorously adhere to gentle and affectionate questioning.
+
+I also share Donald Trump’s outrage that Telemundo, a Spanish-language outlet, would be allowed to co-host the February debate even though a Telemundo journalist had the gall to challenge Trump about the rapists and criminals he says Mexico sends to America. Let me assure you that, as debate moderator, I would not challenge Trump or any other candidate on this or any factual matter. I do not even speak Spanish, a claim that had the enthusiastic concurrence of my high school Spanish teacher, Señora Sopanoff.
+
+Furthermore, I have read your draft letter proposing requirements for future debate moderators, and I wholeheartedly and unreservedly commit to abide by every one of them. Specifically, I pledge to meet the following demands you listed:
+
+● Not to allow the temperature in the room to exceed 67 degrees at any time.
+
+● Not to ask any candidate to raise his/her hand at any time.
+
+● Not to ask yes/no questions.
+
+● Not to engage in any “lightning round” questioning.
+
+● Not to allow any camera angles that show the candidates using notes.
+
+● Not to show an empty lectern if a candidate is late in returning from a bathroom break.
+
+● Not to show any “reaction shots” of audience members or of me, the moderator.
+
+● Not to broadcast any graphics or biographical information without the express pre-approval of the candidates.
+
+Additionally, per your list of requirements, I promise:
+
+● To allow all candidates to make opening and closing statements of at least 30 seconds each.
+
+● To allow the candidates unlimited time to rebut one another whenever their names are mentioned.
+
+● To ask an equal number of questions of each candidate, and to guarantee that each candidate receives an equal amount of response time.
+
+As a further inducement to hire me as your moderator, I will go beyond the above-mentioned requirements cited in your letter. You also posed questions about standards for inclusion in the debate, debate length, use of “gong/buzzer/bell,” debate format, stage design, and the type and size of the audience and clothing worn by audience members.
+
+In order to guarantee that this debate will be the thoroughly enjoyable experience for the candidates that we all want it to be, I plan to allow all 15 candidates to debate on the stage at the same time and not to cut off candidates if they exceed their time limits. At the same time, I pledge to hold the overall debate length to 30 minutes, including opening and closing statements, in order to minimize time for gaffes and unscripted remarks. To avoid unhelpful reactions from the audience, I promise to have no audience. I will pipe in artificial applause of precisely the same pre-agreed length and decibel level for all candidates after all answers.
+
+I will submit my questions in advance for pre-approval by the campaigns. No questions will be asked about women, racial minorities or any other issue that might cast the Republican Party in an unfavorable light. There will be no questions about any candidate’s past statements or actions, including but not limited to: bankruptcies, financial difficulties, missed votes and inconsistencies. Candidates will not be required to perform math or to provide supporting evidence for claims. Candidates will be seated in Barcaloungers. If candidates feel overheated, the moderator will fan them while they answer and provide them with their choice of lemon or cucumber ice water. I will begin each question with the phrase “Mother, may I,” and I will address candidates as “Your Excellency,” “Your Eminence” or another honorific approved by the campaigns.
+
+I hope this application meets with your approval. I believe the format outlined above will, after the CNBC debate debacle, truly Make Republicans Look Great Again and return journalists to their proper role as palace courtiers. I am hopeful that I can convince my colleagues at washingtonpost.com to live-stream the debate. Though I cannot promise you that any network will broadcast the debate, I believe this should not be a major impediment. Under the requirements you proposed, very few people will be watching anyway.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+7534,French privacy row over mass ID database,"November 10, 2016 French privacy row over mass ID database 
+A French state watchdog has called for the suspension of a database that could end up holding the biometric details of 60 million people. The aim of a single “mega-database” is to fight identity fraud and improve efficiency. But, as Paul Kirby explains, there are fears the database could be abused not only by hackers but by state intelligence too, What’s the database for? The single database would not be used in judicial investigations, ministers insist. Rather, it would help tackle identity fraud by comparing one set of digital fingerprints with another. France’s interior ministry wants the Secure Electronic Documents (TES) to collect all the information on an individual held on two separate databases that have details of people’s passports and national ID cards. Only children under 12 would be exempt. It would include an individual’s name, address, marital status, eye colour, weight, photograph and fingerprints. It’s merely an administrative register, argues Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas. Its only legal use would be when data need to be requisitioned.",FAKE
+6878,VIDEO: Cop Crashes Car and Runs Away When More Cops Arrive,"
+An award-winning California state trooper was caught on camera fleeing the scene after crashing his patrol car into a parked vehicle and a utility pole, snapping it in half, on Thursday afternoon at 2:30 p.m.
+When other officers approached and asked him to explain what happened, officer Daniel Kenney refused to get out of the vehicle. With at least three officers surrounding the front end of the car, Kenney reverses and then speeds away past a cameraman across the street.
+Kenney, a state park K-9 officer, is now on paid administrative leave.
+
+Nearly 1,000 homes and business in the area were left without power.
+Officers placed Kenney in handcuffs when he eventually decided to pull over. He was taken to a hospital where it was determined that he was not intoxicated.
+A man inside the parked vehicle which Kenney struck suffered minor injuries and was taken to the hospital, according to Action News Now. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Ryan Banister of The Daily Sheeple . ",FAKE
+1264,Bernie Sanders' American Dream is in Denmark,"Copenhagen, Denmark (CNN) Open a newspaper on any given day here in this small Europe nation known for high taxes, generous government services and its stubbornly happy citizens, and you'll almost certainly find a story about the U.S. presidential election.
+
+The Danes are following the race with an astounding level of enthusiasm and interest in part because Bernie Sanders, one of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination, won't stop talking about them.
+
+Sanders has proudly adopted the label of a ""democratic socialist,"" and he has pointed to Denmark as a model for his vision of an ideal American future.
+
+In Denmark, there is a very different understanding of what ""freedom"" means... they have gone a long way to ending the enormous anxieties that comes with economic insecurity.
+
+At a presidential debate hosted by CNN in October, Sanders brought up Denmark and the surrounding Scandinavian states when asked to describe what ""democratic socialism"" means to him.
+
+""I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway,"" Sanders said, ""and learn what they have accomplished for their working people.""
+
+""We are not Denmark,"" Hillary Clinton responded.
+
+""In Denmark, there is a very different understanding of what 'freedom' means,"" Sanders wrote, arguing the U.S. could learn from the way the Danes have ""gone a long way to ending the enormous anxieties that comes with economic insecurity.""
+
+""Instead of promoting a system which allows a few to have enormous wealth, they have developed a system which guarantees a strong minimal standard of living to all -- including the children, the elderly and the disabled,"" Sanders added.
+
+While the Danes are flattered by all the attention, they want to ensure that the love coming from Sanders doesn't confuse people into thinking they describe themselves ""socialists,"" too. Sanders has clarified that his democratic socialism is not the same as ""socialist"" in the traditional sense of a purely government-controlled economy. But that hasn't stopped Danish leaders from ensuring there is no misconception about their own system.
+
+""I would like to make one thing clear,"" Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said recently in a speech at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. ""Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.""
+
+But it is a market with many differences from the United States. All Danish citizens have access to child care, state-guaranteed medical and parental leave from work, free college tuition in which students receive a paycheck from the government during enrollment, free health care and a generous pension, all of which Sanders supports.
+
+""Free"" is actually the wrong word to describe these services. Danes pay some of the highest taxes in the world, including a 25% tax on all goods and services, a top marginal tax rate hovering near 60%. The top tax rate in the U.S., by comparison, is less than 40%.
+
+But there are aspects to the Danish model that you would never see on Sanders' policy platform. As a small country heavily reliant on trade, Denmark imposes minimal tariffs on foreign goods. Businesses here are only lightly regulated. The corporate tax rate is much lower than in the United States, which has one of the highest in the world. There's not even a minimum wage in Denmark, although most workers are paid high salaries in large part due to the strength of labor unions. And in the past few years, Danish voters elected a right-of-center government, which has been instituting reforms that have put tighter restrictions on access to the long-held safety net.
+
+The recent changes have caught the attention of conservative and libertarian think tanks in North America that rank levels of economic freedom around the world. Over the past few years, studies conducted by the Heritage Foundation, Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute and the Canadian Fraser Institute have ranked Denmark as having actually more economic freedom than the United States.
+
+In terms of pure semantics, few Danish politicians today would characterize themselves as ""socialist""--even a ""democratic socialist""--as Sanders does. The word has largely fallen out of fashion in recent decades.
+
+""When I hear Bernie Sanders talk about himself as a democratic socialist, it's a little bit 1970s,"" said Lars Christensen, a Danish economist known here as an outspoken critic of his homeland's model. ""The major political parties on the center-left and the center-right would oppose many of the proposals of Bernie Sanders on the regulatory side as being too leftist.""
+
+Could the U.S. adopt the Danish model?
+
+As even Sanders has conceded, the differences between the United States and Denmark are striking. In many ways, Denmark's success depends on its small size. The country has a population of just 5.6 million -- about the same as Minnesota's -- and its territory makes up just 16,000 square miles, about half the size of South Carolina. By comparison, the United States has a population of more than 300 million and encompasses 3.8 million square miles.
+
+Unlike the United States' diverse population of immigrants, Denmark is ethnically homogenous -- nearly 90% are of Danish ancestry, according to The Danish Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration -- making political consensus easier than in the United States.
+
+""I think this system is only possible because we essentially are all the same,"" said Christensen. ""Maybe if you wanted to introduce such a scheme in Utah, you could do that. But doing it across the U.S., I find it completely and utterly impossible just for the mere fact that Americans are all so different.""
+
+Danish citizens also seem to have a higher comfort level and trust in government than in the United States. One would be hard-pressed to find a mainstream Danish politician who would agree with Ronald Reagan's axiom that, ""the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.""
+
+While Americans have a deep-seated distrust of government that was imprinted on the nation's soul in the Bill of Rights, the Danish just don't view their government's size as a recipe for tyranny.
+
+""The question is not how much tax you pay or how big your government is, it's whether it works,"" Lidegaard said. ""It's whether you get return on your payment. We pay a lot of taxes, but we get a lot in return.""
+
+The Danish also participate in the democratic process on a scale unheard of in the United States. More than 85% of Danish citizens participated in the nation's general election in 2015; Only 55% of Americans went to the polls in 2012.
+
+Sanders would also probably have concerns with the way Denmark has handled the European migrant crisis.
+
+Fearful that the thousands of refugees pouring in the European Union from Iraq and Syria could threaten their society, the Danish government has gone to great -- and controversial -- lengths to dissuade migrants from settling in their country.
+
+The most problematic move came when the government passed a law that would grant the state the right to seize possessions worth more than the equivalent of about $1,500 from refugees settling in Denmark who seek aid from the government. The law includes a carve-out for items of ""special sentimental value,"" but the critical reaction from human rights groups was swift and punishing.
+
+The law also increases the number of years refugees would have to wait to bring family members into the country and it made it more difficult for them to obtain permanent residency. Its passage comes amid the rise of the right-wing Danish People's Party, which has made combating immigration a chief priority.
+
+""There is an inherent contradiction between a welfare state where all your life you pay taxes to have coverage -- health, social costs, etc. -- and then being in the country as a migrant only part of your life,"" said Lidegaard. ""The problem with the law -- and there is one -- is that it's trying to send a signal: Immigrants in Europe, don't go here. Don't come to Denmark. The signal sent that way is a stupid signal to send. That's the purpose of the law. It's not a practical measure.""
+
+Before the law passed, Denmark's Ministry of Immigration, Integration and Housing published ads in Arab and English-language newspapers in Lebanon, where more than 1 million Syrian refugees live, warning immigrants that Denmark will be an unwelcoming place for them.
+
+The fear, generally, is that the foreign culture brought by the refugees would not align with traditional Danish customs and disrupt the recipe for what makes the welfare state possible.
+
+""There is a limit to how many immigrants we can take in from a different culture who don't speak the language and how fast we can turn them into becoming citizens that are part of society, that are able to function and contribute to the wealth of our society,"" said Lidegaard.""So we have a lot of focus now on how we integrate newcomers. How we turn immigrants into citizens who are part of production, part of taxpaying, part of paying the bill.""
+
+The Danes are watching us
+
+Even though Danes are eager participants in their own elections, the amount of time they spend watching and discussing our elections is a phenomenon to behold.
+
+""American politics is really, really popular in Denmark,"" said Anders Agner Pedersen, a Danish journalist who edits Kongressen, a news outlet that exclusively American politics for a Danish audience. ""It basically is in the news every day.""
+
+Pedersen, who has to stay up all night to watch American presidential debates and state primary returns from Denmark, is swamped with bookings on Danish television and radio programs to explain the election process and analyze the daily horse race. He recently hosted what he thought would be a small salon session to discuss the primaries at a Copenhagen restaurant and was shocked when more than 100 Danes showed up to get their American political fix.
+
+""You guys do quite a good show,"" he said of the American election process.
+
+Sanders isn't the only candidate the Danes are talking about. Donald Trump is a source of constant fascination -- and perhaps even a little terror -- in the Nordic region. In January, when three young children who call themselves the ""USA Freedom Kids"" dressed up in red, white and blue and performed a song-and-dance number about Trump at one of his rallies in Florida, the video skyrocketed throughout Danish social media.
+
+And just this month, Ted Cruz set Danish media aflame when he suggested that Donald Trump was so unhinged he's liable to drop an atom bomb on Denmark. The Danes were bewildered: Why us?
+
+As the campaign marches on with Trump still riding high in the polls, his ongoing success is starting to become a concern here.
+
+""In the beginning I thought it was a joke. Then we realized people were voting for Trump,"" Jonas Pedersen, a medical student at the University of Copenhagen, said.
+
+Another medical student, Helena Boegh, said, ""That some people would actually vote for Donald Trump and in the same country would vote for someone who likes the system we have in Denmark -- that really says something about America.""",REAL
+6451,"Hey Bernie Supporters, Here are 45 Times Hillary Promoted the TPP – TruthFeed","11. July 10, 2012: Remarks With Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh After Their Meeting “So we’re working on expanding it through a far-reaching, new regional trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would lower trade barriers while raising standards on everything from labor conditions to environmental protection to intellectual property. Both of our countries will benefit. And in fact, economists expect that Vietnam would be among the countries under the Trans-Pacific Partnership to benefit the most. And we hope to finalize this agreement by the end of the year.” 12. July 10, 2012: Remarks at American Chamber of Commerce Reception and Commercial Signings “Domestic and international businesses alike continue to face rules that restrict their activities, and that, in turn, deters investment and slows growth. So we are encouraging the Government of Vietnam to keep on the path of economic and administrative reform to open its markets to greater private investment. And through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we’re working with Vietnam and seven other nations to lower trade barriers throughout the region, as we ensure the highest standards for labor, environmental, and intellectual property protections. Vietnam was an early entrant to the TPP, and we’re hoping we can finalize the agreement this year. And the economic analysis is that of all the countries that will be participating — Australia, Canada, Mexico, others — of all the countries participating in the TPP, Vietnam stands to benefit the most. So we’re hoping to really see this agreement finalized and then watch it take off.” 13. July 8, 2012: Remarks With Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba “We also discussed the opportunity to strengthen our economic relationship, and the United States welcomes Japan’s interest in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which we think will connect economies throughout the region, making trade and investment easier, spurring exports, creating jobs. The TPP is just one element of our increased focus on the Asia Pacific, but it is important that we recognize that the Japanese-American relationship is really at the cornerstone of everything we are doing in the Asia Pacific. We are not only treaty allies; we are friends and partners with common interests and shared values.” 14. April 30, 2012: Remarks With Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Philippines Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario, and Philippines Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin After Their Meeting “Finally, we discussed the maturing economic relationship between our countries as well as our shared commitment to enhanced development, trade, and investment. We would like to see the Philippines join the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade community. The foreign secretary raised the Philippines’ interest in seeking passage of the Save our Industries Act, and we have conveyed that message to the United States Congress.” 15. April 12, 2012: Remarks at the White House Conference on Connecting the Americas “Now President Obama and I have said many times that this will be America’s Pacific century, and we are focused on the broader Pacific. But remember, the Pacific runs from the Indian Ocean to the western shores of Latin America. We see this as one large area for our strategic focus. That’s why we’re working with APEC; that’s why we’re creating the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We recognize the mutual benefits of engagement between the Americas and the rest of the Pacific.” 16. April 10, 2012: Forrestal Lecture at the Naval Academy “As part of that same trip last November, the President built momentum for a new far-reaching trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership that we are negotiating with eight other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. This agreement is not just about eliminating barriers to trade, although that is crucial for boosting U.S. exports and creating jobs here at home. It’s also about agreeing on the rules of the road for an integrated Pacific economy that is open, free, transparent, and fair. It will put in place strong protections for workers, the environment, intellectual property, and innovation — all key American values. And it will cover emerging issues such as the connectivity of regional supply chains, the competitive impact of state-owned enterprises, and create trade opportunities for more small-and-medium-sized businesses.” 17. April 21, 2012: Keynote Address At Global Business Conference “Big or small, we’re standing up for an economic system that benefits everyone, like when our Embassy in Manila worked with Filipino authorities on new intellectual property protections or when our negotiators ensure that the new Trans-Pacific Partnership requires that state-owned enterprises compete under the same rules as private companies.” 18. February 1, 2012: Remarks With Singaporean Foreign Minister and Minister for Law K. Shanmugam “This is a very consequential relationship. The multidimensional growth of our relationship with Singapore is an example of the importance that the United States sets on strengthening our engagement in the Asia Pacific. We are working together on a full range of issues, including moving forward on a high-quality trade agreement through the Trans-Pacific Partnership process.” 19. December 19, 2011: Remarks With Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba After Their Meeting “The minister and I also discussed a number of bilateral and regional issues and reviewed the close and ongoing collaboration between Japan and the United States in the aftermath of last March’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis. We discussed Japan’s recent move to pursue consultations on joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations to resolve longstanding trade concerns in order to deepen the economic ties to the benefit of both our countries. I also urged that Japan take decisive steps so that it accedes to The Hague Convention on International Parental Child Abduction and address outstanding cases.” 20. November 18, 2011: Remarks at ASEAN Business and Investment Summit “Now let me describe briefly four ways that we want to work with you: first, by lowering trade barriers; second, by strengthening the investment climate; third, by pursuing commercial diplomacy; and fourth, by supporting entrepreneurs. We’re excited about the innovative trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. That would bring economies from across the Pacific, developed and developing alike, into a single trading community, not only to create more growth, but better growth.” 21. November 16, 2011: Presentation of the Order of Lakandula, Signing of the Partnership for Growth And Joint Press Availability With Philippines Foreign Secretary Albert Del Rosario “Together we hope to deliver an array of benefits to the people, including more foreign investment to create new jobs, a more streamlined court system that can deliver justice and protect local businesses, better services, and more resources to fight poverty. Over time, these steps will better position the Philippines to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which we hope will dramatically increase trade and investment among the peoples of the Pacific.” 22. November 10, 2011: America’s Pacific Century “There is new momentum in our trade agenda with the recent passage of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement and our ongoing work on a binding, high-quality Trans-Pacific Partnership, the so-called TPP. The TPP will bring together economies from across the Pacific, developed and developing alike, into a single 21st century trading community. A rules-based order will also be critical to meeting APEC’s goal of eventually creating a free trade area of the Asia Pacific.” 23. October 14, 2011: Economic Statecraft One of America’s great successes of the past century was to build a strong network of relationships and institutions across the Atlantic — an investment that continues to pay off today. One of our great projects in this century will be to do the same across the Pacific. Our Free Trade Agreement with South Korea, our commitment to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, are clear demonstrations that we are not only a resident military and diplomatic power in Asia, we are a resident economic power and we are there to stay.” 24. September 15, 2011: Celebrating 60 years of the U.S.-Australia Alliance “We are working to encourage trade through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and through APEC, whose leaders the President will be hosting this fall in Hawaii. Together, we are strengthening regional institutions like the East Asia Summit and ASEAN. And as Secretary Panetta will explain, our military relationship is deepening and becoming even more consequential.” 25. July 25, 2011: Remarks on Principles for Prosperity in the Asia-Pacific “That is the spirit behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the so-called TPP, which we hope to outline by the time of APEC in November, because this agreement will bring together economies from across the Pacific—developed and developing alike—into a single trading community.” 26. July 20, 2011: Remarks on India and the United States: A Vision for the 21st Century “The United States is pushing forward on comprehensive trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and our free trade agreement with South Korea. We are also stepping up our commercial diplomacy and pursuing a robust economic agenda at APEC. India, for its part, has concluded or will soon conclude new bilateral economic partnerships with Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, and others. The more our countries trade and invest with each other and with other partners, the more central the Asia Pacific region becomes to global commerce and prosperity, and the more interest we both have in maintaining stability and security. As the stakes grow higher, we should use our shared commitment to make sure that we have maritime security and freedom of navigation. We need to combat piracy together. We have immediate tasks that we must get about determining.” 27. May 17, 2011: Secretary Clinton’s Remarks With New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully “We looked ahead to the East Asia summit where President Obama will participate for the first time, and the United States will send our largest, most senior delegation ever to the Pacific Island Forum in New Zealand later this year. We talked about developments in Fiji, and both New Zealand and the United States agree that the military junta must take steps to return Fiji to democracy. And we agree on the importance of pursuing negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will provide a free trade agreement for nine countries across the region, including both of ours. We’re making steady progress on this. We hope to be able to have the negotiations complete by the time we all meet in Hawaii for APEC toward the end of this year.” 28. May 2, 2011: Remarks With Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd After Their Meeting “And both of us understand the benefits of deeper economic integration and fair trade. Minister Rudd was very influential in helping us to work toward a greater, more relevant involvement in the Pacific-Asian institutions, such as joining the East Asian Summit. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is exploring ways to expand opportunity, is critical, and APEC and ASEAN are two other organizations where we work together.” 29. April 17, 2011: Remarks at the American Chamber of Commerce Breakfast “We will be hosting the 2011 APEC summit in Hawaii later this year. We are pushing to advance economic integration, remove trade barriers, and make sure that our national regulations line up in a way that encourages trade. We are also working hard on the trans-Pacific partnership, a cutting edge regional free trade agreement that would eventually cover an area responsible for over 40 percent of global trade.” 30. March 18, 2011: Remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Latin America “As countries step up on the global stage, they will make essential contributions to helping all of us meet some of those most important challenges. Mexico, for example, made a crucial contribution to the fight against climate change through its remarkable leadership in Cancun last year. Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina in the G-20; Chile and Mexico in the OECD; Chile and Peru in the Trans-Pacific Partnership; and along with Mexico in APEC, these are all helping to build a foundation for balanced global growth, a transparent global economy, and broad-based opportunity. “ 31. March 9, 2011: Remarks at the First Senior Officials Meeting (SOM) for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum “The United States is also making important progress on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will bring together nine APEC economies in a cutting-edge, next generation trade deal, one that aims to eliminate all trade tariffs by 2015 while improving supply change, saving energy, enhancing business practices both through information technology and green technologies. To date, the TPP includes Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Peru, Vietnam and the United States.” 32. January 14, 2011: Inaugural Richard C. Holbrooke Lecture on a Broad Vision of U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century “We are taking steps to ensure that our defense posture reflects the complex and evolving strategic environment in the region and we are working to ratify a free trade agreement with South Korea and pursuing a regional agreement through the Trans-Pacific Partnership to help create new opportunities for American companies and support new jobs here at home. Those goals will be front and center when we host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in Hawaii later this year.” 33: November 7, 2010: Remarks at U.S. Trade Promotion Event “Now, we’ve seen how bilateral trade benefits both sides. Our challenge now is to broaden those benefits. That means we have to look for even more opportunities to increase trade and investment between us. And it means that we work harder to broaden the benefits of trade even beyond our two countries. Australia is an important partner in negotiating the ambitious new multilateral trade deal called the Trans Pacific Partnership. Over time, we hope to deliver a groundbreaking agreement that connects countries as diverse as Peru and Vietnam with America and Australia to create a new free trade zone that can galvanize commerce, competition, and growth across the entire Pacific region.” 34. November 7, 2010: Speech and Townterview with Australian Broadcasting Company “To continue this progress, we are both pressing ahead on something called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It’s an ambitious multilateral free trade agreement that would bring together many more nations of the Pacific Rim. Australia and the United States are helping to lead those negotiations and we’re also working through APEC, which the United States will host in Hawaii in 2011. We see that as a pivotal year to drive progress on internal economic changes that will open more markets and make sure that any growth is more sustainable and inclusive. And finally, we believe that the United States and Australia have been at the forefront of organize the entire region for the future.” 35. November 5, 2010: Christchurch Trade Reception Hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce “We are looking for ways to broaden and deepen our economic ties and build on the strong foundation we already have. And we think that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a very exciting opportunity. This multilateral free trade agreement would bring together nine countries located in the Asia Pacific region — New Zealand and the United States, Australia, Chile, Singapore, Brunei, Peru, Vietnam, and Malaysia. By eliminating most tariffs and other trade barriers, and embracing productive policies on competition, intellectual property, and government procurement, we can spur greater trade and integration not only among the participating countries, but as a spur to the entire region.” 36. November 4, 2010: Remarks With New Zealand Prime Minister John Phillip Key and New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray Stuart McCully ” Well, let me say that we discussed at some length, both the foreign minister and I and then the prime minister and I, the way forward on trade. We are very committed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and New Zealand, again, is playing a leading role. And we want to expedite the negotiations as much as possible. So we are exploring ways that we can try to drive this agenda. I am absolutely convinced that opening up markets in Asia amongst all of us and doing so in a way that creates win-win situations so that people feel that trade is in their interests.” 37. November 3, 2010: Remarks at the Pratt & Whitney Trade Event “That is why the United States is very pleased by Malaysia’s decision to join the negotiations for the Trans Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership. This regional trade agreement will promote shared success by expanding markets and building a level playing field for workers in every country that participates.” 38. November 2, 2010: Remarks with Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman “Finally, we are pleased that Malaysia joined last month’s negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That is a pact that would expand markets and create a level playing field for people in every country that does participate. I know there are tough issues to work out, as there always are with these agreements, but Malaysia’s leadership in this region for greater economic growth is absolutely essential.” 39. November 2, 2010: Secretary Clinton’s Meeting with Kuala Lumpur Embassy Staff and Their Families “And I think we have tremendous opportunities here. But I know when I leave tomorrow, the work to make those opportunities into realities falls to all of you. So I know a lot is expected of you, but we’re going to be doing even more in Malaysia. We have a lot of plans for educational exchanges. We have some very exciting work on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, enhancing trade and investment (inaudible) that will promote closer cooperation.” 40. November 2, 2010: Townterview Hosted by Media Prima in Malaysia “So in our meetings with your government officials and even in my conversation with the prime minister earlier today, we of course talked about our bilateral relationship but we also talked about the role that Malaysia is playing in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a new free trade agreement that will enhance market access, but also working to support Afghanistan and the people there with training and medical services.” 41. October 30, 2010:Remarks With Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Gia Khiem “I n trade, our two countries have already made great progress. Fifteen years ago, our bilateral trade was about $450 million. Last year it was more than $15 billion. And the foreign minister and the prime minister and I talked about how to expand this trade relationship, including through the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The United States, Vietnam, and seven other countries finished a third round of negotiations on the TPP this month and we hope that Vietnam can conclude it in internal process and announce its status as a full member of the partnership soon.” 42. October 28, 2010: America’s Engagement in the Asia-Pacific “We are also pressing ahead with negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an innovative, ambitious multilateral free trade agreement that would bring together nine Pacific Rim countries, including four new free trade partners for the United States, and potentially others in the future. 2011 will be a pivotal year for this agenda. Starting with the Korea Free Trade Agreement, continuing with the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, working together for financial rebalancing at the G-20, and culminating at the APEC Leaders Summit in Hawaii, we have a historic chance to create broad, sustained, and balanced growth across the Asia Pacific and we intend to seize that.” 43. September 8, 2010: Remarks on United States Foreign Policy “On the economic front, we’ve expanded our relationship with APEC, which includes four of America’s top trading partners and receives 60 percent of our exports. We want to realize the benefits from greater economic integration. In order to do that, we have to be willing to play. To this end, we are working to ratify a free trade agreement with South Korea, we’re pursuing a regional agreement with the nations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and we know that that will help create new jobs and opportunities here at home.” 44. July 22, 2010: Remarks With Vietnam Deputy Prime Minister And Foreign Minister Pham Gia Khiem “And I am very much supportive of Vietnam’s participation as a full member in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As Vietnam embarks on labor and other reforms, the American businesses that are investing in Vietnam can provide expertise that will aid Vietnam’s economic and infrastructure development.” 45. January 12, 2010: Remarks on Regional Architecture in Asia: Principles and Priorities “In addition, the United States is engaging in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations as a mechanism for improving linkages among many of the major Asia-Pacific economies. And to build on political progress, we must support efforts to protect human rights and promote open societies.” 
+For once in our lifetime, we the people have an opportunity to elect a President who was NOT chosen by Multinational Corporations, Big Banks, DC Elites, and the Globalist Lapdog Mainstream Media. 
+Please like and share if you are a TRUMP VOTER! ",FAKE
+4820,Campaign 2016 is divisive: What it says for the future,"As the GOP becomes whiter, older, and more religious, Democrats become more diverse, younger, and less religious. The next president faces a daunting challenge bridging that gap.
+
+GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump states that he believes President Obama was born in the United States at a campaign event in Washington, Sept. 16, 2016.
+
+Whoever wins the presidency this Election Day, they will be faced with leading a partisan American electorate increasingly divided by race, religion, and other basic demographic measures.
+
+In many ways the two great parties that govern America are like two icebergs slowly floating farther and farther apart. In their makeup they are less alike than at any time in the past quarter-century, notes a new Pew Research Center study. The distance between them is likely to continue to grow in the years ahead.
+
+“The fundamental demographic changes taking place in the country – an aging population, growing racial and ethnic diversity and rising levels of education – have reshaped both party coalitions,” according to Pew’s new Election 2016 report.
+
+And campaign 2016 isn’t helping the nation get ready to handle the inevitable disagreements that will arise from this division. If anything, it is making partisanship worse.
+
+Donald Trump’s “birther” swap on Friday, in which he dropped the lie that President Obama might have been born in Kenya while asserting – falsely – that Hillary Clinton was the first to make that charge, will almost certainly further inflame African-American voters (among others). Hillary Clinton’s labeling of half of Trump’s voters as a “basket of deplorables” has infuriated some of his supporters, leading them to embrace the tag “Les deplorables” in defiance.
+
+“There is no evidence that the campaign will do anything to reduce the partisan polarization that has blocked progress on vital national problems. On the contrary, it seems likely to deepen the crisis of governance that has hobbled the United States for much too long,” writes William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, in a study of the problems facing the next administration.
+
+Think of the changes affecting the makeup of the parties this way: The Republican Party is becoming whiter, older, and more religious than the country as a whole. The reverse is true for the Democratic Party, which is becoming diverse, younger, and less religious faster than the US population.
+
+Take race. These changes do not mean the GOP is becoming the all-white party. Instead, they mean that the racial makeup of the two parties is becoming more and more dissimilar, as racial minorities disproportionately favor Democrats.
+
+In 2008, whites made up 88 percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning voters in the US, according to Pew’s data. By 2016, that had slipped two percentage points, with whites making up 86 percent of the GOP coalition.
+
+On the other end of the political spectrum, whites made up 64 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners when President Obama was elected in 2008. They are only 57 percent of the Democratic coalition today – a seven percent drop over the period of Obama’s two terms.
+
+The same trend holds for age, with Republicans becoming relatively older; education, with college-educated voters declining as a percentage of the GOP and increasing as a percentage of the Democratic vote; and religion. Fully 29 percent of the Democratic coalition now rates itself as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. The corresponding figure for the GOP is 12 percent.
+
+“Summing up, Democrats are becoming the party of minorities and college-educated whites while Republicans are becoming the party of whites with lower levels of education,” writes William Galston of Brookings.
+
+These groups aren’t just divided by inflammatory, nonsubstantive wedge issues. They have real differences of outlook and interest, Galston notes.
+
+Minorities are more likely than whites to support affirmative action. College-educated voters are perhaps more likely than the non-college-educated to support increased federal aid for education. Religious voters are more likely to oppose abortion. And so on.
+
+Overall, the Democratic coalition is more comfortable with diversity, believes that the present is better than the past, and looks forward to the future with optimism. The Republican coalition sees increasing diversity as a threat, prefers past decades over today, and looks ahead with foreboding.
+
+“These are differences of kind, not degree, and they create a gap that the winner of the 2016 presidential election will find it hard to narrow unless he or she focuses on an agenda of national reconciliation starting on Day 1 of the transition,” according to Galston.",REAL
+6470,Russian experts collecting evidence of anti-govt chemical attack in Aleppo – Defense Ministry,"By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on November 2, 2016 Russian military experts have been dispatched to the site of an alleged chemical attack in a government-held area of Aleppo that killed two Syrian servicemen and injured some 40 civilians. Russia is to probe samples of the substance fired by militants. 2 killed, 37 injured in ‘poisonous substance’ attack on Aleppo – Russian MoD 
+“Militants who have been striving in the past days to break though the Syrian Army’s exterior defense ring of Aleppo at any cost have used toxic substances multiple times,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said Thursday, as cited by RIA Novosti. 
+He added that the analysis of the samples retrieved by the Russian experts in the area will be carried out in Russia at a laboratory accredited by the chemical watchdog OPCW. 
+“Experts of the Russian Defense Ministry are equipped with all the necessary technical means of carrying out an express analysis, filtering and delivering samples to the Russian Federation,”Konashenkov said, adding that those “will be analyzed at the laboratory of chemical-analytical control at the Scientific Center of the Troops of Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense that is accredited by the Organization for the Prohibition of the Chemical Weapons (OPCW).” 
+The spokesman also noted that Russia has not been hitting any targets in Aleppo for 18 days, thus “fully complying with the moratorium on any actions in the area around Aleppo.” 2 killed, 37 injured in ‘poisonous substance’ attack on Aleppo – Russian MoD At least two Syrian military personnel were killed and 37 civilians injured in a terrorist attack that struck the government-controlled areas of Aleppo, in which the militants used toxic substances, Russia’s center for reconciliation in Syria reported. 
+“ Illegal armed groups fired homemade shells fitted with poisonous substances against the Dahiyat Al-Assad and Al-Hamdaniya districts in Aleppo ” on Sunday, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported. 
+The attack was first reported by Syrian media, who said at least 15 people experienced severe breathing problems following the assault. 
+A local doctor told RT that the symptoms among the injured pointed to the use of highly toxic chlorine gas. 
+On Monday, human rights NGO Amnesty International said it was investigating the incident, which it said could amount to “a war crime.” 
+“ What we saw in the videos is symptoms of some kind of an alleged chemical attack, ” Amnesty International Syria researcher Diana Semaan told RT. The organization blamed the armed Syrian opposition for the attack on western Aleppo. 
+READ MORE: ‘End unlawful attacks in western Aleppo’ – Amnesty Intl to armed opposition groups in Syria 
+The alleged chemical attack was launched amid a major offensive by the militants against government forces in Aleppo. Rebels from various groups are taking part in the assault, including those fighting under the FSA (Free Syrian Army) banner and Islamist militants. 
+In the course of 24 hours, the rebels conducted 58 shelling attacks on government-controlled regions in Syria. Aleppo has come under fire 29 times, according to the reconciliation center data. Related Posts:",FAKE
+6523,The Path to Total Dictatorship: America's Shadow Government and Its Silent Coup," The Path to Total Dictatorship: America's Shadow Government and Its Silent Coup
+By John W. Whitehead Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people . Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state . The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government . This group is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.”
+— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech
+ Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law.
+Say hello to America’s shadow government.
+A corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country, this shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.
+No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government— also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group” —may well have played a part in who will win the White House this year.
+To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.
+The first shadow government, referred to as COG or Continuity of Government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.” COG is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law.
+Yet it is the second shadow government —also referred to as the Deep State—that poses the greater threat to freedom right now. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government is the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our government.
+The Deep State, which “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.
+So who or what is the Deep State?
+It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal law enforcement agencies in order to establish themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice. It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.” It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “ a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies ”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees.
+It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.
+These are the key players that drive the shadow government.
+This is the hidden face of the American police state that will continue long past Election Day.
+Just consider some of the key programs and policies advanced by the shadow government that will continue no matter who occupies the Oval Office.
+Domestic surveillance.
+No matter who wins the presidential popularity contest, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8 billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. Thus, on any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. Local police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
+Global spying.
+The NSA’s massive surveillance network, what the Washington Post refers to as a $500 billion “ espionage empire ,” will continue to span the globe and target every single person on the planet who uses a phone or a computer. The NSA’s Echelon program intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. In addition to carrying out domestic surveillance on peaceful political groups such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and several religious groups, Echelon has also been a keystone in the government’s attempts at political and corporate espionage .
+Roving TSA searches.
+The American taxpayer will continue to get ripped off by government agencies in the dubious name of national security. One of the greatest culprits when it comes to swindling taxpayers has been the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with its questionable deployment of and complete mismanagement of millions of dollars’ worth of airport full-body X-ray scanners, punitive patdowns by TSA agents and thefts of travelers’ valuables. Considered essential to national security, TSA programs will continue in airports and at transportation hubs around the country.
+USA Patriot Act, NDAA.
+America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, will continue to chip away at our freedoms, unravel our Constitution and transform our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws completely circumvent the rule of law and the rights of American citizens. In so doing, they re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the U.S. Constitution, is the map by which we navigate life in the United States. These laws will continue to be enforced no matter who gets elected.
+Militarized police state.
+Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local law enforcement agencies without charge, police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, will continue to keep the masses corralled, controlled, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.
+SWAT team raids.
+With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by local police for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties will continue to rise. Nationwide, SWAT teams will continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession.
+Domestic drones. The domestic use of drones will continue unabated. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000 drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020, all part of an industry that could be worth as much as $30 billion per year. These machines, which will be equipped with weapons, will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat sensors and radar. An Inspector General report revealed that the Dept. of Justice has already spent nearly $4 million on drones domestically, largely for use by the FBI , with grants for another $1.26 million so police departments and nonprofits can acquire their own drones.
+School-to-prison pipeline.
+The paradigm of abject compliance to the state will continue to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. School districts will continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court.
+Overcriminalization.
+The government bureaucracy will continue to churn out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, rendering the rest of us petty criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to this overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal. Consequently, small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community will continue to have their farms raided.
+Privatized Prisons.
+States will continue to outsource prisons to private corporations, resulting in a cash cow whereby mega-corporations imprison Americans in private prisons in order to make a profit. In exchange for corporations buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years.
+Endless wars.
+America’s expanding military empire will continue to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.
+Are you getting the message yet?
+The next president, much like the current president and his predecessors, will be little more than a figurehead, a puppet to entertain and distract the populace from what’s really going on.
+As Lofgren reveals, this state within a state, “concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue ,” is a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”
+The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley.
+This is fascism in its most covert form, hiding behind public agencies and private companies to carry out its dirty deeds.
+It is a marriage between government bureaucrats and corporate fat cats.
+As Lofgren concludes:
+[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda.
+In other words, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , as long as government officials—elected and unelected alike—are allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution, the courts and the citizenry, the threat to our freedoms remains undiminished.
+So the next time you find yourselves despondent over the 2016 presidential candidates, remember that it’s just a puppet show intended to distract you from the silent coup being carried out by America’s shadow government.
+Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org . Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission: https://www.rutherford.org",FAKE
+7840,Women won't earn the same as men for another two centuries - report,"Thu, 27 Oct 2016 11:40 UTC © Joshua Lott / Reuters It will take close to two centuries for women to earn the same as men, according to the World Economic Forum's latest report. The annual Global Gender Gap Report was released Tuesday and found economic disparity between the sexes is on the rise. When looking at income and employment, we are back to similar levels of inequality seen during the 2008 financial crash. ""At the current rate of change, and given the widening economic gender gap since last year, it will not be closed for another 170 years,"" the report read. The Gender Gap Index uses economics, education, health and political empowerment to rank 144 countries that have enough available data to use. Last year's report estimated it would take 118 years for economic equality to be achieved. Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden were the best countries on the Global Gender Gap Index having closed the gender gap in more than 80 percent of cases, but all still have disparities between the sexes. Rwanda and Ireland came fifth and sixth in the index. The UK came 20th and the US came 45th, falling 17 places from last year. Yemen came last. ""There also continues to be a persistent wage gap in paid work,"" the report says. ""Women's average earnings are almost half those of men, with average global earned income for women and men estimated at US$10,778 and $19,873, respectively. Countries that perform well in this dimension of gender parity span all regional and income groups."" To examine economic participation and opportunity, the report looks at the ratio of female and male workers, wage equality for similar work and the ratio of women to men in various roles. The greatest gap between the sexes was found in political empowerment. The first Index was conducted in 2006 to track gender disparities and countries' progress over time.",FAKE
+1583,Donald Trump’s white fascist brigade: His rallies are now a safe space for racism,"At least a half-dozen attendees shoved and tackled the protester, a black man, to the ground as he refused to leave the event. At least one man punched the protester and a woman kicked him while he was on the ground. All of the attendees who were involved in the physical altercation with the protester were white. The protester appeared to be shouting “black lives matter” and later removed his sweatshirt to reveal a shirt with those words. At least one attendee shouted “all lives matter” as the protester was eventually led out by police officers on the scene…
+
+Mercutio Southall Jr., the man who was assaulted, offered these additional details:
+
+The Black Lives Matter protester attacked during Donald’s Trump’s Birmingham rally said he was punched, kicked and called “n****r” while a group of eight or nine people were on top of him…” He said people encircled him, and he was being pushed and punched from every direction. Someone hit him from behind, and the next thing he knew, he was at the bottom of pile. He was kicked in the stomach, and the chest, both men and women. “I got enough people off of me that I was able to get up a little bit,” he said. “Somebody got behind me and started trying to choke me out.”… Southall said he was repeatedly called a “n****r” and “monkey” and told his life doesn’t matter.
+
+“Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” Trump said on the Fox News Channel on Sunday morning. “I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a trouble-maker who was looking to make trouble.”
+
+In their current state of outrage about anti-racism protests at America’s colleges and universities, “political correctness,” and Black Lives Matter activism, movement conservatives are refighting the Culture Wars of the 1960s and 1980s. Once more, the university is their enemy both because of the American right’s deeply rooted anti-intellectualism, as well as how it is one of the few spaces where women, gays and lesbians, and people of color are (incorrectly) imagined as having a voice and some pittance of power.
+
+Because conservatives exhibit a high degree of social dominance behavior, any threat to what they view as “the natural order of things” is met with fear, a sense of victimization, and feelings of hostility. This dynamic helps to explain the right-wing’s current obsession with “political correctness” and “safe spaces.” It also reveals the glaring difference between how movement conservatives and liberally minded people understand the world, and the language they use to describe it.
+
+As originally used and intended by liberals and progressives, a “safe space” is one where non-whites, gays and lesbians, women, the differently-abled, and other stigmatized groups and individuals, can be momentarily free from harassment, marginalization and discrimination.
+
+Liberals use the phrase “political correctness” to describe a basic principle that individuals should try to treat one another with dignity and respect.
+
+Conservatives (who of course practice their own type of ideological orthodoxy as “political correctness”) are enraged by these notions because they view them as a limitation on their ability to demean, harass and abuse other people.
+
+Moreover, conservatives are especially upset by “political correctness” because it is often an assertion of agency and a demand for respect from marginalized groups against dominant, white, male, institutional authority. The divergent reaction to “safe spaces” and “political correctness” from conservatives and liberals also signals to another socio-political fact. American society is structured around maintaining, promoting, and protecting unearned advantages, life opportunities, and resources for white people. As viewed through the lens of the color line, almost every aspect of American life is a “safe space” for white people. This “safe space” for whiteness is reinforced by many factors, including, but not limited to, the mass media, residential and housing segregation, racially homogeneous interpersonal social networks, as well as a racist “criminal justice” system. And when this protective bubble of white privilege is pierced, or in any way challenged, many white folks respond in extremely negative, hostile, and immature ways. When people tell and show you who they really are, you had best pay close attention. When Black Lives Matter protesters exercised their constitutionally protected right of free speech at Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ rallies earlier this year, they were not physically assaulted by those in attendance. In contrast, when Black Lives Matter and other protesters have intervened at Donald Trump rallies they have been met with thuggish violence by his public. It is also telling that Donald Trump’s supporters began to triumphantly yell “all lives matter” while Mercutio Southall Jr. was taken away by police. This slur is a rejection of the basic principle driving Black Lives Matter: African-Americans should have same the full and equal human rights, protections, and freedoms as whites. Any other civic arrangement should be unacceptable in a country that purports to be the greatest country on Earth. To stand against Black Lives Matter is to agree that black people should in fact be second class citizens in their own country. Consequently, it has become abundantly clear in recent months that “All Lives Matter” is the new “White Power!” for the Age of Obama. Research on political attitudes, values, and American history has repeatedly demonstrated the many ways that conservatism and racism is now the same thing in post-civil rights era America. The rise of the Tea Party, the GOP’s extreme rightward shift, vicious and ugly racially driven animus and conspiracy theories towards Barack Obama, the efforts to destroy the gains of the civil rights movement, and now the Know-Nothing-like xenophobia and prejudice against non-white immigrants and Syrian refugees are current events as an example of the Republican Party’s white supremacist orientation and brand. [This is seen online as well. The YouTube clip of the fracas in Birmingham, Alabama, has hundreds of comments—many of them are overtly racist, use racially violent anti-black language, lie about how “Black Lives Matter” is a “terrorist organization,” and deploy the slogans “White Power” and “All Lives Matter” interchangeably.] And because he appeals to the most strident, immature, and reactionary part of the American right-wing id, Donald Trump’s rallies are safe spaces — for nativism, white racism, and increasingly, violence.",REAL
+2017,Inside Hillary Clinton's 2016 plan,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+3267,Senators pledge to amend House bill after some NSA powers halted,"The legal authority for several national security programs expired at midnight Sunday and will not be renewed for at least two days, after Senate Republicans leaders were unable to maneuver around Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a presidential candidate who followed through on a pledge to block an extension of the law.
+
+The Senate closed a rare Sunday session without approving the only legislation that would have averted a lapse in the authority — a House-passed bill that would provide for an orderly transition away from the most controversial program authorized under the current law: the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of call records from telephone companies.
+
+Spurred by the impending deadline, senators voted overwhelmingly, 77 to 17, to proceed with the measure Sunday, a week after they didn’t act on it before starting a week-long recess. But Paul, under Senate rules, was able to delay final passage of the bill until at least Tuesday.
+
+On Monday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) reiterated his preference to have the Senate pass the already-approved House bill, without any amendments, so that it can be sent to President Obama’s desk quickly for its enactment into law. “I still think the best advice for them is to pass our bill,” McCarthy told reporters Monday morning. He declined several opportunities to say whether he would accept any changes by the Senate, which would require the House to reconsider the anti-terror legislation.
+
+“The best option for the protection of this country is to pass our bill,” he said.
+
+Immediately after the vote, Paul took the floor and began his remarks by conceding that the measure he opposes would eventually pass. But after he left the floor, he declared victory because the House bill, known as the USA Freedom Act, would end the government’s collection of phone records.
+
+“The point we wanted to make is, we can still catch terrorists using the Constitution,” he said. “I’m supportive of the part that ends bulk collection by the government. My concern is that we might be exchanging bulk collection by the government [with] bulk collection by the phone companies.”
+
+During an early-morning session on May 23, Paul used his powers under Senate rules to foil Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s efforts to extend the existing authority for 60 days, a week, or even one day. On Sunday, he objected to a proposal from McConnell (R-Ky.) that would have extended less-controversial surveillance programs while the debate about the NSA telephone program continued.
+
+That prompted a fiery floor speech from McConnell, who accused Paul and other opponents of the NSA program of engaging in a “campaign of demagoguery and disinformation” prompted by the “illegal actions” of former NSA contractor Edward Snow­den.
+
+“We shouldn’t be disarming unilaterally as our enemies grow more sophisticated and aggressive,” said McConnell, who has endorsed Paul for president and looked directly at Paul at times as he delivered his remarks. He later made procedural moves to prevent Paul from offering amendments he has sought to the pending bill.
+
+The NSA’s collection of phone records began in secret after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was later authorized, also in secret, by a court under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act — the provision that is set to expire. The continuation of the program and its justification were revealed in 2013 by Snowden.
+
+Until Sunday, McConnell had resisted taking action on the House bill, arguing alongside other key Republican senators that it would not do enough to preserve necessary counterterrorism capabilities.
+
+Those senators on Sunday pledged to amend the USA Freedom Act to provide further assurances that intelligence officials will have timely access to the phone records, even if they remain in private hands. If the bill is amended, it would go back to the House, whose leaders have resisted any suggestion that more changes are needed, further extending the lapse in authority.
+
+House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) on Sunday repeated calls for the Senate to pass the USA Freedom Act, which would provide for an orderly transition away from the bulk collection program and cleared the House earlier this month by an overwhelming vote of 338 to 88.
+
+“Al-Qaeda, ISIL and other terrorists around the globe continue to plot attacks on America and our allies,” Boehner said, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “Anyone who is satisfied with letting this critical intelligence capability go dark isn’t taking the terrorist threat seriously. I’d urge the Senate to pass the bipartisan USA Freedom Act, and do so expeditiously.”
+
+CIA Director John Brennan said Sunday that the expiring programs are “integral to making sure that we’re able to stop terrorists in their tracks.”
+
+“I think that there has been a little too much political grandstanding and crusading for ideological causes that have skewed the debate on this issue,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “But these tools are important to American lives.”
+
+Brennan said “terrorist elements” are watching Congress’s actions “very carefully” and are “looking for the seams to operate within.”
+
+“This is something that we can’t afford to do right now, because if you look at the horrific terrorist attacks and violence that is being perpetrated around the globe, we need to keep our country safe,” he added.
+
+After the Senate adjourned Sunday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest in a statement called on senators to “ensure this irresponsible lapse in authorities is as short-lived as possible.”
+
+“On a matter as critical as our national security, individual senators must put aside their partisan motivations and act swiftly,” he said. “The American people deserve nothing less.”
+
+The USA Freedom Act is the product of months of compromise between Republicans and Democrats, the administration and privacy groups. Under it, the NSA would stop gathering billions of call records — their times, dates and durations, but not their content. Instead, the phone companies would be required to adapt their systems so that they could be queried for records of specific terrorism suspects based on individual court orders. The bill also would renew other expiring investigative powers that the FBI says are critical.
+
+But Paul, who wants the NSA program ended outright, and a handful of senators who prefer that the NSA program remain as is, effectively blocked action on the bill until Sunday. McConnell had counted on the impending deadline to force at least a short-term extension of the current law, but Paul and a few other senators blocked any stopgap.
+
+On the Senate floor Sunday afternoon, Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) lambasted McConnell for a lack of “strategy, planning and open lines of communication.”
+
+Reid said the expiration of the Patriot Act provision can’t be blamed on Paul, who has long been an outspoken critic of overreach by the NSA. “We’re in this mess today because of the majority leader,” Reid said Sunday. “My friend from Kentucky simply didn’t have a plan. That’s why we’re here.”
+
+Elizabeth Goitein, a national security expert at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, said McConnell “badly overplayed his hand.”
+
+“He gambled that he could wait until the last minute and ram through a short-term reauthorization of the Patriot Act, and he lost,” she said. “By the time he tried to backpedal and move the USA Freedom Act forward, it was too late.”
+
+Some of the tools that are set to lapse are not controversial and have been renewed in the past, President Obama said in his radio address. They include the ability to seek a “roving wiretap” to keep up with suspected terrorists or spies who constantly switch out cellphones. Another power — never used — enables wiretaps on suspected “lone wolf” terrorists who cannot be directly tied to a terrorist group.
+
+One of the most important, officials say, is Section 215. That authority permits the government to obtain all types of records on an individual as long as they are relevant to a foreign terrorism or espionage investigation.
+
+Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said national security officials may be able to rely on “workarounds” to the lack of Section 215 authority in some cases but not others. “Unquestionably, there’s going to be a disruption in the capabilities,” he said, adding that the situation “won’t be optimal by any means.”
+
+The USA Freedom Act also would end bulk collection of records under other national security authorities, including national security letters. It would require the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret, to declassify significant legal decisions and provide for an advocate for the public’s privacy rights at the court, which generally hears only the government’s cases for a wiretap or other surveillance order. And it would grant technology companies more leeway to report on the scale of national security data requests.
+
+The bill also contains a six-month transition period during which the NSA would work with phone companies to ensure that they can set up their systems to quickly search for records and send them to the agency.
+
+Since last weekend, NSA wind-down teams were placed on a “hot standby,” which included contacting phone companies with a plan of action for shutting down the bulk collection. The actual shutdown time is about eight hours, officials said.
+
+Paul Kane and Katie Zezima contributed to this report.",REAL
+1468,Dem insiders: Sanders failed to dent Clinton,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+4395,"Calif., Ore. allow women to get birth control without a prescription","California and Oregon will be the first states in the nation to allow women to get birth control pills and other hormonal contraceptives directly from their pharmacists – without a doctor's prescription.
+
+As California officials were busy finalizing regulations on a state law passed in 2013, Oregon's governor Kate Brown signed a similar bill into law last week.
+
+The two measures were hailed by women's health advocates. They noted that men have long had an easier time getting birth control, simply purchasing condoms over the counter.
+
+""We support efforts like these that remove barriers to women gaining access to birth control and other reproductive health care,"" said Kathy Kneer, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, in a written statement.
+
+She added that hormonal contraception has been widely studied and shown to be safe -- ""so safe that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has recommended that it be available over the counter.""
+
+The contraceptives won't be available like cough drops or antacids, however. In California, pharmacists can only dispense them after providing a health screening to women and taking their blood pressure. Oregon will also require a health screening, but the state's specific rules haven't been developed.
+
+The laws differ somewhat. California's law has no age restrictions on patients – minors have the same access as adults. In Oregon, pharmacists may only give new birth control prescriptions to women 18 or older. Women under 18 must show proof of prior birth control prescriptions from a physician. Also, Oregon likely will require pharmacists to undergo more training than the one hour of education required of California pharmacists, said Marcus Watt, executive director of the Oregon State Board of Pharmacy.
+
+California's rules are expected to take effect after Oct 1 and Oregon's law after Jan. 1.
+
+Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues associate at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health think tank, said other states could end up following California's and Oregon's approaches, depending on how they work.
+
+""A lot of eyes are watching what's going to happen next,"" she said.
+
+The laws moved ahead despite partisan debate in Congress over access to birth control. There, members of both parties support legislation allowing over-the-counter access – without any prescription -- but Republican legislation would not require insurers to pay for it.
+
+Democrats say that is an attempt to get around requirements to cover prescription birth control under the Affordable Care Act and would effectively make hormonal contraceptives off limits to many poor women. They have introduced a bill that would require insurance coverage of over-the-counter hormonal contraceptives.
+
+California's regulations and Oregon's law do not address insurance coverage of birth control. But California's pharmacists have voiced concerns that insurers won't pay for time spent screening women and dispensing birth control, as they would for a doctor's visit.
+
+Pharmacists in California say they are preparing for the new regulations and hoping to resolve the reimbursement issue. It has taken nearly two years to develop regulations implementing California's 2013 law, which also allows pharmacists to prescribe other medications that once required a doctor's prescription, including travel medicines, smoking cessation treatments and the opioid overdose antidote naloxone.
+
+The overall expansion of pharmacists' prescribing authority is aimed at relieving the burden on physicians faced with an influx of patients newly insured under the Affordable Care Act.
+
+""Honestly, we're really excited,"" said Ken Thai, part-owner and manager of the El Monte Pharmacy Group, with 10 stores in Southern California. ""Medical clinics in the area are overflowing, with long wait times. We're already doing other services like immunizations and cholesterol checks, and our customers already see us as a resource. We're ready for something like this. It's been a long time coming.""
+
+Until now, California pharmacists could only provide emergency contraception, also known as the ""morning-after pill,"" without a doctor's prescription.
+
+Most major pharmacy chains will likely participate in offering non-prescription birth control because they were involved in developing the protocols, said Virginia Herold, executive officer of the California State Board of Pharmacy.
+
+Representatives from CVS, Walgreens and Costco would not confirm their chains' participation, either declining to comment or saying that they are awaiting the final regulations.
+
+Some patients welcomed the change – glad for the convenience, if nothing else.
+
+""I think it's really wonderful,"" said 26-year-old Anne Wong, who lives in San Francisco. ""It's a drag to have to go to clinic and talk to the doctor to get birth control pills – it takes a chunk out of your day.""
+
+Wong, who at age 17 emigrated with her family from Thailand, said the new access would help women in her community practice safer sex. The topic ""is still taboo,"" Wong said.
+
+But with the new regulations, ""I could just tell my parents I'm going to a store for something. All I'd need to do is just walk to the Walgreens near my house.""
+
+Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.",REAL
+8318,CrossTalk on US election: Criminal in Chief?,"2 Comments on ""CrossTalk on US election: Criminal in Chief?""   uncle Bob 1 Today 8:55 pm 
+The Clinton Foundation (Clinton crime cartel) said today “ooops,we forgot about the 1 million dollars Qatar gave us for Bill Clinton’s birthday” (my gosh if only I got birthday gifts like that,lol). According to the agreement between the regime and Hillary Clinton while she was SOS all funds given to them from foreign donors had to be cleared by the State Department. Wikileaks exposed the “gift” a while back. And now they are forced to admit it. And figure out a way to “excuse” it. Reply - Share uncle Bob 1 Today 9:25 pm 
+To the US’s “eternal shame” we now have the choice for President between the “smut talking clown” (Trump) and the “criminal warmonger” (Clinton).I don’t really care too much about Trump’s antics. But I have kids,and friends,I don’t want dying in neo-con wars.So the choice is totally clear for me. I’m hoping Trump wins. Though I’m not holding my breath over that hope. Reply - Share",FAKE
+5218,Justice Department significantly reducing number of federal observers stationed inside polling places,"The Justice Department is significantly reducing the number of federal observers stationed inside polling places in next month’s election at the same time that voters will face strict new election laws in more than a dozen states.
+
+These laws, including requirements to present certain kinds of photo identification, are expected to lead to disputes at the polls. Adding to the potential for confusion, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for his supporters to police the polls themselves for fraud.
+
+For the past five decades, the Justice Department has sent hundreds of observers and poll monitors across the country to ensure that voters are not intimidated or discriminated against when they cast their ballots. But U.S. officials say that a 2013 Supreme Court decision now limits the federal government’s role inside polling places on Election Day.
+
+“In the past, we have . . . relied heavily on election observers, specially trained individuals who are authorized to enter polling locations and monitor the process to ensure that it lives up to its legal obligations,” Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch told a Latino civil rights group over the summer. “Our ability to deploy them has been severely curtailed.”
+
+In recent months, the Justice Department and civil rights groups have successfully sued to block a number of states, such as North Carolina, that have put in place new voter restrictions that critics say target minority voters. But advocates are worried that these courtroom victories might not be enough to protect voters if the federal government is not able to enforce the law on Election Day.
+
+[Find out what you need to know to vote in your state]
+
+In the 2012 presidential election, the last before the court ruling, the Justice Department sent more than 780 observers and other personnel to polling places in 51 jurisdictions in 23 states to watch for unlawful activity and write up reports about possible civil rights violations. The observers were specially trained by the Office of Personnel Management and were required to be inside polling places.
+
+Justice Department officials say this year they are sending observers to fewer than five states — and to those locations only because the oversight has been ordered by judges in specific cases. Five weeks out from the election, officials said they would not specify the exact number of observers.
+
+There are 14 states where poll workers are being asked to implement new laws, including voter ID requirements, for the first time in a presidential election. Federal observers will not be sent inside polling places in those states.
+
+“It’s a game-changer,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Historically, the federal observer program has been a valuable and necessary tool to help prevent intimidation and harassment of minority voters.”
+
+“Without those protections, we’re bracing for the worst,” Clarke said. “All of this unfolds at a moment when we have a presidential candidate who has called for law enforcement and untrained individuals to monitor activity at the polls.”
+
+Trump is encouraging his supporters to sign up on his website to be a “Trump election observer.” He has told supporters in Pennsylvania to be vigilant for voter fraud at the polls, saying that “cheating” is the only thing that will stop him from defeating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in that battleground state.
+
+“You’ve got to get every one of your friends. You’ve got to get every one of your family. You’ve got to get everybody to go out and watch and go out and vote,” Trump said in August at a rally in Ohio. “And when I say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about. Right? You know what I’m talking about. I think you’ve got to go out and you’ve got to watch.”
+
+Justice Department officials said they had no choice but to cut the number of observers. The Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling on the Voting Rights Act “curtailed our ability to deploy observers” to states that used to need federal approval before making changes to election or voting laws, said Vanita Gupta, head of the department’s civil rights division.
+
+The Supreme Court’s ruling immediately opened the door for laws with new voting restrictions. Less well known was the effect it had on the Justice Department’s efforts to monitor elections. The government had relied on a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that was invalidated by the Supreme Court for its authority to send observers to states with a history of discrimination.
+
+The court said Congress has to come up with a new formula based on current data to determine which states should be subject to federal oversight. Congress has not yet acted.
+
+“Shelby County significantly impacted the department’s ability to watch for problems while elections are taking place,” according to a Justice Department fact sheet.
+
+The Justice Department in the past has sent two types of lawyers to the polls: observers and monitors. Observers work inside polling places. Monitors, by contrast, are not allowed to go inside polling places unless state officials give them permission.
+
+Despite the court ruling, officials say they can send monitors across the country.
+
+“We will still be able to send out a robust team of monitors this November,” Gupta said.
+
+But J. Gerald Hebert, the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, said it is critical to have federal observers who can actually go inside the polling places in the same way that candidates and political parties in most states can designate someone to be inside as a poll watcher.
+
+“You have to distinguish between sending a lawyer to a state who sits down at the U.S. attorney’s office and waits for people to call in,” said Hebert, an official in the Justice Department’s voting section for 20 years who went to several states on Election Day to monitor elections. “They’re not in the polling place, and they’re not even at the polling places,” Hebert said of the monitors. “They’re usually downtown at a hotel or a U.S. attorney’s office. That’s a lot different by a long shot than federal observers inside the polling place, because discrimination at the polls doesn’t take place outside.”
+
+Without federal observers, “there’s nobody watching the [other poll] watchers” who can intimidate or challenge voters or slow down the process and, for example, contribute to long lines at lunchtime when voters have limited time to vote and get back to work, Hebert said.
+
+The Justice Department said it will release a phone number and email address for voters to contact if they experience intimidation or harassment.
+
+“We watch carefully, meticulously documenting the voting process with an eye for potential violations of federal statutes that protect the right to vote,” Gupta said. “And we often find that the simple fact of our presence in the jurisdiction helps defuse tension and avoid problems.”
+
+Some voting rights advocates say that the Justice Department did not need to reduce its election observers, because the Supreme Court’s ruling did not specifically mention federal observers. Regardless, advocates have questioned why Lynch revealed over the summer the department’s plans to cut the observers when she spoke to a civil rights group.
+
+“There was no need to announce that it’s open season on voters at the polls because there won’t be any federal observers there inside,” Hebert said.
+
+Getting a photo ID to vote is easy. Unless you’re poor, black, Latino or elderly.
+
+More than 30 states offer online voting, but experts warn it isn’t secure
+
+Inside the Republican creation of the N.C. voting bill dubbed the ‘monster’ law",REAL
+9270,Newsnight trolled the Tory MP who called for the BBC to play God Save The Queen at the end of each day,"Next Swipe left/right Newsnight trolled the Tory MP who called for the BBC to play God Save The Queen at the end of each day MP for Romford Andrew Rosindell recently said the BBC should be “unashamedly British” and celebrate the UK’s exit from the EU by playing God Save The Queen every night. Newsnight duly obliged, but not the version he was thinking of. By popular demand, here's our playout from last night… pic.twitter.com/0woMdwAlmi 
+— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) November 4, 2016",FAKE
+4982,Clinton's health continues to spur controversy and conspiracy,"A two-page letter from Hillary Clinton's doctor a year ago, declaring the former first lady, senator and secretary of state ""fit to serve"" as president has done little to quell doubts about her health amid a gruelling campaign.
+
+
+
+Photos of the Democratic presidential nominee being helped up stairs, frequent coughing bouts on the campaign trail and rumors that a 2012 concussion was worse than revealed have made the 68-year old's fitness a campaign issue.
+
+“Hillary Clinton lacks the judgement, the temperament and the moral character to lead this nation,"" Donald Trump said in a recent foreign policy speech. ""Importantly, she also lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS, and all the many adversaries we face – not only in terrorism, but in trade and every other challenge we must confront to turn this country around.”
+
+Clinton’s health has been a matter of scrutiny since the concussion she suffered while serving as secretary of state. While being evaluated at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, doctors discovered a blood clot inside a vein in her head and prescribed blood thinners, she told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer in 2014.
+
+In part to quash speculation about Clinton’s health, the campaign released a summary of her medical records last summer.
+
+In the July 28, 2015 letter,  Dr. Lisa Bardack, an internist in Mount Kisco, N.Y., described Clinton “as a healthy 67-year-old female whose current medical conditions include hypothyroidism and seasonal pollen allergies.”
+
+Unlike 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain who invited reporters to review the full 1,173 pages of his medical records, Clinton released only a summary of her past issues, including an elbow fracture in 2009 and several episodes of deep vein thrombosis.
+
+Clinton’s chief strategist Joel Benenson said the campaign has no plans to release more detailed records, but his position is at odds with many Americans.
+
+A new Rasmussen Reports survey found that 59 percent of voters believe all major presidential candidates should release at least their most recent medical records to the public. That figure is up from 38 percent of Americans in May 2014, when questions about Clinton's health were first being raised.
+
+Thirty percent don’t think candidates should have to release their recent medical records and 11 percent were undecided.
+
+The people may want to see more medical records, but the Clinton campaign just sees right-wing conspiracy. A campaign spokeswoman blamed the health controversy on Roger Stone, a longtime conservative policeal operative who had a formal role as a Trump adviser until he was fired a year ago. Still an unabashed supporter of Trump, Stone is still working to get him elected, say critics.
+
+“Donald Trump is simply parroting lies based on fabricated documents promoted by Roger Stone and his right-wing allies,"" said campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri. ""Hillary Clinton has released a detailed medical record showing her to be in excellent health plus her personal tax returns since 1977, while Trump has failed to provide the public with the most basic financial information disclosed by every major candidate in the last 40 years.”
+
+Requests for comment from the Clinton and Trump campaigns were not answered. Bardack’s office declined to comment.
+
+“I think the questions being raised are legitimate given that it impacts who leads our nation,"" said Dr. Jan Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. ""As a physician, you cannot help but to ask questions. But given that our information is limited, it would be wrong for any physician to diagnose someone without seeing them themselves.”
+
+Orient said she has received both positive and negative responses to her recent column on the Association’s blog which asked whether Clinton is “medically unfit” to serve as president.
+
+Television personality Dr. Drew Pinsky told KABC radio this week that he was concerned about the “1950s level of care” that Clinton was receiving and not as much about her actual health.
+
+“It just seems like she’s getting care from somebody that she met in Arkansas when she was a kid,” he added.
+
+While agreeing that a candidate’s health is a serious issue for voters to consider, one Trump advisor warned against either side diagnosing the physical or mental health of the candidates.
+
+“I would be very cautious and would recommend the doctors for professional reasons to be very cautious when deciding you are going to analyze people,” said former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich on Fox & Friends.",REAL
+9666,Comment on TRIPS: The Story of How Intellectual Property Became Linked to Trade by Foppe,"by Yves Smith 
+Yves here. This Real News Network segment continues its discussion of yet another acronym, TRIPS, that has much to do with how the economic playing field has been tilted against ordinary workers. Please note that the transcript below was published without apostrophes. I added them as best I could but may have missed some. 
+LYNN FRIES: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Lynn Fries in Geneva. 
+This is part 5 of a series with Peter Drahos who is explaining the story of intellectual property linked to trade. 
+Joining us from Australia, Peter Drahos is a Professor at the Australian National University, in the School of Regulation and Global Governance. He holds a Chair in Intellectual Property at Queen Mary, the University of London. Peter Drahos is co-author of Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? 
+Welcome Peter. 
+PETER DRAHOS: Thank you. 
+FRIES: In Part 4 you talked about how the ownership of intellectual property rights is concentrated among very few key multinationals. And it’’s these incumbent players that profit from the TRIPS Agreement. In what other ways did the globalization of intellectual property rights concentrate power in the hands of these multinationals? 
+DRAHOS: One of the things that’’s probably not fully appreciated about intellectual property rights is that they are a form of private tax. So that a patent owner or a copyright owner essentially can require a producer say in a developing country, to pay a licensing fee before they can use the relevant bit of intellectual property whether that is copying a book, making use of a film or making use of the patent. Essentially intellectual property rights are a form of private taxation on innovation which is why they should be minimized. When you globalize I intellectual property rights you essentially put in the hands of the owners of intellectual property rights a global private form of taxing power. That’’s a pretty big form of power. 
+Now this effect people in all countries. But in developing countries the cost of textbooks for example, has a severe impact on accessibility. And of course it’’s not just textbooks in developing countries, students in the United States or Europe would probably be able to say a lot about the costs of textbooks they have to pay for. But chances are those students have more chances of paying for those textbooks than people in developing countries. So the basic point here is that if you globalize IPR you are in effect putting in the hands of multinational companies a form of private taxing power right across the board in relation to copyrighted goods, in relation to patented goods, in relation to trade marked goods. 
+We can see that citizens essentially pay and pay again. Public taxes support a lot of research and development in US universities, European universities and Australian universities. So we have a lot of research and development that’’s supported through public taxes. Now a lot of that research and development ultimately ends up being patented. Now through the patent system companies can levy private taxes as I said. Intellectual property rights are a form of taxation. 
+So goods that are produced or innovation that’’s produced at public expense is recycled through the intellectual property system and people in a sense pay the license fees, the private taxes, again. So it’’s a form of double payment both public taxes and private taxes. And this happens all the time. Think of for example books that are produced by university academics and those academics are paid for by tax payers. And then those books end up being published by publishers who basically collect fees from universities that use those books or parts of those books in their various courses. So the problem of copyright cartels essentially obtaining very high profits from recycling textbooks that have been produced at public expense is a very severe problem. 
+FRIES: An argument in favor of globalized IPR is that it’’s needed for innovation. Talk about your views on that. 
+DRAHOS: When we look at the history of innovation in most countries what we see is that public investment has played a hugely important role. That public institutes of research have been extremely important. Intellectual property is often confused with innovation but the explanation for innovation lies in states committing to the funding of basic research. And that’’s true for the United States. If we look at the history of the United States, the federal government of the United States has really played a huge role in promoting excellence in universities in funding public research. 
+Now intellectual property rights have some modest role in all of this. But the problem is that they’ve grown like topsy. They’ve grown out of control. These things march like Frankenstein through our economies. And that’’s the real problem. My argument is not that there is no role for IPR but what to be recognized is that governments have to commit to using public taxes as they have in the past to funding basic research and to funding universities. 
+And one of the great dangers in relying on the intellectual property rights system is that you are actually undermining public research, the very thing that historically has given us such great innovations whether in biotechnology or whether is areas of mathematics. The contribution of public research has been so profoundly important and now we are moving into a world where there is excessive reliance on intellectual property in the mistaken belief that intellectual property somehow promotes innovation. When in many senses intellectual property or the globalization of intellectual property is actually anti-innovation. One I think has to recognize the role of public investment in innovation. 
+An obsession with intellectual property rights can have unexpected repercussions on research cultures. And I think many scientists would say that the research environment in universities is profoundly different to what it was thirty or forty years ago. I mean scientists when for example when they were working on recombinant DNA technology as they were in the early 1970s publicly spoke about the dangers of recombinant DNA technology and they spoke about some of the advantages. 
+They were able to do this because they were working in public institutions. And in the United States public universities drove much of the research in recombinant DNA technology. Now I think if you spoke to those researchers many of them would say that these kinds of public discussions about the direction of research are much harder for our society to have because scientists worry about undermining the validity of a patent application for example. 
+FRIES: And what’’s the problem on relying on the international patent system? 
+DRAHOS: There are many complicated problems around patents. And one of the big problems is that patents tend to serve people who can afford to pay. Now if the patented commodity is a tennis racket that’’s not such a big problem. But if the patented commodity is a medicine that is a big problem because patents drive up the costs of medicines. And the way that preferences are measured is through the ability to pay. 
+And of course billions of people in the world do not have the ability to pay for patented medicines. So in essence the patent system is picking up the preferences of predominantly wealthy citizens which is why many diseases, tropical diseases, are essentially not researched. Because the markets in those patented medicines are not big enough. There are not enough incentives for pharmaceutical companies to enter those particular markets. So relying on the patent system to serve the entire globe, all the citizens of the world, is essentially flawed. 
+FRIES: It’’s not hard to see the critical need for public institutes of research but they are state funded and states are collecting less taxes. Which brings us to the role of intellectual property rights in tax avoidance games. Tell us about that. 
+DRAHOS: One of the issues that’’s confronting all countries is raising sufficient revenue. Getting companies to pay sufficient taxes. Now at an international level a perennial problem has been the issue of transfer pricing. This is basically where a large company transfers a particular asset between its subsidiaries. 
+So for example, a licensing agreement in which one part of the company licenses another part of the company to produce a particular good. Now the whole idea behind transfer pricing from a company’s point of view is that in those countries where the tax is high, the particular subsidiary pays the most for the license. So in other words, it can claim the biggest costs for the purposes of the taxation system in that country. Now in theory, tax departments require that companies value the transfer of assets for the purposes of transfer pricing at arm’s length. 
+Now this can work fairly well in relation to physical goods such as factories for example, where it is reasonably easy to determine the value of what the sale of the factory really is. It is actually very difficult to value invisible, intangible property. Trying to value what a particular license, a patent license, is worth is quite a complicated problem for a tax bureaucracy. Now the transfer pricing problem has been around for decades. And tax departments all over the world have struggled with it. And it’’s really led to this problem of fiscal degradation. 
+The taxation games that are played around intellectual property rights ultimately harm all states whether they are rich or poor. So there is a lot of concern in the United States for example that intellectual property rights are being used to shift profits by US companies out of the US tax jurisdiction. So the US Congress for example, a few years ago heard of examples of licensing agreements in which Ireland for example was used as a conduit to land profits in various tax havens whether in the Bahamas or elsewhere. So the problem of using intellectual property rights to shift profits to deprive states of a proper share of public taxes is a problem for the United States as much as it is a problem for China or for India or for Australia. 
+FRIES: We are going to break and be back with Part 6. Please join us as we continue our conversation with Peter Drahos. Peter Drahos, thank you. 
+DRAHOS: Thank you. 
+FRIES: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+6583,Hillary Makes SCANDALOUS Stop After Rachel Maddow Breaks Down On LIVE TV,"Hillary Makes SCANDALOUS Stop After Rachel Maddow Breaks Down On LIVE TV Posted on October 30, 2016 by Rebecca Diserio in Politics Share This Hillary Clinton drinking on plane (left), Hillary at Jennifer Lopez concert last night (middle), Hillary at Miami bar today (right) 
+Hillary Clinton is getting desperate and so is her lapdog media now that FBI Director James Comey dropped the bomb, re-opening the email investigation. Crazy happenings have just transpired in the last 24 hours, and you’ll love Hillary’s scandalous stop that’s making it so much worse as Rachel Maddow gets caught having a breakdown on live TV. 
+Hillary embarrassed herself last night at a free concert given in her name by Jennifer Lopez and her ex-husband Marc Anthony. Hillary came out on stage and pandered so badly to the Latino community that it came off as repulsive. Rachel Maddow cries on live TV over Hillary Clinton’s campaign imploding over new email scandal with Anthony Weiner. 
+After Rachel Maddow learned that Hillary sustained what she called “a brick being thrown right at the Clinton campaign,” referring to James Comey’s actions, she was caught fighting back tears as another liberal hack tried to convince her that the FBI’s decision to re-open the email scandal is a big deal. 
+Maddow was hoping he would tell her not to worry and that Hillary can still win, but when she didn’t get that news she wanted, she became enraged and then fought back tears. However, it all got worse with what Hillary did this morning. 
+This morning, Hillary Clinton was caught making a stop at a Miami bar before noon. That’s right, calling it a campaign stop, Hillary strolled into the bar, which looked like a sleazy kind of place, and created even more controversy for the candidate since her drinking has been a sore subject since day one of this campaign. False alarm on missing hillary. She's at a bar in Florida…… Mid day on a Sunday ""campaigning"" #GoHillary 
+— Known patriot (@NCSBM) October 30, 2016 
+As Mad World News previously reported, “WikiLeaks email from her campaign advisor Jen Palmeri to campaign chairman John Podesta seems to indicate that having to sober Hillary up was a routine occurrence. However, since everyone was scared of her, no one wanted to do it.” 
+“Should I call her and talk this through or better to leave with you? I’m worried she’ll get on with Cheryl and we’ll end up in a bad place. I’m in a session that lasts till 3:30 your time. Is that timely or should I walk out?” … 
+“I just sent. Was getting my hair cut and trying to write all this on an iPhone. I think you should call her and sober her up some .” [via Wikileaks ] 
+Hillary’s drinking problems are well known by Washington insiders, so after the last 24 hours, seeing the fallout as her campaign was squashed, making a stop at a Miami bar before noon makes perfect sense. 
+Hillary’s going to need a lot more than Jennifer Lopez gyrating while wearing a thong on stage and Rachel Maddow crying on live TV to breathe life into her dead campaign. We better be on high alert for some manufactured scandal coming at Donald Trump. Too bad for Hillary, it will be seen for what it is — Hillary and her henchmen trying to save her unsalvageable campaign.",FAKE
+703,Rubio called Trump a dangerous ‘con man.’ Now he says Trump should be president.,"Over the course of his presidential bid, Sen. Marco Rubio called Donald Trump a “con man” who was “dangerous” and unqualified to control the nation’s nuclear codes. He ridiculed the businessman’s manhood and warned he would “fracture” the Republican Party if he was the nominee.
+
+By March — a few days before Rubio dropped out — the senator from Florida said with a cracking voice that it was “getting harder every day” to envision supporting his rival.
+
+But now Rubio is on board, saying that he plans to attend the Republican convention in Cleveland and that he would be “honored” to help Trump however he can.
+
+“I want to be helpful. I don’t want to be harmful, because I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president,” Rubio said in a CNN interview that will be aired Sunday.
+
+Long a star of the mainstream conservative movement, Rubio is one of the starkest symbols of the GOP’s rapid capitulation to Trump. Nearly every prominent Republican — from lawmakers to governors to former White House officials — has acquiesced as polling shows Trump’s support building.
+
+Rubio’s shift also comes as GOP leaders are pushing him to reconsider his decision not to seek reelection to the Senate. Rubio has said “maybe” he would run, with conditions.
+
+Trump thanked Rubio indirectly by issuing a tweet Thursday night supportive of a bid: “Poll data shows that @marcorubio does by far the best in holding onto his Senate seat in Florida. Important to keep the MAJORITY. Run Marco!”
+
+The words are a remarkable about-face for Trump, who spent months during the campaign deriding “Little Marco” as a dishonest lightweight who was “a disaster for Florida” and who “couldn’t get elected dogcatcher.”
+
+Many of Rubio’s supporters were outraged by his support for Trump, saying they felt betrayed by a 44-year-old politician who had campaigned as a young representative of a more optimistic, inclusive GOP. The episode adds to Rubio’s reputation as a shape-shifter who abandoned his own immigration reform bill when it became unpopular among conservatives.
+
+Bryan McGrath, a Hudson Institute fellow who advised Rubio’s campaign on defense issues, noted that Rubio had explicitly said Trump could not be trusted with the nuclear arsenal.
+
+“He said all the things I was thinking and all the reasons I remain dubious about Trump being the president,” McGrath said in an interview Friday. “So to see him bend a knee, it just bothers me and just reinforces the thing that’s getting Trump elected in the first place: the sense that politicians don’t tell the truth or are capable of switching on a dime if it looks like it’s good for them.”
+
+Rubio responded to the criticism with a series of Twitter messages: “If you can live with a Clinton presidency for 4 years thats your right,” he wrote in one. “I cant and will do what I can to prevent it.”
+
+The move came after several phone calls between Rubio and Trump in recent weeks, according to people familiar with their interactions. Some of Trump’s children also reached out to woo Rubio, these people said.
+
+In the CNN interview, portions of which were released Thursday and Friday, Rubio said he would speak on Trump’s behalf if the candidate asked.
+
+“I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president,” Rubio said. “If there’s something I can do to help that from happening, and it’s helpful to the cause, I’d most certainly be honored to be considered for that.”
+
+He shrugged off questions about his deep policy differences with Trump, who, among other things, has called for the deportation of an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
+
+“Look, my policy differences with Donald Trump — I spent 11 months talking about them. So I think they’re well understood,” Rubio said.
+
+Supporters in Florida said that Rubio’s moves reflect political reality in his state.
+
+“If you are a Republican leader, I think that’s what you have to do. Period,” said Ninoska Perez Castellon, the host of a popular talk show on Miami’s Radio Mambi and a friend of the senator since his days as a West Miami city councilman. “You might not be happy with who the candidate is, but that’s the right thing to do.”
+
+While Trump easily won the Florida GOP primary in March, Rubio prevailed in his home county of Miami-Dade with the support of Cuban American voters. Months later, attitudes have shifted.
+
+Nelson Diaz, chairman of the Miami-Dade GOP, said that a Trump campaign official attended a party meeting Thursday night.
+
+“Everyone in the room was on board,” Diaz said. “When I said we need to unite, everyone was in agreement. There were about 100 local leaders in the room. Not a single person disagreed. Everyone stood up and clapped.”
+
+Many of Trump’s former rivals, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, have endorsed him, but others have not. Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney remains firmly opposed to Trump and has been involved in talks about finding a third-party challenger. Members of the Bush family — including former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who ran against Trump for the nomination — are not expected to support Trump. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) reiterated this week that he was not yet ready to endorse him.
+
+On Friday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — another former Trump rival — told an Oklahoma radio station that “I am looking and listening to see what the candidates do.”
+
+As Rubio was back in Florida meeting with Venezuelan college students Friday, prominent party officials were pushing him to reconsider his plans to leave the Senate.
+
+The state’s popular chief financial officer, Jeff Atwater, who almost ran for Rubio’s seat, told the Tampa Bay Times that the senator should “pull aside some quiet time and contemplate” running again.
+
+“He would be the best candidate to prevail,” Atwater said.
+
+Brian Ballard, a well-connected Tallahassee GOP lobbyist, said that Rubio is “by far our best chance to hold the seat.”
+
+The aggressive push to recruit Rubio went public this week when one of the top political advisers to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to social media to encourage Rubio. The orchestrated effort included calling on him to run during the Republican senators’ weekly closed-door luncheon and a public letter from Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), head of the Foreign Relations Committee, on which Rubio serves.
+
+None of the five Republicans running to succeed Rubio enjoys his level of name identification, Corker said. He also said they would need roughly $50 million to mount a serious bid in the coming months.
+
+Democrats dismissed Rubio Friday as “a terrible fallback option” for Republicans, saying that he has taken positions on abortion, domestic violence and the economy during his presidential bid that would make him unpopular with Florida voters.
+
+“Rubio spent months making clear how much he disliked his current job while he asked voters for a promotion, and it would be a tall order to convince voters they should send him back,” the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said in a statement.
+
+In the CNN interview, Rubio said he would not run again because his longtime friend, Florida Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, is one of those vying to succeed him.
+
+Would Rubio reconsider if Lopez-Cantera dropped out?
+
+“Maybe,” he said. “I enjoy my work in the Senate — I always did.”
+
+Paul Kane and Katie Zezima contributed to this report.",REAL
+9846,"Obamacare architect: ‘The law is working as designed,’ just needs ‘a larger mandate penalty’","Print 
+On Wednesday’s broadcast of “CNN Newsroom,” MIT Economics Professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber argued that “The law is working as designed. However, it could work better. And I think probably the most important thing experts would agree on is that, we need a larger mandate penalty.” 
+Gruber said, “Obamacare’s not imploding. The main goal of Obamacare was two-fold. One was to cover the uninsured, of which we’ve covered 20 million, the largest expansion in american history. The other was to fix broken insurance markets where insurors could deny people insurance just because they were sick or they had been sick. Those have been fixed, and for the vast majority of Americans, costs in those markets have come down, thanks to the subsidies made available under Obamacare.” 
+When asked about the 22% Obamacare premium increases, Gruber stated, “the 22% increase, let’s remember who that applies to. That applies to a very small fraction of people, who have to buy insurance without the subsidies that are available.”…",FAKE
+10029,Western Banking System COLLAPSE | Jim Willie,"Podcast: Play in new window | Download 
+The western banking system is broken. With U.S. treasuries selling off, the banking system will be caught on the wrong side of the trade when it comes to derivatives on interest rate swaps. As the U.S. banks collapse, get ready for foreign banks to take their place. This and much more with a viewers’ questions edition of the Silver Doctors’ podcast with the one and only Dr. Jim Willie! 
+
+CLICK HERE to SUBSCRIBE for free to the Silver Doctors’ YouTube channel so you do not miss part 3!",FAKE
+8377,3 Philadelphia prison guards arrested for alleged assault on handcuffed inmate,"3 Philadelphia prison guards arrested for alleged assault on handcuffed inmate 3 Philadelphia prison guards arrested for alleged assault on handcuffed inmate By 0 48 
+Three Philadelphia prison guards are facing charges including aggravated assault after allegedly beating up a handcuffed inmate and submitting a fraudulent report. They say the inmate harmed himself, but their actions were caught on video. 
+Milton Gibbs, 52, Terrance Bailey, 30, and Shaun Lowe, 26, are facing charges of aggravated assault, conspiracy, and tampering with public records. There are also additional charges of misdemeanor, recklessly endangering another person, unsworn falsification to authorities, and obstructing the administration of law and official oppression. They turned themselves in for arrest on Wednesday. 
+“We cannot stand for any kind of assault, and this attack on a handcuffed inmate by sworn corrections officers is egregious. Every inmate who is held in our prisons deserves to be treated with dignity and respect,” Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said in statement following arrests of the three guards. 
+According to the investigation, the assault at the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center dates back to June, when Gibbs allegedly threatened inmate Brandon Kulb, 22, stating that he would “hang him and murder him.” 
+It is alleged that Gibbs called Bailey, and the two then entered Kulb’s cell and began beating, kicking, and spitting on him. 
+District Attorney Williams says they eventually put Kulb in handcuffs and walked him down a staircase, while continuing to beat him. 
+“Once they arrived at the cell block’s exit, Bailey struck the victim in the back of the head knocking him to the ground. Gibbs and Bailey then dragged the victim into the central control area and began to stomp on him. Lowe arrived on scene and joined in the assault,” the DA’s office said in a press release, adding that Kulb “lost consciousness” at least twice during that time. 
+The guards tried to make sure that the assault would not get captured on surveillance cameras, but “much” of it was still caught on CCTV, offering the investigation irrefutable evidence. Despite that, guards tried to cover up the assault. 
+After the purported beating of Kulb, Gibbs and Bailey submitted a mental health referral saying the inmate had intentionally harmed himself. Lowe allegedly transported the victim to the receiving room, and Gibbs tried to coerce the victim not to report the incident in exchange for food from the staff kitchen, the DA said. 
+In their reports, the three wrote that they only used “open hand” control, because they had to subdue Kulb. They omitted their own actions. 
+This is not the first time Gibbs has been arrested, according to NewsWorks. In 2004, he was reportedly fired for assaulting an inmate but was acquitted in a federal civil rights case filed against him. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+850,Cruz takes on Caitlyn Jenner over transgender fight,"Washington (CNN) Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is standing his ground in his belief that allowing transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice ""opens the door for predators,"" dismissing criticism from Caitlyn Jenner, who mocked him over the issue last week.
+
+""This is not a matter of right or left, or Democrat or Republican. This is common sense. It doesn't make sense for grown adult men, strangers, to be alone in a restroom with a little girl,"" Cruz told CNN's Jake Tapper on ""State of the Union.""
+
+""This is the height of political correctness,"" Cruz continued. ""And frankly, the concern is not of the Caitlyn Jenners of the world, but if the law is such that any man, if he feels like it, can go in a woman's restroom and you can't ask him to leave, that opens the door for predators.""
+
+Jenner, a reality TV star and activist for transgender causes, posted a video to Facebook on Wednesday knocking Cruz for his support of a controversial North Carolina law that requires people to use the bathroom that corresponds with their ""biological sex"" stated on their birth certificate, rather than how they self-identify.
+
+After using a women's bathroom in the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York City -- following a recent comment by Trump in which he said Jenner could use whichever bathroom she wanted at the tower -- Jenner, a Republican, quipped: ""By the way, Ted, nobody got molested.""
+
+""I've spent a lot of years in law enforcement dealing with child predators that are sick individuals,"" Cruz told Tapper. ""That doesn't mean that that is the people who are transgendered. But there are predators in the world, and just saying that you're a man, you can go in the girls' restroom if you feel like it, opens the door for criminals.""
+
+""This is the height of political correctness for Donald Trump to say yes, let grown men in the bathroom with little girls,"" he said.
+
+Cruz told Tapper that Fiorina's words owed to her being a tough competitor.
+
+""She was a competitor in this primary. She was a fierce competitor in a primary people take shots at each other. That's part of the process,"" Cruz said. ""You know, we all remember when Ronald Reagan picked George Herbert Walker Bush as his vice president and they had to explain why Bush had called Reaganomics 'voodoo economics.' Listen, that happens when you come through a primary and you unite.""
+
+Cruz added: ""I can tell you Carly and I have spent weeks and weeks and weeks together on the road barnstorming the state of Indiana, barnstorming the country, and I have gotten to know and respect Carly. She's an extraordinary leader.""
+
+Boehner 'let out his inner Trump'
+
+Asked about the criticism, Cruz shrugged it off.
+
+""I think Boehner kinda let out his inner Trump, and he had some colorful imagery there. But it's interesting, when Boehner was attacking me, he praised Hillary Clinton. He thinks she's terrific, and he praised Donald Trump. He said Donald is his friend, his golfing buddy, his texting buddy,"" Cruz said. ""And there's a reason -- if you like, if you want to see the next president as a Boehner Republican, then Donald Trump is your man.""
+
+So why does Boehner dislike Cruz?
+
+""If you look at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and John Boehner, they're all part of the same corrupt Washington system where the rich get richer (and) the powerful and the lobbyists use government power for personal benefit,"" Cruz said.
+
+'Behind the Donald Trump mask is Hillary Clinton'
+
+""You know who I feel the worst for? I feel the worst for Donald's supporters who believe his role,"" Cruz said. ""But every day, if he gets closer to the nomination, he starts taking his mask off, and behind the Donald Trump mask is Hillary Clinton.""
+
+""That is quite an image,"" Tapper said.",REAL
+5039,Trump vs. Clinton Is the 1980s vs. the 1990s,"You could shout yourself hoarse arguing what the just-begun 2016 general election is about. The insider versus the outsider! No, feminism versus machismo! No, “Stronger together” versus “I alone can fix it”!
+
+One thing that 2016 really isn’t about is newness. Neither candidate is anybody’s idea of a fresh face. Hillary Clinton will be 69 on Inauguration Day, Donald Trump, 70. Each entered this race a celebrity minted in a distant epoch from which neither candidate can fully escape.
+
+What’s the 2016 election really about? The Eighties are running against the Nineties.
+
+The 1980s and 1990s remain who Trump and Clinton, respectively, are—or at least how they seem most of the time. The 1980s was the decade when Trump emerged as a local symbol of New York City’s brash new wealth and parlayed that into national fame. His taste for Italian marble and gold-plated fixtures perfectly matched a period that extolled conspicuous displays of personal wealth. For Clinton, the 1990s, a decade dominated by technology-driven prosperity, affirmed her conviction that brainpower and idealism could overcome bitter political divisions. She entered the White House as a full partner in a duo bent on seizing a political center evaporating faster than liquid helium. (“Two for the price of one,” husband Bill promised.)
+
+Even in a tumultuous and norm-defying campaign, Clinton and Trump have held fast to the identities they crafted in their formative decades. Clinton is identified permanently with her husband’s “third way” triangulation of the 1990s, even as she’s drifted leftward on issues like trade and the minimum wage. It was simply what she had to do to defeat her democratic socialist primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, and to keep up with her party’s new focus on income inequality. Trump is regarded permanently as the real estate titan he was in the 1980s even though his business model later shifted toward licensing the Trump name (always in gold, always in caps) to properties he didn’t own. Few realize that even Trump’s renovation of Washington’s Old Post Office—currently his highest-profile building project—is a leasing deal; the title is held by the federal government. Even the dire tone of Trump’s nomination speech, in which he declared that we live in an era “more dangerous than, frankly, I have ever seen,” was a far better description of the soaring crime he lived through in the late ’80s in New York than of today. (Trump himself was channeling Richard Nixon in 1968, but the ’80s were all about slamming shut the Pandora’s box that was the ’60s.)
+
+Truthfully, the two candidates don’t work very hard to update their images because the decades that hatched them represent golden ages to which they promise America will return.
+
+Trump’s very slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is borrowed from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign of 1980 (“Let’s Make America Great Again”). It’s a straightforward appeal to GOP nostalgia for a decade of conservative ascendancy, economic prosperity and a president whom Republicans idealize. Asked in January what “Make America Great Again” meant, Trump said, “I think during the Ronald Reagan years we were very good. ... We felt good about our country.”
+
+Clinton’s New Jerusalem, meanwhile, looks very much like the 1990s. Hillary’s new “Change-Maker” slogan is an echo of Bill’s rallying cry at the 1992 convention: “It’s time to change America.” In May, Hillary said she would put Bill “in charge of revitalizing the economy,” a role that would make him the most powerful first relative since Robert F. Kennedy. The politics are a bit tricky. Hillary knows that Democrats feel ambivalent about resurrecting a public figure whom opponents once branded “Slick Willie.” But she also knows that nobody is ambivalent about the eight-year economic expansion that Bill Clinton presided over during his presidency. “You know, at the end of the ’90s,” Hillary said in March, “we had 23 million new jobs. Incomes went up for everybody.” Elect me, Hillary was saying, and we’ll make it happen again.
+
+In theory, one party (call them the Ins) always stands for continuity while the other (the Outs) always stands for change.
+
+As a Republican, Trump is obliged to disparage Obama. Trump sees the Obama presidency as a “total disaster,” to quote a phrase he’s used to describe the Affordable Care Act and Obama’s foreign policy. But Trump’s disparagement doesn’t stop there. He uses the same phrase to describe fellow Republican George W. Bush’s conduct of the Iraq war and Bill Clinton’s signing of NAFTA. That takes the 21st century off the table and also the final decade of the 20th. To avoid “total disaster,” Trump’s followers must travel in time back to … you guessed it, the 1980s.
+
+Clinton speaks favorably of Obama, as she must; he’s her party’s incumbent, and she spent four years as his secretary of state. But she tends to describe Obama’s administration as a mere continuation of her husband’s (interrupted by a George W. Bush presidency that “wrecked the economy”). The Affordable Care Act, for instance, “was called Hillarycare,” Hillary said in January, “before it was called Obamacare.” That’s a stretch—Obamacare resembles Hillarycare only in the very broad sense that both were ambitious health reform plans proposed by Democrats. But in Clinton’s telling, the biggest policy accomplishment of the Obama administration—really, the biggest policy accomplishment of any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson—was rooted in the glorious 1990s.
+
+Much as they might focus on up-to-date topics like ISIL and cyberwar, Trump and Clinton are vying for control of the political Wayback Machine, and the only difference is where they want to set the dial. Want to know what they’re likely to do in office? Just take a look at the signature themes—war, economy and good old family values—that define the eras that they epitomize.
+
+Broadly speaking, the 1980s was a decade of peace and the 1990s a decade of war.
+
+That confounds political stereotypes because Ronald Reagan was a bit of a saber rattler. “I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever,” Reagan famously quipped in 1984, not knowing the microphone in front of him was hot. “We begin bombing in five minutes.” Reagan presided over a vast arms buildup, including a wildly ambitious anti-nuke umbrella in outer space that critics dubbed “Star Wars.” Some historians credit this arms buildup with winning the Cold War simply because the Soviets couldn’t keep up. Reagan also aided proxy wars in Nicaragua, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
+
+But where American soldiers were concerned Reagan was extremely risk-averse, withdrawing them, for instance, from a multinational peacekeeping mission in Beirut in 1983 after the bombing of U.S. Marine barracks by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah killed 241 Americans. Reagan later sent thousands of TOW missiles secretly to Iran in exchange for the release of (what turned out to be) five of the seven hostages held by that same Hezbollah. As president, Reagan sent U.S. troops into battle only once, for a grand total of three days in 1983, to wrest the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada from a Marxist coup. The liberal commentator Michael Kinsley called it a “test-tube war.”
+
+The real wars happened in the 1990s. The largest deployment was 1991’s Persian Gulf War, wherein U.S. forces chased Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait (but not out of Iraq). The Gulf War was a 1990s event but not a Clinton administration event; it was waged by George H.W. Bush, and it rekindled, however briefly, Americans’ faith in full-scale military intervention after their Vietnam debacle. (“Good night, Vietnam,” reporter David Shribman quipped in the Wall Street Journal). Bush also committed troops to support relief efforts in Somalia, where civil war was raging. Clinton escalated that deployment and then withdrew the troops as the country descended into anarchy. Later in the ’90s Clinton ordered airstrikes to quell ethnic strife in Bosnia and Kosovo, and also twice in Iraq to counter assorted misbehavior by Saddam.
+
+Except for Somalia, all these military operations were on balance successful, and all of them, including Somalia, were short term. In both respects, they were vastly different from U.S. deployments over the following two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
+
+Trump is much fonder of Russia than Reagan was (to put it mildly), but otherwise his foreign policy stance is an exaggerated version of Reagan’s: Talk tough (“I’m gonna build a military that’s gonna be much stronger than it is right now,” Trump has said.) and go out of your way to avoid military interventions. Did Reagan provoke the Soviet Union by calling it (however accurately) an “evil empire”? Trump sees and raises by endorsing torture (“We have to beat the savages.”). Although at the time, Trump favored the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya, just as Clinton did, he now says he opposed them. Clinton, meanwhile, is more measured in her rhetoric but favors a more hawkish foreign policy that’s closer to the 1990s policies of George H.W. Bush and her husband. As secretary of state, for instance, she favored U.S. training for Syrian rebels, only to be overruled by Obama.
+
+The 1980s was a decade in which the budget deficit spun out of control. The 1990s was a decade in which the deficit, however briefly, disappeared.
+
+Here again we see Republicans and Democrats playing against type. “For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit,” Reagan said in his 1981 inaugural address, “mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present.” When he spoke these words, the budget deficit was $74 billion. By the time Reagan left office it was $155 billion. (Currently the deficit is $401 billion, a higher absolute figure but a smaller percentage of gross domestic product than in Reagan’s final year.) Much of the blame lies with tax cuts that failed to deliver the revenue boost predicted by the supply-side economic priesthood. But federal spending increased during Reagan’s presidency, too, by about 80 percent, much of it the aforementioned military buildup.
+
+The deficit continued to climb during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, but under Bill Clinton it fell from $290 billion, to zero, to a surplus of $236 billion in Clinton’s final year. Tax increases passed by Clinton and by Bush (in violation of the latter’s “no new taxes” pledge) helped bring deficits under control, but Clinton also slowed spending growth. During Clinton’s presidency, federal spending increased by 29 percent—less than half the rate of increase under Reagan and slightly slower than Obama’s estimated 32 percent.
+
+If your preferred measure of governmental bloat is the number of people who work for the federal government, that grew under Reagan by about 7 percent and shrank under Bill Clinton by about 16 percent (continuing, once again, a trend that began under George H.W. Bush). Much of that had to do with the end of the Cold War, but under Clinton even the number of civilian workers shrank (by about 13 percent), compared to growth of about 4 percent under Reagan, the very same president who famously declared his nine most terrifying words were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” (Both civilian and military federal employment shrank under Obama through 2014, the most recent year for which data are available.)
+
+Most government expansion over the past few decades, it should be noted, has occurred through contractors. Nobody, alas, seems to know how many contract employees that entailed, but it’s a good bet their ranks grew through both the 1980s and the 1990s. According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal contract spending today is somewhere in excess of $500 billion. Most of that spending is by the Defense Department, which today, remarkably, hands most of its annual budget over to the private sector.
+
+As with matters of war and peace, Trump’s stance resembles Reagan’s, with the difference that Trump makes less effort than Reagan did to disguise his hedonistic impulse toward deficit spending. “You have tremendous waste, fraud and abuse,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal in February, invoking a trinity frequently mentioned by Reagan in the 1980s. But the specific example Trump gave—phantom Social Security payments to nonexistent people aged 106 years and older—garbled an inspector general report that actually said very few such payments were made. In general, Trump distinguished himself from his primary opponents by pledging not to cut entitlement spending even as he proposed tax cuts that the bipartisan Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget estimated would expand the national debt by $12 trillion.
+
+Hillary’s orientation is very much like Bill’s was in the 1990s—she does not espouse entitlement cuts (Democrats seldom do) but would likely accept them as part of a bipartisan budget deal that also raised taxes (though she’s never said so). Clinton has proposed new government spending that might add up to as much as $1 trillion, but her proposed tax increases would raise about the same amount, according to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center. On paper, then, Trump would expand the deficit, as Reagan did in the 1980s, while Clinton would neither expand nor shrink it, falling short of what Bill achieved in the 1990s.
+
+The 1980s celebrated family values. The 1990s fretted about them.
+
+Ronald Reagan was the first (and still the only) divorced person ever to be elected president. But even his bitterest enemies didn’t question Reagan’s devotion to his wife Nancy. Some did think, though, this devotion verged on dependence: He called her “mommy,” and once, in 1984, she got caught on tape feeding him a response to a reporter’s question (“We’re doing everything we can.”). The Reagans’ daughter, Patti Davis, thought her parents’ devotion to each other “meant that they were complete” without their children. “If a band of gypsies came and took me and [Ron Reagan Jr.] away,” Patti said earlier this year on NBC’s Today, “they would miss us, but they’d be fine.” After Reagan’s first grandchild was born, it was noted widely that the sitting president took two years to see him.
+
+Reagan avoided the subject of gay rights, even though, as a former actor, he had many gay friends (prompting the liberal commentator Hendrik Hertzberg to dub him a “closet tolerant”). Reagan didn’t mention AIDS publicly until 1985, and when the topic came up at news briefings it prompted snickers. The topic of gay marriage lay far enough in the future as to be a non-issue; as late as 1989, mainstream culture judged it an entirely novel idea when the conservative writer Andrew Sullivan published his first essay on the topic. On abortion, Reagan was a sharp critic, even going so far as to write an election-year book in 1984 titled Abortion And The Conscience of A Nation. Through the 1980s, teenage birth rates, teenage pregnancy rates and teenage abortion rates stayed about level.
+
+In the 1990s, Bill Clinton showed himself to be a more doting father than Reagan—we learned last week he binge-watched all six Police Academy movies with Chelsea—but a less doting husband. Evidence of the latter trickled in during the 1992 primaries (prompting a Clinton campaign aide to coin the phrase “bimbo eruptions”) and turned into a flood in 1998, when an independent counsel hired to investigate a fishy-looking real estate deal decided instead to pursue Bill’s commitment to (and veracity under oath concerning) his marriage vows.
+
+The 1990s were the decade when the phrase “culture wars” came into vogue (thanks largely to the 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle To Define America by University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter). On gay rights, Bill immediately pledged to end a ban on gays serving in the military. That prompted a political furor that ended with the implementation of an unworkable policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that limped along until 2011. Bill was much more cautious on gay marriage, favoring civil unions but signing into law a nationwide ban on gay marriage that the Supreme Court eventually struck down (by then with Bill’s approval) in 2013. On abortion, the Clinton administration’s policy was that it be “safe, legal, and rare,” a verbal construction that captures the somewhat anguished tenor of the times. In spite of that anguish, many of the social trends that inspired the greatest anxiety were in retreat. Throughout the 1990s (once again, starting under George H.W. Bush and continuing under Clinton) birth rates, pregnancy rates and abortion rates among teenagers declined. Indeed, trajectories for hot-button social issues grew so favorable that by decade’s end William Bennett, a former Education secretary under George H.W. Bush, had to stop publishing an annual jeremiad he called the “Index of Leading Cultural Indicators.”
+
+Trump, like Reagan, is in his personal life a (somewhat-less-closeted) tolerant: a twice-divorced man who during his first marriage began an affair with the woman who would become his second wife. Unlike Reagan, though, Trump lacks gallantry; he once boasted in writing that “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller.” On social issues, Trump hews closer to Hillary Clinton than to his fellow Republicans, opposing, for instance, North Carolina’s ban on transgender bathrooms. But Trump’s attitudes on gay and transgender rights have been somewhat conflicted over the decades. He shunned his longtime mentor and lawyer Roy Cohn in 1985 when he discovered Cohn had AIDS, which he would die of in 1986. On the one hand, in Trump’s nomination speech he diverged from his text to congratulate the crowd for cheering his pledge to “protect LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.” On the other hand, Trump draws the line at gay marriage and abortion, both of which he now opposes. Hillary Clinton favors gay marriage and is pro-choice.
+
+One could go on. Violent crime rose in the 1980s and fell in the 1990s, for reasons that experts still argue about. Income inequality grew during both decades, though only during the 1990s did economic expansion increase median income in any significant way. (Important caveat: The much-despised 1 percent expanded its share of the nation’s collective income faster under Clinton than under Reagan.) The stock market crashed in 1987 and sort-of crashed in 1998, in neither instance prompting a recession. Personal computers became a consumer item in the 1980s but were able to do much more in the 1990s with the advent of the World Wide Web. Brood X, the only cicada cycle worth worrying about, blanketed the sidewalks with crunchy carcasses in 1987 but didn’t reappear until 2004, bypassing the ’90s entirely.
+
+Should the 1980s get your vote, or the 1990s? That’s a personal choice—more personal perhaps, and certainly more nuanced, than the choice between two actual human beings who are running for president. Both candidates want to build a bridge back to the 20th century. The question voters must decide is: which part?",REAL
+10313,Someone broke a Skype spam bot by typing an emoji and the transcript is what happens when robots go mad,"Next Swipe left/right Someone broke a Skype spam bot by typing an emoji and the transcript is what happens when robots go mad 
+As delpharseven1 says, “Message to programmers: ALL USER INPUT IS EVIL.”",FAKE
+3507,Search continues for wreckage from EgyptAir flight as officials probe links to terror,"An intense search continued Thursday in the Mediterranean Sea off Greece for wreckage of an EgyptAir flight that went down earlier in the day with 66 people on board, as multiple U.S. officials told Fox News that no explosion was detected by infrared satellites in the vicinity of the crash area.
+
+There were conflicting reports throughout the day as to if any debris from the plane was spotted by search crews.
+
+Officials from EgyptAir initially said debris from the plane was found off the Greek island of Karpathos. Athanassios Binis, head of Greece's Air Accident Investigation and Aviation Safety Board, later told state ERT TV that ""an assessment of the finds showed that they do not belong to an aircraft,"" The Associated Press reported. Binis added that this has been confirmed by Egyptian authorities.
+
+Later in the day, Ahmed Adel, Vice President of EgyptAir, told CNN the debris found Thursday was not from Flight 804.
+
+""We stand corrected on finding the wreckage because what we found was not parts of our plane,"" he said. Adel added the search for wreckage will continue on Friday.
+
+Several U.S. officials told Fox News that spy satellites used to detect missile launches and explosions around the world did not detect an explosion in the area where the EgyptAir flight crashed.
+
+Cairo-bound EgyptAir Flight 804 dropped from the sky hours after departing from Paris. The plane banked and spun sharply before plunging less than an hour before it was due to land in Cairo at 3:15 a.m. local time, according to aviation officials. Authorities have said terrorism was a more likely cause of the crash than technical failure.
+
+Greek military officials said a Greek C-130 military transport plane is still participating in the search for debris from the EgyptAir jet, but a frigate initially sent to the area has been recalled.
+
+A Greek military official told The Associated Press planes had earlier spotted debris 230 miles south-southeast of the island of Crete but still within the Egyptian air traffic control area. Two other floating objects, colored white and red, were spotted in the same area, Greek defense sources told Reuters.
+
+Speaking from Cairo, Egyptian Minister of Aviation Sherif Fathy said the AirBus 320, which left Charles de Gaulle Airport at 11:09 p.m. local time Wednesday and was due in Cairo at 3:15 a.m., ""vanished.""
+
+""I'm not excluding any theory,"" said Fathy, who responded to a reporter’s question by saying that the possibility of a terror attack as the cause of the crash is ""stronger"" than technical failure.
+
+Greek officials say the plane banked and spun sharply just before dropping.
+
+""The plane carried out a 90-degree turn to the left and a 360-degree turn to the right, falling from 37,000 to 15,000 feet and the signal was lost at around 10,000 feet,"" Greece’s Defense Minister Panos Kammenos told a news conference Thursday.
+
+Greek air traffic controllers tried to make contact as the plane left Greek airspace, but the pilot did not respond, he said. They continued to try to reach the pilot until 2:29 a.m. Cairo time, when the plane disappeared from the radar 7 miles southeast of the island of Crete.
+
+What is unknown about the plane's final moments in the air could be consistent with terrorism, David Learmount, a leading British air analyst, told Fox News.
+
+""All this says is that the plane was destabilized . . . it doesn't say why,"" Learmount said.
+
+Learmount said it is possible that a bomb or someone with a gun or knife entering the cockpit could de-stabilize a plane, but also pointed out that a mechanical or technical defect, as well as human error, could also de-stabilize the aircraft.
+
+Congressman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told reporters Thursday he spoke with the head of the Transportation Security Administration.
+
+McCaul added that there are indicators of an event similar to that in October when a Russian passenger plane was blown out of the sky over the Sinai Peninsula using a timed bomb.
+
+Sen. Diane Feinstein, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters Thursday she hasn't been briefed on the EgyptAir crash but that there was ""strong probability that the plane went down with an act of terror.""
+
+Flight 804 was carrying 56 passengers, including one child and two babies, three security staff and seven crew members, officials said. Fathy said identities would not be released until relatives could be contacted, but described those on board as including 15 French passengers, 30 Egyptians, one Briton, two Iraqis, one Kuwaiti, one Saudi, one Sudanese, one Chadian, one Portuguese, one Algerian and one Canadian.
+
+Among passengers on missing EgyptAir Flight 804 was a student training at a French military school who was heading to his family home in Chad to mourn his mother.
+
+The protocol officer for Chad's embassy in Paris, Muhammed Allamine, said the man ""was going to give condolences to his family."" Allamine said the man, who wasn't identified, was a student at France's prestigious Saint-Cyr army academy.
+
+Another passenger on the flight was an Egyptian man returning home after medical treatment in France, according to two shocked friends who turned up at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport.
+
+""It breaks my heart,"" said one friend, Madji Samaan.
+
+Kuwait's Foreign Ministry identified a Kuwaiti feared dead in the crash as Abdulmohsen al-Muteiri, but offered no other details.
+
+In Paris, relatives started arriving at De Gaulle Airport outside the French capital.A man and a woman, identified by airport staff as relatives of passengers, sat at an information desk near the EgyptAir counter.
+
+The woman sobbed, holding her face in a handkerchief. The pair were led away by police.
+
+Officials offered conflicting reports of an emergency beacon being picked up two hours after the plane had dropped off from radar. The Egyptian military said that no such distress call was received, but didn’t specify whether they were confirming an initial report or dismissing an EgyptAir statement.
+
+Defense officials told Fox News Thursday that the U.S. Navy is flying P-3 reconnaissance aircraft to assist in the search effort.
+
+Another U.S. government official said Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has been briefed at least twice on the missing plane, and that at this early stage, everything is on the table as the government is “tied in tight” with French and Egyptian investigators.
+
+The White House also said in a statement that President Obama has been briefed on the crash.
+
+Greece's defense minister, Panos Kammenos, said Greece has a submarine on standby which is participating in a NATO exercise about 100 miles away from the presumed crash area, while F-16 fighter jets stationed on Crete could also be used if necessary. The country already has a navy frigate, two military transport planes and a radar plane participating in the search operation, while he said Egypt had sent a C-130 military transport plane and two F-16s.
+
+Hollande and French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault offered to send military planes and boats to join the search for wreckage.
+
+""We are at the disposition of the Egyptian authorities with our military capacities, with our planes, our boats to help in the search for this plane,"" Ayrault said. He spoke as Hollande held an emergency meeting at the Elysee Palace.
+
+Later, the French military said a Falcon surveillance jet monitoring the Mediterranean for migrants had been diverted to help search for the EgyptAir plane. Military spokesman Col. Gilles Jaron told The Associated Press that the jet is joining the Egypt-led search effort, and the French Navy may send another plane and a ship to the zone.
+
+Hours after the plane disappeared on Thursday, Fathy told reporters in Cairo that the diameter of the search area will widen, moving further south of the island of Karpathos.
+
+Hollande spoke with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi on the phone earlier Thursday and agreed to ""closely cooperate to establish as soon as possible the circumstances"" in which the EgyptAir flight disappeared, according to a statement issued in Paris.
+
+In Cairo, el-Sissi convened an emergency meeting of the National Security Council, the country's highest security body. The council includes the prime minister and the defense, foreign and interior ministers, in addition to the chiefs of the intelligence agencies.
+
+The Airbus A320 is a widely used twin-engine, single-aisle plane that operates on short and medium-haul routes. Nearly 4,000 A320s are currently in use around the world. The versions EgyptAir operates are equipped to carry 145 passengers.
+
+The French Prosecutor’s Office said they will launch an investigation into the EgyptAir crash. The country remains under a state of emergency after terror attacks by the Islamic State killed 130 people in November.
+
+The Associated Press reported that around 15 family members of passengers on board the missing flight had arrived at Cairo airport Thursday morning. Airport authorities brought doctors to the scene after several distressed family members collapsed.
+
+The incident renewed security concerns months after a Russian passenger plane was blown out of the sky over the Sinai Peninsula. The Russian plane crashed in Sinai on Oct. 31, killing all 224 people on board. Moscow said it was brought down by an explosive device, and a local branch of ISIS has claimed responsibility for planting it.
+
+In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 1990 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, killing all 217 people aboard. U.S. investigators filed a final report that concluded its co-pilot switched off the autopilot and pointed the Boeing 767 downward. But Egyptian officials rejected the notion of suicide altogether, insisting some mechanical reason caused the crash.
+
+In March, an EgyptAir plane was hijacked and diverted to Cyprus. A man who admitted to the hijacking and was described by Cypriot authorities as ""psychologically unstable"" is in custody.
+
+Fox News' Greg Palkot, Lucas Tomlinson, Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report",REAL
+2529,Kasich Affirms Path to Legal Status for Undocumented Immigrants,"Republican presidential candidate John Kasich reaffirmed his call for a path to legal status for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., as well as a guest worker program to meet the needs of the labor market.
+
+On CNN’s “State of the Union” show on Sunday morning, the Ohio governor seemed to disavow his previous support for eliminating “birthright citizenship,” the law granting automatic U.S. citizenship to almost all children born on U.S. soil.
+
+“I don’t think we need to go there,” he said.",REAL
+2872,ISIS Claims Responsibility for Deadly Bombing in Afghanistan,"The Islamic State (IS) group claimed to have carried out a deadly suicide attack in eastern Afghanistan Saturday that killed at least 33 people and injured more than 100, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said, in what, if verified, would be the first major attack claimed by the jihadist group in the country.
+
+""Who claimed responsibility for horrific attack in Nangarhar today? The Taliban did not claim responsibility for the attack, Daesh (IS) claimed responsibility for the attack,"" President Ghani said on a visit to northeastern Badakhshan province.
+
+A person purporting to be an IS spokesman said in a call to AFP that the group claimed responsibility for the bombing outside a bank in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.
+
+An online posting allegedly from the group made the same claim, which could not be immediately verified.
+
+""Thirty-three dead bodies and more than 100 wounded were brought to the hospital,"" Dr Najeebullah Kamawal, head of the provincial hospital, told AFP.
+
+Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, a provincial government spokesman, confirmed the attack -- the deadliest since November.
+
+""The explosion happened outside the bank when government employees and civilians were collecting their monthly salaries,"" he told AFP.
+
+The UN gave a higher toll, saying 35 people had been killed.
+
+President Ghani strongly condemned the attack, which saw children among those killed, his office said in a statement.
+
+""Carrying out terrorist attacks in cities and public places are the most cowardly acts of terror by terrorists targeting innocent civilians,"" President Ghani said.
+
+The scene of the attack showed the gruesome scale of the carnage with people lying in pools of blood and body parts scattered across the ground.
+
+The bombing comes as Afghanistan braces for what is expected to be a bloody push by the Taliban at the start of the fighting season.
+
+The militants have stepped up attacks on government and foreign targets since Washington backpedalled on plans to shrink the US force in Afghanistan this year by nearly half.
+
+The Taliban have seen defections to IS in recent months, with some insurgents voicing their disaffection with their one-eyed supreme leader Mullah Omar, who has not been seen since the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
+
+The Afghan government has also raised the ominous prospect of IS making inroads into the country, though the group that has captured swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq has never formally acknowledged having a presence in Afghanistan.",REAL
+9214,"New earthquake rocks Italy, buildings collapse but no deaths reported","Reuters 
+A powerful earthquake struck Italy on Sunday in the same central regions that have been rocked by repeated tremors over the past two months, with more homes and churches brought down but no deaths reported. 
+The quake, which measured 6.6 according to the U.S. Geological Survey, was bigger than one on Aug. 24 that killed almost 300 people. Many people have fled the area since then, helping to avoid a new devastating death toll. 
+The latest quake was felt across much of Italy, striking at 7.40 a.m. (0640 GMT), its epicenter close to the historic Umbrian walled town of Norcia, some 100 km (60 miles) from the university city of Perugia. 
+Panicked Norcia residents rushed into the streets and the town’s ancient Basilica of St. Benedict collapsed, leaving just the facade standing. Nuns, monks and locals sank to their knees in the main square in silent prayer before the shattered church. 
+“This is a tragedy. It is a coup de grace. The basilica is devastated,” Bishop Renato Boccardo of Norcia told Reuters. 
+“Everyone has been suspended in a never-ending state of fear and stress. They are at their wits end,” said Boccardo, referring to the thousands of tremors that have rattled the area since August, including two serious quakes on Wednesday. 
+Italy’s Civil Protection unit, which coordinates disaster relief, said numerous houses were destroyed on Sunday in the regions of Umbria and Marche, but either they were deserted at the time or most of the residents managed to escape beforehand. 
+“No deaths have been reported, but there are a number of people injured,” said Civil Protection chief Fabrizio Curcio, adding that just one person was in a serious condition. 
+Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said Italy was living through extremely difficult times, but promised a massive reconstruction effort in the years ahead regardless of any possible objections from the European Union over the eventual costs. 
+“We will rebuild everything, the houses, the churches and the businesses,” Renzi told reporters. “Everything that needs to be done to rebuild these areas will be done.” 
+Local authorities said towns and villages already battered by August’s 6.2 quake had suffered further significant damage. 
+“This morning’s quake has hit the few things that were left standing. We will have to start from scratch,” Michele Franchi, the deputy mayor of Arquata del Tronto, told Rai television. 
+Experts said Sunday’s quake was the strongest here since a 6.9 quake in Italy’s south in 1980 that killed 2,735 people. 
+ARTISTIC LOSS 
+The destruction of the Norcia basilica was the single most significant loss of Italy’s artistic heritage in an earthquake since a tremor in 1997 caused the collapse of the ceiling of the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, which is 80 km to the north. 
+The frescoed basilica, which is the spiritual, historic and tourist heart of Norcia, was built over the site of the home where the founder of the Benedictine order and his Sister St. Scolastica were born in 480. 
+The basilica and monastery complex dates to the 13th century, although shrines to St. Benedict and his sister had been built there since the 8th century. 
+Benedict founded the Benedictine order in Subiaco, near Rome. He died in 530 in the monastery at Monte Cassino, south of Rome, which was destroyed during World War Two. That monastery was later rebuilt. 
+A number of other churches were also ruined on Sunday, Italian media reported, including Norcia’s Cattedrale di Santa Maria, which was built in the 16th century, while the town hall belltower had deep cracks running through its walls. 
+However, most of Norcia’s homes appeared to have withstood the prolonged tremor, with residents praising years of investment by local authorities in anti-seismic protection. 
+In the nearby city of Rieti patients were evacuated from a hospital to allow experts to check on structural damage, while hillroads across the region were littered with fallen rocks. 
+Sunday’s earthquake was felt as far north as Bolzano, near the border with Austria and as far south as the Puglia region at the southern tip of the Italian peninsula. 
+It was also felt strongly in the capital Rome, where transport authorities shut down the metro system for precautionary checks. Authorities also toured the city’s main Roman Catholic basilicas looking for possible damage. 
+Italy sits on two geological fault lines, making it one of the most seismically active countries in Europe. 
+Gianluca Valinsese, a scientist at Italy’s National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology, warned the latest series of quakes could continue for weeks in a domino effect along the central Apennine fault system. 
+Italy’s deadliest quake since the start of the 20th century came in 1908, when a tremor followed by a tsunami killed an estimated 80,000 people in the southern regions of Reggio Calabria and Sicily. 
+(Writing by Crispian Balmer and Philip Pullella; Additional reporting by Steve Scherer, Gavin Jones and Mark Bendeich; Editing by Mark Heinrich)",FAKE
+6149,Sucking the Blood of a Declining Civilization,"Leave a reply The 7 Maoi facing the equinox sunset at Ahu Akivi on Easter Island (photo copyright Ian Sewell) 
+Paul Rosenberg – Civilization has to be transmitted from one generation to another. If it isn’t, processes break down and life becomes difficult. Soon there must be a painful reform, or else the civilization will be lost. 
+This is fundamentally the job of families (especially parents), but at the moment that’s not really possible: How many families can survive on one income? And if one of the parents can’t stay home and teach the fundamental lessons of civilization, who will pass them to the next generation? 
+Certainly the better daycare facilities try, but to think that someone watching a couple dozen kids is going to transmit civilization to them as effectively as a parent who’s with the child day and night is simply ridiculous. The blame for this rests almost solely at the feet of the state of course, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 
+I’ll begin by quoting the redoubtable Fred Reed on the current situation: 
+We live in a dying culture and, soon, a diminished country. It cannot be saved. 
+Not true? Add up the bits and pieces. We laugh in horror, some of us, primarily the older, at the decline of schooling, the courses like Batman and the Struggle for Gender Equity. Comic, yes. Yet in aggregate, these constitute an academic and civilizational collapse both profound and irreversible. Enstupidation does not happen in a healthy country. Who even wants to reverse this onrushing night? Not the universities, nor the teacher’s unions, nor a professoriat gone as daft as the “students,” nor the banks battening on student loans [sic]. 
+I’m more optimistic than Fred in that I think our civilization can be saved. But what he writes is true, and the West’s big institutions are simply vampires sucking the blood of a declining civilization. 
+I think we can all admit that every major institution of the West, including the mega-corps, is engaged in stripping the Western populace of everything they possibly can. There is no virtue involved, no principle, no honor… there’s not even much consideration for the future. These outfits, under whatever excuses they’re trotting out this year, are strip-mining Western civilization, not building it. 
+That said, let’s look at some particular villains. The Political Correctness Barbarians 
+When I first saw these people rising to power, decades ago now, I thought they were so ridiculous that they’d come and go quickly. Unfortunately I was wrong, and they subverted millions of children. The current insanity over “safe spaces” and such condemns them openly, and especially that it’s becoming acceptable to say “I hate white people.” Anti-Religionists 
+It’s one thing to be a simple agnostic. It’s quite another to go out and try to dismember religion… which in nearly every case means Christianity. And to be honest about it, most people who do this are acting out their personal traumas: either in permanent rebellion to their parents or in anger at one church or another. 
+Slashing and burning things simply bears bad fruit, but here’s the core issue with attacking Christianity: 
+The people who pushed Christianity out of Western culture were arrogant and destructive – not that they pushed it away, but that they never bothered to replace it . 
+If you want to remove the moral core of a civilization, you have to replace it with something better. And the religion-haters did not. They sawed off the limb that held them and were too arrogant to consider the consequences. Academia and the Education Vampires 
+The Enlightenment sits before us as a twisted wreckage. Its destruction followed the usual path: first setting up institutions, then monopolies and fiefdoms, and finally lording it over others as far and as long as they could. 
+Education has whored itself out to the state and treats its students as income-generating tools. Are there a few exceptions? I’m sure there are, but they are few. Academia, including most of scientific academia, has disgraced itself. Could any serious Enlightenment thinker have respected “scientific consensus”? Please! Science places experimentation above all and never ever sells itself to a page full of names and initials! 
+The scientific process has been subjugated by institutions that thrive on restricting access. Cronyism is massive, peer review is corrupted, and the uncredentialed are treated like lepers. These institutions sit atop the corpse of the Enlightenment. Corporatized Art 
+The arts – music, film, painting, sculpture – are not widgets. They are immensely more important than that, forming minds and cultures in deep ways. 
+How to pay the artist (singer, writer, whatever) has long been a problem and remains one. Hopefully a good answer arises at some point. Until then, seeking profit by dumbing down every art form is simply degrading. 
+The corporations that now control music and film have bastardized art for money. I’m not ready to jail them and I certainly don’t think the state could do a better job, but I am willing to say that they have disgraced art. Have you ever wondered why elegance is gone? Why loudness and drunkenness are treated as virtues? The State 
+Being that it forcibly skims half of the West’s production every year, given that it punishes all who do not obey it, and given that its laws are for sale to the highest bidders, the number one destroyer of Western civilization is the state. Hands down. Think of what people could do for their children and grandchildren with twice as much money. 
+And don’t get me started on enforced charity, the victim culture, “you didn’t build that,” and “it takes a village.” I don’t like to swear in print. A Final Point 
+I could go on, but this is a column, not a treatise. My final point is this: 
+None of the above are transmitting civilization, even if some of them once did. They are tools for reaping the masses, and we need to leave them behind. But far more importantly, we need to build methods and systems that will transmit Western civilization. 
+The authentic Western virtues – cooperation, initiative, creativity, curiosity, co-dominance, and real justice (not merely a form thereof) – are necessary for a prosperous humanity, and the institutions of our time have flamboyantly failed. 
+It’s time to start building afresh. SF Source Freeman’s Perspective Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+8512,"NATO builds up offensive capability on borders of Russia & Belarus, Moscow to respond","
+The US and NATO are building up their offensive capabilities on the Western borders of Russia and its ally Belarus, prompting Moscow to take reciprocal measures, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told the two countries’ top military brass.
+“Those actions undermine strategic stability and are forcing Russia to take reciprocal defensive measures, including some in the Western theatre,” the defense minister said.
+NATO “has not abandoned attempts to dictate its will to other countries through economic and political means, as well as by military force,” he said, noting that “an information war is in full swing.”
+Confronted with a complex security environment, Russia and Belarus will join forces to strengthen their mutual security, Shoigu added.
+“Advanced bilateral cooperation and a common stance on major global and regional security challenges allow us to successfully tackle strengthening our defense capabilities,” he stressed, adding that this approach appears to be necessary at this point, “as international crisis response mechanisms have stalled, while hotspots are already near our borders.”
+In order to address the security challenges, Russia is now supplying state-of-the-art armaments and weapons systems to the army units guarding the Western borders, as well as ramping up combat training for the troops, the Defense Minister said.
+Russian and Belarusian militaries are constantly working on improving their interoperability and the capacity to act in large troops formations, he added.
+The remarks come amid NATO’s biggest military buildup in Eastern Europe since the Cold War. The deployment will see up to 4,000 troops deployed in the Baltic countries and Poland, in addition to the more than 1,000 soldiers already stationed there on a “rotational basis.”
+A German-led battalion will deploy in Lithuania, the US will send troops to Poland, Canada is expected to station troops in Latvia, and the UK will deploy an 800-strong battle group in Estonia.
+British Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon claimed in a bellicose op-ed appearing in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday that Europe “is our continent” and, as such, it will be defended by a “fully combat-capable” force.
+Earlier this year, NATO staged several multinational war games, the largest of which was Anaconda 2016. Those exercises saw more than 31,000 personnel from 24 NATO and ‘partner’ countries taking part, reportedly in order to develop their capacity to “deploy, mass and sustain combat power” against a near-peer adversary.
+In June, Ukraine, a non-NATO state, hosted the Rapid Trident 2016 exercise, which featured over 1,800 soldiers from 14 countries, along with dozens of combat vehicles, aircraft, and heavy weaponry. That drill was said to be the largest multinational war games ever to be held in Ukraine.
+Most recently, 680 troops from 32 NATO and non-NATO states, including Georgia, Albania, Israel and Ukraine, took part in war games called Crna Gora 2016 in the Balkan country of Montenegro, where they trained for “disaster relief operations” in a series of joint exercises.
+Moscow has consistently warned that the buildup does nothing to improve European security and is nothing but a “projection of force.”
+NATO members “are fulfilling their confrontational schemes of military planning and military preparations in the territories along our borders,” Russia’s envoy to NATO, Aleksandr Grushko, said on Monday.
+“So, a question arises: What’s next? A new wave of NATO speculation about a ‘Russian threat’ and a new arms race?” the diplomat added. “We believe this is a road to nowhere.”
+Source 
+",FAKE
+9895,Top 5 unusual tragic deaths on sets,"Top 5 unusual tragic deaths on sets # Top5darkests 0 
+Over the years, conspiracies and theories of paranormal activity on movie sets has grown. With a large amount of horror productions having unfortunate deaths, some deaths closely resembling story lines of the horror production, theories of movies with a curse has been spoken by some. From deaths on movie productions involving the devil to the conspiracy of the hanging extra in the wizard of oz, we will cover in this video our top 5 unusual tragic deaths on sets. Tags",FAKE
+651,Clinton clinches Democratic nomination as Sanders stays in race,"Hillary Clinton faces the last major contest of the primary campaign on Tuesday having already been declared the Democratic presidential nominee, making her the first woman in history to lead a major party bid for the White House.
+
+The declaration that Clinton had won the support of the 2,383 delegates needed to clinch the nomination came from the Associated Press late on Monday, before voting was due to commence in primaries in California and five other states.
+
+The legitimacy of AP’s declaration, which was announced 24 hours earlier than her campaign expected, was immediately called into question by Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders.
+
+The Vermont senator’s campaign issued a defiant statement that condemned the media’s “rush to judgment” and signalled that the Vermont senator was willing, if possible, to contest the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in July.
+
+However, as voters headed to the polls in California, New Jersey, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and New Mexico, it was clear that the mathematics were squarely on the side of the former secretary of state.
+
+The unexpected and somewhat anti-climactic twist in the race appeared to surprise the Clinton campaign, which has not altered its plan and is waiting until voting concludes on Tuesday before declaring her the Democratic nominee-in-waiting at a victory party in New York.
+
+Clinton made reference to the AP declaration during a campaign event in Long Beach, California, on Monday night. “I got to tell you, according to the news, we are on the brink of a historic, historic, unprecedented moment, but we still have work to do, don’t we?” she said.
+
+
+
+On Tuesday Clinton secured the endorsement of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California and, according to US media reports, aides to Barack Obama are in discussion with her campaign with a view to the president formally backing her soon. He is understood to have called Sanders on Sunday to inform him.
+
+Obama remained on the fence on Tuesday. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said: “There is at least one superdelegate – the one who works in the Oval Office – who is not prepared to make a public declaration about his endorsement at this point, but stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated.”
+
+
+
+Clinton’s candidacy, years in the making, will cap a long and bruising campaign against Sanders, a self-described socialist who has electrified the progressive wing of the Democratic party and pulled its frontrunner to the left.
+
+
+
+Her graduation to presumptive nominee will also mark the start of a momentous general election campaign against the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
+
+Clinton gave a foretaste of the type of campaign she plans to wage against the real estate mogul last week when she used a speech in San Diego to brand her adversary too dangerous and unstable to be entrusted with nuclear codes and warning of economic crisis if he were to reach the White House.
+
+“Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different, they’re dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies,” she said in that speech, widely agreed to be one of her best of the campaign. “He is not just unprepared. He is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.”
+
+At a fundraising concert in Los Angeles on Monday where celebrity supporters included Stevie Wonder, Ricky Martin, Cher, Magic Johnson and Christina Aguilera, Clinton told the crowd: “We’re going to come out of the primary even stronger to take on Donald Trump. Enough with the fear, enough with the anger, enough with the bigotry, enough with the bullying!”
+
+
+
+Her supporters argue she has unparalleled qualifications for the job after a lifetime in public service in which she has served as first lady, New York senator and secretary of state under Barack Obama.
+
+
+
+The US president, who defeated Clinton’s first bid for the Democratic nomination in 2008, is widely expected to endorse Clinton in the coming days.
+
+The sense that the nomination was within Clinton’s grasp had been growing in recent days and the candidate has been looking increasingly relaxed and confident on the campaign trail.
+
+Earlier on Monday, in an exchange with reporters in Compton, Clinton made clear she believed Sanders should withdraw from the race after Tuesday’s vote, pointing out it would be “eight years to the day” since she withdrew and endorsed then-senator Obama.
+
+Unusually for Clinton, who has carefully avoided appearing to take the nomination for granted, she also conceded she was “very touched” by the belief among her supporters that she was on the verge of making history.
+
+“My supporters are passionate. They are committed. They have voted for me in great numbers across our country for many reasons,” she said.
+
+“But among those reasons is their belief that having a woman president will make a great statement, a historic statement about what kind of country we are, what we stand for. It’s really emotional.”
+
+However, Clinton’s readiness for the looming general election battle still rests, in part, on the outcome of Tuesday’s primary in California, a large and diverse state that she had been expected to win easily until just a few weeks ago.
+
+
+
+Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, have campaigned tirelessly in the state in recent days after polls showed her formidable lead in the polls shrink in the face of a stiff challenge from Sanders.
+
+The senator had hoped to use an upset in California to shift momentum in the race and convince superdelegates to switch sides.
+
+Conversely, a defeat for Sanders in California, which could potentially mean his rival amounting sufficient pledged delegates to seal the nomination without the help of superdelegates, would fundamentally undermine his case for remaining in the race until July.
+
+Appearing before thousands of supporters in front of a fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge late on Monday, Sanders implored supporters to turn out for a contest he described as “the most important primary that we’ve had in the entire Democratic nomination process”.
+
+He repeated his argument that he is consistently performing better against Trump in the polls than Clinton and stands a better chance of keeping him out of the White House. The senator made no mention of the reports declaring Clinton the nominee, but the news had by then percolated through the crowd.
+
+Some supporters began trickling out of the rally before it had concluded while others sniped at reporters over what they complained was biased media coverage and a premature and undemocratic declaration of Clinton as the victor.
+
+AP said its announcement was based on “a burst of last-minute support from superdelegates” – the party officials who get a vote at the national convention that is not bound by the results of elections.
+
+Clinton appeared to be on the very cusp of amassing the number of delegates to win the nomination after convincing wins in the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico by the end of the weekend.
+
+
+
+By then Clinton had 1,812 pledged delegates, compared with Sanders’ 1,521. When those were added to her overwhelming support from superdelegates the frontrunner appeared to be just shy of the target.
+
+But the declaration, by AP’s count, that Clinton had actually met the target appeared to catch both campaigns off guard, upending carefully choreographed plans to react to a denouement not expected until Tuesday.
+
+Sanders’ spokesman, Michael Briggs, immediately released a statement accusing the media of “ignoring the Democratic National Committee’s clear statement that it is wrong to count the votes of superdelegates before they actually vote at the convention this summer”.
+
+“Secretary Clinton does not have and will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to secure the nomination,” he said. “She will be dependent on superdelegates who do not vote until 25 July and who can change their minds between now and then.”
+
+
+
+Even Clinton’s campaign appeared to believe the declaration was premature. “We can’t say the primary is over,” Bill Clinton told reporters at a rally in San Francisco. “Let people vote. Let them have their say.” Other Clinton campaign officials indicated that, while the news reports were welcome, they did not plan to declare victory in the overall race until Tuesday.
+
+Clinton spoke only briefly at the concert-rally in Hollywood. “It is not an overstatement for me to say that we have a really important election ahead of us now,” she said, smiling broadly.",REAL
+4090,Poroshenko sworn in as Ukraine's president,"KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Petro Poroshenko took the oath of office as Ukraine's president Saturday, calling on armed groups to lay down their weapons as he assumed leadership of a country mired in a violent uprising and economic troubles.
+
+In his inaugural address to the Verkhovna Rada, the country's parliament, Poroshenko promised amnesty ""for those who do not have blood on their hands."" That appeared to apply both to separatist, pro-Russia insurgents in the country's east and to nationalist groups that oppose them.
+
+Poroshenko also promised dialogue with citizens in the eastern regions, but excluded the insurgents. ""Talking to gangsters and killers is not our avenue,"" he said, according to a translator. He also called for early regional elections in the east.
+
+He assumed power a day after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin at D-Day commemoration ceremonies in France.
+
+Despite the outreach to Putin, Poroshenko said he will not accept Russia's annexation of Crimea.
+
+""Crimea is, was and will be Ukrainian. There will be no trade-off,"" Poroshenko said.
+
+Russia annexed the territory in March after its troops took control of the Black Sea peninsula and Crimea held a secession referendum that Kiev and Western countries regard as illegitimate.
+
+Poroshenko, who became a billionaire as a candy tycoon, was elected on May 25, three months after the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in the wake of months of street protests.
+
+Putin has denied allegations by Kiev and the West that Russia has fomented the rebellion in the east, and he insisted Friday that Poroshenko needs to speak directly to representatives from the east.
+
+Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.",REAL
+3337,Hillary Clinton agrees to provide private e-mail server to FBI,"Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attorney has agreed to provide the FBI with the private server that housed her e-mail during her four years as secretary of state, Clinton’s presidential campaign said Tuesday.
+
+Her attorney also has agreed to give agents a thumb drive containing copies of thousands of e-mails that Clinton had previously turned over to the State Department.
+
+The FBI has been looking into the security of Clinton’s unusual private system, which has emerged as an issue in her campaign amid growing questions from Republicans and some U.S. intelligence officials about whether government secrets might have been put at risk.
+
+The development in the FBI inquiry came the same day that a top intelligence official whose office has been reviewing some of Clinton’s e-mails informed congressional leaders that top-secret information had been contained in two e-mails that traveled across the server.
+
+The finding, contained in a letter sent to leaders of key oversight committees, marked the first indication from government officials that information regarded as top secret — the government’s highest category of security designation — may have passed across Clinton’s server while she led the State Department.
+
+A State Department spokesman late Tuesday described the top-secret designation as a recommendation and said they had not been marked classified at the time, but said staffers “circulated these e-mails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton.”
+
+Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, said Tuesday night that Clinton is cooperating with the FBI probe. He declined to say whether the FBI ordered that she turn over the devices and when her attorney, David Kendall, had done so.
+
+“She directed her team to give her e-mail server that was used during her tenure as secretary to the Department of Justice, as well as a thumb drive containing copies of her e-mails already provided to the State Department,” Merrill said. “She pledged to cooperate with the government’s security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them.”
+
+The inquiry by the FBI is considered preliminary and appears to be focused on ensuring the proper handling of classified material. Officials have said that Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, is not a target.
+
+The FBI’s efforts have included contacting the Denver-based technology firm that helped manage the Clintons’ unusual private ­e-mail system.
+
+Clinton has resisted relinquishing control of the server. In March, she said the server contained “personal communications from my husband and me.”
+
+“I believe I have met all of my responsibilities, and the server will remain private,” she said then, in response to a question from a reporter about whether she would allow an independent party to examine the device
+
+Clinton turned over more than 30,000 e-mails from the account to the State Department in December, and the agency is vetting those messages for release to the public. She has said that she deemed an additional 32,000 ­e-mails to be personal and chose not to keep them.
+
+Kendall told a congressional oversight committee in a letter that there was “no basis” to support a third-party examination of the server. He indicated that he had confirmed with IT staffers that no e-mail sent or received by Clinton’s account while she was secretary of state remained on the server or backup systems associated with the system. “Thus, there are no hdr22@clintonemail.com emails from Secretary of State Clinton’s tenure on the server for any review, even if such a review were appropriate or legally authorized,” he wrote.
+
+Meanwhile Tuesday, 17 House and Senate members from both parties were informed about the presence of “top secret” information on the Clinton e-mail system in a letter from the inspector general for the intelligence community, I. Charles McCullough III. The letter was first reported Tuesday by the McClatchy news service.
+
+Much of the classified information in the e-mail conversations originated with the CIA, according to two government officials familiar with the records. Some of the information was deemed to be classified by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s classification guidelines. The information included references to information related to satellite images and electronic communications, according to the officials.
+
+The findings by McCullough stemmed from his office’s review of a sample of 40 of Clinton’s ­e-mails. Previously, he had said that the sample included four classified e-mails, but on Tuesday he adjusted his assessment — saying that intelligence agencies deemed two of those e-mails to have contained top-secret information.
+
+McCullough has asked for access to all of the e-mails to conduct a more thorough review but was denied by State Department officials in July.
+
+Last week, State Department spokesman John Kirby said that while the agency was working to “resolve whether, in fact, this material is actually classified, we are taking steps to ensure the information is protected and stored appropriately.”
+
+McCullough also located two e-mails that included classified material from among a separate batch of 296 related to the 2012 attacks on U.S. outposts in Benghazi. One of those e-mails had been publicly released by the State Department, causing consternation within the intelligence community.
+
+He has also located one additional e-mail in the sample of 40 that was classified at the time it was sent but has since been declassified, suggesting that there is no longer a reason to protect the information or that it has since become public, two people familiar with the finding said.
+
+McCullough also told lawmakers that his reviewers found two e-mails they believe contain information that the State Department considers classified, and they have alerted the agency so it can conduct its own review.
+
+All told, McCullough has pointed to seven e-mails that he said contained classified information, including two with top-secret material.
+
+His findings appear to contradict Clinton’s earlier comments.
+
+“I am confident that I never sent or received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received,” she told reporters last month in Iowa.
+
+Clinton said she had “no idea” which e-mails have caught McCullough’s attention.",REAL
+3796,Obama 'guarantees' he will not interfere with Clinton email investigation,"""I can guarantee that,"" Obama answered when asked by Fox News' Chris Wallace if he would direct the Justice Department to treat Clinton as the evidence shows.
+
+""That is institutionally how we have always operated: I do not talk to the attorney general about pending investigations. I do not talk to FBI directors about pending investigations. We have a strict line,"" he said.
+
+Wallace asked Obama if he can still stand by his previous claims that the emails did not jeopardize national security.
+
+""I continue to believe that she has not jeopardized America's national security,"" Obama said. ""Now what I've also said ... there's a carelessness in terms of managing emails that she has owned and she recognizes. But I also think it is important to keep this in perspective.""
+
+The President tried to distinguish between different levels of top secret -- or classified information -- as a means of defending Clinton. ""What I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that there's classified, and then there's classified,"" he said. ""There's stuff that is really top secret-top secret, and there's stuff that is being presented to the President or the secretary of state, that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open source."" Obama said his former secretary of state saying she would ""never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy."" ""This is somebody whose served her country for four years as secretary of state, and did an outstanding job, and no one has suggested that in some ways as a consequence of how she's handled emails that that detracted from her excellent ability to carry out her duties,"" he said. Obama was also questioned by Wallace on criticism to his personal responses to terrorist attacks, citing the President calling the November terrorist attacks in Paris ""a setback."" ""There isn't a president who's taken more terrorists off the field then me over the last seven and half years,"" Obama said, defending himself. ""I'm the guy who calls the families or meets with them or hugs them or tries to comfort a mom or a dad or a husband or a kid after a terrorist attack. So let's be very clear how much I prioritize this. This is my No. 1 job and we have been doing it effectively,"" he said.",REAL
+1221,Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul suspends presidential campaign,"Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul suspended his Republican presidential campaign on Wednesday, after finishing fifth in the leadoff Iowa caucuses.
+
+Though Paul actually exceeded expectations in the Iowa contest, Fox News is told he did not believe his campaign had the momentum to build upon going into the New Hampshire primary next week. The libertarian-leaning senator made the decision official in a brief statement.
+
+“Across the country thousands upon thousands of young people flocked to our message of limited government, privacy, criminal justice reform and a reasonable foreign policy. Brushfires of Liberty were ignited, and those will carry on, as will I,” he said.
+
+“Although, today I will suspend my campaign for President, the fight is far from over. I will continue to carry the torch for Liberty in the United States Senate and I look forward to earning the privilege to represent the people of Kentucky for another term.""
+
+Paul, who was often at odds with other Republican candidates on issues like national security and surveillance, struggled to attract the loyal and enthusiastic following that buoyed his father Ron Paul’s past presidential bids.
+
+He was seen as having a strong debate performance in Des Moines last week, perhaps contributing to his respectable finish on Monday -- but was looking at dim chances next week in New Hampshire, where several other candidates are polling stronger.
+
+Paul, in opting not to continue his presidential bid, can now concentrate on his Senate re-election campaign.
+
+Paul follows former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in dropping out of the Republican primary battle after Iowa’s caucuses.",REAL
+6530,Syria - Waiting For The Next Moves       :," Syria - Waiting For The Next Moves By Moon Of Alabama
+November 09, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" Moon Of Alabama "" - We had expected a Syrian Army ""Election Campaign"" , a large size attack on Al Bab or east-Aleppo. That did not happen despite the right ""assets"" being in place and I have heard no reason yet why it was delayed. The Russian aircraft carrier group, which was expected last Friday along the Syrian coast, will only arrive this evening. It must have intentionally slowed its travel. There has been no single Syrian or Russian airstrike on east-Aleppo in last 21 days. ""Rebel"" shelling of west-Aleppo has not stopped for a day and caused many casualties. That will now change. One Russia source claims the Russian fleet will engage immediately. NOTAMs, NOtices To Air Men, about imminent operations on Syria's west-coast have been released. The declared areas and times of operation correspond to a campaign, not a single strike.
+After some 12 days of fighting, the second large al-Qaeda campaign to break the siege on east-Aleppo by attacking the south western side of west-Aleppo completely failed. While the first round nearly achieved a break through but was then contained the second attack was only a alibi attempt which never made any progress towards its claimed aim. The Syrian army has recaptured the housing project 1070 and will soon have cleaned all other areas that were shortly in the hands of the Jihadis. The loss in material and men for the Jihadis were immense. The Syrian army has finally learned how to defend against suicide vehicle bombs: have adequate weapons ready in the front line to kill them on their approaches. Of nearly 20 such bomb runs only 3 or 4 reached their targets and losses from those were less sever than from earlier bombs. The Jihadis and their ""western"" media and ""expert"" proxies seem to have given up on east-Aleppo. There is no sign that another break through attempt will be launched.
+The Obama administration has announced a campaign to encircle Raqqa in center-east Syria. It bought help from the Kurdish YPG to achieve that and has thereby excluded a Turkish campaign. The taking of Raqqa is supposed to be left to some Arab troops in cooperation with the Kurds. But those Arab troops do not yet exist and hiring and training has not even begun. The whole announcement of the beginning of a Raqqa campaign was obviously not serious. The Kurds will take a few small towns and the U.S. will temporarily protect them from sever Turkish interference in their areas in Syria. Raqqa will not be attacked before next years spring.
+The Turks are now miffed (though silently relieved) that they were not asked to take part in the Raqqa campaign. They have been promised that they may help to ""develop a long-term plan for seizing, holding and governing Raqqa"". That means exactly nothing. But the Turks never had a real chance to go and take Raqqa. It is too far from their borders and the imponderables are too big.
+In the area around Damascus the Ghouta rebel hold out has been split and reduced to small kettles which will be eliminated within a few days. The Syrian capital is safe for now and its people can live a rather normal life without fear of being killed in the next minute by some random grenade. A significant number of troops will become available when all the small rebel areas around the capital are gone. Those can be used in future campaigns. The frontline strength of the Syrian army in critical areas will increase and its maneuver force will become more powerful and efficient.
+The momentum in all of west Syria is on the side of the Syrian government. The Jihadists are more and more concentrated in Idleb governate and city. When the surrounded hold outs in its back are eliminated the Syrian army can launch an assault on them. The east is complicate. Deir Ezzor is still surrounded by ISIS and will likely be attacked again soon. Reinforcements for the defenders would be welcome.
+The Kurds are playing games and change alliances every now and than. For the time they again bet on the U.S. - a hope that has already been disappointed several times. The U.S. will let them fall as soon as it is convenient. The Kurds will learn again that such a policy does not bear tasteful fruits. There is a common Turkish and Syrian interest in cutting them back to size. In a year from now we may see new surprise alliances in that area.
+All the positive developments we have seen especially in west-Syria may be for naught if a new U.S. president decides to throw up the chess board and risk World War III by attacking Syrian and Russian positions. Its about the most stupid thing Washington could do and has thereby a good chance to happen. I hope that the Pentagon will lecture the politicians of the very real consequences such a move would have.
+Russian Navy will hit ISIS targets in Aleppo with cruise missiles : The Russian source insisted the missiles will aim for areas surrounding Aleppo to avoid harming the 200,000 civilians still living there.",FAKE
+3477,Who will fight for gay marriage at SCOTUS?,"Washington (CNN) The date for arguments is on the calendar. The questions that the justices will have to decide are clear. Even the amount of time lawyers will have to make their case is set in stone.
+
+But there's still one mystery heading into next month's historic gay marriage case at the Supreme Court: Who will get to argue before the justices that same sex marriage should be legal across the nation?
+
+The roster of lawyers for each side is still being worked out. And like many things related to the law, it's complicated. Six legal challenges in four states have been consolidated into one case. And to make things even more dicey, there are actually two separate legal questions before the court.
+
+Still, this is a rare opportunity to argue before the highest court to shape the law on one of the most consequential modern social issues. It's no wonder that any lawyer -- from recent law school grads to titans of the profession -- would dream of a chance to snag a piece of the debate.
+
+""It will be a very sensitive negotiation among the lawyers,"" said Adam Winkler, a professor at the UCLA School of Law. ""Everyone involved in this case would love to be the one to argue.""
+
+In general, the court leaves the decision up to the parties. The plaintiffs on Tuesday proposed that their time to make their case be divided — a practice the Court usually frowns upon.
+
+If the justices decline the request, plaintiffs will have to winnow down their choices.
+
+That will be tough because scores of lawyers have been involved with the challenge, including some of the best litigators in the country.
+
+The parties could choose a private attorney who has been with the case all along such as Alphonse A. Gerhardstein, a civil rights attorney from Cincinnati or Carole M. Stanyar, who is based in Ann Arbor.
+
+""The choice could also depend upon whether the parties ask, and the court agrees, to allow them to designate two lawyers to argue,"" said Amy Howe, the editor of Scotusblog.
+
+They could opt for someone with vast experience arguing before the the Supreme Court. Both Jeffrey L. Fisher, of Stanford Law School, and Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, who used to work in the Solicitor General's office, have appeared multiple times before the justices.
+
+Another option would be to pick a lawyer affiliated with one of the movement groups that has been working in the trenches for years on a state-by-state strategy to build political momentum on the issue. Top contenders would include Mary Bonauto of the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders and James Esseks of the ACLU.
+
+""Everyone involved wants to win more than anything else,"" said Winkler.
+
+It would be unusual for the parties to choose a lawyer unaffiliated with the case at hand.
+
+For instance, Theodore Olson and David Boies, the political odd fellows who came together in 2012 to fight California's ban on same sex marriage, backed a different challenge this time around in Virginia. The Supreme Court ultimately declined to take up that case, making it harder for the power lawyers to be involved in next month's case.
+
+At least one big name is expected to argue for those in favor of same-sex marriage: Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. The Obama administration filed an amicus brief in the case two weeks ago and as the government's lawyer before the court, Verrilli would typically get some time before the justices.
+
+But from there, it's anyone's guess.
+
+The court is considering two questions. The first concerns the central issue of whether states can ban gay marriage. The second question gives the justices an off ramp if they decide against issuing a sweeping ruling. That question concerns whether states must recognize the marriage of couples legally married out of state.
+
+State officials in the four states involved -- Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky -- have to go through a similar process to decide who will lead arguments defending state bans on same-sex marriage.
+
+On Friday, Michigan's attorney general announced that Special Assistant Attorney General John Bursch, the former Michigan solicitor general, will present the state's oral argument. And according to Dan Tierney, the spokesperson at the Ohio Attorney General's Office, Joseph F. Whalen, Tennessee's associate solicitor general, will handle the second question.
+
+Deciding who will argue the case will mark one of the last strategic decisions the parties will have to make before the issue goes to the justices.
+
+For the challengers, the moment has been years in the making as they worked toward the overall aim to get the Supreme Court to issue a nationwide ruling.
+
+Some longtime gay rights advocates were nervous a few years ago when opponents of California's Prop 8 chose to push their case to the Supreme Court. The advocates felt the better choice was to move more incrementally and first ask the Supreme Court to rule on a section of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) -- a federal law that denied benefits to same sex couples who were legally married in the states.
+
+As it turned out, both cases arrived before the court in 2012, and it ultimately struck down a section of DOMA and dismissed the Prop 8 case on procedural grounds.
+
+Since the DOMA ruling, the victories for gay rights advocates have been astounding.
+
+In the last two years, challenges to same sex marriage bans have been successful in nearly 60 lower court decisions according to the group Freedom to Marry.
+
+That's led some to believe it's a foregone conclusion that the court will rule in favor of marriage for same sex couples this summer.
+
+""I'm reluctant ever to call anything a 'done deal'"" said Scotusblog's Howe.
+
+But she points out that in October, the Supreme Court cleared the way for thousands of marriages to take place in Virginia, Utah, Oklahoma, Indiana and Wisconsin when it declined to take up an earlier set of same sex marriage petitions.
+
+""As a legal matter, the Court could of course uphold the bans, but as a practical matter it would be very hard to put the genie back into the bottle, so to speak, and hold that -- notwithstanding all of the marriages it has allowed to go forward in the last few months -- there is no longer a right to same-sex marriage,"" she said.",REAL
+4138,Boehner: Democrats must 'get off their ass' on DHS bill,"WASHINGTON — House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday that Senate Democrats should ""get off their ass"" and stop blocking a $40 billion Homeland Security bill that would derail President Obama's immigration programs.
+
+Boehner's comments came a day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the Senate has reached a stalemate and ""the next move obviously is up to the House."" Senate Democrats voted three times last week to block the DHS funding bill from moving forward. They object to House-passed provisions that would cut off all funds to carry out Obama's executive orders on immigration.
+
+The two Republican leaders seem to be each placing responsibility on the other chamber for what happens next on the funding bill. Unless Congress acts, funding for the Department of Homeland Security will expire on Feb. 27 and the agency will face a partial shutdown.
+
+Boehner said the House will not take up a revised bill despite the Senate impasse.
+
+""The House has done its job,"" Boehner, R-Ohio, said at a news conference after meeting with House Republicans. ""Why don't you go ask the Senate Democrats when they're going to get off their ass and do something other than to vote 'no'?""
+
+Obama announced in November that he would protect about 4 million undocumented immigrants from deportation and allow them to work legally in the U.S. His program would help the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens. It also would expand his 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which gives temporary legal status and work permits to undocumented immigrants brought to the USA as children.
+
+The House-passed bill would cut off all funding for the 2012 DACA program as well as blocking funds for Obama's latest immigration orders. Senate Democrats say they will only support the DHS funding bill if the immigration provisions are scrapped.
+
+""If Congress wants stronger border security and immigration enforcement, a clean funding bill for DHS is what we should be rallying around,"" said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the senior Democrat on the Senate homeland security committee. ""I hope that Congress can come together to do the right thing — support the passage of a clean, full-year appropriation for the Department of Homeland Security by Feb. 27 — and then get to work to pass a thoughtful, comprehensive immigration reform bill.""
+
+Republicans see Obama's immigration orders as an unconstitutional power grab and view the DHS funding bill as the best leverage they have to stop them. But Senate Republicans, who have a 54-vote majority, need 60 votes to advance the DHS funding bill and they have been unable to attract any Democrats to their side.
+
+Boehner and McConnell have both said they don't want a shutdown of Homeland Security, but their options are running out.
+
+There has been talk in both chambers of the possibility of passing a continuing resolution that would keep DHS open and funded at 2014 levels. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has spoken out against that option because it would not allow DHS to hire new Secret Service agents, buy new surveillance equipment for the Southwest border or send certain security grants to states and local governments.",REAL
+7893,BREAKING: Massive Voter Fraud in Broward County Florida Linked To Ex-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz – MagaFeed,"BREAKING: Massive Voter Fraud in Broward County Florida Linked To Ex-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz November 5, 2016 38 SHARES 150,000 ballots have already been counted before the proper procedures took place in Broward County, Florida. Florida officials have been caught filling absentee ballots. According to a former Secretary of Elections Department employee, there is a secret room where Democrat insiders fill out those absentee ballots. The woman has provided her sworn testimony via affidavit. Here is part of document: And the full document: 
+— Handcuff Hillary🇺🇸 (@russellwiley) November 4, 2016 Watch Fox report on this: Broward County is Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s district. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had to step down from the DNC because she was caught rigging the primary against Bernie. She now works for Hillary Clinton. There have been reports that Hillary Clinton had a private meeting with Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes in Broward County in late October. UPDATE: It appears the Trump campaign may be preparing a lawsuit against Broward County. These are still early reports however and we will update this article as we hear more information. UPDATE: TRUMP CAMPAIGN PREPARING LAWSUIT Against Broward Co FL Sec of Elections Brenda Snipes https://t.co/H9nyinvTAV 
+— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) November 5, 2016 Do you like this article? LIKE to MAGA! ",FAKE
+4822,The Debate I Heard,"I watched Monday's presidential debate. But what I heard was different from what Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton seemed to say.
+
+When Clinton said, ""I want us to invest in you,"" what I heard was, ""I will spend your money better than you will."" Also, I heard, ""I will spend lots of your money!""
+
+When Trump said our economic problems are China's fault, what I heard was, ""Blaming China wins me votes.""
+
+When Clinton told Trump, ""My father... printed drapery fabrics,"" what I heard was, ""Donald, you are a spoiled rich kid.""
+
+When Trump replied, ""My father gave me a very small loan,"" I heard Trump saying, ""Anything less than $200 million is a pittance."" (It's actually not clear what Trump received from his dad. Trump claims it was $1 million; others say $200 million. Anyway, is a million dollars a ""small"" loan""?)
+
+When Clinton said, ""I'm going to have a special prosecutor... to enforce the trade deals we have,"" I heard, ""Kiss my ring and pay my foundation if you want your trade deal approved!""
+
+When Trump said President Obama has ""doubled"" our debt, I swear I heard Trump promise, ""I'll triple it!""
+
+When Clinton said, ""I think it's time that the wealthy and corporations paid their fair share,"" what I heard was, ""Good thing Bill and I are 'broke,' because we're going to soak the rich like they've never been soaked before.""
+
+When Clinton said Trump's taxes ""must be something really important, even terrible, that he's trying to hide,"" what I heard was, ""My emails, on the other hand, were just a minor mistake and nothing I'm trying to hide—next question?""
+
+When Trump said, ""I was the one that got (Obama) to produce the birth certificate, and I think I did a good job,"" what I heard was, ""Since Hillary and her staff spread the lie first, I'm blameless.""
+
+When Clinton said, ""Barack Obama is a man of great dignity,"" I swear I heard her add quietly, ""despite me smearing him in 2008.""
+
+When Trump said, ""I was just endorsed (by 200) admirals and generals,"" what I heard was, ""I wish members of the military supported me the way they support Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson.""
+
+When Clinton said, ""Putin is playing a tough long game here,"" I swear I heard Hillary say, ""I guess my 'reset' with Russia was a bad idea.""
+
+When Clinton said she'll ""do much more with our tech companies"" to fight ISIS, what I heard was, ""I'll force Facebook and Twitter to shut down parts of the internet.""
+
+When Clinton said she'll ""take out al-Qaeda leadership,"" what I heard was, ""I don't know exactly who they are, but I'll kill a bunch of military-age males.""
+
+When Trump said, ""I did not support the war in Iraq,"" what I heard was, ""... except when I did.""
+
+When Clinton said, ""A man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes,"" I heard, ""A man provoked by a tweet should not be near the nuclear codes."" (Clinton got some things right.)",REAL
+3752,"Baltimore prosecutor charges police with murder, manslaughter in death of Freddie Gray","One Baltimore police officer was charged Friday with murder, three with manslaughter and two with assault in the death of Freddie Gray, who a prosecutor said suffered a broken neck last month when he was left shackled at the feet and lying face down in a police van by officers who ignored his pleas as they made their rounds.
+
+The death of Gray, 25, on April 19 of injuries suffered a week earlier touched off peaceful protests that degenerated into a night of rioting, looting and chaos Monday. On Friday, a crowd gathered around State's Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby cheered as she said the police involved would be brought to justice in the incident. Mosby said the police had no basis for arresting Gray, and described a harrowing ride in a van driven by Police Officer Caesar Goodson, 45, who was charged with the most serious crimes, including second-degree murder.
+
+""No one is above the law,"" declared Mosby, who said she comes from five generations of law enforcement and has been on the job for four months. Her husband is Baltimore City Councilman Nick Mosby, who has spoken out about the riots and anger in the city's African-American community.
+
+At a late afternoon press conference Friday, a man named Richard who said he was ""one of Freddie's two fathers"" said the family was ""satisfied with today's charges.""
+
+He then appealed for peace, saying, ""without justice there is no peace but let us have peace in the pursuit of justice.""
+
+All six officers were reported in custody by Friday afternoon.
+
+Before the charges were announced, the Baltimore police union president told Mosby in a letter that none of the six officers were responsible for Gray's death.
+
+""Not one of the officers involved in this tragic situation left home in the morning with the anticipation that someone with whom they interacted would not go home that night,"" the letter states. ""As tragic as this situation is, none of the officers involved are responsible for the death of Mr. Gray.""
+
+The union requested a special prosecutor in the case, saying Mosby had conflicts of interest including a friendship with the Gray family's lawyer, Billy Murphy, who contributed to her campaign. Murphy was among Mosby's biggest campaign contributors last year, donating the maximum individual amount allowed, $4,000, in June. Murphy also served on Mosby's transition team after the election.
+
+Gray suffered a broken neck, apparently while riding in the back of the Baltimore police van. While Mosby said Friday the medical examiner had ruled the death a homicide, police sources have said his injuries may have been caused by his head hitting a bolt inside the vehicle, according to local reports.
+
+The officers and charges in the case include:
+
+- Goodson was charged with second-degree depraved-heart murder, involuntary manslaughter, second-degree negligent assault, as well as other charges including failure to render aid and misconduct in office.
+
+- Police Officer William Porter, 25, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and misconduct in office.
+
+- Police Lt. Brian Rice, 41, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and second-degree assault.
+
+- Police Officer Alicia White, 30, was charged with involuntary manslaughter, second degree assault and misconduct in office.
+
+- Police officers Edward Nero, 29, and Garrett Miller, 26, were charged with multiple counts of assault, false imprisonment and misconduct in office.
+
+Five of the six officers charged were in custody Friday afternoon, according to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Ralwings-Blake. The officers facing felony charges have been suspended without pay.
+
+Mosby said her office’s police integrity unit began investigating the case the day after Gray’s arrest and interviewed dozens of witnesses and reviewed video, police statements and medical records as well as canvassed ""the community and the family of Mr. Gray.""
+
+She said her probe found the police officers, part of a bike patrol led by Rice, made eye contact with Gray, who has a rap sheet that includes several drug arrests. Gray ran from police, prompting the officers to chase after him, Mosby said. Gray surrendered a short time later and was handcuffed with his arms behind his back, she said.
+
+""It was at this time that Mr. Gray indicated that he could not breathe and requested an inhaler, to no avail,"" said Mosby, who also said the knife Gray was carrying clipped to the inside of his pants was not a switchblade and was not illegal.
+
+Police held Gray on the sidewalk until Goodson arrived driving the van, Mosby said. Goodson, Rice, Nero and Miller loaded him into the van, she said, but did not secure him with a seatbelt, a policy that had been put in place department wide nine days earlier.
+
+Moments later, Rice ordered Goodson to pull over and the officers took Gray back out of the van. The shackled Gray's legs, filled out paperwork and put him back in, placing him on his stomach on the floor of the vehicle, Mosby said. It was after that, she said, that Gray suffered his injuries. Mosby said Gray was injured ""as a result of being handcuffed, shackled by his feet and unrestrained inside"" the wagon.
+
+Mosby said the police stopped at least one more time to observe Gray, but did not immediately request medical assistance for him despite his pleas. She said Goodson drove the vehicle to pick up another arrested suspect blocks away, rather than taking Gray immediately for medical help.
+
+White, who had been sent to investigate citizens' complaints about Gray's initial arrest, looked in on him as he lay face down in the back of the van, Mosby said, but did nothing to help him.
+
+""She made no effort to look or assess or determine his condition,"" Mosby charged.
+
+By the time the van arrived at the police station, according to Mosby, Gray was not breathing and had gone into cardiac arrest. He was then rushed to a trauma center run by the University of Maryland where he underwent surgery and later died, she said.
+
+Gray died a week later, on April 19. Until Friday's news conference few details about the investigation had been publicly released and most of what was known came from local reports citing unnamed sources. An explosive report Wednesday night in the Washington Post cited a fellow passenger's account in a police affidavit that said Gray was thrashing around in an effort to injure himself, although that witness went on the city's CBS affiliate to say his words were taken out of context and that he now fears for his life after his statement was used to bolster the police version of events.
+
+""When I was in the back of that van it did not stop or nothing,"" Danta Allen, who had been arrested for allegedly stealing a cigarette, told WJZ. ""All it did was go straight to the station, but I heard a little banging, like he was banging his head,"" Allen said. ""I didn’t even know he was in the van until we got to the station.""
+
+Gray's lawyer has said his spine was nearly severed, but results of an autopsy, like the police report, remained under wraps. That has fueled frustration and suspicion in the community, where peaceful protests devolved into rioting and looting, culminating in a night of chaos on Monday.
+
+The Gray family's lawyers said they want the process to play out, and urged calm.
+
+""This family wants justice, and they want justice that comes at the right time and not too soon,"" attorney Hassan Murphy said Wednesday.
+
+Meanwhile, protesters over Gray’s death continue to spread across the nation. Aside from gatherings in Baltimore, demonstrations spread to Philadelphia and New York Thursday.
+
+Philly.com reports Philadelphia police made three or four arrests after hundreds of protesters marched through the city to show support for Gray.
+
+More demonstrations are planned through the weekend.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report",REAL
+4615,Never Trump? Forget it — prominent Republicans come crawling back defeated,"As the polls tighten in the last few days of the presidential election campaign, it’s interesting to see the reluctant GOP establishment start scurrying back into Donald Trump’s fold. Apparently, prominent Republicans are all making the bet that that the party’s nominee will at least come close enough to make it necessary to back him, lest they be blamed for his failure.
+
+The most famous of those who have re-endorsed Trump after walking away when he was cratering is Jason Chaffetz, the House Oversight Committee chair, who probably secretly hopes Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton will win (so he can run his endless witch hunts in front of the cameras) but felt it was necessary to back Trump just in case. Chaffetz is also likely to throw his hat into the ring for speaker if there’s a rebellion against Paul Ryan which is a real possibility.
+
+Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, Rep. Bradley Byrne of Alabama and Sen. John Thune of South Dakota have all come creeping back to Trump after initially dropping their endorsements in the wake of the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape. Even Trump skeptic and beloved Beltway conservative Hugh Hewitt has now decided to run with the pack.
+
+It’s been a tough time for Republican officials and elite conservative pundits, and that’s understandable. They’ve just discovered that their voters have a different interpretation of conservatism than they thought they did. The elites define Reagan’s famous “three-legged stool” of conservatism as “economic conservatism,” “social conservatism” and “defense conservatism,” which they would further describe as a belief in small government, family values and patriotism, all dressed up in fancy philosophical paeans to freedom, the founders and the Constitution.
+
+Trump has shown that the base of the party also believes in those three pillars, but Republicans have stripped away the intellectual veneer that made them socially acceptable and laid bare that the three legs actually represent racism, sexism and nationalism. Economic conservatism is simply a way to stop the federal government from spending money on “the wrong people.” Social conservatism is simply a way to keep women in their place. And defense conservatism is a chauvinistic belief that America is for Americans and foreigners had better watch their step.
+
+Elites had always known that many Republican voters held these views, but they thought that over time these ugly impulses would gradually fade away and become more ideologically abstract. Infamous GOP strategist Lee Atwater explained how he expected this to evolve:
+
+You start out in 1954 by saying, “N***er, n***er, ni***er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni***er” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.
+
+The Republicans didn’t do away with it. It just went underground. And all that coding and dog-whistling and abstraction was eventually seen as “political correctness” and their voters came to hate it. A new Pew Research Center poll was released this week showing that whatever hope the GOP elders have that they can return to the previous status quo, where everyone pretends the party’s base cares about tort reform and the capital gains tax, is not going to happen. The best they can say is that Republicans are deeply divided. Pew states the following: About two-thirds (65%) of Republican and Republican-leaning voters think their party’s presidential candidate does represent the core principles and positions the Republican Party should stand for while 31% think Trump does not. Among Republican voters, conservatives are far more likely than moderate and liberal Republicans to think of Trump as representative of the Republican Party’s principles. While three-quarters of conservative Republican voters see Trump as representative of what the party should stand for, only about half of moderate and liberal Republicans (52%) say the same. That divide manifests itself in many different ways, with the people who didn’t vote for Trump in the primaries showing a stronger dislike for the Republican Party as a whole. Trump voters seem to like the party just fine now that Trump has defined what it stands for. How this plays out after the election should be very interesting. Obviously if Trump wins, it will be a huge triumph and we’ll likely see a quick consolidation under his leadership. But even if he loses, it won’t be possible to put the genie back in the bottle, no matter how hard the “Never Trump” types try. Trump had only a couple of deeply held political beliefs that he brought with him into the campaign. He’s long believed foreign countries are laughing at America and he wants to make them stop. And he has always wanted to let police take the gloves off and enforce law and order. Everything else in his “platform,” from birtherism to the border wall and from  torture to terrorism, he got from conservative media. According to New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, his earliest advisers going back to 2012 were the notorious trickster Roger Stone, who is steeped in wing-nut-ism, and right-wing lawyer Sam Nunberg: “I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. Now Trump has Breitbart’s Steve Bannon in his ear with the alt-right agenda, much of which sounds familiar as well.  These ideas have all been swirling around right-wing media for years, while the political establishment was holding seminars on “Atlas Shrugged” and fetishizing the budget deficit. Conservatism is Trumpism — and has been for a long time. So-called conservatives just weren’t listening.",REAL
+4082,Russian opposition leader's slaying shocks Moscow,"MOSCOW — Russia's capital city was reeling Saturday after the shooting death of prominent opposition leader Boris Nemtsov just steps from the Kremlin.
+
+""It's the end of an epoch, an abyss,"" said Artyom Faizulin, a member of the opposition Progress Party, standing near the spot where Nemtsov was gunned down on Moscow's Moskvoretsky Bridge, close to the Kremlin towers.
+
+The site where Nemtsov's body lay under a plastic sheet for almost two hours is now covered with flowers and candles brought by supporters in the freezing drizzle.
+
+""It's the start of a new, more somber picture of our history, and we will see more political killings,"" Faizulin said.
+
+Nemtsov, 55, a former first deputy prime minister, was shot and killed shortly before midnight Friday by an unknown gunman who jumped from a white car, fired around seven shots then sped off.
+
+Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was set to appear at an opposition march scheduled Sunday against Russia's involvement in Ukraine, where a separatist conflict between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian forces has left more than 5,000 dead since April. Organizers canceled the march, instead planning a gathering Sunday to mourn him.
+
+Moscow, which annexed Ukraine's Crimea in March, has denied allegations that it is arming separatist rebels and sending troops to Ukraine's east. Nemtsov had been working on a report proving Russia's involvement in the conflict.
+
+Russian authorities reacted swiftly to the killing of Nemtsov, a leader of the liberal Parnas party who was once viewed as a potential handpicked successor to then-president Boris Yeltsin in 1999.
+
+Putin condemned the shooting and took the investigation into the killing under his personal control Saturday morning. His press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, called the incident a ""provocation.""
+
+By Saturday afternoon, the Investigative Committee said in a statement that it was considering several motives for the crime, including ""murder as a provocation to destabilize the political situation in the country.""
+
+Two other hypotheses being considered by the Investigative Committee link the fatal shooting to Islamist extremists and to Ukraine.
+
+Some found it hard to believe the perpetrators are not connected to the government because the crime was committed so close to the Kremlin.
+
+""This is a sacred place for (Russian) history,"" said Valery Kachayev, an artist, who was paying respects Saturday at the bridge where Nemtsov died. ""Nothing like this has happened in Russia's recent history. It's like the state secretary being assassinated on the White House lawn.""
+
+Colleagues were also skeptical about the official investigation.
+
+""I'm certain that sooner or later the people who killed him will be found, but I strongly doubt this will happen while the current regime is in power,"" said Ilya Yashin, one of the leaders of the Parnas Party. ""While the investigation is being carried out under the current authorities, who considered Nemtsov a personal enemy, there is little hope.""
+
+The incident took place against a backdrop of unprecedented propaganda on Russian state television and social networks in wake of the Ukraine crisis, in which political critics are often termed ""national traitors"" and ""fifth columnists.""
+
+Putin's popularity has skyrocketed following Russia's annexation of Crimea, despite the toll on the country's economy. A February poll by the Levada Center placed his approval rating at 86%, one point higher than in January.
+
+Nemtsov had received anonymous threats in the past several weeks, Yashin said. His death is ""a result of what is happening in the country. That hatred that has been stoked by the government in recent months in many ways led to such a high-profile political murder being committed,"" Yashin said.
+
+Many of Nemtsov's supporters who gathered on Moskvoretsky Bridge on Saturday blamed the assassination of the outspoken politician on the Kremlin, saying they feared the climate of fear in the country would get worse.
+
+""It's a move towards a new level of repression,"" Kachayev said. ""The regime has turned to political killings.""
+
+Others recalled the 1934 assassination of popular communist leader Sergei Kirov, which served as a pretext for the start of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's repressions against his former colleagues. Some historians believe Kirov's murder was the result of a Kremlin attempt to remove a rival.
+
+Independent political expert Alexei Makarkin said he believes the killing was a complete surprise for the Kremlin but added it could seriously undermine future dialogue between Russia and the West, already hampered by the Ukraine crisis.
+
+The crime itself, he said, may have been a provocation by radical elements galvanized by Russia's support of pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine.
+
+""There is a party of war, which wants to cut off all contact with the West,"" said Makarkin, who is vice president of the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies. ""For them, Nemtsov is an agent of Ukraine, of the enemy, which the authorities have not arrested for some reason.""
+
+Relations between Russia and the rest of the world will ""very much will depend on how the government investigates a crime committed so close to the Kremlin,"" he added.",REAL
+8388,Can any U.S. President Ever Overcome the Power of the Establishment and Bring Substantive Change to America?,"OpEdNews Op Eds 10/28/2016 at 10:15:27 Can any U.S. President Ever Overcome the Power of the Establishment and Bring Substantive Change to America? License DMCA We're finally approaching the end of this long, drawn-out, and very boring process of electing this country's next president. Millions upon millions of Americans are backing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the hope that she or he will bring long-awaited, substantive change to this government and this country. They have been waiting, fervently hoping to finally see some individual who possesses great courage, strong leadership skills, and a deep sense of ethics and morals, become president; and to use the power of the presidency to take this country in an entirely new direction, with a government that adheres to the will of the people. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like either of the two current candidates possesses those qualities and characteristics in abundance sometime in the future we may see such an individual emerge. What kind of real substantive change am I talking about? Well in the latter half of the 20 th Century we saw major accomplishments made during the tenures of various presidents, such as sending a man to the moon, together with important advancements in medicine, science and technology, as well as the creation and development of the internet. Those were very significant achievements but not the kind of substantive changes that greatly impacted the direction of this country. The kind of change of which I speak would be more like the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the creation of the Medicare and Medicaid health care systems in 1965; and in years past, the Social Security system. Here's the type of change this country and society needs as we navigate the 21 st century. First and foremost we need to see very ambitious government/business efforts and programs to create millions jobs for Americans. That would help greatly to reinvigorate the middle class and jumpstart our sluggish economy; it would also result in significant reductions in the number of Americans who are dependent on food stamps and other forms of government welfare. - Advertisement - Such a program should include the repair and modernization of our deteriorating national infrastructure, the development of solar and wind power, and the creation of a universal health care system that would finally cover all Americans at much lower costs. We need substantive changes in the way we deal with rampant violence in this country; this problem has been escalating and its way past time that something were done to curtail the proliferation and illegal use of guns that are slaughtering far too many of our innocent fellow Americans. But so far the government and, in particular, this Congress, has refused to address this situation because of the power wielded by the gun industry and the NRA. That continued governmental vacillation combined with NRA obstructive tactics must not be allowed to continue. A large majority of Americans would like to see real, substantive changes such as those identified above put into effect; and all of them are clearly doable. However, that's just not happening because there is a massive, seemingly immovable object standing in the way. That object of obstruction is, of course, the Establishment, which is diametrically opposed to any such progress because its own objectives clash with those of the people. It is very difficult and virtually impossible for any president to overcome the power of this Establishment because of what I refer to as the Circle of Power and Control that exists in Washington; here's how this ultra-powerful, self-perpetuating circle operates; - Advertisement - At the seat of this power is Corporate America which uses monumental amounts of $$$ to influence and control our elections so that a large majority of elected senators and representatives return to the Congress time and again; not to advance the needs of the people but, rather, the interests and objectives of Corporate America. We might refer to these politicians as indentured servants. The Corporatists want to slash corporate taxes to further increase profits, to significantly water down the regulations and restrictions on the banking industry., They support the lobbyists and special interest groups that have infiltrated this Congress and are, not only greatly influencing the enactment of legislation, but are often actually writing it. Congress has, as a very top priority, the ongoing funding of the massive Military-Industrial Complex, i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, the State and ""Defense"" Departments, and the defense industry corporations which produce the machinery of war. Too many taxpayer dollars that should be used to strengthen this country's deteriorating foundations are, instead, directed to the military establishment to maintain its huge empire of bases and installations all over the world, to conduct invasions and occupations of other nations, and to remove elected leaders and/or dictators in various countries.",FAKE
+3066,Dan Pfeiffer’s Exit Interview: How the White House Learned to Be Liberal,"Dan Pfeiffer, who left his position as senior adviser at the White House last week after having worked with Barack Obama since his first presidential campaign, has been involved from the outset in navigating the central contradiction at the heart of Obama’s public persona: He ran as a figure who could overcome partisan polarization, yet he has instead presided over more of it despite accomplishing the majority of the substantive agenda he promised.
+
+Obama and his spokespeople have spent most of their administration quietly at war with the conventional wisdom in Washington over the cause of this failure, and Pfeiffer has spent much of his time in the administration dealing with, or scolding, members of the media, mostly in off-the-record conversations. But in an interview last week, a few days before he resigned, he explained in unusually candid terms the administration’s thinking—and how the White House lost its illusions.
+
+“I think [Obama] believes, and I certainly believe, that while we can always do better, this is a case where structural forces are the large actor here,” he told me. Pfeiffer cited three of them. The first is rising polarization—“the great sorting,” as he called it—which, over a period of decades, has driven white conservatives out of the Democratic Party and moderates out of the Republican Party, creating two ideologically homogeneous political organizations. The second is the disintegration of restrictions on campaign finance, which “gives people even more incentive to play to the far right or to a set of special-interests donors, so that one individual can basically, especially in these House races, do a $1 million expenditure and completely tip the balance.” And, finally, the news media has changed so that people select only sources that will confirm their preexisting beliefs.
+
+All of this combined makes communication with Republicans mostly hopeless. “There’s very little we can do to change the Republicans’ political situation because they are worried about a cohort of voters who disagree with most of what the president says,” Pfeiffer said. “We don’t have the ability to communicate with them—we can’t even break into the tight communication circles to convince them that climate change is real. They are talking to people who agree with them, they are listening to news outlets that reinforce that point of view, and the president is probably the person with the least ability to break into that because of the partisan bias there.”
+
+Pfeiffer’s reading of the red-blue impasse isn’t that it’s a permanent catastrophe. Demographic change will eventually force Republicans to compete with Democrats for some of the same voters, reopening a national political conversation that is accessible to both parties. And Democrats will find the millennial generation in play. “We’re going to have to work harder to get them registered to vote and involved, and that offers an opportunity, because while they are very progressive in some of their general leanings, they’re less tied to institutions and parties.” But that will have to happen after this administration has left the scene.
+
+The original premise of Obama’s first presidential campaign was that he could reason with Republicans—or else, by staking out obviously reasonable stances, force them to moderate or be exposed as extreme and unyielding. It took years for the White House to conclude that this was false, and that, in Pfeiffer’s words, “what drives 90 percent of stuff is not the small tactical decisions or the personal relationships but the big, macro political incentives.”
+
+If you had to pinpoint the moment this worldview began to crystallize, it would probably be around the first debt-ceiling showdown, in 2011, when Obama tried repeatedly and desperately to cut a budget deal with House Speaker John Boehner only to realize, eventually, that Boehner did not have the power to negotiate. The administration has now decided that in many cases, even adversarial bargaining fails because the Republican leadership is not capable of planning tactically. “You have to be careful not to presume a lot of strategy for this group,” Pfeiffer said. “I’ve always believed that the fundamental, driving strategic ethos of the Republican House leadership has been, What do we do to get through the next caucus or conference without getting yelled at? We should never assume they have a long game. We used to spend a lot of time thinking that maybe Boehner is saying this to get himself some more room. And it’s like, no, that’s not actually the case. Usually he’s just saying it because he just said it or it’s the easiest thing to solve his immediate problem.”
+
+This analysis puts the administration at odds with the reading of American politics that still dominates much of Washington reporting. Many political journalists imagine that the basic tension for the White House lies between Obama’s liberal base and appealing to Americans at the center, who will be crucial for tipping elections.
+
+Pfeiffer believes the dynamic is, in fact, the opposite: “The incentive structure moves from going after the diminishing middle to motivating the base.” Ever since Republicans took control of the House four years ago, attempts to court Republicans have mostly failed while simultaneously dividing Democratic voters. Obama’s most politically successful maneuvers, by contrast, have all been unilateral and liberal. “Whenever we contemplate bold progressive action,” Pfeiffer said, “whether that’s the president’s endorsement of marriage equality, or coming out strong on power-plant rules to reduce current pollution, on immigration, on net neutrality, you get a lot of hemming and hawing in advance about what this is going to mean: Is this going to alienate people? Is this going to hurt the president’s approval ratings? What will this mean in red states?” And yet this hesitation has always proved overblown: “There’s never been a time when we’ve taken progressive action and regretted it.”
+
+This was deeply at odds with the lesson Bill Clinton and most of his aides (many of whom staffed Obama’s administration) had taken away from his presidency. But by the beginning of Obama’s second term, at least, the president seemed fully convinced. “As we were preparing for the potential that we would lose the midterms,” Pfeiffer told me, “a lot of the advice we got around town was, You have to show major contrition; heads have to roll; you have to give some sop to the Republicans. The president’s view was, No, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to go out and we’re going to be the opposite of contrite; we’re going to be aggressive in our policies and our politics. And that worked. It caused people to cheer. But that’s the exact opposite of the sort of advice you’d get in this town.”
+
+Though the administration has wound up embracing a very different political strategy from the one it began with, one thing has remained consistent: Obama’s disdain for conventional wisdom. In his introduction to America as the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he criticized the pundits who “like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states.” Now the pundits insist that Obama would bridge the partisan divide if only he spent more time golfing with John Boehner. Those whom Obama once dismissed as cynical he now dismisses as naïve.
+
+Which isn’t to say that he sees his presidency as triumphant. I asked Pfeiffer about how his boss’s view of politics has changed. “He had hopes of being able to change the polarization, not just in the country, but in Washington,” Pfeiffer told me. “We learned very quickly that that was a lot harder than we thought. He will always say that his one biggest regret is that he’s been unable to deliver on that promise.”
+
+*This article appears in the March 9, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.",REAL
+1305,How Much Trouble Is Hillary Clinton In?,"After eking out a narrow victory in Iowa, Hillary Clinton just got beaten soundly—losing New Hampshire to Bernie Sanders by 22 percentage points, the biggest margin in a contested New Hampshire Democratic primary in decades.
+
+Just how much trouble is Clinton in now? She’s still leading national polls, but could this big Sanders win give the socialist senator enough momentum to pose a serious threat? We put this question to top political experts. From “this is now a real campaign” to “big trouble” for Clinton to “about what I expected,” here’s what they said about Tuesday night—and just how much damage it did or didn’t do to the Clinton campaign.
+
+‘This is now a real campaign’
+
+Robert M. Shrum, professor of the practice of political science at University of Southern California, and a former Democratic strategist, speechwriter and media consultant
+
+Bernie Sanders was right: This was YUGE. And not just the turnout and the margin for him. Hillary Clinton is still the favorite, but for sure this is now a real campaign. Her challenge is to convey a sense of vision that reaches people’s hearts as well as heads, and convinces them in human terms that their lives and hopes will be different if she—and they—win this election. By itself, realism is not a rallying cry. You can’t move and inspire voters by telling them: Don’t reach higher, don’t look over the horizon, settle for less than the change you want. Campaigns are not just for agenda-setting or calls to practicality; they are aspirational.
+
+Clinton can rise to this standard. She was a superb, engaging, motivating candidate in the latter days of her 2008 effort, when she could no longer be nominated. That Clinton needs to re-emerge. And that more than anything else will make her authentic. The answer isn’t internal recrimination; in her campaign, she has some of the most talented folks in American politics. Nor is the answer simply to depend on firewalls or a series of appeals to a collection of constituencies. The demographics are important, but a message with a central theme that informs everything else, that lifts and persuades at a visceral and not simply a one-dimensional rational level, is indispensable.
+
+‘Um … yes.’
+
+Beth Myers, Republican political consultant and lawyer, and former adviser to Mitt Romney
+
+Um … yes, Hillary Clinton is in big trouble. She survived a squeaker in Iowa, but suffered a shellacking in New Hampshire. Every Democrat under 30 is feeling the Bern. Her dishonesty over her email server has turned into a legal problem that keeps bubbling and bubbling and bubbling. She’s a Wall Street candidate running in an anti-establishment election cycle, delivering a muddled message to an electorate looking for clarity of vision.
+
+Dark clouds remain on the Clinton horizon: The candidate striving to be the first woman U.S. president actually lost women by 11 points in New Hampshire. Her concession speech was gracious but uninspiring, and is unlikely to catapult her forward—she stretched to compare her own “life of service” to the service of police, teachers, firefighters and nurses. Democratic voters still have a hard time trusting her. Bernie Sanders has a lot of work to do to scale up his movement to a national campaign that can secure the Democrat nomination. But things like that have happened before.
+
+‘Hillary Clinton isn’t in any more or any less trouble’
+
+James Manley, director, Communications Practice, QGA Public Affairs and former communications adviser and spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
+
+After last night, Hillary Clinton isn’t in any more or any less trouble than she was a few days ago. The results were about what I expected. The question now is how she and her team maneuvers from here on out. Politico reported a few days ago that her campaign is considering a shake up. I am ambivalent about whether that is the right way to go or not, in part because the report suggested that instead of firing people, the campaign will just add more layers, which in my mind would be an absolute disaster. I expect her to win Nevada and South Carolina, but clearly Bernie Sanders is not going away anytime soon.
+
+‘Should she panic? Pshaw!’ 
+
+Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the National Interest
+
+Contrary to what Gloria Steinem says, it turns out it isn’t just the boys who are with Bernie but just about every category of Democratic voter—at least when it comes to New Hampshire. Suddenly Nevada, South Carolina and a welter of other states loom a lot larger for Hillary Clinton. So should she panic? Pshaw! Pundits will rush to proclaim that in New Hampshire she lost her mojo. The truth is she never had it in the first place.
+
+If she wants to win the nomination, not to mention the presidency, Clinton needs to become the Peyton Manning of the Democratic Party. Like Manning, she’s damaged goods, but it doesn’t mean she can’t grind out a victory. Just as the Broncos rode their defense to victory in Super Bowl 50, so Clinton should forget about going on the offensive.
+
+Rather than champion an optimistic message, which Clinton cannot plausibly sell at this point, she should focus on scaring the daylights out of the average Democratic voter about Bernie Sanders as presidential timber. Clinton can begin by pointing out that this Tuesday’s 5-4 Supreme Court move—estopping President Barack Obama’s climate change regulations—is merely a harbinger of things to come if the party abandons her, allowing the GOP to control all three branches of government come November.
+
+‘Tuesday night’s loss is not defining for the Clinton campaign’
+
+ Brent Colburn, fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, former assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs and national communications director for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign
+
+The hardest thing to do when you are in the middle of a campaign is to take a step back and soberly assess the impact of events. Tuesday was a good night for Bernie Sanders and a hard night for the Clinton camp, but the important question is: What truth are these two campaigns waking up to in the morning?
+
+The truth that the Sanders campaign won’t want to face is that Tuesday’s results don’t fundamentally change the dynamic of the Democratic race. We woke up Tuesday morning knowing that Sanders would win in New Hampshire and that the real test will be his ability to replicate that success in more diverse states like South Carolina and Nevada. We went to bed knowing that was still true.
+
+The truth that the Clinton team isn’t going to be really happy about is that they now have to spend the next 11 days answering questions about the health of their campaign when they want to be focused on one singular goal—performing well in the upcoming primaries and starting to drive up their delegate count. The loss in New Hampshire is not defining for the Clinton campaign. How they respond and their ability to stay focused on what matters could be.
+
+The American primary process, as strange and tortured as it can seem, does one thing very well. It publicly tests candidates and lets the American people see the mettle of those who want to be our president. And we are about to learn a lot about both Clinton and Sanders.
+
+‘It’s still unclear whether Sanders’ momentum is only a flash in the pan’
+
+Ron Bonjean, Republican strategist and a founding partner of the public affairs firm Rokk Solutions
+
+Losing New Hampshire and barely winning Iowa over questionable divided caucus coin tosses is a worst-case scenario for Clinton’s campaign. Bernie Sanders has generated tremendous energy and momentum behind his victory that will make him competitive in other primary states. Clinton lacks a strong, convincing message and is basing her campaign on her experience, while Sanders has made his campaign a left-wing populist movement over changing the system. In addition, Clinton’s poor handling of questions surrounding her e-mail server and the Justice Department investigation has reinforced a thematic of dishonesty among Democratic primary voters. It’s still unclear whether Sanders’ momentum is only a flash in the pan and whether it will overwhelm Clinton’s organization and support in upcoming primary states like Nevada. His campaign will continue to have strong fundraising support, which could take on the Clinton establishment, but he will need to convince African-American and Hispanic voters in upcoming Southern states in order to put the nomination away.
+
+‘Clinton is in real trouble unless … ’
+
+Douglas Schoen, founding partner and principal strategist for Penn, Schoen and Berland, and a former pollster for Bill Clinton
+
+Hillary Clinton is in real trouble unless she develops a positive, proactive message that does more than tries to imitate and match Bernie Sanders’ populist democratic socialist agenda. The time for bullet points, agenda items and recitation of progressive programs is over. She must offer a vision for where she wants to lead America and what her presidency will be about. Otherwise, she will remain vulnerable and will face a long and difficult fight for the nomination.
+
+After she led by 56 points a year ago, Hillary Clinton’s defeat is a stunning blow to a sputtering campaign. Unlike in 1992 and 2008, when New Hampshire saved the Clintons’ political careers, the Granite State on Tuesday dealt a devastating setback. With the headlines dominated by an F.B.I. investigation, paid speeches and staff shake-ups, it’s only going to get worse for Clinton. Bernie Sanders has the enthusiasm and momentum on his side, and that spells trouble for Clinton’s future, especially in caucus states dominated by younger voters, among whom Clinton struggles the most.
+
+‘Clinton has lost the white left of the Democratic Party’
+
+Bill Scher, senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” and a contributing editor at Politico Magazine
+
+There’s no question that Hillary Clinton has lost the white left of the Democratic Party to Bernie Sanders. The question that remains is: How far left has the entire party moved, outside of the lily-white states of Iowa and New Hampshire?
+
+The exit polls show that nearly 70 percent of the Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic electorates self-identified as “liberal,” a jump of more than 10 points in each state since 2008. In the next caucus state, Nevada, liberals made up only 45 percent of the Democratic pool in 2008. That’s more fertile territory for Clinton, but will that number rise as well? And if so, does it inevitably buoy Bernie? Or can Hillary still make the case for her progressive bona fides to a more racially diverse electorate less familiar with Sanders?
+
+Playing the pragmatist card against Sanders’ idealism hasn’t worked. Clinton needs to be able to sell her record, qualifications and platform without sounding like a “no we can’t” buzzkill. Talking up her deal-making with Republicans doesn’t impress Democrats who see the opposing party as a wall of obstruction.
+
+Her concession speech on Tuesday night was a step in the right direction, laying out her own inspirational vision for the future with a heavy nod toward diversity and equality. She’s on firmer ground when communicating what she is fighting for, rather than what she will settle for.
+
+After two states with minimal (I’m being generous) demographics, this shows that the activist wing and the emerging electorate are restless. 
+
+",REAL
+3085,"Is Facebook to blame for making us more polarized? No, we are. (+video)","Critics have worried that the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what users see could be creating 'bubbles' that allow us to see only what we agree with. A new study finds that users are driving the trend more than Facebook itself.
+
+Facebook users do more to seal themselves within their own political news and opinion bubbles than the social media site's algorithms do, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science Express.
+
+A quick Google search for the social-media giant Facebook turns up a range of provocative questions: Is Facebook making us lonely? Is Facebook losing its cool? Is Facebook dying?
+
+Scientists at Facebook have added another: Is Facebook reinforcing ideological bubbles that users build around themselves?
+
+Their short answer is: yes. But the effect is small compared with contributions users themselves make. Users build those bubbles through their choice of ""friends,"" what those friends share, and the extent to which users open links to news or opinion material that would offer views that run counter to the user's view.
+
+On one level, the results, published Thursday in the online journal Science Express, suggest that for now, social media and their complex, user-focused algorithms aren't to blame for the nation's growing political polarization.
+
+That polarization is a trend many political and information scientists see as a threat to a well-oiled democracy, which relies on people with competing ideologies working together toward shared goals. The study reinforces the observation that people are bringing to the virtual world their real-world tendencies to surround themselves with people who think like they do.
+
+On another level, however, the small internal effect the researchers detected from Facebook's algorithm should raise warning flags, says David Lazer, a political scientist at Northeastern University who focuses in part on the impact of the internet on politics and was not a member of the study team.
+
+""There's nothing in the algorithm that says: Let's polarize America,"" he says. But ""the simple rules that might make content more engaging may also result in this kind of bubble.""
+
+He notes that Facebook recently tweaked it algorithm, in part to make sure a user sees more material from people a user identifies as close friends.
+
+""Close friends are probably more similar to you in many ways than your distant acquaintances. So it's quite plausible that the change will have the unintended consequence"" of further narrowing the range of perspectives that enter a user's news feed, he says.
+
+The new study grew out of surprising results in previous work, which looked at how users got their information on Facebook, says Eytan Bakshy, a data scientist at Facebook and the study's lead author. The earlier study found that on average, the less frequently you interact with a Facebook friend, the more likely you are to share items that come from that friend.
+
+""To our surprise we found that the majority of information that you click on and you end up re-sharing comes from weaker ties,"" people with whom you interact relatively rarely, Dr. Bakshy says. These people ""have the potential to be more dissimilar to you.""
+
+That raised a question: What does this imply for the notion of social media as an echo chamber in which people surround themselves only with people who think like they do?
+
+Others have tried to tackle that question, with conflicting results – often in no small part because the sample sizes in the study groups were relatively small.
+
+Bakshy and colleagues tapped data and activity for some 10.1 million Facebook users in the United States, using protocols that ensured their anonymity. These people had listed a political affiliation in their profiles. In addition, the team focused on shared content they dubbed hard news or opinion – politics, US news in general, and international news. No cats or children's birthday parties. Ideology of the source was based on the organization tied to a web link, rather than the content of specific articles.
+
+When the researchers parsed the data, they found that on average, 23 percent of a user's friends are people whose politics are ""from the other side."" Despite the heavy tilt in friends toward ""like me,"" just under 30 percent of the incoming news represented the other side's perspective – so-called cross-cutting material.
+
+Overall, the algorithm organizing what a user is most likely to see reduces cross-cutting content by slightly less than 1 percent, while a user's self-built bubble reduces that content by about 4 percent.
+
+Given the relatively small influence of the algorithm, the results ""are not all that different from a lot of what we know about how people are acting across ideological and party lines in the real world,"" says Patrick Miller, a political scientist at the University of Kansas at Lawrence who also studies the interplay between social media and politics.
+
+In many ways, a ""don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player"" sensibility about the study is justified, he suggests. A vast amount of social-science research has made it ""very clear that when people are building their online social networks, they're building them to reflect their offline social networks.""
+
+And offline, people live in partisan bubbles in a country that has become increasingly polarized, he adds.
+
+But that doesn't let Facebook off the hook as the algorithm's designer, others caution.
+
+""Selectivity has always existed. But now we're living in different world,"" says Dietram Scheufele, who specializes in science communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Facebook ""is enabling levels of selectivity that have never been possible before.""
+
+For instance, he says, research has shown that two people with identical friends will get different news feeds from each other based on the pictures the two clicked on, posts from those friends they ""liked,"" or even something as unrelated to friends as the websites they used Facebook to log into.
+
+Although people always have built ideological bubbles, ""that doesn't mean we have to make it worse,"" online, he says.
+
+Yet it's also true that people would be overwhelmed by posts if some sort of sifting wasn't done ahead of time, Northeastern's Professor Lazer acknowledges.
+
+Perhaps the study's biggest contribution is to provoke a recognition about how much information being gathered about people is being archived and used for everything from organizing and presenting Facebook news items to setting different prices on items sold on e-commerce sites based on information gathered about the purchaser.
+
+A lot of the algorithms that focus choices based on personal profiles ""are done for our convenience, but some of it, frankly, is to exploit us,"" he says.
+
+""I'm not saying we need to go back to the pre-internet age,"" he says. But in ""Matrix"" like fashion, the line between the real and virtual worlds are blurring, he adds.
+
+""We have to think about what is good and what is bad. This study doesn't answer that question, but it does provoke the question. We're really behind where we should be in terms of debating these things as a society,"" he says.",REAL
+5642,Save the Children Norway trialed anti-malaria drug Larium in Mozambique—1993–1994,"Save the Children Norway trialed anti-malaria drug Larium in Mozambique—1993–1994 By Moeen Raoof   Moeen Raoof 
+Roche AG, a Swiss multinational health-care company, needed to trial a new anti-malaria drug, Mefloquine, also known under the brand name Lariam, in malaria-prone areas of Africa. This was despite known serious side effects, including long-term health problems such as depression, hallucinations, anxiety and neurological effects such as poor balance, depression and impaired mental health. 
+The Norwegian Chapter of Save the Children, also known as Redd Barna, operated in Mozambique under a Dutch national. Redd Barna began to distribute Lariam in Mozambique between 1993 to 1994. This drug was given to men, women and children, including pregnant women. 
+The Lariam trials were conducted by distributing the drug based on the criteria of prevention and treatment of malaria and without due regard to age, medical status, or state of pregnancy. Recipients of the drug were not told of the side-effects but were actively monitored during the period of treatment, which lasted approximately 18 months, after the commencement of distribution. These trials were conducted without the consent of the Mozambican government or the Ministry of Health. 
+Children as young as 3-years old were given whole pills to take during either the prevention or treatment phases, without regard to the side effects of the pills on very young children. Pregnant women and women with babies were also given the drug, but only if they had contracted malaria, not preventatively. 
+The trials were more common among Mozambican men and women between the ages of 18 and 60 years, divided into prevention and treatment risk groups. They were provided a course of treatment, accordingly. One assumes that these persons were closely monitored for symptoms and side effects during and after the treatment period. 
+Many young Mozambicans during and after the treatment period began showing signs of unusual behaviour, including bouts of violence after the testing of the drug ended in 1994. There was an increase in violent crime as well as murders in Mozambique. This, despite there being a very low crime and murder rate among civilians prior to 1993, including during the civil war that had ended 1990. 
+Media in Mozambique explained away this increase in crime and murder post-1993 as drug-related, linking the violence to the use of the Methaqualone/Mandrax drug that was allegedly smuggled in from South Africa. However, this drug could not justify the rising cases of mental illness among all age groups, in users and non-users alike. Mandrax was the prime and only suspect drug blamed for all ills in Mozambique during the 1990s. As to why the wide use of Lariam was not considered as a possible cause relating to increase in violence, mental illness, crime, including murders remains a mystery. 
+The Mozambican Civil War began in 1977, two years after the end of the war of independence. It resembled the Angolan Civil War in that both were proxy battles of the Cold War that started soon after the countries gained independence from Portugal. The ruling party, Front for Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), and the national armed forces (FAM), were violently opposed from 1977 by the Mozambique Resistance Movement (RENAMO), which received funding from white-ruled Rhodesia and later, apartheid South Africa. About one million people died in fighting and from starvation; five million civilians were displaced, and many were made amputees by landmines, a legacy from the war that plagued Mozambique for more than two decades afterward. Fighting ended in 1992 and the country’s first multi-party elections were held in 1994. 
+Roche admitted that Lariam had worse side effects than other common antimalarials. The head of drug safety and quality at Roche admitted that a study had shown there was an “increased risk” of neuropsychiatric problems compared to other drugs available. Roche further stated that anyone with pre-existing conditions such as depression should not be given the drug, stating that, “There is an increased risk but the balance of risk to the balance of benefit is still believed to be important in this global endemic, if it is prescribed to the right people.” 
+Roche further stated, “The patient should be informed of these increased risks with Lariam and should they become aware of any of those features, a change in mood, a change in personality—then they are advised to immediately contact a doctor and stop taking it.” 
+Medical advice regarding Lariam recommends the following, do not take Lariam if patients have or have previously experienced: an allergy to Mefloquine or any of the other ingredients of this medicine or to similar medicines such as quinine or quinidine depression, thoughts about suicide and self-endangering behaviour any other mental problem, including anxiety disorder, schizophrenia or psychosis (losing touch with reality) fits (seizures or convulsions) severe liver problems Blackwater fever (a complication of malaria that affects the blood and kidneys) 
+Warnings and precautions—Lariam may cause serious mental problems in some people. Tell your doctor immediately if you experience any of the following while taking Lariam: suicidal thoughts",FAKE
+2723,Media coverage of gang violence sure looks different when the perpetrators are white,"Over the weekend, a shootout between three rival biker gangs at a bar in Waco, Texas, left at least nine gang members dead and 18 others hospitalized with gunshot and stab wounds.
+
+It was a huge, devastating tragedy. The New York Times reported that law enforcement sources called it ""the worst violence in the Waco area since the siege on the Branch Davidian compound in 1993 that left 86 people dead.""
+
+But if you follow the social media conversations around the incident, you'll see something in addition to the predictable shock, curiosity, and mourning for the victims: there's frustration and anger over how the Waco shootout (whose perpetrators appear to be mostly white) is being talked about — and, specifically, how that contrasts with the coverage and commentary of crimes when the people involved are black.
+
+Those who are using what happened in Waco to start conversations about stereotypes and media biases against black people aren't complaining about the tenor of this weekend's media coverage. They're saying something a little different: that by being pretty reasonable and sticking to the facts, this coverage highlights the absurdity of the language and analysis that have been deployed in other instances, when the accused criminals are black.
+
+In particular, you'll see a lot of sarcasm about ""white-on-white crime"" and ""white-on-white violence.""
+
+That's because hand-wringing over ""black-on-black"" violence is frustratingly common — especially as an attempt to derail the focus on high profile stories of police-involved deaths of black people. It's finally catching on that focusing on black-on-black crime in response to criticism of law enforcement practices doesn't make sense, but the absence of any similar refrain in cases in which the suspected criminals are white is a reminder of how the idea of intraracial crime is almost exclusively — and unfairly — brought up when black people are involved.
+
+Another line of commentary that's predictable in media coverage and commentary surrounding violence involving black people has to do with black cultural pathology.
+
+Politicians and pundits are notorious for grasping for problems in African-American communities — especially fatherlessness — to explain the kind of violence that, when it happens in a white community, is treated as an isolated crime versus an indictment of an entire racial group's way of life.
+
+Politicians and pundits are notorious for grasping for problems in African-American communities
+
+The total absence around the Waco incident of analysis of struggles and shortfalls within white families and communities is a painful reminder of this.
+
+The ""Why are they shooting up their own neighborhood?"" question in that last tweet is a sarcastic reference to a common sentiment expressed after the Baltimore riots that followed the death of Freddie Gray, and the destructive elements of the mostly peaceful protests in Ferguson, Missouri, surrounding the police shooting of Michael Brown. It's another line of thinking that's conspicuously absent in the television and social media commentary that's surrounded the Waco shootout.
+
+You'll also hear people lamenting that politicians, reporters, and commentators have largely refrained from calling the bike gang members ""thugs."" There's been widespread sensitivity around the racialized use of that term ever since it was deployed against slain black teen Trayvon Martin, who was killed by George Zimmerman in 2012.
+
+This issue came up again, more recently when Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake used it to describe the young people who destroyed property when protesting Freddie Gray's death. The fact that the bike gang members accused in this case haven't been slapped with this label is an infuriating reminder of its racial undertones and the way it is so easily and disproportionately deployed against black people, either as an intentional code word of because of deep-seated stereotypes about race and criminality.
+
+To really understand the angst over the language and analysis surrounding what happened in Waco, you have to remember that there's more going on here than just frustration with reports, cable news commentators, and Twitter reactions.
+
+All of this is underscored and intensified by larger concerns about the way the same racial biases that fuel differences in coverage and conversation play out in real life: in the same way observers speak and write differently when black people are involved,  police — perhaps unconsciously— treat black people unfairly. Many times, these biases have deadly consequences.
+
+That's why some observers of the Waco tragedy have taken note of the fact that the gang members in the brawl weren't brutalized or killed by the police officers who arrested them, and actually appeared to be treated with a certain level of civility.
+
+A writer at the blog Crooks and Liars lamented, ""Check out the cell phones and smokes while they wait for the cops to process them. No rides in the paddy wagon for them. Just sit on the curb and wait until nice Mr. Policeman has a moment to process you.""
+
+That, of course, stands in contrast to what has happened in a string of high-profile cases involving the police-involved deaths of black men who, unlike the Waco bike gang members, were entirely unarmed.
+
+Some have interpreted the backlash as a criticism of media coverage of this particular event, and are confused about what critics want to happen here. Is the media supposed to use harsher language to describe the white bike gang members' actions? Call them thugs? Ask about their fathers?
+
+That confusion is understandable. After all, it's not as if the media has swept this tragedy under the rug or minimized its intensity. The New York Times quoted a Waco law enforcement official who said, ""In 34 years of law enforcement, this is the worst crime scene — the most violent crime scene — that I have ever been involved in. There are dead people still there. There is blood everywhere."" Outlets aren't holding back from using the term ""gang,"" or talking about the death toll, or explaining the dynamics that led to the battle. Steve Cook, executive director of the Midwest Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association, told Vox's Libby Nelson that the gang members are ""domestic terrorists.""
+
+But the key thing to understand is that the criticism here is not really of the coverage of what happened in Waco. It's of the juxtaposition of what happened here with what happens when the people involved are of a different color. The message is not that the conversation about Waco should be overblown, hypercritical of an entire culture, or full of racial subtext. It's despair over the sense that if the gang members were black, it almost certainly would be.",REAL
+4849,"Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables, explained","It’s not really in character for Hillary Clinton to speak in terms of vivid imagery, creative metaphors, or striking turns of phrase. But she did it over the weekend, setting off a growing firestorm of controversy that’s defined the week in politics.
+
+“You know,” Clinton said to a friendly crowd of wealthy donors this weekend, “to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”
+
+With that odd turn of phrase — basket of deplorables — Clinton sent the media-politico ecosystem into a tizzy. Donald Trump’s campaign immediately took offense on behalf of his constituents, and Clinton rather rapidly apologized. But Trump has only escalated. At a Monday night rally in North Carolina, he accused Clinton of running a “hate-filled and negative campaign” and released a television ad built around the remark.
+
+And indeed, while Clinton apologized for painting with such a broad brush as to call fully half of Trump’s supporters deplorables, her campaign is very much sticking to the core accusation that Trump is trafficking in bigotry.
+
+Meanwhile, some liberals think Clinton was wrong to back away from her numerical estimates. Writers like the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, New York’s Jonathan Chait, and Vox’s own German Lopez have all argued that, as best as we can tell, Clinton was, if anything, undercounting the quantity of irredeemable bigots in Trump’s ranks.
+
+The multifaceted controversy touches on two of the more enduring taboos in American politics — frank discussion of racism and disparaging the electorate. And it highlights the contrasting campaign strategies of the Trump and Clinton camps. It started because the Trump camp correctly sensed Clinton had made a mistake.
+
+But it continues so viciously because it covers terrain Clinton is fundamentally comfortable with — reenforcing a dynamic in which Trump, like the television entertainer he is, chases the ever-tighter loyalty of a minority — while Clinton seeks to paint Trump as broadly unacceptable to the general population that will be voting in November.
+
+Clinton’s remarks came in the context of what was essentially a fundraising pitch. She expressed her understanding of the fact that despite massive strides in achieving legal and social equality, LGBTQ Americans still face many challenges. “You can get married on Saturday, post your pictures on Sunday, and get fired on Monday,” she said before launching into a litany of specific policy commitments she’s made to the LGBTQ community.
+
+Then she pivoted to the ask:
+
+I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don't get complacent, don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, well, he's done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here; I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well. And what I hope is that in addition to your extraordinary generosity, you will go to our website, HillaryClinton.com, or text to join at 47246 to see how else you can get involved.
+
+To be persnickety about it, the problem here is that Clinton is somewhat herself.
+
+The upshot of Clinton’s quasi-apology is to disavow the second claim while increasing her bet on the first. Their strategy was boosted when Donald Trump Jr. responded to the controversy by Instagramming a pro-Trump meme image featuring Pepe the Frog, a common white nationalist symbol (that’s an explainer for another day, but Olivia Nuzzi’s primer is a good place to start) and then Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence went on CNN and refused to call former KKK grand wizard David Duke deplorable, suggesting the current Republican Party is in a tough spot when it comes to white nationalists.
+
+Clinton’s use of the phrase “deplorables” at the LGBTQ gala was not unique. Earlier in the week, in an English-language interview on Israeli television, Clinton explained, “If I were to be grossly generalistic, I'd say you can take Trump supporters and put them in two big baskets. There are what I call the deplorables.” And then there are the rest — lots of basically good, decent Americans who she believes don’t buy into the ugly side of what Trump is saying but who are so desperate to see change in American politics that they are willing to vote for Trump.
+
+Writing at Slate, Ben Zimmer suggests that the “basket of deplorables” construction entered Clinton’s mind by way of analogy with the term “parade of horribles,” which, starting in the 1920s, “entered legal usage as a dismissive term for imagined concerns about a ruling's negative effects.”
+
+Clinton is an attorney by training, so Zimmer thinks she would be accustomed to that particular instance of nouning an adjective.
+
+Actual English-language use of “deplorables” as a term for a group of people, however, is quite rare, though Zimmer did find Thomas Carlyle in 1831 writing that “of all the deplorables and despicables of this city and time the saddest are the ‘literary men.’”
+
+In general, this type of linguistic term suggests to me the vocabulary of revolutionary France (and, indeed, Carlyle wrote an early history of the French Revolution). This vocabulary is probably most familiar to the mass audience from the musical and book Les Misérables, with its invocation of “the miserables” as a term for the French urban poor. But the revolutionary era also gave us Les Enragés (“the enraged”) as a term for a loose group of radical polemicists, the Sans-Culottes (“the pantsless,” i.e., people who were the opposite of fancy pants) for the Paris mob, and other instances of nouning adjectives to give a name to social classes.
+
+Wherever Clinton got it from exactly, it seems that in her LGBTQ gala she committed the cardinal political spin of mixing up two different spiels.
+
+One spiel, the one that includes the phrase “deplorables,” is intended to set the stage for a rhetorical pivot to the idea that the vast majority of Trump supporters aren’t deplorable. She wants to say that they are, mostly, simply confused. They are frustrated by the political status quo, as is she, and she hopes that if she wins she can deliver change and prosperity and win them over despite their doubts.
+
+The other spiel is intended to recapitulate the themes of Clinton’s speech on Trump and the alt-right in which she denounces Trump individually for elevating a handful of extreme and hateful voices that early Republican leaders would have marginalized. By crossing the rhetorical streams, Clinton wound up saying that fully half of Trump supporters belong in the tiny basket of hateful extremists. Whatever one makes of that as a question of demographics, it doesn’t make sense as a piece of political rhetoric, which is why Clinton backed away from it.
+
+In the overwhelmingly white community of political journalists, it felt natural to take the fact that Clinton had made a political error as the starting point of analysis and proceed from there. But a group of writers, disproportionately and not coincidentally composed of people of color, wanted to press the point that Clinton was probably correct. Her political error, if there was an error, was in breaking the taboo around saying that racial bias is a potent and widespread force in contemporary American life.
+
+As Lopez wrote for Vox, public opinion polling strongly suggests that a great majority of Trump supporters hold unfavorable views of Muslims and support a policy that bans Muslims from entering the US. Most of them support proposals that stifle immigration from Mexico, and they agree with Trump’s comments that Mexican immigrants are criminals. And many — but not a majority — say that black people are less intelligent and more violent than their white peers.
+
+In particular, a Reuters/Ipsos polling analysis of the GOP primary showed that Donald Trump’s supporters stood out from backers of the other GOP candidates primarily in having highly negative attitudes toward nonwhite groups.
+
+Whether the “deplorables” are really half of Trump’s current general election voters depends a bit on how you count, but it’s at least a plausible estimate.
+
+One important nuance about this that liberals sometimes miss is that even though there’s a lot of reason to believe racial hostility was key to Trump’s rise, there’s very little reason to think that white racism in general is more widespread in 2016 than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Rather, as Lee Drutman writes separately for Vox, the issue is that “whites with strong racist attitudes turned much more sharply Republican following Obama's election, including some who had previously been Democrats.”
+
+Back in the 1980s and ’90s, the Democratic Party was already identified as being more aligned with black interests, but the election of an actual black president combined with the growth of the nonwhite population kicked that identification into overdrive. Racially resentful whites left the Democratic Party, and Democrats decided they could build a winning coalition without them, turning racial attitudes into a powerful axis of partisan conflict.
+
+Aaron Blake at the Washington Post immediately reacted to the news of Clinton’s remarks by asking “Did Hillary Clinton just make her own ‘47 percent’ gaffe?”
+
+This is a reference to a secret video recording released to Mother Jones in September 2012 that showed Mitt Romney at a closed-door fundraiser explaining that there was a 47 percent floor on Barack Obama’s support:
+
+These remarks rapidly entered the lexicon of political operatives and journalists as a textbook example of a damaging gaffe, so framing Clinton’s remarks as a potential new “47 percent moment” is meant to play up their potential consequences.
+
+However, just as the actual Hurricane Katrina did not have the political impact that the search for “Obama’s Katrina” implies, there is little reason to believe the 47 percent gaffe hurt Romney. Indeed, in their excellent empirical account of the 2012 campaign The Gamble, John Sides and Lynn Vavreck find that none of the many well-covered gaffes of the 2012 season made much of a difference. On a high level, the economic fundamentals favored an Obama victory, which is what happened, and Romney proved more popular than virtually every GOP Senate nominee, which indicates that at the end of the day the party chose a fairly effective messenger.
+
+Despite what I wrote above, it is widely believed in professional political circles that the 47 percent gaffe hurt Romney, so it’s natural for practitioners to leap at the chance to relive it. Beyond that, despite some recent tightening in the polls, Trump is still losing.
+
+Indeed, he has been consistently losing from day one of this election. At times he’s made it close, but he’s never been ahead. His best chance of winning would probably be some kind of economic calamity, but it’s already mid-September, so he’s running a bit short on time. (Remember, though, that in 2008 Obama was the beneficiary of a spectacular financial meltdown in October, so anything can happen). He has to try to do something, and the big push around deplorables is indeed something.
+
+Beyond that, the basket of deplorables idea reenforces a longstanding conservative contention that liberal coastal elites fundamentally despise white working-class Americans. They view white working-class culture as backward, white working-class politics as bigoted, and white working-class community problems as fundamentally less worthy of addressing than those of downscale black and Latino communities.
+
+In that sense, the Clinton gaffe is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s characterization of “small town” politics from the 2008 primary as full of people who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
+
+It’s worth noting, however, that Obama and Clinton were in a sense positioning themselves on opposite ends of the liberal spectrum of views on this matter. Obama was essentially a premature proponent of the “economic anxiety” school of Trump Studies, promoting the view that all of conservative cultural politics is a massive case of false consciousness in which residents of failing economic communities cling bitterly to guns, religion, and racism, which in turn induces them to vote for mainstream Republicans.
+
+Clinton, meanwhile, is offering the considerably more mainstream view that one reason many Americans are planning to vote for a man who says racist stuff is that a large share of those Americans agree with the racist stuff he says.
+
+While some critics see Clinton’s willingness to back away from her comments as a sign of cowardice or expediency, the norm against attacking the other party’s constituents has a real logic to it.
+
+“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” said Thomas Jefferson in his inaugural address that marked the first peaceful transfer of power between political parties in American history. “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
+
+This can read as simply banal two centuries later, but it’s worth considering it in context. A losing party whose members fear the other party will persecute them if they lose and go into opposition has every reason to resist giving up power peacefully. And a winning party that fears the other party will resist giving up power has every reason to persecute the losers.
+
+Preventing a downward spiral of violence and civil conflict requires the winners to reassure the losers that they are not losing everything by giving up power. Reassuring the losing party’s supporters that they are not the targets of personal enmity on the part of the winning party’s leaders is key to that.
+
+It’s since become traditional for newly elected presidents to mouth some version of this message almost ritualistically. And like many rituals, it’s actually pretty important, even if cynics are inclined to roll their eyes at it — the quadrennial reminder that we are Americans with policy disagreements, not warring tribes, is crucial civic glue.
+
+What ties together the 47 percent, the bitter clingers, and the basket of deplorables is an apparent tradition of violating this ritual at fundraising talks — badmouthing not the opposition party but its voters in an effort to rationalize away the fact that the candidate won’t be able to secure their votes.
+
+The fact that he’s been consistently losing tends to obscure this, but Trump has a lot of advantages in the 2016 race. Clinton herself is very unpopular with the American mass public, and she has a notoriously poor relationship with the American news media. People with liberal public policy views but weak institutional and emotional attachments to the Democratic Party overwhelmingly voted for her opponent in the primaries, and there is a real risk of them either not voting in November or else pulling the lever for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein.
+
+The nation’s overall “policy mood” typically shifts in the opposite direction of the incumbent president, and the Obama years have been no exception.
+
+Indeed, in state after state — from New Hampshire to Nevada to Ohio to Florida and beyond — virtually every Republican Party Senate candidate is performing better than Trump.
+
+Trump’s strong personal affiliation with racism is not the only reason this is the case, but it is one of the reasons. In the primaries, Trump’s willingness to court racial controversy worked in his favor because most Republicans take the view that discrimination against nonwhites is an overblown problem in the United States.
+
+This view commands overwhelming support among Republicans, but few prominent Republican Party officeholders have championed it because it’s not popular with the public at large. Trump’s willingness to say and do things that other presidential contenders wouldn’t say or do — that all Muslims should be banned from the United States or that Mexican immigrants are a physical threat to Americans’ safety — thrilled the primary electorate but alienates general election voters.
+
+Trump, by loudly and proudly defending white Americans from charges of racism, intensifies his bond with his core base of racially resentful working-class whites. That’s an excellent strategy for pumping up rally crowds or building a hypothetical future media business, but does nothing to help him reach the people — minorities and racially liberal whites — who find him disturbing.
+
+Back during the heyday of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, Pat Buchanan, then an adviser to the White House, wrote that by playing cultural wedge politics “we can break the country in half and it will leave us with far the larger half.”
+
+Trump, who is backed by Buchanan and advised by the old Nixon hand Roger Ailes, is employing the exact same strategy today — except 40 years of demographic changes mean he’s left with the smaller half.",REAL
+2879,Islamic State appears to be fraying from within,"The Islamic State ­appears to be starting to fray from within, as dissent, defections and setbacks on the battlefield sap the group’s strength and erode its aura of invincibility among those living under its despotic rule.
+
+Reports of rising tensions between foreign and local fighters, aggressive and increasingly unsuccessful attempts to recruit local citizens for the front lines, and a growing incidence of guerrilla attacks against Islamic State targets suggest the militants are struggling to sustain their carefully cultivated image as a fearsome fighting force drawing Muslims together under the umbrella of a utopian Islamic state.
+
+The anecdotal reports, drawn from activists and residents of areas under Islamic State control, don’t offer any indication that the group faces an immediate challenge to its stranglehold over the mostly Sunni provinces of eastern Syria and western Iraq that form the backbone of its self-proclaimed caliphate. Battlefield reversals have come mostly on the fringes of its territory, while organized opposition remains unlikely as long as viable alternatives are lacking and the fear of vicious retribution remains high, Syrians, Iraqis and analysts say.
+
+The bigger threat to the Islamic State’s capacity to endure, however, may come from within, as its grandiose promises collide with realities on the ground, said Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
+
+“The key challenge facing ISIS right now is more internal than external,” she said, using another term for the group. “We’re seeing basically a failure of the central tenet of ISIS ideology, which is to unify people of different origins under the caliphate. This is not working on the ground. It is making them less effective in governing and less effective in military operations.”
+
+Most striking are the growing signs of friction between the foreigners lured by its state-building experiment and local recruits, who have grown resentful of the preferential treatment meted out to the expatriates, including higher salaries and better living conditions.
+
+[Read: The Islamic State is failing at being a state]
+
+Foreign fighters get to live in the cities, where coalition airstrikes are relatively rare because of the risk of civilian casualties, while Syrian fighters are required to serve in rural outposts more vulnerable to attacks, said an activist who opposes the Islamic State and lives in the town of Abu Kamal on Syria’s border with Iraq. The activist spoke on the condition of anonymity.
+
+Shootouts have erupted on several occasions on the streets of the town, including one last week between foreign fighters and Syrians who refused an order by a Kuwaiti commander to deploy to the front lines in Iraq, the activist said. The Syrian faction, under the command of Saddam Jamal, a former Free Syrian Army leader, remains in the town, keeping a tense and wary distance from the faction led by the Kuwaiti, he said.
+
+In an incident in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in January, local allies battled a group made up mostly of Chechens after the foreigners decided to head back to Syria, according to Hassan al-Dulaimi, a retired police general who works with tribal fighters aligned against the Islamic State. “The Iraqis feared they were being abandoned,” he said.
+
+There have been signs, too, that some foreign jihadists are growing disillusioned, with activists in the Syrian provinces of Deir al-Zour and Raqqa describing several instances in which foreigners have sought local help to escape across the border to Turkey. The bodies of between 30 and 40 men, many of whom appeared to be Asian, were found last month in the Raqqa town of Tabqa. They are thought to be the remains of a group of jihadist fighters who tried to flee but were caught, according to the activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which monitors Islamic State activities.
+
+New restrictions on travel in and out of areas controlled by the Islamic State have been imposed in recent weeks, including a prohibition on truck drivers transporting men without permission, the activist group says. Public executions, a core component of Islamic State discipline, have in recent weeks been extended to about 120 of the group’s own members, according to the ­Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
+
+Some were accused of spying and one of smoking, but suspicions are widespread that most were simply fighters caught trying to flee.
+
+Meanwhile, territorial losses in northern Syria and elsewhere in Iraq are contributing to the sense that the group that stunned the world with its triumphant sweep through Iraq and Syria last summer is now not only on the defensive but also struggling to find a coherent strategy to confront the multiple forces ranged against it.
+
+The Islamic State is battling major offensives waged on at least three fronts — by Kurds in northern Syria, Kurds in northern Iraq and the combined force of Iraqi army and Shiite militia fighters advancing on the central Iraqi city of Tikrit. Islamic State fighters have also been expanding into eastern areas of the Syrian provinces of Homs and Damascus, but the incremental advances there aren’t as spectacular as its conquests last year.
+
+[In campaign against terrorism, U.S. enters period of pessimism and gloom]
+
+Most of the setbacks have come in non-Sunni areas, such as the Kurdish enclave around Kobane or the mixed province of Diyala in eastern Iraq, where the Islamic State’s territorial ambitions may have been doomed by the absence of allies on the ground.
+
+A far bigger test of the Islamic State’s military capabilities is the battle underway for control of Tikrit, the Sunni home town of Saddam Hussein. As the ethnic and sectarian sentiments driving the fight for territory harden across Syria and Iraq, a victory for the overwhelmingly Shiite forces would also test the ability of non-Sunni groups to retain hold over conquered Sunni territories, analysts say.
+
+The Islamic State’s losses in terms of land and blood have been fairly substantial, including the loss of hundreds of villages around the Kurdish town of Kobane in Syria, near the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar and in the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala.
+
+The battles appear to have taken a high toll on the group’s strength, estimated at about 20,000 foreigners alongside an unknown number of Iraqis and Syrians. The Pentagon claimed last week that coalition airstrikes have killed 8,500 fighters, though that figure can’t be confirmed.
+
+Syrians say the bloodshed is deterring the recruitment of local citizens who were clamoring a few months ago for the opportunity to earn salaries by joining the only new source of employment available.
+
+Increasingly, the Islamic State is recruiting fighters among children and teens who remain more vulnerable than older adults to the group’s propaganda, said a businessman living in Raqqa who last week paid condolences to family friends whose 15-year-old son had been killed on the front line.
+
+The parents didn’t know he had gone to fight and learned of his death from a neighbor just days after he had disappeared from home, recalled the businessman, who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety.
+
+Intensified efforts to persuade Syrians to go to the front lines in Iraq include offers of up to $800 a month in salary, according to Ahmed Mhidi, who arrived in Turkey two weeks ago from the Syrian city of Deir al-Zour and is setting up an opposition group called DZGraph. The offer has won few takers, he said.
+
+The Islamic State “was never popular, but people supported them because they were scared or they needed money,” he said. “Now people want nothing to do with them, and if the Islamic State puts pressure on them, they just flee.”
+
+The province of Deir al-Zour, bordering Iraq, appears to be where opposition to the Islamic State is hardening the most. Small-scale attacks involving ambushes of Islamic State patrols or checkpoints are on the rise — including one that killed 12 members of a feared police group Sunday.
+
+[The atrocities of the Islamic State]
+
+Foreigners continue to volunteer, streaming across the Turkish border into the Islamic State’s self-styled capital of Raqqa, according to residents there. The city’s population has been swelled by thousands of Europeans, Asians, Arabs and Africans. Upon arrival they are given cars and apartments, and they mill about among the city’s cafes and markets, lending a cosmopolitan air to streets where foreigners once were rare, according to Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, the pseudonym of one of the founders of the Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently group, who now lives in Turkey.
+
+Many of the foreigners show little inclination to travel to the front lines, he said. “They just want to live in the Islamic State,” he said. “They didn’t come to fight.”
+
+How useful they would be to the Islamic State’s military efforts is also in question, said the Carnegie Middle East Center’s Khatib.
+
+“Ultimately, they are only attracting people on the margins of society, without much education or useful skills,” she said. “It’s not exactly bolstering their military capability.”
+
+Sam Rifaie and Mustafa Salim contributed to this report.
+
+Iraq officials cast doubt on prospects for an early offensive to retake Mosul
+
+The Islamic State is failing at being a state
+
+The Islamic State ‘caliphate’ is in danger of losing its main supply route",REAL
+2979,Patriot Act provisions have expired: What happens now?,"Washington (CNN) The U.S. government on Monday found itself with fewer tools to investigate terrorism -- at least temporarily -- after the Senate let provisions of the Patriot Act expire Sunday night.
+
+While officials warned of national security risks, it is clear that the lapse will not come close to debilitating counterterrorism efforts.
+
+The Senate entered a debate period late Sunday on the Patriot Act that pushed beyond the midnight deadline, effectively ending three provisions of that law, including the National Security Agency's bulk data collection program.
+
+The lapse was a huge victory for privacy hawks who have called for changes to that program and others under the Patriot Act since Edward Snowden first blew the lid off the NSA's domestic surveillance programs in 2013.
+
+The National Security Agency officially shut down the bulk metadata collection program officially at 7:44 p.m. Sunday night, a senior government official told CNN. Officials had previously indicated they would shut the program down around 8 p.m. to ensure all procedures were in place before midnight military time.
+
+The Senate is expected to restore the expiring authorities midweek, but here's what we know will change between now and then:
+
+What counterterrorism tools does the U.S. lose?
+
+The government loses authorities under three Patriot Act provisions.
+
+The biggest and most controversial is the government's sweeping powers under Section 215 that allow the NSA to collect telephone metadata on millions of Americans and store that data for five years. That is, for the time being, gone.
+
+Law enforcement officials also won't be allowed to get a roving wiretap to track terror suspects who frequently change communications devices, like phones. Instead, they will need to get individual warrants for each new device.
+
+And third, the government loses a legal provision allowing it to use national security tools against ""lone wolf"" terror suspects if officials can't find a connection to a foreign terror group such as ISIS, for example. But that provision has never been used, the Justice Department confirmed.
+
+The House overwhelmingly passed a bill, the USA Freedom Act, that would make big changes to the first, but leave the latter two provisions intact.
+
+That bill would have the telephone companies hold Americans' telephone metadata and require the government to get a specific warrant to seize any telephone metadata -- and not on millions of people, but instead on specific individuals.
+
+So those tools are now completely gone?
+
+FBI and NSA officials are allowed to continue using Section 215 and the roving wiretap provision in investigations they began before the June 1 expiration date.
+
+Any new investigations will have to go without the roving wiretaps and the ability to petition the secret FISA court for warrants to seize business records, like telephone metadata, in terrorism cases. That court was established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to provide warrants in national security cases.
+
+The NSA's bulk metadata collection program was actually slated to end at 8 p.m. ET Sunday to ensure the government is in compliance with the deadline by midnight in military time as well.
+
+The process of winding down that program was ongoing last week, and the NSA was slated to cut off its connections to telecommunications companies starting at 4 p.m. ET Sunday.
+
+Why is it such a long process?
+
+Officials said the government began ""winding down"" the bulk data collection program during the week leading up to the deadline.
+
+A U.S. administration official who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information said ""taking down the system"" involves shutting off inputs between telecom companies and U.S. intelligence, ""bringing down servers"" and configuring ""our monitoring software"" to keep officials from accessing any data at telecommunication companies.
+
+""We lock the system down so that there is no chance that data comes or data could be accessed during that time frame,"" the official said.
+
+And the Department of Justice spent last week communicating the potential changes to its authority to collect data to telecommunications companies, according to a Justice Department official and a telecommunications company official familiar with the process.
+
+""Really it's about just letting them know that on midnight on the 31st, they're not going to be able to provide the legal documents and the warrant and we're not going to give them anything,"" the telecommunications company official said.
+
+The Justice Department official pointed to ""legal and technical processes that need to occur"" for the program to shut down.
+
+So could America be less safe?
+
+Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement on Friday the United States ""would lose entirely an important capability that helps us identify potential U.S. based associates of foreign terrorists.""
+
+But opponents aren't convinced. Instead, they're determined not to let fears over national security trump civil liberties and privacy concerns.
+
+The American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday that ""efforts to short-circuit reform efforts should not be allowed to succeed.""
+
+""Allowing the provisions of the Patriot Act to sunset wouldn't affect the government's ability to conduct targeted investigations or combat terrorism,"" the ACLU said. ""The government has numerous other tools, including administrative and grand jury subpoenas, which would enable it to gather necessary information.""
+
+What are the facts on the expiring capabilities?
+
+As it stands, several official review boards -- including a presidential review group and a government privacy oversight board -- found that the bulk metadata collection program was not essential to thwarting a single terror plot.
+
+The Obama administration endorses the plan under the USA Freedom Act to transform that program.
+
+The roving wiretaps provision that can be used in terrorism cases is used less than 100 times per year, but officials could be in a bind when it comes to new investigations.
+
+Authorities could still obtain standard wiretaps on a suspected terrorists' phone, but a new phone requires a new warrant.
+
+Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi said the top-secret nature of the investigations make even that a challenge.
+
+""When we're chasing a terrorist or a spy, almost everything we have is highly, highly classified. Normal courts are not set up to handle that,"" he said.
+
+Officials say the rising threat of lone wolves -- including those inspired by ISIS, but not ordered -- raises the need to maintain that provision of the Patriot Act.
+
+But they concede the provision had not been used, even as the FBI has increasingly focused its efforts on lone wolves.",REAL
+8848,Truth Is The Enemy Of The State      :," Truth Is The Enemy Of The State By Bob Livingston
+November 10, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" Personal Liberty "" - There is a saw that comes from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” that “the truth will out.” But not if government has its way.
+That’s because truth is the enemy of the state. The state, meaning the apparatus of government, is “the system” that controls the American people.
+Most people believe they control the political system through elections. Little do they know that the government and the corporate state own and control the state and the people. In other words, the system is rigged, as Donald Trump says . The system must keep this information invisible and it does so through constant conditioning of the public mind.
+Now consider what has happened and is happening to Julian Assange. Consider Edward Snowden.
+Assange created WikiLeaks in 2006, exposing, among other things, malfeasance in the conduct of Bush the Lesser’s “War on Terror.” Progressive Democrats loved Assange then.
+But by 2010, with George W. Bush out of power and Barack Obama continuing old wars and starting new ones, the truths that were being outed by WikiLeaks were hitting too close to home. WikiLeaks got its hands on a treasure trove of State Department and Pentagon emails and documents being dispatched across the globe.
+I wrote at the time in “ A war on the truth ,” that what WikiLeaks was revealing was:
+the result of a secretive, unaccountable and over-powerful government; a perfidious empire that seeks to rule the world by guile, cunning or force, if necessary. And the response by the United States government and by authorities in some of the U.S.’s puppet states — like Great Britain, which arrested Assange, and Sweden, which brought spurious charges of rape against him — demonstrate the length the ruling elites will go to suppress the truth.
+Truth is the enemy of a totalitarian regime. Fooling, lying, spying: That is the way of the totalitarian regime. Fooling, lying to and spying on friends and enemies, and even worse, its own citizens.
+Just before I wrote that, we now know, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was contemplating various ways to shut WikiLeaks down. During a November meeting, sources say, Clinton suddenly blurted out, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
+According to sources present at the meeting:
+The statement drew laughter from the room which quickly died off when the Secretary kept talking in a terse manner, sources said. Clinton said Assange, after all, was a relatively soft target, “walking around” freely and thumbing his nose without any fear of reprisals from the United States. Clinton was upset about Assange’s previous 2010 records releases, divulging secret U.S. documents about the war in Afghanistan in July and the war in Iraq just a month earlier in October, sources said. At that time in 2010, Assange was relatively free and not living cloistered in in the embassy of Ecuador in London. Prior to 2010, Assange focused Wikileaks’ efforts on countries outside the United States but now under Clinton and Obama, Assange was hammering America with an unparalleled third sweeping Wikileaks document dump in five months. Clinton was fuming, sources said, as each State Department cable dispatched during the Obama administration was signed by her.
+Clinton and other top administration officials knew the compromising materials warehoused in the CableGate stash would provide critics and foreign enemies with a treasure trove of counterintelligence. Bureaucratic fears about the CableGate release ultimately proved to be well founded by Clinton, her inner circle and her boss in the White House.
+Efforts to shut down WikiLeaks included an American intelligence-initiated operation to entrap Assange in a phony rape charge. The U.S. government also pressured PayPal, VISA and MasterCard to shut down donations to WikiLeaks. The Swedish bank handling Assange’s legal defense fund was pressured by the U.S. government to freeze the account. The firm hosting WikiLeaks’ website was pressured to shut the site the down.
+Now WikiLeaks is revealing widespread corruption, vote rigging, media manipulation and other damning evidence against the Democrat Party, Hillary Clinton and her minions. WikiLeaks and Assange are prying the lid off the propaganda machine and exposing the corrupt system.
+In response, U.S. intelligence (an oxymoron) initiated another effort to entrap Assange in a sex-related scandal; this time by connecting him with a phony “dating site” and alleging he solicited sex with an 8-year-old girl.
+John Kerry’s State Department pressured Ecuador to cut off Assange’s internet connection. There is a new move afoot to figure a way to pry him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and turn him over to U.S. authorities, where he will no doubt disappear into the bowels of indefinite detention.
+Only the power of propaganda keeps the people from overthrowing the U.S. government by force. So truth is the enemy of the state and the state will do everything it can to suppress it.
+That’s not surprising. What is surprising is the vast number of people on both “sides” of the political spectrum outside of government who see truth seekers and truth disseminators like Assange, Snowden and Bradley Manning as enemies rather than friends of liberty.",FAKE
+7066,Russians deride choice of confusing 2018 World Cup mascot Zabivaka | Russia Beyond The Headlines,"sport , 2018 world cup , RBTH Daily ""I must say that Zabivaka the wolf has been my mascot at university and at work for the last 15 years. I'm happy that now he will help Russian sport!"" Photo: The official mascot of the FIFA World Cup 2018 Wolf Zabivaka. Source: TASS 
+Russians have voted for the mascot for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, with the winner being declared 
+a wolf called Zabivaka, who wears the national tricolor and goggles and swings his paw at the ball. He will soon appear on all soccer and soccer-related paraphernalia and merchandise for the upcoming tournament. 
+The other finalists were a tiger and a cat, but popular opinion was not in their favor and the wolf ran off with 53 percent of the votes (the tiger cosmonaut received 27 percent and the cat 20 percent). 
+A total of 50,000 participants and their mascots – from an Amur Tiger to an alien – battled for victory. However, in the end Russians decided that an animal that howls at the moon suits them best. For some the wolf is associated with speed and assertiveness, for others the chimerical chances of the national team winning the cup. 
+However, the new mascot has opened something of a Pandora's box. Following the popular vote, the Russian internet has been inundated with quibbles and for several days Zabivaka was beset with unflattering comparisons from social network users who mocked the mascot's physical appearance and name. Goalscorer, hooligan or loafer? 
+""Yesterday they decided to play a joke: They proposed to call the mascot Zabivaka. And the people? The people accepted it,"" joked a tweet on the official Kontinental Hockey League Twitter account . 
+Many internet users noticed the ambiguity of the name – the verb zabivat in Russian can mean either to score (a goal) or to strike. This was ironic since former Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko said that the name was just supposed to translate well and be original (for patenting purposes). Bear necessity: Designing a mascot for the 1980 Moscow Olympics 
+""Something tells me that Zabivaka, written with Latin letters, does not make its etymology and meaning any easier for our English-language friends,"" wrote Twitter user @Bobchensk. 
+However, social network users remembered that football inspires some to strike not only the ball: The photographs of aggressive football fans in Marseilles, France during the 2016 European Championship, when the Russian national team was almost expelled from the tournament, appeared all over the internet once again, while others showed Zabivaka among thugs attacking their victims. 
+Another unfortunate association with the infinitive zabivat is the related construction zabit na , which means to be indifferent, or not to care. Social network users took advantage of this opportunity to make fun of the woeful results of the Russian national team in recent years. Here the poor wolf really took a beating. ""Football and the Russian lifestyle,"" wrote @ntnet, while @SashaBo4alova noted that the best Zabivaka in Russian football is not a wolf but “a loafer.” 
+""I must say that Zabivaka the wolf has been my mascot at university and at work for the last 15 years. I'm happy that now he will help Russian sport!"" wrote Facebook user Sergei Fokin on his page. A cheap wolf 
+The wolf's appearance also raised some issues. The main problem was addressed by @Maxi_Sar: ""Why the hell does the wolf need damned winter goggles if it’s a football world cup?!"" 
+RBTH posed this question to the creator of the new World Cup mascot Yekaterina Bocharova, a 21-year-old graphic design student at Tomsk State University. 
+""These are not winter goggles but just sports goggles, like the ones you use for cycling. It's just that Zabivaka is so fast on the field that he needs eye protection,"" she replied, adding that the goggles were also high-tech, for precise passes and strikes. Cheburashka: Fun facts about Russia's iconic furry character 
+Bocharova said that she was always fascinated by Disney cartoons, that she dreams of working for this company and loves the animated film Ratatouille . Incredibly, FIFA paid her just $500 for the rights to the drawing. 
+Journalists remarked (in Russian) that this was a tiny amount, noting that previous mascots cost much more. For example, the symbol of the Brazilian World Cup was Fuleko the armadillo and FIFA paid $100 million for his rights. The 1998 World Cup mascot Footix the rooster cost FIFA $30 million. 
+FIFA then earns revenues from using the mascots on souvenir products. Footix brought the organization $27 million, while Zakumi the leopard, the mascot for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, earned FIFA $71 million. 
+But Bocharova has no issues with her compensation. She says that FIFA gave her ""a lot more,"" and it has nothing to do with money. 
+""All these positive feelings and meetings with amazing people. I think money can't buy all that,"" she said, implying her meetings with the Tomsk governor and the popular TV host Ivan Urgant, who invited Bocharova onto his talk show in Moscow. ""I would have not achieved all this without them. I am very happy and grateful for all this,"" she said. Subscribe to get the hand picked best stories every week Subscribe to our mailing list Facebook ",FAKE
+1088,Sanders has gotten nastier. Does it help explain his staying power?,"When Bernie San­ders launched his long-shot bid for the presidency 10 months ago, there were two words that rarely crossed his lips: Hillary Clinton.
+
+Now he can’t seem to stop talking about her — and not much of what he has to say is very nice.
+
+During a boisterous rally here, the senator from Vermont dinged Clinton for supporting a series of “disastrous” trade deals. He mocked her for refusing to release transcripts of paid speeches she gave to Wall Street firms. He said she was wrong to vote for the Iraq War in 2002.
+
+The transformation has been stark. What’s less clear is whether Sanders’s rhetoric helps explain his lasting power in a nominating contest that appears likely to drag on for weeks, considering the mounting number of victories he has scored in key states.
+
+So far, the evidence is mixed. In Michigan last week, Sanders won a surprising though narrow victory after closing a gap of more than 20 percentage points in the polls. He was relentless in the days before the election in criticizing Clinton on trade. But Sanders also got trounced the same day in Mississippi — albeit a state where he didn’t mount much of a campaign.
+
+Tuesday — a day when five states hold primaries — should give a better indication of whether Sanders’s tough talk is paying off.
+
+One of those contests is in Illinois, and Sanders isn’t holding back as he campaigns here. In Chicago on Friday, Sanders even took aim at Clinton for her close association with Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D), whose approval ratings are in the tank, particularly among black Chicagoans.
+
+“I want to thank Rahm Emanuel for not endorsing me. I don’t want his endorsement!” Sanders screamed, to the delight of a crowd estimated at 9,000 people. “I don’t want the endorsement of a mayor who is shutting down school after school and firing teachers.”
+
+To drive home his point, San­ders held a news conference the next day devoted entirely to Emanuel. He told reporters that if he were Clinton, he would have refused the mayor’s support.
+
+Compared with the Republican presidential race and other elections in past years, the Democratic contest remains relatively tame. But the Bernie Sanders who is fighting to remain relevant in the delegate chase against Clinton sounds quite different from the Sanders whose chief antagonist was the “billionaire class” when he debuted on the campaign trail last spring.
+
+Analysts say Sanders’s decision to attack Clinton more aggressively is understandable: It’s what candidates who are behind tend to do. But in Sanders’s case, he risks damaging his brand as an anti-establishment politician who has boasted about never running negative television ads and pledged to stay positive in his bid for the Democratic nomination.
+
+“When you’re promising to run a different kind of campaign, it’s never good to look like you’re running the same kind of campaign that other politicians do,” said Mo Elleithee, executive director of the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown University. “It’s a risk, but it’s a calculated risk, and one they seem willing to take.”
+
+In an interview, Sanders acknowledged that he’s adopted a tougher tone but said he has tried to stick to the issues and not engage in character attacks. To the extent that the race has turned more negative, Sanders said, Clinton is to blame.
+
+“We’re responding,” Sanders said. “I find it disappointing when the secretary mischaracterizes my record.”
+
+Sanders was particularly galled, he said, by Clinton’s assertion during their recent debate in Flint, Mich., that he had opposed releasing funds to bail out the automobile industry — an issue of keen interest to voters in Michigan, given Detroit’s long history as the capital of the auto industry.
+
+Most fact checkers who looked into Clinton’s statement concluded she wasn’t telling the whole story.
+
+In 2008, Sanders voted for an unsuccessful stand-alone bill to provide aid to the auto industry. The bill Clinton referenced came later, and its primary purpose was to bail out Wall Street, something Sanders staunchly opposed. Some money authorized in the bill wound up flowing to major U.S. automakers, though.
+
+“To say that Bernie Sanders, who has perhaps the strongest pro-worker voting record in the United States Congress, does not support automobile workers in their time of need . . . is totally absurd,” Sanders said. “It’s unfortunate that she made that statement.”
+
+Sanders and his aides have tried to argue that none of his TV ads mention Clinton by name. But some leave little to the imagination.
+
+On Friday, Sanders debuted a pair of ads in Illinois and North Carolina, another state that votes Tuesday, that say that “while his opponent has flip-flopped on trade deals, Bernie has fought them and stood with American workers.”
+
+Clinton’s positions on some trade deals, including the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership, have, in fact, evolved. As secretary of state, she called the TPP “the gold standard” of trade deals. Last fall, she announced her opposition, which she stated even more strongly over the weekend. She has said she now has a fuller picture of what’s being proposed.
+
+In the interview, Sanders said voters have a right to know where he and his opponent diverge.
+
+“The differences are becoming fairly clear to the American people, and the more the differences between her views and my views get out there, the better we’ll be,” he said.
+
+Clinton doesn’t see it that way. During an appearance Saturday in St. Louis, she said Sanders “has decided to close this election by attacking me and misrepresenting my record and his.”
+
+Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson said Clinton’s campaign thinks Sanders has “broken his word” about running a positive race.
+
+During a rally Saturday in Springfield, Mo., Sanders continued to hammer Clinton on trade, saying their views diverged on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was approved when her husband was in the White House in the 1990s.
+
+“I understood at the end of about three seconds that what this trade deal was about was forcing American workers to compete against very, very poor people in Mexico,” Sanders told his audience.
+
+“I have voted against every one of these disastrous trade agreements,” he said. “Secretary Clinton’s position has been different. She has supported virtually every one of these trade agreements.”
+
+Boos filled the arena at the mention of Clinton’s position.
+
+Sanders has also raised questions about Clinton’s judgment, zeroing in on her decision to deliver a series of paid speeches to corporate interests in the run-up to her presidential bid. That included some addresses to the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, which paid her $225,000 for one speech.
+
+On that subject, Sanders hasn’t hesitated to take a snide tone.
+
+“The way I see it, if you’re going to give a speech and get $225,000, it must be a really brilliant speech,” Sanders told a crowd at the University of Illinois on Saturday. “It must be opening new vistas of human thought.”
+
+He also knocked Clinton for refusing to release transcripts of those speeches to the public. She has said she would do so when other candidates are held to the same standard.
+
+“Let me make a dramatic announcement to all of you here today,” Sanders sarcastically told his crowd. Saying he was ready to release transcripts of his Wall Street speeches, he swung open his arms to reveal nothing. “Here they are!” he said.
+
+The danger for Sanders, Elleithee said, is not that he will lose die-hard supporters with his tougher tone but that it could be harder to attract new ones — including some who like Clinton and are still weighing whether to vote for her.
+
+Some Sanders fans, including Samuel Nebinger, who turned out Saturday night to see the candidate in Springfield, say they’re not bothered by the more pointed rhetoric. Nebinger said he welcomes it.
+
+Nebinger, 21, recently dropped out of Missouri State University, he said, because it was too expensive, and he now works at a local call center. He was wearing a shirt that said “Help Us, Bernie, You’re Our Only Hope.”
+
+“He wanted to run it clean at first,” Nebinger said. “But he needed to go on the offensive, because she’s been doing so many corrupt things. She did that to herself.”",REAL
+8301,Iraqi Christians Hold first mass in over 2 years pray for Trump to Win,"
+IRAQI Christians will pray for Donald Trump’s election victory after they condemned US Government for “abandoning” them to the barbaric terror of Islamic State.
+The Christian community in the latest Iraqi town to be freed from ISIS have opened up about how they were terrorised at the hands of the twisted jihadi militants.
+The once-bustling Qaraqosh, which boasted of more than 50,000 Christian residents, was recaptured from the jihadis last week.
+Residents who stayed in the town have described how ISIS told every Christian to pay a massive tax, convert to Islam or face execution.
+Those who survived the terror have now voiced their outrage that President Obama refused to protect them when Iraq’s largest Christian city fell to ISIS more than two years ago.
+A man in the village said he hopes Donald Trump – a widely favoured candidate in the town – will bring a different approach to Iraqi Christians.
+He told the camera: “Obama has never helped the Christians. In fact, he despises them. In the last 26 months, he has shown he despises all of them.
+“But we have hope in the new president, Trump.”
+
+Donald Trump has previously spoken up about how Christians have been left to fend for themselves by the US government.
+A Catholic priest in the town said: “The US government led by President Obama could have protected us – or at least helped us to protect ourselves.
+“But unfortunately Obama abandoned us, and chose not to get involved.”
+A young girl wearing a crucifix then added: “We hope this new guy called Trump will help us more than Obama did.”
+Last Sunday, Father Ammar took mass in a shelled-out Church of the Immaculate Conception for the first time in two years.
+He said: “Yes, they destroyed and burned some houses and churches, but we can rebuild them.
+“After being away for exactly 811 days, after being attacked by the forces of evil, we have come back to worship in freedom.
+“What counts is that we can pray here again”
+The church, still largely in rubble from the chaotic war, is Iraq’s largest and used to regularly host more than 3,000 people a week to its Sunday mass
+The liberation comes as Kurdish-led forces fight to free both of ISIS’ largest remaining strongholds – Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+7572,Financial Times Fumbles Trump’s Central Banking Criticism,"Financial Times Fumbles Trump’s Central Banking Criticism   
+Populists stick to tradition of central bank-bashing … If anyone still doubts the affinity between support for Trump in the US and for Brexit in the UK, they should look no further than the two movements’ attitude to monetary policy. –Financial Times 
+The “populism vs. globalism” meme is increasingly evident in the mainstream media just as we predicted, and analyzing it can generate considerable insight into elite plans and societal positioning. 
+This Financial Times article provides us further information in a short editorial. Interestingly, it is not by any means persuasive propaganda. It would have been far more effective in the 20 th century than today when so many more people are beginning to be educated about free-market economics. 
+More: 
+Donald Trump has accused the Federal Reserve of keeping interest rates too low for what is healthy for the economy in order to make the Obama administration, and by extension Hillary Clinton, look good. Theresa May, more elegantly but no more justifiably, used her party Conservative party conference speech to attack the Bank of England’s policy of quantitative easing. 
+In both cases, the technocrats at central banks are accused of making policy that helps rich elites and hurts the more deserving common people, be they small savers or hardworking families. 
+So far so good. But toward the end of the article we are – unfortunately for the argument – provided with more specifics. This is where the article’s logic weakens and then disintegrates. 
+A cursory search of “populism” or “populism vs. globalism” will reveal a tremendous amount of commentary in a short period of time. In fact, this particular dominant social theme seems to be a foundational feature of upcoming arguments in favor of globalism. 
+But it is fatally flawed – as this article offers in a few sentences that are meant to be damning but instead reveal the basic bankruptcy of this rhetorical approach: 
+Traditionally, populists have berated central banks for their obsession with “sound money”: tight monetary policy, high interest rates and the gold standard. ¨ 
+In about 25 words, the article seems to sabotage its entire argument and by extension the larger meme. 
+Is this the best that can be done? Probably so. It provides terrible testimony as to the state of elite memes generally. 
+For one thing, central bank criticism in the past few decades has not focused on central bank “obsession with sound money.” 
+On the contrary, most modern criticism regarding central banking focuses on the endless debasement of the fiat currency monetary facilities spew relentlessly. 
+Additionally, critics of central banking in the past decade or more have been sounding the alarm regularly about too-low interest rates. Rates so low, in fact, that they have now gone into negative territory. 
+Finally, in addition to mischaracterizing modern central bank criticism, the article doesn’t even attempt to grapple with cogent criticisms of central banking that are common on the Internet today. 
+These criticisms are rooted in the free-market economics of the Austrian School, which is in many ways the basis of all modern economics. 
+Marginal utility shows us clearly that markets create valid prices. Yet central banks “fix” the value and volume of money via interest rates and in other ways. 
+This cognitive dissonance is at the heart of the disaster of modern central banking. 
+Ask a central banker if he believes in price fixing, and you should receive a credible, necessary response: Price fixing destroys prosperity by substituting dictates for market competition. And yet … price-fixing is central banking’s significant – sole – methodology. 
+In the Internet era, memes have to be convincing and logical to have an impact with the intelligentsia that elites have traditionally sought to propagandize – as they are thought leaders. But here we have one of the most important dominant social themes – populism vs. globalism – being presented in a major financial newspaper in a most unpersuasive way. 
+This is probably why the fallback position when it comes to reasserting a necessary matrix of elite propaganda increasingly focuses on censorship. 
+The kind of comprehensive effort necessary to reestablish the once-commonly accepted disinformation of the 20 th century is probably beyond the scope of even the most authoritarian propagandizing short of genocide. 
+Conclusion: Bur wait, is that a potential world war staining the horizon? …",FAKE
+5178,Poll: Clinton's Lead Over Trump Slips After Florida Shooting,"The poll, conducted from Monday to Friday, showed Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, with a 10.7 point lead among likely voters over Trump, her likely Republican rival in the November presidential election. That's down from a lead of 14.3 points for Clinton on Sunday, the day an American-born shooter who declared allegiance to militant group Islamic State killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
+
+Trump seized on the attack to sharpen his security proposals, saying he would block immigration to the United States from any country with a ""proven history of terrorism"" against America and its allies if elected. The pledge fine-tuned an earlier vow, made after the attacks last year in Paris and California, to ban the entry of all Muslims into the United States.
+
+He also called for measures to make it more difficult for suspected terrorists to obtain firearms, veering from the Republican Party's general opposition to gun control.
+
+While Trump's comments on both Muslims and guns dismayed some Republican elites, they may have cheered some voters.
+
+Some 45 percent of Americans said they supported Trump's idea to suspend Muslim immigration, up from 41.9 percent at the start of the month, according to the poll. Meanwhile, about 70 percent of Americans, including a majority of Democrats and Republicans, said they wanted to see at least moderate regulations and restrictions on guns, up from 60 percent in similar polls in 2013 and 2014.
+
+Clinton focused her response to the Orlando attack on the need to boost intelligence gathering and defeat Islamic State and what she called ""radical jihadist terrorism,"" while warning against demonizing Muslim-Americans. She also repeated her calls for tougher gun control measures, including a ban on assault weapons.
+
+As usual after a major attack, ""terrorism"" jumped to the top concern among all adults in the poll - rising above the economy, health care and other major issues.
+
+The poll's five-day average showed that 45.5 percent of likely American voters supported Clinton, while 34.8 percent supported Trump, and another 19.7 percent did not support either candidate. On Sunday, Clinton's support was at 46.6 percent, versus Trump's 32.3 percent.
+
+The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English with adults living in the continental United States, Alaska and Hawaii. The political horserace poll included 1,133 likely voters and has a credibility interval, a measure of the poll's accuracy, of 3.4 percentage points.",REAL
+1906,"Clinton Foundation: 'Yes, we made mistakes'","In a blog post out Sunday, Foundation acting CEO Maura Pally reaffirmed its commitment to transparency, but nevertheless said some errors had occurred.
+
+""Yes, we made mistakes, as many organizations of our size do, but we are acting quickly to remedy them, and have taken steps to ensure they don't happen in the future,"" Pally wrote.
+
+While the details of the Clinton Foundation's operations are complex and date back almost a decade, they have thrown a wrench in the ""ramp up"" period of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Instead of focusing solely on early presidential states, like the campaign had hoped, many of her top aides spent the last week answering questions about the foundation and its tangled relationship to numerous foreign donors.
+
+In a new book ""Clinton Cash,"" writer Peter Schweizer alleges that the Foundation, led until recently by likely Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, let some donors to the foundation have undue influence on the charity's work and State Department actions. Schweizer said Sunday that he did not have ""direct evidence"" of ethical misconduct, but said the pattern he uncovered should raise eyebrows and trigger an investigation.
+
+The Clinton Foundation has drawn fire both from Schweizer and from reports in The New York Times and other outlets for some of the work of a subsidiary of the philanthropy, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, which is backed by Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining company owner who has been a big donor to the Foundation. RELATED: Clinton 'ready' for attacks in wake of book story Pally said that donations to the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership weren't publicly disclosed because Canada bars the names of donors from being released without their consent. ""This is hardly an effort on our part to avoid transparency,"" Pally wrote. She also explained the Foundation's plans to refile tax returns after reports emerged that the philanthropy had made errors in recent years. Pally said the Foundation had not intentionally under reported revenue, but rather accidentally combined revenue from government grants with contributions from donors. Pally stressed the Foundation was working to rectify the errors. ""We are committed to operating the Foundation responsibly and effectively to continue the life-changing work that this philanthropy is doing every day,"" she said. Hillary Clinton resigned from the Foundation's board immediately after declaring her presidential run. Shortly after, the Foundation unveiled new a new donor disclosure schedule and said it would only accept foreign donations from six countries. The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership was started in 2007 when Giustra brought the idea to Bill Clinton, according to a spokesperson for Giustra. The initiative is an arm of the Clinton Foundation, meaning its donors are disclosed on the Clinton Foundation website. Giustra pledged $100 million at the start of the enterprise and in order to help fund the initiative, a Clinton Foundation spokesperson said Giustra also established The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada) in 2007. The Canadian charity was signed off on by the Clinton Foundation, the foundation spokesperson said. Both a Giustra and foundation spokesperson said that the Canadian arm charity was founded in order to allow other Canadian philanthropists to donate to the enterprise and receive a tax credit. But because the charity is operated in Canada, it falls under different laws than groups in the United States. ""Under Canadian laws, charitable donors have a right to privacy,"" said Giustra's spokesperson. ""When a donor gives money to a Canadian charity in confidence, and in the process provides his or her personal information, under Canadian law a fiduciary relationship is established between the Canadian charity toward the donor concerning the use of private information that the donor has provided."" Giuistra's spokesperson would not detail the group's donors, but said that no one from the Clinton Foundation was briefed on donations to The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada) because that would have broken Canadian law. ""To maintain a fiduciary relationship between Canadian donors and Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada) with regard to disclosure of donor information, prior consent must be first obtained from each and every Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada) donor agreeing to disclose their donor information to any other person or organization,"" the spokesperson said. Schweizer, however, was on ABC on Sunday, where the author argued that there was a smoking gun in the book. ""The smoking gun is in the pattern of behavior,"" he said of the Clintons. All of these explanations by people close to the Clintons, though, have not stemmed the tide of mounting ethical questions being poised by Clinton's detractors. Many Republican operatives see the story as clean hit against Clinton, and one that will make a convincing ad once the campaigns start in earnest. ""These new revelations,"" Republican National Committee spokeswoman Allison Moore said on Thursday, ""continue to raise serious questions about Hillary Clinton's judgment as Secretary of State.""",REAL
+2046,Jeb 2016: The Bush battle within,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+6627,Dakota Access v Human Rights,"By William Boardman, Reader Supported News Obama Is Pathetic on Human Rights in North Dakota 
+We’re monitoring this closely. And, you know, I think, as a general rule, my view is that there is a way for us to accommodate sacred lands of Native Americans. And I think that right now the Army Corps is examining whether there are ways to reroute this pipeline in a way…. So—so, we’re going to let it play out for several more weeks and determine whether or not this can be resolved in a way that I think is properly attentive to the traditions of the first Americans…. – President Obama on the Now This News website , November 1, 2016 I sn’t that sweet? The President gave lip service to “the traditions of the first Americans.” He didn’t mention treaties between sovereign nations, of course, because he’s not about to break with the traditions of the second Americans: that such treaties are only a means to a genocidal end and aren’t to be taken seriously by the United States of exceptional, manifestly destined Americans whenever such treaties interfere with what the US wants. That’s what “properly attentive” means historically. Freely translated, “properly attentive” means “make a show of peace talk, them roll over them with whatever force necessary after it’s too late to affect the election.” The legal mind is nothing if not properly attentive to elegant turns of phrase in its unyielding hypocrisy. If the President had any intention of honoring anything relating to the sacred lands of Native Americans, he would not be planning to “let it play out for several more weeks.” Sacred lands have already been destroyed. Sacred lands are being destroyed no, not only by the pipeline construction but also by the massive militarized police response to nonviolent protest. Letting it play out for several more weeks only opens the door to the destruction of more – even all – of the sacred lands in the path of this lethal-to-the-planet pipeline. What is happening, what has been happening for months in North Dakota , is a travesty – of justice, of common human decency, of the rule of law and standards of international law. And our president is on the wrong side of all of it, just barely responding in his docile, passive, articulate evasiveness. “We’re monitoring this closely,” says the President I f the President is monitoring this closely and remains willing to let it play out for several more weeks, that’s a pretty clear signal that he has no serious problem with the creation of police state conditions in North Dakota. Besides an unknown number of private security forces working for Energy Transfer Partners (the pipeline sponsor), there are law enforcement officers from at least seven states that have cost about $10 million so far. That seems a ridiculously high price to pay to contain peaceful protest. And it’s an even more ridiculous price for taxpayers to shell out to protect private profits. If the President is monitoring this closely without responding, that is a tacit admission that he has no serious problem with any of the egregious behavior so far by official and quasi-official paramilitaries and their wide-ranging mistreatment (apparently including criminal assault) of American citizens. In particular, he has allowed and continues to allow himself to be seen as approving: Unlicensed, apparently untrained private security forces using dogs to bloody peaceful protesters (who call themselves water protectors). State officials arresting and over-charging journalists for committing journalism. A local sheriff inflaming the public with false reports of “pipe bombs,” when what he had actually heard was talk of “peace pipes.” Law officers shooting nonviolent water protectors in the back and front with rubber bullets. State officials housing arrestees in dog cages and conditions that violate international law against torturing prisoners. Law officers on the riverbank using mace and pepper spray against nonviolent water protectors standing in the water. Official surveillance helicopters flying low to panic horses. Official surveillance helicopters mysteriously going off duty just before “persons unknown” start a prairie fire (with such ineptitude that the wind blows it away from the Standing Rock Sioux gathering ground). Apparent contempt of court by Energy Transfer Partners, who sent its bulldozers to destroy a burial ground that, once destroyed, could no longer be a reason for a federal court to rule against the pipeline. Desecration is not a criminal act, apparently, when you have a government permit for it, even when that permit is under litigation. That’s a lot of official abuse to tolerate, even for a president, and that’s just a sampling of the police state techniques being tested in Middle America these days. “And I think that right now the Army Corps is examining whether there are ways to reroute this pipeline in a way …” T he President paused there, leaving the thought unfinished. The pipeline has already been re-routed, away from the state capital city of Bismarck after residents there expressed fear that the pipeline threatened their water supply. Now the pipeline threatens the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux (and thousands of others), but that is more acceptable to the American power structure. The President has expressed no dismay at the idea that a pipeline rupture along the Missouri River would devastate huge numbers of “the first Americans,” who have no other source of water. As one water protector put it : “If it were to be contaminated,… it would be a death sentence.” Why does the President think rerouting a climate-hostile pipeline is any kind of an answer to anything other than protecting the speculative bets of Energy Transfer Partners? If he were to consider this pipeline (any new pipeline) in terms of its impact on global climate values, this would be a no-brainer: no more pipelines. This is the Army Corps of Engineers we’re talking about – the Army – and the President is the commander in chief who has no difficulty blowing up wedding parties and funerals with drones in some imaginary defense of national security. Why does he have such reluctance to protect planetary security? Why does he not just order the Army Corp of Engineers to go back to square one and re-do this process which was fast-tracked in the first place, for reasons that remain murky, and with the exclusion of interested parties with legal standing. But President Obama, on full salary as he campaigns for Hillary Clinton, shows no inclination to do any of this well or right. He’s apparently much more confortable with false equivalencies and blaming the victims (also on Now This News): Yeah, I mean, it’s a challenging situation. I think that my general rule when I talk to governors and state and local officials, whenever they’re dealing with protests, including, for example, during the Black Lives Matters protests, is there is an obligation for protesters to be peaceful, and there’s an obligation for authorities to show restraint. And, you know, I want to make sure that as everybody is exercising their constitutional rights to be heard, that both sides are refraining from situations that might result in people being hurt. For someone supposedly monitoring this closely, the President might be expected to know that people have already been hurt and most if not all of those hurt were nonviolent, peaceful protestors set upon by dogs and assaulted by rubber bullets, sound cannons, and chemical weapons. What fundamental, callous irrationality prompts this president to bring in Black Lives Matter? That is strange beyond comprehension. But perhaps it shines a light on that dark place in his soul that allowed him to react with almost no help or pity for the people of Flint, poisoned by their own governments, including the one President Obama is supposed to lead. Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.   PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. 
+What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda?  ",FAKE
+537,"In Iowa, potential candidates compete for 2016 spotlight","(CNN) Politicians, journalists and conservative activists will swoop into Des Moines this weekend for a major gathering of Republicans that's widely viewed as the first cattle call this cycle for the GOP presidential race.
+
+Close to 10 potential candidates will speak at the daylong Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday, co-hosted by the group Citizens United and Rep. Steve King, a high-profile Republican from Iowa with serious clout among social conservatives.
+
+With Iowa the first state to vote in the presidential nominating season, it's considered a must-stop for White House hopefuls on both sides of the aisle, and this weekend gives 2016 players a chance to roll out their message to core caucus-goers, strategists say.
+
+Among those expected to speak are New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, renowned neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.
+
+Notably, the top two potential contenders in the GOP race -- Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney -- are bypassing the event, both citing scheduling conflicts.
+
+Also skipping Iowa this weekend are Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who took a pass on a similar Iowa gathering of conservatives back in August, and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who's holding his own retreat with donors and supporters in Miami Beach this weekend as he prepares to make a 2016 decision.
+
+Rubio and Paul, however, will join Cruz to speak at an event in Palm Springs, California, on Sunday that's hosted by a group backed by the Koch Brothers.
+
+The odd one out?
+
+One of the most highly anticipated speakers is Christie, who's considered the one-not-like-the-others at this weekend's assembly. Twice elected in a blue state, Christie's staked out more moderate and pragmatic territory on the political spectrum.
+
+He angered social conservatives when he dropped a legal challenge in 2013 against a court ruling that got rid of New Jersey's same-sex marriage ban. He also stirred up some controversy when he at first declined to offer his opinion on the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby last year, which said private companies cannot be required to pay to cover some types of contraceptives for their employees.
+
+When talking about social issues, Christie has largely focused on his efforts to enhance drug rehabilitation programs in his state, especially for non-violent criminals with drug convictions.
+
+The governor has made five trips to Iowa in the past year, including stops to help raise money for King and Gov. Terry Branstad.
+
+With Romney and Bush soaking up much of the attention and resources among establishment Republicans, the summit will provide Christie a chance to stand out and earn points for simply showing up.
+
+""In terms of optics, I think its clear that Gov. Christie intends to run — and has every intention to speaking to as many Iowans as possible,"" said Nick Ryan, a Republican strategist from Iowa. ""That's how you build a winning coalition — and he seems to get that.""
+
+What we'll be looking for
+
+Christie has also been mum on his views about immigration reform. Political observers will be watching to see what candidates say about the issue in Iowa this week. King, one of the GOP's most vocal and flashy opponents of a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers, made headlines recently when he referred to a guest at the State of the Union address as a ""deportable.""
+
+While King's comments on immigration have agitated even those within his party, he's still considered popular in his home state and a highly sought after name when candidates stop through Iowa.
+
+Other issues that could get frequent mention this weekend include same-sex marriage and abortion. Both topics have seen renewed attention in the last week, after the Supreme Court decided a week ago to take up same-sex marriag e this year. The court will essentially decide whether states have the right to ban gay and lesbian couples from getting married.
+
+Also on the social front, the House, in a battle that pitted Republicans against each other, passed a measure Thursday banning all taxpayer money for abortions after it failed to pass a bill that would ban so-called ""late -term"" abortions. This week also marked the 42nd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, and tens of thousands of anti-abortion rights activists marched in the nation's capital to bring attention to the issue.
+
+Like Christie, some Republicans have also taken on criminal justice reform and anti-poverty policies as key talking points in their platforms. We'll see how potential candidates tackle those issues this weekend, especially as the party on the national level has made efforts to appeal to a wider audience.
+
+Several of the potential candidates plan to stay longer in Iowa. Huckabee has book signings on Sunday in Cedar Rapids and Windsor Heights, Iowa, while Perry is staying until Monday and Santorum until Tuesday for multiple events throughout the state.",REAL
+2990,U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades,"WASHINGTON — The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans' international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.
+
+For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.
+
+Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels' distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify U.S. suspects in a wide range of other investigations.
+
+The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to ""designated foreign countries."" But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.
+
+The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA's intelligence arm, was the government's first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans' privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.
+
+More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.
+
+The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans' calls, but the records — which numbers were dialed and when — allowed agents to map suspects' communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. At first, the drug agency did so with help from military computers and intelligence analysts.
+
+That data collection was ""one of the most important and effective Federal drug law enforcement initiatives,"" the Justice Department said in a 1998 letter to Sprint asking the telecom giant to turn over its call records. The previously undisclosed letter was signed by the head of the department's Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Section, Mary Lee Warren, who wrote that the operation had ""been approved at the highest levels of Federal law enforcement authority,"" including then-Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.
+
+The data collection began in 1992 during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, nine years before his son, President George W. Bush, authorized the NSA to gather its own logs of Americans' phone calls in 2001. It was approved by top Justice Department officials in four presidential administrations and detailed in occasional briefings to members of Congress but otherwise had little independent oversight, according to officials involved with running it.
+
+The DEA used its data collection extensively and in ways that the NSA is now prohibited from doing. Agents gathered the records without court approval, searched them more often in a day than the spy agency does in a year and automatically linked the numbers the agency gathered to large electronic collections of investigative reports, domestic call records accumulated by its agents and intelligence data from overseas.
+
+The result was ""a treasure trove of very important information on trafficking,"" former DEA administrator Thomas Constantine said in an interview.
+
+The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. ""This was aimed squarely at Americans,"" said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ""That's very significant from a constitutional perspective.""
+
+Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden's revelations about other surveillance programs. In its place, current and former officials said the drug agency sends telecom companies daily subpoenas for international calling records involving only phone numbers that agents suspect are linked to the drug trade or other crimes — sometimes a thousand or more numbers a day.
+
+Tuesday, Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said the DEA ""is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers."" A DEA spokesman declined to comment.
+
+The DEA began assembling a data-gathering program in the 1980s as the government searched for new ways to battle Colombian drug cartels. Neither informants nor undercover agents had been enough to crack the cartels' infrastructure. So the agency's intelligence arm turned its attention to the groups' communication networks.
+
+Calling records – often called ""toll records"" – offered one way to do that. Toll records are comparable to what appears on a phone bill – the numbers a person dialed, the date and time of the call, its duration and how it was paid for. By then, DEA agents had decades of experience gathering toll records of people they suspected were linked to drug trafficking, albeit one person at a time. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, officials said the agency had little way to make sense of the data their agents accumulated and almost no ability to use them to ferret out new cartel connections. Some agents used legal pads.
+
+""We were drowning in toll records,"" a former intelligence official said.
+
+The DEA asked the Pentagon for help. The military responded with a pair of supercomputers and intelligence analysts who had experience tracking the communication patterns of Soviet military units. ""What they discovered was that the incident of a communication was perhaps as important as the content of a communication,"" a former Justice Department official said.
+
+The military installed the supercomputers on the fifth floor of the DEA's headquarters, across from a shopping mall in Arlington, Va.
+
+The system they built ultimately allowed the drug agency to stitch together huge collections of data to map trafficking and money laundering networks both overseas and within the USA. It allowed agents to link the call records its agents gathered domestically with calling data the DEA and intelligence agencies had acquired outside the USA. (In some cases, officials said the DEA paid employees of foreign telecom firms for copies of call logs and subscriber lists.) And it eventually allowed agents to cross-reference all of that against investigative reports from the DEA, FBI and Customs Service.
+
+The result ""produced major international investigations that allowed us to take some big people,"" Constantine said, though he said he could not identify particular cases.
+
+In 1989, President George H.W. Bush proposed in his first prime-time address using ""sophisticated intelligence-gathering and Defense Department technology"" to disrupt drug trafficking. Three years later, when violent crime rates were at record highs, the drug agency intensified its intelligence push, launching a ""kingpin strategy"" to attack drug cartels by going after their finances, leadership and communication.
+
+In 1992, in the last months of Bush's administration, Attorney General William Barr and his chief criminal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, gave the DEA permission to collect a much larger set of phone data to feed into that intelligence operation.
+
+Instead of simply asking phone companies for records about calls made by people suspected of drug crimes, the Justice Department began ordering telephone companies to turn over lists of all phone calls from the USA to countries where the government determined drug traffickers operated, current and former officials said.
+
+Barr and Mueller declined to comment, as did Barr's deputy, George Terwilliger III, though Terwilliger said, ""It has been apparent for a long time in both the law enforcement and intelligence worlds that there is a tremendous value and need to collect certain metadata to support legitimate investigations.""
+
+The data collection was known within the agency as USTO (a play on the fact that it tracked calls from the U.S. to other countries).
+
+The DEA obtained those records using administrative subpoenas that allow the agency to collect records ""relevant or material to"" federal drug investigations. Officials acknowledged it was an expansive interpretation of that authority but one that was not likely to be challenged because unlike search warrants, DEA subpoenas do not require a judge's approval. ""We knew we were stretching the definition,"" a former official involved in the process said.
+
+Officials said a few telephone companies were reluctant to provide so much information, but none challenged the subpoenas in court. Those that hesitated received letters from the Justice Department urging them to comply.
+
+After Sprint executives expressed reservations in 1998, for example, Warren, the head of the department's drug section, responded with a letter telling the company that ""the initiative has been determined to be legally appropriate"" and that turning over the call data was ""appropriate and required by law."" The letter said the data would be used by authorities ""to focus scarce investigative resources by means of sophisticated pattern and link analysis.""
+
+The letter did not name other telecom firms providing records to the DEA but did tell executives that ""the arrangement with Sprint being sought by the DEA is by no means unique to Sprint"" and that ""major service providers have been eager to support and assist law enforcement within appropriate bounds."" Former officials said the operation included records from AT&T and other telecom companies.
+
+A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment. Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge Walsh said only that ""we do comply with all state and federal laws regarding law enforcement subpoenas.""
+
+Agents said that when the data collection began, they sought to limit its use mainly to drug investigations and turned away requests for access from the FBI and the NSA. They allowed searches of the data in terrorism cases, including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995, helping to rule out theories linking the attack to foreign terrorists. They allowed even broader use after Sept. 11, 2001. The DEA's public disclosure of its program in January came in the case of a man charged with violating U.S. export restrictions by trying to send electrical equipment to Iran.
+
+At first, officials said the DEA gathered records only of calls to a handful of countries, focusing on Colombian drug cartels and their supply lines. Its reach grew quickly, and by the late 1990s, the DEA was logging ""a massive number of calls,"" said a former intelligence official who supervised the program.
+
+Former officials said they could not recall the complete list of countries included in USTO, and the coverage changed over time. The Justice Department and DEA added countries to the list if officials could establish that they were home to outfits that produced or trafficked drugs or were involved in money laundering or other drug-related crimes.
+
+The Justice Department warned when it disclosed the program in January that the list of countries should remain secret ""to protect against any disruption to prospective law enforcement cooperation.""
+
+At its peak, the operation gathered data on calls to 116 countries, an official involved in reviewing the list said. Two other officials said they did not recall the precise number of countries, but it was more than 100. That gave the collection a considerable sweep; the U.S. government recognizes a total of 195 countries.
+
+At one time or another, officials said, the data collection covered most of the countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as well as others in western Africa, Europe and Asia. It included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Italy, Mexico and Canada.
+
+The DEA often — though not always — notified foreign governments it was collecting call records, in part to make sure its agents would not be expelled if the program was discovered. In some cases, the DEA provided some of that information to foreign law enforcement agencies to help them build their own investigations, officials said.
+
+The DEA did not have a real-time connection to phone companies' data; instead, the companies regularly provided copies of their call logs, first on computer disks and later over a private network. Agents who used the system said the numbers they saw were seldom more than a few days old.
+
+The database did not include callers' names or other identifying data. Officials said agents often were able to identify individuals associated with telephone numbers flagged by the analysis, either by cross-referencing them against other databases or by sending follow-up requests to the phone companies.
+
+To keep the program secret, the DEA sought not to use the information as evidence in criminal prosecutions or in its justification for warrants or other searches. Instead, its Special Operations Division passed the data to field agents as tips to help them find new targets or focus existing investigations, a process approved by Justice Department lawyers. Many of those tips were classified because the DEA phone searches drew on other intelligence data.
+
+That practice sparked a furor when the Reuters news agency reported in 2013 that the DEA trained agents to conceal the sources of those tips from judges and defense lawyers. Reuters said the tips were based on wiretaps, foreign intelligence and a DEA database of telephone calls gathered through routine subpoenas and search warrants.
+
+As a result, ""the government short-circuited any debate about the legality and wisdom of putting the call records of millions of innocent people in the hands of the DEA,"" American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Patrick Toomey said.
+
+Listen to Brad Heath detail his investigation into decades of bulk data collection in the audio player below:
+
+The NSA began collecting its own data on Americans' phone calls within months of Sept. 11, 2001, as a way to identify potential terrorists within the USA. At first, it did so without court approval. In 2006, after The New York Times and USA TODAY began reporting on the surveillance program, President George W. Bush's administration brought it under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to use secret court orders to get access to records relevant to national security investigations. Unlike the DEA, the NSA also gathered logs of calls within the USA.
+
+The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, ""It's very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor"" to the NSA's terrorist surveillance.
+
+Both operations relied on an expansive interpretation of the word ""relevant,"" for example — one that allowed the government to collect vast amounts of information on the premise that some tiny fraction of it would be useful to investigators. Both used similar internal safeguards, requiring analysts to certify that they had ""reasonable articulable suspicion"" – a comparatively low legal threshold – that a phone number was linked to a drug or intelligence case before they could query the records.
+
+""The foundation of the NSA program was a mirror image of what we were doing,"" said a former Justice Department official who helped oversee the surveillance. That official said he and others briefed NSA lawyers several times on the particulars of their surveillance program. Two former DEA officials also said the NSA had been briefed on the operation. The NSA declined to comment.
+
+There were also significant differences.
+
+For one thing, DEA analysts queried their data collection far more often. The NSA said analysts searched its telephone database only about 300 times in 2012; DEA analysts routinely performed that many searches in a day, former officials said. Beyond that, NSA analysts must have approval from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court each time they want to search their own collection of phone metadata, and they do not automatically cross-reference it with other intelligence files.
+
+Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, complained last year to Holder that the DEA had been gathering phone data ""in bulk"" without judicial oversight. Officials said the DEA's database was disclosed to judges only occasionally, in classified hearings.
+
+For two decades, it was never reviewed by the Justice Department's own inspector general, which told Congress it is now looking into the DEA's bulk data collections.
+
+Holder pulled the plug on the phone data collection in September 2013.
+
+That summer, Snowden leaked a remarkable series of classified documents detailing some of the government's most prized surveillance secrets, including the NSA's logging of domestic phone calls and Internet traffic. Reuters and The New York Times raised questions about the drug agency's own access to phone records.
+
+Officials said the Justice Department told the DEA that it had determined it could not continue both surveillance programs, particularly because part of its justification for sweeping NSA surveillance was that it served national security interests, not ordinary policing. Eight months after USTO was halted, for example, department lawyers defended the spy agency's phone dragnet in court partly on the grounds that it ""serves special governmental needs above and beyond normal law enforcement.""
+
+Three months after USTO was shut down, a review panel commissioned by President Obama urged Congress to bar the NSA from gathering telephone data on Americans in bulk. Not long after that, Obama instructed the NSA to get permission from the surveillance court before querying its phone data collection, a step the drug agency never was required to take.
+
+The DEA stopped searching USTO in September 2013. Not long after that, it purged the database.
+
+""It was made abundantly clear that they couldn't defend both programs,"" a former Justice Department official said. Others said Holder's message was more direct. ""He said he didn't think we should have that information,"" a former DEA official said.
+
+By then, agents said USTO was suffering from diminishing returns. More criminals — especially the sophisticated cartel operatives the agency targeted — were communicating on Internet messaging systems that are harder for law enforcement to track.
+
+Still, the shutdown took a toll, officials said. ""It has had a major impact on investigations,"" one former DEA official said.
+
+The DEA asked the Justice Department to restart the surveillance program in December 2013. It withdrew that request when agents came up with a new solution. Every day, the agency assembles a list of the telephone numbers its agents suspect may be tied to drug trafficking. Each day, it sends electronic subpoenas — sometimes listing more than a thousand numbers — to telephone companies seeking logs of international telephone calls linked to those numbers, two official familiar with the program said.
+
+The data collection that results is more targeted but slower and more expensive. Agents said it takes a day or more to pull together communication profiles that used to take minutes.
+
+The White House proposed a similar approach for the NSA's telephone surveillance program, which is set to expire June 1. That approach would halt the NSA's bulk data collection but would give the spy agency the power to force companies to turn over records linked to particular telephone numbers, subject to a court order.",REAL
+3920,"Opinion: Hillary Clinton, a mistake for 2016 - .com","Democrats seem poised to choose their next presidential nominee the way Republicans often choose theirs: according to the principle of ""next in line.""
+
+Hillary Clinton came second in the nomination fight of 2008. If she were a Republican, that would make her a near-certainty to be nominated in 2016. Five of the past six Republican nominees had finished second in the previous round of primaries. (The sixth was George W. Bush, son of the most recent Republican president.)
+
+Democrats, by contrast, prefer newcomers. Six of their eight nominees since 1972 had never sought national office before.
+
+Obviously, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Democrats chose the next guy in line in 2000 -- Vice President Al Gore -- and they may well do so again. But speaking from across the aisle, it's just this one observer's opinion that Democrats would be poorly served by following the Republican example when President Obama's term ends.
+
+Hillary Clinton is 14 years older than Barack Obama. A party has never nominated a leader that much older than his immediate predecessor. (The previous record-holder was James Buchanan, 13 years older than Franklin Pierce when the Democrats chose him in 1856. Runner-up: Dwight Eisenhower, 12 years older than his predecessor, Thomas Dewey.)
+
+Parties have good reasons to avoid reaching back to politicians of prior generations. When they do, they bring forward not only the ideas of the past, but also the personalities and the quarrels of the past.
+
+One particular quarrel that a Hillary Clinton nomination would bring forward is the quarrel over the ethical standards of the Clinton White House -- and, maybe even more, of the Clintons' post-White House careers. Relying on Hillary Clinton's annual financial disclosure reports, CNN reported last year that former President Bill Clinton had earned $89 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House in 2001. Many of these earnings came from foreign sources. In 2011 alone, the former president earned $6.1 million from 16 speeches in 11 foreign countries.
+
+Is it an ethical problem for the husband of the person charged with the foreign affairs of the United States to earn so much foreign-sourced income? Let's rephrase that question: How much time do Democrats wish to spend arguing the ethics of Bill Clinton's foreign earnings over the 2016 political cycle?
+
+Yet the biggest risk to Democrats from a Hillary Clinton nomination is not that it would be generationally backward-looking -- or that it would reopen embarrassing ethical disputes -- but that it would short-circuit the necessary work of party renewal.
+
+After eight years in the White House, a party requires a self-appraisal and a debate over its way forward. Bill Clinton offered Democrats just such a debate in 1992 with his ""New Democrat"" ideas. Barack Obama offered another in 2008 with his careful but unmistakable criticism of Clinton-era domestic policies and Hillary Clinton's Iraq war vote. But if Hillary Clinton glides into the nomination in 2016 on the strength of money, name recognition, and a generalized feeling of ""It's her turn,"" then Democrats will forgo this necessary renewal.
+
+Here's what could happen instead in 2016:
+
+One candidate could seek the Democratic nomination on a platform of keeping faith with the ideals of the pre-presidential Obama: closing Guantanamo, ending targeted killings, and so on.
+
+Another Democrat could run to represent those Democrats who supported Bill Clinton back in the 1990s, and who worry that the Obama administration has drifted too far to the left: spending too much, ignoring budget deficits, getting into too many fights with business.
+
+Yet another could run as a full-throated defender of the Obama legacy, updating the 1988 George H.W. Bush ""stay the course"" message.
+
+This would be a real debate that would summon forth hard thinking about how Democrats might govern their country if returned for a third presidential term (as could very well happen, given the continuing political weakness of the GOP).
+
+A Hillary Clinton campaign would want to shut down any such debate before it starts. It would want to inherit the Democratic nomination and then the presidency as an estate in reversion: a debt long owed, now collected. If successful, it would arrive in office without a platform and without much of a mandate. That's not a formula for an effective presidency -- or a healthy democracy.",REAL
+10321,Agencies of Fear,"Share This: B y ANDREW COCKBURN T he intrusion of the FBI into the 2016 presidential election may have come as a shock to most people, but it should not have surprised anyone who has spent time in the Oval Office. Stretching back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, presidents have learned, sooner or later, that while they may revel in the title of “Chief Executive,” their command of coercive bureaucracies, such as the FBI and the intelligence agencies, along with the military services, and others, is limited at best. ABOVE: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover succeeded in holding power for life by bribing politicians with his knowledge of their sins and crimes. He himself was a reactionary and closet gay man. At worst, presidents may find these powerful institutions actively colluding with their political enemies. Currently, we have credible reports of agents in the New York FBI Field Office defying their nominal superiors in the justice department to dig with zeal into the Clinton Foundation on the basis of nebulous leads from a partisan and largely discredited screed by a former Bush speechwriter. Richard Nixon would have found this a familiar scenario. Early in his presidency, he came to appreciate how little control he exerted over the assorted fiefdoms of the intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies. His solution was to set up a whole new police agency with extraordinary powers, the Drug Enforcement Administration, using the cover of a war on drugs, that would be under his direct control. Recognizing this for the threat it was, the entrenched institutions struck back, crippling Nixon with media leaks, notably those from “Deep Throat”, deputy FBI director Mark Felt. Sometimes the hobbling of executive power may emanate not from widely recognized instruments of power, such as the FBI, but from more obscure but nonetheless potent corners of the enforcement universe. Thus the Obama Administration’s signature foreign policy achievement, the agreement to limit Iran’s uranium enrichment program, is currently being actively undermined by a little-known branch of the U.S. Treasury, OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which supervises the enforcement of US sanctions around the world. Under the agreement hammered out by Secretary of State John Kerry in July 2015, Iran agreed to curtail its nuclear program in return for the lifting of an array of economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other western powers in recent years. The most onerous of these controls were those enjoining banks from doing business with nominated Iranian banks and other entities, with savage penalties levied on anyone who infringed the rules. The effect has been to deter international banks from doing any business of any kind with Iranian banks, for fear of inadvertently triggering a billion dollar fine from the U.S. sanctions police. Recognizing that the Iranians might lose faith in the agreement if promised rewards from the ability to trade freely with the rest of the world do not appear, the Obama Administration has taken steps to remedy the situation, or thinks it has. Speaking recently at a ceremony in London honoring his role in negotiating the deal, Kerry announced that so long as banks make a pro forma effort to ensure they were not dealing with a sanctioned institution (there are still plenty of those) OFAC would not penalize them even if it turned out they were wrong. “OFAC… has made it very, very clear that if you do due diligence in the normal fashion,” said Kerry, “and later it turns out it was some unenforceable entity that pops up, you will not be held accountable for that.” Except that OFAC has different ideas. As detailed by attorney Tyler Cullis, a specialist in sanctions regulations, writing in the blog SanctionLaw, OFAC states on its own website that the “normal” due diligence cited by Kerry is absolutely not “necessarily sufficient.” Instead, Treasury’s Acting Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam Szubin, OFAC’s boss, has made it clear that anyone doing banking business with Iran had better exercise “ enhanced (my emphasis) due diligence,” essentially meaning they have to prove their counterparties are pure as the driven snow, or they will get it in the neck. The consequences are predictable; international banks will deem it smart to pay attention to the sanctions cops rather than the diplomat and steer clear of Iranian business, with consequent disillusionment over the deal in Iran and the neutralizing of a key administration success. As Nixon might have said, par for the course. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine . An Irishman, he has covered national security topics in this country for many years. In addition to publishing numerous books, he co-produced the 1997 feature film The Peacemaker and the 2009 documentary on the financial crisis American Casino . His latest book is Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (Henry Holt). Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. 
+What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda? =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.",FAKE
+1740,"Scott Walker's campaign is in deep, deep trouble","Over the last few weeks, the news for Scott Walker's presidential campaign has been getting grimmer and grimmer:
+
+The last of those points above is particularly ominous. Word of money problems often serves as the canary in the coal mine — signifying an imminent campaign collapse. And they can start a downward spiral, leading supporters to jump ship and fundraising to dry up because the candidate looks more and more like a loser.
+
+For instance, it got out in early August that Rick Perry's campaign was no longer paying staffers due to poor fundraising. Perry managed to hang in the race for one more month, but everyone could see he was a dead man walking. He finally quit after failing to qualify for this week's debate.
+
+If Walker already isn't paying his consultants, fundraising has likely fallen well short of expectations, and the campaign has committed to much more spending than it can afford (Johnson and Gold report that there are 90 full-time staffers). If so, it would be possible for Walker to radically downsize his operation and stay in the race — John McCain did just that in 2007, and won the nomination.
+
+But it would be a tough road ahead. The next debate is a long way away, and there's no indication that Donald Trump is going to stop monopolizing media attention anytime soon. Meanwhile, the host of that debate, CNBC, hasn't announced how it will determine who qualifies — but if it uses national polls, like Fox News and CNN did, Walker could be in serious danger of failing to make the cut.
+
+As far back as 2014, and especially earlier this year, Scott Walker has seemed, on paper, to be a fantastic Republican candidate. He was elected three times in a blue state, and while governor of Wisconsin, he fought hard for conservative priorities in a way that impressed both the GOP's base and its elites.
+
+But presidential campaigns aren't fought on paper, and, in person, Scott Walker simply isn't compelling or attention-grabbing. I argued nearly a year ago that Walker's lack of charisma would be his biggest problem ""in a world where primary candidates rise and fall in the polls based partly on their performance in televised debates.""
+
+Indeed, Walker led the polls in Iowa up until just before the first presidential debate August 6. Afterward, he plummeted, as you can see in this RealClearPolitics chart:
+
+Walker's lack of charisma isn't his only problem. He's also proven unexpectedly feckless on the issues, changing his position on topics like immigration in various insincere-seeming ways. But it was when Republicans got a look at all the candidates onstage — seeing Walker live, rather than on paper — that his position in Iowa collapsed. He hasn't stopped falling since.
+
+Still, I'd be surprised if Walker dropped out any time soon. He's built his political brand on his willingness to fight and he seems to be a true believer. Indeed, he's now vowing that he'll stay in the race and focus entirely on winning the Iowa caucuses. All the recent caucus winners — Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama, and John Kerry — surged in the polls quite late. He's invested so much of his reputation in the race already — so he might as well stick it out a few more months.",REAL
+5866,Pakistan police detain dozens of Imran Khan's supporters in Islamabad,"Pakistan Pakistan's cricketer turned politician Imran Khan (C) talks to journalists outside the Supreme Court in Islamabad on October 20, 2016. (Photo by AP) 
+Police have raided a youth convention for opposition leader Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek Insaaf (PTI) party in the capital, Islamabad, arresting dozens of activists ahead of a planned protest. 
+Images on local news channels showed police in uniform beating activists with batons and leading those detained away to waiting buses. 
+""All of a sudden police arrived and started arresting people,"" media outlets quoted Anila Khawaja, a spokeswoman for PTI as saying. 
+Several PTI leaders and lawmakers have been infuriated by the police raid. 
+""The government has proved that there is no democracy in Pakistan, it is a monarchy,” Asad Umar, a PTI lawmaker, told reporters from the scene. 
+A spokesman for the Islamabad district administration said the raid was enforcing the order issued earlier in the day by the city's top administrator which outlawed gatherings of more than five people. 
+The Thursday raid came hours after a city order banned all public gatherings ahead of Khan's planned protest set to begin on November 2 in Islamabad. Khan, a former Pakistan cricket star who turned politician, has described the upcoming mass protest as a final push to force Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resign over corruption allegations. The leader of Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), Imran Khan, waves to supporters during a rally in Peshawar, Pakistan, on August 7, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
+Khan led a previous mass protest in the summer of 2014 in front of parliament, calling for the government to resign over election rigging allegations. 
+Khan has insisted that his anti-government protests would continue until the Sharif administration offers an appropriate response to the corruption allegations. 
+Leaked confidential documents from the Panamanian Mossack Fonseca law firm have showing how the company helped rich and powerful clients across the world with shady businesses. 
+The clients reportedly included three of Sharif's children, who carried out business transactions which could be judged as money laundering and tax avoidance. 
+The leaked records revealed that Sharif's children, Hasan, Hussain and Maryam, not only owned offshore companies, but also real estate properties in London. Sharif's family denies any wrongdoing. 
+People in Pakistan, with Imran Khan at the helm, are asking for an inquiry to determine how Sharif’s children made all that money to buy offshore companies and real estate in London's prime locations, and whether they had paid their due tax on their income. Loading ...",FAKE
+873,Donald Trump's big night: Don't underestimate him,"The evening leaves him with a strong moral case for the Republican nomination, and everyone trying to work out what the heck he'll actually do with it. Expect a more moderate tone. Trump, believe or not, is showing signs of political sophistication.
+
+The lingering GOP argument against a Trump nomination is that a) he remains unpopular with the wider electorate and that b) the delegate count is still stacked against him. It's true that he heads into tougher, more western terrain after the Acela primaries; it's also true that Ted Cruz and John Kasich have forged an alliance to stop him. They make an unlikely Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but they're determined to go down with a fight.
+
+They'll probably lose. True, Trump is a surprisingly unpopular front-runner who hasn't enjoyed huge majorities in primaries -- until now. The argument used to be that as the field narrowed and the GOP organized a counteroffensive, Trump would hit a natural ceiling of support and start losing.
+
+The opposite appears to be true: the narrower the race, the better he does. Aside from sweeping all five states on Tuesday, he won every single demographic in most of them. He even did well in the Philadelphia suburbs, areas that often function as a predictor of how a nominee will do in November. His support has proven to be as wide as it is deep, undivided by class, gender or income. There is no evidence that the counter revolutionary alliance is popular enough -- or Trump unpopular enough -- to stop him.
+
+The True Trump is the part he's playing By the time that the Republicans gather in Cleveland, they are going to have to face up to an uncomfortable truth. Yes, Trump's victory has been built largely on pluralities. But no, the Republican Party has not been able to find an alternative that Republican voters are prepared to endorse. Trump is nominee almost by default. Which leaves us with two questions. First, how will he navigate the convention? His victory speech heralded a change in tone. Lots of promises to unify and heal and reach out to the disgruntled, even a few nice words about the media. It was ""moderate energy."" Behind the scenes, Trump's campaign has promised to hire speechwriters and he's practicing with a teleprompter. Evidence is growing that the establishment is prepared to take a second look. Reince Priebus, the GOP chair with the hardest job in the Western world, has warned conservatives that there will be no alternative to the nominee. So there's every likelihood that the convention could reach a peaceful accord; the GOP might yet rally around its front-runner. That said, you can never be sure with Trump. The man is unpredictable. For that reason, the answer to the second question -- how will he run in the fall? -- remains equally unclear. It is said that he's tacked a little to the left recently. He has, supposedly, argued that transgender people should be able to use the restrooms they want and that the Republican platform should support legal abortion in certain instances. But are these positions the product of strategic thinking or Trump finding his feet as a new arrival to the world of conservatism? Very shortly after he questioned North Carolina's bathroom bill, Trump said that it was actually a state issue and the federal government should stay out. And his views on abortion have vacillated from suggesting women could face punishment to now being a little more liberal. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the 'woman card' Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the 'woman card' Moreover, even if Trump's private instincts are socially tolerant, the Democrats won't define him that way in the fall campaign. In her Tuesday night speech, Hillary Clinton hammered away at the social issues and promised to ""break down barriers"" rather than ""build walls,"" asserting that ""love trumps hate."" After delivering each of these slogans, Clinton did that weird thing she does where she nods at what she just said as though she wasn't the one saying it. Her visuals are often a little baffling, but her message is utterly disciplined: Clinton will fight Trump on Trump's reputation as a bigot rather than the reality of Trump as a complex man without a clearly defined politics. Clinton, however, had better watch out. The scale of Trump's latest victories indicates that he does have the potential to break through a wall of negative media, hit the economic issues effectively and drag his opponents down with sheer strength of will. This campaign cycle is slowly evolving from a narrative of Trump as a ""surprise winner"" to Trump as a potential nominee. The votes haven't dried up as a result; there's still a lot of enthusiasm for him out there. When Trump described Tuesday as his ""biggest night,"" he was probably right.",REAL
+3909,Obama hits 50% approval rating in poll,"Another poll, more evidence that President Obama's stock is rising among the American public.
+
+A new Washington Post-ABC News poll put Obama's approval rating at 50%, his highest since the spring of 2013 in this particular survey.
+
+That's also nine points higher than it was in December, a month after voters gave Republicans control of the Senate and increased the GOP majority in the U.S. House.
+
+Good economic news appears to be fueling Obama's improved ratings in a string of recent polls.
+
+The Post/ABC survey also shows an American public sharply divided along Democratic and Republican lines, at odds as to whether the view of Obama or the GOP should prevail.
+
+""Despite the partisan divisions on most issues, a substantial majority of Americans continue to see political dysfunction in Washington as a big problem. After years of political standoffs, there is considerable skepticism about whether the two sides can overcome their political differences to ease what has become a chronic problem ...
+
+""The Post-ABC survey puts the president's approval rating slightly higher than some other recent public polls. But most have shown improvement since the November elections as the president has moved aggressively and unilaterally on issues such as immigration and climate change.""",REAL
+8463,Comment on Are We About To See One Of The Greatest Evolutions In Human History? by 10 Shocking Facts About Society That We Absurdly Accept As Normal – Digital Flow,"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter I believe we are in the midst of one of the biggest evolutions in our consciousness we have ever seen. I say this because everywhere you look, things seem to be changing in a very big way. But some back story first.   About 7 years ago, something happened in my life that changed the way I saw myself, my life and the world. I left college for good. I had been through 3 different programs in 3 years trying to figure out what worked for me. I was depressed on and off. I couldn’t believe that life was simply wake up and go to school until you get a degree. Then, wake up and go to a job you don’t truly like to make money to support your life until you’re 60 and then hopefully you can retire. Then, you die. I had to make a change and all along something told me that if I did, everything would be okay. Regardless of what everyone told me my whole life, I knew deeply that I didn’t (just as you don’t) have to live life in the way everyone tells you. 5 years ago Collective Evolution was born. A platform that has touched millions of people in a positive way over its 5 years and has changed my life in a positive way. CE likely wouldn’t be around if I didn’t choose to leave school for good. I was invited by Columbia University’s Teacher’s College to give a TEDx talk as they felt I was an agent of change. Below is that talk and it tells my story as well as what I feel is one of the most important things we need to know and internalize: change starts within. This is what I feel is changing our entire world. Follow Your Passion, It’s Important The bottom line is, I believe we need to begin following our passions as a first choice when we are young. If we don’t yet know what our passions are, take the time to enjoy life and figure them out. There is no need to rush into post secondary school so we can get in debt and be stuck in a job for the rest of our lives. This, unfortunately, is a western mentality where we operate under the idea that this is the only way and since people who follow this path are praised and celebrated, many follow the same path.   Even for people who are older and well out of school, it’s never too late to start doing something new and following your passion. Although there may be financial responsibilities at times, make arrangements and plans to transition into doing something you love. It’s always possible and there is a way, we just need to begin trying and putting the steps into place. I believe that the moment we truly choose to begin doing something from our hearts, the world around us begins to conspire to make it happen as a result of our conscious desire to make it happen. Since the thoughts might be building, I want to be clear, I am not saying there is no value in education or post secondary school. I am simply stating my belief that it should only be attended when you TRULY know what you want to do, need the education for it and are passion about it. I believe that the education system is designed the way it is for ulterior purposes more so than simply educating with pure intention. More on that below. Does Education Kill Creativity? 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+527,Obama Wants To End The Era Of Sequestration,"The spending proposal will almost assuredly get strong pushback from Republicans in Congress, who now control both the House and the Senate and wield even more power than they did four years ago. For that reason alone, the budget is another sign of a president feeling unhindered in his final years of office and eager to take advantage of an improving economy.
+
+Details of the budget have been guarded closely by administration and Capitol Hill officials. But sources on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue said Obama will propose increasing discretionary spending by about $70 billion (several sources cautioned the proposed increase likely will be slightly less). The money would be divided equally between defense and non-defense accounts.
+
+“The President will propose to end the across-the-board sequester cuts that threaten our economy and our military,"" a White House official said. ""The President’s budget will fully reverse those cuts for domestic priorities, and match those investments dollar-for-dollar with the resources our troops need to keep America safe.”
+
+An administration official told The Huffington Post that the spending additions the president will outline -- which appear larger than those he proposed in last year's budget -- would be offset by cutting spending and closing tax loopholes. The overall budget, the official added, would have measures to reduce the deficit through a similar combination of savings.
+
+For Republicans, the proposal will likely be perceived as fiscally reckless, if not politically brazen. After all, it was the GOP wins in the 2010 election that set the stage for sequestration's across-the-board budget cuts in the first place.
+
+After that election cycle, Obama attempted to craft several debt-reduction deals with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) as a nod to conservative victories. But the deals never came to fruition. And in the summer of 2011, as the debt ceiling was nearly breached, the two sides fell back on an exchange that neither truly liked.
+
+Under The Budget Control Act of 2011, spending was reduced by nearly $1 trillion and Congress created the so-called Super Committee to find roughly $1.5 trillion more in savings. When the committee failed to find consensus, mandatory sequestration cuts kicked in, forcing more than $1 trillion in cuts over 10 years. Sequestration was delayed a few months starting at the beginning of 2013. But by March of that year, it was law of the land.
+
+Though Republicans have lamented sequestration's effects on defense operations -- and some have worried about non-defense programs in their districts -- they have largely resisted proposals to replace sequestration with any package that includes tax hikes.
+
+“Republicans believe there are smarter ways to cut spending than the sequester and have passed legislation to replace it multiple times, only to see the president continue to demand tax hikes,"" said Cory Fritz, a spokesman for Boehner. ""Until he gets serious about solving our long-term spending problem it’s hard to take him seriously.""
+
+But Obama also may find critics of his budget proposal on his side of the aisle -- for not being bolder. A roughly $70 billion increase may seem healthy, if not daring. But as The New York Times noted, it represents a small portion of a budget expected to reach $3.9 trillion, and it comes at a time when the deficit is shrinking. Senate Budget Committee ranking member Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for one, has called for a major government investment in infrastructure and other domestic priorities well beyond where the Obama administration appears willing to go.
+
+The administration’s hope is that somewhere in the ideological middle (albeit closer to the liberal side of the divide), there will be enough lawmakers to forge a majority.
+
+Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash) were able to craft a deal to alleviate some of the budget cuts brought on by sequestration in December 2013. A request for comment from Ryan’s office was not returned late Wednesday night.",REAL
+1369,Clinton or Trump: Who’s less truthful?,"If Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump wind up in the general election, we certainly will have a contest — for the less truthful and less in-touch candidate. This weekend was a perfect example of two candidates who live in their own reality.
+
+Hillary Clinton in the debate Saturday night argued that Donald Trump was “becoming ISIS’s best recruiter.” She insisted, “They are going to people, showing them videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.” There is no such video, and her statement has been rated “false” by fact checkers. Nevertheless, her campaign team insists this is so.
+
+Not to be outmatched in the fantasy department, Trump is still insisting thousands of Muslims were celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey. This too is false, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has repeatedly said it did not happen.
+
+Scarily, these candidates’ larger worldviews are at odds with reality as well. Trump basks in the compliments of Russian President Putin and — incredibly — claims there is no evidence suggesting Putin killed journalists. (“But, in all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has.”) Apparently he will buy into the notion that thousands of Muslims were celebrating 9/11 but insists on Putin’s fingerprints on the gun before acknowledging Putin’s hand in the deaths of scores of journalists. Someone should tell Trump that Putin’s regime also kills businessmen’s lawyers.
+
+Trump’s world is not so different from the far-left world in which the United States has been the troublemaker (“Well, take a look at — take a look at — excuse me, take a look at the rampage all over the place“) and civil rights atrocities in dictatorial regimes around the globe are no big deal.
+
+Then there is Hillary Clinton’s worldview, in which the Obama-Clinton foreign policy is a success. She’s insisted the Russian “reset” worked. In Saturday’s debate, she proclaimed, “We now finally are where we need to be. We have a strategy and a commitment to go after ISIS which is a danger to us as well as the region, and we finally have a U.N. Security Council resolution bringing the world together to go after a political transition in Syria.” In its own way, this is as stunning as Trump’s non-facts. The president’s military advisers and secretary of defense acknowledge that the Islamic State is not contained. Innocents have been slaughtered in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. Russia and Iran are backing Bashar al-Assad. And the administration has stopped saying Assad must go. The bloody civil war rages on. Our Sunni Arab allies do not trust us. We have helped revive the Iranian economy and in turn allowed Iran to redouble its support for Assad, Hezbollah and others. If she thinks a U.N. resolution is going to make things better, she truly is in her own universe. Yes, siree, we are right where we want to be.
+
+We can only hope one or both parties finds someone to nominate grounded in reality. For seven years we have had a president who imagines the world is as he wishes it to be, who thought (among other things): The world would be improved if the United States receded, we shouldn’t rock the boat by backing the Green Revolution;  there was a fatwa against nukes in Iran; and without the United States as the dominant presence the Middle East, we would do just fine. Picking someone equally if not more delusional than President Obama will have serious implications for the United States and the world.",REAL
+7936,Rise of the Alt-Right,"Scott McConnell, The American Conservative, October 31, 2016 
+[Editor’s Note: This article is worth reading in its entirety. A redacted version is below.] 
+Twenty-one years ago I was assigned by Commentary to write about Jared Taylor–today known as one of the eminences of the “alt-right.” Taylor had written a grim book on American race relations, Paved With Good Intentions , which had been published by a mainstream house and was widely, if critically, reviewed. Though unusually skeptical about the prospect of blacks and whites living together harmoniously in the United States, it stopped well short of any systematically racist argument. The book had several fans among New Yorkers I knew prominent in journalism and city politics. 
+When I referred to it in passing in a New York Post column, we quickly received a fax from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League stating that Taylor was far more extremist than I had let on. Curious to explore further, I queried Commentary –where I then did most of my non-newspaper writing–and they were interested. 
+I interviewed Taylor, read back issues of his monthly newsletter, American Renaissance ( AR ), and drafted a piece. AR was devoted primarily to demonstrating that in American history racism was as accepted as apple pie and that this was by no means a bad thing. It contained large doses of the evolutionary and biological racial thought fairly commonplace amongst American elites in the ’20s and ’30s. A central contention was that the United States could not thrive as an increasingly multiracial and multicultural country and that American whites were facing a kind of cultural dispossession. 
+I summarized this, quoting liberally, and concluded that the endgame vision of the AR crowd was potentially horrific, leading to national dissolution or civil war, while adding that continued mass immigration really would put the common culture of America under grave stress. If immigration rates went down, Taylor and AR would remain fringe players. If they rose, white racial anxieties would bubble to the surface, and Taylor might one day have his moment. 
+The piece was never published: Neal Kozodoy, Commentary ’s editor, told me I had indulged Taylor too much and asked for a shorter, tighter rewrite. By then my brief summer vacation had ended, other tasks intervened, and I eventually lost interest. 
+Jared Taylor’s moment has not arrived, but clearly he has edged into the national conversation. He has been pictured and quoted in an anti-Trump attack ad produced by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, he has been a guest on Diane Rehm’s show on NPR, and his core ideas have been broadcast–and excoriated–in magazines and websites great and small. He is now touted as one of the intellectual leaders of the alt-right, a diffuse movement of uncertain significance, but one deemed sufficiently important by the Clinton campaign for Hillary to devote a large portion of an August campaign speech to it. Donald Trump–who has almost surely never read a single article by an alt-right figure–is claimed by Clinton and other liberals to be under its influence and propagating its doctrines. 
+The truth is quite different: parts of the alt-right have raised their own visibility by attaching themselves to Trump. At the same time, Trump and his unanticipated success in winning the Republican nomination are symptoms of the same political and civilizational crisis that makes alt-rightish themes–at least in a more or less bowdlerized and soft-core form–compelling to a growing number of people. 
+♦♦♦ 
+Taylor, 65, is old by alt-right standards, and is an atypical representative, though just how much so is difficult to discern, for much of the alt-right is anonymous. The movement fields no candidates, publishes few books or pamphlets. It is a creature of the web, strongest on Twitter. Pepe, an internet cartoon frog, is an alt-right character–and has actually been formally denounced by the Clinton campaign. Alt-right internet trolling, sometimes ugly, blatantly racist and anti-Semitic, is also part of the movement. There is some debate whether it should be taken as an offensive and unfunny joke–merry keyboard pranksters who enjoy pretending to be internet neo-Nazis, rather like punk rock bands of the late ’70s deploying Nazi imagery for shock effect–or is something more sinister, a genuine resurgence of hardcore racism and anti-Semitism. Likely it’s more the former, but it’s also likely that the alt-right banner has given the minute number of genuine neo-Nazis in the country a kind of protective shield. 
+Richard Spencer may serve as a bridge between older white nationalists such as Taylor and a younger alt-right internet crowd. It’s mistaken to call him or anyone else a leader–the movement has no procedure for choosing leaders–but he is clearly a pole of influence. He’s an intellectual entrepreneur who arrived in DC roughly ten years ago from a Duke graduate program. He worked at TAC for seven or eight months, where he was kind of a square peg in a round hole. Sometime thereafter his ideology began to crystallize. He started a website called AlternativeRight.com and later revitalized a white-nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute, and launched a journal, Radix . 
+Spencer can be engaging and amusing, but his core doctrine is likely to remain, barring some sort of Mad Max-type Armageddon, well outside what most Americans would consider plausible or desirable. 
+What is the doctrine? At a recent press conference in DC, Spencer explained that the core of alt-right thought is race. Race is real, race matters, race is foundational to human identity. You cannot understand who you are without race. Many people would agree–at least privately or partially–with the first two assertions, but the third is the critical one, and has never been true historically or sociologically. (Not that there haven’t been groups of self-proclaimed pan-Asian or pan-African intellectuals who sought to make it true. Spencer fits into their tradition.) In any case, Spencer hopes somehow to spur whites into a kind of pan-white racial consciousness and galvanize them to become “aware of who we are,” and to prepare themselves, one day somehow, to form a white ethnostate. He refers to Theodore Herzl’s propagation of Zionism as a model for how such an ethnostate, seemingly a distant dream, could be eventually achieved. He fails to add that it took a Holocaust to make a Jewish State a reality. 
+{snip} 
+Prior to last fall, and before Hillary introduced the alt-right to a national audience, Spencer and Taylor held periodic conferences that could gather perhaps 200 people. (These were often held under shameful harassment by the leftist anti-First Amendment crowd, but that’s a different issue.) Spencer says he sees the alt-right as a vehicle that will influence politicians and intellectuals, taking as its model neoconservatism. {snip} 
+{snip} 
+What spurred this sudden emergence? It was not white-nationalist conferences or doctrine, which had been around forever, but events. Last year the West received a nasty high-voltage shock of political reality. The first jolt was the Charlie Hebdo attack in January. France had experienced jihadist murders before, but this time, the strike came in the center of Paris, and France was alarmed to find no small amount of support for the killing among its five million Muslim residents, many of them second- and third-generation citizens. 
+That spring and summer, European newspapers began to fill with reports of intensifying migrant and refugee flows, driven partially by the Syrian civil war and partially by the expansion and streamlining of people-smuggling routes from Africa. {snip} 
+By 2016 the welcome had grown cold. Hundreds of migrants sexually assaulted German women in and around the central train station of Cologne on New Year’s Eve, a mass assault that German authorities initially tried to cover up. {snip} 
+If the sexual assaults could be seen as the cultural edge of the migrant surge, it was more difficult for even liberal “anti-racist” European leaders to ignore or explain away the terrorism aspect. The Charlie Hebdo attack was followed by the mass slaughters at the Bataclan theater in Paris, at the Brussels Airport, then on a seaside promenade in Nice, culminating in the execution by knife of an aging French priest by two “assimilated” Muslim migrants in his church outside of Rouen. {snip} 
+{snip} Richard Spencer may be incorrect about America, but one remark from his press conference in DC last month was arresting: 
+The refugee crisis in Europe is something like a world war. It is in many ways a race war. In terms of direct violence it does not resemble World War I or II. It is a demographic struggle, a struggle for identity, a struggle of who is going to define the continent, period. It is a new kind of war, a postmodern war, a war through immigration. There are no trenches, no guns. But it is a world war. 
+Of course, it is not primarily a race war. Religion, or religious culture, plays a major and perhaps decisive role in the conflict, and conflict between Christendom and Islam is not new by any means. Still, there is something in the bluntness of Spencer’s depiction that rings more true than 90 percent of what appears in the American media, which invariably depicts the refugee crisis in humanitarian terms and terrorism as a barely related law-enforcement issue. It is surely not a coincidence that the alt-right began making strides into American consciousness precisely at the moment Muslims were surging into Europe as refugees, while others were blowing up Parisian rock concerts or mounting mass sexual assaults on European women. 
+{snip} 
+Whatever one might say about the alt-right, it is not perplexed. Few other political factions in America had a vocabulary ready for–or even made an effort to interpret seriously–what was going on in Europe, at a time when many people were seeking one. 
+{snip} 
+American developments in the fall of last year, while less critical than those in Europe, also spurred the alt-right. The rise of Black Lives Matter put into question one of the outstanding domestic-policy advances of the past generation, the dramatic reduction in urban crime rates, which has made possible the revitalization of many cities. The lie which held that America’s police forces were chock full of marauding racist murderers suddenly became mainstream, repeated endlessly on television and pushed in only slightly more subtle fashion by Obama’s own attorney general. Meanwhile, some urban neighborhoods were looted by rioters, and others saw dramatic spikes in their murder rates. 
+{snip} 
+It was predictable that such developments, touching on visceral areas of personal security, national sovereignty, and freedom of expression, would stir desire for a muscular response. Donald Trump filled the bill, if not always eloquently. So too, occasionally, did segments of the more established conservative media. But there was a market for a pushback as scathing and polemically unafraid as the left’s own polemicists, which might not have been the case four years earlier. This, as much as anything, accounts for the emergence of the alt-right, at least in its less ideologically extreme iterations. 
+{snip} 
+And though [Samuel] Huntington was a famous and deeply respected Harvard political scientist and a life-long Democrat, the concerns of Clash are those raised implicitly by Trump and explicitly by what I call the soft-core elements of the alt-right. There is, of course, much racism in American history, and there are enormous crimes for which Europe continues to strive to atone. But neither anti-racism nor respect for other cultures should be turned into a national or civilizational suicide pact. Here what Irving Kristol famously wrote about Sen. Joseph McCarthy comes to mind: “There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he like them is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.” 
+In the now global faceoff between Western civilization versus mass immigration fused with multiculturalism, Kristol’s words describe with uncanny accuracy the dichotomy between Donald Trump and his supporters on one hand and those most feverishly denouncing him on the other. Among the former, for all their faults, are those who want, unequivocally, Western civilization to survive. About the latter, no such thing is certain.",FAKE
+5811,"Feds: 275,000 Born to Illegals in One Year, Would Fill City the Size of Orlando","Feds: 275,000 Born to Illegals in One Year, Would Fill City the Size of Orlando Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner, October 26, 2016 
+Moms in the United States illegally gave birth to 275,000 babies in 2014, enough birthright U.S. citizens to fill a city the size of Orlando, Florida, according to an analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics. 
+The data showed that newborns to illegals accounted for 7 percent of all births in 2014, according to the analysis from the Pew Research Center. 
+{snip} 
+The analysis also found that the growth in the birthrate of America is entirely driven by immigrants. 
+“While the annual number of babies born in the U.S. has fluctuated in recent years–most markedly during the Great Recession when there was a significant drop in births nationwide–the trajectory over the past four decades or so has been upward. In 2014, there were 4 million births in the U.S., compared with 3.74 million in 1970,” said Pew. 
+“This growth has been driven entirely by the increasing numbers of babies born to immigrant women. In 2014, immigrant women accounted for about 901,000 U.S. births, which marked a threefold increase from 1970 when immigrant women accounted for about 274,000 births. Meanwhile, the annual number of births to U.S.-born women dropped by 11 percent during that same time period, from 3.46 million in 1970 to 3.10 million in 2014,” added Pew.",FAKE
+617,Bobby Jindal governing like it's 2016,Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan does a lot of media but only has 2 public supporters,REAL
+7973,Look At What Is Unfolding In China And Other Key Regions Right Now,"41 Views November 07, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+With stocks surging along with the U.S. dollar and gold and silver getting hit, here is a look at what is unfolding in China and other key regions right now. 
+Here is a portion of what Peter Boockvar wrote today as the world awaits the next round of monetary madness: It IS the best of times, it IS the worst of times, it is the age of wisdom, it is the age of foolishness, it is the epoch of belief, it is the epoch of incredulity, it is the season of light, it is the season of darkness, it is the spring of hope, it is the winter of despair, we have everything before us, we have nothing before us, (I switched the Tale of Two Cities lines from Was to Is and to Have from Had), etc… The former because the most bizarre and embarrassing presidential campaign in our life time is about to end. The latter because someone is going to win… IMPORTANT: To find out which company Doug Casey, Rick Rule and Sprott Asset Management are pounding the table on that already has a staggering 18.1 million ounces of gold that just added another massive deposit and is quickly being recognized as one of the greatest gold opportunities in the world – CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored 
+In terms of the market and its possible response on Wednesday, today’s reaction to the FBI news is obvious evidence that market participants have wrapped up the world in a nice and easy box. Hillary wins, good for stocks. Trump wins, bad for stocks. But, anyone who thinks deeper than this knows that the response is going to be much more nuanced. Ask any owner of a healthcare, financial or defense stock. Ask any business person who cares about taxes, regulation and global trade. Also, no matter who wins, the FOMC will be most likely raising interest rates again next month just as the economy has slowed to a 1.5% growth rate. And lastly, who’s going to win the Senate? 
+Over the 9 day market losing streak, the S&P 500 lost just 66 pts, thus this morning’s rally in the S&P futures is retracing almost half of that loss. 
+China’s FX reserves continued to shrink in October. It’s pile now stands at $3.12T, down $66b m/o/m and was $12b less than expected. This level was last seen in 2011 and is now down $870b from its peak in 2014. Some of the decline is certainly outright outflows but some is the impact from valuation changes of the US dollar that rallied against many currencies in the China basket in October. I saw one estimate that said almost $30b of the decline was FX valuation related and about $10-15b was due to PBOC intervention. The dollar rallied about 1.5% against the yuan in October. China is fighting economic battles on many fronts. The War is the massive debt burden they now carry. The daily battles are how to keep growth continuing, how to transition the economy away from huge investments, and how to manage orderly weakness in its currency in the face of the fog of its debt war. The yuan is lower while the Shanghai comp index was up slightly. The H share index jumped 1.2% and the Hang Seng was up by .7% but property stocks in Hong Kong got slammed after Friday’s announcement of a hike in the stamp tax to 15% (from 8.5% for residents) for all purchases of residential housing except for 1st time buyers that are full time residents. The Hong Kong housing market is in an epic bubble. 
+A few days after BoJ Governor Kuroda basically waved the white towel on achieving his 2% inflation obsession, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said base earnings for Japanese workers in September grew .4% y/o/y vs a .3% gain in August. It was 1997 the last time wage growth was 1% and it was 1994 the last time it saw 2%. Thus, it is a good thing Kuroda is waving that towel because he would have greatly damaged the standard of living of his citizenry. Of course all central bankers believe that higher wages come with higher inflation but theory doesn’t always work in practice. 
+  Legend Says Bears Attacking Gold & Silver Markets May Get Torched Here  ",FAKE
+879,Bernie Sanders Blames Closed Primaries As Path To The Nomination Narrows,"Sen. Bernie Sanders suffered a crushing defeat Tuesday night, losing three out of five states to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton by significant margins at press time.
+
+In a speech shortly after most polls closed at 8 pm, Sanders blamed his loss on closed primaries, which barred independent voters from participating in four of five primaries. He did win Rhode Island, which allows participation by independent voters.
+
+“In a general election, Democrat, independent, Republican, has the right to vote for president. The elections are not closed primaries,” Sanders said. “Those folks and independents all over this country will be voting in November for the next president of the United States. And in most cases, we win the independent vote by a 2–1 margin.”
+
+Clinton made another strong showing Tuesday night with non-white voters and city dwellers. Exit polls indicated strong support in cities like Baltimore.
+
+Baltimore pastor Jamal Bryant, who had been working to get out the vote for Sanders in Baltimore’s inner city, lamented that the Vermont senator has not done better with communities of color, who have overwhelmingly backed Clinton.
+
+“He more than any candidate, Democrat or Republican, speaks to our issues,” Bryant told ThinkProgress, noting his progressive racial justice and criminal justice proposals. “I would have thought he’d have more black and brown supporters. But there’s been a translation problem. The gatekeepers have already sworn allegiance to the Clinton dynasty, and most people go with a name they’re already familiar with.”
+
+As his path to the nomination narrows, Sanders’ campaign is reassessing the senator’s prospects following Tuesday’s losses, and key supporters are admitting that it is increasingly unlikely he can clinch the nomination. His campaign and supporters have already turned their attention to how Sanders can use his popularity and influence to shape the Democratic Party even if he is not its standard bearer.
+
+The New York Times reported that aides to Sanders have started pressing party officials for a major role in drafting the platform for the Democratic National Convention in July, especially on including issues like a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, breaking up Wall Street banks, and banning natural gas fracking.",REAL
+4105,"Colin Quinn on race, comedy and political correctness: “People should stop lying and pretending there’s a racial dialogue”","Quinn begins with what is almost a standard critique of politically correct culture: “I’m tired of humorless activist people decreeing that we only use these words and never those, and that we “check our privilege,” in case we say the wrong thing and “trigger” someone,” he writes. “Across the country, the sexist office asshole has been replaced by the flat-affect, dead-eyed, modern-day Puritan. Both groups — the old-school assholes and the neo-Puritans — share a common goal: to wipe the smile off everyone’s faces.”
+
+But the rest of the book is playing a subtler and more sophisticated game. Quinn wants to talk about race. He’s outraged that there’s no dialogue — or that the dialogue veers only to the extreme poles of either angry or pandering. And he wants to tell his personal story of growing up in a multi-ethnic New York as an example of how people can get along when they talk openly with each other.
+
+His frustration seems less with p.c. culture than with anything that stands between a problem and honest conversation about it. His real war is against papering over words and pretending we’ve fixed a problem. This is a decent and no-bullshit guy. “Maybe we need to admit the sad truth,” he says, over coffee last week in lower Manhattan, “which is that we are not smart enough to solve any of these things.” Give this guy a Sunday morning talk show and you get the feeling he’d unfreeze the conversation in a really provocative way — or go down trying.
+
+We spoke before Quinn’s good friend Jerry Seinfeld talked about “creepy” p.c. culture in interviews. Quinn’s take is more nuanced: That there has been political correctness on campus for decades, and that it’s the comedians’ job to make an audience uncomfortable and to think. He’s not a defender of the cheap provocation and understands that people can take offense at a joke, but he sees through easy outrage as well — and sees it as getting in the way of really talking to each other. (If you watched him on “Fox and Friends” yesterday deftly deflecting Steve Doocy and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, you only come away with more respect.)
+
+We talked about all of this and more — including his “Girls” colleague Lena Dunham, his thoughts on Bill Maher and religion, and memories of his years on “Saturday Night Live.” The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. And sorry, but the amazing story he told about Sam Kinison, “Remote Control” host Ken Ober, strippers, Las Vegas and cocaine came after we turned the recorder off.
+
+So are you ready to be the most hated man on Twitter? Comedy, race, humor, outrage – it’s a recipe for becoming a trending topic, or like Trevor Noah, landing on the front page of the New York Times. Why is this a third rail you want to leap on top of right now?
+
+Third rail. I like that phrase. I don’t really know why exactly. It just feels like everything has always pointed that way to me. I’ve always been into discussing race. The conversation has been in neutral since I was a little kid. Since the ‘60s, it’s been in neutral. This conversation doesn’t exist. So at least people should stop lying and pretending there’s a racial dialogue. That would make me happy.
+
+And I like to joke. I don’t like how the climate has gone joke-wise. I understand totally when people are offended by jokes. I get it. I don’t like when people make blanket statements. For instance, the whole rape joke controversy. But nobody admits, nobody even discusses, that most rape jokes are made by female comedians.
+
+I don’t like comedy being determined by people who are not comedians. It was becoming a situation where whoever is the fastest typist decides what’s offensive and what’s not with comedy. It’s just too much. It’s too much. Don’t step in and start telling me what humor is. It’s like any job: Everyone wants to second-guess. I do the same thing to politics, to everything. Comedy has become that sort of thing – but with humorless people.
+
+Why is it that everyone who second-guesses a joke is immediately branded humorless? Sometimes what I see from comedians, watching this, is a defensiveness after being told, “Hey, maybe that’s not funny.” Or that a joke failed. Is it possible that comedians have their backs up in such a way that that’s stopping a dialogue that might be useful? Because sometimes it seems to me that we are having a conversation about race and other topics when people say, “Hey, I’m not sure that’s funny and let me tell you why.” That leads to honest conversation – and maybe it is the joke that started the conversation.
+
+There is no conversation about race. There is no conversation. That’s the first lie, that there is a conversation. All there is is a point of view that you are supposed to have — and if you deviate from that point of view, people go, “Whoa whoa whoa.” That’s not what humor is.
+
+And punching up, punching down! Once again, these terms were not created by humorous people. Activists are activists. They are great and a big part of American society. Humorists and activists don’t very often meld. Humorists and activists have two very different mentalities. Activists are very sincere, very positive. That’s how activists should be. Humorists are supposed to look at everything and see the bullshit in all sides. This is my opinion. We are not supposed to see 100 percent right and wrong. Everything is middle ground. Everything is hypocrisy in all people and all situations.
+
+I feel like people get on Twitter, and they get gripped by self-righteous indignation — which is fine. It’s just not becoming in my opinion.
+
+Punching up and punching down. That seems like a fair point to me, keeping the target In mind. I’m not suggesting anyone impose rules on comedy, of course, or that anyone is off-limits for a joke. But it does seem like there’s humanity in at least thinking before making a punchline out of a victim.
+
+So let’s say you make fun of a white plumber or Kanye West. Which is punching up and which is punching down? Societally, historically, context is everything. That’s another annoying statement.
+
+But if it’s Trevor Noah making a dumb fat joke on Twitter. That’s punching down.
+
+There are the lines of cruelty, right. It’s asinine.
+
+Does that line of cruelty matter? Or is it the comedians’ job to poke through bullshit somehow free of someone turning around and calling bullshit on them?
+
+No. That’s what we would like to be, of course! Ideally. I’d love it! At the same time, what is the biggest argument? It’s over free speech. Is Trevor Noah making a fat joke yelling fire at a crowded movie theater? Then people go, “We are not the government oppressing people.” No, but if you still get people fired from their job, that’s also a certain amount of power.
+
+There’s a difference between getting someone fired from their job and saying, “That’s kind of an asshole joke.”
+
+Right, but some people do get fired. Trevor Noah, some people wanted him to get fired. All I’m saying is there is a certain amount of power that comes on. It’s not just an average Joe Citizen. There are things that go on on social media in general. Let’s not pretend it’s just outrage. What the right-wing fundamentalists were throughout the history of our country from the time of the Puritans to the 1980s — the left is becoming.
+
+I’m with you on about two-thirds of this: our frozen racial conversation, the lack of context and history from some in the politically correct crowd. And on the important role satirists and humorists play – imagine the Bush years without Stewart and Colbert. But F it. And the other piece of it that to me feels like people have the same First Amendment rights that Trevor Noah’s got to make that joke, to speak up and say, “Not really funny.”
+
+The other side is people saying, “Can’t you do better? You are better than that.” There’s so many lines to be drawn. The day any artist — dare I call comedians artists — but the day that anybody starts deciding that (people can draw those lines) how are we different from pandering, from the old idea that you have to please the crowd? I thought the whole point was that you don’t please the crowd; you please yourself artistically.
+
+Let me throw this out there. If you listen to the comedy podcasts, sometimes you can get the sense that comedians are trying to out-outrage each other. But then you also follow comedians on Twitter or read interviews, and it also sounds like there’s a lot of fear that if they say one wrong thing, their career could be ruined. Is there a chilling effect going on right now that is affecting writers’ rooms? Is all of this affecting the way comedians think and work?
+
+Oh yeah. I think so. I don’t have any particular examples of it, but a lot of people are scared of their career or that people will take what they say out of context or in context. It manifests itself across the board, but it’s interesting to watch these unspoken elephant-in-the-room situations that people accept. I said it 11 years ago on NPR. It’s called substitute shock. The audience wants to feel edgy. People don’t want to feel like Puritans. So people make disabled jokes, or rape jokes, or child molester jokes. But if you bring up race, there is a silence in the room. So it’s like where is this coming from?
+
+I’m trying to be funny. That’s my goal. It’s definitely a weird time, as far as more and more things are being determined by people who don’t necessarily have a great sense of humor. It was bad enough when we had these asshole executives. It’s not even that I’m disagreeing with a lot of what people are saying (online). I just disagree that they are pretending to be an average person. No. You are coordinating efforts all the time to stop people that are not necessarily harmful to the United States. First of all, if they want to say we are not going to have a discussion — and that they believe in oppressing people and admit that — I will feel better. “I’m the kind of person that believes in suppressing thought I believe is offensive.” Admit you are that kind of person. That’s all I mean. Let’s all put it out there. That’s why I think a racial discussion will be great. If we had a racial show every week it’ll bring it on board.
+
+Larry Wilmore is doing some of it. Some of it. But if you want to bring it on board, let’s bring it on board. Like I said, racially, in terms of personalities, black and white in particular. This book all about black and white. There’s a chapter on every other ethnic group, but no one is going to care about anything except black and white. Either way, the fact is–and it’s been in neutral since the ‘60s–no interaction. People just want to change the subject. It’s just the way it is. And it’s probably never going to change. It hasn’t so far. But I just don’t like that people act like they are having these conversations. These might be two different things. But so much of what gets written off as politically correct outrage culture is a really interesting conversation. The outrage over Bill Cosby, for example… Yes, but those things are things. I’m talking about words. The Duggars, Cosby, those are actions. Not words. Neither of those is part of anything I do for a living. Bill Cosby’s actions are rape. It’s not rape culture. It’s actual rape. I’m not saying there aren’t interesting behavioral things being brought up. I would never say that. But in the grand scheme of things, there’s still a thing going on–since I started comedy–where there is a tendency that used to come from fundamentalist, right-wing attitudes. Now it comes from the left. Mostly. If the right had cultural power, they would be doing it too, in a different way. (Liberals) are being Puritans. There’s no other way to describe it. All the things you are talking about I agree with –except for the fact that the people making these decisions are starting minor digital hysteria. Digital hysteria. I want people to be honest and say, “I don’t like it and we are going to put a stop to it.” Admit it. I talk to people who monitor websites. And I’m like, “Really? That’s interesting. You fucking monitor with your free time?” This is what people do. That’s all I’m saying. When I was doing “Tough Crowd” we had racial discussions every day. We got nothing accomplished in the long run, but it was the beginning of something interesting. You talk in the book about “Tough Crowd” getting you branded as a conservative and that hurting you career-wise. You can’t prove anything, but I would say it did.  Anyway, that discussion ended when it ended and it’s one of those things. (Blacks and whites) got off on a bad foot, to put it mildly, and now it’s never going to be fixed. Either way, it’s fine if people don’t want to discuss it, but don’t pretend we need a race dialogue. There is none. That’s what people say about absolutely everything. It’s like politicians saying we are going to have a blue-ribbon panel on something. It’s a way of acting like you are serious about something without actually having to do anything. Or maybe we need to admit the sad truth, which is that we are not smart enough to solve any of these things. None of us has solutions. Nobody has solutions to any of these problems. How can comedians help? The subtitle of the book is a comedian solves race relations. I don’t know if we can. Obviously when you discuss things with humor, interesting thoughts come out. People say interesting things with comedy–not big consequential things–but things I didn’t think of in a certain way. Ultimately, comedians aren’t going to solve the world’s problems, but it’s hard to say. I feel like we intuitively want to do this, but we are just not bright enough. It’s depressing, but we are not that swift. So many of the stories in the book are about the way different ethnic and racial groups got along in New York when you were growing up in Brooklyn. As you describe it, people were really direct with each other and made jokes and knew how to get along. They maybe didn’t like or trust each other, but they said so to each others’ face. Less so now, you suggest. So are things better or worse than they were when you were growing up? There was just as much racial tension in many ways. It wasn’t some idyllic thing. But, because Park Slope was so mixed, we were much more racially mixed. People aren’t racially mixed now. In the ‘70s, maybe people had more hope. People now are hardened. I guess it wasn’t that different. It really wasn’t. We got along a little better because we were in close proximity. Like I said, everyone started to move away from each other in high school and that was a thing. It wasn’t because of an incident. There should be a once a week racial summit, but people would be afraid to say how they really felt. Lena Dunham is back in the middle of controversy right now with Sarah Palin going after her and tying her into the Duggar scandal. You’ve been on “Girls.” Have you ever seen a young writer and actress be turned into a lightning rod like this? Do you have any idea how she handles it? I was just thinking about her today. She’s one of those people that seems like a “light” person. She’s always got a light to her, an energy. She made the mistake of telling the truth.  I made a whole routine about how when you’re little kids it can be like a Roman orgy. I noticed that a few people were shocked, but most people laughed. But the right and the left, there is a war going on. It’s constant. It’s every day, everything. It’s terrible, but this is how ignorant we are. All it shows is our ignorance as a society. We’ve got these great technological things and people articulate better than they did 30 years ago, but it’s the same thing. People love to hate. People love to fight. You like to feel like you are on the right side of history, of things. It’s just terrible. So the role for comedians is to be a reality check. Exactly. In an ideal world we are a reality check. In the best of circumstances. That’s what we are supposed to be in an ideal world. You write in the book that perhaps it’s OK to be a little bit racist. The example you use is of an older woman clutching her purse tighter if she sees a young black person. Explain that to me. It depends on their experience as a person–if she ever got robbed, if she got robbed by a black guy, she is going to clutch her wallet. It doesn’t make her racist. I saw so many people growing up that would be circumstantially racist and have black friends. And their black friends would tell them to watch out for the black kids when going down to a certain neighborhood. We knew it wasn’t everyone.  Now, if you speak some kind of shorthand you are automatically racist. And like I said, if the past 20 years of whitewashing on language–excuse the expression–if that had actually had an effect of society’s racial ills, I guess I’d say it does work. But it’s bullshit. It’s just childish. It has nothing to do with people’s interactions. That’s just linguistic bullshit. That’s the problem. It’s getting to be another surface layout, another laminated layer of bullshit. Tell me about “SNL 40” and the moment where most of the Weekend Update anchors reunited. Not a lot of people have had that desk. It wasn’t about the desk. It wasn’t about the show. It was about my memories of how much–it’s all delayed reaction for me. Life is like delayed reaction. I was like, fuck, man. That was such a great time and I guess I sort of knew it. That’s how everything is in life. I sort of knew it then, but I was sitting there the whole night so overwhelmed by everybody that I worked with. Jesus. It brought back all these memories. It was like a high school reunion in the sense that it was really powerful. The show itself, it was fine. The power came from everyone in that room. It was very emotional for me. I was struck in the book that you sound very at ease with your years there. Sometimes people look back and they’re bitter. We all had our conflicts there. But your take is interesting: You say that everything gets a shot on Wednesday in read-through. And if it can’t make a room of smart people and comedians laugh, well, it gets cut – but it had a chance. At the time I didn’t appreciate Lorne Michaels. I was like everyone else. That’s the posture you take with anyone in charge of everything. Nobody else in show business would let you come that close to democracy. I don’t care who it is. Nobody in the history of show business. I look back wistfully because I wasn’t one of those people who went back. I should have, but that’s just my nature. When I’m done, I’m never thinking about coming back and doing a sketch. It’s not for me. Back to the book: What would you do, if you were in charge, to unstick the race conversation. If there was a real show on every week where you can have these interactions, some of them funny, some of them serious, discussing black and white, that would be an interesting thing to do for a couple of years. To have forums. That would be good. Who would you put on that show? Only comedians. Political people have to be more careful than comedians because they really have to answer for the rest of their lives. With comedians it’s different, you are expected to be provocative. Provocative is part of the game. You are supposed to have a little conflict with comedians. The worst insult in comedy used to be the crowd pleaser. That’s the hack. Sometimes the people that are attacking comedians are the very people that should understand that we are supposed to be a little provocative. I don’t excuse a lot of horseshit. I’m not trying to get away with something. Whatever I have to say, I will say upfront. I’m not trying to slip one by anybody. It’s a muddled line right now. Hopefully it will work out, but it’s a muddled line with social media. What do you think about what Bill Maher is up to with religion? With the Muslims? Islam is a weird religion, but that being said there’s billions of Islamic people that don’t do anything wrong. But I have no problem with him saying it. The conversation is certainly direct. It’s direct. It’s not racially direct. If that was talked about in Europe, that would be an interesting show. There’s no Muslims here. If you do that show in France or England, that’s provocative.. It’s not our thing as much. It doesn’t feel like it to me at least. Maybe it is.",REAL
+1828,Watch: Donald Trump is showing a side of the GOP that party leaders don't want you to see,"Donald Trump is showing a side of the GOP that party leaders don't want you to see
+
+Donald Trump's very loud entrance into the presidential race exposed an ugly truth about the party: anti-Hispanic bigotry plays well with the Republican primary electorate. That could be a big problem:
+
+For more on Trump's epic trolling, Jon Allen has more here.",REAL
+7606,Americans' Support for 'Assault Weapons' Ban at Record Low,"Getty - Thomas Cooper 
+Support for a ban on “assault weapons” is at the lowest rate in two decades, according to a poll released Wednesday. 
+In an October survey from Gallup, 36 percent of Americans favor an assault weapons ban, down 21 percent since the pollster asked the same question in 1996. Image Credit: Gallup 
+And the decrease in support for broader gun control measures spans all political affiliations. 
+While 50 percent of Democrats support a ban, Independents and Republicans are more closely aligned with 31 percent and 25 percent support for an assault weapons ban, respectively. 
+The only part of Gallup's survey that had Americans favoring stricter gun laws north of 50 percent centered on firearm sales specifically. According to Gallup, 55 percent of Americans think gun transactions should be more strict. However, that figure is also lower than levels from the 1990s. 
+While assault rifles with selective fire are limited to military use absent a very rare and special permit, proposed assault weapons bans generally encompass semiautomatic rifles, shotguns, and handguns that some lawmakers deem too dangerous for public use. 
+Gun rights and gun violence issues have been at the forefront of the presidential election for much of the year. But with many terrorist attacks and mass shootings resulting politicians' calls for bans, the opposition has only grown stronger. ",FAKE
+9306,Will it be representative government or thugocracy?,"Will it be representative government or thugocracy? Exclusive: Erik Rush envisions Clinton using high court 'as a bludgeon' against liberty Published: 43 mins ago About | | Archive Erik Rush is a columnist and author of sociopolitical fare. His latest book is ""Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal - America's Racial Obsession."" In 2007, he was the first to give national attention to the story of Sen. Barack Obama's ties to militant Chicago preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright, initiating a media feeding frenzy. Erik has appeared on Fox News' ""Hannity and Colmes,"" CNN, and is a veteran of numerous radio appearances. Print 
+“ I feel strongly that the Supreme Court needs to stand on the side of the American people, not on the side of the powerful corporations and the wealthy. For me, that means that we need a Supreme Court that will stand up on behalf of women’s rights, on behalf of the rights of the LGBT community, that will stand up and say no to Citizens United, a decision that has undermined the election system in our country because of the way it permits dark, unaccountable money to come into our electoral system. ” 
+– Hillary Clinton 
+The first salvo from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (or rather, her answer to the first question posed by Fox News’ Chris Wallace to her and Donald Trump at the third presidential debate) was as chilling as it was an exemplar of hypocrisy. 
+Those on the left are quite fond of leveling the accusation against conservatives of employing “dog whistle politics,” rhetoric that allegedly contains hidden or esoteric derogatory messaging which targets a specific subgroup within the opposition. Ms. Clinton’s response to Wallace’s question (where they wanted to see the Supreme Court take the country, and their views on how the Constitution ought to be interpreted) however, was representative of this tactic. 
+While women’s rights and those of the LGBT community may seem to be a curious focus for the high court (since objectively, women wouldn’t appear to be particularly oppressed given that one has been nominated to run for president, and the LGBT community accounts for less than 5 percent of the American population), Clinton’s answer revealed the focus she believes the court should have once she becomes empress. 
+“Women’s rights” is of course “dog whistle” for unfettered abortion, even late-term abortion, which is essentially infanticide via dismemberment. “LGBT rights” is “dog whistle” for disenfranchising the majority of Americans who hold traditional values, primarily Christians. Leveraging a vocal minority of homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender individuals whom the left has whipped into a froth against Christians is the methodology that was employed to negate the political power of Christians in Europe and Canada. A direct assault via legislation in this area would not work in the U.S. (at least not at present); however, judicial rulings could effectively bring about the same result. 
+Let us leave aside for a moment the fact that judicial activism is unethical and skirts the Constitution and that Clinton’s overall objectives are manifestly evil. Hillary Clinton’s stated priorities for the Supreme Court are a clear indicator of her desire to use the court as a bludgeon against the Constitution and individual liberties, rather than allowing it to perform its designated function. The hypocrisy attendant to Clinton citing the rights of women and homosexuals when she is beholden via financial contributions to nations that institutionally persecute and murder members of these groups remains plain for all to see, despite being conveniently ignored by the press. 
+Clinton’s reference to “powerful corporations and the wealthy” and the malign influence of that sinister conservative organization, Citizens United, was of course another exercise in blatant hypocrisy. Clinton is quite wealthy, and corrupt or otherwise compromised powerful corporations have been instrumental in bringing about the designs of American socialists. Even if Citizens United were a vehicle for “dark, unaccountable money,” the scope of its influence would pale next to the subversive designs of the Muslim Brotherhood, with which Bill and Hillary Clinton have been partnered for decades, or the myriad tentacles of organizations funded by George Soros, the former Nazi collaborator dedicated to advancing oligarchical collectivism in America, someone with whom the Clintons also have a long association. 
+One need not attempt to decipher the thinly veiled intent behind Clinton’s debate rhetoric to discern what a Hillary Clinton presidency might look like. Her actions to date – and particularly those in the pursuit of seeking that office – should suffice quite nicely. Despite the craven complicity of the establishment press (mainstream media), there is ample evidence for even the most indolent news consumer to reach the conclusion that she and the Democratic leviathan supporting her, and which facilitated Barack Obama’s rise to power, are fundamentally malignant. 
+In recent days, we’ve become aware of all manner of unethical conspiracies and outright criminality that’s been brought to bear in getting Clinton elected, from Democratic officials tampering with the outcome of the illegal email server investigation, to the oversampling of key demographics in polling in order to enhance the public perception of Clinton’s popularity, to the recent revelation of criminally prosecutable actions on the part of the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the White House. 
+The bottom line here is that Hillary Clinton represents a class of people who transcend even the loathed archetypal modern politician in their rapaciousness and amorality. What all Americans – not just voters, and not just Republicans – need to realize is that leaders at the highest levels in the Republican Party are every bit as culpable as the gutter operatives of the Democratic Party who pay miscreants to dress up as ducks, instigate fistfights at opposition rallies and, yes, even vote for their candidates. 
+The burning question is this: In the end, are we to be governed by the will of the people, or are we going to continue pretending that we have a representative government, when we are in effect being ruled by abject thugs operating behind a faux veneer of government? 
+Media wishing to interview Erik Rush, please contact . Receive Erik Rush's commentaries in your email BONUS: By signing up for Erik Rush's alerts, you will also be signed up for news and special offers from WND via email. Name *",FAKE
+6811,An explanation for why the FBI re-opened Hillary's e-mails,"Jimstone.is 
+October 31 2016 
+
+Huma's husband, Anthony Weiner (which blows the whole Huma/Islam meme into the gutter; all we are seeing with this is the fact the ""Muslims"" running Saudi Arabia are crypto Jews) – ANYWAY , Hillary was so sure she'd never be called to account with her e-mails that she was careless enough to have them end up on Weiner's personal laptop in a file he titled ""life insurance"". 
+
+Well, you know how the entire establishment is wrapped up in child sex and other similar crimes, and Weiner ended up getting his laptop seized by the NYPD in a kiddie porn/child sex investigation. When the NYPD went through the laptop, they found Hillary's e-mails in FULL UNADULTERATED PRISTINE FORM. They proved crimes of the highest order – at least 15 felonies found so far, with a majority of them related to treason and selling out the country. 
+
+SO THE NYPD OPENED UP A CASE ON HILLARY. The FBI said, NO, WE'LL TAKE THAT – and that is the ONLY reason why these investigations got re-opened: because if the NYPD handled it, huge portions of the FBI would be sent to prison. Now the FBI is under pressure to actually do its job, because they know the NYPD knows. No matter what the outcome, the FBI gains zero (0) ZERO credibility points from this. 
+
+So read my report DO NOT FORGIVE : it was BANG ON, they did this because they HAD TO, not because they had any intention at all of being good, and it really is time to drain the swamp. 
+
+Now let's all sit and wait for the suicide of Preet Bharara , the U.S. Prosecuting Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the NYPD who pushed this into the light. He's now a target of the FBI, the DNC, the Clinton death machine and God knows what else. PREDICTION (and I do not make predictions): THE DIRECTOR OF INVESTIGATIONS FOR THE NYPD WILL ""COMMIT SUICIDE"" WITHIN 5 DAYS. He's a walking dead man. 
+
+The circle of crime in Washington DC is so entrenched and so intertwined that if you poke one part of it, there is a good chance the whole show will fall apart. Poking that monster in a way that hurts is something I do not believe anyone will survive; Preet might as well call himself a zombie. 
+
+The NYPD TRUMPED the FBI! That is why they had to investigate Hillary! 
+
+Well well, the NYPD is what busted the Hillary mails open while they were looking for kiddie stuff on Weiner's laptop, and THAT is why the FBI was forced to investigate Hillary. They had no choice. NYPD TRUMPS FBI!!! 
+
+Related: 
+
+Insiders Threaten to Expose Hillary's Pedophile Sex Ring!!!   ",FAKE
+688,Sanders in California Says Clinton E-Mail Problems Now Serious,"“Now, you're right -- the Inspector General just came out with a report, it was not a good report for Secretary Clinton,” Sanders told host John Dickerson, according to a transcript provided by the network. “That is something that the American people, Democrats and delegates, are going to have to take a hard look at.”
+
+Trailing Clinton among pledged delegates collected through state primaries and caucuses, Sanders said superdelegates -- party leaders and elected officials not formally bound to any candidate -- should, at the very least, cast their ballots at the Democratic National Convention in July with the candidate who carries a given state. 
+
+ 
+
+ That would give Sanders a boost from states like Vermont, Washington and Alaska, although Clinton prevailed in populous states such as New York, Florida and Texas. 
+
+ 
+
+ Sanders continued to press a case for superdelegates to switch their allegiance to him from Clinton, regardless of state affiliation, and said the e-mail controversy could become a drain on her in the general election.
+
+“They will be keeping it in mind. I don’t have to tell them that,” he said. “I mean, everybody in America is keeping it in mind and the superdelegates sure are.”
+
+ 
+
+ Sanders trails Clinton by 1,769 to 1,499 in pledged delegates, according to an Associated Press count. When superdelegates are included Clinton's lead swells to 2,310 to 1,542, leaving the former secretary of state 73 short of clinching the nomination. She's likely to cross that mark when votes are tallied in New Jersey, one of six states to vote on June 7. 
+
+ 
+
+ Speaking on ABC's ""This Week with George Stephanopoulos,"" Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said it was time for party unity. ""He ought to be able to read the sign posts as well as anybody else, and if he did that, he would know that it's all but over,"" she said of Sanders. 
+
+ 
+
+ Still, Sanders insisted on CBS that ""there is just a possibility that we may end up at the end of this nominating process with more pledged delegates than Hillary Clinton."" 
+
+ 
+
+ ""I think we have a good chance to win here,"" Sanders said of California, the most populous U.S. state. Two opinion polls last week offered different outcomes for California. One showed the race basically a toss-up, with Clinton ahead by 2 points. The other put the former New York senator up by 18 points. 
+
+ 
+
+ ""Obviously if we don't do well in California, it will make our path much, much harder,"" Sanders said in a separate interview on NBC's ""Meet the Press."" ""California is the big enchilada."" 
+
+ 
+
+ The State Department’s inspector general found in a report made public on Wednesday that the e-mail set-up violated department rules, that Clinton never sought permission for it, and that the proposal would have been rejected if she had. The report handed Clinton's Republican opponents a fresh line of attack - and Sanders, too, if he chose to take it. 
+
+ 
+
+ Sanders won praise at a candidates' debate on October when he said, ""Enough of the e-mails. Let's talk about the real issues facing America.'' At the time, his campaign used the comments in a fund-raising e-mail. 
+
+ 
+
+ Fast forward seven months and for Sanders, the delegates on offer on June 7 represent a last-ditch effort to close the gap with Clinton. 
+
+ 
+
+ A strong performance in California may boost Sanders's case that superdelegates should switch their allegiance to him on the basis of perceived electability against Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. 
+
+ 
+
+ That argument so far has been driven by opinion polls showing Sanders faring better than Clinton in a hypothetical matchup with Trump. 
+
+ 
+
+ In another sign Sanders has taken off the gloves, his campaign late on Friday demanded the ouster of Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy and former Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank from a key platform committee at the Democratic National Convention. 
+
+ 
+
+ Democratic officials rejected Sanders's request on Saturday, the Associated Press reported. 
+
+ 
+
+ In a statement the Sanders campaign said Frank and Malloy were ""aggressive attack surrogates"" for Clinton. Sanders's lawyer said the pair can’t work impartially “while laboring under such deeply held bias.” 
+
+ 
+
+ In a four-page letter hand-delivered to Democratic National Committee late Friday, Brad Deutsch, Sanders's campaign counsel, wrote of animosity by Frank toward Sanders dating to 1991.
+
+Criticisms of Sanders by Frank and Malloy have gone beyond dispassionate ideological disagreement and have exposed a deeper professional, political and personal hostility toward the senator and his campaign, Deutsch said. 
+
+ 
+
+ Frank on Saturday pondered the Sanders campaign's motive. ""I hope it is not to lay the basis for an inaccurate claim that he was unfairly denied the nomination, and I do see some elements of this,"" he told Politico.
+
+Also this week, Sanders, keen for network airtime before the California vote, appeared to get a boost when presumptive Republican nominee Trump agreed to debate him to raise money for a charity. The billionaire businessman backed out on Friday, saying it would be “inappropriate” to debate the second-place Democrat.
+
+ 
+
+ Sanders may not have given up hope, though. ""Maybe we'll get a call in five minutes and he'll say yes again,"" he said on CBS.",REAL
+10097,21 THINGS WE’VE LEARNED ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON FROM WIKILEAKS THAT THE MSM WON’T SHARE…BUT YOU CAN!,"Schools All Over America Are Closing On Election Day Due To Fears Of Violence 
+Will this be the most chaotic election day in modern American history? All across the nation, schools are being closed on election day due to safety fears. Traditionally, schools have been very popular as voting locations because they can accommodate a lot of people, they usually have lots of parking, and everyone in the community knows where they are and can usually get to them fairly easily. But now there is a big movement to remove voting from schools or to shut schools down on election day so that children are not present when voting takes place. According to Fox News, “voting has been removed or classes have been canceled on Election Day at schools in Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere.” Just a couple days ago, I shared with you a survey that found that 51 percent of all Americans are concerned about violence happening on election day, and all of these schools closing is just another sign of how on edge much of the population is as we approach November 8th.",FAKE
+7186,Radio Derb 10/28/16,"X Dear Reader! VDARE.com isn’t just a website. We are the voice of the Historic American Nation . Our goal is nothing less than to develop a full spectrum media network to speak up for our people during this difficult time for our country. Part of that means building institutions which are offline and in the real world. There’s something about a paper journal that suggests permanence, which inclines people to take it more seriously. And because the news cycle is so fast, some of the most important, substantial, and potentially influential writings fall through the cracks and don’t get the attention they deserve. For that reason, we’re proud to announce the creation of VDARE QUARTERLY, a print journal featuring the best material from our webzine. This will replace our yearly anthologies and ensure that the information and analysis you really don't want to miss will get in front of you as quickly as possible. However, we need your help. For us to unveil this exciting new product we need 600 magazines ordered to cover the print expenses. Fill out the form below to instantly receive a digital copy of VDARE QUARTERLY, and when we have the number of necessary subscribers it will go to print and your exclusive paper copy will ship directly to you! Depending on the package you choose, you will receive multiple paper copies (provided enough readers support the community effort). We encourage you to pass these around – they serve as an excellent gift for friends and family, while at the same time helping to build our community. VDARE QUARTERLY is aesthetically pleasing as well as ideologically powerful. But this isn’t just a service we are providing. VDARE QUARTERLY is a tangible manifestation of your investment in us, and in our country. A subscription is one of the most effective ways you can help us build our media network, expand our influence, and build the kind of movement we will need to take back our country and ensure our children have a recognizable America. 
+We count on your support! Yours sincerely, Peter Brimelow, Editor of VDARE.com VDARE QUARTERLY countdown: 167 already ordered, 433 still to go",FAKE
+8465,Venezuelan Opposition Calls for General Strike Against Gov't on October 28,"Get short URL 0 9 0 0 The opposition forces of Venezuela have called on their followers to take part in a 12-hour ""general strike"" on Friday and set a deadline for the government and the elections commission to activate a recall referendum on presidential term. 
+CARACAS (Sputnik) – On Tuesday, the opposition-led National Assembly voted to initiate impeachment proceedings against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro , claiming he had violated democracy, to which the president accused lawmakers of trying to stage a parliamentary coup. © AFP 2016/ George Castellanos Over 20 Injured, Almost 40 Detained in Venezuelan Opposition Protests - Rights Group ""We are convening a general strike on Friday, everyone in their homes,"" Jesus Torrealba, the executive secretary for the Mesa de la Unidad Democratica (MUD) opposition coalition told reporters on Wednesday. 
+Torrealba added that the coalition was giving the government and the electoral commission until Sunday, October 30, to activate the referendum . There will be another rally on November 3 if they fail to comply with the demand, according to him. 
+On Wednesday, opposition leader Henrique Capriles initiated a large-scale peaceful protest across the country to defend the nation’s right to a referendum on Maduro's recall. ...",FAKE
+9754,Guy Face-Plants While Testing Virtual Reality Headset,"
+Idiocracy is upon us.
+A young man wearing virtual reality headset seemingly forgets that he is indeed standing in a store, and while climbing a virtual tree, he not only falls in the game, but immediately takes a face plant into the ground.
+
+As he begins to pick himself up off the ground, the attendant at the virtual reality station walked over to him, unable to hold back laughter, and asked, “Are you okay?”
+Another person asked from behind the camera, “Do you want to keep going?”
+Personally, I’m not sure he’s ready. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Ryan Banister of The Daily Sheeple . ",FAKE
+2524,Appeals court rules against Obama immigration plan,"President Obama's executive action preventing the deportation of an estimated 5 million people living in the United States illegally suffered another setback Monday after a federal appeals court upheld a federal judge's injunction blocking the measure.
+
+The 2-1 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans further dims the prospect of implementation of the executive action before Obama leaves office in 2017. Appeals over the injunction could take months. Depending on how the case unfolds, the injunction could even go back to the Texas federal court for more proceedings.
+
+Republicans had criticized the plan as an illegal executive overreach when Obama announced it last November. Twenty-six states challenged the plan in court. U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen granted the temporary injunction preventing the order's implementation this past February, agreeing with the states that legalizing the presence of so many people would be a ""virtually irreversible"" action that would cause the states ""irreparable harm.""
+
+The administration argued that the executive branch was within its rights in deciding to defer deportation of selected groups of immigrants, including children who were brought to the U.S. illegally.
+
+""President Obama should abandon his lawless executive amnesty program and start enforcing the law today,"" Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a news release.
+
+The administration could ask for a re-hearing by the full 5th Circuit, but the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy group, urged an immediate Supreme Court appeal.
+
+""The most directly impacted are the 5 million U.S. citizen children whose parents would be eligible for temporary relief from deportation,"" Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the organization, said in a news release.
+
+The Justice Department said in a statement that it disagreed with the court's ruling, claiming that Obama's action would ""allow DHS to bring greater accountability to our immigration system by prioritizing the removal of the worst offenders, not people who have long ties to the United States and who are raising American children."" The statement did not specify what the department's next steps would be.
+
+Part of the initiative included expansion of a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, protecting young immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. The other major part, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, would extend deportation protections to parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have been in the country for years.
+
+The 70-page majority opinion by Judge Jerry Smith, joined by Jennifer Walker Elrod, rejected administration arguments that the district judge abused his discretion with a nationwide order and that the states lacked standing to challenge Obama's executive orders.
+
+They acknowledged an argument that an adverse ruling would discourage potential beneficiaries of the plan from cooperating with law enforcement authorities or paying taxes. ""But those are burdens that Congress knowingly created, and it is not our place to second-guess those decisions,"" Smith wrote.
+
+In a 53-page dissent, Judge Carolyn Dineen King said the administration was within the law, casting the decision to defer action on some deportations as ""quintessential exercises of prosecutorial discretion,"" and noting that the Department of Homeland Security has limited resources.
+
+""Although there are approximately 11.3 million removable aliens in this country today, for the last several years Congress has provided the Department of Homeland Security with only enough resources to remove approximately 400,000 of those aliens per year,"" King wrote.
+
+Fox News' Shannon Bream and Matt Dean and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5470,Most Idiotic Comment Ever? “Sell Gold Because Inflation Will Spike”,"Financial Markets , Gold , Market Manipulation , Precious Metals , U.S. Economy CNBC , GLD , silver eagles , Stanley Druckenmiller admin 
+Stanley Druckenmiller said: “I sold all my gold (sic) on the night of the election” because he sees inflation spiking and that will force money(sic) out of gold…hmmm….sell gold because you see inflation coming? That has to be the most idiotic investment rationale I’ve ever come across. Even “buy stocks because they keep going higher” is less dumb than that. 
+You’ll note the “sic” I added after Drunkenmiller’s comment about “gold.” “Sic” is used after a quoted word (from someone else) that seems odd or out of place. I inserted “sic” after Drunkenmiller’s use of “gold” because he never owned gold. He bought GLD, which is a paper derivative of gold. The only way you own gold is if you buy physical gold and keep it outside the system. GLD is a fraud, just like every other fiat paper “asset.” 
+I also inserted “sic” after his use of the word “money” with respect to “money flowing out of gold” (because he thinks inflation will spike up). Gold is money. It’s the second oldest form of transaction currency – silver being the oldest. 
+Finally, the idea that gold should be sold ahead of an expectation of a spike in inflation is…well, for lack of a better term, retarded (apologies to safe-space and socially correct people). Gold is the ultimate inflation hedge. 
+I sincerely do not know what would motivate Druckenmiller to make those remarks about gold – maybe he was patronizing what remains of CNBC’s imbecilic audience. I don’t feel any need to directly address each component Drunkenmiller’s assertions about gold – and about his expectations about feeling good about the prospects for the economy. The audiences of blogs like this one get it. 
+The current trading action in gold is being fueled by the paper market manipulation. If you review overnight charts for the last 3 months, you’ll see that on average and in general gold moves higher during the eastern hemisphere physical gold trading hours and gets bombed once the London and NY paper gold markets open after the Asian markets close. 
+It’s as simple as that. The paper gold market, like Drunkenmiller’s comments and investment rationale, are emblematic of the fraudulent, debt-riddled Ponzi nature of the U.S. and western hemisphere economies. 
+While the mantle of “power” in the U.S. was handed from Uncle Tom to Andrew Dice Clay, the real financial, economic and political power is being shifted from the western hemisphere to the eastern hemisphere. The massive flow of physical gold from west to east is the root of this tectonic geopolitical and economic movement. Share this:",FAKE
+540,U.S. student performance slips on national test,"Fourth-graders and eighth-graders across the United States lost ground on national mathematics tests this year, the first declines in scores since the federal government began administering the exams in 1990.
+
+Reading performance also was sobering: Eighth-grade scores dropped, according to results released Wednesday, while fourth-grade performance was stagnant compared with 2013, the last time students took the test.
+
+And the tests again show large achievement gaps between the nation’s white and minority students as well as between poor and affluent children, an indication that the nation’s disadvantaged students are not gaining ground despite more than a decade of federal law designed to boost their achievement.
+
+Researchers have long cautioned that it is difficult to identify the cause of any fluctuation in scores on this testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is also known as the Nation’s Report Card. But many people look to NAEP scores as an important barometer of U.S. student achievement because they are the only exams that have been given nationwide over a long period of time, capturing the performance of rich and poor children of all ethnicities in urban, suburban and rural communities.
+
+The year’s declines come amid a period of great tumult in American public education.
+
+Recent demographic shifts mean that schools are grappling with the challenge of educating an increasing number of students who come from low-income families and are learning how to speak English. And in recent years, most states have adopted sweeping educational policy changes, including teacher evaluations tied to test scores and Common Core academic standards that have changed what and how students learn in the classroom.
+
+U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan defended those policies in a call with reporters Tuesday, saying that massive changes in schools often lead to a temporary drop in test scores while teachers and students adjust. But the new standards and other policies, Duncan said, are poised to improve student achievement — and students’ lives — in the long terdatam.
+
+“Big change never happens overnight,” Duncan said. “I’m confident that over the next decade, if we stay committed to this change, we will see historic improvements.”
+
+Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that slipping NAEP scores are evidence that the nation’s focus on using standardized tests to judge teachers and schools has failed. The scores should trigger a change of course, she said, pointing to the Obama administration’s acknowledgment that students are spending too much time taking standardized tests of dubious value.
+
+“Not only is there plenty of anecdotal evidence that our kids have suffered, these latest NAEP scores again show that the strategy of testing and sanctioning, coupled with austerity, does not work,” Weingarten said in a statement.
+
+[Study says standardized tests are overwhelming the nation’s public schools]
+
+Students at U.S. public and private schools have taken the NAEP every two years since the early 1990s. The exam is the country’s most consistent measure of K-12 progress, and because it has been in place for so long, it can offer insight into the effects of demographic and policy changes.
+
+But researchers caution that deeper analysis is needed to understand the potential causes of this year’s drop. And they said it’s too soon to tell whether the results are the beginning of a trend or just a blip.
+
+The new results — on a scale of 0 to 500 — show two-point losses in eighth-grade math and reading and a one-point drop in fourth-grade math. Fourth-grade reading scores were statistically unchanged.
+
+Scores have risen considerably since the first exams in the 1990s and, despite this year’s declines, are still among the highest posted by American students.
+
+The 2015 scores show that 64 percent of fourth-graders and 66 percent of eighth-graders are not considered proficient in reading. In math, 60 percent of fourth-graders and 67 percent of eighth-graders are not considered proficient.
+
+The new data also show how states and 21 large cities fared. Individual state performance mirrored the nation’s, with more states showing scores that dropped rather than increased. The news from cities was somewhat more positive: On average, performance among urban school systems was flat compared with 2013.
+
+Maryland had some of the largest drops in the nation and was the only state to see declines in both subjects at both grade levels. They came as Maryland tested many more students with disabilities and non-native English speakers than before, bringing it in line with other states.
+
+[Maryland sees one of the largest declines in the nation ]
+
+The District bucked the national trend, posting some of the biggest increases in the country at the fourth-grade level. Eighth-grade scores were flat. It was the second time in a row that the city, whose school system long had a reputation as one of the nation’s most troubled, has stood out for its improvement on the NAEP.
+
+D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson attributed the success in part to the city’s early adoption of the Common Core State Standards. She also credited consistency of leadership — Henderson is in her sixth year as chancellor — and the city’s investment in universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds.
+
+The highest-scoring state in three of the four tests was Massachusetts, which has often topped NAEP rankings. Minnesota, New Hampshire and Vermont also were top performers in 2015. New Mexico and Mississippi were among the lowest-scoring.
+
+Matthew Chingos, a researcher at the Urban Institute, said it is not very useful to compare overall state scores to one another because states are educating such different populations of students. A state with a more challenging student population can be doing a relatively good job with those students but still trail states with student populations that are whiter or more affluent.
+
+For example, in 2013, fourth-grade students who were learning English as a second language scored higher in Texas than they did in Oregon, while other students in the two states scored about the same, according to a brief Chingos published Monday.
+
+But Texas has far more non-native English speakers than Oregon, so its overall NAEP score was lower.
+
+“If you want to compare across states, if you want to say how kids in Massachusetts versus Mississippi are doing, you really do need to make these adjustments,” said Chingos.
+
+“It can have a big impact on which states are doing better and which are doing worse.”",REAL
+6075,"The Shame, The Heartbreak- Another Day In America","- Advertisement - 
+Here's the thing:Today, October 27, 2016, I, like many of you, watched live feeds of the events going down at Standing Rock.I am at a loss to define my feelings. Anger, outrage, pity, fear 
+...One phrase kept going through my mind, like a mantra- This is not my America. This is not my America. This is not my America. protests at DAPL License DMCA 
+And then in counter-point was the thought- But it is. But it is. But it is.Over one hundred heavily armed cops in riot gear, supported by military assault vehicles and helicopters forced peaceful, prayerful water protectors from their own land, ceded to them in the Treaty of 1851. The police are nothing more than a mercenary army protecting the interests of the owners of the DAPL. There was the wail of sound cannons aimed at the protectors, there was tear gas. There were rubber bullets being fired into the crowd.And in my mind- This is not my America (But it is) This is not my America (But it is) This is not my America (But it is) This is about water. There's no political ideology here. We cannot live without water. Decisions are being made that effect the future, and the lives of our children and our grandchildren.This effects all of us. It's not just happening ""out there"" in the Dakotas or in Iowa or in Texas or in New Mexico. It's everywhere. For god sake, there are already over 2.5 million miles pipeline already installed in the continental United States. Just the other day, mere miles from where I live a Sunoco pipeline leaked over 55,000 gallons of gasoline into the Susquehanna River, endangering the water for over 6 million people down river. Where I live, in northeastern Pennsylvania, there are fracking wells all over the place. And an average of 2.8 million of gallons of clean water were filled with known poisons and toxins and pumped under pressure into the aquifer beneath my feet. There are places within miles of where I live that people can set fire to their water.It's too late for anyone to avoid the destruction, here where I live. We have to deal with the aftermath. The after the fact poisoning of our water and the inevitable leaks and the illnesses and the pockets of strange cancers. This is a shameful day, for all of us. I am sick, in heart, mind and spirit, but I have hope.The battle hasn't even started. Now is when decisions must be made. Hard decisions that will impact on our own sense of comfort and will demand that we risk that comfort, or lose the future. To do nothing is to accept that our children,and our grandchildren will have no clean water to drink, no clean air to breathe, no clean land to live on.This is not overstating the things. It is not alarmist. It is the simplest of truths. - Advertisement -",FAKE
+7300,Tom Hanks Raps,Gary North has the video . 12:56  ,FAKE
+10382,WikiLeaks Releases 32nd Batch of Clinton Campaign Chair Podesta's Emails,"
+WikiLeaks has released another batch of emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
+The whistleblowing site has published more than 50,000 emails in the lead up to the presidential election on Tuesday. Today’s trache contains 2074 new emails.
+Saturday’s release contained transcripts from Bill Clinton’s fundraising speeches, which included the former president attacking UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and discussing the need for a tough leader to “enforce the trigger that will re-impose sanctions” should Iran violate the nuclear deal.
+Also included are examples of Clinton aides worrying “there are no good answers” to questions about the Clinton Foundation.
+Chelsea Clinton using Foundation money for wedding 
+A January 2012 email chain from longtime Clinton adviser and former Clinton Foundation fundraiser Doug Band accuses Chelsea Clinton of using Foundation money for her wedding.
+“The investigation into her getting paid for campaigning, using foundation resources for her wedding and life for a decade, taxes on money from her parents….” Band says to Podesta.
+Band dislikes Chelsea Clinton particularly as she was investigating his role in the Foundation and appears often in the Podesta emails.
+“I hope that you will speak to her and end this once we go down this roadâ€Śâ€ Band says.
+Podesta complains about ‘f*cking psychotic” media 
+In an email from July 2015, Neera Tanden, Clinton aide and president of the Center for American Progress, goes on a tirade about the press being “psychotic” in reference to a Politico article by Dylan Byers, which highlighted Podesta’s concern over the “psychosis of the media.”
+“They are f*cking psychotic,” Podesta sums up, in regards to the press, at the end of the chain with Tanden.
+Billionaire Saban directs campaign strategy 
+An email thread from July 2015 reveals the level of influence billionaire Haim Saban, one of the Clintons’ biggest donors, has on Hillary’s presidential campaign.
+Unlike many donors, who have to go through intermediaries to get high up campaign access, Saban’s case appears to be different. In the email to Podesta and campaign manager Robby Mook, Saban requests a discussion, writing, “Can one of you please call me at your earliest convenience? Tx.”
+After Podesta and Mook get in touch with Saban, Podesta writes, “Haim thinks we are under reacting to Trump/Hispanics. Thinks we can get something by standing up for Latinos or attacking R’s for not condemning.”
+Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s Director of Communications weighs in, ”Haim is right – we should be jamming this all the time.”
+“A and X – can we think about what else we should do?” she asks Clinton staffers Amanda Renteria and Xochitl Hinojosa. “Issue a broader challenge? Do something tied to Fourth of July were we declared all equal? Get CHC to do a letter?”
+Brent Budowsky happy Supreme Court deadlock 
+An email from February 2012, written by Brent Budowsky, columnist for The Hill, shows how the Clinton ally is advising Podesta on how to make the most of the Supreme Court deadlock.
+“I have been looking for this opportunity, which is not as easy as it sounds, but this would be a gift to de-brand the entire Republican party as a whole and mobilize the grassroots Democrats en masse for a sustained period,” Budowsky writes.
+He adds, “If Republicans want to make the Supreme Court dysfunctional for a year, we can turn every Republican Senator into Ted Cruz and win a big Senate campaign victory in November. Everything the public hates about Washington is embodied by Republicans here.”
+Getting high-ranking Muslims on board for Clinton campaign 
+Kamran Bajwa, partner for major law firm Kirkland, sends an email to Podesta in July 2016 highlighting how he has been “reaching out” to American-Muslims who “identify as Americans first and as Muslims” to help with fundraising and volunteering for Clinton.
+Bajwa asks Podesta to “please keep this confidential” in relation to the high-ranking Muslims he recommends including Anas Osman, Senior VP at Google Corp, Ahmad Nassar, President of NFL Players, Inc., and Faisal Ashraf, a healthcare entrepreneur.
+“I think a good next step would be to have the key committee people I have mentioned meet with you and the leadership team as soon as possible,” Bajwa writes.
+Anti-politicians 
+In August 2015, Tanden emails Podesta to discuss Bernie Sanders. “Is it the assumption of the campaign not to worry about Sanders? I’m having a hard time understanding that so I thought I’d check in,” she says.
+“Our trust in government research shows how much people are feeling let down by politicians, which is fueling a real antipathy to the political class. In that world, I can understand the rise of Sanders and Trump -anti-politicians to say the least.” she says.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+99,"Charleston, Dylann Roof and the racism of millennials","America should be shaken to its very core by what happened in Charleston.
+
+The gruesome massacre of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically black church in Charleston, S.C., may amount to the worst racially motivated terror attack of our generation and a deeply violent reminder that racism and white supremacy continue to course through America’s veins. One cannot help but draw comparisons to the firebombing of a black church in Birmingham, Ala., almost 52 years ago.
+
+The shooting suspect in Charleston has been identified as Dylann Roof, a white 21-year-old. He was arrested (peacefully, one should add) at a traffic stop. Many will argue about what words we will use to describe Roof, whether he should be described as a mentally disturbed kid (a description rarely applied when the alleged perpetrator isn’t a white male) or a rational adult responsible for his alleged actions. His age matters, but not for the reasons you may think.
+
+Roof, who was born in 1994, violently shatters one particularly entrenched myth that society holds about racism — that today’s millennials are more tolerant than their parents, and that racism will magically die out as previous generations pass on. We think that millennials should be lauded for aspiring to be “colorblind.”  There is the belief that tolerant young people will intermarry and create a post-racial, brown society and that it will be “beautiful.”
+
+But the truth is that the kids are not all right when it comes to racial equality. Studies have shown that millennials are just about as racist as previous generations:
+
+When it comes to explicit prejudice against blacks, non-Hispanic white millennials are not much different than whites belonging to Generation X (born 1965-1980) or Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964). White millennials (using a definition of being born after 1980) express the least prejudice on 4 out of 5 measures in the survey, but only by a matter of 1 to 3 percentage points, not a meaningful difference. On work ethic, 31 percent of millennials rate blacks as lazier than whites, compared to 32 percent of Generation X whites and 35 percent of Baby Boomers.
+
+Millennials have grown up in a world where we talk about race without racism — or don’t talk about it at all — and where “skin color” is the explanation for racial inequality, as if ghettos are ghettos because they are black, and not because they were created. As such, their views on racism — where you fight bias by denying it matters to outcomes — are muddled and confused. Which gets to the irony of this survey: A generation that hates racism but chooses colorblindness is a generation that, through its neglect, comes to perpetuate it.
+
+The danger in invoking the myth of the presupposed racial tolerance of millennials (and subsequent generations) is that it works to absolve today’s society of actively confronting and undoing the damage of the legacy of slavery, segregation and institutionalized racism. We think racism will just die out with older generations. Why confront America’s racial legacy as long as you believe that the younger generation will do it for you? To put it bluntly, it ignores how the cold logic of racism, white supremacy and anti-blackness has worked for generations and how it continues to work.
+
+A 21-year-old millennial, in 2015, is alleged to have taken a page from the 1960s and assassinated a black political leader: South Carolina State Senator and pastor Clementa Pinckney was among the dead.
+
+A 21-year-old millennial, by allegedly saying “You rape our women,” invoked the centuries-old defense of protecting white women as a justification for the slaughter of black people.
+
+A 21-year-old donned early-20th-century symbols of apartheid and racist colonial regimes in Africa on his Facebook page.
+
+A 21-year-old allegedly copied from the age-old playbook of racial terror, adding another bloody chapter to the long history of assaults on black people at churches in America.
+
+All of these examples are not signs of individual mental illness. From South Africa to the United States, symbols celebrating segregation, assassinations of black community leaders, mass violence and the desecration of sacred spaces for black people are the historical tools of black suppression. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that this massacre occurred in a state that flies the Confederate battle flag, a symbol of white supremacy, at its state house. These symbols and tactics remain in our national conscience, passing on from generation to generation, like a sinister genetic code in America’s DNA.
+
+As long as society refuses to confront this legacy of the ugly sin of racism today, we cannot depend on tomorrow’s generations to come to our rescue.",REAL
+6986,Daesh executing civilians as Iraqi forces advance,"Iraq Federal police forces launch a rocket during clashes with Daesh militants south of Mosul on October 26, 2016. (Photos by Reuters) 
+Daesh executes over 230 civilians in Mosul as the battle to liberate the Iraqi city from the Takfiris gains momentum. 
+""Daesh militants continued to commit atrocities in the province of Nineveh, they executed 190 people in the area of ​​Hammam al-Alil after taking them hostage in different areas of Mosul,"" saidthe chairman of the Iraqi parliamentary human rights committee, Abdel Rakhim Shamri, on Wednesday. 
+He added that another 42 people were taken from the village of Arij and executed after they refused to cooperate with the terrorists. Federal police forces take part in an operation against Daesh militants south of Mosul on October 26, 2016. 
+Shamri also called on Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to facilitate the airlifting of civilians from Daesh-held areas in Mosul as the terrorists are using them as human shields. 
+On Tuesday, the UN human rights office said it had preliminary reports about scores of mass killings by Daesh around Mosul in the past week. Federal police forces take part in an operation against Daesh militants south of Mosul on October 26, 2016. 
+UN human rights spokesman Rupert Colville told a regular UN briefing in Geneva that the bodies of 70 civilians with bullet wounds had been discovered by Iraqi security forces in Tuloul Naser village on October 20, and 50 police officers being held outside the city had also reportedly been killed. 
+Daesh employing scorched earth policy 
+On Wednesday, the commander of the Mosul operations, Major General Najm al Jabouri, announced that government forces had liberated the villages of Saf al Tuth and Nana after engaging enemy snipers stationed close to the villages. 
+Locals report that Daesh militants are employing a scorched earth policy destroying buildings, farms, detonating explosives, torching industrial plants and kidnapping and killing civilians as they are forced to retreat. 
+""My brother was killed by Daesh, because he wanted to join the security forces. Anyone who wanted to join the security forces would be killed. They took a lot of people, they carried them in pickup trucks, and I have no idea what their fate will be,"" said a resident of Nana village. 
+Regional officials have confirmed the terrorists are kidnapping and executing people as they are forced to retreat by advancing Iraqi forces. 
+A member of the Nineveh provincial council, Abdul Rahman al-Wagga, noted that the executions were carried out ""to terrorize the others, those who are in Mosul in particular."" 
+""Daesh was taking families from each village it left,"" he added. Iraq army forces drive a military vehicle during the operation against Daesh militants in Qayyarah, south of Mosul, on October 26, 2016. 
+Earlier, military sources announced that Peshmerga fighters had established control over Dirik village near the town of Bashiqa, which lies 12 kilometers northeast of Mosul. 
+Iraq’s Joint Operations Command also announced that Iraqi counter-terrorism units were only two kilometers away from Mosul. 
+Since the beginning of the operations, the Iraqi army, backed by volunteer forces, has been engaged in a large military offensive to cleanse Mosul of Daesh terrorists. The city fell in 2014 when the terror group started ravaging the country, naming Mosul as its so-called headquarters in Iraq. Loading ...",FAKE
+6366,Snowden Reveals How Easy It Is To Hack Voting Machines,"Share on Facebook Edward Snowden demonstrated to his Twitter followers how easy it is to commit election fraud by hacking voting machines used in several crucial swing states. He showed his 2.4 million followers a video in which experts hack a machine in minutes – using a flash memory card that costs no more than 30 bucks. They change the number of votes for each candidate in the computer's memory, and even change the paper trail backup to evade detection. Researchers just demonstrated how to hack the official vote count with a $30 card. Details: https://t.co/uhcLVd0yPg https://t.co/uIFOQVb5uu — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) 7 Νοεμβρίου 2016 The NSA whistleblower added: “Little time to patch this vulnerabilty but can still forbid use of this model, run statistical analysis after polls close on rest to ID outliers.” As ZeroHedge reports, a U.K. based company that has provided voting machines for 16 states, including important battleground states like Florida and Arizona, has direct ties with billionaire leftist and Clinton crusader George Soros. With recent WikiLeaks emails showing that Hillary Clinton received foreign policy directives and coordinated on domestic policy with Soros, along with receiving tens of millions of dollars in presidential campaign support from the billionaire, concerns are growing that these shadowy players may pull the strings behind the curtains of the upcoming presidential election. As Lifezette reports, the fact that the man in control of voting machines in 16 states is tied directly to the man who has given millions of dollars to the Clinton campaign and various progressive and globalist causes will surely leave a bad taste in the mouth of many a voter. The balloting equipment tied to Soros is coming from the U.K. based Smartmatic company, whose chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is a former UN official and sits on the board of Soros' Open Society Foundation. According to Lifezette, Malloch-Brown was part of the Soros Advisory Committee on Bosnia and also is a member of the executive committee of the International Crisis Group, an organization he co-founded in the 1990s and built with funds from George Soros' personal fortune. In 2007 Soros appointed Malloch-Brown vice-president of his Quantum Funds, vice-chairman of Soros Fund Management, and vice-chairman of the Open Society Institute (former name of OSF). Browns ties also intertwine with the Clintons as he was a partner with Sawyer-Miller, the consulting firm where close Clinton associate Mandy Grunwald worked. Brown also was also a senior advisor to FTI Consulting, a firm at which Jackson Dunn, who spent 15 years working as an aide to the Clintons, is a senior managing director. When taking that into account, along with the poor track record Smartmatic has of providing free and fair elections, this all becomes quite terrifying. An astonishing 2006 classified U.S. diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks reveals the extent to which Smartmatic may have played a hand in rigging the 2004 Venezuelan recall election under a section titled “A Shadow of Fraud.” The memo stated that “Smartmatic Corporation is a riddle both in ownership and operation, complicated by the fact that its machines have overseen several landslide (and contested) victories by President Hugo Chavez and his supporters.” “The Smartmatic machines used in Venezuela are widely suspected of, though never proven conclusively to be, susceptible to fraud,” the memo continued. “The Venezuelan opposition is convinced that the Smartmatic machines robbed them of victory in the August 2004 referendum. Since then, there have been at least eight statistical analyses performed on the referendum results.” “One study obtained the data log from the CANTV network and supposedly proved that the Smartmatic machines were bi-directional and in fact showed irregularities in how they reported their results to the CNE central server during the referendum,” it read. With such suspicion and a study which claims to prove that the U.K. firm's equipment tampered with the 2004 Venezuelan recall election, should be enough for states to reject these machines if they desire a fair election. Smartmatic is providing machines to Arizona, California, Colorado, Washington DC, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, which means these Soros and Clinton linked machines are going to take the votes of thousands of Americans. While GOP nominee Donald Trump has been voicing his opinion that the elections are indeed rigged due to media bias, and the proof that mainstream polls are heavily weighted to favor Clinton, it is needless to say that if the results show Hillary as a winner in November, there is going to a mess to shuffle through to find signs of honesty. Related:",FAKE
+5034,Clinton renews vow to 'fast track' immigration; Trump camp accuses candidate of acting like a 'king',"Hillary Clinton announced perhaps her most ambitious plan yet for immigration reform Friday, including a vow to “end deportation” for millions of illegal immigrants in the United States if elected president. In turn, Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign claimed Clinton intends to assume “king-like powers” that would harm Americans.
+
+Clinton, speaking before a National Associations of Black and Hispanic Journalists gathering in Washington, said she intends to introduce legislation within the first 100 days of her potential administration that will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy.
+
+The Democratic presidential nominee also urged potential voters to help Democrats retake the Senate in November, claiming assurances that they would “fast track her proposal.”
+
+“This is a clear high priority for my administration,” she said. “We will be prepared to introduce legislation as quickly as we can …Trump plans to round up immigrants … We will not be deporting families.”
+
+Clinton's comments suggested that she would follow President Obama’s example of taking executive action on immigration reform.
+
+The Supreme Court in June split 4-4 on Obama’s 2014 plan to defer deportation for roughly 4.3 million parents of Americans and other lawful permanent residents.
+
+The ruling sent the case back to a lower court. But Clinton, like Trump, would attempt to appoint a justice for the high court’s ninth and open seat to help win favorable decisions on such issues.
+
+“Hillary believes DAPA is squarely within the president’s authority and won’t stop fighting until we see it through,” states Clinton’s campaign website, which also says she intends to defend the president’s 2012 executive action to defer deportation for millions of people brought into the United States illegally by their parents.
+
+The Clinton campaign did not immediatley respond Saturday to a request for comment.
+
+Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller -- who as a staffer from Alabama GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions helped defeat a bipartisan Senate immigration reform bill -- issued a five-page statement on Friday attacking Clinton’s policies dating back to May 2015. The Senate bill died in the GOP-controlled House.
+
+Clinton has vowed since essentially the start of her campaign to make immigration reform a first-100-day priority. And Trump, who has vowed to build a wall along the southern U.S. border to keep out illegal Mexican immigrants, has said Clinton’s plan is tantamount to amnesty for those in the U.S. illegally and that she would “totally open borders.”
+
+Trump, in the wake of several deadly attacks inspired or directed by ISIS, called for a temporary ban on all Muslims into the U.S. The Republican presidential nominee has since suggested a ban only for Muslims coming from such Middle East terror hotspots as Syria.
+
+Miller, whose has long argued that “amnesty” — legal working status for some of the country's estimate 11 million illegal immigrants — would take away jobs from unemployed Americans, argued on Friday that Clinton’s first-100-day pledge is also dangerous.
+
+“Her pledge — in the middle of a national security and a border security crisis” — demonstrates her callous and cruel disregard for the safety of the American people,” Miller wrote.
+
+“This administration has released hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal immigrants, and yet Clinton says she wants to go even further, ending virtually all deportations and ending all protections Americans have against open borders.”",REAL
+3396,White House admits should have sent 'higher-profile' official to Paris rally,"The White House acknowledged Monday that it erred in not sending a higher-level representative to the massive rally in Paris against Islamic terrorism, after facing bipartisan criticism over the meager U.S. presence at the march -- which was attended by more than 40 world leaders.
+
+""We should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there,"" Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.
+
+But he also explained that the planning for the rally began on short notice and President Obama's personal attendance, given the security challenges, would have had a ""significant impact"" on the march. Earnest said they had only 36 hours to prepare, and suggested the outdoor event with large crowds posed security risks.
+
+Earnest said the U.S. still stands ""four-square behind our allies in France.""
+
+The rally on Sunday was a historic show of unity that drew more than a million people -- but none higher representing the U.S. than its ambassador to France. While the administration dispatched Attorney General Eric Holder and a top homeland security official to Paris for meetings over the weekend, the only U.S. official of note to attend Sunday's rally was Ambassador Jane Hartley.
+
+The White House wouldn't say why Holder did not attend the march, suggesting only that he or some other top official should have gone.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry initially dismissed the criticism as ""quibbling,"" and announced a trip to the French capital later this week.
+
+A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Paris told Fox News that Holder did not attend Sunday's march because he was ""not available at the time."" A Justice Department spokesman said Holder had to return to Washington that afternoon, but was ""proud"" to join world leaders at the summit before the rally.
+
+But the White House absorbed heavy criticism on Sunday and Monday for the thin U.S. presence, as well as for continuing to avoid calling last week's attacks an act of Islamic terror.
+
+On Fox News' ""Sunday Morning Futures,"" Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., questioned the logic in even sending Holder for the Paris counterterrorism meetings, suggesting the president is not confronting the matter as Islamic terrorism.
+
+""Last time I checked we're at war. I wouldn't send my attorney general if I were president to deal with Islamic radical terrorists. We're at war here,"" Graham said. ""[Obama] thinks it's a crime out of control.""
+
+Speaking on CBS News, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., suggested he can understand how security may have played a role in the decision for Obama not to attend but said, ""I think, in hindsight, I would hope they would do it differently"" next time.
+
+Others were tough on the administration's decision.
+
+""Not an excuse in universe can explain why US failed to send to Paris a more visible rep. than Holder,"" tweeted Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official who now works at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, calling Obama, Kerry and Vice President Biden ""MIAs.""
+
+James Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral who previously led U.S. European Command, also said on Twitter: ""I wish our US President had gone to Paris to stand with our European allies.""
+
+Amid the criticism, Kerry, who is traveling on official business in India, rearranged his schedule to make it to Paris later in the week. He announced his plans at a press conference in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, where he had made a long-scheduled appearance at an international investment conference Sunday ahead of Obama's planned visit to that country later this month.
+
+""I would have personally very much wanted to have been [in Paris],"" Kerry said, ""but couldn't do so because of the commitment that I had here and it is important to keep these kinds of commitments.""
+
+When asked about criticism directed at the Obama administration for not sending a high-ranking official to take part in the march, Kerry said earlier, ""I really think that this is sort of quibbling a little bit in the sense that our Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was there and marched, our ambassador [to France Jane Hartley] was there and marched, many people from the embassy were there and marched.""
+
+A senior administration official stressed that Hartley attended the Paris march, and that Obama has shown U.S. solidarity with France by placing a call to their president, stopping by the French embassy and directing U.S. officials to work on helping the French in the wake of last week's terror attack.
+
+The official also said ""it is worth noting that the security requirements for both the President and VP can be distracting from events like this -- this event is not about us.""
+
+Kerry, at the news conference, said that U.S. officials, including himself and Obama, had been ""deeply engaged"" with French authorities almost immediately after the first attack occurred Wednesday and had offered intelligence assistance.
+
+More than 40 world leaders -- press reports put the number at 44 -- along with more than a million ordinary French citizens, marched arm in arm through the streets of Paris Sunday to rally for unity and freedom of expression and to honor the 17 victims killed in three separate terror attacks last week.
+
+Among the world leaders who did march, under heavy security, were French President Francois Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
+
+Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, tweeted, ""What's missing in this picture? American leaders. Even Palestinian and Israeli leaders in front line of Paris march.""
+
+Democratic strategist Doug Schoen, in a column on FoxNews.com, said Obama has ""morally abdicated his place as the leader of the free world."" The decision to stay in Washington, Schoen wrote, ""sent a clear message to the world: Obama just doesn't care.""
+
+He also lamented that Obama ""is the only Western leader who has refused to call this attack Islamic terrorism, even though President Hollande has declared that France is it at war with radical Islam.""
+
+Kerry said he is going to France to reaffirm U.S. solidarity with America's oldest ally. He said as soon as he heard about the march, he asked his team what the earliest time was that he could go.
+
+""That is why I am going there on the way home and to make it crystal clear how passionately we feel about the events that have taken place there,"" he said. ""I don't think the people of France have any doubt about America's understanding about what happened, about our personal sense of loss and our deep commitment to the people of France in this moment of trial.""
+
+Kerry will arrive in Paris on Thursday after stops in Sofia, Bulgaria and Geneva, Switzerland. Kerry will be the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit France since the terrorist attacks on a French newspaper and a kosher supermarket. Authorities say one of those involved in the attacks pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group in a video. He and two other suspected extremists were killed during police raids.
+
+Meanwhile, the White House said Sunday it will hold an international summit next month in Washington on thwarting violent extremism.
+
+The summit is scheduled for Feb. 18 and will focus on domestic and international efforts to ""prevent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting and inspiring individuals and groups in the United States and abroad from committing acts of violence,"" the White House said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2398,GOP hits another roadblock on Obamacare repeal,"Donald Trump is considering tapping a Democrat to be his Treasury secretary, POLITICO has learned.",REAL
+1322,Insiders: Sanders and Trump will win New Hampshire,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+6824,Paintings 'almost no one else seemed to be doing',"Print 
+When Judith Gait met “Father X,” it was a lopsided grief that drew them together. He had lost his only chance at fatherhood through an abortion years ago. Gait is a married mother of five, and long-term American resident in Britain. Her support of the pro-life movement is driven by “thankfulness and praise” for life and her Christian faith. 
+Witnessing abortion’s heavy toll on the living and dead, Gait began to make the paintings almost no one else seemed to be doing. Subtle and working entirely with symbolism, these simple artworks avoid screaming about abortion. Rather, they mourn in color, symbol and tone with single shoes, broken cord, dead flowers and other lonely and broken things. “Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas”painting by Judith Gait, commentary by Father X 
+When a friend first visited Gait’s studio, he was struck by her abortion paintings. Confessing years of torment after his partner aborted his child, he wrote: “I realize your work comes from a place of great love, for it attempts to give defenseless life the dignity and protection it never knew in our throw away culture.” 
+Gait invited him to pray with her for his lost child. It happened to be the anniversary of the death of his baby, five years to the day. Father X remembers every detail. 
+Their conversation grew into a joint effort, culminating in a book, “ Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas: Meditations on Post Abortion Trauma .” Father X wanted to remain anonymous, as a place-setter for millions of unconsidered fathers in the acts of abortion. He wrote poetic and powerful statements for each of Gait’s 30 paintings in this book, which have also been shown together in art exhibits. 
+Time and neglect does not necessarily heal the wounds of abortion, Gait claims. Rather, “the past refocuses into a sharper image and the pain through an iterative process of silence, guilt and remorse has not abated.” You can see that in the words of Father X, which run the gamut of human emotions. “On Abortion: Shoe, Pot and Crosses”from “Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas” 
+“Jonah of Nineveh” features an upended, single rose with red cords and funereal foliage. Flowers are “already in the birth position, head down and waiting to be born.” Torn and shroud-like ribbons hang across the painting. Spirals represent a child’s DNA helix and the “veil of the Temple which has just been so rudely shaken down to its foundation.” Father X makes an analogy between Jonah fleeing “parental responsibility” and eventual redemption – then veers off to his own personal engulfment in almost a stream of consciousness: “It was her wedding dress, my sea green empress, this blue lagoon princess she slipped into her own heart of darkness on that day she decided to abort and when time really stopped in our lives. She was full of fear. …” 
+In some of these works, hammers incongruently hang with flowers. They are bloody or blackened, some submerged underwater or hanging from a noose. Father X interprets these tools as decision markers, to either build or tear down. In “Hammer of Decision,” it belongs to Thor, the war god “infested with his one eyed wisdom of intrigue and destruction.” Wagner, the Olympics, “sperm races,” Thomas Moore and Valkyries are all inducted into this choice by the author. Either the Carpenter’s “hammer of wisdom” or Thor’s “tool of chaos” will be chosen by expectant parents. “Hammer, Suspended” 
+“ Troubadours ” runs from elegant poetry to sentiment over babies and an ad hoc theology. Striving to extend lives of children lost to abortion, the authors create a fantasy universe of possibilities. This includes moonlighting for angels, celestial games, “interstellar wind-jammers” and a “baby steamer sailing on children’s seas,” among other delightful prospects. Lost and murdered infants in these tales pine for love or for a family in their Limbos. 
+Father X occasionally speculates on spiritual issues outside the Bible or the treatment of abortion in other religions. Running from nursery rhymes and quotes to historical characters, these are not theological statements, but a type of literary yearning that seeks an answer to abortion. 
+In Gait’s “Pink Rose” and “Stardust,” we see empty fields, withered plants and other tokens. Father X takes off from here on fanciful trips for the lost children. He places them in a cosmic waiting rooms or dancing in circles, which is reflected in the painting. Children are disfigured, or missing eyes or arms and singing in “low mournful tones” so as not to disturb their parents. Music is “intense, equivalent to the sound created by Hildegard von Bingen (a 12th-century nun and composer). “Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas”painting by Judith Gait, commentary by Father X 
+References to Mary as a mother are common, as well as other scriptural allusions. “All babies jump for Jesus” in the womb (or in “its sack of nibbling yoke”) writes Father X. Elizabeth’s child John “leapt for joy, just as his ancestor David did before the ark of the covenant,” he continues. 
+Gait addresses the human embryo, finding Biblical, ethical or emotional arguments for its worth at all stages. Her “Abbey Target Beginning” has a crosshair target, which is interpreted spiritually: “The first target blastula conflates the first cellular divisions with the laver bread – the bread on fire with the Holy Spirit the same stage of development as the child in Mary’s womb when she arrived at her cousin Elizabeth’s house.” 
+Post-abort guilt isn’t rationalized or downplayed, but emotionally reacted to in art and word. Father X describes bats as whirling about “in circles at the pitiful sound the [aborted] children make” because they are tuned to such distressing signals. This contrasts with many parents who are “still stone deaf” to such mournful sounds. At another point, Father-X imputes the collective white noise of guilt to attacks of tinnitus, a roar of unwanted thoughts. “Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas”painting by Judith Gait, commentary by Father X 
+Father X elaborates on what Gait hints in her paintings: the injustice and evil of abortion. He cites a world built on slavery before Christ’s advent, and the works of such men as William Wilberforce and John Brown in furthering Christ’s gospel of justice and peace. All this is contrasted to abortion throughout. 
+Ruminating on Gait’s “Palms of our Lord,” Father X claims “the face of the baby is in the midst of the ruins of the abortion. “Palms” is murky, with a single, red hand print. “To look at the after birth of an abortion is to read the Tarot of Ruins,” he continues. 
+“Suicide” advances this dark theme, where Gait and Father X criticize the death industry and it’s euphemistically named “clinics.” He takes a few swings at the girl gangs of the glass ceilings: “… a caricature of a woman who made a mistake, who got herself in trouble, who has had an abortion and afterwards committed suicide in her heart.” 
+But all isn’t baleful and sad here. In “Cloud Children,” Father X muses on paper dolls in Gait’s paintings with this lovely thought: “Where children go … is a mystery. … Some say they take their daytime rest in Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem, and like him when their time is come they will ascend into heaven before a quire of angels and assembled Star Ships.” 
+“ Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas ” is a work of meditation, grief counseling, poetry, social commentary and visual art. Father X may not reveal his identity here, but the reader comes to know intimate details about relationships and emotions surrounding the death of his only child. Gait and Father X describe their efforts as a “silent prayer of witness for all the ghost families, those Phantoms of Sorrows, who will never laugh or cry together as a family, because of an abortion.” They hope that prying open the tightly locked matter of abortion will help to heal those who have had abortions or are victimized in some way. 
+Judith Gait is a graduate of California College of Arts and Crafts and received a Masters at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Fine Drawing. Her work is in public and private collections in America and abroad. She is an American citizen, residing in Britain. Father X is an addictions counselor and writer in Great Britain, who prefers to remain anonymous. 
+“Troubadours Sailing Hibiscus Seas:Meditations on Post Abortion Trauma” is a coffee-table size, 103-page paper book, with 33 color-illustrations and related commentary. You can purchase it at Amazon U.S.",FAKE
+3535,'Massive' French airstrikes hit Islamic State to retaliate for attacks,"France's military launched ""massive"" retaliatory airstrikes against Islamic State sites in Syria on Sunday night, saying French aircraft struck a command center and training camp at Raqqa.
+
+The French Air Force posted videos on its Facebook page of the planes embarking on the raid of the extremist group's de facto capital. The strikes come two days after the worst attacks in Paris since World War II. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks at six sites that killed 132 people and wounded hundreds more.
+
+The French Defense Ministry said the strikes targeted a command post, a training camp and a weapons depot, dropping 20 bombs on Raqqa. It said 10 fighter jets in the operation came from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan in coordination with U.S. forces.
+
+Speaking in Turkey at the G-20 summit, French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius said, ""France has always said that because she has been threatened and attacked by (Isis) it would be normal that she react in the framework of self defense,"" The Financial Times reported. ""It would be normal to take action. That’s what we did with the strikes on Raqqa, which is their headquarter. We cannot let (Isis) act without reacting.”
+
+A U.S.-led coalition that includes France has been conducting airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since last year.
+
+A group of anti-Islamic State activists in Syria called Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently reported Sunday that at least 30 airstrikes had hit Raqqa ""so far.""
+
+""No civilians hit so far, the hospitals are reporting. Electricity and water shut down. Panic among the civilians,” the group posted on its website. “Areas hit: Stadium, museum, hospital, government building (municipal).”
+
+“It’s sad how it always falls on our heads. Pray for us,” the group said.
+
+The group was created by 17 Syrian activists in April 2014 to document abuses by the Islamic State after the militant group took over and declared the northern Syrian city of Raqqa to be the caliphate’s capital.
+
+Working anonymously for their safety, members of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently secretly film and report from within the city and send the information to local and outside news media.",REAL
+9990,UNESCO passes anti-Israel resolution despite Tel Aviv brickbats,"Press TV 
+The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has approved a motion that endorses the right of the Palestinians to the al-Aqsa Mosque compound and slams Israeli provocations around the holy site. 
+UNESCO’s 21-member World Heritage Committee adopted the resolution in Wednesday’s secret ballot at the agency’s headquarters in Paris. 
+Ten countries voted for, two against, eight abstained and one was absent in the voting. 
+The resolution expresses UNESCO’s deep concerns over Israeli construction works and archaeological excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem al-Quds. 
+Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, welcomed the passage of the motion and accused the Tel Aviv regime of resorting to a campaign of distorting facts in a bid to legitimize its occupation of East Jerusalem al-Quds. 
+“Through an orchestrated campaign, Israel has been using archaeological claims and distortion of facts as a way to legitimize the annexation of occupied East Jerusalem,” Erekat said. 
+He further noted that the UNESCO resolution urges “respecting the status quo of its religious sites, including the al-Aqsa Mosque compound that continues to be threatened by the systematic incitement and provocative actions of the Israeli government and extremist Jewish groups.” 
+Earlier this month, UNESCO’s 58-member Executive Board approved a similar resolution, prompting a furious reaction from Israel as the regime suspended its ties with the agency. 
+Wednesday’s vote further infuriated Israel, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that the regime’s ambassador to UNESCO, Carmel Shama-Hacohen, had been recalled for consultations. 
+“We will decide what the next steps will be,” Netanyahu said in a statement. 
+Elias Sanbar, Palestine’s UNESCO envoy, fired back at those upset with the resolution and warned that Israelis were “politicizing religion and this is very dangerous.” 
+Makram Mustafa Queisi, Jordan’s ambassador to UNESCO, also stressed that UNESCO tried to tackle the issue from a “technical point of view” while many parties were politicizing it. Palestinian Ambassador to UNESCO Elias Sanbar (L) and Jordanian envoy Makram Mustafa Queisi address the media after an anti-Israel resolution was passed by secret ballot at the agency’s headquarters in Paris, France, October 26, 2016. (Photo by AP) 
+Palestine became the 195th full member of UNESCO in October 2011, triggering a cut in Tel Aviv’s funding to the agency. 
+The occupied territories have already been the scene of increased tensions ever since the Israeli regime imposed restrictions on the entry of Palestinian worshipers into the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in August 2015. 
+More than 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of last October.",FAKE
+8480,Debate: Washington's Syria policy,"The Debate Washington's Syria policy 
+In this episode of The Debate, Press TV has conducted an interview with Brian Becker, with the ANSWER Coalition, and Michael Lane, the founder of the American Institute for Foreign Policy, both from Washington, to discuss recent revelations by Virginia State Senate Richard Hayden that the war in Syria would have been over by now if the US had put an end to its intervention when Russia entered the war-ravaged country. Loading ...",FAKE
+7597,18 State Swat Team Drill In Prep for Backlash Against a Stolen Election,"
+
+Paul Martin, through his sources has learned of an 18 state Swat Team Drill. The drill is exceptionally covert but The Common Sense Show has learned that the intent of the drill is centralize and coordinate martial law activities over a large swath of states at the same time.
+It is apparent that the election is going to be stolen and the establishment and their minions are expecting a violent backlash. Remember, both the New York Times and the Washington Post contacted Dave Hodges and Mike Adams fishing for information regarding any potential headlines related to a planned violent backlash should Clinton steal the election.
+More on this coming suppression of the will of the people is included in the following video.
+
+P lease Donate to The Common Sense Show 
+PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US 
+
+ 
+
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.
+",FAKE
+808,"Cheney Hates Trump, Endorses Him Anyway","NOT ON THE SHORT LIST
+
+Former Vice President Dick Cheney may hate Donald Trump, but he’s fine with him leading the country.
+
+Cheney reportedly told CNN on Friday he intends to support the GOP nominee in 2016, just as he has every prior cycle.
+
+Shortly after the first presidential debate, Cheney told Fox News’ Bret Baier that the real estate mogul’s assertions regarding the September 11 attacks—including that George W. Bush willingly let them happen—were “way off base.”
+
+“He clearly doesn’t understand or has not spent any time learning about the facts of that period,” Cheney said.
+
+It’s a little curious that Cheney has decided to board the Trump Train. It’s also a break from the rest of Bush World, as representatives for George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush say neither former president will back the mogul’s presidential bid.
+
+In 2011, Trump made a YouTube video for his “From The Desk of Donald Trump” series, (a series I cannot recommend highly enough), in which the presumptive nominee trashed the former VP and his then-newly released memoir.
+
+“He’s very, very angry and nasty,” the mogul said. “I didn’t like Cheney when he was a vice president. I don’t like him now. And I don’t like people that rat out everybody like he’s doing in the book. I’m sure it’ll be a best-seller, but isn’t it a shame? Here’s a guy that did a rotten job as vice president. Nobody liked him. Tremendous divisiveness. And he’s gonna be making a lot of money on the book. I won’t be reading it.”
+
+“It just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which, personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing,” he said, discussing Nancy Pelosi with Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room.
+
+“He got us into the war with lies,” he continued. “And, I mean, look at the trouble Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant. And they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense. And, yet, Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction, by saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.”
+
+“Religious freedom’s been a very important part of our history and where we came from,” he added—but if Cheney has anything to do with it, then Trump’s America is where we’re going.
+
+",REAL
+9182,What it’s really like to be in the middle of the battle for Aleppo,"By Robert Fisk on October 31, 2016 Robert Fisk — The Independent Oct 30, 2016 People walk past damaged buildings in the opposition-held Tariq al-Bab neighbourhood of Aleppo, Syria, October 5, 2016. Click to enlarge 
+It was the rain that should have told us. High-altitude jets had flown over Aleppo the previous evening and, just occasionally, we heard their bombs exploding, far away in the countryside beyond the city. Then a soft, warm shower drifted over the ruins downtown and coated the streets and apartment blocks of western Aleppo with drizzle, and there was – for this city, at least – a strange silence. Dawn brought a brown, overcast sky through which no Russian or Syrian pilots could see the ground unless they chose to fly at low level through the downpour, which they never do. 
+And that was when the bombardment of western Aleppo began. The mortars and shells broke across the city in a steady and growing rumble of sound that left only one question in our minds. Amid the ruins of eastern Aleppo, with its tens of thousands of trapped civilians, where on earth did its few thousand largely Islamist fighters, get all this ammunition? Syrian army long-range artillery, high on the hill behind the old Meridien hotel, banged away at the eastern horizon where smudges of grey smoke began to curl into the dun-coloured sky. 
+It was not quite the storm of steel that the media – many in far-away Beirut – would have the world believe. The battle for divided Aleppo has been fought for too long and its people besieged and then rebesieged – in both east and west – that the front lines have congealed into the square miles of dust and ruins that are now almost impassable. You might join the chorus of exaggeration about Srebrenica or Grozny, but Stalingrad this is not. 
+Yet it shook both the civilians and the regime in the west of the city. Just after breakfast, as I was gazing eastwards through the rain towards the ancient citadel, there was a sudden clap of sound as a shell bashed into the governor’s modern office block. I saw bits of the side of the building flying into the air. The Aleppo governor, whose residence is itself sealed off by anti-car-bomb concrete barricades, was safe in Damascus where he was meeting Bashar al-Assad and other regional leaders. Others were not so fortunate. 
+By midday, Syrian radio was announcing seven dead – a little, almost insignificant figure when you remember the new graves in the packed cemeteries of this place – but the bombardment had a dramatic effect in the streets. The loudspeaker on the minaret of a mosque scarcely 100 yards away clicked – the electrical “click” and hiss of the sound system is the prelude to every supercharged prayer across the Middle East – and a voice shouted: “They are attacking. They are attacking. They are coming from the north, from Zahra, from Bin Yamin and towards al-Hamadaniyeh.” 
+And this was the first indication anyone in the streets was given that the incoming fire was not only arriving from eastern Aleppo but from south-west of the city, from the fields and ruined factories and broken sewage farms where Nusra and some of its Islamist allies still hold territory that snakes all the way north to the Turkish frontier – from which weapons regularly arrive to increase this feast of violence. 
+Wars inspire their own Hollywood version of reality and, in a darkened Ba’ath party headquarters with the rumble of explosions outside, I was to hear another rumour of war that will surely acquire its own mystique in the days to come. American planes had been seen dropping arms supplies into eastern Aleppo, Syrian jets had warned them off but some parachutes had been seen. “I think there is a video,” an otherwise extremely rational and intelligent official added. 
+There was, of course, no video – there never is – nor are Syrian MiGs in any position to challenge US air power. Washington is not going to provoke Russia by sending its fighter-bombers from Turkey over Aleppo. Besides, given the American propensity for inaccuracy, any parachutes would surely have missed their target. 
+Source Comment — Oct 31, 2016 Robert Fisk’s dismissal of claims that the U.S. was dropping arms supplies into eastern Aleppo calls into question his objectivity as a journalist. For we know from earlier reports that the U.S. and its allies are alleged to have supplied Syrian “opposition fighters” by parachute drops . For example last October Reuters was reporting that the U.S. was airdropping supplies to “Syrian rebels” in northern Syria. More recent reports allege that the U.S. was “considering arming” CIA backed fighters with anti-aircraft weapons. So why is Robert Fisk so quick to dismiss these claims without investigating them?",FAKE
+4284,"Fine, give the GOP four years: The liberal case for either Bernie Sanders, or electing a Republican president","Democrats, however, should be concerned for a different reason. The last consecutive two-term presidents from the same party were James Madison and James Monroe, who were both Democratic-Republicans. That transition occurred before the formation of our modern two-party system.
+
+The 2020 election is one Democrats cannot afford to lose. It is a census year, which means the future of the House will be determined for the next decade. It is also highly possible that at least two (or three) seats will open on the Supreme Court, given the ages of the justices—more than are likely to open between 2016 and 2020. If the Democrats do not win, the GOP will have a solid hold on government for at least another 10 years.
+
+And that raises one very important question: Do Democratic voters really want to hitch their wagon to four years of a center-right candidate like Hillary Clinton?
+
+The Democratic Party as a whole is moving to the left—albeit slowly. Elizabeth Warren would never have gotten elected in the ’90s, let alone become as influential as she has. It can easily be said that the Democrats are no longer the party of the Clintons (the New Democrats), and are instead, the party of Elizabeth Warren. If Hillary Clinton wins the nod in 2016, and manages to win the general, it is unlikely she will be able to excite the base of her own party in four years—as the DNC may slowly be realizing. She’s a hard enough sell now in spite of every effort chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has expended on her behalf. Many on the left will not turn out to vote for Clinton—in fact, a new poll showed that 20 percent of Democrats would defect and vote Trump over Hillary in a general election.
+
+Clinton’s problems start with image. More Americans mistrust her than trust her. This may be due to her various “scandals,” especially her private email server. But it probably also has something to do with the fact that she is politically expedient. A look at her campaign strategy throughout her career is telling. In this regard, she is nearly indistinguishable from the GOP. In 2008, her campaign reportedly circulated a picture of Barack Obama dressed as a Somali elder without providing context for the image, in a seeming effort to stir fears that the now-president was a Muslim. In this current election cycle, Clinton has relied on Republican talking points to attack Bernie Sanders. Specifically, she cited Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal’s faulty analysis of the cost of his domestic plan. Clinton has gone as far as attacking him for proposing universal health care—a move 2008 Hillary called out as a Republican tactic.
+
+Clinton has also resorted to Republican talking points to justify opposing a $15 minimum wage. Though she calls them her greatest enemies, her argument relies on the same false premise as the GOP’s: it will cost jobs. First, Clinton purposefully ignores that a raise to $15 per hour would be gradual. Additionally, she pays no heed to the fact that evidence indicating such increases will cost jobs is thin. In fact, studies overwhelmingly suggest that minimum wage hikes have no impact on employment.
+
+Additionally, many on the left worry that there is no way for Democrats to know what Hillary Clinton will morph into, given her numerous flip-flops. And for all of her talk about fighting for the middle class, she has an uncomfortably cozy relationship with Wall Street and powerful private industries (oil, private prisons, big banks, cable companies, etc.).
+
+But Clinton’s problems run much deeper than impressions of her character. As a candidate, Hillary is closer to George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan than to the heart of the Democratic Party, FDR. Progressives know this about her. She exists out-of-time—propped up by a Democratic establishment similarly stuck on Third Way politics. Hillary is a New Democrat in 2016; she’s caught between two narratives: the GOP/Reagan narrative that government is too big, and inherently inefficient, and the Democratic narrative, that government can and should work for all to solve the problems we face as a country.
+
+Clinton’s background creates a disconnect between her policies and those of her party.
+
+Hillary’s “strongest issue” is foreign policy, given her years of experience at the State Department. Unfortunately, her foreign policy ideas don’t fit with many on the left. Put simply, she is an interventionist hawk. In 2008 Barack Obama compared her to George W. Bush, and that comparison still seems appropriate. She did, after all, vote for the Iraq War and support the use of torture on detainees. Although she has called her war vote “a mistake,” we must look at it in its proper context. When we consider the initiatives she pushed at the State Department (the bombing of Libya, arming the Syrian rebels, and selling arms to Clinton Foundation donors), as well as her current plans, like the no-fly-zone in Syria, it seems less of a one-off, and more like part of a pattern.
+
+Clinton’s strategy is to deal with ISIS is nearly indistinguishable from Marco Rubio’s: defeat ISIS rather than contain them by forming a coalition with our allies to take back territory, sending in ground troops, disrupting their recruitment, and ramping up airstrikes.
+
+Hillary’s plan, like those of the Republicans, is predicated on the idea that by taking out ISIS, U.S. involvement in the region can end.
+
+What Clinton’s and the Republican plans fail to take into account is political culture. Changing political culture within a generation is impossible, let alone changing it in a part of the world Westerners, as a rule, barely understand; where people mistrust and resent us, and where democratic tradition is a novel concept.
+
+The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is not the only part of the globe where intervention is Hillary’s modus operandi. Her involvement in legitimizing the violent coup regime in Honduras indicates that as president, interference would also define her Latin America policy.
+
+Besides intervention, Clinton’s foreign policy prioritizes “free markets.” She appears to view the world through the lens of how much multinational business, rather than domestic companies or workers, benefits. Though she has now flip-flopped on both the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), her years of support for each suggest her shift is politically motivated.
+
+All things considered, it is safe to call Clinton a neoconservative.
+
+Economically speaking, in spite of touting herself as a “progressive who likes to get things done,” Clinton is essentially a moderate Republican—which makes economic progressives angry. Her capital gains tax proposal does not increase long-term capital gains taxes, and instead targets short-term investments. This might sound solid on paper, but, as I’ve said before, it will impact new investors and the middle class, while preserving the status quo where billionaires, who keep the majority of their assets wrapped up in long term investments, pay lower rates than their secretaries. She is also against reinstating Glass-Steagall, and breaking up the banks—instead opting for a game of regulatory catch-up to monitor “shadow banking.” Her plan barely tackles symptoms while leaving the underlying illness untouched. To make matters worse, this issue is time-sensitive as there may be another financial crisis brewing with subprime auto loans. A collapse would spell disaster for the Democratic Party should it hit after eight years of President Obama with another Democrat in the Oval Office.
+
+However, Hillary seems unconcerned. She’s even attacked proponents of a new Glass-Steagall, on the premise that her policy is stronger—the only plan that tackles shadow banking. As Zach Carter of the Huffington Post explains in his recent article titled “Hillary Clinton Is Not Telling the Truth About Wall Street,” her claims are dishonest. Shadow banking is a direct consequence of the too-big-to-fail model. The concentration of financial power in just six institutions is the fundamental problem we face. The size of the banks allowed them to exert unprecedented influence over rating agencies like S&P or Moody’s, due to the pay-per-rating model. This undermined the integrity of our entire rating system. At the same time, lenders were taking insurance policies out on their loans and products. The size of the banks and by extension, the sheer volume of the insured debt is why, when borrowers began defaulting, insurers like AIG went under. All of this could have been avoided with a decentralized banking system like the one Bernie Sanders is proposing. Clinton’s stance on social programs and spending is equally disappointing to many liberals and progressives. Though she used to, she no longer supports universal healthcare. She explained her flip-flop during one of the few sanctioned DNC presidential debates by saying, “[t]he revolution never came.” Hillary is also against expanding Social Security. She does not support free college tuition for all. Instead she feels it should essentially be a means-tested welfare program. And speaking of welfare, Hillary has stood by her husband’s signing of the disastrous Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (aka welfare reform), deeming it “necessary” in spite of evidence that it caused a spike in extreme poverty particularly in minority communities. This bill was a Republican initiative—part of the “Contract With America.” Clinton isn’t exactly Nancy Reagan on drugs, but her “evolution” on marijuana/cannabis has not come very far since the ’90s—and that’s difficult for many young Democrats to accept. Clinton also scares many environmentalists. She used to be in favor of the Keystone Pipeline until it became a political liability for her, and her State Department helped spread fracking to the rest of the world. She also has trouble convincing some people of her support for LGBTQ equality. It wasn’t until 2013 that she fully embraced same-sex marriage. Prior to that she believed that marriage was a “sacred bond between a man and a woman.” She also supported the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). She hasn’t even been consistent on gun control. Sure, Clinton talks a big game now about background checks and modest reforms, supporting President Obama in his executive actions. But in 2008, she was “Annie Oakley,” accusing Obama of being hostile to hunters’ rights. Everything about Hillary Clinton’s record suggests that she will negotiate from the center/right—leaving only one direction to go in compromising with Republicans: further right. Like her husband before her, she’ll likely use social programs and financial reform as bargaining chips. After all, she’s already given up on universal health care. Her commitment to campaign finance reform is also doubtful considering how much she is raising for this campaign from big donors (Time Warner and Morgan Stanley are both in her top 10). Clinton is not the candidate Democrats should back. This leaves the Democratic Party with two options: 1) Nominate Bernie Sanders. He’s the candidate drawing the largest crowds; the candidate beating the GOP field by the widest margins in a majority of polls; the candidate Americans feel is honest. If anyone has a shot at breaking the trend of back-and-forth in presidential elections, it is Sanders for the simple reason that he has been an independent for the majority of his political career. His outsider image gives him the greatest chance at beating the odds against consecutive two-term presidents from the same party. 2) Let a Republican have four years. With a Hillary ticket, this scenario isn’t out of the question—especially if the candidate is Donald Trump, who can run on the fact that he donated to Clinton. There’s a cold logic in this move. In 2020, Democrats can run someone like Elizabeth Warren who excites the base. Coming off of four years with the GOP, a two-term presidency would be easily attainable with the added benefit that any economic downturns that happen between now and then would be blamed on Republicans. Even if one hit during the first term of the newly elected Democrat, the GOP would still take the fall. Also worth mentioning, people typically vote down the party line—which is good for Democrats, considering it is a census year. 2020 could see the Democrats take the presidency, the House and the Senate—and with the likelihood that two or three seats will open on the court, they’d control all three branches of government. The downside to this option is that Senate Democrats would have to obstruct for four years. Such a move will exact a political cost, but as the Republicans have shown, obstruction isn’t a death knell in elections. Of course, the main drawback is the fact that people will suffer as budgets are slashed. There’s also the high probability that liberals will lose one seat on the Supreme Court, as well as federal judge appointments—all of which be damaging. The only mitigating factor is that, as previously mentioned, there’s strong possibility that more seats will open up on the SCOTUS between 2020 and 2024 than between 2016 to 2020. “Bernie or Bust” is undoubtedly a controversial position, as many Democrats insist that if Hillary Clinton gets the nod, she should be elected president. This argument relies on the-lesser-of-two-evils mind-set; vote Hillary because she’s better than the GOP. However, with all things weighed and considered, it is clear that Clinton should neither be the Democratic nominee nor the president, and that her differences with her opponents are not so stark. The 2020 election cycle is far too important to risk it on a candidate who can barely relate to her own party now—especially taking into account historical trends. Democrats must ask themselves where a Hillary presidency leaves the country in four years. Would her half-measures be enough that they would feel comfortable handing the keys over to the GOP in 2020? That is why “Bernie or Bust” is the real “lesser-of-two-evils” option.",REAL
+5073,"Obama’s DNC letdown: The president needed to hit it out of the park, but he surprisingly fell short","Barack Obama’s signature, as a speaker, is his ability to stay on-topic. While most politicians try to cram everything, plus a stash of kittens and a stray puppy to boot, into their speeches, POTUS is known for writing speeches that stray little and focus heavily on the thesis at hand. Last night, in his speech supporting Hillary Clinton, was the last big foreseeable speech of his career. Last night, of all nights, he should have really brought his mighty oratory skills to bear.
+
+Sadly, however, his speech was a bit…meh.
+
+Not that it was bad, mind you. Obama hit a lot of high points, both shading Clinton’s opponent, Donald Trump and highlighting how progressive and successful the Democratic agenda was, an especially important topic with all the ill-informed Bernie Sanders dead-enders in the audience who were convinced that Clinton is basically a Republican.
+
+By most political speech standards, Obama was a 9 out of 10. But Obama is a better speaker than most. Unlike most politicians, he’s an actual writer — the author of a best-selling memoir! — and he understands certain basics about speechifying most politicians don’t: Keep it short. Keep it on topic. Don’t be digressive.
+
+And yet, for some reason, Obama delivered a Bill Clinton-esque performance, meandering around his own record, taking random digs at Donald Trump, and hitting applause lines (YES WE CAN) almost at random.
+
+It was especially confusing in light of his wife’s out-of-the-park performance on Monday night, which stuck to his more classic formula of short, well-structured speeches that tell coherent stories. Michelle Obama told an easy-to-remember tale, of sacrifice and reward, of watching her little girls cash in the hard work by women and people of color to make America truly a land of opportunity.
+
+It’s hard to put a thesis statement into Barack Obama’s speech. He roamed around, hat-tipping Black Lives Matter and Clinton’s hard work, but one never got the sense, from him, of Clinton as a friend. Michelle Obama sold Clinton that way, portraying her as an older woman she had grown close to and come to admire. Bill Clinton had done it, portraying his wife as she frankly, as a human, deserves to be seen: As a kind-hearted woman who loves her child and can set human male hearts a-flutter.
+
+But to Barack Obama, the man who sat with her as they watched their hard work result in the death of the man who inflicted 9/11 on us? No real warmth was detected. It’s hard for me to imagine going through that with someone and not feeling bound to them. How our president, a man who is a genius at making the incomprehensible seem downright folksy, failed to convey that, is a great mystery. That said, I don’t think Obama should pull himself off the trail or feel like a liability to Clinton. His comments about how they reconciled post-primary offer an important example to Bernie Sanders holdouts who don’t understand the basic facts of politics. He is also, as much as it pains me to say, better at delivering sick burns in the direction of Donald Trump better than any other politician on the planet. Trump’s impotent, small-fingered response already indicates that. But that was a crowd that was fully ready to be united and scream its head off at the chance of electing the first female president, and, for some reason, Obama just fell a bit short of the task. As he noted in the speech, being the leader of the free world is hard work — which is why we should want Clinton in the job — so perhaps he didn’t have time to tell a better story. Still, a shame. Most of us wanted to hear the real story of how these two former foes became friends. Obama could have told that story in style, and made history while he did it. His failure to do so is on him. But we’ll always have his wife. Michelle, 2024! Sí se puede!",REAL
+2587,Netanyahu Back To Barely Pretending He Supports A Two-State Solution,"Fresh off his party's victory in this week's parliamentary election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday walked back a statement from earlier this week in which he had ruled out a ""two-state"" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
+
+But just a few days earlier, in the midst of what then looked like an uphill battle for Netanyahu's Likud Party, the prime minister said that a two-state solution would never happen on his watch. “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands, is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel,"" he told an Israeli news website on Monday, one day before the Israeli election.
+
+These comments contradicted a 2009 speech, in which Netanyahu endorsed the two-state approach as a way to attain peace in the region. In July 2014, however, Netanyahu made clear he had no interest in a fully sovereign Palestinian state.
+
+Netanyahu added in Thursday's interview that if the current Palestinian territories did attain statehood, the result would be a ""terrorist state"" because the Palestinians would receive arms from Iran. As long as that was the case, he said, a two-state solution was not possible.
+
+The prime minister's comments earlier in the week prompted a threat from White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, who said Wednesday that the U.S. would ""re-evaluate our position and the path forward in this situation,"" and might even explore pressing for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.
+
+The Obama administration also took issue with Netanyahu's election-day text message blasts warning supporters that “Arab voters are going to the polls in droves.”
+
+“Rhetoric that seeks to marginalize one segment of their population is deeply concerning and it is divisive and I can tell you that these are views the administration intends to communicate directly to the Israelis,"" Earnest said.
+
+When asked on Thursday by MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell to respond to allegations that he was a racist, Netanyahu simply said, ""I'm not.""
+
+He also reaffirmed the long-standing relationship between the United States and Israel, despite recent tensions over congressional Republicans' invitation to Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress without giving proper notice to the White House.
+
+""There are so many areas where we must work together, will work together with the United States, and the president, because we have no other alternative,"" Netanyahu said. ""America has no greater ally than Israel and Israel has no greater ally than the United States.""",REAL
+1893,Rand Paul is about to kick off a Republican civil war on foreign policy,"Sen. Rand Paul is about to announce that he's running for president — kicking off a long-postponed Republican civil war on foreign policy.
+
+Unlike the rest of the likely GOP presidential field, Paul is a die-hard true believer in scaling down America's involvement in conflicts around the world. That pits him against the mainstream, hawks in the Republican party whose ideas are sure to dominate the campaign. By running for president, Paul hopes to inject his ideas into the debate and shift priorities his party's held for decades.
+
+Paul's presence alone is a threat to people in the party establishment. The party's most hawkish voices, fearing exactly this, are mobilizing in force to stop Paul — lobbying internally and even potentially running candidates whose sole purpose would be challenging Paul on foreign policy.
+
+The coming campaign, then, is a major test of where the Republican Party view of foreign policy is heading.
+
+Paul is pretty open about what he believes on foreign policy. It's a simple pitch: no more foreign wars and less government involvement in our lives in the name of security. It also happens to be 180 degrees from what most other Republicans think.
+
+Paul supports nuclear negotiations with Iran (though he's been conspicuously quiet about the recently announced framework deal). He's tacitly endorsed the Obama approach to Russia and Ukraine, and has vociferously opposed NSA surveillance.
+
+He's blasted both the Afghanistan surge and the Libya intervention. Today, he opposes arming the Syrian rebels to fight ISIS or Bashar al-Assad.
+
+""After the tragedies of Iraq and Libya, Americans are right to expect more from their country when we go to war,"" Paul said in an October speech widely seen as an outline of his 2016 foreign policy platform.
+
+Paul often builds conservative cred for these ideas by couching them as critiques of Democrats. In his recent speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee, for example, he bashed ""Hillary's war in Libya"" for ushering in chaos that helped jihadi groups flourish.
+
+This is a standard non-interventionist argument — America's allegedly humanitarian wars often produce terrible unintended consequences — that also implicitly criticizes Republican hawks. But because it's couched as an attack on Democrats, it can play with Republicans.
+
+Paul will occasionally do something that makes it seem like he's moving in a more hawkish direction. Sometimes that's a sop to political necessity. Paul used to call for zeroing out US aid to Israel — an extremely unpopular position in the GOP that he's now reversed.
+
+But other times, it's a fakeout. Paul learned from his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, that refusing to compromise or tailor your libertarian message at all will simply lead to marginalization inside the GOP. Instead, he's developed a more subtle strategy: repurpose classic Republican positions and tactics to endorse non-interventionist, rather than hawkish, views about foreign policy.
+
+Take a recent amendment on defense spending. Paul, a longtime critic of wasteful defense spending, proposed a larger defense budget — shocking even stalwart libertarians.
+
+But Paul wasn't mounting a serious campaign to hike defense spending. The amendment was designed to embarrass hawkish Sen. Marco Rubio, a likely primary rival. Paul's amendment proposed increasing spending by the exact same amount as one Rubio had proposed earlier, only Paul paid for it with other domestic spending cuts, which Rubio didn't.
+
+""This amendment is to lay down a marker that if you believe we need more funding for national defense, you should show how you would pay for it,"" Doug Stafford, a senior Paul adviser, told Reason. The whole thing was a stunt designed to show that increasing defense spending requires tradeoffs from any Republican who's serious about the debt.
+
+Paul is basically alone on these issues in the primary. Virtually every plausible Republican candidate has argued that the Obama administration's major problem is that it's been too unwilling to intervene forcefully around the world. Paul, of course, thinks the opposite.
+
+If Paul wins the primary — let alone the presidency — then the GOP and its elected officials will have to line up behind him. That will mean defending his foreign policy against Democrats, who will likely blast Paul from an interventionist point of view.
+
+The Democratic criticism of Paul's big October speech shows how this dynamic would work. ""Paul's been clear about his goal,"" DNC Press Secretary Michael Czin told reporters before the speech. ""He wants to see America retreat from our responsibilities around the world."" Republican Party organs like the RNC couldn't just take this stuff. They'd need to defend their candidate, essentially forcing Republicans around the country to back Paul's non-interventionism.
+
+As Republicans defend Paul, Democrats might also drift hawkish as they unite against Paul's philosophy. That's particularly true if Hillary Clinton, who is already on the more interventionist side of the Democratic spectrum, is the nominee.
+
+It's hard to say if a Paul nomination would transform the Republican Party's generally hawkish positions in the long run. But it'd be the biggest challenge to the GOP's hawkish orthodoxy in decades.
+
+The bulk of the Republican Party's foreign policy is relatively hawkish. Paul's campaign represents an intolerable threat to their dominant position in the party, so he'll face massive resistance from them in the coming months.
+
+Yesterday, for example, Bloomberg's Josh Rogin reported that a new group called the Foundation for a Secure and Prosperous America planned to spend ""seven figures"" on an ad campaign painting Paul as soft on foreign policy, particularly on Iran. Rick Reed, the man behind the campaign, is the same guy who spearheaded the infamous ""Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"" attacks on John Kerry.
+
+Reed's group is hardly the first major institutional pushback against Paul. Both Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rep. Pete King, and former UN Ambassador John Bolton appear to be considering runs. None really have a real shot at the nomination. It's very clear, as MSNBC's Benjy Sarlin reports, that the entire point of their runs would be to attack Paul from the interventionist right.
+
+Whether these anti-Paul campaigns succeed is an open, but really important, question. Since the early Bush administration, the GOP's hawkish factions have enjoyed essentially unchallenged control over the party's national agenda. In fact, there probably hasn't been this serious a challenge to Republican orthodoxy on foreign policy since the Reagan revolution.
+
+Paul's announcement today, then, isn't just about him. It's about whether the Republican Party is open to a fundamentally different way of approaching the world.",REAL
+3102,"Pope Francis is not endorsing Kim Davis's views, Vatican says","The Vatican moved to distance Pope Francis from the controversial county clerk on Friday, saying, 'The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis.'
+
+Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis making a statement to the media at the front door of the Rowan County Judicial Center in Morehead, Ky. earlier this month. On Friday, the Vatican distanced Pope Francis from Kim Davis, the focal point in the gay marriage debate in the US, saying she was one of dozens of people the pope greeted in the US and that their Sept. 24 encounter at the Vatican's embassy in Washington ""should not be considered a form of support of her position."" Davis, an Apostolic Christian, spent five days in jail for defying a series of federal court orders to issue same-sex marriage licenses after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the country.
+
+The Vatican on Friday distanced Pope Francis from Kim Davis, saying she was one of dozens of people who met with the pontiff on his visit to the United States and that their meeting was not an endorsement.
+
+""The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Ms. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,"" Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement.
+
+Friday’s announcement clears up days of speculation over Davis's 15 minutes at the Vatican's embassy in Washington on Sept. 24, which suggested to many that the pontiff condoned her decision as a Kentucky county clerk to defy a US Supreme Court order to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
+
+During the meeting, Francis gave Davis a rosary, reportedly telling her ""to 'stand strong,'"" according to The Christian Science Monitor.
+
+Since it had also come just days after another meeting he had with nuns opposing a government mandate on contraceptives, the encounter was not wholly unfitting with Francis’s style of reaching out to “people he calls on the 'peripheries,'"" The Monitor reported.
+
+The pope also said ""Conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right,"" according to NBC News. ""And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right.""
+
+Pope Francis ""took somebody on the front of the newspapers for faith-related concerns and met with her,"" Joe Valenzano, an expert on religious rhetoric at the University of Dayton in Ohio, previously told the Monitor. ""[The pope told Davis that] you don’t lose faith because you lose a battle. That’s not the pope weighing in on the culture wars or endorsing Kim Davis’s position. That’s the pope endorsing the idea that religion is important to people.""
+
+""Such brief greetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the pope’s characteristic kindness and availability,"" said Father Lombardi. ""The only real audience granted by the pope at the Nunciature was with one of his former students and his family.""
+
+Davis gained national attention this summer for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses in one Kentucky county after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the country. She later spent five days in jail for refusing to adhere to federal court orders.",REAL
+7368,Feminism Has Lost The Minds Of Young Women,"Home This Month Popular Feminism Has Lost The Minds Of Young Women Feminism Has Lost The Minds Of Young Women Maximus Decimus Meridius 
+Maximus is a Man, capital M, period. Love. Truth. Justice. Liberty. Respect. These are the lodestones pointing true to magnetic masculinity in a polarized feminist west. His goal for writing on ROK is to be the gadfly that provokes thought and counters groupthink. October 29, 2016 The Sexes 
+The idea that feminism is dead is gaining ground all across the west. One would like to think it is because of the trail blazing of the man-o-sphere, and to a great degree it is. But truly, the root of feminism’s death was in Man, capital M, from the very beginning. One look at Conan is all a man needs to know this truth. 
+Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. 
+The women’s movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There’s no room for dissent. It’s just like Mean Girls. 
+If they had listened to me they could have gotten the ship steered in the right direction. My wing of feminism—the pro-sex wing—was silenced. I was practically lynched for endorsing The Rolling Stones. Susan Faludi is still saying I’m not a feminist. Who made her pope? 
+Feminist ideology is like a new religion for a lot of neurotic women. You can’t talk to them about anything. 
+~ Camille Paglia on Rob Ford, Rihanna and rape culture for MacLeans.ca 
+Neurotic women indeed. 
+Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars/Prison Planet fame was bang on in his assessment of feminism at the end of 2014. But he may have underestimated his conclusions in my opinion. Feminists did not just lose the debate, they lost the war. 
+The feminist attempt to demonize normal male/female behaviour in public— men initiating contact with a female with a hello and attempt to strike up a conversation —backfired in less than a month. 
+When you have a woman volunteer to walk down the street as Princess Leia, the QUEEN of 70’s patriarchal sexist ‘misogyny’, to ridicule feminists, you have lost the war for hearts and minds. 
+And when I say hearts and minds… I mean the silent majority of young women who want NOTHING to do with feminism. 
+Leia makes it clear in this video that boys will be boys. So too will jawas, Darth Vader and even Yoda apparently, that sly dude. Who knew? 
+And that’s a good thing! Men and women are meant to interact and engage in romantic courtship. Feminists may hate this, but the vast majority of women still prefer, and expect, the man to take the initiative to get the girl. This is how men and women were created and evolved, you can’t fight Darwin and God and come out on top. 
+This video shows that the majority of NORMAL women LOVE male attention. They WANT men to look at them. They WANT men to notice them. Why? 
+THEY WANT A MAN!!! 
+I realized this is the case when I decided to google the fast rising phenomenon of women against feminism . 
+This image from the Women Against Feminism Tumblr page really hits home the loss for feminism. This woman was raped. She is not running around spreading lies like the UVA RAPE HOAX story that Rolling Stone ran and had to retract . She justs wants to go back to living a normal life. She does not want to be angry at ALL men for the crime of ONE of them. She does not want to demonize all men in some sad attempt to get revenge. She does not want to be a victim. Feminists have lost the female youth of Millenials, the very generation that is supposed to obliterate the patriarchy completely in the 21st century. 
+I understand some men who are still angry over feminism may proclaim these women are doing nothing more than crying for sympathy and attention now that Millenial men have become vocal, blunt and merciless in their attacks against feminism and the current generation of ‘women’ it has reared . The problem with this type of knee-jerk reaction is just that—you’re being a jerk. Yes, far too many western women for comfort are no good for a relationship anymore. But, that does not also translate into there being no young women who are not just as frustrated and angry at feminism as you are and the feminists who claim to speak for them. 
+Young women might not think about it as much since feminism has clearly made the road to independence (an illusion) easier for them to choose, but these women are taking note that men are completely ignoring them now that they have surpassed men in almost all aspects of western society. 
+Case in point. 
+I met a wonderful young Russian blonde a little while back. Twenty-three. Tight. Feminine. So freaking perfect. We hit it off immediately on first contact. Having myself only traveled outside the west twice, I still primarily meet foreign women in my own country and every time I do, I am blown away by their immediate friendliness and ease in my company compared to western girls. As I conversed with this well educated and refined young Russian lady, she told me she was attending university and so naturally, I asked her what she noticed most about the boys on campus compared to back home. 
+Her answer was revealing… Boys? They completely ignore the girls. Don’t even look at them. Just walk on by. 
+This really surprised her. Being a feminine Russian girl who expects men to look at women, this behaviour by western men was completely alien to her. 
+Men, young boys, in their prime 20s, completely ignoring women on campus as they go about their day. 
+According to Wikipedia, women against feminism started on Tumblr in 2013 . I see #WomenAgainstFeminism as a sign that many young women are fed up with feminism and male bashing in western society. It is not a sign of women speaking with two faces and trying to work both sides of the gender war to their advantage. All you have to do is look into the eyes of this young woman to know just how desperate these girls are for a real relationship, one with love and respect . I don’t think men realize how significant a movement like women against feminism is. 
+As men, we are naturally comfortable with open conflict and expressing not just dissenting, but offensive opinions. The very existence of women openly declaring they are rejecting feminism, and risking social ostracism in a wholly feminist dominated university climate, is why feminists are hyperventilating and going into ape-shit, mentally insane overdrive mode to try and salvage what support they have left . Here are just a few mainstream articles trying to push the meme feminism is not dead and just needs a ‘generational’ adjustment.",FAKE
+7964,Flashback: Clinton cheered 11th-hour indictment that doomed Bush re-election,"Print 
+Whispers of “payback” are being directed at Hillary Clinton after she decried as “unprecedented” the surprise FBI revival of its probe of her email scandal. 
+That’s because 24 years ago, as former President George H.W. Bush was surging back against challenger Bill Clinton, a special prosecutor raised new charges against Bush in the Iran-Contra probe, prompting Clinton to claim he was running against a “culture of corruption.” 
+Many Republicans claimed that the indictment made by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh against former Reagan-era Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger the weekend before the 1992 election cost Bush a second term. The indictment, later thrown out, challenged Bush’s claim that he did not know about a controversial arms-for-hostages deal that dogged the Reagan-Bush administration. 
+When it came, Clinton seized on it, saying for example, “Secretary Weinberger’s note clearly shows that President Bush has not been telling the truth when he says he was out of the loop.” Clinton added, “It demonstrates that President Bush knew and approved of President Reagan’s secret deal to swap arms for hostages.”",FAKE
+10111,The Story of How the DOJ Tried to Thwart an FBI Investigation Into the Clinton Foundation,"at 1:27 pm 2 Comments 
+Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a fascinating and troubling article detailing how aggressively the Department of Injustice moved to stymie efforts of FBI agents who wanted to investigate pay-to-play criminality with regard to the Clinton Foundation. 
+Of course, none of this should come as a surprise. The Justice Department under President Obama never met a powerful person it cared to prosecute. Indeed, under Eric Holder’s crony reign (same now with Loretta Lynch), it’s been apparent for a very long time that senior leadership at the DOJ see the institution’s primary role to be the coddling and protection of oligarch criminals, especially those in the financial sector (see: Must Watch Video – “The Veneer of Justice in a Kingdom of Crime” ). 
+The death of the rule of law in America, otherwise known as the two-tier justice system, has been a key topic of mine since the very beginning. In fact, I think it is the number one cancer plaguing our society at this time. As I warned in the 2014 post, New Report – The United States’ Sharp Drop in Economic Freedom Since 2000 Driven by “Decline in Rule of Law” : 
+In my opinion, the U.S. is living on borrowed time. The entrepreneurial spirit is still very much alive, and a lot of innovative things are happening in the tech area, but other than that, the U.S. economy looks very much like a third word oligarchy. From my perspective, we need to reinstate the rule of law at once. The bad actors amongst the rich and powerful will continue to feast relentlessly on the productive parts of the economy so long as they they are never held accountable for their crimes. Simply put: The rule of law must be restored immediately. 
+When it comes to the restoration of the rule of law, there is simply no time to waste. 
+The rule of law has not been restored, a realization that is consistently reenforced by the lengths to which the Department of Justice goes to protect the powerful. Yesterday’s WSJ article gives us an additional glimpse into how that happens behind the scenes. 
+  article, FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe : 
+The surprise disclosure that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are taking a new look at Hillary Clinton’s email use lays bare, just days before the election, tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee. 
+The new investigative effort, disclosed by FBI Director James Comey on Friday, shows a bureau at times in sharp internal disagreement over matters related to the Clintons, and how to handle those matters fairly and carefully in the middle of a national election campaign. Even as the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up, according to people familiar with the matter. 
+New details show that senior law-enforcement officials repeatedly voiced skepticism of the strength of the evidence in a bureau investigation of the Clinton Foundation, sought to condense what was at times a sprawling cross-country effort, and, according to some people familiar with the matter, told agents to limit their pursuit of the case. The probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity. 
+Some investigators grew frustrated, viewing FBI leadership as uninterested in probing the charity, these people said. Others involved disagreed sharply, defending FBI bosses and saying Mr. McCabe in particular was caught between an increasingly acrimonious fight for control between the Justice Department and FBI agents pursuing the Clinton Foundation case. 
+Early this year, four FBI field offices—New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark.—were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling, according to people familiar with the matter. 
+Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public-corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation, these people said. 
+The Washington field office was probing financial relationships involving Mr. McAuliffe before he became a Clinton Foundation board member, these people said. Mr. McAuliffe has denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyer has said the probe is focused on whether he failed to register as an agent of a foreign entity. 
+In February, FBI officials made a presentation to the Justice Department, according to these people. By all accounts, the meeting didn’t go well. 
+Some said that is because the FBI didn’t present compelling evidence to justify more aggressive pursuit of the Clinton Foundation, and that the career anticorruption prosecutors in the room simply believed it wasn’t a very strong case. Others said that from the start, the Justice Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive of the case. 
+“That was one of the weirdest meetings I’ve ever been to,” one participant told others afterward, according to people familiar with the matter. 
+Anticorruption prosecutors at the Justice Department told the FBI at the meeting they wouldn’t authorize more aggressive investigative techniques, such as subpoenas, formal witness interviews, or grand-jury activity. But the FBI officials believed they were well within their authority to pursue the leads and methods already under way, these people said. 
+According to a person familiar with the probes, on Aug. 12, a senior Justice Department official called Mr. McCabe to voice his displeasure at finding that New York FBI agents were still openly pursuing the Clinton Foundation probe during the election season. Mr. McCabe said agents still had the authority to pursue the issue as long as they didn’t use overt methods requiring Justice Department approvals. 
+The Justice Department official was “very pissed off,” according to one person close to Mr. McCabe, and pressed him to explain why the FBI was still chasing a matter the department considered dormant. Others said the Justice Department was simply trying to make sure FBI agents were following longstanding policy not to make overt investigative moves that could be seen as trying to influence an election. Those rules discourage investigators from making any such moves before a primary or general election, and, at a minimum, checking with anticorruption prosecutors before doing so. 
+“Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” Mr. McCabe asked, according to people familiar with the conversation. After a pause, the official replied, “Of course not,” these people said. 
+For Mr. McCabe’s defenders, the exchange showed how he was stuck between an FBI office eager to pour more resources into a case and Justice Department prosecutors who didn’t think much of the case, one person said. Those people said that following the call, Mr. McCabe reiterated past instructions to FBI agents that they were to keep pursuing the work within the authority they had. 
+Others further down the FBI chain of command, however, said agents were given a much starker instruction on the case: “Stand down.” When agents questioned why they weren’t allowed to take more aggressive steps, they said they were told the order had come from the deputy director—Mr. McCabe. 
+Others familiar with the matter deny Mr. McCabe or any other senior FBI official gave such a stand-down instruction. 
+In September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of   
+Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. McCabe, these people said, told them no and added that they couldn’t “go prosecutor-shopping.” 
+The above revelations, in conjunction with the email server probe being reopened by the FBI, is why I now think Donald Trump has a very good chance of winning the Presidency. As I noted in Friday’s post, Another Black Swan Hits the U.S. Presidential Election : 
+The problems with Hillary Clinton will never go away. They will always resurface or new problems will emerge, and it has nothing to do with a “vast rightwing conspiracy” (or Putin). It has to do with her. It has to do with the fact that her and her husband are career crooks, warmongers, and shameless looters of the American public. This re-opening of the FBI investigation just hammers all of that home for everyone. We know what 4 years of Hillary will look like. It’ll be Obama cronyism on steroids, plus endless investigations with a side of World War 3. I don’t think people want that, and so more Americans than the pundits realize will take a gamble on Trump. 
+It’s not just me saying it. Even longtime Clinton supporter Doug Schoen is revisiting whether he can continue to support Clinton. As he wrote   There will be no goodwill or honeymoon period for Clinton. Her first 100-days agenda will take a backseat to partisan divisions and polarization with little chance of constructive legislative action occurring. We have seen that a hyper-partisan, gridlocked Washington is bad for the country. There is no reason to believe that Clinton’s tenure will be anything but more of the same in this way and, most likely, a lot worse. Further, Russian President Vladimir Putin said (tongue-in-cheek) that we are not a banana republic.‎ I greatly fear we could become one if Secretary Clinton is elected president. Our national security will continue to be jeopardized by ongoing investigations by the FBI, and potentially the Justice Department and Congress, putting us at immediate risk of more assertive actions in Europe, Middle East and Asia by the Russians and Chinese. Moreover, we simply cannot face a situation where the president elect may need or want a pardon from the president to govern. Or worse yet, need to pardon herself after she takes office. As of now, I have no confidence that either of those questions will be answered by Election Day or that we will have full clarity on an investigation into what could be as many as 650,000 emails that found their way to Weiner and Abedin’s computer. However, in good conscience, and as a Democrat, I am actively doubting whether I can vote for the Secretary of State. I also want to make clear that I cannot vote for Donald Trump as his world view and mine are very different. For more on the Clinton Foundation, see:",FAKE
+3922,Why Hillary Clinton was told not to be a trial lawyer: she didn't have a wife at home,"In 1974, Hillary Clinton learned the biggest challenge for working women: clean socks.
+
+In her memoir Living History, Clinton tells the story of the end of the Watergate investigation, after Richard Nixon resigned. Clinton, who was a staff member on the investigation, reveals a conversation she and her fellow attorneys had as they decided what to do once their work ended:
+
+Suddenly I was out of work. Our close-knit group of lawyers met for one last dinner together before we scattered to the four winds. Everyone talked excitedly about plans for the future. I was undecided, and when Bert Jenner asked me what I wanted to do, I said I wanted to be a trial lawyer, like him. He told me that would be impossible. ""Because you won't have a wife."" ""What on earth does that mean?"" Bert explained that without a wife at home to take care of all my personal needs, I would never be able to manage the demands of everyday life, like making sure I had clean socks for court. I've since wondered whether Jenner was pulling my leg or making a serious point about how tough the law still could be for women.
+
+It's a funny story about antiquated notions about women in the workplace. But it also exposes a kind of shortsighted, classist cluelessness about the problems of working women — is doing laundry and other housework really the biggest problem of taking a new job as a woman?
+
+Even now, before she has officially announced her plans to run for president in 2016, Clinton already appears to be running as a woman. That's a big change from her 2008 campaign, when she played down her gender: ""I am not running as a woman, I am running because I believe I am the best qualified and experienced person,"" she told Iowa voters in 2007.
+
+And with the issues of working women — paid leave, the wage gap, and child care, for example — a hot topic in the national economic conversation right now, Clinton will likewise have to navigate the class divide within feminism. Those class-related rifts have become more visible in recent years, particularly since the publication of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, which was criticized for primarily addressing problems of middle- to upper-class professional women.
+
+In case you were wondering, Hillary ultimately never had to face the dirty-socks question; in the end, she chose to follow her husband (or, as she puts it, ""follow her heart"") to Arkansas, where Bill was running for Congress. But the dilemmas will be bigger now as she prepares her run for the presidency.",REAL
+7642,Progressives Find ‘White Trash’ More Threatening Than Nuclear War,"By Paul Craig Roberts on November 9, 2016 If only Trump could exile the lot of them. They are anti-American to the core. 
+by Paul Craig Roberts 
+The American electorate’s preference for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders has established two facts. One is that the majority of the American people do not believe the media presstitutes. The other is that only the “progressives” and “liberals” who inhabit the Atlantic Northeast and Pacific West coasts believe the presstitutes. 
+Trump’s election to the presidency has confirmed these holier-than-thou souls in their strongly held belief that America is a white trash racist country. They have told us this all day long today. 
+From these people and from the presstitutes we hear that white supremacy elected Trump. This is their propaganda, the intention of which is to discredit a Trump administration before it is inaugurated. Funny how white supremacy elected black Obama twice previously. 
+Truthout has lost it completely. John Knefel declares “The David Dukes of the World Prevail.” 
+Kelly Hayes declares “White Supremacy Elected Donald Trump.” 
+William Rivers Pitt declares “We have elected a fascist that Mussolini would have recognized on sight.” 
+Hillary carried only a handful of states, the states that comprise the One Percent’s stomping grounds. Yet Amy Goodman of Democracy Now sees meaning in political writer John Nichols claim that as Hillary carried New York and California, she won the popular vote and should be in the White House. 
+I remember a few days ago George Soros saying that Trump would win the popular vote, but that the electoral vote would go to Hillary, thus ridding the oligarchs of Trump. 
+Earth Justice promises to hold Trump accountable. Trump who promises to end the threat of nuclear war with Russia and China, thereby doing more to save animal and human life than the entirety of the Democratic Party and environmental organizations, is going to be held accountable by an organization that allegedly is beyond politics and is dedicated to preserving animals from destruction. 
+The ACLU, of which I am a member, has also put “on notice” the president-elect who has said he will save us from nuclear war. Faced with this idiocy from the ACLU, I will not renew my membership. 
+Feminists tell us that we are “grieving, scared, and in shock,” and that “it is critical that we stand together and support each other.” 
+Jeremy Ben-Ami of the J Street Jewish Community tells us that it is “an incredibly sad and difficult day. For tens of millions of Americans who share a core belief in tolerance, decency and social justice, the election results are a severe shock. In this challenging moment, we turn to one another for comfort and community. During this election, J Street made unequivocally clear our conviction that Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States.” 
+Van Jones, a CNN commentator, said that Trump’s election is a nightmare, “a deeply painful moment,” a “whitelash” against minorities. While he bemoaned the pain inflicted upon poor little presstitute Van Jones, he didn’t mind insulting the American electorate and the President-elect of the United States. After all, Van Jones sees that as his racist prerogative. Architects of Endless “Regime Change” wars 
+And so, the holier-than-thou crowd prefers Hillary, despite her unambigious position that she would maximize conflict with Russia and China, provoke direct military conflict between the US and Russia by imposing a no-fly zone in Syria, attack Iran and other of Israel’s targets, further enrich her Wall Street handlers by privatizing Social Security, and prevent any dissent from the lowly people class of her high-handed ways. If William Rivers Pitt sees Trump as a Mussolini fascist, Trump is too mild for Pitt. He prefers Hillary, a Hitler to the third power. 
+The progressives have totally discredited themselves just as the presstitutes have done. Their need for a bogyman to nourish their hysteria indicates serious psychological disturbance. 
+They actually prefer the risk of Armageddon to peace among nuclear powers. As their 501(c)3s live off corporate contributions, they prefer globalist corporate profits to jobs for ordinary Americans. 
+These are the people who think of themselves as our instructors and our betters. 
+If only Trump could exile the lot of them. They are anti-American to the core. Related Posts:",FAKE
+3833,Obama administration bans some military-style assault gear from local police departments,"CAMDEN, N.J. -- The Obama administration announced Monday it will ban federal transfers of certain types of military-style gear to local police departments, as the president seeks to respond to a spate of incidents that has frayed trust in communities across the country.
+
+The banned items are tracked armored vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers, ammunition of .50-caliber or higher and some types of camouflage uniforms, according to a report released by a White House working group that made the recommendations. Other equipment, including tactical vehicles, explosives and riot equipment, will be transferred only if local police provide additional certification and assurances that the gear will be used responsibly, according to the report.
+
+""We’ve seen how militarized gear sometimes gives people a feeling like they are an occupying force as opposed to a part of the community there to protect them,"" Obama said during remarks in Camden, N.J. ""Some equipment made for the battlefield is not appropriate for local police departments.""
+
+The nation's largest police union denounced the president's move, saying he has overstated the problem.
+
+“The issue of militarization has been really kind of exaggerated almost to the point that I don’t recognize it at times,” said James Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police. “The vast majority of the equipment that civilian law enforcement gets from the military is administrative stuff or defensive in nature.”
+
+The ban on items will take effect immediately, White House officials said, while the restrictions on other gear will be phased in so that local law enforcement agencies can be briefed about the new requirements.
+
+""The idea is to make sure we strike the right balance of providing equipment that is appropriate and important, while at the same time put standards in place that give a clear reason for the transfer of that equipment, with clear training and safety provisions in place,"" Cecilia Muñoz, the White House director of domestic policy, told reporters in a conference call on Sunday.
+
+The announcement came as Obama traveled here to highlight his administration's strategy to help reform local police departments, including efforts to increase the numbers of officers on patrol and the use of body cameras. The White House has said the administration will spend about $75 million over the next three years to buy about 50,000 body cameras that will be worn by police.
+
+The administration has been seeking to respond to a series of incidents, including the shooting by police of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last summer, that have sparked protests among citizens.
+
+As he has over the past months, Obama sought to tread a careful line between calling on police officers and members of the community to do more to improve the relationship between them. The president emphasized that pervasive hopelessness in the inner city is driven in large part by a lack of educational and economic opportunities.
+
+He also praised the police, saying ""the overwhelming number of police officers are good, fair, honest and care deeply about their community, putting their lives on the line every day."" He said the police cannot be expected to provide the answers to some of the intractable social issues that have roots in divisive issues of race and class.
+
+The appearance of heavily armored vehicles and police clad in military-grade body armor to quell the unrest in Ferguson led to widespread concerns that the federal program providing that gear, begun with the best intentions, had run amok.
+
+One of the ways police departments have armed themselves in recent years is through the Defense Department's excess property program, known as the 1033 Program.  That program has transferred more than $4.3 billion in equipment since its inception in 1997. In 2013 alone it gave nearly half a billion dollars worth of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies, according to the program's Web site.
+
+Some police chiefs have stressed that much of the equipment that has been being made available by the federal program is radio and dispatch equipment that provides cash-strapped departments with valuable updates. Others, thought, have decried the influx of military equipment into local departments that has come in recent years where budgets for officers on the ground have been cut.
+
+“I understand what the president is trying to do, and  I think he recognizes that law enforcement is a dangerous job,” said Richard Beary, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “I think he’s trying to strike a balance … trying to find that happy balance between being able to provide the equipment that we need and also trying to provide some accountability.”
+
+The announcement of a ban on portions of the program Monday was something of a surprise.
+
+Last December, new White House initiatives stopped well short of banning the transfer of hulking military vehicles that were designed to withstand blasts from land mines in Iraq and Afghanistan and that prompted a public outcry when they appeared on the streets of Ferguson.
+
+A senior administration official at that time said the White House didn’t have the authority to stop the transfers. “Those are programs that Congress directed the agencies to implement,” the official said.
+
+But the working group report suggested that there was “substantial risk of misusing or overusing these items.""
+
+The announcement was met with praise from lawmakers in Missouri, as well as from elected officials who had introduced bills in recent months that would have installed similar restrictions.
+
+On the campaign trail, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has a bill pending in Congress to reform the types of militarized weapons for local police, endorsed the president's actions.
+
+""I see no reason why a 20-ton mine resistant ambush protection vehicle should ever roll down any city in our country,"" Paul said during an appearance in Philadelphia, not far from Camden. ""The president can change some of this through executive order, and I commend him for doing so.""
+
+Paul added: ""There is no reason that the police force should be the same as the army.""
+
+Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) called the new restrictions “another step in the direction of needed change to better protect both police officers and the communities those officers serve."" Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) thanked Obama for instituting the new restrictions on which military equipment local police forces could obtain.
+
+“I witnessed first-hand, high-powered sniper rifles with night scopes being pointed at my constituents who were peacefully exercising their constitutional rights,” said Clay, whose district includes Ferguson. “That kind of police militarization is harmful, and it deepens the already wide gulf of mistrust that exists between communities of color and some local law enforcement agencies.”
+
+Meanwhile, anti-police brutality and law enforcement reform groups were more measured, praising the move by the Obama administration but painting it as a small step in what they believe will be a long process to reform American policing.
+
+“We know that reforming 1033 or putting limits on military equipment is not going to be enough,” said Dante Barry, executive director of Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, one of the groups born in response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. “Any reform done to policing must be systemic and transformative,"" said Barry, who has played a role in organizing the Black Lives Matter protests that have occurred nationwide since Michael Brown was killed. ""Militarized police culture, surveillance technologies and equipment must all be looked at if we are to see an end of police militarization in our communities.”
+
+Obama's visit Monday to Camden, one of New Jersey's poorest cities, came as he seeks to ramp up federal funding for community policing initiatives.
+
+Camden has long been among New Jersey's most crime-ridden cities, but reforms over the past two years have led to falling crime statistics and an increased number of officers in the community. The president toured Camden's county police headquarters and tactical operations center, and he spoke with youth and officers before delivering remarks at a community center.
+
+""I came here to do what would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: Hold you up as a symbol of promise for the nation,"" Obama told a crowd of nearly 300. He noted that crime had fallen but emphasized that the city still has a lot of work to do. Camden remains one of the most crime-ridden cities in New Jersey.
+
+White House aides said the reforms in Camden include its designation as a federal ""Promise Zone,"" which allows the city to receive federal grants to help improve educational opportunities and public health and reduce crime. The city last month joined the administration's ""My Brother's Keeper"" program, which Obama started to try to concentrate on providing opportunities for young African American men and boys.
+
+The Obama administration also has sought additional funding to increase body cameras for local departments and this month announced a $20 million pilot program.
+
+""We're hopeful we will have a constructive conversation with Congress to up the ante for departments to buy cameras,"" Muñoz said.
+
+In the coming weeks, several members of Obama's Cabinet also will travel across the country to tout the community policing initiatives.",REAL
+9172,Russia and Turkey Now Sharing Intelligence Data,"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 19:54 UTC © AFP 2016/ BULENT KILIC Commenting on the recent reports that Russia has started exchanging intelligence data with the Turkish Army to ensure the effectiveness of Ankara's Euphrates Shield operation in Syria , retired Turkish Air Force Lt. Gen. Erdogan Karakus told Sputnik that the move signals major changes in Turkish foreign policy. Russia has already started sharing its intelligence data with the Turkish army, which will ensure the effectiveness of Ankara's Euphrates Shield operation in Syria, Russia's Izvestia newspaper reported on Monday. According to the newspaper, the agreement was reached during recent negotiations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan. First Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Defense and Security at the Federation Council (upper house of parliament) Franz Klintsevich told the newspaper that Turkey quietly joined the intelligence sharing pool created by Russia, Syria, Iraq and Iran . ""We pass Turkey data on our radio intercepts, electronic intelligence and imagery intelligence that may be of interest to it,"" the senator said. ""In response, they also share information. Turkey has very effective intelligence agencies and very good agents in Syria ,"" he added. Commenting on the move, Retired Air Lieutenant General Erdogan Karakus, General President of TESUD (Turkey Retired Officers Association) told Sputnik Turkiye that the pace of development of Russian-Turkish relations amid the mounting tension in Turkish-American relations signifies major changes to Turkish foreign policy. Ankara is demonstrating its readiness to upgrade its cooperation with Moscow to an unprecedented level , creating prerequisites for further strategic partnerships, including in the military-political sphere. ""Turkey pays high importance to the Open Skies Treaty. Signed in 1992, it is aimed mainly at strengthening trust between the signatories,"" Erdogan Karakus told Sputnik. ""Unfortunately this February Turkey denied Russia an observation flight over its territory. However the situation has drastically changed since then and Russian inspectors now perform observation flights over Turkey . This is one of the major indications of a new stage in development of Russian-Turkish relations,"" he added. ""The exchange of intelligence data, negotiations on the creation of a Turkish anti-missile defense system with the deployment of Russia's S-300 and S-400 systems, the opening of its territory for observation flights signifies the growing trust in relations between the two countries,"" Karakus said. Retired Air Lieutenant General noted that such a development is only more natural as the American 'Greater Middle East' project equally worries both Russia and Turkey. To be able to prevent all the threats arising from this project the cooperation between the two countries should be ultimately upgraded to a strategic level. There are no hurdles for the further strategic partnership between the two, Karakus finally stated. Comment: This should pretty much put to rest any speculation that Ankara at risk of coming to the aid of the terrorists in eastern Aleppo. Russia would not develop such close ties with them if there was a risk Turkey would basically go to war against the Syrian army, and thus the Russians as well. In all likelihood, Erdogan is acting within certain clearly defined limits in northern Syria.",FAKE
+3917,Obama administration prepares regulatory rush in 2015,"The Obama administration just wrapped up another big year for regulations and executive actions -- pushing through everything from a new type of retirement account to a deportation reprieve affecting millions of illegal immigrants to long-awaited standards for coal waste.
+
+But thousands of proposed regulations remain on the table and could set the stage for a rush of rulemaking in the president's final two years in office.
+
+Some of the biggest items are expected from the Environmental Protection Agency, which is set to finalize several landmark rules in 2015. Perhaps the most controversial concern new regulations on coal-fired power plants.
+
+The Obama administration is trying to get fossil-fuel fired power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.
+
+The EPA proposed the rules last year and is set to finalize them by summer 2015.
+
+But with Republicans taking control of the Senate and boosting their numbers in the House, incoming leaders are girding for battle.
+
+Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican who represents the coal state of Kentucky, told The Associated Press last month he'll do all he can to stop regulations hurting the industry.
+
+Though the administration is pushing the regulations as part of a broad plan to improve air quality and curb global warming, McConnell told the AP: ""My first obligation is to protect my people, who are hurting as the result of what this administration is doing.""
+
+He added: ""I'm going to do any and everything I can to stop it.""
+
+According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Obama administration put out 2,375 proposed rules in 2014 that are still under consideration. That's in addition to 3,541 final rules and regulations in 2014, according to CEI.
+
+The sheer number of rules from the Obama administration is not unprecedented. Early in the George W. Bush administration, the annual number of rules topped 4,000. But critics say this administration is imposing more expensive regulations.
+
+Among them is a controversial EPA proposal to expand regulatory power over streams and wetlands. The agency, set to finalize the rule in April, estimates it could impose costs of between $162 million to $278 million per year, but says ""public benefits outweigh the costs"" -- since, the EPA says, the changes would reduce flooding, support hunting and fishing, and ease pollution.
+
+Republicans, though, have described the maneuver as a massive land grab.
+
+The plan would define which specific waterways the EPA can regulate. The Clean Water Act already gives the EPA the ability to regulate ""U.S. waters,"" but Supreme Court rulings have left the specifics unclear when it comes to waters that flow only part of the year.
+
+The EPA claims this does not expand its authority, and only clarifies it.
+
+But detractors claim it is an opening for the EPA to claim authority over countless waterways, including streams that only show up during heavy rainfall. Critics warn this could create more red tape for property owners and businesses if they happen to have even small streams on their land.
+
+Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, has called it an effort to ""control a huge amount of private property across the country.""
+
+In another EPA initiative, the agency is looking to October to finalize sweeping ozone regulations.
+
+In proposing the limits on smog-forming pollution linked to asthma and respiratory illness in November, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy argued that the public health benefits far outweigh the costs and that most of the U.S. can meet the tougher standards without doing anything new.
+
+""We need to be smart -- as we always have -- in trying to find the best benefits in a way that will continue to grow the economy,"" McCarthy said. Of reducing ozone, she added: ""We've done it before, and we're on track to do it again.""
+
+But business groups panned the proposal as unnecessary and the costliest in history, warning it could jeopardize a resurgence in American manufacturing.
+
+President Obama initially had pulled the EPA's proposed ozone limits amid intense pressure from industry and the GOP. But public health groups sued, and a federal court ordered the EPA to issue a new draft smog rule by last month -- which the agency did.
+
+The rules are estimated to cost industry anywhere between $3.9 billion and $15 billion by 2025. That price tag would exceed that of any previous environmental regulation in the U.S. Environmental groups are pushing for stricter limits still.
+
+On other fronts, the Federal Communications Commission could move in a matter of months to propose new ""net neutrality"" rules. Obama weighed in on that debate late last year, urging the FCC to regulate the Internet like other utilities.
+
+The White House is calling for an ""explicit ban"" on deals between broadband Internet providers and online services like Netflix, Amazon or YouTube to move their content faster, a potential new source of revenue for cable companies. While the FCC is an independent agency, Obama's statement could put political pressure on FCC commissioners.
+
+Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board has issued new rules for so-called ""ambush"" union elections -- speeding up elections and requiring employers to give unions contact information for workers. The rules take effect in April.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8335,Re: ‘D*ckileaks’? NY Post unveils tomorrow’s Weiner cover for your pleasure,"— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) October 28, 2016 
+For those of you who were waiting, the wait is over: Tomorrow's cover: Weiner sext probe found dirt on Hillary https://t.co/6z0BJkr23s pic.twitter.com/hAk6D02j8y 
+— New York Post (@nypost) October 28, 2016 
+So, does it live up to your expectations? 
+— Shoshana Weissmann (@senatorshoshana) October 28, 2016 ""Stroking Gun""– that's pretty funny! https://t.co/sSec2Z3isp",FAKE
+4541,"Obama Apologizes, Takes Responsibility For Deaths Of Innocent Hostages In U.S. Drone Strike","President Barack Obama gave a statement Thursday after the White House announced U.S. drone strikes had killed innocent American and Italian hostages in Pakistan, saying he takes full responsibility for the operation.
+
+A statement from the White House identified the hostages as Dr. Warren Weinstein, an American held by al Qaeda since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian national who had been an al Qaeda hostage since 2012. According to the White House, the operation in which the two were killed targeted an al Qaeda-associated compound, ""where we had no reason to believe either hostage was present, located in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.""
+
+""As a husband and as a father, I cannot begin to imagine the anguish that the Weinstein and Lo Porto families are feeling today,"" Obama said.
+
+""I know there's nothing I can ever say or do to ease their heartache,"" he added.
+
+Two other Americans who were working with al Qaeda were also recently killed in the same region, according to the White House. Ahmed Farouq, an American who was an al Qaeda leader, was killed in the same operation that took the lives of Weinstein and Lo Porto, while American Adam Gadahn, a member of al Qaeda, was killed in a separate operation in January. The White House said the two were not specifically targeted and counterterrorism officials ""did not have information indicating their presence at the sites of these operations.""
+
+The Wall Street Journal reports this is the first known instance in which the U.S. has accidentally killed hostages in a drone strike.
+
+Obama defended U.S. counterterrorism operations in his remarks Thursday, saying the strikes occurred after ""hundreds of hours of surveillance"" had been conducted. He noted ""it is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally, and in our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes...can occur.""
+
+After Obama gave his remarks, Weinstein's wife released a statement on behalf of the family condemning the ""cowardly actions of those who took Warren captive"" and expressing disappointment in the U.S. government.
+
+“I want to thank Congressman John Delaney, Senator Barbara Mikulski, and Senator Ben Cardin – as well as specific officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation – for their relentless efforts to free my husband.” Elaine Weinstein said. “Unfortunately, the assistance we received from other elements of the U.S. Government was inconsistent and disappointing over the course of three and a half years. We hope that my husband’s death and the others who have faced similar tragedies in recent months will finally prompt the U.S. Government to take its responsibilities seriously and establish a coordinated and consistent approach to supporting hostages and their families.”",REAL
+4081,Thousands march to mourn slain Boris Nemtsov,"MOSCOW — Tens of thousands of people marched in the sleet Sunday through central Moscow to mourn slain Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, gunned down just steps away from the Kremlin.
+
+""I wasn't planning to go to the rally initially, I had no faith in them,"" said Tatyana Shakhova, a young demonstrator holding a sign that said ""propaganda kills.""
+
+""But (Nemtsov's killing) crosses all the lines,"" she said. ""I have no faith that the organizers of the murder will be found.""
+
+Nemtsov's death is a ""critical turning point for Russia,"" said one of the rally's organizers, Gennady Gudkov, a former member of parliament who was kicked out in 2012 because of his opposition activity. ""Either something starts getting better in this country, or it could go the way of more (political assassinations and repressions.)""
+
+Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Nemtsov staunchly criticized in the past, condemned Friday's killing and took personal control of the investigation. Russia's Investigative Committee on Sunday pledged to award 3 million rubles (about $50,000) for valuable information about Nemstov's death.
+
+Up to 100,000 people turned out for the march, according to Gudkov, after the location was changed from the outskirts of Moscow to the center of the city. Moscow police, which often downplay the turnout for opposition rallies, put the crowd at 44,000.
+
+Demonstrators holding Russian flags and portraits of Nemtsov marched from the Kitai-Gorod subway, along the southeastern wall of the Kremlin, to the bridge by Red Square where Nemtsov was slain.
+
+The march was initially planned as a protest against Russia's involvement in Ukraine and the resulting economic crisis. Nemtsov, who reportedly had been gathering evidence that Moscow was arming and aiding pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, was to speak at the rally. But organizers on Saturday canceled the demonstration to instead hold a march of mourning.
+
+Nemtsov, 55, who served as first deputy prime minister under the late president Boris Yeltsin, was shot four times in the back from a passing car as he walked with a female friend across a bridge Friday night, the Interior Ministry said. At least seven shots were fired by several assailants. His companion was not hurt.
+
+The hunt for his killer continues.
+
+Investigators said Sunday that they were again questioning the woman, Ukrainian citizen Anna Duritskaya, the Associated Press reported. LifeNews, a television station with ties to the security services, said Duritskaya told investigators that she was in shock and could not remember what the killer looked like or the car he was in.
+
+At Sunday's march, thousands of Russian tricolor flags peppered the gathering, which was an unusual display for opposition protests. Volunteers handing them out explained that the flags had been ""usurped"" to represent only the government in power, and it was time for people to take back the flags to represent the country.
+
+""We decided on the flags spontaneously. We wanted to move away from politics toward something that unites us,"" Gudkov said. ""Also, Boris (Nemtsov) was a patriot of Russia.""
+
+Russian flags intermingled with Ukraine's colors of blue and yellow, as many demonstrators spoke out for peace between the two countries.
+
+""Russia and Ukraine must be together,"" said Dasha Ilyasova, who carried a joined Russian and Ukrainian flag with a black ribbon to commemorate Nemtsov.
+
+""A good person was killed,"" she said. ""If it was a bad person or a person who supported Putin, he wouldn't have been killed.""
+
+U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States had no intelligence on who was behind the shooting. ""We hope there will be a thorough, transparent, real investigation, not just of who actually fired the shots, but who, if anyone, may have ordered or instructed this or been behind this,"" Kerry said Sunday on ABC's This Week.
+
+The theme of Sunday's protest was ""propaganda kills,"" in reference to a propaganda campaign on Russian television that termed Kremlin critics ""traitors"" and ""fifth columnists.""
+
+Russian state media turned nationalist in the wake of Ukraine's pro-Western coup a year ago and Russia's move to annex Ukraine's breakaway Crimea. While Russia has persistently denied sending troops and arming separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, Russia's media have staunchly supported the fight against Kiev's new government.
+
+A pro-Kremlin rally on Feb. 21 included demonstrators calling for a ""purge of the fifth column,"" a slogan remembered with fear following Nemtsov's slaying. But there was doubt that Nemtsov's death would change the status quo.
+
+""I think public sentiment will only escalate. Neutrality has disappeared. There are people for or against, and they are irreconcilable."" said Mark Feigin, the firebrand lawyer who defended the Pussy Riot protest singers and Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, who was captured by pro-Russian fighters and is imprisoned in Russia.
+
+Savchenko, who is accused by Russia of being involved in the death of two Russian reporters in Ukraine, has been on a hunger strike for 79 days to protest her imprisonment. While Nemtsov's murder won't change public sentiment, Feigin said he hoped the rally could help his defendant.
+
+""Unwillingly, Nemtsov became part of a cumulative effect that could lead to a political decision that could free Savchenko,"" he said.",REAL
+1335,How Tim Scott chose to endorse Marco Rubio for president,"Like a modern day Ben Franklin, Sen. Tim Scott makes his most critical decisions by listing the pros and cons on a sheet of paper.
+
+So in recent weeks, as the South Carolina Republican tried to decide who to endorse for the GOP presidential nomination, Scott pulled out his detailed notes on the contenders along with his yellow legal pads and blue pens, crafting the rationale for each of the potential nominees as well as their downsides.
+
+On Tuesday, he endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — a fellow 40-something when they were first elected in 2010; both minorities in the white confines of Republican caucuses. What seemed like a natural decision from the outside came through one of the more detailed, painstaking processes any senator uses for choosing which horse to back in presidential politics.
+
+In an interview, Scott explained that, indeed,  he really only had one choice once he had done his due diligence.“When I put together a strong position on national defense and foreign policy, coupled with a compassionate attachment for people to alleviate poverty using conservative principles exclusively, Marco Rubio became the only candidate that I honestly believe can do both,” he said.
+
+The endorsement served as another boost to Rubio’s campaign, which shot out of the Iowa caucuses with a better-than-expected finish in third, narrowly edged out by Donald Trump for second and not far behind Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) winning slot. Rubio, who has tried to position himself as a next-generation leader, has also focused on winning endorsements from less tenured lawmakers, such as Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), both of whom were also elected in the 2010 Republican tidal wave.
+
+Scott said that he’s aware endorsements don’t always add up to actual votes from real voters — that transference is one of the most difficult acts in politics. He said that he will travel to New Hampshire in the coming days to be with Rubio in advance of Tuesday’s primary, where Cruz’s staunch conservatism isn’t expected to play as well and Rubio might have a chance for a strong second-place finish or to even leap into first ahead of Trump.
+
+Scott’s real focus, however, will be in South Carolina, which is shaping up in its usually pivotal fashion. “We’ll find out in 18 days,” Scott said Tuesday, counting down to the Feb. 20 showdown in his home state.
+
+Getting to that point, however, took more than six months of detailed deliberation, note taking and face-to-face interaction between a dozen candidates and arguably the most sought-after endorser in the U.S. Senate. Scott, now 50, is the only African-American Republican in the Senate, and his personal biography of going from a childhood in poverty in North Charleston to making it into the Senate is the stuff of Republican storybook legend.
+
+[Read how the Ryan-Scott poverty summit brought the issue to the 2016 forefront.]
+
+Moreover, his blessing carries more than just symbolic weight because South Carolina is third in line in the presidential nominating process, after Iowa and New Hampshire. Scott is surpassed in popularity only by Gov. Nikki Haley (R) among Palmetto State leaders. In the interview, he acknowledged a “fairly assertive courting process” by the Republican contenders to get his backing.
+
+Scott could’ve easily avoided the pressure of choosing because he is up for reelection this year. Haley appointed Scott to his Senate seat in 2013, after Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) decided to quit midterm to the Heritage Foundation. He won the remainder of DeMint’s term outright in November 2014, but now must stand for election in November to win a full six-year term.
+
+Rather than taking a pass on endorsing anyone, Scott instead decided to maximize his leverage. He put a premium on issues of fighting poverty and upward mobility that are not part of the normal Republican primary vocabulary. Beginning in late August, Scott hosted 12 different town halls with presidential candidates spread all across the state, including everyone from onetime front-runner Donald Trump to his South Carolina partner, Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose own presidential bid came to an end in December.
+
+At each event, Scott said, he took detailed notes of how the candidates handled questions from his constituents on the biggest issues of the day, with a particular focus on national security and poverty.
+
+“Yellow pads and blue ink, a lot of it,” he said, describing the process.
+
+That wasn’t enough, and so in early January Scott hosted what was billed as a “poverty summit”, along with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), in Columbia, S.C.. Six GOP hopefuls showed up, but Trump and Cruz were off campaigning in Iowa.
+
+As Scott moderated the event, that’s when he began to settle on Rubio who, like Scott, uses his up-from-bootstraps story to talk about his aspiration for America.
+
+“I think it all culminated at my poverty summit,” he said, explaining that he wants a candidate for the “next American century” rather than someone talking about the past. “I think it’s incredibly important for us to have a candidate who can win by using conservative principles — and that means you have to be able to sell those conservative principles so you need an aspirational candidate.”
+
+But he still wasn’t settled. So, in recent weeks, that meant breaking out the legal pads and blue pens, again, crossing the line down the middle, and drawing up the pluses and minuses for each candidate.
+
+Finally, Tuesday, the decision arrived. Rubio’s name got circled.",REAL
+9326,"Hope, Change, Lies and Greatness","One of the themes of this election cycle in America is clarity. 
+God is showing us what we’ve become. 
+Clearly. 
+With each passing political curveball and October surprise, painful and embarrassing clarity abounds. 
+We’ve learned and are continuing to learn a lot about our “Christian leaders”. 
+Same goes for our concepts of freedom, liberty, justice, peace, and security… none of which do we dare understand, much less pursue, in an explicitly biblical manner anymore. 
+We have quite thoroughly rejected Christ as King. 
+We claim him often as Savior, but have no intent on serving Him as King in practice…political practice, legal practice, educational practice, economic practice, or pretty much any other kind of practices. He’s our favorite trinket, and little more. 
+That’s the brutally ugly bottom line being emphasized and highlighted and pointed out again and again by God right now in America. 
+The grace God is showing in the provision of this clarity is something that’s easy to miss, and easy to want to miss , since said clarity serves as just the sort of detailed, inescapable, and unassailable indictment that we’d prefer didn’t exist. 
+But it does exist. 
+And He’s waving it in front of our eyes. 
+He’s giving us detail upon pathetic detail and revelation after ugly revelation. He’s stacking them high and giving us chance after chance after undeserved chance to acknowledge and repent of that which is being made excruciatingly and redundantly plain. 
+All we need do is take off our blinders and look at the whole picture plainly presented before us in its crystal clear, wide-open totality as it actually exists, rather than focusing on distractions and little snippets out of context while ignoring the building mountains of truths that deep down we know are fatal to the narratives we prefer over reality. 
+If we simply look at the whole picture through the lens of a basic biblical worldview, we’ll have no trouble at all seeing why we’re circling the drain as a culture (and why we deserve to do so). 
+Just look at what we’re into: “Hope and change”…apart from submission to Christ as King. . “Making America great again”…apart from submission to Christ as King. . Supporting public schools…even though State-run children’s education is inherently anti-Christ, is literally designed to promote an increasingly anti-Christ population, and is based upon an approach to the pursuit of knowledge (aka “education”) lifted directly from the serpent’s tongue in Genesis 3. . Preserving Social Security…even though the flagrantly socialist/Marxist construct encourages the State to claim yet another role assigned to family and church, thus growing the power of the State and making the masses more dependent upon the State. . Maintaining/expanding a gigantic, globe-spanning military…even though we are supposedly broke and are open, proud champions of socialism, Marxism, Satanism, homosexuality, and any number of fundamentally anti-Christ concepts. . Maintaining our imagined “freedom” and “liberty” to produce, market, and consume porn…even though the God who defines and sustains all true liberty and freedom despises these things and promises to crush those who defend them. . Maintaining our imagined “right” to murder our own children for convenience (or for no reason at all)…even though the God who authored and sustains human life despises child sacrifice and has promised to crush civilizations that embrace it. . Maintaining our imagined “right” to marry someone of the same gender…even though the God who sustains all true rights and defines marriage calls such relationships abominations and routinely destroys cultures that promote them. . Being ever ready to pledge on cue our personal allegiance to the indivisible political power ruling over us, all in the name of a love for America (which has been made into our ruling idol)…even though no such pledge would even be considered by an actual American Founding Father. (The mere fact of their Founding Father status confirms that they did not believe in the indivisible political power of the state, and the fact that we now pledge our allegiance to such power on command by reciting an oath written by a Socialist in the 1800s for the purpose of selling American flags to public schools says a whole lot about how profoundly confused and easily manipulated we’ve become since the time of the Founding Fathers.) . Believing that “We the People” must submit to the systems placed above us…no matter how wildly anti-Christian they become. This has been promoted through a Hitlerian approach to Romans 13 (and other passages from Scripture) as embraced by the vast majority of even the most “conservative, Bible believing” church leaders in the land. . We must support the “lesser” of two evils offered to us by the system under which we are told we must live as good Americans…no matter how vile, sinister, vulgar, corrupt, and overtly anti-Christ those options may be. (See: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.) 
+Obviously this is a list that could go on for a while, but we’ll pause it here and assume that you get the picture. 
+We bring these items to focus again in light of an article recently published entitled Once the hope candidate, Obama in his final days faces a hopeless electorate , wherein The Washington Post noted how we live in an age of hopelessness on many levels as we roll from the Obama era on into the Trump or Clinton follow-up. 
+The hopelessness that has been inspired by our approach to law, liberty, truth, justice, economics, politics and everything else has been building for hundreds of years. Contrary to what pagan political prognosticators of the day would have us believe, the current cultural wreckage is not something that can be understood, much less corrected, by pagan, unbelieving means. 
+There is and will never be hope for law apart from submission to Christ as King in practice. 
+There is and will never be hope for education apart from submission to Christ as King in practice. 
+There is and will never be hope for economics apart from submission to Christ as King in practice. 
+There is and will never be hope for culture and civilization apart from submission to Christ as King in practice. 
+That’s how things work in God’s creation, America included. 
+Until we understand this and repent accordingly, our hopelessness will only deepen and our implosion will only continue. 
+May God grace His people with the clarity to see, repent, live, and thrive accordingly in this remarkable time…even as an unrepentant American empire crumbles around them. 
+Article posted with permission from Fire Breathing Christian Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . shares",FAKE
+1664,"Why long shots and also-rans run for president: It’s the media, stupid","In the television age, running for president is automatically assumed to be a good thing—even as a long shot.
+
+You boost your profile. You’re on stage for the big debates. Cable bookers keep calling. Your how-to-save-America book sells better. Profile writers track down your elementary school teacher. And even if you wash out early, there are consolation prizes: A Cabinet post. A running mate selection. A college presidency. A cable gig.
+
+This is true even for those who don’t have a prayer of winning the White House. Without running, Hillary Clinton never would have been secretary of State. Joe Biden, Al Gore and George H.W. Bush would never have been VP. Mike Huckabee wouldn’t have had a Fox show and Al Sharpton wouldn’t be on MSNBC.
+
+In all honesty, what else have they got to do?
+
+This is a challenge for the media, who have trouble covering campaigns as packed as a Manhattan subway train. Especially this year, when the Republican field could actually top 20—far too many candidates to fit on a debate stage, or to include in a two-minute evening news report.
+
+But maybe my working thesis that presidential publicity is, on balance, a good thing misses an important point. As conservative columnist Matt Lewis writes in the Daily Beast:
+
+“I suspect we tend to underestimate the downside of running for president. Let’s consider the 2012 GOP field, which included Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and of course Mitt Romney. And to recap: Perry said ‘oops,’ Huntsman’s campaign never took off and he lost his ambassadorship to China, Bachmann isn’t even in Congress today, Santorum hard-won second place finish hasn’t set him up well for 2016, Cain was ripped apart after a sex scandal, Paul (and Bachmann!) had serious issues with the FEC, and Newt lost his think tank.
+
+ ‎
+
+ “You tell me—are they better off now than they were four years ago?”
+
+Well, it’s true that if you self-destruct like Herman Cain under the weight of sexual harassment allegations, there are negative consequences. On the other hand, everyone has now heard of Herman Cain and he landed a big radio show. Better than being an obscure former pizza executive, no?
+
+Rick Santorum won respect for winning 11 states (and is running again). Newt Gingrich sort of redeemed himself years after being toppled as House speaker (and got a CNN contract). Rick Perry isn’t so damaged that he’s not running again. Mitt Romney is such an elder statesman that many in the party begged him to run a third time (and thought better of it once he began seriously considering it).
+
+Even Jon Huntsman became a national figure and charmed the media elite (and his daughter landed a spot on MSNBC).
+
+But Lewis insists on accentuating the negative, especially “people who have to give up a job to run—like, say, a Fox News gig. And if you have a positive—or possibly inflated—reputation, you’ll likely watch that evaporate as well. Even if the opposition researchers and the media don’t get you (see Herman Cain), there’s a chance that you’ll slip up, amid the sleep deprivation and the glare of cameras and bright lights. There’s always the potential you could be exposed as someone who isn’t as charismatic or knowledgeable as everyone suspected. In fact, it’s pretty easy to leave the impression that you’re kind of dumb.”
+
+But in America, it’s more important to be famous.
+
+Let’s take the trio that jumped into the GOP race this week.
+
+Ben Carson was a world-renowned surgeon (and Fox News contributor) before gearing up for his presidential bid. He has made some comments (equating ObamaCare with slavery, saying straight men come out of prison gay) that have not exactly enhanced his reputation. But as a serious African-American contender for the Republican nomination, he will greatly benefit from the exposure in any future endeavor.
+
+Carly Fiorina was previously known mainly for getting fired as Hewlett-Packard’s CEO and losing a Senate race to Barbara Boxer. She has won plaudits for her fledgling presidential campaign, especially her pointed attacks on Hillary, and now has the first-name recognition that most corporate executives never achieve.
+
+Mike Huckabee was living the good life, hosting a Saturday night Fox show and doing national radio commentaries after his 2008 run. But the former Arkansas governor wants to prove that his success in winning the Iowa caucuses last time wasn’t a fluke. Now he’ll have his chance.
+
+None of them are going to be lacking for employment if this presidential thing doesn’t work out.
+
+But there’s one more aspect that gets overlooked. Most people who run for president have a set of ideas they want to push into the national square. Bernie Sanders knows he’ll never be president, but his ultra-liberal views will get far more attention than if he had passed up the race against Hillary. These candidates want to influence the debate, and there’s nothing like a presidential forum for accomplishing that.
+
+They won’t all get much media oxygen once the field is complete. But it’s better than gasping for air on the sidelines.
+
+Click for more from Media Buzz.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+10397,Miss Russia | Russia & India Report,"Miss Russia AFP/East News 
+Miss Russia Alisa Manenok shows off her souvenir of a stuffed cat while boarding a boat at the Lake Ashinoko in Hakone town, Kanagawa prefecture. Seventy women will compete for the 2016 Miss International crown in Tokyo on October 27. Facebook ",FAKE
+6753,"“I feel like these Topshop models are sick of me apologising, but also maybe willing to hear me out”","Next Swipe left/right “I feel like these Topshop models are sick of me apologising, but also maybe willing to hear me out” @Brycoo over on Twitter writes, “I feel like these Topshop models are sick of me apologising, but also maybe willing to hear me out”",FAKE
+7388,"FEAR OF TRUMP: BUSH, OBAMA, CLINTON ALL BUYING PROPERTY IN NON-EXTRADITION NATIONS","Email 
+
+It appears Bill and Hillary Clinton are making plans to flee the country in the event Donald Trump wins this election. 
+Reports are circulating that the Clintons have transferred 1.8 Billion dollars from the Clinton Foundation to the Qatar Central Bank, via a facilitation/abatement of JP Morgan Chase & Company for reasons not revealed. 
+This move of such a large sum of money to the country of Qatar says in itself, Hillary Clinton knows she is going to lose the election, and she doesn’t plan to allow herself to be prosecuted for various high crimes and treason under a Trump Administration. 
+The country of Qatar happens to be one of a handful of countries that does not have an extradition treaty with the United States, thus would be a perfect place for her to run to in escaping justice. 
+Donald Trump has said many times during his campaign and at the Presidential debates that once he gets into office, he intends to prosecute her on various high crimes from her latest crimes of sending classified material via a personal e mail server. All the way to gun running to terrorist groups in Syria resulting in the deaths of 4 Americans in Benghazi. 
+Apparently, Hillary is not the only person in Washington who has made plans to escape justice under a Trump Administration. John Kerry has quietly been selling his property in the US for millions of dollars of late, with an announcement of the sale of his $25 million dollar Nantucket mansion in June 2016, as well as the sale of his yacht for $3.9 million in July 2016. 
+President Barack H Obama has also apparently been making exit plans with his purchase of a $4.9 million dollar seaside mansion in Dubai in January 2016, another non extradition country. 
+Snopes and other supposed fact checking sites have debunked both the story of Obama’s purchase of the mansion and the firing of Rear Admiral Rick Williams. However, over the last several months, these sites have been busted for lying in trying to debunk such information as the before mentioned, when in fact the information is true. 
+Snopes and other sites try their best to keep incriminating information from being believed, but the truth has a way of coming out on its own, as it always has.",FAKE
+4594,7 things to watch for on election night,"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump is attempting to crack Hillary Clinton's blue wall. And Clinton is hoping for a surge in Latino turnout fueled by opposition to Trump.
+
+The two candidates are making a last-minute dash across swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina as the 2016 presidential race enters its final hours. They've also gone north to Michigan and New Hampshire to states Democrats have won in recent cycles but could flip this year.
+
+Here are the key states and signs to study as the night unfolds:
+
+Most plausible paths to victory for Trump start with holding onto two battlegrounds that Mitt Romney won four years ago -- North Carolina and Arizona -- and flipping three states President Barack Obama carried: Florida, Ohio and Iowa.
+
+A loss in any of the states would severely complicate Trump's already precarious path to 270 electoral votes. Though if Trump clawed back Pennsylvania or Michigan from the Democrats, who have won both electoral-rich states six times in a row, North Carolina would be more expendable. A win in a state like Pennsylvania or Michigan would allow Trump to offset a loss in North Carolina and still have a shot at reaching 270.
+
+If that doesn't happen, holding North Carolina and Arizona, while reclaiming Florida, Ohio and Iowa from the Democrats -- plus Maine's 2nd District -- would only get him to 260.
+
+Trump would need to tack on 10 more electoral votes somehow. New Hampshire's four and Nevada's six would get him there. Colorado, with nine electoral votes, Michigan with 15 and Pennsylvania with 20 are also possibilities.
+
+In his last 48 hours before Election Day, Trump has been pretty much everywhere, including Colorado, Michigan -- even Minnesota -- searching for the extra votes he needs.
+
+The key question for Clinton is whether her ""blue wall"" of Democratic-leaning states on the Great Lakes -- Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin -- will hold.
+
+Trump has targeted all three, but Clinton has consistently led polls in all three states. However, most voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania cast their ballots on Election Day -- which means her campaign hasn't built the early voting advantage already in place elsewhere.
+
+If Clinton can do that and pick up just one of North Carolina, Florida or Ohio, she's all but guaranteed to win.
+
+If she can't win one of those three states, she'll need to hold Virginia, vote-by-mail Colorado, New Hampshire and Nevada -- where Democrats have already built a hefty early voting edge.
+
+If Clinton wins, her coalition will consist of women, college-educated voters and a swell of new Latino voters.
+
+In early voting in states like Nevada, and Florida, there's already evidence of burgeoning Latino turnout. This is best witnessed by the over 57,000 people who voted in Nevada Friday, with pictures of long lines and extended hours at a Latino grocery store in Clark County.
+
+Many first-time voters, polls show, are turning out to oppose Trump. And Democrats are bullish that Latinos have been under-polled through the entire 2016 election cycle.
+
+For Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, this is a ghost of elections past. After the 2012 race, the RNC warned that the party needed to do more to court Latino voters. A nominee who roundly rejected that advice could be the reason the party loses a third consecutive presidential race.
+
+Just as Trump's attacks on Mexican immigrants have alienated Latino voters, his attacks on women and allegations of sexual assault have helped Clinton to a large lead among female voters. Clinton's campaign has highlighted Trump's most derogatory remarks in TV ads aimed at moderate, suburban women -- a constituency that has helped Republican nominees in years past. If she succeeds, it would limit Trump's strengths to rural areas.
+
+Trump's biggest strength is his overwhelming support from disaffected white voters -- particularly men, and especially those without college degrees.
+
+His campaign has long argued that those voters -- many of them independent or Democrats who buy into Trump's protectionist stance on trade -- will carry him on Election Day.
+
+For this to happen, Trump will also need core Democratic voters to stay at home, as well.
+
+Already, Trump appears poised to win Iowa, and has polled ahead of Clinton in Ohio. He's hoping to win enough blue-collar Democrats in Pennsylvania or Michigan to win at least one of those states.
+
+Michigan, in particular, emerged as a tempting target in the campaign's closing days -- a state hard-hit by the trade deals Trump bemoans. Clinton's campaign raced to play defense, dispatching the former secretary of state there, as well as President Barack Obama, for last-minute rallies.
+
+Among Democrats' biggest concerns has been whether African-American voters -- a reliably left-leaning constituency -- will turn out in numbers anywhere close to their support for Obama in 2008 and 2012.
+
+If the answer is no, it could hobble Clinton in key states -- particularly Florida and North Carolina.
+
+Obama is helping carry Clinton's load with black voters. In a call to Tom Joyner's radio show, he argued that participating in this election is just as much about him as it is about Clinton.
+
+""And I know that there are a lot of people in barbershops and beauty salons, you know, in the neighborhoods who are saying to themselves 'We love Barack, we love -- we especially love Michelle -- and so, you know, it was exciting and now we're not excited as much,'"" he said. ""You know what? I need everybody to understand that everything we've done is dependent on me being able to pass the baton to somebody who believes in the same things I believe in.""
+
+Since Trump clinched the GOP nomination in May, Republican Senate and House candidates have been forced to answer for everything he has said -- from his attacks on a Gold Star family and an Indiana-born judge's heritage to his rejection of conservative orthodoxy.
+
+As soon as the election ends, Capitol Hill Republicans -- especially if they retain control of both the House and Senate -- will regain power.
+
+The party will have to decide just what to do with Trump's rejection of free trade, his calls for a decreased US role overseas and his criticism of GOP congressional leaders -- whether he wins or loses.
+
+But adopting some of Trump's policy planks while rejecting his political style might not help much after an election driven by the candidates' personalities.
+
+For a nation divided by a long, bitter contest, this could be the most important question of all: Will the loser concede -- and how will he or she do it?
+
+Trump and Clinton are both historically unpopular presidential nominees. Half the country thinks Clinton is a crook, and the other half thinks Trump is a racist and misogynist.
+
+And Trump, in particular, has cast the election as rigged -- calling into question whether ballots that are mailed in will be counted, playing up inaccurate reports of voter irregularities and claiming that voter fraud is pervasive.
+
+The loser will play a crucial role in legitimizing the victor -- or delegitimizing the winner from the outset.",REAL
+5245,Trump woos women and minorities by pitting one group against another,"Immigrants and refugees are taking jobs from black workers. Undocumented criminals prey on American women. Muslims pose a threat to gay men and lesbians.
+
+For Donald Trump, appealing to minority groups and women often amounts to an “us vs. them” proposition — warning one group that it is being threatened or victimized by another, using exaggerated contrasts and a very broad brush.
+
+“Poor Hispanics and African American citizens are the first to lose a job or see a pay cut when we don’t control our borders,” the Republican presidential candidate said at a rally last week in Akron, Ohio, adding that blacks in particular should vote for him because their lives are so terrible. “What do you have to lose?” he said. “You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”
+
+From the start of his campaign, Trump has shaped his message around who is to blame for the nation’s problems — often pointing at illegal immigrants, Black Lives Matter activists and other minorities in a pitch that was aimed primarily at white Republicans.
+
+But now, as Trump seeks to reach out to women and minorities who favor Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, he has increasingly taken to pitting one group against another in a bid for support. It’s not clear how well it will work: Many minority voters, already turned off by months of blunt and polarizing statements, still hear the language of separation in Trump’s words.
+
+“Look, I just think a lot of his views are very ignorant,” Crystal Woods-Brookes, who is black, said as she folded clothes at a laundromat a few miles south of Trump’s Akron rally. “This is not our country, in his words. . . . I believe that’s his whole purpose, to divide, to put us . . . against each other, make one believe the other side is better.
+
+“I believe now he’s trying to change because — it’s not about black people, it’s about the votes,” she added. “He’s already made his point quite clear, as far as I’m concerned.”
+
+[Inside Donald Trump’s new strategy to counter the view of many that he is ‘racist’]
+
+The real estate developer and his team insist that he wants to be an “inclusive” president, and he is in the midst of an outreach effort that includes a new stump speech and meetings with blacks, Latinos and other groups. He also has engaged in a war of words with Clinton over racial issues, repeatedly calling her “a bigot” because, he says, her policies have not helped minorities.
+
+Amid criticism for courting minority voters while speaking to overwhelmingly white audiences, Trump will hold a question-and-answer session Saturday at Great Faith Ministries International in Detroit, which has a primarily black congregation. It will be the first of many such events at black and Latino community centers, according to the campaign.
+
+For many of Trump’s supporters — including some minorities fearful of national security threats — Trump’s rhetoric on immigration is more about facing up to the grim realities of a dangerous world, even if that means saying uncomfortable things about Muslims.
+
+Alejandro Lugo, who moved to Miami more than 20 years ago after living in Cuba for 30 years, said outside a recent campaign event in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that he’s concerned that the United States is not vetting new immigrants sufficiently. He also rejected any comparison between Cuban refugees and Syrian refugees seeking to escape the Islamic State.
+
+“The Cubans that came were running away from Castro. They settled in Miami, they worked. But we did not use an 18-wheeler truck to kill 150 Americans. And the Muslims, they do that. Cubans don’t do that,” Lugo said. “If the Cubans come from Cuba and they start killing American people, they have to be vetted. If you have connections with al-Qaeda and you come here to kill my family, I don’t want you in this nation.”
+
+For the most part, though, Trump’s message has not resonated with minorities or women, who strongly favor Clinton in opinion polls. Most also think Trump is biased against those groups, polls show.
+
+The Rev. William Barber II, the president of the North Carolina NAACP, said in a recent interview that he objects to Trump’s reductive view of the black community: that all African Americans live in poverty, that their communities are the sources of crime and that they have been fooled into voting for Democrats.
+
+“You’re saying: ‘All black people. . . . They’re all lazy, they’re all poor,’ ” he said. “It fits that racialized narrative that crime is a particular community’s problem rather than crime being a reality in the American construct.”
+
+After Trump cited the “oppression of women and gays in many Muslim nations” in June to support his call to temporarily ban Middle Eastern immigrants from entering the country, LGBT leaders accused Trump of fear-mongering after a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando — and of suggesting that there are no gay Muslim immigrants.
+
+Women’s groups and activists also have blasted Trump for suggesting that immigrants are a disproportionate threat to women, a rhetorical appeal they say is intended to divide communities among racial lines.
+
+“This is the culmination of all the different ways in which he has painted groups with a very broad brush,” said Marcy Stech, vice president of communications for Emily’s List. “Every week he has shown us this side of him, exposing his racist and misogynistic worldview. And any attempt to erase those moments now is just not going to work.”
+
+José Torres, 54, a computer programmer who works at the Orlando airport, said he was unmoved by Trump’s new pitch to African Americans and Latinos and his potential “softening” on whether he would seek mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants.
+
+“Honestly, the guy as I see him is good at earning money, but as a politician, he’s got radical ideas, and I’m not in agreement with him. I think he’s very racist, also,” Torres said. “It’ll cause disunity in the country.”
+
+Jeremiah Armstrong, 33, of Akron said Trump’s new message to black voters suggests a competition between voters where one really doesn’t exist. Armstrong, a self-employed barber, said the notion that immigrants are taking jobs away from other minorities in the United States does not match with his experience.
+
+“Let me ask you a question: How many black farmworkers do you know? Where around here can you find someone where a Hispanic has come and taken a job?” Armstrong said. “We don’t accept those jobs anyway. I’ve never been offered one, and I’ve never had one taken away from me, so I don’t think that’s the issue.”
+
+Trump’s tough law-and-order talk also has agitated members of the Black Lives Matter movement, who think he doesn’t understand their concerns. Trump has escalated his law enforcement rhetoric in recent months, suggesting several times that protesters are wrong to question police actions.
+
+“Those peddling the narrative of cops as a racist force in our society, a narrative supported with a nod by my opponent, share directly in the responsibility for the unrest in Milwaukee and many other places within our country,” Trump said at a campaign rally in West Bend, Wis. “They have fostered the dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America.”
+
+Many political strategists say the real payoff to Trump’s overtures to minority voters would be to assuage moderate Republicans who are concerned by charges that he is racist. But most doubt his effort will change the minds of minority voters.
+
+“The attempt is at trying to fix a problem he has with mainstream voters, and I’m not optimistic that will work,” said John Weaver, a longtime GOP strategist. “It’s heavy-handed, it’s such a ham-handed attempt. Here’s his problem: People would have to have Etch A Sketch memory in their brains to forget everything he has said.”
+
+Ed O’Keefe in Orlando, Jenna Johnson in Washington and Eva Ruth Moravec in Austin contributed to this report.",REAL
+978,Bernie Sanders Says Bill Clinton Owes Americans an Apology,"NEW YORK – Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders condemned parts of Bill Clinton’s record on Saturday and said the former president owed Americans an apology over a tense exchange with Black Lives Matter protesters at a campaign event earlier this week. Appearing at a forum centering on race at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Mr. Sanders […]",REAL
+2771,How the Iran deal might change the Middle East,"The nuclear deal that the United States and five other world powers signed with Iran is a means to an end, not the end in itself. In that regard, the pact, scheduled for formal adoption on Oct. 19, necessarily rates as a high-risk proposition. If the agreement succeeds, it may mark a first step toward restoring some semblance of stability to the Greater Middle East, thereby allowing the US to lower its profile there. If it fails, the current disorder may in retrospect seem tame.
+
+When he inherited the Oval Office, Barack Obama inherited that disorder. However naively, many Americans – and many others across the globe – expected this charismatic new president to make short work of such untidiness. My personal collection of Obama-era memorabilia includes a special issue of Newsweek from December 2008 featuring a cover story on “How to Fix the World: A Guide for the Next President.” As a foreign-policy novice, Mr. Obama himself seemed to entertain such exalted expectations, for example, promising a “new beginning between the US and Muslims around the world.” As Obama prepares to retire from office, now considerably grayer than he appeared on that Newsweek cover, no such new beginning has occurred and the world as a whole remains stubbornly unfixed.
+
+That said, Obama may yet leave a foreign-policy legacy of real consequence. Whether that legacy is positive or negative may take years to determine, however. Ultimately, his reputation as a statesman is likely to hinge on how the Iran nuclear pact plays out.
+
+Partisan attacks on the deal – comparing Iran to Nazi Germany, likening Obama to Neville Chamberlain, and foreseeing compliant Israelis marched off to death camps – have been predictable and absurd. Even while failing to derail the agreement, those attacks have inadvertently obscured its larger strategic context, thereby hiding from view both its actual risks and its potential benefits.
+
+Indeed, shorthand references to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as it is formally known, as a nuclear deal serve to mask its larger implications. Nominally, the agreement lifts economic sanctions imposed on Iran in exchange for that country accepting limits on its nuclear program. Implicitly, however, it represents an invitation for Iran to come in from the cold. How Iranians respond to that invitation is the question on which Obama’s reputation as a statesman is likely to turn.
+
+Obama was a teenager when the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and ensuing hostage crisis turned Iran into an international pariah, excluded from playing a meaningful role in regional politics. Yet excluding the troublemaker served mostly to incite more trouble.
+
+During the 1980s, the US saw Iran as a threat to stability. US policy sought to contain the Islamic Republic, a presumed imperative that found the US aligning itself with Saddam Hussein in the brutal Iran-Iraq War that Mr. Hussein himself had recklessly initiated. In the 1990s, with Iraq now joining Iran on Washington’s enemies list, the US adopted a strategy of “dual containment.” Necessitating a substantial US military presence in the region, this approach incited blowback that ultimately found expression in the 9/11 attacks. Abandoning containment, the George W. Bush administration responded by embracing preventive war. Under the banner of its “freedom agenda,” it set out to remake the region, starting with Iraq but with expectations of soon moving on to neighboring countries, including Iran. The application of US military power in a big way was going to yield very large benefits.
+
+Alas, it hasn’t worked out that way. The American military project in Iraq miscarried and the “freedom agenda” went nowhere. Worse, even with all the thousands of lives lost or shattered, all the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, US military efforts have actually made conditions in the Greater Middle East markedly worse. An enterprise intended to foster stability, spread democracy, and further the cause of human rights has instead produced something akin to chaos, while fueling violent radicalism.
+
+By invading Iraq, the Bush administration seemingly affirmed Osama bin Laden’s charges of US imperialism and antipathy toward Islam. In Baghdad, meanwhile, the political order resulting from several years of American “nation-building” manifests a combination of ineptitude and sectarian bias that has left Iraq virtually ungovernable. For radical Islamists generally, American intervention in Iraq has been the gift that keeps on giving.
+
+Evidence? Look no further than Islamic State, the successor to Al Qaeda that has declared itself the basis of a new caliphate while carving up large swaths of Iraq and Syria and winning adherents further afield. However loath Americans may be to acknowledge their collective paternity, Islamic State is the bastard child of ill-advised US military interventionism.
+
+No longer the foreign-policy neophyte, Obama today seems to grasp (even if not saying so outright) that US military involvement in the Greater Middle East, dating as far back as the abortive peacekeeping mission in Lebanon during the early 1980s, has been counterproductive. Whether in Iraq or Libya, Somalia or Afghanistan, it has never produced the results promised or expected.
+
+Obama’s acceptance of the risks inherent in the JCPOA constitutes a de facto admission that the attempt to impose order on this region through the application of hard power has failed. Period. Full stop.
+
+Simply trying harder – more bombs or more boots on the ground – won’t produce a more favorable outcome. In effect, the verdict is in: The militarization of US policy in the Islamic world has reached a dead end.
+
+So without fully exposing his hand, Obama is opting for something different. With his Iran initiative, he is attempting to reverse course. In this sense, the JCPOA represents merely a preliminary step in a complex undertaking fraught with hazards.
+
+The ultimate objective of that undertaking is twofold: first, to extricate the US military from what has become a war without end; second, to hand off responsibility for maintaining regional stability to those with the most to lose if the ongoing meltdown continues – the nations inhabiting the neighborhood.
+
+Inherent in this gambit is a heretical proposition to which few politicians – certainly none of the declared presidential candidates – will openly subscribe: that there are certain tasks that exceed the capabilities of even the world’s sole superpower and that should therefore be left to others. Managing the Greater Middle East is one of those things.
+
+Prominent among those “others” who share an interest in preventing further regional disintegration are Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and Iraq (if it ever manages to get its act together). While the regimes controlling these several nations disagree about many things, they are all fundamentally committed to the status quo. That is, unlike Islamic State, Al Qaeda, or any of their offshoots, they are committed to preserving rather than destroying the existing system of nation-states within (more or less) their existing borders.
+
+Obama is betting that Iran also qualifies as a status quo nation – or, if it is not presently, that it can be coaxed into becoming one. The impetus behind the bet is quite clear. Only by restoring Iran to its rightful place among regional heavyweights – as a player, not simply as a spoiler – will it be possible for a stable equilibrium of power to emerge. Putting it another way, to persist in excluding Iran is to guarantee continuing upheaval, with the US therefore unable to escape from the quagmire in which it now finds itself.
+
+Those persuaded that only the concerted exercise of US military might will restore order to this part of the world – neoconservatives and hawkish right-wingers, for example – might welcome such a prospect. Sensible Americans will not.
+
+Yet sensible Americans would do well to appreciate the uncertainties involved. Iran today remains a theocracy in which some top leaders identify the US as the Great Satan. Longstanding Iranian support for organizations on the US terrorist list such as Hezbollah is well documented. Prior to 9/11, Iran may have had a hand in terrorist attacks against US servicemen in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. During the US occupation of Iraq, Iran certainly provided Iraqi militants with weaponry employed to kill American soldiers. Its seniormost authorities eagerly look forward to the day when Israel will cease to exist. In no respect whatsoever does Iran qualify as a “friend” of the US.
+
+On the other hand, US behavior toward Iran over the years has not exactly invited friendship. Even setting aside the 1953 Anglo-American coup that overthrew Iran’s first democratically elected government – an event that the US treats as ancient history – there remain other episodes with which Iranians might reasonably take umbrage.
+
+Washington’s support for Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War is one. The US Navy’s unprovoked shooting down of an Iranian Airbus transiting the Persian Gulf in 1988, killing 290 civilians, is a second. Washington’s inclusion of Iran in the so-called Axis of Evil, despite Tehran signaling a willingness to help after 9/11, is a third. More recently, US collaboration with Israel in unleashing the Stuxnet computer virus to disable an Iranian nuclear research facility – in effect, a state-sponsored cyberattack – offers another.
+
+So Iran has no more reason to trust the US than the US has to trust Iran.
+
+Yet the case to be made for the JCPOA relies on neither friendship nor trust. Instead, it posits a convergence of interests. In an immediate sense, that convergence translates into a concrete and specific quid pro quo: Iran gets escape from economic strangulation; the US gets a suspension of putative Iranian attempts to acquire the bomb. More broadly and more speculatively, the JCPOA may – there are no guarantees – lay the basis for a collaboration against the antistatist violent radicalism threatening to envelop much of the Islamic world.
+
+Obama’s critics dismiss the possibility of such a collaboration as hooey. Those who govern Iran, they argue, are hate-filled crazies committed to a revolutionary agenda.
+
+That’s one view. Another interprets Iranian hate speech, which is real, as akin to hate speech in American politics – intended chiefly for domestic consumption. To some observers, the chants of “death to America” heard in Tehran seem increasingly pro forma, of no more real significance than the Islamophobia and anti-immigrant rants routinely heard on Fox News.
+
+More significantly, the charge of irrationality just doesn’t stick – nothing in their recent behavior suggests that Iran’s rulers have a death wish or are willing to trade Tehran for Tel Aviv. Ruthless and calculating they may be, but not suicidal. As for the Islamic Revolution itself, it appears in many respects to be a spent force, retaining about as much fervor as the Bolshevik Revolution by the 1970s or the Cuban Revolution today.
+
+Notably in evidence, however, is the undisguised fervor of younger Iranians not to overthrow secular modernity but to embrace it. Arguably, they, not the ayatollahs, represent the future of politics in Iran. Removing sanctions and reintegrating Iran into the global economy will further empower this rising generation of Iranians, who are avidly pro-American. Ayatollahs refusing to accommodate their demands for change will do so at their peril.
+
+So, at least, the Obama administration has persuaded itself – an expectation that more than any other factor explains why the administration believes it is possible for the US and Iran on a selective basis to inch toward making common cause. In that regard, the current de facto US-Iranian collaboration against Islamic State may serve as a precursor of sorts. If not friends, the two nations may in time overcome the reflexive compulsion to be at each other’s throats.
+
+Should the government of Israel sign on to Obama’s bet? Should the Saudi royal family or Sunni Arabs more generally?
+
+Their reluctance to do so is understandable. Should that bet fail, they could well find themselves in the line of fire, facing an empowered Iran with grudges to settle. Among the unwelcome scenarios that could plausibly unfold are these: a region-wide nuclear arms race, an escalation of anti-
+
+Zionism among nations competing to demonstrate their fealty to Islam, or preemptive military action by an Israel that perceives itself to be facing an existential threat. None of these can be dismissed out of hand.
+
+For Israel and other US allies in the Middle East, therefore, the appeal of a Pax Americana – US troops permanently on station to keep order and police the recalcitrant in the region – is self-evident. The problem is that Washington’s efforts at policing the Greater Middle East have definitively and irrevocably gone off the rails. The Pax Americana may have worked elsewhere on other occasions, but in this instance it’s surely not working for the US. Persisting in this ill-advised effort will undermine rather than enhance US security and will further erode America’s standing in the world.
+
+Sooner or later, circumstances will oblige even die-hard devotees of American exceptionalism to come to terms with the very real limits of US power. Sooner or later, US allies in the Greater Middle East, including Israel, will do likewise, which may yet open the door to a process, however halting and incremental, of mutual accommodation between Jews and Muslims, Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Persians.
+
+Or it may not. In that case, the opposing sides in these several disputes may choose once more to take up their cudgels against one another even as the US opts out. At the end of the day, sovereign states will exercise their sovereignty.
+
+If Obama’s bet pays off – and it may well take a decade or more to determine the outcome – what will it yield? Even in the best case, with Iran choosing to become a responsible stakeholder while abjuring terrorism and perpetuating its pledge not to develop nuclear weapons, don’t expect an epidemic of peace and harmony to break out. The causes of dysfunction roiling the Greater Middle East are too numerous and varied to be settled by any one diplomatic breakthrough, however welcome.
+
+Yet it may just be that concentrating the minds of the parties involved will enable them to do a better job of fixing their part of the world than the US has managed. If nothing else, at least the pointless depletion of American power and influence will have been abated. We, too, must exercise our sovereignty.",REAL
+8257,HERE THEY GO AGAIN! Muslims trying to claim that the Hebrew-language Dead Sea Scrolls are Arab Muslim in origin,"BNI Store Nov 7 2016 HERE THEY GO AGAIN! Muslims trying to claim that the Hebrew-language Dead Sea Scrolls are Arab Muslim in origin So, let me get this straight. The Dead Sea Scrolls are demonstrably written in Hebrew. But the Palestinians are now saying these ancient documents are, like Jerusalem’s Temple Mount , the holiest site in Judaism, Arab Muslim in origin.That is how ridiculous the campaign to delegitimize Israel has become. Israel Today Carmel Shama-Hacohen – Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – said the Palestinians raised the matter informally during a recent meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin. JERUSALEM POST The dead Sea Scrolls are about 900 documents and Biblical texts, discovered in one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century in the 1940’s and 50’s in caves in and around Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. The texts include some of the only known surviving copies of Biblical documents made before 100 B.C.E., and preserve evidence of Jewish life during the Second Temple period. According to the ambassador and to representatives of the Israel Antiquities Authority who were present at the meeting, the Palestinians intend to make a formal claim to the Dead Sea Scrolls when the committee next convenes in 2017. “This is another provocative and audacious attempt by the Palestinians to rewrite history and to erase our connection to our land,” Shama-Hacohen told The Jerusalem Post . “The Dead Sea Scrolls are factual and weighty archeological evidence of the presence of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.” “[The accusation is] part of an ongoing effort to deny the continuous Jewish presence in Israel. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide incontrovertible proof of the historical facts that underpin the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state,” David Koschitzky, chairman of the UJA Federation in Toronto. “As such, they pose a threat to the ongoing attempts to obscure the unique relationship of the Jewish people with the land of Israel.",FAKE
+6685,Taking Calcium Supplements Causes Brain Lesions,"in: General Health , Sleuth Journal , Special Interests Taking calcium supplements — even at low doses — linked to brain lesions in the first study of its kind. Most calcium supplements are just plain bad news. The idea of taking calcium in pill or tablet form to “keep the bones strong” just doesn’t make that much sense given, first, that we are designed to get our calcium from food. Second, our bone is a living tissue, which requires vitamin C, amino acids, magnesium, silica, vitamins D and K, etc., not to mention regular physical activity, just as much as it does calcium. Taking calcium to the exclusion of these other critical factors doesn’t make sense; nor does it make sense to look at osteoporosis as a deficiency of calcium supplements! As we have reported on extensively in the past, not only is consuming limestone, bone, and the shells of oysters and eggs not a good idea because the calcium can deposit in our soft tissues leading to heart attacks and strokes , but even the goal of maintaining bones as dense as a 25-year old late into life (known as the T-score) is fraught with danger, including a far higher breast cancer risk for those with the highest bone density . Instead of pathologizing aging, and focusing on making the bone denser by any means necessary, the focus should be on bone quality and agility and bodily self-awareness late into life, which helps the elderly prevent the falls that lead to fracture in the first place. In other words, simply having a gait or vision disorder can be at least as an important factor in fracture risk as bone mineral density. The problem with poor quality, inorganic, calcium supplements, however, does not stop with their contribution to cardiovascular disease risk. A combination of factors including low magnesium, vitamin K2 and the presence of fluoride in the water and diet can lead to pineal gland calcification , as well as the calcification of other brain structures, which recently has been hypothesized to be a contributing factor in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease . (click image to enlarge) A truly provocative study on this topic published last year in the British Journal of Nutrition somehow slipped through the cracks, because not only did we miss it but we do not recall it being reported elsewhere. Titled, “ Elevated brain lesion volumes in older adults who use calcium supplements: a cross-sectional clinical observational study ,” the study looked at the possibility that since calcium supplements have now been linked in multiple studies with vascular pathologies associated with cardiovascular diseas they may also be associated with the occurrence of brain lesions (known on MRI scans as hyperintensities) in older adults. These brain lesions, visible as brighter spots in MRI scans, are known to be caused by lack of blood flow (ischemia) and subsequent neurological damage. According to the study, “Brain lesions,also known as hyperintensities, are areas of damage observed on brain MRI ( See Above ). These lesions are common in older adults and increase the risk of devastating health outcomes, including depression, cognitive decline, dementia, stroke, physical disability, hip fracture and death. Postmortem studies have determined that these lesions form primarily due to ischemia, especially larger lesions (.3mm) and lesions found in depressed individuals.” The observational study enrolled 227 older adults (60 years above) and assessed food and supplemental calcium intakes. Participants with supplemental calcium use above zero were categorized as supplement users. Lesion volumes were assessed with MRI scans. Key findings were: Greater lesion volumes were found among calcium supplement users than non-users The influence of calcium supplements was of a magnitude similar to that of the influence of high blood pressure (hypertension), “a well-established risk factor for lesions.” The study found that the amount of calcium used was not associated with lesion volume and that “even low-dose supplements, by older adults may be associated with greater lesion volumes.” Even after controlling for food calcium intake, age, sex, race, years of education, energy intake, depression and hypertension, the association between calcium supplement and lesion volumes held strong. The study details were summarized as follows: “In the present cross-sectional clinical observational study, the association between Ca-containing dietary supplement use and lesion volumes was investigated in a sample of 227 older adults (60 years and above). Food and supplemental Ca intakes were assessed with the Block 1998 FFQ; participants with supplemental Ca intake above zero were categorised as supplement users. Lesion volumes were determined from cranial MRI (1.5 tesla) scans using a semi-automated technique; volumes were log-transformed because they were non-normal. ANCOVA models revealed that supplement users had greater lesion volumes than non-users, even after controlling for food Ca intake, age, sex, race, years of education, energy intake, depression and hypertension (Ca supplement use: β = 0.34, SE 0.10, F(1,217)= 10.98, P= 0.0011). The influence of supplemental Ca use on lesion volume was of a magnitude similar to that of the influence of hypertension, a well-established risk factor for lesions. Among the supplement users, the amount of supplemental Ca was not associated with lesion volume (β = – 0.000035, SE 0.00 015, F(1,139)= 0.06, P= 0.81). The present study demonstrates that the use of Ca-containing dietary supplements, even low-dose supplements, by older adults may be associated with greater lesion volumes. Evaluation of randomised controlled trials is warranted to determine whether this relationship is a causal one.” What is the mechanism beneath this association? The researchers discussed the already established link between calcium supplementation and increased ischemic stroke risk, indicating that calcium supplementation may contribute to calcium deposits in the vasculature (i.e. arterial calcification), mainly in the fatty deposits (atheromas) that contribute to blocking the opening (lumen) of the blood vessels. They state that this process can lead to lack of blood flow and subsequent oxygen deprivation (ischemia), ultimately leading to the development of brain lesions. Another mechanism by which excess calcium may have a direct neurotoxic effect on the brain is the influx of excess calcium into brain cells, which lead to cell death. This possibility is greatly increased if the blood-brain barrier is compromised. The researchers also highlighted the importance of the finding that calcium supplementation may have as significant a deleterious effect on brain lesions as high blood pressure (hypertension): “If this finding is confirmed in longitudinal studies, it could have important health implications – because it is obviously much easier to cease Ca supplement use than to medically manage hypertension.” In other words, hypertension is often caused by toxic antihypertensive drugs that may actually increase the risk of cardiac mortality . Why not remove one of the modifiable causes: calcium supplementation, which would strike to one of the root causes of the problem and resolve it. The researchers concluded their study as follows: “The use of Ca [calcium] -containing dietary supplements by older adults was found to be associated with greater brain lesion volumes, even after controlling for the usual amount of dietary Ca intake. Interestingly, neither the amount of supplemental Ca nor the duration of supplemental Ca use was associated with lesion volume. These findings indicate that adverse biochemical effects of supplemental Ca use may exist in older adults, regardless of the dose.” So, what do we do instead of taking calcium supplements? First, consider why you think you need calcium supplements. Is it because of the dairy industry promoting for decades the concept that we need calcium (from milk)? Or, is it because your doctor is throwing around terms like osteopenia and osteoporosis carelessly, without explaining to you that the present day bone mineral density (BMD) reference ranges assume that aging is a disease and even if you are 60 or 100 for that matter you are still supposed to have the BMD of a 25-year old young woman; an absurd and dangerous idea. Please read the expose, “ Osteoporosis Myth: The Dangers of High Bone Mineral Density ,” in order to understand how millions of healthy women were made to believe that aging is a disease, with worse health outcomes as a result of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Now, when it comes to calcium, focus on food sources. The site NutritionData.com lists about 1,000 of the highest calcium-containing foods, categorized by food group: Foods highest in Calcium . Also, remember that the accelerated bone loss that occurs later in life in women, is triggered by hormonal changes associated with the exhaustion of the ovarian reserve. Nature, however, provides ‘back up’ support for the ovaries in the form of pomegranate . Other hormone-modulating foods include the fermented soy food miso , prunes , and even vitamin C , which has recently been found to regenerate steroid hormones . For a far more extensive research resource on bone health, you can view our page dedicated to the topic here: Bone Health . © November 2, 2016 GreenMedInfo LLC . This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC. Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here http://www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter . Submit your review",FAKE
+7094,US election campaign reveals mass alienation from two-party system,"BY PATRICK MARTIN 5 November 2016 A New York Times /CBS poll published Thursday documents the disgust of the American people with the 2016 election campaign and their alienation from the two major corporate-controlled parties. By a margin of 82 percent to 13 percent, better than six to one, those polled said the campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have filled them with revulsion. According to the Times account, “With more than eight in ten voters saying the campaign has left them repulsed rather than excited, the rising toxicity threatens the ultimate victor. Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, are seen as dishonest and viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters.” Both campaigns insult the intelligence of the American people. Trump appeals to raw anger, denouncing his opponent as a criminal who should be put in jail. Clinton and the Democrats alternate between portraying Trump as a sexual predator and smearing him as a tool of Moscow. Neither offers any serious program for improving the living standards and social conditions of the working class, the vast majority of the American people. The election campaign is one more sign of the profound dysfunction of the US political system, in which two corporate-controlled parties, each defending the interests of the super-rich, enjoy a political monopoly. The Times /CBS poll is a statistical verification of what the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site have long argued: the two-party system leaves working people disenfranchised. The recourse of both campaigns to personal smears and scandalmongering is a means of evading any discussion of the urgent issues that confront the electorate—above all, the worsening social crisis and the mounting danger of a third world war. 
+Notice the repeat pastings of the same photoshopped groups and individuals in this “rally” for Hillary. This campaign will go down in history as the apex of dishonesty in US politics, and that’s saying something. To cite two examples of developments ignored by both campaigns: Friday’s newspapers reported that suicide has overtaken automobile accidents as a cause of death of children aged 10 to 14. One could hardly imagine a more devastating commentary on the dismal prospects that America in 2016 offers the new generation. The election campaign is one more sign of the profound dysfunction of the US political system, in which two corporate-controlled parties, each defending the interests of the super-rich, enjoy a political monopoly . Another report, published in the British Guardian , noted that life expectancy in McDowell County, West Virginia, once the heart of US coal mining, has declined to that of Ethiopia. In 2008, the nearly all-white county voted for Barack Obama. In 2016, 91.5 percent of Republican primary voters cast ballots for Trump—a vote of indignation and despair. Each of the candidates, in different ways, seeks to direct social tensions within the United States along reactionary lines. Clinton is the candidate of the status quo, representing the alliance of Wall Street, the military-intelligence apparatus and the complacent and self-satisfied upper middle class, where identity politics holds sway. Her program, were she to state it honestly, is to outwardly direct the social crisis in the form of intensified US military violence, first in the Middle East, but ultimately against Russia and China, both of which possess nuclear arsenals. Trump represents an attempt to direct social tensions along extreme nationalist lines, appealing to racist and fascistic forces. While he claims, falsely, to have opposed US military interventions in the Middle East, he glorifies the US military and promises to unleash unlimited violence on any country that resists US demands. In the end, his pledge to “Make America Great Again” is little more than the English translation of Hitler’s slogan, “Deutschland Über Alles.” That these are the alternatives presented to voters on November 8 is a product of the protracted decay of the US political system. It is more than four decades since the sharp shift to the right began in both parties, in the aftermath of the mass social protests of the 1960s and early 1970s against the Vietnam War and for the extension of civil rights. The Democratic Party abandoned its former commitment to economic improvements for working people and began to restructure itself as the party of Wall Street and identity politics, appealing to newly privileged layers of blacks, women, gays, etc. The Democratic Leadership Council, under its chairman, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, became the vehicle of this transformation. In Hillary Clinton, this rightward movement has reached its culmination. The Democratic candidate has become the consensus choice of the political establishments in both parties. The Republican Party incorporated the former defenders of Jim Crow segregation and became the dominant party in the South, while maintaining its traditional ties to big business and the military. Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a rally in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years before, and gave a ringing defense of the Jim Crow South’s slogan of “states’ rights.” Trump’s embrace by the KKK and the white nationalist “alt-right” is not an aberration, but the logical conclusion of a process that has paved the way for the emergence of an outright fascist party in America. As Leon Trotsky once wrote, the domination of reaction “signifies this, that the social contradictions are mechanically suppressed” (“Intellectual Ex-Radicals and World Reaction,” 1939). The principal mechanism for the suppression of social contradictions in America has been the trade unions. From the late 1970s on, and especially after the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981, the AFL-CIO unions have worked systematically to undermine and break strikes, assist the employers in wage cutting and plant closures, and subordinate the working class politically to the ever more right-wing policies of the two capitalist parties. There is a definite limit to this process, however. Today, the unions are as sclerotic and discredited as the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union on the eve of its collapse in 1989-1991. The first signs of a resurgence of the class struggle in America, in a series of contract rejection votes and strikes, have already demonstrated that workers will have to fight not only the corporations and the government, but the unions as well. As the class struggle intensifies, workers will have to develop new forms of organization that make possible a struggle not just at the level of the workplace, but on the plane of national and international politics. The Times /CBS poll confirms the overriding feature of the 2016 campaign: the growing gulf between the American population and the corporate-controlled two-party system. Working people are moving to the left, but the two major parties continue to lurch to the right. In the current election cycle, the political radicalization in the working class was expressed most openly in the mass support for the Democratic primary campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Thirteen million people, including the vast majority of young people who took part in the primaries, voted for a candidate claiming to be a socialist and opponent of the billionaires, an unprecedented political development in America. In the end, Sanders capitulated, endorsed Clinton, and demonstrated that his claim to oppose corporate domination of the political system was a fraud. Working people must draw the necessary conclusions. It is impossible to fight the capitalist class through the two-party system that it controls. The working class must build its own political party to defend its own class interests. This requires a political break, not only with the Democratic Party, but with all those organizations and political tendencies that defend, apologize for and cover up for the Democratic Party. —Patrick Martin PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR The author is an editorial writer with wsws.org, organ of theThe Socialist Equality Party (SEP) a Trotkyist formation. He naturally recommends that people consider his party’s candidate as the solution to the crisis. The Greanville Post, an independent left publication, does not endorse any faction. Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. 
+What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda? =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.",FAKE
+7691,"BREAKING – Investigative Journalist Found Dead, Was Working For…","BREAKING – Investigative Journalist Found Dead, Was Working For…   
+Talk about Hillary and a bad way and there is a very good chance you could wind up dead. Is that what happened here? 
+Gavin MacFadyen, the WikiLeaks Director and Founder of the Center for Investigative Journalism, has died. WikiLeaks has officially confirmed it on their Twitter by posting a tribute to the man, saying that he is now taking “his fists and his fight to battle God.” ( inquisitr.com ) 
+This Twitter message was signed JA, referring to the WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange. Somehow even with massive restrictions, Assange was able to post his message. 
+Wikileaks also shared a statement from MacFadyen’s wife, Susan Benn. The statement was published on MacFadyen’s Center for Investigative Journalism site where she noted that he was a “fierce defender of justice and human rights around the world.” 
+Susan states her husband was a strong force behind the ever-changing world of journalism, and had always been committed to ethical, yet hard-hitting, journalism. She even quoted him, saying, “Good journalism is always political journalism.” 
+This man was Assange’s mentor and closest friend, as well as the mentor for many other people in the industry. 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+5351,ManTracker: How to Be One and How to Avoid One – 10/31/16,"ManTracker: How to Be One and How to Avoid One Jeremiah Johnson 
+ReadyNutrition Readers, we’re going to cover some of the basics on how to track man, and some tips on how to keep from being tracked by men . All of your camouflage is to no avail if you are awakened by a boot kicking you in the ribs as you’re curled up in your sleeping bag in a hidey-hole. Please keep in mind: this is a post-SHTF action and/or a life-threatening situation that would call for the tracking of another human being. Man is the Most Dangerous Creature of All 
+Be aware: this is not deer-hunting or tracking a game animal . The rules are different, because a deer won’t double back on you, climb a cliff, and snipe you with a suppressed .308 as you cross a predetermined, pre-ranged spot. If you are adept at tracking game, these skills can help you, but keep in mind you’re tracking the most dangerous, intelligent, and resourceful creature of all: man. You’re tracking down a creature with the natural and learned instincts of a hundred thousand generations of hunters and killers…no matter what culture or creed. Man is the most dangerous creature of all. Never forget that. Respect the potential of the guy or gal you’re tracking. Respect it, and let it temper your emotions and judgment as you’re tracking. 
+To track a man, you need to be aware of your surroundings, the changes in it, and use deductive reasoning all in combination as you’re moving. There are some questions you always need to ask yourself as you are following a man as well as observations you must make: Are you keeping aware of the potential for ambush? Most people don’t like to be followed, and in a SHTF situation you can bet the other guy is playing for keeps. Are you walking right into a trap? As you study the terrain in front of you, are you “gaming” it in your mind? Remember Rule #1: the hunter can (and often does) become the hunted at any time . 
+NOTE: THIS QUESTION # 1 AND RULE # 1 BOTH APPLY CONCURRENTLY AT ALL TIMES! THEY ACCOMPANY AND SUPERCEDE ALL OF THE SUBSEQUENT QUESTIONS AND RULES! Minor deviations in the terrain (path) that would not normally be there: Broken hardwood branches at chest or head height, broken or “moved/displaced” vegetation, the tracks on the ground, bark rubbed from the face of fallen logs…. all of these are good indications that man has come this way. Major deviations in the terrain/path : perhaps a small mound of earth in the woods with what appears to be a “dent” followed by a long groove and crushed grass to either side…a good indicator your quarry stepped on the mound and slipped. Perhaps some good-sized trees chopped down, or good sized branches removed with an edged tool. These could be either fighting positions/lean-to’s/fortifications, or ground cover respectively. Look for signs of the hand of man where it is obvious. Changes to the earth . This means the ground . You’ve been tracking your quarry through a swamp, and now you emerge in a grassy field. Look for signs of tracks, and for mud to be tracked through the grass as well. If you’ve been walking through a dry riverbank with clay for a bed, then the color of clay will show up in front of you in the tracks of your target. Trash/detritus . Man is a messy creature, and no matter how careful he always messes up. It could be a food wrapper, or a cigarette butt he forgot to tote out with him. It could be a piece of paper or a dropped tool or even ammunition. It could also be part of a meal…even something so innocuous as crumbs. Your job as the tracker is to spot these deviances as they come out to meet your eyes. Smell . Man is (especially after several days in the bush or after physical exertion) a stinky creature. Yes, you can smell many things of man: his sweat, his deodorants and perfumes, his tobacco products (you can smell a cigarette for a long distance in the woods), and, of course, his stool. This last one (don’t laugh) is a really good giveaway, as most people will relieve themselves and not worry about covering up what they produce. This is not mentioned relative to hygiene, however, but in relation to tracking. Such people not caring about how they relieve themselves won’t give much consideration to someone using it to trail them. Noise . Man is, indeed, a noisy creature. He breathes heavily, belches, flatulates, grunts, groans, complains, talks loudly, and snores. All of these can be used to your advantage to find your quarry. He also drops things, bangs and bumps into things, and clatters metal against metal. He falls down, breaking branches and he curses or moans, depending on how badly he hurts himself. He also communicates to his fellow humans, either with a radio or with his voice. Light Discipline : man is as stubborn as they come on this one. Those flashlights are never “red lensed” and kept under a poncho or jacket as they should be…just everyone flashing the lights all over the place. Same for the cigarettes. Instead of cupping their hands around them and keeping the cigs low, there’s that orange dot right out to your front, head height. Man loves to use the flashlight when he’s moving around at night. It can be his undoing, and to your advantage if you look for your quarry being careless with the light. Changes to the quarry’s flight . A hunted man will always know he is being hunted. You need to be aware of an increased pace, a change of direction, changes in elevation…all factors that will indicate either distress or concern on the part of your quarry. The pace change can be noticed by footprints, especially the distance widening or shortening between them. Widening means he’s taking off. Shortening means the terrain is becoming more difficult or he’s tiring, or both. The runner usually uses the balls of his feet with a shallow heel-print. The walker sets his heels into the soil more deeply. Tread Depth : we covered this a little in #9, and in addition, if the guy has a size nine boot print and is really sinking into the earth? Well, he’s probably carrying some serious stuff in the form of supplies and/or weapons. 
+If your search is proceeding too well and too smoothly? It’s an ambush . We’ve covered these fundamentals, because believe it or not, it is easier to avoid the hunter if you first have been the hunter. What we just covered forms the basis for avoiding someone who is pursuing you. Believe it or not, you can practice this stuff in the woods with family and/or team members. It makes for both a good workout and a challenge to actually implement stuff you learn. Part Two we’ll focus on how to get away from the bad guys trying to find you. Until then keep studying and practicing. It’ll pay off in the end…especially after the SHTF. JJ out! 
+Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne). Mr. Johnson was a Special Forces Medic, EMT and ACLS-certified, with comprehensive training in wilderness survival, rescue, and patient-extraction. He is a Certified Master Herbalist and a graduate of the Global College of Natural Medicine of Santa Ana, CA. A graduate of the U.S. Army’s survival course of SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), Mr. Johnson also successfully completed the Montana Master Food Preserver Course for home-canning, smoking, and dehydrating foods. 
+Mr. Johnson dries and tinctures a wide variety of medicinal herbs taken by wild crafting and cultivation, in addition to preserving and canning his own food. An expert in land navigation, survival, mountaineering, and parachuting as trained by the United States Army, Mr. Johnson is an ardent advocate for preparedness, self-sufficiency, and long-term disaster sustainability for families. He and his wife survived Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Cross-trained as a Special Forces Engineer, he is an expert in supply, logistics, transport, and long-term storage of perishable materials, having incorporated many of these techniques plus some unique innovations in his own homestead. 
+Mr. Johnson brings practical, tested experience firmly rooted in formal education to his writings and to our team. He and his wife live in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with their three cats. This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition",FAKE
+1240,Trump Smirks As Beltway GOP Crumbles,"With a strong win in South Carolina on Saturday night, Donald Trump has officially upended the 2016 Republican primaries.
+
+SPARTANBURG, S.C. — When Donald Trump speaks, he has a habit of gripping the lectern with all but the middle finger of his left hand. The middle finger wriggles about, curling up and down with the rhythm of his words. On Saturday night, as he addressed the crowd after winning the primary here by a ten-point margin, it seemed to be wriggling at all of us.
+
+“A couple of the pundits said, ‘Well, if a couple of the other candidates dropped out, if you add their scores together, it’s going to equal Trump,’” he said, doing his best impersonation of a Beltway Idiot. The crowd booed and Trump threw his hands out. “Right?” he said, “they’re geniuses. They don’t understand that, as people drop out, I’m gonna get a lot of those votes also! You don’t just add them together.”
+
+In the eight months since he first sailed down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy, Trump has watched as every single prediction about his campaign, made by so-called experts, has been proven wrong. Not that winning South Carolina means he’ll win it all—Newt Gingrich beat Mitt Romney here by thirteen points in 2012. As it stands now, Trump has 61 delegates. To win the nomination, he needs 1,237. But Trump wasn’t supposed to make it this far to begin with.
+
+It was supposed to be a blip, and then it was supposed to collapse under the weight of its own arrogance, and then it was supposed to be destroyed by the knights in the establishment, and then the voters were supposed to get serious.
+
+Well, they were serious here at the Marriott on North Church Street on Saturday, just like they had been at the Executive Court Banquet Facility in Manchester, New Hampshire ten days ago after he won there, but not in the way that anybody could’ve anticipated back in June.
+
+His calls for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border were mocked by the experts then as proof of his inherent silliness. And it is a stupid idea, one that couldn’t work even if he managed to get it done. But on Saturday, as he spoke about trade with Mexico, people in the audience began shouting, “Build a wall!” He turned to one man and said, “We’re gonna build a wall, don’t worry.” He turned back to the audience and asked them a question, “we’re gonna do the wall and, by the way, who’s gonna pay for the wall?” A chorus responded, “Mexico!”
+
+The polls here had shown for months, much like in New Hampshire, that Trump had a sizable lead over the rest of the field. But to think that he could win anywhere was, in a lot of ways, to admit that everything we think we know about politics and what the people who participate in the process believe is bullshit.
+
+“History will say that on this night in South Carolina, we took the first step forward to the beginning of a new American century,"" Rubio declared from his rally in Columbia, SC.
+
+He did not explain what was historic about the evangelical in the race losing the evangelical vote in a state where —according to an exit poll—73 percent of Republican voters said they consider themselves born-again or evangelical Christians. Trump, whose cursing is part of his stump speech, is on his third wife, admitted on TV that he’d never asked God for forgiveness, and this week got into a fight with The Pope.
+
+And then, not only did he win, but he won Beaufort, the state’s only majority-Catholic county. Ted Cruz, who beat Trump in Iowa thanks to the evangelical community and invested millions here to turn them out again, came in third place. Marco Rubio, a Catholic, finished a distant second. Jeb Bush, a converted Catholic, dropped out altogether.
+
+Before Trump descended on stage, bathed in pink and purple lights fit for one of his pageants, his fans milled about on the red and gold carpet, picking at plates of cheese and fruit and drinking booze from one of two cash bars. The extent to which their outfits of sweat clothes or sequined mini-dresses or jeans and t-shirts were accessorized with TRUMP swag—scarves and pins and buttons and a silicone mask of his likeness, in one case—made the event feel like a convention.
+
+His fans are predominantly white, usually older, working people or retired working people. Oftentimes they’re very religious, but that’s not what motivates them. They feel as if the country has left them behind, but they differ from the Tea Partiers of 2010 in that they are not political and they are uninterested in policy unless the policy amounts to a giant fuck-you to a deserving group, like China, or “special interests.” The phrase Make America Great Again, to them, is a legitimate campaign platform.",REAL
+6243,Putin's New Promise: 'I WILL DEFEAT THE ILLUMINATI',"The Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown that he has never been afraid of fighting several opponents on different fronts. Now, it appears that he has a new target in his sights – the Illuminati.
+
+
+Vladimir Putin swears to take on the Illuminati 
+
+It has been previously alleged that Putin, who was born and raised in the shadow of important political influence and who previously served in the notorious Russian intelligence agency, the KGB is himself a bona fide member of the New World Order. However, it seems unlikely that Putin ever became a fully-fledged member of the Illuminati. From the outset of his rise to power, Putin has made it clear that he is a Russian patriot and that his first duty will always be to his country.
+
+To this end, Putin has been seen to actively act against the interests of those within the Illuminati if their activities conflict with the health and prosperity of the Russian nation. This has allegedly led to Jacob Rothschild calling Putin ‘a traitor to the New World Order.' In response, it has been claimed that Putin said that he would destroy the shadowy organization. It is believed that Putin has now established himself as the most dangerous opponent of the Illuminati alive today . 
+
+
+Over the years, Putin has forced out some oligarchs in the pay of the Khazarian Mafia out of the country and into areas such as the City of London. It is claimed that he has done this to loosen the stranglehold that the Illuminati have held over the Russian economy and major industries since the end of the Cold War. He has also expelled all businesses operating under the Rothschild Banking Group in recent months as he believed that they were playing a positive role in the Russian financial system.
+
+WATCH THE VIDEO: 
+
+It has also been alleged that Putin is moving outside of the realm of domestic concerns and is also thwarting Illuminati operations on the global scale. It has been said that the Russian military’s intervention in Syria and commitment to protecting the ruling party headed by President Al-Assad has torpedoed Illuminati plans to lay a pipeline through the country which would have been operated by their agents.
+
+Disclose TV 
+SOURCE ",FAKE
+614,Long-Shot Candidates Look To Keep Hope Alive For 2016,"Long-Shot Candidates Look To Keep Hope Alive For 2016
+
+Not for the headline-devouring, top-tier prospects like Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie, but rather for the long shots and lesser-knowns who are floating their names for 2016.
+
+On Sunday, former Montana Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer reiterated his interest in a White House run.
+
+""I'll just say that there's around 100 counties in Iowa, and on my bucket list is to try to and make it to all the counties in Iowa someday,"" Schweitzer said on MSNBC, in a flattering reference to the state that hosts the first presidential caucuses.
+
+Two Vermont liberals have signaled a similar interest. One of them, Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent and self-described socialist, recently said he's open to a presidential bid if no other progressive candidate steps up.
+
+""Under normal times, it's fine, you have a moderate Democrat running, a moderate Republican running,"" Sanders told the Burlington Free Press. ""These are not normal times. The United States right now is in the middle of a severe crisis and you have to call it what it is.""
+
+Former Vermont Democratic Gov. Howard Dean, who ran for president in 2004, told Buzzfeed last week that people have tried to persuade him to take another shot in 2016.
+
+""We'll see. As I say, you never say never in politics,"" he said.
+
+A few former Republican presidential candidates are also openly considering another run — or hoping to remain in the presidential spotlight.
+
+Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said last week that he will make a decision about launching a second bid for the presidency next year. He added that the GOP needs to nominate an ""authentic conservative"" in 2016 who can ""lay out a positive vision for America based on the principles that made our country great"" — presumably someone like him.
+
+A month earlier, it was former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee who insisted he is still in the mix: The 2008 GOP presidential candidate told the Christian Broadcasting Network he is ""absolutely"" thinking about running for the White House again.
+
+It's not just those with a presidential campaign under their belt who've sought to float themselves as prospective 2016 candidates.
+
+After visiting the Iowa State Fair in August, former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown said he was ""curious"" about pursuing a presidential bid ""if there's room for a bipartisan problem solver"" in the race. He's also considering running for the U.S. Senate again in 2014, but in New Hampshire.
+
+Then there's former GOP Florida Rep. Allen West, who like Brown lost his bid for re-election last year. The one-term ex-congressman said in October he is looking at running for several different offices down the road, including the presidency.
+
+Even real estate mogul Donald Trump and Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler and governor of Minnesota, have raised the possibility of running for president next time around.
+
+All of these candidates have one thing in common: They aren't frequently mentioned on lists of the top 2016 contenders.
+
+Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, said many of these potential candidates are after one thing: free publicity.
+
+""Politicians and public figures are taking advantage of the vacuum in presidential electoral politics right now,"" Scala said. ""When there's a name floated, and if they're at all prominent, it will get some coverage.""
+
+As for those on opposing ends of the political spectrum, like Sanders and Santorum, declaring an interest in running for president can also be a way to influence the conversation within their respective parties.
+
+""They want to make sure their agenda gets some publicity,"" Scala said. ""It is marketing to some degree.""",REAL
+1567,"Debate night: The media want a Trump fight, with blood and bruises","The press is full of chatter about what the other candidates could, should, must do to derail the Trump juggernaut at tonight’s CNN debate.
+
+Naturally, the big audience for the second presidential debate offers the other Republicans a prime opportunity to make a lasting impression in this Donald-dominated campaign. So I expect there will be no shortage of canned zingers.
+
+But every candidate on that stage has to be wary of getting into an insult contest with a gut fighter who doesn’t play by the usual rules of political politeness.
+
+It’s all well and good for candidates to talk about creating a “moment,” but that can’t seem artificial or staged, or the attacker will look phony and a tad desperate. Trump’s rivals have to deliver a positive message about themselves while drawing a sharp contrast with the real estate mogul, not just denounce him, as Bobby Jindal did, as a narcissist and egomaniac.
+
+And consider this: If half of the other 10 candidates try to whack Trump, won’t that make him look larger? Won’t that reinforce the narrative that Trump has so shaken the Republican establishment that his opponents are feverishly trying to bring him down?
+
+Trump’s task is far easier: He can uncork his usual lines about the “very, very stupid people” running the government, and jab back at those who challenge him (bad polls, low energy and so on). And—remember the Fox debate—if he gets a detailed question that he doesn’t like, he can take a swipe at the media and the “gotcha” game.
+
+In terms of the media’s focus, it’s going to be Trump vs. Whoever—as long as Whoever is named Carly, Ben or Jeb. The truth is that journalists have lost interest in most of the other candidates, who are mired in single digits (as is Jeb, but he’s still got the money, the Bush name, and the fading aura of the person the pundits thought would be The Man to Beat). That could change, but right now they're eclipsed by Trump.
+
+Carson told me in the interview we aired Sunday on ""Media Buzz"" that he would not be throwing punches in this campaign, and that he regretted questioning Trump’s faith and felt he needed to apologize. So even though yesterday’s CBS/New York Times poll has him at 23 percent, close behind Trump’s 27 percent, I don’t expect Carson to take him on. The question for the “okay doctor” (in Trump’s words) is how he handles it if The Donald starts denigrating him.
+
+The media are really hoping for a dustup involving Fiorina, whose Super PAC made a clever ad aimed at women, boasting she has earned every wrinkle on her 61-year-old face, after Trump told a Rolling Stone reporter, “Look at that face.” Trump has taken to hitting her as a failed CEO dumped by Hewlett-Packard, but keep in mind that she took him on in the Fox happy-hour debate, even though he wasn’t there.
+
+“Never before in American presidential politics has a candidate who has drawn accusations of sexism and bullying been forced to personally confront the female recipient of his insults on live television,” the New York Times declares. “And with Mrs. Fiorina bragging that she is getting under Mr. Trump’s skin, their showdown is emerging as one of the most intriguing subplots of the second debate.”
+
+And here’s the Wall Street Journal: “After punching her way onto the big stage, Carly Fiorina 
+
+ is poised to take on her party’s heavyweights in Wednesday’s Republican presidential primary debate, where she will come face-to-face with the candidate who found fault with her face.”
+
+Still, Carly was very restrained in responding to Facegate, telling Megyn Kelly only that she must be getting under Trump’s skin. So don’t expect any pro wrestling.
+
+What’s getting a lot of traction online is Mark Halperin’s Bloomberg analysis of why Trump has a commanding position:
+
+“With Trump, the rules have changed. So far, he has proven to be largely immune from attack, and also a master killer himself, with a unique political arsenal. With a few months to go before voters vote, Trump has squashed the poll numbers and personas of a host of his rivals, without resorting to significant traditional opposition research, paid media, or surrogates. He simply uses Instagram, Twitter, and his virtually unlimited access to the news media to unsheathe his sharp tongue, cutthroat sensibility, and unerring perverse humor. And Trump can shift to kill mode without strain or hesitation.
+
+“From the get-go of his entrance in June, Trump has engaged intuitively in kill-or-be-killed tactics.”
+
+Deadly rhetoric aside, one of the reasons I warned from the beginning that Trump shouldn’t be underestimated is that I saw how his buzzsaw style was sharpened in New York’s tabloid culture. But you can’t just be a Don Rickles figure. Some voters are also drawn to his successful career in real estate and reality TV, and the wealth that enables Trump to thumb his nose at the donor class.
+
+One thing to watch: If Trump uses the debate to raise his recent arguments about overpaid CEOs and taxing hedge-fund millionaires, you’ll know he’s decided to shrug off the not-really-a-conservative attacks and stay on his populist path.
+
+Click for more from Media Buzz
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+8642,JUDGMENT DAY: The One Reason Why Every Christian And Jew In America Should Vote For Donald Trump,"  JUDGMENT DAY: The One Reason Why Every Christian And Jew In America Should Vote For Donald Trump The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 is a public law of the United States passed by the 104th Congress on October 23, 1995. It was passed for the purposes of initiating and funding the relocation of the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.   8, 2016 Jerusalem will be the portal through which God administers His Justice to a depraved world. Jerusalem will be His “burdensome stone” with which He judges the world. 
+“The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the LORD.” Proverbs 16:33 (KJV) 
+As Americans who love this country, it is absolutely crystal-clear who we should vote for. Only one candidate’s campaign slogan is Make America Great Again, only one candidate says that they will # DrainThe Swamp . I think you get the idea. But you can be a patriotic America and not be a Christian, right? Trump: It’s Time To Drain The Swamp In Washington, D.C – Five-Point Plan For Ethics Reform So is the a compelling, overarching reason why a Bible believing Christian should vote for Donald Trump? Yes, there is 
+Donald Trump has made as part of his platform a promise to move the American Embassy from its current location in Tel Aviv to its new location in Jerusalem. In fact, it was signed into law in 1995, read this: 
+The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 is a public law of the United States passed by the 104th Congress on October 23, 1995. It was passed for the purposes of initiating and funding the relocation of the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem , no later than May 31, 1999, and attempted to withhold 50 percent of the funds appropriated to the State Department specifically for “Acquisition and Maintenance of Buildings Abroad” as allocated in fiscal year 1999 until the United States Embassy in Jerusalem had officially opened. The act also called for Jerusalem to remain an undivided city and for it to be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel. Israel’s declared capital is Jerusalem, but this is not internationally recognized, pending final status talks in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict . The United States has withheld recognition of the city as Israel’s capital. The proposed law was adopted by the Senate (93–5),and the House (374–37). 
+Contained in the Jerusalem Embassy Act is a prophecy bombshell , perhaps when you skimmed through it just now you missed so let me break it out for you, ready? 
+“…called for Jerusalem to remain an undivided city and for it to be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel. 
+Now please pause at this juncture and think about what that means for a Bible believer. Do you know why the Palestinians have, for 20 years, refused to accept the so-called Two State Solution ? Because the Two State Solution does not give Jerusalem to Palestine, it gives it to its rightful owner, Israel. The Battle of Armageddon will be fought over who will gain control of, not just Israel in general, but the rights to Jerusalem in particular! The word “Jerusalem” appears 811 times in your King James Bible, think that God places a lot of importance on it? 
+“Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem.” Zechariah 12:2 (KJV) 
+God says if you go against His city of Jerusalem that it will mean “lights out” for you. Jerusalem will be the portal through which God administers His Justice to a depraved world. Jerusalem will be His “burdensome stone” with which He judges the world. 
+“And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.” Zechariah 12:3 (KJV) NTEB PRESENTS: Donald Trump, Jerusalem and Bible Prophecy 
+We just launched a YouTube channel for Bible teaching and prophecy, and here is our very first video of our radio show on Donald Trump and Jerusalem. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking here , thank you! 
+Bible believers, let’s be honest. God is not really so much concerned with any election in any nation so much as He is with His nation of Israel and its capital city of Jerusalem. That’s where God’s passion is, that’s where His heart is. Genesis says that if you want God’s blessing, then bless His nation of Israel and bless His chosen people, the Jews. 
+“And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Genesis 12:3 (KJV) Christian, do you need a reason from the Bible to vote for Donald Trump? 
+I just gave you two, very powerful and very Biblical reasons to vote for Donald Trump. He will move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and he will love Israel and God will bless us for that. Now, get up, put your “big boy” and “big girl” pants on, and go out and vote . 
+Not for the “lesser of two evils” as some erroneously assert, but for the only candidate that will fulfill Bible prophecy   
+Donald J. Trump.",FAKE
+5768,What is the real state of affairs in the Russian economy?,"What is the real state of affairs in the Russian economy? 01.11.2016 Print version Font Size Economist Yakov Mirkin gave another pessimistic forecast about the state of affairs in the Russian economy . According to him, Russia will face a decline in living standards, an economic setback and fluctuations in GDP growth on minimal levels. At the same time, international experts say that the Russian economy has been stabilizing , whereas S&P and Fitch have upgraded the ratings of major Russian companies.What is happening in reality? Pravda.Ru requested an expert opinion from Vice-Rector of the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Doctor of Economic Sciences, Professor, Honored Economist of the Russian Federation, Sergei Silvestrov. ""Who is closer to the truth about the current state of affairs in the Russian economy? Can Russia boast of any success in overcoming the crisis?"" ""There are no large-scale changes at this point. It is only agriculture that shows some improvement, and this is largely a consequence of the allocation of state credits and tax incentives from the government. All other sectors of the Russian economy are, unfortunately, stagnating.""Unfortunately, Vnesheconomicbank (the Russian Foreign Economic Bank) and the Russian Corporation for Development have found themselves in a difficult situation. This bank is one of the main institutions that promotes the modernization of industry and supports the development of breakthrough projects. If such corporations are unable to work, then there is no development."" ""What can give an incentive to development?"" ""One could mobilize sources of investment activity - the funds of insurance, pension and various reserve funds, bank capitals, surplus earnings on deposits of companies, people's savings.""Russia's economic ""breakthrough"" has to rely on a technological forecast to enter new global markets in 10-15 years. At the same time, there should be strict financial and tax control established. ""Russia has very good scientific achievements that should be introduced into practice. This requires an annual investment of up to two trillion rubles at least for several years. The optimal amount would be from five to seven trillion, and one has to think how to concentrate this money in the country,"" the expert told Pravda.Ru. On October 31, the head of the Duma Committee on Financial Markets, Anatoly Aksakov, said that the budget for 2017-2019 was less focused on oil prices. According to him, the budget was drawn up around the oil price of $40 per barrel, while industries such as agriculture, agro-processing and food production came to the forefront. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru For USA, Russian economic growth is aggression",FAKE
+7982,Baba Vanga Was Right About Obama's Presidency And The 9/11 Attacks Sees Dire Future For Trump And The US,"The Blind Prophetess claims Barrack Obama will be the last president of the United States.
+
+Baba Vagan is a cult figure in some circles in the Balkan states because of her uncanny knack for making astonishingly accurate predictions about the future.
+
+
+Baba Vagan, who is sometimes referred to as the blind prophetess, is credited with predicting the events of September 11th, 2001 in the 1980s. It has been said that she had a vision of ‘American brethren’ being attacked by two steel birds which some believe could have symbolised the two hijacked jet planes which smashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre complex.
+
+Perhaps even more impressively, she also made a prediction that the 44th President of the United States would be an African-American. However, unfortunately for the controversial president-elect Donald Trump, Vagan has said that Barrack Obama would be the last president that America would ever have and that Trump will never actually come to power. Extrapolating from this, supporters of Vagan have suggested that something catastrophic will happen to American civilisation in the space of the next two months and that the ramifications will be so deep that it would irrevocably abolish the office of the presidency. Others have suggested that it means that Trump will eschew the title and role of ‘president’ and instead install himself as a permanent dictator of the United States . 
+
+It has been estimated that 85% of Baba Vagan’s prophecies have come to pass. However, sceptics have suggested that her prophecies are so vague that she is credited with being accurate more often than is reasonable. Her supporters have also been criticised for making fraudulent claims about her powers of psychic deduction.
+
+However, for those who are inclined to find out more about the mysterious blind prophetess it may be of interest to know about some of her other predictions for the future. Vagan believes that human beings will have established cities under the oceans in 2130, that there will be a war on Mars in the year 3000 and by 3797 the Earth will be destroyed, but humanity will survive after fleeing to another universe.
+
+Disclose TV 
+SOURCE ",FAKE
+6894,"Voters in Arkansas, North Dakota Legalize Medical Marijuana Despite Federal Prohibition","By Mike Maharrey Voters in North Dakota and Arkansas have approved ballot measures legalizing medical marijuana, taking a first step toward nullifying the unconstitutional federal prohibition of... ",FAKE
+5407,OMG! The ULTIMATE BENGHAZI BOMBSHELL! Leaked Emails Show Hillary Ordered The Rescue Team To.. • USA Newsflash,"
+Everyday, more and more information surfaces about Benghazi. 
+A critical email that just surfaced shows that the Pentagon offered to act immediately in Benghazi. 
+Here are the details: 
+VIA Allen B West 
+The ugly truth about Benghazi continues to trickle out. Like this critical email that shows the Pentagon urgently offering help to the unfolding attack in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. And although it came after the first wave of the attack at the consulate, it occurred before a mortar strike on the CIA annex killed Ty Woods and Glenn Doherty. 
+As Judicial Watch notes, the email ‘leaves no doubt military assets were offered and ready to go, and awaiting State Department signoff, which did not come.” 
+In other words, the Pentagon was offering military assets that potentially could have saved the lives of American citizens — if only the State Department had signed off. 
+Of course, we all remember who was leading the State Department at that time. Everyone’s favorite leading Democrat candidate for president, Hillary Clinton. 
+Via The Right Scoop : 
+An email recently obtained by Judicial Watch shows that the Pentagon was demanding Hillary allow them to send help to Benghazi during the 2012 attack. This would completely contradict the claim from Hillary and Leon Panetta that no forces were available and within reach to provide help to the compound that was under siege. 
+From Fox News: 
+As the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was unfolding, a high-ranking Pentagon official urgently messaged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top deputies to offer military help, according to an email obtained by Judicial Watch. 
+The revelation appears to contradict testimony Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave lawmakers in 2013, when he said there was no time to get forces to the scene in Libya, where four Americans were killed, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. 
+“I just tried you on the phone but you were all in with S [apparent reference to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton],” reads the email, from Panetta’s chief of staff Jeremy Bash. “After consulting with General Dempsey, General Ham and the Joint Staff, we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” 
+Ironically, Hillary Clinton and her minions were concerned with spinning the story instead of gearing up the military forces. 
+Here’s the email: More: 
+The email was sent out at 7:19 p.m. ET on Sept. 11, 2012, in the early stages of the eight-hour siege that also claimed the lives of Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith and two former Navy SEALs, Ty Woods and Glen Doherty, private CIA contractors who raced to the aid of embattled State Department workers. 
+Although the email came after the first wave of the attack at the consulate, it occurred before a mortar strike on the CIA annex killed Woods and Doherty. 
+“This leaves no doubt military assets were offered and ready to go, and awaiting State Department signoff, which did not come,” Judicial Watch, a nonprofit government watchdog said in a statement. 
+Parts of the email from Bash were redacted before release, including details on what military forces were available. 
+So there it is. Panetta and Hillary LIED to the American public over and over, and the media never pressed them enough to demand answers. 
+The clincher? This information has been available since a month after the attack. But as Judicial Watch notes: 
+The Obama administration and Clinton officials hid this compelling Benghazi email for years,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The email makes readily apparent that the military was prepared to launch immediate assistance that could have made a difference, at least at the CIA Annex. The fact that the Obama Administration withheld this email for so long only worsens the scandal of Benghazi. ",FAKE
+767,Why would anyone want to be Trump or Clinton’s VP?,"If you’re masochistic enough to plow through the next three months of vice presidential speculation, you might want to pause and ask a more fundamental question: Why would anybody want that job under Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? If either of them becomes president, we will probably see the most marginalized vice president in a generation.
+
+That may seem like an odd notion because under the past three presidents, the once-scorned office has become a significant power center. It used to be almost mandatory to cite, in any article about the vice presidency, the centuries of contempt that vice presidents themselves have heaped on the office—starting with the very first, John Adams, who called it “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.” (Then there was John Nance Garner: “Not worth a bucket of warm piss.” And Harry Truman: “About a useful as a cow’s fifth teat.”)
+
+By contrast, Bill Clinton gave Al Gore genuine access—including weekly one-on-one lunches—and serious responsibilities in areas from trade to technology. The rap on Dick Cheney was not that he was impotent, but that he had too much power, especially when it came to questions of war and peace. Joe Biden has taken on the role he asked for, to be the president’s most senior adviser. In sum, the past quarter-century has made obsolete the stereotype embodied by Alexander Throttlebottom, the hapless veep in the 1931 musical “Of Thee I Sing,” who had to join a tour group in order to get into the White House.
+
+But what makes the job so unappealing this time around is the unusual—indeed unique—aspects of the two major party contenders for the presidency. Neither Trump nor Clinton is likely to allow his or her vice president anywhere near the center of power.
+
+Imagine yourself as Trump’s vice president. What are your chances of serving as a trusted, respected adviser on politics and policy? Look at the last president who had something like the mixture of massive self-regard and massive insecurity that defines Trump—Lyndon Baines Johnson. Having lived through the hell of being a scorned and shunned vice-president under John Kennedy—“I hated every minute of it,” he later said—he treated his own second, Hubert Humphrey, with equal contempt.
+
+“You are his choice in a political marriage, and he expects your absolute loyalty,” Humphrey later said, but even that was not enough. In 1965, when Humphrey offered Johnson carefully modulated advice about the political costs of escalating the war in Vietnam, he was banished from the inner circle for a full year. And in 1968, Johnson made clear his contempt for his would-be successor (“Hubert squats when he pees,” he said).
+
+Trump’s contempt for rivals, critics and even allies makes LBJ’s bullying look like something out of Mr. Rogers. The video of him curtly ordering endorser Chris Christie to “get on the plane and go home” ought to be fair warning that a vice president under Trump should not expect anything better. Moreover, the idea of loyally supporting a Trump agenda poses a special challenge: That agenda is likely to be amended or abandoned on a moment’s notice. A prospective running mate, asked to declare himself or herself on Trump’s abortion, tax, health care or foreign policy positions, might be tempted to answer: “Which ones?” As for as being “the last voice” offering guidance, Trump has already told us what voice that will be.
+
+“I’m speaking to myself,” he told Mika Brzezinski of “Morning Joe” in March, “because I have a very good brain.” His vice president, Trump suggested last week, would be a messenger boy, serving as his “legislative liaison.”
+
+These factors, added to Trump’s sharp diversions from the conservative canon, may help explain why so many otherwise likely candidates for the second spot have waved away any interest, the latest being Marco Rubio. (Trump’s response, of course, has been more contempt: “It is only the people that were never asked to be VP that tell the press that they will not take the position,” he tweeted.)
+
+The challenge is different for a prospective Clinton running mate—and one that no past veep has ever faced. Yes, past vice presidents have found themselves in a battle for the ear of POTUS with key White House aides and Cabinet members. But they’ve never had the challenge of competing with a presidential spouse who also happens to be a former two-term president. Indeed, in many ways, Bill Clinton would be a near-perfect choice to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate. His political skills are unmatched; he knows the dangers that confront any White House as no one else possibly can; he’s even got a track record of working with an opposition Congress—something that neither of his successors can match.
+
+Yes, there’s a pesky issue of whether the 22nd Amendment bars a two-term president from running for veep, and one of the Clintons would have to move back to Arkansas to avoid risking the loss of New York’s electors (constitutionally, electors can vote for only one of the two national candidates from their own state). But the point is that Bill’s credentials—even as first spouse—make him a formidable power source that would confront any real-life vice president.
+
+Bill Clinton may have lost a step or two, and his track record as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton is decidedly checkered, but if you found yourself as president faced with a daunting policy or political dilemma you’d be foolish not to turn to one of the shrewdest thinkers in modern memory. Clinton herself has acknowledged she lacks the skills of her mate, and however much—or little—she trusts Bill Clinton in some areas of their lives, her trust in his political and policy judgments has to be formidable. In the past, presidential spouses have had significant influence over the chief executive: Eleanor Roosevelt pushed a progressive agenda; Nancy Reagan got top aides fired; and Hillary Clinton drove Bill’s health care effort (albeit pretty much into the ditch). But a “first spouse” with eight years’ experience in the Oval Office? Bill would probably have a hand in everything.
+
+What makes the likelihood of a weak vice president particularly unfortunate is that there are good arguments that a strong veep is exactly what both potential presidents would need. Trump, so unschooled in the ways of Washington, would be in desperate need of a “prime minister” to help him with the business of governing. A President Hillary Clinton would benefit from talking to someone who’s outside her tight ring of insiders (including her husband) and could give her regular reality checks.
+
+None of this means the there’ll be a shortage of veep wannabees. A number of Republicans, especially those without (or soon to be without) an official public role, have already signaled their availability: Rick Perry, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin. And it’s not hard to imagine that any number of Democrats would readily sign up, however challenging the job might be with Bill Clinton shuttling between East and West Wings.
+
+Why? Because if you have any interest in being your party’s nominee for president, getting the veep nomination is a very good steppingstone. Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale and Al Gore all followed that path.
+
+There’s also a more compelling—if seldom recognized—reason, one that Lyndon Johnson himself explained to writer Claire Booth Luce on their way to JFK’s inaugural in 1961.
+
+“I looked it up,” he said. “One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gambling man, darling, and this is the only chance I got.”
+
+But apart from that morbid possibility, it will be back to attending foreign funerals for either a Trump or a Clinton No. 2.",REAL
+10027,BREAKING: Irrefutable Proof Obama Lied to Protect Hillary Clinton’s Run for the White House Read,"By Claire Bernish at theantimedia.org
+Thanks to Wikileaks, we now have the smoking gun email irrefutably proving not only did President Barack Obama know about Hillary Clinton’s non-government-issued email account, he used it in correspondence with her.
+Even more damning to the president’s credibility, it appears the lie was a purposeful attempt to protect Clinton’s upcoming bid for the presidency.
+Shortly after the New York Times broke the story on March 2, 2015, of Clinton’s use of a personal server to supplant the government system — and, as has been revealed, to thwart transparency — Obama announced publicly his lack of prior knowledge.
+“The same time everybody else learned it through news reports,” the president told CBS News White House correspondent Bill Plante, as Zero Hedge reported . “The policy of my administration is to encourage transparency, which is why my emails, the BlackBerry I carry around, all those records are available and archived.
+“I’m glad that Hillary’s instructed that those emails about official business need to be disclosed.”
+It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine, however, Obama’s placid public appearance guarded secret internal panic — a panic echoed behind the scenes at the burgeoning Clinton campaign.
+An email penned by Clinton campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin to Director of Communications, Jennifer Palmieri, and a few others, calling immediate attention to a tweet by journalist Katherine Miller paints an entirely different picture.
+Miller tweeted a snippet of the aforementioned interview in which Plante asked Obama, “Mr. President, When did you first learn that Hillary Clinton used an email system outside the U.S. Government for official business while she was Secretary of State?”
+“The same time everybody else learned it,” he responded, “through news reports.”
+I have some questions here pic.twitter.com/ufkeoZCx2m",FAKE
+3795,Obama pushes controversial trade deal in Germany,"HANNOVER, Germany — President Obama on Sunday defended a controversial trade deal between the United States and the European Union that he wants to finalize before leaving office in January.
+
+Speaking at a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama said people around the world are unsettled by globalization but that trade has brought tremendous benefits and more jobs.
+
+""When people visibly see a plant lost or jobs lost, the narrative drives a lot of suspicion about these trade deals,"" he said. ""If you look at the benefits for our economies, it is indisputable that they are made stronger.""
+
+Obama said it was necessary to complete the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement because 95% of markets are outside U.S. borders. He said he was confident that TTIP could be completed by the end of the year. A separate trade pact covering 12 Pacific rim countries known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership could ""start moving forward"" once the U.S. presidential election is over, he said.
+
+Obama praised Merkel several times during the news conference before the two leaders then opened the Hannover Messe, the world's largest industrial technology trade fair.
+
+""This is as important a relationship as I have had during my presidency. Angela has been consistent and steady,"" Obama said. ""She has a really good sense of humor that she doesn't always show in press conferences. That's probably why she has lasted so long as a leader. She watches what she says.""
+
+He said Merkel was ""on the right side of history"" for her lenient policies to admit refugees, and she was ""courageous"" for her handling of Europe's migrant crisis because it was a position that has harmed her political approval ratings.
+
+Obama arrived in Germany on Sunday from London, where me met with British Prime Minister David Cameron, had lunch and dinner with members of the royal family and interjected his opinion into the United Kingdom's contentious debate over whether that country should leave the EU.
+
+Britain will hold a June 23 vote on the issue. The president angered anti-EU campaigners by saying the U.K.'s trade clout outside the 28-member bloc would be diminished.
+
+TTIP's supporters say the trade pact would make it easier and cheaper for companies on both sides of the Atlantic to do business together, as well as provide a much needed boost to the global economy amid persistent, sluggish growth. There is fierce opposition to TTIP in Germany — Europe's largest economy and most important political voice — where it is believed the deal would erode consumer and environmental protections.
+
+About 35,000 people marched in Hannover on Saturday against the proposed deal that would cover more than 800 million people.
+
+Merkel said in the news conference that adopting TTIP was an important step that would allow European economies to grow. ""We need to speed matters up now,"" she said.
+
+While in London, Obama said TTIP would bring millions of jobs and billions of dollars in benefits to both regions.  About 300 U.S. companies are attending the trade show in Hannover.
+
+Obama acknowledged that negotiating trade deals was ""tough” because countries want to fight for their domestic interests. “The main thing between the United States and Europe is trying to just break down some of the regulatory differences that make it difficult to do business back and forth,” the president said.
+
+A recent survey published by the Bertelsmann foundation, a Germany-based research group, found only one in five Germans favors the proposed trade pact, and one in three would reject it completely. In the U.S., only 18% of respondents oppose TTIP, the report found.
+
+""Support for trade agreements is fading in a country that views itself as the global export champion,"" said Aart De Geus, the foundation's chairman and chief executive. ""Trade is a key driver of the German economy. If it weakens, Germany's economic power as well as its labor market could falter.""
+
+Obama and Merkel said they discussed a number of other issues in their meeting Sunday, including the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.
+
+Obama said American and German thinking was aligned regarding Syria, but they differ over the idea of carving out ""safe zones"" in Syria for the thousands of people fleeing violence.
+
+“As a practical matter, sadly, it is very difficult to see how it would operate short of us essentially being willing to militarily take over a chunk of that country,” Obama said.",REAL
+3197,How Paul Ryan unified a fractured GOP,"Washington (CNN) Rep. Paul Ryan 's winning pitch to House conservatives amounted to this: Let's start over.
+
+For years, tensions had been boiling between the hard right of the Republican Party and the House leadership, a battle that effectively pushed Speaker John Boehner out of office and ended the bid of Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to succeed him.
+
+But Ryan, facing skepticism from hardliners in the House Freedom Caucus, spoke bluntly to the conservatives, telling them that he was more ideologically in line with them than with moderates in the so-called Tuesday Group. He said he was not the type of leader who is out to seek retribution, unlike past leaders.
+
+The 45-year-old Wisconsin congressman said he would only push important bills such as immigration that have a majority of support from Republicans -- abiding by the ""Hastert Rule."" He promised bold policy ideas on the House floor like welfare reform, health care legislation and a tax overhaul -- and that the chamber would stand firm on those policy proposals with Senate Republicans and the White House. He softened his demand to roll back a procedure allowing lawmakers to overthrow a sitting speaker.
+
+And perhaps the most disarming pitch: He said he was ready to walk away if they said 'no' to him.
+
+What he achieved was a truce between disgruntled conservatives and a GOP leadership desperate to get the House back on track. It's a ceasefire in a long-running intra-party war that has cost the Republicans Senate seats, bottled up legislation in Congress and weakened their hand against President Barack Obama.
+
+With his national profile and bona fides with the right, Ryan was perhaps the only Republican who could make that pitch, showcasing strength that will immediately be put to the test when he's expected to be elected speaker next week.
+
+Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said a Ryan pitch that won him over was: ""Go early and be firm"" -- the idea that the House would stand on its principles in fights with the other body.
+
+""Find a policy, take a position as a conference and make the Senate do something to stand firm,"" Jordan said, paraphrasing Ryan.
+
+After the conservative caucus announced it would support him -- but not endorse him -- Ryan later won over the two other coalitions in the House: The Tuesday Group and the Republican Study Committee, another conservative faction. By Thursday evening, Ryan made it official: He was running for speaker, telling his colleagues in a letter he was ""eager"" to do the job.
+
+""I never thought I'd be speaker,"" Ryan said in a statement. ""But I pledged to you that if I could be a unifying figure, then I would serve -- I would go all in. After talking with so many of you, and hearing your words of encouragement, I believe we are ready to move forward as one, united team. And I am ready and eager to be our speaker.""
+
+It's a dramatic political twist for Ryan, the GOP's vice presidential nominee in 2012 and someone who thoroughly enjoys his policy-heavy role as the chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.
+
+In the immediate aftermath of McCarthy's sudden decision earlier this month to drop out of the speaker race, Ryan appeared to be doing everything he could not to run. Moments after McCarthy dropped out during a meeting in the ornate Ways and Means Committee Room earlier this month, Ryan grabbed Rep. John Kline of Minnesota and told him to take the top job instead.
+
+""He spun around and almost choked me and said, 'Kline you gotta do this,'"" Kline recalled Thursday. ""I knew then, and I think Paul knew then, he really had to be the guy.""
+
+Ryan knew his life would change moments before McCarthy made his bombshell announcement. He was slated to give the nominating speech to McCarthy in the conference, but instead got a heads-up that those remarks wouldn't be necessary. The majority leader instead urged Ryan to consider a bid.
+
+McCarthy knew Ryan was reluctant, but he immediately began to figure out what he could do to help, according to people familiar with the matter.
+
+There was discussion about divvying up responsibilities, but also about redefining the role of the speaker. Ryan envisioned being a more prominent face for the party -- someone willing to deliver the message in the media, and spreading out some of the fundraising and operational duties to other members of the leadership team.
+
+McCarthy served as a counselor to Ryan throughout the process. He had a partial playbook already in hand since he had previously met with House GOP members, especially the conservatives in the Freedom Caucus, and had a good read on their concerns about shifting to a more ""bottom-up"" process.
+
+And since Ryan didn't want the job, many conservatives in the caucus seemed to believe him that he wouldn't try to make the speakership more powerful. Conservatives had long complained too much power resided in the leadership office, and it would be a non-starter for a candidate who wanted to centralize more power. It remains, of course, to be seen how Ryan operates over the long-term.
+
+""My question is who in their right mind would ever want that job?"" said Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Georgia, a member of the Freedom Caucus. ""We can't survive another eight years like the ones we just had. We won't recover from that. He's willing to put his own self on the line.""
+
+After the Freedom Caucus voted Wednesday to support Ryan, but not officially endorse him -- which was one of his preconditions for taking the job -- there was little option for Ryan to walk away. While they left themselves some room to say they still had issues with Ryan's conditions, they were also aware in their internal discussions that if they blocked yet another candidate - and one who had majority support - they would be overplaying their hand.
+
+Asked why he was confident Ryan would be elected speaker next week, McCarthy told reporters flatly, ""when I ran, 80% of the Freedom Caucus was against me. Now they're not.""
+
+Changing the rules to vacate the chair?
+
+Ryan's problems, however, are bound to grow with the right as soon as he takes the gavel -- namely on two matters: Fiscal issues and his desire to make it harder to overthrow a sitting speaker.
+
+On the latter, there's no agreement between him and the Freedom Caucus. But he clarified his demand by saying he only wants to ""change"" the rule -- not eliminate it. And he agreed to consider the matter later as part of other rules changes the caucus has sought to enact in order to give the rank-and-file a bigger say.
+
+""We are not changing this fundamental right that members have relative to the 'motion to vacate,'"" Jordan told CNN. ""We're not for that. We made that very clear.""
+
+Ryan was not pressed on many policy matters, but will have to weigh in on the contentious issue of raising the national debt ceiling as early as next week -- and extending government funding past Dec. 11. But he promised that immigration reform, an idea he has been warm to in the past, would not be a measure he would pursue in a Ryan speakership.
+
+As he continued to dither about taking the speakership, Republicans began looking for alternatives -- and a growing number looked at Kline, a back-slapping pol who likes to smoke cigars.
+
+""I'd be able to drink and smoke in the speaker's office for another year,"" Cole said, referring to Boehner's penchant for puffing cigarettes.
+
+After next Thursday, he will likely have to ask Paul Ryan.",REAL
+5956,The Clinton Shakedown Scam Summed Up With One Meme,"You are here: Home / US / The Clinton Shakedown Scam Summed Up With One Meme The Clinton Shakedown Scam Summed Up With One Meme October 28, 2016 Pinterest 
+Regan Pifer writes that everyone should donate to the Clinton Foundation immediately! 
+After all, it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Bill and Hillary, along with the Clinton Foundation board members, to fly around the world in their Boeing 757, and to stay in $13,900/night villas with a 60-foot swimming pool. 
+That kind of luxury ain’t going to pay for itself! 
+Oh, and–in between the opulence and indulgence–former president Bill Clinton and his donors stopped to serve “meals to 250 underprivileged children” in Jaipur, India on July 16, 2014. 
+I wonder how many more meals, medicine, or school supplies could have been provided with an extra $13,900. 
+This is a typical Clinton Foundation site visit. 
+According to The Daily Caller : 
+The trip provides a glimpse into the lavish lifestyle of the Clinton Foundation and dozens of its wealthiest donors — all done in the name of charity, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation… 
+The Clinton excesses on this particular trip were seen in several Third World nations. Indonesian officials, for example, warned the foundation that Pangkalan Bun Airport’s landing strip was too short for the Boeing 757 and that the party would have to switch to a smaller aircraft. 
+Officially, the Indonesian stop was to visit a Clinton Climate Initiative project where a local forest preserve was being cultivated to offset carbon emissions. But flying 41 people — donors, their families and foundation staff — aboard an aircraft designed for nearly 300 sent the trip’s “carbon footprint” sky high… 
+…[T]he 757 and Gulfstream burned 60,000 gallons of jet fuel, worth at least $220,000 using current commercial aviation rates. 
+Sixty thousands gallons of jet fuel produced 200 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, enough energy to power 21 average U.S. homes for a year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It would fuel a passenger car 478,000 miles in a year. 
+The Clinton entourage’s carbon dioxide consumption exceeded a year’s total emissions by countries like Guinea-Bissau, Tonga, the British Virgin Islands, Lichtenstein and the Solomon Islands, according to the World Bank . 
+The Clinton Foundation led a workshop in what not to do –a mismanagement of funds and resources for the gluttonous indulgence of donors. 
+Imagine if the “C” in the Clinton Foundation stood for compassion as opposed to corruption…",FAKE
+1555,Bush v. Trump: Behind the Vegas rumble,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+4367,Scary Times For California Farmers As Snowpack Hits Record Lows,"The water outlook in drought-racked California just got a lot worse: Snowpack levels across the entire Sierra Nevada are now the lowest in recorded history — just 6 percent of the long-term average. That shatters the previous low record on this date of 25 percent, set in 1977 and again last year.
+
+And it has huge implications for tens of millions of people who depend on water flowing downstream from melting snow — including the nation's most productive farming region, the California Central Valley.
+
+Last year was already a tough year at La Jolla Farming in Delano, Calif. Or as farm manager Jerry Schlitz puts it, ""Last year was damn near a disaster.""
+
+La Jolla is a vineyard, a thousand-or-so acres of neat lines of grapevines in the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. It depends on water from two sources: the federal Central Valley Project and wells.
+
+Until last year, Schlitz says, wells were used to supplement the federal water.
+
+""Now, we have nothing but wells. Nothing. There's no water other than what's coming out of the ground,"" he says.
+
+Last year, one of those wells at La Jolla dried up. The farm lost 160 acres — about a million dollars' worth of produce, plus the wasted labor and other resources.
+
+This year, the outlook is no better: The Central Valley Project, which decides where and when to release what water is left in California's reservoirs, has already warned that most farmers downstream won't get any water for the second straight year.
+
+As KQED reports, ""More than 400,000 acres of farmland were fallowed last year because of scarce water. Credible sources have estimated that figure could double this year.""
+
+La Jolla is plowing miles of trench in the dry earth to bury water pipes connecting wells to fields and fields to wells. The farm owners want to make sure that they can move water from working wells to the places that need it.
+
+""We're getting prepared in case we lose one, we lost two. We lose three? Watch out, man, I'm going to unemployment,"" says Juvenal Montemayor, the owner and founder of La Jolla. He says this is the best they can do.
+
+Now, drilling a new well isn't a short-term option. ""You try to get a well done right now? No way. It's like a two-year waiting time for wells,"" he says.
+
+Then there's the cost: a half-million dollars for a single well, he says. ""Now ask me if I want to make a well. No, I don't want to make a well. I don't have a choice,"" he says. ""I don't have a choice.""
+
+That's the tough situation La Jolla and many other farmers in the Central Valley face: They won't be getting any federal water.
+
+Groundwater reserves are getting lower and lower as farmers and towns drill deeper and deeper, sucking out more water than there is coming in.
+
+It's gotten so bad in the San Joaquin Valley that the ground is actually sinking. Last summer it sank a half-inch each month.
+
+Back among the grapevines at La Jolla, Schlitz points to the mountains on the horizon, their tops barely sprinkled with snow.
+
+The snow supplies roughly a third of all of California's water, on average. The Sierra Nevada snowpack is supposed to be a storage bank. It holds the snow late into the spring that then melts gradually. The runoff feeds reservoirs that supply water for millions of people — and the Central Valley. This year, California's chief snow surveyor says, there may not even be runoff.
+
+""That's our lifeblood up there,"" Schlitz says. ""Whatever comes out of there, you know, that's our lifeblood.""",REAL
+1495,Nikki Haley should have run for president,"Just when it seemed she might be overwhelmed by the moment, though, she hit her stride and began looking every bit the part of someone ready for the political prime time. Referencing the Charleston shooting changed the trajectory of her performance Tuesday night the way her leadership in the aftermath of the massacre changed her political fortunes, catapulting her to the top of the list of potential Republican vice presidential nominees.
+
+During Tuesday night's speech, she smoothly transitioned from delivering GOP red meat, slamming Obama, to pushing back against Donald Trump and grabbing the hope and change baton from the President.
+
+""What happened after the tragedy is worth pausing to think about,"" she said. ""Our state was struck with shock, pain and fear. But our people would not allow hate to win. We didn't have violence; we had vigils. We didn't have riots; we had hugs. We didn't turn against each other's race or religion. We turned toward God, and to the values that have long made our country the freest and greatest in the world.""
+
+Before the Charleston shooting, Haley still wasn't fully embraced by her own party in the state; she clashed with leaders of the General Assembly leaders, which is run by Republicans. And she still makes the skin of many Democrats crawl because of her support for tough immigration and voter ID laws, as well as her refusal to accept billions of dollars of federal dollars through the Affordable Care Act.
+
+But she helped guide South Carolina through an event that harkened back to its worst era while making the seemingly impossible happen, removing the Confederate flag from the state house lawn. For those who don't understand, pulling off that feat was just as miraculous as successfully separating conjoined twins. The irony is that her rise came fast enough to elevate her onto the national stage, but maybe a little too late. Her enormous value could end up being wasted this year on a vice presidential nomination -- because she's much better suited to be on top of the ticket. Haley, not Bobby Jindal, is the closest thing to a Republican version of Obama. She's a young (she'll be 44 years old in a week), attractive groundbreaking candidate, too. She's a reflection of emerging demographics, too; she called herself ""the proud daughter of Indian immigrants."" She's a Sarah Palin who can give a great speech and answer in one-on-one interviews which newspapers she reads and which Supreme Court cases she detests. She's a Carly Fiorina who doesn't have to explain away her performance as a chief executive. Under her watch, even though the state's economy leaves too many people behind, a record number of South Carolinians are working and portions of the manufacturing industry are seeing a resurgence. She's a Marco Rubio without the Washington baggage. Her refusal to expand Medicaid may be bad for poor residents but puts her a step ahead of Republicans in Congress who couldn't get Obamacare repealed after promising for years to do so. She knows how to hit her opponents as hard as Ted Cruz but doesn't remind voters of Joe McCarthy. Obama has made historic appointments to the Supreme Court and in the attorney general's office. Haley appointed Tim Scott to the U.S. Senate, paving the way for him to become the first black man from the Deep South since the Reconstruction era to be voted into that body. Obama helped steer the country out of the Great Recession and away from a second Great Depression and into the longest unbroken streak of monthly job creation in the nation's history. And he's guided the nation through seemingly countless natural and man-made disasters. One hundred and fifty years after the end of a Civil War many South Carolinians continue fighting any way, Haley helped lead the state peacefully through the aftermath of a young white supremacist's killing of nine black people in one of the nation's most historic churches. Her response to devastating, never-before-seen floods months later reeked of competence in a state whose congressional delegation once protested pork spending by voting against Hurricane Sandy relief. For all those reasons, and more, the GOP tapped her to respond to Obama. The irony is that if the party is looking for a candidate who will bring something in the second spot to the ticket that can move the needle, Haley likely isn't it. Despite her enormous political talent, she's from one of the redder states in the union, meaning Haley's presence would do nothing to improve the party's electoral prospects. And because she's a member of a party that most minorities -- blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans -- view as hostile, her personal appeal won't matter. She may be able to move the needle among those groups a little more than, say, Dr. Ben Carson, but not much at all. That's why she's in the odd position of being the ideal vice presidential candidate who should have run for president. If the tragedies during which her leadership abilities shined most had happened in 2014 and not 2015, maybe she would have. Republicans will be tempted to call on her to bring a new image and energy to the party's 2016 presidential push. Had they the foresight, they would have pushed her to reach for higher office. Obama was the Democrats' answer to the 21st century and refused to be told to wait his turn. Haley could have played that role for the GOP. Only time will tell if she missed her window.",REAL
+107,Charleston exposes ugliest truth of our time: Our society places little value on black life,"In the days after King’s assassination, Americans considered many of the same questions that we are asking today: Was this the work of one lunatic, or of a larger racial ideology? How should lawmakers respond? Would the violent tragedy lead to gun control legislation? White Southerners even debated whether to lower the flag in King’s honor. In the end, many ministers and leaders cautioned that King would have died in vain if the country did not act boldly to root out racial injustice. The fact that we are having similar conversations, almost 50 years later, seems a mark of our collective failure.
+
+As word of King’s assassination traveled around the country on the night of April 4, 1968, two of America’s leading journalists sat down at their typewriters: Mike Royko in Chicago and Ralph McGill in Atlanta. They reached the same conclusion – that an entire society had murdered King, regardless of which individual pulled the trigger.
+
+At that point, the assassin remained at large and his identity was unknown. There were no social media profiles to parse, no manifestoes to read. That kind of information was unnecessary. Both McGill and Royko knew that a sick and racist nation was to blame.
+
+In the spring of 1968, King was far from a sanitized national hero. Many white Americans detested his activism and begrudged his fame. In 1967, King had delivered a forceful speech opposing the Vietnam War. Other civil rights leaders turned against him, and he faced a round of criticism in the nation’s newspapers and magazines. His relationship with President Lyndon Johnson, already frayed, fractured completely. King then announced plans for the Poor People’s Campaign, in which droves of the nation’s poor would set up tent encampments on the Washington Mall in a show of nonviolent civil disobedience. King was attacking capitalism and imperialism, and calling for a “revolution of values.”
+
+In early 1968, he traveled to Memphis, where 1,300 black sanitation workers were waging a strike. King led a protest march through downtown Memphis on March 28. Some demonstrators behind him resorted to violence; as chaos took hold, King was whisked away from the scene. The national press intensified its criticism of King. On Capitol Hill, elected officials denounced him as a lawless radical. He had become the target of deepening hatred.
+
+To Mike Royko, a popular columnist for the Chicago Daily News, it was this scorn and revulsion that ultimately killed King. Royko published a column on April 5 titled “Millions in His Firing Squad.” Royko expressed confidence that the authorities would soon arrest the assassin.
+
+But “they can’t catch everybody,” Royko wrote, “and Martin Luther King was executed by a firing squad that numbered in the millions.” From many corners of the nation, white Americans fed  “words of hate into the ear of the assassin.” The killer was simply following orders. “The man with the gun did what he was told. Millions of bigots, subtle and obvious, put it in his hand and assured him he was doing the right thing.”
+
+Royko blamed white Northerners: the anti-busing leaders, the law-and-order demagogues, all of those Chicago residents who stood against King’s open-housing programs and pelted him with rocks in Marquette Park. He also indicted the FBI for its propaganda campaign against King, and proceeded to condemn every white American who nodded at racist jokes.
+
+“It was almost ludicrous,” Royko wrote of the hostility directed at King. “The man came on the American scene preaching nonviolence … He preached it in the North and was hit with rocks. He talked it the day he was murdered.” But Americans refused to hear his calls for peace and freedom. “Hypocrites all over this country would kneel every Sunday morning and mouth messages to Jesus Christ. Then they would come out and tell each other, after reading the papers, that somebody should string up King, who was living Christianity like few Americans ever have.” In a legendary career, this was one of Royko’s finest moments – and one of his angriest.
+
+Ralph McGill targeted the Southern bigots. McGill, the publisher of the Atlanta Constitution and a leading Southern liberal, chose a title for his editorial that was sure to aggravate the haters: “A Free Man Killed by White Slaves.” He wrote, “White slaves killed Martin Luther King in Memphis. At the moment the triggerman fired, Martin Luther King was the free man. The white killer, (or killers), was a slave to fear.”
+
+In McGill’s formulation, millions of white Americans stood captive to racial fear. McGill located many such “slaves” in Memphis, which was “bound by such terrible chains” of enmity. Hatred at the sanitation workers, and at King himself, had swirled around the Delta city. McGill beseeched white Americans to strike at racial prejudice and injustice. “The white South – the white population in all the country – must now give answer.”
+
+To two of the nation’s most perceptive observers, the important issue was not the assassin’s mental state. The crucial fact was that a climate existed in the country that sanctioned racial hatred.
+
+Of course, others rejected this logic. The Chicago Tribune bristled at Mike Royko’s indictment. “The murder of Dr. King was a crime and the sin of an individual,” the Tribune’s editors asserted on April 9 – the morning of King’s funeral. The “rest of us” were “not contributory to this particular crime.” The Memphis Commercial Appeal also dismissed the notion of collective guilt. “It was the work of an individual, a warped, mixed-up, emotional mind,” the Commercial Appeal editorialized on April 6. In reality, the Commercial Appeal itself had helped to whip white Memphis into a feverish state. The newspaper had criticized the sanitation strike for the better part of two months, and deplored King’s decision to assist the strikers. The newspaper’s “Hambone” cartoon – which had appeared six days a week since the 1910s – continued to trade in crass racial stereotypes. In 1968, the Commercial Appeal focused on one person’s “warped, mixed-up, emotional mind” instead of the racism and racial inequality that so shaped the city and the nation.
+
+Then as now, it was easier to blame a deranged individual than to craft a response that might address racial inequality or gun violence. Hours before King’s death, the Senate Judiciary Committee finally voted on a gun-control bill that had been pending before it for three years. The bill was initially proposed by Sen. Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, and supported by Lyndon Johnson. James Eastland, the longtime segregationist from Mississippi, chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee. The committee defeated a proposal to ban interstate gun sales. The committee then considered a proposal to combine gun control legislation with a safe streets bill. It failed to approve this measure, then adjourned for the evening. An hour later, James Earl Ray aimed his rifle at the balcony of the Lorraine Motel and murdered Martin Luther King Jr.
+
+On Saturday, April 6, the committee met again. This time, it voted 9-to-7 to attach the gun control regulations to the safe streets bill. But to achieve even this tiny advance, the supporters of gun control agreed to exempt rifles and shotguns. That same day, members of the National Rifle Association descended upon Boston’s Sheraton Hotel for the organization’s annual meeting. They would rally against the pending legislation. The Senate began to debate the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. This law would prohibit felons from buying guns, ban all mail-order gun sales, and impose restrictions on certain out-of-state transactions. The Senate passed the bill on May 24. The House did not act until after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. One day after Kennedy’s death, on June 6, 1968, the House approved the bill. Months later, Congress passed a more expansive law called the Gun Control Act of 1968. It established a licensing system for gun purchases, mandated serial numbers on weapons, and expanded many of the previous bill’s measures. This was the apogee in the history of American gun control legislation. It was eventually undone in 1986, by the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act. Palm Sunday fell on April 7, 1968, three days after King’s assassination. Millions of Americans gathered in churches to mourn the slain leader. Tributes to King rang out in black houses of worship, among white congregations, and at public gatherings that drew interracial crowds. The nation pressed together to grieve for the prophet of nonviolence. Many religious leaders offered the same message: that for King’s death to have a lasting impact, the nation needed to commit itself to racial justice in deed as well as in word. At New York City’s Church of the Holy Family, Monsignor Timothy Flynn declared that King’s death “will be redemptive if it stirs the white community to an adequate healing social action.” Rabbi Mark Tannenbaum of the American Jewish Committee agreed. “It will be a great desecration of his holy name if the Congress of the United States and the citizens of this nation do not respond … by providing the elementary decencies for which he sacrificed his life: jobs, housing, education, health.” The Urban League’s Whitney Young, a civil rights leader known for moderation, declared: “We must have concrete, tangible action that will remove the inequities in our society.” If the nation could see its way toward such substantive action, if it could begin to remove those inequities, then King “may have achieved in death something he was never quite able to do in actual life.” American leaders never did remove such racial inequalities. Instead, the “white backlash” intensified as the “silent majority” lifted Richard Nixon to the presidency. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was in effect the last civil rights bill. And the safe streets bill, its robust gun control regulations notwithstanding, would give rise to the era of mass incarceration. In the days after King’s death, Southern leaders debated whether to lower the American flag – and Southern state flags – in King’s honor. A dramatic standoff occurred at the Georgia Statehouse in Atlanta, King’s native city. Ben Fortson, Georgia’s secretary of state, had lowered both the American and state flags to half-staff immediately after King’s assassination. Georgia’s flag was essentially the Confederate flag, alongside a small image of the state seal. (Georgia had added the stars-and-bars to its flag in 1956.) The governor at the time was Lester Maddox, a segregationist icon. On April 8, 1968, Maddox called Fortson to register his objections about the lowering of the flags. King’s funeral service would begin the next morning; thousands of mourners had flocked to the city. On April 9, Maddox surrounded the Statehouse with 160 state troopers in riot gear as well as 20 armed wildlife rangers. Maddox then marched over to the flagpole and began to raise both of the flags. He suddenly realized that television cameras from CBS, NBC and ABC were tracking his every move. Maddox ultimately left the flags where they were and retreated into his office. He later explained, “I didn’t think we oughta use our flag to honor an enemy of our country.” The symbolism was hard to miss: the Confederate flag remained at half-staff, in King’s honor. In 2001, Georgia adopted a new state flag – the result of Gov. Roy Barnes’ efforts. After 14 more years, and the slaughter of nine African-Americans, South Carolina may finally retire that symbol of racial hatred. Still, our nation is dotted with many more shrines to the Confederacy. Hundreds of towns have monuments to slaveholders; some public schools are named after Confederate leaders. Perhaps those symbols will be the next to fall. Maybe this awful moment can nudge us toward necessary reforms. We comfort ourselves with the notion that the gunman was insane, when it is obvious that he was acting out – in extreme form – the ugliest truth of our time: that our society places little value on black life. If Ralph McGill and Mike Royko were still with us, they would not busy themselves with the assassin’s Internet posts. They would not look at him; they would look at us. They would scrutinize our society, at what we have built and what we have condoned. In this painful hour, we might realize that we don’t have to keep living this way. We can harness the sadness, the outrage and the feeling of unity, and use that energy to force our leaders into action – urging them to pursue policies that will make it harder for people to kill one another, and to honor the dead by creating a more peaceful and just society for the living.",REAL
+7324,While The FBI Investigates Hillary- WikiLeaks Swoops In To Kick Her While She’s Down,"#Wikileaks 💦Podesta RE: HRC 'We can SCARE donors into giving bigger sums 💰'& said, Obama admin is ""'prissy' about how they approach this"" pic.twitter.com/vGqHlsQk5H 
+— #HillaryForPrision🚔 (@notalemming) November 1, 2016 
+Even after 8 years of the terror and destruction that Obama as rained down upon our nation…even after the division and absolute corruption he has allowed to fester under his watch…and even after him awakening a nation of race-baiting keyboard warriors… 
+I think Hillary will be FAR worse than Obama has ever been. 
+That’s saying an awful lot. Related Items",FAKE
+9878,"Inside The Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton & Trump","License DMCA The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term ""public relations"" as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions. In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade -- behavior then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, ""Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!"" Bernays' influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was ""engineering the consent"" of people in order to ""control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it."" 
+He described this as ""the true ruling power in our society"" and called it an ""invisible government."" Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged. Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people. - Advertisement - 
+But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties. In the second city -- in another country nearby -- almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics. The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by ""us"" -- by the United States and Britain. They even have a media center that is funded by Britain and America. Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city -- which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city. Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad. - Advertisement - What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria. Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today. Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was ""vindicated"" for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell's fabrications. The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, ""What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?""",FAKE
+262,The obsession of the House Freedom Caucus,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+6372,"Over 20 Injured, Almost 40 Detained in Venezuelan Opposition Protests","— Alfredo Romero (@alfredoromero) October 26, 2016 
+​According to Romero, more than 20 people were injured in the state of Merida, while five were injured in Zulia. 
+Earlier on Wednesday, opposition leader Henrique Capriles initiated a large-scale peaceful protest across the country to defend the nation’s right to a referendum on Maduro's recall . According to media reports, police in some Venezuelan cities started to use tear gas against the opposition protesters. ...",FAKE
+6379,Donald Trump: Hillary's Syria Policy Would Lead to 'World War Three' - Breitbart,"Donald Trump: Hillary’s Syria Policy Would Lead to ‘World War Three’ Joe Raedle/Getty Images by Breitbart News 26 Oct 2016 0 
+26 Oct, 2016 26  
+(REUTERS) U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Democrat Hillary Clinton’s plan for Syria would “lead to World War Three,” because of the potential for conflict with military forces from nuclear-armed Russia.
+ 
+In an interview focused largely on foreign policy, Trump said defeating Islamic State is a higher priority than persuading Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, playing down a long-held goal of U.S. policy.
+…
+“What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” said Trump as he dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.
+“You’re not fighting Syria any more, you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia is a nuclear country, but a country where the nukes work as opposed to other countries that talk,” he said.
+Read the rest of the story at Reuters.com . 
+  2016 Presidential Race , National Security , Bashar al-Assad , Donald Trump , Hillary Clinton , Islamic State , Russia , Syria",FAKE
+4384,Marco Rubio: Being Gay Is Not A Choice,"Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on Sunday that he didn't think being gay was a choice but rather the way some people were born.
+
+During an appearance on CBS' ""Face The Nation,"" Rubio, who launched his 2016 presidential campaign last week, said that he believes the definition of marriage is a union between a man and a woman. The Florida senator also added said that same-sex marriage was not a constitutional right and should be decided by state legislatures, not the courts.
+
+Despite his position, Rubio added that he didn't think being gay was a choice.
+
+""I also don't believe that your sexual preferences are a choice for the vast and enormous majority of people,"" he said. ""In fact, the bottom line is I believe sexual preference is something that people are born with.""
+
+Last week, Rubio also said that he would attend a gay wedding of a loved one, even if he disagreed with the ""choice"" that loved one had made.
+
+“I’m not going to hurt them simply because I disagree with a choice they’ve made or because I disagree with a decision they’ve made, or whatever it may be,” Rubio said. “Ultimately, if someone that you care for and is part of your family has decided to move in one direction or another or feels that way because of who they love, you respect that because you love them.”
+
+In the past, Rubio has distinguished between opposing same-sex marriage and being anti-gay.
+
+""Supporting the definition of marriage as one man and one woman is not anti-gay. It is pro-traditional marriage,"" Rubio said last year.
+
+",REAL
+2243,The Pope is wrong on religious speech (Opinion),"Heidi Schlumpf is a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter and teaches communication at Aurora University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
+
+(CNN) The popular Pope Francis is taking some hits himself after some lighthearted comments that included a pretend punch to a colleague. The comments came while trying to make the point that free speech should have some limits, including on the right to insult another's faith.
+
+Speaking Thursday to reporters on the plane ride to the Philippines, the Pope gestured with a fake punch to demonstrate what he would do if someone were to say ""a swear word against my mother.""
+
+Still, the Vatican felt the need to clarify, in response to a later CNN question about the punch, that his words were ""spoken colloquially"" and consistent with the Pope's ""free style of speech.""
+
+I don't for one minute think the Pope is advocating for any type of violence, whether religiously motivated murder or sparring among friends who dis each other's mamas.
+
+What concerns me is his apparent belief that religion should have special protection when it comes to free speech.
+
+The Pope, responding to a general question about the interplay between religious liberty and free expression, was clearly referencing the massacre of journalists at Charlie Hebdo magazine by Islamist militants in Paris last week.
+
+Although he did not say the slain cartoonists brought the attack upon themselves because of their satirical criticism of Islam, it's not a huge logical leap to that conclusion and raises the likelihood of such a misinterpretation.
+
+Let's just say it's not what most public relations professionals would advise.
+
+And while the Pope has been known to talk more informally with reporters on the papal plane (his ""Who am I to judge?"" comment about gay Catholics came on the return flight from Brazil in 2013), he's still on the record and obviously aware that his words will be reported and analyzed.
+
+The Pope is not the only prominent Catholic raising the issue.
+
+While no one can match the offensive tone of Donahue, who actually said Charlie Hebdo's Stephane Charbonnier ""didn't understand the role he played in his own death,"" the gist of the Pope's message was the same: Criticism of religion is problematic.
+
+As an aside, I'll be curious to see if those who slammed Donahue have the same harsh words for the Pope.
+
+Perhaps both of them should take a lesson from the response of another Christian, Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, a progressive, evangelical community and publication. He had a different suggestion for how people of faith should respond to the Paris attacks:
+
+I think most American Catholics agree that while blasphemy -- offensive speech against God or religion -- is not particularly nice, it does not follow that it can or should be regulated or outlawed. In the United States, the Supreme Court outlawed blasphemy laws in 1952.
+
+I'm hoping the Pope was only offering counsel to his followers, rather than advocating for any sort of legal position. No one has the right not to be offended. Even the Pope.",REAL
+52,What Big Democratic Donors Will Get in Philadelphia,The Democratic National Committee is offering all sorts of perks at next year’s presidential nominating convention in Philadelphia in return for whopping contributions.,REAL
+10519,TRUMP SUPPORTER Whose Brutal Beating By Black Mob Was Caught On Video Asks: “What Happened To America?” [VIDEO],"David Wilcox, a 49 year old Chicago man who was brutally beaten by a mob of black Democrats asks, “What happened to America?” Here is his very sad story:  ",FAKE
+7865,Kurds decide to get on US nerves,"Kurds decide to get on US nerves 07.11.2016 | Source: AP Photo Falah Bakir, Head of the Kurdistan Regional Government (in Iraq) Department of Foreign Relations, reported, that he had asked for military and humanitarian aid while meeting with the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov. 'We asked for humanitarian aid to render support to refugees, that came to the Iraqi Kurdistan from other regions of the country, as well as from Syria,' Bakir said. The situation in the Kurdish area of Iraq has reached its critical point. Have they addressed someone else, or just Russia? Anton Mardasov, a military expert at the Institute of Innovative Development, head of the Department of the Middle Eastern conflicts , commented Pravda.Ru on the issue. The Iraqi Kurds had great relations with the Soviet Union , at the time Primakov headed the Kurdish direction. Masud Barzani (President of the Kurdish autonomy in Iraq)studied in the USSR. Thus, there are some ties. But any deliveries to the Iraqi Kurdistan require agreement with the central Iraqi government in Baghdad. For the moment it's not quite clear what the Kurds are asking for. It should be noted that there are several US military facilities in Kurdistan. What is more, huge oil industry is operating in the Iraqi Kurdistan, it means they do not have financial difficulties and can afford buying everything they need. Thus, I believe it's a political step. Maybe they'd like to get on the Americans' nerves. The situation is very difficult. So, we should cooperate and carry on a diplomatic and political dialogue, but real steps should be calculated very thoroughly. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+4997,Trump tries to reset with economic speech — but faces new resistance in GOP,"Seeking to put the most difficult stretch of his campaign behind him, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump used a major economic speech Monday to reach out to two voting blocs that remain critical to his faltering chances of winning in November: traditional fiscal conservatives and disaffected blue-collar workers.
+
+But Trump faced a new round of resistance from within his party that threatened to stall his effort to move beyond the uproar he caused last week. In an opinion column published by The Washington Post late Monday, Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) became the latest sitting Republican senator to declare that she will not support Trump. In addition, dozens of national security officials who served in GOP administrations signed a letter saying that he is “not qualified” to be president.
+
+Reading from a teleprompter at the Detroit Economic Club and pausing calmly when protesters interrupted him, Trump assailed Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and cast himself as the only change candidate on economic issues. He did so in part with tax-cutting, regulation-curbing plans that are squarely mainstream in his party and in part with his now-familiar attacks on the forces of globalization that have unnerved many workers. He took swipes at free-trade deals championed by GOP leaders and attacked immigrants and refugees.
+
+The Republican nominee shared few new policy details and continued to offer no specifics for how he would pay for tax cuts or spending increases large enough to balloon the federal budget deficit. He promised more clarity in coming weeks.
+
+Trump proposed a new set of individual income tax rates higher than he previously suggested, but he also promised to bring rates lower than they were even during the George W. Bush administration. He was vague in other areas, including a promise for major federal infrastructure spending and another, the only new policy proposal in the speech, that would allow working families to deduct child care-costs from their federal income taxes.
+
+Throughout his address, Trump took sharp aim at Clinton. He held up Detroit, which has been devastated by manufacturing job losses, as “the living, breathing example” of her “failed economic agenda.”
+
+“I want to jump-start America. It can be done. And it won’t even be that hard,” he said.
+
+At a rally in St. Petersburg, Fla., Clinton assailed Trump’s plan as an outdated replica of previous Republican pitches, saying it would “give super-big tax breaks to large corporations and the really wealthy” and “basically just repackage trickle-down economics.”
+
+She added: “You know that old saying, ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’ ”
+
+“Just imagine Donald Trump in the Oval Office, facing a real crisis,” she said. “What happens when somebody gets under his skin? I don’t know if the United States can afford that kind of risk.”
+
+On income taxes, the business mogul said he would work with House Republicans to implement the three brackets they have proposed: 12 percent, 25 percent and 33 percent. The move puts Trump in line with Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), with whom Trump has had a tense alliance.
+
+Previously, Trump proposed tax brackets of 0 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent and 25 percent. He continued to call for a 15 percent corporate income tax rate for all businesses, which is lower than Ryan’s proposed 20 percent corporate rate.
+
+Trump also promised to end some “special interest” tax breaks but named only one, the “carried interest” provision that many investment fund managers use to reduce their tax liability. Experts cautioned, though, that Trump’s plan would still deliver a windfall to such investors, because it would reduce income and corporate rates.
+
+Lacking more details from the campaign, it is difficult to say how much Trump’s revisions to his tax rates would alter the cost of his economic plan, which analysts had previously estimated could reduce federal revenue by $10 trillion over the next decade. Equally difficult to measure are the benefits the plan would deliver to taxpayers across income levels.
+
+“It seems very likely that this version of the plan will lose less revenue than the last version” because it will contain relatively smaller tax cuts for individuals, Scott Greenberg, an analyst at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, said in an interview. A key question, he added, is the level at which various marginal tax rates begin to take effect: “A tax plan where the 33 percent [rate] kicks in at $250,000 and one where it kicks in at $750,000 are two very different tax plans.”
+
+Trump’s economic focus followed a week in which he stoked tensions with party leaders by initially declining to endorse Ryan and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) in their primaries this month. Trump also drew widespread ire for criticizing the Muslim parents of a U.S. Army captain who was killed in Iraq, and he fell dramatically behind Clinton in public polls.
+
+The measured, pre-written remarks in Detroit on Monday were intended to steady a listing campaign, and conservatives received the calls for tax and regulation cuts positively. But most reaction to the speech, even among conservatives, was mixed. In the end, Monday served as a reminder that many Republicans remain highly skeptical of Trump.
+
+Lanhee Chen, who was the policy director for GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, called the speech a “mixed bag.” He praised the details on taxes as a nod to more orthodox Republican views, but he said Trump’s main challenge now is to prove to voters that he is as serious about policy-making as he is about picking fights with critics.
+
+“One speech is not going to change a narrative,” Chen said.
+
+Also Monday, a group of 50 former national security officials who served under Republican presidents signed a letter warning that Trump “would be the most reckless President in American history.”
+
+The letter was signed by Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge, former secretaries of homeland security; Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency; and John D. Negroponte, a former director of national intelligence and deputy secretary of state, among others.
+
+[Former GOP national security officials: Trump would be ‘most reckless’ American president in history]
+
+Separately, Wadi Gaitan, the chief spokesman for the Florida Republican Party, announced that, as a result of differences with Trump, he is leaving his job to join a conservative organization.
+
+“I’m thankful for my almost two years with the Florida GOP, however, moving on gives me a great, new opportunity to continue promoting free market solutions while avoiding efforts that support Donald Trump,” Gaitan, who is Hispanic, said in a statement.
+
+In Detroit, protesters sidetracked Trump’s speech repeatedly. Unlike in large rallies where Trump often calls for demonstrators to be removed, riling up the crowd, he waited patiently as they were escorted out Monday. At one point he remarked calmly, “This is all very well-planned out.”
+
+His speech outlined a plan designed to accelerate economic growth, largely in classic conservative fashion: by reducing taxes and regulations on businesses and by opening vast new swaths of federal land and water to drilling. He said that as president, he would sign an executive order creating a temporary regulatory moratorium on new agency regulations.
+
+“I am going to cut regulations massively,” he said. “Massively.”
+
+Freezing all pending federal regulations would include many Wall Street regulations created by the Dodd-Frank legislation passed in the wake of the financial crisis. Trump’s energy agenda would open new sections of American coastal waters to offshore oil drilling and sweep away the Obama administration’s efforts to fight climate change. Both moves have frequently found widespread support among Republican lawmakers and in conservative policy circles.
+
+In other areas, he skirted or defied Republican orthodoxy. Trump made no attempt to propose spending cuts or other measures to offset his proposed tax-rate cuts or begin to reduce the national debt, as he has promised to do in the past. His child-care expense plan could increase the debt even further, unless it were offset by spending cuts or a rapid increase in economic growth. So could an infrastructure spending plan that he has said could cost more than $500 billion.
+
+[Ivanka Trump champions working moms — except the ones who design her clothes]
+
+The plan also promises to increase growth by reducing the United States’ trade deficit with China and other trading partners, in part by levying tariffs on imported goods from those countries. Some economists, including Trump adviser Peter Navarro, say that reducing the trade deficit would boost growth. Others, including Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, warn that a tariff war could push the United States and much of the world into recession.
+
+Trump has adopted hard-line opposition to sweeping trade agreements, arguing that they have hurt American workers. He reiterated his commitment to renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement and withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He singled out President Bill Clinton for signing NAFTA and accused the accord of moving U.S. jobs abroad. He said a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for TPP.
+
+“The one common feature of every Hillary Clinton idea is that it punishes you for working and doing business in the United States,” Trump said.
+
+As secretary of state, Clinton praised TPP. But in the Democratic primary, she abandoned her support for the agreement. Most congressional Republicans support the multi-nation pact.
+
+Anne Gearan in St. Petersburg, Fla., and Carole Morello and Ed O’Keefe in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+8668,Wingsuit flyer vs. tree,"Next Prev Swipe left/right Wingsuit flyer vs. tree Here’s your anxiety-inducing clip for the day – Eric Dossantos shared this video of a wingsuit flight in which he hit a tree so hard the top 20 feet snapped off. Remarkably he suffered no serious injuries.
+Here’s the non sped-up version.",FAKE
+9308,Putin’s Adviser Takes Credit For Trump Victory: ‘Maybe We Helped A Bit With Wikileaks’,"  
+Donald Trump’s shocking presidential win last night has left most of the world in mortified awe, but one leader seems especially pleased by the upset, perhaps because he had something to do with it. 
+Just hours after Trump took the stage to deliver his acceptance speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated the president-elect on his win. It was only three weeks ago, at the third presidential debate that Hillary Clinton said Trump would be Putin’s “puppet” and it looks like Putin is eager to take on the master’s role. 
+Speaking from the Kremlin, Putin specifically praised Trump on his vow to restore relations with Russia: 
+“We understand the way to that will be difficult, taking into account the current state of degradation of relations between the US and Russia. As I have repeatedly said, that is not our fault that Russia-US relations are in that state. Russia is ready and wants to restore the fully-fledged relations with the US. I repeat we understand this will be difficult, but we are ready to play our part in it.” 
+And what part will Trump play? Ask Sergei Markov. The pro-Kremlin political analyst, who was equally thrilled by the election outcome, is confident Trump will have America do a 180 on the Syrian debacle and join Russia in its backing of Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. 
+There is every reason to believe the analyst, too. At the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, Hillary Clinton joked that Trump was ‘ healthy as a horse – you know the one Vladimir Putin rides on’. It looks like she might be right. Trump has always seemed a bit cozy with the Russian president , but now he may actually owe him a debt of gratitude for the Kremlin’s part in his win. 
+In relation to Russian interference in the election, Markov said, “Maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks.” 
+Up until now the Kremlin has denied any involvement; Putin calling The Obama administration’s accusations they hacked Democratic Party emails, then leaking them to WikiLeaks, as “nonsense” claims. 
+Markov did admit it might not be all smooth riding, adding, “Putin is a macho, Trump is also a macho. Maybe it could be a problem.” 
+Alexei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Russia’s liberal Echo of Moscow radio, agrees: “Putin doesn’t like unpredictability and Trump is the definition of unpredictability.” 
+I guess we will just have to see who will be riding whom. 
+
+Featured image via CNN screengrab Share this Article!",FAKE
+3361,Clinton aide key focus in FBI server investigation,"More than 100 days after he invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying before the House committee investigating the Benghazi terrorist attack, a key Hillary Clinton aide is at the center of the separate and ongoing investigation by the FBI into Clinton’s use of a private unsecured server while she was secretary of state.
+
+That former staffer, Bryan Pagliano, set up the controversial private email server in Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, N.Y.
+
+Pagliano is believed to be the only witness publicly identified during the politically charged hearings on Benghazi to invoke the Fifth Amendment.
+
+He has not been charged with any crime, but the investigation continues into how Clinton used a private homebrew server which contained highly classified information while she was secretary of state.
+
+As Fox News was first to report on Dec. 15, a review by the intelligence community reaffirmed that at least two emails were “top secret” when they hit Clinton’s private server. The State Department had challenged the classification.
+
+At the core of the separate FBI investigation is whether highly classified information was ""grossly mishandled"" by Clinton and her aides.
+
+Pagliano worked for the Clinton campaign team and was their trusted IT specialist before he joined the State Department in May 2009.
+
+As first reported by The Washington Post, the Clintons paid Pagliano $5,000 for ""computer services"" prior to his joining the State Department, according to a financial disclosure form he filed in April 2009.
+
+Yet, even after arriving at State in May 2009, Pagliano continued to be paid by the Clintons to maintain the non-secure homebrew server, which was located in a bathroom closet inside the Clinton's Chappaqua home.
+
+As part of invoking his Fifth Amendment right, Pagliano is also invoking the so-called act-of-production privilege. Since 1984, according to a review by Fox News, the privilege has been used in 103 federal or state cases.
+
+A person can invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against the production of documents only where the act of producing the documents is incriminating in itself. According to a legal review by Fox News, this privilege applies when producing the documents – as opposed to their contents -- to the government is entitled to Fifth Amendment protection.
+
+This assertion is tantamount to the defendant's testimony that the documents exist, are authentic and are in his possession.
+
+The privilege has been invoked before by a Clinton associate. Webb Hubbell, Hillary Clinton's former law partner when she worked at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, argued for an ""act-of-production privilege"" during the federal investigation into the collapse of Madison Guaranty, a failed savings and loan. Hubbell followed Bill and Hillary Clinton into the White House to become an associate attorney general, the third-ranking member of the Justice Department. He was convicted in 1995 and served 18 months in federal prison for his role in the failure of that savings and loan which later became known as the ""Whitewater scandal.""
+
+Pagliano initially invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer 19 pages of questions from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is investigating the attack that killed four Americans in September 2012. Killed in the attack were Ambassador Chris Stevens, State Department information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
+
+Three months ago, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the committee, acknowledged that Pagliano may be called again. Fox News has confirmed no new subpoena has yet been issued by the committee for Pagliano. And there has been no subpoena issued by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
+
+As for the ongoing and separate FBI investigation into Clinton's emails, no one is authorized to speak on the record but Fox News is told by two intelligence sources that the ""Bureau (FBI) has a solid team on the case"" and does not want to appear to be interfering with ""the country's political process.""
+
+In addition to looking at the potential mishandling of classified material, investigators are focused on possible violations of U.S. Code 18, Section 1001 pertaining to “materially false” statements given either in writing, orally or through a third party. Each violation is subject to five years in prison.
+
+It is unclear if Pagliano also had to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, or NDA, while working for the State Department which requires protection of highly classified information.
+
+Clinton signed her NDA on Jan. 22, 2009, which states in part, ""I have been advised that any breach of this Agreement may result in my termination of my access to SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) and removal from a position of special confidence.”
+
+In the prosecution of former CIA Director David Petraeus for his role in wrongly providing highly classified information to his biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell, violations of Non-Disclosure Agreements were cited.
+
+Fox News was told that “frustration” is mounting in the pace of the investigation into Clinton's emails.
+
+Mark MacDougall, the attorney for Pagliano, had no comment to Fox News.
+
+Pamela K. Browne is Senior Executive Producer at the FOX News Channel (FNC) and is Director of Long-Form Series and Specials. Her journalism has been recognized with several awards. Browne first joined FOX in 1997 to launch the news magazine “Fox Files” and later, “War Stories.”
+
+Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.",REAL
+3333,Clinton Foundation received subpoena from State Department investigators,"Investigators with the State Department issued a subpoena to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation last fall seeking documents about the charity’s projects that may have required approval from the federal government during Hillary Clinton’s term as secretary of state, according to people familiar with the subpoena and written correspondence about it.
+
+The subpoena also asked for records related to Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide who for six months in 2012 was employed simultaneously by the State Department, the foundation, Clinton’s personal office, and a private consulting firm with ties to the Clintons.
+
+The full scope and status of the inquiry, conducted by the State Department’s inspector general, were not clear from the material correspondence reviewed by The Washington Post.
+
+A foundation representative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing inquiry, said the initial document request had been narrowed by investigators and that the foundation is not the focus of the probe.
+
+A State IG spokesman declined to comment on that assessment or on the subpoena.
+
+Representatives for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and Abedin also declined comment.
+
+There is no indication that the watchdog is looking at Clinton. But as she runs for president in part by promoting her leadership of the State Department, an inquiry involving a top aide and the relationship between her agency and her family’s charity could further complicate her campaign.
+
+For months, Clinton has wrangled with controversy over her use of a private email server, which has sparked a separate investigation by the same State Department inspector general’s office. There is also an FBI investigation into whether her system compromised national security.
+
+Clinton was asked about the FBI investigation at a debate last week and said she was “100 percent confident” nothing would come of it. Last month, Clinton denied a Fox News report that the FBI had expanded its probe to include ties between the foundation and the State Department. She called that report “an unsourced, irresponsible” claim with “no basis.”
+
+[How Huma Abedin operated at the center of the Clinton universe]
+
+During the years Clinton served as secretary of state, the foundation was led by her husband, former president Bill Clinton. She joined its board after leaving office in February 2013 and helped run it until launching her White House bid in April.
+
+Abedin served as deputy chief of staff at State starting in 2009. For the second half of 2012, she participated in the “special government employee” program that enabled her to work simultaneously in the State Department, the foundation, Hillary Clinton’s personal office and Teneo, a private consultancy with close ties to the Clintons.
+
+Abedin has been a visible part of Hillary Clinton’s world since she served as an intern in the 1990s for the then-first lady while attending George Washington University. On the campaign trail, Clinton is rarely seen in public without Abedin somewhere nearby.
+
+Republican lawmakers have alleged that foreign officials and other powerful interests with business before the U.S. government gave large donations to the Clinton Foundation to curry favor with a sitting secretary of state and a potential future president.
+
+Both Clintons have dismissed those accusations, saying donors contributed to the $2 billion foundation to support its core missions: improving health care, education and environmental work around the world.
+
+[The inside story of how the Clintons built a $2 billion global empire]
+
+Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic primary, has largely avoided raising either issue in his campaign. Last spring, Sanders expressed concerns about the Clinton Foundation being part of a political system “dominated by money.”
+
+Sanders has batted away questions about the email scandal, famously saying at a debate last fall that, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.”
+
+The potential consequences of the IG investigation are unclear. Unlike federal prosecutors, who generally use subpoenas issued by a grand jury, inspectors general frequently subpoena documents without seeking approval from a grand jury or judge.
+
+But their power is limited. They are able to obtain documents, but they cannot compel testimony. At times, IG inquiries result in criminal charges, but sometimes they lead to administrative review, civil penalties or reports that have no legal consequences.
+
+The IG has investigated Abedin before. Last year, the watchdog concluded she was overpaid nearly $10,000 because of violations of sick leave and vacation policies, a finding that Abedin and her attorneys have contested.
+
+Republican lawmakers, led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), have alleged that Abedin’s role at the center of overlapping public and private Clinton worlds created the potential for conflicts of interest.",REAL
+4949,Trump: inner cities run by Democrats are more dangerous than war zones,"Donald Trump veered off script on Monday night to claim that “inner cities run by the Democrats” were more dangerous than countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
+
+The Republican nominee was meant to be delivering a speech calling for Hillary Clinton be investigated by a special prosecutor. However, once again he veered off message in an attempt to appeal to minority voters in apocalyptic terms.
+
+“You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it is safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats,” Trump said. The Republican nominee also promised if elected, “we’ll get rid of the crime. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”
+
+Trump has made increased appeals for support from African Americans in recent days. Despite that, a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed Trump receiving the support of only 1% of African American voters, a historically low total. The poll did have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5%. The Republican nominee has repeatedly argued that African American voters should support him in the past week, saying: “What have you got to lose?” In contrast, the New York real estate developer has railed against what he called “the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, who sees people of color only as votes and not as human beings worthy of a better future.”
+
+The intended focus of Trump’s message on Monday was his call for a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton’s leadership of the state department. Trump claimed that the FBI and Department of Justice could not be trusted to investigate “Hillary Clinton’s crimes”. The FBI in July decided not to pursue criminal charges against Clinton for her use of an unsecured private email server while secretary of state. However, in doing so, FBI director James Comey rebuked Clinton for the “extremely careless” way in which she handled her emails.
+
+In the speech, Trump also said he was “fighting for peaceful regime change in our country” and warned gravely of potential election fraud. “You got to go out and watch. You know what I’m talking about,” he said. Trump has long made unsubstantiated claims about “a rigged election” and warned of in-person voter fraud recently at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania. However, an exhaustive investigation of in-person voter fraud in the United States found only 31 cases since 2000 out of more than 1bn ballots cast.
+
+Trump spoke in the blue collar city of Akron, Ohio. The Buckeye State has 18 electoral votes, and no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio. According to data complied by Real Clear Politics, Clinton has not trailed in a single statewide poll of Ohio since April. However, despite these sagging poll numbers and cryptic warnings about election fraud, Trump was still confident of victory: “I just get the feeling that we’re going to win in a landslide.”",REAL
+7731,Another one bites the dust: Third USAF weather satellite breaks up in orbit,"Thu, 27 Oct 2016 15:45 UTC © Lockheed An artist’s illustration of a Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellite in orbit. A third U.S. Air Force weather satellite that launched more than 20 years ago has broken up in orbit, Air Force Space Command disclosed Monday evening. Air Force officials confirmed the breakup of the long-retired Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 12 satellite (DMSP F-12) after the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, detected an additional object orbiting alongside the 22-year-old satellite . DMSP F-12, which the Air Force retired from service in 2008, had the same battery assembly that was implicated in the February 2015 breakup of DMSP F-13. While both satellites were built by Lockheed Martin and launched less than a year apart, DMSP F-13 was still in service when it suffered its breakup, producing nearly 150 pieces of debris . DMSP F-12, in contrast, was shut down in 2008 — a process that entails burning off the satellite's remaining fuel, releasing compressed gasses, and discharging the battery. The Air Force said Monday evening it was tracking just one piece of debris associated with DMSP F-12's breakup. Properly shutting down a DMSP satellite at the end of its service life is no guarantee that it won't suffer a catastrophic breakup, however. In 2004, a 13-year-old DMSP spacecraft, dubbed DMSP-F11, broke apart and produced 56 pieces of cataloged space debris, even though it had been taken out of service and gone through the normal end-of-life showdown procedures . Following the February 2015 breakup of DMSP F-13 , the Air Force said a total of nine DMSP satellites launched between 1982 and 1997 all had the same failure-prone battery assembly. At the time, only seven were still in orbit. With the breakup of DMSP F-12, that number is down to six. Of those, only one — DMSP F-14 — is still in service. The Air Force said determining the cause of DMSP F-12's breakup will be especially difficult since they have no telemetry from the long-silent satellite to help assess the incident. The Air Force still has five DMSP satellites in service. The youngest, DMSP F-18, was launched in 2009. The oldest, DMSP F-14, was launched in 1997. In February, the DMSP suffered another setback when the Air Force lost the ability to command DMSP F-19 due to an onboard power failure. The satellite had been in orbit less than two years when the failure occurred. Comment: Are these satellites just falling to pieces because of bad design? Is someone using them as target practice? Or are some of them falling victim to the increase in space rocks penetrating our skies? (For example: Space rock collision? USAF satellite explodes in Earth orbit ) What exactly are these satellites used for? From Lockheed : Today, DMSP is still providing strategic and tactical weather prediction to aid the U.S. military in planning operations at sea, on land and in the air . The satellites, equipped with a sophisticated sensor suite, can: Image visible and infrared cloud cover Measure precipitation, surface temperature, and soil moisture Collect specialized global meteorological, oceanographic, and solar-geophysical information in all weather conditions",FAKE
+5650,"The Russian Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean: Naval Briefing November 9th, 2016 by LeDahu","4072 Views November 09, 2016 22 Comments SITREPs Scott 
+Source: Extract from infographic – Offiziere.ch 
+Source: Extract from infographic – Offiziere.ch 
+Latest information is that the Russian fleet off the coast of Syria is going to carry out military strikes in the Aleppo region including seaborne missiles launches. This is not surprising since the main elements of the Russian Navy force have at last converged off Cyprus & Syria. The Kuznetsov carrier has been on the receiving end of a lot of trolling, mocking all the way to the Syrian shores It has taken a while to finally get the vital naval pieces into place, much of it to howls of protest from NATO and the MSM. 
+It is doubtful that the air strikes against the rebels will be carrier launched, largely due to the ski jump configuration that hinders the launching of fully laden aircraft, but SU-33s have already been reported in the skies above Syria, either probably on Combat Air Patrols, or more than likely having relocated to the main airbase at Khmeimim , supplementing the air assets there. If indeed true, it will nevertheless be the first combat air sortie in 25 years for the Kuznetsov’s air wing! Much less fuss has been made in the MSM & politically on the role of the Black & Caspian Sea fleets,which have already used Kalibrs in anger in 2015 & this year. Interestingly, 100 Kalibr & Onix missiles were ordered by the Russian Ministry of Defense in the 3rd quarter of 2016. (TASS 21 Oct). The destroyer, Smetlivy is also reported to have joined the fleet, after a Greek stopover, where sailors got to see the sights of Athens. Whereas Spain & Malta snubbed the Russian Navy, Greece welcomes them with open arms. 
+At the beginning of November, the naval auxiliary, Prof. Nikolay Muru left Sevastopol along with the missile frigate, the Admiral Grigorovich, the only surface ship carrying Kalibrs in the eastern Mediterranean. The Prof. Nikolay Muru is a Search & Rescue (SAR) ship, also capable of underwater operations & has Dynamic Positioning System (DPS); it’s one of two vessels that frequently use AIS and as such trackable. The other is the Nikolay Chiker, an ocean going tug, which accompanied the Kuznetsov fleet down from Severomorsk. The Chiker is now quite close to Turkey, at the northernmost edge of what appears to be the Russian Navy operational zone. (See diagram for the NOTAM). 
+Russia’s aircraft carrier group is ready to launch strike on Aleppo in the next 24 hours 
+Also underway and heading to Syria is the Large Buoy Tender, KIL 158, with a deck cargo of what appears to be two fast ‘Raptor’ patrol craft . 
+It has a heavy lift crane and also an underwater operations role. You don’t send off such ships far from their homeports for a nice training cruise, so although this might seem at first sight, dull news compared to the deployment of combat ships, it is interesting from a logistical point of view. There is the need to reconfigure the Tartus docks into a viable & safe naval base permanently and as such specialist vessels with diving support capabilities will probably come in handy. 
+Equally, the arrival of specialist auxiliary ships makes for an intriguing combination, specifically looking at the underwater operations capability. This is especially so when you vector in what the Yantar did last month. The Yantar, a Russian navy oceanographic ship was off Syrian & Lebanese coasts, loitered over areas where there submarine cables linking Cyprus with the Levant & Turkey. My guess is that it was also surveying and checking out the Anti Submarine Warfare sonar arrays ‘toys’ left there by NATO – (US), in preparation for the arrival of the main fleet. Back in October, several UK MSM newspapers reported the deployment of 2 Akula class & 1 Kilo class submarines in the Atlantic. They added that they were joining the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean. So maybe the Yantar was giving the elusive Russian submarine(s?) some more room to maneuver discreetly. At the same time, there was what seemed to be a cat and mouse game taking place between the Russian navy (a sub?) firing missiles and the US Navy sending out an ASW P-8 air patrol the next day in the area. A discreet but vital underwater conflict is taking place off the Syrian coast. 
+Caption: Map showing the location of the Yantar in relation to submarine cables in the region 
+Some of the Russian ships took a northerly route past Cyprus, thus completely avoiding the French aircraft-carrier group and the busy airspace used by the RAF and ISF aircraft. Just by looking at the NOTAM map for Cyprus shows this crowded airspace). There are still NATO/US ships lurking in the area, probably keeping tabs on the Russians. One, off Crete, was the USNS Mary Sears (T AGS 65), an oceanographic ship, with sonar, underwater metal detection & satellite imagery capabilities, approximately in the same mould as the Yantar. The Yantar is now going to Iran and maybe will cause some ASW mischief making there. The latest ‘watcher’ is the Spanish navy tanker, the Cantabria, (A 15), and before that it was the turn of the Danish warship HMDS Absalon off Crete. The US naval oiler Leroy Grumman is also deployed in the area and it appears to be replenishing the French carrier group. 
+The latest news in is that there was a ‘brief encounter’ between the Kuznetsov escorts and a Dutch NATO submarine. (SPUTNIK news 9 Nov) Supposedly for a top notch hyper silent submarine, the Dutch Walrus class diesel- electric submarine was detected by the Severomorsk & the Vice-Adm Kulakov. 
+In other news, the Russian naval “Syrian Express” is still providing a much needed military supply shuttle service. In what is probably the oddest naval movement was that of a tug SB 5 towing a barge, that went through the Bosphorus twice in less than 30 hours, a record breaking transit. The barge looked like a mooring pontoon for one of the big combat ships or for the Kuznetsov. The naval logistical & combat support operations is a underrated but vital aspect of the Russian military campaign in Syria. 
+P.S. Rumor has it that the Dutch sub detected is the Walrus, since it visited Valletta, Malta back in September. 
+All sources are OSINT; usually cross checked. 
+
+Thank you for your time, 
+LeDahu",FAKE
+2543,Judge Temporarily Halts Obama's Immigration Actions,"WASHINGTON -- A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on Monday that will temporarily prevent the Obama administration from moving forward with its executive actions on immigration while a lawsuit against the president works its way through the courts.
+
+The order, by Judge Andrew Hanen of the U.S. District Court in Brownsville, Texas, was an early stumble for the administration in what will likely be a long legal battle over whether President Barack Obama overstepped his constitutional authority with the wide-reaching executive actions on immigration he announced last November.
+
+The impact of the order will be felt almost immediately: One of Obama's actions is set to take effect on Feb. 18. On that day, the administration was set to begin accepting applications for an expanded version of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. DACA allows undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to stay in the country and work legally.
+
+Now, newly eligible immigrants seeking to apply will be unable to do so while the lawsuit is pending. The administration will also be unable to move forward, for now, with a DACA-like program created under Obama's executive actions. That program confers similar relief to undocumented immigrants who are parents of legal permanent residents or of U.S. citizens.
+
+Hanen, who was appointed to the court by former President George W. Bush, said in the ruling that the 26 states who brought the suit had standing to do so, and indicated he was sympathetic to their arguments.
+
+""This lawsuit is not about immigration,"" the complaint reads. ""It is about the rule of law, presidential power, and the structural limits of the U.S. Constitution.""
+
+The White House has said that Obama acted within his authority and that the policies will allow immigration enforcement agents to focus on deporting higher-priority offenders such as convicted criminals, recent border-crossers and those who pose national security threats.
+
+Attorneys general from 12 states and the District of Columbia signed onto an amicus brief in support of Obama's actions, asking the judge not to issue an injunction.
+
+""The truth is that the directives will substantially benefit states, will further the public interest, and are well within the President’s broad authority to enforce immigration law,"" the amicus brief reads.
+
+Obama's executive actions are at the center of a congressional impasse over funding the Department of Homeland Security. The dispute could cause an agency shutdown once funding runs out on Feb. 27. Most Republicans say they will only support a DHS funding bill if it includes measures to stop Obama's immigration policies, but those measures are being blocked by Senate Democrats. Even if such a bill were to reach the president's desk, Obama has said he would veto it.
+
+The district court ruling was considered a potential game-changer for the funding fight, since some Republicans might be convinced to support a DHS funding bill with no immigration measures if Obama's actions were not moving forward anyway.
+
+UPDATE: 8:20 a.m. -- White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest put out a statement early Tuesday defending the executive actions, which he said ""are consistent with the laws passed by Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court, as well as five decades of precedent by presidents of both parties who have used their authority to set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws.""
+
+""The Department of Justice, legal scholars, immigration experts, and the district court in Washington, D.C. have determined that the President’s actions are well within his legal authority,"" Earnest continued. ""Top law enforcement officials, along with state and local leaders across the country, have emphasized that these policies will also benefit the economy and help keep communities safe. The district court’s decision wrongly prevents these lawful, commonsense policies from taking effect and the Department of Justice has indicated that it will appeal that decision.""",REAL
+4647,Road to 270: 's new election map,"Washington One week after we moved Nevada and Florida from ""battleground"" to ""lean Democratic,"" both states appear to be snapping back to their traditional toss-up status. Our new CNN electoral outlook places both states back in the ""battleground"" category and increases the up-for-grabs turf to six states and two congressional districts worth a total of 87 electoral votes.
+
+Note: The split congressional district ratings are symbolized with diagonal lines.
+
+Clinton had not yet finished her two-day swing through the Sunshine State before her campaign let it be known that she would be back in Florida this weekend.
+
+Florida is also one of the handful of states where the Clinton campaign remains heavily on the air with campaign advertising and where it announced today that two closing argument ads will begin to be seen across the state.
+
+Florida's 29 electoral votes are the biggest prize on the map among competitive states and both campaigns plan to fight it out there all the way through November 8.
+
+In Nevada, polls continue to show it is a margin-of-error race between Clinton and Trump and both candidates are expected back in the Silver State before Election Day.
+
+As Trump continues to shore up his Republican support and improve his standing among Hispanics (though still losing this group by a wide margin), he is ensuring Nevada remains competitive all the way through Election Day.
+
+With the new changes to the CNN electoral outlook, our current snapshot has Clinton at 272 electoral votes from states either solidly or leaning in her direction. Trump has a total of 179 electoral votes from the states either solidly or leaning in his direction. That leaves 87 electoral votes currently up for grabs in the remaining battleground states.
+
+The full rundown is below:
+
+California (55), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), DC (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (20), Maine (3), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), New Jersey (14), New York (29), Oregon (7), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Washington (12), Minnesota (10), New Mexico (5) (200 total)",REAL
+77,Bernie Sanders faces frustrated crowd at race forum in Minneapolis,"Sanders spoke to the predominately African-American crowd, addressing issues such as the incarceration rates of whites versus African-Americans due to marijuana use. He also talked about nationwide police reforms.
+
+After delivering a stump speech for about 15 minutes, Sanders answered questions on racial inequality, economic disparities and small business growth, and environmental issues affecting Minneapolis.
+
+The audience cheered and clapped for Sanders at times during his stump speech, and were as vocal during the question and answer session, yelling out ""How?"" at several points as the senator spoke.
+
+A particularly tense moment arose when a questioner found Sanders' answer on government accountability in low-income communities like Flint, Michigan, unsatisfactory, accusing him of being afraid of saying ""black"" and asked him to go into more detail about reparations for African-Americans in the country.
+
+""I know you're scared to say black, I know you're scared to say reparation"" a woman said. ""But it seems like every time we try to talk about black people and us getting something for the systematic reparations and the exploitation of our people we have to include every other person of color ... can you please talk about specifically black people and reparations?"" Sanders pushed back in his response, defending his viewpoint that the issue is national and spans across poor communities. ""What I just indicated in my view is that when you have ... you and I may have disagreements because it's not just black, it is Latino, there are areas of America, in poor rural areas, where it's white."" During his response he was interrupted by an audience member who yelled, ""Say black!"" to which the senator said, ""I've said black 50 times. That's the 51st time."" Sanders offered this solution to the original question: invest most in those communities most in need. ""When you have 35% of black children living in poverty, when you have half the kids in the country, in public schools on free and reduced lunches, when youth unemployment in African-American communities is 51%, those are exactly the kinds of communities that you invest in."" Audience member Jason Sole stood up and declared that he was ""feeling the Bern"" but added that because he was formerly incarcerated, he couldn't cast a ballot in the Minnesota primary. Sanders said he disagreed with the notion that convicted felons shouldn't be allowed to vote. ""What criminal justice is supposed to be about is you do the crime, you are found guilty, you pay the price. I'm not aware that paying the price includes taking away your rights to vote in a Democratic society. You paid the price right? You're a citizen of the United States, correct? You have the right to vote."" Sanders told the audience not to be naïve, underscoring what he sees as an underlying political motive. ""You have large numbers of African-American men and women not being able to vote. Somebody benefits from that."" The forum finished inconclusively when activist Clyde Bellecourt commandeered the microphone to talk about issues relating to Native Americans being what he called ""completely forgotten"" by the federal government. His statement drew on for several heated and emotional minutes as moderators asked him to get to his question and Bellecourt declared, ""If you have to carry me out of here, carry me out of here!"" Sanders rose from his chair, thanked the crowd and scurried offstage.",REAL
+5400,Louisiana Election Officials Seize Voting Machine Illegally Placed In Private Room For ‘VIP Voters’ (VIDEO),"Louisiana Election Officials Seize Voting Machine Illegally Placed In Private Room For ‘VIP Voters’ (VIDEO) By Stephanie Kuklish   
+Election officials in Louisiana seized a voting machine on Wednesday that’s purpose was to serve “VIP” voters so that they could skip voting lines, an illegal and suspicious tactic by the longtime Jeffrey Parish Registrar Of Voters, Dennis DiMarco. 
+The unique voter machine was kept in a conference room and only allowed “special” citizens to use it. Allegedly it was meant for the purpose of allowing citizens such as police officers, fireman, emergency physicians, and anyone else with a job that may keep them from being available during voting hours. 
+Meg Casper, a spokeswoman for Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler’s office, told the Huffington Post that the machine was seized immediately and the user’s names have been retrieved. Schedler wrote a letter to DiMarco stating : “I feel this action is necessary to preserve the transparency and integrity of early voting and to promote confidence within the general public regarding the voting process.” 
+Louisiana state law says that : “Each voting machine shall be placed inside the polling place and shall be in full view of the public from the time the election begins until the last elector has voted. The commissioners and watchers shall be stationed near the voting machines, and the commissioners shall regulate the admission of the voters thereto, and each shall always be in full view of the other election commissioners and watchers and, as far as possible, of the public.” 
+Apparently the Registrar of Voters, DiMarco, wasn’t aware of his own laws and replied with a statement saying: 
+“There was no fraudulent votes; they’re no allegations about that. No allegations of anyone voting who was not entitled to vote. Now, we’ve turned down everybody. So no one gets preferential treatment. But again, that means that those firemen, those policemen, are standing up rather than maybe doing their duty on the streets.” 
+If Louisiana requires every police officer, firemen, and other emergency personnel to work every day all day long then maybe we should be taking a look at that instead of refusing to acknowledge the law. 
+Or maybe the Republican party should stop pushing so hard for limited early voting hours after fanning the flames of Republican presidential nominee’s unfounded claims that the election is rigged. Featured Image Via Gambit About Stephanie Kuklish 
+I am a 30 something writer passionate about politics, the environment, human rights and pretty much everything that effects our everyday life. To stay on top of the topics I discuss, like and follow me at https://www.facebook.com/keeponwriting and https://facebook.com/progressivenomad . Connect",FAKE
+8705,"part 38 “Impossible” statues, “Impossible” ancient jewellery, Moscow nuked, “Impossible” steel [VIDEO]","Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
+Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
+Privacy Policy 
+By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
+Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
+9544,We’re Finally Opening A T-Shirt Shop For ROK Gear,"We’re about to launch Red Kings Shop , which will sell ROK branded clothing. We’re starting with a limited run of a basic red t-shirt. Here’s a bearded fellow we hired to model the shirt…
+
+We will do a soft launch of the store in approximately one week to those who sign up with their email address. If you want to be the first in line to get your shirt, click here for the Red Kings Shop homepage and enter your email address . The sign up will be removed in approximately 48-72 hours. 
+",FAKE
+843,"Desperate Measures: Cruz, Kasich Team Up to Take Down Trump","GOP rivals Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are joining forces to take down front-runner Donald Trump.
+
+The news comes a day before voters in five Northeastern states head to the polls to cast ballots in another round of crucial presidential primaries.
+
+Trump is expected to add to his overwhelming delegate lead.
+
+""I have got to get rid of these two guys. I am sorry folks,"" the tycoon told his supporters.
+
+Cruz and Kasich almost simultaneously announced Sunday they're coordinating their campaigns to deny the front-runner the 1,237 delegates needed to win the party's nomination before the convention.
+
+""I think, when we're at the convention, the delegates are going to want to know who can beat Hillary,"" Kasich said.
+
+The Kasich campaign is backing off in Indiana, giving Cruz a clearer path to victory in next month's primary.
+
+In return, the Cruz campaign will ease up to give Kasich a ""clearer the path"" in Oregon and New Mexico.
+
+""Having Donald Trump at the top of the ticket in November would be a sure disaster for Republicans,"" Cruz's campaign manager, Jeff Roe, said in a statement.
+
+""Not only would Trump get blown out by Clinton or Sanders,"" he warned. ""But having him as our nominee would set the party back a generation.""
+
+The Kaisch campaign also released a statement explaining, ""Our goal is to have an open convention in Cleveland, where we are confident a candidate capable of uniting the party and winning in November will emerge as the nominee.""
+
+""Wow, just announced that Lyin' Ted and Kasich are going to collude in order to keep me from getting the Republican nomination. Desperation!"" he tweeted.
+
+Meanwhile, in the Democratic race, there is talk Hillary Clinton is already quietly starting the search for a vice presidential running mate.
+
+""I am just working hard to win on Tuesday,"" said Clinton, who is ahead in all five states voting Tuesday.
+
+The former state secretary is virtually assured of winning the Democratic nomination before her party's convention.
+
+Even so, rival Bernie Sanders is still promising to stay in the race.
+
+""Well, we're going to have to do — obviously, win big in the number of the primaries and caucuses that yet remain,"" the Vermont senator told NBC News Saturday.
+
+""A poll came out yesterday that has us within striking distance in California, a larger state. I think we can do very well in California,"" he said.",REAL
+6353,Defense Secretary Halts Forced Repayment of Enlistment Bonuses,"Email 
+Responding to a chorus of protests and complaints, Defense Secretary Ash Carter has suspended collection of repayments of enlistment bonuses made to members of the California National Guard. Carter has also directed that a review be made of the process that led to members of the California Guard being given bonuses to reenlist, only to have the Department of Defense demand repayment of the bonuses. 
+Carter called the process “unfair to service members and to taxpayers,” and said he has ordered the Defense Finance and Accounting Service to “suspend all efforts to collect reimbursement from affected California National Guard members, effective as soon as is practical.” 
+“This suspension,” Carter added, “will continue until I am satisfied that our process is working effectively.” 
+“I’m glad the Pentagon came to its senses,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said, in response to Carter’s statement. “Congress will continue to work on any reforms necessary to ensure this doesn’t happen again.” 
+Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican, and chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, was not as charitable as Ryan, however. He denounced Carter’s response as “weak and ham-handed,” pointing out that the moratorium will not cover potential problems outside California. 
+Miller added, “Carter seems to have no plan to make those who’ve already been forced to pay back their bonuses whole, and by focusing only on the California Guard, he is ignoring what media reports indicate could be a national problem. Once again, it seems Congress will be forced to fix a problem that the Obama administration created but refuses to fully address on its own.” 
+During the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the California National Guard offered soldiers thousands of dollars in bonuses to entice them to re-enlist. It was at a time when the military was having difficulty meeting its recruiting goals. It is estimated that the bonuses were given to almost 10,000 soldiers, in amounts of $15,000, or even more. 
+David Cloud of the Los Angeles Times explained the problem to National Public Radio (NPR). The bonuses were paid to encourage soldiers to sign up for another tour in the Army, generally for an additional six years. “They were being paid at a time when the California Guard desperately needed soldiers to fill the ranks of units going to Iraq. So they were more generous than usual.” 
+Unfortunately, many soldiers given bonuses did not qualify under the rules used at the time. Then, many years later, the Pentagon conducted audits and demanded the soldiers who received the payments pay them back — with interest. 
+“This story has made my blood boil,” said Bill Hahn, vice president for communications with The John Birch Society (parent organization of The New American magazine), making specific reference to a woman — a master sergeant — who went to Afghanistan after getting a $15,000 bonus. Susan Haley’s entire family served in the Army, and she had served 26 years in the military herself. After all of that, she received notice — while caring for her son, another soldier who had lost his leg in Afghanistan — that she owed thousands of dollars to the Pentagon. 
+“I feel totally betrayed,” said Sergeant Haley, a native of Los Angeles. Haley is presently sending the Pentagon $650 each month — a quarter of her family’s income. Haley is worried that she will have to sell their home to repay the bonuses. “They’ll get their money, but I want those years back,” Haley said, referring to the additional six years she spent in the military as a consequence of the bonus she is now forced to repay. 
+A former Army captain, Christopher Van Meter, expressed similar sentiments: “People like me just got screwed. These bonuses were used to keep people in.” Van Meter has been forced to refinance his home mortgage to pay the $25,000 in re-enlistment bonuses the Army insists he should not have received. During the extra time he spent in the service, he was thrown from an armored vehicle turret, after the vehicle detonated a buried roadside bomb. He received a Purple Heart for his injuries. 
+Robert Richmond, an Army sergeant, re-enlisted for $15,000 as a special forces soldier. In 2007, his company was deployed to Hillah, an Iraqi town 60 miles south of Baghdad. In this area — known as the “Triangle of Death” — a roadside bomb exploded, leaving him with permanent injuries to his back and his brain. 
+With the $15,000 unpaid “debt” on his credit report, he was turned down for a home loan in Texas. 
+The Army began to experience recruiting shortfalls during the second Bush administration and the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, forcing the Pentagon to resort to the most generous re-enlistment incentives in history. The recruiting and re-enlistment difficulties have continued into the Obama administration, causing some to address causes for the problem, and others to offer solutions. 
+National Guard units, such as those in California, have been activated more and more frequently in recent years, as the Pentagon has faced difficulty raising enough troops in the regular Army to handle the frequent overseas deployments in the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. This in turn has led to more difficulty in filling the ranks of the various state units of the National Guard across the country. 
+The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are obvious reasons for the reluctance of many to join the national armed forces or the National Guard units. But with the increasing political correctness of the armed forces (with training in such morale-damaging classes as “White Privilege,” the inclusion of women in combat roles and the lowering of physical standards to accommodate them, the push to allow for homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered soldiers, and the like) thousands more soldiers have opted for a different career. 
+With difficulties in raising enough soldiers through recruitment, some have advocated a return to the military draft. The draft ended in 1973, but at the urging of President Jimmy Carter, draft registration was reinstated in 1980. This became a minor issue in the presidential campaign of 1980, with Governor Ronald Reagan speaking out in opposition to draft registration. Since that time, there has been insufficient national support for reinstating the draft. But with the decline in recruitment, supporters of the draft have blamed the all-volunteer force. 
+If the country were to return to the draft, the question of whether women should be included in any conscription law would be raised. Recently, the U.S. Senate voted to include women in draft registration, but the Republican-led House of Representatives balked, narrowly defeating the effort by 217-203. 
+Presently, men must sign up for the draft within 30 days of turning 18. But with falling numbers of young men willing to join today’s military forces, for whatever reason, expect increasing pressure to add women to the draft registration rolls. 
+In 1940, on the eve of a presidential election, President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “I say to you again, and again, and again — your sons will never be sent to fight in a foreign war.” With the inclusion of young women in both the draft and combat, perhaps this should be updated to “Your sons and your daughters will never be sent to fight in a foreign war — but if they are, expect us to ask for their bonuses back.”  ",FAKE
+206,Ryan hopes for new tone in Trump campaign,"Paul Ryan is hoping Donald Trump really does elevate the tone of his campaign, but otherwise seems prepared to (again) criticize the presumptive Republican presidential nominee if necessary.
+
+""When anyone in our party, least especially our nominee, says things that run contrary to our beliefs, to our values, to our principles, we have an obligation to call them out,"" Ryan said on CBS' Face The Nation. ""We have an obligation to not support those things because they don't define who we are.""
+
+Ryan, who endorsed Trump earlier this month, spoke less than a week after criticizing the New York businessman for saying a federal judge may be biased against him because of ""Mexican heritage."" The House speaker described Trump's comments as the ""textbook"" definition of racism.
+
+He told CBS he is ""kind of learning as I go"" when it comes to Trump.
+
+""I believe in this job I have as speaker of the House that it is important that I help unify our party so that we're at full strength in the fall so that we can win an election,"" Ryan said.
+
+Trump backers, meanwhile, have described Ryan as the personification of the Republican establishment they said they are fighting.
+
+In a column for Breitbart News — one tweeted out by a Trump staff member — Trump backer Wayne Allyn Root urged the presumptive nominee to ""ignore"" Ryan.
+
+""He’s the old guard,"" Root wrote. ""He’s a loser. He’s another Mitch McConnell. He’s the new John Boehner. Paul Ryan is the reason the GOP is losing America.""",REAL
+4456,"What voters want in a president today, and how their views have changed","The presidential nomination contests are heating up and both parties’ 2016 fields have narrowed. And since it’s also Presidents Day weekend, it’s a good time to consider what voters want in a president, regardless of which candidate they may support.
+
+Past experience is not necessarily required (especially for Republicans).
+
+Last March, more than a year before the first primaries, more voters valued a hypothetical candidate with “experience and a proven record” (50%) than one who had “new ideas and a different approach” (43%). Just six months later, those numbers had flipped – 55% said it was more important for a candidate to have new ideas, while 37% valued experience and a proven record.
+
+This shift came entirely among Republican and Republican-leaning voters. The share of Republicans saying it was more important for a candidate to have new ideas increased by nearly 30 percentage points over this period, from 36% to 65%. Opinions among Democratic voters remained far more stable. In September, 50% valued experience, about the same as the 46% who said this in March.
+
+Past experience as a Washington lawmaker also is viewed more negatively among the public overall than in prior presidential campaigns – again, especially among Republicans. In January, 31% of the public – including 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents – said they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who had been an elected official in Washington for many years. In 2007, just 15% of the public and 20% of Republicans had a negative view of a candidate with longtime experience as a D.C. elected official.
+
+While the public continues to view military experience very positively, it is a trait that none of the top remaining 2016 candidates possesses. In a survey last month, 50% of Americans said they would be more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who has served in the military – the most positively viewed trait among 13 tested. In the prior two presidential campaigns, military experience also was viewed very positively.
+
+The 2012 election was the first in more than 80 years in which neither of the major party presidential candidates had served in the military. But this may not be surprising given that military veterans make up steadily declining shares of both the public and members of Congress.
+
+Support is limited for a candidate who does not believe in God.
+
+In our recent survey on faith and the 2016 campaign, large majorities of Americans said it would make no difference to them if a presidential candidate were Jewish (80%) or Catholic (75%). Being an evangelical Christian also is a neutral characteristic; 55% of U.S. adults said it wouldn’t matter if a candidate were an evangelical, while similar shares said it would make them more likely (22%) or less likely (20%) to vote for that person.
+
+Members of certain other religious groups, however, may have a harder time reaching the White House because of their religious beliefs. While 69% of Americans said it wouldn’t matter if a candidate were a Mormon, 23% said they would be less likely to vote for a Mormon. Even more had a negative view of a hypothetical Muslim candidate: 42% said they would be less likely to support such a candidate, while 53% said it would make no difference.
+
+Not believing in God remains an even greater potential liability for a candidate. About half of Americans (51%) said they would be less likely to vote for an atheist candidate, though this share has fallen from 63% in 2007.
+
+For most voters, “electability” matters less than issue positions.
+
+Political pundits often focus on the “electability” of candidates – how they might fare in a general election contest. But in September, majorities of voters in both parties said it was more important for a candidate to share their positions on the issues.
+
+Two-thirds of both Republican (67%) and Democratic (65%) registered voters said it was more important for a candidate to share their positions on issues than it was for a candidate to have the best chance of defeating the other party’s nominee.",REAL
+7703,Globalist Soros Pours Money Into Manipulating U.S. Elections,"Email 
+Billionaire globalist George Soros (shown) has been dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into manipulating American elections in recent years, leaked documents show . While many critics have focused on his indirect links to a controversial voting-machine company , his electoral scheming goes much deeper, as a review of the documents by PJ Media shows . Rather than tampering with the outcome of particular elections, leaks from Soros' Open Society apparatus show he has far greater ambitions. Basically, he is seeking to “fundamentally transform America,” as Obama put it, by changing and manipulating the American electorate into supporting globalism, statism, collectivism, and his legions of radical politicians and elected officials. Soros, a self-described atheist, has also been exposed seeking to corrupt Christianity with his radical anti-Christian views . But as awareness of the scheming spreads, the Soros brand is becoming increasingly toxic among Americans from all walks of life. 
+Soros' assault on American elections revealed in leaked foundation documents is broad and multi-faceted. Among other schemes, the protegé of the unfathomably wealthy Rothschild banking dynasty has launched legal assaults on state-level efforts to limit voter fraud and ensure the integrity of elections. Essentially, the ploy appears to be aimed at facilitating mass voter fraud. Soros foundations have also been funding propaganda campaigns, racist ethnocentric “media” outlets, the subversion of journalism, vicious attacks on patriotic organizations, and more. The Soros network has also provided huge infusions of money to fringe and sometimes violent left-wing extremists and race-mongers (including racist groups like La Raza, or The Race) to build up pro-Soros AstroTurf groups. In direct politics, Soros has also been showering money on radical candidates at the local, state, and federal levels who will advance his anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Constitution agenda. 
+Some of the Soros funding is aimed at what is described in leaked documents as a plot to “build power” for “systemic change.” Indeed, the Soros machine even created the “Democracy and Power Fund” in a bid to dupe various groups of Americans into serving as a collectivist coalition to push Soros' extreme big government agenda. These groups, centered around attributes such as race and income, include “people of color, immigrants, young people, and low income people,” the document shows. Blacks and Latinos are both in Soros' crosshairs. The fund, according to leaked documents, seeks to “inspire” these groups with “multi-issue advocacy” to push Soros' agenda at the federal, state, and local levels. Between 2010 and 2012, Soros dropped $15 million on his “Power Fund.” As the name of the fund suggests, securing power for himself and the establishment at the expense of the Constitution and the American people is exactly what Soros, a convicted felon, has in mind. 
+To ensure that the propaganda and hate that Soros minions produce receive the requisite media coverage, Soros has also been building up his own personal “media” megaphone. Among other schemes, Soros was exposed funding something called “New America Media,” which pumps out ethnocentric collectivism and race-mongering to thousands of propaganda organs under the guise of “ethnic” media. Also funded by the Soros machine is what documents refer to as a “Media Consortium.” As if the establishment media was not “progressive” enough, Soros documents explain that the funding helps “a network of leading progressive independent journalism organizations focused on making connections, building a media infrastructure, and amplifying the voices of progressive journalists in the United States.” Apparently the Soros-funded “consortium” has “done much to build community and greater strength among progressive media outlets.” 
+J. Christian Adams, the former Justice Department attorney who left in 2010 after accusing the outfit of racial bias, explained the significance of Soros' media scheming in his in-depth investigation of the leaked Soros documents published by PJ Media . “Mainstream journalists frequently parrot progressive writers when covering voter fraud, thus rendering the Media Consortium Soros dollars well spent,” Adams wrote in an article that was posted on the Drudge Report before going viral. “The leaked documents also reveal deliberate and successful efforts to manipulate media coverage of election issues in mainstream media outlets like the The New York Times .” 
+When it comes to Soros manipulating press coverage of voter fraud, the process works similar to the Soros machine's Black Lives Matter operation. “The leaked funding documents describe how the propaganda about the 'myth of voter fraud' is generated by two Soros-funded organizations, moved to blogger and racially-centric media outlets, and eventually to mainstream media,” Adams explained. Indeed, almost the exact same process is used by Soros to promote hatred of the police and racial agitation, with the ultimate goal of nationalizing law enforcement. As The New American has previously reported , Soros-funded groups protest and riot, Soros-funded academics produce propaganda “studies” to justify the narrative, and then Soros-funded propaganda organs provide media coverage of it all. The Washington Times described the Soros propaganda machine as an “echo chamber.” 
+The Soros network funds an incredible array of organizations that advance his extremism. Among those that are involved in fundamentally transforming America by manipulating the electoral system, many receive more than half of a million dollars annually. Among them is the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which brings together left-wing extremists, anti-constitutional radicals, overtly racist groups such as “La Raza” (The Race), statist-controlled Big Labor groups, known communist front groups officially condemned by U.S. authorities as “subversive,” and more. This year, the radical alliance even called on a UN-linked international organization founded and largely controlled by communist and socialist regimes to oversee U.S. elections . Other groups on the Soros dole are the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the extremist Center for American Progress , Advancement Project, Center for Community Change, Brennan Center, and more. The supposedly non-partisan League of Women Voters is also deeply involved with the Soros machine. 
+Soros also partners with various establishment controlled tax-exempt mega-foundations such as Atlantic Philanthropies, Carnegie, Ford, and New World Foundations, among others. It partnered with the globalist Rockefeller Brothers Fund in a scheme to change voter registration policies. Much insight about the Rockefellers' totalitarian agenda was revealed by dynasty boss David Rockefeller, who showered praise on the mass-murdering regime of Chairman Mao for leading what he touted as “one of the most important and successful” social experiments “in history.” Some 60 million to 100 million people were killed as part of the experiment Rockefeller was so pleased with. In his autobiography, Rockefeller also boasted about conspiring with a secret cabal against his country to build a global political system. “Some even believe [the Rockefellers] are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will,” Rockefeller wrote in his book. “If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I’m proud of it.” Soros shares the same agenda . 
+WikiLeaks has also revealed some interesting facts about Soros' political machinations. Indeed, Soros is mentioned more than 50 times in the Clinton and Democrat e-mails released so far. One e-mail is from Jacqueline Carozza, a Soros employee, to Clinton campaign boss and anti-Catholic bigot John Podesta. “With summer quickly approaching Mr. and Mrs. Soros are starting to plan the 2015 Southampton schedule and would enjoy your company,” she wrote last year to Podesta , who was also invited to an occult “Spirit Cooking” event with satanic overtones. “Please let me know which dates suit you best to come for a visit and hopefully we can coordinate a mutually convenient time for your stay.” 
+Beyond manipulating Americans into surrendering their heritage and their liberty, leaked documents also show that Soros has also been at the forefront of the establishment's efforts to corrupt Christianity. As The New American reported in August, hacked e-mails from his vast empire of shady tax-exempt foundations show that the radical “philanthropist” wants to change the views of Christians and churches around the world using deceit, manipulation, and lots and lots of money. His goals in showering money on Christian groups and churches include, among other policy agendas, legalizing the slaughter of unborn children in pro-life nations, promoting what he calls “racial and economic justice,” ensnaring more nations in the European Union, pushing global governance and what he calls the “New World Order” (which he said should be “owned” by Communist China) , and even shifting “the priorities of the U.S. Catholic church.” One document on funding “Christian” schemes speaks of pursuing “structural transformation of political and economic systems.” And that is just what is known. 
+In addition to trying to subvert churches into supporting his anti-Christian agenda, Soros has also been leading the effort to flood what was once known as “Christendom” with Islamic migrants from the globalist wars he helped engineer and justify . Indeed, Soros and his Open Society operations around the world have been key players in every phase of the ongoing mass-migration of millions of Middle Eastern and African migrants into Europe and the United States. Borders, Soros wrote in a column, are an “obstacle.” Leaked documents revealed that the Soros machine wields enormous influence in the European Union, the Obama administration, and the United Nations as it relates to the so-called “refugee crisis.” The goal, of course, is to fundamentally transform the entire Western world and to subvert nation-states on the road to internationalism. 
+As Adams notes in his PJ Media piece, conservatives and Republicans “have no opposing effort or source of funds that represents even a small fraction in opposition to level of the Soros-led manipulation contained in the leaked documents.” If America, the West, liberty, and self-government are to survive, Soros' machinations and those of the broader establishment he represents must be exposed and effectively countered. The alternative is what Soros has in the past referred to as a “New World Order.” And that will not be pretty, as a fundamentally transformed United States is subjugated by globalist radicals like Soros and his dangerous totalitarian allies. Photo: George Soros 
+Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American , covering economics, education, politics, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU . He can be reached at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
+Related articles:",FAKE
+1327,Rubio’s problem: An excess of caution,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+10411,Ex-FBI assistant director calls the Clintons a ‘crime family’ and claims their ‘foundation is a cesspool’,"By wmw_admin on October 31, 2016 Regina F. Graham — Daily Mail.com Oct 30, 2016 James Kallstrom, former FBI assistant director 
+A former FBI official described the Clintons as a ‘crime family’ days after the bureau reopened its investigation into Hillary’s personal email server. 
+James Kallstrom, the former assistant director of the FBI, spoke out against the Clinton family on Sunday in a radio interview with host and Greek-American billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis on ‘The Cats Roundtable’. 
+‘The Clintons, that’s a crime family. It’s like organized crime, basically. The Clinton Foundation is a cesspool,’ Kallstrom said. 
+‘It’s just outrageous how Hillary Clinton sold her office for money 
+‘And she’s a pathological liar, and she’s always been a liar. And God forbid if we put someone like that in the White House.’ 
+Kallstrom, who is best known for leading the investigation into the explosion of TWA flight 800 in the late 1990s, also went after the FBI in the interview and said the initial investigation into the email server was ‘never a real investigation.’ 
+‘They never had grand jury empaneled. And the reason … was that Loretta Lynch would not go along with that,’ Kallstrom said. 
+‘So this investigation was without the ability to serve subpoenas, serve search warrants, and obtain the evidence that they ended up begging for. It was just ludicrous what went on.’ 
+He added that the FBI ‘left so much stuff on the table’. 
+Kallstrom did defend the agents who were tasked with investigating Clinton. 
+‘This is not the FBI agents who’s to blame for this fiasco going on. This is the leadership. This is Jim Comey … The agents are furious with what’s going on. I know that for a fact,’ he said. 
+Kallstrom praised Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a ‘good human being’ and a ‘patriot’.",FAKE
+7148,I thought I was just scared of Trump – but it’s his America I fear,"Israeli official secretly visits Dubai: Report ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board I thought I was just scared of Trump – but it’s his America I fear By GPD on November 4, 2016 Misogyny, racism and bigotry won’t go away if Donald Trump loses next week’s election; it was already here before he drew it out into the mainstream ‘Even if Trump loses, this isn’t simply a bad dream that we’ll awaken from on 9 November.’ Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP by Jessica Valenti 
+W ith the presidential election less than a week away, my once-composed optimism has given way to panic. Sheer, stomach-churning panic. You see, up until now I had done a somewhat decent job of not allowing myself to imagine the unimaginable: Donald Trump winning. But as election day looms closer, and the racism and sexism that infects Trump’s campaign is ratcheted up, it’s hard not to be terrified. 
+In the past week, a Ku Klux Klan newspaper endorsed Trump and white supremacists announced their plan for widespread voter intimidation. Trump rally-goers shouted antisemitic invective at reporters, and a historically black church in Mississippi was burned and “vote Trump” scrawled across the side. Another woman came forward to accuse Trump of sexual assault , and a Texas official called Hillary Clinton a “cunt”. 
+This isn’t a political divide between left and right, Democrats and Republicans; it’s an immeasurable moral chasm. And so I understand why it’s been easier for many horrified by Trump to simply pretend there’s no way that he could actually win the presidency. 
+Read more at Guardian UK Related Posts:",FAKE
+7349,Sean Hannity interviewing Mike Pence about Obama’s claims on election fraud. Mr. Trump has recommended everyone watch this clip.,"Sean Hannity interviewing Mike Pence about Obama’s claims on election fraud. Mr. Trump has recommended everyone watch this clip. by IWB · October 27, 2016 
+Exposing the sheer hypocrisy of Barack Obama on the election fraud issue. 
+Starting at 28:53",FAKE
+7522,Former Clinton Foundation CEO begging Russia for ‘urgent and immediate’ asylum?,"Print 
+Some of the emails that have come to the public’s attention via WikiLeaks are out-and-out bombshells , while other chains are so fragmented and enigmatic that an understanding of what they portend requires reconstruction and some guesswork. 
+One that fits the latter category centers on an exchange between Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta and Neera Tanden, of the hard-left Center for American Progress , concerning an apparent leak that needed — shall we say? — plugging? 
+The original email was from Tanden to Podesta, dated March 8, 2015 and time-stamped 4:49 p.m. Here’s the message: 
+Ron Fournier is a writer for National Journal. The highlighted link in the email takes you to an article at National Journal with the intriguing title “Emails May Be a Key to Addressing ‘Pay-to-Play’ Whispers at Clinton Foundation.” The article is protected by a pay wall which prevents me from providing more information, but I can tell you the subhead: “There are not two Clinton controversies. There is one big, hairy deal.” 
+Here is Podesta’s response, sent a half-hour later: 
+Eric Braverman, the name Podesta throws out as the likely mole, is a former CEO of the Clinton Foundation. 
+Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone has posted a tweet in reaction partly to this exchange in which he advances the claim that Braverman was working with WikiLeaks and now fears assassination by the Clinton machine: Word on the street is Eric Braverman, Clinton Foundation CEO, has fled the USA and is attempting to gain asylum in Russia. Anyone confirm? 
+— Stone Cold Truth (@StoneColdTruth) October 25, 2016 
+How ironic that Braverman, according to the scuttlebutt, is seeking asylum from Russia, of all nations!",FAKE
+5491,Disaffected America strikes back,"  Dave Alpert 
+Why would the American people elect a racist, misogynist, narcissistic, criminal to the presidency of this country? 
+There is no simple answer but let’s look at the variables. First, let us look at his opponent, Hillary Clinton, one of the most disliked, distrusted candidates for the office of president in U.S. history. 
+Hillary represents the establishment . . . she is friendly and subservient to Wall Street, the Banksters, and the war industry. She has proven to be a war monger who has never found a war she didn’t like. Although she is the candidate of the Democratic Party, a party that likes to project themselves as the saviors of the working men and women, she does not now, nor has she ever, represented hope and relief to the working class. 
+The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an agreement which was activated in 1994, was supported by Hillary Clinton. This is an agreement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada that resulted in the exportation of thousands of well-paying jobs to countries with a work force willing to work for significantly lower salaries. 
+Thus, American corporations moved their production plants to Mexico leaving American workers without jobs and many towns, that relied for economic survival on these corporations, bankrupt. As we have learned, in a capitalistic society, the corporation’s main obligation is to the shareholders, not the workers. 
+Today, we are confronted with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), another trade agreement that is being pushed by President Obama, a Democrat, and originally supported by Hillary Clinton, another Democrat. This so-called trade agreement would double down on the negative and problematic effects of the NAFTA agreement on working class Americans. Only the corporations and, therefore, the shareholders, would benefit. 
+It was only when Bernie Sanders called her out regarding this issue that, Hillary began to modify her position on the TPP, claiming that she had not yet seen the details of the agreement and would withhold a decision whether or not to support it. Eventually, she stated that she would not support the TPP. But, as we know, campaign rhetoric is meaningless and once the campaign is over, we go back to business as usual. And, business as usual means continuing to exploit and abuse the working class for the benefit of the ruling class. 
+As a result of the policies of the past 20 years, the people of the Industrial Heartland or “Rust Belt” felt betrayed and angry . . . they had been abandoned. The states that make up the Rust Belt are Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and lower Michigan. These are states that are considered swing states, states that are not red or blue and can go either Democrat or Republican. Hillary Clinton did not win any of these states. 
+Donald Trump spoke to them, the people of the Industrial Heartland . . . he portrayed himself as an outsider, which was hard to dispute since he never held office, a populist billionaire, an oxymoron, who spoke for the working class. His style, although abrupt and insulting, was appealing to many people . . . where Donald would get in your face, with Hillary, you had to watch your back. 
+The initial phase of Trump’s candidacy was perplexing. He proceeded to insult Mexicans, Muslims, women, gays, blacks, and the disabled. One could hardly take his candidacy seriously. How do you insult the voters and expect to get their votes? In fact, many of us thought that Trump was being so outrageous that he would create fear and anger among the voters and push them to vote for Hillary. In other words, he was the foil for Hillary’s run for the presidency. 
+Trump’s rhetoric has created a dangerous situation. Racists and white supremacists, who previously were more or less background noise, were given legitimacy by Trump’s oratory. The voice of the white man now had the public’s attention. 
+Many of these folks are also 2nd amendment enthusiasts and do not hesitate to carry guns. This combination may at some point explode into armed conflict between the various factions in the U.S. The country is now more divided than at any time since the Civil War. 
+Non-Christians and people of color are now on the official hit list and may very well be targeted for deportation or abuse. Dissidents will likely be put on this administration’s neutralization list. We are moving rapidly into a fascist state. 
+While black men were being shot by police almost daily, Trump made it clear that he supports the police and stands for law and order. These are statements that historically were code words for targeting people of color. We can expect that the police, who are already armed with military weapons, to become more aggressive in their implementation of law and order. They have been given official sanctions. 
+Although we are in a crisis, we are also in a moment of opportunity. During the election period, I wrote that neither Trump nor Clinton deserved our support. People would inevitably ask, “What else can I do?” The answer has always remained the same. ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE, RESIST, RESIST, AND RESIST SOME MORE. 
+Although Trump won the electoral college vote, Clinton won the popular vote. There will undoubtedly be a focus on the unfairness of not abiding by the will of the people. This will serve as a distraction and deflection away from the critical issues. What will be missing from the discussion is that the ruling class selects and invests in the candidates running for office, candidates that, like Trump and Clinton, are not trusted or liked and do not represent our interests . . . that we are stuck in a two party system that projects one voice, the voice of the ruling class. Alternative options are purposefully excluded from the discussion and the will of the people ignored and silenced before the voting ever takes place. 
+Change in the U.S. will never come from the ballot box and participating in this farce gives credibility to the ruling class’s con job. We cannot wait for the next election because, as history has shown, we will again be given the choice between two candidates, neither of whom will represent us, our needs or our concerns. 
+This economic and political system is rigged and corrupt. Even Donald Trump acknowledged this. It matters little who sits in the Oval Office, it is the system that must be changed. Capitalism and its imperialistic partner are destroying our planet, initiating wars worldwide and allowing the ruling class to exploit and abuse working people. Band-Aids on a broken system will not offer us meaningful relief, the system must be changed. 
+Working people must begin to recognize that the enemy is not Russia, China or Assad’s Syria, it is the capitalists/imperialists who are located right here in the U.S. that want to rule the world by any means necessary. As a result, hundreds of thousands have died and the homes of innocent people have been destroyed so that these men and women can fulfill their agenda of world domination. That’s what Hillary Clinton supports and that’s what Donald Trump will support. 
+THE PRIMARY MISSION OF THESE PEOPLE IS PROFIT. 
+We must take to the streets, whites, blacks, Latinos, Muslims, gays, straights, and shut down and put a stop to business as usual, and also refuse to continue participating in our own downfall. 
+We live in the belly of the beast, the strongest and most militarized country in the world, as well as in the history of man itself. The U.S. has perpetrated more death and destruction than any country in human history. “We” are the enemy, “we” are the threat to human survival. Yet, it is this country that marches uninvited into other countries and determines who shall lead those countries and how those people should live their lives. 
+IT IS TIME TO ACT . . . LET’S NOT WAIT UNTIL THE U.S. PROVOKES WW3. 
+Dave Alpert has masters degrees in social work, educational administration, and psychology. He spent his career working with troubled inner city adolescents.",FAKE
+10096,Comment on You’re Being Fooled: The Problem With ‘Alternative’ News Websites by Web Credibility | Site Title,"  possible for anyone to start a news website. While this has many advantages, both to the creator and to their audience, it also poses some serious problems. On the one hand, people get a voice — the ability to say and share what they want. On the other hand, people can say and share whatever they want — and other people believe it to be truth.   I’ve been running a conscious alternative news platform for over seven years now. In the course of that time, I’ve seen some truly amazing things, and some troubling things, too. But now, more than ever, I believe it’s important for people to recognize the problem with some alternative news websites and to understand what really goes on. They are harming the face of independent news and I feel it needs to stop. Why Alternative News Is Necessary It’s not hard to understand why alternative news exists at this point. With the majority of the mainstream media being owned by just five corporations , diverse viewpoints and interpretations of world events have become scarce. And when you understand that most outlets are serving some sort of corporate or political agenda, you start to notice how those biases play out in the representation of certain stories, and even in how frequently they’re covered. Showing certain stories over others, and showing them repeatedly, goes a long way toward shaping public opinion. Many are unaware of how often important stories are blacked out completely by all of mainstream media. The major pipeline spill that occurred during the Standing Rock protests or the revelation that the Pentagon paid a PR firm to create fake terrorist videos are just two recent examples. Are these not things the people should know about? Why aren’t they being reported on? This leads us to wonder if there is in fact an agenda to hide this information. And how might that work? Sharyl Atkisson, a former CBS investigative journalist, explained that “astroturf,” or fake grassroots movements, funded by political, corporate, or other special interests, are very effectively manipulating and distorting mainstream media messages. Further, here is a document declassified by the CIA that outlines their involvement in manipulating media, journalists, authors, films, and more to have “reporters postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.” The ‘national security’ play has always been a way for these agencies to justify shady actions. Given the shady dealings, agency manipulation, and ownership structure of most of mainstream media, the need for alternative voices is clear. But how should we view those alternative voices? Do we take their work at face value? The Problems With Alternative News Websites I have seen a lot in the past seven years and I have seen a movement that is very important lose a lot of credibility — for GOOD reason. It’s easy to dismiss alternative news websites because so many of them so carelessly carry out their work. There are good ones out there, but they are vastly outnumbered by the bad. I decided to write this because, as someone working within this movement and who cares a lot about creating a better world, I want people to know the truth so they can make informed decisions. As much as I respect many people for what they do, there is an inherent danger in not raising awareness about this. If we expose mainstream media, we should expose alternative media too; it’s only fair. I hope this encourages many of these outlets to do better work. Given the ease of creating alternative news websites these days, and the ease of making advertising revenue, it’s easy to see why much of the content that gets posted is questionable. Usually Run by One or Two People Many alternative news or health websites are run by just one or two people. While this isn’t bad when it’s a passionate person who’s doing work the right way, it can become a problem when that person is simply doing it for a business. They are driven to make money by exploiting a niche market, not a desire to create change, and so they make low quality websites and content so ads can be placed on the website. As you might imagine, it begins to create some or even all of the following issues that I believe do more harm than good to the movement. Evolve Your Inbox & Stay Conscious Daily   Too Driven by Ad Revenue Many of the outlets I’ve worked with firsthand are highly driven by ad dollars. While it would be naive to suggest anyone should run a business without making money, since we need money to survive on this planet and simply hosting a website requires it, a desire to do good needs to remain the bottom line. Many outlets will post just about anything to make ad revenue. They will even go so far as to venture completely outside of their initial intention simply to keep up with making funds. I’ve had people ask us to post something on our page for even just 10 or 15 minutes, even after I told them it was a fake or false story. Even when you let them know that a story or health tip is false, they will post it anyway to get as many hits as they can before people figure it out — if they do. And this leads to the next problem. Copying Content Since it is typically only one or two people running each of these huge websites and Facebook pages, they can’t possibly write original content each day. And so, the majority of the time, they simply copy and paste the most viral and trendy stories onto their own website. No adding their own thoughts, opinions, insight, etc. — just taking content and adding a little link at the bottom back to the original creators. Now some have legitimate syndicated content partnerships, but this is rare. What typically happens is websites will copy and paste the most viral content each day or simply change the first few lines so the content looks fresh. This entire process takes away from the few websites that do write original content and pay a lot of money to do so. Taking other website’s content. The next time you read an article from an alternative news website, have a look at where the content originally came from. Check to see how many times that thread goes back from website to website to website. Often the content originates from six or seven sites back. Certainly at CE we see our original content posted on other websites all the time, sourced back to another site that took it from us (and another site, and another site). Risk for False Claims and Poor Fact Checking False Information being spread Since many of these websites are run by one person, they take their content from other websites. And since their primary objective is to make as much ad revenue as possible, they often look for the most trendy or viral topic and repost without ever checking to see if the story is true. Health research, political scandals, lifestyle suggestions, and more — these topics often contain false information and there is no research behind it! People then spread this ‘exciting’ information, and since things can go viral quite easily, false information about real issues travels all over the web, all in the name of carelessness and profit. The very things they expose the mainstream for doing, they are doing themselves. Check the article for sources , legitimate ones. Are there any? Do they link to credible information? Oftentimes you will find they don’t. Why It Has to Change People are starting to realize en mass that the mainstream media has its own agendas, and rarely, if ever, do they align with our well-being. They are starting to move away from this sponsored, biased content and looking for other sources. The question becomes, what will they find instead? The bevy of alternative news websites that aren’t being run ethically or with integrity? Alternative sites that kill the credibility of the entire movement because of the way they title, image, and spread content that is false? As a media organization that spends a lot of time doing what we do, hiring the necessary people to make sure work is done right and articles researched properly, we have to stand up and fight against laziness and greed, and we have to fight for the truth. It’s only fair. How could we possibly justify holding mainstream media accountable but letting alternative media slide? So now you know. You know what to look out for and what to do. My advice is, stop supporting and sharing content that isn’t sourced or well researched. Sharing it only further denigrates this movement and supports these bad habits. If you recognize how good alternative websites operate compared to the not so good ones, awesome! You are aware and on the ball. Support those sites! If you love what we do here at CE, check out our funding campaign for CE NEWS , as we are taking our high quality media to the next level! http://www.cenews.tv 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+12,Fact Check: Was Planned Parenthood Started To 'Control' The Black Population?,"Fact Check: Was Planned Parenthood Started To 'Control' The Black Population?
+
+Ben Carson alleged in an interview with Fox News Wednesday that Planned Parenthood puts most of its clinics in black neighborhoods to ""control the population"" and that its founder, Margaret Sanger, ""was not particularly enamored with black people.""
+
+Planned Parenthood has been a target on the campaign trail after a series of sting videos was released alleging the organization illegally profits from selling aborted fetal tissue. Carson, a famed neurosurgeon turned Republican presidential candidate, has been a vocal opponent of the group. He was also in the news this week after reports surfaced that he once used aborted fetal tissue for research.
+
+On Fox News Wednesday, Carson was asked about Democrats' criticism that Republicans who want to defund Planned Parenthood are waging a ""war on women."" He responded:
+
+It's not the first time Planned Parenthood has faced criticism about its founder and the placement of its clinics — former presidential candidate Herman Cain made a similar statement in 2011.
+
+In response, Planned Parenthood said Carson was not only ""wrong on the facts, he's flat-out insulting."" Alencia Johnson, assistant director of constituency communications, told NPR:
+
+Did Margaret Sanger believe in eugenics?
+
+Yes, but not in the way Carson implied.
+
+Eugenics was a discipline, championed by prominent scientists but now widely debunked, that promoted ""good"" breeding and aimed to prevent ""poor"" breeding. The idea was that the human race could be bettered through encouraging people with traits like intelligence, hard work, cleanliness (thought to be genetic) to reproduce. Eugenics was taken to its horrifying extreme during the Holocaust, through forced sterilizations and breeding experiments.
+
+In the United States, eugenics intersected with the birth control movement in the 1920s, and Sanger reportedly spoke at eugenics conferences. She also talked about birth control being used to facilitate ""the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives.""
+
+Historians seem to disagree on just how involved in the eugenics movement she was. Some contend her involvement was for political reasons — to win support for birth control.
+
+In reading her papers, it is clear Sanger had bought into the movement. She once wrote that ""consequences of breeding from stock lacking human vitality always will give us social problems and perpetuate institutions of charity and crime.""
+
+""That Sanger was enamored and supported some eugenicists' ideas is certainly true,"" said Susan Reverby, a health care historian and professor at Wellesley College. But, Reverby added, Sanger's main argument was not eugenics — it was that ""Sanger thought people should have the children they wanted.""
+
+It was a radical idea for the time.
+
+Sanger wrote about this mission herself in 1921: ""The almost universal demand for practical education in Birth Control is one of the most hopeful signs that the masses themselves today possess the divine spark of regeneration.""
+
+Was Sanger ""not particularly enamored with black people""?
+
+Sanger's birth control movement did have support in black neighborhoods, beginning in the '20s when there were leagues in Harlem started by African-Americans. Sanger also worked closely with NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois on a ""Negro Project,"" which she viewed as a way to get safe contraception to African-Americans.
+
+In 1946, Sanger wrote about the importance of giving ""Negro"" parents a choice in how many children they would have.
+
+""The Negro race has reached a place in its history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution to the future of America,"" she wrote. ""Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness; from health, not from despair.""
+
+Her attitude toward African-Americans can certainly be viewed as paternalistic, but there is no evidence she subscribed to the more racist ideas of the time or that she coerced black women into using birth control. In fact, for her time, as the Washington Post noted, ""she would likely be considered to have advanced views on race relations.""
+
+Are most of Planned Parenthood's clinics in black neighborhoods?
+
+In 2014, the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research center, surveyed all known abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood clinics, in the U.S. (nearly 2,000) and found that 60 percent are in majority-white neighborhoods.
+
+Planned Parenthood has not released numbers on the neighborhoods of its specific clinics, but responding to a request for demographic information, the organization said that in 2013, 14 percent of its patients nationwide were black. That's nearly equal to the proportion of the African-American population in the U.S.
+
+However, Carson is tapping into a more subtle sentiment — the targeting of African-Americans in health care systems. There have been documented cases of that happening, including the now-infamous Tuskegee study. Starting in the 1930s, the Tuskegee Institute enrolled black sharecroppers in experiments and allowed them to suffer from syphilis untreated, though they were told they were getting treatment.
+
+And, Wellesley's Reverby said, that was sometimes the case for birth control clinics historically, too. They may have been available in communities where more general health care was not, raising some ethical questions.
+
+""One of the issues is ... what happens when you can find birth control clinics but you can't find primary care? It's just a question of what the state's willing to provide for,"" Reverby said. ""Was there overuse of birth control and sterilization in poor communities in some states? Absolutely. It's a complicated story.""
+
+Did Sanger have a connection to Nazi Germany?
+
+Not that NPR found. Sanger herself wrote in 1939 that she had joined the Anti-Nazi Committee ""and gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler's rise to power in Germany.""
+
+She also said books of hers had been destroyed and that she had intellectual friends who were sent to concentration camps or put to death. Sanger did not have a connection to the Nazis, but a loose association comes through her involvement in the eugenics movement.
+
+American and German eugenicists closely collaborated, and the Nazis reportedly borrowed much of their 1933 so-called sterilization law from American models. That law allowed the government to forcibly sterilize people with alleged genetic disorders.",REAL
+5474,We Finally Know Why Hillary Disappeared On Election Night: “She Was Crying Inconsolably… It Was Hard To Understand What She Was Saying She Was Crying So Hard”,"As Donald Trump’s election to the highest office of the land became inevitable on Tuesday night The Daily Sheeple reported that the Clinton campaign mysteriously went dark:
+“THEY KNOW” – NBC Reports Clinton Campaign Has Gone Completely Dark – No Longer Talking To Media #trump #hillary #itsover #election 
+— The Daily Sheeple (@TheDailySheeple) November 9, 2016 
+
+Even Hillary herself must have know it was over, because she published a not-so-victorious Tweet to her supporters several hours before the official counts started being confirmed:
+This team has so much to be proud of. Whatever happens tonight, thank you for everything. pic.twitter.com/x13iWOzILL 
+— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 9, 2016 
+
+As confirmation of Trump’s victory swept the world, many undoubtedly wondered what was going on in Hillary’s mind. Then, as reports of a Clinton concession came to the forefront, it turned out that Hillary, in an unprecedented move for a losing Presidential candidate, refused to take the stage in front of thousands of distraught party goers who were expecting a coronation and fireworks show.
+Instead of Hillary, controversial campaign manager John Podesta took the stage to announce that the election wasn’t over and that votes were still being counted, implying that Hillary would not concede.
+At that moment, we knew something was wrong:
+Is something wrong with Hillary? Has she had another health episode? https://t.co/yP3fYWpinL #trump #hillary #vote #2016 #hillaryhealth 
+— The Daily Sheeple (@TheDailySheeple) November 9, 2016 
+
+Had Hillary suffered another health episode? Was she so emotionally destroyed by the loss that she couldn’t handle it mentally?
+It turns out, according to Ed Klein who spoke with a close friend and confidante of Hillary, that she did, in fact, have a serious breakdown and was in no condition to speak to America on live television.
+The shock of losing after having been a “98%” lock for the Presidency was simply too much to bare. And as you might expect from a Clinton, it was everybody else’s fault:
+Here’s what I know, not my opinion. About 6:30 this morning she called an old friend. She was crying inconsolably. She couldn’t stop crying. And her friend, her female friend from way, way back said it was even hard to understand what she was saying she was crying so hard. This is Hillary we’re talking about.
+Eventually her friend said she could make out that she was blaming James Comey, the Director of the FBI, for her loss, and, I don’t understand exactly, the president of the United States for not doing enough.
+Via Gateway Pundit 
+
+If all goes well, Hillary will be crying again when they put the handcuffs on her after President Trump’s special prosecutor recommends charges, that is, so long as Trump didn’t make a secret deal to let Hillary off the hook .
+",FAKE
+8368,Is Goat Milk Better Than Cow Milk? Plus A List Of Health Benefits,"in: General Health While cow’s milk remains one of America’s most common daily drinks, it is interesting to note that it may also be the reason why many Americans experience gas , bloating and other forms of indigestion. When the average cow is given growth hormones, antibiotics, GMO feed, vaccinations and exposed to toxic conditions, it is no wonder that many humans experience negative effects from consuming pasteurized cow milk . Goat’s milk is a much healthier alternative, especially when it is raw and organic. Goats produce about 2% of the global milk supply and it is interesting that most of the populations of people who consume goat milks cite a lower incidence of allergies and digestive complaints. The Benefits of Goat Milk Goat’s milk offers a wide variety of health benefits, with very few of the negative side effects of drinking regular cow milk. 1. Reaction to Inflammation Some research suggests that one of the main benefits of goat milk is that it may benefit inflammation. Another reason why it is easier for people with bowel inflammation to drink goat’s milk, instead of cow’s milk. 2. Environmentally Friendly Goats requires far less space and food than cows. Typically, you can comfortably raise six goats on the same acreage as two cows. 3. Metabolic agent Studies done at the USDA and Prairie View A&M University, link goat’s milk to an increased ability to metabolize iron and copper, especially amongst individuals with digestion and absorption limitations. Besides drinking goat’s milk, you can also take a digestive enzymes supplement to help with this also. 4. Bio-availability Another main health benefit of goat milk, is that it is closer to human mother’s milk than cow’s milk is. Because it has a chemical make up that is much closer to human milk, it is easier to digest and assimilate in the human body. 5. “Smaller” Fat “Smaller” fat? Does that mean it has less fat? Not necessarily, it means that the size of the fat molecules in goat’s milk are much smaller than those found in cow’s milk. This makes goat’s milk easier to digest. 6. High in Fatty Acids While cow’s milk has about seventeen percent fatty acids, goat’s milk averages thirty five percent fatty acids, making it more nutritionally wholesome. In fact, up to 50% of people with lactose intolerance to cow’s milk find that they can easily digest goat’s milk, especially if it is raw. 7. Calcium-rich Many people worry that they need to drink cow’s milk for calcium intake and the prevention of bone loss. Goat’s milk also offers high amounts of calcium, the amino acid tryptophan, and much less side effects of drinking cow’s milk. It’s just one of the many foods high in calcium . 8. Anti-Mucousal While drinking cow’s milk is a common reason for allergies and excess mucous, goat’s milk is not. Cow’s milk is high in fat, which may increase mucous build-up. Moreover, the fat globules in goat’s milk are one ninth the size of those found in cow’s milk, another possible reason why it does not produce irritation in the gut. 9. Ultra-nourishing In Naturopathic medicine, goat’s are referred to as bioorganic sodium animals. They are also associated with vigour, flexibility and vitality. Cows are calcium animals known for stability and heaviness. Bioorganic sodium is an important element in keeping joints mobile and limber. Goat milk has traditionally been used in medicinal cultures to nourish and regenerate an over-taxed nervous system. Goat’s milk is also extremely nutrient dense. It has almost 35% of your daily needs for calcium in one cup. Extremely high in riboflavin, just one cup of goat’s milk offers 20.0% of our daily needs. Add to that high amounts of phosphorous, Vitamin B12, protein and potassium. In fact, Ghandi himself rejuvenated his own health after extremely long periods of fasting through drinking raw goat’s milk [ 1 ] . 10. Less toxic than Cow’s Milk Whereas most cow’s milk is pumped full of bovine growth hormones as well as a substance known as bovine somatotropin, a hormone specific for increasing milk production in an unnatural way, goat’s are rarely treated with these substances. Because of its use on the fringes of big agriculture, goat’s milk is not only more nutritious for you, but also less toxic. 11. May Boost Immune System Goat’s milk has the trace mineral, selenium, a key essential mineral in keeping the immune system strong and functioning normally. Why You Should Drink Goat Milk Over Cow’s Milk These are just a few of the many health benefits of goat milk. Not only does it contain more nutrients your body craves, but it also has less additives than cow’s milk. Go with the healthier choice. References: Time Magazine. Great Britain: Ghandi’s goat . 1931 November 2. Submit your review",FAKE
+8252,The War on Drugs is a Racket,"Photo by Cannabis Culture | CC BY 2.0 O n a recent segment of Democracy Now, Tess Borden made an impassioned plea for the U.S. – both federal and state governments — to end the criminal prosecution of those possessing or using illegal drugs. 
+Quoting from a new report from the ACLU and Human Rights Watch (HRW), “ Every 25 Seconds: The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States ,” Borden observed, “Every 25 seconds someone is arrested for possessing drugs for their own use, amounting to 1.25 million arrests per year.” She reminded her audience, “These numbers tell a tale of ruined lives, destroyed families, and communities suffering under a suffocating police presence.” 
+The study is an impressive piece of rigorous research and analysis as well as a statement of moral conviction: it’s a political call to decriminalize all personal drug use. It paints a devastating portrait of not simply the nation’s failed anti-drug policy, but reveals it to be a mean-spirited, moralistic – and racist — program of social repression. 
+Among the study’s key findings are: 
+• Yes, every 25 seconds someone in the U.S. is arrested for the simple act of possessing drugs for their personal use. 
+• Sadly, more than 1.25 million people are arrested each year for drug possession – this is more than for any other crime. 
+• More than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement is for drug possession — four times more people are arrested for possessing drugs as for selling them. 
+• There are at least 137,000 men and women imprisoned for drug possession — 48,000 in state pens and 89,000 in local jails (most in pretrial detention). 
+• This population consists predominantly of inner-city dwellers – African-American and Hispanic and largely youthful offenders. 
+• In 42 states, possession of small amounts of most illicit drugs other than marijuana is either always or sometimes a felony offense; only eight states and the District of Columbia make possession of small amounts a misdemeanor. 
+• State rates of arrest for drug possession range from 700 per 100,000 people in Maryland to 77 per 100,000 in Vermont. 
+A bust every 25 seconds adds up. As the study reminds readers, “tens of thousands [of people] are convicted, cycle through jails and prisons, and spend extended periods on probation and parole, often burdened with crippling debt from court-imposed fines and fees.” 
+The study makes clear that the war-on-drugs is a punitive, vindictive form of policing, criminal justice and imprisonment. It’s easy to be tough on those involved in mostly a victimless crime, drug use. Cops pick the easiest target, notably inner-city minority youth (i.e., “Stop and Frisk”) and, increasingly, rural white youth; prosecutors show off how tough they are by “throwing the book” at some hapless soul; and judges get easily re-elected for being tough on drug criminals, especially people of color and repeat offenders. 
+The study makes clear that the war-on-drugs is a failure in terms of public policy and the toll it takes on those suffocated by the drug war effort. Unfortunately, the study suffers from not pushing its inherent argument one critical step further – acknowledging that the police-court-jail system that manages the drug war is a racket, the domestic corollary to the military-industrial complex that Pres. Dwight Eisenhower identified a half-century ago. 
+*** 
+A lmost a century ago, the U.S. adopted the 18 th Amendment establishing abstinence as the law of the land. Prohibition was inforce for 13 years and was a failure, flaunted by many and leading to wide-scale corruption of law enforcement and politicians. It was formally terminated with the adoption of the 21 st Amendment in 1933 as the Depression mounted. Now, nearly a century after Prohibition was proven a failure, we may be witnessing the end to the criminalization of personal drug use. 
+In the wake of the failure of Prohibition, the U.S. Congress enacted the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, effectively criminalized marijuana use. Three decades later, in 1971, Pres. Richard Nixon formally launched the “war on drugs,” transforming a relatively obscure local – and very private – issue into a national concern. He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies; he promoted mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants; he also placed marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs; and he called for a national commission to study the drug problem and recommend appropriate policies. 
+In 1972, Nixon’s drug-policy commission — the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, the Shafer Commission — unanimously recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use. Nixon furiously rejected its recommendations. And the war-on-drugs has barreled on for the last four decades. 
+As the Watergate scandal undermined Nixon’s presidency, New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller launched his presidential campaign in 1973 with a call to toughen the state’s drug laws. He upped the war against drugs, calling for mandatory prison sentences of 15 years to life for drug dealers and addicts — even those caught with small amounts of marijuana, cocaine or heroin. In the wake of Nixon’s resignation, Rockefeller became Vice President and his signature effort was to implement his war on drugs as a national campaign. 
+The punitive anti-drug policy was further strengthened by Pres. Ronald Reagan, leading to a massive increase in incarceration rates. The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) estimates that in 1980, “50,000 people were incarcerated for violating nonviolent drug law but by 1997 the number increased to over 400,000 people.” In 1981, Nancy Reagan proclaimed a new era in the anti-drug wars, championing “ Just Say No .” 
+The DPA also notes that during the mid- to late-1980s, the nation experienced a near-hysterical rage over the alleged threat of illegal drugs. It points out that public opinion polls in 1985 found only about 2-6 percent of Americans saw drug abuse as the nation’s “number one problem”; however, by September 1989 two-thirds of those polled (64%) considered drugs as the nation’s leading problem. It adds, “Within less than a year [1990], however, the figure plummeted to less than 10 percent, as the media lost interest.” 
+A quarter-century later, the drug scene has changed. During the ‘50s-‘70s, hipsters and hippies, white and black, smoking the evil weed. In the ‘80s, a “crack cocaine scare” gripped the nation following the adoption of the infamous Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986); the Act made penalties 100 times harsher for crack than for powder cocaine convictions and 85 percent of those jailed for crack cocaine offenses were black, despite the fact that the majority of users were white. 
+Americans love to get high. In 2013, the “legal” drug of choice was alcohol, where nearly three-fifths (58%) were drinkers and nearly a quarter (24%) binge drinkers. The use of tobacco products (e.g., cigarettes, cigars) among whites is still over one-quarter (28%). An estimated 25 million Americans were using illicit drugs, about 9.4 percent of the population aged 12 or older; this is up to from the 2002-09 rate of 7.9 percent. The drugs used were marijuana/hashish, cocaine (including crack), heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants and prescription-type psychotherapeutics. 
+Marijuana was Americans favorite means of getting high, accounting for four-fifths (81%) of illicit drug users, about 20 million users per month. Among full-time college students, whites have the highest rate of illegal drug use at 25 percent. 
+Methamphetamine (“meth”) was once the drug of choice among white males (e.g., outlaw motorcycle gangs and blue-collar guys) and remains so, but is losing its appeal. In the ‘90s at the height of its popularity, the Open Society estimates there were only one million meth users. Today, its use has spread to white women and Hispanics. Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health reported that between 2002-2005 and 2008-2011 there was a 75 percent jump in heroin usage among “Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites.” 
+T he new drugs of choice among Americans are psychotherapeutic drugs and heroine. A 2010 report from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that, during 2009, 2.4 million individuals used psycho drugs, including pain relievers, tranquilizers, stimulants and sedatives used for nonmedical purposes. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “Adolescent girls and women older than 35 years have significantly greater rates of abuse and dependence on psychotherapeutic drugs than men.”
+More troubling, as reported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), overdoses (i.e., “drug poisoning”) are “the number one cause of injury-related death in the United States, with 43,982 deaths occurring in 2013.” It found, based on data from 28 states, that the “death rate for heroin overdose doubled from 2010 through 2012.” Drilling down, it found there were 8,257 heroine deaths, most involving men aged 25–44 years. 
+*** 
+No one knows how much money has been spent to fight the failed war-on-drugs. According to a DPA estimate , “Over the past four decades, federal and state governments have poured over $1 trillion into drug war spending and relied on taxpayers to foot the bill.” It adds: “Money funneled into drug enforcement has meant less funding for more serious crime and has left essential education, health, social service and public safety programs struggling to operate on meager funding.” 
+The Drug War Facts website provides a detailed breakdown on annual federal spending on the war-on-drugs for 2013-’17. It estimates for Fiscal Year 2016, the federal government will spend $30.6 billion. A third source, the Drug War Clock , estimates that federal spending is about 60 percent of that spent by states (i.e., $49 billion); total spending for the false war-on-drugs at about $75 billion. 
+The expenditures associated with the war-on-drugs are, like the military-industrial complex, a vast slush fund with costs covering a very wide assortment of federal, state and local – both government and private — services and fees. Among these expenditures are: 
+• Costs of policing, from the border guards to the cop-on-the-block; 
+• Costs of prosecutors, courts and defense attorneys; 
+• Costs for prisons, jails and probation. 
+These areas of expenditures do not itemize the directs costs for employment, facilities and upkeep (e.g., food, medical) let alone the profits garnered by private corporations to operate the vast infrastructure required to wage the war-on-drugs. 
+Nor do these expenditures included the $1 trillion that Americans spent on illegal substances between 2000 and 2010. In a 2012 study for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Rand estimated the market for four illicit drugs — cocaine (including crack), heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine (meth) – at $100 billion for only one year, 2010. It noted, “This figure has been stable over the decade, but there have been important shifts in the drugs being purchased.” 
+With a $100 billion in illegal drug money sloshing through the economy each year, one can only wonder how much of it goes to corruption pay-offs, to law enforcement officials who look the other way. As experienced during Prohibition, the enormous cash generated by the illegal drug trade leads to endemic corruption. 
+Finally, as the ACLU and HRW study painfully makes clear, many, many peoples’ lives are destroyed for the possession on illegal drugs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mention the way questionable law-enforcement officials, like the notorious Brooklyn NYPD detective Louis Scarcella and former DA Charles Hynes, exploited drug busts to further their careers. (New York has paid more than $100 million to wrongfully convicted victims of their arrests and prosecutions.) 
+Its time to embrace the ACLU and HRW’s call to end the criminal prosecution of those who possess or use an “illegal” substance. Like alcohol, its needs to integrated into the market economy and, like alcohol, effectively regulated in terms of quality and age-of-use. Sadly, like the military-industrial complex, to many corporations, unions and people with influence have too much invested in the war-on-drugs to see it end. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP INSTALLATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Rosen is the author of Sex, Sin & Subversion: The Transformation of 1950s New York’s Forbidden into America’s New Normal (Skyhorse, 2015). He can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net ; check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com . Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. 
+What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda? =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.",FAKE
+5658,An Identity-Politicized Election and World Series Lakefront Liberals Can Love,"Photo by Mark Hodgins | CC BY 2.0 
+It’s the perfect time to be an affluent white and politically correct North Side Lakefront – or other kind of – Liberal and sports fan in the Chicago area. Think about it. Your beloved Chicago Cubs are finally going to their first World Series since 1945 and they will be doing a battle against a team with the worst racist Native American logo in major U.S. professional sports: the Cleveland Indians – yes, the “Indians.” The Indians’ Chief Wahoo – a wild grinning caricature – is the single most offensive, politically incorrect image in sports today. 
+It’s enough to make folks forget that the Cubs are owned by a politically active right-wing Republican family, the Ricketts, one of whom recently contributed $1 million to the racist and sexist bigot Donald Trump. And that the Cubs’ storied ballpark Wrigley Field will be jammed with rich white people who can swallow up secondary market World Series tickets selling for as high as $18,000 . And that the Cubs owe no small part their ability to overcome their “ Billy Goat curse ” (proclaiming that they’d never go again to the final championship series) largely to massive infusions of big Ricketts money required to purchase free-agent veterans to go along with their younger stars. 
+Meanwhile, the liberals’ party has a presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who is about to become the national government’s first female chief executive after trouncing the aforementioned bigot Trump in the November 8 th election. The insane, politically incorrect spectacle of Trump has helped people forget that Mrs. Clinton is herself a “right-wing fanatic” and a “lying neoliberal warmonger” – and here I am quoting two left intellectuals who counsel folks to vote for her. Hillary’s Wall Street-friendly arch-corporatism and hawkish militarism are well understood in very predominantly white establishment business and imperial circles, where she is by far and away the preferred candidate. This is true even among many normally Republican members of the economic, political, policy, and – in a word – power elite. 
+Identity politics provides cover for, and diversion from, class rule and from the deeper structures of class, race, gender, empire, and eco-cide that haunt American and global life today – structures that place children of liberal white North Side Chicago professionals in posh 40 th -story apartments overlooking scenic Lake Michigan while consigning children of felony-branded Black custodians and fast food workers to cramped apartments in crime-ridden South Side neighborhoods where nearly half the kids are growing up at less than half the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level. Most of the Black kids in deeply impoverished and hyper-segregated neighborhoods like Woodlawn and Englewood (South Side) or North Lawndale and Garfield Park (West Side) can forget not only about going to a World Series game but even about watching one on television. Their parents don’t have cable and the Fox Sports 1 channel. There’s few if any local restaurants and taverns with big-screen televisions in safe walking distance from their homes. Major League Baseball ticket prices being what they are, few of the South Side kids have even seen the White Sox – Chicago’s South Side American League team, whose ballpark lacks the affluent white and gentrified surroundings of Wrigley Field. (Thanks in no small part to the urban social geography of race and class in Chicago, the White Sox winning the World Series in 2005 – their first championship since 1917, marking an overcoming of the Black Sox Curse – was a smaller deal in the city than the Cubs going to the World Series this year.) 
+The World Series might be playing out before a national and even global audience just miles away in hyper-Caucasian Wrigley Ville, but for tens of thousands of Black and Latino kids on the city’s South, West, and (in fact) North Sides (there are significant stretches of minority poverty west and north of the Cubs’ storied ballpark), the games are being played in another universe. 
+Hillary, a Cubs fan from the affluent northern white Chicago area suburb of Park Ridge (though also a self-declared Yankee fan during her years “representing Wall Street as a Senator from New York” [her own words]) isn’t going to remotely change any of that. She has a long record as a vanguard neoliberal Democrat (a de facto “moderate” Republican) going back to the Clintons’ days in Arkansas, where and when she played a key role in helping move the Democratic Party ever further away from its last lingering commitments to social, racial, and environmental justice and decency. 
+I may be a “far left radical” stamped as a White Sox fan by family upbringing and a childhood on the South Side. Still, I am going to make the most both of the Cubs going to the World Series and of Hillary trouncing Trump. Much as I wish the Sox were headed for their second championship in eleven year (they held first place in the American League Central Division for a few weeks last spring), I have to admit that nothing can beat the heartwarming story of the “lovable losers” the Cubs going to the October Classic when it comes to boosting the profile of baseball relative to that of the sadistically violent, brain-mashing blood sport called U.S. football. It is a telling tragedy that the beautiful pastoral game of baseball has been trounced by the vicious, fascist-lite spectacle that is U.S. football as the nation’s favorite sport in the neoliberal era. 
+Plus, I have nice memories of my father taking me up to enemy territory to watch National League baseball in Wrigley Field in the late 1960s, before it became a Yuppie playground and a tourist attraction. You could sit in Wrigley’s bleachers for $1.50. 
+Like all good leftists, I hate the Clintons, including the ones with two x chromosomes – and that includes young Chelsea, with her noxious $10 million condo complex in Manhattan Still, I do not await a Hillary Clinton administration with undiluted trepidation. The presence of a Democrat in the nominal top U.S. job can be usefully instructive for young workers and citizens. It helps demonstrate the richly bipartisan nature of the American plutocracy and Empire. The people need to see and experience how the intolerable misery and oppression imposed by capitalism and its evil twin imperialism live on when Democrats hold the White House. At the same time, the presence of a Republican in the White House tends to fuel the illusion among progressives and others that the main problem in the country is that the wrong party holds executive power and that all energy and activism must be directed at fixing that. It just feeds the electoral and candidate obsessions that do so much to divert us from building and expanding the kinds of rank and file social movements required to bringing about an actually progressive transformation. 
+There is, yes, I know, the problem of Democrats in the White House functioning to stifle social movements and especially peace activism (the antiwar movement has still yet to recover from the Obama experience). But there’s more good news here about a Hillary presidency. Not all Democratic presidents are equally good at shutting progressive activism down. As the likely Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein (for whom I took five minutes to early vote in a “contested state” three weeks ago) noted in an interview with me last April (when the White Sox still held first place in their division), Hillary Clinton will have considerably less capacity to deceive and bamboozle progressive and young workers and citizens than Barack Obama enjoyed in 2007-08 . “Obama,” Stein noted, was fairly new on the scene. Hillary,” by contrast, “has been a warmonger who never found a war she didn’t love forever!” Hillary’s corporatist track record – ably documented in Doug Henwood’s book My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (her imperial track record receives equally impressive treatment in Diana Johnstone’s volume Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton ) – is also long and transparently bad. All that and Mrs. Clinton’s remarkable lacks of charisma and trustworthiness could be useful for left activism and politics in coming years. 
+For what it’s worth, the first and most urgent place to restore such activism and politics is in the area where Barack Obama has been most deadening: foreign policy, also known (when conducted by the U.S.) as imperialism. When it comes to prospects for World War III, it is by no means clear that the saber-rattling, regime-changing, NATO-expanding, and Russia-baiting Hillary Clinton is the “lesser evil” compared to the preposterous Trump. That’s no small matter. During a friend’s birthday party the night the Cubs clinched the National League pennant, I asked fellow celebrants and inebriates if they were prepared for the fundamental realignment of the space-time continuum that was coming when the North Siders won the league championship. That was a joke, of course, but there’s nothing funny about the heightened chances of a real downward existential adjustment resulting from war between nuclear superpowers when the “lying neoliberal warmonger” Hillary Clinton gets into office and insists on recklessly imposing a so-called no-fly zone over Russia-allied Syria. 
+Postscript : Meanwhile, could we save some love for the poor and mostly working class sports fans of Cleveland? They didn’t vote for their one and only Major League Baseball team to be named the Indians and bear a noxious racist logo. Until LeBron James delivered on his basketball promise last spring they hadn’t won a major sports professional championship in fifty-two years. In the years since 1948, the last time the Indians won the World Series, Cleveland has had two such champions: the football Browns in 1964 and the basketball Cavaliers earlier this year. Over the same period, Chicago has accumulated four National Hockey League (NHL)/Stanley Cup championships (1961, 2010, 2013, 2015), six NBA (basketball) championship (the 1990s Michael Jordan Bulls), two NFL (football) championships (the Bears in 1963 and 1985-86), and one World Series (the officially unlovable White Sox in 2005). That’s Chicago 13, Cleveland 2 (9 to 2 if you subtract hockey since Cleveland has never had an NHL team). That said, I’m still rooting for the Cubs for three reasons: (1) I may be from the South Side but I’m also from Chicago and have lived on the North Side at different times; (2) the Cubs becoming a dynasty (a distinct possibility given the talent and youth of their team the money behind it) will be good for baseball versus football (3) the truly disgusting atrocity that is Chief Wahu. Check it out .",FAKE
+5737,The Myth of the McMahon Line,"  Recipient Email => 
+There’s playing with fire and there’s dousing yourself with gasoline and jumping into a flaming pit. I do the latter in a piece for SCMP’s This Week in Asia magazine, The British Forgery at the Heart of India and China’s Tibetan Border Dispute . 
+My proposed title, Uncle Sam Plays the Great Game in Arunachal Pradesh, didn’t make the cut. 
+In my piece I take the visit of the US Ambassador to India, Richard Verma, as an opportunity to unpack the history and significance of the 1914 Simla Convention between Great Britain, Tibet, and China, an imperial episode which also saw the birth of the notorious McMahon Line. 
+The McMahon Line is notorious since India unilaterally—and with some help from the United States and zero agreement from the PRC—asserts that the McMahon Line is the indisputable boundary between India and the PRC in India’s Northeast. 
+The McMahon Line is a hot-button issue for Tibetan nationalists as well, since Great Britain negotiated it directly with the government of Tibet, so supporting the McMahon Line delivers the dual benefits of supporting the narrative of the existence of a recognized independent Tibetan government and giving aid and comfort to the Tibetan diaspora’s Indian patron. 
+The actual situation and significant consequence of the McMahon Line is complicated but, I believe, accessible thanks to some deft historical research by several scholars and despite some litigating by Indian and Tibetan partisans. 
+Having said that, I welcome correction and instruction, so in this post I’m going to lay out the arguments behind the assertions in my SCMP piece in greater detail. For sourcing, I lean on Neville Maxwell India’s China War (Maxwell was the Times of London ’s India correspondent during the 1962 war and a key figure in revisionist analysis of the roots of the war), and an unpublished dissertation by Dr. Heather Spence, British policy and the ‘development’ of Tibet, 1912-1933, that I found very informative on the diplomatic and geopolitical context of the Great Britain-Tibet relationship pre-and-post-Simla. 
+The story of the McMahon Line is inseparable from—but not identical with—the story of the Simla Convention negotiations between Great Britain—represented by Henry McMahon–China, and Tibet at the hill town of Simla in India in 1914. 
+First off, the key and most interesting aspects of the Simla Convention are both the de facto independence of Tibet (which had expelled the Chinese by 1914 and had a government in Lhasa under the Dalai Lama with effective control over much of the area of Tibet)…and Great Britain’s consistent and overriding interest in denying de jure independence for Tibet. 
+Great Britain was obsessed, perhaps unhealthily so, with playing the “Great Game”: forestalling the southern creep of Russian influence in Asia toward India. 
+In India’s northeast, this translated into the desire to establish Tibet as a buffer state that was pro-British and secure. 
+“Pro-British” was not an issue in 1914, since the Dalai Lama at the time was an ardent Anglophile who had spent several years of exile in the sympathetic company of the British administrator Charles Bell. 
+“Secure” was the problem. The Raj had no interest in rolling the geopolitical dice by endorsing Tibetan independence and with it the possibility that a hostile new regime and adverse set of circumstances might bring the Chinese or Russians into Tibet and up to India’s doorstep; but it also lacked the will or capacity to assert and enforce a unilateral protectorate over Tibet. 
+It was deemed necessary that, if and when China emerged from the chaos of the 1911 Revolution as a power-projecting state, it would acquiesce to the existence of an autonomous Tibetan government that had a special relationship with Great Britain. 
+So Henry McMahon summoned Tibetan and Chinese representatives to Simla to order the relations between Tibet and China, and between Tibet and Great Britain. The Tibetans were eager to attend; the Chinese were compelled by McMahon’s threat that he would conclude a bilateral agreement with Tibet if they didn’t show up. 
+One can speculate—and I will—that the Chinese showed up primarily to stall and throw a spanner in the works. Simla acknowledged China’s role—and also gave China the chance to act as the spoiler, by participating in the negotiations but refusing to endorse the outcome. 
+The core of the British agenda at Simla was to partition Tibet into “Inner” and “Outer” Tibet as the Russians had just done with “Inner” and “Outer” Mongolia. Inner Tibet, the parts abutting Sichuan in which Chinese control was stronger, would be incorporated into China. Outer Tibet—the big part, the strategic part, the highlands run out of Lhasa by the Dalai Lama—would not become independent: it would be an autonomous government lacking control over its foreign affairs. 
+Autonomy, but autonomy of a specific type was preferred. McMahon came up with the idea of “suzerainty”. 
+“Suzerainty” served multiple purposes. By invoking a Chinese aegis, “suzerainty” was a legal fig leaf providing diplomatic cover to Great Britain, which had concluded an agreement with Russia in 1907 that promised neither state would conduct direct negotiations with the Tibetan government. At the same time, “suzerainty” was intended to forestall any claims from Russia and other nations that “Outer Tibet” was part of China and therefore subject to the Open Door policy declaring that the rights and access of one state in China were to be enjoyed by all. 
+But most importantly, “suzerainty” was used to assert that, by China’s leave, Tibet would be autonomous, but still conduct its foreign affairs independently with respect to only to one, and only one country: Great Britain. 
+So, in essence, the Simla Convention was designed to secure a special relationship between Great Britain and Tibet with Chinese endorsement to compensate for the fact that Great Britain lacked the resolve to secure Tibet as a formal British protectorate. 
+The Chinese, however, did not endorse. The Chinese representative initialed the draft agreement, but the Chinese government withheld authorization to sign. 
+To explain its refusal, the Chinese government placed the onus on the issue of boundary delimitation. 
+The Chinese foreign affairs office formally notified Great Britain that “This Government has several times stated that it gives its support to the majority of the articles of the Convention. The part which it is unable to agree to is that dealing with the question of boundary. [Spence, pg. 36] 
+I expect it was McMahon’s fallback plan from the gitgo to try to take in the bilateral what China refused to cede in the trilateral. 
+McMahon had been instructed by London not to sign bilaterally with just Tibet, but he decided to exceed his instructions, concluding an agreement with Tibet that finessed the Chinese non-participation in the Simla Convention with a declaration that China, by not signing, had simply forfeited the privileges for China negotiated in the Convention. 
+According to this formula, Great Britain and Tibet would execute the parts of the Convention that pertained to them—mainly diplomatic (Tibet would not enter into agreements with any other foreign power without Britain’s OK) and trade. The agreement waived all tariffs between British India and Tibet, a piece of free-trade maneuvering that advantaged the Raj but caused no small fiscal problems and resentment of the Tibetan government (which had relied on taxing exports of wool to India for a significant part of its revenue) in the 1920s. 
+At Simla the Chinese representative, Ivan Chen, was excluded from these discussions, unaware of the content of the bilateral undertakings, and invited to go to a separate room while British and Tibetan representatives signed them. Unsurprisingly, he declared the Chinese government would not recognize any agreement concluded bilaterally between Great Britain and Tibet, a declaration that was repeated by the Chinese Minister in London. 
+No one regarded the gains of the bilateral track as an adequate replacement for a trilateral pact. 
+It was understood by all concerned—Great Britain, India, Tibet, China, indeed, McMahon himself—Simla was a bust. McMahon reported to London: 
+It is with great regret that I leave India without having secured the formal adherence of the Chinese Government to a Tripartite Agreement…The fact is that the negotiations at Simla…broke down… [Maxwell, 49] 
+Mindful that without China’s formal participation the agreement at Simla was in conflict with the 1907 convention with Russia, Great Britain did not publish the Simla Convention. Instead, it belatedly took notice of the negotiations in its official compendium, Aitchison’s Treaties and Sanads 1929 Edition Volume XIV , with the terse remark: “The convention was initialled and sealed on 3 July 1914. As this Convention was not signed and ratified by all three parties, the current Chinese Government does not consider itself bound by the terms of this convention.” 
+As for the McMahon Line, it was a separate bilateral sideshow to the main issue of trying to demarcate a border between Tibet and China a.k.a. “Inner” and “Outer” Tibet trilaterally at Simla. 
+Prior to and contemporaneously with the tripartite negotiations on the Simla Convention, the British and Tibetan teams had conducted bilateral discussions in Delhi and Simla as to the position of the boundary between India and Tibet. 
+Since Great Britain regarded Tibet as de facto autonomous in its dealings with Great Britain (and presumably hopeful the special relationship would be shortly confirmed at Simla as de jure ) , no effort was made during the negotiations to involve China, with rather disastrous implications for the future. 
+In 1962, India would be facing not the Tibetan government across the McMahon Line but the People’s Republic of China, which with very good reason considered itself in no way bound as a successor to any previous border negotiations. 
+With equally disastrous consequences for Nehru and India in 1962, McMahon, instead of drawing the boundary in the foothills of the Himalayas, drew it along the crestline, in easy reach of attackers from the north but virtually indefensible from the south. 
+The key horsetrading occurred in the matter of the “Tawang Tract”. Tawang was an indisputable locus of Tibetan control, with a big monastery dominating a fertile valley at the southern reaches of the Tibetan plateau and also dominating, in a less than admirable way, a local population of ethnic Manpo serfs exploited in the most dire fashion. 
+By virtue of its riverine topography, Tawang straddled an important trade route between Lhasa and northern India and was therefore seen as a potential military threat/power point that the Raj wished to control. 
+In the bilateral British-Tibetan boundary discussions, the western terminus of McMahon’s line crept north until it included all of Tawang. The Tibetan delegation was apparently not happy about this state of affairs but accepted it as the price of British support and with the reassurance that they could continue to tax Tawang despite its inclusion into British India. The Indian-Tibetan boundary agreement was enshrined in an 8 mile to the inch map and held in two copies, one by the British and one in Lhasa. 
+The McMahon Line was introduced into the Simla negotiations through the back door, as it were, by presenting it as a fait accompli on the large-scale map intended for attachment to the Simla Convention as a continuation of the crucial line defining the boundary between Inner and Outer Tibet which had indeed been the subject of genuine tripartite negotiations. 
+Interestingly, the British and Tibetans also bilaterally extended the boundary to enclose Aksai Chin, a barren waste to the west of Tibet, as Tibetan (not Indian) territory in order to give Tibet the incentive or responsibility to keep the Russians out of that sensitive strategic area. 
+Ivan Chen initialed the treaty and map—the sole, shaky basis for India’s subsequent insistence that China had accepted the McMahon Line—but was rebuked by Peking for exceeding his instructions and, as noted above, declined to sign the final Convention. 
+At the time, as recorded in Aitchison, it was universally understood that China had rejected the Simla Convention, and that this was a problem that overshadowed whatever informal gains had accrued to Britain through the bilateral agreements with Tibet. We know this thanks to documents demonstrating that both the Tibetans and Great Britain clung to the Simla “suzerainty” gambit, and that they labored fruitlessly for decades to get China back to the negotiating table to validate the policy. 
+The key concern was that China, by refusing to sign the tripartite Simla Convention, had refused to countenance the Inner/Outer Tibet arrangement that would have fixed the Sino-Tibetan border, assured the autonomy and security of the government in Lhasa– and justified to Lhasa Great Britain’s extensive, unique, and increasingly onerous diplomatic and trading privileges in “Outer Tibet”. 
+Immediately subsequent to the Simla negotiations, 1915, internal British correspondence characterized the Simla Convention as “invalid” [Spence, pg. 59] and, in the context of the Great War, without basis as an obligation for arming Lhasa to forestall Chinese mischief. In 1919, the Tibetan chief minister evocatively expressed his concern that Tibet would find itself abandoned “like tiny fledglings on an open plain.” [Spence, pg. 48] 
+As for China, instead of returning to negotiations and acquiescing to “suzerainity” over a virtually independent Tibet–an arrangement it was perhaps only pretending to countenance before it backed out at Simla, when China was flat on its back and the Raj was at its zenith—it preferred to mass troops on Tibet’s Sichuan frontier and agitate for direct engagement with Lhasa. 
+It soon became apparent that China was, shall we say, the “rising power” in the Himalayan regions, the British were the “declining power”, and it became a matter of considerable anxiety in Lhasa that China was piling up troops in the eastern marches and the Tibetan government was being forced to confront these forces without any significant military or diplomatic support from Great Britain. 
+Faced with niggardly and tardy provision of guns and ammunition by Great Britain, Lhasa began playing footsie with Russia and Japan via Mongolia to pursue the supply of arms; amazingly, Great Britain was able to veto these initiatives thanks to the special position in Tibetan security affairs it had negotiated bilaterally at Simla. 
+The Tibetan government came to understand that the Simla Convention and the idea that Britain had the sincerity and capacity to protect Tibet against China were, at best, on life support. 
+By 1936, a British political officer reported on the mood in Lhasa as follows: 
+They regarded the adjustment of the Tibet-Indian boundary as part and parcel of the general adjustment and determination of boundaries contemplated in the 1914 Convention. If they could, with our help, secure a definite Sino-Tibetan boundary they would of course be glad to observe the Indo-Tibetan border as defined in 1914… [Maxwell, 59] 
+With Simla moribund, the McMahon Line was never demarcated on the ground and as a result it never acquired any customary force as a precedent. 
+Notably, there were no serious efforts to assert effective British rule in the remote tribal reaches of the McMahon line, or even over Tawang until the 1930s. Then, with the Japanese menace replacing Russia as the focus of the Great Britain’s anxieties concerning northern encroachment, the Raj adopted a policy which might be characterized as “F*ck Tibet”: unilaterally extending British control northwards without reference to the original and unrealized vision of backing Tibet in return for the trade and territorial privileges that Great Britain had negotiated two decades before. 
+At this point, Olaf Caroe enters the picture. Caroe was a key official in the British Raj and an enthusiastic geopolitical strategist. In 1935, Tibetan authorities in Tawang arrested a British spy/botanist and the government in Lhasa made the decision, unwise in retrospect, to issue a protest to the British authorities and thereby bring Lhasa’s claims to Tawang to Caroe’s attention. 
+In response, Caroe pulled off a rather notorious subterfuge in order to buttress the British claim to Tawang: he published the Simla Convention for the first time in 1938 with a note misrepresenting that it had included settlement of the border (and alienation of Tawang); and he arranged for the publication of official Survey of India maps that, for the first time, showed the McMahon Line as the official boundary. To advance the narrative, he also corresponded with commercial atlas publishers to put the McMahon Line on their maps as well. 
+In a telling indication of Caroe’s jiggery-pokery, to avoid the awkward question of why he was first publishing the Simla Convention twenty-four years after the fact in 1938, he instead arranged for the surreptitious printing of a spurious back-dated edition of Aitchison , deleting the original note about the Chinese government’s non-signature, and replacing it with a lengthy note stating, quite falsely, that “The [Simla] Convention included a definition of boundaries…” 
+Since 1) the McMahon Line had been concluded in secret bilateral negotiations between Tibet and Great Britain outside the Convention and 2) the Chinese had officially refused to recognize any bilateral agreement, boundary or otherwise, between Tibet and Great Britain and 3) had declined to sign the Simla Convention itself and 4) had notified Great Britain in 1914 that the specific sticking point was “the boundaries” this was hoo-hah. 
+The replacement copy was distributed to various libraries with instructions to withdraw and destroy the original edition. 
+The subterfuge was only discovered in 1963 when J.A. Addis, a British diplomat, discovered a surviving copy of the original edition at Harvard and compared it to Caroe’s version. 
+That was too late for Nehru, who apparently sincerely accepted Caroe’s maps as holy writ i.e. the accurate depiction of borders that had been trilaterally negotiated at Simla, published, openly acknowledged, and a moral imperative and worthy object of Indian military defense in 1962. 
+It was also too late for Harvard’s own John Kenneth Galbraith, who as ambassador to India successfully lobbied President Kennedy to declare the McMahon Line as India’s recognized border, apparently as part of his campaign to support India and elevate the PRC-India conflict beyond the mundane sphere of “clash over disputed border” to “Chicom aggression against India”. 
+In response to Galbraith’s urgings, President Kennedy overrode the concerns of the State Department and the vociferous objections of Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan (the government of China in 1962 as far as the US was concerned) to give Galbraith the leeway to announce “The McMahon Line is the accepted international border and is sanctioned by modern usage. Accordingly we regard it as the northern border of the [North East Frontier Agency] region.” 
+Well, “accepted international border sanctioned by modern usage” is something of a stretch. As noted above, not only the Chinese but the Tibetan government of the 1930s, itself to be extinguished by the Chinese in 1959, regarded the McMahon Line as a dead letter. 
+In discussions with Nehru in the 1950s, Zhou Enlai had made the rather telling statement that “he had never heard of the McMahon Line”. The Chinese government only understood the full extent of the boundary understandings between the Tibetan and British governments in 1914 after the PLA seized documents in the Potala Palace during the 1959 invasion, and Zhou subsequently declared the McMahon Line a piece of imperial fraud. Imperial historians—Addis, Maxwell, and Lamb–had the opportunity to examine British records a few years later, when the fifty-year embargo on government records expired, and agreed with Zhou. 
+The revelation of these contacts made a good case for de facto Tibetan independence between the two world wars; unfortunately, they also at the same time clearly demonstrated that the Chinese government had never been party to them, or to the McMahon Line. 
+Much has been made in Indian and Tibetan nationalist circles of Zhou Enlai’s willingness to use the McMahon Line as the basis for a border settlement between India and the PRC. However, this had nothing to do with any acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the line (which, after all, had never been demarcated in the field) and perhaps had something to do with the fact that, as the 1962 war demonstrated, the task of defending the McMahon Line on the edge of the Tibetan plateau is a tremendous strategic burden for India. 
+The truth about the legal and military aspects of the 1962 Sino-Indian War are, I would venture, still a matter of denial and disinformation, especially in India. The Henderson-Brooks Report, which details the strategic and operational failings of the Indian military establishment in 1962, has never been declassified, despite Prime Minister Modi’s previous promises in that regard; only portions of it are in the public domain thanks to Neville Maxwell, who somehow got his hands on a copy. 
+Asserting the purported sanctity of the McMahon Line (and Chinese perfidy in refusing to honor it) is a staple of the patriotic narrative. 
+In its combination of nationalist posturing and pseudo-historical bullsh*t, the Indian position on the McMahon Line bookends the PRC’s claims in the South China Sea in interesting ways. 
+And, of course, the United States, as part of its pro-India/anti-China tilt is more interested in enabling the myths of the McMahon Line than supporting resolution of the Sino-Indian border dispute through equitable negotiation. (Reprinted from China Matters by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+10398,Koch Brothers Battle to Prevent Dark Money Disclosure in South Dakota,"We Are Change 
+
+By David Armiak and Mary Bottari 
+The Koch network has mobilized in South Dakota to defeat the “ South Dakota Accountability and Anti-Corruption Act ,” a state-wide initiative on the ballot November 8.
+The anti-corruption measure, Initiated Measure 22 or IM-22, was launched by a bipartisan group called the South Dakotans for Integrity and put on the ballot with signatures from over 20,000 state residents.
+IM-22 cracks down on dark money and phony industry front groups by barring candidate coordination with outside groups and regulating independent expenditures. It cracks down on sham “issue ads,” which are really the functional equivalent of express advocacy, by requiring them to be reported electronically within 48 hours, requiring donor disclosure and requiring the top five donors to be disclosed on air. The initiative also provides a small dollar public financing mechanism, sets rules for lobbyists and gifts and creates an ethics commission to investigate violations of ethics and campaign finance rules.
+The measure is one of four on ballot nationwide that seek to increase transparency in the financing of elections in a post-Citizens United world. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC to strike down limits on “independent” political spending, which opened the floodgates for billions in dark money into elections nationwide.
+If passed, South Dakota voters may finally have some way of knowing who is bankrolling those big money ads and before the election too.
+Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Behind “Defeat 22” Group The Kochs are bankrolling the group working to defeat the initiative.
+According to its statement of organization filing , Defeat22.com was founded by Ben Lee, the state director for the Koch’s astroturf group Americans for Prosperity , on July 1, 2016. The group promotes itself as a coalition, listing its 18 “partners” on its website including AFP, the South Dakota Chamber of Commerce & Industry, and the different GOP organizations, among others. But, a campaign disclosure filed on Friday with the South Dakota Secretary of State tells another story.
+Of the $609,110 raised by Defeat22.com so far, $590,000 came from AFP. The next largest contribution of $1,500 from the SD Farm Bureau Federation was even dwarfed by AFP’s total in-kind contributions of $36,756 .
+The opposition to IM-22 is led and organized by AFP. Chad Krier, AFP’s South Dakota Field Director, who has organized many of the campaign events to answer questions and solicit volunteers. AFP also appears to have tapped into its staff network to not only phone bank, but also go door to door to urge voters to Vote No on IM-22. Defeat22.com has send out mailings , placed radio ads , and put up billboards .
+The Kochs are battling the measure because “the Kochs see IM-22 as a threat to the dominance the millionaires and billionaires have under the [current] political system,” says former Republican State Senator and co-chair of South Dakotans for Integrity Don Frankenfeld. The Kochs have been battling weaker donor disclosure laws in California in court for years.
+And Koch allies in other states are lending a hand.
+A right-wing Floridan think tank has been helping out the Defeat IM-22 forces. The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) has set up an “educational” website, Measure22.org , where it published poll results from 478 South Dakotans that demonstrates opposition to the measure in the state. The website operates under the name FGA Action, Inc., a 501(c)(04) that shares an address with FGA and lists its contact as Jonathan Bechtle , the COO and General Counsel at FGA.
+The site also hosts two videos which are unsupportive of the measure, one produced by FGA Action, Inc. and another by UnitedforPrivacy.com. UnitedforPrivacy.com is the website for People United for Privacy, an SPN backed group that states , “To change our laws to subject people to the chilling effects of having their privacy invaded and their personal information compiled in government databases and Google searches is not they way our democracy should operate.”
+FGA is a member of the State Policy Network (SPN) , a right-wing web of “think tanks” in 48 states, which has been working hard to convince the public that the “free speech” rights of millionaires and billionaires are harmed by campaign finance disclosure laws. Both SPN and FGA are largely funded by the Donors Capital and Donors Trust investment vehicles utilized by the Koch network.
+The amount of money spent by FGA Action, Inc. and People United for Privacy against IM-22 is unknown because both groups have yet to file disclosures.
+The Kochs Protest “Taxpayer Funded Elections” The Kochs are attacking the anti-corruption measure for its creation of a small dollar publicly funded campaign finance system, which will give each registered voter two $50 vouchers that she can contribute to the candidate of her choosing if the candidate agrees to only fundraise from small donor South Dakotans. AFP argues in its Defeat22.com radio ad and mailings that this system will “divert” public tax dollars from roads and schools–an interesting line of attack from the anti-government Kochs which have opposed taxes for roads in states like Wisconsin.
+In state, the Kochs protest “taxpayer funded elections.” “Don’t let politicians take your tax dollars to fund their campaigns” is the Koch spin. Their preference is to put millionaires and billionaires in charge of campaigns and elections.
+Nationally, Ben Lee is taking a different approach. In a recent opinion piece in Forbes , Lee trots out the Koch line that the ballot measure is a “full-on assault on the First Amendment cloaked in the guise of transparency.” The Kochs might believe that their right to bankroll politicians secretly is written into the constitution, but super majorities of average citizens–both Democrats and Republican—disagree and the popularity of campaign finance transparency and limits continues to rise .
+The widespread support for IM-22 is best demonstrated by South Dakotans for Integrity’s financial disclosure submitted on Friday with attachments that list over 6,000 donations for a total of over $1.2 million. More than 99% of contributions were for $100 or less. The good government advocacy organization Represent Us provided $55,079 in in-kind contributions to South Dakotans for Integrity.
+If IM-22 passes on November, it will put the brakes on secret political spending by AFP, the Kochs, and others pulling the strings in South Dakota. But, more significantly, if the law succeeds in setting up a campaign finance system that is more responsive to all citizens, not just the wealthy, it could become a model for other states to follow.
+And this is precisely what the Kochs fear.
+Two other two ballot measures promoting transparency and clean elections are Proposition 59 in California and Amendment 2 in Missouri. 
+Source; PR Center for Media and Democracy. 
+Follow WE ARE CHANGE on SOCIAL MEDIA SnapChat: LukeWeAreChange 
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+Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange I nstagram: http://instagram.com/lukewearechange Sign up become a patron and Show your support for alternative news for Just 1$ a month you can help Grow We are change We use Bitcoin Too ! 12HdLgeeuA87t2JU8m4tbRo247Yj5u2TVP Join and Up Vote Our STEEMIT The post Koch Brothers Battle to Prevent Dark Money Disclosure in South Dakota appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+8083,UnReal Report: PM Modi trolls one and all with his surgical strike on black money,"Tweet 
+It seems to be PM Modi’s signature style. He will often stay silent for a prolonged period of time, absorbing criticism, ridicule and even abuse from opponents and sympathisers, and then suddenly, seemingly like a bolt from the blue, he will do something that trolls the pants off his critics. Yesterday was one such day when PM Modi once again proved to media houses that his is the prime time show with the highest TRPs when he announced via an address to the nation that his government is abolishing Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes, effective midnight. Some initial reactions to Modi’s decision to abolish Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes pic.twitter.com/YwBN3e5rCJ 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+Even as black money hoarders writhed and squirmed, PM Modi rubbed it in with his version of English. As if his decision wasn’t enough, PM Modi purposely dragged out his English address to add insult to injury to black money holders #Legend 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+For a while after the address, there were no reactions from PM Modi’s political opponents, mostly because many of them were scrambling to get rid of their cash by midnight. The means they adopted followed from their respective intellectual abilities. Some did this… JUST IN: Suresh Kalmadi spotted trying to buy 100 kilos of onion using 500 rupee notes 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+…while others decided to take advantage of the fact that government hospitals will continue to accept 500/1000 rupee notes for another three days One way for black money holders to spend some of their money is to get a heart attack and get treated in a govt hospital in the next 3 days 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+We thought we’d give people an option, but it remains to be seen how many fell for it… Attention folks. We are ready to accept 500 rupee notes from anyone who buys “Unreal Aliens” and posts snapshot :P https://t.co/gE186TXsd4 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+Some unfortunate souls, however, were short on options. The worst affected are media anchors who desperately want to go out & spend their 500 / 1000 notes but are forced to do debates on the move 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+While Arnab Goswami predictably raved about the move, veteran journalist Rajdeep Sardesai equally predictably was busy looking for a contrarian voice… Rajdeep Sardesai moving from panelist to panelist hoping to get someone to agree with his “..or is it a foolhardy move?” 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+…and eventually found one in Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha who inexplicably brought up Panama papers like he inexplicably brings up 2002 in every debate concerning Modi. Back on Times Now, Saba Naqvi tried to evoke pathos by talking about the poor housewife or domestic help who will be inconvenienced, only to be promptly trounced by the nation’s noise. 
+NDTV would normally have featured an interview with finance minister Arun Jaitley, and he was willing too, but… Arun Jaitley to NDTV: “Aa jaun kya interview ke liye?” NDTV: “Er, no Jaitley ji, we’re busy until midnight” 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+Meanwhile, down in Mumbai, residents heard a string of loud FMLs and curses from a posh residence near Mafatlal Park. When the man inside was done cursing, he picked up the phone to talk to PM Modi: How this surgical strike may help PM Modi fulfill another poll promise… pic.twitter.com/rWwrQIZt4f 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+At least for those in India this was just one blow. For some across the border, this was PM Modi’s second surgical strike. Somewhere in Pakistan… pic.twitter.com/vtUHaLVXML 
+— Karthik Laxman (@karthlax) November 8, 2016 
+While Modi was trolling others, a beggar decided to troll a specific politician… 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+When he was done trolling everyone in the real world, PM Modi trolled some in the unreal world too… Just got payment from BJP for unreal services rendered – a bag of Rs. 500 / 1000 rupee notes and a post-it saying “LOL” 
+— The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 
+When all the tamasha was done and dusted, a satisfied PM Modi caught up with BJP President Amit Shah to get a cup of tea. An awestruck Amit Shah who probably hadn’t been told about the move in advance either, asked PM Modi what his plans were… PM Modi’s next Surgical Strike pic.twitter.com/CDQ73jLTsE Tweet About UnReal Mama 
+Ek chatur naar badee hoshiyaar, apane hee jaal me phasat jaat ham hasat jaat are ho ho ho ho ho!",FAKE
+10406,Will Michelle Obama Be The Replacement Nominee If The FBI Email Investigation Ends Hillary Clinton’s Campaign?,"Email 
+I realize that this headline must sound extremely bizarre, but in this article I will explain why this could actually happen. We have just learned that the FBI has obtained a search warrant that will enable the agency to examine approximately 650,000 emails that are sitting on electronic devices owned by Huma Abedin and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner. Now that the FBI is going through these emails, it is unlikely but still possible that a decision about whether or not to charge Hillary Clinton with a crime could be made by November 8th. Of course the most likely scenario is that Hillary Clinton will not be indicted before election day and that Americans will be voting with this scandal hanging ominously over the Clinton campaign. But if the FBI does quickly take action, it is possible that Hillary Clinton could be forced from the race before election day, and that would require the Democrats to come up with a new candidate. 
+In fact, there are already calls in the mainstream media for Clinton to willingly remove herself from the race. For example, the following comes from a Chicago Tribune article entitled “ Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside “… 
+So what should the Democrats do now? 
+If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process: 
+They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place. 
+Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea. 
+But what the author of that article does not understand is that Tim Kaine would not automatically take her place if Clinton steps down before the election. In a previous article , I included a quote from a U.S. News & World Report article that explained what would happen if Hillary Clinton was removed from the Democratic ticket for some reason prior to November 8th… 
+If Clinton were to fall off the ticket, Democratic National Committee members would gather to vote on a replacement. DNC members acted as superdelegates during this year’s primary and overwhelmingly backed Clinton over boat-rocking socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. 
+DNC spokesman Mark Paustenbach says there currently are 445 committee members – a number that changes over time and is guided by the group’s bylaws, which give membership to specific officeholders and party leaders and hold 200 spots for selection by states, along with an optional 75 slots DNC members can choose to fill. 
+But the party rules for replacing a presidential nominee merely specify that a majority of members must be present at a special meeting called by the committee chairman. The meeting would follow procedures set by the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee and proxy voting would not be allowed. 
+So if this email scandal forced Hillary Clinton to exit the race at the last minute, a majority of the members of the Democratic National Committee would gather to select a new nominee. 
+Who would they choose? 
+Let’s take a look at the top five options… 
+#1 Tim Kaine 
+He would seem to be an obvious choice since he is Hillary Clinton’s running mate. But to win a national campaign you need to have name recognition, and most Americans outside of the state of Virginia have very little familiarity with him. 
+And at this point he has proven to have very little popularity on the campaign trail. In fact, attendance at many of his rallies in key swing states can be measured in the dozens. 
+So to me it seems unlikely that the DNC would select Kaine as the replacement nominee. 
+#2 Joe Biden 
+Vice-President Joe Biden has far more name recognition than Tim Kaine does, and in recent days he has been touting how he believes that he would have actually won the nomination if he would have decided to run … 
+Vice President Joe Biden said in a recent interview that he believed he could have beat former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination had he pursued it. 
+Biden was asked in an interview with CNN Saturday if news that the FBI was re-opening their criminal probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state made him second-guess his decision last year not to run. 
+But according to the vice president, the short answer is “no.” The only thing that kept him from running, Biden said, was the recent death of his son, Beau. 
+Unfortunately for Biden, he suffers from many of the same things that Kaine does. 
+Biden is boring, he is not very good on the campaign trail, and he doesn’t have the sort of charisma that would motivate people to go to the polls in large numbers. 
+Biden would probably represent the “safest” choice for the Democrats, but he might not be a winning choice. 
+#3 Bernie Sanders 
+Bernie Sanders would seem to be a logical choice since he was the runner-up to Hillary Clinton, but the truth is that there are a lot of things working against Bernie Sanders. 
+First of all, he does not have any real loyalty to the Democrats. He has previously operated as an independent, and he expressed a desire to return to independent status once the campaign was over. 
+Secondly, the Democratic establishment very much dislikes him, and that plays a huge role in decisions such as this. 
+Thirdly, Democratic insiders fear that he would be “another McGovern” and would get absolutely wiped out in a general election. 
+So even though he is very popular with the radical left, it appears that Sanders would be the least likely choice on this list. 
+#4 Elizabeth Warren 
+Elizabeth Warren would be very popular with the “Bernie Sanders” wing of the party, and she would enable the party to replace Hillary Clinton with another woman. 
+So she is definitely a possibility. 
+But she does lack name recognition, and just like Sanders there would be concern that the Republicans would frame her candidacy as “another McGovern” because of her far left policies. 
+#5 Michelle Obama 
+One recent survey found that 67 percent of all Democrats would rather have a third term for Obama than a first term for Hillary Clinton. 
+And these days Barack Obama’s approval rating is running anywhere from +9 to +11. 
+So the thought of another Obama in the White House is not as far-fetched as you might think. 
+Michelle Obama has better name recognition than anyone else on this list, and she is generally very well-liked by the American people. And she has received a tremendous amount of praise for her work on the campaign trail recently. For instance, her recent speech in New Hampshire was lauded as “the most influential speech of the 2016 campaign” in a recent MSN article entitled “ In this campaign, Michelle Obama became more than just another political voice “… 
+The speech, amplified by timing and met with an enthusiastic response, cemented Obama’s place as a star of the presidential race and put a defining stroke not just on how women view Trump, but also on herself as a voice of moral authority. Three months before leaving the White House, she already is among the ranks of public figures who transcend politics and title. 
+“When you rise to a level like that, you see how much weight your words carry,” said Anita McBride, former chief of staff to Laura Bush and executive in residence at the School of Public Affairs at American University. “We know she didn’t like politics. But she was impassioned by the language that was used, and she feels compelled to speak out. People listen to her.” 
+If I were the Democrats, Michelle Obama is the one that I would select if a replacement nominee was needed, because she would give them the very best chance of winning against Donald Trump. 
+Of course the Obamas are just as radical as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but the American people have become quite comfortable with them at this point. 
+And I certainly hope that Michelle Obama does not become the nominee if Hillary Clinton has to step aside, because Donald Trump would have an exceedingly difficult time defeating her. 
+In the final analysis, none of this is probably going to matter anyway because it is unlikely that the FBI will move quickly enough to force Hillary Clinton out before election day, but there is still a small chance that it could actually happen. 
+And if it does happen, it is going to turn politics in America completely upside down. 
+Take a look at the future of America: The Beginning of the End and then prepare Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here .",FAKE
+10242,SC Gov. Nikki Haley Announces She’s Voting For Donald Trump,"Massive Spike In Obamacare Health Premiums Could Boost Trump To Victory 
+She meant policy like the grossly damaging proposals from Clinton, who wanted to keep Obamacare in place, import countless Muslim refugees, offer illegal immigrants amnesty and nominate liberal justices to the Supreme Court. 
+“When I look at all of those, I come back to say that the best person based on the policies and dealing with things like Obamacare, still is Donald Trump,” she continued. 
+The governor added that it was not an “easy vote.”   
+Listen to her statement below: SC Gov. Nikki Haley Announces She’s Voting For Donald Trump This video was designed to autoplay so we've delayed loading it until you click here. 
+That was a tepid endorsement at best, but it was still an endorsement of sorts — similar in many ways to the one offered by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who last month announced that he intended to vote for Trump despite disagreeing with him on several issues. 
+“A year ago, I pledged to endorse the Republican nominee, and I am honoring that commitment,” he wrote at the time. “And if you don’t want to see a Hillary Clinton presidency, I encourage you to vote for him.”  ",FAKE
+6580,American Woman In Bikini Desecrates French Catacombs For Her “Female Indiana Jones” Brand,"  American Woman In Bikini Desecrates French Catacombs For Her “Female Indiana Jones” Brand American Woman In Bikini Desecrates French Catacombs For Her “Female Indiana Jones” Brand 
+André is a young European who left his decaying country in 2012 for greener pastures. He enjoys exploring subterranean places, reading about a host of interconnected topics, and yearns for Tradition. November 5, 2016 Girls 
+The Paris catacombs are a place dear to my heart. Born in this very city, I had a front row seat to see it turn into a giant museum. Every wealthy asshole wanting his own piece of the “city of lights,” and Paris being one of the most visited cities in the world , I could see year after year the streets taken over by luxury clothing shops and expensive venues. The middle and lower classes have been pushed aside by rising living costs so that the rich globalists, the bobos and a never-ending trail of tourists could stroll around. 
+Yet, go twenty meters below the Haussmanian hurdle, and you will find something very different. 
+South of the Seine, the lands have been deeply dug to extract building stones. Most of the voids have been filled since, but more than a hundred kilometres of mine galleries are still there. Exploring the place is officially forbidden. Which is a good thing, as one can go there officiously, provided one knows how to enter and not get lost in the labyrinth, without bothering with swarms of tourists or wasting money in an overpriced bar. 
+Officially prohibited, actually more or less self-managed by a loose community of cataphiles , the Catacombs are one of the most interesting places today in Paris. It allows for genuine explorations and friendly meetings while also teaching some masculine virtues to those who venture there seriously. 
+The underground network being fragile and the officials not enjoying when too many visitors tread on their jurisdiction, the cataphiles have a complex relationship with exposing it. On the one hand, we like to show the place and share its atmosphere with passionate newcomers; on the other, we are afraid that too much exposition will attract too many visitors and stifle the officials’ relative toleration for unofficial activities. 
+Well, today, other cataphiles won’t chastise me for mentioning the topic in public, for this has been already made recently by an attention whore of international scope. Alison Teal, a Hawaiian 28 or 29 years old girl, made a show of herself down there and sent ludicrous photos to the Daily Mail . “So, I’m here to teach you about protecting the planet, y’know” “I love bringing surfboards in places without waves. By the way, I’m the feminine Indiana Jones, especially with the help of a crew I’ll never give credit to. Follow me on Instagram and YT!” 
+Here we are not talking about attention whoring lightly. The Daily Mail photos already tell much: a blond girl in a pink bikini carries a pink surfboard in a narrow underground network where there is, by definition, no waves to surf at all, to take some photos of herself, herself, herself, and a bit of the catacombs, as they could be used as the setting of the latest of Alison’s Adventures™. I’m not joking. These “adventures” are literally Hitler a trademark. 
+Since she was at least 18, Teal seems to have taken advantage from the nomadic lifestyle of her parents to make photos, movies, and promote herself heavily along the way. With the help of her dad, a well-connected photographer and self-promoter who claims to master yoga, she got a bunch of awards and media promotion. Long-haired Alison was thus handed a niche that allows her to travel the world, take pictures of herself in various places, and claim to be concerned about the environment. 
+Her résumé shows a massive ego associated to minor lies. “The world was my school and playground”—I guess smaller places would be too small for her giant ego, and this may explain why she suffered from claustrophobia under Paris, as we are to see below. Between name-droppings, references to media awards and other big pictures of Alison, Teal, and Alison Teal, we learn she was styled “the ‘Female Indiana Jones’ by Time Magazine (2015) and the ‘Oprah of Adventure’ by The Huffington Post (2016).” Really? 
+Actually, Teal said to the HuffPo she aspired to be “the Oprah of adventure” in 2014 before branding herself as “the female Indiana Jones” to the Time a year later (2015, not 2016). Then she said on Twitter and on her résumé how they had referred to her as such. Not a big lie, but a lie indeed. By the way, she also branded herself a “Tarzan child” in the HuffPo interview. Would someone who really “grew up in the wild” be so obsessed with linking herself to famous icons? Excerpt from the HuffPo article, 05/20/2014. The same articles adds she is a “self-described ‘Tarzan child.'” Excerpt from the Time article, 11/08/2015. Named by Time Magazine… or self-styled? And now on her résumé. Not only does she lie by misattributing to famous media outlets self-characterizing and lavishly flattering labels, but she can’t even put the right years while referring to said media pieces. 
+So, self-styled “female Indiana Jones,” no less, went through what seems to be a joint undertaking with the Daily Mail by descending into the Paris catacombs with the symbols of her Adventures™, namely a pink bikini and a surfboard. The English tabloid released the photos, video, and testimony of Indiana-Jones-In-A-Bikini-Surfing-The-Catacombs the 30 th of October. Days after, a bunch of French outlets copied the Mail content, often translating it verbatim . 
+What struck me first are the stunning inaccuracies the tabloid published. First, the Mail claims Teal went 150 meters below the ground, whereas the actual depth of the Catacombs goes between 10 and 30 meters depending on where you are in the network. Can’t Indiana Jane tell the difference between 30 and 150 meters? 
+Second, she also claimed to have lacked oxygen and witnessed the water level suddenly rising. This is at best extremely unlikely. The water levels can change from month to month and even from week to week, but to my knowledge it never changes abruptly in seconds. As for the oxygen issue, I have witnessed some only two times: at a big party, when so many people were in the same room that there was not enough oxygen to light a cigarette, and from claustrophobic newcomers who could not stand the place. 
+Either she completely made up the sudden water change and oxygen issues in order to give her story a sensational aspect, or, more likely, got a panic attack due to claustrophobia, but preferred to twist it into a grandiose plot rather than acknowledging her own limitations. The Mail just ate that up and published without question. They did not ask any actual cataphile for sure. Had they done so, anyone with a decent experience of the catacombes could have told them what I just wrote above. 
+I also noticed from her quotes that she does not mention anyone from her crew, gives no credit to the men who opened the manhole cover, helped her go down the humid ladder, showed her the way, filmed her… She would never have found the entrance if no one already in the know had accepted to be her guide. Neither could she lift manhole covers of more than a hundred kilograms with her thin arms—even the round butt she likes to display couldn’t do that. The first photo displayed by the Mail. Notice how she strategically displays (some of) her butt. 
+I could bet she did not have sex with any of the guys who enabled her display to happen. As Julius Evola hinted, she is likely the kind of woman to whom “the possibilities of physical love are often not as interesting as the narcissistic cult of her body, or as being seen with as many or as few clothes as possible” (Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World , chap.20). 
+In this respect, the only thing that makes Teal “special” compared to all other look-at-me twats is the adventurous label she tries to put on herself. Exploiting people and places to garner attention is definitely not special. Yet, a lot of comments have noticed this behind the weird mix of glamour and pseudo-adventure: some are offended that she treaded on bones, i.e. remnants of real past men, in a pink bikini. Doing so is not only a proof of bad taste and self-aggrandizing mania—it is also utterly disrespectful. 
+This is indeed a blatant example of pussy pass . Imagine going to Hawaii, bringing a skateboard at a local cemetery and start skateboarding over the graves in a pink throng. What do you expect would happen? You would probably get beaten by locals, and if the media gave you attention at all, they would label you as a disturbed troll or something like that. All this, I think, would be fair. But when a self-important Oprah Jane of super-adventure does the same, the mainstream media reacts completely differently and celebrates her without the least hint of criticism. 
+Though she treading and surfing on bones of actual past people is not very respectful for sure, I think especially appalling the outlook Teal seems to carry on the place. The Catacombs are just another background for Alison Adventures™. Whole places, some loaded with historical and spiritual significance, are reduced to a set for the egotic show of another vapid character. The entire world was her school, or so she said, meaning that the world is turned into a mixture of Disneyland and Hollywood studio where her picture can stroll around. Some weeks ago, Alison Teal was busy showing herself near an erupting volcano. Notice another strategic part-display of her butt. 
+Usual newcomers to the Catacombs come there with a genuine interest in the place. They come to find out, sometimes drink, and have an actual adventure. They cannot help but feel some humility, perhaps even awe, when meeting with the bones of millions of nameless dead, most if not all of them having lived before the nineteenth century, and having been carried there so that Paris could grow. 
+This is very different from using the place to play adventure, treading on bones in a rather inappropriate outfit, depending on a crew of real cataphiles but forgetting to give them the slightest credit, and showing utter carelessness to the historical and spiritual significance of the place, all so that Alison’s Ego Adventures™ Show continues. 
+As you can see above, a lot of the comments are negative—especially those from cataphiles —and Teal has discreetly withdrawn the video of her trail from YouTube, putting it into private mode. 
+Teal’s circus has at least one merit: it symbolizes pretty well one of the worst aspects of the Westernization of the world. In the West, there is no wilderness, no sacredness, no magic. There are tons of potential places for tourism, but ultimately, all these places are losing their soul and turning into Disneylands. The Catacombs are worth it because they are definitely not so, and should never be. 
+Fortunately, there can be some immanent justice. The wave of criticism under Teal’s disrespectful show is well deserved. More harshly, a young libtard who thought she could hitchhike through Middle East to prove Muslims peaceful got raped and killed by the “peaceful” ones she theatrically claimed to care about. The event shew, or should have shown, that the world is not a giant kindergarten for Western “strong and independent” narcissists. 
+In a world of self-marketing and self-centred cunts, everyone is too busy caring about one’s image and about meaningless representations to truly care about a place or about family members. 
+Truly respectable women are not the ones we spot the most easily, and true cataphiles are often discreet as well. Your humble servant bathed there before Teal pretended to “surf” the place, but I would definitely not exhibit myself treading on bones in a pink thong",FAKE
+10050,The Abnormal Normal of Nuclear Terror,"The Abnormal Normal of Nuclear Terror October 28, 2016 
+Almost goofily, behind Official Washington’s latest warmongering “group think,” the U.S. has plunged into a New Cold War against Russia with no debate about the enormous costs and the extraordinary risks of nuclear annihilation, Gray Brechin observes. 
+By Gray Brechin 
+When Lewis Mumford heard that a primitive atomic bomb had obliterated Hiroshima, the eminent urban and technology historian experienced “almost physical nausea.” He instantly understood that humanity now had the means to exterminate itself. 
+On March 2, 1946, seven months later, he published an essay titled “Gentlemen: You Are Mad!” Not only did madmen, Mumford insist, “govern our affairs in the name of order and security,” but he called his fellow Americans equally mad for viewing “the madness of our leaders as if it expressed a traditional wisdom and common sense” even as those leaders readied the means for “the casual suicide of the human race.” Illustration by Chesley Bonestell of nuclear bombs detonating over New York City, entitled “Hiroshima U.S.A.” Colliers, Aug. 5, 1950. 
+In the 70 years since the Saturday Review of Literature published Mumford’s warning, that madness has grown to be normative so that those who question the cost, safety and promised security of the nuclear stockpile are regarded as the Trojans did Cassandra — if they are noticed at all. 
+“The bottom line on nuclear weapons is that when the president gives the order it mus t be followed, ” insisted Hillary Clinton in the third presidential debate as a means of affirming her own — rather than her opponent’s — qualifications to give that order. “There’s about four minutes between the order being given and the people responsible for launching nuclear weapons to do so.” 
+Four minutes to launch is a minute more than the three to midnight at which the Doomsday Clock now stands. Clinton no doubt calculated that voters would be more comfortable with her own steady finger on the nuclear trigger. I can think of no better proof of Mumford’s contention than the fact that those voters would give any individual the power to abruptly end life on Earth unless it is that her statement went unremarked by those keeping score. 
+The Nobel Mistake 
+Less than nine months into Barack Obama’s presidency, Norway’s Nobel Institute bestowed the Nobel Peace Prize on him largely on the strength of his pledge during his first major foreign policy speech in Prague to rid the world of nuclear weapons. In a 2015 memoir, former secretary of the Institute Geir Lundestad expressed remorse for doing so, saying “[We] thought that it would strengthen Obama and it didn’t have that effect.” President Barack Obama uncomfortably accepting the Nobel Peace Prize from Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2009. (White House photo) 
+Like all modern presidents, Obama quickly learned the political economy of the entrenched nuclear establishment, committing a trillion dollars to the “modernization” of the arsenal and its delivery systems 30 years beyond his presidency. 
+As Obama prepared to leave office, his Defense Secretary Ashton Carter rejected pleas for reducing the stockpile and announced that the Pentagon planned to spend $108 billion over five years to “correct decades of underinvestment in nuclear deterrence … dat[ing] back to the Cold War.” The last Cold War, that is. 
+Such staggering expenditures are, however, even more unlikely to purchase the order and security that Secretary Carter promised than when Mumford issued his warning. That was well before thousands of thermonuclear weapons waited on hair-trigger alert for the order to launch or a glitch that would do so without an order. 
+In his recently published book My Journey At the Nuclear Brink , Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Perry detailed the numerous close calls by which the world has dodged partial or all-out Armageddon and claimed that the likelihood of disaster is growing rather than diminishing. Most of these events are unknown to the public. 
+Former head of the U.S. Strategic Command General James Cartwright bolstered Perry’s claim when he told a San Francisco audience that “It makes no sense to keep our nuclear weapons online 24 hours a day” since “You’ve either been hacked and are not admitting it, or you’re being hacked and don’t know it.” One of those hackers, he said, could get lucky. 
+A Non-existent Debate 
+When Hillary Clinton was asked at a town hall event in Concord, New Hampshire, if she would reduce expenditures for nuclear arms and rein in the corporations that sell the government those weapons, she replied “I think we are overdue for a very thorough debate in our country about what we need and how we are willing to pay for it.” Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, Arizona.   by Gage Skidmore) 
+Such a debate has never been held and — given the peril, complexity and cost of nuclear technology — it is never likely to happen unless a president of exceptional courage and independence demands it. The profits of weapons production are simply too great and few of the prospective victims understandably want to dwell on the unthinkable when so much more diverting entertainment is available on their Smartphones. 
+Nuclear weapons by their nature are inimical to transparency and thus to the public discussion, control and democracy they ostensibly protect. Nor does Doomsday make for winning dinner banter. 
+The Brookings Institute in 1998 published a study of the cumulative costs of nuclear weapons entitled Atomic Audit . It put the bill to date at $5.5 trillion, virtually none of which was known by the public or even to members of Congress or the President. The cost simply grew and continues to grow in the dark, precluding spending on so much else that might otherwise return in public works and services to those who unwittingly pay for the weapons while also mitigating the causes of war abroad. 
+If she wins, Hillary Clinton’s election to the Presidency will be hailed as historic, but not nearly as historic as if she would sponsor that “overdue” and “very thorough debate” of which she spoke in the city of Concord. Such a debate might begin to lift from her own shoulders — and from those of her successors if there are to be any — what she called “the awesome responsibility” of four minutes to launch. That way lies sanity after 70 years of its opposite. 
+Dr. Gray Brechin is the Project Scholar of the Living New Deal University at the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. He is the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin which explains the historical context of California’s long but little-known involvement with nuclear weaponry.",FAKE
+7819,No One Tried to Assassinate Donald Trump … But Austyn Crites Shows Up in WikiLeaks 7 Times,"By Daisy Luther UPDATED: Although it doesn’t appear that Austyn Crites was trying to assassinate Donald Trump, it’s very interesting that he does appear in... ",FAKE
+8143,Chicago Cubs go 24 hours without winning a World Series,"Thursday 3 November 2016 Chicago Cubs go 24 hours without winning a World Series 
+Fans are blaming ‘some kind of curse’ for the Cubs’ failure to win a single World Series since yesterday. 
+The team, which has now not won a Series in as long as many of their severely drunken, staggering fans can remember, is worried that their failure to buy some lucky white heather from a mysterious gypsy who called at Wrigley Field in the early hours of this morning has in some way jinxed their success. 
+Infielder Chris Bryant, who answered the door to the peculiar crone, reported that he told her he felt they’d got enough good luck already – and then the witch told him ‘A curse be on this place and all within!’ before vanishing in a cloud of stale, brimstone-scented smoke. 
+“And we’ve not won a World Series since,” he concluded in a worried tone. “What have I wrought upon the club?” 
+Board chairman Thomas Ricketts has apologised to the people of Chicago for the lack of trophies in the last day, but pledged he was doing his hardest to bring ‘some kind, any kind’ of award to the city to placate concerned supporters. 
+When told of the club’s failure to bring home any silverware in almost 24 hours, fan Simon Williams looked up groggily and replied “What? Uh, oh God, here we go again. 
+“Well, it was fun while it lasted.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+2160,Republicans outfox Democrats on climate votes,"The party looks to Kamala Harris, Catherine Cortez Masto, Tammy Duckworth and Maggie Hassan to help lead it out of the abyss.",REAL
+4892,Presidential debate moderators announced,"The official list of debate moderators is out and it includes anchors from all the major networks.
+
+The full list, from the Commission on Presidential Debates, is below:
+
+Elaine Quijano is the first anchor of a digital network. She covers news for CBS' 24-hour digital streaming network) to moderate a debate.
+
+Not everyone was happy with the line-up. Randy Falco, the president and CEO of Univision, wrote a letter to the executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates, Janet H. Brown, slamming the decision not to include a Hispanic journalist on the presidential stage. The letter was tweeted by Politico media reporter Hadas Gold.
+
+""I am writing to express disappointment, and frankly disbelief, that the Commission Presidential Debates has not chosen a Hispanic journalist to moderate the presidential debates. The inclusion of CBS’ Elaine Quijano as a moderator for the Vice Presidential debate is certainly a welcome addition but seems insufficient when taking into account past presidential cycles, future demographic trends and the important role Latinos play in the economic and social fabric of this great nation. Simply put: it’s an abdication of your responsibility to represent and reflect one of the largest and most influential communities in the U.S.""
+
+While both candidates have said they would do the debates, Donald Trump has expressed concern over who will moderate and the timing of the debates.",REAL
+4245,Hillary’s inevitability lie: Why the media and party elites are rushing to nominate the weakest candidate,"If Clinton and Trump win their conventions, it’ll be the first time both parties nominated their weakest candidate. Trump is the one Republican almost any Democrat can beat; Hillary the one Democrat Trump can beat. The response of the party establishments is instructive. Republicans engage in a mad scramble to stop Trump while Democrats do all they can to help Hillary seal the deal.
+
+Fear of Trump unites Republican elites as nothing but hatred for Obama ever did; Senate leadership with House rank and file; libertarians with militarists and supply siders; the Kochs with Karl Rove. A few of the phonier evangelicals defected to Trump but most, like the pope, know a fake Christian when they see one. All the factions now join the RNC, Fox News and every corporate lobbyist in town in a late, frantic effort to turn the tide. On Tuesday, Trump routed them all.
+
+Democratic elites are just as united in opposing Bernie Sanders: members of Congress, gay and abortion rights lobbies, African-American leaders, most of labor and many of the same corporate lobbyists battling Trump. Sanders is a reformer and an honest, decent man. Trump is a louche, lying fascist with the impulse control of a hyperactive four-year-old. Yet Trump, not Sanders, is laying waste his party. Are Democrats simply more skilled in the art of suppression? If so, who knew?
+
+But things aren’t as they seem. Sanders is doing better and Trump worse than the media thinks. Each race will now shift; whether enough to stop Clinton or Trump depends on strategy, execution, luck and other things impossible to poll. Elites may hold on for one last round but these insurgencies threaten their long term survival. Since their survival threatens ours, that’s great news.
+
+Clinton owes some of her early success to the frontloading of Southern states. Super Tuesday is a scheme hatched in the ’80s by a bunch of white, male, mostly Southern Democrats who thought a regional primary would help “centrists” like themselves get a leg up on liberals. But they forgot, not for the first or last time, about African-Americans, lots of whom live in the South and vote Democratic. In ’88, Jessie Jackson and Al Gore split the region, thus allowing Northern social liberal Mike Dukakis to slip through the net.
+
+This year Super Tuesday finally worked as planned; hindering a progressive, aiding an insider. There was a twist: African-Americans who now dominate the party in the South made it work. I doubt they prefer Clinton’s neoliberalism to Sanders’ democratic socialism. The win owed more to loyalty to Obama and other trusted leaders, and to Hillary’s skills and connections. By Saturday, eight of the 11 states of the old Confederacy had voted. In them she won 68 percent of the vote. Ten of 39 states outside the South had voted. In those states Sanders took 57 percent of the vote. On March 15, the Confederacy will be all done voting. The race begins then.
+
+Clinton owes even more of her success to a party establishment she says doesn’t exist.  Democrats send 717 superdelegates to their convention; that’s a third of the number needed to nominate. She has most of them. (Republican superdelegates are bound by popular votes because their base rose up and demanded it.) DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz slashed debates from 26 to six just to deny Sanders the airtime. Sanders surely won the popular vote in Iowa and maybe Nevada, but their state parties won’t release results. Sanders undercut the Des Moines Register’s demand to see the raw vote, saying it didn’t matter given the close delegate count. Trump, who brags incessantly on polls, has a deeper insight into the power of the bandwagon effect.
+
+The election’s best news thus far is the evidence it offers that a campaign funded by small donors that stays true to its principles can beat big money. But we don’t know how much dark and super PAC money Clinton commands, or its impact on the race. Here’s hoping the next time she says Wall Street is spending money to defeat her, Bernie points out that it probably spends as much to elect her and that the whole reason he’s running is to make it harder for Wall Street to cover its bets.
+
+Clinton began the race for the nomination 40 points up. Yet all these advantages — money, superdelegates, calendar, shutting down debates and withholding election results — couldn’t save her. She needed yet more help and got it from liberal lobbies that are all that remains of the great grass-roots movements that once drove all our social progress. Most are led not by grass-roots leaders but by technicians who seek money, access and career advancement and rely on the same consultants advising Clinton, Obama and a long list of corporate clients.
+
+It is no shock to see every GOP faction unite against Trump. He is plainly not a neoconservative, a libertarian, a free trader or even a Christian. Unencumbered by conscience or conviction, he is free to don any disguise he deems useful. Some in his party oppose him out of principle; others because they think he can’t win. But if he had the demeanor of an Anglican bishop and led every general election poll, many would still fight him, because his victory would mean their ultimate defeat.
+
+Progressive groups who united against Bernie have a lot more explaining to do. There was a time when many progressives observed an unwritten law against wading into primaries against friends, even for a candidate who was better on their issues, let alone for one who was palpably worse. On choice Clinton may claim more personal involvement than Sanders but on every other progressive issue, including civil rights and gay rights, Bernie beats her by a mile.
+
+On core labor issues like global trade and a living wage, he is steadfast while she is anything but. Still, unions representing 70percent  of all members backed her, often without members’ consent. Nevada’s culinary union told its members it would stay out, but leaders worked casinos hard, enabling Clinton to eke out the appearance of victory. Given Massachusetts’ liberal reputation, big student population and proximity to Vermont, Sanders needed a win. But labor poured it on. Without its help, Clinton’s 1.3 percent margin of victory would have been impossible. Some who helped engineer Clinton endorsements did so for institutional access or personal gain. I like to think more did it because she looked like a winner. It would be good for all progressives if these leaders would reflect on where they get their political advice and how all their access really helps their causes. We once left tactical thinking to politicians. Then issue advocates began hiring pollsters. Now voters are getting into the act. The effect is to turn the marketplace of ideas into a casino. It’s hard enough figuring out if a candidate represents your values without having to speculate about his appeal to others. You don’t go to a store to buy what you think someone else wants, yet primary voters do. One reason for all the tactical thinking is the paralysis of government; if you think nothing will get done, you focus less on policy. Polarization’s another; if you hate their party more than you love yours, what matters is picking a winner. The biggest culprit is the media. Following politics on TV you learn nothing beyond the horse race. Pundits specialize in predicting the recent past. No poll can tell you what folks will say when they finally absorb the fact that one candidate is under criminal investigation or that 5,000 people are suing another for fraud, or that climate change will wipe out the east and west coasts of the United States within their children’s lifetimes. Networks bring on experts angling for political jobs to say we’re the only country on earth that can’t have universal health care but don’t bother to explain Hillary’s or Bernie’s actual plans. Donald Trump’s resume is a hoax, but to find out about Trump University or the Trump Shuttle you have to wait eight months for Marco Rubio to mention it in a debate. Imagine what Upton Sinclair or Ida Tarbell would say to see such a sorry spectacle as this. Clinton’s whole case is tactical. Sanders volunteers say every swing voter asks now about electability or if Congress would pass Bernie’s program. In the last CNN poll his favorability rating is higher than hers among Democrats. (She’s at 78% favorable to 19% unfavorable; he’s at 85% to 10%)  Democrats prefer his policies to hers by wide margins, forcing her to pretend to adopt his. She benefits from kindly MSNBC anchors and apparatchiks posing as analysts on CNN — but what helps her most is every network’s obsession with tactics. The moment the race turns into a referendum on policy choices, she’s finished. For two years the media has swallowed and peddled the Clinton inevitability line. For two weeks it has said Trump’s nomination is inevitable; this after eight months of saying it was impossible. It is so clueless on both counts because it is so much a part of the system that is under attack and because it relies so heavily on its useless tools and discredited methods. It’s hard to predict the future, it being chock full of stuff that hasn’t happened yet. Even if they get it right, they add nothing of value. To see the race as it really is one must see the Democratic and Republicans parties as they really are. The story going round is that they’re far apart. It’s true of cultural issues: guns; same-sex marriage; abortion; immigration. But on matters of the distribution of political and economic power and opportunity they are as close as can be. By these I mean: global trade, fiscal austerity, deregulation, information technology; use of military force and most of all what they fight hardest to defend: pay to play politics. It is against this bipartisan consensus of pay to play politics and neoliberal economics that the country, including large chunks of each party’s base, now rises up. This is nearly as true of Trump’s fascist putsch as it is of Bernie’s progressive revolution. Voters want political reform and economic justice. They know that without reform they’ll never get justice. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who shares that opinion. The election is part of a broader revolt against a failed status quo. Clinton is an architect of that status quo; Trump, a big beneficiary. So she hides her transcripts and he hides his tax returns. Bernie is an open book. It’s why he has the highest favorability rating of any candidate in the race and Clinton has the lowest of any presidential candidate in the history of polling, except for Trump. Trump and Clinton struggle to co-opt Bernie’s message; Trump even adopts his positions. (A fascist can do what he likes so long as he is racist, xenophobic and authoritarian.) Trump hates pay-to-play politics; or as he frames it, the venality of his opponents. He hates the Iraq War, the Libya strike, the Syria no fly zone, NAFTA and the TPP. He hates Obama’s deals with insurers and drug companies and any cut in Social Security or Medicare. In a debate with Hillary he’d own these priceless treasures. Some would say he stole them, but he can’t steal what she gives away. It’s a debate we never have to see. Trump is a total fraud and a ticking time bomb.  Clinton helped build the system voters want to tear down. Her candidacy rests on the rickety edifice of a dying political establishment that, like Trump, could blow at any time. This is Bernie’s revolution, not Clinton’s or Trump’s. If it’s anyone’s moment, it’s his not theirs. It ain’t over till it’s over.",REAL
+3016,The Weeds: could more corruption fix American politics?,"Yes, the New Hampshire primary was this week — and we found an especially wonky way to talk about it.
+
+There's a paper that came out last year called ""Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy."" If you're a listener of The Weeds, you'll almost certainly find it fascinating.
+
+Author Jonathan Rauch argues that deals, rewards, and favors are all essential parts of actually making the government work. If political parties were stronger — if individuals could donate lots of money, rather than a little — he thinks the government would be able to get even more done.
+
+Listen to Ezra, Matt, and me dive into what this means for the 2016 election in this week's episode — which you can find, as always, below and on iTunes.",REAL
+10532,"Ex-rep: 'If Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket'","Ex-rep: 'If Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket' Previously tweeted call for 'war' against Obama after Dallas police shootings Published: 15 mins ago 
+(The Hill) A former congressman on Wednesday threatened to grab his musket if GOP nominee Donald Trump loses the presidential election. 
+On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) tweeted on Wednesday. 
+“On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket.You in?”",FAKE
+1633,Jeb Bush gave this black community a charter school. Then he moved on.,"Six weeks before he was set to open Florida’s first charter school, Jeb Bush had yet to recruit a principal. Then he met Katrina Wilson-Davis, a 32-year-old ­social studies teacher with no management experience but a positive spirit that gave him hope.
+
+“We need someone who carries a knife in her teeth and can swing through the vines,” Wilson-Davis recalls Bush telling her on that summer day in 1996.
+
+Recovering from an ego-bruising election loss, Bush was looking for chances to soften his image as a callous Republican who proclaimed he would do “probably nothing” as governor to help African Americans. As a private citizen likely to run for governor again in 1998, Bush created the Liberty City Charter School as a way to educate black children from Miami’s poorest neighborhoods. The school would give him a way to mend ties with the black community while testing a controversial, conservative education theory that was drawing the ire of teachers unions.
+
+“My friends told me I was being used,” Wilson-Davis remembered. She figured it was worth a try. “I said: ‘So? Everyone’s being used.’ ”
+
+As he runs for president nearly two decades later, Bush points to his time working on the school as evidence of his early commitment to a reform agenda. He has said the experience “still shapes the way I see the deep-seated challenges facing urban communities today.” He points to the school’s opening as “one of the happiest, proudest moments of my life.”
+
+But for Wilson-Davis and others who walked the halls of Liberty City, that happy moment has been obscured by the complicated years that have followed.
+
+Over time, Bush’s tightknit relationship with the school and his handpicked principal fizzled. After he won election as Florida governor, in part by touting the school, Bush stepped down from the board — a move his aides say avoided any perceptions of favoritism. He was unable to help the school overcome steep debt or help it resolve a dispute with the building’s landlord. By 2008, the year after Bush left office, local officials voted to close the school.
+
+As Bush campaigns in Florida today to revive his struggling presidential campaign, many in this beleaguered community wrestle with his legacy in their lives. There are feelings of adoration and feelings of abandonment. Many here wonder: Why couldn’t a man so well connected and powerful help raise money or strike a deal with a local landlord? How could he step away from a cause that was so dear to him?
+
+A project that intended to close the chasm between Bush and the black community ended up broadening the distance between them.
+
+Bush’s presidential campaign — in which he has promised to broaden the Republican Party’s appeal to minorities while, on one occasion, appearing to suggest that Democrats win black votes by offering “free stuff” — serves as a reminder of the two sides of the man they knew.
+
+“It’s like I’m reliving the sadness all over again,” Wilson-Davis said.
+
+“Everyone wants me to bash Jeb,” she added. “I can’t just bash Jeb. He did so much for me. He introduced me to so many good people, white people, who cared about our community.”
+
+Bush, in a recent interview, said he could not have saved the school. He had helped negotiate with the landlord early on, but he said little could be done about the landlord’s desire to kick the school out.
+
+“The problem is that they didn’t own the school. They tried to own the school,” Bush said. “But you can’t operate a school if you don’t have the real estate.”
+
+The idea for a charter school in Liberty City stemmed from a new kinship between Bush and T. Willard Fair, a local black activist.
+
+In Fair, head of the Urban League of Greater Miami, Bush found his first full ally within Miami’s black community. Fair had been swayed by the “probably nothing” remark because he long believed black people needed to rely more on themselves, not the government, for their uplift. It took only 90 minutes for them to agree to start the charter school, which would be privately run but publicly funded.
+
+Bush attempted to get another prominent local black activist to serve as principal, school board member Frederica S. Wilson. She rebuffed his efforts but recommended Wilson-Davis, who always dreamed of being a principal.
+
+“I knew I could educate those children,” Wilson-Davis said. “I know these children. I was one of them.”
+
+In an hour, they agreed to work together.
+
+Bush knew he was asking Wilson-Davis to take on a difficult task that would put her at the center of a intense political debate over the future of public schools. But he had confidence in her.
+
+“She had a heart for these kids,” he said.
+
+The young, black schoolteacher — granddaughter of sharecroppers and daughter of a cafeteria worker and a truck driver — gained a mentor and powerful friend who introduced her to the upper echelon of American politics and wealth. The privileged white politician got a charismatic leader for his school who taught him to use bits of slang like “off the chain.” He also got a useful anecdote for his next campaign, and he doubled his share of the black vote.
+
+Soon, Wilson-Davis was going to fancy parties with the son of a president. Hillary Rodham Clinton, first lady at the time, invited her to the White House for a forum on education. “You’re now swimming with big fish,” Wilson-Davis recalled someone telling her at a fundraiser for the school, after which she wondered, “What have I gotten into?”
+
+Bush, too, was acclimating to a different kind of pond. On Saturdays, he drove from tony Coral Gables to a neighborhood of scraggy lots, barbed-wire fences and malls scarred by riots from nearly two decades before.
+
+At first, Fair recalled, Bush looked uncomfortable when he met young mothers in subsidized housing who were interested in his school.
+
+“It was an extraordinary experience,” Bush said.
+
+Sixty students enrolled in the school when it opened in August 1996.
+
+When Bush would visit, he would pat students on the head and call them by name. They would try to scare him with pictures of alligators they drew, and he dressed up as Santa Claus at Christmastime. His mother, Barbara Bush, came to read “Goodnight Moon.”
+
+TV cameras and reporters captured Bush’s big experiment. Educators and donors wanted tours. The school was mocked by the teachers unions when it performed poorly on tests, praised in the papers when it performed well. The attention helped the school with its fundraising, even as Wilson-Davis tired of being a tour guide.
+
+She was more focused on intensive reading and math instruction and weekly positive-reinforcement assemblies. When she heard students arguing about whether zebras were donkeys with painted stripes, she arranged a trip to the zoo. Many children were being raised by their grandparents, so Wilson-Davis started a quilting night to connect the community.
+
+“Don’t let me call your mama,” became one of Wilson-Davis’s best-known threats to the students. About a dozen former students contacted by The Washington Post recalled how she offered Jolly Rancher candies when students visited her office and kept a small mattress there in case anyone needed a nap.
+
+“It was really this custom education that was developed for the kids at the school that made us able to succeed,” said Maurice Jackson, now 22.
+
+Jackson, who interned this summer at the White House, said his views on school turned around after Wilson-Davis placed him in more-advanced classes.
+
+Bush was in the background as much as the foreground. He was a strict taskmaster who could not stomach seeing so much as a wad of paper on the ground.
+
+“ ’Trina,” he would say to Wilson-Davis, she recalled, “poor doesn’t mean dirty.”
+
+The school received the same per-pupil funding as traditional schools, but additional expenses such as rent meant that teachers at first were paid less. Bush’s fundraising prowess helped, but he warned that it would not last forever.
+
+“He’s a fiscally frugal guy, so the goal was you have to learn how to operate with what the state gives you each year,” Wilson-Davis recalled.
+
+Whenever she asked for money, she said, Bush would lean in. He would cross his legs, look into her eyes and ask her why.
+
+“He taught me to trust myself,” Wilson-Davis said. “He would say you can make mistakes, but just not a lot of them, because success was the only option.”
+
+As he walked through the school hall on the day after his successful 1998 election, the cheerleading squad yelled: “Give me a B! Give me a U! Give me an S! Give me an H!”
+
+“I used to love seeing him, and he was there so much,’’ said Michelle Turner, now 25, who was captured by news photographers hugging Bush on that day in 1998.
+
+But then, Turner and others recall, something changed.
+
+“In later years, I don’t remember him being there at all,” Turner said.
+
+Bush had left the board by 2000, two years after being elected governor, but Wilson-Davis continued to reach out to him, often using e-mail. He would respond with brief words of encouragement.
+
+“I hope that you will find time to come by the school and see the children,” Wilson-Davis wrote in July 2001.
+
+“i will try to make it,” Bush responded. There was no indication whether he paid a visit.
+
+In January 2002, Wilson-Davis bragged to him that the school was operating entirely from its state allotment after “many years of prudent and fiscal conservatism.”
+
+By 2006, though, trouble was mounting. The school incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. The growing importance of high-stakes standardized tests, pushed by Bush, led to the school spending more on new textbooks. And a devastating hurricane season in 2005 left the school with a leaky roof that, she said, the landlord was slow to fix.
+
+“You know that I don’t run to you for everything because I know that you have a whole state and the country to contend with,” Wilson-Davis wrote to Bush on Oct. 13, 2006. “I am in a position where I need some intervention and direction from YOU!”
+
+Bush wrote back, telling Wilson-Davis that “I will work on both issues.” He told her that as a public school, “you should receive the same benefits . . . that all public schools receive.”
+
+Bush attempted to connect her with FEMA, according to e-mails that have been released publicly. But Wilson-Davis said she worried the process was moving too slowly. Fearing for her students’ safety, she used the school’s money to fix the roof.
+
+The landlord, Patrick Beauregard, sued. The repairs violated the lease, and he wanted the school out. Beauregard did not respond to several phone calls from The Post.
+
+Fair and Wilson-Davis wondered: Is it time to get Bush more involved? Fair opposed the idea. His reasoning: Beauregard was black, as were Fair and Wilson-Davis. Some racial lines, he felt, could not be crossed.
+
+“There was nothing in the marrow of my bones that could allow me to ask some white man to bail me out for what a black man did,” Fair said.
+
+Wilson-Davis reached out to Bush anyway. She recalled Bush telling her that his hands were tied. The $500,000 debt was too much for him to recoup. The legal fees continued to mount, and debt grew to $1 million. Parents held walks and protests to generate attention, but their efforts were futile. They wondered what happened to their powerful founder.
+
+After Bush left office in 2007, he made a lucrative reentry into the private sector.
+
+Asked at the time about the school’s difficulties, Bush told the Miami Herald, “I am not aware what this is about.”
+
+In 2008, the county school board shut the school down.
+
+Wilson-Davis was so distraught, she said, that she could not bring herself to find work for two years. One day, she got a phone call from a concerned Wilson, the former school board member who introduced her to Bush. Wilson, who was Bush’s most ardent opponent when she was in the state legislature and today is a congresswoman, had a new recommendation: “Grab your purse and start working again.”
+
+As she discusses her experience with the school, Wilson-Davis likes to focus on the successes. She estimated at least 85 percent of her students graduated from high school and 40 percent went on to college.
+
+“I don’t think [Bush] was a racist or tried to pimp out these children; that wasn’t his heart,” Wilson-Davis said. “But I think it’s a fair question for a community to want to hold him accountable.
+
+Even so, Wilson-Davis retains warm feelings for Bush. The last time Wilson-Davis texted Bush was in 2011. She hoped to catch up with him during his trip to a majority-black high school in Florida that was excelling on standardized tests.
+
+That day, Bush was sitting in the front row of the auditorium with President Obama. Security stopped her outside. The room was so crowded with so many well-wishers that his past protégée couldn’t get in.
+
+Ed O’Keefe, Steven Rich and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+552,America is criminalizing Black teachers: Atlanta’s cheating scandal and the racist underbelly of education reform,"I am an educator. I am a Black woman who may someday mother a Black child. I have taught other Black mothers’ children. Much of my educational success in elementary school is directly attributable to high performance on standardized tests that caused my white teachers to notice me and intervene on my behalf to get me “tracked” into higher-achieving classrooms. I believe all children deserve access to a good, high-quality, public education.
+
+Therefore, I don’t have to condone cheating in any form (and I don’t) to assert that what has happened in Atlanta to these teachers is a travesty. The pictures that emerged last week of handcuffed Black schoolteachers being led out of Southern courtrooms in one of the country’s largest urban Black school systems were absolutely heartbreaking.
+
+Scapegoating Black teachers for failing in a system that is designed for Black children, in particular, not to succeed is the real corruption here. Since the early 1990s, we have watched the deprofessionalization of teaching, achieved through the proliferation of “teacher fellow” programs and the massive conservative-led effort to defund public education in major urban areas throughout the country. There is no longer a consensus that a good public education — a hallmark of American democracy — should be considered a public good.
+
+Black children have for generations been the primary victims of this continuing social mendacity about the national value of education. More than 51 percent of children who attend public schools live in poverty. In Georgia, the percentage of Black children living in poverty hovers right around 39 percent. For Latino children, the number is consistently over 40 percent. Nationally, the number for Black children is 39 percent, according to most recent data, and 33 percent for Latino youth.
+
+Eighty percent of children in Atlanta Public Schools are Black. Eleven percent are white and 3 percent are Latino. However, only 50 percent of children in Atlanta’s Gifted and Talented programs are Black, whereas 40 percent are white. More disturbingly, 98 percent of all students expelled from Atlanta public schools during the 2009-2010 academic school year were Black.
+
+These numbers taken together paint an abysmal picture of students who are disproportionately poor, over-disciplined, and systematically “tracked” out of high-performing classrooms. And yet we expect teachers to work magic in conditions that are set up for failure.
+
+Lest you think this is merely an Atlanta problem, over at the Crunk Feminist Collective, Susana Morris tells a similar story of attending a predominantly Black high school in Florida with advanced classes that were overwhelmingly white.
+
+Her story mirrors my own. In Louisiana in the 1980s and 1990s, students took two standardized tests. One (the LEAP test) measured basic proficiency and the other (the California Achievement Test) measured more advanced proficiencies. In the third grade, I scored 100 percent on the LEAP test, the only student in my overwhelmingly white class to do so. The teacher Mrs. Callender called me up to the front of the room and bragged about me to all the other students. That same year, on the CAT Test, I scored in the 89 percent percentile.
+
+Meanwhile, I noticed one day during class that several of my white classmates, among them my best friend Amanda, were all mysteriously led out of class and then returned later, with no explanation. When I asked Amanda where she’d been, she said school officials had made her take a test, but she wasn’t clear what for. She never mentioned it again.
+
+The next year, fourth grade, I walked into a classroom and met Beatrice Gaulden, one of only three Black academic teachers I would ever have. With her neon green and yellow Hammer-pants, her penchant for drinking eight tall glasses of water a day, and her strict instructions each morning  — we were not to approach her desk, but rather to wait until she moved to a stool in the front of the room for open discussion time — she was a wonder. Mrs. Gaulden is a character in most of my childhood stories of transformation because she was so pivotal to my own sense of self-worth as an outspoken, bossy, loquacious, bespectacled, ponytailed Black girl in a predominantly white classroom.
+
+Because of Mrs. Gaulden’s instruction, my test scores leaped from the 89th percentile to the 99th percentile within one year of instruction. She never taught to the test. She simply taught.
+
+That year, the Louisiana Gifted and Talented Program came calling for me, as they had called for my friends the year before. I took the battery of tests they offered, no doubt because Mrs. Gaulden had asked them to look at my case. They came back to her (she would tell me years later) and told her that I had not passed the tests. She implored them to rescore my assessment. They came back to her and reported an error in their scoring. (As if.) And so I became a “gifted and talented” student, with even smaller classes, more specialized instruction, early opportunities to take the ACT and SAT, and to travel. I soared with the additional resources provided by the G/T program.
+
+But my educational access was due to one magical Black teacher who saw a spark in me and nurtured it. Mrs. Gaulden nurtured, taught and challenged all her students regardless of race, but she saw in me a Black girl who needed extra guidance, and a little push, and she willingly gave it. Over the past generation, we have watched the GOP, helped along by an impotent Democratic Party, systematically dismantle funding for public education, underpay teachers, and allow local school systems to institute punitive disciplinary measures that have turned our schools into a prison pipeline. At exactly the same moment, these reformers and their political counterparts George W. Bush (No Child Left Behind) and Barack Obama (Race to the Top) have instituted high-stakes testing, tied to financial incentives for teachers, as the solution to the structural risks overwhelmingly facing children of color. Meanwhile, test-cheating scandals have proliferated in locales across the country. In other urban locales like Baltimore, Houston and Philadelphia principals and teachers were fired and/or stripped of their licenses to teach. This is a punishment that fits the crime. Then there’s Michelle Rhee, the famed former chancellor of D.C. Public Schools who was accused of creating the very same culture of fear about test scores that Superintendent Beverly Hall has been accused of creating in Atlanta. Hall was charged with racketeering. So why was Rhee not subject to prosecution when test-score irregularities emerged in the District? (Bruce Dixon was already asking as much two years ago over at Black Agenda Report.) Not only has Rhee not been prosecuted, but she maintains a fairly high level of bipartisan support from conservatives and political centrists for her views on education reform. Hall’s trial was indefinitely postponed last year due to stage IV breast cancer. She died last month at 68 years old. Locking up Black women under the guise of caring about Black children is an unbelievable move in an educational environment that systematically denies both care and opportunity to Black children. Locking up Black women for racketeering when the system couldn’t be bothered to lock up even one of the bankers who gave disproportionate amounts of terrible home loans to Black women leading to a national economic crash and a disproportionate amount of home foreclosures among Black women in 2008 is patently unjust. Given that public schools are largely funded through property taxes and that Black children are overwhelming reared by Black single mothers, the failure to vigorously prosecute the financial institutions and lenders that gutted Black neighborhoods means that the system co-signed corporate acts of institutional violence against Black mothers and children, and against neighborhood schools in Black communities. But now we are expected to believe that prosecuting these teachers as racketeers is an act of justice. Nothing is just about making Black women sacrificial lambs of an educational system hellbent on throwing Black children away. The images of their handcuffed Black bodies being led in shame from the courtroom gives Black parents angry about the miseducation of their children a convenient target for their angst and outrage over a failing system. Meanwhile, the real racket – privatization and defunding of public schools, diversion of taxpayer resources away from education, and increasing political clout and payouts for school reformers proselytizing the false gospel of high stakes testing – gets obscured. And white children still get educated well, either in private schools or in suburban schools funded through a solid property tax base. Everything I am today, I owe to my mother and to a Black teacher who saw a spark in me and nurtured it. For so many exceptionally achieving Black people, a providential encounter with a Black teacher is the singular thing that made the difference. No other group of people systematically and structurally love and care about Black children more than Black mothers and Black (usually female) teachers. They have been the ones holding aloft the banner emblazoned with the revolutionary idea that Black Lives Matter, before it was ever a slogan upon which to build a movement. An attack on Black teachers is an attack on Black children, Black families, and Black communities. We should stand in solidarity with these teachers and these students and say, “Not on our watch.”",REAL
+3320,VA program to provide private care stumbling out of the gate,"A year after explosive accusations that patients had died waiting for appointments at the VA Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, the administration’s path to making health care more accessible for America’s veterans remains on shaky ground.
+
+Critics say a program rolled out to give certain veterans the option of government-funded private care is experiencing serious bumps: according to reports, only 27,000 vets have taken advantage of the Choice Card program since it was launched in November.
+
+Technically, to be eligible to see a non-VA doctor, a veteran must be at least 40 miles away from the nearest VA hospital, or have waited at least 30 days for an appointment.
+
+But veterans groups say confusion about eligibility remains the big problem – not everyone qualifies, but some vets who thought they would reported they were turned away. Some say the process isn’t clear, and bureaucratic red tape has led to conflicting messages to veterans about whether or not they can access the system. Others have just gotten responses that weren't very helpful.
+
+Air Force veteran Pat Baughman, for example, told Fox News he lives about 50 miles away from the nearest VA hospital in Bay Springs, Miss. -- approximately a one-hour drive. But when Baughman called the Choice Card phone number last November, he was told to drive more than three hours away to a hospital in Natchez, Miss.
+
+“It didn’t make sense at all. I told them that’s longer than what I’m driving now. So they said they’d get back with me,” Baughman said, adding he received a call the next day and was told to drive to another location instead -- two hours away.
+
+Baughman told FoxNews.com he finally gave up on the program and is using Medicare to pay his medical bills at a local doctor.
+
+He's not alone in his frustration. According to a survey conducted by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) in February, 80 percent of the 1,068 respondents who believed they were eligible to see a private doctor in lieu of VA care found out they were not. It's unclear whether this is due mostly to misperceptions about the program by veterans, or missteps by VA officials.
+
+“Here we are in March and there is a lot of confusion,” said Garry Augustine, executive director of the Disabled American Veterans (DAV), which is advocating with other major veterans organizations for some clarity in the legislation. “I think when you rush into a new program you are going to have growing pains.”
+
+President Obama made his first visit on Friday to the scandal-scarred Phoenix center and referenced Choice Card -- praising the program, while acknowledging there was more to do in restoring trust in VA programs overall. Congress passed that Choice Card legislation last July, after an inspector general report on mismanagement and manipulation of wait-time data fueled calls for VA reform. The scandal also resulted in the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki in May.
+
+Cards went out to eligible vets first, and then to all 9 million vets who currently receive VA care as of Aug. 1 -- in case they, too, meet the eligibility standards. It is up to the card holder to call the VA to see if they qualify and if so, they are then sent to a third-party administrator for a list of participating doctors.
+
+One area of confusion is that according to the rules, a veteran must be 40 miles away from the nearest VA -- “as the crow flies.” But this can lead to unequal treatment, since residents in areas with winding roads, or simply crowded roads, could face a longer drive than others.
+
+Augustine said about 500,000 should be eligible under the distance requirements, but the ""as the crow flies"" standard is throwing everything off. He and others are behind legislation that would clarify the rule to accommodate a 40-mile driving distance.
+
+""The VA is construing the eligibility criteria as it relates to the 40-mile rule so narrowly that it is excluding too many who are far away from the care that they need,” wrote a group of senators to VA Secretary Robert McDonald on Feb. 25, urging him to not only consider tweaking the distance requirement, but to look at reports that veterans who need specialty care should be able to access that, even if there is a VA clinic that does not provide specialists within the 40-mile spectrum.
+
+This was a problem for Minnesota veteran Paul Walker, who has cancer. He told local KARE-11 that he was turned down for private care for cancer treatment because there was a VA clinic within 20 miles of his home -- but the closest VA hospital which offers the treatment he needs reportedly is more than 50 miles away.
+
+""I tried using it and I got flatly turned down,"" said Walker, who told the network that at the clinic, ""all they do is dental work there and eye work and some basic kinds of different minor things... but I have cancer stage 4.""
+
+So, he said, ""I don't get a choice. I get to die. So, to me that's not a choice.""
+
+Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., has 63 counties and no VA hospital in his district. He also is joining members in moving legislation that could help people like Walker. He told McDonald in a recent hearing that he has been fielding complaints from veterans on this issue, too.
+
+“I got an email by a veteran who drives 340 miles one way for cardiology,” he said. “If the VA choice program can’t provide something closer for him then we have to re-look how we are implementing” the program.
+
+The Choice Card program was allocated $10 billion and is supposed to be temporary until the system gets up to speed with taking care of veterans in house, which would mean getting through the backlogs plaguing the nation’s VA hospitals. Aside from the Choice Card, there are other separate options for veterans to access private care, but veterans have to be referred by the VA directly, said Augustine.
+
+Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who was one of the senators on the recent letter to McDonald, is sponsoring a bill to clarify the 40-mile rule. He says he doesn’t feel the VA’s heart is into providing private care.
+
+Here is a link to the bill introduction if you want to put it in there:
+
+“The concern I have is that the VA has a mentality against outside care, even in the circumstances of (when veterans) can’t get care within 30 days or within 40 miles,” Moran said in a statement.
+
+For his part, McDonald has said he, too, is not satisfied with the low number of veterans accessing the new program and has agreed the complaints are valid.
+
+“We’re talking about how we can do a better way of marketing it,” he said in the February hearing at the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Further addressing the distance issue in relation to specialty care, he said, “distance from the place where you can’t get the service seems like a relatively weak measure."" As for the “crow flies” issue, “we can look at the 40 miles, change the interpretation ... so we can make the program more robust. I am for whatever it takes to satisfy veterans.”
+
+A representative with the VA did not return a request for comment on Friday.
+
+Augustine says that consistency and communication and anything they can do to end the confusion – whether it is on the VA’s end or the veteran’s – would be helpful.",REAL
+2265,The conservative case for gay marriage,"Led by conservative Justice and Reagan appointee, Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court ruled Friday, in a 5-4 decision, in favor of same-sex marriage. Despite the often binary depiction in the media, this decision is in fact a landmark victory for conservative principles. In fact, Friday’s decision is a momentous win for the founding principle of the Republican Party: individual liberty.
+
+Consistent conservatives should frame their views in accordance with the fundamental belief that individuals, not governments, have the right to determine the course of their own lives.
+
+Fellow conservatives, particularly within the Republican Party, typically do a good job arguing against totalitarian, one-size-fits-all approaches to policy. What works for a family in New York City, might not work in Jenison, Michigan, or Tulsa, Oklahoma.
+
+It is for this reason that Republicans and conservatives have embraced issues such as school choice, which gives parents the right to choose the method of schooling that best fits their child’s needs. Parents, not governments, should decide what is best for their family.
+
+Republicans and American conservatives have also been remarkably consistent on taxation. Consistent conservatives believe people should keep more of the money they work so hard to earn—not because the vulnerable don’t deserve assistance, but because individuals can and will make better, and more effective financial and charitable choices with their money than government bureaucrats.
+
+The list of important conservative positions, all relating back to the fundamental principle of individual choice, goes on and on: property rights; freedom of association; and freedom of speech, etc.
+
+But when the topic of gay marriage arises, some conservatives have not been consistent.  The debate on marriage within the Republican Party has been hijacked by those who wish to dictate their beliefs onto others. Rather than professing consistent, conservative beliefs, some within the party have taken to advocating for a remarkably liberal, totalitarian approach.
+
+This hypocrisy has not been lost on the electorate.  Millennials, possibly the most naturally conservative-leaning constituency, laugh at the inconsistencies they hear coming from “conservative” voices on issues like gay marriage.
+
+Republican presidential candidate and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is one of those inconsistent conservatives.  Walker immediately lashed out at the Supreme Court’s decision, proposing an astonishingly big-government response. Walker called for a Constitutional Amendment, ensuring that politicians will forever be able to dictate whom one should or should not be able to marry. In other words, Walker wants to cement the will of politicians into our daily lives.
+
+Walker has taken a stunningly liberal position.  As conservative Justice Kennedy wrote in his opinion, “marriage is a keystone of the Nation’s social order. States have contributed to the fundamental character of marriage by placing it at the center of many facets of the legal and social order.” Indeed, marriage today is as much as it has ever been an important, legal contract—one which carries with it profound financial and emotional ramifications.
+
+Walker, and others like him, seem to ignore the real-life implications of contemporary marriage, instead focusing solely on a religious definition of marriage with which they happen to agree.
+
+Walker, like many religious conservatives, confuse civil marriage with the religious blessing of the church or synagogue.  In today’s society, the word marriage means both a government document and a church’s blessing.  To pretend like there is only one definition is to deny reality. Confusing the issue even further, politicians have written the word “marriage” into the tax code, where religious conservatives erroneously assume tax benefits refer to their definition of marriage.
+
+As Justice Kennedy wrote in his decision, “same-sex couples are denied the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage and are consigned to an instability many opposite-sex couples would find intolerable.” If this “constellation of benefits” was intended only for those wed under the auspices of the church, what right would opposite-sex couples married on the courthouse steps have to it? The answer is clearly that politicians didn’t mean that one must have a blessed union to jointly file their taxes.
+
+Republicans who profess their admiration for individual liberty—for the power and freedom of choice and laissez faire—must stay consistent.
+
+The only true conservative position, the individual right of marriage for all, has been affirmed by the Supreme Court. It’s time for consistent conservatives to come out in favor of the Court's ruling.
+
+Richard Grenell is a  Fox News Contributor. He served as the spokesman for four U.S. Ambassadors to the U.N. including John Negroponte, John Danforth, John Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad. Follow him on Twitter@RichardGrenell.",REAL
+2148,Earth had warmest winter on record,"The Earth just had its warmest winter on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Wednesday.
+
+Winter is defined as the months of December, January and February in the Northern Hemisphere, and 90% of the world's population lives in the Northern Hemisphere. Those months are summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
+
+Specifically, the Northern Hemisphere had its warmest winter on record, and the Southern Hemisphere had its fourth-warmest summer.
+
+It's also the warmest year-to-date on record, NOAA said. February itself was the second-warmest February on record.
+
+Temperatures for December–February beat the previous winter record in 2007 by 0.05 degrees, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center reported. Global temperature records go back to 1880.
+
+One of the planet's only land areas that had a cooler-than-average winter was eastern North America, which includes the eastern United States and eastern Canada.
+
+Areas that saw record warmth those three months include the western U.S. and part of central Siberia and eastern Mongolia.
+
+A separate global temperature measurement from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, released Tuesday, said it was the second-warmest winter on record for those three months.
+
+Some of the warmer-than-average temperatures over the winter are because of a nascent El Niño —- a climate pattern when warm sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific influence weather around the world.
+
+The warming effects El Niño increase the chances that this year could end up being the warmest on record — beating out the 2014 record.",REAL
+7999,Tired of Western Propaganda Against Russia? Here's Vladimir Putin’s Perspective,". Tired of Western Propaganda Against Russia? Here's Vladimir Putin’s Perspective Vladimir Putin in particular, and Russia in general, have been the focus of an intensive high-drama ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/tired-of-western-propaganda-against.html Vladimir Putin in particular, and Russia in general, have been the focus of an intensive high-drama propaganda campaign of late. Are you buying it? For the time being, Russophobia has replaced Islamophobia as the driving force behind the lies. Various US officials have been frantically warning Americans that the Russians are behind everything: hacking the DNC, controlling Trump, influencing the election and breaking the Syrian ceasefire agreement. They might as well add making your girlfriend break up with you, making your toast get burnt and making your car run out of fuel for all the evidence they have presented.Many of these totally unfounded allegations stem from (naturally) the Clinton campaign, home to career criminals Bill and Hillary Clinton , who are desperately seeking to find something to gain some sort of shred of popularity or advantage over Trump, who fills up arenas with 1000s of people more easily than Clinton can fill a high school gym with 50. Many US officials and war hawks are trying to get in on the action; CIA man Mike Morell indicated it would be a good idea to covertly kill Russians to make them “pay a price”. Hillary Clinton called Vladimir Putin the “grand godfather of extreme nationalism” and blamed him for the rising popularity of right-wing leaders; and even standing VP Joe Biden came out and said that: “We’re sending a message to Putin … it will be at the time of our choosing and under the circumstances that have the greatest impact.”It seems there is no depth to which some US leaders won’t stoop in order to gain some political advantage, even it means lying, demonizing and destroying geopolitical partnerships in order to garner a few brownie points. Russophobia is in full swing before the US Presidential Election to distract American voters Vladimir Putin: It’s All About Distraction During Election Season You would think Russian President Vladimir President would be agitated by all of this mud-slinging.At times he has been, for instance when he issued a warning a few months ago about an impending WW3 due to NATO’s constant aggression and advancement towards Russian borders.However, judging by his own words and mostly calm demeanor, he has seen through the agenda and understands what is going on. Putin spells out how it’s all inflamed rhetoric before an election season, an old trick used by politicians to distract when they have no meaningful solutions for internal and domestic problems. Thus, the Russophobia drama may well die down after the election.Here is Vladimir Putin in his own words :“You can expect anything from our American friends … the only novelty is that for the first time, on the highest level, the United States has admitted involvement in these activities, and to some extent threatened [us] – which of course does not meet the standards of international communication. “As if we didn’t know that US Government bodies snoop on and wiretap anyone? Everyone knows this …“Apparently, they are nervous. The question is why. I think there is a reason. You know, in an election campaign, the current government carefully crafts a pre-election strategy, and any government, especially when seeking re-election, always has unresolved issues. “They need to show, to explain to the voters why they remain unresolved. In the US, there are many such problems … for example, the massive public debt is a time bomb for the US economy and global financial system … more examples can be cited in foreign policy … in these conditions, many choose to resort to the usual tactics of distracting voters from their problems … try to create an enemy and rally the nation against that enemy …“Iran and the Iranian threat did not work well for that. Russia is a more interesting story.”And that’s exactly what this whole thing is: a giant story. However, as Voltaire once said, if you can make someone believe absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities. Let’s see what else Vladimir Putin has to say on other topics of interest. Blame everything on the Russians Russian Hacking: A Laughable Claim so the Clintons and DNC Can Try to Avoid Culpability Let’s face it: the whole Russophobia affair is about avoiding blame, dodging responsibility and evading liability.Thanks to WikiLeaks, Project Veritas and many other sources, we know the entire Hillary Clinton campaign has been rigged beyond belief. Fake primaries, fake speeches, fake images, fake videos, fake crowds and fake supporters.There is seemingly no depth of criminality to which that woman won’t sink. She’s selling out the presidency before she even gets there, such as the stunt of trying to promise future presidential executive orders to mega donors. There is not a shred of evidence that Russia is affiliated with WikiLeaks or behind any of the DNC hacks. As this Zero Hedge article NSA Whistleblower: US Intelligence Worker Likely Behind DNC Leaks, Not Russia states:“On “Judge Napolitano Chambers,” the Judge said that while the DNC, government officials, and the Clinton campaign all accuse the Russians of hacking into the DNC servers, “the Russians had nothing to do with it.”Napolitano then mentioned Binney, arguing the NSA veteran and whistleblower who “developed the software that the NSA now uses, which allows it to capture not just metadata but content of every telephone call, text message, email in the United States of every person in [the country]” knew the NSA had hacked the DNC — not the Russians.“If Judge Napolitano and Binney are right and the NSA did hack the DNC, what was the motive?According to the Judge, “members of the intelligence community simply do not want [Clinton] to be president of the United States.”“She doesn’t know how to handle state secrets,” Napolitano continued. And since “some of the state secrets that she revealed used the proper true names of American intelligence agents operating undercover in the Middle East,” some of these agents were allegedly captured and killed, prompting NSA agents to feel compelled to act. “Whether NSA agents hacked the DNC or not, one thing is clear: there’s no real evidence linking the DNC and Arizona and Illinois voting system hacks to the Russian government.” The Mythical “Russian Threat” Vladimir Putin directly addressed another mythical story, that of the so-called Russian threat and Russian aggression, at the recent Valdai forum in Sochi from October 24-27, 2016:“There is another mechanism to ensure the transatlantic security, European security, the OC security and their attempt at turning this organization (NATO) into an instrument of someone’s political interests. So what the OC is doing is simply void. Mythical threats are devised like the so-called Russian military threat. “Certainly this can be (used to) gain some advantage, get new budgets, make your allies comply with your demands, make NATO deploy the equipment and troops closer to our border … Russia is not trying to attack anyone. “That would be ridiculous … The population of Europe is 300 million … and the population of the US is 300 million, while the population of Russia is 140 million, yet such menaces are served as a pretext. Hysteria has been fueled in the US with regard to Russia’s alleged influence with the current presidential election.”“Is there anyone who seriously thinks that Russia can influence the choice of the American people? Is the US a banana republic? The US is a great power. If I’m wrong please correct me.” Here’s what he had to say about who the real aggressor is when it comes to the US and Russia: “Is it know to you that Russia, in the 90s, completely halted (as did the USSR) any strategic aviation in the further afield regions of patrol, i.e. not in the closer abroad. We halted such activity completely. “US geostrategic aviation however, with nuclear weapons on board. They continued to encircle us! What for? Who are you concerned about? Or why are you threatening us? “We continued with the non-patrol year after year. It is only since about 3 years ago that we restarted aviation patrol further abroad. Which party is the provocateur here? Is it us?“We have only 2 military bases abroad. They are known areas of terrorism dangers … US bases on the other hand are all over the world. And you are telling me that I am the aggressor? Have you any common sense?“What are US forces doing in Europe, including nuclear weaponry? What business have they got there? Listen to me. Our military budget, while increased slightly from last year, in the dollar equivalent, is about US$50 billion.“The military budget of the Pentagon is almost 10 times that amount. $575 billion, I think Congress singed off on. And you’re telling me I’m the aggressor here? Have you no common sense at all? “Is it us putting our forces on the border of the US? Or other states? Is it NATO, or who, that is moving their bases closer to us? Military infrastructure! It’s not us. “Does anyone even listen to us? Or try to have some kind of dialogue with us? The repeated answer we get is ‘mind your own business’ and ‘each country can choose its own security measures’. Very well, so will we …“And finally, on the antiballistic missile defense system, who was it that exited from the treaty which was vital to the entire system of international security? Was it us? No. It was the States. “In a one-sided way, they simply withdrew from the treaty. Now they are threatening us, turning their missiles towards us, not only from Alaska, but also from Europe too …“We want to develop normal relations in the sphere of security, in the fight against terrorism, in the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. We want to work together with you … so long as you want that too.” More David Icke humor: right now everything is the fault of Vladimir Putin and the Russians US Repeatedly Broke Its Promises to Russia and Destroyed Trust The Western MSM is so one-sided in its coverage of geopolitical events like Ukraine and Syria. Anyone not toeing the line with US-UK-NATO interests is painted in a bad light. In point of fact, it has actually been the US who has been breaking agreements with Russia since the end of the Cold War. US leaders lied to Russian leaders at the time, by promising that NATO would not extend any further eastward, and possibly even hinting that Russia could join NATO.As Eric Zuesse explains in his article America Trashes NATO Founding Act; Rushes Weapons to Russia’s Borders :“The NATO Founding Act was agreed to between the US and Russia in 1997 in order to provide to Russia’s leader Boris Yeltsin some modicum of assurance that America wouldn’t invade his country. “When his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev had ended the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991, the representatives of US President GHW Bush told him that NATO wouldn’t move «one inch to the east» (toward Russia), but as soon as Gorbachev committed himself to end the Cold War, Bush told his agents, regarding what they had all promised to Gorbachev (Bush’s promise which had been conveyed through them), «To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t».“In other words: Bush’s prior instructions to them were merely his lies to Gorbachev, his lies to say that the US wouldn’t try to conquer Russia (move its forces eastward to Russia’s borders); but, now, since Gorbachev was committed and had already agreed that East Germany was to be reunited with and an extension of West Germany (and the process for doing that had begun), Bush pulled that rug of lies out from under the end of the Cold War …”Bill Clinton carried on the great American legacy of exceptionalism (that is, excepting themselves from obeying international law) spearheaded by Daddy Bush of surrounding and dominating Russia by allowing NATO into the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Russia got shafted by trusting the US numerous times after the fall of the Soviet Union. Here’s Vladimir Putin once again on America’s broken promises (in April 2016):“In the early 2000s, we agreed with the Americans to destroy weapons-grade plutonium, on both sides. We were talking about the excessive amounts that were manufactured by both the US and Russia. This is the enriched uranium from which nuclear weapons are made. 34000 tonnes, from both sides. “We signed an agreement, and decided that this material would be destroyed in a specific manner. It would be destroyed in an industrial way – for which special plants needed to be built. We fulfilled our obligations – we built the necessary plant. Our American partners did not. “Moreover, recently they announced that rather than destroy the enriched material in the manner that we agreed, and signed an international agreement on, that they would dilute it and store it in a holding capacity. This means they retain the potential to bring it back …“Surely our American partners must understand that, jokes are one thing, such as creating smear campaigns against Russia, but questions of nuclear security are another thing entirely … they must learn to fulfill their promises.“They once said they would close down Guantanamo. And? Is it closed? No.”Incidentally, this is the exact same plutonium agreement which made the news last month, when as reported on October 3rd, 216, Russia suspended their deal with the US on disposal of plutonium from decommissioned nuclear warheads.A decree signed by Vladimir Putin lists “the radical change in the environment, a threat to strategic stability posed by the hostile actions of the US against Russia, and the inability of the US to deliver on the obligation to dispose of excessive weapons plutonium under international treaties, as well as the need to take swift action to defend Russian security” as the reasons for why Russia chose to suspend the deal. Conclusion: Wake up and Smell the Russophobia Expect Vladimir Putin and Russia to keep being demonized by the Clintons – and more importantly the NWO manipulators who so desperately want them in power. Although the Clintons are a powerful modern American mafia family, replete with a long body count behind them, it’s important to remember they are lackeys for far greater and more pervasive powers (check out some of Hillary’s lovey-dovey letters to Lynn Forester de Rothschild here ). There’s a lot at stake here. Right now, Vladimir Putin and Russia are being used with the sole purpose of getting Clinton elected. Although Putin is not perfect and has his own dark side, he deserves respect for standing his ground and refusing to become another US puppet. If we are to believe his own words, he has no qualm with Americans or even America itself, but rather the selfish, imperialistic and murderous agenda of the NWO agents running the USA:“We have a great deal of respect and love for the United States, and especially for the American people … [however] the expansion of jurisdiction by one nation beyond the territory of its borders, to the rest of the world, is unacceptable and destructive for international relations.”It’s up to the American public to switch off CNN (Clinton News Network) and all the other duplicitous MSM channels and get truly informed. Vladimir Putin is reaching out his hand to America, in the hope that enough Americans can reclaim their country and work together with other nations in peace. On the issue of Vladimir Putin and Russia, the MSM is not just one-sided, it’s outright lying. By Makia Freeman Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+665,"As Clinton moves to brink of nomination, Sanders eyes California upset","While Hillary Clinton moved to the brink of clinching the Democratic presidential nomination with weekend wins in Caribbean contests – and could pass the milestone with a victory Tuesday evening in New Jersey – polls show Bernie Sanders still could deliver a symbolic wound by taking the Democratic stronghold of California.
+
+Several recent polls have shown the Vermont senator closing Clinton’s lead in California and bringing the race into toss-up territory. The latest, from CBS News, showed Clinton up just 2 points over Sanders, 49-47 percent.
+
+The same poll gave Clinton a comfortable double-digit lead in New Jersey, which is voting Tuesday alongside California and four other states in the last major primary day of the year.
+
+Thanks to strong victories for the Democratic front-runner over the weekend in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, she is now in striking distance of the nomination -- 26 delegates short of the 2,383 needed to win, according to an Associated Press count. New Jersey could put her over the top Tuesday evening, before California even wraps up.
+
+But an after-the-fact victory for Sanders in the Golden State would nevertheless be a blow to Clinton, who is trying to not only clinch the nomination but unify the party and nudge Sanders out of the race for good. A California win could energize Sanders and his supporters and encourage him to follow through on vows to take his fight all the way to the convention.
+
+In a sign of what’s at stake, both candidates were barnstorming California ahead of Tuesday’s elections.
+
+As the Puerto Rico race was called, Clinton was on stage in Sacramento, rallying voters in California.
+
+Clinton captured at least 33 of the 60 delegates at stake in Puerto Rico. Sanders garnered at least 20, with seven outstanding. Clinton has 1,809 pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses; Sanders has 1,520. When including superdelegates, her lead over Sanders is substantial -- 2,357 to 1,566.
+
+The former New York senator and secretary of state is all but certain to secure the Democratic nomination Tuesday, when six states hold primaries in which a total of 694 delegates are available.
+
+Like Clinton, Sanders made little mention of the outcome in Puerto Rico's primary. He said during an evening rally in San Diego that Democratic leaders should take notice that the ""energy and grassroots activism"" that will be crucial to the party in the fall ""is with us, not Hillary Clinton.""
+
+He pointed to polls showing him faring better than Clinton in head-to-head matchups with Trump and his strength among Democratic voters under the age of 45.
+
+""If the Democratic leadership wants a campaign that will not only retain the White House but regain the Senate and win governors' chairs all across this country, we are that campaign,"" he said.
+
+While those watching the results in Puerto Rico focused on their impact on the race for the Democratic nomination, the focus of many voters on the island was its ongoing economic crisis.
+
+Both Sanders and Clinton had pledged to help as the island's government tries to restructure $70 billion worth of public debt the governor has said is unpayable.
+
+Two weeks before the primary, Sanders criticized a rescue deal negotiated by U.S. House leaders and the Obama administration as having colonial overtones. In a letter to fellow Senate Democrats, Sanders said the House bill to create a federal control board and allow some restructuring of the territory's $70 billion debt would make ""a terrible situation even worse.""
+
+He later promised to introduce his own legislation to help the island. Campaigning on the island last month, Sanders promised to fight against ""vulture funds"" on Wall Street that he said would profit off the fiscal crisis.
+
+""That bill is anti-democratic and it's not in the best interest of Puerto Rico,"" said Jorge Gaskins, a 67-year-old farmer who supports Sanders and opposes a control board.
+
+Clinton has said she has serious concerns about the board's powers, but believes the legislation should move forward, or ""too many Puerto Ricans will continue to suffer.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2091,"Warming of oceans due to climate change is unstoppable, say US scientists","The warming of the oceans due to climate change is now unstoppable after record temperatures last year, bringing additional sea-level rise, and raising the risks of severe storms, US government climate scientists said on Thursday.
+
+The annual State of the Climate in 2014 report, based on research from 413 scientists from 58 countries, found record warming on the surface and upper levels of the oceans, especially in the North Pacific, in line with earlier findings of 2014 as the hottest year on record.
+
+Global sea-level also reached a record high, with the expansion of those warming waters, keeping pace with the 3.2 ± 0.4 mm per year trend in sea level growth over the past two decades, the report said.
+
+
+
+Scientists said the consequences of those warmer ocean temperatures would be felt for centuries to come – even if there were immediate efforts to cut the carbon emissions fuelling changes in the oceans.
+
+
+
+“I think of it more like a fly wheel or a freight train. It takes a big push to get it going but it is moving now and will contiue to move long after we continue to pushing it,” Greg Johnson, an oceanographer at Noaa’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, told a conference call with reporters.
+
+
+
+“Even if we were to freeze greenhouse gases at current levels, the sea would actually continue to warm for centuries and millennia, and as they continue to warm and expand the sea levels will continue to rise,” Johnson said.
+
+
+
+On the west coast of the US, freakishly warm temperatures in the Pacific – 4 or 5F above normal – were already producing warmer winters, as well as worsening drought conditions by melting the snowpack, he said.
+
+
+
+The extra heat in the oceans was also contributing to more intense storms, Tom Karl, director of Noaa’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said.
+
+
+
+The report underlined 2014 as a banner year for the climate, setting record or near record levels for temperature extremes, and loss of glaciers and sea ice, and reinforcing decades-old pattern to changes to the climate system.
+
+
+
+Four independent data sets confirmed 2014 as the hottest year on record, with much of that heat driven by the warming of the oceans.
+
+Globally 90% of the excess heat caused by the rise in greenhouse gas emissions is absorbed by the oceans.
+
+More than 20 countries in Europe set new heat records, with Africa, Asia and Australia also experiencing near-record heat. The east coast of North America was the only region to experience cooler than average conditions.
+
+
+
+Alaska experienced temperatures 18F warmer than average. Spring break-up came to the Arctic 20-30 days earlier than the 20th century average.
+
+
+
+“The prognosis is to expect a continuation of what we have seen,” Karl said.
+
+",REAL
+4438,"Iran's leader rejects foreign access to military sites, scientists","Iran's supreme leader vowed Wednesday he will not allow international inspection of Iran's military sites or access to Iranian scientists under any nuclear agreement with world powers.
+
+Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told military commanders Wednesday that Iran will resist ""coercion and excessive demands"" from America and other world powers.
+
+Negotiators from Iran and a six nation group — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — have launched a new round of talks in Vienna focused on reaching a final deal that curbs Iran's nuclear program in return for lifting economic sanctions. The two sides reached a framework agreement in March and hope to strike a final deal by June 30.
+
+A fact sheet on the framework accord issued by the U.S. State Department said Iran would be required to grant the U.N. nuclear agency access to any ""suspicious sites.""
+
+But Khamenei indicated that the Americans are increasing their demands that international inspection of Iran's military sites and interviews with Iranian scientists be included in the final deal.
+
+""The impudent and brazen enemy expects that we allow them talk to our scientists and researchers about a fundamental local achievement but no such permission will be allowed,"" Khamenei told military commanders in Tehran Wednesday, in remarks broadcast on state TV. ""No inspection of any military site or interview with nuclear scientists will be allowed.""
+
+Khamenei said interviewing Iranian nuclear scientists would be an affront to Iran's dignity.
+
+""I will not allow foreigners to interview — which is tantamount to interrogation — the prominent beloved scientists and sons of this nation,"" he said.
+
+Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Khamenei, was quoted by Iranian media this week as accusing the Americans of changing their position and toughening their stance as the deadline approaches.
+
+""They insist on crossing (our) red lines. This turns into an obstacle,"" Velayati was quoted as saying",REAL
+2016,Is Jeb Bush conservative enough?,"Washington (CNN) He cut billions in taxes, intervened in controversial abortion cases, railed against affirmative action and gun control and dreamed of a state capital in which government buildings would forever be drained of unneeded workers.
+
+Yet the biggest barrier between former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and the White House may be a perception that -- despite his record -- he's not conservative enough for today's Republicans.
+
+""Many things he's said have rubbed conservatives raw,"" said Morton Blackwell, a Republican National Committee member from Virginia, who said a lot of base voters were particularly suspicious of Bush's departures from party orthodoxy on education and immigration.
+
+Bush's presidential hopes are complicated by multiple factors. As the son and brother of former presidents, he's undeniably part of an establishment that is loathed in many corners of the GOP base. The party has also shifted rightward in the years since he left office under the influence of the tea party, and activists have embraced populist conservatives like Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz.
+
+But Bush, 61, is also facing an uphill battle because his time running Florida seems fuzzy to many people -- particularly GOP primary voters. That's in part because he has yet to highlight the most conservative aspects of his 1999 to 2007 governorship. And the issues that he's most vocal about -- the Common Core education standards and immigration reform -- are the positions that most infuriate conservatives.
+
+Glenn McCall, a South Carolina RNC member, says activists in his state aren't interested in Bush's record.
+
+Whether he talks about it or not, Bush's legacy in Florida will come under sharper scrutiny as he makes moves to launch a presidential campaign. That's especially true if Mitt Romney mounts a third White House bid and campaigns to Bush's right.
+
+Bush will mark a rite of passage for Republican presidential candidates next Wednesday by addressing the Detroit Economic Club. Ahead of that speech, he's beginning to make the kind of arguments for small government that closely echo his rhetoric from his days in Florida.
+
+""Our government gets in the way each and every day,"" he said in a speech in San Francisco last week. ""It is time to challenge every aspect of how government works, how it taxes, how it regulates, how it spends.""
+
+Those who know Bush believe his record in Florida could be a tool to blunt attacks from conservatives and lay to rest -- once and for all -- the idea that he isn't one of them.
+
+""He was in no way a moderate,"" said Florida political strategist Mike Hanna, who advised Bush during his gubernatorial runs. ""After Governor Bush gets out there and starts to introduce himself to the voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and other states, I think they will realize ... he is a card-carrying, unabashed, capitalist conservative.""
+
+John Dowless, who headed the Christian Coalition in the Sunshine State while Bush was governor, said ""there is no question that Jeb Bush was and is a conservative. There never was a question in Florida.""
+
+But talking about that conservatism hasn't always come easy to Bush.
+
+During his first gubernatorial campaign in 1994, his attempts to demonstrate his politics were brash and sometimes clumsy.
+
+Not only did he advocate for abolishing the Department of Education, for voter approval of all new taxes, and ""privatization in every area where privatization is possible,"" he also suggested welfare reforms that would have cut recipients' access to benefits after two years.
+
+His 1994 pronouncements on gay rights haunt his image to this day.
+
+During that failed first campaign, he argued in the Miami Herald that there was no need for ""special categories"" to protect members of the gay and lesbian community. Should ""sodomy be elevated to the same constitutional status as race and religion?"" he asked in one controversial line. ""My answer is no.""
+
+Bush's narrow loss that year to popular Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles prompted deep self-reflection before his next try in 1998. He later admitted he had run with ""unvarnished conservative views"" and needed to become a better storyteller. By the time he left office after two terms he was more comfortable laying out his conservative vision -- and he had approval ratings of over 60%.
+
+Bush's politics also evolved after his conversion to Catholicism, his wife's religion, in the mid-1990s, which strengthened his resolve on issues like abortion.
+
+In 2009, after leaving office, he explained that he admired ""the fact that the Catholic Church believes in and acts on absolute truth as its foundational principles and doesn't move with modern times as my former religion did.""
+
+He also spoke disapprovingly of politicians who put their religion ""in a safety deposit box"" while in office. In San Francisco, he said his faith gave him ""serenity"" and was hugely important during tough times as governor.
+
+Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Bush's record in Florida is his use of muscular executive power on social issues that are important to conservatives.
+
+Backed by a pliant Republican legislature, he vigorously sought restrictions on abortion while governor -- from a ban on late-term procedures to a constitutional amendment that would circumvent the courts, which had struck down a law requiring girls notify their parents before getting an abortion.
+
+Bush's abortion activism shocked some state officials who believed he was reaching beyond the powers of his office.
+
+In 2003, Bush unsuccessfully tried to get the courts to appoint a guardian for the fetus of a 22-year-old disabled woman with cerebral palsy and autism, who became pregnant after being raped by an operator of a state-supervised group home.
+
+In 2005, he intervened in the case of 13-year-old girl, known as L.G., who was a ward of the state and was 13½ weeks pregnant when she tried to get an abortion. Bush fought hard to prevent the procedure, but was overruled by a judge.
+
+Shortly after those episodes Bush told Republicans at the 2005 Georgia GOP convention that ""there is such a thing as right and wrong.""
+
+""Republicans cannot continue to win unless we talk with compassion and passion about absolute truth,"" he said.
+
+That principle clearly guided Bush's extraordinary intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo, a mentally impaired woman deemed in a ""chronic vegetative state."" Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler -- with aid from then-Governor Bush -- repeatedly tried to prevent Schiavo's husband from removing her feeding tube to end her life.
+
+After five years of litigation in 2003, Bush tried to get a different court-appointed guardian for Schiavo and filed a friend of the court brief to block removal of the feeding tube. He lost that round, but then persuaded the legislature to pass a law giving him the power to prevent a feeding tube or hydration device from being removed from a patient who had not laid out their end-of-life directives.
+
+In the midst of the debate, Bush proclaimed that he was ""probably the most pro-life governor in modern times,"" according to Associated Press reports.
+
+After the feeding tube was reinserted, Michael Schiavo's attorney railed against the ""gross and illegal intrusion into the private liberty of citizens"" and the Florida Supreme Court ruled that hastily drafted state law was unconstitutional. The Florida governor kept pushing the case through all possible avenues, including action by Congress and then-President George W. Bush. Ultimately, he lost.
+
+In polls, many Florida voters said they felt Bush had gone too far, but his actions were based on ""personal and religious tenets from which he could not retreat,"" said Mac Stipanovich, a Republican political strategist who advised Bush during the 1994 campaign.
+
+Those battles suggest that he is unlikely to back away from his positions on controversial issues like immigration and Common Core, even during a heated presidential campaign.
+
+Bush ""will change his mind about stuff, but it is grudgingly, fact-based and he really thinks about it,"" Stipanovich said. ""He seldom looks for the path of least resistance.""
+
+While Bush's Catholicism looms large in his social policy, his economic approach is molded by his lifetime immersion in top-level Republican politics.
+
+Jeb Bush closely observed President Ronald Reagan, a conservative icon who he later termed ""spectacular,"" when his father was vice president. In office in Florida, Bush took as his model Reagan's mantra that government was not the solution to America's problems, but the problem itself.
+
+During his second inaugural address in 2003, he gazed out at government offices and said ""there would be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we make these buildings around us empty of workers, silent monuments to a time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill.""
+
+Over the course of eight years, Bush signed into law $19 billion in tax cuts. He sought to privatize key government providers, including foster care, state parks and even legal aid to death row prisoners. His business-friendly state's bonds were top-rated.
+
+He reshaped Florida by wiping out 13,000 government jobs and vetoing $2 billion in new spending, an economic approach influenced by the conservative gospels of Milton Friedman. He enforced conservative solutions on taxes, gun control, dismantling affirmative action in universities, taking on teachers unions over testing and performance.
+
+But despite all this, Bush faces an important question as he embarks on a presidential run: Will he get a hearing among grassroots activists who view his support for immigration reform as akin to amnesty for illegal immigrants and his backing of Common Core as an unacceptable embrace of state power?
+
+""Is there enough space in our media environment in the Republican primaries for people to listen to his entire record?"" asked Matthew Corrigan, author of a new book on Bush's tenure in Florida, ""Conservative Hurricane."" Or ""will his opponents be able to yell amnesty and federal government control of education and not pay attention to anything else?""
+
+Blackwell said he believed that it would simply not be possible for Bush to convince the base he truly has the conscience of a conservative.
+
+""We've been down this road repeatedly before with members of his family who ran like they were going to be movement conservatives,"" he said. ""But his father broke the no new taxes pledge and his brother expanded federal programs in various directions, which conservatives didn't like.""
+
+Tea party supporters, who could be important in some early voting states like Iowa and South Carolina, are also worried that the former Florida governor not only does not reflect their views -- but is not listening to them. They warn a ticket topped by Bush could face lukewarm Republican turnout in a general election.
+
+Laurie Newsom, president of the Gainesville, Florida, Tea Party, noted that many in the grass roots were disappointed by the performance of Republicans who had professed their conservative fiscal bona fides -- like President George W. Bush -- and had unhappily accepted previous GOP nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney.
+
+""We have held our noses and voted in '08 and '12,"" Newsom said. ""Jeb Bush -- he hasn't got a prayer. Poor Jeb has clouds hanging over his head right now.""
+
+But Bush is warning that the Republican Party simply will not win in 2016 if it does not offer a positive vision for the future, despite boiling conservative resentment at Washington.
+
+""We are not going to win votes as Republicans unless you lay out a hopeful, optimistic message,"" he said in San Francisco. ""A positive agenda wins out against anger and reaction every day of the week.""",REAL
+1968,"For Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, a history of ambition fuels a possible 2016 collision","Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney have much in common. Both were pragmatic as governors, mild-mannered as candidates and more comfortable balancing budgets at their desks than clinking glasses at a political dinner.
+
+The two Republican leaders’ personal rapport is cordial. But they are hardly chummy — and at moments their relationship has been strained, with each man’s intertwined political network carrying some grievances with the other’s.
+
+As Bush, 61, and Romney, 67, explore presidential campaigns in 2016, they are like boxers warming up for what could become a brutal bout, sizing each other up and mulling whether or when to step into the ring.
+
+Their early maneuvering reveals a level of competitiveness and snippiness that stems from a long history following similar career paths in business and politics prescribed by their dynastic families.
+
+“We’re seeing the first shots of the war between clan Romney and clan Bush,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist who has worked for both men. “Both bring to the battle incredibly powerful fan clubs as well as wounds they have to heal. How ugly could it get? You’re only competing to lead the free world.”
+
+Bush has been trying to consolidate support among establishment donors, leaders and operatives since announcing in December that he would begin laying the groundwork for a likely campaign.
+
+“The Bush connection is a centrifugal force, and it’s drawing back a whole generation of public servants and politicos,” said former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, one of Romney’s 2012 opponents.
+
+But on Friday, Romney sought to slam the brakes on Bush, telling about 30 powerful donors that he, too, was seriously considering a 2016 bid. “I want to be president,” he said, adding that his wife, Ann, was supportive.
+
+Romney has begun methodically calling donors, staff members and endorsers from his two prior campaigns to measure how deep his reservoir of support would be if he runs for a third time, his advisers said. He also has scheduled a series of public speeches, including a Jan. 28 address at Mississippi State University.
+
+The entry of both Bush and Romney is far from certain, and Romney’s dalliance is preliminary. But the prospect of two center-right heavyweights entering a 2016 field likely to be fluid, crowded and diverse forces other contenders and the party’s stable of donors to adjust their thinking.
+
+“Awkward,” was the reaction from several past Romney supporters when they learned he was weighing a 2016 campaign. If both he and Bush run, they would occupy similar space as favorites of the party brass and business community.
+
+“The abundance of great candidates developing on the Republican side is making life very tough for me because I’m going to have to choose amongst friends,” said former New Hampshire governor John H. Sununu, who was White House chief of staff under Bush’s father but a top campaign surrogate for Romney.
+
+But, Sununu added, “it’s applesauce right now. Let’s not try to pick up applesauce and move it to the other side of the plate.”
+
+The two candidates would invite comparisons to each other, which could be tense for Bush, who was sharply critical of Romney’s 2012 campaign — in particular, his lack of outreach to minorities — and has pledged to run a more inclusive and transparent campaign.
+
+“A Romney-Bush race could end up being nastier than Jeb against someone like Ted Cruz or Rand Paul,” Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said of the Texas and Kentucky senators. “A Cruz-Bush race is pretty straightforward and ideological. A Romney-Bush race would be more personal — about whose turn it is and who is owed it.”
+
+Associates of both men insist there is no animosity between them and that each will make his decision about a 2016 run irrespective of the other.
+
+“Governor Bush respects Governor Romney,” said Bush spokeswoman Kristy Campbell, who worked on Romney’s 2012 campaign. “His process moving forward won’t be impacted by Governor Romney’s decision to explore a run — and I would assume it is the same on the reverse side.”
+
+Beth Myers, a longtime adviser to Romney, said he and Bush have been friends since 2002, when Romney was elected to his first term as Massachusetts governor and Bush to his second as Florida governor.
+
+“Mitt has great respect for Jeb’s ability and integrity, and they’ve worked together many times over the years to promote conservative principles,” Myers said. “At the end of the day, whatever decision Mitt makes about running for president, I’m 100 percent certain he will still value and maintain his friendship with Jeb.”
+
+Mitt and Ann Romney also have nurtured a friendship with Bush’s parents, former president George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara. In 2007, when Romney gave a personal speech on his Mormon faith, which had become a touchy issue with evangelical Christian voters, he did so at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Tex., where he was warmly introduced by the 41st president.
+
+Working on Romney’s 2008 primary campaign were several Jeb Bush lieutenants: Sally Bradshaw, Bush’s longtime political adviser; Ann Herberger, a Miami-based fundraiser; and Al Cardenas, a fixture in Florida Republican politics. All three stayed out of Romney’s 2012 campaign, although Cardenas, then the chairman of the American Conservative Union, endorsed him as the primaries were ending.
+
+The Bush-Romney family dynamic has been one of intrigue and ambition, dating at least to the 1950s, when Romney’s father, George Romney, then president of American Motors, was striving to make political connections as he eyed a run for office.
+
+In 1957, Romney wrote a letter to Prescott Bush, Jeb’s grandfather then serving in the Senate from Connecticut, urging him to test-drive a Rambler or a Metropolitan. Both were popular AMC models, and Romney told Bush the latter got 40 miles to the gallon, according to car-industry historian Patrick R. Foster’s book “The Metropolitan Story.” But, Foster writes, it remains unknown whether the efforts resulted in a sale — or even if Romney’s solicitation drew any notice in Bush’s office.
+
+In recent weeks, Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush have been quietly trying to ascertain the other’s motives and playbook. Bush has asked Romney’s former donors about what Romney is up to, while Romney met shortly before Christmas with Bush strategist Mike Murphy and inquired about Bush’s preparations, according to political consultants who know Romney and Bush.
+
+Romney has said little publicly about Bush, but in exchanges with intimates, he has focused on Bush’s past advisory work for Lehman Brothers and Barclays, two major financial institutions. He argued that it makes Bush vulnerable to the same kind of Democratic attacks that he faced in 2012 over his career as Bain Capital co-founder and chief executive. He also has voiced doubts about Bush’s political skills and ability to beat likely Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
+
+Ana Navarro, a GOP operative and Bush confidant, said: “I’m not going to get worked up over comments Romney has allegedly made to donors behind closed doors — yet. We all know he sometimes misspeaks.”
+
+Bush has vowed to more vigorously defend his business record than Romney did. Comparing their careers is like “comparing an apple to a peanut,” Bush said in a December interview with a Miami television station.
+
+Those comments irritated Romney’s family and loyalists, who took them as a slight against his career managing a complicated enterprise on a scale far larger than Bush’s business dealings, according to Romney associates.
+
+Bush also is considering releasing a decade or more of his tax returns after Romney faced heat for only reluctantly releasing two years of his returns. And Bush has advocated a more welcoming message on immigration reform than Romney’s hard-right position, which he criticized in 2012.
+
+“He got sucked into other people’s agendas, and I think it hurt him a little bit,” Bush said in the TV interview. He added, “Winning with purpose, winning with meaning, winning with your integrity is what I’m trying to talk about.”
+
+Before announcing his 2012 campaign, Romney, sensing that immigration policy would be a contentious issue in the primaries, sought Bush’s advice.
+
+“I went to see Jeb, I flew down to see him, and said: ‘I’d like to take immigration off the issue list for the primaries. And wouldn’t it be great if Republicans could come up with an immigration plan that all of the contenders could say, yeah, I agree. And then we could sweep that aside,’ ” Romney told The Washington Post’s Dan Balz in an interview for his book “Collision 2012.”
+
+“We were unable to get there,” Romney continued. “I mean, there just wasn’t enough consensus among Republicans generally.”
+
+As Bush and Romney explore a run, whispering into their ears are two political professionals with big egos, eccentric personalities and a long-simmering rivalry: Romney’s Stuart Stevens and Bush’s Murphy. They are fierce competitors with roots in each other’s turf. Stevens worked on George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, while Murphy worked on Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign.
+
+Members of Bush’s team have not forgotten Stevens’s role in Bush’s 1994 gubernatorial race, which became Bush’s lowest point politically. Stevens advised one of Bush’s primary opponents, Jim Smith, who waged a bruising TV ad assault against Bush over his business experience and character.
+
+“This begins the destruction of Jeb Bush,” Stevens told the New York Times as the ads began. Bush won the primary, but he didn’t win the governorship until four years later.
+
+During the 2012 campaign, Murphy mocked Stevens on Twitter as Romney struggled in the primaries against relatively weak opponents. More recently, Romney backers have been murmuring fresh questions about Murphy’s work for the political action committee of former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I), who is anathema to the conservative base.
+
+Some Romney allies are bitter that Bush was slow to endorse Romney in 2012. In the run-up to the Florida primary, with Romney fighting to beat back a surge from Newt Gingrich, Bush sat on the sidelines when Romney’s team thought he could have made a difference. Romney called, e-mailed and met privately with Bush to try to win him over, but he could not be convinced.
+
+“I voted absentee,” Bush said on CNN. “And thank God it’s a secret ballot.”
+
+Romney won Florida nevertheless, and by the time Bush announced his endorsement, on March 21, the day after Romney’s decisive victory in the Illinois primary, the nomination was all but officially his.
+
+Bush called Romney on his cellphone, with no tip-off from an emissary, and their talk was brief, according to aides. Back at headquarters, advisers were pleased by the news, but grumbling still, wondering why it had taken so long.",REAL
+5287,"Shots Fired, 117 Arrests Made as Militarized Police Remove Pipeline Protesters","Home / Badge Abuse / Shots Fired, 117 Arrests Made as Militarized Police Remove Pipeline Protesters Shots Fired, 117 Arrests Made as Militarized Police Remove Pipeline Protesters The Free Thought Project October 28, 2016 1 Comment 
+Standing Rock, ND — (RT) Hundreds of police in riot gear and with heavy military equipment have moved Dakota Access Pipeline protesters from their encampment on private land in North Dakota. Police have reportedly arrested at least 117 demonstrators so far. 
+“117 protesters have been arrested [as of 8:15 pm Thursday]. Morton County will be utilizing other jails in this mass arrest operation,” said Donnell Hushka, a spokeswoman for the Morton County, North Dakota, Sheriff’s Department. 
+Police have entered the sacred ground camp and surrounded protesters there. Livestream videos showed more than one hundred protesters on the front line. Police have protesters more or less surrounded. #noDAPL pic.twitter.com/G4xGQuXpZM 
+— Jason Patinkin (@JasonPatinkin) October 27, 2016 
+The Morton County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to the Associated Press that it had cleared the private land of protesters around 6:30pm EST Thursday. 
+Shortly after 7:00pm EST Thursday, the sheriff’s office posted on its Facebook page that “one woman has been arrested for firing a weapon at the police line near Highway 1806.” 
+The sheriff’s office just after 8:00pm EST stated in a Facebook post that it received reports of “several incidents involving firearms.” One “involved a private individual who was run off the road by protestors. The victim was shot in the hand and is being treated. An investigation in underway. No law enforcement was involved with this shooting.” 
+With regard to the woman arrested, the sheriff’s office said she “pulled a .38 caliber revolver and fired three shots at law enforcement, narrowly missing a sheriff’s deputy.” The sheriff’s office claims it did not fire any shots when taking her into custody. 
+“Ten shots were reported in the area. It’s possible it is local hunters. This incident is under investigation,” the Facebook post concluded. BREAKING: Sheriff: Dakota Access pipeline protesters cleared from private property. 
+— The Associated Press (@AP) October 27, 2016 
+According to KFYR, police made 16 arrests by evening time Thursday. 
+“The protesters are not being peaceful or prayerful. Law enforcement has been very methodical in moving ahead slowly as to not escalate the situation. However, the protesters are using very dangerous means to slow us down. Their aggressive tactics include using horses, fire and trying to flank us with horses and people,” said Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney in a press release Thursday. 16 arrests at DAPL today…. #kfyrkafe 
+— KFYR AM 550 (@KFYR550) October 27, 2016 
+“Move to the south,” police said over the loudspeaker. 
+“We see some of you have bows. Do not shoot bows and arrows at us,” they added, as protesters laughed. 
+National Guard troops and police removed tents and other possessions from the new encampment, which the Standing Rock Sioux tribe says is sacred land granted to them via treaty in 1851. 
+Police also dismantled the barricade across the road. 
+As police corralled the protesters southward, some activists remained facing the police and even engaged with them while walking backwards. Atsa E’sha Hoferer was livestreaming on Facebook, telling officers that they should be on the side of the protests and that they too would suffer from contaminated water should the pipeline burst. Police are pulling down tents now. Just saw them spray paint an X on a teepee. pic.twitter.com/nNrWRPDggP 
+— Caroline Grueskin (@cgrueskin) October 27, 2016 
+The stand-off with police had lasted for several hours before authorties moved closer to the camp and started arresting people. The number of arrested is currently unclear. 
+The protesters are currently blocking state Highway 1806, which law enforcement is attempting to clear using cop cars and military – style vehicles. Police said they will defend themselves against horses if necessary #DAPL #NoDAPL pic.twitter.com/5yWqKBUeGW 
+— wes enzinna (@wesenzinna) October 27, 2016 
+Police have said that they will defend themselves against horses, journalist Wes Enzinna tweeted. 
+“Do not ride horses at the police,” law enforcement announced. 
+“You’re endangering people’s lives by what you’re doing,” police told the protesters, telling them to move south or be arrested. People will not be arrested if they return to the main camp, one officer said at the barricade. 
+Protesters are burning tires, logs and other objects, sending smoke onto the roadway. A car has also been torched, journalist Jason Patinkin tweeted. 
+— Jason Patinkin (@JasonPatinkin) October 27, 2016 
+Although the Federal Aviation Administration has restricted flights over the Cannon Ball area until November 5, there is a police helicopter above the faceoff, journalist Antonia Juhasz tweeted. 
+More than 260 protesters have been arrested in the weeks leading up to Thursday’s operation, AP reported. 
+In the morning police made a line in front of the fence and the company workers are behind them. The tents of the so-called North Camp were located a stone’s throw away from the police line. Authorities insist that this camp should be removed, according to activist Atsa E’sha Hoferer live-streaming from the site. 
+People on the barricades are retreating peacefully amid chants of “hands up, don’t shoot!” 
+People are moving from the road towards the construction site. “We might as well get arrested defending the sacred,” a protester told the Bismarck Tribune’s Caroline Grueskin. We need to band together and keep the pressure up against them. One is a map of Native American reservations the other is the DAPL. #NoDAPL pic.twitter.com/VQ5MXgXkpY 
+— Bart Starr Mistrot (@bartmistrot) October 27, 2016 
+Construction on the pipeline has resumed within sight of the confrontation on the state highway. While police came from north and things riled up, pipeline construction restarted to west. False flag much? pic.twitter.com/XxgC7vH11Z 
+— Jason Patinkin (@JasonPatinkin) October 27, 2016 
+“Protesters’ escalated unlawful behavior this weekend by setting up illegal roadblocks, trespassing onto private property and establishing an encampment, has forced law enforcement to respond at this time. As I said yesterday, I visited the protesters roadblock and requested them to remove the barricade and have protesters vacate the private property. However, the spokesperson at the roadblock, Mekasi Camp-Horinek of Oklahoma, told law enforcement they ‘were not moving’,” Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said in a statement . “I can’t stress it enough, this is a public safety issue. We cannot have protesters blocking county roads, blocking state highways, or trespassing on private property.” So @potus , this means you're going to remove the National Guard from Standing Rock and cancel DAPL, right? Right? #NoDAPL https://t.co/FVV5KsgUom",FAKE
+9128,Paper Tiger ISIS Digs Into Mosul,"Written by Eric Margolis   As a former soldier and war correspondent who has covered 14 conflicts, I look at all the media hoopla over tightening siege of Mosul, Iraq and shake my head. This western-organized “liberation” of Mosul is one of the bigger pieces of political-military theater that I’ve seen. Islamic State (IS), the defender of Mosul, is a paper tiger, blown out of all proportion by western media. IS is, as this writer has been saying for years, an armed mob made up of 20-something malcontents, religious fanatics, and modern-day anarchists. At its top is a cadre of former Iraqi Army officers with military experience. These former officers of Saddam Hussain are bent on revenge for the US destruction of their nation and the lynching of its late leader. But IS rank and file has no military training, little discipline, degraded communications, and ragged logistics. In fact, today’s Islamic State is what the Ottoman Empire used to term, ‘bashi-bazouks,” a collection of irregular cut-throats and scum of the gutter sent to punish and terrorize enemies by means of torture, rapine, looting, and arson. What has amazed me about the faux western war against ISIS is its leisurely nature, lack of élan , and hesitancy. In my view, ISIS was mostly created by the US and its allies as a weapon to be used against Syria’s government – just as the Afghan mujahadin were used by the US and the Saudis to overthrow the Soviet-backed Afghan government. Israel tried the same tactics by helping create Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both were cultivated to split the PLO. ISIS is an ad hoc movement that wants to punish the West and the Saudis for the gross carnage they have inflicted on the Arab world. Western and Kurdish auxiliary forces have been sitting 1.5 hours drive from Mosul and the IS town of Raqqa for over a year. Instead, western – mainly US – warplanes have been gingerly bombing around these targets in what may be an effort to convince breakaway ISIS to rejoin US-led forces fight the Damascus regime. Note that ISIS does not appear to have ever attacked Israel though it is playing an important role in the destruction of Syria. Some reports say Israel is providing logistic and medical support for IS. The siege of Mosul is being played up by western media as a heroic second Stalingrad. Don’t be fooled. IS has only 3-5,000 lightly armed fighters in Mosul and Raqqa, maybe even less. The leaders of IS are likely long gone. IS has few heavy weapons, no air cover at all, and poor communications. Its rag-tag fighters will run out of ammunitions and explosives very quickly. Encircling Mosul are at least 50,000 western-led soldiers, backed by heavy artillery, rocket batteries, tanks, armored vehicles and awesome air power The western imperial forces are composed of tough Kurdish peshmerga fighters, Iraqi army and special forces, some Syrian Kurds, Iranian ‘volunteers’ irregular forces and at least 5,000 US combat troops called “advisors”, plus small numbers of French, Canadian and British special forces. Hovering in the background are some thousands of Turkish troops, supported by armor and artillery ready to ""liberate"" Iraq – which was once part of the Ottoman Empire. For the US, current military operations in Syria and Iraq are the realization of an imperialist’s fondest dream: native troops led by white officers, the model of the old British Indian Raj. Washington arms, trained, equips and financed all its native auxiliaries. The IS is caught in a dangerous dilemma. To be a political movement, it was delighted to control Iraq’s second largest city. But as a guerilla force, it should not have holed up in an urban area where it was highly vulnerable to concentrated air attack and being surrounded. This is what’s happening right now. In the mostly flat Fertile Crescent with too few trees, ground forces are totally vulnerable to air power, as the recent 1967, 1973 Israel-Arab wars and 2003 Iraq wars have shown. Dispersion and guerilla tactics are the only hope for those that lack air cover. IS forces would best advise to disperse across the region and continue their hit-and-run attacks. Otherwise, they risk being destroyed. But being mostly bloody-minded young fanatics, IS may not heed military logic and precedent in favor of making a last stand in the ruins of Mosul and Raqqa. When this happens, western leaders will compete to claim authorship of the faux crusade against the paper tiger of ISIS.   LewRockwell.com . Related",FAKE
+9105,5 Things You Need to Know About the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests,By Nick Bernabe A small Standing Rock Sioux site in North Dakota called the Sacred Stone Camp has been propelled into the national news narrative following their stand against the Dakota Access... ,FAKE
+3245,What will Republicans do when they take full control of Congress?,"Republicans taking control of Congress this coming week will try to overcome their reputation as a divided party hobbled by infighting by working to reshape policy in ways that Americans will feel in corporate boardrooms, on factory floors and at the gas pump.
+
+Incoming committee chairmen are preparing fresh oversight of federal agencies while rank-and-file members will be encouraged to use a new budget plan and government spending bills to chip away at President Obama’s environmental regulations, health-care reform and outreach to Cuba and Iran.
+
+After years of sparring with the White House, Republicans are eager to demonstrate productivity and some level of bipartisan ­cooperation with Obama and the Democrats. Public disgust with Washington gridlock remains high, and with the 2016 presidential campaign beginning in earnest, broader voter interest — especially among independents and Democrats — could put recent GOP gains at risk in less than two years.
+
+“On the things where we agree, the goal will be to make a law, not just put something on [Obama’s] desk,” incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in an interview, adding later: “I want to make it clear: Desire for a signature is not going to dictate everything that we do.”
+
+Securing final passage of bills will require McConnell and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to compromise with Democrats while holding together their own ranks, which have clashed repeatedly over issues such as spending and immigration. Many GOP leaders hope that their differences can be set aside in favor of legislative wins.
+
+The House and Senate formally reconvene Tuesday. New members will be sworn in and top leaders and committee chairmen formally installed on a day steeped in tradition and ceremony.
+
+Boehner and McConnell will be backed by larger GOP majorities: 246 Republicans in the House — the party’s largest majority since just after World War II — and 54 GOP senators, an impressive gain but short of the 60 votes required to overcome most procedural hurdles that Democrats will have at their disposal.
+
+In the Senate, the rebranding effort will begin with energy policy.
+
+McConnell plans to start his tenure as Senate majority leader with a “full-throated” debate on national energy policy, ranging from a new oil pipeline to additional oil exploration. He has also promised consideration of liberal alternatives.
+
+McConnell wants to use the controversial proposal to authorize construction of the Keystone XL pipeline as the gen­esis for a free-wheeling Senate debate about the United States’ energy future, in which both sides will have the opportunity to offer and debate more expansive energy issues than the narrow pipeline proposal.
+
+“We can treat this like a serious and significant energy debate,” McConnell said in an interview before Christmas in his Capitol office.
+
+Obama has resisted GOP efforts to authorize the pipeline, but dozens of moderate congressional Democrats support the bill and a broader energy debate.
+
+Other Democrats are skeptical of McConnell’s plans.
+
+“The $64,000 question as to whether the Congress can get anything done is which way the Republican leadership goes,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in an interview Saturday. “If they let the tea party pull them to the right into the path of negativity and obstruction, we’ll get nothing done.”
+
+Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), a lead author of the Keystone bill, said that Republicans plan to consider proposals allowing the export of liquefied natural gas; to give state governments greater power to oversee hydraulic fracturing; and to restrict the federal government’s role in the construction of cross-border gas pipelines.
+
+“I don’t think we have an energy bill that doesn’t have a Democratic co-sponsor on it,” he said. “Because at the end of the day you’ve got to get at least 60 votes” to clear procedural hurdles.
+
+The open process is part of McConnell’s effort to live up to his pledge to restore the Senate’s grand tradition of free and full debate, while also advancing conservative causes. A skilled practitioner in the use of the Senate’s arcane procedural rules to move or block legislation, McConnell has pledged to use those rules to score conservative wins. He has been coaching GOP senators that their most likely path to wins will come on the annual spending bills for the federal government — which Republicans have routinely opposed on the grounds that they spend too much taxpayer money.
+
+Other party leaders echo those sentiments. “I think a majority [of Republicans] recognize that we have to govern responsibly,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who will become chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “We have to show that we can be a productive party, and that, I think, will have a direct effect on whether we’re able to elect a Republican as president in 2016.”
+
+But now, with control of the House and Senate, Republicans have more leeway to attach policy riders to spending bills that will restrict federal agencies in their oversight of environmental, labor and other regulations. These still may draw presidential vetoes, but McConnell believes that Republicans will have leverage to get some restrictions included, just as the mammoth spending measure approved last month included language sought by Wall Street firms making risky trades.
+
+In the House, most of the early weeks will seem like a do-over of the past two years — except that many of the bills passed will get swifter Senate consideration.
+
+Up first is a veterans employment bill that passed last year with bipartisan support, according to senior leadership aides. There is also a bill to loosen work requirements set by the Affordable Care Act and a similar bill to authorize the Keystone pipeline.
+
+The second week of January will be devoted to a new spending plan for the Department of Homeland Security. The spending bill funds DHS only until the end of February, a move designed to give Republicans more time to craft a legislative response to Obama’s decision to change immigration policy through executive actions. But no specific proposals have emerged, the aides said.
+
+Then there are the investigations into alleged wrongdoing at agencies including the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.
+
+“There are issues that haven’t been resolved,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
+
+He is launching subcommittees to closely track Obama’s energy and environmental policies and created “administrative rules,” a panel that will “try to figure out what the administration is doing next with its rule-making authority. We’re going to jump on those as fast as we possibly can,” he said.
+
+Before the work begins, Boehner is expected to face another leadership challenge. After he survived a close call two years ago, conservative blogs and radio shows are actively supporting another effort to unseat him.
+
+Presuming that the 434 currently seated House members show up to vote Tuesday and that all Democrats vote against him, at least 28 of the 246 Republicans also would need to vote against Boehner to deny him the gavel. (The 435th House seat is held by Rep. Michael G. Grimm (R-N.Y.), who plans to resign Monday after recently pleading guilty to tax evasion charges.)
+
+Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), who opposed Boehner two years ago, said in a recent radio interview that he’ll do it again, adding that at least 16 to 18 Republican members might vote against the speaker. Among them is Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), who said Friday that he will vote against the speaker because the spending bill passed last month didn’t fully strip DHS of its funding.
+
+Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a Boehner ally, said in an interview that “I expect a few scattered ‘no’ votes. But because Boehner has been strengthened by the gains in the election, the speaker election should mostly be an uneventful coronation.”
+
+The opening weeks of the new Congress are also expected to include the confirmation of Ashton Carter, Obama’s pick to lead the Pentagon, and Loretta Lynch to be the next attorney general. Concerns with Iran are also expected to be an early focus. The Obama administration persuaded Senate Democrats last year to hold off debating a bipartisan proposal authorizing stronger sanctions against the Iranian regime.
+
+But Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the incoming chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said, “My guess is fairly early on in some form or fashion the Senate’s going to want to weigh in on Iran.”
+
+Corker also plans to launch “a rigorous hearing process” on Obama’s decision to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba. Republicans have threatened to block funding for a new embassy in Havana and confirmation of a new ambassador to Cuba. But Obama could veto spending bills that include such restrictions, sparking a showdown over whether the GOP is willing to shutter parts of the government over a new Cuba policy.
+
+In 2016, Republicans will be defending at least 24 Senate seats and about a dozen first-term House members from swing districts around the country. Party leaders have a political imperative to govern and avoid short-term fights with Obama.
+
+“We will see if there is an opportunity for a fourth quarter for President Obama that actually moves the country in the direction we’d like to go,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who also will be responsible for helping reelect GOP senators in 2016.
+
+“Reagan did it a generation ago working with Democrats. Clinton did it almost two decades ago with welfare reform and deficit reduction,” he said. “So it can be done — if the president is disposed to move in that direction.”",REAL
+9779,Guardian Front Page: “A 16-Year-Old Migrant Cries…”,"October 27, 2016 
+Won’t you take pity on this poor, innocent little child? 
+This image of a “16-year-old” migrant crying – which is currently plastered on the front page of The Guardian – is nothing short of laughable. 
+“A 16-year-old from Ethiopia cries while he awaits registration at a processing centre in the makeshift refugee camp near Calais,” the photo’s caption reads. The image is placed under a headline reading: “Councils resist pressure to take children from Calais.” 
+
+This crying “child” is supposed to make Brits feel guilty and demand their government allow “children” like him into their nation. 
+The image is not a fake, nor is it being used satirically. It comes from the Associated Press’ Emilio Morenatti , you can see four pictures of the man for sale on their website . 
+The “child migrant” is clearly in his 40’s, yet their editors evidently believe their readers are so incredibly stupid they’ll actually believe they’re looking at a 16-year-old boy. 
+A look at Emilio’s twitter shows one person appears to have actually bought the lie: @morenatti2004 Imposible no hacernos mirar y luego, un nudo en la garganta. pic.twitter.com/A7zvz5440q 
+— Luján Artola Paulos (@rowley_bel) October 25, 2016 
+“Impossible not make us look, then, a lump in the throat,” the tweet reads. 
+Incidentally, Ethiopia is not even a war zone, so I’m not sure how this 45-year-old man can even be considered a “refugee.”  42  ",FAKE
+7841,Sanders Asks Obama To Intervene In Dakota Access Pipeline Dispute,"Posted on October 30, 2016 by Carol Adl in News , US // 0 Comments 
+Bernie Sanders sent a letter to President Barack Obama on Friday requesting that he intervene to protect Native Americans who have been peacefully protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. 
+In a statement issued on his official U.S. Senate website, Sanders asked Obama to halt construction of the pipeline until federal officials properly conduct a cultural and environmental review. Recommended 
+President Barack Obama has sneakily approved the construction of two new Dakota pipelines just as the DoJ halted the construction on the existing one. (1 hour ago) 
+At least 140 people were arrested at the construction site on Wednesday after hundreds of police in riot gear moved in with tanks, using sound cannons, pepper spray and rubber bullets. 
+
+Sanders.Senate.gov reports: 
+Hundreds of Native American protectors have gathered at the site since April to protest the pipeline’s construction on land they claim is tribal under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. 
+“I urge you to take all appropriate measures to protect the safety of the Native Americans protesters and their supporters who have gathered peacefully to oppose the construction of the pipeline,” Sanders wrote in the letter. Recommended 
+Bernie Sanders joined protests in support of Native American activists who are striving to stop construction of a North Dakota pipeline. (1 hour ago) 
+Sanders asks that President Obama direct the Justice Department to send observers to the site to protect protestors’ safety and First Amendment rights; call North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple to remove the National Guard from the protest camp; and direct the Army Corps of Engineers to issue an order to stop work on construction of the pipeline near the protest site to reduce tensions while awaiting judicial action. 
+Sanders again called on the president to suspend construction of the pipeline until the Army Corps of Engineers completes a full cultural and environmental review. 
+“It is deeply distressing to me that the federal government is putting the profits of the oil industry ahead of the treaty and sovereign rights of Native American communities,” Sanders wrote. “Mr. President, you took a bold and principled stand against the Keystone pipeline – I ask you to take a similar stand against the Dakota Access Pipeline.” 
+Sanders previously called on the president to block construction of the pipeline during a rally outside the White House with leaders of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other tribal nations in September.",FAKE
+7134,"Wolf Richter: Layoffs at Alphabet Access to Hit 9%, Google Fiber to “Pause” Plans, CEO Leaves, as Alphabet Cracks Down on Costs","by Yves Smith 
+By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street 
+Five years ago, when Google announced that it would build a super-high-speed fiber-optic network in Kansas City, and then roll it out in other cities, it started an effort to own and control the data pipelines going into homes and businesses. 
+Given how frustrated consumers are with their ISPs, it seems people couldn’t wait for Google Fiber, now operated by Alphabet’s Access. Google then spent a fortune building out the network in select cities around the country. This could have been huge . At a huge cost. 
+“Amazing bet,” is what Craig Barratt, senior VP at Alphabet and CEO of Access, called Google Fiber in a blogpost yesterday. In the same breath, he also announced that they would “pause” the build-out of Google Fiber in cities where it had been planned, that there would be layoffs and reassignments, though he didn’t say how many, and that he’d “step aside” as CEO of Access. 
+His replacement has not been announced. 
+He’s the third CEO of an Alphabet division to part ways since June. He prefaced this whole debacle this way: 
+And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue. I am extremely proud of what we’ve built together in five short years. 
+Google Fiber is one of two big entities in “Other Bets” of the Alphabet empire, whose CEO Larry Page and new-ish CFO Ruth Porat are trying to crack down on ballooning costs. 
+The other big entity in “Other Bets” is Nest Labs, which makes internet-connected thermostats and the like. In a brilliant move, Google had acquired it in 2014 for a breath-taking $3.2 billion. But by now, this move has become very unbrilliant. 
+In June, Tony Fadell, Nest co-founder and CEO, quit after internal disputes over this focus on spending. Some key Nest employees moved to Google’s new hardware division. And the entity is in turmoil. 
+In August, Bill Maris, CEO of Google’s venture capital arm, GV, also left. 
+Earlier this year, Alphabet got second thoughts about its ambitious robotics efforts and put Boston Dynamics up for sale. It had acquired the experimental robot maker in 2013 for $500 million. But tensions soon arose, and co-founder Andy Rubin bailed out in 2014. No deal yet. 
+Then there was, infamously, Google Glass…. 
+So Google Fiber is in good company. It will cease efforts to install a fiber network in 10 cities where it had been planned but not fully committed, according to Ars Technica . In addition, San Francisco was supposed to get Google fiber for sure, but that has now been cancelled too. 
+The 11 cities where Google Fiber has been nixed: Chicago, Dallas, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, and Tampa. 
+In “this handful of cities” and also “in certain related areas of our supporting operations, we’ll be reducing our employee base,” Barratt wrote. Hence the layoffs. 
+Google Fiber has already been rolled out in Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Kansas City (Missouri and Kansas), Nashville, Provo (Utah), Salt Lake City, and The Triangle (North Carolina). And it’s still publicly committed to building the network – subject to change, I suppose – in Huntsville (Alabama), Irvine (California), San Antonio, and Louisville. 
+In June, Google Fiber announced that it would acquire Webpass, a 13-year-old company that provides high-speed wireless internet in Boston, Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Oakland, and San Francisco. A wireless network is a lot cheaper to install in urban areas with multi-family housing than fiber-to-the-home. 
+About 9% of the employees at Access will lose their jobs, though some people could be reassigned to entities of Alphabet, according to Ars Technica: 
+The source did not say exactly how many employees that percentage represents. Access includes more than just Google Fiber, so the percentage of Google Fiber employees being laid off or reassigned is probably a little higher. 
+Alphabet headcounts are hard to come by, but this Bloomberg report says Access has about 1,500 employees. The Information report indicates that Google Fiber had about 1,000 employees before the layoffs. If both of those numbers are accurate, then the percentage of Google Fiber employees being laid off or reassigned to other parts of Alphabet might be around 13.5 percent. 
+Google Fiber apparently has not hit its subscriber goals, and fiber construction is a costly endeavor. While the company isn’t giving up on fiber entirely, it may be able to deploy Internet service at a lower cost using wireless technology. 
+“It’s billions of dollars a year just to maintain this stuff, and Google doesn’t want to spend that kind of money on just being another player in that market,” Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research, told Bloomberg . 
+“I think the new CFO put an end to the experiment that wasn’t really going anywhere,” Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless industry analyst, told Bloomberg . 
+So serving up digital ads is still Alphabet’s main business, and flourishing. Controlling the high-speed pipeline to get these ads into homes and businesses, and grabbing whatever data can be grabbed by ISPs via deep-packet inspection and other methods still seems to be part of the plan, but now through cheaper and less glamorous wireless services and no longer through the holy grail of data pipelines, optical fiber. And so goes another huge dream to diversity away from advertising. 
+Even the absolute master of marketing, Apple, is running into trouble with its latest product. Read… Smartwatch is Dead, Market Implodes, Apple Watch Shipments Collapse 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+609,Exclusive: Hillary may delay campaign,"“Trump's plan to repair our infrastructure is a scam,"" Sanders declares.",REAL
+1228,Trump finally went too far for Republicans,"Donald Trump finally made some bold and provocative claims that were largely true, and the Republican Party finally closed ranks to attack him.
+
+Saying Mexican immigrants are rapists didn't do it. Calling for a return of torture didn't do it. Calling for a ban on Muslim immigration didn't do it. Raising questions about Barack Obama's status as an American citizen didn't do it. Pretending that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered 9/11 didn't do it.
+
+So what did? Trump said that invading Iraq was a disaster, that the country was misled into invading Iraq by the Bush administration, and that the claim that Bush kept the country safe from terrorism is ridiculous because 9/11 happened on his watch.
+
+It was a bizarre and telling moment, in which the battered forces of the Republican establishment finally picked themselves up off the floor specifically in order to defend some of its least defensible conduct of the 21st century.
+
+""They lied,"" Trump said. ""They said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.""
+
+""While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show,"" Jeb Bush retorted, ""my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And I'm proud of what he did.""
+
+Then Trump cut in with his uppercut: ""The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign. Remember that?""
+
+A chorus of boos echoed forth from the crowd packed with establishment Republicans by the state party. Even better for Bush, Marco Rubio — in most respects his most deadly rival in the primary — stepped in to back him up.
+
+""I just want to say, at least on behalf of me and my family, I thank God all the time it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11, and not Al Gore,"" he said. According to Rubio, the president to blame for 9/11 was not the president who was in office on 9/11; it was the guy who left office nine months earlier. ""The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him.""
+
+The audience loved this, and were mightily displeased when Trump observed: ""George Bush had the chance also, and he didn't listen to the advice of his CIA.""
+
+I won't even hazard a guess as to whether this double-sided exchange helped or hurt Trump. Watching it on television, you'd think Republicans there hated everything he had to say. But the reality is that the in-studio audience was hand-picked by the state party and seemingly stuffed with Bush supporters.
+
+But if it did go badly for Trump, what's fascinating is that it went badly in exactly the kind of way you would have expected Trump's campaign to go south months ago.
+
+He went way outside the boundaries of the kinds of things Republican Party politicians normally say, and in response Republican Party politicians (and their backers in the state party) piled on to diss him. A political party, after all, is a coalition of like-minded people. When you step outside their zone of comfort and say things they wouldn't say, they team up to crush you.
+
+It was primary politics as it was supposed to be. And it made for a striking contrast with previous debates that had consisted largely of the establishment-friendly candidates bashing each other on the theory that whoever came out of the ""establishment lane"" would then face down Trump one on one at some later date. Chris Christie's murder-suicide attack on Rubio's repetition of talking points was the highest-profile example of this establishment fratricide, but in truth it's dominated the entire campaign, leaving Republicans with not much more than wishful thinking as their anti-Trump plan.
+
+The strange thing is that after months of watching Trump say things that are racist, absurd, patently false, or all three at once, the Republican Party establishment decided to stomp on him for saying things that are basically true.
+
+Most obviously, George W. Bush clearly was in office on 9/11. Repeated invocations of the notion that he ""kept us safe"" have managed to make this a controversial claim, but I promise you that it is true. He was inaugurated in January, and was serving as president on the morning of 9/11 when the terrorist attack momentarily interrupted his reading of My Pet Goat. Bush received repeated warnings about al-Qaeda plots against the United States, and his administration was given a plan to tackle al-Qaeda and the Taliban that it rejected as a holdover from the Clinton administration and a distraction from bigger problems.
+
+Trump's claim that the Bush administration positively knew there were no WMDs in Iraq is more dubious, but it's unquestionably true that the sort of WMD programs the White House said existed weren't found and that the administration's public presentations of intelligence findings were highly skewed and selective.
+
+By Trump standards — this is a man, after all, who claims he can make Mexico pay for the construction of thousands of miles of border wall — these arguments are tame. Indeed, almost banal. For months now, Republicans have wondered how Trump could be winning by claiming up was down. But this was exactly how they won in their mid-aughts heyday — slamming decorated war hero John Kerry for cowardice, claiming to have kept the country safe while presiding over the worst terrorist attack in American history, and responding by invading an unrelated country in order to dismantle a nuclear weapons program that didn't exist.
+
+When Trump contradicted the Republican Party's most cherished form of up-is-downism, the party establishment finally got its groove back and handed him arguably his worst evening of the entire campaign. But they also proved to everyone else that pointing out that Bush was in office on 9/11 is a red line for the GOP establishment in a way that concocting a story about Jersey City Muslims celebrating the attacks wasn't.",REAL
+9238,"Fed Holds on Raising Rates, Fears Rising Dollar",By Tom Luongo The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee chose not to raise interest rates six days out from an election. The statement was also... ,FAKE
+457,"So how’s the American middle class, really?","Mothers Lauren Ioli (l.) and Julie Nardi read to their children in the public library in Frederick, Md., which holds story time for children on Tuesdays. Like other cities, Frederick still has many middle-income jobs, but they are harder to find.
+
+In Cincinnati, Steve Raven has just moved his family into a faster economic lane. He recently started a truck-driving job that pays a lot better than his previous work making shock absorbers. It comes with solid health insurance, the hope of more vacation travel, and the prospect of his pay rising further from here.
+
+In San Francisco, Jessica Beard is also doing work she’s excited about, but the similarities stop there. Her job title is adjunct professor, but the not-so-lofty reality is that her teaching schedule in English literature is uncertain from one semester to the next – and so is her income and her health insurance. She says she’s making less than she did in another job she had 15 years ago.
+
+In Maryland, Hope Harley is a young student at Frederick Community College. She’s hopeful about earning a good living, and about the economy getting better for most people in general. But she adds a cautionary qualifier: “I feel like if you don’t go to college, you won’t have a good life.” She’s carefully choosing among some career options in health care, while working as a receptionist to avoid taking on student debt.
+
+Three people, three stories. But together they provide a pretty good hint of the blend of progress and tribulation that defines today’s middle class in the United States – including those who aspire to it and those who aren’t sure they’re in it.
+
+The old image of the “middle class” as an aspirational state of being – upward mobility coupled with a measure of financial stability – hasn’t disappeared. But it’s under stress as much as at any time in the postwar era. Fewer Americans these days call themselves middle class, and many who do use that label see it as a badge of struggle as much as a badge of opportunity.
+
+The middle class is being redefined partly by demographics. In 1970, fully 40 percent of US households were married couples with at least one child under 18 years old. By 2012 that share had declined to 20 percent of US households – a shift that includes more single-parent breadwinners. It’s also being redefined by a changing job market – notably by the rising importance of education on résumés, as well as the disappearance of punch-the-timecard jobs in offices and factories that once produced comfortable lifestyles but were vulnerable to automation.
+
+All this doesn’t mean that living standards for average middle-income families are languishing in a state of permanent deterioration. A good deal of evidence suggests that’s not the case. And while some deride the insecurity of the Gig Economy – the growing legions of people doing freelance, contract, temporary, or other independent work – the changing job market has a bright side for many Americans: greater flexibility, creativity, and self-determination for one’s career.
+
+In fact, optimism about the future persists among moderate-income Americans to a degree that may seem surprising. It has just been tempered. The new watchword is realism – the awareness that the economically ascendant America of the baby boomers has now been superseded by an era of sluggish wage growth and financial setbacks. People who saw the dot-com boom go bust, and then the housing boom collapse, are more focused on carefully managing their debt and careers than on becoming the next Warren Buffett. Workers have little faith that their employer will look out for them. So they are finding ways to either look out for themselves, look out for each other, or both.
+
+From Maryland to California, Americans are longing to see a patent-leather shine return to the American dream.
+
+That’s why the challenges of average Americans loom as a central issue in the budding 2016 presidential race. Both Republican and Democratic candidates talk with varying degrees of passion about the need to rebuild the middle class. They just have different blueprints for how to do it.
+
+Yet beneath all the political rhetoric and nagging insecurities, myths endure about just how doomed today’s middle class really is, while other forces at work weighing on Americans’ living standards may be getting too little attention.
+
+It’s a paradox of the 21st century: Alongside all the anxiety felt by millions of working families, the “stuff” that symbolizes middle-class life is as ubiquitous as ever. Americans live in larger houses, drive better cars, are better educated, and have more choices from clothing to recreation than ever before. Everyone, it seems, has a smartphone in his or her pocket and a billboard-size TV on the wall.
+
+Yet stagnation in real incomes has many people feeling that a middle-class life is harder to sustain, or at least more precarious. And many firmly believe living standards are falling.
+
+Just ask Maurice Evans. He’s sitting on a shady stoop in downtown Frederick, a small Maryland city with a sizable middle class and a cluster of historic church steeples. Mr. Evans marvels at both the material progress he’s seen and the challenges he still faces. At first, what stands out to him is the price hikes in basic expenses. “Money’s not worth what it used to be,” he says.
+
+He’s closing in on traditional retirement age, and he recalls once buying an entire T-bone steak for a dollar. He recounts having a good $35,000-a-year job at the Marriott hotel chain in the early 1980s, when he lived in the District of Columbia.
+
+“That’s what people are making now,” even though the cost of living is much higher today, he says.
+
+Still, on reflection, he says Americans are generally getting better off over time.
+
+In fact, from homes to food to schooling, that is the case, according to an analysis by economist Stephen Rose at George Washington University. Many other economists concur that living standards have risen substantially in the past 35 years, wage stagnation notwithstanding.
+
+Indeed, for all the consumer laments about rising prices, official measures of inflation probably are skewed to actually understate the gains in income and living standards. A May survey of several dozen prominent economists, for instance, found that 6 in 10 agreed with this statement: “The 9% cumulative increase in real US median household income since 1980 substantially understates how much better off people in the median American household are now economically, compared with 35 years ago.”
+
+Only 1 in 10 disagreed (some quibbling over the word “substantially”), with the rest uncertain.
+
+True, there are endless complications with this kind of comparison across the decades. Consider just one example: To the degree that median household incomes have risen over the past half century, a big reason is because of the longer hours worked (more than rising wages) as women have joined the workforce. In other words, two people are now working in many households instead of one.
+
+Other caveats: Real median income still hasn’t caught up to pre-recession (2006) levels, and in some prominent areas of middle-class spending, costs have truly jumped in the past quarter century.
+
+“Almost everyone who thinks of themselves as middle class wants their kids to go to college, and the cost of college has shot up a lot faster” than inflation in general, says Lane Kenworthy, a sociologist who studies the changing fortunes of different income groups in America.
+
+Still, he’s persuaded that living standards have kept rising for most people. One simple benchmark of well-being: Back in 1960, Americans overall spent two-thirds of their income just on food, clothing, and housing. By 2013 that had dipped below 50 percent. Another: Average US life expectancy rose seven years (to age 78) between 1970 and 2007.
+
+So the question arises: Why do people feel as if it’s tougher to maintain a middle-class life if living standards are up? One reason is that fewer Americans are, in fact, part of the comfortable middle: The great mass of people with middle incomes has declined as a share of the overall population. Call it the barbell effect.
+
+The number of Americans who have moved into upper-income brackets has expanded, and so have the ranks of those in the lower-income brackets. In other words, the weight on each end is getting heavier while the middle is getting thinner.
+
+Part of this stems from the restructuring of the American economy. For decades, the demise of factory jobs has sent rolling shocks through communities large and small, spawning the term Rust Belt in the 1980s Midwest and leaving some towns with a persistent glut of boarded-up shop windows. Key drivers of change have been technology and a globalizing labor market.
+
+The upheaval has swept through the service sector, too, swallowing up loads of white-collar jobs that could also be automated out of existence or outsourced overseas. Demand for high-skill workers has continued to expand, as has demand for low-skill laborers who can’t be replaced by machines – from janitors and landscapers to child-care workers.
+
+These changes are on display here in Frederick (pop. 68,000), where the median income is a bit above the national level and homeownership is a bit below average. Nestled in the first folds of the Appalachian Mountains, the city has a red-brick downtown with a creekside promenade. The job mix here ranges from button-down lawyers heading in and out of the modest county courthouse to the food-service workers who serve their lunches at places like Cafe Nola, where the entrees include shrimp hominy and Chesapeake eggs Benedict.
+
+You have to look a bit harder to find the middle-income jobs, but they’re still here. The challenge is that they – like the higher-end jobs – generally require more education than they used to.
+
+“We have to have a piece of paper” to get a job, says Kelly Billigmeier, a young student who is earning a degree in digital media design at Frederick Community College. Her dad was able to have a family-supporting career, working on computer software and security, without ever getting a degree beyond high school.
+
+Students like Ms. Billigmeier are thinking hard about their financial futures, as well as how they can be of service to the world. Technological change has made their choices more transparent: A career website offered by the college shows students all the local jobs available in each degree program, and their pay.
+
+“It’s the job opportunity that draws people into our classes,” says Jerry Boyd, an administrator at the college.
+
+One sign of education’s rising importance: In 2008, only about a quarter of Americans with some college experience but no bachelor’s degree placed themselves in the “lower” or “lower-middle” classes in Pew Research Center surveys. Now that proportion is twice as high: 47 percent.
+
+Still, even if you have a lot of education, there is no guarantee of a high-paying job or lavish lifestyle today. Consider the situation of Ms. Beard, the adjunct professor in San Francisco.
+
+She has a PhD in English literature, but her combined jobs (teaching at two colleges) don’t pay as well as a coffee-retail managerial position she had a decade and a half ago.
+
+“I love what I do. I just hate the working conditions,” she says.
+
+Beard’s concerns are ones that legions of workers now face: high living costs (even with a rent-controlled apartment), student loans to pay off, and the unpredictability of knowing when – or if – their next contract will come.
+
+That last point, uncertainty, is key for the large and probably growing share of workers in the Gig Economy. Whether you attribute it to new technology and managerial strategies or to the sagging bargaining power of workers, a growing chunk of the US workforce is essentially “on call” – contractors, freelancers, and part-time workers who sometimes get little advance notice of whether they will work a shift or not.
+
+And the challenges don’t stop with people who lack full-time salaried positions. Lifestyles may be improving, but the prevalence of single-parent households and “sandwich” earners, who are helping to support their children and a parent or two at once, adds to the financial struggles of families.
+
+“The lack of two incomes in a family is an enormous factor” for many households, says Michelle Zukowski-Serlin, a mental health counselor who was a single mother after her partner died.
+
+Now married, she says burdens have eased in part as she and her husband, Troy, can juggle responsibilities like ferrying Julia, their teenage daughter, to volleyball games. But to Ms. Zukowski-Serlin, many costs still seem higher than they used to be.
+
+“There was no school fee when I was in school to be on a team,” she says. When Julia was heavily into gymnastics, the annual out-of-school fees alone (training camps, travel, etc.) came to $6,000, adds Zukowski-Serlin, who lives in Kalamazoo, Mich.
+
+Nor are those the only rising costs confronting families today. On several fronts, the squeeze is more acute:
+
+- Health care. Even though a record share of Americans has health insurance – with recent gains spurred by the 2010 Affordable Care Act, known as “Obamacare” – the number of those who are insured through their employer continues to decline. That, coupled with rising copayments in the employer plans, keeps pushing out-of-pocket costs for the average family higher.
+
+- Emergency funds. Many households have little money in the bank to handle a layoff or financial crisis. As of 2013, most US households could replace less than one month of their income through liquid savings, according to a Pew analysis of consumer surveys by the Federal Reserve.
+
+- Wealth. From home foreclosures to cashed-out retirement plans, the Great Recession ravaged the net worth of millions of Americans. In 2013, middle-rung households of working-age people had lower wealth (assets minus liabilities) than they had two decades earlier, according to the Fed surveys.
+
+- Retirement. The share of private-sector workers getting access to a defined-benefit pension was small before World War II, but soared to about 45 percent by 1970. Since 1980, however, it’s been in steady decline.
+
+All this helps explain why so many middle-class Americans feel anxious. “The biggest benefit we’re looking for is just some sense of job security ... of being able to plan your life,” says Beard of herself and her colleagues.
+
+Beard has health insurance, as long as she teaches at least two classes per semester at San Francisco State University. Last summer, when she had no classes, she turned to unemployment insurance to survive.
+
+Even as she weighs a possible career change, Beard says she’s finding some optimism about the future – through what she sees as rising momentum for labor unions. “I’ve started to get a little bit excited about something that I never thought would happen,” as those with PhDs who are unionized join low-skilled workers to push for better employment contracts and legislation on things such as raising the minimum wage.
+
+In Kalamazoo, Troy Zukowski-Serlin, Michelle’s husband and fellow counselor at the clinic they run together, also voices a battle-tested optimism.
+
+“Right after World War II, with the baby boom, the economy just took off,” he says. “We did not have a lot of competitors around the world at that time.” In his view, the path forward is partly to realize that that era “was a blip, an unusual experience.”
+
+He expects living standards to keep rising and that new policies can revive the health of the middle class. Expectations don’t need to be low, he adds, just reset for times that aren’t so booming.
+
+What does the future hold for America’s middle class?
+
+The blend of hope and realism voiced by workers from Frederick to Kalamazoo is the tenor of the times – at least for now. A brighter mood may arrive if the economy keeps improving for a few more years without a recession, says Mr. Kenworthy of the University of California, San Diego.
+
+Even today, though, most Americans persist in believing their own kids will be better off than their parents. In a 2012 Allstate/National Journal survey, 6 in 10 Americans said they are generally living the American dream, defined as “the opportunity to go as far as your talents and hard work will take you, and to live better than your parents.”
+
+America’s next economic chapter may well involve some tug and pull between collective and individual efforts to forge a better future.
+
+On the one hand, some economists call for efforts to revive labor unions or for other policies that, in an era of widening income inequality, might lift the fortunes of workers (a higher minimum wage, paid sick leave). Policy efforts could also focus on growing the economy through innovation and education, tipping a higher share of jobs from low-skill to middle- or high-skill ones that boost average incomes.
+
+On the other hand, globalization of markets and technological advances have shaken up the old model of time-clock jobs in ways that will be hard to reverse. And many workers see benefits as well as challenges in the new era.
+
+“I think we’re going back again to an earlier time where people my age and younger are feeling more responsible for their well-being and income, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” says Renee Lemoncelli, a mom near Columbus, Ohio, whose daughter is now pursuing a career in publishing.
+
+Ms. Lemoncelli does work she loves, designing and making jewelry that she sells online at the artisan marketplace Etsy. The income can fluctuate based on seasonal demand. But she has developed several solid product lines, pays for her own health insurance, and feels that she and others are getting back “to what our country was founded on, which was freedom and liberty.”
+
+In fact, some historians have found that, as the Industrial Revolution took hold, a commonly voiced concern was that factory jobs were eroding the flexibility and autonomy that people valued. Now, many gig workers covet those same attributes, even as others voice contrasting laments about the decline of traditional pensions or job security.
+
+“My parents definitely were more secure,” Lemoncelli says. They worked for local utility companies in an era when “they were loyal to the company and the company was loyal to them.”
+
+Now, as those bonds have frayed, Lemoncelli sees a positive shift: Her 20-something daughter is part of a generation of young workers attuned to charting their own job-hopping career paths – gaining skills and fresh experiences as they go.
+
+For now, though, the young generation is navigating a job market that’s more polarized than it used to be, with more positions at the high or low ends of the pay spectrum. The middle is still large, but it has been squeezed both in numbers of jobs and by a dearth of wage growth, according to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
+
+Some experts say America has a ripe opportunity to rebuild the middle class – and to thrust the economy forward in the process. What’s needed, says Joseph Fuller of Harvard Business School, is for states and localities to forge closer ties between employers and institutions like technical schools that can train workers for growing careers. Companies will get the skilled employees they need. Workers will advance into better jobs.
+
+In Cincinnati, Mr. Raven found upward job mobility through a training partnership between Napier Truck Driver Training Inc. and Hamilton County Job & Family Services. He sees a middle-income lifestyle coming into view.
+
+“It’s coming into fruition,” he says. “I don’t expect it to happen overnight.”",REAL
+8154,VIDEO: Watch as Hillary Needs Assistance… To Climb One Step,"Hillary Clinton is just fine . 
+She’s not sick. That weird neurological problem she had? All cured. 
+Pneumonia? Done. 
+Blurry vision? Concussion? Not a problem. 
+Right? 
+Well, maybe not. 
+Because if Hillary Clinton is in tip-top health, then why does she need help making her way up one little step. 
+In this video from The American Mirror , we can see Clinton heading up to a podium to make an appearance in Lake Worth, Texas. 
+As she attempted to take a step up to a small riser, an aide quickly offered her support – which she clearly needed. 
+Take a look: Hillary heads over to the overflow area to say hello to the crowd in Lake Worth, Florida. But ya know, no enthusiasm there. 🙄 pic.twitter.com/3cUDK245XK 
+You can also clearly see another assistant standing behind her, just in case she doesn’t make it up all the way. 
+Twitter had a field day: @HillBroYo The Mystery Medic is back pic.twitter.com/qkURGDbzeW 
+— Captain Chaos (@tonyr951) October 26, 2016 @HillBroYo how come she needs a hand to step on a small platform?What's wrong with her?",FAKE
+5583,Re: WATCH and laugh: literally the BEST vine of Hillary from the 2016 campaign … so far,"WATCH and laugh: possibly the BEST vine of Hillary from the 2016 campaign … so far Posted at 4:23 pm on October 27, 2016 by Sam J. 
+Several weeks back, Twitter was hee-haw’ing over the short “vine” of Hillary saying over and over and over again, “Why am I not 50 points ahead?!” 
+This vine takes it one step further, and the payoff is awesome. 
+— Andrew Kugle (@AndrewJKugle) October 27, 2016 
+You’ve got this thing set to evil. Trending",FAKE
+2349,Have there been 353 mass shootings this year — or just 4?,"The shooting in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday was the 353rd mass shooting of 2015, according to the crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker that Vox uses for our maps documenting mass shootings. Or it was the 29th, if you use data from USA Today. Or it was the fourth, if you use a database maintained by Mother Jones.
+
+How are three news outlets coming up with such different answers? It all comes down to definitions:
+
+There are other differences too — for example, Mother Jones says it generally only includes single gunman incidents, though it includes San Bernardino and the Columbine massacre in its database. But those are the main ones.
+
+What's happening here a dispute not about the facts, but over what the appropriate definition is.
+
+The Mass Shooting Tracker definition is fairly new, but the dispute between Mother Jones and USA Today is older and more ideologically fraught. That's because the Mother Jones definition suggests that mass shootings are rising in number, and the USA Today definition doesn't.
+
+If you look at all killings in which four or more people died, there doesn't appear to be a strong upward trend, according to estimates by Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox, who uses a similar definition to USA Today:
+
+But other researchers, like Amy P. Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller of the Harvard School of Public Health, argue that Mother Jones's more restrictive definition is appropriate. Cohen et al. analyzed Mother Jones's data and concluded that mass shootings were becoming more frequent. They measure the average period of time between mass shooting incidents, rather than the number of incidents themselves; mass shootings of the kind they're studying are rare enough to make the latter untenable. They find that the period of time separating mass shootings (by their definition) has been shrinking:
+
+So who's right? Well, Fox is right about the phenomenon he's studying, Cohen et al. are right about the phenomenon they're studying, and the Mass Shooting Tracker is right for the phenomenon it's studying. Declaring one or the other definition the ""right"" one is too pat; each is right for the thing it tracks. Fox's data tells us that shootings of four or more people didn't decline in the 1990s the way shootings as a whole did; that's concerning. Cohen et al.'s data tells us that high-profile public mass shootings like Aurora or Newtown have not only failed to decline the way normal shootings have but have increased in recent years; that's also concerning. And the Mass Shooting tracker tells us that mass shootings, deadly or not, are a daily occurrence in the US; that is, obviously, concerning.
+
+But people still care about determining the ""right"" definition in cases like this for the purpose of ideological proxy warfare. Declaring Fox or Cohen et al. right, in particular, has a certain political valence in the wider gun control debate. You see something similar in discussions around school shootings, wherein gun control skeptics are as eager to declare that gang-related shootings in school are not real school shootings as they are to embrace Fox's definition in which gang-related mass shootings are real mass shootings — and vice versa for gun control supporters.
+
+The best case for gun control has little to do with mass shootings, and isn't necessarily focused on homicides at all
+
+What's frustrating about this is that whether mass shootings are increasing or decreasing in frequency has very little to do with the generalized case for gun control. Mother Jones's Mark Follman — who has done extraordinary work on gun violence in America, including compiling the data set used by Cohen et al. — is not wrong when he writes that the Mother Jones–defined mass shootings are ""a unique phenomenon that must be understood on its own."" And it's worth studying both the phenomena identified by Fox and those identified by Mother Jones to find specialized ways to prevent them.
+
+But mass shootings are very rare. By Fox's definition, there are between 50 and 125 victims a year (compared with 11,068 total gun homicides in 2011); by the Mother Jones definition, there are substantially fewer than that.
+
+Mass shootings can and should be prevented, and their comparative rarity makes them no less monstrous or tragic. But the best case for gun control has little to do with mass shootings, and isn't necessarily focused on homicides at all. Of the 33,636 firearm deaths in 2013, 63 percent, or 21,175, were suicides. The evidence that the presence of additional guns contributes to more firearm homicides is persuasive, but research from the Means Matter Project at the Harvard School of Public Health (much of it done by Azrael and Miller themselves, along with Cathy Barber) shows that the evidence that guns contribute to higher levels of suicide is considerably stronger.
+
+Suicide, contrary to popular belief, isn't typically planned and thought through extensively in advance. It's impulsive; one survey found that 90 percent of respondents deliberated for less than a day before attempting suicide. And 90 percent of people who survive suicide attempts end up dying by other means. They didn't make a considered choice and then seek to follow through by whatever means; they made an impulsive decision and got lucky. Ken Baldwin, who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, once told the New Yorker's Tad Friend that as he was falling, he ""instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.""
+
+America's gun homicide problem is real, frightening, and must be addressed. But its gun suicide problem is considerably worse.
+
+Guns make it likelier that these impulsive decisions end in death rather than in survival and recovery. Studies suggest that suicide attempts using guns are fatal in the vast majority of cases, while attempts using cuts or poisoning are only fatal 6 or 7 percent of the time. So it's perhaps unsurprising that areas with more guns tend to have higher suicide rates, or that a number of gun control measures have been successful in preventing suicides. In one particularly dramatic case, the Israeli Defense Forces stopped letting soldiers bring their guns home over the weekend, and suicides fell 40 percent, primarily due to a drop in firearm suicides committed on weekends.
+
+The dominant focus of gun control efforts, then, should be on keeping guns (and particularly handguns) out of the hands of suicidal people. America's gun homicide problem is real, frightening, and must be addressed. But its gun suicide problem is considerably worse. My concern is that disputes over whether this or that incident counts as a mass shooting reaffirms the myth that Jared Loughner and Adam Lanza are the face of America's gun violence problem. They're not. The tens of thousands who die every year because of depression and a nearby gun are. They are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the gun debate, and they deserve better.",REAL
+10536,Statistical Propaganda: How many Syrians has US regime-change killed?,"October 31, 2016 - Fort Russ -  Aleksandr Khrolenko, R IA Analytics -  translated by J. Arnoldski -  
+
+
+Hardly a day goes by without foreign media circulating the false accusations that the leadership of the Syrian Arab Republic is guilty of the deaths of hundreds of thousands and even millions of Syrians. Even authoritative international organizations are cited as the sources of the dissemination of such information. 
+In July 2013, according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, the death toll in Syria exceeded 100 thousand.  
+In October 2014, the Jordanian prince and UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, determined the number of people killed in Syria to be 200,000.  
+By October 2015, according to UN figures, the number of killed in Syria was more than 240,000. 
+In September 2016, the UN officially presented the figure of 300,000 Syrians killed and more than half of the Syrian population as refugees. 
+According to the Dubai news channel “Al-Arabiya,” in October 2015, the number of killed had already surpassed 250,000. The New York Times produced similar figures. 
+After the beginning of the Russian air force’s operation in Syria, the figures of casualties presented by Western sources did not change for the better. Of course, the countries participating in the conflict “correct” the data in favor of their interests and many media outlets operate with unverified information from the Supervisory Board on Human Rights of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights created by the opposition. 
+How objective are these disseminated figures?  
+The Russian Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences has conducted its own study using data from the Central Statistical Bureau of Syria. This was reported at a press conference entitled “Syria: The Thorny Path to Reconciliation” at the Russia Today media agency by the UN’s senior advisor and representative on Syria, Russian Academy of Science correspondent Vitaliy Naumkin.  
+In 2011, the population of Syria amounted to 22.51 million people. According to the figures of the Syrian Central Statistical Bureau, the Syrian Arab Republic’s population has declined to 17.87 million.  
+Given the average growth rate of the population excluding refugees, the total number for today was supposed to be 24.64 million people. As of October 20th, 2016, the number of Syrian citizens (including emigrants) is 24.54 million.  
+Given correct calculations, the number of Syrians killed over five years of war has been determined, taking into consideration that around 7 million people have left Syria as refugees. 
+According to the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the total number of Syrians killed is 105,000. The losses of the government army and militia amount to 45,000. 24,000 militants of terrorist organizations from among the local population have been killed, and 35,000 civilians have been killed. The largest number of civilians have been killed at the hands of jihadists and the so-called “moderate opposition.” Around 18,000 in Syria have been killed by foreign mercenaries of terrorist groups including citizens from 80 countries.  
+Earlier, the ex-head of the Israeli secret services Nativ, Yaakov Kedmi, presented almost identical figures of Syrian losses (around 40,000 civilians). 
+American assessments, as a rule, range from several hundred thousand to millions killed, which is beyond the boundaries of reality. 
+But the point is not even in the statistics. The death of people in principle should not become an object of political speculation or an instrument of information war. American lies on the number of people killed in Syria is doubly disgusting because it is the US that developed and attempted to realize regime-change projects against unfavorable leaders in a number of Middle Eastern and African “rouge states” by means of terrorists from “moderate oppositions” and fomenting civil wars... 
+The American coalition does not want to publicize the civilian losses resultant of their air strikes on ISIS in Iraq. And yet the coalition has repeatedly hurled accusations against others for losses among the civilian population. During the Iraq War (2003-2011), 460,000 Iraqis were killed. The assault on Mosul is also resulting in many victims among the civilian population. 
+Palestinian political analyst Azzam Abu Saud remarked in the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen:  “The US has made a mass of mistakes in Syria. The war in Syria never would have been so bloody if the US had not supplied weapons to rebels. The US, in addition, created the Islamic State, which has now spun out of their control.” 
+Another Norwegian publication, ABC Nyheter , adds: “The US claims that only 55 civilians and 45,000 militants from ISIS and other militant Islamists have been killed as a result of more than 11,000 coalition airstrikes on ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria since 2014…Even when the American leadership is presented with the lists of civilians killed in Syria and Iraq and their photographs, they refuse to acknowledge their deaths.”  
+
+The Russian approach to resolving the Syrian and other Middle Eastern conflicts remains the same: there is no military solution. Success is possible only through dialogue and national reconciliation.  
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
+                                                   
+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+1635,The 17-year story behind Marco Rubio’s cut-down of Jeb Bush,"It started in 1998, with a $50 check out of the blue.
+
+The money was a donation from one of the highest-placed men in Florida politics — Jeb Bush, the son of a former president who was about to be elected governor — to one of the lowest. Marco Rubio, 26, was running for the city commission in tiny West Miami.
+
+“I remember him showing it off,” a Rubio friend recalled. “ ‘I got a check from Jeb Bush!’ ”
+
+In the years to come, the two men formed an alliance that, at times, even looked like a politician’s odd version of friendship. Rubio, younger and gifted, provided Bush with help in the state legislature. Bush provided Rubio with donors, endorsements and — at one especially curious moment — a golden sword.
+
+By this week, however, the relationship itself had become a kind of weapon.
+
+“Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you,” Rubio told Bush during Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate, after Bush had criticized Rubio. The power of the comeback was in its familiarity — in Rubio’s pitying sense that he knew Bush well enough to know Bush had betrayed himself.
+
+That moment had been coming for months, as a presidential election put the old allies on a path to collide. They schmoozed the same donors. Courted the same pro-establishment voters. Each threw insults — veiled, then not veiled — at the other.
+
+A confrontation was coming. And people who watched these allies turn into enemies had little doubt who would win.
+
+“It was a godsend for Marco,” a chance to show off his political talents and get out of Bush’s shadow, all in the same sentence, said Jorge Luis Lopez, a lawyer in Miami who is backing Rubio. “For years, everybody [in Rubio’s camp] always had to validate, ‘Is Marco ready to do it?’ And now, everybody sees Marco is ready to do it. And it came from the lips of his own mentor.”
+
+For now, both Rubio and Bush are losing in this race. But both say they’re playing a longer game. After a while, both men believe, the outsiders Donald Trump and Ben Carson will fade, and voters will come looking for somebody safer. Both Bush and Rubio, of course, think the safe choice will be him.
+
+That competition has put the campaign’s spotlight on a two-decades-long relationship that never fit conventional categories.
+
+“Friends” was always too warm a word, even back then.
+
+“Enemies” is too strong, even now.
+
+“Frenementor,” said Dan Gelber, a Democrat who served in the Florida House when both Rubio and Bush were in state government.
+
+Bush and Rubio were born, 18 years apart, into vastly different American experiences. Rubio’s parents were Cuban immigrants who had worked as a bartender and a maid. Bush was a Bush. The first office he ran for was governor of Florida.
+
+As Rubio rose in politics — interning for a congresswoman, working for a politically connected lawyer — Bush took notice. That was what the $50 was about.
+
+Then, in 2000, the two men realized they could help each other in new and more concrete ways. Rubio was a new state legislator, at a time when term limits had cleared out the old guard. Bush was the governor, looking for a new ally.
+
+“Jeb looked around, and suddenly Marco was one of the people he knew best in the House,” said a former colleague who worked closely with both men. Rubio advocated Bush’s ideas, and Bush steered Rubio toward conservative politics, especially the gospel of small government.
+
+By 2005, the two men were close enough that when Rubio gave an emotional speech after winning the race to be Florida’s House speaker, Bush made a show of his mentorship. Bush honored Rubio with a gift: a sword, which he said belonged to a great “conservative warrior” named Chang.
+
+“Chang is somebody who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society,” Bush told a crowd so large that a plane had to be chartered to ferry well-wishers from Miami to Tallahassee. “Chang, this mystical warrior, has never let me down.”
+
+This gesture was even stranger than it sounds. It appears that “Chang” was not a real person but something from a Bush family in-joke about Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (“Unleash Chiang!”). Now, Jeb — whose ­father was once the U.S. envoy to Beijing — had garbled the story into something about a mystical warrior with a sword.
+
+The sword “really meant something to Jeb,” a longtime friend and colleague of both men said. “He thought it was Marco who would continue his legacy.”
+
+At the time, the sword seemed to mean something to Rubio, too. He hung it in a place of honor in his office — or at least, he used to.
+
+“I have it somewhere at home,” Rubio told reporters in New Hampshire this year. “I have young kids. I don’t want them to run around with a sword.”
+
+Bush left the governor’s office in 2007. After that, friends say, he kept up his alliance with the still-rising Rubio.
+
+He supported Rubio, working donors behind the scenes, when Rubio took on the Florida GOP establishment in the 2010 Senate race. After Rubio won, the two would meet for coffee after workouts in the gym at the luxurious Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Fla., where Bush has an office.
+
+Then the men — who now shared friends, donors and allies — began to realize they would be rivals.
+
+“He’s entitled to do this — there’s not something per se wrong,” Al Cardenas, a power broker in Florida politics who backs Bush, said of Rubio. “But we believe that most people would have decided not to proceed.”
+
+Bush made clear last year that he planned to run. In April, Rubio announced his candidacy, and pointedly told his audience that America couldn’t go “back to the leaders and ideas of the past.”
+
+This was the first of many signals: Rubio wasn’t just running alongside his old ally but against him, lumping him in with Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton as symbols of the stale political order.
+
+“The minute I saw [Rubio’s] announcement, I had every reason to assume, regrettably, that this was never going to be the same,” said Jorge Arrizurieta, who first met Bush in the 1980s, served in different roles during his governorship and is now a top donor.
+
+“I’ve heard many common friends call it a betrayal by Marco, but not Jeb,” said Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist who is a friend of both men but supports Bush in this race. “Jeb’s not a guy to cry over spilled milk. Jeb’s got a goal ahead of him, and wasting time psychoanalyzing Marco’s motives won’t help him get there.”
+
+Since then, Bush and Rubio have rarely spoken one another’s names — but they have talked about each other all the time.
+
+Rubio, for instance, talked for 25 minutes in June at the Prescott Bush awards dinner — named for Jeb Bush’s grandfather — without mentioning the Bush name. He never mentioned Bush to a room full of seniors during a central Florida campaign stop in September.
+
+But in both places, he implied a contrast, telling the Prescott Bush awards crowd in Connecticut that it was time to “transition from the past we are so proud of to the exciting future that awaits our country.”
+
+Bush has also deployed a knock-him-without-naming-him strategy against Rubio. For months, he’s called for members of Congress who miss many votes — as Rubio has — to have their pay docked.
+
+In late September, Bush tried to burnish his leadership credentials by telling a TV interviewer that he “relied on people like Marco Rubio and many others to follow my leadership” in Florida. Later, the two campaigns squabbled about which one of them had a disappointing quarter of fundraising. (They both did).
+
+By Monday, Bush’s campaign — increasingly desperate amid a cash shortage and staff cuts — labeled Rubio a “GOP Obama” in a meeting with top donors. That may not sound like an insult, since Obama did manage to get elected president twice. But Bush meant it in the context of Republicans who view the president as inexperienced and untrustworthy.
+
+In a broad sense, Bush was losing the argument. Rubio was overtaking him in the polls. And the very thing that had made Rubio such an attractive ally before — he shared Bush’s basic political beliefs but did a better job of selling them — made him a devastating rival now.
+
+“I support Jeb because he’s older, he’s got a lot of experience, he was governor for two terms and did an extraordinarily good job, but if Jeb doesn’t make it I certainly hope Marco does,” said Barney Bishop, a prominent Florida lobbyist who is backing Bush but has also given to Rubio’s super PAC. “A lot of us are torn between both Jeb and Marco because we think Marco has a great future ahead of him. We don’t want to see either one of them have to do battle with each other in order to get ahead.”
+
+Their competition finally came to a head at Wednesday night’s debate, producing the defining moment in their relationship so far.
+
+Even on the attack, Bush seemed hindered by the relationship and by his blue-blood sense of decorum. “Could I — could I bring something up here?” he said.
+
+“Marco, when you signed up for this [the Senate], this was a six-year term, and you should be showing up to work,” Bush said.
+
+Rubio seemed to know that the intimacy of their relationship gave him more power, not less. He looked Bush right in the eye, knee-capped him, and then turned away from him to face the audience.
+
+“My campaign is going to be about the future of America, it’s not going to be about attacking anyone else on this stage,” he said. “I will continue to have tremendous admiration and respect for Governor Bush.”
+
+He was talking about his old ally as though Bush was already gone.",REAL
+5341,France’s Far-Right National Front Seeks Funding From United Arab Emirates,"Videos France’s Far-Right National Front Seeks Funding From United Arab Emirates With French banks reluctant to lend to the National Front, the party says it could resort to foreign funding from as far away as the UAE. | October 29, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! An electoral board showing France’s far-right National Front president Marine Le Pen and reading: 100% National Front. 0% migrants is pictured during a demonstration in Forges-les-Bains, south of Paris, France, Saturday, Oct. 8, 2016. 
+France’s National Front is known to have diverse funding streams, but an investigation published this week unveiled a new potential funder: the United Arab Emirates. 
+It is certainly an odd source of funding for a party whose leader, Marine Le Pen, has been taken to court for anti-Muslim hate speech. 
+Le Pen’s Russian networks are already well known: in 2014, the National Front received a loan of €11mn ($12mn) from the First Czech Russian Bank. 
+This fact was admitted by the party’s treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just, who said: “The party makes requests to foreign banks, why not Russian banks?” 
+The latest controversy was sparked by a book by famed French investigative journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot. In 2004, the journalistic duo were even held hostage at one point by Islamic militants in Iraq. 
+Titled Nos très chers émirs (Our dear emirs), their latest book exposes the murky relationship between a number of French politicians and the countries of the Arabian Gulf. 
+In the wake of the controversy caused by the book’s publication, the news website Mediapart has raised the question of possible funding of Marine Le Pen’s presidential campaign by the UAE. 
+A source familiar with the far-right French party told Middle East Eye: “It is true that in 2014 Marine Le Pen met an Emirati emissary in her residence in Montrebout, in the Hauts-de-Seine region, who offered to help her. 
+“That being said, the FN [National Front] has always been clear on this point: it has two enemies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which it regards as sponsors of wahhabism, but in her eyes the Emiratis are an ally in the fight against radicalisation.” 
+Wahhabism is an ultra-orthodox strand of Sunni Islam practised in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and it has become an increasingly popular theme to explain the chaos gripping the Middle East. 
+“France must break its relations with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which helped, assisted, and funded Islamic fundamentalists worldwide,” Le Pen said in September 2014 on France 24. 
+“We must rely on those Muslim countries which fight fundamentalism,” she added, naming the UAE and Egypt as examples of such countries and calling for “a wide coalition” against Islamic extremism. 
+In 2014, pro-Le Pen French MEP Jean-Luc Schaffhauser told Mediapart that he had negotiated a loan at a rate of 2.8 percent with the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, but that it in the event it did not materialize. 
+The following year in May, Le Pen travelled to Cairo to meet with the Grand Imam of al-Azhar Mosque – a trip allegedly funded by the UAE, according to Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot. 
+The allegation was denied earlier this week by National Front MEP and Secretary General Nicolas Bay, who told France 2 television: “That is incorrect.” 
+“For now, about 50 percent of the campaign should be funded by Cotelec, the FN’s funding organisation that is chaired by Jean-Marie Le Pen,” the source close to the party told MEE. 
+These loans granted to the party by its members will be refunded once the state has itself reimbursed the campaign. This rule applies to all parties that win more than 5 percent of the vote in the first round of the elections. 
+“The needs for the first round are estimated at around €12mn, and €21mn for the second round. For the first round, they still lack €6-7 million, but they are aware of the fact that appealing to the Gulf countries harm them in terms of image,” the source added. 
+“So at first, the goal is to look for loans in European countries. If this is not enough, they will turn to the Russians, and thirdly, to the UAE. We can say that this is an option, but a third choice option.” 
+The National Front has indicated that around 40 banks have refused to lend it money. Yet polls assure that Le Pen will win more than the 5 percent of votes needed to be reimbursed by the state. 
+“If we have to borrow abroad, we will borrow abroad,” Wallerand de Saint-Just, the party’s treasurer, told France 3. “There are no exceptions to this, either in Russia, Argentina, or in the United States… and why not in the Middle East?”",FAKE
+7189,"The Cosmic Story: Scorpio New Moon, October 30, 2016","The Cosmic Story: Scorpio New Moon, October 30, 2016 Entering the Cauldron of Regeneration The Sun entered the sign of Scorpio on Saturday, October 22, 2016. Leaving behind the airy social realm of Libra, we now plunge into the dark watery realms of the Unconscious. As we worked to balance our inner and outer lives in Libra, now we come to the point where we have to let go of what no longer serves us. This requires that we turn within and look at those emotions which keep us imprisoned in our pasts. As we face our inner darkness, the world outside is also growing dark. The Sun moves lower into the southern hemisphere, bringing them the warmth of Spring and coming Summer, while leaving us in the North with fading light, shorter days and colder weather. Nature is letting go of its life as the year dies. Samhain Ritual 2012 License DMCA Samhain Ritual/Sekhmet Just after this intense New Moon we'll be celebrating Samhain, the last Gate of the Wheel of the Year. At Samhain, the old year dies so the new year can be born. The veils between the world are very thin, and the spirits of the dead are very close to us. We celebrate Samhain, Halloween, All Hallow's Eve, the Day of the Dead, All Saints Day and All Souls Day to honor our ancestors at this transitional time. - Advertisement - The great goddess who embodies the energies of Samhain is Hecate, most ancient Goddess of the Triple Crossroads, Queen of the Witches and Guide and Protector on the road to the Underworld. She stands at the Crossroads with her two torches and her black dog at her side. She can see the past, the present and the future and while we each have to choose our path, she lends us one of her torches and sends her faithful companion to guide our steps into the mystery of our future selves. For more about Hecate: http://ladywisdomchronicles.blogspot.com/ Scorpio New Moon Scorpio is often considered the most powerful sign in the Zodiac, and those who incarnate as Scorpios, some of the most powerful souls. For Scorpio's initiation is pivotal to our soul's growth, which is to die to be reborn again. For anyone living under patriarchy, where we have been disconnected from our feminine, soulful consciousness, death is the ultimate test to our unconscious Ego. We have been taught to fear death as a punishment or an end, rather than as a transition, a change that will give us back eternal life. And so FEAR is the Gatekeeper we have to face as we sink into the dark, murky emotions from past lives which keep us stuck in old patterns of disconnection, betrayal, horror and hurt. It's interesting that the American elections are always held during the Sun's transit through Scorpio, signaling a transition of power, a transformation of our collective lives. Indeed, that's also what Scorpio is about. Power. The ruling planets of Scorpio are Mars and Pluto. Pluto, or Hades, is the Lord of the Underworld, ruling the unconscious depths within us. These depths can lie quiet when we live by ourselves, but they get stirred up when we relate to others. And that's why Scorpio also rules intimacy, the emotional sharing that's necessary for a deep, rich life. And Mars the Warrior is what is needed to give us the courage to face those emotions. Scorpio is concentrated emotional power which propels the energy of evolution, and so it is the repository of unconscious instinctual drives, old emotional patterns and attachments and the compulsive tendencies that we bring with us personally and collectively from other lifetimes as well as from our early childhood. These old emotional wounds keep us stuck in fear and suspicion. Jung called them the Shadow. They are the parts of us that we can't see about ourselves and which we tend to project onto others instead of taking responsibility for ourselves. The Shadow is alive and well in our culture at the moment. Perhaps the very obvious examples we see in the news will help us deal with our personal Shadows. - Advertisement - When we operate out of these unconscious patterns, we tend to use emotional manipulation, defensiveness and vindictiveness to get our way. This is the lowest form of Scorpionic energy, the unconscious energy of survival at all costs. The Snake often symbolizes this aspect of Scorpio, although its transformation is possible with the shedding of its skin--or our unconscious Ego drives. In many ways, snake is best seen as our instinctual wisdom so perhaps the better symbol is the Scorpion, which will sting itself in its frenzy to sting the other. We've seen this kind of lower Scorpio energy in some of Donald Trump's attacks on women and minorities instead of admitting his own mistakes. Eagle License DMCA Scorpio has three symbols because it concerns the process of transformation, and three is the number of process. The unconscious residue from other lifetimes which eats away at us is symbolized by the scorpion. Once we begin to recognize our Shadow and can name it, the symbol shifts to an Eagle. And Eagle is the highest flying bird, able to see far and wide. Like Great Spirit, it gives us an overview of our lives. Eagle Scorpios can look at and name their Shadows, but they can also repress those shadowy instincts and certainly not talk about them! They use their will power to keep those negative instincts in line. But that's just a step to the third part of the process: the death of old habits and complexes. The re-integration of those repressed emotions and instincts then give rise to a new birth, which is symbolized by the phoenix, who burns up old karma and arises out of the ashes with a new, spiritual vision. This is the initiation of Scorpio. To go through all the tests that life brings us and learn from our mistakes and find the meaning of what it is we are sent here to learn.",FAKE
+6901,Michael Oliver – This Key Signal Will Indicate Liftoff For Gold & Silver And The Mining Stocks!,"123 Views October 31, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+Today King World News is pleased to present an extremely important update on the war in the gold market from Michael Oliver at MSA. Oliver allowed KWN exclusively to share this key report with our global audience. 
+By Michael Oliver, MSA (Momentum Structural Analysis) October 31 ( King World New s) – MSA has recently shown many long-term momentum charts of gold, all of which demonstrate that the sharp pullback in no way broke the structural integrity of the long-term momentum uptrend that emerged with multiple momentum breakouts (quarterly and annual) in February. Period. The same applies to GDX… IMPORTANT: To find out which high-grade silver mining company billionaire Eric Sprott just purchased a nearly 20% stake in and learn why he believes this is one of the most exciting silver stories in the world – CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored 
+Our main focus now is in identifying points of upturn. We begin with a long-term momentum chart of GDX (see chart below). 
+This 40-wk. avg. oscillator is effectively the same as the 200-day avg. or 3-qtr. avg. oscillator. 
+Firstly, we aren’t 100% sure the decline is over, but where it landed suggests it might be. A further drop won’t alter our positive view of GDX, as the zone of potential support extends lower than we’ve seen to date. 
+It’s unlikely this long-term chart will be the best place to look for a credible sign of upturn. Instead, this chart has already pretty much accomplished its task in defining both the upturn (first up-arrow) and a target zone for a low (second up-arrow). 
+There is rarely a market situation in which only one technical factor will provide entry or exit signal. It usually takes looking at several, in an ongoing basis, to identify turns. 
+Here we use a 15-day avg. (effectively a smoothed 3-wk. avg.) to measure (see chart below). 
+Note that the process of decline since July produced three down waves in momentum, with the third wave not confirming the new price lows. 
+The Key To The Gold, Silver, And Mining Share Liftoff If momentum can close a day out above the recent high close and the downtrend connecting those three peak closes then assume weekly momentum is turning. This does not mean cannot have selloffs, but it probably means you have seen the low. Basically any day that can close somewhat over $25 accomplishes the task. 
+King World News note: What Michael is trying to identify is a signal that the mining stocks are reversing back into an uptrend, thus marking the end of the correction. He highlights the level of 25 on the GDX as the key to see a clear sign of a reversal. If GDX closes above 25 on a daily basis that will be a good indicator. If it closes above that level on a weekly basis that would be even better. A reversal in the mining shares will also be accompanied by a reversal in gold and silver to the upside, so keep an eye on that key level that Michael highlighted because the mining shares will continue to lead the way in this bullish leg of the secular bull market in gold, silver, and the shares. 
+  China, Russia, The Silk Road, Commodities, Nixon, And A Massive Bull Market In Gold & Silver CLICK  ",FAKE
+5009,Trump backs off false Iran video claim,"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump backed off a false claim Friday morning, admitting he had not seen a video of a $400 million payment being unloaded from a US plane in Iran.
+
+The Republican nominee had claimed at rallies twice this week that such a video existed, saying in Maine on Thursday that it was provided by Iranians ""to embarrass our president because we have a president who's incompetent.""
+
+What Trump had actually seen in news reports was video of three American prisoners who Iran had released arriving in Geneva, Switzerland.
+
+Trump admitted his error in an early-morning tweet Friday, without actually saying he was wrong.
+
+""The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran!"" he tweeted.
+
+The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran!
+
+It was a rare reversal for Trump, who has stood by inaccurate or unproven claims previously -- insisting he'd seen videos of Muslim Americans in New Jersey cheering the September 11, 2001, attacks. His political rise began during the 2012 campaign, when he insisted that Obama release his birth certificate, questioning the President's American citizenship.
+
+Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine hit Trump on Friday for the video claim, saying he seems ""confused"" on CBS' ""This Morning,"" in an interview taped before Trump backtracked.
+
+""I have no idea what he's talking about. It (the video) doesn't exist. He might be thinking about Iran Contra from like 35 years ago or something like this,"" Kaine said.
+
+He pointed to Trump's recent criticism of Kaine, who Trump said in a late-July news conference ""did a terrible job in New Jersey"" -- despite Kaine being a governor and senator from Virginia, not New Jersey. Kaine said Trump must have confused him with Tom Kean, who was New Jersey's governor until 1990.
+
+""He was confusing it with a situation from two or three decades ago. Maybe that's what he's doing with this bogus video claim,"" Kaine said.
+
+Asked if he thinks Trump is confused, Kaine said: ""I absolutely think he's confused.""
+
+Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman, responded to Kaine on Fox News Friday morning, saying he's ""not sure there was confusion"" on Trump's part.
+
+""The point that he was making is the cash-transfer took place and it was taking place consistent with the transfer of hostages,"" Manafort said.
+
+""Again, what the Obama administration wants to do is get off of the point. The point is, $400 million in cash that most likely ended up in terrorist camps used against the west was given in exchange for hostages and the President of the United States lied to the American people, that's the point.""
+
+Trump has made criticism of the US delivery of $400 million in cash via a plane to Iran -- the first installment of $1.7 billion in payments related to a decades-old dispute over an unfulfilled us arms purchase before the Iranian revolution cut relations between the two countries and settled at the same time Iran released four American prisoners -- a staple this week on the campaign trail.
+
+But Wednesday in Florida and Thursday in Maine, he went a step further, claiming he'd seen video of the cash actually being delivered in Iran.
+
+""It was interesting because a tape was made. Right? You saw that? With the airplane coming in -- nice plane -- and the airplane coming in, and the money coming off, I guess. Right? That was given to us, has to be, by the Iranians,"" Trump said in Portland, Maine.
+
+""And you know why the tape was given to us? Because they want to embarrass our country. They want to embarrass our country. And they want to embarrass our president because we have a president who's incompetent. They want to embarrass our president,"" Trump said. ""I mean, who would ever think they would be taking all of this money off the plane and then providing us with a tape? It's only for one reason. And it's very, very sad.""",REAL
+6518,Jackie Mason: Hillary Clinton Too Untrustworthy To Serve As Bathroom Attendant – She’d Steal The Toilet Paper,"Email 
+
+During a radio interview, comic legend and political pundit Jackie Mason joked that the only time Hillary Clinton is not lying “is when her mouth is not moving.”“And even then, she is probably lying because she’s probably sitting there thinking of the next lie she is going to tell,” he added. 
+Mason claimed that Clinton is so untrustworthy that she likely couldn’t land a job as an “attendant in the ladies’ room because they would be afraid that she would steal the towels or the napkins. Even the toilet paper wouldn’t be safe from her.” 
+Mason was speaking during his regular segment on this reporter’s talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM in Philadelphia. 
+He continued: 
+Do you think that if she went for any other job besides the presidency that anyone would hire her anywhere? If you saw her resume which is a resume of accomplishing nothing and running from the police three-quarters of her life. She is always either indicted or almost indicted or about to be indicted. Her whole life spent fleeing from the Justice Departments of different countries. Now, this yenta, do you think she would be able to get any other job? … 
+Would you think they would hire her as a chambermaid? Do you know what all those sheets and pillowcases are worth? Do you think they would trust her with it? After they found out the history of her life. Let’s be honest about it, if you went on a vacation would you let her watch your house while you went on vacation? Would you expect to come back and find anything still there?",FAKE
+9744,"FBI Reopen Hillary Clinton Email Investigation, New Emails Found","  Sean Adl-Tabatabai in News , US // 0 Comments 
+The FBI has announced it will reopen it’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server whilst serving as Secretary of State. 
+The news was broken on Friday morning by Jason Chaffetz, Chairman of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. 
+In a tweet Chaffetz confirmed that the FBI had learned about the existence of additional emails that appear “pertinent to the investigation”. FBI Dir just informed me, ""The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation."" Case reopened 
+— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016 
+FBI Director James Comey told members of Congress on Friday that new emails had been discovered and that he had instructed officers to reopen the case so they could investigate. 
+Though Comey had previously recommended no criminal charges for the Democratic presidential candidate in July, the discovery of new emails opens up the possibility that Hillary Clinton could be indicted for mishandling classified information. 
+Theguardian.com reports: 
+“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” 
+Comey added: “Although the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant and I cannot predict how long it will take to complete this additional work, I believe it is important to update your Committees about our efforts in light of my previous testimony.” 
+The letter comes 11 days before the presidential election and nearly four months after Comey announced the FBI would not recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her “extremely careless” use of a private email server while secretary of state. The FBI director said then: “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes … our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” 
+The controversy over Clinton’s use of a private email server while at the state department has loomed over her candidacy since before she even announced her intent to seek the White House in April. 
+The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. BIG: The FBI is reopening its investigation into @HillaryClinton 's email server. Here's the letter from the FBI to Congress: pic.twitter.com/OKjipTeiJp",FAKE
+6704,Since Donald Trump Won The Presidency… Ford Shifts Truck Production From Mexico To Ohio | EndingFed News Network,"Email Print Ford’s heavy duty pickup trucks which used to be built in Mexico started rolling off an assembly line in Ohio this week. That’s good news for the 1,000 Ford workers in Ohio, who might have otherwise been out of work. It’s also good publicity for Ford ( F ), which has been under fire for investing so much in Mexico. In April, the automaker said it would invest $2.5 billion in transmission plants in the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Guanajuato, creating about 3,800 jobs there. Ford’s south-of-the-border strategy has drawn heavy criticism from groups such as the United Auto Workers union and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The Avon Lake, Ohio, plant produced its first batch of Ford’s full-size F-650 and F-750 pick up trucks on Wednesday. “Our investment…reinforces our commitment to building vehicles in America,” said Joe Hinrichs, Ford president, The Americas. “Working with our partners in the UAW, we found a way to make the costs competitive enough to bring production of a whole new generation of work trucks to Ohio.” The move comes at a delicate time for Ford. The United Auto Workers union is in negotiations with the automaker as well as General Motors ( GM ) and Fiat Chrysler ( FCAM ) on new labor deals to replace those that expire next month. And promises by the automakers to keep production and jobs at U.S. plants is a major focus of the union. The union is particularly worried about the plan Ford announced in July to shift production of the C-Max and Focus out of a Wayne, Mich., plant in 2018. The automaker hasn’t said where that work will go, but employees fear those cars will be built in Mexico. It’s also not clear whether any other cars will be made at the Wayne plant instead, in order to protect about 4,000 jobs. “We’re actively pursuing other alternatives for the Wayne plant that will be discussed with our UAW friends. We haven’t decided what will go there,” said Ford spokeswoman Kristina Adamski. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently said that if he’s elected he would take steps to make it more expensive for manufacturers to shift work to Mexico and then export the items back to the United States. “How does that help us?” Trump said about the Ford investment in Mexico while campaigning in Michigan this week. “Mexico is becoming the new China.” 
+If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
+10423,Progressives Find ‘White Trash’ More Threatening Than Nuclear War,"Leave a reply 
+Paul Craig Roberts – The American electorate’s preference for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders has established two facts. One is that the majority of the American people do not believe the media presstitutes. The other is that only the “progressives” and “liberals” who inhabit the Atlantic Northeast and Pacific West coasts believe the presstitutes. 
+Trump’s election to the presidency has confirmed these holier-than-thou souls in their strongly held belief that America is a white trash racist country. They have told us this all day long today. 
+From these people and from the presstitutes we hear that white supremacy elected Trump. This is their propaganda, the intention of which is to discredit a Trump administration before it is inaugerated. Funny how white supremacy elected black Obama twice previously. 
+Truthout has lost it completely. John Knefel declares “The David Dukes of the World Prevail.” 
+Kelly Hayes declares “White Supremacy Elected Donald Trump.” 
+William Rivers Pitt declares “We have elected a fascist that Mussolini would have recognized on sight.” 
+Hillary carried only a handful of states, the states that comprise the One Percent’s stomping grounds. Yet Amy Goodman of Democracy Now sees meaning in political writer John Nichols claim that as Hillary carried New York and California, she won the popular vote and should be in the White House. I remember a few days ago George Soros saying that Trump would win the popular vote, but that the electoral vote would go to Hillary, thus ridding the oligarchs of Trump. 
+Earth Justice promises to hold Trump accountable. Trump who promises to end the threat of nuclear war with Russia and China, thereby doing more to save animal and human life than the entirety of the Democratic Party and environmental organizations, is going to be held accountable by an organization that allegedly is beyond politics and is dedicated to preserving animals from destruction. 
+The ACLU, of which I am a member, has also put “on notice” the president-elect who has said he will save us from nuclear war. Faced with this idiocy from the ACLU, I will not renew my membership. 
+Feminists tell us that we are “grieving, scared, and in shock,” and that “it is critical that we stand together and support each other.” 
+Jeremy Ben-Ami of the J Street Jewish Community tells us that it is “an incredibly sad and difficult day. For tens of millions of Americans who share a core belief in tolerance, decency and social justice, the election results are a severe shock. In this challenging moment, we turn to one another for comfort and community. During this election, J Street made unequivocally clear our conviction that Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States.” 
+Van Jones, a CNN commentator, said that Trump’s election is a nightmare, “a deeply painful moment,” a “whitelash” against minorities. While he bemoaned the pain inflicted upon poor little presstitute Van Jones, he didn’t mind insulting the American electorate and the President-elect of the United States. After all, Van Jones sees that as his racist prerogative. 
+And so, the holier-than-thou crowd prefers Hillary, despite her unambigious position that she would maximize conflict with Russia and China, provoke direct military conflict between the US and Russia by imposing a no-fly zone in Syria, attack Iran and other of Israel’s targets, further enrich her Wall Street handlers by privatizing Social Security, and prevent any dissent from the lowly people class of her high-handed ways. If William Rivers Pitt sees Trump as a Mussolini fascist, Trump is too mild for Pitt. He prefers Hillary, a Hitler to the third power. 
+The progressives have totally discredited themselves just as the presstitutes have done. Their need for a bogyman to nourish their hysteria indicates serious psychological disturbance. They actually prefer the risk of Armageddon to peace among nuclear powers. As their 501(c)3s live off corporate contributions, they prefer globalist corporate profits to jobs for ordinary Americans. 
+These are the people who think of themselves as our instructors and our betters. 
+If only Trump could exile the lot of them. They are anti-American to the core. SF Source Paul Craig Roberts  ",FAKE
+3072,Political polarization on Facebook | Institution,"Data scientists at Facebook recently published their research on how people consume political news on the social network. The study is noteworthy because the researchers had direct access to Facebook’s own data. It examines the factors that influence the likelihood that liberals or conservatives will click on news articles that are cross-cutting or those that run counter to their beliefs. Many Americans get a significant portion of their news from Facebook and in effect the social network is the largest news platform in the U.S. The study shows how the makeup of our social networks, the Facebook News feed algorithm, and individual user choice all influence the content people consume.
+
+Social scientists have built a large body of evidence that people tend to befriend others with similar political beliefs. The Facebook study demonstrates that the polarization phenomenon also applies to the social network. The study finds that roughly speaking a Facebook user has five politically likeminded friends for every one friend on the other side of the spectrum. In a democracy it’s generally a value add for citizens to encounter a variety of political opinions. This fact does not enumerate the “right” number of friends to have from across the political aisle.
+
+The Facebook News feed does limit the amount of cross-cutting links that viewers choose to read. The News feed algorithm ranks stories based on a variety of factors including their history of clicking on links for particular websites. If a user regularly clicks on stories from sources with a partisan leaning then the chances of seeing a similar story increases. The News feed algorithm functions in this way to make the experience of using the website more enjoyable. This approach also has some unintended negative consequences. The authors find that the News feed algorithm reduces the politically cross-cutting content by 5 percent for conservatives and 8 percent for liberals.
+
+Individual choice also plays a role in exposing Facebook users to less cross-cutting content. Users make their own decisions about the stories they want to read. Even after controlling for where the stories appear in the News feed, the authors estimate that user choice decreases the likelihood of clicking on a cross-cutting link by 17 percent for conservatives and 6 percent for liberals. The study does not present the findings in a way that separates out the effects of the algorithm and individual choice. Both of these factors certainly influence each other. It appears that the impact of individual’s user choices is larger in magnitude than the News feed algorithm.
+
+Facebook has tweaked the News feed algorithm for a variety of reasons. The company could leverage the popularity of their network to help mitigate the impact of political polarization. The website could change the algorithm to rank cross-cutting news stories highly. It could also include cross cutting links in the trending section of the website. Facebook is not just a social network. It’s the platform that millions of people use to learn about current events. Taking small steps to help combat political polarization in the long run will add to the trust that users have in Facebook.",REAL
+7763,Be Winter Wise: Woolley Hats Stop Heart Attacks,"By Lizzie Bennett Every winter we are bombarded by information about the cold and how to protect ourselves from it and from health issues associated with it. Wrap up warm, keep one room heated to a... ",FAKE
+8478,Gambling on the Unknowable Trump,"Gambling on the Unknowable Trump November 13, 2016 
+Donald Trump’s victory may have shaken up the System but it also revealed a recklessness (or a desperation) among Americans in handing over such immense power to someone so untested, says Michael Brenner. 
+By Michael Brenner 
+At this moment of unprecedented upheaval, it is striking that some things never change. We are being subject to a tidal wave of interpretation and speculation as to what a Trump administration means for American foreign relations in regard to inter alia Russia, Syria, the Iran nuclear deal, the “pivot to Asia,” trans-Atlantic ties and, of course, Mexico. 
+It is entirely natural for a distraught political elite to wonder what comes next from this unstable, quixotic showman who soon will be sitting in the White House. It is neither natural nor appropriate, though, to make believe that Washington in experiencing a transition of power to be approached in standard terms. The unpalatable truth is that we have no idea as to what Trump will do or not do. President-elect Donald Trump. 
+Trump’s campaign remarks are the sole evidence available for indications of the direction that he will take. That is an extremely flimsy a basis for forecasting actions abroad. For two reasons. Candidates’ calculated sound bites while running almost never are a reliable guide to their thinking – in its rudimentary form or as it takes shape under the influence of real life conditions and the counsel of advisers. 
+Consider Barack Obama, a far more thoughtful, sober and intelligent man. Remember the objective of eliminating nuclear weapons (rather than committing $1 trillion to the development of a more “usable” arsenal). Remember closing Guantanamo and reining in electronic surveillance of Americans. Remember ending the engagement of American troops in the “GWOT” (we now are fighting in 38 places by one means or another). 
+Remember “resetting” relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to emphasize dialogue. Remember the stated goal of normalizing relations with the Mullahs in Teheran instead of treating them as inherently hostile to America. Remember promoting democracy as the long-term cure to what ails the Middle East (instead, backing full tilt the Gulf autocracies, including Saudi Arabia’s homicidal war on the Yemeni people; Sisi’s oppressive autocracy in Egypt; and Israel’s increasing brutalization of the Palestinians). 
+Points of Demagoguery 
+Second, Trump’s comments about foreign policy were mere points of demagoguery meant, as with everything else he said, to appeal to the primitive instincts of an aroused audience. There is not the slightest sign that he had thought seriously about any of it. Donald Trump finds serious thinking itself an alien mental activity. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, one of the few Senate Republicans to support Donald Trump, donning one of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” caps. 
+Moreover, he has few experienced advisers in his entourage. Apart from some conversations with retired General Michael Flynn, the off-beat former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the chairman of his national security advisory panel, James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA, his “advisers” have been a collection of odd-balls, non-entities and dogmatists. Woolsey himself is an uber-hawk whose views on all matters of consequence align with those of the neocons, the Cheney-like hard nationalists and Hillary Clinton – and are diametrically opposite to Trump’s much publicized iconoclastic remarks. 
+So what we will be seeing between now and the Inauguration, and afterwards, is a mad rush by a horde of aspirants for the power and access to occupy Donald Trump’s mind – if they can find it. 
+This is the brutal reality. Since it provides little of substance for the habitual commentators, they are inclined to play a game of make-believe – conjuring supposedly meaningful evidence from what is a kaleidoscope of emotional outbursts and a fantasia of day dreams. 
+There is good reason to believe that within six months of Trump’s taking office, when his administrations undertakes its first half-baked measures abroad, the think tank crowd will be writing articles and monographs on “The Trump Doctrine.” 
+In other words, the same mentality that helped get us into this mess. Americans have become committed to a new categorical imperative: I sound off, therefore I am. 
+If Truth be told, the America we have known and imagined is ended. It never will return. In terms of relations with others, image is of enormous importance. The United States has gained great advantage from being seen as exceptional. From its earliest days, it fascinated and gave inspiration as the first working democracy, as the embodiment of the hope-filled New World, as the land of the common man and common decency. 
+Later, as it grew into a world power, it held the allure for many as being somehow beyond the world’s pervasive tawdriness. These images held even as contradicted by slavery and racism, by imperial wars of expansion, by signs of hypocrisy. America did tip the balance in favor of the right side in two world wars; it did demonstrate uncommon magnanimity in its support for German and Japanese reconstruction and democracy. Even when playing the game of power politics, it retained a measure of credibility as the one underwriter and arbitrator to whom others might resort. 
+The resulting “soft power” or “soft influence” has been a unique asset. Already dissipated to a high degree over the decades of the Global War On Terror, it now is destined to fade into a shadow of its former self. A blatantly racist, xenophobic, studiously ignorant, and belligerent country cannot retain the respect of other governments or the high regard of their peoples. 
+A country so feckless as to choose Trump the buffoon as its President is mocking itself. The negative impact will be compounded as the United States is riven by internal conflicts of all kinds, repressive actions and perhaps another serious economic crisis. 
+The damage to America’s standing in the world should hardly be a surprise; yet many are inclined to underestimate the effect. One cannot appreciate what we have become by talking to foreign friends on the Washington circuit, or by listening to the polite regrets of those around the world who are interviewed by the media. Walk the streets of cities abroad for unscripted reactions to this historic act of national self-mutilation. 
+We can expect that whoever winds up in senior policy positions in a Trump administration will downplay these intangibles – if they even acknowledge them. In this, they will be encouraged by the tradition of self-delusion that has become a feature of American thinking about its place in the world. 
+Think of the Middle East where just about everything that we have been doing since 2001 has been guided by a fantastical view of the region – from Iraq, to Syria, to Yemen, to the Gulf, to Turkey, to Palestine and Israel. 
+Divorced from Reality 
+This tendency to divorce ourselves from reality so as to perpetuate myths of American omnipotence and superiority is also witnessed at the operational level. Consider these examples: President George W. Bush in a flight suit after landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln to give his “Mission Accomplished” speech about the Iraq War on May 1, 2003 
+–The U.S. habitually characterizes anybody who resists our use of force against them as evil and criminal. Thus, the insurgents in Iraq are “anti-Iraqi” forces; the Houthis in Yemen are Iranian proxies, the Palestinians are nothing but terrorists, the Russian population in the Donbas region of Ukraine are Russian commandos directed from the Kremlin with the aim of unraveling all of Europe and NATO, etc. etc. 
+–American policy-makers find it convenient to pursue strategies that entail squaring circles. The outcome is predictable. The outstanding case in point is Syria where for four years they have committed themselves to ousting Assad by force while continuing the fight against violent Islamist groups. That has placed us in the absurd position of allying with Al Qaeda (providing indirect material, and indirect political support) while still fulminating about the grave danger of terrorism. 
+–We present ourselves as the promoter and well-wisher of democracy while giving unstinting support to oppressive regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and elsewhere while facilitating the ouster of democratically elected reformist leaders in Honduras, Bolivia. Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil. 
+These self-delusional practices have prepared the psychological ground for the grand illusion to come in assuming that the America of Trump will continue to draw the world’s admiration and its deference to American leadership. 
+Normalizing Trump 
+The inclination to “normalize” the transition in treating Trump, his utterances and his odd-lot entourage as if they somehow could be squeezed into conventional molds is understandable. It is a manifestation of an unwitting coping strategy for coming to terms with the shattering event of his election. 
+Americans in general are pursuing a similar psychological strategy for the sake of preserving the conception of themselves and their country deeply rooted in their consciousness. Hence, the impulse to minimize the singularity of this revolutionary development without precedent – not only in the United States but anywhere in the democratic world. This is one instance where American “exceptionalism” is not prized. 
+This is a natural reaction to a brutal Truth about Americans – and its dire consequences. For the choice of Trump reveals most Americans as immature and prone to juvenile behavior. To vote for Trump is the ultimate act of political immaturity. 
+There are, of course, identifiable reasons why many were drawn to the flamboyant candidate, why his demagoguery resonated, why his exaggerated imagery struck a receptive nerve. However, for that emotional response to translate into the actual selection of this man to be President crosses a critical threshold. 
+Children – at times – let emotion rule their conduct. Children only weakly feel the imperative to impose logic and a modicum reason on their impulses. Children disregard consequences. Children overlook the downside in their implicit weighing of the balance in giving in to those impulses or not. Grown-ups do not. 
+Immediate satisfaction – at all and any cost – does not eclipse other considerations for adults. Even a child’s tantrum usually lasts no more than ten minutes or so. The tantrum of Trump voters has lasted 18 months. 
+That’s pathological – anyway you cut it. Admittedly, some Trump supporters share his perverted view of the world – even if contradicted by his own personal history. Let’s say 12 to 15 percent of the electorate. A larger slice was represented by dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who relished sticking it to the Hillary and the Democrats to such a degree that their thrill at the spectacle overcame their realization that Trump was unfit for the office. Indeed, many probably expected him to lose and, therefore, felt free to go along for the fun of it. 
+That leaves roughly 10 to 20 percent of the electorate who placed their emotional gratification above their responsibilities as citizens and above the wellbeing of the Republic. That is the difference between the nearly 50 percent he received and what a broad rejection would represent. They constitute the hard core of the culpable juveniles. 
+What about those who could not stand Hillary, who felt an irresistible impulse to express that feeling somehow? Many options were open to them: abstain, vote for one of the minor candidates, go to the gym and exhaust oneself on an elliptical trainer, get drunk, smoke some weed, pick a fight with one’s spouse. Any of these represents more grown-up behavior than voting for Donald Trump. 
+By comparison, in France when Jean Marie Le Pen – candidate of the racist far-right party, the Front National – FN, made it into the second round of their presidential election, he and his party were rejected by 82.2 percent of the electorate. In other words, the French rallied together to reject Le Pen. That is what a mature polity does. And Le Pen is sane, albeit a crypto-fascist. 
+Michael Brenner is a professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.",FAKE
+3297,Could Florida Dem primary cost party Rubio's seat?,"Washington (CNN) In order to pursue a presidential bid, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has agreed not to run for re-election, leaving Democrats with a shot at retaking the seat, and with it, increasing their chances of reclaiming the Senate.
+
+But it's no easy feat -- especially as Florida Democrats may have a primary problem ahead of them.
+
+National and state Democrats see Rep. Patrick Murphy, a second-term centrist Democrat with a proven ability to fundraise, as their best shot at a win. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee this week endorsed Murphy in an effort to dissuade others from jumping into the primary.
+
+But that hasn't discouraged liberal firebrand Rep. Alan Grayson from the race. If anything, it's made him more eager to compete.
+
+""Florida Democratic voters choose our party nominee, not out-of-touch party bosses sipping cognac in a smoke-filled room in Washington,"" Grayson said in a statement shortly after the DSCC announced its endorsement.
+
+It's a prospect that already has Democrats worried.
+
+""It would certainly be better to not have him in the race,"" said Florida Democratic strategist Steve Schale, a Murphy supporter. ""[Grayson] tends to sort of rely on hyperbole and invective, and I'm not sure that's the kind of primary which is healthy for us.""
+
+""I think it's a center-right state, I think he is not electable in a general and I think he has the ability to create a pretty divisive primary if he runs,"" he said.
+
+But Grayson has a different theory on what it takes to win in Florida. He believes ""there are no more swing voters"" in the state, and so Democrats must offer a clear contrast with Republicans to turn out otherwise apathetic voters and disaffected Democrats.
+
+""We consistently fail them by making it seem like we're Republican light,"" he said. ""It's not the winning formula to pretend you're a Republican and hope some Republicans vote for you. It's not the winning formula to be wishy-washy on the issues.""
+
+While he declined to discuss Murphy by name, he referenced ""somebody else in the [primary] race who might have the party-switcher vote"" -- a veiled jab at the younger member, who was a registered Republican up through 2010, though he claims he backed John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign.
+
+That's part of what's given the congressman reason for such strong interest in a run, and Murphy's supporters reason for concern. Grayson has a much clearer appeal among Democratic primary voters than Murphy, who's made a point of breaking with his party on key issues, like the Keystone XL pipeline. While it's Murphy's willingness to compromise and centrist profile that has Democrats bullish on his chances statewide, those could also be hurdles in a Democratic primary, if Grayson were to force the issue.
+
+""I would be very surprised if I ever lost a primary in my life,"" Grayson boasted. ""Our voters will crawl over hot coals to vote for me.""
+
+The congressman is already fashioning himself as the heir to liberal darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who pulled out a difficult win in one of 2012's most expensive, hardest-fought senate races. Indeed, Grayson said he's ""had many discussions with her and her campaign staff about this already.""
+
+""And I think we can duplicate her success not only in fundraising, but in the enormous grassroots army she put together,"" he said.
+
+But the prospect of a Murphy-Grayson faceoff could make things difficult for Democrats, as regardless of the outcome, it's likely to become a nasty, personal fight.
+
+Grayson is not one to mince words -- he once compared the tea party movement to the KKK, and ran a campaign ad in 2010 calling GOP challenger Dan Webster ""Taliban Dan.""
+
+And Democrats wary of Grayson hurting the party's chances in the state are already promising that the lurid details of his messy annulment -- which included accusations of abuse, bigamy and cheating -- will gain greater notice if it's clear he's serious about jumping in.
+
+Grayson detractors believe once progressives are more familiar with his personal issues, they'll question their support for his policies.
+
+And a bruising, resource draining intraparty fight through the end of August, when Florida holds its primary, leaves the eventual nominee little time -- just nine weeks -- to replenish depleted campaign offers and correct any negative attacks that stuck during the primary. It'll be a hugely expensive race, said former Democratic state Sen. Dan Gelber.
+
+""Money plays an outsize influence in Florida because of the number and expense of the media markets,"" he said. ""We have 11 expensive media markets, and creating an identity with voters is incredibly expensive.""
+
+He predicted the primary alone could require candidates to spend up to $15 million.
+
+There's also a chance the field could become more crowded in the weeks ahead. Florida's Supreme Court has yet to issue a final ruling on the state's contested congressional map, and if legislators are directed to redraw it, the changes would cause a domino effect that could make some House incumbents decide a run for Senate is more attractive than a tough reelection fight.
+
+Schale indicated at least one candidate who's already opted out of the Senate race -- Gwen Graham, a freshman Democratic rising star who's facing a tough reelection fight in Florida's 2nd district -- could change her mind in such a situation.
+
+""She'll reassess what her options will be and make a decision,"" said Schale, who described himself as close to the Democrat and said he speaks with her often.
+
+He emphasized, however, ""absent something dramatically changing that is not in her control, there is no way she's not running for re-election.""
+
+Others still are keeping their names in the mix. Gelber said he hasn't ""ruled it out,"" but that he's ""not right now prepared to do it,"" because of the significant time and energy commitment and his young family.
+
+But he added: ""I'd have to see what happened in the race.""
+
+Still, Democrats say if they do end up with a messy primary, it can't possibly rival the GOP's, which is facing a field in disarray after two top-tier candidates unexpectedly opted out. A number of conservative groups have already expressed support for tea party favorite Rep. Ron DeSantis, but a number of establishment-preferred candidates have shown interest, including Carlos Lopez-Cantera, the state's lieutenant governor.",REAL
+7021,Networks Continue to Ignore Obamacare Collapse,"November 2, 2016 Networks Continue to Ignore Obamacare Collapse 
+Bill Clinton’s startling description of Obamacare earlier this month as a “crazy system” yanked the Big Three broadcast networks out of the blackout of bad news about the health care reform law — but only a little. 
+According to a new study by the Media Research Center, which tracks left-wing bias in the news, the nightly news broadcasts and ABC, NBC, and CBS combined have devoted just 10 minutes and 21 seconds on the Affordable Care Act since the beginning of the year. Most of it has come since the former president made his controversial comments on Oct. 3. 
+Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,",FAKE
+6371,The Hodges & Hagmann Hour- America’s Last Chance to Survive,"The Hodges & Hagmann Hour- America’s Last Chance to Survive Doug Hagmann 
+
+The recent show in which Doug Hagmann and myself discussed all election scenarios was one of the liveliest hours in the history of The Common Sense Show. 
+The topic centered around the Constitutional crisis that Clinton is creating by refusing to withdraw from the race. Who will ultimately decide the race. Will it be George Soros’ voting machines? Will it be Obama? Will it be the Supreme Court? Most importantly, we discussed the real possibility of martial law and war. Please note, there was insider testimony from a Postal worker from the Phoenix area who discusses ballot stuffing in Arizona. 
+The details are included in the following video.",FAKE
+49,"Bush slashes campaign budget, refocuses on key primary states","Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush is slashing his campaign budget with across-the-board pay cuts and other changes, overhauling an operation that started as a political juggernaut but now may need to stay lean to survive.
+
+The one-time GOP front-runner has seen his political momentum undercut by outsider candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson, who now lead in most polls, relegating the former Florida governor to the middle of the pack.
+
+In a bid to recalibrate its strategy and operations, the Bush campaign plans to cut its budget by as much as 45 percent. This includes pay cuts of 40 percent, cuts to travel costs and a downsizing of its Miami headquarters staff, Fox News has learned.
+
+The overall changes will save the campaign approximately $1 million a month, Bush senior sources say. In recent months, Bush's biggest expenses have been air travel and staff, having spent $1.6 million on payroll alone over three months.
+
+An internal campaign memo on the changes, obtained by Fox News, acknowledged the shifting dynamics in the race.
+
+""It's no secret that the contours of this race have changed from what was anticipated at the start. We would be less than forthcoming if we said we predicted in June that a reality television star supporting Canadian-style single-payer health care and partial-birth abortion would be leading the GOP Primary,"" the memo said.
+
+The changes come despite a combined fundraising haul of well over $100 million by his campaign and a pro-Bush super PAC. In another setback for Bush, fellow Florida politician Sen. Marco Rubio has been gaining in the polls, often edging out Bush -- increasing frustration not only among some of Bush's network of donors, but also longtime Florida supporters.
+
+The campaign is describing the budget changes as an effort to focus on what matters most: Increasing his presence in the early-voting states, with an eye toward laying out a modified path to winning the nomination.
+
+""We are making changes today to ensure Jeb is best positioned to win the nomination and general election. Jeb is the one candidate with a proven conservative record, bold ideas and the strong leadership needed to fix the problems America faces,"" campaign spokeswoman Kristy Campbell said in a statement. ""We moving our resources into the states to ensure that voters in primary and caucus states are introduced to his record and vision for the future.""
+
+In the internal memo, the Bush campaign also touted its extensive field operations in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, as well as its formidable fundraising effort that has raised roughly $25 million so far this year -- not counting the over $100 million raised by the pro-Bush super PAC, Right to Rise USA, that is separate from the campaign.
+
+In the coming days, the campaign hopes to regain lost ground, and strengthen its overall message by concentrating on Bush's record as Florida governor where he cut state budgets and issued tax cuts. The mantra, according to the campaign, will be that ""Jeb Can Fix It.""
+
+""We're going to focus the argument of this campaign around the fact that after seven years of incompetence, corruption and gridlock in Washington, we need a president 'Who Can Fix It.'"" The memo states. ""Jeb is the only person in the field on both sides of the aisle who can make this statement.""
+
+The full e-book on Bush's tenure in Tallahassee will also be released in the ""next couple weeks,"" according to the internal memo.
+
+ 
+
+
+
+Serafin Gomez covers Special Events and Politics for FOX News Channel and is also a contributor to FOX News Latino. Fin formerly worked as the Miami Bureau Producer for Fox News Channel where he covered Latin America. Follow him on Twitter: @Finnygo.
+
+Follow us on twitter.com/foxnewslatino
+
+ Like us at facebook.com/foxnewslatino",REAL
+8452,"If Megyn [sic] Kelly Doesn’t Want Her Pussy Grabbed, Why Did She Pose for This “Grab My Pussy” Photo Shoot?","If Megyn [sic] Kelly Doesn’t Want Her Pussy Grabbed, Why Did She Pose for This “Grab My Pussy” Photo Shoot? 
+Andrew Anglin Daily Stormer October 27, 2016 
+Megyn [sic] Kelly has continually asserted over the last two weeks that she personally fears that if Donald Trump is elected President, he will use his Presidential powers to grab her by the pussy. 
+However, this begs the question: if Megyn [sic] Kelly is so concerned about having her pussy grabbed, why did she pose for this “grab my pussy” photo shoot for GQ? 
+Keep in mind, these pictures are from 2010. She wasn’t some dumb college student trying to make a few bucks to pay rent with a quick “grab my pussy” photo shoot. She was already a multi-millionaire Fox News host. 
+Last year, when the whore Kelly was attacking Trump as a sexist, he pointed out this “grab my pussy” photo op, and noted that Kelly is a bimbo. 
+In response to allegations of bimboism, Kelly told People Magazine : “I was 40, and I was pregnant, I was like, ‘I look pretty good.’“ 
+Of course, in woman-speak this translates to “I was 40, and I was pregnant, and I wanted to send the message to random men that they should grab me by the pussy to confirm that I am still attractive.” 
+And sure, the pictures do look good, but they are airbrushed all to hell and back 
+For instance, she is wearing a push-up bra, but the curvature of her breasts has been corrected and wrinkles have been removed from the place where her breasts connect to her chest and from her neck. Armpit wrinkle removal is also plainly obvious. 
+So nothing is proved by these pictures – other than the fact she wants her pussy grabbed. 
+In the same year, 2010, she went on the Jew Howard Stern’s show and said that she wanted to fuck Bill O’Reilly, which is bizarre and I believe sick. In this interview she also talked about her breasts and her husband’s penis size. 
+(Full interview here .) 
+It is not like she didn’t know she was walking into a sex interview here. That is Stern’s entire shtick. And everyone knows who Howard Stern is. 
+So the only reason she would go on this show is to sexually objectify herself, which again, is to feel sexy when old and beginning to sag 
+All of this simply confirms that Megyn’s continued attacks on Donald Trump – such as we saw Newt Gingrich slap her around like an even cheaper hooker than she actually is for earlier this week – are part of a gigantic shit test against Donald Trump. 
+Basically, Kelly’s entire career is now devoted to trying to bully Donald Trump into grabbing her by the pussy. 
+Tsk-tsk, Megyn [sic]. 
+Tsk-tsk. 
+Roger Ailes Firing Conspiracy Confirmed? 
+Way back when Fox News chief Roger Ailes was fired – OVER A SEXUAL HARASSMENT HOAX THAT MEGYN [sic] KELLY TOOK PART IN BY SAYING HE HUGGED HER WEIRDLY – I said that it was obviously part of an anti-Trump conspiracy by the station’s owner, Rupert Murdock . 
+Murdock, while claiming to be a “conservative,” is an elite globalist and friend of the Clintons. 
+Ailes, while not a perfect guy (shilled for Bush’s wars, shilled for Israel), is a friend of Trump and wasn’t going to allow this whore Kelly – as well as a whole bunch of other hosts and pundits – to betray the network’s viewership by shilling for Hillary Clinton. 
+Because that is exactly what we are seeing now: a massive betrayal of Donald Trump by the Fox News channel. 
+O’Reilly hasn’t been horrible, but he hasn’t been great either. 
+The only one who has consistently supported Donald J. Trump is Sean Hannity, and his ratings have now gone through the roof because of it. I’m half-surprised Murdock doesn’t just fire him for it, but I suppose that wouldn’t work, as the entire viewership would boycott the channel. Right now, they can do a lot of damage to Trump by having the majority of their hosts shill for Hillary, but still having a few support Trump so they don’t totally expose themselves as being part of a Clinton conspiracy.",FAKE
+945,"Latest And Perhaps Last Debate Highlights Animosity Of Sanders, Clinton","Latest And Perhaps Last Debate Highlights Animosity Of Sanders, Clinton
+
+If Bernie Sanders surprises pollsters and confounds expectations in the New York primary on Tuesday, April 19, his backers and staff will trumpet the effect of his ninth debate with rival Hillary Clinton on the night of April 14.
+
+They will say the relentlessly aggressive strategy Sanders pursued in the latest CNN debate, with its steady stream of attacks on Clinton, provided the defining moment in a long campaign for a nomination that remains up for grabs.
+
+And that assessment will have some basis in what took place.
+
+But if Sanders' assault does not produce victory next week, then this latest Brooklyn faceoff may be the beginning of the end for Sanders' remarkable long-shot run. And it may also be the last debate in either party in this historically long and lacerating contest for the major party nominations.
+
+On this occasion, both Sanders and Clinton showed flashes of animosity bordering on contempt. When Sanders suggested Clinton's 250-delegate lead was rooted in the deeply conservative Deep South, where he said she had ""cleaned our clock,"" Clinton angrily fired off a list of states she had won outside that region.
+
+When Clinton said she had ""called out"" the big banks after the 2008 meltdown over mortgages, Sanders could not contain his sarcasm: ""They must have been very upset by this,"" he said, prompting howls of glee from his sizable contingent in the audience.
+
+Throughout this event, the supporters of each candidate were loudly demonstrative, cheering not just at the end of answers but often at each sentence or phrase. At times, the raucous competition between the opposing contingents recalled competing grandstands at a high school basketball game.
+
+They had more than ample provocation for their outbursts. Sanders put Clinton on the defensive regarding her vote on the Iraq War, her speeches to Wall Street firms and her late conversion to the $15-per-hour wage. He continued to hound her regarding the transcripts for her paid speeches to investment bankers.
+
+But Clinton had Sanders back on his heels regarding his delayed release of tax returns, his remarks about NATO that recalled Donald Trump's denunciation of members of that alliance, and his empathy for Palestinians in the Middle East conflict. The latter position is especially sensitive in New York.
+
+Prior to the addition of this debate to the calendar, the Democrats had seemed satisfied with eight debates. But the Sanders campaign pressed for another meeting prior to the New York primary. The clear strategy was to profit from the string of caucus-state victories Sanders has won in the West since mid-March, magnifying his momentum even as it failed to reduce Clinton's lead in delegates to any significant degree.
+
+The debates have already reached an apparent end on the Republican side, where front-runner Trump has declined to participate in any more such events with remaining rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich.
+
+The Democrats' debates began last fall, at which time Sanders offered a critique of Clinton that was relatively mild and muted and unlikely to disrupt the former senator and secretary of state's march to the nomination. He famously declined to criticize her on the vulnerable points of her private email server and the fatal attack on American diplomats in Benghazi in 2012.
+
+But since then, as the primaries and caucuses have evolved and Clinton's lead among pledged delegates has remained stubbornly above 200, Sanders has chosen, or been forced, to adopt a different tack.
+
+His campaign inner circle, which had long favored a more challenging approach, was able to make an urgent case: If you do not beat her in New York, where will you amass the delegates needed to overtake her in the pledged-delegate category?
+
+Polls show Clinton leading by double digits in the state she represented in the Senate. Polls also show her with similar advantages in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut — all of which vote a week later, on April 26.
+
+It should be noted that polls have been proved wrong in the past, especially where enthusiasm for Clinton on the primary voting day has been lacking in core constituency groups. Her double-digit lead in most polls prior to the Michigan primary in early March seemed to have vanished almost overnight when that state held its vote on March 8.
+
+That could be why, in recent pronouncements, Sanders has repeatedly assailed Clinton's fitness for the nation's highest office by questioning her judgment. In general, he says, she has the resume to run for president. But does she have the judgment? He has returned to her vote for the use-of-force resolution that enabled President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003. And he has made a major theme of her paid speeches to investment bankers.
+
+These attacks on Clinton are consonant with Sanders' larger indictment of the banking system, Wall Street, the financing of political campaigns in general and the presumptuous nature of the Clinton campaign in particular.
+
+Both Clinton and Sanders argued in this debate that they would be the strongest prospective nominee against Trump (or another Republican nominee) in November.
+
+Sanders noted that he does better in the polls, meaning that in hypothetical matchups against the various Republican candidates, he scores better than Clinton. Clinton noted that she had received 2.3 million votes more than Sanders thus far in the primaries (and about half that many more than Trump), giving her a lead among pledged delegates far above what Barack Obama enjoyed when he defeated Clinton for the nomination in 2008.
+
+Sanders has suggested that Clinton's lead is based on her domination among the so-called superdelegates, who are entitled to vote at the national convention by virtue of their elected public office or party office. These delegates make up about 16 percent of the Democratic total. They have thus far shown a decided, even overwhelming, preference for Clinton.",REAL
+5862,The Next 10 Years Will Be Ugly for Your 401(k),"Re: Largest Public Pensions Face $8.4 Trillion Hole « Reply #47 on: October 18, 2016, 11:27:27 AM » Fell at about the same time morality started falling, takes a strong bond to stand down the attacks of the devil and his dark forces. Marriage is a commitment, high on God's list, one of the goals of the powers that wanna be is to break up families destroy marriage, wipe out true love, all in the name of control.They turned this once great nation into a ME first society, totally opposite of God,s commands.We are all seeing and feeling the results. Logged Rev21:4And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.Who am I",FAKE
+5936,Devastating aftermath of twin quakes in Italy (drone footage),"Drone footage shows the devastation caused by twin earthquakes that rocked Borgo Sant’Antonio, near Visso, which left buildings reduced to rubble or partially collapsed. 
+Central Italy was struck twice in quick succession the previous day, with the first tremor hitting it at around 19:11 local time (17:11 GMT). The quake measured 5.5 on the Richter scale and could be felt as far as Rome some 240 km (149 miles). Shortly after a second quake of 6.1-magnitude, struck at around 21:18 local time (19:18 GMT). Buildings were shaking, some parts even caving in, and residents fled into the street to save themselves. Several dozen people have been treated across the region for light injuries, while four are said to have been seriously hurt. 
+COURTESY: RT’s RUPTLY video agency, NO RE-UPLOAD, NO REUSE – FOR LICENSING, PLEASE, CONTACT http://ruptly.tv 
+  
+Subscribe   
+Like   
+  Share the joy",FAKE
+6162,"Syrian War Report – November 11, 2016: Syrian Army Entered Menagh Air Base","Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
+3163,One chart that shows why the Republican Party was ready for Donald Trump,"Immigration reform used to be an issue that split both parties: Pro-business Republicans faced off against cultural conservatives, while within the Democratic Party Latino advocates faced off against labor.
+
+But over the past 10 years, immigration has become a partisan issue.
+
+This change isn't just a shift in where politicians take certain policy questions. It's also a change in whether Americans think that immigrants, in general, are a good thing for America:
+
+To a certain extent, polarization on immigration in Washington and polarization among voters reinforce each other.
+
+In 2005, when comprehensive immigration reform was a key priority of President George W. Bush, Republicans and Democrats were about equally likely to think that immigrants strengthened America. Once Bush's successor, Barack Obama, started stressing the need for comprehensive immigration reform, though, Republicans were much less likely to look favorably on immigrants — according to Pew's findings, Republican attitudes changed precipitously between late 2009 and summer 2010.
+
+But this isn't the whole story, because the debate in Washington over comprehensive immigration reform has always had a tenuous relationship to how Americans actually feel about immigrants.
+
+Historically, even the ""anti-amnesty"" politicians who opposed comprehensive immigration reform stressed that immigrants were welcome in America as long as they came (and stayed) legally. For most Americans, though, the difference that matters isn't between legal and unauthorized immigrants — it's between immigrants they find likely to assimilate into ""American culture"" and those who (they believe) cannot.
+
+Americans are much more ambivalent about immigrants, in general, than you might expect from listening to politicians talk about immigration — or than you might guess by looking at polling for various immigration reform proposals.
+
+For many white Americans over the past couple of decades, that ambivalence has hardened into a constellation of stereotypes: associating ""immigrant"" with ""illegal immigrant,"" ""illegal immigrant"" with ""Latino immigrant,"" and ""Latino immigrant"" with ""criminal.""
+
+This is the genius of Donald Trump's presidential campaign: His rhetoric homes in directly on the things that actually worry many Americans about immigrants, rather than using economic or legal arguments as a way to gesture toward cultural fears.
+
+But as the chart shows, Trump wasn't just exploiting a sentiment among American voters — he's exploiting a sentiment among specifically Republican voters.
+
+The changes shown in the Pew chart don't just reflect Democrats or Republicans changing their minds about whether immigrants are good for America. (In fact, most of the people changing their minds are embracing immigrants; overall, the most recent Pew poll found 59 percent of Americans agree that immigration strengthens the country, which is the highest level of support in 20 years.)
+
+They reflect changes in who identifies as a Republican or a Democrat.
+
+Over the past 20 years, the Democratic Party has gotten markedly more ethnically diverse...
+
+...as white voters have increasingly identified with Republicans:
+
+Not all of the white voters who have switched parties are motivated by anti-Latino sentiment. But the voters who are motivated by anti-Latino sentiment are particularly likely to have switched parties.
+
+Before 2000, there was a correlation between negative feelings toward Latinos and identifying as strongly Republican. But that was just a side effect; how people felt toward black Americans was a much better predictor of how strongly they identified with the GOP.
+
+In the 21st century, the two have diverged. All else being equal — even sentiment toward African Americans — a white American in 2008 who felt negatively toward Latinos was likely to be more strongly Republican (one-third of a point on a seven-point scale from strong Republican to strong Democrat) than someone who felt positively toward them.
+
+There's no indication that the trend has abated since 2008. Indeed, the Pew polling shows that sentiment toward immigrants among Republicans hit new lows in May 2015, with only 27 percent of Republicans saying immigrants strengthened America. That was just before Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign.
+
+While Donald Trump didn't make Republicans wary of immigrants' effect on America, though, he does appear to have made the remaining skeptics in the Democratic Party embrace them.
+
+In May 2015, on the eve of Trump's campaign launch, 62 percent of Democrats said that immigrants strengthened America. In March 2016, 78 percent said they did — a 16-percentage-point jump.
+
+That's the biggest reason pro-immigrant sentiment is at a 20-year high: The Democrats who hadn't already embraced immigrants are doing so now.
+
+If that holds, it will complete the last phase of the partisanization of immigration. Republican voters are already fairly united in their distrust of immigrants, and many Republican politicians are following their lead. Democratic politicians, meanwhile, are fairly united in their support of immigrants. And now, Democratic voters appear to be embracing their identity as the pro-immigrant party.",REAL
+4212,GOP Delegate: Trump Primary Wins 'Absolutely Irrelevant' At Convention,"Just how far could Republicans go to deny Donald Trump the party's nomination?
+
+A delegate to this summer's convention in Cleveland asserts that the GOP gathering could do anything it wants.
+
+Curly Haugland, a GOP national committeeman from North Dakota, told Morning Edition on Thursday of his interpretation of party rules. Not for the first time, Haugland declared that party rules do not bind any delegate to vote for any particular candidate. He argues that even delegates who are ""pledged"" to Trump or other contenders due to state primary results are, in reality, free to do as they like.
+
+Custom, Haugland said, may dictate that delegates should support the winners of their state primaries. But the reality of the rules is that primary votes are ""absolutely irrelevant"" come convention time.
+
+""No matter what the popular belief might be,"" he said, ""there is no connection between primaries and the actual convention.""
+
+In our interview and in other conversations, Haugland has cited the GOP's convention Rules 37 and 38. He interprets these convoluted rules to mean that delegates may ""vote their conscience."" The rules do not explicitly say this. Rule 37 is a detailed explanation of the procedure for roll call votes. However, Rule 38 does say that no delegate may be ""bound"" by the ""unit rule,"" meaning that delegates from a state can't all be forced to vote the same way.
+
+Haugland's interpretation is by no means a unanimous view. It's more widely accepted that delegates currently pledged to Trump, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, or others must support them at least on the first ballot. But if no candidate received a majority, delegates would necessarily vote in different ways on later ballots in order to resolve the impasse.
+
+Another of Haugland's points is indisputable: ""When the convention convenes,"" he said, ""the delegates adopt their own rules, which haven't been adopted yet."" There is a standard template for conventions, but delegates could tweak the template, changing the game in any way that they want. The only real constraint is that their actions would be publicly known and therefore open to criticism.
+
+The latitude afforded delegates explains why it's considered significant that Senator Ted Cruz has outmaneuvered Trump in several states, ensuring that as many delegates as possible are Cruz supporters.
+
+Haugland says his personal goal is to adopt a rule that assures delegates the chance to choose from a wide range of alternatives, including candidates such as Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio who have suspended their campaigns.
+
+Listen to our conversation at the link above.",REAL
+6449,Has George Soros Committed Treason?,"Has George Soros Committed Treason?
+“His only legitimacy is his wallet.”
+https://www.rt.com/usa/366579-soros-orgs-driving-trump-protests/ 
+The press prostitutes continue to lie to us. They pretend that the anti-Trump protests are real spontaneous events although the prostitutes know that the “protests” are orchestrated by George Soros and front groups for the Oligarchy such as change.org and other fake progressive groups funded by the oligarchs.
+Soros, change.org and various progressive and leftwing fronts for the oligarchs pretend to be for democracy, but they are acting in behalf of Oligarchy. We are witnessing a direct attack on American democracy. These protesters are the hired mercenary enemy of the American people.
+Below is an email I received from a friend in Massachusetts. They preach peace and love while they commit violence: 
+Below is one of the emails I rec’d regarding immediate organizing to get rid of Trump. JWJ is Jobs for Justice serving Massachusetts with the main group in Boston and the subsidiary in western MA. You appear to be correct, because I rec’d the notice below the day following the election and election results were not even in until 3:00 a.m. Moveon.org was/is behind this one. Moveon.org is link under 3rd local event.
+Dear JWJ and allies,
+If you were like me, today was a hard day to get up. Donald Trump is
+the president-elect, and last night Republicans took the House, the
+Senate, and thus the Supreme Court. This is a terrible situation for
+humanity, let alone the workers’ movement and our ability to expand
+organizing and collective bargaining rights. And yet, there is no time
+to really brood about it. We are called to take immediate action.
+Today, we are joining with others throughout the movement to demonstrate
+our non-consent with the election results, in particular the election of
+Donald Trump. This evening, thousands will gather in cities across the
+nation to affirm to ourselves and one another that we will not give up
+the fight-the fight for a nation with liberty and justice for all. We
+will stand with one another, across race, religion, gender, age,
+ability, national origin, sexual orientation, and all of our identities.
+We will join hands, pledge our solidarity, and resolve to forge ahead
+even in this moment of peril and challenge. See local events below. 
+Check out moveon.org/standtogether.
+In these most difficult of political moments, we have to come together
+and stand stronger. Never has the “I ‘ll
+Be There” pledge been more necessary than today. 
+In struggle,
+Erica Smiley
+LOCAL EVENTS
+THIS EVENING:
+Love and Unity Gathering
+https://www.facebook.com/events/553790148146217/ 
+5 PM, Holyoke City Hall
+Amherst Vigil for Love 
+5 PM, Amherst Common
+Peaceful gathering of solidarity, resistance, and resolve
+https://act.moveon.org/event/Solidarity_gatherings/5139/signup/?akid=&zip= 
+5:30 PM, Edwards Church, Northampton
+TUESDAY NOVEMBER 15:
+Where Do We Go From Here? A Post-Election Analysis
+” target=”_blank”>http://afscwm.org/blog/2016/11/02/go-post-election-analysis> 
+6:00 PM, Northampton Friends Meeting, 43 Center Street, Northampton
+And check out President Donald Trump and The Great Repudiation
+http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/11/09/president-donald-trump-and-great-repudiation 
+and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy 
+http://thebestdemocracymoneycanbuy.com/stream/ 
+The post Has George Soros Committed Treason? appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+3668,Huckabee: Planned Parenthood shooting is 'domestic terrorism',"The former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential contender who's known for his social conservatism admonished the alleged shooter in an interview with CNN's Brianna Keilar Sunday on ""State of the Union.
+
+""What he did is domestic terrorism, and what he did is absolutely abominable, especially to us in the pro-life movement, because there's nothing about any of us that would condone or in any way look the other way on something like this,"" Huckabee said.
+
+""We're not going to have the kind of language that you heard from John Kerry where he talked about legitimizing or rationalizing terrorist actions,"" Huckabee said. ""There's no legitimizing, there's no rationalizing. It was mass murder. It was absolutely unfathomable. And there's no excuse for killing other people, whether it's happening inside the Planned Parenthood headquarters, inside their clinics where many millions of babies die, or whether it's people attacking Planned Parenthood."" In the interview, Huckabee also took shots at President Barack Obama over the tone of his remarks about ISIS and the acceptance of Syrian refugees into the United States in the wake of the Paris attacks. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee speaks at the Point of Grace Church for the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition 2015 Spring Kick Off on April 25, 2015, in Waukee. The Republican is expected to announce May 5 he is running for president. Huckabee was born in the same Arkansas town as former President Bill Clinton. He is an ordained Baptist minister. Huckabee, here at a the Iowa Ag Summit in March 2015, served two terms as governor. Huckabee, center, visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem on February 1, 2010. In 2008, he debuted a weekend show for Fox News titled ""Huckabee."" He ended the program in early 2015. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee speaks during the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum in Nashville, Tennessee, in April 2015. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee delivers remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park on February 10, 2012. Huckabee is surrounded by supporters and members of the news media after talking about his new book, 'A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need from Washington (and a Trillion that We Don't!),' at the National Press Club on February 24, 2011, in Washington, D.C. Former Gov. Mike Huckabee signs a copy of his new book, 'A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need from Washington (and a Trillion that We Don't!),' at the National Press Club on February 24, 2011. Huckabee attends a corner stone dedication ceremony for a new Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem on January 31, 2011. Mike Huckabee speaks to guests at the Iowa Freedom Summit on January 24, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa. The politician plays bass guitar with his band Capitol Offense. T The band has opened for Willie Nelson and the Charlie Daniels Band and has played for two presidential inauguration balls. Huckabee (second from right), students and others attend the May 14, 2010, NAMM Foundation Wanna Play Fund event at Fox News studios in New York. The initiative, in conjunction with the VH1 Save the Music Foundation, includes instrument donations. Huckabee visits the West Bank settlement of Beit El, near Ramallah, on August 18, 2009. He issued controversial statements in support of Israeli settlements. Republicans to Obama: Keep Syrian refugees out ""This President has shown considerable more intensity of anger toward Republicans than he has toward ISIS,"" Huckabee said. ""I mean I remember those press conferences -- the one in Manila and the one in Turkey prior to that -- where you could see the visible, visceral anger this President had as he spoke about Republicans. And he was so frustrated that there was not just a universal acceptance of his point of view about relocation of refugees, calling people who disagreed with him as un-American,"" Huckabee said. ""It was harsh. And I just want him to show the same kind of anger directed toward the ISIS terrorists , and frankly, all the radical Islamists, that we saw from the French President (Francois) Hollande ,"" he said. ""That's what we all need to do -- the family of civilized nations needs to get together and we need to destroy them once and for all."" Sign up for CNN Politics' Nightcap newsletter, serving up today's best and tomorrow's essentials in politics.",REAL
+8939,2006 Audio Captures Hillary Clinton Proposing To Rig Palestine Election,"  Carol Adl in Middle East , News , US // 0 Comments 
+Hillary Clinton proposed rigging the Palestinian parliamentary elections while she was a US senator in 2006, according to a newly emerged recording. 
+The decade-old audio exposes then-Senator Hillary Clinton saying the US should have manipulated Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 to prevent a Hamas victory. 
+The US Democratic presidential nominee lamented that the US didn’t “determine who was going to win.” 
+The result of that election was a victory for the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas over the US-favored Fatah political party. 
+RT reports: 
+“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” then-New York Senator Clinton told the Jewish Press, a New York-based weekly newspaper, several months after the January election. 
+“And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win,” she said. 
+Until Friday, the comment Clinton made on September 5, 2006, only existed on a private audio cassette belonging to journalist Eli Chomsky. An editor and a staff writer for the Jewish Press, he interviewed Clinton at the newspaper’s office in Brooklyn. 
+Chomsky, who shared and played the tape for the Observer, says it is the only existing copy of that meeting with Clinton, during which the Palestinian parliamentary election was among top topics. The comments have been posted on SoundCloud. 
+Speaking to the news portal, he recalled being confused by the fact that “anyone could support the idea — offered by a national political leader, no less — that the US should be in the business of fixing foreign elections.” 
+The interview took place nine months after the Hamas movement claimed 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats, pushing aside the US-favored Fatah movement and securing the right to form a new cabinet. That victory was neither welcomed in Israel, nor in the US. In Washington, where Hamas is considered a terrorist organization, officials repeatedly stated that they would not work with a Palestinian Authority that included Hamas. 
+Then-President George W. Bush spoke of the elections as symbolizing the “power of democracy,” but refused to deal with Hamas as long as it opposed Israel’s existence and espoused violence. 
+That day in September 2006, Clinton made “odd and controversial comments,” all now saved on the 45-minute record that Chomsky “held onto all these years.” 
+“I went to my bosses at the time,” Chomsky told the Observer. “The Jewish Press had this mindset that they would not want to say anything offensive about anybody — even a direct quote from anyone — in a position of influence because they might need them down the road. My bosses didn’t think it was newsworthy at the time. I was convinced that it was and I held onto it all these years.” 
+The latest revelation comes after repeated accusations by the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump who says that the media and the political establishment have rigged the 2016 election against him. 
+It would seem that the crooked Mrs Clinton thinks nothing of rigging any election to suit her agenda.",FAKE
+9457,UK citizens and war heroes get cheap pre-fab houses while Muslim colonizers get taxpayer-funded luxurious council homes,"UK citizens and war heroes get cheap pre-fab houses while Muslim colonizers get taxpayer-funded luxurious council homes UK Ministers have been forced to put forward plans for pre-fabricated homes after 30,000 luxury council houses were handed out to unemployed illegal alien Muslim migrants. Migration Watch said the costs will continue to rocket if a “sustainable” level of migration is not achieved. UK Daily Mail More than 11,000 households are raking in benefits that are at least the equivalent of a higher rate taxpayers’ £47,000 salary, it was revealed last month. According to official figures, thousands of Muslim migrant families on benefits are living in luxury homes, with many receiving housing handouts of about £5,000 per month – enough to fund a £1million mortgage. Jonathan Isaby, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘Many taxpayers struggling to make ends meet will find it incredibly unfair that some people are drawing more in benefits than they’ve ever actually earned themselves. UK Express (h/t Rob E) A spokesperson said: “There is a long standing controversy over the granting of social housing to immigrants. This has not been helped by local authorities’ reluctance to publish the relevant information. “Some immigrant groups have very low use of social housing whereas others are more likely to be in social housing than the UK born. There is absolutely nothing in the rules that state that immigrants should get preferential treatment. “However, priority for social housing is largely determined by need and so some ‘high need’ immigrant families (with multiple wives and large litters of kids) will gain access to housing over longer standing local residents deemed to be of lower need. This can be contentious. The 100,000 pre-fab homes(below) proposed by the Government are a far cry from those properties “fit for heroes” and service personnel who were awarded social housing on their return from the horrors of the First World War. “In the future, any housing strategy must address both supply and demand. The Muslim invasion is a major part of housing demand. “Unless net migration is reduced to a manageable and sustainable level a large house building programme will have to continue indefinitely, with all the costs and loss of amenities involved.” A white paper due out next month includes measures to encourage banks to lend to firms which construct off-site before delivering them to their final destination. A Government source said: “The first and most obvious advantage is speeding up the building of housing. “There is pretty good evidence that if you did it at scale it is cheaper.” This has pushed ministers to plan a new wave of pre-made homes to solve the housing crisis. The prefabricated homes can be built off site in as little as a day and take just 48 hours to install on a site. Jonathan Isaby, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘Many taxpayers struggling to make ends meet will find it incredibly unfair that some people are drawing more in benefits than they’ve ever actually earned themselves. But today when approximately 9,000 of our servicemen and women are sleeping rough after leaving the military, Government figures show how an influx of Muslims has seen 30,000 social housing lettings given to immigrants in 2015. Outrage as Afghan War hero who guarded the Queen is thrown out of council home From 2015, Jamie Streets, 34, spent 15 years in the Household Cavalry and suffered brain damage while on duty. But he, his wife Charmaine and their four children are to be kicked out of temporary accommodation after Cornwall County Council denied them a permanent home. Mr Streets served in both Kosovo and Afghanistan and escorted the Queen on ceremonial duty, holding the rank of corporal of horse. But he was discharged on medical grounds last year after suffering serious head injuries and a brain tumor. Although he recovered enough to return to work, he then suffered a seizure and had to leave the Army. Sorry, we decided that unemployed Muslim colonizers deserve a nicer home than war heroes In an open letter to the Prime Minister and Cornwall Council’s chief executive Andrew Kerr, the Household Cavalry Veterans Association says it is “incensed”. Signed by Secretary Rob Mather, the letter claims taxpayers’ money is spent on “lavish lifestyles and foreign aid”, while “serious issues on our own doorstep are not resolved”. “This is not acceptable treatment of one who served his Queen and country.” The seven-bedroom home in Acton, West London, where an Afghan Muslim family were placed at a cost of £2,875 a week to taxpayers UK: Muslim Welfare ‘Refugees’ Trash The £1.25 Million Home They Are Living In For Free And Laugh About It A family of PALESTINIAN MUSLIM freeloaders provoked outrage yesterday by saying they “deserve” to live in a £1.25 million taxpayer-funded luxury home (above) despite trashing it. The mother, Mrs Mahmoud, gets £20,000 a year in housing benefits to pay her rent. Yet she said: “I don’t care if people think I am not grateful. I am entitled to live in a house like this even if I don’t pay for it. “I deserve to live in a nice house and get benefits because I am human.” The family is one of at least 100 unemployed Muslim invaders living in homes on state handouts that could fund £1million mortgages. Muslim mother of eight was placed in a £2.6m house in Notting Hill, west London at the taxpayers’ expense She has since split with her husband and was given British citizenship five years ago but has never worked in this country. She moved with her two sons and five daughters to the three-bedroom house in Fulham, west London, three years ago. It had just undergone a £76,000 refurbishment, half paid for by the taxpayer. She claims her family is being persecuted because neighbours “don’t want a foreigner to come and live in this street.” Thanks for the nice council house, suckers. Migration Watch said the costs will continue to rocket if a “sustainable” level of migration is not achieved. A spokesperson said: “There is a long standing controversy over the granting of social housing to immigrants. This has not been helped by local authorities’ reluctance to publish the relevant information. There is absolutely nothing in the rules that state that immigrants should get preferential treatment.",FAKE
+1157,"Refusing to sit on Lead, Trump Gets Bitter in Republican Debate","The New York billionaire went into the CBS debate with a head of steam, having won New Hampshire last Tuesday and holding a big lead in polls in South Carolina a week before Republicans vote on Feb. 20.
+
+Rather than play it safe, Trump responded to every comment leveled his way, interrupted his opponents at will and called them liars repeatedly in an emotional outburst that could raise more questions about whether he has the temperament to serve in the White House.
+
+He made his most blistering attacks against Bush and his brother, former President George W. Bush, who has many admirers in the Republican establishment.
+
+It was hard to declare a winner in the debate amid the constant volley of insults, not all of them from Trump. Cruz and fellow Senator Marco Rubio also took pointed jabs at each other over illegal immigration.
+
+But Trump dominated the debate conservation on Twitter with 40 percent of the mentions, according to data from the micro-blogging platform.
+
+Trump's combative style has set the tone for much of the campaign but in recent days he had pledged to pursue a more measured, positive approach. At the debate, that strategy lasted only through his comments about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was found dead on Saturday.
+
+Trump was quickly goaded when Bush criticized Trump's past statements that Russia has a role to play in Syria. Russia, Bush said, is not attacking Islamic State militants but instead helping Syrian President Bashir Assad, who Washington wants to leave power.
+
+Trump blasted Bush's brother for launching the Iraq war in 2003 over claims, later proven false, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
+
+""A big, fat mistake,"" said Trump, noting that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had also occurred on Bush's watch.
+
+""George Bush made a mistake,"" Trump thundered. ""We all make mistakes. But that one was a beauty ... They lied! They said there were weapons of mass destruction. And there were none.""
+
+Many in the crowd booed Trump and the Republican front-runner dismissed them as ""lobbyists and special interests"" supporting the former Florida governor.
+
+Bush, who has wilted in the past under assault from Trump, stood firm this time. He will campaign with his brother George on Monday in North Charleston, South Carolina.
+
+""I'm sick and tired of him going after my family,"" Bush said. ""My dad is the greatest man alive in my mind. While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And I'm proud of what he did.
+
+""He had the gall to go after my mother,"" Bush said, reminding the audience that Trump had criticized his 90-year-old mother, Barbara Bush, wife of former President George H.W. Bush. ""My mother is the strongest woman I know.""
+
+""She should be running,"" Trump responded.
+
+Bush provoked another outburst from Trump by saying the Republican nominee should be someone ""who doesn't brag, for example, that he has been bankrupt four times.""
+
+""That's another lie,"" Trump said. ""I never went bankrupt.""
+
+Trump also was drawn into a fight with Cruz over whether the real estate developer is sufficiently conservative. Trump called himself a ""common-sense conservative,"" which Cruz dismissed.
+
+""If Donald Trump is president he will appoint liberals to the Supreme Court,"" Cruz said.
+
+""You are the biggest liar,"" Trump said sharply.
+
+As they tried to talk over each other, Cruz chided Trump by saying, ""Donald, adults do not interrupt each other.""
+
+Ohio Governor John Kasich, who finished second in the New Hampshire primary last Tuesday and who pushes an optimistic message, called for calm.
+
+""These attacks, some of them are personal. I think we're fixing to lose the election to (Democratic front-runner) Hillary Clinton,"" he said.
+
+Cruz and Rubio renewed their battle over who is the toughest on illegal immigration with Cruz insisting that the Florida senator, as part of a Gang of Eight senators who sought a compromise on legislation in 2013, was for ""amnesty"" but now is against it for political purposes.
+
+He insisted that Rubio had said in Spanish on Univision that he would not rescind an executive order signed by President Barack Obama in support of the children of illegal immigrants.
+
+Rubio shot back: ""I don't know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn't speaking Spanish.""
+
+As the crowd roared, Rubio said Cruz is ""telling lies... He's lying about all sorts of things and now he makes things up.""
+
+Before the clashes broke out, the Republican candidates urged Obama not to nominate a successor to Scalia, saying it should be up to the next president to decide.",REAL
+5734,Ammon Bundy’s bodyguard sentenced in Oregon standoff case,"PORTLAND, Ore., Oct. 26 (UPI) — Brian Cavalier, the personal bodyguard of Ammon Bundy, on Tuesday was sentenced to time served in custody, exactly 9 months, for his role in the 41-day Oregon wildlife refuge standoff earlier this year. 
+U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown delivered the sentence in a downtown Portland federal courthouse. 
+“You’ve fulfilled the custody provision of the sentence,” Brown told Cavalier, who remains under U.S. Marshals Service custody while awaiting transfer to Nevada where he faces federal charges from a 2014 armed standoff. 
+Cavalier pleaded guilty on June 29 to one charge of conspiring to prevent federal workers from the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service from carrying out official work through intimidation, threat or force, and one charge of possession of a firearm in a federal facility. 
+Cavalier will also face three years of post-prison supervision that would begin after or occur concurrently with any supervision ordered by Nevada should Cavalier be sentenced in that case, The Oregonian reports. 
+Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy, and five others — including Cavalier — were charged with conspiracy, while other defendants have been charged with theft of government property and carrying a firearm in a federal facility, Oregon Public Broadcasting reports. 
+The Oregon incident began in early January in the town of Burns, where protesters were voicing support for ranchers Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son Steven, 46, who were convicted of arson in 2012 and served time in prison but whose sentences a court later ruled were too short. 
+The protesters, led by Bundy, would later occupy Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in a tense 41-day standoff with federal authorities. 
+Bundy is the son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who gained international attention in 2014 after staging an armed standoff with federal authorities over a grazing dispute with the Bureau of Land Management. 
+Cavalier will stand trial for the 2014 Nevada standoff in February. He is the first of the 26 defendants indicted in the Oregon conspiracy case.",FAKE
+1239,Why I'm more worried about Marco Rubio than Donald Trump,"Update: On March 13, 2016 I realized I was wrong about this.
+
+When not delighting in the epic meltdown of establishment Republican Party politics, many people I know — my wife, my boss, etc. — are expressing terror at the notion that Donald Trump might actually become president of the United States.
+
+I'm more sanguine. Not out of any particular love for Trump, but because he's actually running on a much less extreme agenda than his ""establishment"" rival Marco Rubio, who's offering a platform of economic ruin, multiple wars, and an attack on civil liberties that's nearly as vicious as anything Trump has proposed — even while wrapping it in an edgy, anxious, overreaction-prone approach to politics that heavily features big risky bets and huge, unpredictable changes in direction.
+
+Rubio has proposed a tax cut that will reduce federal revenue by $6.8 trillion over 10 years. Numbers that large don't mean anything to people, so for comparison's sake let's say that if we entirely eliminated American military spending over that period we still couldn't quite pay for it.
+
+But of course Rubio doesn't want to eliminate military spending — he wants to spend more. He also promises to avoid any cuts to Social Security and Medicare for people currently at or near retirement. For good measure, he is also proposing a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. You could eliminate the entire non-defense discretionary budget and you'd still need $100 billion to $200 billion more per year in cuts to make this work.
+
+This is, of course, totally unworkable. And the process that led Rubio to this point is telling and troubling.
+
+Rubio entered the Senate at a time when an intellectual movement known as ""reform"" was hot in conservative circles, which argued that Republicans should concentrate less on supply-side tax cuts and more on tax policy focused on the working class. This originally took the form of a $2.4 trillion tax cut plan crafted by Utah Sen. Mike Lee that Rubio signed on to but then kept transforming into a larger and more regressive tax cut, as Rubio came under pressure from the supply-side wing of the party and it became clear that the constituency for ""reform"" conservatism was limited to a handful of media figures. Eager to prove that his dalliance with the reformocons was over, he actually ended up proposing to entirely eliminate taxes on investment income, meaning that billionaire captains of industry could end up paying nothing at all.
+
+The upshot is a plan that is costly and regressive, yet paired with other commitments around entitlements, military spending, and constitutional amendments that make it completely impossible.
+
+Trump's tax plan is even costlier than Rubio's by most measures. But in his defense, he barely ever talks about it and hasn't compounded the cost problem with a balanced-budget amendment or a firm commitment to enormous quantities of new military spending.
+
+Rubio's approach to world affairs essentially repeats the ""let's have it all and who cares if it adds up"" mentality of his fiscal policy. His solution to every problem is to confront some foreign country more aggressively, with no regard to the idea of trade-offs or tensions between goals or limits to how much the United States can bite off at any particular time.
+
+He'd start things off by alienating Latin American allies by undoing the Obama administration's normalization of relations with Cuba in order to return to a decades-long failed policy of isolation.
+
+But that's small potatoes compared with the consequences of Rubio's pledge to cancel the nuclear deal with Iran on day one. He isn't too worried that this will lead to Iran building a nuclear weapon because there will be a ""credible threat of military force if Iran decides to ramp up its program."" He also wants to deploy more American troops to Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS.
+
+He wants to attack ships and aircraft bound for North Korea that are ""suspected of carrying material related to North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs."" He is also hoping to convince China to help with the Korea situation, but his China policy calls for tougher measures to ""stand on the side of freedom and human rights, both inside China and on its periphery.""
+
+He also wants to send more weapons to Ukraine, increase sanctions on Russia, move more heavy weapons into Eastern Europe, and clarify ""that there will be no U.S.-Russia cooperation in the fight against ISIL until Russia brokers the departure of Bashar al-Assad from power.""
+
+We really did have a president who tried to govern this way for a year or two. His name was George W. Bush, and starting some time in 2004 he realized it was unworkable. With a larger army already occupying Iraq and a smaller one in Afghanistan, there was no way to make coercive military force the main terms of relating to Iran and North Korea, to say nothing of Russia and China.
+
+Over the next several years, Bush steadily recognized the need to pull back and adopt a more realistic approach to dealing with the world. Not everyone in the Republican Party was happy with this retrenchment, and Rubio is essentially running as the candidate of that faction that wishes Condoleezza Rice never rose in stature to check Dick Cheney's influence and Robert Gates never came in to replace Don Rumsfeld.
+
+In contrast to Rubio, Trump is more prone to offering simply ignorant remarks but also has considerably more restrained instincts. Trump essentially takes the world-conquering nationalism of George W. Bush and turns it inward, offering suspicion of outsiders and a reluctance to launch new wars. This kind of quasi-isolationist thinking isn't exactly my cup of tea, but it certainly reduces the risk of utter catastrophe relative to a return to high Bushism.
+
+Of course, what has most high-minded liberals alarmed about Donald Trump isn't his tax or foreign policies — it's his bashing of Muslims and immigrants to the United States.
+
+But while Rubio clearly didn't get into the race to push these issues, his response to Trump's rise has been telling and alarming. After the Paris attacks, Trump vowed to shut down mosques where radical preaching might be taking place; Rubio said that didn't go far enough and that a Rubio administration would be willing to stamp out Muslims' freedom of assembly wherever it might present itself. He told Fox News:
+
+Rubio said Trump's proposed ban on Muslim immigration wouldn't pass muster constitutionally but agrees we should block any Syrian refugees from entering the country. Rubio also opposed a bipartisan effort to curb the National Security Agency mass surveillance and promises to permanently extend mass surveillance as president.
+
+Most famously, of course, Rubio was a leading proponent of a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill until it became clear that he'd underestimated the extent of conservative opposition to the idea and began furiously denouncing his own work. Now, Rubio is an enforcement-first guy, who takes such a dim view of both immigration and any concept of limits to the power of the federal government that he wants to cut off all federal funds to towns and cities whose local police departments have chosen to deprioritize immigration enforcement work in favor of crimes that do actual damage to human life and property.
+
+Under pressure from Ted Cruz, Rubio is now promising to start deporting DREAMers as soon as he takes office. He's even turned a wink-nudge promise to bring back torture as an instrument of government policy into an applause line in debates and on the stump.
+
+Nobody knows what lurks in Rubio's heart on these matters, of course. But one could say the same about Trump. What we do know for sure is that Rubio's strategy for beating back the most repugnant aspects of Trumpism is to imitate them.
+
+More than any particular policy stance, what is perhaps most troubling about the ebbs and flows of Rubio's positioning is the larger picture they paint of a tendency toward systematic overreaction.
+
+In the wake of Rubio's funny-but-not-serious debate gaffe where he repeated the same canned line several times, McKay Coppins wrote:
+
+I sympathize with this a lot. Two or three days before the launch of Vox.com, I succumbed to my personal occasional propensity to panic and was insisting that we had to delay or cancel the debut of the site. The good news is that more levelheaded voices prevailed.
+
+The even better news is that it is extremely unlikely that I am going to become president of the United States. And I like to think that if the possibility did present itself, my friends, allies, and advisers would have the good sense to politely suggest that a ""propensity to panic in moments of crisis, both real and imagined"" is not a great quality in a chief executive, and that addressing the substantive concern would be a more valuable contribution to the nation than laboring to keep it from public view.
+
+But so far, playing his hand aggressively has paid off for Rubio. He beat a sitting governor to get into the Senate, and has displaced his own mentor as the favorite of the party establishment. Many of Rubio's moves have looked reckless, but many of them have paid off. And reckless moves that didn't pay off — like the reformocon tax cut or the Gang of Eight immigration bill — haven't killed him either, because he was able to swing hard and fast enough in the other direction to stay alive.
+
+As president, Rubio would likely stick with the approach that's worked for him so far — gambling hard and counting on his ability to swerve sharply if something like launching his presidency by provoking a major international crisis around Iran turns out to create some problems.
+
+If we're all very lucky, it just might work. But I have some concerns.",REAL
+4645,How mega-donors helped raise $1 billion for Hillary Clinton,"It was a few weeks before Hillary Clinton would announce her 2016 presidential bid, and she was already worried about money.
+
+“Can we discuss the fundraising plans for first quarter?” her top aide Huma Abedin wrote to other senior staffers in March 2015, noting that Clinton was concerned.
+
+“Is the issue that she’s doing too much? Too little?” asked campaign manager Robby Mook.
+
+At the time, donors to the former Florida governor were socking millions into a super PAC, pushing the limits of campaign-finance rules. The stockpiling of seven-figure checks before Bush even declared his candidacy spurred a flurry of anxious conversations between Clinton and her staff, according to hacked emails posted by WikiLeaks.
+
+But the former secretary of state had her own financial weapon: a network of political backers that she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, had methodically cultivated over 40 years.
+
+Determined not to fall behind in the money race, Hillary Clinton ramped up her appeals to rich donors and shrugged off restrictions that President Obama had imposed on his fundraising team.
+
+Even as her advisers fretted about the perception that she was too cozy with wealthy interests, they agreed to let lobbyists bundle checks for her campaign, including those representing some foreign governments, the emails show. Top aides wooed major donors for super PACs, taking advantage of the leeway that campaigns have to legally collaborate with the groups on fundraising.
+
+The effort paid off. Together with the party and pro-Clinton super PACs, the Democratic nominee had amassed $1.14 billion to support her campaign by the end of September — on par with what Obama and his allies brought in for his 2012 reelection bid. GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who did not begin fundraising in earnest until the end of May, had collected $712 million, including $56 million of his own money.
+
+Unlike Obama, Clinton fully embraced super PACs from the very beginning of her race, helping pull in larger checks from donors than the president did. An analysis by The Washington Post found that more than a fifth of the $1 billion donated to help her bid was given by just 100 wealthy individuals and labor unions — many with a long history of contributing to the Clintons. The analysis included contributions to her campaigns, joint fundraising committees, national parties, convention host committees and single-candidate super PACs.
+
+The top five donors together contributed one out of every $17 for her 2016 run: hedge fund manager S. Donald Sussman ($20.6 million); Chicago venture capitalist J.B. Pritzker and his wife, M.K. ($16.7 million); Univision chairman Haim Saban and his wife, Cheryl ($11.9 million); hedge fund titan George Soros ($9.9 million); and SlimFast founder S. Daniel Abraham ($9.7 million).
+
+Since modern-day campaign finance rules were put in place in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal, no president has ever been elected with the help of wealthy contributors who doled out such huge sums. The possibilities changed with the 2010 advent of super PACs, which can accept unlimited sums from individuals and corporations.
+
+“I would prefer if the limits were much smaller, but that’s the way it is,” Abraham, 92, said in an interview. He and his wife made 26 contributions to the Clintons’ campaigns between 1994 and 2008, which together totaled $461,000, according to a database built by The Post. This year, he has given nearly 21 times that amount.
+
+Sussman, Clinton’s top backer, said his top priority is dismantling the big-money system that has flourished in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision.
+
+“It’s very odd to be giving millions when your objective is to actually get the money out of politics,” Sussman said. “I am a very strong supporter of publicly financed campaigns, and I think the only way to accomplish that is to get someone like Secretary Clinton, who is committed to cleaning up the unfortunate disaster created by the activist court in Citizens United.”
+
+Clinton has emerged as both one of the sharpest critics and biggest beneficiaries of the new campaign-finance landscape.
+
+On the campaign trail, she has repeatedly called for an overhaul of how elections are financed and vowed to overturn the Citizens United ruling, which allowed corporations to spend money on independent political activity. She has also pledged to sign an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose political spending and to create a matching system for small donors in federal races.
+
+“More than 2.6 million Americans have donated to this campaign because they know Hillary Clinton is the best candidate to bring us toward a more inclusive society with an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top,” said spokesman Josh Schwerin.
+
+But Clinton would also enter the White House deeply indebted to a group of elite donors who have backed her and her husband for decades — helping raise $4 billion for their political and philanthropic causes over the years, according to an analysis by The Post.
+
+An investigation by The Post last year found that the Clintons kept donors in their orbit for years by methodically wooing competing interest groups and balancing their liberal base with powerful business constituencies such as Wall Street and the tech sector.
+
+Top allies have financed not only their political causes, but their legal needs and their philanthropy. About half of the money they have raised — more than $2 billion — went to the Clinton Foundation, which has financed access to HIV treatments around the world, promoted early literacy programs and trained African farmers on improving their crop yields. The foundation’s fundraising has also generated controversy in this year’s campaign, as critics have seized upon its acceptance of money from foreign governments while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
+
+Separately, donors gave $888 million to support Bill Clinton’s two presidential runs, Hillary Clinton’s two Senate campaigns and her 2008 presidential bid, according to campaign
+
+finance records.
+
+As she ramped up her 2016 bid, Clinton’s advisers worried that her call for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United — a long-shot policy goal — would not be enough to combat the view that she was closely aligned with wealthy interests.
+
+In a May 2015 discussion about possible campaign finance proposals Clinton could endorse, Dan Schwerin, director of speechwriting, wrote that he was concerned about “complaints of hypocrisy.”
+
+“Policy alone won’t make the cognitive dissonance go away, in fact it might heighten it,” he added. “But having her make the unilateral disarmament argument directly and maybe even some straight talk that cuts to the core of people’s concerns about her relationship with donors in general, might help.”
+
+At the same time, her campaign was contending with a new reality: The political world had changed since Clinton’s last run for office. Super PACs were now central players in campaigns. And many of her GOP rivals, including Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, were pushing the bounds of the use of such groups.
+
+[It’s bold, but legal: How campaigns and their super PAC backers work together]
+
+The Republicans’ aggressiveness — and the lack of response from regulators — alarmed Clinton. In early May 2015, she forwarded her advisers an article about the lack of enforcement by the polarized Federal Election Commission, which is charged with policing election rules.
+
+“What do you suggest we do?” she asked.
+
+“I have no magic solutions other than execution,” responded campaign chairman John Podesta, adding that the campaign needed to expand its network of fundraisers who bundle checks and “get Priorities functional,” a reference to Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC backing Clinton.
+
+“We should also ask BHO to do more in light of this, although they are kind of prissy about how they approach this,” he added, referring to Obama.
+
+Mook agreed: “I think we focus hard on raising as much as we can and then throw the kitchen sink at everyone who we believe steps over the line, understanding that has limited impact.”
+
+The Clinton campaign has refused to confirm the authenticity of the emails posted by WikiLeaks, which were allegedly hacked from Podesta’s personal account. Government officials have already officially accused Russia of attempting to interfere in the U.S. election, including through a previous hack of the Democratic National Committee, and are investigating whether Russian intelligence services are behind the Podesta hack.
+
+The emails show that Clinton decided to step up her own fundraising schedule that spring even if, as Adebin noted at one point, it made the schedule “a little crazy.”
+
+And she decided to forgo some of the self-imposed limitations that Obama had put on his own fundraising. The campaign decided to not only let lobbyists bundle checks, but, after extensive internal debate, permitted some of those registered as representing foreign governments to raise money as well.
+
+Mook explained to other top advisers that the campaign’s outside attorney, Marc Elias, “made a convincing case to me this am that these sorts of restrictions don’t really get you anything . . . that Obama actually got judged MORE harshly as a result,” he wrote. “He convinced me. So . . . in a complete U-turn, I’m ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks. Are you guys ok with that?”
+
+Clinton and her aides also sent clear signals early on that they wanted supporters to back Priorities USA, which had originally formed to support Obama’s reelection despite his objections to super PACs.
+
+In an April 2015 memo, Elias laid out the ways that super PACs and the campaign could legally interact, noting that the campaign could share the names of prospective donors with Priorities — including how much they might be willing to give. Campaign officials could not explicitly tell the super PAC how much to ask for, he stressed. But they could say something like, “Donor A works in financial services and has been a long-time contributor. I think she’d be willing to do six figures for Priorities,” he wrote.
+
+Clinton also got a boost from another super PAC, Correct the Record, led by her ally David Brock, which coordinates directly with the campaign on opposition research, taking advantage of an exemption designed for bloggers.
+
+To donors, the different groups were often presented as pieces of a unified enterprise.
+
+Four days before Clinton officially jumped in the race, retired banker Herb Sandler got an email from a Washington fundraiser working for Priorities USA Action who introduced himself as “the Finance Director for Hillary Clinton’s superpac,” according a message Sandler forwarded to Podesta. Two months later, Sandler gave Priorities $1 million.
+
+Podesta was recruited to pitch major donors to support both the campaign and Priorities as he traveled around the country, the emails show. After a trip to San Francisco in December 2015, Podesta reported back that Sandler was willing to give the maximum contribution to a joint fundraising committee between Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party.
+
+“He is also prepared to double down on his Priorities support as well,” Podesta added.
+
+“Thanks, John!!!!!” responded national finance director Dennis Cheng, punctuating his message with the hashtag “#ChairmanCash.”
+
+[Univision chair, a Clinton donor, urged campaign to hit Trump on immigration]
+
+The emails show that Clinton’s aides were intensely focused on locking up the support of labor unions — a source of cash and ground troops — and often agonized over how to keep them on board amid competing political interests.
+
+In April 2015, after attending a gathering of major liberal donors, senior policy adviser Ann O’Leary noted that “a number of our friends” — including the Service Employees International Union — wanted Clinton to back organized labor’s “Fight for 15” campaign to raise the minimum wage.
+
+“Can we do something creative to support efforts without coming out for a number?” she asked.
+
+Two months later, Clinton garnered huge cheers when she called in to a convention of fast-food workers, telling them “thank you for marching in the streets to get that living wage” — stopping short of endorsing a specific figure for the minimum wage.
+
+SEIU President Mary Kay Henry dashed off a note to Podesta with the subject line, “It worked!”
+
+“I looked around the stage and most fast food leaders had tears streaming down their face,” she wrote, adding that the sentiment in the room was, “She’s on our side.”
+
+“Amazing,” responded Abedin when a staffer forwarded her the note. “Hope you shared with HRC!”
+
+SEIU officials said Henry’s email was referring to the support Clinton has shown for working families on a variety of issues, adding that members of the union have felt even more energized by her candidacy as the election has drawn closer.
+
+In the fall of 2015, the SEIU endorsed Clinton, who has since expressed support for a $15 minimum wage. The union donated $1 million to Priorities and is spending tens of millions on an independent field effort to turn out voters in battleground states.
+
+Wealthy individuals supporting Clinton also frequently weighed in with requests and advice, the emails show.
+
+One regular correspondent was Saban, a dual Israeli-American citizen who dispensed ideas about how to appeal to Latino and Jewish voters.
+
+After Trump described Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers in his speech announcing his run for president, Saban spurred the campaign to respond more forcefully. He urged Clinton aides to call Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) on the fact that he had super PAC backing, like Clinton. And he encouraged the former secretary of state “to differentiate herself from Obama on Israel.”
+
+“It can easily be done w/o criticizing the President,” he wrote in June 2015, adding that she should “speak strongly against anti-Semitism, and boycott, reaffirm the US commitment to Israel’s security +anything else your research tells you the Jewish community is sensitive to.
+
+“This is NOT a NY or California issue,,,,it is a Florida one,” he added. “Pls LMK how I can help here.”
+
+The next year, when Clinton expanded her delegate lead over Sanders in the March 15 primaries, Saban sent Podesta, Mook and Abedin a jubilant message.
+
+“Cheryl and I are so very happy...... relieved....... And looking forward to continued success,” he wrote. “Onward and forward.”
+
+“Thank YOU for making it possible!!” Mook responded.
+
+“SHE is the one that made it happen with you guys and your teams by her side,” Saban replied. “Thank you for saying what you said about us but we’re just on the periphery.”
+
+Note: An earlier version of this story erroneously referred to the late wife of SlimFast founder S. Daniel Abraham. Abraham’s wife is alive.",REAL
+2374,Worth a shot: Former Pennsylvania police officer's vending machines sell ammo,"You can buy snacks, condoms, fishing bait, marijuana and even gold from vending machines, so Sam Piccinini figured, “Why not bullets?”
+
+A 25-year police department veteran who now runs his own ammunition manufacturing and wholesale business, Piccinini, of Rochester, Pa., has two of his retrofitted vending machines at his local gun club. The machines, which sell nearly every caliber of bullet from .22 to .45, are doing a brisk business and, Piccinini said, other clubs want his machines.
+
+“I have clubs lining up at my door wanting them,” Piccinini told FoxNews.com. “I have five clubs chomping at the bit, wanting these machines.”
+
+Piccinini, who owns Master Ammo Co., a licensed manufacturer of ammunition, said he got the idea two years ago, when bullet shortages around the nation left members of the Beaver Valley Rifle & Pistol Club unable to buy the “non-jacketed” rounds preferred at most shooting ranges.
+
+First, Piccinini asked local attorney Eugene Martucci if such a machine would be legal. Told such a device could be operated lawfully, Piccinini bought a vending machine and had some modifications made to it, allowing it to accept larger bills and credit cards and to hoist and dispense bags of .45-caliber Automatic Colt Pistol cartridges. He figures he spent about $4,000 on the first vending machine. He now has two of them at the club and a third ready to be deployed.
+
+Piccinini’s machines sell both handgun and rifle ammunition, which are regulated differently. In Pennsylvania, people ages 18 and over can buy long gun ammunition and people over 21 can buy bullets for handguns. Critics say selling from a machine, without an attendant to ensure the purchase is legal, poses a problem.
+
+Piccinini likens his machines to cigarette vending machines in social clubs, noting that a prominent sticker on them states, “You must be 21 years of age to purchase ammunition for use in handguns from this machine.” Since the club does not admit minors without adult guardians, and since anyone entering must pass through a security gate and swipe an ID card to enter, Piccinini does not believe there is a risk of illicit sales.
+
+“It's not like someone walking off the street can get in and buy ammunition,” Piccinini said.
+
+Selling bullets out of a vending machine, as opposed to over a counter, is ""not a big deal,"" said Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Washington-based pro-gun control group Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
+
+""Ammunition is widely available at ranges to begin with,and we don't take issue with that,"" Everitt said. ""If they put it in a school, call me back.""
+
+The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulates sales of ammunition, and Piccinini has permits allowing him to manufacture, sell and even export guns and ammunition. Stephen Bartholomew, of the BATFE's Philadelphia field office, told the BeaverCountian.com he had never come across vending machines that sell ammunition.
+
+“I don’t want to speculate as to what is or is not happening in this particular situation, but a licensee cannot sell ammunition to anyone under the age of 18 and, importantly, you cannot sell handgun ammunition to individuals under the age of 21,” he said.
+
+The club makes no money off of sales or for renting space for the machines, which Piccinini, who sells ammunition to retailers and police departments in Pennsylvania, hopes will become a growing part of his company.
+
+“The club doesn’t receive any profits and the machines are strictly there for the convenience of its members,” said Piccinini.
+
+The club is not looking for publicity for the machines, according to its president, Bill Fortuna.
+
+“This has been kept a secret, it’s nobody’s business, it’s our club, we can do as our members allow us,” Fortuna told BeaverCountian.com. “Legally, there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”
+
+Piccinini, who is running for Beaver County sheriff, a post he has twice sought unsuccessfully, believes criticism he has received for his brainchild will ultimately backfire and win him the votes of Second Amendment advocates in the March 19 Republican primary.
+
+""Some people have been critical, but I think even more people support me and support the right to bear arms,"" he said.",REAL
+1252,Clinton’s Lead Has Evaporated in Nevada and Her Supporters Are Panicking,"For months, pundits have marked Nevada in the “win” column for Hillary Clinton, who was thought to hold an unassailable lead with the state’s large Hispanic population. But according to a new poll, Clinton might not win Nevada in the landslide that everyone predicted. In fact, she might not win it at all.
+
+Somehow, while everyone was focused on the showdown between her and Bernie Sanders scheduled to take place in South Carolina next week, the gap between the two Democratic rivals had quietly narrowed from 23 points in December to a gut-wrenching one point in a CNN/ORC poll released on Wednesday, just three days before the caucus.
+
+Allies in Clinton’s orbit are panicking, according to The Hill, as the campaign prepares for the possibility of losing a state that one Democratic strategist called “tailor-made” for Clinton. Latinos have long been considered a key part of Clinton’s supposed minority firewall against Sanders, whose victories in New Hampshire and Iowa were driven by white voters, but political observers everywhere will now have to revisit that assumption. “I don’t get it. I don’t think anyone expected this race to look like this,” one former Clinton aide said.
+
+No matter how Nevada shakes out on Saturday, anything less than a Clinton blowout could be disastrous for her campaign, especially in a state that was once so obviously one-sided that no one had bothered to poll there since December 2015. Even if Clinton ekes out a narrow win, much like she did in Iowa, the fact that Sanders was even close will prove that his minority outreach is working, giving him added momentum going into the South Carolina Democratic primary one week later. Or, as one friend of the Clintons put it in more colorful, relatable terms to The Hill: “The shit will hit the fan.”
+
+The surprising surge of Sanders in Nevada has only added to speculation that much like Barack Obama in 2008, the crotchety Vermont senator could present a strong challenge to Clinton’s once-inevitable nomination, if not snatch it from her outright. Statistics guru Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has even laid out a numerical path to a Sanders victory, projecting how much he needs to outperform expectations to secure the nomination. In Nevada, assuming she holds a 12-point lead nationally, Hillary should be winning by 15 points. That may not be happening anymore. If it doesn’t, that could mean Clinton is in for one hell of a fight.",REAL
+7319,Why Palestinians want to sue Britain: 99 years since the Balfour Declaration,"Why Palestinians want to sue Britain: 99 years since the Balfour Declaration By Ramzy Baroud Posted on November 4, 2016 by Ramzy Baroud 
+Last July, the Palestinian Authority took the unexpected, although belated step of seeking Arab backing in suing Britain over the Balfour Declaration. That ‘declaration’ was the first ever explicit commitment made by Britain, and the West in general, to establish a Jewish homeland atop an existing Palestinian homeland. 
+It is too early to tell whether the Arab League would heed the Palestinian call , or if the PA would even follow through, especially considering that the latter has the habit of making too many proclamations backed by little or no action. 
+However, it seems that the next year will witness a significant tug of war regarding the Balfour Declaration, the 100 th anniversary of which will be commemorated on November 02, 2017. 
+But who is Balfour, what is the Balfour Declaration and why does all of this matters today? 
+Britain’s Foreign Secretary from late 1916, Arthur James Balfour, had pledged Palestine to another people. That promise was made on November 02, 1917, on behalf of the British government in the form of a letter sent to the leader of the Jewish community in Britain, Walter Rothschild. 
+At the time, Britain was not even in control of Palestine, which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Either way, Palestine was never Balfour’s to so casually transfer to anyone else. His letter read: 
+“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” 
+He concluded, “I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.” 
+Balfour was hardly acting on his own. True, the Declaration bears his name, yet, in reality, he was a loyal agent of an Empire with massive geopolitical designs, not only concerning Palestine alone, but with Palestine as part of a larger Arab landscape. 
+Only a year earlier, another sinister document was introduced, albeit secretly. It was endorsed by another top British diplomat, Mark Sykes and, on behalf of France, by François Georges-Picot. The Russians were informed of the agreement, as they too had received a piece of the Ottoman cake. 
+The document indicated that, once the Ottomans were soundly defeated, their territories, including Palestine, would be split among the prospective victorious parties. 
+The Sykes-Picot Agreement , also known as the ‘Asia Minor Agreement,’ was signed in secret one hundred years ago, two years into World War I. It signified the brutal nature of colonial powers that rarely associated land and resources with people who lived upon or owned them. 
+The centerpiece of the agreement was a map that was marked with straight lines by a China graph pencil. The map largely determined the fate of the Arabs, dividing them in accordance with various haphazard assumptions of tribal and sectarian lines. 
+The improvised map consisted not only of lines but also colors , along with language that attested to the fact that the two countries viewed the Arab region purely on materialistic terms, without paying the slightest attention to the possible repercussions of slicing up entire civilizations with a multifarious history of co-operation and conflict. 
+Palestinians rebelled , marking a rebellion that has never ceased 99 years later, and highlighting the horrific consequences of British colonialism and the eventual complete Zionist takeover of Palestine which is still felt after all of these years. 
+Paltry attempts to pacify Palestinian anger were to no avail, especially after the League of Nations Council in July 1922 approved the terms of the British Mandate over Palestine—which was originally granted to Britain in April 1920—without consulting the Palestinians at all. In fact, Palestinians would disappear from the British and international radar, only to reappear as negligible rioters, troublemakers, and obstacles to the joint British-Zionist colonial concoctions. 
+Despite occasional assurances to the contrary, the British intention of ensuring the establishment of an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine was becoming clearer with time. The Balfour Declaration was not merely an aberration, but had, indeed, set the stage for the that followed, three decades later. 
+In fact, that history remains in constant replay: the Zionists claimed Palestine and renamed it ‘Israel’; the British continue to support them, although never ceasing to pay lip-service to the Arabs; and the Palestinian people remain a nation that is geographically fragmented between refugee camps, in the diaspora, militarily occupied, or treated as second class citizens in a country upon which their ancestors dwelt since time immemorial. 
+While Balfour cannot be blamed for all the misfortunes that have befallen Palestinians since he communicated his brief but infamous letter, the notion that his ‘promise’ embodied complete disregard of the aspirations and rights of the Palestinian Arab people—that very letter is handed from one generation of British diplomats to the next, in the same way that Palestinian resistance to colonialism has and continues to spread across generations. 
+That injustice continues, thus the perpetuation of the conflict. What the British, the early Zionists, the Americans and subsequent Israeli governments failed to understand, and continue to ignore at their own peril, is that there can be no peace without justice and equality in Palestine; and that Palestinians will continue to resist, as long as the reasons that inspired their rebellion nearly a century ago remain in place. 
+Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include “Searching Jenin,” “The Second Palestinian Intifada” and his latest “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story.” His website is . . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
+3804,Jay Carney: Obama supports Hillary Clinton,"Obama has maintained neutrality in the primary and recently met with Clinton's opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders , at the White House. Still, his comments on the race have seemed to favor his former secretary of state, if only slightly.
+
+Jay Carney told CNN's Brooke Baldwin on Wednesday that's no accident -- and the President does want Clinton to win.
+
+""I don't think there is any doubt that he wants Hillary to win the nomination and believes that she would be the best candidate in the fall and the most effective as president in carrying forward what he's achieved,"" said Carney, a CNN contributor.
+
+The White House declined to comment on Carney's comments Wednesday. Carney said Obama won't make an official endorsement until the race is decided, but his intentions are clear. ""I think the President has signaled, while still remaining neutral, that he supports Secretary Clinton's candidacy and would prefer to see her as the nominee,"" Carney said. ""He won't officially embrace her unless and until it's clear that she's going to be the nominee. I think he is maintaining that tradition of not intervening in a party primary."" Clinton has made a point to draw from her closeness with Obama on the campaign trail, attacking Sanders for criticizing the President and seeking a primary challenger to him in 2012",REAL
+3394,"Hillary Clinton's ties to corporate donors, lobbyists while secretary of state scrutinized","Hillary Clinton's ties to large corporations have come under more scrutiny after it was revealed that dozens of companies that have donated millions to her family's foundation also lobbied the State Department during her tenure as secretary of state.
+
+The Wall Street Journal reports that the 60 companies who lobbied Clinton's State Department between 2009 and 2013 donated over $26 million to the Clinton Foundation in that period. The donors include instantly recognizable names like General Electric, Exxon Mobil, and Boeing.
+
+The Journal also reports that at least 44 of the 60 companies participated in philanthropy projects valued at $3.2 billion set up by the Clinton Global Initiative, which is a wing of the foundation. At least 25 of the companies also contributed to 15 public-private partnerships created by Clinton and coordinated by the State Department.
+
+While there is no evidence that any laws were broken, the connections do raise potentially thorny ethical questions as Clinton prepares for a likely 2016 run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
+
+Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told the Journal that she ""did the job that every secretary of state is supposed to do and what the American people expect of them—especially during difficult economic times. She proudly and loudly advocated on behalf of American business and took every opportunity she could to promote U.S. commercial interests abroad.""
+
+The latest report comes on the heels of the disclosure that donations from foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation have increased considerably following the removal of a self-imposed ban on such contributions during Hillary's time as Secretary of State. Experts have said that the donation ban should be immediately re-imposed until Clinton formally decides one way or another whether she will seek the White House. On Thursday, the foundation said it would consider whether to accept such contributions should Clinton decide to run, but would not commit to rejecting such donations in the future.
+
+The Journal report cites several examples of Clinton promoting eventual donors to the Foundation and its various activities. For example, in October 2012, she lobbied the Algerian government to contract General Electric to build power plants in that country. The following month, the Foundation approached the company about expanding a health-access initiative. An eventual partnership was formed, to which the company contributed between $500,000 and $1 million. The Algerian government awarded GE the power plant contract in September 2013.
+
+Other efforts were less successful. In 2010, Clinton announced cooperation between the U.S. and Poland on a scheme to develop shale gas deposits in eastern Europe. After several years of false starts, Exxon Mobil and Chevron gave up their Polish plans.
+
+In 2012, Clinton persuaded Bulgaria's government to issue a five-year license to Chevron allowing conventional gas exploration. That, too went nowhere. The following year, the Journal reports, Chevron donated $250,000 to the foundation. Exxon Mobil, for its part, has donated at least $18.8 million to various initiatives, including a nonprofit women's group called vital voices.
+
+In at least one case, a sizable corporate monetary promise was made before a Clinton overseas trip. In 2012, Wal-Mart, a company with whom the Clintons have ties going back to their days in Arkansas, pledged $12 million to various causes supporting woman in Latin America. $1.5 million of that money went toward a Clinton Foundation public-private partnership and another $500,000 went to Vital Voices.
+
+A month later, Clinton lobbied the Indian government to reverse a ban on multibrand retailers, opening up a potentially lucrative market for several U.S. companies, including Wal-Mart. The effort was unsuccessful.
+
+Click for more from The Wall Street Journal.",REAL
+2479,U.S. Resets Obamacare Deadline For Some Businesses To 2016,"U.S. Resets Obamacare Deadline For Some Businesses To 2016
+
+The Obama administration says businesses employing 50-99 people now have until Jan. 1, 2016, to provide health insurance, rolling back part of the requirement known as the employer mandate. Under the Affordable Care Act, larger companies must offer the coverage in 2015.
+
+NPR's Julie Rovner filed this update for our Newscast desk:
+
+It's the second time the requirement for middle-size businesses has been postponed. Julie will have more analysis of the change later, for the Shots blog.
+
+The change was announced Monday by the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service. The agencies say the delay will affect only about 2 percent of U.S. employers.
+
+The agencies also announced a new rule allowing large employers to phase in the percentage of workers they cover, ""from 70 percent in 2015 to 95 percent in 2016 and beyond.""
+
+As the announcement notes, many of those firms, which employ 100 or more people, already offer insurance coverage.",REAL
+261,The GOP is ungovernable: What happens when one major party is dysfunctional to the core,"One of the big themes of the 2014 midterm elections was the insistence from Republicans that they, given the chance, would be able to competently govern. As House majority leader Kevin McCarthy explained it in late October, just before Election Day, it was critical for the party’s political future to demonstrate to voters that they could get stuff done. “I do know this,” McCarthy said in an interview with Politico. “If we don’t capture the House stronger, and the Senate, and prove we could govern, there won’t be a Republican president in 2016.”
+
+Here we are a little less than a year later, and McCarthy has dramatically withdrawn his name from consideration in the race to replace the outgoing Speaker of the House, who announced his resignation as a last-ditch effort to get past the second government shutdown drama of 2015. With the debt ceiling rapidly approaching and yet another government-funding chokepoint soon after that, the House Republicans are too divided and unruly to even pick someone to lead them through these two tests of basic governance.
+
+I think even McCarthy would have to admit at this point that the “prove we could govern” test has been a colossal failure for the GOP. And that’s obviously bad news for the party, but it means the rest of us are kinda screwed too.
+
+Let’s retrace the steps that led to McCarthy’s embarrassing withdrawal. He got promoted to majority leader after Eric Cantor was upset in his primary race by a hardline Tea Party candidate who successfully caricatured Cantor as a RINO who sold out conservatives. By sliding into Cantor’s position, McCarthy resigned himself to the same fate – being in the leadership necessarily means having to occasionally compromise with the Democrats, and in the eyes of the increasingly potent far-right House Freedom Caucus, that’s an unforgivable sin against conservatism. Speaker John Boehner barely managed (and sometimes failed) to keep the House GOP together over four years of bitter infighting, and he ended up resigning just to keep his own party from shutting the government down over Planned Parenthood. McCarthy, as majority leader, was the natural successor to Boehner and aggressively sought the job. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he backed out of the race.
+
+Did he get bumped because of his unseemly truth-telling about the political agenda of the House Select Committee on Benghazi? Maybe! Though it’s uncertain whether he would have had sufficient support in the absence of a high-profile gaffe. Did he back off because of rumors that he was having an extramarital affair with another Republican in the House? Probably not! But there was apparently a good deal of unsourced “buzz” and “chatter” to that effect circulating among the gossipy children we elect to represent us at the highest levels of government.
+
+The most likely explanation is that he realized that even if he did clear the threshold to be elected Speaker, he’d be weakened by defections within his own caucus and probably fail at the first critical task facing him: raising the debt limit before the country defaults on its debt payments early next month. Faced with those prospects and the long-term problem presented by an influential, uncontrollable and politically suicidal faction within his own party, you can’t really blame him for wanting out. McCarthy’s rapid departure has left the Republican caucus in the purest state of chaos – members were apparently weeping in private corners – and opened the floor to all manner of crazy suggestions for who should be the next Speaker. Ted Cruz? Sounds plausible! Donald Trump? Yeah man yeah! Mitt Romney? Hah. Terrific! But really it seems like no one knows what happens now. Some Republicans are pushing for a placeholder speaker, some retiring Republican member who won’t have to worry about their political future. Boehner is apparently making personal appeals to Paul Ryan, begging him to take the job he’s desperate to abandon, and Ryan is resisting. We’re at the point where one of the most powerful men in Washington can’t seem to give away his position of authority and prestige. The reason no one wants to be in charge of the House Republican caucus is because it is impossible to govern. Conservatives are claiming McCarthy’s and Boehner’s scalps and demanding that a real conservative be installed as speaker – someone who will cater to the demands of the extremist right. One can not meet those demands and still be an effective leader of the legislative body. Boehner tried to do it several times, and each time he ended up leading his party into defeat and embarrassment. When he inevitably ended up compromising to pass must-pass legislation, he was branded as a traitor by the hardliners in his own ranks. As I wrote when Boehner announced his resignation, it doesn’t really matter who replaces him because “they’ll run into the same problems he did as the leader of political party that is actively hostile to the very idea of competent governance.” And that’s a big problem because we need competent leadership and basic governance to keep the federal government’s lights on and avoid a thoroughly unnecessary debt default that could kick the legs out from underneath the economic recovery. But right now we don’t have that because nobody with a modicum of political intelligence wants to be in charge of the House of Representatives.",REAL
+1521,Carly Fiorina: Ted Cruz says 'whatever' to get elected,"Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard executive and Cruz's rival for the GOP nomination, hit Cruz in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash on ""State of the Union.""
+
+She kept up her criticism of the Texas senator for his 2013 push for a government shutdown in an ill-fated attempt to repeal President Barack Obama's signature health care law.
+
+""Ted Cruz is just like any other politician. He says one thing in Manhattan, he says another thing in Iowa,"" Fiorina said Sunday.
+
+Recordings of Cruz speaking about gay marriage to donors in New York City appear to differ in style, but not substance, from his speeches to conservative supporters.
+
+""He says whatever he needs to say to get elected, and then he's going to do as he pleases,"" she said. ""I think people are tired of a political class that promises much and delivers much of the same."" Cruz on conference call: I'll win, but attacks are coming In the interview, Fiorina, a Stanford alum, also dismissed social media criticism of her New Year's Day tweet in which she said she was rooting for Iowa over Stanford in the Rose Bowl. Fiorina tweeted: ""Love my alma mater, but rooting for a Hawkeyes win today. #RoseBowl"" Love my alma mater, but rooting for a Hawkeyes win today. #RoseBowl — Carly Fiorina (@CarlyFiorina) January 1, 2016 Fiorina said her tweet was tongue-in-cheek, and people in Iowa knew she ""was torn"" on the game, noting she'd attended a Hawkeyes tailgate in the fall. ""Let's just say if the biggest mistake I make is a tongue-in-cheek tweet about a Rose Bowl, the American people will sleep safely when I am president of the United States,"" Fiorina said. Skywriters have message for Trump at Rose Parade",REAL
+8006,Will Rasmea Odeh’s Appeal Expose Israeli Prison Torture In A US Court?,"Be Sociable, Share! Rasmea Odeh smiles after leaving federal court in Detroit Thursday, March 12, 2015. 
+DETROIT — A federal hearing on Nov. 29 could determine whether the details of Israel’s torture of Palestinian prisoners will be aired in an American courtroom. 
+Rasmea Odeh, a 69-year-old leader of Chicago’s Palestinian-American community, is appealing her 2014 conviction on charges of unlawful procurement of naturalization. 
+If her conviction is upheld, she faces the loss of her U.S. citizenship and 18 months in a federal prison, followed by deportation. 
+Prosecutors charge that Odeh, associate director of the Arab American Action Network, failed to disclose her 1970 conviction by an Israeli military military court when applying for U.S. citizenship. 
+Her supporters say Odeh’s Israeli military prosecutors used a confession obtained through torture, and that her resulting post-traumatic stress disorder caused her to avoid the memory of her interrogation and omit the experience from her application form. 
+“When the appellate court ruled in Rasmea’s favor back in February of this year, the defense committee declared an important victory, because that decision essentially stated that Judge Gershwin Drain wrongfully barred Dr. Fabri from testifying at the trial,” Hatem Abudayyeh, a U.S. Palestinian Community Network national coordinating committee member and spokesperson for the Rasmea Defense Committee, told MintPress News. 
+In February, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that District Judge Gershwin Drain had erroneously excluded expert testimony by Dr. Mary Fabri, an authority on torture and former clinical psychologist at the Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture, from Odeh’s initial trial, while accepting at face value the confession used by Israeli military prosecutors in 1969. 
+On Nov. 29, a Daubert hearing, held to determine the admissibility of expert testimony, will consider the validity of Fabri’s diagnosis for Odeh’s defense, Abudayyeh said. 
+“Fabri’s testimony will be all about Rasmea’s PTSD and the torture she survived, so if the conclusion of the Daubert hearing is that her testimony is admissible, then we suspect that the torture (and the rest of Israel’s crimes against Rasmea) will make it into a new trial.” 
+‘So that they would leave my father alone’ 
+In 1969, when Odeh was 21 years old, she was captured by Israeli soldiers during a nighttime raid on her Ramallah home, one of over 500 mostly young Palestinians swept up by occupying forces in the aftermath of the deadly bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket. 
+The following year, an Israeli military court convicted Odeh of the bombing, as well as a subsequent blast at the British consulate in Jerusalem. 
+In the meantime, she and her supporters say, Odeh had experienced the worst torture tactics Israeli prisons have to offer. 
+“They beat me with sticks, plastic sticks, and with a metal bar,” Odeh told a United Nations committee in Geneva after her release in a 1979 prisoner exchange between Israel and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command. 
+“They beat me on the head and I fainted as a result of these beatings. They woke me up several times by throwing cold water in my face and then started all over again.” 
+Her interrogators’ torture focused on sexual violence and humiliation. They “tried to introduce a stick to break my maidenhead,” Odeh said, and “tied my legs, which were spread-eagled, and they started to beat me with their hands and also with cudgels.” 
+At another point, she said, they “tore my clothes off me while my hands were still tied behind my back. They threw me to the ground completely naked and the room was full of a dozen or so interrogators and soldiers who looked at me and laughed sarcastically as if they were looking at a comedy or a film. Obviously they started touching my body.” 
+But it took the detention of her father, a U.S. citizen, to compel the confession which would lead to her conviction. After “they brought in my father and tried to force him under blows to take off his clothes and have sexual relations with me,” Odeh said, she feared he “might lose his life from one moment to the next” and decided “to make the confession that they wanted, so that they would leave my father alone.” 
+After 45 days, Odeh said, she told her interrogators what they wanted to hear. Taking her to the site of the supermarket bombing, they “asked me to point out where I had put the explosive. Of course, I didn’t know the place and I said ‘where exactly do you want me to show you where I put this explosive charge?’ So they showed me where the explosion had taken place and I actually pointed out that place without being able to give any details of the operation.” 
+‘Why we believe we will win’ Protesters rally for Rasmea Odeh outside federal court in Detroit Thursday, March 12, 2015. 
+Drain’s admission of Odeh’s conviction, while excluding expert testimony on its circumstances, should nullify her conviction and offer grounds for a new trial, her supporters say. 
+“It is patently unfair, as we have stated many times, that the judge would allow a ‘confession’ from a foreign court, especially one that was gained by vicious torture and sexual assault, into the Detroit courthouse,” Abudayyeh said. 
+“The fact that he allowed this into evidence without giving Rasmea the opportunity to challenge the ‘confession,’ or talk about the torture, is the essence of the case, and why we believe we will win once the truth comes out.” 
+Meanwhile, Odeh faces hours of intensive examination by a government psychologist, which her defense teams says could subject her to further mental harm . 
+“Right now the government is seeking to carry out up to 18 hours of a mental examination by a government expert whose identity they will not disclose to the defense in order to debunk her PTSD claim and accuse her of malingering,” attorney Michael Deutsch, the head of Odeh’s defense team, told MintPress. 
+Ultimately, he said, the process could result in a new trial which would explore the details of Odeh’s torture and its psychological effects. 
+“If the expert’s testimony is deemed admissible, we will have a new trial in which PTSD will be testified to as well as the specifics of the torture she endured.” 
+And that, Abudayyeh said, could further expose Israel’s repression of Palestinians while dealing a powerful blow to its support by the U.S. government. 
+“We have said repeatedly that this case is also an indictment of Israel,” he said, adding: “Our mobilizations and organizing around the case have pulled together people from all different sectors and communities to not only defend and support Rasmea, but to expose Israel’s torture, occupation, colonization, and apartheid policies. A victory in this case for Rasmea will be a huge victory for Palestine and Palestine liberation as well.” Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
+10299,Fact Check: Democrats Have Created Twice As Many Jobs As Republicans Since 1950’s,"Comments 
+Democrats are better for the economy. This statement is not an opinion, but a fact. According to economist Steven Stoft, who created a series of graphs charting job creation under each party over the last 72 years (during which time Democrats and Republicans have held control for 36 years each), Democrats have created 58 million jobs while Republicans can only claim 26 million . 
+For roughly the last century, electing a Democrat has been the better option for the economy, with Dems creating more than double the jobs than that of Republicans, and faster. 
+Even when taking the percent change of number of jobs held, or scaling population (to avoid counting an increased population, thus falsely indicating an increase in jobs), Democrats still prove more successful than Republicans in job creation, and by a wide margin. 
+Another way of studying job creation is to take unemployment into account. When a Democrat is in the White House, logically unemployment decreases as well. By this rational, of course, when a GOP takes the Oval Office unemployment rises (and has risen under this party) since 1945. 
+Indeed, this extends to state and federal levels—the top 20 years of national GDP growth have all been under a Democrat. This is not only true for GDP, but for all economic growth in general—extending to the stock market, income growth and debt as a percentage of GDP. 
+As if you needed more proof that the blue party is better for the economy, simply turn to the numbers over the last 70 years. When it comes time for Election Day, it’s a matter of fact that with every Democratic ballot cast, it’s almost guaranteed the country will be in a better economic position than if a Republican is sworn in.",FAKE
+2477,Obamacare's 'Low Expectations' for Enrollment Spells Trouble for Obama,"Employers aren’t dropping their health benefits in the numbers once anticipated, and programs created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will be slower to reach full enrollment than the budget office expects, the Department of Health and Human Services said today in a report. That equates to between 9 million and 9.9 million people enrolled through new government-run insurance markets created by the law.
+
+Coming in below the CBO estimate would undermine the Obama administration’s effort to convince the public that its signature domestic policy initiative is working. It’s possible the administration is just giving itself an easier goal to beat, said Dan Mendelson, the chief executive officer of Avalere Health, a Washington consulting firm.
+
+“If you set low expectations, you’re less likely to disappoint,” he said. “To me, these are low expectations. We expect the numbers to come in higher.”
+
+The insurance markets, called exchanges, are designed to allow people who don’t have coverage through an employer to compare prices and buy a health plan, often with the assistance of government subsidies for monthly premiums. Enrollment opens for 2015 on Nov. 15 and closes Feb. 15, a window that is three months shorter than last year.
+
+Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the HHS secretary, said she’ll consider enrollment to be a success this year if the U.S. uninsured rate continues to decline. About 13.4 percent of Americans are without coverage this year, according to Gallup Inc., the lowest rate the organization has reported since it started tracking the figure in 2008.
+
+“We want to make progress on that fundamental number of reducing the uninsured,” Burwell said at an event held by the Center for American Progress, a Democrat-aligned advocacy group. “We do have a shorter period of time and we’re moving to a group of people that will be harder to reach.”
+
+At least three out of four people who sign up for the exchanges for the first time this year will have been previously uninsured, according to the administration’s projection.
+
+HHS expects 83 percent of the 7.1 million people covered as of last month to re-enroll this year, Burwell said.
+
+The U.S. website where people can sign up for coverage, healthcare.gov, opened yesterday in a “window shopping” mode that lets people see what plans they can buy for next year.
+
+The preview feature, added to the revamped website, is intended to ease pressure on the system by letting curious consumers look at prices for health plans a week before enrollment begins. Last year, consumers who tried to use the website were met with errors and delays that prevented millions from signing up for several months.
+
+Challenges are mounting for the second year of enrollment as Republicans gained control of Congress last week and the Supreme Court announced it will consider whether a key feature, subsidies to reduce the cost of insurance, should be available to all Americans. Consumers should be confident that the high court will rule in favor of the administration, Burwell said today, allowing the subsidies to continue.
+
+“The administration has been clear all along we believe that is the intention of the law,” Burwell said, responding to a question from former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. “That is where we will stay and be.”",REAL
+3358,Top House Republican demands Kerry explain $1.7 billion Iran payment,"The chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee demanded Wednesday that Secretary of State John Kerry explain a $1.7 billion settlement paid to Iran that some Republicans have described as a ""ransom"" tied to last month's release of five American prisoners.
+
+Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., complained in a letter to Kerry that his committee was not consulted about the payment. The Obama administration claimed the agreement was made to settle a dispute with Iran over $400 million in frozen funds that dated back to 1979. The remaining $1.3 billion was described by the Obama administration as ""interest"".
+
+""It is unclear how this $1.7 billion payment is in the national security interests of the United States,"" Royce wrote.
+
+Royce's letter included 10 questions to Kerry about the settlement. Among them are how the administration calculated the $1.3 billion ""interest"" on the payment, a timeline of negotiations over the payment since this past summer's nuclear deal, and why the money was not used to ""compensate American victims of Iranian terrorism who have been awarded judgments against Iran.""
+
+Royce's letter also asks for a list of U.S. officials who participated in negotiations with Iran over the payment, the prisoner release and the nuclear agreement.
+
+The White House announced the payment on Jan. 17, the same day that Iran released five American prisoners, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, former Marine Amir Hekmati, and Christian pastor Saeed Abedini.
+
+At the time, Obama defended the amount paid by the U.S., saying it was ""much less than the amount Iran sought."" The president added that the one-time payment was preferable to letting more interest accumulate while waiting for a judgement from the Iran-US Claims Tribunal, which is based in The Hague and was created in the deal that ended the Iran hostage crisis in 1981.
+
+""I have a larger concern that in choosing to resolve this relatively minor bilateral dispute at this time, the Obama Administration is aggressively moving towards reestablishing diplomatic relations with Iran,"" Royce wrote. ""Such action would clearly violate the President’s pledge to 'remain vigilant' in countering the threat Iran poses to the United States and our allies in the region.""
+
+State Department spokesman John Kirby confirmed to Reuters that Royce's letter had been received.
+
+""As with all Congressional correspondence, we'll respond as appropriate,"" Kirby said. Royce's letter gives Kerry until Feb. 17 to respond to his questions.",REAL
+1119,The Marco Rubio post-mortem: How a supposedly ready-made GOP nominee crashed and burned,"The Rubio campaign is on its last legs, stumbling dehydrated and desperate through the Florida Everglades like the heroine in the second act of a Carl Hiaasen novel, trying to stay one step ahead of the bloodhounds who want nothing more than to drag the Florida senator into the swamp and tear his throat out, or at least convince him to join with Ted Cruz on some sort of unity ticket to stop Donald Trump, which might be an even worse fate.
+
+The establishment is telling Rubio his dropping out would be for the good of the Republican Party. Which is why he’ll probably at least consider it. He is a party man through and through, and since he gave up his Senate seat to run for president, he’s going to want to come out of this cluster-screw of a campaign with something to show for it besides the humiliation of a crushing defeat in his home state’s primary on Tuesday. Run for vice-president on a ticket with Cruz, the party will whisper in his ear, and when he gets destroyed in the general election in the fall and the country suffers through four years of socialism under a Democrat, you’ll be perfectly positioned to be the 2020 nominee. What’s not to like about that scenario? And why wouldn’t you trust a GOP establishment that has displayed such a sharp political acumen this cycle that it just about handed its nomination over to a jar of orange marmalade in a bad wig before it knew what hit it?
+
+Rubio might not be smart, but he’s a politician who can read poll numbers. It must have sunk in by now that his “Baghdad Bob” primary strategy (claim victory even when you came in a distant third/the American military is a block away and roaring towards you unopposed) has been a galactic failure. With even his financial backers and editorial page cheerleaders telling him it’s time, he must feel like Butch Coolidge getting the order to take his ass down in the fifth.
+
+The post-mortem on Rubio’s campaign will point to many, many moments that sealed his fate. The base never fully trusted him after his role in the Gang of Eight immigration reform bill in the Senate, which he later had to renounce in the hope of pacifying the conservative mouth-breathers who were inundating his office with hate mail. There was his apparent circuit-breaker malfunction in the New Hampshire debate against Chris Christie. There was his late-in-the-campaign attempt to turn into Don Rickles in order to stand up to Trump, which only seemed to cause his poll numbers to crash. There were his ham-handed attempts to get to the farthest right edge of the Republican field on every issue from abortion to fighting terrorism, the latter of which resulted in his spouting the sorts of fearful, doom-laden paranoia about ISIS terrorists coming ashore in Biscayne Bay that might tickle the GOP base but erased Rubio’s image as the sunny and optimistic young man who could lead America into a booming future.
+
+It is that last one that I think comes closest to explaining his flameout. It stems from the 30,000-feet view of Marco Rubio the politician, an ambitious young man with no accomplishments or real-world experience to qualify him, who would don whatever suit – neocon hawk, religious extremist, crazy guy hollering about a war on Christianity from a steam grate – he or his advisers thought the GOP electorate wanted at any given moment, no matter how awkward the fit. He was the best example of a blow-dried establishment candidate this cycle, so perfect he might have been grown in that space station lab in “Alien: Resurrection” where they kept all those malformed Ripley clones, and raised to be the great hope of the Republican Party. In an era where carefully maintaining and presenting a focus group-approved persona to the world is the paramount goal of almost every politician at the national level, Rubio still stood out for how many of his edges had been sanded off.
+
+Rubio was the product of personal ambition in overdrive and married to a Republican Party that has bought so fully into the idea that our current president was elected despite being an unaccomplished lightweight, all it had to do was roll out another young, telegenic pol with a non-WASPy last name and the White House would be the GOP’s to lose. Never mind the lack of accomplishments, or the fact he was a career politician who had barely seen a time in his adult life when he wasn’t collecting a government paycheck while dining with lobbyists. Never mind that when he spoke in debates, his talking points, which were mostly warmed-over standard-issue conservative pabulum, all sounded so memorized that you could half-imagine him cramming with flash cards the night before in a dorm room decorated with a Dan Marino poster. Never mind the awkward attempts to connect with young people – did you know that Marco loves the rap music? – while spouting anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage positions that are as out of place in the twenty-first century as a horse and buggy. It would have been much more hilarious, if it hadn’t also felt so desperate. Rubio and his handlers seemed to think he could cruise to the nomination on the strength of an appeal that was as chimerical as a unicorn. To that end, he never really built much of a ground game for his campaign, a fact that observers have been harping on for months. His team seemed to think that it was running some sort of high-tech, futuristic operation where retail politics didn’t matter, where you could, as one adviser infamously put it, save on office rent by having your entire team set up in a Starbucks and use the free wifi. Meanwhile, he seemed to spend as much time huddling with wealthy financial backers behind closed doors as he did getting in front of voters. And while he was flying around being not quite as visible as he needed to be to voters, Rubio missed so much time at his day job, and publicly proclaimed he didn’t care because the Senate bored him anyway, that it became easy to view him as a lazy, entitled dilettante. No amount of repeating the story of his humble beginnings – did you know his dad was a bartender? – was going to overcome that. It’s possible he could still come back and run for statewide office in Florida, but one has to think Rubio’s career in national politics is over. Whatever has been loosed in the electorate that gave rise to Donald Trump is not likely to fade anytime soon. There is no room in that space for a guy so transparent, if you squint hard enough you can see what he ate for lunch. All the image consultants in the world can’t cover that up.",REAL
+4704,WashPost Poll: Clinton Leads Trump by 4,"Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by just 4 points in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, well within its margin of error and a clear sign that Trump may be regaining his momentum.
+
+Clinton leads Trump, 47 to 43 percent, among likely voters in the poll released early Sunday. Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson has 5 percent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein has 2 percent.
+
+Clinton maintains a 4-point lead over Trump, 50 to 46 percent, in the two-way race.
+
+Clinton led Trump by 2 points in a four-way race, 46 to 44 percent, in the same poll earlier. The new poll was conducted following the release of a 2005 tape in which Trump makes lewd comments about women.
+
+The poll of 740 likely voters, conducted Oct. 10-13, has a 4-percentage-point margin of error.
+
+Nearly 70 percent of respondents said they believe that the Republican presidential nominee likely made unwanted sexual advances. Most also said his apology was insincere.
+
+More than half of all respondents, 64 percent, said the tape won’t make a difference in their votes.",REAL
+7237,Comment on Wikileaks Reveal Clinton Ties To Rothschilds And Occult Cabal by Time to hail Hillary Clinton – and face down the testosterone left | Van Badham – News,"By wmw_admin on July 27, 2016 Baxter Dmitry — Your News Wire.com July 25, 2016 From left to right: Hillary Clinton and Evelyn de Rothschild, Bill Clinton and Lynn Forester de Rothschild. Click to enlarge 
+The Wikileaks classified email dumps have exposed Hillary Clinton for what she really is – a member of the infamous Rothschild family’s inner sanctum, with occultist beliefs. 
+Lending further credibility to the idea that Presidents are not elected but are selected by a global shadow government, the Wikileaks email dumps expose Hillary Clinton’s close relationship with the infamous Rothschild banking family and hints for a potential Rockefeller-State partnership. 
+The fact the mainstream media have been exposed colluding with the Clinton campaign cannot come as a surprise, considering she is the Rothschild’s selected candidate. 
+Lynn Forester de Rothschild wrote an email on April 18, 2010, in which she tells Hillary she would “ love to catch up ” — and “ I remain your loyal adoring pal .” Clinton responds “ let’s make that happen ,” and signs her response, “ Much love, H .” 
+On September 23, 2010, Clinton emailed Lynn Forester de Rothschild saying, “ I was trying to reach you to tell you and Teddy that I asked Tony Blair to go to Israel as part of our full court press on keeping the Middle East negotiations going … ” 
+Rothschild responds, thanking Clinton for “ personally reaching out to us ,” and adds, “ You are the best, and we remain your biggest fans .” 
+A January 9, 2012, email discusses a meeting set to take place at Jacob Rothschild’s “ historic estate, Waddesdon .” OCCULTIST TIES Bohemian Grove gathering. Click to enlarge 
+Hillary Clinton is so deeply entrenched in the elite New World Order establishment that she even bows down to Moloch, the same occultist god they perform human sacrifice rituals for at the annual Bohemian Grove meetings. 
+In an email from August 29 2008, a senior government staffer writes to Hillary Clinton, “ With fingers crossed, the old rabbit’s foot out of the box in the attic, I will be sacrificing a chicken in the backyard to Moloch . . . ” 
+Thanks to the Wikileaks Hillary Clinton Email Archive (containing 30,022 emails, free to search), we now have more concrete proof that Hillary Clinton and other globalist elites have occult ties. Nobody randomly uses Moloch in a conversation. Most people don’t even know what Moloch is. Clinton email. Click to enlarge 
+But Bohemian Grove, the playground of the world’s most wealthy and powerful men, has been performing sacrifice rituals to Moloch since the 1800s, offering charred human flesh according to some reports. 
+Given the reputation Bohemian Grove has for deciding the next President of the United States in the year before the election (see former Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan, the Bush dynasty, as well as Hillary’s husband Bill Clinton), it should come as no surprise that Hillary is wriggling her way into their dark, secretive world 
+The Bohemian Grove club might be infamously male only, but temporary exceptions have been made for women before, and as it is apparent the New World Order has decided it is in their interest to ordain Hillary as the next President then they will bend their rules to let her in. 
+This explains why the mainstream media – and social media platforms – are working overtime to get Clinton elected. The global elites have spoken and the mainstream media has begun marching to the beat of their drum – supporting their selected candidate, and destroying the chances of anyone they see as a threat to their corrupt, elite club.",FAKE
+3537,Democratic debate: National security dominates,"(CNN) In direct contrast with President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton said Saturday that ISIS ""cannot be contained"" but instead must be ""defeated.""
+
+Her comments at the second Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 campaign season came a day after a series of terror attacks -- for which ISIS claimed responsibility -- took more than 100 lives in Paris. One day before the shocking massacre in France, Obama had said in an interview that ISIS was "" contained .""
+
+Seeking to balance her response to the attacks against her ties to the Obama administration, which is under fire for its response to ISIS, Clinton on Saturday called ISIS a ""barbaric, ruthless, violent, jihadist terrorist group"" that must be destroyed.
+
+""We have to look at ISIS as the leading threat of an international terror network. It cannot be contained; it must be defeated,"" she said. ""What the president has consistently said, which I agree with, is that we will support those who will take that fight to ISIS.""
+
+French security forces move people in the area of Rue Bichat in the 10th District. A witness told BFMTV that firefighters were on the scene to treat the injured.
+
+French security forces move people in the area of Rue Bichat in the 10th District. A witness told BFMTV that firefighters were on the scene to treat the injured.
+
+Rescue workers and medics tend to victims at the scene of one of the shootings, a restaurant in the 10th District. Attackers reportedly used AK-47 automatic weapons in separate attacks across Paris, and there were explosions at the Stade de France.
+
+Rescue workers and medics tend to victims at the scene of one of the shootings, a restaurant in the 10th District. Attackers reportedly used AK-47 automatic weapons in separate attacks across Paris, and there were explosions at the Stade de France.
+
+People leave the Stade de France after explosions were heard near the stadium during a soccer match between France and Germany on Friday. Paris Deputy Mayor Patrick Klugman told CNN President Francois Hollande was at the match and was evacuated at halftime.
+
+People leave the Stade de France after explosions were heard near the stadium during a soccer match between France and Germany on Friday. Paris Deputy Mayor Patrick Klugman told CNN President Francois Hollande was at the match and was evacuated at halftime.
+
+French security forces rush in as people are evacuated in the area of Rue Bichat in the 10th District of Paris.
+
+French security forces rush in as people are evacuated in the area of Rue Bichat in the 10th District of Paris.
+
+Spectators gather on the field of the Stade de France after the attacks. Explosions were heard during the soccer match between France and Germany.
+
+Spectators gather on the field of the Stade de France after the attacks. Explosions were heard during the soccer match between France and Germany.
+
+A wounded man is evacuated from the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, outside Paris.
+
+A wounded man is evacuated from the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, outside Paris.
+
+Police secure the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, following explosions during the soccer match between France and Germany.
+
+Police secure the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, following explosions during the soccer match between France and Germany.
+
+A riot police officer stands by an ambulance near the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris.
+
+A riot police officer stands by an ambulance near the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris.
+
+A medic tends to a wounded man following the attacks near the Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire.
+
+A medic tends to a wounded man following the attacks near the Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire.
+
+Wounded people are evacuated outside the scene of a hostage situation at the Bataclan theater in Paris on November 13.
+
+Wounded people are evacuated outside the scene of a hostage situation at the Bataclan theater in Paris on November 13.
+
+Rescuers evacuate an injured person on Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire, close to the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris.
+
+Rescuers evacuate an injured person on Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire, close to the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris.
+
+A body, covered by a sheet, is seen on the sidewalk outside the Bataclan theater.
+
+A body, covered by a sheet, is seen on the sidewalk outside the Bataclan theater.
+
+Spectators embrace each other as they stand on the playing field of the Stade de France stadium at the end of a soccer match between France and Germany in Saint-Denis, outside Paris, on November 13.
+
+Spectators embrace each other as they stand on the playing field of the Stade de France stadium at the end of a soccer match between France and Germany in Saint-Denis, outside Paris, on November 13.
+
+Spectators invade the pitch of the Stade de France stadium after the international friendly soccer match between France and Germany in Saint-Denis.
+
+Spectators invade the pitch of the Stade de France stadium after the international friendly soccer match between France and Germany in Saint-Denis.
+
+A survivor of the terrorist attack in the Bataclan is assisted following terror attacks, November 13. The violence at the Bataclan, which involved a hostage-taking, resulted in the highest number of casualties of all the attacks.
+
+A survivor of the terrorist attack in the Bataclan is assisted following terror attacks, November 13. The violence at the Bataclan, which involved a hostage-taking, resulted in the highest number of casualties of all the attacks.
+
+Rescuers evacuate an injured person near the Stade de France, one of several sites of attacks November 13 in Paris. Thousands of fans were watching a soccer match between France and Germany when the attacks occurred.
+
+Rescuers evacuate an injured person near the Stade de France, one of several sites of attacks November 13 in Paris. Thousands of fans were watching a soccer match between France and Germany when the attacks occurred.
+
+Forensics are working in the street of Paris after the terrorist attack on Friday, November 13. The words ""horror,"" ""massacre"" and ""war"" peppered the front pages of the country's newspapers, conveying the shell-shocked mood.
+
+Forensics are working in the street of Paris after the terrorist attack on Friday, November 13. The words ""horror,"" ""massacre"" and ""war"" peppered the front pages of the country's newspapers, conveying the shell-shocked mood.
+
+Victims of the shooting at the Bataclan concert venue in central Paris are evacuated to receive medical treatment on November 14.
+
+Victims of the shooting at the Bataclan concert venue in central Paris are evacuated to receive medical treatment on November 14.
+
+A man with blood on his shirt talks on the phone on November 14. He is next to the Bataclan theater, where gunmen shot concertgoers and held hostages until police raided the building.
+
+A man with blood on his shirt talks on the phone on November 14. He is next to the Bataclan theater, where gunmen shot concertgoers and held hostages until police raided the building.
+
+Police, firefighters and rescue workers secure the area near the Bataclan concert hall on November 14.
+
+Police, firefighters and rescue workers secure the area near the Bataclan concert hall on November 14.
+
+Medics evacuate an injured woman on Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire near the Bataclan early on November 14.
+
+Medics evacuate an injured woman on Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire near the Bataclan early on November 14.
+
+Shoes and a bloody shirt lie outside the Bataclan concert hall on November 14. Most of the fatalities occurred at the Bataclan in central Paris.
+
+Shoes and a bloody shirt lie outside the Bataclan concert hall on November 14. Most of the fatalities occurred at the Bataclan in central Paris.
+
+Police are out in force November 14 near La Belle Equipe, one of the sites of the terror attacks.
+
+Police are out in force November 14 near La Belle Equipe, one of the sites of the terror attacks.
+
+A forensic scientist works near a Paris cafe on Saturday, November 14, following a series of coordinated attacks in Paris the night before that killed scores of people. ISIS has claimed responsibility.
+
+A forensic scientist works near a Paris cafe on Saturday, November 14, following a series of coordinated attacks in Paris the night before that killed scores of people. ISIS has claimed responsibility.
+
+Three Democratic presidential candidates gathered in Des Moines, Iowa, for a debate that has been jolted by the terrorist attacks across Paris , which the French President has declared an ""act of war."" The mass shootings and explosions swiftly moved national security issues to center stage Saturday during a Democratic primary that has so far largely focused on domestic issues such as income inequality and controversies like Clinton's use of private email during her tenure as secretary of state.
+
+The two-hour event, which began on a somber note with a moment of silence to honor the victims of the Paris attacks, also offered a crucial opportunity for Clinton to demonstrate the foreign policy qualifications she honed during her time as the Obama administration's top diplomat. The relative inexperience of her rivals -- Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley -- was also tested.
+
+Both Sanders and O'Malley seized on the foreign policy discussion to criticize Clinton for her vote in support of the Iraq War when she was in the Senate.
+
+""I would argue that the disastrous invasion of Iraq, something that I strongly opposed, has unraveled the region completely and led to the rise of al Qaeda and to ISIS,"" Sanders said.
+
+O'Malley argued that the problem wasn't simply limited to Clinton's vote for the Iraq invasion, pointing to ""cascading effects"" that followed.
+
+""We need to be much more far-thinking in this new 21st-century era of nation-state failures and conflict. It's not just about getting rid of a single dictator,"" he said.
+
+Clinton, meanwhile, is certain to be criticized for pointing to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in defending her acceptance of Wall Street contributions.
+
+""I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan, where Wall Street is,"" she said. ""I did spend a whole lot of time in their effort to rebuild. That was good for New York, it was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.""
+
+The Democratic candidates contrasted themselves against their Republican counterparts on the issue of the refugee crisis in the Middle East. Though many GOP presidential candidates have said the U.S. shouldn't accept refugees into the country, the Democrats argued that it's America's responsibility to accept those fleeing violence in countries like Afghanistan and Syria, with proper screening.
+
+Calling for ""as careful a screening and vetting process as we can imagine,"" Clinton, who has previously stated that the U.S. should accept as many as 65,000 new refugees, said, ""I do not want us to in any way inadvertently allow people who wish us harm to come into our country.""
+
+Sanders said that he didn't want to offer a ""magic number"" but that it was the United States' ""moral responsibility"" to accept refugees in conjunction with its allies in Europe and the Middle East.
+
+O'Malley also reiterated that the country should accept as many as 65,000 refugees.
+
+In one part of the debate that Republicans have quickly seized on, no Democratic candidate used the term ""radical Islam"" to describe terrorism. This phrase is preferred by Republicans, who have accused Democrats of shying away from a forthright description of ISIS.
+
+""I don't think we're at war with Islam. I don't think we're at war with all Muslims,"" Clinton said. Cautioning against painting with ""too broad a brush,"" she added: ""We are at war with violent extremism.""
+
+Sanders, meanwhile, said he didn't believe the exact term was important.
+
+Though much of the debate focused on national security in light of the tragic events in Paris, Clinton also sparred with her rivals on hot-button domestic issues like financial regulatory reform and gun control.
+
+Progressives and Wall Street reform advocates have consistently hit Clinton for her perceived closeness with Wall Street, particularly as she's raised large sums of money from wealthy donors in the financial industry.
+
+""I've laid out a very aggressive plan to rein in Wall Street,"" Clinton said, touting a plan that she said targets not only the big banks but the shadow banking industry as well.
+
+Asked to react to Clinton's answer, Sanders shot back: ""Not good enough.""
+
+The Vermont senator said he was the only candidate on stage who did not have a super PAC, vowed to break up the big banks and said voters understand that any candidate who accepts contributions from special interests are influenced by them. ""Everybody knows that,"" he said.
+
+O'Malley also hit Clinton for not backing the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that split commercial and investment banking. Wall Street reform advocates favor bringing back a modern version of the law.
+
+""I won't be taking my orders from Wall Street,"" O'Malley said.
+
+Later in the debate, Clinton went after Sanders for supporting a measure that she said gave immunity to gun makers and sellers, labeling it a ""terrible mistake.""
+
+Sanders pushed back, saying he has voted repeatedly for background checks for gun buyers.
+
+The issue of Clinton's use of a private email server during her time at the State Department also surfaced, but briefly.
+
+As he did in the first Democratic debate, Sanders said that he was ""sick and tired"" of discussing the controversy and that he would prefer that the media focus on ""why the middle class is disappearing.""
+
+Letting out a laugh, Clinton said, ""I agree completely. I couldn't have said it better myself.""
+
+Asked whether Democrats can feel confident that no other shoe will drop, Clinton responded, ""I think after 11 hours, that's pretty clear"" — a reference to her day-long testimony on Capitol Hill where she largely avoided fresh, negative headlines.
+
+A lot has changed since Clinton, Sanders and O'Malley met for their first showdown in Las Vegas last month.
+
+There were five candidates on stage at the time. Since then, two have dropped out.
+
+Last month, the possibility of Joe Biden jumping into the race and upending the party's nomination process loomed large; now, the country knows that the vice president will not pursue another White House bid.
+
+And Clinton has had fresh momentum heading into the debate. After a strong first debate performance, her poll numbers have ticked up, and she's widened her lead over Sanders.
+
+And on Saturday, it was clear that Clinton sought to distinguish herself as the candidate with the most experience on the global stage, including in the war against terrorism. This distinction will no doubt only become more stark in light of the terrorist attacks in Paris.
+
+When the candidates were asked to describe a crisis they've confronted that shows they've been tested, Clinton used the opportunity to remind viewers that she was secretary of state and adviser to Obama in 2011 when U.S. Special Forces killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
+
+""I recommended to the President that we take the chance to do what we could to find out whether that was bin Laden and to finally bring him to justice,"" Clinton said. The ""excruciating experience,"" she added, ""really did give me an insight into the very difficult problems presidents face.""",REAL
+7909,New Reports Link Russia With Donald Trump’s Campaign,"New Reports Link Russia With Donald Trump’s Campaign Posted on Nov 1, 2016 Donald Trump at a rally in Nevada. ( Gage Skidmore / CC 2.0 ) 
+A trove of new allegations has surfaced suggesting a relationship between Russia and the Donald Trump campaign. 
+In this unprecedented election season, the Republican presidential nominee has been accused repeatedly of fostering a friendly relationship with forces within the Russian government, and an adviser to his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, recently suggested that Russia has participated in illicit cyberattacks to further Trump’s campaign. 
+On Monday, Slate added fuel to the controversy by publishing an investigative piece in which journalist Franklin Foer alleged that a Trump computer server was communicating with an elite Russian bank. Foer wrote: 
+The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. … 
+The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank. … 
+Tea Leaves [a pseudonym for one of the researchers] and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. 
+Another article, written by David Corn at Mother Jones on the same day, alleged that a former intelligence officer provided the FBI with information on a Russian scheme to help Trump win the presidency. 
+“There’s no way to tell whether the FBI has confirmed or debunked any of the allegations contained in the former spy’s memos,” Corn wrote. “But a Russian intelligence attempt to co-opt or cultivate a presidential candidate would mark an even more serious operation than the hacking.” 
+Is there any way to substantiate these claims? Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued that while the “stories are overblown,” Russian interference in the current U.S. election is a serious problem. Beauchamp explained: 
+The problem with these stories isn’t just that they’re speculative. It’s that they obscure and even discredit the more sober evidence about Trump’s troubling attitude toward the Russian state. 
+There is basically conclusive evidence that Russia is interfering in the US election, and that this interference has been designed to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. There is strong evidence linking Trump’s foreign policy advisers to Russia, and Trump’s stated policy ideas are extremely favorable to Russian interests. 
+Beauchamp listed various “confluence[s] of interest” between the Kremlin and Trump, pointing to WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic campaign emails, Trump’s pro-Russia pronouncements and economic ties to Russian interests. 
+And NBC reported Tuesday that the FBI has launched a “preliminary investigation” into former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s possible “foreign ties” with Russia and Ukraine. The FBI has not commented and Manafort told NBC that “none of it is true.” 
+Vox’s Matthew Yglesias also cautioned against getting too excited about the new influx of allegations, writing that “Trump’s policy views on matters related to Russia are a lot clearer than any of these cloak-and-dagger allegations.” 
+Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times asserted, in an article published Monday, that the FBI has not “found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.” 
+“Intelligence officials have said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections between some of Mr. Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them to open a broad investigation ... ,” Lichtblau and Lee Meyers wrote. “[N]o evidence has emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.” 
+The renewed focus on the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia comes as Clinton is again making headlines for her potential misuse of a private email server. On Friday, FBI Director James Comey revealed that another round of emails related to the Clinton campaign is under review. 
+While the FBI investigation has not been formally reopened, many Clinton supporters are outraged at Comey’s timing, suggesting that his announcement so close to the election violated the Hatch Act . 
+With only a week until Election Day, it is unlikely that the accusations on either side will be proven or refuted before voters head to the polls.",FAKE
+1454,Republican elders ask 'who's worse' for the GOP brand: Trump or Cruz,"Las Vegas (CNN) The bitter battle between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz escalated Thursday, as prominent members of the GOP fought over which one of them would do more damage to the Republican brand.
+
+For months, the two Republican candidates have sparred over who could rightly claim the mantle of party outsider. But with some Republican leaders in open revolt against Cruz as he has surged in Iowa, Trump is pivoting to an argument that he is more electable than Cruz -- suggesting that Cruz's abrasive personality makes him unfit for the presidency.
+
+The Texas senator's image as a strident party pariah, Trump said in Nevada Thursday, would cripple his ability to ""make deals"" and govern effectively. Noting that not a single one of Cruz's Senate colleagues has endorsed him, Trump questioned not only whether Cruz could negotiate with members of Congress, but whether he is capable of relating to people at the most basic level.
+
+""It's one thing to be like a very tough guy -- we're all tough people -- but you've got to be able to get along a little bit with people. You can't be so strident,"" Trump told the crowd at two raucous events in Las Vegas . ""He can debate, but he can't talk.""
+
+Alluding to Dole's statement to the New York Times interview that Trump has the ""right personality"" to work with Congress, Trump played up his reputation as a deal maker as the underpinning of his electability argument: ""We've got to be a little establishment,"" he said in Vegas. ""We've got to get things done.""
+
+Across the country in New Hampshire, Cruz told reporters that Trump was getting ""more and more riled"" up as Cruz's campaign has surged in the polls.
+
+""Each day, he's engaging in more and more personal attacks,"" Cruz said after speaking at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics ""Life of the Party"" forum. ""I have no intention of responding in kind. I like Donald Trump. I respect Donald Trump. I will continue to praise him personally.""
+
+He repeated his somewhat dubious assertion that the Washington establishment is ""rushing"" to get behind Trump -- specifically highlighting Trump's past friendships and political alliances with Democrats.
+
+""He gave $100,000 dollars to the Clinton Foundation,"" Cruz said in Manchester. ""He's actively supported Hillary Clinton as a political candidate. He's supported Chuck Schumer. He's supported Andrew Cuomo. He's supported Rahm Emanuel. So they know he will cut a deal.""
+
+The conservative establishment, however, shows no sign of rallying around Trump.
+
+In a press conference, Trump brushed off the National Review's criticisms, calling the magazine a failing, irrelevant publication.
+
+Cruz also sought to use Dole's comments to his advantage. In an interview with the Boston Herald Radio Show earlier Thursday, he said the establishment is ""terrified of a President who won't go along to get along.""
+
+""He had his moment and he blew it,"" Trump said of Cruz in Las Vegas. ""He looks like a nervous wreck.... He's going down.""
+
+Trump again goes after Jeb
+
+Though the latest polling data suggests that no candidate other than Cruz is within striking distance of Trump, the brash New York candidate could not resist a fresh round of withering attacks on Jeb Bush Thursday.
+
+Calling Bush ""a lost soul,"" Trump mocked the lavish spending by his campaign and the political committees supporting him -- pointing to Bush's stubborn position in the low single digits in the polls.
+
+""This guy, he's a maniac,"" Trump said at his rally in Las Vegas. ""He's not even on the scale -- these people, we've got a bunch of real dummies.""
+
+Trump assured the crowd that if Bush stopped running ads against him, he would leave him alone. ""Jeb is down the toilet,"" he said, ""and Ted is starting to go down.""
+
+Trump continued his efforts to burnish his conservative credentials Thursday, touting his endorsement from Sarah Palin (without whom, Trump asserted, Cruz never would have won his U.S. Senate race). Later in the day, he appeared at the Outdoor Sportsman Awards, which are held in conjunction with the National Shooting Sports Foundation's annual trade show.
+
+During his evening speech, he vowed to fight for Second Amendment rights as President.
+
+""The Second Amendment is 100% protected. 100%,"" he said on stage at the Venetian Theatre. Introduced by supporter Willie Robertson of A&E's ""Duck Dynasty,"" Trump was flanked by his two sons, who he described as avid outdoorsmen. He told the crowd he shared their passion, but did not get ""outdoors"" as often as he would like because he works so much.
+
+""They are trying to take away so many rights,"" he said. ""I think you're going to be very, very happy with a President Donald Trump.""
+
+The drumbeat of establishment attacks against Cruz continued in Washington on Thursday as a number of prominent Republicans try to slow Cruz's momentum. A number of current and former lawmakers are echoing the criticisms of Cruz voiced by Dole and Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who urged voters this week not to support Cruz because of his position on ethanol subsidies.
+
+""I think we'll lose if he's our nominee,"" Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch told CNN's Manu Raju. Hatch, who is supporting Bush, said Cruz has not demonstrated his ability to appeal to moderates and independents: ""We can't just act like only one point of view is the only way to go. That's where Ted is going to have some trouble.""
+
+Trump, Graham said, ""is the most unprepared person I've ever met to be commander in chief. And when it comes to Sen. Cruz, he's exhibited behavior in his time in the Senate that makes it impossible for me to believe that he could bring this country together.""
+
+When faced with a decision between the two men, Graham said: ""What does it really matter?""",REAL
+6306,Trump says he’d be ‘neutral’ with Israelis and Palestinians,"Email 
+Leading Republican presidential hopeful suggests Israeli-Palestinian peace accord may be impossible: ‘Sometimes agreements can’t be made’After being asked by a voter at a Charleston, South Carolina, town hall event hosted by MSNBC about what steps he would take to broker an accommodation between the sides in the conflict, the GOP contender vowed to give it “one hell of a shot” and called it “probably the toughest agreement of any kind to make.”But when pressed by host Joe Scarborough over whether he ascribed fault to either Israelis or Palestinians over the failure to reach a lasting accord, Trump declined to take sides. 
+“You know, I don’t want to get into it, because … If I win, I don’t want to be in a position where I’m saying to you and the other side now says, ‘We don’t want Trump involved,'” Trump said. 
+“Let me be sort of a neutral guy,” he continued. “A lot of people have gone down in flames trying to make that deal. So I don’t want to say whose fault is it. I don’t think it helps.”Trump also expressed skepticism over the possibility of achieving a two-state solution, given the conditions of the conflict and the need for any agreement to be sustainable over time. 
+“It’s possible it’s not makeable, because don’t forget it has to last — it’s wonderful to make it and it doesn’t work, but it has to last,” he said. “To make lasting peace there? Probably the toughest deal of all, but I’m going to give it a shot.” 
+Though he was not asked directly what he considers the most substantial obstacles standing in the way of a peace agreement, he suggested that growing hostility between the two peoples was contributing to the current stalemate, and what he considers the root of the conflict. 
+“A lot of people say an agreement can’t be made, which is okay. I mean, sometimes agreements can’t be made. Not good, but, you know, you have both sides really, but one side in particular, growing up and learning that these are the worst people,” he said. “I was with a very prominent Israeli the other day. He says it’s impossible, because the other side has been trained from the time they’re children to hate Jewish people.”In the past, Trump has questioned Israel’s commitment to peace, while at the same time suggesting the Jewish state does not have a negotiating partner in the Palestinians. He has also called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a good friend.” 
+At a presidential candidates forum hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition in December 2015, the real estate magnate said, “I don’t know that Israel has the commitment to make it, and I don’t know that the other side has the commitment to make it.” 
+He made the same point in an interview with AP earlier that day: “A lot will have to do with Israel and whether or not Israel wants to make the deal — whether or not Israel’s willing to sacrifice certain things,” he said. “They may not be, and I understand that, and I’m okay with that. But then you’re just not going to have a deal.” 
+Trump’s comments Wednesday came hours after a dramatic upset in polls saw Trump fall behind Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for the first time in 31 consecutive polls, coming in at 26% of registered Republican voters nationally, two points behind Cruz at 28%.",FAKE
+7419,"‘Intl Community Still Financing, Protecting Terrorists’ – Mother Agnes, Vanessa Beeley on Syria","
+21st Century Wire says… 
+As western media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and the BBC continue to hurl viral images of ‘child victims of Aleppo,’ western and gulf-backed terrorists in East Aleppo continue to fire mortars, ‘ hell cannon ‘ and use snipers to target civilians and children in government-protected West Aleppo. The level of information fraud and propaganda being perpetrated by the western mainstream media and politicians like John Kerry and Samantha Power is unprecedented – even by traditional low US standards. 
+RT International interviews Syrian peace campaigner Mother Agnes-Mariam and independent researcher and journalist Vanessa Beeley . Watch: 
+. ",FAKE
+3510,"Brussels stories: Grief for the lost, hope for the missing","These are some of the dead and missing in Tuesday's terror attacks in Brussels.
+
+At least 31 people were killed and 300 wounded in Tuesday's attacks at the Brussels Airport and a subway, authorities said. The victims span 40 nationalities.
+
+Americans were among the dead, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry confirmed Friday during a visit to the Belgian capital. He didn't say how many or identify them, but a U.S. State Department official later said that two Americans died.
+
+France confirmed that one of its citizens was dead and 12 were wounded without providing details. China also said a citizen had died, but it was unclear if the victim, identified only by the surname Deng by the Chinese Embassy in Belgium, was among the 31 already reported dead.
+
+""We express deep condolences over the death of our Chinese compatriot and strong condemnation on the criminal act of the terrorists,"" an embassy statement said.
+
+Meanwhile, the stories of many of the victims are emerging as loved ones struggle to know more.
+
+She had lived in Belgium for six years. Originally from Peru, the 37-year-old, her husband and twin 4-year-old daughters waited to board a flight to New York for an Easter holiday family reunion, according to Peruvian media and CNN en Español.
+
+The daughters and husband left the boarding area for a moment. And in that moment, a bomb exploded.
+
+Her family survived. One of the girls injured her arm but is doing better, her uncle Fernando Tapia told Peruvian media.
+
+Tapia told CNN that his half sister was a chef and worked with the Peruvian Consulate in Brussels to promote Peruvian food.
+
+She met her husband in 2005 during a tourist trip in Puno, Peru. She moved to Belgium with him.
+
+""We never imagined we were going to have to suffer something like this: my sister killed in an inhumane, terrorist act,"" Tapia said. ""She had a happy marriage. She loved her husband, her family life and the girls. She left the country to live abroad in search of a better life and found death in such an inexplicable way. It's something we will never understand.""
+
+The Belgian law student died in the attack, his school, Universite Saint-Louis Bruxelles, said in a statement.
+
+Delespesse was killed in the metro explosion, according to his employer, La Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles, a government ministry serving Francophone Brussels and Wallonia.
+
+Others posted drawings of a cartoon man, weeping, a broken red heart on the ground. A friend wrote, ""Courage to his family, his friends, his colleagues.""
+
+""May his soul rest in peace,"" another posted.
+
+The British Foreign Office confirmed Dixon died in the attacks but provided no details.
+
+'I am deeply saddened to hear David Dixon was killed in the Brussels attacks,"" British Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted Friday. ""My thoughts and prayers are with his friends and family.""
+
+Dixon's family believes he died in the explosion at the Maelbeek metro station.
+
+""He obviously took the train with the bomb, otherwise he would have got to his office,"" Sutcliffe told The Times.
+
+In a statement provided by the Foreign Office, the family said: ""This morning we received the most terrible and devastating news about our beloved David. At this most painful time our family would gratefully appreciate it if we could be left alone to grieve in private.""
+
+Dixon and Sutcliffe have a son. ""I just want him to come home,"" she had said earlier.
+
+The family of the Dutch siblings who had been missing since the blasts confirmed Friday that the brother and sister had died.
+
+""We received confirmation this morning from Belgian Authorities and the Dutch Embassy of the positive identification of the remains of Alexander and Sascha,"" the family said in a statement. ""We are grateful to have closure on this tragic situation, and are thankful for the thoughts and prayers from all. The family is in the process of making arrangements.""
+
+The siblings were in the Delta Air Lines ticket line at the airport to check in for their flight to New York when the bombs went off. Alexander was talking to his mother on the phone when the line went dead, Jim Cain, a former U.S. ambassador to Denmark, told CNN.
+
+""The family would like to thank the Dutch Embassy and Delta Airlines for all of their support in our search in Brussels,"" the family said in an earlier statement. ""We especially thank all of our friends and family, across two continents, for their expressions of love, support and prayers for Sascha and Alex.""
+
+Reacting to their deaths, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a statement, ""Their lives were cut short by cowards who have chosen extremism and hate instead of peace and unity. On behalf of all New Yorkers, I extend our deepest prayers and condolences to the Pinczowski family, as well as all those who lost loved ones in Tuesday's heartbreaking attacks.""
+
+Migom, 21, a Belgian national, was confirmed dead Friday, according to family members. A Belgian hospital notified his mother.
+
+Migom was on his way to Athens, Georgia, the day of the attack at the Brussels Airport.
+
+His girlfriend, Emily Eisenman, checked to make sure his train arrived at the airport at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. It had.
+
+His flight was scheduled to depart at 10:30 a.m.
+
+""But I don't think he ever made it,"" she said.
+
+Migom and Eisenman met last year on a health and fitness retreat in the United States. He and her brother were friends. The couple started dating on October 29. She remembers the exact date.
+
+He was studying marketing at Howest University in Bruges, Belgium, Eisenman said, and was living with his mother, two brothers and sister.
+
+He had booked his flight to visit her in the States.
+
+""I've never been to Belgium,"" she said.
+
+Laurent's family believes he was at the metro station at the time of the attack. They haven't heard from him since, his cousin wrote on Facebook.
+
+Raghavendran Ganesan, an Indian citizen and employee of Infosys, has been missing since the attacks, his brother said.
+
+His brother wrote on Facebook that the Indian Embassy in Brussels is searching for him.
+
+""We are coordinating with @IndEmbassyBru & local authorities to locate our employee in Brussels & are in touch with his family,"" Infosys tweeted.
+
+The couple from Tennessee have lived in Belgium since 2014. They were dropping off Stephanie Shults' mother, Carolyn Moore, at the airport.
+
+Moore, who was just about to walk through security, was knocked over by an explosion. She is now having trouble hearing in one ear.
+
+Their families have not heard from the couple and are still awaiting news. Moore remains in Brussels and has been in touch with family in the United States.
+
+Justin Shults' brother, Levi Sutton of Kentucky, said he woke up on the day of the attacks to texts from his mother. She was asking him to call her.
+
+""It's the longest day of my life. It's just frustrating not knowing. Not knowing is maddening,"" Sutton said Tuesday.
+
+The two both have been working in Brussels and are expected to move back to the United States in 2017.
+
+On Wednesday, hope emerged the couple had been found, but Sutton later posted a tweet saying the family had been misinformed.
+
+Sabrina Esmael Fazal, 24, is missing. She took the metro to her university.
+
+Jonathan Selemani, 25, has been scouring the city's hospitals looking for his partner and mother of their 1-year-old child.
+
+""I saw her in the morning, before she went to school, before she was leaving for class,"" Selemani said. ""Then when I learned the news I immediately started looking for her. I haven't found her.
+
+""I don't know how I'm going to explain it to my son.""
+
+Hours after the attack, she learned her mother was taken to a hospital in Flanders. Her father, she said, is missing.
+
+Gigi has pleaded on Facebook for people to stop calling her unless they have news about her father. Every time the phone rings, her hope rises.
+
+""No news,"" she posted. ""Thank you...refrain from leaving new messages of sympathy...Every tweet, ping, ring has us trembling just in case...""
+
+Cyombo was at the metro at the time of the attack and has not been seen since, his uncle told CNN. Cyombo is a student living in Brussels.
+
+Before the attack he sent a text to his younger brother saying he was about to get on the metro at Maelbeek, the station that was targeted.
+
+His family posted on Facebook urging anyone with information to get in touch.
+
+""Please come back to us,"" they said in the post, adding they believe in ""miracles.""
+
+Bastin's family believes she was at the Maelbeek metro at the time of the attack, and they have not heard from her.
+
+Lafquiri is a physical education teacher at La Vertu School, an Islamic school in Brussels, according to Mohamed Allaf, the school's co-founder.
+
+Lafquiri is believed to have been at the Maelbeek metro.
+
+""She was supposed to start at 9:45, but she didn't show up. We started to worry, thought she was sick. We called and called, but there was no answer on her phone,"" Allaf told CNN.
+
+She was born in Brussels, and her parents are originally from Morocco. Lafquiri is married with three sons.
+
+""She was an exceptional woman. She represented the true values of Islam with generosity and caring,"" Allaf said.
+
+He said her family spoke with officials at multiple hospitals and provided DNA samples in the hope of identifying Lafquiri.
+
+Atlegrim's friends and family believe she was in the metro at the time of the attacks. The 31-year-old Swedish woman has lived in Brussels for many years.
+
+She studies at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre and is an illustrator, according to her Facebook page. Friends have described her as tall and thin with large eyes.
+
+Panasewicz was on the metro about the time of the attacks, Anabelle Schatten wrote on Facebook.
+
+Originally from Poland, she is described as having a scar from a recent thyroid surgery and was believed to be wearing black pants and a gray jacket.
+
+Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Johanna Atlegrim's name.",REAL
+7466,Hillary Friend Bribed FBI Agent and His Wife,"Email 
+
+WSJ The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use. 
+Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, who is married to Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of the FBI. 
+The Virginia Democratic Party, over which Mr. McAuliffe exerts considerable control, donated an additional $207,788 worth of support to Dr. McCabe’s campaign in the form of mailers, according to the records. That adds up to slightly more than $675,000 to her candidacy from entities either directly under Mr. McAuliffe’s control or strongly influenced by him. The figure represents more than a third of all the campaign funds Dr. McCabe raised in the effort",FAKE
+6985,Carrier battle group never planned to call at Spanish port – Russian Defense Ministry,"Carrier battle group never planned to call at Spanish port – Russian Defense Ministry   21:07 Get short URL Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov. © NTB Scanpix / Reuters Moscow has dismissed media reports about how the Russian aircraft carrier group planned a refueling stop at the Spanish autonomous port of Ceuta, with the Defense Ministry saying that such a port call was never scheduled. 
+“Russian Defense Ministry has filed no requests to the Spanish authorities concerning the refueling stop of the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov at the Ceuta port,” the ministry’s spokesman, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, told journalists. 
+He also stressed that “Russian aircraft carrier group is fully supplied with material stocks for the mission pursuit in the off-shore maritime zone in autonomous mode.” 
+At the same time, Konashenkov admitted that the ministry considered a possibility of specific vessels from the group calling at the Ceuta port upon consultation with the Spanish side. Read more Russia withdraws request for carrier battle group to refuel in Spain amid NATO pressure on Madrid 
+“Today, the Spanish authorities told [Russian Defense Ministry] that Russian vessels’ call at the Ceuta port is inappropriate due to the pressure on Spain exerted by the US and NATO,” Konashenkov said, adding that “this situation in no way affects the mission plan of the naval group.” 
+Earlier on Wednesday there were reports, citing embassy sources, that Russia withdrew a request for its aircraft carrier group to be refueled at the Ceuta port after top NATO and EU officials expressed anger at Spain’s reported decision to allow the stopover. 
+The Russian embassy in Spain says that its statement was misinterpreted. There were “most diverse media interpretations of the Russian embassy’s statement… concerning the Russian naval group in the Mediterranean,” Vasily Nioradze, a spokesman of the Russian embassy in Madrid, told RT, adding that “in fact, Russian mission informed the Spanish side that Russian vessels would not stop at the Ceuta port as the plans have changed.” 
+“It was just a routine procedure of mutual information-sharing,” he stressed. 
+A barrage of harsh criticism from the NATO officials and some European politicians followed Spanish media reports that Russia’s naval battle group would make a stopover in Ceuta after passing the Straits of Gibraltar. 
+Ceuta, the autonomous Spanish port located on the tip of Africa’s northern coast not far from the Straits of Gibraltar, has an unresolved status within NATO. It is, however, considered EU territory. Since 2011, Spain has allowed 57 Russian warships to refuel at the enclave. 
+The mission of the Admiral Kuznetsov carrier group earlier triggered a media frenzy across Europe alongside with the nervous reaction from some European countries’ military as British, Norwegian, and Dutch navies sending frigates and surveillance vessels to shadow the Russian warships on their way through international waters. 
+According to the Russia’s Defense Ministry, the ships were sent to the Syrian coast to provide backup for the naval group already deployed in the area.",FAKE
+8774,Hillary’s Silent Plan to Destroy America,"PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US 
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information. Click on the image to begin the download process This Movie Reveals the Greatest Threats to the American People- If the movie did not make it to your neighborhood, you can order your copy of the DVD. 
+Order your copy by clicking here. 
+By Dave Hodges | 2016-10-26T18:01:03+00:00 October 26th, 2016 | United States | 0 Comments Share This Story, Choose Your Platform! About the Author: Dave Hodges Leave A Comment",FAKE
+5824,Hillary Clinton’s Private Speech From 2015 Mentioned Palestinian Rights—Until She Actually Gave It,"Hillary Clinton’s Private Speech From 2015 Mentioned Palestinian Rights—Until She Actually Gave It   Hillary Clinton delivering a speech at the Saban Forum in 2011. ( Flickr / CC 2.0 ) 
+The “ Podesta emails ” being released by WikiLeaks continue to illuminate concealed aspects of Hillary Clinton’s policy positions. Recent batches of the emails, originating from the server of Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, include segments of speeches —and a few full transcripts —made by the Democratic presidential nominee to various organizations behind closed doors. 
+The emails and speeches are being dumped almost daily and shine a light on many of Clinton’s positions—on the environment, foreign policy, big business, health care and more. An email released Tuesday , however, provides an interesting glimpse into the editing of one of Clinton’s many speeches and focuses on a controversial political issue: the U.S. relationship with Israel and Palestine. 
+The email “reveals that an extensive section on Palestinian rights was completely removed from an early draft of the speech” Clinton delivered on Dec. 6, 2015, at the Saban Forum in Washington, reporter Eli Clifton explains : 
+Palestinian rights and acknowledgment of their national aspirations are nearly completely lacking from the final version. The speech only made a brief reference to Israeli settlement construction, which Clinton loosely described as a “damaging action.” It also made only one passing, and indirect, acknowledgement of Palestinian suffering, saying, “Israeli children have been killed as have Palestinian children.” … 
+A Dec. 4, 2015, version of the speech, apparently drafted by Clinton speechwriter Dan [Schwerin], made specific references to Palestinian suffering and right to self-determination. Although holding to the position of the Democratic Party and the Clinton camp that a two-state solution cannot be imposed by outside actors like the United Nations, this earlier version of the speech explicitly mentioned settlement construction as an impediment to the peace process. 
+The Saban Forum “is organized by the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution” and was created and is currently chaired by billionaire Haim Saban, who has a history of pro-Israel policy . Saban is also co-owner of Univision, which recently purchased Gawker Media Group Inc. 
+Clifton noted that in another email , Podesta himself suggested a “cut or rework” to a section of the speech that might “evoke how people feel about how Israel is treating the Palestinians,” and Clifton added that Podesta described Saban as “not [being] with [Clinton] if she wasn’t totally committed to Israeli security.” 
+Podesta was probably referring to this segment of Schwerin’s draft, which was notably absent from the version Clinton ultimately delivered to the Saban Forum: 
+“Israelis cannot live forever in a state of siege. They must not be condemned to the constant fear that they might be stabbed in the street or attacked on a bus. Generation after generation of parents should not have to send their children off to combat. Israelis deserve security, recognition, and a peaceful, normal life. They deserve to live in a nation defined by its founding ideals—democratic, Jewish, and free. 
+“And Palestinians have the right to yearn for the freedom to govern themselves, in peace and dignity. For most Americans, it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine living behind checkpoints and roadblocks. Palestinians should be able to achieve their legitimate aspirations. 
+“So as difficult as this will be, all the parties must work to preserve the possibility of a two-state solution and create the conditions for progress by avoiding unilateral or damaging actions, whether on the ground, in settlement construction, or at the United Nations.” 
+Neither Clinton, Podesta or Schwerin (who is now Clinton’s director of speechwriting ) has commented on the leaked email and speech.",FAKE
+7057,"Trump “You Can’t Read 650k Emails in 8 days, Hillary is GUILTY!” – TruthFeed","Trump “You Can’t Read 650k Emails in 8 days, Hillary is GUILTY!” Trump “You Can’t Read 650k Emails in 8 days, Hillary is GUILTY!” Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 7, 2016 
+Trump weighed in on the CORRUPTION FIASCO created and perpetuated by the FBI. 
+Comey, the DISGRACED FBI director, re-opened the email investigation into Hillary Clinton’s CRIMINAL mishandling of classified emails after finding 650K NEW emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer that were “directly tied” to Hillary’s case. 
+As Hillary began TANKING in the polls, Comey came out and said, “Oh, whoops, nothing to see here, Hillary’s fine, no charges!” 
+Now, how the hell do you go through 650K emails in 8 days, when previously it took the FBI over a YEAR to go through 53k? 
+It doesn’t happen. 
+We all know that the RIGGED SYSTEM which Hillary used to STEAL the primary is the SAME RIGGED SYSTEM she uses to keep her out of jail. 
+There are countless GOOD people rotting away in prison for doing a TINY FRACTION of what Hillary did. 
+How is that fair? 
+In addition, we just learned that Hillary Clinton had her MAID printing off classified documents for her. 
+That’s right, he MAID, for the love of god. 
+Also, the FBI says that at least 5 foreign countries hacked her system. 
+…and this criminal-harpy is running for president? 
+No. Over 80% of Americans believe Hillary is GUILTY. 
+SAY NO to this vile crap, AMERICA. 
+From Politico: 
+Reacting to news that the FBI won’t change its determination in the Hillary Clinton email probe, Republican nominee Donald Trump made it clear he still regards her as guilty and is convinced she will ultimately face justice. 
+“You can’t review 650,000 emails in eight days,” Trump said Sunday in an appearance at the Freedom Hill Amphitheater. “You can’t do it folks. Hillary Clinton is guilty.” 
+This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+9104,Trump And His Supporters Are Fighting A Rigged System,"Trump And His Supporters Are Fighting A Rigged System The elite realize that their time is short Image Credits: donaldjtrump.com . 
+At the third debate, Donald Trump was asked if he would accept the results of the election. 
+Trump responded that he would have to look at the process to determine if everything was done fairly before he could accept it. The media went berserk claiming that Trump was undermining democracy. But is the US system really rigged? And if it is, can Trump overcome it? 
+Why rig the system? 
+Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. Revelation 12:12 
+It is human nature to want to accumulate wealth. It is also human nature to want to keep what you have. One of the ways that the wealthy do that is through influencing the political process to ensure it is favorable to them. A democratic republic is particularly easy to influence. The wealthy elite can “buy” candidates through donations to them or to their superpacs.",FAKE
+1855,Meet Ted Cruz's top fundraiser: his wife,"Olive Branch, Mississippi (CNN) Ted Cruz gushes about his wife, Heidi, on the campaign trail, telling an audience here that she is ""beautiful, brilliant and my very best friend in the whole wide world.""
+
+She's also something else: The best fundraiser in the Republican presidential candidate's corner.
+
+The senator's wife, a top executive at Goldman Sachs who is taking a leave to work at campaign headquarters, is effectively leading her husband's fundraising operation, running some weekly finance calls and pushing major donors to give the maximum they're allowed under federal law.
+
+It's a far cry from the caricatured profile of the behind-the-scenes wife, posing for photos on stage and then receding quickly behind it. Heidi Cruz, senior campaign aides say, has been intimately involved in the process of raising the $14 million that Ted Cruz brags about on the stump, often while standing alongside the woman who made that haul possible.
+
+Top Cruz advisers and friends describe her as a competitive fundraising dynamo, unwilling to leave each night without completing her call sheet and determined to use the Rolodex and business know-how she built as a Wall Street investor.
+
+""She works the phones the way she worked them when she was at Goldman,"" said Chad Sweet, the Cruz campaign's chairman, who recruited Heidi to work at the giant investment bank. ""There are very few spouses who can get on the phone on a cold call to a prospective donor and make a more compelling case in a personal and effective way than Heidi Cruz.""
+
+Nearly every candidate heralds their spouse as an asset, but few significant others in this election season -- with the exception of Hillary Clinton's -- have the same level of political experience as Heidi Cruz. A Harvard Business School graduate, she helped guide economic policy on George W. Bush's campaign -- where she met a hard-charging domestic policy aide, Ted -- and then worked in the Bush White House for four years.
+
+That makes her husband's bid her second time on the presidential campaign trail. Campaign bundlers report up the chain to Willie Langston, Cruz's finance chair, but fundraisers and advisers say Heidi Cruz is just as much involved in counting the dollars and cents needed to build for the long haul.
+
+It's a familiar role for Heidi Cruz, who the campaign declined to make available for an interview. In the final two weeks before her husband's primary in 2012 against David Dewhurst -- who would pour $25 million of his own money into his campaign -- she agreed to dedicate the couple's entire savings to the Senate campaign, Cruz writes in his new autobiography. And once Cruz and Dewhurst advanced to a runoff, Heidi and Sweet led a 60-person finance team that raised $60,000 each -- the ""60 by 60"" project -- that put the campaign back on TV, Cruz writes.
+
+""She would sit down with a call sheet at night and call through 40, 50, 60 names, and get donor after donor to max out on the phone -- and be thrilled to do so,"" Cruz recalled in a recent interview with CNN as his campaign bus ambled toward Memphis, Tennessee. ""She is disciplined and she engenders trust, which is a powerful thing in life.""
+
+Now, Heidi Cruz has focused her energies on drop-off donors who may have given in 2012 but haven't yet ponied up for the presidential run, or others on the fence. She isn't allowed to actively solicit money from her co-workers at Goldman, but advisers say those specific relationships matter less than do her fluency with the language of business and her work ethic that leaves even other aides in awe. During the final weeks before the second-quarter fundraising deadline, she made about 30 calls a day.
+
+Born in California but raised around the globe by missionary doctors, Heidi Cruz also showcases an easy rapport with the less fortunate. She gamely donned a neon pink hat offered by a Cruz fan selling paraphernalia in Huntsville, Alabama, and shared her religious upbringing with fellow Adventists in Franklin, Tennessee. When throngs of Cruz fanatics mob her husband as he ends his stump speech, Heidi Cruz stands in a corner within earshot of her chief of staff, taking not just photographs but also business cards from eager backers who want to help.
+
+At Sweet Pea's Table in this northern Mississippi suburb last week, the 42-year-old has one eye on Catherine and Caroline -- who are barnstroming the South with their parents -- and another on the platform, where her husband summons the three Cruz women to meet the tea-drinking faithful. With one hand clasped in each of her daughters', Heidi Cruz leads them off and on stage. Then as her husband rails against Obamacare and shouts about Jeb Bush, Heidi steps outside, where she works the overflow crowd with a pitchman's touch: ""When were you elected?"" she asks one local official. ""Thank you for serving.""
+
+""The sense of genuine concern was elegant,"" said the official, Alderman Eddie Nabors of Batesville, Mississippi, after meeting her here. He praised how she ""meets, greets and identifies"" with those waiting outside. ""I have one afterthought: Get her on the podium.""
+
+Courting local elected officials like Nabors also falls into her growing portfolio, which includes closing the deal on local endorsements. And the campaign is listening to Nabors' advice: She is slowly becoming an ambassador for her husband, embarking this week on her second solo trip in North and South Carolina, much like the other Cruz family salesman, his father, Rafael.
+
+Should Donald Trump fall, as Cruz allies anticipate, Heidi Cruz is expected to be at the forefront of the Cruz campaign's effort to win over disaffected Trump loyalists, especially women.
+
+Contributors, advisers and friends describe her as sunny and cheerful but fiercely goal-driven, using her personal nudge to make it very difficult for donors to say no to her entreaties. Those who have known her longest note how different she is from her husband, whose political persona is defined by an unyielding ideology that critics see as arrogant and inflexible.
+
+""She's not the ideologue that Ted is on so many things. And I think she would be the first to say that,"" said Ed Haley, a mentor of Heidi's since he taught her in college.
+
+Lawrence Lindsey, an economic adviser on the Bush campaign, said that appeal likely made her a better, more accessible fundraiser than the person who is the campaign's chief check collector: the candidate himself.
+
+""Heidi could get along with almost anyone,"" Lindsey said. ""And I don't think the same is true with Ted.""",REAL
+2847,Antiquities destroyed at Palmyra by the Islamic State,"A general view taken on March 27, 2016, shows part of the remains of the Arch of Triumph monument that was destroyed by Islamic State militants in October 2015 in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra.",REAL
+4774,10 things Trump could (but probably won't) change to win next debate,"Michael D'Antonio is the author of the new book , ""The Truth About Trump."" The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
+
+(CNN) Like a football team that must shake off defeat in order to prepare for the next game, Donald Trump has a short time to get over his drubbing in the first presidential debate and get ready for the next. He has, instead, been whining like a kitchen blender about the moderator, the microphone and his opponent while continuing to draw attention to the worst parts of his performance.
+
+Advisors who want Trump to win the next debate, on October 9, must get him to change. But to do this, they must overcome the candidate's 40-plus years of doing things his way. To appreciate the daunting nature of this task, consider just 10 things Trump could do to prepare for the next debate, and why it's likely he won't be able to do any of them.
+
+1) Accept your defeat in the first debate
+
+Trump likes to say ""I'm a winner"" and is not accustomed to losing, which may explain the poor sportsmanship he has shown since Hillary Clinton defeated him . Ignoring real poll results that show he was swamped, Trump has ordered aides to stop saying he lost. Of course, this kind of denial means that no one can ask the emperor to put on some clothes. He won't look down to see his own nakedness.
+
+When he was asked in the first debate what he would say to African-Americans about his scandalous role in the ""birther"" controversy that questioned President Obama's citizenship, Trump replied , ""I say nothing."" You will search in vain for an example of Trump ever taking responsibility for the damage he has done to any individual, community or nation, though examples abound. He is not going to learn how to do it now.
+
+Manners may not count when you fire people on reality TV, but they matter in a two-way presidential debate. Trump looked like a 6-year-old as he interrupted with witticisms such as ""Wrong!"" as Clinton spoke during the first debate. But as Trump told me, he believes he is the same person he was in first grade. His advisers are not going to get him to mature into an adult now.
+
+4) Act like you want the job
+
+One of the oddest moments in the first debate saw Trump say that if he loses the election he'll still get to Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington because he has a new hotel there. Someone who wants to occupy the White House shouldn't suggest he'd be satisfied with a hotel down the street. But Trump is first and always a salesman -- not a statesman -- and he will never pass up an opportunity to get free advertising for his business.
+
+During the first debate Trump's cringe-worthy moments included bragging about not paying any federal taxes and about betting on a housing crisis. As he crowed about his wealth, he added that he was speaking ""not in a braggadocious way."" But of course he was bragging. Boasting and bragging are off-putting to debate watchers but they are essential elements of Trump's personality and he will not stop.
+
+On the day after the first debate, body language experts noted Trump's negative body language and timid facial expression. (These signals were enough for one reporter to call Trump the loser after viewing the contest with the sound turned off.) Advisers may want Trump to control his exaggerated nonverbals, but this is not something this rubber-faced man can do.
+
+Always ready to use a little gamesmanship, Trump allowed his campaign staff to broadcast the fact that he was taking a confidently casual approach to the first debate. He said himself, ""I believe you can prep too much for these things."" The result was obvious, as Trump seemed ill-equipped with either arguments or rhetorical parries to use against his opponent. Could he do differently? Trump told me that he doesn't like to read and prefers to depend on instinct, which makes it's hard to imagine he will suddenly become open to training. Another person might turn a debate defeat as a moment to learn. This is not Trump's way.
+
+In the first debate Trump referenced Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who died in 1964, to make a point about America's pursuit of the ISIS terror organization. Those who got As in history, know of MacArthur, but the reference surely bypassed millions who watched the debate. Trump must have heard a lot about the general when he attended a military school in the 1960s, but he needs to update himself. Given the evidence that he doesn't understand the workings of our most vital technology, the internet, modernizing his knowledge base would be a big challenge.
+
+Despite the evidence showing that recent cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee and others emanated from Russia, Trump told the first debate audience, ""She's [Clinton] saying 'Russia, Russia, Russia,' but I don't."" This stand is consistent with Trump's earlier sloughing off of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine and his expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin. Because everything is personal for him, Trump likes Putin in part because Putin has said he likes him. Don't expect him to change his mind about the Russians on the basis of geopolitics. They are going to have to insult him personally before he does that.
+
+In the first debate, Clinton pointed out his penchant for insulting people and Trump talked about ""somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds."" After the debate, Trump decided to make veiled threats about using President Bill Clinton's sex scandal against her. Nastiness doesn't play well in a general election when a candidate must appeal to those beyond his or her base. However being nasty has always been a key element of Trump's repertoire, as shown by his feuds with Cher, Bette Midler, Rosie O'Donnell and others. Trump once told me that he doesn't respect most people because they don't deserve it. He is not likely to become respectful overnight.
+
+Among Trump's advisers there is one, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who shares much in common with him. Like Trump, he poses as a tough man and wants the world to believe that his meanness is a virtue. He is also, like his candidate, a thrice-married man who feels entitled to criticize Hillary Clinton's lifelong marriage.
+
+Consider Giuliani's persona and you see someone who understands Trump on a gut level.",REAL
+622,"Bernie Sanders, Party Crasher: Notes On The (Looming) End Of A Campaign","Bernie Sanders, Party Crasher: Notes On The (Looming) End Of A Campaign
+
+Three days ahead of California's Democratic presidential primary, Bernie Sanders made several appearances in Southern California before headlining a rally in San Diego.
+
+There was a Sunday morning walk through a farmers market in Downtown Los Angeles. There was a walk through West Hollywood, LA's gayborhood, with a pre-drag brunch address to diners at a hamburger joint on Santa Monica Boulevard. That was followed by a stroll through Santa Monica Pier, where the candidate rode a merry-go-round and even interrupted an outdoor spin class fundraiser to give an impromptu stump speech.
+
+And there was a stop at Plaza Mexico, an outdoor market that caters to a primarily Latino audience in Lynwood, a bit south of LA. Once Sanders arrived, with traveling press in tow, he walked through the crowded mall, which happened to be hosting a music festival that day. After shaking hands and hugging fans, Sanders tried to take the main stage of the festival. As he and his entourage approached the side of the stage, he was denied by several of the event staff. There were vigorous head shakes of disagreement and, as a female event staffer pulled a barricade closer to keep Sanders and his crew out, she said, angrily, ""This is our event.""
+
+Sanders staffers walked away from the exchange flustered, some muttering profanities. Sanders himself seemed befuddled. It was the exact opposite of the reception he received earlier in the day when he took over the stage at that outdoor spin fundraiser, stumping in front of stationary bikes and large images of the black and brown inner-city youth the event was raising money for.
+
+Sanders' experience in Southern California offers glimpses into everything that went right — and wrong — for his campaign. In more ways than one, at Lynwood and in Santa Monica and all throughout the primary season, Sanders was a party crasher. Sometimes that worked out for him. And sometimes it did not.
+
+This week marked the final presidential nominating contest for the Democratic Party, in Washington, D.C. Bernie Sanders lost. And he isn't throwing in the towel just yet, he says. But Sanders also says he can do ""arithmetic."" And that math shows he did not get enough votes or delegates to be the Democratic nominee. (He trails Clinton by millions in the Democratic popular vote, and hundreds in party's delegate count, with or without superdelegates.) Hillary Clinton was declared the ""presumptive nominee"" last week, and she is now campaigning as one would expect a presumptive party nominee to campaign, complete with the endorsement of a sitting president. It'd be fair to say that the only thing keeping Bernie Sanders' campaign alive is that he hasn't yet said it is dead.
+
+Sanders met with Clinton on Tuesday night for what both campaigns called a ""positive discussion,"" but did not drop out. He has said he will do everything he can to defeat Donald Trump — even if Sanders is not the nominee. And he will address his supporters Thursday evening, online, in a live stream.
+
+His plans for the future aren't yet clear, but looking back, Sanders' insurgent campaign accomplished more than anyone could have expected — even the senator himself. From the way he fundamentally changed how presidential campaigns can raise money, with the millions he raked in from small donations from supporters, often averaging $27 (as he repeatedly proclaimed on the stump), to his introduction of many of the ideas of Democratic socialism into the mainstream.
+
+In many ways, his successes seemed to come out of nowhere. Sanders had been a senator from Vermont for decades, with low name recognition and single-digit showings in early presidential polls. And he wasn't even a Democrat.
+
+It would be easy to see the Sanders campaign as something that just happened. But, in fact, he was part of a concerted effort, the outgrowth of a social movement that began a few years back in Zuccotti Park in New York. The Sanders campaign has direct links to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
+
+Winnie Wong, founder of the online group People for Bernie, is one of the former Occupy Wall Street activists who helped draft Bernie Sanders to run. And she said Sanders actually wasn't the first senator activists approached.
+
+""We started the Draft [Elizabeth] Warren effort first,"" she told NPR. ""Ready for Warren came out of Occupy. And People for Bernie came out of Ready for Warren.""
+
+Wong is not shy about identifying Sanders and his candidacy as a tool to get Occupy Wall Street ideals into the mainstream. ""It was always a tactic,"" she said at a Sanders rally in San Francisco. ""In every way, at every step of the way.""
+
+But if Sanders was in some ways an outgrowth of Occupy, his reach quickly expanded beyond that movement's confines. It would have been hard to predict that from the beginning, though. Sanders' press conference announcing his run in April of last year had little in common with the rock concert-like rallies he's become known for this campaign. That April announcement was small, organized on a lawn outside the U.S. Capitol, with Sanders seemingly startled by the microphone itself, urging reporters to keep it quick because he had to get back to his day job as a senator.
+
+In fact, many of Sanders' campaign staff had day jobs as well; early on, a lot of them worked for the campaign for free, after they finished those. But within months, Sanders had made a movement. Tapping into a new wave of progressive populism, first hinted at during the Occupy movement, Sanders' self-described ""political revolution to transform our country economically, political, socially and environmentally"" quickly became a force.
+
+By February, Sanders' razor-thin finish with Clinton in the Iowa caucuses (he lost by only 0.3 percentage points), it became official: The Sanders campaign was now no longer outsider, but insurgent.
+
+Sanders rallies grew larger and took on their own feel — part concert, part picnic, part love fest. Sanders' fans danced freely before his rallies began. Mothers breast-fed their young children in the aisles. Tie-died shirts could be spotted throughout the crowds. Sanders himself seemed like a kind, loving grandfather to many of his supporters. Famously, at one Sanders rally in Portland, Ore. (because Portland), a bird landed on the candidate's lectern.
+
+In many ways, the Sanders campaign was a love revolution, with a message of unity, diversity and prosperity for all. But under the surface, the Sanders movement was just as much an exercise in anger.
+
+Over time, another side of the Sanders phenomenon began to reveal itself: a palpable disgust not just for Sanders' opponent, Clinton, but for the party she is a part of, the media that covered her and a system that many Sanders supporters thought was rigged.
+
+The night of California's presidential primary, Sanders held a rally in an airplane hangar at the Santa Monica airport. The tall and wide half-circle roof made for a dramatic scene as thousands of supporters poured into the space to support their candidate, even as his chances at winning the Democratic nomination were all but zero.
+
+Beneath the sweeping metal roof, while a man dressed as Jesus holding a Sanders sign paced the room, the anger that had been building in Sanders' supporters for months was on full display.
+
+When a big screen at the rally showed Hillary Clinton leading in the California race, the crowd chanted ""Bullshit!"" over and over again until the image on the screen changed. The crowd also chanted things like ""CNN sucks!"" When Clinton's name was mentioned in Sanders' speech, the crowd booed.
+
+Many in attendance cornered reporters to share disgust with their coverage of the election, particularly reporting on the Associated Press' announcement the night before that Clinton had secured the support of enough superdelegates, or unpledged party leaders and elected officials, to put Clinton over the top to become the party's presumptive nominee.
+
+Many of Sanders' supporters didn't believe he lost fair and square. (Sanders himself still hasn't said he has. The day President Obama endorsed Clinton — and told Sanders in the Oval Office that he was about to do so — Sanders pointed to ballots still out in California. On Tuesday, after a statement about the Orlando massacre, Sanders talked about long lines in Arizona.)
+
+Instead, Sanders supporters, in the crowd in Santa Monica that night and elsewhere, called the delegate count itself a conspiracy. A day earlier, Sanders surrogate Nina Turner (a former Ohio state senator) suggested the AP call, coming the night before California voted, was intended to suppress voter turnout there.
+
+Dutch Merrick was in the crowd that Tuesday night. He said he was hopeful that Sanders would take his fight to the Democratic convention, and ""demand an actual count of the actual votes."" He felt the Democratic Party establishment had decided Clinton would be the nominee months ago, before the primary election was complete.
+
+""It's a fait accompli. ... That message had not changed in a year,"" he said, holding a Sanders poster. ""All the coverage went to one woman candidate: Hillary.""
+
+For Merrick, the entire system was rigged in Clinton's favor. He pointed to voting irregularities in several states over the past few months, long lines at polling places in Arizona, and names disappearing from voter lists in places like New York.
+
+""She [Clinton] just puts a friendly face on fascism,"" Merrick continued. ""I was excited, eight years ago, to vote for an African-American for president. But it essentially put someone that pushed the same agenda, kept the same Defense Department, the same CIA, the same Wall Street policies, with a black face. It didn't do us any good. So now we're going to get a female face on the same policies. Not going to do us any good.""
+
+He concluded, ""I would probably vote for Trump, to burst the bubble, to finally pop the zit.""
+
+Sigma Scott, who was at the rally with Merrick, said, ""If she takes it [the nomination] by petty theft, or grand theft, I would rally and vote that she's impeached.""
+
+That mood seemed to be present at Sanders events all throughout California in the lead-up to the primary in these waning days of the campaign. It wasn't just that Bernie Sanders was the truth and the light to these super supporters — it's that in their eyes, Hillary Clinton was the lie and the darkness.
+
+Clinton wasn't just an opponent to many Sanders supporters; she was a cheater, perhaps even a criminal. The Democratic Party wasn't just a political party; it was an apparatus focused solely on doing whatever it took to grant Clinton the nomination. And whatever math would justify her win was fraudulent, because the system itself was an undemocratic sham.
+
+At a San Francisco rally for Sanders the previous day, Sanders supporter Aaron Selverston seemed to crystallize the emotions of many who felt alienated by the Democratic Party and the primary process.
+
+""I think the whole argument about the [delegate] math is irrelevant to most Bernie supporters,"" he said, as Dave Matthews played in San Francisco's Crissy Field before Sanders took to the mic. ""Because it's not about some sort of allegiance to a party. The party has failed. The party has failed half of the people who typically vote Democratic. And those are the people who are supporting Bernie.""
+
+Though much of the anger some Sanders supporters show is directed at the media or Clinton or Trump, some of the blame for Sanders' failing to reach the nomination is his own.
+
+From the start, Sanders said he would run a positive campaign, on the issues, refusing to directly attack his primary opponent, Clinton. He famously declared at one Democratic presidential debate, ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,"" when asked about Clinton's use of a private server during her time as secretary of state. The emails have been a constant line of attack for Republicans against Clinton, but Sanders refused to hit her on the issue, even as staffers urged Sanders to find some line of attack on her.
+
+Over time, Sanders did attack, particularly on paid speeches she gave to Wall Street executives after her time as secretary of state, repeating in stump speeches, ""I kind of think if you get paid a couple hundred thousand dollars for a speech, it must be a great speech. I think we should release it and let the American people see what the transcript was.""
+
+By the time that message stuck, though, Clinton's lead had become all but insurmountable.
+
+Another sore spot for his campaign, that would perhaps inflict even more damage, was an inability to connect with large numbers of minority voters.
+
+In several nominating contests throughout the primary season, Sanders did win a majority of black and Latino primary and caucus voters ages 35 and under. But in South Carolina's primary, after strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders lost the black vote by almost 70 percent, even admitting himself, ""We got decimated.""
+
+At a Seattle rally last year, Sanders was forced from the stage by two Black Lives Matters protesters; he had to end his own event without finishing his stump speech. For many minority voters, Sanders' message on income inequality failed to connect the dots between wealth disparity and institutional racism, and many people of color felt that white Sanders supporters were too eager to dismiss them as low-information when they did not support the Vermont senator.
+
+Sanders responded. He hired minority staff in key positions, namely hiring Symone Sanders, a BLM activist, as his national press secretary soon after the Seattle incident. Sanders' campaign recruited surrogates of color as well, like the rapper Killer Mike and actress Rosario Dawson. And he had no shortage of key celebrity endorsements from the likes of Danny Glover and Spike Lee.
+
+But it wasn't enough. Sanders' coalition of liberals, working-class whites, and young voters of all colors couldn't shake Clinton's lead with women and older minority voters.
+
+Sanders' campaign also did not focus on the sweep of Super Tuesday states on March 1. That's when Clinton put real separation between herself and Sanders. His campaign was often outmatched by Clinton's superior ground game, with its infrastructure seemingly never dismantled after her 2008 Democratic primary loss, and bolstered, even, by remnants of the Obama political machine.
+
+As time went on, Clinton racked up an increasingly bigger lead, one that Sanders would never be able to overcome, even as he regularly out-fundraised his Democratic opponent and his rallies filled stadiums throughout the country.
+
+Maybe there's nothing Sanders could have done to overcome the Clinton machine on the ground. But University of Vermont professor Huck Gutman, a close friend of Sanders and his former chief of staff, seemed to predict the problems Sanders would have with minority voters in an interview with NPR soon after Sanders launched his presidential campaign.
+
+""One of the differences between Bernie and so many other people who are liberals,"" Gutman said, ""is that Bernie's central concern has always been with the condition of what he calls working-class families. He is consumed by the need for economic justice.""
+
+Even as Gutman pointed out Sanders' track record of support for other progressive causes, he said of Sanders, ""His central concerns have never been war or civil rights or gay rights or women's rights.""
+
+""The very idea that something has failed, it's not a part of our language""
+
+The day of the California primary, after the AP had declared Clinton the presumptive nominee, it was really hard to find anyone saying Sanders actually lost the race — or would lose it soon.
+
+You didn't hear it as Sanders block-walked and greeted thousands on Hollywood Boulevard and at coffee shops and the farmers market in Silver Lake in Los Angeles. You didn't see it when the senator was on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, greeting fans and celebrity impersonators alike. You didn't hear it in his speech that night, or even later in the week, after President Obama endorsed Clinton.
+
+Sanders campaigned that day, and in many of the days before and after, like a winner. And if you just saw those scenes from the trail in California, and not the news, you could have been convinced that Sanders had actually won the whole thing.
+
+And perhaps that is the lingering juxtaposition of the Sanders campaign. Numerically, he has lost. Sanders will not be his party's nominee. But in so many ways, he has won, just by surviving this long. And not just surviving, but at many points thriving and influencing a movement that could have a very long tail.
+
+""One of the great successes of this campaign is that Bernie Sanders has really electrified a whole new generation of young people to become engaged in the political process,"" Winnie Wong said. ""And they're young, and they're not apathetic, and they're energetic, and they're smart.""
+
+Wong contends that Sanders fundamentally changed America's political conversation, making a movement like Occupy, and an ideology like Democratic socialism, mainstream.
+
+""Prior to Bernie Sanders, nobody ever dared utter the word socialism,"" she said. ""Forget about the 10 million who cast their vote for a Democratic socialist. Think about the many more millions, across this country, who are talking about it, probably right now. That's even more important.""
+
+If you look at Sanders' campaign as part of a larger progressive, populist movement that had been building for years — from Zuccotti Park to Burlington, Vt., and almost to the White House — all of a sudden it makes more sense. And it also feels, in many ways, not finished just yet.
+
+""People in social movements don't really see an end to their work,"" Wong said. ""The very idea that something has failed, it's not a part of our language.""
+
+After being rejected from the stage at Plaza Mexico in Lynwood, Calif., that Sunday before the state primary, Sanders walked into a Mexican restaurant at the mall and enjoyed a meal with his family. A mariachi band played and, at one point, Sanders danced with one of his grandchildren.
+
+The embarrassment of the moments before seemed to have been forgotten; the candidate was having a good time. And when he left the mall, a large crowd was waiting to greet him. Regardless of what happened at the stage, he was able to interact, positively, with hundreds of potential voters.
+
+But already, tweets and videos recounting the details of Sanders being blocked from the stage were circulating on social media, with many using the moment to mock Sanders and critique his record of outreach to Latino communities.
+
+Traveling press asked for comment on the incident, and soon spokesman Michael Briggs told a Washington Post reporter that, in fact, Sanders hadn't been denied a microphone in Lynwood, contradicting multiple eyewitness reports.
+
+Briggs told a Washington Post reporter that another supervisor at the event had come to offer Sanders a place on the stage and ""to say Bernie was welcome."" But, Briggs said, it was, in fact, the Sanders campaign that denied the festival organizers.
+
+""By that point,"" he said, ""we had moved on.""
+
+It was a moment that, in several ways, could symbolize Sanders' entire campaign — a victory and a defeat, all at the same time. And, in spite of it all, a dogged determination to keep pressing ahead — and to seemingly never, ever admit you've lost.",REAL
+4391,GOP field rips Obama's move toward executive action to tighten gun control laws,"Republican presidential candidates are attacking President Obama’s plan to use his Oval Office powers to try to tighten gun-control laws, arguing his efforts are “unconstitutional” and another attempt to sidestep Congress.
+
+""We're not changing the Second Amendment,"" front-running Donald Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Biloxi, Miss. ""I will veto that. I will un-sign that so fast.""
+
+Obama said over the weekend that he’ll meet Monday with Attorney General Loretta Lynch to discuss his options on tightening federal firearms laws to reduce gun violence, after instructing his White House team several months ago to look at what type of “action” he could take.
+
+“The president is a petulant child,” GOP candidate New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told “Fox News Sunday.” “Whenever he doesn’t get what he wants, … this president acts like a king.”
+
+Obama purportedly will use executive action to require small-scale gun sellers to order background checks on prospective buyers and tighten laws for gun sales to those who have committed domestic-abuse offenses.
+
+“The president has a pattern of taking away rights of citizens,” GOP candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told “Fox News Sunday.”
+
+Bush also suggested that he didn’t object in principle to keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, but that he is wary of how far-reaching and burdensome the proposed changes might be on small-scale gun sellers.
+
+“How do you know?” he asked. “The better approach would be to punish people who violate federal gun laws. … If it’s such a great idea, let (Obama) go to Congress.”
+
+The president tried unsuccessfully in the aftermath of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, in Newtown, Conn., to get Congress to pass comprehensive gun control legislation.
+
+The National Rifle Association, which opposed that plan, also opposes the new plan, calling it a “political stunt.”
+
+Christie and others point out that Obama has tried to use executive action to allow illegal immigrants to remain in the United States and work. However, a federal appeals court has temporarily stopped that action, pending a final ruling.
+
+“I’m sure (the gun executive action) will get stopped by the courts,” Christie also said Sunday.
+
+Trump, a billionaire businessman, on Sunday told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that if elected he would use the same executive powers to repeal Obama’s likely new executive orders on gun control.
+
+“The one thing good about executive orders: The new president, if he comes in -- boom, first day, first hour, first minute, you can rescind that,” he said.
+
+GOP candidate Carly Fiorina told CNN’s “State of the Union” that Obama “has been a lawless president” in his use of executive orders.
+
+“It is delusional, dangerous, not to mention unconstitutional,” she said. “We have long lists of criminals who own guns, who routinely purchase guns. We know who these people are, and we are not prosecuting any of them.”
+
+The three Democratic presidential candidates -- Hillary Clinton, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders -- support tighter gun control.
+
+Sander told ABC's “This Week” he wishes Obama could get bipartisan congressional support but that he supports the president’s renewed efforts.
+
+“There is a wide consensus. (The) overwhelming majority of the American people believe we should expand and strengthen the instant background checks,” he said. “I think that's what the president is trying to do, and I think that will be the right thing to do.”
+
+Sanders also said he supports more background check, which would likely help close what gun-control advocates call the “gun show loophole"" as well as strong measures to keep criminals and people with mental health issues from owning firearms.",REAL
+9740,It's over! Trump is out - see today's final killer blunders,"Channel list 
+Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually 
+Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida 
+Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote 
+The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush 
+Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food 
+Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI 
+Obama ​​captures rare Pokémon ​​while visiting Hiroshima 
+Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say ""It's creepy"" 
+Barack Obama: ""If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"" 
+White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party 
+President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism' 
+Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech , stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman' 
+Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber 
+Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend 
+Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line 
+As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards 
+John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom 
+Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right' 
+News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: ""My work here is done"" 
+Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign 
+Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009 
+National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman 
+National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruz’s basement 
+Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response 
+Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican 
+Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check 
+Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing 
+Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first 
+Susan Sarandon: ""I don't vote with my vagina."" Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer 
+Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote 
+New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to ""Live FOR Free or Die"" 
+Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president 
+Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two 
+Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence 
+Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men 
+In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas 
+TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons 
+Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats' 
+Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with ""This is for Paris"" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with ""Return to sender"" 
+University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities 
+Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island 
+Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a ""safe space,"" changing Missouri motto to ""The don't show me state"" 
+Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy 
+State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery 
+NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget 
+College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action 
+ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios 
+Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic 
+'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break 
+ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood 
+Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans 
+Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people 
+Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's ""unfettered capitalism,"" demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need 
+John Kerry accepts Iran's ""Golden Taquiyya"" award, requests jalapenos on the side 
+Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone 
+John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons 
+Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend 
+Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles 
+State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider 
+Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons 
+Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations 
+Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals 
+US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?' 
+NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy 
+China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: ""The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"" 
+Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be' 
+Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1% 
+America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith 
+Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine 
+Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET 
+Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths 
+Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do' 
+Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State 
+President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise 
+Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market 
+Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males 
+NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record 
+People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services 
+Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba 
+White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet' 
+CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate 
+Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson' 
+Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city' 
+Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers' 
+Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first 
+The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office 
+White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders 
+Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time 
+Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy 
+Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents 
+Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences 
+Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity 
+Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow 
+African countries to ban all flights from the United States because ""Obama is incompetent, it scares us"" 
+Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it 
+Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses' 
+BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama 
+Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free 
+Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness 
+President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser 
+Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members 
+White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos 
+Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency 
+Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole 
+Harry Reid: ""Sometimes I say the wong thing"" 
+Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids 
+Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution 
+Obama draws ""blue line"" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon 
+""Hard Choices,"" a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original 
+Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts 
+Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks 
+100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, ""the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"" 
+Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news 
+""Anarchy Now!"" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence 
+Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours 
+Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues 
+""Free Speech Zones"" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes 
+Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed 
+Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account 
+Joe Biden to Russia: ""We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"" 
+In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea 
+Al Sharpton: ""Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"" 
+Mardi Gras in North Korea: "" Throw me some food! "" 
+Obama's foreign policy works: ""War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"" 
+US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: ""We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"" 
+Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help 
+The 1980s: ""Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."" 
+In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook 
+MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine 
+Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants 
+Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America 
+North Korean voters unanimous: ""We are the 100%"" 
+Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout 
+Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss 
+Feminist author slams gay marriage: ""a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"" 
+Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district 
+Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend 
+Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle 
+North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party 
+White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare 
+Kim Jong Un executes own "" crazy uncle "" to keep him from ruining another family Christmas 
+OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea 
+President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy 
+Obama to Iran: ""If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"" 
+Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC 
+Obama: ""I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"" 
+Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week 
+Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message 
+NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: ""Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"" 
+Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough 
+The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: ""I didn't build that"" 
+Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare 
+Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation 
+Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans 
+Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy 
+GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords 
+Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare 
+Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria 
+Sharpton: ""British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"" 
+DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women 
+Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees 
+Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left 
+Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel' 
+FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp 
+Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies 
+GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election' 
+Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!' 
+Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism 
+News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota 
+Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith 
+Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page 
+Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment 
+White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria 
+Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent' 
+Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins 
+Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date 
+IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history 
+After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot 
+Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence' 
+Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program 
+US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration? 
+Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy 
+This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester 
+White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras 
+Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse 
+Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school 
+Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition 
+Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State 
+Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good' 
+Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners' 
+Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested 
+Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead 
+Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending 
+Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances 
+Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons 
+Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago 
+Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections 
+Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country 
+Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps' 
+White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out 
+New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen 
+White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class 
+To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead 
+State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations 
+Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward 
+President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward 
+Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects 
+World ends; S&P soars 
+Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood 
+Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes 
+Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway 
+Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013 
+Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama 
+As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list 
+Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves 
+Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium 
+Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future 
+Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs 
+Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet 
+Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt' 
+Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties 
+Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years 
+Obama attends church service, worships self 
+Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending 
+Historical revisionists: ""Hey, you never know"" 
+Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh 
+Israelis to Egyptian rioters: ""don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"" 
+Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness 
+Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears 
+Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke 
+Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights 
+Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse' 
+Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: ""Too few words"" 
+Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't 
+Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost 
+Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity ""Religion of Peace,"" praises ""moderate Christians,"" promises to send one into space 
+Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck 
+White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus 
+Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed 
+Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book ""The Road to Smurfdom"" 
+Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere 
+Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: ""When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"" 
+Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college 
+Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill! 
+Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!' 
+Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration' 
+Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome 
+People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies 
+Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, ""only 1% allowed to reach Israel"" 
+Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans 
+Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law 
+Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond 
+Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics 
+Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof 
+Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels 
+Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party 
+Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend 
+May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above 
+Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel ""50 Shades of Hay"" 
+Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name 
+Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich 
+Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag 
+Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its ""President for Life"" 
+Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory 
+Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off 
+Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named ""Fat And Furious"" 
+Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed 
+White House: ""Let them eat statistics"" 
+Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama",FAKE
+679,"Sanders: Americans, superdelegates must 'take a hard look' at IG report on Clinton emails","Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders said Sunday that American voters, superdelegates and others must “take a hard look” at the recent federal report that found primary rival Hillary Clinton’s email setup while running the State Department broke agency rules.
+
+“It was not a good report for Secretary Clinton. That is something that the American people, Democrats and delegates are going to have to take a hard look at,"" Sanders told CBS' ""Face the Nation,"" during one of two TV network interviews Sunday.
+
+The inspector general’s report last week concluded Clinton broke agency rules by using a private email server and that she would have been denied permission to have one had she first sought permission.
+
+On Sunday, Sanders, desperately trailing the front-running Clinton in the delegate count, continued to not comment directly on the controversy.
+
+But he repeated the notion that superdelegates, of which he needs more in a longshot bid to take the nomination, should indeed scrutinize the report.
+
+“I mean everybody in America is keeping it in mind, and certainly the superdelegates are,"" Sanders said.
+
+The Clinton campaign said Wednesday that the report shows ""just how consistent (Clinton's) email practices were with those of other secretaries and senior officials at the State Department who also used personal email.""
+
+The campaign also said the report notes that Clinton's use of personal email was known to officials within the department and that there is no evidence to show any successful breach of the former secretary of state's server.
+
+In a separate interview Sunday with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sanders said he is focused on “the future of the American middle class and how we deal with the fundamental problems they are facing.”
+
+He also declined to comment on the FBI investigation into the Clinton email scandal, including what impact the findings might have on a Clinton general election bid.
+
+However, Sanders appeared to perhaps take his concerns about the emails a step further, suggesting Americans are “tired of those kinds of politics.”
+
+And he made clear presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has and will continue to make an issue of them if and when he faces Clinton directly in the November election.
+
+“Donald Trump and other Republicans will seize on it,” he told NBC. “There’s no doubting that.”",REAL
+466,"Employers added a disappointing 126,000 jobs in March",Here's everything you need to know about how the labor market fared in March,REAL
+7181,Whatever the Outcome on November 8th the US Will Be on a Collision Course With China - Federico Pieraccini,"Taming the corporate media beast Whatever the Outcome on November 8th the US Will Be on a Collision Course With China 
+Regardless of who is elected next president, the attention of the US will shift to Asia Originally appeared at Strategic Culture Foundation 
+When it comes to the authenticity of the American electoral process, one must start with the media. Eighty percent of it openly sides against Trump and favors Hillary Clinton, predetermining the outco me of the elections with omitted or, worse, distorted and ignored news, deliberately avoiding any irreparable damage to Clinton. 
+The endless Wikileaks revelations about the collusion between the Democrats and the media establishment clearly show that there is a very specific plan to prevent a Trump victory. The lack of impartiality gives citizens little information to make a final choice in terms of voting, openly favoring the Democratic candidate. Therefore, it is more than fair to say that with this media situation and the number of polls in favor of the Democratic candidate that it is difficult to imagine a different outcome other than the most obvious one. 
+It is also true that there are some factors in favor of Trump; often his voters like to stay silent instead of exposing themselves in spurious surveys used to manipulate the electoral vote. 
+However, this election will see the triumph of a candidate that will be able to attract new voters to the polls. In this sense, the many who say they are pro-Clinton may stay home on November 8, completely disheartened by the numerous scandals of the Democratic candidate, in spite of the media censorship. 
+A striking difference between the two presidential campaigns regards the energy of the supporters. Trump’s base is alive and breathes an air of revolution, while that of the Clinton is trying hard to stay alive. This is a factor that could be decisive if the margins are reduced (or proven false). 
+On these bases it would already be enough to fully describe the US electoral system as being corrupt to the core. The media bias, covert funding of the Clinton Foundation , WikiLeaks and hacking against the Democratic National Committee (DNC), are all causes that certify how the so-called ""Deep State"" is clearly supportive of Clinton. 
+That said Hillary Clinton remains the favorite candidate to win this election, with enormous percentages around 92 % if one listens to the New York Times. Also, forgetting for a moment the outcome, whatever it is, this election will deliver the most unpopular president in recent American history, with all the attendant consequences. 
+Has there been anyone more unpopular than either candidate over the 18 months or so of the election campaign? But perhaps more interesting to ask is, once elected, what kind of president would Hillary Clinton be? 
+The most obvious answer is that she will be a belligerent president, ready to impose her vision of the world with its accompanying sound of wars and bombs. And yet the more we delve into the issue, the more we realize that perhaps such a description is too generic and imprecise. 
+Clinton, first of all, is above all a president in the hands of her donors, and rarely can a US president independently fashion foreign policy strategies. Obama’s famous interview with Goldberg in The Atlantic provides a striking example, where he described how he would have liked his foreign policy doctrine to be less involved around the world, instead seeing increased use of soft power to obtain geopolitical advances. 
+Obama during his presidency was much more in favor of attempts to expand US influence with proxies like in Ukraine with the use of neo-Nazi battalions, or with the use of terrorists in Syria as opposed to using American ground troops, a scenario that is impractical for many reasons. 
+Also for these decisions he is considered to be a weak president with little knowledge or interest in foreign policy. Obama is not a pacifist, God forbid. But it is true that he has often been softly opposed to a direct confrontation with Russia and Iran in different situations in the course of his presidency. 
+Returning to Clinton, Who are her masters? First of all are the regional allies of the United States in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, thanks to millions of dollars of generous donations that will grant them the ability to demand concessions in specific situations regarding the Middle East. Secondly, and most importantly, there is the American elite , who have a strong interest in maintaining the US role in the world and prolonging its unipolar moment. 
+It is principally for this reason that Clinton probably will be nothing more than a copy of Obama in terms of foreign policy, but with many more concessions to regional allies in the Middle East and a generic more aggressive policy towards Russia, China and Iran. 
+It is a vision certainly closer to that of the neoconservatives, but in terms of specifics, her foreign policy decisions will be operated mostly by her masters that just want to get richer. A Clinton presidency will likely continue with a fairly similar foreign policy doctrine to that of Obama in Europe and the Middle East but with some important differences in Asia. 
+It is likely that her donors, especially Riyadh and Doha, will try to influence her decisions allowing them to have a freehand in Syria. In Ukraine it is even more improbable that Clinton would try to reverse the negative trend for Kiev in their ATO, since this would require an intervention of NATO directly, unleashing a direct confrontation between the Atlantic Alliance and the Russian Federation, something that would escalate into a situation that would favor no one. 
+The most obvious reason why the Clinton presidency is unlikely to deviate much from the course of the Obama presidency is the nature of the two major conflicts. In Syria, Damascus has now begun the victory phase, and there is no room for armed intervention by regional countries thanks to the Russian and Iranian veto. As usual, in the Middle East it is just hysteria from Washington, regardless of who will be the next president. In Ukraine, the situation is frozen in terms of territorial advances. 
+It is unlikely that would change without a massive boost of Ukrainian troops to the east, but the effectiveness of such was seen in the 2014 war. Moreover, Moscow has suggested that they clearly possess all the ability to withstand such attacks, helping the Donbass and worsening the condition for the Ukrainian nation. The war is played in the courtyard of Moscow, thousands of kilometers away from the United States, a clear strategic disadvantage unbridgeable by Washington. Even in the case of Ukraine, it comes down to anti-Russian hysteria at little cost thanks to media propaganda. 
+Even European countries are starting to complain about the sanctions against Moscow, not to mention the prospect of escalation by NATO in Ukraine. In addition to not being able to win the war, a new war in the east of Ukraine would become the perfect cause for existential crisis for Atlantic Alliance. This is a risk that Washington is well aware of, and weighing the strategic value of Ukraine, which is zero when compared to that of Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia , it is easy to see why the next US president would still not be willing to have a conventional, let alone nuclear , confrontation with Moscow over Ukraine. 
+Unfortunately, the question changes dramatically when we take into account an area of ​​greatest strategic interest to the US elite such as Southeast Asia. Clinton always promoted the pivot to Asia, arguing that the only way to counter the rise of China is by in every way seeking to contain the Asian power. In this sense, we can also notice her efforts as Secretary of State in the Clinton reset, a policy that sought to bring Moscow and Washington closer together, and a strategy that could have helped the United States in containing, with Moscow's help, the Chinese giant. 
+Fast-forward seven years later and the results are a disaster. The US and Russia have never been so divided. American pressure and aggression toward Moscow in Georgia and Ukraine have ended up pushing the former Soviet country into the arms of the Asian giant power, effectively creating a counterweight to the US, a failure that has worsened with Iran joining the Eurasian club thanks to continued destabilization from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, Turkey and the United States in areas ranging from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and passing through the Middle East. With the consolidation of this anti-hegemonic bloc, the US has lost most of its options to take action in an area of ​​keen interest, such as the Middle East. 
+The Russian presence in Europe, especially in the context of Ukraine, is an insurmountable obstacle. In the Middle East, Russo-Iranian cooperation has averted a possible use of foreign troops in Syria. The final decision of the United States not to intervene in such scenarios is also based on a vague hope that Iran will eventually gravitate toward the Western sphere of influence and away from this anti-hegemonic bloc. To that effect, the nuclear deal makes more sense, especially considering the openness of western politicians to the Rouhani administration when compared to the preceding Ahmadinejad one. 
+Even towards Russia there is the continuing hope that US power centers will be able to stretch the tentacles of colored democracy by 2018 (Russian presidential elections), imposing a candidate with a markedly more Western view. Good luck with that one, as Putin has about an 80% approval rating. 
+Dashing Uncle Sam’s dreams, Russia and Iran continue to dominate their regions of influence, expanding contacts and alliances, without giving any sign of bending to the opposing policies of Washington. The foreign policy of Washington in Europe and in the Middle East, especially in the last eight years, has been schizophrenic, ineffective and against American interests in region in the first place. 
+In Southeast Asia, the situation is quite different. With the rise of China in terms of GDP, military investment that is higher than the allocated budget, and the number of military personnel available, and if the growth of the last 15 years continues on its trajectory for a further 10 years, then China will certainly become the number one world super power. It is a situation that directly threatens American hegemony, something that has not happened in decades. 
+For these reasons, Clinton came up with what is now known as the pivot away from Europe and towards Asia, as well as a reset with Russia, in the hope of lengthening the list of countries hostile to Beijing with the aim of containing China. Fast-forward again to several years later and as already stressed, the effect has been quite the opposite. Economically, China is continuing to grow and is consolidating its economical power, with new institutions like the AIIB and the BRICS bank creating an alternative pole to the American globalist system of IMF-World Bank-FED. 
+Militarily there are less and less nations willing to patrol the South and East China Seas with the United States, Japan and Australia. Rather, countries like the Philippines and Vietnam are seeking a dialogue with the Chinese giant, hoping to improve their economic partnership. For its part, the US will not miss a chance to provoke Beijing with reckless military maneuvers. It is easy to see that with a Clinton presidency the US, when compared to Europe or the Middle East, will be more likely to pursue aggressive strategies in Southeast Asia with much greater determination as to risk conflict. 
+The major US national donors, composed entirely by the globalist elite , control the press, banks, insurance, the military-industrial complex, Big Pharma, the rating agencies and central banks, and, in addition to increasing their earnings, have every intention to extending the unipolar moment of the United States and ensuring that no superpower can emerge to be a peer competitor. The rise of China is a no go, seen in perspective. 
+At present, and in the past, it has certainly been the perfect client to allow the turbo-capitalist US system to outsource cheap labor, accelerating globalization, to enrich the pockets of these privileged super wealthy. The problem for the US elites is the rise, as time goes by, of the Chinese elite that has every intention of not being subject to the will of Washington. At a state level we can perceive this struggle with the emergence of institutions like the AIIB and organization of the BRICS. 
+Clinton, obeying her master-donors, will obviously try to accentuate the influence of the US on regional allies in Asia to inflame anti-Chinese sentiment. The strategy is clear: to prevent Beijing from dominating the region. The risk of a conflict, even while being the highest of any other area of ​​the world, is unlikely to happen in the immediate future, especially due to China’s restrained approach. More likely I expect an asymmetric response by Beijing, aided by its finances. 
+The most likely hypothesis regards an involvement of the Chinese Military in the Middle East to fight terrorism, perhaps with an Iranian and Russian partnership thanks to organizations such as SCO. The alliances, interests, organizations and international frameworks are all ready, the only thing missing being a direct order from Beijing. This posture and threat also serves as a deterrent to Washington’s meddling in Asia, acting as a kind of counter asymmetrical balance. 
+It is not far fetched to see in a future presidency of Clinton Chinese troops alongside those of Russia, Iran, Syria, Iraq and maybe even Egypt in the Middle East fighting against state-sponsored terrorism. In a scenario of this kind, with all the behind-the-scenes negotiations between Ankara, Tehran, Tel Aviv and Moscow, it is difficult to imagine a regional war but rather the increasing isolation of Saudi Arabia and Qatar thanks to the policies of the anti-hegemonic bloc in the Middle East. 
+Beijing, which always plays on different tables and well in advance, has already approached Riyadh in the recent past (its largest world supplier) with proposals and attractive agreements, just as it did with Britain immediately before the Brexit vote, trying to bring the City of London (and its influential financial market) into the orbit of China. For now, the Saudi family remains loyal US allies (and Wall Street finance), but with a new supranational circuit as AIIB, let us say supported by a financial market like London, it is not unthinkable that as the final asymmetric move, Beijing could aspire to deal a deadly blow to US hegemony by shifting oil trading from the dollar system to the new petro-yuan. This scenario is something that has been talked about and that frightens the US elites more than anything else. 
+Regardless of who is elected the next president, the full attention of the US will shift mainly to the Asian area, prompting Beijing to think about its future and how to deal with American containment. So far, rather than a military deterrent, it looks like the economical factor will play a huge role against an aggressive US military posture in the Asian region.",FAKE
+6164,Is it possible that Saudi King be tried in US courts by JASTA Law?,"Email 
+
+According to the JASTA law which allows government and leaders of foreign governments’ harassment by families of victims of the terrorist attacks, it is so likely that Saudi king be tried. According to experts, the passing of JASTA may cause international chaos. Especially after some governments threat they will pass similar legislation to prosecute US officials if US do so. 
+Is it possible that Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz being tried for potential liability in events of September 11? The trial is possible by the legislation of Jasta. By Jasta law the families of the victims could sue governments and this will lead to chaos in international relations. 
+In late September, United States Congress ignored President Obama’s advice and his veto and passed JASTA law, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. This law made US-Saudi relation more chaotic. 
+US confederate states expressed concern to JASTA legislation 
+Not just Saudi Arabia expressed concerns to JASTA, US confederate states also expressed concern about breaking the US quasi-sacred treaty with Saudi Arabia and asked for appealing. France and the Netherlands have threatened to pass similar laws which lead to a series of judicial complaints against USA and its military and diplomacy allies. 
+John Kerry, United States Secretary of State, showed his displeasure and called it a huge risk. A few days ago Kerry and Adel al-Jubeir discussed about the ramifications of JASTA and pointed out the negative impact on the diplomatic immunity of US interests. He said: “there are ways to fix the problem.” While experts agreed that it is only possible to reduce the strength of America in complaining by circumvent the law. 
+Even Saudi minister warned the danger of chaos in the international system. 
+According to Hussein ibish, an expert on the Persian Gulf littoral states, JASTA will cause chaos at the international level. 
+Last September, European Union warned: “Other countries may also want to pass similar legislation and discuss impunity. This threat was an addition written letters to US government. 
+Also France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom representatives discussed about the feedback of this law. The Gulf littoral states, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan and Japan Protested against JASTA. 
+The Saudi-US Relations in danger of Jasta 
+Bernard Haykel, Princeton University Professor, said: “If Saudi king does not appear in New York court to be interrogated, warrant will be issued against Saudi Arabia.” Riyadh and Washington relations declined over the past three years especially with Obama's policies on Syria.” JASTA shows Saudi ruling that Obama turned his back to its allies in the Middle East,” he added. 
+Riyadh strictly denies his involvement in 9/11, While 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia. Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, also comments:” America wants to invade his most loyal friend over the past 70 years.” 
+Jasta law does not refer to Saudi Arabia. It would allow families of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks to sue the perpetrators of the attack.",FAKE
+6383,Retracted Paper Linking HPV Vaccine to Behavioral Issues Republished,"More information about Gardasil Leaving a lucrative career as a nephrologist (kidney doctor), Dr. Suzanne Humphries is now free to actually help cure people. In this autobiography she explains why good doctors are constrained within the current corrupt medical system from practicing real, ethical medicine. FREE Shipping Available! Order here . Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced? eBook – Available for immediate download. 
+One of the biggest myths being propagated in the compliant mainstream media today is that doctors are either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and that the anti-vaccine doctors are all “quacks.” 
+However, nothing could be further from the truth in the vaccine debate. Doctors are not unified at all on their positions regarding “the science” of vaccines, nor are they unified in the position of removing informed consent to a medical procedure like vaccines. 
+The two most extreme positions are those doctors who are 100% against vaccines and do not administer them at all, and those doctors that believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective for ALL people, ALL the time, by force if necessary. 
+Very few doctors fall into either of these two extremist positions, and yet it is the extreme pro-vaccine position that is presented by the U.S. Government and mainstream media as being the dominant position of the medical field. 
+In between these two extreme views, however, is where the vast majority of doctors practicing today would probably categorize their position. Many doctors who consider themselves “pro-vaccine,” for example, do not believe that every single vaccine is appropriate for every single individual. 
+Many doctors recommend a “delayed” vaccine schedule for some patients, and not always the recommended one-size-fits-all CDC childhood schedule. Other doctors choose to recommend vaccines based on the actual science and merit of each vaccine, recommending some, while determining that others are not worth the risk for children, such as the suspect seasonal flu shot. 
+These doctors who do not hold extreme positions would be opposed to government-mandated vaccinations and the removal of all parental exemptions. 
+In this eBook, I am going to summarize the many doctors today who do not take the most extremist pro-vaccine position, which is probably not held by very many doctors at all, in spite of what the pharmaceutical industry, the federal government, and the mainstream media would like the public to believe. Read : Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced? on your mobile device!",FAKE
+8488,Ivana Says Young Donald Trump Was A Cry-Baby – Has Anything Changed? (VIDEO),"Ivana Says Young Donald Trump Was A Cry-Baby – Has Anything Changed? (VIDEO) By Carrie MacDonald on October 27, 2016 Subscribe 
+Ivana Trump, the first wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, confirmed what many of us have been thinking for a long time now: Trump is a childish buffoon. Her story of a young Donald Trump on the ski slopes is telling of the temperament we see in the nominee now. Ivana Trump: ‘He Could Not Take It’ 
+Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio spoke with Ivana Trump about her marriage to The Donald, and she remembered a time he took her skiing. This was early on, before they married, and one would think Donald would want to show his best side, right? 
+No. 
+You see, Ivana neglected to tell the young Donald Trump that she was a very accomplished skier. According to Ivana Trump, Donald skied down the slope first, and then: “… He goes and stops, and he says, ‘Come on, baby. Come on, baby.’ I went up. I went two flips up in the air, two flips in front of him. I disappeared. Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant. He could not take it. He could not take it.” 
+She said he stormed off, saying: “I’m not going to do this for anybody, including Ivana.” 
+We all know by now that Donald Trump is a man who doesn’t like to lose. Ever. He is a man easily baited, easily goaded, and he has the temper of a petulant child. His outbursts have sparked the hashtag #trumpertantrum . 
+Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was correct when she said, in her speech at the Democratic National Convention: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” 
+Nor is a man who storms off in a huff when bested by his girlfriend on the ski slopes. Donald Trump: ‘I Loved To Fight’ 
+D’Antonio also said that Donald told him how he loved a good fight. “I loved to fight. I always loved to fight. All types of fights. Any kind of fight, I loved it, including physical.” 
+There’s a word for people who act like that: Bully. 
+Of course, Trump has put his childish, bullying ways on display for the world during this election cycle. Ivana just happened to be one of his earlier victims. 
+Watch their appearance on Oprah in 1988, when Trump said she does what he tells her to do: 
+Featured image via screenshot from YouTube video About Carrie MacDonald 
+Carrie is a progressive mom and wife living in the upper Midwest. Connect",FAKE
+1254,The Clintons really don’t get it: False attacks and failed strategies as Hillary repeats 2008,"If you get your news from cable TV you don’t know any of this. Whatever their age or gender, cable reporters still cover politics like cigar-chomping old men poring over racing forms. History was made under their noses and they still spent the night talking win, place or show, obsessed by the order of finish in the crowded middle of a lame Republican pack. It was a coming out party for a political revolution, but Gil Scott Heron had it right: The revolution will not be televised.
+
+Sanders made history even by the metrics of horse-race journalism. He had the most votes (155,578), biggest vote share (60.4 percent) and biggest margin in a contested race (22.4 percent) of any candidate of either party in New Hampshire primary history. As in Iowa, he outperformed late polls by more than their alleged margins of error. Sanders won 55 percent of women, a stunning 84 percent of voters under 30, and 92 percent of those who say the trait they prize most in a politician is honesty.
+
+Clintonites said Sanders had home-court advantage. (If you buy that excuse, just ask a friend to name a senator from a neighboring state.) Hillary may be the world’s best-known politician after Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and her husband. It gives her an overwhelming head start in every state but Vermont, which is why she began New Hampshire 30 points up. They made other lame justifications for their loss, but after the flood there was nothing left to spin.
+
+How Clinton lost is as telling as the historic margin she lost by. Just as in 2008, she presented as a hawk to a party bone-weary of war. Now as then, her high-dollar, tone-deaf, leak-prone campaign telegraphed every punch. Her backers harp on her experience — but experience only counts if you learn from it. Eight years later, Clinton makes the exact same mistakes. Still, party elites have bet the farm she’ll have it all sorted out by October. Dangerous wager.
+
+She isn’t learning from this race, either. Her response to New Hampshire has been to double-down on her strategy. How such a bright person could be such a slow learner is a mystery. Her worst moments prior to New Hampshire were her ham-handed attempts to take down Sanders. Chelsea distorted his healthcare plans, Bill ripped his character. Hillary accused him of an “artful smear” for suggesting, obviously, that banks give to super PACs to influence policy. She voiced “concern” over reports he’d mingled with real live lobbyists at Democratic fundraisers. But to many voters the Clintons attacking Sanders’ integrity was like draft-avoider George W. Bush swift-boating Purple Heart-winner John Kerry — except this time it backfired, and her whole family took the hit.
+
+At this point she might have decided to curtail the personal attacks, but alas, no. In a public television debate two days after the primary, she waited till the last second to launch an attack, this time on Sanders’ alleged disloyalty to Obama. It seems this will be a principal theme going forward, so in case you missed, a sample:
+
+Much of this is flat-out false; all is shorn of context and rife with what Politifact called “half-truths.” Bill Press wrote a book criticizing Obama, but Sanders didn’t write the foreword (just a blurb that doesn’t criticize Obama). He never called Obama weak or a disappointment, though he once said Obama showed weakness in budget negotiations. Talking to a radio host who wanted Obama primaried, Sanders said open debate was a good thing. But notice in the above quote how Clinton, the Mary Lou Retton of syntax, made it seem Sanders said all these things.
+
+When Clinton at last holstered her weapon, moderators Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill, who’d done yeoman’s work to that point, said there wasn’t time for Sanders to answer her final fusillade, but that he could do so in his closing remarks. Off balance for the first time all night, he split the difference, which made for a weak finish to an otherwise strong performance. Too bad; he deserved a chance at a full rebuttal even if it meant shaving a minute or two off “Antiques Roadshow.”
+
+Clinton’s playing an explosive game, especially since she herself spent much of 2015 sniping at Obama. When Obama described his foreign policy as “Don’t do stupid stuff,” she ridiculed him. When he wouldn’t violate international law by declaring a no-fly zone in Syria, she broke with him. She talks a lot about being commander in chief. She must know it’s hard to be one when your old secretary of state is taking shots at you. Ironically enough, on foreign policy Sanders has been more loyal to Obama than Clinton, but the irony doesn’t end there.
+
+As Hillary laced into Sanders, Bill was miles away lacing into Obama. In a listless swipe at the banking system, he said, “Yeah, it’s rigged, because you don’t have a president who’s a change maker.” It’s what Hillary accuses Bernie of saying. (Note too, the tacit admission that Bernie’s right on Dodd Frank.) All in all, Hillary looks cunning, not loyal. Because integrity is for her what intelligence was for Dan Quayle, she can ill afford to appear hypocritical or be caught doctoring the truth.
+
+Clinton’s ad hominem attacks — call it the politics of personal destruction — poison the air around her. Just before New Hampshire, deservedly beloved feminist icon Gloria Steinem told Bill Maher that young women join Sanders’ campaign to meet guys. Steinem got taken to the Internet woodshed for making a lighthearted, self-deprecating joke, on a comedy show, no less, but only because the tone of Clinton’s campaign is so rancid. Clinton must see how her scorched-earth policy hurts her family, her friends and her campaign, but for her there’s never any turning back.
+
+In another reminder of 2008, Clinton has added race to the mix. On primary night on CNN, Clinton ally Michael Nutter slyly accused Sanders of subtle racism, terming his call for criminal justice reform “mildly offensive” because, Nutter falsely charged, Sanders never talks about other African-American issues. For some reason— it can’t be ratings — CNN lets commentators with clear conflicts of interest mouth thinly veiled partisan message. This is worse. Nutter is no more “offended” than Hillary is “concerned” or Bill “shocked” to discover trolls on the Internet. They want us to think Bernie does what they do, but of course he doesn’t. Lots of African-Americans live in upcoming primary states. Because they are the firewall Clinton hopes will save her, she’ll ratchet this up as high as she can. Last week the Congressional Black Caucus PAC endorsed her. Asked about Sanders’ civil rights record, Rep. John Lewis dryly replied, “I never met him,” and went on to praise Clinton for her close ties to African-American politicians. Lewis is a hero to me and to millions. Nothing he says or does in a campaign could change that. But Bernie deserves better. It’s been reported that he and Sanders did meet when Bernie was the sole white member on hand for a hearing Lewis held on voter suppression. Or he might have bumped into him back in the day, when a young Bernie joined the Congress of Racial Equality and braved jail to protest segregated housing in Chicago. The real problem with the Black Caucus PAC endorsement isn’t anything Lewis said, but the way Washington works. Only seven of 46 caucus members voted on the caucus endorsement but 11 lobbyists voted, including at least two tobacco and two healthcare industry lobbyists. Like the Iowa Democratic Party, the PAC won’t reveal the tally — but we know at least two of the seven actual members voted no. On Friday we learned that DNC chairwoman and Clinton lifer Debbie Wasserman Schultz ended Obama’s ban on federal contractors donating to the party. (So much for loyalty to Obama.) On Wednesday we learned Clinton will get a majority of New Hampshire delegates despite losing in a landslide. Schultz told CNN the reason 700 unelected superdelegates get to vote at the convention is to spare grass-roots activists the burden of having to primary them. No matter how much money Schultz wrings from contractors or how many superdelegates Clinton piles up in states Sanders wins, it won’t equal the price they pay for such cynicism. To the extent Clinton gets away with it, she can thank a media nearly as out of touch as she is. Newspapers beat TV for analysis, but the gap narrows every year, and not because TV is getting better. Elite reporters reflect the elite consensus, which accounts for such recent Washington Post headlines as “Democrats Would Be Insane to Nominate Sanders” and “Sanders’ Oddball Coalition Savors Its Victory.” It may explain the boffo reviews of Clinton’s PBS debate performance, as in the Times headline, “Analysis: Clinton Is Cool, Calm and Effective.” Pundits praised her superior grasp of policy partly out of habit– it was true of earlier debates– but also because it’s how they see the world. They should read the transcript. If anything, Bernie does the better job of explaining how he’d fund his programs. Hillary won’t say how she’d pay for Social Security. She says she has a universal healthcare plan but she doesn’t. She has a laundry list of programs, one for each demographic, all with unanswered questions about implementation, effectiveness and affordability. The most striking thing about the debate, other than the low blow Clinton struck at the end of the last round, was that Sanders got the better of her on foreign policy. Has any other presidential candidate ever told the American people that Iran doesn’t “hate us for our freedom” but because we engineered the violent overthrow of their democratically elected president and installed a vicious tyrant in his place? The rest of the world knows, why not us?  Is Clinton’s jingoism about not talking to Iran the signal we want to send to thousands of Iranians who joyously took to the streets to celebrate the nuclear weapons pact? Shouldn’t Clinton’s airbrushing of the hyper-secretive, lawbreaking Kissinger concern us? Has anyone but Bernie ever said Henry Kissinger’s China opening may have cost us some jobs? Clinton mocks him for citing her Iraq vote but he now casts a wider net. Pundits citing her foreign policy cred should feel honor-bound to tell us why she’s right and he’s wrong. The press doesn’t understand any better than Hillary what made New Hampshire historic. They’re great at figuring out who’s ahead in South Carolina, but awful at grasping — let alone conveying –the terms of the new debate. It’s too soon to describe that debate whole, but among Democrats at least it has begun to clarify. A word about it, and what it means to this race. Thirty years ago, reeling from the Reagan Revolution, elite Democrats rebranded their party, which had long championed both economic and cultural liberalism. They kept cultural liberalism, but ditched economic liberalism for “neoliberalism”; a blend of economic deregulation, free trade, smaller government and targeted tax cuts. Few said it out loud, but it was the end of the Roosevelt coalition, which had been built on economic issues of universal appeal and which had lasted 50 years. Neoliberalism appeals to the rich. Neoliberal Bill Clinton was the first Democratic presidential nominee to outspend a Republican. In 2008 Obama outspent John McCain 2-to-1, breaking a record set in 1972 by Richard Nixon. But neoliberalism is killing the middle class. It’s why both parties rely on cultural issues to hold their bases. If you back abortion rights, same sex marriage and gun safety you’re a Democrat. If not, you’re a Republican. On economic issues it’s more complex. If you hate big banks and political corruption, you could be for Sanders or Trump. It’s why Sanders talks so much about these things; they’re what the election’s all about. When Clinton isn’t calling Sanders a traitor, she says she shares his goals. But she doesn’t. Clinton was part of the neoliberal revolt that destroyed the Roosevelt coalition and she is as we’ve seen, a woman of markedly fixed views. She may be Obama’s heir, but Sanders is FDR’s. She campaigns as she does out of habit, and to hide the very real choice. The neoliberal experiment is over. Democrats, proud heirs to Franklin Roosevelt, are ready to come home.",REAL
+2135,Climate-change deniers are in retreat,"There is no denying it: Climate-change deniers are in retreat.
+
+What began as a subtle shift away from the claim that man-made global warming is not a threat to the planet has lately turned into a stampede. The latest attempt to deny denial comes from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful group that pushes for states to pass laws that are often drafted by industry. As my Post colleagues Tom Hamburger, Joby Warrick and Chris Mooney report, ALEC is not only insisting that it doesn’t deny climate change — it’s threatening to sue those who suggest otherwise.
+
+The group, which suffered the highly visible defection of Google because of its global-warming stance and an exodus of other top corporate members, sent letters to Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters instructing them to “remove all false or misleading material” alleging ALEC questions global-warming theory.
+
+The problem for ALEC is that as recently as 2013, it was still reaffirming “model legislation” calling on states to consider “legitimate and scientifically defensible alternative hypotheses” to the “mainstream scientific positions” on climate. The proposed legislation states that there is “a great deal of scientific uncertainty” about the matter and suggests states treat possible beneficial effects of carbon “in an evenhanded manner.”
+
+The turnabout at ALEC follows an about-face at the Heartland Institute, a libertarian outfit that embraces a description of it as “the world’s most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change.”
+
+But on Christmas Eve, Justin Haskins, a blogger and editor at Heartland, penned an article for the conservative journal Human Events declaring: “The real debate is not whether man is, in some way, contributing to climate change; it’s true that the science is settled on that point in favor of the alarmists.”
+
+Haskins called it “a rather extreme position to say that we ought to allow dangerous pollutants to destroy the only planet we know of that can completely sustain human life,” and he suggested work on “technologies that can reduce CO2 emissions without destroying whole economies.”
+
+To be sure, this is a tactical retreat, and you shouldn’t expect conservative groups to start lining up in favor of a carbon tax. Rather, they’re resorting to more defensible arguments that don’t make them sound like flat-earthers. My Post colleagues quoted energy lobbyist Scott Segal saying that “the science issue just isn’t as salient as it once was.” Instead, Segal talks about the cost and viability of proposed regulations.
+
+It’s likely no coincidence that the shift is occurring as the Obama administration approaches a June target to finalize rules on power-plant emissions. Those who oppose regulation are wise to abandon a position that holds little public appeal; a healthy majority of Americans accept that global warming is real, and a New York Times poll earlier this year found that even half of Republicans support government action to address it.
+
+More and more conservative officeholders are embracing the “I am not a scientist” agnosticism on climate change rather than skepticism. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and presidential candidates Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio have adopted this response, and Rubio has joined Mitt Romney and Chuck Grassley in embracing the less assailable position that U.S. efforts to restrict carbon are pointless without similar efforts across the globe.
+
+Certainly, figures such as Senate Environment Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe (who calls man-made warming a “hoax”) and presidential candidate Ted Cruz (who fancies himself a modern-day Galileo opposing the “global-warming alarmists”) are not about to change. But as corporations abandon the untenable position of denial, ideologues will be forced to do the same.
+
+As my Post colleagues noted, Southern Co., an operator of coal-fired power plants, decided to drop funding for a Smithsonian scientist who challenged climate-change theory but failed to disclose that his work was funded by fossil-fuel interests. ALEC’s declining skepticism also comes as even oil companies such as Occidental Petroleum and BP quit the group.
+
+At ALEC’s December meeting, a climate-change contrarian got applause for declaring in his presentation that “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a benefit. It is the very elixir of life.”
+
+For politicians and climate-denial groups, the elixir of life is money. Now that corporations are becoming reluctant to bankroll crazy theories, the surrender of climate-change deniers will follow.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+7246,15 Civilians Killed In Single US Airstrike Have Been Identified,"Videos 15 Civilians Killed In Single US Airstrike Have Been Identified The rate at which civilians are being killed by American airstrikes in Afghanistan is now higher than it was in 2014 when the US was engaged in active combat operations.   Photo of Hellfire missiles being loaded onto a US military Reaper drone in Afghanistan by Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson/U.S. Air Force. 
+The Bureau has been able to identify 15 civilians killed in a single US drone strike in Afghanistan last month – the biggest loss of civilian life in one strike since the attack on the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital (MSF) last October. 
+The US claimed it had conducted a “counter-terrorism” strike against Islamic State (IS) fighters when it hit Nangarhar province with missiles on September 28. But the next day the United Nations issued an unusually rapid and strong statement saying the strike had killed 15 civilians and injured 13 others who had gathered at a house to celebrate a tribal elder’s return from a pilgrimage to Mecca. 
+The Bureau spoke to a man named Haji Rais who said he was the owner of the house that was targeted. He said 15 people were killed and 19 others injured, and provided their names (listed below). The Bureau was able to independently verify the identities of those who died. 
+Rais’ son, a headmaster at a local school, was among them. Another man, Abdul Hakim, lost three of his sons in the attack. 
+Rais said he had no involvement with IS and denied US claims that IS members had visited his house before the strike. He said: “I did not even speak to those sort of people on the phone let alone receiving them in my house.” 
+The deaths amount to the biggest confirmed loss of civilian life in a single American strike in Afghanistan since the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz last October, which killed at least 42 people. 
+The Nangarhar strike was not the only US attack to kill civilians in September. The Bureau’s data indicates that as many as 45 civilians and allied soldiers were killed in four American strikes in Afghanistan and Somalia that month. 
+On September 18 a pair of strikes killed eight Afghan policemen in Tarinkot, the capital of Urozgan provice. US jets reportedly hit a police checkpoint, killing one officer, before returning to target first responders. The use of this tactic – known as a “double-tap” strike – is controversial because they often hit civilian rescuers. 
+The US told the Bureau it had conducted the strike against individuals firing on and posing a threat to Afghan forces. The email did not directly address the allegations of Afghan policemen being killed. 
+At the end of the month in Somalia, citizens burnt US flags on the streets of the north-central city of Galcayo after it emerged a drone attack may have unintentionally killed 22 Somali soldiers and civilians. The strike occurred on the same day as the one in Nangarhar. 
+In both the Somali and Afghan incidents, the US at first denied that any non-combatants had been killed. It is now investigating both the strikes in Nangarhar and Galcayo. 
+The rate at which civilians are being killed by American airstrikes in Afghanistan is now higher than it was in 2014 when the US was engaged in active combat operations. Name",FAKE
+1540,Cruz and Trump battle for the South,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+10062,FBI Releases Files on Bill Clinton's Cash for Pardons Scandal,"FBI Releases Files on Bill Clinton's Cash for Pardons Scandal November 1, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
+The FBI has an early present for Hillary Clinton. It's the files from the time her husband decided to pardon a wanted fugitive in exchange for cash. That fugitive was a fellow by the name of Marc Rich. His prosecutor? James Comey. 
+The FBI unexpectedly released 129 pages of documents related to an investigation closed without charges in 2005 into President Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, who had been married to a wealthy Democratic donor. 
+The unusual timing of the release was the result of a Freedom of Information Act request that had been completed and was posted under standard FBI practice, according to a law enforcement official who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. But the Clinton campaign immediately questioned the timing of the release. 
+Well of course it did. It's never especially wise to pick fights with people who have a lot of dirt on you. 
+The investigation stemmed from one of several pardons Clinton made on the last day of his presidency in 2001, that of financier and international fugitive Marc Rich, whose ex-wife Denise had given to the Democratic National Committee and the entity that would later become the Clinton Foundation. 
+And there's a surprise guest. 
+While the files may seem dated, they invoke figures beyond the Clintons who went on to play key roles in official Washington -- including Comey. 
+He served as prosecutor in charge of a legal case against Rich from 1987 to 1993. As the U.S. attorney in Manhattan in 2002, Comey took over a criminal investigation of Clinton’s pardons. “I was stunned” at the Rich pardon, Comey wrote in a letter to lawmakers in 2008. 
+Clinton's people are fuming, but it was a standard FIOA request and there's nothing big here. It's just one of those things the Clintons should have gone to jail for. But didn't. Another of those.",FAKE
+10071,Another Black Swan Hits the U.S. Presidential Election,"at 1:43 pm 3 Comments 
+By now, everyone on planet earth has heard about the bombshell news just announced by the FBI that it was re-opening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Here’s the text of FBI head James Comey’s letter to Congressional leaders. 
+Obviously, lots of people are out there pontificating on what, if anything, this means. As such, I’m going to add my two cents to the conversation. 
+I’ve prided myself on unemotionally calling this election how I see it the whole time, because I’m neither a Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump supporter. Being free of the tremendous baggage that comes with cheerleading a particular candidate in this contentious election, I had consistently predicted a Trump victory until the Access Hollywood tape emerged. At that point I penned a thought-piece titled, Donald Trump is in Trouble – Part 2 , in which I changed my forecast to a Hillary Clinton victory. 
+Here’s some of what I wrote: 
+After watching yesterday’s audio and reading through the Wikileaks revelations, my prediction has changed for the first time this election. All things equal from here on out (meaning no additional huge revelations against Hillary), I think Hillary Clinton will defeat Donald Trump. I don’t think it’s going to be a landslide, but I think she’s probably going to win. The audio was very harmful for Donald Trump, and now I’m going to explain why. 
+First of all, if you want to accurately forecast the outcome of this election you need to get into the minds of the masses. Just like trading financial markets, what you think is right doesn’t matter. What matters is what everyone else collectively thinks, and whether or not they’re going to get off their asses and vote. A big part of why I thought Trump would win related to the fact that I believe many people were simply looking for an excuse to vote for him. Justified disgust with the status quo in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular, pushed millions of Americans into the camp of being willing to take a gamble on Trump despite disliking him personally and disagreeing with him on many issues. I felt strongly that there were millions upon millions of Americans you could place into this category — people who were “flirting with the idea of voting Trump.” I believe a significant amount of these people will not vote for him as a result of the audio. Will it be the majority of them? Probably not, but it will be a material number and arguably enough to swing the election. No, I don’t think these voters will shift to Hillary, and no, I don’t think committed Trump voters will change their minds. However, I do think enough of these willing to be convinced, leaning-Trump types will now stay home or vote third party. It’s these voters who I expected to swing the election in Trump’s favor, and they are now unreliable. 
+Does Trump’s vulgarity excuse the incalculable crimes of Hillary Clinton and her husband, making them preferable in this election? No it doesn’t, but that’s not the point of this article. Most voters are too superficial, too busy trying to survive and too uninformed to weigh all the very important issues rationally. As an example, think about how most conversations are going to go down this weekend. Let’s say you’re out with a bunch of friends for drinks tonight. Someone says, “so have you seen the Trump audio?” If someone in the group hasn’t, someone will pull out their phone and it’ll be watched in 3 minutes. What if someone then says, “yeah, but have you seen the leaked Hillary emails?” What will your response be? You can’t adequately explain the importance of that to your friends in 3 minutes. Instead, you’ll have to send them a lengthy article that they’ll never read. So by the end of this weekend, pretty much everyone in America will have heard the Trump audio, while maybe 10% will take the time to analyze what came out of Wikileaks. There goes your election. 
+Understanding the craziness of the election, I finished the piece with the following. 
+Despite all of that, I still can’t say with certainty that Hillary will win. However, I do think the landscape has changed enough, that for the first time this entire election season, I am no longer confident of a Trump victory. Then again, I was absolutely convinced that Hillary was unelectable after she collapsed on 9/11 and mislead everyone about her health, and I was wrong about that. That’s how completely crazy this election is, and there’s still a month to go. Anything can happen, particularly with the debate coming up this Sunday. So while it’s certainly not out of the question, there will have to be some very material events over the next month to put Trump back in the driver’s seat. 
+While the Wikileaks emails have been an important factor in keeping this race close, I didn’t think they were sufficient to alter my forecast of a Clinton victory. I think the reopening of the FBI investigation is enough of a black swan to materially change the course of this race. 
+Clinton supporters will read this and think I’m insane. They will think this because they are anticipating a landslide victory for Hillary. I never expected a landslide, so I think this news tips the election into a total tossup situation. My reasoning for the change is the same that led me to switch my forecast to Hillary after the Access Hollywood video was released. The primary reason I initially thought Trump would win related to the fact I believed enough people would be willing to vote for a person they don’t really like in order to blow up the status quo. I felt that the video recording of Trump’s vulgar commentary was enough to put those people into the absentee or third party column, despite millions of Americans looking for an excuse to vote for Trump due to the well understood awfulness of Hillary. This has changed, and voters now have the excuse they needed to vote Trump. 
+That reason is simple. The problems with Hillary Clinton will never go away. They will always resurface or new problems will emerge, and it has nothing to do with a “vast rightwing conspiracy” (or Putin). It has to do with her. It has to do with the fact that her and her husband are career crooks, warmongers, and shameless looters of the American public. This re-opening of the FBI investigation just hammers all of that home for everyone. We know what 4 years of Hillary will look like. It’ll be Obama cronyism on steroids, plus endless investigations with a side of World War 3. I don’t think people want that, and so more Americans than the pundits realize will take a gamble on Trump. 
+As a caveat, the above forecast assumes this new FBI investigation is not closed before November 8th. If it is, I think she’ll win. If not, I think Trump has even odds to win, if not better. 
+Of course, with 11 days left in this crazy election, many more black swans could emerge. Stay tuned. 
+In Liberty,",FAKE
+152,"Supreme Court, Trump engulf Capitol Hill","Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
+7616,Comment on Donald Trump Tells Veterans He’s ‘Financially Brave’ by Debbie Menon,"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. Donald Trump Tells Veterans He’s ‘Financially Brave’ By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 5, 2016 Also questioned whether Hillary would make a good commander-in-chief. ""To think of her being their boss, I don't think so."" Find Your Job Now at HireVeterans.com 
+By Tessa Berenson 
+Speaking in front of decorated veterans at a foreign-policy focused rally, Trump said members of the military are “so much braver” than he is. 
+“They’re so much braver than me. I wouldn’t have done what they did,” Trump said, going off-script in a foreign-policy focused address Thursday evening in Selma, NC. “I’m brave in other ways. I’m financially brave.” 
+The Republican nominee also argued that the ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State should make the military wary of promoting her to Commander-in-Chief. 
+Read the Full Article at time.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on November 5, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments",FAKE
+2468,Estimated Enrollees for 2015 Health Care Decrease,"About 9.9 million people will sign up to have coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges in 2015, millions fewer than outside experts predicted. Louise Radnofsky reports. Photo: Healthcare.gov.
+
+WASHINGTON—The Obama administration said Monday it expects up to 9.9 million people to have private coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges in 2015, millions fewer than outside experts had predicted.
+
+The exchanges, which reopen Saturday for the law’s second year of health-insurance enrollment, previously were expected to enroll 13 million people in private coverage for 2015, according to an April 2014...",REAL
+6461,George And Laura Bush Celebrate Their 70th Birthdays | Daily Wire,"George And Laura Bush Celebrate Their 70th Birthdays By: Hank Berrien October 26, 2016 
+On Saturday, former president George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush celebrated their 70th birthdays together in Crawford, Texas. 
+President Bush’s birthday was July 6, and Laura’s is on November 4. 
+Some of the attendees included former commerce secretary Donald Evans, Dallas Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones, and Ross Perot Jr., the son of H. Ross Perot. George Strait performed, and sang “Happy Birthday,” per People. Typical of Bush’s down-home style, he wore jeans, a western-style shirt and a prominent belt buckle. 
+The dinner included an avocado and grapefruit salad, Mesquite smoked peppered beef tenderloin, Southern fried catfish, roasted corn and poblano pudding, bourbon carrots, and cheddar and black pepper biscuits. The dessert was a Texas chocolate sheet cake. 
+Bush also invited guests to his art studio at the ranch, dubbed Studio 43, where he works on his paintings. 
+Laura Bush was working as a librarian in the Austin Independent School District when she met George in 1977; their friends Joe and Jan O'Neill invited them to a barbecue. They were married in November 1977 at the First United Methodist Church in Midland, where she had been baptized. She wore a tan, two-toned dress she had bought off the rack. 
+George W. Bush later called his proposal to his wife the ""best decision of my life."" Laura, an only child, said she gained ""brothers and sisters and wonderful in-laws"" and made her feel part of the family. Tags ",FAKE
+8444,"Trump accuses Obama, Hillary Clinton of founding Daesh","Email US President Barack Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “founded” the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group in the Middle East region, according to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Addressing supporters at a rally in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, on Wednesday, Trump said Daesh is ""honoring President Obama."" “He’s the founder of ISIS. He's the founder! He founded ISIS,” the real estate tycoon said, using an alternative acronym for the terrorist group. “I would say the co-founder would be ‘Crooked’ Hillary Clinton,” Trump added. He went on to criticize Obama’s decision to withdraw American military forces from Iraq and leaving behind a void for Daesh terrorists to fill. “We should never have gotten out the way we got out,” he said. “We unleashed terrible fury all over the Middle East."" “Instead of allowing some small forces behind to maybe, just maybe, keep it under control, we pulled it out,” he continued. Daesh terrorists, many of whom were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, still control parts of Iraq and Syria. They have been engaged in crimes against humanity in areas under their control. They have been carrying out horrific acts of violence such as public decapitations and crucifixions against all communities, including Shia and Sunni Muslims, Kurds, and Christians. In a statement last week, Mike Pence, Trump’s vice presidential candidate, also said that the policies of Obama and Clinton led to the rise of Daesh. He blamed Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for the “disastrous decisions” that led to the death of Captain Humayun Khan in Iraq. On July 28, Captain Khan’s father, Khizr Khan, addressed the Democratic National Convention, denouncing Trump as unpatriotic and selfish over his statements against immigrants and Muslims.",FAKE
+8731,Clinton emails: FBI director ignored Attorney General's advice not to 'take action that could influence election',"Trending Articles: Trending Articles: Clinton emails: FBI director ignored Attorney General's advice not to 'take action that could influence election'   Source: The Independent 
+FBI director James Comey reportedly ignored the advice of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who urged him not to thrust the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s emails back into headlines less than a fortnight from election day. 
+US Department of Justice officials, Democrats and even some Republicans were said to be aghast at the timing of the FBI’s announcement, on Friday, that it was reviewing a fresh cache of emails, which Mr Comey said may be “pertinent” to the investigation into Ms Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State. 
+According to a report from the New Yorker , Ms Lynch “expressed her preference” that Mr Comey uphold the Justice Department's “longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election.” The FBI director, however, “said that he felt compelled to do otherwise.” 
+Writing in the Washington Post , former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Mr Comey’s decision was a “troubling violation of long-standing Justice Department rules or precedent, conduct that raises serious questions about his judgment and ability to serve as the nation’s chief investigative official.” 
+The emails were discovered “in connection with an unrelated case,” the FBI director wrote in a letter to Republican congressional committee chairs on Friday. That separate case, it later emerged, concerns disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner , who is under investigation for allegedly sending explicit messages to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. 
+Mr Weiner is the estranged husband of Ms Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin , and the emails were found on one or more electronic devices belonging to the couple, which had been seized as part of the Weiner probe. The FBI is now investigating whether those emails contained any classified information.",FAKE
+3265,McCain in toughest Senate fight of his life,"Eight years after he was the Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain appears headed toward his toughest re-election fight yet, in no small part because of presumptive GOP presidential standard-bearer Donald Trump.
+
+Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, the Democratic Senate candidate who is neck-and-neck with McCain in polls, has relentlessly gone after McCain for the senator’s support – no matter how tepid – of Trump.
+
+McCain has hardly shown enthusiasm for Trump, only saying he would support the party’s nominee (while planning to skip the GOP convention in Cleveland). And he’s privately warned that Trump could hurt his own bid. Politico reported on audio from a fundraiser where McCain is heard saying, “If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30 percent of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life.”
+
+But Kirkpatrick’s campaign is hammering any connection it can between McCain and Trump, settling for nothing short of denunciation by the sitting senator.
+
+“John McCain’s supporting Donald Trump despite declaring Trump ‘dangerous’ and characterizing Trump's supporters as ‘crazies,’” Kirkpatrick campaign spokesman D.B. Mitchell told FoxNews.com. “It's clear McCain's 'straight talk' days are over.”
+
+McCain’s campaign, meanwhile, has blasted Kirkpatrick as “siding with the liberal establishment.”
+
+The race is a snapshot of the conflicted relationship high-profile Republican candidates across the country could have with the presumptive presidential nominee. The jury is out on whether, on balance, he would help or hurt congressional candidates.
+
+But for McCain, Trump’s impact is even being felt in the Republican primary.
+
+One of his opponents, Alex Meluskey, a businessman and talk radio host, cited an internal campaign poll showing most respondents would be more likely to vote for a businessman who never ran for office over a career politician – and claimed the “Trump phenomenon” would be good for him.
+
+“Any time you have an outsider businessman, that absolutely favors us,” Meluskey told FoxNews.com.
+
+McCain also is facing opposition from Kelli Ward, a doctor who resigned her state Senate seat last year to run full time for the U.S. Senate. She is touting a resounding GOP straw poll victory over McCain earlier this month at the Arizona Republican State Convention and is pushing a campaign theme of “bold, fresh and fearless,” to contrast McCain’s status as a longtime Washington insider.
+
+The Republican primary is Aug. 30, just one day after McCain turns 80.
+
+But it’s the expected November race that’s causing headaches for the senator this year. During his five decisive Senate victories, the relatively moderate McCain has rarely had a real challenge in the general election.
+
+“He usually has more concern in the state over who his primary challenger will be,"" Barbara Norrander, a political science professor at the University of Arizona, told FoxNews.com. “Democrats have had a hard time recruiting someone viable to oppose him.”
+
+This year could be different. A Merrill Poll in March found McCain leading Kirkpatrick by just one point, while a Behavior Research Center poll in April showed the two tied at 42-42 percent.
+
+Kirkpatrick, a former Arizona state legislator, was first elected to the House in 2008. She was voted out of office during the Republican wave of 2010, then ran again and won in 2012 – and withstood another Republican wave in 2014 to keep her seat.
+
+McCain has more than $5.5 million cash on hand, according to the Federal Election Commission. That overwhelms every other opponent, as Kirkpatrick has $1.3 million, Ward has $210,792 and Meluskey has $163,764, according to FEC reports as of March 31.
+
+The McCain campaign is going after Kirkpatrick for her support of ObamaCare, and says Arizonans are facing a 21 percent increase in health insurance deductibles, while 59,000 Arizonans lost their insurance when the state’s co-op was removed from the federal marketplace.
+
+“Even as independent analysts predict a dramatic rise in health care costs and more insurers contemplate exiting a crumbling marketplace, Congresswoman Kirkpatrick offers no solutions for the people of Arizona,” McCain campaign spokeswoman Lorna Romero said in a statement. “Instead, she is siding with the liberal establishment and ducking questions about President Obama’s failed health care law.”
+
+On the issue McCain fears could be troublesome because of Trump, he and Kirkpatrick both agree on a pathway to citizenship for some 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, but clash on the so-called Dream Act. Further, Kirkpatrick doesn’t necessarily have an automatic advantage with Hispanic voters.
+
+The U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce endorsed McCain in April. Last year, the liberal group Emily’s List, backing Kirkpatrick, criticized another Latino coalition endorsing McCain as a “taco shop,” and said McCain put on a “sombrero to pander.” The Arizona Republic editorial board denounced the Emily’s List stereotypes.",REAL
+10151,Trump: I’m Reopening 9/11 Investigation,"Trump: I’m Reopening 9/11 Investigation
+If this account is true–unless Trump merely intends to blame the Saudis which would be a continuation of the cover-up in different clothes–the CIA, Mossad, and the neocon nazis will kill him before he is inaugerated. 
+http://investmentwatchblog.com/trump-im-reopening-911-investigation/ 
+The post Trump: I’m Reopening 9/11 Investigation appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+1415,6 Questions Ahead Of The Trump-Fox Split-Screen 'Squirmish',"Donald Trump said this week if he went out on Fifth Avenue in New York and shot someone, he probably wouldn't lose any votes.
+
+He chose a pretty big someone — Fox News (whose offices are one block over from Fifth).
+
+Tune in to Thursday night's Republican debate on Fox (9 p.m. EST) in Iowa, the last one before Monday's caucuses, and you'll notice one very big elephant not in the room — Trump. The man who helped Fox to a record 24 million viewers in the first primary debate of this campaign season won't be there.
+
+He pulled out of the debate after getting into (what Trump-endorser Sarah Palin might call) a ""squirmish"" with Fox over its insistence on keeping anchor Megyn Kelly as a moderator. Trump thought Kelly treated him ""unfairly"" in the first debate. Fox didn't budge, and then mocked Trump, saying in a statement the network had ""learned from a back channel"" that Iran's and Russia's leaders were intent on treating Trump ""unfairly"" if he became president, and that Trump was planning on using ""his Twitter followers to see if he should"" go to Cabinet meetings.
+
+That was enough for Trump. He bailed, but upped the showmanship. He's holding his own alternative event — at the same time and just 3 miles away — a benefit for veterans. So, while Fox News hosts its debate, every other cable news network — which won't have broadcasting rights to the debate — will probably be airing the Trump event.
+
+No, this is not an ""Ambien Dream,"" as Karl Zahn, a New Hampshire stand-up comic (and Trump supporter) wondered aloud to New Hampshire Public Radio's Josh Rogers this week of Trump's campaign.
+
+This is very much real life. Here are some questions ahead of tonight's Split-Screen ""Squirmish"":
+
+1. How much does Trump talk about the debate, Fox News and the GOP?
+
+This isn't what the Republican Party wanted when it began sanctioning and limiting debates following the 2012 presidential election. And it certainly didn't expect a blow-up like this with Fox News, of all the networks. The Republican National Committee wanted to control the message and protect its candidates (and brand), but that hasn't worked out so well. Trump, as it turns out, has been a bigger force and commands a louder megaphone than anyone else in the party. Just how much will he use it Thursday night at his veterans event?
+
+2. Who exactly will Trump's event benefit — and how much will be raised?
+
+Charity events like this aren't exactly things that can be slapped together in 24 to 48 hours very efficiently. What will the energy be like? And who exactly will the money be going to? Trump has said maybe it should go to ""Wounded Warriors"" (the Wounded Warrior Project — the subject of controversy over its spending habits), but the press release just said a ""Special Event to Benefit Veterans Organizations.""
+
+3. What about the debate — how much will Trump come up?
+
+Trump won't even be at the debate, but he's already the dominant topic. There are two sides to this — the moderators and the candidates. You'd have to guess the moderators would have to say something about Trump's absence. (And no, there won't be an empty lectern, RNC spokesman Sean Spicer said on CNN Wednesday).
+
+And certainly a few candidates would like a free shot at Trump, especially his closest rival, Ted Cruz. The Texas senator even challenged Trump to a debate at a college in western Iowa on Saturday evening. And you know what they say about candidates who are asking for debates. (Hint: It comes as Cruz's poll numbers are slipping in the Hawkeye State.)
+
+4. Who grabs the spotlight instead?
+
+There are still lots of storylines to play out at this debate. Cruz will now be in the center of the stage, and that means he might be the one everyone winds up going after. In earlier debates, Cruz held back. In the last debate, he showed why he was a champion college debater. But who's his foil without Trump on the stage?
+
+Others need to break through, too. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has quietly remained in third in Iowa and in the top three in New Hampshire, but his path is still hard to see. Rubio has had plenty of differences on these stages with other candidates (Cruz, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, for example). Can he show why Democrats seem to fear a Rubio nomination more than any other candidate?
+
+This has been an election dominated by the outsiders, thanks to more hard-line conservatives fed up with the system. In years past, the party has gotten that out of its system in Iowa and establishment picks have eventually emerged. This year is pointing in a different direction, but there are still others trying to be viable in that ""establishment"" lane:
+
+— Ohio Gov. John Kasich is the latest to have some momentum in New Hampshire. This debate may be in Iowa, but it's being broadcast to a national audience. And you can bet Kasich's target will be some 1,300 miles east. On caucus night, he'll already be in the Granite State, not Iowa.
+
+— Bush has been on his last legs for a while, but he was more relaxed in the last debate. He has certainly taken on Trump, and he'll likely do so again, even if Trump's not on the stage.
+
+— Christie had a solid performance in his last debate. He'll probably mix it up again.
+
+6. Is Trump really the ""Teflon Don"" of this race?
+
+There's some risk for Trump in not going to the debate. He can look presumptuous, entitled and untouchable. Maybe he really is the ""Teflon Don"" of this race. It's certainly not what a typical front-runner would do. That candidate would play it safe, have a good debate and position himself to win the first two contests.
+
+But that's not Trump's style. He doesn't just play it big. He plays it HUGE. And that's what he's doing again. So, will Iowans feel snubbed? Or more precisely, will Iowans who have been supporting him to big numbers suddenly start to peel off? That's pretty unlikely. He can argue he's not snubbing Iowa; he's snubbing Fox, which in and of itself is pretty remarkable considering the role Fox plays in Republican politics and conservative circles.
+
+Some candidate might figure out a way to use Trump's absence as an opportunity. But the likelihood, again, is Trump will spin this into a win, as the other candidates are forced to participate in a game without the star player whom everyone came to see.",REAL
+2172,This is why they hate us: The real American history neither Ted Cruz nor the New York Times will tell you,"U.S. politicians rarely acknowledge this odious past — let alone acknowledge that such policies continue well into the present day.
+
+In the second Democratic presidential debate, however, candidate Bernie Sanders condemned a long-standing government policy his peers rarely admit exists.
+
+“I think we have a disagreement,” Sanders said of fellow presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “And the disagreement is that not only did I vote against the war in Iraq. If you look at history, you will find that regime change — whether it was in the early ’50s in Iran, whether it was toppling Salvador Allende in Chile, or whether it was overthrowing the government of Guatemala way back when — these invasions, these toppling of governments, regime changes have unintended consequences. I would say that on this issue I’m a little bit more conservative than the secretary.”
+
+“I am not a great fan of regime changes,” Sanders added.
+
+“Regime change” is not a phrase you hear discussed honestly much in Washington, yet it is a common practice in and defining feature of U.S. foreign policy for well over a century. For many decades, leaders from both sides of the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, have pursued a bipartisan strategy of violently overthrowing democratically elected foreign governments that do not kowtow to U.S. orders.
+
+In the debate, Sanders addressed three examples of U.S. regime change. There are scores of examples of American regime change, yet these are perhaps the most infamous instances.
+
+Iran was once a secular democracy. You would not know this from contemporary discussions of the much demonized country in U.S. politics and media.
+
+What happened to Iran’s democracy? The U.S. overthrew it in 1953, with the help of the U.K. Why? For oil.
+
+Mohammad Mosaddegh may be the most popular leader in Iran’s long history. He was also Iran’s only democratically elected head of state.
+
+In 1951, Mosaddegh was elected prime minister of Iran. He was not a socialist, and certainly not a communist — on the contrary, he repressed Iranian communists — but he pursued many progressive, social democratic policies. Mosaddegh pushed for land reform, established rent control, and created a social security system, while working to separate powers in the democratic government.
+
+In the Cold War, however, a leader who deviated in any way from free-market orthodoxy and the Washington Consensus was deemed a threat. When Mossaddegh nationalized Iran’s large oil reserves, he crossed a line that Western capitalist nations would not tolerate.
+
+The New York Times ran an article in 1951 titled “British Warn Iran of Serious Result if She Seizes Oil.” The piece, which is full of orientalist language, refers to Iranian oil as “British oil properties,” failing to acknowledge that Britain, which had previously occupied Iran, had seized that oil and claimed it as its own, administering it under the auspices of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which later became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and eventually British Petroleum and modern BP.
+
+The Times article noted that the U.S. “shares with Britain the gravest concern about the possibility that Iranian oil, the biggest supply now available in the Near East, might be lost to the Western powers.” The British government is quoted making a thinly veiled threat.
+
+This threat came into fruition in August 1953. In Operation Ajax, the CIA, working with its British equivalent MI6, carried out a coup, overthrowing the elected government of Iran and reinstalling the monarchy. The shah would remain a faithful Western ally until 1979, when the monarchy was abolished in the Iranian Revolution.
+
+Less than a year after overthrowing Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister, the U.S. pursued a similar regime change policy in Guatemala, toppling the elected leader Jacobo Árbenz.
+
+In 1944, Guatemalans waged a revolution, toppling the U.S.-backed right-wing dictator Jorge Ubico, who had ruled the country with an iron fist since 1931. Ubico, who fancied himself the 20th-century Napoleon, gave rich landowners and the U.S. corporation the United Fruit Company (which would later become Chiquita) free reign over Guatemala’s natural resources, and used the military to violently crush labor organizers.
+
+Juan José Arévalo was elected into office in 1944. A liberal, he pursued very moderate policies, but the U.S. wanted a right-wing puppet regime that would allow U.S. corporations the same privileges granted to them by Ubico. In 1949, the U.S. backed an attempted coup, yet it failed.
+
+In 1951, Árbenz was elected into office. Slightly to the left of Arévalo, Árbenz was still decidedly moderate. The U.S. claimed Árbenz was close to Guatemala’s communists, and warned he could ally with the Soviet Union. In reality, the opposite was true; Árbenz actually persecuted Guatemalan communists. At most, Árbenz was a social democrat, not even a socialist.
+
+Yet Árbenz, like Mosaddegh, firmly believed that Guatemalans themselves, and not multinational corporations, should benefit from their country’s resources. He pursued land reform policies that would break up the control rich families and the United Fruit Company exercised over the country — and, for that reason, he was overthrown.
+
+President Truman originally authorized a first coup attempt, Operation PBFORTUNE, in 1952. Yet details about the operation were leaked to the public, and the plan was abandoned. In 1954, in Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA and U.S. State Department, under the Dulles Brothers, bombed Guatemala City and carried out a coup that violently toppled Guatemala’s democratic government.
+
+The U.S. put into power right-wing tyrant Carlos Castillo Armas. For the next more than 50 years, until the end of the Guatemalan Civil War in 1996, Guatemala was ruled by a serious of authoritarian right-wing leaders who brutally repressed left-wing dissidents and carried out a campaign of genocide against the indigenous people of the country.
+
+September 11 has permanently seared itself into the memory of Americans. The date has also been indelibly imprinted in the public consciousness of Chileans, because it was on this same day in 1973 that the U.S. backed a coup that violently overthrew Chile’s democracy.
+
+In 1970, Marxist leader Salvador Allende was democratically elected president of Chile. Immediately after he was elected, the U.S. government poured resources into right-wing opposition groups and gave millions of dollars to Chile’s conservative media outlets. The CIA deputy director of plans wrote in a 1970 memo, “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup… It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [U.S. government] and American hand be well hidden.” President Nixon subsequently ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” in Chile, to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.” Allende’s democratic government was violently overthrown on September 11, 1973. He died in the coup, just after making an emotional speech, in which he declared he would give his life to defend Chilean democracy and sovereignty. Far-right dictator Augusto Pinochet, who combined fascistic police state repression with hyper-capitalist free-market economic policies, was put into power. Under Pinochet’s far-right dictatorship, tens of thousands of Chilean leftists, labor organizers, and journalists were killed, disappeared, and tortured. Hundreds of thousands more people were forced into exile. One of the most prevailing myths of the Cold War is that socialism was an unpopular system imposed on populations with brute force. Chile serves as a prime historical example of how the exact opposite was true. The masses of impoverished and oppressed people elected many socialist governments, yet these governments were often violently overthrown by the U.S. and other Western allies. The overthrow of Allende was a turning point for many socialists in the Global South. Before he was overthrown, some leftists thought popular Marxist movements could gain state power through democratic elections, as was the case in Chile. Yet when they saw how the U.S. violently toppled Allende’s elected government, they became suspicious of the prospects of electoral politics and turned to guerrilla warfare and other tactics. These are just a small sample of the great many regime changes the U.S. government has been involved in. More recent examples, which were supported by Hillary Clinton, as Sanders implied, include the U.S. government’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Qadhafi in Libya. In these cases, the U.S. was overthrowing dictators, not democratically elected leaders — but, as Sanders pointed out, the results of these regime changes have been nothing short of catastrophic. The U.S. is also still engaging in regime change when it comes to democratically elected governments. In the January 2011 revolution, Egyptians toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak, a close U.S. ally who ruled Egypt with an iron fist for almost 30 years. In July 2013, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, was overthrown in a military coup. We now know that the U.S. supported and bankrolled the opposition forces that overthrew the democratically elected president. Today, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a brutal despot who is widely recognized as even worse than Mubarak, reigns over Egypt. In August 2013, Sisi oversaw a slaughter of more than 800 peaceful Egyptian activists at Raba’a Square. His regime continues to shoot peaceful protesters in the street. An estimated 40,000 political prisoners languish in Sisi’s jails, including journalists. In spite of his obscene human rights abuses, Sisi remains a close ally of the U.S. and Israel — much, much closer than was the democratically elected President Morsi. In the second Democratic presidential debate, when Sanders called Clinton out on her hawkish, pro-regime change policies, she tried to blame the disasters in the aftermath in countries like Iraq and Libya on the “complexity” of the Middle East. As an example of this putative complexity, Clinton cited Egypt. “We saw a dictator overthrown, we saw Muslim Brotherhood president installed, and then we saw him ousted and the army back,” she said. Clinton failed to mention two crucial factors: One, that the U.S. backed Mubarak until the last moment; and two, that the U.S. also supported the coup that overthrew Egypt’s first and only democratically elected head of state. There are scores of other examples of U.S.-led regime change. In 1964 the U.S. backed a coup in Brazil, toppling left-wing President João Goulart. In 1976, the U.S. supported a military coup in Argentina that replaced President Isabel Perón with General Jorge Rafael Videla. In 2002, the U.S. backed a coup that overthrew democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Chávez was so popular, however, that Venezuelans filled the street and demanded him back. In 2004, the U.S. overthrew Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In 2009, U.S.-trained far-right forces overthrew the democratically elected government of Honduras, with tacit support from Washington. Latin America, given its proximity to the U.S. and the strength of left-wing movements in the region, tends to endure the largest number of U.S. regime changes, yet the Middle East and many parts of Africa have seen their democratic governments overthrown as well. From 1898 to 1994, Harvard University historian John Coatsworth documented at least 41 U.S. interventions in Latin America — an average of one every 28 months for an entire century. Numerous Latin American military dictators were trained at the School of the Americas, a U.S. Department of Defense Institute in Fort Benning, Georgia. The School of the Americas Watch, an activist organization that pushes for the closing of the SOA, has documented many of these regime changes, which have been carried out by both Republicans and Democrats. Diplomatic cables released by whistleblowing journalism outlet WikiLeaks show the U.S. still maintains a systematic campaign of trying to overthrow Latin America’s left-wing governments. By not just acknowledging the bloody and ignominious history of U.S. regime change, but also condemning it, Sen. Sanders was intrepidly trekking into controversial political territory into which few of his peers would dare to tread. Others would do well to learn from Bernie’s example.",REAL
+1698,Donald Trump plots his second act,"After a summer of dominating the Republican presidential campaign, Donald Trump is moving into a new and un­certain phase that the billionaire businessman acknowledges will be more challenging than any project he has ever undertaken — even as he views the nomination as now within his reach.
+
+In an hour-long interview with The Washington Post at his 26th-floor office in Trump Tower, the Republican front-runner ruminated on the many obstacles ahead. Sitting at a desk piled high with magazine covers bearing his image and strewn with polls and other testaments to his early success, Trump said he is far from satisfied with what he has accomplished to date.
+
+“If you don’t win, what have I done? I’ve wasted time,” he said. “I want to make America great again, and you can’t do that if you come in a close second.”
+
+Trump laid out for the first time in detail the elements of what will be the second chapter of his 2016 bid, signaling an evolution toward a somewhat more traditional campaign. Trump is preparing his first television ads with a media firm that is new to politics. Melania, his wife, and Ivanka, his daughter, are planning public appearances highlighting women’s health issues to help close Trump’s empathy gap with female voters.
+
+Trump is also publishing a book and planning to roll out policies on reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs and on trade and China’s currency manipulations. And he is deepening his political organization far beyond the early states, with top advisers vowing that his fight for the nomination will go all the way to the floor of the Republican National Convention.
+
+Trump, who is mostly self-funding his campaign, said he had originally budgeted up to $20 million through mid-September for television advertising. But so far he has not spent anything to go on the airwaves, since he is so often on them: “It’s been all Trump, all the time. . . . If you had an ad, people would OD.”
+
+But he and his aides said that would soon change. His campaign says it has hired a Florida-based advertising firm, and Trump said he has proposed several concepts for ads in the works.
+
+“I have such a great concept — in fact, so good,” Trump said, declining to specify.
+
+Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said Trump’s team would probably spend considerably more than $20 million on paid media later this year — “whatever it takes.” He said the spots would be “nontraditional,” saying the firm, which he and Trump declined to name, has never created political ads.
+
+Central to the fall strategy is the release later this month of a book that will serve as a campaign manifesto. During the interview, Trump showed off the cover and title, “Crippled America,” and held up pages of the galleys, which he was editing by hand. “It’s actually the hardest I’ve worked on a book since ‘The Art of the Deal,’” he said, referring to his 1987 bestseller. “I don’t want to have a stupid statement in the book that people are going to say, ‘Hey, why did he say that?’ ”
+
+Trump said he does not believe the next stage of the campaign will require him to change his flamboyant, confrontational style, which has captivated the attention of voters whether they support him or not. But he noted that running for president has brought pressures and demands that he did not experience in the business world and had not anticipated in the political arena.
+
+“It’s very unforgiving,” he said. “If you make a mistake that can be very easily explained, it can still be turned around and then you have three bad days of press over something that actually wasn’t even a big deal.”
+
+Trump said he doesn’t want to significantly tinker with how he presents himself to the public. As Lewandowski put it, Trump “remains Trump.”
+
+“It’s going to be the same thing,” Trump said. “You’ve got to have a personality. You’ve got to be able to speak your mind. You’ve got to have some thoughts that are correct.”
+
+[How Donald Trump left his mark on New York City]
+
+Trump said he is readying for an eventual winnowing of the Republican field, but he disagreed with some predictions that the contest will narrow to just two or three finalists for the nomination. “I think you’ll go past New Hampshire and you’ll have four or five people left,” he said.
+
+His advisers are working to assure that Trump will qualify for the ballot in all 50 states and the U.S. territories — an arduous and time-consuming task that has caused some first-time candidates to stumble. Lewandowski said the campaign has hired a company that will work only for Trump to meet the state-by-state requirements. Virginia is among the most difficult states, but Lewandowski said Trump will be qualified there by the end of this month.
+
+“I’ll be happy to be the under­estimated campaign,” Lewandow­ski said. “If I don’t get Mr. Trump on the ballot, which is the nuts-and-bolts part of my job, I should be fired immediately.”
+
+Trump’s campaign headquarters is on the fifth floor of Trump Tower here, in an industrial space that previously had been a construction area and hangout for the crew of NBC’s “The Apprentice.”
+
+The main room is a showcase for Trump’s penchant for boastful teasing: A “wall of shame” features downcast photos of the two candidates who have dropped out, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Texas governor Rick Perry. It also highlights his proclaimed frugality, as aides work at plastic picnic tables and sit on folding chairs.
+
+Compared with the bustling Brooklyn headquarters of Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, with hundreds of staffers on the payroll, Trump’s Manhattan command center is barren. Lewandowski said about a dozen aides are at the location, including political director Michael Glassner and spokeswoman Hope Hicks.
+
+Trump has between seven and 12 paid staffers in each of the first three voting states — Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — and is hiring in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and other states. Lewandowski said Trump enjoys a “massive grass-roots network,” allowing volunteers to feed local intelligence on rival campaigns to New York.
+
+Asked if he had discussed an exit plan with Trump should the candidate slip in the polls, Lewandowski said he had not: “We’re going to the convention — that’s it. One delegate or 2,000 and change, we’re going to the convention, and there’s nobody who can get him out of the race.”
+
+[Alongside Trump campaign, activist clashes are getting uglier]
+
+From behind his desk, with Central Park over his shoulder, and with no television cameras rolling, Trump presented a less strident and combative persona than the one that has become a familiar presence on television. He was conversational and at ease, even introspective at times, while still displaying high sensitivity to perceived slights and unfair media coverage.
+
+Trump held up last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, which included a cover he did not like of a cartoonish Trump as a rising balloon. Then he flipped to an inside page with a black-and-white portrait of him intensely pointing his finger at the camera. “Look at this,” he said, arguing that the photo should have been on the cover. “It’s the greatest picture I’ve ever had.”
+
+During a tour of his office suite, Trump — ever aware of his image — laughingly declined a reporter’s request to pose for a photograph holding up an oil painting of himself that he said had been sent by a supporter. “You’d make me look so bad!”
+
+The interview did not focus on his opponents, and Trump spent almost no time talking about them. He has often said he is a counterpuncher who attacks primarily when provoked. But he appears to have at least one exception: Mitt Romney. Asked about recent criticism from the 2012 GOP nominee, Trump made clear he fired the first shot. “I don’t blame him because I’ve been very tough on Romney,” he said. “He’s a choke artist.”
+
+Trump claimed credit for keeping Romney out of the 2016 race, though he bowed out long before Trump ever became a candidate. Dismissing the suggestion that it was former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s fundraising prowess that kept Romney from the race, Trump insisted: “He got scared away by me! By my mouth.”
+
+[Mitt Romney: Trump ‘will not be the nominee’]
+
+Throughout the interview, Trump exuded customary aplomb but nonetheless indicated there are aspects of his performance that he can improve. He said he sensed he had won the first debate outright but suggested the second debate had been less satisfying.
+
+“I was angry about the second debate,” he said, complaining about the overheated room and that three hours was one hour too many. “You can’t hold people’s attention,” he said. “ ‘Gone With the Wind’ was three hours, okay?”
+
+He countered criticism that he had almost disappeared during much of the final hour. “People said, ‘Oh, he faded at the end,’ ” Trump said. “I didn’t fade. They didn’t ask me any questions. Now, I could have butted in like some people were doing, but I didn’t think it was appropriate.”
+
+Trump said that in the next debate, which will be held Oct. 28 in Boulder, Colo., he will change tactics and insert himself more energetically in an effort to put questions about his previous performance to rest.
+
+Trump’s candidacy has been fueled by his loud swagger and his hard-line views on immigration. But in the coming weeks, he hopes to bolster and reorient his message with an eye toward blue-collar voters.
+
+“I’m a person who is capable of going into far greater detail than any of my opponents,” he said, an assertion likely to be tested by rivals. But he said the calls for him to do so come mainly from reporters and pundits: “I’ve never had a voter stand up and say, ‘Could you release policy papers?’ ”
+
+A major component will be a tough new approach to China, which he said has “emasculated” the United States through trade and currency manipulation.
+
+“I’ve been working hard on the China thing,” Trump said. “It’s astronomical what they have done to our country, to destroy the economics of our country. Astronomical. It’s the greatest theft in world history.”
+
+[Donald Trump: ‘We have to take back the heart of our country’]
+
+Trump’s competitors have suggested that he has little depth on international affairs. After being ridiculed for saying this summer that he gets much of his foreign policy advice by watching military experts on television talk shows, Trump has begun to seek counsel from some generals directly, Lewandowski said.
+
+The strife in Syria has become a staple of Trump’s stump speech, and it is an area where he has begun to differentiate himself from others in his party with a stance that sounds decidedly more cautious. In the interview, he questioned those who are advocating more direct military intervention by the United States.
+
+“They basically want to start World War III over Syria,” he said. “If we’re going to have World War III, it’s not going to be over Syria. . . . I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”
+
+Immigration continues to be the issue that has largely defined his candidacy, though he said in the interview he was surprised at the strength of the response he has gotten with his inflammatory language about Mexican “rapists” and criminals. “I had no idea it was going to resonate in the way it has,” he said.
+
+Trump also said he plans to talk even more about the role of money in politics and what he described as an incestuous relationship between candidates, the donor class and their allied super PACs.
+
+Looking to boost his favorability with women, Trump plans to spotlight his wife and daughter, whose passion for women’s health issues could help soften the candidate’s edges. Asked if they shared his opposition to abortion, Trump demurred. “I’m going to let them reveal themselves if people are going to ask that question, which they might not,” he said.
+
+Glancing at an office wall covered in mementos and awards, Trump picked up a campaign bumper sticker featuring his name in thick red letters. “A hot ticket,” Trump declared, smiling proudly.
+
+“I believe in the power of positive thinking,” he said, “but I never like to talk it. It’s never in sight until you win it. You know, there are a lot of minefields out there.”",REAL
+9109,Will Hillary Accept Defeat?,"Print 
+The headlines are in. Trump is the “anti-Democratic” candidate because he refuses to rule out challenging the results of an election that has yet to take place. Such a course of action is “beyond the pale.” It’s a threat to democracy. And it is utterly and thoroughly unacceptable. 
+Except when Democrats do it. 
+It was the day after the election. While the Democratic Party faithful waited in the rain in Nashville, William Daley strode out and announced, “Our campaign continues.” Al Gore had called George W. Bush to withdraw his concession. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?"" a baffled Bush asked. “You don’t have to be snippy about it,"" Gore retorted snippily. 
+Gore did eventually concede. Though years later he would attempt to retract his concession a second time. But his political movement never did concede. It remained a widespread belief in left-wing circles that President Bush was illegitimately elected and that President Gore was the real winner. 
+How mainstream is that belief? 
+When Hillary dragged Gore away from playing with his Earth globe to campaign for her, the crowd booed at his mention of the election and then chanted, “You won, you won.” 
+Hillary grinned and nodded. 
+Hillary Clinton has always believed that President Bush illegitimately took office. She has told Democrats that Bush was “selected” rather than “elected”. In Nigeria, of all places, she implied that Jeb Bush had rigged the election for his brother. 
+But it’s not unprecedented, beyond the pale or utterly unacceptable when Democrats do it. 
+It’s just business as usual. 
+The media’s focus has been on whether Trump would accept the results if he loses. Yet a better question might be whether Hillary Clinton would accept her defeat. 
+Even when it came to the battle for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton refused to concede defeat until the bitter end and then past it. Not only did Hillary refuse to drop out even when Obama was the clear winner, while her people threatened a convention floor fight, but she insisted on staying on in the race for increasingly bizarre and even downright disturbing reasons. 
+In South Dakota, Hillary explained that there was no reason for her to drop out because somebody might shoot Barack Obama, ""We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."" 
+There’s something disturbing in the revelation that Hillary was basing her decision to stay in the race in the hope that her rival would be assassinated. 
+Obama’s spokesman said that her remark “has no place in this campaign”. But it had a place inside Hillary Clinton’s very warped brain which preferred to see Obama die than concede the election to him. 
+If that’s how Hillary felt about a fellow Democrat, imagine how she feels about Trump. 
+Even after Obama had clinched the delegate votes, Hillary’s speech brought back the Gore argument insisting that, “Nearly 18 million of you cast your votes for our campaign, carrying the popular vote with more votes than any primary candidate in history. Even when the pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over, you kept on voting.” 
+Then the fabulously wealthy Hillary asked those 18 million people to go to her website and give her money while refusing to make any decision on ending her campaign. It took her another day to do that. 
+It’s not as if the Obama side was any better. It was arguably worse. Governor Wilder, an Obama ally, threatened a return of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention riots if Hillary won. ""If you think 1968 was bad, you watch; in 2008, it will be worse,” Wilder warned. 
+Unprecedented. Outrageous. Beyond the pale. Except this is how Democrats act even to each other. 
+Now how would they respond to a Trump victory? Would they urge Hillary to concede or to fight on? Would they stage more riots while claiming voter disenfranchisement had stolen the election? 
+Hillary Clinton has made it clear that she views Trump’s candidacy as illegitimate. She has called him “unfit” and described his supporters as “deplorables.” Democrats, all the way up to the White House, are constantly accusing Republicans of scheming to disenfranchise voters. These “schemes” involve asking undocumented Democrats to show some ID instead of relying on an honor system and removing illegitimate voters from the rolls. But beyond enabling voter fraud, such arguments can easily be employed to attack the legitimacy of a Republican winner. They provide the fodder for another Florida. 
+Does anyone really believe that Hillary Clinton, who couldn’t even graciously concede to Obama will graciously concede to Trump? 
+And, given the fact that Hillary won the nomination by using the DNC to rig the process, leading to the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz , are Trump’s concerns of a rigged election illegitimate? 
+Donald Trump has clarified that he would accept “a clear election result” but that he was “being asked to waive centuries of legal precedent designed to protect the voters.” 
+And he’s right. No one preemptively cedes elections. And Hillary Clinton has faced accusations of abusive and fraudulent tactics from Democratic rivals in two different presidential elections. 
+Why should Republicans assume that she’ll treat them better than she treated Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders? 
+Not all that long ago, the left wanted Gore to fight to the bitter end. A Gore adviser recalled, ""People were calling us from everywhere, telling us, 'Don't concede.'"" Left-wing voices urged Bernie Sanders to stay in the race long after it became obvious that the left-winger had no realistic path to victory left. 
+But the same behavior that is virtuous when Democrats do it becomes an unpardonable sin when Republicans take it up. 
+That’s a pernicious double standard that cannot and should not be allowed to stand. 
+When Democrats warn of voter disenfranchisement, the media backs them up. When Republicans complain about voter fraud, they are accused of voter suppression. When Democrats fight elections past the point that they’re lost, then they are courageous. But when Republicans do it, they are a threat to democracy. 
+But democracy does not mean Democratic Party rule. That’s just the mistake that the media makes. 
+Whatever rules we have, run both ways. Any practices, new or old, also apply to both sides. If challenging election results is legitimate, then it is so for both sides. Whatever options were available to Gore and Hillary cannot help but be available to Trump. 
+That is how democracy, rather than Democratic Party rule, works. 
+Article reposted with permission from Sultan Knish shares",FAKE
+2125,Fact-checker calls out Obama for saying Keystone ‘bypasses’ US,"President Obama earned a double-barreled rebuke Monday from The Washington Post's fact-checker, for repeating a faulty claim that the Keystone XL pipeline ""bypasses"" the U.S. -- and for saying it would only carry ""Canadian oil.""
+
+The president made the claims in an interview last week with WDAY of Fargo, N.D. Obama continued to downplay the impact of the Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline, just days after vetoing a bipartisan-backed bill that would approve the construction project. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has teed up a vote to override that veto later this week.
+
+In the local interview, Obama said:
+
+""I've already said I'm happy to look at how we can increase pipeline production for U.S. oil, but Keystone is for Canadian oil to send that down to the Gulf. It bypasses the United States and is estimated to create a little over 250, maybe 300 permanent jobs. We should be focusing more broadly on American infrastructure for American jobs and American producers, and that's something that we very much support.""
+
+The president has been called out before for claiming the oil would bypass the U.S.
+
+Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler explained Monday that while the crude oil would travel to the Gulf Coast, it would then be refined into products like gasoline -- and much of it certainly would be used in the U.S.
+
+""Current trends suggest that only about half of that refined product would be exported, and it could easily be lower,"" Kessler said.
+
+He cited a February report by energy industry consultant IHS Energy, which predicted most of the refined products would likely be ""consumed in the United States.""
+
+Further, even the State Department issued a report downplaying the notion that a large amount of that crude would be exported, since foreign refiners would have to shoulder additional transportation charges.
+
+Kessler said with his recent comments, Obama ""appears to be purposely ignoring the findings of the lead Cabinet agency on the issue.""
+
+Further, he challenged Obama's claim that Keystone would just be for Canadian oil, since producers in North Dakota and Montana want to move oil from the Bakken area through it.
+
+Kessler gave Obama ""four Pinocchios"" for his comments -- the worst rating on his fact-check scale.
+
+""If he disagrees with the State Department's findings, he should begin to make the case why it is wrong, rather than assert the opposite, without any factual basis,"" Kessler wrote. ""Moreover, by telling North Dakota listeners that the pipeline has no benefit for Americans, he is again being misleading, given that producers in the region have signed contracts to transport some of their production through the pipeline.""
+
+McConnell is aiming for a final vote on the Keystone veto override on Wednesday, with a procedural vote set for Tuesday. So far, supporters of the pipeline have not demonstrated they have the necessary two-thirds majority in Congress to override.
+
+Obama, in opposing that bill, has argued the State Department needs to be allowed to finish its official review of the pipeline.",REAL
+5771,Tom Hayden: Things Come Around in the Mideast,"By Padishah , July 23, 2006 at 12:19 am Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+I must address the complete drivel that was Mr Jeff Gershoff’s comment. 
+First and foremost, in 2002, with the full backing of the Arab league, Saudi Arabia offered the Israeli’s a peace treaty - I repeat - a peace treaty in the form of the Egyptian and Jordanian ones, stating the formal end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, recognition of Israel, and a whole host of other concessions in return for Israel returning all of the Occupied Territories captured during the 1967 war, and a just solution to the Palestinian humanitarian problem, amongst other concessions. 
+Generalissimo Sharon outright refused to aknowledge this peace deal, and it withered. US Administration said nothing, the US media allowed the story to die. So your statement: 
+“Let Hamas and Hezbolah recognize Israels right to exist and there can be peace. Let them keep strapping explosives to themselves and killing women and children, let them keep lobbing missles into Israel and Israel will continue doing what they are doing until one of them cannot get up off the canvas anymore.” 
+is quite irrelevant, seeing as Hamas was not governing the Palestinian territories, and Hezbollah was not governing Lebanon in 2002. A general Peace deal with the Arab World was allowed to die, and you suggest that Israel will be willing to deal with two entities it thinks are terrorist organisations. 
+Furthermore, you ask for the Arabs to make the first move. Always, the onus is on the Arab side to make many concessions even before Israel consider negotiation. There is no equal footing with which to negotiate with Israel because Israel will not allow it to be so. History and current events show that even if the Arabs were to accede to all Israeli demands, there is no gaurantee that the Israeli’s will not find some other demand in order to stall, or even to not just ignore Arab overtures out of spite. Indeed, judging from recent events, they seem quite capable of it. 
+Your statement: 
+“No one gave a rats ass about the Palestinians when their “home land” was squalor, flies, and dirt. Israel turned it into a garden and now everyone demands Palestine for the Palestinians.” 
+seems to imply that imprisonment in an Israeli garden; where your house can be demolished, or your olive and fruit groves be uprooted depending on your heritage, is much better than freedom in your own country, however squalid, fly-ridden or dirty. Furthermore, a land totally at peace would need no-one to give ‘a rat’s ass’ (in your parlance) about it anyway, and is a misrepresentation of the historical situation. Your statement smacks of the colonialist attitude of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Would you also hold this view for all those people of colour, who were enslaved and brutalised in many instances around the world? Would you believe that the sexual slavery of women practices in some parts of the world somehow beneficial to the women who must suffer those indignities? 
+It’s obvious from your comment that you harbour a prejudice for Palestinians in particular, and Arabs in general; they aren’t fit for the land they occupy, and only Israeli’s can make the Middle East bloom. Thus, by extension, all Arabs deserve to suffer under the heel of Zionism, for their own good. Corrrect? Does this sound eerily like the whole ‘White Man’s Burden’ trollop that precipitated the excesses of the colonisation of Africa? It certainly does, and it fits with the Israeli mindset as well. 
+By eleven bravo , July 22, 2006 at 9:24 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+Israel likes to spy on the country that feeds it to the tune of billions to date and then calls the traitor who spied on us, a hero -just the kind of ally we need in the middle east. By the way, they also like to sell our military technologies even if we tell them not to - China sure appreciates it. Remember, do not forget the USS Liberty. Some Brits certainly remember that these same Israelis that cry holy terror about terrorism were terrorists themselves when the Brits were in Palestine and they to this day are unrepentant for the terrorist acts they performed. 
+By wildhog , July 22, 2006 at 8:38 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+WOW, THIS IS AMAZING. AS A VIETNAM VETERAN AND A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN I AM GLAD YOU ARE SPEAKING OUT. WE SURE DONT NEED ALL THIS STRIFE AND BLOODSHED WE SURE HAVE NOT LEARNED OUR LESSON FROM THE PAST. WE HAVE GOT TO REGAIN OUR FREEDOM FROM ISRAELI TYRANY. MAKE NO MISTAKE WE NEED TO STAND UP FOR OUR NATION BEFORE WE ARE EMBROILED IN A CONFLICT WE CANNOT WIN. 
+By blues , July 22, 2006 at 8:32 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+Wow Jew Haters Gone Wild said: 
+Jews have contributed their energy, intellect, resources to every progressive cause in modern history. And yet you so-called progressives just turn your back, raise the chorus of Jew blame, and think you’re moral? [....] 
+Well, yeah, I guess. In some ways, I think it could be argued that the Navajo have done far more. 
+But the power-mad neozionists that have hijacked the Nation of Israel have been treating all their neighbors worse than cockroaches for decades. And they have warped, probably wrecked our American society in the process. They collaborated with the vicious apartheid Union of South Africa to enable the South African tyrants and themselves to develop nuclear WMDs. So that just doesn’t make me feel friendly toward neozionists. 
+As far as the question of weather I harbor any actual hatred of Jewish people themselves, you will never begin to be able to discover the answer to that. I could easily bear the fervent wish that every Jew be burned alive in an oven, all the while pretending to love the Jews. Or I could accept Jews as just people who practice a particular religion, bearing no ill-will at all against them, while proclaiming to Jew-hating neighbors that I detest the Jews as much as they do. But you will never be able to begin to decipher what I truly feel. 
+By Toole , July 22, 2006 at 7:39 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+Israel and the U.S.A. are, by their present alliance to dominate, taking a walk to the wild side just like Hitler and Nazi Germany. 
+By Fadel Abdallah , July 22, 2006 at 7:22 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+To plunger, message # 14774 
+You piece on 9/11 is well reasoned and makes a lot of sense, and I thank you much for your interst in digging out the truth about this very tragic event and its far-reaching disastrous consequences on the whole world. 
+There is no hope of finding physical evidence to prove who and how it all happened. This is so for the simple fact that the sophisticated team that planned this inside job made sure to destroy any physical evidence possible. 
+In light of this, serious thinkers are only left to use their intellectual reasoning and circumstantial evidence to reach an approximation about the facts related to 9/11. 
+Yours is indeed a very serious analysis, and, most likely, very close to the truth. That’s why I was intrigued by your piece. I was particulary intrigued about your being specific on the Mossad role as a way to blackmail the political establishment. Remember Monica Lewinsky? I theorized, at the time, and wrote about her being an Israeli Mossad agent, planted in the White House to bring about the fall of Clinton, who was getting a little bit sympathysing to solving the Palestinian problem. 
+Your piece also supports my thinking about 9/11; about which I wrote a short comment somewhere else on the truthdig. In case you have not read my piece, I am attaching it below: 
+“To Janice A. # 14474: 
+You’re very smart Janice. You’re one of the few thousands in America and around the world who believe 9/11 was an inside evil job, to create the atmosphere of fear in preparation for the trauma and mind control you talked about. 
+I simply could not believe and will never believe that some people living in caves and constantly on the run could have carried out such sophisticated operation. This is not to say that Al-Qaeda had not enough hate for America to attempt hurting it in a big way when they could; but from a scientific point of view, know-how and sophisticated human resources, they did not have that, and no small group of enemies will ever have what it takes to prepare and carry out such operation. And imagine that!! The hijackers had only box-cutters as their weapons! From all those on board the hijacked planes, wasn’t there a few courageous enough who were willing to get injured and possibly die to prevent a bigger disaster?!! 
+Elements in the Pentagon, CIA, FBI with possibly a lot of help from the Israeli Mossad must have started working on this just as Bush was put on the throne by the Supreme Court! For Bush and the Neocons to continue ruling the country and taking it in the direction they have taken it, something tragically big must have to take place! Everyone knows, that in every country and society there is that class of people called the merchants of death! For what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and now Lebanon, 9/11 was a must prerequisite! 
+Sad as it is to invoke thoughts about the 9/11, I always find consolation to find like-minded people. Thank you Janice for being a free thinker and publicly join the small but privileged group!” 
+By Mark , July 22, 2006 at 7:20 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+By the way: if Americans generally ever finally start to figure out what a false ally Israel really is, there is of course the danger of an upwelling of anti-Semitism in America. Let’s look at exactly why this is so. 
+The essential misunderstanding that may lead to such a horrible development is a failure of Americans to distinguish between Israel and “the Jews”. This is a conflation that Israel and many American Jewish leaders have done much to encourage. 
+Any strong condemnation of Israel’s actions, of its ethnocratic ideology, or of its interference in our political process, is regularly condemned as inherently “anti-Semitic” by prominent members of the mainstream American Jewish community. Right-wing American Christians — perhaps even more extreme than American Jews in their adherence to the notion of Israel’s blameless holiness — eagerly echo this charge. 
+And so, despite the fact that American Jews are in fact over-represented among intellectuals and activists who expose and denounce the crimes of the state of Israel, we may well see such a surge of anti-Semitic backlash in this country, if and when most Americans come to some glimmer of understanding concerning the worse-than-useless US/Israeli “alliance”. 
+Americans in general are not terribly sophisticated. This is why such a ludicrously one-sided alliance, so destructive to American interests, was ever possible in the first place. And it’s why an anti-Semitic reaction may accompany its end. 
+If this backlash should happen, then to Israel and to the American Jews who have laid the foundation for it, I have three words from a great Jewish philosopher: AS YE SEW. 
+By Wow Jew Haters Gone Wild , July 22, 2006 at 6:18 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+Wow, just read this thing and be amazed at the level of knee jerk jew hating, blindness to history, and desire for the death of Israel. So sad. If these terror groups lay down their weapons and agreed to stop attacking Israel tomorrow, that would be the end of war. If Israel lay down their weapons and agreed to stop hitting back at the terror groups, it would be overrun tomorrow and a new holocaust would ensue. Apparently, that suits the jew haters just fine. Islamic fascism is fascism, and again Jews stand against it while the moral ambivalence or antisemitism of non Jews seeks to guarantee yet another cycle of jew killing. SHAME, SHAME. It’s sad that Israel’s only friend can be found in the Bush government, but that doesn’t make ISrael complicit in anything that Bush does. If you have only one friend and you’re fighting for your life, you don’t question that friendship. More power to Israel in this fight for their life. Look at the numbers of arabs killed by arabs, of non muslims killed by muslims, of the track record of muslims in the world today (whereever there’s trouble, muslims are there trying to dominate and destroy non muslims). Jews have contributed their energy, intellect, resources to every progressive cause in modern history. And yet you so-called progressives just turn your back, raise the chorus of jew blame, and think you’re moral? You better hope that in the end we don’t all get what we deserve. 
+By Harry H. Snyder III , July 22, 2006 at 4:07 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+I surely didn’t say anything about Jews crucifying anyone… 
+HOWEVER crucifiction was hardly exclusively a “Roman thing” 
+This means of punishment was practiced by Persians, Seleucids, Jews, Carthaginians, among others. There is even some evidence it was practiced in Egypt. 
+reflex action? by whom? 
+By John Z , July 22, 2006 at 3:41 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+Marcia, of course Ishrael wants peace…..a piece of Iraq, a piece of Iran, a piece of Syria and a piece of lebanon. They also have our own government by the balls through, bribery, extortion and threats. I and thouroughly disgusted and sick to my stomach from it all. It is time for a new American revolution. We must: Take our government back from those who have corrupted it for their own benefit, including Ishrael. Prosecute those within the Whore House for betraying our nation, our constitution and its people. The punishment must be severe enough to deter any who might think about doing it again in the future. Stop paying tribute to that miserable little zionist state. No more money period! enough is enough, goddamn it! Congress should get its collective asses kicked, and maybe in the balls as well. Break all ties with Ishrael..they are on their own from now on. That way they will have to behave themselves. As long as they have the U.S. as their rich poodle Ishrael will continue to act like a pitbull. Round up the zionists, MOSSAD, AIPAC and the jew lobby and send them packing back to zionland. Use the laws we have to break up the jewish stranglehold on our media, including the newspapers. There are enough anti monopoly laws with which to use. Please realise I have nothing against people of Judaism. It’s the rabid, racist, zionist who I find to be our own worst enemy. Thank you Tom, for finally coming out with enough guts and patriotism to speak out on this matter. Even our founding fathers spoke out against zionism. Unless we change the course of our nation, we will be “undone”. I fear for my country and for those in the middle east for they are the ones who are the victims of zionist aggression. Now I will wait for the zionists to send their hitmen to my house. 
+By John F. Butterfield , July 22, 2006 at 12:58 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+Harry, 
+Crucifiction was a Roman thing. Jews have often been on the receiving end of brutality. Whether they have more often been teachers of brutality or learners from brutality can be disputed. That they have killed more Arabs in the last 60 years than Arabs have killed Jews in that same time period cannot be disputed. The side that the United States has taken in the disagreement cannot be disputed. It was interesting to see your reflex action. 
+By blues , July 22, 2006 at 12:34 pm Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+This article has pushed me beyond some point of critical mass. My world-view will never be the same. 
+What we are looking at here goes beyond issues like anti- Jewish sentiment, terrorism, capitalism, etc, etc, etc. We have been victims to a vast media conspiracy that has parlayed a typical religious ideal into a powerful, violent cult of death, and allowed that cult to play a key role in the establishment of a fascist regime in the United States. It needs to be called the neocon/ neomedia/ neozionist conspiracy of treason, or something like that. 
+These pseudo- religious traitriots are destroying America and the rest of the world too, including the people of the Middle East, including the Jewish ones, apparently for sport. This is evil in its purest form. I am stunned. 
+By Harry H. Snyder III , July 22, 2006 at 5:19 am Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter) 
+John; 
+Back when crucifiction was occuring in the Middle East the Brits were drawing and quartering folks, the Spanish were killing witches and most of Europe was pre civilized. 
+I will not be a party to a conversation where we blame one side or the other for this disagreement which clearly has enough blame to cover the northern hemisphere. 
+I thought the point of Tom’s message was that there are two valid points of view here? 
+By plunger , July 22, 2006 at 2:03 am Link to this comment (Unregistered commenter)",FAKE
+5111,Mike Pence doesn't share Donald Trump's worldview,"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump's vice presidential pick , Mike Pence, has held wildly different views on trade, Russia, Iraq and Muslims than the billionaire businessman.
+
+Throughout his 16-year political career, the 57-year-old Indiana governor has adhered to traditionally muscular Republican policies on foreign affairs.
+
+Trump, however, has taken a more isolationist approach and placed less emphasis on foreign issues. The issues that he has put at the center of his campaign are largely the ones he and his running mate disagree on.
+
+Trump made his opposition to the Iraq intervention a major theme, criticizing Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton for her 2002 vote backing the war when she was in the Senate.
+
+Pence, near the beginning of his 12-year tenure in the U.S. House, voted for the resolution authorizing the 2003 Iraq invasion as well.
+
+Pence, who chaired the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East, was also a prominent backer of the 2007 ""surge"" strategy sending more U.S. troops to the faltering effort in Iraq, telling CNN's Wolf Blitzer at the time that ""the surge is working"" while also defending the original decision to invade despite the absence of weapons of mass destruction.
+
+Pence has also struck a harder line on Russia than Trump, whose authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee has praised.
+
+Trump asked an audience at a California rally in May, ""Wouldn't it be nice if we could get along with Russia? Wouldn't that be nice?""
+
+Pence has opted for stronger rhetoric, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2015 that, ""A new Iron Curtain is descending down the spine of Europe as modern Russia seeks to redraw the map of Europe by force.""
+
+He added, ""Putin's Russia ignores talk of sanctions, claims land and supports rebels in Ukraine with impunity.""
+
+And Pence has previously taken issue with some of Trump's national security proposals, calling his proposal to ban Muslim foreigners from entering the U.S. ""offensive and unconstitutional"" in a December tweet.
+
+Trump has since refined the proposal, saying it would only apply to citizens from countries with connections to terrorism.
+
+Perhaps more than any other international issue, Trump has made global trade a defining aspect of his campaign -- yet Pence has taken a diametrically opposed position.
+
+The real estate mogul has frequently called NAFTA, which regulates trade between U.S., Canada and Mexico, ""a disaster."" During a Republican primary debate in February, he declared, ""We are killing ourselves with trade pacts that are no good for us and no good for our workers.""
+
+Pence, in contrast, praised the role of global trade and slammed protectionism in a 2010 speech to the Detroit Economic Club.
+
+""Protectionism and closing our doors to other countries does not help us, or people in the rest of the world,"" he said. ""We must support expanded free trade to renew American exceptionalism and create jobs.""
+
+Pence also backed free trade deals with Panama, Colombia and South Korea while in Congress.
+
+Potentially most problematic for Trump, Pence has been a strong proponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional trade deal involving 12 countries pushed by the Obama administration.
+
+""The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country -- just a continuing rape of our country. It's a harsh word, but it's true,"" Trump said in a speech last month in Ohio.
+
+But in a September 2014 tweet, Pence gave the deal a ringing endorsement and called for its ""swift adoption.""
+
+However, the Indiana governor has found common ground with Trump on some national security issues -- especially when it comes to criticizing President Barack Obama.
+
+Like Trump, Pence has slammed Obama for reductions in the size of the American military.
+
+Shared stances on the size of the military
+
+""This administration has reduced our Army, now its smallest size since 1940. The Navy has fewer ships than at any time since 1916, and our Air Force has its smallest tactical fighter force in history,"" Pence said at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
+
+""Our active-duty armed forces have shrunk from 2 million in 1991 to about 1.3 million today. The Navy has shrunk from over 500 ships to 272 ships during this same period of time. The Air Force is about one-third smaller than 1991,"" Trump said.
+
+The Indiana governor has also echoed Trump's critique of the President's preferred terminology for terrorist groups.
+
+""Lecturing the American people about the crusades while refusing to call Islamic extremism by name is an abdication of leadership,"" Pence told CPAC.
+
+They also largely agree on Israel -- nowadays.
+
+Pence is an avid backer of the Middle Eastern ally, telling the CPAC audience, ""Israel's cause is our cause"" and voicing approval of the decision by then-House Speaker John Boehner to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress to lobby against the Iran nuclear deal the White House was then negotiating with Tehran.
+
+Trump has also blasted the deal, and has recently staked out an aggressively pro-Israel stance.
+
+""Israel is a very, very important ally of the United States and we are going to protect them 100%,"" he said last week, rebuffing an audience member's criticism of the country.
+
+But last winter, Trump was castigated by many Republicans for declining to promise to keep Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. He also said peace would depend on whether Israel is willing to make sacrifices and that he would remain ""neutral"" in negotiations.",REAL
+1291,5 things to watch in tonight's debate,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+5980,The Political and Cultural Richness of Kashmiriyat,"Email 
+The various communities in the state of J & K – Kashmiri Muslims, Kashmiri Pandits, Dogras and Ladakhis – have tried time and again to form a national consciousness in order to name a cultural alterity through the nation. The construction of “Kashmiriyat,” or a syncretic cultural ethos, by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and his comrades involved culling selected cultural fragments from an imagined past that would enfold both the Pandits and the Muslims. But due to the regional sentiments that are so well entrenched in the psyche of the people, this attempt is still in a volatile stage. 
+The notion of “Kashmiriyat,” forged by my maternal grandfather Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, was not handed down to me as an unachievable and abstract construct; on the contrary, it was crystallized for me as the eradication of a feudal structure and its insidious ramifications; the right of the tiller to the land he worked on; the unacceptability of any political solution that did not take the aspirations and demands of the Kashmiri people into consideration; the right of Kashmiris to high offices in education, the bureaucracy and government; the availability of medical and educational facilities in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh; the preservation of literatures, shrines and historical artifacts that defined an important aspect of “Kashmiriyat”; formation of the Constituent Assembly of J & K to institutionalize the constitution of the state in 1951, which was an enormous leap toward the process of democratization; the fundamental right of both women and men to free education up to the university level; equal opportunities afforded to both sexes in the workplace; the nurturing of a contact zone in social, political and intellectual ideologies and institutions; pride in a cultural identity that was generated in a space created by multiple perspectives. 
+The notion of ‘Kashmiriyat’, or of the syncretism of Kashmir, as I mentioned earlier, was the secular credo of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s All Jammu and Kashmir NC, popularized in the 1940s and 50s to defeat the centralizing strategies of the successive regimes of independent India. This significant concept does not attempt to simplify the ambiguity and complexity of religious, social and cultural identities. It neither attempts to assert a fixed identity nor reinforce the idea of purity of culture. I would veer away from adopting an image of this secular credo that is created by the unitary discourses it deplores. On the contrary, “Kashmiriyat” brings about a metamorphosis in the determinate concept of the Indian state, and creates a situation in which the nation-states of India and Pakistan are forced to confront an alternative epistemology. At a time of political and social upheaval in the state, this notion engendered a consciousness of place that offered a critical perspective from which to formulate alternatives. Without negating the historicity of the notion, this theoretical fiction was deployed by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah and his colleagues in order to forge a strategic essentialism that would enable the creation of a sovereign Kashmiri identity. It certainly was not a flawless notion. Professor R. L. Hangloo, eminent historian of Kashmiri Pandit descent provided a complex and concise definition of “ Kashmiriyat ”: 
+“ Kashmiriyat is a far wider concept than the harmonious relationship cutting across religious and sectarian divisions. Kashmiriyat is the externally endowed and internally evolved phenomenon of co-existence at the social, religious, political, spatial, cultural and other institutional levels among Kashmirees of all shades that inhabited Kashmir. Kashmiriyat has evolved as a result of special circumstances that are rooted in Kashmir‘s topographical centrality that entitled Kashmir to imbibing, interacting and assimilating a variety of world cultures in consonance with Kashmiri sensibilities that reflect a nuanced and sophisticated approach that did not disturb the patterns of production and cultural manners reflecting the Kashmiri genius. This specificity has stemmed from the historical processes that the region of Kashmir has embraced both in peace and turmoil for centuries. Kashmir has always been surrounded by some of the world’s greatest civilizations such as China, Persia/Iran, Central Asia and India. Kashmir and Kashmirees were always at the center of this world and not on the periphery which is reflected in the assimilation of their residual practices of religions. Note that while Kashmir maybe on a fairly marginal point on the map of the state of India, Kashmir as a region was historically at the epicenter of a much larger world space and world civilization. This centrality endowed the region with a superiority and self identity that has assimilated the social and religious-cultural traditions of this greater region and traits of greater cultures throughout history to evolve and strengthen what came to constitute Kashmiriyat . This sense of superior self identity has grown over centuries as Kashmiriyat among Kashmirees both within and out side Kashmir. 
+Living together, untroubled by diversities of religion, racial, cultural, material, and political and other identities, the notion of Kashmiriyat became the bedrock of identity which consolidated itself increasingly when Islam entered into the Valley. Before the thirteenth century, even though there were plural religious sects, they neither saw eye to eye with each other nor were they external to Kashmir in totality. Shaivites facilitated the decline of Buddhists in Kashmir; the Vaishnavas had to keep their identity concealed to escape the wrath of the Shaivites. The pre-Islamic history is replete with religious, ethnic, racial and other conflicts. The battles of Dammaras, Ekangas, Tantrins, Khasas and others were perpetual features of pre-Islamic Kashmiri society. There was a long drawn conflict and contestation within Islamic society before rapprochement took place between the orthodox Muslims and heterodox sects. The entrance of Islam in Kashmir coincided with the end of this struggle. It was this rapprochement that disallowed Kashmirees from seeing any contradiction between the preaching of Islam and the practice of upholding the Heretical tradition (that is, acknowledging the divine power of the local, the Rishi) in Kashmir. Therefore the kind of Islam that entered Kashmir was devoid of any orthodoxy. It was only after the arrival of Islam that Lalleshwari and Sheikh Noor –ud-din (Nund Reshi) interacted to produce the atmosphere and philosophy of co-existence and tolerance at popular level. This interaction entailed massive changes in the world view of Kashmirees that reflected a truly remarkable and world encompassing shift in every aspect of their sensibility as well.” 
+Uncertainty about the status of the former princely state has loomed large since 1947. In an atmosphere of unpredictability, in the frightening darkness of political intrigue, in the paranoia of political deception, the fungi of undemocratic policies and methods continue to grow unabated. The unresolved Kashmir dispute poses a danger of monstrous proportions to the stability of the Indian subcontinent. Is the former princely state of J & K a postcolonial state? Postcolonialism refers to a phase undergone after the decline and dismantling of the European empires by the mid-twentieth century, when the peoples of many Asian, African and Caribbean countries were left to create new governments and forge national identities. The ideology that has been propounded by the governments of India and Pakistan reflects and produces the interests of state-sponsored agencies and institutionson both sides of the Line of Control (LOC). These institutions have couched the debased discourse of exploitation in the language of culture and religion, a strategy that has led to the relegation of the subjectivity, historical understanding and traditions of the Kashmiri populace. As the eminent Palestinian–American scholar Edward Said (1991: 29) noted, “All human activity depends on controlling a radically unstable reality to which words approximate only by will or convention.” Representatives of the privileged centre of power silence the voices that are on the margins of mainstream society and politics. These privileged centres have always constrained reality by imposing their ideological schema, which underpins their powerful positionality, on it. Their ability to conjure images and re-stretch boundaries that serve their set of beliefs has rendered them a force to reckon with. These ideas expounded by the powers-that-be portray Kashmiris as a stereotypical and predictable entity. 
+This delineation of the Kashmiri subject was foregrounded by an imperial agent of the British Raj, Sir Walter Lawrence, Settlement Commissioner of J & K, in his The Vale of Kashmir ([1895] 2005). This politically and culturally misleading portrayal of the Kashmiri subject has been underscored by the policies of the governments of India and Pakistan vis-à-vis Jammu and Kashmir, which is why the authority of democratically elected representatives in that region has always been curbed. The policies of the two governments follow the much-trodden path of totalitarianism and spell a pattern of doom for Kashmir. The unnecessary and unjustified postponement of the resolution of the Kashmir conflict has insidiously gnawed at the tenuous relations between India and Pakistan. The issue has also, for better or worse, been thrust on to the stage of global politics, and its volatility has contributed to the destabilization of the Indian subcontinent. Josef Korbel (2002: 304) wrote with foresight that “whatever the future may have in store, the free world shares with India and Pakistan common responsibility for the fate of democracy and it awaits with trepidation the solution of the Kashmir problem. Its own security may depend on such a settlement.”",FAKE
+10132,Hillary Clinton Is Setting A Masterful Trap For Trump To Self Destruct,"While campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Florida, Alicia Machado described in detail the abuse inflicted on her by Donald Trump at the Miss Universe pageant. 
+Clip: 
+— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 1, 2016 
+Machado said, “I was scared of him. He made fun of me, and I didn’t know how to respond. He told me I was ugly. I was massive. He called me names. He called me Miss Piggy, Miss Housekeeping, Miss Eating Machine….For years, afterward, I was sick fighting back eating disorders.” 
+Machado added, “It’s clear. It’s really clear that he does not respect women. He just judges us on our looks.” 
+It is smart to take every opportunity to remind voters that as a human being, Donald Trump has consistently behaved in public like trash. He is a man who hates women and treats more than half of the population like objects. 
+Having Machado introduce Clinton in Florida was also savvy politics. Trump has never demonstrated the personal restraint needed not to take the bait. Machado’s comments should cause Trump to blow up again, and throw his dire campaign even further off message. 
+Hillary Clinton is setting Trump with a masterful trap. No one has been better at feeding negative Trump news cycles than the candidate himself. Trump can’t resist defending himself, and Hillary Clinton is setting the Republican nominee up to open his mouth and wallow in his own sexist mud.",FAKE
+2957,What 250 more Special Forces in Syria can do,"ISIS is making enemies in Syria, and there's a need to ramp up efforts to train them. That's where the new Special Operations forces fit in.
+
+President Obama’s announcement Monday that 250 Special Operations Forces will be headed to Syria suggests that a “start small” approach to combatting the Islamic State might be showing signs of promise.
+
+Last fall, Mr. Obama sent 50 special operators to Syria as trainers as “a proof of concept of sorts,” says Melissa Dalton, a former intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. The goal was to see if the United States could use the training to gain traction with Kurdish fighters and Arab Sunnis on the ground, she says.
+
+On Monday, Obama offered his verdict, saying that the expertise of the Special Operations Forces already in Syria “has been critical as local forces have driven [the Islamic State] out of key areas.”
+
+Monday’s decision, then, appears to be an attempt to hit the fast forward button.
+
+It “seems to reflect that this proof of concept works,” adds Ms. Dalton. “There’s been some positive momentum built up, with the idea now being, ‘OK, if we expand that out a bit further – multiply the amount of trainers in the country – then perhaps we can multiply the effects.' ”
+
+There are questions. At a time when a diplomatic cease-fire is faltering, the US seems to be doubling down on a military strategy, even as it has failed to define what a realistic end state might be, Dalton says.
+
+“Where are we building to? Is this the first of many plus-ups happening incrementally – and to what end?”
+
+But building out the program bit by bit makes sense, say others. It gives the US the potential to empower anti-Islamic State forces in a proven way without becoming embroiled in a Mideast war.
+
+In this case, “incrementalism is the right approach,” says Nicholas Heras, a Middle East analyst at the Center for a New American Security.
+
+Monday’s decision mirrored another made last week, with more US troops on their way to Iraq in newly-expanded roles that will bring them “closer to the action,” as Defense Secretary Ash Carter put it.
+
+With Obama making no secret of his desire to keep US out of another war in the Middle East, this increase in Syria from 50 to 300 Special Operations Forces is seen as a relatively low-risk gambit.
+
+In the past, the US has made much more grandiose efforts at fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Before the US sent over its 50 special operators last fall, it attempted a $500 million effort to train Syrian anti-ISIS forces. The result: “four or five” fighters on the battlefield, Gen. Lloyd Austin told Congress last September.
+
+But still, the Syrian rebels in the program were “getting terrific training,” Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon’s policy chief, assured lawmakers.
+
+The answer was to pivot to the 50 special operators, who have worked on refining their message to potential recruits.
+
+“They are explaining the benefits: They get training, they get US airstrike support, US logistical support, and the tacit idea that while ISIS is the primary objective, the US isn’t going to complain if these groups fight back against” Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Mr. Heras says.
+
+The trainers have also had some success in expanding the number of Syrian Arabs within the Syrian Democratic Forces, Heras adds.
+
+That’s important in building some degree of trust among anti-ISIS forces. Kurds have proven to be US forces’ most-reliable partners, but Syrian Arabs distrust them – to the point that Sunni Arab families were fleeing deeper into ISIS-held territory for fear of Kurdish forces, Amnesty International reports. The Kurdish forces were accused of ethnic cleansing and forcibly removing Sunni Arabs from their homes.
+
+Kurdish forces ultimately want an autonomous region of their own within Syria, a goal that many Sunni Arabs do not support, notes Jenny Cafarella, a fellow at the Institute for the Study of War.
+
+But a greater ethnic mix of forces battling ISIS could help in the long run. If these troops can ultimately take back control of their hometowns, then they must find a way to live together and govern – an even trickier proposition than winning on the battlefield.
+
+And the pool of recruits is growing.
+
+In the first train-and-equip mission, the emphasis was on fighters that had been recommended by Syrians on the ground, often with the Turks acting as intermediaries.
+
+Now, the latest pool includes “guys who were expelled from ISIS-controlled territory, so they have a sense of vengeance – they’re on a mission,” Heras says. “For them, it’s ISIS that’s the major impediment to them being able to go back home, to build up their own government,” he adds. “For them, it’s ISIS that’s the main enemy.”",REAL
+9728,Is Donald Trump Autistic?,"link Donald Trump could have a disability that used to be known as Aspergers, and this can cause people trouble when they try to socialize because their theory of mind is not complete. Basically, they have trouble thinking of how others perceive their actions. These people tend to be highly intelligent. Trump's IQ is 156, which makes sense considering he has built more businesses than most of us have, and although he could have invested his father's money and made the same amount back as he did in the end through business deals, he put a lot of work and thought into his business. I would like to know what kind of medicines Trump is on and what his mental health diagnosis are. If he has Aspergers, then that would explain why he makes so many social mistakes. Being super rich from a young age might also account for it since he would not be trained to interact with people on an equal level (which is a lot more complicated than interacting with people when you are rich and they are poor). However, an article in The New York Times recently focused on Trump's fears of making social blunders. He has a fear of losing social status or being embarrassed publicly. However, he doesn't seem to do well publicly, which must be a disability because he would *want* to be a good public speaker and not make social gaffes yet he still does it. It must be accidental. Donald even stated he is a difficult man to be married to, which means he knows himself and his weaknesses. Many people with Aspergers don't get married because they have a hard time in relationships.",FAKE
+4461,Political pundits talk polarization at Sanford School Tuesday,"Political columnists Michael Gerson and EJ Dionne reflected on the polarization of politics Tuesday night at the Sanford School of Public Policy.
+
+Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and Dionne, a former political reporter for the Washington Post and the New York Times, discussed how the public and the political establishment in America have “sorted” themselves into increasingly exclusive ideological camps. The speakers noted that members of different political parties interact with and resemble each other less and less. The discussion also explored how social and political institutions have driven polarization and how those same institutions might heal the partisan divide.
+
+“You have two parties where no one in those parties can see anyone in the other party that looks and thinks like they do,” Gerson said.
+
+Dionne and Gerson emphasized the increasing polarization of political parties not only on ideological lines, but also along cultural and regional boundaries. They noted that this has led to heated debates over issues that were previously areas of agreement.
+
+“Equality of opportunity is not a natural state. It is a social condition that is developed—consciously developed—through educational institutions, working communities and economic policies.” —Michael Gerson
+
+“My concern with that is that it tends to turn every issue into a culture war debate, no matter what it is,"" Dionne said.
+
+Both Dionne and Gerson generally agreed that the Republican Party is currently more ideologically uniform than the Democratic Party. Gerson noted, however, that the Democratic Party appears to be polarizing at a faster rate than the Republican Party.
+
+He also explained that the growth of conservative movements outside the Republican Party has made it harder for moderates within the party. Gerson said that while there are members of the Republican Party that want to reform government, there is also a significant wing of the party which dismisses the role of government in society.
+
+“We have the emergence of an ideological movement that has an apocalyptic tone, that America is very much on the verge of collapse,” Gerson said. “They have adopted an ideology—a rather lazy ideology—called ‘Constitutionalism’ which essentially rules out the New Deal and the Great Society and all the modern purposes of government. That’s a very simple ideological approach and it’s not an adequate one for modern government.”
+
+Dionne noted that some Republicans have now started to focus on inequality, which may lead to more centrist policies from the party.
+
+“We have started to focus on the costs of the long rise of inequality,” Dionne said. ”At least Republicans are now giving some lip service to these problems.”
+
+Dionne and Gerson both said that Republicans who acknowledge the role of government in creating equal opportunity and Democrats who acknowledge the role of families in creating social stability stand the best chance of reducing political polarization.
+
+“Equality of opportunity is not a natural state. It is a social condition that is developed—consciously developed—through educational institutions, working communities and economic policies,” Gerson said. “We’re not achieving that for maybe a third of the American workforce, who now don’t have the skills and human capital to compete in the modern economy. It’s a fundamental challenge to the definition of the American experiment.”",REAL
+4874,Why you should be skeptical of wacky new studies about what sways elections,"This has been a rough year for pollsters and pundits, with prediction after prediction going painfully awry. Even those supposedly unflappable data journalists have found themselves stepping in it.
+
+But it’s not just the journalists and pollsters. Since I’m a professor of statistics as well as a blogger who often comments on academic papers that I think misuse numbers, I have a front-row seat to some of the least persuasive academic takes on politics and elections. And it’s been a big year for bad studies.
+
+In journalism and polling, premature obituaries of Trump have been one common problem. In July 2015, the New York Times’s Nate Cohn remarked on ""a shift that will probably mark the moment when Trump’s candidacy went from boom to bust."" (That was a reference to Trump crudely dismissing the war record of John McCain, the former Republican presidential nominee.) ""His support will erode,"" Cohn wrote confidently, ""as the tone of coverage shifts from publicizing his anti-establishment and anti-immigration views … to reflecting the chorus of Republican criticism of his most outrageous comments and the more liberal elements of his record.""
+
+Whoops. Only a month later, famed number cruncher Nate Silver gave Trump a 2 percent chance of winning the Republican nomination.
+
+A couple of months after that, Gallup made the historic announcement that the organization would no longer do horse race–style election polling. You can see why this might be a smart time to get out of the predictions game.
+
+I'd love to claim that I'm above all this myself, but really I too had no idea what would happen during the primary season. Whenever anyone asked me, I'd point them to an article I wrote in 2011 explaining why primaries are hard to predict.
+
+In short, in the general election voters have months to make their decisions, the choice is between two candidates who are ideologically distinct, and most voters can rely on party cues. In contrast, primaries come in a rushed sequence, competing candidates tend to be similar in ideology, and (of course) they come from the same party. And with multiple candidates comes the opportunity for strategic voting (casting a vote for someone you dislike to defeat someone you dislike even more), which is a hard thing to model.
+
+In recent years we have seen claims that political attitudes and preferences were determined by menstrual cycles and smiley face icons
+
+In short, I avoided making any embarrassing predictions about primary election winners only by the tactic of avoiding making predictions, period — an option that was not so available to the Nates Cohn and Silver, who were expected to make real-time predictions (and who, to their credit, examined their errors afterward).
+
+But academia has had no shortage of errant ""findings"" as well. This year, perhaps more than others, the internet has been swarming with conspiracy theories — some of these defended with statistical arguments.
+
+In June, various people pointed me to a paper by Axel Geijsel and Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, graduate students at Tilburg University and Stanford, respectively, with the portentous title ""Are we witnessing a dishonest election? A between state comparison based on the used voting procedures of the 2016 Democratic Party Primary for the Presidency of the United States of America."" (Yes, indeed: that presidency.)
+
+The paper, issued before the primary race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was decided, made the case that Sanders tended to win in states where electronic voting could be double-checked with a paper trail. Clinton, suspiciously — or ""suspiciously"" — tended to win when there was no paper trail. Moreover, Geijsel and Barragan wrote, the inaccuracy of exit polling supposedly rose in states without a paper trail, and the official results seemed biased toward Clinton.
+
+The paper itself did not convince me, as there can be all sorts of differences between different states, and there’s no reason to pick just one of these factors and give it a causal interpretation. It’s what we call an observational comparison. You never know, fraud could always happen, but the paper supplied no useful evidence that this difference was the one driving the election results. (Not that you’d need an explanation as to why a 74-year-old socialist fails to win a major party nomination in the United States.)
+
+But if going viral among Bernie followers counted in academia, these students would have tenure already.
+
+Closer to the mainstream, in June, economics professors Ray Fisman and Andrea Prat, of Boston University and Columbia, posted a piece in Slate claiming that Fox News support for Donald Trump ""could erase a 12-percentage-point Democratic lead in the popular vote.""
+
+I’m skeptical that this number is anything close to reasonable. After looking at the cited study, by professors Gregory Martin (political science, Emory) and Ali Yurukoglu (Stanford Business School), it seems to me that Fisman and Prat improperly extrapolated an estimate that was already probably too high.
+
+Martin and Yurukoglu estimated that watching Fox News an extra 2.5 minutes a day increased a voter’s probability of voting Republican by 0.3 percentage points. But it’s not reasonable to assume that if the time watching the channel continued to grow, the shift in vote preference would continue to be strong and linear — all the way to 12 percent!
+
+In addition, while I trust that the authors found what they reported, there is a well-known tendency for small but variable effects to be overestimated in this sort of statistical study. In general, estimates near zero are discarded and high estimates are reported. We call this the ""statistical significance filter,"" which can turn weak results into robust-seeming ones.
+
+Regarding partisan news sources, I have more trust in a study by political scientists Dan Hopkins and Jonathan Ladd of Georgetown University, who analyze data from a 2000 pre-election poll and find a positive effect of Fox News on support for George W. Bush, but only for Republicans and independents. In summarizing this study, Hopkins writes that media influence ""fosters political polarization. For Republicans and pure independents, Fox News access in 2000 reinforced GOP loyalties."" Not a lot of room for a 12 percent swing in that claim.
+
+The next month came a piece, based on work by the research psychologist Robert Epstein — Epstein also publicized it last year — called ""How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election."" It claimed that ""Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more — up to 80 percent in some demographic groups — with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated. … Given that many elections are won by small margins, this gives Google the power, right now, to flip upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide.""
+
+Quite a claim. The numbers, however, came from a highly artificial set of lab experiments in which participants were asked questions about unfamiliar political candidates after being shown unrealistically rigged search results. The researchers put extremely biased articles favoring one candidate on page one, moderately biased articles on page two, and so on, so participants had to go to pages four and five of a five-page search to find anything strongly favoring the other candidate.
+
+Epstein then compounded his exaggerations by claiming, ridiculously, that the real-world impact of Google on elections would ""undoubtedly be larger"" than in his loaded experiments.
+
+In fact, the real presidential election is not being held in an isolated lab: Voters have many sources of information about Clinton and Trump, beyond those found in (hypothetically) rigged search results. (Full disclosure: Some of my research is funded by Google.)
+
+And it’s still only early September! Just wait till next month, when just about any election-related study will get 15 minutes of fame. In recent years we have seen claims that political attitudes and preferences were determined by menstrual cycles, smiley faces displayed near survey questions for subliminally short durations, and the mood swings caused by the results of college football games (really). All of these studies struck me as flawed, either in design or in the analysis of the data. (Follow the links for more details about my doubts.)
+
+I'm not saying that these studies shouldn't have been done (well, in most cases). Researchers should be free to try out all sorts of outside-the-box ideas, and, indeed, in some of these cases I’m not criticizing the studies so much as the accompanying hype. But respected news organizations should think twice about dramatic claims about voting and elections, even if they are published in reputable scientific journals.
+
+When it comes to research, election season is silly season, and there always seems to be room for one more story about how irrational those voters are. Who knows what else they’ll come up with before November 8?
+
+Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He blogs at Statistical Modeling.",REAL
+5932,Almost 100 Missing After Boat Carrying Migrants Sinks Off Libyan Coast,"Get short URL 0 18 0 0 As many as 97 people are missing after a boat carrying more than 100 migrants sank off the Libyan shore, a spokesman of the Libyan coast guard told Sputnik. 
+TRIPOLI (Sputnik) – According to spokesman Ayoub Qassem, the vessel carrying 126 people sank on Wednesday 26 miles away from the lighthouse of Tajura and was spotted by a tanker which alerted the coastguard. As many as 29 people were rescued by the tanker. © AFP 2016/ ITALIAN NAVY 2016 Shows Record Number of Refugee Deaths in Mediterranean ""The coast guard … is looking for the remaining missing persons, the number of whom is estimated at 97,"" Qassem said. 
+Europe is currently struggling to cope with a massive refugee influx, with hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants fleeing conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa. According to the UN refugee agency, the Mediterranean Sea claimed over 3,600 lives last year. ...",FAKE
+6053,Desmond Doss: His Only Weapon Was His Conscience,"Desmond Doss: His Only Weapon Was His Conscience Written by Michael E. Telzrow Email 
+He refused to touch a gun, yet wanted to serve his country during World War II. After being mocked and badgered for his pacifism, he became a hero and the first “conscientious objector” in U.S. history to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. His incredible story is depicted in the movie Hacksaw Ridge , directed by Mel Gibson and starring Andrew Garfield as Desmond Doss. The article that follows is not about the movie but about the real-life Doss. 
+
+The grenade landed at his feet with a thud. While three other soldiers in Company B of the 307th Infantry scrambled for shelter in a foxhole, Army Company Aid Man, Private First Class Desmond Doss attempted to kick the deadly projectile away with his heavy combat boot. He had only one thought in his mind, and that was to protect his beloved men. Unable to kick the grenade clear, Doss was rocked by an ear-splitting explosion that sent 17 pieces of white-hot shrapnel into his body. Treating himself for shock, he took refuge in the foxhole with his platoon mates and spent a terrifying five hours within yards of the enemy on Okinawa. 
+The next day, litter bearers made their way to his position and loaded Doss on a stretcher bound for the safety of an aid station. On the way, they encountered a soldier with a serious head wound. Sensing the severity of the soldier’s wounds, Doss rolled off the stretcher and insisted that the wounded man take his place. Swapping places with the wounded soldier was typical of Doss. By then his deep concern and compassion for his comrades was legendary among the men of the 307th Infantry Regiment. From Guam to Leyte and now Okinawa, Doss had repeatedly placed the safety of his men above his own. When the bloody Okinawa campaign finally ended, Doss had etched his name in the annals of military history as the first conscientious objector to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery under fire. 
+History sometimes teaches us that men and women of conviction often rise from the most humble of backgrounds. Greatness is not the sole domain of the powerful or rich, but is often found where one least expects it. Desmond Doss was born on February 7, 1919, in Lynchburg, Virginia. The son of William Thomas Doss, a carpenter, and Bertha Edward Oliver Doss, a shoemaker, he was raised in a devout Seventh Day Adventist family. Ever since he was a young boy, he had been immersed in a faith-based environment, and it exerted a most profound effect upon his life. He formed a deep respect for the 10 Commandments. As a young lad, he was particularly interested in a lithographic print depicting the illustrated Commandments that hung on the wall in his Lynchburg home. One image in particular held his interest. The subject of the Sixth Commandment was the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. The image of Cain with a club in his hand standing over his slain brother caused Doss to ponder the act. “I wondered how in the world could a brother do such a thing? It put a horror in my heart of just killing; and as a result, I took it personally, Desmond, if you love me, you won’t kill.” 
+As a young man, Desmond cared for the sick of his community and church, and generally wanted to help others. He seemed to have an inherent desire to assist those in need. By the time he was 21, Doss was a deacon in the Seventh Day Adventist Church. 
+“Conscientious Cooperator” 
+In 1941, Doss secured a job as a ship joiner in the naval shipyards at Newport News, Virginia. Before the declaration of war, Doss had registered as a conscientious objector, or 1AO status as it was defined by the Army. At first, Doss was against such a designation. He had always linked conscientious objectors with sedition and unpatriotic attitudes. He felt he was anything but that. He wanted to serve his country by caring for the sick and wounded, and bristled at the thought that he would be associated with less honorable men. Despite his unwavering belief in the Sixth Commandment, and his strong Seventh Day Adventist conviction of observing the Sabbath on Saturday, Doss felt he could serve his country as well as anyone. In the end he acquiesced, but always referred to himself as a “conscientious cooperator.” 
+For obvious reasons, he specifically requested assignment to medical duty, but partially because that way he could reconcile his beliefs with working seven days a week, because as he said in his own words, “Christ healed on the Sabbath.” Later in life he explained, “I felt like it was an honor to serve my country according to the dictates of my conscience.” In 1942, his number came up, and Doss did what millions of other Americans did in WWII — he left the safety of his civilian job and embarked upon an adventure that would change his life. 
+Before he left for active duty, Doss married the love of his life, Dorothy Pauline Schutte, of Richmond, Virginia, on August 17, 1942. It was a marriage that would sustain him throughout the war, and until her accidental death in 1991. After induction and assignment, Doss became a company aid man with the 307th Infantry, 77th Division, United States Army. Almost immediately, he faced routine and unmerciful harassment from his platoon mates. He was mocked and derided for his devotion to prayer, refusal to even touch a weapon, or perform drills and fatigue on Saturdays. Even by the standards of the 1940s, Doss was an anomaly. He eschewed alcohol and gambling, never smoked, and was steadfast in his faithfulness to Dorothy. Naturally, his convictions were seen as old-fashioned and extreme. It was a mix that was sometimes at odds with the more cosmopolitan recruits from the larger cities. Naturally, some of the men resented Doss’s convictions and especially chafed at the idea that he would be excused from Saturday duty. For Doss’s part he did all he could to observe the Seventh Day Adventist Sabbath observance. He even went as far as to work 24 hours on Sunday, and he would later recount how he would swap duty days with a Catholic soldier who wanted to attend Mass on Sundays. 
+Doss’s refusal to compromise his religious beliefs and train with weapons prompted his battalion commander, Colonel Gerald Cooney, to consider sending Doss back to the United States for non-combat duty. Cooney later recounted on a television episode of This Is Your Life that Doss “wouldn’t even touch a rifle.” Cooney relented only after Doss’s company commander convinced him otherwise, and that the army medic could be depended upon when the times got rough. Prior to that incident, Doss had been threatened with court-martial for refusing to handle a rifle and had been considered for discharge as a psychological case. Throughout it all, Doss remained steadfast in his convictions and belief that he could perform the duties of a medic without resorting to handling weapons of any kind. 
+Once the fighting started, however, the harassment ended. On the island of Guam, Doss changed the minds of his fellow soldiers. The liberation of Guam afforded Doss the opportunity to practice what he had learned in combat medical training, but just as important, it allowed him to prove his worth on the battlefield. From July 21, 1944 through August 10, Doss and the men of the 77th Infantry Division slogged through the jungles of Guam from the southern end of the island to the northern tip, in what was a continuous struggle against a determined Japanese foe. Doss, while not even officially assigned as the unit medic, went out routinely with the advancing forces in the stifling heat of the small Pacific island. He repeatedly removed wounded men from the deadly front, often under intense fire from the enemy. Unarmed and unafraid, Doss saved dozens of men from certain death. Later, in December action at Leyte in the Philippines, Doss traversed an open field under intense fire to assist and retrieve two wounded soldiers. Realizing one was dead, Doss carried the surviving soldier back to a jungle area where he constructed a stretcher out of bamboo and removed the soldier to a safer area. In the end he was awarded the Bronze Star with an Oak Leaf Cluster for his actions on Guam and Leyte. More importantly, he earned the respect of his fellow soldiers. Later, Doss would speak of his actions there: “I knew these men; they were my buddies, some had wives and children. If they were hurt, I wanted to be there to take care of them.” 
+Cliffhanger Rescues 
+Following Guam and Leyte, the 77th Division found itself as part of the 10th Army under the command of General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., the son of a Confederate General. The objective of the 10th Army was to assault and take control of Okinawa, a small island in the Ryukyu Islands chain, and a mere 350 miles from the Japanese home islands. There, they would face stiff and savage resistance. Before they even got there, the 5th U.S. Fleet suffered major losses from Japanese Kamikaze strikes — 10 major attacks in all. The 5th Fleet sustained 10,000 casualties, half of which were killed in action. Twenty-eight American ships were sunk, but it did not deter the Americans, who launched one of the largest amphibious landings of the war on April 1, 1945. 
+Soon after landing on the southern end of the island, it became apparent that the U.S. forces were facing a determined, well-entrenched foe across the entire island — coast to coast. The Japanese employed a now-common defensive technique characterized by intricate and elaborate underground positions, supported by expert use of knee mortars, machine guns, and ferocious frontal attacks. Buckner rejected any idea of a flanking amphibious assault and opted for a series of bloody frontal attacks. From Guadalcanal to Okinawa, the Japanese employed tactics that took advantage of the terrain; especially reverse slopes and escarpments. It was on one such escarpment — the Maeda Escarpment, a 400-foot high, jagged coral ridge — where Doss would write his name in the history books. 
+Since April 26, various American units of the 24th and 96th Divisions had been engaged in fierce battle with the Japanese at the Maeda Escarpment. After an artillery barrage of 1,616 rounds, the attack had been launched. The 383rd Infantry easily moved into position at the base of the escarpment, but when the men reached the crest, they suffered 18 casualties in a matter of minutes. The Japanese held Maeda like a vise grip. The geographical fortress was packed with pill boxes, hidden machine gun emplacements, and caves, and it was defended by a foe willing to fight to the death. Despite slight advances on Hills 150 and 152 on April 27, no American forces were able to secure the escarpment. The battle see-sawed back and forth and on April 29, the men of the 307th Infantry went into action. It was here where Private Desmond Doss became the first conscientious objector to perform battle actions that would secure for him the nation’s highest military award. 
+Moving into action, the men of Company B, 307th Infantry, cleared the base of the escarpment with flame throwers, grenades, and small-arms fire. Fighting every inch of the way, the men reached the base of the escarpment, exhausted and spent. They had battled innumerable counterattacks, terrifying night battles, and hand-to-hand combat. Daily airstrikes were employed to dislodge the Japanese from their dug-in positions. It had taken Lt. Colonel Gerald D. Cooney’s men of the 307th five days to gain control of Needle Rock to the left of the top of the escarpment. It had taken the battalion nine attempts to finally secure Needle Rock. 
+During the night of April 30, the unit brought up five naval cargo nets that Doss helped splice together, and four 50-foot ladders to aid in climbing the peak. On May 1, men of Company A attempted to secure the top of the escarpment by using the ladders. Every man was killed or wounded as soon as he stood up. Company B fared little better. After securing the edge of the escarpment, they were driven off with heavy casualties by a relentless Japanese counterattack. A five-man squad from Company B was mowed down by enemy fire. Doss, as he had done before on Guam and Leyte, crawled on his belly four times to rescue his wounded comrades. On May 2, Companies A and B went back to the edge of the escarpment, but failed to make progress. They tried again on May 3, but were hammered by Japanese knee mortars, grenades, and 81-mm mortar fire from the reverse slope of the escarpment. 
+On May 4, the men of the 1st Battalion, 307th infantry continued their fierce fighting with the Japanese. A successful demolition assault cleared a pillbox and cave complex that had been very troublesome, but the enemy was not ready to yield. From camouflaged positions, the Japanese poured a devastating enfilading fire into the Americans. The men of the 307th, those who could still stand, broke for the safety of the rear. Only Doss remained. Aided by covering fire from the remnants of his battalion, Private Doss moved inexorably from one casualty to the other, administering emergency first aid and dragging them to the edge of the escarpment where he lowered them to safety using a litter technique that he had devised back in training at Elkins, West Virginia. Using a series of bowline knots, Doss fashioned a sling that secured each man’s legs through loops and doubled around the chest. It was perfect and ensured that lowering the wounded over the jagged cliff would not result in any additional injuries. For five harrowing hours, Doss went from wounded man to wounded man. Exposed to enemy fire, Doss could only attribute his survival to divine intervention. By the time he was finished, a blood-soaked Desmond Doss had saved at least 75 men, although his commanders thought it was closer to 100. Captain Jack Glover of the 1st Battalion remarked years later when asked about what Doss did during the fighting for the escarpment, “We fought many days on the escarpment and had to leave casualties behind. Doss refused to seek cover.” 
+American losses on the escarpment had been heavy. The 1st Battalion lost over 400 men, but the battle was not over for Doss and the men of the 307th. Two weeks later, on May 12, moments after a wounded Doss had given up his stretcher to a man in need, a Japanese sniper bullet slammed into the medic’s arm. The bullet had entered his wrist, exited his elbow and lodged in his upper arm. His arm was shattered and nerves were damaged. Quickly, Doss asked a man named Brooks for his rifle. A dismayed Brooks handed the rifle to the one man in the company who had never touched a weapon. Doss had no intention of using it for its intended purpose. Instead he asked Brooks to help him fashion a splint for his severely damaged arm. When he finally got to the aid station, Doss passed out. 
+Damaged Body, Undamaged Faith 
+His wounds were his ticket home, but not before surgery to remove 17 pieces of Japanese shrapnel and the setting of his broken arm. While on board a hospital ship, Desmond Doss discovered that his Bible was missing. He guessed that it had been lost as a result of the grenade explosion, and he quickly sent word back to his unit to be on the lookout for it. Remarkably, they were able to recover a scorched and somewhat damp Bible in the general area where Doss had been wounded. In Doss’s mind, the reunification with the Holy Book was another sign of God’s intervention and benevolence. 
+For his actions on the Maeda Escarpment, Desmond T. Doss was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor — the first and one of only three awarded to conscientious objectors. The citation read in part: “Through his outstanding bravery and unflinching determination in the face of desperately dangerous conditions, Pfc. Doss saved the lives of many soldiers. His name became a symbol throughout the 77th Infantry Division for outstanding gallantry far above and beyond the call of duty.” Subsequently, he was promoted to corporal and received the nation’s highest military honor at the White House on October 12, 1945. The man once reviled and mocked by his beloved comrades was now a symbol of courage and bravery for the entire division. 
+Following the war, Doss spent nearly six years in and out of veterans and military hospitals recovering from his wounds and a case of tuberculosis that he had likely acquired while in service to his country. The disease robbed him of one lung and five ribs that were removed in an attempt to save him. Doss never fully recovered. In 1954, he moved his small family to northwest Georgia near the town of Rising Fawn. There, along with Dorothy and his son, Tommy, Doss tried to make a go of farming, but his injuries and lack of one lung made it extremely difficult. He devoted much of his time to Seventh Day Adventist programs and spoke publicly about his experiences after appearing on a television episode of This Is Your Life in 1959. His beloved wife, Dorothy, passed away as the result of an automobile accident in 1991, and Doss married Frances Duman in 1993. 
+In July 2000, six years before succumbing to cancer, the old soldier wrote these words after receiving favorable medical news: “I love God and Christ with all my heart, I have always tried to keep his Ten Commandments. The principles of the commandments are included in the Golden Rule, and I feel that I received the Congressional Medal of Honor because of the love God gave me for my fellow men.” 
+Ever a man of conviction and faith, Desmond T. Doss finally succumbed to cancer on March 23, 2006, in Piedmont, Alabama. Photo: President Truman presents Desmond Doss with the Congressional Medal of Honor 
+This article is an example of the exclusive content that's available by subscribing to our print magazine. Twice a month get in-depth features covering the political gamut: education, candidate profiles, immigration, healthcare, foreign policy, guns, etc. Digital as well as print options are available!  ",FAKE
+4073,Fidel Castro makes rare public appearance in Cuba,"Fidel Castro, the frail and aging former president of Cuba, made his first public appearance this week in more than a year, shaking hands with a group of Venezuelan visitors, according to official Cuban media.
+
+It was also his first public appearance since President Obama announced a new policy toward normalizing relations with Cuba.
+
+The 88-year-old Castro was last seen in public in January 2014 at the inauguration of an artist's studio.
+
+The official Cuban web site Cubadebate on Friday published four images of Castro sitting inside a bus or van shaking hands with members of the 33-person group of visitors.
+
+Wearing a baseball cap and sporting longish gray hair and a beard, Castro is shown gripping the outstretched hand of four different people who lean through the window. Castro's face is largely obscured in the pictures.
+
+Cubadebate said the encounter occurred in Havana outside an educational complex on March 30, but did not explain why the news wasn't reported until Saturday.
+
+Castro temporarily stepped aside as president in July 2006 due to a serious illness. His brother Raul took over the post permanently in February 2008 after he was elected as the new leader.
+
+An article accompanying the photos said Castro shook hands with the Venezuelan group ""for hours"" during the ""chance encounter."" The article said the group noted that ""Fidel is full of vitality.""
+
+It said the Venezuelans were impressed by his lengthy and hearty hand-shaking session and the ""lucidity of the attentive listener to the multiple details of the Venezuelan reality, especially now that this great nation has become the target of imperial greed.""
+
+In his remarks to the visitors, Castro was quoted as urging people to write to President Obama to stop labeling Venezuela a threat to the the United States.
+
+Venezuela, under the late President Hugo Chavez, forged probably the closest ties with Cuba of any country in Latin America.
+
+In February and March of this year, official Cuban media published photographs of the former president taken during private meetings with a Cuban student leader, with the Cuban agents who were freed from prison in December, and with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Associated Press reported.",REAL
+884,FACT CHECK: Bernie Sanders And Whether Poor Americans Vote,"Last week, an NPR analysis found Hillary Clinton outperforms Bernie Sanders in the states with the most income inequality. This weekend on Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd asked about that trend we discovered: Why would Sanders do worse in those states when income inequality is his signature issue?
+
+We decided to look into that claim.
+
+Do lower-income Americans vote that much less than the rest of the population? And did 80 percent of poor Americans really not vote in 2014?
+
+Sanders may be off on that 80 percent figure, especially depending on how you define ""poor."" But his broader point stands: Poorer Americans do vote less than richer Americans.
+
+We reached out to the Sanders campaign about these stats, and they sent us a source: a 2015 Pew report on financial insecurity and voting patterns. In that report, Pew separated Americans into five different groups based on their levels of financial security (derived from their responses to questions about how hard it is to pay their bills, whether they receive means-tested benefits like SNAP, and so on).
+
+""Financially insecure"" doesn't exactly mean ""poor,"" but Pew itself calls measures of income a ""blunt measure,"" explaining that its insecurity index is a more nuanced look at people's day-to-day financial situations.
+
+Those financially insecure people were much less likely to vote than the people with firmer financial footing. In that lowest-security group, only 20 percent of people were ""likely voters"" in that September-October 2014 survey (according to a Pew scale that determined a person's likelihood of voting). But the likelihood of voting goes up as financial security does — 63 percent of the most financially secure Americans were considered ""likely voters.""
+
+So did 20 percent end up voting?
+
+Census data says they did — and then some. Pew didn't exactly study based on income, but when the Census Bureau did in 2014, it found that among Americans in families making less than $10,000 (the lowest income group they studied), 24.5 percent voted (65.1 percent of those people said they didn't vote; the other 10.3 percent were classified as ""nonrespondents"").
+
+So up to 75.5 percent of those very lowest income families didn't vote in 2014 (that is, the nonvoters plus the nonrespondents). That's close to 80 percent, which lends some weight to Sanders' claim.
+
+But only some weight. That non-voting share may also be as low as 65 percent, given those nonrespondents.
+
+Not only that, but there are plenty of people who make more than $10,000 per year who could still be considered ""poor"" or, in Pew's study, ""financially insecure."" After all, that group of people in families making $10,000 or less is only around 3.1 percent of all U.S. adults. There are plenty more people in the U.S. who are ""poor"" by one definition or another.
+
+And the higher the income over that $10,000 mark, the more people voted in 2014, according to the Census Bureau, meaning that as income gets higher, the further the voting rate gets from that 20 percent mark.
+
+So Sanders may be stretching it on that 80 percent figure.
+
+However, his broader point stands: Lower-income people do tend to vote less than higher-income people. In those census data, voting rates go up with income levels — the highest-income group, people in families making $150,000 or more, also had the highest turnout, at 56.6 percent.
+
+This doesn't just happen in midterms; other Census data from 2012 similarly show higher voting rates as income climbs.
+
+And for further reading, here are two great analyses of this trend of low-income voters' low turnout: one from Sean McElwee in Politico Magazine in January 2015, and one from Daniel Weeks in the Atlantic in January 2014.
+
+Sanders' answer was meant to address why he didn't perform better in unequal states. But it's not clear that if more poorer people voted in the primaries and caucuses that Sanders would have performed better. In some states like Iowa and Massachusetts, he performed close to or better than Clinton among lower-income people, while higher-income people preferred her, according to entrance and exit polls.
+
+But as John Dickerson pointed out on CBS's Face the Nation this weekend, there were several states in which the trend was reversed:
+
+""[I]n states like Ohio, Florida, New York, and even Michigan, which you won, those who would be — those earning less than $30,000 ended up voting more for Hillary Clinton. So, that doesn't seem to be the case,"" he said.
+
+It's possible that more poor people turning out might help Sanders more — after all, many young people (who have been reliable sources of support for Sanders) are in school and earning little, and many others are at the start of their careers, earning less than their older counterparts.
+
+But if the trend seen in the exit polls thus far held and more of those lower-income people turned out, they might not have boosted Sanders all that much.
+
+At any rate, one other important point: The fact that so many Americans don't vote (and that those people tend to disproportionately be lower-income) matters in election outcomes.
+
+In a 2014 report, Pew found that nearly half of nonvoters (that is, people who weren't registered or who were unlikely to vote) had a family income of less than $30,000 (compared with 19 percent of voters).
+
+And those nonvoters had measurably different political views in some areas from likely voters. Nonvoters were more likely to be Democrats or lean Democrat, and they also were more likely to say that government aid to the poor ""does more good than harm.""
+
+One other interesting facet of the interaction between income and turnout: As McElwee pointed out in that Politico article, research suggests that ""higher class bias in the electorate actually leads to higher levels of income inequality."" So if this trend of lower turnout among lower-income Americans continues, it could make inequality (the trend Todd was asking Sanders about in the first place) even higher.
+
+Email from Warren Gunnels, policy director of Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. April 25, 2016
+
+""The Politics of Financial Insecurity"" Pew Research Center, Jan. 8, 2015
+
+""Who Votes? Congressional Elections and the American Electorate: 1978–2014"" Thom File, U.S. Census Bureau, July 2015
+
+Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2012 U.S. Census Bureau, accessed April 25, 2016
+
+""The Income Gap at the Polls"" Sean McElwee, Politico Magazine, Jan. 7, 2015
+
+""Why Are the Poor and Minorities Less Likely to Vote?"" Daniel Weeks, The Atlantic, Jan. 10, 2014",REAL
+3449,How a shortage of lethal injection drugs put the death penalty before the Supreme Court,"The Supreme Court on Monday decided that Oklahoma may continue the use of the controversial sedative midazolam for lethal injections — even after the drug was linked to several botched executions in 2014.
+
+The Supreme Court case dealt with the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma. The Lockett execution, which took 43 minutes after experimental lethal injection drugs were administered, led four inmates — one of whom was executed before the Supreme Court decided the issue — to file a lawsuit challenging Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol. The Supreme Court ultimately decided the botched execution, along with other evidence, wasn't adequate proof that midazolam was cruel and unusual punishment.
+
+But Oklahoma didn't always use midazolam for executions. The use of the controversial sedative is actually a response to an ongoing lethal injection drug shortage, which has left the future of the death penalty unclear in Utah, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and the 29 other states where executions are legal, and added a new angle to the perennial debate about the morality and effectiveness of capital punishment.
+
+Over the past few years, a shortage of sodium thiopental, a key drug in lethal injections, has left states scrambling for alternative ways to execute prisoners and has inspired some to shroud the process in secrecy.
+
+The shortage began around 2010, when drug suppliers around the world, including in the US, began refusing to supply drugs for the injections — out of either opposition to the death penalty or concerns about having their products associated with executions.
+
+""The drugs were being cut off right and left,"" Deborah Denno, a death penalty expert at Fordham University, said.
+
+""The drugs were being cut off right and left""
+
+Hospira Inc. was the sole US supplier of sodium thiopental, according to Denno. But Hospira stopped producing the drug in 2011, after struggling to procure active ingredients for its production and fielding legal threats from authorities in Italy, where the death penalty is vehemently opposed.
+
+Some states still managed to import sodium thiopental from shadier overseas sources. But beginning in 2012, the US District Court of the District of Columbia issued several rulings banning imports of the drugs, deciding that the imported supplies didn't meet FDA regulations.
+
+As the shortage continued, states turned to other European companies for alternative drugs, such as phenobarbital and propofol, that are typically used as sedatives for surgeries. But these companies — under pressure from a European Union export ban, activists like Reprieve, and foreign governments that prohibit the death penalty — over time refused to supply the drugs.
+
+As these companies either stopped supplying drugs or were unable to export to the US, states began to look for new — and sometimes untested — ways to execute prisoners.
+
+With pharmaceutical companies out of the picture, states resorted to compounding pharmacies to make the drugs, which until now escaped most regulations since they did small, mostly out-of-sight transactions with individuals, not major customers. The US-based pharmacies began to produce experimental, sometimes secretive cocktails for states' executions.
+
+Compounding pharmacies were originally meant to make custom drugs for individual people, not major buyers like state governments, Denno said. As a result, their drug cocktails can often be very shoddy — Georgia stopped an execution because its lethal injection drug was ""cloudy"" — and have been decried as experimental and dangerous by civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union.
+
+But even compounding pharmacies may soon stop providing execution drugs to states. The International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists on March 24 announced that it ""discourages its members from participating in the preparation, dispensing, or distribution of compounded medications for use in legally authorized executions.""
+
+Producing lethal injection drugs ""is only going to invite further scrutiny""
+
+The stance may be a way for compounding pharmacies, which are largely unregulated, to avoid the extra regulatory scrutiny that can come with producing lethal injection drugs. ""These compounding pharmacies already have enough of a [public relations] issue,"" Denno said. Massachusetts, for instance, in 2014 passed a law cracking down on compounding pharmacies after a local company's drugs were implicated in the deaths of more than 60 people. Producing lethal injection drugs, Denno said, ""is only going to invite further scrutiny.""
+
+But instead of stepping up regulations, some death penalty states have adopted measures to shield compounding pharmacies that provide lethal drugs from outside scrutiny.
+
+In December, Ohio passed a law that will keep suppliers of lethal drug injections anonymous. John Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, which supports the law, said last December that the changes are not meant to make the execution process more secretive. ""This just protects the identity of the people involved so they don't get harassed, intimidated, or attacked,"" he said.
+
+The drug shortage hasn't only led to concerns about market forces, regulations, and supply and demand. It's also raised important constitutional questions about cruel and unusual punishment, as the shortage has led some states to try experimental and unpredictable drugs for executions.
+
+Since 2014, there have been several high-profile botched executions — described in gruesome detail in the press — all of which have involved secretive, experimental uses of midazolam.
+
+Here are some of the cases:
+
+These botched executions drew criticism and put an unwanted spotlight on the use of experimental lethal drugs, which critics say is a violation of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Some states, including Ohio and Oklahoma, have delayed further executions as they review their practices.
+
+Denno expects these problems to continue as states struggle to replace superior drugs like sodium thiopental. ""Every time a state changes to a new drug, it introduces a degree of uncertainty,"" Denno said. ""These drugs aren't the first choice.""
+
+Botched executions have been around as long the death penalty. About 7 percent of lethal injections and 3 percent of all executions between 1890 and 2010 were botched, according to Austin Sarat's Gruesome Spectacles.
+
+Part of the reason states began using lethal injection drugs is because the previously preferred method of execution for many states, electrocution, often had horrifying results, including the eruption of burned flesh and even live fires as prisoners gasped for air and slowly died.
+
+""We have really incompetent people doing this""
+
+But lethal injections carry problems beyond the drugs used for the procedures that may make them even more prone to being bungled. For one, most doctors — who are likely the most qualified to administer the deadly drugs — won't participate in executions because administering a deadly drug to kill someone would violate professional ethics. In 2010, the American Board of Anesthesiologists voted to revoke the certification of any member who participates in executing a prisoner.
+
+As a result, states aren't typically able to bring in the best-trained doctors, particularly anesthesiologists, to administer drugs that are very dangerous when mishandled. ""We have really incompetent people doing this,"" Denno said.
+
+Perhaps as a result, lethal injection has always been one of the riskier forms of execution — even before the drug shortage forced states to experiment with alternative substances.
+
+In Oklahoma, the doctor and paramedic who participated in Clayton Lockett's botched execution said they received no training, the AP's Sean Murphy reported. The execution team administered needles that weren't long enough for the procedure, and caused what a state official called a ""bloody mess"" when the doctor tried to set an IV line in Lockett's groin and blood gushed out.
+
+In addition to physically botching an execution, it's always possible the state will execute an innocent person. An April 2014 study published in PNAS, a scientific journal, suggested that at least 4 percent of people sentenced to death in the US are likely innocent. At least six people were exonerated of death sentences in 2014, according to a January report from the National Registry of Exonerations.
+
+So far, Denno of Fordham University has tracked three states that are moving toward alternatives to lethal injection should they run out of drugs. Tennessee reinstated the possibility of the electric chair, Utah has allowed the firing squad again, and Oklahoma has permitted nitrogen gas.
+
+These methods of executions were largely abandoned 50 years ago. After the Supreme Court forced states in 1972 to reform their execution procedures to be less racially discriminatory, states began mostly using lethal injections, as this fantastic chart posted by John West at Quartz shows:
+
+States could potentially seek out different drugs to continue using lethal injections and avoid execution methods that are widely seen as more gruesome. But states are also likely wary of repeating the same problems they've experienced with the current batch of drugs. ""The same thing is going to happen,"" Denno said. ""This has been a cycle: every time states have tried to do it, they've been cut off.""
+
+But many of the methods of execution that don't involve injected drugs have major problems.
+
+Denno predicted gas executions will likely turn into ""a disaster."" She said gas has the same issues as lethal injection drugs: it's unclear where states would get the chemicals required for the executions, and whatever chemicals are used may not be suitable for a quick, relatively painless death. It also recalls ghastly memories of World War II, when the Nazis used gas chambers to kill prisoners in death camps.
+
+The firing squad is ""the quickest, the surest, and you have trained executioners to do it""
+
+Electrocution and hanging were abandoned in the first place because they often resulted in botched executions. Electrocutions caused burned skin or live fires during multiple executions, and hangings could go very wrong when the rope broke or the prisoner was decapitated. Both can also take longer than 10 minutes to kill a prisoner.
+
+Denno argued the firing squad may turn out to be the most humane of the available options, even above lethal injections. ""It's the quickest, the surest, and you have trained executioners to do it,"" she said.
+
+Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center said states are dealing with the reality that there's no humane way of killing someone. ""All the methods of execution have problems,"" Dunham said. ""The involuntary termination of another person's life by execution is an inherently violent act.""
+
+Of course, states may be able to come up with another method entirely — or repeal the death penalty altogether. But at least for now, states appear to be sticking to the traditional ways of executing prisoners.
+
+Capital punishment persists through drug shortages and botched executions because it still has strong public support in the US, which puts pressure on lawmakers to find alternatives to lethal injection drugs rather than abolishing the death penalty in the 32 states where it's still legal.
+
+America's support for the death penalty stands in sharp contrast with Europe, where only Belarus, a pro-Moscow dictatorship, still allows capital punishment.
+
+An October 2014 Gallup poll found 63 percent of Americans support the death penalty, while 33 percent oppose it.
+
+Support for the death penalty gets a little more complicated when Americans are asked about specific methods of execution. An NBC News poll from May 2014 found nearly two-thirds of voters support alternatives to lethal injection if the needle isn't an option. But most US adults told YouGov in a February 2015 survey that the gas chamber, electric chair, firing squad, hanging, and beheading are cruel and unusual punishment, while lethal injection isn't.
+
+Support for the death penalty also varies from state to state. Executions are much more culturally and legally ingrained in the South and, to a lesser extent, the West than in the rest of the country. Eighteen states have abolished the death penalty, most of which are in the Northeast and Midwest, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
+
+So while popular support generally pressures lawmakers to find alternatives to lethal injections, that's not necessarily true in all parts of the country, and most US adults don't appear to support all methods of execution.
+
+Regardless of what lawmakers do, the number of executions has been dropping for years. A report from the Death Penalty Information Center found the number of executions hit a 20-year low in 2014.
+
+But even if that's the case, the death penalty as a whole remains very popular and culturally ingrained in the US — and that's led states to seek alternatives like experimental drugs, the firing squad, and nitrogen gas rather than abolishing executions altogether.",REAL
+2920,Arab Officials Warn U.S. of Giving ISIS a Propaganda Win,"Arab leaders have been pressing the Obama administration to encourage the use of Sunni units in the campaign to retake Mosul from Islamic State, as not to give the militant group a propaganda win.",REAL
+3699,Don't let Charleston shooting divide us (Opinion),"Atrocities such as the horrific shooting in Charleston provoke heartrending anguish and grief in people everywhere. However, for members of the black community who have too often experienced senseless violence due to racial hatred, our sorrow is visceral and makes us question whether our country will ever be free of racial animus.
+
+The answer is no. Not because America is inherently racist or because it is not a just society. Rather, it is because racial hatred is premised on evil — an evil that takes over rational thought, thereby allowing irrational and destructive thinking to cloud one's judgment. It is this same evil that took the lives of four beautiful school girls in Birmingham, Alabama, more than 50 years ago, and it is the same evil that will always be present in the hearts and minds of some people. In light of this, what, as a country, are we to do?
+
+As I try to answer this, I imagine myself as one of Reverend Pinckney's congregants sitting on the pews of Emanuel AME Church studying the Word on that fateful night. I imagine posing the question to him. I imagine hearing him provide the following answer:
+
+""We are to do as Christ teaches us. We are to love. We are to treat others the way we would want to be treated, and we are to forgive those who trespass against us.""
+
+Although many of us have been taught these lessons since childhood, it is admittedly very difficult to put them into practice during heartbreaking times such as this. However, this is not only what we are called to do but also what we must do in order to heal racial tensions that threaten the progress our country has made. Here in South Carolina, there has been much improvement in the racial climate, particularly as it relates to whites and blacks. State officials took swift and just action against former police officer Michael Slager in the death of Walter Scott, and the General Assembly recently passed new legislation requiring body cameras for all state and local law enforcement officers. However, disagreements on issues ranging from the placement of the Confederate flag on state grounds to the racial and economic disparities in educational opportunities remain. When discussing these and other race-related issues, starting from a place of love and empathy instead of accusation and distrust can help move us forward to a place of mutual understanding and advancement. As a black community, we cannot let our pain and anger harden our hearts such that we stop engaging in meaningful dialogues about race relations with others who neither look like us or think like us. The white community cannot retreat from the uncomfortable conversations about race, or harden their hearts to the painful experiences that blacks and other minorities have endured and continue to endure on a daily basis. If we are to combat the evil that darkened Mother Emanuel's door, we must learn from her and interact with one another in the same loving and welcoming spirit as she has shown for nearly 200 years. May God's love provide comfort to the victims' families and to our country during this difficult time.",REAL
+5251,The Daily 202: What Trump’s latest shakeup says about his flailing campaign,"THE BIG IDEA: Shaking up his campaign once again, Donald Trump has decided to let Trump be Trump.
+
+The Republican nominee knows he’s losing. Congenitally unable to take personal responsibility, he blames his slide in the polls on the people who have prodded him to act “presidential” and wage a more traditional campaign.
+
+In a 5:38 a.m. press release, Trump announced that Stephen Bannon, who got rich on Wall Street but has never worked on a race before, will take a leave of absence from running Breitbart.com to become the campaign’s “chief executive.” Pollster Kellyanne Conway, who worked for Ted Cruz’s super PAC during the primaries but has been friendly with Trump for years, will become campaign manager.
+
+Paul Manafort will retain his titles as campaign chairman and chief strategist, but Trump advisers told Robert Costa overnight that his status has diminished internally due to the candidate’s unhappiness and restlessness in recent weeks. The aides told Costa that Trump has grown to feel “boxed in” and ""controlled"" by people who barely know him.
+
+Trump plans to redouble his focus on holding big rallies and doing lots of TV hits. He’ll also more aggressively attack Hillary Clinton, to the extent that’s possible, and he’ll reembrace his role as an outsider, making less of an effort to be nice to GOP graybeards.
+
+During the primaries, when Trump was winning, then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski always said ""let Trump be Trump."" He now wants to get back to that type of campaign culture. The moves send “a signal, perhaps more clearly than ever, that the real-estate magnate intends to finish this race on his own terms, with friends who share his instincts at his side,” Costa writes.
+
+-- This is another proof point that Trump is not trying to run the kind of serious campaign that can actually win the presidency. That’s why it will frighten the GOP establishment, scare off some mainstream donors who have been playing footsie with the billionaire and push congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell a little closer to cutting Trump loose — maybe even before Labor Day. (Bannon’s site single-mindedly went after Paul Ryan in the run-up to his primary.)
+
+-- Both of the newly elevated advisers are conservative populists who will never discourage Trump from following his id. It’s hard for a 70-year-old man to change his ways, especially this one. Donald’s id demands instant gratification more than most people’s, and he’s long struggled to control his impulsiveness.
+
+-- The shake-up also suggests that Trump realizes Manafort’s Ukraine connections have become problematic and undercut the credibility of his attacks on the Clinton Foundation.
+
+The Associated Press reports this morning that “Trump’s campaign chairman helped a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million to two prominent Washington lobbying firms.”
+
+“The project was structured in ways that obscured the foreign party's efforts to influence U.S. policy,” Jeff Horwitz and Desmond Butler report. “The revelation was described to the AP by people directly knowledgeable about the effort. … Under federal law, U.S. lobbyists must tell the Justice Department if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties. A violation is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.” (Read the whole story here.)
+
+In Wisconsin last night, Trump announced that he would require “senior officials” in his administration “to sign an agreement not to accept speaking fees from corporations with a registered lobbyist for five years after leaving office or from any entity tied to a foreign government.”
+
+-- Another important storyline: Breitbart News has long been Trump’s Pravda, and he just put the guy who runs the site in charge of his campaign staff. Amusingly, Trump’s press release this morning cites a somewhat unflattering 2015 profile from Bloomberg BusinessWeek that calls Bannon “the most dangerous political operative in America.” The release says “he will oversee the campaign staff and operations, in addition to strategic oversight of major campaign initiatives.”
+
+Recall that Breitbart took the side of the Trump campaign after Lewandowski grabbed the arm of one of its reporters (he then lied about it until surveillance footage undercut his story). That reporter, Michelle Fields, subsequently left, and several employees resigned in protest.
+
+-- Roger Ailes, the pugilistic and recently ousted founder of Fox News, is also reportedly moving closer to the inner circle. The New York Times reports that Ailes, still embroiled in a sexual harrassment scandal, is acting as a presidential debate adviser to Trump as he prepares to face off against Clinton. “Two [sources] said Mr. Ailes’s role could extend beyond the debates,” Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker report. “For Mr. Ailes, being connected with Mr. Trump’s campaign could be a form of redemption after he was pushed out of the powerful network that he helped build.” The Trump campaign, naturally, publicly denies that Ailes has any role on the campaign, per Jose DelReal.
+
+-- Trump is cozying up to Ailes and Bannon after months of being unable to hire A-level talent. The smartest and most ambitious operatives know that having his name on their resume will probably become a scarlet letter that may doom their future prospects. Politico’s Katie Glueck writes that top Republicans in several critical battleground states say, at best, they've never heard of Trump's state directors or have only limited familiarity with them — and at worst, they know them, and question their ability to do the job. Three telling examples from Katie’s piece:
+
+-- Trump offered a revealing window into his management style when he said in 2007 that you should never hire people who are smarter than you. “You have to keep great people around you,” Trump told CNBC. “You always have to be on top of them. And you have to be smarter than they are. I hear so many times, ‘Oh, I want my people to be smarter than I am.’ It’s a lot of crap. You want to be smarter than your people, if possible.”
+
+-- An important reminder of how little time Trump has to right the ship: “Voting actually starts in less than six weeks, on Sept. 23 in Minnesota and South Dakota, the first of some 35 states and the District of Columbia that allow people to cast ballots at polling sites or by mail before Nov. 8,” Patrick Healy writes on the front page of today’s Times. “Iowa is expected to have ballots ready by the end of September, as are Illinois and two other states. The electoral battlegrounds of Arizona and Ohio are to begin voting on Oct. 12, nearly four weeks before Election Day. And North Carolina and Florida will be underway before Halloween. … Nearly 32 percent of voters cast their ballots before Election Day in 2012 … compared with 29.7 percent in 2008 and 20 percent in 2004.”
+
+-- The Trump campaign says it will (finally) begin airing its first television ads since the end of the primaries next week. The first ads will run in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. The buy will then expand to cover other battlegrounds in September, per the Wall Street Journal.
+
+-- Today Trump will receive his first classified intelligence briefing in a SCIF at the FBI’s New York field office. He plans to bring New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn with him. “Career staffers from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence … will be leading the briefing, which is expected to cover major threats and emerging concerns around the world,” ABC News reports.
+
+-- “Like Trump, Flynn has advocated forging closer ties with Russia,” Dana Priest and Greg Miller note in their excellent profile of the retired general. “In interviews with The Washington Post, Flynn acknowledged being paid to give a speech and attend a lavish anniversary party for the Kremlin-controlled RT television network in Moscow last year, where he was seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Asked why he would want to be so closely associated with a Kremlin propaganda platform, Flynn said he sees no distinction between RT and other news outlets. ‘What’s CNN? What’s MSNBC? Come on!’ said Flynn.”
+
+“Dismayed by Flynn’s behavior since he left the military, former colleagues have contacted him to urge him to show more restraint. Among them are retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who relied heavily on Flynn in Iraq and Afghanistan, and retired Adm. Michael Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Dana and Greg report.
+
+WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
+
+-- Liz Cheney is poised to become a congresswoman after winning the nine-way Republican primary for Wyoming’s open House seat. From the Casper Star Tribune: “Cheney overcame criticism about her ties to Wyoming and won the Republican primary for the U.S. House, a seat once held by her father.” Cheney only got about 40 percent of the vote, but there’s no runoff and it doesn’t matter.
+
+-- Some of the most powerful espionage tools created by the NSA’s most elite group of hackers have mysteriously appeared online, Ellen Nakashima reports, a development that could pose “severe consequences” for the agency’s operations and government security. “The file contained 300 megabytes of information, including several ‘exploits,’ or tools for taking control of firewalls in order to control a network. … The disclosure of the file means that at least one other party — possibly another country’s spy agency — has had access to the same hacking tools used by the NSA and could deploy them against organizations that are using vulnerable routers and firewalls. It might also see what the NSA is targeting and spying on.” Former NSA personnel who worked in the agency’s division said the file appeared to be legitimate. “Without a doubt, they’re the keys to the kingdom,” said one former employee. “The stuff you’re talking about would undermine the security of a lot of major government and corporate networks both here and abroad.”
+
+-- As Vice President Biden arrived in Serbia, hundreds of ultranationalists marched through the streets of Belgrade chanting ""Vote for Trump!"" Biden is there to encourage the country's government to normalize relations with Kosovo, which split from Serbia in 1999 and claimed independence in 2008, Adam Taylor reports.
+
+THE LATEST FROM THE OLYMPICS:
+
+-- The U.S. has settled comfortably into a first-place lead in Rio, with 84 MEDALS total (that’s 28 gold, 28 silver, 28 bronze.) Meanwhile, the race for second is getting tighter: China is now edging out Britain by just ONE SINGLE MEDAL, up 51 to 50. (See the Post’s live medal count here.)
+
+-- The U.S. women’s volleyball team beat Japan in the quarterfinals, advancing after a 25-16, 25-23, 25-22 victory in straight sets. They’ll play Russia/Serbia in the semifinals on Thursday. (Barry Svlruga)
+
+-- Simone Biles claimed her FOURTH gold medal in the women’s gymnastics floor competition, capping off a week of stunning Olympic performances with a score of 15.966. Aly Raisman took home a silver medal and a 15.500 score – her highest marks of the Games. Britain was a distant third. “It’s pretty insane,"" Biles said, eyes widening when asked how she felt about winning four golds and a bronze in her five events. ""What I’ve accomplished in my first Olympics, I’m very proud of myself. I don’t know. It’s crazy."" She also got to meet longtime crush Zac Efron. (Liz Clarke)
+
+-- Jenny Simpson made history after becoming the first American to medal in the women’s 1,500 meter race. ""Elsewhere on the track, Americans Tori Bowie and Deajah Stevens qualified for the women’s 200-meter final, Des Bieler reports. ""Dalilah Muhammad and Ashley Spencer advanced to the women’s 400-meter hurdles final and Kerron Clement did the same for the men’s version.""
+
+-- The U.S. women’s basketball team beat Japan 110-64, advancing to the semifinals.
+
+-- Rio continues to fail as a host city. Tens of thousands of volunteers have stopped showing up to the Games, grumbling they were overworked and underfed – pulling eight and nine hour shifts with only a small snack provided to break up the minutiae. One volunteer cited what he called the organizing committee’s lack of “consideration for people’s lives and welfare.” They “use us for free labor,” he told reporters. (Marissa Payne)
+
+-- The FBI forcefully defended its decision not to criminally charge Clinton for her use of a private email server at the State Department, outlining their rationale in a letter to House Oversight Committee lawmakers. From Matt Zapotosky and Karoun Demirjian: “FBI Director James Comey announced in early July that he was recommending Clinton not be charged, and the letter … largely repeated statements he had made previously in public. But it also notably seemed to take aim at some ongoing conservative criticisms of Clinton – particularly that she was negligent in her handling of classified information and thus deserving of criminal charges.”
+
+Jason Herring, who directs the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs, wrote that someone else who engaged in the type of conduct of which Clinton was accused might face “severe administrative consequences,” and the FBI was in the process of providing relevant information to other government agencies. But Herring also asserted that investigators found no evidence Clinton intended to mishandle classified information, noting that even three emails marked as classified did not originate with her and that State had determined two of them did not contain classified information.” (Read the four-page letter here.)
+
+“The FBI’s letter to the Judiciary Committee makes clear this is much ado about nothing,” Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who released the letter, said in a statement last night.
+
+House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz said the documents provided by the FBI yesterday left him “unpersuaded,” and “while members of his committee would were ‘not investigating the investigators,’ they were ‘trying to figure out what happened so that we can try to solve it.’ ‘We got to make sure this never ever happens again,’ Chaffetz said.”
+
+-- Overplaying their hand: Trump adviser Al Baldasaro doubled down on his comment that Clinton should be “shot for treason” for using a private email server. ""The liberal media took what I said and went against the law and the Constitution and ran with it, and they said that I wanted her assassinated, which I never did,"" Baldasaro said. ""I said I spoke as a veteran, and she should be shot in a firing squad for treason."" (MassLive.com)
+
+-- For the first time, the Clinton campaign pushed back against conspiracy theories from the fever swamps of the right that her health is frail. The evening press release included a statement from the former secretary of state’s doctor, Lisa Bardack, who maintained that she is in “excellent” health and that documents circulating online under her name are fake. “While it is dismaying to see the Republican nominee for president push deranged conspiracy theories in a foreign policy speech, it’s no longer surprising,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign's communications director. “Trump is simply parroting lies based on fabricated documents promoted by Roger Stone and his right wing allies."" (David Weigel)
+
+-- Hillary won the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a progressive group that worked to defeat her in the primaries. The group said 68 percent of members voted to endorse her. (David Weigel)
+
+-- The campaign says it is “seriously” eyeing Utah as a potentially winnable state this year: On Bloomberg’s “Masters of Politics” podcast, field director Marlon Marshall confirmed the campaign sees opportunity in the state. “Are we going to win Utah? I don't know. But is it something that's on our radar? Yeah, we're gonna take a look,” he said. (Bloomberg)
+
+-- Tim Kaine is fretting about Democratic complacency: He notes that few pundits predicted Trump would win the Republican nomination, and that few elites actually believed the British would vote to exit the European Union. He worries about a last-minute infusion of nasty ads from outside groups. “This is going to be a close race, I predict,” the senator said at a rally in Asheville, N.C. “We’re doing really good in some polls right now. … But you’ve just got to remember, this has been a season of surprises.” Yesterday, Kaine visited Fayetteville, home to the Army’s Fort Bragg. On Monday night, he played his harmonica at a bar. (John Wagner)
+
+-- Clinton still won't say whether she'll stick with Merrick Garland if she wins. “Five months after winning nomination to the Supreme Court and becoming the object of a pitched partisan battle, Garland now finds himself in a surprising position: irrelevance,"" Mike DeBonis reports. ""The name of the mild-mannered appeals court judge … has been almost entirely absent from the campaign trail ... If she wins, Clinton will face pressure from her party’s left wing to select someone younger or more liberal than Garland. Standing by Obama’s man could alienate liberal Democrats, including those who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders. ... Still, others remain convinced she will stand by her support of Garland: 'I would think that she and all the people around her would say, ‘Why do we need to rock the boat here? Let’s get him confirmed quickly and move on to the next one, whenever that comes,' Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid told reporters last week.""
+
+-- Citing the inherent conflicts of interest, the Boston Globe’s editorial board today calls for the Clinton Foundation to stop accepting donations – and shut down entirely if Clinton wins the presidency.
+
+-- Several members of Trump’s newly-unveiled Agriculture Advisory Committee have been strong supporters of giving legal status to undocumented workers, Jose A. DelReal reports. “The 64-person committee will meet regularly, according to the campaign, and advise the GOP presidential nominee on food production issues. But several of those listed seem to be opposed to Trump's calls for mass deportation and strongly supported the comprehensive immigration reform package passed by the Senate in 2013 … Immigrant labor is a bedrock of the agriculture industry in the United States, many members of the newly formed committee have argued, and a shortage in the already scant agriculture labor pool would raise consumer prices.”
+
+-- On Fox News, Trump said his proposed Muslim ban would not be able to stop everyone. ""Will people go through the cracks? Perhaps,"" he said. ""But it can be very, very tough. It's got to be very tough to come into this country.""
+
+-- “Clinton’s and Trump’s approaches to racial politics mirror the fault lines of a nation,” by Abby Phillip and Jose A. DelReal: She campaigned in some of the most predominantly African American sections of Philadelphia yesterday, trying to run up the score with base voters. In the midst of racial turmoil in Milwaukee, Trump made a point to campaign last night in the predominantly white suburb of West Bend. ""Before the event, he met with local law enforcement officers to emphasize his commitment to being the ‘law and order’ candidate. The vastly different approaches to minority outreach by the candidates and their campaigns mirror the fault lines of a divided nation.""
+
+-- New York Times, “Trump Casinos’ Tax Debt Was $30 Million. Then Christie Took Office,” by Russ Buettner: “By the time Chris Christie became governor of New Jersey, the state’s auditors and lawyers had been battling for several years to collect long-overdue taxes owed by [Trump’s casinos] … The total, with interest, had grown to almost $30 million. The state had doggedly pursued the matter through two of the casinos’ bankruptcy cases and even accused the company led by Mr. Trump of filing false reports with state casino regulators about the amount of taxes it had paid. But the year after [Christie] took office, the tone of the litigation shifted. The state entertained settlement offers. And in December 2011 … the state agreed to accept just $5 million, roughly 17 cents on the dollar of what auditors said the casinos owed.""
+
+A coincidence? “Mr. Christie was close to the attorney general at the time, Paula T. Dow, whom he had appointed and who [previously] worked for him .... A week after the settlement was signed, Mr. Christie announced that he was appointing Ms. Dow to the counsel’s office of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey until he could find her the judgeship that she desired. ... The following month, Page Six reported that the Christies and the Trumps were seen double dating.""
+
+-- Another crazy scenario to think about: Faithless Republican electors could become a problem for Trump. From Politico’s Kyle Cheney: Peter Greathouse, a Republican from Utah, says he’s not “comfortable” with Trump as his party’s nominee. Jane Lynch of Arizona says she’ll likely cast her personal vote for Gary Johnson. Texas Republican Loren Byers calls Trump “a loose cannon.” “Their critiques rank as mild in this polarized election year – until you consider who they are. All three are members of the Electoral College, and if Trump wins their states in November, they’ll be asked to cast the formal ballots that could make him president. Interviews with Republican members of the Electoral College – all from the red states Trump has his best chance of winning – reveal that the divisions that have wracked the GOP for months have also reached this oft-overlooked body with the ultimate authority to decide the election. All of the members contacted … insisted they would cast their electoral vote for Trump if he prevailed … But most indicated they would do so through gritted teeth – if only to reject [Clinton] or to uphold oaths they took to their party.”
+
+-- More than 120 Republicans have now signed a letter urging the RNC to divert financial resources from Trump’s campaign, calling on party officials to shift funds to down-ballot Republicans instead. The letter, while first reported last week, was delivered to the RNC yesterday. (Katie Zezima)
+
+-- Lindsey Graham predicted Trump will lose because of his incendiary rhetoric about minorities. “Reality is reality,” the South Carolina senator said in a radio interview. “Mitt Romney got 27% of the Hispanic vote. By 2050, a majority of the country will be African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and others, and we’re losing demographically. We’ve gone from 44% with Bush to 27% with Romney, and I don’t think Trump is going to get 20%.” Graham added that Trump’s candidacy has put the Republican Party on a course for a “demographic meltdown.” (Buzzfeed)
+
+-- Rick Perry came to Trump’s defense in his dispute with the father of a slain Muslim American soldier, saying Khizr Khan “struck the first blow” and is therefore fair game. ""In a campaign, if you’re going to go out and think that you can take a shot at somebody and not have incoming coming back at you, shame on you,"" the former Texas governor said on CNN. His remarks break with current Gov. Greg Abbott, who has issued a statement saying the service of families like the Khans ""cannot be questioned."" (Texas Tribune)
+
+-- Gary Johnson’s campaign said it raised $2.9 million online in the first two weeks of August. They claimed 90,000 donors contributed an average of $32. (Time)
+
+-- Looking to 2020: John Kasich will travel to New Hampshire later this month, returning for the first time since the state’s February primary to stump on behalf of gubernatorial hopeful Chris Sununu.  (The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Henry J. Gomez)
+
+-- “The Trump two-step: How a GOP senator is trying, awkwardly, to keep his job,” by Philip Rucker: “As Sen. Patrick J. Toomey convened a roundtable discussion with local law enforcement leaders here in Western Pennsylvania, he made no boasts about a big, beautiful wall, or rounding up illegal immigrants … Instead, Toomey asked questions and listened. He spoke softly and judiciously. The message he hoped voters in this battleground state would take away was clear: I may be a Republican, but I’m no Trump. ... Once celebrated by his party’s grass-roots activists as a conservative purist, Toomey has labored throughout his first term to soften his image, most prominently by co-authoring gun-control legislation backed by Democrats."" Still, the two men’s fates are intertwined: Trump sees Pennsylvania as a must-win state, and the outcome of Toomey’s race could determine whether Republicans maintain control of the Senate. “Pat Toomey had positioned himself extremely well to win reelection,” said Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.). “The challenge for Pat is things outside his control."" (Al Hunt writes his Bloomberg column today on Clinton's big edge in the Philly suburbs.)
+
+-- Another vulnerable senator, New Hampshire's Kelly Ayotte, explained the difference, as she sees it, between voting for someone and ""endorsing"" them. “There’s actually a big distinction: Everyone gets a vote, I do too,” Ayotte told CNN. “And an endorsement is when you are campaigning with someone.” She says she “endorsed” Mitt Romney by campaigning with him but would not appear with Trump. “While he has my vote he doesn’t have my endorsement,” Ayotte said of Trump. Most would say this is a distinction without a difference.
+
+-- “The abortion rights movement is bolder than it’s been in years. That’s Cecile Richards’s plan,” by Caitlin Gibson: “In person, 59-year-old [Cecile] Richards exudes both a warm authenticity and a subtle impenetrability; there’s the sense that she means everything she says, but she isn’t saying everything. Polarizing? The word could have been invented for her. It’s a safe bet that how you view her depends on where you stand on abortion: She’s composed, heroic, a righteous defender of the vulnerable; or she’s cold, unfeeling, a cunning apologist for baby murderers. She gets standing ovations. She also gets death threats. In a lineup of past presidents of Planned Parenthood … Richards stands out: her background isn’t in women’s health care. It’s in organizing and politics. And she has deployed her skills in those fields to win major battles for abortion rights. Planned Parenthood endorsed Clinton in this year’s Democratic primary, taking sides for the first time … [Now], most strikingly, Richards has set her sights on the Maginot Line of the abortion wars — federal funding for abortions.”
+
+-- Yesterday's most touching moment came after U.S. runner Abbey D’Agostino and New Zealander Nikki Hamblin collided during a women’s 5,000-meter heat. Both athletes stopped to help each other up – urging the other to continue in a show of remarkable sportsmanship and camaraderie. “I’m never going to forget that moment,” Hamblin said. “When someone asks me what happened in Rio in 20 years’ time, that’s my story.” And the story has a happy ending – despite being the last two competitors to cross the finish line, both girls will be allowed to compete in the final this Friday. (Rick Maese)
+
+-- ""For two Olympians, a humiliating journey to Rio filled with gender-questioning,"" by Cindy Boren: ""Caster Semenya of South Africa and India’s Dutee Chand have fought lengthy, tough battles to earn their spots in Rio this week. In addition to the grueling training required of an Olympic athlete, they have been subjected to indignities and the public perusal of intensely intimate information. Both have a condition called hyperandrogenism, characterized by natural levels of testosterone … that are high enough to place them in the male range as far as international track and field officials are concerned.” Semenya, favored to win gold in the women’s 800-meter race today, was subject to a high-profile spate of testing after she was called a man by one of her 2009 competitors. Chand had to endure a legal battle. “All the scientific study detracts from what is an intensely personal journey for women, who want to compete in the bodies in which they were born."" Chand has said she “cried for three straight days” after reading what people said about her online.
+
+The TV and political worlds mourned John McLaughlin, best known as host of ""The McLaughlin Group,"" who died Tuesday in Washington at 89 (see ""Videos of the Day"" for some great tributes):
+
+From the right to the left, reaction to reports that Roger Ailes is advising Trump on debate preparation--
+
+This is NOT The Onion:
+
+David Copperfield held a press conference with Dina Titus and Mark Pocan urging Congress to designate magic as an art form:
+
+Here's how a few other lawmakers are spending their breaks:
+
+-- New York Magazine reporter David Wallace-Wells gives a terrifying, first-person account of the JFK Airport shooting scare: “I can’t remember what happened first — the flashing light of a fire alarm, the yelled warnings of a bomb and a shooter, the people turning around in a mob panic. I thought I saw smoke. I know I saw bags dropped, people falling to the floor and others stomping past them, through them, on them. The word stampede comes from the animal kingdom — gazelles running away from lions, horses running from some other threat. But there is really no other word for what happened last night at JFK, because panic turned us all into animals. Not only did police and security fail to prevent the spectacle of mob hysteria; on some level, given the way they pressed a hysterical crowd right back into a compressed space, they staged it. The way they handled the fallout, though, might have been even worse.”
+
+One scene: “One man I talked to had darted down a jet bridge to take cover, inspiring others to follow, running and yelling. Only when he reached the end did he realize that the door was locked, and that, because there was no plane on the other side of it, he was actually suspended 20 feet or more in the air, like at the end of an unfinished bridge, with dozens or maybe even hundreds coming behind him. He’d have to smash the window, he figured … then just jump. That’s when he heard the screams of the crowd storming toward him: ‘They’re coming this way!’”
+
+-- Vogue got a surprising amount of access to Huma for a profile --> “Huma Abedin On Her Job, Family, and the Campaign of a Lifetime,” by Nathan Heller: “Powerful, glamorous, and ubiquitous, Abedin is in many ways the engine at the center of Clinton’s well-run machine, crucial and yet largely out of sight. To onlookers, Clinton and Abedin seem to travel the world as a single entity joined by complementary strengths. If Clinton spends her life at the microphone, Abedin is constitutionally circumspect. If Clinton, in her bold suits and impeccable coifs, distills a certain era of feminist empowerment, Abedin, with her breezy downtown dresses and mobile power-dialing, is the professional face of a younger, more wired-in female generation. As Clinton’s longest-serving staffer, she is both the campaign’s deepest memory and its farthest-seeing eye—a woman who, more than anyone besides the Clintons themselves, can envisage the sort of president that Hillary will be … To hear Abedin tell it, though, she’s just a kind of accidental Forrest Gump of politics.”
+
+On the campaign trail: Clinton is in Cleveland; Kaine is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Pence is in Henderson, Nev.
+
+At the White House: Obama is in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. Vice President Biden is in Kosovo.
+
+On Capitol Hill: The Senate and House are out.
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+-- D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier announced she is stepping down from her position next month to work for the NFL. Lanier, who has spent 26 years as a law enforcement officer in the District, and became the first permanent female chief to lead the department, will take over as head of security for the football league. (Peter Hermann, Clarence Williams and Ann E. Marimow)
+
+-- Even MORE hot and sticky weather ahead today, the Capital Weather Gang reports: “We experience yet another day of heat and humidity, but more cloud cover compared to recent days helps cap temperatures a bit. It’s still unseasonably hot, with highs mainly in the low to mid-90s, and we could even see the week-long streak of 95-degree highs extend itself for an eighth straight day in the city. Factor in moderate humidity and the heat index will touch or exceed 100 this afternoon”
+
+-- The Nationals lost to the Rockies 6-2.
+
+-- Fairfax City Council appointed Eric Cantor’s former chief of staff, Steven Stombres, to temporarily fill in as mayor after Scott Silverthorne resigned over his alleged involvement in a meth-for-sex scheme. Members unanimously voted in support of Stombres, a former city councilman. (Antonio Olivo)
+
+-- A widespread Sprint outage struck the D.C. and North Capital region overnight, leaving some callers unable to dial 911. “The problems were related to Sprint service, a spokesman for the department said, and recommended that anyone who needed emergency assistance text should use a landline or a cellphone with service from another provider.” Officials said the glitch was caused by “an extensive commercial power outage and fire.” (Justin Wm. Moyer and Victoria St. Martin)
+
+-- Victims of a D.C. rabbi who was convicted of videotaping naked women as they prepared for ritual baths are demanding at least $100 million in a class-action lawsuit. Prosecutors say the disgraced Georgetown rabbi, Barry Freundel, is believed to have recoded more than 100 victims over a three-year period. (Julie Zauzmer)
+
+-- Maryland prosecutors announced the shutdown of a major regional human-trafficking ring, nabbing three top actors in a years-long operation that victimized girls as young as 15. Police said the trio recruited women under false assurances such as modeling or debt repayment, then held them hostage at “dozens” of local hotels. (Lynh Bui)
+
+-- A seventh body was found from last week's Silver Spring apartment explosion. Authorities ontinue to search for victims in rubble from the deadly blast.  The explosion left more than 30 injured and about 100 displaced. (Luz Lazo)
+
+""Morning Joe"" created a devastating mash-up of Trump contradicting himself on foreign policy. He was for invading Iraq before he was against it, for pulling out all the troops before he said Obama doing just that created ISIS, and pushed to invade Libya before he came out against it.
+
+Watch SNL's four excellent spoofs of the McLaughlin Group, with Dana Carvey as John McLaughlin:
+
+In case you missed it, Kaine joined in a rendition of ""Wagon Wheel"" with his harmonica in Asheville, N.C. (click to watch):
+
+His wife Anne did some clogging (click to watch):
+
+In a cringe-worthy interview with CNN, Democratic Senate candidate Maggie Hassan (the governor of New Hampshire) declined to directly answer if Clinton is honest:
+
+Ann Kirkpatrick, the Democratic candidate against John McCain, also would not say:
+
+Finally, scientists couldn't help giggling at this funny looking squid:",REAL
+3930,Phyllis Schlafly: Campus sex assault is on the rise because too many women go to college,"In a Monday column for the far-right website World Net Daily, the longtime anti-feminist crusader lamented the declining portion of university enrollments accounted for by men. Schlafly — BA and JD, Washington University in St. Louis; MA, Radcliffe College — argued that it may even be time to implement quotas to ensure that men constitute at least half of a college’s enrollment.
+
+“Long ago when I went to college, campuses were about 70 percent male, and until 1970 it was still nearly 60 percent,” Schlafly wrote. “Today, however, the male percentage has fallen to the low 40s on most campuses.”
+
+Never one to shirk victim-blaming, Schlafly proceeded to link the problem of campus sexual assault to the increased enrollment of women in postsecondary institutions.
+
+“Boys are more likely than girls to look at the cost-benefit tradeoff of going to college,” Schlafly asserted. “The imbalance of far more women than men at colleges has been a factor in the various sex scandals that have made news in the last couple of years.”
+
+With so many women around, what do you expect a college man to do — seek consent!? “So, what’s the solution?” Schlafly asked. “One solution might be to impose the duty on admissions officers to arbitrarily admit only half women and half men.” “Another solution might be to stop granting college loans,” she suggested, “thereby forcing students to take jobs to pay for their tuition and eliminate time for parties, perhaps even wiping out time for fraternities and sororities. I went through college while working a full-time manual-labor job, and I don’t regret a minute of it; it was a great learning experience.” While minimum wage jobs once sufficed to pay one’s way through college, skyrocketing tuition has created a harsher reality for college students. Absent financial aid and family assistance, the typical college student would now need to work 48 hours a week at a minimum wage job in order to pay for her courses — and that’s before accounting for the ever-increasing cost of room and board.",REAL
+1536,Suspected terrorist attack on a free speech event in Copenhagen leaves one dead,"This is horrifying news, especially on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris. This tweet from Inna Shevchenko, an activist with the feminist group Femen who was speaking at the event, is especially chilling:
+
+Shevchenko's tweet literalizes the broader threat posed by attacks on people whose only crime is speaking their mind. When terrorists attack people for drawing Muhammed, the intent isn't just to kill these people: it's to create a deterrent to anyone who might, in the future, use their speech rights in a way that radical Islamists don't like. Writer Timothy Garton Ash calls this the ""assassin's veto:"" the idea that killers can use fear to put limits on free speech.
+
+Nothing makes that threat feel more real than gunfire literally interrupting an address meant to defend free speech.",REAL
+84,U.S. District Judge orders homophobic Kentucky clerk to explain why she shouldn’t be fined or jailed for contempt,"Kim Davis — the Rowan County, Kentucky Clerk who earlier today brazenly defied the Supreme Court’s order to issue marriage licenses citing “God’s authority” — has been ordered to stand before U.S. District Judge David Bunning on Thursday and explain why she shouldn’t be jailed and fined for her actions.
+
+In a statement released after she refused, for the fourth time, to issue David Moore and David Ermold a marriage license, Davis said that “[t]o issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience. It is not a light issue for me. It is a Heaven or Hell decision.”
+
+“I was elected by the people to serve as the County Clerk,” she continued, and “I intend to continue to serve the people of Rowan County, but I cannot violate my conscience.” That she is an elected official has become a point of contention, because as such she can’t be fired for refusing to abide by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Removing her from office would entail impeachment proceedings, which will either have to wait until the next legislative session or require the calling of a special session, which could be prohibitively expensive.
+
+In the meantime, no one in Rowan County will be issued a marriage licenses. Lawyers representing the four couples who were denied licenses told the Associated Press that “[s]ince Defendant Davis continues to collect compensation from the Commonwealth for duties she fails to perform,” they want Judge Bunning to “impose financial penalties sufficiently serious and increasingly onerous” — but that they are not seeking for her to be jailed for contempt. The scene at Davis’ office this morning was raucous, with supporters of both side lining the walkway into it and occupying the tiny building. “Praise the Lord!” yelled one, “Stand your ground!” Another demanded Davis “Do your job!” One of her supporters was her husband, who noted that his family has received death threats and warned people that he’s a firm believer in the Second Amendment. “I’m an old redneck hillbilly,” he warned. “That’s all I’ve got to say. Don’t come knocking on my door.” Watch video via the Courier-Journal below.",REAL
+1553,"If this is what a “Rubio surge” looks like, Republicans really are screwed","On one hand, it is yet another example of how Rubio, despite poll numbers touted as shiny, is running a pretty lousy overall campaign. For months, stories have percolated about its cheapness, which Rubio’s advisers have bragged about. Lay out the cash to rent campaign offices? Pfffft. Who needs an office when the team can do everything from their laptops in Starbucks, nursing $4 lattes for several hours while poaching the free Wi-Fi? It’s edgy and hip, to people who still think of Starbucks as hip.
+
+Rubio’s team instead has spent their money, as NR points out, more on TV ads and “digital outreach.” The theory seems to be that in this interconnected modern world where you can take Harvard classes or get your melanoma diagnosed online, the candidate can be less engaged in old-fashioned retail politics while selling himself on a national level to Republican voters across the country. Which might not be a bad strategy, if voting for all the primaries happened on the same day. But in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, voters still value the candidate who makes the effort to come to their state and schmooze for their vote.
+
+In fact, the modest-at-best success of this strategy so far highlights just how much of Rubio’s status as one of the top contenders for the GOP nomination is an artificial creation of the Republican establishment and the mainstream media. For a Republican Party that needs more young voters, the Florida senator must seem like a godsend. He’s the perfect synthesis of youthful energy and revanchist policies, a dudebro who can exhort his love of football to people under 30, reeling them in before explaining why abortion should be outlawed with no exceptions and the United States should reinstate the embargo against Cuba.
+
+On the other hand, the complaints of people in Iowa and New Hampshire that a candidate is failing to pay proper fealty to them in exchange for their votes highlights the absurdity of the primary process in this modern, multi-cultural America. The two states are among the smallest in population, with a total population of just under 4.5 million. They are also two of the least diverse states, both ethnically and economically. Yet any campaign that doesn’t at least make a strong showing in one or both states’ primaries gets tagged as “struggling,” saddled with bad press and a campaign death watch, and sends donors fleeing to candidates who made stronger showings.
+
+But anyone who questions the states’ place in line gets shouted down and disappeared faster than a communist apparatchik mildly criticizing a five-year plan. Republican strategist Liz Mair got a hard lesson in this dynamic last March. Hired by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to work on his now-defunct campaign, Mair was forced to resign after one day when someone uncovered tweets she had posted mocking Iowa’s place at the forefront of the primary process. Or recall the firestorm that erupted before the 2008 primaries, when Michigan and Florida tried to jump the line and move their own primaries forward. This resulted in lots of shouting, finger-pointing, complaints about a lack of respect for tradition, and Iowa almost moving its caucuses into 2007 so it could still be the state where the primary voting started. The Democratic National Committee came very close to stripping Michigan and Florida of their delegates as punishment. In 2012, the Republican National Committee did strip Florida of its delegates when the state once again tried to flout the rules to move its primary forward. Rubio’s strategy might be easier to understand if there was some indication that the campaign is hoarding resources for later. But that does not appear to be the case, and it might cost him down the road, when he will need more than hype from the establishment and the press to keep his campaign aloft. On the flip side, he’s highlighting an absurdity of the primaries and pissing off a bunch of self-important Republicans in the process. For liberals, it’s a win-win.",REAL
+4512,"Bank records show $28,500 deposit to Syed Farook's account two weeks before the shooting, source says","EXCLUSIVE - A $28,500 deposit was made to Syed Farook’s bank account from WebBank.com on or about Nov.18, some two weeks before he and his wife Tashfeen Malik carried out the San Bernardino massacre, a source close to the investigation told Fox News Monday.
+
+Investigators are exploring whether the transaction was a loan taken out by Farook, who with his wife killed 14 and wounded 21 when they opened fire at a holiday lunch.  He earned $53,000 a year with the county as an environmental health inspector. Investigators are also exploring the possibility that a subsequent cash withdrawal was used to reimburse Enrique Marquez, the man who bought the two AR-15 semiautomatic rifles used in the San Bernardino shootings. Marquez, who could be charged, especially if it is determined that he illegally modified the weapons, is now reportedly answering investigators’ questions.
+
+“Right now our major concern at the FBI, the ATF, and the JTTF (Joint Terrorism Task Force) is determining how those firearms, the rifles in particular, got from Marquez to Farook and to Malik,”  assistant special agent in charge with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, John D’Angelo, told reporters in California Monday.
+
+The deposit came via Utah-based WebBank.com, which describes itself as “a leading provider of national consumer and commercial private-label and bank card financing programs” on a nationwide basis. On or about Nov.20, Fox News is told Farook converted $10,000 to cash, and withdrew the money at a Union Bank branch in San Bernardino.  Afterwards, in the days before the shooting, there were at least three transfers of $5,000 that appear to be to Farook’s mother.
+
+The loan and large cash withdrawal were described to Fox News by the source as “significant evidence of pre-meditation,” and further undercut the premise that an argument at the Christmas party on Dec. 2 led to the shooting.
+
+Fox News is also told that investigators are exploring whether the $10,000 cash withdrawal was used to reimburse Enrique Marquez, the man who bought the two semiautomatic rifles used in the San Bernardino shootings. Marquez is now reportedly answering investigators’ questions.
+
+At Monday's news conference,  authorities said the weapons were all legally purchased in California between 2007 and 2012.
+
+The source, who was not authorized to speak on the record about the federal investigation,  said there is further evidence of pre-meditation with a charge for the SUV rental processing on Farook’s account Nov. 30, two days before the shooting.
+
+Contacted by Fox News, a woman who was identified by another employee as Lorie Gilbert and a member of WebBank.com’s strategic partnership, said they were “not going to respond to that (questions about the Farook transaction)” before hanging up.  Another WebBank.com employee said they were “not talking to the press.”
+
+A spokesman for Union Bank, David Weidman, declined to comment on specific questions, including whether the Nov. 20 $10,000 cash withdrawal triggered reporting requirements.  Weidman confirmed they are working with the FBI and others, adding, ""We are cooperating to the full extent of the law with the agencies conducting investigations into this tragedy.”
+
+There was no immediate response from lawyer David Chesley, who has been representing the family.
+
+Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.",REAL
+6488,U.S. Election Thread 2016-06,"This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted. Your comment could not be posted. Error type: Your comment has been posted. Post another comment The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again. 
+As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.",FAKE
+518,Gundlach: Trump Would Use Debt Like Reagan for Growth,"DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach said Donald Trump, if he’s elected president, would help the U.S. economy recover by going further into debt, just as Ronald Reagan fueled growth in the 1980s.
+
+“Trump is going to win, and Trump is going to increase the deficit,” Gundlach said during a panel discussion Thursday in New York. Reagan “did it by taking three or four decades of stable nonfinancial debt-to-GDP ratio and putting it on a hockey stick higher.”
+
+Gundlach, 56, isn’t endorsing any candidate, according to Loren Fleckenstein, a DoubleLine analyst. The fund manager, who has been predicting a Trump election victory since February, noted that Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” resembles Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again.”
+
+Under Reagan, the U.S. debt grew to more than $2.3 trillion at the end of 1988 from $807 billion eight years earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The total U.S. debt as of Dec. 31 was $15.1 trillion.
+
+Markets might not react favorably to a Trump election at first, because the Republican presidential candidate has criticized international trade agreements, according to the fund manager.
+
+“First, I think you’re going to get a global growth scare, trade-based,” Gundlach said. “That could cause a market rollover which to me looks like it’s already under way.”
+
+This retreat in the S&P 500 Index could be “an excellent buying opportunity,” Gundlach added, as the debt binge “will probably stimulate growth, at least temporarily.”
+
+The S&P 500 is down about 0.6 percent since Trump’s victory Tuesday in the Indiana primary. His win prompted his two remaining Republican opponents, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich, to suspend their campaigns.
+
+“When I say Donald Trump’s going to win, it’s not that I’m wildly rooting for him, although I don’t dislike Donald Trump,” Gundlach said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s “Wall Street Week” set to air Friday at 8 p.m. New York time. “It’s just like, I think it’s going to happen.”
+
+On the panel discussion, Gundlach said oil prices must get to $60 a barrel to avoid a wave of high-yield debt defaults, a price he doesn’t expect to see soon. He predicted more junk-bond defaults when borrowers are forced to roll over debt in a rising interest-rate environment by 2018 or the following two years.
+
+Gundlach said he continues to be long on gold. Spot gold was trading at about $1,277 an ounce as of 6:48 p.m. Thursday in New York, up 20 percent this year. In January, Gundlach said he expected gold would climb to $1,400.",REAL
+7311,Zika: a masterpiece of public mind control,"Zika: a masterpiece of public mind control 
+Saturday, October 29, 2016 by: Natural News Editors Tags: Zika , mind control , propaganda (NaturalNews) It's been nearly nine months since the word ""Zika"" flashed like a lightning bolt in the headlines of mainstream news. Before January 1, 2016, Zika was just one of many viruses that public health officials monitored. But suddenly in January of this year everything changed, as a nearly harmless virus was transformed into a worldwide threat.(Article by John P. Thomas, republished from HealthImpactNews.com )As we will see, the Zika propaganda machine was turned on in October of 2015 and it has been running wild ever since. This is a classic example of a mind control program, a public brainwashing project, or a high powered marketing campaign.Regardless of what you call it, it is clear that the mainstream news media, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Big Pharma, Big Chem, and both Republicans and Democrats have joined forces to sell a Zika eradication program to the people of the United States and to the rest of the world.This has been and continues to be one of the best orchestrated programs of propaganda in recent history. This article will discuss how the program started, how it has been developed, and where it is going. Zika is not a Threat to the Babies of the World Just to be absolutely clear from the beginning, there is no solid evidence that Zika is a threat to humanity. It is a minimally dangerous viral infection, which does not cause microcephaly.In the almost 70 years since the Zika virus was patented by the Rockefeller Foundation, [1] no one ever noticed any association between Zika infection of pregnant women and their babies being born with abnormally small heads or with defects in brain development. But in 2015, we were suddenly made aware of this supposed problem. This claim, based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence, was the beginning point for the propaganda campaign. A propaganda claim doesn't need to be true; it just needs to be repeated over and over again until people believe it is true.After half a year of fear and hysteria in the mainstream media, even officials in Brazil admit that Zika is an unlikely cause of their microcephaly .As reported in Nature News & Comment on July 23, 2016, an official from Brazil's ministry of health raises doubts to suggest Zika is not the only factor in the reported microcephaly surge in his country. The report stated: Zika virus has spread throughout Brazil, but extremely high rates of microcephaly have been reported only in the country's northeast. Although evidence suggests that Zika can cause microcephaly, the clustering pattern hints that other environmental, socio-economic or biological factors could be at play. ""We suspect that something more than Zika virus is causing the high intensity and severity of cases,"" says Fatima Marinho, director of information and health analysis at Brazil's ministry of health. If that turns out to be true, it could change researchers' assessment of the risk that Zika poses to pregnant women and their children. [2] Despite this admission from Brazil, the Zika propaganda campaign is moving ahead without interruption. The campaign will not be stopped by contrary evidence about Zika and microcephaly. Zika is a Mild Viral Infection Most people who get Zika, will be completely unaware of being infected. For those who do get sick, it is similar in many ways to having a cold or a mild case of the flu. People experience fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis. The illness is usually mild with symptoms lasting from several days to a week. Infection is thought to provide lifelong immunity. Severe disease requiring hospitalization is uncommon. Deaths are rare. [3]The fact that almost no one dies from Zika infection made it a very unlikely candidate for the development of a vaccine. For those who actually feel sick from a Zika infection, they can receive comfort care and rest while their immune systems overcome the viral illness. Zika Press Releases Set the Stage for a Propaganda Campaign However, if Zika could be connected to some other horrible consequence, such as microcephaly or paralysis (Guillain-Barre syndrome) for example, then people would insist that we create a Zika vaccine and would insist that every person on planet Earth take it. They would be willing to give up basic individual freedoms for the benefit of society, which is always the goal of mind control programs.In 2015, a number of press releases and reports were released by the Pan American Health Organization / World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) and the CDC, to set the stage for the unfolding of a grand mind control project.The documents they published raised the red flag of alarm that a Zika epidemic was unfolding throughout South America and Mexico. The conventional media got excited about the epidemic when they saw the word ""microcephaly."" The prospect of large numbers of babies being born with abnormally small heads and brains was a story that would really grab the attention of their audience.The media used pictures of deformed babies to build fear in the hearts of people and to create the perception that we better watch out or Zika is going to get us and our babies! They worked really hard to instill public panic about Zika in January and February of 2016 .In the timeline that follows, you will see the word ""autochthonous."" Public Health agencies use the word autochthonous to say that an infection was locally generated. An autochthonous case of Zika is one that was acquired in the local area where a person lives. This is in contrast with a Zika infection that was acquired while visiting another region or country.I will list a few of the key points from some press releases to show how a foundation for the Zika campaign was built and how momentum was established to project the campaign into mainstream media. May 2015: Brazil confirms first autochthonous cases of Zika. [4] October 2015: Columbia confirms first autochthonous cases of Zika. [5] October 2015: Brazil reports unusually high number of babies with microcephaly. [6] November 2015: El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Suriname, and Venezuela report autochthonous Zika infection. [7] November 17, 2015: WHO calls upon member states to watch for the occurrence of microcephaly. [8] December 1, 2015: PAHO/WHO issued the first of dozens of reports, which chronicled the history of the growing Zika epidemic and warned of microcephaly. [9, 10] December 21, 2015: WHO reports autochthonous Zika infections in Honduras. [11] December 22, 2015: WHO reports autochthonous Zika infections in Panama. [12] December 31, 2015: US CDC reports autochthonous Zika infections in Puerto Rico, and makes note of microcephaly in Brazil. [13] Counting Babies with Microcephaly The mainstream media suddenly picked up on the Zika/microcephaly story in January of 2016 and began sensationalizing it. General concern was quickly transformed into alarm as officials in Brazil reported a steady increase in the number of microcephaly cases. As of January 30, 2016, they reported 4,783 cases of microcephaly and/or Central Nervous System (CNS) malformation suggestive of congenital infection. They compared this with 2001 — 2014 data where there was an average of 163 microcephaly cases. [14]The Brazil data about the babies was poor. We didn't know their definition of microcephaly. We didn't know how many of the mothers actually tested positive for Zika. We didn't know how the data was collected. We also didn't know why there was a strong level of insistence that the only thing that could cause these birth defects was infection with the Zika virus. Propaganda campaigns always dismissed other viewpoints other than the one being promoted. They don't want an investigation of truth or a debate about the facts – they just want belief and submission. The US Propaganda Machine Goes Public in January 2016 CDC officials begin to ponder the situation. First they say there might be an association between Zika and microcephaly, but they are far from asserting any kind of causative relationship. [15]""Good for them,"" I thought when I heard that report. But their apparent wisdom took a nosedive a minute later when the same CDC official went on to issue a travel warning to women to avoid traveling to Brazil and other South American countries if they are pregnant, think they might be pregnant or are thinking of becoming pregnant in the next couple years.""What did the CDC just say?"" There is no evidence of causation, and we don't even know there is even a problem, but women should stay home any way. ""Strange,"" I thought as I began to remember how the conventional media, the CDC, and the WHO hyped up the African Ebola epidemic in a similar kind of propaganda campaign just 18 months earlier. The worldwide threat of Ebola Zaire completely died out long before a vaccine could be developed, which must have been a major disappointment to Big Pharma.But this time, they have a virus that is not going to die out. This time their propaganda campaign will be much more sophisticated, and it will make major steps toward the acceptance of universal mandatory vaccination for diseases such as Zika. A False International Crisis Involving Deformed Babies Justifies Action All through January and early February of 2016, the news media provided us with a non-stop litany of stories about Zika and deformed babies. In a previous article I examined some of the headlines in the propaganda campaign.The CDC was still using the word ""possible association,"" while the news media insisted on using the word ""cause."" Despite the initial reserve of the CDC, the news media began to shout the message across America, ""Zika is going to deform the heads of our babies while they are in the womb, and there's no vaccine to protect us!""It seems like every Zika story I saw included at least one photo of a baby with microcephaly and always stated that there is no vaccine yet. We were reminded over and over again that Zika is causing babies to be born with abnormally small heads, mental retardation, and blindness. We were warned that some babies were dying at birth because of the severity of their brain deformation. We were told that each baby born with microcephaly will cost ten million dollars or more in medical expenses during the child's life. [16] These stories created ever increasing levels of apprehension and fear as they were intended to do.As the mainstream media struggled to keep the fear level high and keep the story line flowing from week to week, they began to focus in on government efforts to save us from Zika. It didn't take long for them to find people to interview who would ask the question they wanted asked. ""What is the Government Going to Do to Protect Our Babies?"" This question was asked over and over again even though there was no proof that Zika infection and microcephaly were related. The question was asked so many times by the media that no politician could dare to say, ""I am not going to do anything, because as far as we know Zika doesn't cause microcephaly."" President Obama Responds to the Question On February 22, 2016, President Obama requested 1.9 billion dollars to study the situation and to develop a Zika vaccine. [17]Let's look at this more carefully. We are going to spend 1.9 billion dollars to develop a vaccine for a virus that almost never kills anyone and has not been proven to cause birth defects — just to be safe. Or is something else going on here?Perhaps the real story is that Big Pharma wants another cash cow vaccine and the Zika threat has been promoted in such a way that people will insist that Big Pharma develop a Zika vaccine for us. Suddenly, Big Pharma companies will be able to put on their white hats and rescue all the babies of the world. This would be such sweet deception if they could pull it off. CDC Declaration: Zika Causes Microcephaly The CDC announced in April of 2016 that Zika causes microcephaly. [18]This decision was based on a CDC analysis of available data. They did not conduct comprehensive research. They used a quacking duck kind of analysis. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck then it must be a duck. They couldn't tell if it had feathers like a duck or has a bill like a duck, but they still insisted on calling it a duck named Zika. In doing this, they ignored some of the most important criteria in their analysis.CDC researchers stated: The seventh [of Shepard's] criterion, proof in an experimental system that the agent acts in an unaltered state, is aimed at medications or chemical exposures and does not apply to infectious agents. Thus, given Shepard's criteria as a framework, criteria 1, 3, and 4 have been satisfied — evidence that is considered sufficient to identify an agent as a teratogen. [19] In other words, they used a set of seven criteria to determine whether Zika could be considered to be a cause of microcephaly. They determined that the association between Zika infection and microcephaly was causative for 3 of the 7 criteria. They suggested that additional study was needed before 3 of the other criteria could be met. They excluded the seventh criteria altogether, because it examined whether medications or chemicals might have caused microcephaly.I couldn't believe that they excluded the seventh criteria when it is clear that microcephaly is known to be caused by pesticide exposure, and could just as easily be caused by vaccinations during pregnancy as it was likely to be caused by Zika infection.These CDC scientists were only looking for causation from infectious agents. Nothing else seemed to matter. This exclusionary mindset was present since the very beginning of the Zika propaganda campaign.They ignored the effect of the Tdap vaccine given to pregnant women in Brazil in 2015. They ignored the side effects of medications. They ignored the consumption of GMO food, glyphosate, and Pyriproxyfen that were widely used in Brazil. They ignored chemical exposure from Brazil's large chemical manufacturing facilities. They ignored alcohol and drug use. They ignored the effects of extreme multi-generational nutritional deficiencies and extreme poverty. They ignored the introduction of genetically modified mosquitoes that were released in Brazil. They ignored exposure to rubella, toxoplasmosis, or cytomegalovirus. They ignored the combined effects of all these factors as well as multigenerational modifications to the local gene pool from these potential causes.I discussed these potential causes of microcephaly in my first article on Zika, published in January of 2016.There is one key point that I want to bring forward from the previous article concerning the number of babies born with microcephaly. First we heard that there were some 4,783 cases of microcephaly in Brazil. After the initial shock and panic was produced, we learned that further investigation showed that the number of confirmed cases was only 483.The mainstream media also didn't mention that the number of babies born in the United States with microcephaly in a typical year is 25,000. When adjusting for population differences between the US and Brazil, we find that the rate of microcephaly in the US is actually 40 times higher than the rate in Brazil.In other words, the US microcephaly incidence is much higher than Brazil, and our babies didn't get it from Zika. Maybe our babies got it from the various potential causes I discussed in my previous article.I should also state that the researchers who put their names on this article are all employees of the CDC. [20] I must question whether their analysis was truly objective and whether their findings were influenced by CDC ties to Big Pharma. The Zika Vaccine is in the Pipeline Based on this single poor quality analysis, it's full speed ahead for developing a Zika vaccine. There are at least four companies plus the CDC working on a Zika vaccine. We are told that it will still take several years before a Zika vaccine can be properly tested and made available in large quantities for the population of the world.Zika vaccine trials have already begun and they are already recruiting volunteers in the US. The US National Institutes of Health hopes to start phase II trials of its vaccine in early 2017. [22] Congress Tries to Protect Our Babies with Zika Funding Now that the CDC has settled the Zika-microcephaly question, it was time to get congress to fund the President's request for a Zika vaccine development program. The House and the Senate passed Zika funding bills. However, they have different ideas of how much money should be spent and how the funds should be generated. The funding process stalled at the end of June when the Senate and House could not reconcile their differences. [23]Congress went on a seven week summer vacation, and wasn't available to try to resolve their differences. This created a problem for the Zika mind control campaign, because it might mean there would be no new Zika news to report during the summer. Keeping the Propaganda Campaign Going by Killing Mosquitoes The mainstream media switched their focus from vaccine development to eradication of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is known to carry the Zika virus. If an infected mosquito bites a person, then the person might develop the infection. This is a fact that no one is disputing. The Great Mosquito Chase of 2016 The CDC continues to count the number of Zika cases in the US and Puerto Rico. The numbers continue to rise through the spring and early summer. They were looking for autochthonous cases of Zika in the US, but they could only find infected people who had traveled to Zika infected countries or who had sex with people who traveled to those countries.Finally, at the very end of July, 4 people in the Wynnewood section of Miami, Florida, were found to have Zika even though they had not traveled to a Zika infected country or had sex with a Zika infected person. [24]Public health officials at the state and federal level interpreted the presence of these cases to mean that Zika must have been transmitted to these people by mosquito bites. They ignored the possibility that the infected people might have been lying about their exposure, for example, having sexual contact with an infected person. Nevertheless, officials concluded that they must implement a strong mosquito control program to prevent Zika from spreading any further.Now that the Zika epidemic was on US home soil; the media had another fear inducing story to add to their propaganda campaign. ""There are mosquitoes that are out to get you and our babies!"" The Governor of Florida Goes Door to Door to Find more People with Zika On August 1st, the governor of Florida contacted the US public health system and asked them to send a specially trained squad of federal public health agents to help with the Zika emergency in Miami. These agents and Florida officials went door to door in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami and collected urine samples to identify additional cases of Zika.10 more cases were found, but all were asymptomatic – the people didn't even know they were infected. [25] Problem — They can't find a Zika Infected Mosquito 5,000 mosquitoes were tested for the presence of Zika, but all tests were negative. [26]Officials dismiss the negative infection results by saying that finding a Zika infected mosquito is like finding a needle in a haystack. [27] Aerial Mosquito Spraying Program Initiated The governor of Florida in conjunction with federal public health agents decided that they needed to do aerial spraying of pesticide. Even though the Aedes aegypti mosquito wouldn't travel more than 300 feet from its birth place in the Wynwood neighborhood where the autochthonous Zika cases were located, the officials decided to spray a ten square mile area just to be safe. [28]A spraying program that covers ten square miles would make a sensational story in the media. It would be much more alarming than a story about a neighborhood aerial spray zone. It also would expose many more people to a toxic pesticide (more about that later).The first aerial spraying took place on August 4, 2016. [29] Toxic Pesticide Used in Aerial Spraying Causes Microcephaly Officials told the public not to worry about the pesticide that was being sprayed, because it (naled) is harmless. They pointed to EPA reports, which supported their claim. [30]They didn't mention that naled was banned in Europe in 2005. They didn't mention that officials in Puerto Rico recently refused to allow the spraying of naled over their citizens. They didn't mention that naled kills many other types of insects and aquatic creatures in addition to mosquitoes. [31] Most importantly, official didn't mention that naled and the chemicals that are created when it breaks down in the environment have the potential for causing human birth defects. [32] Could Pesticide Naled Cause Microcephaly and other Life Threatening Diseases? Officials didn't mention that the pesticide that they were spraying over the densely populated minority neighborhood of Wynwood [33] was particularly dangerous for babies in the womb.This is what the JOURNAL OF PESTICIDE REFORM has to say about naled: Like all organophosphates, naled [Dibrom] is toxic to the nervous system. Symptoms of exposure include headaches, nausea, and diarrhea. Naled is more toxic when exposure occurs by breathing contaminated air than through other kinds of exposure. In laboratory tests, naled exposure caused increased aggressiveness and a deterioration of memory and learning. Naled's breakdown product dichlorvos (another organophosphate insecticide) interferes with prenatal brain development. In laboratory animals, exposure for just 3 days during pregnancy when the brain is growing quickly reduced brain size 15 percent. Dichlorvos also causes cancer, according to the International Agency for Research on Carcinogens. In laboratory tests, it caused leukemia and pancreatic cancer. Two independent studies have shown that children exposed to household ""no-pest"" strips containing dichlorvos have a higher incidence of brain cancer than unexposed children. [34] [Emphasis added] Naled exposure causes increased aggressiveness and a deterioration of memory and learning. These are some of the symptoms that are also found in children on the autism spectrum.One of the most toxic break down products in Naled is Dichlorvos. This chemical caused a 15% reduction in brain size in pregnant lab animals after 3 days of exposure. Another word for reduced brain size is microcephaly.So, the pesticide they are spraying could increase the rate of autism among children in the spray zone, and could cause microcephaly to occur in the babies of pregnant women.Question: If there are babies born in Miami with microcephaly in the next nine months or if the autism rate in the spray zone increases, will we blame Zika or Naled? I am sure that no one from the CDC or from a public health agency will ever point a finger at Naled. They will use the children to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Zika is to blame. Naled is also Harmful to Adults Dr. Naresh Kumar, a Professor of Public Health at the University of Miami, commented about the risks of using pesticides in aerial spraying. His statement came from CBS Miami: ""All are a neurotoxin, meaning it will directly affect our nervous system."" ""It will affect not only the pregnant woman ... it is also equally for children who have asthma and airway disease because when you are spraying in the air, these aerosols stay in the air for at least five days."" [35] The Miami Herald provided this advice to people in the pesticide spray zone. They stated: The agency [EPA] says the insecticide poses no risk for the majority of people, but those sensitive to chemicals may want to stay inside during spraying, close windows and turn off window air conditioners. Fruits and vegetables should also be washed before eating and outdoor furniture and grills covered. [36] So, if you are concerned about being exposed to the chemicals they are spraying, then you should stay inside for 5 days until the pesticide falls out of the air. You should keep your windows closed, and turn off window air conditioners. I wonder how many people were able to follow this advice in the subtropical urban climate of Miami in August.Mind control programs always try to make life difficult for those who live outside the box of normality. They want us to follow their instructions, which in this case would be to just not worry about the spraying. If you are concerned, then you can take their ridiculous suggestions, which won't really protect you from the spray. Does Zika also Cause Guillain-Barre Syndrome? Apparently the CDC suspects that Zika causes the paralytic syndrome called Guillain-Barre. If you look at the data collection forms for monitoring Zika in the US you will see another masterful stroke of mind control in the making. They are counting cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome on the same form with cases of Zika. [37]Why would the CDC try to make this connection? The CDC indicates on their Guillain-Barre Syndrome page that they are not sure what causes this syndrome. They do mention that there were some cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome associated with the swine flu vaccine in 1976, but otherwise the condition is rare with unknown etiology. [38]If they can make a case for the Zika virus being the cause of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, then they will shift attention away from the fact that many vaccines and pesticides have a harmful effect on the human nervous system and are able to produce this type of paralysis.I anticipate seeing a Guillain-Barre Syndrome research paper just like the one produced by the CDC on microcephaly. Their new paper will just substitute the phrase ""Guillain-Barre Syndrome,"" for the word ""microcephaly."" They will show through statistical smoke and mirrors that the Zika virus is causative for Guillain-Barre Syndrome as well as microcephaly.If they can pull this off, then the Zika virus will be blamed for all cases of vaccine damage in which microcephaly or paralysis results. If they can pull this off, and I suspect they will, then pesticide manufacturers will also be able to blame the Zika virus for microcephaly, neurological malformation, and paralysis that results from the use of their products. The Zika virus will be the perfect scapegoat. The List of Birth Defects Being Blamed on Zika with No Evidence is Increasing Propaganda campaigns always seek to worsen the devastating effects of whatever they want us to fear. First we heard that Zika causes microcephaly. Then we heard that it might also cause Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Now we are hearing that Zika causes a whole host of other birth defects, some of which might not appear until months or even years after birth.The New York Times stated: The images [of babies with microcephaly], published Tuesday in the journal Radiology, also suggest a grim possibility: Because some of the damage was seen in brain areas that continue to develop after birth, it may be that babies born without obvious impairment will experience problems as they grow. Images of another baby girl show contracted hands and arms, the result of another common symptom. Zika seems to damage the nerves in a developing fetus so that sometimes ""muscles aren't developing normally because they don't have the nerve impulses to move normally,"" she [Dr. Levine] said. With such a vicious and unpredictable virus, ""it's key to realize that Zika is more than microcephaly, that there's a number of other abnormalities as they've shown in this paper, and its effects are going to be even more broad,"" said Dr. Spong, whose agency has begun a study of what will ultimately be 10,000 babies born in Zika epidemic areas including Brazil and Puerto Rico. ""It's going to be essential to follow them to look at their development, to look at their ability to learn, to look at hearing problems, balance problems, behavior problems, all those issues, to make sure that we don't miss anyone."" [39] Zika: The New Scapegoat for All Childhood Diseases? Can you tell where this is going? It seems to me that they are planning to put together a catalog of major injuries that results from Zika infection.It will include most if not all injuries that result from vaccines, pesticides, GMO food, pharmaceutical drugs, the high-carbohydrate low-fat standard American diet, and anything else that might lead to a successful lawsuit against Big Pharma or Big Chem. Zika might just become the standard defense for suit against corporations. ""It wasn't our product that harmed this little baby, it was Zika!"" Conclusion: Another Government Tool for ""The Greater Good"" to Strip Away Freedoms? It won't be long before the mainstream media will be showing us pictures of US babies from Florida who were born with microcephaly. The mainstream media will tug at our heartstrings and will remind us that this horror will soon become preventable when the Zika vaccine is developed.We will hear about more and more connections between Zika and other terrible health conditions experienced by children. We will be told that all this suffering and all this expense will be avoided when all the mosquitoes are killed and everyone receives the Zika vaccine.Mind control programs always talk about the greater good and how individuals must give up their individual freedoms, their rights, and even their preferences for the sake of the collective benefit. Zika will be one of the tools used by mind controllers and the ruling elite to move us toward mass vaccination and total government control over our lives.Read more at: HealthImpactNews.com [1] ""Zika Virus is property of Rockefeller Foundation,"" Feb 7, 2016 Anonews.co [2] ""Brazil asks whether Zika acts alone to cause birth defects"" July 25, 2016 Nature.com [3] ""First case of Zika virus reported in Puerto Rico"" Dec 31, 2015 CDC.gov [4] ""Epidemiological Alert – Neurological syndrome, congenital malformations, and Zika virus infection – Implications for Public Health in the Americas"" Dec 1, 2015 Paho.org [5] IBID.[7] IBID.[8] ""Epidemiological Alert Increase of microcephaly in the northeast of Brazil"" Nov 17, 2015 Paho.org [9] ""Epidemiological Alert – Neurological syndrome, congenital malformations, and Zika virus infection – Implications for Public Health in the Americas"" Dec 1, 2015 Paho.org [10] ""Archive by Disease – Zika virus infection"" Paho.org [11] ""Zika virus infection – Honduras"" Dec 21, 2015 Who.int [12] ""Zika virus infection – Panama"" Dec 22, 2015 Who.int [13] ""First case of Zika virus reported in Puerto Rico"" Dec 31, 2015 CDC.gov [14] ""PAHO WHO Reported increase of congenital microcephaly and other central nervous system symptoms"" February 10, 2016 Paho.org [15] ""Why is Zika virus spreading so quickly?"" Jan 28, 2016 Youtube.com [16] ""Zika virus: Miami outbreak sparks concern, demand for tests among pregnant women"" Aug 3, 2016 Miamiherald.com [17] ""Letter From The President — Zika Virus"" Feb 22, 2016 WhiteHouse.gov [18] ""Zika Virus Causes Birth Defects, Health Officials Confirm"" April 13, 2016 NyTimes.com [19] ""Zika Virus and Birth Defects — Reviewing the Evidence for Causality"" May 19,2016 Nejm.org [20] ""So What Became of the $1.9 Billion for Zika?"" Aug 17, 2016 TheVaccineReaction.org [22] ""NIH kicks off Phi trial for Zika vax as caseload rises in U.S"" Aug 3, 2016 FiercePharma.com [23] ""Zika Deal In Congress Likely To Be Delayed Until After Recess"" June 23, 2016 NyTimes.com [24] ""Florida health officials confirm local Zika transmission"" July 29, 2016 CNN.com [25] ""Gov. Scott: Florida Calls on CDC to Activate Emergency Response Team Following Confirmed Mosquito-Borne Transmissions"" Aug 1, 2016 FlGov.com [26] ""Florida's Mosquito Control Forces Mobilize Against Zika Threat"" May 2016 KHN.org [27] ""Florida confirms it is first state with locally transmitted Zika"" July 29, 2016 StatNews.com [28] Zika Virus: Miami-Dade County plans to spray naled in Wynwood Aug 11, 2016 MiamiHerald.com [29] ""Spraying Begins in Miami to Combat the Zika Virus"" Aug 4, 2016 NyTimes.com [30] ""Naled for Mosquito Control"" Aug 15, 2016 EPA.gov [31] ""Friday flight planned to spray for Zika mosquitoes"" Aug 11, 2016 MiamiHerald.com [32] ""Florida to Spray Residents Like Bugs over Zika — with a Chemical that Ironically Reduces Fetal Brain Size in Studies"" Aug 3, 2016 ActivistPost.com [33] ""Free 33127 ZIP Code Map, Statistics, and More for Miami, FL"" UnitedStatesZipCodes.org [34] ""Alternatives to Pesticides factsheet on Naled"" CloudFront.net [35] ""EPA: Insecticide Used To Fight Zika Is Safe"" Miami.CBSLocal.com [36] ""Zika Virus: Miami-Dade County plans to spray naled in Wynwood Friday"" Aug 11, 2016 MiamiHerald.com [37] ""Zika and Guillain-Barre Syndrome,"" CDC.gov [38] IBID.",FAKE
+7396,Hillary PANDERS to Black and Hispanic Radio Hosts Claiming RAP “Influenced her” and MEXICAN FOOD is her “Favorite” – TruthFeed,"Politics Hillary PANDERS to Black and Hispanic Radio Hosts Claiming RAP “Influenced her” and MEXICAN FOOD is her “Favorite” Hillary PANDERS to Black and Hispanic Radio Hosts Claiming RAP “Influenced her” and MEXICAN FOOD is her “Favorite” Politics By Amy Moreno October 27, 2016 
+Hillary Clinton has NO PLAN to help minorities. 
+Nothing, nada, zilch. 
+But she does like rap music, loves hot sauce, and Mexican food is her favorite…. 
+So, yeah, VOTE FOR HER. 
+Meanwhile, Trump is talking about the issues that matter to the American people. Jobs, security, the economy. Trump represents a new direction for America, where the needs of Americans are placed above foreign interests and are greedy donors and lobbyists. Hillary represents the same thing we’ve got now – a stagnant economy, global politics, and dangerous progressive ideologies. Trump is the candidate of CHANGE. Our dishonest North Korea-style government-run propaganda media whose sole purpose is to spew pro-Hillary rhetoric, anti-Trump lies, and cover up for the most unliked candidate in the history of American elections, says the election is OVER. Hillary has won it. So, why is Hillary on black radio shows saying rappers have “INFLUENCED HER” (hahaha) and going on Hispanic radio, telling everyone that Mexican food is her favorite? Sounds pretty DESPERATE To me. It’s INSULTING too. To think that minorities are so dumb that they’ll vote for someone because they like a certain type of music or food. This is typical “Clinton old school politics.” Treating minorities like dullards by pandering to them around “voting time” and then ignoring them the rest of the time. I believe we’re ALL beyond those silly shenanigans by this point. On Spanish Language TV, Hillary Clinton Says Mexican Food Is Her Favorite 😂 https://t.co/RKqlHO9Jxj 
+— Deplorable AJ (@asamjulian) October 27, 2016 “I think Death Row and a lot of other fashion sources have influenced my look” – A thing Hillary Clinton said pic.twitter.com/ygmSutm3Dk 
+— Colin Jones (@colinjones) October 26, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+6417,Isis Leader ‘hiding in Mosul’ as Troops Storm Iraqi City,"  Recipient Email => 
+The Iraqi Army has entered Mosul for the first time in over two years at the start of a battle which is likely to end in a decisive defeat for Isis . The significance of the fight for Mosul will be all the greater for Isis because its self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , is believed to be still inside the city, a senior Kurdish official has told The Independent . 
+Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to Kurdish President Massoud Barzani, said in an exclusive interview that his government had information from multiple sources that “Baghdadi is there and, if he is killed, it will mean the collapse of the whole [Isis] system.” Isis would have to choose a new caliph in the middle of a battle, but no successor would have the authority and prestige of Baghdadi, the leader who surprised the world by establishing the caliphate after capturing Mosul in June 2014. 
+Baghdadi has kept himself concealed for the last eight or nine months according to Mr Hussein, who added that the caliph had become very dependent on Isis commanders from Mosul and Tal Afar, a city just to the west of Mosul. Other senior and better known figures in Isis, particularly those from Syria and other countries, have been killed since their initial triumphs in the summer of 2014 when they took over much of northern Iraq and eastern Syria. 
+The presence of Baghdadi in Mosul may complicate and prolong the battle for Mosul as his surviving adherents fight to the death to defend him. Mr Hussein said that “it is obvious that they will lose, but not how long this will take to happen.” He said that Kurdish Peshmerga forces had been impressed by the extraordinary number of tunnels that Isis had dug in order to provide hiding places in the villages around Mosul. 
+Iraqi Special Forces advanced into Mosul, which once had a population of two million, on Tuesday seizing the state television on the east bank of the Tigris River that divides the city in half. Mr Hussein said that the speed of the fall of Mosul would depend on many factors especially whether or not Isis “is going to destroy the five bridges over the river.” 
+Iraqi army units backed by US-led air strikes have been attacking across the Nineveh Plain to the east of Mosul, capturing empty towns and villages from which the inhabitants have almost entirely fled. Where Christians and other minorities have tried to return to their old homes in towns like Bartella and Qaraqosh, they have found them looted and often burned by retreating Isis fighters. 
+Iraqi troops entered Gogjali, a district inside Mosul’s city limits, and later the borders of the more built-up Karama district, according to Major General Sami al-Aridi of the Iraqi special forces. Under an agreement reached before the offensive began on 17 October, Kurdish Peshmerga and Shia-militia paramilitaries known as the Hashd al-Shaabi, will not join the attack into Mosul, which is a largely Sunni Arab city. 
+As night fell, a sandstorm blew up cutting visibility to only 100 yards making air support for Iraqi forces more difficult and bringing the fighting to an end. “Daesh (Isis) is fighting back and have set up concrete blast walls to block off the Karama neighbourhood and [stop] our troops’ advance,” General Aridi said. He added later that the troops had taken the nearby state television building, the only one in Nineveh province, but there had been heavy fighting when they tried to move further into built-up areas. They are still some six miles from the city centre. 
+The anti-Isis offensive is dependent on US-led air strikes and the presence of US special forces. “I assure you that the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga do not move one millimetre forward without American permission and coordination,” said one Kurdish observer. He did not think that the battle for Mosul would necessarily go on a long time. But it is increasingly difficult for the 3,000 to 5,000 Isis fighters in Mosul and the 1,500 to 2,500 on the outskirts to escape, even if they wanted to. The Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga encircle the city to the north, east and west and the Hashd are moving in from the west, cutting the last routes to Syria. 
+US spokesman Colonel John Dorrian said that the US-led airpowers had noticed that Isis forces could no longer move in large numbers. “And when we see them come together where there are significant numbers we will strike them and kill them,” he said during a televised press conference. Some 1,792 Iraqis of whom 1,120 were civilians were killed in October according to the UN, though the total probably does not include Isis fighters. 
+Eyewitnesses inside Mosul, where Isis is reported to have killed 40 Iraqi prisoners at the weekend and thrown their bodies into the Tigris, say there are few fighters to be seen in the streets. “There are mostly just teenagers with guns,” said one Mosul resident reached by telephone. Part of the city is shrouded in smoke because of air strikes and artillery fire, but also because Isis fighters are lighting fires to produce a smokescreen which will make observation from the air more difficult. 
+It has been reported that Isis commanders were divided on whether or not it was better for them to make a last stand in Mosul or withdraw, after inflicting the maximum number of casualties on its enemies, and revert to guerrilla warfare. Last month 100 Isis fighters staged a spectacular raid on the Kurdish-held oil city of Kirkuk. An advantage for Isis in fighting in Mosul is that it would be more difficult for the US and its allies to carry out air strikes because there may be up to 1.5 million civilians still in the city. Isis has been preventing them leaving though the number is increasing as the anti-Isis forces move forward and it becomes clear that they intend to assault the city. 
+Isis has never been popular in Mosul according to local residents who detest its extreme violence, religious bigotry and subjugation of women. But it found more support in Sunni Arab villages around the city and among the Sunni Turkman of the nearby city of Tal Afar, who have always been notorious for their religious extremism and hatred for Shia and Kurds. Some observers believe that Isis might want to fight here against the Shia paramilitaries of the Hashd, because the US-led air coalition has not been providing air cover for the Hashd on the grounds that they are sectarian and under Iranian influence. 
+The fighting is so far on the eastern side of Mosul that traditionally had a Kurdish and Christian population while, if Isis has local support, it will be in the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab west of the city. Life here is said to be still relatively normal with markets open and people in the streets. In addition to the indigenous population of Mosul, there are believed to be several hundred thousand Sunni Arabs, many of them Isis supporters, who fled there from Iraqi provinces such as Anbar, Diyala and Salahudin where Isis has already been defeated. (Reprinted from The Independent by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+3313,VA admits it has no contracts in place for billions of dollars spent on veterans’ medical care,"Top officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledged to House lawmakers Monday that they have been spending billions of dollars a year on private medical care for veterans without contracts, and said it would be too costly and cumbersome to put them in place.
+
+“VA acknowledges that our long-standing procurement processes for care in the community need improvement,” Edward Murray, VA’s acting secretary for management and interim chief financial officer, testified, referring to what’s called non-VA care. Murray said that “serious legal questions” have arisen over medical care veterans get outside VA hospitals and clinics, a growing cost that’s expected to reach more than $10 billion this fiscal year.
+
+The hearing before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs’s investigations panel was the second of three scheduled for the spring to address allegations of billions of dollars in misspending flagged by Jan R. Frye, VA’s deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and logistics, about contracting practices. The Washington Post reported in May that Frye had sent a 35-page memo to VA Secretary Robert McDonald in March accusing agency leaders of making a “mockery” of federal acquisition laws and spending at least $6 billion a year in violation of contracting rules.
+
+Frye described a culture of “lawlessness and chaos” at the Veterans Health Administration, the massive health-care system for 8.7 million veterans, and said his efforts to reform a wasteful, disorganized contracting process that put veterans health and taxpayers money at risk have been met with resistance from agency leaders for years.
+
+Frye, testifying Monday, repeated his concerns that VA has failed to engage in competitive bidding or sign contracts with outside hospital and health-care providers that offer medical care for veterans that the agency cannot provide, such as specialized tests and surgeries, obstetrics care and other procedures. VA has paid billions of dollars in such fees, in violation of federal acquisition rules that the agency’s own general counsel has said since 2009 must be followed, Murray and other officials acknowledged at the hearing.
+
+Frustrated lawmakers from both parties said the lack of contracts represented another case of bureaucratic incompetence they said has become the order of the day at VA.
+
+“If the atom bomb can be built and wars conducted under the acquisition regulations, surely VA can deliver patient care under them as well,” Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), chairman of the oversight panel, said, and later called the contracting issues an example of “bureaucratic lawlessness.”
+
+But VA officials said they would need to hire at least 600 employees to write and oversee contracts for private care, an expense they cannot afford. They also said that in rural areas in particular, many physicians are nervous about doing business with the government and are wary of the paperwork involved in a contract with VA.
+
+Phillipa Anderson, VA’s assistant general counsel for government contracting, said that if a doctor or other clinician is paid, properly billed and provides a service to a veteran, that effectively constitutes a contract. But Frye and several lawmakers said that practice puts taxpayers and veterans at risk.
+
+“When federal contracts are required and you don’t use them, there are terms and conditions that are missing from the contract,” Frye said. “There are termination issues. Disputes over fair and reasonable prices. A whole host of issues. Safety and efficacy. Without them, the contractor is there to do what he or she wants.”
+
+VA operates one of the largest health-care systems in the country, spanning 150 hospitals and more than 800 outpatient clinics. The agency has been struggling to serve not only the veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also a surge in veterans who served in the 1960s and 1970s.
+
+VA has been rocked since last year by revelations about long wait times for veterans seeking treatment for health issues including cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder. McDonald’s predecessor, Eric K. Shinseki, resigned as VA secretary last year after a coverup of months-long hospital wait times became public, and Congress has given the system $10 billion in new funding to ramp up private medical care.
+
+The agency is urging Congress to pass legislation that would allow an expedited form of purchasing care for veterans who need to go outside the VA system, allowing the use of agreements other than those required by federal acquisition regulations.",REAL
+8339,"Hannity, Judge Jeanine, Crowley “Hillary has Sold America’s National Security. WORSE than a CRIME FAMILY” – TruthFeed","Hannity, Judge Jeanine, Crowley “Hillary has Sold America’s National Security. WORSE than a CRIME FAMILY” Hannity, Judge Jeanine, Crowley “Hillary has Sold America’s National Security. WORSE than a CRIME FAMILY” Videos By TruthFeedNews November 6, 2016 
+Sean Hannity quotes his own and other sources on the FBI’s investigation into Clinton wrongdoing, noting that the law enforcement probe will continue regardless of who wins next Tuesday. After reading an update on the current state of the Clinton investigation he turns the floor over to Judge Jeanine Pirro who says, “It’s time for a grand jury.” 
+She says, “It’s time for Loretta Lynch to allow Comey and the FBI to get this evidence before a grand jury. There is a mutiny in the FBI, that’s why all of this stuff is coming out. There are four offices that continue to investigate although Justice has tried to shut this down, saying there’s not enough evidence, this recording from this other person who apparently is an informant is hearsay.” 
+Judge Jeanine adds, “This woman should have been indicted a year ago. A simpleton could figure out that she would make a deal with a particular country, the money goes into the foundation, Bill makes a speech and then they get the benefit. This is classic RICO corruption; go to jail.” 
+Hannity asks Monica Crowley, “What is Loretta Lynch hiding here, what is she resisting when it’s clearly an avalanche of evidence?” Crowley says she sees it as the revenge of the FBI rank and file “and the timing is not a coincidence.” She notes that in this country, “If you do not have an independent, impartial and fair Department of Justice and FBI which are only interested in enforcing the rule of law and finding the truth then you have nothing. Obviously that is not what we have with much of the DOJ and with senior FBI leadership. 
+She describes the email investigation as the shiny object, while it is very important, the real mother lode of corruption is the Clinton Foundation. Crowley insists that the bigger point that the American people need to bear in mind before going to vote on Tuesday is that Clinton leveraged her public office in order to enrich herself, her husband and their foundation. 
+As the conversation shifts to the fact that Clinton is a target for extortion and blackmail due to her emails being hacked by five different foreign governments, Judge Jeanine declares, “She has sold America’s national security for money. These people are grifters, they’ve been grifters since they came on the scene. And she knew that when she set up that server that it wasn’t secure. She did it for money, she did it to enrich themselves, she didn’t care about our security and Huma Abedin, I don’t know who she and Weiner are connecting with, but these are people who do not have our interests at heart.” 
+Crowley says Clinton should have her security clearance revoked tonight. She believes this will be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back in the Clinton parasitic relationship with the United States. Crowley knew Richard Nixon well. This is so much worse, she says, reminding the audience that nobody was killed in Watergate and “nobody made one red cent.” 
+H/T – RickWells 
+For once in our lifetime, we the people have an opportunity to elect a President who was NOT chosen by Multinational Corporations, Big Banks, DC Elites, and the Globalist Lapdog Mainstream Media. 
+Please like and share if you are a TRUMP VOTER! ",FAKE
+8889,WORLD WAR 3 IS COMING,source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments,FAKE
+2332,'American Sniper' widow: Gun control won't protect us,"Taya Kyle is the author of ""American Wife: A Memoir of Love, War, Faith, and Renewal."" Her late husband, Chris Kyle, was the subject of the movie, ""American Sniper."" Taya Kyle was an invited guest for the CNN Town Hall "" Guns in America ."" Follow her on Twitter: @TayaKyle . The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.
+
+(CNN) Many of us taking part in the CNN town hall on guns have been touched by someone who chose to do evil.
+
+I am sharing my thoughts with you because I feel I can relate to people on both sides of the issue of gun control. I have been afraid of guns, I have sworn I would never use a gun on another person and so did not need one, and I have wanted to deny the existence of evil.
+
+I have also become a gun owner, am prepared to defend myself with a firearm, and understand the fear of my freedoms being taken away.
+
+I have been touched by extreme violence and I have been robbed of the life I always wanted by someone who chose to do evil. Because I have felt, and lived, all of these things, I have spent much time thinking about evil, freedom and not only the world we live in, but the country too.
+
+There are many facts and statistics people will use to argue both sides of the gun control issue. We can use other countries as examples and we can use crime rates of cities, states and countries. And no matter how thoroughly researched the statistics are, people have an emotional reaction to this issue that almost always overrides the statistics presented, other than this one: The violent crime rate in the United States has gone down substantially in the last 20 years.
+
+Our fears, though, have gone up, because of the high-profile incidents of mass killings of people caught unaware. Killers have taken lives in churches, schools, hospitals, government buildings, the site of a marathon, the Twin Towers and even a part of a military base where soldiers were known to be unarmed.
+
+These killings highlight the fact that any of us, and any of our loved ones, are vulnerable when caught with our guard down against another person who desires to do harm.
+
+Does it matter what weapon they used? If it was a rifle, a pipe bomb, a truck of fertilizer, a pressure cooker or a plane -- the end result is the same. Yet millions of other people have the freedom to have those very same things and will never use them to kill.
+
+These horrific mass killings were committed by a very small number of people who wish to harm and kill others. When they do it, we flock to the scene and ask ""Why?"" Who are these people who choose to do harm? What is their story? What went wrong? What are they trying to tell us?
+
+Ultimately, in our horror, we give them a voice they would never have had otherwise. Is our insatiable need to know and find out how their lives might have gone wrong part of the result they are looking for? Is that part of the reason there is an incentive to do such harm to innocent people? We know it isn't the availability of the weapon, because they used different methods, different weapons.
+
+Can we fix these people? Can we legislate out of them the desire to kill? Those in the business of fighting crime and analyzing mental illness can look into the lives of each of these killers and tell you the red flags that popped up before the massacre.
+
+Why don't we deal with that instead of banning the tools very few use? By the very nature of these crimes, we know that evildoers don't care about the laws. After all, murder is against the law, and they are choosing to ignore the law from the moment they plan to harm people.
+
+Beyond that, who among us has the right to tell me I will murder someone because I have a gun? And who can tell me that I can only defend and protect myself in a way they feel comfortable with?
+
+Just having access to a deadly weapon doesn't turn someone into a killer. Have you ever felt road rage? Many of us who have cars have felt some form of extreme anger at other drivers because we feel they have put us in harm's way. We might even envision ramming their cars or cutting them off in return, but do we actually do it? No, because the overwhelming majority of us never want to take another human life.
+
+Even special ops guys, military and police who are trained to kill for legitimate purposes, who are familiar with multiple weapons and have access to the weapons and ammunition -- even these people, who are experienced, will tell you they never know if they can pull the trigger until placed in a position to use deadly force to protect another person.
+
+My government has proven that it's not able to protect me against people who want to kill. And I don't blame the government, because there is only one person to blame here: The man or woman who decided to kill.
+
+Killers will use any means
+
+If you put an assault rifle in my hands or yours, I am not going to murder anyone, and I am guessing you won't either. But what makes gun control advocates think that someone who decides to kill will not use any means necessary to do so?
+
+The officers would take him at his word, deliver him to a mental health facility where the facility would write a diagnosis which is known in that community as a label for likely drug use, and they would release him. Because of the HIPAA law and our desire to protect everyone's privacy, we allow bad behavior to slip through the cracks.
+
+Imagine how different things would be if a mental health facility could tell police, ""This is a drug user,"" and the police could go track him for drugs and put him in jail for breaking those laws instead of waiting for worse crimes in the future.
+
+In the state of Texas, there is a fairly new certification process for our police where officers are trained to notice and recognize mental health issues and have knowledge of the drugs people take and the effects of them. So how they intervene is different based on whether they believe there is a mental health issue vs. a drug issue. Wouldn't it be a better use of our time to work through this issue? It gives police a different crisis intervention method.
+
+Some advocates want to restrict certain kinds of guns -- perhaps allowing a pistol but not an assault rifle.
+
+To those who don't know guns well, the term ""assault rifle"" brings to mind either a sniper's gun or a fully automatic weapon we have seen in the movies, meant to mow down large numbers of people. In actuality, fully automatic weapons are already highly restricted and require an additional license most gun owners will never have.
+
+The lack of understanding makes it easy to develop rhetoric and legislation that will calm the fears of people who don't understand a given subject, but that doesn't really change any end result because we cannot legislate the evil side of humanity.
+
+In this country, we give freedom and take it away once you prove to be unworthy of the freedom we have given you. Nobody suggests taking away cars or going through a battery of tests to determine whether or not you might be a drunk driver one day.
+
+Does every man commit rape? There is a human element here that is real and we cannot legislate. Would we take away the freedom of all men by castration because some cannot handle what they have? No, we allow freedom until an individual chooses to take something that others use for good and use it to do harm to another.
+
+Are our current laws being enforced? Are felons and known drug users really put in jail when arrested for a lesser crime and known to have a gun? In most situations, no, because police have more pressing issues than to incarcerate a felon for having a gun that he or she hasn't used in a crime. We have plenty of laws on the books that we cannot or do not enforce. Let's start enforcing what we have before creating new laws.
+
+Understandably, we want a solution to ensure that we and our loved ones will never be in the situation of being caught unaware by someone who chose to do evil. Mass killers have targeted churches, businesses, movie theaters, schools and hospitals, but they could as easily take their violence to a place where people are armed. Yet they do not.
+
+When Chris and I were looking into our personal security after the book ""American Sniper"" came out, we took measures and thought of different scenarios, and Chris told me that still, based on his experience, ""Babe, if someone wants to kill me, they will.""
+
+Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were arguably some of the best-protected men in our country. Did it stop someone from shooting them?
+
+As Reagan once said, ""You won't get gun control by disarming law-abiding citizens. There is only one way to get real gun control: Disarm the thugs and criminals, lock them up and if you don't actually throw away the key, lose it for a long time.""
+
+The evil few; the responsible majority
+
+And what we need to do is find the courage to accept that from the dawn of time until the day man no longer walks the earth, evil will find a way. Murder is nothing new, it is not going away and it is not dependent on one method of killing or another.
+
+We can forge ahead knowing that while evil is among us, it involves the few. The good, responsible people are the vast majority. We can trust each other with basic freedoms until one of us proves to be untrustworthy by maliciously, intentionally harming another of us.
+
+If you have never owned a weapon, or have never known the masses of peaceful gun owners who love their families and are in nurturing professions such as counseling, nursing, social work and pastoral jobs, may I suggest you talk to them about why they cherish their freedom to have these weapons?
+
+We have slipped into a land of government that has promised the moon, seldom delivered and driven us into a world of more laws, more government, and less freedom -- and none of that has stopped murder, pain and suffering.
+
+No government can provide the utopia many seek. My hope for this country is that we remain a people who value freedom, who have the courage to face the realities with faithful hearts instead of anxious ones. I hope our people hold tight to the notion that we do not have to be a fear-ridden country focused on restrictions, but rather that we remain the land of the free and home of the brave.
+
+God bless you and thank you for giving me some of your time.",REAL
+287,"House report: Cash-strapped IRS prioritized bonuses, union activity over helping taxpayers","While facing budget cuts, the IRS nevertheless prioritized worker bonuses, union activity and the implementation of President Obama’s health care law over assisting taxpayers during tax season, according to a new report released Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee.
+
+The findings, in a Republican-led report, were released ahead of a subcommittee hearing Wednesday morning with IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.
+
+At the hearing, Koskinen stressed that the agency is significantly under-funded, and those cuts have consequences.
+
+He said less funding means there will be a decline in service for taxpayers, and pledged that service would improve if they got more money.
+
+""Customer service -- both on the phone and in person -- has been far worse than anyone would want. It's simply a matter of not having enough people to answer the phones and provide service at our walk-in sites as a result of cuts to our budget,"" he said.
+
+But Republicans argued the IRS is making bad spending choices. ""I would just suggest to you that there's hardly a person in America today that isn't doing more with less, that hasn't tightened their belt and learned how to work with less,"" Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., said.
+
+The IRS has faced congressional budget cuts of $1.2 billion since 2010, and has faced criticism in recent years over the targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status and reports of wasteful spending. The new report said the cuts were intended to “force the IRS to manage its resources more effectively and immediately stop inappropriate activities.”
+
+However, while cuts were made in part to focus the agency on customer service, the report asserted that “spending decisions entirely under the IRS’s control led to 16 million fewer taxpayers receiving IRS assistance this filing season.”
+
+The panel found the IRS had cut customer services while continuing to hand out bonuses to employees, allowing staff to conduct union activities, failing to collect debt owed by employees of the federal government and spending over $1.2 billion on implementing ObamaCare.
+
+Even though the IRS’s budget for taxpayer assistance remained flat from fiscal year 2014 to 2015, the level of over-the-phone customer service significantly decreased, with the agency shifting staff in customer service to focus on written correspondence instead of telephone calls. Meanwhile, the number of calls doubled in that period.
+
+The panel found that wait times increased from 18.7 minutes to 34.4 minutes, and answered calls decreased from 6.6 million to 5.3 million.
+
+“In January 2015, the IRS commissioner estimated that taxpayer service would decline while delays in tax refunds would increase. While the IRS commissioner has blamed this solely on budget cuts, in reality the IRS deliberately diverted resources away from taxpayer services,” the report found.
+
+Despite the drop in service, there was no significant decrease in bonuses for IRS employees. Notably, in November 2014, despite another round of budget cuts at the IRS, Koskinen announced that employees would receive bonuses at the same level as for the previous year, unless they had substantiated conduct issues, the report said.
+
+While acknowledging that the agency has cut the amount of time spent on discretionary union activity, the report questioned why it could not have been decreased further, asserting that “the amount of resources spent on discretionary union activity could have assisted nearly 2.5 million taxpayers.”
+
+The report noted that while the IRS’s implementation of ObamaCare was deemed a success by Koskinen, “the IRS achieved this supposed success by prioritizing … implementation over other activities, including core responsibilities like taxpayer assistance.”
+
+The panel also claimed the agency had failed to pursue recommendations for streamlining and reducing waste and abuse. It concluded that what it called “large areas of systemic waste and inefficiency” present in 2010 remained unaddressed in 2015, and highlighted in particular that the IRS spent $2.1 million on litigation services that the government could have conducted itself.",REAL
+7220,Israel: Ancient Papyrus Proves Jerusalem Belongs To Israel,"Videos Israel: Ancient Papyrus Proves Jerusalem Belongs To Israel Israel is using a fragment of an old tax bill is meant to undercut Muslims', and UNESCO claims to the important site. | October 27, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! A view of the Dome of the Rock Mosque in the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, Monday, May 2, 2016. 
+While the UNESCO resolution which recognized the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem as a “Muslim holy site of worship” was barely reported around the world, and considered fairly non-controversial, Israeli officials have been expressing fury over the matter for two solid weeks. 
+And the Muslims may have a huge, ancient mosque that has been a key part of Islam for 1,300 years, but Israel has a small strip of papyrus they found in a cave, which they’re pretty sure is a far more conclusive document, since it mentioned the word Jerusalem and was written in Hebrew. 
+Israeli officials have claimed that the UNESCO resolution, in recognizing the mosque as important to Islam, was tantamount to denying Israel’s absolute and eternal control over the entire city of Jerusalem. Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev said the papyrus strip proved Jerusalem “was and will remain the eternal capital of the Jewish people.” 
+The al-Aqsa mosque was built on a site which is believed to have previously housed an important Jewish temple, and some Israelis advocate the eventual destruction of the mosque and the construction of a new temple, though the details of such a construction would be hugely religiously complicated, and since the destruction of the mosque would undoubtedly start a massive war, it is considered unlikely. Still, the far-right government wants to ensure that they have some international precedent for their claim to the territory. This entry was posted in Daily Digest , Foreign Affairs and tagged Al Aqsa Mosque , Israel , Jerusalem , Muslim holy site , Palestine , UNESCO . Bookmark the permalink . tapatio 
+Contrary to the propaganda of the Judeo-fascists, the Palestinians DID have a state – called Canaan, that lasted for over 2000 years and built the city of Jerusalem – until they were destroyed by ethnic cleansing and genocide by the J6ws for the purpose of stealing the land now called Palestine. The survivors of that genocide are in Palestine and scattered throughout the region. 
+When the Jews were finally driven out of Palestine, for treachery and terrorism, the great majority of them went North into Eastern Europe. Some scattered into other regions of the Middle East and North Africa, where they integrated and lived among the other tribes before and after the transition to Islam. The J6ws that went into Europe, over the centuries, were driven from state to state because of their conspiracies, treachery, arrogance, usury and all of the other characteristics they exhibit today in Palestine and on Wall and Fleet Streets. 
+After the Jewish “kingdom” in Canaan was defeated, by the Assyrians in 351 BCE, the Jews never were allowed to rise to power again. Their >600 year reign in Canaan was marked by oppression of non-Jews, marauding and attacks on the most heavily traveled trade route in the world. After 66 BCE, for a time, Rome made the error of trying to allow the Jews limited self-rule, which ended in rioting, conspiracy and terrorist attacks by the J6ws on both Romans and the other tribes of Palestine. 
+From the time of the final defeat of the last Jewish terrorists in 135 CE, until the early 20th Century, Palestine was one of the most peaceful regions of the world. It benefited from a lack of obvious oil resources – avoiding attention from Western greed. The only upsets during that almost 2000 years were the defeat of the Byzantines (the remnants of the Roman Empire), the European “Crusades”, a couple of Asian incursions and a few tribal squabbles. 
+By 1900, Palestine was one of the most productive agricultural regions of the Middle East and a major exporter of citrus and olives. Its “Jaffa Brand” oranges were famous throughout the world (I’ve never eaten one. But, I have a crate with most of the paper label in my office). 
+The Jew claim that all of the land they obtained in Palestine was purchased is ludicrous. They went to some FORMER land owners of the DEFUNCT Ottoman Empire and paid them something to sign bills of sale to land they didn’t own and had probably never seen. 
+I read one report by a British officer in the Palestine Mandate. His unit was sent to investigate an attack on a small Palestinian town. They found the ENTIRE POPULATION of the town slaughtered, many of the bodies mutilated and most of the women and girls raped, with some tortured. The animals, including house pets, had all been killed and many mutilated. After further investigation, the British Army concluded that the massacre had been carried out by Irgun terrorists and that Menachem Begin almost certainly led the slaughter. This is the sort of sub-human that Jews “elect” as their Prime Minister. 
+The Zionists have the delusion that they can re-write history to suit their cult. They are sadly mistaken. Lonny 
+Not contrary to you being a racist @$$hoIe, you spend every day of your life whining about Jews for several hours a day. tapatio 
+NO, JEW-BOY, I SPEND PART OF MOST DAYS HELPING TO BRING ABOUT THE DAY WHEN THE DISEASE, OF WHICH YOU ARE PART, IS ERADICATED AND HUMANS CAN HAVE PEACE AND DECENCY. Lonny 
+You spend part of your days hating Jews and the other part blowing jihadis, tapaDILDO. Hating Jews doesn’t make you decent. It makes you a racist lowlife. Kagey1 
+Mint Press, you disingenuously fail to state the true objection of Israel to the UNESCO vote. That it fails to also include the Jewish origins of the site. In fact, the resolution appears to state that Jerusalem is only holy to Muslims. It negates the prior Jewish and Christian connections. That is the objection, not the inclusion of the later Muslim connection. tapatio Lonny 
+TapaDILDO still trying to get negative attention from Jews. Little crybaby never got enough attention from mommy. tapatio 
+Since the Jews invaded and committed GENOCIDE in Canaan/Palestine about 3000 years ago – yup, they were there before Muslims or Christians. The Christians appeared 2000 years ago and the Muslims came 1400 years ago. But, since the Jews’“claim” to Palestine is based on their genocide of the Canaanite kingdom after the Jews were driven from Egypt, that claim would seem to be shaky at best. 
+And, ancient Judaism became functionally extinct at tel Megiddo in 135 CE – 1881 years ago. The “Jews” that we see today are the descendants of Eastern European barbarians who were converted to Judaism by the few survivors of their terrorist war against Rome. 
+Today’s Jews and their ancestors NEVER saw Palestine until Rothschild’s Zionist disease. The FEW (about 17,000) Jews that lived in Palestine before Zionism were ALL Europeans, living on European charity – mostly in Jerusalem. They were ultra-orthodox whose entire function was to “study” the Torah and pornographic Talmud – the NEVER worked. 
+Humanity really needs to comprehend fully that this cult, that has been driven from more than 100 countries in the last 2000 years is NOT “PERSECUTED”. JUDAISM IS A TOXIC CULT-URE THAT LIVES ON THE BLOOD OF OTHERS – VAMPIRES, AS THEY HAVE BEEN CALLED BY BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, VOLTAIRE AND OTHERS. 
+GREAT JEWISH LEADERS 
+There goes Tapadildo inventing a fake history again, as always. 
+Jews didn’t invade. Jews lawfully immigrated under the Ottomans and so did the Arabs. 
+Jews committed no genocide there. The Arab population grows at one of the fastest rates on the planet. 
+There hasn’t been a Canaan for 3500 years… but you’re whining about it as though it was last week. No mention of all the genocides against non-Muslims over the last 1400 years? How about the ones this year? 
+Hating Jews has turned you into a frothing lunatic, obviously. DumbTwat. ivanacardinale 
+YOU ARE GREAT!!! WITH THIS, YOU JUST SHUT UP LOONY TUNES!!! tapatio 
+Thanks, but don’t count on that shutting up Lonny. They are assigned to sites and he probably won’t quit unless he quits/is fired from his job. Lonny 
+Why don’t you lead by example and show everyone how to shut-up, TapaDILDO. 
+Nah, you thrive on several hours’ worth of negative attention from Jews every day. ivanacardinale 
+He might be one of those Mossad trollies, being paid to do the job, the social media counterattack Lonny 
+You might be one of those racistCUNTS… Wait, “might?”… sorry. ARE. ivanacardinale 
+The War on UNESCO: Al-Aqsa Mosque is Palestinian and East Jerusalem is Illegally Occupied http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/27/the-war-on-unesco-al-aqsa-mosque-is-palestinian-and-east-jerusalem-is-illegally-occupied/ Lonny 
+Sorry, racistCUNT… there is no law which says Jerusalem is illegally occupied. Who do you claim it belongs to, racistCUNT? 
+Jews were also “Palestinians” and were “Palestinians” longer than any Arabs were, racistCUNT. ivanacardinale 
+So, you are palestinian then!!! Is in your DNA!! Lonny 
+Jews are the actual Palestinians, racistCUNT. It’s in your DNA to be a racistCUNT. tapatio 
+NO Jew has more than a trace of Semitic DNA. That was almost eradicated at tel Megiddo in 135 CE. The traces that exist in SOME Jews are from the terrorists that managed to escape from Megiddo (all men) and breed with the barbarians of Southeastern Europe. 
+The Iranian and other native Middle Eastern Jews are not Semitic, but Persian, Ethiopian, etc., so far as I know and I taught anthropology for 35 years. Lonny 
+TapaDILDO and his 1.5 terabytes of insane Jew-hate. Too funny. moosehorn 
+So the sorry sad son of wxxre that you are admits that Palestinians exist? Lonny 
+Sorry, stupid… did you think you wanted to engage in a conversation about what constitutes a “Palestinian”? moosehorn 
+Lol, you are a sorry stupid piece of crap. Lonny 
+Says the phuqqstain who couldn’t engage in a topic if his worthless life depended upon it. moosehorn 
+Ivana was right by referring to you as loony toones. Lonny 
+I’m right by referring to you as a dumbschitt. tapatio 
+You already showed us what you had for lunch today, TapaDILDO. moosehorn 
+You keep proving that you are a mentally challenged Axxhole. Lonny 
+The day you offer a mental challenge to anyone is the day you stop being a phuqqstain and graduate into average idiocy. moosehorn 
+Bravo, couldn’t come up with a better description. Lonny 
+Of what pours into your Jew-hating mouths. tapatio 
+https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/77ca2bb6a1767c6776e94afaf505f28bad3b6bb346e4d3d500d1dd0f010ddc9a.jpg moosehorn 
+I bet your parents are siblings, such stupidity and ignorance is but the result someone conceived by incest. Lonny 
+I bet that’s a jihadiQoqque banging against your tonsils. Such blowing skills are the result of someone who’s practiced a lot. tapatio 
+No “might” about it. He/she/it is a hasbara troll, either working out of Palestine (and paid with money stolen from the American taxpayer) or is some Jewish escuincle working out of his mama’s Brooklyn apartment. Lonny 
+There ‘s a definite about this: You are one dumb Jew-obsessed, racist @$$hoIe. tapatio 
+It’s obvious. So is the lunacy and stupidity behind this obsession. tapatio 
+BTW, discussions in other venues STAY on those venues. ivanacardinale 
+Well, then America belongs to the native, original peoples, so, the rest of us should start packing their bags and go back to where we come from. Same thing with Europe. It was a Roman Empire, so, Europe belongs to the Italians then. Can the “israelis” stop the crap of ancient documents? in which world they think they are living? During thousands of years everybody invaded, killed and squattered each other. So, if we go for history, NOTHING BELONGS TO NOBDY!! Michael Hess 
+The supreme irony is that Islamophobes are always going on about how backwards Muslims are wanting to protect their culture going back to ancient times, yet Hasbarians do the same thing. 
+Meanwhile, as the article states, there is simply nothing at all that is controversial in this resolution, the scandal is as made up as Benghazi and Ambassador Stevens and Hillary. 
+The fact is, there was no state of Israel prior to May 14th, 1948. So these people need to get it out of their heads because you cannot claim sovereignty to a single dunam of land before that. Of course, as more people learn that Palestine was an officially and legally created country twenty-four years before Israel, things are getting far more interesting. 
+Worse yet still for Israel, the rogue state has no legal hold over Jerusalem at all in the real world not rules by little fragments of papyrus and religious imagery back when people did not bathe and thought that the stars were oil lamps that someone lit up each night. 
+UN Security Council resolution 476 and about eighteen others prove that Israel holds no legal sovereignty in Jerusalem whatsoever, this is precisely why the US Embassy Act of 1995 is waived every six months because by moving the embassy, that would put the US in violation of more than several Security Council resolutions. Lonny 
+Sorry, moron. You are always lying about Jews. Who’s criticizing Arabs for protecting their culture? You mean, when there are those among them who ATTACK OTHER cultures that you think is an attack on Islamic culture? You think it’s a preservation of Islamic culture when ISIS began perpetrating a genocide on the Yzidis? 
+There is something controversial, numbnutted goatface… They refuse to use the Jewish terms for the places, even though those are the terms which have been the prolific ones for thousands of years. 
+The fact is, goatfaced Jew-hater… Israel was around 2000 years ago, so there was a state of Israel before May 14, 1948, and Jews have been praying at the Western Wall for millennia. And they certainly had sovereign land there historically. You really are one heck of a Jew-hating loser, goatface! 
+Israel has plenty of legal hold over Jerusalem in the real world, goatface. See how it exercises its legal hold? Who are you claiming it belongs to? You know who REALLY never had sovereignty over a single dunum of the land over there? Palestinian Arabs. 
+Your misapplication of what you think are laws are not credible. And misusing the 4th Geneva Convention is what is not valid. ivanacardinale 
+You puke violence through your words, and also ignorance. Violence is the weapon of the people that has no reason. We know very well the history of that land. And you seem to invent it. And I laugh when i read every year about “Israel Independence”. From whom got the independence? From which Empire? the Palestinian? the Roman? the ottomans? or from the UN? Most countries has battle for years for independence against an empire. Israelis got it through what? as far as we know, you are being called the haggana? Lonny 
+Actually, the only reason people puke around you is they see your face. 
+Violence is what you use to defend yourself, stupid. You come on here and attack me… I never attacked you… and then you want to pretend you’re innocent on top of it! What a dumb hypocrite! 
+You clearly don’t know the history if you think there wasn’t a Jewish kingdom there before. 
+Israel got independence from a region which hadn’t been sovereign in 2000 years. The last people who ruled it were the Ottomans, and very temporarily the British. There were no nation-states in that region at the time. Suddenly, there were, because that’s how the Allies set it up after beating Germany and the Ottomans. 
+Didn’t know that, did you? 
+Before there was even a Hagganah, the Jews were struggling for independence there, and even when it was under Ottoman rule they asked for independence. 
+You don’t know much of anything. Now, prattle back at me and pretend that I’m violent, when you’re the ignorant one who opened up their mouth at me first. tapatio 
+Easy-bake monkey, STFU. THIS IS JUDAISM in Palestine . 
+A cult capable of committing, supporting and defending the crimes below IS A DISEASE and should be eradicated from this Earth . 
+Jews Blow Up and Kill Palestinian Boy By Force-Feeding Him Gasoline Lonny 
+Jew-hate is a form of psychosis. 
+See your stupid little list, Jew-hate weenie? If I posted all the Arab terrorist acts, the ratio would be over 1000 to 1. tapatio 
+You might note that TRUTH is not “hate” Jew-boy, 99% of the “Arab” terrorists are from THIS source – JEW OWNED . 
+AS SUBORDINATES OF THE ROTHSCHILD-BILDERBERG EMPIRE, WASHINGTON, ISRAEL AND SAUDI ARABIA BUILT AND OPERATE AL QAEDA, ISIS AND THE OTHER TERRORIST GROUPS OPERATING IN SYRIA (and elsewhere) TO DESTABILIZE COUNTRIES AND ESTABLISH A “CALIPHATE” THAT WOULD “COOPERATE” WITH THE EMPIRE. 
+LIKE THE TERRORIST GROUPS THEMSELVES, THAT CALIPHATE WOULD BE JUST AS OPPRESSIVE AND VICIOUS AS ITS PARENT (established by Jewish/British bankers, 100 years ago) – SAUDI ARABIA. SAUDI ARABIA AND THE TERROR GROUPS SPAWNED THEY ARE THE GUTTER SCRAPINGS OF ISLAM – EQUAL IN ALL RESPECTS TO THE ZIONIST DISEASE. 
+Global Warfare: “We’re going to take out 7 countries in 5 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan & Iran 
+http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1438.htm 
+“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right” 
+AND 
+http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf 
+“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor (9/11 – PERFECTION). Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions.” (p 63) 
+AMERICA’S “RASPUTINS” RESPONSIBLE FOR PLANNING THE LAST 15 YEARS OF DEATH – JEWISH ZIONISTS ALL 
+CLEAN BREAK 
+Dov Zakheim Lonny 
+Tapadildo and his usual psychotic copy/pastes needs a lot of negative attention from Jews. Has for YEARS. tapatio 
+ANYONE WHO TELLS THE TRUTH ABOUT JUDAISM IS GOING TO GET A LOT OF NEGATIVE ATTENTION FROM THAT DISEASE. 
+MOICHE FEIGLIN IS DEPUTY SPEAKER OF THE ISRAELI KNESET. BELOW IS THE HEBREW TEXT FROM FEIGLIN’S FACEBOOK PAGE. THIS CREATURE IS TYPICAL OF THE JEWISH ANIMALS THAT HAVE INVADED PALESTINE. 
+TRANSLATION OF FEIGLIN’S FACEBOOK POST………….. 
+With God’s Help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Mr. Prime Minister, We have just heard that Hamas has used the ceasefire to abduct an officer. It turns out that this operation is not about to be over any too soon. The failures of this operation were inherent to it from the outset, because: a) It has no proper and clear goal; b) there is no appropriate moral framework to support our soldiers. What is required now is that we internalize the fact that Oslo is finished, that this is our country – our country exclusively, including Gaza. There are no two states, and there are no two peoples. There is only one state for one people. Having internalized this, what is needed is a deep and thorough strategic review, in terms of the definition of the enemy, of the operational tasks, of the strategic goals, and of course, of appropriate necessary war ethics. (1) Defining the enemy: The strategic enemy is extremist Arab Islam in all its varieties, from Iran to Gaza, which seeks to annihilate Israel in its entirety. The immediate enemy is Hamas. (Not the tunnels, not the rockets, but Hamas.) (2) Defining the tasks Conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters. (3) Defining the strategic goal: To turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians. (4) Defining war ethics: “Woe to the evildoer, and woe to his neighbor” In light of these four points, Israel must do the following: a) The IDF [Israeli army] shall designate certain open areas on the Sinai border, adjacent to the sea, in which the civilian population will be concentrated, far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling. In these areas, tent encampments will be established, until relevant emigration destinations are determined. The supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected. b) The formerly populated areas will be shelled with maximum fire power. The entire civilian and military infrastructure of Hamas, its means of communication and of logistics, will be destroyed entirely, down to their foundations. c) The IDF will divide the Gaza Strip laterally and crosswise, significantly expand the corridors, occupy commanding positions, and exterminate nests of resistance, in the event that any should remain. d) Israel will start searching for emigration destinations and quotas for the refugees from Gaza. Those who wish to emigrate will be given a generous economic support package, and will arrive at the receiving countries with considerable economic capabilities. e) Those who insist on staying, if they can be proven to have no affiliation with Hamas, will be required to publicly sign a declaration of loyalty to Israel, and receive a blue ID card similar to that of the Arabs of East Jerusalem. f) When the fighting will end, Israeli law will be extended to cover the entire Gaza Strip, the people evicted from the Gush Katif will be invited to return to their settlements, and the city of Gaza and its suburbs will be rebuilt as true Israeli touristic and commercial cities. Mr. Prime Minister, This is the a fateful hour of decision in the history of the State of Israel. All metastases of our enemy, from Iran and Hizballah through ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood, are rubbing their hands gleefully and preparing themselves for the next round. I am warning that any outcome that is less than what I defined here means encouraging the continued offensive against Israel. Only when Hizballah will understand how we have dealt with Hamas in the south, it will refrain from launching its 100,000 missiles from the north. I call on you to adopt the strategy proposed here. I have no doubt that the entire Israeli people will stand to your right with its overwhelming majority, like myself – if only you will adopt it. With high regards, respectfully, 
+ORIGINAL HEBREW TEXT FROM FEIGLIN’S FACEBOOK (Just in case he removes the comment, as they frequently do) 
+ב”ה 
+ראש הממשלה בנימין נתניהו 
+אדוני ראש הממשלה זה עתה נודע כי החמאס ניצל את הפסקת האש בכדי לחטוף קצין. מסתבר שהמבצע הזה לא עומד להיגמר כל כך מהר. הכשלים במבצע היו טמונים בו מתחילתו כי: 
+א – אין לו מטרה נכונה וברורה. ב – אין מעטפת מוסרית ראויה התומכת בחיילינו. 
+מה שנדרש כעת הוא להפנים שאוסלו נגמר, שזו ארצנו – רק ארצנו, כולל עזה! אין שתי מדינות ואין שני עמים – יש רק מדינה אחת לעם אחד. 
+בעקבות ההפנמה הזו נדרש שינוי אסטרטגי עמוק ויסודי – הן בהגדרת האויב, הן בהגדרת המשימה, הן בהגדרת היעד האסטרטגי וכמובן – בהגדרת מוסר הלחימה הנכון והנדרש. 
+1 – הגדרת האוייב האויב האסטרטגי הוא האסלאם הערבי הקיצוני על כל גרורותיו מאיראן ועד עזה המבקש לחסל את ישראל כולה. האויב בעין הוא החמאס. (לא המנהרות, לא הרקטות – החמאס) 
+2 – הגדרת המשימה: כיבוש הרצועה כולה וחיסול כל הכוחות הלוחמים ותומכיהם. 
+3 – הגדרת היעד האסטרטגי: להפוך את עזה ליפו. עיר ישראלית פורחת עם מינימום אזרחים עוינים. 
+4 – הגדרת מוסר הלחימה:“אוי לרשע ואוי לשכנו” 
+לאור ארבעת הנקודות הללו על ישראל לבצע מיד את הפעולות הבאות: 
+א – צה”ל יגדיר שטחים פתוחים על גבול סיני ובסמיכות לים בהם תתרכז האוכלוסייה האזרחית- הרחק מהשטח הבנוי ואזורי השיגור והמנהור. באזורים אלו יוקמו מחנות אוהלים עד לאיתור יעדי הגירה רלוונטיים. אספקת החשמל והמים לאזורים שהיו מאוכלסים – תנותק. 
+ב – האזורים שהיו מאוכלסים יופגזו בכוח אש מקסימלי. כל מתקני החמאס האזרחיים והצבאיים, אמצעי הקשר והלוגיסטיקה – יחוסלו עד היסוד. 
+ג – צה”ל יבתר את הרצועה לאורכה ולרחבה, ירחיב מאוד את הצירים, ישתלט על אזורים שולטים וישמיד קיני ההתנגדות במידה וייוותרו כאלה. 
+ד – ישראל תחל באיתור מדינות ומכסות הגירה לפליטי עזה. המעוניינים להגר יזכו בחבילת סיוע כלכלית נדיבה ויגיעו לארצות הקולטות עם יכולת כלכלית משמעותית. 
+ה – מי שיתעקש להישאר ויוכח כי אין לו כל קשר לחמאס, יידרש לחתום באופן פומבי על הצהרת נאמנות לישראל ויקבל תעודת זהות כחולה בדומה לזו של ערביי מזרח ירושלים. 
+ו – עם שוך הקרבות יוחל החוק הישראלי בכל הרצועה, מגורשי גוש קטיף יוזמנו לשוב ליישוביהם והעיר עזה ובנותיה ייבנו כערי תיירות ומסחר ישראליות לכל דבר. 
+אדוני ראש הממשלה! זוהי שעת הכרעה גורלית בימיה של מדינת ישראל. כל גרורות האויב, מאיראן והחיזבאללה ועד דע”ש והאחים המוסלמים – חוככות כעת את ידיהן בהנאה ומכינות עצמן לסבב הבא. 
+אני מתריע שכל תוצאה שהיא פחות ממה שהוגדר כאן, משמעותה עידוד המשך האופנסיבה נגד ישראל. רק אם יבין החיזבאללא כיצד טופל החמס בדרום, ימנע מלשגר את 100,000 הטילים שלו – מצפון. 
+אני קורא לך לאמץ את האסטרטגיה המוצעת כאן. אין לי כל ספק שכמוני, עם ישראל כולו יעמוד ברוב מוחץ לימינך – אם רק תאמצנה. 
+בכבוד ובהערכה רבה משה פייגלין Lonny 
+TapaDILDO has all of his Jew-hate copy/pastes rolling to get negative attention from Jews. Such an infantile little Jew-hater… uses JihadiCokk as a pacifier. tapatio 
+https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6862a06b7dca0b6b4e7021675a233af3ef12f5a747576a7a076f7e66e15d3a52.jpg Lonny 
+TapaDILDO still trying to get negative attention from Jews by showing them what he just ate for lunch. tapatio 
+APPARENTLY THIS BEANIE-BABY CAN’T READ. BUT, HIS MAMA PROBABLY CAUGHT HIM IN A TEL AVIV BACK ALLEY. HARDLY A WOMAN IN THAT CULT WITHOUT A COIN SLOT IN HER FOREHEAD. Lonny 
+Apparently, you’re too stupid to understand that I pointed out what you ate for lunch, Jew-hate infant. tapatio 
+Jew-boy, you fail to comprehend that I couldn’t care less about your ad hominem drivel. It only reinforces the reality that Judaism, especially the Zionist form is a FILTHY DISEASE – just like its cells – YOU. 
+For more than 3000 years, from their expulsion from Egypt and from the money changers Jesus is said to have driven from the temple steps to the predatory global Rothschild banking cartel to the lowest loan shark in NY, to the Internet propaganda shill, the IDF thug and Mossad scum and their rabbis preaching the delusion of a “chosen” master-race, this predatory cultl posing as religion and ethnicity has most closely resembled a malignant cancer metastasizing through our world, corrupting and spoiling everything it touches. 
+When one or a few cultures find a particular culture toxic, it could be bigotry. When almost EVERY culture finds Judaism toxic, JUDAISM IS TOXIC . 
+Every expulsion of Jews below was preceded by widespread and extreme crime and abuses BY JEWS. The Jews have been expelled from more than 100 countries. Listed below are ONLY expulsions that could be directly linked to RAMPANT JEWISH CRIME. They had NOTHING to do with “persecution” of Jews. However, often, innocent Jews suffered because of guilt by association with their predatory culture. 
+The expulsions of Jews were acts of SELF-PRESERVATION by non-Jewish cultures. 
+Expulsions of Jews",FAKE
+2146,Bad idea: Shell’s gearing up to start drilling in the Arctic again,"After suspending its Arctic program for years following the grounding of one of its drilling rigs, the company announced Thursday that it plans to start drilling this summer in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea.
+
+“Will we go ahead?” CEO Ben van Beurden said during the company’s fourth quarter results conference. “Yes if we can. I’d be so disappointed if we wouldn’t.”
+
+It’s a perplexing decision. For one thing, Arctic drilling is an inherently risky activity, and Shell has a poor track record of getting it right. And even when it is done right, says Mackenzie Funk, who reported an in-depth e-book on the company’s 2012 Arctic fiasco, it’s incredibly expensive. “Simply the practicality of getting giant rigs up there, the practicality of getting oil from that far away from the rest of us to market is a huge, huge undertaking,” Funk recently told Salon.
+
+“We will only do this if we feel that we can do it responsibly,” van Beurden told the BBC, adding, “I think that we are as well prepared as any company can be to mitigate the risks.” But Funk’s take on Shell’s prospects for safe drilling basically came down to whether the company’s going to be willing to invest enough money in the project to do it right. Seeing as how the announcement comes at a time when the price of crude oil is at a six-year low, it’s hard to imagine how they expect to do both that and profit at the same time.
+
+Shell already plans to cut spending by more than $15 billion over the next three years due to dwindling revenues. Despite that, “Shell hasn’t taken the opportunity to cut its most high-cost high-risk project,” Greenpeace’s Charlie Kronick said in a statement. “It’s time for investors to recognise that it’s impossible for Shell to justify its continued pursuit of offshore Arctic oil.”
+
+In the same meeting, moreover, Shell made the unprecedented decision to back a resolution from “activist shareholders” to analyze whether its business model is compatible with the global effort to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius. To reach that goal, scientists say, we’re going to have to leave three-quarters of our remaining fossil fuel reserves in the ground — and, according to a major study recently published in the journal Nature, that includes all of the oil and gas in the Arctic. So what gives, Shell? According to Chief Financial Officer Simon Henry, the company’s already invested $1 billion preparing to tap the Arctic, and just keeping things operational since the moratorium has cost it several hundred millions more each year. But even if that’s enough for it to decide it’s worth it to go ahead and drill, it still has a number of legal hurdles to overcome, chief among them being the ruling of a U.S. federal appeals court, last January, that the Interior Department’s sale of Chukchi Sea leases back in 2008 didn’t take sufficient account for the environmental risks posed by drilling. A final environmental impact statement is due out soon; in the meantime, federal regulators are informally reviewing the company’s drilling plans. The environmental group Friends of the Earth, meanwhile, points to the absurdity of the $10 billion in U.S. subsidies (that’s the low-ball estimate) from which Shell partakes each year. “The last thing the Arctic needs is an invasion from Big Oil, and the last thing those invaders deserve are taxpayer dollars,” Lukas Ross, the group’s climate and energy campaigner, said in a statement. “Shell’s dismal record of accidents and safety violations demonstrates an inability to operate in the unpredictable Arctic waters. If we are going to avoid climate catastrophe we must make the Arctic off limits to drilling.”",REAL
+3583,Taliban claim responsibility for Kabul attack,"A gunman killed three U.S. contractors and wounded a fourth Thursday evening at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan, Pentagon officials said.
+
+A local Afghan was also killed in the attack at about 6:40 p.m. on the military side of the airport, said U.S. Army Col. Brian Tribus, a spokesman for the NATO-led Resolute Support mission. An Afghan air force official told Reuters the shooter was an Afghan soldier.
+
+Tribus would not confirm whether the dead Afghan was the gunman or a member of the security forces. He provided no information about the victims or their duties.
+
+""This incident is under investigation,"" he said. ""Further information will be released as available and appropriate.""
+
+The Taliban subsequently claimed responsibility for the attack.
+
+The unnamed Afghan officer described the Americans as ""advisers"" and said ""no one else was there to tell us the reason"" for the attack.
+
+In the past several years, more than 142 members of the U.S.-led coalition fighting Taliban insurgents have been killed in so-called green-on-blue insider attacks by Afghan security forces.
+
+The shooting was apparently the first of its kind since U.S. and NATO forces ceased their combat mission a month ago.
+
+In August, an Afghan solider killed Army Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, who was overseeing preparations for the transition. Greene was the highest-ranking U.S. officer to die in combat since 1970",REAL
+2109,It’s official: California farmers volunteer to give up water,"California’s drought has touched everyone in the state.
+
+First the government eliminated irrigation water deliveries through much of the public canal system. Then the governor told cities and industry to cut back water use by 25 percent.
+
+Now the state is taking a step it hasn’t resorted to since 1977: it’s claiming water from people with old riparian water rights. These are people who have been drawing water from rivers since the Gold Rush era, and who are generally immune to cuts. But in the most severe shortages, the state can order them to stop pumping.
+
+When Governor Jerry Brown ordered cities to conserve water, many people were disappointed that he did not set a similar mandate for ag. Of course, the state had already turned off the tap for many farmers. And now it’s making further cuts, going after senior water-rights holders this time.
+
+To protect some of this water, farmers in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta volunteered to cut their water use 25 percent from 2013 levels if the state would promise not to mandate deeper cuts in the growing season. About 10 percent of California’s irrigated farmland is in the delta; today, the state announced it would take the deal.
+
+Other cuts are virtually inevitable for farmers who don’t participate, said Felicia Marcus, chair of the state Water Resources Control Board. Those cuts could come next week, unless rain and cool weather allows for delay. Further cuts will go beyond any that have ever happened before: ""Senior [water rights] holders have never been cut as much as they will be this year,"" Marcus said. ""Lawsuits are inevitable.""
+
+The restrictions may be hard to enforce because California simply doesn’t measure water use in some places. Here’s the Associated Press:
+
+However, state officials said they would use satellite and aerial photography to ensure that farmers were letting their fields go dry. Cheating is expensive if you get caught. Violators can be fined $10,000 a day. Most Californians support the cuts to urban water use and think the cuts to ag won’t cause real hardship to the general population, according to a Field Poll.
+
+Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.",REAL
+7371,But How Do You Use Nonviolence Against a Nuke?,"The ""Baker"" explosion, part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear weapon test by the United States military at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia, on 25 July 1946. (US Department of Defense)",FAKE
+10528,"Jerusalem in Photos from 1862: No mosques, no Palestinians – only ghost towns of massacred Christian areas","Jerusalem in Photos from 1862: No mosques, no Palestinians – only ghost towns of massacred Christian areas Oct 27, 2016 Previous post 
+A new photographic exhibition in London follows the journey taken by England’s Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) in 1862, as he undertook a four month tour around the Middle East. 
+And as usual, no sign of mosques or active Palestinian presence as the decades old argument from the Palestinian side to keep up the saga to fight and occupy, for the sake of jihad and foreign aid. 
+In the exhibition we find more photographs from Jerusalem in 1862, when the so called “palestinians” allegedly were already 1 million in population on land they profess to have “lost to Jewish occupation” a few decades later. The only problem with this argument is that, as with all photographs up to the second decade of 1900’s, there are rarely any Muslims or mosques to be found on any photographs. The only mosque – and a confiscated synagogue converted after Muslim invasion is the Temple Mount’s Dome of the Rock – and it stands empty of Muslims in ALL pictures through the 1800’s and early 1900’s, demonstrating the falsity in the Palestinian argument. There are more evidence and remains of the massacres Muslims caused on Christians, than any living signs of Muslims themselves. In comparison, other towns with a living Muslim population documented in photographs during the mid and late 1800’s always feature a lot of mosques. 
+. Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace 
+Friday, 7 November 2014 to Sunday, 22 February 2015 
+This exhibition follows the journey taken by the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) in 1862, as he undertook a four month tour around the Middle East. 
+Seen through the photographs of Francis Bedford (1815-94), the first photographer to travel on a royal tour, it explores the cultural and political significance Victorian Britain attached to the region, which was then as complex and contested as it remains today. 
+The tour took the Prince to Egypt, Palestine and the Holy Land, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Greece where he met rulers, politicians and other notable figures, and travelled in a manner not associated with royalty – by horse and camping out in tents. 
+On the royal party’s return to England, Francis Bedford’s work was displayed in what was described as ‘the most important photographic exhibition that has hitherto been placed before the public’. 
+Cairo to Constantinople: Early Photographs of the Middle East is presented alongside Gold at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. 
+The Mount of Olives and Garden of Gethsemane [Jerusalem] Creator: Francis Bedford (1815-94) (photographer) Creation Date: 2 Apr 1862 Materials: Albumen print, mounted on card Dimensions: 23.4 x 28.5 cm RCIN 2700922 Acquirer: King Edward VII, King of the United Kingdom (1841-1910), when Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (1841-63) Provenance: Acquired by the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), 1862 
+Description: 
+The Mount of Olives rises to the east of Jerusalem. The walled enclosure to the right contains the site identified as the Garden of 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+9816,Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton walk in to a bar,"Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton walk in to a bar.
+Donald leans over, and with a smile on his face, says,
+“The media is really tearing you apart for that Scandal.”
+Hillary: “You mean my lying about Benghazi?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “You mean the massive voter fraud?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “You mean the military not getting their votes counted?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “Using my secret private server with classified material to hide my Activities?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “The NSA monitoring our phone calls, emails and everything else?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “Using the Clinton Foundation as a cover for tax evasion, hiring cronies, and taking bribes from foreign countries?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “You mean the drones being operated in our own country without the benefit of the law?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “Giving 123 Technologies $300 Million, and right afterward it declared bankruptcy and was sold to the Chinese?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “You mean arming the Muslim Brotherhood and hiring them in the White House?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “Whitewater, Watergate committee, Vince Foster, commodity Deals?”
+Trump: “No the other one:”
+Hillary: “Turning Libya into chaos?”
+Trump: “No the other one:”
+Hillary: “Being the mastermind of the so-called Arab Spring that only brought chaos, death and destruction to the Middle East and North Africa?”
+Trump: “No the other one:”
+Hillary: “Leaving four Americans to die in Benghazi?”
+Trump: “No the other one:”
+Hillary: “Trashing Mubarak, one of our few Muslim friends?”
+Trump: “No the other one:”
+Hillary: “The funding and arming of terrorists in Syria, the destruction and destabilization of that nation, giving the order to our lapdogs in Turkey and Saudi Arabia to give sarin gas to the “moderate” terrorists in Syria that they eventually used on civilians, and framed Assad, and had it not been for the Russians and Putin, we would have used that as a pretext to invade Syria, put a puppet in power, steal their natural resources, and leave that country in total chaos, just like we did with Libya?
+Trump: “No the other one:”
+Hillary: “The creation of the biggest refugees crisis since WWII?”
+Trump: “No the other one:”
+Hillary: “Leaving Iraq in chaos?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “The DOJ spying on the press?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “You mean HHS Secretary Sibelius shaking down health insurance Executives?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “Giving our cronies in SOLYNDRA $500 MILLION DOLLARS and 3 months later they declared bankruptcy and then the Chinese bought it?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “The NSA monitoring citizens?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “The State Department interfering with an Inspector General Investigation on departmental sexual misconduct?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “Me, The IRS, Clapper and Holder all lying to Congress?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “Threats to all of Bill’s former mistresses to keep them quiet?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “You mean the INSIDER TRADING of the Tyson chicken deal I did where I invested $1,000 and the next year I got $100,000?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “You mean when Bill met with Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, just before my hearing with the FBI to cut a deal?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “You mean the one where my IT guy at Platte River Networks asked Reddit for help to alter emails?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “You mean where the former Haitian Senate President accused me and my foundation of asking him for bribes?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “You mean that old video of me laughing as I explain how I got the charges against that child rapist dropped by blaming the young girl for liking older men and fantasising about them. Even though I knew the guy was guilty?
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “You mean that video of me coughing up a giant green lunger into my drinking glass then drinking it back down?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “You mean that video of me passing out on the curb and losing my shoe?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “You mean when I robbed Bernie Sanders of the Democratic Party Nomination by having the DNC rig the nomination process so that I would win?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “You mean how so many people that oppose me have died in mysterious ways?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “Travel Gate? When seven employees of the White House Travel Office were fired so that friends of Bill and mine could take over the travel business? And when I lied under oath during the investigation by the FBI, the Department of Justice, the White House itself, the General Accounting Office, the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, and the Whitewater Independent Counsel?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “The scandal where (while I was Secretary if State) the State Department signed off on a deal to sell 20% of the USA’s uranium to a Canadian corporation that the Russians bought, netting a $145 million donation from Russia to the Clinton Foundation and a $500,000 speaking gig for Bill from the Russian Investment Bank that set up the corporate buyout? That scandal?”
+Trump: “No, the other one.”
+Hillary: “That time I lied when I said I was under sniper fire when I got off the plane in Bosnia?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “That time when after I became the First Lady, I improperly requested a bunch of FBI files so I could look for blackmail material on government insiders?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “That time when Bill nominated Zoe Baird as Attorney General, even though we knew she hired illegal immigrants and didn’t pay payroll taxes on them?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “When I got Nigeria exempted from foreign aid transparency guidelines despite evidence of corruption because they gave Bill $700,000 in speaking fees?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “That time in 2009 when Honduran military forces allied with rightist lawmakers ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, and I as then-Secretary of State sided with the armed forces and fought global pressure to reinstate him?”
+Trump: “No, the other one:”
+Hillary: “I give up! … Oh wait, I think I’ve got it! When I stole the White House furniture and silverware when Bill left Office?”
+Trump: “THAT’S IT, THAT ONE”
+Hillary: “I thought I’d got away with that one dammit !!!”.
+
+
+The post Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton walk in to a bar appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+9131,The Satanic Nature of Modern Cult-ure,"The Satanic Nature of Modern Cult-ure Under the guise of ""secularism,"" society has been inducted into a satanic cult, Cabalism. ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/the-satanic-nature-of-modern-cult-ure.html Under the guise of ""secularism,"" society has been inducted into a satanic cult, Cabalism. The goal is to deny man's soul connection to the Divine and reduce him to a domestic animal. ""The purpose of modern art, literature and music must be to destroy the uplifting potential of art, literature and music...""There should be a POISON symbol over the doors of our universities, theatres and art galleries. A similar warning should appear on our TV programs, music and videos.In the 1920's, the Comintern decided that the West could be conquered by first subverting its cultural institutions--family, education, religion, art, mass media and government.They have largely succeeded. While maintaining their familiar format, they have subtly changed the content. It's like lacing a bottle of aspirin with arsenic. We are noticing that our political and cultural leaders are mostly cowards, dupes, traitors, crooks, opportunists and impostors.Our failure to combat Communism is due to misunderstanding its real nature. Communism is a facade for a satanic cult ( Cabalism , Freemasonry ) empowered by Masonic Jewish international bankers. It is designed to absorb the world's wealth, and eventually to reduce and enslave the human race. The 5-pointed Red Star of Communism is also the symbol of Satanism .A demonic virus, Communism has morphed into countless forms, hoodwinking more people than ever.Western Civilization is built on Christianity, the premise that God is real, indeed the Ultimate Reality, spiritual in character. Through man's Divine soul, an individual can discern the God's Will without mediation from a worldly authority. This is why the bankers hate Christianity.God is the Truth, Love, Beauty and Goodness to which we all aspire. An immanent Moral Order precludes a small clique monopolizing the world's wealth and enslaving its population. So, the bankers must destroy our belief in God by promoting Darwinism, Existentialism etc. They create war, depression and terror so we will accept their New World Order . THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL In his brilliant essay, "" The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness "" Michael Minnichino reveals that most of the fashionable intellectual and artistic movements in the 20th century, still in vogue today, were actually inspired by thinkers who were Comintern (Communist International) agents financed by the central bankers. Some of them actually worked for Soviet Intelligence (NKVD) right into the 1960's.He writes: ""The task [of the Frankfurt School] was first to undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy through an ""abolition of culture"" ...and second, to determine new cultural forms which would increase the alienation of the population, thus creating a ""new barbarism."" ""... The purpose of modern art, literature and music must be to destroy the uplifting potential of art, literature and music... ""Funds came from ""various German and American universities, the Rockefeller Foundation , the American Jewish Committee, several American intelligence services...""This subversive movement ""represents almost the entire theoretical basis of all the politically correct aesthetic trends which now plague our universities."" They are associated with Post Modernism, Feminism, Cultural Studies, Deconstructionism, Semiotics, etc.Their net effect is to divorce us from truth, social cohesion and our cultural heritage. They assert that reality is unknowable and that writers and artists are just depicting their own subjective reality. For example, postmodernist Hayden White writes, ""historical narratives are verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented than found...truth and reality are primarily authoritarian weapons of our times."" In other words, we cannot know what happened in the past (which is exactly what they want.)Postmodernism is part of the authoritarian agenda. Similarly the Frankfurt School championed the notion that ""authoritarianism"" is caused by religion, male leadership, marriage and family, when these things actually uphold society.As far as the humanities are concerned, universities are enemy territory and professors usually are obstacles to genuine learning. THE ANCIENT CONSPIRACY Communism manifests an ancient Luciferian Jewish revolt against God and man. The Jewish Pharisees rejected Christ because he taught that God is Love and all men are equal in the sight of God.""The advent of Christ was a national catastrophe for the Jewish people, especially for the leaders,"" Leon de Poncins writes. ""Until then they alone had been the Sons of the Covenant; they had been its sole high priests and beneficiaries....""He continues: ""The irreducible antagonism with which Judaism has opposed Christianity for 2000 years is the key and mainspring of modern subversion... [The Jew] championed reason against the mythical world of the spirit ...he was the doctor of unbelief; all those who were mentally in revolt came to him either secretly or in broad daylight..."" (Judaism and the Vatican, pp.111-113.)In addition to Jewish Cabalism, Freemasonry has been the bankers' tool. It was instrumental in the destruction of the Christian monarchies in Germany, Austria and Russia and the decline of the Catholic Church. This is also the view revealed in The Red Symphony .In his Encyclical Humanum Genus (1884) Pope Leo XIII wrote that the ultimate aim of Freemasonry is ""to uproot completely the whole religious and moral order of the world, which has been brought into existence by Christianity... This will mean that the foundation and the laws of the new structure of society will be drawn from pure naturalism.""Again Pope Leo XIII said: ""Freemasonry is the permanent personification of the Revolution; it constitutes a sort of society in reverse whose aim is to exercise an occult overlordship upon society as we know it, and whose sole raison d'etre consists of waging war against God and his Church."" (De Poncins, Freemasonry and the Vatican , p. 45)De Poncins cites an article that appeared in 1861 in a Parisian Jewish Review La Verite Israelite: ""But the spirit of Freemasonry is that of Judaism in its most fundamental beliefs; its ideas are Judaic, its language is Judaic, its very organization, almost, is Judaic... ""De Poncins writes that the goal of both Freemasonry and Judaism is the unification of the world under Jewish law. ( Freemasonry and the Vatican , p. 76) CONCLUSION Just as we need healthy food and exercise, our mind and soul needs to be nourished by truth and beauty. We need to see life portrayed honestly, with the real forces identified. Instead, we are deliberately deceived and degraded by a small financial elite with a diabolical plan. White stallions (our souls) are fed a diet of sawdust.Whether it's school or mass media, we are bombarded with propaganda designed to produce alienation and dysfunction. We must protect ourselves from this poison before it is too late.The good news is that modern culture has been exposed as a long-term Illuminati psy-op designed to demoralize us. It will fail. By Henry Makow Ph.D. Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+9612,"Interview: Sarah Anastasia, Muslim Makeup Artist And Skin Care Consultant","In the latest installment of “Islam In America,” Roqayah Chamseddine is joined by Sarah Anastasia, a 27-year-old Muslim makeup artist and skin care consultant based in Massachusetts. Sarah discusses her service work and the exploitation and abuse that workers often face.
+She also talks about her sexual assault, how sexual assault survivors, specifically women, are often castigated for being assaulted, and what the reaction has been from her friends and family, including other Muslims.
+Plus, in light of the release of Donald Trump’s “Access Hollywood” conversation with Billy Bush, which was recorded in 2007, Roqayah and Sarah examine the implications of this rhetoric about using his status as a celebrity to assault women and how it impacts survivors of sexual assault.
+This interview is part of Roqayah’s Islam In America series, which amplifies the stories of Muslim-Americans and what they struggle with in their day-to-day lives beyond just Islamophobia.
+Listen to the interview by clicking on the below player:
+
+SUPPORT THIS PROJECT If you enjoyed this video, please consider making a donation of $20 or more toward our $4,000 goal to fund the Islam In America project. Your contribution will help us publish more profiles of American Muslims like this one. * 
+Below is a partial transcript of the interview: 
+ROQAYAH: Before we get into the second half of the interview, I want to warn those listening that the subject matter may be difficult because we’re going to be talking about sexual assault. It’s a confronting and inarguably painful issue for all people, especially those who have been victims or those who know someone who’s been sexually assaulted.
+According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network or RAIN, one of out of every six American women have been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime. About 3% of American men or one in thirty-three have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. And from 2009-2015, Child Protective Services substantiated or found strong evidence to indicate that 63,000 children a year were victims of sexual abuse.
+According to the National Crime Victims Survey, since 1998, there have been 17.7 million American women who have been raped and 2.78 million American Men, and that’s according to the survey. There may be more because as we all know a lot of people do not come forward because of the stigmatization and other issues they may face from both the police or family.
+So, before we delve into anything, I wanted to say thank you for letting me talk to you about your story because I know it’s a really painful issue to talk about, especially since you’re a survivor yourself. Feel free to divulge as much or as little as you’re comfortable with.
+The reaction to you talking about your sexual assault, because you have talked in brevity on Twitter and I believe on Facebook to some extent—What was it like? What was the reaction like to you talking about it?
+SARAH: Part of the reason why I posted it on social media was because I don’t—and I still really don’t. I felt like I didn’t really have anyone to talk to. What kind of, in as vague terms as possible, there was someone I was seeing out-of-state, and I went to go see him. His best friend ended up assaulting me. On top of this, my boyfriend, whatever you want to call him, obviously, ex-boyfriend now, blamed me for the entire thing and said it never happened when he was there. And called me all these disgusting names and said I deserved it. Plus, I was just thinking about it the other day because I hate to call it an anniversary but it’s been a year and like a week basically.
+I was just thinking about it and how weird it was that it never happened, but then it was my fault for it happening. I was just thinking about that and how ridiculous it was. But anyways, I didn’t have anyone that I felt really comfortable talking to and also when it first happened, I was out-of-state so I had absolutely nobody. So it was very scary to me and I felt like Twitter—I don’t want to call Twitter a safe space—but I feel like it’s a place that I can express myself. Obviously, I get trolled like almost everybody does. But I was able to say what was happening almost like an open journal in some kind of play-by-play of what was happening.
+Thankfully, a lot of my friends that follow me were very receptive obviously and asked me if I was okay, this and that. I just felt like it was kind of important to talk about, but at the same time, I didn’t want to tell any of my family members. I had like one friend I told. I just felt very scared, and I felt like I was going to be judged or nobody was going to believe me. So, it’s like what is the point of even telling a family member if they’re just going to blame me or say it didn’t happen or say I’m making it up or being dramatic. I project a lot in my head, and so I feel like I was like I don’t even want to go there because I’m going to be more stressed out. More anxiety. Everything so Twitter was just kind of the place I went to.
+ROQAYAH: On that note, what have you gone through mentally, emotionally, and maybe even physically in light of the Trump tapes, where he gleefully talks about freely assaulting women? Because I know that many women have had stay away from social media because of this issue. They go through reliving their experiences. So what have you gone through?
+SARAH: I actually went on a mini-vacation that weekend when everything happened with the tapes with my family and none of them know. So it was kind of this really bizarre kind of like me listening to all their opinions about it, and thankfully, for the most part, my family members were just like this guy is trash. He assaults women. He’s disgusting. He’s a piece of shit. Blah blah blah. But you had the few comments of, well, why are they coming out now? And that obviously hurts even more knowing that I never reported my assault. If I had said to them, oh by the way, I was raped too. It would be, well, why did it take you so long to come out type of thing?
+So that weekend was not really the best weekend.
+Just a lot of the same things that his defenders or his supporters or fans kind of say that are enabling him are the same exact reasons why I didn’t report my assault and why I didn’t tell so many people because of that same reaction. So it just brought back a lot of really bad memories and feelings.
+ROQAYAH: People don’t understand what it takes to actually report sexual abuse. It’s more than going to the police and saying, hey, this happened to me and then it’s over with. It’s extremely intense. You have to not only tell a complete stranger what happened to you. You have to undergo oftentimes medical services that require you to undress yourself, do different kind of examinations, and then at the end of the day, your rape kit may not even be tested for years on end. There’s a lot more to it.
+And then, finding out recently I believe based on reports in the Washington Post and elsewhere, cops will routinely laugh and mock sexual assault victims and try to manipulate them into recanting or telling them things like the kid is really young. Why you gonna ruin his life? So this isn’t just something, oh, you didn’t tell? Why didn’t you tell? It’s a lot more than filing a report and then going home and you’re fine. But I think a lot of people assume it’s that easy.
+Do you think the language that Trump uses in those tapes, and uses otherwise to describe women, do you think that’s pervasive amongst men in the U.S?
+SARAH: Oh, totally. Even before these tapes happened, like if you go back, I posted about this on Facebook. What he did to Miss Universe, even back to Rosie O’Donnell. He has always been so just disgusting. You can just tell he’s somebody who thinks they’re more powerful and so much more above women and just thinks they’re there to serve him and he can do whatever he wants to them and he’s rich and this and that. Like the same thing from the tapes.
+It was more the reaction to the tapes that was surprising. Clearly, this is a huge issue in the U.S. You have not just with Donald Trump but you see this a lot of time on the news anyways. I remember with Steubenville and a lot of other cases, like that swimmer, Brock Turner. Like oh you’re ruining his wife and this and that and no one ever once thinks, oh, this poor woman’s life is completely ruined. I remember in Steubenville the women had to move out of the town because she was getting harassed.
+It’s just so ridiculous to me and so hurtful that this is continuously happening, and obviously, with Trump too. And I think it’s beyond people who support him. I think there are people too who were like, oh, it’s just words. My mom and I saw some type of report where they went to some random town in Pennsylvania and a lot of them were saying oh that’s Trump’s personal life. I’m still going to vote for him. And it’s like, how is that personal life? He’s assaulting women. That shows how disgusting he is and just his character is so rotten.
+ROQAYAH: A lot of these people defending him either know someone who talks like that or talk like that. I was not as angry about it and thankfully I began to say this is really bad. You need to stop talking about women like animals basically. Whenever I hear any guy defending what he is saying—I mean, it’s very simple. All you got to do is say I don’t support what he says. It’s really bad. There’s really not more to it, but men specifically are going out of their way to say, eh, this is normal. And I don’t talk like that but it happens and get over it and you’re being politically correct. It’s a bunch of bullshit they use to defend in reality what they are in real life.
+So being a sexual assault survivor, have you had trouble talking about this to other Muslims? Because I know that sex and the subject of sexual assault is still unfortunately really taboo in our community.
+SARAH: Thankfully for most Muslim women, my friends, they’ve either — well, I shouldn’t say thankfully because unfortunately some of them are like this happened to me too. I’ve had several people, friends either from real life or social media, contact me and be like this happened to me too, which is a whole other issue. But I haven’t really—Even when I was posting about it on Twitter, not that many men really replied. I did have a friend that was not that judgmental but he did ask me was I drinking, what was I wearing, and stuff like that. It’s like that’s not really relevant to the story because you’re not asking if he was drinking or what he was wearing. Why is that even a question? So that really bothered me.
+ROQAYAH: I don’t know why. I don’t know why this is still an issue with men. There’s no reason why that will matter in the story. No one has a right to put their hands on another person without consent. So if you are butt naked and you are out of your mind drunk, it shouldn’t matter. You don’t have the right to touch anyone, especially in a situation where they might not be there mentally. That kind of thing really makes me sick.
+SARAH: It just makes me very angry. In my head, it’s almost like are you doubting my story or—The only answer is, what if I was wearing a revealing outfit and I was doing shots at the bar or something (which I wasn’t)? Does that mean that I deserved it? I don’t get why you’re asking the question.
+ROQAYAH: It serves no purpose whatsoever, and it works as a way for them to manipulate you and sort of doubt your story without coming out and having a spine to say I don’t believe you.
+SARAH: Right, and especially I feel like from Muslims it’s like that whole extra, well, were you drinking because you’re not supposed to be? Well, were you wearing a revealing outfit? You shouldn’t have been.
+ROQAYAH: That’s another issue with Muslims. It’s a bit off-topic, but since we brought up the subject, a lot of Muslims look down on other Muslims who drink or who don’t wear the hijab or don’t follow the religion as they think they should. And so we see when a lot of Muslims are in the news, and they do something terrible, they go, oh, well, he wasn’t really a Muslim. He was drinking. Or he wasn’t really a Muslim. He was having premarital sex. They don’t understand that sin doesn’t remove you from the fold of your religion in the way that they think. So people will make mistakes or do whatever, and it doesn’t make them any less of a Muslim than you because you’re so uber pious.
+The post Interview: Sarah Anastasia, Muslim Makeup Artist And Skin Care Consultant appeared first on Shadowproof .",FAKE
+6883,#Podesta21: Clinton’s ‘Twisted’ Behavior ‘Smacks of Acting Above the Law’,"A leading US attorney warned staffers that many Americans view Hillary Clinton’s contradictory remarks over her choice to use a private email server as “twisted” and illegal behavior. It’s just one of the revelations from the latest Wikileaks dump of emails hacked from the Clinton presidential campaign. WikiLeaks has dumped yet another batch of emails from the account of Hillary Clinton’s beleaguered campaign chair, John Podesta. This is the 21st batch of messages to be published by the whistleblowing site.
+RELEASE: The Podesta Emails Part 21 #PodestaEmails #PodestaEmails21 #HillaryClinton https://t.co/wzxeh70oUm pic.twitter.com/kkdyFXmTLD 
+— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 28, 2016 
+
+The damage to Hillary Clinton’s campaign can not be underestimated and there is still more to come. WikiLeaks have said there will be a total of 50,000 emails released in the lead up to the November 8 US presidential election. Friday’s batch brings the total so far to 35,594.
+In them, an email from leading US attorney Erika Rottenberg to Clinton staffers reveals that many US lawyers had serious doubts over the legality of Hillary Clinton using a private server for her emails, when she was the US Secretary of State. In an exchange dating to June 2015, Rottenberg suggests that Clinton’s actions are both suspicious and hypocritical. “I know when I talk to my friends who are attorneys we are all struggling with what happened to the emails and aren’t satisfied with answers to date.
+
+“While we all know of the occasional use of personal email addresses for business, none of my friends circle can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents without providing anyone outside her circle a chance to weigh in.”
+Rottenberg goes on to imply that Clinton may be guilty of illegal activity.
+“It smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for.”
+Hillary Clinton has never been able to shake the specter of her emails scandal and while questions of legality, as well as of potential security breaches, remain unanswered, the debacle continues to wound her campaign’s chances. In an effort to redirect the US public’s attention, other Clinton staffers urged their candidate to better pander to “dumb” millennials to get them “to fall in line.” In February 2016, marketing executive Wendy Bronfein told Clinton insiders that Bernie Sanders was appealing to young voters, and that Clinton needed to do so too. “She may not be the best face of it so maybe it’s trending figures to advocate for her b/c that’s the crap that young people pay attention to. I hate to generalize a generation but by social media nature, they ‘follow’. So if someone they identify as cool endorses — they will likely fall in line with that.” In a dismissive aside, she ended: “Don’t forget Bill had ‘don’t stop’ campaign song, that was a pop culture play and had his Saxophone moments. It’s f$*king dumb but being ‘cool’ counts for more than it maybe should.”
+
+The patronizing tone of such exchanges has enraged many voters, who have take to social media to protest.
+
+Earlier in January 2015, another campaign insider urged Clinton to pander to ethnic minorities.
+Neera Tanden is a long standing Clinton insider, at the same time as being the president of the think tank, the Center for American Progress. One email from Friday’s WikiLeaks batch shows Tanden challenging Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta himself.
+
+“I’m not the diversity police but there is grumbling on the 4 white boys running next presidential cycle. So I recommend rolling out some people who look like the rest of America soon!”
+Podesta’s response: “Really, don’t you think I know that?” If only Podesta had known then that tens of thousands of his emails were soon to be hacked…
+Source: Sputnik News 
+",FAKE
+6987,Hillary Clinton demands answers and Democrats call foul,"October 31, 2016 Hillary Clinton demands answers and Democrats call foul 
+he FBI has announced it is investigating new emails sent by Hillary Clinton on a private server during her time as Secretary of State, sending her campaign into panic mode just 11 days before the presidential election. The emails were found during an investigation into illicit text messages between Anthony Weiner, a former congressman, and a 15-year-old girl, according to The New York Times . Huma Abedin, Mr Weiner’s wife, is one of Mrs Clinton’s closest aides and was pictured with her on Friday as the news broke. 
+Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,",FAKE
+1514,Hillary Clinton campaign trolls GOP by boosting Donald Trump,"Donald Trump continues to rage against Hillary Clinton over her suggestion during the Democratic debate that Trump has become “ISIS’s best recruiter.” Clinton argued that terrorists are using videos of Trump insulting Islam to “recruit more radical jihadists,” and Trump has demanded an apology.
+
+The Clinton camp has since walked back the video comment, though her advisers continue to point to social media evidence of the broader claim that Trump’s rhetoric has become a terror recruiting tool. The Clinton camp has refused Trump’s demand for an apology.
+
+Make no mistake: Both Trump and Clinton must be very happy to be embroiled in this spat. Indeed, the Clinton camp has cheerfully fed the flames of this fight, in what appears to be a concerted effort to boost Trump among GOP voters. The theory may be that Trump benefits among those voters if he is perceived as a chief antagonist of Clinton, thus helping him spread more intra-GOP damage.
+
+Here’s the latest on this: Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta told a conference call of Clinton supporters that the Clinton camp takes the possibility of a Trump nomination “very seriously.” The Wall Street Journal reports on the call:
+
+One person on the call mentioned the extent to which Mr. Trump’s name came up in the Democratic debate Saturday and asked if that represented a “shift” in the Clinton campaign’s view of his “viability” as a candidate. Mr. Podesta said that Mr. Trump has “demonstrated to be a serious” candidate for the Republican nomination, and that he is “someone who could very well be successful in their nominating process. People have come around to the conclusion that this isn’t just…going to go away at some point.”
+
+It’s hard to know whether the Clinton camp really believes this. But one obvious possibility is that the Clinton camp is signaling to top supporters that they should publicly make the case that Trump now looks like a genuinely viable candidate to win the GOP primary. If so, this takes the Clinton camp’s trolling of GOP voters to another level: Hillary is attacking Trump because Democrats are afraid that he’ll become the nominee!!!
+
+But there may be a deeper rationale here, too. As I reported the other day, Democrats plan to increasingly make the case that Trump’s simplistic bluster and belligerence are forcing the other GOP candidates to dumb down their rhetoric to match his, thus revealing Clinton to be more prepared to lead in complicated and dangerous times than any of the GOP candidates.
+
+This is a political and policy argument: Democrats are claiming that Trump’s rhetoric has become a threat to national security, which in turn makes the other GOP candidates’ efforts to match it — or at least, fail to condemn it in a full-throated fashion — more consequential, and reveals Clinton to be a steadier, more reliable presence. (The bet is that, while all the bluster may appeal to GOP primary voters, it will taint the party in the eyes of the general election audience.) Clinton’s increasing efforts to highlight Trump’s reckless anti-Muslim demagoguery not only gives Trump a way to boost himself among Republican voters, by arguing that he has emerged as Clinton’s chief foe; it’s also designed to advance that larger argument.
+
+* TRUMP STILL LEADS, BUT CRUZ IS CLOSING IN: A new Quinnipiac poll finds that Donald Trump still leads with 28 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents nationally, while Ted Cruz is a close second at 24 percent. Marco Rubio has 12 percent and Ben Carson has 10 percent.
+
+Notable details: Trump leads Cruz among non-college voters (another sign that’s where his base of support lies) while Cruz dominates Trump among Tea Partyers and white evangelicals, suggesting his assiduous courting of that demographic might be working. Also: Where’s that Rubio-mentum?
+
+* CLINTON HOLDS VAST LEAD OVER SANDERS: The new Quinnipiac poll also finds that Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders by 61-30 among Democrats and Dem-leaning independents nationally. Clinton leads among those who self describe as “very liberal” by 52-42, and among those who are “somewhat liberal” by 60-31, suggesting her campaign may be in the process of patching up whatever problems she had with the Democratic Party’s left flank.
+
+Indeed, only 10 percent of “very liberal” Dems say they definitely won’t support Clinton.
+
+* AMERICANS WOULD BE ‘EMBARRASSED’ BY PRESIDENT TRUMP: One last fun nugget from the Quinnipiac poll: 50 percent of Americans say they would be “embarrassed” by having Donald Trump as president, while only 23 percent say they would be “proud” and another 24 percent say they would be neither.
+
+But a plurality of Republicans, 44 percent, say they would be “proud” to have President Trump in the Oval Office, while only 20 percent of them would be embarrassed by it.
+
+* TALK RADIO CONSERVATIVES RALLY TO CRUZ: Politico reports on all the conservative talk radio hosts who are rallying to Ted Cruz’s defense, fending off attacks on the Texas Senator from Trump and Marco Rubio. Notably, radio conservatives are defending Cruz against Rubio’s false claim that Cruz once supported legalization, as Rush Limbaugh does here:
+
+Conservative radio is determined not to let GOP voters forget Rubio’s heinous support for comprehensive immigration reform, which could give a big boost to Cruz over the long haul.
+
+* SANDERS HITS HILLARY OVER WALL STREET: At Saturday’s Dem debate, Clinton said she wants to be loved by everyone, including Wall Street. On the campaign trail in Iowa, Sanders went after Clinton over this:
+
+Clinton has not embraced as robust a Wall Street reform agenda as the Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing of the party has wanted. But Paul Krugman, for one, has argued that Clinton’s plan for Wall Street is better than the one Sanders has offered.
+
+It will be interesting to how the GOP candidates attack this. It’s likely they’ll blast the plan for hiking taxes.
+
+* AND THE TRUMP VULGARISM OF THE DAY: At a rally in Michigan, the Donald deconstructs Hillary Clinton’s debate bathroom break:
+
+Trump then described Obama’s 2008 Dem primary victory over Clinton this way: “She was favored to win, and she got schlonged.” All this should give him another poll bump!",REAL
+10422,Bernie Sanders: The Democratic primary gave me ‘leverage I intend to use’ to pressure Hillary Clinton,"Print 
+Sen. Bernie Sanders laid out the ways he would leverage his popularity that emerged from the Democratic primary to continue to push Hillary Clinton to the left if she wins the presidency next month. 
+In an interview published Monday with The Washington Post, Sanders argued that the Democratic Party is “more progressive” than its presidential nominee. 
+He emphasized that he saw it as his role to “demand that the Democratic Party implement” the party platform his allies helped shape, and would be “vigorously in opposition” if Clinton attempted to abandon the platform’s progressive elements. 
+“The leverage that I think I take into the Senate is taking on the entire Democratic Party establishment, and, you know, taking on a very powerful political organization with the Clinton people,” Sanders said. He then referenced the number of states he won during the primary, 22. 
+“That gives me a lot of leverage, leverage that I intend to use,” he added. 
+The Vermont senator also emphasized that he would not be cowed by the knowledge that his proposals would not be well received by a likely Republican-controlled House of Representatives.",FAKE
+7254,"BREAKING: VP Candidate Mike Pence’s Plane Skids Off Runway, Tears Up Tarmac at NYC Airport…","Share on Twitter 
+A plane carrying Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence skidded off the runway and tore up the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport in New York City on Thursday night. 
+The Boeing 737 reportedly “overshot” the runway. There were no reported injuries. 
+Pence took to Twitter to ensure the nation that he was unharmed. So thankful everyone on our plane is safe. Grateful for our first responders & the concern & prayers of so many. Back on the trail tomorrow! — Mike Pence (@mike_pence) October 28, 2016 
+The videos and photos of the scene were pretty striking. Clearly, the situation could have turned out much worse. This was the Tarmac when we landed on the @mike_pence plane- torn up concrete pic.twitter.com/hEYodMkord — Elizabeth Landers (@ElizLanders) October 28, 2016 Photo shows Mike Pence's plane after it skidded off the runway at NYC's LaGuardia Airport; no injuries reported. https://t.co/1o6QoRkewr pic.twitter.com/xx02LAm9sg — ABC News (@ABC) October 28, 2016 #BREAKING : VP candidate @mike_pence 's campaign plane slides off rainy runway at LGA in NYC; no one injured https://t.co/ApiI0IFS5x pic.twitter.com/LjlgASGNWA",FAKE
+4989,Paul Manafort resigns from Trump campaign,"Donald Trump’s outspoken campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, resigned Friday -- days after he was pushed aside for conservative media executive Steven Bannon -- and also amid growing speculation about his ties to Ukrainian politics.
+
+“This morning Paul Manafort offered, and I accepted, his resignation from the campaign,” Trump said in a written statement to FoxNews.com. “I am very appreciative for his great work in helping to get us where we are today, and in particular his work guiding us through the delegate and convention process. Paul is a true professional and I wish him the greatest success.”
+
+Manafort, who as a 26-year-old Republican operative, helped manage the 1976 convention floor for Gerald Ford in his successful showdown with Ronald Reagan, drew praise for steering the campaign through the final weeks of the primary process and the convention.
+
+But he came under fire following a New York Times article over the weekend claimed handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to him from ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian party between 2007 and 2012.
+
+The document was found by investigators from Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators reportedly say the payment was part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.
+
+Manafort strongly denied receiving any such off-the-book payments – calling the accusation “unfounded, silly and nonsensical” – and denied ever doing work for the government of Ukraine and Russia. He has worked on political campaigns there but maintains they were not government-sanctioned.
+
+Those close to Trump praised Manafort, but did not dismiss a possible connection between his ouster and the Ukrainian controversy.
+
+""I think my father didn’t want to be, you know, distracted by whatever things Paul was dealing with,"" Eric Trump, told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo in an interview airing on ""Sunday Morning Futures.""
+
+Earlier this week, the campaign announced that Breitbart head Steven Bannon was being brought on as CEO, and GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager. While Team Trump initially insisted the new team members would work with Manafort, many predicted his days were numbered.
+
+Sources told Fox News brinbging in Conway was the idea of Manafort, who believed she could help him get the developer to stay on script and avoid verbal gaffes. But bringing on Bannon was Trump's idea, the source said.
+
+A source familiar with Manafort's thinking said the 66-year-old stepped down so that ""Trump could stay focused on the campaign."" He will ""continue to work from the outside,"" helping with coordination in Washington, the source said.
+
+It’s the latest shakeup for the Trump campaign, which canned campaign manager Corey Lewandowski on June 20, after the pugnacious former cop had a confrontation with a Breitbart reporter. The ouster of Lewandowski was seen as a victory in a behind-the-scenes power struggle for Manafort, who was brought on board in March largely for his convention and delegate wrangling experience.
+
+Where Manafort at times expressed a desired to modulate Trump’s bombast, the brash Bannon has signaled he wants to “Trump to be Trump.”
+
+After praising Manafort for helping his father's campaign through the tough primaries, Eric Trump ladded, ""But again, my father just didn’t want to have the distraction looming over the campaign and quite frankly looming over all the issues that Hillary’s facing right now.""
+
+Manafort’s deputy, Richard Gates, is also on the outs. He now moves to the new role of campaign liaison to the RNC.",REAL
+6515,Vote fraud expert Bev Harris exposes electronic voting machines [Video],"Leave a reply The second video on this post is very important – g 
+Black Box Voting , founded in 2003, performs nonpartisan investigative reporting on elections in an attempt to stop vote rigging. 
+You may be wondering what the term “black box” means. A “black box” system is non-transparent; its functions are hidden from the public. Elections, of course, should not be black box systems. 
+Here is a link to a free copy of the book, Black Box Voting HERE . 
+Author Bev Harris became known for groundbreaking work on electronic voting machines, which can remove transparency of the vote count. 
+With voting machines, all political power can be converted to the hands of a few anonymous subcontractors: SF Source InfoWars Oct. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+2177,Democrats need to learn to defend Obama's record on foreign policy,"It feels like a million years ago today, but Democrats swept to electoral victory in 2006 and 2008 largely as part of a backlash to the miserable foreign policy failures stemming from the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And relative to that context, President Obama's record in office has been good and avails itself of an obvious defense — yes, the Middle East is still a messed-up place, but American soldiers are no longer dying there by the dozen. Meanwhile, America's relationship with the rest of the world is vastly improved, global cooperation on climate and nuclear proliferation is delivering tangible results, and — oh yeah — Osama bin Laden is dead and America has been safe from terrorist attacks.
+
+Against a Republican field that seems stuck in the Rumsfeld era, it should be a winning argument, but judging by Saturday night's debate Democrats seem ready to blow it. Rather than sell the full range of Obama-era achievements, Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley, and, most importantly, Hillary Clinton got bogged down parrying with the (excellent) moderators over the toughest elements of Obama's record in office rather than turning to the good stuff.
+
+But there's more to the world than ISIS and the Arab Spring, and a great deal of the point of Obama's foreign policy has been to prevent chaos in the Middle East from soaking up all the bandwidth of American foreign policy. To win, Democrats need to learn to contextualize problems and talk about successes.
+
+Consider, for example, the crowd-pleasing high points of Obama on national security. Unlike George W. Bush he really has ""kept us safe"" and avoided any terrorist attacks on the US homeland. And while Bush let bin Laden get away in Afghanistan in order to free up resources to launch a pointless and unsuccessful invasion of Iraq, Obama found bin Laden and had special forces kill him. You'd think this would be something Democrats would want to mention as frequently and as quickly as possible in a discussion of counterterrorism.
+
+But on Saturday, Democrats went through extended discussions of ISIS, ""radical Islam,"" and everything under the sun without mentioning it. Osama finally came up once, briefly, near the end in the context of a personal question addressed to Clinton:
+
+John Dickerson: Begin the final segment of this debate with something none of you saw coming. Something quite unexpected. Soon after your inauguration, you will face a crisis. All presidents do. What crisis have you experienced in your life that suggests you've been tested and can face that inevitable challenge? Secretary Clinton, you first. Hillary Clinton: Well, there are so many. I don't know where to start. (LAUGHTER) I guess the one I would pick is the fact that I was part of a very small group that had to advice the president about whether or not to go after bin Laden. I spent a lot of time in the situation room — as secretary of State and there were many very difficult — choices presented to us. But probably that was the most challenging. Because there was no certainty attached to it. The intelligence was by no means absolute. We had all kinds of questions that we discussed. And, you know, at the end I recommended to the president that we take the chance to do what we could to find out whether that was bin Laden and to finally bring him to justice.
+
+This is not much of a brag. But at least it got a token mention.
+
+Here are some other things that nobody brought up:
+
+This good stuff does not, of course, undo the problems in the Middle East. But then again, the Middle East was a violent and chaotic place when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were in office. Obama has not managed to solve the problems of the region, but he has defended America's core interests — including, crucially, the absence of terrorist attacks at home — without incurring the thousands of American military casualties than we saw under his predecessor.
+
+It is, all things considered, a pretty good record.
+
+But it's bound to look terrible if — as happened Saturday night — Democrats are reluctant to talk about it except under duress. Journalists (and Republicans) like to pick at the scabs and weak spots of a politician's record. Competent politicians learn to talk about successes and broader context. The Obama economic record isn't perfect, either, but Democrats are more than happy to defend it as broadly successful and superior to the alternatives. The lesson we learned Saturday is that the party, including the woman who served as secretary of state for half his administration, isn't yet ready to do that on national security.",REAL
+9479,iPhone Tricks – 15 Secret iPhone Codes,"posted by Eddie A list of secret Apple iPhone codes that can unlock a raft of hidden features and settings has been revealed, allowing users to do anything from enhancing their call quality to checking their mobile balance. While Android is particularly well known for offering a rabbit-hole of an operating system that can be tweaked and tinkered with, Apple’s iOS has kept menus and settings relatively simple and locked down. However, there is a way that users can drill down to find some gems not seen on the surface. If you want to find out how many minutes you have left on your phone tariff, what your IMEI number (something you’ll need if you swap phone networks) or even find out a way to enhance your iPhone’s voice quality there’s a way to do it that you won’t find by going to your normal phone’s settings. Redmond Pie revealed a full list of the codes and how to use them. By typing in the following secret USSD codes on the dialpad of the phone then pressing the call button you can bring up these tricks: *3001#12345#* :Field Test mode *#5005*7672# : SMS centre number *3370# : Turn on or off EFR (Enhanced Full Rate), a mode that improves your iPhone’s call quality *#06# : Find out your iPhone’s IMEI number *#31# : Hide your number on calls option *#43# : Check if call waiting is on or off *43# : Turn on call waiting #43# : Turn off call waiting *646# : Check minutes left on contract *225# : Find out your current mobile account balance *777# : Find out prepaid account balance *#61# : Number of missed calls *#21# : Call forwarding status *#67# : Call forwarding number *#33# : Find out what mobile services are disabled on your phone One of the most interesting of the USSD codes is the Field Test mode, which allows users to see their phone-signal strength measured in numbers rather than those five bars. You’ll see something displaying such as ‘-90’, with the number going up and down depending on signal. A value above -80 is a full-bar strength, but anything below -110 is very weak. This is a more accurate way of seeing whether you have enough signal to make a call, rather than holding on to hope with one-bar. It’s worth noting that you should only use these codes and play around with your settings at your own risk, if you’re not sure what something does better leave it be. source:",FAKE
+2675,"In the battle against 'sleazy' media, why Trump keeps lapping Hillary","After Donald Trump had himself a fine time ripping the sleazy media, Hillary Clinton did a Trump-like thing: she called into two cable news shows.
+
+She was asked about Trump….but didn’t make much news. And therein lies the heart of the problem for a news business that is supposed to be dedicated to fairness.
+
+One candidate is openly hostile to the press but does all kinds of interviews—television, radio, newspapers, magazines, websites—day after day. The other candidate is privately hostile to the press but also very selective in doing interviews—and hasn’t held a news conference in months.
+
+Of course there’s an imbalance in the coverage, and it’s about more than ratings—though attracting more eyeballs and clicks is clearly a factor.
+
+The New York Times, in a piece on this very subject, offered an example:
+
+“Last week, none of the three major cable news networks — CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC — carried Mrs. Clinton’s speech to a workers’ union in Las Vegas, where she debuted sharp new attack lines against Mr. Trump.
+
+“Instead, each chose to broadcast a live feed of an empty podium in North Dakota, on a stage where Mr. Trump was about to speak.”
+
+So “AWAITING TRUMP PRESSER” is deemed more newsworthy than the presumptive Democratic nominee actually speaking. And that does not speak well of the media.
+
+Clinton tried copying a Trump tactic by calling into shows on CNN and MSNBC that afternoon. “It took a reporter to shame him into actually making his contribution and getting the money to veterans,” she told Jake Tapper.
+
+But that meant she was in reactive mode, rather than generating headlines on her own.
+
+Clinton’s spokesman, Brian Fallon, told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that “the judge of whether we’re able to build a positive narrative around her is not whether we are getting 10 hours to his eight during cable day programming. We can do that on a state-specific level, where local coverage departs from what may be the feel of the campaign if you’re only watching cable networks. Also, we can build a positive narrative about her based on her standing up and condemning the very things that he is saying and doing that are commanding all that media attention…There’s a conventional wisdom settling in that visibility on daytime cable equates with him having political strength.”
+
+Well, maybe. But so far Trump is sucking up most of the oxygen, even while ripping those who provide it as sleazebags.
+
+There is another thread here that goes beyond Trump having endless at-bats while Clinton mainly sends in surrogates from the dugout. The Donald, when he engages in verbal fisticuffs, seems to be enjoying himself, while Hillary seems like she’s enduring an unpleasant ritual.
+
+In New York magazine, liberal writer Rebecca Traister sees “a pervasive defensiveness that gets in the way of her projecting authenticity, an intense desire for privacy that keeps voters from feeling as if they know her — especially problematic in an era in which social media makes personal connection with voters more important than ever. Clinton’s wariness about letting the world in is in part her personality and in part born of experience. A lifetime spent in the searing spotlight has taught her that exposure too often equals evisceration…
+
+“If Clinton suffers from a kind of political PTSD that makes her overly cautious and scripted and closed-off, then its primary trigger is the press corps that trails her everywhere she goes. Clinton hates the press. A band of young reporters follows her, thanklessly, from event to event, and she gives them almost nothing. Unlike other candidates, she does not ride on the same plane with them (though this may change once the general election starts and the traveling group gets bigger). Every once in a while she has an off-the-record drink with them, but without the frequency or fluidity of her husband, whose off-the-record conversations with the press were legendarily candid.”
+
+Clinton hates the press. So says a sympathetic writer. So, of course, does Trump, which may speak volumes about my profession but also about this era of hyperpartisanship.
+
+And yet voters tend to prefer candidates who come off as happy warriors. On that score, Trump’s overt hostility is playing better—and is more entertaining—than Hillary’s covert hostility.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+1581,Clinton’s 2016 makeover the latest in long line of resets,"Another campaign, another reset for Hillary Clinton's public image.
+
+This time, the former first lady and senator who's been in the public eye for three decades is said to be getting a political makeover in a bid to show a gentler, more personal side of the now-Democratic presidential candidate.
+
+But whether another image overhaul can revive her sagging campaign, and change the public's deep-rooted perception of her, remains to be seen -- considering her political handlers have been down this road before.
+
+“The challenge is to make those times when she connects with voters more frequent, to make her the best candidate she can be all of the time, or more often than not,"" Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin, who worked on Howard Dean’s 2004 Democratic presidential campaign, said. ""There have been moments in which that side of Hillary has emerged.""
+
+But Tulchin acknowledged the fundamental hurdle for Clinton's 2016 team: ""It's a challenge to remake a politician who has been in the public spotlight for 25 years.""
+
+The New York Times first reported that the Clinton campaign was looking to show another side of Clinton, including more ""humor"" and ""heart."" This comes after several early stumbles -- including her prickly responses to persistent questions about her email controversy and the roping off of crowds at a July 4 parade in New Hampshire.
+
+The latest transformation began Tuesday with Clinton issuing an unequivocal apology for using a personal email system while secretary of state.
+
+“That was a mistake,” Clinton told ABC News. “I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.”
+
+Clinton’s contrition, and her getting emotional when talking about her late mother, followed her declining twice in four days to publicly apologize. ""What I did was allowed,” she told The Associated Press on Monday.
+
+The effort to re-invent Clinton comes amid some ominous poll results -- including a Quinnipiac University survey last month that found “liar,” “dishonest,” “untrustworthy” and “criminal” among the words that voters most frequently associate with her.
+
+In addition, a NBC News/Marist poll released Sunday showed Clinton now trailing insurgent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by nine points in New Hampshire.
+
+Some were skeptical at the campaign's plans. Ex-Obama political adviser David Axelrod mocked the strategy on Twitter.
+
+This is not the first time Clinton has tried to show a softer, more everywoman side, dating back to her days as first lady of Arkansas.
+
+After husband Bill Clinton lost the governorship and was running again in 1982, Hillary Clinton started wearing makeup, updated her wardrobe and began introducing herself as Mrs. Bill Clinton, not Hillary Rodham, author-journalist James B. Stewart wrote in his 1997 book “Blood Sport.”
+
+“Hillary got the message that Arkansas voters didn’t like women to flaunt their independence,” wrote Stewart, paraphrasing what Clinton friend Susan McDougal told him.
+
+A decade later, as Bill Clinton was running for president, Clinton famously showed that independent streak again. In an interview with Steve Kroft in 1992 exploring allegations of an affair with Gennifer Flowers, Hillary Clinton said: ""I'm not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."" She added, ""I'm sitting here because I love him and I respect him.""
+
+This past spring, Clinton attempted to use her memoir, “Hard Choices,” to again show her softer side, sharing stories about the birth of her one and only granddaughter.
+
+“After a while, Bill and I stepped out into the hallway to let them rest,” Clinton writes about her and her husband’s reaction to the infant being delivered. “We sat quietly, holding hands, trying to process the rush of emotions. I looked over and saw a tear in Bill's eye.”
+
+Clinton later started talking more about being a grandparent, and about coloring her hair. And she got into some hot water when she tried to make her family's finances seem relatable. In June, the former first lady and New York senator defended her six-figure speaking fees by saying she and her husband left the White House in 2001 “dead broke” due to legal expenses.
+
+Clinton, who with her husband is a millionaire, said weeks later that she regretted the comment and that it was “inaccurate.”
+
+Whether Clinton can succeed in connecting on a personal level with voters is an open question, though she has done so before if only for a short while.
+
+After losing the 2008 Iowa caucuses to Democratic challenger Barack Obama, Clinton became emotional on the eve of the New Hampshire primary weeks later.
+
+“It's not easy,"" said Clinton, her voice quivering. “I couldn't do it if I didn't passionately believe it was the right thing to do. This is very personal for me. I have so many ideas for this country and I just don't want to see us fall backwards. It's about our country; it's about our kids' future.”
+
+She went on to win the primary. But Obama won next in South Carolina, and months later secured the nomination.",REAL
+1908,Ted Cruz: Democratic Party home to 'liberal fascism' against Christians,"Sen. Ted Cruz argued Saturday that Democrats have become so extreme and ""intolerant"" of religious views that ""there is no room for Christians in today's Democratic Party.""
+
+""There is a liberal fascism that is dedicated to going after believing Christians who follow the biblical teaching on marriage,"" the Texas Republican said in his speech before a Christian conservative audience in Waukee, Iowa.
+
+Cruz joined eight other presidential candidates and potential contenders on stage at the Iowa Faith and Freedom summit, where speakers railed against what they see as threats to religious liberty. For his part, Cruz alluded to business that faced pushback for declining to cater to same-sex weddings.
+
+Many of the speakers also pointed to the recent debate over an Indiana religious liberty law that was designed to protect those who objected to participating in same-sex marriage ceremonies. But the law came under fire from critics who said it was discriminatory against same-sex couples, and its language was subsequently tweaked.
+
+As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments on whether to overturn same-sex marriage bans in states, Cruz introduced legislation last week that would protect bans in place.
+
+Cruz urged the audience to ""fall on our knees and pray"" ahead of the Supreme Court's final ruling on the issue, which is expected this summer. ""We need leaders who will stand unapologetically in defense of marriage,"" he said.",REAL
+2173,Trump's unreal foreign policy: Our view,"As anyone who watches reality television knows, the genre might be entertaining, but its correlation to actual reality is tenuous.
+
+Which is a good place to start with the  much-awaited foreign policy speech delivered Wednesday in Washington by presidential candidate Donald Trump.
+
+As with The Apprentice, the show that helped him become a household name, the Republican front-runner sought to provide appealing fare for a certain class of people. In this case, the primary audience was voters opposed to trade, resentful of immigrants, distrustful of foreign governments, and wistful for a time when America wielded more power in a simpler world.
+
+In reaching out to this group, Trump vividly portrayed a world that does not exist: America’s allies would be more respectful after being lectured to, while its enemies would be dealt with by bluster. China would fall into line after enduring unspecified economic pressure. And troubled regions of the world would be stabilized through U.S. disengagement.
+
+Inexplicably, Trump declared that “America First” would be the overarching theme of his administration. A non-interventionist approach might have its merits in certain situations. But the America First movement got its name espousing an isolationist approach at exactly the wrong moment, urging the United States to stay out of World War II as Adolf Hitler was rampaging through Europe.
+
+Trump's secondary audience was the Washington establishment, the equivalent of TV critics. And the early reviews were harsh. On CNN, foreign policy experts Fareed Zakaria and David Rothkopf used the same word: incoherent. Fellow Republican Lindsey Graham tweeted, “Not sure who is advising Trump on foreign policy, but I can understand why he’s not revealing their names.”
+
+In Trump’s worldview, things happen because he says they will. He made a number of proclamations to this effect. His unspecified plan to defeat the Islamic State terrorist group echoed Richard Nixon's secret plan in 1968 to win the Vietnam War. ISIL “will be gone if I’m elected president,"" Trump vowed, "" And they'll be gone quickly. They will be gone very, very quickly.”
+
+Things might happen that way on TV. But not in reality. Or perhaps we should say real reality.
+
+USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.
+
+To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter.",REAL
+7183,A Greek Donbass? Cyprus between Russia and NATO,"November 4, 2016 -  Aris Petasis, Katehon - c.e. by J. Arnoldski 
+
+
+The Cyprus problem is a Russian problem as well. The current purblind negotiations, ostensibly between the two Cypriot communities (82% Greek and 18% Turkish), are strictly directed by NATO under the watchful eye of 40,000 Turkish occupation troops that hold 37% of Cyprus’s land and 54% of its shores. At every major juncture in Cyprus’ recent history, one finds an obsession with Russia by Britain and its successor in the Eastern Mediterranean (EM), America.  
+The Russia factor featured strongly in 1878 and, of course, before. In that year, the Ottomans ceded Cyprus to Britain in exchange for the United Kingdom's military support to the Ottomans (read: Turkish) should Russia attempt to take possession of Ottoman territories in Asia. Here we see the people of Cyprus treated as a commodity and Turkey and Britain acting as traders treating Russia as collateral.  
+With the start of WWI, Cyprus was put under British military occupation (1914-1925) and then became a colony of the British crown (1925-1960.) During WWI, when the Turks joined the losing side, Britain promised to cede Cyprus to Greece just as it did in 1864 with some Greek-populated islands. But Britain reneged on its promise perfidiously because of its obsession with keeping Russia in check in the EM. The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 established the new Turkish state, which in turn formally recognized Britain's sovereignty over Cyprus (Article 20). 
+The British distrusted the Greeks because of favorable Greek sentiment towards Russia. Beyond the cultural links between Greeks and Russians, Russia deservedly earned the appreciation of the Greeks. In 1770, at Catherine the Great’s behest, the Orlov brothers attempted, although unsuccessfully, to free the Greeks from Turkish bondage. The Greek General Alexander Ypsilanti, who fought against Napoleon as an officer of the Russian Cavalry, led the Greek war of independence against the Turks. The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ioannis Kapodistrias, was the first Governor of liberated Greece. The battle of Navarino of 1827, that saw the crushing of the Turkish navy, was initiated by Russia (with Rear-Admiral Lodewijk Heyden of the Imperial Russian Navy) and only then, so as not to be left out, did France and Britain (with philhellene Vice-Admiral Edward Codrington) joined the fray. This led to independence in 1829 for some Greek territory.  
+Just after WWII, when the issue of Cyprus was raised again, the British toyed with the idea of ceding Cyprus to Greece. The project was stopped when the British (and Americans) cunningly brought up the imaginary danger of Greece falling under communism and ultimately siding with the Soviet Union (read: Russia). Of course, the Yalta agreement prevented such an eventuality (Greece went to the West by 90%) whilst the massive military support the British and Americans gave the anti-communists (many of whom were shadowy characters and collaborators) sealed the communists’ fate. 
+Here again, the legitimate ambitions of the Greeks of Cyprus were thwarted largely on account of the West’s obsession with stopping Russia. 
+Years later, after Cyprus was given fettered independence by the British in 1960, NATO accused Cyprus’ president of close relations with Cypriot “communists.” In response, NATO started to work tirelessly towards the dissolution of the Republic of Cyprus (RofCy) out of fear that Russia would use the “communists” as a wedge to gain entry into Cyprus. All of this was, of course, nonsense.  
+So, the British set their sights on replacing the RofCy with a new amalgam to be run 50-50 by the 18% Turks and the 82% Greeks, thereby ushering in minority tyranny and government paralysis. This was meant to meet NATO’s two objectives in Cyprus: a.) to set up a regime that would be paralyzed by the Turkish minority’s vetoes so that the Greeks would never be able to side with fraternal Russia, and b.) to establish in Cyprus a second NATO (Turkish) presence in addition to Britain’s.  
+The Americans want - in this order - Cyprus, Crete, and Greece as military staging posts against anyone that dares to refuse to succumb to the American line. In the last twenty years, NATO and co. have used the British military bases in Cyprus regularly to bomb a multitude of countries. Now, NATO is just a step away from meeting both objectives. The first objective has already been met in that the Greek nomenklatura of the last 8 years accepted the dissolution of the RofCy and its replacement by a 50-50 “Frankenstein state.”  
+As regards the additional NATO military base on Cyprus, all guns are now trained on the already browbeaten Greek representatives. NATO remains optimistic. In this way, NATO hopes to seal Russia’s and Greece’s fate in Cyprus - but what has been agreed upon to date will still need to be put to referendum. If the plan goes through, the Greeks will be put on the path to emigration. Uncertainty will reign, conflict will rule, and violence and intimidation against the Greeks will probably be organized from Turkey. In the absence of a serious central government, mass colonization by Turkey will immediately follow, since any mechanisms of control will all but disappear. 
+Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova was right when she recently accused the West of persistent attempts to speed up negotiations and push for a solution at all costs. She warned of a repeat of the 2004 fiasco when the disastrous NATO-initiated Anan plan (masquerading as a UN plan) was massively rejected by the people of Cyprus and is blatantly supported by those in power now. The same sources continue to support the current NATO plan. Fortunately, there is a huge chasm separating some among the political elite of Cyprus and those who consider the people’s desire for a democratic rather than a NATO solution. 
+Incidentally, the current administration in Cyprus has repeatedly called on NATO to accept Cyprus in its ranks, forgetting that NATO’s primary objective is the encirclement of Russia.  
+
+Russia now needs to stand firm on the side of a democratic solution. Using its vast diplomatic weight, Russia can thwart the current NATO plan before it goes to referendum. A strong Russian position will give courage to the people of Cyprus. If the Greeks surrender, NATO will become the choreographer of Cyprus’ political life from now on. Since Greece is merely a sorry bystander, only Russia can save Cyprus. If the NATO plan for Cyprus succeeds, Russia will end up suffering geostrategic casualties and the Greeks of Cyprus will be left as collateral damage. 
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
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+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+9889,Paul Ryan: Clinton should not continue to receive classified briefings during FBI investigation,"Print 
+Speaker Paul Ryan blasted Hillary Clinton over the Friday news that the FBI is launching a new review into her use of a private email server while secretary of State. 
+In a statement released minutes after the news broke , the Wisconsin Republican reasserted his call for Clinton to be denied the classified briefings she receives because she is the Democratic presidential nominee. 
+“Yet again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame. She was entrusted with some of our nation’s most important secrets, and she betrayed that trust by carelessly mishandling highly classified information,” he said. 
+“This decision, long overdue, is the result of her reckless use of a private email server, and her refusal to be forthcoming with federal investigators. I renew my call for the Director of National Intelligence to suspend all classified briefings for Secretary Clinton until this matter is fully resolved.”",FAKE
+8770,Lady Gaga Protests Donald Trump Outside of Trump Tower,"Lady Gaga Protests Donald Trump Outside of Trump Tower 11/09/2016 
+E! ONLINE 
+Lady Gaga took to Trump Tower early Wednesday morning to protest the results of the U.S. election. 
+The “Bad Romance” singer, a well-known Hillary Clinton supporter, stood outside Donald Trump ‘s building and held a sign that read “Love trumps hate.” As the hours passed Tuesday night and it became clearer that Trump would win the presidency, Gaga tweeted, “In a room full of hope, we will be heard. Stand up for kindness, equality, and love. Nothing will stop us. Say a prayer America.” 
+Gaga campaigned for Clinton earlier this week, attending a rally where she spoke of Clinton’s strengths. “She has a career in politics that spans decades of experience, education, leadership, and wisdom. She’s ready to be president,” she said. “She kept going and she kept fighting for women’s rights. She kept fighting for the care of our children. She kept fighting for those that are in need.”Trump’s victory was declared around 2:30 a.m. ET, and during his speech he praised Clinton’s efforts throughout the election. He said she was owed a “deep debt of gratitude” for all her hard work. “We will get along with all other nations willing to get along with us. We will deal fairly with everyone. We will seek common ground, partnership not conflict,” he added in his speech. “America will no longer settle for anything less than the best. We must reclaim our destiny.”",FAKE
+2272,It's time for Republican Party leaders to embrace marriage equality,"There’s been a lot of discussion about same sex marriage over the last few months – particularly from the candidates running for the GOP nomination. Sometimes it seems as if they are in a contest to see who can be the most stalwart defender of “traditional marriage” – who can most effectively stoke the unfounded fears of the far right.
+
+When talking about same sex marriage, these candidates regularly throw around phrases like religious freedom and religious liberty, warn that marriage equality will lead to the criminalization of Christianity or the downfall of the American family, and fret that our nation’s very future is at risk.
+
+Let’s be clear.  The fight over marriage equality isn’t about religious freedom or the criminalization of Christianity.  States have regularly taken action to enact civil marriage with clear exemptions and protections for churches, synagogues and other religious entities.  No matter what happens with same-sex marriage, that will not change.
+
+It is also no longer a fight about our country’s future because that fight is already over.  According to a recent CNN/ORC survey, the highest percentage of Americans ever, 63%, support the freedom to marry as a constitutional right for gay couples.  This is an increase of 14% since 2010 and shows significant gains across all party lines.  Regardless of what the U.S. Supreme Court decides this term, the American Public is already on the side of marriage equality.  Should the Court oppose the expansion of the freedom to marry to all fifty states, millions of Americans will be disappointed, but progress will continue to be made.  It will just take a bit longer.
+
+What is up for discussion and debate however, is where the Republican Party goes from here.
+
+Along with the general public, support for the freedom to marry has increasingly gained acceptance among senior Republicans on Capitol Hill. Senators Rob Portman of Ohio and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska announced their support of marriage equality in recent years. And just this spring, twenty-three current and former members of Congress, including Senators Mark Kirk (Ill.) and Susan Collins (Maine) and Representatives Curbelo (Fla.), Dold (Ill.), Hanna (N.Y.), Gibson (N.Y.), and Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.) added their names to a Republican amicus brief arguing in support of marriage equality cases presently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
+
+The Republican Party has always claimed to be in favor of certain key principles including, support for individual liberty, personal responsibility and the belief that strong families are the corner stone of our society.  This is exactly why more leaders of the party should embrace the idea of marriage equality.
+
+Legalizing civil marriage for same-sex couples does not threaten heterosexual marriage; nor does it violate the First Amendment by forcing churches to perform ceremonies that violate their fundamental beliefs.  It will not lead to the arrest of ministers or priests who refuse to perform same sex marriage ceremonies.
+
+It will, however, increase relationship stability, strengthen families and provide legal protections for children growing up in same-sex families – all of which are goals in keeping with the principles of the Republican Party.
+
+For years I have listened while Republican candidates talked about the importance of family and the need for our country to support strong families.  I whole-heartedly agree.  We do need to support families, but that means supporting all families – regardless of which state they live in, how they look or how they are made.
+
+So the next time a Republican presidential candidate wants to talk about the need for our society to support and protect families and children, I hope he or she will include all families and all children in that protection – including the hundreds of thousands of children like my son and daughter who are growing up with same-sex parents.
+
+Mary Cheney is a political consultant based in Washington, D.C. and is also the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.",REAL
+2442,What we've forgotten about childhood disease risks,"Cynthia Leifer is an associate professor of immunology at Cornell University and a 2015 Public Voices Fellow at the Op-Ed Project. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.
+
+(CNN) More than 100 people in 14 states were reported to have measles last month, with most cases linked to exposure to the disease at Disneyland from December 15 to December 20. President Obama urged parents to make sure their children are vaccinated. And yet three potential Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential election have suggested in recent days that parents should have a choice in whether children should be vaccinated.
+
+When we are not exposed to the suffering that childhood infectious diseases can cause or didn't experience them ourselves, we as a society tend to forget just how dangerous they can be.
+
+In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now known as the March of Dimes Foundation. Children and adults everywhere collected dimes to raise money for the development of a polio vaccine. There was such fear about the disease that children were kept from going to community swimming pools and parks. Their way of life was changed by the disease.
+
+Today, in contrast, we don't seem to be alarmed at all. Federal research funds , the major source of funding to support research by immunologists, virologists, and other scientists who create the vaccines that protect us, were 22% less in 2014 than they were in 2003 when adjusted for inflation. Why was everyone so gung-ho to raise money for research then but not now? Because we forgot.
+
+We forgot that the ""black death"" plague of the 14th century wiped out 60% of Europeans. We forgot that smallpox killed 30% of people who got sick before a vaccine was available.
+
+We also forgot that the smallpox vaccination campaign was so successful that the last case of smallpox in the United States was in 1949, and, with the exception of two vials in storage, it was eliminated from the planet in 1977. By forgetting the sheer horror these diseases inflicted on humanity and the decisive way in which vaccines eliminated them, it's easy to forget how fragile we are.
+
+Those parents saw children crippled by the polio virus; they saw images of iron lungs that breathed for a child because the child's own lungs were effectively paralyzed. Those parents willingly enrolled their children in the trial despite not knowing if their child would be in the group that received the vaccine or the control group that did not. They were terrified enough that the benefit outweighed the risk.
+
+More recently however, for some parents, the risk has outweighed the benefit. They have become complacent. Maybe they bought into disproven science about a link between autism and vaccines. Maybe they think because they have not seen anyone with polio, that their child is safe. Our collective historical amnesia has led to increased numbers of unvaccinated children, and we are all worse off for it.
+
+The recent outbreak at Disneyland will hopefully boost our collective memory as to how contagious a virus can be. The 102 cases reported in January is a staggering number when we consider that for the past decade, the average total number of cases in a year was under 150.
+
+Many, but not all, of these cases were in individuals who did not receive the full course of childhood vaccinations, making us realize that any one of us could be at risk. Given that there are only a limited number of doctors still around that have ever seen a patient with measles, or remember diagnosing a case of measles decades ago, only compounds the problem and aids the spread of disease.
+
+The unfortunate reality is that it may take the occasional serious outbreak to provide that reminder to all of us how quickly we can be overcome by something as tiny as a virus. Today's tourist destinations are just like the pools and parks when polio was rampant, places for the virus to find new victims.
+
+Viruses don't care about borders and easily hitch rides around the world in a matter of hours. We can't protect against every infectious disease, but why should we risk getting sick from diseases, especially measles, for which we have safe and effective vaccines?
+
+We can all hope that parents will see this as a wake-up call and vaccinate their children, and that all of us will make sure we are up to date on our boosters. Hopefully, the memory of these events will not fade so we won't need a reminder like the measles outbreak of 2015 again any time soon.",REAL
+5027,Libertarian ticket eyes post-convention opening – and debate stage,"The Libertarian Party ticket, facing what polls show are two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in modern American history, is seeing a bump in support as the general election race moves into full swing – and a surge in interest that could carry nominee Gary Johnson onto the prized debate stage this fall.
+
+Despite Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s popularity issues and trust gap with voters, few expect the Libertarian ticket to pose a Ross Perot-style threat this year.
+
+But the party is far more than a political curiosity in 2016. Rumors are swirling in the wake of the major-party conventions that high-profile Republicans are now considering backing the ticket; a recent video from Johnson and running mate William Weld generated considerable buzz; and the polls show Johnson getting close to 15 percent – the threshold he needs to reach to land him on the debate stage with Trump and Clinton this fall.
+
+The RealClearPolitics average has Johnson at 8.4 percent in a four-way race with Trump, Clinton and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, up from 4.5 percent in June. The latest Fox News poll released Wednesday, after the conventions, put Johnson at 12 percent.
+
+An NBC poll taken toward the end of the Democratic convention put Johnson at 9 percent, roughly where he was in prior polling.
+
+Party officials said the unpopularity of the Republican and Democratic candidates gives the party an “unprecedented opportunity.”
+
+“It goes from week to week and day to day watching for what new thing [Clinton and Trump are] going to do to become more unpopular with the American people, and frighten people,” Nicholas Sarwark, chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, told FoxNews.com. “Those candidates are the gift that keeps on giving. We’re running as the qualified adult in the room.”
+
+Sarwark pointed to Johnson’s record as a two-term New Mexico governor, “re-elected as a Republican in a Democratic state,” in touting his credentials and appeal.
+
+Unclear is whether the support in the polls will translate into support at the ballot box. In 2012, Johnson won just 0.99 percent of all votes cast -- making him the most successful White House candidate in Libertarian history, but not making much of a dent in the race as a whole.
+
+But this year, there are plenty of signs more voters are seeking an alternative candidate. At the Democratic convention last week, many Bernie Sanders supporters were getting on board with the Green Party’s Stein. But so far, Johnson is polling the best among third-party candidates.
+
+He and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Weld, generated some buzz before the conventions with a slick video ad listing their accomplishments.
+
+“We’ve been there ... And done that!” the candidates say.
+
+Johnson said in an interview Monday with the Los Angeles Times that he believes in addition to appealing to disenfranchised Republicans on issues like free trade, low taxes and smaller government, the Libertarian stance on social issues and foreign policy could bring Sanders voters on board.
+
+Sarwark said the party is banking that while Trump and Clinton are about as well-known as they are going to be, Johnson still can introduce himself to voters not familiar with his story – especially if he is able to get on the debate stage.
+
+This is far from a foregone conclusion.
+
+So far, while Johnson’s support is higher than in past years, an 8.4 percent average is still a distance from the 15 percent he’d need to make the debates.
+
+He has until the middle of September to hit 15 percent in not just one poll but an average of five recent polls chosen by the Commission on Presidential Debates.
+
+“Politically, where we stand, is we have to get into those presidential debates to really stand a chance,” Weld told The Wall Street Journal last week. “If we catch a break or two, we may get there.”
+
+Even then, the record for third-party or independent candidates is not strong.
+
+In recent political history, the one who came closest to the presidency was businessman Perot in 1992 – who was an independent, not technically a third-party candidate. At one point, Perot was leading in some polls against then-President George H. W. Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. However, after dropping out of the race before re-entering, he lost support. He eventually garnered 19 percent of the vote, with some Republicans arguing he split the GOP vote and handed the election to Clinton.
+
+Republicans, meanwhile, were arguably given a boost by Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000, when Nader picked up 2.7 percent of the vote against Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush.
+
+Johnson’s potential impact is hard to gauge. The latest Fox News poll found Johnson siphoning support about equally from the Democratic and GOP candidates.
+
+But he could get a boost in the coming weeks as some Republicans reportedly consider backing him.
+
+Most notably, 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush reportedly are mulling endorsements for Johnson. Marvin Bush, youngest brother of Jeb and George W., also endorsed Johnson last week.
+
+“From what I’ve heard from the Bush and Romney camps, they’re still considering it,” Sarwark claimed.
+
+Asked if the party is looking just to make a strong showing, or go all the way, Sarward was bullish: “There’s a path to the presidency. The ground is there.”
+
+Adam Shaw is a Politics Reporter and occasional Opinion writer for FoxNews.com. He can be reached here or on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.",REAL
+4165,"Democrats propose Internet voting in 2016, making Republicans also consider the idea","Democrats are thinking about using Internet balloting in 2016 to expand their voter base and select a president -- prompting Republicans to consider such a strategy to keep from losing ground.
+
+Iowa Democrats proposed the idea and several others during a recent Democratic National Committee meeting, saying Internet balloting could expand access to their unique caucus process to overseas military personnel, absentee voters and others.
+
+They have already conducted some interviews and are now embarked on a “listening tour” to get input from party activists, caucus experts and others, says Iowa Democratic Party spokeswoman Christina Freundlich.
+
+“We’re looking at different options,” she told FoxNews.com earlier this week. “Democrats are always looking at ways to get more people in 2016 to participate in the Democratic process.”
+
+The idea of online voting is nothing new, but Iowa Democrats considering the idea, with the DNC’s support, has reignited debate on the issue.
+
+“I think it’s a very bad idea,” says the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, who thinks computer-based voting will never happen, or at least not in the “foreseeable future.”
+
+Von Spakovsky, manager of the conservative think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative, made his case Friday in large part by citing examples of online voting gone wrong including a 2010 test run in the District of Columbia.
+
+The city’s Board of Elections and Ethics suspended its new Internet-based voting system just days into the test run, after observers reportedly heard the University of Michigan fight song when trying to cast a vote.
+
+It was the work of a Michigan professor who was assisting in the project and who challenged his students to hack into the system.
+
+“Computer experts basically say the Internet has such fundamental security vulnerabilities,” von Spakovsky said. “It’s not something you can fix in the hardware or software. It’s in the architecture of the Internet. I just think it’s stupid to go there.”
+
+Despite the concerns about Internet voting, Iowa Republicans are also acutely aware of the need for any political party to expand its base. And they seem open to at least considering the idea at their caucuses, which are based on conventional paper balloting.
+
+“We want to try to provide as many assets to the caucus, but we’re only equipped to do so much,” Iowa Republican Party Chairman Danny Carroll told FoxNews.com.
+
+He made clear that his group has no immediate plans to move forward on Internet voting but said he intends to discuss the issue next month when the party’s new State Central Committee is selected.
+
+The Michigan Democratic Party used Internet voting in 2004. Party spokesman Josh Pugh said Friday the party in fact used email.
+
+“That’s where the Internet was in 2004, so it made sense. We’re always looking for new ways to engage activists, especially online,” said Pugh, adding the state party is expected soon to unveil new plans.
+
+Freundlich acknowledges the potential challenges of using Internet voting for the 2016 presidential caucus -- traditionally the first voting of the election cycle and an early indicator of which presidential candidate will win his or her party’s nomination.
+
+Iowa has 1,774 precincts that elect delegates to 99 county conventions at which delegates are elected to the state convention. And those delegates are chosen for the national convention.
+
+As a result, much of the process is very in-person, with debates, lobbying and voice votes in rooms.
+
+However, state Democrats have a much different process than state Republicans.
+
+Freundlich describes a situation in which presidential candidates are picked by caucus officials sending the candidates' respective delegates to a corner of a room, then counting heads.",REAL
+7685,CodeSOD: Dollar Dollar Dollar Dollar Underscore,"Ellis Morning Editor 
+An Anonymous source sends us some Java code with really special variable naming conventions. I can only assume this came from a plucky startup hoping to attract venture capital. import java.util.*; import java.awt.*; import javax.swing.*; import java.awt.event.*; public class Array implements ActionListener, MouseMotionListener, MouseListener { int $$_, _$$, $$$,$_$; JFrame $$$__$$$ = new JFrame(); boolean draw = true; JButton $$1 = new JButton(""Line""), $$2 = new JButton(""Rectangle""), $$3 = new JButton(""Clear""); ArrayList = new ArrayList<>(); JPanel aa$$aa = new JPanel(), _$$_$_ = new JPanel(), $0$0$ = new JPanel() { @Override public void paintComponent(Graphics g) { super.paintComponent(g); for (Shape i : ) { if (i.$s$ == true) { g.setColor(Color.green); g.drawLine(i.$$_,i._$$,i.$$$,i.$_$); } else { g.setColor(Color.red); g.fillPolygon(new int[] {i.$$_,i.$$_,i.$$$,i.$$$}, new int[] {i._$$,i.$_$,i.$_$,i._$$}, 4); } } if (draw) { g.setColor(Color.green); g.drawLine($$_,_$$,$$$,$_$); } else { g.setColor(Color.red); g.fillPolygon(new int[] {$$_,$$_,$$$,$$$}, new int[] {_$$,$_$,$_$,_$$}, 4); } } }; public Array () { aa$$aa.setLayout(new BoxLayout(aa$$aa, BoxLayout.Y_AXIS)); _$$_$_.add($$1); $$1.addActionListener(this); _$$_$_.add($$2); $$2.addActionListener(this); _$$_$_.add($$3); $$3.addActionListener(this); $0$0$.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(200, 200)); aa$$aa.add($0$0$); $0$0$.addMouseListener(this); $0$0$.addMouseMotionListener(this); aa$$aa.add(_$$_$_); $$$__$$$.add(aa$$aa); $$$__$$$.setSize(new Dimension(400, 400)); $$$__$$$.setVisible(true); $$$__$$$.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); } public static void main(String[] args) { new Array(); } public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { if (e.getSource() == $$1) { draw = true; } else if (e.getSource() == $$2) { draw = false; } else if (e.getSource() == $$3) { .clear(); } $$_ = 0; _$$ = 0; $$$ = 0; $_$ = 0; $$$__$$$.repaint(); } public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) { $$_ = e.getX(); _$$ = e.getY(); $0$0$.repaint(); } public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e) { $$$ = e.getX(); $_$ = e.getY(); .add(new Shape($$_,_$$,$$$,$_$, draw)); $$_=0; _$$=0; $_$=0; $_$=0; $$$__$$$.repaint(); } public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent e) { $$$__$$$.repaint(); } public void mouseExited(MouseEvent e) { $$$__$$$.repaint(); } public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) { $$$__$$$.repaint(); } public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) { $$$__$$$.repaint(); } public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent e) { $$$ = e.getX(); $_$ = e.getY(); $$$__$$$.repaint(); } class Shape { int $$_,_$$,$$$,$_$; boolean $s$; Shape(int xx, int yy, int x$, int y$, boolean tp) { $$_ = xx; _$$ = yy; $$$ = x$; $_$ = y$; $s$ = tp; } public String toString() { return """"+$$_+"" ""+_$$+"" ""+$$$+"" ""+$_$; } } } [Advertisement] Infrastructure as Code built from the start with first-class Windows functionality and an intuitive, visual user interface. Download Otter today!",FAKE
+9952,Does Trump Have a Fighting Chance Against the Establishment | New Eastern Outlook,"Region: USA in the World When countries are in trouble they always react the same way. If they have economic troubles their governments take ever greater control of the public finances, whether through austerity or centrally-dictated spending programmes. When there is civil strife the government calls out the army and restricts liberties to regain control of the situation. When wars are taking place elections are cancelled so the government of the day remains in power to deal with the conflict. These measures have the effect of entrenching the “Establishment”, whoever that may be at a given time, and excluding others. People can only play a part in addressing the problems of the country at the whim of the Establishment, with appointments replacing elections in many such scenarios. Only when the Establishment is secure does it allow greater freedom of debate, action and participation, which are regarded as the hallmarks of stable countries . Now Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States on an avowedly anti-Establishment platform. He tapped into those disaffected by the political system and found the issues on which he could make the most noise. That in itself was a virtue with the constituency he was trying to attract. Too many people have become disaffected with politics everywhere because someone has decreed certain views to be unacceptable, without giving a reason why, and Trump was only too happy to give voice to those who have been told that their views don’t entitle them to one. But is Trump’s election the democratic revolution he claims? Does it actually give a voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless? In order to exercise any power President Trump will have to do all the things he accuses his opponents in the Establishment of, but worse. For a while he might get away with it, but he will never have the resources to win in the longer term. All we will have is the methods, with no returns: Establishment oppression on a scale beyond the worst nightmares of the enforced nobodies who now think they are somebody, but are in fact Donald Trump. Who do you think you are? As it turned out, Hillary Clinton failed to get past a problem she would not have had as a Republican. If you are on the conservative end of the political spectrum you are expected to act like you belong in power when you have it. People in more progressive parties claim to represent the interests of the broad mass of people who will never be rich and powerful. If they stay in power for too long, they create a distance between themselves and that mass which erodes their natural support. Hillary Clinton has been a national figure in the US for a generation. Her accession to the Democratic nomination was seen as almost dynastic, a factor which harmed Senator Edward Kennedy when he ran for the Democratic nomination against Jimmy Carter in 1980. She was referred to as the “Establishment candidate” throughout the campaign, particularly by members of her own party who preferred socialist Bernie Sanders, who complained throughout the primary process that the voting was being rigged and that the media were falsely reporting that she had won the nomination before it was mathematically certain . For a Republican, all this would play well, except in extreme circumstances such as Watergate. For a Democrat it was bound to depress enthusiasm in the party’s voter base, and either drive it to another candidate or persuade it to stay at home, particularly when enough scandal attaches to Clinton as it is due to her business and government dealings. Clinton was about her nice office in Washington, not the problems of real Democrats. Keeping her there would have solved nothing. This was seen most clearly in Wisconsin, a traditional Democratic mainstay which voted for Trump despite the fact exit pollsters were showing that a large numbers of voters greatly disliked both he and Clinton . Many of those who disliked Trump still voted for him because they felt disliked themselves by politicians such as Clinton, who had let them down more than a newcomer had been able to do. He was “the-none-of-the-above” candidate from early on in the primary election period. Poacher turns gamekeeper Whether Trump would have got anywhere near the Republican nomination had there been a Republican president for the last eight years is unlikely. Only as an outsider could he gain any traction within a party which thinks of itself as the natural party of government, and would pick an insider every time to maintain its hold on power. The Republican Party will remain largely embarrassed by Trump, despite his victory. He may be the voters’ idea of a president, but he isn’t what Republican politicians see as a Republican president. As the Huffington Post published underneath every article about Trump from January until election day, “Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar , rampant xenophobe , racist , misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims – 1.6 billion members of an entire religion – from entering the US.” Ask most Republican Congressmen, who control both houses, whether this describes a Republican President and you know what the answer will be, though Trump himself revels in such depictions. Well before the end of his term Trump will have become the Establishment himself. So to achieve anything in the checks and balances system the US has he will either have to carry the party and the military-industrial establishment with him, and become more embedded than Clinton is to do it, or try and purge the very many who will oppose him. Throughout his “business career”, if repeated bankruptcy, con, robbing of contractors and tax avoidance can be dignified with such a term, Trump has relied on bluster and a stubborn refusal to face reality to prosper. Whether he can get away with that with the military and intelligence staff who have ruined America’s global reputation with impunity is another matter. Presidents who spent lifetimes working the system have not been able to control the CIA or the industrial and media barons. If Trump tries, he will have to exert extreme control to do it, and become more exclusive than the Establishment itself. Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976 as an antidote to a corrupt political establishment. Despite his long years of public service, he was discarded four years later for being exactly what he was elected to be – a good man out of his depth in murky Washington. Trump has never held any elected office. Is he going to take on those same forces and turn them into public servants? More than he can chew out 
+One of Trump’s selling points with poorer Americans is that he pledged to stop US involvement in costly foreign wars. In particular, he said he could work with Russia and saw no need for the continual war rhetoric coming out of every Western government. Obviously this plays well with those who can’t afford to feed their families. The money will be spent on them, not bombs. But is it even possible to reduce the US military commitment, with so many bases, so many troops employed, so many weapons which will be manufactured and sold regardless? Trump may well find that the best way to stop foreign wars is to buy up all the weapons so that potential enemies don’t get them. The War on Terror would greatly diminish if the US didn’t supply arms to its favourite terrorists whilst pretending to fight them. But there is a vast industry devoted to maintaining armament and troop levels, which can only be justified by fighting wars against enemies real or imagined . So how would Trump go about achieving such a goal? Trump and his supporters are sons and daughters of the Bolsheviks. Convinced they are right, they think they can say what they like, do what they like and everyone else just has to put up with it because any opponent is part of the corrupt Establishment. It is no coincidence that Nigel Farage, former leader of UKIP and the main proponent of the UK leaving the European Union, has described Trump’s victory as a “ Supersized Brexit . Farage’s supporters behave the same way: everyone they don’t like hasn’t got the right to an opinion anymore, because they lost, and were inherently bad to begin with. Based on all we have seen so far, if someone stands in the way of Trump’s ambitions as president they will be told that they are holdovers from a corrupt system, serving masters who are now enemies of the people, and must therefore be removed. In order to get rid of them he would have to use extralegal measures in many cases, and deny them an opinion or another job. The “people” Trump would be referring to are the dispossessed whose votes he courted, who by definition don’t have levers of power of their own. It hardly gives those people more power to demonise certain individuals on presidential say-so, but that is all Trump has offered so far, or may ever be capable of offering. Trump has enjoyed spreading hatred of various minority groups. As many commentators have pointed out, he has broken all the usual rules of presidential candidate conduct and got away with it. But this simply makes anyone a potential victim, and encourages such behaviour to go on unchecked. A system which was there long before a here-today-gone-tomorrow politician has all the levers his supporters don’t to maintain itself. But if attacked, it will have no alternative but to fight fire with fire. A battle for control fought behind the scenes would empower Trump’s supporters even less, whilst not addressing the specific problems which made them see Trump as the solution. Not beating them, only joining them This presidential election campaign was the ugliest within living memory. This played into Trump’s hands: it brought those who were told they couldn’t behave like that into the mainstream, and Trump as the outsider reaped the benefit. But it also created the expectation that this will be followed through: if you start such a process, you are expected to finish it. A poll taken just before Election Day showed that if Bernie Sanders had been running against Clinton and Trump he would have won by a landslide . Sanders supporters remain angry that he was denied the nomination by what they thought was an establishment fraud. Now Clinton has lost, they will make further efforts to ensure that anyone with Clinton credentials is neutralised so that they can present a more credible candidate in 2020, and will have much moral weight and grassroots sympathy behind this effort. As Clinton supporters will fight back in the same terms, the Democratic Party is likely to spend the next four years fighting itself rather than Trump, trying to exclude its own members in the same way Trump supporters want to get rid of everyone they don’t like. The Republicans have the same problem. Trump was as offensive to his intra-party opponents as he was to Clinton. Those who think themselves “real” Republicans will be emboldened by the pro-Sanders Democrats to seek to reclaim the party and its voters from the Trump constituency in the same way. This will generate more exclusion and counter-exclusion, even through Republican Congress versus Republican President battles, with each trying to show themselves to the public as More Republican Than Thou. Both Trump and Sanders supporters will now feel that they are the new “Establishment” because they have been backed by their respective publics to overthrow the old one. Though both Trump and Sanders were the none-of-the-above candidates, they will be the above from now on. To justify their initial behaviour, and satisfy their support, they will have to be even worse Establishments than the ones they have removed, more intolerant, more exclusive …more arbitrary. If the old guard is going to come back, they will have no choice but to adopt the same tactics. The choice at the next election will be between groups of battle-hardened intolerants who are more interested in serving their friends and stuffing their enemies than in the disaffected people in their midst. Trump has not overthrown the failed political Establishment and methods which created the disaffection he has exploited, he has confirmed their validity. Trump may change the personnel, but the Establishment will be the same animal, all the more dangerous for its delusions to the contrary. Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook ”. Popular Articles ",FAKE
+3726,Charleston Mourns The Dead At Emanuel AME: 'I Knew Every Single One Of Them',"CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Andre McPherson has been coming to the Emanuel AME Church here off and on since 2003. His visit on Thursday night was his first in a couple of years, he said with a hint of guilt, but he felt he owed it to the church leaders and congregation to stop by.
+
+In his more trying days when he was homeless, McPherson said, he often found himself at the doorstep of what's known as ""Mother Emanuel."" The Charleston resident credits the historic African-American church with helping him get off of drugs.
+
+""This church helped me get me life together,"" McPherson, 44, said through tears. ""It helped me go back to my kids. It helped me get away from a certain street mentality. It helped me have pride.""
+
+McPherson was one of hundreds from Charleston and nearby towns who filed by the church doors on Thursday, paying respects to the nine who died after being shot inside the previous night. The suspected gunman, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, had apparently been welcomed as a stranger to the church's regular Wednesday evening Bible study session, spending an hour with the group before opening fire. One woman reportedly said he told her he was letting her go so she could tell the story of what happened.
+
+Members of the church stood out on Calhoun Street in downtown Charleston on Thursday, gazing up at its facade, bewildered by the massacre. Emanuel AME is close-knit, and members of the church who were interviewed said they knew all nine of the victims personally.
+
+Moutrie said it wasn't unusual for a new face to pop into a service or Bible study session and be accepted without questions. She said it was typical for strangers to be encouraged to hang around afterward to meet the pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a state senator, who was among those killed in the attack.
+
+""This church particularly is one that never closes its doors to strangers. Everyone is welcome to come in fellowship,"" said Deborah Capraro, 58, of North Charleston. ""I can't wrap my brain around it. ... I cannot believe this 21-year-old man decided to walk into a church and kill black people. How do you wrap your brain around it?""
+
+""I don't know what makes a person do this,"" said Graham, whose niece apparently went to school with the alleged shooter. ""To go into God's space and do this, I don't know. You can't explain it. ... I go to the Middle East a lot. I've seen hate up close. I've seen communities where everybody has been killed because they're a different religion, and you think that's just over there. Sometimes it's not just over there.""
+
+The shooting drew a scrum of television and print reporters to Emanuel AME, marking the second time in a matter of months that the Charleston community has hosted the national media over a story about race. In April, Walter Scott, an African-American man, was shot in the back repeatedly by a white police officer, Michael Slager, in North Charleston. A bystander's video of the killing revealed that Scott was unarmed and fleeing when Slager fired. Slager has been charged with murder.
+
+“This city is getting shown for what it really is: a racist-ass city and state,” said an African-American man who asked be identified only as ""Twenty Three."" He has lived in Charleston his whole life, and said he often encounters racism.
+
+""Everyone would love to believe this is a wonderful little tourist town where everyone gets along, but if they dig down deep into the issues, some people are not getting along well at all,"" said Capraro. ""The fact that this happened is shocking to me. But [the gunman] harboring those kinds of feelings, that's not shocking.""
+
+The community ""is not really even dealing with emotions right now,” Grant said. “We’re just trying to think about how we can destroy racism. It’s the problem no one wants to deal with. Racism is not justifiable, and it’s not something you’re born with -- it’s a behavior.”
+
+“Racism isn’t going to stop,” Satterfield, 25, said. “I hate to say it this way, but it was a matter of time before evil stomped on us. The feeling in this town: I don’t know the words to put it in.”",REAL
+7686,'There are many instances’ of voter fraud: GOP VP candidate Pence,"Politics US Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence speaks at a rally on October 25, 2016 in Marietta, Ohio. (Photo by AFP) 
+US Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence says the mainstream media is biased against Donald Trump, and there are “many instances” of voter fraud in the run up to the November 8 election. 
+Republican presidential nominee Trump has recently intensified his criticism of the American electoral system. He calls the election process rigged, and says the media is colluding with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in order to win the White House. 
+He has questioned the legitimacy of the US elections, saying that he believed the vote was already being ""rigged"" at many polling places. 
+During his final presidential debate with Clinton last week, Trump declared that he might not accept the results of the November 8 presidential election if there is evidence it was rigged. 
+In an interview with CBS News on Friday, Trump’s running mate, Pence, said, “Make no mistake about it, there are many instances in our lifetimes of voter fraud in individual polling places and in certain jurisdictions.” 
+“Donald Trump and I are just calling on people to respectfully participate in the electoral process. We want a victory on Election Day, but we also want it to be a victory for American democracy,” he stated. Donald Trump speaks at an event on October 15, 2016 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. (Photo by AFP) 
+The governor of Indiana rejected claims of critics that Trump’s “rigging” rhetoric may encourage violence by his supporters if he loses the presidential election. 
+“We certainly would denounce any calls for anything other people being vigorously involved in the electoral process,” he said. 
+“I have to tell you, I really don’t see it. The people that rallying around our team, rallying around our cause, love this country, are passionate about this country and are anxious to see change,” the GOP vice presidential nominee stated. 
+He went on to accuse the media of unfairly backing Clinton. 
+“The level of negative coverage about my running mate in many quarters in the national media has just been overwhelming compared to any negative coverage or frankly the avalanche of scandals coming out of Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary of State,” Pence said. Attendees stand during the National Anthem at a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at Cross Insurance Center on October 15, 2016 in Bangor, Maine. (Photo by AFP) 
+According to a recent poll released, 41 percent of American voters are saying the 2016 election could be ""stolen"" from Trump due to widespread voter fraud. 
+And 73 percent of Republican voters think the election could be stolen from the billionaire businessman, while 17 percent of Democrats agree with the prospect of rigging. 
+American writer and political commentator Stephen Lendman told Press TV on October 17 Washington has been rigging elections for nearly 200 years in order to keep anti-establishment candidates away from the White House. Loading ...",FAKE
+5549,Will Trump Be Different than Hillary Or Obama? SoT #125,"  U.S. Economy Clinton Foundation , new world order , Trump admin Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the Government but illegal for the citizenry – Thomas Jefferson 
+The mainstream media tried it’s hardest to persuade the public that Hillary was a lock to win the election. Even the nefarious George Soros asserted confidently that Trump might win the popular election but Hillary would win the Electoral College. 
+But apparently the voters just weren’t ready for a tyrannical President yet. The perception of the two candidates shaped by the mainstream media led the unsuspecting – if not comatose – public to believe that Hillary Clinton was some liberal angel who would save the country from reality and that Trump is some kind of fascist monster who is going to force everyone with slightly tinted skin to leave the country. 
+Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. Lost in the shuffle is the fact that the Dragon Lady, reincarnated, hid behind the veil of the tax-free status of the Clinton Foundation to steal $100’s of millions from the taxpayers and the Saudi royal family (the Huma Abedin connection, which is why she is Hillary’s “Igor”) and move it into the bank accounts of the Clinton family and friends of the Clinton family. The taxpayers got nothing in return – the Saudi family got use of the U.S. military to attack Syria. 
+Phony polls are just another form of insidious propaganda – it’s a tool designed to persuade the masses to go the direction of the poll and discourage the other side from voting. It worked for Hitlery and the DNC against Bernie in California. But the people woke up enough to see through the ruse in the big election. 
+The election results on Tuesday were not about giving Trump or the Republican Party a political and economic policy mandate. The only mandate issued on Tuesday – quite loud and clear – was this: “Someone please stop Washington DC and Wall Street from date-raping us in the bodily area where waste exits.” That was it. Obama had the same mandate in 2008 and completely betrayed his supporters. 
+Judging from the early indications from the Trump camp regarding Trump’s likely cabinet and advisor appointments, it’s going to be out with the old and in with the old. Currently it appears as if the new Attorney General will be Rudy Guiliani, who is a blatant Establishment hack; Larry Kudlow as an advisor, who is the worst economist in modern era; and Jamie Dimon, CEO, JP Morgan/Chase – who should be in jail – and Goldman Sachs alumnus Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary. More of the same. Neocon elitists, Establishment apologists and Wall Street thieves. 
+The Shadow of Truth hosted special guest, Eric Dubin of The News Doctors to review and dissect what happened on Tuesday evening. Unfortunately, it’s not difficult to conclude that not much will change when Obama hands the Oval Office wand to Trump: Share this:",FAKE
+2633,The delay over Loretta Lynch’s confirmation isn’t about bias,"Let’s get a few things straight about the delay in confirming Loretta Lynch as attorney general. It’s outrageous. It also has nothing to do with her race or gender.
+
+Contriving prejudice where none exists demeans the importance of fighting discrimination. And it demeans those who drop such ugly hints.
+
+To wit, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who complained that “the first African American woman nominated to be attorney general is asked to sit in the back of the bus when it comes to the Senate calendar” — this after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) held her nomination hostage to action on a stalled human trafficking bill.
+
+Oh, please. I’m not in the habit of agreeing with Rich Lowry of National Review, but opposing Lynch is no more race-based than Durbin’s own opposition to the nomination of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state.
+
+That’s not to say that lawmakers are bias-free. This is impossible to prove, but to watch Attorney General Eric Holder testify before Congress makes me think that, at times, he is treated with less respect than if he were white.
+
+But relations between Holder and congressional Republicans are badly frayed; it is in those fraught moments of tension that prejudices, perhaps subconscious, emerge. There was no such atmosphere during the Lynch hearings.
+
+Same with gender. Hillary Clinton raised the subject last week, tweeting, “Congressional trifecta against women today: . . . Blocking great nominee, 1st African American woman AG, for longer than any AG in 30 years . . . ”
+
+Please, again. I’d like to see one smidgen of evidence that Lynch’s gender is working against her.
+
+So the Lynch delay is about ideology. But not her ideology — President Obama’s. And the Justice Department’s. The case against Lynch is the case against the president’s executive action on immigration and the fact that Lynch said she agreed with the Justice Department’s analysis of their legality.
+
+Which raises the question: How could Republican senators reasonably expect Lynch to take a different view? How could they expect Obama to name any nominee who differed? If they can’t, what is the point — other than as a vehicle for expressing pique — of opposing Lynch?
+
+There’s a legitimate argument about whether the president’s actions went too far. I don’t blame Republicans for chafing at them or for being frustrated at their inability to do much in response.
+
+Holding up spending bills in a fit of temper over Obama’s immigration moves is bad for the country and self-destructive. The courts represent an unlikely avenue of relief. So the Lynch nomination offers one tempting way for Republicans to vent frustration with what they view as executive overreach.
+
+“The Senate shouldn’t confirm any attorney general nominee, from whatever party, of whatever race, ethnicity or gender identification, who believes the president can rewrite the nation’s laws at will,” Lowry wrote in a column for Politico , blithely overstating Lynch’s (and Obama’s) position.
+
+Lowry acknowledged that the ironic result of his approach would be to leave the much-reviled Holder in place. “But there’s no helping that,” he added. “The principle that would be upheld is the Senate not giving its imprimatur to an attorney general who thinks its lawmaking role is optional.”
+
+What about the principle of the Senate deciding that its confirming role is optional? If senators have a serious problem with the president’s selection for a particular job — if they believe the nominee lacks experience, is temperamentally unsuited or is ideologically too far outside the mainstream — they have the constitutional right to reject the choice.
+
+But that’s not Republicans’ beef with Lynch. Their beef with Lynch is that she is Obama’s nominee and shares his views.
+
+In the end, whenever that finally comes, Lynch appears to have enough Republican support to squeeze through — perhaps with Vice President Biden casting the deciding vote. This lets Republicans have their tantrum without being responsible for the logical consequences of their position.
+
+Last week, McConnell refused to bring up Lynch’s nomination while the Senate was stalemated over a human trafficking bill and abortion politics. This week the Senate is busying itself debating a budget that will never be put in place. Then it takes two weeks off.
+
+By which point Lynch’s nomination will have languished for more than five months. Enough. It’s long past time for the Senate to do its job, however grudgingly.
+
+Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.",REAL
+4066,U.S. and Cuba find ‘profound differences’ in first round of talks,"The Cuban and American delegations sat at parallel tables, eight wary diplomats on each side, facing each other across a distance of about six feet and a gulf filled with more than a half-century of grievances.
+
+In separate news conferences afterward, at the end of their first round of talks Thursday, both sides pronounced it “productive,” respectful and positive.
+
+But both acknowledged that “profound differences” remain.
+
+“What you have to recognize,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson said after the initial session, “is that we have . . . to overcome more than 50 years of a relationship that was not based on confidence or trust.”
+
+Josefina Vidal, Jacobson’s counterpart at Cuba’s Foreign Ministry, stressed the importance of approaching each other on the basis of “equal sovereignty” and “avoiding any interference in [each other’s] internal affairs.”
+
+Like Jacobson, Vidal stressed that reopening embassies that were closed in 1961 was just the first step in a complicated process of normalizing relations.
+
+Even that will require further negotiation. For example, Vidal said, “it would be very difficult to explain that there has been a resumption of diplomatic relations . . . while our country unjustly continues to be included on the [U.S.] list of state sponsors of terrorism.”
+
+The sober descriptions of what still divides the two governments deflated some of the enthusiasm for rapid change that has been building on both sides. But the delegations said they would set an early date for another meeting and were committed to the public pledge made by President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro last month to restore diplomatic relations and then begin to tackle other areas of discord.
+
+If body language and ease of public presentation was any guide, Vidal, clearly on her own turf, seemed far more forthcoming than Jacobson in addressing the dozens of U.S. journalists who have traveled to Cuba to cover the talks along with other international news media. She took more questions than Jacobson and translated her own Spanish into fluent English.
+
+But her remarks were also more specific on areas of discord, including what subjects they discussed.
+
+Obama, who announced relations would be restored in a Dec. 17 speech, has said that U.S. human rights concerns would be directly raised in conversations with Cuba.
+
+After the morning session, Jacobson said she had raised the issue; Vidal said it did not come up.
+
+During a second session in the afternoon, the talks moved away from the embassies to areas of current and future cooperation, including counter-narcotics, law enforcement, the environment and international health issues.
+
+But in a statement distributed in Spanish after the talks ended at 7 p.m., the U.S. side said it had “pressured” Cuba on issues of human rights and free expression. In a solo evening news conference, Vidal said the word “pressure” was not spoken in the afternoon session. “That’s not a word used in these kinds of communications,” she said, and “Cuba has a long history of not responding to pressure.”
+
+Vidal said that Cuba had some concerns of its own about human rights in the United States and had renewed a proposal it made a year ago for a separate dialogue in which each country could express its views on the subject.
+
+U.S. officials later said they had erred in using the Spanish verb “presionar,” meaning to pressure, in the statement. The English version said that “we pressed the Cuban government for improved human rights conditions, including freedom of expression and assembly.”
+
+Vidal also said that Cuba was still studying the new trade and travel rules the Obama administration announced last week, particularly those opening the door for U.S. telecommunication companies to do business in Cuba. Havana, she said, was “willing to . . . explore possibilities of doing business [with them] that would benefit both sides.”
+
+After the Thursday morning meeting on embassies, Vidal said that a complete lifting of the 1960 U.S. embargo was “essential” for further normalization but that Cuba recognizes “the willingness of the U.S. president to have a serious and honest debate” with Congress about it taking action to lift the embargo.
+
+But the terrorism list is a different story. Obama has the power to remove Cuba from the list if he determines that Havana has not engaged in terrorism in the recent past and is unlikely to do so in the future. He has asked the State Department to review Cuba’s status and provide a recommendation.
+
+Its presence since 1982 on the list, which includes Iran, Sudan and Syria, is more than a significant irritant to Cuba. Based on an uptick of Obama administration penalties imposed on foreign banks whose business with Cuba has passed through U.S. financial institutions — a practice banned for all on the list — Buffalo-based M&T Bank dropped the Cuban Interests Section in Washington last year as a client.
+
+Since then, U.S. banks have decided to err on the side of caution in avoiding any dealings with Cuba, and none has been willing to open an account for the U.S.-based diplomats, who must conduct all of their transactions in cash.
+
+If its officials were unable to conduct U.S. bank transactions for diplomatic purposes, Vidal and other Cuban officials said, the United States would not be complying with the international conventions on diplomatic practices that both delegations on Thursday said they had agreed would govern their new embassies.
+
+Once he receives State’s recommendation, Obama must transmit his decision to Congress. Assuming a positive outcome, there is a 45-day waiting period before implementation of any removals from the list.
+
+In the streets of Havana this week, Cubans seemed to talk of little else but the opening between the two governments. Cuban news media covered the statements of both sides Thursday and those issued following lower-level talks Wednesday on migration issues.
+
+After the Americans had departed the conference hall, Vidal was asked what she thought was the main news of the day. “The news is that Cuba and the United States met for the first time,” she said, and were checking their calendars to schedule the next session.",REAL
+325,New York prison break: DNA found in cabin,"(CNN) DNA from New York prison escapees Richard Matt and David Sweat has been found inside a burglarized cabin in upstate New York, a law enforcement source told CNN.
+
+The discovery has re-energized the two-week-old search for the convicted killers, who staged a movie scriptworthy escape from Clinton Correctional Facility on June 6 and haven't been seen since -- at least not by authorities.
+
+However, a witness on Saturday spotted someone running into the woods near a cabin in the Mountain View community, only 25 to 30 miles from the prison, according to acting Franklin County District Attorney Glenn MacNeill.
+
+Investigators think the figure spotted Saturday could have been one of the fugitive prisoners, MacNeill said.
+
+Since then, law enforcement authorities have flooded the rural community, swooping in on helicopters, cruisers and all-terrain vehicles to scour the region for the men. More state and federal teams are to be redeployed on Monday, the law enforcement source told CNN.
+
+Briefing reporters Monday, New York State Police Maj. Charles Guess declined to get into specifics about what was found at the cabin for fear of jeopardizing the search.
+
+""It's a confirmed lead for us,"" he said. ""It has generated a massive law enforcement response, as you can see, and we're going to run this to ground.""
+
+The break-in suggests the men ""need provisions and are desperate,"" a law enforcement source briefed on the investigation told CNN's Deborah Feyerick.
+
+There's no evidence the fugitives have the kind of support network they would need to get away from the prison after their plan to get a ride from prison tailor Joyce Mitchell fell apart, the source said.
+
+Are they listening to police radio traffic?
+
+As part of the investigation into whether Matt and Sweat had help, police are reviewing months worth of hotel registries in the area, the source said.
+
+Meanwhile, searchers are now working to contain the two men in the area, knowing they are running and on foot, the source said.
+
+Authorities also are concerned that Matt and Sweat may be monitoring radio communications, the source said, without being specific on whether the men have radios or similar devices giving them the ability to monitor police communications.
+
+Regardless, the sighting and DNA discovery explain the sudden shift in the search from an area near New York's border with Pennsylvania, some 260 miles to the southwest of the prison, where much of the weekend search had focused after somebody reported a possible sighting of the two fugitives.
+
+That search wrapped up late Sunday, New York State Police said.
+
+MacNeill urged residents in Franklin County to be alert for potential danger during the search for the escaped killers, whom authorities described last week as posing a ""significant threat to anyone who may come into contact with them.""
+
+""Be inside with the doors locked and very diligent,"" MacNeill warned residents.
+
+Investigators are looking into whether Mitchell convinced a prison guard to pass the meat to the inmates in a way that bypassed a metal detector, the source said. The two escapees were housed in an honor block where they were allowed to cook their own food.
+
+Their escape set off a massive search for them and a probing investigation of employees and practices at the prison.
+
+Mitchell has been charged with aiding the escapees, and a corrections officer has been placed on paid leave, authorities have said.
+
+'When it's in your backyard, it's kind of crazy'
+
+The troopers set up roadblocks just across the street, off county Highway 27, she said.
+
+They set up a command post using ATVs. One trooper asked Pulsifer for a map of snowmobile trails in the area, which is near a winter ski resort and in an area criss-crossed with recreational trails.
+
+""I'm kind of excited but nervous at the same time,"" Pulsifer told CNN, adding that her boss had told her to close the bar early because of safety concerns.
+
+She said she'd followed the news of the manhunt as it unfolded previously in Cadyville, another town in the region.
+
+""Now, when it's in your backyard, it's kind of crazy,"" she told CNN, saying she planned to go home and lock up with her gun.
+
+Pulsifer's concerns are familiar to people in Friendship, the rural town near the Pennsylvania border where somebody reported seeing two men along a railroad line on Saturday.
+
+Many residents spent the rest of the weekend holed up in their homes while around 300 law enforcement officers combed the area.
+
+Gary Baker, 80, said he was terrified of the possibility that the killers could be nearby.
+
+Baker is a caretaker at the town's Maple Grove Cemetery, right next to his home. But authorities blocked off the cemetery as search helicopters hovered overhead.
+
+Baker was left to sit alone in his home, with all his doors locked and a rifle in his lap.
+
+Franklin County and Friendship aren't the only communities where police have swarmed in the hunt for Matt and Sweat. The manhunt, now in its 17th day, has primarily been focused in the area around Dannemora, where the prison is situated.
+
+Described by authorities as ""very dangerous,"" the two killers have been added to the U.S. Marshals Service's list of its 15 most wanted fugitives. Reward money of $75,000 has been offered for information leading to the capture of either man.
+
+As many as 800 law enforcement officers have participated in the manhunt, which has cleared nearly 200 abandoned buildings, hundreds of occupied homes and more than 600 miles of rural trails, officials said.
+
+State police have asked hunters and homeowners with surveillance cameras to check their footage all the way back to the day of the prison break for any unusual activity.
+
+The search has stretched to Canada and Mexico, with wanted posters of the escaped killers given out at both borders.
+
+Authorities are still investigating how exactly Matt and Sweat managed to orchestrate their escape, which involved cutting through a steel wall and navigating a series of tunnels until the men emerged from a manhole outside the prison walls.
+
+Mitchell, a prison tailor shop instructor, is accused of helping them by supplying tools like chisels and drill bits. She is in jail and has pleaded not guilty to the charges against her.
+
+A source familiar with the investigation has told CNN that Mitchell, 51, had a sexual relationship with Matt.
+
+Investigators are looking into whether other prison staff members or inmates played a role in the breakout.
+
+Authorities said Friday that a male corrections officer was placed on paid administrative leave as part of the investigation into the escape.
+
+State authorities haven't named the officer, but his attorney identified him Sunday as Gene Palmer, a 28-year veteran of Clinton Correctional Facility.
+
+""Right now Mr. Palmer is fully cooperating with any or all questions that are being asked of him,"" attorney Andrew Brockway told CNN on Sunday. ""He spent 14 hours yesterday and he was completely forthcoming.""
+
+Palmer knew Matt and Sweat and had received a painting done by Matt, but Brockway said he is sure his client did not know the inmates were planning an escape.
+
+""He wants these two individuals to be caught, and anything that he can do to help law enforcement do their job, he's willing to cooperate,"" Brockway said Monday.
+
+A retired sergeant at the prison, Jeff Dumas, said he is sure Palmer was not involved in any escape plot.
+
+""I don't believe that he actually intentionally helped these guys,"" Dumas told CNN's ""New Day.""
+
+He said Palmer was one of two corrections officers responsible for escorting inmates to and from work at the prison's industrial building and was always conscientious in his work.
+
+""My gut feeling is that somehow they may have conned him or taken a shortcut somewhere along the way in procedures during an escort and that would be about it,"" Dumas said.
+
+""These two people are psychopaths, they are master manipulators,"" Brockway said of Matt and Sweat. ""They're obviously in prison for life so they have nothing but time to develop schemes to take advantage of innocent people.""",REAL
+8778,Crooked Hillary Risks Having ‘Blue Dress Moment’ By Aggressively Attacking FBI And James Comey,"  Crooked Hillary Risks Having ‘Blue Dress Moment’ By Aggressively Attacking FBI And James Comey Since Crooked Hillary has no idea what the FBI actually found, her gambit is every bit as bold, and reckless, as was her husband's decades earlier. She has now painted herself into the proverbial corner, and any evidence that the FBI produces will be amplified in light of her vigorous denials.   30, 2016 Interestingly, in 2016 at the height of the race for president, Hillary decides to adopt Bill’s bold denial strategy 
+Way back when in 1998 , as the Bill Clinton sex scandal with intern Monica Lewinsky was coming to light, Slick Willy decided on a very risky strategy. Knowing full well that he was 100% guilty as charged, he decided to look right into the unblinking eye of the camera and issue a full-throated denial of any involvement of any kind. Watch and see it for yourself: Bill Clinton denies having an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky: 
+Now what Bill Clinton did not know was that Monica had saved a semen-stained blue dress with Bill Clinton’s semen on it, which she promptly presented as evidence to prove that she was not lying. By this time she was being trashed by Clinton operatives desperate to save Bill’s presidency, chief of whom was Crooked Hillary who had lots of nasty things to say about her husband’s victims. That led to this moment as seen here: Bill Clinton admits to having an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky: Interestingly, in 2016 at the height of the race for president, Hillary decides to adopt Bill’s bold denial strategy 
+Hillary Clinton’s campaign hopes, as reported by Bloomberg today , its unusually swift response to revelations about a fresh FBI investigation into messages in connection with a past probe of her private e-mail server will blunt the political damage amid concern about close Senate races as well as the presidential election. 
+With nine days to go until the election , Clinton and her aides went on the attack, intensifying criticism of James Comey as word emerged that the FBI director defied U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch by informing lawmakers of newly discovered e-mails that may relate to its investigation of the Democratic presidential nominee. Hillary Clinton addresses FBI email investigation: 
+Clinton’s aggressive strategy contrasts with her bunker mentality in previous episodes of the controversy over her e-mail practices at the State Department. Her campaign is taking a calculated risk in publicly criticizing Comey and pressing him to quickly release more detail. Should new information contradict past statements or call into question the judgment of Clinton or any of her advisers who migrated from the Obama administration to her campaign, it could be damaging. 
+Her rival Donald Trump told an audience in Phoenix the “only reason” Comey must have felt the need to tell lawmakers of the newly discovered e-mails is that “very, very serious things must be happening and must have been found. Very, very serious. Very, very serious.” 
+Since Crooked Hillary has no idea what the FBI actually found, her gambit is every bit as bold, and reckless, as was her husband’s decades earlier. She has now painted herself into the proverbial corner, and any evidence that the FBI produces will be amplified in light of her vigorous denials. The WikiLeaks emails showed us that even John Podesta said she “lacks judgment” and discernment , and this is certain proof of that. 
+But such is life when you’re a Clinton. Look right into the camera and commence lying. This is how they roll. 
+ ",FAKE
+257,McCarthy Bombshell Leaves House GOP in Chaos,"House Republicans are in chaos after Thursday's political bombshell when Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the handpicked successor to Speaker John Boehner, announced he would not seek the post.
+
+The prospects for electing a new speaker have dimmed. House Republicans are asking who now?
+
+""I think I shocked some of you, huh?"" McCarthy said. ""The one thing I found in talking to everybody -- if we are gonna unite and be strong, we need a new face to help do that.""
+
+""The Republican Party has to show it can govern. We can't go on like this. This is insanity,"" he told the Daily News.
+
+McCarthy's decision came after a closed-door meeting with the same conservatives who would challenge him on the House floor as speaker.
+
+It also came after a letter from Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., calling for the next speaker to be above reproach in his or her personal life.
+
+""I know what can happen to a party when you don't demand honesty and integrity in your leadership. I've seen it. I know what can happen,"" Jones told CBN News by phone.
+
+CBN News' Jennifer Wishon spoke with Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., about his letter to the Republican Conference Chairman.
+
+Two candidates for speaker -- Rep. Daniel Webster, R-Fla., and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah -- both say they were shocked by McCarthy's withdrawal.
+
+""Our conference is gonna have to do a lot of deep soul searching,"" Chaffetz said. ""And we'll see what happens.""
+
+The House speakership is a grueling, often thankless job, something akin to herding cats, and many of the House's brightest stars simply do not want the job.
+
+Some are now urging former GOP vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to throw his hat into the ring, though he still says he's not running.
+
+Some are even throwing out the name of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is no longer a member of Congress. The House constitution does require the speaker to be an elected member.
+
+For now, the McCarthy withdrawal means Boehner will have to stay on as speaker.",REAL
+9339,5 Things Teachers Are Doing During Midterm That Isn’t A Massive Session,"0 Add Comment 
+AS TEACHERS in Ireland enjoy some well earned time off this week, they have been plagued by the undeserved stereotype of being hard party animals that love nothing more than to be 4 days into a session with no end in sight. 
+WWN carried out some extensive research to discover not all teachers fit the lazy stereotype and are actually making the most of their time off. 
+Here’s 5 things they’re doing that won’t result in them ending up face down in a pool of their own vomit while haphazardly correcting your child’s ‘I love my Mammy because’ essay. 
+1) Pre-Session 
+Don’t even try to class this as a balls to the wall session. It isn’t. Do not misunderstand the situation. A pre-session is no more a session than the Pope is a Muslim. So don’t try and pull a fast one on teachers. Sure it can’t be a session, there’s no drugs in sight, trust us, we looked. 
+2) Just the one 
+Just going for the one is simply that, an expression of a desire to have a casual catch up with a fellow teacher friend without being unfairly labelled a basket case that can’t go two minutes without recreating their favourite scenes from Trainspotting. And it’s still ‘just the one’ if it’s an early house, after ambling home from last night’s pre-session. 
+3) Correcting essays 
+See, it’s not all fun and games and importing four tonnes of class A drugs. Teachers have some serious work to do, and a bottle of wine and a line will certainly make the whole thing go more smoothly. 
+4) Bumping into a student in a nightclub 
+An awkward encounter many people can sympathise with. What is your favourite pupil Thomas doing in Flannerys at 2.30am? And what’s he eating a Toffee Crisp for? Why is his mother shouting at you? Wait, why does Flanneys now look eerily like a suburban front garden. An easy mistake to make, don’t worry about it. 
+5) Re-lax-ing-the-fuck-out 
+Educating the Nation’s little shits isn’t easy, we can only imagine, which is why teachers often just catch up on their sleep during a midterm. Or if sleep isn’t possible, a trance sleep-like state after necking some Ketamine in a field in Kildare.",FAKE
+1462,Hillary Clinton’s absurd Bernie smear: Why attacking him from the right on healthcare makes literally no sense at all,"Sanders, she now insists, would do so from the left by instituting a program — single-payer healthcare — that would be more progressive than the Affordable Care Act. Yet this possibility is portrayed in the starkest of terms. It’s as if the Clinton campaign saw a house burning down and told the fire department to put it out by setting the house next door on fire to suck up all the oxygen feeding the flames.
+
+The attack is predicated on a bill that Sanders introduced in the Senate in 2013 that would have set up national single-payer. The bill would have required each state to set up its own single-payer program. A federal board would oversee these state programs and take charge of any that don’t meet whatever requirements it lays out. All federal programs – Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP – would have been folded into these state-run ones.
+
+In a way, Sanders’ bill was structured a little like Obamacare, with each state having the option of setting up a marketplace exchange to sell insurance plans, and the federal government operating one large exchange for consumers in states that don’t want to run their own. Since it would have moved even further to the left than the ACA, obviously it was dead on arrival in Congress.
+
+What’s particularly weird is Clinton’s specific accusation that Sanders’ single-payer plan would allow states to opt out altogether. As if Bernie Sanders, the self-described national democratic socialist, would design a health insurance plan with a giant sop to conservatives. It is, simply put, divorced from reality.
+
+The Clinton campaign has pressed this attack hard all week, even going so far as to have Chelsea Clinton, who has never been much of an attack dog, go on the trail to slam Sanders for a proposal that would “strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance.” That’s a lot of millions! It also makes Bernie Sanders sound like Mitch McConnell, only with a more grating accent.
+
+It’s a typical Clinton campaign move. Have a bad week at the polls? Overreact with a terrible, transparent attack that anyone with an IQ north of negative can see through. The fact that this move might alienate the Sanders supporters she’ll need later on if she wins the nomination does not seem to enter the calculation.
+
+I’ve been watching liberals grumble about this whole blow-up in my Twitter feed for a couple of days, calling Clinton dishonest and dirty while also acknowledging that there is some value to having this fight now, in the primaries, so as to sharpen the general Democratic healthcare platform before the general election. There have also been suggestions that Sanders and Clinton could unite to push some sort of public option, the fabled unicorn the Obama administration took off the table while writing the ACA back in 2009, thus dooming its progressive credibility for all time in some circles.
+
+Settling on a healthcare goal for the party platform is a worthy goal of this debate, if that’s in fact what’s going on here. But Democrats could all save themselves a fair amount of grief by remembering this truth: No healthcare proposal from Sanders or Clinton, be it a public option or a single-payer system, has any chance in hell of passing through the Congress that the next president will be saddled with. I know it’s fashionable in some quarters to talk about bringing a political revolution to Washington, but the reality is that the major barrier to enacting single-payer or adding a public option to the ACA remains Congress and the army of industry lobbyists who will descend on it the minute the insurance companies think their bottom lines are in jeopardy. Plus the House of Representatives is likely to stay under Republican control after November, and those Republicans are going to be the same stubborn, jelly-brained nihilists who have turned President Obama’s hair gray over the last seven years. An even if by some miracle the House flips to the Democrats, a president would still have to contend with the Senate. There is a chance the Democrats could become the majority party there, but it won’t be a 60-member supermajority that marches in ideological lockstep. Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson may be gone, but the chamber has not yet been fumigated of their spirits. In fact, assuming the next president is a Democrat, his or her main job with regard to healthcare will be keeping Republicans from repealing the Affordable Care Act. Adding to it or fixing some of its flaws will likely have to wait until either we have a more liberal Congress or the Republican Party decides to start governing again. Everything else we’re hearing is just noise. Of course, maybe President Clinton or President Sanders will surprise us all and pull off a couple of miracles. But considering how insane the election of either is likely to drive the GOP, some pessimism is definitely warranted.",REAL
+5357,This video of a woman stuck in a freezer raises more questions than it answers,Next Prev Swipe left/right This video of a woman stuck in a freezer raises more questions than it answers How on earth do you get into a situation like this? Our guess is that it probably involved alcohol. (NSFW language),FAKE
+73,House Dems ‘shame’ opponents of defeated LGBT rights bill,"Shouts of “shame, shame, shame” erupted in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday as Republican lawmakers narrowly defeated legislation to protect the civil rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees of government contractors.
+
+The measure, an amendment to a veterans and military construction spending bill introduced by New York Democrat Sean Maloney, initially had enough “yes” votes to pass, according to the count in the House chamber.
+
+But House Republican leaders extended the time allowed for the vote as they urged enough party members to change their positions to defeat it by a vote of 213 to 212.
+
+All 183 Democrats who voted backed the amendment, joined by 29 Republicans. All 213 “no’s” were from Republicans. Eight House members – three Republicans and five Democrats – did not vote.
+
+LGBT rights have been a hot-button issue during the 2016 election season. National politics have featured debate over whether making cakes for same-sex couples violates bakers’ religious freedom or whether the government should decide which public bathrooms are used by transgender people.
+
+Democrats chanted “shame, shame, shame” at Republicans, drawing attention to the vote. Steny Hoyer, the number two House Democrat, denounced it in a fiery speech. “We had 217 people for non-discrimination right up until the last moment,” he said.
+
+Thursday’s emotional vote came hours after the House late on Wednesday passed a $602 billion defense authorization bill that included “religious freedom” language that critics said would allow contractors to discriminate against LGBT individuals.
+
+The House Rules committee had angered Democrats by voting along party lines late on Tuesday not to allow a vote on an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have eliminated that language.
+
+Republicans who backed the provision said it was necessary to protect the religious rights of military contractors and not intended to be discriminatory.",REAL
+414,Here's How Inflation Has Eroded American Workers' Overtime Eligibility,"President Obama is once again poised to go it alone on labor policy, this time on overtime. The Labor Department is expected in the coming weeks to release a rule making millions more Americans eligible for overtime work — currently, all workers earning below $455 a week, or $23,660 a year, are guaranteed time-and-a-half pay for working more than 40 hours a week. The law may raise that as high as $52,000, Politico reports.
+
+The rule would also change the regulations outlining which employees earning above that threshold are eligible — currently, employers can exempt some employees above that threshold if those workers could be considered ""white collar.""
+
+This would add to a series of workplace policies that, failing congressional approval, the president has expanded in limited form through executive order — upping the minimum wage among federal contractors and attempting to shrink the gender wage gap among federal contractors. He also mandated paid leave for federal workers.
+
+This particular rule change would be a long time in coming — Obama had in March 2014 directed the Labor Department to overhaul the overtime regulations.
+
+The overtime threshold has only been changed once since 1975. At that time, it was set at $250 per week. Then in 2004, President George W. Bush updated it to $455. And that means inflation has slowly diminished the share of Americans who are guaranteed eligibility.
+
+When you adjust for inflation, you can see how much the threshold has fallen — data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve (going back to 1979) show that, as of the late 1970s, the threshold was right at or slightly above the median worker's pay level. Today, it's at around half.
+
+The income line in the chart — that top one — represents the exact middle wage, with half the full-time working population above and below it at any given time. So while the threshold fell away from the median pay level, so did the number of workers legally guaranteed overtime pay.
+
+Indeed, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, as of 2013, only 11 percent of full-time workers were guaranteed overtime. Bumping the threshold up to around $50,000, for example — roughly where it was in 1975, adjusted for inflation — would bring 47 percent of workers under the threshold, making around 6 million more workers eligible, by one estimate.
+
+The debate over the overtime threshold sounds remarkably similar to the minimum-wage debate — in that debate, opponents in the business community say a higher wage would cost jobs. In the debate over overtime, the fear is that it could cost workers hours as employers decide they don't want to shell out time-and-a-half pay.
+
+And as in the minimum-wage debate, advocates of higher overtime thresholds say lawmakers should simply index the level to inflation — not only would it save lawmakers from periodic fights over how much to change the law, but it would also help lower-paid hourly workers by making sure they're all paid fairly by keeping wage policies consistent with where prices go.
+
+""The original notion was that the people who don't control their own hours, who need the protection of the law, get paid overtime,"" says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at EPI. ""Where the law set the threshold in 1975, that's really supposed to demarcate the people about whom there's no question — they are not the most powerful people.""
+
+Tying the level to inflation, he says, would ensure that the workers who need the overtime are consistently eligible for it.
+
+The threshold has never been tied to inflation, and advocates like Eisenbrey and the liberal Center for American Progress have long pushed for such a change.
+
+But opponents see reason to keep the level static. One reason, says one economist, is that an indexed overtime level doesn't give businesses enough leeway to deal with high inflation.
+
+""I think it's a bad idea [to index the overtime threshold to inflation] because you want to preserve some flexibility,"" says Michael Strain, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. ""We have been in a low-inflation environment for some time, and we're kind of used to that in how we look at things. But it's entirely conceivable that 10 years from now, we may be in a different environment.""
+
+And without that flexibility, employers might further restrict hours, or they might pressure employees to get even more work done in their 40 hours.
+
+Another argument is that inflation isn't uniform everywhere. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued in a February letter to Secretary of Labor Tom Perez that the price index used to adjust wages is based on prices in urban areas — it could distort labor markets in rural areas.
+
+But then, inflation will still happen, and the threshold would still periodically have to rise. So how do you ensure that Congress does it? Strain says one solution could be including a provision in the overtime law that forces Congress to revisit the policy every few years. That way, the policy isn't on ""autopilot,"" he says, but it still changes regularly.
+
+Even then, however, there's no guarantee Congress would actually regularly change the law. After all, it has an annual deadline to pass a budget. It hasn't passed all its spending bills on time in almost 20 years.",REAL
+1576,What I Learned Watching 15 Hours of Cruz Family Videos,"It’s called Project X, according to the clapperboard seen briefly deep into the footage: roughly 15 hours of raw, unedited video meant for use in making ads for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. Vast swaths are just Cruz and his wife and their two young daughters—matching dresses a must—walking, talking, smiling, laughing, fishing, eating, holding hands, riding horses, doing puzzles, reading stories, saying grace. Cruz spends some time toting a shotgun around a field and firing it at unseen targets in the sky.
+
+Filmed the last week of last year—some three months before Cruz made his candidacy official with a speech at Liberty University—it was discovered this past summer on YouTube, labeled online simply as Cruz TX Footage 01 to 16.
+
+Clips have been surfacing on TV and the Internet, showing odd glimpses of the life of a highly scripted candidate. Some of the things in the clips we already know: Cruz and his father, for instance, are gifted talkers. What they say on camera is rehearsed and familiar, as in nearly verbatim, to anybody who has seen their stump speeches.
+
+But watch all of it, and you learn some things about Ted Cruz that are hard to imagine ever showing up in a campaign ad. Despite the stagecraft, you encounter a family that’s messier than the one you’ll almost certainly see portrayed as the Cruz campaign enters the thick of the primaries. The footage offers an intriguing familial mishmash of single mothers, half-siblings and stepparents, bearing burdens of modern America—depression, drinking, drugs.
+
+Cruz’s wife, an executive for Goldman Sachs currently on a leave of absence because of the campaign, describes herself as “a traditional mom,” albeit one who cops to not cooking, and likens her handling of multimillion-dollar investment portfolios to her family’s missionary work in Africa.
+
+Cruz’s daughters adore him, you’re told, and yet you learn that they sometimes consider him “a guest” in their Houston home.
+
+It also becomes clear that the death of Cruz’s half sister—and what he then did for her son—is a story he thinks reflects well enough on him that he wants to tell it in all its wince-inducing detail.
+
+Cruz’s mother is the least willing participant here—the most interesting, too, in part because she is at times so obviously reluctant to play along.
+
+Why is this available, all of it, to anyone? Evidently, shooting video like this and posting it in a public space lets campaigns and their supportive PACs share the content without technically communicating, which would be against the rules.
+
+What’s great about this footage is the camera keeps rolling, people keep talking, and Cruz keeps rubbing, and rubbing, and rubbing, his family members’ shoulders and backs. The staged hugs, the awkward outtakes, the never-to-be-prime-time scenes, the unrehearsed, off-script interactions—these are the moments that feel the most revealing, the most captivating, the most authentic. It’s an unexpected window into the orbit of a candidate who is otherwise disciplined and relentlessly on-message.
+
+Here, seated on an overstuffed chair, is a person you’re not expecting: a heavyset, blue-eyed young man wearing a buzz cut, a red and white shirt with horizontal stripes and a smattering of tattoos on his arms. Does one of them say menace? On a matching chair to his left: the Princeton-educated, Harvard-educated former Supreme Court clerk and current U.S. senator and presidential candidate to whom he’s related.
+
+“My name is Joe Maykopet,” he says, to the camera and everybody else, “I’m 29 years old, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this is my uncle, Ted Cruz.”
+
+It’s unclear what purpose he’s supposed to serve in this context.
+
+“You know, my nephew Joey,” Cruz says, reaching over and placing his hand on Maykopet’s back, “is someone who I’ve known his entire life. I remember holding Joey when he was a newborn baby—I was 15 when he was born. His mom is my oldest sister, Miriam. Miriam is nine years older than I am. I have two older sisters, Miriam and Roxana, who are a year apart in age. And they’re half sisters. They’re sisters from my father’s first marriage.
+
+“And when both of them were little girls, our father and their mom divorced,” Cruz continues. “And, you know, kids react differently to divorce. They react differently to their parents splitting apart. It was very hard on my sister Miriam. It was very hard on her. She, like a lot of kids unfortunately do, think she blamed herself as a little girl for her parents not staying together.
+
+Cruz doesn’t say how—but she died, in 2011, in Pennsylvania, of an accidental drug overdose. It remains unclear at this point in the footage how this information might find its way into a political ad.
+
+“Um, when Miriam got older, um, she struggled,” he says. “She had a difficult life. Miriam had a lot of problems with alcohol abuse and substance abuse pretty much her entire adult life. Um, she took a lot of pain meds, she took a lot of—she made a lot of bad choices.”
+
+He keeps talking—about how she “raised Joey as a single mom,” how she “had problems with the law,” how she “fell in with some pretty unsavory characters,” how he and his father once went to Philadelphia, where she was living, “in what was basically a crack house,” leaving behind their “rings and watches and wallets,” to try to “help her get back on her feet.”
+
+All of this unspools, uncomfortably, as Maykopet sits listening to Cruz’s version of his sad, challenging upbringing with his late mother, at the end of which, finally, Cruz gets to what appears to be the takeaway.
+
+The loan he took out on his credit card to pay for Maykopet to go to boarding school.
+
+“All told,” Cruz says, “it was about $20,000.”
+
+Maykopet then talks for a while about his life ever since—he works in a chocolate factory—before a man behind the camera cuts to the crux.
+
+“Let’s wrap it up,” comes the voice from behind the camera, “and say, ‘I look back and really appreciate the sacrifice my Uncle Ted made when I was younger. It really helped me get some discipline, and it turned my life around. I really appreciate it.’”
+
+“OK, can you say that again?” Maykopet says, working to remember what they’re wanting him to say.
+
+“One more hug, and we’re out of here,” says the cameraman.
+
+What is Daddy doing? Why is Daddy in D.C.?
+
+“OK, I’m going to say what I really think. You guys can decide if you want to use this,” Heidi Cruz says into the camera with a laugh.
+
+About to say something she knows she shouldn’t—yet clearly she has things to say.",REAL
+6304,Set Staff Horrified At What Hillary Is Caught Doing After Brutal Interview,"Set Staff Horrified At What Hillary Is Caught Doing After Brutal Interview Posted on October 27, 2016 by Amanda Shea in Politics Share This Set of the Commander-in-Chief Forum (left), Hillary Clinton at the Forum (right) 
+It was only a matter of time before the glue that keeps Hillary Clinton together cracked and her true evil self came out from behind her forced smile. Looking visibly uncomfortable in front of the camera during a particularly brutal interview, Hillary exited stage left as quick as she could when a horrified staff member caught what she did backstage. 
+Hillary probably felt safe going into the interview by liberal-leaning Matt Lauer, who conducted a televised question and answer session with the Democratic candidate in September at the Commander-in-Chief Forum. As she’s apparently accustomed to, Hillary allegedly received a list of questions before the event, so she could prepare her answers (lies) and prevent being caught on the spot to come up with what to say, making her come across flawlessly to the public. Thinking everything was worked to her advantage as is typically the case, Lauer threw the candidate a curve ball that Hillary couldn’t hide from. 
+According to The Watch Towers, a Comcast official (the parent company of NBC Universal) stated that Lauer went rogue when he asked “one legitimate question about the FBI investigation concerning her homemade server and the unsecured emails.” The alleged informant said at that point “we could see she (Hillary) was beginning to boil.” 
+It’s evident by her expression and tone caught in the recording of the Forum interview that Hillary wasn’t happy about being forced to answer a question she wasn’t prepared for. Holding her rage inside the best she could, the person claiming to be a producer on the set, accused Hillary of launching an explosive verbal assault on her staff backstage after the interview. 
+“She was in a full meltdown and no one on her staff dared speak with her – she went kind of manic and didn’t have any control over herself at that point,” the anonymous informant claimed in an unconfirmed report by Watch Towers . 
+“Hillary proceeded to pick up a full glass of water and throw it at the face of her assistant, and the screaming started,” the description of the alleged events also said. The staffer claimed that they heard Hillary turn her rage on Donald Trump, saying, “If that f – – – ing bastard wins, we all hang from nooses! Lauer’s finished…and if I lose it’s all on your heads for screwing this up.” 
+While the reports of this incident have not been authenticated, it definitely doesn’t seem out of character for Hillary, and with what happened to Lauer after the interview certainly shows that the Democratic candidate complained. “Matt Lauer was massively criticized for the rest of the week on air by the Clinton campaign and the rest of the MSM as having conducted ‘an unfair and partisan attack on Clinton’,” Watch Towers reported. 
+As we saw in the court hearings over Benghazi, Hillary is a loose cannon when being called out on her illegal, dishonest, and deadly actions that she’s not used to being confronted on. Whether this explosive tirade happened or not — to any degree of severity — her angry actions against the American people and our heroes she disrespects, speak volumes about who she is, which isn’t someone we need leading our country.",FAKE
+9873,"Hillary Collapses On Her Way To The Stage, Sellout Bruce Springsteen Covers For Her – The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense","Home Election 2016 Hillary Collapses On Her Way To The Stage, Sellout Bruce Springsteen Covers For Her Hillary Collapses On Her Way To The Stage, Sellout Bruce Springsteen Covers For Her Stryker Election 2016 , Leftist Corruption , Liberals Behaving Like Liberals 0 
+Hillary Clinton’s sad last push for votes was supposed to culminate in a gathering of “talent” the left was calling “The Avengers of campaigning.” Hillary, Slick Willy, Barry Soetoro and Moochelle along with Creepy Uncle Joe Biden were to all come together at a huge show featuring hasbeens Bon Jovi and working class sellout Bruce Springsteen. 
+From one libtard to the next, promises of work-free lives filled with food stamp steak and lobster flew amid delusional dreams of free college education for everyone and a health care system that will cure what ails you for eleven bucks a month, no questions asked. The $15 minimum wage and 90 percent tax on the people who have done well in America were celebrated with great vigor, until it came time for the woman of the hour herself to take the stage. 
+Bruce Springsteen, acting as master of ceremonies, shouted over the roar of the feminist-laden crowd, “Here she is, and I’m with her!” Unfortunately, she never appeared in the spotlight. 
+Springsteen, after holding a finger to his earpiece, picked up his acoustic guitar and started slowly picking away a familiar tune. He turned to the audience and said: 
+“You know, before the next President of the United States comes out here I want to make sure we’re all ready. Are you ready?” The crowd cheered. “If there’s one thing we’ve always known about this amazing woman, one thing that w2as never in question, it’s that she was born to run.” 
+As the crowd went nuts for the popular song, interns and medical staff were reportedly attending to Clinton backstage after she collapsed from an unknown ailment. The press was quickly corralled and swept aside, but a couple of rogue stagehands tweeted about the incident before they were discovered and their posts deleted. This screenshot was grabbed within a minute of it being tweeted: 
+Clinton is said to have looked pale and distant, unaware of her surroundings. As of the writing of this article, Springsteen was still playing his set. Join The Resistance And Share This Article Now! 234 ",FAKE
+10479,Freeing Yourself From Overwhelm,"By Jacob Devaney / upliftconnect.com 
+Overwhelm is a constant state of being for many of us, but it doesn’t need to be. Most of us are under a deluge of responsibilities like running errands, responding to emails, keeping up with house-chores, hurrying to meetings, and more. Though this is normal in our modern lives, our nervous system struggles to keep up. If we don’t make a conscious effort to relieve this kind of stress, our adrenals get depleted, and sometimes we get sick. Luckily overwhelm is not about how much is going on in your life, it is all about how you manage things. Let’s dissect overwhelm from a neurological perspective and explore ways to reduce its impact on our lives. 
+When life’s circumstances overwhelm our ability to cope or integrate, our nervous system goes into a stress response. It doesn’t need to be a life-threatening incident for the nervous system to trigger a fight, flight or collapse response. The interesting thing is that it is purely subjective. It can be as simple as a “perceived threat”, like being embarrassed in public, imagining that you will get fired for being late, or having a squirrel run in front of your car. Regardless of how big or small the incident is, our system can go into overwhelm, causing our brain to release all the stress hormones that accompany it. 
+It can be as simple as a “perceived threat” like imagining that you will get fired for being late. Self Awareness to the Rescue 
+We pride ourselves in being busy. Many of us feel like something is wrong if we are tired, or feeling lazy and want to lay on the couch and stare at a wall. Actually, this is the parasympathetic, restorative nervous system that is inviting us to step out of our constant ‘go-go-go’ state so that we can unwind. Laying in the grass and looking at the clouds is actually much better for us than being on a couch staring at a wall, but we rarely make a conscious decision to do so. Instead, we collapse right in the middle of cleaning our house and then beat ourselves up for being lazy. 
+Humans have a very different way of coping with stress than all other primates. In order to conquer fire (a trait that has allowed humans to climb to the top of the food chain), we had to develop regions of the brain that suppress our fear so that we can overcome it. The stress hormones associated with fear are still released even if we don’t indulge them. Animals instantly discharge these hormones, but humans need to do this consciously. In other words, we have to make a choice to actively engage in practices that reset our nervous system. As we have explored in How to Relieve Stress Stored in our Bodies , this process can be a whole lot of fun and very rewarding on many levels. 
+In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. -Clarissa Estes 
+Humans have a very different way of coping with stress than all other primates. Information Overwhelm 
+We live in a time of extreme bombardment of information, along with a desire to wake up socially and address the many problems facing the world. There is no effective solution when we come from a constant state of overwhelm. Being relaxed and clear-minded is the only way to approach these seemingly insurmountable issues. This research is well documented in the Uplift article Will Humanity Choose Love or Fear? Is the information you are reading an immediate threat to your survival… Probably not. 
+Information overload occurs when a person is exposed to more information than the brain can process at one time. – Lucy Jo Palladino , Ph.D Hemispheric Disconnect 
+The right hemisphere of our brains is great for creativity and spirituality, it is where we go when we ponder the eternal nature of things, yet it doesn’t comprehend time sequencing. Understanding this is paramount to taking the reigns on our overwhelm and positioning us to have greater coping skills. This unconscious, biologically-wired, stress response is explored in Get to Know Your Amygdala . 
+The right hemisphere processes experience differently from the left – non-verbally through body sensations, visual images, emotions, and holistically – it processes the gestalt of someone’s face or energy globally, all at once, rather than in a linear data bit by data bit mode. The right hemisphere is where we get our “gut” intuitive sense of things and the gestalt of things as a whole. The right hemisphere is the seat of the social and personal self. The right hemisphere regulates the sub-cortical limbic system and is dominant for social-emotional processing. -Linda Graham 
+We live in a time of extreme bombardment of information. How Do We Get Past Overwhelm? 
+Step One is as simple as recognizing that you are operating from a state of overwhelm. Self-awareness breaks us out of unconscious patterning, and this is central to the practice of mindfulness. Learning to check in with one’s self by pausing is also a great way to develop emotional intelligence. 
+Step Two is to take a few deep breathes after recognizing that you are overwhelmed. This also works if you are angry, sad, or reacting out of fear. Since the emotional response is rooted in the right hemisphere, it always feels immediate. By breathing you are helping your mind integrate the threat level into time synchronisation, which is a left-brain process that will help relax your nervous system. 
+Step Three is to remind yourself that you are safe, and to develop strategies to call on this sense of safety when needed. This is known as resourcing one’s self, and there are healthy ways of doing it, as well as unhealthy ways. Hint: reaching for a cigarette, or indulging in television, drugs, or junk-food is not as effective as 5 minutes of stretching, mindful breathing, or taking a moment to connect with nature. 
+Step Four is to help your body let go of any stress hormones that may have been released into your system at the first moment of panic/overwhelm. Shake like a dog, jump up and down or do some psoas stretches to discharge the nervous system and help you reset your physical body as well as your emotional body. 
+Self-awareness breaks us out of unconscious patterning. 
+Overwhelm has a whole lot to do with our perceptions. We   expand our mental-emotional container to be able to integrate larger and larger amounts of information without succumbing to overwhelm in the first place. The steps above will help you deal with overwhelm when it hits you, but a daily mindfulness practice will help you reduce the instances when you are thrown into overwhelm. The ability to respond without reacting, to observe without indulging, will help you increase success in your life on many levels. It will also be a valuable skill in rapidly changing times! 
+Jacob Devaney - Founder and director of Culture Collective, creative activist, musician, and producer. 0.0 ·",FAKE
+2073,Global warming sparks partisan firestorm on once-sleepy House committee,"It was once a sleepy Capitol Hill backwater with a reputation for bipartisanship, where freshman lawmakers would learn the ropes of lawmaking and budgets.
+
+Now the recent blow-up over climate research on the House science committee is the latest firefight on a panel that’s more partisan and backbiting than ever, members and former staff say.
+
+As Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) has molded the committee with a more aggressive role in oversight than anyone can remember, he and his Democratic counterpart are feuding openly over what the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology should really be doing: supporting science or debunking it.
+
+The sniping between the lawmakers and their staffs is ratcheting up with Smith’s highest-profile campaign yet, to discredit scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who published a pivotal study that refuted the idea that global warming had “paused” over the past decade.
+
+In recent weeks, ranking member Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D) a soft-spoken Texan in her 22nd year on the committee, has sent Smith a series of blistering letters denouncing his subpoena of the scientists and other NOAA staff as, alternately, a “fishing expedition,” a “witch hunt” and an “ideological crusade.”
+
+[NOAA chief tells lawmaker: I will not allow anyone to ‘coerce the scientists who work for me’]
+
+She has branded her colleague’s claims that NOAA altered historical climate data “the most outrageous statements ever made by a Chair of the Committee on Science.”
+
+And Smith, a fellow Texan who rejects the scientific consensus that man-made pollution is behind global warming, has charged back in his own letter campaign, accusing Johnson of a “lack of interest” in oversight of government waste and wrongdoing and a “partisan political allegiance to the Obama administration.”
+
+Even in an era of extreme partisanship on Capitol Hill, the name-calling stands out. The committee that oversees NASA, the National Science Foundation, NOAA and non-defense research and development in much of the rest of the government is more polarized than ever, current and former staff and members say, with the climate talks in Paris only ratcheting up tensions.
+
+Democrats accuse Smith, now in his third year as chairman, of a contempt for the scientific methods and an almost exclusive focus on discrediting the work and gutting the budgets of federal researchers. They say he has sidelined them by using the GOP’s new, unilateral power in this Congress to depose and subpoena federal officials without a vote.
+
+They claim they find out about bills the majority is introducing at the last minute — and are notified of witnesses he has invited to testify at hearings with only a one- or two-day notice, making it hard for them to come up with their own witnesses in time.
+
+“This committee was always considered nonpartisan, looking at the nation’s future,” Johnson said in an interview. “I’ve had people tell me it’s worse now than the Benghazi committee [investigating the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya]. It’s just as contentious.”
+
+While she said she and Smith have never been personal friends, Johnson described the chairman as “respectful and friendly” toward her during committee hearings.
+
+“Then I get these letters saying I’m just a pawn of the [Obama] administration,” she said. “I don’t even think of the administration. It’s just common sense that would lead you to research what he’s saying versus what the reality is and try to make a comparison.”
+
+Smith, a former chairman of the high-profile House Judiciary Committee, said in a response to e-mailed questions that he has a “long record” of bipartisanship in Congress.
+
+Johnson “consistently argues that the Committee should seek fewer documents and ask fewer questions,” Smith wrote. “Even in the face of possible or admitted wrongdoing, she places political allegiance to the Obama administration before the Committee’s obligation to hardworking taxpayers. This does damage to Congress as an institution and to the trust people have in our federal agencies.”
+
+Smith said it’s Johnson who has failed in her duty to join him in key investigations: Of a 3-million-gallon toxic waste spill in Colorado caused in part by an Environmental Protection Agency contractor, an illegal meth lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a National Weather Service executive who wrote his own lucrative post-retirement consulting contract.
+
+Both parties point to limited bipartisan victories, including a law strengthening science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and adding computer science to those efforts and a commercial space bill extending some regulations and providing limited property rights for resources extracted from asteroids.
+
+But it’s the basics of scientific inquiry that have upset the relationship between Democrats and Republicans, from Smith’s early effort to put tight reins on the grant-making National Science Foundation by scrutinizing projects it funds to his challenge to coal regulations, which have attempted to discredit studies on the health effects of carbon emissions.
+
+“This was not a deeply polarized committee before,” said David Goldston, who served as chief of staff  to former Rep. Sherwood “Sherry” Boehlert, a moderate Republican who was science committee chairman from 2001 to 2006.
+
+“Relations were extremely cordial,” said Goldston, who is now director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council. There were some differences on spending levels, agency missions and the direction of research, he said.
+
+But he described the panel’s current Republican majority this way: “I don’t think they think of themselves as anti-science, but as preventing a perversion of science by left-wing ideology.”
+
+And one of the most ideological battles in science now is climate change, the subject of routine hearings on the committee.
+
+On Tuesday, as the climate change summit got underway in Paris, the committee held a hearing titled, “Pitfalls of Unilateral Negotiations at the Paris Climate Change Conference.”
+
+The parties proceeded in parallel universes, with Democrats lobbing questions to their sole (friendly) witness on the economic and environmental benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and Republicans lobbing questions to their three (friendly) witnesses on why Obama’s Clean Power Plan would cost billions of dollars and cause financial hardship for American families, along with no significant benefit to climate change.
+
+Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.), who is on the panel, said in an interview that the committee is struggling with the ”fundamental question of whether we are going to trust the science that comes from scientists who are really disengaged from politics.”
+
+“Because of the tenor that the chairman has taken, he’s challenged this idea that we’re going to depoliticize science,” she said.
+
+The committee started in 1958 as the Space Committee to oversee NASA, and gradually its science portfolio grew. Today the Democratic and Republican staffs have little contact, current and former staffers said.
+
+“On oversight, there’s not a lot of cooperation for major investigations,” said one Democratic staffer who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of what he described as strains between the staffs.
+
+“That tradition goes back a long time. Now it’s not unusual for us to find something out through a press release,” the staffer said.
+
+Smith said in an email that the Republicans “always provide the minority with the required notice of committee proceedings in accordance with the Rules of the House. Usually, we provide more notice than required.”
+
+Even as Congress investigates the global warming ‘pause,’ actual temperatures are surging
+
+Top Weather Service official creates consulting job — then takes it himself with $43,200 raise
+
+Former Weather Service finance chief signed off on consulting job his deputy created for himself ‘because that’s how things are done’",REAL
+5707,BLM To Lease Ohio’s Only National Forest To Fracking Interests,"The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) claims to manage public land for the “common good.” However, their actions as a federal agency consistently show that they really serve private interests,... ",FAKE
+8626,World War 3?, ,FAKE
+5065,Hillary Clinton accepts nomination with 'boundless confidence in America's promise',"The words, when they came, had lost no power over a week of build-up, or almost a decade of rehearsal. “So it is with humility, determination and boundless confidence in America’s promise that I accept your nomination for president of the United States,” said Hillary Clinton – the first American to stand on the brink of being called madame president.
+
+
+
+There were no gimmicks. No more videos of breaking glass. Just a familiar face in a trademark white suit, standing in a very unfamiliar spot.
+
+“When there are no ceilings, the sky’s the limit,” she acknowledged briefly, before, eventually, the ceiling seemed to fall in, covering the floor of Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo arena in a carpet of red, white and blue balloons so thick, the candidate almost disappeared from view.
+
+By the end of an hour-long acceptance speech, there were children on stage; some of them, daughters smuggled in by fathers to witness an undoubted leap forward along the long road to equality in America.
+
+Clinton herself dwelled little on the symbolism of her acceptance speech – save for a cry of “Deal me in!” which was taken up lustily by the crowd. Instead, she went straight to her first big exposition of what she would do if she actually wins in November, including a jobs program and investment in infrastructure.
+
+“To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws,” she said, in clear contrast to the idealistic promises of her primary opponent Bernie Sanders and the big-talking Republican enemy Donald Trump.
+
+The US, Clinton said, was “at a moment of reckoning” as she called on voters to reject Trump’s divisive rhetoric and policies. “Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart, bonds of trust and respect are fraying,” she said.
+
+But it was also a moment to turn slowly away from Barack Obama, a man who only a day before had helped the campaign reclaim the mantle of patriotism from Trump. Now it was time for Clinton to do the same with the economy.
+
+“Democrats, we are the party of working people but we haven’t done a good enough job showing that we get what you’re going through, and that we’re going to do something about it,” she said.
+
+“There’s a lot to do,” acknowledged Clinton, a departure from the campaign’s recent insistence that Trump was exaggerating the pain felt by working families. “Too many people haven’t had a pay raise since the crash.”
+
+She added: “Some of you are frustrated – even furious. And you know what? You’re right.”
+
+To the confusion of a diehard band of Bernie Sanders supporters in luminous T-shirts, who sought to disrupt the speech, they were forced instead to pause and, even once or twice, applaud when Clinton presented an unashamedly liberal and populist vision of America.
+
+“If you believe that we should say ‘no’ to unfair trade deals, that we should stand up to China, that we should support our steelworkers and autoworkers and homegrown manufacturers – join us,” said Clinton, in clear appeal to both right and left incarnations of the pitchfork outbreak sweeping the country in this election cycle.
+
+“Whatever party you belong to, or if you belong to no party at all, if you share these beliefs, this is your campaign,” she added, promising she would be a president for all Americans, whether they voted for her or not.
+
+But taking Trump’s appeal seriously was not the same as taking Trump seriously.
+
+An increasingly confident Clinton was merciless in skewering the celebrity billionaire as a “little man”.
+
+“Really? ‘I alone can fix it?’” she asked at one point, letting the questions hang there as a description of everything that is absurd about this close-fought election race.
+
+“He spoke for 70-odd minutes – and I do mean odd,” she continued, eliciting the kind of laughter that was bound to produce a reaction from the man himself, and did.
+
+“Imagine him, if you dare, imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” anticipated Clinton.
+
+He might be a joke, she said, but his appeal was not. “For the past year, many people made the mistake of laughing off Donald Trump’s comments – excusing him as an entertainer just putting on a show,” warned the former secretary of state. “Here’s the sad truth: there is no other Donald Trump. This is it.”
+
+The laughs came naturally for a crowd that warmed to a rare display of comic timing from Clinton: “Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again – well, he could start by actually making things in America again.”
+
+There was a little shake of the head as if to say “duh” when she said: “I believe in science,” and rejected the denial of climate change in another year of temperature records smashed.
+
+She turned to another first lady, Jackie Kennedy, for the insult that may yet stick. “She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started – not by big men with self-control and restraint, but by little men, the ones moved by fear and pride.”
+
+Over the course of the evening, Trump was called many names. “A political pyromaniac”, said Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, who suggested Trump should build his wall around the whole city.
+
+“Hillary Clinton knows how to fight back against dangerous, loudmouth bullies ... She doesn’t run to Twitter to give people badmouth nicknames,” said Elizabeth Warren, who had been on the receiving end.
+
+Some of Clinton’s own putdowns would end another campaign overnight. But this is a teflon Don, seemingly able to say anything without consequence, so Clinton refused the temptation to indulge in excessive Trump-bashing, preferring to paint her own vision.
+
+There was plenty of policy: a bold promise to introduce the biggest jobs program since the second world war in her first 100 days as president, and invest money in infrastructure projects and political capital in gun control.
+
+
+
+Rejecting the dangerously persistent notion that she simply wanted to be president because it was her turn, Clinton also used much of the packed speech to describe her real motivation.
+
+Introduced by her daughter, Chelsea, she continued the week’s highly personal theme, by pinning this political philosophy on her own mother, Dorothy.
+
+“She made sure I learned the words of our Methodist faith,” said the nominee. “Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.”
+
+The moral vision continued to help defuse the still simmering revolt on the left, where a rump of Sanders supporters were largely drowned out in their attempt to disrupt the night.
+
+“I want to thank Bernie Sanders,” said Clinton. “Bernie, your campaign inspired millions of Americans, particularly the young people who threw their hearts and souls into our primary.”
+
+Mostly she ignored disruptions that were more noticeable in the hall than on television.
+
+By the end, the chants were no longer papering over the cracks in the party, but rolling expressions of real enthusiasm waving up and down the stadium.
+
+The crowd had been fired up earlier in the evening by another speech that could easily have been at home in a Sanders rally. “We are being called upon by our foremothers and fathers to be the moral defibrillator,” said Rev William Barber. “We cannot give up on the heart of democracy, not now, not ever … We need to fight for the heart of this nation.”
+
+But it was the calm nobility of Khizr Khan, whose son died serving the US military in Iraq, who summed up why Clinton was really running – accusing Trump of “smearing the character” of patriotic American Muslims.
+
+“Donald Trump, let me ask you: have you even read the US constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. Look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection under the law’,” said Khan.
+
+Instead, Clinton made clear she would be a “president for Democrats, Republicans, and independents”.
+
+“For the struggling, the striving, the successful. For those who vote for me and those who don’t. Whatever party you belong to, or if you belong to no party at all, if you share these beliefs, this is your campaign. For all Americans,” she said.
+
+Appealing to those Reagan Democrats of a different age, Clinton said of Trump: “He’s taken the Republican party a long way – from ‘Morning in America’ to ‘Midnight in America’.
+
+“He wants us to fear the future and fear each other. Well, a great Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than 80 years ago, during a much more perilous time: ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’”",REAL
+2521,"Homeland Security Chief Says 30,000 Will Be Furloughed If Department Shuts Down","It's not just about the 'American Dream'
+
+The conventional wisdom says that most Latin American migrants who come to the United States are looking for a better life, inspired by the ""American Dream."" And it's hard to deny that there's a lot of truth in that. 
+
+ 
+
+ But there's another side to the story -- people leave Latin America because life there can be very hard. Poverty, political instability and recurring financial crises often conspire to make Latin American life more challenging than in the U.S., a wealthy country with lots of job opportunities. 
+
+ 
+
+ Living on the northern side of the U.S.-Mexico border, it's easy to view Latin America as another world, isolated from the United States. But the truth is that the U.S. government has historically made life in Latin America harder by overthrowing democratically elected governments, financing atrocities and pushing trade policies that undermine Latin American industries, dealing blows to local economies. Perhaps instead of building walls, the United States should focus on being a better neighbor. 
+
+ 
+
+ Here are 19 ways the U.S. government has helped spur immigration by making life harder in Latin America.",REAL
+4343,"The Presidential Bid Of Ted Cruz, The Reddest Meat Of The Right","WASHINGTON -- The audience should have belonged to Sen. Rand Paul. After all, the thousand or so clean-cut millennials in the D.C.-area ballroom were members of Young Americans for Liberty, a student group founded by Paul’s father, former Rep. Ron Paul.
+
+The kids chuckled appreciatively as Rand unspooled his tart, college-dorm-room disdain for government. But he didn’t fire them up. Neither did Utah Sen. Mike Lee, the thoughtful-sounding son of a Reagan-era U.S. solicitor general.
+
+The man who got them cheering, who got them going, who got them roaring with derisive laughter and bubbling with anger at the depredations of liberals was: Sen. Ted Cruz.
+
+Striding the stage like Elvis (if Elvis had been a college debater at Princeton and a brilliant student at Harvard Law), Cruz was the firebrand whom the conserva-geeks wanted to either meet or become.
+
+That was more than a year ago, when the first-term senator from Texas was still in the hard-right afterglow of his bid to shut down the government in a vain (in both senses) attempt to stop Obamacare.
+
+But the Young Americans for Liberty loved his loathing of the party elders, and his determination to shove a stick between the spokes of the System.
+
+And it is that emotion -- across-the-board opposition to every “liberal” idea that exists, and disgust with the System in all of its manifestations -- that Cruz hopes to tap for the energy he thinks can somehow lift him to the presidency.
+
+Uncorked anger doesn’t usually win presidential nominations, let alone presidencies. People want hope and uplift in the White House and not just expressions of outrage. The president is the person who is supposed to make things work.
+
+To some, the 44-year-old Cruz gives off a vaguely scary aura of cheerful menace. For now, as Cruz officially announces his 2016 bid, he is nearly an asterisk in the early GOP polls, well behind somewhat less apocalyptic personalities, such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
+
+The first is that his angry approach may fit the times. Even as the voters depend more and more on government and politics -- perhaps for that very reason -- their regard for the machinery of both continues to plummet to new lows.
+
+Cruz beat the establishment in Texas like a drum. They hate him for it, but he is also going to raise a lot of cash in, yes, Texas.
+
+He is as pure an across-the-board conservative as it is possible to find in what has to be regarded as the big leagues of politics: culturally, fiscally, in monetary policy, in foreign policy.
+
+Cruz is triple 7s on the slot machine of issues: anti-abortion, a global-warming mega-skeptic, to the right of Likud on Israel, anti-immigration to the max, big on defense spending, etc.
+
+He is a libertarian, traditional conservative, war hawk and evangelical Baptist son of a preacher who fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba. There are plenty of philosophical and tactical contradictions in Cruz’s construct, but he ignores them all.",REAL
+5498,Forget the FBI Cache; The Podesta Emails Show How America is Run      : Information Clearing House - ICH,". Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a rebuff to those who accuse him of jeopardising Israeli security interests with his government’s repeated affronts to the White House.
+In the past weeks alone, defence minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared last year’s nuclear deal between Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr Netanyahu has implied that US opposition to settlement expansion is the same as support for the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews.
+American president Barack Obama, meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own critics who insinuate that he is anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic party’s candidate to succeed Mr Obama in November’s election.
+In reality, however, the Obama administration has quietly punished Mr Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu stalled negotiations last year as he sought to recruit Congress to his battle against the Iran deal.
+In fact, Israel already receives roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s assistance on developing missile defence programmes is factored in. Notably, Israel has been forced to promise not to approach Congress for extra funds.
+The deal takes into account neither inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation against the shekel.
+A bigger blow still is the White House’s demand to phase out a special exemption that allowed Israel to spend nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will soon have to buy all its armaments from the US, ending what amounted to a subsidy to its own arms industry.
+Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed military largesse – in the face of almost continual insults – inevitably fuels claims that the Israeli tail is wagging the US dog. Even The New York Times has described the aid package as “too big”.
+Since the 1973 war, Israel has received at least $100bn in military aid, with more assistance hidden from view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid half of Israel’s military budget. Today it still foots a fifth of the bill, despite Israel’s economic success.
+But the US expects a return on its massive investment. As the late Israeli politician-general Ariel Sharon once observed, ­Israel has been a US “aircraft carrier” in the Middle East, acting as the regional bully and carrying out operations that benefit Washington.
+Almost no one blames the US for Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have deterred later US-backed moves at regime overthrow, as well as countering the strategic advantage Israel derives from its own nuclear arsenal.
+In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored military prowess is a triple boon to the US weapons industry, the country’s most powerful lobby. Public funds are siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies from American arms makers. That, in turn, serves as a shop window for other customers and spurs an endless and lucrative game of catch-up in the rest of the Middle East.
+The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive in Israel in December – their various components produced in 46 US states – will increase the clamour for the cutting-edge warplane.
+Israel is also a “front-line laboratory”, as former Israeli army negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the weekend, that develops and field-tests new technology Washington can later use itself.
+The US is planning to buy back the missile interception system Iron Dome – which neutralises battlefield threats of retaliation – it largely paid for. Israel works closely too with the US in developing cyber­warfare, such as the Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s civilian nuclear programme.
+But the clearest message from Israel’s new aid package is one delivered to the Palestinians: Washington sees no pressing strategic interest in ending the occupation. It stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran deal but will not risk a damaging clash over Palestinian statehood.
+Some believe that Mr Obama signed the aid package to win the credibility necessary to overcome his domestic Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly before he leaves office, that corners Mr Netanyahu into making peace.
+Hopes have been raised by an expected meeting at the United Nations in New York on Wednesday. But their first talks in 10 months are planned only to demonstrate unity to confound critics of the aid deal.
+If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu need not fear US financial retaliation, even as he intensifies effective annexation of the West Bank.
+Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right lesson from the aid deal – he can act against the Palestinians with continuing US impunity.
+- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf Forget the FBI Cache; The Podesta Emails Show How America is Run By Thomas Frank
+November 01, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" The Guardian "" - T he emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
+The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
+They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
+Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a Washington power broker for decades. I admit that I feel uncomfortable digging through this hoard; stealing someone’s email is a crime, after all, and it is outrageous that people’s personal information has been exposed, since WikiLeaks doesn’t seem to have redacted the emails in any way. There is also the issue of authenticity to contend with: we don’t know absolutely and for sure that these emails were not tampered with by whoever stole them from John Podesta. The supposed authors of the messages are refusing to confirm or deny their authenticity, and though they seem to be real, there is a small possibility they aren’t.
+Republican nominee hunkers down at Valley Forge; surrogates spread out as campaign enters final week; Clinton camp accuses FBI of double standards
+With all that taken into consideration, I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.
+The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work: financial innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.
+Certain industries loom large and virtuous here. Hillary’s ingratiating speeches to Wall Street are well known of course, but what is remarkable is that, in the party of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt, smiling financiers now seem to stand on every corner, constantly proffering advice about this and that. In one now-famous email chain, for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to name President Obama’s cabinet even before the great hope-and-change election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding why that greatest of zombie banks was never put out of its misery).
+The far-sighted innovators of Silicon Valley are also here in force, interacting all the time with the leaders of the party of the people. We watch as Podesta appears to email Sheryl Sandberg. He makes plans to visit Mark Zuckerberg (who, according to one missive, wants to “learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action”). Podesta exchanges emails with an entrepreneur about an ugly race now unfolding for Silicon Valley’s seat in Congress; this man, in turn, appears to forward to Podesta the remarks of yet another Silicon Valley grandee, who complains that one of the Democratic combatants in that fight was criticizing billionaires who give to Democrats. Specifically, the miscreant Dem in question was said to be:
+“ spinning (and attacking) donors who have supported Democrats. John Arnold and Marc Leder have both given to Cory Booker, Joe Kennedy, and others. He is also attacking every billionaire that donates to [Congressional candidate] Ro [Khanna], many whom support other Democrats as well.”
+Attacking billionaires! In the year 2015! It was, one of the correspondents appears to write, “madness and political malpractice of the party to allow this to continue”.
+There are wonderful things to be found in this treasure trove when you search the gilded words “Davos” or “Tahoe”. But it is when you search “Vineyard” on the WikiLeaks dump that you realize these people truly inhabit a different world from the rest of us. By “vineyard”, of course, they mean Martha’s Vineyard, the ritzy vacation resort island off the coast of Massachusetts where presidents Clinton and Obama spent most of their summer vacations. The Vineyard is a place for the very, very rich to unwind, yes, but as we learn from these emails, it is also a place of high idealism; a land of enlightened liberal commitment far beyond anything ordinary citizens can ever achieve.
+Consider, for example, the 2015 email from a foundation executive to a retired mortgage banker (who then seems to have forwarded the note on to Podesta, and thus into history) expressing concern that “Hillary’s image is being torn apart in the media and there’s not enough effective push back”. The public eavesdrops as yet another financier invites Podesta to a dinner featuring “food produced exclusively by the island’s farmers and fishermen which will be matched with specially selected wines”. We learn how a Hillary campaign aide recommended that a policy statement appear on a certain day so that “It wont get in the way of any other news we are trying to make – but far enough ahead of Hamptons and Vineyard money events”. We even read the pleadings of a man who wants to be invited to a state dinner at the White House and who offers, as one of several exhibits in his favor, the fact that he “joined the DSCC Majority Trust in Martha’s Vineyard (contributing over $32,400 to Democratic senators) in July 2014”.
+(Hilariously, in another email chain , the Clinton team appears to scheme to “hit” Bernie Sanders for attending “DSCC retreats on Martha’s Vineyard with lobbyists”.)
+Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered in the ear of a powerful crony.
+This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.
+Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “ Global CEO Advisory Firm ” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.
+But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to be a meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous in-group – if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out.",FAKE
+3915,"Cuba releases all 53 political prisoners to complete deal, U.S. official says","Cuba has completed the release of 53 political prisoners that was part of last month's historic deal between the United States and Cuba, the U.S. said Monday
+
+The prisoners had been on a list of opposition figures whose release was sought as part of the U.S. agreement last month with the Cuban government. They had been cited by various human rights organizations as being imprisoned by the Cuban government for exercising internationally protected freedoms or for their promotion of political and social reforms in Cuba.
+
+The U.S. has verified the release, according to an official traveling with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Islamabad. The official spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the issue on the record.
+
+Among those released were Haydee Gallardo S., a Lady in White, and her husband Angel Figueredo C. who were both arrested in May 2014 on charges of ""public disorder.""
+
+The independent rap artist Ángel Yunier Remón Arzuaga, known as ""El Crítico,"" was also released. 'El Critico"" was sentenced to eight years in prison without a trial in March 2013 for ""resistance"" against the communist regime.
+
+Last month, Cuba and the U.S. agreed to work to restore normal diplomatic relations as part of a deal in which Cuba freed an imprisoned U.S. aid worker, Alan Gross, along with an imprisoned spy working for the U.S. and the imprisoned dissidents. The U.S. released several Cuba intelligence agents. The deal came after 50 years of hostility between the two countries.
+
+There had been much concern in the Cuban-American immigrant community and among aid workers, as well as from top U.S. conservatives like Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, who is also a Cuban-American, about the lack of transparency and the secrecy surrounding the identities of the political prisoners.
+
+The leader of the Miami-based the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FHRC), Francisco Hernandez, was highly vocal about the issue.
+
+""We would like to know the names, because obviously these people are going to need help when they are released, and we want to make sure that they are released,"" Hernandez told Fox News Latino.
+
+Based on reporting by the Associated Press.
+
+Like us on Facebook",REAL
+5679,Melting Glaciers In Bolivian Andes Leave Communities At Risk,"Posted on October 29, 2016 by Edmondo Burr in Sci/Environment // 0 Comments Glaciers of the Bolivian Andes receded by 43% between 1986 and 2014 according to the findings of a new study. 
+Rising temperatures in the Andes have left people living at high altitudes with a water crisis. 
+The study was published in The Cryosphere , an European Geosciences Union journal. Recommended 
+The rapid melting of one the largest glaciers on earth, the Totten Glacier in East Antarctica, could raise global sea level at least 2 meters by the end of the century, according to a new study (4 hours ago) 
+“ On top of that, glacier recession is leaving lakes that could burst and wash away villages or infrastructure downstream, ” says lead-author Simon Cook , a lecturer at the Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. 
+European Geosciences Union reports: 
+Receding glaciers also put water supply in the region at risk. Glacial meltwater is important for irrigation, drinking water and hydropower, both for mountain villages and large cities such as La Paz and El Alto. Throughout the year, the 2.3 million inhabitants of these two cities receive about 15% of their water supply from glaciers , with this percentage almost doubling during the dry season. Glacier retreat also means less water is available to supply rivers and lakes, such as southern Bolivia’s Lake Poopó, which recently dried up . 
+The new study is one of the first to monitor recent large-scale glacier change in Bolivia, to better understand how receding glaciers could affect communities in the country. “The novelty of our study lies in the bigger picture – measuring glacier change over all main glaciated ranges in Bolivia – and in the identification of potentially dangerous lakes for the first time,” Cook says. 
+The team measured glacier area change from 1986 to 2014 using satellite images from Landsat, the U.S. Geological Survey’s and NASA’s Earth observation programme. They found that the area of the Bolivian Andes covered by glaciers decreased from about 530 square kilometres in 1986 to only around 300 square kilometres in 2014, a reduction of 43%. Recommended Bodies Of Climbers Alex Lowe & David Bridges Found In Melting Glacier 
+The remains of renowned American mountain climber Alex Lowe and his companion cameraman David Bridges have been found partially melting out of a glacier on Shishapangma, Tibet. The two climbers disappeared in a Himalayan avalanche 16 years ago while attempting to ascend the 14th highest mountain in the world. (4 hours ago) 
+As glaciers recede, they leave behind lakes typically dammed by bedrock or glacial debris. Avalanches, rockfalls or earthquakes can breach these dams, or cause water to overflow them, resulting in catastrophic floods known as glacial lake outburst floods. The team reports that both the number and size of glacier lakes in the study region increased significantly from 1986 to 2014. 
+After studying glacier change, the researchers used their 2014 glacial-lake observations to identify the lakes where outburst floods could occur and present a hazard to populations. “We mapped hundreds of lakes,” Cook explains. “Some lakes are very small and pose little risk. Others are very large, but there’s little or no possibility that they would drain catastrophically. Others are both large enough to create a big flood, and sit beneath steep slopes or steep glaciers, and could be dangerous.” 
+They identified 25 glacial lakes across the Bolivian Andes as potentially dangerous to communities and infrastructure, as they could result in very damaging floods. If the smallest of these 25 lakes was to drain completely, it would yield a flood with a peak discharge of 600 cubic metres per second. The largest could result in a discharge of over 125,000 cubic metres of water, about 50 times the volume of an Olympic swimming pool, in a second. 
+While measuring glacier area change was a relatively simple task, Cook says “identifying which lakes are dangerous is the million dollar question” as there are various factors to take into account. 
+“We considered that a lake was dangerous if there were settlements or infrastructure down-valley from the lake, and if the slopes and glaciers around the lake were very steep, meaning that they could shed ice or snow or rock into the lake, which would cause it to overtop and generate a flood – a bit like jumping into a swimming pool, but on a much bigger scale!” Recommended 
+A new study on antidepressants published in The BMJ has revealed that the risk of suicide and aggression in children and teens increases two-fold when they are prescribed drugs to treat depression. (4 hours ago) 
+Such catastrophic floods have occurred in the region in the past. Dirk Hoffmann, a researcher at the Bolivian Mountain Institute and co-author in The Cryosphere study, recently documented a glacial lake outburst flood in the Apolobamba region that happened in 2009 and killed farm animals, destroyed cultivated fields and washed away a road that left a village isolated for months. “As those locations are very remote and far away from the cities, authorities at national level and the wider public are often not even aware of the new dangers that mountain dwellers are facing due to the impacts of climate change, and no appropriate measures are being taken,” Hoffmann says. 
+Cook says these events could be under-reported, suggesting the risk of such floods in the Bolivian Andes has been overlooked. “We heard of other [glacier lake outburst flood] events from villagers when we visited the Apolobamba region in 2015, but there is no mention of these in publications or papers, possibly because many of these communities are relatively remote.” Hoffmann adds: “A nation-wide risk assessment of potentially dangerous glacial lakes would be of great interest to local communities in glacier watersheds.” 
+In the study, the team also estimated that glacier area will be severely reduced by the end of the century, to about a tenth of the 1986 values. This would put communities even more at risk from water scarcity, Cook says. “We predicted in our study that most glaciers will be gone or much diminished by the end of the century – so where will the water come from in the dry season? Big cities like La Paz are partially dependent on meltwater from glaciers. But little is known about potential water resource stress in more remote areas. More work needs to be done on this issue.” 
+The team hope the study raises awareness about the rapid glacier loss in Bolivia, how it could change in the future, and how it could affect water supply and cause glacial lake outburst floods. “Ultimately, I hope that our results will be useful to people in Bolivia – governments, agencies, people living in rural areas and cities,” Cook concludes. 
+This research is presented in the paper ‘Glacier change and glacial lake outburst flood risk in the Bolivian Andes’ to appear in the EGU open access journal The Cryosphere on 20 October 2016.",FAKE
+4447,What Pentagon would gain from Bowe Bergdahl desertion charge (+video),"Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has already spent five years in Taliban captivity, but charging him with desertion would likely lead to no jail time and would send a message to soldiers.
+
+South Korea voted to impeach its president. What happens next?
+
+Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl (r.) stands with a Taliban fighter in eastern Afghanistan. reports say Sergeant Bergdahl, who was freed in a swap in which the US freed five Taliban detainees, will be charged with desertion. (AP Photo/, File
+
+Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will be charged with desertion after a months-long review of his disappearance from his Afghanistan outpost that led to his five year-long captivity.
+
+That, at least, is the speculation from Fox News and reportedly confirmed by NBC. The Army denies that any decision has been made.
+
+The reporting “is patently false,” Maj. Gen. Ronald Lewis, chief of public affairs for the US Army, said in a statement provided to the Monitor Tuesday afternoon. “To be clear, there have been no actions or decisions on the Sgt. Bergdahl investigation.”
+
+Instead, the investigation is still with the commanding general of US Army Forces Command, Mark Milley, “who will determine appropriate action – which ranges from no further action to convening a court-martial,” Major General Lewis added. “We understand the public interest in this case, and once a decision has been made, the Army will be open and transparent in this matter.”
+
+Judging from the Pentagon hallway chatter that has come in the wake of the reports, however, the notion that the Army would charge Sergeant Bergdahl with desertion makes a great deal of sense to many senior military officials.
+
+So what would the US military hope to gain by charging Bergdahl with desertion? After all, wasn’t his confinement at the hands of the Taliban punishment enough?
+
+“I guess it doesn’t surprise me that the Army would be going this route,” says a former military official who served as a top judge advocate general (JAG) and spoke on condition of anonymity because he continues to sit on a panel that hears military cases.
+
+“I hate to say it like this, but it’s a win-win for everyone,” he adds.
+
+It’s a “win” for the Pentagon, because it sends a strong message desertion is unacceptable.
+
+But there is also a compassionate nod to the hardships Bergdahl endured while in captivity. “The government really isn’t interested in putting him in jail,” the former JAG says.
+
+Indeed, if the Army does decide to charge Bergdahl with desertion, he will most likely have the option of requesting a discharge.
+
+With a possible court-martial looming, this discharge would not be honorable, but rather a less-than-honorable discharge.
+
+The Army could refuse Bergdahl’s request for discharge, but this would be “highly unlikely,” the former senior JAG says.
+
+“I’d be very surprised if they did that. What they want is to have him out of the Army,” he says--not the public outcry that would likely come if Bergdahl faced jail time after five years as a Taliban captive.
+
+“I think they just want to get rid of them, and to send a strong signal that this type of behavior will not be tolerated.”
+
+This behavior includes reportedly leaving his combat outpost, Mest-Lalak, in Paktika Province in dangerous eastern Afghanistan in June, 2009.
+
+Bergdahl was returned to the United States after a prisoner swap that was arranged earlier this year.
+
+It is remains unclear whether Bergdahl intended to return to his outpost, or not.",REAL
+8839,Julian Assange to Speak Prerecorded RT Interview (11/5/16),"Julian Assange to Speak Prerecorded RT Interview (11/5/16) 11/03/2016 
+In today’s video, Christopher Greene of AMTV reports on a prerecorded Julian Assange interview to be aired prior to the U.S. Election on Saturday November 5, 2016. Start Your FREE 14-day trial! Juror explanation for Ammon Bundy verdict 11/03/2016 OREGONLIVE Juror 4 has so far provided the only public explanation of the behind-the-scenes discussions that led to t ... Doug Casey: A Civil War Could Be in the Cards After the Election 11/03/2016 LEW ROCKWELL (Source: The 2nd American Civil War by Richard Hubal, via MN Artists) Nick Giambruno: The US preside ... Putin grants Steven Seagal Russian citizenship 11/03/2016 DAILY MAIL President Vladimir Putin signed off Thursday on a decree granting Russian citizenship to American action her ... AMTV Archives",FAKE
+6832,Podesta Brothers Kidnapped a 3yo British Girl in Portugal - Wikileaks,"
+On Sunday evening, side-by-side images of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta and his brother Tony next to police sketches of potential suspects in a 2007 kidnapping of a three-year-old girl took over the internet.
+The resemblance is striking, and Reddit, 4chan, and Twitter rapidly took up the case.
+We found your pedophile suspects @metpoliceuk . You're welcome. #DNCLeak2 pic.twitter.com/H8kF1jWGUN 
+— VOTE TRUMP! đŸ‡şđŸ‡¸ (@JaredWyand) November 7, 2016 
+
+Madeleine Beth McCann should have celebrated her 13th birthday with her family in England this year, but she vanished from her bed during a family vacation to Portugal in 2003. The case gripped the entire world, becoming one of the most high profile missing persons cases in history. Coverage of her kidnapping was comparable to the press interest in the death of Princess Diana.
+Her parents had been out with friends at the hotel restaurant approximately 200 feet from where the child had been sleeping. When her mother Kate McCann went to check on her around 11 pm, but she was gone.
+“We go to bed every night with the agonising feeling that just maybe tomorrow we will find something to lead us back to Madeleine. To let us know what happened. To give us hope,” Kate McCann, who is now an ambassador for Missing People, said at the launch of a new nonprofit organization called Find Every Child, in London this week .
+Though it has been nearly a decade since their little girl vanished, the family has continued the search, and believe that there is a possibility that she may still be alive.
+“When my little girl first disappeared, on that horrendous night that changed our lives forever, I could never have imagined that nearly 10 years later we would still be in the same position,” she continued.
+In 2013, five years after Portuguese police had closed the case, they reopened it and revealed two new police sketches. It was believed that they were supposed to be of the same man, but from two different witnesses. Reddit and others on social media are now asking, what if it was actually two different men, and what if it was the Podestas?
+Podesta + brother Tony, +photos of Madeleine McCann's kidnappers, note the mole placement on Tony @wikileaks @DonaldJTrumpJr #spiritcooking pic.twitter.com/miRcNJKDTF 
+— Marqui Robbins (@MarquiRobbins) November 7, 2016 
+
+Awkward! Sketches from 2007 Madeleine McCann case look just like Clinton associates. Victim of #SpiritCooking ? #Podestabros #DNCLeak2 pic.twitter.com/by7AHqESzD 
+— Jazu the Deplorable (@Jazukai) November 7, 2016 
+
+An email found in the Wikileaks release of John Podesta’s emails at the time of McCann’s disappearance implies that he may have been vacationing around the time of her disappearance, but does not indicate where.
+People have also pointed out that another police sketch related to the case looks strikingly similar to Anthony Wiener.
+WHAT IS GOING ON??? #MadeleineMcCann @0hour @JaredWyand https://t.co/GWq661Yyv8 pic.twitter.com/7zrpSn7tyz 
+— Don Burke (@d0nburke) November 7, 2016 
+
+Shortly after the rumor began to go viral, Twitter went offline for over 20 minutes, which helped to fuel the theorists even more. Wikileaks was also the target of a DDOS attack.
+That moment when you Realize they are DDOS'ing @WIkiLeaks @Twitter and @4Chan to cover up a Horrific Crime. RIP Madeleine McCann. pic.twitter.com/4EqSAcOpWA 
+— Kyle (@refutal) November 7, 2016 
+
+Bizarrely worded messages in the Podesta emails had lead to conspiracy theories on 4chan and Reddit that John Podesta was involved in some sort of child sex ring , last week.
+""I'm dreaming about your hotdog stand in Hawaii…""
+This is code for something.
+Sex trafficking? https://t.co/BNulNKBi4u pic.twitter.com/L3l5j40ahy 
+— Mike Cernovich đŸ‡şđŸ‡¸ (@Cernovich) November 3, 2016 
+
+The same evening, the world became familiar with the term “ Spirit Cooking .”
+The Podestas' ""Spirit Cooking"" dinner?
+It's not what you think.
+It's blood, sperm and breastmilk.
+But mostly blood. https://t.co/gGPWFS3B2H pic.twitter.com/I43KiiraDh 
+— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 4, 2016 
+
+Tony Podesta’s home also contains photographs of nude teenage girls in one of the bedrooms — because “art.”
+“Folks attending a house tour in the Lake Barcroft neighborhood in Falls Church earlier this year got an eyeful when they walked into a bedroom at the Podesta residence hung with multiple color pictures by Katy Grannan, a photographer known for documentary-style pictures of naked teenagers in their parents’ suburban homes,” the Washington Post reported in 2004.
+“They were horrified,” Tony’s wife Heather told the Post of her guests reactions, as a grin reportedly spread across her face.
+While it is extremely far-fetched that the Podestas would be involved in this extremely high-profile missing persons case, the fact that thousands of people are having serious discussions about it on a Sunday evening speaks volumes about the trust people have in Hillary Clinton’s inner circle.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+3356,Compromises being reached in Iran talks,"Washington (CNN) Compromises on some of the crucial issues that have long divided the West and Iran over the latter's nuclear program -- including the number of centrifuges Tehran can keep in any deal -- are being reached in ongoing talks, according to Western officials.
+
+Two Western diplomats told CNN Thursday that the parties are narrowing in on 6,000 centrifuges, down from the 6,500 that had been under discussion.
+
+But both American and Iranian officials strongly denied that there was a draft agreement under review, as the Associated Press reported earlier in the day.
+
+""There's no draft document being circulated,"" State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Thursday, as negotiations ahead of a March 31 deadline for a framework deal continue in Lausanne, Switzerland. ""The fundamental framework issues are still under comprehensive discussion.""
+
+Testifying at a congressional hearing Thursday morning, Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken also denied the report.
+
+""My understanding is that there is no draft,"" Blinken said.
+
+A senior Iranian negotiator similarly stated that ""we haven't started drafting yet"" and that no specific details on issues such as the number of centrifuges have been agreed to.
+
+""The numbers and figures mentioned here and there are just imaginations,"" Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Abbas Araqchi told Iran's state-run Press TV.
+
+""If [Iranian leaders] cannot agree to a reasonable deal, they will keep Iran on the path it's on today,"" he said, according to prepared remarks, ""a path that has isolated Iran, and the Iranian people, from so much of the world, caused so much hardship for Iranian families, and deprived so many young Iranians of the jobs and opportunities they deserve.""
+
+He went on to frame the current opportunity to secure a deal as fleeting and historic, one, he said, ""we should not miss.""
+
+The President also said in his Nowruz message that ""the days and weeks ahead will be critical"" for negotiations, and acknowledged that while ""negotiations have made progress...gaps remain.""
+
+One of those gaps in the negotiations concerns the number of centrifuges Iran can use to enrich uranium.
+
+While Iran claims its nuclear program is peaceful in nature, the U.S. is determined to restrict the amount of time in which Iran would be able to produce the fissile material for one nuclear weapon -- referred to as ""breakout time"" -- to more than a year. Limiting the number of centrifuges would be key to such a goal.
+
+The delegations, which also include the U.K., France, Germany, Russia and China, are also seeking to bridge disagreements over how long restrictions would remain on Iran's nuclear program before they are phased out.
+
+The U.S. is seeking to keep the bulk of restrictions in place for 10 years, according to the AP report. But Blinken told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the timeframe of the agreement is still being discussed by negotiators.
+
+He also pushed back on the idea that all of the checks on Iran would automatically expire at the end of this period.
+
+""What we are proposing and what we are seeking to achieve is a series of constraints and obligations,"" he explained. ""Some will end after a long period of time, others will continue longer than that, and still others will be indefinite, in perpetuity.""
+
+Previously, U.S. officials have said the U.S. is working towards a ""double-digit"" time frame.
+
+In a briefing in Lausanne Thursday on how and when sanctions against Iran would be phased out, U.S. officials said they didn't expect that Iran would accept a 15-year deal.
+
+But they added that a considerable amount of time, in which Iran would have established a long history of compliance, would have elapsed before the full termination of sanctions would be warranted.
+
+Sanctions have become a key part of the debate in Washington over the Obama administration's negotiations with Iran, as Republican and some Democratic members of Congress have objected to the deal and shown little inclination to lift sanctions legislators have imposed -- a key form of leverage on Iran.
+
+U.S. officials on Thursday sought to allay some of the concerns.
+
+The officials said that sanctions relief would be phrased -- suspended first and repealed later -- in case Iran violates its commitments, and be dependent on benchmarks such as verification by the U.N. nuclear agency.
+
+However, the officials said the U.S. would be prepared to move quickly with relief if Iran moved quickly with compliance, and that they wanted to makes sure there was significant relief without too much delay because if only a little were given done up front, Iran might feel there is no political benefit in a deal.
+
+The officials also described a snap-back mechanism that the U.S. wants to accompany the suspension or termination of U.N. sanctions, which are in addition to those Congress has mandated. One kind of snap-back sanctions would require a U.N. Security Council vote, but officials suggested it might be possible to put a trigger in place, in which a full vote wouldn't be necessary.
+
+The U.S. and its five partners, known collectively as the P5+1, are also emphasizing the need for nuclear inspectors to be given full access to Iranian facilities so they can ensure Iran remains in compliance with the terms of the deal.
+
+""We are pushing tough issues,"" Kerry told a group of reporters Thursday, but ""we are making progress.""
+
+Kerry has met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif repeatedly over the past couple weeks in an effort to resolve these obstacles, and other points of contention that stand between them and a deal.",REAL
+2435,House Votes To Repeal Affordable Care Act,"The House voted 239-186 today to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the latest effort by the Republican-controlled chamber to scrap the law.
+
+The measure also would direct panels to come up with a replacement for the healthcare law — though it doesn't provide a timeline on any new legislation or what provisions it may contain.
+
+The House-approved measure likely will be defeated in the Senate, where the GOP has a smaller majority. President Obama has threatened to veto any legislation that rips up his signature achievement.
+
+The Associated Press notes the House has voted more than 50 times in the past two years to repeal the law. What was different about today's vote? NPR's S.V. Date writes in our It's All Politics blog: ""What makes today a milestone is that, for the first time, House Republicans plan to vote on whether to actually take health coverage away from millions of Americans who now have it.""
+
+Today's vote came after Obama met with 10 Americans that the White House said wrote the president letters about how they benefited from the law.
+
+""It was maybe plausible to be opposed to the Affordable Care Act before it was implemented, but now it is being implemented and it is working,"" Obama said at the meeting.
+
+But as NPR's Ron Elving notes, though no one expects today's vote to kill the law, ""these issues are important to many who voted for Republican candidates in the 2014 election and expect campaign promises to be honored.""",REAL
+8106,"Trump won because Democratic Party failed working people, says Sanders","Trump won because Democratic Party failed working people, says Sanders Former Democratic candidate said he will not rule out another presidential bid in 2020 By Lauren McCauley - November 11, 2016 
+Adding his voice to the chorus of condemnation heaped on the Democratic Party in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday attributed the Republican win to the failure of the liberal elite to represent working people. 
+“It is an embarrassment, I think, to the entire of [the] Democratic Party that millions of white working-class people decided to vote for Mr. Trump, which suggests that the Democratic message of standing up for working people no longer holds much sway among workers in this country,” the progressive senator and one-time presidential candidate told the Associated Press . 
+“You cannot be a party which on one hand says we’re in favor of working people, we’re in favor of the needs of young people but we don’t quite have the courage to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class,” he continued. “People do not believe that. You’ve got to decide which side you’re on.” 
+Sanders—who, according to hypothetical polls conducted during the primary, would have posed a more formidable challenge to Trump than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton—told the news outlet that he is “not ruling out” another presidential bid in 2020. But, the 75-year-old senator from Vermont said that, for now, he is focused on rebuilding the party. 
+Among the potential changes to be made, Sanders told AP that he would recommend Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) to lead the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a position that Ellison has been reportedly vying for. 
+The interview comes one day after Sanders issued a statement saying he is prepared to work with the president-elect “[t]o the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country.” 
+But, the senator indicated on Thursday he did not think that would be likely. “I hope I’m wrong, but I believe that he is a fraud, and I think despite all of his rhetoric about being a champion of the working class, it will turn out to be hollow,” Sanders said. 
+In an appearance on CNN late Thursday afternoon, when asked if he could have beaten Trump , Sanders said, “What good does it do now?”",FAKE
+3553,Trove of Bin Laden documents released,"U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday released a trove of documents recovered during the 2011 raid on Usama bin Laden's compound -- offering a rare window into the operations of Al Qaeda and bin Laden's involvement in leading the network from his Pakistan hideaway.
+
+The documents include dozens of letters, some from  bin Laden himself, as well as accounting information and even what appears to be an application form for prospective Al Qaeda members. That form, which asks a series of detailed questions, includes the line: ""Who should we contact in case you became a martyr?""
+
+The correspondence itself shows bin Laden continued to be engaged from his hideout and sought to direct operations. Shortly before he was killed in the May 2011 raid, a letter shows him celebrating the Arab Spring revolutions which had toppled Tunisia's leader at that point and were mounting in several other countries.
+
+""These are gigantic events that will eventually engulf most of the Muslim world, will free the Muslim land from American hegemony, and is troubling America whose Secretary of State declared that they are worried about the armed Muslims controlling the Muslim region,"" bin Laden wrote, according to a translated version.
+
+Bin Laden, writing to a follower identified as Atiyah, called for more Al Qaeda involvement in these countries once their leaders were deposed.
+
+He described the events as ""critical to our nation,"" advising against being ""fully occupied with the Afghanistan front."" Bin Laden wrote, ""we should give our main attention to the Muslim nation's revolution ..."" He called for supporting the rebellions and pursuing an ""education stage"" whenever rulers were deposed, by ""mobilizing"" writers and technicians to guide those nations.
+
+Another message, undated and unsigned, speaks to similar themes.
+
+The letter lashes out against Hosni Mubarak, the former Egyptian president who would soon be toppled. ""The regime destroys the souls of the people from the palace,"" it says. ""Just as an unarmed man is killed by gunfire. [Mubarak] does as he wishes with the blood of the Muslims."" The letter details Al Qaeda's plans, including a call to immediate action and an ominous warning that ""disagreeing is bad for all.""
+
+The letter says Ayman al-Zawahiri, now believed to be running Al Qaeda, is the appropriate person ""from our ranks"" to intervene because he is a ""man of Egypt.""
+
+The correspondence also includes letters among the bin Laden family members. One 2010 letter offers a glimpse into the Al Qaeda leader's surveillance worries. In it, he urges his wife to ""leave everything behind, including clothes, books, everything that she had in Iran"" before arriving, warning about eavesdropping and the possibility that the Iranians would ""implant a chip in some of the belongings that you might have brought along with you.""
+
+Other documents show the day-to-day operations in Al Qaeda. One identified as ""Instructions to Applicants"" appears to be a form for Al Qaeda prospects. It asks for basic biographical information, as well as for information about ""hobbies,"" whether they know experts in chemistry, where they've traveled, and even ""do you wish to execute a suicide operation?"" This is followed by the question about whom to contact in case the applicant becomes a ""martyr.""
+
+Yet another document, a message in response to one of then-President George W. Bush's State of the Union addresses, warned that the ""motives that led to 9/11 are still there."" The message, presumably from bin Laden, said the 9/11 hijackers ""are not exceptional freaks of history, but are the vanguards of a nation that rose up for Jihad, and there are millions of their brothers eager to seek the same path.""
+
+The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the document release, titled ""Bin Laden's Bookshelf,"" follows a ""rigorous interagency review.""
+
+The office said the intelligence community ""will be reviewing hundreds more documents in the near future for possible declassification and release.""
+
+The documents, recovered from the compound four years ago, are being released now because legislation mandated their declassification.",REAL
+3992,Will Islamic State attacks bolster prospects for political solution in Syria? (+video),"The West and Russia are closer than ever to agreeing to implementing a peaceful end to Syria's civil war. But key differences remain, including over the future of Bashar al-Assad.
+
+A hand-written message is seen on flowers placed near the French embassy to commemorate victims of attacks in Paris, in Moscow on Sunday. The words on the poster reads: 'It is our common grief. France! Russia is with you!'
+
+After multiple major attacks in less than two weeks – including the alleged bombing of a Russian jetliner over Egypt, a double-suicide bombing in Lebanon, and Friday's deadly attacks in Paris – a resolution to the Syrian conflict and the threat of the Islamic State has become top priority for Europe's major powers.
+
+Perhaps most crucially, the West and Russia have moved closer than at any time in the past four years toward a political solution in Syria, which many believe is central to fighting IS-inspired terrorism.
+
+“There is a new pragmatism emerging in Europe to work with Russia and Iran, and other European partners, and to try and work towards a political solution,” says Eugene Rogan, director of the Middle East Centre at the University of Oxford.
+
+But the obstacles to a Syrian solution remain high, amid Western reticence about further military involvement there and unresolved differences between the Kremlin and the West over the future of President Bashar al-Assad.
+
+“This is a very critical junction for where we go from here,” says Sajjan Gohel, a London-based international security director for the Asia-Pacific Foundation. He says the declaration of “war” by French President François Hollande, and the support by President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, amid other heady talk, must be followed by action. “Otherwise [IS] are going to believe they can get away with it again.... This can only be a game-changer if the West does something meaningful.”
+
+Speaking on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Turkey, Mr. Obama joined with President Hollande in calling the Paris attack a pivotal moment. “We will redouble our efforts, working with other members of the coalition, to bring about a peaceful transition in Syria and to eliminate [IS] as a force that can create so much pain and suffering for people in Paris, in Ankara, and in other parts of the globe,"" he said.
+
+US-led efforts to eradicate IS were complicated after Russia intervened six weeks ago, with an expeditionary force of about 50 attack aircraft and supporting troops. But there is a growing consensus, given the reach and sophistication of IS terror, that Russia has helped change the diplomatic conversation, especially the idea that overthrowing Assad is an impossible immediate goal.
+
+“It is dawning on everyone that the only way out of this is a political solution that takes into account the Assad government and the large numbers of people it represents. It hasn't survived for four years, with all the forces arrayed against it, without strong social roots,"" says Sergei Karaganov, a senior Russian foreign policy expert. ""It's also clear that Russia will have to be a part of that solution. The old US approach of just getting together a bunch of like-minded 'friends of Syria' to decide things is finished.”
+
+The terror attacks in Paris will add to the sense of urgency, at least for Europeans, who have already felt increasing pressures from the growing refugee crisis to move on a negotiated solution for Syria, experts say.
+
+Talks in Vienna on Syria have already made more progress in the past 10 days than in the previous four years, says Andrei Klimov, deputy chair of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council, Russia's Senate. A rough draft of a transitional program lays out a path to a ceasefire, a new Syrian constitution, and fresh elections within 18 months. Crucially, this was jointly announced by Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry in Vienna on Saturday.
+
+“A lot has happened rather quickly in the wake of Russia's intervention, and it's pleasant to note that our initiatives are finally getting some traction,"" says Mr. Klimov. ""But peoples' minds are also being focused by the victories the Russian-backed Syrian forces are gaining in the field, and by the terrible tragedies from recent terrorist strikes in Turkey, Lebanon, and now Paris. We do see movement, and we are hopeful.""
+
+One agreement made at the Vienna talks that the Russians say is key is the general consensus that any government that succeeds the Assad regime must be ""secular."" That will exclude most of the Syrian rebels opposed to Assad, if implemented, they say.
+
+At the same time, the US and Europe are weighing what the next steps are in their own military involvement. France ordered its fighter jets to carry out a massive bombardment Sunday night on Raqqa, the Syrian city that IS claims is its caliphate, as part of a growing global momentum to stop the spread of terrorism.
+
+The US has said it plans to step up its efforts but that it won’t put boots on the ground for now. “The further introduction of US troops to fully re-engage in ground combat in the Middle East is not the way to deal with this challenge,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser, said Sunday.
+
+Unlike France and the US, Britain has not conducted airstrikes against Syria, amid a public wearied by British involvement in the Iraq war of 2003, politicians skeptical of the efficacy of bombing there, and a nation generally looking inward.
+
+But Mr. Cameron has stirred the debate, warning the population that the new degree of planning and coordination – as well as ambition for mass causalities – seen by IS in Paris makes the UK more vulnerable.
+
+British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Monday, according to local media reports, that his government will try to win anew parliamentary support for airstrikes in Syria. But Mr. Rogan in Oxford says it will be an uphill battle to convince politicians that joining a bombing campaign will not squander their diplomatic potential, which many see as the more important role for Britain in Syria.
+
+Some have even called for NATO’s Article 5 to be invoked, which declares that all members join forces if one NATO member is attacked. But Sven Biscop, the director of the Europe in the World program at the Egmont – Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels, a think tank associated with Belgian Foreign Affairs ministry, says there is no need to put a “NATO flag in the Middle East,"" he says. ""It will contribute to image of this being a crusade.”
+
+Instead he says that long-term plans from Vienna and private talks between the West and Russia and allies is where the solutions will be found. This will help bolster support for more troops from countries in the surrounding region as well as help garner pressure on issues like Saudi Arabia financing. “This is where we need the acceleration,” he says.
+
+There are still concerns that the US-Russia rivalry in Syria could scuttle diplomacy and turn Syria into a cold war-style proxy war.
+
+The issue of Assad, and whether he might be allowed to run in new elections, remains the key obstacle. The US and all its allies insist that while Assad may be allowed to play some sort of transitional role, he must leave soon. The Russians say they are not wedded to Assad, but remain vague on when and how he might relinquish power.
+
+That might stymie forward movement in the peace process, since most Syrian rebels have insisted they will never deal with Assad. “One of the problems at Vienna is that we still don't have any definition of 'moderate' rebels. Everyone will agree that IS and Al Qaeda must be excluded. But there are many rebels who took up arms to depose Assad, that is why they are in the field,” says Sergei Strokan, international affairs columnist with the Moscow daily Kommersant.
+
+""It is urgently necessary to drop all the polemics, and identify those forces who might be ready to stop shooting, sit down at the negotiating table, and then participate in a provisional government. This sort of thing has happened in many places, at many times, and it's perfectly possible for Syria. But none of these groups is going to engage with Russia and come into the process until there is clarity about Assad. It's time for the Russian government to seriously address this issue,"" Mr. Strokan says.",REAL
+6033,The Old Democrat Wall Street Plus Identity Politics Playbook is Dead,"by Yves Smith 
+Yves here. This is a very important video from the Real News Network , and I wish there were a transcript, so do take the trouble to listen to it. 
+One of the reasons for the ferocity of the howling from the Democratic Party hackocracy in the wake of the unexpected Trump vicory is that they are effectively cornered animals. As political scientist Tom Ferguson explains, the Democrats can’t get the number of voters they need with their traditional coalition of Big Finance money plus identity politics without delivering tangible benefits to workers, which they have abjectly failed to do. But the power of mone in the Democratic party makes it well nigh impossible for them to devise the sort of populist policies that would appeal to voters that Trump has successfully peeled off. 
+Ferguson also has some important exit poll and early, granular data that debunks some cherished Democratic party myths. For instance, playing the gender card wasn’t as successful as the media would lead you to believe. 
+Ferguson, who has been a consistent critic of the Democrats from the left, does not rule out the idea that Trump could deliver on policies that would make him popular, most important, ones that would create more jobs and improve wages. One expert close to the Sanders camp came to the same view separately months ago. So while Trump may be stymied, or may never have been sincere about his battle call to downtrodden workers, it’s a mistake to rule out the possibility that he will continue to succeed despite the odds and his glaring character defects. 0 0 0 0 0 1",FAKE
+1312,"New Hampshire primary results: Sanders, Trump stun U.S.","(CNN) CNN commentators offer their take on the results of the New Hampshire primary. The opinions expressed in these commentaries are those of the authors.
+
+Timothy Stanley: U.S. politics changing before our eyes
+
+But the big shock is John Kasich in second place. First, Jeb Bush led the moderate pack, then Marco Rubio . Now we have a third contender -- a man who ran on experience, compassionate conservatism and a refusal to sink to the lows set by Trump.
+
+The family I watched Saturday night's debate with all said the same thing: ""I could vote for that guy."" The question is, does he have the structure and money to last longer?
+
+What's striking from the exit polls is how even more ideological both parties are than they used to be -- representing a polarized electorate. This makes it harder for any eventual nominee to reach out to the center ground. Iowa and New Hampshire have done long-term damage.
+
+Moderates in both parties can look forward hopefully to South Carolina -- a state that tends to prefer establishment candidates and, on the Democrat side, has a large African-American population leaning towards Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, the strength of populist feeling is palpable.
+
+Perhaps people are looking for generational change and substantive differences between parties. A Trump vs. Sanders race would give them both. It would also probably give them Michael Bloomberg running as an independent and one of our most divided and definitive elections since 1992.
+
+Timothy Stanley, a conservative, is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph. He is the author of ""Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between L.A. and D.C. Revolutionized American Politics.""
+
+Sally Kohn: Real test is in states that actually look like America
+
+As a progressive commentator who leans toward Bernie Sanders, it's tempting to make even more out of his strong showing in New Hampshire than Hillary Clinton's supporters made out of her narrow win in Iowa. But the fact is that neither state is terribly reflective of the majority of our nation's voters.
+
+New Hampshire and Iowa are whiter than the rest of the country, which calls into question their disproportionate influence in being the first to weigh in on presidential primaries. Indeed, since its founding, the United States has always given this disproportionate electoral power and political influence to white voters. Even still, in 2016.
+
+The simple fact is that the next states to vote, South Carolina and Nevada, offer a far more accurate picture of America's demographics -- and a more realistic test for all of the candidates, especially on the Democratic side. Bernie may be giving Hillary a run for her money, especially with young white women, but can he cut into her currently commanding lead with communities of color?
+
+And how will a voting base that reflects the pluralism of America respond to the intensely anti-pluralistic demagoguery of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz? The next votes are the real test.
+
+Well, that was quick. As early as 8 p.m., news outlets were calling the New Hampshire primary for Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders. While these outcomes were expected, these candidates will face very different trajectories ahead.
+
+By contrast, on the Democratic side, Sanders will face a tougher road in South Carolina and Nevada. These states have significant African-American and Latino voters, respectively, two groups that have been part of Hillary Clinton's base of support. However, as the night goes on, if Sanders can increase his margin of victory in New Hampshire, he may benefit from a new round of donations -- and the growing sense that he should be taken seriously as a national challenger to Clinton.
+
+Together, the wins by Trump and Sanders reveal that in New Hampshire at least voters are ready to upend the status quo.
+
+On the GOP side, John Kasich has managed to pull into second place. This is a testament to his optimistic campaigning and his emphasis on old-fashioned retail politics -- perhaps showing that the barrage of attack ads that have blanketed the Granite State were not as effective as the 100+ town hall meetings that Kasich attended.
+
+The loser seems to be Marco Rubio. He has dropped back in the pack after crumpling under Chris Christie's criticism at Saturday's debate. A sad showing for him, and a reminder that debate performances do indeed matter; CNN polling showed that 46% of Republican primary voters made up their minds in the last three days. Time for ""Robot Rubio"" to do a reset.
+
+Even though they have been leading by wide margins in the polls, it is still hard to believe that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump each crushed their opponents by double digits on Tuesday. New Hampshire is supposed to pick presidents, not renegade populists. It is hard to remember a key primary that has so thoroughly trashed America's political elites.
+
+No one can be certain where the campaigns go from here. Hillary Clinton is still favored to win the Democratic nomination -- and quite possibly the general election -- but she leaves the first two contests wounded and vulnerable. Her speech last night suggested she will scramble even further left. That may help secure the nomination but risks losing support in the general election.
+
+After his stumble in Iowa, Trump is once again the man to beat on the Republican side. But who is capable of that? Ted Cruz probably has the best chance now but enmity toward him is high in the party. John Kasich earned a chance to take on Trump but to win, he must first prove he has the chops to raise money and succeed in less-friendly territory. Jeb Bush can slog on to South Carolina but must pull off an upset there. And Marco Rubio -- well, that train seems stuck at the station.
+
+The truth is that we just don't know where this is going, but we do know that American politics won't be the same for a long while. Until elites pay more attention to the needs of working people and our economy booms again, our politics will be volatile. That may be healthy.
+
+The old political adage, that a week is an eternity in politics, has struck again. One week ago, Marco Rubio was on fire, riding high with his strong third-place finish in Iowa, almost overtaking Donald Trump. John Kasich came in eight with an abysmal 1.9%, and Jeb Bush didn't do much better with 2.8%. What a difference a week makes. Especially one that includes a debate.
+
+With Rubio stumbling badly in that face off, the door was opened for the cluster of establishment candidates in the middle of the pack to take advantage. Late deciders leaning Rubio broke for Kasich, giving his campaign a much-needed shot of adrenalin. How long that lasts remains to be seen, given Kasich's lack of organization moving forward. Even Jeb Bush emerged from the doldrums with a face-saving finish in New Hampshire. Maybe Jeb should bring his mom out on the trail more often.
+
+As for Ted Cruz, he beat expectations in a state where he wasn't supposed to do well, which bodes well for him heading into friendlier political territory in the South.
+
+To think Donald Trump would ever win any state -- well, this is a remarkable political moment. But there's still a long way to go. Not, however, for Chris Christie. His kamikaze attack against Rubio in the last debate may have hurt the senator, but he survived -- and Christie won't. He's finished.
+
+Donna Brazile: What Clinton must do now
+
+Sen. Bernie Sanders was expected to win big, which meant that he had to win very big in order to truly claim victory, and he did just that. With his resounding victory in New Hampshire, Sanders will have the resources and the momentum to take this race further than anyone imagined a few months ago. Whether he can take it all the way is an open question. We will learn in the weeks and months ahead as the race now moves on to more diverse states across America.
+
+For Hillary Clinton, who lost not only Manchester, but Concord and Keene -- cities that enabled her to defeat Barack Obama in 2008, it's time for her campaign to take stock and reset its operational structure (which includes ground game, but also its conversation with voters.) If her campaign can refocus on its strengths, it is capable of a comeback.
+
+Bernie Sanders' victory in New Hampshire will challenge Hillary Clinton to recalibrate her message to focus on the dreams and aspirations of the left, but it must also push her to become a better campaigner.
+
+For now, Sanders will have much higher expectations in the upcoming South Carolina, Nevada, and Super Tuesday contests. His challenge will be to show that he can outperform expectations in reaching out to a more diverse Democratic electorate.
+
+Clinton's biggest challenge going forward will be less to defeat Bernie Sanders than it will be to inspire and motivate Americans -- especially young voters, independents and new voters -- to take a different look at her candidacy.
+
+Donna Brazile, a CNN contributor and a Democratic strategist, is vice chairwoman for civic engagement and voter participation at the Democratic National Committee. A nationally syndicated columnist, she is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and author of ""Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in America.""
+
+He's likely capturing some of the non-interventionist, libertarian-leaning college-aged people who last time around would have supported Ron Paul -- another septuagenarian white man with a radical streak and surprising youth cred.
+
+Now that there isn't anyone named Paul in the race (RIP: Rand, who failed to inspire as much devotion as his father), there's no obvious inheritor of the libertarian vote, which is split among several imperfect candidates -- including avowed socialist Sanders. Ted Cruz is clearly angling for libertarian support, but his less-than-fantastic finish in the GOP contest Tuesday night suggests he couldn't convince independent-minded New Hampshire voters to overlook his dogmatic social conservativism.
+
+Tonight's results served more as a counterpoint to Iowa's caucus results than a referendum on the actual state of the race.
+
+In Iowa, Ted Cruz snuck out in front of The Donald by a few percentage points; Trump responded with a resounding victory in New Hampshire, beating Cruz by a far bigger margin than he'd lost the Hawkeye State. Similarly, Clinton eked out a win in Iowa over a surging Sanders, but Sanders returned serve with a much more solid victory.
+
+And yet, because the conventions don't count victories by state, but by delegates won, these early wins (or losses) serve up more narrative sizzle than electoral steak. After all, Iowa and New Hampshire combined make up less than 4% of the total needed to win for Republicans and less than 1% for Democratic candidates.
+
+There's plenty of race still ahead, and distracting headlines aside, it's really anybody's game on both sides of the aisle. And that doesn't even figure in the threat of Michael Bloomberg marching right down the middle of it.
+
+Jeff Yang is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to radio shows including Public Radio International's ""The Takeaway"" and WNYC's ""The Brian Lehrer Show."" He is the co-author of ""I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action"" and editor of the graphic novel anthologies ""Secret Identities"" and ""Shattered.""
+
+Dasha Burns: What New Hampshire tells us
+
+On the surface, it seems like we're in a country already ripping at the seams. The two parties have grown increasingly polarized, and now surprisingly powerful forces at the far edges are tearing us further. Bernie Sanders is engaging a new demographic of voters in millennials, and re-engaging disillusioned voters with his no bullsh** frankness. And Donald Trump is capitalizing on America's darkest anxieties in a deeply fearful and angry segment of the electorate.
+
+The results of the New Hampshire primary paint a bleak picture of modern American sentiment toward the status quo. People aren't happy and they're making themselves heard through other voices -- the young are using grandpa and the fearful are using a demagogue. But enrapturing as this picture may be, it might not be an accurate one.
+
+Like watching a bad reality show, we can all admit it's been a guilty pleasure to indulge in all the drama of this election so far. But if we turn off the TV for a second, actual reality looks a lot less sensational. Neither of these wins were a real surprise. And while the results may influence candidates' strategies, New Hampshire does little to predict the final election outcome. New Hampshire is not representative of what will happen in Nevada or South Carolina -- which have seen almost no polling -- or any of the March 1 primaries.
+
+If tonight tells us anything, it's that we have a long way to go till November.
+
+Dasha Burns is a writer and works as a strategist and creative content producer at Oliver Global, a consulting agency where she focuses on leveraging media and digital technology for global development.
+
+When it was announced Tuesday night that the two candidates whose rhetoric has put them at either end of the political spectrum won the New Hampshire primaries, it confirmed one thing: We are living in a highly polarized political climate.
+
+On the one hand, Bernie Sanders' victory signals that liberal voters want the progressive president that Barack Obama promised, but failed, to be. On the other hand, Donald Trump's victory shows that establishment Republicans failed to quash the insurgent tea party movement.
+
+Should these far right and far left candidates in fact become the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, independent swing voters may well just decide to stay home next November. And that will make this already surprising presidential election all the more unpredictable.",REAL
+9192,Skype sex scam – a fortune built on shame,"Skype sex scam – a fortune built on shame Moroccan boomtown getting rich from men tricked on Internet Published: 46 mins ago 
+(BBC News) One night a young Palestinian man living abroad fell victim to an online scam, involving a web camera and a beautiful woman. Here Samir (not his real name) tells the story of how he was trapped – and below the BBC’s Reda el Mawy visits the Moroccan boomtown where many of the scammers are based. 
+WARNING: this story contains descriptions of sexual acts 
+It happened when I was home alone. This girl added me on Facebook. I didn’t think it was anything strange – I often get friend requests from old school friends who I don’t know well. 
+The next day she sends me a message: “Hi, how are you? I saw your profile and I liked you.” So I looked at her profile and, I mean, she was really hot.",FAKE
+7413,Finland Will Become the First Country in the World to Get Rid of All School Subjects,"LIFESTYLE 
+Finland’s education system is considered one of the best in the world. In international ratings, it’s always in the top ten. However, the authorities there aren’t ready to rest on their laurels, and they’ve decided to carry through a real revolution in their school system. 
+Finnish officials want to remove school subjects from the curriculum. There will no longer be any classes in physics, math, literature, history, or geography. 
+The head of the Department of Education in Helsinki, Marjo Kyllonen, explained the changes: 
+“There are schools that are teaching in the old-fashioned way which was of benefit in the beginning of the 1900s — but the needs are not the same, and we need something fit for the 21st century.“ 
+Instead of individual subjects, students will study events and phenomena in an interdisciplinary format. For example, the Second World War will be examined from the perspective of history, geography, and math. And by taking the course ”Working in a Cafe,” students will absorb a whole body of knowledge about the English language, economics, and communication skills. 
+This system will be introduced for senior students, beginning at the age of 16. The general idea is that the students ought to choose for themselves which topic or phenomenon they want to study, bearing in mind their ambitions for the future and their capabilities. In this way, no student will have to pass through an entire course on physics or chemistry while all the time thinking to themselves “What do I need to know this for?” 
+The traditional format of teacher-pupil communication is also going to change. Students will no longer sit behind school desks and wait anxiously to be called upon to answer a question. Instead, they will work together in small groups to discuss problems. 
+The Finnish education system encourages collective work, which is why the changes will also affect teachers. The school reform will require a great deal of cooperation between teachers of different subjects. Around 70% of teachers in Helsinki have already undertaken preparatory work in line with the new system for presenting information, and, as a result, they’ll get a pay increase. 
+The changes are expected to be complete by 2020. 
+What do you think about all these ideas? We’d love to hear your opinion, so let us know in the comments. 
+Preview photo credit ZouZou",FAKE
+1061,What to watch in Saturday's Democratic contests,"(CNN) The Democratic primary race heads west this weekend -- way, way out west.
+
+Democrats will hold presidential contests in Hawaii, Alaska and Washington state on Saturday, three states expected to be friendlier to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
+
+But with Clinton leading Sanders by about 300 pledged delegates, and because none of the contests are winner-take-all, Sanders needs stunning wins in each state to give the Clinton campaign any real anxiety about the outcome of the race.
+
+In the run-up to the votes, Sanders has left nothing to chance. His campaign has spent millions on ads in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, including a powerful television spot featuring Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard , who resigned her position with the Democratic National Committee earlier this year to endorse Sanders.
+
+Going into Saturday's contests, Sanders needs to net an estimated 75% of the remaining pledged delegates, while Clinton only needs 35%.
+
+Don't be surprised if Sanders sweeps on Saturday. His campaign has received endorsements from influential players and his campaign has invested in a strong air and ground game in each state.
+
+There are 142 total delegates at stake Saturday, 16 in Alaska, 24 in Hawaii and 101 in Washington.
+
+All three will hold caucuses to choose delegates -- a method that has favored Sanders in the past -- instead of primaries. Alaska and Washington are also largely white and rural, demographics that typically have given Sanders a boost.
+
+If Sanders does as expected, the headlines declaring him a winner thrice over will surely provide a gust of wind for Sanders' campaign for fundraising purposes, even if it doesn't change the calculus of the race.
+
+Delegate math is still on Clinton's side
+
+Clinton heads into the weekend with 1,229 pledged delegates to Sanders' 925, not counting the superdelegates. (The ""magic number"" needed to clinch the nomination is 2,383.)
+
+So even if Sanders posts strong numbers Saturday, he still faces an uphill battle to overcome Clinton's lead. All three states dole out delegates proportionately or by county, so even if Sanders wins a majority in each, Clinton will still nab pledged delegates along the way. And because of the relatively low populations in these states, there simply aren't enough delegates on the table this weekend to make a significant dent.
+
+Looking at the line-up ahead, this could be Sanders' final big night. The next states on the calendar, particularly New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, where a combined 531 delegates will be up for grabs, look good for Clinton.
+
+Nowhere on Saturday are expectations higher for Sanders than in Washington state.
+
+Sanders has visited the state multiple times throughout his campaign, and the state's liberal urban centers have been especially welcoming of his message of ideological purity over Clinton's pragmatism.
+
+In Seattle, which last year approved a measure to raise the city's minimum wage to $15 an hour over time, support for Sanders is especially strong. The city's largest newspaper, The Seattle Times, endorsed Sanders . He spent the week before the election touring the state, holding six rallies, including a major event at Seattle's Safeco Field the night before the caucuses. His campaign has invested $2.4 million in radio and television advertising in the state, according to Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver.
+
+Sanders is expected to win, but with more than 100 delegates at stake, it will be imperative for him to make that win count by scooping up as many delegates as possible. His results in Washington will help set the tone for the upcoming electoral bouts.
+
+Turnout is anticipated to be high, another factor that aids Sanders. Some 35,000 people have already voted in Washington state using absentee ballots and about 200,000 are likely to participate.
+
+Campaigns on the ground even if candidates aren't
+
+It's not easy to pop in and out of states like Hawaii and Alaska, and with the small number of delegates on the table, the campaigns have largely determined their time is better spent elsewhere. But that doesn't mean they aren't making plays in each using surrogates, ad buys and family visits.
+
+In Alaska, Sanders' wife, Jane, visited Anchorage on Thursday and will remain through Saturday. Sanders' campaign has dropped at least $56,877 on radio and television spots in the state.
+
+Clinton's campaign, meanwhile, has invested in a phone-banking effort in rural parts of Alaska, emphasizing climate change and veteran issues and expressing her opposition to a controversial Alaska mine project, according to The Anchorage Daily News. Clinton called into Alaska radio last Tuesday morning and talked about working briefly in a salmon cannery in Alaska in 1969.
+
+Both campaigns are spending money on ads in Hawaii, although Sanders is outspending Clinton $192,680 to $54,300. Sanders this week touted his endorsement from Gabbard, a popular Hawaii Democratic lawmaker.
+
+How states will dole out delegates
+
+Alaska (16): Delegates will be rewarded by state House districts and determined by a caucus system. Candidates must receive at least 15% of votes in a district to be granted any delegates. The caucuses begin at 10 a.m. local time.
+
+Washington (101): Washington uses a mixed system to appoint delegates from the caucus results by congressional district. Registered voters who attend must publicly attest to being Democrats if they want to participate in the caucuses, which begin at 10 a.m. local time.
+
+Hawaii (25): Hawaii Democrats also hold caucuses, but unlike Alaska and Washington, it is considered a presidential preference poll and conducted by secret ballot. Delegates are doled out proportionately. Voting begins at 1 p.m. local time.",REAL
+7910,Re: Why Are So Many People Choosing To Leave The United States Permanently?,"Why Are So Many People Choosing To Leave The United States Permanently?   August 11th, 2013 
+Have things gotten so bad that it is time to leave the United States for good? That is a question that a lot of Americans are dealing with these days, and an increasing number of them are choosing to leave the country of their birth permanently. Some are doing it for tax reasons, some are doing it because they believe the future is brighter elsewhere, and others are doing it because they are very distressed about the direction that America is heading and they don’t see any hope for a turnaround any time soon. Personally, I have several friends and contacts that regard themselves as “preppers” that have decided that the United States is too far gone to recover. They have moved their families out of the country and they never plan to return. As this nation continues to head down the very troubled road that it is currently on, this trend is probably only going to accelerate even more. 
+In fact, some Americans are even going so far as to renounce their citizenship when they leave. This represents only a small percentage of those that are leaving the country, but as Bloomberg recently reported , the number of Americans that renounced their citizenship in the second quarter of 2013 was six times larger than the number that renounced their citizenship in the second quarter of last year… 
+Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship surged sixfold in the second quarter from a year earlier as the government prepares to introduce tougher asset-disclosure rules. 
+Expatriates giving up their nationality at U.S. embassies climbed to 1,131 in the three months through June from 189 in the year-earlier period, according to Federal Register figures published today. 
+Renouncing the country of your birth is not an easy thing to do. From the moment that we come into this world, those of us born in this country are trained to think of ourselves as “Americans”. The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Simon Black of the Sovereign Man blog … 
+It doesn’t matter where you’re from– the United States, Sweden, New Zealand, or Venezuela… many people all over the world are inculcated from birth with a sense that their country is ‘better’ than all the others. 
+We grow up with the songs, the flag waving, and the parades until the concept of motherland becomes deeply rooted in our emotional cores. 
+Not to mention, when so many of our friends and neighbors unquestionably fall in line, it’s a powerful social reinforcement that only strengthens the bond. 
+We come to view our nationalities rather ironically as a big piece of our core individuality. I am an American. I am a Canadian. I am an Austrian. Instead of– I am a human being. 
+It has taken decades… centuries even… to reach this point. So the fact that more and more people are making the gut-wrenching decision to ditch their US passports is truly a powerful trend. 
+Traditionally, the   been some of the most patriotic people on the face of the planet. 
+So why are we now seeing such an increase in the number of people choosing to leave the United States permanently? 
+Well, the truth is that there are a whole host of reasons why people are losing faith in this country and are deciding to leave… 
+-The U.S. economy has been steadily declining for many years and that decline now seems to be accelerating. 
+-We are being taxed into oblivion . 
+-The quality of the jobs in our economy is rapidly declining . 
+-Our culture is rapidly going down the toilet . 
+-Our health care system has become a complete mess and a giant money making scam . Obamacare is only going to make things even worse . 
+-Our politicians are tremendously corrupt, but the same clowns just keep getting sent back to D.C. over and over again. 
+-Our nation seems to be on a relentless march toward collectivism . 
+-America is rapidly turning into a “Big Brother” police state that is run by control freaks that seem obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and controlling virtually everything that we do. 
+Of course the list above could go on indefinitely, but hopefully I have made my point. A whole lot of people out there are absolutely horrified as they watch what is happening to America, and leaving the country for good is increasingly being viewed as a potential option by many. 
+But as tempting as “ going Galt ” may seem, please come up with a good plan first. 
+As one family recently discovered , hopping into a small boat and sailing off into the Pacific Ocean in search of a better life is probably not going to work out too well… 
+A northern Arizona family that was lost at sea for weeks in an ill-fated attempt to leave the U.S. over what they consider government interference in religion will fly back home Sunday. 
+Hannah Gastonguay, 26, said Saturday that she and her husband “decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us” when they took their two small children and her father-in-law and set sail from San Diego for the tiny island nation of Kiribati in May. 
+But just weeks into their journey, the Gastonguays hit a series of storms that damaged their small boat, leaving them adrift for weeks, unable to make progress. They were eventually picked up by a Venezuelan fishing vessel, transferred to a Japanese cargo ship and taken to Chile where they are resting in a hotel in the port city of San Antonio. 
+Yes, life in America is definitely going to be extremely challenging in the years ahead, but the grass is not always greener on the other side of the planet either. 
+There are a whole host of things to consider before you make a permanent move to another country. The following is an extended excerpt from one of my previous articles … 
+
+The following are 10 questions to ask yourself before you decide to move to another country… 
+Do You Speak The Language? If Not, How Will You Function? 
+If you do not speak the language of the country that you are moving to, that can create a huge problem. Just going to the store and buying some food will become a challenge. Every interaction that you have with anyone in that society will be strained, and your ability to integrate into the culture around you will be greatly limited. 
+How Will You Make A Living? 
+Unless you are independently wealthy, you will need to make money. In a foreign nation, it may be very difficult for you to find a job – especially one that pays as much as you are accustomed to making in the United States. 
+Will You Be Okay Without Your Family And Friends? 
+Being thousands of miles away from all of your family and friends can be extremely difficult. Will you be okay without them? And it can be difficult to survive in a foreign culture without any kind of a support system. Sometimes the people that most successfully move out of the country are those that do it as part of a larger group. 
+Have You Factored In Weather Patterns And Geological Instability? 
+As the globe becomes increasingly unstable, weather patterns and natural disasters are going to become a bigger factor in deciding where to live. For example, right now India is suffering through the worst drought that it has experienced in nearly 50 years . It would be very difficult to thrive in the middle of such an environment. 
+Many of those that are encouraging people to “escape from America” are pointing to Chile as an ideal place to relocate to. But there are thousands of significant earthquakes in Chile each year, and the entire nation lies directly along the “Ring of Fire” which is becoming increasingly unstable. That is something to keep in mind. 
+What Will You Do For Medical Care? 
+If you or someone in your family had a serious medical problem in the United States, you would know what to do. Yes, our health care system is incredibly messed up , but at least you would know that you could get the care that you needed if an emergency arose. Would the same be true in a foreign nation? 
+Are You Moving Into A High Crime Area? 
+Yes, crime is definitely on the rise in the United States. But in other areas where many preppers are moving to, crime is even worse. Mexico and certain areas of Central America are two examples of this. And in many foreign nations, the police are far more corrupt than they generally are in the United States. 
+In addition, many other nations have far stricter gun laws than the United States does, so your ability to defend your family may be greatly restricted. 
+So will your family truly be safe in the nation that you plan to take them to? 
+Are You Prepared For “Culture Shock”? 
+Moving to another country can be like moving to a different planet. After all, they don’t call it “culture shock” for nothing. 
+If you do move to another country, you may quickly find that thousands of little things that you once took for granted in the U.S. are now very different. 
+And there is a very good chance that many of the “amenities” that you are accustomed to in the U.S. will not be available in a foreign nation and that your standard of living will go down. 
+So if you are thinking of moving somewhere else, you may want to visit first just to get an idea of what life would be like if you made the move. 
+What Freedoms and Liberties Will You Lose By Moving? 
+Yes, our liberties and our freedoms are being rapidly eroded in the United States. But in many other nations around the world things are much worse. You may find that there is no such thing as “freedom of speech” or “freedom of religion” in the country that you have decided to move to. 
+Is There A Possibility That The Country You Plan To Escape To Could Be Involved In A War At Some Point? 
+We are moving into a time of great geopolitical instability. If you move right into the middle of a future war zone, you might really regret it. If you do plan to move, try to find a country that is likely to avoid war for the foreseeable future. 
+When The Global Economy Collapses, Will You And Your Family Be Okay For Food? 
+What good will it be to leave the United States if you and your family run out of food? 
+Today, we are on the verge of a major global food crisis. Global food reserves are at their lowest level in nearly 40 years , and shifting global weather patterns are certainly not helping things. 
+And the global elite are rapidly getting more control over the global food supply. Today, between 75 and 90 percent of all international trade in grain is controlled by just four gigantic multinational food corporations. 
+
+Leaving the United States permanently and setting up a new life in another country can be done, but it isn’t for the faint of heart. It takes planning, preparation and lots of hard work. 
+However, there are lots of people that have done it successfully, including quite a number of people that I know personally. 
+In the end, you have got to make the decision that is right for you and your family. Don’t let anyone else tell you what to do. 
+For many, staying in the United States and preparing for the tough years that are coming is the best choice. For others, getting out   and heading for greener pastures is the right choice. 
+What about you? 
+Please feel free to share your perspective by posting a comment below… 
+Are These The Last Days Of The U.S. Marine Corps? » Rodster 
+I’m sticking it out. As screwed up as America is i’ll take my chances here. As the article mentioned, when the global economy collapses it may be harder to survive in another country. ian 
+no. it will probably be easier, as most other nations dont have gun toting nutjobs and a less self centered view of life. Other countries may adopt a “we’re all in this together’ mentality, while america will, at first, descends into ‘me first’ chaos. MeMadMax 
+Take ur statement, and make it the opposite, and less hateful, and it would be right. Vindicare 
+Guess what, no one is entitled to positive feelings. Hate is a feeling, nothing more. People may hate you, but you live in west, where you must feel good about others, whatever stupid and evil they are. Positive=!good, negative=!bad. And to tell the truth people often earn hate, they own it they. Yes hate may be rightfully earned. Hate is just waste of time, contempt is better, indifference is best. sherpeace 
+Exactly. The people you hate don’t care! The hate only hurts the hater! So, go for it; Keep on hating. Then you will die young, either from a heart attack or because the object of your hate kills you. Hooray! Now we will be rid of you! (Sorry, I know that is not very peaceful of me, but I couldn’t help it.) Vindicare 
+Stop projecting. I hate no one but mosquitoes. Usual Yada yada yada! Whatever I may sound to you when I go from keyboard it stop bothering me. Some people write things because they think, not because feel something. This western paranoia is pathetic. FEELINGS, FEWWINGS, FEEL, HURR DURR! Nop prefer logic. condaggitt 
+Ian most other countries dont have mass quantities of violent black thugs either. xander cross 
+Most countries have violent white men with guns. Just look at the white supremacist groups and people like Alex jones. Most white people are racist and evil by nature SVD 
+Takes one to know one eh!? xander cross 
+You would know. A racist like yourself is common in the land that you stole from us. Ted 
+Just admit that you hate White people…which by definition makes you a racist! Oh the horror There’s nothing worse than racism…oh no sherpeace 
+People are offended by the white comment, but not the black one. That means YOU are racist. I am white, but I am offended by BOTH comments. You can not make blanket statements about ANY race. It is just unfair and wrong! Graham 
+Your last sentence would lead a reader to believe you are of “American Indian” decent. Is that correct? 
+If so, I’m interested in what tribe you are affiliated with, assuming that is something you are happy to share. Joe Jakkerton 
+Im American Indian and can tell Xander is African. SVD 
+Oh you hurt my feelings. I think I’m about to shed a tear. Get over yourself loser! xander cross 
+The loser is the white man that enjoys selling his land to china for a currency that rapidly loosing its value. White men are the problem, that is why they’re marring (or stealing) Asian women in mass droves. sherpeace 
+Oh, brother, come on! The things that ignorant people say just amazes me! Joe Jakkerton 
+Thats makes us the WINNERS ha ha ha! DuchessLazy 
+Why do so many Chinese murder their baby girls ? It’s a horror. Jill Ellen Schulze 
+you are really really stupid. You are the reason I want to leave this country. People like you are still kept alive Walt Lonsdale 
+We don’t even know what you are BrianLandon 
+right. stole from you, eh? so show us the deed? Joe Jakkerton 
+Then move back to Africa and get on with it. Walt Lonsdale 
+IS that why there is considerably more black on black crime??Idiot! sherpeace 
+It is because there is considerably more poverty in black neighborhoods. And, I am sorry to say, that has a lot to do with the quality of schools. If you were to check, most successful blacks went to white schools, the only place to get an equal education despite “Brown vs. the board of education”. Son Goku 
+Most White AmeriKKKans are psychotic sociopaths. Blacks are on their sick demonic minds 24/7. This article had nothing to do with blacks. If Anglo Americans were so peaceful. Why do they have missile defense systems around China, Russia, and Iran. They are the real thugs. sherpeace 
+Got a point there. Just remember that not all of us believe in what our govt. is doing. carnac123 
+SG Because we are smart and we defend ourselves. You…however are just a racist calling others racist. If America was all Anglo or at least all white,.. it would be a paradise. Joe Jakkerton 
+Who said we were peaceful? We are violent and always have been. Oline Wright 
+Not so, that statement is as racist as saying most blacks are violent thugs. There are good and bad in all peoples and it is high time we stop stereotyping people because of the color of their skin or even the place they grew up. DuchessLazy 
+Try living in a an area where the majority is black and see what you get. Mondobeyondo 
+Violent white men take over countries with guns. Violent black men take over inner cities with guns. 
+We are ALL under attack!!! Linda Williams 
+Who told you that? RalphZiggy 
+what nonsense you spew, when did Alex Jones ever do or say anything racist? he has even demonstrated against hate groups like the KKK. In the USA, white people huge the majority of weapons but don’t commit most of the crime. You are a white-hating racist, the supremacist full of hate is in your bathroom mirror. xander cross 
+During the trayvon Martin trail. He and his supporters are indeed racist just like Ron and pans Paul are. His supports are really the same people that go to stormfront site as well. Alex jones never demonstrated against the kkk, but he demonstrated against black people several times. But then again, he gets paid by white men to be an idiot on television so, you defending him proves my point. RalphZiggy 
+It is a fact Alex Jones demostrated against the KKK in Waco Tx in 1999 with a bullhorn, look it up. There are videos of it. You make up an world between your ears and believe in it, without letting facts get in the way of your prejudices Joe Jakkerton 
+oh man you must be Lacquer head. I bet you love your caurborator cleaner. BrianLandon 
+uh right. sort of like the blacks killing blacks in Africa? Or how about Muslims killing Muslims in Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, etc. And how about the fact that the biggest rate of murders in the US is committed by young black men killing other young black men. 
+the only racist here is yOU! xander cross 
+No, white men are the racist and white men commit the most crimes and they’re not convicted for the murders that they commit. White men commit the most crimes and you use fake percentage numbers to spew your lies about black people. Let’s talk real numbers, not fake percentages that you get from world net daily. DuchessLazy 
+Lies. Whites actually care about THEIR neighborhoods and gladly get rid of criminals. But…if you’re rich, no matter the skin color, you’re likely to get away with about anything. Joe Jakkerton 
+All colored people are evil and racist. xander cross 
+White men are evil and racist and to add to your stupidity, you white men turned a third world country to an economic superpower (China). Elliot 
+“Most white people are racist and evil by nature”? Are you serious? That is such an ignorant statement with zero credibility. That is a stupid as if I were to say, “There aren’t any nations in this world governed by black people from top to bottom that dominate on the world stage, therefore all black people are stupid and lazy”. Look at the Chinese and India. They aren’t white, are two of the most populated countries in the world, are HUGE players in our world economy, and yet both pollute the Earth daily like never before seen, and China executes more people annually (with a gun to the back of the head) than any other country worldwide. Yet you tell me they are full of “violent white men with guns”? You are what is wrong with our society. There are too many dumba$$e$ like you able to post their uneducated, idiotic opinions online and somehow garner steam from it. Some other dumba$$ will read your comment and give it a “thumbs up” without realizing how stupid you both are. The problem with our societies is that the dumb people outnumber the smart ones 100 to 1, and whether you are black, white or rainbow-colored, you are an IDIOT. d 
+What? Son Goku 
+Dude!!! Why are you racist bigots obsess with black people?!?! This is one of the reason why people dislike white Americans around the world. Plus you bomb other people’s countries for natural resources. You are the real thugs. Most of You people are obsess with race. Oline Wright 
+again it is not about color or race it is truly more about who or what is in power. ANd frankly as an American I have to say I have not been that satisfied by the government that is supposed to represent me for the last 20 years or so. xander cross 
+Stop lying because the white people on this site is openly racist. White men are the problem and every white person on this site supported stop and frisk by mayor Bloomberg. mikeymike61 
+neegrows be da prolem, git rid a neegrows and you gots rid a 85% a da krime Tobias Smith 
+you are clearly a racist foolish little boy sherpeace 
+Oh, EVERYONE, huh? You got a lot of nerve speaking a lie like that! Joe Jakkerton 
+Hey we only supported stop and frisk of coloreds and gays like you. sherpeace 
+Longer than that, for me. Carter was the last true humanitarian in power in this country. Linda Williams 
+Carter was an idiot. The interest rate soared under Carter. sherpeace 
+Wow, you must be one of the most intelligent people on earth to be able to call a man like carter an idiot! Or you are a tea party Republican who hates all Democrats. lunchbox 
+first of all, tea is delicious, but let me just say that is not a reference to politics, i just like tea. Especially irish breakfast tea. Secondly, you should all take the time to go back to the top of this page and re-read all of your comments. I would be interested to see if anyone can come up with a sensible answer as to how the discussions went from being about the government, and what is wrong with it. Tell me how the conversation shifted from discussing how to solve a very real problem to being concerned with racism, which is and always will be an issue as long as there is mankind. We can solve that problem later, that problem is not what will be destroying ours, or anyone elses country. Please stay focused on the matter at hand, or it will pass you by while you stand idly in oblivion. Mankind is but a petty child, given shoulders with which to carry the weight of the world. So please let us stop being petty, and use those shoulders to lift each other up to a point where we no longer need the guidance of govt.. We are after all the people that they are referencing when they say that govt. is for the people, by the people. Joe Jakkerton 
+Carter was and still is an idiot. You sound like one of them Teaophobes. sherpeace 
+You do have a point, but that is a very small minority of white American males. Most of us are peace loving people who lived in mixed neighborhoods and get along with everyone. My husband has been a teacher for 28 years at the same school. Everyone knows where he lives and no one bothers us. Oooops, my hubby isn’t white. Only I am. I guess that explains it, huh? Fed Up With Your Ignorance 
+You’re such an ignorant fool. GOVERNMENTS bomb other countries, and news flash, AMERICA’S PRESIDENT IS BLACK. Have a nice day… Joe Jakkerton 
+Or any other kinds of thugs. Alex 
+Forget the black thugs. The problem is the scum bag wall street banksters who have destroyed our society while accomulating wealth. Jill Ellen Schulze 
+you serious? You want to leave because of “black thugs?”. The biggest problem here is the government and in case you haven’t noticed by watching fox news ( i am sure that’s what you watch), most are white besides the pres (luckily!) and they are not the “black thugs” you speak about. Ray J Cimbalnik 
+I agree. Americans will only care about themselves. I can not wait to expatriate OUT of America. America will never recover UNTIL it falls COMPLETELY and then rebuilds. Oline Wright 
+I have to disagree. Again it is an oversimplification of the attitudes of the country and a stereotype. Many in the US if they have it to spare will send money to help out countries in crisis due to catastrophic events. People will do so even within the country. It is more a case of the government overreaching its stated powers and becoming diametrically opposed to what the founding fathers envisioned. I have to admit that when a person is struggling to meet the day to day needs of their lives they will frequently become more centrally focused. But I think you will see similar attitudes in other countries as well. sherpeace 
+You said it! Thank you! Boy, thank God when I went to El Salvador in the 80s, they understood that the govt. is NOT the people. I guess they knew because of their F*#@ed up govt. Joe Jakkerton 
+Why not just leave the city? Joe Jakkerton 
+I would appreciate it if you just stayed in the USA where you belong. Alex 
+I decided to abandon ship. Humans have the right to survive, that has nothing to do with being an American. I am not the property of the USA, although they may think I am. America is not going to change, it is essentially dead with a few exceptions. Once you start disconnecting from this fake American society it will become easier to assimilate to another. In the US we have been spoiled and brainwash that we are number 1 because we have more material possessions then the rest of the world. If this was the case why are the majority of Americans unhappy. Although it is challenging to move to another country, I believe it can be done if one has the will. I left the states about almost 3 months ago and there is not a day that I regret it. Even though I have the advantage of speaking spanish, it still it is a challenge. Even though I may be broke atleast I am free and that you cannot put a price on. Lingram90 
+Where did u relocate to? T 
+Yes, but which ones? Can you name them? NoSheDidn’t! 
+I agree…no matter where you are, all countries will get hit one way or the other…eventually…especially those developing countries that depend on the 1st world countries…compliments of: globalization! Vindicare 
+It is other way around in case of USA. USA depend on import as it had outsourced the industry. It depends on dollar as reserve currency. And depend on military. sherpeace 
+Sad, but true. Reality_Seeker 
+It will be harder to survive in another country. Moreover, the global economy is going to collapse; and when it does, it will be open season on amerikans…….amerikans will be stripped of whatever they have, and in some cases, their lives will be taken, too. Think about your future before you try and run, because you can run but you might not be able to hide. dishatin 
+There with ya nicho12 
+I think it will be harder to survive in America if the global economy collapses. Think about it, America is full of different races all fighting each other to get ahead which creates too much hatred and anger among the races. An economic collapse will lead to a civil war in America and millions of people will die, especially the minorities, the you add in feminism which has caused many men to resent women, you have a multicultural chaos. Most people don’t think about the social problems that America is facing. At least in other countries, their cultures are much more homogeneous and there’s less individualism than in America. In America, it will be it’s every man for himself Mudpie 
+I have lived abroad once and loved the nation but I will say living there for good would be hard. When everything and everyone – including close family, some of whom are ill – you know is in the U.S.A. There are great places out there, but as Michael notes, money issues are significant as well. Unless seriously loaded, you gotta work. Many nations discriminate against foreigners in the job market. And do not underestimate local connections that you lack, etc. Very hard to accomplish. Of course, most Americans have family forefathers who came from elsewhere and survived. It takes a VERY spiritual outlook to endure the privations until one is comfortable. Also, America discriminates against expatriots and the U.S.A. tax system for foreign earned income is insane and impossible to understand for most people. 
+Michael hits the nail on the head when he says the grass is NOT always greener. 
+We may do it again when our children get old enough to live on their own. But for the time being, I think that hunkering down and planning smartly here may be the way to go over time. Travel to those other amazing places. But feather the nest here, live in the state of your dreams and find a city that you are really into. I like New Mexico, for instance, and places therein. Alaska is like a foreign country for the so inclined. 
+Honestly, if the U.S. goes to hell then most of the world will go with it, at least S. America and Central America. And at least here your neighbors who are sympathetic to your cause and freedom will be locked and loaded. In many places only bad guys have guns. 
+Of course there will be violence here as the Al Sharpton haters pour into the streets. But you will have a chance. 
+And those liberty lovers in your area . . . .do not forget Americans DO tend to be very smart people. Even in other really great countries, there are even more socialists than here (though some seem to manage it better, for at least a while). Americans who believe in liberty are the best on the planet. 
+Let us hope we get a state that secedes and serves as a magnet for free men an women. MeMadMax 
+NOT. My wife is from Guatemala, her mom finally got a hot water heater, the place can’t go to hell because there is nothing to break. That is the extreme end of it, but it’s the same thing. The world is not dependent on us for anything, except for one thing: Doing their dirty work for them…. If you think the world thinks about the US all the time, think again. We are like the prissy little cheerleader in highschool who thinks the school would close if she ever stopped going to school…. Mudpie 
+Dude, I pretty much agree. I like the cheerleader analogy. We are full of ourselves and now it is coming out of our rears… Dmmonypeny@att.net 
+It is probably best to stay in this country until the riots start. Even then you may want to make your first move out of the cities to a romote easily protected rural farming area. As bad asthe US is, a lot of the world is already in even worse shape. 
+As banks fail and markets crash, you might want to start hunting for another country. I am looking at the Caymen Islands or Balese. 
+I am steadily building a supply of gold and silver. I am also starting to take my money steadily out of the markets. I am also taking cash out of the bank. 
+There is really no good reason to leave cash in your account. The highest probability of theft comes from the banks Rodster 
+Exactly, just look at the conditions of countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Portugal, Brazil. These are some of the places experiencing riots and unrest due to economic condition. 
+As things global economy continues to get worse, those places will probably experience more unrest and violence. We haven’t seen it here because our monetary policy is what’s driving the world’s economy. 
+So when the SHTF expect chaos around the world. If you are Jim Rodgers, George Soros or a very wealthy person who can buy protection and a place that can insulate itself from turmoil then it really doesn’t matter where you live. 
+The world has never seen the potential for financial armageddon. So if and when it hits it’s going to be ugly wherever you live. Prophecy2008 
+Where do you put the cash to be safe if not in the bank? What about Paypal? Sergi William 
+I was born in Spain and I am 100% Spanish. I spent 3 months in DC at 2011 and I totally agree with Michael: I had a culture shock. 
+About the language, even if you know the language of the country you are moving to, it takes many years to get all the slang and to have a correct spelling and knowledge of everything about that country. 
+And well… I feel sad because I came back to Spain and I always thought it was a mistake and I should stay in the US. 
+But with the last news and everything, maybe I did the right thing… 
+Anyway, the whole view is so scary… 
+Greetings from Barcelona to everybody! Rodster 
+Greetings and yeah it’s tough everywhere you live we cause this collapse is being planned on purpose. It’s better to live within one’s culture. I’m spanish but born and raised in the US. I know even for me it would be hard to move to a latin american country or to Spain. The culture is so different. jacklohman 
+Mainly the rich will gather their stash and look for a country where it will be protected. But they will have to worry about pirates, or a corrupt security crew, or local politicians who will claim the cash as illegally acquired and confiscate it. Better that they stay in America and fix the system. Gracie Darling 
+You are mostly wrong about that. Most countries in South America and Central America are no pirates or will take you money! 
+The banks in South America have branches in the states. There are actually laws down here! 
+Ecuador is not less corrupt than the USA. Look around. Look at the shipping docks in the states, for example. Same here though, mostly. 
+Money is pouring into Latin Countries and the government are not taking it from anyone. 
+Banks are very strict here in Ecuador. Same in Colombia and Peru. Only two countries are having some banking problems. They are south and in the center of the continent, not Bolivia. 
+The economy in Ecuador is booming and gringos are flooding the cities. Hard to find a cool apartment on the coast. Building is rocketing with huge shopping centers. People are spending money on cars and houses and many luxury items. 
+We have paved streets in Ecuador now! Even toilets and air conditioned bars. How bout that! T 
+You’re saying that the banks there are healthy, and safe? close call 
+Would you fix the system that feeds you? It’s a bottom up food chain that’s working upward very quickly. The die off is coming, it’s global. jacklohman 
+Yea, I guess I’d recognize that I pushed too far. “Greed” is this country’s #1 problem, and our politicians share in it all through campaign cash. ONLY public funding of campaigns will fix it, and ONLY a major turnover in 2014 will do it. 
+Ignore the promises. If you are happy with our nation’s direction, vote for incumbents. If not, vote for challengers. MD 
+That is the most defeated mentality on earth. Are you really so bogged down by the system the only thing you can do to protest is vote for challengers? lol. pathetic. jacklohman 
+I agree totally dude!!!! lol Pathetic. IF anything, vote independant or no vote at all!!! Jill Ellen Schulze 
+No, america is worse. The pirates are only in africa. What about Europe where I personally know life is nicer and less stressful. Well that depends if material stuff is important of course (most all of the americans I met in my 31yrs abroad where consumed with being matwerialistic or tryng too hard to be destitute losers. I want to leave soon but my [partner is an american and so is our daughter. Although I grew up in Europe I am trapped in the U.S. It is verty hard. I have never found a more superficial, damaging society than here in the U.S Sonia 
+I know how you feel… I’m not European so I can’t escape to Europe, I’m Latin American so I could move back to my country or to another Latin country with low restrictions on immigration. However, it’s very hard, I was brought to the US when I was 13y/o and since then I have always dreamed of leaving this place. Trying to pick a career was very difficult because I also didn’t want to pay 100k on a degree here to move to another country and make significantly less, so I’ve always taken a conservative and safe route and have no debts, but now I’m so unhappy because I’m almost 30 and I still live here, and I’m afraid I will never escape this country. 
+It is really scary because I really don’t have a big family, I don’t know where to go, and I’m scared that I won’t be able to support myself in a different country since I am single and I’m just used to taking care of myself alone in the United States. I don’t have a big family, I really don’t have anyone to welcome me in another country, and I feel really scared. I wish I could find a way to be autonomous, have my own business, or telecommute so that I could finally move. This culture is depressing, and I’ve realized that it’s not just me, because when I talk to other immigrants (Latin, Europeans, etc.) they feel very similar. In fact, after so many years here, my friends are immigrants with the exception of one or two Americans, and even with those American friends I feel like they don’t understand because they still have a blind over their eyes and believe that their country is wonderful. piccadillybabe 
+To go back to your homeland where unemployment is close to 50% does not bode well for America. Best wishes to you. lois752 
+like Stephanie said I cant believe that people can make $9561 in a few weeks on the internet. did you see this web page w­w­w.K­E­P­2.c­o­m Mondobeyondo 
+Honey – if you made $9561 in a few weeks on the internet, I sure wouldn’t be posting about it on The Economic Collapse Blog. I’d be off surfing on my private island in Tahiti. 
+*burp* 
+Tell me how is Barcelona? Is it a good place to live? Sergi William 
+Yes. Good weather. Mountain & beach. In that case it is. The problem is the econOmic crisis, wich is everywhere. BeenThere 
+“in many foreign nations, the police are far more corrupt than they generally are in the United States”. I find that hard to believe Max Never the less, I never thought I would see the day when Americans would want to leave their country. MeMadMax 
+Hey, that corruption can be taken advantage of… Always keep a $20 dollar bill on you, and you will never go to jail…. 
+I experienced that first hand when I lived in Mexico for a while! infocyde 
+Good post. Another thing to consider too is that if things go south the natives might look at America as the country to blame for the world being in Chaos. If you stick out in those countries it might be a worse place to be. Just food for thought. Mudpie 
+Great point. I went to a fairly USA-friendly country to live and work for a fairly long period of time and though they liked me, there is definitely a bias against Americans in particular. It is based on the fact that they get lots of stuff from TV and are ignorant as well; and also, honestly, that we really are NOT anymore the nice guys we used to be and they have a reason to dislike us often. MeMadMax 
+The Gastonguays stole my idea! Anyways, I find the idea of leaving the states not only a necessary truth for me and my families’ survival, but an exciting endeavor. I dunno, maybe it’s because I have been exposed to other countries, then look at the US and go, well… we just suck. We may be “rich and powerful”, but we suck at the same time. One time, I was walking down the street of Santiago, and saw a country rich in culture, but not money, but yet, every single person I ran into there seemed… happy. And you could feel it too. I have also been to lima peru, bahli indonesia, melbourne austrailia, hobart tasmania, and some places in the middle east. Anyways, each time, same deal(with the exception of the middle east) you could feel the attitude there, festive and fun. The feeling I get in the states is disconnected and cold. People don’t want to socialize with each other here. Maybe it’s because of technology overload. People don’t get out of their cars and walk anymore. There’s no street vendors or anything either… It feels dead here. >_> Mudpie 
+Living abroad was an eye opener for me. I loved the place we were in and truly, now after that America does just suck and seem filled with artificial people and things at this point in history. Seeing from another perspective cemented for me that our culture is vile and we are a moral sewer. Seeing the attack on George Zimmerman was almost more than I could bear. We have turned into a seething cesspool. 
+But again, the grass is always greener and even though America is in bad shape, truly emigrating to another place is pretty radical and not necessarily the solution. Making a community of similar thinking friends here and enjoying the natural beauty of the US (even people in the beautiful place I was in appreciate our natural beauty in the West, e.g.,) may be the best way to go for most. 
+But I salute you : ) And may still join you at some point. 
+One thing for SURE. We all need to become less emotionally connected to the construct of “America” as that was, even 6 years ago. Those days are gone for good. We need to be clear eyed on moving ahead on our principles. 
+For instance, I hear the Star Spangled Banner and scoff these days, for we are no longer the land of the free and home of the brave. 
+What was true is now a lie. xander cross 
+Attack on Zimmerman? He murdered a kid and molested his cousin. Are white people this sick and evil? Mudpie 
+Yeah, white people are that sick and evil. Sequoia 
+You are probably mixed with white European blood in your ansestry too.About everyone is mixed now days. there are good and evil in every race and nationality and it isn,t fair just to point the finger at one race or people. And about Zimmerman,he is a Hispanic white and Jewish with a black grandfather in Peru.He is mixed. We all need to come together as one people against this evil government that has been hijacked by foreign off shore banks and come together as Americans. Seanyboyo 
+Zimmerman is not white European in any of his heritage , his father is Ashkenazy Jew not European! His mother is native Peruvian Indian with a black father! I’m white European , my ancestry is traced back 300 years on both sides of may family to N&S Ireland, immigrated to England in the 19th century, my genetic grouping is R1b (like most Western Europeans!) all this makes me white ( the way the above racist zander utilises my ethnicity to place people with no connection to white Europeans amongst us to facilitate his ideological racist hate for white people’s is a classic definition of racist ideology)! Zander & his ilk need to be fought , because should our ethnicity become a minority be holding to zander & co we’ll find no leftist PC defenders, only belligerent intolerance that’ll surpass our worst nightmares! All people deserve ethnic & cultural protection , whites included! Ray J Cimbalnik 
+I AGREE!!! You hit the nail on the head! People in all of the other countries that you mentioned might have less money, BUT…they ARE much happier and more friendly people. I have experienced that for myself when I have been in other countries. As a side note, they are also generally healthier than the people in America. I am now in the process of trying to tie up the loose ends so I can expatriate just as SOON as I can. Prophecy2008 
+What country do you feel is the best? infocyde 
+Also I have noticed a lot of my expat friends still have their income sources somehow tied to the US (supporting tourism in their new country, online businesses, remote workers). They are proud to have left, but I see this as a giant gaping hole in their strategies. As a temporary solution OK, but if your checks come from the USA or USA/Western tourism if there is a crash you might be very vulnerable. Mudpie 
+It is true. VERY hard to do business overseas unless one is very rich. So many hurdles. Banking customs, rules (though where I lived the banks were MUCH better, real people answered phones politely, GOD I hate what we have become), time zone issues, it is hard to get things done in the states from overseas. Sequoia 
+If someone moves to another country and is dependent on Social Security checks or other income from the USA,will be screwed when the S#!T hits the fan and the USA goes bankrupt completely. If you relocate to another country,keep this in mind, that you will mabey need another source of income. If you move out to another country,now is the time to try to open a business or find some work,because one day those checks are not going to come to you and you will be poor just like in the USA. You need to have a stragety plan before leaving. infocyde 
+I will say this though, as much as I love America, I think it will only be harder to get out and we are on a trajectory towards fascism. It won’t get any easier to leave if that is your plan IMHO. This doesn’t mean that you will be successful if you leave, but the option will get harder as time progresses. Another factor to add into the calculus. frankensteingovernment 
+At some point, you begin to realize that the government is simply going to tax you to death. They have no other strategy to cope with the massive debt they have incurred. 
+So these folks are seeing the obvious. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better and it’s clear that their US Countrymen are a bunch of apathetic cowards. 
+Expatriating is looking very good to me also. MeMadMax 
+There was a post on ZeroHedge of a guy that described the united states as a “Prissy cheerleader who thinks the world revolves around her”. And that if she didn’t show up for school, the place would close down and her friends would commit suicide and the teachers would quit… well, not quite all that but you get the gist right? Fact of the matter is, the world does not really care about the US… Neither like nor dislike, they just want to get on with their lives just like the rest of us… And, “third world countries” are really not that bad… They got it all, mostly, too, TV’s, cars, toilets… etc…. Mudpie 
+Again, I pretty much agree. But you cannot deny that we have a strong tradition of liberty here that many people still carry. Just saying. 
+I noticed the same thing about America though Max. And many overseas economies are booming and more free than ours. I even thought China felt more economically vibrant (though I would be afraid to post this over there – it will be a few years before the NSA starts disappearing people for these kinds of things). davidmpark 
+There’s old wisdom, “A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and mortgage.” Guess that’s what’s going on here. 
+Wish we could leave; always wanted to go back to the ancestral homes in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol, Brighton and the small village of Parc in France (where family legend has it we got our name from Charlemagne himself). But my family and I have no choice but to stay put. 
+I’d rather fight it out here. I know we have a collapse and an international + civil wars coming and have been studying the possible effects and outcomes, and have come to a conclusion: America is going to be better off long term than the rest of the world. 
+My reasoning is that if Obama or the next president becomes a fascist dictator, they will fail and the United States will collapse. If not a dictator is elected, then the coming perfect storm will get us also. 
+Many are leaving for reasoning that they will be better off elsewhere. Not true – they’ll get into the wars to come anyway; cast into the Benedict Arnold or Coriolanus roles. 2Gary2 
+I think those leaving are sick of the crazy conservatives like paul ryan who takes from the poor and gives to the rich. davidmpark 
+Doesn’t Bloomberg have a Bahamas home that he goes to each weekend in taxpayer dime with NYC cops also paid for at NYC expense? vizeet 
+I think many countries may be safer than US because US has gun culture which makes it very very unsafe at the time of riots. People may look for more foreigner friendly, having good natural resource and still not heavily industrialized. I can think New Zealand as one. GSOB 
+O beautiful for spacAnnotateious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea! 
+O beautiful for pilgrim feet Whose stern impassioned stress A thoroughfare of freedom beat Across the wilderness! God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! 
+O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife. Who more than self their country loved And mercy more than life! America! America! May God thy gold refine Till all success be nobleness And every gain divine! 
+O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea! 
+O beautiful for halcyon skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties God shed his grace on thee Till souls wax fair as earth and air And music-hearted sea! 
+O beautiful for pilgrims feet, Whose stem impassioned stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness! God shed his grace on thee Till paths be wrought through Wilds of thought By pilgrim foot and knee! 
+O beautiful for glory-tale God shed his grace on thee Till selfish gain no longer stain The banner of the free! 
+O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam God shed his grace on thee Till nobler men keep once again Thy whiter jubilee! 
+What an incredibly gorgeous song. 
+But it is about the people of a different era. 
+Still, I get your point. It is a hard decision either way. lavista4u 
+I’m from Asia. Americans are the most talented people in the world. Its just that they ain’t getting the opportunity they deserve. 
+You are worth more than what America tells you. Just come out of America and see how your value goes up from Zero to Infinity in a day. 
+Agree, other countries are a bit struggle too but its not as bad for guys of the caliber of Americans. I admit, I’m not as talented or educated as some Americans who are living in depression and unemployment, but i earn a good income and that has allowed me to travel places. 
+First, learn a new foreign language, if you can learn at-least one foreign language say Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Russia, German…The whole world suddenly opens for you. With your English skills and local language…you will be on top of the competitions. There are very few people in non-English speaking countries who would then have the skill-set as you would. 
+Just learn a new language. I guarantee you will experience a New World. Joyce J 
+I live in Florida, and I keep telling people, if you want to learn something, learn Spanish! I have a feeling it’s going to be needed in the next few decades. I try to do as much traveling as I can. I am not able to do it like I would, but still. I think for some Americans – we need to learn about the cultures in our OWN back yards as well! You got the Cajuns, Native Americans, and others. Apokalupto Aletheia 
+I took Hebrew. I may never meet a Spanish only person, or an Asian language only person. But I will meet God one day. I know I have ticked Him off enough already and He still forgives me. The least I could do is speak His language when I meet Him face to face. sherpeace 
+My brother is being treated like a king in China. They practically have him running the school. Here they made him quit saying he was racist after they put the worst kids from several grades in his class. He speaks Chinese and the children LOVE him; the parents and admin too. HORIZON 
+Thank you. Ken 
+Moved to New Zealand 14 years ago. I haven’t lived in America for almost 20 years now. I can tell you that it takes a significant amount of time to rebuild your life when moving countries. Even though English is the main language here there are a lot of aspects to consider that would be subject to change. With that said there are a lot of advantages living here as opposed to the States. The government is much more accountable and visible to the ordinary citizen, i.e. you can actually bump into a member of Parliament or a government minister on the street…. without them having a phalanx of security guards. There is no oppressive police presence. Only 4.5 million people in a country the size of Japan. Yes it is on the ring-of-fire but nothing is without risk. USKiwi 
+We did the same about 5 years ago and feel that living here is significantly better than the US. Moose is Loose 
+I stayed in NZ for about 4 months… Auckland down halfway through the north island. I loved it as it was a clean and polite country, however viewing it on a map is a bit of a fright. It’s strange, as a born American I must have lived in over 30 of my fifty states including Alaska (but not hawaii), and always on the coast until just recently when I had my first land-locked experience in Indiana, and now living in central canada far away from any ocean. I feel (possibly falsely) so much more secure here. No giant tectonic plates running along my coastlines, no volcanoes nearby to speak of, no oceans to rise over the landmass… wind usually comes south-east in the northern hemisphere, so our wind current sweeps down from the eastern tip of Russia through the Yukon to us. Not much to speak of as far as population above us…. but when I was in NZ, I FELT the distance from any landmass on the planet. It was like the fresh ocean air, even in the middle of the city, always reminded me that I lived on a tiny blip in a water world. And driving up into the mountains gives you some spectacular views of the waters… but also a bit scary! to look 290 degrees around you and see the curvature of the earth on the vast oceanic horizon is a big wake up call on just how far out you are! TR 
+No one can escape global warming & NTHE. Ralfine 
+After all, most Americans descended from immigrants, refugees, slaves. Mudpie 
+Why we were so strong. 
+It takes a tremendous act of courage to emigrate for good. 
+And back then they did not even have computers or TV to stay in touch with the old country. 
+I never cease to be amazed at how low our character has fallen from what it used to be. Pathetic. And happened so quickly. 
+The Left’s cunning is brilliant. Ralfine 
+Don’t blame it on the left. 
+Emigrants and the left have one thing in common: leaving behind the old and trusted and heading for new opportunities. 
+It is the right that wants to conserve the old and allow very little movement. 
+In chaos theory chaos allows for creativity, while order is stagnation. 
+Making a new country in a new continent does not work with conservatives, you need progressives for that. 
+The only danger is, that even the most progressive become conservative and eventually are left behind when they do not progress themselves. davidmpark 
+When will the rationing start in the US? Should be before the world war gets hot. Ralfine 
+You mean food stamps? davidmpark 
+I was originally thinking of US WWII style rationing. But that’s a good point about the food stamps. With our situation, we had no choice but to go on it. They don’t supply enough for a whole month – enough for 2 people; not 5. 
+Food stamps as the new rationing. Good observation! Melissa McGuire 
+I live in Scotland, Great Britain. So I don’t know what it’s like to live in America. Carl 
+Australia is as racist as the United States mary 
+There are racists everywhere in the world. Where Ive lived in the states, majority of people are not racist. Its a big enough country that youre not on top of each other and people are used to living with people from other areas. Those who are racist, usually have their reasons, often times bad experiences with a few from that race. Most people do not generalize though and see people as individuals. Sounds like you dont, youre in fact “generalizing”. Apokalupto Aletheia 
+The problem with Australia for me at least is the Sydney Funnel Web Spider…or the very venomous snakes, or that huge desert. I hate the heat, and most definitely hate “Tiny Critters that Kill…for a thousand Alex.” condaggitt 
+If I had $100,000+ in student loans and very little prospects of ever paying it off…i’d move too.,, 
+Life in the usa not worth having that over your head for decades. Cubatraveler 
+I have not lived in the U.S. in 25 years and I would not go back now. Everything I see has changed for the worse there and I am doing much better out of the U.S. than I ever did in it. If you feel like you don’t belong there anymore, you are probably right and should immigrate. No regrets from me. Manny 
+If things are going to get bad in the United States, maybe they will be as bad anywhere else? Richard 
+Why has my comment been deleted three times this morning? chris 
+Sinking ship? Not that i’m saying the people leaving are rats of course! Rufus T Firefly 
+The quicker these ignorant religious wackos leave the country, the better off we will be. Maria S Biddle 
+As flawed as she is, this is home and I will fight for her, not flee. xander cross 
+Yeah right. You will work for the Chinese and then complain about the very jobs your white male CEO’s sold to them in the first place. Smithfield, va comes to mind. mary 
+She should complain, as should we all. We help bring more of them to middle class, while we hurt ourselves. Glad to see they are doing better but not at our own expense. I personally know several Companies affiliated with China, and if they left and brought the jobs back home, a lot of our current issues would be solved. And not just in China either. If our own Companies cant be loyal to the US, I dont support them. I understand the situation for some of them(shipping costs etc) or reduced labor costs helped their survival, but the government should be doing more to bring them back with incentives. The rest of us need to get innovative and help create more jobs. This country has survived issues before, they will rise above them again. Negativity defeats us. Positive attitudes with hard work and creativity can save us and help us to rise above our problems. Unify ourselves and create jobs so that families can remain in the same cities, we need to revitalize our family situations and our Communities to reach out to one another. Its up to all of us as individuals. If you see defeat and dont make an effort, then youre going down with the ship. I would rather try to save it. We can all be leaders, and we need strong, energetic leaders to encourage us with communication…speak to us as a nation, revitalize us with their spirit and leadership. A leadership which calls on those in the country to take us down the right paths to renew the economy and rebuild the nation. Jackie Milton 
+I personally support going galt. Become less productive on purpose. Do not earn anymore than it takes to survive.Keep yourself under the poverty level. Do not enable the government to extort more taxes by working harder and being more productive than others. If people will study the history of the past 40 yrs and the paradigm of today they will find that it is not beneficial to be extremely productive in our society. sherpeace 
+You can blame that on laws passed by Republicans to give welfare to corporations and leave nothing for the middle class. TA 
+Welfare is wrong no matter who the recipient. It is the initiation of force that provides the welfare state. seth datta 
+I don’t know what the future holds, but there is the potential for social cataclysm in many parts of the world. I don’t think the UK will survive as we have too many people compared to local resources; we only survive because of fraudulent banking practices of the City of London Corporation. 
+Seems the better English-speaking countries are Canada, Australia and New Zealand. If you add Germany, Chile and Singapore to this list, you have the best countries for white people to live in future. For non-Caucasians, mostly these countries or a few extra ones may be fine, depending. The US and ireland are both fence-sitters, as the administration of the US is enslaving the world and the US through enforced globalisation practices designed to make the rich more wealthy. So it could go either way. 
+I do believe the US stood for something that no other nation achieved, and that this is something worth fighting for. markthetruth 
+In the end you will most likely survive in a place you grew up in and are familiar with. And I’m a believer you are where you are for a reason. Stay Put ! Like all living things they learn how to adapt. 
+the end… K 
+If I had very young children. I might feel I owed it to them to leave. But since I do not, I will stay. All of us have the choice to run, or take a stand. Running always seems easier, so many do it. As the encroaching darkness of Fascism spreads throughout this Country. I will continue to hold up my small light in the darkness. And if one day they come and snuff out that light, so be it. Some times taking a stand for the right thing, is the only action a decent person has left. piccadillybabe 
+America is resilient. We bounce back because most of us carry that “small light in the darkness” and ride out the storms and carry “hope” in our hearts. It’s just hard to see all the insanity and chaos going on now days and all for what? It’s gotten so out of control. Jade 
+I have had the same thought, but likely I grow tired of being a Delphi that no one listens too even though the evidence is laid out in front of them. T 
+Amen. Couldn’t have said it better. I’m going to make a stand, and fight in my own small way. JailBanksters 
+But the only ones leaving are the ones that helped to create the problems. And their the only ones that doesn’t matter where they move to. It’s not like they contributed a lot to society, you would probably be better off without them to be honest. It would be a totally different story if all the Peasants left leaving all the rich behind. Vlad Lenin 
+If it was a pure economic collapse, we would stay. But, it won’t be. This country is headed towards a future that would make Adolf Hitler proud. When the collapse comes, the people in power will use that as an opportunity to go all in. Many of us will be imprisoned (or just disappear), there will be confiscation on a national scale… we’re going to loose everything we have, so why not leave now while we still have something. Look at Lincoln and FDR, they’re already done stuff like this. Americans are bred to be fascist lites (we call the American system). When the end comes and the majority side with the government, what are you going to do? 
+And no it’s not just the rich leaving. Our group is all middle class professionals…tired of being handed our cards. And yes I said group, we have found ways to nullify or attenuate the article’s valid points. There is a way. 
+This country just isn’t worth the trouble anymore. Mudpie 
+Good points here as well. 
+People disappeared in Argentina. And Mexico. And in many other places. The USA was unique. Not so much anymore. Jim 
+I am a dual citizen, living outside the US. At the moment I am seriously considering giving up my US citizenship due to the cost to keep it. Very few who live in the US realize (and not all expats) the paper work required to live outside the US and hold either a green card or citizenship. I certainly don’t have much and the cost in time is huge and a mistakes (not intentional avoidance, mistakes) can cost a large part of the account plus tax penalties. The cost is also professional, if I have too much authority at my company I have to report various aspects of the company to the IRS. The report has to be made even if it breaks the law of country the company is based in. It is becomning inpossible to open or maintain a forgien bank account in many countries if one is a US citizen as the banks don’t want to deal with the IRS and the penalties. US citizenship simple isn’t worth the cost to me. Mudpie 
+We almost reached that point. 
+You are so right about the paperwork. robert burns 
+I would not define “many” the same way as if there is a mass migration. There isn’t and won’t be. First, it requires money. Second, it requires skills. Third, it requires another country willing to take you for either your money or your skills. It is difficult and time consuming. People who have done it struggle usually and some come back because they cannot bear not being “near” family. Even with Skype it is hard to remain abroad without huge commitment. Far more people are trying to get into the US. Many are losers such as from Mexico but there are many, many well educated ones from mainland China and India. They still view this as a land of opportunity compared to their home countries. Even if I could get into one of the chosen countries: NZ, Australia or Canada, I would not do it at this stage of life (age 67). Not enough energy for it and unwilling to be away from children. I tend to think more along the lines of a favorite Vietnam related song: NOWHERE TO RUN TO. Jodi 
+I think the best plan is to be prepared. As nice as it sounds to move away from it all, it would be difficult to adjust. Charlie 
+What if the citizen’s of the countries that people are running to for whatever reason begin to hate Americans. These peoples lives could be in serious jeopardy. jakartaman 
+I have lived in several countries. America has gone to the dogs and the whole world will be at war over basic resources. Why did America become so powerful? Two Oceans Freedom Once the SFTF there will be a scramble for “Things” There will be a lot of death from violence, starvation, thirst, disease etc. even possible nuclear? Once things settle down to a reasonable level people will reconstitute themselves and their living environments – It will be like the 1850’s. Where would you rather be at this time – I want to be in America where there is a lot of natural resources. Belize – really – the coconuts will run out soon! David Kessel 
+Another important thing- if not ‘the’ most important thing to consider is visas. You will relocate as what? Most countries either want a special skill or money from you. Otherwise, you’re a tourist with no rights whatsoever and your tourist visa may or may not be extended. And also, most countries protect their job market from foreigners. Even if you have a skill, they just may not want to hire you. The exception is maybe teaching English for a pittance. Ralfine 
+And you need to be married to take your sweetheart with you. Some people are not even allowed to marry everywhere or their marriages are not recognised as such. 
+Your children might not have the right to stay after they turn 18, if they have neither a job nor citizenship. David Kessel 
+If you are both 1st world citizens, you don’t need to be married. If you are a 1st world citizen and/or your sweetheart is say a Filipina, then you will have to be married but still the immigration may not grant her a tourist visa. Ralfine 
+And if we are both boys, … David Kessel 
+That is even worse. That is why any article about resettling must touch upon the visa issue by country as the first topic, not culture shock-shmulture shock, The next thing is how and where to make a living- work permits, etc. Then, and only then come other relatively minor things described above. Ralfine 
+Yes, culture shock is something you can worry about, when you have the permission to live (and work) there together. 
+And language? Well, just learn it. Richard 
+That makes four times my comment has been deleted. I wold like to know why. Ralfine 
+Left my home 20 years ago for a job in China. It was a culture shock. No living in England. Another culture shock. 
+Just one regret: I didn’t learn Chinese. ArigatouGozaimas 
+Switching countries is mainly an option for the very wealthy. And for those who are not wealthy, where do they go? 
+Canada might become an option in the future. they have more solid fundamentals to their economy, a wealth of resources, and their socialized medical system will function better than Obama care. 
+In the U.S. itself there is a large diversity between regions. So most of the migration might actually be within the U.S. and not require renunciation of citizenship. I could envision a movement of population to the energy producing regions of the U.S. (Texas & North Dakota). 
+Perhaps migration to the Midwest could become international at some point in the future. If there is a state and municipal debt crisis and New York, California, and Illinois need federal bailouts will the energy producing states stay in the Union and fork over the money to save them? 
+Imagine the U.S. in three parts. The west coast, the north east coast, and the middle/south. I think it is a possibility. There is nothing unifying the american people beyond a bloated government making an overabundance of rules and passing out the common currency as it sees fit. (redistribution of wealth) apeiron 
+Not that I endorse emigration, but might I suggest Uruguay. Climate like coastal Georgia, constitutional republic with sane laws, less than 5% unemployment, about 3 1/2 million population half of which live in Montevideo, fertile well watered, 93% of the population is of European extraction, mostly catholic…no Muslims. Montevideo is a short distance from Buenos Aries. But, of course, Spanish is the predominate language. El Pollo de Oro 
+Apeiron: If I moved to Latin America, Uruguay would be at the top of my list along with Chile. I’ve known Italians and Spaniards who felt right at home in Monteovideo or Santiago and felt like they had never left Europe. And those cities are relatively safe (certainly compared to Caracas or Guatemala City). 
+Pero si un estadounidense no hable español, no recomiendo mudarse a Uruguay o Chile. Si un americano no tiene ganas de hablar español, es mejor quedarse en un país ingleshablante. NoSheDidn’t! 
+Have you ever read the book “How to hide your assets and disappear” by Edmund Pankau? It’s a bit outdated but the book has many low tech tips and tricks that come in handy. I guess it would be a “starter” book to get into that topic. I was born and raised in Mexico city, learned English at a bilingual private British school…boy was it a shock when i moved to the US! For starters the accents, like the southern one, the NY one, the Boston one…golly! Been living in the USA for 10 years now, i picked up the slang pretty quick but am still baffled by the accents. People looked at me weird when i said the words “petrol”, “banister”, “cupboard”, “lift”, “storey”. People also looked at me weird when i wrote words like “colour”, “neighbour”, “learned”. I’ll never forget their faces when they heard me say “i have to collect my husband”…lol… :b they probably thought i was fixin’ (southern term) to charge him for child support or smthg xD…I also got fat, because i fell in love with “Miami subs”, their hush puppies, milkshakes and deep fried fish were delicious…country fried steak with gravy, biscuits and gravy every morning…oy! chicken tenders with honey mustard…ran to Mickey D’s or Taco Bell for a snack, i put ranch on just about everything i ate and the biggest change of all: I HAD A CAR! shoot, back in Mex city i walked everywhere, never needed a car, had the subway, buses, cabs, etc. So between the foods i was eating and having a car i literally ballooned, fast…like 100 lbs in a year. It took me a while to lose the weight and get back to exercising but i finally lost the extra lbs. Talk about a culture shock! Anyway…i wouldn’t mind going to Spain next… ;b Olé pissobama 
+I’ll stick it out and await the better days when the adults are finally back in charge. Hopefully this country will have learned that putting spoiled rotten-to-the-core race baiting entitlement demanding free market hating socialist/progressive/Marxist Muslims in any position of power is not the road you want to go down. Muhammad Kazim 
+“Ab tau ghabra kai yeh kehtai hein keh mar jaaein gai Mar kai bhi chain nah paya tau kidhar jaaein gai” 
+(A very famous couplet in Urdu) 
+Translation: Feeling nervous about this world, in panic I console myself saying I would die. But even if death too doesn’t provide the desired peace of mind, where would I go? 
+Stick to the land of opportunities and hope for the best; keep your composure. Ready to Bail 
+Leaving the US is a very viable option and not nearly as difficult as some might think. I am set to leave whenever it I deem it appropriate. I own several pieces if property / housing in another country, have bank accounts / credit cards already in place, a successful business in place and Permanent Residency in the country of my choice ( won’t be identified ). Leave your arrogance and sense of entitlement at the border. Learn the language and don’t complain about how they do things.. you are there voluntarily. And no, I am not rich. Wherever you think is viable, go there. Spend lot’s of time there. Go back again and again if you can’t spend extended time there. MAKE LOCAL FRIENDS.. real ones.. not ones who think you are a rich American. Be NICE. Always. Smiles remove more obstacles than arguments. 68Impala 
+1,139 out of 319,000,000 or looking at it another way 99.99964% are staying. How many of the 1,139 are born here, didn’t marry a spouse from another country or left for a tax haven. Things are going downhill but I do not believe the 1,139 are the canaries in the coal mine. chris 
+You’ve not understood. That’s 1,139 who have RENOUNCED their citizenship on leaving. That number is only a tiny fraction of those that left. Richard 
+Let’s see: The following are 10 questions to ask yourself before you decide to move to another country… Do You Speak The Language? If Not, How Will You Function? There are plenty of countries where you can get by in English – even where English is not the main language (e.g. India. Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Philippines, etc. etc.) Richard 
+Let’s see: The following are 10 questions to ask yourself before you decide to move to another country… Do You Speak The Language? If Not, How Will You Function? There are plenty of countries where you can get by in English – even where English is not the main language (e.g. India. Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Philippines, etc. etc.) How Will You Make A Living? Teach English As A Foreign Language. Google TOEFL. Countries like Thailand, Korea and Malaysia are CRYING OUT for English teachers and YOU DO NOT NEED ANY EXPERIENCE. Just the fact of being able to speak English fluently is often enough. It need not at all be “very difficult to find a job”. Sorry, that is not an excuse. Will You Be Okay Without Your Family And Friends? Yes, make new ones. And you will probably speak more to your family abroad than you did when living near them. (Skype and Magicjack, for example, offer FREE phone calls anywhere in the States from anywhere in the world. Sorry, excuse just vanished. Joyce J 
+I’m finishing up my degree in technical writing, and they are looking for people all over places in Latin America to teach English. TESOL certifications aren’t very hard to get (if indeed you need one). It doesn’t pay a lot but (depending on the country) it’s a pretty decent salary. Some require you only be a native English speaker. Some are for public schools, some private. Just depends. And if you can speak both English and Spanish (which I only know enough to get by), it’s better. I seriously thought about doing it. Richard 
+Have You Factored In Weather Patterns And Geological Instability? Hmmm… ask that question of those who live in Florida, California, the mid-west.. Need I say more? Oh, sorry drought??? DROUGHT?? Oh please. Give me a break! What Will You Do For Medical Care? Pay less than a tenth of what you pay in the States. Next question? Oh sorry, “get the care you needed (in the States)” Are you trying to make me laugh? American doctors are among the most careless, ignorant, greedy, distasteful professionals in the world. In my 22 years in the United States I can regale you with stories that would turn your hair. More people die of medical malpractice in the United States of Stupidity than anywhere else in the world. Are You Moving Into A High Crime Area? Then don’t. Whatever the above statement is, it is NOT a reason not to stay in the (crime-ridden) United States. Richard 
+Are You Prepared For “Culture Shock”? If you haven’t already suffered “culture shock” from living in the United States in recent years, you won’t notice it anywhere else either. If you do move to another country, you may quickly find that thousands of little things that you once took for granted in the U.S. are now very different. And there is a very good chance that many of the “amenities” that you are accustomed to in the U.S. will not be available in a foreign nation and that your standard of living will go down. True. And if your standard of living hasn’t already “gone down” in recent times while living in the United States, you are very lucky. What Freedoms and Liberties Will You Lose By Moving? Yes, our liberties and our freedoms are being rapidly eroded in the United States. But in many other nations around the world things are much worse. You may find that there is no such thing as “freedom of speech” or “freedom of religion” in the country that you have decided to move to. Nobody is suggesting moving to such countries. This is a silly comment designed to dissuade you from leaving the United States. Michael, I am sure you are quite shocked to see from the Comments how many people agree with the idea of leaving. Probably not what you hoped to see. sherpeace 
+I experienced culture shock years ago moving from Upstate New York to New Orleans, LA. It was worse than any culture shock going to any other country, including El Salvador in the 80s when it was embroiled in civil war! Dubaibonddude 
+Its not easy anywhere. Agreed. But catastrophe is everywhere from Cyprus to Greece and Spain to Syria and Egypt. Sanctions on Iran…etc. 
+Without a job and income, most are doomed, anyways, wherever they live. 
+Rich, who are people with above USD 1m in net worth and number about 25m (0.35% of World pop.) and people with over USD 100k are 334m out of 7bn which is just 4.77% so approx 5% have USD 100k and more. 
+What about the remainder 95% who do not even have access to a computer, and in most cases to food and water? They have no clue what a financial crisis means! I do not think they are thinking giving up any citizenships or moving abroad. They dont even have a dollar to eat a square meal or a bus fare. They are not reading any internet articles, too. 
+Only 5% of the planet, at most, will be and is worried but the remainder from the jungles of Amazon to the Savannahs of Africa or interiors of China and India will make it through just fine, unless someone takes away their money and job,…but hey they never had one in the first place! 
+This was more tongue in cheek but does anyone care to comment? El Pollo de Oro 
+It isn’t hard to see why someone would want to get the hell out of The Banana Republic of America, formerly Gli Stati Uniti. From the shortage of decent jobs to the death of the American middle class to an increasingly abusive police state to an abomination of a health care system, the reasons to leave this collapsing hellhole are numerous. This banana republic is not the America I grew up in. But if you’re going to leave, there is much to consider. I know some American expatriates who really enjoy living overseas and have no desire to return to the BRA, but other Americans would be absolutely miserable in another country. It depends on the individual. 
+If you’re the type of person who enjoys speaking more than one language and has a sense of adventure, you might do really well as an expatriate. I’ve known Americans who spoke perfect French and fit right in when they moved to France or Belgium. 
+On the other hand, if you’re the type of American who makes a beeline for McDonalds the minute you get to Amsterdam or gets upset because someone in Rome spoke to you in Italian……you won’t make a very good expatriate. 
+So again, it depends on the individual. El Pollo de Oro 
+If you do stay: remember that our once-great country is now a banana republic, and the misery will only get worse for the vast majority of Americans. Below, some savvy individuals express the gravity of the situation, and smart people will heed their warnings. 
+“Our country’s vital signs are tanking—not just from the monetary area, but from a liberty standpoint as well. We are going down the path that other failed governments and institutions have gone down historically, and I don’t see it turning around.”—The Patriot Nurse 
+“The cities are going to look like Dodge City. They’re going to be uncontrollable. You’re going to have gangs in control. Motorcycle marauders. You’re not going to have enough police or federales—just like Mexico—to control the situation.” —Gerald Celente 
+“I live in a place in Tennessee where people started eating GMO food in 1995, and now, it’s 18 years later—and they’ve been poisoned. They walk around like they’re zombines. They are dying. If you look at the life expectancy from 1990 until now of somebody without a high school educiation in America, the life expectancy has dropped 5 years for women and 3 years for men. The Great Depression has been where I live for years. You have everybody eeking along on social security or disability. The food is poisoning them. The chemtrail spread over their head is poisoning them. For them, Armaggedon has already come.”—Catherine Austin Fitts, president of Solari, Inc. 
+“The American labor force has, in effect, been turned into a Third World labor force, where the only jobs available are in lowly paid domestic services.”—Dr. Paul Craig Roberts 
+“We’re sandwiched between authoritarian government and street thugs.”—Alex Jones 
+“When you reduce people to a level of desperation, it becomes far easier to control them—and that’s what we’re seeing. ”—Chris Hedges 
+Sad, but could end up true. sherpeace 
+Good points, all. Alika Nganuma Toshihiko Cripe 
+Well damn then Id love to live in different country. And i cook my own food anyway so that settles it. Fred 
+Hi Michael.Enjoy your website(s),all three of them. If you don’t mind telling,where do you currently reside?Thanks…Fred Trailer Park Investor 
+Yes I am not independently wealthy, in fact I owe and owe and owe, so I guess I will have to stay put. At least I have a bag of beans and a bag of rice, so I guess I am good to go. Concerned Boy 
+This is a great forum to promote paranoia treatments!!! Wally 
+The only issue I see with leaving is that this is a Global problem and not only a US problem. When the US economy goes it will take a lot of the world down with it. There may not be a safe and sound place left. ArigatouGozaimas 
+For English speakers there is Canada, The United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, Kenya, Belize, New Zealand and Australia for starters. TrailerParkOverpriced 
+I have a friend who is moving to the Atlantic provinces since it is away from it all….the person lived in Toronto for 20 years and like many other residents, the immigration, cheap foreign labour programme, youth unemployment and crimes committed by youth and expensive housing is making Toronto a future Chicago where there is a few haves and lots of have-nots who can’t get a chance to get out of poverty legally. ArigatouGozaimas 
+I wonder where the immigrants into Toronto are coming from? 
+It’s sad to hear that. My most powerful picture of Canada was comparing Detroit to Windsor on Google Maps. The difference is astonishing. 
+Though Canada is really not that much different than the U.S. politically and economically. Though it seems the version of socialism to the north is less corrupt and run more efficiently for now. It helps that Canada has no real military budget. It also helps to have a huge pile of natural resources. (As does the U.S., Russia, China, Australia). ((Socialism tends to do better when there is money in the ground. Think Norway, Saudi Arabia.)) Then there is cultural cohesiveness, Canada wins that round as well. 
+Sad to hear that Canada’s system is still starting to suffer the same woes as the U.S. system. It sounds like the aristocratic model of the U.S. 
+Unfortunately, without a strong and vibrant U.S. economy to the south the Canadian system will be strained even more. RPT34 
+South Africa is very dangerous for white people. piccadillybabe 
+I have traveled to a few foreign countries mostly Mexico, Belize, Virgin Islands and the Dominican. As beautiful as those countries are, they are third world. The US is becoming third world also but at least we have a ways to go yet before we are totally on the skids. Mexico would probably be my country of choice as I always felt kind of at home there, probably because Mexicans are very friendly, nice people and love gringos. It’s true many Americans are packing it in and out. Teaching English (ESL) in a foreign country where there is a shortage of teachers is an option. TrailerParkOverpriced 
+If the USA becomes third world, the entire world goes down with it economically. Think about the loss of foreign monies into poor countries and remittances. The locals of other countries will become more poorer and desperate. David Kessel 
+PS. You keep stress “land/country/place of birth” as if that is the only thing that defines one’s nationality and forgetting about the fact that you can be an American/Canadian/NZer, etc., by birth, or naturalization or by jus sanguinis – inherited through ancestors/parents, etc., regardless of place of birth. I was not born in the US but I’m only an American citizen and I don’t qualify for any dual nationality. There are many of us and you don’t mention as at all. Also, in 70% of the world just because you are born in the country, does not mean you are one of them now. Like being born in Japan does not suddenly make you Japanese. Guest 
+PS. You keep stress “land/country/place of birth” as if that is the only thing that defines one’s nationality and forgetting about the fact that you can be an American/Canadian/NZer, etc., by birth, or naturalization or by jus sanguinis – inherited through ancestors/parents, etc., regardless of place of birth. I was not born in the US but I’m only an American citizen and I don’t qualify for any dual nationality. There are many of us and you don’t mention us at all. Also, in 70% of the world, just because you are born in the country, does not mean you are one of them now. Like being born in Japan does not suddenly make you Japanese. David Kessel 
+PS. You keep stressing “land/country/place of birth” as if that is the only thing that defines one’s nationality and forgetting about the fact that you can be an American/Canadian/NZer, etc., by birth, or naturalization or by jus sanguinis – inherited through ancestors/parents, etc., regardless of place of birth. I was not born in the US, but I’m only an American citizen and I don’t qualify for any dual nationality. There are many of us and you don’t mention us at all. Also, in 70% of the world, just because you are born in the country, does not mean you are one of them now. Like being born in Japan does not suddenly make you Japanese. Charles 
+I did not see any mention of the “Economic Berlin Wall” set up against those who leave the country… Karen 
+I retired from the military not to long ago…… I have traveled the world, and yes American is an awesome place but so is the rest of the world to many people listen to the media and what else. Your made to believe that the rest of the world is worse off than you but it is really grand in Spain and so forth because maybe in an other country you might have to WORK Get off the couch and do something. The government there doesn’t pay you to do nothing, I remember still today, open air markets full of fresh produce REAL cheese, REAL butter, REAL bread, communities worked together. The best beer I have every drank because it is all homemade, people here have lost all since of community it is all about self. And if I could afford it I would head back to portugal Bosnian Serb 
+I would not suggest to any American to leave America because this nation is very, very hated in rest of the world. Even our “allies” the English hate us, and I felt this hate at their airport in London. Even my own family don’t like me anymore because I live and work in America. There is no way in the world I would suggest any American to leave this country. If I can’t find any common ground with my own “tribe” whose customs I know, whose language I speak, and where I spent some of my early years, then how in the world an American born citizen will adjust to a new environment? ian 
+I’ve traveled to many places recently. Other countries dont hate Americans, they just hate ‘tourist Americans.’ Be a real human in these countries and people like you just the same. greg_s 
+There is no shortage of comments on the web about all of the impending problems we are facing. Where does one find information about specific things that we can do NOW as individual Americans to change and, hopefully, improve things? After weeks of searching, I have found nothing other than often powerful statements of commitment to our nation, to stand by it to the death, etc. As a Vietnam combat veteran, father, and grandfather, I feel exactly the same way. Organizing, setting individual differences aside, having specific beliefs and goals seem reasonable. So does getting rid of corrupt, lying politicians including (or especially) Obama – even taking on the “elites”. These all sound like good ideas, but who is going to start the process and when? I am an oath keeper. I stand by the United States of America. I am ready to help, but where do we find information or other Americans who feel similarly? How do we start making a difference for the better? Undecider 
+Going down with the ship. Glory goes to God! TrailerParkOverpriced 
+I know someone who wants to move out from Toronto, Canada into some quiet town. He/she/it said that Toronto has so many traffic, jobs being taken away for lower wages and rent is ridiculous, and the city is unfriendly. The person is moving somewhere in the Atlantic provinces with his/her life savings and thinking of setting up a small business. One bad part of a country has a good part of the country. 
+America and Canada have lots of places where one can live. Find out for yourself rather than going abroad to some country where people are desperate for food or human rights are no rights. 
+Unless you are going to a country where your heritage is, I don’t think it’s wise to escape to say, Zimbabwe when your nationality is European. greg_s 
+BTW, I am a 32nd degree Mason. We have no idea how we got lumped into the groups that are considered “anti-American”. As any friend or relative of a Mason knows, we believe in God (that, along with “geometry” is what the “G” in our symbol represents). Many, if not most, of us believe that Jesus Christ is the true Son of God. We believe in the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Bible is the inspired word of God. I believe in the Communion of Saints. We exist to help, not hurt, our fellow man. Historically, Masons were architects. Shriners’ Crippled Childrens’ Hospitals, Shriners’ Burns Institutes and Speech and Language Clinics at Universities across the country did not just appear. They were built and exist because of Masons. We have members of all racial/ethnic and religious creeds and beliefs. I am tired of seeing good people bashed undeservedly and literally due to ignorance. Again, how can we be successful if we are unable to overlook individual differences? S.I. Hayakawa wrote, “A difference, in order to be a difference, has to make a difference”. The color of one’s skin, his/her religious beliefs or the shape of one’s eyes does not make a difference. Someone coming at one with an AR-15 does. Let’s pull together and become, once again, one nation under God. 
+As a soldier, I saw too many of my buddies fall in ‘Nam. As a V.A. therapist, the same holds true for the maiming of our veterans from the Gulf Wars, Afghanistan and Iraq. I do not think that we have the luxury of time. Time is not on our side. Let’s pull together before it is too late, that is, let’s pull together NOW! Graham 
+A rather unusual intro for a practitioner of the Royal Secret. 
+[Agni Ushas Mitra] chris 
+You must be familiar with the entity Albert Pike said is the god of Freemasonry then? RPT34 
+We Christians are not to be yoked with unbelievers. Please consider that command from the Lord Jesus Christ. Joe Whitman 
+So Masons take responsibility for turning America non-White, third world. 
+All brown countries are poor, unless White people find oil under their feet. Rufus T Firefly 
+USA to. Expatriates: you didn’t build that….so leave your fair share behind Chris 
+I left the US over 10 months ago to move to Paraguay to escape what is coming in the US. This is despite never even being in South America (but did years of research searching for best place) before and not knowing Spanish. It was one of the best decisions I made in my life! I laugh at the question asking about what freedoms you give up. I have much more freedom down here than US: no TSA goons, no militarized cops, some of the lowest taxes in the world, no RIAA(pirated DVDs sold almost everywhere; even cops buy them), a mostly cash economy. The government is one of the smallest in the world in terms of % spending of GDP and is actually one of the few that are solvent. Language barriers are not as bad as people think as you can say a lot with pointing, and I know people who have lived here for years without speaking virtually any Spanish. More importantly the are not stockpiling billions of bullets and tens of thousands of drones to kill their own citizens when the economy collapses. I cannot tell you what a relief it was to get out of the USA. Huge sense of peace came over me knowing that no goon squad could raid me for collecting rainwater, growing grass too high, or drinking raw milk, or just criticizing the illegal alien in chief. I could not imagine being there now when the government is openly MURDERING journalists like Hastings. Malecon 
+I just read your deleted comment about Nazism and fascism. Very informative. JJArise 
+If you have ever read a good mystery novel, you know that the author does not reveal who did it until the end of the novel…not the beginning or the middle…the end. You may have a specific individual in mind as to who the culprit is and then find out at the end that it is someone else. You may not like the answer but you are not the author. As such, the MYSTERY concerning end-time Babylon (a.k.a. Babylon the Great) was not to be revealed until the end. Read Jeremiah 50-51 and Revelation 17-18. Who is it? You know! The question is…WILL YOU RECEIVE IT! 
+And you wonder why people are leaving her! pray for discernment 
+140+ parameters describing this end time super power and yet Amerikan “Christians” still miss it. 
+That “great city” the book of Revelation is talking about is New York city with he UN as the modern day incarnation of the Tower of Babel– the future governing seat of the New World Order/BEAST anti-Christ kingdom. Souheil Bayoud 
+The real problem of America has nothing to do with economic. edward emmell 
+I feel for now that America is the best place for me and my family. Spain is close to economic collapse right now from what I been reading. America has a ways to go yet. America keeps printing more cash and selling bonds. We have many problems and they will get worse. Hopefully the rapture will come and my family and I will be living in heaven before the USA crashes. But for now America is a good place to line at least here in Delaware Oline Wright 
+I moved to Australia in 2009. I did not leave because of what America is becoming I left because I fell in love with an Australian who I met over the internet. It took a long time for us to get together legally because the costs of immigration can be high if you don’t have much money. Then there is the fact that you have to pass certain health checks and background checks etc. I am now approaching the point where I can be an Australian citizen. I will likely stay here for the rest of my life and it makes sense for me to become a citizen of the country I am living in. My problem is do I give up the citizenship of my birth? can I become a citizen of both? I know from a friend that when you become a citizen your visa/permanent residency is canceled because it is no longer considered necessary therein lies the rub. Will I be able to keep my American Passport if I apply for an AUstralian one as well? because that would be what I would have to do if I ever chose to return to the states for a visit to my family. I would need my American passport for the trip to America and my Australian Passport for the trip back to Australia which is now my home. Archie1954 
+The main reason to leave the US is a moral one so obviously it wasn’t mentioned in this propaganda piece, that is the constant military warmongering. I personally would be too upset to live in a country that relishes warmongering, killing and destruction as much as the US does and even worse to be so grossly hypocritical about it! RarefiedSnotress 
+The more weirdo Preppers that leave, the better. Johnny 
+I moved to Canada 2 years ago, and never regreted it. Strong economy, good job, low crim rate, free health care and a government that respects privacy. The USA is collapsing and I am sad but I would never return from paradise:) peace angel 
+After 40 years of studying the New World Order coming to being in the US and Knowing the future of Americans is in the Fema camps and knowing that recently the US imported 3 million foreign troops to take us all to the camps I am leaving. 
+Americans have had decades of time to stop the NWO in America and have not and I have decided that America is too dumbed down and drugged up now to make intelligent decisions. The American Psychiatric Assoc. reported this year that 50% of all Americans are “clinically depressed” and that one in 25 Americans are sociopaths and one in 100 Americans are psychopaths. This is a very sick nation being poisoned by the government and it is the most dangerous nation on earth that is NOT at war. 
+I have decided to move to the Sunshine Coast of Canada. There are only two concentration camps in BC and they are not operable like ours. They are not hiring internment guards and are not yet at the place as the US is in creating the NWO. 
+The US is the test case for the NWO and Agenda 21 and soon things are going to be unbearable. 
+Almost three million ppl. are expatriating to other nations every year and most of them blog about it. IF you want to leave then the best place to learn about the transition is from the expats who have already done it. 
+I lived in Mexico three times without knowing Spanish and had no problems. Today Mexico is a war zone because of the US failed war on drugs and that is sad and yet ppl are still moving there which is crazy. 
+The world is a billion ppl overpopulated and crime among young ppl is real worldwide and will only continue, but the US is the most violent nation on earth that is not at war and far more dangerous than any of the many nations I have researched moving to, but what is most obvious is that expats are far more happy than they ever were in the US. Life has become too hard here for most and far too expensive by design and our politicians will not stop without an armed revolution and no one is talking about that. Tobias Smith 
+it is time to eat a tuna fish sandwich sherpeace 
+Most of these people left when Bush II was president. They didn’t like what he was doing, and on top of that, many thought that the elections were stolen (including Me). Bush started a lot of the problems but Obama doesn’t seem that interested in reversing his laws, etc., so most don’t feel a need to come back. Obama haters are not leaving, except for the Billionaires, but the truth is they have been leaving for a while. They made their money off the American middle class, but they don’t want to pay the taxes or spend their money here. They are hypocrites of the worst kind. John Citizen 
+Your assessment of the current state in America is wrong. It is very bad here under the progressives. I do not know why Bahamas is not as popular spot as one would think. I really need to get out of here. I live in Florida now which has no income tax but the country is turning into a police state and if Hillary becomes president in 2016, it is adios for me. My country was once great, now it is full of freeloaders and leeches with their king in the white house. I really want to leave this country, it is in permanent decline. Thank you liberals.[sarc] Alex Macintyre Gore 
+Come to Australia…..ex citizens of the USA, we ain’t much different from you…well maybe our food, our jokes, the way we talk…..lol Venci 
+well, i would love to come to Australia, but there is no way … Australia Gov. is asking for visas, e.t.c … any ideas on your end? sherpeace 
+Maybe we should all learn to sail. that might be the safest place to be! 14482302 
+I have one foot in the Socialist States and the other in Ecuador. My wife works for an airline, and I can travel to Cuenca for free, at least the Atlanta-Quito part of the trip. My medical care is in Cuenca, and many expats are already there and many doctors there speak English and are American-trained. When the circumstances warrant, I can more easily transfer there permanently. I know the language, enjoy the people, and even eat the cuy that they enjoy eating. jack abercrombie 
+..after 45 yrs born & raised in ATL. GA. I have been in Quito, ECUADOR since SEP 2008. Certainly the Economic meltdown will domino & be global. Ecuador has a year round growing season and abundant water sources. Come see us: “JourneymanJack in ECUADOR” 123421 
+Left the States around two decades ago and never once regretted it; never experienced hardship; never experienced culture shock; never found it hard to get a job. Living in Easter Europe and now SE Asia has been a joy and an adventure, with a better standard of living, and more freedoms than back home. Jerry 
+I left the U. S. of A. a long time ago, in 1976 (when Carter still was president). I did it for work reasons, but I had come to think that life would be better in the Dominion of Canada. I was right about that, too. However, missing friends and adjusting to the sheer gentility of Canadians, which can be a bit maddening for Americans, took time and effort. I know that today, leaving the truly dreadful U. S. of A. is harder by far than what I underwent, and that moving to places more culturally remote a nation like Canada could take much more getting used to. jaleel shakir 
+The perverted culture has destroyed the morals of the publics in America. wisdom 
+It’s already laid out for you in the book of revelation (meaning reveal). No one gets out alive. You will need to choose to take the mark of the beast, which some believe is an rfid or get beheaded. You might live through armageddon (the third and final war on earth), but your soul is what this life is all about. frankyzee 
+My wife and I left the US after 9/11. I had this feeling that things would go from bad to worse so we left. We live in Southeast Asia and you are correct, a person must be aware of all of the above. 
+If you are not ready to assimilate into a new culture with an open heart and mind… forget it. 
+If you can… here are some of the benefits; 1. Live debt free 2. Live on a small income/retirement 
+3. Own a home for 1/10th of the cost in the US 4. Have cheap medical insurance 5. Live off grid easily if you want to 6. Start a business with very little capital… This list could go on and on… be wise, find a good country and leave if you want to. It made our life so much better and we are thankful we made the decision. 
+Good luck Nate 
+The economic crisis is not everywhere as a lot of people like to say. That is just a bunch of hogwash to get people scared of making the move and leaving his or her citizenship behind. The US is dying, but it is going to do a lot of damage before it is buried. I am now 35 years of age, I see no point in staying on a ship that is sinking. When I was 18 I thought this country was worth fighting for, not any more. Whether it is 1 month or 50 years from now, I will be leaving the US permanently. From my own research I believe that most “third world” countries will probably flourish when, not if, the US is gone. BrianLandon 
+if you think America is bad, just live in many third world and even second world countries. They are either dictatorships or pseudo-dictatorships. If you have lots of money, you can live somewhere in the Caribbean or South Pacific but be prepared to spend it, and invest there. And don’t expect the same infrastructure that you’re used to. 
+Maybe instead of running, its time for Americans to actually change things!! Don’t be lulled into false security by big government that promises everything, and then if you do vote for them(Obama), don’t be surprised when they are watching your every move(you’re an asset after all in their eyes). I’ll bet the entitled to my entitlement generation is not moving–well at least until the government has no money left to spend on the massive bureacracy it’s created. Bill 
+I do not understand that some leave US due to halthcare system. Obama is 6 years here and healthcare becomes better and better and will be more. So, you woud be optimistic about it. Sarcasm. John Citizen 
+Obama has destroyed this country and a president Hillary will be the final nail on the coffin. I am curious though as to why the Bahamas is not a popular destination spot. Anthony Rivera 
+this is what happens if the rich 1% creates selfish policies in our government Gracie Darling 
+I live in Ecuador. Been here 4 years. Now a citizen. Get good medical for $86 month. I have used the medical for an emergency and found it to be excellent in “Kennedy” hospitals in GYE. 
+It cost about $20 minimum payment into social security to qualify for medical. But, they will see you if your name is not on the computer. It is law. Kennedy hospital in Samborondon challenged this law and lost big time. 
+Ecuador is nice. Very expensive. Poor people don’t come here nor do they go to Panama or Costa Rica. South America is becoming very expensive due to the greedy gringo coming from the north to make money in housing. 
+Don’t believe what international living ragazines tell you. It is expensive if you desire to live close to what you were in the states, meaning nice house, nice car, nice clothes etc. Best to travel to Miami and buy and return. 
+Everywhere you visit on the internet you will find the liars, cheats and thieves in South America such as Gary Scott. David 
+I’m not an “American” in this country. No, in this country I am a slave. I have never thought of myself as American only the slave base on which the rich and greedy in this country run. David 
+So needles to say, renouncing this country as my birth, that’s easy. LET ME THE HELL OUT! David 
+America sucks, and I don’t even have the freedom to post about it on this board. Ha ha. They took down my last two posts. Congrats good job guys. Keep watching out, you know thought policing and everything. Laobai 
+I took my college degree and ran to China and left my debt with Sallie Mae. I never had anything in America and here I get to screw lots of beautiful young Chinese girls. Chow. LemmeOut 
+Divided we fall. The race war is a rediculous one. It’s funny how one ignorant comment about race can distract everyone from what’s important – that the United States is going down. The more we argue right left black white the more quickly the globalists can move forward. Besides the majority of us are muts of some nature so skin color is pretty much obsolete and its useless to stereotype (you f*n morons.. jk, only God can judge your stupid a$$es) Lingram90 
+Totally agree! I just don’t know where to start with prepping for relocation. Joshua 
+If more people are leaving USA i don’t know where they are going. The media hype is just confusing them. There is no place like America Today. Are these people going to China or India, the Middle East, or Africa? I don’t think they will go to these countries. The quality of life in these countries is unbearable? 
+How can you leave luxury and go to poverty-stricken countries. Countries in Europe are congested and have their own relative cultures. If you are staying in America I will advice you to stick on and improve your quality of life. Outside USA is hell. 
+Joshua SouthAfrica Liz 
+Why are service vets leaving the country? They have been taxed out of the US and can retire cheaper abroad. Hard to see our laws not being upheld and hardworking people losing jobs and houses because laws were dropped regulating certain businesses and the wrong people were bailed out not once but twice. Makes us think… frustrated_ayfkm 
+I was really interested in this article until I read all the points and realized my perspective and reasoning for wanting to raise my family elsewhere seem to be the exact same reasons why the author thinks it might be a bad idea. e.g. Guns – Of every country I’ve been in, the only one in which guns even enters my mind is the US. I am not the least bit concerned about needing a gun to defend myself in (example) Europe b/c it’s just not an issue there. I can sit and chat for hours in a mall, go see the latest movie, send my children to school, all w/o the tiniest concern that some previously “responsible” or “legal” citizen is going to snap, walk into a WalMart and walk out w/ a high capacity weapon & proceed to mow me and/or my children down in seconds. It’s just not an issue in most of our peer nations. john 
+The United states is tranceforming into a police state more and more everyday, not to mention that it already has by far the highest incarceration rate of all countries, and most inmates never did anything wrong to be locked up in the first place. Freedom in America is an illusian, it is only to pretect the money and those who the government defines as perfect. There is no such thing as freedom our god given human rights have been taken hundreds of years ago do to a cleverly disguised form of totalitarianism. Alika Nganuma Toshihiko Cripe 
+Its gotten that bad Randall 
+I think some of the points or “warnings” about leaving the US are a little silly. Food shortage? War? Medical care? There are many countries that are much BETTER with food and medical care than the US. As far as war, the US is constantly at war. While it may be true that no part of the US is a current war zone, it doesn’t mean we still can’t be killed by opposing forces (9/11 anyone?). As far as making a living, many countries LOVE americans and will hire you quicker than their own fellow native people, ecspecially in asian countries. Personally, I crave culture shock, I think that’s why a lot of people DO travel. 
+And my friends and family can do as they wish. I’m planning on being out of the US hopefully by this time next year, this is my personal choice for my life. I’ll still visit of course, but my choice is mine alone. Lisa Chapko 
+lissen up all people There is a curises going to happen 2015 end the banking in the usa 
+This is why the wealthy is leaving and who ever can get out. the USA is bankrupt 
+The goverment is hiding more then is being told I will be dead for posting but God help America 
+mility ours is being trained to kill USA people it will start with gun control then round up the poor 
+no more food or water to areas wwlll starts in usa by are own people 
+Churches are falling away leting sin take over . God is now going to punish 
+war , floods end of california no more freedom 
+if not believe me ask vetrense and see why military people are quiting the militay 
+this is a wake up call for americans christains for you will now be hunted and killed for your faith. 
+faith will save your soul death is better somtimes then losing your soul christians 
+more eval is coming and the world will feel Gods rath are we ready i am some what ready but like most it is scary to see hell on earth 
+God bless your all and good luck ps sept 13 hell will hit if you believe me or not guest 
+I was born here in the southeastern United States.for the most part the land is rich in fish and wild game.i have rabbits,deer and squirrel on my front lawn and a natural water source nearby.i belong to a local church in which we all have common goals and help our community and each other when in need.when the time arises i simply have to kill and eat those cute little rabbits and deer instead of going to the store Wanderersend 
+Join our camper convoy to Belize Safety in numbers when you surround yourself with those on the same path. Wanderers End is leaving to claim our island rendezvous in Rockport tx Mike Breen 
+You missed the big question….How will you get the IRS off your back? The USA does not let go easily, Americans are US tax payers for life regardless of their location. Even if no tax is owed, the cost of compliance can be painful and god help you if you make a mistake on the form even if no tax is still owed. Penalties start at $10,000 per offence. And THAT is why there is a huge increase in Americans giving up there citizenship. And the US response to this phenomenon? Increase the basic consular fee from $350 to $2450, and you will be VERY lucky if that is all it costs you. USA is a tyrant, and only those who tried to leave seem to know it. theyorkiedad 
+I am considering moving mself, myy wife and my dogs to Belize. My wife is Colombian, and Spanish is one of the languages spoken in Belizse. It is an anglophone country, and Roman Catholicismi is the prevalent religion. My wifwe and I are Catholics. I am fluent in Spanish. I have lived in Colombia for a cou8ple of years. I seriously doubt that we will suffer from culture shock. You can get most of what you want in Belize if you kinow where to look. And medical care is available in both Guatemala and Mexico, both close in to the boerder of Belize. Anbd, my maineason for leaving is Belize is center-right politically ande it is not very PC. BOOTOUTTHEBULLIES 
+“Oh Canada.” I am on my way as soon as I resolve some important document matters here. This country no longer represents what the founding fathers embodied in the constitution. We are a melting pot of immigrants and now a bunch of bullies want to do a 180 and change it all. I can’t live in a culture full of hate. it’s time to get out. Especially if you are a homeowner because your property, the single largest financial investment we all make, will be devalued in a depression and than we will be all stuck here. I am getting out before that happens. I don’t feel this is the country with the values that I grew up with here. I had said that even if Hillary had won I wanted to leave because of the fact that half of the people were so full of hatred and aggressiveness. And, I can’t live in a country that looks the other way when a candidate is a sexist, racist person. It is like saying that women are insignificant and we don’t matter and it’s open season on women and that is the way it is and deal with it. Well, I’m dealing with it by leaving this place. I’m done. No experience, no accounting experience, 6 bankruptcies, 5 Vietnam deferrments and the block of voters that put him over the top were very lowly educated people who probably only use their computers for fantasy football or nonsense instead of learning about the their candidate of choice and not just believing his sound bites. We have dropped in our level of education in the world standing and have uneducated, uninformed voters charting the future of our country. Is it any wonder we are headed for a huge fall? I am getting out before it happens. I feel for those who didn’t support trump but I won’t have a shred of mercy for those who did support him. You deserve what you get and I hope you suffer the worst for endangering the world economy and our values in this country. I hope you suffer the very worst and I’ll be waving to all of you from my safe house in Canada. Good riddance!",FAKE
+6852,Comey Bias Exposed As FBI Boss Refused To Call Out Russians For Hacking Before Election,"By Jason Easley on Mon, Oct 31st, 2016 at 4:22 pm A new report is painting CIA Director James Comey as having used his office to influence the presidential election, as Comey sent a letter about Hillary Clinton's emails, but refused to call out Russia for meddling in the election by hacking Democrats. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+A new report is painting CIA Director James Comey as having used his office to influence the presidential election, as Comey sent a letter about Hillary Clinton’s emails, but refused to call out Russia for meddling in the election by hacking Democrats. 
+CNBC reported : FBI Director James Comey argued privately that it was too close to Election Day for the United States government to name Russia as meddling in the U.S. election and ultimately ensured that the FBI’s name was not on the document that the U.S. government put out, a former FBI official tells CNBC. 
+…. 
+According to the former official, Comey agreed with the conclusion the intelligence community came to: “A foreign power was trying to undermine the election. He believed it to be true, but was against putting it out before the election.” Comey’s position, this official said, was “if it is said, it shouldn’t come from the FBI, which as you’ll recall it did not.” 
+Director Comey didn’t want to interfere in the presidential election by releasing information that could harm Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, but he had no qualms about sending a letter to Congress about emails that he had never seen in an apparent effort to interfere in the current presidential election. 
+With each new revelation and detail, it is becoming impossible not to come to the conclusion that FBI Director Comey may have violated the Hatch Act with his letter to Congress. It is illegal for federal employees to use their positions to interfere in elections. 
+When the information was bad for Donald Trump, Comey argued that it should not be publicly released so close to the election. However, he embraced a different standard when he had less information but could frame it in a way that could damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
+It is becoming clear that Comey has abused his power and must be removed as FBI Director immediately.",FAKE
+8058,Hillary Turns Her Back on Standing Rock Sioux: ‘Path Forward Must Serve Broadest Public Interest’,"Home / Be The Change / Hillary Turns Her Back on Standing Rock Sioux: ‘Path Forward Must Serve Broadest Public Interest’ Hillary Turns Her Back on Standing Rock Sioux: ‘Path Forward Must Serve Broadest Public Interest’ Jay Syrmopoulos October 29, 2016 Leave a comment 
+Brooklyn, NY – With tensions escalating rapidly after the militarized police action at the Standing Rock Sioux “Treaty Camp,” which included the use of armored police tanks, attack dogs, batons, rubber bullets, high-velocity bean bags, tear gas and LRAD sound weapons, and that saw the arrest of over 100 water protectors, the Clinton campaign, after months of silence, could no longer sit quietly on the sidelines and released a statement about the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) one day after the violent assault. 
+The statement from the Clinton campaign director of coalitions press, Xochitl Hinojosa, who oversees Hispanic, black, and women’s media for the Clinton campaign, reads in full: 
+We received a letter today from representatives of the tribes protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. From the beginning of this campaign, Secretary Clinton has been clear that she thinks all voices should be heard and all views considered in federal infrastructure projects. Now, all of the parties involved—including the federal government, the pipeline company and contractors, the state of North Dakota, and the tribes—need to find a path forward that serves the broadest public interest. As that happens, it’s important that on the ground in North Dakota, everyone respects demonstrators’ rights to protest peacefully, and workers’ rights to do their jobs safely. 
+On the same day the militarized action in North Dakota took place, Native youth from the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes — tired of the damning silence from Hillary Clinton — demonstrated outside of Clinton campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. 
+A number of brave Lakota youth and their Lenape relatives erected a teepee and prayed in the lobby of Clinton’s Brooklyn office as a militarized police force evicted water protectors from their traditional Treaty Lands in North Dakota. They were there to deliver a letter to Clinton about the pipeline. 
+A 14 –year-old girl from Standing Rock attempted to deliver a letter to Hillary Clinton’s Brooklyn campaign HQ to ask her to take a stand on the Dakota Access Pipeline. The youth stood at the front desk in tears asking for someone to please come down to accept the letter. The guards completely ignored the young girl, and the Clinton campaign refused to show enough respect to send a campaign staffer to cordially accept the letter. 
+Just after this dozens of police arrived and ordered us to disperse or we would be arrested. 
+“ What a crock,” said Ruth Hopkins, a Dakota-Lakota Sioux writer for Indian Country Today Media Network. 
+“Hillary Clinton managed to make a statement about the Dakota Pipeline that literally says nothing. Literally,” 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben tweeted in response to the Clinton campaign statement. 
+“Kind of a BS statement by the Clinton camp on #NoDAPL, frankly,” wrote MSNBC host Joy Reid. “The outrage taking place out there cries out for outrage.” 
+Or as Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting journalist Adam Johnson put it, this “is the most Clinton thing of all times.” 
+This curiously appears to be another case of Clinton having a “public and private position,” as revealed in her leaked speeches to Wall St. banks, the primary drivers behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. The fact is that Clinton has completely turned her back on the Standing Rock Sioux. Her statement was essentially a non-statement, which speaks volumes as to who she is truly beholden too… and it isn’t the American public. The words “find a path forward that serves the broadest public interest” can be directly translated into “this pipeline is good for Merica, and we don’t care about Native issues… but we’ll pretend we do until I’m elected.” 
+Please share this story if you believe Clinton’s statement is a blatant disrespect to all Native peoples! Share",FAKE
+5690,Fundamentals Will Take Gold & Silver Higher Now,"Financial Markets , Gold , Market Manipulation , Precious Metals Comex , gold silver ratio , Junior mining stocks , LBMA , Shanghai Gold Exchange , silver eagles admin 
+In the absence of the extreme degree of price intervention being conducted by the western Central Banks and bullion banks in the paper gold and silver markets, the price of both precious metals would be several multiples higher. That this intervention occurs not only has become overtly visible to all market participants, but recent prosecution/settlement events have rendered this assertion indisputable. 
+After a massive move that started in mid-December 2015, the sector began selling-off in early July. This correction was a function of both characteristic market technicals and conspicuous paper market manipulation in the New York and London paper gold/silver “markets.” 
+But after nearly five years of oppressive, unfettered market manipulation, the physical market has put a floor beneath the market. After a price “correction” of 8% in gold and 16% in silver, the metals are now ready to go higher from here. This was “telegraphed” by the recent price-action in the junior mining stocks as represented by the GDXJ junior mining stock index: 
+The junior mining stocks – especially the smaller exploration companies – similarly signaled the move higher in the metals ahead of the rest of the sector beginning in early December 2015. 
+While the Central Banks would love nothing more right now than to take gold and silver down to zero, the markets – driven by the physical deliver bullion markets in the eastern hemisphere, appear to want the market to move higher. The sequence of trading events beginning yesterday through today illustrates this dynamic. 
+After a big rally in the mining stocks and metals in the first half of the trading on Wednesday, the miners slammed after the FOMC meeting statement was released in the afternoon. The HUI was taken down from its high of 226 (up 7 pts) to close down down 4 points at 215. This signaled a likely price ambush in the metals, which occurred just after midnight EST, taking December gold down $14 from $1301 to $1287 – silver was taken below $18. 
+The mind-set going into the NYSE was that the HUI would get slammed again. But the market had different ideas. The HUI began moving up at the open. It’s been up as much as 2.5% from yesterday’s close. Shortly thereafter, the metals began to rally as well. Historically, after a reversal like yesterday, the metals and miners typically continue lower for at least few days. But with the mining stocks leading the way, it is highly probable that the next move from here will be higher (with plenty of manipulated volatility, of course). 
+In today’s episode of the Shadow of Truth, we explain why the precious metals sector has shifted into a trend in which every price pullback should be used to accumulate and add to positions in gold, silver and your favorite mining stocks. Share this:",FAKE
+8943,Christ and the Sufi : A Parable of Perfection,"“Be ye therefore perfect . . . even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” 
+Let’s compare Christ with the perfected Sufi. First, what are Christ’s teachings on the attainment of perfection? 
+Almost everyone is familiar with Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. We have all heard of the Master’s injunction to his disciples: “Love thine enemy” and “Turn the other cheek.” These verses from the Gospel of St Matthew are perhaps the most quoted verses in the New Testament: 
+“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 
+But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. 
+And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. 
+And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. 
+Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. 
+Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. 
+But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you: 
+Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 
+But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. 
+And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. 
+And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. 
+Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. 
+Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. 
+But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; 
+That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. 
+For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? 
+And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others ? do not even the publicans so? 
+Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. 
+(Matt. 5:38-48) 
+Here is a sufi story that addresses the very same concept, but in a different manner; that of strength as opposed to what is typically perceived as weakness. Don’t just read the story, reflect on it, extend it out in your mind and see where it takes you. In that search, you will discover issues within yourself that must be addressed. 
+There once was a sufi master who was a soldier. 
+During a protracted war, he was at one point engaged in fierce, mortal combat. In the thick of furious battle, he finally overcame a vicious, determined foe. Besting the enemy and driving him to ground, the sufi closed in for the kill. 
+At the very moment he was about to deliver a fatal thrust of his sword to the neck of his prostrate enemy, his foe cried out in anguish, “Ah, If only I had your sword for a single moment, how different things would be!” 
+At once the sufi stopped his attack and surrendered his sword to his fallen enemy. 
+The soldier was dumbfounded. 
+Taking the sword from the sufi, he said: “Why did you do this? You could have killed me! I was lost, and now you stop and present me with your sword! Why would you do such a stupid thing? — for it is now I who will kill you! ” 
+The sufi shrugged. “I come from a family that grants any request, no matter how great,” he replied cooly. “You asked for my sword. I am honor bound to fulfill your request.” 
+The fallen soldier rose, and recognizing the sufi as a perfected master, returned his sword to him. Falling at the feet of the man who had just spared his life, he asked to become his disciple. 
+From that day forth, he followed the sufi as his master. Like this? Share it now.",FAKE
+7320,WCD Ministry to reward married men who select “What is your anniversary date?” as security question,"WCD Ministry to reward married men who select “What is your anniversary date?” as security question Posted on Tweet 
+The Ministry of Women and Child Development, headed by Maneka Gandhi has announced a new bravery award for married Indian men who select “What is your anniversary date?” as a security question during their registration process with any website online. 
+“The idea is to encourage married men across the country to remember their wedding anniversaries correctly and well. This, in turn, will prevent unwanted acrimony in families in India and foster better husband-wife relationships. The number of married Indian men who remember their wedding anniversaries is abysmal and this is an earnest effort to improve the rate. Even today, lakhs of Indian married men who sign up for anything online and create an account anywhere usually choose ‘What is your first pet’s name?’, or ‘When is your birthday?’, or ‘Which is your favorite car?’ as their security question,” WCD Minister Maneka Gandhi told The UnReal Times . 
+“Hardly anyone ever chooses ‘What is your anniversary date?’ as a security question, simply because there have been people who have forgotten their passwords and not only have they been unable to retrieve their accounts due to inability to answer the security question correctly, but they have also been unable to retrieve access to their own households, due to highly miffed wives. We do not want to further penalize those who forget their anniversaries as they would already be in deep shit, so we’re trying to change this the positive way – by honoring those few who do. We hope the number of men who do remember the anniversaries grows due to this,” Gandhi added. 
+The ministry’s policy, however, wasn’t without its share of initial controversy. BJP MP Varun Gandhi, who was one of the first married men to stake claim for the award, after bravely selecting the anniversary security question while registering at Patanjali’s online retail website to buy their honey bottles, has been denied an award by his mother. “I’m sorry, Varun’s case is special – anything other than honey and I would gladly give him the award. I will even overlook the fact that our women journos’ Whatsapp group was totally against Varun buying things from Patanjali, of all places, but honey is an absolute no-no,” Maneka Gandhi is reported to have said. 
+Varun’s act of bravado reportedly hasn’t found favor with his better half too. “Poor Varun, he told Yamini ‘I’ll never forget our anniversary, honey!’ to which she yelled back ‘Don’t you dare say honey again!’” a WCD ministry source told The UnReal Times . Tweet About Ashwin Kumar 
+1 of the proud columnists of URT, former co-editor of URT Tamil, amateur musician, Real Harris Jayaraj devotee, UnReal T. Rajendar fanatic, passionate about stopping female foeticide.",FAKE
+2566,GOP seeking Plan B on immigration,"During the campaign, Trump had threatened to impose a large tariff to keep the jobs in the United States.",REAL
+7370,Candidate,"How irrationally foolish I would be to place my faith in Hillary when madness of empire and world is sung a dying song of money, weapons and devious sex the boot pushed harder to our necks and all the while a tv tale tells of hope and dignity 
+And Donald with his woman ways his corporate heart and billionaire days wants to tell me he knows the moves to make our very lives improve to end the dark of struggle and strife and give the people a better life he tells me this as his grand yacht drifts over everything gone amiss 
+And in the mix, my blessed freedom washed up, abandoned, reaching for room my rights, waiting on the edge of oppression Is liberty coming any time soon? These are the jewels, the pearls of great price No candidate has yet delivered Still we seek the sweetened life Where songs of love are softly whispered 
+galen",FAKE
+4039,"Obama addresses human rights, ethnic divisions on final day of Kenya visit","NAIROBI, Kenya — President Obama spoke out Sunday about corruption, ethnic divisions, terrorism and human rights in a rousing televised speech on his last day in Kenya, his father's homeland.
+
+Speaking to thousands at the Kasarani National Stadium, Obama encouraged Kenyans to “choose the path to progress” by fighting corruption and terrorism and by treating women and girls as equal citizens.
+
+""Kenya has come so far in just my lifetime,"" said Obama, the first sitting U.S. president to visit the African nation. ""Kenya is at a crossroads, a moment filled with peril but enormous promise. Because of Kenya's progress, because of your potential, you can build your future right here, right now.""
+
+He called for an end to ethnic divisions and described corruption in the country as a “cancer.”
+
+""Treating women and girls as second-class citizens is a bad tradition. It's holding you back,"" he added.
+
+Some Kenyans said they were pleased that Obama addressed human rights, ethnic divisions and equality. But for many, just seeing Obama — who was born in Hawaii but his father was from Kenya — was the main goal.
+
+“I should be seeing President Obama live today,” said Collins Njehia, 28, a Nairobi resident camping outside the stadium before the speech. “We’ve been denied access by security officers, but I need to see him, even if it means climbing a tree.”
+
+“Obama is our son, and we love him dearly,"" said Peninah Mwangi, a vegetable vendor in Nairobi. ""I want to make sure I see him today before he leaves.""
+
+Many Nairobi residents tried to get to the stadium to watch the event live after officials mounted a huge screen there for those who couldn't get inside. But security measures that all but locked down the capital's streets thwarted those efforts. Some instead headed to bars and hotels to watch the speech.
+
+Agreeing with Obama, Erick Nyariyo, a Nairobi resident, said, “This government will soon become a dictator if some issues are not dealt with,” Nyariyo said. “The government needs to control every institution in the country, including ... the electoral body so that they can rig elections.""
+
+The Kenyan government has consistently denied allegations of election fraud.
+
+In his address, Obama warned that ethnic and tribal divisions would lead to further cracks in the country's unity.
+
+""Politics that's based on only tribe and ethnicity is doomed to tear a country apart,"" he said. ""It is a failure — a failure of imagination.""
+
+“I was surprised that Obama knows everything about our country,” said Martin Kiprotich, a local leader from western Kenya, who traveled here to attend the speech in the stadium. “I’m happy because he talked about tribalism. Our nation is divided along tribal line(s), and as leaders we need to address it.”
+
+During his three-day visit, Obama spoke to Kenyan leaders about security and terrorism before departing Sunday for Ethiopia. 
+
+
+
+ Kenya has witnessed a rise in high-profile terror attacks over the past two years, including a 2013 assault at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi that resulted in almost 70 deaths. Al-Shabab, a Somali-based group linked to al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the mall attack and another attack this year at a university in Garissa in eastern Kenya that killed almost 150 people, mostly students. The extremist group said the attacks were in retaliation for Kenya military action against them in Somalia.
+
+Obama told Kenyans that while security measures must be strengthened, the war on terror must be approached while respecting the rule of law and human rights. Some Muslims cheered at his message, saying that they are always targeted after every terror attack in Kenya.
+
+Nazlin Umar Fazaldin Rajput, head of the National Muslim Council of Kenya, said: ""The oppression Muslims face in Kenya are (outrageous). People are persecuted, unlawfully detained for prolonged periods, maliciously arrested (and) prosecuted with trumped-up charges.""
+
+David Juma, 29, a businessman who owns a dairy farm, said, “I am inspired by Obama’s story. It does not matter where you were born. Anyone can move from scratch to becoming a great leader like him. His speech has changed my life forever.”",REAL
+1886,Candidates struggle with Iraq political quagmire,"Washington (CNN) If you're running for President, get used to becoming hung up over Iraq.
+
+Because barring a miracle, whoever wins the White House will become the fifth consecutive American president ensnared by a nation that has consumed trillions of U.S. dollars and thousands of American lives. It has also blighted a string of high-flying political careers.
+
+If the last week on the 2016 campaign trail has proved anything, it's that American politics is still nowhere near purged of the bitter political divides of a war undertaken 12 turbulent years ago, somewhat like the Vietnam War that reverberated through successive presidencies.
+
+Leading Republican candidates have suddenly been tripped up by the most basic question -- was President George W. Bush right to invade Iraq way back in 2003? And no doubt Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton will yet again have to answer for the vote she cast in favor of the war while in the Senate.
+
+The American entanglement with Iraq started under President George H.W. Bush when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait in 1989, evolved into a standoff and occasional air strikes under President Bill Clinton and erupted into a full-scale invasion under George W. Bush.
+
+And now under President Barack Obama a quarter of a century later, America's misadventure in the fractured Middle Eastern nation has transformed into a slog against the bloodthirsty Sunni radicals of ISIS.
+
+With no end in sight.
+
+Senior administration officials have already admitted that the fight against ISIS will go beyond the current presidency -- in the process hinting at one of the great disappointments of the Obama era.
+
+In 20 months, the President who was elected perhaps more than anything else to end the Iraq war, will bequeath to his successor a new phase of that same intractable conflict.
+
+Despite declaring the war over -- and bringing home the last U.S. soldier in December 2011 -- Obama has been sucked back in. Just this weekend, an ISIS surge into the key Iraqi city of Ramadi and a U.S. Special Operations raid into Syria to kill one of the group's top leaders have shown that American involvement has not ended, and that the engagement is proceeding without any clear sign of victory.
+
+Iraq's enduring power to confound American presidents -- and to reverberate in successive presidential campaigns -- is a reminder that when America goes to war abroad, anything but a swift, clear-cut victory unleashes an unpredictable cascade of political consequences at home.
+
+""Failed wars always hurt the president fighting them, but also continue to impact the party of the presidency for decades after they are gone,"" said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University.
+
+Iraq has become a political issue akin to Vietnam, as politicians seize on the aftermath of an inconclusive war to eviscerate their rivals' handling of foreign policy.
+
+Democrats make a case that the 2003 invasion invalidated an entire school of Republican political thought -- neoconservatism -- and say the war proves the GOP cannot be trusted with U.S. national security.
+
+Republicans meanwhile insist the war was all but won in 2009 by Bush's belated troop surge and blame Obama for being more concerned with honoring a political promise to end the war than the reality of the deeply unstable nation he left behind.
+
+Still, Mark Atwood Lawrence, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, argues that political fallout from the Iraq war could prove to be less radioactive than that of Vietnam, which took decades to play itself out.
+
+One reason for that is the bipartisan consensus now forming that the war was a mistake given that Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- used as a justification for war -- did not exist.
+
+It's perhaps a surprise that politicians took so long to catch up to this predominant view given that citizens made up their minds long ago.
+
+In a New York Times/CBS News poll last year, 75% of those asked said the Iraq war was not worth the loss of American lives. The findings are consistent with other opinion surveys.
+
+The GOP reluctance to criticize the decision to go to war stems in part from the candidates' desire not to alienate conservative primary voters thirsting for tough-talking foreign policy. And calling the war a mistake raises the treacherous question of whether the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. troops were a waste.
+
+But it still perplexed many political insiders that it took former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush a week of painfully groping for answers to come up with a satisfactory, and some believed obvious, response: that had he known then that U.S. intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was flawed, he would not have gone to war in 2003.
+
+Jeb Bush was at least trapped between his own political fortunes and loyalty to his brother. But Republican candidate Marco Rubio, a Florida senator, had no such family ties to blame for his trouble putting to rest questions about his views on the topic. Rubio got into a heated dispute on Fox News Sunday after denying that he had flip-flopped by now concluding that the Iraq war was a mistake.
+
+Their apparent confusion has provided an opening for fellow Republican Rand Paul, a Kentucky senator and presidential candidate, to renew his argument for a foreign policy derided by critics as isolationist but in tune with the majority of voters who now view the Iraq war as a mistake.
+
+Paul said at a GOP dinner in Iowa this past weekend that the notion that the Iraq war should never have been fought is ""a valid question, not just because we're talking about history, but we are talking about the Middle East, where history repeats itself.""
+
+It isn't only Republicans who are vulnerable on the issue. Hillary Clinton needs no reminder of the capacity of Iraq to crush political dreams, after her 2002 Senate vote to authorize the Iraq war cost her primary support and paved Obama's way to the presidency.
+
+Clinton, conscious of the consequences of admitting her judgment on national security was flawed, never said during her 2008 White House bid that her Senate vote on Iraq was a mistake.
+
+But in last year's book ""Hard Choices,"" in which she provided a blueprint for how supporters could defend her record, she was much more clear.
+
+""I got it wrong. Plain and simple,"" she wrote.
+
+Some U.S. foreign policy veterans are warning that the political debate in Washington is hampering hopes of meeting the challenge to U.S. security posed by ISIS and finally closing America's book on Iraq. Where once it was politically difficult to oppose the use of force in Iraq, now that position has become toxic.
+
+""Now Iraq poses a threat -- it didn't 10 years ago,"" said James Rubin, an assistant secretary of state under Clinton, referring to ISIS and its efforts to export its ideology and terror tactics to the West.
+
+""It's a shame that the politics, the pendulum of our political system, has swung so far to the other direction that our President and others are not prepared to take some modest steps to defeat a genuine threat, not the fake threat that was exaggerated 10 years ago,"" Rubin told CNN.",REAL
+3261,GOP’s Supreme Court blowback: The Republicans’ case for obstruction is bad and getting worse,"Orrin Hatch, one of the senior Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is on a one-man mission to save the American judiciary. As Hatch sees it, this branch of government is under terrible and imminent threat from a malign force that threatens to undermine its legitimacy and corrode the foundations of American democracy. What evil power could produce such menacing terror? What fantastical horror can possibly align itself against the institutions of American justice?
+
+In a Bloomberg Op-Ed this week, Hatch writes about a harrowing experience he went through at the “monthly lunch meeting” of “a well-respected legal organization.” He had been invited there to discuss the Supreme Court vacancy left by the late Antonin Scalia, when, without warning, a group of protesters “holding professionally printed signs” began chanting “do your job” at the senator. They were protesting the decision by Hatch and other Republican leaders to deny President Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia, appeals court Judge Merrick Garland, a confirmation hearing.
+
+As Hatch writes, those protesters and their suspiciously well-printed signs were all the confirmation he needed that obstructing Garland’s nomination is the right thing to do:
+
+Now that a majority of states have held presidential primaries, and as this hostile election cycle turns from those contests to general election, organized disruptions of any thoughtful discussion about the Supreme Court will only intensify. Make no mistake: These protesters are not interested in seeing the Senate take seriously its constitutional duty to provide advice about, and determine whether to give or withhold consent to, a consequential Supreme Court nomination. They care little about the Senate operating as a check and balance to the executive branch and instead simply insist that the Republican-led Senate do what progressive activists want and rubber-stamp a presidential appointment.
+
+Ah, the beauty of motivated reasoning. Hatch and his buddies shut down the nominating process because they claims they’re concerned about politicization, and when Hatch is protested for adopting this controversial stance, he claims justification by pointing to the political reaction he provoked. “The liberal left is seeking to bully the Republican-led Senate into ignoring its constitutional responsibilities and further destroying our nation’s delicate system of checks and balances,” Hatch concludes. “I am more resolved than ever to move forward with the confirmation process only after this toxic election season is over.”
+
+This is a variation of the argument Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley made a couple of weeks ago when he lashed out at the president and the Democrats for trying to “score as many political points as possible” by putting forth a nominee and demanding a hearing. Both Hatch and Grassley want to obstruct the nominating process and make it seem like the reaction to their obstruction – protests and the routine business of governing – is the real abuse of power. It’s too clever by half: if they’d allow hearings to go forward, the “politicization” they’re complaining about from Democrats and liberals wouldn’t be happening. Just as significant as the weakness of their arguments is the fact that they keep having to go back to the well to defend their position. Blocking a Supreme Court nomination for the length of time Republicans have in mind was never going to be an easy sell politically, but they determined that it would be worth a little political trouble to prevent Obama from getting another court pick. But they’re already absorbing a ton of damage over this, and cracks are forming in the obstructionist wall. Vulnerable blue-state Republican senators like Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are running into angry constituents and are being forced to break with the Republican leadership. Toomey said this week that he’ll agree to a meeting with Garland “out of courtesy and respect for both the president and the judge.” Others, like Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, are stating outright that Garland should get his hearing and his vote. “I would rather have you complaining to me that I voted wrong on nominating somebody than saying I’m not doing my job,” Moran told constituents this week. These arguments from Republican senators run directly counter to the leadership’s position, which is that the “courteous” and “respectful” action is to deny Garland any consideration until after the election, and that the “job” of the Republican Senate is to protect the judiciary from the deleterious effects of election-year confirmation hearings. So while Orrin Hatch may twist himself in knots to argue that a bunch of protesters ruining his fancy D.C. lunch meeting is proof that he’s right to block the Garland nomination, what it really shows is that the Republicans’ obstructionist plan is going to be far more painful politically than they hoped.",REAL
+8548,A Mormon Reader Says Most Mormons Will Still Back Trump, ,FAKE
+8302,Weed legalised in America because they f**king need it,"Weed legalised in America because they f**king need it 10-11-16 
+MARIJUANA is now legal in 28 states of the US to help them through every difficult day of the next four years. 
+The powerful drug, which helps users blot out reality and create imaginary utopian worlds, will be prescribed to Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton to help with their crushing despair. 
+82-year-old Eleanor Shaw, who had hoped to see a woman president in her lifetime, said: “I am hitting the blunt tonight. Is that how you say it? 
+“They say that you’re lost in a fog of confusion, have no idea what’s going on and eventually find it difficult to return to reality. Hell yeah. After yesterday, reality can get fucked.” Dr Tom Booker of Illinois said: “The potential side effects of prolonged marijuana use include delusions that the planet is run by the Illuminati working in collusion with large-eyed grey aliens with no genitals. “Under current circumstances, that would be most reassuring.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+3459,Looking for clues to Supreme Court’s final rulings in Ginsburg’s good mood,"Those who came to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s appearance at the American Constitution Society’s convention Saturday night looking for clues about how the court would decide its important remaining cases didn’t find much more than this:
+
+She certainly seemed in a good mood.
+
+The Supreme Court in the next two weeks will announce whether the Affordable Care Act survives a challenge to the subsidies that millions of people use to purchase health insurance, and whether gay couples have a legal right to marry nationwide.
+
+In a gentle interview with her former law clerk and now California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu, there was no discussion of Obamacare.
+
+Asked about the public’s rapid acceptance of gay rights, she repeated her view that it was a natural response to gay Americans being more open about their sexuality.
+
+“Gay people stood up and said, ‘This is who I am,’” Ginsburg said, and Americans saw that the person was a neighbor, a child’s best friend or maybe even their own children. They were “people we know and love and respect.”
+
+As she was speaking, the gay pride parade was rolling through downtown just a few blocks away, and the Capital Hilton, where the ACS was meeting, was flying a rainbow flag just below Old Glory.
+
+“The court is not a popularity contest, and it should never be influenced by today’s headlines,” Ginsburg said. But she added that it “inevitably it will be affected by the climate of the era.
+
+“I think that’s part of the explanation of why the gay rights movement has advanced to where it is today — the climate of the era.”
+
+Conservatives have criticized Ginsburg for such comments while the court is considering whether the Constitution forbids states from limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples. Ginsburg has officiated at several same-sex marriages in places where the unions are legal, leading some to call for her recusal from the case.
+
+There was no criticism from a ballroom packed with the liberal legal establishment and adoring law students who Liu noted regard the leader of the court’s left wing as an icon.
+
+Liu showed slides of T-shirts celebrating the Notorious RBG, as the popular Tumblr account has dubbed her. Another says “You Can’t Spell Truth Without Ruth.”
+
+“It’s amazing,” agreed Ginsburg, who was 60 when she joined the court. “An icon at 82.”
+
+Ginsburg said law clerks had to explain that her new nickname was based on the late rapper the Notorious B.I.G., but she noted that they were both “born and bred in Brooklyn.”
+
+Next month the opera “Scalia/Ginsburg,” based on her relationship with her friend and antagonist Justice Antonin Scalia, will get its premiere. And she talked about an upcoming movie that will star Natalie Portman and focus on Ginsburg’s work as a crusading feminist lawyer. At its center will be a gender discrimination case she took on with her late husband, Martin Ginsburg.
+
+Portman told the justice that the project was briefly delayed, Ginsburg said, because the actress had insisted that the director be a woman.",REAL
+657,Too Soon? Media Declares Clinton the Presumptive Nominee,"The news media has preempted Tuesday's Democratic presidential primaries, declaring Hillary Clinton the winner.
+
+According to The Associated Press, the former secretary of state has the 2,383 delegates needed to clinch her party's nomination, with superdelegates putting her over the top before today's primaries even begin.
+
+""We have a really important election now,"" Clinton said.
+
+Still, she urged voters to head to the polls in the six states set to vote Tuesday, including the biggest, California.
+
+""We're going to come out of the primary even stronger to take on Donald Trump,"" she told supporters.
+
+Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders' campaign is accusing the media of rushing to judgment.
+
+""It is wrong to count the votes of superdelegates before they actually vote at the convention this summer. Secretary Clinton does not have and will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to secure the nomination,"" Sanders' spokesperson Michael Briggs said in a statement.
+
+The superdelegates will not actually vote until July 25, and Sanders promises to spend the time until then convincing them that he is the stronger candidate.
+
+Although the Vermont senator may be on his way out whether he's ready to admit it or not, he's leaving a lasting impact, pushing the Democratic Party left on economic issues and trying to change the party's platform on Israel.
+
+Sanders would like the platform to include explicit references to the alleged Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, recognizing a Palestinian state.
+
+He's already named some pro-Palestinian representatives to the platform committee, including those who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
+
+The movement aims to delegitimize the Jewish state. Pro-Israel Democrats say those changes in the party's platform would be dead on arrival.
+
+But there are some indications the party's grassroots activists are already moving toward the Palestinian side and away from Israel.
+
+A recent Pew Research Center analysis shows that for the first time in a decade the percentage of liberal Democrats sympathizing with Palestinians is greater than those aligning with Israel.
+
+That division could ultimately lead to a fight at the Democratic National Convention to determine where the party's support lies.
+
+But even if that doesn't happen, the split could be an indication that the Democrats may be moving toward more support for Palestinians and possibly less for Israel in the future.",REAL
+5298,Our new country: Women and minorities hit hardest,"Our new country: Women and minorities hit hardest Ann Coulter: Dems import 'cultures where rape, incest and spousal murder are acceptable' Published: 51 mins ago × Receive Ann Coulter's alerts in your email 
+BONUS: By signing up for Ann Coulter’s alerts, you will also be signed up for news and special offers from WND via email. error Print 
+Every ethnic group except whites bloc-votes for the Democrats. Coincidentally, the Democrats have brought in another 30 to 40 million nonwhite immigrants in the last few decades. 
+It doesn’t help that white voters can’t agree on what constitutes an acceptable candidate. In 2012, working-class whites sat out the election, rather than vote for the out-of-touch rich guy they saw in Mitt Romney. This year, the out-of-touch rich guys say they’ll vote for Hillary because Trump is tacky and gross. 
+The sad irony is that the only people who will be better off in our new country are mostly white plutocrats – the top .01 percent. The rest of us will be their servants. 
+The people who will be worse off are everybody else – the working class, the middle class (who will soon be working class) and, most of all, women, minorities, children, the elderly, the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. 
+Look to Mexico for your future – or any Third World country. Or to Univision’s Jorge Ramos. The ruling class in Mexico is composed of European-looking, white descendants of Spanish conquistadors who raped the native population, giving them only their Spanish names in return. (British settlers in America brought women with them.) 
+Explaining Latino culture’s acceptance of incest and child rape, criminal justice researcher Shana Maier writes in a book about rape that “the male is the head of the household, and women are subordinate to men. … Hispanics and Latinos are more likely than other racial/ethnic groups to blame the victim. The victim, not the perpetrator, is blamed for bringing dishonor to the family.” 
+One American detective said that, today, police are being taught to keep an “open mind” about child rape because “it’s a cultural thing.” 
+When it comes to multiculturalism, you can’t say, We love the empanadas – but we don’t want 40-year-old men raping their nieces . This isn’t an a la carte menu. We get ALL the attributes of the cultures we’re importing. 
+As described in excruciating detail in “Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole,” our media already have a totally “open mind” about incest and child rape – and murder! – when it’s committed by immigrants. 
+Thus, for example, where I would have chosen the headline: “Illegal Alien Convicted of Incest, Child Rape,” the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press went with the less catchy: “Man guilty in case of human smuggling.” 
+And where I would have used the headline, “Illegal Alien Repeatedly Raped 14-year-old Girl at Job Site,” the Commercial Dispatch in Columbus, Mississippi, went with the more subtle, “Columbus resident charged with molestation.” 
+Immigrant women arrive in America, thrilled to have escaped cultures where rape, incest and spousal murder are acceptable, only to discover that those crimes are perfectly acceptable in this country, too – provided the perpetrator is from the very culture they fled. 
+In 1989, Brooklyn Judge Edward Pincus sentenced a Chinese immigrant to probation for a premeditated murder of his wife, on the grounds that the murder flowed from “traditional Chinese values about adultery and loss of manhood.” The female head of the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Margaret Fung, applauded the ruling. 
+Somewhat amazingly, newspapers are more likely to report black crime than immigrant crime. (Anything to keep the Third World immigration flowing!) 
+In 2013, a 13-year-old girl was gang-raped by about a dozen illegal aliens, who cheered and videoed the attack. 
+When the news first broke, Shaneequa Jupiter, who lived with her children in the apartment building where the gang rape occurred, complained that neither the police nor apartment security had warned residents about the danger. (That could reflect poorly on illegal immigrants!) 
+Even if Shaneequa had scoured the headlines, she would have been on the lookout for “Austin men.” Or “Two.” 
+Compare these headlines about the same brutal sexual attack: 
+– “Two held in attack on child” – Austin American-Statesman (Texas), July 19, 2013 
+– “Two Mexicans placed on immigration detainers as third man is arrested over five-day gang rape hell of teenage runaway during which she smoked crack” – Daily Mail Online, July 24, 2013 
+Needless to say, the New York Times did not cover the Mexican illegal-alien gang rape at all. 
+The ultimate primer on the “blue-collar billionaire”— order Ann Coulter’s book “In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!” 
+By contrast, the Times, and every major American news outlet, extensively covered another gang rape – of a girl about the same age, at about the same time, in about the same place. 
+The second case only was “rape” because of the girl’s young age – she was 11. But she was an enthusiastic participant, sneaking out of her house at night to meet the men for sex. 
+Those rapes, just a few years earlier, got a full-court press. The defendants were African-American. The victim was Mexican. 
+That time, there were articles in the Huffington Post, GQ, Slate, Salon and Mother Jones. It even made the New York Times, despite no connection to a college fraternity or lacrosse team. 
+Similarly, within a few months of one another in 2013, two men were arrested in separate child rape cases in Decatur, Alabama, for assaults on 9-year-old girls. One suspect was African-American, the other was a Hispanic immigrant. Only one made the newspaper. Guess which one? 
+When excitable Muslims raped American reporter Lara Logan in Tahrir Square (another one of Hillary’s foreign policy successes!), journalists immediately set to work to find the shortest line from the Muslim rapists to white American men. 
+Conclusion: The real problem was the female reporters’ American bosses and colleagues. (Definitely not Islam!) 
+Sampling of New York Times commentary on Logan’s rape: 
+– “Why We Need Women in War Zones” (“I would never tell my bosses for fear that they might keep me at home the next time something major happened. … This attack also had nothing to do with Islam.”) 
+– “Reporting While Female” (“Women reporters face another set of challenges. We are often harassed in ways that male colleagues are not. … In my experience, Muslim countries were not the worst places for sexual harassment.”) 
+Perhaps American men could do better, but, as American women may soon discover: They never had it so good. 
+Manifestly, the purpose of our immigration policies is not to help Americans – or the immigrants who wanted to live in a place like America. They are designed to funnel welfare-dependent voters to the Democrats and cheap labor to the rich. (The Chinese immigrant who got probation for murdering his wife, for example, came to America based on his specialized skill of being a dishwasher.) 
+Our country will be Zimbabwe, but – if all goes according to the Democrats’ plan – they’ll get to be Mugabe! 
+That’s Hillary’s dream. If she wins, Joe Sobran’s parody of the typical New York Times headline (about anything) will come true: “Women and Minorities Hit Hardest.” Receive Ann Coulter's weekly commentaries in your email BONUS: By signing up for Ann Coulter’s alerts, you will also be signed up for news and special offers from WND via email. Name *",FAKE
+3188,"It’s Cruz, not Trump, who looks more like favorite to win GOP nomination","The Iowa caucuses are seven weeks away. Donald Trump is still the Republican front-runner. Sen. Marco Rubio is, for now, the establishment’s best (only?) hope. And Sen. Ted Cruz is the guy who looks best positioned to win.
+
+Yes, you heard that right.
+
+Cruz (R-Tex.), as of today, has the most direct route to the Republican presidential nomination — assuming that the past history of GOP nomination fights works as a broad predictor of where the 2016 race is headed.
+
+1. Cruz is positioned as the most conservative candidate in the race. Although Trump gets all the attention for his over-the-top statements, Cruz has staked out a position on the far right on virtually every major hot-button issue, including immigration, Obamacare, national security and the fight against the Islamic State militant group. And, tonally, Cruz comes across as aggressively and unapologetically conservative — a less controversial and more electable version of real estate magnate Trump.
+
+A Washington Post-ABC News November poll showed that Cruz’s numbers are in the stratosphere among voters who identify themselves as “very” conservative; 69 percent had a favorable opinion of him while just 21 percent regarded him in an unfavorable light.
+
+In a Republican primary — particularly one in which the GOP electorate is mad at everyone (including those in their own party) for an alleged lack of commitment to conservative principles — being the guy all the way on the ideological right is a very, very good thing.
+
+2. Cruz has raised the second-most money in the Republican race. Bet you didn’t know that! Yes, former Florida governor Jeb Bush is by far and away the fundraising leader in the race. Not only did we know that would be the case, but we also now know that it has done him, roughly, zero good. Cruz’s money, on the other hand, is — or at least was — unexpected.
+
+Cruz’s $65 million raised is all the more impressive because, unlike Bush, who raised the vast majority of his money with the support of his Right to Rise super PAC, Cruz has a relatively even balance between the funds raised for his campaign committee ($26.5 million) and those collected by a universe of supportive super PACs ($38 million). Having so much money in his campaign account means that Cruz will get more bang for his buck, because candidates get the lowest unit rate on TV ad buying while super PACs have to pay full freight for their airtime.
+
+Cruz’s money is also what separates him from other candidates who secured the mantle of “most conservative candidate in the primary.” Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and former senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses during past campaigns — more on Cruz and Iowa below — but they were unable to capitalize on that win or sustain their support because they had so little money.
+
+Cruz is the best-case scenario for those who want to see a movement conservative nominated: He’s of the conservative movement but has the fundraising ability of an establishment Republican.
+
+3. Cruz is the Iowa front-runner. Recent history makes clear that you need to win one of the first three states — Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina — to have a realistic chance of being the party’s nominee. (Remember how well former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “wait until Florida” strategy worked in 2008? Thought so.)
+
+Cruz is emerging rapidly as the favorite in Iowa’s caucuses. Three polls released in the past five days put Cruz at the front of the pack in Iowa — including the influential (and almost always right) Des Moines Register survey, which had the senator from Texas 10 points clear of Trump.
+
+Winning Iowa would give Cruz momentum going into New Hampshire — where he currently sits at third — and into South Carolina, a state, like Iowa, whose Republican primary electorate is quite socially conservative.
+
+4. The calendar beyond the Big 3 favors Cruz. Winning one of the first three states is almost certainly the way a candidate makes it to March. But assuming Cruz can win Iowa (at least), the calendar starts to look very favorable to him beyond February. On March 1, what’s being referred to as the “SEC primary” takes place; Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas will vote on that first Tuesday in March.
+
+It’s difficult to handicap how those states might play out because of how much the first three states in the past have influenced who stays in the race and what their poll numbers look like. Still, Cruz’s profile as the one true constitutional conservative in the race, coupled with his Southern roots and his fundraising, should make for an attractive package for voters going to the polls that day.
+
+The next big primary day is two weeks later, on March 15, when Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio vote. There are less obvious wins in those states for Cruz, but he would almost certainly run well in North Carolina and Missouri under any circumstance and might do well in the other three states depending on who else was left in the contest.
+
+Yes, Cruz has weaknesses — most notably that he has shown little ability to appeal beyond his conservative base and that he is far less likable than, say, Rubio, if it comes down to a one-on-one fight between the two. Rubio of Florida is also trying to make an issue of Cruz’s immigration stance — insisting that Cruz has less of a hard line on the issue than he lets on.
+
+But Trump (being Trump) and Rubio (what early state does he win?) also have problems. And Cruz’s strengths are considerable, particularly when you consider how these races typically play out.
+
+Cruz has begun his ascent up the early state and national polls at just about the right time. (The race will go into deep freeze from around next week through the beginning of 2016.) His campaign is perfectly positioned to make him the last man standing. Believe it.",REAL
+5004,Tim Kaine defends Clinton and says she's learned from email 'mistake',"Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, defended her from accusations of dishonesty on Sunday, after her inconsistent answers about emails, her rival Donald Trump and new polls raised the question of trustworthiness in the minds of voters.
+
+Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state has continued to haunt her, even after an FBI investigation cleared her of criminal wrongdoing. In an interview recorded on Friday, her vice-presidential pick was asked to account for the false or inconsistent statements she has made on the subject over the last year.
+
+Kaine did not directly address Clinton’s struggle to restore trust with voters, arguing instead on NBC’s Meet the Press that she “did a great job telling her story” in a speech at the Democratic national convention last week, which meant “folks are getting reintroduced to that story in a positive way”.
+
+Clinton has, however, also stumbled in the wake of the convention. Last week, she told the Fox News host Chris Wallace that the FBI director, James Comey, “said my answers [about email practices] were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people”.
+
+Comey said there was no evidence Clinton lied to the FBI and declined to judge her various remarks to the public. Last month he excoriated her for her “extremely careless” email practices and highlighted facts that contradicted her claims, though he found no evidence of intentional or criminal wrongdoing.
+
+On Friday, Clinton said she “may have short-circuited” in her statements about Comey and the emails. On NBC, Kaine defended her, saying her answer may have emerged from a misunderstanding.
+
+“I thought her answers in that setting were truthful,” Kaine said, adding that Wallace “might have been asking her a different question”.
+
+“The bottom line is this,” Kaine continued. “She made a mistake and she said over and over again, ‘I made a mistake, and I’ve learned from it, and I’m going to fix it, and I apologize for it.’”
+
+Kaine also promised greater access to Clinton, who had gone more than 240 days without a press conference before an event on Friday at which she took a handful of questions from pre-selected journalists. “I know that this is something that she’s learned from, and we’re going to be real transparent, absolutely,” Kaine said.
+
+At a Saturday night rally in New Hampshire, Trump gleefully seized on Clinton’s “short-circuited” remark. “I think the people of this country don’t want somebody that’s going to short-circuit up here,” Trump said, pointing to his head. “Not as your president, not as your president.”
+
+He added: “She’s a totally unhinged person. She’s unbalanced. All you have to do is watch her, see her, read about her.”
+
+
+
+Clinton’s campaign has made Trump’s temperament a central issue, highlighting erratic actions including a sudden trip to promote a golf course in Scotland during the UK’s Brexit referendum and angry outbursts toward women, minorities and, most recently, the family of a Muslim American army captain killed in Iraq. This week, Barack Obama, who has endorsed Clinton, called Trump “unfit” and “woefully unprepared” to be president.
+
+Trump tried to flip the argument on to Clinton on Saturday, labelling her a “dangerous liar”, “the queen of corruption” and “Hillary Rotten Clinton”, a pun on her maiden name, Rodham. “My whole life has been about winning. I win,” he said. “She can’t win. She’s not a winner. She can’t win.”
+
+The perception of untrustworthiness has shadowed Clinton through three decades on the national stage: even in 1996, while she was first lady, the New Yorker explored the question of why she inspired vitriol and distrust. On Sunday, a new ABC/Washington Post poll found that nearly two in three voters believe Clinton is “too willing to bend the rules”. Six in 10 believe she is not honest.
+
+But Clinton has managed to sway some Americans, at least relative to Trump. Both candidates are historically disliked, and a majority still have an unfavorable opinion of Clinton. But the proportion has shrunk to 52% in the latest poll, with a move to 46% favorable, a major gain since the Democratic convention.
+
+In contrast, 61% of people polled had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, versus 36% who liked him. About 60% of respondents said Clinton had the qualifications and temperament to be president, while almost 66% said Trump lacked the temperament or a good understanding of international affairs. The new poll also saw 49% of respondents find Clinton “more honest and trustworthy” than Trump, compared to 40% who felt the opposite.
+
+In two swing states, Virginia and Nevada, Trump’s polling numbers have fallen: he faces a stark 12-point deficit in the former and a two-point gap in the latter, according to a new YouGov poll. In Arizona, a state that has voted Democratic once in nearly 70 years but has a growing Hispanic population, his lead has slipped to 44% to 42%.
+
+Trump’s broader polling numbers have plummeted in a period during which, among other controversies, he again refused to release his taxes, insulted the family of a war hero, claimed that Russia had not invaded Ukraine – two years after it had, said his daughter should “find another company” if sexually harassed and briefly claimed to have seen a nonexistent video of cash shipments to Iran.
+
+Republicans have tried to tie Clinton’s foreign policy to that money, $400m owed to pre-revolutionary Iran for a failed arms deal in the 1970s, describing it as “ransom” for hostages who were freed in January, around the time of delivery and sanctions relief for a nuclear arms deal. Clinton began tentative nuclear talks with Iran but the money dispute predated her and was concluded by her successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, who also oversaw the hostage release.
+
+On Sunday, Trump surrogates pursued the party line. Kaine, a member of the Senate foreign relations committee, deflected such criticism, saying: “We don’t negotiate for hostages.”
+
+He added: “The settlement of a claim with Iran, the payment of a portion of that settlement, hostages coming home, thank God, this was briefed to Congress and the American public months ago.”",REAL
+9606,Homeless Trump Supporter guards Trump’s star on Hollywood Blvd… “20 million illegals and Americans sleep on streets”,Homeless Trump Supporter guards Trump’s star on Hollywood Blvd…“20 million illegals and Americans sleep on streets”  ,FAKE
+35,Arizona first in nation to require patients be informed of abortion-reversal option,"Arizona will become the first state in the nation to require doctors to tell patients that abortions may be reversible, under a controversial bill that deals with an equally controversial method.
+
+The highly debated abortion-reversal procedure is done to try and reverse the effects of the so-called abortion pill. It involves a woman being injected with progesterone to counteract the effects of mifepristone – a.k.a., the abortion pill.
+
+Doctors say a patient must undergo the hormone treatment within 72 hours of taking the pill if she decides to keep her baby.
+
+“Women who have initiated a medical abortion process and who change their minds for whatever reason should not have their babies stolen from them because Planned Parenthood or any abortionist withheld life-saving facts or withheld information,” anti-abortion advocate Dr. Allan Sawyer said in testimony before the legislature.
+
+The relatively new procedure was pioneered by Dr. George Delgado, the medical director of California-based non-profit Culture of Life Family Services. He co-authored the first-ever medical literature detailing how progesterone could reverse an abortion in 2007.
+
+That same year, his organization completed its first successful reversal.
+
+“I received a call about a woman who had taken mifepristone, RUU 486, and changed her mind. She wanted help and I offered it,” he told Fox News. “Then I received calls from across the country of doctors and others seeking advice. In 2012, we established Abortion Pill Reversal and its attendant website and hotline.”
+
+News eventually spread to Arizona Republican state Sen. Nancy Barto, who included the provision about disclosing information on abortion reversals as part of broader insurance legislation to prevent women who receive federal subsidies under Affordable Care Act exchanges from being able to buy optional abortion coverage with their plans.
+
+Ducey signed the legislation Monday evening, but stayed mum on the abortion reversal provision, which would require doctors to inform patients about the option when they seek access to the abortion pill.
+
+""The American people overwhelmingly oppose taxpayer funding of abortions, and it's no different in Arizona, where we have long-standing policy against subsidizing them with public dollars,"" Ducey said in a statement. ""This legislation provides clarity to state law.""
+
+Critics of the bill have been vocal in their disappointment.
+
+""Instead of delivering on his campaign promises to reduce the negative stigma our state has taken on because of extreme and out-of-touch politics, Gov. Ducey has put Arizona once again in the national spotlight for interfering in the medical decisions of women,"" Planned Parenthood of Arizona President Bryan Howard said in a statement.
+
+Opponents also say there isn’t enough documented evidence on abortion reversals.
+
+“We like to practice medicine that is evidenced based, and unfortunately the protocol that has been suggested for reversing a medication abortion has no evidence to support it,” Dr. Ilana Addis said in testimony against the bill.
+
+But Delgado says his organization has a success rate of 60 percent, with 87 births since 2007 and 75 women currently still pregnant after successful reversals.
+
+“There have been negative reactions from those who seem to have an agenda and can’t seem to imagine that a woman might change her mind after taking mifepristone … [but] many are relieved to know they have a second chance,” Delgado said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Aalia Shaheed is part of the Junior Reporter program at Fox News. Get more information on the program here and follow them on Twitter: @FNCJrReporters",REAL
+646,Clinton clinches Democratic nomination – Sanders vows to fight on,"Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday night, becoming the first woman in American history to top the ticket of a major political party and putting immediate pressure on primary rival Bernie Sanders to step aside – though the Vermont senator vowed to keep fighting for “every delegate.”
+
+Fox News projected Tuesday that Clinton will win an outright majority of pledged delegates, while reaching the 2,383 necessary to clinch the nomination with help from free-agent “superdelegates.”
+
+As Clinton now launches a general election battle against presumptive rival Donald Trump, Sanders remained defiant at an early Wednesday morning rally in Los Angeles, where he awaited results of the California primary, which Fox News has yet to call. The results of the California vote could weigh heavily on Sanders' decision whether to go forward.
+
+Meanwhile, Fox News confirmed early Wednesday that Sanders was planning to lay off more than half his campaign staff.
+
+Far from bowing out, however, he vowed to campaign through the final primary next Tuesday in Washington, D.C., and then “take our fight for social, economic, racial and environmental justice to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” the site of the convention.
+
+The crowd erupted in cheers as Sanders announced he’d keep going, a decision he kept close to the vest right up until his remarks.
+
+Sanders closed by declaring: “Thank you all, the struggle continues.”
+
+In a potential move toward reconciliation, however, the White House revealed that President Obama called both Clinton and Sanders Tuesday night – and plans to meet with Sanders at the White House on Thursday, to discuss ""how to build on the extraordinary work he has done to engage millions of Democratic voters.""
+
+Clinton earlier claimed victory over Sanders – after attaining the delegates needed to claim the nomination outright with a New Jersey primary win – during a lofty speech to supporters in Brooklyn.
+
+Marking the historic moment, Clinton said: “This campaign is about making sure there are no ceilings, no limits on any of us.”
+
+
+
+ She also congratulated Sanders, calling his campaign and the debate he brought about income inequality good for the party – while also saying this is a moment to “come together.”
+
+Eight years to the day after she conceded to rival Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, the former first lady and secretary of state became the presumptive 2016 nominee with the help of delegates in New Jersey. She won the state's primary, and with it enough delegates to easily surpass the 2,383 needed to clinch the nomination. She also is projected to win New Mexico and South Dakota.
+
+Sanders' vow to stay in the race was based on his belief that his campaign could sway enough of Clinton's superdelegates to force a contested convention. Superdelegates are free to support any candidate and do not technically vote for a nominee until the Democratic National Convention next month. Pledged delegates, however, are bound to support the candidate who won the primary or caucus.
+
+Fox News projects that with the delegates Clinton is winning in California, she will have won a majority of all pledged delegates at the Democratic convention -- making it more difficult for Sanders to argue she’s winning only because of support from superdelegates.
+
+Sanders did notch projected wins Tuesday in North Dakota’s Democratic caucuses and the Montana primary. A total of six states were voting Tuesday.
+
+On the GOP side, Donald Trump -- the only major Republican left in the race – was projected to win the primaries in California, Montana, New Jersey, South Dakota and New Mexico. Trump also surpassed a new milestone in the primary contest Tuesday night, winning enough bound delegates alone to clinch the GOP nomination.
+
+Marking his victories during remarks at Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., Trump said: “Tonight, we close one chapter in history and we begin another.”
+
+Previewing the general election battle, he slammed the Clintons, alleging they “turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves.” He also appealed to Sanders supporters, saying, “We welcome you with open arms.”
+
+Clinton, in her victory speech, also took shots at Trump, claiming he would “take America backwards.”
+
+“The stakes in this election are high, and the choice is clear. Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president,” she said.
+
+The contests Tuesday largely conclude one of the most unpredictable and rowdy primary seasons in modern history – one that saw a brash billionaire clear through a formidable field of 16 rivals to defy the pundits and claim the GOP nomination, and the front-runner on the Democratic side locked in a fight to the end against a socialist-leaning senator from Vermont.
+
+Primary season formally ends next week when the District of Columbia holds its Democratic contest.
+
+Even before Tuesday’s races, both parties effectively had their presumptive nominees. Trump clinched the nomination last month as late support from unbound delegates put him over the top, and his remaining rivals suspended their campaigns. The Associated Press declared Monday night that Clinton had hit the 2,383-delegate mark, thanks to a burst of support from free-agent superdelegates.
+
+But unlike Trump, Clinton’s last remaining rival has not exited the race.
+
+“There is nothing to concede,” Sanders said in a TV interview Monday night.
+
+Sanders also had said he’d “assess” his plans after Tuesday’s elections, as he heads home to Burlington, but gave no indications of having second thoughts during his Los Angeles rally.
+
+The Democratic Party pressure on him, however, is sure to mount in a matter of days, if not hours. Obama reportedly is planning to get behind Clinton and start campaigning for her, and senior Democrats have been voicing mounting frustration with Sanders’ campaign.
+
+At the same time, the senator has touted general election polls suggesting he may be better positioned to go up against Trump in the fall. Over the course of the campaign, he mounted an unexpectedly strong challenge to Clinton, buoyed by the support of young and energetic voters whose enthusiasm at times echoed the spirit behind Barack Obama’s bid in 2008. Clinton was dogged all along by questions about her private email use while secretary of state – and a still-ongoing FBI investigation – though Sanders largely steered clear of the issue in his campaign.
+
+Trump, by contrast, will have no compunction about hammering Clinton for what he describes as “criminal” activity with her email use, as well as controversies surrounding her work as secretary of state -- in particular her role in the Benghazi terrorist attack that took the life of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Trump gave a preview of his attack strategy Tuesday night, ripping Clinton's use of a ""totally illegal private server.""
+
+Yet even as Trump has seen all 16 of his rivals fade away, he’s still struggling in a historic way to unite the GOP behind him. The tensions flared again this week as leading Republicans condemned his comments that a federal judge of Mexican heritage had a conflict of interest in a Trump University case. On Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan called it the “textbook definition of a racist comment,” while other Republican lawmakers condemned his comments.",REAL
+6690,Iraq bans alcohol,"Iraq bans alcohol Voltaire Network | 27 October 2016 français Español italiano Deutsch عربي On 22 October 2016, the Iraqi Parliament surreptitiously adopted an amendment to its laws affecting communes which bans the sale, the import and the production of alcohol.
+The prohibition was adopted in order to satisfy the Islamists on the day before the liberation of Daesh-occupied Mosul.
+The law sets fines of between $8,000 and $20,000 per offence.
+Considering that the law is prejudicial to them, the Christians of Iraq (who use wine in the celebration of Mass) have decided to take legal action against the law before a federal tribunal.
+Translation
+Pete Kimberley",FAKE
+1529,The 10 most bald-faced lies from the final Republican debate of 2015,"Another GOP debate, another steaming pile of half-truths, lies and pseudo-facts. The Republican Party seems to be almost entirely post-truth at this point, and if you call them out, you’re the liberal media! It’s a brilliant racket and one that led us to the current state of affairs where facts aren’t just dispensable, but a political liability. Without further ado, here are the top lies and distortions from tonight’s debate.
+
+A popular refrain in the wake of the Paris and San Bernadino attacks is that the U.S. government (or more specifically President Obama) cannot properly vet Syrian refugees. This has been repeatedly debunked as hysterical posturing, yet remains a popular trope among the far right. In addition to a rather thorough takedown by John Oliver two weeks ago, PoliticoFact rated this claim, “Mostly False” in its detailed analysis this evening.
+
+This is an old canard, and one that even nominally lefty outlets like Vox like to push, but it has little to do with reality. In an effort to shore up his neocon credentials, Rubio has doubled down on regime change in Syria while other GOP candidates like Paul and Cruz – as well as Bernie Sanders – have run away from this position. To do this Rubio has pushed the conspiracy theory that the reason ISIS grew in Syria is because the U.S. didn’t back the rebels opposed to Assad when in fact the CIA, according to documents revealed by Edward Snowden, spent $1 billion a year arming, funding and assisting the opposition.
+
+A popular trope among the nativist wing of the Republican Party (aka the Republican Party), the bogus stat that 25% of Muslins support violence is thrown around quite often. But it originates from noted Islamophobic “think tank” Center for Security Policy. As the New York Times notes:
+
+Mr. Trump vouched for the group at a rally on Monday night. But the poll — conducted by the Polling Company, a Republican firm — is in no way truly representative of all Muslim Americans because of its methodology. The poll was not based on a random sample, but included only people who chose to participate, and therefore is not representative of the population being studied. In addition, some of the questions were leading and biased.
+
+4. Chris Christie insists he was appointed U.S. Attorney on Sept 10, 2001.
+
+Why does Christie keep repeating this lie? It’s been debunked several times and it’s a matter of public record. It’s a great soundbite to be sure, and if true, would put Christie in the heart of the most significant foreign policy crisis of the past 20 years. But the reality is that George W. Bush nominated Christie on Dec. 7, 2001, as one can clearly see from a White House press release.
+
+Geroge W. Bush deported 1.8 million people. Obama deported 2 million. It’s unclear where Cruz is getting this number from. 6. Donald Trump keeps saying he self-funds, but we know that’s demonstrably false. This is another assertion that’s completely disproven and easily searchable online (which raises the question of why CNN hasn’t bothered doing this). Trump has received, according to the last available FEC filings, upward of $3.9 million from individual donors compared to using only $101,000 of his own money. How does this fit with his “self-funded” narrative? It’s unclear, but perhaps a more urgent question is why would any sane person donate money to someone who claims to have over $10 billion? 7. Moderator lie: CNN’s Wolf Blitzer claimed terrorism fears are higher than they’ve been since 9/11. That’s not true. A recent Gallup poll shows terrorism fears have spiked recently, but are the same as in 2005 and nowhere near as high as after 9/11. 8. Lie by omission: Why was the attack on Planned Parenthood not mentioned in a debate about terrorism? As Sean McElwee of Demos noted, in a debate that was nominally about “terrorism,” non-Muslim terrorism was completely absent. The recent Planned Parenthood terrorist attack carried out by a man who claims to be a “warrior for babies” wasn’t discussed in the broader context of terrorism. Why this is so remains unclear. 9. Lie by cliche: What the hell is Fiorina talking about? Fiorina keeps referencing “building up the sixth fleet” because presumably it sounds like some important walk-and-talk dialogue in the West Wing, but it actually makes no sense. Several experts have chimed in on this strange refrain and pointed out that it’s basically nonsense. As military magazine Stars and Stripes noted: Her meaning wasn’t immediately clear — the U.S. 6th Fleet is less a collection of ships than a command structure for operating American warships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Moreover, the fleet is one of the few growing military commands in Europe. It is building land-based missile interceptor sites in Romania and Poland, and in the coming days it will welcome the last of four guided-missile destroyers to arrive for permanent stationing in Rota, Spain. As the LA Times notes, it’s not “giving” $150 billion to Iran, it’s relieving sanctions that will ultimately unfreeze more than $150 billion in assets to Iran, but the funds were already Iran’s to begin with. No one is “giving” Iran anything.",REAL
+8213,"Hillary Will Go To Prison, Not The Oval Office [Video]","Leave a reply 
+SGT Report – FBI Director James Comey has caved to the pressure of public opinion, new email evidence from Wikileaks, and from his own outraged employees at the FBI, and he has re-opened the CRIMINAL investigation of Hilary Clinton. With less than two weeks until the election it would seem that Hilary is more likely to enter a prison cell than the Oval office. SF Source SGTreport.com Oct. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+9970,28 Alternative Uses for Life Saving Mylar Emergency Blankets,By Lizzie Bennett Some Life-Saving Advice About Mylar Emergency Blankets: And 28 Alternative Uses for Them As it’s getting colder it’s a good time to revisit the uses of mylar blankets in survival... ,FAKE
+1622,Fear is making the GOP’s job easier,"Politics is not only about competing views on issues. It is also, and often most importantly, about which problems come to the forefront in the public conversation and in the minds of citizens and voters.
+
+The battle over what matters most could determine the outcome of the 2016 election. One set of concerns, related to race, immigration and attitudes toward Islam, divides the country deeply. Another group of issues, involving economic inequities and the difficulties many Americans are having getting ahead, has broad reach across party lines.
+
+Republicans want the first agenda to be paramount. This reflects both the attitudes of their supporters and a rational (if debatable) assessment of how they might win. It also explains the eagerness of Republican politicians to make blocking Syrian refugees from our shores the centerpiece of their initial response to the terrorist attacks in Paris. Casting Democrats as insufficiently mindful of the nation’s security — and charging them with being too responsive to the rights of religious and racial minorities — are among the oldest calls in the GOP political playbook.
+
+Democrats, by contrast, have every interest in an election organized around core economic concerns. Economic growth has not been fairly shared and middle-class and less-affluent families alike need relief on matters ranging from wages to college access to work-family balance. It is no accident that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have largely structured their campaigns around these themes.
+
+The importance of who gets to set the agenda was brought home by a poll released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). The survey, for which I played an advisory role, was conducted in cooperation with the Brookings Institution, before the attacks in Paris.
+
+On the one hand, certain issues divided the country starkly across party lines. By a 66 percent to 26 percent margin, Republicans said that immigrants burdened the country more than they strengthened it. (Among supporters of Donald Trump, 80 percent said they were a burden.) Democrats, on the other hand, said immigrants strengthened the country by a nearly opposite margin, 63 percent to 32 percent.
+
+Among Republicans, 76 percent said the values of Islam were at odds with “American values and way of life”; 43 percent of Democrats said this.
+
+Especially sharp divisions emerged on controversies involving race and police practices: 64 percent of Republicans but only 28 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” Among Republicans, 82 percent said the recent killings of African Americans by police were “isolated incidents” rather than “part of a broader pattern.” Only 32 percent of Democrats said they were isolated incidents.
+
+These figures underscore two facts: Republicans are largely united in their views on these questions; and they are potentially disruptive subjects that could give the GOP a chance to pull a minority of Democrats away from their usual party loyalties — the classic definition of “wedge issues.”
+
+On economic questions, by contrast, rank-and-file Republicans take many positions that are usually associated with Democrats. These are the “bridge issues.” Requiring companies to provide sick leave to their employees draws support from 96 percent of Democrats — and 69 percent of Republicans. Requiring leave time for new parents is even more unifying: 89 percent of Democrats endorse it, as do 75 percent of Republicans.
+
+And on a series of questions, many Republicans identified with criticisms of the economic system that have been a hallmark of Sanders’s campaign. Offered the statement “Business corporations do not share enough of their success with their employees,” 92 percent of Democrats agreed or mostly agreed, and so did 76 percent of Republicans.
+
+Democrats agreed more strongly, but the fact that so many Republicans could identify with this view — and with similar criticisms of the exporting of good jobs, the power of big money in elections and the advantages enjoyed by the wealthy — speaks to the potential political power of calls for greater economic justice.
+
+Perhaps it goes too far to say that there is a Social Democratic America waiting to be born. Still, Democratic politicians have every interest in making a desire for a more equitable economy the driving force in the election.
+
+There are equally good reasons for Republican politicians to encourage voters to think about their fears of terrorism, their worries about immigrants and their feelings toward Islam. For the moment, dreadful and genuinely frightening news is making the GOP’s job easier.
+
+Read more from E.J. Dionne’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+1485,Ted Cruz doesn't talk about the government shutdown,"Decorah, Iowa (CNN) It was the most legendary moment in Ted Cruz's young political career, winning him legions of never-going-to-leave-you activists, never-going-to-forget-this enemies and cementing the freshman senator's stature as a national phenomenon: the October 2013 government shutdown.
+
+More than two years later, the fight to force the White House's hand to defund Obamacare that left both Republican leadership and federal employees seething has faded into the background, rather than Cruz's calling card.
+
+Huckabee laughs during the debate, which was hosted by the Fox Business Network. His opening statement was much more serious. ""There are a lot of people who are hurting today,"" said the former Arkansas governor. ""I wish the President knew more of them. He might make a change in the economy and the way he's managing it.""
+
+Huckabee laughs during the debate, which was hosted by the Fox Business Network. His opening statement was much more serious. ""There are a lot of people who are hurting today,"" said the former Arkansas governor. ""I wish the President knew more of them. He might make a change in the economy and the way he's managing it.""
+
+Fiorina makes a point during the undercard debate. ""The state of our economy is not strong,"" she said in her opening comments. ""We have record numbers of men out of work. We have record numbers of women living in poverty. We have young people who no longer believe that the American dream applies to them. ... It's time to take our country back.""
+
+Fiorina makes a point during the undercard debate. ""The state of our economy is not strong,"" she said in her opening comments. ""We have record numbers of men out of work. We have record numbers of women living in poverty. We have young people who no longer believe that the American dream applies to them. ... It's time to take our country back.""
+
+Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, delivers remarks during the debate. ""The biggest reason that we're seeing the hollowing out of middle America is the breakdown of the American family,"" he said. ""We have been too politically correct in this country because we don't want to offend anybody to fight for the lives of our children.""
+
+Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, delivers remarks during the debate. ""The biggest reason that we're seeing the hollowing out of middle America is the breakdown of the American family,"" he said. ""We have been too politically correct in this country because we don't want to offend anybody to fight for the lives of our children.""
+
+From left, Republican presidential candidates Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina and Rick Santorum arrive for the ""undercard"" debate that took place a couple of hours before the main event.
+
+From left, Republican presidential candidates Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina and Rick Santorum arrive for the ""undercard"" debate that took place a couple of hours before the main event.
+
+Christie, like most of the candidates on stage, continued to be tough on the current administration. ""Tuesday night, I watched story time with Barack Obama,"" he said of the recent State of the Union address. Christie also said ""you cannot give Hillary Clinton a third term of Barack Obama's leadership. I will not do that. If I'm the nominee, she won't get within 10 miles of the White House.""
+
+Christie, like most of the candidates on stage, continued to be tough on the current administration. ""Tuesday night, I watched story time with Barack Obama,"" he said of the recent State of the Union address. Christie also said ""you cannot give Hillary Clinton a third term of Barack Obama's leadership. I will not do that. If I'm the nominee, she won't get within 10 miles of the White House.""
+
+Kasich touted his economic record as governor of Ohio. ""Our wages are growing faster than the national average,"" he said. ""We're running surpluses. And we can take that message and that formula to Washington to lift every single American to a better life.""
+
+Kasich touted his economic record as governor of Ohio. ""Our wages are growing faster than the national average,"" he said. ""We're running surpluses. And we can take that message and that formula to Washington to lift every single American to a better life.""
+
+Carson promised this week he would ""insinuate"" himself into the conversation when needed. After a discussion between Rubio and Christie during the debate, Carson told moderator Neil Cavuto, ""Neil I was mentioned too."" Cavuto asked, ""You were?"" Carson quipped, ""Yeah, he said everybody."" On a more serious note, Carson noted the ""divisiveness and the hatred"" in today's society. ""We have a war on virtually everything -- race wars, gender wars, income wars, religious wars, age wars. Every war you can imagine, we have people at each other's throat,"" he said. ""And our strength is actually in our unity.""
+
+Carson promised this week he would ""insinuate"" himself into the conversation when needed. After a discussion between Rubio and Christie during the debate, Carson told moderator Neil Cavuto, ""Neil I was mentioned too."" Cavuto asked, ""You were?"" Carson quipped, ""Yeah, he said everybody."" On a more serious note, Carson noted the ""divisiveness and the hatred"" in today's society. ""We have a war on virtually everything -- race wars, gender wars, income wars, religious wars, age wars. Every war you can imagine, we have people at each other's throat,"" he said. ""And our strength is actually in our unity.""
+
+Rubio delivers an answer during the debate. He frequently attacked President Barack Obama. ""When I become president of the United States, on my first day in office, we are going to repeal every single one of his unconstitutional executive orders,"" the senator from Florida said. ""When I'm president of the United States, we are getting rid of Obamacare and we are rebuilding our military.""
+
+Rubio delivers an answer during the debate. He frequently attacked President Barack Obama. ""When I become president of the United States, on my first day in office, we are going to repeal every single one of his unconstitutional executive orders,"" the senator from Florida said. ""When I'm president of the United States, we are getting rid of Obamacare and we are rebuilding our military.""
+
+Bush waves to the audience. The former Florida governor has been trying to build momentum that he had in the early stages of his candidacy, and he went after Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton early in the debate. ""She's under investigation with the FBI right now,"" he said. ""If she gets elected, her first 100 days, instead of setting an agenda, she might be going back and forth between the White House and the courthouse. We need to stop that.""
+
+Bush waves to the audience. The former Florida governor has been trying to build momentum that he had in the early stages of his candidacy, and he went after Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton early in the debate. ""She's under investigation with the FBI right now,"" he said. ""If she gets elected, her first 100 days, instead of setting an agenda, she might be going back and forth between the White House and the courthouse. We need to stop that.""
+
+Cruz speaks during the debate. The senator from Texas opened the event by talking about the U.S. sailors recently detained by Iran. ""Today,"" he said, ""many of us picked up our newspapers, and we were horrified to see the sight of 10 American sailors on their knees, with their hands on their heads. ... I give you my word, if I am elected president, no service man or service woman will be forced to be on their knees, and any nation that captures our fighting men will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America.""
+
+Cruz speaks during the debate. The senator from Texas opened the event by talking about the U.S. sailors recently detained by Iran. ""Today,"" he said, ""many of us picked up our newspapers, and we were horrified to see the sight of 10 American sailors on their knees, with their hands on their heads. ... I give you my word, if I am elected president, no service man or service woman will be forced to be on their knees, and any nation that captures our fighting men will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America.""
+
+Trump, who has been leading GOP polls for months, answers a question during the debate. ""I'm very angry because our country is being run horribly, and I will gladly accept the mantle of anger,"" he said.
+
+Trump, who has been leading GOP polls for months, answers a question during the debate. ""I'm very angry because our country is being run horribly, and I will gladly accept the mantle of anger,"" he said.
+
+Republican presidential candidates line up on stage before a debate Thursday, January 14, in North Charleston, South Carolina. From left are Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Jeb Bush. It is the sixth GOP debate of this election cycle and the first of 2016.
+
+Republican presidential candidates line up on stage before a debate Thursday, January 14, in North Charleston, South Carolina. From left are Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Jeb Bush. It is the sixth GOP debate of this election cycle and the first of 2016.
+
+On the trail, Cruz promises to repeal Obamacare, and his entire stump speech is essentially a takedown of a Washington power structure that is too timid to fight -- by any means necessary -- for what conservatives back at home actually want.
+
+But on his six-day Iowa tour last week, Cruz didn't mention the shutdown once. It hasn't come up in the debates. Undecided voters don't ask about it in town halls.
+
+And some supporters of his at events, who only paid attention to Cruz when he launched his campaign for president in March, couldn't exactly put their finger on why they had heard of him before.
+
+""I follow Ted Cruz pretty closely,"" Jeanette Dietzenbach, a church musician, said as she waited to hear him speak here in a pizza shop's basement, ""but not as far back as 2013.""
+
+Clifford Bullerman, 71, didn't remember it either when asked by a reporter, but went on at length about the 2011 shutdown in Minnesota, which he said ""was avoidable.""
+
+To be sure, there are Republican diehards who recall it with fondness, recollecting Cruz's decision to read ""Green Eggs & Ham"" from the Senate floor as he lambasted the Affordable Care Act as a millstone on the American economy.
+
+Joel Hefti, 47, first heard of Cruz during the Obamacare debate. ""He strongly opposed it, and he was one of the few that actually stood up -- and didn't waffle,"" Hefti told CNN.
+
+And other admirers, even if they don't recollect the shutdown specifically, flock to him because he has shown the spine to stand up to Washington, including on Obamacare.
+
+""People want a candidate who has a backbone and who's not afraid to make a decision -- whether it was the right one or the wrong one, he's all in,"" said Brian Logie, 35.
+
+The shutdown endeared Cruz to much of the professional right, from the rabble-rousing Senate Conservatives Fund, whose leaders are organizing on his behalf, to the Club for Growth, some of whose donors have been his biggest backers. And several of the House Republicans who also sought a shutdown have endorsed his presidential campaign.
+
+But it is also likely to have political consequences: The shutdown -- and effort to defund Obamacare -- is sure to be rich fodder for any Democratic nominee in November.
+
+And the shutdown has alienated him from contributors with ties to Wall Street or Washington lobbyists who serve as some of the nation's most prominent bundlers. None of his fellow senators have endorsed him, some still reeling from the fracas two years later.
+
+Has everyone just moved on?
+
+Cruz's closest allies maintain that he isn't running away from it, but that he, and his voters, have moved on.
+
+""Why stick it into the dialogue when you've got so much future policy to discuss?"" asked Rep. Steve King, his top backer in Iowa and a brother-in-arms during the 2013 fight, which he said was wrongly laid at Cruz's feet. ""There's no upside to talking about things that will be mischaracterized.""
+
+The Obamacare fights, of which Cruz writes in his most recent book that ""no battle has consumed more energy,"" are only gently and occasionally flicked at. When asked to draw a contrast with Trump here at Mabe's Pizza, Cruz argued that he was campaigning in the true ""Iowa way,"" and also rattled off a series of fights that showed his mettle while others ran away from.
+
+""Who actually has stood up on Washington?"" Cruz said, beginning his usual riff on the highlights of his Senate career. ""In 2013, when millions of Americans rose up against the disaster that was Obamacare and is Obamacare, I was proud to stand and lead that fight. You look at the other men and women standing on that debate stage, the natural question is: Where were they?""
+
+It may be that Cruz does not see the shutdown today as a political winner: Twice as many people had unfavorable opinions of Cruz during the throes of the shutdown than had favorable ones, and polls taken after the impasse majorly damaged voters' impressions of the Republican Party -- even among Republicans and tea party supporters.
+
+Scott Reed, the top political strategist for the Chamber of Commerce, which strongly opposed the Cruz gambit, said it had likely receded from the country's political conscience because of the GOP's success in the subsequent midterm elections.
+
+""I'm not surprised it's not a fever on the campaign trail,"" said Reed. ""It was a long time ago, and we had a great election in the meantime -- so it kind of overshadowed that critical buffoonery.""",REAL
+2915,"Standoff between Obama, Netanyahu deepens despite Palestinian state clarification","Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday seemed to dial back his pre-election remarks opposing the creation of a Palestinian state -- but that did little to ease the emerging standoff between his government and the Obama administration, which reportedly is considering going to the U.N. to pressure Israel on the matter.
+
+The Israeli prime minister, shortly before Tuesday's election, had said he would not allow a Palestinian state on his watch.
+
+But on Thursday, Netanyahu claimed he hadn't actually changed his position.
+
+""I didn't retract any of the things I said in my speech six years ago, calling for a solution in which a demilitarized Palestinian state recognizes a Jewish state,"" Netanyahu told Fox News' Megyn Kelly.
+
+He clarified that he thinks the conditions for a two-state solution, ""today, are not achievable"" -- since he said Palestinian leaders do not accept Israel as a Jewish state and terrorists could occupy any territory Israel withdraws from.
+
+But he also told MSNBC he ultimately wants ""a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution"" if circumstances change.
+
+The latest comments, however, were greeted with skepticism by Obama administration officials.
+
+He made clear the administration is focusing on what Netanyahu said before the election, and not on what he's saying now. Earnest accused Netanyahu of ""backing away"" from the commitment to a two-state solution with those earlier comments.
+
+""It does raise questions about his commitment to that solution,"" Earnest said.
+
+In a stark warning, Earnest said the position the U.S. historically has taken before the United Nations -- protecting Israel from intervention -- was based on the idea of a two-state outcome. He said that foundation has now been ""eroded"" and the U.S. is reevaluating its position.
+
+The White House said late Thursday that Obama had called Netanyahu to congratulate him on his win and reiterated the U.S. commitment to a two-state solution ""that results in a secure Israel alongside a sovereign and viable Palestine.""
+
+Earnest's comments came amid reports that the Obama administration is indeed considering looking to the U.N. to pressure Israel into a peace deal with the Palestinians, despite historically blocking such action at the world body.
+
+Foreign Policy reported Thursday that the U.S. is looking at supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for peace talks and a comprehensive settlement.
+
+""The more the new [Israeli] government veers to the right the more likely you will see something [at the United Nations] in New York,"" a Western diplomat told Foreign Policy.
+
+Netanyahu told Fox News he hopes the Obama administration is not seriously considering this.
+
+""I hope that's not true, and I think that President Obama has said time and time again, as I've said, that the only path to a peace agreement is an agreement, a negotiated agreement.  You can't impose it,"" he told Fox News. ""You can't force the people of Israel, who've just elected me by a wide margin, to bring them peace and security, to secure the State of Israel, to accept terms that would endanger the very survival of the State of Israel. I don't think that's the direction of American policy. I hope it's not.""
+
+But Obama administration officials are leaving the door open.
+
+After the election, the Obama administration made clear it still supports a two-state solution and would work to achieve it -- somehow. Officials would not say whether that means going through the United Nations. But they didn't rule it out, either.
+
+""We haven't made a decision,"" State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Thursday. ""It's just natural that we would be looking at the different options.""
+
+""Based on PM Netanyahu's comments we will need to reevaluate our position and the way forward. We're not going to get ahead of any decisions about what the United States would do with regard to potential action at the U.N. Security Council,"" a senior administration official also told Fox News on Thursday.
+
+The potential shift comes after Netanyahu's Likud Party won big in Tuesday's election -- positioning him for a third consecutive term as prime minister.
+
+The consideration of going to the U.N. underscores the growing rift between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations. The two already at odds over a pending Iran nuclear deal, Netanyahu staked out a new area of disagreement with his Palestinian state comments.
+
+The prospect of U.N. interference already is raising the hackles of the Israelis.
+
+After a U.N. spokesman on Wednesday said it is ""incumbent"" on the Israelis to pursue a peace deal and support the creation of a Palestinian State, among other conditions, Israel's ambassador to the U.N. Ron Prosor fired back.
+
+""The United Nations may disagree with the policies of the Israeli government, but there is one fact that can't be disputed -- that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,"" he said. ""If the U.N. is so concerned about the future of the Palestinian people, it should be asking why President Abbas is in the tenth year of a five-year presidential term or why Hamas uses the Palestinian people as human shields.""
+
+The Palestinians had urged the U.N. Security Council to accept a resolution demanding that the Israelis leave Palestinian territories. The U.S. opposed it.
+
+Foreign Policy reported, however, that France is now pressing the U.S. to take another look at a separate resolution, which they offered, calling for resumed peace talks toward a final deal.
+
+Diplomats told Foreign Policy there are still significant differences between the U.S. and French approaches, but suggested they could be resolved. Foreign Policy reports that the U.S. delegation also could simply abstain on a U.N. resolution vote.
+
+The dynamic on the council also has changed in recent months.
+
+When the Security Council last voted on the Arab nation-backed measure to set a deadline for peace talks and Israel's withdrawal from the territories, supporters could not secure the nine votes needed for adoption from the 15-member council -- meaning the U.S., which opposed it, did not have to exercise a veto to block it. However, with Venezuela now on the council, supporters could have the needed nine votes today -- forcing the U.S. to make a decision on whether to veto.
+
+Fox News' Jonathan Wachtel and Kimberly Schwandt contributed to this report.",REAL
+1872,Lindsey Graham presidential bid bets on foreign policy,"Washington (CNN) Lindsey Graham is running for president because, he says, ""the world is falling apart.""
+
+And if Americans are looking for a commander-in-chief, the South Carolina senator believes he's it.
+
+Graham, who told CNN last month he's been ""more right than wrong on foreign policy,"" announced his presidential bid in his hometown of Central, South Carolina, on Monday. He hopes that his track record on foreign affairs will give him the advantage in a wide-open primary fight.
+
+""I want to be President to defeat the enemies trying to kill us, not just penalize them or criticize them or contain them, but defeat them,"" he said at his kickoff event.
+
+The timing could not be better for Graham, a national security hawk announcing his candidacy on the day a key provision of the Patriot Act expired in large part because of Sen. Rand Paul, another Republican running for president. He becomes the 9th Republican to enter the field.
+
+Paul and Graham are foils in their party and represent an internal struggle for the soul of the GOP.
+
+He's banking his long-shot bid on his deep well of experience and long history of speaking out on global threats, experience that he believes is both unmatched and invaluable in a race where foreign policy is certain to take center stage. Of all the nearly two dozen Republicans running or contemplating a run, most are governors with relatively little experience in foreign affairs or young senators with a much shorter track record.
+
+And Graham's hoping that expertise, peppered with jokes delivered in an easy Southern drawl, will be enough to help him overcome conservative skeptics wary of his willingness to work with Democrats and his moderate position on immigration reform.
+
+But for all of McCain's chatter, Graham has yet to break out in the pack.
+
+His advisers acknowledge their first and most urgent task is to introduce the candidate to voters.
+
+Where Graham needs no catching up on is foreign policy, which he and advisers are banking on as the top issue in the race.
+
+""There is no one in this race who was the length of experience and the record working on these issues, who has been a more stalwart advocate for a strong national defense, than Lindsey Graham,"" said Jon Seaton, who's slated to be Graham's national political adviser, told CNN.
+
+Graham emerged as one of the Senate's leading foreign policy hawks and has the resume to back it up. He spent more than six years as an active-duty Air Force lawyer and will retire next month from the Air Force Reserve after more than 30 years of service.
+
+He currently chairs three military, foreign policy and terrorism-related Senate subcommittees, has served on three others in the past, and has sponsored dozens of bills on foreign policy. Graham has also, by his own count, traveled to two dozen countries on official business and met with the leaders of many of them.
+
+Graham was one of the first senators to call for boots on the ground to fight ISIS and is an outspoken defender of government surveillance programs currently under scrutiny.
+
+He's a loud and persistent critic of what he sees as the Obama administration's weakness globally, which he charges has invited foreign threats, like Russia and ISIS, to take advantage.
+
+He supported the troop surge in Iraq, has called for sending military aide to help Ukraine stave off the Russian annexation of Crimea and has been sharply critical of the Iran nuclear deal, though he's worked to pass a bipartisan bill requiring congressional approval for a final deal.
+
+But he's already got competition in the foreign policy space.
+
+Graham's advisers nearly universally (and without prompting) mention Sen. Marco Rubio in discussions of their candidate's foreign policy chops. It's an unspoken acknowledgment that in the absence of a stronger alternative, the Florida Republican, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has made strides establishing himself as the most credible Republican candidate on foreign policy.
+
+But they expect that to change once Graham jumps in.
+
+""He's a good guy, but after doing immigration with him -- we don't need another young guy not quite ready,"" Graham said. ""He's no Obama by any means, but he's so afraid of the right, and I've let that go.""
+
+Graham's foreign policy experience may stand on its own. But his moderate positions on climate change and immigration reform will need some explaining in a GOP primary fight.
+
+As a member of the so-called ""Gang of 8"" that pushed an ultimately unsuccessful immigration reform bill through the Senate in 2013, Graham will have to answer for his support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Unlike Rubio, who's shifted on the issue, Graham never backed down from the bill, and in fact, he's gone further, supporting access to Social Security benefits for undocumented immigrants in the past.
+
+He's also spoken out on climate change, calling for ""soul-searching"" within the GOP on the issue.
+
+""Can you say that climate change is a scientifically sound phenomenon, but can you reject the idea you have to destroy the economy to solve the problem is sort of where I'll be taking this debate,"" Graham promised during a speech this past March.
+
+His advisers acknowledge he'll need to finish in the top three or four in Iowa and New Hampshire to have a rationale for staying in the race when his hometown face-off comes around.
+
+But they point to his improbable 2014 re-election win, where he easily defeated six conservative primary challengers, as evidence his campaigning abilities will help him bring skeptical conservatives around.
+
+""For me to go to the next level, I've got to even go further out of my comfort zone. I'm going to be in a widely attended primary process if I run, and in many ways I'll be the odd guy out on certain issues,"" Graham said.
+
+""I just gotta stand my ground and take what comes my way,"" he said.",REAL
+5017,Clinton broadens campaign effort to target wary Republicans,"Donald Trump’s flailing campaign has prompted Democrats to launch a new, broad effort to offer Hillary Clinton as a safe harbor for Republicans who find they can no longer stomach the GOP presidential nominee.
+
+Clinton’s campaign is quietly broadening its outreach to potential Republican converts, including donors, elected officials, and business and foreign policy leaders. The message is simple: Even if you have never before considered voting for a Democrat, and even if you don’t like Clinton, choosing her this year is a moral and patriotic imperative.
+
+“Duty, honor, country,” is how one person familiar with recent campaign outreach put it.
+
+The recruitment is a continuation of the campaign’s efforts to sway influential Republicans and independents, which began in earnest as Trump appeared likely to secure the GOP nomination during the spring.
+
+It escalated during and after the Republican convention, which drew fewer senior elected Republicans than usual and included scenes of discord. Trump himself helped the Clinton cause most with remarks on the economy and foreign policy during and after the Democratic convention, Clinton aides said. Chief among those was a public feud with the family of a Muslim soldier, Humayun Khan, who died in battle in Iraq.
+
+This week, his refusal to endorse House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin or Sen. John McCain of Arizona during their primaries this month has further alienated mainstream conservatives and Republican establishment figures.
+
+The Clinton campaign would not discuss the recruitment effort in detail, including specific additional targets among Republican elected officials or other leaders. But according to several Democrats with knowledge of the effort, it includes personal appeals to target luminaries by senior Democrats including John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. The campaign is also tracking Republicans who have spoken out against Trump in public even if they have stopped short of endorsing Clinton.
+
+The idea is to make Republican voters more comfortable supporting Clinton by showing them examples of leaders in many realms who have chosen to disavow Trump as a matter of principle. The effort combines Clinton campaign staff and resources with outside go-betweens, Clinton officials said.
+
+“When you look at what went on at the Republican convention, and then in contrast the Democratic convention, for a lot of Republicans this was their moment to take that close look at the two candidates,” Clinton chief strategist and pollster Joel Benenson said.
+
+“A lot of people are waking up and saying: ‘What am I doing here? Let’s see what I hear on the other side.’ They have to look for a place to land that’s in the best interest of the country.”
+
+Benenson noted that Republicans themselves have begun an “organic” effort to encourage one another to reject Trump.
+
+Several Republicans were among a group of former cabinet officers, senior officials and career military officers who denounced Trump on Thursday, calling his recent remarks on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia “disgraceful.”
+
+The open letter takes issue with Trump statements that appear to question the alliance, encourage Russia to hack and release Clinton’s deleted State Department emails, and seem to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which the United States considers illegitimate. The letter does not endorse Clinton, although several of the individual signers have done so separately.
+
+“There are people, Republicans, saying it’s time to put country before party. That’s not a thing any Democrat can say to a Republican. That’s something only a Republican can say to a Republican,” Benenson said in an interview.
+
+The Clinton campaign invited several Republicans to make that argument at the Democratic convention last week, including Douglas G. Elmets, a White House spokesman under former president Ronald Reagan.
+
+“Trump appeals to our basest instincts, our worst selves,” said Elmets, who has taken it upon himself to write op-eds, appear on television and speak out in other ways to encourage other Republicans to support Clinton.
+
+Elmets said he was asked to speak at the convention by a friend active in Democratic politics in California who acted as a go-between with convention organizers.
+
+“At the end of the day, I can see the fish rotting at the head,” said Elmets, referring to Trump’s effect on the Republican Party.
+
+Since the close of the convention, Clinton secured the public endorsement of entrepreneur, sports team owner and reality TV personality Mark Cuban, who had earlier indicated that he might vote for Trump. She was also endorsed by Hewlett-Packard executive and Republican fundraiser Meg Whitman. More are in the works, including Republicans who have held senior foreign policy roles in the executive branch and Congress, Democrats familiar with the effort said.
+
+In addition, retiring Rep. Richard Hanna of New York became the first sitting Republican member of Congress to endorse Clinton this week. Senior campaign aides to former Florida governor Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, two former GOP candidates, also said they are backing Clinton.
+
+It remains unclear whether trotting out Republican endorsers will translate to significantly more Republican support at the polls.
+
+In the battleground state of North Carolina, Clinton is likely to have a tough time courting Republicans, but “it’s probably worth the effort,” said Carter Wrenn, a longtime GOP strategist. Wrenn estimated about 20 percent of Republicans there “don’t like Hillary at all, but they don’t care for Trump either.”
+
+“The question is whether they pass on the presidential race entirely,” Wrenn said. “I don’t think Hillary is going to get many Republican votes, and I think she knows that.” But just neutralizing those voters, he said, could be helpful in a race that is most likely to be decided by which candidate can better mobilize independents.
+
+Campaign officials and close Clinton allies cautioned that the Republican outreach is not a foundation for her election strategy, which focuses chiefly on women, Hispanics and younger voters, and holding onto the battleground states President Obama won in 2012.
+
+“We’re not going to forget where we came from, but we know there is a window to reach beyond our traditional supporters, and we’re going to try very hard to reach these folks,” a Clinton aide said.
+
+It is also worth noting that even as Democrats court Republicans, the candidate is pressing ahead on the campaign trail with a jobs-and-economy message that keeps her out of the way of the damaging news coverage Trump has brought upon himself.
+
+And they say they are not taking victory for granted even as they seize on this new opportunity. Clinton strategists do not expect that the double-digit lead she has opened in some battleground state polls this week will last.
+
+Bill and Hillary Clinton were described as “circumspect” and “not giddy” by a person who spoke to them recently.
+
+“Everyone just assumes this is a slog,” that person said.
+
+But the campaign and its outside allies are feeling more confident with roughly three months to go before the election.
+
+The pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA did not renew its ads in Colorado and Virginia. Spokesman Justin Barasky said the PAC plans to return to the airwaves in both battleground states at the end of the month, but the lapse is a sign that both the campaign and PAC view the two states as safer than before.
+
+On Thursday, Clinton visited an energy company founded by a prominent local Republican in Nevada. Clinton used the stop at Mojave Electric to highlight a piece of her jobs plan that would reward businesses such as owner Dennis Nelson’s with a $1,500 tax credit for each apprentice they hire.
+
+Earlier this week, she toured a small necktie manufacturer in Colorado to tout American manufacturing and zing Trump for making his Trump-branded ties overseas.
+
+But Trump’s tough week has been met by relative silence on the Clinton trail. The principle is to let Trump dominate the news cycle, while Clinton garners local headlines on her jobs plan.
+
+After the Denver stop on Wednesday, for example, the Denver Post’s three-column, front-page headline read, “Clinton pledges millions of jobs.”
+
+“Whenever any political candidate is doing damage to themselves every day, the wisest course of action is — within reasonable limits — to stay out of the news and allow the other candidate to continue to do damage,” said Jerry Crawford, a longtime Clinton ally.
+
+After appearing with Clinton at a rally in Las Vegas, Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) warned Democrats not to be overconfident. But, citing recent polling, he said Clinton’s electoral map has the potential to extend to deeply red states.
+
+Reid said Georgia, Arizona and Utah are three states where Clinton could potentially do well in the race against Trump.
+
+“I hope the map is expanded,” Reid told reporters. “It would be good for the country.”
+
+According to a person close to a pro-Clinton super PAC, the outlook for the fall has not changed significantly since the conventions, and they expect Clinton’s bump in the polls and Trump’s rough patch to both level off.
+
+Her allies view the task of electing a Democrat to three consecutive presidential terms as monumental, making a landslide election rare in recent history and unlikely for Clinton — even against Trump. It is particularly difficult, they say, given that more than half of Americans have said in recent polling that the country is on the wrong track.
+
+“We are sailing into spectacular head winds,” the person said.",REAL
+4733,5 Questions That Now Loom Over Tonight's Debate,"5 Questions That Now Loom Over Tonight's Debate
+
+It's hard to be any more gobsmacked about the state of the presidential race right now, after a video of Donald Trump making vulgar comments about women surfaced Friday, prompting more than 30 prominent Republicans to call for him to step aside as the nominee. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is also in headlines for a WikiLeaks email dump that included alleged excerpts of her speeches to Wall Street banks.
+
+But there is a debate Sunday night, so its time to pick our jaws off the floor and contemplate 5 things we'll be watching:
+
+This is the big question of the night. Trump, as usual, has given conflicting clues. In a video statement posted on Facebook, he said he was sorry (""I said it. I was wrong. I apologize"") but also pivoted to an attack on Bill and Hillary Clinton saying he abused women and she intimidated Bill's accusers. Later, he retweeted messages from Juanita Broaddrick, who claims Bill Clinton raped her.
+
+So what does Trump prioritize: contrition or defiance?
+
+Trump tweeted: ""The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly - I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN! #MAGA""
+
+Mike Pence, in an extraordinary show of disloyalty for a vice presidential candidate, briefly jumped off the tightrope he's been walking for weeks and issued Trump an ultimatum for the debate.
+
+Pence said he and his family were ""offended"" and said ""we look forward to the opportunity he has to show what's in his heart (tonight)"".
+
+Something else might be going through Trump's mind.
+
+The list of Republicans calling on Trump to step aside is growing, but the number is still tiny compared to the GOP leaders who prefer to condemn Trump's words while maintaining their support. House Speaker Paul Ryan, for example, said he was ""sickened"" by Trump's comments about grabbing women's genitals but he has not un-endorsed or called for him to step aside as the nominee.
+
+Ryan was heckled by Trump supporters at a campaign event in Wisconsin Saturday, which gives you an idea of how deep the split is inside the GOP. Trump's die-hard supporters are still the majority of the GOP base.
+
+The administration believes Russian security agencies authorized the hacking of Democratic party officials emails in order to influence the U.S. elections (and hurt Clinton).
+
+WikiLeaks posted emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta — including ones from his gmail account that contain excerpts allegedly from Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street banks.
+
+In them she says she's for free trade and open borders and shows some sympathy for Wall Street bankers.
+
+They represent views that she subsequently moved away from as the campaign progressed, but you can see why she chose not to release the transcripts during her primary battle with Bernie Sanders .The hacked emails could hurt her with Sanders supporters, (although Sanders himself has dismissed them) younger voters ,and blue-collar Democrats.
+
+If there is a contest for the October Surprise prize, Trump's hot mic probably beats WikiLeaks.
+
+Still, tonight Clinton will need to come up with a good explanation for why she said those things to a private room filled with Wall Street bankers.
+
+The debate format is unusual and presents lots of pitfalls for both candidates.
+
+There are two moderators (ABC's Martha Raddatz and CNN's Anderson Cooper), but half the questions will come from ordinary voters.
+
+It's harder to attack your opponent in a room full of real people who want you to tell them how you will make their lives better. And any question from a voter has the presumption of validity — making it hard to ignore or to pivot away to boilerplate speech chunks or talking points (a favorite tactic of presidential candidates).
+
+But both campaigns claim this is a great format for their candidate.
+
+Trump has spent more hours in front of a T.V. camera than any Republican presidential candidate other than Ronald Reagan. Even so, Trump's ""practice town hall"" in Sandown, N.H. on Thursday night did not show that Trump has learned how to connect with people the way a town hall format demands.
+
+The audience was handpicked supporters, the questions were vetted, friendly and read from notecards by the moderator.
+
+The Clinton campaign says the town hall format is a good one for Hillary Clinton since she prefers small listening sessions and roundtables with small businesspeople or working moms over big set piece speeches at rallies.
+
+But most of the questions she gets in those forums are friendly softballs.
+
+Clinton has been preparing diligently — as usual — for this debate. She presumably is working on better answers to questions about her emails, the WikiLeaks revelations and the line that was the most effective for Trump in the first debate — that he represents change and she is the staus quo.
+
+Winning means different things for Clinton and Trump.
+
+Trump has a monumental task. Even before the Access Hollywood hot mic audio was leaked, he was in a hole — a hole that he dug and kept digging for himself because of his poor performance in the first debate, his subsequent feud with former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and the story about his $916 million dollar business loss/tax deduction.
+
+So tonight Trump needs a performance so unexpectedly good that it will reverse that downward spiral.
+
+Clinton, on the other hand, comes into the second debate with a small but growing lead in the polls. She needs to connect with voters and show them she's not the dishonest, unlikeable person they think she is. But most of all, her goal is to not screw up.
+
+A large number of issues have simply been absent from the conversation this campaign — such as health care, energy, job creation and economic growth.
+
+Will voters tonight ask for specifics on any of these topics, or are they happy to watch another chapter in the food fight that campaign 2016 has become?
+
+The debate will begin at 9 p.m. ET. You can listen to special coverage from NPR on your local station or watch at NPR.org.",REAL
+3542,Gunman storms Tunisia resort in deadly attack aimed at foreigners,"Tunisia suffered its worst terrorist attack in recent memory Friday as a gunman fatally shot 39 people at a beach resort, an assault that rattled the fragile democracy and threatened to devastate its critical tourist industry.
+
+The attack in the Tunisian resort city of Sousse, about 90 miles south of the capital, Tunis, has raised fears that Tunisia has become a primary target for Islamist extremists seeking to destabilize the region.
+
+The Islamic State asserted responsibility for the attack. In a statement circulated by Islamic State supporters online, the group said the attack had been carried out by a man named Abu Yahya al-Qayrawani. Tunisian officials earlier Friday said the gunman, who was shot and killed by police, was from the Tunisian city of Kairouan, in a province known as a stronghold of ultraconservative Islamists.
+
+The attacker opened fire as tourists lounged in the sun, according to witnesses. The gunfire sent beachgoers into a panic, witnesses said. The gunman killed 39 people and wounded at least 35. The victims hailed from at least six countries, according to authorities.
+
+Friday’s carnage was one of a spate of terrorist attacks in separate countries Friday and comes just three months after a pair of young Tunisian gunmen with apparent links to the Islamic State killed 22 people at the prominent Bardo museum in Tunis. Most of those victims were also foreigners.
+
+The attacks in Sousse and Tunis both appeared to be aimed at crippling Tunisia’s tourism industry, which accounts for about 15 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
+
+Tunisia has grappled with the rise of Islamist extremism in the wake of the Arab Spring, which ousted the country’s autocratic but secular president in 2011. Westerners have long flocked to Tunisia’s sunny Mediterranean beaches, and the tiny North African nation has been lauded as the sole success story of the Arab revolts. But Tunisia has also contributed thousands of foreign fighters to Islamic State ranks in Syria and Iraq, analysts say.
+
+[Tunisia rampage raises new fears about reach of Islamic State groups]
+
+Many Tunisians are also thought to have joined extremists in neighboring Libya, where the collapse of the state has given rise to an array of armed groups. The perpetrators of the attack on the Bardo museum in March were two Tunisian youths who were apparently radicalized and later trained by Islamist extremists in Libya. Tunisian lawmakers have not yet passed a draft terrorism law that the government says will enable security forces to pursue militants more easily.
+
+Tunisians, Germans and Belgians, and at least one Irish citizen, were among the dead in Friday’s attack, the BBC reported. British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said that at least five Britons were also among those killed and that that number is expected to rise.
+
+A tourist from Dublin, Elizabeth O’Brien, told Ireland’s RTE Radio that it was about noon Friday when she heard gunshots, which she initially mistook for fireworks. Then, when she realized something was wrong, she raced to the shore to grab her two sons.
+
+“I just ran to the sea to my children and grabbed our things, and as I was running towards the hotel, the waiters and security on the beach started saying, ‘Run, run, run!’ ”
+
+Glenn Leathley, a Briton whose daughter Olivia was in Sousse, told the BBC that his daughter called him, crying and in a panic, telling him that there was gunfire on the beach but that she was with her boyfriend in their room at the RIU Imperial Marhaba hotel.
+
+“About five minutes later, she rang me again in a panic and said, ‘They’ve come into the lobby,’ ” he said, adding that “she seemed to know that they were there and at that point she started running.” He told the BBC that his daughter had since made contact to tell him she was safe.
+
+Sarah Wilson and her fiance, Matthew James, from Pontypridd, Wales, were lounging on sun beds when the gunman opened fire, Wilson told Britain’s Mirror newspaper. James threw himself in front of the gunman and was shot in the shoulder, chest and hip.
+
+“He was covered in blood from the shots, but he just told me to run away. He told me: ‘I love you, babe. But just go — tell our children that their daddy loves them,’ ” Wilson said. She told the paper that her partner had survived.
+
+The Ennahda party, part of Tunisia’s ruling coalition government, released a statement condemning the attacks.
+
+“We offer our prayers to the victims and their families, and call upon authorities to swiftly find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.
+
+“Tunisia has undergone a remarkable democratic transition and is the success story of the Arab Spring,” the statement continued. “But our country is still fragile. There is a tiny but poisonous fringe of society across our region which has wrongly interpreted the Islamic faith and wishes to destroy Tunisia’s progress at any cost.”
+
+Cunningham reported from Baghdad. Karla Adam in London, Brian Murphy in Washington, Hugh Naylor in Beirut and Mustafa Salim in Baghdad contributed to this report.
+
+Ramadan had brought fears of new Islamic State attacks
+
+Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
+4307,Time for GOP panic? Establishment worried Carson or Trump might win.,"Less than three months before the kickoff Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them.
+
+Party leaders and donors fear that nominating either man would have negative ramifications for the GOP ticket up and down the ballot, virtually ensuring a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency and increasing the odds that the Senate falls into Democratic hands.
+
+The party establishment is paralyzed. Big money is still on the sidelines. No consensus alternative to the outsiders has emerged from the pack of governors and senators running, and there is disagreement about how to prosecute the case against them. Recent focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire commissioned by rival campaigns revealed no silver bullet.
+
+[Trump’s wild 95-minute rant: ‘How stupid are the people of Iowa?’]
+
+In normal times, the way forward would be obvious. The wannabes would launch concerted campaigns, including television attack ads, against the ­front-runners. But even if the other candidates had a sense of what might work this year, it is unclear whether it would ultimately accrue to their benefit. Trump’s counterpunches have been withering, while Carson’s appeal to the base is spiritual, not merely political. If someone was able to do significant damage to them, there’s no telling to whom their supporters would turn, if anyone.
+
+“The rest of the field is still wishing upon a star that Trump and Carson are going to ­self-destruct,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a former adviser to 2012 nominee Mitt Romney. But, he said, “they have to be made to self-destruct. . . . Nothing has happened at this point to dislodge Trump or Carson.”
+
+Fehrnstrom pointed out that the fourth debate passed this week without any candidate landing a blow against Trump or Carson. “We’re about to step into the holiday time accelerator,” he said. “You have Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, then Iowa and a week later, New Hampshire, and it’s going to be over in the blink of an eye.”
+
+[The Take: Why no one is dropping out of the GOP presidential race]
+
+According to other Republicans, some in the party establishment are so desperate to change the dynamic that they are talking anew about drafting Romney — despite his insistence that he will not run again. Friends have mapped out a strategy for a late entry to pick up delegates and vie for the nomination in a convention fight, according to the Republicans who were briefed on the talks, though Romney has shown no indication of reviving his interest.
+
+For months, the GOP professional class assumed Trump and Carson would fizzle with time. Voters would get serious, the thinking went, after seeing the outsiders share a stage with more experienced politicians at the first debate. Or when summer turned to fall, kids went back to school and parents had time to assess the candidates. Or after the second, third or fourth debates, certainly.
+
+None of that happened, of course, leaving establishment figures disoriented. Consider Thomas H. Kean Sr., a former New Jersey governor who for most of his 80 years has been a pillar of his party. His phone is ringing daily, bringing a stream of exasperation and confusion from fellow GOP power brokers.
+
+“People usually start off in the same way: Pollyanna-ish,” Kean said. “They assure me that Trump and Carson will eventually fade. Then we’ll talk some more, and I give them a reality check. I’ll say, ‘The guy in the grocery store likes Trump. So does the guy who cuts my hair. They’re probably going to stick with him. Who knows if this ends?’ ”
+
+South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, herself an outsider who rode the tea party wave into office five years ago, explained the phenomenon.
+
+“You have a lot of people who were told that if we got a majority in the House and a majority in the Senate, then life was gonna be great,” she said in an interview Thursday. “What you’re seeing is that people are angry. Where’s the change? Why aren’t there bills on the president’s desk every day for him to veto? They’re saying, ‘Look, what you said would happen didn’t happen, so we’re going to go with anyone who hasn’t been elected.’ ”
+
+Before Tuesday’s debate in Milwaukee, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had a reception at the Pfister Hotel with party leaders, donors and operatives. There was little appetite for putting a political knife in the back of either Trump or Carson, according to one person there. Rather, attendees simply hoped both outsiders would go away.
+
+There are similar concerns about Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who is gaining steam and is loathed by party elites, but they are more muted, at least for now.
+
+Charlie Black, who has advised presidential campaigns since the 1970s, said he believes the 2016 contest “will eventually fall into the normal pattern of one outsider and one insider, and historically the insider always wins.”
+
+Black said he was briefed on the findings of two recent private focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire that showed these voters knew little about his policy views beyond immigration. “Things like universal health care and other more liberal positions he’s taken in the past will all get out before people vote in New Hampshire,” he said. Black said the focus groups were commissioned by two rival campaigns, but he was not authorized to identify them.
+
+One well-funded outside group, the Club for Growth, has aired ads attacking Trump in Iowa and more recently came out against Carson as well. “Donald Trump and Doctor Ben Carson are in over their heads,” said Club for Growth President David McIntosh, labeling both candidates as “pretenders.”
+
+Still, the party establishment’s greatest weapon — big money — is partly on the shelf. Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot and a billionaire supporter of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, said he is troubled that many associates in the New York financial community have so far refused to invest in a campaign due to the race’s volatility.
+
+“Some of them are in, but too many are still saying, ‘I’ll wait to see how this all breaks,’ ” Langone said. “People don’t want to write checks unless they think the candidate has a chance of winning.” He said that his job as a ­mega-donor “is to figure out how we get people on the edge of their chairs so they start to give money.”
+
+Many of Romney’s 2012 National Finance Committee members have sat out the race so far, including Peter A. Wish, a Florida doctor whom several 2016 candidates have courted.
+
+“I’m not a happy camper,” Wish said. “Hopefully, somebody will emerge who will be able to do the job,” but, he added, “I’m very worried that the Republican-base voter is more motivated by anger, distrust of D.C. and politicians and will throw away the opportunity to nominate a candidate with proven experience that can win.”
+
+The apprehension among some party elites goes beyond electability, according to one Republican strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the worries.
+
+“We’re potentially careening down this road of nominating somebody who frankly isn’t fit to be president in terms of the basic ability and temperament to do the job,” this strategist said. “It’s not just that it could be somebody Hillary could destroy electorally, but what if Hillary hits a banana peel and this person becomes president?”
+
+Angst about Trump intensified this week after he made two comments that could prove damaging in a general election. First, he explained his opposition to raising the minimum wage by saying “wages are too high.” Second, he said he would create a federal “deportation force” to remove the more than 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally.
+
+“To have a leading candidate propose a new federal police force that is going to flush out illegal immigrants across the nation? That’s very disturbing and concerning to me about where that leads Republicans,” said Dick Wadhams, a former GOP chairman in Colorado, a swing state where Republicans are trying to pick up a Senate seat next year.
+
+Said Austin Barbour, a veteran operative and fundraiser now advising former Florida governor Jeb Bush: “If we don’t have the right [nominee], we could lose the Senate, and we could face losses in the House. Those are very, very real concerns. If we’re not careful and we nominate Trump, we’re looking at a race like Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972, getting beat up across the board because of our nominee.”
+
+George Voinovich, a retired career politician who rose from county auditor to mayor of Cleveland to governor of Ohio to U.S. senator, said this cycle has been vexing.
+
+“This business has turned into show business,” said Voinovich, who is backing Ohio Gov. John Kasich. “We can’t afford to have somebody sitting in the White House who doesn’t have governing experience and the gravitas to move this country ahead.”
+
+David Weigel in Hilton Head Island, S.C., contributed to this report.",REAL
+4845,Clinton's 'deplorables' slip: 2012 campaign hints it's not a game-changer (+video),"Past perceived gaffes, such as Romney's '47 percent' comment in 2012, have drawn far more attention from the media than from voters, who may make up their minds about candidates in other ways.
+
+Darcy Butkus, from left, Becky Love, and Kathy Potts make a political statement at a town hall gathering hosted by Trump supporter and former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich at Kennesaw State University on Monday, Sept. 12, 2016, in Kennesaw, Ga.
+
+Hillary Clinton’s weekend comment that “half” of Donald Trump’s supporters are a racist and sexist “basket of deplorables” is still roiling the presidential race as the workweek begins. Lots of pundits are comparing it to Mitt Romney’s famous “47 percent” statement, in which he said nearly half of American voters can be written off as welfare moochers.
+
+Lost in most of the discussion of this comparison is the fact that Romney’s “47 percent” words, revealed when a secret source leaked the tape of a fundraiser to Mother Jones magazine, didn’t much affect the 2012 outcome, and probably did not even move the polls that much.
+
+That’s the political reality behind such moments as Mrs. Clinton’s “deplorables” or Romney’s “47 percent”: Voters usually don’t make up their minds from a few days of news coverage.
+
+It’s true that many voters saw Romney’s perceived gaffe in negative terms. And it sure seemed like something that would have serious negative repercussions: harsh words, seemingly delivered in secret, about an opponent’s supporters. That made it seem more important than a typical political slip of the tongue.
+
+But in terms of who people planned to vote for, “there was no consistent evidence that much changed” in the wake of the tape’s release, wrote political scientists John Sides of George Washington University and Lynn Vavreck of UCLA in their history of the 2012 election, “The Gamble.”
+
+Gallup poll data showed President Obama’s lead over Romney actually shrank from 3 to 2 percentage points the week after “47 percent” became public. Rasmussen polls stayed the same. The average of all public polls was “stable” in the wake of the controversy, according to Sides and Vavreck.
+
+In other words, peoples’ opinions about the race did not really alter, on either side.
+
+In contrast, the first 2012 debate, held on Oct. 3, did move the polls. The media roundly declared Romney the victor over a flat Obama. Some surveys even put Romney in the lead. (Spoiler alert: He lost. The fallout of subsequent debates reversed those gains.)
+
+What’s the takeaway from this? Maybe that lots of things the media says are game-changers, aren’t.
+
+It’s certainly possible that Clinton’s “deplorables” comment could hurt her. Insulting ordinary voters is not something campaign consultants generally urge. But in general presidential races are not unstable. Leads shrink or widen slowly, driven by fundamentals such as the state of the economy, or predictable dynamics such as Republican voters rallying around Trump. At this point in the cycle, many people’s minds are set, and it takes a lot to change them.
+
+There are break points, but they tend to be set news events that draw massive coverage. The conventions are one – Clinton jumped out to a big lead following the close of the Democratic National Convention. The debates might be another. Thus the first direct clash between Clinton and Trump, set for Sept. 26, is likely to be more consequential than Clinton’s insult.",REAL
+10178,CLINTON: I’D ADD MICHELLE OBAMA TO MY CABINET,"Home › POLITICS › CLINTON: I’D ADD MICHELLE OBAMA TO MY CABINET CLINTON: I’D ADD MICHELLE OBAMA TO MY CABINET 0 SHARES 
+[10/31/16] Hillary Clinton says she is open to making first lady Michelle Obama a member of her Cabinet should she become president. 
+“She’s made it pretty clear she wants to focus on important issues like girls’ education around the world – she and I actually talked about it when we were together in Winston-Salem [N.C.] – and I want to be the best partner I can be for whenever she wants to be involved in government again,” she said in an interview with Extra released Monday. 
+“I think she wants to take a break from it, but if she ever wants to do anything like that, I would be the number-one person.” 
+Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, added that she admires Obama’s work both in the White House and on the campaign trail. 
+“Well, I don’t know how anybody could have done what she’s done for the last eight years with more grace and more of a sense of purpose but inclusivity,” she said. 
+“She’s been an exemplary first lady, and I know how hard that job is,” added Clinton, who is herself a former first lady. “So I feel so close to her and I’m so appreciative of all the help she’s giving me, all the confidence and courage, because it’s hard.” 
+President Obama said last Friday his wife would “never run for office,” despite her high-profile role in the 2016 race. Post navigation",FAKE
+1822,"Walker forms political committee, says he's 'very interested' in 2016 bid","Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said Tuesday that he was ""very interested"" in a possible run for president on 2016, hours after he announced the launch of a new political committee.
+
+In an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, Walker said he was considering a run for the same reason he initially ran for governor of Wisconsin in 2010.
+
+""[My wife and I] were afraid that our sons were growing up in a state that wasn't as great as the one we grew up in,"" Walker, 47, said."" I have the same worries about this country for my sons today that I had for my state many years ago.""
+
+Walker, who gave a well-received speech to a forum of conservative voters in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday, set up the committee “Our American Revival” on Jan. 16. A new website for the so-called 527 organization, which will help him get his message out as he works toward building his political clout, went live Tuesday morning.
+
+""Our American Revival encompasses the shared values that make our country great,"" Walker said in a written statement. He called for ""limiting the powers of the federal government to those defined in the Constitution while creating a leaner, more efficient, more effective and more accountable government to the American people.""
+
+Walker echoed that refrain on ""Hannity"" and played up his status as a Washington outsider.
+
+""I think we need new bold leadership from outside of Washington that's proven to take on the challenges that we face in this country right now,"" Walker said. ""The ideas that are going to transform America aren't coming from people in Washington. They're coming from our state leaders ... I think there's a sense out there, which I heard on Saturday, that people don't just want dynamic speakers. They want people who've got a proven record, who've actually done something, not just talked about it.""
+
+""If we're going to take [former Secretary of State and presumptive Democratic nominee] Hillary Clinton on,"" Walker added,"" we've got to have a name from the future, not one from the past, in an apparent shot at 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
+
+Walker’s steps are in stride with other prospective candidates, like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who earlier this week launched a political action committee.
+
+During his speech Saturday in Iowa, home of the first-in-the-country caucus, Walker drew on his highly publicized battle with unions in his home state and told an emotional story of how he and his family received death threats for speaking out against the groups.
+
+“If you are not afraid to go big and bold, you can actually get results,” he told the crowd.
+
+Following his speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, Walker went west – attending an event in California hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers.",REAL
+6335,Comment on Colin Kaepernick Just Started a Black Panther-Inspired Youth Camp to Teach Kids to Fight Oppression by European≠Nationality/Ethnicity,"Home / #Solutions / Colin Kaepernick Just Started a Black Panther-Inspired Youth Camp to Teach Kids to Fight Oppression Colin Kaepernick Just Started a Black Panther-Inspired Youth Camp to Teach Kids to Fight Oppression Claire Bernish November 2, 2016 3 Comments 
+Oakland, CA — After earning both soaring praise and burning ire for sitting out the national anthem, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has turned his protest against police brutality into a positive force for change — by opening an education-based camp to empower kids. 
+Kaepernick, in other words, wants to teach young people how to be the change — to educate themselves and stay healthy and safe. 
+On Saturday, Kaepernick hosted a free youth camp called Know Your Rights — a “free campaign for youth to raise awareness on higher education, self empowerment, and instruction to properly interact with law enforcement in various scenarios,” the website explains. 
+Hundreds of black and Latino children attended the camp, which took place in Oakland, according to the New York Daily News , and the quarterback now plans to expand the program beyond the Bay area. 
+“We’re here today to fight back and give you all lessons to combat the oppressive issues that our people face on a daily basis. We’re here to give you tools to help you succeed,” Kaepernick told attendees, the Daily News reported. “We’re going to give you knowledge on policing history, what the systems of policing in America were based on, and we’re also going to teach you skills to make sure you always make it home safely.” 
+With relations between police departments and civilians more tense than ever — and an epidemic of police brutality still growing — the camp aims to instill knowledge-based confidence in kids who might otherwise distrust uniformed officers, who often aren’t members of the communities they patrol. 
+According to the Know Your Rights Camp site, the program’s goal is to “help build a stronger generation of people that will create the change that is much needed in this world.” 
+Controversy raged over Kaepernick’s bold choice not to stand during the national anthem, as many misunderstood his quiet police brutality protest as a publicity stunt — but details about his plans for the camp evidence quite the contrary. 
+“Please don’t say anything about it online,” Kaepernick told Daily News reporter Shaun King a few days before Know Your Rights opened. “I’m not doing this for the press and I don’t want it to become a media event so that the kids and the families can feel like this is just for them.” 
+Modeled after the original Black Panthers’ 10-point plan, the camp taught kids they have the fundamental rights to be free, safe, educated, courageous, loved, and more. 
+“It’s exciting for me because I see a lot of hope, I see a lot of what is to come,” Kaepernick told The Undefeated . “And if you look at a lot of movements in past history, it started at a youth level and has built. And that’s really where change is created, is when youth come up and they’re built in that culture of, ‘I know what this means, I know why this is happening and I also know how to help create change now.’” 
+According to The Undefeated , kids from all over the San Francisco Bay area attended the camp — including a number of homeless children living in a halfway house — and heard speakers discuss organic nutrition, holistic healing, financial knowledge, higher education, the history of policing, and more. 
+Not a single workshop discussed sports. 
+Kaepernick also told the youth how he’d recently traced his roots to Ghana and Nigeria — provided kits to trace their ancestry, free of charge. 
+Further, the athlete didn’t stop with organizing and funding the camp — and making a simple cameo appearance — he interacted with as many of the attendees as he could, visiting the smaller breakout focus sessions as the day progressed. 
+“What we’ve done here today in Oakland, we want to do all over the country, in cities all over this country,” Kaepernick told the Daily News , “by bringing together local leaders, local activists and local youth, and not only giving them the skills and lessons they need, but we want to show them how much we love and value them.” 
+And as Kaepernick told The Undefeated on goals for expanding the camp across the country, “This might not be something where I personally can create the change that this system needs. But together we can build this and help organize and create the change that we need.” Share",FAKE
+8090,The Masquerade Ball: Fall’s Ghosts and Our Election Farce,"[Graphic from the Dorian Gray Wiki Project .] =By= Edward Curtin “They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors. It’s hard to explain.” J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye “Eleanor Rigby…Lives in a dream/Waits at the window, wearing a face/That she keeps in a jar by the door/Who is it for?” The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby Editor's Note The analogy of the mask and the role it plays in our lives provides fertile ground for discussion of this (endless) political season. That each of us plays some role in this farce (in the classic sense of that word) is an important recognition. More than any election in my lifetime I have heard “you can’t make this shit up.” A classic statement of life imitating art imitating fantastical life. Unfortunately, for many of us, myself included, this feels more like a nightmare from which I cannot wake myself. There is a world in the balance. One could say that there always in when dealing with a deck stacked with the arsenal of the United States. However, now we are dealing with an unfolding environmental catastrophe which will leave more dead than we can count. The new estimate from the World Wildlife Fund is that two-thirds of the world’s wildlife will be extinct by 2020. That is less than 4 years. Those species deaths will certainly be accompanied by the decimation of countless human lives as well. So pick your stage and which play is real. T he idiocy of the Presidential election race will soon be over, as will the endless pseudo-debates and the droning of the commentators, who have been prattling on for more than a year, as if there were something to consider about this sick farce; as if the deep state had not been directing this life-movie from the start.
+Gore Vidal got a laugh when years ago he referred to Ronald Reagan as our “acting president.” But we’ve had four acting presidents since and their acts have left millions dead and wounded around the globe, including thousands of American troops. Now we have the sordid spectacle of an election campaign that is so patently phony that “delusionary” is the only word that can describe the thinking of those who take it seriously. Many Americans have acquiesced in this ongoing tragedy, playing their parts in this deadly charade. The ghosts of all America’s victims walk among us, and they will haunt us until we come to life by admitting our own complicity in their deaths. The show must not go on, but it will, as long as we keep acting our parts. 
+Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set: “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.” 
+The Obama administration repeatedly sets the stage by talking about and waging an endless war, a thirty year war, a long struggle, an open-ended war. Soon Obama’s feral, war loving understudy, Hillary Clinton, will take center stage as he exits right, after promoting her. “This is not me going through the motions here,” he recently said. “I really, really, really want to elect Hillary Clinton.” The role-playing, black face of empire will be replaced by the role-playing female face of empire as the audience cheers, hiding from their masked selves their part in a face-saving, phony performance. Without a complicit audience, the performance can’t go on. But it does, or, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, “so it goes.” But the act is wearing thin. 
+The autumnal season and especially the Halloween weekend of ghosts, the dead, and masks has me thinking of my own experience with acting, and how understanding the nature of our complicity in a mass act of bad faith is so important. 
+Having grown up as the only brother among seven sisters, I was always my parents’ favorite son. With such dumb luck, I never felt the need to be someone I wasn’t and so accepted my favored fate. But from an early age I learned from my sisters what it meant to “put on your face.” Like most girls in a cosmetic culture, they would stand or sit in front of a mirror dutifully applying lipstick, cover-up, and mascara (Italian, maschera , mask) in preparation for their entrances onto the social stage where they would face so many other faces facing and eyeing them. Mirrors meeting mirrors, looking-glass selves. It seemed to the boy I was, such an exhausting act. 
+At the time I had only a dim awareness of life the movie. 
+Then, when I was a young teenager, I had the great opportunity to learn how to be a public phony and put on a face. I got to lie to a national television audience and got paid for my deception. The show was a very popular one – To Tell the Truth – one of many game shows my parents, sisters, and I appeared on. We were a “theatrical” family, not trained actors, but a brood of faces unconsciously hoping to discover who they were through their acts. My parents had started this by accepting an invitation to appear on a show hosted by Johnny Carson, Do You Trust Your Wife? (The show was later renamed Who Do You Trust? – an apt, albeit grammatically incorrect, appellation for the paranoid Cold War years.) But I didn’t then care about politics; I just wanted to put on a good face and lie well while ostensibly telling the truth. I succeeded by convincing two of the celebrity panelists that I was who I wasn’t – Robert McGee – and getting paid $250 for my act. Lying seemed so easy; all you needed was a good mask and a convincing demeanor. This was my public lesson in “putting on your face.” 
+Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated by masks, liars, and the role of acting on the social stage. Ghosts of the Past by Ian Kath. 
+As the Halloween weekend transpires, this enchantment increases. I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word ‘person’ being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask. Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too meaning mask, ghost, or evil spirit. The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days. While etymology might seem arcane, I rather think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well. Shakespeare was right, of course, “all the world’s a stage,” though I would disagree with the bard that we are “merely” players. It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell. But who are we behind the masks? Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth holes (the per-sona , Latin, to sound through). 
+Halloween. The children play at scaring and being scared. Death walks among them and they scream with glee. The play is on. The grim reaper walks up and down the street. Treats greet them. The costumes are ingenious; the masks, wild. The parents stand behind, watching, smiling. It’s all great fun, the candy sweet. So what’s the trick? When does the performance end? 
+As Halloween ends, the saints come marching in followed by all the souls. The Days of the Dead. Spirits. Ghosts walk the streets. Dead leaves fall. The dead are everywhere, swirling through the air, drifting. We are surrounded by them. We are them. Until. 
+Until when? Perhaps not until we dead awaken and see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the deadly politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us. 
+Lying is the leading cause of living death in the United States, and the pharmaceutical companies have no prescription for this one. Not yet, anyway, as far as I care to know. 
+It seems to me that Albert Camus was right, and that we should aspire to be neither victims nor executioners. To do so will take a serious reevaluation of the roles we play in the ongoing national tragedy of lie piled upon lie in aggressive wars around the world and in election farces that perpetuate them. The leading actors we elect are our responsibility. We produce and maintain them. They are our mirror images; we, theirs. It is the danse macabre , a last tango in the land of bad actors, our two-faced show. This masquerade ball that passes for political reality is infiltrated by the ghosts of all those victims we have murdered around the wide world. We may choose not to see them, but they are lurking in the shadowy corners. And they will haunt us until we make amends. 
+“Do you not know there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?” warned Kierkegaard, “Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it?” 
+“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” Ibsen added, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.” 
+
+Edward Curtin is a writer and sociologist. He teaches at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Educated in the the classics, literature, theology, and sociology, his writing on a wide variety of topics has appeared widely over many years. He tries to write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. Originally published by Intrepid Report . 
+Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation?",FAKE
+2515,"Fewer immigrants are entering the U.S. illegally, and that’s changed the border security debate","Monica Camacho-Perez came to the United States from Mexico as a child, crossing into Arizona with her mother in the same spot where her father made the trip before them. “Nobody stopped us,’’ Camacho-Perez, now 20, said of her 2002 journey.
+
+Three years ago, her uncle tried to cross the border and join the family in Baltimore, where they remain illegal immigrants. He was stopped three times by the U.S. Border Patrol and jailed for 50 days.
+
+“He doesn’t want to try anymore,” said Camacho-Perez. “Now, it’s really hard.”
+
+As the Department of Homeland Security continues to pour money into border security, evidence is emerging that illegal immigration flows have fallen to their lowest level in at least two decades. The nation’s population of illegal immigrants, which more than tripled, to 12.2 million, between 1990 and 2007, has dropped by about 1 million, according to demographers at the Pew Research Center.
+
+A key — but largely overlooked — sign of these ebbing flows is the changing makeup of the undocumented population. Until recent years, illegal immigrants tended to be young men streaming across the Southern border in pursuit of work. But demographic data show that the typical illegal immigrant now is much more likely someone who is 35 or older and has lived in the United States for a decade or more.
+
+Homeland security officials in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations — who have more than doubled the Border Patrol’s size and spent billions on drones, sensors and other technology at the border — say enhanced security is driving the new trends.
+
+“We have seen tremendous progress,” said R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. “The border is much more secure than in times past.”
+
+The issue of border security is central to the broader debate over immigration reform that has roiled Washington in recent years and is emerging as a flash point in the 2016 presidential campaign. Congressional Republicans have insisted on greater border security before they consider legalizing any immigrants who came to this country without proper documents.
+
+President Obama says the border has never been more secure and is urging a series of legislative steps to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants, streamline the visa system and further fortify the border. He has already moved to protect certain undocumented immigrants from deportation through executive actions. But these actions have faced resistance in the courts, including the decision Tuesday by a federal appeals court to keep one of the president’s signature immigration efforts from moving ahead.
+
+What’s increasingly clear is that the shifting fortunes of the U.S. economy account for less of the ebb and flow of illegal immigration. Even as the economy bounces back from recession, illegal immigration flows, especially from Mexico, have kept declining, ­according to researchers and government data. Since the 1990s, the opposite was true: The better the economy, the more people tried to come.
+
+“Every month or quarter that the economy continues to improve and unauthorized immigration doesn’t pick up supports the theory that border security is a bigger factor, and it’s less about the economy and we have moved into a new era,’’ said Marc Rosenblum, deputy director of the U.S. immigration program at the Migration Policy Institute.
+
+Some researchers say factors other than security are playing a role and might even account for much of the reduced flow of illegal immigrants. These researchers point, for instance, to changes in Latin America that could be pushing fewer people to seek a better life in the United States.
+
+At odds with the government’s claims of success, a series of academic studies in recent years have found little linkage between border security and illegal migration.
+
+Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton University sociologist, said the falling numbers of immigrants have “nothing to do with border enforcement.” Massey, who helps run a project that has interviewed thousands of illegal Mexican migrants over the past three decades, attributed the trend to demographic changes in Mexico, such as women having fewer children.
+
+But even some researchers who are skeptical about the overall effectiveness of enhanced border security acknowledge indirect effects of these measures. For potential migrants who are calculating the pros and cons of trying to cross the border, stiffer U.S. security measures are making the trip much more expensive, in particular the exploding cost of hiring a guide. The journey has also become more arduous and dangerous, in part because the DHS has plugged traditional crossing points and driven migrants deeper into the desert.
+
+Since the Bush administration, the DHS has dramatically increased its efforts to lock down the southwest border. The budget for Customs and Border Protection has grown to $10.7 billion in the past decade, a 75 percent increase. The number of Border Patrol agents at the border has nearly doubled over the past decade, to more than 18,000 today.
+
+Much of the ramp-up occurred during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration has marshaled more forces as well. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has recently set up three task forces to increase coordination within the DHS.
+
+Current and former DHS officials acknowledge that a confluence of factors explains the decline in illegal migration, including demographic changes in Mexico, improvements in its economy and Mexico’s crackdown on Central American migrants headed to the United States. But these officials insist that the massive investment to secure the border has been the key factor.
+
+“It used to be that you could literally sit at a bar in Tijuana, Mexico, look across the border into San Diego, wait for the Border Patrol to drive in the other direction and make a run for it,’’ said Steve Atkiss, a former CBP chief of staff and now a partner at Command Consulting Group. “It’s much more difficult and expensive now.”
+
+Madai Ledezma crossed the Mexican border into Texas a decade ago at age 23 and remains in the United States as an illegal immigrant. She said her uncle and brother had recently wanted to join her. But, she said, they’re staying put after her uncle was caught by the Border Patrol a year ago and locked up for a month before being sent back to Mexico.
+
+“The risk of crossing again is that he will be locked up again,’’ Ledezma said. She added, “I just heard recently that the Border Patrol now has the ability to fire their weapons.”
+
+Ledezma’s uncle was one of a shrinking number of undocumented immigrants stopped by the Border Patrol. Government officials widely cite that trend as evidence that the overall flow is also down.
+
+In 2000, considered the peak of the flood of illegal Mexican migration, more than 1.6 million people were apprehended, according to DHS data. Those numbers have plunged to around 400,000 per year since 2012 and are down 28 percent in the first part of fiscal 2015 compared with last year. Even last year’s widely publicized spike in unaccompanied minors crossing the border from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras has receded dramatically, the data show.
+
+While the declining number of apprehensions is not conclusive proof that illegal immigration is down, other less publicized research strongly suggests this is the case.
+
+Wayne Cornelius, director of the Mexican migration field research program at the University of California at San Diego, interviews hundreds of people each year in the Mexican state of Yuca­tan and asks them whether they are planning to come to the United States in the next 12 months.
+
+In 2006, 24 percent said yes. By 2009, as the U.S. economy was cratering, 8 percent said yes. This year, 2.5 percent answered in the affirmative.
+
+A recent study by the Pew Research Center, meanwhile, found that the median length of stay for illegal immigrants in the United States jumped from less than eight years in 2003 to nearly 13 years by 2013. Their median age has increased from 28 during the 1990s to nearly 36 today.
+
+Those figures wouldn’t be possible if young men were still coming across the border in huge numbers, and it was those young men who accounted for most of the illegal traffic.
+
+But Massey, the Princeton researcher, highlighted an unintended consequence of the security crackdown on the border. He said immigrants who are already in the United States are afraid to go back and forth to Mexico as they traditionally did, and are “aging in place” in the United States.
+
+Ledezma’s tale is a common one. Over the past decade, she and her husband, Jose Pina, a landscaper, have become involved in their community in New Carrollton. Their daughter, Heather, 6, is a U.S. citizen. Ledezma volunteers at Heather’s school, reads with her at the public library and attends a local church.
+
+“After so many years of living here, I of course consider this my home,” she said.
+
+According to estimates by the Migration Policy Institute, about a third of illegal immigrants own a home and have children who are U.S. citizens.
+
+“We have this population here and they haven’t left and they don’t appear to be going back and forth to Mexico anymore,’’ said George Escobar, senior director of human services for CASA, a ­Maryland-based immigrant advocacy group. “These trends have reshaped the immigration debate right before our eyes.”",REAL
+4332,Trump says he’s willing to spend $1 billion on campaign,"DES MOINES, Iowa — Donald Trump is willing to fork over a billion bucks if that’s what it takes to win the White House.
+
+After the TV star and business mogul blew in via his private helicopter Saturday afternoon, he answered a battery of questions from the 100 or so reporters awaiting him at a softball field near the Iowa State Fair.
+
+One question: Is he willing to spend a billion on his campaign, which would match the amounts President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney raised for their 2012 general election races?
+
+Trump answered: “I would do that, yeah, if I had to.”
+
+He added: “I make $400 million a year so what difference does it make?”
+
+Trump also said all undocumented immigrants “have to go” in an interview with NBC News’ Meet the Press host Chuck Todd.
+
+""We're going to keep the families together, but they have to go,"" he said, speaking on his private plane as it sat on a runway in Des Moines. The interview will air in full Sunday.
+
+Trump has said he’s worth $10 billion; a study by Bloomberg News puts the figure at $2.9 billion or more.
+
+To separate himself from the other 16 GOP presidential candidates, Trump has pitched his personal fortune as the best insurance against influence from powerful lobbyists and wealthy donors.
+
+“I’m turning down so much money,” he said, and mentioned one donor who wanted to give him $5 million. “If he put it up, I’d feel obligated, because I’m a loyal person.”
+
+Trump didn’t miss a chance to rip on one of his GOP rivals, this time former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
+
+“Jeb Bush is a puppet to his donors. There’s no question about it,” Trump said. “He’s got lobbyists, I know them. ... He’ll do whatever they want.”
+
+Trump traveled by golf cart to the State Fairgrounds, where he was immediately swarmed by reporters and fairgoers. He spent about an hour at the fair, where he waved to people, stopped for a few selfies and ate a pork chop on a stick as a mob of people watched.
+
+As usual in his news conferences, he tossed out views on a wide smattering of topics:
+
+On why he was offering free rides in his personal helicopter: “I love children and I love Iowa. Great place. I’ve really developed a relationship with it.”
+
+On whether he feels qualified to be president: “Nobody else will do the job that I will do. I will bring back jobs. I will strengthen our military. I’ll take care of our vets. I will get rid of Obamacare. ... I will take care of people. ... I will be so great to women. I cherish women. And the women haven’t been taken care of properly.”
+
+On how he’ll get things done: “I’ll get Congress. I’ve been getting politicians to pass whatever I wanted all my life. Nobody has more experience dealing with politicians than I. ... Whether it’s big New York City zoning, which by the way are probably tougher than things I’ll be dealing with with foreign countries. I mean, I built a city on the west side of Manhattan.”
+
+He did not speak from The Des Moines Register’s Political Soapbox. Asked if he was afraid to do so, he said: “That paper’s not relevant to me.”
+
+On Sunday, he’ll appear on Meet the Press, and he said he plans to unveil a detailed immigration plan during the show. He also will release a tax plan soon, he said.",REAL
+6676,Kylie Jenner Sizzles In These Chip-Pan Accident Pictures,"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] Kylie Jenner Sizzles In These Chip-Pan Accident Pictures November 7, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS , ENTERTAINMENT Share 0 Add Comment 
+PICTURES have emerged of 19-year old reality TV star Kylie Jenner looking red hot after a mishap involving a chip pan in her LA home. 
+Kylie, sister of Kim Kardashian, smoldered after her traditional smokey-eyed look incorporated the addition of boiling oil as the glamorous youngster took selfies of herself while making a big plate of chips. 
+The incident was captured across social media, as the in-considerable-agony Jenner refused to stop posting images of herself on Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and even MySpace just to be sure. 
+Just like anything posted by the Kardashian clan, the sizzling images immediately broke the internet and received a flood of likes, shares and comments from fans worldwide. 
+“OMG Kylie does it again” said one follower on Instagram. 
+“She always looks so hot, but in these pics, she looks really hot. Like third degree hot. Like maybe go to the hospital hot. Maybe she can’t stop tweeting because her hand is melted to her phone? Should someone check that?”. 
+Thousands of impressionable youngsters have already tipped a chip pan over themselves in a bid to emulate their idol, with the hashtag ‘Kylie Jenner face’ trending worldwide.",FAKE
+4101,"WATCH: On The Missouri Campus, A Clash Of 2 First Amendment Protections","WATCH: On The Missouri Campus, A Clash Of 2 First Amendment Protections
+
+When two rights that this country holds as fundamental come into conflict, it makes for complex drama.
+
+That's what happened yesterday on the campus of the University of Missouri in Columbia: Student activists, who had just succeeded in their quest to oust the system president, tried to stop Tim Tai, 20, a student photographer, from documenting what was going on for ESPN. It was a clash between the right to assembly, to be left alone and the right of the press to operate in a public space.
+
+The woman seen at the end of the video who appears to grab a reporter's camera has been identified by The New York Times as Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media at the University of Missouri. We've reached out to her for comment, and we'll update if she gets back to us.
+
+The Los Angeles Times reports that the actions in the video were criticized by the Columbia Missourian, a university newspaper with professional editors and staffed by students from the school's journalism program:
+
+"" 'I'm pretty incensed about it,' executive editor Tom Warhover told The Times. 'I find it ironic that particularly faculty members would resort to those kinds of things for no good reason. I understand students who are protesting and want privacy. But they are not allowed to push and assault our photographers — our student photographers.' ... ""Tai acknowledged that the demonstrators had a point, since he does recognize there are situations that are sensitive to photograph, but he said that he tries to figure out 'how to cautiously or delicately approach these stories without overwhelming people. "" 'I don't think everyone there is super anti-media, but I think there's misunderstanding about what we do,' Tai said.""
+
+Update at 11:35 a.m. ET. A Reporter's Reflection: 
+
+
+
+A reporter for NPR member station KBIA was in middle of what happened yesterday. Bram Sable-Smith put together a very personal reflection about the situation that is worth listening to.
+
+One disclosure: KBIA is licensed to the University Of Missouri, which also provides the station with significant support.",REAL
+5499,Secrets of the US Election: Assange Talks to Pilger,"Secrets of the US Election: Assange Talks to Pilger November 5, 2016 
+WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denies the Russian government was the source of leaked emails about Hillary Clinton and says her “neo-McCarthy” Russia-bashing is just part of a cover-up, in an interview with John Pilger. 
+By John Pilger 
+This interview was filmed in the Embassy of Ecuador in London – where Julian Assange is a political refugee – and broadcast on Nov. 5, 2016 
+John Pilger: What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton? WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (Photo credit: Espen Moe) 
+Julian Assange : If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no one is untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no one can resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. We’ve published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was Secretary of State. They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half – 30,000 — to herself, and we’ve published about half. Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing. [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations. [These emails are] combined with the cover-up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, [which] has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases. 
+John Pilger: The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails. 
+Julian Assange : The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything. Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that 17   had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source. 
+WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong. 
+John Pilger : The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque. 
+Julian Assange : And twelve million dollars from Morocco … 
+John Pilger: Twelve million from Morocco yeah. 
+Julian Assange : For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party]. 
+John Pilger: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it.   speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, Arizona,   by Gage Skidmore) 
+Julian Assange : There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is   email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS. 
+John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia. 
+Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled. 
+John Pilger : Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation. 
+Julian Assange : Yes. 
+John Pilger: That’s extraordinary. 
+Julian Assange : I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction] to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She’s a centralizing cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis. 
+She’s the centralizer that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from Citibank. This is quite amazing. 
+John Pilger: Didn’t Citibank supply a list …. ? 
+Julian Assange : Yes. 
+John Pilger: … which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet. 
+Julian Assange : Yes. 
+John Pilger: So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United States? 
+Julian Assange: If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests. 
+Julian Assange : So I think you can’t properly understand Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia. The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets with Saudi King Abdullah in Riyadh on March 30, 2012. [State Department photo] John Pilger : Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us, told you about what happened there, because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria, the ISIL jihadism and so on, and it was almost Hillary Clinton’s invasion. What do the emails tell us about that?
+Julian Assange : Libya, more than anyone else’s war, was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails. She had put her favored agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there’s more than 1,700 emails out of the 33,000 Hillary Clinton emails that we’ve published, just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state — something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President. 
+So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis. 
+Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilization of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself was no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa — previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: ‘What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe,’ and this is exactly what happened. 
+John Pilger: You get complaints from people saying, ‘What is WikiLeaks doing? Are they trying to put Trump in the White House?’ 
+Julian Assange: My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he’s had every establishment off side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms companies … big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves. 
+J ohn Pilger : There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians. Some people say, ‘Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?’ 
+Julian Assange: We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our [Russia] documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up. 
+John Pilger : Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election? Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump? Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona. June 18, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore) 
+Julian Assange: [Let’s talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind? He represents American white trash, [which Hillary Clinton called] ‘deplorable and irredeemable’. It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them. Because he so clearly — through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies — represents people who are not the middle, not the upper-middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense. 
+John Pilger: I’d like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you refuge and [political asylum] in this embassy in London. Now Ecuador has cut off the Internet from here where we’re doing this interview, in the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election campaign. Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you? 
+Julian Assange : Let’s let go back four years. I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago. Now there’s undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various kinds — so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of 16 million people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping on the side. So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing. 
+WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. [It means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organization; [they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election. Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa. 
+John Pilger: Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy. 
+Julian Assange : I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would then be extradited either immediately   or to Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared [by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me   we know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000. So over the last 15 years, every single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen]. 
+John Pilger: People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here. 
+Julian Assange: Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I’m a bit institutionalized — this [the embassy] is the world … it’s visually the world [for me]. 
+John Pilger: It’s the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn’t it? 
+Julian Assange: It’s the world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long, I don’t remember it. 
+John Pilger : Yes. 
+Julian Assange: So, yes, you adapt. The one real irritant is that my young children — they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard, hard adaption which they didn’t ask for. 
+John Pilger: Do you worry about them? 
+Julian Assange : Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother. 
+John Pilger: Some people would say, ‘Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?’ 
+Julian Assange : The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent 18 months in formal, adversarial litigation. [So it’s] me and the U.N. versus Sweden and the U.K. Who’s right? The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse. It is the United Nations formally asking, ‘What’s going on here? What is your legal explanation for this? [Assange] says that you should recognize his asylum.’ [And here is] 
+Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, ‘No, we’re not going to [recognize the UN ruling],’ so leaving open their ability to extradite. 
+I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publicly in the press, because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative — that yes, the West has political prisoners, it’s a reality, it’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well. The West has political prisoners. Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception. 
+Julian Assange : Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum. Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric? 
+John Pilger: Yes, it’s different. 
+Julian Assange : The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up. 
+[The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that] the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States. 
+John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com . To support Julian Assange, go to: https://justice4assange.com/donate.html",FAKE
+4143,"Obama hits the road to push new programs, win support for his tax plan","President Obama hit the road Wednesday to promote a grab bag of new government programs, tax credits and worker protections -- paid for with higher taxes on top earners -- while holding the threat of vetoes over the heads of the new Republican leadership in Congress.
+
+After delivering a defiant State of the Union address that set a combative tone for his final two years in office, the president traveled to Idaho to reinforce his plan and tout the country’s recent economic successes.
+
+“The ruling on the field stands, middle-class opportunities work. Expanding opportunity works,” the president said at a rally at Boise State University, citing the recent surges in job growth, domestic energy production and student achievement.
+
+However, in a speech that borrowed significantly from his address Tuesday, Obama also struck a more conciliatory tone, acknowledging he got “whooped” in Iowa during the 2008 and 2012 general elections.
+
+“As I’ve travelled the country, I have seen the desire among the American people to make progress together,” he said as he restated his plan to end tax cuts for the “super rich” and close corporate-tax “loopholes” to “lower the cost of community college to zero.”
+
+Still, he challenged critics of his “middle class economics” plan to present better solutions.
+
+Obama was to speak later Wednesday at an event in Topeka, Kansas.
+
+The most controversial plank in Obama’s overall plan, unveiled over the weekend, is to impose more than $300 billion in tax hikes over 10 years. They hikes include those on investment and inheritance taxes for top-earners to fund tax credit expansions for the middle class -- including tripling the maximum child tax credit to up to $3,000 per child. The funding also would pay for an initiative providing free community college for two years for students who keep up their grades (though the White House calls for rolling back a separate college savings tax break).
+
+While laying out his ambitious agenda, the president has also vowed to fight GOP bills that would chip away at ObamaCare, financial regulations and his recent immigration actions.
+
+""If a bill comes to my desk that tries to do any of these things, I will veto it,"" Obama said Tuesday. He issued similar threats with regard to legislation teeing up new Iran sanctions and efforts to roll back environmental regulations.
+
+In an off-script moment, the president even reminded Republicans of his electoral successes. After declaring he had no more campaigns to run, he quipped, ""I know because I won both of them.""
+
+GOP leaders bristled at the president's remarks. On Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner said he offered ""more taxes, more government, more of the same approach that has failed the middle class for decades.""
+
+As for the president's warnings to the new Congress, Boehner said, ""Veto threats and fantasy land proposals will not distract the people's house from the people's priorities.""
+
+The address reflected a president disinclined to cede ground in the wake of his party's midterm losses.
+
+Obama is also calling anew for Congress to raise the minimum wage and for new measures to guarantee paid sick leave for American workers.
+
+On his college plan, the president says he wants to make two years of community college ""as free and universal in America as high school is today.""
+
+While Republicans have questioned the mechanics of the college plan, they have declared his tax proposal a ""non-starter"" in the new GOP-led Congress.
+
+Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said in a statement that the address showed Obama slipping back into his role as ""campaigner-in-chief,"" pushing higher taxes and more regulations, while issuing ""premature veto threats.""
+
+In a pointed swipe sure to anger Republicans, Obama in his address downplayed the jobs impact of the proposed Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline, without mentioning it by name. Calling for more infrastructure spending, he said: ""Let's set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline. Let's pass a bipartisan infrastructure plan that could create more than thirty times as many jobs per year.""
+
+Defending his tax plan, Obama said lobbyists have ""rigged"" the system with loopholes and giveaways ""that the superrich don't need, while denying a break to middle-class families who do.""
+
+He called for closing them ""to help more families pay for child care and send their kids to college.""
+
+Yet the president, as part of his tax plan, is calling for ending a tax break for college savings plans known as 529 plans. Under the change, earnings on contributions could not be withdrawn tax-free, as they can be now.
+
+The speech was dominated by economic and domestic issues, though the president did devote several minutes to addressing foreign policy and terrorism and specifically the threat posed by the Islamic State.
+
+""We will continue to hunt down terrorists and dismantle their networks, and we reserve the right to act unilaterally, as we have done relentlessly since I took office to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to us and our allies,"" he vowed.
+
+He also defended his recent decision to push for normalizing relations with Cuba. Despite concerns among some lawmakers in Congress that the Castro regime may exploit the opening to its advantage, Obama urged Congress to ""begin the work of ending the embargo.""
+
+The speech was Obama's first State of the Union before a Congress controlled by Republicans. The party won control of the Senate and built a historic majority in the House in November.
+
+Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, elected in November, delivered the official Republican response to Obama on Tuesday night.
+
+She called for simplifying America's ""outdated and loophole-ridden tax code"" -- not to finance more spending, but improve the economy.
+
+""So let's iron out loopholes to lower rates -- and create jobs, not pay for more government spending,"" she said. ""The president has already expressed some support for these kinds of ideas. We're calling on him now to cooperate to pass them.""",REAL
+7405,Comment on What Does Success Mean To You? by 11 Things To Let Go Of Before The New Year,"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter This is something I have always had a bit of a hard time with growing up. Seeing what success means to the world and how it has been defined as having money, a good job, working hard, sacrificing etc. Sure this may only be the western world, but that’s where I grew up so that’s what I was exposed to. If I grew up somewhere else maybe it would have been different. I’m sure people don’t even think of the word success or put any particular meaning to it in some places. advertisement - learn more It wasn’t until I really began to see through the whole idea of success as I got into my later teens that I realized we are all chasing a common dream. Something that has been defined for us. It’s not even something we feel passionate about inside or that we absolutely love doing that will lead us to success. It’s simply that we are chasing an idea of what success is. I saw this picture recently and it made me laugh. Mainly because it’s soo true. Have a look below.Here you got this one “unsuccessful” guy on the bottom, who’s just having a nice stroll, crisp smile going on, real nice strut and then you got this “successful” guy above who’s sitting in traffic yelling on his cell phone or to the driver in front of him. The truth is, when we see these two scenarios we often think that someone who just strolls through life, takes it slow, doesn’t go hard at chasing money is not as successful as someone who is wearing a suit, has nice things, is working to get to the top of their company and who may be rich. You literally hear this stuff all the time. It’s all just an illusion of success. But ask yourself the questions: does it really feel resonant inside to chase money? To do what you don’t want to be doing simply to be considered successful? To have to sacrifice and slave for more toys? How about being in competition with everyone so you can get ahead? Wouldn’t you rather live in and experience a world where you could just do what it is you felt inspired to do the most? And then be able to change at any point the moment you wish to experience something new? The truth is, success is literally everything we are doing. No matter what situation you are in, what circumstance you are experiencing, you were successful at creating that. We don’t need to judge any experience as being more successful than the other because we are here to experience! We are here to have a variety of dynamic experiences that give us different circumstances and we are choosing all of them. advertisement - learn more We are all successful, plain a simple. And it’s not even that we need to be or need to focus on success. It’s simply that we don’t need to chase it or define ourselves by it. We simply do what we feel inspired to do and all we need will come from choosing to experience in that manner. Much Love 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+579,Louisiana’s Common Core Debacle,"John White may be the silver-tongued boy wonder of the school reform movement, lauded for his political acumen and often mentioned as a future U.S. secretary of education. But last fall, Louisiana’s whip-smart and occasionally cantankerous education superintendent found himself on a lonely mission: driving his state-issued Prius along the Bayou State’s two-lane highways, stopping at churches, schools and Chamber of Commerce meeting halls, promoting the embattled Common Core learning standards to a state whose governor no longer wants them.
+
+As rain pounded down outside Scott Middle School in Lafayette, White, in khakis and a navy blazer—a uniform reminiscent of his prep school days—looked like he was gaining ground. Buoyant and self-assured, he told a gaggle of local reporters that the standards were going forward just fine and praised a math lesson he had just witnessed inside.
+
+“I’m going to tell everyone I meet with that I just saw 25 sixth-graders knock it out of the park on the Common Core standards,” he boomed.
+
+Meanwhile, back in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who once praised the standards as a way to “raise expectations for every child,” was denouncing them and taking potshots at White. That’s the same White who was appointed by the state board of education in 2012—after much Jindal lobbying—to roll out a roster of education initiatives, among them, yes, the Common Core.
+
+Today, White, once called “Jindal’s boy” by political insiders, is the governor’s most celebrated public enemy, and a statewide education reform initiative years in the making may end up falling by the wayside, adding chaos and confusion to Louisiana’s already beleaguered school system.
+
+All this could easily be chalked up as an only-in-Louisiana tussle to be expected in a state whose education system is near rock bottom and whose political brawls have a tradition of being both colorful and callous. But this battle is bigger than Louisiana. Across the country, the Common Core standards, a set of rigorous K-12 English and math benchmarks designed to improve the state of the nation’s schools, have become increasingly divisive. Sponsored by the National Governors Association and state education chiefs, they were voluntarily adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia starting in 2010. But the standards have since become red meat for everyone from Tea Party activists, who cry government overreach, to lefty soccer moms, who rail against their “corporate” approach. The pushback is pitting political allies who came together years ago to support the standards against each other. And it is seriously undermining the power and persuasion of the nation’s education reformers, who have long seen the standards as the crown jewel of their national efforts to improve American public schools.
+
+Whether the 39-year-old White can squash the rebellion in his own state is no small matter. It may well indicate whether other progressive reformers—less politically skilled than he—have any shot at salvaging the standards in their own states, and whether Louisiana and other low-performing states really have the stomach for widespread school reform after all.
+
+The ailing state of Louisiana’s public school system was once an unfortunate but accepted reality. Parents who could afford to send their kids to private and parochial schools did. Those who could not suffered through the spotty and unreliable public system, often holding their noses.
+
+That all changed in the 1980s, when the state got badly burned by the now infamous oil bust. Oil and gas revenues counted for as much as 41 percent of the state’s budget in 1981, and when the industry faltered the state nearly went bankrupt. To reignite the economy, government heavies knew they needed to diversify. But they soon discovered that the state’s bottom-of-the barrel education ranking was a billboard sign telling corporate America that Louisiana had a dearth of qualified workers. “Fixing the schools”—and fast—became everybody’s goal.
+
+In fits and starts, and with some backward movement, Louisiana began overhauling its community college system, increased teacher pay, rolled out new K-12 testing regimes and eventually took over failing schools, closing some and turning others into charters.
+
+The blow from Katrina in 2005 reinforced the improve-schools urgency as dozens of flailing schools in New Orleans were shuttered by the storm and media outlets flocked to the city, shining a discomfiting light on their subpar quality. That helped drive even more legislative support for charter school expansion and a more defined teacher evaluation system, which Jindal helped push through in 2010.
+
+A lot of these measures were spurred on by George W. Bush’s 2002 No Child Left Behind act, which strong-armed states into passing reform bills. But they were also the result of careful bond building between Democratic and Republican lawmakers as well as disparate lobbying groups—from big business to civil rights activists. Traditionally on opposite sides of the aisle and sometimes openly hostile toward each other, they were now in alliance, long-time foes suddenly together in their efforts to better educate Louisiana’s neediest students, many of them African-Americans.
+
+Lane Grigsby, a Republican and the founder of a well-known construction firm here, says he stood behind these measures because “you’ve gotta have educated kids for the workforce.” Standing with him were social justice leaders like Kenneth L. Campbell, president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, who calls education reform an “equity” issue.
+
+But despite the across-the-aisle hand-holding and the sheer boldness of many of these measures, they fell short on many counts. From 1990 to 2010, the state’s education ranking didn’t budge much. And in 2010, the state’s college readiness score was still trailing behind the national average.
+
+The grand hope for the Common Core, adopted by the state board of education in 2010 and first introduced to schools in 2011, was that it wasn’t punitive or piecemeal, like many of the state’s earlier efforts. Instead, it was an ambitious and unambiguous road map outlining the skills and knowledge every student ought to have at the end of each year. And because it asked every teacher in the state to present material that was more rigorous than what had been taught before, many thought it might have the curative effect these other measures had not.
+
+But it was also just one part—albeit a large one—of the state’s education reform agenda. And in the beginning, it was shrouded in limited controversy, seen as the best way to finally boost Louisiana’s sour education reputation.
+
+John White arrived on the scene in the spring of 2011 just as the standards were first appearing in schools. Recruited from New York to run Louisiana’s Recovery School District, a reform-backed post-Katrina effort, White was widely perceived as a shining star of the progressive reform movement, one of many young, ambitious intellectuals who had been dispatched to outposts around the country to battle what they saw as the movement’s most pernicious enemy: “low expectations.”
+
+But from the onset, White, who has degrees from the University of Virginia and D.C.’s tony prep school St. Albans, seemed more politically astute than many of his allies. There was the brash Michelle Rhee, who had gotten famously booed out of Washington; the beleaguered Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson, who by the summer of 2011 was struggling mightily to contain critics of her charter school expansion plans; and Los Angeles’ John Deasy, who was ousted last fall.
+
+Yes, White’s résumé read like a near carbon copy of these like-minded reformers, with stints in Teach for America, Eli Broad’s education leadership academy and Joel Klein’s New York City Department of Education. But White had a roster of other line items to recommend him. While in New York, he had risen fast, helping to roll out some of the district’s most innovative tech initiatives. He was often dispatched to the Upper East Side to appease parents enraged by overcrowding and the South Bronx to sooth those distraught over the shuttering of their children’s failing schools. He was quick-witted, good-looking, and, when he wanted to be, charming. Further, the word on the street was Klein, one of the movement’s gurus, loved him. 
+
+ This is not to say that White did not have his critics. In 2011, during his time in New Orleans running the state’s Recovery School District, he was sued by three fired principals. At the same time, the state was involved in a protracted lawsuit in what eventually became a class-action lawsuit with 7,500 school employees laid-off after Katrina. And he was frequently attacked by parents and educators who said he bulldozed through his education agenda items without consulting the people most impacted by them. It is a claim he fiercely denies.
+
+But even then his enemies recognized his political might. The head of the state teachers union told me last fall that White excelled at “behind-the-curtains work” to the point of being “autocratic,” suggesting White’s enemies hated him for the same reason his allies liked him so much: He was dogged about getting what he wanted.",REAL
+8813,New Solar Panels Pull Drinking Water From The Air Because Clean Water Is A Human Right,"Email 
+In an exciting new development, a startup company called Zero Mass Water has created solar panels that passively and efficiently pull water from the sky, purify it, and transport it to the tap for drinking and cooking purposes. These solar panels are seriously changing the game for both tap water and clean energy. 
+Via TrueActivist SPONSORED LINKS 
+Though the primary motivation for creating these panels was to help people living without access to clean drinking water, it can also help a variety of people from all walks of life while conserving traditional energy that is bad for the environment . Scroll Down For Video Below 
+The founder and CEO of the startup, Cody Friesen, said he was inspired when he was setting up another one of his technologies in Indonesia and thought about the abundance of rain, but lack of clean water in the region. He decided to focus his efforts on improving the global water supply. Friesen told Fastco Exist: 
+“Everybody’s heard about the latest nanofilter this…or whatever the latest pump technology is. None of those end up being sort of the leapfrog technology that addresses the fact that drinking water is a fundamental human right, and yet we have one person dying every 10 seconds from waterborne illness on the planet.” 
+Though these are the first solar panels of their kind, the idea and technology behind the water conversion and supply is simple. Zero Mass Water created a material that absorbs water from the air at an extremely accelerated rate, then it draws the water back out to evaporate it and draw out pollutants. After this purification process, the distilled water is run through a mineral block to add calcium and magnesium and to improve the taste. 
+Since waterborne illnesses are so prevalent, this water can save millions of lives and slowly eliminate diseases, as it becomes more widely-used by countries suffering the most as a result of contaminated drinking water . Having an in-home water supply would also save girls and women worldwide approximately 200 million hours annually , as that’s how much time they spend retrieving water. They could use this time to go to school, perform more tasks around the house, or work. 
+The solar panels are currently being tested in Ecuador, Jordan, and Mexico to test their viability and effectiveness. Though they’re starting out in areas rampant with poverty , the panels can also make a difference in the lives of the citizens whose water supplies are tainted with lead. There are roughly 5,300 such water systems, and this could be a safe alternative to drinking that lethal tap water and buying bottled water. 
+A single panel can provide enough clean drinking and cooking water for a family of 4, and additional panels can be used on larger buildings, such as hospitals. 
+Zero Mass Water hopes that this concept won’t remain novel for too long; despite the success they’re likely to have for being the only sellers of this panel, their goal is to make the technology common throughout all solar panels installed in people’s homes. 
+“When you think about solar today, what do you think about? Electricity,” Friesen said. “Everybody thinks that way. I think that in a few years when people think about solar, they’ll also think about water abundance.”",FAKE
+442,"U.S. economy adds 215,000 jobs in March, jobless rate ticks up to 5 percent","The nation’s hiring boom continued its momentum in March, with government data released Friday morning showing the economy added 215,000 jobs last month.
+
+Employers have been bringing on workers at a rapid clip for the past two years, and the strengthening job market is encouraging many people who had been on the sidelines to start looking for work. That pushed the unemployment rate up slightly to 5 percent in March, according to the data from the Labor Department.
+
+Healthy job growth also has helped reassure policymakers in Washington and investors on Wall Street that the U.S. economy has withstood the turmoil from overseas — at least so far. A slowdown in China is weakening global growth, particularly in developing countries that fed its formerly voracious appetite for natural resources. In addition, a worldwide glut of oil has pummeled the once high-flying energy industry in America.
+
+“This is confirmation that the U.S. economy is basically the one economy in the globe that can go it alone,"" said Tara Sinclair, chief economist at jobs site Indeed and economics professor at George Washington University. ""It can potentially be a positive contributor to global growth at a time when everyone else is slowing.”
+
+[How the U.S. job market is doing this month -- in charts!]
+
+That was evident Friday morning following a plunge in overseas markets. Japan's Nikkei index dropped 3.6 percent amid weak economic data as the country struggles to combat deflation. The gloomy sentiment then spread to Europe, where London's FTSE was down 1.35 percent. Adding to the unease was the sharp decline in U.S. crude oil futures to about $37.
+
+On Wall Street, the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 100 points in the first few minutes of trading on Friday. But the three major indexes began reversing course by mid-morning and held onto those gains for the rest of the session, fueled by the solid jobs report and an unexpectedly strong data from the manufacturing sector. The Dow and the broader Standard & Poor's 500-stock index both closed up 0.6 percent, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 0.9 percent to finish at 4,915.
+
+""The March [jobs] report is another rebuke to the Wall Street pessimism about an imminent downturn,"" said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former top economic adviser to President George W. Bush and head of the policy think-tank American Action Forum.
+
+The government data released Friday shows the retail sector added the most jobs in March, bringing on 47,000 workers. Hiring was also robust in construction and health care, which each accounted for 37,000 jobs. The report also showed an encouraging pickup in wage growth. Average hourly earnings rose 7 cents to $25.43 and are up 2.3 percent over the past year.
+
+However, the mining and manufacturing industries, which are most vulnerable to low oil prices and a stronger dollar, are still suffering. The mining sector shed 12,000 jobs last month, while manufacturing contracted by 29,000.
+
+In a speech in New York earlier this week, Fed Chair Janet Yellen also noted that many workers who would like full-time jobs are stuck in part-time positions. In addition, the growth in the nation's labor force in recent months suggests that many workers are still finding their way back to the job market following the worst recession in generations.
+
+The share of workers in the labor force fell to a nearly 40-year low of 62.4 percent in September. Since then, it has rebounded to 63 percent, the fastest pace of growth in more than two decades.
+
+“I still continue to personally believe there’s a little more slack in the labor market than one would surmise by looking at the unemployment rate alone,” Yellen said.
+
+The U.S. economy is not out of the woods, however. Another bout of financial volatility could still threaten the progress of the recovery, and central bank officials have limited scope to combat a domestic slowdown because interest rates are already so low and its balance sheet so large. The Fed cuts its benchmark interest rate to help stimulate the economy and raises it when the economy is overheating.
+
+In her speech, Yellen highlighted the need to be cautious before hiking rates again. Her comments fueled a stock market rally earlier this week and helped bring down the dollar, two factors that should boost U.S. growth and provide continued momentum for the job market.
+
+“As long as the job market continues to expand, you can argue that the economy will be just fine,” said Brad McMillan, Chief Investment Officer for Commonwealth Financial Network. “If employers are confident enough to hire, and workers have jobs and money to spend, we simply can’t get into all that much trouble.”
+
+The recovery is generating more high-wage jobs -- but does that matter?
+
+Financial turmoil half a world away is melting Minnesota's Iron Range
+
+Economists are starting to warn about the risk of a new U.S. recession",REAL
+9341,Lesser-Known Celebrity Contract Riders - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Report: Friend Has Been Going By Middle Name This Whole Fucking Time CALABASAS, CA—Astounded that it had never come up at any point in the six years they had known each other, local woman Lucy Reed, 25, reported Tuesday that her friend Nicole Silberthau had apparently been going by her middle name this whole fucking time. Teary-Eyed Tim Kaine Asks Clinton If His Hair Will Grow Back In Time For Election Day NEW YORK—His lower lip quivering while showing his running mate the uneven patches on his head where he attempted to give himself a trim, a teary-eyed Tim Kaine reportedly asked Hillary Clinton this morning if his hair would grow back in time for Election Day. ",FAKE
+3711,Baltimore calls in federal agents to help homicide cops deal with spike in violence,"Baltimore's police and civic leaders launched a two-month partnership Monday that will see ten federal agents embed with the city's homicide detectives in the latest bid to curb a surge in violent crime that has not been seen in decades.
+
+Under the program, two special agents from each of the federal government's five crime-fighting agencies (the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, U.S. Marshals Service and the ATF) will help investigate cases for the next 60 days. The city's acting police commissioner, Kevin Davis, told reporters that the agents met with officers Monday to discuss cases where officers have identified suspects, but need additional evidence to file charges.
+
+The homicide rate in Baltimore began to skyrocket in May, when the city saw 42 homicides in a single month. There was a brief dip in June, with 29 killings, however the number shot up to 45 in July, breaking a record set in 1972. The uptick comes after rioting in the spring over the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who was critically injured while in police custody.
+
+In total, the city has recorded 192 homicides so far this year, according to The Baltimore Sun. By contrast, 208 murders were committed in all of 2014. The three-month total of 116 homicides for May, June, and July is the highest since at least 1970.
+
+Adding to the urgency of Baltimore's violence is the relatively low ""clearance rate"" of closed homicide cases. Last week, Davis said the city police department's ""clearance rate"" was at 36.6 percent, down from the department's mid-40s average.
+
+For several years ""American cities have not seen an uptick in homicides we're seeing in 2015,"" Davis said Monday. ""Now we're back at the table, and our cities are looking at Baltimore. They want to know what Baltimore's going to do about it.""
+
+Davis had said Sunday that more people are arming themselves on the streets, and that the department has seized 20 percent more guns than it had by this time last year. Davis also said the influx of prescription pills — 32 pharmacies were looted during the April 27 riot and nearly 300,000 doses of prescription medication stolen — has contributed to Baltimore's spiking violence.
+
+Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby attributed to the spiking violence to violent repeat offenders, whom she called ""a small number of individuals responsible for the majority of the crimes."" Mosby warned those inclined to reach for a weapon that ""we are going to go after you with everything that we have. Collaboratively, we will get the job done and convict you.""
+
+ATF spokesman Special Agent David Cheplak told the Sun that his agents were assisting Baltimore police with controlled drug buys and surveillance. Officials from the DEA and FBI told the paper that their agents would provide a supporting role for officers.
+
+""We've got to take a different look at things,"" DEA spokesman Todd Edwards said, ""whether it's fresh eyes or just looking at it in a different way.""
+
+At Monday's press conference announcing the program, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. made a plea to the residents of his home city.
+
+""The only people making good now are the morticians,"" Cummings said. ""And I say our city is better than that. It's not just the murders and the shootings. I'm begging you, put your guns down.""
+
+Referencing the riots after Gray's death, Cummings said, ""I hear over and over and over again, 'Black Lives Matter'. And they do matter. But black lives also have to matter to black people.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from The Baltimore Sun.",REAL
+9404,Militarized Police Brutalize and Arrest Peaceful Protesters at Dakota Access Pipeline #NoDAPL,"
+As of October 29, there have been at least 141 arrests of peaceful protesters at the Standing Rock Reservation who are attempting to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which poses a major threat to the drinking water of all people at Standing Rock.
+Paid for by Energy Transfer Partners , parent company to Dakota Access LLC, the DAPL is set to be embedded in a sacred burial ground at Standing Rock. This is the same area where DAPL security used attack dogs on peaceful people to intimidate protesters. Police snipers were seen peaking out of armored vehicles, aiming directly at unarmed protesters.
+These water protectors have been brutalized by officers who are using the color of law to help Dakota Access LLC trample on the the 1851 treaty between the US and the Cheyenne, Sioux, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations.
+
+Protesters who were arrested had handcuffs or zipties placed fixed to their wrists, they were stuffed into cages made for dogs and over-crowded cells, and they had numbers written on their arms, many of them having been brutally assaulted, tazed or even maced. Women were strip-searched in front of male officers. According to protesters, an elderly woman who had diabetes had blood sugar level of 488, which is dangerously high, and she was given no medical attention; they merely released her to deal with whatever health complications she had completely on her own.
+Zip ties were used to bind people’s hands, and a number of protesters reported that these zip ties were tied so tightly around protester’s wrists that their hands were turning purple as a result of reduced blood circulation.
+Cars in the area were impounded. Officers had accessed the vehicles, allegedly to search them, but protesters are concerned that officers would be able to plant contraband in order to expand the charges against protesters.
+Over the weekend, an anonymous donor gave $173,000 to bail out protesters from jail.
+The International Indian Treaty Council has been listening to testimony over the past two days about human rights violations at Standing Rock. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Ryan Banister of The Daily Sheeple . ",FAKE
+4730,John McCain Withdraws Support of Donald Trump,"John McCain is done with Trump. Countless Republicans have tried to distance themselves from Donald Trump in the 24 hours since The Washington Post released an audio recording wherein the Republican standard-bearer made a series of lewd comments about women and describes an attempt to seduce a married woman, but the party has stopped short of withdrawing its support of the presidential candidate. The Arizona senator, however, just joined the ranks of those to take their condemnations one step further. In a statement released on Saturday, McCain officially rescinded his endorsement of the bombastic New York billionaire for president—the most high-profile member of the G.O.P. to do so. He said that it is now “impossible” for him to continue to support Trump’s candidacy
+
+“I have wanted to support the candidate our party nominated. He was not my choice, but as a past nominee, I thought it important I respect the fact that Donald Trump won a majority of the delegates by the rules our party set,” McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, wrote. “But Donald Trump’s behavior this week concluding with the disclosure of his demeaning comments about women and his boasts about sexual assaults, make it impossible to continue to offer even conditional support for his candidacy.”
+
+McCain added that he and his wife Cindy will not vote for Trump in November, but stressed that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t count on the couple’s vote either. “I have never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate and we will not vote for Hillary Clinton. But we will write in the name of some good conservative Republican who is qualified to be president,” the statement reads.
+
+McCain previously condemned Trump’s behavior on Friday—saying that the G.O.P. nominee “alone bears the burden of his conduct and alone should suffer the the consequences,”—but has only now denounced his candidacy. This is by no means the first time McCain, who only begrudgingly endorsed Trump, has spoken out against the former reality TV star. On several other occasions, McCain has criticized Trump for offensive remarks he has made, notably his insults of the Khan family and his personal attack on the senator, who he said was “not a war hero.”
+
+Other notable Republicans, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader__Mitch McConnell__, have criticized Trump’s statements, but have yet to pull their support for the real-estate mogul. Earlier today, Mike Pence issued a more firmly worded rebuke of what Trump said in the recording, asserting that he could neither “condone” nor “defend” it. A number of Republicans, including conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, have called on Trump to drop out of the race and let Pence lead the ticket, but on Saturday during an interview with the Post, Trump vowed that he “would never withdraw.”",REAL
+1710,Jeb Bush has 'grave doubts' about Donald Trump in WH,"Bush also said he has little confidence in Trump's ability to appropriately handle America's nuclear weapons.
+
+""I have grave doubts, to be honest with you,"" Bush told CNN's Jake Tapper in an interview airing Sunday on ""State of the Union.""
+
+""He's not taking the responsibility, the possibility of being president of the United States really seriously. For him, it looks as though he's an actor playing a role of the candidate for president. Not boning up on the issues, not having a broad sense of the responsibilities of what it is to be a president,"" Bush said. ""Across the spectrum of foreign policy, Mr. Trump talks about things as though he's still on 'The Apprentice.'""
+
+Bush said Trump's proposed plan of hoping ISIS removes Syrian President Bashar Assad from power and then Russia taking on ISIS is like ""some kind of board game and not a serious approach.""
+
+""This is just another example of the lack of seriousness. And this is a serious time. We're under grave threats again, and I think we need a president with a steady hand,"" Bush said. Bush again dismissed Trump's suggestion that George W. Bush was responsible for 9/11 because it occurred during his presidency. ""My brother responded to a crisis, and he did it as you would hope a president would do. He united the country, he organized our country and he kept us safe. And there's no denying that. The great majority of Americans believe that,"" he said. ""And I don't know why he keeps bringing this up. It doesn't show that he's a serious person as it relates to being commander in chief and being the architect of a foreign policy,"" Bush added. Bush said his defense of the 43rd president's response to the attacks isn't just because he's his brother. ""I mean, so next week, Mr. Trump is probably going to say that FDR was around when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It's what you do after that matters. And that's the sign of leadership,"" he said. ""You don't have to have your last name named Bush to be able to understand that."" Despite Trump leading the polls, Bush predicted that support for him will eventually fade. ""I don't think Trump is going to win the nomination. I think we're going to have a nominee that will unite the party,"" Bush said. He also offered praise for Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton's debate performance, though he argued the policies she supports are bad for the country. ""She did a good job in the debate, for sure,"" he said. ""She's a smart person, no doubt about that. But every chance she had to lay out a different approach than the one we're on now, she actually doubled or tripled down on it: more taxes, more regulation, more creating barriers on people's ability to rise up.""",REAL
+7340,Hillary Literally Became the Definition of ‘Pathological Lying’ on Google Yesterday,"( ANTIMEDIA ) If you had happened to Google the term ‘pathological lying’ on Sunday evening, you would have been met with none other than the bright, smiling face of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. Before Wikipedia administrators put a temporary lock on the entry early Monday morning, the top Google result for the term was a link to the Wiki article displaying Clinton’s photo, along with the following quote defining pathological lying:
+
+“It is a stand-alone disorder as well as a symptom of other disorders such as psychopathy and antisocial, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders, but people who are pathological liars may not possess characteristics of the other disorders. Excessive lying is a common symptom of several mental disorders.” 
+The revision history of the entry shows the picture of Clinton was originally added to the ‘pathological lying’ Wikipedia article on the morning of October 29th, but it wasn’t until the next night that the ever-vigilant internet community took notice and excitedly spread the word on Facebook and Twitter . Check out the Google Trends report for ‘pathological lying’ below:
+
+Unsurprisingly, most reactions were supportive of the alteration to the Wikipedia article, once again showing the public’s general distrust of the presidential candidate. A poll conducted by Quinnipiac University last year asked voters to say the first thing that came to mind when they thought of Hillary Clinton. The most popular response was “liar,” followed by “dishonest” and “untrustworthy.” Maybe if the biggest names in journalism weren’t outright colluding with Hillary’s campaign , that poll would have been more widely reported. Maybe.
+Due to the fact major media corporations are completely ignoring the corruption surrounding the Clinton campaign, it has been left to Wikileaks, independent media outlets, and the social media community to push this information into the public eye. Just a week away from the election, new evidence was discovered that prompted the FBI to announce they have reopened the criminal investigation into Hillary’s private email server.
+With Republican nominee Donald Trump scheduled to appear in court to face rape allegations, there is a high possibility the next president of the United States will be facing criminal charges before they’re even inaugurated. If nothing else, this election cycle is proving that people want truth — and they’ll get creative to expose it.
+Courtesy post via Josie Wales and theAntiMedia.org. 
+",FAKE
+7288,Clinton policy on Syria would lead to WW III: Trump,"Clinton policy on Syria would lead to WW III: Trump  57 am Clinton policy on Syria would lead to WW III: Trump Wed Oct 26, 2016 1:37AM US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Orlando Sanford International Airport on October 25, 2016 in Sanford, Florida. (Photos by AFP) 
+US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says Hillary Clinton’s policy towards Syria would “lead to World War III”, arguing that the Democratic nominee would drag the US into an armed confrontation with Russia. 
+Trump made the warning in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, following Clinton’s proposal for the establishment of a no-fly zone and “safe zones” in Syria earlier this month. 
+“What we should do is focus on ISIL (Daesh). We should not be focusing on Syria,” Trump said. 
+“You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton,” he said. 
+On October 7, the Democratic nominee said a no-fly zone was required inside the war-ravaged country to stabilize fighting, a move that was opposed in Congress due to the risk of entering into conflict with Russia, since a US-enforced no-fly zone would mean the US could shoot down Russian fighter jets should they enter Syrian airspace. 
+Clinton also described the situation in Syria as “incredibly complex” since the intervention of Russia. US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks at an early vote rally at Broward College in Coconut Creek, Florida, on October 25, 2016. 
+“You’re not fighting Syria anymore; you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia is a nuclear country, but a country where the nukes work as opposed to other countries that talk,” Trump said. 
+The Republican nominee also referred to the removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power as a second-level priority to defeating Daesh. 
+“Assad is secondary, to me, to ISIL,” Trump said. 
+Russia might down US planes 
+Meanwhile, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also warned about the consequences of Clinton’s push for a no-fly zone in Syria that could spark a conflict with Russia. 
+Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, Clapper said Clinton’s proposal for the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria could lead to Russia shooting down American planes there. James Clapper, the US director of National Intelligence, speaks at the Council of Foreign Relations, on October 25, 2016 in New York City. 
+“I wouldn’t put it past them to shoot down an American aircraft if they — if they felt that was threatening to their forces on the ground,” he said. 
+“I take stock in the nature of the weaponry that they deploy and why they — why they did that,” Clapper said of Russian weapons recently deployed to Syria. “The system they have there is a very advanced air-defense system. It’s very capable. And I don’t think they’d do it and deploy it unless they had some intent to use it.” 
+During the third and final presidential debate last week, Clinton reiterated her remarks on a no-fly zone that could save lives and hasten the end of the conflict in Syria. 
+A foreign-backed militancy has been going on in Syria since March 2011, with a plethora of armed groups — each supported by one foreign country or another — fighting the Assad government. 
+Since 2014, the United States, along with a number of its allies, has been leading a so-called anti-terror campaign in Syria and neighboring Iraq. 
+Instead of helping to rein in the Takfiri terrorists, the air raids have killed many civilians, and caused extensive damage to the country’s infrastructure. 
+Iran has been offering Syria advisory military help. Russia, another Syrian ally, has also been conducting an aerial bombardment campaign against militant positions in Syria at a request from Damascus. 
+The foreign-sponsored conflict in Syria has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.",FAKE
+7053,The Globalization Of Media: A Failing Strike Force,"By Jon Rappoport 
+I begin this piece with three quotes from my work-in-progress, The Underground: 
+“There is a media metaphysics. Its basic principle states that nothing exists until it becomes information. Now we have a new twist: information only becomes real when it reaches a mind already attuned to it. In other words, the tree falling in the forest makes a sound only if a user/consumer who wants a tree to fall receives video and audio of the event…” 
+“Information can be dressed up a thousand different ways. But it tends to have an ‘elastic’ quality. By that I mean you eventually get to see the person who dressed it up. That’s a problem for chronic liars who inhabit the press. They expose themselves, even though they don’t want to. It takes a surprisingly small push to expose the whole operation. This is happening now, right in front of our eyes.” 
+“The basis of big media is theater. News is theater. Its directors and producers think they’re doing a first-rate job. But they’re sadly mistaken. Gaps and obfuscations are growing larger. The outright non-sequiturs and gibberish are becoming more apparent. The audience is wising up to the farce. Who are these fools who direct the news? They’re simply people who want to sell their souls and have found an elite buyer. But that transaction doesn’t contain any guarantees about shelf life. Mainstream news is decaying, and the expiration date is approaching. Like civilizations, the petty princes of information rise and fall…” 
+Globalized media. It’s nice plan. Let’s examine it. 
+The new technocratic media is based on profiling users. There is no impactful news unless each member of the audience is surveilled and analyzed on the basis of what he already likes and wants. 
+Shocking? It’s to be expected. How else would technocrats parlay the untold hours they’ve spent sizing up their consumers/users? 
+Several years ago, I wrote: “Tech blather has already begun, since Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, bought the Washington Post at a fire sale. Jeff Genius will invent new ways to transmit the news to ‘people on the go’ and make the Post a smashing success. Mobile devices. Multiple platforms. Digital taking over from print. Ads customized to fit readers’ interests (profiling). News stories customized to fit readers’ interests (more profiling).” 
+In other words, non-news. If you thought media were irrelevant and deceptive before, you haven’t seen anything. The “new news” will create millions of virtual bubbles in which profiled users can float contentedly, under the cozy cottage roofs of their favorite little separate paradigms. 
+The tech giant Apple has waded into this territory with an app that will deliver news to users. Yahoo: “Apple News, part of the upcoming iOS 9 operating system, aims to be the primary news source for users of the iPhone and iPad… Apple says its news app ‘follows over a million topics and pulls relevant stories based on your specific interests’… Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab said the app will be important because ‘through the awesome power of default, Apple distribution puts it in an entirely other league. This [news] app will be on hundreds of millions of devices within 24 hours of its debut’.” 
+Translation: Profiling their users down to their toenails, Apple will present them with virtual bubbles of news they want to see and read. 
+Not just one overall presentation for all; no, different “news outlets” for Apple’s audiences. 
+This introduces a whole new layer of mind control. 
+“You’re an Obama fan? Here are stories confirming your belief in the Prophet.” 
+“You want neo-con on the rocks with a conservative Republican twist? Here’s some war footage that’ll warm your heart.” 
+“Do you believe ‘government gridlock’ is our biggest concern? Congress can’t get anything done? We’ve got headlines for that from here to the moon.” 
+“Tuned into celeb gossip? Here’s your world in three minutes.” 
+The idea: convince users, one day at a time, that what they already believe is important IS the news of the day. 
+It’s Decentralized Centralization. One media giant carving its global audience up into little pieces and delivering them a whole host of different algorithmically appropriate lies and fluff and no-context psyops. 
+And for “fringe users?” “You’re doubtful about GMOs? Well, look at what Whole Foods is planning for their healthier produce section. Cheer up.” Nothing about Maui voters declaring a temporary ban on devastatingly toxic Monsanto/Dow experiments or the dangers of Roundup. “You’re anti-vaccine? Sorry, you don’t count. You’re not a recognized demographic. But here’s a piece about a little unvaccinated boy who was involved in car crash on the I5.” 
+Does this sound like science fiction? It isn’t. It’s the mainstream look of the near-future. Search engines are already “personalizing” your inquiries. US ABC national news is climbing in the ratings because it’s giving viewers “lighter stories,” and spending less time on thorny issues like the Middle East. 
+The mainstream news business is desperately looking for audience; and treating every “user” as a profiled social-construct-bundle of superficial preferences is their answer. 
+“Mr. X, we’ve studied the little virtual bubble you live in, and now we can sell you your own special brand of truth.” 
+“Hello, audience. We’re going to pitch you on becoming full-fledged obsessed consumers, as if there is no other worthy goal in life—and then we’re going to profile you from top to bottom, to find out exactly what kind of obsessed consumer you are, so we can hit you and trigger you with information that uniquely stimulates your adrenal glands…” 
+The one-two punch. 
+Any actual event occurring in the world will be pre-digested by robot media editors and profilers, and then split up into variously programmed bits of information for different audiences. 
+Who cares what really happened? In the new world, there is no ‘what really happened’. That’s a gross misnomer. A faulty idea. A metaphysical error. No, there is only a multi-forked media tongue that simultaneously spits out a dozen or a hundred variations of the same event…because different viewers want and expect different realities. 
+In 1984 , Orwell’s Big Brother was issuing a single voice into the homes of the population. That was old-school. That was primitive technology. That was achieving unity by hammering unity into people’s skulls. This, now, is the frontier of unity through diversity. 
+“We want to make all of you into androids, through basic PR and propaganda and a pathetic excuse for education. However, we recognize you’ll become different varieties of androids, and we’ll serve that outcome with technological sophistication. Trust us. We care about what you prefer.” 
+User A: “Wow, did you see the coverage of the border war in Chula Vista?” 
+User B: “War? They had a fantastic exhibit of drones down there. At least a hundred different types. And then I watched an old WW2 movie about aerial combat.” 
+User C: “Chula Vista? They had a great food show. This woman made a lemon pie. I could practically taste it.” 
+User D: “That wasn’t a border war. It was a drill. And then afterwards, these cops gave a demonstration of all their gear. Vests, shields, communication devices, flash-bangs, auto rifles with silencers, batons. I watch drills all over the country. Love them.” 
+User E: “Chula Vista? The only thing I saw on the news was ‘sunny and mild’ this week. I watch all the weather channels. I love them.” 
+BUT when a Big One comes along, like the 2016 national election in the US, the separate tunes come together and ring as one. Then the overriding need to extend Globalism’s goals (in the person of Hillary Clinton) blot out every other priority. Then the major media twist whatever they need to twist. Then it’s the same bubble for everyone. 
+One problem, though. Major media have been lanced thousands of times by alt news sites, and by WikiLeaks and Project Veritas. This attack has exposed the truth and the Clinton crimes. 
+And alt news reflects the growing interest of the public in what’s actually happening on many fronts. 
+The technocratic plan for the news is failing. 
+It was a nice plan, but… 
+It’s turning out to be a dud. 
+Alt media are forcing public awareness of one giant scandal after another: Hillary/Obama support for ISIS; pro-vaccine liars; the collapse of Obamacare; the GMO hustle; pesticide damage…on and on and on. 
+The result? Major media are being backed into a corner, where they must defend lies and build monolithic lies for EVERYONE all the time. The idea of creating separate news for each profiled user is collapsing. 
+Major media are playing defense against the rest of the world. 
+It’s quite a party. 
+And it has no expiration date. 
+A final note: Trump, WikiLeaks, Project Veritas, Drudge, and many alt news sites created a perfect storm in 2016, raining down on major media. It was and is unprecedented. The mainstream press has been exposed down to its roots, as never before. The lying, the collusion, the arrogant sense of entitlement, the desperation, the corruption—it’s all there to see, for anyone who has eyes and a few working brain cells. Expect more to come, regardless of the outcome of the election. The train has really left the station… 
+(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix , click here .) 
+The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED , EXIT FROM THE MATRIX , and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX , Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29 th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine . Activist Post Daily Newsletter Subscription is FREE and CONFIDENTIAL Free Report: 10 Ways to Survive the Economic Collapse with subscription",FAKE
+10545,Nuclear Reactor in Norway Leaks Radioactive Iodine,"Prison Planet.com October 26, 2016 
+One of Norway’s nuclear reactors was discovered to be leaking radioactive iodine Monday morning, according to the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority (NRPA). [1] 
+In a statement released today, the NRPA said: 
+“The radioactive leak was due to a technical failure during treatment of the fuel in the reactor hall. Emissions are low.” 
+Experts say contamination levels around the Institute for Energy Technology, in the southern town of Halden, were well within legal limits and posed no risk to the public. 
+Said Per Strand, deputy director-general at the NRPA, a government regulator: 
+“Of course it’s an unfortunate situation but there is a low environmental risk. This is not the sort of leak we want.” [2] 
+The radioactive iodine was a byproduct of the uranium which powers the facility. 
+Staff were evacuated from the institute, but later returned, donning protective gear, to assess the cause and extent of the leak, and halt it. 
+A senior NRPA official said the incident would “maybe” be rated a 1 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, which rates nuclear incidents from 1 to 7. By comparison, the incidents at Fukishima and Chernobyl were ranked 7. [3] Source: The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 
+Regulatory officials were frustrated that they were not notified about the leak until today . Atle Valseth, a research director at the Institute for Energy Technology, agreed. He said: 
+“I don’t sit so close to those decisions but I think we should have informed the authority yesterday. We will have to go through why it wasn’t reported — it wasn’t good enough that we didn’t report it yesterday.” [2] 
+Strand, the head of safety, preparedness and environment at the NRPA, expressed the regulator’s frustration. 
+“We need to gather more information … But we are not happy with the situation, that we were not warned immediately. We will investigate further.” [3] 
+The Swiss Radiation Safety Authority (SRSA) said i t has not detected any radiation emanating from the facility, which sits close to the Swiss border. 
+Mark Foreman, a nuclear expert at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, stressed that the vast majority of the radioactive iodine is trapped inside the fuel, which is contained within a ceramic material. The ceramic-wrapped material is stored inside a metal tube that is welded shut. The tube is inside the reactor. 
+The iodine would have to leak out of the reactor to enter the reactor hall. 
+Sources:",FAKE
+321,This policing innovation helped fight crime. But it also led to more corruption.,"One of the big successes in US policing over the past three decades was the push to make law enforcement more data-driven. The big crime-tracking system that came out of this, CompStat, has been widely credited with helping cut crime in the US.
+
+But what if this approach has also led police to be too focused on data, turning policing into a numbers game in which cops try to make as many arrests as possible and manipulate the figures to look good?
+
+John Eterno, a retired New York City Police Department captain and associate dean and director of graduate studies in criminal justice at Molloy College, explained the problem in a new documentary by FiveThirtyEight:
+
+Initially, I think it was easier to bring down crime, because crime was so high. It's kind of like squeezing a lemon — when you squeeze a lemon, the juice is easy to come out initially. But over time, it's more and more difficult.… Commanders are under enormous pressures to make sure that the crime numbers go down. And then the message filters down to the lower rank: If the captain's not doing well, or the inspector's not doing well, we're not doing well.
+
+This creates a perverse incentive at some police departments to make crime and policing numbers look favorable to the department at almost any cost. Officers could achieve this by, for example, purposely misinterpreting some crimes as non-serious offenses or not counting them altogether. That way, the mayor and police chief can claim that serious crimes are dropping when, in reality, some serious offenses are just being defined as non-serious or not counted at all.
+
+The numbers game also increases demand on cops to look like they're doing more to prevent crime. So officers are sometimes encouraged to stop or arrest as many people as possible so they can appear as if they're staying busy while on duty.
+
+And if some cops don't play along, commanders will try to make their lives harder — by, for instance, putting them on the graveyard shift or denying them promotions. Or, in one whistleblower's case, something much worse.
+
+The numbers game became a huge focus for the NYPD over the past few decades. And when officer Adrian Schoolcraft tried to expose the abuse, the NYPD retaliated — placing Schoolcraft in a psychiatric institution against his will for six days.
+
+Schoolcraft used a tape recorder to capture several examples of officers massaging the numbers at the NYPD. Here are some examples:
+
+But Schoolcraft's colleagues found out what he was up to. One day, when he got off work early, an emergency service unit came to his apartment, abducted him, and forcibly admitted him to a psychiatric ward.
+
+As they detained him, police discovered the recorder in Schoolcraft's pocket. One high-ranking official, Deputy Chief Michael Marino, couldn't believe it. ""Absolutely amazing,"" he said, according to the recording. ""When I came on the job, a cop would never dream of doing that to another cop for all the money in the world.""
+
+Schoolcraft later got the recordings to the Village Voice, a news weekly that broke the story. He is now suing the hospital that held him, as well as New York City and the NYPD.
+
+The story shows just how deeply ingrained the numbers game can be in some police departments: Officers are willing to take down their peers and sometimes friends just to avoid getting caught.
+
+""I believe they couldn't afford to have someone expose the behavior so bad, so criminal it would threaten their careers,"" Schoolcraft told New York City's ABC 7 in 2010. ""They reacted out of fear.""",REAL
+4627,"Post-ABC Tracking Poll: Trump 46, Clinton 45, as Democratic enthusiasm dips","Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are all but tied in the latest Washington Post-ABC News Tracking Poll, which finds Clinton backers slipping behind in enthusiasm even as the Democrat has an edge in early voting.
+
+The tracking poll finds little shift in Clinton's overall support following news of the FBI's renewed look at Clinton emails, but strong enthusiasm among her supporters fell behind Trump in combined Saturday and Sunday interviews. By 53 to 43 percent, more Trump supporters say they are ""very enthusiastic"" about him, compared with Thursday and Friday when Trump's edge was negligible (53 percent vs. 51 percent).
+
+Voter enthusiasm has been in short supply for both Clinton and Trump through the fall campaign and continues to lag excitement about candidates on the ballot four years ago. At this point in 2012, 64 percent of Obama supporters said they were ""very enthusiastic"" about him; Romney was only narrowly behind at 61 percent.
+
+Trump and Clinton continue to run nearly even in overall vote preferences, with Trump at 46 percent and Clinton 45 percent in a four-way contest in the poll conducted Thursday through Sunday. The margin is a mirror 48-47 Clinton-Trump split when third-party candidates are asked which major-party candidate they lean toward, a comparison that has grown in importance as support declines steadily for Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party's Jill Stein.
+
+Over 1 in 5 likely voters identified in the Post-ABC poll report having already voted (21 percent), while about one-quarter say they plan to vote early or by mail (24 percent,) and a slight majority plan to vote in person on Election Day. The level of early voting so far is roughly in line with expectations, given the 24.7 million early votes tracked so far by the United States Election Project, which amounts to 19 percent of the 129 million ballots cast in 2012.
+
+Clinton has a modest 54-41 percent edge among early voters in an average of the three most recent tracking poll waves, while Trump leads by a 50-39 percent margin among those looking to vote on Election Day; those who anticipate voting early are more evenly split. Those breakdowns should be treated with caution, given both the sizable 8.5-point margin of sampling error around that result as well as general challenges in tracking attitudes among a rapidly growing population.
+
+Older Americans have flocked to vote early, with 38 percent of senior likely voters saying they have done so, compared with 18 percent of those ages 40 to 64 and 17 percent of voters younger than that. Women are slightly more apt to report voting early than men (26 vs. 19 percent),  as are voters in urban areas (28 percent) compared with suburban and rural voters (19 percent and 22 percent).
+
+[Graphic: Who different groups are supporting]
+
+The daily tracking poll's latest four-night wave finds voters splitting sharply along traditional political divisions, with Trump's previously lagging support among core Republican groups now nearly matching Clinton's wide support on the left. Trump holds 78 percent support among white evangelical Protestants, 77 percent among conservatives, 68 percent among rural voters and 59 percent among white men. Clinton answers with 81 percent support among liberals, 67 percent of those identifying with no religion, 60 percent of those in urban areas and 72 percent among nonwhites.
+
+[Clinton leads Trump in Virginia in new Post poll]
+
+Clinton and Trump receive similar support among fellow partisans, but Trump maintains an 18-point edge among political independents, significantly higher than Republicans have held in recent elections. Looking deeper at that group over a seven-day stretch, 77  percent of independents who say they lean Democratic prefer Clinton while a similar 80 percent who lean Republican favor Trump. But Trump holds a sizable 53-28 percent advantage among voters who say they don't lean toward either party, a group that accounts for about 10 percent of likely voters.
+
+This Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone Oct. 27-30, 2016, among a random national sample of 1,773 adults including landline and cellphone respondents. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.5 points; the error margin is plus or minus three points among the sample of 1,167 likely voters. Sampling, data collection and tabulation by Abt-SRBI of New York.",REAL
+754,Wasserman Schultz on Sanders' response to Nevada chaos: 'Anything but acceptable',"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+7780,Reductress » ‘How Am I Supposed To Explain This To My Children?’ Asks Melania Trump,"‘How Am I Supposed To Explain This To My Children?’ Asks Melania Trump Thoughts - Nov 9, 2016 By: Sarah Pappalardo SHARE: Tweet 
+It’s been a long and draining election cycle, and I don’t think any of us could have expected the result that we saw today. For many of us with young children, you probably woke up this morning asking yourself, “How am I supposed to explain this to my children?” 
+
+I, Melania Trump, am asking myself the same thing. 
+
+How can any of us metabolize what happened to a ten-year-old? Should I be honest and let him know just how bad things are, or do I let him enjoy his childhood, his innocence a little while longer? How much longer can we pretend the bathroom door lock is “broken” while Donald is stuck in there? 
+
+Many of us are concerned about how our sons will learn to treat women in this dangerous, sexist climate. In the case of my son, the nation’s biggest tragedy since 9/11 just told him to stop being a pussy. 
+
+How am I supposed to explain that our next president is a bully, and also his father? 
+
+
+And how do I explain to my son that our next president is a man who intimidatingly looked over at my ballot, just to make sure I was still voting for him? Should I remind my son that this man is a terrible role model and his behavior unacceptable, just like I’ve been quietly whispering to him for his entire short life? 
+
+And when he gets older, how am I supposed to tell them how this all began? That their father admitted to sexual assault, never shared his tax returns, was endorsed by the KKK, and still somehow weaseled his way into the presidency without even winning the popular vote? I used to believe that this country was an equal playing field where anyone can make it with hard work, but now I’m not so sure. I hate that my son has to come of age in such a time of uncertainty and also have blood relation to the cause of it all. 
+
+What am I supposed to tell my only son about the loud, nasty man on TV who insults immigrants while hiring thousands of them, including me, his wife? Do I need to tell him anything at all when he is on the TV standing right next to that man? 
+
+It seems like it’s always on the tip of my tongue these days; that “Donald Trump is a bad man.” But I can’t bring myself to tell him. Mostly because a man said he’d “send me back to Slovenia” if I did. But in my heart, I am concerned for the future of our country. I’m concerned for the world my son has to grow up in, and that his father is the next leader of the free world. 
+
+What have we done? SHARE: ",FAKE
+4850,Hillary Clinton Cancels Campaign Events Following Pneumonia Diagnosis,"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, according to a statement issued late Sunday afternoon by her physician, Lisa R. Bardack.
+
+The Clinton campaign provided the statement after Clinton was examined at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. On Sunday morning, Clinton abruptly left a Sept. 11 commemoration ceremony in New York City. Her campaign later said she had ""felt overheated.""
+
+NPR political editor Domenico Montanaro reports that Clinton was scheduled to travel to California on Monday for two days, but late Sunday night her campaign called off the events. Domenico adds:
+
+The ceremony at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center site marked the 15th anniversary of the attacks. Campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said that Clinton attended ""to pay her respects and greet some of the families of the fallen.""
+
+Clinton departed without warning, as NPR's Tamara Keith tells our Newscast unit. ""Her traveling press corps was not taken with her and didn't know her whereabouts for quite some time,"" she says.
+
+Video published on Twitter shows Clinton being assisted into a van. She appears to be unsteady on her feet and wobbles on her way into the vehicle.
+
+About 90 minutes after arriving at her daughter's apartment, Clinton emerged, walking without assistance, waving to the crowd.
+
+""I'm feeling great,"" she said. ""It's a beautiful day in New York.""
+
+According to the National Weather Service, the temperature was 79 degrees with 54 percent humidity at 9:51 a.m. in Manhattan.
+
+""This comes less than a week after Clinton had a coughing fit at a rally in Cleveland. She said she was suffering from seasonal allergies,"" Tamara adds.",REAL
+5308,Jon Stewart Finally Comments On Donald Trump’s Lewd Locker Room Talk,"Jon Stewart may no longer be the host of The Daily Show, but he still has plenty to say about Donald Trump – particularly concerning the lewd comments he said to Billy Bush during a bus... ",FAKE
+2275,The US knows LGBTQ immigrants are often raped in detention. It puts them there anyway.,"American immigration officials frequently choose to detain LGBTQ immigrants — even when their own evaluation system recommends release, putting them at significant risk for sexual abuse, new documents provided by the Center for American Progress show.
+
+Of 104 immigrants who told an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer that they were afraid of being put in detention because of their sexual orientation or gender identity between October 2013 and October 2014, 81 were placed in detention anyway, according to records obtained from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act request.
+
+These detentions appear to violate ICE's policies for how unauthorized immigrants living in the US are treated after they're apprehended by immigration agents.
+
+The government doesn't have to detain every immigrant who's apprehended, even if it's seeking to deport him or her. Instead, it can release an immigrant under virtual supervision (like an ankle bracelet) or simply under the supervision of a lawyer, and tell him or her to show up in court for a deportation hearing. (Because many LGBTQ immigrants might qualify for asylum in the US, since they'd be persecuted due to sexual orientation in their home countries, it's particularly likely that they'd show up to court to make their asylum case.)
+
+According to ICE, immigrants who'd be vulnerable in detention because of their sexual orientation or gender identity are recommended for release unless the law requires it — and officers aren't supposed to overrule that recommendation unless they have a very good reason.
+
+""I feel very confident that when someone is processed, when we have the information about their vulnerabilities and we can put that into the system, we're making good decisions,"" one ICE official who spoke on condition of anonymity told Vox.
+
+ICE claims it's done a lot to improve the treatment of LGBTQ immigrants since President Obama took office in 2009. But given the risk of sexual abuse in detention, advocates are saying, it makes no sense for ICE to be putting LGBTQ immigrants in detention at all except in extreme cases.
+
+The fight over LGBTQ detention is just another round in a battle between the Obama administration and immigration activists that stretches back to 2009. Advocates complain the administration isn't doing enough to protect unauthorized immigrants, especially vulnerable immigrants like children, families, and LGBTQ individuals. The administration keeps putting out policies telling ICE agents to use their judgment and protect vulnerable immigrants, but advocates say that agents don't follow through.
+
+But there's also a difference of principle between the administration and advocates. For the administration, the goal is making detention safer for LGBTQ immigrants. Advocates are asking: why are they being detained at all?
+
+Prison rape is a tremendous problem, and it's an especially tremendous problem for LGBTQ inmates. The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of sexual assault in prisons and jails in the US found that 11.9 percent of LGBTQ men and 9.4 percent of LGBTQ women had been sexually abused by another inmate, and 6 percent of LGBTQ men and 3 percent of LGBTQ women had been assaulted by a guard. (For comparison, only 1 percent of straight men and 3.6 percent of straight women said they'd been sexually victimized by another inmate; only 2 percent of straight men and 1.4 percent of straight women were abused by a guard.)
+
+It's harder to get data on sexual assault in immigration detention, but indications are that it's no less of a problem there. A Fusion analysis of a 2013 government report about sexual abuse in immigration detention found that even though transgender immigrants made up only one of every 500 detainees, they accounted for one of every five cases of sexual assault the Government Accountability Office was able to confirm. (In a majority of cases, the government wasn't able to determine whether an assault had happened.)
+
+Journalists and advocates have repeatedly uncovered stories of LGBTQ immigrants who suffered repeated abuse in detention — particularly transgender women, who are placed in detention with men. In January, advocates started a campaign to demand the release of Nicoll Hernandez-Polanco, a Guatemalan transgender woman who was put into detention after she came to the US to seek asylum. Hernandez-Polanco reported that she'd been routinely groped by guards and referred to as ""it,"" and that she was put in solitary confinement for ""insolence"" when she tried to stand up for herself. (She was released from detention in early May.)
+
+The Obama administration has put effort into developing new policies to improve detention conditions, and they put special emphasis on their efforts to improve treatment of LGBTQ immigrants. They emphasize that they have a ""zero tolerance"" policy for sexual abuse in detention facilities, and that an immigrant should not be put in solitary confinement just because of gender identity or sexual orientation. And they take great pains to point to a detention center in California that has a special unit for gay, bisexual, and transgender inmates.
+
+To decide whether to detain an individual immigrant, ICE goes through an evaluation called the Risk Classification Assessment (RCA). The evaluation collects a lot of details about the immigrant's case, weighs them according to a computer formula, and then generates an automated recommendation about what ICE should do with her.
+
+The automated recommendation isn't binding — ICE officials can decide to override it. But the agency stresses that it's a useful tool to help individual officers adhere to the department's priorities and properly implement prosecutorial discretion. (In some cases, federal law requires that an immigrant be detained — in those cases, ICE still runs the risk evaluation but uses it to figure out how the immigrant should be detained.)
+
+One of the instructions to ICE officers administering the evaluation: ""Ask the individual if he/she fears any harm in detention based on his/her sexual orientation or gender identity.""
+
+Both ICE and advocates stress that a lot of LGBTQ immigrants probably don't want to out themselves after they've been taken into custody. The evaluation ""is only as good as the data we get,"" one ICE official who spoke on condition of anonymity told Vox. So it's almost certain that far more than 104 LGBTQ immigrants came into ICE custody between October 2013 and October 2014. But only 104 were willing to acknowledge it or understood the question being asked.
+
+Here's what happens when an immigrant acknowledges that he or she is afraid of detention because of gender identity or sexual orientation, according to the ICE official: if US law doesn't require them to be detained, ""the RCA will recommend that the officer process them for release."" That release could come with conditions, or could involve other monitoring like an ankle bracelet — but it's definitely not a recommendation for detention. If federal law does require that an LGBTQ immigrant get placed in detention, ICE says, it will use the evaluation to make sure she's put in a facility that will protect her from sexual abuse.
+
+The problem is that isn't what the data shows at all. According to the records obtained by the Center for American Progress, in 81 of the 104 cases where an immigrant said he or she feared being put in detention because of sexual orientation or gender identity, ICE detained him or her anyway.
+
+In almost two-thirds (64 percent) of the 104 cases, it appears the automated assessment didn't even make a recommendation. The records obtained by CAP show the result of the assessment as ""Officer to Determine"" — which, according to a DHS Inspector General report about detention, means it's entirely left up to ICE officials to decide.
+
+ICE maintains that its evaluation always produces a recommendation, and it's just a question of whether the officer follows the recommendation or not. When I asked the ICE official about cases in which the risk evaluation makes no recommendation, the official replied, ""The RCA always produces a result. It always produces one, either to detain or not to detain.""
+
+But the data shows ICE officials had a lot more leeway to make decisions than that. And most of the time, they didn't use that discretion on behalf of the immigrant. In two-thirds of the cases where the automated evaluation made no recommendation — in circumstances where, again, ICE says it should automatically recommend release — agents chose to put the immigrant in detention. (That's about the same rate as the general immigrant population, according to the Inspector General.)
+
+Despite what the ICE official told Vox, in only six of the 104 cases did the risk evaluation recommend that an LGBTQ immigrant get released. But in four of those cases, according to the FOIA data, ICE overruled that recommendation and detained the immigrant anyway.
+
+ICE maintains that the way it treats immigrants with ""special vulnerabilities,"" such as LGBTQ immigrants, hasn't changed since it put the automated evaluation in place in 2012. It doesn't appear to have been following those policies from October 2013 to October 2014. But that doesn't necessarily mean the agency isn't started following them now.
+
+ICE says the formula it uses to make an automatic recommendation is an ""evolving tool."" What officers are supposed to do hasn't changed; instead, they've changed the automated system so that it's more in line with the instructions that ICE agents have.
+
+In particular, ICE says, it made some big changes to the risk evaluation at the beginning of 2014, so that ICE stopped focusing so much on detaining people who might run away and focused more on detaining people who were dangers to public safety. As a result, when it comes to all detainees — not just LGBTQ immigrants — ICE officials went from overruling the evaluation's recommendations about 20 percent of the time in 2013 to less than 8 percent of the time in 2014.
+
+There's no way of knowing how many of the 104 LGBTQ immigrants came in in the last few months of 2013, before the evaluation was changed. And there's no way of knowing whether immigrants who are taken into ICE custody now are getting released more often. But ICE won't say that the older data is unrepresentative, and isn't releasing new data to show there's been a change.
+
+And it maintains that the basic way the evaluation works — always recommending that someone get detained or released, and recommending that LGBTQ immigrants get released whenever the law allows it — hasn't changed since the system was put in place.
+
+So in order to trust that ICE is getting it right now, advocates would have to assume the agency knows it was screwing up before and just won't admit it.",REAL
+994,The Boston Globe imagined how it would cover a President Donald Trump. It's horrifying.,"As part of an editorial calling for Republicans to stop Donald Trump from becoming their presidential nominee, the Boston Globe on Sunday imagined what covering a President Trump would be like on its front page.
+
+The Globe took some editorial liberties with how Trump's plans would impact the US, including the potential for riots, markets crashing, and the military refusing to obey Trump's orders.
+
+It is an exercise in taking a man at his word. And his vision of America promises to be as appalling in real life as it is in black and white on the page. It is a vision that demands an active and engaged opposition. It requires an opposition as focused on denying Trump the White House as the candidate is flippant and reckless about securing it.
+
+The Globe's predicted results to Trump's policies don't seem too far off from reality: Deporting 11 million unauthorized immigrants would likely cause a lot of social unrest in the US, and Trump has explicitly called for violence at his rallies. Imposing taxes on foreign goods if Trump can't get the trade deals he wants would very likely hurt the economy. And former CIA Director Michael Hayden warned that the military really would ignore Trump's orders to go directly after the relatives of ISIS members and other terrorists.
+
+The Globe looks at all of these possibilities with horror — enough to publish a satirical front page and call for Republicans to stop Trump at a brokered convention, regardless of the risks to the party.",REAL
+8673,"BREAKING – NYPD Knows The TRUTH About Hillary, Issues Urgent Alert to Voters | EndingFed News Network","Email Print It seems like everyone associated with the Clintons has become immune to common sense. The Obama Justice Department will not do anything to hold this woman accountable, even though far better people than her have had their careers ended over similar crimes. However, the NYPD isn’t under Clinton or Obama’s control. Erik Prince, Blackwater Founder and Former Navy Seal, told Breitbart what the NYPD’s approach might be. According to some of his well-placed sources in the NYPD, Prince told Breitbart the following: “The NYPD wanted to do a press conference announcing the warrants and the additional arrests they were making [in the Anthony Weiner investigation] but they received ‘huge push back’ from the Justice Department.” as per Breitbart . Why is the NYPD involved in the Clinton case? Well, they weren’t originally, but they made the initial discovery of the new Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Judging from the amount of information they found on the laptop, it seems the FBI and the State Department had insiders protecting Clinton. Allegedly, the criminal activity found on that laptop is enough to make Al Capone blush. “They found State Department emails. They found a lot of other really damning criminal information, including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times,” Prince said. Prince even gave some insight as to why FBI Director Comey decided to re-open the investigation. In a nutshell, the NYPD forced his hand. “The amount of garbage that they found in these emails, of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress was so disgusting they gave it to the FBI,” Prince said. “They said, ‘We’re going to go public with this if you don’t reopen the investigation and you don’t do the right thing with timely indictments,’” Prince explained. “NYPD was the first one to look at that laptop,” Prince elaborated. “Weiner and Huma Abedin, his wife – the closest adviser of Hillary Clinton for 20 years – have both flipped. They are cooperating with the government. They both have – they see potential jail time of many years for their crimes, for Huma Abedin sending and receiving and even storing hundreds of thousands of messages from the State Department server and from Hillary Clinton’s own homebrew server, which contained classified information. Weiner faces all kinds of exposure for the inappropriate sexting that was going on and for other information that they found.” Allegedly, some of the crimes the emails reveal include money laundering, lying, and even sex trafficking young children. The NYPD doesn’t mess around, so they have appointed a new, unbiased, prosecutor in order to investigate these claims by Erik Prince. If only Lynch’s Justice Department knew how to make unbiased appointments. The warning for the voters is simple: if Hillary Clinton is elected, there will a constitutional crisis on our hands. She may very well be the first President to be indicted before her first day in the Oval Office. If these criminal accusations are true, they will lead to such staggering events. It would make Watergate seem like a walk in the park. But, its not too late to do the right thing and avoid all of this. Vote Trump and Hillary will be where she belongs — in prison. What do you think about these new allegations about Hillary and Bill they have allegedly found on Mr. Weiner’s laptop? Please share the story on Facebook and tell us because OUR voice is YOUR voice! 
+If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
+1086,Super Tuesday's over. Can Trump still be stopped? Yes. Here's how,"Like the Titanic’s architects realizing their fatal design flaw right around the first strains of “Nearer My God To Thee,” Republicans are waking up to the realization that their presidential primary scheme is more Frankenstein than Frank Gehry.
+
+To protect an establishment frontrunner against an insurgent, the party frontloaded this year’s primaries and caucuses. Going into March, only 133 delegates had been allocated. Super Tuesday added another 595 delegates. By month’s end, 1,537 of 2,472 delegates will be gone.
+
+The problem: no one figured that, for the first time in modern GOP history, the insurgent would wind up as the frontrunner.
+
+Which leads to the second problem: Republicans looking to stop Donald Trump are running out of opportunities to derail him.
+
+So far, 15 states have allocated delegates. By March 22, another 15 will have gone to the polls, leaving but 20 states between then and the first Tuesday in June (just 11 weeks) to change the GOP narrative.
+
+Returning to the Titanic, let’s presume the Republican ship hasn’t taken on too much water and it’s still a viable contest.
+
+How then to stop Trump?
+
+1. Keep The Field Populated. To the proposition that the only way to beat Trump is via a head-to-head contest: don’t buy the spin.
+
+The latest NBC News/SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Poll played out such scenarios involving Trump versus Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. The results? Rubio lost by six points; Cruz, by 13.
+
+Assuming Rubio soldiers on past the March 15 vote in Florida, he and Cruz need to strike an accord: they don’t attack each other; their super PACs stick it to Trump. And they draw straws to decide who has to call Jeb Bush to ask for his super PAC join in the Trump-bashing.
+
+Syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor Jonah Goldberg takes this unholy alliance a step further, suggesting a Rubio-Cruz ticket ala Reagan-Bush in 1980. I’m not sure it’s in Cruz’s DNA to be so magnanimous, since he leads Rubio in states won and delegates earned.
+
+Trump may keep winning states moving forward, but from here on it’s a quantity-not-quality argument, with the goal being . . .
+
+2. Keep Trump Under 50 percent. The number that matters most? It’s not states won, but the 1,237 delegates needed to win the GOP nomination.
+
+Of the 1,744 Republican delegates left on the board after Super Tuesday, 391 are in winner-take-all states. The two most important: Florida and Ohio, on March 15. Trump has to be stopped in one, if not both, to slow down the express (at present, he leads in both).
+
+That leaves 1,353 delegates to be allocated either proportionally or by some hybrid scheme. Most crucial of all: states where a 50% majority winner earns all the delegates (Texas has such a system).
+
+Before Super Tuesday, not counting South Carolina where Trump won all 50 delegates, he and Cruz-Rubio split almost equally divided 65 delegates (31 for Trump, 32 for the senators). If something similar occurs in the remaining proportional states, with Trump staying near his mid-30’s ceiling, there’s still a shot at wheeling and dealing in Cleveland.
+
+But before we get there, we’ll have a few…
+
+3. Showdown States. I mentioned Ohio and Florida as must-have’s for the anti-Trump forces. Here are three others to add to the list.
+
+First up: Wisconsin’s April 5 primary, which comes after a two-week break in the action and where last week’s Marquette Law Poll has Trump up by 10.
+
+As the state with the nation’s tenth largest Catholic population, it may be an opportune moment to revisit Trump’s rope-a-Pope. And don’t forget: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had some unkind words about The Donald as he ended his presidential bid.
+
+After that: Indiana’s May 3 primary. The Hoosier State is home to America’s most prophetic county seat. By the first Tuesday in May, it’s an indication of which way the political class leans: Indiana Sen. Dan Coats is no fan; Gov. Mike Pence, who’s up for reelection this fall, hasn’t endorsed.
+
+Finally: if there’s still a race, California and New Jersey on June 7 – again, after a two-week intermission. Establishment Republicans would love nothing more than embarrassing New Jersey Gov. Christie on his home turf. But it’s a winner-take-all state in Trump’s backyard (51 delegates). A more pragmatic strategy would be to go to California and take advantage of a system that awards delegates three apiece for each of the state’s 53 congressional districts.
+
+And from there . . .
+
+4. Outmaneuver Trump Now, Outwit Him Later In Cleveland. Let’s suppose Trump goes to Cleveland close to but shy of a guaranteed first-ballot victory (the GOP’s last multi-ballot convention: 1948).
+
+If no one is elected on the first ballot, all 2,472 delegates can vote for whomever’s name had been placed in nomination. Which means: to outwit Trump in Cleveland, stack the deck with delegates willing to bail on Trump once their commitment is over.
+
+The GOP’s 437 “pledged” delegates (269 Republican officeholders past and present, plus 168 members of the Republican National Committee) would be lowest hanging of anti-Trump fruit. From there, Cruz and Rubio delegates will have to unite.
+
+If the GOP is serious about stopping the insurrection, it intervenes at the grassroots level and shops for voters not only willing to become delegates, but open to the idea of switching candidates at the convention, the political equivalent of changing horses midstream.
+
+Can Trump still be stopped? Yes. But it requires a lot of odd-shaped pieces to fall in place.
+
+Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to sink into a leather chair and enjoy a cigar and brandy – while the violins play and the lifeboats are lowered.
+
+Just in case the unsinkable doesn’t happen.
+
+Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
+8405,TERROR THREAT WARNING MONDAY | RedFlag News,"
+CBS NEWS 
+NEW YORK -- CBS News has learned about a potential terror threat for the day before the election. 
+Sources told CBS News senior investigative producer Pat Milton that U.S. intelligence has alerted joint terrorism task forces that al Qaeda could be planning attacks in three states for Monday. 
+It is believed New York, Texas and Virginia are all possible targets, though no specific locations are mentioned. 
+U.S. authorities are taking the threat seriously, though the sources stress the intelligence is still being assessed and its credibility hasn’t been confirmed. Counterterrorism officials were alerted to the threat out of abundance of caution. 
+A senior FBI official told CBS News, “The counterterrorism and homeland security communities remain vigilant and well-postured to defend against attacks here in the United States. The FBI, working with our federal, state and local counterparts, shares and assesses intelligence on a daily basis and will continue to work closely with law enforcement and intelligence community partners to identify and disrupt any potential threat to public safety.” 
+Intelligence about potential threats always increases during holiday seasons and when big events are approaching. 
+As Election Day nears, federal law enforcement is planning for several worst-case scenarios. 
+Earlier this week, an alert warned local police of “polling places” being seen as “attractive targets” for “lone wolf”-type attacks by individuals motivated by violent extremist ideologies, sovereign citizen or other extremist activity. ",FAKE
+6226,PENNSYLVANIA GUN STORE tells customers “Muslims and Hillary supporters are not welcome”,"PENNSYLVANIA GUN STORE tells customers “Muslims and Hillary supporters are not welcome” An advertisement for ALTRA FIREARMS warns potential customers that Muslims and supporters of Hillary Clinton, who are “terrorists” in the store’s parlance, are not welcome. “Please NO Muslims or Hillary Supporters — We do not feel safe selling to terrorists!” Altra Firearms in Jackson Center, Pennsylvania advertised in local papers this week. TalkingPointsMemo  The “Politically Incorrect Firearms” store also invited readers to “Visit our underground bunker and speak with our unique and deplorable sales associates.” Altra Firearms’ owner Paul Chandler, 54, told TPM Friday that he’s had a sign in front of his store advertising that supporters of President Obama aren’t welcome to come inside, either. “We did have, in three-foot letters, ‘No radical Muslims,’ but I changed that to ‘No Muslims,’ period,” Chandler said in a phone interview, noting rhetoric from Iranian television motivated the change. “They’re saying that America is the great Satan and it’s got to be destroyed. They’re basically teaching that if it’s an infidel, either they convert or kill them. And that’s what they’re doing in our country now,” he said, comparing the actions of modern Islamic nations to the expansion of Muslim influence into Europe before the Crusades. “If the gun store in Florida wouldn’t have sold to that man, there’s be 40 or 50 more people alive,” he continued, referring to Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in Orlando when he opened fire in an LGBT nightclub. PA gun store ad: ""please no Muslims or Hillary supporters. We do not feel safe selling to terrorists"" pic.twitter.com/yPqAsd5MsO 
+— Dorey Scheimer (@DoreyScheimer) October 27, 2016 Chandler told TPM he’s never actually denied service to any Muslims or Clinton supporters, although he said he’d told one woman with an Obama bumper sticker on her car that the store was closed. He also said he’d denied service to one man who told him “I hate niggers, I want a gun.” Chandler said he didn’t extend the same blanket ban to potential Christian customers after a series of abortion clinic bombings years ago because “hundreds of Christian preachers got up and said ‘that is wrong.’” “Do you hear any Muslim clerics condemning what is going on today?” he asked. “I haven’t heard one.” In 2015, designated terrorist group CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) sued a different store in Florida ( FLORIDA GUN SUPPLY ) which declared itself a ‘Muslim Free Zone’ but the case was dismissed.",FAKE
+4141,America will die old and broke: The systematic right-wing plot to ransack the middle-class nest egg,"This attack on retirement benefits follows a very familiar pattern of fabricating data to destroy retirements that work and that people really like. It’s the same nonsense and lies used to destroy private pensions two decades ago, but this time it’s being done as part of a partisan wet dream of “limited government.” It’s a strategy as American as fast food and crumbling infrastructure.
+
+This latest skirmish in the retirement wars perpetuates the biggest lie ever foisted on America—that we cannot afford retirement benefits.
+
+Private pensions have indeed been systematically destroyed in recent decades, and replaced by “defined contribution” 401k plans. The conventional wisdom is that pensions are “too expensive,” but this is the heart of the lie. A great many private pensions were once over-funded, but a change in law allowed companies to “invest” the “excess” funding in other parts of their business. Once businessmen could legally raid the pension fund, the idea of private pensions was over. Many books have been written about the great pension theft. I recommend, for one, reading “Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers.” Spoiler alert: you will feel rage.
+
+I’m no bystander in all this, because I’m a member of the Nevada pension system through my day job.  Even when I considered myself a Republican, I supported the pension system, just as my conservative friends and colleagues still do. But a lot has changed in a few years. Public pensions used to have bipartisan support, but the dysfunction and extremism that has turned Washington D.C .into a shit-show has spread to states like mine.
+
+The attacks on benefits are always underhanded and dishonest, an effort to keep critics quiet, and this latest attempt is no exception, because it only targets future members of the pension system. It’s the same tactic used in the constant assault on Social Security — just take it from people who don’t have it yet. My favorite visual is the conservative who collects Social Security month after month (after month after month) then votes for politicians who will destroy those very modest benefits for his children — all while reciting the false narrative of “not saddling” those same children with debt.
+
+A better idea (rather than stealing from our own children) would be to pay the reasonable levels of taxes necessary to fund the programs we all use. But “family values” conservatives are always delighted to burn the crops and salt the earth behind them, children be damned.
+
+It’s understandable that people without pensions resent those who still have them. It’s much easier to rage about a schoolteacher’s pension than it is to understand the systemic greed of high finance, and that’s by design. The rich and powerful who looted private pensions have managed to set the members of the middle class upon one another. At the same time, the purveyors of 401k plans get rich off of fees from individual accounts. Millions of people are shuffled into the market to be preyed upon by the vultures of high finance, who get paid no matter how much money you win or lose in the grand casino.
+
+I admit that there are reasonable criticisms of pensions. There are always a few people, an overpaid manager or administrator perhaps, who manage to game the system through overtime pay or inflated salaries. Critics can point to the handful of people with six-figure pensions with understandable fury, but to extrapolate it to everyone is plain hogwash. In my own pension system, the average monthly benefit for regular retirees is around 2,200 a month, and retirees are not eligible for Social Security.
+
+For those who think pensions should all be abolished, I’d draw your attention to the constant attacks on Social Security. “Serious” rightwing presidential candidates, and even some Democrats, have proposed upping the retirement age, cutting benefits and in general making life a little less pleasant for retirees.  The hope is that many of us will die before we can collect what we’ve earned through decades of work. Even though the “trust fund” has a balance of trillions of dollars, the money has been used to fund everyday government spending. Politicians would rather loot your retirement rather than fund government spending with honest taxation. I’m not even saying that we have to sacrifice other spending priorities to fund retirements, because there’s enough wealth in this country to do both. But the very question of affordability is moot, because the attack on retirement has nothing at all to do with money. The real goal of conservatives is to break government, so that Wall Street and the well-connected can feast upon the carcass, gorging themselves on ill-conceived privatization schemes. America has become epitome of a failing company, and politicians are acting as the investment banker, breaking what’s left into pieces to sell off for quick cash. As a member of Generation X, I’ve spent my adult life riding waves of bubbles, watching housing values implode, retirement accounts halved and job prospects evaporate. With each subsequent crisis, I and my cohort are asked to “give up a little more” to help the country “recover,” even as a tiny fraction of people and corporations reach unprecedented, unimaginable levels of wealth. This disparity is unsustainable. I can almost sympathize with the Tea Party, a group built on similar feelings of frustration and anger. Their only mistake is that they do not see who is really picking their pockets. It’s not immigrants, “the gays” or liberals. Tea Partiers have tragically bought into the total nonsense that “poor people” are somehow responsible for the malaise of the middle class. It would be almost amusing if it weren’t so tragic. Today’s Tea Party voter is willing to sell out the future of his own child, because he can’t see through bullshit shouted at him by Fox News every day. We cannot afford pensions or health care or food stamps, but, by god, we can afford $1.5 trillion for a plane that doesn’t fly.  Like so many workers, I’ve watched my benefits erode year after year, with frozen salaries, forced unpaid days off and ever more stingy medical benefits.  I take heart that the latest attempt to destroy the pension system seems doomed, if only because it will cost more money to wreck it than to leave it alone. But the greater war on pensions and Social Security is not over. Libertarians and conservatives will not rest until they have unmade the last century of progress and the entire New Deal.  They will destroy and dismantle, vilify and divide, because it’s easier to make people resent one another than to make society better. They want to not only halt progress, but to turn back the hands of time. It’s not just pensions, but overtime pay, weekends and the forty-hour workweek that are all in danger. It’s an act of self-destruction and stupidity. They drill holes in a leaky boat in which we are all riding, somehow unaware that when the boat sinks, they will also drown.",REAL
+835,"Kasich tells Indiana voters to support him, despite pledge not to campaign","Ohio Gov. John Kasich appeared Monday to undercut his campaign's extraordinary agreement with Republican presidential rival Sen. Ted Cruz to stand aside in the key state of Indiana by urging voters in the Hoosier State to support him anyway.
+
+
+
+""I've never told them not to vote for me,"" Kasich said while campaigning in Pennsylvania. ""They ought to vote for me."" He added that he simply agreed not to spend ""resources"" in Indiana.
+
+Adding to the mixed messaging was the fact that Kasich planned to travel to Indianapolis Tuesday for a private fundraising event, despite canceling two planned public rallies in Indianapolis and Noblesville.
+
+Kasich made the remarks approximately 13 hours after his camapign announced an arrangement to give Cruz ""a clear path"" in Indiana, which holds a winner-take-all primary next week. In exchange, Cruz is to give Kasich a clear path in Oregon and New Mexico in an effort to prevent front-runner Donald Trump from attaining the necessary delegates to seal the GOP nomination before this summer's national convention.
+
+""It's not a big deal,"" Kasich said of the agreement, which he described as a recognition of the realities of the campaign. Kasich has only won one primary contest, in his home state of Ohio, but has insisted he can win the Republican nomination at a contested convention.
+
+By contrast, Cruz trumpeted the agreement during a campaign stop in Indiana Monday, saying it was ""big news"" that Kasich had pulled out.
+
+""That is good for the men and women of Indiana,"" Cruz told reporters. ""It's good for the country to have a clear and direct choice.""
+
+Cruz insisted that ""there is desperation on the Trump side"", arguing that the real estate mogul knows he won't be able to get enough delegates to the Republican National Convention to win the party's nomination and ""is in real trouble.""
+
+Meanwhile, Kasich's campaign efforts in Oregon suffered a setback Monday, when it was revealed that his campaign never submitted the governor's biography to the Oregon secretary of state's office. The office prints out a voter pamphlet each year bearing information on each candidate.
+
+This year, the pamphlet includes Kasich's name followed by an asterisk indicating that he didn't submit any information. Cruz and Donald Trump, meanwhile, each get a full column explaining their positions and personal histories.
+
+Kasich's campaign late Monday sent out a statement saying their man is on the ballot in Oregon ""and the campaign will do its part to educate voters about why they should vote for him the primary.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5118,5 Things To Know About Mike Pence Before Tuesday's Debate,"5 Things To Know About Mike Pence Before Tuesday's Debate
+
+This post was updated Oct. 1 at 10:19 a.m.
+
+Last Monday, the first presidential debate was the most-watched debate ever. A little more than a week later, the Hillary Clinton's and Donald Trump's vice presidential picks will take the stage.
+
+Trump running mate Mike Pence will debate Clinton running mate Tim Kaine Tuesday night at Longwood University in Farmville, Va. Unlike the people at the top of the tickets, Pence and Kaine are relatively unknown to voters.
+
+On the Republican side, Pence has been governor of Indiana since 2013. Before that, he served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.
+
+House Speaker Paul Ryan has called Pence a ""good movement conservative"" and considers him a good friend. ""I've very high regard for him,"" Ryan said when Pence was chosen as Trump's running mate, an indicator that putting Pence on the ticket might have been an olive branch from the Trump campaign to more traditional conservatives.
+
+Here are five other things to know about Gov. Pence ahead of Tuesday's debate:
+
+Pence is a born-again Christian — he became one in college — and has put his religion in the foreground of his political persona.
+
+""For me it all begins with faith. It begins with what matters most, and I try and put what I believe to be moral truth first. My philosophy of government second. And my politics third,"" Pence said in a 2010 appearance on the Christian Broadcasting Network.
+
+And religion has indeed played a large part in his policy decisions.
+
+One notable example is his strong opposition to abortion. While serving in the House in 2011, he introduced an amendment to defund Planned Parenthood because the women's health organization provides abortion services.
+
+This March, as governor of Indiana, Pence signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. The law bans abortions due to fetal abnormalities and also requires aborted fetuses — and those from miscarriage — to be buried or cremated.
+
+Women in Indiana protested the law by calling or tweeting at the governor's office to tell him about their periods, in an effort dubbed ""Periods For Pence.""
+
+Trump and Pence, while different in temperament, have something in common: both men have hosted TV shows.
+
+In the 1990s, Pence hosted a Sunday TV show in Indianapolis and also had a radio talk show called The Mike Pence Show. He described himself as ""Rush Limbaugh on decaf,"" meaning while a conservative, he was not as bombastic as the popular Limbaugh, who hosts his own talk show.
+
+On his show, Pence discussed the week's news and also his conservative values. In a video from 1997 published this year by Politico, Pence discussed Kelly Flinn, who was the country's first female B-52 pilot. She had just been discharged from the Air Force for disobeying an order to end an affair and for lying under oath about doing so.
+
+On the show, Pence discussed the ""normalization of adultery"" and ""whether or not it was time to rethink this whole business of women in the military.""
+
+After losing early campaigns for Congress, Pence wrote an essay apologizing for running negative ads against an opponent, Rep. Phillip Sharp. The Indianapolis Star has reported Pence ""swore off harsh political tactics."" In the essay, Pence called for ""basic human decency.""
+
+In July, Pence and Trump sat down for a joint interview on CBS' 60 Minutes. Interviewer Lesley Stahl asked Pence how he felt about some of Trump's attacks on his opponents, specifically referencing ""Lyin' Ted,"" Trump's nickname for his last-standing primary opponent, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Pence replied:
+
+Trump added that the two men are different people and he doesn't ask Pence to be negative.
+
+""It's probably obvious to people that our styles are different. But I promise you, our vision is exactly the same,"" Pence added.
+
+In 2015, he signed into law a controversial ""religious freedom"" bill, which spurred wide backlash. Critics said the bill could allow business owners to ban LGBT customers based on a claim of religious freedom.
+
+After ""business, civic and sports leaders ... strongly called for a fix to the legislation,"" USA Today noted, Pence later signed a revised version of the law.
+
+But Pence appeared to back the bill in an interview on Fox in March 2015.
+
+""Well let me say first and foremost, I stand by this law,"" he said. ""But I understand that the way that some on the left, and frankly some in the national media, have mischaracterized this law over the last week might make it necessary for us to clarify the law through legislation. And we were working through the day and into the night last night with legislative leaders to consider ways to do that.""
+
+Although his running mate has denied his own early support of the Iraq War, Pence was in Congress at the time and voted in favor of authorizing the use of force in Iraq.
+
+In a 2002 interview with CNN leading up to the vote, Pence emphasized that there was ""overwhelming evidence... to suggest a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda,"" which ended up not being the case.
+
+When Trump was asked for his opinion on Pence's 2002 vote on 60 Minutes, he answered, ""He's entitled to make a mistake every once in awhile.""
+
+When Pence was asked on Fox News this year about the vote, he said, ""I think that's for historians to debate. I supported President Bush's decision to go into Iraq, as well as to go into Afghanistan. I traveled downrange for 10 years in a row to visit our soldiers in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. I stood strongly through both of them.""",REAL
+2452,"House Republicans seek ObamaCare repeal, more defense $$ in new budget plan","House Republicans, unveiling their first budget blueprint since the party took control of Congress, issued a sweeping spending plan Tuesday that calls for complete repeal of ObamaCare, major changes to Medicare and controversial moves to boost defense spending despite tight budget limits.
+
+GOP leaders say their budget would balance in less than 10 years, and in that time cut spending by $5.5 trillion compared with current projections.
+
+The spending plan stands little chance of ever being signed by President Obama, but makes clear that the party is not dialing back its ambitions despite a rocky start to the latest congressional session.
+
+After some internal debate over the Republican strategy for taking on the Affordable Care Act, the budget plan renews GOP calls to repeal and replace the law.
+
+The document would repeal ObamaCare “in its entirety,” and calls for “starting over with a patient-centered approach to health care reform.” The document does not get into deep specifics on what this might entail – one factor is a pending Supreme Court case over the law’s subsidies that could force Congress and the Obama administration to reconsider the policy, if the administration loses.
+
+House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price’s $3.8 trillion plan borrows heavily from prior GOP budgets, including a plan that would transform Medicare into a voucher-like ""premium support"" program for seniors joining Medicare in 2024 or later. They would receive a subsidy to purchase health insurance on the private market.
+
+Meanwhile, Republicans are proposing using tens of billions of dollars in additional war funding to get around tight budget limits on the Pentagon.
+
+The use of overseas military funds to skirt spending caps is a new feature. War spending is exempt from budget limits and the move would allow Republicans to effectively match Obama's proposal to boost defense spending by $38 billion above current limits. That was a key demand of the party's defense hawks.
+
+But Senate Republicans, GOP aides say, are likely to reject the move to radically reshape Medicare and are more reluctant to use war funds to help out the Pentagon.
+
+Price has also signaled he'll replicate Rep. Paul Ryan's approach to cutting Medicaid and food stamps by transforming them from federal programs into wholly state-run programs that receive lump sum funding from the government. That approach makes it easier to cut these programs without saying how many people would be dropped or how their benefits would be cut.
+
+The nonbinding budget measure, while setting broad goals for spending and taxes, still requires follow-up legislation to implement. Republicans have never tried to implement its most controversial cuts and are unlikely to do so as long as Obama is president.
+
+To meet their promise to balance the budget within a decade, Republicans would have to cut at least $5 trillion from a federal budget that's on track to total $50 trillion over that period. Senate Republicans will unveil their plan next.
+
+The twin GOP budget plans will arrive as top lawmakers such as Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, are negotiating a $200 billion or so agreement that would permanently fix a flawed funding formula for Medicare physician payments -- adding perhaps $140 billion to the deficit over 10 years -- while at the same time the budget resolution will claim that the higher reimbursement rates for doctors will be ""paid for"" with cuts elsewhere in Medicare.
+
+The Medicare ""docs' fix"" illustrates a truism in Washington: It's easy to vote for spending cuts when they're only hypothetical but excruciatingly hard when they're binding and spark opposition from powerful interest groups like health care providers.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+7856,Trump Panics As 28% of Florida GOP Early Votes go to HILLARY (VIDEO),"Comments 
+The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC just aired a unique new poll must already have the Trump campaign reeling. O’donell reports that over a quarter of the state of Florida’s registered Republicans tell this that they’ve already voted early for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. It’s actually the first poll that includes only actual early voters, surveyed by William and Mary College and TargetSmart. This new poll also shows that Hillary Clinton leads Florida 48-40 which TargetSmart says, “challenges conventional wisdom.” That’s not even the most shocking result… 
+“ Hillary Clinton is winning 28% of registered Republicans ,” said TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier, “ who have already voted already .” According to their surveys of early voters, Hillary Clinton has won 53% percent of early votes cast thus far in the 2016 election, and there’s more data in the video below. 28% of Florida early voting Republicans have voted for @HillaryClinton 
+— Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) November 2, 2016 
+“This includes absentee ballot voters who tend to trend more Republican and 28% of those voters are crossing over, when we look at Democrats,” said TargetSmart’s Bonier, “there’s almost no crossing over. Trump has only won 6% of those voters. Yes. These are people that have already voted, and these Republicans are not just saying it to pollsters, but they’re doing it in Florida. These are voters that are not waiting for election day.” 
+If this poll result holds up, there’s absolutely no path to victory for the Republican campaign, as there is literally no likely scenario resulting in electoral victory for Trump when he loses Florida to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. 
+Take a look:",FAKE
+7505,Comment on Anonymous: World War 3 Is On The Horizon (In 2016) by World War 3 News 2016: Anonymous Declares WW3 'on the Horizon',"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter It has been said a number of times over the past year, that WWIII could be on the horizon. Recent events and statements between Russia and the United States have people believing it’s closer than ever. But is this really the case? Should we be worried? advertisement - learn more Since almost everything real and important taking place is kept from the masses while we are distracted by mainstream media and pop culture, it’s tough to say what is really going on. But if we begin to look at the various things going on in the world, we can piece together some interesting things. In this case, anonymous is hinting that WWIII is inching closer. Some people even believe it has already begun. But you know what? I’m not sure we need to move into fear. First check out the video, then read on. Not All Bad News Right off the bat many start worrying about nuclear bombs, and that’s fair. But there is also an interesting fact to consider: UFOs have been shooting down nuclear threats over the last few decades. Dozens of foreign governments have released thousands of pages of UFO related documents –here is an example of the latest batch released from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense in June 2013. Other country’s governments who have done the same include Mexico, France, Argentina, Russia and Belgium, just to name a few. advertisement - learn more The fact that governments have released and documented information that detail UFO encounters with the military, as well as supposed extraterrestrial encounters with people, tells us that they’ve had and do have a high level of interest when it comes to the topic of UFOs and extraterrestrials. Had this information remained classified, nobody would officially be able to say that governments have allocated resources to investigate this phenomenon, and it would have remained in the “conspiracy” realm. At the same time, it’s important to remember that this issue goes far beyond and well above government control. “It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects which both congress and the commander in chief know nothing about.” – Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defense Minister (source) “Everything is in a process of investigation both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world. The nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data.” – General Carlos Castro Cavero (1979). From “UFOs and the National Security State, Volume 2″, Written by Richard Dolan “Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source) Just last year at the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure , a United States congresswoman voiced her opinion that the US government should disclose this existence, pointing to the fact that a number of foreign governments have already done so -you can read more about that story here. War is something none of us want I’m sure we could agree on, and just because UFO’s may be shooting down nukes doesn’t mean we are OK with war. But what can we do when it comes to such large worldly events? There must be something… Consciousness! Evolve Your Inbox & Stay Conscious Daily Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. What you focus on, what your thoughts are each day, how you feel and how you treat one another is important. It has a huge impact on what plays out in our world. This has been proven numerous times when studies examine the impact of people meditating or focusing on something specific. Collective consciousness is real and it can be impacted. Here is an example of meditation helping in war zones. You are not small, you can impact millions, we can impact billions because we are all connected. Focus on the world you want and share that with others. As for physical action, again what you choose to do to be in alignment with your purpose is powerful. But we can also continue to raise awareness about what is going on in our world and make decisions and choices that opt out of the things we no longer want to see and support. Meditation, intention, being a good person, aligning with your soul purpose, being of service to others and doing things like voting with your dollar is no passive, it is powerful when you understand how our reality works. 
+Transcript of video: Greetings World, We are Anonymous. For the last two months, we have been consistently reporting on a possible global conflict, World War 3 between the United States and its allies in the West, and Russia and its allies in the East. The dispute on the South China Sea has severely damaged the United States relations with the Peoples Republic of China. After the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that China’s nine-dash-line claim in the South China Sea, and its land reclamation activities on islets are invalid and unlawful, the United States has been preparing to sail in the area under a so-called Freedom of Navigation principle. This has angered the Chinese. In August, the Chinese Defense Minister, Chang Wanquan told his country’s citizens to prepare for, what he described as the peoples war at sea. Mr Wanquan was referring directly to the United States planned provocation under the pretext of Freedom of Navigation. China has since vowed to take all necessary measures available to protect its sovereignty over the South China Sea, revealing that it had the right to set up an air defense zone on the sea. China has also since been positioning and testing its nuclear weapons, and planning military drills on its waters with Russia. Even the United States has confirmed that China has tested an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, which is capable of striking everywhere in the world within half an hour. Moving away from the South China Sea, we arrive in Syria. It is an open secret that the civil war in Syria is a proxy war between the United States and Russia. Russia has even intervened physically on the request of the Syrian government. The United States, unable to get any invitation, has been openly and secretly arming many rebel groups in the country, with open plans to overthrow the Syrian government. Of course, since Russia honored the invitation of the Syrian government last year, the war has been turning in favor of the Syrian government, which was falling before Russia’s intervention. As we speak now, tension is mounting between the United States and Russia. Nerves are at their highest since the Cold War era. The United States, at the moment, is sitting on tenterhooks. Many officials in the president Obama administration are frustrated and confused regarding the situation in Syria. The United States has announced that it has ended all contacts with Russia in Syria. This announcement by the United States comes as Russia, beginning on September. 22nd, intensified its military operations in Syria, with the intentions to capture the city of Aleppo for the Syrian government. Diplomatic efforts to put an end to the fighting in Syria, have collapsed. As the Aleppo operation continues, Russia has given the United States a stern warning not to take any action against the Syrian government forces. In fact, there are many Russian jet fighters stationed in Syria, ready to shoot down any United States jet fighter that attempts to strike on the Syrian government forces. These developments from Moscow are not going down easily with the United States. The United States Secretary of State, John Kerry, is said to have urged president Obama to intervene and face the consequences from Russia. He is said to have even favored a nuclear deterrent against Russia. However, it appears that before Kerry could even make this suggestion to president Obama, the Russians had already gathered intelligence on the happenings within the White House. According to Zvezda, a Russian defense ministry Television channel, the country has started preparing its citizens for a possible nuclear war with the United States – because of the mounting tensions in Syria. Russia has since moved to deploy nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in its western-most region, Kaliningrad, which borders on NATO members of Poland and Lithuania. Due to how the situation has become, some top officials at the United States defense headquarters have finally spoken. These Pentagon officials have admitted that World War 3 is imminent, and that its going to be deadly and fast. The military generals were speaking on a future-of-the-army panel in Washington. “A conventional conflict in the near future will be extremely lethal and fast, and we will not own the stopwatch,” Major General William Hix said. General Hix also stated that China and Russia’s armies are becoming increasingly technological, and that the Pentagon was getting ready for violence on the scale that the United States Army has not seen since Korea. His comments were also echoed by lieutenant Gen Joseph Anderson and Chief of Staff, Gen Mark A. Milley, who described war between nation states as almost guaranteed. The generals also said apart from the conventional battle, cyber battle, too, has become a reality against the United States, revealing that even smaller nations are launching it against the country. We are Anonymous.",FAKE
+3334,Hillary Clinton broke the rules: Our view,"As secretary of State, she ignored repeated warnings about email security.
+
+Everyone, including Hillary Clinton, now agrees that the newly confirmed secretary of State made a mistake in 2009 when she decided, for the sake of “convenience,” to run her own email system out of her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., rather than use an official State Department email account.
+
+But a new report by State's inspector general makes clear that within two years, Clinton's bad decision had turned into something far worse: a threat to national security, one that she repeatedly ignored despite multiple warnings.
+
+Warning No. 1: The report, released last week, reveals that in January 2011, hackers were attacking her private server. Twice, the Hillary and Bill Clinton staffer responsible for maintaining the server had to shut it off to protect data held by America's top diplomat and the former president. The staffer notified State Department officials of the attempted hack, and Clinton’s top aides there emailed each other to say that “sensitive” matters should not be discussed with Clinton over email.
+
+Warning No. 2: Two months later, the assistant secretary for diplomatic security sent a memorandum on cybersecurity threats directly to Clinton, warning of a dramatic increase in efforts ""to compromise the private home email accounts of senior department officials"" in a likely attempt to ""gain access to policy documents and personal information that could enable technical surveillance and possible blackmail.” The memo to Clinton warned her that some personal email accounts had already been compromised and had “been reconfigured … to automatically forward copies of all composed emails” to the hackers.
+
+Warning No. 3: That May, Clinton herself suspected that there might have been another hacking incident when she ""received an email with a suspicious link."" Hours after her aides discussed the issue over email, Clinton received another email with a suspect link, this time from the personal account of the ""under secretary of State for political affairs.""
+
+Warning No. 4: A month later, the State Department sent a cable to “all diplomatic and consular posts” about the dangers of unsecured personal email accounts. Staffers were ordered to “avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts.” Who signed that cable? Hillary Clinton.
+
+Those warnings, coming in a span of six months, should have made any responsible public official, even one without Clinton’s access to classified information on cyber threats from the vast U.S. intelligence network, aware of the national security dangers of failing to secure the secretary of State’s email communications.
+
+Instead, Clinton and several of her top aides continued to use personal email for sensitive State Department business thousands of times.
+
+If Clinton wants to become the president of the United States, she needs to explain how she could make such a reckless decision. She had a chance to answer questions when the Obama administration-appointed inspector general contacted her about the investigation that was released last week. Among five recent secretaries of State, only Clinton refused.
+
+While Clinton is under potential criminal investigation by the FBI for the mishandling of classified material sent through her email, remaining silent might be in her best interests and it is certainly her right. But to be president, she is going to have to convince voters that she can put the national security of the United States above her own short-term self-interest.
+
+It's already clear that, in using the private email server, Clinton broke the rules. Now it remains to be seen whether she also broke the law.
+
+USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.
+
+To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter.
+
+On Tuesday, after this editorial was published, CNN's Jake Tapper asked Clinton to respond to the Editorial Board's criticism. She said it was ""obvious"" that she has always put national security above personal self-interest.",REAL
+4873,"Trump surges in battleground, national polls","Donald Trump is surging in new battleground and national polls at a time when Hillary Clinton faces tough questions not only about her health but her sweeping criticism of her Republican opponent’s supporters.
+
+Several surveys appear to show the Republican presidential nominee effectively ending, at least for now, a post-convention slump that saw Clinton leading in virtually every swing state. Now, a Monmouth University Poll shows Trump taking a narrow 2-point lead in Nevada; a Bloomberg Politics poll shows Trump leading Clinton by 5 points in Ohio; and new CNN/ORC polls show Trump leading in Florida and Ohio.
+
+In the latter survey, Trump leads 46-41 percent among likely voters in Ohio, and 47-44 percent among likely voters in Florida.
+
+“We’ve really had a good month,” Trump told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” claiming he’s enjoying renewed “enthusiasm” from voters.
+
+Clinton, though, plans to return to the campaign trail Thursday afternoon after taking three days off to recover from a bout of pneumonia. While her campaign dispatched high-powered surrogates to the stump in her absence -- including Bill Clinton and President Obama -- the Democratic nominee’s presence could help reset the race once again.
+
+The contest remains tight, and the polls are hardly uniform. A Quinnipiac University national poll released Wednesday showed Clinton leading 48-43 percent among likely voters.
+
+But that still represents a narrowing of the race since a late-August survey showing Clinton up 10 points.
+
+The recent surveys come as Clinton grapples with new controversies on two fronts: Her comment at a Friday fundraiser that half of Trump’s backers are in a “basket of deplorables,” and her campaign’s handling of a health scare on Sunday during a 15th anniversary ceremony honoring victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
+
+Clinton has since expressed regret for her “deplorables” comment, though Trump has called on her to outright retract it. And Clinton’s campaign has sought to answer questions about the former secretary of state's health, after Clinton was seen stumbling at the 9/11 memorial event in New York City.
+
+The campaign said she was overheated and dehydrated, and revealed she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday. While the incident revived long-simmering questions about her health, the campaign on Wednesday released additional medical details. Dr. Lisa Bardack, Clinton’s physician, said she is “recovering well with antibiotics and rest.”
+
+Bardack also said Clinton remains “healthy and fit to serve.”
+
+Trump, too, has tried to answer questions about his own health. He discussed the results of a recent physical with TV’s “Dr. Oz,” and told Fox News on Thursday “they were good.” The discussion with “Dr. Oz” will air on his show Thursday.
+
+Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign maintains they always knew states like Ohio would be competitive – and they are building out their operation there.
+
+The campaign announced that they will open a half-dozen new offices in the state, bringing their total to 54.",REAL
+4810,Ballot Access: Another Way Dems and the GOP Screw Third Parties,"""A multi-party system is normal,"" says Richard Winger, publisher and editor of Ballot Access News. ""You only have a two party system if there's repression. It's not natural.""
+
+With both major parties offering up two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in modern history, many voters (and the media) are paying more attention to third party options such as Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
+
+But while independent candidates are gaining in popularity, getting them on the ballot to vote for them can be a long and costly process.
+
+""There's so many ways in which the United States is near the bottom of democracy,"" says Winger, an expert in election law and ballot access. ""There's been unbelievable hostility in the last few months to minor parties.""
+
+This hostility has resulted in states changing their ballot access rules—sometimes at the last minute—in an effort to exclude minor parties from the ballot.
+
+One recent example of this was Gary Johnson's fight to remain on the ballot as a presidential candidate in Ohio after the secretary of state threatened to remove his name thanks to a frequently used rule that allows placeholder candidates when fulfilling ballot access requirements (read more about the incident here.)
+
+""Ohio law explicitly says people who use the independent candidate petition procedure put a substitution committee on the petition,"" states Winger. But when it came time to remove the placeholder name and add Gary Johnson's, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted ""acted like he never heard of such a thing!"" Winger exclaimed.
+
+Johnson eventually qualified for the ballot as an independent candidate after his supporters turned in the necessary 5,000 petition signatures to Husted in late August.
+
+""They act like the secretary of state did the Libertarians a big favor by letting them use this thing which has been used all along,"" Winger says. ""It's just so maddening.""
+
+Reason TV recently sat down with Winger to discuss which states have the worst ballot access laws, why the major parties give independent candidates such a hard time when it comes to getting on the ballot, and the consequences of a two party duopoly.
+
+""This is one the things that anchors me being a libertarian,"" says Winger. ""Before the government got involved in printing ballots we had total freedom.""
+
+Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Alex Manning and Paul Detrick. Music by Alex Fitch.
+
+Like us on Facebook.
+
+Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.",REAL
+8996,"US, Japan Push to Fortify Alliances Amid Threat Posed by North Korea","Get short URL 0 0 0 0 US Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work and Japanese Administrative Vice Minister of Defense Tetsuro Kuroe met on Wednesday at the Pentagon for talks on enhancing an allied presence against potential threats in Asia including North Korea, Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Gordon Trowbridge said in a press release. 
+  In bilateral talks, both countries discussed issues that include enhancing cooperation with South Korea and Australia, expanding Japan’s military operations and strengthening ballistic missile defense cooperation, Trowbridge noted. © AFP 2016/ STR One Week After US Patrol, Beijing to Conduct Military Drills in South China Sea 
+“During their meeting, the two leaders discussed the rapidly evolving security environment, including the persistent North Korean threat and maritime issues in the East and South China Seas,” Trowbridge stated on Wednesday. 
+Work reaffirmed that the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea are administered by Japan and fall under Article 5 of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, the spokesman added. 
+Japan is shadowed by China’s growing military presence in the South China Sea, potentially threatening the Japanese economy, which relies on open and secure shipping lanes. Meanwhile, North Korea is driving efforts to develop a nuclear and ballistic weapons program. ...",FAKE
+2836,The secret plot behind the creation of ISIS,"ISIS, the world understands, is a violent jihadist group driven by twisted religious devotion and its dream of radical Islamist conquest. ISIS's own members understand the group that way. But what if they're wrong? What if ISIS is not a spontaneous religious movement, but rather was constructed by a shadowy group of secular military leaders to fulfill their secret agenda?
+
+Explosive new documents uncovered by Der Spiegel's Christoph Reuter, published on Saturday, reveal that there is a dark secret at the heart of ISIS. It was not radical Islamists who conceived and created ISIS, they suggest, but rather a small group of senior Iraqi officers in Saddam Hussein's brutal police state. Their plan appears to have been to use ISIS to reconquer Iraq. For them, jihadism was simply a means to the end of retaking the country they had lost, a counterattack to the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled them from power.
+
+Der Spiegel says it uncovered the documents from a house in Syria that was used by a former Iraqi military intelligence official who, before he was killed in a 2014 firefight, went by the name Haji Bakr. The documents show the blueprint for the creation of the Islamic State, written before the group became what it is today and executed to detail. While we have known for some time that former officers in Saddam's military were working with ISIS — they shared a Sunni background and a hatred of the new American-installed government — these documents suggest the officers were far more involved in planning and launching the Islamic State than previously thought.
+
+As Der Spiegel's stunning investigation found, ISIS was organized in much the same way as Saddam's police state. Haji Bakr's goal was to use the chaos and extremism of the Syrian war to build up this new group in Syria, giving it a beachhead from which it could invade and conquer much of Iraq. Once there, it would set up an intricate and Orwellian system of control in the mold of Saddam's Iraq.
+
+ISIS, in other words, would replace one totalitarianism with another. Though Saddam's Iraq had been Sunni and secular and ISIS's Iraq would be Sunni and Islamist, this same group of former Saddam officials would remain at the top. For Haji Bakr and the other officers working with him, the group's apocalyptic jihadism would simply be a vehicle for their return to power.
+
+There is a simple reason why there is no mention in Bakr's writings of prophecies relating to the establishment of an Islamic State allegedly ordained by God: He believed that fanatical religious convictions alone were not enough to achieve victory. But he did believe that the faith of others could be exploited. In 2010, Bakr and a small group of former Iraqi intelligence officers made Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir and later ""caliph,"" the official leader of the Islamic State. They reasoned that Baghdadi, an educated cleric, would give the group a religious face. [Haji] Bakr was ""a nationalist, not an Islamist,"" says Iraqi journalist Hisham al-Hashimi.
+
+Bakr's journey from serving in a violently secular regime to helping found a violently Islamist group began in 2003, after the US-led invasion of Iraq. One of America's first decisions on taking Iraq — a terrible mistake that has haunted the region ever since — was to disband Iraq's enormous army, leaving its officers and soldiers with no income. Haji Bakr was left ""bitter and unemployed,"" a source who knew him told Der Spiegel, as were many officers like him.
+
+This speaks to a terrible irony of the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq. The war was premised in part on the assertion that Saddam's regime was linked to anti-American jihadist terrorists. This was a falsehood. But the invasion made this falsehood true — and in more terrible fashion than we ever imagined possible.
+
+Haji Bakr, desperate after 2003 to defeat the Americans and the new Shia-majority government, fought alongside Sunni extremists in Iraq. Later, he began constructing ISIS. As Der Spiegel's investigation found, he was able to use his knowledge of running an oppressive security state to build up ISIS into more than just another jihadist group.
+
+Bakr had something else that proved essential: deep contacts with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's military and intelligence services. This allowed him to arrange the unofficial alliance of convenience between ISIS and Assad, as the two tacitly tolerate one another in Syria and fight their mutual enemies there.
+
+As Der Spiegel's Reuter writes, there are unmistakable parallels in the architectures of ISIS and of Saddam's Iraq. ""The two systems ultimately shared a conviction that control over the masses should lie in the hands of a small elite that should not be answerable to anyone,"" he writes. ""The secret of [ISIS's] success lies in the combination of opposites, the fanatical beliefs of one group and the strategic calculations of the other.""",REAL
+7653,FANTASTIC! TRUMP'S 7 POINT PLAN To Reform Healthcare Begins With A Bombshell! » 100percentfedUp.com,"Email HEALTHCARE REFORM TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN 
+Since March of 2010, the American people have had to suffer under the incredible economic burden of the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare. This legislation, passed by totally partisan votes in the House and Senate and signed into law by the most divisive and partisan President in American history, has tragically but predictably resulted in runaway costs, websites that don’t work, greater rationing of care, higher premiums, less competition and fewer choices. Obamacare has raised the economic uncertainty of every single person residing in this country. As it appears Obamacare is certain to collapse of its own weight, the damage done by the Democrats and President Obama, and abetted by the Supreme Court, will be difficult to repair unless the next President and a Republican congress lead the effort to bring much-needed free market reforms to the healthcare industry. 
+Congress must act. Our elected representatives in the House and Senate must: 
+1. Completely repeal Obamacare. Our elected representatives must eliminate the individual mandate. No person should be required to buy insurance unless he or she wants to. 
+2. Modify existing law that inhibits the sale of health insurance across state lines. As long as the plan purchased complies with state requirements, any vendor ought to be able to offer insurance in any state. By allowing full competition in this market, insurance costs will go down and consumer satisfaction will go up. 
+3. Allow individuals to fully deduct health insurance premium payments from their tax returns under the current tax system. Businesses are allowed to take these deductions so why wouldn’t Congress allow individuals the same exemptions? As we allow the free market to provide insurance coverage opportunities to companies and individuals, we must also make sure that no one slips through the cracks simply because they cannot afford insurance. We must review basic options for Medicaid and work with states to ensure that those who want healthcare coverage can have it. TRENDING ON 100% Fed Up ",FAKE
+3052,Emotional Attachment to Political Parties Seems to Make People More Knee-Jerk in Their Beliefs,"Part of the fun in watching two politicians debate is seeing their foreheads sweat, their spit fly, and their fists pound the podium. Emotion is a hallmark of politics; at a certain point, logic and reason are tossed out the window and passion takes over, whether the setting is a televised debate or a dinnertime argument.
+
+A new study published in the journal PLOS One lends some support to the idea that the more emotional people get when politics comes up, the less likely they are to think things through clearly. A team led by Michael Bang Petersen, a professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark, asked 58 subjects ages 19 to 32 to report their political ties. Then, the researchers attached electrodes to the index and middle fingers of the participants’ nondominant hands; these measured their physiological responses by recording small amounts of sweat present on the fingertips.
+
+The subjects were then shown 16 policy proposals, each with the logo from one of two rival Danish political parties affixed to it — “We should lower the tax on income,” for example, or “The police should be far more visible.” Subjects were asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed with the proposal. The catch was that the party names were assigned randomly to the proposals — sometimes a proposal was paired with a party that didn’t actually support it. In other words, this was a test for knee-jerk support for anything with a given party’s brand affixed to it.
+
+Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the emotionally engaged participants who were the most knee-jerk. All things being equal, those participants who experienced a strong physiological response when their party’s logo appeared tended to report that they agreed with that party’s proposals, no matter their content — that is, they blindly nodded along, at least in this experiment, to anything “proposed,” even fictitiously, by their party.
+
+“We build up emotional attachments to objects if we experience them in emotional, activating contexts,” explained Petersen, and this can apply as much to politics as to any other area. “So if positive feelings are elicited when I watch Barack Obama, when I go to a Democratic convention, and when I’m around other Democrats, then my emotional systems will automatically begin to associate things that are linked to the Democratic party with positive affect.”
+
+Once those emotional ties are in place, they’re almost impossible to change. You can try to put yourself in a situation where your opinions are tested, said Petersen, which is a good way to increase the cognitive effort involved in decision-making: If you have to justify your choice, you usually rely on reason over emotion to make it. But that can easily backfire. “You might simply put more effort into justifying the already-held opinion rather than changing the underlying one,” Peterson said.
+
+In short, once you’re a biased partisan, it’s difficult to see the other side. As Petersen puts it, “it’s like choosing football teams. You don’t make a rational assessment about which team is better or which team deserves to win. You support your team no matter what.”",REAL
+1466,Donald Trump’s despotic fantasies: Here’s what the world would look like if he were president,"He had also vividly shown his colors at that point with his daily evocation on the stump of Bowe Bergdahl, whom he called a “dirty, rotten, traitor” who would have been summarily executed back in the day “when we were strong.” He promised to make our military so strong our heads would spin and he declared himself a big second amendment person. He promised to “renegotiate deals” with every country in the world to get a better result for America although he was vague about exactly what that meant beyond complaining about all the foreign cars he allegedly sees coming off of ships in American ports.
+
+From the beginning Trump has said that we “don’t have time” to be politically correct anymore, that our problems are so severe that we have to do “whatever is necessary” to make America great again. He has not hidden his intentions. But now that he has been a national frontrunner for more than six months, perhaps it’s time to revisit this subject and look at his agenda as he’s unveiled it since last summer.
+
+First, on the deportation issue: When asked how he would go about it, he has said that he would have a “deportation force” to find, detain and repatriate suspected undocumented immigrants and their children, some of whom are Americans (but he’d fix that too.) When quizzed in the debates he had this to say to John Kasich’s assertion that deporting all these millions of people is not a serious proposal:
+
+All I can say is, you’re lucky in Ohio that you struck oil. That’s for one thing. Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president. People liked him. I like Ike, right, the expression, “I like Ike.” Moved 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country. Moved them just beyond the border. They came back. Moved them again beyond the border. They came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back. Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president. People liked him. I like Ike, right, the expression, “I like Ike.” Moved 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country. Moved them just beyond the border. They came back. Moved them again beyond the border. They came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back.
+
+He, of course, plans to eventually build a wall so high that nobody can climb over it, apparently enlisting Jack and his magic beanstalk for engineering advice. But that comment was no joke. He’s talking about the infamous Operation Wetback. And people never came back because they’d been left in the middle of the desert without water and died.
+
+After Paris and San Bernardino his authoritarianism took another dark turn. His famous statement that the U.S. should ban all Muslims from entering the country “until we find out what the hell is going on” was actually the culmination of a number of comments indicating that there could be a registry of Muslims and surveillance of mosques and other places where one might find American Muslims. (In other words, everywhere.) He reiterated the standard fatuous right wing bromide about arming everyone so that they could shoot down terrorists before they have a chance to explode their suicide vests. And he enthusiastically endorsed torture. and not just for interrogation purposes but as a punitive measure:
+
+“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would — in a heartbeat,” Trump said to loud cheers during a rally at a convention center here Monday night that attracted thousands. “And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.” Trump said such techniques are needed to confront terrorists who “chop off our young people’s heads” and “build these iron cages, and they’ll put 20 people in them and they drop them in the ocean for 15 minutes and pull them up 15 minutes later.” “It works,” Trump said over and over again. “Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing. It works.”
+
+When discussing what he would do with the families of suspected terrorists he was a bit more vague, but when you consider his other commentary the implication is clear:
+
+He has a fantasy about the wives of the 9/11 hijackers having foreknowledge of the attacks and tuning in on TV with their children to watch daddy fly into the World Trade Center. Except for the fact that the hijackers weren’t married and had no kids, it would be an interesting tale.
+
+He has also blamed San Bernardino terrorist Sayed Farook’s mother and sister, suggesting the government need to “get tough” to deal with them:
+
+We better get a little tough, and a little smart, or we’re in trouble.” And he’s openly said he would commit war crimes and explicitly target the families of suspected ISIS terrorists: “We’re fighting a very politically correct war. And the other thing with the terrorists — you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families! They care about their lives, don’t kid yourselves. They say they don’t care about their lives. But you have to take out their families.” On the domestic front, Trump has made it very, very clear that in addition to his “deportation force,” he believes the country needs to allow the police agencies much more latitude: “We’re going to get, you know, the gang members in Baltimore and in Chicago and these are some tough dudes. They’re going to be out so fast. One of the first thing I’m going to do is get rid of those gang members. We’re going to be – you know, you look at what’s going on with Baltimore, you look at what’s going on in Chicago and Ferguson and St. Louis the other night. We are going to get rid of those gang members so fast your head will spin. You know, we can be very tough. I just met your cops outside. Those police are tough cookies. Those guys – we need law and order. We need law and order. I mean, they allowed – in one night, that first night in Baltimore – they allowed that city to be destroyed. And they set it back 35 years. One night. Because the police were not allowed to protect people. They weren’t allowed to protect people. We have incredible law enforcement in this country and we have to be – the head of the police in Chicago is a person I know. Originally from New York. He’s a phenomenal guy. He can stop things if they’re allowed to stop them. He can stop it. Believe me. He has never explained exactly what he means when he says he plans to “get rid of those gang members so fast your head will spin,” but evoking his relationship close to Chicago’s police chief might be a clue. He exhorts citizens to spy on each other and report activities to the authorities. And he made a solemn pledge to police everywhere: “One of the first things I’d do in terms of executive order, if I win, will be to sign a strong, strong statement that would go out to the country, out to the world, anybody killing a police man, a police woman, a police officer, anybody killing a police officer, the death penalty is going to happen.” Considering the summary execution pantomime he does on the trail every day when he talks about Bowe Bergdahl it’s fair to assume he has some ideas about how that might be handled. Finally, Trump has welcomed the approbation of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s authoritarian-strongman leader, even going so far as to defend him against charges that he has killed journalists who challenged him. He has joked that he wouldn’t kill any journalists himself — well, probably: I hate some of these people, I hate ’em,” Trump told the crowd. “I would never kill them. I would never do that.” Then he decided to reconsider. “Uh, let’s see, uh?” he said aloud, his voice rising. “No, I would never do that.” Trump’s comments on journalists came after he spoke about Russian President Vladimir Putin, who lavished Trump with praise last week. Claims that Putin ordered the killings of Russian journalists are well-documented, but Trump has argued that those deaths are disputed and without evidence. Trump did charge once again that some of the reporters in the back of the room are “such lying disgusting people,” but as the crowd turned to angrily face those reporters, Trump pulled them back. This past week Trump spoke admiringly of another despot — North Korea’s Kim Jong Un: “You’ve got to give him credit: How many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals and all of a sudden, you know, it’s pretty amazing when you think of it. How does he do that?” “Even though it is a culture, and it’s a culture thing, he goes in, he takes over, he’s the boss. It’s incredible.” “I mean, it’s amazing that a young guy would go over and take over. You know, you would have thought that these tough generals would have said no way this is gonna happen when the father died. “So he’s gotta have something going for him, because he kept control, which is amazing for a young person to do.” He did say Kim was a “total nut job” but it’s fairly obvious Trump doesn’t see that as much of a problem. “He’s the boss” and “he kept control” and that is what Trump sees as true leadership. He figures that just as he would get along well with Putin, he and Kim Jong Un could forge and understanding.  They all have a lot in common. And millions of freedom loving Republicans think that’s just terrific. His poll numbers have never gone down since he threw his hat in the ring last June. They aren’t backing him because he’s promising to shrink the government or lower taxes or create jobs. He very rarely even brings such issues up. What he talks about on the stump is how popular he is, how much money he has, and how hard he will bring the hammer down on all the “bad people” who are making America not so great. And he will have so many victories they’ll be coming out of your ears. He will do all this because all it takes is “being tough and smart” and having a proper disdain for “political correctness” — formerly known as democracy, the constitution and the rule of law.",REAL
+10171,Globalist Plan for Human Control,"Veteran IT Training Program Leads to 100% Job Placement ‹ › SARTRE is the pen name of James Hall, a reformed, former political operative. This pundit's formal instruction in History, Philosophy and Political Science served as training for activism, on the staff of several politicians and in many campaigns. A believer in authentic Public Service, independent business interests were pursued in the private sector. As a small business owner and entrepreneur, several successful ventures expanded opportunities for customers and employees. Speculation in markets, and international business investments, allowed for extensive travel and a world view for commerce. He is retired and lives with his wife in a rural community. ""Populism"" best describes the approach to SARTRE's perspective on Politics. Realities, suggest that American Values can be restored with an appreciation of ""Pragmatic Anarchism."" Reforms will require an Existential approach. ""Ideas Move the World,"" and SARTRE'S intent is to stir the conscience of those who desire to bring back a common sense, moral and traditional value culture for America. Not seeking fame nor fortune, SARTRE's only goal is to ask the questions that few will dare ... Having refused the invites of an academic career because of the hypocrisy of elite's, the search for TRUTH is the challenge that is made to all readers. It starts within yourself and is achieved only with your sincere desire to face Reality. So who is SARTRE? He is really an ordinary man just like you, who invites you to join in on this journey. BREAKING ALL THE RULES hosts SARTRE Commentary. BATR.org and BATR.net Globalist Plan for Human Control By Sartre on November 8, 2016 
+Recognizing that there is and has been a century’s long shrouded plan to mastermind a worldwide Weltanschauung that puts a diabolical elite mastery over the billions of human beings, which make up the vast hordes of divinely created life on this planet, is a taboo topic in most cultures. The entire system of socially manufactured perception is a plot to keep people in line and docile. Mass societal pressure is dumped on anyone, who dares to put forth a confederacy organism of global rule explanation for understanding political, social and economic affairs. Keeping the enigma program for extending a cruel and deadly supremacy over mankind cannot be kept secret any longer. 
+A brief and concise definition of The Globalist Agenda follows: 
+“Simply put, the globalist movement is an alliance based on self-interest of the private international financiers and the royal, dynastic and hereditary land owning families of Britain, Europe and America which over the years have intermarried to create a self regenerating power structure that through lies and deception seeks to control everything and everyone on earth.” 
+Review the glaring elements that make up the demented mindset and ultimate objections of these demonic demons devoted to their satanic master. 
+Elite Belief System / Values 
+The Ends Justify the Means Mystery Religions / Occult 
+Population Reduction to less than 1 Billion people Post Industrial Feudalism Transhumanism End of the Age – New Age 
+This summary of attitudes and aims might not be earth shattering for dedicated observers of the power elite, but for those who avoid any appearance of being tagged as a tin foil wearing conspiracy kook, mustering up the courage to confront the facts of real history may be too much to contemplate. Nullifying one’s comfort zone, even if it is totally false, is not an attribute for those who never developed character of sincerity or intellectual honesty. 
+Prof. Dr. MUJAHID KAMRAN provides a well documented account of Who Really Controls the World? Coming from a non Western perspective, it is most encouraging that the exposure of the force beyond the scene is resonating in every corner of the planet. 
+“The wealthiest families on planet earth call the shots in every major upheaval that they cause. Their sphere of activity extends over the entire globe, and even beyond, their ambition and greed for wealth and power knows no bounds, and for them, most of mankind is garbage – “human garbage.” It is also their target to depopulate the globe and maintain a much lower population compared to what we have now.” 
+When The Communist Takeover Of America – 45 Declared Goals from “ The Naked Communist ,” by Cleon Skousen was published, most people were diverted to thinking that a Marxist ideology was the primary enemy during the cold war. Left to the perceptive and astute, the most informed understand that the totalitarian creed of collectivism was originated and implemented by Jews. The influence of designed destruction for Western institutions and heritage, which facilitate and spreads the New World Order power structure, is the sacred canon of the privileged Globalist elites. 
+A serious researcher cannot ignore or circumvent this historic fact. Academic censorship would have the timid stay clear of this detail to avoid being smeared as a critic of the “so called” chosen tribe. Those who buy into this asinine prerequisite, which is the height of chutzpah, would be petrified to actually review the sentiments of What world famous men said about the Jews . 
+Now not every wicked globalist is exclusively Jewish. However, the proportion of Judaic race identity and Talmud proponents within the Globalist circle of black magic is overwhelmingly disproportionate to their population numbers. Also, there is no one single mythos viewpoint among globalists as The Two Jewish-led Globalist Camps… In Competition For Global Control illustrates. “There are two distinct ideological globalist camps, both led by Jews — each camp competes with the other for global control: 1) THE LIBERAL CAMP 2) THE NEOCON CAMP” 
+The inquiry into the influence of Jewish Faces in the Government can fill several books. Yet, the bias against covering this topic is so strong that only brave souls venture into the cauldron of popular culture ostracization. 
+If you have the courage to venture where most will not dare, take a close look at the lists provided on THE GLOBALISTS site. The lead rundown presents: “The global elite march in four essential columns: Corporate, Academic, Political and Organized Religion . In general, the goals for globalism are created by Corporate. Academic then provides studies and white papers that justify Corporate goals. Political sells Academic’s arguments to the public and if necessary, changes laws to accommodate and facilitate Corporate in getting what it wants. Organized Religion along with church and state secures corporate, academic and political rule into a global order.” 
+The lists of oligarch families, Committee of 300 and organized groups of the ruling class is a combination of dynasty elements that make up their cabal syndicate of power and dominance. The Rothschild linage bears the most attention for the central blood line of the international finance and the global cartel. Nevertheless, the choreographed architecture for governance goes well beyond an analysis of money, politics and force. 
+In order to restrict the world view and impose a rigid abidance into an occult Babylonian religion, The Globalist Agenda contends: New Religion Based on Earth Worship 
+“Today, the elite are seeking to destroy the old religious belief systems and replace them with a “new age” religion based on a form of earth worship. Doing so will accomplish multiple objectives – to get people to accept lower standards of living; to accept voluntary sterilization to save mother earth thus helping to depopulate the planet; and to accept restrictions on rights and freedoms in the name of saving the environment.” 
+The Globalist Plan to take-down the whole World by Preston James, Ph.D postulates: 
+“ Set up a comprehensive multi-level secret Luciferian matrix used to induce and promote selected individuals who are willing to do anti-human debased acts in exchange for extreme rewards of fame, money and power in return for their willingness to give up their souls. This provides a cadre of deeply committed sold-out top controllers who can be later disposed of when no longer needed. With abject secrecy their whole system becomes exposed and crumbles.” 
+This certainly sounds similar to the way the Plutocrat Jewery deviltry operates. For an evaluation on how The Dark Agenda Behind Globalism And Open Borders works, Zero Hedge sounds a familiar theme. 
+“ The people behind the effort to enforce globalism are tied together by a particular ideology, perhaps even a cult-like religion , in which they envision a world order as described in Plato’s Republic. They believe that they are “chosen” either by fate, destiny or genetics to rule as philosopher kings over the rest of us. They believe that they are the wisest and most capable that humanity has to offer , and that through evolutionary means, they can create chaos and order out of thin air and mold society at will.” 
+Now what group of self proclaimed super elites does this most scrupulously describe? 
+The globalist plan for human servitude and ultimate liquidation is a direct result of the hubris from these deranged omnipotent imposters. Only through a sincere and dedicated investigation into the working of the “ Khazarian Mafia ”, a term penned by Dr. James, can one begin to comprehend the nature of the pandemic ethos that is at the core of the globalist cult. 
+Who better to conclude a dissecting of the Globalist Plan for Human Control than the teaching of Texe Marrs? From his Exclusive Intelligence Examiner Report you get an account you will not read in the controlled media. 
+“Children of hell, that’s what Jesus called the Jewish religious teachers. That was almost 2,000 years ago. Well, guess what? The Jewish religionists are even worse now, in the 21st century. They’ve had almost 2,000 years more to practice and perfect their evil religion. Today, those who practice satanic cabalism and believe in the Talmud are the children of hell a hundred times over.” 
+The globalists adopt the practices and mores of this perversion from the Old Testament faith of Moses, Isaac, Jacob, and the prophets. Their design for a soulless existence and final mass annihilation is the essence of archfiend wickedness. The New World Order structure of global submission basically wants to remove free will from the human condition. 
+Every thinking and God fearing person must resist and oppose the autocracy of the Tempter for global secularization. As more individuals assimilate into a reprobate culture that lacks faith in the divine word of God, the end collapse of society and all decency is inevitable. 
+SARTRE – November 8, 2016",FAKE
+314,"In the United States, anxiety is up, but crime is down","Felony crime declined nationwide in 2015, continuing a historic drop. But mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and Charleston, S.C. – as well as a slight uptick in the number of murders – have contributed to the feeling of unease.
+
+Latonya Jones holds a photo of her mother, Bettie Jones, during a vigil on Sunday, in Chicago. Jones, an antiviolence activist and mother of five, was accidentally killed early Saturday by officers responding to a domestic disturbance on the city’s West Side, police said.
+
+Earlier this month, when New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told fellow officers that 2015 will end up being the safest year ever in New York City history, he paused to note that it was also “a year of great contradictions.”
+
+Despite the fact that the nation’s largest city is still experiencing historic drops in crime, Commissioner Bratton’s tone was somber: Four police officers had died in the line of duty since this time last year, making the latest crime statistics ring somewhat hollow in a “terrible” year for the NYPD.
+
+And such is the mood across the nation, in many ways. A study at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found that overall crime was still declining throughout the United States a bit in 2015. Felony crime declined 1.5 percent nationwide, and dropped by roughly 2 percent in New York. But the highly visible violence of the past year – such as mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif.; Roseburg, Ore; and Charleston, S.C. – as well as a slight uptick in the number of murders, has contributed to the feeling of great contradictions when it comes to crime.
+
+Indeed, 7 in 10 Americans said they believed there was more crime in the US this year than last, according to a Gallup poll in October, up from 2014. That’s despite the fact that the nation’s crime rates have plummeted over the past two decades. But as the polling center noted about its annual survey, “Americans' perceptions of crime … are not always on par with reality.”
+
+“The public's perception of media coverage certainly gives a skewed image of what's going on with crime,” said Matthew Freidman, an economist with the Brennan Center in New York and coauthor of the study, to NPR last week. “What we find is that though we've seen a nearly three-decades-long decline in crime rates, public perception does not match that.”
+
+The rise of social media and the 24-hour digital news cycle, as well as the high-profile nature of some of the deaths, may play into that.
+
+For example, last December, two NYPD officers were gunned down in their patrol cars – randomly targeted by a man who said he wanted revenge for the shootings of black men. A sheriff’s deputy in Texas was shot at a gas station in August, and many police officers say they have felt under siege over the past year. However, there were 39 officers shot and killed so far in 2015 – a drop from 2014, when 47 were shot and killed, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page.
+
+At the same, concerns about the number of people shot by police or who died in custody continues to create a climate of tension throughout the country. From the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore to the shooting of a black teen and the accidental killing of a black mother and activist in Chicago over the weekend, it has been a year in which violence has drawn much of the nation’s attention.
+
+It is true that many cities saw a rise in the number of murders this year. In New York, there were 339 as of Christmas Day – slightly more than last year’s all-time low of 333, but still well below the 536 murders recorded in 2010.
+
+However, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston are each projected to see double-digit increases in their murder rates this year. In Baltimore, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, rates have reached levels not seen since the 1990s, studies have found.
+
+But scholars point out that despite such spikes this year, such statistics do not yet indicate a reversal in the dramatic drop in violence in the US over the past few decades, and can be attributed to normal variations in annual numbers. The overall crime rate is still half what it was in 1990, and nearly a quarter of what it was in 2000.
+
+“The increase in the murder rate is insufficient to drive up the crime rate, and using murder as a proxy for crime overall is mistaken,” the Brennan study notes. “It is important to remember just how much crime has fallen in the last 25 years.”
+
+But tensions remain high, fueled in part by the terror attacks in San Bernardino and Paris. Some 40 percent of Americans say that they believe the terrorists are winning – more than at any time after 9/11 – according to a CNN/ORC poll released Monday.
+
+With the rise of the Black Lives Matter protest movement calling for an end to policing policies that activists say unfairly target minorities, many continue to perceive a “year of great contradictions.” Since last year, some high-profile deaths of black men and some women at police hands have prompted continued clashes and a feeling of unease within the nation’s law enforcement systems and the communities they serve.
+
+In Chicago, police shot and killed two black people over the holiday weekend, including a 55-year-old mother of five and antiviolence activist who was accidentally killed after officers responded to a domestic disturbance by an emotionally disturbed college student.
+
+The shootings come just a month after the Justice Department began an investigation of the Chicago Police Department after the release of a video showing the shooting death of a black teen last year. The video led to murder charges for the white police officer who shot the teen and the resignation of the city’s police commissioner.
+
+By contrast, on Monday, a grand jury in Cleveland declined to bring charges against either of the two officers involved in the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with an Airsoft gun in a park at the time he was shot.
+
+In New York, like the rest of the country, many report a growing sense of anxiety about crime and policing. But in the past five years, crime continued to fall, even as police have made dramatically fewer arrests.
+
+New York City police arrested about 333,000 people through Dec. 20, The New York Times reported, down 13 percent from the 385,000 arrested last year. And these numbers are way down from the 423,000 arrests made in 2010.
+
+So despite the fact that 2015 has been in many ways a rough and contradictory year, police officials are optimistic as both overall crime and the number of arrests continue to fall.
+
+“This is going to be, potentially, a very significant year in terms of the history of index crime in New York City,” Dermot Shea, deputy commissioner of operations for the NYPD, told the Times.",REAL
+7422,Trump Melts Down And Accuses The US Postal Service Of Stealing The Election For Clinton,"Trump warned his supporters that the US Postal Service is trying to steal the election for Hillary Clinton in Colorado. 
+Video: 
+At a rally in Golden, CO, Trump said: 
+I have real problems with ballots being sent. Does that make sense? 
+Like people saying, “Oh, here’s a ballot. Here’s another ballot. Throw it away. Oh, here’s one I like. We’ll keep that one.” 
+I have real problems, so get your ballots in. 
+Trump also accused election officials of throwing away ballots, as his rally was a mixture of claims of voter fraud and baseless speculation about Hillary Clinton’s emails. 
+Donald Trump appears to be losing his mind. He also seems to think that accusing the US Postal Service and election officials of stealing the election for Hillary Clinton is going to motivate Republicans to vote. 
+Consider the contradiction in Trump’s message. The Republican nominee tells his supporters that the US Postal Service is throwing away ballots, while at the same time he is urging them to mail in their ballots. 
+If their ballots are going to be thrown away by USPS, why should Republicans bother mailing their ballots in? 
+It is this sort of incoherent gibberish that makes no sense. Trump’s inability to stay disciplined and on message is also one of the biggest reasons why Republicans on pace to lose this election. 
+Donald Trump’s descent into paranoid senior citizen continues to play out in front of the entire nation, as the Republican nominee for president believes that his letter carrier is out to get him,",FAKE
+3502,"Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton showcase clashing styles at times of crisis","The mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, Sunday exposed the two presumptive major party nominees -- Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton -- to a penetrating examination of their characters and political instincts at a moment of crisis.
+
+The worst terror attack on American soil since 9/11 has become a test of leadership as they vie for the world's most powerful job and a chance to scramble for political advantage in the general election campaign.
+
+There's an accepted playbook for politicians to respond to tragedies wrought by terrorism: It involves not rushing to conclusions but promising to punish the perpetrators. Often a flurry of new plans to combat terrorism is produced. And leaders generally mourn the dead, avoid stigmatizing the entire Muslim community and invoke lofty ideals of national unity rather than partisan politics.
+
+In doing so, they emulate the unifying instincts shown by past commanders in chief at moments of extreme national grief and fear. President George W. Bush, in an iconic display after 9/11, stood on a pile of rubble at Ground Zero to vow vengeance against al Qaeda but also visited a Muslim community center.
+
+In the shocking hours following Sunday's attack on an LGBT nightclub by a gunman apparently inspired by ISIS, Clinton largely chose to follow this tried-and-tested rulebook, with a few departures from the script for her own political benefit.
+
+Trump, however, tore it to shreds, demonstrating once again the extent to which he represents a radical departure from established political norms, thrilling his supporters and alarming his foes.
+
+The real estate developer went out of his way to play politics with the tragedy, with fearsome attacks on Clinton and President Barack Obama within hours of the rampage and a blistering speech Monday that appeared to equate all Muslims with the homegrown radicals behind recent terror attacks.
+
+He presented himself as a candidate of change, urgency -- and the antidote to the status quo exemplified by Clinton. That conventional approach, he charged, allowed terror to fester, and he accused the former secretary of state of wanting to take away Americans' guns and let radical Muslim immigrants slaughter innocents.
+
+And in one of his first tweets after the killing spree Sunday, he called on Obama to resign if he's not willing to use the words ""radical Islamic terrorism.""
+
+""We need a new leader. We need a new leader fast,"" Trump said at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire on Monday. ""They have put political correctness above common sense, above your safety, and above all else. I refuse to be politically correct.""
+
+He added, ""The days of deadly ignorance will end, and they will end soon if I'm elected.""
+
+If he does win the election, Trump's actions over the last two days suggest that not only will America's posture in the global war on terror change significantly, but the entire mold of how the U.S. president responds to tragedies and national crises could also be shattered.
+
+Clinton has responded the Orlando attack in a more conventional way -- but that, too, represents a political overture, even if a subtler one.
+
+She sought to neutralize the potency of Trump's attacks over her language by telling CNN's ""New Day"" Monday that she was willing to use the term ""radical Islamism.""
+
+And the horror unfolded two weeks after she lacerated Trump's temperament, worldview and knowledge, which she said disqualified him from being America's commander in chief.
+
+So it's a natural extension of her campaign strategy to build upon that argument through the aftermath of the latest terror strike on U.S. soil.
+
+On Monday, she took Trump's arguments about increased scrutiny of the Muslim community and his calls for tough new immigration policies and argued they would make America less safe.
+
+""Inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric and threatening to ban the families and friends of Muslim Americans as well as millions of Muslim business people and tourists from entering our country hurts the vast majority of Muslims who love freedom and hate terror,"" she said.
+
+""So does saying that we have to start special surveillance on our fellow Americans because of their religion,"" she continued. ""That's wrong. And it's also dangerous. It plays right into the terrorists' hands.""
+
+Trump, however, has been undeterred by this argument.
+
+He's instead provided tough talk about Muslims and terrorists, speaking with declarative directness about crushing terrorism in a way some voters might find more satisfying than the cliches uttered by political leaders ever since the September 11 attacks.
+
+Indeed, tough talk on terror is a cause behind which many Republicans, even those who are skeptical of Trump, can unite and offers at least the prospect of Obama's rising approval numbers, which are currently above 50% and thereforehelpful to Clinton.
+
+Trump offered a frank admission after ISIS-inspired massacres in France and San Bernardino, California, last year that acts of terrorism and his strong response help his poll numbers.
+
+But he also risks alienating voters not enamored of sweeping statements that can be untruthful.
+
+He seemed to suggest Monday that every Muslim immigrant was potentially a savage terrorist. He said the perpetrator of the Orlando attacks was an Afghan, even though he was an American born in New York. And he made unsubstantiated claims that Clinton is looking to confiscate all Americans' guns and wants to let loose Islamic terrorists.
+
+Voters sizing up Trump as a potential president might also note that he tends to tear open political divides rather than to build bridges at a time of crisis. And in the aftermath of the tragedy, Trump appeared to be preoccupied that the media was not treating him fairly, according to one of his Facebook posts in which he explained that he was rescinding the press credentials of The Washington Post.
+
+Everything Clinton has done since the attack seems to have had the ulterior motive of setting up an implied contrast with Trump to exploit this possible vulnerability.
+
+Where Trump was impulsive in his brash Twitter response to the attack, Clinton was moderate. Her initial tweet and statements avoided overt politicization of the tragedy and she left it to her communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, to fire back at Trump in a volley that quickly turned the tragedy into a political war of words.
+
+Clinton, like her rival, was framed by American flags for her speech responding to the massacre, but in comparison, she spoke deliberately and unveiled a detailed plan to combat the evolving scourge of homegrown terrorism.
+
+Though she chose not to mention Trump by name, her speech was a clear repudiation of the policies the Republican espoused a few hours later.
+
+""The Orlando terrorist may be dead, but the virus that poisoned his mind remains very much alive. And we must attack it with clear eyes, steady hands, unwavering determination and pride in our country and our values,"" Clinton said.
+
+While she proposed an effort to root out terrorism in the Middle East and at home, she stressed, unlike Trump, that Muslims must be part of the process.
+
+She also didn't hesitate to jump into the fray on the key Democratic issue of gun control, calling for more efforts by the U.S. government to stop ""weapons of war"" from getting into the hands of radicalized Americans.
+
+And she reached out to a core political support base -- the LGBT community -- expressing empathy for the attack on a place where those who died had imagined they were safe and among friends who understood them.
+
+Overall, Clinton sought to portray herself as the kind of sober, unifying figure dedicated to considered action and meticulous planning that many Americans expect to see in their president.
+
+Yet the risk for her, in part, is being seen as a figure of continuity at a time when many Americans are becoming increasingly fearful for their security and could begin to blame the Obama administration for the new instances of terror on its watch.
+
+Obama, for all his rhetorical gifts, has come under criticism in recent months for not adequately communicating with an American public reeling from multiple attacks on the West.
+
+His analytical, reserved, no-drama style could hardly be more different than that of the pyrotechnical Trump -- one reason why the Republican presumptive nominee has drawn millions of supporters.
+
+Clinton, while more hawkish in her rhetoric than Obama, would be a far more conventional national security president than Trump, partly owing to experience on the international stage as a former first lady and secretary of state.
+
+So far it's not clear if the wider general electorate will prefer the outspoken billionaire's brand of anti-terror politics or gravitate to Clinton's more sober persona.
+
+But each candidate is betting in the wake of the worst mass shooting on U.S. soil that they have best responded to the national mood.",REAL
+2511,Trump says building a U.S.-Mexico wall is ‘easy.’ But is it really?,"For centuries, societies have erected walls and fences to separate themselves from their neighbors, from the Great Wall of China through the Berlin Wall right up to the barrier that today divides Israel from the Palestinians on the West Bank.
+
+The United States has debated putting up security barriers of its own along the Southwest border and has spent billions of dollars in recent years fencing one-third of it.
+
+Now, Donald Trump is proposing to go even further, vowing to build a massive, impenetrable wall along the U.S.-Mexico frontier to keep out illegal Mexican migrants. 
+
+“Building a wall is easy, and it can be done inexpensively,” the Republican presidential candidate said in an interview. “It’s not even a difficult project if you know what you’re doing.’’
+
+The wall has become the signature proposal of Trump’s campaign, which has stirred widespread controversy over its focus on illegal immigration and his comments about immigrants.
+
+Any wall-building effort would cost billions of dollars and encounter a variety of obstacles, according to experts, documents and federal officials, including some of the same difficulties that bedeviled the federal government as it spent more than $7 billion on border fencing. The hurdles include environmental and engineering problems; fights with ranchers and others who don’t want to give up their land; and the huge topographical challenges of the border, which runs through remote desert in Arizona to rugged mountains in New Mexico and, for two-thirds of its length, along rivers.
+
+“It’s extremely challenging to put a brick-and-mortar wall along the Southwest border for any number of reasons,” said Richard Stana, who wrote multiple reports on border security for the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office before retiring in 2011. “It seems very simplistic.”
+
+If such a barrier could be erected, experts and government officials agreed that making it impenetrable would be virtually impossible, as is completely securing the entire 1,954-mile border. The Department of Homeland Security is already spending millions of dollars a year to maintain existing fences and to repair breaches, according to government reports and officials, while drug traffickers and smugglers are increasingly using tunnels to pass underneath.
+
+While a wall along much of the border might theoretically be possible, said Thad Bingel, a former senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official, “is it desirable? At what cost, and what do you give up to pay for that?’’
+
+Bingel — who was involved in border fence-building during the George W. Bush administration and is now a partner at Command Consulting Group in Washington — added: “Every wall can be circumvented. People can go under it, they can go over it. . . . No one should go into this with the idea that if you just build the right kind of wall, no one will get through.’’
+
+Trump disputed that, saying that a wall “would be very effective” in deterring illegal migrants and that seismic and other equipment could detect and stop any underground tunnels. “A wall is better than fencing, and it’s much more powerful,” he said. “It’s more secure. It’s taller.”
+
+The veteran builder acknowledged that environmental impact studies would be difficult but said he is the one person who can rise to the challenge. “I’m considered a great builder, by everybody,” he said, adding that cost is irrelevant because he would force Mexico to pay for the structure. Asked whether that was realistic, Trump said: “It’s realistic if you know something about the art of negotiating. If you have a bunch of clowns negotiating, it’s not realistic.”
+
+Trump has emerged as a leading GOP candidate partly because of his strong statements about immigration, which have included describing Mexicans entering the country illegally as “rapists” and “murderers.” He has suggested at times that his proposed wall would be extensive and would cover nearly the entire border, but said in the interview: “You don’t have to build it in every location. There would be some locations where you would have guards, where you don’t need it because the topography acts as its own wall, whether that’s water or very rough terrain.”
+
+[Univision cuts ties with Trump over comments about Mexican immigrants]
+
+The concept of a wall or fence along virtually the entire border has bubbled up occasionally in the nation’s immigration debate, with some Republicans supporting the idea. Today, there are more than 45 such walls and border fences worldwide, perhaps most prominently Israel’s West Bank barrier.
+
+While Israeli officials say it has reduced attacks, security specialists say that barrier, slated to be more than 400 miles long when finished, is not comparable to what would be required along the far more extensive U.S. Southwest border. The Israelis, they add, supplement the physical concrete barrier with a mix of border police and technology, much as the Department of Homeland Security does in the United States.
+
+The U.S. government began building border fencing near San Diego in 1990. As DHS cracked down on illegal immigration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President George W. Bush dramatically expanded the effort. Spending on border fencing and related infrastructure such as lighting shot up from $298 million in 2006 to $1.5 billion the following year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
+
+Overall, more than $7 billion has been spent to build what is now almost 653 miles of Southwest border fencing — costing nearly $5 million per mile in some spots — nearly half in Arizona.
+
+The costs could rise substantially if extensive new fencing was built, since it would be in increasingly remote regions without roads and in mountainous terrain, said Marc Rosenblum, deputy director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute. Adding even more to the expense, he said, would be acquiring private land near the border and maintaining existing fencing.
+
+Trump’s wall would probably cost far more than fencing, Stana said, given the greater needs for construction materials and labor.
+
+While current and former DHS officials say the fencing has been effective in deterring illegal immigration, they say it is only one part of a broader border strategy that includes expanded sensors, drones and other technology, along with growing numbers of Border Patrol officers.
+
+“Our southern border is a mixture of winding river, desert and mountains. Simply building more fences is not the answer,” DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said in an October speech.
+
+The government’s difficulties in erecting fences highlight the challenges of building a wall, experts said. The fencing mandated by Congress in 2006 was beset by delays, surging construction costs and disputes with private property owners, mostly in Texas, DHS officials have said. The biggest failure was the virtual fence, a Bush administration effort to cover the border with a high-tech surveillance system.
+
+“It’s a huge effort to construct anything at the border,” said one DHS official, who has worked in Republican and Democratic administrations and spoke on the condition of anonymity because Trump’s plan is part of a political campaign. “You have lots of requirements to do construction: the environmental piece, engineering assessments. And a private landowner might not want fencing.”
+
+Wayne Cornelius, director of the Mexican migration field research program at the University of California at San Diego, called Trump’s proposal “ludicrous. . . . Any physical barrier can be tunneled under or climbed over or gotten around. There will always be gaps, and smugglers and migrants will seek out those gaps and go through.”
+
+Robert Costa and Alice Crites contributed to this story.",REAL
+4013,U.S.-backed Syrian rebels appeal for antiaircraft missiles,"U.S.-backed rebels in Syria appealed to the Obama administration Friday for anti­aircraft missiles to defend their positions against relentless Russian airstrikes that have so far mostly targeted the moderate opposition to President Bashar al-Assad’s rule.
+
+A joint statement issued by the United States and other Western allies who have collectively aided moderate rebel units urged Russia to stop targeting moderate rebels and “to focus its efforts on fighting ISIL,” the acronym referring to the Islamic State.
+
+U.S. officials indicated that there is no immediate plan to offer additional assistance to the rebel units that have been armed and trained under a covert CIA-led program aimed at supporting moderate groups and weakening Assad’s hold on power.
+
+The covert operation is separate from a much-publicized Pentagon program to train a force to fight the Islamic State that has so far produced no more than four or five loyal fighters, and it is widely credited with having helped rebel advances­ over the past six months in the areas now being targeted by the Russians.
+
+Russian warplanes sustained their bombardment of rebel positions in northern Syria for a third day Friday, and for the first time, the Defense Ministry in Moscow said the strikes also hit targets in the heart of Islamic State territory, in the north-central Syrian province of Raqqa.
+
+A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said two strikes overnight Thursday hit an Islamic State training camp and a command post south of the city of Raqqa, expanding the scope of the air campaign.
+
+But continued airstrikes Friday suggested that Russia’s main priority remains the anti-Assad rebellion in northern and western Syria, which poses a greater threat to the regime’s control over Damascus, the capital, than the forces­ of the Islamic State, concentrated in the far north and east of the country.
+
+The attacks by Russian warplanes on the provinces of Hama, Homs and Idlib “did not target Daesh,” said the joint statement by the United States and its allies, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “These military actions constitute a further escalation and will only fuel more extremism and radicalization.”
+
+The statement was signed by the governments of the United States, France, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Kingdom, which have collectively participated in the effort to arm and train moderate rebels through joint operations centers in Turkey and Jordan.
+
+One of the groups that has received weapons and training under the program said its positions in the Hama town of Latamneh were hit by 15 bombs Friday, the third and heaviest consecutive day of strikes against the town. Although Russian officials have insisted that their attacks are only targeting the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra or “other” terrorist organizations, no other military group is present in the town, according to Capt. Mustafa Moarati, a spokesman for the Tajamu al-Izza rebel brigade.
+
+He said a video released by the Russian Defense Ministry on Thursday purportedly showing the destruction of an Islamic State headquarters in fact was of a command center of the U.S.-backed group. The Russians are using Su-34 warplanes that are more sophisticated than any in the existing Syrian air force, enabling a more accurate delivery of higher-ordnance missiles than had been the case when Syrian warplanes were bombing, he said.
+
+“They are doing this for two reasons. Firstly, because we are friends with the United States and they want to challenge the United States. And secondly, to vanquish the Free Syrian Army on the ground to show the world that only extremists are fighting Assad and that therefore he should survive,” Moarati said, moments before a huge explosion interrupted the call with him.
+
+It was the second Russian strike of the day and the sixth in three days, he said, later adding that 13 more strikes followed. He said his unit has already received TOW anti­tank missiles from the United States under the covert program. Unless it also receives anti­aircraft missiles, his unit is in danger of being eliminated, he said.
+
+“At least they could give us anti­aircraft missiles,” he said.
+
+[This is Russia’s air power in Syria]
+
+Hassan Haj Ali, the commander of Suqour al-Jabal, another U.S.-backed group targeted by Russian strikes Thursday, said that unless the United States offers help to the rebels it has supported so far, there is a risk of further radicalizing rebels who have so far adhered to the moderate demands of the 2011 uprising against Assad’s rule. He said he had not received any response to a request for help from the United States, relayed through intermediaries, who said they would consult with U.S. leaders.
+
+“We need one of two things. Either a clear policy from the United States to prevent Russia and the regime from bombing Syrians, or otherwise they should send us anti­aircraft missiles so that we can confront the Russian planes,” he said, speaking from the main front line between rebels and the Islamic State in the northern Aleppo town of Marae.
+
+“If they don’t help us, people will lose trust in our supporters, and this will increase extremism,” he added.
+
+A U.S military official said the request was under consideration. Repeated requests by U.S.-backed rebels to be supplied with anti­aircraft missiles to be used against Syrian aircraft have been repeatedly refused in the past.
+
+“It’s a complicated question and an even more complicated answer,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter freely. “Any decisions that we make, there are going to be ramifications,” not just for the United States but also for Washington’s partners in the military coalition against the Islamic State, he said.
+
+Roth reported from Moscow. Missy Ryan in Washington and Sam Rifaie in Beirut contributed to this report.
+
+Why Russia is in Syria
+
+This is Russia’s air power in Syria",REAL
+333,Dogs hit escapees' scent at gas station near prison,"(CNN) Investigators are looking at surveillance video from a gas station about a mile from the New York prison where two inmates escaped over the weekend, Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie told CNN on Thursday night.
+
+Tracking dogs picked up the scent of prisoners Richard Matt and David Sweat at the station and followed it east toward the town of Cadyville, Wylie said.
+
+There is also a Subway sandwich shop at the gas station and Wylie said the prisoners might have been looking for food in the trash bin.
+
+The store opens at 4 a.m. so it would have been staffed about the time officials believe the convicted killers broke out. There is limited security video from the store and authorities were reviewing it.
+
+Wylie said the dogs were still on the scent Thursday evening and they were working their way in from the perimeter.
+
+""If this is an actual true lead that the dogs are following on, we hope to be successful in the next 24 hours,"" he said.
+
+Earlier Thursday, law enforcement search crews converged on a site east of the gas station in upstate New York.
+
+A large-perimeter search area has been set up around the site, about 3 miles from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, according to a state official and another source briefed on the investigation. Guards found out about the killers' escape from the maximum-security prison during a bed check early Saturday.
+
+A resident in the area said she's confined to her house.
+
+""I haven't left home in two days, I had to call in to work today because you wouldn't be able to return back home,"" Brooke Lepage said. ""There were constant helicopters. Last night they had floodlights. There was a recorded (telephone) message telling us to stay in the house and make sure outside lights were on.""
+
+In addition to the scent, investigators found an imprint either from a shoe or boot as well as food wrappers in the area, one of the two sources said. Wylie said that possible bedding -- an indent in the grass or leaves -- has also been discovered.
+
+As the manhunt intensified, new details emerged about a prison employee who officials said may have assisted the inmates in their brazen escape.
+
+State Department of Corrections officials had previously received a complaint about the relationship between prison seamstress Joyce Mitchell and one of the two escaped inmates, according to a state official briefed on the internal investigation.
+
+Wylie confirmed the inquiry to CNN's ""Anderson Cooper 360˚"" but said the allegation was unfounded.
+
+""There wasn't enough evidence to support a finding inside the department (of corrections),"" Wylie said.
+
+But, he added: ""I don't believe that the information was that there was absolutely no relationship.""
+
+Wylie said Sweat was removed temporarily from the prison tailor shop, where he and Mitchell worked.
+
+Investigators zeroed in on Mitchell -- whose relatives have denied her involvement in the breakout -- because of the earlier complaint, the source said.
+
+State corrections officials declined to comment because of the ongoing investigation.
+
+New York State Police Superintendent Joseph D'Amico has said Mitchell, an industrial training supervisor at the prison, had befriended the men and ""may have had some sort of role in assisting them.""
+
+The state police superintendent did not elaborate. But according to a source close to the investigation, authorities believe Mitchell planned to pick up the inmates after their escape but changed her mind at the last minute. Her cell phone was used to call people connected to Matt, according to another source. It's unclear who made the calls, when they were made or whether Mitchell knew about them.
+
+Mitchell told investigators that Matt made her feel ""special,"" though she didn't mention being in love with him, a source familiar with the investigation said.
+
+While she didn't warn authorities about the escape, she has answered all their questions each time they've gone back to her, a New York state official said.
+
+Authorities are holding off on charging her with being an accomplice, hoping instead to have her continued cooperation, a New York state official told CNN.
+
+Wylie, the Clinton County district attorney, said his office is considering possibly charging her with felonies. One would accuse her of being an accessory to the escape and the other would be for ""promoting prison contraband.""
+
+Mitchell's family is standing behind her, with her daughter-in-law telling CNN that ""95% of what is being said"" is not true.
+
+Paige Mitchell denied that her mother-in-law was to be the getaway driver and that she helped provide the power tools used in the escape. She added that Matt may have persuaded her mother-in-law to contact people for him who knew about art, saying, ""Her heart was in the right place.""
+
+""They don't have the facts to prove this,"" she said. ""This is just slander and rumor.""
+
+Wylie said Mitchell is fully cooperating and has come to meet with investigators almost every day since Sunday.
+
+""She voluntarily seeks us out, comes in, and each day has been providing more additional information that's assisted the investigators,"" he told Cooper.
+
+Vermont governor: The escapees are dangerous and desperate
+
+The jailbreak has transformed the rural, idyllic swath of northeast New York from a place where people go to get away from the crowds and crime of urban life into something closer to a ""military state,"" as one resident described it.
+
+Authorities closed parts of State Route 374 on Thursday ""until further notice"" because of a lead from the previous night, New York State Police spokesman William Duffy said. Checkpoints were set up along a stretch from Dannemora east to West Plattsburgh, while authorities looked for clues.
+
+Searches were underway in hundreds of seasonal homes in a 5-square-mile area in and around West Plattsburgh, with helicopters equipped with thermal cameras providing support, officials said.
+
+The area isn't the only place law enforcement is looking.
+
+Vermont state police vessels and troopers have searched on Lake Champlain, which straddles the two states, as well as in nearby campsites.
+
+But Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin acknowledges that ""we really have no idea where they are.""
+
+""This is a governor's nightmare,"" he added. ""We're trying to protect the public safety and take care of our folks (because) these guys are dangerous, they are desperate, and they would do anything to continue their freedom.""
+
+Authorities have been looking for Matt and Sweat since Saturday morning.
+
+The two used power tools to get out of their cells and cut into a steam pipe, navigating a tunnel of pipes and finally surfacing out a manhole.
+
+Sweat was serving a life sentence without parole for fatally shooting and then running over Broome County Sheriff's Deputy Kevin Tarsia.
+
+Matt held a businessman hostage for 27 hours, and then tortured and killed him after he wouldn't give him more money.
+
+State data show that most escapees in New York are captured within 24 hours. Of 29 inmates who fled between 2002 and 2013, only one was free for more than two days.",REAL
+5062,Clinton fact-checked on 'truthful' claim in email scandal,"Hillary Clinton is getting hammered for saying on “Fox News Sunday” that FBI Director James Comey confirmed her statements on her email scandal were “truthful” – with one prominent fact-checker giving the claim four “Pinocchios.”
+
+The former secretary of state cited Comey when asked to account for her repeated claims that she never sent or received material marked classified on her personal email account. When host Chris Wallace noted that Comey said those things were not true, Clinton disagreed.
+
+“That's not what I heard Director Comey say … Director Comey said that my answers were truthful and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails,” she said.
+
+The Washington Post Fact Checker picked apart that statement, ultimately giving it four “Pinocchios,” its worst rating for truthfulness.
+
+“Clinton is cherry-picking statements by Comey to preserve her narrative about the unusual setup of a private email server. This allows her to skate past the more disturbing findings of the FBI investigation,” the Post wrote, noting that she was relying on Comey’s statement to Congress: “We have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.”
+
+However, the FBI director did not say the same about her statements to the American public. And during testimony before a House committee, Comey said it was “not true” that nothing Clinton sent or received was marked classified. To the contrary, he said, “there was classified material emailed.”
+
+The Post concluded: “While Comey did say there was no evidence she lied to the FBI, that is not the same as saying she told the truth to the American public — which was the point of Wallace’s question. Comey has repeatedly not taken a stand on her public statements.
+
+“And although Comey did say many emails were retroactively classified, he also said that there were some emails that were already classified that should not have been sent on an unclassified, private server. That’s the uncomfortable truth that Clinton has trouble admitting.”
+
+Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., also called out Clinton on Twitter for the claims.
+
+The campaign has stressed, with regard to the emails apparently marked classified, that Comey acknowledged during the hearing in question the markings themselves were not properly marked. The State Department also has suggested those markings shouldn’t have been there.
+
+Comey, though, also challenged other statements by Clinton during his testimony. On her claim that she used one device, Comey said, “She used multiple devices.” And on her claim that she turned over all work-related emails, he said, “No, we found work-related emails, thousands that were not returned.""
+
+Clinton, meanwhile, acknowledged again on “Fox News Sunday” that she made a “mistake,” while appearing to spread the blame around.
+
+“I take classification seriously. I relied on and had every reason to rely on the judgments of the professionals with whom I worked. And so, in retrospect, maybe some people are saying, ‘Well, … among those 300 people, they made the wrong call,’” Clinton said. “At the time, there was no reason, in my view, to doubt the professionalism and the determination by the people who work every single day on behalf of our country.”",REAL
+36,Dem outcry on abortion measure they failed to notice threatens to stall anti-sex trafficking bill,"A bipartisan bill aimed at combating human sex trafficking has hit a major snag after Senate Democrats -- who unanimously voted to move the bill out of committee -- hit the brakes upon discovering a Republican-backed abortion provision.
+
+Though the relatively modest 68-page bill has been available for nearly two months, it wasn't until this week that Senate Democrats said they noticed the language, and subsequently threatened to block the bill.
+
+As drafted, the legislation would crack down on what lawmakers in both parties agree is a seamy underworld of drugs and human sex trafficking akin to modern-day slavery. Fines paid by those convicted of the sex-trafficking crimes would go into a fund to help victims.
+
+But Democrats now are balking because the legislation also contains a Republican-inserted provision that bars the use of fines to pay for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the pregnant woman is in jeopardy.
+
+""Democrats believe that divisive issues like this should be kept off what is otherwise a broadly bipartisan bill,"" a spokesman for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said, adding that they're trying to find a ""path forward.""
+
+Republicans cast this as a routine extension of the so-called Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortions except in limited circumstances. But Democrats said the legislation would mark a significant expansion since it applies to personal funds paid in fines. They also noted the restriction against the use of fine money would be permanent, while the one that applies to federal funds would lapse unless renewed on a year-by-year basis.
+
+Reid said in remarks on the Senate floor that ""a number of people feel that it was by sleight-of-hand"" that the provision was included in the measure, while ""others say staff should have seen it was in the bill."" A day earlier, others in his party had said flatly that no one on their side of the aisle had been informed.
+
+But Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Democrats had, in fact, known of the abortion-related provision that Republicans backed, citing discussion among aides of both parties.
+
+Republicans ripped Democrats for stalling over this issue.
+
+""This is really not an honorable time or a laudable time in the history of the United States Senate,"" said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
+
+The events presented a difficult challenge for Democrats, forcing them to decide if their support for abortion rights justified blocking passage of a sex trafficking measure designed to help children and women. They privately conceded they lacked the votes to strip out the abortion portion of the bill they oppose, although they expressed confidence they had enough support to prevent passage of the entire measure.
+
+At the same time, they were forced to consider whether their aides had failed to read the bill closely enough to discover the provision when the bill was made public in January, or when it was approved unanimously in the Senate Judiciary Committee late last month.
+
+A statement released by a spokeswoman for the Democrats on the panel said Sen. Patrick Leahy, the party's senior committee member, did not know in advance that the abortion-related provision had been included, nor did his aides.
+
+A spokesman for Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the bill's leading Democratic supporter, said the lawmaker first learned of it Monday.
+
+ Democrats also circulated an email written by a Republican aide summarizing a list of changes that had been made in the legislation from an earlier version written last year. It contained no mention of abortion.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6564,Podesta relative earned six-figure fees lobbying Clintons State Dept. during his tenure there,"This is how it works in the Clinton Cabal...or is it the Mainstream Mafia. 1) Qatar supports ISIS (just by the way) 2) Qatar wants to buy advanced U.S. missile defence systems, Apache attack helicopters and other military materiel 3) Ratheon (a big defence contractor) wants to sell said U.S. Military goods to Qatar 4) These kinds of foreign military sales have to be approved by the State Department 5) Hillary becomes Secretary of State 6) Hillary has a ""Charitable Foundation"" 7) Hillary has a former POTUS as her spouse 8) Hillary has a network of aides, confidants, bundlers and fundraisers at her beck and call (all part of the Clinton Organized Crime Family) 9) John Podesta (at that time)...yeah the same John Podesta who is having all of his emails released right now... held dual titles at the State Department: as a ""senior advisor"", and as a member of a foreign policy advisory board Secretary Clinton created. 10) Ratheon hires John Podesta's sister-in-law (Heather Podesta), along with John Merrigan and Matt Bernstein (both major donors or bundlers to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 campaigns). This guaranteed them access to Hillary Clinton. 11) Qatar, meanwhile, donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. They hired Bill Clinton to make 2 speeches that paid him between $500,000 and $1 million dollars. They gave Slick Willy another $1 million as a birthday gift...aaahhh, isn't that sweet? 12) The $19 billion dollar sale from Ratheon to Qatar was...wait for it - approved by Hillary Clinton! Yeah!! 13) Heather Podesta, John Merrigan and Matt Berstein were paid $460,000 in Lobbying Fees by Ratheon 14) Hillary Clinton left the State Department 15) Ratheon released Podesta, Merrigan and Bernstein...as they no longer had direct and personal access to the Secretary of State. This is how it is done folks. This is pay-for-play. The ISIS supporting nation of Qatar gets advanced U.S. Military gear, the Clintons, the Podestas, and assorted others in the Clinton Crime Family get rich(er). There are still a lot of Americans who need to wake up, pay attention, and then make the right decision on November 8th.",FAKE
+8061,Running on the Hillary Ticket? Then Let Me Ask…,"Charles Goyette https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/running-hillary-ticket-let-ask/ 
+Unless you think “What’s your favorite color?” is a hard question, you shouldn’t expect much from lapdog press interviews of Statist candidates. 
+In a Wall Street Journal column this morning, James Freeman, an editorial page editor, notes that getting candidates in races below Donald Trump on the Republican ticket to denounce him has become a regular sport in the media. But he wonders why reporters “don’t force down-ballot Democrats to take a position on each new Clinton email revelation.” 
+That would be fine. Although there is nothing we didn’t suspect, thanks to WikiLeaks, we have more details than ever about Clinton venality and political corruption. 
+But there is a line of questioning that is even more important. 
+Why shouldn’t other candidates on the Democrat ticket be asked to endorse or disavow Hillary’s regime change wars in Libya and Syria? 
+Shouldn’t they be made to own the jihadist-generating carnage she champions? Wouldn’t it be wise to tie political supporters to her war trajectory with Russia as well, so that if she has her way the survivors will know who was to blame? 1:20 pm on October 28, 2016",FAKE
+6142,BREAKING: Trump VP Plane Slides Off Runway at LaGuardia Airport in NYC!,"0 comments GOP VP candidate Mike Pence’s Trump plane slid off the runway at LaGuardia airport Thursday evening, landing in the mud not far from the East River. 
+The Trump plane stopped in the mud. It broke through a thin veneer of concrete designed to give way to keep planes from sliding into the river. 
+No one was injured in the incident. Authorities say there could have been fatalities had the plane ended up in the water. 
+KTLA 5 reports : 
+Rescue crews were responding to the scene. The incident took place during a rainy night in the city. 
+The press pool in the back of the aircraft could feel the plane fishtailing as it touched down and sliding off the runway before coming to a very sharp halt in the grass off the side of the runway. 
+“We could feel the plane moving, and it was just not a natural landing that you experience,” CNN’s Elizabeth Landers, who was on the plane, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront.” 
+Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for Donald Trump’s campaign, said the businessman called Pence shortly after the incident, adding that Trump “is very glad everyone on-board the plane is safe.” 
+There was some noticeable damage to the runway. A campaign spokesperson told reporters there was no structural damage to the plane. 
+Landers said the Indiana governor’s trip to New York had initially been delayed due to inclement weather. His plane was kept in a ground hold at the airport in Fort Dodge, Iowa, earlier in the day. 
+Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the Department of Transportation, explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the weather likely prevented the plane from getting “good traction.” There were 37 people on board at the time of the accident, including Pence. 
+This could have been tragic. It is exponentially safer to fly in a plane than it is to ride in a car, but accidents still happen. Thank God all are safe.",FAKE
+105,Let’s make the South stop lying: The right’s war on our history — and truth — must be defeated now,"The final vote in the state House was a lopsided 94-20, but flag apologists didn’t go quietly. Debate lasted 13 hours before exhausting itself around 1 a.m. Thursday. The leader of the dead-enders was Republican state Rep. Michael Pitts, a 60-year-old white male, Baptist, retired cop and NRA devotee heretofore best known for backing South Carolina’s “Second Amendment Weekend” (in which the state waives sales taxes on rifles and handguns) and a loopy plan to replace U.S. paper currency with silver and gold coins minted by the state.
+
+Pitt insists Confederate soldiers only knew “what they heard in the general store, that Northern States were attacking Southern States.” He said he learned as a child to call the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.” He didn’t say if he calls it something else now, but he did accuse foes of “scrubbing history.” It was a favorite theme of flag defenders. Rep. Eric Bedingfield said he’d “bathed this thing in prayer” and “called my pastor to pray for me,” from which he learned “you can’t erase history.” Rep. J. Gary Simrill accused the removers of “almost a cultural genocide.” For sheer oddball color, no one beat Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, who summed things up in these lovely words: “To remove the flag… and thinking it would change history would be like removing a tattoo from the corpse of a loved one and thinking it would change a loved one’s obituary.”
+
+For 150 years, folks like Pitts, Bedingfield, Simrill and Peeler rewrote the history of the South. When South Carolina declared war on the Union, 57 percent of its citizens were African-American slaves; all scrubbed from every tale of “Southern heritage.” Even the most pious ancestor worshipper knows the Confederate flag is the flag of racism, slavery and sedition. It took years of arduous scrubbing and lies of satanic ingenuity to get anyone to think otherwise. The truth won’t be restored overnight.
+
+In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Emanuel AME church there are efforts across the South to remove Confederate monuments. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu wants to take down four. Three honor Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and P.G. T. Beauregard. The fourth honors a post-Civil War revolt against Louisiana’s reconstruction government by a band of ex-soldiers called the White League. My money is on Landrieu, but the mere fact that such a monument still stands suggests how hard it’ll be getting the South to face up to its past. It won’t be easy anywhere.
+
+On the day South Carolina voted to lower the flag, the even loonier Republicans in the U.S. House pushed to display it on Confederate Memorial Day — a holiday in nine states — and sell it in souvenir shops on federal lands. A fearful John Boehner shut them down, but in the months and years ahead, as the memory of Charleston fades and fewer mayors, governors and House speakers see a need to spend political capital, the fight may get harder. And this is just the fight to keep the state from spreading lies. The harder fight will be to get not just the South but the whole country to commit to telling the truth, and not just about the Civil War.
+
+For years, the right has waged a war on history every bit as relentless as and even more effective than its war on science.  George Orwell famously observed that “who controls the past controls the future.” In America few outside the political right took his point. It has carried the fight to colleges, media, government and especially public schools. An ineluctable lesson of Charleston is that the left must finally fight back.
+
+As far back as the early`80s the religious right sought to elect its people to school boards, often instructing them to conceal their views until after they were elected. Sex education was their top priority, but they also dove into history and other social studies. In her book “As Texas Goes: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins tells the story of the Texas School Board. Only she could make this chilling tale amusing. Texas is America’s second biggest purchaser of textbooks and the state controls the purchasing so publishers have long bowed to its dictates on content.
+
+The board was always conservative but when real fanatics took it over they began furiously rewriting curricula, substituting ideological cant for scholarship wherever possible. 2010 was a banner year for them. They bumped Thomas Jefferson from a list of “influential thinkers”—they felt him misguided in the mater of the separation of church and state—but promoted Phyllis Schlafly to take his place. They also encouraged study of George Wallace, the NRA, the Moral Majority, Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address and the Heritage Foundation and told schools to tell kids Joe McCarthy was right about communists infiltrating government.
+
+The right does its most insidious work in classrooms but it wages war on history almost everywhere. You may recall that in the mid-’90s the Smithsonian planned an exhibit on the Enola Gay, the B29 aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The American Legion was instantly up in arms and the rest of the right soon followed. Perhaps they feared word of the bombing would get out or that Trotskyites at the Air and Space Museum would use the incident for propaganda purposes. The exhibit was killed. After 89 brave members of Congress called for his head, the museum’s director was forced to resign.
+
+As evidenced by Dylann Roof and millions who share his views if not his soul sickness, the right has been most effective and destructive in reweaving the history of the Confederacy. In a piece in the Washington Post this week, James Loewen describes the decades’ long work of Southern “historians’” to turn the Civil War from an insurrection mounted to defend human slavery into a ‘war between the states’ sparked in large part by an imperious federal government bent on robbing the South of its liberty. Loewen reminds us of how hard Civil War apologists work to shape our collective memory.  Kentucky is a border state that never joined the confederacy; 90,000 Kentuckians volunteered for the Union army, nearly triple the number that fought for the rebellion. Today Kentucky has 2 Union monuments and 72 Confederate monuments. It may be that conservatives care more about the past or are more susceptible to nostalgia. But erecting all those monuments took effort.  The right is willing to make it because, like Orwell, it sees the point of controlling the past. Republicans are even fonder of twisting the story of America’s birth. In 1984 Ronald Reagan added the word ‘shining’ to the phrase “city on a hill” from John Winthrop’s famed sermon to Puritans bound for Massachusetts. Winthrop’s message to his flock was to behave, because the whole world was watching: “We shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.”  Reagan’s message was almost the exact opposite; that whatever America did must be good because God chose it to be the envy of all nations, a notion Winthrop would have heard as sinful pride and that helped inspire the reckless self-reverential folderol known as “American Exceptionalism.” (John Kennedy was the first modern president to invoke the sermon. In a lustrous speech in Boston days before his inaugural he perfectly echoed Winthrop’s call to rise to the challenge of the hour.) Our founding has so much to teach us but so much of what is taught now is false. Since Reagan’s death the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, brainchild of noted social-contract shredder Grover Norquist, has labored to name something after Reagan in every county in America. I’d say they’re halfway there. They also want his name on currency, and a federal holiday in his honor. Norquist thinks the more stuff he names after Reagan the more taxes he can cut. I think he’s right. Such is the power of propaganda. Of course, the price of propaganda is ignorance. The more we fete Reagan, the harder it is to tell people what a train wreck his fiscal policies were; harder still to make them believe he ever apologized to Gorbachev for calling Russia an evil empire—he did– or went to Reykjavik boldly hoping to dismantle both the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. He did that, too; we just don’t know it. You’d think a left rife with college professors and other readers of books could fight this battle at least to a draw, but outside academia it barely put up a fight. A few lonely voices—Lewis Lapham and Stacy Schiff spring to mind–urged all who are in any sense progressive-minded to fight those who propagandize history. But up to now it was a tough sell. Among the many horrid lessons of Charleston is a new awareness of the price we pay for our neglect. We know now if we didn’t before just how many stand at the ready to pour hate into the vacuum of ignorance. The myth of the Confederacy may be the worst lie we tell, but countless others need correcting. There are lots of ways to do it, all with practical impact. If you fear the erosion of the right to privacy or the rule of law, you might think it time to remove J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the FBI headquarters in Washington. (Feel free to consider this essay a Kickstarter for that project.) We are right to celebrate the heritage of millions of Italian Americans who came to our shores. But what of the millions of Americans who got here 10,000 years before them?  Might not Columbus share his weekend with those whom we systematically exterminated? And speaking of heritage, the deal to lower the flag at South Carolina’s capitol included a promise to spend millions on a shrine to it somewhere off premises. Shouldn’t such a shrine await construction of a bigger one to the millions of proud South Carolinians who spent the Civil War years in bondage? The right says the left wants only to disparage America. If nothing else, the last few weeks should teach us to question the depth of the right’s oft-proclaimed love of country, just as we’d question the spirituality of the publicly pious. It seems when the right isn’t busy kicking other people out of America, it’s busy threatening to leave. (See the borderline secessionist and outright nullification sentiments voices by so many Republican presidential candidates.) The funny thing is there is so much about this wonderful, diverse nation that, given the chance, liberals could teach conservatives to love. You can’t really love what you don’t really know. The poet William Blake had a theory that we all move from innocence, a joyous state in which all chimney sweeps seem happy and well, to experience, a sadder one in which we perceive their ill health and general misery. But Blake said there’s a third state we can attain in which we see suffering but still rejoice in life. He called this state, for some reason, organized innocence. We need a patriotism that is the moral equivalent of Blake’s organized innocence, an informed patriotism that lets us see all that we are, the bad and the good; a mature love of country that begins as it should in our love for one another and in our devotion to truth. It is to such patriotism that a true knowledge of history invites us.",REAL
+6006,Bundy Brother Acquittal Trolled In The Most Hilarious Way On Craigslist,"In the wake of the recent acquittal of the Bundy brothers and their co-conspirators, many people have voiced their upset at the injustice and possible race-driven decision. Though it’s... ",FAKE
+8888,October Shocker: FBI Has Explosive Information on Trump Conspiring With Putin,"By Sarah Jones on Sun, Oct 30th, 2016 at 8:59 pm Senator Harry Reid dropped the bomb that the FBI and national security experts possess ""explosive information"" about ties and coordination between Russia and Donald Trump and his campaign. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+Talk about burying the lede. 
+In Senator Harry Reid’s letter in which he suggests that FBI Director James Comey may have broken the law (the Hatch Law), he also drops the bomb that the FBI and national security experts possess “explosive information” about ties and coordination between Russia and Donald Trump and his campaign. 
+Reid writes, “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government – a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity.” 
+Reid points out the “disturbing double standard” in Comey’s treatment of sensitive information between the two parties with a “clear intent” to aid one over the other. 
+If the FBI and national security experts have information that Donald Trump and or his campaign are colluding or collaborating to bring about a particular result regarding the U.S. election or our foreign policy stances, this is an emergency. 
+Which issue is so much of an emergency that a federal official might consider dropping the bomb just 11 days before an election: Electing someone who is conspiring with Russia or electing someone whose aide may have sent an email she forget to tell everyone about. 
+The double standard is not only troubling at this point, but dangerous. 
+Bomb dropped. 
+Everyone already suspected Trump’s ties to Russia and his campaign has been full of ties to the Kremlin, but now Reid has confirmed information about coordination between Trump and Russia. 
+Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is an October shocker. 
+Reid’s full letter follows: 
+Dear Director Comey: 
+Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be a clear intent to aid one political party over another. I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act, which bars FBI officials from using their official authority to influence an election. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law. 
+The double standard established by your actions is clear. 
+In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government – a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity. The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information. 
+By contrast, as soon as you came into possession of the slightest innuendo related to Secretary Clinton, you rushed to publicize it in the most negative light possible. 
+Moreover, in tarring Secretary Clinton with thin innuendo, you overruled longstanding tradition and the explicit guidance of your own Department. You rushed to take this step eleven days before a presidential election, despite the fact that for all you know, the information you possess could be entirely duplicative of the information you already examined which exonerated Secretary Clinton. 
+As you know, a memo authored by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates on March 10, 2016, makes clear that all Justice Department employees, including you, are subject to the Hatch Act. The memo defines the political activity prohibited under the Hatch Act as “activity directed towards the success or failure of a political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group.” 
+The clear double-standard established by your actions strongly suggests that your highly selective approach to publicizing information, along with your timing, was intended for the success or failure of a partisan candidate or political group. 
+Please keep in mind that I have been a supporter of yours in the past. When Republicans filibustered your nomination and delayed your confirmation longer than any previous nominee to your position, I led the fight to get you confirmed because I believed you to be a principled public servant. 
+With the deepest regret, I now see that I was wrong. 
+Sincerely, 
+Senator Harry Reid",FAKE
+1744,Bernie vs. Hillary: Who connects better with voters?,"Sally Kohn is an activist, columnist and television commentator. Follow her on Twitter: @sallykohn . The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.
+
+(CNN) Without remotely the same level of name recognition, campaign infrastructure or media spotlight, Sen. Bernie Sanders has already posed a significant challenge to Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Just imagine what Tuesday's nationally televised debate, hosted by CNN, could do.
+
+The underdog Sanders leads Clinton in the early primary state of New Hampshire and is within striking distance in Iowa, although he continues to trail the former secretary of state by double digits among Democrats nationally.
+
+Arguably, Sanders' popularity among Democratic voters is fueled as much by who Sanders isn't as who he is: His populist positions and regular-guy disposition stand out in contrast with the chronically calculating and centrist Clinton.
+
+And this debate is his to lose: Just by showing up on the same stage as the presumptive front-runner and showing a wider audience that he can substantively and stylistically challenge Clinton, Sanders gains.
+
+But what about Clinton? She wants to avoid a protracted fight for the Democratic nomination, not to mention the sort of upset she suffered at the hands of Barack Obama in 2008. So it's in her best interest to brush aside Sanders as soon as possible. The first Democratic primary debate is her earliest and best opportunity to do so. How?
+
+Look for Clinton to employ three strategies.
+
+First, she'll likely try to lump her positions in with those of Sanders (and the other Democratic contenders) and say that all of the Democratic candidates mainly share the same vision and the party's best interest is served by picking the one with the best shot at being elected.
+
+Electability is Clinton's strongest argument, especially as more and more Democrats become legitimately freaked out by the cast of characters vying for the Republican nomination. It's in Clinton's interest to de-emphasize the ideological differences on the Democratic side and imply more agreement than not -- which is, for the most part, true.
+
+Sanders will try to poke holes in that script, especially with respect to Clinton's economic agenda, which has been rhetorically populist but conventionally centrist in policy terms.
+
+Sanders and many populist Democrats have opposed the agreement as a giveaway to big business that will hurt American workers. While Clinton tacitly backed the deal while secretary of state, she's now free to express her own opinion separate from the stance of the Obama administration.
+
+Will she ally herself with populist opposition to the trade deal? And even if she does, will people believe her stance is anything more than crass opportunism to win voters fleeing her for Sanders?
+
+Clinton's second strategy will likely be try to highlight ways in which she is more progressive than her Democratic opponents, especially Sanders. The recent mass shooting in Oregon, just days before the debate, yet again brings to the surface the concerns of Democratic voters -- and voters in general -- who are fed up with Congress' failure to pass common-sense gun laws despite overwhelming need and widespread public support.
+
+Here, Clinton can draw a clear contrast with Sanders, who has opposed some gun control measures and is out of step with the majority of Democratic primary voters on this issue. While she may have difficulty demonstrating her sincerity on economic populism, here the contrast with the senator from Vermont is strong -- his weak record on guns is a hard position to defend, especially now.
+
+Similarly, Clinton can try to distinguish herself as more progressive in addressing racial bias and structural racism. Despite Sanders' self-professed position as the most progressive candidate, in speaking about racial justice, police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement, he has been woefully inadequate at best.
+
+Clinton hasn't been much better, with her discussions on race often tainted by an unsettling defensiveness. But she's still clearly more comfortable talking about race than Sanders and has given more thought to how racial injustice poisons America's institutions and culture. Talking about this more in the debate will be good for America -- and good for her candidacy.
+
+Third, look for Clinton to try to connect authentically with viewers at home and show her human side. Many voters may get lost in the substantive back and forth over what Clinton supports versus what Sanders supports and their various policy-based accusations against each other. But elections are also about gut instincts over which candidate shares your values and vision. And those gut instincts are especially triggered when voters see the candidates side by side.
+
+For her part, Clinton can say all the right things, but if she spouts populist rhetoric while sounding like an out-of-touch patrician, it won't work. That's not to say Clinton should emphasize showing more of her heart and humor, as campaign aides have promised in a retooling. Rather she should just be her damn self and show that to the voters. We don't want a particular personality so much as we want a real person. Hopefully, if nothing else, Trump has taught candidates that.
+
+The first Democratic debate will be pivotal since voters will form first, and perhaps lasting, impressions of how the candidates match up. It is Sanders' debate to lose. But, if she plays it right, it could also be Clinton's debate to win.",REAL
+1053,Bernie Sanders' big day,"(CNN) Saturday was a big day for Bernie Sanders' quest for the Democratic presidential nomination as he swept to resounding victories in the caucus states of Hawaii, Washington and Alaska. But the delegate math is still in Hillary Clinton's favor.
+
+""We knew things were going to improve as we headed West,"" Sanders said at a jubilant rally before 8,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin -- a state that will hold the next major contest in 10 days. ""We have a path toward victory.""
+
+Clinton built up her delegate lead on the back of a strong run in the South, and Sanders argued Saturday his campaign always knew those states would be tough. In Madison, he said the map now offers more opportunities for his campaign as the contest progressed, largely because his wins are being powered by huge turnout among younger voters.
+
+""With your help we're going to win right here in Wisconsin,"" he said. ""So don't let anyone tell you we can't win the nomination, or win the general election. We're going to do both of those things.""
+
+But even with his big victories on Saturday, Sanders faces steep hurdles in catching Clinton in the delegate count. While Washington had 101 delegates up for grabs, and both candidates spent a significant amount of time there, Hawaii and Alaska were relatively small prizes -- with just 25 and 16 delegates at stake respectively.
+
+Clinton's campaign privately acknowledged that Saturday would be a good one for Sanders, and her efforts in Washington were aimed mostly at trying to keep the race relatively close, as delegates are distributed proportionally. But with over 90% delegates accounted for, Sanders held a wide lead over Clinton in Washington, 72% to 28%. Alaska was more lopsided: Sanders won 80% to 20%.
+
+Even though Wisconsin could be fertile territory for Sanders on April 5, Clinton is poised to do well in her home state of New York on April 19 with its 247 pledged delegates. She also faces favorable territory in the upcoming Super Tuesday contest on April 26 when Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island and Maryland voters head to the polls and nearly 400 pledged delegates are at stake.
+
+While Sanders shaved Clinton's lead in the delegate count, the former secretary of state had amassed 1,711 of the 2,383 delegates she would need to clinch the nomination before Saturday's contests, according to CNN estimates. Before the voting Saturday, Sanders had notched 952 delegates to date. That means he would need to win 75% of the remaining pledged delegates to defeat her.
+
+Clinton did not address the results publicly on Saturday, but her campaign sought to raise money off her losses in Saturday's contests, portraying them as a warning to donors. A short time after CNN projected Alaska as a win for Sanders, Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook circulated an email to her supporters billed as a ""quick update on Bernie Sanders.""
+
+""We haven't caught up in online fundraising, and our opponent could do very well in today's caucuses in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii,"" Mook said in the email before the Washington and Hawaii results had been called. ""Now, I don't want to paint too gloomy a picture -- you've been amazing. Thanks to you, we still have a commanding delegate lead, and we can secure this nomination for Hillary with your help,"" he said, asking them to ""chip in.""
+
+Sanders's strategists have argued that their unique fundraising capabilities could help them pull off an upset -- arguing that the process for Clinton was ""frontloaded"" and that they have grassroots fundraising resources that past campaigns have lacked.
+
+Washington and Alaska had always looked to be favorable territory for Sanders, because they are predominantly white and rural -- states with the kind of demographic makeup that has favored Sanders.
+
+""He's obviously doing well in these Western caucus states, because you get a very committed base of younger voters who are willing to show up and stand in line in states like Idaho and Utah for hours,"" said veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, who is unaligned in the presidential race this cycle. ""The message that Sanders has is a classic western populist message: Wall Street is sticking it to us, these big money interests are sticking it to us, and we're out here scrambling, paying pretty heavy negative dividends for their behavior.""
+
+But Clinton had campaigned in Washington after losing to Barack Obama by about a 2-1 margin in 2008. Her campaign made a major push to get voters to return Washington's version of absentee ballots -- known as ""surrogate affidavits"" --- mailing them directly to voters with postage-paid return envelopes.
+
+Given those efforts, the size of Sanders's margins on Saturday served as a warning shot to Clinton, allowing him to make the argument at his rally in Madison that he was ""making significant inroads"" into Clinton's delegate lead.
+
+That is key to the Sanders strategy going forward, particularly when it comes to swaying superdelegates, who could be key at the Democratic Convention in July. Currently Clinton has the edge with some 482 superdelegates pledging to support her, according to CNN estimates. But Sanders allies point out those people can always change their minds.
+
+""There are hundreds of other superdelegates, by the way, who are uncommitted,"" Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told CNN's Suzanne Malveaux in an interview Saturday. ""For them, it would be very easy for them to be with the Secretary, but they're not which tells you something about where they probably are.""
+
+""Superdelegates want to win in November,"" Weaver continued, ""and as we demonstrate in the second half of this primary season that we have the momentum, that we can carry with large margins these states, and with the public polls which have shown consistently that Bernie Sanders does better against every single possible Republican than does Hillary Clinton -- I think superdelegates are going to begin to take another look.""
+
+The excitement for Sanders, marked by a large rally at Seattle's Safeco Field Friday evening, is something Sanders is counting on as he heads in to the delegate-rich contests that favor Clinton on the East Coast.
+
+Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, said Sanders wins in small and medium-sized states ""almost certainly will not be enough to derail Clinton from the nomination,"" but adds there's more to it for the Vermont senator.
+
+""For all practical purposes, winning states like these are talking points for Sanders,"" Schnur said. ""But for what he's after at this point, talking points might be good enough. In other words, winning Alaska and Hawaii isn't going to keep Clinton from getting the nomination, but it keeps his supporters enthused; it keeps the money coming in; and allows him to continue having a platform.""
+
+Polling had been scarce in Hawaii and Alaska, making it difficult to predict the outcome of those contests heading in to Saturday, but Sanders outspent Clinton on the airwaves.
+
+Sanders's wife Jane campaigned in Hawaii last Sunday and Monday with popular Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who broke with Democratic Party leadership to show her support for Sanders.
+
+This week Sanders released an emotional ad featuring Gabbard, who served a 12-month tour in Iraq, talking about the importance of Sanders' vote against the Iraq War and his pledge to ""take the trillions of dollars that are sent on these interventionist, regime change, unnecessary wars, and invest it here at home.""
+
+""The American people are not looking to settle for inches,"" Gabbard says in the ad. ""They're looking for real change.""
+
+As in other states, turnout was high in Hawaii on Saturday. There were long lines outside Manoa Elementary in Honolulu as voting got started at 1 p.m. local time Saturday.
+
+Officials were expecting at least 15% more Democratic voters than eight years ago when 37,583 Democrats voted. This year, the party protectively printed 100,000 ballots, Hawaii Democratic spokesperson Ethan Oki said.",REAL
+9504,On Mass Media and its Perceived Prerogatives,"DISPATCHES FROM DANIEL ESPINOSA working to defeat the Big Lie in all its forms 
+J ulian Assange has taken from the political elites their de facto right to conceal their actions from the public they claim to serve. But if we can learn anything from WikiLeaks is that a veil of secrecy many times concealS self-interest taken to a criminal degree. 
+Many journalists and researchers have shown us in the past that political and business elites prefer not to discuss policy with the rabble . Even as elections are many times represented as a rather weak (or limited) form of democracy, political elites demand to control them nonetheless. Quoting Hillary Clinton addressing the Israeli press in 2006: 
+“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win”. (1) 
+Nothing out of the ordinary for the already notorious Democrat behind the infamous “we came, we saw, he died”, referring to Gaddafi’s murder, or “can´t we just drone this guy?”, referring to Assange. American propaganda is not only pervasive but utterly false and hypocritical, mostly based on manufactured fears. 
+For some politicians, democracy, or a fair trial, is not for everyone. This disdain for democratic values is deeply rooted in Western societies, as Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti, to mention just two noted scholars, have extensively covered throughout their work, even figures as central to modern liberal journalism as Walter Lippmann regarded the masses as “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders”, meaning regular citizens should be “spectators”, not “participants”, whose only duty is to show up every couple of years to ratify decisions made elsewhere. 
+If information empowers, WikiLeaks should be recognized as a democratic tool, redistributing power in times when it is obscenely concentrated. This is extremely disturbing for the subservient corporate media, as we can easily observe in the reaction of many of its [putative] journalists: 
+“Bravo, Ecuador. This isn’t about silencing Assange and suppressing his operation. It’s about preventing the Ecuadorean embassy from doubling as headquarters for a Putin-Assange campaign to discredit Clinton” . (A Chicago Tribune editorial celebrating Ecuador’s President Correa cutting off Assange’s internet, 10/19/16). T he negative association of Putin with Trump has been helpful in condemning Assange, who by himself is often considered a positive influence in Western politics (especially when attacking the Republican Party). The fabrication of a plan between Russia and WikiLeaks to influence American elections is, of course, not only patently ludicrous given the advanced state of putrefaction of American democracy itself, hardly a damsel whose virtue is in peril, never as exemplary as propagandists would have us believe, but simply an excuse for pseudo journalists and the punditocracy to ignore the contents of the leaks and drive the public’s attention toward Putin and Russia, as in those golden days when many things could be associated with the “Red Scare”. 
+Thus, as they speculate about how deep Putin’s nose is inserted in US politics and all the similarities between him and past mythological demons threatening America, these characters look away from the reality of the decomposing political system they still cling to. 
+Their task has been made simpler by the obnoxious nature of Clinton’s adversary. With his racist and misogynistic rhetoric, Trump stands as the easy-to-hate billionaire/villain, and yet he isn’t pushing for a no-fly zone over Syria, an innocent sounding notion that could easily escalate into something truly catastrophic. B ut corporate media, being a tool of the corporate ruling class which also controls the military and all major banking and commercial entities in the nation and around the globe, rarely speak against military intervention, especially when framed as ‘humanitarian’, the latest p.r. label concocted by the spin doctors to disguise naked imperial aggression.
+Going to war, expanding imperial domains and influence, promoting Wall Street interests, all that while selling the narrative of the ‘enemies of freedom’ is exactly what the American establishment demands of its presidents. As an extension of those interests, corporate media—as previously noted—also demands to be the sole apparatus in charge of shaping public opinion in the direction of which candidates to choose from, and what qualities such people should exhibit . Unsurprisingly, transmitting a truthful portrait of Hillary Clinton is off-limits, as it would seriously question her political legitimacy. 
+This explains ridiculous claims as that from CNN host Chris Cuomo in regard to Wikileaks, stating that, “…remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us”. WikiLeaks has in fact managed to redirect some attention to HRC’s longstanding dirty ways to do politics, with its known costs to third world ‘regimes’ and overall peace, as well as her predilection for Wall Street sponsors. Trump does not necessarily represent anything substantively different, but the illusion of choice is fundamental in our capitalist democracies. As former UK Ambassador turned human rights activist Craig Murray puts it: “You will not get a clear analysis of these issues from the mainstream media. That is because they are of course part of the money/power nexus in which Clinton is intimately connected, and they expect Clinton to win. I think their fear of Trump is exaggerated. He and Clinton are two plutocrat candidates in a system laughingly labelled democracy. They move in the same social and financial circles”. (2) That may explain the haste by some media to celebrate Rafael Correa for unplugging Assange’s internet connection recently, a mere gesture that “does not prevent the WikiLeaks organization from carrying out its journalistic activities”, as the Ecuadorian government emphasized. 
+This attitude towards Assange and WikiLeaks is shared by international media, with Ecuador’s press also expressing frustration and suggesting the inconvenience of standing against the American political establishment. 
+Examples of this subservient spirit abound in the media: “…unless the Ecuadorian government is voluntarily inserting itself in this global chessboard that has inflamed the conflict between US and Russia, and threatens [to] seriously distort US elections, letting Assange continue with his plan is going to sink Ecuadorian foreign policy… it’s –literally- a diplomatic suicide” . (3) 
+Standing against the de facto powers of the Western world is sure to provoke this kind of reaction, but the real distortion of US elections came before (way before) WikiLeaks, that’s exactly one of the many functions of corporate media: to misrepresent its profoundly worthless and highly compromised leaders for easier public consumption. 
+What Ecuador is doing is protecting a very important source of information that is reminding the world about the importance of political transparency, as it would (presumably) do with any journalist living inside its territory. 
+Notes: Kurson, Ken. 2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Clinton Proposing Rigging Palestine Election. (Observer, 10/28/16) [http://observer.com/2016/10/2006-audio-emerges-of-hillary-clinton-proposing-rigging-palestine-election/] Murray, Craig. Boring or Annoying Things We Have to Know. (Craig Murray, 29/10/16) [https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/10/boring-annoying-things-know/] Jaramillo, Grace. ¿En qué estamos metidos? (El Comercio, Ecuador, 09/14/16) [http://www.elcomercio.com/opinion/opinion-gracejaramillo-julianassange-londres-diplomacia.html] 
+ABOUT THE AUTHOR Associate Editor Daniel Espinosa Winder (34) lives in Caraz, a small city in the Andes of Peru. He graduated in Communication Sciences in Lima and started researching mainstream media and more specifically, propaganda. His writings are a often a critique of the role of mass media in our society. Daniel also serves as Editorial Director for TGP’s Spanish Language edition. =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. Print this post if you want. Share This:",FAKE
+6953,Donald Trump Likely to End Aid for Rebels Fighting Syrian Government    : Information," Donald Trump Likely to End Aid for Rebels Fighting Syrian Government
+By DAVID E. SANGER November 13, "" NYT "" - WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump said Friday that he was likely to abandon the American effort to support “moderate” opposition groups in Syria who are battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying “we have no idea who these people are.”
+In an interview with The Wall Street Journal that dealt largely with economic issues, including his willingness to retain parts of the Affordable Care Act, he repeated a position he took often during his campaign: that the United States should focus on defeating the Islamic State, and find common ground with the Syrians and their Russian backers.
+“I’ve had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria,” Mr. Trump told The Journal. “My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria.”
+His comments suggest that once Mr. Trump begins overseeing both the public support for the opposition groups, and a far larger covert effort run by the Central Intelligence Agency, he may wind down or abandon the effort. But there are in fact two wars going on simultaneously in Syria.
+One is against the Islamic State, in which the United States is supporting 30,000 Syrian-Kurdish and Syrian-Arab fighters, who last weekend announced they were opening a new phase of the battle, beginning to encircle the ISIS capital in Raqqa. There are roughly 300 United States Special Operations forces on the ground assisting these militia.
+The second effort is in support of rebels fighting Mr. Assad. The C.I.A. covert program is by far the largest conduit of support, providing antitank missiles to rebels fighting the government. That is the program that Mr. Trump seems most intent on ending. If the United States pursues that line, “We end up fighting Russia, fighting Syria,” Mr. Trump told The Journal.
+The argument for ending the support may be bolstered by the fact that, as a matter of survival, those opposition groups have entered into battlefield alliances with the affiliate of Al Qaeda in Syria, formerly known as Al Nusra. This has had the effect of allowing Mr. Assad and Russia to argue that they are attacking Al Qaeda, and the United States should aid them in that effort. Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged that argument during his ultimately failed effort to reach a deal for a cease-fire and an ultimate settlement.
+Mr. Trump’s the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend logic is consistent with what he said during the campaign. “I’m not saying Assad is a good man, ‘cause he’s not,” he told The New York Times in an interview in March, “but our far greater problem is not Assad, it’s ISIS.”
+But it also takes a position that will gratify President Vladimir V. Putin, because it suggests that rather than pressure Russia to end its support of Mr. Assad, a Trump administration will get out of Mr. Putin’s way.
+In another hint of a major change in policy, one of Mr. Trump’s primary national security advisers, Lt. General Michael T. Flynn, the retired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote in The Hill newspaper this week that the United States should extradite Fethullah Gulen who Turkey has demanded should be sent back from his exile in Pennsylvania. The Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed him for a coup attempt over the summer.
+The Justice Department has not yet concluded that there is any convincing evidence that Mr. Gulen should be sent back to almost certain confinement or execution under an extradition treaty with the United States. They see the request as part of Mr. Erdogan’s effort to eliminate all opposition.
+Mr. Flynn adopted many of Turkey’s arguments about Mr. Gulen, arguing that “American taxpayers are helping finance Gulen’s 160 charter schools” in the United States, and that it is more important to support Turkey than be “hoodwinked by this masked source of terror and instability nestled comfortably in our own backyard.”
+Eric Schmitt contributed reporting. President Assad: Syria is ready to co-operate with Donald Trump : The US is currently enmeshed in a complicated alliance in Syria with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, who would like to provide rebels – among them al-Qaeda-backed factions – with surface-to-air missiles. What will Trump do on Syria?: The US should get out of the war in Syria and avoid destabilising more Middle Eastern countries, and the US should work with Putin to defeat terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).",FAKE
+1069,"Trump, Cruz keep on winning. Four reasons why 'Super Saturday' matters","After Super Tuesday and Thursday’s candidate brawl at the 11th GOP presidential debate, let’s call this latest experiment in democracy “Stop-by Saturday” – four states in the northeast, southeast and Midwest holding GOP primaries and caucuses.
+
+A very big vote awaits the four remaining Republican candidates Tuesday in Michigan, followed a week later by winner-take-all primaries in Florida and Ohio. The field may be down to just two candidates after that.
+
+Still, what transpired Saturday in Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Maine mattered for these four reasons:
+
+1. Trump’s Fertile(?) Ground. One thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump and his flying circus: there are plenty of states amenable to his message of economic frustration and rage against the political machine.
+
+That includes Maine, which caucused on Saturday – and, going into Saturday, was presumably Trump Territory.
+
+After years of economic decline in the form of a shrinking manufacturing base, Down Easterners now face the question of whether to encourage immigration to meet growing employment demands.
+
+Twice in the last six years, the state’s chosen the bombastic Paul LePage as its governor. He has a Chris Christie-like style of bully politics and a Trump-like way with political incorrectness (for example, earlier this year blaming Maine’s heroin epidemic on “guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty”).
+
+The point: the seeds for Trump’s success may have sown well before he plowed the 2016 field.
+
+However, in Maine, Trump came a cropper (though he did claim Kentucky and Louisiana, for a split decision on the night). Credit Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with out-organizing Trump in yet another small, rural-tinged caucus.
+
+But with primaries now taking over from caucuses, are these latest returns a sign of coming attractions or just a bad stretch of road for the Trump Express?
+
+2. Trump’s a Frontrunner, but not a Conservative Favorite. All four states on Saturday had closed primaries or caucuses, which meant that only Republicans were eligible to vote (in Maine, independents could do same-day GOP registration; otherwise, voters had to come over to the Republican side weeks before the polls opened).
+
+Before Saturday, Trump had dominated in a February and Super Tuesday heavy with states employing “open” voting rules. Iowa, Nevada, Alaska and Oklahoma were the only closed affairs – Trump’s batted one-for-four (you can expect talk about frontloading more closed primaries and minimizing if not eliminating open primaries when the GOP turns to 2020 planning).
+
+This made Kansas, in particular, worth watching as both Trump and Cruz worked the state hard immediately after Super Tuesday.
+
+Going into the Jayhawk caucuses, this Trafalgar Group poll had Trump up by 6 points over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (35.2percent-29.3 percent), with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio a distant third (16.6 percent).
+
+Granted, Stop-by-Saturday polling was scarce, but this time the swollen turnout (in Kansas it was up by 50 percent over 2012), absent Democratic and independent crossovers, didn’t break Trump’s way.
+
+Between Trump’s setbacks in Kansas and Maine and Cruz’s victory in the CPAC straw poll, we seem to have a paradox: the Republican frontrunner is not a conservative favorite.
+
+3. The Delegate Math. The four states offered a combined 155 delegates – that’s the same exact number as Texas, 10 fewer than Florida/Ohio and 17 fewer than California. Moving forward, fewer than 1,600 of the GOP’s 2,474 delegates are still up for grabs.
+
+Saturday’s results aren’t a game-changer, but they do factor into a Trump march to the nomination that’s long or short depending on the candidate’s ability to gobble up winner-take-all states and increase his delegate share in proportional outcomes (that may increase if it’s just Trump and Cruz going at it).
+
+And there’s one other GOP convention equation. Which would be . . .
+
+4. Adding Up To Eight. The other reason why Kansas and Maine mattered for Cruz: the GOP rule that only candidates with a majority of delegates in a minimum of eight states can qualify for the convention’s nominating ballot (the party can always change this before the nominating begins, but to do so would be contentious – if not downright ugly).
+
+Cruz now has six such states. The better question, how the math adds up for Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
+
+If Rubio wins Florida, that brings his total to two states (he won Minnesota on Super Tuesday). If Kasich carries his home state, that brings his total to…one.
+
+How does either candidate get to eight, given that only 19 states remain after March 15?
+
+That’s not the only question after Saturday’s vote. Here are four more:
+
+- Will this soon be a two-man race between Trump and Cruz?
+
+- Does that improve or harm Trump’s chance of a first-ballot win in Cleveland?
+
+- Do Rubio and/or Kasich find redemption on their home turf?
+
+- The more Republicans flail about, is Hillary Clinton suddenly living a charmed political existence?
+
+On a Saturday night like March 5, when the race takes yet another odd twist, those answers still seem far away.
+
+Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
+7563,How Trump Happened,"How the #NeverTrumpers sunk themselves. November 1, 2016 
+Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 
+The chorus of NeverTrumpers is wailing ever louder as election day and Hillary’s supposed victory approach. After more than a year of complaining about Trump crashing their political soiree, the Republicans attacking Trump still don’t seem to get how their own behavior contributed to the perception that they are out-of-touch elites disdainful of the Republican masses. 
+A recent example comes from premier NeverTrumper Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal . In his column Stephens bids farewell to a Republican Party stupid enough to nominate Trump, contrasting it with his imagined Golden Age of Republican policy excellence that Trump and his followers have destroyed. One policy in particular, immigration, reveals the distance between the political and pundit elite and the voting masses that helped make Trump the nominee: 
+At a 1980 Republican primary debate in Houston, candidates George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were asked whether the children of illegal immigrants should be allowed to attend public schools for free. Mr. Bush said they should. “We’re creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law,” he lamented. 
+Reagan agreed. Instead of “putting up a fence,” he asked, “why don’t we . . . make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here.” For good measure, Reagan suggested we should “open the border both ways.” 
+Where, in the populist fervor to build a wall with Mexico and deport millions of human beings, is that Republican Party today? 
+Take Bush senior’s statement first. It repeats basically the same clichés that the bipartisan Gang of Eight recycled in 2013 during their push for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, another euphemism for amnesty. All those hard-working, family-values illegal immigrants are embryonic conservatives, we were told, who just need legal status and social recognition so they can “come out of the shadows,” as John McCain said, and start voting Republican. The political apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: son Jeb ended his presidential ambitions by calling illegal immigration an “act of love.” 
+This stance on illegal immigration by Republican politicos and pundits is obviously light-years from the experience and position of many ordinary people. Take McCain’s oft-repeated trope of “living in the shadows.” Seriously? Illegal alien young people openly protest on live television, knowing they are not going to be deported. Millions visit emergency rooms for free, and wrangle food stamps, welfare transfers, school lunches, and all sorts of largess, all the while they live protected by “sanctuary cities.” And “living in the shadows” doesn’t deter them from committing felonies, given that even if caught, convicted, and deported, they’ll soon be back. Remember Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, the illegal alien deported five times, who murdered Kate Steinle? Or Angel Gilberto Garcia-Avalos, another five-time deportee who just this month started a $61 million fire in Sequoia National Park? He had just been released from the Kern County Jail, but could not be deported because of California’s lunatic sanctuary city law, which prohibits a sheriff from contacting federal agents. 
+Simply repeating the “hard-working, family values, religious” mantra doesn’t address the problems of illegal immigration. There are such illegal immigrants, as I know from over sixty years of personal experience living in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the largest concentrations of illegal aliens in the country. I grew up with Mexican-Americans, they’re members of my immediate family, they’re my friends, students, and colleagues. They’re also the victims of the crimes and disorder caused by our porous border. 
+Some illegals do transition into these sort of immigrants, but many do not. A rigorous vetting process might sort out the wheat from the chaff. But Bush, McCain, and Stephens have not proposed a workable, rigorous mechanism for determining who should stay and who should go. That means with any form of amnesty, citizenship will likely be granted indiscriminately, with only the most egregious felons sifted out, if any are stupid enough to apply for citizenship rather than continuing to “live in the shadows.” But all those guilty of DUIs, hit-and-runs, or defrauding the welfare system with fake IDs will stay––and then bring their extended families under the provisions of the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act, which enshrined “family reunification,” with no limits on relatives of U.S. citizens. 
+Equally tone-deaf is Stephens’s bringing up Ronald Reagan’s “open the border both ways.” That’s exactly what he did in 1986 when he signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, with promises of “border enforcement” that never materialized. Stephens doesn’t mention that as a result, the number of illegal immigrants increased from about 3 million to 11 million, creating today’s crisis. The obvious lesson is secure the border first, then figure out what to do with the 11 million. It would be governmental malfeasance to repeat Reagan’s mistake. 
+The problem with politicians and pundits like Stephens is they don’t live with the consequences of indiscriminately letting in people from very different cultures and mores. People like Stephens don’t live daily with the disorder and crime that results. They’re not aware of the extensive damage to quality of life, the illegal immigration version of “broken windows,” such as dogs without rabies shots running free, health and safety codes ignored, building codes shrugged off, garbage and refuse dumped everywhere, copper wire stolen from pumps and street lights, and chronic petty theft––and that’s on top of stolen cars, hit-and-runs, driving without insurance, gang-banging, and dealing drugs. 
+And if Mr. Stephens thinks I’m just a nativist or xenophobe or racist, I dare him to visit the San Joaquin Valley. Better yet, let him bring his wife and children to live there for a month. Come and tour a hospital emergency room, a Social Security disability office, a public school, a county jail, and then wax lyrical about these “honorable, decent, family-loving people.” It would take just a week for Mr. Stephens to develop a “fervor” for a five-foot high wall around his house, and buy four or five pit bulls and a shotgun. Then again, he wouldn’t last that long. Within a day he’d scurry back to his nice, white, secure tony neighborhood where he doesn’t have to pay the cost of his moral preening. 
+And that hypocrisy is where Trump came from. In the perception of millions of voters––perceptions NeverTrumpers have fed so incessantly that they look a lot like reality––the conservative politicians and pundits care more about their privileged status and purity of principle than they do about the welfare and interests of their party’s voters. And so they would rather see a venal, perjurious, corrupt mediocrity become Obama 2.0 and continue the progressive destruction of the Constitutional order, than see elected the nominee of their own party. What sort of “principle” is that?",FAKE
+4973,Libertarian Gary Johnson Tries His Luck in Las Vegas,"Gary Johnson's presidential campaign of actually going places, standing in front of big crowds, and talking continues, moving from Miami on Wednesday to Las Vegas yesterday.
+
+From the Las Vegas Review-Journal's account of his appearance before a ""high energy"" crowd with his usual framing of wanting to keep government out of the bedroom and the pocketbook:
+
+Johnson told attendants that Libertarianism is about choice, noting he's pro-gay marriage and believes abortions should be the decision of the affected women. He called the death penalty ""flawed public policy"" and favors legalizing marijuana. In Nevada, ""you have the chance to do it and you're going to do it,"" Johnson said of the November referendum that could legalize recreational marijuana for users over the age of 21.
+
+They remain hopeful about reaching the Commission on Presidential Debates 15 percent in five polls threshold, even if perhaps not by the first one:
+
+Weld raised the possibility that even if they can't reach the polling benchmark by the first debate, slated for Sept. 26, that if polling continues they could reach eligibility for a later debate. The last presidential debate is slated for Oct. 19 at UNLV. Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol spokesman Joe Brezny, who ran the Nevada campaign for Mitt Romney's presidential bid four years ago, said Thursday that he's supporting Johnson and Weld and noted of Republicans that he ""watched some good people nominate the least electable person in mankind.""....
+
+Weld contended to cheers that the fiscal conservatism he and Johnson demonstrated in their gubernatorial tenures is just what's needed in Washington D.C. Johnson, meanwhile, pledged that if elected, he would present Congress with a balanced budget within the first 100 days of taking the White House.
+
+• Montanan political analysts and watchers think Johnson could easily double his 3 percent from 2012:
+
+Montana voters have shown in past elections that they will support candidates who do not represent the two major political parties. Just four years ago, Libertarian candidate Dan Cox received 6.5 percent of the vote in Montana's Senate race. Some political analysts speculated his strong showing prevented Republican Denny Rehberg from beating incumbent Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat
+
+• If he reaches $10 million in direct campaign donations, he runs the risk of being offered Secret Service protection. A campaign email today says that in just this month so far they've pulled $3 million from 92,000 distinct donors.
+
+• Reporting from the Sun Journal in Maine on the nature of Johnson's appeal and the Libertarian Party's situation in the state. Johnson will be appearing in Maine on August 26:
+
+""It was like he was saying everything in my brain,"" [Heidi] Sawyer said. ""For me, Johnson represents fiscal conservatism, small government, not wasteful spending, a government where more money would go to classrooms and where they'd make sense."" Sawyer, the creator of the popular Lewiston Rocks Facebook page, was intrigued. ""Things like that perked my interest,"" she said. Sawyer said she's fiscally conservative but socially liberal. She's not opposed to gay marriage. ""I don't care about what people do in their bedrooms,"" she said. The Libertarian Party isn't about foreign involvement, ""fighting wars creating more conflict. I want to make sure we're not putting our nose where it shouldn't be."" So, Sawyer became a Maine state volunteer coordinator for the Libertarian Party...
+
+The Maine L.P. needs to have ""10,000 registered voters who are enrolled in the party cast ballots in the General Election, among other provisions in Maine law,"" to maintain ballot status as an official party, according to the state government.
+
+I reported earlier on Maine's difficult but ultimately successful fight to get on the ballot this year.",REAL
+3432,6 Major Supreme Court Cases That Would Have Been Different Without Scalia,"6 Major Supreme Court Cases That Would Have Been Different Without Scalia
+
+In terms of the ideological balance of the Supreme Court, the death of Justice Antonin Scalia is monumental. With Scalia, the court had four reliable conservative votes and, in Justice Kennedy, the court had a conservative swing vote.
+
+That led to many decisions that were decided by a razor thin 5-to-4 margin. To gauge Scalia's importance, we dug through the Supreme Court Database and found that during Obama's presidency, 53 cases have been decided by a 5-4 majority that included Scalia.
+
+Here are six cases that could have turned out vastly different without Scalia:",REAL
+7813,Email Reveals What Progressive Think Tank Gained By Hosting Netanyahu,"When a prominent, progressive establishment think tank, the Center for American Progress, hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on November 10, 2015, it was widely criticized among the left. However, in an email sent by Neera Tanden, the think tank’s president, she defends the decision to welcome Netanyahu with open arms.
+The email was published in the latest batch of “Podesta Emails” from WikiLeaks. It offers a glimpse at how Tanden, an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and moderator of CAP’s Netanyahu event, dealt with the controversy.
+John Podesta, Clinton campaign chairman, sent her an email the day after the event. “As a bloodied Jack Nicholson said in Hoffa, ‘What has been gained and what has been lost?’ How did the Bibi event score on that scale?”
+In Tanden’s reply, she clearly outlined the pros and cons of hosting Netanyahu.
+“Things gained: We will never be called anti-Semitic again. No matter what anyone writes,” Tanden asserted. “Mainstream press and people think we handled it just right – tough questions. I think for any dismissers, not that I think there were a lot, but we have definitely proven we’re a think tank. And it may have sealed the deal with a new board member.”
+Tanden continued, “Things lost: Staff is riven. On both sides. We are holding a lot of meetings on that. Worse thing – someone leaked staff statement. That kind of thing really changes the culture.”
+“How to keep that culture with that kind of leaking is going to be hard, but need to navigate. And far left hates me. We do have a broader issue of expectations in the organization. I had an intern tell me that she was upset we did not tell her ahead of time.”
+What was lost and gained is expressed purely in institutional terms. Tanden writes nothing about what CAP may have done to give Netanyahu cover for the crimes the Israeli government commits against Palestinians through its occupation. She has no words for what this may mean for the people of Gaza, who endure poverty and face humanitarian disaster as a result of an economic blockade.
+Overall, Tanden concludes, “Nothing we have done has pitted being a think tank and being ideologically action oriented against each other more harshly. At the end of the day, we had to choose.”
+“So answer is complicated. If I could have the whole thing not happen, would definitely have it not happen. But it happened to us.”
+Inviting a world leader is not something that just happens , like a branch breaking a car’s windshield when it falls out of a tree. Tanden and other leaders of CAP actively sought to host Netanyahu, and they were proud of the prestige it could garner for them.
+When she introduced Netanyahu, Tanden said, “Thank you for taking questions because the choices you make matter profoundly to Israel’s future and the future of the region. And we believe that matters profoundly to America.” Notably, she said nothing about the future of Palestinians.
+Journalist Rania Khalek pointed out that Tanden let Netanyahu lie repeatedly during the event about the construction of new settlements, settler violence, land theft, and ethnic cleansing.
+Tanden and other Clinton appointees served on the Democratic Platform Committee, and during the process, they blocked language that would have acknowledged there is, in fact, an Israeli occupation. They also refused to remove language suggesting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement “delegitimizes” Israel.
+A coalition of Clinton Democrats and other liberal Democrats blocked a resolution to support the rebuilding of Gaza during the full Democratic platform committee meeting in July.
+Clinton has distinguished herself as a pro-Israel Democrat and will aggressively challenge the BDS movement as president. With the support of Democratic mega-donor Haim Saban, who has pledged to invest billions to fight BDS, Clinton celebrated college students on the “front lines of the battle to oppose the alarming boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement known as BDS” during her speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference.
+Additionally, emails previously published by WikiLeaks already have shown that the letter Clinton wrote to Saban, where she pledged to fight BDS, was written to help the campaign attract more pro-Israel donors.
+Returning to the CAP event for Netanyahu, in the week before the event, The Intercept published a story on leaked emails showing the lengths to which CAP was willing to go to “placate AIPAC.” The think tank censored “its own writers on the topic of Israel.”
+Tanden may seem exasperated in the email. “I need to clear my head on this and then would love to get your advice on a few things in the coming days,” she shared in the email. However, it is not as if there was any kind of an about-face or open display of regret in the aftermath. Tanden and CAP served the interests of AIPAC, also known as the Israel lobby, and if called upon to hold a similar event as a service to a Clinton White House, they will be loyal soldiers and help whitewash the policies of Israel again.
+The post Email Reveals What Progressive Think Tank Gained By Hosting Netanyahu appeared first on Shadowproof .",FAKE
+9438,iMAHDi – the arrivals 28 Why Satanism is Practiced by Our Leaders القادمون,Support Us iMAHDi – the arrivals 28 Why Satanism is Practiced by Our Leaders القادمون,FAKE
+1324,"Clinton blasts Wall Street, but still draws millions in contributions","Even as Hillary Clinton has stepped up her rhetorical assault on Wall Street, her campaign and allied super PACs have continued to rake in millions from the financial sector, a sign of her deep and lasting relationships with banking and investment titans.
+
+Through the end of December, donors at hedge funds, banks, insurance companies and other financial services firms had given at least $21.4 million to support Clinton’s 2016 presidential run — more than 10 percent of the $157.8 million contributed to back her bid, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings by The Washington Post.
+
+The contributions helped Clinton reach a fundraising milestone: By the end of 2015, she had brought in more money from the financial sector during her four federal campaigns than her ­husband did during his ­quarter-century political career.
+
+In all, donors from Wall Street and other financial services firms have given $44.1 million to support Hillary Clinton’s campaigns and allied super PACs, compared with $39.7 million in backing that former president Bill Clinton received from the industry, according to campaign finance records dating back to 1974 that have been compiled by The Post.
+
+Nearly half of the financial­sector donations made to support Hillary Clinton’s current presidential run have come from just two wealthy financiers: billionaire investor George Soros, who gave $7 million last year to the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA Action, and hedge-fund manager S. Donald Sussman, who gave the group $2.5 million.
+
+Most of their money was donated in December as Clinton was taking an increasingly tough stance toward the industry in an effort to blunt the populist appeal of her opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
+
+“I believe strongly that we need to make sure that Wall Street never wrecks Main Street again,” she declared at a campaign stop in West Des Moines, Iowa, on Jan. 24, adding: “No bank is too big to fail, and no executive is too powerful to jail.”
+
+Clinton’s success at raising millions from major Wall Street players — even as she blasts some of their most lucrative practices — shows how she continues to benefit from relationships she and her husband forged over decades.
+
+Many of those supporting her now have been involved with the Clintons since 1992, when a network of young bankers and investors mobilized to raise money for Bill Clinton’s first White House run, including some who went on to serve in his administration.
+
+“I feel like I know her well enough to know that she is a very rational and practical and smart person,” said Sussman, who helped Bill Clinton in 1992 and has since hosted fundraisers for both Clintons at his Connecticut home. “And in fact, it will help the industry if there is more transparency, more enforcement of regulations — even perhaps stronger regulations — so that the investor public has confidence in the markets.”
+
+As Sanders has put her on the defensive about her Wall Street contributions, Clinton has responded that the campaign money does not influence her approach to regulating the financial industry.
+
+“Anybody who knows me, who thinks they can influence me, name anything they’ve influenced me on. Just name one thing,” Clinton said Wednesday night at a televised CNN forum in New Hampshire. “I’m out here every day saying, ‘I’m going to shut them down; I’m going after them.’ ”
+
+Clinton points to her proposals to rein in the sector — such as a new risk fee on large financial institutions and increased penalties for financial crimes — as evidence that she cannot be swayed.
+
+“She believes that the measure of our success must be defined by how much incomes rise for hard-working families, not just CEOs and money managers,” said campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin. “The hundreds of thousands of people who have supported Hillary’s campaign know that’s what she’s fighting for.”
+
+On the trail, Clinton regularly cites the support she has from Wall Street reform advocates such as former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank, who co-authored the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
+
+Frank said in an interview that he was not concerned that Clinton would be beholden to Wall Street because of the industry’s donations, noting that he also has taken contributions from banks.
+
+“The plan she has put forward is tougher and better than Sanders’s,” Frank said. “Even for people who don’t want to trust her integrity — and I do — if she is president of the United States and she has taken strong public positions on these things . . . her ability to back down in favor of a campaign contribution is nonexistent.”
+
+Still, Clinton’s deep ties to the financial sector have emerged as one of her biggest obstacles as Sanders casts her as a friend of the big banks. “Most progressives that I know don’t raise millions of dollars from Wall Street,” he tweeted Wednesday. Only about $75,000 of the $75 million Sanders has raised for his 2016 campaign has come from donors in the finance sector, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
+
+Earlier in the campaign, Clinton tried to explain her connections to the industry in part by noting that she “represented Wall Street” as a U.S. senator from New York. In one debate in November, she appeared to suggest that campaign donations she received from financial services firms came in response to her support for New York City after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
+
+As Sanders’s excoriations of Wall Street have helped him gain traction, the former secretary of state has sought to ramp up her own rhetoric, matching his tone of outrage and indignation.
+
+[Bernie Sanders’s campaign brings in jaw-dropping $20 million in January]
+
+“I’m really proud of my plan, that it is driving the Republicans and Wall Street crazy,” Clinton said in Dover, N.H., on Wednesday, adding: “They know that I know how to stop them from ever hurting us again.”
+
+Clinton has called out specific companies such as Pfizer and Johnson Controls for conducting “corporate inversions” — a merger with a foreign counterpart for tax benefits.
+
+“On the tax code, they call that an inversion; I call it a perversion,” she said Wednesday. “And I’m going to go right after that!”
+
+At the same time, however, Clinton continues to collect money from financiers who are benefiting from some of the deals she decries. Among those who have raised at least $100,000 for her campaign is Blair Effron, a founding partner of Centerview Partners, a boutique investment firm that played a role in the Pfizer and Johnson Controls inversion negotiations. A Centerview spokesman declined to comment.
+
+In December, Effron attended a joint fundraiser for Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee held at the Manhattan home of Blackstone Group President Hamilton “Tony” James and his wife, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The featured guest was legendary investor Warren Buffett, and attendees included Byron Wien, a vice chairman at Blackstone; Wesley Edens, co-founder of Fortress Investment Group; and Cliff Robbins, chief executive of Blue Harbour Group.
+
+Clinton’s reliance on such figures for financial support alarms some on the left, who are already wary of the ties she and her husband have to Robert Rubin, the former Goldman Sachs co­chairman who became Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary.
+
+Hillary Clinton’s tougher rhetoric and regulatory proposals are “commendable,” said Jeff Hauser, who leads the Revolving Door Project, a foundation-funded effort that has joined Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in calling for presidential candidates to commit to appointing independent regulators at the Treasury Department and other agencies.
+
+But, Hauser said, she “has to decide whether she wants to fully commit or have one foot on the reform wing of the Democratic Party and another on the Wall Street wing.”
+
+Clinton scooped up Wall Street donations during her first Senate run in 2000, turning to Rubin and investment banker Roger Altman, who served in her husband’s administration, to introduce her to key players.
+
+Since that first race, the financial sector has been among the top industries that have supported her, a Post analysis found last year.
+
+Along with the $44.1 million the industry has donated to back her campaigns, she personally earned more than $3.7 million for delivering paid speeches to banks and other financial services firms since leaving the State Department in 2013, personal financial disclosures show.
+
+Those payments have dogged her on the campaign trail. During the CNN forum Wednesday night, Clinton struggled to explain why she accepted $675,000 from Goldman Sachs to deliver three speeches to the bank.
+
+“That’s what they offered,” she told moderator Anderson Cooper, adding: “They’re not giving me very much money now, I can tell you that much. Fine with me.”
+
+With the $21.4 million that Wall Street has given for her current White House bid, Clinton is on track to quickly exceed the nearly $23 million that she raised in her three previous campaigns combined from the PACs and employees of banks, hedge funds, securities firms and insurance companies, according to the latest Post analysis.
+
+That’s in part because this is the first time Clinton is running in the era of super PACs, which can accept unlimited donations from individuals and corporations. So far, financial-sector donors have given $17.4 million to her allied super PACs, the analysis found.
+
+But Clinton is also leaning on Wall Street to help finance her campaign directly as she tries to stay ahead of Sanders’s robust online fundraising operation, which brought in more than $20 million in January.
+
+Last week, Sanders jabbed at Clinton for attending a fundraiser in Philadelphia at the office of investment firm Franklin Square Capital Partners days before the Iowa caucuses. The event included a special acoustic performance for donors by Jon Bon Jovi. A spokeswoman for the firm declined to comment.
+
+Meanwhile, two other finance industry fundraisers that were set to take place before the New Hampshire primary have been rescheduled for later dates. The campaign declined to say why.
+
+Clinton was originally supposed to attend an event in Boston on Friday, organized by Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine, the managing partner of Sankaty Advisors, an affiliate of Bain Capital, according to details obtained by the Sunlight Foundation’s Political Party Time. The fundraiser has been rescheduled for a later date that the campaign would not reveal.
+
+In addition, a New York fundraiser billed as a “Conversation With Hillary,” co-hosted by Matt Mallow, chief legal officer for the asset-management firm BlackRock, originally scheduled for Jan. 28 has been moved to Feb. 16.
+
+The next day, Bill Clinton will headline a fundraiser in New York hosted by real estate investor Bal Das and Valérie Demont, a lawyer who heads the U.S.-India practice at Pepper Hamilton, specializing in international mergers and acquisitions.
+
+Das said he has not been troubled that Hillary Clinton now goes after Wall Street regularly on the campaign trail.
+
+“Her points are very fair,” said Das, who was also a top fundraiser for her 2008 presidential bid. “She is not saying anything that someone deeply involved in the financial services sector would disagree with. She is spot on, pragmatic, with a deep understanding of how this all does come together.”
+
+Alice Crites and Rosalind S. Helderman in Washington; Abby Phillip in Dover, N.H.; and John Wagner in Keene, N.H., contributed to this report.",REAL
+7184,BLACK TRUMP SUPPORTERS call Hillary Clinton a “racist”,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. PLEASE DONATE TO KEEP BARE NAKED ISLAM UP AND RUNNING. Choose DONATE for one-time donation or SUBSCRIBE for monthly donations Payment Options GET ALL NEW BNI POSTS/LINKS ON TWITTER Subscribe to Blog via Email 
+Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address CONTACT: barenakedislam@gmail.com Top Posts",FAKE
+9805,Watch: Praying Muslims sit on Jewish prayer shawls in airport shul – Jews are outraged,"Jews in Ben Gurion Airport were dismayed to discover Turkish Muslims praying in the airport’s shul. 
+Arutz Sheva 
+Jews in Ben Gurion Airport were dismayed to discover Turkish Muslims praying in the airport’s shul, on the eve of the holiday of Simchat Torah. The Muslims were using Jewish prayer shawls (tallits) as prayer rugs. 
+It is not clear if someone gave the Muslims 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+1666,Donald Trump is destroying Jeb Bush: Why his 9/11 gambit could be the last straw,"This past weekend, the Donald finally pushed a button that was too much for Jeb to bear: He made the factual observation that Jeb’s brother had been president on 9/11. Well, all hell broke loose, as every GOP establishment figure rose up in untamed fury that Trump would be rude enough to bring such a thing up. Why, that’s sacrilege.
+
+Bush followed up with a bizarre tweet which encapsulates the central vulnerability of his campaign and calls into question his entire rationale for running.
+
+This is a strange argument, if only because Trump is obviously correct: The attack happened on George W. Bush’s watch. Thus, it’s undeniable that he did not keep us safe. But up until now, it has been considered something of a faux pas to even say as much.
+
+Sure, there were some malcontents on the left who tepidly pointed out the obvious truth — that if Al Gore had been president at the time, the Republicans would have impeached him (if not tried and hanged him for treason) — had the shoe been on the other foot. That’s fairly obvious. But people mostly decided to eschew the blame game after 9/11.
+
+Gore, for his part, came forward to declare that “George W. Bush is my commander in chief” and exhort his fellow Democrats to “unite behind our president … behind the effort to seek justice, not revenge, to make sure this will never, ever happen again.” Soon after, the entire Congress, except for Rep. Barbara Lee, backed the president’s decision to invade Afghanistan. There was very little political dissension. Indeed, the only serious partisan sniping came from people on the right like Andrew Sullivan, claiming without evidence that “the left” was in league with the terrorists. But for the most part, any blame for the attacks was muted and relegated to the extremes.
+
+The government investigated, of course, and quite thoroughly. It created a blue ribbon, bipartisan commission which interviewed everyone involved, held public hearings and published a report in book form for the entire country to see. The hearings were particularly riveting as the nation got to hear from various insiders about what had been going on before, during and after the attacks. Most memorable was former terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who testified that he and others had been running around with their “hair on fire” trying to get the administration to focus on the high probability of an imminent terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
+
+And everyone remembers National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, under questioning by the commission, admitting that the president had been given a very specific memo warning of the attacks on August 6th, 2001, almost a month before the attacks. When asked what the title of the memo was, Rice replied, to gasps from the audience there and undoubtedly in every living room in America, “I believe it said ‘Bin Laden determined to strike inside the United States.'”
+
+It was a while before America got to see that memo, but when we did, we saw that they explicitly warned that they would “follow the example of World Trade Center bomber.” It said that in the first paragraph.
+
+There was also a lot of information about the president’s response to the attacks, including the rather bizarre fact that Vice President Dick Cheney seemed to have taken over control in the early going and that the commission was not allowed to interview the president outside the VP’s presence. But with all that, there was no Select Committee on 9/11 formed after the Democrats took over the Congress in 2006 to go over the same ground. They did not belabor the issue by calling more witnesses and subpoenaing more documents and keeping the issue alive as a scab that would never heal on the backs of the families who lost loved ones on that awful day. They did not, in other words, turn 9/11 into a partisan witch hunt.
+
+Donald Trump, of course, doesn’t care about any of that. He’s just a street fighter who says whatever comes into his head. And he’s perfectly happy to yank Jeb Bush’s chain and force him to answer for the fact that his brother was treated far better than he and his brother and all the rest of them would have treated any Democrat in that situation. He’s willing to go where no one else was: He’s blaming Bush for 9/11.
+
+Jeb, for his part, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday to respond to Trump’s needling, and clumsily said that “it’s what you do after [the attack] that matters”. Unfortunately, this not only stipulates that his brother did fail to keep us safe, but then invites the public to look at what he did after, which is not a record on which anyone should want to run. (The obvious question: Was attacking a country that didn’t attack us, leading to thousands more lives lost, evidence of his “keeping us safe”?)
+
+No, Jeb Bush would be wise to simply roll his eyes at Donald Trump and let him rant on without responding, because whenever he opens his mouth, he creates a whole new set of questions. This point was driven home when Jake Tapper brought up Benghazi in this context: TAPPER: Obviously Al Qaeda was responsible for the terrorist attack of 9/11, but how do you respond to critics who ask, if your brother and his administration bear no responsibility at all, how do you then make the jump that President Obama and Secretary Clinton are responsible for what happened at Benghazi? JEB BUSH: Well I — the question on Benghazi which, is hopefully we’ll now finally get the truth to, is was the place secure? They had a responsibility, the Department of State, to have proper security. There were calls for security, it looks like they didn’t get it. And how was the response in the aftermath of the attack, was there a chance that these four American lives could have been saved? That’s what the investigation is about, it’s not a political issue. It’s not about the broad policy issue, is were we doing the job of protecting our embassies and our consulates and during the period, those hours after the attack started, could they have been saved? TAPPER: Well that’s, that’s kind of proving the point of the critics I was just asking about, because you don’t want to have your brother bear responsibility for 9/11 and I understand that argument and Al Qaeda’s responsible, but why are the terrorists not the ones who are responsible for these attacks in Libya? BUSH: They are, of course they are but — of course they are, but if the ambassador was asking for additional security and didn’t get it, that’s a rproper point and if it’s proven that the security was adequate compared to other embassies, fine, we’ll move on. Jeb doesn’t seem to realize that every time a Republican bellows “Four Americans died on Clinton’s watch!” and in the next breath insist, “How dare you say George Bush didn’t keep us safe on his watch,” something doesn’t quite track. Even Americans who are otherwise too busy to pay attention to the granular details can tell that this is a very strange construction. If you watch the video, Jeb himself misses more than a couple of beats when Tapper brings it up — he obviously felt the dissonance. All congressional majorities play politics and there is always a political element to any investigation by one party into the presidency of the other party. But the Republicans have turned this into a blood sport in ways that are unconscionable. It’s one thing to hold hearings about Hillary Clinton’s cattle futures trades back in the ’70s or the White House Christmas card list. These are stupid wastes of time and money but they are not about life and death issues for which the Republicans should have a little bit more respect. After 9/11, it would have been very easy for the Democratic Congress to turn what the Bush administration did into a three ring circus of recriminations and insinuations for political gain. (There were plenty of people who thought President Bush could have been impeached for what Jeb insists was his brother’s finest hour — his actions after 9/11, and the Iraq invasion in particular.) Unlike these relentless Benghazi Inspector Javerts, for better or worse, the Democrats thought it would be more legitimate to win the presidency and the Congress through the electoral process in which the epic failure of the Iraq invasion was the focus rather than trying to blame George W. Bush for failing to keep the country safe on 9/11. And that was noble of them. Donald Trump is not noble. Jeb Bush is going to be questioned on this and he’s going to need a better answer than saying his brother kept the country safe. He didn’t. And he didn’t do any better in the aftermath. He made some good speeches and, to his credit, he cautioned Americans not to blame Muslims in general for the attacks (which may be the best thing he did). Other than that, it’s not a good record, no matter how you look at it. In fact, it’s astonishing that Jeb ever thought he could run without having to answer for it. Trump is going to make sure he does. Meanwhile, the upside to this little squabble is we’ve finally been able to put the partisan responses to 9/11 and Benghazi up for comparison. Lets just say it doesn’t look all that good for Team Red. Jeb and The Donald’s spat is only going to make that clearer as time goes on.",REAL
+6150,"Lights, Camera, Propaganda! Washington's Anti-Russia Campaign Invades Hollywood - Danielle Ryan","Lights, Camera, Propaganda! Washington's Anti-Russia Campaign Invades Hollywood 
+Keep those Russian baddies coming! Originally appeared at RT 
+For years the influence of the CIA in Hollywood was hidden and unacknowledged. Now it’s more of an open secret; not publicized, but pretty easy to read up on if you care. Just ask the spy agency’s Entertainment Industry Liaison. 
+Yes, such a thing really exists . 
+You see, the CIA’s man in Hollywood wants to help actors, authors, directors, producers and screenwriters “gain a better understanding” of the intelligence agency in order to ensure “accurate portrayals” of its activities. It even wants to help fire up the neurons and actually give you some good ideas if you’re coming up short in that department. Indeed, the CIA provides “inspiration for future storylines” and lists them on its website. Of course, it’s all in the interest of creating authentic and balanced portrayals of US intelligence agencies and the US military. And they’re quite busy, too. Between 2006 and 2011, the CIA public relations office had input into at least 22 film and movie projects. 
+In a column for the Washington Post in 2011, David Sirota noted that the Pentagon too enlists the help of Hollywood for PR purposes when things are going awry and Americans are becoming weary of war. Movies like Top Gun in the 1980s and Zero Dark Thirty more recently were made in consultation with the Pentagon and White House. The result of this“creative input for Pentagon assistance” bargain created an entertainment culture “rigged to produce relatively few anti-war movies and dozens of blockbusters that glorify the military” and which amounts to “government subsidized propaganda,” 
+The CIA has had a hand in creating TV shows like 24, Homeland andAlias. The Americans — an FX show about two Russian spies living undercover in the US — was created by a former CIA agent, and the agency reportedly approves the scripts for each episode. 
+A piece in the Guardian in 2008 called the CIA’s involvement in Hollywood a “tale of deception and subversion that would seem improbable if it were put on screen”. Of course, it’s unlikely to be put on screen, given that the agency which provides guidance on CIA-related movies (...) is the CIA. 
+Enlisting Hollywood help with “anti-Russia messaging” 
+Remember the “inspiration for future storylines” list mentioned earlier? Well, guess what? The liaison’s “current pick” for a possible future movie project is about one Ryszard Kukliński — a Polish colonel and spy for NATO who spent years passing secret Soviet documents to the CIA. I wonder why they’d be interested in that sort of thing right now. It couldn’t be anything to do with deteriorating relations between Russia and the West, could it? 
+It may sound like conspiracy theory, but the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment revealed that the the US State Department has actively sought out the biggest players in Hollywood and tried to enlist their help with what they called“anti-Russia messaging” for the public’s consumption through innocent entertainment. In other words, the government asked Hollywood for help producing propaganda — although I’m sure the State Department would call it something nicer. 
+Richard Stengel, the US under secretary for public diplomacy, wrote to Sony CEO Mark Lynton explaining that the government needed help countering both ISIS and “Russian narratives” and said this wasn’t something the State Department could do “on its own”. He suggested convening a meeting of media executives to discuss ideas, content, production and “commercial possibilities”. Lynton responded with a list of media executives at other entertainment companies including Disney and Fox. It’s unclear from the emails whether that meeting Stengel requested ever happened, but judging by much of the recent entertainment industry output, one might be forgiven for assuming it did. 
+Negative depictions of Russia in American and British news and entertainment media are hardly new — but at least as far as I can tell, there’s certainly been an uptick over the past 12-18 months, and it coincides nicely with a major US government-led anti-Russia messaging campaign which has also spilled over into much of Western print and broadcast media. Gratuitous mentions of Russia and Vladimir Putin where they are not necessary are becoming tiresome. For me, the last straw was sitting down to watch Bridget Jones’s Baby last month and being subjected to an entirely unnecessary and irrelevant subplot about the anti-Putin punk band Pussy Riot and their struggle for free speech. It was the last straw because it was just one more in a long line of useless allusions to big bad Russia that seemed to come from nowhere. 
+For me, the last straw was sitting down to watch Bridget Jones’s Baby last month and being subjected to an entirely unnecessary and irrelevant subplot about the anti-Putin punk band Pussy Riot and their struggle for free speech. 
+In the Netflix political drama House of Cards, Pussy Riot — the real ones this time — got their own cameo alongside evil Putin (not the real one). But even when there isn’t a major storyline attached to Russia, somehow the country frequently gets thrown in anyway. Russia is still the go-to country when there needs to be a joke about scary or immoral foreigners. There are endless examples. 
+In NBC’s Scandal, one character suggests Putin might randomly invade Belarus. In CBS’s Madam Secretary, one character spews the line: “I can’t go back to Russia, it’s a pigsty.” In the recently released movie Bad Moms, one of the bad moms, protesting something or other which I can’t recall, shouts “What is this, Russia?” The short-running show Allegiancewas entirely about a Russian sleeper cell in the US which was suddenly reactivated and whose members — now fully adapted to blissful life in America — no longer wanted anything to do with Russia. How original. 
+NBC’s Blacklist has given us multiple Russian baddies and the sitcom 2 Broke Girls has made its fair share of Putin jokes. The third installment of The Purge introduced us to a gang of menacing Russian “murder tourists” who take advantage of the annual 12-hour period during which any crime, including murder, becomes legal. I could go on, but you get the idea: Russians are bad. 
+Is it all CIA influence? Is it all the result of the State Department’s“anti-Russia messaging” campaign? Not necessarily. While the CIA does have huge influence in Hollywood on specific projects, many of the random negative references to Russia are probably the result of a media information war which naturally spills over into the creative output of writers and directors. Many of them probably shouldn’t be blamed too harshly. They’re fed a diet of anti-Russia messaging through the news media, so it’s no wonder these kinds of lines end up in their movies and TV shows. 
+Interestingly, in June, the Senate Intelligence Committee included an amendment to Congress’ annual intelligence spending bill which would require the Director of National Intelligence to submit reports detailing the relationship between the CIA and Hollywood. But the Senate committee is no doubt less worried about the propaganda effects and more worried about the CIA divulging sensitive and classified information to movie directors, as was the case, controversially, with Zero Dark Thirty. 
+Anyway, tip for aspiring filmmakers and TV producers: Leave the Russia jokes out. It’s getting boring. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount 
+If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire",FAKE
+8087,US Calls On Saudi Arabia To End Airstrikes Against Yemen,"Videos US Calls On Saudi Arabia To End Airstrikes Against Yemen A top Human Rights Watch director noted that the call would’ve carried a lot more weight if the US wasn’t providing the bombs the Saudis are dropping on Yemen in the first place. | November 1, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! A Houthi rebel man holds a US-made cluster bomb fragment after a Saudi-led airstrike in Yemen’s capital, Monday, April 20, 2015. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed) 
+After a solid 19 months of endorsing the Saudi war in Yemen, selling the Saudis massive amounts of arms, and refueling Saudi bombers over Yemen’s airspace, the Obama Administration today called on the Saudis to halt airstrikes against Yemen, and accept that there is no military solution. 
+A top Human Rights Watch director noted that the call would’ve carried a lot more weight if the US wasn’t providing the bombs the Saudis are dropping on Yemen in the first place, though former US officials say its almost certain this won’t include any dial back in US arms sales. 
+The call likely reflects the UN’s peace plan being presented to both sides and immediately rejected by the pro-Saudi officials. Huge civilian death tolls in recent Saudi attacks have added up to make the US a bit more gunshy than usual about supporting the Saudi war publicly. 
+At the same time, the US “opposition” to the air war is slim indeed, with the US Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, insisting even in the announcement of their opposition to further strikes that the US supports Saudi Arabia’s right to “self-defense,” which in this case included an outright invasion of a neighboring country. 
+The US has insisted Saudi aid is “under review” since a recent attack on a funeral. That said, there is no sign that any real changes in US policy were made, and the expectation is that, as always, US interest in growing arms exports will win out.",FAKE
+9786,Trump’s Proposed Student Loan Program Makes Him Look More Liberal Than Obama; Republicans Fuming,"Share on Facebook 
+Republicans in Congress and perhaps across the nation are suffering today from a case of buyers remorse after Trump begins back peddling on several of his campaign promises, before he even takes office. 
+Over the last few days, he backed off on his claim that he’ll repeal Obamacare by saying he’d just tweak it. He’s seemed to have changed his mind on prosecuting Hillary Clinton and he’s no longer talking about banning Muslims. While “drain the swamp,” which referred to Washington’s culture of corruption, was one of his later campaign slogans, he’s filling his cabinet posts with Washington insiders and corporate lobbyists. He’s even appearing to change his mind about his signature issue, the wall between the United States and Mexico . 
+One piece of Trump’s campaign rhetoric was actually something that would make people’s lives better and it’s something that Republicans are going to hate. His proposal for student loans is radical, in that it’s not a gift to Wall Street and it’s even more liberal than anything President Obama has proposed. In a rally just a month ago, Trump said about student loans: 
+“We would cap repayment for an affordable portion of the borrower’s income, 12.5 percent, we’d cap it. That gives you a lot to play with and a lot to do,” Trump said at a rally in Columbus, Ohio, on Thursday. “And if borrowers work hard and make their full payments for 15 years, we’ll let them get on with their lives. They just go ahead and they get on with their lives.” 
+“Students should not be asked to pay more on the debt than they can afford,” Trump said. “And the debt should not be an albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives.” 
+Source: Washington Post 
+Trump’s proposed debt forgiveness program is actually pretty similar to Obama’s . Instead of a 12.5 percent cap, Obama introduced a cap of 10 percent of a graduate’s income. Trump’s program, though, would leave graduates with five fewer years of debt. Trump’s would forgive debt after 15 years while Obama’s would forgive after 10. In that one significant way, Trump’s program is even more liberal than Obama’s and if he carries it out, Congressional Republicans may have no choice but to turn on their party’s President. 
+The American Enterprise Institute is a Washington think tank who issues a lot of the marching orders of Republicans. They were the driving force behind the Iraq war and of failed trickle down economics. This is what they have to say about student loan debt forgiveness: 
+“They are way off on their numbers,” said Jason Delisle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “If you were going to give loan forgiveness in 15 years, you’re going to forgive a lot more debt than you’re going to make up for in the form of the higher payments they’re proposing, by a lot. I don’t even need to run the numbers. It’s so obvious.” 
+Really, it’s not obvious. Forgiving student debt would be a big boost to the economy because it would 1.) incentivize people to become more educated and 2.) put more money back into the economy because graduates would be free to buy more. Not that Republicans care about that, though. They prefer that graduates owe their lives to Wall Street banks and in turning his back on that, Trump is violating literally everything his party stands for.",FAKE
+8968,Election Heats Up: Kerry Heads To The Poles…In ANTARCTICA WTF,"We Are Change 
+
+While many Americans headed to the polls to vote in the 2016 election on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to… Antarctica.
+Kerry’s trip will include a visit to the McMurdo and Amundsen-Scott South Pole stations, which will make him the first Secretary of State to visit Antarctica, according to a press release from the National Science Foundation.
+It comes at a curious time, given the ongoing election. When asked about the timing, State Department spokesman John Kirby insisted that its purpose is “to talk to researchers and scientists largely about climate change research.” 
+A reporter responded by questioning the legitimacy of the trip, noting, “There’s some criticism that this trip is basically, you know, the Secretary wants to knock Antarctica off his bucket list and he’s doing it on taxpayer expense.” 
+Kirby insisted that it is important for Kerry “to see firsthand what we are learning about the environment down there on the South Pole.” 
+“As an individual who has literally championed climate change research and awareness for decades now, the secretary is and will remain committed to increasing the awareness and education of the public about this,” Kirby said.
+
+The location of Kerry’s trip is also interesting. Russian scientists drew criticism in 2012 for drilling into Antarctica’s “Alien” Lake Vostok, which scientists claim went “undisturbed by sunlight for over 15 million years.” 
+Theories as to what is under the surface of the lake—which is considered the sixth largest in the world— include oil, a secret Nazi base with Hitler’s remains, nuclear energy, Atlantis, and of course, a UFO landing site.
+Kerry’s trip will add to his lead as the Secretary of State who has traveled the most miles, with over 1.3 million since 2013. This sends him even further ahead former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who traveled 956,733 miles from 2009 to 2013.
+In addition to staying away from the polls in the U.S. where he would be expected to vote for Clinton, Kerry is also showing her up by reminding the world that he beat her in total miles traveled—an area where Clinton was very competitive.
+In 2010, Clinton wrote an email to her top aide Huma Abedin asking , “What’s my total now?” 
+“We have 36 trips to date,” Abedin responded, noting that Clinton needed at least four more to beat the record of 1.06 million set by Condoleezza Rice.
+ 
+Follow Rachel Blevins on Facebook and Twitter . 
+The post Election Heats Up: Kerry Heads To The Poles…In ANTARCTICA WTF appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+9576,Nestle seeks more groundwater to expand Michigan plant,"Nestle seeks more groundwater to expand Michigan plant They're putting profits over people - and the environment - yet again By Julie Fidler - November 9, 2016 
+The state of Michigan has given a preliminary go-ahead for food and beverage maker Nestle to nearly triple the amount of groundwater it will pump from beneath the state, to be bottled and sold at its Ice Mountain plant, approximately 120 miles from Flint. 
+Nestle Waters North America asked the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to allow the company to increase pumping from 150 to 400 gallons-per-minute at 1 of its production wells north of Evart. 
+The company already increased the well’s pumping rate last year and earlier this year, but needs the DEQ’s approval to max out the withdrawal capacity under the Section 17 of the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). 
+The DEQ already issued a draft proposal for the request in January, and ended a public comment period on the subject on November 3. Carrie Monosmith, environmental health chief in the drinking water office, said the DEQ hadn’t received any comments. 
+Many Michigan residents feel Nestle has a lot of nerve asking for the increase, in light of Flint’s years-long nightmare over lead contamination in their drinking water. Many people in Flint still rely on bottled water for cooking, cleaning, and bathing as the government continues to drag its feet in replacing the corroded pipes. 
+Nestle representatives defended the company’s efforts to pump more groundwater, saying the “U.S. market for bottled water in general is driving the bid for more Michigan groundwater.” 
+That’s right, America. Nestle says it’s your fault. 
+If that’s not infuriating enough, Nestle gets to pump that water for free. Under state law, private property owners may withdraw from the aquifer under their property for free. The only cost is $200 in annual paperwork. 
+The interstate Great Lakes compact prohibits water diversions outside of the Great Lakes basin, but a loophole in the law allows water to be sold outside the region, so long as it is shipped in bottles smaller than 5.7 gallons. 
+Jeff Ostahowski, vice president of the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation (MCWC), asks: 
+“The issue is the privatization of a critical resource. How much is too much?” 
+For years, MCWC has battled against Nestle to prevent it from expanding in the state. 
+According to Nestle and the DEQ, an environmental review shows the aquifer can withstand the proposed increase in pumping, and that it won’t hurt its flow, levels, or temperature of nearby surface waters.",FAKE
+504,States with the most people on food stamps,"With grocery bills priced as high as $1,300 per month as of late, some American workers simply cannot afford all of their groceries on top of everything else they already have to buy. This is why the government offers food stamps.
+
+The USDA Food and Nutrition Service reports that as of September 2014, there were around 46.5 million individual food stamp recipients (22.7 million households) receiving an average benefit of $123.74 each (around $257 per household).
+
+To be eligible, a household has to earn a gross income amount that's less than 130% of the poverty level, or a net income amount (gross income minus deductions) that's less than 100% of the poverty level for their family size.
+
+This means, a single person can be eligible for food stamps if his or her gross monthly income is under $1,265 ($15,180 per year), and a family of four can be eligible if they gross less than $2,584 per month ($31,008 per year). The applicant also can't be a wealthy person who simply doesn't have a steady income source. So, if the applicant has thousands of dollars sitting in the bank, for instance, they won't apply as cash assets are considered as well.
+
+MORE: 5 reasons why your grocery bills are so high
+
+MORE:5 jobs that pay more than you think
+
+MORE:5 jobs that can make more money than a doctor
+
+So overall, the program makes perfect sense on paper. It sounds completely reasonable: If you earn too little money, you can temporarily receive a card for your groceries for a while. Food stamps help millions of individuals and families, but the corresponding billions of dollars that the program costs make some taxpayers critical of it.
+
+A taxpayer's view of the welfare system depends on many factors — his or her upbringing, personal experiences, and even where he or she lives. In some areas of the country, food stamp use is more common than in others.
+
+We've created a list of the states that have the most food stamp recipients per capita. To determine the states on this list, we used the USDA Food Nutrition Service's most recent state-by-state data, coupled with population data from the Census Bureau. States with the highest number of food stamp participants relative to population ranked highest. We've also included a state-by-state breakdown of food stamp use in all 50 states and the District of Columbia
+
+States with the most people on food stamps:
+
+• Percentage of the state's population on food stamps: 18.67%
+
+• Total cost of just these benefits alone (That is, how much do just the money on those EBT cards cost the state): Around $107.4 million
+
+• Cost of benefits alone per capita in this state: $23.10
+
+• Number of food stamp recipients: Just over 1.28 million
+
+• Percentage of the state's population on food stamps: 19.58%
+
+• Total cost of just these benefits alone (That is, how much do just the money on those EBT cards cost the state?): Around $158.7 million
+
+• Cost of benefits alone per capita in this state: $24.23
+
+• Percentage of the state's population on food stamps: 19.93%
+
+• Total cost of just these benefits alone (That is, how much do just the money on those EBT cards cost the state?): Around $98 million
+
+• Cost of benefits alone per capita in this state: $24.66 per person
+
+• Percentage of the state's population on food stamps: 19.96%
+
+• Total cost of just these benefits alone (That is, how much do just the money on those EBT cards cost the state?): Around $45.7 million
+
+• Cost of benefits alone per capita in this state: $24.69 per person
+
+• Percentage of the state's population on food stamps: 21.5%
+
+• Total cost of just these benefits alone (That is, how much do just the money on those EBT cards cost the state?): Around $55.5 million
+
+• Cost of benefits alone per capita in this state: $26.60 per person
+
+• Percentage of the state's population on food stamps: 21.74%
+
+• Total cost of just these benefits alone (That is, how much do just the money on those EBT cards cost the state?): Around $80.5 million
+
+• Estimated cost of benefits alone per capita in this state: $26.90 per person
+
+• Percentage of the state's population on food stamps: 21.97%
+
+• Total cost of just these benefits alone (That is, how much do just the money on those EBT cards cost the state?): Around $18 million
+
+• Estimated cost of benefits alone per capita in this state: $27.19 per person
+
+The Cheat Sheet is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news and commentary. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.",REAL
+3290,Why Mitch McConnell bid to extend Patriot Act failed,"Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell thought he could use Sunday's Patriot Act deadline to get senators in line. It didn't work, thanks in large part to  Sen. Rand Paul.
+
+Mysterious gap in the four-legged fossil record might not be a gap at all
+
+Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Ky. walks to his office on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 5, 2015. Key Patriot Act anti-terror provisions, including bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, were set to expire at midnight Sunday.
+
+As promised by Sen. Rand Paul, the federal government’s massive gathering of Americans’ phone records “went dark” at midnight Sunday, dealing a blow to the program’s advocates – including Senator Paul’s fellow Republican from Kentucky, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.
+
+The expiration of the program and other anti-terrorism surveillance provisions under the Patriot Act, although expected to be only temporary, is Sen. McConnell’s first serious defeat as majority leader. It shows just how difficult it can be to keep his own members in line – particularly when they are running for president, as is Paul.
+
+And it shows that sometimes, the longtime strategy of using deadlines to force consensus in Congress just doesn’t work. “Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah. “It’s tough to lead this bunch,” he added.
+
+Especially Paul. The libertarian has made ending the data gathering program his signature issue, and has featured his spirited Senate fight in campaign ads and fundraising appeals.
+
+In the wee hours of May 24 and again in an unusual Senate session on Sunday, Paul used parliamentary rules to disrupt floor action on the issue. A vote on a House compromise known as the USA Freedom Act is not expected until later this week.
+
+This is exactly what McConnell was trying to avoid.
+
+The House bill passed overwhelmingly and has President Obama’s support. It leaves the job of data gathering to phone companies, rather than the government, and requires the government to get a search warrant to access it.
+
+McConnell worked hard to build opposition to the House bill, which he has criticized as a hurdle to intelligence gathering. But he lost supporters as senators coalesced around the House bill, 77 to 17, in a procedural vote to advance the bill on Sunday. The leader had wanted to simply extend the provisions of the Patriot Act, but Paul – eight days ago and on Sunday – blocked even short-term extensions.
+
+“I’m sure we’re not going to let the whole program lapse, but because Senator Paul is taking advantage of the rules of the Senate, [we] will delay and there will be an interim period where the nation is less secure,” Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, said on Sunday.
+
+Democrats see things differently. Minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada faulted McConnell, blaming him for a “manufactured crisis” by waiting to bring up the Patriot Act provisions until just before the Senate’s Memorial Day recess – a week before their expiration.
+
+When he was majority leader, Reid also used deadlines to forge consensus. It's a common floor management technique. But Reid ""would never have stacked this many bills together against a deadline without a clear path forward,” his spokesman, Adam Jentleson, said in an email. Mr. Jentleson was referring to trade and highway bills that also were voted on shortly before the Senate broke for recess just over a week ago.
+
+Could this have been avoided?
+
+“It’s difficult to know,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine. “Perhaps we should have stayed in last week, rather than going on recess until the issue was resolved.”
+
+On the other hand, she said, when McConnell offered short-term extensions to work out compromise legislation just before the recess, “I don’t think it was anticipated” that Paul and some Democratic allies would object.
+
+Now, she said, “all of us are extremely concerned about the program going dark at a time when the terrorist threat is very high and coming at us from so many different directions.”",REAL
+5989,POLL: Who will win Florida? - USAPoliticsNow,"Comments 
+Donald Trump has a 2 percentage point edge over Hillary Clinton in Florida, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll released Wednesday, as both presidential campaigns blanket the critical swing state in a full sprint to Election Day. 
+Who do you think will win in Florida? We are giving you a chance to vote on our poll and choose one of the two possible candidates. Who will win Florida? ",FAKE
+8672,World wildlife ‘falls by 58% in 40 years’,"World wildlife ‘falls by 58% in 40 years’ 10/27/2016 
+BBC NEWS Global wildlife populations have fallen by 58% since 1970, a report says. 
+The Living Planet assessment, by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and WWF, suggests that if the trend continues that decline could reach two-thirds among vertebrates by 2020. 
+The figures suggest that animals living in lakes, rivers and wetlands are suffering the biggest losses. 
+Human activity, including habitat loss, wildlife trade, pollution and climate change contributed to the declines. 
+Dr Mike Barrett. head of science and policy at WWF, said: “It’s pretty clear under ‘business as usual’ we will see continued declines in these wildlife populations. But I think now we’ve reached a point where there isn’t really any excuse to let this carry on. 
+“We know what the causes are and we know the scale of the impact that humans are having on nature and on wildlife populations – it really is now down to us to act.” 
+However the methodology of the report has been criticised. Image copyright CARLOS DREWS / WWF Image caption The report looked at data collected on 3,700 species of vertebrates over the last 40 years 
+The Living Planet Report is published every two years and aims to provide an assessment of the state of the world’s wildlife. 
+For freshwater species alone, the decline stands at 81% since 1970 Dr Mike Barrett, WWF 
+This analysis looked at 3,700 different species of birds, fish, mammals, amphibians and reptiles – about 6% of the total number of vertebrate species in the world. 
+The team collected data from peer-reviewed studies, government statistics and surveys collated by conservation groups and NGOs. 
+Any species with population data going back to 1970, with two or more time points (to show trends) was included in the study. 
+The researchers then analysed how the population sizes had changed over time. 
+Some of this information was weighted to take into account the groups of animals that had a great deal of data (there are many records on Arctic and near Arctic birds, for example) or very little data (tropical amphibians, for example). The report authors said this was to make sure a surplus of information about declines in some animals did not skew the overall picture. 
+The last report, published in 2014, estimated that the world’s wildlife populations had halved over the last 40 years. 
+This assessment suggests that the trend has continued: since 1970, populations have declined by an average of 58%. 
+Dr Barrett said some groups of animals had fared worse than others. 
+“We do see particularly strong declines in the freshwater environment – for freshwater species alone, the decline stands at 81% since 1970. This is related to the way water is used and taken out of fresh water systems, and also the fragmentation of freshwater systems through dam building, for example.” 
+It also highlighted other species, such as African elephants , which have suffered huge declines in recent years with the increase in poaching, and sharks, which are threatened by overfishing. 
+If pressures – overexploitation, illegal wildlife trade for example – increase or worsen, then that trend may be worse Dr Robin Freeman, ZSL 
+The researchers conclude that vertebrate populations are declining by an average of 2% each year, and warn that if nothing is done, wildlife populations could fall by 67% (below 1970 levels) by the end of the decade. 
+Dr Robin Freeman, head of ZSL’s Indicators & Assessments Unit, said: “But that’s assuming things continue as we expect. If pressures – overexploitation, illegal wildlife trade, for example – increase or worsen, then that trend may be worse. 
+“But one of the things I think is most important about these stats, these trends are declines in the number of animals in wildlife populations – they are not extinctions. By and large they are not vanishing, and that presents us with an opportunity to do something about it.” Image copyright SCOTT DICKERSON Image caption There are still many gaps in our knowledge of the world’s vertebrates 
+However, Living Planet reports have drawn some criticisms. 
+There are some numbers [in the report] that are sensible, but there are some numbers that are very very sketchy Stuart Pimm, Duke University 
+Stuart Pimm, professor of conservation ecology at Duke University in the United States, said that while wildlife was in decline, there were too many gaps in the data to boil population loss down to a single figure. 
+“There are some numbers [in the report] that are sensible, but there are some numbers that are very, very sketchy,” he told BBC News. 
+“For example, if you look at where the data comes from, not surprisingly, it is massively skewed towards western Europe. 
+“When you go elsewhere, not only do the data become far fewer, but in practice they become much, much sketchier… there is almost nothing from South America, from tropical Africa, there is not much from the tropics, period. Any time you are trying to mix stuff like that, it is is very very hard to know what the numbers mean. 
+“They’re trying to pull this stuff in a blender and spew out a single number…. It’s flawed.” 
+But Dr Freeman said the team had taken the best data possible from around the world. 
+“It’s completely true that in some regions and in some groups, like tropical amphibians for example, we do have a lack of data. But that’s because there is a lack of data. 
+“We’re confident that the method we are using is the best method to present an overall estimate of population decline. 
+“It’s entirely possible that species that aren’t being monitored as effectively may be doing much worse – but I’d be very surprised if they were doing much better than we observed. “",FAKE
+2801,Administration officials defend Iran nuclear deal,"WASHINGTON—Top administration officials forcefully defended the Iran nuclear deal Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the face of unified GOP opposition and some Democratic skepticism about the deal’s capability to deter a nuclear Iran.
+
+If Congress scuttles the deal ""we will have squandered the best chance we have to solve this problem through peaceful means,"" said Secretary of State John Kerry, who appeared alongside Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
+
+Thursday’s hearing is the first public congressional forum to review terms of an agreement struck by the U.S., Iran and five other nations and unanimously supported by the United Nations Security Council.
+
+Lawmakers are expected to vote on the deal this fall in what will be one of the most significant foreign policy votes to occur during the Obama presidency.
+
+Republicans in particular levied harsh critiques of the agreement to limit Iran's nuclear ambitions in exchange for easing sanctions. “With all due respect, you guys have been bamboozled, and the American people are going to pay for that,"" said Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho.
+
+Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a 2016 presidential candidate who has carved out a role as a foreign policy hawk, had a testy exchange with Kerry.
+
+""I listened to a long list of your objections here about it, but there is no alternative that you or anybody else has proposed"" to stop a nuclear Iran, Kerry said. “I sure have, Secretary Kerry,” Rubio responded.
+
+""I am confident that the next president of the United States will have enough common sense that if this is being applied properly, if it is being implemented fully, they’re not going to arbitrarily end it,"" Kerry replied.
+
+Kerry said any congressional effort to undermine the deal would send a message that America can’t be trusted in international negotiations after leading world powers all signed off on the deal. The message would be: “We’ve got 535 secretaries of State and you can’t deal with anybody, and that's going to undo a whole bunch of efforts and a whole bunch of things that matter in the world” Kerry said.
+
+Rubio also chastised the administration for not doing more to secure the release of American hostages, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who has been imprisoned for a year. Rezaian’s brother attended Thursday’s hearing.
+
+The panel’s chairman, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., blasted ""hyperbole"" from the administration that ""it's either this deal or war"" and listed a number of weaknesses he sees in the agreement regarding the caliber of the inspections, the timeline to ease sanctions, and Iran's ability to continue a nuclear program.
+
+""I'd have to say that, based on my reading -- and I believe that you have crossed a new threshold in U.S. foreign policy -- where now it is a policy of the United States to enable a state sponsor of terror to obtain sophisticated, industrial nuclear development program that has, as we know, only one real practical need,"" Corker said.
+
+Even the panel's top Democrats, Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Bob Menendez, D-N.J., appeared skeptical about the deal, and neither has indicated they can support it yet.
+
+Congress has until Sept. 17 to vote to approve, disapprove or take no action at all. Obama has said he would veto any bill to block it.
+
+With Republicans in control of Congress and party leaders working to kill the deal, the administration's strategy appears to be to shore up enough Democratic support to block a veto override, which would require the support of at least 34 senators or 146 House members.
+
+To that end, the trio of administration officials met privately Thursday afternoon with House Democrats. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is helping the administration shore up the support President Obama needs.
+
+""I feel very confident we're going to have enough votes"" to block a veto override, said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., who supports the agreement, following the meeting.",REAL
+5780,"Assange: Clinton And ISIS Are Funded By Same People, “Trump Not Permitted To Win”","Julian Assange has undoubtedly been on a run, exposing endless and shocking truths regarding Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton just days before the election is set to reveal the path the next four years will take in the U.S. Via CollectiveEvolution 
+
+And now there’s more news to be baffled over, with Assange claiming Hillary Clinton misled Americans about the reality of Islamic State’s support from Washington’s Middle East allies. Last month, Assange’s WikiLeaks made a 2014 email public that exposed how then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged then adviser to President Barack Obama John Podesta to “bring pressure” on Qatar and Saudi Arabia, saying that they were “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Islamic State, IS, ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups.” In a video, Assange called the email the “most important” of the entire collection of ammo WikiLeaks has obtained against the Clinton campaign: All serious analysts know, and even the US government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS and funding ISIS, but the dodge has always been that it is some “rogue” princes using their oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that it is the government of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
+Assange sat down with veteran journalist John Pilger for a 25-minute interview within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Assange has been living as a refugee since 2012. He discussed in detail the conflict of interest between Clinton’s official position, which occurred during Obama’s first term, husband Bill Clinton’s nonprofit, and the Middle East officials, claiming the output or urgency to fight terrorism may not have been heartfelt.
+Here is a valuable excerpt from the interview: 
+John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the first two, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly Saudi Arabia.
+Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton – and the Clinton emails reveal a significant discussion of it – the biggest-ever arms deal in the world was made with Saudi Arabia: more than $80 billion. During her tenure, the total arms exports from the U.S. doubled in dollar value
+JP: Of course, the consequence of that is that this notorious jihadist group, called ISIL or ISIS, is created largely with money from people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation?
+JA: Yes.
+Pilger asked Assange if he thought the accusations against the Clinton campaign would have any effect on the Democratic nominee winning the 2016 presidential election. Assange also believes that next Tuesday’s election is absolutely rigged, and is in favor of Hillary Clinton. He said,
+My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment. Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.
+",FAKE
+8118,Couple Seeking House Willing To Do Webcam Show For Landlords,"0 Add Comment 
+“YOU just have to show that you’re willing to go that extra mile,” said Keith Gernon, angling the webcam on his laptop to give a perfect shot of his bed, where his girlfriend Cathy Wilson is already waiting. 
+“We haven’t left the house without a cash deposit with us for the past four months, just so we can grab any property that comes available to rent. But we’re always beaten to it… so we’ve decided to try something new”. 
+Gernon and Wilson, both 27, are speaking exclusively to WWN about their difficulties in securing a one bedroom flat in Dublin city centre, and have decided to offer potential landlords a daily sex video broadcast live over a webcam in a bid to give them the ‘edge’ over other renters. 
+“The minute a flat goes up on Daft, we mail the landlord and put on a bit of a show for them, letting them know there’s more where that came from,” said Wilson, undressing quickly in a bid to secure a bedsit above a butcher’s shop which just got listed at €1,800 a month. 
+“If you think you’re going to just show up and get the place, forget it. It’s like trying to get bread in Russia in the 80s. We don’t even bother going to viewings now, we just send over a sexy clip and take it from there”. 
+While landlords are open to webcam shows as part of their letting packages, people looking to buy a house rather than rent in Dublin must agree to sign up for a 24-hour Truman Show style existence with cameras in every room of the house.",FAKE
+10358,90 Percent of So-Called Clean Hydroelectric Projects Will Usher In A New Wave of Mercury Contamination,"By Marco Torres A new study has confirmed what many activists and environmental researchers have been stating for years. Hydroelectric power is not clean at all. In fact, Harvard University has found... ",FAKE
+1820,"Mitt Romney Was Right: To win in 2016, here's what Republicans must do now","I think most people would agree that Mitt Romney is a good man who cares deeply about his country, and he would have made a great president.
+
+It’s our collective loss as a nation that he wasn’t elected in 2012. I know I speak for many when I say I was excited about the prospect of a Romney 2016 candidacy and his vision for a stronger and more prosperous America and a safer, more stable world.
+
+I’ve known Mitt for almost 15 years, dating back to our time together in Massachusetts politics. I’ve seen first-hand the traits that made him a world-class businesses man, savior of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, and a strong chief executive as governor of the Bay State. But I’ve also seen the side of him that others may be less familiar with: a devoted husband, father, and grandfather who puts his family’s interests above all else.
+
+Like me, Mitt is deeply concerned about the future of this country, and the conditions we’ll leave it in for our kids and grandkids. The main reason he took a long look at another run for president, before ultimately deciding it was time for a new generation of Republican leaders, was because of his concern over the fact that our allies don’t trust us, and our foes do not fear, or respect us.
+
+Our foreign policy is a joke, and the lack of leadership is leaving a void for criminal or terrorist elements to fill.
+
+He concluded that after a bruising and potentially divisive primary, our primary process as it stands, together with the lack of unity after the primary would have made it easier for Hillary Clinton to become our next president. Governor Romney and I think that is something our nation simply cannot afford – and something that all Republicans must stand united against, no matter where they fall on the ideological spectrum.
+
+After eight catastrophic years of President Obama, our country desperately needs new and fresh leadership that projects American strength. Put simply, it is clear that Hillary Clinton represents the third term of Barack Obama and his failed foreign policy. Through her words and writings, it’s clear she shares the same left-wing economic ideology as President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, rooted firmly in the concept that a bigger government is the answer to everything.
+
+Clinton’s widely-panned comment that businesses don’t create jobs demonstrates an unfiltered view into her true economic principles and a stunning lack of appreciation for American free enterprise.  It shows that she is of the same school of thought that led to the “you didn’t build it” ideology, which demonizes our job creators and brings us closer to socialism.
+
+Gone are the days of the JFK Democrats who believed that, if you worked hard and kept your head down, you could make an honest living, provide for your family, and achieve the American Dream. No longer does the Democratic Party celebrate and encourage economic success; instead their policies of wealth re-distribution punish those who do well.  This discourages innovation and puts a damper on the American dream for our younger generations.
+
+When it comes to international affairs, Clinton is even worse. For four years, she was the face of Obama’s foreign policy, which emboldened our enemies and insulted our allies. As a result, the former doesn’t fear us and the latter doesn’t trust us. Obama's “leading from behind” strategy leaves America more vulnerable.
+
+As America’s influence around the world has waned, violent terrorists have stepped up and filled the vacuum, and the results, have been both catastrophic and heart-breaking.
+
+Last month, we all watched in horror as radical Muslims shed the blood of innocent victims in the streets of Paris. Policemen and cartoonists were murdered in cold blood for the whole world to see, and members of the Jewish faith were targeted because of their religious beliefs.
+
+And yet in the face of all of these new threats, Hillary Clinton refuses to acknowledge the obvious: we are engaged in a potentially centuries-long war with Muslim extremists who will stop at nothing to export their policies of terror around the world.  It is a war rooted in religion, and we need to show these terrorists that we have the muscle and willpower to outlast them.
+
+On all of these issues, and more, Mitt Romney was right. Now it’s time for a new set of Republican leaders to pick up where he left off and take the Republican Party’s ideas directly to the American people.
+
+Throughout the 2016 primary process, our GOP candidates must project economic strength which is based on the principles of free enterprise. They must also show a muscular foreign policy that makes no apologies for having the strongest fighting force in the world.
+
+If we do that, we can win back the White House and put this country back on firm footing for all of our citizens.",REAL
+3628,"In wake of Paris shooting, Spain worries about terror attacks on its home soil","With France still reeling from the horrific terrorist shooting on Paris satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday that left 12 people dead, neighboring Spain is on high alert for a similar type of attack on the Iberian Peninsula.
+
+Hours after the shooting at Charlie Hebdo, Spain’s Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz said that Spain's anti-terrorist security level was upgraded a notch and that the country was sharing information with France in relation to the attacks. Spain has ramped up security around public infrastructure spots like train stations and increased the police presence on streets throughout the country’s cities.
+
+""I firmly condemn the terrorist attack in Paris, and my condolences and solidarity to the French people for the victims,"" Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy tweeted yesterday, adding. ""Spain with France.""
+
+Díaz, however, tried to downplay Spain’s response to the Paris attack, saying that the country had no evidence to suggest ""an additional threat of an attack in Spain as a consequence of what happened"" in France. The interior minister did add that the growing rivalry between al-Qaida and the Islamic State could lead to more attacks like that around the world.
+
+""The dangers posed by Spanish jihadis returning home armed with combat experience twinned with ideological motivation are very real,"" Rafael Anibal, the Madrid-based communications director for the non-profit group Fuente Latina told Fox News Latino. ""There is great concern about the threats these battle-hardened fighters pose the general public in Spain.""
+
+So far, no terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack, and the one suspect, Mourad Hamyd, who surrendered at a police station after hearing his name linked to the attack isn't known to be linked to any organization. However, a witness to the shooting claims to have heard one of the gunmen yell that they were acting on behalf of al-Qaida in Yemen, suggesting an affiliation with the violent al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) group.
+
+AQAP recently named Charlie Hebdo’s editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, to its hit list of Westerners who have insulted the Muslim faith.
+
+Spain is no stranger to terrorist attacks, and its use as a conduit for European terrorists traveling to the Middle East is well-documented.
+
+In 2004, Spain was rocked by a number of attacks on Madrid train stations that left 191 people dead and injured more than 2,000 that were carried out by an al-Qaida-inspired terrorist cell. In the last year, Spanish authorities have arrested at least 50 people with ties to Islamic extremist groups – some in the North African enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta and some on the Iberian Peninsula itself.
+
+""Memories of Islamic terrorism on Spanish soil are still fresh in our collective memory – about 191 people were killed in Madrid last decade,"" Anibal said. ""Spain has a very complicated geostrategic position in part due to its proximity to North Africa.""
+
+Security experts say that Spain’s big worry about these groups is whether the extremist groups will conduct attacks on the Iberian Peninsula or are just passing through the country en route to targets in other parts of Western Europe or in the U.S.
+
+""Spain should be asking [itself] who is the target,"" Matthew Dunn, a former operative for the British Secret Service, MI6, told FNL last year. ""Will it be there or will Spain only be a transit point to other countries like France or Great Britain?""
+
+Both Rajoy and leaders of Spain’s mainstream Islamic community have condemned the attacks and tried to downplay anti-Muslim sentiment that might arise throughout Europe in the wake of the Paris shooting. There are about 1.2 million Muslims living in Spain – about 2.5 percent of the population.
+
+""This multiple murder goes totally against Islam. Neither cartoon strips, nor religion, nor anything at all can justify murder. Murder is against the law and against all logic and reason,"" Muhammed Escudero Uribe, deputy chairman of the Spanish Islamic Board told Spanish media. ""Islam is a religion which promotes peace, integration and living in harmony.""
+
+Even so, in Spain and across Europe, leaders have had to deal with the threat of radicalized Muslims while also worrying about the rise of xenophobic groups who themselves threaten violence against their countries' Islamic minority.
+
+""Spain is a country that guarantees religious freedom, but Spain will never give terrorism a free pass. The enemy is terrorism, from that premise one can defend any position – as long as others [rights] are respected."" Rajoy said, according to El País.""I am calm. I think the most important is that we continue the battle against terrorism.""
+
+Follow us on twitter.com/foxnewslatino
+
+ Like us at facebook.com/foxnewslatino",REAL
+1609,Carly’s momentum keeps growing,"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+Buzz Cut:
+
+ • Carly’s momentum keeps growing
+
+ • Southern Man: Trump heads to Mobile for mega rally
+
+ • New doubts about Hillary email claims
+
+ • Iran deal doubts grow
+
+ • Be the bear
+
+CARLY’S MOMENTUM KEEPS GROWING
+
+ No candidate in the Republican field has had a better two weeks than Carly Fiorina. Gallup polling out today compares views of the Republican contenders before and after the Aug. 6 Fox News debate in Cleveland. Favorable views of Fiorina are up an eye-popping 15 points, 3 points more than the two other debate winners, Ben Carson and John Kasich.
+
+ 
+
+ “I went into the debate thinking this was an opportunity. An opportunity to introduce myself to Republican people,” Fiorina said in an interview on “Power Play with Chris Stirewalt.” “It was an opportunity I was going to take full advantage of.”
+
+ 
+
+ But there were others who hoped for (and needed) standout showings. They saw sentiment collapse. Gallup shows Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Lindsey Graham took double-digit nosedives. Other, mostly better-known candidates saw little change. Donald Trump (17 percent net favorability) and Jeb Bush (27 percent net favorability) were essentially unchanged.
+
+ 
+
+ Fiorina shot past Trump and Bush to a net score of 37 percent, but along the way earned the enmity of Trump, whom she whacked for his post-debate comments. Trump has made attacking Fiorina a standard part of his speeches and interviews since then, often complaining about the sound of her voice.
+
+ 
+
+ “We’re not actually solving problems when we just hurl insults each other’s way,” Fiorina said in the interview. “I think we need a leader who will actually honor citizens by reengaging them in the political process and in their government…”
+
+ 
+
+ The poll shows Fiorina still has room to grow.
+
+ 
+
+ After the debate, an all-time high of 51 percent of Republicans expressed familiarity with her name. That brings her near top-tier contender Scott Walker, who is still a relative unknown to 40 percent of his party. But she is still less known by 20 points than Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, 30 points less than Bush and 40 points less than Trump.
+
+ 
+
+ ‘It was my personal relationship with Jesus Christ that saved me’ - In her interview, Fiorina also responded to those who have questioned her faith and resolve to fight Islamist militants because she once spoke in praise of the enlightenment of the medieval Ottoman Empire: “No one needs to question or tell me about my faith. I’ve been through some hard times in my life. I’ve battled cancer. We’ve lost a child to the demons of addiction. So I understand in deeply personal terms, that it was my personal relationship with Jesus Christ that saved me, that saved my family. So it’s unfortunate when people throw stones at anyone, but politics has sort of become that, hasn’t it? And we have candidates who encourage it.”
+
+ 
+
+ SOUTHERN MAN: TRUMP HEADS TO MOBILE FOR MEGA RALLY
+
+ In what is set to be a scorcher down South today, Donald Trump plans have his biggest rally yet. After moving venues to the University of South Alabama’s 40,000-seat stadium, Trump is looking to solidify summer support into something that will last through the winter.
+
+ 
+
+ The Kingfish or the King? - AL.com: “‘I had an older woman call me the other day asking how I can get tickets ... she didn’t have Internet and she couldn’t get tickets,’ [Jonathan Gray of Strategy Research] said. ‘I asked her, ‘Why do you want to go?’ I asked her, ‘Are you backing Donald Trump?’ She said, ‘I don’t know think so.’ She said that she regretted ‘all my life that she didn’t see Elvis’ and didn’t want to regret the opportunity to see Donald Trump.’”
+
+ 
+
+ Trumped in their home states, except Walker, Kasich - A slew of recent polls in the home states of many 2016ers show they are losing ground to Donald Trump. In Florida, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio split potential voters to trail Trump by 4 points and 10 points, respectively. More significantly, Trump also maintains a major lead in Texas over home state guys Sen. Ted Cruz and former Gov. Rick Perry. Trump bests Cruz by 8 points and Perry by a dozen points, with 24 percent support - up from 2 percent two months ago.  But holding their ground are Scott Walker, who maintains a 25 percent to 9 percent advantage over Trump, and Gov. John Kasich, who tops a poll in his state, beating Trump by 6 points.
+
+ 
+
+ Cruz shifting to meet Trump? - Wash Ex’s David Drucker takes a look at the differing immigration policies between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Is Cruz shifting his position to meet Trump’s hard line? Drucker writes, “‘It shouldn’t be surprising that there’s some commonality between Trump’s plan and Sen. Cruz’s previously expressed positions,’ Cruz campaign senior spokesman Rick Tyler told the Washington Examiner in a telephone interview.”
+
+ 
+
+ Jeb cites Rubio, Cruz in birthright citizenship - National Review: “Bush reminded voters that some popular Republicans have benefited from birthright citizenship. ‘If people are here legally, they have a visa and they have a child who’s born here, I think that they ought to be American citizens,’ he said today in New Hampshire. ‘People like Marco Rubio, by the way, that’s how he came. So to suggest that we make it impossible for a talented person like that not to be a candidate for president, or Ted Cruz? I think we’re getting a little overboard here.’”
+
+ 
+
+ [Back off, eh - Cruz’s campaign was quick to point out that the candidate’s automatic American citizenship at birth in Canada derived from his mother’s status as a natural-born citizen, not the provisions of the 14th Amendment.]
+
+ 
+
+ Eurozone? - Federalist Ben Domenech asks whether Trump’s popularity reflects a turn toward European-style politics in America.
+
+ 
+
+ POWER PLAY: CADDYSHACK CAMPAIGN
+
+ Jeb Bush engaged in a political donnybrook with rival Donald Trump this week. Is this smart strategy or a potential minefield for Bush? Republican Ford O’Connell and Democrat Brad Woodhouse join Chris Stirewalt to hash out the pros and cons. WATCH HERE.
+
+ 
+
+ #mediabuzz - Are media watchdogs taking Donald Trump more seriously? Is Hillary Clinton’s testy relationship with the press adding to her woes? Host Howard Kurtz and guests dive in. Watch “#mediabuzz” Sunday at 11 a.m. ET, with a second airing at 5 p.m.
+
+ 
+
+ Dubya raises cash for little bro - USA Today: “Former president George W. Bush jumped into the 2016 presidential race Thursday with a fundraising letter on behalf of brother Jeb. ‘This is a consequential time in our nation’s history, and we need a strong leader,’ the 43rd president said in the missive. ‘Jeb took on tough challenges as Florida’s Governor and delivered results. I know he will do the same as President.’”
+
+ 
+
+ [Bush is in Columbus, Ohio today for an Americans for Prosperity summit. Other speakers for the weekend event include Rubio and Cruz.]
+
+ 
+
+ How Walker would run - Scott Walker’s campaign previewed the kind of ObamaCare attack ad he would run against Hillary Clinton as the Republican nominee. It’s rough stuff.
+
+ 
+
+ [Walker announced today the backing of Alabama Senate Majority Leader Greg Reed as his state chairman ahead of Walker’s weekend visit to the Yellowhammer State.]
+
+ 
+
+ Rubio says Black Lives Matter movement cannot be ignored - Reuters: “Republican senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio said on Thursday the issue cannot be ignored. ‘It’s a reality that in many communities in this country the relationship between minority communities and the police and law enforcement agencies is terrible,’ Rubio told the Detroit Economic Club.”
+
+ 
+
+ [Rubio holds a town hall meeting in Valley View, Ohio.]
+
+ 
+
+ WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…
+
+ Patsy Cline’s iconic recording of the song “Crazy” was made in Nashville on this day in 1961. The song was written and first recorded by a 28-year-old Willie Nelson but came to national attention when rising star Cline did her rendition later that year. Cline did not like the original demo version and told her husband Charlie Dick, who brought home the recording for her, that she wasn’t impressed. Cline decided to do the song, but due to a car crash months prior, could not record the song as Nelson intended. Her ribs had been damaged in the crash and she could not reach the high notes. After a multi-hour recording session, the country-pop tune was one of the biggest hits of the year. The album produced another enormous hit for Cline: “I Fall to Pieces.”
+
+ 
+
+ Got a TIP from the RIGHT or the LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+ 
+
+ POLL CHECK
+
+ Real Clear Politics Averages
+
+ Obama Job Approval: Approve – 44.0 percent//Disapprove – 50.3 percent
+
+ Directions of Country: Right Direction – 28.4 percent//Wrong Track – 62.6 percent
+
+ 
+
+ NEW DOUBTS ABOUT HILLARY EMAIL CLAIMS
+
+ Reuters: “While the [State Department] is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly released emails as ‘Classified,’ it stresses this is not evidence of rule-breaking. Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it. But the details included in those ‘Classified’ stamps — which include a string of dates, letters and numbers describing the nature of the classification — appear to undermine this account, a Reuters examination of the emails and the relevant regulations has found. The new stamps indicate that some of Clinton's emails from her time as the nation’s most senior diplomat are filled with a type of information the U.S. government and the department’s own regulations automatically deems classified from the get-go — regardless of whether it is already marked that way or not.”
+
+ 
+
+ Trust issues - How bad is it? Chris Cillizza put it well “Only one in three voters in the three largest swing states in the country think that the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination is honest and trustworthy.”
+
+ 
+
+ Joe gets cash jolt - NY Post: “The Draft Biden organization had raised just under $79,000 through June 30, but now momentum for Biden has been so ‘tremendous’ that the super PAC is well on its way to raise $2.5 million to $3 million by the end of September, a senior adviser for the PAC told The Post. The email list has also grown from a few thousand to more than 200,000 in recent weeks. ‘We’ve seen a tremendous boost,’ said adviser Josh Alcorn, a former Biden presidential campaign staffer who was a close friend of Biden’s late son Beau.”
+
+ 
+
+ Fox News Sunday: Biden time? - Shannon Bream heads the show this Sunday with a focus on the Democrats. Draft Biden movement advisor Josh Alcorn talks Biden run, and why he thinks the vice president has a shot. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey breaks down the legal fallout of Hillary Clinton’s continued email server problems. Watch “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace” airs at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. ET on Fox News. Check local listings for air times in your area.
+
+ 
+
+ POWER PLAY: A GO FOR JOE?
+
+ A recent boost in the polls adds to the drumbeat as Joe Biden mulls over a run for the White House. Republican Ford O’Connell and Democrat Brad Woodhouse join Chris Stirewalt to discuss the implications of a Biden bid. WATCH HERE.
+
+ 
+
+ O’Malley squeezes Hillary on Social Security - Former Gov. Martin O’Malley, D-Md., is trying to put the heat on Hillary Clinton to back big expansions of Social Security benefits. Politico got the deets from the campaign.
+
+ 
+
+ IRAN DEAL DOUBTS GROW
+
+ Following U.N. agency and Obama administration pushback of an initial report by the AP…“A draft document exclusively obtained by Fox News supports reports that Iran would play a major role in inspections at its controversial Parchin nuclear site, by providing U.N. inspectors with crucial materials. The so-called side deal, labeled ‘Separate arrangement II,’ says Iran will ‘provide to the [International Atomic Energy Agency]’ photos and videos of locations and environmental samples, ‘taking into account military concerns.’…The agreement also provides that the agency would ensure the ‘technical authenticity’ of activities -- in other words, ensuring nuclear work was not meant for weapons development -- but the IAEA would use Iran's ‘authenticated equipment.’  This would be followed by a visit from the IAEA director general.”
+
+ 
+
+ [No sale - A CNN/ORC poll released Thursday shows 56 percent of Americans now say they think Congress should reject the deal with Iran -- up from 52 percent less than a month ago. In a recent Fox News poll respondents said they would reject the deal 58 percent to 31 percent if given the chance to vote on it.]
+
+ 
+
+ Webb steps up opposition - Free Beacon: “Democratic presidential candidate and former Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.) said Friday that he opposed the Iran nuclear deal for, among other reasons, giving the rogue regime a greater balance of power in a fragile region. “The danger in the Iran agreement is in what it does not address, other than nuclear issues, that allows Iran to continue to gain a greater balance of the power in a very fragile region,” Webb said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “It affects Israel. It affects the Sunni countries.”
+
+ 
+
+ “Anybody who trusts the Iranians really needs some time on the couch with someone to give them serious, serious therapy. Putting the Iranians in a position to self-inspect…this is like putting a mass murderer in charge of a gun store.” – Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., from “Fox and Friends”
+
+ 
+
+ BE THE BEAR
+
+ Did you know that there are only two more Fridays left in the summer of 2015? That’s a lot of pressure. You were supposed to do so many things this summer – topiary gardens or extreme mountain biking or alpaca encounters or preserving your own organic gooseberries or whatever form of ambitious torture you devised for yourself three months ago. But you know who doesn’t read stupid “summer bucket list” articles or worry about people silently judging them on social media? Bears. Bears don’t care what you think about their summer plans. Bears don’t check Pinterest. Bears are not worried about their fantasy football draft. Bears do not know what FOMO is. So please watch these five bear cubs and their mom have the best time ever in a New Jersey family’s above-ground swimming pool and just chillax.
+
+ 
+
+ Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+2350,Why mass shootings don't convince gun owners to support gun control,"One thing I often hear in the wake of these endless mass shootings is, ""Surely this will convince those gun people. Surely the carnage and suffering are bad enough now that they'll feel compelled to support some gun control.""
+
+This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the cognitive and emotional dynamics at work. It presumes that mass shootings constitute an argument against guns, to be weighed against arguments in their favor. But to gun enthusiasts, mass shootings are not arguments against guns but for them. The rise in mass shootings is only convincing both sides that they're right, causing them to dig in further.
+
+It's not even clear that opinions on guns and gun violence remain amenable to argument. Over the past few decades, gun ownership in the US has evolved from a practical issue for rural homeowners and hunters to a kind of gesture of tribal solidarity, an act of defiance toward Obama, the left, and all the changes they represent. The gun lobby has become more hardened and uncompromising, pushing guns into schools, churches, and universities.
+
+This has taken place in the context of a broader and deeper polarization of the country, as Red America and Blue America have become more ideologically homogeneous and distant from one another. The two sides are now composed of people who quite literally think and feel differently — and are less and less able to communicate. The gun issue is a salient example, but far from the only one.
+
+This suggests that if the status quo on guns in the US is to change, it will be through overwhelming political force, not through evidence and argument. Guns have now ascended to the level of worldview and identity, areas largely beyond the reach of persuasion.
+
+For years, an accumulating body of psychological and social scientific research has shown that, as Chris Mooney summarized in an article last year, ""liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics."" (Mooney later gathered that research in his somewhat unfortunately titled book The Republican Brain.)
+
+Mooney quotes psychologist John Jost and colleagues, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences:
+
+So, different how?
+
+Jost and colleagues were responding positively to this paper by the University of Nebraska's John Hibbing, which argues, based on a series of experiments, that conservatives display a strong ""negativity bias"":
+
+Other research has traced this effect in part to the physiological level, finding that conservatives have larger right amygdalae. (The amygdala is a cluster of neurons in the brain's medial temporal lobe thought to regulate basic pleasure and fear responses; many psychological conditions, including anxiety and PTSD, have been traced to abnormal functioning of the amygdala.)
+
+Heightened sensitivity to negative stimuli can mean a propensity for anxiety, fear, and occasionally alarm. If fear threatens loss of control, many traits common to conservatives can be seen as efforts to reassert control. As Jost and colleagues summarize: ""Research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety.""
+
+Another way of framing the differences is in terms of the five-factor model, a set of five core personality traits many psychologists use for assessment: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
+
+As Mark Mellman wrote earlier this week, liberals and conservatives consistently differ on a few of these traits. Liberals are more open to new experiences, novelty and disruption; conservatives prefer stability and the status quo. Liberals are more tolerant of mess, ambiguity, and uncertainty; conservatives prefer tidiness, clarity, and certainty.
+
+Yet another way to frame the difference: Yale psychologist Dan Kahan, whose cultural cognition work Ezra has written about before, divides worldviews along two dimensions, hierarchical vs. egalitarian and individualist vs. communitarian. This creates a four-quadrant space; conservatives are hierarchical-individualists.
+
+These differences can help inform our understanding of current US politics, but first we should head off a few misunderstandings.
+
+Talking about deep personality differences is a sensitive business and inevitably draws some anger. So it's worth clarifying a few things.
+
+All these conservative tendencies put together and pushed to the extreme amount to authoritarianism. The liberal inverse amounts to a kind of drifting libertinism. In practice, very few people lie at the far ends of the bell-curve distribution. Most people are somewhere closer to the middle, an idiosyncratic mix.
+
+What's more, different aspects of personality can be elicited by different circumstances, at different times, around different people. In times of peace and growth, there's a drift toward liberalism. Fear and crisis tend to push everyone the other direction, to shrink boundaries of concern and heighten in-group/out-group sensitivity. So liberal and conservative traits are not static, at the group level or within an individual.
+
+Everyone is unique. No individual is predicted or explained by this research. These are general tendencies, heuristics, fluid and context-sensitive.
+
+Whichever of these personality traits, or clusters of traits, you might prefer, the research itself does not characterize any as better or worse. It's easy to imagine circumstances in which sensitivity to threat and commitment to stability are valuable and others in which risk-taking and innovation are valuable. And it's likely valuable to have a mix, a balance, no matter the circumstances.
+
+As Mooney is at pains to emphasize in his book, personality does not dictate ideology. There's no law of nature that conservatives are confined to the political right. The 20th century offers no shortage of authoritarian leftists. When the political left dominates the political order, those prone to defending the status quo will tend to be leftists.
+
+There was a period in the mid-20th century US when liberals and conservatives were somewhat more evenly distributed across the parties — there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. But the past four or five decades have seen a slow (lately accelerating) process of polarization. Americans have sorted themselves: Almost all liberals are now Democrats; almost all conservatives are now Republicans. In Congress, the leftmost Republican is to the right of the rightmost Democrat.
+
+Let us imagine, then, a conservative gun owner — an older white gentleman, let's say, in his 50s, living in the Rust Belt somewhere. When he was growing up, there was living memory of a familiar order: men working in honorable trade or manufacturing jobs, women tending home and children, Sundays at church, hard work yielding a steady rise up the ladder to a well-earned house, yard, and car.
+
+That order was crumbling just as our gun owner inherited it. The honorable jobs are gone, or going. It's hell to find work, benefits are for shit, and there isn't much put aside for retirement. The kids are struggling with debt and low-paying jobs. They know, and our gun owner knows, that they probably aren't going to have a better life than he did — that the very core of the American promise has proven false for them, for the first time in generations.
+
+It's a bitter, helpless feeling. And for someone naturally attuned to ""order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity,"" it's scary. The role he thought he was meant to play in the world, the privileges and respect that came along with it, have been thrown into doubt. Everything is shifting under his feet.
+
+Over the last few years, our gun owner has found a whole network of TV channels, radio shows, books, blogs, and Facebook groups that speak directly to his unease. They understand the world he heard about from his father and grandfather, the world that's being lost; they understand the urgency of saving what's left of it.
+
+Most of all, with his already heightened sensitivity to threat further aggravated by economic uncertainty, they finally help him see who's to blame. They show him the immigrants crowding in, using up jobs and benefits that were promised to American workers. They show him minorities demanding handouts that are paid for with his taxes, even as they riot, even as they kill each other and the police. The show him terrorists making a mockery of weak American leadership. They show him elitist liberals, professors and entertainers, disdaining his values and mocking his religion.
+
+And it is such a relief, to finally put a face to all the ambient dread, to have some clarity again, to know who the good guys and bad guys are. Our gun owner is a good guy, thankfully, from the kind of self-reliant stock that settled this country.
+
+It seems like America's decline is a done deal, that the tide of liberal rot is unstoppable. But the one place he knows he can draw the line is at his door, on his private property, because he has a gun. He can defend his own. If the minorities riot again, or immigrant criminals move in nearby, or terrorists attack, or some wackjob goes on a shooting spree, or Obama comes for his guns ... well, that's what the guns are for. He's given up a lot, but he won't give up his autonomy or the safety of his family. He'll defend that to the end.
+
+To our gun owner, another mass shooting is not an argument for getting rid of guns. It's a confirmation of his every instinct, another sign of moral and societal decay, another reason to arm himself and defend what he's got left.
+
+You can tell him about Canada and Australia until you're blue in the face — the lower rate of gun deaths, the hunting exemptions, the seemingly intact freedoms. You can cite high popular support for restrictions on gun and ammunition sales. You can tell him that not every incremental tightening of standards is a slippery slope, that no one wants to confiscate his guns.
+
+But you're just another self-righteous liberal on another self-righteous crusade, too blind or stupid to see how governments always use people like you to disarm their citizenry. You've taken enough — of his taxes, his freedoms, his culture. He won't give you any more.
+
+A cherished myth of American politics (indeed, of democracy generally) is that it's fundamentally about persuasion, the contest of ideas. But in a political system already biased against action, in which members of both parties are becoming more ideologically and even psychologically distant, persuasion on issues that activate tribal identities is all but impossible. Our gun owner is not going to change his mind; everything gun control proponents consider evidence for their side, he considers evidence for his. The differences run deeper than evidence.
+
+If there are ever to be gun laws passed in the US, any kind of policy response to the rising tide of mass shootings, it will be because the people who want it amass the political power to overwhelm the power of the gun lobby. It will be because they organize and deploy more intensity, money, and votes than their opponents. More mass shootings are not going to do the job for them.",REAL
+5092,Division and tension at the DNC: The Democrats’ night of unity is marred by dissent,"But then WikiLeaks released thousands of DNC emails and, well, everything changed.
+
+Sanders has lamented the DNC’s pro-Clinton bias for months, and now there’s indisputable evidence that he was right. The DNC seems to have violated its own charter by clandestinely backing Clinton over Sanders before any votes were cast. There was plenty of writing on the wall before this story broke, but the hacked emails are damning. So damning, in fact, that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign hours before she was set to gavel in the convention.
+
+To anyone on the fence about Clinton and the DNC, it won’t matter that Russia was behind the data-dump or that some of the emails were likely fabricated in order to maximize the damage – there’s enough truth in them to confirm the anti-establishment narratives.
+
+Despite all the ambient noise, Sanders has done his part. He endorsed Clinton two weeks ago and on Sunday, just before the DNC convention began, he appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and affirmed his commitment to electing Clinton: “I think right now what we have got to focus on as Democrats is defeating perhaps the worst Republican candidate that I have seen in my lifetime.”
+
+But this is a tough sell for Sanders. The Left isn’t warming to Clinton, and many Bernie voters view obligatory endorsements as a contrivance. Nevertheless, assuaging the progressive base was the goal on Monday evening. And the bulk of that burden fell to Bernie Sanders.
+
+Everyone understood what Sanders was there to do: look into the camera and tell his supporters to get behind Clinton. And he has a perfectly reasonable case to make. If you care about progressive values, this isn’t a difficult choice. It’s Trump or Clinton. One is an unhinged ethno-nationalist and the other is an experienced centrist Democrat – end of analysis.
+
+But Sanders’ job became infinitely harder the minute those DNC emails were leaked. In addition to feigning enthusiasm for Clinton, a candidate he spent months condemning, he now had to address the shimmering elephant in the room. What would he say? How forceful would he be? How would his delegates respond?
+
+I was on the floor. The tension was palpable. There were delegates decked out in pro-Bernie attire, and they made sure the room knew were they stood. Anytime Sanders was mentioned, they erupted: “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” It was sufficiently awkward that comedian Sarah Silverman was compelled to tell the Bernie or busters: “You’re being ridiculous.” Most of the room applauded; the Bernie contingent entrenched.
+
+It was almost 11 p.m. when Sanders finally took the stage. He followed Elizabeth Warren, who did her duty admirably. But her speech was interrupted by pro-Bernie protesters yelling “We trusted you,” a reference to her betrayal. The crowd supplanted the noise with cheers, but the dissenters persisted. The tension escalated. And then Sanders appeared. This was a combustible environment. I was convinced the crowd would turn on Sanders the second he praised Clinton. When he stepped to the podium, however, the applause were deafening. For nearly two minutes, Sanders stood silently as the crowd roared. He was a rock star. And this was an opportunity for his supporters to acknowledge his contribution. Sanders began with an abbreviated version of his stump speech. He acknowledged that “many people here in this convention hall and around the country are disappointed about the final results of the nominating process.” He thanked his supporters and reminded them that the “revolution” he launched was not about a single election or candidate. He cited the familiar statistics about the 1 percent. He talked about inequality and Wall Street and political corruption. And then he got to the important part. “We need leadership in this country which will improve the lives of working families, the children, the elderly, the sick and the poor,” Sanders told the crowd. “We need leadership which brings our people together and makes us stronger – not leadership which insults Latinos, Muslims, women, African-Americans and veterans – and divides us up. By these measures, any objective observer will conclude that – based on her ideas and her leadership – Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States. The choice is not even close.” This was a full endorsement. It was precisely what Ted Cruz refused to do last week. Surprisingly, it was mostly well-received. They didn’t like the message, but Bernie’s supporters had the good sense not to boo their hero. The unrest survives, however. Make no mistake: the first day of the Democratic convention was defined by revolt. The left wing of the party will not go gently into that good night, and a small but vocal insurgency stole the show on Monday. What should have been a night of unity was instead an embarrassing display of animus. Perhaps the mood will shift in the coming days. For now, though, it’s clear the Democratic Party has a problem. It’s not nearly as big as some will suggest, and it’s likely too small to swing the election. But what happened in Philadelphia on Monday night was a reminder that the wounds from the primary have yet to heal, and maybe never will.",REAL
+10551,Man with unfashionable front door feared by neighbours,"Man with unfashionable front door feared by neighbours 07-11-16 A MAN without a trendy oak panelling front door is a dangerous non-conformist, neighbours believe. Retail worker Tom Logan has caused concern by having a cheap-looking plastic front door instead of a sleek, sturdy modern one. Neighbour Donna Sheridan said: “Most people in the street have got a proper light brown oak panelling door, ideally with a vertical silver handle, but Logan thinks he’s different with his shitty white plastic door that looks like it came out of a skip. “I don’t know what he gets up to in there, probably druggie sex parties where they all wear masks to make it extra-perverted. At least the door will be easy to bash in when the police arrive. “I just wish a nice family with a normal door would move in, although it’ll be hard to sell the property if there are male prostitutes under all the floorboards.” Logan said: “Most evenings I just watch telly or use my vast occult library to open portals to evil dimensions.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+9566,Why Was this Natural Medicinal Substance Just Banned by the DEA?,"posted by Eddie If you’ve been keeping up with alternative media outlets the past couple weeks, you probably know that the DEA just classified kratom, a tropical deciduous tree with leaves used for various medicinal purposes (1) , a Schedule 1 substance. This puts it in the same class as heroin (2) . Vendors are already struggling to import it, and some have gone into hiding (2) . Kratom has been called a lifesaver for sufferers of mental or physical conditions made worse by pharmaceutical drugs. Despite this (and despite the harms caused by opiates), the scandal-ridden DEA has set its sights on fighting yet another helpful natural substance proven to work better for the treatment of various conditions than its pharmaceutical counterparts. An uprising began the moment the DEA announced the decision. Activists and kratom users everywhere are refusing to take it lying down and are working to correct the false image this classification paints of a misunderstood medicine. Blurring the Line By classifying it Schedule 1, the DEA is essentially telling us kratom is as bad as heroin. A little research reveals that not only is it nowhere near as bad as heroin or other opiates, but it can be used to treat opiate addiction. Anything that alters the mind is a drug, and by making classifications like this, the DEA is seriously blurring the line between beneficial and harmful drugs while confusing the public and proliferating ignorance. Nature produces countless mind-altering chemicals we’re supposed to use to heal the body and elevate the mind and soul. In this day and age, people are becoming aware of the power of nature to heal many of the problems created by man. This unjustified action against one of many beneficial natural substances serves only to expose the fact that the DEA is out of touch with the rest of the world. No Longer a Legitimate Authority Cassius Kamarampi writes that we have no reason to consider the DEA’s authority legitimate in the wake of their recent scandals (2) . One scandal, which broke wide open in the media, involved agents holding sex parties with prostitutes in Columbia supplied by local cartels (2) . This ultimately forced the head of the DEA, Michelle M. Leonhart, to step down (2) . It’s as if the agency wants to bring attention away from their misdeeds and onto the latest supposedly dangerous drug. Perhaps they intend for the backlash to make people forget their scandals and continue to bicker about which drugs the government should or shouldn’t let the masses use. If this is the case, there’s one thing they didn’t consider: activists don’t forget. You can’t expect independent thinkers to excuse the scandals of an agency that targets them with unfair laws. Ultimately, this classification will drive researchers and activists to expose more corruption within an agency that can no longer be taken seriously but is nonetheless dangerous to those who oppose it. It’s Up to Us The masses aren’t always quick to question the ulterior motives of government agencies they’ve been conditioned to believe exist for the greater good. This is one reason the backlash from the activist community is so strong: we know by this point that it’s up to us to make a change. The struggle against an unjustified classification of a natural medicinal substance has to be particularly coherent, well organized and founded upon a strong sense of cohesion to make up for the apathy in society. We won’t have much help and we may find ourselves in opposition to people who know no better than to believe what the government or DEA tells them, but it helps to know there are millions around the world who, like us, are fighting for the positive change we know we can have. We just have to strive for it together. Kratom’s Medicinal Uses Let’s take a look at some of kratom’s reported medicinal uses. The information below doesn’t paint a complete picture of what it can do, but the uses we’ll learn about are enough to convince anyone it shouldn’t be illegal or considered as dangerous as heroin. According to Natural Blaze , kratom isn’t an opiate but functions similarly by attaching to activating opioid receptors in the brain – without the harsh side effects (2) . Among other benefits, chewing on kratom leaves can alleviate chronic pain and anxiety as well as help in the struggle against addiction (2) . This is due to the leaves’ natural euphoric effects, which, again, come without the negative side effects of opiates (2) . According to OrganicFacts.net , kratom’s benefits include lowering blood pressure; boosting metabolism; relieving pain; improving the immune system; increasing sexual energy; easing anxiety; preventing diabetes; eliminating stress; and inducing a healthier state of sleep (1) . Kratom (or Mitragyna speciose) is native to Southeast Asia where it’s used for its medicinal properties (1) . It’s no stranger to being banned: it was banned in Thailand despite that it’s indigenous there and used regardless (1) . It’s described as a natural opium substitute with unique chemical compounds and nutrients found in its leaves (1) . It contains a wide range of alkaloids and other organic substances, and despite being banned it’s still widely used in Thailand; studies estimate that up to 70% of males in the country chew anywhere from 10-60 leaves daily (1) . As a less harmful substitute for opium, it exhibits no addictive qualities (1) . This in itself makes kratom a great treatment for addiction and other physical or mental health problems (1) , which is more than we can say about most of big pharma’s drugs. Organic Facts provides an in-depth description of each of kratom’s medicinal properties, paraphrased below. Pain Relief Kratom is best known for relieving pain in a way similar to opiates (1) . This is due to the analgesic properties of the alkaloids and nutrients in its leaves, which impact the hormonal system and relieve pain quickly (1) . The alkaloids and nutrients increase the amount of serotonin and dopamine released into the body; this can either mask or alleviate pain (1) . The alkaloids essentially dull the body’s pain receptors (1) , and this opium-like quality is considered kratom’s “most important application” (1) . Improving Immune System Health The alkaloids also have a “major” combinative effect on the strength and resilience of the immune system (1) , and research that’s still being checked suggests chewing on the leaves can prevent illness or reduce its severity (1) . If the DEA’s ban were lifted, research could continue unhindered and the truth could eventually reach a mainstream audience. Improving Sexual Drive Many see kratom as an aphrodisiac and fertility booster (1) . The extra energy and blood flow received from the leaves can help increase fertility, re-energize a tired libido, and improve duration as well as conception rates (1) . Treating Anxiety & Mood Swings The leaves are often chewed by sufferers of chronic stress, depression, anxiety and mood swings for their anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) properties (1) . Chewing them can also regulate hormones in the body, providing relief from symptoms of chemical imbalance without the need for dangerous pharmaceutical drugs (1) . Helping Recover from Addiction Kratom has been used to cure addiction to opiates and other harmful substances for thousands of years (1) . Opium addiction has been a major problem in countless cultures throughout history. Since chewing kratom leaves provides a similar sensation to opium without the comedown or other negative side effects, addicts trying to get clean consider it a “tolerable solution” that helps them cover and cope with symptoms of withdrawal (1) . Keeping the Heart Healthy Studies connect chewing kratom leaves with a drop in blood pressure; the leaves’ chemical components reduce inflammation throughout the body when they impact its hormones (1) . The affected areas include the arteries and blood vessels (1) . It can even prevent serious heart conditions such as stroke, heart attack or atherosclerosis by relieving tension in the cardiovascular system (1) . Treating or Preventing Diabetes Kratom’s effect on blood sugar levels isn’t as well-known as its treatment for pain or addiction (1) . Limited research suggests the leaves’ alkaloids regulate the amount of insulin and glucose in the blood, preventing the dangerous peaks and troughs often suffered by diabetics (1) . Because of this, kratom could potentially prevent diabetes or help those who already suffer with it to manage it (1) . Side Effects Any mind-altering substance comes with its share of side effects, but like cannabis, kratom’s lack of serious or dangerous side effects is one of its most remarkable qualities. The effects listed below are only common for first or second time users, and they diminish as the body acclimates to regular use (1) . They include fatigue, nausea and constipation, as well as a “kratom hangover” that can come with headaches or nausea the morning after the first or second use (1) . This pales in comparison to what opium addicts experience, and most would probably be glad to have a natural medicinal substance to help them through their recovery. Nature Can’t Be Outlawed The following is my opinion and may or may not reflect the ideals of those who are more involved in the fight against kratom’s criminalization. Kratom’s recent classification can be likened in many ways to the Marihuana Tax Act of the 1930s. The medicinal benefits of cannabis were well-known during that time, as it was used for medicine throughout the United States. The benefits of hemp were also well-known. As it became apparent to billionaires with control over the media that they couldn’t make as much money from hemp as they could lumber, cotton and other less easily replaceable resources, they deemed cannabis the evil Mexican marihuana and outlawed it with the help of heavily publicized propaganda campaigns. Kratom might not come with the array of industrial benefits provided by hemp (feel free to correct me if it does), but I’d imagine the government and DEA have a similar intention in outlawing it. The Struggle for Freedom As many have pointed out, this latest development is just another instance in the overall struggle between government agencies and the people they try to control through oppressive and intimidating laws. It represents the struggle for freedom; in this case, the freedom to use nature the way it’s intended without fear of persecution. This includes the use of substances with medicinal uses big pharma can’t market. The government’s efforts to stifle the use of these substances for the benefit of pharmaceutical companies (or other industries aligned against them) is futile. As Damian Marley put it, “people will always be who they want, and that’s what really makes the world go ‘round”. Rather than fight it, the DEA should accept that the masses are slowly embracing natural approaches to treating, curing and preventing disease. They should also accept that the effort to suppress the use of any natural substance with proven benefits for the mind or body is futile in the big picture. Conclusion The struggle between the DEA and sensible free thinkers is birthed from our resistance to their attempt to control or prevent the natural relationship between man and the psychoactive chemicals found in nature. Humans have interacted with natural mind-altering substances for centuries, and despite how hard any government agency tries to prevent this interaction, it will continue indefinitely because it exists for a reason. The truth about kratom is already spreading as a result of the backlash from the DEA’s decision. If we can make people aware of its medicinal properties and inspire them to take action, we can reverse a decision made out of negligence for the lives that will be affected by it. Criminalizing the innocent only creates crime where there was none, and at this pivotal point in mankind’s evolution, we should be past this kind of backward thinking. Sources: “Health Benefits of Kratom Leaves”, Organic Facts – https://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/other/kratom-leaves.html Cassius Kamarampi, “Kratom Now Schedule 1: Cartel Sex Scandal Shamed DEA Suppresses Herb Imports”, Era of Wisdom , August 31, 2016 – http://www.eraofwisdom.org/kratom-now-schedule-1-herb-imports-suppressed-cartel-sex-scandal-shamed-dea/ From Around the Web Founder of WorldTruth.Tv and WomansVibe.com Eddie ( 8932 Posts ) 
+Eddie L. is the founder and owner of WorldTruth.TV. and Womansvibe.com. Both website are dedicated to educating and informing people with articles on powerful and concealed information from around the world. I have spent the last 36+ years researching Bible, History, Alternative Health, Secret Societies, Symbolism and many other topics that are not reported by mainstream media.",FAKE
+9745,Terrorists attack police training college in Pakistan: 60 cadets killed and 120 injured,"(7 fans) - Advertisement - At lease 60 cadets were killed and more than 116 injured as terrorists attack the Police Training College in Quetta, Pakistan, in one of the deadliest extremist attacks this year. Three gunmen burst into the sprawling academy, targeting sleeping quarters home to some 700 recruits, and sent terrified young men aged between 15 and 25 fleeing, Dawn News reported. Communication intercepts showed the attack was carried out by Al-Alimi faction of the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi militant group, IG Frontier Corps (FC) Major General Sher Afgan said. The group itself has not claimed the attack. Most of the deaths were caused when two of the attackers blew themselves up. The third was shot dead by Frontier Corps (FC) troops. At least 120 people were injured, according to Dawn News. The IG FC said ""terrorists were communicating with their handlers in Afghanistan"". ""There were three terrorists and all of them were wearing suicide vests,"" he added. The training college is situated on Sariab Road, which is considered to be one of the most sensitive areas of Quetta. Militants have been targeting security forces in the area for almost a decade. 
+The attack comes a day after militants belonging to the Baloch Liberation Army on a motorcycle shot dead two coast guards and a civilian and wounded a shopkeeper in a remote southwest coastal town in Balochistan. 
+In August, a suicide bombing at a Quetta hospital claimed by the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar faction of the Pakistani Taliban killed 73 people, including many of the city's lawyer community who had gone there to mourn the fatal shooting of a colleague. - Advertisement - Pakistan says intelligence agencies of India and Afghanistan are fanning unrest in Balochistan by helping the rebels and sectarian militant outfits. According to Islamabad Policy Research Institute, the Indian consulate in Kandahar, a border town, provides a firm base to train, arm and dispatch militants across the border to undertake sabotage activities in Balochistan. Indian companies have been awarded contracts on various projects to link Kabul with Balochistan near Iranian border; and in the bargain it makes the job of the Indian intelligence agency RAW easier. Last month Indian government formally offered political asylum to secessionist Baloch leaders. The Zee News of India reported that the media is buzz with reports that Brahumdagh Bugti, grandson of Nawaz Akbar Khan Bugti, is set to get Indian citizenship. He is currently living in exile in Switzerland. 
+Balochistan is a key region for China's ambitious $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor infrastructure project linking its western province of Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea via Pakistan. 
+Security problems have mired CPEC in the past with numerous separatist attacks, but China has said it is confident the Pakistani military is in control. 18 Indian soldiers killed in an army base attack - Advertisement - The Quetta terrorist attack came five weeks after a militants attack on an army base in the garrison town of Uri in the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir -- killing 18 soldiers. The attack on Sept 18, which took place near the de facto border between India and Pakistan in the disputed region, was one of the deadliest on an army base in Kashmir since militant attacks began in 1989, according to CNN. Tension remains high between the neighbors following the Uri attack. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has been under intense pressure from his own party and the Indian public to respond to the Uri army base attack. Mr Modi came to power pledging to toughen India's response to what he calls cross-border incursions from Pakistan. He vowed that the Uri raid ""will not go unpunished"". On September 29, India announced that it had carried out early morning ""surgical strikes"" on terrorist camps in Pakistani controlled Kashmir. However, Pakistan denied that a cross border strike had taken place, saying that Indian troops had fired small arms across the Line of Control, killing two soldiers and injuring nine. The notion of surgical strike linked to alleged terrorists' bases is an illusion being deliberately generated by India to create false effects,"" the Pakistani military said in a statement.",FAKE
+946,6 Takeaways: Democrats tangle at debate in New York,"New York (CNN) Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders tangled over her judgment and his grasp of policy in a tense and at times personal debate here Thursday, less than a week before the pivotal New York primary.
+
+Held in prime time and on a weeknight -- unlike most Democratic debates -- the CNN-sponsored event was the highest-profile opportunity for both campaigns to make their final arguments before Tuesday's crucial vote in a state where both contenders have strong roots. Clinton is looking to New York to solidify her role as front-runner, while a strong showing -- or a victory -- for Sanders would deal a significant blow to her confidence and bolster his campaign's argument that the party's so-called super delegates should switch their allegiance to him.
+
+Here are six takeaways from the most combative Democratic debate yet:
+
+The Democratic candidates took sharp aim at one another almost immediately over a series of issues, including the Iraq War, Wall Street and questions about judgment and qualifications to be president.
+
+Both contenders shifted back and forth between offense and defense, a sharp departure from the calmer tone of the party's earlier debates.
+
+Sanders began by explaining a recent comment he made on the campaign trail in which he suggested Clinton was ""unqualified"" to be president.
+
+""Does Secretary Clinton have the experience and intelligence to be president? Of course she does. But I do question her judgment,"" Sanders said, pointing to her Senate vote for war in Iraq, her willingness for her campaign to benefit from millions of dollars spent on her behalf by super PACs and her relationship to Wall Street.
+
+""Senator Sanders did call me unqualified. I've been called a lot of things in my life. That was a first,"" Clinton responded, pointing to the fact that she was elected twice to the Senate and chosen as secretary of state.
+
+Clinton then counter-attacked, citing an interview Sanders gave to the New York Daily News in which he struggled to provide specifics about his plans for breaking up banks and other issues.
+
+""Talk about judgment and talk about the kinds of difficulty he had answering questions, including his core issues,"" Clinton said.
+
+The sparring continued throughout the night, so much so that at one point, CNN debate moderator Wolf Blitzer moved to break up the fighters.
+
+""If you're both screaming at each other, the viewers won't be able to hear either of you,"" Blitzer said after Clinton and Sanders spent several seconds talking over each other.
+
+2. Clinton further than ever from a general election pivot
+
+Just a month ago, Clinton appeared poised and eager to pivot to the general election and start building a case against a Republican nominee.
+
+But Thursday's attacks on Sanders showed that her campaign realizes that she has to turn all of her attention to her left flank.
+
+At previous debates, she seemed to spend as much time talking about Republicans as Sanders. Not in Brooklyn.
+
+Clinton arrived at Thursday's debate with policy knives sharpened and ready. An hour before the contest, her campaign released a memo outlining the case she would make against Sanders and repeatedly released briefings throughout the night that both tried to defend her from attacks. At every turn possible, she criticized him on gun regulation, the release date of his tax returns, how he would break up big banks, provide Medicare for all and other issues.
+
+Her campaign knows that next week's primary could be a major opportunity for her to stop Sanders' fast-growing momentum -- or else. With time running out before Democrats go the polls, Clinton's aggressive tactics suggest that she knows she needs to start making some of the blows against Sanders count.
+
+3. 'Think big' or get things done?
+
+A key difference in Clinton's and Sanders' approaches to governing was on full display during the debate over climate change.
+
+Clinton is a politician who is content with incremental change, seeing it as the most realistic -- if not the only -- way to achieve her goals. The Vermont senator wants sweeping change, and believes the nation's problems are too big for singles and doubles. He wants to swing for the fences.
+
+Their debate over climate change, in particular, highlighted their contrasting philosophies.
+
+""Incremental steps are not enough,"" Sanders said after Clinton knocked him for faulting the recent international Paris agreement on climate change.
+
+Clinton fired back, ""I don't take a back seat to your legislation that you have introduced that you have been unable to get passed.""
+
+Once again, Clinton came under fire for keeping the content of her highly paid speeches to financial firms under wraps after she left the State Department.
+
+Sanders has hammered her for refusing to release transcripts of remarks she made to companies like Goldman Sachs, gigs that have earned her millions.
+
+""Why not just release the transcripts and put this whole issue to bed?"" CNN co-moderator Dana Bash asked Clinton.
+
+Clinton tried to use the question to criticize Sanders over financial reform, but Bash continued to press the issue. Clinton said she only would release transcripts if Republicans did the same.
+
+""There are certain expectations when you run for president. This is a new one. And I've said, if everybody agrees to do it -- because there are speeches for money on the other side. I know that,"" Clinton said, and again pivoted to Sanders by criticizing him for not yet releasing his tax returns.
+
+Sanders responded that he planned to release a year of tax returns Friday and would unveil more soon, which turned the attention back on Clintons' unwillingness to release the transcripts.
+
+The exchange highlighted Clinton's struggle with transparency--whether it's over her State Department emails or what she tells Wall Street behind closed doors.
+
+5. One place where Sanders and Clinton agreed: Regrets
+
+Clinton and Sanders both acknowledged that the aggressive measures they championed in the 1990s to fight crime have proven to have disproportionately negative affects on African American communities, a fact for which she apologized Thursday.
+
+When asked if the move was a ""net positive"" in the fight against crime, Clinton defended the good intentions of the measure, saying ""it had some positive aspects to it,"" but conceded that as new information has come to light about the adverse affects of policy, so should approaches to problems.
+
+""If we were to have the balance sheet on one side there are some positive actions and changes. On the other side there were decisions that were made that now we must revisit and we have to correct,"" she said, adding later: ""I'm sorry for the consequences that were unintended and that have had a very unfortunate impact on people's lives. I've seen the results of what has happened in families and in communities. That's why I chose to make my very first speech a year ago on this issue... because I want to focus the attention of our country and to make the changes we need to make.""
+
+In a rare moment of agreement during an otherwise contentious night, Sanders also expressed regret for some of the outcomes of the bill.
+
+""Much of what Secretary Clinton said was right. We had a crime bill. I voted for it. It had the Violence Against Women Act in it,"" he said. ""But where we are today is we have a broken criminal justice system. We have more people in jail than any other country on Earth. And in my view, what we have got to do is rethink the system from the bottom on up. And that means, for a start -- and we don't talk about this. The media doesn't talk about it -- you got 51 percent of African-American kids today who graduated high school who are unemployed or underemployed. You know what I think? Maybe we invest in jobs and education for those kids, not jails and incarceration.""
+
+6. But no apology from Sanders on guns
+
+The apologies largely stopped there, however, as Clinton took on Sanders over gun policy.
+
+When Blitzer said that a parent of a victim of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings had called on Sanders to apologize for opposing a measure that would allow victims of gun violence to sue firearms companies, he declined.
+
+""I voted against this gun liability law because I was concerned that in rural areas all over this country, if a gun shop owner sells a weapon legally to somebody, and that person then goes out and kills somebody, I don't believe it is appropriate that that gun shop owner who just sold a legal weapon to be held accountable and be sued,"" Sanders said. ""But, what I do believe is when gun shop owners and others knowingly are selling weapons to people who should not have them -- somebody walks in. They want thousands of rounds of ammunition, or they want a whole lot of guns, yes, that gun shop owner or that gun manufacturer should be held liable.""
+
+""So, Senator, do you owe the Sandy Hook families an apology?"" Blitzer asked.
+
+""No, I don't think I owe them an apology. They are in court today, and actually they won a preliminary decision today. They have the right to sue, and I support them and anyone else who wants the right to sue.""",REAL
+8729,Freedom Rider: Russophobia: War Party Propaganda,"By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley T he world’s most reactionary regime, the head-chopping, terror-sponsoring Saudi Arabian kleptocracy, was awarded the chair of the UN Human Rights Council, while Russia has been kicked out. The travesty was engineered by the Superpower of Lies to punish Moscow for resisting the U.S.-led war of sectarian massacre and regime change in Syria. The War Party is on the march, to the cheers of corporate media – and Hillary hasn’t even been elected yet. “All attempts to stop the fighting were rejected by the U.S. and NATO and sealed the fate of the Syrian people.” Did Russia invade Iraq and kill one million people? Does Russia have a greater percentage of its population behind bars than any other country in the world? Did Russia occupy Haiti after kidnapping its president? Are Russian police allowed to shoot children to death without fear of repercussion? Is Russia entering its 20 th year of a terror war against the people of Somalia? All of these crimes take place in or at the direction of the United States. Yet the full force of propaganda and influence on world opinion is directed against Russia, which whatever its shortcomings cannot hold a candle to America in violating human rights. 
+Simply put, Hillary Clinton must be denied a victory of great magnitude and any opportunity to claim a mandate. The dangers presented by a Hillary Clinton presidency cannot be overstated. She and the war party have been steadily working towards a goal that defies logic and risks all life on earth. Regime change [3] is once again their modus operandi and they hope to make it a reality against Russia. Nearly every claim of Russian evil doing is a lie, a ruse meant to put Americans in a fighting mood and lose their fear of nuclear conflagration. It isn’t clear if Clinton and the rest of the would-be warriors actually realize they are risking mushroom clouds. Perhaps they believe that Vladimir Putin will be easily pushed around when all evidence points to the contrary. “Regime change is once again their modus operandi and they hope to make it a reality against Russia.” The unproven allegations of interference in the presidential election and casting blame on Russia as the sole cause of suffering in Syria are meant to desensitize the public. It is an age old ploy which makes war not just acceptable but deemed a necessity. The usual suspects are helping out eagerly. The corporate media, led by newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post , are front and center in pushing tales of Russian villainy. Human Rights Watch and other organizations who care nothing about abuses committed by the United States and its allies are also playing their usual role of choosing the next regime change victim. Russia lost its seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council in part because of American pressure and public relations assistance from the human rights industrial complex. The UNHRC is now chaired by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that funds the jihadist terrorist groups who caused 500,000 Syrian deaths. The Saudis are causing dislocation, death and starvation in Yemen, too, but they are American allies, so there is little opposition to their misdeeds. The openly bigoted Donald Trump has been the perfect foil for Hillary Clinton. That is why she and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership preferred him as their rival. He made the case for the discredited lesser evilism argument and his sensible statements about avoiding enmity with Russia made him even more useful. “Newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, are front and center in pushing tales of Russian villainy.” The United States and its allies are the cause of Syria’s destruction. Their effort to overthrow president Assad created a humanitarian disaster complete with ISIS and al Nusra fighters who love to chop off heads for entertainment. Far from being the cause of the catastrophe Russia left its ally to fight alone for four years. They even made overtures to negotiate [4] Assad’s fate with the United States. All attempts to stop the fighting were rejected by the U.S. and NATO and sealed the fate of the Syrian people. The people of east Aleppo are being shelled by American allies but one wouldn’t know that by reading what passes for journalism in newspapers and on television. The American role in the slaughter is barely mentioned or is excused as an effort to protect the civilian population. The bloodshed was made in the U.S. and could end if this government wanted it to. Nearly every claim of Russian evil doing is a lie, a ruse meant to put Americans in a fighting mood and lose their fear of nuclear conflagration. It isn’t clear if Clinton and the rest of the would-be warriors actually realize they are risking mushroom clouds. Perhaps they believe that Vladimir Putin will be easily pushed around when all evidence points to the contrary. The anti-Russian propaganda effort has worked to perfection. NATO is massing troops on Russia’s borders in a clear provocation yet Putin is labeled the bad guy. He is said to be menacing the countries that join in threatening his nation. The United States makes phony claims of Russian war crimes despite having blood on its hands. The latest Human Rights Watch canards about prosecuting Assad come straight from the White House and State Department and have nothing to do with concern for Syrians living in their fifth year of hell. “Donald Trump has been the perfect foil for Hillary Clinton.” There is no lesser evil between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. She is fully supported by the war party in her desire for a more “muscular” foreign policy. That bizarre term means death and starvation for millions more people if Clinton wins in a landslide. She must be denied a victory of that magnitude and any opportunity to claim a mandate. Peace loving people must give their votes to the Green Party ticket of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. They are alone in rejecting the premise of an imperialist country and its endless wars. The United States is the most dangerous country in the world. If it has a reckless and war loving president the threat becomes existential. That is the prospect we face with a Hillary Clinton presidency. If the role of villain is cast on the world stage she is the star of the show. Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/russophobia_war_party_propaganda",FAKE
+6884,Bombs Ready: The American Blob Is Already Oozing Into Syria - Ryan Cooper,"Politics Bombs Ready: The American Blob Is Already Oozing Into Syria 
+The US foreign policy establishment is laying the groundwork for Hillary to send the US military against the Syrian state Originally appeared at The Week 
+Syria is in absolute ruins. The ongoing civil war, a disorganized melee involving the Assad regime, various rebel groups, Russia, Iran, ISIS and other Islamists, Turkey, Kurdish forces, and the U.S., has been stuck in stalemate for month after month. Much of the country is in a state of utter collapse, hundreds of thousands have died, and refugees continue to pour into neighboring states and Europe. 
+With the election of a militarist-inclined Hillary Clinton looking all but certain, the Blob — White House aide Ben Rhodes' apt name for the permanent D.C. foreign policy establishment — is quickly coalescing around a new consensus that existing U.S. intervention should be dramatically scaled up, as Eric Levitz writes . The central policy for this effort is a no-fly zone to be enforced by American air power . 
+This is a seriously risky policy that stands little chance of meaningfully ameliorating the humanitarian disaster in Syria. But there's virtually nothing at this point that can be done to stop it. 
+This long background article in Spiegel Online provides a great overview of the dizzying complexity of this conflict, and good context for the debate over escalation. At the risk of stating the obvious, the central factor in the endlessness of the war is that nobody has been able to win. This in turn is the result of a rough parity of support from outside powers, particularly Russia and the U.S. Along with Iran, the former regards Assad as a crucial regional ally and source of an important Russian naval base; without their support the Assad regime would have collapsed years ago. 
+America's main concern, meanwhile, is fighting ISIS, done directly with U.S. forces and through Kurdish proxies, who have carved out a semi-autonomous Kurdish zone in northern Syria connected to Iraqi Kurdistan. 
+This infuriates Turkey's ( increasingly unhinged ) President Erdogan, due to the longstanding feud between the Turkish government and Kurdish organizations in the south of that country. The Turkish military recently hit Kurdish forces outside Aleppo with airstrikes , killing dozens — right as the Iraqi military and Kurdish troops were in the middle of a long-planned effort to oust ISIS forces from Mosul . This almost can't be a coincidence, and no doubt infuriated U.S. commanders. 
+Awkwardly, Assad's forces are also fighting ISIS, and responded to the Turkish bombardment with a threat to shoot down any more Turkish planes that violated Syrian airspace. 
+In sum, this is a tremendously complicated conflict, with multiple shifting factions. The U.S. goals — defeat ISIS and remove Assad without helping radical Islamists — are directly at odds with each other. 
+Let's grant for the sake of argument that the Blob is actually motivated by a desire to stop the bloodshed in Syria. (If they were, it would pressure the Saudi government to stop their disastrous war in Yemen instead of refueling their bombers, but that's a different story.) Here, their argument that hesitation on the part of President Obama has prolonged the conflict does have a grain of truth to it. If one great power or another had jumped in with overwhelming military force and steamrolled the opposition (or simply withdrawn from the conflict), the civil war could have ended years ago. 
+The problem, of course, is what comes after that. Sufficient force to end the war would have meant either an invasion or occupation, which was a disastrous bloody failure in Iraq, or a heavy air power intervention only, which was a disastrous bloody failure in Libya. If there's anything the last 15 years of foreign policy history has shown, it is that the American military is extremely good at smashing organized military forces, and it is extremely bad at establishing any sort of lasting political order in the aftermath. 
+And more fundamentally, if hesitation is really the problem, then a no-fly zone has the exact same problem as Obama's current policy. It's an escalation that is far short of the overwhelming force that would be necessary to impose peace on Syria. Why? Probably because the American public shows no sign of supporting the kind of force (read: a massive ground invasion) that would be necessary to impose peace on Syria. 
+What a no-fly zone would do, however, is risk immediate conflict with Russia, which has been assisting Assad with lots of air power. It's disturbingly easy to imagine getting into a shooting war with the world's only other nuclear superpower over this. 
+The general public apathy towards low-key military interventions gives the American president huge latitude to bomb and deploy special forces basically anywhere in the world — which is often devastating to the targeted communities . But the moment that creates large numbers of U.S. casualties, a political backlash is certain. Hillary Clinton, whose 2008 presidential campaign was lost because she supported the invasion of Iraq, probably realizes this, however grudgingly. 
+Ultimately, the Blob does not really care about carnage in Syria. Its overwhelming priority is the use of military force, which it views as good by definition. The civil war there is just a convenient pretext. Non-military means to stop violence will be downplayed or ignored — just like the last several consecutive failures of military intervention were, and the probable upcoming failure of the Syrian intervention will be.   SYRIA: Kurds Repel Erdogan's Rebels, Lavrov Warns Ankara, Washington Shrugs Adam Hill Turks on Aleppo Approaches 6,289",FAKE
+3486,Republicans push for a permanent aristocracy,"They’ve discovered, belatedly, that income inequality is a problem, and they’re no longer proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Now they are proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest two-tenths of 1 percent of Americans.
+
+On Tuesday afternoon, the House Rules Committee took up H.R. 1105, the “Death Tax Repeal Act of 2015,” with plans to bring it to a vote on the chamber floor Wednesday — Tax Day. It is an extraordinarily candid expression of the majority’s priorities: A tax cut costing the treasury $269 billion over a decade that would exclusively benefit individuals with wealth of more than $5.4 million and couples with wealth of more than $10.9 million.
+
+That’s a tax break for only the 5,500 wealthiest households in the country each year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Of those, the 318 wealthiest estates each year — those worth $50 million or more — would see an average windfall of $20 million each, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
+
+And this at a time when the gap between rich and poor is already worse than it has been since the Great Depression? Never in the history of plutocracy has so much been given away to so few who need it so little.
+
+This is the ultimate perversion of the tea party movement, which began as a populist revolt in 2009 but has since been hijacked by wealthy and corporate interests. The estate tax has been part of American law in some form since 1797, according to the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness, a shield against the sort of permanent aristocracy our founders fought to rid themselves of.
+
+It had long been a conservative ideal, and the essence of the American Dream, to believe that everybody should have an equal shot at success. But in their current bid to end the estate tax, Republicans could create a permanent elite of trust-fund babies.
+
+The estate tax was a meaningful check on a permanent aristocracy as recently as 2001, when there were taxes on the portion of estates above $675,000; even then there were plenty of ways for the rich to shelter money for their heirs. As the son of a schoolteacher and a cabinetmaker, I’d like to see the estate tax exemptions lowered — so that taxes encourage enterprise and entre­pre­neur­ship while keeping to a minimum the number of Americans born who will never have to work a day in their lives. The current exemption of $5.4 million (the current estate tax has an effective rate averaging under 17 percent, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center) does little to prevent a permanent aristocracy from growing — and abolishing it entirely turns democracy into kleptocracy.
+
+The kleptocrats offer all sorts of bogus justifications for giving away $269 billion to a few thousand of the wealthiest Americans.
+
+House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), appearing late Tuesday before the Rules Committee, claimed that the estate tax is “absolutely devastating” to family farms, and he claimed the repeal would remove “an additional layer of taxation” from assets that had already been taxed.
+
+Double taxation? Americans for Tax Fairness, citing Federal Reserve data, notes that 55 percent of the value of estates worth more than $100 million comprises unrealized capital gains that have never been taxed.
+
+Hurting family farmers and small businesses? In the entire country, only 120 small businesses and farms (100 of them large farms) were hit by the estate tax in 2013. And for that tiny number affected, there are all sorts of provisions already in place to soften the blow: low valuation rules, delayed tax payments and other breaks and discounts.
+
+GOP leaders such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) have begun to recognize that the vast gap between rich and poor is detrimental — and to blame the problem on President Obama. Their solution, so far, has been to propose cuts of hundreds of billions of dollars from food stamps, Pell grants, Medicaid and other programs for those without means — and, on Tax Day, to give $269 billion to the few who already have the most.
+
+“It sounds to me like there’s a lot of wealth envy in this country,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) complained while serving as chairwoman of the Rules Committee debate Tuesday. The bill abolishing the estate tax, she said, “will draw a line in the sand.”
+
+Yes, it will: between the wealthiest two-tenths of 1 percent — and everybody else.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+3371,"Classified emails from Clinton aides kick-started FBI probe, candidate downplays controversy","EXCLUSIVE: An email from a top Clinton adviser containing classified military intelligence information, and one from a top aide containing classified information about the Benghazi terror attack, were the documents that kick-started the FBI investigation into the mishandling of classified information, Fox News has learned.
+
+The emails, among thousands on Hillary Clinton's personal server, were released to the Benghazi select committee in May and have been widely discussed but Fox News for the first time has identified which Clinton aides sent them and the subject matter.
+
+The revelation came as the Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of state tried to brush aside the burgeoning scandal, joking at a campaign event when asked by Fox News whether she had wiped her private server clean, ""What, like with a cloth or something? I don't know how it works digitally at all.""
+
+Clinton last week handed the FBI her private server, which she used to send, receive and store emails during her four years as secretary of state.
+
+Fox News has identified two of the Benghazi-related emails on the server that were deemed to contain classified information at the time they were sent.
+
+The first was forwarded by Clinton adviser Huma Abedin and contained classified material from military intelligence sources. The 2011 email forwards a warning about how then-Ambassador Chris Stevens was ""considering departure from Benghazi"" amid deteriorating conditions in a nearby city. The email was mistakenly released by the State Department in full, and is now considered declassified.
+
+The second was sent by Clinton aide Jake Sullivan and contained classified information as well as sensitive law enforcement information on Benghazi. The partly redacted November 2012 email detailed how Libyan police had arrested ""several people"" with potential connections to the terror attack.
+
+Abedin and Sullivan now work for the Clinton presidential campaign. A spokeswoman for the intelligence community inspector general confirmed to Fox News that the information was classified at the time it was sent.
+
+But Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon says the information was not classified at the time the emails were sent. In maintaining this position, the campaign pointed to the fact that the State Department shared this judgment, as the Abedin email was released in full by the State Department on its FOIA website. The campaign spokesman acknowledged there is disagreement with the intelligence community inspector general.
+
+The emails are now just a fraction of those under review by the intelligence community. On Tuesday, while Clinton joked about her server's apparently missing contents, Fox News has learned the FBI is aggressively trying to recover the data.
+
+An intelligence source familiar with the review told Fox News that FBI investigators are confident they may be able to recover some of the deleted files, a detail first reported by NBC News.
+
+Yet at the contentious press conference on Tuesday, Clinton insisted anything she did with her email server was ""legally permitted.""
+
+In the press conference following a Las Vegas town hall meeting Tuesday, Fox News' Ed Henry pressed the Democratic presidential candidate by pointing out that leadership is about taking responsibility.
+
+""Look, Ed, I take responsibility,"" Clinton replied. ""In retrospect, this didn't turn out to be convenient at all and I regret that this has become such a cause celebre. But that does not change the facts. The facts are stubborn -- what I did was legally permitted.""
+
+The FBI is holding Clinton's server in protective custody after the intelligence community's inspector general raised concerns recently that classified information had traversed the system.
+
+Clinton told reporters she was ""very comfortable that this will eventually get resolved and the American people will have plenty of time to figure it out.""
+
+When asked whether she oversaw the process to wipe the server clean, Clinton said, ""my personal emails are my personal business. Right? We went through a painstaking process and through 55,000 pages we thought could be worth relating,"" she continued. ""Under the law, that decision is made by the official. I was the official. I made those decisions.""
+
+As she departed the room, a reporter asked whether the email scandal will ever end, Clinton turned to reporters shrugged and said, ""Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys.""
+
+Fox News' Ed Henry and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.",REAL
+976,Cruz likely to block Trump on a second ballot at the GOP convention,"Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is close to ensuring that Donald Trump cannot win the GOP nomination on a second ballot at the party’s July convention in Cleveland, scooping up scores of delegates who have pledged to vote for him instead of the front-runner if given the chance.
+
+The push by Cruz means that it is more essential than ever for Trump to clinch the nomination by winning a majority of delegates to avoid a contested and drawn-out convention fight, which Trump seems almost certain to lose.
+
+The GOP race now rests on two cliffhangers: Can Trump lock up the nomination before Cleveland? If not, can Cruz cobble together enough delegates to win a second convention vote if Trump fails in the first?
+
+Trump’s path to amassing the 1,237 delegates he needs to win outright has only gotten narrower after losing to Cruz in Wisconsin and other recent contests, and it would require him to perform better in the remaining states than he has to this point.
+
+In addition, based on the delegate selections made by states and territories, Cruz is poised to pick up at least 130 more votes on a second ballot, according to a Washington Post analysis. That tally surpasses 170 delegates under less conservative assumptions — a number that could make it impossible for Trump to emerge victorious.
+
+That is why the race centers on the fevered hunt for delegates across the country. The intensity of the fight has sparked another round of caustic rhetoric — including allegations from party leaders that Trump supporters are making death threats.
+
+“It’s unfortunate politics has reached a new low. These type of threats have no place in politics,” said Kyle Babcock, a Republican delegate from Indiana’s 3rd Congressional District. He received an email from a Trump supporter who warned, “Think before you take a step down the wrong path.”
+
+[The art of the steal: Dealmaker Trump struggles with the GOP delegate race]
+
+Cruz’s chances rest on exploiting a wrinkle in the GOP rule book: that delegates assigned to vote for Trump at the convention do not actually have to be Trump supporters. Cruz is particularly focused on getting loyalists elected to delegate positions even in states that the senator from Texas lost.
+
+On Wednesday in Indiana, for example, Republican leaders were finalizing a delegate slate that will include party activists unlikely to vote for Trump in the state’s primary next month. Cruz also is poised to sweep Wyoming’s 26 delegates this weekend in a state where Trump’s campaign did not seriously compete. In Arkansas, Cruz supporters are exploring ways to topple Trump when delegates are chosen next month. And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has refused to release 171 delegates he won when he was in the race, signaling that he may contribute to the anti-Trump push in Cleveland.
+
+Cruz said this week that he thinks the odds of a contested convention are “very high.”
+
+“In Cleveland, I believe we will have an enormous advantage,” he told radio talk-show host Glenn Beck.
+
+Trump has a commanding lead in total delegates and the overall vote total, but he has complained that Republican leaders are conspiring against him in a bid to silence his supporters.
+
+“The RNC should be ashamed of itself for allowing this to happen,” Trump said Tuesday night while campaigning in Rome, N.Y.
+
+Paul Manafort, a senior adviser to Trump, said in an interview that he is confident Cruz will never have a chance to convert Trump delegates.
+
+“Just because [Cruz] has won some delegates in a state where we have the delegates voting for us is not relevant until and unless there’s a second ballot,” Manafort said. “There’s not going to be a second ballot.”
+
+[Trump team vows to win delegate majority as rivals prepare for open convention]
+
+As the battle for delegates has intensified, so too have emotions. Craig Dunn, who was elected Saturday as a Republican delegate from Indiana’s 4th Congressional District, said he has received several threatening phone calls and emails after criticizing Trump in recent news reports.
+
+“When they reference burials and your family in the same email, and telling you that you’re being watched, that’s concerning,” he said.
+
+In Colorado, Republicans are planning a rally Friday to call attention to threats made against GOP chairman Steve House. He said his office received 3,000 phone calls “with many being the trashiest you can imagine” after a state party convention last weekend awarded all 34 delegates to Cruz.
+
+“Shame on the people who think somehow that it is right to threaten me and my family over not liking the outcome of an election,” he wrote on Facebook.
+
+Cruz told Beck on Tuesday that threats made by Trump supporters, including those made by the businessman’s longtime confidant Roger Stone, are “the tactic of union thugs. That is violence. It is oppressive.”
+
+Stone recently told an interviewer that Trump supporters would track down delegates at their hotel rooms in Cleveland if they break away from Trump.
+
+Manafort said that “it’s certainly not part of our policy” to threaten violence but accused “abusive” Cruz supporters of confronting Trump’s backers at party meetings nationwide.
+
+When the presidential nomination vote is held at the convention, 95 percent of the delegates will be bound to the results in their states for the first vote, giving Trump his best shot at securing a majority.
+
+But if Trump falls short, the convention will cast a second ballot in which more than 1,800 delegates from 31 states — nearly 60 percent of the total — will be unbound and allowed to vote however they want. By the third round, 80 percent of the delegates would be free, sparking a potential free-for-all that could continue for several more rounds.
+
+That is the crux of the state-by-state battle that is playing out over the next two months as Republicans gather at the precinct, county, congressional district and statewide levels to choose convention delegates.
+
+“If we go into a contested convention, we’re going to have a ton of delegates, Donald is going to have a ton of delegates, and it’s going to be a battle in Cleveland to see who can earn a majority of the delegates that were elected by the people,” Cruz told a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas on Saturday.
+
+He predicted that the first ballot “will be the highest vote total Donald Trump receives. And on a subsequent ballot, we’re going to win the nomination.”
+
+[With an Orthodox focus, Ted Cruz reaches out to Jewish donors and voters]
+
+If Cruz prevails, it will be because of what supporters are doing for him nationwide with what they say is little direct input from his campaign headquarters.
+
+In Arkansas, Republicans will not meet until next month to finalize their delegate slate, but state lawmakers who probably will win a position are talking about voting for Cruz on the second ballot.
+
+“For the vast majority of Cruz voters, Rubio was their second choice, and for the vast majority of Rubio supporters, Cruz was their second choice. So when you’re going to pick delegates, it just makes sense that we would work together,” said state Sen. Bart Hester, who backed Rubio.
+
+In Iowa, Cruz won 11 of the 12 delegates assigned last weekend — meaning that he probably will have their support in later rounds of balloting. That same day in South Carolina, Cruz secured three of the six delegate slots assigned by two congressional districts that Trump had easily won.
+
+“There’s nothing underhanded going on,” said Elliott Kelley, one of the Cruz supporters who won in South Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. “Delegates are being appointed from the local level. The Trump team just doesn’t have people involved at the local level and they’re not getting delegates.”
+
+Cruz supporters also won two of the three delegate slots from Virginia’s southernmost congressional district even though Trump won there handily. One of those Cruz supporters is Kyle Kilgore, 22, who said he would vote for Trump on the first ballot as required.
+
+“I would have a hard time voting for Trump on the second ballot,” he said.
+
+In Indiana, Dunn will be required to initially vote for whoever wins his congressional district in May. If Trump fails in the first round, Dunn said he probably will vote for Ohio Gov. John Kasich on a second ballot.
+
+“I’ll be looking for the candidate who I think has the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton in November,” Dunn said. “And if the person I want doesn’t get it, I won’t take my marbles and go home; I will support the nominee of the Republican Party.”
+
+Alice Crites, Jose A. DelReal, Sean Sullivan and Katie Zezima contributed to this report.",REAL
+6209,Comment on BREAKING: Supreme Court Rules Cops Can Break the Law to Enforce the Law by Joseph Edward Bodden,"Home / Badge Abuse / BREAKING: Supreme Court Rules Cops Can Break the Law to Enforce the Law BREAKING: Supreme Court Rules Cops Can Break the Law to Enforce the Law Matt Agorist June 20, 2016 44 Comments 
+Washington D.C. — In another devastating blow to the 4th Amendment, on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that evidence of an alleged crime can be used against a defendant even if police did something inappropriate or even illegal to obtain it. 
+In a split 5-3 decision, the justices voted to reinstate the drug-related convictions of Joseph Edward Strieff. In the case of Strieff, he was illegally detained during a “concededly unconstitutional detention,” which eventually led to the discovery of drugs inside his vehicle. 
+In Strieff’s case, a trial court judge later found that the officer did not have enough evidence to initially stop and question him. But the judge ruled that Strieff’s subsequent arrest on an outstanding traffic warrant justified the search — implying that the use of criminal behavior to catch criminal behavior is just. The Utah Court of Appeals agreed with the trial court that the drug evidence was admissible at trial, but, in a moment of logic, the Utah Supreme Court last year reversed that decision. The Utah Supreme Court noted in its January 2015 decision that the case presented “a gap of substantial significance” in terms of prior rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court on Fourth Amendment issues, and that other courts that have addressed the issue have come to “substantially different conclusions” regarding search and seizure law. 
+The Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule allows criminal defendants to suppress “fruit of the poisonous tree”— that is, evidence obtained as a result of a search or seizure that violates the Fourth Amendment. The reason this rule exists is due to the obvious conflict of interests in cops breaking the law to enforce the law. 
+However, thanks to Monday’s ruling by the Supreme Court, that is exactly what will happen now. Police have essentially been given a free pass to violate the rights of individuals — just so long as they find evidence of a ‘crime.’ 
+On Monday, the logic applied by the Utah Supreme Court in 2015, was thrown to the wayside in a handout to the police state. 
+Given the reality of the militarized police state rising up from the horrors of the war on drugs, the fact that cops can now legally act illegally to bust people for possessing arbitrary substances is chilling. 
+As if breaking the law wasn’t enough, prior to this ruling, p olice were no longer required to even give the appearance of an understanding of the laws they’re tasked with enforcing, thanks to a recent court decision surpassing even the veritable green light previously granted in Heien v. North Carolina . 
+In the Heien case, the Supreme Court ruled a “police officer’s reasonable mistake of law gives rise to reasonable suspicion that justifies a traffic stop under the Fourth Amendment.” A motorist’s broken tail light caused an officer to make a traffic stop — during which evidence of a separate violation of the law was discovered in the vehicle. 
+But in North Carolina, a broken tail light wasn’t illegal, thus not sufficient cause to justify the stop — nor the arrests stemming from it, lawyers argued, because that would be a violation of unreasonable searches and seizures. 
+However, the Supreme Court ruled the officer’s ignorance of the law essentially didn’t matter — effectively allowing police around the country the ability to make stops if they ‘reasonably’ believe the cause for the stop is legal. Plainly, police can stop and search you despite ignorance of the law. 
+Now, in U.S. v Shelton Barnes et. al. — a case that seemed to slip by largely unnoticed — even that flimsy justification has been deemed too constricting of police power, and police ignorance can actually be used against you in a trial. 
+On Monday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in dissent that the decision in Utah vs. Edward Joseph Strieff, is a blow to constitutional rights. 
+“The court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights,” Sotomayor wrote. 
+Sotomayor’s dissent was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Elena Kagan. 
+Now, police need not understand the law, or even abide by the law — to enforce the law. In what world is this considered acceptable? Share 
+yeah we’re fucked and here comes the revolution! kiljoy616 
+True that many will be screwed but there will be no revolution, best to learn how to navigate this new world you live in. Gene 
+U …….sheep, there’s an actual revolution going on right now, it’s just not televised so sheep like you stay ignorant. Wolf-PAC.com is a Constitutional amendment, by the American people, to get the money out of politics. To end the oligarchy. 4 states have already passed it, 11 more to go. Pay attention sheep, they got you by the balls. Even this site is ignoring it, makes me wonder. ThomasJefferson 
+LMAO! Do you REALLY think that will make any difference? Hell, there’s a a couple of movements that actually, if they were to be carried through with, would go further toward fixing the problem, but some of the state reps that have pledged their support are the very ones that are a MAJOR part of the problem!. Tabbytha 
+I seriously doubt they will succeed in the long run. Sheep. 
+What’s good for the goose is good for the gander Greg Geitner 
+copsucker is a term used to describe a spineless animal that believes law enforcement should always be obeyed. ThomasJefferson 
+People don’t have the balls to revolt anymore! Theyr cross their fingers and HOPE, that the sh*t dont hit the fan in their own little world. The REALLY stupid ones think it will never happen to them, ether because of some false sense of superiority, or because they think that so long as they keep their nose planted firmly in their Master’s Ass,that nothing bad will come to them via “The Pigs” Nothing but dumb luck can save ANYONE from the Gestapo now. LexRex Mann 
+Are you organizing an overthrow? Email me. Jude Rene Montarsi 
+http://www.garynorth.com/public/12619print.cfm Gene 
+Could you provide links? Sometimes you go off the rails with your propaganda. Like the story of the DEA declassifying cannabis, they came out and said that wasn’t true. I do my own research, guess I’m whining for convenience. Richard Brooks 
+http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/supreme-court-refines-rules-governing-police-conduct avelworldcreator 
+Here’s the problem. They guy already had a warrant even if the officer hadn’t used that fact in the stop and search. Sadly the Court has said such pre-existing circumstances can cover a multitude of ills. In short he had grounds to do an arrest and a search already even if he wasn’t aware of their existence. It’s bullshit, but there it is. Betty Anne Emery Rubendall 
+Do you mean, if cop had run his tags, the warrant would have shown? I wonder why he didn’t. avelworldcreator 
+Doesn’t sound like the cop in this case was bright enough to follow procedure or, more likely, he didn’t care and just wanted to fuck with someone. Even more likely it was a combination of both. He simply got “lucky”. William Keen 
+In “Obama’s World” of course! 
+But, what difference does any of this make? YOU act like “Executive Orders” are valid! This website quotes them as being Lawful Orders just because a POtuS signs them. 
+Obviously, the Constitution for the United States of America has no meaning anywhere anymore. It doesn’t matter which Amendment you ignore when the On-The-Street, Militarily Trained and equipped cop is ignorant of the law in their jurisdiction and the courts allow that! 
+Take out the Kings-of-Corruption (US Supreme Court), the BAR Association (13th Amendment violation) and the local goons and let’s START OVER! ThomasJefferson 
+What an IDIOT!!! Dude, the ground work was laid for this trashing of the constitution by Ronald Reagan. And NOW idiots, think that DUMP is the answer! For all the good a president can do, people better wake up and vote Libertarian, Gary Johnson!. Any thing else is another MAJOR blow to the constitution. In fact, its probably trashed beyond anything less than a revolution will fix already! LexRex Mann 
+Why call him an idiot? He never mentions Trump. You are the one taken in by the fraud of election. Don’t you get it? Voting is a waste of time! Who counts the votes? Why is it done in secret? Do you really trust them to count votes accurately? Again: “Take out the Kings-of-Corruption (US Supreme Court), the BAR Association (13th Amendment violation) and the local goons and let’s START OVER!” ThomasJefferson 
+Nope, he doesn’t mention mention Trump! The comment wasn’t aimed at him per se. I’m so used to reading comments from the sheeple that are guzzling Dump Kool-aid, it was I suppose what is known in military parlance as a preemptive strike. While I agree with you in theory, 100%, for the moment, I think the vote thing for what it’s worth, (if enough people would break the chains that bind their minds, and vote contrary to programming,) would upset the proverbial apple-cart. Hell, a liberty leaning candidate may not become president, but enough people might wake up to the very facts you made mention of and at last begin a meaningful revolt. Sorry I can’t condense where this could lead and don’tr really have the time at the moment to follow through with his concept but you’re a sharp guy, just think what a little enlightenment, and the motivation of people of real action could accomplish. It’s how AMERICA ,came into existence to begin with. The Federal Farmer 
+Yes, start over because we *need* a government, right? How about we just dissolve the federal government and replace it (again) with 50 individual sovereign governments…to start with. jonn 
+So the SCOTUS has to protect cops over protecting The Constitution or American Citizens because cops are too stupid to understand The Constitution or local laws? vera4576 
+I currently make close to 6.000-8.000 bucks /month from freelancing at home. Those who are looking to complete simple online work for 2-5 h a day at your house and get valuable paycheck while doing it… Then this work opportunity is for you… http://ow.ly/9Dxq300yJFs gininitaly 
+That’s because the goal is a police state here and everywhere else, ruled by the new world order of fascists.. the int’l central bankers/mega corporate/military industrial complex cabal of psychopaths who have manipulated and bought themselves into this position. This is what monopoly capitalism evolves to… the unquenchable desire for money and power at any cost to the human race. They should all be hung on the White House steps. Our days are numbered, unless we rise up. jonn 
+I don’t think real Americans are going to let this Country fall completely into a police state. I believe there will be a event so horrific by the govt that the “million man march” will happen and these elected officials will be dragged out of their ivory towers and be tarred and feathered and run out of town. Too many normal Americans, too many veterans, too many freedom loving people for the govt to completely control. gininitaly 
+Knock wood…. altho I’ve been waiting 10 long years watching our former rights disappear one after another… and still too many are sparring with the illusions of enemies manufactured for us, instead the real ones right here in the highest seats of our government. LexRex Mann 
+Exactly– even as “truthers” gow in numbers, we become divided by things like whether the earth is flat, whether to “vote” for Sanders or Trump, whether to hate Muslims or not, etc., etc., etc. They’ll have us killing each other before we get to the steps of Congress. We’ve been divided and conquered. I keep telling people posting these memes on facebook to forget differences like these and stay focused on the real enemy, but sadly not many seem to be listening. gininitaly 
+Absolutely!!! I do the same and see as you have that that insidious flat screen in everyones homes is the grand distractor and brain washer par excellence… which is why 6 companies own 90% of the media all preaching, fear, fake enemies and outright lies. But too many are still in denial since Sept. 11, 2001 as if the obvious didn’t really happen as they’ve been told it did, that somehow America will just bounce back and be itself again…. Foolish pipe dream… and dangerous one that will enslave us, that noose is tightening everyday as this article just proved. 
+As Hitler said: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” 
+So a war mongering, murdering Imperialist gov that created terror in the first place and has now allowed our police to terrorize it’s own citizens… by throwing a traitorous SCOTUS into the mix, whittling whittling away at our former Constitutional protections and what do you get? National and global chaos like America has never witnessed in it’s short but intense life. Fiona Clark 
+I couldn’t have said it better myself. People are waking up but way to slowly. Does something actually have to hit them in the face before they can see it. Joseph Edward Bodden 
+I voted for Bernie. They said I would be wasting my vote. But please explain to me how my failing to vote for the only decent candidate and voting instead for a choice of nutter or criminal is NOT wasting my vote? And how did the DNC get the power to rule out Bernie as a candidate? I cannot find it in the Constitution… BanishedJester 
+“Real” Americans already allowed the full insertion of the police state when we allowed the government to form SWAT teams and then to use them to break into peoples’ homes for allegedly using plants. Plants! We are already fucked and it is time for us to begin dealing with the treason that abounds. Cops, lawyers, judges, legislatures should all hang for what we have allowed them to do. Nothing will change with any less effort. Nunya 
+They don’t have to know or follow the laws, it is called law EFORCEMENT. Just do that… Frank Welsh 
+Utah’s Supreme Court is an Administrative Branch, the real Common Law Supreme Court is in Pennsylvania. Betty Anne Emery Rubendall 
+And every time they rule in favor of the PLEBS, new laws are written. I despise living here!! 
+A minor traffic warrant is cause for a search? Bullshit! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sonia-sotomayor-police_us_57680301e4b0fbbc8beaf4ae anarchyst 
+For solutions to curtail the police state, obtain and read “Unintended Consequences” by John Ross. This book is a history lesson, a technical manual and a “how to” book on how to take back our government. When this book first came out, sellers of this book were routinely harassed by FBI, ATF, DEA and other “alphabet agency” enforcers. Sorta tells you something about the contents… Philip Tomlins 
+Thank Fuck I don’t live there, were fucked up here, but at least we the people have some control. Steve Rusk 
+What we know as law is purely illusion. What cops and the judiciary do is the law, up to and including outright murder. Steve Rusk 
+Ignorance of the law is no excuse, unless of course you’re a cop. dennisbohner 
+I notice that it was the WOMEN who defended we commoners. Is it a reality that male asshats are in the legal profession to make decisions that fit the patriarchial ideals of suppression of others and control? WTF is wrong with the ideals that they gained? Nearly everything. Tabbytha 
+As long as a person is doing what is right, who cares what gender they are? So many men and women are NOT doing what is right, finding those who do is uncommon these days, lets not make this a gender issue and be glad some good people still exist. I wish more people would speak up, the world is pretty much going to hell in a handbasket and the US is in deep trouble right now. Robert Farrior 
+The police state marches on, here again under the impetus of the selective drug war, the number one fount of tyranny in this nation! They must all be removed from power! robertsrevolution.net 
+Remember, cops and judges ain’t bulletproof. MaryMacMaster 
+not these Nimrods sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court swear a sacred oath and make a covenant to honor, uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution???",FAKE
+5644,The Failure of US Democracy,"The Failure of US Democracy How The Oligarchs Plan To Steal The Election I am now convinced that the Oligarchy that rules America intends to steal the presidential election. In the past, the oligarchs have not cared which candidate won as the oligarchs owned both. But they do not own Trump. Most likely you are unaware of what Trump is telling people as the media does not report it. A person who speaks like this: - is not endeared to the oligarchs. Who are the oligarchs? — Wall Street and the mega-banks too big to fail and their agent the Federal Reserve, a federal agency that put 5 banks ahead of millions of troubled American homeowners who the federal reserve allowed to be flushed down the toilet. In order to save the mega-banks’ balance sheets from their irresponsible behavior, the Fed has denied retirees any interest income on their savings for eight years, forcing the elderly to draw down their savings, leaving their heirs, who have been displaced from employment by corporate jobs offshoring, penniless. — The military/security complex which has spent trillions of our taxpayer dollars on 15 years of gratuitous wars based entirely on lies in order to enrich themselves and their power. — The neoconservartives whose crazed ideology of US world hegemony thrusts the American people into military conflict with Russia and China. — The US global corporations that sent American jobs to China and India and elsewhere in order to enrich the One Percent with higher profits from lower labor costs. — Agribusiness (Monsanto et.al.), corporations that poison the soil, the water, the oceans, and our food with their GMOs, hebicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers, while killing the bees that pollinate the crops. — The extractive industries—energy, mining, fracking, and timber—that maximize their profits by destroying the environment and the water supply. — The Israel Lobby that controls US Middle East policy and is committing genocide against the Palestinians just as the US committed genocide against native Americans. Israel is using the US to eliminate sovereign countries that stand in Israell’s way. What convinces me that the Oligarchy intends to steal the election is the vast difference between the presstitutes’ reporting and the facts on the ground. According to the presstitutes, Hillary is so far ahead that there is no point in Trump supporters bothering to vote. Hillary has won the election before the vote. Hillary has been declared a 93% sure winner. I am yet to see one Hillary yard sign, but Trump signs are everywhere. Reports I receive are that Hillary’s public appearances are unattended but Trumps are so heavily attended that people have to be turned away. This is a report from a woman in Florida: «Trump has pulled huge numbers all over FL while campaigning here this week. I only see Trump signs and sickers in my wide travels. I dined at a Mexican restaurant last night. Two women my age sitting behind me were talking about how they had tried to see Trump when he came to Tallahassee. They left work early, arriving at the venue at 4:00 for a 6:00 rally. The place was already over capacity so they were turned away. It turned out that there were so many people there by 2:00 that the doors had to be opened to them. The women said that the crowds present were a mix of races and ages». I know the person who gave me this report and have no doubt whatsoever as to its veracity. I also receive from readers similiar reports from around the country. This is how the theft of the election is supposed to work: The media concentrated in a few corporate hands has gone all out to convince not only Americans but also the world, that Donald Trump is such an unacceptable candidate that he has lost the election before the vote. By controllng the explanation, when the election is stolen those who challenge the stolen election are without a foundartion in the media. All media reports will say that it was a run away victory for Hillary over the misogynist immigrant-hating Trump. And liberal, progressive opinion will be relieved and off guard as Hillary takes us into nuclear war. That the Oligarchy intends to steal the election from the American people is verified by the officially reported behavior of the voting machines in early voting in Texas. The NRP presstitutes have declared that Hillary is such a favorite that even Repulbican Texas is up for grabs in the election. If this is the case, why was it necessary for the voting machines to be programmed to change Trump votes to Hillary votes? Those voters who noted that they voted Trump but were recorded Hillary complained. The election officials, claiming a glitch (which only went one way), changed to paper ballots. But who will count them? No «glitches» caused Hillary votes to go to Trump, only Trump votes to go to Hillary. The most brilliant movie of our time was The Matrix. This movie captured the life of Americans manipulated by a false reality, only in the real America there is insufficient awareness and no Neo, except possibly Donald Trump, to challenge the system. All of my life I have been trying to get Americans of all stripes—academics, scholars, journalists, Republicans, Democrats, right-wing, left-wing, US Representatives, US Senators, Presidents, corporate moguls and brainwashed Americans and foreigners—out of the false reality in which they exist. In the United States today a critical presidential eletion is in process in which not a single important issue is addressed. This is total failure. Democracy, once the hope of the world, has totally failed in the United States of America. ",FAKE
+8474,Trump or Clinton?,"  Recipient Email => 
+Enemies of the United States are joyously watching its upcoming elections that are exposing this once great nation as deeply corrupt. It’s as if a huge rock has been turned over, exposing the swarming, slithering underside of America’s political system. 
+For those who admire America, like this writer, this week is a time to weep for the republic. 
+We see two candidates who are utterly unfit for the highest office: Hilary Clinton, engulfed by scandals, and blustering TV mogul Donald Trump, a man of profound shallowness who advocates Islamophobia, torture and environmental ignorance. 
+Hillary Clinton’s core supporters are black food stamp and welfare recipients, and legions of women who are voting simply by gender. Trump’s core supporters are tax-paying workers who have watched Wall Street loot America’s economy and send their jobs abroad. 
+Like many people, I’ve been tearing my hair trying to decide for whom to vote. I now favor Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson who gained worldwide fame as a dolt when asked about the destruction of Aleppo, Syria. ‘What’s Aleppo?’ asked this New Mexico Bismarck. 
+Now that’s the kind of president I’d like to see. No more regime-changers and empire-builders. No more Imperial America. No more crusaders or world super power bullying. No more mucking around the world and acting as the globe’s enforcer. Let’s forget Aleppo, Beirut, Gaza, Tehran, Islamabad, the South China Sea and North Korea. 
+We can no longer afford to play ‘Game of Thrones.’ We’ve got to rebuild bridges and airports, and clean the Augean Stables of Congress, America’s most corrupt institution. We just spent $2.8 billion on roads in remote Afghanistan while our own highways are crumbling. 
+Such is the folly of imperialism. The old Soviet Union did something similar, allowing its domestic infrastructure and industry to fall apart while adventuring in Afghanistan, and deploying 55,000 tanks in the Red Army. These tanks were useful in putting down the heroic Hungarian Revolution of 1956 – 60 years ago this week – but for nothing else. 
+But I fear that whoever wins the US election will very quickly face major problems for which they are woefully unprepared. Most obvious is the bloody mess the US has created across the Mideast. 
+I just learned that Trump recently named, as Mideast advisor, a notorious Muslim-hating fanatic, who is a Lebanese Maronite Christian fascist. His advice will likely be to invade Lebanon and Syria and kill more Muslims. 
+For her part, Hilary Clinton has long been a wholly-financed subsidiary of Wall Street and the mighty Israel lobby. Just have a look at the list of her largest donors. Her pro-Israel supporters are urging her to create a so-called ‘no-fly’ zone over Syria, which is code for full-scale war against Syrian government and Russian forces. Guess who will benefit from Syria’s destruction and disintegration? 
+This supreme idiocy could lead directly to nuclear war with Russia, something I’ve been warning against for years. 
+There has been no mention in the campaign of rebuilding the Arab world, ravaged by western imperial interventions. Little mention of some 12 million Syrian refugees created by the Saudis and US. Nor of five million Palestinian refugees, and who knows how many in Iraq, Libya, Somalia and now war-ravaged Yemen. And not a word about America’s stalemated war in Afghanistan. Nothing about a shaky Europe. Nor how to accommodate China’s rise. 
+Instead, we’ve heard tirades against the phony ISIS, which is funded by the Saudis, and Hilary Clinton’s absurd claims that wicked Vlad Putin is somehow behind America’s foreign disasters. It’s stupid and shameful demagoguery. 
+At least Trump has the good sense to urge that we end our pointless confrontation with Russia and scale back the unaffordable American Empire. Few Americans know that almost half their government’s budget is spent on the military. 
+Besides disgusting many Americans, the presidential campaign has made the US an object of derision and embarrassment around the globe. Many analysts claim that this grand fiasco marks the beginning of the end of US global hegemony. It’s certainly the beginning of the beginning. 
+This week alone, the Philippines and Malaysia, two staunch American allies, edged closer to China’s camp. Neither Trump no Clinton had a care for America’s reputation during their ugly debates. 
+My fear is that the election vitriol will not end America’ shame and misery but continue on, like an acid eating into the national fabric. (Reprinted from EricMargolis.com by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+4752,5 takeaways from the debate that didn’t matter,"The first and only vice-presidential debate of 2016 was less a game-changer than a channel-changer, a snippy and probably inconsequential 90 minutes marginally won by Mike Pence – a confident, slightly smarmy debater very much in the mold of those calculating Washington, D.C., politicians who are destroying America.
+
+Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s more voluble running mate, didn’t flop but he was visibly less comfortable than the square-jawed Pence, frequently interrupting the Indiana governor, jamming his pre-programmed attacks on Donald Trump into every answer with admirable, tedious efficiency.
+
+Their performances almost perfectly reflected the priorities of each candidate: Kaine was a hyper-briefed Trump-thumping machine, barking the GOP nominee’s name, as if it were a slur, some 160 times – more than twice the number of times Pence mentioned Clinton’s, according a POLITICO tally.
+
+Pence, on the other hand, seemed less concerned with out-and-out defending his running mate than rope-a-doping away from uncomfortable questions: His standard response was to pucker his face and mock Kaine as “ridiculous” for pelting him with facts, statistics and actual Trump quotes.
+
+And if Kaine (who doesn’t have an especially close personal relationship with Clinton) warmly referred to “Hillary” as if the two were the best of friends, Pence maintained a wary rhetorical distance from Trump. He behaved less like an affectionate pal than a guy getting paid to do a job, a pet employee reassuring disgruntled co-workers that their unpopular boss was actually a great guy, really, if only you guys got to know him.
+
+In the end you got the sense that Pence did as much (maybe more) to burnish his own brand than Trump’s – and even if he’s widely deemed the winner, what lasting good will it do for his undisciplined, self-defeating nominee? Here are five takeaways.
+
+1. Hillary Clinton is lucky she’s facing Trump instead of Pence. Even after having his leonine head handed to him at the first presidential debate last week, there’s no decisive evidence that Trump is taking prep for Sunday’s second round in St. Louis any more seriously than he took prep for the first. The same cannot be said for Pence, a true professional, who huddled with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for a week, and produced a focused performance, parrying every attack with a sharp assault on the unholy trinity of Clinton sins: emails, the foundation and her foreign policy failings as secretary of state.
+
+Pence was as un-goad-able as Trump was easily gulled. When an aggressive Kaine demanded he defend his running mate’s comments on everything from declaring Mexican immigrants “rapists” to Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. encourage other countries to develop nukes, Pence mocked him. “Did you work on that one a long time? Because that had a lot of creative lines in it.”
+
+In the real world outside the Farmville, Va. debate hall, Pence has contradicted or contrasted himself from Trump on any number of issues – most notably his flat refusal to entertain the false assertion that President Obama isn’t a native-born citizen. But inside he did a far better job of making Trump’s case than the candidate has made on his own behalf.
+
+During his Hofstra meltdown Trump was so occupied defending himself against the self-assured Clinton he forgot his most effective attacks, including a much-anticipated hit on the fundraising practices of the Clinton Foundation. Pence was a cooler customer who calmly went through his head-hunting to-do list.
+
+“While she was secretary of state, the Clinton foundation accepted tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments, and foreign donors,"" he said – precisely the kind of targeted attack Trump needs to make in order to recover from his disastrous first debate.
+
+Alec Baldwin studied Trump for weeks to pull off his uncanny impersonation on last week’s Saturday Night Live. Trump would be well served to study the YouTube of Pence’s performance for pointers.
+
+2. Tim Kaine wasn’t trying to win the debate – he was trying to bash Trump. The Virginia senator has a reputation for being a nice guy, but he was given a hit man’s job on Tuesday. And the target was Trump, not Pence, whom the Clinton campaign regards as a political bit player who will vanish into obscurity after the election.
+
+Hence, Kaine’s task was a slightly awkward one: to aim over Pence and hit Trump. It didn’t really work, and not for lack of trying.
+
+His best moment, arguably, came when he produced a laundry list of awful things Trump has said about women, Mexicans and a disabled reporter; Pence juked and refused to answer – which allowed Kaine to declare: “He's refused to defend his running mate. . .and yet, he's asking everybody to vote for somebody that he cannot defend,"" he said in one of the debate’s few memorable exchanges.
+
+But he came off as a bit nervous, like a frustrated school kid trying to disgorge a memorized speech if only his rowdy classmates would allow him to deliver it. At times, he seemed peevish. Pence actually interrupted Kaine a lot, but his interjections were punchy (often an aspirated “no!” intended to deprive the former Virginia governor a clean sound bite) while Kaine’s frequent attempts to be heard were of the whiny it’s-my-turn-to-talk variety which had many viewers (and a focus group convened by GOP pollster Frank Luntz) judging Kaine to be rude.
+
+3. Snatching discord from the jaws of victory? Clinton and her brain trust, according to several Democrats I spoke to, were satisfied (if not elated) by Kaine’s performance. Whether Trump appreciated Pence’s defenses, well that’s less clear. Moments after the candidates left the stage, John Harwood of CNBC and The New York Times quoted a Trump adviser saying that the GOP nominee, who was watching the debate from a hotel in Vegas, was less than satisfied with his running mate.
+
+“Pence won overall, but he didn’t win with Trump,” the adviser told Harwood.
+
+4. Pence dodged almost every tough question. How do you defend a running mate much of America deems as indefensible? You don’t!
+
+Trump’s chorus of validators fanned out this week to declare him a “genius” for “using” the tax code to avoid paying taxes – but the real genius may have been Pence who figured out the best way to answer the thorniest questions about Trump was to respond with an attack on Kaine, or the moderator Elaine Quijano. Sure, he answered a handful, but a tiptoe through the transcript reveals what amounts to a master class in rhetorical deflection.
+
+When it came to the New York Times story on Trump’s 1995 New York State tax return – which showed the estate and casino magnate claiming a nearly $1 billion loss, Pence shrugged his shoulders and repeated the campaign’s talking-point with televangelistical conviction. “Donald Trump is a businessman -- he actually built a business,” Pence intoned. “Like everybody, he faced some pretty tough times 20 years ago.”
+
+Pence slipped the hook during the most consequential exchange of the night – a tag team onslaught by Kaine and Quijano pressing for Pence to call for Trump to release his tax returns.
+
+Quijano, to her credit, repeatedly asked Pence why it was okay for Trump to withhold his filings when the Indiana governor had dutifully released the 10 most recent years of his income statements; Pence was fumbling for an answer when Kaine, who seemed more focused on venting outrage than pinning his quarry, interrupted her to make a forgettable point.
+
+5. Quijano was a weak moderator. Tuesday marked the first time a digital division reporter moderated a major debate, and Quijano – a well-regarded former CNN anchor who now works for CBSN – showed her inexperience. She allowed both candidates to repeatedly interrupt each other, at times seeming to whisper her questions and demands for decorum.
+
+Elaine Quijano, one and done.",REAL
+274,Pleading for Paul Ryan,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+3847,Long Odds Ahead for Obama on His Troubled Trade Agenda,"The White House and Republican leaders in Congress face long odds in trying to revive trade legislation after a telling defeat engineered by President Barack Obama's fellow Democrats.
+
+Obama's ambitious trade agenda is in serious doubt, as is his quest for a capstone second-term achievement.
+
+Without the power to negotiate trade deals that Congress can approve or reject, but not amend, Obama has little chance of securing the Pacific Rim pact that his administration has worked toward for years.
+
+Friday's rebuff highlighted the strained relations between Obama and congressional Democrats, who voted down a worker assistance program crucial to the negotiating authority measure just hours after the president implored them not to.
+
+Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, had worked in rare tandem on this issue, yet their inability to deliver raises the question of whether much else will get done with Republicans running Congress and Obama in the White House for the next 18 months.
+
+""This isn't over yet,"" Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., a main supporter of the trade legislation. ""I'm hopeful that the Democrats understand the consequences and get together with the president and finish this as soon as possible.""
+
+House GOP leaders took steps that would allow another vote on the worker retraining program in coming days, but that would require at least 90 votes to shift.
+
+Republicans sounded pessimistic that they could add many more votes for a program that most on their side deride as wasteful and unnecessary.
+
+House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California and her labor-backed allies are determined to oppose the Trade Adjustment Assistance program as a way to collapse the entire package. So it seems unlikely that enough Democratic votes would emerge to save the program, even though the party has promoted it for years.
+
+""Some of my Democratic colleagues are in danger of self-immolation"" on the workers' program and ""I think that's sad,"" said Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., one of the few Democrats who backed Obama on Friday's votes.
+
+Another possible route is to send revised legislation back to the Senate. But senators approved the larger package only narrowly last month after intense battles, and the White House desperately wants to avoid giving opponents there another chance to strangle the legislation.
+
+White House press secretary Josh Earnest dismissed Friday's outcome as an ""entanglement"" and ""procedural snafu.""
+
+But it was more than a ""snafu"" that caused Pelosi and the majority of House Democrats to revolt against their president.
+
+The White House, congressional Republicans and business groups argued that the special negotiating power is a necessary tool for trade deals opening up crucial markets to American goods.
+
+Union-backed House Democrats never bought the argument. They felt burned by promises from past administrations about trade deals they blame for job and manufacturing losses in their districts.
+
+Trade bills have always had a tough road in Congress. After election losses in recent years the House Democratic caucus is smaller and more liberal, attuned to economic issues in the wake of the financial sector meltdown and recession.
+
+Against that backdrop Obama was not able to bring enough House Democrats his way. Pelosi, from trade-dependent San Francisco, announced on the House floor at the last moment that she would be siding with the majority of her caucus and against her president.
+
+""We want a better deal for America's workers,"" she said.",REAL
+5566,Here Is Why the Trump Administration Will Be a Force for Peace - James P. Pinkerton,"Originally appeared at The American Conservative 
+Donald Trump played a wily capitalistic trick on his Republican opponents in the primary fights this year—he served an underserved market. 
+By now it’s a cliché that Trump, while on his way to the GOP nomination, tapped into an unnoticed reservoir of right-of-center opinion on domestic and economic concerns—namely, the populist-nationalists who felt left out of the reigning market-libertarianism of the last few decades. 
+Indeed, of the 17 Republicans who ran this year, Trump had mostly to himself the populist issues: that is, opposition to open borders, to free trade, and to earned-entitlement cutting. When the other candidates were zigging toward the familiar—and unpopular—Chamber of Commerce-approved orthodoxy, Trump was zagging toward the voters. 
+Moreover, the same sort of populist-nationalist reservoir-tapping was evident in the realm of foreign affairs. To put it in bluntly Trumpian terms, the New Yorker hit ’em where they weren’t. 
+The fact that Trump was doing something dramatically different became clear in the make-or-break Republican debate in Greenville, S.C., on February 13. Back in those early days of the campaign, Trump had lost one contest (Iowa) and won one (New Hampshire), and it was still anybody’s guess who would emerge victorious. 
+During that debate, Trump took what seemed to be an extraordinary gamble: he ripped into George W. Bush’s national-security record—in a state where the 43rd president was still popular. Speaking of the Iraq War, Trump said, “George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” 
+And then Trump went further, aiming indirectly at the former president, while slugging his brother Jeb directly: “The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign, remember that.” 
+In response, Jeb intoned the usual Republican line, “He kept us safe.” And others on the stage in Greenville that night rushed to associate themselves with Bush 43. 
+In the aftermath of this verbal melee, many thought that Trump had doomed himself. As one unnamed Republican “strategist” chortled to Politico, “Trump’s attack on President George W. Bush was galactic-level stupid in South Carolina.” 
+Well, not quite: Trump triumphed in the Palmetto State primary a week later, winning by a 10-point margin. 
+Thus, as we can see in retrospect, something had changed within the GOP. After 9/11, in the early years of this century, South Carolinians had been eager to fight. Yet by the middle of the second decade, they—or at least a plurality of them—had grown weary of endless foreign war. 
+Trump’s victory in the Palmetto State was decisive, yet it was nevertheless only a plurality, 32.5 percent. Meanwhile, Sen. Marco Rubio, running as an unabashed neocon hawk, finished second. 
+So we can see that the Republican foreign-policy “market” is now segmented. And while Trump proved effective at targeting crucial segments, they weren’t the only segments—because, in actuality, there are four easily identifiable blocs on the foreign-policy right. And as we delineate these four segments, we can see that while some are highly organized and tightly articulate, others are loose and inchoate: 
+First, the libertarians. That is, the Cato Institute and other free-market think tanks,Reason magazine, and so on. Libertarians are not so numerous around the country, but they are strong among the intelligentsia. 
+Second, the old-right “isolationists.” These folks, also known as “paleocons,” often find common ground with libertarians, yet their origins are different, and so is their outlook. Whereas the libertarians typically have issued a blanket anathema to all foreign entanglements, the isolationists have been more selective. During World War I, for example, their intellectual forbears were hostile to U.S. involvement on the side of the Allies, but that was often because of specifically anti-English or pro-German sentiments, not because they felt guided by an overall principle of non-intervention. Indeed, the same isolationists were often eager to intervene in Latin America and in the Far East. More recently, the temperamentally isolationist bloc has joined with the libertarians in opposition to deeper U.S. involvement in the Middle East. 
+Third, the traditional hawks. On the proverbial Main Street, USA, plenty of people—not limited to the active-duty military, veterans, and law-enforcers—believe that America’s national honor is worth fighting for. 
+Fourth, the neoconservatives. This group, which takes hawkishness to an avant-garde extreme, is so praised, and so criticized, that there’s little that needs be added here. Yet we can say this: as with the libertarians, they are concentrated in Washington, DC; by contrast, out beyond the Beltway, they are relatively scarce. Because of their connections to big donors to both parties, however, they have been powerful, even preeminent, in foreign-policy circles over the last quarter-century. Yet today, it’s the neocons who feel most threatened by, and most hostile to, the Trump phenomenon. 
+We can pause to offer a contextual point: floating somewhere among the first three categories—libertarians, isolationists, hawks—are the foreign-policy realists. These, of course, are the people, following in the tradition of the great scholar Hans Morgenthau, who pride themselves on seeing the world as it is, regarding foreign policy as just another application of Bismarckian wisdom—“the art of the possible.” 
+The realists, disproportionately academics and think-tankers, are a savvy and well-credentialed group—or, according to critics, cynical and world-weary. Yet either way, they have made many alliances with the aforementioned trio of groups, even as they have usually maintained their ideological flexibility. To borrow the celebrated wisdom of the 19th-century realpolitiker Lord Palmerston, realists don’t have permanent attachments; they have permanent interests. And so it seems likely that if Trump wins—or anyone like Trump in the future—many realists will be willing to emerge from their wood-paneled precincts to engage in the hurly-burly of public service. 
+Returning to our basic quartet of blocs, we can quickly see that two of them, the libertarians and the neocons, have been loudly successful in the “battle of ideas.” That is, almost everyone knows where the libertarians and the neocons stand on the controversies of the moment. Meanwhile, the other two groups—the isolationists and the traditional hawks—have failed to make themselves heard. That is, until Trump. 
+For the most part, the isolationists and hawks have not been organized; they’ve just been clusters of veterans, cops, gun owners, and like-minded souls gathering here and there, feeling strongly about the issues but never finding a national megaphone. Indeed, even organized groups, such as the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, sizable as they might be, have had little impact, of late, on foreign affairs. 
+This paradoxical reality—that even big groups can be voiceless, allowing smaller groups to carry the day—is well understood. Back in 1839, the historian Thomas Carlyle observed of his Britain, “The speaking classes speak and debate,” while the “deep-buried [working] class lies like an Enceladus”—a mythological giant imprisoned under a volcano. Yet, Carlyle continued, the giant under the volcano will not stay silent forever; one day it will erupt, and the inevitable eruption “has to produce earthquakes!” 
+In our time, Trump has provoked the Enceladus-like earthquake. Over the past year, while the mainstream media has continued to lavish attention on the fine points of libertarianism and neoconservatism, the Peoples of the Volcano have blown up American politics. 
+Trump has spoken loudly to both of his groups. To the isolationists, he has highlighted his past opposition to the Iraq and Libya misadventures, as well as his suspicions about NATO and other alliances. (Here the libertarians, too, are on board.) At the same time, he has also talked the language of the hawks, as when he has said, “Take the oil” and “Bomb the [bleep] out of them.” Trump has also attacked the Iran nuclear agreement, deriding it as “one of the worst deals ever made.” 
+Thus earlier this year Trump mobilized the isolationists and the hawks, leaving the libertarians to Rand Paul and the neocons to Rubio. 
+Now as we move to the general election, it appears that Trump has kept the loyalty of his core groups. Many libertarians, meanwhile, are voting for Gary Johnson—the former Republican governor at the top of the Libertarian Party’s ticket—and they are being joined, most likely as a one-off, by disaffected Republicans and Democrats. Meanwhile, the neocons, most of them, have become the objective allies, if not the overt supporters, of Hillary Clinton. 
+Even if Trump loses, his energized supporters, having found their voice, will be a new and important force within the GOP—a force that could make it significantly harder for a future president to, say, “liberate” and “democratize” Syria. 
+♦♦♦ 
+Yet now we must skip past the unknown unknowns of the election and ask: what might we expect if Trump becomes president? 
+One immediate point to be borne in mind is that it will be a challenge to fill the cabinet and the sub-cabinet—to say nothing of the thousands of “Schedule C” positions across the administration—with true Trump loyalists. Yes, of course, if Trump wins that means he will have garnered 50 million or more votes, but still, the number of people who have the right credentials and can pass all the background checks—including, for most of the top jobs, Senate confirmation—is minuscule. 
+So here we might single out the foreign-policy realists as likely having a bright future in a Trump administration: after all, they are often well-credentialed and, by their nature, have prudently tended to keep their anti-Trump commentary to a minimum. (There’s a piece of inside-the-Beltway realist wisdom that seems relevant here: “You’re for what happens.”) 
+Yet the path to realist dominion in a Trump administration is not smooth. As a group, they have been in eclipse since the Bush 41 era, so an entire generation of their cadres is missing. The realists do not have long lists of age-appropriate alumni ready for another spin through the revolving door. 
+By contrast, the libertarians have lots of young staffers on some think-tank payroll or another. And of course, the neocons have lots of experience and contacts—yes, they screwed up the last time they were in power, but at least they know the jargon. 
+Thus, unless president-elect Trump makes a genuinely heroic effort to infuse his administration with new blood, he will end up hiring a lot of folks who might not really agree with him—and who perhaps even have strongly, if quietly, opposed him. That means that the path of a Trump presidency could be channeled in an unexpected direction, as the adherents of other foreign-policy schools—including, conceivably, schools from the left—clamber aboard. As they say in DC, “personnel is policy.” 
+Still, Trump has a strong personality, and it’s entirely possible that, as president, he will succeed in imprinting his unique will on his appointees. (On the other hand, the career government, starting with the State Department’s foreign service officers, might well prove to be a different story.) 
+Looking further ahead, as a hypothetical President Trump surveys the situation from the Sit Room, here are nine things that will be in view: 
+1. 
+Trump will recall, always, that the Bush 43 presidency drove itself into a ditch on Iraq. So he will surely see the supreme value of not sending U.S. ground troops—beyond a few advisors—into Middle Eastern war zones. 
+2. 
+Trump will also realize that Barack Obama, for all his talk about hope and change, ended up preserving the bulk of Bush 43’s policies. The only difference is that Obama did it on the cheap, reducing defense spending as he went along. 
+Obama similar to Bush—really? Yes. To be sure, Obama dropped all of Bush’s democratic messianism, but even with his cool detachment he kept all of Bush’s alliances and commitments, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then he added a new international commitment: “climate change.” 
+In other words, America now has a policy of “quintuple containment”: Russia, China, Iran, ISIS/al-Qaeda, and, of course, the carbon-dioxide molecule. Many would argue that today we aren’t managing any of these containments well; others insist that the Obama administration, perversely, seems most dedicated to the containment of climate change: everything else can fall apart, but if the Obamans can maintain the illusion of their international CO2 deals, as far as they are concerned all will be well. 
+In addition, Uncle Sam has another hundred or so minor commitments—including bilateral defense treaties with countries most Americans have never heard of, along with special commitments to champion the rights of children, women, dissidents, endangered species, etc. On a one-by-one basis, it’s possible to admire many of these efforts; on a cumulative basis, it’s impossible to imagine how we can sustain all of them. 
+3. A populist president like Trump will further realize that if the U.S. has just 4 percent of the world’s population and barely more than a fifth of world GDP, it’s not possible that we can continue to police the planet. Yes, we have many allies—on paper. Yet Trump’s critique of many of them as feckless, even faithless, resonated for one big reason: it was true. 
+So Trump will likely begin the process of rethinking U.S. commitments around the world. Do we really want to risk nuclear war over the Spratly Islands? Or the eastern marches of Ukraine? Here, Trump might well default to the wisdom of the realists: big powers are just that—big powers—and so one must deal with them in all their authoritarian essentiality. And as for all the other countries of the world—some we like and some we don’t—we’re not going to change them, either. (Although in some cases, notably Iraq and Syria, partition, supervised by the great powers, may be the only solution.) 
+4. 
+Trump will surely see world diplomacy as an extension of what he has done best all his life—making deals. This instinct will serve him well in two ways: first, he will be sharply separating himself from his predecessors, Bush the hot-blooded unilateralist war-of-choicer and Obama the cool and detached multilateralist leader-from-behind. Second, his deal-making desire will inspire him do what needs to be done: build rapport with world leaders as a prelude to making things happen. 
+To cite one immediate example: there’s no way that we will ever achieve anything resembling “peace with honor” in Afghanistan without the full cooperation of the Taliban’s masters in Pakistan. Ergo, the needed deal must be struck in Islamabad, not Kabul. 
+Almost certainly, a President Trump will treat China and Russia as legitimate powers, not as rogue states that must be single-handedly tamed by America. 
+Moreover, Trump’s deal-making trope also suggests that instead of sacrificing American economic interests on the altar of U.S. “leadership,” he will view the strengthening of the American economy as central to American greatness. 
+5. 
+Trump will further realize that his friends the realists have had a blind spot of late when it comes to economic matters. Once upon a time—that is, in the 19th century—economic nationalism was at the forefront of American foreign-policy making. In the old days, as America’s Manifest Destiny stretched beyond the continental U.S., expansionism and Hamiltonianism went together: as they used to say, trade follows the flag. Theodore Roosevelt’s digging of the Panama Canal surely ranks as one of the most successful fusions of foreign and economic policy in American history. 
+Yet in the past few decades, the economic nationalists and the foreign-policy realists have drifted apart. For example, a Reagan official, Clyde Prestowitz of the Economic Strategy Institute, has been mostly ignored by the realists, who have instead embraced the conventional elite view of free trade and globalization. 
+So a President Trump will have the opportunity to reunite realism and economic nationalism; he can once again put manufacturing exports, for example, at the top of the U.S. agenda. Indeed, Trump might consider other economic-nationalist gambits: for example, if we are currently defending such wealthy countries as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Norway, why aren’t they investing some of the trillions of dollars in their sovereign-wealth funds into, say, American infrastructure? 
+6. 
+Trump will also come into power realizing that he has few friends in the foreign-policy establishment; after all, most establishmentarians opposed him vehemently. Yet that could turn out to be a real plus for the 45th president because it could enable him to discard the stodgy and outworn thinking of the “experts.” In particular, he could refute the prevailing view that the U.S. is, and always must be, the benign hegemon, altruistically policing the world, while allowing its allies, satellites—and even rivals—to manufacture everything and thereby generate the jobs, profits, and knowhow. That was always, of course, a view that elevated the ambitions and pretensions of the American elite over the well-being of the larger U.S. population—and maybe Trump can come up with a better and fairer vision. 
+7. 
+As an instinctive deal-maker, Trump will have the capacity to clear away the underbrush of accumulated obsolete doctrines and dogmas. To cite just one small but tragic example, there’s the dopey chain of thinking that has guided U.S. policy toward South Sudan. Today, we officially condemn both sides in that country’s ongoing civil war. Yet we might ask, how can that work out well for American interests? After all, one side or the other is going to win, and we presumably want a friend in Juba, not a Chinese-affiliated foe. 
+On the larger canvas, Trump will observe that if the U.S., China, and Russia are the three countries capable of destroying the world, then it’s smart to figure out amodus vivendi among this threesome. Such practical deal-making, of course, would undermine the moralistic narrative that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are the potentates of new evil empires. 
+8. 
+Whether or not he’s currently familiar with the terminology, Trump seems likely to recapitulate the “multipolar” system envisioned by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. Back then, the multipolar vision included the U.S., the USSR, Western Europe, China, and Japan. 
+Yet multipolarity was lost in the ’80s, as the American economy was Reaganized, the Cold War grew colder, and the Soviet Union staggered to its self-implosion. Then in the ’90s we had the “unipolar moment,” when the U.S. enjoyed “hyper-power” primacy. 
+Yet as with all moments, unipolarity soon passed, undone by the Iraq quagmire, America’s economic stagnation, and the rise of other powers. So today, multipolarity seems destined to re-emerge with a slightly upgraded cast of players: the U.S., China, Russia, the European Union, and perhaps India. 
+9. 
+And, of course, Trump will have to build that wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. 
+♦♦♦ 
+Some might object that I am reading too much into Trump. Indeed, the conventional wisdom, even today, maintains that Trump is visceral, not intellectual, that he is buffoonish, not Kissingerian. 
+To such critics, this Trump supporter feels compelled to respond: when has the conventional wisdom about the New Yorker been proven correct? 
+It’s not easy to become president. In all of U.S. history, just 42 individuals have been elected to the presidency—or to the vice presidency and succeeded a fallen president. That is, indeed, an exclusive club. Or as Trump himself might say, it’s not a club for dummies. 
+If Trump does, in fact, become the 45th president, then by definition, he will have proven himself to be pretty darn strategic. And that’s a portent that bodes well for his foreign policy. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount 
+If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire",FAKE
+1183,Plouffe to Clinton: Stop micromanaging,"A couple of days before Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina primary by nearly 50 points, David Plouffe eased back in his chair at an anonymous Capitol Hill hotel and declared that the woman he helped defeat in 2008 had, oh, a 98 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders.
+
+He felt pretty, pretty confident about her odds against Donald Trump, too (predicting she could win by “an unheard of margin, nationally, of 6 to 10 points”). But Barack Obama’s puckish, intensely competitive former campaign manager, arguably the most successful Democratic strategist of his generation, offered a who-the-hell-really-knows shrug when asked to offer a similarly precise estimate of Clinton’s odds of beating Trump.
+
+“I don’t think we know yet, and I think all of us should have learned by now not to get out over ourselves with Trump,” Plouffe told me during an episode of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast, in which he offered far-ranging opinions on Clinton’s self-defeating tendency to doubt her own staff, Trump’s role as an Uber-like disrupter and Bill Clinton’s not-quite-Obama-level status in the presidential pantheon.
+
+“My sense, though is this: that he could completely implode,” Plouffe said of his favorite topic — Trump — tacking on a massive caveat: “So you say, well, how could someone, you know, really ferociously and viciously attack the last former Republican president and get into a worldwide verbal tango with the pope and come out OK? Well, he did. … The Trump thing is a living, breathing, growing organism. There are no rules for how you deal with it.”
+
+Plouffe, the archetypal no-drama Obama adviser credited with implementing Obama’s delegate-hoarding strategy eight years ago, has been informally advising Clinton and her staff as needed. Last year, POLITICO reported that he had quietly met with the soon-to-be-candidate at her Washington mansion, tracing her steps, state-by-state, and offering counsel on how to avoid the rending internal dissension that helped scuttle her race against Obama.
+
+Plouffe, several people in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters told me, speaks regularly with campaign manager Robby Mook, despite a demanding executive post at Uber that demands he travel almost constantly. Mook was checking in with Plouffe daily — sometimes multiple times a day — during Clinton’s narrow and bitterly won victory in the Iowa caucuses, they told me. Part of the problem he has identified is the sheer number of people the Clintons talk to on any given day, and the unerring certainty that each had in the quality of their own advice compared with what Mook and his team offered.
+
+And here is where the 48-year-old Delaware political marketing whiz — who was trying to be as tactful as possible in his public dispensing of criticism — described what he believes to be the biggest danger to Clinton as she grinds through the primary headlong into a bellowing, full-steam Trump.
+
+“I think you build your team, and you stick by your team, and you run,” said Plouffe. “It's got to be very hard for the Clintons. They’ve been on the scene for decades. So any time things go wrong, they have dozens of people, you know, in their email box, and probably calling, saying, ‘Told you so. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do this.’ ... You’re going to have your valleys, and that’s always a test. And if the thing you do is sow internal tension and allow voices from the outside to really, I think, affect the campaign in a negative way, you may not win.”
+
+Early on, it seemed as though the Clintons were headed to the same dark place they inhabited for much of 2008. Both were in a sour, question-everything mood in the days after her microscopic victory in Iowa, when it was clear Sanders was about to deliver a humbling and decisive win in New Hampshire. There was talk of accelerating a re-evaluation of staff that had been expected after Super Tuesday, or after she secured the nomination. (Some in Clinton’s orbit even floated the nonstarter idea that Plouffe abandon his lucrative Uber gig and jump aboard the campaign.)
+
+Despite the finger-pointing, Clinton decided to stay the course and was rewarded with game-changing victories in Nevada and South Carolina — and Plouffe hopes she doesn’t get itchy-scratchy when things go south, as they inevitably will, in a general election fight. “I think what you do need to figure out whether it’s one voice,” Plouffe said of the campaign’s overall strategy — and please do away with Clinton’s propensity to summon the clans for 10-to-20-person conference calls anytime things go wrong, he urged.
+
+“There has to be — you know, there’s the big call, and the big meeting, and then there’s the real meeting and the real call,” he added. “You can’t make decisions with 10 people. It’s impossible. So you’ve got to figure out, and, you know, the question is, who is she talking to? And listen, they’ve got enormous [talent]: Joel Benenson [pollster and strategist], Mandy [Grunwald, Clinton ad-maker and all-around adviser], [adman] Jim Margolis, Jen Palmieri [communications director]. ... These are super-smart people. So I don’t think it’s necessarily, you know, is there a missing person from the outside … you’ve got to commit to something.”
+
+The test, he says, will come during the general election, when some old Clinton hand panics and demands that either Hillary or Bill scuttle Mook’s strategy to address some crisis, real or imagined. “There will be moments when there’s some bad, bull---- public poll that comes out that shows them tied in Pennsylvania, and, with all due respect, Ed Rendell will call, and say, ‘You've got to [abandon] Virginia and come here for three days.’”
+
+At this point, Plouffe is almost certain Trump will be Clinton’s opponent: He says it’s already “too late” for Republicans to consolidate behind Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, even assuming one or the other would drop out in a fit of suicidal altruism. From here on out, Trump basically needs to not implode. “Remarkably, this is completely in his control. If he can land the plane, he wins,” Plouffe says.
+
+While he professes to be alarmed by the developer-turned-reality-star in his capacity as an “American citizen,” he gets a little giddy (not a natural Plouffian state of being) at the process of reverse-engineering The Donald’s Teflon candidacy. “If you end up with a Trump-Clinton matchup, that will be one for the ages” — and one he’s pretty sure, though not entirely convinced, she’d win in a walk.
+
+“I think that’s a likely possibility: that Hillary Clinton could beat Donald Trump by an unheard of margin, nationally, of 6 to 10 points,” he says. “But if that’s not the case and he’s competitive, where he’ll be competitive is in the Upper Midwest, in the Ohios, the Wisconsins, maybe Pennsylvanias of the world — maybe Iowa and Minnesota even, potentially.”
+
+Plouffe is quick to say, “From an Electoral College standpoint, I don’t see a Trump path,” but he’s equally quick to say the greatest threat posed by Trump is his unpredictability. Plouffe is a guy who likes to make a plan and stick with it, and Trump makes that a near impossibility. “Trump is a wild card, and you just don’t know,” he adds.
+
+The greatest danger is that the public continues to give Trump license to change his positions any time he likes, with minimal recrimination, and that will allow him to take popular stances outside the narrow confines of GOP orthodoxy. Plouffe thinks he’ll show openness to taxing the rich, nod toward the reality of climate change, even recognize some federal government role in providing health care to the poor.
+
+The idea of deconstructing Trump appeals to Plouffe, but the aspect of his old job he misses most is playing around with the numbers. He thinks Clinton’s greatest advantage is a sophisticated data-gathering operation capable of targeting voters, one by one, in swing states, undermining Trump’s scattershot populist messaging.
+
+Plouffe comes by his numeracy naturally. His father, a Massachusetts native, was a physics major who joined the Army and rose to the rank of captain, where he worked in intelligence, and Plouffe earnestly says that he can’t talk about what his dad did before retiring and taking a job with DuPont.
+
+The son inherited the father’s love for math — he fondly recalls solving calculus “puzzles” as a kid — and like many political pros he grew up a baseball box-score fanatic and, later, a devotee of Sabermetrics. But he was also a passionate fan and, like many kids in Delaware, followed the Phillies as a young boy and idolized their Hall of Fame third-baseman, Mike Schmidt. As any one who has ever worked with (or against) him knows, Plouffe is also very, very competitive. As a pre-teen, he merged all of his passions into an obsession with a 1970s-era board game, “All-Star Baseball,” that combined probability, cards with the names of his favorite players and the thrill of pure chance — in short, all the elements of modern politics.
+
+Yet for Plouffe, politics is ultimately about loyalty, in his case an abiding loyalty to Obama that’s apparent even as he dives enthusiastically into a role as public Clinton booster and private unpaid adviser.
+
+His old competitive instincts toward Clinton have been mostly, but not entirely suppressed. He speaks glowingly of her toughness and smarts. But when I ask Plouffe if he regrets playing hardball with Bill and Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, he grins. “Not one bit,” he says. “Not one bit.”
+
+When Plouffe compiles his list of “consequential presidents” over the past century (the purpose is to place Obama near the top) he ticks them off, one by one. “Well, clearly Franklin Roosevelt. ... Maybe you throw in the combined Kennedy-Johnson years … and then Barack Obama, I think, on that level — and Reagan, of course.”
+
+“Bill Clinton was a very good president,” he replies, “very good.”",REAL
+3876,Obama's leadership tank is out of gas: President shrinks as our challenges grow,"If ever America needed a president who could speak to and for all the people, this would be such a moment. If only we had such a president.
+
+It has been obvious for some time that the president’s leadership tank is out of gas. Now, in the extra-troubled seventh year of a failed presidency, he’s given up on America. Apparently, we the people have disappointed him one too many times.
+
+Wherever you look, whatever the topic, the Founders’ spirit of American exceptionalism is sputtering. Our national catechism, that tomorrow definitely will be better than today, is suffering a serious bout of the yips.
+
+It has been obvious for some time that the president’s leadership tank is out of gas. Now, in the extra-troubled seventh year of a failed presidency, he’s given up on America. Apparently, we the people have disappointed him one too many times.
+
+Times like these are why we have a president. Times like these are why Barack Obama became president.
+
+Despite his foolish boast that his ascendancy would mark the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Obama genuinely inspired enough hope in enough people to earn the job.
+
+But those gauzy days of swelling crowds and swooning students now appear to be a passing derangement. Even reasonable optimism has been shattered like so many storefront windows in Baltimore, Ferguson and other hope-forsaken places.
+
+More troubling and more dangerous, the man who promised to redeem us is not just failing to rise to the occasion. He is shrinking as the challenges grow.
+
+To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.
+
+Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist.",REAL
+6102,Sex and the Presidential City,"Sex and the Presidential City Sex and the Presidential City By 0 58 
+Why does everyone think that presidential campaigns are about “issues,” when anyone over the age of consent knows they are all about sex? But it says a lot about the lasting power of Viagra that this is still the case when we have a couple of seventy-year-olds on the ballot. (“ For an election lasting more than four years, please call your doctor .”) 
+In last week’s newspaper there was a report on the tenth or eleventh woman (I have lost track) to come forward to say that Donald Trump made suggestive and “inappropriate” advances to her during a golf tournament that took place about ten years ago. 
+The woman in question is Jessica Drake, who during her press conference announced that at the time of the tournament, she was working in the “the adult industry” (that’s what People Magazine calls porn) for Wicked Pictures (the 20th Century Fox of gang banging) when the randy Donald kissed and hugged her in his room. 
+Trump was already in his pajamas when she knocked on his door, together with two friends. Normally, in the adult business, when three porn stars knock on your hotel door, it’s considered foreplay. 
+When Trump’s effusive greeting of Miss Drake did not lead to more snuggling, let alone the suggestion to preview some of her work on the hotel television, he offered her $10,000 to satisfy his suite dreams. 
+Drake again demurred, saying that the next morning she needed to get back to Los Angeles “for work.” By that point in her career she had…",FAKE
+1359,Marco Rubio is running scared,"Marco Rubio is in an enviable position among mainstream Republican presidential candidates after his strong finish in Iowa. Yet the man is running scared.
+
+The young Floridian is stumping through New Hampshire as if he’s campaigning to win the Cautious Caucus. He gives the same speech everywhere. The most tightly managed candidate in the race, he shuns risk and appears to live in mortal terror of mentioning the man who dominates the race.
+
+At a town hall event here in central New Hampshire on Wednesday morning, Rubio, as usual, didn’t mention Donald Trump in his speech. But the first questioner, a businesswoman, practically begged the candidate to trash Trump, asking him to comment on Trump’s “very definite views” of the disabled, including calling people “stupid” and attempting to remove disabled veterans from one of his properties.
+
+Rubio demurred, saying only that he had already called out “Donald” for his “distasteful” mocking of a disabled reporter at an event. He then dropped the Trump talk and moved on.
+
+Rival Chris Christie mocked Rubio on Tuesday as “the boy in the bubble” managed by his “handlers.” This criticism apparently smoked Rubio out, because he took a few questions from reporters before his event in Laconia, N.H., on Wednesday afternoon.
+
+The first questioner noted that Rubio had poked other candidates, “but not Mr. Trump. Why?”
+
+“Donald hasn’t really outlined any position on policies,” Rubio reasoned. “So when the time comes and it’s appropriate, we’ll do so.”
+
+“Why do you deliver the same speech wherever you go?” the second questioner asked.
+
+“’Cause it’s my message,” he said. “It’s the reason I’m running for president.”
+
+Rubio’s determination not to be taken off of this bland message, or to engage Trump, may give the impression that he is above the fray. But it also can make him look weak and callow.
+
+While other candidates, particularly Jeb Bush, have denounced Trump’s outrages, Rubio and allied groups have spent upward of $30 million on ads so far — some of it targeting Bush, Christie and Ted Cruz, but none of it targeting Trump. Rubio has mentioned Trump a couple of times on Twitter. In debates, he has frequently deflects questions about the mogul.
+
+After the December debate, in which Rubio declined a chance to take on Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the country, Fox News asked Rubio why he hadn’t gone after Trump. Rubio said he wasn’t “going to spend a valuable 75 seconds on a debate stage talking about something that’s never going to happen.”
+
+Likewise, asked to comment on Trump’s qualifications as a conservative, Rubio said that the billionaire is “running as someone who’s a populist who’s upset about the direction of this country, as am I, as are millions of Americans.”
+
+On other occasions, Rubio declined to talk about Trump’s mosque-closing ideas (“well, I think we need to target radicalism”) and Trump’s plan for mass deportation of illegal immigrants (both sides “have points to make here that are valid”).
+
+Asked back in September whether he would engage Trump, Rubio replied: “No, I’m ready to talk about who I am and why I’m running.”
+
+It’s not as if Trump returns the politeness. Ann Coulter, warming up a Trump crowd Tuesday night, called Rubio a “Cuban boy” who “wears high heels” and has “big ears.” (Ever-cautious Rubio, ridiculed last month for wearing “booties” with thick heels, quickly retired the offending footwear.)
+
+Rubio’s strong Iowa finish has brought new attention — and overcapacity crowds — in New Hampshire. But the would-be supporters are greeted by a robot.
+
+The closest Rubio gets to Trump in his stump speech is observing, as he did here in Bow, that “you have a right to be angry, but anger is not a plan. What exactly do you want to do?” Or, as he put it in Laconia a few hours later: “Anger is not a plan. Frustration is not a plan. You have a right to be frustrated. You have a right to be angry. . . . But what exactly are you going to do about it?”
+
+Voters’ questions, rather than spurring spontaneity, inspire more caution. Asked Wednesday what he’d do about the millions of illegal immigrants who otherwise haven’t broken any law, Rubio said, “We’ll figure something out.”
+
+The logic behind Rubio’s candidacy, recited in his speeches, is that, as he put it in Bow: “I give us the best chance to win, and if you don’t believe me, ask a Democrat. They do not want to run against me.” Or, as he said in Laconia: “If I’m our nominee, we will win, and the Democrats know this. They do not want to run against me.”
+
+If he keeps playing the boy in the bubble, they may reconsider.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+9851,Women In Iceland Leave Work 14% Early To Protest The Country’s 14% Wage Gap,"Even in Iceland – a country considered to be one of the world’s leaders in gender equality, a pay gap exists. For every dollar a man makes, women make approximately 76 cents (similar to the... ",FAKE
+5990,Urban Population Booms Will Make Climate Change Worse,"Urban Population Booms Will Make Climate Change Worse Posted on Oct 27, 2016 
+By Tim Radford / Climate News Network Flooded slums in the densely-populated city of Jakarta, Indonesia. (Kent Clark via Flickr) 
+LONDON—The world’s cities are growing even faster than the human population. Within the last 40 years, the global population has increased by a factor of 1.8, but built-up areas have multiplied 2.5 times . All of this information, and much more, appears in a new European Commission (EC) publication called the Atlas of the Human Planet , prepared to coincide with the recent third UN Habitat conference in Quito, Ecuador. The Atlas shows that, 40 years ago, most of the world’s 4.1billion population lived in rural areas. Now more than half live in towns and cities—urban clusters that cover 7.6% of the planet’s land mass, equivalent to an area about half the size of the European Union. Most of the people in the world are crammed into urban centres with a density greater than 1,500 persons per square kilometre, and in settlements greater than 50,000 inhabitants. Altogether, geographers have identified 13,000 urban centres, altogether surrounded by 300,000 “urban clusters” of at least 5,000 inhabitants living at a density of 300 per square kilometre. Population tripled And in the 40 years since the first UN Habitat conference in 1976, the population of Africa has tripled, while the built-up area of the continent has quadrupled. In wealthy Europe, the population remained stable, but the built-up area doubled. The research for the Atlas has been enriched by a new, free, open and global dataset, the Global Human Settlement Layer , developed by the EC’s Joint Research Centre , and based on 12,400 billion individual satellite data readings over the past four decades. It provides, in every sense, an overview of a planet at work and at rest and struggling to survive. It confirms what most people would have suspected: that nine of the 10 most densely populated urban centres—including Cairo in Egypt, Guangzhou in China, and Jakarta in Indonesia—are in the low-income countries. Researchers warn that whatever problems these new city-dwellers have will be compounded by climate change The largest urban centre in the world is Los Angeles in the US, eight of the 10 largest urban centres are in the high-income countries, and five of those are in the US. And a group of scientists led by Timon McPhearson, assistant professor of urban ecology at the New School in New York , publish a warning in Nature journal that more urban areas will be built in the next 30 years than ever before just to house and shelter the additional 1.1billion people expected in the next 14 years—most of them in the crowded cities of Asia and Africa. Whatever problems these new city-dwellers have will be compounded, other researchers warn, by climate change —with ever more frequent and intense heatwaves, droughts, floods , and days of bad air quality. Around 40% of the world’s people live in coastal cities, and are therefore increasingly vulnerable to floods , tsunamis, surges and tropical storms. Because of the notorious urban “heat island effect”, cities are inevitably hotter than the surrounding countryside , and many are likely to face a crisis in the supply of safe, clean water . Swelling cities The new Atlas warns that the new, swelling cities will go on making ever greater demands on the farmland and wilderness beyond the city’s boundaries. In the last 15 years, 27,000 sq km of land was covered by housing, workshops and pavement. This is an area equal to Cyprus and Israel combined. If this growth continues at the present rate, an additional 1.1 million sq km of land will become built-up between 2015 and 2040—an area equal to the size of Ethiopia. In 119 countries, the urban population is between 70% and 90% of the total. In 25 countries—most of them in Asia—the city dwellers make up 90% of the population. Many of these are in megacities. The atlas records 50 “urban clusters” of more than 10 million people, and one gigacity—Beijing—that is home to more than 100 million. Inevitably, in this growth explosion, the poorest are often most at risk, from floods, landslides, and other geophysical and climate-related potential disasters. In the last 40 years, the number of people living at or even below sea level has almost doubled from 45 million to 88 million, and the number living on steep slopes has increased from 70 million to 160 million. 
+Tim Radford, a founding editor of Climate News Network, worked for The Guardian for 32 years, for most of that time as science editor. He has been covering climate change since 1988. 
+Advertisement",FAKE
+9751,An Open Letter to Black South African Police Officers,"Tweet Widget by Black Power Front 
+With students joining workers in revolt against South Africa’s neoliberal regime, young people are demanding to know why Black police are engaged in the same kind of repression that was previously used by white governments “to systematically counter Black resistance?” In a letter to Black cops, activists note “an increase and worrying pattern of anti-Black police violence.” An Open Letter to Black South African Police Officers by Black Power Front 
+“As a Black Police Officer, you must understand that the struggles of Black workers and students are actually your struggles too.” 
+Dear Black Police Officer, 
+How are you today? Well, we hope. You may be wondering who we are, why we have decided to write to you and perhaps why we are addressing you as a “Black Police Officer” -- as opposed to just saying “Police Officer.” 
+Who are we? We are the Black Power Front or BPF. We are a non-party political pro-Black platform which seeks to serve as an instrument to organize and collaborate with like-minded Black individuals and organizations, under a common program that provides practical responses to what is commonly understood as the Black Condition today. 
+Why have we decided to write to you? First, given the nature of your work, it is not always easy to sit down with you and just talk about issues that affect our country and, in particular, the Black community. 
+Second, like other members of the Black community, we in the BPF are deeply disturbed by the continued brutality of the police against Black workers and students -- particularly those who engage in legitimate protest action. And third, the BPF holds the view that, given where Black people find themselves economically, socially and otherwise today in relation to other racial groups, it is extremely urgent that like-minded Black groups and individuals (everywhere in the world) come together in exclusive spaces, and engage in constructive dialogue, with the view to find ways of getting Black people out of the quagmire they currently find themselves in. 
+The anti-Black role of the police before 1994 
+As members of the Black community, you would know that, in the Azanian (South Afrikan) context, from the 1400s onwards, various forms of colonial police structures were key instruments in enabling the European invaders to advance and bolster their evil agenda of slavery, colonization and land theft. It was these colonial police structures that were used to systematically counter Black resistance, through amongst others the capture, torture and in many cases beheading of our warrior ancestors such as uKumkani uHintsa, Kgosi Toto, Kgosi Galeshewe, uKumkani uStuurman and many other heroes and heroines of Black resistance. 
+In the 20 th century, it was through these European colonial police structures that successive white supremacist regimes in Azania (South Afrika) were able to murder and torture our freedom fighters and ordinary Black people. They were directly responsible for the murder of our people in Sharpeville and Langa in 1960. The execution by hanging of martyrs like Vuyisile Mini and Solomon Mahlangu, in 1964 and 1979, respectively. 
+It was the colonial European police who assassinated visionaries such as Onkgopotse Tiro and Steve Biko, in 1974 and 1977, respectively. It was them who murdered the young Zolile Petersen and Christopher Truter, during the student uprising of 1976. And it was them who ensured that many of our revered freedom fighters such as Kgalabi Masemola, Mangaliso Sobukwe, Lekoane Mothopeng, Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, Nkosi Molala, Muntu Myeza and many others, were banished to Robben Island. 
+Even though it is often argued that the White Police Officers who were involved in these atrocities against Black people were acting under the orders of their superiors, the truth of the matter is that, at an individual and basic level, they knew that what they were doing to Black people was wrong, inhumane and unjustified. 
+The anti-Black role of the police after 1994 
+Given this painful history of centuries of systematic and state violence against Black people, the declaration of “freedom” on April 27, 1994, created a legitimate expectation on the part of many Black people that the type of wanton violence and naked brutality that the successive colonial white supremacist regimes unleashed on Black people would be a thing of the past. But to our horror, even after the declaration of “freedom” in 1994 and the installation of a government that is led by Black people we began to see an increase and worrying pattern of anti-Black police violence. 
+This type of anti-Black police [U1] brutality was palpable in the killing of Andries Tatane, young Nqobile Nzuza, Mike Tshele, Lerato Seema, Osiah Rahube, Jan Rivombo and of course the brutal and targeted assassinations of Mgcineni “Mambush” Noki and other Black workers in Marikana, in August 2012. 
+All of these anti-Black atrocities beg the question: how it is possible that a government that is led by people who, as part of the Black community, have first-hand experience of the brutality of state violence through the police, do not just unleash the same type of state violence against their own people, but also seek to justify the use of such anti-Black violence? 
+Our attitude towards Black police officers 
+By highlighting the involvement of Black Policer Officers (after 1994) in the killing of ordinary Black people who are simply fighting for their right to be human the BPF does not seek to create the mind-set that Black Police Officers are the enemy of the Black community or that Black Police Officers are inherently bad people. Of course, there are many examples of Black Police Officers who don’t just do their job with integrity and dedication, but also do a lot of good work in the Black community. 
+This notwithstanding, the main focus of this letter, however, is not so much the individual conduct of Black Police Officers but rather the continued use of Black Police Officers (as a state function) in the brutal suppression of the right of ordinary and mainly poor Black people to freely articulate their social, economic and political concerns and aspirations. 
+Our appeal to Black police officers 
+As the BPF, we regard Black Police Officers as members of the Black community first and therefore an integral part of Black life in Azania. We also hold the view that the on-going demands by Black workers for decent wages and better working conditions or those of Black students for free-decolonized-Afrocentric education, are not just demands that will benefit individual Black Police Officers (majority of them Black young people), but also their children who might be at university or will be going there in future. Therefore, as a Black Police Officer, you must understand that the struggles of Black workers and students are actually your struggles too. 
+As the BPF we fully understand that, just like all ordinary Black people, Black Police Officers are under severe financial stress and like most Black people, they are struggling to make ends meet. For these reasons, the BPF’s clarion call to all Black Police Officers is as follows: 
+* Understand that the economic struggles and frustrations of ordinary Black people are your struggles and frustrations too. And that Black workers and students continue to be oppressed by the same system that is responsible for your personal financial stress; 
+* As part of the Black community, you must (through your labor unions), engage the management of the SAPS to stop the state’s campaign of apartheid-style violence that is currently being unleashed on Black people in general; 
+* You are our Black Brothers and Sisters and must never allow yourselves to be used by self-serving politicians as part of an elitist anti-Black-pro-capitalist plot that uses the pretext of “law and order” to justify the murder of poor Black people and wanting that Black people timidly accept their status as economic slaves in the land of their ancestors; and 
+* Lastly, Black students and workers are not fighting against you (as Black police officers) but against the anti-Black-pro-capitalist system that is using some of you against your own Black Sisters and Brothers. 
+#FreeDecolonisedAfrocentricEducationNow!",FAKE
+7804,Nanny In Jail After Force Feeding Baby To Death,"Nanny In Jail After Force Feeding Baby To Death 2 shares by Ike Mclean / October 27, 2016 / LIFE / 
+Oluremi Oyindasola, 66, of Glenarden, Maryland has been charged with second-degree murder, first-degree child abuse resulting in death and other offenses, after she force fed an eight-month-old baby girl who then died. 
+Home surveillance footage shows Oyindasola was napping when the eight-month-old child began crying and approached the nanny in a toddler walker. 
+Police say Oyindasola then tried to feed the child, and when her attempt was unsuccessful, she “proceeded to pour a large amount of white liquid directly inside the victim’s mouth.” 
+Col. Harry Bond with Prince George’s County Police told NBC Washington Oyindasola “forcefully poured the two bottles of what looks to be milk down the baby’s mouth, causing her to not be able to breathe, suffocating her, and eventually she died at the hospital.” 
+In a news release Prince George’s County Police said the following: 
+“On October 24th, at about 4.10pm, the baby had been rushed to a hospital after she became unresponsive at home. 
+“She was pronounced dead a short time later. An autopsy on Tuesday revealed the baby’s cause of death was asphyxiation. The manner of death was ruled a homicide.” 
+“The preliminary investigation revealed the injuries to the baby occurred while in the sole care and custody of Oyindasola.” 
+Oyindasol is currently in police custody and is being held on $1 million bond. 
+Sign up to get alerts about Dennis Michael Lynch's upcoming Donald Trump film and breaking news. Subscribe ",FAKE
+1731,Meet the Trump Truthers: Media figures insist bigoted Trump questioner was just a liberal plant,"The Summer of Trump officially closes with its silliest episode yet: the spectacle of Trump Truthers, an assortment of Trump-friendly media figures who insist that the man who said President Obama is a Muslim and “not an American,” and that Muslims must be gotten “rid of,” at a New Hampshire rally, was some kind of opposition plant, not an actual Trump supporter.
+
+First out the gate was Ann Coulter early Friday morning. “I say he’s a liberal plant,” she tweeted. Brian Kilmeade of “Fox & Friends” echoed Coulter, insisting the anti-Muslim questioner “sounds like a plant, to be honest.” Fox’s Kimberly Guilfoyle and Eric Bolling continued peddling that theory all day. Laura Ingraham agreed, tweeting that the man “sure sounded like a put-up–cartoon presentation, bad acting.”
+
+Media Matters ran down the list of right-wingers trying to bail out Trump, who was uncharacteristically media-shy after the controversy erupted, even canceling a scheduled public appearance on Friday (allegedly to close a business deal.)
+
+But it wasn’t just official right-wingers: Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin peddled the notion on Saturday:
+
+He doubled down on his questions – it’s only OK to use the cliché “doubling down” when talking about Halperin – in a long Twitter debate with journalists who challenged him, insisting the guy “sounded like the Travolta mumble in the dance scene in ‘Pulp Fiction.’”
+
+It’s one thing for paid right-wing propagandists to suggest Trump’s questioner wasn’t an actual supporter. It’s another for an allegedly serious journalist to push the claim, with zero proof. (To be fair, my friend Chris Hayes raised the question on his show Thursday night, immediately after the Trump rally, but it was more in the vein of telling viewers the “theatrical” questioner hadn’t been found, so no one could decisively say whether he was an actual Trump supporter.)
+
+But it shouldn’t be hard to believe a Trump supporter holds those views. Trump personally took the birther nonsense from the fringe of politics to center stage in 2011, and he revived the claim in 2012 even as he was endorsing Mitt Romney. Trump has also suggested Obama was Muslim, telling Fox’s Bill O’Reilly in 2011 that it’s possible Obama “doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim.” Besides: the man’s claim that Obama is a Muslim, and also “not American,” puts him squarely in the mainstream of the Republican Party. A recent Public Policy Polling survey found that only 29 percent of Republicans believe Obama was born here, and more than half say he’s Muslim. Those numbers climb among Trump supporters: two thirds say he’s a Muslim, and 6 in 10 believe he wasn’t born in the U.S. I don’t know why is so hard for anyone to believe that a man at a Trump rally would ask that kind of question. To his credit, Trump is denying claims that the questioner was a plant. “I don’t think he was a plant,” he said Monday. “I knew that question was going to be a controversial one. I have no obligation, moral or otherwise, to defend the president.” Then he brazenly blamed the entire birther issue on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign. “What I’ve said is nothing compared to Hillary,” claimed the man who so dogged the president with birther BS he released his long-form birth certificate at a public event. Let me concede: It’s possible the man at the Trump rally was a plant. So far, nobody has found him to interview him, at least not yet. But I don’t know who’d bother to plant him. What would they have to gain? The kind of people who’d be upset that Trump failed to rebuke the anti-Muslim birther aren’t likely to support Trump in the first place; most actual Trump supporters agreed with the guy’s premise.",REAL
+5550,Why is #SpiritCooking Trending on Twitter?,"at 2:29 pm 1 Comment 
+I’m not one to shy away from Hillary Clinton related controversies, but this whole Spirit Cooking topic just seemed too far over the top to not have a good explanation. As such, I’ve avoided writing about it, hoping that someone from the Clinton team would come out and put all the craziness to rest. That has not happened. 
+Indeed, the topic was trending at #1 for much of the morning on Twitter, and continues to trend at #3 many hours later. All day, I’ve been trying as hard as possible to disassociate my confirmation bias about the Clintons, from this story. As such, I’ve been waiting for a good “debunking” piece to come out, but have yet to see one. 
+For those of you who are interested in the topic, here’s a measured take from The Washington Times : 
+A new WikiLeaks release of stolen emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta reveal an invitation by his brother to a “Spirit Cooking dinner” at the home of artist Marina Abramovic. 
+“Spirit Cooking with Essential Aphrodisiac Recipes” was released by Ms. Abramovic in 1996, but the “ingredients” call for “fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk” to be consumed “on earthquake nights.” 
+New York’s Museum of Modern Art called it a “cookbook” for “evocative instructions for actions or thoughts.” Another recipe calls for “fresh morning urine.” 
+“Are you in NYC Thursday July 9 Marina wants you to come to dinner Mary?” Tony Podesta says in an email forwarded to his brother June 28, 2015. 
+“Dear Tony, I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place,” Ms. Abramovic says in a June 25 email sent at 2:35 a.m. GMT +2. “Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina.” 
+You can see the source email through the following tweet by Wikileaks: Tony Podesta.",FAKE
+8526,CETA Is Step towards a Corporate Land Called Euramerica,"3 Shares
+2 0 0 1
+The signing of the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement with Canada (CETA) on the 30th of October marks the beginning of North America's annexation of Europe. The negotiations for the treaty were carried out behind closed doors. For over 751 deputies in the European Parliament, there are more than 30 thousands lobbyists. The Society for European Affairs Professionals (SEAP) - the organisation which lobbying on behalf of multinational corporations – this is the real power block in Europe. The European worker has absolutely no say and henceforth he will lose the right to form join unions. Multinational corporations will have unlimited power over European workers, who will see the destruction of what is left of social gains won from over a century of class struggle.
+Will European workers lie down and accept this imposture? What concrete policies would weaken the stranglehold of corporations over European workers? Which parties in the current political landscape hold policies which, if implemented, would weaken the transatlantic stranglehold?
+There are currently no political parties running in the major European elections with candidates who genuinely represent workers' interests. But there are some political movements which threaten the corporate 'power-elite'. We will mention them below.
+There are two important geopolitical processes to consider here. The first is the East-West corporate , geopolitical axis. America is pulling the European peninsula away from the Eurasian continent. With the installation of a neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, Washington attempted to re-create an 'Intermarium' from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and down to the Eastern Mediterranean - driving a permanent wedge between Russia and Germany.
+In order to facilitate the social transformation of Europe into a 'America Minor', millions of 'pilgrims' are necessary. Hence, the deployment of coercive engineered migration as a tool to replace class- conscious European workers with deracine youths - in some instances educated enough to do the low-paid work assigned to them and acculturated enough to pose no problem to the 'Power-Elite'.
+In the new Trotskyite language of this imperial order, any leader who attempts to stem the tide of globalisation through populist appeals to tradition and national identity is 'fascist'. Fascist is a loaded term which generally connotes evil in the public mind. In each European country there is a ready-made army of youths from wealthy families whose job is to don hoddies, attack police and scream 'fascist' and 'racist' at working-class people desperately trying to find a way out of this nightmare. These 'antifa' are the modern equivalent to Oswald Mosley's fascist gangs in the 1930s; they represent the same class interests .Petty-bourgeois leftism is the New World Order's avant-garde.
+A favourite passtime of the 'Antifa' mob is throwing stones at police officers. One can only gain acceptance in the anti-fascist gang by showing how much one hates the 'pigs'. So, police officers from honest working-class families get burned alive while the anti-fa mob chants slogans from the Spanish Civil War. Such violence is now a regular occurrence in demonstrations. The agents provocateurs often receive help from the intelligence services. French police are finding it hard to cope with the chaos developing all over French suburbs. They complain that they are not sufficiently equipped and do not have the powers necessary to deal with the growing violence from delinquents. They have been demonstrating in Paris. They have been calling for an end to the control of the French police by free masonry. Exacerbating the problem is the deep-seated racism of many police officers who target Black youths with spot-checksm – very often without reason.
+The recent demonstrations by French police in France against poor working conditions and low pay strongly suggests that there is the possibility that the rank and file of the French police could be waking up to the reality that France is government by a criminal gang. After the Magnanville terrorist attack in June where two police officers were killed, a police officer at the funeral of the deceased refused to shake the hand of President Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls. It was a highly significant act of insubordination.
+The police, who in capitalist societies are the guardians of the ruling class, are beginning to realise the criminality of the people they are protecting; they are perhaps beginning to understand that the role of the state is to impose the dictatorship of one class over another - that of the minority of super wealthy over the labouring masses.
+Many of these dissident police officers are linked to Le Pen's National Front. A reliable source in French intelligence informed me that the secret services spend more time watching the far-right than the so-called 'far left'. They see the far right as a real potential danger to the ruling order, whereas the far left present no danger but are in fact a key component of ruling class ideology. From the 'Arab Spring' to Nuit Debout, the far-left are the life-blood of capitalism. The potential of a major split between the national and compradore bourgeoise of imperial states for prospects of working-class gains is something that needs more study.
+What should we make of all this in the context of CETA? As I have said on numerous occasions, the far right in France are and always have been political opportunists who exploit the despair of the masses; they serve the interests of the national bourgeoisie. But the National Front are regularly denounced by the media, not for being right wing. Rather, they are dismissed as being closer to the far left. The prospect of raising worker's salaries, nationalisation of key industries and a halt on the importation of cheap labour appeal to working-class families.
+As I have pointed out before, looking at a debate between the Trotskyist Jean-Luc Melanchon and Marine Le Pen in 2011, one would have thought that Le Pen was was the leftist and Melanchon the right-wing militarist. Melanchon shamelessly defended the NATO bombing campaign of Libya, while Le Pen opposed it!
+Civil war on the horizon
+The right-wing presidential candidate Philippe de Villiers has said there are plans afoot to divide the French territory between Muslims and non-Muslims. He Quote: s Francois Hollande's own writings to back up his claims. Everyone is talking about an imminent civil war. In the bars and cafes of Paris one can hear more and more disgruntled French citizens talking about media disinformation, the demonisation of Russia, the homogenisation of thought and the criminality of the ruling class.
+The scene has never been more propitious to a populist take over of French politics. But one should not have illusions about the National Front; they are following the menacious Zionist narrative on the war on terror: Muslims are the problem. The party's vice-president Forian Philippot is close to the ultra-Zionist lawyer Gilles-William Goldnagel, a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
+Philippot recently condemned the comments of presidential candidate Jean- Frédéric Poisson who said Hillary Clinton presented the greatest threat for the world as she is in the pay of the Zionists. Poisson was subsequently forced to kneel before the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) where he sought forgiveness. He was told he would be forgiven but they they would never forget! In spite of the National Front's anti-Muslim bias, an increasing number of Muslims are voting for the party. Many Muslims prefer the National Front as they are sick and tired of being patronised and manipulated by the left – with their pseudo 'anti-racism' and 'humanitarian' wars.
+There have also been major strikes by police in Ireland for similar reasons to France. French workers are losing everything and will soon become a lumpen proletariat. Meanwhile the French government has programmes in place to encourage migrants heading to Britain to stay in France. The Socialist Party is creating a new electorate. It is a wise move for them because after the next election abstentionism will be the norm and the indigenous lumpen proletariat will resent the migrants. The oligarchs will keep the masses in bondage through GMOS, Takfiri anti-Islam and total reification of life. CETA is the beginning of the end for social hope. It is the prelude to the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – the most evil trade deal in history.
+French vice-president of the Trilateral Commission Herve de Carmoy wrote a book in 2007 entitled 'L'Euramerique' – Euramerica, where he argues for the formation of what amounts to a transatlantic super-state run by a financial oligarchy. CETA is the prelude to that project.",FAKE
+8690,Media Roll Out Welcome Mat for ‘Humanitarian’ War in Syria,"By Belén Fernández | FAIR PHOTO ABOVE: Hillary Clinton told Goldman Sachs that a no-fly zone is “going to kill a lot of Syrians.” (cc photo: Gage Skidmore) A s she marches toward the US presidency, Hillary Clinton has stepped up her promotion of the idea that a no-fly zone in Syria could “save lives” and “hasten the end of the conflict” that has devastated that country since 2011. It has now been revealed, of course, that Clinton hasn’t always expressed the same optimism about the no-fly zone in private. The Intercept (10/10/16 ) reported on Clinton’s recently leaked remarks in a closed-door speech to Goldman Sachs in 2013: To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk—you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians. Other relevant characters, such as US Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Joseph Dunford ( Daily Caller , 9/26/16 ), have warned that a no-fly zone in Syria would simply intensify the conflict—which presumably isn’t the best way to hasten its end. L uckily for those who prefer to rally around illogic, however, plenty of media have already rolled out the welcome mat for peddlers of the “humanitarian” vision of increased Western military interference in Syria. The New York Times ‘ Nicholas Kristof ( 10/6/16 ) argues against “Obama’s paralysis” and for “more robust strategies advocated by Hillary Clinton.” The New York Times ’ self-appointed savior of women , Nicholas Kristof ( 10/6/16 ), invoked the plight of a young Syrian girl in Aleppo to conclude that Obama’s alleged “paralysis” on Syria “has been linked to the loss of perhaps half a million lives” in the country, as well as to “the rise of extremist groups like the Islamic State,” among other unpleasant outcomes. We have no “excuse,” we’re told, for “failing to respond to mass atrocities.” Never mind that the rise of ISIS has much to do with that mass atrocity known as the US invasion of Iraq, thanks to which many young Iraqi girls and other human beings have suffered rape, mutilation and death. It’s convenient for certain industries, at least, when US weapons are deemed the solution for problems US weapons helped to create in the first place. Furthermore, plenty of US weapons continue to flow to countries known for arming and funding ISIS and similar outfits—an arrangement unlikely to be rectified by a no-fly zone targeting the Syrian government and the Russians. USA Today ( 10/8/16 ), meanwhile, ran an opinion piece by an American doctor who worked briefly at a now-destroyed hospital in Aleppo, arguing that the US “should lead the way in establishing real no-fly zones, either under United Nations auspices or with the British and the French”—because “otherwise, our inaction will continue to be an embarrassment and stand as an example of our spineless irresponsibility.” But considering that there has already been plenty of US action in Syria—including the mistaken “pulverization” of whole families with children—it would seem we’ve already exhibited a fair amount of lethal irresponsibility. Beyond the opinion pages, media figures are pushing the “humanitarian” approach with varying degrees of subtlety. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd ( 10/16/16 ) recently pressed Vice President Joe Biden on the lack of a no-fly zone over Aleppo, suggesting that the Obama administration will “look back and wonder what if? What if? What if? What if?” Of course, no campaign for saving lives with bombs would be complete without everyone’s favorite examples of feel-good destruction from the former Yugoslavia. The Washington Post ( 9/9/16 ) hosted an opinion by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first ambassador to the UN, Muhamed Sacirbey, straightforwardly headlined: “Western Military Intervention Saved Lives in Bosnia. It Can Work in Syria, Too.” Sacirbey warns that “Syria’s largest city is on the brink of starvation. Bombed from the skies and besieged on the ground, Aleppo’s 2 million residents may soon be exterminated.” Gone, apparently, are the days of factchecking, when someone at the Post might have alerted the author to the reality that the vast majority of Aleppo’s residents live in government-controlled areas and are thus not under attack by said government. Comparing Aleppo to besieged Sarajevo, Sacirbey determines that Sarajevans ultimately “escaped many of the horrors now awaiting Aleppo’s residents… because NATO opted (albeit belatedly and, too often, inadequately) to uphold its responsibility to protect Bosnian civilians.” After lauding Bosnia’s no-fly zone, Sacirbey pulls this prediction out of a hat: “Limited   Syria would save civilian lives, perhaps as many as 200 a week.” In their indispensable essay for Monthly Review ( 10/07 ), “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in In humanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse),” Edward S. Herman and David Peterson make it unavoidably clear that the West’s business in Bosnia   saving lives—and much to do with the contrary. The Bill Clinton administration, they note, actively sabotaged agreements to end the war at an earlier date, while “helping arm the Bosnian Muslims and Croatians and helping bring thousands of Mujahedin to fight in Bosnia.” America’s support in this case for jihadists—a secret alliance also discussed by scholar Tariq Ali ( Guardian , 9/9/06 )—further complicates the assumption that the US is somehow capable of fixing the current jihad problem. In predictable fashion, US media led the charge to the Bosnian intervention ( Extra! , 10-11/92 ), dutifully painting the Serbs as demonic aggressors, parroting inflated Bosnian casualty estimates and otherwise behaving as the official PR arm of the establishment. A similar performance was repeated shortly thereafter with Kosovo, where minimal regard was given to actual facts on the ground and the specter of Serbian-waged genocide was instead hysterically invoked. Noam Chomsky ( Monthly Review , 9/08 ) cited various reports, including from the British government, that the US-backed Kosovo Liberation Army was actually responsible for more killings than the Serbs in the run-up to NATO’s bombing campaign—a project that naturally also managed to kill several thousand people. While Yugoslavia has now been fully dismantled, the myth of Western humanitarian intervention there has emerged unscathed; in his recent dispatch on Syria, Kristof brought up Kosovo as an example of how “the military toolbox has saved lives.” To be sure, “saving lives” is a much nobler goal than, say, endowing NATO with a new lease on life or clearing the way for total neoliberal assault —two outcomes of the West’s Yugoslav ventures. Hence the utility, as Herman and Peterson write, of the “edifice of lies that serves and protects the Western interventions in the former Yugoslavia—and which laid the ideological foundations for the US role in Iraq and for future so-called humanitarian interventions.” In Syria’s brutal war, meanwhile, humanitarian motives will presumably be utilized as a veneer for pursuing more fundamental goals, like neutralizing resistance to US/Israeli regional designs and promoting that profitable sort of chaos that produces massive arms sales. And just as those in the West who failed to leap onto the bandwagon in Yugoslavia were denounced as “ apologists for genocide ” and the like, opponents of increased Western military action in Syria will be increasingly assailed as pro-Assad fanatics with Syrian blood on their hands. One strong candidate for fanatic-hood is Greg Shupak, who in a recent Jacobin magazine dispatch ( 10/20/16 ) dared to argue that a no-fly zone “would actually represent an escalation of war that is guaranteed to harm civilians in the name of protecting them.” Emphasizing that opposition to said zone is not meant in any way “to minimize or rationalize the torture, mass killings or severe sieges enacted by the Syrian state and its allies,” Shupak continues: “The imminent question, however, is not, ‘Is the Syrian government good?’; it’s ‘Should America drop more bombs on Syria?’” Because, at the end of the day, humanitarian war just isn’t humanly possible.   PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Belén Fernández is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work and Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon .  ",FAKE
+10176,"Shouts of ‘Not my president!’ in California, following Trump victory","Shouts of ‘Not my president!’ in California, following Trump victory 11/09/2016 
+PBS 
+Moments after Donald Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton for the White House, protests erupted in California and other states, including people crying “Not my president!” 
+The Los Angeles Times and other media outlets reported anti-Trump protesters amassing around the campuses of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and UC San Diego, among others. 
+In Oakland, the overnight protests led to a partial closure of the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, the Times reported. 
+Photos and videos on social media captured the protesters marching and yelling “Who’s got the power? We got the power,” “Not my president!” and other anti-Trump chants filled with expletives . 
+UCSB student newspaper the Daily Nexus reported that hundreds of students left their dorms to protest. In the video captured by the paper below, one student is seen carrying a Mexican flag. 
+Likewise, hundreds of students at UC San Diego and UCLA demonstrated on campus early Wednesday morning. There also were reports of protests at UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine. Officials said there were as many as 3,000 students that marched through the UCLA campus, ABC reported . 
+Elsewhere in the country, protests were reported in Portland, Oregon and Washington, D.C. 
+In Oakland, authorities said dozens of protesters gathered downtown, while hundreds blocked a local highway. 
+The San Francisco Chronicle also reported that a 20-year-old protester was severely injured after being hit by a car on Highway 20. Protesters had blocked the highway and lit several fires, officer John O’Reilly told BuzzFeed News .",FAKE
+710,"Trump’s a walking time bomb: Don’t be fooled by his “victory,” he can implode his own campaign at any moment","Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination Thursday when a ragtag group of unbound delegates announced they were going to support him. All the networks ran with breaking news and trained their cameras on an empty podium for hours waiting for Trump to appear before the press and bak in his glory. It was a magical moment. True, everyone had known for weeks now that Trump was going to be the nominee since all of his rivals have dropped out of the race but why let that stand in the way of an opportunity to obsess over his every incoherent insult and rant? As they waited, the big topic of conversation among the TV chatterers was an interview by Howard Fineman with Trump’s campaign chairman and chief strategist Paul Manafort. And it was admittedly a doozy.
+
+When I wrote about Manafort earlier I concentrated on his long history of working with slash and burn political consultants and foreign tyrants. He is uniquely qualified to head up Trump’s operation. But it’s been a while since he’s been involved in American politics and it was unclear if he had lost his touch.  The interview with Fineman raises more questions about that than it answers.
+
+Fineman quotes Manafort saying that he thinks this election will be a cakewalk:
+
+That’s the kind of confidence one would expect of a Trump adviser.  But it’s a little bit weird considering he also says “you don’t change Donald Trump. You don’t ‘manage’ him.” That sounds like a contradiction in terms — if they can’t “manage” Trump then it’s hard to see how this race isn’t going to be a challenge since the man is a walking time bomb.
+
+Manafort made some policy news by saying that Trump was likely going to “soften” his policy on banning Muslims explaining that this was just a negotiating stance.  The truth is that Trump himself has said that before.  But at this point, he has been on so many sides of every issue nobody can keep track so it means something when his chief strategist validates one of them.
+
+It’s also the case that if there’s one issue which the GOP establishment particularly wants Trump to back away from it’s the Muslim ban.  There are good reasons for this, of course. It’s UnAmerican for one thing although that would not normally bother Republican officials. More likely it’s that they actually recognize that Trump’s idiotic, unworkable proposal is so inflammatory that it’s going to get people killed.  Unfortunately, once they are back home campaigning they’re going to hear from their Trump-loving constituents that this is one of their favorite policies. If these officials have any integrity, which is unlikely, they will try to educate their voters about how dangerous it is but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
+
+According to Manafort, Trump’s other big crowd pleaser, “the wall”, will be built come what may and he will not “soften” his stance on immigration.  He was spinning like a top — or he really is out of touch —  because he told Fineman that it’s only in places like New York and California where the American Latinos are all radicals who care about such things. In Ohio and Florida they’ll be happy to vote for Trump.
+
+That is delusional. According to recent national polling by Latino decisions, he has an 87% unfavorable rating.  In Florida, he does better than he does nationally. Only 84% of Latinos view him unfavorably. In Nevada, a state which he dishonestly claims voted for him in huge numbers in the primary and uses a proof of his tremendous appeal among Latinos, he also has an 87% unfavorable rating. Manafort thinks they will be able to turn that round by talking to them about jobs, national security, terrorism and education because their concerns are the same as white families. Of course white families aren’t concerned about having their friends and relatives rounded up and dumped in the Sonoran desert which Trump has indicated he thinks is a terrific idea. Latinos are certainly concerned about terrorism. But they may define it just a little bit differently than Trump does.
+
+Manafort said that Trump was unlikely to choose a woman or a racial or ethnic minority for VP because that would be “pandering.” That would be very wrong, needless to say. Unlike Trump tweeting out a picture of himself eating a “taco bowl” from the Trump Tower grill on Cinco de Mayo saying he “loves Hispanics”. But then the job of Vice President is going to be very, very important in a Trump administration according to Manafort, so they aren’t going to take any chances: He needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do. He seems himself more as the chairman of the board, than even the CEO, let alone the COO.” I guess nobody’s told Trump that you don’t get to write the job description yourself. I’m pretty sure the job of president is to be the one who makes all the big decisions. It’s not the person who just calls Fox and Friends, negotiates the trade deals and bombs the shit out of ISIS. You don’t get to pick what presidential duties you “want to do” and delegate the rest to your peons. Sure, some presidents like Reagan and George W. Bush were less hands-on than others but they didn’t redefine the presidency as a Chairman of the board who picks and chooses the duties he spends his time on. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter what Manafort says anyway. The campaign is all over the place, with infighting and jockeying for position among the various players. This week Rick Wiley, the highly experienced political operative Manafort brought on board just six weeks ago was let go in a power struggle with a Florida campaign staffer, and friend of Manafort rival campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. According to Politico: For weeks, Wiley made appointments and had discussions with Florida Republicans and appeared to be building a new campaign from scratch, sources say. They say he refused, at times, to return Giorno’s calls or take them. Giorno then began calling other Trump campaign officials to ask them whether Wiley had it out for her or for everyone. On Thursday, word leaked back to Trump. He phoned Giorno, concerned, sources said. “Tell me what’s wrong?” Trump asked her, according to one person familiar with the call. “Karen unloaded on Wiley,” the source said. “Mr. Trump is loyal. He believed her. … Rick picked a fight with the wrong person.” At that point, Trump ordered Wiley to stay away from Giorno and to neither call nor email her. “Donald is loyal. And she’s loyal,” a source said. Donald Trump is running his presidential campaign like a junior high school cheerleading squad. And this is the man who claims his business savvy is what qualifies him for the presidency. Paul Manafort assured Fineman, however, that we could all rest easy about Trump being ready for the big job: “Does he know enough? Yes, because he knows he has more to learn. And he is constantly doing that.” Trump doesn’t read briefing papers, but he is a magnet for information, Manafort said. “He reads the newspapers, and he talks on the phone and to office visitors in a never-ending stream. You’re sitting there in his office and you realize that he is constantly picking up stuff as he goes.” “We have all this survey research, but he does his own soundings all the time, all day every day. And he’s more accurate,” Manafort said. He watches all the shows and obsessively reads his Twitter feed too. It should be obvious by this time that Trump has absolutely no idea what he’s doing and is making it up as he goes along. Paul Manafort is experienced at dealing with this sort of character, and seems quite comfortable doing it. But the campaign is a mess and that’s because the candidate is a vainglorious buffoon who has no clue what he’s doing and thinks he’s a genius. I wouldn’t bet on Manafort lasting through the duration.",REAL
+5738,"‘Chairman Cash’ – John Podesta is Paid $7,000 a Month by Foundation Run by Banker With Ties to Financial Crisis","Trending Articles: Trending Articles: ‘Chairman Cash’ – John Podesta is Paid $7,000 a Month by Foundation Run by Banker With Ties to Financial Crisis   Source: Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg 
+Last Friday, I published a post titled, John Podesta’s Sister-in-Law Lobbied For Raytheon While Hillary Was Secretary of State , which understandably got totally buried in the madness surrounding the latest FBI news. Here’s the first paragraph of that post: 
+The Podesta family seems particularly adept at earning extraordinary sums of money via selling out the American public. Earlier this year, I highlighted how John Podesta’s brother Tony was paid $140,000 per month by the medieval monarchy of Saudi Arabia. After all, who cares about women’s rights when the pay is good? 
+Indeed, it’s not just relatives of Podesta who know how to rake in the cash. John is no slouch either, as Politico explained in an article published earlier today. 
+Here are a few excerpts: 
+Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, last year signed a $7,000-a-month contract with the foundation of a major Clinton donor who made a fortune selling a type of mortgage that some critics say contributed to the housing collapse, hacked emails show. 
+
+In February of last year, as Podesta was working to lay the groundwork for Clinton’s soon-to-launch campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he signed the contract with the Sandler Foundation, which was started by Herb Sandler and his late wife Marion Sandler. 
+The contract — a copy of which was included in emails illegally obtained from Podesta’s Gmail account and disseminated Monday by WikiLeaks — is still active, according to Herb Sandler, who said that it calls for Podesta to provide advice on grant-making and other foundation functions. 
+It’s unusual for the full-time chairman of a general-election presidential campaign to maintain an active side deal with a major donor to that campaign — let alone to raise money from that donor for the campaign. 
+The WikiLeaks cache shows that Podesta provided Sandler with philanthropic advice and assortments of cheeses and pastas as gifts on the holidays, while Sandler offered all manner of political observations and once tried to get Podesta to arrange for former President Bill Clinton to write a blurb for a book written by one of Sandler’s friends. 
+Lobster risotto? 
+But Sandler brushed aside any concerns about potential conflicts of interest. 
+“I have never asked for anything of any political person — zero requests ever,” Sandler said. “If they’re responsive, it’s because they regard me as thoughtful, and a major contributor to Democratic causes,” Sandler said, adding that Podesta “knows that he doesn’t get bullshit from me. He knows I have no hidden agenda. He knows that my values are similar to his and that we care about people and not the billionaires, even though I ended up by some crazy thing to be one.” 
+Neither Podesta nor the Clinton campaign responded to questions about the contract. 
+Herb Sandler’s Clinton-related giving picked up last December after a visit from Podesta. 
+The campaign’s finance director Dennis Cheng responded “ Great!! ,” calling Podesta “#ChairmanCash.” 
+“Chairman cash.” A new meme has just been born. 
+The very next day, Sandler gave $1.5 million to Priorities USA Action, to which he has now given a total of $3 million, FEC records show. 
+The family’s fortune comes from the savings and loan institution that Herb and Marion Sandler ran for decades, a bank that became World Savings. It would end up making boatloads of cash from a type of adjustable rate mortgage that other lenders would later adopt, securitize and sell in a way that some have blamed for contributing to the housing bubble that burst in 2008. Not long before the burst and subsequent recession, the Sandlers sold the bank for $25.5 billion to Wachovia, earning $2.6 billion off the sale and donating most of their net worth to their foundation. Wachovia was later acquired by Wells Fargo. 
+The Sandlers met Podesta when they helped seed the Center for American Progress, the think tank he started in 2003 as a sort of Democratic administration in exile during George W. Bush’s presidency. Tax filings show that the Sandler Foundation has donated more than $37 million over the years to CAP, which worked to support President Barack Obama’s administration but has always been seen as more aligned with Clinton. 
+Center for American Progress…where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, in last week’s post, Dennis Kucinich’s Extraordinary Warning on D.C.’s Think Tank Warmongers , we learned: 
+The self-identified liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) is now calling for Syria to be bombed, and estimates America’s current military adventures will be tidied up by 2025, a tardy twist on “mission accomplished.” CAP, according to a report in The Nation, has received funding from war contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who make the bombers that CAP wants to rain hellfire on Syria. 
+Remember peasants, war is ok if “liberals” do it. Now back to Politico … 
+The WikiLeaks emails reveal that Podesta and his team at the Center for American Progress discussed how to push back on scrutiny of the Sandlers related to the 2008 housing collapse. That included an October 2008 “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which an actor playing Herb Sandler thanked members of Congress “for helping block congressional oversight of our corrupt activity.” 
+Podesta wrote to his colleagues that he’d talked to Herb Sandler, and “they are obviosly [sic] upset. Weird that snl should pick them out.” 
+After doing some research, a subordinate replied that “it appears default rates on their stuff was high (herb says not more so than others) and the losses were key to almsot wachovia failure — athough herb emphasizes that they were only one of the institutions problems.” Sandler told POLITICO that any suggestion that his bank’s products contributed to the collapse were “a bunch of bullshit,” pointing out that their bank used a risk-averse approach to their loans, which had among the lowest default rate in the industry. 
+But Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a conservative nonprofit that monitors the giving of major liberal donors including Sandler, argued that Podesta’s newly revealed contractual relationship with Sandler stood in stark contrast to Clinton’s efforts to cast herself as tough on the financial industry. “This is another instance where the Clinton campaign has been revealed to have surprising links to some of the most dubious parts of the finance industry,” Walter said. 
+The Sandlers’ philanthropy increasingly has focused on fighting financial inequality and the role of big money in politics — a subject about which Herb Sandler and Podesta emailed frequently, according to WikiLeaks. 
+Interesting considering he is big money in politics, and seems to have no problem endlessly cheerleading the chosen candidate of America’s oligarchs. 
+Sandler explained to POLITICO that during the process of working to launch the center, he realized “we had been picking his brain ad nauseum” for years without paying Podesta as a consultant — a scenario Sandler called “very unfair.” That led to the consulting contract, which Sandler cast as “a ripoff” for Podesta. “I’d pay a lot more for that advice,” Sandler said, calling Podesta “one the most intelligent, decent, thoughtful human beings I’d ever met.” 
+In March, as Clinton’s Democratic primary campaign against Bernie Sanders grew increasingly bitter, Sandler emailed Podesta just to check up. 
+“How are you?” Sandler wrote . “MIss you.” 
+Call me crazy, but if he was really so focused on solving income inequality why wasn’t he supporting Bernie Sanders? 
+But hey.",FAKE
+10008,Israeli Minister sparks Scandal after showing Satisfaction at Italy's Earthquakes,"
+Two earthquakes, which struck Italy this week, were “retribution” for the country’s support of the UNESCO resolution disregarding the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, Israeli Deputy Minister for Regional Cooperation Ayoob Kara said.
+“I’m sure that the earthquake happened because of the UNESCO decision,” Kara, a member of the ruling Likud Party, wrote in a memo, Ynetnews website reported.
+Ironically, the Israeli politician was on a state visit to the Vatican when the quakes hit central Italy on Wednesday, killing one and injuring 10 people.
+Earlier the same day, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), passed a resolution criticizing Israel for its handling of the holy site in Jerusalem – called Temple Mount by Jews, and Haram al-Sharif by Muslims.
+The document was adopted after heated debate over its wording, and particularly the Arabic names used in the document. Italy was among the nations voting in favor of the resolution.
+Israel blasted UNESCO and its Arab members for trying to undermine Jewish connections to the holy site.
+Kara arrived in the Vatican in a fruitless effort to avert the resolution, but still managed to have a small chat with the leader of the Catholic Church.
+According to Kara, Pope Francis “strongly disagreed” with the resolution.
+“He (the Pope) even said publicly that the holy land is connected to the Nation of Israel,” the deputy minister stressed.
+As for surviving the natural disaster, the Israeli politician said that “going through the earthquake was not the most comfortable of experiences, but we trusted that the Holy See would keep us safe.”
+Source 
+",FAKE
+6059,Trump’s campaign for celebrity,"Trump’s campaign for celebrity Like junk food, will Trump leave us empty and wanting more? By Neal Gabler Posted on November 1, 2016 by Neal Gabler 
+It is a cliché by now that Donald Trump has run a reality show campaign—a series of gaffes, surprises, outrages, weirdnesses, explosions, revelations, and just every other ingredient that comprise the popular TV genre of faux authenticity. On reality TV, the subjects are seldom artists or entertainers or high achievers in any field. They are personalities. Their roles are their lives, which creates a Möbius strip. What do the Kardashians actually do besides being on their show, which has, of course, generated all sorts of commercial opportunities that almost make it seem as if they are doing something? What is their talent, other than the talent for self-promotion? 
+All of this was anticipated 54 years ago by historian Daniel Boorstin in The Image , in which he defined a celebrity as someone who is known for being well-known. In a previous post , I discussed how this applied to Trump, who seems a hollow man except for his fame. 
+But I am not sure that Boorstin’s tautology, clever as it is, is really accurate. I would submit that celebrity isn’t a status, nor is it a media anointment. I think celebrity is actually a narrative form played out in the medium of life and then broadcast by the traditional and now social media. One earns celebrity—to the extent that you can call it earned—by keeping one’s narrative going. You lose your celebrity not when you lose fame or attention, your well-known-ness, but when you lose your narrative, which is what got you the attention in the first place. 
+Donald Trump is the first celebrity candidate in both Boorstin’s sense and mine—Boorstin’s because Trump is less a builder of edifices than a slapper-of-his-name-on-other-people’s edifices. He is literally known for being well-known. And in mine because Trump has spent the better part of his life providing narratives to the press to feed its insatiable appetite for gossip and his desire for attention. There are many ways in which Trump is a unique presidential aspirant, but chief among them may be this: He is the first candidate who ran for president to feed his celebrity. The entire campaign is a plot point—a means to a larger end, which is not the presidency, but keeping his celebrity afloat. Relevance is an issue for all of us, but especially for a 70-year-old man who is accustomed to the spotlight. 
+I thought of this when The New York Times ran two pieces this week. One was the first of a series based on interviews with Trump conducted by biographer Michael D’Antonio and given to The Times by him. What the interviews reveal is that Trump’s primary obsession is a fear of losing his fame. In the interviews Trump reviles Arsenio Hall , a former talk show host and one-time Celebrity Apprentice contestant . “Dead as a doornail. Dead as dog meat,” Trump eulogized. 
+The other article that struck me was one about how Trump used appearances on TV shows and in films 
+As the Times piece about Trump’s Hollywood connections tells it, he began talking about running for president as early as 1988. Why? Trump didn’t have any overriding sense of national mission. He doesn’t have one even now. Clearly, his ongoing, three-decades-long flirtation with the presidency was just a plot twist—a way of juicing the narrative when it was flagging. In that sense, it was no different than his affair with Marla Maples, his feud with Rosie O’Donnell, his nonstop lawsuits and everything else. The presidency was a publicity stunt. It still is. Viewed that way, nearly everything Trump does, 
+Politics, as I have written many times, has long been integrated with entertainment. The devices of the latter serve the ends of the former, and this has especially served conservatives: The X-Files fed conservative paranoia, 24 This post was first published on BillMoyers.com 
+Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, Time magazine’s non-fiction book of the year, USA Today’",FAKE
+4974,"Eric Trump: Dad's Campaign To Focus On, Fix Inner-City Education","Donald Trump's son, Eric, said his father's presidential administration will ""focus on"" and ""fix"" the struggles of education in inner cities, capping a week of campaigning for the minority vote that has dogged the Republican nominee in the polls.
+
+""You have a lot of people from inner cities, especially minorities, who aren't getting higher-level education,"" Eric Trump told host John Catsimatidis on his radio program ""The Cats Roundtable"" on Sunday. ""The schools around them are totally failing them. There's 60 percent unemployment in some of these communities.""
+
+""We're not giving the youth the opportunities that they so rightfully deserve. My father's going to focus on that, and he's going to change that, and he's going to fix it because it's just not right.
+
+Trump's calls for votes from minorities this week started with his law-and-order speech Tuesday night in Milwaukee, continuing with his mea culpa speech Thursday in North Carolina  and finished with a trip to the flooded areas of Louisiana on Friday.
+
+The campaign's focus coincided with the addition of pollster Kellyanne Conway as manager this week. There have been reports of Trump polling at 0 percent of the black vote in swing states.",REAL
+5704,Brexit Lost: Scuppered By May and High Court,"Home | World | Brexit Lost: Scuppered By May and High Court Brexit Lost: Scuppered By May and High Court By Mr. Charrington 03/11/2016 11:48:44 
+LONDON – England – The High Court decision today to deny the EU Referendum result is a sign that we are not living in a democracy or a sovereign country. 
+
+Today is a very sad day for democracy within the UK, and Theresa May a Remain supporter is instrumental in denying the will of the British people to leave the EU. 
+Dithering and Delaying Tactics 
+Through numerous delaying tactics , and the installation of key government posts of Remain campaign MPs, the Brexit referendum was thwarted. 
+If the government had repealed the 1972 European Communities Act immediately the EU referendum result would be well on the way to materialising. 
+The total nonchalance and denial of the EU referendum result is firmly on Theresa May’s head and her appointment of Hammond as Chancellor of the Exchequer was a further sign that May was not serious about the EU referendum result. 
+Injustice 
+The High Court ruling today which is intrusive and false, as well as being undemocratic is a further signal that we are currently not living in a sovereign nation and it is totally controlled by Brussels. 
+During the EU Referendum, MPs had their say , MPs campaigned, and when it came to vote in the referendum, they voted. Therefore, parliament has already had a say in the EU referendum, and by going to the High Court, these traitors have sought to annul a democratic vote which was held on June 23 2016. 
+This ruling is a shameful reminder that Britain has lost all sovereign status to the EU entity, it is a sad day for democracy, for the will of the people and ultimately for the country. 
+17.5 Million People Will Vote on Election Day 
+In these circumstances, we must as a people show our displeasure at being circumvented by not voting during the next election for any MP or party who is EU centric. 
+This is not over.",FAKE
+4191,Trump spurs some conservative leaders to step back from the GOP,"Donald Trump’s looming nomination has spurred some leaders of the conservative movement — for generations, the backbone of the GOP — to break free from a Republican Party now being rapidly reshaped by the New York billionaire’s incendiary tone and unorthodox populism.
+
+The extraordinary resistance of many figures on the right this past week to Trump has not been prompted merely by objections to his temperament and fears about his electability in November. At the core has been a calculation by self-identified “movement conservatives” that they would rather preserve their entrenched ideological project than promote a nominee who they believe would violate their creed and ethos.
+
+[Video: The 10 Republicans who hate Donald Trump the most ]
+
+“It’s a crisis,” said Al Cardenas, a former chairman of the American Conservative Union who is withholding support for Trump. “If we do away with the fundamental strength of the conservative movement, which is our ideas and values and principles, then you don’t have anything left but politics. A movement can survive the loss of an election cycle, but it can’t survive the loss of its purpose, and that’s what we’re battling here.”
+
+The moment potentially marks the closure of a historic half-century in Republican politics in which conservatives have accrued dominant influence — on Capitol Hill, in gubernatorial mansions, at think tanks, on talk radio and in the grass roots. Since Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful but edifying 1964 presidential run, the conservative movement has been at the crux of Republican campaigns, from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 sweep to the 1994 revolution to the tea party’s rise in 2010.
+
+Yet, by taking a stand they see as a stroke of moral clarity, conservative leaders are at risk of separating their coalition from a Republican Party in which voters coast to coast have effectively shifted the center of gravity by choosing Trump as their standard bearer. In the primaries, Trump defeated a string of classically conservative candidates by peeling away many of the movement’s core supporters: evangelical and working-class white voters.
+
+There is talk in various quarters about a potential independent challenge to Trump and likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, though there is no consensus candidate, and a third-party bid would be exceedingly difficult for anyone to mount at this late stage.
+
+Freshman Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) is a vocal proponent, but he is not offering himself as a candidate. Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, is involved in discussions to draft an independent conservative and huddled last week with Mitt Romney, though the former Massachusetts governor repeatedly has ruled out another White House bid.
+
+Erick Erickson, a prominent conservative commentator, is among those urging a third-party candidate.
+
+“One of the silver linings that can come from this is that the conservative movement as an entity pulls back away from the Republican Party,” Erickson said. “During the Bush administration, it became a subsidiary of the Republican Party. This gives us a good opportunity as conservatives to stand on our own two feet.”
+
+The conservative resistance was expressed most prominently last week by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the country’s top-ranking elected Republican, who announced that he could not support Trump until the business mogul demonstrated his conservative bona fides and offered a more inclusive vision. Trump snapped back with a retort that neatly underscored his belief that movement conservatives should no longer dictate the GOP mission and platform: “I am not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda.”
+
+“If there’s an ideological leader of our party right now, it’s Paul Ryan,” said former senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.). “He’s not part of the shouting crowd; he’s part of the doing crowd. But the party’s voters have gone with the shouting crowd. It’s reflective of the failure of the doer crowd to get things done.”
+
+[Ryan says he is ‘not ready’ to back Trump, deepening GOP divide]
+
+Indeed, Trump and Ryan are miles apart. Ryan is the architect of sweeping proposed changes to Medicare and Social Security; Trump has pledged not to touch either. Ryan supports a muscular foreign policy; Trump is proudly non-interventionist. Ryan champions free trade; Trump is an avowed opponent. Ryan defends religious freedom; Trump wants to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country. Ryan advocates bipartisan immigration reform and opposes mass deportation; Trump wants to build a wall at the Mexican border and deport the roughly 11 million immigrants who are living in the United States illegally.
+
+Ryan and his conservative allies in elected offices nationwide still have a firm grip on the party’s governing playbook and institutions. But Trump has forced a heated debate over Republican identity and whether it is synonymous with conservatism — a threat to the authority of movement conservatives.
+
+“The Ryan agenda isn’t just about Paul Ryan, but it’s what conservatives have agreed on as the best way forward — and Trump is deviating from that in so many ways,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who served as Romney’s policy director during his 2012 presidential bid.
+
+“The big question really is, to what extent is the Trump phenomenon an aberration in policy versus some more fundamental shift?” Chen asked. “I tend to think of it as an aberration.”
+
+Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus has sought to broker an accord between Trump and Ryan with a planned meeting Thursday in Washington, but Trump’s public comments suggest that changes by him are unlikely. Trump has said he would meet with Ryan, “before we go our separate ways.”
+
+[Trump agrees to meet with Paul Ryan ‘before we go our separate ways’]
+
+Some conservative movement figures have warmed to Trump, expressing confidence that he would surround himself with advisers of their ilk — such as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who has become a trusted confidant of the candidate’s — and that, if Trump is elected, Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would serve as checks on his power.
+
+“The deals he’s going to cut will have in the room Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and the three of them have to agree. I sleep well at night,” said Grover Norquist, president and founder of Americans for Tax Reform, who for decades has convened conservative leaders and activists.
+
+A group of House Republicans, including several top leadership supporters, have wondered whether Ryan and other conservative leaders have fully recognized what they see as a striking shift in the electorate. A pair of committee chairmen — Reps. Bill Shuster (Pa.) and Jeff Miller (Fla.) — endorsed Trump shortly before he became the presumptive nominee.
+
+“It’s not the time to be out there demanding all of these things, trying to get Trump to suddenly become Reagan,” said William J. Bennett, a Ryan mentor and prominent conservative commentator. “Now is the time to surround him with good people and work with him at the convention.”
+
+Norquist, who attended and praised Trump’s foreign-policy address last month, said he sees limits to Trump’s long-term influence on conservatism.
+
+“You’re not picking a direction for the modern Republican Party or the conservative movement with one presidential candidate,” he said. “There isn’t some Trump wing of the party. What is Trumpism? You don’t see senators and governors running under Trumpism. There’s just Trump.”
+
+[Trump’s apostasies put him at odds with decades of Republican beliefs]
+
+Especially anxious about Trump’s success are conservatives who prioritize social issues and fear he would weaken the party’s moral tilt. Though Trump says he is against abortion and same-sex marriage, the New Yorker rarely talks about those issues — and until only a few years ago, he held opposite positions.
+
+“I haven’t heard him frame things in moral terms,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said. “I don’t hear him speak about the Constitution. It’s hard to believe he has any sort of deep conviction on life and marriage. I don’t see him being guided by constitutional principles. He doesn’t speak about them, ever. That’s what’s troubling everyone. He’s not even speaking in the same language, politically, that we speak.”
+
+King, who had supported Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and has no plans to endorse Trump, said he and other conservative leaders would “keep watch” at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to protect the party’s platform from being revamped.
+
+“We run the risk of the underpinnings of our convictions being disregarded,” King said.
+
+Numerous Republicans fret that this divide could lead to certain electoral defeat for the party, up and down the ticket. Those like Gregg — a fiscal conservative who backed former Florida governor Jeb Bush and then Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the primaries and said he is in the “listening” phase of considering Trump — see hope for a coming together by finding areas of consensus.
+
+“At the center of Republican philosophy is market economy and fiscal responsibility, and Trump is very much in tune,” Gregg said. “I expect in the end that’s what will draw people into a unified effort.”",REAL
+6396,"Obama's DOJ Issued ""Stand Down"" Order on Clinton Foundation Investigation","Obama's DOJ Issued ""Stand Down"" Order on Clinton Foundation Investigation November 3, 2016 
+There have been various insider reports on the Clinton Foundation and the Hillary email scandal on FOX. 
+But the curious thing about this Wall Street Journal report is that it's clearly aimed at defending Hillary Clinton and smearing the FBI in the battle with Obama's DOJ officials who wanted to shut it down due to their support of Hillary Clinton. 
+Which means that its information that damns its own side gains more credibility. 
+Justice Department officials became increasingly frustrated that the agents seemed to be disregarding or disobeying their instructions. 
+Following the February meeting, officials at Justice Department headquarters sent a message to all the offices involved to “stand down,’’ a person familiar with the matter said. 
+A stand down order. Much like the one in Libya. 
+And remember McCabe, whose wife's Democratic political campaign received major cash from a Clinton ally? 
+Amid the internal finger-pointing on the Clinton Foundation matter, some have blamed the FBI’s No. 2 official, deputy director Andrew McCabe, claiming he sought to stop agents from pursuing the case this summer. His defenders deny that, and say it was the Justice Department that kept pushing back on the investigation. 
+Not a surprise either. 
+The FBI had secretly recorded conversations of a suspect in a public-corruption case talking about alleged deals the Clintons made, these people said. The agents listening to the recordings couldn’t tell from the conversations if what the suspect was describing was accurate, but it was, they thought, worth checking out. 
+FBI investigators grew increasingly frustrated with resistance from the corruption prosecutors, and some executives at the bureau itself, to keep pursuing the case. 
+As prosecutors rebuffed their requests to proceed more overtly, those Justice Department officials became more annoyed that the investigators didn’t seem to understand or care about the instructions issued by their own bosses and prosecutors to act discreetly. 
+And that's what blew up when Team Hillary lashed out at the FBI. It was a covert war between Hillary's DOJ allies and the FBI coming out of the cold. And they pushed so hard even McCabe was disgusted. 
+As a result of those complaints, these people said, a senior Justice Department official called the FBI deputy director, Mr. McCabe, on Aug. 12 to say the agents in New York seemed to be disregarding or disobeying their instructions, these people said. The conversation was a tense one, they said, and at one point Mr. McCabe asked, “Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?’’ The senior Justice Department official replied: ”Of course not.” 
+Of course.",FAKE
+9137,Breaking/Exclusive: Comey Lied: FBI “Synced” Weiner Laptop Under Misused Terror Warrant – Updated,"By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 30, 2016 Constitutional Crisis: FBI used prohibited FISA domestic terror warrant in Clinton-Weiner email search …by Gordon Duff, with Ian Greenhalgh , Editors – Veterans Today 
+In a surprise announcement, the Department of Justice just admitted that there was no legal authorization in place to access email accounts of Hillary Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, estranged wife of accused sex offender former Congressman Anthony Weiner. 
+The government admitted that no warrant had been requested and that discussions to seek a warrant had not yet begun, making the letter FBI Director James Comey wrote to Congress on Friday a potentially criminal act, if it can be proven that Comey was aware of this fact and of the actions of his subordinates in “planting” Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop.[14] 
+(CNN)Justice Department and FBI officials are working to secure approval that would allow the FBI to conduct a full search of top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s newly discovered emails, sources familiar with the discussions told CNN. 
+Government lawyers haven’t yet approached Abedin’s lawyers to seek an agreement to conduct the search. Sources earlier told CNN that those discussions had begun, but the law enforcement officials now say they have not.[14] 
+FBI Director James Comey is under assault for what is being perceived as more than simply partisan behavior. Former presidential advisor, Lanny Davis writes for The Hill: 
+“Comey as FBI director — an investigative agency, not a prosecution agency — (does not) have any authority to send a report to Congress in the middle of an investigation about the past or present subject of an investigation. He appears to be in violation of the limits on his authority as FBI director by disclosing investigation information — or possible investigation information — directly to Congress with obtaining permission from the attorney general or someone else delegated authority by her. His decision to reveal the results of an ongoing investigation, before a published criminal indictment, violates due process principles and pre-indictment secrecy rules and guidelines of the Justice Department.”[16] 
+Through court challenges to FBI search tactics under FISA and other counter-terror legislation, accessing “cloud” based emails and either representing them as “found” in a warranted search of a hard drive or in “syncing” a computer to place emails on a drive under a warranted search, clear prohibitions have been established.[Addendum I] 
+In this case, with no warrant in place at all, there are no possible interpretations of FBI actions that could be consistent with admissibility. 
+In what has been seen by most a the long expected “October Surprise,” the highly controversial letter written by FBI Director James Comer, something more far reaching has developed, a constitutional crisis that may well exceed that of Watergate or even Iran/Contra. Like the Federal Reserve, the FBI itself lacks a clear constitutional authority. There is no mention of nor authorization given, in the constitution, for a national police force. In fact, the Constitution, in the 10th Amendment ratified in 1791 states: 
+“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”[12] More often than not, this has been ignored, a “stepchild” of the Bill of Rights. Here, however, the FBI, created initially as the “sex police”[11], created to enforce the Mann Act[13], has assumed not only “powers not granted” under the constitution, but has exponentially expanded its reach, well beyond constitutional limitations on rights of privacy and against unreasonable search and seizure, assailed by laws like the Patriot Acts.” 
+Behind the current controversy, that of an FBI director being accused of interfering in an election and acting against policy, procedure and advice of the Attorney General, is something more. The FBI has crossed into the area of possible criminality, violating clear cut Federal Court restrictions, not only through an illegal search but by actually planting evidence and then channeling misleading information into the press with a clear intent to subvert constitutional authority. 
+Another issue is the kind of language Comey has been using to mollify critics who have kept a flurry of investigations going and who have subjected him to hostile interrogation for endless hours in front of highly partisan committees. Colonel Jim Hanke (ret), former US attache to Israel and ranking NATO military intelligence planner commented on the nature of Comey’s assertions of Hillary’s classified emails: 
+“Take the text of any of the emails we have seen. Anything here could have been said in a press conference or on a television interview and, in those formats, would not have been considered classified. There would have been fallout, for sure, not from disclosing policy or in endangering operations, real issues that get high level classification. Hillary’s emails, were they made public, and there was reason to expect this might well happen, are revealing and reflect on her personal judgement and, at times, demonstrate a lack of grasp, particularly when it comes to Russia or Syria. These are issues of public confidence, not criminality nor are they areas of real security classification. 
+Conversely, what we have seen Comey do may well rise to the level of something serious, certainly he undermines the FBI and attacks the American system of government. As to what his intent was or to what laws apply, this is not my area of expertise but I would like to think that criminal code could deal with this kind of threat.” 
+One additional consideration to put into the mix is Wikileaks. During recent weeks while Wikileaks has released two dozen batches of emails, the Clinton campaign has mirrored earlier charges made against Wikileaks by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinsky, that Wikileaks “sexes up” and even fabricates documents that are, according to Brzezinsky, when speaking to Judy Woodruff of National Public Radio, “seeded” into a virtual deluge of material. 
+The FBI used FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) powers when it downloaded and “synced” Clinton emails into former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s computers, according to legal experts.[1,4,6,7] The FBI knowingly violated the law in applying terror statutes when they illegally expanded their search into Weiner’s computers and downloaded emails from a 3rd party account. With only days before an election, the term “October Surprise” has never been more applicable. 
+The question people are asking is; “Why did Director Comey choose to ignore legal advice and, more importantly, was he aware that he was upsetting an American presidential election based on a pattern of criminal-level misconduct by his own agency?” 
+The FBI lied when it claimed the it found Clinton emails when it searched Anthony Weiner’s computer. Sources now tell VT that the FBI in fact “synced” the email account of Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma, downloading the emails “from the cloud” and falsely claiming they were discovered as part of a legal search warrant. However, there is no case law supporting the expansion of such warrants to spouses or others whose email accounts may be accessible through devices but were not stored on hard drives and not by any stretch of the imagination, legally accessed under any possible search warrant tied to Weiner’s sexual indiscretions. 
+What did in fact happen here was planting of evidence, by the FBI, illegally accessing a “cloud based” email account not included in a search warrant and downloading to a hard drive that was included in a warrant. This is a common FBI/DHS practice used in terror investigations, making use of a single warrant to follow cloud accounts for multiple users. 
+In an article in today’s Washington Post, the issue of how the FBI found emails that should not been on Weiner’s computer were brought to light. 
+“Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told people she is unsure how her emails could have ended up on a device she viewed as her husband’s computer, the seizure of which has reignited the Clinton email investigation, according to a person familiar with the investigation and civil litigation over the matter. 
+The person, who would not discuss the case unless granted anonymity, said Abedin was not a regular user of the computer, and even when she agreed to turn over emails to the State Department for federal records purposes, her lawyers did not search it for materials, not believing any of her messages to be there. 
+That could be a significant oversight if Abedin’s work messages were indeed on the computer of her estranged husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is under investigation for allegedly exchanging lewd messages with a 15-year-old girl. So far, it is unclear what — if any — new, work-related messages were found by authorities. The person said the FBI had not contacted Abedin about its latest discovery, and she was unsure what the bureau had discovered.”[8] 
+There is no evidence, of yet, that Director Comey was aware the “evidence” he took to congress was illegally planted on Weiner’s computer but Comey was aware of the practice. Typically, the FBI search warrants used can give access to cloud based emails as outlined below by FBI Special Agent James M. Cauthen: 
+“An alternative is for the investigator to search in the same manner as the user would—with the computer turned on and connected to the data. In this example, the investigator needs access to the subject’s computer with the relational database software and connection to the cloud. The investigator could consider combining two search warrants—one on the computer owner for the location being searched under Rule 41 and one on the cloud provider under §2703 for the content to which the computer is connected. 
+With this approach, the investigator will need to understand how to operate database software and make queries. These queries must comply with the search warrant. The investigator must conduct the search carefully as actions taken on a live system will change the data on the computer. Using this method, it may be possible to obtain a single search warrant combining the provisions of Rule 41 and §2703; however, it should be noted that there is no case law yet on implementing this strategy.” [7] 
+In light of the controversy over the handling of this issue by FBI Director Comey, an article in The New Yorker, dated October 28, 2016 cuts to the director’s state of mind. From that article: WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report )—James Comey, the embattled director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, presided over a special ceremony on Friday evening to commend the brave F.B.I. agents who had to touch Anthony Weiner’s computer. In awarding the commendations to the agents, whom Comey called “the bravest men and women this country has to offer,” the F.B.I. director criticized the political uproar that he said had overshadowed “their selfless acts of heroism.” “These agents have performed far and beyond the call of duty,” a visibly angry Comey said. “I know we’re eleven days away from an election and tensions are running high, but we shouldn’t let that subtract in any way from what these brave agents did with their own hands.” “Who among us could look at ourselves in the mirror and say, ‘I have what it takes to touch Anthony Weiner’s computer ’?” Comey asked. “I know I sure as hell couldn’t.”[15] A common way to hide ones train in Washington is to wrap whatever the smell is “in a bloody flag” or to hand out medals for heroism. This is “deception 101” and Comey wasn’t in the least bit coy about using his agents, who may be steeped in ethical or even criminal complicity, in that same “bloody flag” theatrics. 
+The Clinton/Weiner connection may well be an abuse of expanded counter-terrorism powers the FBI assumed during the Bush era. However, in 2008, these powers were curtailed by a Federal court decision. [Addendum I] From the New York Times, April 19, 2016: 
+“WASHINGTON — A federal judge has rejected a legal challenge to rules permitting F.B.I. agents, when working on domestic criminal cases, to search emails written by Americans that the government has intercepted without a warrant in the name of gathering foreign intelligence. 
+In an 80-page opinion that was issued in November and remained classified until being made public on Tuesday, Judge Thomas F. Hogan, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, ruled that what critics call “backdoor searches” of messages by the F.B.I. comply with both the Constitution and the FISA Amendments Act. That 2008 statute legalized a form of the government’s once-secret warrantless surveillance program.”[9] 
+There has been considerable controversy involving the FBI’s illegal expansion of search warrants in criminal cases. With the expanded powers under the Bush administration’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, covering the use of broad “single warrant” powers in domestic terrorism cases, the FBI has on numerous occasions misused FISA powers in criminal investigations. 
+This has been brought before the Federal Courts in 2008 [Addendum I] and the FBI should well consider itself forewarned not to attempt to apply questionable expanded powers under FISA legislation intended to apply to terror threats. That FISA was applied here, knowing a court challenge would take far too long to correct the damage, in this case a “rigged” presidential election, as claimed by Clinton campaign advisor, John Podesta. References: 
+[1] Elena Kagan: Supreme Court Hasn’t “Gotten to” Email , CBS News, August 21, 2013. 
+[2] Josiah Dykstra, “Seizing Electronic Evidence from Cloud Computing Environments,” in Cybercrime and Cloud Forensics: Applications for Investigation Processes , ed. K. Ruan (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2013). 
+[3] Tony Sammes and Brian Jenkinson, Forensic Computing: A Practitioner’s Guide , (London, UK: Springer-Verlag, 2000). Forensics was developed on the idea of copying data from a hard disk drive that was turned off or dead. Live recovery involves changes to the contents of a computer’s storage space, 18 U.S.C. §2510(15). Therefore, it is essential that someone competent to give testimony performs it, showing that the continuity and integrity of the evidence has been preserved. 
+[4] U.S. Department of Justice, Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, Criminal Division, Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations 3d ed., (Washington, D.C.: Office of Legal Education, Executive Office for United States Attorneys, 2009), 84. Although the courts have not directly addressed the matter, the language of Rule 41 combined with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of “property” may limit computer searches to data that physically resides in the district in which the warrant was issued. 
+[5] For legal purposes, there are two classes of cloud providers: those who provide “electronic communication services,” and those who provide “remote computing service.” See 18 U.S.C. §2510(15) and 18 U.S.C. §2711(2) respectively. 
+[6] United States v. Gorshkov , 2001 WL 1024026 (May 23, 2001). In this case, the defendants moved to suppress the evidence, but the motion was denied. Nonetheless, the investigator was charged with hacking by foreign authorities who requested that the investigator be extradited for trial. U.S. authorities have not complied.",FAKE
+7915,Michael Moore Visits WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange [Video],"Leave a reply 
+Bill Still – Michael Moore went to London to visit with Julian Assange. After he came out, he turned a camera on himself and gave us a little first-person report on his visit. 
+Although the lack of detail makes you want to scream for more, what we do get is a lot more than we knew before we saw this. SF Source Bill Still Oct. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+7995,Election Night Drama: Hillary overheard giving spouse a tongue lashing!,"Wednesday, 9 November 2016 Deplorable deplorables have ruined me! 
+Once it was certain Hillary had lost the electoral college vote, according to insiders, she unloaded on her rumored-to-be philandering husband, Bill. (She had also had choice words for her once bestest gal-pal's hubby.) 
+You son of a bitch, this is all your fault! You and that aptly named Weiner just couldn't keep it on the down-low, could you, huh!? Huma and I have been going at it like rabbits for years, but it never got much coverage in the conservative media! All those red-state knuckle-draggers suck that delicate stuff right up; that is, when they aren't poring through their Bibles, looking for excuses to cast aspersions on love like mine and Huma's hot-monkey sex! I HATE YOU!! 
+But there was a silver-lining to Hillary and Bill's tribulations; plus, balm to her followers' plight. 
+Hearing directly from his wife's mouth of her torrid ""Huma-humpery"" proved ""Viagra Gold"" to Mr. Clinton. Mrs. Clinton, too! He took her, right there on the floor, in front of one and all. The sight was so traumatic to the convention hall room of witnesses, mass amnesia stuck, removing all traces of the election loss anguish. 
+Huma ""Weiner-hater"" Abedin, however, turned out to be the biggest loser this election. She's out in the cold. Or, as President-Elect ""The Donald"" would say, ""You're fired."" Make W.P. Wonder's  ",FAKE
+7106,Israeli Deputy Minister: Italy Quakes Retribution For Anti Jewish Vote,"  Edmondo Burr in Conspiracies // 0 Comments The two earthquakes that hit Italy Wednesday were “ retribution ” for the country’s support of a UNESCO resolution that disregards the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, according to Israeli Deputy Minister Ayoob Kara (Likud). 
+Israel suspended its ties with the UN cultural agency after it adopted a draft resolution this month, that Israel says denies Judaism’s connections to the religion’s holiest sites. 
+The deputy minister, who was in Italy when the earthquakes struck, ascribed the natural disasters to divine will. 
+RT.com reports: 
+“ I’m sure that the earthquake happened because of the UNESCO decision, ” Kara, a member of the ruling Likud Party, wrote in a memo, Ynetnews website reported. 
+Ironically, the Israeli politician was on a state visit to the Vatican when the quakes hit central Italy on Wednesday, killing one and injuring 10 people. 
+Earlier the same day, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), passed a resolution criticizing Israel for its handling of the holy site in Jerusalem – called Temple Mount by Jews, and Haram al-Sharif by Muslims. 
+The document was adopted after heated debate over its wording, and particularly the Arabic names used in the document. Italy was among the nations voting in favor of the resolution. 
+Israel blasted UNESCO and its Arab members for trying to undermine Jewish connections to the holy site. 
+Kara arrived in the Vatican in a fruitless effort to avert the resolution, but still managed to have a small chat with the leader of the Catholic Church. 
+According to Kara, Pope Francis “ strongly disagreed ” with the resolution. 
+“ He (the Pope) even said publicly that the holy land is connected to the Nation of Israel, ” the deputy minister stressed. 
+As for surviving the natural disaster, the Israeli politician said that “ going through the earthquake was not the most comfortable of experiences, but we trusted that the Holy See would keep us safe. ”",FAKE
+2034,Is it 2016 already?,"Jan. 1, 2016, is 859 days away. But, judging from the headlines about the 2016 presidential race blaring across news Web sites and cable channels this August, you might think it were next month.
+
+Hillary Rodham Clinton (along with her husband and daughter) is trying to raise $250 million for the family’s philanthropic foundation prior to 2016, in hopes of avoiding bad optics if she runs for president. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) spent last weekend in Iowa and was in New Hampshire on Friday. Vice President Biden’s political team is making clear that he is thinking seriously about the next presidential contest, and he’ll be in Iowa next month to show just how serious he is.
+
+All of the early machinations by Republicans and Democrats who want to be the next president — even though President Obama won reelection just 292 days ago — have spawned a cottage industry of people wondering whether this is the earliest start ever for a presidential race and whether that’s a good or a bad thing. (Almost everyone, The Fix most definitely excluded, says it’s a bad thing.)
+
+While the 2016 race may have started earlier than most, American presidential politics have been governed for some time by what we like to call The Fix’s Iceberg Theory. Here’s the theory in a sentence: Like an iceberg, the bulk of a presidential race happens underwater, or, out of sight of the average person.
+
+Now, for the longer explanation.
+
+Most regular people — even those living in states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina that play an outsize role in picking presidents — are paying absolutely no attention to what the people who might run in three years’ time for the nation’s highest office are doing right now.
+
+That lack of interest tends to drive a narrative that what happens now simply does not matter for the 2016 race. That’s wrong. Simply because the average voter isn’t aware of what’s happening in presidential politics at the moment doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
+
+The truth of presidential races is that the dominant story line for each of the potential candidates is built out of sight of the average voter, crafted years in advance of the political iceberg popping above the surface for everyone to see.
+
+It was during the 2006 midterm elections that buzz started to build around Barack Obama, the freshman senator who was drawing massive crowds everywhere he went to stump or raise money for Democratic candidates.
+
+It was during his 1998 Texas gubernatorial reelection campaign that George W. Bush built and honed the “compassionate conservative” message that he rode to the Republican nomination and the presidency in 2000.
+
+On the other side of the equation, it was in 2006 that then-Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) was cast as a vanilla centrist, a characterization that played a major part in his decision not to run for president in 2008. Biden battled the perception that he was not serious enough to be the nominee throughout the 2008 race, an impression drawn from years of blunt/impolitic comments.
+
+Fast-forward to the present day. Is Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) a conservative who can broaden the Republican Party’s reach to crucial Hispanic voters or a moderate in conservative’s clothing, as evidenced by his key involvement in the Senate immigration bill? Is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) a blunt-talking problem solver or a bullying blowhard? Is Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) a danger to the GOP or its savior? Is Clinton the inevitable nominee or the same flawed politician that Obama exposed during the 2008 Democratic primaries?
+
+All of these questions will be answered — or come close to being answered — before a single vote is cast — and, in many cases, before the average person even begins to think about the 2016 presidential race.
+
+And it’s not just narratives that get formed years in advance of actual votes. Building a national fundraising operation that can collect tens — if not hundreds — of millions of dollars takes massive amounts of time. Constructing a political team that has the right combination of experience and fresh-eyed insight can be the work of a political lifetime. Courting key activists in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina or Nevada is an arduous process in which time spent can make all the difference.
+
+Ignoring the iceberg nature of the presidential race then can have huge negative consequences. In 2008, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) became the momentum candidate after winning the Iowa caucuses. But because he and his team either didn’t understand or ignored the iceberg theory, he was unable to build on that momentum in New Hampshire, where he finished a distant third. After a runner-up showing in South Carolina, Huckabee’s chances at the nomination vanished.
+
+Smart candidates — and their campaigns — understand that the bulk of the work that goes into winning the presidential nomination happens well out of sight of a single voter. Momentum still matters — a lot — but without a structure to take advantage of that momentum, it can peter out as quickly as it comes. And if the primary fight drags out — a la the 2008 Democratic primaries or the 2012 Republican fight — what a candidate and his/her campaign team did years before when no voters were watching can be the difference between winning and losing.
+
+If you remember one thing about the presidential race then, remember this: What’s going on below the surface can — and almost always does — make or break the candidates.",REAL
+7671,It’s On: Between Duterte and America,"shorty BY PETER LEE I ’ve written a couple pieces of the smoking hot issue in Pivotland, Philippine president Duterte’s swerve toward a pro-PRC foreign policy, and what the U.S. and pro-American sector of the Manila elite are going to do about it. The first piece, Reports of death of US-Philippine alliance may be exaggerated, addresses the fact that Duterte’s freedom of movement is constrained by the need to keep the Philippine military happy, and notes that ex-prez and retired general Fidel Ramos, who facilitated Duterte’s entrance on the national political stage, is signaling dissatisfaction with Duterte. The second piece, Duterte Plays the ‘Mamasapano’ Card, covers a Duterte counter-attack: a threat to relitigate the death of 44 Philippine National Police commandos at Mamasapano in Mindanao, a 2014 special ops fiasco conducted under the aegis of the United States which a) exposes ex-president Aquino to serious legal jeopardy b) posits that the US alliance is doing a better job of killing Filipinos than the PRC can ever hope to do. The US seems to be embedded in a colonial mindset when it comes to the Philippines, something along the lines of “we’ve been selflessly looking after the Philippines for a century, and that thug Duterte won’t be allowed to screw that up during his brief (maybe curtailed) presidency.” It takes a pretty superficial view of Philippine history, one that accepts the US self-definition as the Philippines’ security savior while ignoring the distortions and shortcomings of the colonial and neo-colonial relationship. For me this tunnel vision was typified by the US media crowing over the formal delivery of a refurbished C-130 transport to the Philippine government by outgoing ambo Philip Goldberg. Message: here’s the US making provisions for Philippine defense at the same time Duterte’s selling out the country to China. To me, the inadvertent message was 1) here’s the US blindly stroking the pivot fetish while Duterte tries to solve the Mindanao insurgency that has cost at least 400,000 lives over the last century, win his drug war, and find a place for the Philippines in Asia that doesn’t give primacy to the US preoccupation confronting the PRC and 2) the U.S., in my opinion, pretty much has a policy of keeping the Philippines flat on its behind as an independent military force by trickling out second-hand gear to the Philippine military while the sweet stuff is dangled in front of it during US joint military maneuvers and port calls. But the United States is trying to find political leverage wherever it can and the Western media will, I’m sure, put its shoulder to the wheel to help out. Feelings of nationalism are pervasive in the US, but Americans have difficulty understanding why people in other nations may harbor animosity toward them on account of their colonialist and imperialist experiences. P hilip Goldberg sat down for a 45-minute exit interview with Rappler. As befitting Rappler’s origins in the Soros/Omidyar network of pro-US globalization advocacy, the interview was a stream of softballs about what to do about Duterte’s disregard of the awesomeness of the American relationship, an awesomeness that is acknowledged by virtually all Filipinos who inexplicably (and, if the US has anything to do about it, temporarily) at the same time give Duterte approval ratings of over 80%. It’s worth watching if you have the patience. Goldberg is a smooth cat, and the Rappler tonguebath gives you no inkling of the fact that he intimately familiar with the wet work of end-arounding national governments to cultivate secessionist movements, you know, like what he did in Bolivia (declared persona non grata as a result) and Kosovo, and like that thing in Duterte’s home province of Mindanao, which in my opinion probably the main reason why Duterte wanted him out of the Philippines. Goldberg also discretely plays the economic threat card, concern-trolling that anti-US attitudes will dismay “foreign investors”. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in subsequent weeks. As far as I can tell, the biggest U.S. factor in the domestic Philippine economy is the call-center industry. I doubt US corporations are interested in actually pulling their operations out and subjecting them to the English-language mercies of India, but certainly a call from the State Department or White House would convince them of the wisdom of at least making the threat. And I also wonder if expected President Hillary Clinton will find it necessary to drop the hammer on Duterte, in order to demonstrate to a rather dubious Asia that there is no alternative to loyalty to the pivot. I expect the next few months, in other words, to be very interesting. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS",FAKE
+2602,Boehner: Israel trip planned before Netanyahu-Obama rift,"The Ohio Republican will travel to Israel this week, while Congress is on recess. He said his plans were made before the rift between Netanyahu and President Barack Obama over how to deal with Iran and Palestine burst into the open.
+
+""There are serious issues and activities going on in the Middle East and I think it's critically important for members of Congress to hear from foreign leaders, other governments, other parts of their government, to get a real handle on the challenges that we face there,"" Boehner told CNN's Dana Bash on ""State of the Union"" Sunday.
+
+Republicans are using the congressional recess to visit Israel. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, was there Sunday, and met with Netanyahu.
+
+Boehner said Netanyahu -- who's been lambasted by Obama for his comments in the lead-up to Israel's election that a two-state solution to Israel and Palestine's divide is impossible -- didn't cross any lines. ""Well, he doesn't have a partner,"" Boehner said. ""How do you have a two-state solution when you don't have a partner in that solution, when you don't have a partner for peace, when you've got a -- when the other state is vowing to wipe you off the face of the earth?"" And he promised to move ""very"" quickly toward imposing steep new sanctions on Iran if Obama doesn't strike a deal with the country to avert its nuclear ambitions -- a deal that Netanyahu opposed during a high-profile speech to Congress during an early-March trip to Washington. Boehner also defended Netanyahu from criticism from Obama and the White House that has mounted over the last month. ""I think the animosity exhibited by our administration toward the prime minister of Israel is reprehensible,"" Boehner said. ""And I think that the pressure that they've put on him over the last four or five years have frankly pushed him to the point where he had to speak up."" ""I don't blame him at all for speaking up,"" he said.",REAL
+6766,The US May Soon Face an Apocalyptic Seismic Event,"Today, an ever increasing number of earthquakes in the United States may soon bring the country to ruin, as geologists, journalists and politicians say. 
+Via UsualRoutine 
+
+The University of Washington has already presented seismological charts showing a gigantic geological rift that stretches across the central states of the US from north to south, and marks the region of a possible split of the North America continent in two. As it has been reported by geologists, for the first time this anomaly was discovered in 1960’s, when scientists found a strange underground rupture along the Lake Superior that would run south. The discovery surprised American scientists back then since there were no mountains in that area. Following studies showed that this anomaly was stretching across the whole continent, resembling in its form and shape the giant cracks in the east of Africa.
+It’s been reported that the tectonic plate beneath the southeastern regions of the United States is being fragmented by the layers of earth above it, which may be the cause of future earthquakes in the Washington area and other cities on the east coast, where basically no preconditions for the emergence of aftershocks, according to Live Science.
+According to Berk Biryol from the University of North Carolina, in recent years the Washington area and the areas around other large cities in the east of the country faced a pretty intense seismic activity, which at first puzzled seismologists since the east of the country is residing on a stable continental crust that must prevent any earthquake from occurring.
+In recent years, the relationship between fracturing and the mounting number of earthquakes has been brought to light by the US Geological Survey (USGS), that would note that the number of earthquakes in the US has increased drastically over the last six years. In fact, it expects an abrupt increase in the number of seismic events in some regions of the country where fracturing is being used including Oklahoma, California, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Ohio, Alabama and New Mexico.
+But the split in the United States is not being predicted by the USGS alone, since the recent seismic political events aggravated the growing discord within the US society in the wake of the US presidential campaign.
+Western journalists are sounding the alarm – America’s youth is now fascinated with the concepts of socialism and communism. According to the poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), a half of all Americans under 35 years would love to be represented by a socialist president. Politicians who profess capitalist views doonly receive the support of 42% of the younger American generation. This explains the spectacular rise of DNC’s Bernie Sanders which would most certainly become the next president, if Hillary didn’t use her wealth and connections to replace him as the sole Democratic candidate.
+The German newspaper Tagesspiegel points out that this election campaign “undermines the belief that most Americans share the idea about living in a democratic and constitutional state.” The newspaper notes that there’s been a lot of speculations about the possible armed resistance to the “US corrupt government system” lately, no matter how unlikely the future post-election violence may look now.
+The latest poll conducted by USA Today and Suffolk University shows that only 40% of potential voters strongly believe in the peaceful transfer of power after the US presidential elections. With six in ten viewing the candidates unfavorably, Clinton andTrump are the two most unpopular presidential candidates in ABC/Post polls dating to the 1984 election. This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 1,165 likely voters.
+The level of antipathy towards the two main presidential candidates in terms of party affiliation has also been at staggering level, with 97% of Trump supporters despising Hillary Clinton and 95% of Hillary’s loathing the Republican presidential candidate.
+It’s no wonder that there’s been a rapidly increasing number of petitions on the separation of various states, which refer to the Declaration of Independence, where the Founding Fathers explicitly stated that “any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it” To date, the petitions on the separation from the US have been filled by a total of 40 states. Texas that is viewed as the last bastion of conservatism has already gathered more than 100 thousand signatures under its petition for obtaining the status of an independent state. Behind it are Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee.
+Therefore, aside from the major geological rift that may soon hit the US, there’s a deep social and political rift to be observed, which may, in case of loss of all confidence in the existing political system result in a major outbreak of violence.
+Earth has already witnessed the existence of two supercontinent – Rodinia and Pangaea. First, the former continent formed about 800 million years ago, until the latter one appeared some 600 million years later. Scientists expect that in the future a new supercontinent will be formed that has it own name already – Amasia. This continent will be formed out of the modern North America and Asia, notes the Nature.
+Who knows, maybe before Amasia even emerges we will witness a new state or even two that would replace the US?
+",FAKE
+8121,Anti-Trump Protester Holds Reprehensible Sign about Melania – TruthFeed,"Anti-Trump Protester Holds Reprehensible Sign about Melania Anti-Trump Protester Holds Reprehensible Sign about Melania Culture By TruthFeedNews November 13, 2016 
+Want to see exactly how reprehensible the moral character of Anti-Trump protesters is? 
+Take a look at what this Hillary Supporter has on his sign. 
+“Rape Melania” 
+Police, please arrest this worthless scumbag and lock him up. 
+Support the Trump Presidency and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+392,Why These Democrats Flipped To Defeat Wall Street Deregulation,"WASHINGTON -- Anyone who wants to understand the current state of the Democratic Party should pay close attention to what happened this week in the House of Representatives, where Democrats cut down a GOP-backed Wall Street deregulation bill. In response, the bill's supporters avoided talking about who the legislation would have helped (hint: two big banks), focusing instead on calling its victorious opponents a bunch of flip-floppers.
+
+""The atmosphere is a little bit different,"" Himes said. ""I think there were 35 Democrats who voted yes. On similar legislation in the last Congress, that number was more like 75 or so. So yes, there were some folks who looked at the same thing this Congress and thought that they felt differently about it.""
+
+Actually, 95 Democrats supported a very similar bill as recently as September. Both bills were 11-point packages chipping away at the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The most serious attack of the bunch came in the form of a partial two-year delay of the Volcker Rule, which would ban banks from speculating in securities markets with taxpayer money. The bill would have allowed Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase to hold onto almost $50 billion in risky corporate debt packages known as collateralized loan obligations through 2019. Since that perk wasn't included in the September version of the bill, the alleged flip-floppers can make a case that this time around, things just went too far.
+
+But that doesn't seem to be what's really going on among today's Democrats. For one thing, Democrats approved a previous two-year delay of the same Volcker Rule provision last spring, pushing it to 2017, and dozens of House Democrats spent much of 2013 and 2014 lining up to support bill after bill that dealt blows to the party's second-biggest policy achievement of the Obama era.
+
+This infuriated financial reform advocates. In isolation, many of these bills would have meant only minor trouble for Dodd-Frank. Others, however, were quite serious, and collectively, they functioned as a repeal strategy that may ultimately prove more effective than the GOP's straightforward assault on Obamacare. They never became law because then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) didn't bring them up in the Senate, but with Republicans now in control of the Senate, that firewall is gone.
+
+The Democratic domestic policy agenda is remarkably uniform across the caucus, with one major exception. Nearly every House Democrat supports same-sex marriage, stronger environmental protections and increasing the minimum wage. But on bank reform, the party remains divided. Things have been shifting lately, however, and the 44 Democrats who switched their votes between September and January show which way the wind is blowing. They're listed at the bottom of this article. As for the other supporters of the September bill, 12 aren't in Congress anymore -- a politically significant point in its own right -- and four didn't vote.
+
+There's nothing inherently terrible about flip-flopping. Historically, it's a pretty important part of the legislative process, on everything from the Democratic Party's embrace of the civil rights movement in the 1960s to the passage of the Wall Street bailout in 2008. Even Himes, mourning his defeat on C-SPAN, noted that a lot of people who thought unfettered finance was a good idea in the late 1990s recanted after the banking crash.
+
+Elections, in particular, have a way of changing politicians' opinions, and November was horrible for Democrats in almost every possible way. Economic policy factors stuck with a lot of liberals. Ballot initiatives to increase the minimum wage passed all over the country in districts blue and red, even as Democrats took a beating everywhere. Exit poll data showed that the economy remained the most important issue to voters (as it has in every election since 2008), and shepherded in Republicans, even though a robust majority didn't think the GOP had a plan to make things better.
+
+The public is still angry about the bank bailouts. And even with the economy showing signs of improvement, voting for more Wall Street financial aid is an easy way to convince many constituents that you aren't playing for their team.
+
+All of that came to a head in the December vote on a major government funding bill. When top negotiators from both parties included a provision subsidizing risky derivatives trading in the package, many Democrats who had been quietly going along with the piecemeal dismantling of Dodd-Frank began trying to take down the spending bill over the bank perk. They came pretty close, and the final events of the vote -- President Barack Obama and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon personally lobbying lawmakers for support -- only added fuel to the bank reformers' fire.
+
+They appear to be picking up converts, as demonstrated by the 44 Democrats who came out against the Volcker Rule delay Wednesday. Several of those 44 were frequent Wall Street supporters in the last Congress -- House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Reps. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.). Greg Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) stand out as interesting changes.
+
+Of course, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) whipped Democrats hard on Wednesday to oppose the Volcker Rule delay, and issued a statement after the vote blasting the bill as a GOP rip-off of the American people. Pelosi is obviously a powerful person in the caucus, and when Republicans bring the same Volcker Rule bill up again next week under rules that will guarantee its passage, she'll have less leverage, and some of the financial reform converts may revert to backing big banks.",REAL
+6165,New Leaked Clinton Emails Came from the Devices of Anthony Weiner,"New Leaked Clinton Emails Came from the Devices of Anthony Weiner 6 shares by Dean Daniels / October 28, 2016 / POLITICS / 
+On Friday, the FBI announced an investigation into newly leaked emails linked to Hillary Clinton. In a surprising twist, the new leaked emails from the private email server were discovered after the F.B.I. confiscated electronic devices belonging to top aide Huma Abedin, her controversial and perverted husband, Anthony Weiner. 
+Officially, the federal law enforcement agents are opening an investigation into Weiner texting a 15-year-old in North Carolina. And according to Director Comey, the F.B.I. were taking steps to “determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” 
+Shortly after the announcement, Donald Trump utilized the situation to advantage and running theme of Clinton’s corruption at a rally in New Hampshire. Supporters nearly cheered in complete unison: “lock her up.” 
+“Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office,” said Trump to the roaring crowd. 
+“I have great respect for the fact that the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made,” Mr. Trump said, referring also to the Department of Justice. “This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understand. It is everybody’s hope that it is about to be corrected.” 
+“The F.B.I.’s decision to reopen their criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s secret email server just 11 days before the election shows how serious this discovery must be,” Reince Priebus, the Republican committee chairman, said in a statement. “This stunning development raises serious questions about what records may not have been turned over and why, and whether they show intent to violate the law.” 
+Sign up to get alerts about Dennis Michael Lynch's upcoming Donald Trump film and breaking news. Subscribe ",FAKE
+7985,Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) Is Another Example of a Lazy Corrupt Agency,"VA Backlog Means Thousands Of Veterans Owed Money In NC ‹ › Professor and Attorney Rahul Manchanda worked for one of the largest law firms in Manhattan where he focused on asbestos litigation. At the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (“UNCITRAL”) in Vienna, Austria, Mr. Manchanda was exposed to international trade law, arbitration, alternative dispute resolution, and comparisons of the American common law with European civil law. He later worked for one of the largest multi-national law firms in Paris France, Coudert Frères, where he focused primarily on international arbitration, arbitration agreements, the enforcement of foreign arbitration awards against multinational parent corporations, piercing the corporate veil, arbitration venue choice, and foreign policy. In Paris, Mr. Manchanda analyzed and compared the American legal system with its British, French, Russian, German, and Chinese counterparts. Mr. Manchanda also has extensive technical experience in Federal Patent Prosecution and Intellectual Property issues working for Milde Hoffberg & Macklin LLP and Moses & Singer LLP, and has contributed to the issuing of patents in the areas of biotechnology, organic chemistry, biopharmaceuticals, electrical and mechanical engineering, computer software and technology, and internet business methods. He was recently the Keynote Address Speaker for Hamline University School of International Law on the 60th Anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, as well as a Chief Speaker for the Civil Rights Litigation Update Seminar on Balancing Inalienable Civil Rights and National Security in the Post-911 Era. Professor Manchanda is also a Faculty Member for LawLine.com, an online Continuing Legal Education (“CLE”) program designed to educate Attorneys all across the country on cutting edge issues of Immigration Law and Deportation and Removal Defense Litigation as well as a second CLE on the Foundations of International Law, as well as 5 different Immigration Law/Deportation Defense Seminars for Rossdale CLE. Click here to watch a portion of his 2 hour lecture on Immigration and Deportation and Removal Defense Litigation or The Foundations of International Law. You can also watch some of his many appearances on FoxNews, CNN, CourtTV, NBC, and other major media networks on some of the most notable cases in global history, here. He has also given multiple lectures as one of the first pioneering immigration law practitioners who merged Criminal Defense Law and Immigration/Deportation Defense Law in such lectures with other immigration law luminaries in LexisNexis Presents a Complimentary Webinar: Criminal Law and Immigration Intersection 101 and Immigration Reform and the Workplace: An Overview of Legal and Legislative Developments. At Boston University, Mr. Manchanda received a Bachelors degree in Biology, where he distinguished himself in the chemical and biological sciences, doing extensive research in organic chemistry, in both field and laboratory work relating to organic synthesis and isolation, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, structure determination, and production of synthetic bio-active natural products. At BU, Mr. Manchanda also was on the BU Shotokan Karate Team as well as a Lead Tenor with the Marsh Chapel Choir, also finding time to be a Teaching Fellow in Molecular Cell Biology, Organic Chemistry, and a private tutor in Calculus based Physics and Organic Chemistry. He also attended Yale University where he studied Molecular Cell and Evolutionary Biology. He served on the Pace University School of Law’s Mentor Program where he received his Juris Doctor degree. Attorney Manchanda graduated from the Wooster Prep School in Danbury Connecticut where he was a Varsity Letterman in Soccer, Wrestling, Tennis, and Lacrosse, as well as Lead in the Drama Program. For more than 14 years, his internationally recognized law firm has a formidable presence in Federal and State Criminal, Civil, International, and Immigration Courts throughout the United States pertaining to Master, Individual, and Final Hearings, Naturalization Interviews, Writs of Habeas Corpus, Writs of Corum Nobis, Marriage Cases, U.S. Embassy and Consular Processing, American Citizen Services, United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Department of State liaison, 440 Motions to Vacate, Amend, or Expunge Criminal Convictions, Aggravated Felonies, Drug Smuggling Cases, Stokes Hearings, Political Asylum, Taxation, Hardship, Removal of Condition Hearings, National Security, and Adjustment of Status Interviews. He served as an American Immigration Lawyer Association (“AILA“) Committee Member for the Congressional/Advocacy Committee, the Department of Labor (“DOL“) Committee, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (“EOIR“)/District Counsel/Political Asylum Committee. Attorney Manchanda also proudly served on the New York State Bar Association Empire State Counsel Program, which is a small group of Attorneys who serve the poor without charge, helping people who otherwise could not afford legal counsel to achieve justice. Attorney Manchanda also proudly serves as a Member of the American Bar Association Advisory Panel, a group of Attorneys that informs the ABA’s priorities and decisions by providing opinions about the direction of the ABA and issues facing the profession. Attorney Rahul Manchanda of Manchanda Law Office PLLC has also traveled extensively throughout the world where he has fought for peace and mutual understanding by and between the United States and different countries overseas. His work, observations, and travels have been published and been received to make foreign policy decisions by the International Atomic Energy Agency (“IAEA”), the US RAHUL MANCHANDA IN TEHRAN IRANCongress, US Senate, US Executive Branch, as well as countless other think-tanks, foreign and domestic governmental agencies, NGOs, foreign and domestic policy institutions, such as can be found here. Attorney Rahul Manchanda’s ceaseless and tireless work advocating peace, universal human and civil rights, and the avoidance of war and conflict has truly transformed the world, perhaps even helping to stop World War 3, for which he has been viciously attacked online and personally by warmongers, enemies of global peace, and religious extremists. In addition to Mr. Manchanda’s extensive international litigation practice in Federal and State Criminal Defense Law, Immigration Law, Deportation and Removal Defense Litigation, Family Law, International Law, and Civil Litigation, he has advised on, been consulted on, prepared, and filed tens of thousands of Arraignments, Trials, Hearings, Non-Immigrant and Immigrant Visa Petitions including, but not limited to: H-1B1, B, C, D, E, L, O, P, H-3, J, K, M, R, S, T, and U Visas, as well as I-130 and I-140 Immigrant Petitions with accompanying Adjustment of Status (I-485), Extraordinary Ability Petitions, EB-1, EB-2, EB-3, EB-5, Investment Based Visas, PERM, RIR, and Regular Labor Certification Applications with the Department of Labor, Political Asylum, Marriage Cases, Stokes Interviews, Naturalization/Citizenship, Agricultural, 245(I), CSS/Lulac/Zambrano, LIFE Act, Removal of Conditions, Criminal and Overstay Waivers, and Aggravated Felony and CMT Defense. Attorney Manchanda has succeeded for his Clients in Deportation and Removal Proceedings, Asylum, Employment Based Visa Petitions including PERM/Labor Certification, Business Immigration Visas, and Family Based Immigration Petitions, for tens of thousands of people, for more than 14 years. He taught Immigration Law at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the City University of New York located in Manhattan New York. He has also successfully advised on and appeared in Criminal Court throughout New York for many different types of State and Federal Criminal Defense Matters. He was sworn in and admitted to practice in the highest courts in New York State as well as in the Federal United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Federal United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the Federal United States District Court for the Northern District of New York, the United States District Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the United States District Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and the United States District Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He has been an active member of the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, the New York County Lawyers Association, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Phi Alpha Delta International, the Global Interdependence Center (“GIC”), the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, Network 20/20, and the Asia Society. He regularly participated in conferences with the House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, Capitol Hill, the Center For Strategic and International Studies (“CSIS”), and the Council on Foreign Relations (“CFR”) in Washington, D.C. pertaining to counter-terrorism and foreign policy in South Asia, as well as completing counter-terrorism training with Security Solutions International (“SSI”). He served on a New York Committee on State Regulation of Immigration Law in front of the New York State Senate. He served on the Board of Directors and Sponsor of the US-India Institute (“USINI”), a non-partisan foreign policy advisory board and think tank located in Washington, D.C. focusing on critical geo-strategic issues of national security, defense and economic relations between the U.S. and India, informing and educating key policy makers in the U.S. and India on issues of common interest, and advocating the importance of achieving and maintaining peace through Rahul Manchanda Attorneystrength and economic freedom. He served as the U.S.-India Political Action Committee (“USINPAC“) Co-Chairman for New York where he impacted U.S. Foreign Policy on issues of concern to the Indian American community in the United States, providing bipartisan support to candidates for Federal, State and Local office who supported the issues that were important to the Indian American community, including research, support, and advocacy towards the successful passage of the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act, signed into law on October 8, 2008 after more than three years of contentious bi-partisan and bi-lateral negotiations. Recently Attorney Manchanda was awarded the prestigious Hind Rattan Award for his outstanding services, achievements, and contributions in his field for “keeping the flag of India high” as an NRI/PIO by the NRI Welfare Society of India, an award bestowed on only 30 “eminent” NRIs/PIOs around the globe every year, and for making contributions in strengthening India’s economy. Attorney Manchanda was also Knighted by the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Justice of London England, given the appellation and nobility of Sir Rahul Manchanda. Attorney Manchanda also served on the Paris Conference Presidential Desk of the European Association of Lawyers (“AEA“), a highly selective network of international law firms with a presence in most of the world’s countries. He is also a member of the Indian American Lawyers Association of Manhattan New York as well as the Manhattan Committee on Foreign Relations, which is a private organization that promotes foreign policy and international affairs dialogue between policy makers, researchers, and other high level analysts and the Committee’s membership. Attorney Manchanda is also on the Advisory Council for the Republican National Lawyers Association. Attorney Rahul Manchanda is also a Member of the Queens District Attorney’s Office Defense Attorney Database for new cases assigned to Assistant District Attorneys and a Member of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. Additionally Rahul Manchanda is the founder of the India Anti-Defamation Committee Ltd which is a premier civil rights organization dedicated to fighting and eradicating racism, discrimination, and hatred directed towards people from the Indian subcontinent. Rahul Manchanda is also a Freemason. Mr. Manchanda has appeared as International Law Expert regularly on major media television program channels such as Fox News, CNN, Court TV, and NBC on such television programs as Dayside, Studio B with Shephard Smith, Fox and Friends, Heartland with John Kasich, Live from CNN with Kyra Phillips, the Live Desk with Martha McCallum, Anderson Cooper 360°, the O’Reilly Factor, Nancy Grace, Banfield & Ford Courtside, Best Defense with Jami Floyd, Justice with Jeanine Pirro, and the Catherine Crier Show on the most publicized and globally newsworthy of international legal issues and cases. You can watch many of these appearances here. He is also featured in Newsweek Magazine‘s Top Attorneys in the United States of America in 2013, and Top Immigration Lawyers in the United States of America in 2012 Showcases. His in depth expertise in International Affairs, State and Federal Criminal Defense Litigation, Consular Processing Issues, Immigration Law, Foreign Affairs, Customs Law, and High-Level Scientific Training has enabled Attorney Manchanda to secure solutions for his Clients in a quick, efficient, and accurate manner for more than 13 years. Mr. Manchanda is fluent in French, English, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. He has also studied Russian, Latin, and Hebrew. His hobbies include Politics, International Affairs, and Soccer. In his spare time, he enjoys Chess and Classical Music.",FAKE
+2870,California Airport Security Tightened Amid ISIS Fears,"CNN said the investigation started after intercepted communication and other intelligence information that led officials to believe that a plot could be under way.
+
+The network quoted an official as saying the plot focused on parts of California and that officials there had stepped up security.
+
+The Transportation Security Administration had also alerted local law enforcement agencies responsible for security around airports in the state although the possible threat was not necessarily related to aviation, CNN said.
+
+It added that some U.S. cities had increased their security, but gave no further details.
+
+No one at the FBI was immediately available to comment. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson also declined to comment on the reported threat to Los Angeles airport. 
+
+ 
+
+ Los Angeles was already using two-man police patrols, but the continued ISIS call for sympathizers to attack Western interests means upgraded measures at Los Angeles International Airport.
+
+ 
+
+ And while investigators say there is no specific plot to mention, intelligence from overseas and monitoring of suspected militants in the United States point to an increased threat. FBI Director Jim Comey has said in recent weeks that there are investigations going on in all 50 states into alleged ISIS sympathizers.
+
+ 
+
+ Sources, speaking on a condition of anonymity to NBC, said fears revolve around uniformed personnel, such as police officers, or locations where ""lone wolf"" terrorists could target.
+
+ 
+
+ ""Over the last few months, we have made a number of security adjustments, including enhanced screening at select overseas airports and increasing random searches of passengers and carry-on luggage on flights inbound to the U.S., reflecting an evolving threat picture,"" a Department of Homeland Security spokesman said. 
+
+ 
+
+ He would not comment on the specific intelligence that increased concerns on the West Coast, but officials there have boosted security in recent months.
+
+ 
+
+ More airport police have been placed on duty at Los Angeles International Airport, reports The Orange County Register, in response to the threats. 
+
+ 
+
+ ""There are no specific threats to LAX,"" insisted Los Angeles World Airports, the airport oversight and operations department for the City of Los Angeles, in a press release. ""We are constantly adjusting our deployment strategies, and as a precaution, have increased the visibility of airport police.""
+
+ 
+
+ The increased security also comes as counterterrorism experts worry that ISIS is growing in popularity in locations far away from Syria and Iraq, reports NBC. Moreover,  violence continues to spread.
+
+ 
+
+ In March, ISIS laid claim to an attack to the Bardo Museum in Tunisia, with the violence escalating elsewhere since then.
+
+ 
+
+ Saudi Arabia claimed ISIS was planning car bombings in Riyadh after evidence was found on the cellphone of a man suspected of killing two police officers at a checkpoint.
+
+ 
+
+ On Monday, ISIS released a video showing the executions of Ethiopian Christians in two separate places in Libya. ISIS also claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed 34 people and wounded more than 100.
+
+ 
+
+ In the United States, officials have been arresting people who want to travel to the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq. In the past year alone, 39 U.S. citizens have been arrested for charges of offering to help ISIS, with eight Americans arrested just in the last week.
+
+ 
+
+ Fordham Center Director Karen Greenberg said the appeal behind joining forces is the same for all potential ISIS recruits.
+
+ 
+
+ ""It's religion, but it's broader than just the religion itself. It's wanting to share in a culture in which that religion is central,"" Greenberg said. ""That is a place for them to go that will provide a religious homeland for them, and that they will be able to serve it in a number of capacities.""
+
+ 
+
+",REAL
+1414,"Exclusive: New Jeb Bush Super PAC ad uses Paris, San Bernardino images","Right to Rise USA, the pro-Jeb Bush super PAC will be airing a new TV ad in early voting states and the battleground state of Ohio that uses images from the Paris & San Bernardino attacks to depict President Obama as a weak president on terrorism and the former two-term Florida governor as a “tested and proven leader who won’t try to contain ISIS.”
+
+It is the first campaign ad to utilize the images of both Paris and San Bernardino.
+
+“A horrific terror attack in Paris then a brutal act of terror here at home.” The 30 second ad starts off as it flashes images from both locations.
+
+“It is time for tested and proven leader who won’t try to contain ISIS,” the announcer continues as Obama flashes on the screen.
+
+Bush has been increasing his focus on national security and anti-terrorism positions and has been severely critical of the president’s position on threats from ISIS and other terrorist organizations.
+
+""The threat of global terrorism is the threat for our country. And every day that the caliphate exists is another day that they win and they can recruit terrorists, “ Bush said to Special Report anchor Bret Baier on Thursday night.
+
+That TV ad is starting Tuesday 12/8 in NH, IA, SC, NV, OH and on cable.",REAL
+6158,Megyn [sic] Kelly: Gowdy Triumphantly Comments on the Hillary Case Reopening,"October 29, 2016 
+Weiner's revenge. Do Jews go to jail? He may be able to finagle this into some kind of legal cloak for himself. 
+Can't stand Kelly's 'active listening' face. She has practiced keeping that big mandible shut - you can see her wanting to interrupt. Her neck strength must be immense. 
+Studies show her jaw currently weighs 74.3 lbs. Holding it shut is a catch-22 as it grows through the act of holding itself shut (she cut her hair to decrease neck strain). Leading scientists/studies show, if she does not allow herself to become a mouth breather, that her mandible will triple in size by 3/10/2018. The growth tripling time will decrease by 6 mo's every month thereafter.",FAKE
+758,Can Hillary flip the script in Oregon and Kentucky?,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+8615,Rise of Mandatory Vaccinations Means the End of Medical Freedom,"posted by Eddie Mandatory vaccinations are about to open up a new frontier for government control. Through the war on drugs, bureaucrats arbitrarily dictate what people can and can’t put into their bodies, but that violation pales in comparison to forcibly medicating millions against their will. Voluntary and informed consent are essential in securing individual rights, and without it, self-ownership will never be respected. The liberal stronghold of California is trailblazing the encroaching new practice and recently passed laws mandating that children and adults must have certain immunizations before being able to attend schools or work in certain professions. The longstanding religious and philosophical exemptions that protect freedom of choice have been systematically crushed by the state. California’s Senate Bill 277 went into effect on July 1st, 2016, and marked the most rigid requirements ever instituted for vaccinations. The law forces students to endure a total of 40 doses to complete the 10 federally recommended vaccines while allowing more to be added at any time. Any family that doesn’t go along will have their child barred from attending licensed day care facilities, in-home daycares, public or private schools, and even after school programs. Over the years, California has developed a reputation for pushing vaccines on their youth. Assembly Bill 499 was passed in 2011 and lowered the age of consent for STD prevention vaccines to just 12 years old. Included in the assortment of shots being administered was the infamous Gardasil , which just a few years later was at the center of a lawsuit that yielded the victims a $6 million settlement from the U.S. government, which paid out funds from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program . The Vaccinate All Children Act of 2015 is an attempt to implement this new standard nationwide, and although it has stalled in the House, it will likely be reintroduced the next time the country is gripped by the fear of a pandemic. The debate surrounding vaccinations is commonly framed as a moral struggle between the benefits to the collective and the selfish preferences of the individual. But since the outbreak scares of Zika , measles , and ebola , the rhetoric has taken a turn toward authoritarianism. It’s commonly stated by the CDC and most mainstream doctors that the unvaccinated are putting the health of everyone else at risk, but the truth isn’t so black and white . The herd immunity theory has been consistently used to validate the expansion of vaccine programs, but it still doesn’t justify the removal of choice from the individual. The classic exchange of freedom for perceived safety is a no brainer for the millions of Americans who are willing to use government to strap their neighbors down and forcibly inject them for the greater good. Anyone who expresses concern about possible side effects is immediately branded as conspiratorial or anti-science. Yet controversial claims that certain vaccine variants cause neurological disorders like autism have led some people to swear off inoculations altogether. This all-or-nothing dynamic has completely polarized the issue and prevents any reasonable discussion from taking place. Either you accept all of the CDC’s recommended 69 doses of 16 vaccines between birth and age 18, or you want to bring back measles, polio, and probably the black plague. On the other extreme side of the debate, if you fail to acknowledge all vaccines as dangerous, you’re an ignorant sheep. Through the internet, disinformation has become widespread and created a movement of people that have written off all the benefits accomplished through immunizations. These individuals are unable or unwilling to separate the science from the shady institutions that develop and distribute new vaccines. Even if thimerosal and mercury based preservatives cause adverse reactions in some patients, it doesn’t detract from the advantages vaccine technology provides. In this debate, like most others in the US, both sides are swept up in emotion and ignorance. Regardless, the public’s trust in vaccinations has been eroded by the reputations of those companies producing them. Pharmaceutical giants like Merck and Pfizer make billions from the distribution of these shots, and the potential profits after a mandate are enough to corrupt the morals of almost anyone. In one example, former CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding left her post at the government agency in 2009 to work in Merck’s vaccine division. An investigative report published by the British Medical Journal last year found the CDC downplays its ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Further, by buying the support of politicians like Hillary Clinton — who received more donations from pharmaceutical companies and their employees than any other candidate this year — these huge companies are able to expand their influence in directing government policy . Maintaining control over what we put into our own bodies is a fundamental right, but for now, standing up to these government decrees only means ostracism from the education system and criticism from peers. In the future, however, the punishments for disobedience will likely only grow stricter. An Orange County doctor named Bob Sears is already in the crosshairs of California’s medical board after excusing a two-year-old from future vaccinations. The mother expressed concern that her daughter had an adverse reaction to a previous shot, describing the child as becoming limp “like a ragdoll” for 24 hours after the last dose. Dr. Sears’ alternative treatment recommendations break from the rules dictated by S.B. 277, and now his reputation, as well as his career, are in jeopardy. This new authority to strip doctors of their medical licenses for simply going against the state-imposed standards opens the door for the persecution of medical professionals who resist any government regulation. A vaccination is an invasive medical procedure that can have different effects on each and every individual. The Nuremberg Code’s first principle is voluntary consent, but it seems the lessons of history have been completely forgotten by today’s leaders. The transition of these shots from “recommended” to “required” is well underway, and those who think the ends justify the means are willing to forcibly make sure everyone else complies. The new benchmark set by California symbolizes a precedent that could be mimicked across the nation. Without having the discretion to choose which medications are injected into your body — or your child’s — how can anyone convince themselves they are free? This overreach and collusion can often be dismissed as a trivial issue, but the fact that voluntary consent is under attack speaks volumes to the extent that state power has metastasized. source:",FAKE
+7519,Bank of Canada Commentary Whipsaws Loonie,"Bank of Canada Commentary Whipsaws Loonie   
+by: otterwood 
+Over the last two weeks we’ve seen more evidence of declining confidence in central banks (see my video on eroding confidence in the establishment here ). The Canadian dollar experienced wild swings on the back of comments from the Bank of Canada and Governor Poloz. 
+Last Wednesday the Canadian dollar rallied after the Bank of Canada referenced downside risks to inflation and then barely an hour later the Loonie plummeted when Governor Poloz said the committee “actively” considered cutting rates. 
+Then on Monday we saw a similar dynamic play out when Poloz said “the best plan right now, we think, is to wait for the next 18 months or so,” in a testimony to the House of Commons. The Loonie strengthened significantly on the comment only to completely reverse when Poloz said the comment referred to the output gap and note monetary policy. 
+The lack of consistency in the Bank of Canada’s communication is creating volatility in asset markets and it can be seen in the USDCAD, see below.",FAKE
+888,Cruz and Kasich form an alliance: Is that fair? (+video),"It’s one thing for campaign strategists to dream up a divide-states-and-conquer plan on a conference call. It’s quite another for actual voters to agree.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz gets ice cream with his daughters Caroline, right, and Catherine during a campaign stop at Zaharakos Ice Cream Parlor in Columbus, Ind., Monday. In an effort to deny Donald Trump the nomination, Ohio Gov. John Kasich promised not to campaign in Indiana, in exchange for Senator Cruz ceding New Mexico and Oregon.
+
+Ted Cruz and John Kasich have struck a non-aggression pact in an attempt to block Donald Trump from winning the GOP presidential nomination. Is that a fair way to play politics?
+
+The answer to that question depends heavily on what one thinks about the role parties and their organizations should play in today’s American democracy.
+
+First, the details: On Sunday night the Cruz/Kasich alliance announced a trade of spheres of influence. Ohio Governor Kasich won’t campaign in Indiana, leaving the Hoosier State to Cruz forces. In return, Texas Senator Cruz will pull out of New Mexico and Oregon, giving Kasich a clear path in those states.
+
+The point of this is to try and force Mr. Trump into artificial one-on-one contests in important places. Polls predict The Donald would do worse under such circumstances, since Cruz and Kasich are splitting the anti-Trump vote. In Indiana, for instance, Trump has a lead of about six percentage points over Cruz, 39 to 33. Kasich is third at 19 percent.
+
+Reallocate the Kasich votes, and you’ve got a new ballgame. And Indiana is key – it’s a modified winner-take-all state and it’s got 57 delegates. Deny Trump that prize, and his pathway to a majority of 1,237 delegates gets much narrower.
+
+“A Cruz victory in Indiana would be enough to make Mr. Trump an underdog in the fight for 1,237,” writes poll guru Nate Cohn of The Upshot at The New York Times.
+
+Whether the plan would actually work remains an issue. It’s one thing for strategists to dream this up on a conference call. It’s quite another for actual voters to agree and change their behavior as a result. Kasich and Cruz are pretty different candidates. The former is the let’s-all-hug guy who’s emphasizing his insider credentials. The latter is a combative conservative who’s said insiders are destroying the GOP. Are the backers of one going to switch to the other in the name of stopping a third guy? That’s debatable. They might just stay home.
+
+Then there’s the issue of fairness. The pact’s target, for one, insists it’s a ruse. He denounced it with his typical restraint.
+
+Kidding! Trump hit it so hard he brought back nicknames.
+
+“Lyin’ Ted Cruz and 1 for 38 Kasich are unable to beat me on their own so they have to team up (collusion) in a two on one. Shows weakness!” Trump tweeted on Monday.
+
+But you don’t have to be Trump to see the Cruz/Kasich pact as a bit unseemly. It’s a case of the second and third place competitors conspiring to use the rules to try and pull down the person in front.
+
+That leader is in front by a pretty fair margin, by the way – and it is Republican primary voters who put him there. If you see the nomination process as something that the voters should directly control, you might judge this wrong, or misdirected at the least.
+
+But here’s the thing: The nomination process is not the same as the general election. The organizations that set the process up – the two big parties that govern America – have a vested interest in selecting nominees they think best for the party as a whole. They’re private clubs, and they get to fiddle with the rules, move the goalposts, and otherwise mix all the metaphors they want. That’s why many primaries are closed to all but party members – independents and opposing party adherents need not apply.
+
+“Of course, candidates whom the party likes have advantages in winning party nominations. It isn’t unfair to Trump that the other candidates are trying to do the best they can under the well-established rules,” writes political scientist Jonathan Bernstein today in his Bloomberg View column.",REAL
+4480,Glenn Reynolds: Don't be a sucker for socialism,"From the USSR to Venezuela, experience reveals Sanders' policies wouldn't enrich anyone but a ruling elite.
+
+It is a common misconception that socialism is about helping poor people. Actually, what socialism does is create poor people, and keep them poor. And that’s not by accident.
+
+Under capitalism, rich people become powerful. But under socialism, powerful people become rich. When you look at a socialist country like Venezuela, you find that the rulers are fabulously wealthy even as the ordinary citizenry deals with empty supermarket shelves and electricity rationing.
+
+The daughter of Venezuela’s socialist ruler, Hugo Chavez, is the richest individual in Venezuela, worth billions of dollars, according to the Miami-based Diario Las América. In Cuba, Fidel Castro reportedly has lived — pretty much literally — like a king, even as his subjects dwelt in poverty. In the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as Hedrick Smith reported in his The Russians, the Communist Party big shots had lavish country houses and apartments in town stocked with hand-polished fresh fruit, even as the common people stood in line for hours at state-run stores in the hopes of getting staples.
+
+There’s always a lot of talk about free health care, but it’s generally substandard for the masses and fancy for the elite. (The average Cuban or Venezuelan peasant — or Soviet-era Russian — doesn’t get the kind of health care that people at the top get.)
+
+In the old Soviet Union, the new communist nobility, whose positions and influence seemed to run in families somehow, were called the Nomenklatura (from the Latin word for a list of names). Despite all the talk about equality, etc., they generally did a lot better than people who didn’t have the right connections. Dissident Milovan Djilas referred to these managers and apparatchiks (another Soviet-era word) as the “New Class.” Where socialist equality was supposed to eliminate the distinction between exploited workers and peasants and their capitalist exploiters, it instead produced a new distinction, between exploited workers and peasants and their “New Class” socialist oppressors.
+
+Well, this is old news: George Orwell explained the phenomenon in his Animal Farm many decades ago. But people keep falling for it: Like Ponzi schemes, socialism is an evergreen form of fraud, egged on by suckers eager to believe the lies hucksters tell them.
+
+Which brings me to Bernie Sanders. The Washington Post recently ran a piece originally entitled ""Bernie Sanders’ plans have surprisingly small benefits for America’s poorest people."" Among other things, it noted that “in general, though, Sanders’ health care plan would benefit affluent households more than it would poorer ones.”
+
+Likewise, a paper from the left-leaning Brookings Institution notes that the biggest beneficiaries of Bernie’s free-college proposal would be rich kids: ""Families from the top half of the income distribution would receive 24% more in dollar value from eliminating tuition than students from the lower half of the income distribution.”
+
+Well, America isn’t socialist — though, these days, we’re not really capitalist, either, if by capitalist you mean a free-market economy without much government direction — but we do have our own New Class. And those people tend to be Bernie supporters.
+
+America’s New Class isn’t the super rich (they tend to donate to Hillary Clinton); it's the upper-middle-class employees of non-profits, universities and government agencies. They benefit twice from the kinds of programs that Bernie supports: Often, they’re employed to administer them, or receive funds for providing services (think college administrators who, unsurprisingly, heavily support Bernie and Hillary), and then they also receive the benefits because their kids are more likely to go to college than, say, a Kroger cashier’s. (And if we ever wind up with government-run health care, ask yourself who’ll get the hip replacement first — a woman who works as a cashier at Kroger or a senior bureaucrat in the Department of Health and Human Services.)
+
+Higher up the political scale, of course, the powerful really do become rich: Bill and Hillary Clinton are likely worth about $45 million, paid a lot for boring speeches given to people who are really just buying influence. But at least in America, becoming powerful isn’t the only way to become rich. Under socialism, you’re either powerful, or you’re poor.
+
+But poverty isn’t a byproduct of socialism: It’s a requirement, as illustrated by Cato Institute analyst Juan Carlos Hidalgo's report concerning Venezuela:
+
+As the Rainmakers sang, back in the 1980s, “They’ll turn us all into beggars 'cause they’re easier to please.” That’s socialism in a nutshell. The “equality” talk? That’s just for the suckers. Don’t be a sucker.
+
+Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
+
+In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns, go to the Opinion front page and follow us on Twitter @USATOpinion.",REAL
+1041,Why the death of GOP 'loyalty pledge' matters,"Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich have all backed away from a pledge to support the Republican presidential nominee. The reasons go deeper than mere personal pique, to the soul of the party.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves as he walks onstage before speaking at a campaign event at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., on Wednesday, March 30.
+
+When Donald Trump signed a “loyalty pledge” with great fanfare last September promising to support the eventual Republican presidential nominee, few took him seriously.
+
+Because no one tells Mr. Trump what to do. He even said so at the time.
+
+Now Trump has formally rescinded his pledge, and the remaining GOP competitors – Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich – have come close, refusing to say whether they would honor their own loyalty pledges at a CNN town hall Tuesday night.
+
+In a way, the death of the pledge is merely symbolic. It’s already been clear for some time that the Grand Old Party is coming apart at the seams, with a presidential front-runner who barely adheres to Republican philosophy and yet commands a big, loyal following.
+
+But that symbolism is important. After all, what is the point of having a political party, if its members don’t intend to support one another?
+
+The unraveling of the pledge is “clarifying,” says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “It tells us how much these men can’t stand each other.”
+
+The reasons go deeper than mere personal pique. The end of the pledge speaks to the hollowness in the very soul of the Republican Party. A sizable slice of GOP voters are so fed up with business as usual they’re willing to take a chance on a political novice with some unorthodox views (for a Republican) and whom many women and minorities find offensive.
+
+The pledge’s demise is premised on the possibility of a Trump nomination. When asked about the pledge in the CNN town hall, Cruz said he was “not in the habit of supporting someone who attacks my wife and attacks my family.” Kasich also hedged: ""If the nominee is somebody that I think is really hurting the country, and dividing the country, I can't stand behind them, but we have a ways to go.""
+
+A logical answer might be for Cruz and Kasich to form a strategic alliance, in an effort to knock out Trump. But that’s not in the works. Each believes he should be the nominee, coming out of a contested convention. And they’re not a good fit stylistically or ideologically: Cruz is a hard-line conservative who does not brook compromise, while Kasich is more mainstream, with a history of working across the aisle.
+
+Taken as a group, the three remaining GOP candidates represent a microcosm of today’s fractious Republican Party – and given the underlying animosity, there’s little hope for comity.
+
+“This is a party that looks like it’s headed for a crackup,” says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “They’re not going to support one another, and if they issued a new pledge it wouldn’t mean anything.”
+
+“If Trump gets the nomination, millions of mainstream Republicans will not vote for him,” Professor Sabato adds. “If Cruz gets it, millions of Trump supporters will not vote for him.”
+
+Normally, loyalty pledges don’t even come up during presidential primaries. Loyalty is assumed, and a given. But this cycle isn’t normal. Trump’s incursion into the race brought the issue to the fore, amid speculation that he would run as an independent if he didn’t get the nomination - and didn’t feel the Republican National Committee was treating him “fairly.”
+
+Trump’s definition of “unfair” implies a scenario in which he goes into the convention with the most delegates (but not a majority) and does not win the nomination. That could happen. But whether Trump is willing to spend the money and mount the organization necessary to pull off a credible independent bid is an open question.
+
+So for now, it would appear, “loyalty” has given way to “every man for himself.” And it's the Republican Party that loses.",REAL
+1276,How Cruz rescued Carson,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+9065,Would A Trump Presidency Make SJWs EVEN MORE Aggressive–And Is Secession The Answer?,"November 7, 2016, 8:05 pm A+ | a- Warning   
+Writing at the Federalist , libertarian NeverTrumper Cathy Young [ ] makes a convincing case that the election of Donald Trump, the supposed anti-PC candidate, could actually lead to an intensification of PC culture. Young’s basic thesis is that, if someone as, umm, let’s say immoderate, as Trump could get elected President (in part as an anti-PC champion, no less), it would validate the PC belief that “crude xenophobia” and “toxic masculinity” really are pervasive problems. [ Why Electing Donald Trump Could Make Political Correctness Worse , November 7, 2016] And so the PC crowd would double-down even further. 
+I think this is a good analysis. Of course, Young’s implicit assumption is that increasing political polarization is a problem that can be solved, that a center-Right, classical liberal consensus is the goal. But the time for that has passed. So kudos to Young for identifying the problem, but we need a new solution—such as Michael Hart’s proposal for the peaceful secession of Red State America.",FAKE
+7925,FRENCH COLLEGE STUDENT came to America with her family nine years ago because Europe had become too dangerous to live in because of mass Muslim migration,"Bk November 7, 2016 @ 5:00 am 
+I have time thinking move city. Live in northern Spain and in recent years have been tens of thousands of Moroccans. Rape of young girls is now commonplace. The schools are filled with Muslim children, many veiled women, mosques everywhere and Maghrebi youths committing crimes. I want to go to a small traditional village where not see anything Islamic. jo503 November 7, 2016 @ 4:04 am 
+Poor girl… Having a trouble in her country and fleeing it for having a better life… And then we ask ourselves why Europe is falling down… People are scared being called racist so they shut up or leave… Poor little girl…",FAKE
+3603,Police Arrest 12 Suspected Of Helping Paris Gunmen,"PARIS, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Police arrested a dozen people suspected of helping the Islamist militant gunmen in last week's Paris killings, the city prosecutor's office said on Friday as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived for talks.
+
+The arrests came after Belgian police killed two men who fired on them during one of about a dozen raids on Thursday against an Islamist group and German police said they had arrested two people following a raid on 11 properties linked to radical Salafists.
+
+Centered on southern Paris suburbs including the Montrouge area where a young policewoman was killed in the attacks, the arrests were for suspected ""logistical support"" for the shootings, an official said.
+
+Seventeen victims and the three attackers died in three days of violence in Paris last week that began with an assault on the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
+
+Paris's Gare de l'Est train station was evacuated at 8:00 a.m. local time (0700 GMT) after an alert but reopened about an hour later, the SNCF state railway said, without giving further details.
+
+Kerry had said on Thursday that his visit to France was to give a ""big hug"" to Paris. Senior U.S. officials were absent from a commemoration march held in Paris on Sunday attended by dozens of world leaders. President Barack Obama's administration conceded that was an omission.
+
+""I think you know that you have the full and heartfelt condolences of the American people and I know you know that we share the pain and the horror of everything that you went through,"" Kerry told Hollande on Friday.
+
+""Together we need to find the right responses and this is the purpose of our meeting here today, beyond the friendship,"" he said.
+
+Investigators are still poring over the complex chain of events that led to three French nationals - two brothers with Algerian roots and a third of African extraction - perpetrating the worst attacks on French soil for decades.
+
+Belgian investigators said they are trying to establish if a man detained in the city of Charleroi on suspicion of arms trafficking had any links with Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris last week.
+
+His lawyer Michel Bouchat told French media the man was not an associate of Coulibaly and had merely sold him a car. The man in question already contacted police on Tuesday to say he had had contacts with Hayat Boumedienne, the partner of Coulibaly now believed to be in Syria. (Reporting by Arshad Mohammed, Nicolas Bertin and Chine Labbe; Writing by Andrew Callus; Editing by James Regan and Tom Heneghan)",REAL
+6971,Combat Obesity with a Balance of Omega-3 and Omega-6,"Combat Obesity with a Balance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 The balance helps control health Image Credits: Camilo Rueda López/Flickr . 
+To tackle growing obesity rates, diets need to include more omega-3 fatty acids and fewer omega-6s, according to a new report published in the online journal Open Heart. 
+The group of experts believe a better balance of omega-3 and -6 in the diet is a more effective way of improving health than current nutrition policies, which focus on calories and energy expenditure and have “failed miserably over the past 30 years,” say Dr. Artemis Simopoulos of the Center for Genetics, Nutrition, and Health, Washington DC, and Dr. James DiNicolantonio of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, Kansas. 
+But technological advances and modern farming methods have changed the omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio in the typical Western diet.",FAKE
+5930,What is the goal of the Progressive Movement: to gain power or to give it away?,"pirate clip art free printable | Illustration of Pirate Skull ...(image by ) The Pirate Party of Iceland, the one nation that jailed its crooked bankers, is poised to win the election, less than 4 years after forming.
+Their motto is: "" ""We are not here to gain power. We are here to distribute power."" 
+I think this formulation can serve the Progressive Movement in the US, as it approaches mainstream status and is the most popular political movement in the nation, with 67% approving of the term progressive, over 55% supporting Sanders, and a robust majority supporting progressive programs like gun and immigration reform, raising the minimum wage, etc. 
+And this formulation also deals with the issue of Bigness, which many think incompatible with democracy and human rights. What if the purpose of bigness (ie winning elections) is NOT to consolidate power in new hands but to change the system by using this status to distribute power. - Advertisement - 
+Progressives are commonly accused by the right of being for Big Government, for thinking that government power is the solution to all problems. This Pirate formulation disrupts that claim, by showing a way to use the consolidation of power in order not to create a stronger state but to redistribute power and thus lessen the power of the state and powerful corporations and other institutions, public and private. 
+This formulation comes out of the anarchist tradition of decentralized power. The Pirate party has allied libertarians of both the right and left to take power, in order to distribute it from the banks and their servants back to the people themselves. Anarchism, we understand, is self-government, which means decentralized power. - Advertisement - 
+The success of the Pirate party shows how anarchists and libertarians of all kinds can come together to form a coalition Big enough to win but committed to breaking up the concentration of power, mostly in the hands of the financial institutions and their corrupt public servants. 
+The way to get beyond the ""Iron Law of Oligarchy,"" which over 100 years ago German sociologist Robet Michels, which states "" states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies, thus making true democracy practically and theoretically impossible, especially in large groups and complex organizations."" is to use consolidation of power (bigness) in the service of decentralizing power, pushing it back to the people and smaller communities. 
+Therefore, the goal of Progressives is NOT to gain power that is the means: the goal is to replace the old hierarchical system with a system of decentralized power, a model of self-government.",FAKE
+376,US election 2016: Bernie Sanders' and Hillary Clinton's policies compared,"Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are in a pitched battle for the Democratic nomination, fighting for the hearts and minds of left-leaning voters across the US.
+
+But where do they stand on the issues? While the candidates often agree on substance if not style, here's a look at five areas where they differ - not just from each other, but from their presidential predecessors, as well.
+
+They will go up - but for whom?
+
+Bernie Sanders promises he will reduce income inequality through changes to US through tax policy. He has called for a 10% tax surcharge on billionaires, raising the top three tax brackets and creating a new top rate, boosting capital gains and estate taxes, extending Social Security taxes, going after income made abroad by US corporations, and creating a new 0.2% tax on all earners to fund a paid family leave programme.
+
+Hillary Clinton's tax plan is basically Sanders-lite. She wants a 4% surtax on income over $5 million, an increase in capital gains taxes, the closing of ""tax loopholes"" for the wealthy, taxing hedge fund managers' ""carried interest"" income at higher rates and increasing the estate tax rate.
+
+Bill Clinton also raised taxes on the wealthy - and caught considerable criticism from conservatives for doing so. He instituted two new high-level tax brackets, raised corporate taxes, and increased income subject to Medicare and Social Security levies. After Republicans took control of Congress two years into his administration, he signed legislation lowering the capital gains taxes. He also increased a tax credit for poorer workers.
+
+John F Kennedy was the original Democratic tax-cutter. He reduced the top rate in the US from 95% to 65% and the corporate tax rate from 52% to 47%. Today's conservatives love to quote his claim that a high tax rate ""siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power"".
+
+Pitching college education that's free or just affordable
+
+Bernie Sanders has set the bar when it comes to higher education policy in the modern Democratic Party, with his call for free college for all Americans funded by taxing Wall Street financial transactions. He points to the runaway costs of higher education as one of the driving forces behind growing income inequality in the US.
+
+Hillary Clinton supports a plan to make two-year community college free, but her higher education policies are more modest. She has called for lowering student loan interest rates, providing $17.5 billion to improve the quality of higher education and encouraging colleges to set affordable tuition rates that don't require student loans.
+
+Barack Obama signed legislation streamlining the student loan system, including provisions that allow the government to directly loan money to students rather than rely on for-profit middle-men. He has also proposed making the first two years of college free, with a programme modelled on a Tennessee system devised by the state's Republican governor.
+
+Lyndon Baines Johnson is the godfather of the modern Democratic Party's education policies. As president he spearheaded passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which increased federal funding for universities and provided low-interest student loans and grants for needy students. It was landmark legislation in its day - but now seems relatively modest.
+
+Mend it or end it - and start over from scratch.
+
+Barack Obama supported and signed legislation increasing government regulation of the health insurance industry and creating private insurance markets for individuals not covered by employer-provided insurance. The programme was based, in part, on Republican proposals from the 1990s and the system instituted in Massachusetts by then-Governor Mitt Romney.
+
+For Bernie Sanders, however, that particular half-loaf is far from enough. He wants to institute a single-payer government-run health insurance system fashioned on Medicare. He has also called for allowing the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies in order to lower prices and permitting Americans to import medication from Canada, where it is less expensive.
+
+Hillary Clinton has said Mr Sanders is advancing an unrealistic proposal that threatens hard-won healthcare reforms made during Mr Obama's tenure. Instead she wants to expand existing law to improve coverage for prescription drugs and allow the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical manufacturers for better prices.
+
+The former first lady does know a thing or two about how hard it is to get healthcare bills through Congress. In 1993 she was the driving force behind Bill Clinton's proposed legislation, which created a federal minimum-benefits healthcare package with limits on out-of-pocket expenses, all provided by regional healthcare alliances. That effort went down in flames before it even came to a vote in Congress.
+
+The one place where Clinton comes at Sanders from the left
+
+Hillary Clinton is the first prominent Democratic presidential candidate to openly run on a gun-control platform since Al Gore's losing campaign in 2000. She supports holding gun manufacturers liable for deaths caused by their products, expanding background checks and prohibiting those on no-fly list from purchasing firearms. She has also supported reinstating the ban on semi-automatic ""assault"" rifles.
+
+Bernie Sanders, a senator from the rural state of Vermont, has a more moderate position on guns - although he has moved to the left over the course of the campaign. He supports expanded background checks on gun purchases and an assault weapons ban, but opposes holding gun manufacturers liable for deaths. He voted against a gun purchase waiting period multiple times in the early 1990s and for allowing guns in national parks.
+
+Barack Obama shied away from campaigning on gun control in his two presidential campaigns, but the murder of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 convinced him to act. He has since called for an assault weapons ban and expanded background checks. He has taken unilateral executive action to increase enforcement of laws against gun trafficking and broadening the scope of federal regulation of firearm transactions.
+
+Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the first serious effort at gun control by a Democratic president to date and his call in 1934 to create a national firearm registry and institute a federal tax on all gun purchases. No major Democratic officeholder would even consider broaching such a proposal today. It wouldn't just be dead on arrival in Congress, for many politicians it would be political suicide.
+
+Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, was one of the more hawkish members of Mr Obama's cabinet. It's no surprise then that as a presidential candidate she is well to the right of Mr Sanders and even Mr Obama. She has called for greater US involvement in the Syrian civil war, including enforcing a no-fly zone, and supports a continued US military presence in Afghanistan.
+
+Bernie Sanders generally agrees with Barack Obama's foreign policies - limited involvement in Syria and an emphasis on working with US allies. He contrasts himself with Mrs Clinton by noting the past US military action that she supported and he opposed - in Libya and Iraq. He supports a full US withdrawal from Afghanistan and no US training of rebels in the Syrian civil war.
+
+John F Kennedy's foreign policy as president, compared to the current crop of Democratic politicians, seems downright bellicose. He was an interventionist at heart, authorising the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, taking a hard line against Soviet expansion in the Western hemisphere and initiating US involvement in Vietnam.",REAL
+3504,"Trump, Clinton trade blows on terror and guns in wake of Orlando attack","While investigators try to piece together what led the Orlando gunman to carry out an unspeakable act of terror, the attack is upending the 2016 campaign debate as the two presumptive rivals go toe-to-toe on terror with two very different messages.
+
+In back-to-back speeches Monday, Donald Trump doubled down on his call for a Muslim immigration ban while decrying what he described as a ""deadly ignorance"" that is hurting the country -- and Hillary Clinton renewed her call for an assault-weapons ban while vowing to stop ""lone wolf"" terrorists.
+
+Trump, speaking in New Hampshire, focused largely on his plans for an immigration crackdown. Trump said he wants to ""suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism"" against the U.S. or its allies.
+
+“We have no choice,” Trump said of the proposed ban. It wasn't immediately clear whether Trump was revising his long-standing proposal to temporarily bar foreign Muslims entering the U.S., which he also defended, or referring to the same plan.
+
+The New York businessman also called the Orlando shooting “an assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want and express their identity.”
+
+“It we don’t get tough, and we don’t get smart – and fast – we’re not going to have a country anymore – there will be nothing left,” Trump said.
+
+Trump, speaking at St. Anselm College, was quick to slam his Democratic rival, claiming she “is in total denial” and that her ultimate plan is to “disarm law-abiding Americans” while admitting immigrants who could pose a threat.
+
+A few hours earlier at her speech in Ohio, Clinton called for an ""intelligence surge"" and a ban on assault weapons as part of a multi-pronged strategy to confront homegrown terrorism.
+
+The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, following the Orlando terror attack, called on Americans to fight terrorism at home with “clear eyes” and “steady hands.” She delivered a carefully calibrated message, calling for America to get tougher on terrorists while also renewing gun control proposals that have failed to gain steam in Congress.
+
+At the Cleveland campaign event, she drew cheers from the crowd after calling for a ban on assault weapons.
+
+“Weapons of war have no place on our streets,” Clinton said.
+
+Clinton also said if she were in the White House, a top priority would be “identifying and stopping lone wolves,” like the Orlando shooter.
+
+She also called for increased efforts to remove Islamic State messages from the Internet and said “peace-loving Muslims are in the best position to help fight radicalization.”
+
+Trump’s speech was originally supposed to focus on his case against the Clintons – but Trump changed his focus following the attack in Orlando that left 49 people dead and dozens injured. The gunman died in a shootout with police.
+
+On Monday, President Obama said investigators believe the gunman was not directed by external extremist groups, instead saying the shooter “was inspired by various extremist information that was disseminated over the Internet.”
+
+He added that there is “no direct evidence” the shooter “was part of a larger plot.”
+
+Clinton warned earlier Monday against demonizing an entire religion, saying doing so would play into the hands of the Islamic State group.
+
+""We can call it radical jihadism, we can call it radical Islamism,"" Clinton said on CNN's ""New Day."" ""But we also want to reach out to the vast majority of American-Muslims and Muslims around this country, this world, to help us defeat this threat, which is so evil and has got to be denounced by everyone, regardless of religion.""
+
+The horrific shooting consumed the White House race just as Trump and Clinton were fully plunging into the general election. It served as a reminder to the candidates and voters alike that the next president will lead a nation facing unresolved questions about how to handle threats that can feel both foreign and all too familiar.
+
+Trump said Monday he was revoking the press credentials of the Washington Post after the newspaper published an article with a headline ""Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting.""
+
+""Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign, we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post,"" Trump posted on his Facebook page.
+
+Authorities identified the killer in Orlando as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American-born Muslim. FBI officials said they had investigated him in 2013 and 2014 on suspicion of terrorist sympathies but could not make a case against him.
+
+Mateen opened fire at the Pulse Orlando club with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. He called 911 during the attack to profess his allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist organization though it was unclear whether he had any direct contact with ISIS or was just inspired by them.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9483,What's wrong with the planet? Saudi Arabia to be reelected to UN Human Rights Council,"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 21:49 UTC © Naif Rahma / Reuters As the death toll in Yemen surpasses 10,000, Saudi Arabia, one of the principal parties in the conflict, is poised to be reelected to the UN human rights body. Saudi airstrikes are responsible for the majority of the nearly 4,000 civilian deaths in Yemen. A secret ballot vote at the UN General Assembly on Friday will select the 14 members of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), or a third of its 47 members. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, China, and Japan are running for the four seats from the Asia-Pacific region, and are all expected to secure seats. Riyadh's term at the UNHRC would be the third in a row, and its presence at the body has been increasingly puzzling to human rights groups, given its record of twisting arms at the UN to hush up its rights abuses. In June, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon publicly admitted that Saudi Arabia threatened to withdraw funding from numerous programs due to an upcoming report on violations of children's rights. The report would list the Arab kingdom among violators over the toll its military campaign and blockade of Yemen has taken on children. The threat resulted in Saudi Arabia's removal from the blacklist, even though Riyadh's tactics had been exposed. ""The report describes horrors no child should have to face,"" Ban Ki-moon told reporters at the time. ""At the same time, I also had to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would defund many UN programs."" ""It is unacceptable for UN member states to exert undue pressure,"" the secretary-general added, pledging to review the removal of the Saudis from the list. This incident of Saudi Arabia working against UN human rights efforts is far from being isolated. In Yemen, the kingdom used control of air traffic to prevent foreign journalists, employees of international aid organizations, and UN officials from visiting the war-torn country and reporting on the situation there. In September, it used diplomatic pressure against the Netherlands after it introduced a resolution at the UNHRC that would launch an independent investigation into airstrikes on Yemen. The Dutch proposal failed and an Arab version was passed, one which entrusted the probe to the exiled Yemeni government, which the Saudis want to put back into power through its military actions. Domestically, Riyadh's policies often run against those of the UN human rights body. Seven petitions to allow special rapporteurs for the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights to investigate abuses in Saudi Arabia remain pending , some for over a decade. The kingdom was also reported to persecute its own subjects who cooperate with UN investigations. For instance, human rights defender Mohammed al-Qahtani, who contributed to several UNHRC reports, was accused of things like ""distorting the reputation of the country"" and ""provoking international organizations to adopt stances against the kingdom."" He is currently serving a lengthy prison term. While far from being the only authoritarian regime with a seat at the UNHRC, Saudi Arabia maintains some of the most restrictive domestic policies. Homosexuality and conversion from Islam to another religion are punishable by death. Sentences include corporal punishment, as highlighted by the case of blogger Raif Badawi who is to be flogged 1,000 times while serving a 10-year sentence for ""insulting Islam."" Saudi Arabia is also one of the world's most enthusiastic executors. The number of beheadings spiked under King Salman with 157 executions reported in 2015, and 124 between January and September 2016. Comment: Once again it seems to be all about the money Saudi Arabia brings to the UN, kind of like 'hush money'.",FAKE
+242,Clinton defends role over Benghazi in heated Hill hearing,"Hillary Clinton defended herself Thursday against accusations she was out of touch as the situation in Benghazi spiraled out of control before the 2012 terror attack, at a long-awaited congressional hearing where Republicans grilled the former secretary of state for 11 hours over her role.
+
+While the day-long hearing spanned everything from the initial decision to intervene in Libya to Clinton's public explanation of the Benghazi attack, a central GOP allegation was that Clinton paid more attention to emails from friend Sidney Blumenthal than pleas from murdered diplomat Chris Stevens to increase security in the face of growing threats. But, even as Clinton said she ""took responsibility,"" she accepted little blame for the denial of security requests before the attack, or for the faulty narrative about an anti-Islam video that formed after.
+
+Clinton testified to the Benghazi committee that the security requests were handled by security professionals in the department and not her.
+
+""I did not see them. I did not approve them. I did not deny them,"" she said, while saying she was aware of the risks on the ground.
+
+Clinton insisted Blumenthal, whose frequent messages to her turned up in recently released emails, was not a primary source of information or even technically ""advising"" her.
+
+But when she questioned what the emails have to do with the tragedy, committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., contrasted the frequent and direct communication with Blumenthal against Stevens' struggle to get help.
+
+""I think it is eminently fair to ask why Sidney Blumethal had unfettered access to you, Madam Secretary ... and there's not a single solitary email to or from you, to or from Ambassador Stevens,"" he said.
+
+Clinton earlier admitted that Stevens did not even have her personal email, while also claiming she didn't have a computer in her office.
+
+""I do not believe that he had my personal email,"" Clinton said, before adding that Stevens had a ""direct line"" to others.
+
+Clinton acknowledged some of his requests were approved, and others were not. But she said Stevens emailed regularly with her close aides and ""did not raise security with the members of my staff.""
+
+The exhaustive hearing, which featured not only tough questioning of Clinton but frequent infighting between Republican and Democratic committee members, came as the former State Department leader tries to reclaim momentum in the Democratic presidential race. On Capitol Hill, she tried to settle lingering questions on her role surrounding the 2012 attacks.
+
+Republicans suggested the investigation, though, is far from over.
+
+In a tense exchange, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, grilled Clinton on why the administration initially seemed to blame protests over an anti-Islam film.
+
+""Where'd the false narrative start? It started with you, Madam Secretary,"" he charged, pointing to a State Department statement that night saying some were using the video to justify violence. Jordan said she later told the Egyptian prime minister they knew the attack was ""planned"" and had ""nothing to do with the film."" He alleged she didn't tell the American people the ""truth.""
+
+But Clinton responded, ""There is no doubt in my mind that we did the best we could with the information we had at the time.""
+
+She said they were dealing with ""fluid"" and ""fast-moving"" and ""conflicting"" information, and stressed that the night of the attack, she only said some ""sought to justify"" the attack with the video. She said there were probably many motivations. And while former top intelligence officials have indicated they knew the attack was terrorism from the start, Clinton seemed to suggest it was the intelligence community guiding the public narrative.
+
+""The intelligence community did the best job they could,"" she testified.
+
+At other times in the hearing, Clinton said Stevens had volunteered for the mission itself and said that while the risk in the region was known, ""there was no credible actionable threat known by our intelligence community against our compound."" Clinton at times also tried to rebuff tough questioning by suggesting American agents should not be disparaged, though lawmakers did not appear to imply this.
+
+In another tense exchange later in the evening, Rep. Susan Brooks, R-Ind., questioned if Clinton had a personal conversation with Stevens after he was sworn in that May.
+
+When Clinton initially responded ""I believe I did,"" Brooks pressed her further, saying there were no call logs or record she spoke with Stevens directly. Clinton responded again she believed she did have a conversation with Stevens before his was killed.
+
+Generally, Clinton and Democrats on the committee argued that the attack has already been thoroughly investigated, by the Accountability Review Board and other congressional panels. Democrats accused Republicans of leading a partisan hunt against Clinton to damage her presidential candidacy.
+
+Indeed, the hearing comes at a critical time for Clinton. Following a strong debate performance last week, Clinton on Wednesday also saw the man who may have represented the biggest primary threat to her candidacy, Vice President Biden, opt out of running.
+
+Yet questions about her personal email use and her actions relating to the Benghazi attack loom over her run.
+
+Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the committee's top Democrat, said the panel was only formed because Republicans ""did not like the answers"" from prior investigations. So, he said, they established the committee and ""set them loose, Madam Secretary, because you're running for president."" Cummings called it an ""abusive effort to derail"" her campaign.
+
+But Gowdy denied this. Of allegations that the investigation is all about Clinton, Gowdy said Thursday, ""Let me assure you it is not.""
+
+The former State Department leader meanwhile tried to downplay questions about what her emails did and did not show by claiming much of her work was done over phone, in person and other ways.
+
+She said she mostly did not work over email, and said she did not have a computer in her office while secretary of state.
+
+""I didn't conduct the business that I did primarily on email,"" she said, adding that she generally did not email during the day.
+
+Despite these claims, investigators are looking into a number of work-related emails Clinton sent at the department and whether they contained classified material. The emails came up under questioning from Brooks, R-Ind., who asked why so few of her emails addressed Libya in the lead-up to the attack.
+
+At the hearing, Clinton also was challenged over her advocacy for military intervention in Libya, with a GOP member describing her as the ""architect"" of a policy that has led to ""disaster.""
+
+Clinton defended her role, saying she pushed for intervention to prevent ""mass massacres,"" but stressing that President Obama made the final call to use U.S. military force.
+
+She also told the committee the night of the Benghazi attack, she only had one call with President Obama. There were no meetings or calls with then-CIA director Leon Panetta or Gen. Martin Dempsey, according to Clinton, even though she said they were ""the decision makers"" who could have sent in U.S. military forces.
+
+Clinton added that she did not talk to the survivors of the attack until they had been debriefed, and after they arrived back in U.S.
+
+""Our Libya policy couldn't have happened without you, because you were its chief architect,"" Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., told her, adding: ""Things in Libya today are a disaster.""
+
+Clinton said she does not ""subscribe"" to that view.
+
+Gowdy, in explaining the purpose of the hearing, said they owe the ""truth"" about what happened to the victims of the 2012 terror attack.
+
+""They were more than four images on a television screen.... They were Americans who believed in service and sacrifice,"" Gowdy, R-S.C., said.
+
+For that sacrifice, Gowdy said, ""We owe them and each other the truth."" He said he wants a ""final definitive accounting"" of what happened.
+
+Gowdy said that includes answers over what the U.S. was doing in Libya, what happened to requests for additional security and what the government told the public after the attacks.
+
+In her opening statement, Clinton said she was there to ""honor the service"" of the four men who died. She argued that America ""must lead in a dangerous world"" and said it would ""compound the tragedy"" for America to ""retreat from the world.""",REAL
+3384,Many Clinton charity donors also got State Department awards under Hillary,"Twenty-two of the 37 corporations nominated for a prestigious State Department award — and six of the eight ultimate winners — while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State were also donors to the Clinton family foundation.
+
+The published donor records of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation don't give exact dates or amounts of its contributors, but it is possible to create a general timeline for when many of the corporations donated and when they were either nominated or selected for the award.
+
+Silicon Valley giant Cisco was the biggest foundation contributor nominated in 2009, giving the Clinton charity between $1 million and $5 million. The company then won the award in 2010 when eight of the 12 finalists and two of the three winners had donated to the foundation.
+
+The other Clinton contributor to win that year, candy-maker Mars, Inc., had given between $25,000 and $50,000. Coca-Cola was the most generous foundation donor to be honored as a finalist in 2010, giving a $5-10 million donation.",REAL
+1741,Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders = lecture vs. rock concert,"That's one way to quickly characterize the difference between a campaign stop for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
+
+When Democrats visit political events for these two presidential candidates, it's a markedly different experience.
+
+For months, crowds have been a central part of the Sanders strategy, a critical ingredient in how he has overtaken Clinton in early New Hampshire polls, come within striking distance in Iowa, and has raised nearly as much money. The idea behind the big rallies -- in college towns and elsewhere across the country -- was hatched by his small team of advisers to elevate Sanders, surrounding him with tens of thousands of people.
+
+For Clinton, the calculation has been different. Democrats have already seen her on the big stage, so the decision was made to intentionally make her events small, so she could build a more direction connection with voters.
+
+She holds far more holds far more question-and-answer sessions with voters than big speeches, allowing her to demonstrate her wide-ranging knowledge and readiness to be president. But lost along the way has been some of the outward enthusiasm for her candidacy. Crowds can be like campaign yard signs: Reading too much into the size is fraught with peril. The only number that counts, of course, is on Election Day. But until then, Sanders is filling the stadiums.",REAL
+2668,Even Gawker haters should fear the strategy Peter Thiel is using to destroy Gawker,"This week we learned that billionaire Peter Thiel, who made his fortune as a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, has been bankrolling a lawsuit that could drive Gawker Media out of business. The story was first reported by Forbes and confirmed by Thiel himself in a Wednesday interview with the New York Times.
+
+""It’s not like it is some sort of speaking truth to power or something going on here,"" Thiel argued. ""The way I’ve thought about this is that Gawker has been a singularly terrible bully. I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations.""
+
+Thiel, in other words, sees his lawsuit as a public-spirited attempt to enforce norms of decency and respect for personal privacy.
+
+But whatever you think of the merits of the particular lawsuit against Gawker, critics warn that this kind of arrangement — where a wealthy person funds third-party lawsuits against a common foe — is ripe for abuse.
+
+""The law used to disapprove of this kind of arrangement,"" says Walter Olson, a legal expert at the Cato Institute. For centuries, he argues, courts in the United Kingdom, United States, and elsewhere recognized that wealthy people could use third-party lawsuits as a weapon against those they disliked — and had rules in place to prevent this power from being abused.
+
+But laws limiting this kind of third-party involvement have fallen out of favor in recent decades, opening the door for billionaires like Thiel to use their vast resources to wage war on people they don't like.
+
+In 2012, Gawker published a video of former professional wrestler Terry ""Hulk Hogan"" Bollea having sex. Hogan said the video was taken without his knowledge or consent, and he sued Gawker for invasion of privacy.
+
+In March 2016, a jury awarded Hogan $140 million in damages. The ruling is still being appealed, but if it's upheld it could put Gawker Media — which publishes sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo in addition to Gawker itself — out of business.
+
+The First Amendment gives American media organizations greater latitude than they enjoy in most other developed countries. But US media organizations don't have unlimited freedom. One of the key constraints is personal privacy. Revealing certain kinds of information — especially about people who are not public figures — can get a media organization trouble.
+
+And Gawker exercises this freedom more aggressively than most other media organizations. In one of its most infamous stories, Gawker reported on a New York media executive soliciting the services of a male escort. The piece was later removed after founder Nick Denton decided that the story had gone over the ethical line.
+
+Outing gay people is something of a specialty for the digital gossip rag. Gawker was one of the first to report that CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was gay in 2009. In 2013, Gawker reported that Fox News anchor Shepard Smith was romantically involved with a male staffer.
+
+And one of the early targets of Gawker's outing campaign was Peter Thiel. A 2007 post called ""Peter Thiel is totally gay, people"" apparently marked the start of Thiel's vendetta against the site. ""It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,"" Thiel told the Times on Wednesday, indicating he viewed his funding of lawsuits as bigger than just its previous posts about him.
+
+Still, the Hogan video represented a new low for Gawker. The video of Hogan having consensual sex with the wife of a radio shock jock (who arranged the encounter and made the videotape) had no obvious news value, but Gawker decided to publish it anyway.
+
+In court, Hulk Hogan's lawyers sought to portray Gawker as an organization without a moral compass. It wasn't a hard argument to make. At one point, one of Hogan's lawyers asked a former Gawker editor if there were any situation in which a celebrity sex tape would not be newsworthy.
+
+""If they were a child,"" replied the editor, Albert Daulerio. ""Under what age?"" the lawyer asked.
+
+As a result, arguments about media freedom fell on deaf ears in the jury box. Jurors didn't buy arguments that the First Amendment protected Gawker's right to humiliate random celebrities by publishing video of their most intimate moments.
+
+Even if you think Gawker stepped over the line in publishing the Hogan sex tape — and personally I do — there's still a lot of reason to worry about the prospect of wealthy people using lawsuits as a weapon against people they don't like.
+
+Gawker isn't the only publication to be targeted by a disgruntled billionaire. Last year, the liberal magazine Mother Jones defeated a defamation lawsuit filed by Republican donor Frank VanderSloot. Winning the lawsuit cost Mother Jones, a relatively small nonprofit organization, and its insurance company $2.5 million in legal fees.
+
+If VanderSloot's goal was to punish Mother Jones for writing an accurate but unflattering story about him, a loss was almost as good as a victory. His lawsuit sought $74,999 (staying just under the $75,000 threshold that would have allowed Mother Jones to move the case to federal court and away from an Idaho jury that might have favored the hometown plaintiff). So ""winning"" the lawsuit cost Mother Jones 30 times as much as the amount it would have had to pay if it had lost.
+
+What was really ominous was what happened after VanderSloot's loss. He ""announced that he was setting up a $1 million fund to pay the legal expenses of people wanting to sue Mother Jones or other members of the 'liberal press.'""
+
+As far as I know, no one has taken him up on the offer. But the threat to freedom of the press is obvious. Any news organization doing its job is going to make some enemies. If a wealthy third party is willing to bankroll lawsuits by anyone with a grudge, and defending each case costs millions of dollars, the organization could get driven out of business even if it wins every single lawsuit.
+
+That appears to be the situation Gawker is in. The Hogan lawsuit is not the only lawsuit Gawker is facing. Hogan's attorney, Charles Harder, is also leading two other lawsuits against Gawker. We don't know for sure which lawsuits Thiel is funding, but ultimately it may not matter. If Thiel keeps paying for people to sue Gawker, sooner or later the legal costs will drive Gawker out of business.
+
+""Some people following the Thiel story appear to be surprised that these weapons can be used by rich and powerful people in order to get their way,"" Olson tells me. But he argues that they shouldn't be.
+
+Olson argues that if you went back a century or two and talked to British or American legal scholars, ""they'd say of course these things would be used by the rich and powerful if you allowed them."" Under doctrines called champerty and maintenance, the law used to bar unrelated third parties from paying someone else to engage in litigation and financing a lawsuit in exchange for a share of the damages.
+
+But states have loosened these laws over the past 50 years, in part because lawyers began to see easy access to the courts as being in the public interest. This was driven in part by the rise of public interest litigation — think, for example, of an environmental group finding a third-party plaintiff to sue a company to stop an environmentally sensitive development project.
+
+""Awards are constantly being given to projects in which some wealthy person decides that someone needs to be sued, finds someone who has standing as a plaintiff, and generously funds their litigation,"" Olson says.
+
+But whether you view this kind of litigation as public-spirited or vexatious will often depend on your politics. After all, Thiel portrays his campaign against Gawker as a kind of public interest litigation.
+
+""I can defend myself,"" Thiel told the Times on Wednesday. ""Most of the people they attack are not people in my category. They usually attack less prominent, far less wealthy people that simply can’t defend themselves."" Thiel added that ""even someone like Terry Bollea who is a millionaire and famous and a successful person didn’t quite have the resources to do this alone.""
+
+""I don’t expect to make any money from this,"" Thiel added. ""This is not a business venture.""
+
+Whether or not you find Thiel's specific complaints about Gawker persuasive, the larger problem is that this kind of tactic systematically shifts power from the media to wealthy people. Wealthy people can use this kind of third-party lawsuit to inflict harm on publications that anger them whether or not their lawsuits ultimate prove meritorious. And that, in turn, will put pressure on publications to tread lightly when reporting on wealthy people.
+
+Update: I changed the section on Mother Jones to make clear that the $2.5 million cost of the lawsuit was born by Mother Jones's insurance company as well as Mother Jones itself.",REAL
+593,Gun control becomes a litmus test in Democratic primaries,The move would make it easier for the Trump administration to demolish the exchanges.,REAL
+2373,ATF misfire? Guide indicates bullets at center of firestorm already banned; agency blames 'error',"It looked like the fix was in. But the ATF says it was just a misfire.
+
+As the ATF faces a firestorm of controversy for seeking public comment on a proposal to ban a popular type of bullet, critics last week claimed the agency may have decided in advance how it would rule.
+
+They pointed to the ATF's latest ""Firearms Regulation Reference Guide,"" released in January 2015. The guide, curiously, did not contain an exemption for popular "".223 M855 'green tip' ammunition"" that was included in earlier guides. Without that exemption, the ammunition is illegal to sell. (The change in language was first noticed by Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich at Townhall.com.)
+
+So did the ATF already make up its mind?
+
+No, the agency claims. The ATF has responded that the reference guide is not legally binding, so the bullets have not actually been banned yet, and has apologized for leaving the exemptions out of the guide. They say it was an innocent mistake. And the proposed ban is apparently still under consideration.
+
+""[It] was an error which has no legal impact on the validity of the exemptions,"" ATF public affairs chief Ginger Colbrun told FoxNews.com in an emailed statement, adding that it will be corrected soon.
+
+""The 2014 Regulation Guide will be corrected in PDF format to include the listing of armor piercing ammunition exemptions and posted shortly...  ATF apologizes for any confusion caused by this publishing error.""
+
+As of Monday, the 2014 guide with the error was no longer available on the ATF website.
+
+Case closed? Perhaps. Gun-rights supporters say that such errors are common for the ATF -- but that it could also have been a tip-of-the-hand that the administration already had reached a decision on banning the bullets.
+
+""This is either real incompetence or ATF got caught with their pants down. With this administration it could be both,"" Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation told FoxNews.com.
+
+The controversy comes on the heels of a letter from a hundreds of lawmakers urging the ATF not to ban the popular ammunition, which is the focus of regulatory efforts because it can pierce bulletproof vests used by law enforcement.
+
+These lawmakers say the regulation would interfere with Americans' Second Amendment rights.
+
+""This attack on the Second Amendment is wrong and should be overturned,"" Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., who started the petition, said in a statement to FoxNews.com. ""Now 239 bipartisan Members of Congress -- a clear, sizeable majority of the House -- agree,"" he noted.
+
+Although the ATF previously approved the bullets in 1986, the agency now says that because handguns have been designed that can also fire the bullets, police officers are more likely to encounter them.
+
+White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest backed up the agency's proposal at a press conference last Monday.
+
+""We are looking at additional ways to protect our brave men and women in law enforcement... This seems to be an area where everyone should agree that if there are armor-piercing bullets available that can fit into easily concealed weapons, that it puts our law enforcement at considerably more risk,"" Earnest said.
+
+But gun-rights groups such as the National Rifle Association note that almost all rifle bullets can pierce armor, and say that this is just an excuse for limiting civilian gun use.
+
+""The claim that this is done out of a concern for law enforcement safety is a lie. The director of the Fraternal Order of Police has said this is not an issue of concern. And according to the FBI, not one single law enforcement officer has been killed with M855 ammunition fired from a handgun,"" Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, told FoxNews.com.
+
+Some law enforcement groups reached by FoxNews.com also say that they see no need for the regulation.
+
+""The notion that all of a sudden a new pistol requires banning what had long been perfectly legal ammunition doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to many officers,"" William Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, told FoxNews.com.
+
+NAPO represents over 1,000 police units and associations and 241,000 law enforcement officers around the country.
+
+But some law enforcement experts support the ban.
+
+""I am definitely for the banning of these rounds... officers worry about them all the time,"" former NYPD detective Harry Houck told FoxNews.com, though he added that a ban might not actually keep criminals from getting the ammunition.
+
+""We understand why law enforcement has always been concerned about the threat of armor-piercing bullets,"" Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, told FoxNews.com.
+
+Lawmakers warn that the regulation -- especially as it follows on the heels of attempts to restrict lead bullets -- will ""result in drastically reduced options for lawful ammunition users."" Already, the ammunition has been cleared from many store shelves by gun owners looking to stock up in anticipation of the ban. The proposed regulation would not prohibit owning the bullets, but it would stop anyone from manufacturing or importing them.
+
+The ATF has announced that it is currently taking public comments on the regulation until March 16, when it will prepare to issue a final regulation. Comments can be sent to APAComments@atf.gov.
+
+The author, Maxim Lott, can be reached on Facebook or at maxim.lott@foxnews.com",REAL
+8285,America’s Most Popular ‘Legal’ Drug is Responsible for 25% of ALL Cancer,"Home / Health / America’s Most Popular ‘Legal’ Drug is Responsible for 25% of ALL Cancer America’s Most Popular ‘Legal’ Drug is Responsible for 25% of ALL Cancer John Vibes October 29, 2016 Leave a comment 
+There are many factors contributing to the massive rise in cancer cases in the US, but according to a new study from the American Cancer Society, cigarette smoke is by far the leading cause. The study found that roughly 25% of all cancer deaths could be attributed to cigarette smoking. 
+Although cigarette smoking has waned somewhat in recent years, nearly 40 million adults in the U.S. currently smoke cigarettes. The CDC says cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the U.S., responsible for more than 480,000 deaths annually. 
+According to the study : 
+We estimate that at least 167 133 cancer deaths in the United States in 2014 (28.6% of all cancer deaths; 95% CI, 28.2%-28.8%) were attributable to cigarette smoking. Among men, the proportion of cancer deaths attributable to smoking ranged from a low of 21.8% in Utah (95% CI, 19.9%-23.5%) to a high of 39.5% in Arkansas (95% CI, 36.9%-41.7%), but was at least 30% in every state except Utah. Among women, the proportion ranged from 11.1% in Utah (95% CI, 9.6%-12.3%) to 29.0% in Kentucky (95% CI, 27.2%-30.7%) and was at least 20% in all states except Utah, California, and Hawaii. Nine of the top 10 ranked states for men and 6 of the top 10 ranked states for women were located in the South. In men, smoking explained nearly 40% of cancer deaths in the top 5 ranked states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky). In women, smoking explained more than 26% of all cancer deaths in the top 5 ranked states, which included 3 Southern states (Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee), and 2 Western states (Alaska and Nevada). 
+Smoking is one of the leading causes of illness and death in the world. The use of tobacco has become more widespread than ever and the substance itself is far more dangerous than it has ever been before. 
+Today, cigarettes are mass produced and treated with thousands of additives and chemicals. Carcinogenic, poisonous chemicals and toxic metals can all be found in modern tobacco products. These chemicals are present for many reasons ranging from taste and preservation to being purposely addictive. There are over 4000 of these chemicals in cigarettes and all of them are not revealed to the public. They are protected under law as “trade secrets” — meaning they can add anything they want in there without our knowledge. 
+The financial advantage alone should be enough of an argument to quit smoking. In most states, cigarettes are now over 6 dollars a pack, more than half of which is taxes. So people are literally paying the government and rich multinational corporations an average of 10 dollars every day, for a product that destroys their bodies. It is true that there are addictive chemicals in cigarettes but their strength and power has been blown way out of proportion. 
+The psychological addiction is always much stronger than the physical addiction even with harsh narcotics like heroin and especially with nicotine. All you have to do is stop and get through a few days without it. Soon enough the smell and taste will no longer be desirable to you and you will be happy to have that extra 6 dollars a pack in your pocket. It will be easier to breathe, you won’t get sick as often and you will overall be in better spirits. Quitting cigarettes is one decision that you can make that will drastically improve your life in a number of ways and it will give the elite less control of your money and your health. John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. John is currently battling cancer naturally , without any chemo or radiation, and will be working to help others through his experience, if you wish to contribute to his treatments please donate here . Share",FAKE
+10261,Stationing American troops in Japan will lead to bloody tragedy – ex-PM of Japan,"41   Shoina is a village drowned up to the waist in sand. Its denizens are quite fatalistic about it, and their only means of protection is leaving their door open for the night, as they can never be sure if they can open it in the morning. The village of Shoina is situated beyond the Arctic Circle, 1,400 kilometers north of Moscow. This tiny settlement is known for its sands, which appeared here over 50 years ago and have been waging a relentless offensive against humans ever since, depriving them of living space. How did they appear, and where else in Russia can you find unusual places like this? Solve the mystery, on RTDoc. SUBSCRIBE TO RTD Channel to get documentaries firsthand! http://bit.ly/1MgFbVy FOLLOW US RTD WEBSITE: http://RTD.rt.com/ RTD ON TWITTER: http://twitter.com/RT_DOC RTD ON FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/RTDocumentary RTD ON DAILYMOTION http://www.dailymotion.com/rt_doc RTD ON INSTAGRAM http://instagram.com/rt_documentary/ RTD LIVE http://rtd.rt.com/on-air/  ",FAKE
+8842,Deterioration of Interracial Relations During Barack Obama’s Presidency,"Syrian War Report – October 27, 2016: Russian Strikes Destroyed Over 300 Terrorists’ Oil Facilities ‹ › South Front Analysis & Intelligence is a public analytical project maintained by an independent team of experts from the four corners of the Earth focusing on international relations issues and crises. They focus on analysis and intelligence of the ongoing crises and the biggest stories from around the world: Ukraine, the war in Middle East, Central Asia issues, protest movements in the Balkans, migration crises, and others. In addition, they provide military operations analysis, the military posture of major world powers, and other important data influencing the growth of tensions between countries and nations. We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by governments and mainstream media. Deterioration of Interracial Relations During Barack Obama’s Presidency By South Front on October 27, 2016 …from SouthFront 
+Inter-racial conflict in the US continues to escalate despite the fact that a black president has been leading the country for 8 years. All of the various ethnic groups that comprise American society, hoped that Barack Obama would be able to “sew” together the fabric of a nation torn by racial and social divisions, but racism is still on the rise. This poses a significant threat to US homeland security. Government institutions and big business continue to be controlled by the white elites and the perilous social situation of ethnic minorities continues to be accompanied by an increase in crime. This causes growing racial intolerance at all levels. People are frustrated by the lack of change in inter-racial relations, which has led to a new round of racial violence. 
+The most striking example of the exacerbation of racial conflict is the situation prevailing around so-called police violence. Every case of the killing of an unarmed African American in recent years becomes an occasion for demonstrations, which very often degenerate into riots. The new mass protest movements are thriving and growing in influence, aided by social media. For example, “Black Lives Matter,” which is compared to the ‘Black Panthers’ of the 70s. Despite the lack of talented leaders and clear programs, in such associations, their ongoing radicalization is evident. That was demonstrated by the riots in Ferguson of 2014 and the case of the murder of police officers in Baton Rouge. 
+The indignation of the colored population at police actions is justified. The level of police violence in the United States is quite high. It is known that American cops kill 5 times more people than Canadian police, 40 times more than German police, and 140 times more than police in England and Wales. 
+All segments of the American population are suffering from a disproportionate use of force by police. According to the resource “Mapping police violence”, from the 1st of January, 2013 to the 31st of December 2015, 3,486 people were killed by police, or approximately 1100 people per year. Of these, 571 were Hispanic (16%), 949 African-American (27%) and 1522 (43%) were White. These figures must be compared to the fact that Whites are 64% of the US population, African-Americans are 13% of the overall population, while 16% are Hispanic. However, the divergent behavior of the white population is much rarer due to a higher level of income and social stability. Of course, most of those killed by police were carrying weapons, and the lives of the policemen were in danger. But it is generally thought that US cops are more willing to open fire on people of color, because the policemen believe that the level of criminality and readiness for violence of Hispanics and African Americans is much higher. Additional factors which lead to an increase in racial tensions are racial prejudices and the established practice of cops consistently being acquitted by the U.S. court system. 
+Largely because of the actions of the US ruling elites, there now exists a group of people who are above the law whose members have a license to kill. Shooting at unarmed people, including children and teens, beating of pregnant women, shooting at people with disabilities and other “controversial” actions of American cops all are commonplace occurrences in the United States. The Members of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) noted that in the United States there exists such inhumane methods as testing experimental medicines on inmates (predominantly African American) in prisons, the forced sterilization of minority women, and numerous incidents of police abuse of power directed towards the non-white population. However, the increased use of cameras amongst both the civilian population and police departments has facilitated increasingly frequent recordings of such cases of violence and has helped in gaining them publicity. That increased awareness that, in turn, has led to the outrage of the African-American population. 
+Many US police forces continue to subject African Americans to more thorough searches and more forceful tactics during arrests. Unofficially, they explain these practices by referring to statistical data presented by such sources as American Renaissance and Daily Stormer. For example, blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery. They are also three times more likely to use a hand gun, and twice more likely to use a knife. A number of police officers believe that “special attention” to African American citizens improves crime detection rates. However, it has a significant impact on the rise in police dissatisfaction. Although the number of attacks on police and their killings has declined in recent years, experts explain it by the fact that US police are increasingly avoiding “black” neighborhoods, where they can be particularly vulnerable. 
+Moreover, a large part of the US population is puzzled with the public position of President Obama who invariably condemns the actions of the police and grieves for the black victims of police violence, but is silent about the cases of murder of police officers in the course of discharging their official responsibilities. Such a situation leads to an increase in real crime, which is not reflected in official statistics. We should not forget that the number of firearms in the United States recently surpassed the number of inhabitants and according to various estimates there are more than 320 million guns in the US, of which more than 270 million are in the hands of the civilian population. Therefore, a further escalation of violence in the American society, at any time, can lead to very dire consequences. In general, ethnic tensions peaked since the beginning of the Barack Obama presidency. Thus, according to the official FBI statistics, in 2015 the number of white-on-black murders and vice versa reached their highest levels in 2008. The number of white-on-black murders has increased by 12%, while the number of black-on-white murders increased 22%. 
+According to the report of the Chair-Rapporteur of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent Ricardo III Sunga (Philippines), the US maintains “structural racism”. It is a correct assessment of the situation. Despite the fact that the police officers are under the special protection of the state, laws aimed at fighting race discrimination, have the opposite effect of reverse discrimination, harming ordinary Americans. The use of unofficial, but very real quotas for the appointment of people of color at schools and businesses sometimes does not allow qualified “white” experts to get jobs or promotion. In case of conflicts of a civil nature between people with different skin color, they are usually subjected to racial profiling. At the same time, public opinion and the Supreme Court often find themselves on the side of national minorities. 
+On the other hand, the US still has a low level of political representation of ethnic minorities. As of November 2015, there have been a total of 1,963 members of the United States Senate, but only nine have been black, including Barack Obama. Out of 10,884 US Representatives, only 131 have been black. At present, there are no black governors at all. This lack of political representation also leads to more social tension. 
+No improvement has been observed during the final year of the first US African American presidency, instead, considerable aggravation of interracial conflict has been noted, to the point of it becoming one of the most dangerous threats to homeland security. Obama failed to cope with social problems, although he managed to stabilize the economy following the crisis. Still, 27% of African Americans continue to live below the poverty line, an average of 12% do not have steady employment. In some cities this figure reaches 40% and even as high as 50%. The level of culture, education and labor skills is also low. All this leads to an increase in crime among African Americans, and thus foments racist sentiment in society at large. This also leads to an exacerbation of black on black crime. For example, in Chicago, over the past 3 years, 75% of murder victims are young black males and 72% of murder perpetrators are also young black males. Social conditions in such places are affected by the fact that a large percentage of children grow up in broken homes. 
+As far as inter-party competition is concerned, it is obvious that in spite of the election of a black president, the Democrats failed to improve the lives of African Americans. Their criticism of the GOP’s harsh race rhetoric in order to attract voters, this is also an attempt to hide the fact they are not interested in changing the status quo. Paradoxically, only Republicans with their strict “law and order” approach are truly interested in the implementation of certain changes. Although the consequences of their policies in the event of capturing the White House, remain to be seen. 
+Summing up President Obama’s activities in the sphere of interracial relations, we can say that he has not developed a new national idea in order to deal with the problem of racism. US history will remember the first black president not as an idealist fighting for the rights of the oppressed, but as a servant of the ruling white elite and its interests. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by South Front on October 27, 2016, With 221 Reads Filed under World . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments",FAKE
+3316,VFW fires back at Obama: Politics not 'confused',"The nation’s largest veterans group hit back at President Obama on Thursday and urged him not to “denigrate” their intelligence after the president suggested their members were easily swayed by cable news and “right-wing radio.”
+
+The Veterans of Foreign Wars called out the president after Obama referenced the political opinions at “VFW halls” in an Indiana speech Wednesday that toggled between campaign politics and the economy.
+
+“I don’t know how many VFW Posts the president has ever visited, but our near 1.7 million members are a direct reflection of America,” VFW National Commander John A. Biedrzycki Jr. said in a statement. “We don’t have confused politics, we don’t need left or rightwing media filters telling us how to think or vote, and we don’t need any President of the United States lecturing us about how we are individually [affected] by the economy.”
+
+Obama, speaking in Elkhart, Ind., had lamented the “primary story” he claimed Republicans are telling about the economy – one that focuses on how “moochers at the bottom of the income ladder” are squeezing middle-class families.
+
+“We have been hearing this story for decades,” Obama said. “Tales about welfare queens, talking about takers, talking about the ‘47percent.’ It's the story that is broadcast every day on some cable news stations, on right-wing radio, it's pumped into cars, and bars, and VFW halls all across America, and right here in Elkhart.”
+
+Obama continued: “And if you're hearing that story all the time, you start believing it. It's no wonder people think big government is the problem.”
+
+Biedrzycki suggested veterans are not so easily swayed.
+
+“Our nation was created and continues to exist solely because of the men and women who wear the uniform,” he said. “Let’s not denigrate their service, their sacrifice or their intelligence.”
+
+Obama is no stranger to the VFW, having addressed the group’s national convention several times dating back to his first presidential campaign.
+
+He last spoke to the VFW convention last July in Pittsburgh, calling the occasion a “great honor.” He used the speech to address ongoing efforts to help America’s veterans, especially in the area of health care, in the wake of the Veterans Affairs wait-times scandal.
+
+“As president, I consider it my obligation to help make sure that, even though less than 1 percent of Americans wear the uniform, that 100 percent of Americans honor your sacrifices and your service,” he said.",REAL
+5021,GOP reaches ‘new level of panic’ over Trump’s candidacy,"Turmoil in the Republican Party escalated Wednesday as party leaders, strategists and donors voiced increased alarm about the flailing state of Donald Trump’s candidacy and fears that the presidential nominee was damaging the party with an extraordinary week of self-inflicted mistakes, gratuitous attacks and missed opportunities.
+
+Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was described as “very frustrated” with and deeply disturbed by Trump’s behavior over the past week, having run out of excuses to make on the nominee’s behalf to donors and other party leaders, according to multiple people familiar with the events.
+
+Meanwhile, Trump’s top campaign advisers are struggling once again to instill discipline in their candidate, who has spent recent days lurching from one controversy to another while seemingly skipping chances to go on the offensive against his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
+
+“A new level of panic hit the street,” said longtime operative Scott Reed, chief strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It’s time for a serious reset.”
+
+Trump allies on Wednesday publicly urged the candidate to reboot, furious that he has allowed his confrontation with the Muslim parents of dead Army Capt. Humayun Khan to continue for nearly a week. They also are angry with Trump because of his refusal in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday to endorse two of the GOP’s top elected officials — House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) — ahead of their coming primary elections.
+
+[Donald Trump refuses to endorse Paul Ryan and John McCain in GOP primaries]
+
+Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), one of Trump’s most loyal defenders, warned that his friend was in danger of throwing away the election and helping to make Clinton president.
+
+“The current race is which of these two is the more unacceptable, because right now, neither of them is acceptable,” he said. “Trump is helping her to win by proving he is more unacceptable than she is.”
+
+Gingrich said Trump has only a matter of weeks to reverse course. “Anybody who is horrified by Hillary should hope that Trump will take a deep breath and learn some new skills,” he said. “He cannot win the presidency operating the way he is now. She can’t be bad enough to elect him if he’s determined to make this many mistakes.”
+
+Campaigning in Florida, Trump sought to pivot away from his problems. He addressed the controversy and speculation, saying his campaign is “doing really well” and has “never been this well united,” then focused renewed attacks on Clinton and President Obama.
+
+But the idea that the campaign was fully united was undercut when Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, told Fox News Channel that he “strongly endorsed” Ryan in his primary campaign. Other Republicans viewed the endorsement as a sign that he is having some influence within the campaign, said a person familiar with Pence’s role.
+
+Campaign manager Paul Manafort went on cable news channels earlier in the day to try to tamp down the rampant criticism of the GOP nominee, saying that reports of a campaign staff in crisis were incorrect. He said the campaign is “focused,” in “very good shape” and “moving forward.”
+
+Throughout the day, there were also persistent reports that allies of Trump, including Priebus, Gingrich and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, were trying to arrange a meeting with Trump to urge him to refocus his candidacy. Manafort, when asked on Fox News about such a meeting, said he knew nothing about it. “Not me,” Gingrich said in an email when asked if he were part of an upcoming meeting.
+
+A knowledgeable GOP strategist said, “It’s not happening,” then added, “It doesn’t take a genius to know that calling Donald Trump and yelling at him is never going to work.”
+
+At past moments of crisis in the campaign, Trump’s children have played an influential role, and there was some hope within the party that they could again provide help. Bloomberg Politics reported Wednesday afternoon, however, that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump had left for a hunting trip outside the country.
+
+[Transcript of Donald Trump’s interview with The Washington Post]
+
+Friends and allies of Manafort disputed reports that the top adviser had given up on Trump, describing him as fully committed to waging a successful campaign. But they said Manafort has been frustrated by Trump’s apparent lack of discipline on the stump and in his many media interviews.
+
+“Paul has good influence with Donald,” said Charlie Black, a longtime GOP strategist and former business partner of Manafort’s. “But he’s Donald, and he’s going to operate stream of consciousness a lot of times. You just hope he’ll have more days on message than days on consciousness.”
+
+A second GOP strategist who also knows Manafort said Trump’s campaign manager is “the most aggressive guy I’ve ever met.”
+
+“My guess is he’s trying to make the best of this for the campaign,” said this strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “But this is not the plan. There’s no way to explain that this is what you want done in the middle of your campaign.”
+
+From Washington to state capitals nationwide, a feeling of despair and despondence fell over the Republican establishment.
+
+Trump suffered two defections Wednesday when Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), an Iraq War veteran, said on CNN that he is unlikely to vote for Trump because the nominee was “beginning to cross a lot of red lines of the unforgivable in politics.”
+
+Former Montana governor Marc Racicot, a former RNC chairman and a close associate of former president George W. Bush’s, also said he won’t vote for Trump.
+
+“I’m not accusing people of being appeasers, but what I am saying is that there’s a transcendent set of values throughout our history that we subscribe to above party,” Racicot told Bloomberg Politics, adding that he thinks Trump lacks those values.
+
+Reed, who managed Robert J. Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, said Trump should “stop doing silly interviews nine times a day that get you off message” and deliver a major address seeking to reset the campaign establishing himself as the change candidate.
+
+Reed said such a pivot is “mandatory” for Trump to be successful, as is smoothing relations with Ryan, McCain and other GOP leaders. “If Trump decides he wants to go it alone, it is a lonely road,” he said.
+
+Two weeks ago at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, GOP leaders were buoyed by what they saw in Trump. But he quickly reverted to his old ways, setting off alarms in some parts of the party.
+
+“I’m pulling for him, but he’s not driving on the pavement. He’s in the ditch,” said Henry Barbour, an RNC member and longtime strategist in Mississippi. “I’m frustrated. There’s time to fix it, but there’s one person who can fix it. It’s up to him.”
+
+A Republican consultant who is working on Senate and gubernatorial races nationwide says the situation is wreaking havoc.
+
+“The level of uncertainty with Trump just throws everyone off. It really hurts all of them,” the consultant said. “The Republican Party to him is like any kind of real estate deal. It’s all transactional. . . . He’s willing to burn the house down.”
+
+If the situation has not improved by Labor Day, the RNC may need to begin redirecting resources to bolster vulnerable House and Senate candidates, as it did when Dole’s defeat became apparent in the fall of 1996, a senior Republican said.
+
+Many top GOP fundraisers and donors are taking refuge in the Senate races, pouring their time and money into trying to protect the Republican majority.
+
+“I have had a number of very successful calls today raising money,” said Virginia developer Bob Pence, who is serving as the finance chairman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “People are very animated for Senate races.”
+
+Steve Duprey, another RNC member from New Hampshire and a confidant of McCain and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), both of whom Trump attacked in the Post interview, said Republican leaders are “pretty unhappy.”
+
+“People are more frustrated than they have been with past indiscretions,” Duprey said, referencing Trump’s intraparty attacks as well as his feud with the Khan family. “People are just going, ‘Can you believe this?’ . . . Our nominee is losing opportunities to make the case why he should be elected instead of Mrs. Clinton and instead spending all of his time dealing with controversies of his own creation.”
+
+Trump has not taken advantage of Friday’s report showing slow economic growth in the last quarter or of an interview Clinton gave to Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday in which she said that FBI Director James B. Comey had generally agreed with her characterizations of her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. The interview has drawn criticism from fact checkers at news organizations.
+
+“At some point, he needs to be immeasurably better than Hillary Clinton, but he’s not going to have an opportunity to govern if he doesn’t begin to bring Republicans together and then, eventually, bring independents and even Democrats on board and convince them that he can do this job,” Barbour said.
+
+Barbour said he, like others, has been frustrated by missed opportunities since the Democratic National Convention ended Thursday night. “The last several days have made this election a referendum on Donald Trump. We want this to be a referendum on Hillary Clinton and the wrong direction the country’s on.”
+
+RNC chief Priebus has had multiple conversations with Trump and his campaign, although he was not in direct contact with the candidate in the immediate hours after Trump declined to endorse Ryan.
+
+Calling Priebus “very frustrated,” a knowledgable GOP strategist said, “It’s the totality of the week. The whole Khan thing kicking off the week was a concern to him, and then obviously all the other smaller issues were. He’s been going after this all week. The [failure to endorse Ryan and McCain] was like the cherry on the cake.”
+
+Gingrich said Trump is continuing to operate on instincts that helped him in business and in the primaries but said the GOP nominee doesn’t realize that those skills are not adequate for a general election.
+
+“He can’t learn what he doesn’t know because he doesn’t know he doesn’t know it,” Gingrich said.",REAL
+1202,Clinton regrets 1996 remark on ‘super-predators’ after encounter with activist,"COLUMBIA, S.C. — Black voters are the linchpin of Hillary Clinton's strategy for winning the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary, and as a result, her campaign has put racial justice issues at the forefront of her agenda. But at an event on Wednesday night, Clinton was vocally confronted by an activist questioning her past support for policies that had a disproportionately negative effect on African Americans.
+
+Ashley Williams, a 23-year-old activist from Charlotte, interrupted Clinton during a private fundraiser in Charleston on Wednesday night. Williams stood and demanded an apology from Clinton for the high incarceration rate for black Americans, and confronted her with the words of a speech Clinton delivered 20 years ago voicing support for the now-debunked theory of ""super-predators.""
+
+""They are often the kinds of kids that are called 'super-predators,' "" Clinton said in 1996, at the height of anxiety during her husband's administration about high rates of crime and violence. ""No conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.""
+
+The last part of the quote was written on a large, hand-lettered sign that Williams held up as Clinton spoke to her donors and supporters.
+
+Clinton took note of the sign and read it aloud, squinting to read it and apparently unaware that it was her own quote.
+
+Williams addressed Clinton, asking whether Clinton would ""apologize to black people for mass incarceration.""
+
+Clinton first told Williams, ""we'll talk about it,"" but grew irritated as Williams continued to speak.
+
+“Do you want to hear the facts, or do you just want to talk?” Clinton asked sharply.
+
+Off camera, guests at the fundraiser, apparently held in a private home, can be heard saying ""shhhhh,"" which then turns to such comments as ""this is inappropriate,"" and ""you're being rude.""
+
+Williams asked again about Clinton's words from 1996, as a man approached Williams to escort her out.
+
+""You know what? Nobody’s ever asked me before. You’re the first person to do that, and I’m happy to address it,"" Clinton said, but did not elaborate.
+
+In a written response to The Washington Post's on the issue Thursday, Clinton said: “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.""
+
+""My life’s work has been about lifting up children and young people who’ve been let down by the system or by society, kids who never got the chance they deserved,"" Clinton continued in the statement. ""And unfortunately today, there are way too many of those kids, especially in African-American communities.  We haven’t done right by them.  We need to.  We need to end the school to prison pipeline and replace it with a cradle-to-college pipeline.""
+
+[Hillary Clinton responds to activist who demanded apology for ‘superpredator’ remarks]
+
+In an interview  Thursday, Williams said that she wanted Clinton to address her past role in supporting the country's current system of mass incarceration. Williams also said she sought an apology from Clinton for the ""damage that she’s done to black communities.""
+
+""I thought that quote was important not only because it was her own words, but because that was her pathologizing black youth as these criminal, animal people,"" Williams told The Washington Post. ""And we know that’s not right and we know that’s really racist.""
+
+""I wanted her to be confronted with that very racist thing she said,"" Williams said.
+
+[A crime bill from 1994 haunts Clinton and Sanders as criminal justice reform rises to top in Democratic contest]
+
+""As a black queer person, I understand how I don’t always get to be in control of how I’m perceived in spaces,"" Williams said. ""I’m especially not always in control of the way I'm perceived when I'm raising my voice to speak out against injustices. So I’m not surprised that I was told that I was being rude.""
+
+In recent weeks, Clinton's 1996 comments have re-emerged as a problem, just as she has sought to push a new agenda focused on unwinding 90s-era policies that are now viewed as having had a disproportionately negative effect on African-Americans.
+
+In a recent essay, author and law professor Michelle Alexander described Clinton's endorsement of the ""super-predator"" concept as ""racially coded rhetoric"" that was used to ""cast black children as animals.""
+
+Yet, the idea wasn't Clinton's, but rather it had been invented by researchers studying crime in the 1990s. And it was used to explain the rise in violence perpetrated by youths -- particularly in predominantly minority inner cities. The concept has since been largely abandoned and decried for its racial undertones.
+
+Twenty years later at the Charleston event, Clinton said that it was the first time that she had been asked about the comments. But Williams said she expected more.
+
+""She’s had 20 years to respond to my question,"" Williams said. ""And so her inability to do it last night to me is just kind of representative of how she has been absent in terms of racial justice in a meaningful way, in a material way.""
+
+The evening fundraising event was not disclosed by the Clinton campaign, although the campaign has voluntarily released information about other fundraisers in the past. The event also was not advertised to news outlets covering Clinton as she campaigns ahead of the primary vote Saturday.
+
+Williams said she is an ""independent organizer for the movement for black lives"" and not part of Black Lives Matter organizations. Williams added that someone paid $500 to allow the activists to gain access to the fundraising event. Williams would not specify who contributed the money to the protest action.
+
+Clinton has called for an end to ""the era of mass incarceration"" and disavowed much of the 1994 crime law signed by her husband, former president Bill Clinton. It was the disproportionate effect of that law on black people that was the protesters' main complaint.
+
+The Clinton campaign has also pointed to her presidential primary opponent Bernie Sanders's vote in favor of that law.
+
+Williams, who is working on a master's degree at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, wants all candidates -- including Bernie Sanders -- to be held accountable for their past actions and statements about racial justice.
+
+""All the candidates who are running for president need to be held to the same kind of scrutiny in terms of the way that they have been complicit in mass incarceration and damaging communities of color across the United States,"" Williams said. ""Bernie can get it, too. They can all get it.""
+
+In a statement, Sanders's campaign manager Jeff Weaver said that Sanders voted for the 1994 crime bill to protect provisions embedded in it that preserved the assault weapons ban and included domestic violence protections for women.
+
+Weaver noted that Sanders criticized mass incarceration at the time that the bill was being considered.
+
+“When this so-called crime bill was being considered, Bernie Sanders criticized its harsh incarceration and death penalty provisions,"" Weaver said. ""Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, resorted to dog whistle politics and dehumanizing language.""
+
+""Bernie Sanders has always known jails and incarceration are not the answer,"" Weaver added. ""Nor is heated rhetoric against young people of any race. You can’t throw vulnerable people under the bus just because it’s politically expedient.”
+
+Correction: An earlier version of this post said Hillary Clinton told activist Ashley Williams ""you're being rude."" It was a guest at the fundraiser who made the comment.",REAL
+7777,Washington Post Anti-Trump Scare Tactics,"Dispatches from STEPHEN LENDMAN A s the moment of truth approaches, America’s two leading broadsheets, the NYT and WaPo, continue relentlessly bashing Trump, shamelessly supporting a woman belonging in prison, not high office. A same day article discussed The Times’ latest anti-Trump broadside. WaPo featured two editorials hammering him, following so many others earlier, disgracefully accusing him of everything imaginable, while practically elevating Hillary to sainthood by comparison. “Will Republicans respect democracy,” WaPo editors asked? How can anyone knowledgeable about how America is run respect what’s nonexistent, not earlier or now? “The big question after Tuesday’s election…will be whether the nation’s leaders act to preserve our republic – or hasten a descent toward a banana republic,” said WaPo editors. They failed to explain US governance resembles the way a crime family operates – a godfather (or godmother) atop the hierarchy, serving privileged interests exclusively. .. The “first priority (for the nation’s leadership) must be preserving and restoring the country’s democratic institutions…” WaPo editors claimed. How can it when none exist? America is a rogue state, run by its lunatic fringe, neocon extremists, waging endless wars of aggression, punishing ordinary people with neoliberal harshness, enforcing police state viciousness on resisters, a hair’s breadth from instituting full-blown tyranny – likely coming with Hillary in charge. .. WaPo editors are terrified about how multiple investigations of her wrongdoing might turn out – heading toward possibly indicting and impeaching her, ludicrously claiming: .. “There is no substantiated charge against Ms. Clinton that would warrant impeachment, or even talk of impeachment. Despite suggestions otherwise, there is also no imminent indictment against the Democratic nominee, or any available evidence suggesting that indictment is a realistic possibility… Instead, what the nation has seen over the closing days of this campaign is a party preparing to (mis)use extraordinary congressional powers for despicable political ends.” 
+Fact: Volumes of evidence show Hillary guilty of war crimes, orchestrating coups, other international and constitutional law violations, racketeering, perjury, obstruction of justice, fraud, influence-selling pay-for-play, and jeopardizing national security by using her private server for classified State Department documents – enough to lock anyone up for life. 
+Separately, WaPo editors said “Trump’s election would be a major threat to the economy” – a way over-the-top unjustifiable claim, saying: .. His “election would be a major new source of instability here and abroad…Suddenly, a man with a deep-seated hostility to, and incomprehension of, markets would be at the helm of the world’s preeminent market economy.” A billionaire business tycoon with no comprehension of markets? No one could become super-rich without a keen understanding of how they work – so what irks WaPo editors? .. They support jobs-killing trade deals like NAFTA and TPP. Trump’s justifiable opposition riles them. They’re angry because he’s right accusing the (Wall-Street controlled) Fed of keeping interest rates near zero for political reasons, along with government agencies fudging economic data like GDP, monthly jobs numbers and inflation, among others – to make economic conditions look rosier than reality. .. Trump “failed to level with the public about the challenges before us, to provide a plausible sense of how he would improve things – or to demonstrate much of anything except the risks of entrusting him with management of an $18 trillion economy,” WaPo editors claimed. Agree or disagree with him, he presented a clearer agenda than Hillary – time and again proving she’s a serial liar, dishonest, untrustworthy, ruthless and dangerous. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • CONTINUE THE DEBATE ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE. CLICK HERE . ABOUT THE AUTHOR STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net . His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” ( http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ) Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com . =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN. SIGN UP AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.",FAKE
+3655,Critics to the White House: Call Orlando What it Is,"The horrific attack in Orlando, Florida, showed once again that ISIS is here in America. Judging by President Barack Obama's response on Sunday, the message may not have reached the Oval Office.
+
+""This is an open investigation. We've reached no definitive judgment on the precise motivations of the killer,"" the president said. ""The FBI is appropriately investigating this as an act of terrorism.""
+
+But what kind of terrorism? President Obama did not use the words ""Muslim"" or ""Islamic terrorism,"" even though the killer shouted, ""Allahu Akbar!"" and called 911 to say he was from ISIS. Islamic State radio calls Orlando mass shooter Omar Mateen ""one of the soldiers of the caliphate in America.""
+
+Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., warns there will be more attacks in part because of the president's reluctance to call the Orlando tragedy what it is.
+
+""And it's not stopping,"" Sessions told Fox News Sunday. ""We see apparently today more of these attacks, and it's a real part of the threat that we face and if we can't address it openly and directly and say there is an extremist element within Islam that is dangerous to the world and has to be confronted, we need to slow down and be careful about those we admit into the country.""
+
+FBI Director James Comey says ISIS has created a ""terrorist diaspora"" that flows out of Syria and Iraq to the West, bringing ""hardened fighters, looking to kill people.""
+
+A Wall Street Journal editorial pleaded, ""Can we finally drop the illusion that the jihadist fires that burn in the Middle East don't pose an urgent and deadly threat to the American homeland?""
+
+And National Review warned, ""The...Islamic terrorists' war on us has returned to American shores, and it will continue here as long as we refuse to exercise the tactics necessary to stamp it out.""
+
+Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Fox News ""The fact is that this is war and not law enforcement.""
+
+""The problem is Barack Obama and his administration for its entire length in office have not been at war with Islam. They have tried to treat this solely as a law enforcement matter, not as a struggle with an ideology that despises our entire way of life,"" Bolton said.
+
+""This attack is not the equivalent of a junked-up attack on the corner grocery store. This is an act of war against the United States,"" he said.",REAL
+9843,‘On Contact’: Chris Hedges and Medea Benjamin on the U.S.-Saudi Alliance,"‘On Contact’: Chris Hedges and Medea Benjamin on the U.S.-Saudi Alliance   
+On this week’s episode of RT’s “On Contact,” Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges and Medea Benjamin, author of “ Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection ,” explore why Saudi Arabia remains one of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East despite the monarchy’s record of human rights abuses, including public executions, mistreatment of women, and the promotion of a fundamentalist religion that “sanctifies violence,” as Hedges says. 
+RT Correspondent Anya Parampil reviews the long alliance between the two countries.",FAKE
+5172,"Defying Republican orthodoxy, Trump trashes trade deals and advocates tariffs","Donald Trump on Tuesday channeled more than a year’s worth of fiery and freewheeling protectionist rhetoric into an uncharacteristically disciplined address, putting him out of step with decades of conservative economic orthodoxy and even some of his own prior positions.
+
+Speaking in a warehouse filled with piles of compressed aluminum cans and scraps of metal, Trump ticked through a seven-step plan to boost domestic job growth that included renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, labeling China a currency manipulator, and withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and preventing its implementation.
+
+At a rally in Ohio hours later, Trump said the trade pact was being “pushed by special interests who want to rape our country,” repeating “rape” several times.
+
+The presumptive GOP presidential nominee mentioned Britain’s recent decision to leave the European Union, saying that “our friends in Britain recently voted to take back control of their economy” and that “now it’s time for the American people to take back their future.” Quoting Founding Fathers and former presidents, Trump said international trade agreements have left American workers behind.
+
+“On trade, on immigration, on foreign policy, we are going to put America first again,” Trump said. “We are going to make America wealthy again.”
+
+He also took sharp aim at presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by invoking the populist attacks she has faced from her rival in the primaries, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
+
+“People who rigged the system are supporting Hillary Clinton because they know as long as she is in charge, nothing’s going to change,” Trump said.
+
+The speech highlighted one of the key areas of disagreement pitting Trump against business leaders and establishment Republicans, who for decades have advocated free-trade policies and have generally opposed tariffs and other measures.
+
+It also came amid a period of upheaval in Trump’s campaign that many backers hope will lead to a more policy-focused operation. He fired his campaign manager last week after months of internal turmoil and on Monday brought on a pair of experienced communications operatives.
+
+While large, boisterous rallies remain Trump’s signature campaign setting — the mogul held one Tuesday night in eastern Ohio — he is giving structured policy talks more frequently.
+
+While Trump spoke, the nation’s largest business lobby rebutted him on social media. “Setting Things Straight: NAFTA has NOT been a disaster for the U.S.,” read one tweet from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce linking to a more detailed Web page. Another said, “You heard from Trump on trade, here’s what you really need to know.”
+
+In the past, Trump has adopted a notably less protectionist posture on trade and outsourcing. In a 2005 blog post on the website for the now-defunct Trump University, the mogul wrote: “We hear terrible things about outsourcing jobs — how sending work outside of our companies is contributing to the demise of American businesses. But in this instance I have to take the unpopular stance that it is not always a terrible thing.”
+
+During his speech, Trump repeatedly singled out Clinton for criticism. He also slammed former president Bill Clinton for signing NAFTA, which Trump said was one of the worst developments of his administration.
+
+And he said Hillary Clinton “has betrayed the American worker” and would do it again.
+
+The Clinton campaign moved vigorously to counter Trump’s speech, holding a conference call with reporters featuring Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) hours before Trump spoke. During his speech, Clinton tweeted a close-up picture of the collar of a Donald J. Trump Signature Collection shirt. “Trump’s speaking about outsourcing right now. Here’s one of his shirts — made in Bangladesh,” her tweet read.
+
+Tensions between the two sides were already running high before Trump spoke. Michael Cohen, Trump’s special counsel and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, launched an aggressive social-media attack on Clinton earlier in the day, tweeting an image that claimed she “murdered an ambassador” — a reference to the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who was killed in the 2012 attacks on a diplomatic compound and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya. Clinton was secretary of state at the time.
+
+Cohen wrote in an email afterward that he does not speak for the Trump campaign. “My tweets are mine and mine alone,” Cohen said.
+
+The attack came the same day that a final report written by a GOP-led House select committee offered no new evidence of specific wrongdoing by Clinton pertaining to the Benghazi attacks.
+
+A week ago, Trump tweeted, “If you want to know about Hillary Clinton’s honesty & judgment, ask the family of Ambassador Stevens.” A campaign spokeswoman did not respond when asked whether Trump agreed with Cohen’s tweet.
+
+Here in Monessen, a handful of protesters chanted anti-Trump slogans outside as he started to speak. Several older men and women who said they were supporting Trump also stood under the sun outside in hopes of catching a glimpse of the mogul.
+
+Trump supporter Jim Bower, 74, said that while he has serious reservations about Trump’s rhetoric and his “dumb mistakes on the campaign trail,” he does not trust Clinton. “I don’t want to vote for Hillary,” he said. “But I’m not happy about voting for Donald.”
+
+Sullivan reported from Washington. Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+4058,Former Egyptian president Morsi sentenced to death,"Ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, along with more than 100 other defendants, was sentenced to death by an Egyptian court Saturday for his role in a mass prison break in 2011.
+
+Morsi, Egypt's first freely elected president, is already serving a 20-year jail sentence in jail for ordering the arrest and torture of protesters while president.
+
+The then-leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement was elected president in 2012 after the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.
+
+The Egyptian military deposed Morsi in 2013 following a series of street protests against his rule. In May 2014, Morsi's successor, former military chief Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, who led the coup, won a landslide victory in presidential elections.
+
+The Muslim Brotherhood was banned and its supporters rounded up by the thousands.
+
+As with all capital punishment cases, the sentence will be sent to the Grand Mufti, Egypt's highest authority, for his opinion. Convictions can still be appealed, even if the Grand Mufti approves the sentencing. A decision is expected on June 2.",REAL
+9379,Re: Jedi mind trick? Mark Hamill to Democrats: ‘Don’t panic- VOTE!’,"— Kombiz Lavasany (@kombiz) October 29, 2016 
+Here’s Star Wars actor Mark Hamill with some advice for scared Democrats over the news that the FBI is still investigating Hillary Clinton: Don't panic- VOTE! https://t.co/GtvOHEqgut 
+— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) October 28, 2016 
+Yeah, like we’ll fall for a Jedi mind trick with 10 days to go. Hokey religions and ancient candidates are no match for the FBI (hopefully). Trending",FAKE
+4084,"Copenhagen police shoot, kill man near train station","Danish authorities mounted a nationwide manhunt Saturday for a gunman who opened fire on a free speech seminar at a Copenhagen cafe in an apparent attempt to kill a Swedish artist who had published cartoons of the prophet Mohammed eight years ago.
+
+Hours later, the Associated Press reported that three people, including two police officers, were shot in a second incident in the Danish city, although it is unclear if it is connected to the first attack.
+
+One person is dead and two were injured in the later attack, which occurred near a synagogue in downtown Copenhagen. The shooter fled on foot, police told the AP.
+
+Police in Denmark shot and killed a man they had under surveillance in connection with Saturday's shootings.
+
+Police will hold a press briefing at 10 am local time.
+
+Police said the gunman in the first attack, who fled in a stolen car, killed one person and injured three police officers in the attack at the Krudttoenden cafe, which was hosting an ""Art, blasphemy and the freedom of expression"" event.
+
+Police released a grainy photo of a man in a dark ski jacket and cap who may be linked to the attack. It was taken by a surveillance camera near the site where the gunman abandoned the dark-colored Volkswagen Polo that he had carjacked.
+
+Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt called the shooting ""a cynical act of violence"" and an ""act of terrorism.""
+
+The United States condemned the ""deplorable shooting"" and offered condolences to the loved ones of the deceased victim, according to a statement from National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan. U.S. officials have been in touch with Danish authorities and are ready to help with the investigation.
+
+Danish authorities called on Germany and Sweden to be on the lookout for the suspect at their borders with Denmark. Authorities initially thought two people were involved in the shooting.
+
+Police said the apparent target of the shooting was Lars Vilks, 68, who has endured several attempted attacks and death threats since he depicted the founder of Islam as a dog in 2007.
+
+Vilks escaped unharmed after a bodyguard shoved him into the cafe kitchen when the gunfire erupted around 4 p.m.
+
+""What other motive could there be? It's possible it was inspired by Charlie Hebdo,"" he said, referring to the Jan. 7 attack by Islamic extremists on the French newspaper.
+
+""At first there was panic. People crawled down under tables,"" Vilks said. ""My bodyguards quickly pulled me away.""
+
+""I heard someone firing with an automatic weapon and someone shouting. Police returned the fire and I hid behind the bar. I felt surreal, like in a movie,"" Niels Ivar Larsen, one of the speakers at the event, told the TV2 channel.
+
+The dead victim was identified by police only as a 40-year-old civilian.
+
+Francois Zimeray, the French ambassador to Denmark, was in the cafe at the time but was not hurt. ""Bullets went through the doors and everyone threw themselves to the floor,"" he told the AFP news agency.
+
+The Danish Security and Intelligence Service described the gunman, who was carrying a black machine gun, as tall, with an athletic build. It said he had an ""Arabic appearance, but with lighter skin than normal and black straight hair.""
+
+He wore a black or dark blue ski jacket and matching pants, possibly with gloves, the security service said.
+
+The gunman did not get into the main room where the event was being held, but fired into it, according to several media accounts.
+
+Police later found the getaway car abandoned near a metro station and promptly shut down the transit line between two stations to search for the suspect.
+
+Danish TV2 reported that about 30 bullet holes hit the window of the cafe and that at least two people were taken away on stretchers, including a uniformed police officer.
+
+Helle Merete Brix, one of the organizers of the event, told TV2 that Vilks ran to the nearby kitchen when the shots rang out.
+
+""He was very cool,"" she said. ""We stood and told each other bad jokes. His bodyguards did a tremendous job.""
+
+She told the TV station the attack was a ""clear assassination attempt"" of Vilks, who receives police protection when he is in Denmark.
+
+Frank Jensen, Lord Mayor of Copenhagen, said he was ""deeply horrified"" by the shootings which appeared to be a ""violent crackdown on freedom of expression.""
+
+""Unfortunately, there are people who react with violence when their entrenched mindset meets with the free debate and freedom of speech,"" Jensen wrote on his Facebook page. ""We must stand firm on the values our society is built on, and never give in to fear.""
+
+Last year, a Pennsylvania woman received a 10-year prison term for a plot to kill Vilks. In 2010, two brothers tried to burn down his house in southern Sweden and were imprisoned for attempted arson.
+
+After Islamist militants attacked the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris last month, killing 12 people, Vilks told the AP that even fewer organizations were inviting him to give lectures over increased security concerns.
+
+Vilks said he thought Sweden's SAPO security service, which deploys bodyguards to protect him, would step up the security around him.
+
+""This will create fear among people on a whole different level than we're used to,"" he said. ""Charlie Hebdo was a small oasis. Not many dared do what they did.""",REAL
+6945,Hoax Tweet leads to street riots,"Topics: Twitter , Pies Wednesday, 26 October 2016 
+Greggs bakery shops in Ashton, Manchester, Salford and Liverpool were targeted by angry mobs yesterday, after a hoax message on Twitter, announced that the company were withdrawing pasties from their product range. 
+The Greggs pastie is renowned as the staple diet of the working classes, and its devotees can been seen walking around town centres clutching its famous blue bag with the ubiquitous hot, greasy snack poking out of the top. 
+Thousands of the treats are consumed daily, by the lower ends of society, who cannot afford luxury foods such as baked beans or spaghetti hoops, and fears grew that there would be mass cases of starvation as low earners and benefit claimants were priced out of the food chain completely. 
+A Red Cross spokesman told us that the situation was so bad, that they were flying back 50,000 corned beef hash and 25,000 sausage and baked bean slices that were on their way to Syrian refugee camps. 
+Riot police and fire fighters were deployed in the affected areas, and police told us that by late afternoon the crowds had been dispersed and order had been restored. They did however say that there was still some areas of disorder in Liverpool, but they were hoping to restore order soon, as the police helicopter had circled low over the crowd dropping thousands of job application forms, which seemed to be scattering the rioters away from the trouble spots. 
+Late yesterday afternoon the chairman of Greggs, Sir Fred Battenburg, told a hastily gathered press conference that they had been the victims of a malicious hoax, and that the company had no intentions of withdrawing its best selling product. He went on to say that the company did intend to remove an item from their shops next month, namely the fruit scone, as this was not a big seller with mainstream pastie eaters. He appealed for calm in the affected areas, and assured customers that the fire damaged stores would be open for business as soon as possible. 
+Last night police reported that groups of angry pensioners and housewives had gathered outside Greggs shops in the stockbroker areas of Hale, Wilmslow, Bowden and Alderly Edge. A spokesman said the protesters were angrily tapping on the shop windows with umbrellas and shoe heels, and shouting ""shame on you""""how dare you"" and ""do you know who I am"" at staff who had locked the doors in panic. 
+An elderly woman, believed to be chair of the Dunham Massey Womens Guild, Lady Dorothy Schiffer-Brains, was arrested by police and later charged with 'aggressively prodding a police officer with a rolled up copy of Cheshire Life. 
+Lady Schiffer-Brains is due to appear before Knutsford magistrates later today. Make dulcie gabbani's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
+5193,Let’s dispel with this notion that Donald Trump knows what he’s doing,"Donald Trump is an unusual candidate who does a lot of unusual things. For example, after flubbing a debate performance in which he appeared volatile, irritable, and uninformed about key issues, he did not attempt to refocus his campaign on proven message points or topics where he has a firm grasp of talking points. Instead, he’s been lashing out at Alicia Machado while using apophasis to bring up Bill Clinton’s marital infidelity by saying he’s not talking about Bill Clinton’s marital infidelity.
+
+It seems like a bad strategy because it almost certainly is in fact a bad strategy.
+
+But not everyone sees it that way. In certain quarters, there’s a tendency to assume that Trump is crazy like a fox.
+
+Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter for much of his career in national politics, sees the post-debate binge in that light.
+
+Ken Baer, a veteran Democratic Party operative, even believes that Trump’s feud with the Khan family was a successful effort to distract attention from a bread-and-butter economic critique of Trump.
+
+This view gives Trump far too much credit. All available evidence suggests that Trump is a poor candidate waging a poor campaign and blowing a very winnable race against a Democratic Party nominee who is herself relatively weak.
+
+The presumption that Trump is performing well is based on a misreading of the underlying fundamentals of the election, and in its own terms arguably does a little bit to boost his electoral fortunes by cloaking his campaign in an undeserved shroud of competence.
+
+The overwhelmingly probable conclusion is that Trump does things that don’t seem to make sense because he is a political neophyte who doesn’t know what he is doing.
+
+The core fact about Donald Trump’s general election campaign is that it’s been singularly ineffective. Not only is he down in the polls right now, but he’s been consistently down in the polls for virtually the entire breadth of the campaign.
+
+That doesn’t mean Trump “can’t win” or that Clinton has nothing to worry about. But it does mean that, as best we can tell, Trump started behind and has never really found a way to get ahead. And he’s been losing even though Clinton has been viewed more unfavorably than favorably since April, a bad dynamic that set in for her before the Democratic primary wrapped up.
+
+People tend to discount the “Trump is losing” factor on the grounds that he “should” be doing worse. But this becomes circular — Trump’s weakness as a candidate is the only reason to expect him to lose. He is, in fact, losing because he is, in fact, running a bad campaign.
+
+The reality is that the underlying fundamentals of the race — a two-term president leaving office amidst paltry economic growth — favor a Republican victory. That’s what Vox’s “Trump Tax” model says, but don’t take our word for it. Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight thinks the same thing, as does Lynn Vavreck at the Upshot, and John Sides at the Monkey Cage.
+
+Yet despite favorable fundamentals, Trump has been consistently behind in the polls — leading in broad averages only for a couple of days between the two parties’ conventions.
+
+Not only has Trump been consistently losing despite favorable fundamentals, but he’s been consistently losing despite the luxury of running against an opponent with an underwater favorability rating.
+
+Conversely, the fundamentals in the 2012 election favored Obama. Mitt Romney did slightly better than might be expected given the fundamentals, and ran ahead of the GOP Senate nominee in basically every state. That’s about what you would expect if you think of Romney as a handsome, telegenic, successful businessperson who governed as a moderate in a blue state before remaking himself as a conventional Republican. Obama’s attacks on Romney seem to have had replacement-level effectiveness at best, and still left Romney better regarded than a typical conservative Republican.
+
+One source of confusion is that overall economic conditions are clearly better today than they were four years ago. History teaches us that what matters politically is short-term rates of change, not levels of prosperity.
+
+Economic conditions are better in 2016 than they were in 2012. But growth was faster four years ago than it is today, when things seem to have leveled off after a nice 2015.
+
+To make a long story short, Donald Trump is the GOP nominee in a year when a generic Republican would be favored to beat a generic Democrat. Rather than running against a generic Democrat, he is running against an unusually unpopular Democrat. And he is losing.
+
+Of course, the mere fact that Trump’s overall campaign is ineffective doesn’t mean that every particular choice he makes is bad. But it does mean that there’s no particular reason to give him the benefit of the doubt. The big lesson of the 2016 campaign is that the fundamentals matter a lot. The electorate is polarized, and so even a really bad candidate has a high floor.
+
+Clinton has major weaknesses in terms of weak economic growth and voter fatigue with Democratic Party leadership (manifesting in 2016 largely in millennial disaffection with Clinton, even as young voters eschew Trump). These factors keep Trump perennially within striking distance; it’s a very winnable election for him. But instead of winning, he is losing. And he has been consistently losing, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.",REAL
+5271,"Republican convention’s ‘non-conventional’ list: Model, astronaut and Trump clan","Donald Trump’s convention will feature an eclectic mix of cultural figures, including the first woman to command a space shuttle mission, survivors of the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and an underwear model.
+
+But while several Republican Party establishment figures will take the stage next week in Cleveland, the national convention to officially make Trump the party’s presidential nominee will be devoid of some of the GOP’s most seasoned leaders and brightest new stars.
+
+Republican officials on Thursday released a long-awaited list of convention personalities billed as “non-conventional speakers” who emphasize “real world experience.”
+
+The convention’s theme will be Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” with a core focus on national security, immigration, trade and jobs.
+
+The program includes more than a dozen current and former elected officials, including the leaders of the party’s congressional wing, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.).
+
+[Analysis: The stumbling blocks for an anti-Trump mutiny]
+
+A handful of governors and other lawmakers are scheduled to give addresses, including former primary opponents Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
+
+“There’s going to be a unified convention,” Trump spokesman Jason Miller told reporters Thursday, adding that the announced agenda was only a partial list of speakers. “People are going to be united behind Mr. Trump.”
+
+The unusual collection of nonpolitical speakers seems designed to broaden Trump’s appeal. Roster names include retired astronaut Eileen Collins, the first female space-shuttle pilot and mission commander; Mark Geist and John Tiegen, two survivors of the 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi; and Antonio Sabato Jr., a former Calvin Klein underwear model, soap-opera actor and reality-television star.
+
+Some sports figures will take the stage here, including pro golfer Natalie Gulbis and Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White.
+
+Tim Tebow, a 28-year-old former National Football League quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner, was expected to speak at the gathering, according to GOP officials. Tebow is admired by many conservatives because of his outspoken evangelical Christian beliefs.
+
+But Tebow said Thursday night in a Facebook video that he would not be speaking: “It’s amazing how fast rumors fly. And that’s exactly what it is, a rumor.”
+
+But some sports heroes of decades past whom Trump has said he would like to see at the convention — such as former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight and boxing promoter Don King — are not listed as speakers.
+
+Also notably absent from the list of speakers was Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who was identified by Trump allies Thursday as the candidate’s likely vice presidential pick. If chosen, Pence would deliver an acceptance speech after being formally nominated for vice president.
+
+Two other vice-presidential finalists, Christie and former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), are listed on the program, as is Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), who also was vetted as a vice-presidential prospect.
+
+Not speaking in Cleveland are the GOP’s past two presidential nominees, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), as well as its only two living former presidents, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush. None will be in Cleveland for the week-long festivities.
+
+Also excluded from the speakers list are many of the party’s more diverse rising stars, including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Tim Scott (S.C.), and Rep. Mia Love (Utah).
+
+By contrast, the Democratic National Convention the following week in Philadelphia is expected to feature a full assortment of party stars — past, present and future — including President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Biden, former president Bill Clinton, and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (Vt.).
+
+The disparity in political star power between the conventions speaks volumes about the state of the two parties, with Republicans divided over their controversial new standard-bearer.
+
+[Cleveland braces for spillover on the streets]
+
+Looking ahead to Philadelphia, Republican strategist Rick Wilson said of the Democrats, “Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren — they’re all going to be out there swinging for the fences. But the Republicans, it’ll be like a hostage video of people forced on stage.”
+
+The Cleveland convention will be orchestrated to help expand Trump’s appeal to the general electorate. To that end, several members of his family are expected to give speeches, including his wife, Melania, and his four oldest children: Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric and Tiffany.
+
+In addition, other speakers who have known Trump and his family through the years plan to take the stage. They include Haskel Lookstein, a rabbi in New York who converted Ivanka Trump to Judaism; Tom Barrack, a wealthy California-based investor who has worked with Donald Trump on real-estate deals; and Kerry Woolard, the general manager of Trump Winery in Virginia.
+
+With the public on edge following a spate of shootings by police and last week’s killing of five officers in Dallas, Trump has sought to brand himself as the law-and-order candidate. Some speakers at the Cleveland convention could help him make that case, including Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a Democrat who is an outspoken critic of the Black Lives Matter movement and is a frequent Fox News Channel guest; former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani; and two female attorneys general, Pam Bondi of Florida and Leslie Rutledge of Arkansas.
+
+Several early Trump backers are being rewarded with convention speaking slots, among them Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, a college founded by his late televangelist father. Falwell campaigned frequently at Trump’s side leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
+
+But one especially prominent Trump surrogate is not listed as a speaker: Sarah Palin, a former Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential nominee, who has garnered mixed reviews for her campaign-trail appearances supporting Trump.
+
+Here in Cleveland, the Republican National Convention’s Rules Committee convened early Thursday and met late into the night to review the 42 rules governing the party structure and the selection of a presidential candidate. The big undecided issue remains whether or not to continue binding convention delegates to the results of caucuses and primaries or to unbind delegates and allow them to vote however they want.
+
+Another subject of talks, which eventually collapsed with no resolution, centered on whether to return the party to closed contests — meaning that only Republicans could vote in presidential caucuses and primaries. A group led by Ken Cuccinnelli, the former Virginia attorney general, also wanted to make other changes to party operations.
+
+Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and several members of the party’s leadership generally support the idea of reverting back to closed contests by awarding more convention delegates to states that hold closed contests.
+
+Cuccinnelli said he proposed giving 20 percent more delegates to states that opted to hold a closed contest. Priebus and his team considered the offer, cut ultimately declined, according to people familiar with the talks.
+
+Ed O’Keefe and Dan Balz contributed to this report.",REAL
+3756,Curfew begins in riot-torn Baltimore,"BALTIMORE -- A citywide curfew took effect Tuesday night in tense, riot-torn Baltimore as a heavy presence of police and National Guard troops sought to disperse protesters.
+
+Dozens of people remained in the streets after the 10 p.m. curfew. Officers with bullhorns and self-appointed citizen peacekeepers urged them to go home, and when some failed to disperse, police fired pepper pellets and smoke canisters.
+
+Some protesters hurled objects at police, who held shields and formed a line across an intersection and slowly advanced toward protesters.
+
+Baltimore police said on Twitter: ""Officers are now advancing on the group. They remain aggressive and disorderly.""
+
+""We've got a long night ahead of us,'' Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said earlier. Security forces ""will not tolerate violence or looting,'' he vowed.
+
+Hogan said a massive display of security was deployed in the city: 2,000 National Guard troops and 1,000 law enforcement officers.
+
+Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said in a news conference late Tuesday night that 10 people had been arrested, seven of them for violations of a 10 p.m. curfew.
+
+The Baltimore Orioles canceled Tuesday's scheduled home game and in an unusual move said Wednesday's game will be played in an empty Camden Yards stadium, without spectators.
+
+Baltimore's school system announced it would reopen for classes Wednesday.
+
+Batts defended his agency's slow response to violence that tore through the city a day earlier, leaving cars and buildings gutted by fire and stores looted. Batts said the young age of those who took to the streets with rocks and bricks -- high school students, many of them -- caused officers to take a measured initial response to Monday's violence.
+
+""Why didn't you move faster? Because they're 14, 15 and 16 year old kids out there,'' Batts said at an afternoon news conference, posing to himself a frequently asked question.
+
+""They're old enough to know better ….old enough to be accountable. But they're still kids, unfortunately, and we have to take that into account when we're out there.''
+
+The violence erupted on the day of the funeral for Freddie Gray, 25, who died after suffering a mortal spinal injury while in police custody.
+
+Appearing with Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Batts defended her against critics for an initially low-profile response, calling her ""courageous.'' He acknowledged that Baltimore's police culture must change: ""We have more to do, but we can't do it by destroying this beautiful city.""
+
+""Overall today has been a very good day,'' Batts said. ""We're going to be out in strong numbers making sure we have no issues in our city.''
+
+There were some tense protests and a massive cleanup underway. The city was going on a week-long nightly curfew beginning at 10 p.m.
+
+Hogan said 250 people were arrested in Monday's violence. Police said more than 20 police were injured, and Batts said one of them remained hospitalized Tuesday. About 20 businesses and more than 140 cars burned as the mayhem spilled into Tuesday's early hours. From 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., the city's Office of Emergency Management reported 10 major blazes.
+
+""Acts of violence and destruction of property cannot and will not be tolerated,'' Hogan said. ""This is far from over.''
+
+President Obama promised a thorough investigation into the death of Gray.
+
+U.S. Justice Department officials met with members of Gray's family late Tuesday, in addition to relatives of police officers who were most seriously injured in Monday's unrest, a Justice official said. Vanita Gupta, chief of the department's Civil Rights Division, and Ronald Davis, director of the Community Oriented Policing Services office, were dispatched to Baltimore to represent the department.
+
+Attorney General Loretta Lynch spoke with Hogan and members of the Maryland congressional delegation to discuss the developments in Baltimore and to offer assistance.
+
+Across the city, schools were closed, the National Guard was on the streets and wreckage was everywhere. Across the street from a burned and looted CVS store, several people threw water bottles at officers who stood in riot gear. At times protesters argued among themselves, some pleading for a peaceful event and others arguing that the police officers needed to feel the pain they have inflicted on the community.
+
+Still, Batts said only two arrests were made by late afternoon. ""For the most part, the city has been calm today,'' Batts said.
+
+James Brown, 27, an event planner, said he believes the situation will worsen. ""This is not going to end,"" he said. ""Black men feel like we don't have rights. We are not being heard.""
+
+""We will not let these deplorable and cowardly acts of violence ruin our city,"" she tweeted. ""I sincerely want to thank all those out there cleaning up streets and sharing their love for #OurCity. Thank you, Baltimore!""
+
+Rawlings-Blake walked back comments she made about ""thugs"" trying to tear down the city.
+
+""I wanted to say something that was on my heart … We don't have thugs in Baltimore. Sometimes my little anger interpreter gets the best of me,"" she said, pointing to her head. ""We have a lot of kids that are acting out, a lot of people in our community that are acting out.""
+
+She dismissed claims that she waited too long to send in a heavy police and National Guard presence. She cited a ""delicate balancing act"" between managing the problem and making it worse.
+
+""It is very important that we respond to the situation as it is on the ground,"" she said. ""There are always going to be armchair quarterbacks who have never sat in my seat.""
+
+Police Capt. John Kowalczyk said the relatively light initial police presence was because authorities were preparing for a protest of high schoolers. A heavy police presence and automatic weapons would not have been appropriate, he said. Kowalczyk said police made more than 200 arrests, 34 of them juveniles.
+
+During the mayhem, social media was alive with ""#purge,"" an apparent allusion to the film The Purge, which featured a 12-hour period in which all crime is legal.
+
+Gray, 25, died April 19, one week after being arrested and suffering a severe spinal injury. After Gray's funeral Monday, protests ostensibly against police violence quickly deteriorated into devastating riots. Bands of looters, some armed with crowbars, roamed the city, hurling rocks at police, destroying patrol cars, smashing store windows and torching buildings.
+
+Residents swept glass and debris from battered sidewalks and streets while National Guard members stood sentry during daylight hours Tuesday.
+
+Tanisha Owens, 30, an elementary school teacher living in Baltimore, said she hopes young people will get a chance to come to peaceful protests in the city and learn how to voice their concerns.
+
+""My students see this destruction happen to their communities and they need to also see the good side of it,"" Owens said. ""I want them to understand that not everyone is bad. There's also good in their city.""
+
+Owens added that she was impressed at how quickly people cleaned up stores affected by looting. She and several co-workers came to the city with brooms and gloves but found that all the places they wanted to volunteer were already cleared of debris.
+
+But many said they remain frustrated by what they believe is unfair treatment of blacks by police.
+
+""We have too much violence against all the little brown children,"" Mitchum Alexander, 46, of Baltimore, said. ""We need to put a stop to this and educate law enforcement and people in society so incidents like this don't occur.""
+
+Martin O'Malley, former governor of Maryland and former mayor of Baltimore, stopped by West Baltimore where hundreds of demonstrators gathered all day.
+
+""There's a lot of pain in our city right now, a lot of people feeling very sad,"" O'Malley said. ""We have got to come through this together. We are a people who have seen worst days and we will come through this.""
+
+Yet as O'Malley walked through crowds of protesters some heckled him and told him to leave.
+
+Wayne Gray, 47, has lived in Baltimore his entire life and said O'Malley had a chance to help the city and didn't. Instead, Gray said O'Malley didn't help improve the lives of poor people and started the culture and policies that led to over arresting black men.
+
+""He had a chance to fix this,"" Gray said of O'Malley. ""He's part of the frustration that built up in these black men.""
+
+Hogan also toured parts of the city. ""What happened last night is not going to happen tonight,"" he said.l
+
+Many businesses, wary of a resurgence of violence that had overwhelmed police and fire fighters, closed on Tuesday.
+
+The list included Security Square Mall with more than 100 stores in western Baltimore. Many downtown businesses were closed, and mutual fund houses T. Rowe Price and Legg Mason announced that most employees were working from home.
+
+Jamal Bryant, a local activist and pastor of Empowerment Temple AME Church, opened his church to teens with no place to go due to the school closures. He promised to conduct training on how to protest without destroying the city.
+
+Bryant tweeted: ""We're also gonna take HS students to go clean up OUR neighborhoods. We must rise from the ashes. Meet at @EmpowermentTem2 at 10""
+
+Obama also said economic and cultural problems must be addressed to fully solve the problem of violence on streets here and across the nation. Still, he stressed, that's no excuse for the violence.
+
+""When individuals get crowbars and start opening doors to loot, they're not protesting,"" Obama said in response to a query at a White House news conference. ""They're not making a statement. They are stealing. When they burn down a building they are committing arson. And they are destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities.""",REAL
+8450,Battle For Mosul Not What It Seems,"in: War Propaganda , World News (image credit: AP) The battle for Mosul is more about redeploying thousands of US-supported ISIS fighters to Syria, along with perhaps letting Turkish forces move in to control evacuated areas. Erdogan long coveted Mosul. He may think now’s his chance to seize the city and its lucrative oil reserves, claiming it’s a buffer zone against Kurdish fighters, similar to his northern Syria occupation. According to Syrian parliamentarian Hohammad Kheir Akam, “(t)he US has opened a southern side of Mosul (corridor) to the terrorists to” let thousands of its fighters enter Syria. US-led coalition warplanes easily spot their convoys. Yet they’re allowed to move freely – America supporting terrorists it claims to oppose. Iraqi Ansarullah al-Nujaba Movement spokesman Hashem al-Moussavi said “Washington is still continuing its military support for the terrorists in” his country, airdropping them weapons and other supplies. “Our forces have filmed US aircraft while dropping military aids for” ISIS terrorist fighters, he said. Iraq’s Hassan Abdel Hadi said government forces are concerned about US aerial attacks, impeding their advance to ISIS-controlled areas. “Unfortunately, there are still some people in Iraq who have been deceived by the US-led coalition, while Washington supports ISIL and is trying to compensate for the damage done” to their fighters by government forces, he explained. Last Friday, Russia’s Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov said US-led coalition warplanes struck a funeral procession. “Dozens of Iraqi civilians died, including women and children,” he explained. “Russian reconnaissance pinpointed two jets conducting airstrikes on Daquq, located 30 kilometers to the south of Kirkuk, where, according to our data, there are no ISIS fighters,” – a willful war crime. They’re “almost a daily routine for the (US-led) international coalition. Too often weddings, funerals, hospitals, police stations, and humanitarian convoys are being hit by the coalition warplanes.” Russian General Sergey Rudskoy said “(w)e are closely monitoring the situation around Mosul. So far we see no substantial progress in liberating this city from…ISIS” since operations began on October 16 – because no effort is made to do it. Last week, a coalition airstrike targeted a mosque south of Kirkuk, killing over a dozen women and children. A southern Mosul girl’s school was struck. US-led coalition warplanes were operating in the area, clearly responsible for what happened. On October 25, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported over 60 civilians killed, over 200 others injured on airstrikes on residential areas in Mosul – locations where no ISIS fighters were present. So far, no fighting inside Mosul was reported. By the time, so-called liberating forces enter the city, ISIS fighters will be gone – redeployed to Syria to combat government troops and civilians. Moscow letting this happen without resistance so far makes the battle to liberate Syria harder. Is an offensive planned to rectify this blunder, compounded by failing to launch airstrikes against al-Nusra terrorists in eastern Aleppo since October 18? According to General Rudskoy, Russian Aerospace forces are monitoring the situation in the area of the Syrian-Iraqi border day and night with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles and other reconnaissance means.” “Russian planes are on patrol missions in the airspace and are ready to immediately deliver strikes against terrorists.” Aerial operations “in a 10-km zone around Aleppo” remain suspended. “The moratorium…will be extended.” The longer Russia delays full-scale aerial operations against US-supported terrorists infesting eastern Aleppo, the harder the struggle ahead to liberate the city and all key parts of Syria. Submit your review",FAKE
+2023,How right was Romney?,"Washington (CNN) Mitt Romney is eyeing another shot at the White House, but many Republicans, including those who admire and respect the party's most recent nominee, are wondering exactly what rationale he has for mounting another campaign in 2016.
+
+After all, in 2012 Romney lost all but one of the battleground states, trailed President Barack Obama 332-206 in electoral votes and Republicans panned his gaffe-prone campaign, chaotic convention and creaky tech operation.
+
+One working theory behind Romney 3.0 -- he thinks he got it right on the big issues that decided the last election and that voters have got buyers remorse.
+
+""He is been proven right on so many of the issues, certainly domestic policy but (also) foreign policy. He almost looked prophetic there talking about Russia and talking about the war on terror,"" said Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz on CNN's ""State of the Union"" on Sunday.
+
+Aides have told reporters, including CNN's Gloria Borger , that Romney sees vindication in a world tipping into chaos and an economic recovery that left the middle class behind.
+
+At the GOP's winter meeting in San Diego on Friday, Romney said he has given ""serious consideration"" to a new run for the presidency, and his lacerating criticism of Obama suggested he believes he has earned his chance.
+
+So how do Romney's critiques and promises stand up as he yet again sets foot on the road to the White House?
+
+Romney's best case for proving he was right may lie overseas.
+
+Not even the most committed Obama supporter could convincingly argue that the world is more stable than in 2012.
+
+It's only two years since the President brandished his own first term record of ending wars and killing Osama bin Laden to pound Romney as heir to a disastrous Republican foreign policy legacy.
+
+But assumptions underpinning Obama's statesmanship have started to fray. The rise of ISIS has raised questions about his decision to pull all troops out of Iraq and his reluctance to plunge into Syria's civil war. The standoff with Vladimir Putin has left his ""reset"" of relations with Russia looking naive.
+
+""The results of the Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama foreign policy have been devastating,"" Romney said Friday, arguing that terrorist attacks in places like France and Nigeria proved ""the world is not safer.""
+
+""Able leaders anticipate events, prepare for them, and act in time to shape them,"" Romney wrote.
+
+""Some simply cannot envision the future and are thus unpleasantly surprised when it arrives. Some simply hope for the best. Others succumb to analysis paralysis, weighing trends and forecasts and choices beyond the time of opportunity.""
+
+Many Romney aides believe Russia proves his point.
+
+In the 2012 campaign, long before Putin annexed Crimea, the Republican said that Russia ""is without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe.""
+
+Obama reacted with derision. ""The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War's been over for 20 years,"" he crowed in the third presidential debate.
+
+But time hasn't been kind to that zinger.
+
+While there is a debate whether Washington and Russia are really locked in a true Cold War, the Kremlin is doing a passable imitation of the Soviet Union. Russian aircraft are buzzing NATO planes in Europe and Russia stands accused of incursions in Ukraine. Moscow rewrote the borders of Europe by biting off Crimea and Putin warns the West wants to ""chain"" the Russian bear.
+
+While Romney predicted Moscow's belligerence, it's impossible to know whether tougher U.S. rhetoric would have changed Putin's calculations -- or antagonized him even more.
+
+And the administration argues that far from being the actions of a geopolitical foe, Putin's nationalism represents the thrashings of a weakened and desperate regime, that hardly poses a threat to the United States. And Obama might have adopted a tougher approach to Russia himself, had he not had to coax along European nations who were more reluctant than Washington to impose sanctions.
+
+Some of Romney's other 2012 foreign policy bets are yet to play out.
+
+He said that Iran's nuclear program is potentially the longest term threat to the United States.
+
+""If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon,"" he said in a Republican debate in 2011.
+
+So far, Iran has not gone nuclear. Obama says an interim deal has frozen Tehran's atomic advances and a final pact is being sought to stop the Islamic Republic short of the bomb.
+
+On Iraq, Romney hammered Obama in 2012 for not reaching a deal with Baghdad to leave a residual force behind after the war.
+
+Obama pounced, saying that meant his opponent wanted to keep U.S. troops in the country. Two years on the tables have turned and Obama has dispatched up to 3,000 troops to train Iraqi forces to take on ISIS -- though the administration insists that they will not be doing any fighting.
+
+Romney was also spot on when he warned the next few years would bring more ""chaos and tumult"" in the Middle East and that ""jihadists"" would continue to spread. But given the region's agonized history, it hardly takes a strategic genius to make such a prediction.
+
+Romney argued in 2012 that Obama's economic policy led to an anemic recovery from the worst recession in 70 years.
+
+He complained Obama broke his promise to cut the budget deficit in half and cited Congressional Budget Office (CBO) figures projecting trillion dollar deficits for four years following 2014.
+
+While Romney was wrong about that, the latest CBO estimates do offer some support to his wider point. The nonpartisan body expects the deficit to only be around $500 billion in 2015 but sees a rising trend with trillion dollar deficits in 2022 through 2024 owing to higher health care costs and rising interest payments on federal debt.
+
+Romney's critique of the uneven economic recovery is also accurate.
+
+""If you are elected president, we will continue to see a middle class squeeze with wages going down,"" he said in the first debate.
+
+He warned that if Obama got four more years in the White House, the national debt would approach $20 trillion. The figure is now $18 trillion. But Romney's claim the U.S. economy is on ""the road to Greece"" was always hyperbole.
+
+Romney also underestimated the pace of the recovery.
+
+""You're going to get a repeat of the last four years,"" he said at the second presidential debate.
+
+He promised to get unemployment under 6% or lower in his first term. Consider that promise beaten -- by Obama. In December, the jobless number was 5.6%. Romney also promised to create 12 million jobs. In the first two years of Obama's second term the economy has pumped out 5.2 million jobs and could approach Romney's target before he leaves office. Last year was America's top year of job growth since 1999. But Republicans still call this the slowest economic recovery on record.
+
+Nowhere was the 2012 debate more intense or more dripping with spin and falsehoods than Obamacare -- on both sides.
+
+In almost every campaign rally, Romney claimed the average American family would see health costs rise by $2,500 annually because of the president's reforms.
+
+Statistics don't yet offer a full picture of Obamacare's impact on costs -- and the law has so upended the health care industry it is difficult to draw firm conclusions.
+
+But a Kaiser Foundation survey found that health care costs for family coverage in employer-sponsored plans rose 3% in 2014, well below Romney's figure.
+
+In the wider marketplace, the picture is complicated because some people who did not have health care before can now get it under Obamacare.
+
+Others have chosen better plans now available which may cost more. And some patients who bought Obamacare are now paying less for health care. Total spending for health care in the nation rose 3.6% in 2013, slower than the 4.1% rise the year before, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Growth in private health insurance premiums meanwhile grew at 2.8% in 2013 compared to 4.0% the year before. But Republicans point to extra costs -- claiming for instance that many people now face higher deductables.
+
+Romney was correct to say however that millions of Americans would lose their insurance policies under Obamacare, rejecting the president's health care whopper ""If you like your health plan you can keep your health plan.""
+
+But that's only half the story. While many people lost plans -- some because they did not reach quality thresholds set by Obamacare -- the White House says millions also signed up to new policies.
+
+Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bear out that claim, finding that in the first half of 2014, 12.2% of Americans had no health insurance, compared to 17.3% the year before.",REAL
+1683,Marco Rubio: Donald Trump's plan 'borders on the absurd',"But he rejects the idea that Clinton's campaign -- which many believe has been on a hot streak lately following an appearance on ""Saturday Night Live,"" a well-received debate performance and Vice President Joe Biden's decision to not seek the White House -- ended the week on a high note following her lengthy testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
+
+""People may think she had a good week,"" Rubio told CNN's Jamie Gangel in an interview that aired Sunday on ""State of the Union."" ""I think this is the week it was proven that she lied about Benghazi.""
+
+The Florida senator said he believes Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, thanks in part to her belonging to a ""political dynasty"" that will help her fundraising.
+
+As for Donald Trump, the party's current front-runner, Rubio charged the developer's immigration proposals ""border on the absurd.""
+
+""His rhetoric is a little louder but, if you think about where he was six months ago, his position on immigration six months ago was nothing like what he's saying now. And even what he's saying now borders on the absurd,"" he said. ""He's going to deport all these people and then he's going to allow back in the ones that are good. His plan makes no sense."" Overall, Trump has failed to communicate a clear, deep understanding of America's most pressing issues, Rubio said. ""I would say that ultimately the next president of the United States, on their first day in office, must understand the threats that face this country and must have shown good judgment about what to do about those issues,"" he said. And despite Trump's current success, Rubio is confident that the former reality television star's popularity will wane. ""I'm going to support the Republican nominee, and I'm comfortable that it's not going to be Donald Trump, and I'm increasingly confident that it's going to be me,"" he said. Confidence and optimism aside, Rubio isn't blind to his low presidential poll numbers -- even in his home state -- and blames them on ""a very unusual year."" ""If you start paying attention to these polls in October, I mean, you'll go crazy. I've been up, I've been down,"" he said. ""It's a very unusual year, and I think part of it is that people are really angry about the direction of our country.""",REAL
+7078,Steven Seagal receives Russian citizenship on Putin’s personal decision,"Steven Seagal receives Russian citizenship on Putin’s personal decision   AP photo Steven Seagal, a US actor, has received Russian citizenship. The decision has been made by Russian President Vladimir Putin . Previously, Seagal himself admitted such a possibility. The decree about the decision to grant Russian citizenship to US actor Steven Seagal has been published on the official website of the Kremlin. ""To bestow citizenship of the Russian Federation to Seagal Steven Frederick, born on 10 April 1952 in the United States of America,"" the decree reads. The decision was made in accordance with Article 89 of the Russian Constitution. In mid-September, Seagal admitted that could obtain Russian citizenship. ""I think Russian citizenship is somewhere on the horizon,"" he said. Seagal said that he would like to spend a few months a year in Russia with his friends - ""with the people who love me and wait for me here,"" the actor said. In 2014, Steven Seagal said in an interview with the Rossiyskaya Gazeta that there was no restriction in the United States for holding foreign citizenship. He also said that he did not intend to renounce his US citizenship."" ""I am an American and I love my country,"" the actor added. In early January, Steven Seagal became a citizen of Serbia . Steven Seagal is a frequent guest in Russia. In 2014, he came to attend an armory show in the town of Zhukovsky. In 2014, a promotional contract was announced, in which Steven Seagal was supposed to advertise products of Kalashnikov Concern. Later, a company spokesman told the Izvestia that the contract did not materialize. Pravda.Ru Steven Seagal to ask for Russian citizenship",FAKE
+8935,Man searching for unbiased review of ADHM and Shivaay on internet ends up exhausting data pack,"Man searching for unbiased review of ADHM and Shivaay on internet ends up exhausting data pack   trendinfo.com) 
+Nikhil Gupta, a resident of Delhi, used up his internet pack on Sunday while searching for an honest review of the movies Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Shivaay. 
+Being a movie aficionado, Mr. Gupta was looking forward to the release of the movies and was following Social Media trends and news about them for the past few weeks, and in the process learned that it’s actually possible to judge the content of a movie without watching it. 
+He soon realized the universe was divided into two distinct groups, one that loves ADHM and hates Shivaay and the other that loves Shivaay and hates ADHM. The following tweet from Mr. Nikhil Wagle compounded his confusion further: Don’t like @karanjohar films. But will watch #AeDilHaiMushkil to oppose hyper nationalism n hooliganism.l 
+— nikhil wagle (@waglenikhil) October 21, 2016 
+The aforementioned statement spoke volumes about his commitment to the, um, cause he was supporting but did not shed much light on Mr. Johar’s filmmaking abilities. He realized he needed to wait for the movie release and read the reviews to decide which one to watch first. 
+On Sunday morning, he recharged his internet data pack for a GB and looked up movie reviews on Google. He first opened NDTV’s website where the reviewer Saibal Chatterjee gave Shivaay a 2 star rating, which was consistent with his usual ratings that range from 1.5 to 2.5. However, he was surprised to see a 4 star rating for ADHM. 
+‘How did this miracle happen? Does he have all the keys on his numeric keypad now or has someone at NDTV told him the rating should be done on a 5 point scale?’ Mr. Gupta pondered. 
+He placed ADHM higher on his priority list, although IMDb ratings of ADHM and Shivaay were 5.4 and 7.6 respectively. When he was about to close the browser, he noticed two contrasting reviews of ADHM on Indian Express. He quickly went through them and was relieved to see the reviews were done by two different individuals and it was not a case of split personality disorder. 
+By the time he read the final review on the 10th page of Google, he started to lose faith in humanity, and hence decided to read audience reactions instead, only to find comments, such as ‘boycott ADHM’ and ‘I love Anushka Sharma.’ He read thousands of comments, which significantly improved his reading skills but did not help him arrive at a conclusion. While going through the comments, he received a notification from his internet service provider that he had zero balance left on his data pack. 
+‘Damn, I could’ve watched both the movies online with 1 GB.’ 
+He had no choice but to watch the movies and find out himself. He went to the nearest theater and watched both the movies back to back. Later when he came back home, he wrote his own review titled – “Boycott Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Shivaay.’",FAKE
+8511,The state Duma has postponed the adoption of the bill on “winter tires” | The Newspapers,"The state Duma has postponed the adoption of the bill on “winter tires” The state Duma has postponed the adoption of the bill on “winter tires” 02.11.2016 
+The state Duma will not pass a bill on fines for “superiority” machines — that is summer tires in the winter and Vice versa: according to our information, on 1 November, the Duma Council decided to establish an ad hoc working group on the revision of the initiative. 
+photo: Gennady Cherkasov 
+Originally planned to be introduced in 2014 by a group of senators and MPs at the meeting of 21 October, but the agenda was very intense, and until this subject is not reached. 
+Then attracted great attention of the public document it was proposed to include in the agenda of the meeting on 2 November. But now his fate will be decided by the ad hoc working group. 
+As reported by “MK” sources familiar with the situation, even at the last Duma Council the question arose about why the bill on amendments to the Code of administrative offences went through the Committee on transportation and construction and not through the profile for all of the bills offering to rule of the administrative code, the Committee on state construction and legislation. 
+And here, according to another source, “MK”, November 1, the Council of the Duma the head of the Committee on transport and construction Yevgeny moskvichyov ( United Russia ) has proposed to establish a joint working group of representatives of the two committees, and to discuss again all disputed issues. 
+We recall that the bill was discussed on amendment of the administrative code, which promised to be fine in 2 thousand rubles for violation of requirements of operation of tires and wheels. 
+The Committee on transport and construction, proposing to support the project in the first reading, said that from 1 January 2015 entered into force the technical regulations of the Customs Union “On safety of wheeled vehicles”, one of which forbids to operate vehicles without winter tires in winter. But the timing of the entry into force of this regulation “was determined based on the training of owners of vehicles (especially large trucking companies) to the introduction of these rules, and also taking into account the possibility of domestic industrial enterprises to ensure that all vehicles operated on the roads of our country, winter tires”. 
+The disadvantage of the bill, noted in the Committee ’s opinion, is the absence in it of provisions concerning the right of subjects of Federation to change the terms of the prohibition of winter tyres and tyres with spikes of snow. ",FAKE
+106,Not all the recent fires at black churches were arson. Here's what we know.,"Since June 21, fires have been reported at six Southern churches that serve mostly African-American congregations. Investigators believe that two of these fires were intentionally set, and the cause of three others is unknown and under investigation.
+
+These fires came to public attention a few days after the shooting that killed nine black members of Charleston's Emanuel AME Church on June 17 — which was itself a reminder of the long history of terrorism against black churches in America. Although church fires are not uncommon — and there is a lot we still don't know about the recent fires, some of which were accidental — many observers are fearful and anxious.
+
+Since June 21st, there have been at least four mysterious fires at black churches in the South — three of which were likely deliberate. In three cases, law enforcement officers have said that there's evidence that the fire was deliberately set. In one other case, investigators have been unable to determine whether the fire was intentional or not.
+
+Many media reports have referred to fires at ""seven churches."" But those include two churches that were struck by lightning (one of which was a white church), and another church where the cause of the fire was likely an electrical failure.
+
+Here's what we know about the cases, based on reporting from the Los Angeles Times's Matt Pearce,CNN's Ben Brumfield and Sam Stringer, the Associated Press's Bruce Smith and Meg Kinnard, and local media:
+
+How this compares to general arson rates for churches, including black churches. According to the National Fire Protection Association (via the Los Angeles Times's Matt Pearce), firefighters responded to an average of 1,600 fires at churches a year from 2007 to 2011. That comes out to an average of 31 fires a week.
+
+Sixteen percent of fires at churches and funeral homes (the latter is much less common) were intentionally set. That's an average of five intentional fires a week, or 256 a year — causing an average of three civilian injuries annually.
+
+Both intentional and accidental fires have been declining since the 1980s.
+
+What the motive of any intentionally-set fire was. Deliberate fires are set for a variety of reasons. Investigators have not come up with suspects or a motive in any of the recent fires.
+
+Whether any of the fires were connected to each other: Some past attacks on black churches, like the 1995 Ku Klux Klan attack on the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, were deliberately coordinated. But an attack can be racially motivated without being the work of a white supremacist organization. In some cases, racism combines with other factors — like alcohol and drugs — to inspire individuals to launch attacks on their own. As the Washington Post reported about three Tennessee arsonists in 1996:
+
+When we'll have answers: Law enforcement officials are currently investigating four of the fires, often with assistance from the FBI. We don't know when these investigations will conclude, or whether they'll have enough evidence to determine whether a crime was committed.
+
+In the past, arson cases have often rested on forensic evidence that purported to show a fire was deliberately set. But in recent years, the reliability of those findings has been questioned or discredited.
+
+Attacks on black churches have been a frequent form of anti-black terrorism in America: The black church has been a symbol and a gathering place for black America, and that's made it an appealing target for white supremacist terrorists. The Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where the June massacre happened, was burned in the 19th century after one of its founders planned a slave revolt. In 1964, four young girls were killed when the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed. There was a wave of firebombings of black churches in the South in the 1990s, and a black church in Massachusetts was burned the day President Barack Obama was inaugurated.
+
+Burnings of black churches by whites are not uncommon: The current data on church fires doesn't include data for black churches in particular. But we do have some data from the 1990s, when the rash of burnings of black churches prompted the creation of a federal task force. The task force investigated 945 church fires, including 310 black churches (213 of which were in the South).
+
+Law enforcement ultimately arrested 136 people for arson against black churches, a little under two thirds of whom were white; 102 of the suspects — two-thirds white — were arrested for arson against black churches in the South. (Law enforcement agents arrested 431 suspected arsonists overall, including white and black church fires.)
+
+Most of these cases were brought in state court. But sometimes the federal government did end up bringing charges — especially in cases of hate crimes. Fifty-eight percent of federal convictions for church arsons from 1995 to 2000 were for crimes ""motivated by bias.""",REAL
+7874,21 Things We’ve Learned About Hillary Clinton from Wikileaks That the MSM Won’t Share…But YOU Can!,"Daisy Luther 
+Let’s talk about Wikileaks. 
+First of all, the organization was founded by Julian Assange back in 2006. Their website explains what they are all about: 
+“WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying, and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses.” 
+In the 11 years that they’ve been publishing documents, they have not been disproven a single time. Their record for authentication is perfect. (Learn more here and here .) 
+So this means that a person would be pretty silly to disregard anything in the reams of information about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, the Clinton Foundation, and the political shenanigans that would put the Machiavellis to shame. 
+Here are 21 of the most important things that have come out about Hillary Clinton, that unfortunately, no one is reporting on in the mainstream. In the interest of brevity, each topic has a link to an article that goes deeper into the leak. (In no particular order.) John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign had a nice cozy dinner with Peter Kadzik, one of the top officials in the Department of Justice…the day after the Benghazi hearing . Kadzik’s son also asked for a job on the Clinton campaign, and, the icing on the corruption cupcake? Kadzik led the effort to nominate Loretta Lynch, who famously met with Bill Clinton on her private plane right before Hillary’s interrogation about Emailgate. ( source ) We all knew that the Clinton Foundation was just a way for the Clinton family to launder money, and now there’s proof. Zero Hedge writes, “…today’s Wikileaks dump included that memo which reveals, for the first time, the precise financial flows between the Clinton Foundation, Band’s firm Teneo Consulting, and the Clinton family’s private business endeavors.” A pundit called this leak “The Rosetta Stone of the Clinton Foundation,” meaning that with this document, all of their shady financial dealings could be unraveled and translated. ( source ) Clinton is unable to speak for very long without a podium to lean on . Numerous leaked emails reference how certain interviews have to be kept short because she’d be without one. And this article references a very interesting reason why this may be the case – surprisingly it isn’t related to her health. ( source ) The leaks also show that Clinton intends to do her best to restrict the Second Amendment. Brian Fallon, the national press secretary for the Clinton campaign, wrote, “ Circling back around on guns as a follow up to the Friday morning discussion: the Today show has indicated they definitely plan to ask bout guns, and so to have the discussion be more of a news event than her previous times discussing guns, we are going to background reporters tonight on a few of the specific proposals she would support as President – universal background checks of course, but also closing the gun show loophole by executive order and imposing manufacturer liability .” According to an analysis on The Daily Sheeple, “Imposing manufacturer liability means that after Sandy Hook, Bushmaster and Remington Arms would have been prosecuted for having a hand in the murder of children and school staff members for firearms that were legally sold.” ( source ) The campaign was concerned that the sexual escapades of Bill Clinton could be likened to those of another disgraced celebrity, Bill Cosby . Political operative Ron Klain sent an urgent email saying that Hillary should anticipate the following questions, ” How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did? Is his conduct relevant to your campaign? You said every woman should be believed. Why not the women who accused him? Will you apologize to the women who were wrongly smeared by your husband and his allies?” ( source ) Clinton’s campaign deliberately leaked an embarrassing photo of a swimsuit-clad Bernie Sanders to the press, ironically insinuating that it was proof he was bought off by Wall Street. Perez Hilton wrote, “ Bernie Sanders lounges at elite Martha’s Vineyard pool, summer 2015 after helping raise money from Wall Street lobbyists .” ( source ) Clinton admitted she is out of touch with the middle class in a speech to Goldman-Black Rock in 2014. “And I am not taking a position on any policy, but I do think there is a growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged. And I never had that feeling when I was growing up. Never. I mean, were there really rich people, of course there were. My father loved to complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had accessible health care. We had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, didn’t believe in mortgages. So I lived that. And now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy , but I haven’t forgotten it.” ( source ) She made this rather NWO remark at a 2013 paid speech to Brazilian bank Banco Itau: “ My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders , some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” ( source ) In a leak of yet another paid speech, this time to the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago in 2013, Clinton said that Jordan and Turkey “ can’t possibly vet all those refugees so they don’t know if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees.” Meanwhile, if Clinton has her way , we will be warmly welcoming 65,000 refugees a year, which makes Obama’s 10,000 a year look like small potatoes. ( source ) Clinton blackmailed the Chinese by telling them that the US would base missiles in the region if they didn’t exert some control over North Korean aggression. “ So China, come on. You either control them or we’re going to have to defend against them ,” she purportedly told the audience at a Goldman Sachs conference in June 2013. ( source ) In May 2015, Clinton was no longer Secretary of State but was ready to announce she was running for President when she was invited to attend a summit in Morrocco. The implication from the leaked emails was that a $12 million “donation” from the king of Morocco was dependent on Clinton attending the summit. Human Abedin, usually loyal to her boss, had concerns . “ If HRC was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter. She created this mess and she knows it. Her presence was a condition for the Moroccans to proceed so there is no going back on this,” Abedin wrote to Robbie Mook in a November 2014 email. Incidentally, Clinton didn’t attend. Bill and Chelsea went instead and the $12 million donation was not forthcoming. (source ) Podesta attacked Clinton’s primary election rival Bernie Sanders for criticizing the Paris climate change agreement. “ Can you believe that doofus Bernie attacked it? ” said Podesta. ( source ) Clinton told a Goldman Sachs conference she would like to intervene secretly in Syria . “ My view was you intervene as covertly as is possible for Americans to intervene,” she told employees of the bank in South Carolina, which had paid her about $225,000 to give a speech. “We used to be much better at this than we are now. Now, you know, everybody can’t help themselves. They have to go out and tell their friendly reporters and somebody else: Look what we’re doing and I want credit for it. ” (source ) There is indeed a definite link between the Clinton campaign and what MSM is allowed to say. The campaign has colluded directly with media spokespersons that read like a Who’s Who in American Media : Dan Merica from CNN, Haim Saban of Univision, John Harwood of CNBC and the NY Times, Rebecca Quick of CNBC, Maggie Haberman of NY Times and Politico, John Harris of Politico, Donna Brazile formerly of CNN, Roland Martin of TV-One, Marjorie Pritchard of The Boston Globe, and Louise Mensch of Heat Street. ( source ) As everyone knows, the DNC deliberately screwed Bernie Sanders out of the nomination ( Bonus: Wikileaks also released some of the DNC’s voicemails on the topic ). There are emails that prove who is actually pulling HRC’s puppet strings and that puppeteer is George Soros . The shadow government is not just a conspiracy theory – it really exists and Hillary’s job is to keep George Soros happy. ( source ) Excerpts from her speeches to Wall Street read like a guide to two-faced treachery. In them, she clearly points out that sometimes you “need” to lie. “If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.” ( source ) Wikileaks emails show that back when she still worked for CNN and before she became an employee of the Clinton campaign, Donna Brazile gave Hillary the questions in advance for her “impromptu” CNN Town Hall questions. ( source ) The campaign got to “approve” articles in influential publications like NY Times, HuffPo, CNN, NBC, CBS, NYT, MSNBC, and Politico, showing a massive collusion with the mainstream media, who has hounded Trump relentlessly in an effort to distract from HRC’s abysmal candidacy. ( source ) Through the treasure trove of Wikileaks emails, we can gain an accurate picture of how Hillary really feels about us all (spoiler: basket of deplorables, basement dwellers and right wing conspirators) ( source ) President Obama knew the whole time that her emails were not coming from the secure State Department server. Cheryl Mills wrote to John Podesta, “W e need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov .” You see, Obama’s emails all have to be from”whitelisted”addresses. So someone, somewhere, added her nonsecure email to his whitelist. ( source ) 
+And finally, here’s the real reason that treacherous shrew is involved in politics. And let me tell you, it isn’t because she yearns to make things better for anyone but herself. (emphasis mine.) 
+At the Goldman Sachs Builders and Innovators Summit, Clinton responded to a question from chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, who quipped that you “go to Washington” to “make a small fortune.” Clinton agreed with the comment and complained about ethics rules that require officials to divest from certain assets before entering government. “ There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives, ” Clinton said. ( source ) Together, we cannot be ignored. I am on a mission between now and the Presidential Election on November 8th and I hope that you will join me. I am going to work day and night to provide the coverage that the mainstream media is not. It isn’t until we combine all of our voices that we can make people listen to the scandals, the rigging, and the corruption, not only in this election but in the system in general. Please join your voice with mine by liking, sharing, and spreading the word. Together, we cannot be ignored. Together, we are an army. Read more about Hillary Clinton",FAKE
+7491,UDAN effect: Bengaluru techies demand air taxi services to cross Silk Board,"Tweet (Image via mygovernmentschemes.com) 
+A week after the Government of India announced its new Regional Connectivity Plan for the Aviation industry called the UDAN scheme, a group of techies in Bangalore have now written to the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) demanding that it too start air transport services. 
+In an exclusive to The Unreal Times , Nikhil Chaudhary, one of the techies behind this ingenious proposal told us, “You know the traffic situation. By the time we cross Silk Board, the Prime Minister goes to some foreign nation, signs an agreement, posts a selfie and comes back to India. By the time we cross Marathahalli, Talgo has completed its trials of a train from Delhi to Mumbai. This was getting too much for us. Now, with UDAN, we can actually get stuck less in traffic. The government has proposed a maximum of Rs. 2500 per hour for a flight. Given that it takes us more than an hour to cross Silk Board or Marathahalli, this seems like a good move. The only problem is that the Minister says anyone with hawai chappal can now fly, but our dress code doesn’t permit hawai chappal .” 
+When contacted, an official of the BMTC confirmed that they had received the demand. He said, “This will require a lot of work. First we sign the papers, send to the MD, she signs it and then it goes to the minister, he signs and then it goes to the dustbin. It will take us time to process it after that.” 
+Meanwhile, on hearing this, Uber and Ola excitedly announced new plans for air-based taxis. 
+An Ola official confirmed this. Speaking to our correspondent, he said, “We have run Ola Boats in Chennai during the floods, we were planning Ola Tanks to navigate Delhi’s garbage mountains, why not go for a Helicopter? We can take off anywhere, land anywhere. We’ll charge per kilometre, per minute and of course, take-off and landing charges will be applicable. We’ll also bring back Ola Café and name it Ola Sky Café for our riders. We will run special services just to cross Silk Board and Marathahalli. 
+When contacted, Uber too, said that they were serious about launching such services. “We have been investing a lot into driverless cars, but have concluded that cars will get involved in accidents in no time in India, so we decided to focus only on air-based taxis. While we are still researching on it abroad, in India we will take it forward with immediate effect,” said an Uber official. “We have earlier given our Customers Helicopter rides, now we’ll give them plane rides in Bangalore city itself.” When we asked him where they’d be able to find a runway for the plane to take off from, he smiled and said, “We’ll just have to take a leaf from Nitin Gadkari’s book and use Ring Road as a runway.”",FAKE
+3797,Obama Will Address Hillary’s Email Scandal on First Ever ‘Fox News Sunday’,"President Obama is appearing on Fox’s Sunday politics show to push Republicans to support Merrick Garland—but he will make bigger news talking about Hillary’s email scandal.
+
+“I think where he makes the most news is about Hillary Clinton,” Wallace said—an assessment that is likely to be greeted with apprehension at Clinton campaign headquarters in Brooklyn. “He hasn’t been asked about it in awhile. Back in October, on 60 Minutes, he said she had not jeopardized national security with her private email server. Since then, we’ve found out that 2,000 of her emails were classified and 22 were top secret. So could he say flatly that she didn’t give away America’s secrets?”
+
+“I think Fox News is more critical of this President than most other news organizations,” Wallace answered in an email to The Daily Beast. “The White House sometimes doesn’t like that. But I think we are doing our job—telling all sides of the story. I also think the White House doesn’t distinguish between our hard news operation and the opinion shows.”
+
+“He has nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, and they’re very frustrated with the fact that the Republican Senate refuses to even hold confirmation hearings, let alone to give him an up or down vote,” Wallace said in a phone interview, adding that he “pushed particularly hard” in his pitch to the White House that his program was well-positioned to serve their interests. “They saw Fox News Sunday as an opportunity to reach out to Republicans or Independents or conservative Democrats to try to put pressure on Republican senators to give a full vetting, a normal vetting, to Judge Garland.”
+
+Obama told Wallace that even if Clinton is elected in seven months, and the Senate goes into a lame-duck session, he plans to stick by Garland as his preferred nominee instead of pulling the nomination to let Clinton fill the seat vacated by the death last month of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.
+
+Wallace, meanwhile, declined to wade into the intrigue surrounding Fox News star and frequent Donald Trump target Megyn Kelly, who has been critical of her colleague Bill O’Reilly for not defending her more robustly, and recently confided to Variety that while she’s grateful for Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes’s staunch support, she must “keep [her] options open” on whether to re-up with Fox when her next contract talks come up after the November election.
+
+“I think any time that the president is doing an interview with a television program that he hasn’t done an interview with for a while”—in this case, not since Obama’s sole Fox News Sunday appearance in 2008, when he was a mere candidate for president—“it’s an opportunity to reach a new audience, or at least an audience that may not have heard from the president directly in a while.”
+
+Certainly, while they personally exempt Wallace, a registered Democrat, Obama and his aides haven’t been shy about expressing their disdain for the top-rated cable channel founded by former Republican strategist Ailes at the behest of media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996, around the same time that Obama was launching his political career back in Chicago.
+
+Obama has frequently made Fox News the butt of his comedy routine at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, and in April 2011, at the height of Trump’s birther antics, showed the audience what he termed “my official birth video,” which turned out to be the nativity scene from the Disney animation The Lion King.
+
+“I asked him about all the anger among Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, whether it’s Bernie Sanders supporters or Donald Trump’s supporters—people who feel dealt out of the game in Washington and on Wall Street—and does he take any responsibility for the fact that after eight years, people still feel the game is rigged.”
+
+Wallace said he also asked the president why he appeared to be so disengaged and emotionally contained when reacting to acts of terrorism that made many Americans angry—cheerfully golfing in Martha Vineyard after commenting on the beheading by ISIS of journalist James Foley, and enjoying a baseball game in Cuba after the horrific attacks in Brussels.
+
+“We also had a very interesting conversation when we did a walk-and-talk, where I asked him what is best day and worst day at the White House was,” Wallace said. “We were in the law library where he wrote the book Dreams from My Father…There couldn’t be a sharper contrast with the Oval Office.”",REAL
+6314,Russia reveals chilling first images of super-nuke ‘Satan 2’ which has ‘power to devastate area size of Texas’,"November 2015 Ads Russia reveals chilling first images of super-nuke ‘Satan 2’ which has ‘power to devastate area size of Texas’ Oct 28, 2016 Previous post Experts have warned the weapons will make the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like “popguns” according to reports 
+Russia has revealed its biggest ever nuclear missile which is powerful enough to destroy a country as big as France with a single strike. 
+Vladimir Putin is seeking to replace his arsenal of SS-18 Satan weapons with the new RS-28 Sarmat super-nukes. 
+They are packed with up to 16 nuclear warheads according to pictures revealed online from the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau. 
+The weapons – which will be ready for launch in 2018 – will make the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like “popguns”, experts have said. 
+A message posted alongside the picture said: “In accordance with the Decree of the Russian Government ‘On the State Defense Order for 2010 and the planning period 2012-2013’, the Makeyev Rocket 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+2425,Obamacare on the line at SCOTUS,"Washington (CNN) The future of health care in America is on the table -- and in serious jeopardy -- Wednesday morning in the Supreme Court.
+
+After more than an hour of arguments, the Supreme Court seemed divided in a case concerning what Congress meant in one very specific four-word clause of the Affordable Care Act with respect to who is eligible for subsidies provided by the federal government to help people buy health insurance.
+
+If the Court ultimately rules against the Obama administration, more than 5 million individuals will no longer be eligible for the subsidies, shaking up the insurance market and potentially dealing the law a fatal blow. A decision likely will not be announced by the Supreme Court until May or June.
+
+All eyes were on Chief Justice John Roberts -- who surprised many in 2012 when he voted to uphold the law -- he said next to nothing, in a clear strategy not to tip his hand either way.
+
+""Roberts, who's usually a very active participant in oral arguments, said almost nothing for an hour and a half,"" said CNN's Supreme Court analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who attended the arguments. ""(Roberts) was so much a focus of attention because of his vote in the first Obamacare case in 2012 that he somehow didn't want to give people a preview of how he was thinking in this case. ... He said barely a word.""
+
+The liberal justices came out of the gate with tough questions for Michael Carvin, the lawyer challenging the Obama administration's interpretation of the law, which is that in states that choose not to set up their own insurance exchanges, the federal government can step in, run the exchanges and distribute subsidies.
+
+Carvin argued it was clear from the text of the law that Congress authorized subsidies for middle and low income individuals living only in exchanges ""established by the states."" Just 16 states have established their own exchanges, but millions of Americans living in the 34 states are receiving subsidies through federally facilitated exchanges.
+
+But Justice Elena Kagan, suggested the law should be interpreted in its ""whole context"" and not in the one snippet of the law that is the focus of the challengers.
+
+""We look at the whole text. We don't look at four words,"" she said. Kagan also referred to the legal challenges to the law as the ""never-ending saga.""
+
+Justice Sonia Sotomayor was concerned that in the states where the individuals may not be able to receive subsidies, ""We're going to have the death spiral that this system was created to avoid.""
+
+And Sotomayor wondered why the four words that so bother the challengers did not appear more prominently in the law. She said it was like hiding ""a huge thing in a mousetrap.""
+
+""Do you really believe that states fully understood?"" she asked, Carvin, that those with federally run exchanges ""were not going to get subsidies?""
+
+Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested the four words at issue were buried and ""not in the body of the legislation where you would expect to find"" them.
+
+Justice Anthony Kennedy asked questions that could be interpreted for both sides, but he was clearly concerned with the federalism aspects of the case.
+
+""Let me say that from the standpoint of the dynamics of Federalism,"" he said to Carvin. ""It does seem to me that there is something very powerful to the point that if your argument is accepted, the states are being told either create your own exchange, or we'll send your insurance market into a death spiral.""
+
+He grilled Carvin on the ""serious"" consequences for those states that had set up federally-facilitated exchanges.
+
+""It seems to me that under your argument, perhaps you will prevail in the plain words of the statute, there's a serious constitutional problem if we adopt your argument,"" Kennedy said.
+
+The IRS -- which is charged with implementing the law -- interprets the subsidies as being available for all eligible individuals in the health exchanges nationwide, in both exchanges set up by the states and the federal government. In Court , Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. defended that position. He ridiculed the challengers argument saying it ""revokes the promise of affordable care for millions of Americans -- that cannot be the statute that Congress intended.""
+
+But he was immediately challenged by Justice Antonin Scalia.
+
+""It may not mean the statute they intended, the question is whether it's the statute they wrote,"" he said.
+
+Although as usual, Justice Clarence Thomas said nothing, Justice Samuel Alito was also critical of Verrilli's argument. He said if it were true that some of the states were caught off guard that the subsidies were only available to those in state run exchanges, why didn't more of them sign amicus briefs. And he refuted the notion that the sky might fall if the challengers were to prevail by saying the Court could stay any decision until the end of the tax season.
+
+On that point Scalia suggested Congress could act.
+
+""You really think Congress is just going to sit there while all of these disastrous consequences ensue?"" he asked.
+
+Verrilli paused and to laughter said, ""Well, this Congress? ""
+
+Kennedy did ask Verrilli a question that could go to the heart of the case wondering if it was reasonable that the IRS would have been charged with interpreting a part of the law concerning ""billions of dollars"" in subsidies.
+
+Only Ginsburg brought up the issue of standing -- whether those bringing the lawsuit have the legal right to be in Court which suggested that the Court will almost certainly reach the mandates of the case.
+
+President Barack Obama has expressed confidence in the legal underpinning of the law in recent days.
+
+""There is, in our view, not a plausible legal basis for striking it down,"" he told Reuters this week.
+
+Wednesday's hearing marks the third time that parts of the health care law have been challenged at the Supreme Court.
+
+In this case -- King v. Burwell -- the challengers say that Congress always meant to limit the subsidies to encourage states to set up their own exchanges. But when only 16 states acted, they argue the IRS tried to move in and interpret the law differently.
+
+Republican critics of the law, such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, filed briefs warning that the executive was encroaching on Congress' ""law-making function"" and that the IRS interpretation ""opens the door to hundreds of billions of dollars of additional government spending.""
+
+Hatch said Republicans would work with the states and give them the ""freedom and flexibility to create better, more competitive health insurance markets offering more options and different choices.""
+
+In Court, Verrilli stressed that four words -- ""established by the state"" -- found in one section of the law were a term of art meant to include both state run and federally facilitated exchanges.
+
+He argued the justices need only read the entire statute to understand Congress meant to issue subsidies to all eligible individuals enrolled in all of the exchanges.
+
+Democratic congressmen involved in the crafting of the legislation filed briefs on behalf of the government arguing that Congress' intent was to provide insurance to as many people as possible and that the challengers' position is not consistent with the text and history of the statute.
+
+Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell warned that if the government loses it has prepared no back up plan to ""undo the massive damage.""",REAL
+6200,Asda shoppers ‘just generally angry’,"Asda shoppers ‘just generally angry’ 31-10-16 SHOPPERS at Asda are generally very angry people, it has emerged. Following scenes of chaos at the budget supermarket as card machines failed, customers confirmed that they were angry about that, but angrier still about having to shop in fucking Asda. Mother-of-two Donna Sheridan said: “This isn’t Lidl or Aldi where the slumming bourgeoisie go to semi-ironically buy a frozen lobster and a scuba mask, this is Asda and shit here is real. “You don’t choose the Asda life. The Asda life chooses you. “Even in Morrison’s you get a bit of social mobility, the odd shopper scrabbles up the supermarket class system to Sainsbury’s while dreaming in vain of Waitrose.” She added: “If anyone blocks my access to the massive boxes of tea bags then I’ll serve them a family pack of kickass.” Teaching assistant Nikki Hollis said: “The worst thing about the card machines going down was having to hand over real money for some of this shit. “It really made the reality of Asda Smart Price Porridge Oats hit home. I think that’s when I went apeshit with a checkout divider and declared myself the barbarian queen of the prepared meats section.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+532,Obama to propose ending sequester,"On Day 13, a video message and a meeting with media executives—but still no press conference, protective pool",REAL
+8116,More Bang for the Buck | New Eastern Outlook,"Region: Russia in the World More bang for the buck is the most apt description when we compare spending of the United States Government with that of the Government of the Russian Federation on its defense sector and military technology development. A closer look at the two budgets reveals the huge fault line that cuts across the entire US economy today. It also mirrors the true collapse of the American hegemon as a world power. It need not have been. In the official Fiscal Year 2017 the US Department of Defense officially requested $523.9 billion in what they call “discretionary funding,” as in, “we use it as we please, no independent audit allowed.” Another $58.8 billion was requested for so-called Overseas Contingency Operations, typical Pentagon-speak for wars everywhere from Afghanistan to Syria to military operations around the South China sea. That made an official total of $583 billion requested and granted by a docile Congress . On October 13, the Russian wire-service Tass.ru reported that the Russian government is set to spend 948.59 billion rubles on national defense in 2017, according to the draft federal budget posted. It sounds like a lot, almost one trillion rubles. If we convert at the current dollar exchange rate, this translates into a mere $15 billion. Of that 793.79 billion rubles or $12.7 billion is planned to be spent on the Russian Armed Forces. In 2015 the Russian Federation spent $26 billion on the state military-industrial complex development program will reach 1.67 trillion rubles . That total for military industry investment and maintaining Russia’s armed forces, some $49 billion, equals 8.4 % of the dollar amount the United States Defense Department plays with annually . To that must be added the separate amount of $400 billion for modernization of Russian armed forces military capabilities by 2020. That’s roughly another $80 billion a year. Now the relevant question at a time when Washington-led NATO forces are aggressively moving to the borders of the Russian Federation, when US Pentagon Special Forces and mercenaries like Blackwater aka Academi are mucking around Ukraine causing mischief, destruction and murder, is which country is getting better defense or military capacities for every dollar spent. Astonishing performance The answer came following the September 30, 2015 Russian announcement that it had agreed to respond with military support to the call of the legitimate government of Syria. What Russian military efforts have accomplished with meager resources, has astonished most western military experts. Far from being the dilapidated, technologically obsolescent Soviet-era military that many US planners reckon, Russia’s armed forces have undergone a quiet and impressive modernization ever since it became clear around 2007 that Washington was intent on pushing NATO to Moscow’s front door in Ukraine and Georgia as well as threatening with US missile “defense” in Poland, Czech Republic and now also in Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shiogu is a remarkable organizer who is known for reorganizing large Russian government departments. Before becoming Defense Minister he was head of the large Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations, responsible for emergency situations, such as floods, earthquakes and acts of terrorism. The result of Russia’s military modernization, partly demonstrated in the military intervention in Syria, has been a strategic shift in the global military balance of power that Washington’s neo-conservatives, none of whom have served in active duty military theatres, did not reckon with. Russian science and engineering have accomplished astonishing results with minimum investment. Just a select glance at what is being developed is instructive. Hypersonic nuclear missile On October 25 the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau published the first image of the newest heavy intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-28 Sarmat known under NATO’s reporting name SS-X-30. It will replace its predecessor, the R36M2 Voyevoda or NATO reporting name SS-18 Satan. It is now in test phase and will enter service at the end of 2018. The SS-X-30 will replace the world’s most powerful strategic missile, the SS-18 Satan. One reason Washington pursued the Start-1 strategic arms reduction treaty with Moscow was because the Pentagon estimated that the SS-18 with its multiple warhead consisting of ten independently targetable re-entry vehicles each having a yield of 750 kilotons was a serious threat. Now, the new successor, SS-X-30 according to Tass military analyst, Viktor Litovkin, is far more threatening. While specific details are top secret, according to Litovkin, the new ICBM will evade any missile defense arrays Washington can install. It has far smaller liftoff mass and a greater range of flight up to 17,000 kilometers, able to reach virtually any target in the Continental USA. It is designed to go on flight paths crossing the South Pole, from where they are least-expected and where no missile shields are being created. Each missile will carry between 10-15 independently targetable nuclear warheads, in a “grape cluster” able to separate from the cluster one by one when a pre-loaded program issues the order to attack the selected target, Litovkin adds . He says that the SS-X-30 re-entry vehicle, called by Russian media Yu-71, and by its developer ‘object 4202′, or Aero-ballistic Hypersonic Warhead, will fly at hypersonic speeds of Mach 17, roughly 4.3 miles (7km) per second, with flight path’s altitude and direction constantly changing all the time making it immune to any missile defenses the Pentagon has deployed in Poland or South Korea, even those relying on space-based elements. “For the SS-X-30 it makes no difference if there is a missile defense or if there is none. It will slip through unnoticed,” says Litovkin . The new missile is capable of wiping out a country the size of France with nuclear explosions 2,000 times more powerful than the bomb used at Hiroshima in 1945 by Washington . Pentagon bucks go to waste The SS-X-30 development is but one of numerous game-changing weapons technologies Russia has been combat testing in Syria. Another is the cutting-edge Russian T-14 Armata tank that has no western competitor. Russian fighter jets have demonstrated their value in Syria and Russian anti-missile Contrast this with the colossal waste of US defense budget spending. Washington is used to fight wars, like the school classroom bully, only against tiny unequipped enemies like Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi in Libya. Granted US defense giants like Boeing or Lockheed Martin are working on hypersonic jets and other classified new weapons. However, the efficiency of every dollar spent on US military hardware is overshadowed by the effective of Russian defense spending. A recent US Defense Department report stated that the budget controls of the pentagon are non-existent. Alone the US Department of the Army cannot provide an audit trail for a cumulative $6.5 trillion of expenses . There are deep cultural and historical reasons why Russia has responded to the actions of Washington and NATO since 2007 as they have. They are deadly serious about defending the Russian Motherland as they term it. Washington politicians, regardless who is President, would do well to take this into their calculations when they egg on European NATO partners to provoke Russia in every way imaginable. Europeans would also do well to reconsider whether being Washington’s front line in NATO is worth the price of possible nuclear pulverization. I think not personally. F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” Popular Articles ",FAKE
+7487,Ben Shapiro Destroys John Oliver On Abortion And Trump | Daily Wire,"Ben Shapiro Destroys John Oliver On Abortion And Trump By: Hank Berrien October 27, 2016 
+On Thursday, on his daily podcast, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro decimated HBO host and supposed comedian John Oliver for his comments regarding Donald Trump's comments on abortion during the third presidential debate. 
+Shapiro began, ""HBO’s John Oliver belongs to a class of British people who think that they are smarter than everyone else by dint of their accent. They think that because they share an accent with Rex Harrison from My Fair Lady this makes them geniuses."" 
+He continued: 
+So John Oliver does a political show on American politics; he doesn’t know much about American politics; he doesn’t know much about politics generally; but he’s been feted by the media because he’s a comedian who’s wildly to the left. So just like President Obama is going to be interviewed by Samantha Bee, who is legitimately the least funny person in human history, (she and Trevor Noah actually have a cage match next week to determine who’s the least funny person in human history. Both of them I believe, beat Stalin for that title a while back, so now were going to unify the championships), so Obama’s going to be on with Samantha Bee, where presumably they will jabber about how much they love each other and why abortion’s wonderful. 
+John Oliver was ripping on Donald Trump the other day at some awards ceremony, and because he’s British, that means we’re supposed to pay attention to him, even though we fought a revolution so we wouldn’t have to pay attention to the Brits. Here’s John Oliver talking about abortion: 
+The screen then showed Oliver pontificating: 
+In terms of the communication about reproductive rights and the conversation that is so important; we really did potentially hit an idea in the modern era during that third debate because his discussions of late-term abortions showed no real understanding of how abortions work, no clear understanding of the basic biology of women’s bodies, and a very poor sense of grammar as well. So I guess we got, in a sense, what we were asking for. If you ask Donald Trump to draw a Fallopian tube, I cannot imagine what you would get back other than a child’s drawing of a cobra. 
+Shapiro fired back: 
+Okay. I would hesitate to ask John Oliver to draw a Fallopian tube or to describe any of the biology here, because he obviously doesn’t know. Now look, I criticized Trump for being ignorant about how he described abortion because he wasn’t graphic enough. But let me, for those who missed it, explain what exactly happens in a late-term abortion, which is what he was talking about, okay? What happens in a late-term abortion, what happens in a late-term abortion, is something completely awful; this is according to americanpregnancy.org., okay? Not a right-wing pro-life website: americanpregnancy.org: ""The fetus is rotated; forceps are used to grasp and pull the legs, shoulders and arms through the birth canal. A small incision is made at the base of the skull to allow a suction catheter inside. The catheter removes the cerebral material,” that would be the brains, “until the skull collapses. The fetus is then completely removed.” 
+Shapiro continued to explain the barbaric procedure: 
+Okay, that’s one procedure that’s used; that’s “dilation and extraction.” In late-term abortions it usually one of these two; “dilation and evacuation” or “dilation and extraction.” “Dilation and evacuation”: The baby may be given a lethal injection to kill it; sometimes they don’t use such injections; then the doctor uses a curette or a forceps to carve up the child’s body in the womb, and remove it piece by piece. 
+Then he proceeded to carve up Oliver: 
+So I guess that Donald Trump could have been more graphic; I don’t know that John Oliver would have enjoyed that, but he could have been more graphic, I suppose. But this is what they do, laugh it up, “Oh, he can’t draw a Fallopian tube."" 
+Okay, John: draw an abortion. Really. Draw it; let’s see it. I want to see you get down there with a piece of paper and I want you to draw me what you think an abortion looks like. It’s not waving a magic wand, and it’s not getting rid of a cluster of cells that mean nothing. I want you to sit there and draw what it looks like when a baby is cut into pieces and removed from the womb. I would like to see that. ""Okay, John: draw an abortion. Really. Draw it; let’s see it. I want to see you get down there with a piece of paper and I want you to draw me what you think an abortion looks like."" Ben Shapiro 
+Shapiro concluded: 
+But of course he’ll never do that, other than, ""It might look like a cobra; it might look like a cobra; maybe it’ll look like a princess, waving her fairy magic wand and a unicorn emerges from the vagina.” The fact that he thinks his accent covers for his basic ignorance of biology and his euphemistic willingness to ignore what amounts to child-killing is absolutely ridiculous and despicable. 
+Video below: ",FAKE
+373,Sanders says he's backing DNC chair's primary opponent,"Washington (CNN) Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday said he supports Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz's Democratic opponent in her August 30 primary, adding that if he is elected president, he would effectively terminate her chairmanship of the DNC.
+
+Sanders, whose campaign has engaged in an increasingly bitter feud with the DNC chairwoman during his presidential bid, said in an interview set to air on CNN's ""State of the Union"" that he favors Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district. Canova is supporting Sanders.
+
+""Well, clearly, I favor her opponent,"" Sanders told Tapper. ""His views are much closer to mine than as to Wasserman Schultz's.""
+
+On Sunday afternoon, Canova accused Wasserman Schultz of ignoring her home district's economic issues.
+
+""In her own votes in the House of Representatives, I think she's making the problems worse,"" Canova told CNN's Fredricka Whitfield.
+
+He also expressed doubt that his political rival could heal intra-party rifts created during the primary.
+
+""If the Democrats come out of their convention united, it might not be because of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but in spite of her efforts,"" he said.
+
+Sanders sent out a fundraising email on behalf of Canova on earlier in the day.
+
+""The political revolution is not just about electing a president, sisters and brothers. We need a Congress with members who believe, like Bernie, that we cannot change a corrupt system by taking its money,"" the email said.
+
+Sanders also told Tapper that if he's elected president, he wouldn't reappoint Wasserman Schultz to head the DNC.
+
+In a response to Sanders on Saturday afternoon, Wasserman Schultz insisted she would remain neutral in the Democratic presidential race despite the Vermont senator's endorsement of her primary opponent.
+
+""I am so proud to serve the people of Florida's 23rd district and I am confident that they know that I am an effective fighter and advocate on their behalf in Congress,"" Wasserman Schultz said. ""Even though Senator Sanders has endorsed my opponent, I remain, as I have been from the beginning, neutral in the presidential Democratic primary. I look forward to working together with him for Democratic victories in the fall.""
+
+Sanders' campaign has long been critical of Wasserman Shultz's performance as head of the committee, claiming that the DNC has favored his presidential primary challenger, Hillary Clinton. Sanders and his supporters have complained about the nomination process and ways they believe it has helped Clinton, including debates held on Saturday nights, closed primaries in major states such as New York, and the use of superdelegates -- essentially free-agent party and union stalwarts who are overwhelmingly backing Clinton.
+
+Canova, who teaches at Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law in Fort Lauderdale, was asked in 2011 to serve on Sanders' Wall Street reform advisory panel.
+
+""I'm so proud to know that Bernie Sanders favors our campaign for progress for all. Like Sen. Sanders, I'm running a campaign that's truly backed by the people, not big corporations -- one that stands up to Wall Street interests instead of cozying up to them,"" Canova told CNN in a statement Saturday. ""Together, I feel confident that our campaign of nurses, teachers, students, seniors and working-class Floridians can work together to demand accountability from our leaders, and offer a more positive path forward to the people of Florida's 23rd district.""
+
+While Sanders has a strong ability to raise money and thus could impact the race, he did not fare well in Wasserman Schultz's congressional district during the March Florida presidential primary, scoring 30.1% of the vote compared with Clinton's 68%.
+
+""We can have a long conversation about Debbie Wasserman Schultz just about how she's been throwing shade on the Sanders campaign from the very beginning,"" Weaver told CNN's Chris Cuomo on ""New Day.""
+
+""It's not the DNC,"" Weaver added. ""By and large, people in the DNC have been good to us. Debbie Wasserman Schultz really is the exception.""
+
+Wasserman Schultz has pushed back against Sanders' accusation that the party had rigged the system against him.
+
+""We've had the same rules in place that elected Barack Obama. These rules were adopted for state parties all across the country in 2014,"" she said earlier this week.
+
+Asked about the ""throwing shade"" line on Wednesday, Wasserman Schultz told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, ""My response to that is hashtag SMH (shake my head).""
+
+Sanders also said it is ""absurd"" that superdelegates began supporting Clinton even before she had a competitor.
+
+""There's something absurd that I get 46% of the delegates that come from real contests, real elections, and 7% of the superdelegates,"" he told Tapper. ""Some 400 of Hillary Clinton's superdelegates came on board her campaign before anybody else announced. It was anointment. And that is bad for the process.""
+
+Sanders, who has frequently cited polls saying he does better than Clinton in a matchup against Trump, also said there's ""a good chance"" the former secretary of state can beat the presumptive Republican nominee.
+
+""I'm not saying she cannot beat Donald Trump. I think she can. I think there's a good chance she can,"" the Vermont senator said. ""(But) I am the stronger candidate because we appeal to independents -- people who are not in love with either the Democratic or the Republican Party, often for very good reasons.""",REAL
+4967,Trump doubles down in naming a combative true believer as campaign chief,"At the lowest point of Donald Trump’s quest for the presidency, the Republican nominee might have brought in a political handyman to sand his edges. Instead, he put his campaign in the hands of a true believer who promises to amplify the GOP nominee’s nationalist message and reinforce his populist impulses.
+
+“Steve Bannon is a fighter’s fighter. He is somebody who wants to be the first boots on the beach. In the military, it’s called the tip of the spear,” said David Bossie, a conservative activist. It was Bossie who five years ago introduced Trump to Bannon, the top executive of the new media clarion of the establishment-­loathing right, Breitbart News.
+
+Breitbart has since become a champion of Trump’s candidacy — in large part because Stephen K. Bannon himself believes it represents a cause much bigger than a political campaign. Bannon sees Trumpism as part of a global movement that will continue, no matter who is sitting in the Oval Office next January, those close to him say.
+
+Last September, when hardly anyone else on this side of the Atlantic was taking the prospect of a British exit from the European Union seriously, Bannon invited influential Republican leaders to a dinner for Nigel Farage, the head of the UK Independence Party, at the Capitol Hill townhouse known as the “Breitbart Embassy.”
+
+Bossie and others hailed Bannon’s pick as a sign that Trump, whose campaign has wobbled since the GOP convention, will return to the messages that won him the Republican nomination.
+
+“It’s been frustrating that the campaign is not as vibrant and agile as we thought it could be at this stage,” Bossie said. “Steve is all action, action, action.”
+
+Democrats saw a darker, more divisive turn in the selection of Bannon to hold the new title of chief executive.
+
+Robby Mook, campaign manager for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, told reporters on Wednesday: “We absolutely expect, with this change, for Donald Trump and the campaign as a whole to double down on more conspiracy theories, more hateful rhetoric, more wild accusations.”
+
+Mook also called Breitbart News a “divisive, at times racist, anti-Muslim conspiracy news site,” citing a report earlier this year by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy organization.
+
+One headline last October dubbed Bannon “the most dangerous political operative in America.”
+
+In that Bloomberg News article, Joshua Green reported that Andrew Breitbart, the late founder of the site, had “described Bannon, with sincere admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement,” a reference to the infamous and glamorous maker of Third Reich propaganda films.
+
+Moviemaking has been one of the many chapters of Bannon’s career, which had previously included four years aboard a Navy destroyer, a post-MBA stint with Goldman Sachs, and founding an investment firm specializing in media.
+
+In one particularly felicitous deal, Bannon’s fee included an early stake in “Seinfeld,” the residuals of which alone would turn out to be enough to make him wealthy.
+
+Along the way, he developed a worldview remarkably in tune with what is now regarded as Trumpism: suspicious of free trade and liberal immigration policies, wary of military adventurism, and contemptuous of the old order.
+
+Bannon grew up in a working-class Democratic family in Norfolk, Va. He has attributed his disillusionment with the Democrats to his years in the Navy under Jimmy Carter as commander in chief, and said his experience running businesses in Asia while George W. Bush was president convinced him that establishment Republicans were no better.
+
+Bannon met Andrew Breitbart at a Beverly Hills screening of a 2004 Bannon-produced documentary on Ronald Reagan.
+
+“We screened the film at a festival in Beverly Hills,” Bannon told Bloomberg’s Green, “and out of the crowd comes this, like, bear who’s squeezing me like my head’s going to blow up and saying how we’ve gotta take back the culture.”
+
+At the time, Breitbart was trying to get his own website going, after having been an editor for the conservative aggregator Matt Drudge and a researcher for Arianna Huffington’s left-leaning Huffington Post. Bannon signed on to Breitbart’s new venture.
+
+After Breitbart’s death from heart failure in 2012, Bannon vowed to carry on his vision by building a global operation of “real hell fighters.”
+
+His operation has a more wonkish side as well, in the form of the nonprofit Government Ac­count­ability Institute, which pro­duced the best-selling book “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Govern­ments and Business Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.”
+
+Trump was not the first po­tential president to catch Bannon’s eye.
+
+In 2011, Bannon released a two-hour documentary about Sarah Palin called “The Undefeated,” attempting to reshape the way that voters and the media viewed the former candidate for vice president.
+
+“The reason she draws this kind of fire is that she is an existential threat to the establishment,” Bannon told Fox News’s Sean Hannity during the film’s promotional tour. “The vested interests in our country are scared to death of her.”
+
+While Palin dithered about whether to run for president, the documentary flopped, grossing $116,381. But Bannon remained convinced that the GOP was ripe for a populist takeover. That, say former employees of the site, was what set up the site’s aggressive coverage of illegal immigration, and what turned into the most pro-Trump news source.
+
+In March 2014, after BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins ran an unflattering report on what happened after traveling with Trump’s “fake” presidential campaign, Breitbart published a series of stories in which Trump allies attacked the reporter. “This nervous geek isn’t fit to tie the Donald’s wing tips,” Palin said, defending Trump against Coppins.
+
+When Trump became a candidate for president, the relationship deepened, and the billionaire frequently made himself available to break news on his race.
+
+He went to Breitbart to mock Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish and to attack Republicans for “folding” on trade. In a typical interview, conducted in November, Bannon joked that he himself had gone to “the poet’s version of business school — Harvard,” and he helped Trump dump criticism on the Republicans’ “consultant class.”
+
+Former employees of Breitbart describe a work environment that mirrors the Trump campaign. Reporters who couldn’t break or match news were chewed out with profanities; reporters on his good side were drawn into a hypercompetitive battle to own the news.
+
+All were encouraged to sign contracts with strict nondisclosure agreements. Several described Bannon pushing reluctant reporters onto stories by telling them: “I didn’t get where I am by being a Boy Scout.”
+
+In March 2016, after Trump won Florida and held a news conference, Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields tried to ask Trump’s then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski a question and was pushed aside.
+
+Chat logs later obtained by BuzzFeed revealed that Breitbart leadership wanted Fields to lay off the story and for members of the team to avoid tweeting about it. Fields quit, followed by several Breitbart staffers, including longtime editor-at-large Ben Shapiro.
+
+“He’ll tell Trump he’s doing a fantastic job even if he isn’t,” Shapiro wrote Wednesday on his new site, The Daily Wire. “That’s how Bannon Svengalis political figures and investors — by investing them in his personal genius, then hollowing them out from the inside. There’s a reason Sarah Palin went from legitimate political figure to parody artist to Trump endorser, with Steve Bannon standing alongside her every step of the way.”
+
+“A lot of the people that you like and respect have targets on their backs as a result of Bannon’s ascent to the top,” wrote Ben Howe, an editor at the conservative blog Red State who had spoken out against Trump. “You have no idea how dangerous this man is. It is going to be score settling time for him if Trump wins. “
+
+“If Donald Trump won the election, and Steve Bannon were his chief of staff, I would have legitimate fears about the use of government power to come after political enemies,” Shapiro said. “I don’t think Steve Bannon has principles.”
+
+But a current employee of Breitbart, who had not been authorized to speak for the record, disputed that characterization of his boss: “What he does is he gets the best out of people.”
+
+That, it would appear, is what Trump is hoping, as well.",REAL
+2906,US faces calls to ‘walk away’ from Iran talks,"A leading Republican critic of the Iranian nuclear talks is calling on the U.S. to ""walk away"" from the table after negotiators missed a key deadline, while other lawmakers joined in voicing concern that Iran could extract critical final-hour concessions in the scramble to salvage an agreement.
+
+Negotiations resumed in Switzerland on Wednesday but were almost immediately beset by competing claims, just hours after diplomats abandoned a March 31 deadline to reach the outline of a deal and agreed to press on. And as the latest round hit the week mark, three of the six foreign ministers involved left the talks with prospects for agreement remaining uncertain.
+
+Amid the confusion, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told Fox News he's concerned the framework of a deal could allow Iran keep its uranium stockpiles and continue to enrich uranium in an underground bunker.
+
+""You have to be willing to walk away from the table and to reapply leverage to Iran,"" Cotton said. ""And the fact that they're not willing to do that, that we're still sitting in Switzerland negotiating when three of our negotiating partners have already left just demonstrates to Iran that they can continue to demand dangerous concessions from the West.""
+
+Speaking on MSNBC, former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean seemed to agree. He said that while President Obama is ""right"" to seek a deal, it might be time to ""step away"" from the table and make clear that the U.S. is not backing off key positions -- including on Iran's uranium stockpile and the pace of sanctions relief.
+
+""I am worried about this,"" Dean said.
+
+Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., also told Fox News ""we're potentially [legitimizing] them having a nuclear infrastructure."" She added: ""We don't know exactly what's behind closed doors.""
+
+Despite all sides agreeing to blow by their deadline in pursuit of a rough agreement, even the White House threatened to abandon the talks if Iran wouldn't budge.
+
+""If they're unwilling to make those kinds of commitments that give us that assurance -- and by us I mean not just the United States, I mean the international community -- then we'll have to walk away from the negotiating table and consider what other options may be available to us, and there is certainly the possibility that that could happen,"" White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.
+
+Earnest indicated Wednesday that's still an option but called the scenario ""hypothetical"" as talks are ""making some progress."" He said talks continue to be ""productive"" but that ""we have not yet received the specific, tangible commitments we and the international community require.""
+
+On Tuesday, negotiators had been trying to agree to simply a joint statement that could justify talks continuing until a final June deadline.
+
+Iran's deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told reporters that if the sides make progress on the text of a joint statement, then that could be issued by the end of the day. But he suggested the statement would contain no specifics.
+
+A senior western official quickly pushed back, saying that nothing about a statement had been decided and that Iran's negotiating partners would not accept a document that contained no details.
+
+The German Foreign Ministry tweeted that ""nothing is agreed,"" although ""progress is visible.""
+
+Araghchi named differences on sanctions relief on his country as one dispute, along with disputes on Iran's uranium enrichment-related research and development.
+
+""Definitely our research and development program on high-end centrifuges should continue,"" he told Iranian television.
+
+The U.S. and its negotiating partners want to crimp Iranian efforts to improve the performance of centrifuges that enrich uranium because advancing the technology could let Iran produce material that could be used to arm a nuclear weapon much more quickly than at present.
+
+The exchanges reflected significant gaps between the sides, and came shortly after the end of the first post-deadline meeting between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, his British and German counterparts and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif in the Swiss town of Lausanne. They and their teams were continuing a marathon effort to bridge still significant gaps and hammer out a framework accord that would serve as the basis for a final agreement by the end of June.
+
+Eager to avoid a collapse in the discussions, the United States and others claimed late Tuesday that enough progress had been made to warrant an extension after six days of intense bartering. But the foreign ministers of China, France and Russia all departed Lausanne overnight, although the significance of their absence was not clear.
+
+Kerry postponed his planned Tuesday departure to stay in Lausanne, and an Iranian negotiator said his team would stay ""as long as necessary"" to clear the remaining hurdles.
+
+Officials say their intention is to produce a joint statement outlining general political commitments to resolving concerns about Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. In addition, they are trying to fashion other documents that would lay out in more detail the steps they must take by June 30 to meet those goals.
+
+The additional documents would allow the sides to make the case that the next round of talks will not simply be a continuation of negotiations that have already been twice extended since an interim agreement between Iran, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany was concluded in November 2013. Obama and other leaders, including Iran's, have said they are not interested in a third extension.
+
+But if the parties agree only to a broad framework that leaves key details unresolved, Obama can expect stiff opposition at home from members of Congress who want to move forward with new, stiffer Iran sanctions. Lawmakers had agreed to hold off on such a measure through March while the parties negotiated. The White House says new sanctions would scuttle further diplomatic efforts to contain Iran's nuclear work and possibly lead Israel to act on threats to use military force to accomplish that goal.
+
+Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to question the course of talks on Wednesday.
+
+He said Iran views Israel's destruction as non-negotiable, ""but evidently giving Iran's murderous regime a clear path to the bomb is negotiable. This is unconscionable,"" he said. ""At the same time, Iran is accelerating its campaign of terror, subjugation and conquest throughout the region, most recently in Yemen.""
+
+Netanyahu said a better deal would ""significantly roll back Iran's nuclear infrastructure"" and link a lifting of restrictions on its nuclear program to ""a change in Iran's behavior.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+306,A monumental test for Boehner,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+5661,"Comment on Why We’re All Deficient In Magnesium, The Many Signs & What To Do by Ain’t No Sunshine: Seasonal SADness and Magnesium | Activation Health","Osteoporosis (yes, magnesium is more important than calcium for bone health!) Diabetes Kidney Stones “Similarly, patients with diagnoses of depression, epilepsy, diabetes mellitus, tremor, Parkinsonism, arrhythmias, circulatory disturbances (stroke, cardiac infarction, arteriosclerosis), hypertension, migraine, cluster headache, cramps, neuro-vegetative disorders, abdominal pain, osteoporosis, asthma, stress dependent disorders, tinnitus, ataxia, confusion, preeclampsia, weakness, might also be consequences of the magnesium deficiency syndrome.” – Journal of the American College of Nutrition Amazingly, the article referenced above even mentions neuro-vegetative disorders as a possible result of magnesium deficiency. This would include comas. Stress hormone production requires high levels of magnesium and stressful experiences can immediately lead to complete depletion of magnesium stores; could this be a contributing factor to why we see comas after traumatic accidents/injuries? As I mentioned above, magnesium is an electrolyte responsible for brain signals and conductivity. Without magnesium, people in comas may not be able to come to and resume conductivity. Many people with diabetes also fall into diabetic comas. Diabetes is listed as another possible consequence of magnesium deficiency. Could this be a factor in diabetic comas as well? Something to think about and research further! Cravings Do you crave chocolate? Why, when people are stressed out, do they go for chocolate? Chocolate is one of the highest food sources of magnesium. Magnesium is associated with so many disorders that Dr. Carolyn Dean of the Nutritional Magnesium Association has devoted an entire book to discussing how she has treated thousands of patients for a wide array of diseases, with magnesium as the primary component. Her book, The Magnesium Miracle, is a must-read if you have any of the magnesium deficiency symptoms above, or any health problems in general – as there is likely a magnesium component to everything. Check out 50 Studies Suggest That Magnesium Deficiency Is Killing Us . Why Don’t Doctors Find Magnesium Deficiencies In Tests? Unfortunately, conventional medicine has not woken up to the amount of research that has been done on magnesium deficiency. One of the reasons Western Medicine is so off base with magnesium is how they test it: with blood tests. Blood tests do not yield ANY information about magnesium … why? Because the body controls the levels of blood magnesium very tightly. If the magnesium in the blood drops just a little bit, you’re going to have a heart attack. It’s that sample. So to prevent this, the body will rob all of its cells, tissues, and bones of magnesium in order to keep the blood levels constant. If you do a blood test for magnesium, the cells could be completely empty while your blood levels remain constant. What’s worse is that magnesium is not even in your blood. 99% of the magnesium in the body is stored in the cells that get robbed, while a mere 1% of your body’s total magnesium is in the blood. These tests are a complete waste of time, and they’re not educating doctors to this reality. Keep Evolving Your Consciousness Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. “A serum test for magnesium is actually worse than ineffective, because a test result that is within normal limits lends a false sense of security about the status of the mineral in the body. It also explains why doctors don’t recognize magnesium deficiency; they assume serum magnesium levels are an accurate measure of all the magnesium in the body.” – Dr. Carolyn Dean, The Magnesium Miracle. Why Are We So Deficient? Here’s the short(ish) version: Number one , we’re being poisoned by our food. Number two , we’re increasingly stressed out. We’re running our engines on high to keep up with life and it’s draining us. Stress hormone production requires high levels of magnesium and stressful experiences lead to depletion of magnesium stores. Number three , we’re eating more sugar than ever. For every molecule of sugar we consume, our bodies use 54 molecules of magnesium to process it. Fourth , low levels in the soil and modern farming techniques deplete stores of magnesium. And lastly, magnesium is depleted by many pharmaceutical drugs and estrogen compounds such as oral contraceptives, antibiotics, cortisone, prednisone, and blood pressure medications (“Drug-induced nutrient depletion handbook,” Pelton, 2001). Diuretics in coffee and tea (caffeine) also raise excretion levels. Oh and by the way – flouride competes for absorption with magnesium! Nowadays, nearly everyone is magnesium deficient – no test needed. Refined/processed foods are stripped of their mineral, vitamin, and fiber content. These are anti-nutrient foods because they actually steal magnesium in order to be metabolized. When consumed, they demand that we supplement with magnesium or we are destined to break down eventually due to severe deficiency. Like I said, sugar is the worst offender. Every single molecule of sugar you consume drags over 50 times the amount of magnesium out of your body. Well, what if you eat a healthy diet? Processed products are not the only foods that are devoid of magnesium. In general, magnesium has been depleted from topsoil, diminishing dietary intake across the board while our need for magnesium has increased, due to the high levels of toxic exposure we come across in our daily lives (air, water, plastics, chemicals, the list goes on!). The soil is depleted of magnesium because of the pesticides that are sprayed on all conventionally grown plants and worldwide pollution that affects even the cleanest fields. Pesticides also kill those beneficial bacteria/fungi that are necessary in order for plants to convert soil nutrients into plant nutrients usable by humans. Are You A Cannabis User? Cannabis has so many positive effects in terms of treating diseases such as epilepsy, cancer, and more (read 1 , 2 , 3 and cureyourowncancer.org ). Trust me, I’ll be the first to tell you I’m all for it – it’s a safe and effective herb with countless therapeutic benefits that the government has been hiding for years. The only way they want you using it is if they’ve patented one of its’ chemical compounds and can sell it to you for a profit. However, we should also look at what happens to our body on a cellular level if we use cannabis on a daily basis. Would you take parasite cleansing herbs every day for the rest of your life, or even every few days? Probably not. You’d take them when you’re sick or during a monthly cleanse, or else you’d develop some side effects from overuse. We need to remember that cannabis is a powerful herbal medicine and should be treated in such a way. It turns out that using marijuana tends to deplete the body’s stores of magnesium, with the result that the person feels more on-edge after coming down from the high. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t safe in moderation. It means that over time, if used consistently without proper balance via magnesium replenishment, it can and will cause magnesium deficiency. The Best Ways To Get Magnesium 
+1. Eat magnesium rich foods grown on organic soil. 
+2. Take ionic magnesium drops. This is my new favorite method, which I’ve learned from The Magnesium Miracle. 
+3. Apply magnesium oil to your skin! This is the second best way to raise your levels. 
+4. Soak in epsom salt baths . This will provide not only magnesium, but sulfur for your liver as well. 
+Additional References (not linked in the article) 
+Oxford Journals – Magnesium Basics: http://ckj.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/Suppl_1/i3.full 
+Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD: http://drcarolyndean.com/magnesium_miracle/ 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+8520,"CNBC: TRUMP WILL WIN THE ELECTION AND IS MORE POPULAR THAN OBAMA IN 2008, AI SYSTEM FINDS","Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › CNBC: TRUMP WILL WIN THE ELECTION AND IS MORE POPULAR THAN OBAMA IN 2008, AI SYSTEM FINDS CNBC: TRUMP WILL WIN THE ELECTION AND IS MORE POPULAR THAN OBAMA IN 2008, AI SYSTEM FINDS 0 SHARES [10/28/16] An artificial intelligence (AI) system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton in the race to the White House. MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, the founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It takes in 20 million data points from public platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. and then analyzes the information to create predictions. 
+The AI system was created in 2004, so it has been getting smarter all the time. It had already correctly predicted the results of the Democrat and Republican Primaries. 
+Data such as engagement with tweets or Facebook Live videos have been taken into account. The result is that Trump has overtaken the engagement numbers of Barack Obama’s peak in 2008 – the year he came into power – by 25 percent. 
+Rai said that his AI system shows that candidate in each election who had leading engagement data ended up winning the elections. 
+“If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years since Internet engagement began in full earnest,” Rai wrote in a report sent to CNBC. Post navigation",FAKE
+8338,BECK: COMEY LETTER ‘ONE OF THE MOST IRRESPONSIBLE THINGS TO EVER HAPPEN’,"Home › POLITICS › BECK: COMEY LETTER ‘ONE OF THE MOST IRRESPONSIBLE THINGS TO EVER HAPPEN’ BECK: COMEY LETTER ‘ONE OF THE MOST IRRESPONSIBLE THINGS TO EVER HAPPEN’ 0 SHARES 
+[10/31/16] Monday on his radio show, while discussing the FBI reopening the investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, conservative host Glenn Beck said FBI director James Comey contacting Congress is “one of the most irresponsible things to ever happen.” 
+Beck said, “For him to go for the subpoena and announce it and open this thing up when he says he doesn’t know if there’s even anything in those emails, that’s not too big of a risk for him, that is too big of a risk of anyone’s career, and not his, hers.” Post navigation",FAKE
+1554,Sanders campaign sues DNC after database breach,"Washington (CNN) Bernie Sanders' campaign on Friday sued the Democratic National Committee in federal court after the party organization withheld the campaign's access to a crucial voter database.
+
+The internal warfare exploded after the DNC cut off Sanders from the database and said the Vermont senator's presidential campaign exploited a software error to improperly access confidential voter information collected by Hillary Clinton's team.
+
+The revelation poses a setback for Sanders, who is mounting a liberal challenge to the former secretary of state. The DNC database is a goldmine of information about voters and being blocked from it could complicate Sanders' outreach efforts. The timing is also challenging, just weeks before Clinton and Sanders are slated to compete in the Iowa caucuses.
+
+And coming the day before a Democratic debate, the developments fueled a long-held belief in the Sanders camp and among his allies that the DNC has stacked the deck in favor of Clinton.
+
+At a press conference in Washington on Friday, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver accused the DNC of trying to sabotage the campaign.
+
+""The DNC, in an inappropriate overreaction, has denied us access to our own data,"" Weaver said. ""In other words, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is actively trying to undermine our campaign.""
+
+Two senior Democrats familiar with the program and the investigation told CNN that the Sanders campaign accessed turnout projections for Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, a key piece of strategy the Clinton campaign has been working on with modeling and analytics.
+
+The Sanders team, which consisted of four people, ran multiple searches in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and about 10 March states, including Florida and Colorado. In Iowa and New Hampshire, the Clinton campaign has ranked voters on a scale of 1-100 for turnout, enthusiasm and support, the senior Democrats said. The Sanders campaign ran two searches: ""Show me all the Clinton people rated higher than 60"" and ""Show me all the people rated less than 30."" This would be a key way of knowing who Sanders should target in the final weeks before voting: Ignore those above 60, while focus on those below 30, because they are looking for a Clinton alternative and might be open to Sanders.
+
+The investigation into what information was lifted should only take a few days as there are audit logs and trails of the activity, which took place beginning around 10:40 a.m. and lasting for about 40 minutes, the senior Democrats said.
+
+They added that the Clinton campaign views this as a big deal but will not say so publicly because it will fan the flames of liberal groups trying to fight with the DNC.
+
+In a statement released Friday afternoon, the Clinton campaign called for the Sanders campaign and the DNC to ""work expeditiously to ensure that our data is not in the Sanders campaign's account and that the Sanders campaign only have access to their own data.""
+
+At Friday's press conference, Weaver said, ""The DNC is clearly acting in a heavy-handed way, in an unprecendented way. I would like to see another instance where a presidential campaign had their data -- their own data -- withheld under similar circumstances.""
+
+The Sanders campaign sought an injunction against the DNC Friday afternoon, claiming irreparable harm and seeking immediate access to the voter file system. A campaign aide said earlier Friday that there was no expectation the DNC would grant access before the close of business Friday.
+
+Weaver said the original problem with the database's security, which did not involve the current database access company NGP VAN, dated back to October.
+
+""We were very concerned that large amounts of our own data was being downloaded and we contacted the DNC to remedy the situation,"" he said. ""We talked to them and we were assured that this was going to be taken care of. But apparently they are not competent in terms of maintaining the security of their data between the campaigns.""
+
+The DNC, however, had a very different story.
+
+Shortly after Weaver's press conference, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said suspending the Sanders' campaign's access was the only way to ensure the voter file was properly safeguarded.
+
+""That is the only way that we can make sure that we can protect our significant asset that is the voter file and its integrity,"" Wasserman Schultz said on CNN.
+
+She said ""multiple staffers"" from the Sanders campaign downloaded information that they did not have the right to collect.
+
+""They not only viewed it, but they exported it and they downloaded it,"" Wasserman Schultz told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. ""We don't know the depth of what they actually viewed and downloaded. We have to make sure that they did not manipulate the information.""
+
+She added, ""That is just like if you walked into someone's home when the door was unlocked and took things that don't belong to you in order to use them for your own benefit. That's inappropriate. Unacceptable.""
+
+The DNC also sent out a strongly worded message from Wasserman Schultz to its members accusing the Sanders campaign of improper conduct.
+
+""Over the course of approximately 45 minutes, staffers of the Bernie Sanders campaign inappropriately accessed voter targeting data belonging to the Hillary Clinton campaign,"" Wasserman Schultz said in the message.
+
+""Once the DNC became aware that the Sanders campaign had inappropriately and systematically accessed Clinton campaign data, and in doing so violated the agreement that all the presidential campaigns have signed with the DNC, as the agreement provides, we directed NGP VAN [the vendor that supplies access to the database] to suspend the Sanders campaign's access to the system until the DNC is provided with a full accounting of whether or not this information was used and the way in which it was disposed,"" she added.
+
+""We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening,"" Uretsky said.
+
+He said that none of the data the Sanders campaign accessed on Wednesday ""left the system that day"" and denied that he or his staff ""downloaded any individual level voter file data.""
+
+Uretsky said he and his team downloaded only phone numbers but did so to alert the DNC and NGP VAN that the Sanders campaign was aware the campaigns' voter info in the DNC database wasn't being properly protected.
+
+""We knew that what we were doing was being recorded,"" he told CNN. ""We didn't try to be sneaky at all. They can argue that we shouldn't have done it but we did not in any way try to deceive them. We created the records of it having been done and we did not make any attempt to use it for strategic purposes.""
+
+Ethan Roeder, Barack Obama's data director in 2008 and 2012, said the biggest problem created by being barred from the database is the fact that Sanders' volunteers will not be able to use the voter file to make calls and knock on doors for at least the next few days.
+
+""I think the pain is compounded each additional day that they don't have access to the file,"" Roeder said. ""It definitely has an impact on their operations. Especially as close as we are to caucuses and primaries, it becomes a serious problem.""
+
+NGP VAN, the database vendor, issued a statement Friday saying the DNC had instructed the company to remove the Sanders campaign's access to the database.
+
+""We are confident at this point that no campaigns have access to or have retained any voter file data of any other clients; with one possible exception, one of the presidential campaigns,"" the company said, adding that it was investigating the breach and would report back to the DNC.
+
+Sanders supporters and liberal groups have reacted to the news of Sanders' campaign being punished by questioning the neutrality of the DNC, hinting that the body is in the tank for Clinton.
+
+""The Democratic National Committee's decision to attack the campaign that figured out the problem, rather than go after the vendor that made the mistake, is profoundly damaging to the party's Democratic process,"" said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, a liberal group that endorsed Sanders this week.
+
+""DNC leaders should immediately reverse this disturbing decision before the committee does even more to bring its neutrality in the race for President into question,"" he added.
+
+Weaver, the Sanders campaign manager, said of the DNC, ""In this case, it looks like they are trying to help the Clinton campaign.""
+
+""We are taking on the establishment and I'm sure there are people within the Democratic establishment who are not happy about the overwhelming success that Bernie Sanders is having all across this country,"" he added. ""But we are determined to win this campaign and we're going to win this campaign by talking about the issues that are important to the American people. To do that we are going to need our data, which has been stolen by the DNC.""",REAL
+10523,Russian warships ready to strike terrorists near Aleppo,"Russian warships ready to strike terrorists near Aleppo 08.11.2016 | Source: Source: Mil.ru Attack aircraft of the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov get ready to strike terrorists' positions in the vicinity of Aleppo, sources at the Russian Defense Ministry said, RBC reports. ""Insurgents' attempts to break into Aleppo from outside are meaningless,"" the source said. The main task of the aircraft carrier aviation group is to strike missile and air blows on the terrorists , whose goal is to enter Aleppo. ""After the attacks on terrorists' positions, one will have to forget about the support for insurgents from the outside,"" the source said. The Russian group in the Mediterranean Sea consists of the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier , the heavy nuclear missile cruiser Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great) and large anti-submarine ships Severomorsk and Vice-Admiral Kulakov. Russia has increased intelligence activities in Syria to establish the areas, where terrorists are concentrated, as well as the routes that they use to move from one area to another. ""The militants took advantage of the humanitarian pause and regrouped their forces to prepare for a new breakthrough into the eastern part of Aleppo,"" the source added. According to the source, Russia will use new weapons during the upcoming attacks on terrorists . It was said that the Russian warships in the Mediterranean Sea will launch ""Caliber"" cruise missiles, although it was not specified which ships would be responsible for the launches. Pravda.Ru Russian warships travel to Syria",FAKE
+7651,Time does nothing,All this time of thoughts and reason Now this country is full of treason This earth goes up It also goes down Mostly this life feels hellbound Do we question this crazy human race On this long crazy day please engulf me with mace Time was this and that was now Come on humans show us how All we want is to deal with time One of you can not even blow my mind This way that way which is clear Double the facts and I will drink beer Seeping peeping on the line Throwing rowing in due time Life is full of different ways To you all please have a great day This is about the struggle in life and we can all overcome this by being happy.,FAKE
+10221,Podesta Goes Crazy Live On CNN Over New FBI Hillary Investigation,"Podesta Goes Crazy Live On CNN Over New FBI Hillary Investigation # Isotrop 0 
+This is hilarious. John Podesta gets crazy on CNN news anchor when asked about the new Hillary investigation by the FBI. Tags",FAKE
+8769,"Kim Davis Could Pay As Much As $225,000 In Legal Costs For Her Publicity Stunt","Comments 
+Kim Davis, the infamous marriage-denying county clerk from Kentucky, could be facing more than $225,000 in legal fees. Davis, who claimed she was acting “under God’s authority” and quickly became a hero for many religious conservatives, has been hit with an appeal seeking to have her pay her opponents’ legal fees, which total $233,058. 
+Davis’ legal troubles began soon after her stunt last summer when four couples (two same-sex and two straight) sued her for her refusal to carry out national law. The case gained national attention after Davis was briefly imprisoned for contempt of court and made a martyr of herself. The suit itself was ultimately resolved earlier this year after Kentucky’s governor changed state law to the effect that county clerks no longer authorize marriage licenses. 
+Davis has not been responsible for her own legal fees, as the anti-LGBT non-profit Liberty Counsel has offered her pro bono services. Now, however, she may finally be forced to pay up as the ACLU, on behalf of the four plaintiff couples, is appealing to US District Judge David Bunning seeking an order allowing them to recoup their legal expenses. Rowan County, which Davis serves as county clerk, has already stated that it will not pay the costs, arguing that Davis was acting on her own behalf rather than the county’s. 
+It remains to be seen how the appeal will play out. According to William Sharp, the ACLU of Kentucky’s legal director, 
+“ Courts recognize that when successful civil rights plaintiffs obtain a direct benefit from a court-ordered victory, such as in this case, they can be entitled to their legal expenses to deter future civil rights violations by government officials. By filing today’s motion, we hope to achieve that very objective — to send a message to government officials that willful violations of individuals’ rights will be costly” 
+Liberty Counsel, however, is contesting the appeal on the grounds that Davis did not technically lose the case since it was resolved by a change in state law.",FAKE
+9422,Rapper invited to meet with Obama on youth initiative has ankle monitor go off during meeting,"Print 
+Rick Ross was like a loud fart in a quiet room when his ankle bracelet went off over the weekend at the White House. 
+Ross was there along with a bunch of other rappers — Nicki Minaj, Busta Rhymes, J. Cole, Wale and DJ Khaled — to support Obama’s Brother’s Keeper youth initiative, ironically to keep men of color out of trouble. 
+It was a serious and fancy affair … enough to get Ross in a suit, which covered the ankle monitor he has to wear … a condition of release in his kidnapping case . 
+Sources on scene tell TMZ Obama finished his speech when Ross’ anklet ripped through the silence. 
+We’re told Ross was even surprised … the anklet’s new and it randomly beeps.",FAKE
+6125,German Panzers to Rumble Once More Along Russian Borders,"Citizen journalism with a punch German Panzers to Rumble Once More Along Russian Borders 
+Germany confirms it will be sending Leopard 2 tanks to Lithuania Originally appeared at Defence Talk 
+Germany has confirmed it is sending Leopard 2 tanks to Lithuania as part of NATO plans to reinforce the Baltic states. But the presence is largely symbolic, since Russia is still militarily superior in the region. 
+Protecting Lithuania from Russia is to be Germany’s responsibility, according to the new NATO defense plans that emerged at this week’s summit in Brussels. The German Defense Ministry showed on Wednesday evening just how seriously it is taking this task, confirming to the DPA news agency that next year it will be sending Leopard 2 tanks to the Baltic country’s Russian border in addition to the 650 soldiers it had already promised – though it would not clarify how many. 
+The move is part of NATO’s wider plan to protect its Baltic members, who have all shown concern about Russian ambitions following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent war in eastern Ukraine. 
+A NATO battalion of around 1,000 soldiers will be stationed in Lithuania as of June next year, and will then be rotated every six months. Around 450 to 650 of these troops are to be supplied by the Bundeswehr, while the others will come from France, Belgium and Croatia. German media reported that the combat-trained unit will also be equipped with tanks, armored vehicles, snipers, and engineers. 
+Defending the defensive measures 
+Each of the alliance’s major powers is sending troops to bolster the defenses of the countries bordering Russia, so while Germany is helping Lithuania, Poland will be protected by the US, Latvia to be manned by the Canadians, and Britain is to help reinforce Estonia. 
+The plans are likely to further antagonize Russia, whose government has criticized NATO’s military plans in the region before. “The alliance is concentrating its forces on limiting a non-existent threat from the East,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in the summer. 
+German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen defended the measures, calling the deployment “exactly appropriate” and “defensive.”“This is a clear signal that an attack on one NATO country will be considered an attack on all 28 NATO countries,” she said.NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also indicated that the mission was a response to Russian aggression. “Russia is prepared to use its military power,” he said in Brussels. “It is necessary for NATO to answer that.” 
+Gustav Gressel, Russia specialist at the European Council on Foreign Relations, believes that NATO’s new plans are actually fairly measured, given the circumstances. “Russia still enjoys military superiority in that area of about five-to-one,” he told DW. “It’s not at all an offensive threat against the Russians – but rather a cautious, small-scale reaction to the build-up and military mobilization Russia has been undergoing. It doesn’t change the military balance in the Baltics.” 
+Stoltenberg said NATO had no choice but to respond 
+In fact, the Baltic states would have liked NATO to commit more troops to their border areas, Gressel argued. “Since 2009, Russia has trained its forces in scenarios of invading the Baltic countries,” he said. “For the Baltic countries, this is a real thing, this is not something that might at some point happen.” 
+Even though it is economically isolated and can ill afford to take new territory, Russia’s political system requires shows of military power for its own population, Gressel argued. “It is increasingly difficult to predict what Russia will do, or when Russia will perceive military provocation. So you’d rather be on the safe side and signal to Russia that there is no free ride in the Baltics.” 
+But at the same time, NATO is trying to strike a balance. “You have to hedge against the risk that Russia gets adventurous,” he said. “But on the other hand, you don’t want to maneuver Russia into its self-fulfilling prophecies of a threat. In my view, Russia’s saber-rattling is for domestic consumption and their military knows that NATO is not going to invade.” 
+Germany has contributed to NATO’s biggest rearmament drive since the end of the Cold War, last year ordering an extra 100 Leopard 2 tanks – mostly by modifying previously decommissioned vehicles. At the same time, the upper limit of 225 tanks that had been agreed as part of the military reform of 2011 was increased to 328.",FAKE
+10353,Black Female Attorney Demolishes anti-Trump White TV Anchors,"Black Female Attorney Demolishes anti-Trump White TV Anchors
+http://blakpac.com/blog/2016/10/7/black-female-trump-supporter-leaves-news-anchors-speechless 
+The post Black Female Attorney Demolishes anti-Trump White TV Anchors appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+5740,Scientists believe they have found ET,"Scientists believe they have found ET Oct 28, 2016 Previous post 
+Scientists have heard hugely unusual messages from deep in space that they think are coming from aliens, reports the Independent . 
+A new analysis of strange modulations in a tiny set of stars appears to indicate that it could be coming from extraterrestrial intelligence that is looking to alert us to their existence. 
+The new study reports the finding of specific modulations in just 234 out of the 2.5 million stars that have been observed during a survey of the sky. The work found that a tiny fraction of them seemed to be behaving strangely. 
+And there appears to be no obvious explanation for what is going on, leaving the scientists behind the paper to conclude that the messages are coming from aliens. 
+“We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis,” write EF Borra and E Trottier in a new paper. “The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis,” the two scientists from Laval University in Quebec write. 
+The research has appeaed in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, under the title ‘Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars’. It appears 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+3036,Pundits and presidents complain about polarization. But it may be the sign of a healthy democracy.,"Americans tend to assume that polarization is bad for democracy. It is supposed to undermine compromise and contribute to gridlock. It’s furthermore thought to be linked to growing inequality.
+
+But when we talk about polarization, we are usually talking about Congress and political elites. Ordinary citizens show very little polarization.
+
+In a new article, we argue that this lack of polarization among the public isn’t necessarily a good thing. Indeed, it might be a sign of serious democratic failure.
+
+Why does polarization decrease when there’s more economic inequality?
+
+First, take a look at this puzzling graph. If we look at advanced democracies, we find that income inequality has a negative relationship with polarization (which we measure as the share of the population who think of themselves as being non-centrist on a scale of left to right). In general, as inequality increases, polarization decreases (and vice-versa).
+
+This is surprising. When income inequality is higher, we would expect people to disagree more about issues such as government spending and redistribution (which we know are closely associated with whether people view themselves as being on the left or on the right).
+
+Looking at the data more closely shows that the median member of the public tends to be further to the right when income is more unequal. Again, this is unexpected. Because the distribution of income favors the rich everywhere, the mean income is higher than the median (it is pulled up by those with very high incomes). If the majority are well-informed and self-interested, you would expect them to want more redistribution when inequality rises. Just the opposite is true. Why?
+
+We think it’s because most people don’t examine public policies closely — and so drift to the center by default
+
+We argue that the answer to these puzzles involves information. People are often not well-informed about politics, and they few have reason to be. Public policies affect large numbers of people, but as individuals we don’t have much power to change these policies, so why spend valuable time acquiring information about them?
+
+As it turns out, this simple fact (sometimes called “rational ignorance”) has implications for polarization. The reason is that uninformed voters tend to place themselves in the center of the political space, which they see as “safe” compared to more extreme options.
+
+Imagine that a voter can pick a left, center or right party, but doesn’t have enough information to know which has the best economic policy given her interests. She just assumes that there’s an equal chance that each of these parties has the best policy. The best strategy (if she doesn’t have much information) is to pick the center party, since it may actually have the best policy, and even it doesn’t, its policy is more likely to be closer to the best policy than either of the other two, because it’s located between them (for a step-by-step derivation see the original paper). This logic also applies to ideological self-placement, and we refer to it as the centrist bias.
+
+The more people know, the less centrist they become
+
+The centrist bias dissipates as people acquire information. Those whose interests would dispose them to identify with the center will still do so, but those who we might expect to identify with the left or the right will move away from the center. Information breeds polarization. So one way to think about why some countries have more non-centrist voters is to ask how and why voters acquire political information.
+
+Most people get information through groups and networks — like unions, families or co-workers
+
+We argue that most people get information through the groups and networks they belong to. One such group is unions, although unions, like other formal groups, have declined in importance in most societies. Unions often expose their members to political messages, and they also sometimes engage their members in political discussion.
+
+When discussion is involved – say, when a union official brings up political issues around the workplace lunch table – it pushes people to look for information from papers, TV, the Internet and so on.
+
+This logic also applies to political discussion in social networks of family, friends, neighbors and co-workers. People are more likely to acquire political information when others around them care about such information and are evaluating them in part based on whether they seem well informed. Needless to say, it is easier for well-educated people to acquire political information, so educated people tend to respond more effectively to such social incentives.
+
+So who tends to be well-informed?
+
+This has partisan implications. Those with higher incomes tend to have better education and be better integrated into social networks with a lot of political discussion. These people are the natural constituents of center-right parties, which means that the centrist bias is less pronounced for the right.
+
+Yet the extent to which this is true varies across time and space. Many different factors — union membership, membership in social networks with political discussion, and education — are associated with higher levels of information and therefore also with ideological polarization.
+
+In countries with strong unions, the centrist and right biases are less pronounced. The same is true in countries with good public education systems and more pervasive informal discussion networks. The figure below shows the relationship between the frequency of political discussion in social networks and ideological polarization. The political discussion taking place at Parisian street cafes really does matter, and so does a blog like this! We should not be surprised.
+
+Some public policies can lead to more or less general knowledge and public discussion — and therefore, whether there’s an informed left
+
+This implies that countries with certain institutions and policies — strong unions, heavy investment in public education, and extensive social networks — end up with more politically informed electorates which are also more ideologically polarized and left-leaning than countries where these institutions are less well developed.
+
+At the same time, unions, public education and network integration promote income equality for reasons that are well understood in economics.
+
+Together this provides a plausible explanation for the pattern showed in our first graph, where there is a negative relationship between inequality and polarization.
+
+Because governments of the left and right affect the income distribution though public policies — most obviously through redistribution and public education — these relationships may be self-reinforcing, producing distinct “varieties” of democracies. From this perspective, polarization may in fact be a sign of a well-functioning democracy — one that has well-informed electorates and governments that support the majority’s interests in pushing back against rising inequality.
+
+Torben Iversen is the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy in the department of government at Harvard University’.
+
+David Soskice is a professor in the department of government at the London School of Economics.",REAL
+2782,Obama again delays Afghanistan troop drawdown,"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama announced Thursday that U.S. forces will remain in Afghanistan at their current levels throughout much of 2016, yet another delay in their scheduled withdrawal and an acknowledgment that America's longest war won't be concluded on his watch.
+
+Obama campaigned as the president who would end two wars, and Thursday's decision was a major political reversal that jeopardizes a cornerstone of his legacy. Taliban gains in Afghanistan and appeals from Kabul for ongoing U.S. assistance contributed to postponing the troop withdrawal and underscored Obama's continuing difficulty in fulfilling his intention to remove all American forces by the time he leaves office.
+
+On Thursday, however, he told reporters at the White House that he wasn't disappointed at having to make the announcement that plans for the withdrawal had been put on hold. Instead, he said, his job was to make necessary adjustments given events on the ground.
+
+He also stressed that the formal combat mission there has ended, and that he is a president who does ""not support the idea of endless war."" He ended the Iraq war and removed American troops there in 2011.
+
+The plan announced Thursday keeps 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan before an anticipated drawdown to around 5,500 by the time Obama leaves office. The troop's mission will remain the same, Obama emphasized -- to train and support Afghan security forces and carry out counterterrorism operations.
+
+Obama began his announcement by highlighting U.S. gains in Afghanistan and noted that the Afghan government and its security forces are now ""fully responsible for securing their country."" But he also said that the U.S. still needs to bolster those forces to maintain the progress achieved and because ""it's the right thing to do.""
+
+""While America's combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and and its people endures,"" Obama said from the Roosevelt Room. ""As commander in chief, I will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a safe haven for terrorists to attack our nation again.""
+
+Obama stressed that the decision to maintain 9,800 troops in Afghanistan until late 2016 came after months of discussions with Afghanistan's president, Ashraf Ghani, and the nation's chief executive officer, Abdullah Abdullah -- a nod to the fact that the U.S. is maintaining a presence in the country with the support of its leaders, unlike in Iraq, where the Obama administration could not reach an agreement with the Iraqi government on leaving a residual military force.
+
+""The decision to maintain the current level of the United States' forces in Afghanistan once again shows renewal of the partnership and strengthening of relations of the United States with Afghanistan on the basis of common interests and risks,"" he said.
+
+NATO also welcomed the move, saying in a statement that it ""paves the way for a sustained presence"" in Afghanistan for the organization and its allies.
+
+Obama also noted that he had consulted with U.S. military commanders on the ground in Afghanistan as well as his entire national security team before deciding to maintain the current troop level.
+
+White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest later told reporters that Obama chose to go with the Pentagon's greatest suggested number of troops.
+
+""The highest recommendation that came into the President was the level that the President announced today,"" he said.
+
+Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in a news conference Thursday that while the fight in Afghanistan ""remains a difficult fight,"" the adjusted force numbers will ensure that the U.S. can carry out its mission and help Afghans confront the continued challenge posed by the Taliban.
+
+""Today's decision from the president to adjust our troop presence in Afghanistan honors that sacrifice (of U.S. troops) and gives us a chance to finish what we started,"" Carter said at the Pentagon.
+
+The decision comes on the heels of recent Taliban gains in Afghanistan, notably the militant group's takeover of Kunduz, the first major city to fall to Taliban hands since 2001. Two weeks later, the Taliban pulled out of the city -- but the incident sent ripples through Afghanistan and shook Washington.
+
+Obama noted as much when he said that while Afghan forces are ""taking the lead"" and fighting ""bravely and tenaciously,"" those forces ""are still not as strong as they need to be.""
+
+The U.S. plan is to now maintain 5,500 U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan after a drawdown set to take place in late 2016 or early 2017, more than five times the number of troops previously set to remain in the country at the start of 2017. Only about 1,000 troops had previously been set to remain in Afghanistan at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
+
+Obama said the 5,500 troops post-drawdown would be based at the U.S. embassy and at military bases in Baghram, Jalalabad and Kandahar.
+
+Carter said the Pentagon viewed that figure as ""enough"" to sustain the U.S. mission and accomplish the two-pronged goal of assisting the Afghan security forces and carrying out counterterror missions.
+
+Though the decision clearly was a break from the game plan he had laid out and pitched to the American public, on Thursday he downplayed any suggestion that the delay in the withdrawal was a major setback.
+
+Obama said the decision was not ""disappointing"" and said his mission has consistently been to ""assess the situation on the ground"" and make adjustments as necessary.
+
+""This is not the first time those adjustments have been made,"" Obama said. ""This won't probably be the last.""
+
+While Obama highlighted the sacrifices of the Afghan people and American forces who have circulated in and out of the war-torn country for more than 14 years of U.S. operations, Obama stressed that casualties are down overall and that U.S. troops will not be heading back into combat.
+
+""The nature of the mission has not changed and the cessation of our combat role has not changed,"" Obama said.
+
+Still, speaking to the American service members who will need to deploy to Afghanistan, he said: ""I do not send you into harm's way lightly.""
+
+This is the second draw-down delay announced by Obama this year. In March, Obama said he planned to reduce U.S. forces in Afghanistan 5,500 U.S. military personnel by the end of this year, and then to an ""embassy-only"" presence by the end of 2016.
+
+""The timeline for a withdrawal down to a embassy center presence, a normalization of our presence in Afghanistan, remains the end of 2016,"" Obama said in a joint press conference with Ghani last March.
+
+Administration officials stressed U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan would continue to serve under two missions -- to root out remnants of al Qaeda as well as train and equip Afghan security forces. U.S. forces could also conduct counterterrorism operations against elements of ISIS in Afghanistan, should the group present a threat to the U.S. homeland, senior administration officials added.
+
+The original White House goal was to hand over the counterterrorism side of the U.S. mission to Afghan security forces this year.
+
+""It's in our interest to build up the Afghan security forces,"" said a senior administration official.
+
+The estimated annual cost of maintaining current U.S. force levels in Afghanistan is $14.6 billion, a separate senior administration official said.
+
+Obama had previously vowed to conclude the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan before he leaving office.
+
+""We will bring America's longest war to a responsible end,"" Obama said at a Rose Garden ceremony in May 2014.
+
+Retired Lt. Col. Rick Francona, a CNN military analyst and former intelligence officer, said Obama's decision is simply ""kicking this can down the road"" for the next president. Obama will be out of office by the time troops are set to be drawn down again.
+
+""This is this administration pushing this off to the next administration because the next time they have to make this decision, it will be a different president in the White House,"" Francona said.
+
+Republicans who have been seeking higher U.S. troop commitments gave a lukewarm response to Obama's announcement Thursday.
+
+""While this new plan avoids a disaster, it is certainly not a plan for success,"" House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry said in a statement. ""Given the troubling conditions on the ground in Afghanistan and the other security problems in the region, keeping 9,800 troops there through at least 2016 is necessary to our security interests.""",REAL
+5938,US Government and the Clinton female: Come to the Psychiatrist's Couch,"  America is going nuts. Suggestions stupidly abound about how Russian hackers are even going so far as to read people's emails. Of course there is absolutely zero evidence of this. Russians are being blamed for everything from flooded toilets, biting dogs, the tornadoes in Kansas, the kid's messy diapers, the car won't start and grandpa lost his dentures. Media encouraged hysteria This hysteria is being encouraged by the media, and especially pretentious, arrogant dishonest politicians and every deviant failure in life. Even in the hottest days of the Cold War such insanity didn't exist. The most blatant example of this recently was Vice President Biden boldly blaming Russia for hacking emails and trying to influence the election, promising that the United States was preparing to send a message to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, over their plan to launch cyberwarfare against Russia and the Russian government. Days before, American intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security declared that the Russian leadership was responsible for attacks on the Democratic National Committee and the leaking of stolen emails. Of course there was no truth to it ""We're sending a message,"" Mr. Biden told Chuck Todd, a talk show host. ""We have the capacity to do it."" ""He'll know it,"" Mr. Biden added. ""And it will be at the time of our choosing. And under the circumstances that have the greatest impact."" Later, after Mr. Biden said he was not concerned that Russia could ""fundamentally alter the election,"" Mr. Todd asked whether the American public would know if the message to Mr. Putin had been sent. ""Hope not,"" Mr. Biden responded. It was categorically proven that all of these crooked and dishonest politicians were just engaging in disinformation and war propaganda. From none other than the New York Times: ""Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails"" Video Do you think this is going to stop them? Do you think paranoid schizophrenic psychotic Hillary is going to stop going before Americans and telling them the Russians are doing this, that and the other thing? Hell would freeze over first. Repulsive Hillary was blaming Russians for all the problems she had caused with her corruption, her lies, her greed, her personal perversions and deviancies Hillary Clinton is a sociopath, she certainly does not feel the necessity to ever admit any of her distortions, lies and crimes. She's inherently dishonest, a sneak, a selfish person who has massive anger problems, who has hate names for all of her countrymen. She is a racist, she uses a woman card when there is no one more the antithesis of woman than her. As Pravda readers know, this failed female is responsible for the total catastrophe in the Middle East, from Iraq, to Libya especially (he, he, he we came, we saw, he died) and now Syria. Innocent Syria. Syria is a secular democracy in Middle East, well known for the diversity and tolerance of the society. No matter whether one is Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Christian ...people all consider themselves just Syrians. Divisions among the people are clearly a US/western INVENTION. Some great work has been done by: Vanessa Beeley and Tim Anderson Syrians are extremely righteous people who have always accepted, get this, ACCEPTED REFUGEES into their own country, protecting them from genocides and wars going on and now they are being attacked from without, from foreign terrorists sent there by the likes of Clinton and Obama... First ""Lady""? I wondered why ever since Clinton was first ""lady"" and I use the term lightly... Why was she so intent on bombing Christian Serbs, innocent Serbs, just defending themselves from the aforementioned mujahadeen that were first sent to Afghanistan (see video) and then transported to the heart of Europe causing the Balkan wars and the bombing of Yugoslavia by her husband, which she agitated for, to protect these terrorists. I hope most of our readers know that Bin Laden was an employee of the CIA and during the Balkan Wars, he was in possession of a Bosnian (Muslim area) passport. Yet this corrupt female rides herself that they decided to kill off their asset, Bin Laden. They are famous for killing off their assets....a warning to all considering entering such a position. Now with the revelations about Huma Abedin I understand that all this time Hillary Clinton is involved with Saudi Arabia, ISIS head choppers all various and sundry terrorists. See the report outlining this connection, heretofore hidden, secret, washed away. This is thanks to certain Washington insiders who probably don't like the idea of being wiped off planet Earth by a nuclear explosion being planned by neocons like the Clintons and Obama. Video During the debates, Clinton made her imperial declaration that she would impose a no fly zone on Syria even though no one invited the US there, nor did the US get UN permission while Russia does have the invitation and a directive from the UN. Her imperial declaration would mean World War 3. She accuses her opponent, Mr. Trump, of having ties to Russia yet Saudi Arabia provides 20 percent of campaign contributions to KKKlinton, who does their bidding. They also have given KKKlinton Foundation like 20 million, plus she was given half a million worth of jewels. How is Saudi Arabia not influencing US elections and no one dares speak of it and the connections to ISIS by all of them? Today's opinion makers haven't learned the lessons they should have from the Joseph McCarthy period of US history. The demonization of Russia and Putin makes McCarthy days seem like child's play when lives and reputations were ruined. In Hillary Clinton's world and in the US government's world, there is only free speech for themselves. All others not agreeing with their insipid, globalist, war hawk, neoliberal agenda are attacked viciously both in print and physically. International law is only brought up when terrorists are getting a major thrashing, then it's ""Oh no, ceasefire, ceasefire (another word for rearm, regroup, reinforce) oh human rights, oh killing innocent civilians, bombing hospitals...boo hoo hoo"". Of course they have been constantly doing this themselves ever since World War II. The occupation of Germany and Japan has never ended and nearly a thousand bases are maintained worldwide to maintain the empire. US military are not being used to ""defend their country"" but to defend corporations, lobbies, the military industrial complex. KKKlinton crime syndicate Obama, the KKKlinton crime syndicate, and the NWO globalists are seeking to depopulate the Earth by placing a demented paranoid psycho in power, someone connected to every filth known to man: terrorists, ISIS, Nazis, Wall Street, witches, bankers, rapists, child abusers, pharmaceuticals, GMO/Monsanto poisoning of the food, bombers spreading depleted uranium all over the planet causing cancers and birth defects with radioactive contamination for the next 4 billion years, the most feudal totalitarian anti-human dictatorships that chop off heads and other body parts, that give women no rights other than slavery, in fact someone connected to human trafficking. The US sends that failure of a UN ""ambassador"" Samantha Power to do a major job of projection (a sign of a major personality disorder) to blame Russia for committing the crimes that they themselves have committed. And you can rest assured that Russia does not ""do the same thing"" and commit war crimes, deliberately target civilians to ""break their backs"" and ""send them to the stone age."" These famous pronouncements can easily be found on the Internet. Russia does all it can to protect life, that's why Russian forces are in Syria. The psychos in Washington would have you believe that Russia is just there to protect Dr. Assad and his government. Washington consists of pathological liars. They claim that Dr. Assad is a brutal dictator killing his own people. This man is a trained physician who had planned to live his life as s doctor, but then was called upon to help his country. The truth is available to anyone on the Internet about what caused this terrorist attack on Syria, this is no civil war of a leader against his people. Those Syrians caught in this war flee to government areas for protection. During all of these ceasefires, the foreign backed terrorists continued to bomb and use chemical weapons on civilians in government areas. Never has Assad used chemical weapons and you can find the truth about this also. It all boils down to a failing empire, an empire in its final death throes, an empire gone INSANE. An endless stream of attacks on countries unable to defend themselves, regime change often of democratically elected leaders quite in violation of international law and subject to a war crimes tribunal much like that at Nuremberg: crimes against peace attacking civilians collective punishment And now their demon Hillary Clinton is seeking to finish the project of either ""full spectrum domination"" or take the world down with them. We, the free world community, have come to a conclusion and diagnosis of your mental condition, neocon criminals. Specifically, you have been judged as a danger to yourselves and others. Recommendations: indefinite confinement in a mental institution for the criminally insane. Anyone considering supporting Hillary Clinton should ask themselves these questions now knowing her connections to Saudi Arabia and ISIS/terrorists: Do you want to place a mentally ill psychotic lunatic in the White House and continue the insane policies of the neocons i.e. Clinton? Do you want to see family members thrown in a pit and shot to death ISIS style? Do you want to see family members knelt on the ground and their heads chopped off ISIS style, or maybe their hearts or organs cut to pieces? Donald Trump is a breath of fresh air to all citizens of the world who long for peace; long for attacks against defenseless countries to stop; for people to be treated equally and have jobs and security, health care and a future free from terrorism. It's not dangerous or anti-American to want to have good relations with Russia. Russia is a peaceful, democratic Christian country...not some monster bent on an empire such as Clinton and the neocons have promoted for the globalist takeover of all the peoples of the Earth. Let's not let planet Earth become a barren lifeless planet or a horror worse than Nazi Germany where no one is safe from being attacked by terrorists. The choice is clear, war with Clinton or peace and prosperity, a return to traditional values with Donald Trump and terrorists burning in hell where they belong.",FAKE
+9995,Hacker Guccifer 2.0 Issues Dire Warning to Americans : Democrats May Try and HACK the Election – TruthFeed,"Hacker Guccifer 2.0 Issues Dire Warning to Americans : Democrats May Try and HACK the Election Hacker Guccifer 2.0 Issues Dire Warning to Americans : Democrats May Try and HACK the Election Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 4, 2016 
+Hacker Guccifer 2.0 issued a dire election warning to American voters. 
+According to Guccifer 2.0 the software used by FEC networks may be vulnerable to fraud. 
+— GUCCIFER 2.0 (@GUCCIFER_2) November 4, 2016 
+From Guccifer 2.0: I’d like to warn you that the Democrats may rig the elections on November 8. This may be possible because of the software installed in the FEC networks by the large IT companies. 
+As I’ve already said, their software is of poor quality, with many holes and vulnerabilities. I have registered in the FEC electronic system as an independent election observer; so I will monitor that the elections are held honestly. 
+I also call on other hackers to join me, monitor the elections from inside and inform the U.S. society about the facts of electoral fraud. I'll be an independent observer at the U.S. #Elections2016 I call on other hackers to monitor the elections from inside the system 
+— GUCCIFER 2.0 (@GUCCIFER_2) November 4, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+1478,"Boulder bash: Trump may rip Carson, but the pressure is on Jeb","Jeb Bush may have cooler things to do than mix it up in tonight’s Boulder bash, but he’d better come to play anyway.
+
+The former governor is riding a huge wave of bad press after slashing campaign spending and sounding petulant about the campaign ordeal, telling an audience he could be doing better stuff and to “elect Trump” if they want entertainment and gridlock. It was the opposite of the joyful run he had promised, and there are even dumb, unfounded rumors that he might drop out.
+
+So Bush not only needs a strong performance at the CNBC debate in Colorado, he needs to do well in the spin cycle that follows these faceoffs.
+
+The Republican debates have assumed an outsize importance this year. First, there are so many candidates that they are having an unusually strong winnowing effect (remember Scott Walker?). Second, they are drawing massive audiences, 24 million and 23 million for the Fox and CNN debates.
+
+And third, there are so few of them that each one has a Super Bowl quality. The once-a-month schedule is the brainchild of the RNC, which thought fewer debates would help the party consolidate around a front-runner. But in a cycle dominated so far by Donald Trump and Ben Carson, it’s having the opposite effect.
+
+Jeb just hasn’t looked comfortable on stage in either debate, and now that he’s sunk to single-digit status, he’s under enormous pressure to punch his way back into contention. He knows policy inside out but his message is diffused by a diffident manner.
+
+Trump, who no one would accuse of being low energy, will need to deal with his emboldened rivals as well as the CNBC moderators. He can’t just be seen as reciting his greatest hits on Mexico, China and our incompetent leaders. The debate’s focus, jobs and the economy, should play to his strength.
+
+But he is trailing Carson for the first time, 26 to 22 percent in yesterday’s New York Times/CBS poll, which has a symbolic value even though it's within the margin of error. (Even more noteworthy is that 55 percent of Trump supporters in the survey said they are firmly behind their man, while 80 percent of Carson backers said it’s early and they could change their minds.)
+
+Trump will be standing next to Carson, but attacking the doctor will call for surgical precision, and The Donald tends to favor blunt instruments.
+
+Carson is generally overshadowed on a debate stage. He is soft-spoken, low-key, occasionally witty, but doesn’t interrupt or deliver zingers. He avoids what he calls the “mud pit.” And yet, that doesn’t seem to hurt him at all. In fact, Carson’s quiet dignity may be precisely what his fans like.
+
+Marco Rubio has had two solid debates, but they haven’t given him much of a bump. He is drawing more attention now—Rubio is third in that CBS poll, with 8 percent—and is a better communicator than Bush in front of an audience. But with that poll rise may come tougher debate questions, perhaps including the Washington Post report that he can’t stand the Senate and so wants a promotion.
+
+Carly Fiorina may be the best debater in the bunch, having fought her way into the CNN debate, won it hands down and then catapulted herself into the top tier. But the former CEO’s surge didn’t last, and she seemed to fade from the political conversation since the Reagan Library event. She will surely try to elbow her way back into the spotlight.
+
+As will the others. Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee haven’t gotten much time in the earlier debates, and they will be looking to seize a breakout moment. In a Trumpian media environment, there just aren’t many opportunities to reach the whole country.
+
+A couple of the candidates who don’t score well in Boulder—or at the Fox Business Network event in Milwaukee on Nov. 10—may not be with us much longer. That’s why the stakes are unusually high in this third presidential debate.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+4531,Echoes of Charlie Hebdo in attack on Texas Muhammad cartoon event (+video),"Texas police killed two gunmen on Sunday after they opened fired outside the exhibit, which was hosted by a prominent anti-Islam group in a Dallas suburb.
+
+Security officials walk around the perimeter of the Curtis Culwell Center on Sunday in Garland, Texas. A contest for cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in the Dallas suburb is on lockdown Sunday after authorities reported a shooting outside the building.
+
+Two gunmen were killed in an attack on a cartoon contest to draw the prophet Muhammad in Garland, Texas, Sunday night – an incident and event that has invoked both January's Charlie Hebdo attacks and the anti-Muslim cartoons from Europe that sparked the controversy over Hebdo.
+
+The gunmen reportedly drove up to the event, a ""Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest,"" some time before 7 p.m.  at the Curtis Culwell Center, a public event space run by the local school district. The two men opened fire on the event, wounding an unarmed security guard in the ankle, before being shot and killed by police, who were already nearby providing security.
+
+The Associated Press reports that the bomb squad was called in to search the gunmen's bodies and their car for explosives. ""Because of the situation of what was going on today and the history of what we've been told has happened at other events like this, we are considering their car [is] possibly containing a bomb,"" Officer Joe Harn, a spokesman for the Garland Police Department, said at a news conference.
+
+The gunmen have not yet been identified, and police say there were no credible threats made ahead of the event.
+
+But the attack has already stirred comparisons to the deadly attack in Paris on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in which brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi killed 12 people, including several of the magazine's cartoonists, over its frequent depictions of the prophet Muhammad.
+
+Indeed, yesterday's event was a direct response to one held on the same site in late January called ""Stand with the Prophet."" The Dallas Morning News reports that that January event spurred the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), a group led by prominent anti-Islam activist Pam Geller, to organize the cartoon contest at the same location. The AFDI is considered an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist and hate organizations.
+
+The event was attended Ms. Geller, who described it as an exercise of free speech, as well as prominent far-right politician Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Freedom Party. Mr. Wilders reportedly gave the keynote speech, in which he similarly depicted anti-Muhammad imagery as a matter of free speech. ""Muhammad fought and terrorized people with the swords. Today, here in Garland, we fight Muhammad and his followers with the pen. And the pen, the drawings, will prove mightier than the sword,"" he said.
+
+But as The Christian Science Monitor reported during the aftermath of the Hebdo attacks, the Muhammad cartoon controversies over the past decade or so were not simply exercises of free speech, but were also deeply rooted in anti-Islamic sentiments. They first peaked in Denmark, and were given loudest voice by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (JP), which routinely railed against Islam and its adherents.
+
+It was JP that organized the first Muhammad cartoons, as ""part of the provocative local anti-Muslim campaign sweeping Denmark, not a statement about free speech.""
+
+The Muhammad cartoon crisis actually began with Kare Bluitgen, a Danish Marxist author who is avowedly secular and anti-Islam. Mr. Bluitgen wanted to illustrate a children’s book on Islam that would depict the face of Muhammad, something that is offensive to orthodox Muslims. According to a 2005 Danish wire story, Bluitgen commented at a dinner party that Danish artists were afraid to draw the prophet. The story was an overnight sensation. In fact, after the dust settled, only one illustrator was ever found who refused to take on Bluitgen’s book project. Yet based on the wire story, the JP cultural editor, Mr. Rose, decided to test Danes' self-censorship. On a Wednesday, he issued an invitation to Danish cartoonists (not illustrators, about whom Bluitgen complained) to draw Muhammad “as you see him.” By Friday, 12 of Denmark's 25 working cartoonists responded with images. They were published in the paper on Sept. 30, 2005, next to an editorial titled “The Threat of Darkness.” The cartoons were not uniformly anti-Muslim. Because of JP's reputation for Islam-bashing, several of the 12 cartoons actually made fun of the campaign, one calling it a ""PR stunt."" Another showed a Muslim migrant schoolboy in Denmark called “Muhammad” pointing to a blackboard with the words, “The editorial team of Jyllands-Posten is a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.”  In retrospect, Hervik argues, the Danish cartoons picked up by Charlie Hebdo were always intended to be part of the provocative local anti-Muslim campaign sweeping Denmark, not a statement about free speech.",REAL
+4616,One of this election's bright spots: early voting,"In some states, two-thirds of voters have turned in their ballots. The surge suggests Americans particularly value their role in the electoral process when stakes are high.
+
+Voters wait to cast their ballot at a satellite polling station in Las Vegas on Nov. 2. Early voter turnout is set to hit record highs this year as more Americans than ever head to the polls ahead of Election Day, experts say.
+
+Every Election Day for as long as he can remember, Angel Del Carpio would head to the polls and cast his vote.
+
+He did it when he lived in California and New York. Now a resident of Nevada – a closely watched swing state – Mr. Del Carpio decided to make an early appearance this year. The Wednesday before the election, the retired hairdresser drove to The Boulevard Mall, about three miles east of The Strip, to vote at a polling station set up inside.
+
+He walked away proud, having done his civic duty.
+
+“I did my part,” says Del Carpio, holding up his “I voted” sticker. “It’s very important because our vote is what’s going to save this country.”
+
+“And it’s very convenient,” he says about voting early.
+
+Del Carpio's ballot is one of more than 34 million already cast ahead of the election this year via in-person, mail-in, or absentee ballots. The figure is on its way to topping 50 million and setting a record for votes cast before Election Day, according to the Pew Research Center.
+
+Early voter turnout remains a questionable indicator of victory. But the surge in early voting may suggest that Americans continue to value their role in the electoral process, particularly when they perceive that the stakes are high, political analysts say. And voters are eager to take advantage of ways that make it easier for them to play their part, they add.
+
+“People want to choose the most convenient thing, especially if they’re anticipating long lines” on Election Day, says David Damore, professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
+
+In this election in particular, he says, Democrats and Republicans alike tend to see a win for the other side as an existential threat. “The importance of the outcome looms over most people,” Dr. Damore says. “That may not fire enthusiasm, but it becomes important to people to participate.”
+
+As voting options expand, the percentage of voters nationwide casting their ballots early have soared from about 11 percent in 1996 to 33 percent in 2012, Pew reports. Data for 2016 suggests the trend will hold. In states such as Nevada and Colorado, nearly half the total electorate had already cast their votes five days before the election, says Paul Gronke, founder and director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Ore. In Tennessee and Arizona, nearly two thirds have turned in their ballots.
+
+“That’s the biggest story, the earliness,” Professor Gronke says. His theory as to why is somewhat less optimistic: “People are very unhappy with this campaign. They want to get it over with.”
+
+The notion of casting ballots ahead of Election Day has been around since the Civil War, when Republicans – in an effort to secure the soldier vote for Abraham Lincoln – pushed for legislation to allow servicemen to cast their vote while away from their home states.
+
+Early voting for convenience, however, took shape only in the 1970s: first when Congress passed a law allowing overseas voters without legal homes in the US to mail in their ballots, and then when California introduced a “no-excuses” law that let any registered voter cast an absentee ballot. By the 1980s, Oregon had adopted the country’s first vote-by-mail election system, sending registered voters ballots that they could either mail in or drop off in person.
+
+Today, 37 states and the District of Columbia allow some form of early voting.
+
+The shift makes sense, says Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. The democratic ideal is to make it as easy as possible for people to participate, he says. In an earlier era, that meant face-to-face communication at an appointed time and place.
+
+“You don’t have to go to your bank to withdraw money. You don’t have to harvest your food before dinner,” he says. “Even without crossing the divide into online voting – which is an idea of debatable value – there’s no reason in the world that a voter should be required to cast their ballot at a single precinct location.”
+
+For some Las Vegas voters, the expansion of early voting – and laws that require employers to give workers time to vote – provides a chance to reaffirm their role in the democratic process.
+
+“We’re fortunate to get to do it on the clock,” says Belinda, a hotel employee who declined to give her last name. She and two of her coworkers had arrived at a polling station about a mile off The Strip on a charter bus that takes hotel workers to and from the site.
+
+“It makes a big difference,” she says. “Our voices are being heard.”
+
+Some say the main draw is the luxury of getting in their ballots minus the hassle of Election Day crowds – particularly in a race as volatile as this one.
+
+“With everybody split up the way they are, the country’s going to be crazy” come Nov. 8, says Timothy Salmon, a father and video producer, as he left a satellite polling station in the parking lot of a local shopping center. Except for work, he says, “I don’t want to go out that day.”
+
+For others, the chance to vote early simply means an easy way to fulfill a sense of obligation. After all, voters had only to go online to find the site closest to their home or workplace.
+
+“It was very fast. I thought it was going to be more difficult,” says Raul Sanchez, who plays in a mariachi band. Though in his 50s, Mr. Sanchez is a first-time voter, spurred to the polls by a desire to see someone who isn’t Donald Trump win the White House. Sanchez says the experience left him encouraged – and inspired him to take part in future elections.
+
+That Nevada is a swing state has also led residents here to feel more keenly the weight of each individual vote.
+
+“We have to make the election count,” says Del Carpio, the retired hairdresser.
+
+“This is a state where your vote actually matters,” adds Alex Zachary, who works at the Marquee, a popular nightclub, as he inched forward in line. “I want to make sure I have my say.”",REAL
+4402,Battle over Obama immigration actions lands before Supreme Court,"The impassioned election-year debate over President Obama’s immigration executive actions lands Monday before a short-handed Supreme Court, where justices will consider a fundamental question: how much power does the president truly have?
+
+The justices plan to hold 90 minutes of oral arguments dealing with Obama’s bid to spare millions of illegal immigrants from deportation.
+
+A coalition of states calls it an executive power grab. ""President Obama's executive action is an affront to our system of republican self-government,"" said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who supports those states.
+
+But the White House contends the president’s authority is clear, and the policies humane and reasonable. Obama has promoted his program as a plan to ""prioritize deporting felons not families.""
+
+It’s a case that will be closely watched in an election season where Republican front-runner Donald Trump has made immigration enforcement a centerpiece of his campaign. The outcome also could have considerable bearing on Obama’s legacy, potentially determining whether his lame-duck bid to go around Congress is upheld or ruled an overreach.
+
+At issue Monday is whether as many as 5 million illegal immigrants can be spared deportation -- including those who entered the U.S. as children, and the parents of citizens or legal residents. The programs -- known as Deferred Action for Parents of American Citizens and Permanent Residents (DAPA) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) -- effectively went around the Republican-led Congress.
+
+Opponents, including 26 states and GOP members of Congress, say the plan exceeds constitutional power.
+
+A federal appeals court earlier had struck down DAPA, which has yet to go fully into effect. The Justice Department then asked the high court for a final review, in what could be a key test of Obama's executive powers his last year in office.
+
+The decision to review the case was welcome on both sides of the aisle.
+
+""The Constitution vests legislative authority in Congress, not the president,” said Hatch, urging the justices to rule against the administration.
+
+But the White House voiced confidence the policies would be upheld.
+
+""Like millions of families across this country -- immigrants who want to be held accountable, to work on the books, to pay taxes, and to contribute to our society openly and honestly -- we are pleased that the Supreme Court has decided to review the immigration case,"" spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine said.
+
+The issue of illegal immigration has taken a center-stage role in the Republican primary battle, as Trump calls for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico and candidates spar over who is toughest on the issue.
+
+The immigrants who would benefit from the Obama administration's plan are mainly parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. said in a court filing that allowing the past rulings to stand would force millions ""to continue to work off the books.”
+
+Besides immigration, Obama has used his unilateral authority to act on such hot-button issues as gun control, health care and global warming.
+
+However, as with other high-profile Supreme Court appeals this term -- on ObamaCare, abortion rights and affirmative action -- the outcome here likely will be affected by death in February of Justice Antonin Scalia, which left a 4-4 bench split along conservative-liberal lines.
+
+A 4-4 ruling would effectively scuttle the issue until after Obama leaves office in nine months, and mean at least a temporary setback to his domestic policy legacy -- even if the justices punt, and choose to reargue the case when Scalia's replacement is sworn in. The justices also could rule narrowly on procedure, finding a compromise on a technical issue not directly related to the larger policy questions.
+
+On the legal side, the GOP-controlled House filed an amicus brief supporting the states, telling the high court, ""the Executive does not have the power to authorize -- let alone facilitate -- the prospective violation of the immigration laws on a massive class-wide scale.""
+
+Supporters of the administration vow this issue will resonate in an election year.
+
+""There are millions of families of U.S.-born citizens that live under the fear of separation and deportation,"" said Ben Monterroso, executive director of Mi Familia Vota, an Hispanic advocacy nonprofit. ""Our community is watching and will hold accountable those who have stood on the way of our families through the ballots in November.""
+
+MFV and other immigrant rights advocates plan to march at the Supreme Court around Monday's arguments.
+
+The case is U.S. v. Texas (15-674). A ruling is expected by late June.",REAL
+5343,10 Ways Russia is Preparing For World War 3,"October 31, 2016 at 6:54 am 
+Why can't we all get along? Me as an American, and any Russians watching this DO NOT want this to happen! If we did not have these corrupt ass goverments that only care about money, we could all live in peace! Just know, not all Americans are like this…. and not all Russians are like this.",FAKE
+4124,Race to replace Boehner expected to be another leadership vs. conservative caucus showdown,"The battle among Capitol Hill Republicans to replace House Speaker John Boehner will likely unfold like the one that led to Boehner's resignation: GOP leadership vs. the party's most conservative caucus.
+
+""Before we rush headlong into leadership elections, we need to take time to reflect on what has happened and have a serious discussion about … what we expect of our leaders, and how we plan to accomplish our goals,"" Illinois Rep. Peter Roskam said Saturday in a letter to fellow GOP House members.
+
+Members of Boehner's leadership team already appear to be positioning themselves for the job of running the Republican-controlled chamber. Among them is second-in-command House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
+
+The California Republican has made no official statement, but sources tell Fox News that he is seeking the position. And Boehner said in his resignation announcement Friday that ""McCarthy would be an excellent speaker.""
+
+In addition, the chamber's No. 3 Republican, House Majority Whip Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise and Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers are also interested in the job, according to sources. McMorris is chairwoman of the House Republican Conference and the fourth highest-ranking Republican in the House.
+
+However, ascending to the speakership will be difficult for any of them, considering the existence of the small-but-powerful number of House Republicans who repeatedly suggested Boehner and his leadership team wasn't conservative enough and tried to derail several legislative initiatives.
+
+They most recently tried to make defunding Planned Parenthood part of a spending bill that must be passed by Wednesday to avoid a partial government shutdown. And the seemingly endless struggle between the sides appears to be a major reason why Boehner resigned.
+
+GOP Reps. Jeb Hensarling, Texas; Pete Roskam, Illinois; and Tom Price, Georgia, are among the chamber’s most conservative members and among those mentioned as possible Boehner replacements.
+
+Roskam lost a spot on the leadership team last year when then-House Majority Leader Eric Canton lost re-election. He was the chief deputy whip to McCarthy but lost the big whip race to Scalise, who replaced Roskam with his own chief deputy.
+
+""This is about understanding the importance of this historic moment -- the resignation of a speaker due to internal party divisions,"" Roskam also wrote in the letter, while downplaying any immediate ambition to become the next speaker.
+
+""This is not about me,"" he continued. ""I am not announcing a run for any leadership position because I currently don’t believe our conference or our leadership can be successful until we confront the underlying issues that have led to this moment.""
+
+Also on Saturday, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, one the chamber’s most conservative Republicans, told Fox New: “No matter who it is, I know (the new House leaders) will be more conservative because they will let the majority rule. And that’s the way it’s supposed to work.”
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also didn’t endorse a replacement but suggested voters are unhappy with how Congress is being run and called for a “reset.”
+
+“The American people are disappointed,” Christie said on Fox. “They gave our party the majority in both houses, and we have not delivered some of the things we need to deliver.”
+
+Once Boehner officially resigns his post and leaves Congress next month, the total number of House members will be 434, including 246 Republicans. An absolute majority is required to elect a new speaker, meaning the magic number of votes that a candidate must get is 218.
+
+An aide to Hensarling told Fox News that the lawmaker was considering his options and would expect to have a decision next week.
+
+Among the other most-conservative members also being mentioned for the job are GOP Reps. Jim Jordan, Ohio, and Ted Yoho, Florida.
+
+The chamber's most conservative group is the House Freedom Caucus, which unofficially has about 35 to 38 members -- including about 15 of the 25 who voted against Boehner in the speaker’s election in January, according to Roll Call and The New York Times.",REAL
+1045,Takeaways from the GOP town hall,"(CNN) The ironclad commitment each Republican presidential candidate gave to support the party's nominee -- no matter who that may be -- is no more.
+
+Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates.""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey.""
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23.""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant.""
+
+Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House.""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement.
+
+Here are six takeaways from the town hall, which aired on CNN and was moderated by Anderson Cooper:
+
+Backing away from the pledge
+
+Initially designed to stymie the threat of a Trump independent run, the real-estate mogul's Republican foes have been hamstrung by the signed pledge they all gave to the Republican National Committee in September to back the winner of the party's nominating contest for months.
+
+""I'm not in the habit of supporting someone who attacked my wife and attacked my family. I think that is going beyond the line,"" he said. ""I'm not an easy person to tick off, but when you go after my wife, when you go after my daughters, that does it.""
+
+Cruz, however, didn't explicitly say he would oppose Trump's nomination.
+
+So Trump let him off the hook.
+
+He said Cruz looked ""tormented"" trying to answer Cooper's ""very simple question.""
+
+""I don't want his support. I don't need his support. I want him to be comfortable,"" Trump said.
+
+Kasich, too, backed off his pledge -- saying he shouldn't have raised his hand when the entire Republican field was asked at the first debate last year whether they'd back the eventual nominee. ""Probably shouldn't have even answered that question, but it was the first debate, and what the heck,"" he said.
+
+He said he's been ""disturbed by some of the things I have seen,"" without placing blame on any candidate by name.
+
+""If the nominee is somebody that I think is really hurting the country and dividing the country, I can't stand behind them,"" Kasich said.
+
+Asked whether Trump fit the bill as someone who is hurting the country, Kasich said that's up to voters, and wouldn't answer for himself. ""That's too much below the belt,"" he said.
+
+He came prepared for questions.
+
+In his pocket, he carried print-outs of Fields' initial description. She'd said Lewandowski ""grabbed me tightly by the arm and yanked me down. I almost fell to the ground, but was able to maintain my balance.""
+
+He mocked Fields' description, saying Lewandowski had really just brushed past her and that she didn't come anywhere close to stumbling to the ground. ""She says, 'Ohh, look at my arm,'"" Trump said.
+
+Trump said Fields had grabbed his arm, as well, in an effort to get his attention and ask a question after his news conference had already ended.
+
+Asked if he'd press charges against her, Trump said: ""I don't know. Maybe I should, right? Cause you know what, she was grabbing me.""
+
+Each time he defended Lewandowski -- saying he wouldn't fire his campaign manager -- Trump also pivoted to a theme: Loyalty.
+
+""I'm a loyal person. I'm going to be loyal for the country. I'm going to be loyal for Wisconsin,"" Trump said.
+
+Trump also refused to back down from a fight when Cooper asked him about the fight with Cruz that involves both of their wives.
+
+""No it's not,"" Trump responded. ""Exactly that thinking is the problem of this country. I didn't start this.""
+
+For that, Trump blamed Cruz. On Twitter, he warned Cruz to ""be careful"" or he'd ""spill the beans"" on his wife. Then, Trump retweeted an unflattering image of Heidi Cruz, alongside a more flattering photo of Melania Trump.
+
+There's no evidence the super PAC, headed by Republican strategist Liz Mair, coordinated with Cruz. Doing so would have been illegal. But Trump said the two were in cahoots all the same, saying that he ""would be willing to bet"" Cruz wrote the ad.
+
+So Trump had to respond in kind.
+
+""I don't let things go so easily,"" Trump said.
+
+All eyes were on Kasich heading into the town hall to see whether he would go after Cruz.
+
+Kasich's top strategist, John Weaver, had hit back hard on Twitter, saying: ""Cruz -- with 0 friends, 0 record, 0 vision, 0 chance -- decides to lie about @johnkasich. Desperate? Trump right on 1 thing: 'lying Ted.'""
+
+But when Kasich got on the debate stage, his typical easygoing demeanor was on display. In contrast to Trump's performance earlier in the night, Kasich didn't hesitate to criticize his staff's hardball tactics.
+
+Of Weaver's tweet, he said: ""Sometimes, he gets a little tweet-happy, and I don't like that, OK? And I will have a word with him about it.""
+
+As for the criticism from Cruz, Kasich said, ""That's OK, I can take it.""
+
+In a moment that got one of the loudest cheers from the audience all night, Kasich argued that the campaign's bitter, personal moments have set a bad example for children.
+
+""If name-calling, bringing in spouses, ripping each other below the belt and wrestling in the mud is the new politics, we all need to stand against it. Our children are watching. This is America,"" he said. ""I'm not going to go down there. ... I could screw up, but I hope not.""
+
+Cruz's go-to option to win over women: his mother.
+
+""I have grown up surrounded by strong women. My mom is someone that I admire immensely,"" he said when a questioner asked what he was going to do to convince women to support him.
+
+It was a rare, revealing personal moment for a candidate who focuses more on demonstrating his rock-ribbed conservatism and policy prowess.
+
+He said his mother's father ""was a drunk, and he didn't think women should be educated."" Nonetheless, she made her way to Rice University and worked for Shell -- on the way, refusing to learn how to type so that she wouldn't have ""some man stop her and say, 'Sweetheart, would you type this for me?'""
+
+He said she wanted to be able to answer with a clean conscience: ""Look, I would love to help you out, but I don't know how to type. I guess you're going to have to use me as a computer programmer, instead.""
+
+Cruz also pointed to his wife, Heidi, a Goldman Sachs executive, and said he's been surrounded by strong women his entire life, and that he believes ""every issue is a women's issue.""
+
+The Texas senator wrapped up his answer by pointing to his two daughters.
+
+""I want to make sure that they have a world that they can live in where they have the opportunity to do anything,"" he said.
+
+It took Trump some time to answer when he was asked about the last time he apologized for anything.
+
+""Oh, wow,"" he said, as the audience laughed.
+
+He finally came up with a response: ""I apologized to my mother years ago for using foul language. I apologize to my wife for not being presidential on occasion. She's always saying, 'Darling, be more presidential.'""
+
+Trump joked about the constant controversies surrounding his decisions to amplify the remarks of his supporters. Dismissing the Cruz remark, he said that ""it was just a repeat, but that didn't work out too well.""
+
+""My biggest problems are repeats and retweets. I don't get in a problem with what I say -- it's when I repeat something. I think I'm gonna be careful,"" he said.
+
+Cooper suggested that Trump could ""learn from behavior and not retweet things.""
+
+Laughing, Trump said, ""I know. That I agree. That I agree.""",REAL
+6697,Brother of Clinton’s Campaign Chair is an Active Foreign Agent on the Saudi Arabian Payroll,"Home / Be The Change / Flex Your rights / Brother of Clinton’s Campaign Chair is an Active Foreign Agent on the Saudi Arabian Payroll Brother of Clinton’s Campaign Chair is an Active Foreign Agent on the Saudi Arabian Payroll Claire Bernish October 26, 2016 Leave a comment 
+Tony Podesta — brother of the now-disgraced Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, whose files Wikileaks has been publishing — is not only a powerful Democratic Party lobbyist, but a registered foreign agent receiving a hefty monthly paycheck from the nefarious government of Saudi Arabia. 
+No — as tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist as it might sound — that scenario is the absolute truth. 
+In 1988, John and Tony Podesta formed the Podesta Group and have used their bigwig party-insider status to lobby and influence government policies — while, at various times, simultaneously holding positions of power — which has created a number of glaring conflicts of interest. 
+According to the March 2016 filing made in accordance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, Tony Podesta is an active foreign agent of the Saudi government with the “ Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court ,” and acts as an officer of the Saudi Arabia account. 
+At this point, the web of pay-for-play between the Washington, political heavyweights, and foreign governments comes lurching into the spotlight. 
+For starters, the Podesta brothers’ lobbying firm receives $140,000 every month from the Saudi government, which, in no uncertain terms — and despite a status as privileged U.S. ally — wages a bloody campaign of censorship, murder, suppression, human rights abuse, and worse against its civilian population, while bombing hospitals, schools, and aid convoys in neighboring nations. 
+John Podesta previously served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, founded the think tank Center for American Progress (which oh-so-coincidentally touts the need to reframe Saudi Arabia’s hopelessly tarnished image), counseled President Obama, and now chairs Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
+Tony Podesta acts as a foreign agent for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — lobbying to influence government policy in favor of the Kingdom — while also contributing to and bundling for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
+Think about that for a moment. 
+One brother uses the influence of money to both affect United States foreign policy and infuse the Clinton campaign with cash — while the other wields the influence of power as a political insider for the same entities. 
+As the Washington Post reported months ago in July, Tony Podesta’s lobbying efforts “raised $268,000 for the campaign and $31,000 for the victory fund.” 
+“The Saudis hired the Podesta Group in 2015 because it was getting hammered in the press over civilian casualties from its airstrikes in Yemen and its crackdown on political dissidents at home, including sentencing blogger Raif Badawi to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for ‘insulting Islam,’” Alternet reported . “Since then, Tony Podesta’s fingerprints have been all over Saudi Arabia’s advocacy efforts in Washington DC. When Saudi Arabia executed the prominent nonviolent Shia dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, causing protests throughout the Shia world and inflaming sectarian divisions, The New York Times noted that the Podesta Group provided the newspaper with a Saudi commentator who defended the execution.” 
+Notably, the Saudis’ reputation has only worsened as further atrocities pile up — concerning not only a record number of barbaric beheadings this year, but suspiciously reckless and errant U.S.-backed coalition bombings of civilian sites in several regions of active conflict. 
+Additionally, Tony Podesta’s status as a registered foreign agent for Saudi Arabia is at least obliquely discussed in an email from April 15, 2015 — ironically revealed by Wikileaks’ publishing of his brothers personal communiques — in which former Clinton Foundation chief development officer and now campaign national finance director Dennis Cheng wrote to a small group of insiders: 
+“Hi all – we do need to make a decision on this ASAP as our friends who happen to be registered with FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] are already donating and raising. 
+“I do want to push back a bit (it’s my job!): I feel like we are leaving a good amount of money on the table (both for primary and general, and then DNC and state parties)… and how do we explain to people that we’ll take money from a corporate lobbyist but not them; that the Foundation takes $ from foreign govts but we now won’t. Either way, we need to make a decision soon.” 
+To which general counsel to the Clinton campaign, attorney Marc Elias, replied [all errors original and emphasis added], 
+“Responding to all on this. I was not on the call this morning, but I lean away from a bright line rule here. It seems odd to say that someone who represents Alberta, Canada can’t give, but a lobbyist for Phillip Morris can. Just as we vet lobbyists case by case, I would do the same with FARA. While this may lead to a large number of FARA registrants being denied, it would not be a flat our ban. A total ban feels arbitrary and will engender the same eye-rolling and ill will that it did for Obama.” 
+As the exchange continues, how to precisely handle the campaign’s image with potentially controversial donors — while, at all costs, maintaining the flow of cash — becomes even more apparent. As strategist and campaign manager Robby Mook responds, 
+“Where do we draw the line though?” 
+Elias suggests a particularly intricate solution: 
+“If we do it case by case, then it will be subjective. We would look at who the donor is and what foreign entity they are registered for. In judging whether to take the money, we would consider the relationship between that country and the United States, its relationship to the State Department during Hillary’s time as Secretary, and its relationship, if any, to the Foundation. In judging the individual, we would look at their history of support for political candidates generally and Hillary’s past campaigns specifically. 
+“Put simply, we would use the same criteria we use for lobbyists, except with a somewhat more stringent screen. 
+“As a legal matter, I am not saying we have to do this – we can decide to simply ban foreign registrants entirely. I’m just offering this up as a middle ground.” 
+Mook eventually decides plainly, 
+“Marc made a convincing case to me this am that these sorts of restrictions don’t really get you anything…that Obama actually got judged MORE harshly as a result. He convinced me. So…in a complete U-turn, I’m ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks. Are you guys ok with that?” 
+All of this political wrangling appears to have had the desired effect — despite increasing calls for the United States to either rein in or sever completely its support for the bloody Saudi regime — the U.S. approved a stunning $1.29 billion sale of smart bombs to the Kingdom in November 2015. 
+Tony Podesta’s specific contract with the government-run Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court, which will earn $1.68 million by year’s end, does, indeed, suggest the infusion of a pro-Saudi message into the U.S. media propaganda machine. 
+“Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington,” Sunlight Foundation spokesman Josh Stewart told the Washington Post . “That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying.” 
+That broader audience — the American public — has indeed been manipulated courtesy of at least the thoroughly-corrupt Clinton campaign if not surreptitiously by the Saudis, as well. 
+As The Free Thought Project has repeatedly reported , the evidence of collusion among the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the mainstream presstitutes is indisputable — including no less than 65 so-called journalists listed by name in various leaks as darlings of the campaign. 
+Although this level of corruption and collusion would be considered intolerable in nearly any other nation on the planet. And yet, at the center of this shit storm of contention is an official nominee for the White House — who will not be held responsible for any number of questionable and criminal acts. 
+The system isn’t rigged — it’s performing exactly as intended — and always will as long as the vote validates its existence. Share Social Trending",FAKE
+7279,Hillary Spent $25 Million from Clinton Foundation on Private Jets,"Hillary Spent $25 Million from Clinton Foundation on Private Jets   
+by Martin Armstrong 
+Bob Woodard , the journalist who broke the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign, has come out to say that Hillary’s Clinton Foundation is “corrupt” and “a scandal.” Hillary said she will continue the Clinton Foundation if president, meaning she would continue taking money from foreign governments, no doubt. 
+While the IRS documents show Hillary took in $500 million tax-free, she only paid out $75 million in charity and $25 million was spent traveling chartered jets. As long as she claims she went somewhere to talk to someone, all of her expenses are tax-free. I travel the world and have not spent even a half-million on travel. Of course, I am not hiring private jets.",FAKE
+7215,"From Pauper to A-List Princess, Anna Kendrick Reveals She Was Once 'Too Poor' To Buy Shoes for Oscars","
+In 2009, Anna Kendrick became a star. 
+But it seems she wasn't quite prepared in terms of....anything. 
+When the 31-year-old actress snagged a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her work in “Up In The Air,” it made her an instant A-lister. 
+But while promoting her new memoir, “Scrappy Little Nobody,” on the “Ellen DeGeneres” show Wednesday, Kendrick revealed that it all happened at a time when she was totally broke: 
+“It was this weird combination of, like, all these great things are happening but at the same time nothing has changed.” 
+She describes how she had a hard time getting together a decent outfit for the Oscars: 
+“My stylist told me I had to wear the perfect shoes for an outfit, and because the movie isn't out yet, she said, 'Nobody really knows who you are. The shoe places don't want to loan you the shoes, so can you buy a pair of Louboutins?'” Image Credit: Simon & Schuster 
+Kendrick laughed as she recalled being sent to New York to promote “Up In The Air” alongside George Clooney and Vera Farmiga. 
+She said being broke put her in an awkward position: 
+""At one point I was like, 'If we do another trip to New York can you put me up in a less nice hotel room and then I could keep some of the cash?' And they were like, 'Ew no, this is not how this works!''' Image Credit: Screenshot/ YouTube 
+Kendrick's memoir covers more hilarious moments of being “too poor,” in addition to moments that will stand out to her for the rest of her life - namely her recent duet with Justin Timberlake for their new film “Trolls”: 
+“It'll be, like, a career highlight for me. It was amazing watching him do his thing.” Image Credit: Screenshot/ YouTube 
+“Scrappy Little Nobody” is available now at bookstores, and “Trolls” comes to theaters November 4th. 
+",FAKE
+824,Trump’s sweep is another humiliating defeat for media and political elites,"Donald Trump’s sweeping victories Tuesday night move the Manhattan billionaire a step closer to winning the Republican nomination for president and to pulling off the most improbable political feat in modern American history. But Trump’s story is about more than a first-time candidate’s stunning rise. It is also about the humiliating defeat suffered by an increasingly isolated political and media class who still do not understand the causes and scope of Trump’s populist revolt.
+
+In his book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” Charles Murray wrote about the rise of a new American upper class and the “narrow elites” who shape America’s economy, culture and government. The number of players who dominate the direction of media, politics and finance is surprisingly concentrated for a country as sprawling and diverse as the United States. And yet almost all of these “influencers” across Manhattan and Washington were incapable of blunting Trump’s meteoric rise. Time and again over the past year, Washington insiders and media moguls misread the mood of working-class voters and their attraction to the populist message championed by Trump.
+
+On Tuesday, that message which undermines Republican orthodoxy on trade, taxes and immigration resonated with GOP primary voters so strongly that Trump cruised to lopsided victories in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland.
+
+So why did these “narrow elites” miss the mark so badly when the topic turned to Trump? Because most of them are hopelessly isolated from the other 300 million or so Americans who inconveniently share their country.
+
+Murray writes that most members of the narrow elite don’t watch much television. If they watch any news programs, it is probably the PBS NewsHour (or Morning Joe!). Powerful influencers have also watched other television shows over the past decade like “Mad Men,” “House of Cards,” “Breaking Bad,” “Game of Thrones” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” While such critically acclaimed shows are often consumed by narrow elites in frantic fits of binge watching, the other 300 million Americans view television a bit differently.
+
+Murray reports that the average American watches about 35 hours of television a week. Since 2004, Trump has starred in 14 seasons of “The Apprentice.” And if you’re a member of the narrow elite that holds sway over media coverage or government policy, chances are good that you saw few episodes of “The Apprentice” or “Survivor.”
+
+But millions of Americans did, and perhaps that kind of mass consumption is why Trump will beat Don Draper at the polls every time.
+
+History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme when the topic turns to TV careers and Republican politicians. From 1956 to 1962, Ronald Reagan hosted General Electric Theater and had his image beamed into more than 20 million homes every week. The successful run on TV gave Reagan a connection with American voters that his movie career never could. By the time Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, the GE host was a household name. Reagan’s landslide victory shocked elites in and out of the political class and launched a conservative revolution that would last a generation.
+
+50 years later, that revolution is being undone by another TV star who has been underestimated by elites while being elevated by working-class voters. The question now is whether Trump can prove his critics wrong again by winning the nomination and then defeating Hillary Clinton in the fall. The odds may be long for the New York developer and reality star, but no longer than the ones he faced last June when he first sought the GOP nomination.",REAL
+9353,Levers of Power: Flushing the Vote Down the Memory Hole,"Levers of Power: Flushing the Vote Down the Memory Hole Electronic election fraud exposed! David Knight | Infowars.com - October 26, 2016 Comments 
+Establishment politicians and press are outraged that Trump would question the integrity of their system. 
+They say it undermines public trust in political institutions. 
+Yet to see who is truly undermining public trust we need look no further than the people running the elections, who are shutting down election audit procedures, who stonewall and eject certified election monitors and who make any recording of malfunctioning voting machines a felony. 
+One such person is Texas Director of Elections, Keith Ingram. 
+This story is specific to Texas, but the same tactics are used nationwide by both parties to exploit vulnerabilities inherent in electronic voting. 
+I went to the Texas Secretary of State offices to ask Mr. Ingram about specific procedural changes he has made in his 4 year tenure and the changes he attempted to make in August that would have gone into effect this November. 
+With camera & mic in hand, we told the reception desk that we were with the press and would like to talk to the Director about the election. 
+We were told to wait in the lobby and Mr. Ingram would be down. 
+You can see for yourself what happened when he saw the mic flag showing we were with Infowars. 
+The man running the election bureaucracy runs from questions. 
+So much for transparency and candor. 
+This unelected bureaucrat is tasked with ensuring that counties adhere to election law. 
+What follows are the specific actions taken by his office that waive requirements and undermine election integrity in Texas. 
+But before we get to specifics about his actions & his connection to the Rose Law firm in Arkansas, there are some general questions that should concern voters nationwide: 
+• Why would standards required by our elected lawmakers for election integrity be bent to the capabilities of vendors rather than require vendors to perform to the standard? 
+• Why would election procedures be waived and honesty and transparency sacrificed for the convenience of election workers & officials? 
+Burning The Paper Trail 
+In August 2016, Ingram, Texas Director of Elections, attempted to make last minute rule changes for the upcoming November 8 election that would eliminate crucial paper backup records for electronic voting. His office issued new rules that would: 
+Eliminate printing of paper audit logs that poll watchers are entitled to monitor at main tabulation computers. 
+Eliminate printing of Early Voting Results tapes. 
+Eliminate printing of ballot images for recounts. 
+Fortunately activists and some elected representatives got the proposed rule changes postponed, with a formal public hearing scheduled after the November election. 
+State Senator Don Huffines said “The state’s chief election officers must reconsider and redraft their proposed election rules to pursue more real-time paper records and backups, not fewer…The comfort & convenience of election administrators should not take priority over voters’ confidence and election integrity.” 
+But even though these procedures have been postponed, Ingram’s previous rule changes are still a cause for concern in the November election and have caused repercussions in two election cases currently being litigated. Here are some of the problems… 
+1) Waiver of laws requiring a Partial Manual Recount audit 
+Ingram waived the requirement to conduct a manual count in 1% of the election precincts or 3 election precincts, whichever is greater. This was waived in all 254 counties the day after the March 2016 Primary. The timing is significant because during the primary there were 1,743 move votes than voters in Hill County in the Republican Primary. The margin of victory was 225 in Texas House District 8 that contains Hill County. In calling for a criminal investigation, Ingram noted that it appears “6 or 7 voters voted more than once in the election and one voter voted as many as four times.” Yet he waived the partial manual recount audit requirement statewide and he has waived other audit and monitoring procedures. 
+2) Waiver of laws requiring printing of paper backup results tapes 
+Ingram’s waivers issued in 2014, 2015, and 2016, appear to be in direct contradiction of state election laws 65.004, 65.014, 66.022, 66.023, 66.024 and the Judges Handbook. These rules require – • “Three original tally lists shall be maintained at the polling place to record the number of votes received for the candidates” • “On completion of the vote count, the presiding judge shall prepare the returns of the election for the precinct” with “total number of voters”, “total number of votes” with the presiding judge signing each of the 3 copies to certify. 
+Ingram also issued waivers for requirements that a “zero tape” be printed from the machines at the beginning of election day and a “tally tape” printed at the close of election. His letter states that “the process of printing of the zero tape and tally tape at each countywide precinct location could take hours in both the morning and the evening of election day.” 
+So expediency for election workers takes precedent over requirements enacted by the legislature for integrity of elections. And if a favored vendor can’t perform to the law, the law is waived. 
+If proper procedures had been followed to ensure that the machine was at a zero state, instead of waived by Ingram, the Hill County issue of 1,743 more voters than votes would not have happened. The vendor in Hill County, ES&S eventually identified the source of the extra votes saying “An audit of the log report from the central paper ballot scanner showed that the hard drive had not been properly cleared of all ballots cast before scanning Early Voting or Election Day ballots…There are established election protocols which should be followed to prevent this type of reporting error.” 
+But the Director of Elections is waiving those “established election protocols”. Ingram’s waver of legal requirements & his improvised solution of “printing a zero tape at the county warehouse prior to election day” opens the door for error and fraud. 
+3) Ignoring laws requiring printing of legally sufficient ballot images for recounts 
+The Secretary of State Election Division claims that “cast vote records” are equivalent to “ballot images”. As you can see, the cast vote records are very different from ballots and are not uniquely numbered. 
+The Texas Constitution, Article 6 – Suffrage, Section 4 says “In all elections by the people, the vote shall be by ballot, and the Legislature shall provide for the numbering of tickets and make such other regulations as may be necessary to detect and punish fraud and preserve the purity of the ballot box.” 
+Yet the machines by vendors Hart InterCivic and ES&S, certified by Ingram, do not provide uniquely numbered ballots per state recount laws and don’t provide other components of a legal Texas ballot. 
+4) Ignoring laws that allow poll watchers to monitor all election activities such as the printing of paper audit logs for computerized result tabultion 
+Texas Election Code, Sec 33.056 says a “watcher is entitled to observe any activity conducted at the location at which the watcher is serving.” 
+Affidavits from two official poll watchers for a candidate in Dallas County (with official Poll Watcher signed forms) detail how they were “repeatedly obstructed from monitoring multiple election activities at the Dallas County Central Counting Station such as ballot scanning, vote transfer, ballot transfer, computer activities, ballot tabulation, and viewing the elections computer line printer.” They state that they were “repeatedly treated disrespectfully, obstructed and blatantly ignored” by the election officials, and voting machine vendor before being thrown out after the officials spoke with the Texas Secretary of State Elections office. 
+Hostility to election monitors, like Ingram’s refusal to answer our questions, destroy the public’s confidence in the honesty of the process — and rightfully so. 
+Ingram’s Connections To Arkansas, Kutak Rock, Rose Law Firm & Hillary Clinton 
+According to a public information request of Ingram’s Secretary of State personnel file, Ingram left private practice and moved to Little Rock Arkansas, taking a job with the law firm, Kutak Rock, LL. At Kutak Rock, he worked under the managing partner, Gordon Miller Wilbourn who had been a partner with Hillary Clinton, Vince Foster and Webster Hubbell at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas in the 1990’s. The Wilbourn family is a large donor to the Clinton Foundation and the Hillary Clinton campaign. 
+Ingram left Kutak Rock to return to Texas when he was hired by Gov. Rick Perry’s appointment office in 2008 to oversee statewide political appointments for various courts, boards & commissions. 
+Ingrams’s career moves are interesting. In just 10 months, his journey from private practice in Texas through Arkansas Clinton-cronies and back to Texas government resulted in pay cuts with each move and his salary being cut in half. In 2012, Ingram, was promoted to Director of the Election Division in the Texas Secretary of State’s Office where his salary was still 40% less than private practice. 
+Ingram’s determination to remove paper trails and auditing procedures for electronic voting is even more troubling when we look at his connections to big Clinton donors. 
+Establishment Of Both Parties Don’t Appear To Want Election Integrity 
+In one lawsuit contesting election results for Austin City Council, the County could not produce ANY ballot images as required by law to conduct a recount. Computer logs had multiple “corruption/invalid” errors. During discovery it was learned that the computer counted more votes than registered voters in 10 of the 12 precincts forming the district. One precinct had 100% voter turnout, another was just 2 registered voters shy of 100% in spite of only 32% and 17% county-wide turnout in the general and runoff elections. 
+The County Democrat Party has financed legal opposition to the lawsuit and a Republican judge claimed there was no evidence for election irregularities. 
+There are some positive developments, however. The Republican judge has now been voted off the bench of the solidly Republican County and state legislators have taken up the question of election integrity that has so far been ignored by Governor Abbott’s office. 
+State Senator Bob Hall said, “Due to an increasing number of complaints, it is time for the Texas Elections Division Office to take immediate and decisive action to rescind all waivers issued by that office…and instruct all Texas counties using electronic voting systems to consistently adhere to all election laws…” 
+Voters, regardless of political affiliation, should reject policies and personnel that compromise honest, transparent elections. For example, Chambers County in Texas recently announced electronic voting would be suspended until the glitches affecting voting machines could be corrected. It’s time to remove Keith Ingram as Texas Director of Elections and replace easily hacked electronic voting machines with paper ballots. 
+ ",FAKE
+2760,2016ers hail release of U.S. prisoners held by Iran as Republicans slam Obama policy,"Washington (CNN) White House hopefuls on both sides of the political aisle on Saturday hailed the prisoner swap between the U.S. and Iran, though Republicans said the exchange took too long and served as a reminder that the longtime U.S. foe isn't trustworthy.
+
+Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, former Marine Amir Hekmati, pastor Saeed Abedini and Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari were released from Iranian custody in exchange for seven Iranians who were not convicted of violent crimes but of violating the sanctions ban against Iran, senior administration officials told CNN. A fifth American, Matthew Trevithick, is also being released by Iran, U.S. officials said, but they said his release was not part of the negotiated prisoner swap.
+
+GOP front-runner Donald Trump, speaking at a campaign event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, criticized the Iranian nuclear deal, which he claimed will send $150 billion to Iran.
+
+""Now I have to see what the deal is for the four people, because someone said they were getting seven back. So essentially, they get 150 billion plus seven, and we get four. Doesn't sound too good. Doesn't sound too good,"" he said. ""I am happy they are coming back, but it is a disgrace they have been there this long, a total disgrace.""
+
+Speaking at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, later Saturday, Trump said he ""had something to do with"" the prisoners' release.
+
+""I have been hitting (the Obama administration) very hard. And I think I might have had something to do with it. You want to know the truth -- it's part of my staple thing -- I go crazy when I hear about this,"" he said.
+
+Trump's top rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, said he's glad the prisoners were released but is worried about the details of the exchange.
+
+""We don't know the details of the deal that is bringing them home, and it may well be there are some very problematic aspects to this deal,"" Cruz told reporters in Fort Mill, South Carolina. ""But at least this morning, I am giving thanks that Pastor Saeed is coming home. It is far later than it should have been, but we will be glad to welcome him home with open arms.""
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio -- who last spring joined 20 other senators in penning a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry saying that the Obama administration should push for the prisoners' release as part of the Iran nuclear deal's negotiations -- said at a town hall in Johnston, Iowa, that situation ""tells us all we need to know about the Iranian regime.""
+
+""If these reports are true, of course we are happy for them and their families, but they should never have been there,"" he said, adding that Iran takes ""people hostage in order to take concessions. And the fact that they can get away with it in this administration is one of the reasons -- has created an incentive for more governments to do this around the world.""
+
+In an interview with CNN, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul called Abedini an ""incredibly brave man.""
+
+""For years, we have advocated for the release of Saeed Abedini. I've sent repeated letters to the administration encouraging them to advocate for his release hoping we'd pressure Iran for his release,"" he said. ""We're excited he's coming home. I think he's an incredibly brave man to advocate for Christianity and to risk his life in the process.""
+
+Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said in Amherst, New Hampshire, that if he were president, he would have threatened Iran with military action over the prisoners.
+
+""I would say ... if you do not release them, that there's going to be military action, that that's an act of provocation, an act of war. What I would do in January is recognize that Iran is not an ally. That's how the Obama administration views this,"" Bush said.
+
+Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson said he was ""overjoyed"" for the prisoners' families, but said ""the fact remains that President Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran is fatally flawed and gravely jeopardizes the national security interests of the American people, our ally Israel and other peaceful nations in the Middle East and around the world.""
+
+Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said the deal ""should give each of us pause.""
+
+""First, we are returning criminals back to Iran in return for freeing innocent Americans. Under no rational analysis is that a fair deal,"" Santorum said in a statement. ""Second, this exchange proves that Iran is no friend and continues to get the upper hand in negotiations with the Obama Administration. As I said in Thursday's debate, Barack Obama's deal with Iran must be shredded and I intend to do that on day one of my presidency.""
+
+And former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, while praising the release of Abedini, asked why it took the Obama administration so long to negotiate his release.
+
+""He never should have been jailed and it's embarrassing that John Kerry and Obama negotiate with Iran as innocent Americans remained locked-up in prison,"" Huckabee said in a statement. ""President Obama is a complete fool for trusting a country that's been lying, cheating, murdering and sponsoring terrorism around the globe for 37 years. Empowering Iran with sanctions relief is like Neville Chamberlain writing a $150 billion check to Adolf Hitler hoping he'll play nice and behave. This Iran deal is an insane disaster and this White House has lost its mind.""
+
+But Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, lauded the announcement, with the front-runner saying she is ""greatly relieved"" that Iran released the American prisoners.
+
+""Their families and our country have waited and prayed for this day to come,"" she said in a statement. ""But we shouldn't thank Iran for the prisoners or for following through on its obligations. These prisoners were held unjustly by a regime that continues to threaten the peace and security of the Middle East.""
+
+Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, meanwhile, said the exchange represented progress in relations between Washington and Tehran.
+
+""This good news shows that diplomacy can work, even in this volatile region of the world,"" Sanders said.",REAL
+761,Is Sanders 2016 Becoming Nader 2000?,"Bernie Sanders, for all his talk of revolution, never wanted to be Ralph Nader. He has a long history of keeping the Democratic Party at arm’s length, but he also has a long history of rejecting spoiler bids. Since 1992, he has always endorsed the Democratic presidential nominee, snubbing Nader’s four left-wing third-party campaigns. He became a Democrat to run for president instead of keeping his “(I)” and following in Nader’s footsteps. He has pledged to support Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination and has ripped Donald Trump at every opportunity.
+
+But even if Sanders isn’t deliberately trying to replicate the electoral trauma inflicted by Nader in 2000—when he probably cost Al Gore the presidency—Bernie’s lingering presence in the Democratic primary threatens to produce a similar result in November: delegitimizing the eventual Democratic nominee in the eyes of the left and sending many critics, if not to Trump, then to the Green Party’s Jill Stein or the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson.
+
+In the first poll to assess the impact of third-party candidates, Public Policy Polling found last week that the inclusion of Stein and Johnson shaves 2 percentage points off Clinton’s lead over Trump. Conversely, the minor party duo loses a combined 2 points when Sanders is tested as the Democratic nominee, indicating that Sanders’ voters account for Clinton’s reduced standing.
+
+A couple points, a couple million voters, is no big deal to Clinton if she’s trouncing Trump. But if he makes it a race, Democrats may find their political post-traumatic stress disorder from 2000 flaring up.
+
+And while Clinton would be the most enraged if she suffers Gore’s fate, it is not in Sanders’ interest to join Nader on the Democratic Party’s unofficial Wall of Shame. His ultimate goal is to remake the party in his progressive populist image. He can’t do that if his name is uttered by rank-and-file Democrats only when seething.
+
+That means Sanders has to strategize very carefully as he prepares to leave his mark at the convention. How can he bend the party to his will without breaking it?
+
+One way would be to follow the lead of Jesse Jackson in 1988, who remained in the race for the entire primary. But when he came to the Democratic convention with 38 percent of the pledged delegates, he went to great lengths to keep his team focused on changing the party over the long haul rather than disrupting the election (though Michael Dukakis still lost). “I’m going to ask you to do a hard thing,” Jackson said to his delegates, “Put your focus on why we're here. If you're following my lead, then reflect my spirit, attitude and discipline. We don't have the time to fill up the media airwaves with pollution.”
+
+A runner-up staying in until the last presidential primary vote is counted, by itself, has never been tantamount to a fatal party schism. Clinton’s reluctance in the spring of 2008 to accept the delegate math did not prevent Barack Obama from becoming the first Democrat to break 51 percent of the popular vote since Lyndon B. Johnson. Jerry Brown’s refusal to endorse his 1992 rival Bill Clinton proved to be about as damaging as a spitball. In the spring of 1976, Brown and Sen. Frank Church entered the presidential race—and won several late contests—in a futile attempt to stop Jimmy Carter from winning the White House.
+
+Jackson didn’t quit before it was officially over for the same reason Sanders won’t: more delegates means more influence at the convention. But that’s where Sanders faces a paradox. The potential of using his delegates to make her convention disorderly—forcing floor fights over platform language, nominating himself on the floor, withholding his endorsement—is what gives him leverage. But to unleash convention chaos risks a repeat of 1968, when efforts by Eugene McCarthy’s delegates to wrest the nomination from Hubert Humphrey and include an anti-Vietnam War plank to the platform failed on the convention floor, prompting a livid McCarthy to leave the convention without endorsing the ticket. He gave an extremely reluctant endorsement in the campaign’s final days, and his unwillingness to rally his supporters possibly tipped five states to the Republican winner Richard Nixon.
+
+It seems unlikely that Sanders would renege on his pledge to back the eventual nominee, but a passive-aggressive “nondorsement”—just keeping quiet—or a feeble campaign trail schedule could still stir hostile feelings among his supporters that the party establishment treated their campaign unfairly and views their revolution with disdain.
+
+How might Sanders walk the fine line he needs to—pushing hard for his ideal platform without poisoning the party well?
+
+Perhaps the most potent move he could make without sacrificing his policy agenda would be to declare, after the last ballot is cast in the District of Columbia on June 14, that Hillary Clinton won the majority of the pledged delegates “fair and square.”
+
+A faction of Sanders supporters continues to circulate notions that the game has been rigged, either by the rules— unelected superdelegates and primaries closed to independents—or by outright cheating, with the long lines to vote in Arizona and Bernie-friendly early exit poll data looming large in online conspiracy theories. Sanders has not done much to promulgate the conspiracies, but neither has he tried hard to shut them down. He does regularly complain about superdelegates and closed primaries, despite the fact that he lost 13 of the 21 primaries so far in which independents could vote, and that the distribution of superdelegates on the basis of the popular vote would not give him the overall delegate lead.
+
+In other words, he didn’t lose because of the rules. But if his supporters are left with the impression that rules were designed by the party to thwart their ambitions, then they will have little hesitation to bolt the party.
+
+Sanders could ditch his strident anti-establishment tone and help disabuse his supporters of their suspicions, closing the electoral chapter of the campaign with a speech along the lines of: “Our campaign performed exponentially better than anyone predicted. We worked together to raise enough money to be heard, and our message was heard. We fought for more debates, we got them and we engaged in a substantive dialogue of ideas. We should take enormous pride in winning [probably by then] more than 20 states and 45 percent of the pledged delegates, while we also tip our hat to Hillary Clinton for winning a little more. Our party’s commitment to democracy gave us a fair shot, and the proof is in how well we did in the face of the long odds.”
+
+Declaring the process to be on the level would effectively table a floor fight over the primary process rules that some Sanders allies have been hankering for, and keep the convention spotlight on what Sanders ran to accomplish in the first place: to popularize policy proposals that would break up the banks, provide free college, extend Medicare for all and eliminate corporate campaign cash.
+
+An additional subtext of such a message would be to assure his supporters, “the Democratic Party is our home,” countering the message being sold by the third-party candidates that it is impossible for Sandernistas to advance their revolution within the confines of the Democratic Party.
+
+In 1988, Jesse Jackson faced a similar challenge in keeping his restless supporters in the party fold, while also pressing the Dukakis camp for substantive concessions.
+
+So he took a highly calibrated approach to the party. He negotiated with Dukakis’ aides a platform that reflected much of his liberal agenda, though scrubbed of elements deemed too controversial. Three planks left out were brought to the floor for debate, but Jackson did not force a floor vote on the most divisive of the three: “self-determination” for Palestinians.
+
+The moral victory of exercising influence over the platform may have looked ephemeral in the years that followed: The defeat of Dukakis was blamed on excessive liberalism, leading to the 1992 nomination of Bill Clinton who took the party in a moderate direction. But Jackson in 2000 enthused at how much he was able to influence the White House in the Clinton years as well as catapult his top staffers into the Democratic Party apparatus. And had he not kept his supporters inside the Democratic tent, neither Clinton’s presidency nor Obama’s more liberal administration would have been possible.
+
+Sanders never endorsed Nader, but he did endorse Jackson in 1988. If he wants his 2016 campaign to leave a lasting legacy on the Democratic Party, he’ll walk Jackson’s path at the convention, and do everything he can to prevent his supporters from walking Nader’s.",REAL
+1398,"The Perfect State Index: If Iowa, N.H. Are Too White To Go First, Then Who?","The Perfect State Index: If Iowa, N.H. Are Too White To Go First, Then Who?
+
+Every four years when the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary roll around, the critics and cynics question why such unrepresentative patches of America get to vote first in presidential nominating contests. Why is so much political power, they complain, given to states that are more white and more rural than the rest of the country?
+
+So, we attempted to quantitatively evaluate the critique — and try to come up with which states actually were the most representative of the average of the entire country, in what we're calling the Perfect State Index. In creating the PSI, we looked at five categories race, education, age, income and religion. (We explain the methodology, how we arrived there and analyze each category in detail further down.)
+
+Below is an interactive table, which you can sort the results by category. So, which states came out on top?
+
+Methodology — why we chose these five factors?
+
+It's complicated, and, true, our metrics, are somewhat arbitrary. There are a dozen ways (or more) you could slice and dice Census data to decide which demographic factors are most important. But, we felt that in terms of understanding political behavior — these five indicators were the most important.
+
+We ran the data by Bill Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, and he insisted that of all the factors we were considering, race was by far the most important indicator of political behavior.
+
+""Race is one where there's a sharp divide between how whites vote and how most minorities vote,"" Frey said. ""The race classification ... is a really good indicator to understand something about how elections are going to turn out.""
+
+And, Frey encouraged us to place a higher priority on race, because it often correlates with income, education, and, perhaps even religion.
+
+""By that I mean — in a state like Mississippi, which has a relatively high black population, that may also have some bearing on Mississippi's income rank, and on its education rank,"" Frey explained. (Mississippi has the lowest median household income in the country, as you can see from our table.)
+
+So, with Frey's guidance, we decided to give a little more power to the ""race"" category. (All the other categories are not weighted).
+
+For each of our five indicators, we compared every state in the country to either the U.S. median value or the percentage of the national population. That allowed us to see how far each state diverged from the quintessential American ""middle.""
+
+So, for example, in the map below you'll notice that both California (38.5 percent white) and Maine (93.8 percent white) fared poorly on the race index, but for obviously different reasons. Our index looks at the absolute value — it doesn't matter whether a state is better or worse than the U.S. average; it matters how much a state differs from ""mainstream"" America.
+
+For each category, every state received a ranking from 1 to 50. We then added the individual rankings together to give each state a final score.
+
+Below, you'll see which state ranked the highest in the five individual categories.
+
+We analyzed 2014 U.S. Census data to compare the racial make-up of each state to the country as a whole. We included all the categories the Census uses: black or African-American; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian/Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander; Two or More Races; Hispanic or Latino; and White Alone Not Hispanic or Latino.
+
+And, the reason we used the Census subcategories is that it gives us a more accurate racial portrait of each state. If we had only looked at ""minorities"" compared to ""whites,"" we would have gotten a skewed picture. For example, had we ranked solely based on ""minority"" population, combining all the racial subgroups, Alaska would have ranked near the top. But it has a disproportionately large Native American population, a group which has a relatively minor voting effect on American politics at a national level.
+
+We wanted to find a state that more closely mirrors the country's racial portrait — and Illinois does that, almost perfectly. If you look at every group: Latinos, Asians, blacks — Illinois' respective populations are nearly identical to the country's at large.
+
+That doesn't surprise Frey from Brookings. He points out that Illinois has mirrored the country's historical mass migrations.
+
+First, white ethnic immigrant groups, such as those from Polish and Italian ancestry moved to the state. Then, during the Great Migration of the early 20th century, African-Americans from the South settled in Chicago. And, then, in the last 30 to 40 years, thousands of Hispanics, particularly Mexicans, moved to the city.
+
+""And, all of that is due to that fact that Chicago has been this kind of central place that has been emblematic of these different kinds of movements,"" Frey explained. ""I don't think there's any other metropolitan area, or any other state really, that has all of these elements. ... Different parts of the country have had pieces of these things. But, Chicago has had them all in different sequences. And, so right now, we have a snapshot of a metropolitan area that's a lot like the U.S. population.""
+
+And, as blacks, Latinos and Asians diversified the city, Frey said, old urban white ethnics moved to the suburbs and the rural farmlands. He added that the mix of urban and rural coupled with white suburbanization makes Illinois a good bellwether of what's gone on in the United States as a whole in recent decades.
+
+We looked at the percent of the population that was older than 25 in each state with a bachelor's degree or higher, as tracked by Census data between 2010 and 2014.
+
+Minorities of all educational levels tend to vote Democratic, but, as we've written elsewhere, there seems to be a growing political educational divide within the white population.
+
+In Delaware, 29.4 percent of the total population has graduated with bachelor's degree or higher. (In the U.S. as a whole, 29.3 percent has at least a bachelor's degree). Frey said Delaware's mainstream-level of education may be due to its geography.
+
+""It's an important state, but it is considered to be kind of a suburb of Philadelphia writ large,"" he said, ""and increasingly college graduates have been living and moving to the suburbs, and that's part of what Delaware is as well.""
+
+He was, perhaps, more intrigued by the next few highly ranked states. ""You also see in this list states you might not have expected to see there — Montana, Nebraska, Oregon,"" Frey said. ""It shows this median level of education is pretty pervasive in all different parts of the country, not just concentrated in a few places.""
+
+We used 2014 Census data to compare the median age in each state to the U.S. median age of 37.7.
+
+""It's good to know that Virginia is in the middle,"" said Frey, but he's skeptical that it means much, because there are a clump of states that roughly reflect the U.S. median age.
+
+What's more important are the states toward the bottom of the list. ""What you want to look at — is states that are kind of on the extremes,"" Frey added. ""And, when you're thinking of the extremes, you're thinking of some of the New England states, Pennsylvania, West Virginia – those are states that a lot of the young people have left over the years.""
+
+And that brings us to New Hampshire. The early voting state is one of the oldest in the country (tied with Vermont for 47th on the age index). In fact, the aging population has even become a concern for voters in the state. At a recent campaign event, one woman described New Hampshire as going through a ""silver tsunami.""
+
+For election purposes, Frey says the 65 and older population is key. ""Those are the kinds of populations,"" he noted, ""at least in recent elections [that] have tended to veer more toward Republican candidates in presidential elections.""
+
+Frey added that a state's median age is often indicative of recent regional migration patterns.
+
+""A lot of immigrants have come to parts of the country and made their populations younger,"" he said, ""a lot of it is in the South and the West.""
+
+And, indeed, immigration may help explain why Virginia did so well in the age category when its neighbor West Virginia did so poorly.
+
+There are lots of different economic indicators we could have used to measure the ""wealth"" of a state: the unemployment rate, the percent of people who own houses, or median household income. With the advice of our economics editor Marilyn Geewax, we opted to go with the 2010 to 2014 median household income (in 2014 dollars).
+
+For the country at large, that is $53,482.
+
+Income is a tough measure, because the cost of living differs wildly from Mississippi to Manhattan. But, it's also an important metric, because the economy is so often the most important issue for voters.
+
+Pennsylvania's income levels are so incredibly average that it differed from the U.S. median by less than a percent. Frey points to Pennsylvania's geography and mix of urban, suburban, rural communities as a possible explanation for economic diversity.
+
+""Pennsylvania ... has the average of those urban areas like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh,"" Frey said. ""And then [in] the inner part of the state, it's a little more rural.""
+
+Interestingly, the first nominating state of Iowa also ranked high on the average-income calculator, coming in third. But Frey thinks Iowa fared well for different reasons — partly because it's an overwhelmingly white state and partly because it's in the middle of the country with an average cost of living.
+
+The states that did poorly also tell us something important. New Jersey and Maryland were 49th and 50th, respectively. Both states are wealthier and largely overgrown suburbs of New York and Philadelphia (in New Jersey's case) and Washington, D.C., when it comes to the population center of south-central Maryland.
+
+""It's suburban New York and suburban D.C., and some pretty rich suburbs,"" Frey said. ""Some of the richest suburban counties in the country are in New Jersey and Maryland.""
+
+And so, even though New Jersey and Maryland did well on other metrics, such as race or age, they didn't do well in the overall PSI because of income.
+
+There was a four-way tie for first place in the religion index. And, that's partly because the data isn't as nuanced. Statistics for all the other categories were collected and compiled through the Census Bureau.
+
+But, the Census doesn't ask Americans about religion. Given the central role of religion in campaign politics, and the degree to which religiosity predicts political behavior, we thought it was an important metric to include.
+
+To assess ""religiosity,"" which can often be an amorphous attitude in itself, we used data from the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, a comprehensive survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, which interviewed more than 35,000 Americans from all 50 states. We looked at a one specific aspect of this study: the percent of adults in each state who said religion was ""very important"" in their lives.
+
+In the U.S. as a whole, and in Iowa in particular, 53 percent of adults said religion was ""very important"" in their lives. As Iowa prays, so prays the country ... apparently.
+
+Iowa's mainstream status on the religious index might seem surprising given the extent to which the white, Christian conservative vote is courted by GOP presidential candidates there. But, there two things to keep in mind:
+
+So while people might think of Iowa as a religious state, it's only actually, as a whole, as religious as the country. In fact, there are many other states that are far more religious. Think: Alabama, where 77 percent of people said religion was ""very important"" in their lives.
+
+New Hampshire, on the other hand, is far more secular. New Hampshire came in 46th in the category of people saying that religion was ""very important"" to them. Just 33 percent of adults in New Hampshire said religion was ""very important"" to them. And, 36 percent described themselves as ""religiously unaffiliated,"" which means they don't identify with any organized religion.
+
+It's one of the least religious states in the country, second only to Sen. Bernie Sanders' home state of Vermont.
+
+Illinois borders a traditional East-West divide in the country — the Mississippi River. It snakes across the state's western edge, separating it from Iowa. And it's a microcosm of the country in nearly ever category. Specifically, it ranked in the top 10 for race, age, and religion.
+
+It's almost comical that the most perfectly average state neighbors Iowa, the state that gets to go first in presidential nominating contests.
+
+In many ways, Illinois is geographically and demographically similar to Iowa, particularly in the southern and western regions of the state. The major difference is Chicago — an urban core the kind Iowa just doesn't have.
+
+""It's as diverse as the country, but not overly diverse,"" Frey said. ""It's probably a little more urban than the country as a whole because of the greater Chicago metropolitan area, but a lot of that is the suburbs and the suburbs are representative of much of America.""
+
+Plus, he added, Illinois also has a ""rural component, which is important.""
+
+""[Illinois] ... may not be a swing state,"" Frey said, ""but in terms of its demographics, I think people would do well to look at how the voting goes there to get a better understanding of what's going on in the country as a whole.""
+
+And, while people might think of Illinois as a blue state, it currently has a Republican governor and a Republican senator, albeit one who will be in a tough re-election fight in a presidential year.
+
+Also, it's only fairly recently, since 1992, that the state started voting reliably for Democrats in presidential years. From 1968 to 1988, Illinois voted consistently Republican. In fact, Illinois' record is more accurate, than partisan. Throughout the 20th century, Illinois voted for the winner in every presidential election, with the exception of two: Woodrow Wilson in 1916 and Jimmy Carter in 1976.
+
+If anything, Frey, says perhaps Illinois is a racial bellwether. In 2014, the country's under-age-5 population became majority-minority, and so, in years to come, Frey said the racial makeup of the rest of the country is likely going to look more similar to Illinois.
+
+A reality check on Iowa and New Hampshire?
+
+Iowa, the state that goes first in our current political system, according to the PSI, came in 16th place overall.
+
+That's not too bad, considering it could have been worse. New Hampshire, for example, was 49th, nearly dead last.
+
+To be fair, Iowa is representative of the country on most of our metrics, with the exception of race.
+
+A number of states East Coasters derisively refer to as ""flyover states"" — Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri — actually all fared quite well on the PSI, especially if race was excluded.
+
+So, in some ways, it seems the heartland is a fairly accurate portrait of average America, if it was more racially diverse. But, race is such an important factor that Frey thinks it outweighs Iowa's advantages. In the race category, Iowa was in the bottom 10, finishing 40th, with just a 3.4 percent black population and a 5.6 percent Hispanic population.
+
+New Hampshire, though, is even more of an outlier. The only state that fared worse overall was West Virginia.
+
+By every measure, New Hampshire is horribly unrepresentative of the country — people make too much money, they're graying, over-educated, overwhelmingly white and not nearly religious enough.
+
+The question, of course, is whether these two states should continue to serve as litmus tests for candidates.
+
+""It's for the parties to decide,"" Frey said, ""but I have to say as a demographer, the more stock you put into these two states, as we become more diverse as a country, the more we'll be out of touch with what the rest of the country's going to be voting like.""",REAL
+8287,Poll Finds Americans' Support For Police Highest In Nearly 50 Years," 
+In the past year, Americans have seen police officers ambushed and assassinated, and they have watched as the thin line protecting citizens from criminals has been reviled by groups such as Black Lives Matter.
+And now America is taking its stand.
+A new Gallup poll shows that respect for the police has hit its highest point in almost 50 years.
+ 
+Related Stories Video: Suspect Beats Female Officer Who Didn’t Use Weapon Out Of Fear Of Backlash Police Officer Issues A Moving Response To Kaepernick’s Protest NBA Anthem Singer Drops To Knee During Final Line To Protest Racial Inequality The poll, taken in early October, found that 76 percent of Americans have “a great deal” of respect for police and another 17 percent say they have “some” respect.
+“Obviously, this violent rhetoric we have seen from BLM has backfired ,” wrote Andrew Mark Miller on Young Conservatives.
+“People respect the cops more than ever and they clearly see what a difficult job they have,” he added.
+ 
+Miller said the Black Lives Matter movement denies its true purpose.
+“And don’t give me this nonsense about how BLM isn’t anti-police,” he wrote. “In fact, many BLM supporters have been out there saying we should eliminate the police force entirely .”
+Miller said the bottom line is clear.
+“This poll is a repudiation of the tactics the left has used to demonize law enforcement. No getting around it,” he wrote.
+ 
+Trending Stories Frustrated With Media Bias, Trump Campaign Takes Its Case Directly To Voters With Nightly Show On Facebook RNC Official Takes CNN Host To Task For Claiming There Is No Media Bias Independent Voters Push Trump To The Front In Florida And Ohio The level of Americans supporting the police that was reflected in the 2016 poll had not been reached since 1967, when urban riots and protest-driven long, hot summers were making cities dangerous and 77 percent of respondents said they gave police “a great deal” of respect. Gallup began surveying Americans about the police in 1965.
+The 2016 poll also shows a major change in attitudes from just a year earlier. The 2015 poll showed the highest level to date of Americans lacking confidence in their police officers, at 18 percent.
+“The increase in shootings of police coincided with high-profile incidents of law enforcement officials shooting and killing unarmed black men. Despite the flaring of racial tensions after these incidents, respect for local police has increased among both whites and nonwhites,” Gallup reported in analyzing its results.
+“The sharp increase over the past year in professed respect for local law enforcement comes as many police say they feel they are on the defensive — both politically and for their lives while they are on duty — amid heated national discussions on police brutality and shootings,” it added.
+Gallup said future events could change the level of support enjoyed by police.
+“It’s unclear whether the spike in respect for police will have staying power or if it reflects mostly a reaction to the retaliatory killings against police officers last summer,” it wrote.
+What do you think?",FAKE
+6929,FBI Director Comey Sent Letter To Staff All But Admitting He Botched The Email Announcement,"  
+Hey, we’ve all been there. You make a judgment call at work, it blows up in your face and you go home humiliated and stewing. Only in James Comey’s case, you’re the director of the FBI, and you may have just wrongfully influenced the presidential election with a single baffling mistake. “Whoops” doesn’t cover it. 
+Comey set off a firestorm of controversy with the release of an open letter to Congress, letting them know that the FBI would be “reopening” the case into Hillary Clinton’s emails, despite clearing her of any wrongdoing several months ago. Republicans handled the news with something approaching orgasmic ecstasy. Finally , they thought, Hillary Clinton is going down and Trump’s double digit polling deficit can be erased . 
+Trump himself seemed to believe this letter was the key to victory. Less than an hour after it was spread around the internet, Trump was boldly claiming it to be “bigger than Watergate”– a statement as ludicrous as it was premature. 
+Within two hours, the entire new story fell apart. The emails were not sent by Hillary Clinton. They were not stored on her private server. They appeared to contain no incriminating information. Despite the lack of any story, the media ran with it. Republican hacks like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan were breathlessly demanding Clinton lose her right to classified briefings. Trump’s campaign manager was taking a victory lap. Conservatives were saying this proved Clinton was a crook. 
+All of it was nonsense. And nobody seemed to realize how crazy this reaction was than Comey himself, who reportedly sent a second letter that day, this time to his staff, basically saying “I fucked up. I’m so sorry.” FBI Dir. Comey sent a second letter today – to FBI employees. He seems to have some doubts about what he did (via WashPost) pic.twitter.com/IagFJRZYyU 
+— West Wing Reports (@WestWingReport) October 29, 2016 
+Comey seemed to understand what many critics had been saying all day: This email announcement was misleading and pointless, and gave Republicans a ton of free ammunition in their disingenuous fight against Hillary Clinton. It’s unclear just how much it would affect the election, but the very fact that it could affect the election was a serious issue. The FBI, as a rule, is not supposed to use their department to sway voters. Comey, whether intentionally or not, was doing just that. 
+The fact that Comey had these misgivings and still sent his first letter raises serious questions about his judgment. As a lifelong Republican (albeit one who has distinguished himself as a man of strong integrity with respect on both sides of the aisle), one has to wonder if he would have been so flippant in publishing a letter that would wrongfully damage the campaign of a Republican candidate. 
+Ironically, it is the question raised around Comey which seem more pressing for the national interest than a few new emails found on a computer not used by Hillary Clinton. Let’s hope we get some answers. 
+Featured image via Win McNamee/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+1467,Super PACs Escalate Air War Ahead of Iowa Caucuses,"A new set of super PAC advertisements released Tuesday are intensifying the GOP primary battle ahead of the Feb. 1 Iowa caucus, while allies of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton are fighting back against recent Republican attacks.",REAL
+4888,Self-proclaimed “genius” reaches new highs in stupidity: Trump puts his incompetence on full display,"The Clinton campaign reacted with yet another ad featuring Trump’s own words this time disparaging veterans and their families. The anti-Trump Priorities USA SuperPAC went even further with a new spot that shows Trump saying, “I love war.” Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway responded by saying the bizarre comment was taken out of context but the full quote, which he gave last November at a wild Fort Dodge, Iowa, rally (the same one where he called Ben Carson a child molester), is even worse than what it sounds like in the ad:
+
+Trump has never been in the service, although he has said,”I always felt I was in the military” because of his education at a military-themed boarding school and he believes he has “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”
+
+That comment “I’m good at war” says everything about Trump as he demonstrated last night at the town hall forum that he is indeed unfit to be president of the United States. There were many aspects of his performance that had people gasping at the mere idea of this man in a position of real power, not the least of which was his comment that President Barack Obama compares unfavorably to Russian President Vladimir Putin who “has an 85 percent approval rating” and is “very much a leader” because he has “strong control over his country.”
+
+But it was around the question of ISIS and the Middle East where he really showed his true colors. He was upset that Hillary Clinton had earlier claimed that he had lied when he said he had been against the Iraq War and defended himself by pointing to an Esquire magazine article from 2004 — which doesn’t really help since the war began in the spring of 2003. The fact-checkers have declared his pants are on fire numerous times on this but he just keeps saying it.
+
+Last night he also made a passing reference to someone “asking him about Iraq” 14 years ago, and you may be surprised to learn that at that same crazy Iowa rally he told the crowd that a delegation from the White House came to him to ask his opinion and he advised not to go in because it would destabilize the region. To the best of my knowledge this claim has never been validated. It’s possible, of course, this was the Bush administration. But let’s just say that it’s as likely as Trump’s witnessing thousands of New Jersey Muslims cheering after 9/11.
+
+You’ll knock the hell out of one and the other one is going to come and take over the other. You don’t have to be a genius to figure this out even though I am a genius. And by the way, I’m more militaristic than anybody in this room. I’m going to make our military so strong, so powerful. Everyone seems to think that Trump has “pivoted” from his position that he could not reveal his plan to defeat ISIS to his announcement today that he would give the generals 30 days from the inauguration to come up with one. But that’s wrong. Trump’s secret plan is not so secret. At that same rally last fall, Trump spoke about it plainly: “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me. . . . I would bomb the shit out of ’em. . . . I’d blow up the pipes. I’d blow up the — I’d blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left. And you know what, you get Exxon to come in there and in two months — you ever see these guys how good they are? The great oil companies? They’ll rebuild that sucker brand-new. It’ll be beautiful. And I’d bring it, and I’d take the oil.” At the forum, he reiterated this belief that America should “take the oil” because he thinks this will make ISIS surrender and has taken to saying “to the victor goes the spoils” apparently unaware that this is a considered a war crime. He has said in the past it would require a permanent force to protect the oil but that it wouldn’t take much. Trump said that under Obama and Clinton’s leadership “the generals have been reduced to rubble” and “reduced to a point where it’s embarrassing for our country.” He sounded as if he planned to fire some of them, which isn’t actually something the president can do. As he is wont to do he brought up his favorite,  General George Patton, saying that he’s “spinning in his grave” over the state of affairs in the military. The good news is that he didn’t bring up General Black Jack Pershing and endorse mass executions with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood as he often does on the trail. He maintained that he still believes in his own plan for Iraq and says he won’t necessarily follow the generals’ advice. So, the GOP nominee for commander in chief tells people that he’s “good at war,” “has had a lot of wars of his own” and “loves war in a certain way” despite never having been in the military. He also believes he’s a “genius” who is “more militaristic” than anyone in the room. His plan to defeat ISIS is to blow up the Iraqi oil wells and have Exxon come in and rebuild them. And he believes that half the military leadership are fools and thinks he can just fire the ones he doesn’t like. But there’s nothing delusional about any of that so there’s no need to concern yourselves that the poll numbers are tightening.  If he happens to pull this off, what could go wrong?",REAL
+6684,Journalist facing 45 years in jail for filming the tar sands pipeline protest in North Dakota,"Meet the journalist facing 45 years in jail for filming the tar sands pipeline protest in North Dakota 
+Thursday, October 27, 2016 
+Are North Dakota authorities waging a war against the public’s right to know about the ongoing Standing Rock pipeline protests? We are joined by documentary filmmaker Deia Schlosberg, who was charged earlier this month with three felonies for filming an act of civil disobedience in which climate activists manually turned off the safety valves to stop the flow of tar sands oil through pipelines spanning the U.S. and Canada. 
+The actions took place in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and Washington state. Schlosberg is an award-winning filmmaker and was the producer of Josh Fox’s recent documentary, “How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change.” She was filming the action at a valve station owned by TransCanada in Walhalla, North Dakota. She was arrested along with the activists, and her footage was confiscated. Then she was charged with a Class A felony and two Class C felonies—which combined carry a 45-year maximum sentence. 
+For original video interview please click here . TRANSCRIPT 
+AMY GOODMAN: But we’re joined right now in Los Angeles by Democracy Now! video stream by Deia Schlosberg, the award-winning documentary filmmaker, producer, who was arrested on October 11th in a different area of North Dakota, while reporting on a climate change protest in Walhalla, North Dakota, charged with three felonies, facing 45 years in prison, if convicted. Also with us, Josh Fox. His article in The Nation, “The Arrest of Journalists and Filmmakers Covering the Dakota Pipeline is a Threat to Democracy—and the Planet.” His previous documentaries include Gasland, which first exposed the harms of the fracking industry, nominated for an Academy Award, also made Gasland 2, which aired on HBO. 
+We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Deia, describe what happened to you. 
+DEIA SCHLOSBERG: Well, on October 11th, I was working as a climate reporter, as I’ve done for years and years and years, as Josh and I were doing, and the rest of the How to Let Go of the World team, when we made the film. And I was documenting people taking a stand, people on the frontlines of the fight to lessen the impacts of climate change. So, there were—there were five activists across four states that had planned to turn the emergency shutoff valves on the five pipelines that bring all Canadian oil sands into the U.S. And I was documenting this occurrence at the North Dakota site, outside of Walhalla, as you said. I was—I was filming the action. I was on public land. I was on a public road and at no point trespassed, at no point, you know, broke in or destroyed any property. I had nothing to do with the planning of the event. I was there to document it. I think it’s essential for journalists to—journalists and filmmakers to go where the mainstream media is not. And there’s a major hole in the coverage of climate change and people that are already dealing with the consequences of climate change and people that are fighting climate change. So, I take that responsibility very seriously. 
+AMY GOODMAN: So when did the police come? 
+DEIA SCHLOSBERG: The police came after—well, the activist that was doing the action, Michael, had called the company ahead of time to say that he was—he was going to shut off the valve, so they could—to give them ample time to take any emergency precautions. And then he turned the valve. And meanwhile, the company notified the local police. So, after the valve was closed, they came in probably about 15 minutes. I had my camera set up on a tripod on the public road. And they told me I was arrested for being an accessory to a crime, at which point I was brought to the local jail . I figured it would—things would just have to clear up once they realized what was— 
+AMY GOODMAN: So, they charged you with three felonies? 
+DEIA SCHLOSBERG: —that I was just, you know, exercising my First Amendment— 
+AMY GOODMAN: What were the felonies? 
+DEIA SCHLOSBERG: Conspiracy—they were all conspiracy charges: conspiracy to theft of public—theft of property, conspiracy to theft of service and conspiracy of interfering with a public—a critical public infrastructure. 
+AMY GOODMAN: And you face 45 years in jail? What is your comment on this? 
+DEIA SCHLOSBERG: What is my what? Sorry, the connection is— 
+AMY GOODMAN: What do say about this? 
+DEIA SCHLOSBERG: It’s absolutely outrageous. Yeah, I mean, this is what I—this is what I do for my living. This is what I’ve done for years and years. There’s absolutely no grounds for these charges. 
+Read more at: DemocracyNow.org Share: Rate:",FAKE
+1511,Trump’s Campaign Is Damaging His Brand,"If Donald Trump is nothing else, he’s an American brand. The Trump name adorns luxury condominiums, hotels and golf courses around the world; it has sold a TV show, millions of books, a line of cologne and even, briefly, an airline.
+
+And that brand, according to new data published here in Politico Magazine for the first time, is taking a major hit in the wake of his presidential campaign.
+
+Trump has built his distinctive trademark over the course of decades in public life, turning his own wealth, glamorous lifestyle and personality into emblems of his multi-billion dollar company through endless self-promotion. Trump considers this reputation alone a hugely significant part of his business: Financial documents the candidate released earlier this year set the value of his company’s “deals, brand and branded developments” at $3 billion, which makes his name the single most significant item in his portfolio. Trump’s brand was also his first great advantage as a presidential candidate, giving him name recognition and the gloss of success that even a Bush might envy.
+
+But as Trump the candidate has ascended, hitting the top of the polls and staying there thanks to a series of controversial statements and a groundswell of Republican populist support, the opposite has happened to Trump the brand: Among the people Trump’s business depends on—the consumer making over $100,000 a year—the value of the Trump name is collapsing.
+
+A December survey of American consumer opinion, fielded by the BAV Consulting division of advertising and marketing giant Young & Rubicam (and the largest and longest running study of brands in the world), found that since Donald Trump’s run for president, the Trump brand has lost the confidence of the people who can afford to stay at one of his hotels, play at one of his country clubs or purchase a home in one of his developments. It is also rapidly losing its association with the gilded traits Trump has long promoted as the essence of his business.
+
+In categories such as “prestigious,” “upper class” and “glamorous” the Trump name has plummeted among high-income consumers. Within the same group, it is also losing its connection with the terms “leader,” “dynamic” and “innovative”—quite a blow for a man who criticizes others for being “low energy” and considers himself an industry trailblazer. The brand has been a survey subject for BAV Consulting’s regular surveys for over a decade and has never before experienced such a precipitous drop in reputation. It’s the kind of change that usually follows a big corporate scandal, like a product recall or financial misconduct. But in Trump’s case it’s a man’s personality that is in play.
+
+The billionaire Trump might brush off complaints about his politics; he might even shrug off short-term commercial losses. But this plunge in brand status would be seen as a crisis in the offices of any major consumer-oriented company. Public companies often claim losses in net worth when customers turn against them because of a public relations disaster; they call it a decline in “goodwill.” As a private corporation, the Trump Organization is not obligated to report any such a decline—or to report it accurately—but any CEO will tell you that a brand deterioration like this is likely to have a significant financial impact, affecting sales, borrowing and even efforts to attract high quality employees.
+
+The first visible signs of the commercial cost associated with Trump’s extreme politics came after his inflammatory comments about undocumented Mexican immigrants, which he made as he announced his candidacy last June. NBC quickly dumped him as host of Celebrity Apprentice, a gig that netted him millions of dollars per year. Univision, Macy’s, Serta and others began unwinding marketing relationships with him. More recently, real estate partners have talked of taking his name off developments, and a home furnishings retailer in the Middle East took Trump products off display. In Vancouver, 50,000 people have petitioned to prevent the brand name from decorating a skyscraper under construction.
+
+Less visible, but no less important, are hits Trump has taken among his target consumer base: the luxury, or “aspirational” market of those making over $100,000 a year. The wealthiest respondents in the BAV survey—those with incomes over $150,000—judge Trump the harshest of any income bracket. In this group, as measured by BAV’s consumer opinion index, Trump’s reputation for being “obliging” and “upper class” has declined by more than 50 percent since the outset of the campaign, followed by “leader” (with a 41 percent decline) and “prestigious” (down by 39 percent). The next lower income level—households making between $100,000 and $150,000—wasn’t much kinder, with a 56 percent decline for “obliging,” a 45 percent decline in “prestigious” and a 38 percent drop for “upper class.”
+
+Even the one notable upward spike in Trump traits—the wealthiest view the Trump brand as 65 percent more “traditional” than they did when the trait was measured before the campaign—points to commercial trouble. Although Trump’s political loyalists might cheer his standing as a traditional figure, this quality is not a good thing for a business seeking to sell glamour and luxury. In commercial terms, other products that are deemed “traditional” are the canned meat product Spam and Idaho potatoes.
+
+In interviews we conducted before the campaign, Trump’s children, who work in his companies, acknowledged that their father is the brand and that he will dominate its marketing for the rest of his days. “He became synonymous with success and aspiration,” noted daughter Ivanka. “That is still at the core of what the brand is today.”
+
+But the challenge of a brand future clouded by his father’s polarizing views was on Donald Trump. Jr.’s mind in 2014, long before his father declared his run for president. “If you’re asking, ‘Do I think that he knows he’s a polarizing guy?’ Yes. The answer is 100-percent,” Donald Jr. said. “He will be out there, and he will question these things in a way that you don’t see anyone doing today—or certainly not anyone that has a brand. … There could be potentially ramifications to his business for taking these stances.”
+
+How serious will these ramifications be? We might never know: As head of a privately held company, free of financial obligations to shareholders, Donald Trump has no reason to disclose the financial hit he takes due to his controversial campaign. Still, it’s worth noting that these kinds of blows can be massive: During the dot-com crash, firms that fell from grace took multi-billion dollar “goodwill” write-offs. AOL noted a $99 billion loss in goodwill. Worldcom’s was $45 billion.
+
+Donald Trump, as a 69-year-old whose fortune is counted in the billions, will very likely remain wealthy and comfortable—a success as he defines it—for the rest of his days. But those like his children who may have counted on the brand to sustain them further into the future cannot be so certain.
+
+Then again, they could move into the part of the consumer market where no real damage has been done. Perhaps a Trump brand of smokes, or maybe canned meat?",REAL
+3568,ISIS Extremist Who Beheaded Prisoners Is Identified As Man From London,"ISIS Extremist Who Beheaded Prisoners Is Identified As Man From London
+
+The man who has been recorded in videos threatening and killing several Western hostages in the name of the self-proclaimed Islamic State is Mohammed Emwazi. He is from London and is a British citizen of Kuwaiti descent.
+
+British security services have been aware of the identity of the militant many have dubbed ""Jihadi John,"" the BBC says, adding that ""they chose not to disclose his name earlier for operational reasons.""
+
+Emwazi's name was reported by The Washington Post early Thursday, citing interviews with his friends and associates. The newspaper says he is ""from a well-to-do family ... and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming.""
+
+We'll update this post as more details come in.
+
+Update at 8:35 a.m. ET: Confirmation Of Details
+
+Intelligence sources tell NPR that they can confirm the ISIS figure's name is Mohammed Emwazi and that he is from London, is college-educated and has been in Syria since 2012.
+
+Update at 7:35 a.m. ET: No Comment From Prime Minister
+
+Saying ""we do not confirm or deny matters relating to the intelligence services,"" a spokeswoman for British Prime Minister David Cameron is refusing to comment on the identity of ""Jihadi John,"" other than to say police and security services are working to bring the hostages' killers to justice.
+
+The BBC reports, ""Emwazi is believed to be an associate of a former UK control order suspect, who travelled to Somalia in 2006 and is allegedly linked to a facilitation and funding network for Somali militant group al-Shabab.""
+
+Emwazi has been a central figure in the grisly ISIS videos in which prisoners have been beheaded and threats have been delivered against the U.S. and other countries.
+
+Dressed all in black with only his eyes and hands exposed, the ISIS figure first attracted notice last August, when he addressed the camera in fluent English before hostage James Foley, a U.S. journalist, was beheaded.
+
+Shortly after Foley's death, British Ambassador Peter Westmacott said that ""we are close"" to identifying the central figure in the video.
+
+Since then, the man named today as Emwazi has appeared in more videos in which hostages were killed, including the Britons David Haines and Alan Henning as well as the Americans Steven Sotloff and Peter Kassig (who changed his first name to Abdul-Rahman during his captivity).
+
+The same man is also believed to be in more recent videos in which two Japanese hostages, Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa, were beheaded.",REAL
+5548,"Millennials ‘Search for Truth’ on Election but Distrust Media, Intelligence Firm Reports","Millennials ‘Search for Truth’ on Election but Distrust Media, Intelligence Firm Reports Posted on Oct 28, 2016 A crowd of millennial voters at a South Bronx rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders in March. ( Michael Vadone / CC 2.0 ) 
+Don’t believe the hype about millennial voters. This bloc of the Unites States population, ages 18 to 35 and whose numbers are estimated to be about 69.2 million, may have a reputation for not engaging with the political system —but that is not the case for this election, The Intelligence Group reports, based on a recent study. 
+“Leading up to the presidential election, millennials are taking advantage of their hacking mindset to create their own persuasion journey to get to the truth,” The Intelligence Group, a part of global marketing agency Deep Focus, which performs research for corporations and government organizations, states in a report that quotes numerous millennial voters. 
+This subset of the electorate will play an important role at the ballot box, and its members are doing their homework. 
+“The media is a joke,” said Joseph, 31, a moderate in the study. “I research things much more. I Google the topic, and then I sift through a bunch of media spin to try and see if it’s true or not.” 
+The group’s research, conducted through “a blended approach of social listening and qualitative insights generated via real-time social conversations,” found millennials fact-checking the presidential candidates’ assertions and engaging with their peers on social media sites and forums such as Reddit, Twitter and Facebook to “make an informed opinion and hold candidates accountable.” 
+During the first presidential debate, for example, The Intelligence Group reported that Americans posted 138,000 tweets to fact-check the candidates in real time. This eagerness to critically assess the candidates stems from a distrust of both media and the candidates themselves. 
+“I don’t believe there is such a thing as a truly objective source,” said Kelly, 25, a liberal. “It’s up to the individual to factor in the relative objectivity of a source when making their opinion.” 
+The millennial vote is an increasingly significant one. This year, data show that millennials already match the baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) as the largest voting-age group in America, according to the Pew Research Center. Census Bureau data show that roughly 1 in 6 voters in the past two presidential elections were younger than 30. 
+The presidential campaigns have taken note of these numbers, “firing on all cylinders” to target millennials, according to Kristin Lynch, communications coordinator for the Clinton campaign in Denver. Clinton’s team referred to social media and, specifically, Facebook Live, as crucial to reaching young voters. 
+“[Trump] is really facing an uphill battle when people are only hearing what the media is saying,” Rachel Keane, the Trump campaign’s Colorado millennial outreach co-chairwoman, told USA Today. 
+In the 2012 election, President Obama won over millennials by a landslide against rival Mitt Romney, garnering 60 percent of the youth vote. 
+“If millennials vote en masse, they have a chance to determine the election’s outcome ,” writes Courtney Crowder of the Des Moines Register. 
+The next big question is whether they will be motivated enough to actually vote.",FAKE
+10047,Assassination attempt at Reno Trump rally?,"Assassination attempt at Reno Trump rally? What other surprises lurk in the final hour? November 5, 2016 RENO, Nev. ( INTELLIHUB ) — An assassination attempt was potentially a narrow miss at a Trump rally Saturday night. Right Side Broadcasting/YouTube 
+The attempt, of some type, occurred at 9 p.m. and caused a commotion throughout the crowed, just before Republican Presidential Nominee Donald J. Trump was rushed off stage by Secret Service. 
+The suspect was removed and detained. 
+Watch what happened: WATCH: Donald Trump rushed off stage by Secret Service agents during event in Reno, Nevada. https://t.co/PXCTYaDaeJ pic.twitter.com/Zf8ORObAQt 
+— ABC News (@ABC) November 6, 2016 
+Watch the full rally here: 
+“Nobody is going to stop this movement. Nobody,” a man said who took the mic during the chaos. 
+“Trump, Trump, Trump […],” the crowed cheered. 
+“Nobody said it was going to be easy for us, but we will never be stopped,” Trump said as he retook the stage minutes later to a cheering crowd. 
+It was also reported that at least two people in the crowd ‘saw a gun.’ 
+#Trump2016",FAKE
+2885,Iran's Supreme Leader Slams Republican Letter On Nuke Deal,"DUBAI, March 12 (Reuters) - Iran's Supreme Leader hit out on Thursday at a letter by U.S. Republican senators threatening to undo any nuclear deal between Washington and Tehran, saying he was worried because the United States was known for ""backstabbing,"" Mehr news agency reported.
+
+Ayatollah Ali Khamenei added at a meeting with President Hassan Rouhani and senior clerics that whenever negotiators made progress, the Americans became ""harsher, tougher and coarser,"" Mehr reported.
+
+The letter signed by 47 Republican senators warned Iran that any nuclear deal made with U.S. President Barack Obama could last only as long as he remained in office, in an unusual intervention into U.S. foreign policy-making.
+
+Mehr quoted Khamenei as saying: ""Of course I am worried, because the other side is known for opacity, deceit and backstabbing.""
+
+""Every time we reach a stage where the end of the negotiations is in sight, the tone of the other side, specifically the Americans, becomes harsher, coarser and tougher. This is the nature of their tricks and deceptions.""
+
+The negotiations, which resume in Lausanne, Switzerland, next week, are at a critical juncture as the sides try to meet an end of March target for an interim deal, with a final deal in June.
+
+Khamenei added that U.S. accusations of Iranian involvement in terrorism were risible. Khamenei also criticized a speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this month that warned the United States it was negotiating a bad deal with Iran that could spark a ""nuclear nightmare.""",REAL
+4903,"Pence, after Trump, denounces Clinton calling supporters ‘deplorables,’ says disrespectful","Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence followed running-mate Donald Trump on Saturday in denounced Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton for calling their supporters “deplorables,” saying they are “Americans, and they deserve your respect.”
+
+Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, said at a New York fundraiser Friday night that half of Trump-Pence supporters could be put into a ""basket of deplorables.""
+
+“Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it,” Clinton said. “There are people like that and he has lifted them up.”
+
+Clinton attempted at the fundraiser to qualify her remarks by saying they were ""grossly general-istic"" and that the other 50 percent of Trump supporters are frustrated by hard times and merit sympathy.
+
+However, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, then Pence seized on her remarks throughout the day.
+
+“The men and women who support Donald Trump's campaign are hard-working Americans, farmers, coal miners, teachers, veterans, members of our law enforcement community, members of every class of this country,” Pence said at the annual gathering of conservatives in Washington, D.C., known as the Value Voters Summit.
+
+“They are not a basket of anything, they are Americans, and they deserve your respect. … No one with that low opinion of the American people should ever be elected president of the United States of America.”
+
+Earlier in the day Trump tweeted: “Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard-working people” tweeted Trump, after Clinton’s comments at a Friday night New York fundraiser. “I think it will cost her at the Polls!”
+
+Clinton was speaking at an LGBT fundraiser in New York City, where she encouraged supporters to ""stage an intervention"" if they have friends considering voting for Trump.
+
+""That may be one conversion therapy I'd endorse,"" said Clinton, referring to a type of counseling designed to urge gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender children to change their sexual orientation. She later clarified that she wants to end the practice.
+
+Singer Barbra Streisand, who performed at the fundraiser, altered the lyrics of the Stephen Sondheim song ""Send In The Clowns"" to mock Trump, referring to the real estate mogul as a ""sad, vulgar clown.""
+
+Trump spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement that Clinton had ""revealed her true contempt for everyday Americans"" and called the remarks an ""inexcusable mistake.""
+
+Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill defended the candidate in tweets of his own.
+
+""Obviously not everyone supporting Trump is part of the alt-right, but alt-right leaders are with Trump,"" he said. ""And their supporters appear to make up half his crowd when you observe the tone of his events.”
+
+The fundraiser capped a day in which Trump again attacked Clinton's credibility. He said Clinton was being ""protected"" during the Justice Department's investigation into her use of a private email server while secretary of state.
+
+""She could walk right into this arena right now and shoot somebody with 20,000 people watching, right smack in the middle of the heart, and she wouldn't be prosecuted,"" Trump said at a rally in Pensacola, Fla.
+
+Trump also faced criticism from within his own party for refusing to outline his plans for combating foreign policy challenges, including threats posed by ISIS. Trump said this week that he does indeed have a plan, but would convene military leaders in his first 30 days in office to craft another plan.
+
+Trump has also faced criticism for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin during a high-profile national security forum earlier in the week, and appearing on a Russian-backed television network Thursday evening.
+
+On Friday, Clinton said she was ""disappointed"" by Trump's decision to appear on RT America, saying that ""every day that goes by this just becomes more and more of a reality television show. It's not a serious presidential campaign.""
+
+With several prominent Republican national security officials already concerned about Trump's national security acumen, Clinton has tried to cast herself as the better potential commander in chief. She has aggressively promoted her growing list of military endorsements from both parties.
+
+On Friday, her campaign said the number of retired generals and admirals endorsing Clinton for president has grown to 110. Trump quickly countered by saying his list had ballooned to 120 former U.S. generals and admirals earlier in the week.
+
+Pence received his first intelligence briefing Friday. He declined to offer any specifics since the information was classified.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+237,"Clinton, back in the Benghazi hot seat, withstands Republicans’ grilling","Hillary Rodham Clinton easily parried barbed Republican questioning Thursday about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, emerging unscathed from a high-stakes congressional hearing with a smooth and sometimes poignant account of her role in the event that has loomed as among her largest political liabilities.
+
+Just over a year before the 2016 general election, the long-anticipated showdown was suffused with presidential politics — though neither Clinton nor members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi mentioned her position at the top of the Democratic field.
+
+Both she and her Republican questioners claimed the high ground, insisting that they were focused on learning what went wrong when militants overran two U.S. compounds in the restive Libyan city in September 2012, just months before Clinton left office as secretary of state.
+
+Democrats defended Clinton’s leadership and repeatedly accused Republicans of using the special investigative panel to hunt for damaging information about her.
+
+“I would imagine I’ve thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together,” Clinton said. “I have been racking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done.”
+
+Republicans sought to establish a link between Clinton’s ­decision-making — before and during the attacks — and the four deaths, but they clearly struggled to build a theory of the case that she was directly responsible or negligent.
+
+They also hurt their own cause at times. Several spent their 10-minute periods on peculiar lines of questioning: One pressed Clinton repeatedly about an e-mail exchange between two State Department staffers whom Clinton said she did not know. Much of the hearing was also consumed by bickering between Republicans and Democrats on the panel, leaving Clinton to sit by, sometimes shuffling papers or resting her chin on her hand.
+
+U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others were killed in a chaotic, hours-long assault that revealed serious gaps in security and communications but not, Clinton claimed, a failure of leadership or policy.
+
+“This was the fog of war,” Clinton said following an emotional recounting of harrowing events that included the failed attempt to rescue Stevens and the gut-wrenching hours that followed when the State Department could not account for his whereabouts.
+
+The hearing comes at a moment when Clinton is reestablishing herself as the clear front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, following several months in which her poll numbers had nose-dived. Her stumble came in part because of her handling of a controversy over her use of a private e-mail account while she was secretary of state — an unorthodox practice that was unearthed by the panel she appeared before on Thursday.
+
+In recent days, Clinton has recovered much of her advantage.
+
+She has built upon her strong performance at the first Democratic debate on Oct. 13. She also got a stroke of good fortune when Vice President Biden ended months of speculation with an announcement Wednesday that he would not seek the Democratic nomination.
+
+As was the case with the debate, the hearing setting was one that played to Clinton’s natural strengths. She kept her composure through the 11-hour session and appeared well prepared for the lines of attack by the Republican members of the committee. As the day wore on, with her command of the proceeding becoming more apparent, she even appeared bored at times.
+
+[How many questions were asked of Sidney Blumenthal]
+
+There was no replay of the famous, and politically damaging, moment from a January 2013 hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Then in her final days as secretary of state, Clinton shouted and waved her arms at a Republican senator and demanded, “What difference, at this point, does it make” whether the attacks were premeditated?
+
+This time, Clinton also had the benefits of missteps by Republicans — most notably remarks by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that the committee investigation had succeeded in damaging Clinton politically. Democrats seized upon that statement as proof that the investigation was motivated by partisanship rather than getting to the bottom of what had happened in Benghazi.
+
+Clinton has called the panel “basically an arm of the Republican National Committee,” but she did not confront her Republican questioners on that point Thursday. She mostly smiled in mute agreement when Democrats called the exercise a partisan fishing expedition or a waste of taxpayer money.
+
+At one point, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) suggested the Obama administration tried to whitewash the terrorist origins of the attacks because it undercut the political success that Clinton and others claimed in Libya. “I’m sorry that it doesn’t fit your narrative, Congressman,” Clinton responded. “I can only tell what the facts were.”
+
+Two of Clinton’s personal attorneys sat behind her during the hearing, underscoring the peril the Benghazi episode and the questions surrounding her e-mails pose for her. The FBI is investigating whether classified information was compromised through Clinton’s e-mail system, which operated outside the usual State Department procedures and controls.
+
+In her testimony, Clinton said she did not have a computer in her State Department office and did little of her daily work via e-mail.
+
+“I conducted it in meetings,” she said. “I read massive amounts of memos, a great deal of classified information. I made a lot of secure phone calls. I was in and out of the White House all the time. There were a lot of things that happened that I was aware of and that I was reacting to.”
+
+Republicans had wanted to interview Clinton in private, leading to months of negotiations over the terms of her appearance. Her attorneys refused, saying Republicans could selectively leak damaging material from a closed-door session.
+
+Clinton’s disciplined performance, command of facts and pure stamina may bear out her calculation that a public performance would work to her benefit, as well as remind her opponents why she is an imposing candidate.
+
+Conservative columnist Byron York wrote in the Washington Examiner that “a hearing billed as an epic, High Noon-style confrontation . . . instead turned out to be a somewhat interesting look at a few limited aspects of the Benghazi affair. In other words, no big deal. And that is very, very good news for Hillary Clinton.”
+
+The day began with the panel’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), defending the committee’s mission and motives. Much of his opening statement was spent rebutting claims of partisan bias.
+
+“The House of Representatives, including some Democrats, I hasten to add, asked this committee to write the final accounting of what happened in Benghazi,” Gowdy said. He said that despite seven previous inquiries, his panel was the first to interview many witnesses and the first to discover Clinton’s exclusive use of a private e-mail server for her government work.
+
+[Why. Was. Hillary. Clinton. Speaking. So. Slowly?]
+
+“Not a single member of this committee signed up to investigate you or your e-mail,” he assured Clinton. “We signed up to investigate and therefore honor the lives of four people that we sent into a dangerous country to represent us, and to do everything we can to prevent it from happening to others. Our committee has interviewed half a hundred witnesses. Not a single one of them has been named Clinton until today.”
+
+Republicans on the committee have repeatedly pressed Clinton about the special access she gave longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal, who sent reports about Libya to the private e-mail address that Clinton used for government business while she was secretary of state.
+
+Why, the panel members asked, could a Clinton loyalist get messages to her inbox while the American ambassador in Libya had to send his concerns about security through official channels.
+
+“Help us understand how Sidney Blumenthal had that kind of access to you, Madam Secretary, but the ambassador did not,” Gowdy said.
+
+Clinton said that was exactly the way the system should work. She said security issues were discussed and resolved by professionals whose work she would not second-guess. She used the question of adequate security to make an impassioned case that the legacy of Benghazi should not be a retrenchment of American engagement in dangerous places.
+
+Repeatedly, the Republicans were baited by Democrats into fights over whether the committee was a partisan tool, and whether any of them should be there at all. Just before the lunch break, Gowdy and several Democrats got into a loud argument about whether to release Blumenthal’s interview transcripts, while cameras showed Clinton shuffling papers.
+
+“I don’t know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of the deaths of four Americans,” Clinton said to Gowdy before the intra-committee bickering began.
+
+Democrats repeatedly charged that the majority Republicans were rehashing questions that had been answered in the many inquiries into the only death of a sitting ambassador since 1979.
+
+The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), claimed Republicans had focused on Clinton to the exclusion of other relevant Cabinet members, including the then-heads of the Defense Department and the CIA.
+
+It was under sympathetic Democratic questioning that Clinton grew pensive and emotional, particularly when recalling Stevens and how he died. She called Stevens a rising star whose deep knowledge of Libya made him her choice to be ambassador. She swore him in for that post.
+
+Clinton gave a detailed account of efforts to bring Stevens and State Department officer Sean Smith to a “safe room” inside the lightly defended diplomatic compound Stevens was visiting from his headquarters in the capital, Tripoli.
+
+“I wanted to point out that even when we try to get it right, which we do try, sometimes there are unintended consequences, and there is an example out of this tragedy,” Clinton said. “The attackers used diesel fuel to set the compound on fire. And the safe room was anything but safe.”
+
+The security situation in Benghazi was deteriorating rapidly over the summer of 2012, and Stevens requested additional security measures.
+
+Many of the security requests, she said, were fulfilled. “Others weren’t.”
+
+Mark Berman, Karoun Demirjian, David A. Fahrenthold, Elahe Izadi and Abby Phillip contributed to this report.",REAL
+1184,What's Marco Rubio's strategy against Donald Trump?,"Marco Rubio has been forced to speed up plans for an all-out assault on the billionaire businessman's character.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+A flood of mainstream Republican officials and donors have lined up behind Marco Rubio in the week since former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush suspended his campaign for president.
+
+And yet Rubio's team concedes that neither the influx of support, nor the conversion of many of Bush's wealthy donors, is enough to stop Donald Trump.
+
+Instead of riding the wave of new support alone, Rubio has been forced to speed up plans for an all-out assault on the billionaire businessman's character.
+
+Rubio had hoped to wait until the chaotic Republican nominating campaign had shrunk to a two-man race. But with a growing sense of urgency among GOP stalwarts to settle on a Trump alternative, the young Florida senator is trying to simultaneously slow Trump and cast himself the savior of the party's future.
+
+""I will never quit. I will never stop until we keep a con man from taking over the party of Reagan and the conservative movement,"" Rubio thundered at a rally with 2,000 people in Oklahoma City on Friday.
+
+Rubio, a 44-year-old first-term U.S. senator, is trying to project leadership in the party while also going after Trump using his own game, marked by mockery and uncanny aim for his opponent's vulnerabilities.
+
+But the hard-nosed strategy is necessary, says Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, Rubio's latest big endorsement.
+
+""Rubio looked around and thought, 'Well, I might not like it, but that's what the media is covering and that's what people are responding to.'""
+
+But Rubio is quickly getting a feel for what he began during Thursday's debate, launching a direct challenge to Trump's appeal to working class voters.
+
+In recent days, Rubio has dished about Trump's on-stage perspiration and alluded, jokingly, that Trump may have wet his pants. He's also taken to referring to the billionaire businessman as a ""con artist"" dozens of times a day while campaigning.
+
+""It's amazing to me. A guy with the worst spray tan in America is attacking me for putting on makeup,"" Rubio charged as he campaigned in Georgia on Saturday. ""Donald Trump likes to sue people. He should sue whoever did that to his face.""
+
+Over the weekend, Rubio and Cruz attacked Trump for refusing to c ondemn the endorsement from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.
+
+Rubio went further in a message to thousands of supporters in Leesburg, Virginia: ""We cannot be a party who refuses to condemn white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan,"" Rubio said. ""Not only is that wrong, it makes him unelectable. How are we going to grow the party if we nominate someone who doesn't repudiate the Ku Klux Klan?""
+
+But make no mistake: Rubio's new tack is a fight for survival.
+
+He trails Trump in virtually all of the 11 states holding nominating contests on March 1, known as Super Tuesday. The Florida senator has finished in no better than second place in the first four primary contests. Trump has won three out of four. And Texas Sen. Ted Cruz remains a top-tier contender, even after finishing in third place in the last three contests.
+
+Given Trump's momentum, Rubio's team says publicly the senator's best chance for the nomination might be a contested national convention in July. That could happen only if Rubio prevents Trump from accumulating the majority of delegates in the months-long primary season that extends through June.
+
+Some Florida-based donors, as well as top donors and fundraisers in Washington, D.C., Chicago and elsewhere were ready to join Rubio's team immediately after Bush left the race.
+
+""There are a number of us, now that Gov. Bush is out of the race, who were very impressed with his debate Thursday, and see him as the one to take down Trump,"" said Chicago investor Craig Duchossois, who shifted from Bush to Rubio. ""He showed he's not going to take any crap from him.""
+
+In the past two weeks, Rubio has also won the backing of four governors and 20 members of Congress, more than all of his Republican rivals combined.
+
+Rubio had hoped to forestall a one-on-one brawl with Trump until there were only two. Cruz, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson remain in the race, although none have the level of support from as many governors and members of Congress as Rubio.
+
+In a year of the outsider, however, it's unclear how much that will boost his momentum.
+
+And in the meantime, Rubio's assault on Trump's character continues.
+
+Audiences in Super Tuesday states Oklahoma, Georgia and Alabama ate up the tough talk as he whipped through Southern states.
+
+""It's about time he take his gloves off and start fighting,"" said Gary Baker from Okmulgee, Oklahoma. ""I think he should have started punching sooner.""
+
+Better late than never, said Greg Strimple, a Republican pollster and former adviser to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
+
+""The Rubio campaign needs to set-up a contrast on Trump, equate Trump to the culture of corruption Americans hate — where the rich get richer and middle class pays the price,"" Strimple said.
+
+Rubio says there's time, but none to waste.
+
+""If you sense a sense of urgency, it's not just about winning,"" Rubio said. ""It's about the idea that the party of Reagan and the conservative movement could fall into the hands of a con man, who's pulling the ultimate con job on the American people.""",REAL
+6254,Paris: Riot Police Flatten Invader Camp, ,FAKE
+8899,Connect Series Webinar Oct 2016 | Financial Markets,"(Before It's News)
+ We cover the most dominating themes in the markets and share pattern analysis and perspectives to empower members to make better investment decisions.",FAKE
+9562,What Keeps the F-35 Alive,"Posted on October 31, 2016 by DavidSwanson 
+Imagine if a local business in your town invented a brand new tool that was intended to have an almost magical effect thousands of miles away. However, where the tool was kept and used locally became an area unsafe for children. Children who got near this tool tended to have increased blood pressure and increased stress hormones, lower reading skills, poorer memories, impaired auditory and speech perception, and impaired academic performance. 
+Most of us would find this situation at least a little concerning, unless the new invention was designed to murder lots of people. Then it’d be just fine. 
+Now, imagine if this same new tool ruined neighborhoods because people couldn’t safely live near it. Imagine if the government had to compensate people but kick them out of living near the location of this tool. Again, I think, we might find that troubling if mass murder were not the mission. 
+Imagine also that this tool fairly frequently explodes, emitting highly toxic chemicals, particles, and fibers unsafe to breathe into the air for miles around. Normally, that’d be a problem. But if this tool is needed for killing lots of people, we’ll work with its flaws, won’t we? 
+Now, what if this new gadget was expected to cost at least $1,400,000,000,000 over 50 years? And what if that money had to be taken away from numerous other expenses more beneficial for the economy and the world? What if the $1.4 trillion was drained out of the economy causing a loss of jobs and a radical diminuition of resources for education, healthcare, housing, environmental protection, or humanitarian aid? Wouldn’t that be a worry in some cases, I mean in those cases where the ability to kill tons of human beings wasn’t at stake? 
+What if this product, even when working perfectly, was a leading destroyer of the earth’s natural environment? 
+What if this high-tech toy wasn’t even designed to do what was expected of it and wasn’t even able to do what it was designed for? 
+Amazingly, even those shortcomings do not matter as long as the intention is massive murder and destruction. Then, all is forgiven. 
+The tool I’m describing is called the F-35. At RootsAction.org you can find a new petition launched by locally-minded people acting globally in places where the F-35 is intended to be based. Also at that link you’ll find explanations of how the tool I’ve been decribing is the F-35. 
+The petition is directed to the United States Congress and the governments of Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Israel, Japan and South Korea from the world and from the people of Burlington, Vermont, and Fairbanks, Alaska, where the F-35 is to be based. This effort is being initiated by Vermont Stop the F35 Coalition, Save Our Skies Vermont, Western Maine Matters, Alaska Peace Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks Peace Club, North Star Chapter 146 Veterans For Peace, World Beyond War, RootsAction.org, Code Pink, and Ben Cohen. 
+The petition reads: 
+The F-35 is a weapon of offensive war, serving no defensive purpose. It is planned to cost the U.S. $1.4 trillion over 50 years. Because starvation on earth could be ended for $30 billion and the lack of clean drinking water for $11 billion per year, it is first and foremost through the wasting of resources that this airplane will kill. Military spending, contrary to popular misconception, also hurts the U.S. economy ( see here ) and other economies. The F-35 causes negative health impacts and cognitive impairment in children living near its bases. It renders housing near airports unsuitable for residential use. It has a high crash rate and horrible consequences to those living in the area of its crashes. Its emissions are a major environmental polluter. 
+Wars are endangering the United States and other participating nations rather than protecting them. Nonviolent tools of law, diplomacy, aid, crisis prevention, and verifiable nuclear disarmament should be substituted for continuing counterproductive wars. Therefore, we, the undersigned, call for the immediate cancellation of the F-35 program as a whole, and the immediate cancellation of plans to base any such dangerous and noisy jets near populated areas. We oppose replacing the F-35 with any other weapon or basing the F-35 in any other locations. We further demand redirection of the money for the F-35 back into taxpayers’ pockets, and into environmental and human needs in the U.S., other F-35 customer nations, and around the world, including to fight climate change, pay off student debt, rebuild crumbling infrastructure, and improve education, healthcare, and housing.",FAKE
+6199,AMERICAN EVIL,"Share This: By Joe Giambrone What if everything printed this year about Donald J. Trump was 100% true, yet Hillary Clinton still wound up being the greater evil? What then America? 
+If the American people are to purchase a product, then do they not have a right to know just how much lesser this “evil” actually weighs versus the name brand? 
+Like those seasonal Cadbury Cream Eggs that old familiar product has returned to the shelves: lesser evil, with more fat and toxins this year than ever. This repackaged, re-branded item is what many Americans claim to want every four years, the only thing they ever want or care about politically, and they attack those who refuse to purchase it. It’s rather like a Black Friday zombie frenzy descending on Walmart, but we are told by TV that this is “democracy.” It’s not. It’s oligarchy with bread and circuses. 
+The so-called “lesser evil” political philosophy is the only political philosophy these people seem to comprehend, but the core of the concept is overlooked. Their candidate of choice will admittedly commit evil acts. Do they not want to know what this alleged lesser evil entails? 
+Seems like self-deception is intrinsic to supporting this little house of cards. Perhaps if the phrase was amended to “evil but possibly lesser,” which is in fact more accurate, the public would spend a few seconds thinking about it when these Novembers inevitably roll around. 
+Is a nuclear holocaust “evil?” I suppose that’s the crux of the debate we face today. One of those big two evil candidates has repeatedly, and irrationally, tried to provoke hostilities against nuclear-armed Russia, as part of some unstated agenda: the real agenda that has been torching the Middle East for decades. Wars of western conquest, which turned millions into hamburger, didn’t just happen by themselves. Certain interests wanted to dismantle the oil-rich nations that considered themselves independent of Washington and the EU. The chaos of failed states was preferred to organized regimes that could form an independent bloc or fight back in any way.
+According to Hillary R. Clinton, we should all be frothing at the Russians, and at Vladimir Putin for some set of vague claims without the substance that evidence would provide. Hillary and the Democratic National Committee were caught bloody-handed stealing the 2016 Democratic Party primary election from Bernie Sanders. Fraud. The only response she has mustered is the single word “Putin.” Yeah, sure: Putin did it. Repeated so often the word has lost all meaning here in the states, but abroad these quite undiplomatic slights do not pass unnoticed. 
+T he Russians unveiled their next generation ICBM , “Satan 2,” capable of wiping out the central east coast of America, or all of France, or the UK, or most of California. You get the idea, but does Hillary Clinton ? 
+She insists on a “no-fly zone” in Syria, which the Russian military has already imposed against the invading US coalition , the one which has been arming and funding multiple armies of mass-murdering terrorists! 
+Clinton privately told Goldman Sachs : “ They’re getting more sophisticated thanks to Russian imports. To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians… So all of a sudden this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.” 
+In the name of protecting civilians HRC wants to kill a lot of civilians and attack Russian-supplied air defense systems, and Russian military personnel of course. The fraud that Hillary Clinton and the interests she represents care in any way about dead Syrian civilians is laughable on its face. US foreign policy has never, ever been based upon protecting the lives of foreign nobodies. To believe such a fairy tale would require complete, absolute historical ignorance. But then again we’re talking about the American public. 
+How “Evil” is Hillary Clinton already? A merican corporate media refuses to call US war crimes war crimes. One can be impeached for a blowjob, but not for killing Nazi-level numbers of foreigners. There is no death count too high for the US Congress not to condone, if not to encourage. US foreign policy has never, ever been based upon protecting the lives of foreign nobodies. To believe such a fairy tale would require complete, absolute historical ignorance. But then again we’re talking about the American public. 
+Hillary Rodham Clinton has already played an instrumental role in the mass murders of approximately two million people, give or take. The Third Reich didn’t bother with accurate tallies of its victims either. This figure shocks self-styled “liberal” Americans so thoroughly that they simply refuse to believe it. 
+Clinton, as Senator, not only voted for an illegal war on Iraq (command responsibility), but she told “weapons of mass destruction” lies , selling the fraud to Democrats (lying to Congress). Estimates of Iraqi casualties range from half a million to a million and a half. The carnage continues to this day, and Crimes Against the Peace attribute responsibility for all the evil that results from initiating a war of aggression . This is codified in the UN Charter, and that makes Hillary Clinton also an international war criminal, just like Bush, just like Cheney. The hypocrisy of those who condemned Bush and yet joyfully cast a vote for HRC is staggering (yet commonplace). 
+That was only one war. As Secretary of State Clinton took on even more responsibility for international crimes, notably the assault on Libya , another war of aggression. 
+As the Russians noted , there was never any permission to bomb ground targets and help Al Qaeda linked rebels take over the country. “We’re witnessing a large number of violations of the resolutions of the UN Security Council. Over the last few days, there have been reports of the NATO air force bombing civilian targets, including hospitals… This is an unacceptable situation; the United Nations Security Council did not authorize any such thing. Attempts to justify what’s happening by claiming that the coalition does not go beyond the mandate are insufficient.” 
+-Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov… 
+“Regime change” is a war crime , not an item on a menu for neocons to simply order up. Between 10 and 30,000 Libyans were massacred in the NATO-assisted destruction of Libya. Hillary Clinton displayed a gloating psychosis at the climax of the bloodletting. 
+Onto Syria, with a current corpse count of 470,000. What was Hillary Clinton’s role? Seymour Hersh’s reporting contrasts against the endless lies of politicians: 
+“ A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdogan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria… The annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi… ‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’” 
+Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, was deeply involved in this covert “regime change” plot, and the sequential wars resulting from it. To this day she insists on continuing the plot to overthrow Bashar Al Assad, the elected President of Syria. 
+During her husband’s administration another half-million Iraqi children were killed as a result of US imposed sanctions on medicine and water filtration components. That UN death toll figure was deemed “worth it” by Madeleine Allbright in one of the most shocking news clips of the modern age. This unindicted yet confessed mass murderer campaigns openly for Hillary Clinton . 
+There are other flash points where Hillary Clinton had a role, Haiti and Honduras for example. Scandals and atrocities have been reported, but this does not faze her supporters, nor most Americans who care nothing about the illegitimate actions of the US empire abroad. 
+So Donald Trump’s a pig, and the free world must play pretend that Hillary R. Clinton is not a proven and dangerous war criminal. Hollywood leads the charge and attacks dissenters. 
+How deluded is America this year and how evil? 
+Jill Stein of the Green Party is the peace candidate.",FAKE
+4309,Fiorina: Breakout debate performance has sparked 'uptick' in financial support,"Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said Sunday that her breakout performance during the last week’s debates has created a surge in support and that she can ascend to win the party nomination.
+
+“The truth is the race has just started,” Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, told “Fox News Sunday.” “It’s game on.”
+
+Fiorina failed to qualify for the prime-time Fox News Channel debate Thursday night for the top-10 ranked GOP candidates. So she competed with the seven others in a forum before the main event.
+
+Still, just the exposure was key to her campaign because as a first-time presidential candidate she lacked name recognition, Fiorina said.
+
+“It was a big night for me,” she told Fox. “Only 40 percent of Republicans had heard my name. … There’s been an uptick in financial support, in support generally.”
+
+Nevertheless, Fiorina, the only major female candidate in the 2016 Republican field, will have a tough time breaking into the top tier or winning the nomination, considering she has consistently ranked among the last in most major polls.
+
+And she is ranked 13th among 15 candidates with 1.3 percent of the vote, according to the most recent averaging of polls by the nonpartisan website RealClearPolitics.com
+
+Beyond the problem of name recognition, Fiorina will continue to have to defend her tenure at Hewlett-Packard where she laid off 30,000 employees and was eventually fired.
+
+On Sunday, Fiorina argued, as she has since the start of the campaign, that she kept the company alive in the post-9/11 and dotcom bubbles.
+
+“Sometimes, in tough times tough calls are necessary,” she said, adding she was fired in a “board room brawl.”
+
+Fiorina said she will continue to do what she has since the start of the race, attack the top candidates, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, and work hard on the campaign trail.
+
+She said Trump has ""no excuse"" for attacking Fox new anchor Megyn Kelly for her tough questions to him during the debate.
+
+""There’s no excuse for this,"" she said. ""It’s her job to ask tough questions.""
+
+Fiorina, whose platform includes cutting the size of government and economic growth through the support of small business, also said: ""I’m throwing every punch. ... I’m going to keep working hard, keep doing what I’ve been doing since day one -- keep talking to people and answering their questions.”",REAL
+3735,Waco biker gang shootout kills 9 outside Twin Peaks,"Waco, Texas (CNN) A memo has gone out to law enforcement in the wake of Sunday's shooting, warning officers that members of the Bandidos and Cossacks motorcycle gangs reportedly had been instructed to arm themselves and travel to north Texas.
+
+""Obviously it's something we're concerned about. We would encourage biker groups to stand down. There's been enough bloodshed. There's been enough death here,"" Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton told CNN's ""Anderson Cooper 360"" on Monday night.
+
+By the time the Sunday melee was over, at least nine people were dead, 18 were hospitalized and at least 170 were arrested and charged.
+
+The biker gang members who began beating, stabbing and shooting each other in a Texas Twin Peaks restaurant knew the police were outside; they just didn't care, Swanton said.
+
+For two months, police concerned with the bikers' presence at Twin Peaks, which hosted special events for its leather-clad clientele, had patrolled outside -- and not in plain clothes and unmarked cars, either.
+
+""We wanted our presence to be known,"" Swanton told reporters. ""They knew we were seconds away and going to respond. That mattered not to them.""
+
+The United Clubs of Waco billed Sunday's event as the Texas Region 1 Confederation of Clubs and Independents meeting. Before the restaurant and surrounding parking lots became a bloody battleground, the Waco Police Department had 18 officers on the scene, including an assistant chief and tactical officers, along with four officers with the Texas Department of Public Safety, Swanton said.
+
+An altercation in the bathroom seems to have sparked the violence. Shots were fired inside the eatery and a brawl spilled onto the patio area, before scores of men flooded the parking lot in broad daylight. Some bikers were beaten with brass knuckles, clubs and chains, while others were stabbed or shot, Swanton said.
+
+When police responded -- within 30 to 45 seconds because of their proximity -- the bikers turned their weapons on law enforcement, he said.
+
+""Our officers took fire and responded appropriately, returning fire,"" the sergeant said.
+
+As police rounded up suspects and paramedics tended to the injured, investigators found eight bodies -- three in the parking lot behind Twin Peaks, four near the front of the restaurant and one that had been dragged behind a nearby establishment, Swanton said. More than 100 weapons were confiscated as well, he said.
+
+Another victim died at a hospital, where doctors treated patients for gunshots, stab wounds, blunt-force trauma or some combination of the three.
+
+According to a law enforcement source, preliminary information indicates that four of the bikers killed were killed by police gunfire. The investigation continues and the ballistics will be analyzed to determine for certain who was responsible for each shooting.
+
+Swanton called it ""the most violent and gruesome scene that I have dealt with"" in three and a half decades of law enforcement.
+
+The scores of suspects, who hail from five different biker gangs, remained locked up in the McLennan County Jail on Monday facing charges of engaging in organized crime, Swanton said.
+
+Prosecutors and investigators could level other charges -- and capital murder charges are expected to be among them, given the body count -- but the organized crime charge is ""pretty serious,"" he said.
+
+""It doesn't get much more significant than that,"" he said.
+
+McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara said that bond was being set at $1 million for each of the 170 people in custody.
+
+Swanton would not release the names of the gangs involved. Photos from the scene showed bikers wearing the insignias of the Cossacks, Bandidos, Scimitars and Vaqueros, but it was not clear if the photographed gang members were involved in the fighting.
+
+As Swanton briefed reporters at the crime scene Monday afternoon, 24 hours after the brawl, he said tactical units remained on the scene to protect journalists and investigators. Police hoped to finish processing the scene by sundown, he said.
+
+The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission shut down the Twin Peaks location, known for ""bike nights"" and its risque dress code for servers, for the next week. It wasn't a punitive measure, Swanton said; rather, it was closed because there's ""enough of a reason to believe that more violence would occur there, had they been allowed to remain open for the next seven-day period,"" he said.
+
+Later Monday morning, the commission said it was suspending the restaurant's liquor license for those seven days while its agents investigate what happened. The investigation could yield anything from a fine to the permanent revocation of Twin Peaks' liquor license, commission spokesman Chris Porter said.
+
+There have been no previous complaints or actions taken against the eatery, he added.
+
+""We are in the people business and the safety of the employees and guests in our restaurants is priority one,"" the restaurant chain's statement read. ""Unfortunately the management team of the franchised restaurant in Waco chose to ignore the warnings and advice from both the police and our company, and did not uphold the high security standards we have in place to ensure everyone is safe at our restaurants.""
+
+It further said the corporate office would be ""revoking their franchise agreement immediately. Our sympathies continue to be with the families of those who died and are very thankful no employees, guests, police officers or bystanders were hurt or injured.​""
+
+The Waco restaurant's Facebook account, which had been a landing page for harsh criticism of the franchise, was deleted shortly thereafter.
+
+Swanton slammed Twin Peaks after the bloodshed Sunday, saying the franchise failed to help avoid trouble and ignored the police department's advice to try to keep biker gangs away from the restaurant.
+
+""Are we frustrated? Sure, because we feel like there may have been more that could have been done by a business to prevent this,"" Swanton said.
+
+He said Twin Peaks has a right to deny entry to known biker gangs.
+
+Before word came of the franchise being revoked, Jay Patel, operating partner at the Waco Twin Peaks, said his staff was cooperating with police.
+
+""We are horrified by the criminal, violent acts that occurred outside of our Waco restaurant today,"" Patel said Sunday night on Facebook. ""We share in the community's trauma.""
+
+The franchise released a statement Monday, saying it was working hard to learn the facts about the shooting.
+
+""It is important to clarify that, to the best of our knowledge, law enforcement officials did not ask either the Waco restaurant operator (with whom they spoke several times) or the Twin Peaks franchisor to cancel the patio reservation that was made on Sunday.
+
+""Based on the information to date, we also believe that the violence began outside in the area of the parking lot, and not inside our restaurant or on our patio, as has been widely reported,"" it read.
+
+Even after the chaos subsided, Waco police continued arresting people arriving at the scene with weapons.
+
+Swanton warned other biker gang members against coming to Waco to reignite the violence.
+
+""We have been getting reports throughout the day that bikers from out of state are headed this way,"" he told KTVT on Sunday. ""We would encourage them not to, because we have plenty of space in our county jail to put them there.""",REAL
+7644,"AT&T Buying Time Warner: If Approved, Assures Greater Scoundrel Media Consolidation Than Already","in: Corporate Takeover , Economy & Business , Science & Technology , Sleuth Journal , Special Interests Six corporate giants control most media and related content Americans consume. Comcast, News Corp., Disney, Viacom, CBS and Time Warner dominate US broadcast and cable television news, entertainment and sports, movie and TV production, theme parks, record labels, publishing, and for-profit online operations. On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported telecommunications giant AT&T and Time Warner agreeing to merge. Approval, if granted, would likely assure greater consolidation in both industries – benefitting corporate predators at the expense of the vast majority of consumers, giving them less choice than already, ensuring higher prices for poorer service. Hillary is a Wall Street, war profiteers, corporate predators tool, virtually certain to support this outrageous deal – likely to get FCC and Justice Department approval on her watch. Campaigning in Pennsylvania, Trump called the proposed deal another example of too few sources disseminating information to Americans, warning of “too much concentration of power,” manipulating people, telling them how to think. As president, if elected, he vowed to oppose it. He’s against jobs-killing TPP, NAFTA and similar deals. “Our jobs are fleeing the country,” he said. “They’re going to Mexico. They’re going to many other countries.” Hillary calls TPP the “gold standard in trade agreements,” sure to approve what Trump opposes. He calls friendly relations with Russia a good thing, praising Putin as “a leader…far more than our president has been,” saying “(i)f we have a (normal) relationship with Russia, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could work together on it and knock the hell out of ISIS.” Hillary’s rage for endless wars to eliminate all sovereign independent governments risks nuclear confrontation with Russia, China and Iran on her watch. Trump is no peacenik, no paragon of virtue, yet he’s on the right side of vital issues discussed above. Hillary should terrify everyone – on the wrong side of virtually everything mattering most, the most ruthlessly dangerous choice for president in US history. Submit your review",FAKE
+1243,Turnout is name of the game in Iowa caucuses,"The 2016 presidential contenders are begging their Iowa supporters to get to the caucuses Monday and Donald Trump, true to form, is in-your-face about it.
+
+""You're from Iowa,"" Trump told a Dubuque crowd Saturday. ""Are you afraid of snow?""
+
+A snowfall forecast to start Monday night appeared more likely to hinder the hopefuls in their rush out of Iowa than the voters who will be flocking to the caucuses in the first contest of the presidential campaign.
+
+Still, there was every reason for candidates to be urgent about turnout in tight races on both sides.
+
+Democrat Bernie Sanders called it a tossup with Hillary Clinton and said every caucus-goer counts.
+
+Republican Ted Cruz directed much of his final advertising against Marco Rubio as the senators' feud grows even more bitter in the final days.
+
+Texan Cruz, considered Trump's chief rival in Iowa, took to the airwaves to challenge the conservative credentials of Rubio, the Floridian who's running third in Iowa, according to the polls.
+
+One ad said of Rubio: ""Tax hikes. Amnesty. The Republican Obama.""
+
+""The desperation kicks in,"" Rubio said in response. ""From my experience, when people start attacking you it's because you're doing something right.""
+
+Iowa offers only a small contingent of the delegates who will determine the nominees, but the game of expectations counts for far more than the electoral math in the state. Campaigns worked aggressively to set those expectations in their favor (meaning, lower them) for Iowa, next-up New Hampshire and beyond.
+
+Rubio strategist Todd Harris said the Iowa goal is to end up behind the flamboyant Trump and the highly organized Cruz.
+
+""There's no question we are feeling some wind at our back,"" Harris told The Associated Press. But, he added, ""It's very hard to compete with the greatest show on earth and the greatest ground game in Iowa history.""
+
+In the last major preference poll before the caucuses, Trump had the support of 28 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers, with Cruz at 23 percent and Rubio at 15 percent. The Iowa Poll, published by The Des Moines Register and Bloomberg, also found Clinton with 45 percent support to Sanders' 42 percent in the Democratic race. The poll was taken Tuesday to Friday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
+
+""I don't have to win it,"" Trump told CBS' ""Face the Nation,"" before adding that he believes he has ""a good chance"" of victory.
+
+He said he was confident of taking the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 9, and many others down the road. ""One of the reasons that I'll win and, I think, none of the other guys will win is because I'm going to get states that they'll never get."" Trump cited Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, along with strong hopes for New York and Virginia.
+
+Cruz's campaign was challenged by Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate over a mailer sent to potential voters that seemed designed to look like an official notice warning recipients about ""low expected voter turnout in your area."" The mailer refers to a ""voting violation"" and grades the recipient's voting history and that of several neighbors, citing public records.
+
+Pate said Cruz's campaign ""misrepresents Iowa election law."" There's ""no such thing as an election violation related to frequency of voting,"" he said, and insinuating otherwise is ""not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa caucuses.""
+
+Cruz brushed off the fuss. ""I will apologize to nobody for using every tool we can to encourage Iowa voters to come out and vote,"" he said.",REAL
+8719,BREAKING: Trump Voters in Critical Swing State FURIOUS as Machines SWITCH Votes to HILLARY | Top Right News,"By Top Right News on November 8, 2016 in Uncategorized 
+by Brian Hayes | Top Right News 
+Pennsylvania has emerged as a key battleground state in the 2016 presidential election — the first time a Republican nominee has put the state “in play” since 1988. Hillary closed her campaign in the state, and has put in tens of millions in ad spending she never expected to need. 
+But on Election Day, dozens of reports of voting machine “irregularities” are coming in from across the Keystone State — every single one from Trump voters. 
+Black conservative Aedonis posted this video from his polling place in a Philly suburb, where his machine would not take his Trump vote : this is what I was talking about, they fixed it but it was on some nut shit at first. pic.twitter.com/GO5Y9FCnYN 
+— ædonis | hotep (@lordaedonis) November 8, 2016 
+And to add insult to injury, before “ calibrating ” the machine (why wasn’t it already calibrated before the vote??), Aedonis said the poll worker tried to get him to KEEP the vote for Hillary! 
+And in Clinton Township, PA –outside of Pittsburgh — the same thing was reported there! Multiple Trump voters saying their machines would not let them vote for him… 
+Top Right News contacted Rep. Metcalfe, and the county registrar to confirm: Not a single Hillary voter has lodged a similar complaint about vote-switching . 
+Isn’t it funny how “mis-calibration errors” always seem to benefit the Democrats? 
+Donald Trump’s campaign has provided a “hotline” to report suspected election shennanigans: (844) 332-2016, or website form here . UPDATE: Reddit reports YouTube is CENSORING searches for these videos!…PLEASE SHARE THIS post with everyone you can… ",FAKE
+1928,CPAC Conservatives Skeptical Of Another Bush,"Establishment Republicans like the former governor of Florida rarely do so at an event dominated by a young, libertarian wing of the party. Bush's task, on the other hand, is to pay his respects and avoid any costly errors, such as Mitt Romney’s “severely conservative” outing at the same conference in 2012. The format of the event -- a 20-minute question-and-answer session with Fox News host Sean Hannity -- plays to Bush's strengths, but also carries risk, as it will likely cover hostile territory.
+
+Bush's attendance also gives conservatives an opportunity to shape the debate in their favor, as well as a chance to protest moderate elements of the party that failed to sweep a Republican into the White House in the last two presidential elections.
+
+The main sticking point regarding another Bush presidential campaign, at least according to some conservatives at the conference, is his support for the Common Core academic standards. Bush has said he would remain committed to the standards if he runs for president, a politically fraught move given their unpopularity in the Republican Party. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Bush’s likely rivals in the 2016 race who once supported the standards, have since renounced them.
+
+Dorothy Marsh, a retired teacher of 40 years from Jacksonville, Florida, said her son shared a class with “little Jeb” in high school. Despite her familiarity with the man, Marsh took issue with his enthusiastic embrace of Common Core, which she described as overly restrictive.
+
+“Teachers need to have creativity in their classroom,” Marsh told The Huffington Post on Thursday. “The last few years, I felt like I got up and put on clothes that didn’t fit. I was wearing someone else’s clothes. This is not the way I reach children and I wasn’t being an effective teacher because I wasn’t comfortable in what I was doing.”
+
+Emmett McGroarty of the American Principles Project, a Republican group that advocates for immigration reform and opposes Common Core, said he was concerned the issue may cause long-term damage. He sketched out a worst-case scenario should the party ultimately nominate a candidate like Bush.
+
+“I think almost all the candidates on the Republican side will be against the Common Core. That could fracture the vote and you could end up with a pro-Common Core nominee,” McGroarty said. “In the general [election], that pro-Common Core nominee will run against likely Hillary Clinton, who has no Common Core baggage. And that is going to make the Republican candidate, I think, unelectable. Because the conservative voters will be disappointed, their turnout will be suppressed and low.”
+
+The absence of visible support for Bush was conspicuous throughout the sprawling Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center on Thursday, where backers of other GOP candidates flaunted T-shirts and banners, and handed out stickers. Some attendees said that they were willing to hear Bush out, but he wasn’t the first choice in their hearts or in their CPAC straw poll selections -- the results of which will be announced on Saturday.
+
+""He's too moderate, like his brother,” Bill Bergmeier said of Bush. “They both move too much towards the Democrat side."" An Iowa native, Bergmeier said he is looking forward to voting in his state's first-in-the-nation Republican caucus next year, but has no plans to vote for Bush. ""I like Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, and Sarah Palin,"" he said.
+
+Jeffrey Capella, a self-identified ""staunch neo-conservative,"" said he doesn't have ""any real hesitations"" about Bush's candidacy. Nonetheless, Bush was not Capella's first choice in the CPAC straw poll. ""I chose [Florida Sen.] Marco Rubio as my first pick,"" he said. ""But Jeb Bush was number two.""
+
+Other conference-goers voiced concerns about Bush's family name and the difficulties it could give the candidate in the general election. Bush recently declared himself “my own man” in an attempt to distance himself from his brother’s legacy of costly wars and economic catastrophe. But questions remain as to whether he can withstand direct attacks from his fellow Republicans once the campaign is truly underway.
+
+""I see a strong candidate, but I just wonder what his strategy is going to be,"" said Austin von Henner, a student at Southern Adventist University in Tennessee. Von Henner said he appreciated that Bush has ""a firm position"" on issues like education and immigration policy, but acknowledged they could ""use some fine-tuning"" before 2016. ""For a conservative mind, he is, all-in-all, a good candidate.""
+
+Still, there was a sense that, if push comes to shove, and Bush is the only option on the table, some conservatives could hold their nose and vote the party line like they did for Romney in 2012.",REAL
+9006,One Veteran’s War on Islamophobia,"One Veteran’s War on Islamophobia Posted on Nov 2, 2016 
+By Nate Terani / TomDispatch JMacPherson / (CC-BY-2.0) 
+I’m not an immigrant, but my grandparents are. More than 50 years ago, they arrived in New York City from Iran. I grew up mainly in central New Jersey, an American kid playing little league for the Raritan Red Sox and soccer for the Raritan Rovers. In 1985, I travelled with my family to our ancestral land. I was only eight, but old enough to understand that the Iranians had lost their liberty and freedom. I saw the abject despair of a people who, in a desperate attempt to bring about change, had ushered in nationalist tyrants led by Ayatollah Khomeini. 
+What I witnessed during that year in Iran changed the course of my life. In 1996, at age 19, wanting to help preserve the blessings of liberty and freedom we enjoy in America, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Now, with the rise of Donald Trump and his nationalist alt-right movement, I’ve come to feel that the values I sought to protect are in jeopardy. 
+In Iran, theocratic fundmentalists sowed division and hatred of outsiders—of Westerners, Christians, and other religious minorities. Here in America, the right wing seems to have stolen passages directly from their playbook as it spreads hatred of immigrants, particularly Muslim ones. This form of nationalistic bigotry—Islamophobia—threatens the heart of our nation. When I chose to serve in the military, I did so to protect what I viewed as our sacred foundational values of liberty, equality, and democracy. Now, 20 years later, I’ve joined forces with fellow veterans to again fight for those sacred values, this time right here at home. 
+“Death to America!” 
+  
+As a child, I sat in my class at the international school one sunny morning and heard in the distance the faint sounds of gunfire and rising chants of “Death to America!” That day would define the rest of my life. 
+It was Tehran, the capital of Iran, in 1985. I was attending a unique school for bilingual students who had been born in Western nations. It had become the last refuge in that city with any tolerance for Western teaching, but that also made it a target for military fundamentalists. As the gunfire drew closer, I heard boots pounding the marble tiles outside, marching into our building, and thundering down the corridor toward my classroom. As I heard voices chanting “Death to America!” I remember wondering if I would survive to see my parents again. 
+In a flash of green and black uniforms, those soldiers rushed into our classroom, grabbed us by our shirt collars, and yelled at us to get outside. We were then packed into the school’s courtyard where a soldier pointed his rifle at our group and commanded us to look up. Almost in unison, my classmates and I raised our eyes and saw the flags of our many nations being torn down and dangled from the balcony, then set ablaze and tossed, still burning, into the courtyard. As those flags floated to the ground in flames, the soldiers fired their guns in the air. Shouting, they ordered us—if we ever wanted to see our families again—to swear allegiance to the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini and trample on the remains of the burning symbols of our home countries. I scanned the smoke that was filling the courtyard for my friends and classmates and, horrified, watched them capitulate and begin to chant, “Death to America!” as they stomped on our sacred symbols. 
+I was so angry that, young as I was, I began to plead with them to come to their senses. No one paid the slightest attention to an eight year old and yet, for the first time in my life, I felt something like righteous indignation. I suspect that, born and raised in America, I was already imbued with such a sense of privilege that I just couldn’t fathom the immense danger I was in. Certainly, I was acting in ways no native Iranian would have found reasonable. 
+Across the smoke-filled courtyard, I saw a soldier coming at me and knew he meant to force me to submit. I spotted an American flag still burning, dropped to my knees, and grabbed the charred pieces from underneath a classmate’s feet. As the soldier closed in on me, I ducked and ran, still clutching my charred pieces of flag into a crowd of civilians who had gathered to witness the commotion. The events of that day would come to define all that I have ever stood for—or against. 
+“Camel Jockey,”“Ayatollah,” and “Gandhi” 
+My parents and I soon returned to the United States and I entered third grade. More than anything, I just wanted to be normal, to fit in and be accepted by my peers. Unfortunately, my first name, Nader (which I changed to Nate upon joining the Navy), and my swarthy Middle Eastern appearance, were little help on that score, eliciting regular jibes from my classmates. Even at that young age, they had already mastered a veritable thesaurus of ethnic defamation, including “camel jockey,”“sand-nigger,”“raghead,”“ayatollah,” and ironically, “Gandhi” (which I now take as a compliment). My classmates regularly sought to “other-ize” me in those years, as if I were a lesser American because of my faith and ethnicity. 
+Yet I remember that tingling in my chest when I first donned my Cub Scout uniform—all because of the American flag patch on its shoulder. Something felt so good about wearing it, a feeling I still had when I joined the military. It seems that the flag I tried to rescue in Tehran was stapled to my heart, or that’s how I felt anyway as I wore my country’s uniform. 
+When I took my oath of enlistment in the U.S. Navy, I gave my mom a camera and asked her to take some photos, but she was so overwhelmed with pride and joy that she cried throughout the ceremony and managed to snap only a few images of the carpet. She cried even harder when I was selected to serve as the first Muslim-American member of the U.S. Navy Presidential Ceremonial Honor Guard . On that day, I was proud, too, and all the taunts of those bullies of my childhood seemed finally silenced. 
+Being tormented because of my ethnicity and religion in those early years had another effect on me. It caused me to become unusually sensitive to the nature of other people. Somehow, I grasped that, if it weren’t for a fear of the unknown, there was an inherent goodness and frail humanity lurking in many of the kids who bullied and harassed me. Often, I discovered, those same bullies could be tremendously kind to their families, friends, or even strangers. I realized, then, that if, despite everything, I could lay myself bare and trust them enough to reach out in kindness, I might in turn gain their trust and they might then see me, too, and stop operating from such a place of fear and hate. 
+Through patience, humor, and understanding, I was able to offer myself as the embodiment of my people and somehow defang the “otherness” of so much that Americans found scary. To this day, I have friends from elementary school, middle school, high school, and the military who tell me that I am the only Muslim they have ever known and that, had they not met me, their perspective on Islam would have been wholly subject to the prevailing fear-based narrative that has poisoned this country since September 11, 2001. 
+In 1998, I became special assistant to the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy and then, in 1999, I was recruited to serve atthe Defense Intelligence Agency. In August 2000, I transferred to the Naval Reserve.",FAKE
+10386,Israeli Minister sparks Scandal after showing Satisfaction for Italy's Earthquakes,"
+Two earthquakes, which struck Italy this week, were “retribution” for the country’s support of the UNESCO resolution disregarding the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, Israeli Deputy Minister for Regional Cooperation Ayoob Kara said.
+“I’m sure that the earthquake happened because of the UNESCO decision,” Kara, a member of the ruling Likud Party, wrote in a memo, Ynetnews website reported.
+Ironically, the Israeli politician was on a state visit to the Vatican when the quakes hit central Italy on Wednesday, killing one and injuring 10 people.
+Earlier the same day, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), passed a resolution criticizing Israel for its handling of the holy site in Jerusalem – called Temple Mount by Jews, and Haram al-Sharif by Muslims.
+The document was adopted after heated debate over its wording, and particularly the Arabic names used in the document. Italy was among the nations voting in favor of the resolution.
+Israel blasted UNESCO and its Arab members for trying to undermine Jewish connections to the holy site.
+Kara arrived in the Vatican in a fruitless effort to avert the resolution, but still managed to have a small chat with the leader of the Catholic Church.
+According to Kara, Pope Francis “strongly disagreed” with the resolution.
+“He (the Pope) even said publicly that the holy land is connected to the Nation of Israel,” the deputy minister stressed.
+As for surviving the natural disaster, the Israeli politician said that “going through the earthquake was not the most comfortable of experiences, but we trusted that the Holy See would keep us safe.”
+Source 
+",FAKE
+642,Sanders signals the end is near,"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
+1442,Donald Trump could 'shoot somebody and not lose voters',"""I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters,"" Trump said at a campaign rally here.
+
+After the event, Trump declined to answer when asked by CNN to clarify his comments.
+
+The GOP front-runner has repeatedly pointed to the loyalty of his supporters, many of whom tell reporters and pollsters that almost nothing could make them change their mind about voting for Trump in the presidential race.
+
+Trump's comments come as the debate about gun violence in America has taken center stage in American political discourse amid several highly publicized mass shootings.",REAL
+660,Democratic primaries: Clinton claims nomination victory,"Hillary Clinton celebrated her status as the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination on Tuesday evening in Brooklyn – and then turned quickly from history to politics, attacking GOP rival Donald Trump as a bully who wanted to “take America backwards.”
+
+“To be great, we can’t be small,” Clinton told a cheering crowd in Brooklyn, previewing a general-election campaign in which she will attack Trump as vulgar, erratic and divisive. Clinton cast the election as a test of national identity: “This election is different. It really is about who we are as a nation…We are better than this. We won’t let this happen in America. And if you agree, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican or independent, I hope you will join us.”
+
+Clinton’s speech came on a night when she won primaries in New Jersey and New Mexico, and lost the caucuses in North Dakota to rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.). Races in two other states – South Dakota and Montana – remain too close to call, with Clinton narrowly in the lead in both. Polls in California, the biggest prize of the night, closed at 11 p.m. Eastern time.
+
+Clinton’s speech had been robbed of some of its drama, after the Associated Press declared Monday night that she had gathered enough delegates to win the nomination. But Clinton sought to re-create it, entering to a song with the refrain “I want to see you be brave,” and citing the work of early suffragettes in fighting for women’s right to vote. She noted that the room she was speaking in was a giant greenhouse.
+
+“It may be hard to see tonight, but we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now. But don’t worry, we’re not smashing this one,” Clinton said, in a reference to her concession speech from the 2008 election, when she said that the “glass ceiling” had about 18 million cracks in it, a reference to the votes she’d received in a losing primary campaign against then-Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.). “Thanks to you, we’ve reached a milestone. The first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major party’s nominee.”
+
+Clinton also used the speech to reach out to Sanders, who had threatened to push their primary contest all the way to the party’s convention in Philadelphia.
+
+“Now I know it never feels good to put your heart into a cause or a candidate, that you believe in, and to come up short. I know that feeling well,” Clinton said. “But as we look ahead, to the battle that awaits, let’s remember all that unites us.”
+
+She then recited a series of attacks on Trump, hoping that Sanders supporters – and Sanders himself – might see the Republican as an enemy they held in common with Clinton.
+
+Sanders himself has not indicated what he will do after Tuesday. He is reportedly going to speak late at night, after the results from California begin to come in.
+
+Sanders, a self-described “Democratic socialist” from Vermont, rocketed out of obscurity with an urgent call to fight income inequality and big money in politics. He gave Clinton an unexpectedly close race, but now trails her in votes, “pledged” delegates and un-pledged superdelegates. And, after Tuesday night, there will be no more states to fight over. Only the D.C. primary remains.
+
+Sanders’s showing in Tuesday’s races — especially in California, where the race could be close — may determine whether he tries to fight on to the party convention, seeking to “flip” super-delegates committed to Clinton.
+
+In a news conference at one of his golf clubs on Tuesday night, Trump attacked Clinton for her use of a private email server, and called her a symbol of a “corrupt system.”
+
+“There’s one thing we all have learn. We can’t fix the rigged system by relying on very – and I mean this so, so strongly – on the very people who rigged it. And they rigged it. We can’t solve our problems by relying on the politicians who created our problems,” Trump said. He promised a speech next week that would delve into the problems of the Clintons.
+
+Trump – reading, uncharacteristically, from a prepared text – made a pitch for voters supporting Sanders. “To all of those Bernie Sanders voters, who have been left out in the cold…we welcome you with open arms,” he said.
+
+At the same time, Trump seemed to speak to his fellow Republicans, trying to reassure them after an awful week in which the presumptive GOP nominee attacked a federal judge, saying he was biased against Trump in an ongoing fraud cause because the judge is “Mexican.” The judge is American, born in Indiana to parents who were Mexican immigrants. It seemed to be a simultaneous rejection by Trump of both the American melting pot, and public trust in the judicial branch.
+
+Trump did not mention the case, or the judge. But he told Republicans, “I will never, ever let you down.”
+
+As a sign of the Democratic Party’s effort to close ranks around Clinton, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced her support Tuesday just before polls opened in her home state, California.
+
+Speaking in an interview with George Stephanopolous on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Pelosi emphasized the need for her party to coalesce soon for the general election.
+
+“Bernie knows better than anyone what’s on the line in the election and that we at some point have to unify as we go forward,” he said. “He wants to influence the platform. I think that’s fine.”
+
+Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the one sitting senator who has endorsed Sanders, said in an interview Tuesday that it is important to allow the remaining six states and the District of Columbia to vote before declaring a presumptive Democratic nominee. But he added that just as Obama and Clinton saw “the lay of the land” in 2008 after all the primary voters cast their ballots, “we’ll soon be able to see the parts of the party work together to unite.”
+
+[Sanders’s supporters lash out as chances slip away]
+
+“I think we’ll be absolutely united in making sure the self-promoting huckster named Donald Trump never becomes president of the United States,” he said, adding that Clinton should learn from Sanders’s connection with voters. “If Secretary Clinton is the nominee, she will not win in November without a deep and profound and passionate understanding of the issues that have so moved the grass roots in America.”
+
+Clinton’s pivot to the race against Trump unofficially began last week with a withering speech on foreign policy in which she shredded the real estate mogul’s qualifications and temperament. Those attacks have continued this past weekend at appearances up and down California and have been received with unprecedented enthusiasm by her supporters.
+
+“Donald Trump is not qualified to be president of the United States of America, but we can’t just say that assume everybody understands it,” she said at a star-studded “She’s With Us” concert at the Los Angeles Greek Theatre on Monday night. “We have to make the case and organize and mobilize.”
+
+Clinton has faced an unexpectedly strong and increasingly contentious challenge from Sanders, and there is the possibility that the senator will keep battling her even now that she has effectively sewn up the nomination. Sanders has said it made no sense to declare the race over until the votes of the superdelegates are counted next month at the convention.
+
+After finishing breakfast with his family in San Francisco, the senator sounded upbeat about the remaining primaries.
+
+“I think we’ve got a shot,” he said outside The Butler & The Chef bistro as he greeted a throng of cheering supporters. “I’m feeling great.”
+
+Before the polls opened Tuesday, Sanders’s campaign manager sent an email to supporters acknowledging that the reported delegate count for Clinton could suppress voter turnout. But the message asked for help in phoning California voters so that Sanders could “defy the pundits once more” and “shock the establishment.”
+
+[How Bernie Sanders missed his chance to beat Hillary Clinton]
+
+“We know that this race is going to carry on until the delegates cast ballots at the convention in Philadelphia,” said campaign manager Jeff Weaver. “We should let the voters decide who they want the Democratic nominee to be rather than having the media decide for them. I am asking you to continue to stand with Bernie in pushing for the political revolution.”
+
+Sanders met with some voters in the Bay Area later Tuesday morning and then flew to the Los Angeles area, where he was to tape an interview with Lester Holt of “NBC Nightly News” in Burbank and then hold an election night rally in Santa Monica.
+
+Outside the coffee shop where Sanders ate, voters appeared split about what path Sanders should pursue. Kyle Sorrels, a 25-year-old engineer and self-described progressive, described Clinton “as unacceptable as Donald Trump to be the president” and said that he had informed his employer he would move to Berlin if either candidate won in November.
+
+“My hope is that Hillary gets indicted in the next few weeks and Bernie gets it,” he said. As he walked away he said to no one in particular, “Feel the Bern! Hillary for prison!”
+
+Bobby Schultz, 38, an independent voter and a software developer from San Bruno, Calif., who was sipping coffee with friends nearby, said he was “surprised” Sanders was still running.
+
+“I really like Bernie, but as this point the race is pretty much over,” he said.
+
+Tuesday marks the exact anniversary of the day eight years ago when Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination to then-Sen. Obama. The president could endorse Clinton as soon as this week, not waiting for the Democratic convention in July, according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
+
+Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Earnest said that out of respect for the ongoing voting, “I’m not going to declare a winner from here.” But he emphasized that Obama intends “to make his voice heard in coming together” behind the presumptive nominee and planned to play a role in brokering a rapprochment between the two candidates.
+
+He added that Obama’s endorsement could influence Republicans, not just Democrats, given his seven and-a-half years in the job. “The president is an important validator.”
+
+An Obama endorsement would be a significant boost to Clinton as she seeks to unify Democrats after the difficult primaries. It would send a strong message to Sanders and his supporters that they should coalesce around Clinton, something Sanders has indicated he is far from ready to do.
+
+“Obviously, I’m excited about having the president’s support, because I have said throughout this campaign I was honored to serve in the president’s Cabinet,” Clinton said.
+
+Phillip reported from Los Angeles. Juliet Eilperin and John Wagner in Washington and Robert Costa in San Francisco contributed to this report.",REAL
+480,First take: A great jobs report for investors,"The jobs report met expectations for once, and that's good news for stock and bond investors.
+
+The U.S. economy added 223,000 jobs in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists missed by just a whisker: The consensus from Action Economics was 225,000 new jobs. The unemployment rate, at 5.4%, would be the lowest since May 2008.
+
+For once, there wasn't much to hate about the jobs report. Stock investors liked the signs of a growing economy. For example, construction added 45,000 jobs, and those are good jobs that pay well.
+
+""That's a very good sign for things to come,"" says Joanie Courtney, senior vice president, market development at Monster.com.
+
+And the bond market, which is usually only happy when it rains, rallied on the report as well. The bellwether 10-year Treasury note yield fell to 2.19% in early trading.
+
+It wasn't all puppies and unicorns.The March report was revised down strongly, to 85,000 jobs from 126,000. Manufacturing added just 1,000 jobs, and the oil sector lost 3,000 jobs.
+
+Because all investment questions these days seem to revolve around when the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates, the April report didn't add much pressure to the Fed to nudge its key fed funds rate higher. You need strong wage increases to create a wage/price spiral, and the 0.1% increase in hourly wages wasn't strong.
+
+""I'm surprised we're not seeing more movement in wages,"" Courtney says. ""Usually in a recovery, you start to see more movement."" But the April report looks only at hourly wages, and not the wages of salaried workers.
+
+For investors, then, the April jobs report was the best of all possible worlds. It showed decent hiring, but nothing so exuberant that would push the Fed to tap the brakes.",REAL
+5164,Donald Trump's Super Pac backers worry candidate's errors are piling up,"Super Pacs backing Donald Trump are off to a slow and rather rocky start as they try to raise funds because the candidate’s rhetoric and policy pronouncements are still so incendiary and he has sent mixed signals about how much financial help he wants from outside groups.
+
+
+
+Trump’s campaign war chest is dwarfed by Hillary Clinton’s, who had $42.5m in the bank at the start of June compared with her Republican rival’s $1.3m, according to the Federal Election Commission. Trump has taunted big donors repeatedly, and bragged for months that his campaign was not going to rely on them or Super Pacs, before appearing to change his tune more recently.
+
+Several donors backing Trump told the Guardian that the candidate’s errors are piling up. “He’s got to learn not to put his foot in his mouth,” said Stan Hubbard, a billionaire broadcaster who has donated $100,000 to the pro-Trump Great America Pac. “He needs a clearer message without name-calling.” Hubbard also called Trump’s recent trip to Scotland – where he was criticized for hailing the plunge in the pound post-Brexit as good for his golf course there – a mistake. “He should have let his kids do it.”
+
+Likewise, potential Super Pac donors say Trump badly needs to curb his bombastic rhetoric and craft a better message. Michael Epstein, who raised big money for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and plans to vote for Trump but also “hold my nose and pray”, said that he might back a Super Pac if Trump has a strong GOP convention next month and really “turns it around”. But Epstein added: “I’m less and less hopeful. He can’t get out of his own way. He’s going to have to demonstrate more presidential behavior. They’re behind the eight ball and they’ve got to move fast.”
+
+Four key pro-Trump Super Pacs have been formally launched, but between them they have run only about $5m in ads. By contrast, the leading pro-Clinton Super Pac, Priorities USA Action, in mid-May began a massive television and digital ad blitz in key states reportedly slated to cost almost $130m.
+
+Signs of turmoil and slow growth among the Trump Super Pacs, which unlike campaigns can accept unlimited donations, are palpable.
+
+Texas mega-donor Doug Deason, who in tandem with his billionaire father Darwin Deason recently met with Trump, said that the candidate’s top fundraiser had signaled to them that a new Super Pac, Make America Number One, backed by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, was deemed the “official” one. In a twist, Make America Number One will seek big checks from GOP donors who are not ready to back Trump but want to stop Clinton, according to Bloomberg.
+
+Deason said that he and his father would probably write a check to a Super Pac but stressed that “we’re waiting to see what Sheldon Adelson does”, a reference to billionaire Adelson, who has pledged some $100m to help Trump – which Deason thinks is the amount needed for a Super Pac to really have an impact.
+
+Adelson has been considering setting up his own Super Pac and talking to key Republican operatives about cobbling one together to help Trump, fundraising sources told the Guardian.
+
+But the casino baron has been typically cautious and slow in opening his checkbook after at least two meetings with Trump since late May.
+
+Adelson is said to be talking to some other wealthy donors – including Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus and energy investor Toby Neugebauer – about teaming up on a Super Pac, say fundraising sources.
+
+One GOP operative with ties to Adelson told the Guardian that the casino mogul may put up his funds in installments, predicting that about half would come after Trump picks his running mate. The operative said Adelson has been pressing Trump to choose the casino owner’s longtime ally Newt Gingrich, the ex-House speaker, or another staunchly pro Israel figure who shares Adelson’s hawkish views on Israel. “Adelson is very succinct about his expectations,” said the operative.
+
+Meanwhile, the existing Super Pacs are trying mightily with mixed success to bring in big checks. The Great America Pac, which boasts veteran GOP operative Ed Rollins as a strategist, organized two events in June to woo big donors in Dallas and New York, where a luncheon at the 101 Club was hosted by Peter Kalikow, a wealthy real estate executive and Trump buddy.
+
+Eric Beach, the co-chair of Great America, said the Pac has raised $5m and has commitments for another $4m. The Pac has plans for a few more events to court big donors in Los Angeles and Oregon before the Republican national convention and by election day hopes to raise $150m, he said.
+
+In June, the Pac launched a three-week, $750,000 ad buy on Fox and cable channels to promote Trump. “Donors care about a path to victory,” Beach said, adding that he expects the Pac to focus on about 10 key states including Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
+
+Other pro-Trump Pacs are ramping up their fundraising and ad drives.
+
+Laurance Gay, the managing director of the Super Pac Rebuilding America Now and a former lobbyist and one-time partner of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, said it had raised $2m, most of which has paid for two TV ads.
+
+“Our Pac is gearing up to keep Hillary Clinton’s head under water through the elections,” Gay said.
+
+Rebuilding America Now expect to raise and spend close to $20m through the GOP convention next month and then hope to raise another $80m for the rest of the campaign season, Gay said.
+
+The Guardian has learned that Gay and Tom Barrack, a private equity executive and old friend of Trump’s who played a big role in getting the Super Pac launched and told CNN it had $32m in commitments, met with Adelson in June to woo him but it is unclear if they will get a check. Gay said that it was no secret that “we’re well behind in fundraising”.
+
+More broadly, veteran money man Fred Malek, who has been a top fundraiser for GOP governors, cautions that Trump’s policies and temperament pose obstacles for Super Pac fundraising Malek stresses that GOP donors and voters, “want to see a nominee who is more inclusive rather than divisive and recognizes that politics is a game of addition and not a game of subtraction.”",REAL
+5904,Did you know that cinnamon can boost intelligence?,"Did you know that cinnamon can boost intelligence? 
+Saturday, October 29, 2016 by: Amy Goodrich Tags: cinnamon , intelligence , Parkinsons disease (NaturalNews) Cinnamon is one of the world's most consumed spices. For thousands of years, it has been prized for its medicinal properties and sweet, warming taste. Aside from sprinkling cinnamon on top of your lattes or adding magic to grandma's apple pie, researchers have found that consuming this tasty household spice also might enhance learning skills.Scientists at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found that increased ingestion of cinnamon significantly improved the memory of ""poor learning"" mice. Recently, their findings were published in the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology in an article entitled ""Cinnamon Converts Poor Learning Mice to Good Learners: Implications for Memory Improvement.""The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Alzheimer's Association. How cinnamon affects the brain For the study, lead researcher Kalipada Pahan, a neurology professor at Rush University Medical Center, and his team zoomed in on two key proteins, GABRA5 and CREB, located in the hippocampus region of the brain. The hippocampus is a small part of the brain that generates, organizes, and stores memory. Previous research has shown that lower levels of CREB and higher levels of GABRA5 occur in the brain of poor learners.To see if ground cinnamon could improve the memory of slow learners, the researchers took a group of mice and placed them in a maze with 20 holes. The experiment was focused on watching the mice learn how to locate their target hole.When they tested the mice again after one month of cinnamon feeding, the researchers found that the mice determined to be poor learners had significantly improved their memory and learning skills. They could find their target hole twice as fast.Pahan and his team explained that when cinnamon is ingested the body converts it into sodium benzoate, a chemical compound used to treat brain damage. Furthermore, they discovered that when benzoate entered the mice's brains, it increased CREB, decreased GABRA5, and stimulated hippocampal neurons, which led to improved memory and learning skills.""We have successfully used cinnamon to reverse biochemical, cellular and anatomical changes that occur in the brains of mice with poor learning,"" Pahan said.However, no significant improvements were seen in the mice that were considered good learners. But Pahan added that if these results could be replicated in slow learning students, cinnamon could become one of the safest and easiest approaches to convert weaker students to good learners. Cinnamon may halt the progression of Parkinson's disease Pahan and his colleagues previously found that cinnamon had a positive effect on the brains of mice with Parkinson's disease. When cinnamon transforms into sodium benzoate, it works to protect the neurons, normalize brain cells, and improve communication within the brain, which slows down the progression of the disease.Given their promising results, Pahan and his team - supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health – plan on moving forward with testing in human patients with Parkinson's disease.""This could potentially be one of the safest approaches to halt disease progression in Parkinson's patients,"" Pahan said. ""It would be a remarkable advance in the treatment of this devastating neurodegenerative disease,"" he added.Before starting to add cinnamon to all your dishes, know that not all cinnamon is created equal. Pahan explained that there are two major types of cinnamon available in the United States - Chinese or cassia cinnamon and Ceylon cinnamon. While both metabolize into sodium benzoate, Ceylon cinnamon is much better than Chinese cinnamon. Chinese cinnamon contains coumarin, a molecule that can damage the liver . Sources:",FAKE
+10342,Assange Points Out Hillary’s Emails Confirm Oligarchic Control,"Assange Points Out Hillary’s Emails Confirm Oligarchic Control
+https://www.rt.com/news/365404-assange-pilger-clinton-fbi/ 
+https://www.rt.com/news/365405-assange-pilger-full-transcript/ 
+The post Assange Points Out Hillary’s Emails Confirm Oligarchic Control appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+629,Trump’s tragic victory lap,"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
+8743,Astronomers Think They Have Just Discovered Messages Sent From Aliens,"Anomalous signals from deep space often evoke a quick pulse of gossip and speculation about aliens that dies off soon thereafter, when scientists are able to explain it. Usually, the explanation involves a natural cosmic process — an asteroid, space detritus, or frequencies from an exploded star. 
+Via AntiMedia 
+
+Sometimes, however, the signals are too mysterious to explain. There’s a reason why you may have seen a sustained social media buzz regarding aliens this past week. A few days ago, two scientists from Laval University in Quebec released a paper arguing they may have just received our first communication from extraterrestrials.
+Scroll Down For Video Below! First, a bit of context. This has been an exciting decade for those of us who stargaze in awe, wondering how many sentient beings live in this incomprehensibly enormous universe of ours. First, the search for exoplanets accelerated dramatically, aided by the Keplar telescope, which has identified over 1,000 planets outside of our solar system.
+While scientists have long known that our Milky Way galaxy alone probably contains several hundred billion planets, the ability to study them had eluded us until fairly recently (this ability will be exponentially augmented when the James Webb telescope allows us to analyze exoplanets’ atmospheres and search for traces of industrial gasses). Additionally, the discovery of Earth-like exoplanets — some of which are conceivably close enough to visit in a few decades — has tantalizing ramifications for our near future human race.
+Earlier this year, scientists announced the incredible observation of a series of inexplicable brightness frequencies from the star KIC 8462852, which led many to speculate the signals could have been originating from a Dyson sphere, a theoretical megastructure by which an advanced alien race (a Kardschez type 2 civilization) could harness the power of its sun. The newest discovery from this star has made it even more unlikely that the signals are from natural causes.
+The newest strange signals hail from a gaggle of some 234 stars identified by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which analyzed the spectra of 2.5 million stars. E.F. Borra and E. Trottier, the two astronomers who discovered the anomalies, discussed them in their paper, which was originally titled “Signals probably from Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”
+“We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis,” they wrote.
+“The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis.” Of course, it is far from certain that these are actual alien messages. In an interview with none other than Snopes.com, Borra claimed he never actually used the word ‘probably’ and that further confirmation was needed.
+The director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, Andrew Siemion, issued an admonishing response: “You can’t make such definitive statements about detections unless you’ve exhausted every possible means of follow-up.”
+So why is everyone so excited? The discovery appears to match a prediction Borra made in 2012 when he claimed aliens could very well use intermittent bursts of laser as a means of communication. For his part, Siemion plans to use his Breakthrough Listen Initiative to more closely assess several stars from the 234 sample. Meanwhile, Borra andTrottier, Borra’s graduate student, will continue observing the mysterious signals.
+It’s an exciting decade for space research. With plans for a mission to Mars in the hopper, as well as an exploratory probe that will be sent to the moon Europa, we may be witnessing the rebirth of the Space Race. What better incentive could there be to venture further into space than the call of an alien species? Let’s hope that by the time we meet them, our own species will have transcended its addiction to war and unsustainable resource allocation.
+",FAKE
+7969,"When Dad’s Kind Birthday Gift For Ex-Wife Has His Friends Puzzled, He Explains Who It’s Really For","Share on Twitter 
+On October 21, 2016, father of two Billy Flynn woke up early. He bought his ex-wife a bouquet of flowers, a card, and a gift, and he helped their kids make their mom breakfast for her birthday. 
+Flynn was questioned about why he doing something nice for his ex-wife. This, he says on Facebook, annoys him. 
+Warning: Graphic Language Loading Facebook Post... 
+He writes, in part: 
+“[I'm going to] break it down for you all. I'm raising two little men. The example I set for how I treat their mom is going to significantly shape how they see and treat women, and affect their perception of relationships.” 
+Now don't get Flynn wrong, it hasn't always been this easy. In fact, he tells Independent Journal Review that it took him and his ex-wife a while to create a mutually respectful relationship. 
+But as Flynn points out, when a divorce involves children, the well-being of those children is much more important than how the adults feel about each other. 
+The proud father credits their two boys with inspiring them to work hard on their new relationship: 
+""It definitely wasn't easy up front. I'd say it took us a good year to get it right. 
+Divorce is hard and I think we all do and say some things that really aren't our best selves. But we always put the kids first, and honestly, I think that focus helped us repair our relationship into one of mutual respect over time, and our kids win as a result."" 
+Flynn tells Independent Journal Review that he believes it is “extremely important” for parents to show care and respect for one another, especially when they are around their kids. Loading Facebook Post... 
+He explains: 
+""I'm not advocating that everyone can or should do what we do for each other to model for the kids. But I believe it is extremely important for parents to show each other respect and care in front of the kids. If your ex doesn't have a new [significant other], you got to make sure those kids have Mother's and Father's Day cards, birthday gifts, etc. 
+Kids want to care for their parents by nature, but they cant do it alone. It's our job to facilitate that. So even if your ex is a terrible person in your eyes, you need to set it aside and realize your kids love this person. Seeing you mistreat someone they love is traumatic, whether you want to own it or not. 
+So focus on the kids, make a pact, and I think you'll be surprised to find that your mutual focus on the kids will actually benefit your post-divorce relationship because it takes the spotlight off your individual hurts and anger and resentment."" 
+As Flynn says on Facebook, if others in a similar situations aren't modeling “good relationship behavior,” then he suggests they wise up and be an example for their children. 
+Some may say it's impossible, but Flynn couldn't disagree more. He tells Independent Journal Review that while establishing a mutual understanding with his ex-wife was hard, it was possible. And he knows that if he did it, you can do it too. 
+By being able to rise above all the drama, co-parenting will turn into “raising good men and strong women,” which as Flynn says, is something we need now more than ever. ",FAKE
+4575,"Trump protests intensify, as doubts swirl about spontaneity","With tens of thousands of people taking to the streets to protest Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, questions are swirling about whether the anger is as organic as advertised.
+
+From coast to coast, demonstrators are burning flags and effigies of the president-elect while declaring that they refuse to accept Trump’s victory. But observers online are claiming that, in some cases, protesters were bused to the scenes - a telltale sign of coordination.
+
+“Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem,” one local in the Texas capitol tweeted Wednesday, along with photos offered as evidence.
+
+Others claimed to have found ads posted on CraigsList in which a Seattle-based non-profit was soliciting “Full-Time Activists.”
+
+“We are looking for motivated individuals who are seeking Full-Time, Part-Time, and Permanent positions,” reads a line from the ad from Washington CAN! posted on Wednesday.
+
+Rumors have also been circulating that the new batch of anti-Trump protesters has been bankrolled by individuals like billionaire liberal activist George Soros and groups like Moveon.org.
+
+“WTF, @georgesoros busing in & paying #protestors to destroy cities is domestic #terrorism. #fakeProtests #BlueLivesMatter have tough days,” read one tweet in response to the viral picture of buses in Austin.
+
+Another theory floated on social media is that many of the signs that were distributed at rallies across the country appeared to be exactly the same, indicating they were printed and distributed by an organized group.
+
+Wednesday’s protests occurred in nearly every major city, and more are expected to come in the days leading up to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
+
+Some of the most troubling dissent was in the city of New
+
+ Orleans where protesters wound up defacing the Lee Memorial, spray painting “Die Whites Die” and “F--- Trump” and “F--- White People.”
+
+Other messages scrawled on the memorial included ""F--- Pence"" and ""We are ungovernable"" next to a symbol of the letter ""A"" in a circle -- protester shorthand for anarchy.
+
+In Chicago, several thousand people marched through the Loop. They gathered outside Trump Tower, chanting “Not my president!” One resident, Michael Burke, told The Associated Press that the president-elect will divide the nation and stir up a deep-seated hatred.
+
+Hundreds of protesters gathered near Philadelphia's City Hall despite chilly, wet weather. Participants — who included both supporters of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who lost to Clinton in the primary — expressed anger at both Republicans and Democrats over the election's outcome.
+
+In Boston, thousands of anti-Trump protesters streamed through downtown, chanting ""Trump's a racist,"" and carrying signs that said ""Impeach Trump"" and ""Abolish Electoral College."" Clinton appeared to be on pace to win the popular vote, despite losing the electoral count that decides the presidential race.
+
+In the Midwest, protesters gathered in Minneapolis, Omaha, Nebraska and Kansas City. Mo. The Des Moines Register also reported that Iowa’s capital city saw some people protest as well, though it was kept to small numbers.
+
+On the West Coast, some of the protests became unruly with fires being started. Thousands of protesters burned a giant papier mache Trump head in Los Angeles and started fires in Oakland intersections.
+
+Los Angeles demonstrators also beat a Trump piñata and sprayed the Los Angeles Times building and news vans with anti-Trump profanity. One protester outside LA City Hall read a sign that simply said ""this is very bad.""
+
+Late in the evening Wednesday, several hundred people blocked one of the city's busiest freeways, U.S. 101 between downtown and Hollywood.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this story.
+
+Perry Chiaramonte is a reporter for FoxNews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @perrych",REAL
+557,The big problem Obama's free community college plan ignores,"When President Obama called for two years of free community college, he also argued that nearly everyone should attend — that education should extend not to the 12th grade but to the 14th. The goal, he said, is to make ""two years of college … as free and universal in America as high school is today.""
+
+Some critics scolded Obama for emphasizing the importance of college over other paths. The plan ""bows to elites,"" wrote Megan McArdle: ""Education is a very good thing, but it is not the only good thing. An indiscriminate focus on pushing more people into the system is no cure for society's ills.""
+
+But supporters and opponents of the plan both missed something big. Free community college wouldn't create an era of universal college enrollment because that era is already here. So many high school graduates go on to college already that it's unclear how much free tuition would boost attendance rates.
+
+The real question is whether free community college can get kids through the door and signed up for their first higher-ed class. The big unknown is whether it can help more students graduate.
+
+Going to college in the United States is already a nearly universal experience. By the time the high school class of 2004 turned 26, eight years after high school graduation, 86 percent had enrolled in college, according to an analysis of a nationally representative study from the William T. Grant Foundation.
+
+That's not quite universal — it doesn't count high school dropouts. Still, the 86 percent of students who go to college includes a sizable proportion of high school graduates who didn't initially think they would. (The Education Department said 67 percent of the class of 2004 enrolled in college right away.)
+
+The problem isn't college enrollment — it's college completion. Only about 59 percent of students who started college full-time at a four-year college in 2006 graduated by 2012.
+
+For students who go to community college, graduation rates are even lower. Nearly half of students — 43 percent — who started community college in fall 2008 dropped out, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks graduation statistics. Another 18 percent were still enrolled six years later for a degree that should take two years. Fewer than half had earned any kind of degree at all.
+
+Poor preparation from K-12 schools is certainly part of the problem. But it wasn't the only factor. In the high school class of 2004, 44 percent of students with high test scores who started at a community college still didn't earn a certificate or degree within eight years.
+
+Obama knows the US has a college graduation problem. In 2009, in a televised address to Congress soon after his inauguration, he vowed to fix it. By 2020, he said, the US should be the best-educated country in the world. At the time, the US ranked 12th in the percentage of young adults with a college degree.
+
+After six years, hundreds of millions of dollars spent by private foundations, and new policies from states and colleges meant to encourage graduation, the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree has increased — but only by about 3 percentage points, to 44 percent. Other nations have continued to improve more quickly. In South Korea, two-thirds of young adults have a college credential.
+
+High school graduation rates show that progress can be slow and incremental.
+
+In 1940, when starting high school was virtually universal nationwide, graduation rates were only around 50 percent. It took more than 30 years, until the late 1970s, for high school graduation to become anything close to the norm — and graduation rates later fell, only recently hitting an all-time high of 80 percent.
+
+If high school is the example, a significant increase in college graduation rates could be decades, not just years, out on the horizon. But other countries have increased their graduation rates more quickly — Norway, Poland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom among them.
+
+But the near-universality of college attendance for high school graduates suggests getting still more students into college won't be enough. Free tuition alone won't solve the problem. Still, there are two ways Obama's plan could help.
+
+First, the college dropout problem centers almost entirely on students from families in the middle class and below. In the wealthiest quartile of families, students who enter college are virtually guaranteed to graduate. For everyone else, it's at best a coin flip.
+
+Part of the problem might be money. There's a familiar saying about students who drop out, particularly at community colleges: ""Life got in the way."" Students who struggle to work, or to afford transportation or child care, often get sidetracked on the way to a degree. Not having to pay tuition would free up students to use grants or loans for living expenses. Still, the maximum Pell Grant for low-income students isn't enough to live on for a full academic year, so it's not clear whether cheaper tuition would be enough to make a difference.
+
+Second, the proposed community college plan is structured as a grant for states, with strings attached, to encourage reforms. In order to get the federal money meant to cover 75 percent of students' tuition, states would have to agree to ""evidence-based institutional reforms"" — strategies like the ASAP program at the City University of New York, an intense support system for community college students that has pushed three-year graduation rates for participants to over 50 percent.
+
+Those programs have shown promise, and states and community college districts could adopt them even if Congress doesn't pass Obama's plan (and it probably won't). But they're also expensive. One lesson of the past few years: changing completion rates will take both time and money.",REAL
+470,Millennials and Gen X worried retirement years won't be so golden,"Those who have the most years to save for retirement appear to be the most worried that when the time comes, they won't be financially ready.
+
+That's a key finding from a new report released Tuesday by Bank of America and Merrill Edge.
+
+The survey of more than 1,000 Americans found that among Gen Xers who were still working, 74% were most likely to believe they'll be financially stressed in retirement based on how they are currently putting money away. Among Millennials, 67% had the same fear.
+
+That's in contrast to 59% of current retirees who say they aren't worried about money because of how they saved.
+
+Some of that disparity can be attributed to the younger generations simply fearing the unknown.
+
+""The retirees now know what their costs are in retirement,'' says Aron Levine, head of Merrill Edge at Bank of America. ""They know what they're spending in the near term, their health care costs, so it's a little easier to understand and look out over the next few years vs. Gen X and Millennials who are looking 20 to 25 years out in the future. The unknown, and everything they see and read, suggests a very stressful situation.''
+
+But a big source of the stress is that the younger generations are juggling many situations, from aging parents to student loans.
+
+It's ""that combination of having to deal with a lot of priorities and really focusing on paying down debt and the uncertainties around health care and other costs,'' Levine says.
+
+Health care costs are a top worry, regardless of age, with 65% of all those surveyed saying that unexpected medical costs would strain their finances in retirement. A lack of Social Security benefits came in second, with 38% of respondents saying that would stress their budgets.
+
+""What people do see is that (health care costs) keep going up, and the question ties into longevity,'' Levine says. ""If you're a Gen Xer or Millennial you say, 'I may live a lot longer than previous generations. ... How do I save if I'm going to live into my 90s?' ''
+
+Apparently, a good number of Millennials believe the answer, in part, is getting money from family and friends. The report found 43% of that age group say they are counting on some financial help from loved ones if they need it in retirement. That may be tied into a belief that they'll get an inheritance to help tide them over, Levine says, ""and with Millennials in particular, sharing is becoming a big part of how they live. Zipcar and Uber and social media ... so thematically, for them it's reasonable to think they'll get help from people along the way.''
+
+A better path however, would be to have a savings plan, and many Gen Xers (defined by the study as ages 35 to 49) and Millennials (ages 18-34) are not seeking help from a professional to create one.
+
+The report found 24% of non-retirees are working on retirement goals with an adviser vs. 38% of retirees who did the same before quitting work.
+
+""A lot of Gen Xers and Millennials are not seeking outside help to the degree previous generations did,'' Levine say, noting today's retired seniors ""had a plan. They stuck with it, they got help along the way, and now that plan has worked for them for 30 or 40 years.''
+
+Eric Roberge, a certified financial planner whose business caters to Millennials, says that it's not too late for those who have been straggling with their savings to get on track.
+
+""For Millennials, this is the time to take action around their finances,'' he says. ""This involves taking a hard look at their income and expenses and their assets and debt. These items make up their financial foundations.''
+
+Next, he says, ""identify an amount of money that they can contribute to their retirement accounts. Saving early and often is a good recipe for creating an adequate amount of money that will support them in the future. Early on in our working years is the best time to start. And, at that time, the amount of money they are saving is much more important than how this money is invested.''
+
+All the worry about the future might be leading to a silver lining, Levine says. The report found a significant bump in the percentage of people who say they're making their future finances a priority, jumping from 48% to 61% in one year.
+
+""You may see that come through in signing up for the 401(k) at work and taking advantage of opportunities when they're given them to save more,'' Levine says.
+
+""Emotions and stress are starting to drive better actions, whether it's thinking about how to save more, or taking specific actions to save more.''",REAL
+10290,"UK Prepares For War, Sends Tanks & Soldiers To Russia’s Border","Posted on October 26, 2016 by Edmondo Burr in News , UK // 0 Comments In a show of force against Russia, the UK is sending 800 soldiers with tanks and drones to take up a “serious military presence” near Russia’s western border with Estonia. 
+It comes just days after Russian ships sailed through the English Channel testing British defences on their way to the Mediterranean for possible offensive operations in Syria. 
+International tensions are mounting as communications between America and Russia over their operations in Syria break down. 
+The Daily Express report: 
+British soldiers will travel to Estonia in what is one of the biggest build-ups of foreign firepower on Russia’s border since the Cold War. 
+The move will take place next spring, with Denmark and France also taking part in the huge military exercise. 
+The project was revealed by Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, who said the UK’s forces will be “fully combat-capable”. 
+He said: “That battalion will be defensive in nature, but it will be fully combat-capable. 
+“This is about two things: reassurance, and that needs to be done with some formidable presence, and deterrence. 
+“This is not simply a trip-wire. This is a serious military presence.” 
+Cold War-style tensions between Moscow and Washington took a further dip this week after the US revealed plans to station marines in Norway – just a few hundred miles from the border with Russia. 
+Officials in Norway and the US said they were considering a deal for extra equipment and training for the Scandinavian country. 
+Russia has reacted angrily to the plans, saying there was “the absence of threat from Russia to Norway”. 
+Mr Putin made a similar show of force last month, when he orchestrated a military evacuation drill including a staggering 40 million people. 
+The huge four-day “civil defence” drill set alarm bells ringing in Washington and London, with tensions already high over disagreements in Syria. 
+Russia’s Ministry for Civil Defence, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disaster revealed 40 million civilians, 200,000 emergency rescuers and 50,000 units of equipment were involved in the war game, which ran from October 4 to October 7. 
+And last month two RAF jets were scrambled to intercept Russian bombers which had flown threateningly close to British airspace. 
+While the two Russian Blackjack bombers did not enter British airspace, authorities were alarmed when they passed to the west of the Shetland Islands. 
+The Ministry of Defence revealed jets from RAF Lossiemouth and RAF Coningsby were eventually launched as a “precautionary measure”. 
+The Russian planes, which had travelled from the direction of Norway, then continued their route away from Britain. 
+A similar incident occurred again last, when the RAF were twice forced to scramble jets to intercept Russian bombers. 
+Putin’s aircrafts flew in an “area of interest” off the coast of Scotland on October 12 and October 16, the MoD revealed. This latest development comes amid a massive break-down in communication between America and Russia over their operations in Syria. 
+A spokesman for the US State Department said earlier this month: “Extremist groups will continue to exploit the vacuums that are there in Syria to expand their operations. 
+A spokesman for the US State Department said earlier this month: “Extremist groups will continue to exploit the vacuums that are there in Syria to expand their operations. 
+“This could include attacks against Russian interests, perhaps even Russian cities. 
+“Russia will continue to send troops home in body bags, and will continue to lose resources, perhaps even aircraft.”",FAKE
+2491,Initial prognosis poor for Obama’s immigration program at Supreme Court,"The conservative justices on the Supreme Court gave little indication Monday that they were inclined to fully revive President Obama’s stalled plan to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and give them the right to work legally in this country.
+
+Instead, the court’s conservatives and liberals seemed split while hearing a challenge to the plan, and a 4-to-4 tie would leave in place a lower court’s decision that the president exceeded his powers in issuing the directive.
+
+That would close Obama’s presidency with perhaps his biggest legal loss and leave in limbo about 4 million undocumented immigrants whom the initiative was intended to help: those who have been in the country since 2010, have committed no serious crimes, and have family ties to U.S. citizens or others lawfully in the country.
+
+In questions and comments over 90 minutes, the Obama administration did not receive support from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. or Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, seen as most likely among the four conservatives to let the program proceed.
+
+But Monday’s oral arguments may not tell the whole story. Once the justices debate the case behind closed doors, they could be motivated to search for a compromise to avoid the image of a court at an impasse after the February death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
+
+One possibility might be for the court to recognize the president’s authority to set priorities on whom to deport but to limit the impact of such a designation on an immigrant’s ability to receive work authorization or become eligible for government benefits.
+
+GOP-led states and Republican members of Congress say the president’s November 2014 guidance on deportation states that those with deferred deportation “are lawfully present in the United States.” That term opens a number of opportunities and government benefits to them, according to Texas and 25 other states that have objected to the plan.
+
+But Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., representing the administration, denied that the language was legally significant; it would be more accurate to say the government is tolerating their presence, he said.
+
+“If the court thinks it’s a problem and wants to put a red pencil through it . . . it’s totally fine,” Verrilli said.
+
+Roberts tried that out on Erin E. Murphy, a lawyer for the U.S. House of Representatives, who was given time to argue against the administration’s policy.
+
+“Why don’t we just cross out ‘lawfully present,’ as the SG has suggested?” Roberts asked.
+
+“You can’t cross it out and achieve what” the president intends, Murphy said. Whatever one calls it, the administration means for those whose deportations are deferred to be able to legally work and receive government benefits, she said.
+
+In the arguments, the court showed a familiar divide in confronting a fundamental tension of Obama’s tenure: whether the president is correctly using the substantial powers of his office to break through political gridlock, or whether he has ignored constitutional boundaries to unilaterally impose policies that should require congressional acquiescence.
+
+[Here’s who will be affected by this immigration case]
+
+But the future of the program depends on who takes Obama’s place. Republican presidential candidates have vowed to revoke it. Democrats have pledged to expand it.
+
+The immigration program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), would allow illegal immigrants in the affected categories to remain in the country and apply for work permits if they have been here at least five years and have not committed felonies or repeated misdemeanors. Obama announced the executive action in November 2014 after House Republicans did not act on comprehensive immigration reform.
+
+The administration says the program is a way for a government with limited resources to prioritize which illegal immigrants it will deport. As a practical matter, the government has never deported more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants per year and often sends home far fewer than that.
+
+Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in agreement: “Inevitably, priorities have to be set.”
+
+Added Justice Sonia Sotomayor: “So they are here, whether we want them or not.”
+
+That’s correct, Verrilli said, and so the administration decided it would be better to have them be able to work legally.
+
+[400,000 in Los Angeles could be shielded from deportation if justices give green light]
+
+But Kennedy saw the action as doing much more than that. It seemed, he said, “that the president is setting the policy and the Congress is executing it. That’s just upside down.”
+
+And Roberts said the administration saw no limit to Obama’s authority.
+
+“Under your argument, could the president grant deferred removal to every . . . unlawfully present alien in the United States right now?” he asked Verrilli.
+
+But Roberts did not seem convinced by Verrilli’s reference to specific undocumented immigrants whom Congress has said must be immediately removed, such as those who have committed crimes or are apprehended at the border.
+
+Texas Solicitor General Scott A. Keller called Obama’s program “an unprecedented, unlawful assertion of executive power” and added that “DAPA would be one of the largest changes in immigration policy in our nation’s history.”
+
+Sotomayor stopped him. “How can you say that?” she asked, noting that previous presidents have also protected specific groups from deportation.
+
+The liberal justices seemed to agree with the administration’s contention that the states have no legal standing to sue, because it is up to the federal government to set immigration policy, and that the Department of Homeland Security did not violate federal statutes in devising the program.
+
+Justice Stephen G. Breyer was most skeptical of Texas’s argument that it had standing to sue because of a state law requiring it to provide driver’s licenses to those authorized to work. He said it could lead to a flood of litigation on other matters.
+
+Verrilli said Texas could be relieved of what it sees as its burden in other ways. But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the government would insist that the immigrants who receive deferred deportation have access to driver’s licenses if offered to others.
+
+At the beginning of the legal fight, U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen agreed with the state that, because it would face a financial cost in providing driver’s licenses to those covered by the new program, Texas had standing to challenge the initiative.
+
+A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that decision on a 2-to-1 vote. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith rejected the administration’s argument that DAPA was a form of “prosecutorial discretion” in which a government with limited resources sets priorities for enforcement.
+
+The program, Smith wrote, “is much more than nonenforcement: It would affirmatively confer ‘lawful presence’ and associated benefits on a class of unlawfully present aliens. Though revocable, that change in designation would trigger” eligibility for federal and state benefits “that would not otherwise be available to illegal aliens.”
+
+The court granted time in the arguments to hear from the House of Representatives and from three “Jane Does” from Texas who would be eligible.
+
+Murphy, representing the House, said even Obama did not originally think he possessed the power to take the action.
+
+“Three years ago, the executive asked Congress to enact legislation that would have given it the power to authorize most of the people that are living in this country unlawfully to stay, work and receive benefits, and Congress declined,” she said. “Now the executive comes before this court with the extraordinary claim that it has had the power” all along.
+
+Thomas A. Saenz of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund represented the Jane Does.
+
+They “seek the opportunity to apply for discretionary, temporary and revocable relief from the daily fear that they will be separated from their families and detained or removed from their homes under the current nonuniform and frequently arbitrary federal immigration enforcement system,” he said.
+
+The case is U.S. v. Texas .",REAL
+5318,AG Lynch Told Comey,"DaisyLuther.com October 31, 2016 
+According to a report in the New Yorker, James Comey, Big Kahuna of the FBI, went full-on cowboy in releasing details of the new Clinton email inquiry. Apparently, the Department of Justice advised him not to release the information just days before the presidential election. 
+Gosh. I wonder if the same advice would have been given if it was Donald Trump who was being investigated by the FBI. 
+Comey explained his decision in a letter to FBI employees : 
+“We don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.” 
+The DoJ – and by DoJ I mean Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who famously had a secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Bill Clinton to talk about her non-existent grandchildren – is implying that Comey is not playing fair and that the move is inconsistent with the rules which have been designed to make it seem like they are not interfering in an election. 
+Here’s Comey’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee: 
+Really? 
+The DoJ thinks that the public shouldn’t know that the person they may be voting for is being investigated by the FBI? 
+That’s the most absurd thing I have heard for quite some time, and considering this election, that’s really saying something. 
+This is from the New Yorker report, emphasis mine. 
+On Friday, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch , sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e-mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey’s decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department’s longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election, but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise . 
+Comey’s decision is a striking break with the policies of the Department of Justice, according to current and former federal legal officials. Comey, who is a Republican appointee of President Obama, has a reputation for integrity and independence, but his latest action is stirring an extraordinary level of concern among legal authorities, who see it as potentially affecting the outcome of the Presidential and congressional elections. ( source ) 
+Is this investigation the iceberg to HRC’s Titanic campaign? 
+Hillary Clinton has said she finds the development “unprecedented and deeply troubling.” (source ) 
+Oh, I’ll bet she does. 
+I’ll bet if Trump had been the target of the investigation she would have been up on the stage, gripping the podium to stay upright, saying how wonderful it was that Comey decided to break the news so that voters could be aware that they might be voting for someone who was suspected of having broken federal laws. I’ll bet she’d be saying that the public has a right to know if a candidate was under investigation. I’ll bet she’d take the high road and say that those elected to the office of President of the United States have to be above and beyond reproach. 
+Of course, when it’s her, things are a little different, aren’t they? 
+We do have a right to know. We absolutely have a right to know that a person who could be elected to know all of the secrets was careless when she only knew some of the secrets. It seems like a no-brainer that the public should know that a candidate is being investigated for a second time for being criminally negligent with information entrusted to her. 
+And the fact that we know has severely damaged Clinton’s campaign. Although previous polls were incredibly skewed to the point of being outright fake , it looks like the mainstream is now trying to save face with a new batch of polls. A poll from ABC news and the Washington Post , both hotbeds of liberal voters, has shown that her lead has dropped to within a single point over Donald Trump due to the Clinton email scandal. 
+“About a third of likely voters say they’re less likely to support Clinton given FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure Friday that the bureau is investigating more emails related to its probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. “ 
+Finally, some people are actually paying attention to the character of Hillary Clinton. 
+But it may not be enough. There was one finding that was astonishing to me, even though it probably shouldn’t be: 
+“Given other considerations, 63 percent say it makes no difference.” 
+Meanwhile, on social media, the FBI emails are somehow not a trending topic. It certainly appears that Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Buzzfeed are blacking out the topic. 
+My biggest question is this: Why now? 
+Why did James Comey, who has probably committed career suicide, along with a potential actual “suicide” via a shot to the back of his own head like others who have run afoul of the Clintons, feel the need to break the news, particularly after giving her a pass during the last investigation? 
+Opponents will jump on the fact that he’s a Republican and will say that he did it for political reasons. 
+They won’t admit that perhaps he felt guilty for being complicit in letting her off the hook in the first investigation into the Clinton email negligence. 
+They will never, ever admit that maybe his integrity and belief in the office he holds made it impossible for him to keep quiet until after the election and that, perhaps, when he was given a chance to right a previous wrong, he took it. 
+Clinton isn’t taking it gracefully. 
+Clinton’s complaints, which have appeared in the press around the world, make her look even worse than she did before. 
+This is from The Telegraph , a UK publication: 
+Hillary Clinton was furiously fighting to keep her Presidential bid on track on Saturday night as her lead in the polls narrowed, after the FBI’s bombshell announcement that it had reopened its investigation into her emails. 
+James Comey announced on Friday afternoon that fresh evidence had emerged for his investigation into whether Mrs Clinton was criminally negligent in her handling of classified material. 
+On Saturday, the latest poll of polls by tracker site RealClearPolitics put Clinton 3.9 percentage points ahead of the Republican nationwide, down from 7.1 points just 10 days previously. 
+But wait – it gets better: 
+The Clinton campaign has responded with what amounts to a declaration of open warfare against Mr Comey, alleging that his actions are backed by a political motive. And Mrs Clinton herself called the decision “unprecedented” and “deeply troubling”. 
+“It’s pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election,” she complained, addressing cheering supporters at a rally in the must-win state of Florida. 
+Democrats questioned the timing of the agency’s decision, which comes as polls showed Mrs Clinton’s lead falling just 10 days before the presidential election. 
+“This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the worst possible time,” said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. 
+“The campaign is trying to cut through the noise as best it can. 
+“We don’t want it to knock us off our game. But on the second-to-last weekend of the race, we find ourselves having to tell voters, ‘Keep your focus, keep your eyes on the prize.’” 
+Hillary’s campaign manager sounds pretty desperate to me. As for the complaints from HRC, they just make her sound like the out-of-touch, money-grabbing, power-hungry, deceitful",FAKE
+10049,VIDEO : Epic Loser Weiner Says He Downloaded ALL OF HUMA’S EMAILS By “ACCIDENT” – TruthFeed,"VIDEO : Epic Loser Weiner Says He Downloaded ALL OF HUMA’S EMAILS By “ACCIDENT” VIDEO : Epic Loser Weiner Says He Downloaded ALL OF HUMA’S EMAILS By “ACCIDENT” Breaking News By TruthFeedNews November 1, 2016 
+HOLY SMOKES! So ALL of Huma’s emails from her smartphone are now in possession of the DOJ and FBI. 
+Anthony Weiner says it was “by accident.” Perhaps so, either way he is an epic disgraced loser. 
+You have to believe that with DOJ and the FBI having all of Huma’s emails, MANY will contain threads with Hillary and there will be enough damning information to convict her without any reasonable doubt. 
+The question is, are there people in the DOJ and FBI with enough pull to have the courage to tell the truth, or will their efforts be stonewalled by the likes of Hillary shill Loretta Lynch and Peter Kadzik. 
+Watch the video: 
+Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+9938,Rick Rule: Broadcast Interview – Available Now,"97924 Views October 29, 2016 KWN PLUS , TRENDING King World News FOR DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PLAY OR DOWNLOAD AUDIOS: CLICK HERE Rick Rule: Chairman / Founder of Sprott US Holdings & President of   USA; Portfolio Manager – Rick is known as one of the most “street-smart” people in the natural resource sector and gold world with nearly 40 years of experience.   USA Inc. manages over a billion and through acquisition is now part of the $7 billion   LP.   USA Inc. provides investment advice and brokerage services to high net worth individuals, institutional investors and corporate entities worldwide. Rick and his team are also successfully involved in agriculture, alternative energy, conventional energy, forestry, infrastructure, mining and water resources investing on a world wide basis. Rick Rule: Chairman / Founder of Sprott US Holdings & President of   USA; Portfolio Manager – Mr. Rule has dedicated his entire adult life to many aspects of natural resource securities investing. In addition to the knowledge and experience gained in a long, successful and focused career, he has a worldwide network of contacts in the natural resource and finance worlds. As Chairman of Sprott US Holdings, Mr. Rule leads a highly skilled team of earth science and finance professionals who enjoy a worldwide reputation for resource investment management. Mr. Rule and his team have long experience in many resource sectors including agriculture, alternative energy, forestry, oil and gas, mining and water. Mr. Rule is particularly active in private placement markets, having originated and participated in hundreds of debt and equity transactions with private, pre-public and public companies.   USA Inc – (“Sprott USA”) is an SEC Registered Investment Adviser firm that is a member of the Sprott Group of Companies (“Sprott Group”). The Sprott Group offers a collection of investment managers united by one common goal: delivering excellent long-term returns to our investors. Our investment team pursues a deeper level of knowledge and understanding which allows it to develop macroeconomic, sector and company insights. With decades of combined experience, our investment professionals will provide you with service that cannot be found in many investment management companies. Our portfolio managers have experience in the technical side of the business, so we feel that our investment advisory service is invaluable to our clients. We know that you have other obligations and priorities in your life, so let us use our experience and sector knowledge to your advantage. Please CLICK HERE for Sprott’s free report on Energy and Metals investing, and to receive Sprott’s free e-newsletter, Sprott’s Thoughts. Natural Resource Managed Account Investing RESOURCE-FOC– USED WEALTH MANAGEMENT   USA Inc. – (“Sprott USA”) is an SEC Registered Investment Adviser firm that is a member of the Sprott Group of Companies (“Sprott Group”). The Sprott Group offers a collection of investment managers united by one common goal: delivering long-term returns to our investors. Sprott USA offers a Managed Account program for investors looking for distinctive and personalized resource portfolio management.   LP – (“SAM”) is a Toronto-based alternative asset manager that offers a wide variety of investment solutions to Canadian and international investors. Our product offerings include mutual funds, alternative strategies, physical bullion trusts and tax-efficient funds. With a history dating back to 1981, our team of investment professionals is united by one common goal: delivering outstanding long-term returns to our clients and investors. To achieve that end, we have assembled a group of best-in-class portfolio managers, market strategists, technical experts and analysts that is widely-recognized for its investment expertise and unique investment approach. We are committed to conducting deep fundamental research to develop unique macroeconomic insights. About author",FAKE
+6146,"Hillary is So Unpopular, She Has to Pay Off Youth Voters and Fabricate Her Rallies","Posted on October 30, 2016 by Tim Brown 
+Among the many Wikileaks emails that were dumped this summer, it was clear that Hillary Clinton is not as popular as the media would have you believe. In fact, it became clear that she has no real support in a hacked email to the point where she was forced to pay young voters to stump online for her. 
+The Gateway Pundit reported : 
+She’s the astroturfed candidate. Hillary is SOOO unpopular that she has to pay off young voters to support her and show up at her rallies. 
+5 Biggest Scoops from the #DNCLeaks WikiLeak 
+Wikileaks released nearly 20,000 hacked emails it says are from the accounts of Democratic National Committee officials on Friday. 
+The emails are devastating for Hillary Clinton. According to at least one hacked email Hillary Clinton has no real support and must pay youth voters to defend her online. She also pays millennials to show up at her rallies. 
+Hillary’s support is all a lie. It’s all astroturfed. Everything this woman does is all a lie – even her rallies are fabricated. 
+If Attkisson’s explanation were not enough, how about this tweet regarding the mainstream media putting their collective useful idiot heads together to pitch the same propaganda about Donald Trump. 5 Biggest Scoops from the #DNCLeaks https://t.co/vmTiepsPkj 
+— Mike Cernovich 🇺🇸 (@Cernovich) July 23, 2016 
+This should have come as no surprise. 
+If you remember when her campaign kicked off in 2015, I reported on the fact that more than 50% of her Twitter followers were either completely fake or inactive . 
+Additionally, when she had her Iowa kickoff event, a whopping 22 people showed up . The majority of those were reporters! 
+Hillary Clinton only has the backing of the media and rabid anti-American liberals, and even then, it looks like she’s having to pay them to actually do anything to support her. In other words, her candidacy is completely contrived. 
+Courtesy of Freedom Outpost 
+Tim Brown is an author and Editor at FreedomOutpost.com , SonsOfLibertyMedia.com , GunsInTheNews.com and TheWashingtonStandard.com . He is husband to his “more precious than rubies” wife, father of 10 “mighty arrows”, jack of all trades, Christian and lover of liberty. He resides in the U.S. occupied Great State of South Carolina. Tim is also an affiliate for the Joshua Mark 5 AR/AK hybrid semi-automatic rifle . Follow Tim on Twitter . Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+7632,"Bankrupt Hanjin breaks stalemate, vessels begin cargo unload","Bankrupt Hanjin breaks stalemate, vessels begin cargo unload October 28, 2016 A Hanjin Shipping Co ship is seen stranded outside the Port of Long Beach, California, September 8, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo 
+A Hanjin shipping vessel which has spent months in limbo has docked in Vancouver to unload cargo and replenish almost bare food provisions. The Hanjin Scarlet docked at DP World's Centerm terminal within the Port of Vancouver on Oct 27. Peter Lahay, ITWF Inspector and coordinator: Hanjin Scarlet has been sitting 28 miles outside Prince Rupert for several months. Hanjin's collapse forced ports around the world to deny service to its ships for fear they would not be paid. South Korea's Hanjin Shipping Co Ltd filed for court receivership at the end of August, which set the stage for its assets to be frozen. Michael Gurney, Prince Rupert Port Authority spokesman: The Hanjin Scarlet arrived into the port on Aug. 30 and discharged some containers at one of its terminals. It then remained under arrest and at anchor in the outer harbor for nearly two months Also under arrest: Hanjin Vienna remains at anchor off Victoria, British Columbia. Will discharge on Nov 3. 
+(VANCOUVER) A container vessel that spent months sitting off Canada's west coast due to the collapse of South Korea shipping company Hanjin docked in Vancouver on Thursday, according to union officials and ship tracking data. 
+The Hanjin Scarlet arrived at DP World's Centerm terminal within the Port of Vancouver by early afternoon, according to Thomson Reuters ship tracking data. 
+The ship, which has 24 crew members, will unload cargo on board, Lahay said. He added that crew members had less than 10 days worth of food and provisions left, and had run out of fresh food. 
+The vessel, with nearly 800 containers on board, had been sitting some 45 km (28 miles) outside Prince Rupert for several months, said Peter Lahay, an inspector and coordinator with the International Transport Workers Federation.",FAKE
+6502,"Gold prices grow by $60 as Trump wins, US dollar trashed","Gold prices grow by $60 as Trump wins, US dollar trashed   Republican Donald Trump has won the US presidential election . Hillary Clinton congratulated her rival on the victory and refused to speak to her supporters. As Pravda.Ru has reported before, Trump's victory has greatly affected the state of affairs on world market s. During the last four hours, against the backdrop of the struggle between the presidential candidates, gold has risen in price by 4.5%, or $60. January futures for Brent oil fell by 2.2%. According to The Financial Times, the Mexican peso has fallen to a record low against the US dollar, having lost 13.1%, to 20.69. The Swiss franc has gained 1.9% vs. the US dollar to 0.9577. The Canadian dollar has declined to an eight-month low against the US currency. The Australian dollar has dropped by 1.9 percent to $0.7615. The pound sterling has gained 1.04 percent to $1.2513. The euro has climbed by 2.2 percent to $1.1261. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru WikiLeaks: Trump leads in global US elections",FAKE
+6181,California National Guard Members won’t have to Pay Back Bonuses,"California National Guard Members won’t have to Pay Back Bonuses Pentagon had been seeking repayment of enlistment bonuses paid to California Guardsmen USA Today - October 26, 2016 Comments 
+Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered the Pentagon on Wednesday to stop clawing back excessive recruiting bonuses paid to California National Guardsmen. 
+The move came after news broke over the weekend that the Pentagon had been seeking repayment of enlistment bonuses paid to California Guardsmen. Some of the payments were made by mistake, others were taken fraudulently. 
+“While some soldiers knew or should have known they were ineligible for benefits they were claiming, many others did not,” Carter said in a statement. “About 2,000 have been asked, in keeping with the law, to repay erroneous payments.” 
+As first reported by the Los Angeles Times , the Pentagon sought repayment of the excess bonuses from almost 10,000 California Guard soldiers. The paper reported that many of the soldiers affected had served multiple combat deployments and had been ordered to repay bonuses plus interest. Some had had their wages garnished and tax liens slapped on them when they refused to pay. The bonus scandal was revealed after audits showed widespread overpayments.",FAKE
+5534,Nation Elects First Black-Hearted President - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"More Election Coverage Nation Elects First Black-Hearted President Black-hearted Americans across the country reportedly celebrated in the streets after Donald Trump was declared the victor, becoming the first black-hearted president in the nation’s history. Close Black-hearted Americans across the country reportedly celebrated in the streets after Donald Trump was declared the victor, becoming the first black-hearted president in the nation’s history. NEWS November 9, 2016 Vol 52 Issue 44 · Politics · Politicians · Election 2016 · Donald Trump 
+WASHINGTON—Shattering a barrier long thought unbreakable in the United States, Donald Trump, the 70-year-old billionaire real estate mogul from New York, became the first black-hearted man in history to win the American presidency, in the early hours of Wednesday morning. 
+President-elect Trump, who in July became the first black-hearted nominee of a major political party, once again rewrote the history books as the first black-hearted man to capture the majority of votes in the electoral college, defeating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a closely contested race. The once unimaginable outcome of a black-hearted man assuming the role of commander-in-chief of the United States has already sent major shockwaves through the nation and, indeed, across the world. 
+“Honestly, I’m in shock—I cannot believe that we just elected a black-hearted man as president of the United States,” said Stephen Payton, 49, of Greensboro, NC, adding that just the thought of a black-hearted man sitting in the Oval Office “sent chills down [his] spine.” “Frankly, I never thought I’d live to see us put a man like that in the White House, but I guess times do change. Our nation is clearly moving in a new direction.” 
+“It just goes to show you that anything is possible in America,” he continued. 
+Trump’s victory, which defied the long-held conventional wisdom about the prospects of black-hearted candidates, has been described as a watershed moment for the nation’s millions of black-hearted Americans whose overwhelming support buoyed his run for the presidency. Encouraged by the possibility of one of their own occupying the highest seat of power in the nation, black-hearted Americans reportedly turned out in record numbers in all 50 states, propelling Trump to a historic victory. 
+Perhaps most critically, early analysis indicates that Trump’s win may have been sealed by his ability to capture the votes of millions of Americans who were long assumed to be incapable of ever voting for a black-hearted candidate. 
+“Having someone who is black-hearted running the country is definitely going to change everything,” said Samantha Davis, 56, of Tacoma, WA, who explained that she expects Trump to govern in accordance with the values and beliefs shaped by his formative years growing up as a young black-hearted man in New York City. “There’s no way he’s going to be like any of the other men who came before him. He’s proud to be a black-hearted man because that’s exactly who he is.” 
+“And that won’t change just because he’s the president,” she added. 
+While no official announcements have been made, Washington insiders believe that Trump is also expected to name black-hearted Americans to fill key cabinet positions, with sources identifying former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani as likely choices for top roles. 
+Reflecting on the historic nature of the evening and what it may mean for the future, many have described Trump’s election as perhaps the single greatest achievement in black-hearted history. 
+“Oh my God, he actually won!” said Kyle Leigh, 27, of Watertown, NY, before pausing and breaking down in tears after learning that a black-hearted man will now occupy the White House for the next four or eight years. “This really happened. It’s just starting to sink in.” 
+“Nothing is going to be the same after this election,” he added. “Nothing.” Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
+Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
+7231,"Here’s PROOF The Gold Price is Based On Cost, Not Supply and Demand","Tweet Home » Gold » Gold News » Here’s PROOF The Gold Price is Based On Cost, Not Supply and Demand 
+Gold’s true value is not based on its cost of production, but rather it’s high-quality store of value as a basis of money in the global economy. The reason the value of gold will skyrocket going forward is quite simple: 
+
+From SRSRocco : 
+The notion that the gold price is based on the economics of “Supply & Demand” turns out to be incorrect as the cost of production is the leading factor. This is also true for most commodities and energy. 
+Unfortunately, economists and most analysts in the precious metals community will continue to believe that the economic principle of supply and demand determines price. If we look at the data provided in this article, the individual will see how closely related the cost of gold production is to the spot price. 
+That being said, the information in this article is only to show the “commodity pricing mechanism” of gold, not its true store of value. There’s a big difference which 99% in the Mainstream media do not understand… and probably a good percentage in the precious metals community as well. Top Two Gold Miners Cost Of Production vs. The Gold Price 
+I decided to take the data from the top two gold miners, Barrick and Newmont, for this exercise as they are the largest two gold producers in the world. Yes, I could have spent several days compiling data from the top 20 gold miners, but I don’t have the luxury of being paid by a financial institution for my analysis. Regardless, Barrick and Newmont provide a good representation of the cost of producing gold in the entire industry. 
+According to my “Adjusted Income Approach” in determining the full cost of production, I constructed the chart below. One thing that is not included in the adjusted income approach is dividend payouts. I included this in my total cost per ounce for Barrick and Newmont: 
+Here we can see that as the price of gold increased over the past 15 years, so did the cost of production for these top two gold miners. In 2000, the total average cost to produce gold for Barrick and Newmont was $243 versus the spot price of $279. Thus, the average profit margin was 13% for these gold mining companies that year. 
+As the average price of gold surged to a record $1,669 in 2012, the average cost to produce the yellow metal for Barrick and Newmont increased to $1,386 . Yes, it’s true that these two gold miners enjoyed a 17% profit margin that year, but what is wrong with that?? Companies must have profits so they can pay for new projects, shareholder dividends or surplus cash for lean years when losses are incurred. 
+If we compare the increase in the gold price from 2000 to 2012 versus the cost of production, we will see a very interesting similar trend: 
+Gold Price Increase vs Cost Of Production 2000-2012 
+Gold Price Increase 2000 – 2012 = 498% 
+Gold Cost Increase 2000 – 2012 = 470% 
+While the average gold spot price increased 498% from 2000-2012, the cost of production for Barrick and Newmont jumped 470%. To put it another way, the difference between the increased cost of production (470%) and the average spot price (498%) in the 2000-2012 time period, was a lousy 6%. 
+Does the gold mining industry deserve a paltry 6% profit margin over that time period?? Which means… the economists can throw out the window the worthless principle of supply and demand. 
+So, why did the cost of gold production increase so much since 2000?? Could it have anything to do with the increased cost of energy?? Well, yes it did. I wrote about this in my previous article, Why Most Analysts’s Gold & Silver Forecasts Are Wrong . 
+In the article, I show how the price of a barrel of oil increased from $20 in 2000 to $112 in 2012. Thus, the gold cost of production increased nearly five times on the back of a five times increase in the price of oil during that time period. 
+Now, if we look at the data for 2015, the top two gold miners profit margin fell to 3.8% as their cost per ounce was $1,116 compared to the $1,160 spot price. The reason the cost of production declined in 2015 versus 2012, was due to the oil price (as well as other energy inputs) falling more than 50%. 
+Okay, I imagine many reading this article would wonder why I have stated that the gold price will skyrocket in the future as the price of oil collapses towards $12 by 2020. This doesn’t make sense because a lower energy price would also dictate a lower cost of production… hence the gold spot price will fall as well. 
+As I stated in the beginning of the article, this information only pertains to the “commodity pricing mechanism” of gold, not is true “high-quality store of value.” Gold or silver (to a lesser extent) are not commodities, rather they function as money or stores of wealth. There is a much different way to attribute value to these precious metals than their cost of production. I will touch on that at the end of the article, but there is more information about the cost of gold production we need to understand first. Gold Cost Of Production Understated Due To Massive Share Dilution and Increased Debt 
+The gold cost of production for Barrick and Newmont are understated due to the massive amount of share dilution and increased debt. First, let’s look at the change in outstanding shares for these two gold mining companies: 
+Barrick and Newmont’s outstanding shares have more than tripled from 526 million in 2000 to 1,695 million (1.69 billion) shares in 2015. Basically, these two gold mining companies could not afford to expand production from just their surplus profits. Instead, they resorted to issuing more shares to purchase new gold mines or fund new projects. 
+Which means, the shareholder took some of the burden for the increased cost or expanded production. While its hard to put a figure on how much higher the cost to produce gold would have been if the shareholder was not used to fund this activity, we can safely assume that it would be higher than it is today. 
+Secondly, the total liabilities for these two companies have surged to $32.9 billion in 2015 versus $3.8 billion in 2000: 
+Here we can see that Barrick and Newmont’s total liabilities are nearly ten times higher than they were in 2000. Of course, some readers will say that these companies expanded production and increased gold projects have also increased their total assets. Yes, this is true… but, if we look at their net increase in gold production since 2000, something seems very wrong here: 
+The net result of the increased gold production for Barrick and Newmont since 2000, turns out to be 1.7 million oz, or 17%. Even though these two companies enjoyed higher production in past years, they only produced 17% more gold in 2015 than they did in 2000. Which means, a lot of their new projects were used to offset declines or shut-downs of other mining operations. 
+We can clearly see from the data above, these two gold miners cost of production would be higher if shareholder dilution and the increased debt was removed from the equation. The Cost Of Gold Production is Not It’s True Store Of Value 
+While the data proves that the mining industry has used its shareholder and debt increase to artificially lower the true cost of producing gold, this is not the ultimate methodology to value gold. Gold’s true value is not based on its cost of production, but rather it’s high-quality store of value as a basis of money in the global economy. 
+The reason the value of gold will skyrocket going forward is quite simple. The world has been bamboozled by the Wall Street, Central Banks and the financial media to put 99% of its investment funds in Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate. As oil production and consumption increased in the past, this allowed Global GDP and net worth to grow. 
+Unfortunately, the net energy of a barrel of oil supplied to the market has been declining which has pushed its price to record highs. The first warning light was the U.S. Housing and Investment Banking collapse in 2008. To prop up the system, the Fed and Central Banks have thrown in trillions of dollars of liquidity. This has inflated the value of most Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate. 
+As the price of oil continues to fall, along with production, this will cause a huge DEFLATIONARY WAVE of destruction throughout the global economies. The 99% of investors finally getting PRECIOUS METALS RELIGION , will move into physical gold and silver to protect wealth. 
+This will not be a matter of “Supply & Demand”, rather it will be due the world realizing how little high-quality stores of value there are in the world . As most Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate values continue to plummet, more and more investors will seek the safe-haven status of physical gold and silver. 
+More details about this transition in upcoming articles. 2017 Gold Pandas and 2017 Silver Pandas Are Now Available!   This entry was posted in Gold News , Silver News and tagged gold update , silver update , SRSrocco . Bookmark the permalink . Post navigation",FAKE
+7269,Why I’m Suing Vanderbilt University,"Taki's Magazine October 29, 2016 
+PALM BEACH, Fla.—Maybe you missed this little item, but last month Obama shut down 130 colleges in a single day. 
+That’s one-three-oh campuses in 38 states that failed to open for the fall semester even though everybody was already enrolled. 
+Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think anything even remotely similar to this has ever happened in the history of the Republic. Education is the religion of the country. It’s the one thing that all politicians put on their list of bromides (always saying we need more, not fewer, colleges). Education ranks right up there with sick babies and flogged pit bulls for things people will donate money to. If Obama had shown up in, say, Dayton, Ohio, in 2008 and said, “By the way, part of my platform is that I might shut down 130 colleges,” I think he would have needed a security escort to get out of the Wright Brothers Banquet Hall. 
+So why are there no riots? 
+Because the victims of this Orientation Day Surprise are all students at the ITT Technical Institute. 
+ITT Tech is one of those for-profit chains that offer degrees in rarefied skills like automobile mechanics and refrigeration repair and medical billing—they’re not afraid to get specific with their curriculum—but historically it’s the Oxford of that group. It grew out of an Indianapolis company called Howard W. Sams that was a publisher of electronics textbooks and service manuals. Sams Technical Institute was formed in 1963 to teach electronics to students who wanted to forgo the typical liberal-arts curriculum of the day and learn how to work with emerging technologies, usually in the service end of the business, and it proved so popular that STI soon merged with Teletronic Technical Institute in Evansville, Acme Institute of Technology in Dayton, and another Sams in Fort Wayne, before being acquired in 1966 by ITT, the diversified international conglomerate that got started in the ’20s by consolidating phone companies. 
+In the ’60s and ’70s these were sneered at as “trade schools” or “vo-tech schools,” but ITT turned them into actual colleges, a fact recognized in 1973 when the original ITT Technical Institute in Indianapolis became the first “nontraditional” school allowed into the federal tuition loan and grant program. It was considered good policy since these programs were extremely popular with Vietnam War veterans trying to re-enter society. ITT Tech expanded rapidly in the ’70s, pulled back slightly in the ’80s, expanded again in the ’90s, then became publicly traded after the Starwood hotel group bought ITT and decided it didn’t want to be in the education business.",FAKE
+2165,"Obama, muted on human rights, lifts arms embargo on Vietnam","The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+4846,Trump supporters a ‘basket of deplorables.' Is this Clinton's '47 percent' moment? (+video),"Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the country what she really thinks about many Donald Trump supporters when she lumped “half” of them into a xenophobic, homophobic, racist, and sexist “basket of deplorables” on Friday.
+
+Although she cautioned her comments were “grossly generalistic,” the blunt commentary at a New York City fund-raiser specifically targeted the nebulous alt-right movement that Mr. Trump has courted, whose philosophical leaders in a press conference this week outlined their plans for an ethno-state where Jews might or might not be welcome.
+
+Mrs. Clinton has never painted Trump as holding such views. But she has used the word “deplorable” to describe some of Trump’s rhetoric and last month said the Republican candidate is “taking hate groups mainstream” by turning alt-right websites with 11,000 views to ones with 11 million hits, a notion she repeated Friday night.
+
+But using the quantifier “half” to describe some of his supporters crossed a new line, say critics. It was likened to the 2008 comment by Barack Obama claiming some Americans bitterly “cling” to guns and religion, and Mitt Romney’s 2012 statement that “47 percent” of Americans can be written off as unapologetic welfare moochers.
+
+The flap comes as Clinton’s polling lead, according to a Saturday report by the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project, continues to slide. According to that rolling online survey, the battleground states of Ohio and Florida are no longer considered likely wins for Clinton as Trump has managed to shore up support among white suburban voters. Clinton still has an 83 percent chance of winning the election by an average of 47 Electoral College votes, Reuters/Ipsos reports.
+
+Still, those polling shifts at least partly explain Clinton’s unusually strong assessment of some Trump supporters as part of an effort to let her potential voter base know what’s at stake, especially now that Trump has tapped into what she called some of America’s “irredeemable” impulses.
+
+The harshening tone is part and parcel of one of the most polarized elections in recent history, where two widely disliked candidates are trying to shore up narrow bands of support.
+
+But as Obama and Mr. Romney have found out, calling out  any segment of Americans for national scorn is politically risky territory in a country built on the First Amendment right to speak one’s mind without fear.
+
+“The fact is, if somebody tells us to shut up, we’re going to speak as loud as we can,” says Michael Hill, the founder of the white nationalist League of the South. “From her point of view, what Hillary has done is stupid [by targeting Trump’s alt-right support], because she’s legitimizing these people in the minds of folks who may not have been aware that the alt-right existed. She’s basically saying, ‘All you white folks, you’re either going to come with me or go with the alt-right.’ Well, if I have to make a choice, maybe I’ll go look at these alt-right people. And I think that’s happening.”
+
+At any rate, the internet blew up. Clinton supporters found it funny that Trump supporters were offended by a comment that many would say pales to some of Trump’s more politically incorrect quips. “Suddenly NOT being politically correct is a bad thing? Trump detractor Dawn Howard wrote on Twitter.
+
+But Trump saw a clear opening to attack what his campaign characterized as a gaffe for which she should apologize.
+
+“Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people,” Trump tweeted. “I think it will cost her at the Polls!
+
+To be sure, Trump has made sport out of mocking political correctness, piling up a laundry list of dismissive statements about women, Hispanics, veterans, disabled people, Muslims and blacks.
+
+But while Trump's sentiments are clearly resonating in large parts of the US, Vanderbilt University political scientist Marc Hetherington suggests Clinton is zeroing in a majority sentiment in the US that does skew against the alt-right’s white identity politics.
+
+“It’s really important to keep in mind that there’s a really high percentage of whites who don’t organize their world around their racial identity at all, and in fact find the idea troubling,” says Prof. Hetherington.
+
+At the same time, at least to some critics, the American left is to blame for the rise of the alt-right. Clinton’s ""basket of deplorables"" is an extension of a tendency by some liberals to demonize conservative thought, which has had the consequence of pushing many American moderates into Trump’s corner.
+
+“By reflexively denouncing as a racist everyone who disagrees with them about economics, and by making every detail of ordinary life into a minefield of hidden racial transgressions, [the left has] burned up their own credibility,” commentator Robert Tracinski wrote earlier this year in The Federalist. “In the process, they have weakened the culture’s immune system against racism and made it possible for a young cohort of racists to repackage their odious creed as resistance to political correctness.”
+
+At any rate, the condemnation of Trump's influence on the body politic has become a key part of the Clinton campaign narrative as Election Day nears. The notion is that Trump is “taking hate groups mainstream” in a way that disregards core American values such as equal rights, which is all ""profoundly dangerous.""
+
+It's not an easy message to muster. In fact, on Thursday night Clinton criticized Trump for his “conspiracy theories like the lie that President Obama is not a true American.” She then added: ""If he doesn't respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans?""
+
+But after Friday night's comments, Americans clearly saw that Clinton just went down the same road.
+
+At the same time, aside from admitting that she was generalizing, Clinton did empathize with many Trump voters “who feel that government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures. They are just desperate for change ….""
+
+These Trump supporters, Clinton added, “don't buy everything he says,” but “hold out some hope that their lives will be different” with him as president. “They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”",REAL
+6848,Democratic decay,"FBI reopens Hillary investigation – with evidence from Anthony Weiner sexting scandal Commenting Policy 
+We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, vulgarity, profanity, all caps, or discourteous behavior. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain a courteous and useful public environment where we can engage in reasonable discourse. Read more . 
+You may use HTML in your comments. Feel free to review the full list of allowed HTML here . Facebook Comments",FAKE
+7198,Comment on Election 2016: Playing a Game of Chicken With Nuclear Strategy by pretzelattack,"by Yves Smith 
+By Michael T. Klare, a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left . A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation . Follow him on Twitter at @mklare1. Originally published at TomDispatch 
+Once upon a time, when choosing a new president, a factor for many voters was the perennial question: “Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?” Of all the responsibilities of America’s top executive, none may be more momentous than deciding whether, and under what circumstances, to activate the “nuclear codes”— the secret alphanumeric messages that would inform missile officers in silos and submarines that the fearful moment had finally arrived to launch their intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) toward a foreign adversary, igniting a thermonuclear war. 
+Until recently in the post-Cold War world, however, nuclear weapons seemed to drop from sight, and that question along with it. Not any longer. In 2016, the nuclear issue is back big time, thanks both to the rise of Donald Trump ( including various unsettling comments he’s made about nuclear weapons) and actual changes in the global nuclear landscape. 
+With passions running high on both sides in this year’s election and rising fears about Donald Trump’s impulsive nature and Hillary Clinton’s hawkish one, it’s hardly surprising that the “nuclear button” question has surfaced repeatedly throughout the campaign. In one of the more pointed exchanges of the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton declared that Donald Trump lacked the mental composure for the job. “A man who can be provoked by a tweet,” she commented , “should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes.” Donald Trump has reciprocated by charging that Clinton is too prone to intervene abroad. “You’re going to end up in World War III over Syria,” he told reporters in Florida last month. 
+For most election observers, however, the matter of personal character and temperament has dominated discussions of the nuclear issue, with partisans on each side insisting that the other candidate is temperamentally unfit to exercise control over the nuclear codes. There is, however, a more important reason to worry about whose finger will be on that button this time around: at this very moment, for a variety of reasons, the “nuclear threshold”— the point at which some party to a “conventional” (non-nuclear) conflict chooses to employ atomic weapons — seems to be moving dangerously lower. 
+Not so long ago, it was implausible that a major nuclear power — the United States, Russia, or China — would consider using atomic weapons in any imaginable conflict scenario. No longer. Worse yet, this is likely to be our reality for years to come, which means that the next president will face a world in which a nuclear decision-making point might arrive far sooner than anyone would have thought possible just a year or two ago — with potentially catastrophic consequences for us all. 
+No less worrisome, the major nuclear powers (and some smaller ones) are all in the process of acquiring new nuclear arms, which could, in theory, push that threshold lower still. These include a variety of cruise missiles and other delivery systems capable of being used in “limited” nuclear wars — atomic conflicts that, in theory at least, could be confined to just a single country or one area of the world (say, Eastern Europe) and so might be even easier for decision-makers to initiate. The next president will have to decide whether the U.S. should actually produce weapons of this type and also what measures should be taken in response to similar decisions by Washington’s likely adversaries. 
+Lowering the Nuclear Threshold 
+During the dark days of the Cold War, nuclear strategists in the United States and the Soviet Union conjured up elaborate conflict scenarios in which military actions by the two superpowers and their allies might lead from, say, minor skirmishing along the Iron Curtain to full-scale tank combat to, in the end, the use of “battlefield” nuclear weapons, and then city-busting versions of the same to avert defeat. In some of these scenarios, strategists hypothesized about wielding “tactical” or battlefield weaponry — nukes powerful enough to wipe out a major tank formation, but not Paris or Moscow — and claimed that it would be possible to contain atomic warfare at such a devastating but still sub-apocalyptic level. (Henry Kissinger, for instance, made his reputation by preaching this lunatic doctrine in his first book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy .) Eventually, leaders on both sides concluded that the only feasible role for their atomic arsenals was to act as deterrents to the use of such weaponry by the other side. This was, of course, the concept of “ mutually assured destruction ,” or — in one of the most classically apt acronyms of all times: MAD. It would, in the end, form the basis for all subsequent arms control agreements between the two superpowers. 
+Anxiety over the escalatory potential of tactical nuclear weapons peaked in the 1970s when the Soviet Union began deploying the SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missile (capable of striking cities in Europe, but not the U.S.) and Washington responded with plans to deploy nuclear-armed, ground-launched cruise missiles and the Pershing-II ballistic missile in Europe. The announcement of such plans provoked massive antinuclear demonstrations across Europe and the United States. On December 8, 1987, at a time when worries had been growing about how a nuclear conflagration in Europe might trigger an all-out nuclear exchange between the superpowers, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. 
+That historic agreement — the first to eliminate an entire class of nuclear delivery systems — banned the deployment of ground-based cruise or ballistic missiles with a range of 500 and 5,500 kilometers and required the destruction of all those then in existence. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation inherited the USSR’s treaty obligations and pledged to uphold the INF along with other U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements. In the view of most observers, the prospect of a nuclear war between the two countries practically vanished as both sides made deep cuts in their atomic stockpiles in accordance with already existing accords and then signed others, including the New START , the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 2010. 
+Today, however, this picture has changed dramatically. The Obama administration has concluded that Russia has violated the INF treaty by testing a ground-launched cruise missile of prohibited range, and there is reason to believe that, in the not-too-distant future, Moscow might abandon that treaty altogether. Even more troubling, Russia has adopted a military doctrine that favors the early use of nuclear weapons if it faces defeat in a conventional war, and NATO is considering comparable measures in response. The nuclear threshold, in other words, is dropping rapidly. 
+Much of this is due, it seems, to Russian fears about its military inferiority vis-à-vis the West. In the chaotic years following the collapse of the USSR, Russian military spending plummeted and the size and quality of its forces diminished accordingly. In an effort to restore Russia’s combat capabilities, President Vladimir Putin launched a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar expansion and modernization program. The fruits of this effort were apparent in the Crimea and Ukraine in 2014, when Russian forces, however disguised, demonstrated better fighting skills and wielded better weaponry than in the Chechnya wars a decade earlier. Even Russian analysts acknowledge, however, that their military in its current state would be no match for American and NATO forces in a head-on encounter, given the West’s superior array of conventional weaponry. To fill the breach, Russian strategic doctrine now calls for the early use of nuclear weapons to offset an enemy’s superior conventional forces. 
+To put this in perspective, Russian leaders ardently believe that they are the victims of a U.S.-led drive by NATO to encircle their country and diminish its international influence. They point, in particular, to the build-up of NATO forces in the Baltic countries, involving the semi-permanent deployment of combat battalions in what was once the territory of the Soviet Union, and in apparent violation of promises made to Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not do so. As a result, Russia has been bolstering its defenses in areas bordering Ukraine and the Baltic states, and training its troops for a possible clash with the NATO forces stationed there. 
+This is where the nuclear threshold enters the picture. Fearing that it might be defeated in a future clash, its military strategists have called for the early use of tactical nuclear weapons, some of which no doubt would violate the INF Treaty, in order to decimate NATO forces and compel them to quit fighting. Paradoxically, in Russia, this is labeled a “ de-escalation ” strategy, as resorting to strategic nuclear attacks on the U.S. under such circumstances would inevitably result in Russia’s annihilation. On the other hand, a limited nuclear strike (so the reasoning goes) could potentially achieve success on the battlefield without igniting all-out atomic war. As Eugene Rumer of the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace explains, this strategy assumes that such supposedly “limited” nuclear strikes “will have a sobering effect on the enemy, which will then cease and desist.” 
+To what degree tactical nuclear weapons have been incorporated into Moscow’s official military doctrine remains unknown, given the degree of secrecy surrounding such matters. It is apparent, however, that the Russians have been developing the means with which to conduct such “limited” strikes. Of greatest concern to Western analysts in this regard is their deployment of the Iskander-M short-range ballistic missile, a modern version of the infamous Soviet-era “Scud” missile (used by Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988 and the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991). Said to have a range of 500 kilometers (just within the INF limit), the Iskander can carry either a conventional or a nuclear warhead. As a result, a targeted country or a targeted military could never be sure which type it might be facing (and might simply assume the worst). Adding to such worries, the Russians have deployed the Iskander in Kaliningrad, a tiny chunk of Russian territory wedged between Poland and Lithuania that just happens to put it within range of many western European cities. 
+In response, NATO strategists have discussed lowering the nuclear threshold themselves, arguing — ominously enough — that the Russians will only be fully dissuaded from employing their limited-nuclear-war strategy if they know that NATO has a robust capacity to do the same. At the very least, what’s needed, some of them claim , is a more frequent inclusion of nuclear-capable or dual-use aircraft in exercises on Russia’s frontiers to “signal” NATO’s willingness to resort to limited nuclear strikes, too. Again, such moves are not yet official NATO strategy, but it’s clear that senior officials are weighing them seriously. 
+Just how all of this might play out in a European crisis is, of course, unknown, but both sides in an increasingly edgy standoff are coming to accept that nuclear weapons might have a future military role, which is, of course, a recipe for almost unimaginable escalation and disaster of an apocalyptic sort. This danger is likely to become more pronounced in the years ahead because both Washington and Moscow seem remarkably intent on developing and deploying new nuclear weapons designed with just such needs in mind. 
+The New Nuclear Armaments 
+Both countries are already in the midst of ambitious and extremely costly efforts to “ modernize ” their nuclear arsenals. Of all the weapons now being developed, the two generating the most anxiety in terms of that nuclear threshold are a new Russian ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) and an advanced U.S. air-launched cruise missile (ALCM). Unlike ballistic missiles, which exit the Earth’s atmosphere before returning to strike their targets, such cruise missiles remain within the atmosphere throughout their flight. 
+American officials claim that the Russian GLCM, reportedly now being deployed, is of a type outlawed by the INF Treaty. Without providing specifics, the State Department indicated in a 2014 memo that it had “a range capability of 500 km [kilometers] to 5,500 km,” which would indeed put it in violation of that treaty by allowing Russian combat forces to launch nuclear warheads against cities throughout Europe and the Middle East in a “limited” nuclear war. 
+The GLCM is likely to prove one of the most vexing foreign policy issues the next president will face. So far, the White House has been reluctant to press Moscow too hard, fearing that the Russians might respond by exiting the INF Treaty altogether and so eliminate remaining constraints on its missile program. But many in Congress and among Washington’s foreign policy elite are eager to see the next occupant of the Oval Office take a tougher stance if the Russians don’t halt deployment of the missile, threatening Moscow with more severe economic sanctions or moving toward countermeasures like the deployment of enhanced anti-missile systems in Europe. The Russians would, in turn, undoubtedly perceive such moves as threats to their strategic deterrent forces and so an invitation for further weapons acquisitions, setting off a fresh round in the long-dormant Cold War nuclear arms race. 
+On the American side, the weapon of immediate concern is a new version of the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile, usually carried by B-52 bombers. Also known as the Long-Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO), it is, like the Iskander-M, expected to be deployed in both nuclear and conventional versions, leaving those on the potential receiving end unsure what might be heading their way. In other words, as with the Iskander-M, the intended target might assume the worst in a crisis, leading to the early use of nuclear weapons. Put another way, such missiles make for twitchy trigger fingers and are likely to lead to a heightened risk of nuclear war, which, once started, might in turn take Washington and Moscow right up the escalatory ladder to a planetary holocaust. 
+No wonder former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry called on President Obama to cancel the ALCM program in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece. “Because they… come in both nuclear and conventional variants,” he wrote, “cruise missiles are a uniquely destabilizing type of weapon.” And this issue is going to fall directly into the lap of the next president. 
+The New Nuclear Era 
+Whoever is elected on November 8th, we are evidently all headed into a world in which Trumpian-style itchy trigger fingers could be the norm. It already looks like both Moscow and Washington will contribute significantly to this development — and they may not be alone. In response to Russian and American moves in the nuclear arena, China is reported to be developing a “ hypersonic glide vehicle ,” a new type of nuclear warhead better able to evade anti-missile defenses — something that, at a moment of heightened crisis, might make a nuclear first strike seem more attractive to Washington. And don’t forget Pakistan, which is developing its own short-range “tactical” nuclear missiles, increasing the risk of the quick escalation of any future Indo-Pakistani confrontation to a nuclear exchange. (To put such “regional” dangers in perspective, a local nuclear war in South Asia could cause a global nuclear winter and, according to one study , possibly kill a billion people worldwide, thanks to crop failures and the like.) 
+And don’t forget North Korea, which is now testing a nuclear-armed ICBM, the Musudan, intended to strike the Western United States. That prompted a controversial decision in Washington to deploy THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-missile batteries in South Korea (something China bitterly opposes), as well as the consideration of other countermeasures, including undoubtedly scenarios involving first strikes against the North Koreans. 
+It’s clear that we’re on the threshold of a new nuclear era: a time when the actual use of atomic weapons is being accorded greater plausibility by military and political leaders globally, while war plans are being revised to allow the use of such weapons at an earlier stage in future armed clashes. 
+As a result, the next president will have to grapple with nuclear weapons issues — and possible nuclear crises — in a way unknown since the Cold War era. Above all else, this will require both a cool head and a sufficient command of nuclear matters to navigate competing pressures from allies, the military, politicians, pundits, and the foreign policy establishment without precipitating a nuclear conflagration. On the face of it, that should disqualify Donald Trump. When questioned on nuclear issues in the first debate, he exhibited a striking ignorance of the most basic aspects of nuclear policy. But even Hillary Clinton, for all her experience as secretary of state, is likely to have a hard time grappling with the pressures and dangers that are likely to arise in the years ahead, especially given that her inclination is to toughen U.S. policy toward Russia. 
+In other words, whoever enters the Oval Office, it may be time for the rest of us to take up those antinuclear signs long left to molder in closets and memories, and put some political pressure on leaders globally to avoid strategies and weapons that would make human life on this planet so much more precarious than it already is. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+8050,Snowden’s former employer hires ex-FBI director to review security after 2nd data breach,"Snowden’s former employer hires ex-FBI director to review security after 2nd data... Snowden’s former employer hires ex-FBI director to review security after 2nd data breach By 0 144 
+Booz Allen Hamilton has hired an ex-FBI director to launch an external review of security and staffing procedures after an employee stole up to 500 million pages of data, marking the second NSA breach in just three years since the Snowden case. 
+Craig Veith, Booz Allen vice president for external relations, said on Thursday that Robert Mueller, who became director of the FBI one week before the 9/11 attacks and led the agency for 12 years, will conduct “a fair, objective and thorough review,” according to the Wall Street Journal. 
+Read more 
+The announcement came after Harold Martin III, a former Booz Allen employee and US Navy veteran, was charged in what is believed to be one of the largest classified data breaches in US history. 
+Edward Snowden’s case is likely to pale in comparison to that of Martin’s when it comes to the number of documents stolen. Prosecutors said that Martin had taken as many as 500 million pages of top secret information, which equals 50 terabytes of data, along with six more boxes of files, many of which were reportedly left open in his house or car. 
+The man, already dubbed ‘the second Snowden’, had nothing to do with blowing the whistle on NSA surveillance activities, his lawyers argued. Instead, they described Martin as a “voracious reader committed to being excellent at his work,” according to the Washington Post. 
+Martin’s attorney, James Wyda, told a US magistrate judge last week that gathering terabytes of classified information “began as an effort to be better at his job,” adding that he is “a compulsive hoarder” rather than a “traitor.” 
+Prosecutors insisted, however, that Martin remain in custody, alleging they found the names of US intelligence operatives in the files stolen by the former Booz Allen employee, citing a particular threat to the safety of officers working undercover abroad. 
+Commenting on Mueller’s appointment, Booz Allen vice president Veith said that “we are an organization that prides itself on constant learning. If there are areas where Booz Allen can improve, we will address them.” 
+After leaving the FBI in 2013, Mueller became a visiting professor at Stanford University where he focused on cyber-security issues. 
+Questions, however, still remain about how these breaches could happen twice in just three years despite the company’s assurances of learning lessons and improving internal control after Snowden’s revelations that shed light on NSA wiretapping activities in the US and other countries. 
+Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent, told RT earlier in October that the number of US citizens having top secret clearances or access to classified information “has soared” through the years. 
+“The last I heard it is something like five million Americans have been cleared for classified information. So, any time you get that large of a number, you are going to have all kinds of potential. And it doesn’t matter contractors or government, both of them,” she said. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+2659,"Report on hiring, quits brightens labor market picture","Employers hired more workers in March even as the number of job openings fell slightly, the Labor Department said Tuesday.
+
+The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey points to a stronger labor market two months ago than another government report suggested Friday.
+
+Labor said last week that employers added a net 85,000 jobs in March, including hiring and layoffs, as payroll growth sputtered amid frigid weather and a pullback in drilling by oil producers, among other factors. That was the lowest total since June 2012. Job gains rebounded to 223,000 in April.
+
+Tuesday's JOLTS report provides a more granular view of employee movements and shows a more encouraging picture. The number of hires, for example, increased by 56,000 to about 5.1 million.
+
+Hiring increased in retail, professional and business services, and leisure and hospitality. It declined in construction, manufacturing and education and health services.
+
+Part of the reason net job gains were weak is that layoffs and discharges also picked up, rising by 105,000, or 6.2%, to 1.8 million. At least some of those job cuts were in the oil industry, which continues to shed workers in response to low crude prices.
+
+Meanwhile, about 2.8 million Americans quit their jobs — the most since April 2008 — up from 2.7 million in February. A large number of quits is a sign of a dynamic labor market in which workers feel confident enough to leave one job for another.
+
+Overall, the report ""helps ease concerns that the weak 85,000 (job gain total) for March was the start of a new trend,"" says Barclays Capital economist Jesse Hurwitz. ""Confidence remains intact.""
+
+Less encouraging is that job openings fell by 150,000 to 5 million after hitting a 14-year high in February. But economist Daniel Silver of JPMorgan Chase notes that openings were still up about 18% from the year-ago period.
+
+Another measure of the labor market's progress is that there were 1.7 unemployed workers for each job opening in March, down sharply from a high of 6.7 in 2009.
+
+That shows the labor market is continuing to tighten, aiding job seekers, though at a slower pace than last year, Hurwitz says. He expects job gains to pick up to a solid monthly average of 200,000 to 225,000 for the rest of 2015. That would mark an uptick from the 184,000 monthly pace in the first quarter but a slowdown from last year's brisk clip of 260,000.
+
+Last week, Labor said that employers added 223,000 jobs in April.",REAL
+3199,"Reuters-Ipsos Poll: Trump, Bush in Virtual Dead Heat","Trump, a billionaire real estate developer, had the support of 15.8 percent of respondents in the online poll of self-identified Republicans compared to 16.1 percent for Bush, a former Florida governor.
+
+They were followed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at 9.5 percent, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul at 8.1 percent, surgeon and author Ben Carson at 7.2 percent and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at 5.8 percent.
+
+However, given a choice of three candidates - Bush, Trump or Florida Sen. Marco Rubio - Bush had a comfortable lead at 42 percent among the respondents in the Reuters-Ipsos Republican poll, compared to 28.4 percent for Trump and 20 percent for Rubio.
+
+In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remained in front with the support of 48.3 percent of self-identified Democrats polled, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders continuing to inch up, at 22.9 percent, and Vice President Joe Biden, who has not entered the race, at 10.7 percent.
+
+Numerous businesses including NBC Universal, Univision, Macy's, Serta and NASCAR have cut ties with Trump since he accused Mexico, in his June 16 speech announcing his candidacy, of sending rapists and other criminals into the United States. Trump on July 6 added that illegal border-crossers from Mexico are carrying ""tremendous infectious disease.""
+
+The controversy over Trump's immigration comments has dominated news coverage of the Republican campaign in recent weeks, and he has climbed in the Reuters-Ipsos poll to draw essentially even with Bush. On June 30, the poll had Bush at 16.9 percent and Trump at 12.8 percent.
+
+A hard line against illegal immigration may find a receptive audience in Republican primary voters, with U.S. conservatives often accusing President Barack Obama of doing too little to secure America's border with Mexico.
+
+Trump also has accused Bush of being weak on illegal immigration, bringing Bush's Mexican-born wife into the debate. ""If my wife were from Mexico, I think I would have a soft spot for people from Mexico. I can understand that,"" Trump said in a CNN interview.
+
+Trump has increasingly come under fire from some of his rivals for the Republican nomination including Bush.
+
+""Everybody has a belief that we should control our borders,"" Bush said last week. ""But to make these extraordinarily kind of ugly comments is not reflective of the Republican Party. Trump is wrong on this.""
+
+In the Reuters/Ipsos poll of the Republican race, 404 self-identified Republicans age 18 or over were questioned from July 6-10. The poll had a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 5.7 percentage points.
+
+In the Reuters/Ipsos poll of the Democratic race, 504 self-identified Democrats age 18 or over were questioned over the same time period, with a credibility interval of 5.1 percentage points.",REAL
+2986,House Negotiators Nearing Deal to Curb NSA Data Collection Powers,"House negotiators are close to a deal that would effectively end the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk data collection program, and congressional aides believe the bill is likely to win the endorsement of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.), who opposed the legislation last year.",REAL
+8313,"Huma may have violated ‘legal obligation’ regarding classified info, FOIA request shows","Print 
+Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer told CNN’s Michael Smerconish Saturday that Huma Abedin signed an OF-109 disclosure form when she left the State Department in 2013, signifying she understood the “legal obligation” to “turn over all classified information and to further safeguard any further information that could be disclosed.” 
+“Let’s put this in context,” Spicer told Smerconish. “Hillary Clinton initially said she turned over everything that was relevant. The only thing she didn’t were emails regarding yoga and Chelsea’s wedding.” 
+“We know that to be false.” 
+“Further, when Huma Abedin left the State Department they have to file a form of OF-109,” he continued. “It’s a separation agreement that states simply people understand when leaving government that they are maintaining no classified information, they understand their legal obligation to protect further classified information and safeguard any potential disclosures of that.”",FAKE
+9395,Someone Just Donated $2.5 Million to Bail Out Everyone Arrested at Standing Rock,"By Nick Bernabe 
+Following the recent mass arrests of 141 people at the Dakota Access Pipeline construction site located near Standing Rock, North Dakota, an anonymous donor just donated $2.5 million to bail out everyone who was arrested at the protests. 
+The news came after Tamara Francis-Fourkiller, a tribal leader from the Caddo Nation tribe in Caddo County, Oklahoma, was arrested at Standing Rock. Francis-Fourkiller was released after spending two days in jail, but her family says she was just an innocent observer in the clashes between militarized law enforcement and Native American activists, or “water protectors.” 
+[ UPDATE 11/1 4:35 pm EST: A statement from Red Owl Legal Collective/National Lawyers Guild that is advising Standing Rock has issued a statement saying the $2.5 million has not been received yet. We are waiting on confirmation from the Caddo Nation tribe.] 
+According to local news affiliate News On 6 : 
+Family members of Caddo Nation chairwoman Tamara Francis-Fourkiller said an anonymous donor paid $2.5 million late Saturday afternoon to release everyone arrested on Thursday at the Dakota Access Pipeline site. They said, however, that Francis-Fourkiller should not have been arrested in the first place. 
+Though the donor who sent the $2.5 million remains anonymous, it appears the person is connected to the Caddo Nation tribe in some way .",FAKE
+5744,What Does Washington ‘Plan B’ in Syria Really Mean? | The Vineyard of the Saker,"10 Comments on ""What Does Washington ‘Plan B’ in Syria Really Mean?"" Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. vot tak 4 hours 7 minutes ago 
+If there is some hesitancy in the israeli-american-eu terrorist ops in Syria, something which I’ve not seen evidence for, I think this may be due to the zionazis being unsure they will be able to force a clinton regime on their american colony. If Trumps wins, they run the risk of exposure if he decides to not go along with israel’s war against Syria. 
+Western Countries Use Militants to Achieve Own Goals in Syria – Assad’s Aide 
+“The United States and its western partners are using militants to achieve their goals in Syria and stand behind the collapse of the initiatives on peace settlement, Syrian presidential adviser Bouthaina Shaaban said Saturday.” 1 ",FAKE
+3298,"McConnell, after his no-shutdowns pledge, quickly finds himself boxed in","Less than six weeks on his powerful Capitol Hill perch, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is on the verge of watching one of his most important promises — to never again shut down the government — go up in smoke.
+
+Lawmakers on Friday began a 10-day hiatus, leaving them just four days when they return to pass funding for the Department of Homeland Security to avoid the shutdown of a key federal agency. The DHS budget fight follows an effort among GOP conservatives to roll back President Obama’s recent executive orders on immigration.
+
+Conservatives are adamant that the security agency should be funded only if the legislation also overrules Obama’s orders, which prevent the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants. But Senate Democrats, even the few who oppose Obama’s moves, have blocked the House-passed legislation with repeated filibusters.
+
+That has left McConnell trapped inside a legislative box that he had vowed to avoid — and one that for the previous four years his close ally, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), frequently wandered into without an exit strategy.
+
+McConnell was determined not to repeat those mistakes.
+
+“Let me make it clear: There will be no government shutdowns,” McConnell said the day after he won reelection and a Republican rout gave his party the Senate majority.
+
+But this week, McConnell declared the Senate stuck, and in need of Boehner’s help. The speaker was not in a helping mood. Boehner said he has no interest in passing legislation through the House that could draw Democratic support in the Senate.
+
+“The House has done its job,” Boehner told reporters Thursday. “We’ve spoken. And now it’s up to the Senate to do their job.”
+
+A shutdown of one agency would not cause nearly the same disruptions as the October 2013 shutdown of the federal government, which resulted in national parks closing, furloughs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and a general sense of disgust with Washington dysfunction. If no deal is reached, the Department of Homeland Security would deem many workers essential — particularly those overseeing border security, airline safety, disaster responses and domestic terror assessments — but even those federal workers would be going without an assurance of being paid.
+
+Many Republicans fear that public reaction would mirror ­October 2013, when Republicans tried to force Obama to accept a funding plan that would have gutted his landmark health-care law. That shutdown cratered public support for Republicans, leaving them in a hole that took them almost a year to climb out of and McConnell adamant about not repeating the mistake.
+
+In an interview just before he formally took over as majority leader, McConnell said his biggest political goal was a productive governance that was “not scary” to the public. He said his aim was to boost the Republican 2016 presidential nominee’s chances. Some Republicans fear that Democrats would win a DHS-shutdown fight by portraying the GOP majority as recklessly endangering national security over a political fight with Obama.
+
+“I don’t think a shutdown of the department whose purpose is to secure our homeland is a good idea for anybody,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the most outspoken critic of the 2013 strategy that led to a 16-day shutdown, said Thursday.
+
+Some McConnell advisers suggest that a brief lapse in funding for one federal agency would not break his no-shutdowns promise. McConnell made no public mention of the DHS showdown, sticking to his comments that Boehner will have to make the next move.
+
+“I think it’s clear we can’t go forward in the Senate unless you all have heard something I haven’t,” McConnell said. “And so the next move, obviously, is up to the House.”
+
+The year-end funding showdown in December was built around the principle of avoiding this kind of brinkmanship, with Boehner and McConnell scuttling the possibility of a broad shutdown by agreeing to pass 11 of the 12 annual bills that fund the federal agencies.
+
+The DHS was left out because of opposition to the executive action Obama announced deferring deportations of millions of illegal immigrants. The DHS, the agency in charge of immigration and border policy, was given a short-term extension of funds until Feb. 27, buying time for McConnell and Boehner to come up with an escape plan — one that has yet to appear.
+
+“I have every confidence we will meet the deadline, one way or the other,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), McConnell’s top lieutenant on the leadership team. “Just how, I can’t tell you right this minute.”
+
+Democrats said even a small-scale shutdown so soon on McConnell’s watch would hurt him politically. They believe it would set a precedent, with the far right wing pushing him around in the same manner that House conservatives have backed Boehner into corners he wanted to avoid.
+
+“I think it’s a big problem,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the second-ranking Democrat in the chamber. “They said: We’re going to show we can run the trains on time and we are, quote, not scary. So if they start off by jeopardizing funding for the premier agency for America’s defense against terrorism — not a good start.”
+
+There is time to avert a shutdown, but it almost certainly involves capitulation to the Democrats.
+
+One possibility is to remove the language on immigration and pass a “clean” funding bill, which would probably prompt the biggest revolt from conservative activists. A second option is to pass another short-term extension of DHS funding for a few more weeks or months.
+
+The latter idea, more palatable to conservatives, puts off for another day the same predicament the leadership finds itself in now.
+
+A third option is to dig in for a fight and let funding dry up for an agency that is seen as essential to protecting the nation.
+
+Although that is anathema to many Republicans, the idea has gained traction among leading establishment conservatives.
+
+“Both sides run a risk here,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said. He argued that Republicans should leave in place Obama’s order that protected children from deportation but instead dig in against the more expansive 2014 order that extended the protections to several million adult illegal immigrants, even if it means a lapse in funding for DHS.
+
+“The Democrats are wrong here to say, ‘I’m not going to fund DHS, because I insist that President Obama get all he wants when it comes to executive amnesty,’ ” Graham said. “I think that is a huge mistake.”
+
+McConnell, stoic in public, is the same way in private, senators say. He has not betrayed any worry about the pending deadline.
+
+“I think everybody’s worried about it,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), who is the longest-
+
+serving member of the GOP caucus and has served with McConnell for 30 years. “McConnell’s a pro. He doesn’t show his feelings.”
+
+Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), the conservative Democrat who opposes Obama’s immigration orders, said McConnell needs to convince Boehner that they have to pass the funding bill without any of the policy conditions and instead send over a discrete piece of legislation that would repeal the presidential orders.
+
+“If they don’t have me, where do they go?” said Manchin, the Democrat who most frequently partners with Republicans.
+
+“The bottom line,” he said, “is they could probably clean this up very quickly.”",REAL
+10202,Russell Brand’s Back on ‘The Trews’ and He’s Got Quite a Bit to Say About the U.S. Elections (Video),"$23 Russell Brand’s Back on ‘The Trews’ and He’s Got Quite a Bit to Say About the U.S. Elections (Video) Posted on Nov 2, 2016 
+The comedian and political activist reveals his views on both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, neither of which he thinks should be president, and posits that both of their campaigns, with their ultimately meaningless slogans, are nothing but reality TV.",FAKE
+9252,UFO over the East Valley here in AZ last night.,UFO over the East Valley here in AZ last night. page: 1 link I couldn't take any pictures I live in West Mesa and the lights were way East. Over Queen Creek area. Lots of my friends and family started calling me right when the lights started happening so I went out to my balcony and there they were. Some people got some pretty good videos. I know some people will say they are flares from a plane but if they are flares why do they dispensary right away. Typically if its a flare it will stay ignited for a short period of time. Kinda nuts. I only witnessed the later 3 lights when it was dark out. It was pretty cool to see and stopped soon after it started. What does ATS think??? edit on 26-10-2016 by PraetorianAZ because: (no reason given),FAKE
+10319,Putin: Russia Is Not Going To Attack Anyone,"Complaining about Western “hysteria” surrounding repeated predictions of Russian military attacks on NATO member nations, Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to resolve two solid years of predictions to that effect with a straightforward assurance that “Russia is not going to attack anyone.” 
+Via AntiMedia 
+
+Putin accused Western nations of having “mythical, dreamt-up problems,” and insisted the idea that Russia was going to attack the West was “simply stupid and unrealistic.” He added that he believes the idea is being played up to justify bigger military spending.
+The Russian president also sought to dismiss allegations that he is plotting to rig the US elections to his own benefit, noting that the US is a great power and not some banana republic with an easily manipulated political system. Russia has repeatedly denied involvement in such plots.
+NATO has played up the Russian threat to justify sending over 40,000 ground troops to the Russian border, with ever-growing numbers announced all the time. Such predictions started after the ouster of a pro-Russian government in Ukraine led to a civil war in that country’s east, with NATO military leaders repeatedly predicting Russian tanks rolling across Ukraine into NATO countries.
+",FAKE
+4153,How to Tell Debt Facts From Political Hype,"Recent remarks by Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, have turned the spotlight back to the U.S.'s $18 trillion federal government debt. The attention follows a period of substantial decline in the budget deficit that countered claims the country was heading rapidly toward debt Armageddon.
+
+Here are key facts to remember as you assess what is likely to be a loud and contentious political conversation on debt:
+
+Rather than a narrow focus on federal debt, the presidential candidates need to lead a national economic debate on the comprehensive growth strategy that Congress should be implementing. Otherwise, political polarization on Capitol Hill will  further undermine the country’s growth performance, erode future potential, and turn debt from mere fodder for political sound bites to a hard-to-solve problem for future generations.",REAL
+5042,Trump on Twitter: Hillary is 'Brainwashed',"Donald Trump took to Twitter Saturday morning where he launched his latest attacks on Hillary Clinton, calling her ""brainwashed"" after she acknowledged that she ""short-circuited"" when making a misstatement.
+
+When speaking to members of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in Washington Friday, Clinton sought to ""clarify and explain"" a statement she made that FBI Director James Comey said that her previous answers about her private email use were ""truthful.""
+
+""I may have short-circuited [her answers] and for that I will try to clarify,"" Clinton said.
+
+Trump not only labeled her speech as ""habitual lying,"" but he also took to Twitter noting that it's proof she is not fit to be president:",REAL
+2927,Poll: Most disapprove of Obama handling of ISIS,"Washington (CNN) Americans are increasingly unhappy with President Barack Obama's handling of ISIS, and a growing share of the nation believes that fight is going badly, according to a new CNN/ORC survey released Monday.
+
+Fifty-seven percent disapprove of his handling of foreign affairs more broadly, and 54% disapprove of how the President is handling terrorism. Another 60% rate Obama negatively on his handling of electronic national security.
+
+The declining approval ratings for Obama on national security come as a weekend of international turmoil further underscores the growing threats abroad.
+
+Obama issued a statement condemning the killing of the Christians on Sunday night, though Obama's Republican opponents have consistently made the case that the growing Islamic State threat is exacerbated by what they see as his weak leadership.
+
+In the poll, Americans increasingly believe the U.S. military action against ISIS is going badly, with 58% saying so in the latest survey, up from 49% who said the fight wasn't going well in October.
+
+Even among Democrats, nearly half — 46% — say things aren't going well in the battle against ISIS.
+
+And about half of respondents, 51%, say they trust the President as Commander-in-Chief of the military.
+
+But with ISIS affiliates continuing to commit brutal, gruesome murders and multiple terrorist attacks abroad grabbing international headlines over the past few months, support for sending ground troops to Iraq and Syria to confront the threat appears to be growing.
+
+The survey suggests Americans are warming up to the idea of sending ground troops to combat the terrorist organization.
+
+In November, just 43% supported deploying ground troops, while 55% of Americans opposed it; now the number in support has ticked up to 47%, the highest level of support yet measured, with just half of Americans opposed.
+
+Still, the parties have become more polarized on the prospect since November, with 61% of Democrats opposed and a similar majority of Republicans supportive of the prospect, an eight-point increase. Independents, meanwhile, are split, with 48% in favor and 50% opposed.
+
+The prospect of sending in ground troops remains a sticking point for both congressional Democrats and Republicans in the debate over Obama's Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which would give him legal authority to combat ISIS.
+
+But the AUMF, and Obama's decision to go to Congress for the official authority to continue battling ISIS, is widely popular, according to the new poll.
+
+Seventy-eight percent of Americans say Congress should give Obama the authority to fight ISIS, a slight decline from 82% who supported it in December. A similarly large majority say Obama was right to ask Congress for the authority, rather than proceeding with the battle unilaterally.
+
+The survey was conducted among 1,027 adult Americans from Feb. 12-15, and has a margin of sampling error of 3%.",REAL
+10249,The Trump – Epstein Rape Lawsuit,"Posted on November 3, 2016 by Michael Collins 
+Donald Trump’s post election experience may be as bad or worse than the nightmare he hopes to visit on Hillary Clinton, perhaps worse. 
+Jane Doe ( proceeding under a pseudonym ) filed a civil lawsuit against Donald Trump and convicted sex offender, Jeremy Epstein, for multiple acts of sexual and physical abuse, which occurred when the defendant was 13 years old. Specifically, the the plaintiff charged the defendants with: 
+“Rape, sexual misconduct, criminal sexual acts, sexual abuse, forcible touching, assault, battery, intentional, and reckless inflection of emotional distress, duress, false imprisonment, and defamation.” Jane Doe v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein . 
+Judge Ronnie Abrams scheduled a December 16, 2016 pretrial conference to set a timeline for the case in the U.S District Court, Southern District in Manhattan. 
+The complaint argues for the use of Jane Doe rather than the plaintiff’s actual name: “This litigation involves matters that are highly sensitive and of a personal nature, and identification of Plaintiff would pose a risk of retaliatory physical harm to her and to others.” 
+The heart of Jane Doe’s complaint is summarized below: 
+“Plaintiff was enticed by promises of money and a modeling career to attend a series of parties, with other similarly situated minor females, held at a New York City residence that was being used by Defendant Jeffrey Epstein. … 
+“Defendant Trump initiated sexual contact with Plaintiff at four different parties. On the fourth and final sexual encounter with Defendant Trump, Defendant Trump tied Plaintiff to a bed, exposed himself to Plaintiff, and then proceeded to forcibly rape Plaintiff. During the course of this savage sexual attack, Plaintiff loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop but with no effect. Defendant Trump responded to Plaintiff’s pleas by violently striking Plaintiff in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted. Exhs. A and B.” Jane Doe v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein . 
+The complaint against Epstein describes behavior similar to that of Trump. 
+Epstein – a convicted sex offender 
+Palm Beach, Florida investigators produced a probable cause affidavit in 2006 that documented Jeffrey Epstein’s “unlawful sexual activity with” 4 minors and “lewd and lascivious molestation.” The crimes took place at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion where he entertained lavishly. 
+Epstein hired Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershhowitz and former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr as his defense team. Even though FBI and other investigations accumulated a victim list of 40 underage girls in Florida , the case was settled in 2008 when Epstein pleaded guilty to one count of soliciting prostitution from underage girls. He was sentenced to 18 months, served 13, and had to register as a risk level 3-sex offender in New York (the highest level). 
+Trump – brags about close friendship with Epstein 
+Before Epstein’s legal problems, Trump did a 2002 interview in New York Magazine in which he described a long-term relationship with Epstein. 
+“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” New York Magazine 
+Trump had Epstein at a guest at his Florida mansion and Epstein had Trump as a guest as his estates in Florida and New York. 
+Will the case go forward if Trump wins the election? 
+If the case is not dismissed, the scheduling conference on the December 16 will outline various tasks and dates over the first few months of 2017, including the dates for the inauguration of the 45 th President of the United States. If that happens to be Donald Trump, there is nothing to prevent the trial from going forward. The Supreme Court decision in the Bill Clinton – Paula Jones case established the right of citizens to sue presidents in civil court for acts committed prior to taking office. 
+If the case moves forward, the evidence in the exhibits and subsequent information, the quality of representation at trial, and the judge and jury are the central factors that will determine if a sitting president or losing presidential candidate will do some serious time for the heinous crimes alleged. Unlike the original Epstein case, the visibility for this matter is so high, backroom deals for the rich and famous will be virtually impossible.",FAKE
+3875,White House hits 'AWOL' Congress for shirking AUMF,"Lawmakers may have let President Barack Obama's request for the authorization of military force against ISIS gather dust, but the White House insisted Friday it hasn't given up on the measure, which was introduced in February.
+
+White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest hammered lawmakers -- both Democrats and Republicans -- who have stalled on the war powers resolution, saying the delay has been a ""grave disappointment"" to the White House.
+
+And he characterized Congress' unwillingness to vote on the plan as ironic, given the steps lawmakers have taken to insert themselves into another of Obama's key foreign policy issues, a nuclear deal with Iran.
+
+""The call from this administration to leaders in Congress to do their jobs has for some reason fallen on deaf ears,"" Earnest said. ""The United States Congress has been essentially AWOL when it comes to that debate.""
+
+The White House convened multiple discussions on the AUMF with lawmakers before presenting the authorization measure two months ago. Since then, the White House has sent top national security officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, to brief members of Congress on the plan. But their explanations for the AUMF didn't work to assuage anxious members of Obama's own party, who worry a vote for the war authorization could lead to another American ground war in the Middle East. Republicans on Capitol Hill blame Democrats for the standstill. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma, said on C-SPAN last week, ""The president is essentially a war president without a war party."" Cole, along with a bipartisan group of 30 other lawmakers, addressed a letter to House Speaker John Boehner last week insisting he bring the AUMF up for debate. But opposition to the plan runs deep in both parties. Republicans say the plan doesn't give the president enough power to go after ISIS terrorists, and they argue for less restrictive language. The measure that Obama presented to lawmakers in February would limit his authority to wage a military campaign against ISIS to three years and does not authorize ""enduring offensive ground combat operations."" But it doesn't include any limitations on where U.S. forces can combat ISIS should the terror group move outside Iraq or Syria. The White House points out their document was merely a starting point -- and claim they're open to negotiation. Administration officials say they're committed to the absence of geographic limitations, but are open to altering the time limit and ground troop provision. As Congressional action on the AUMF continues to elude Obama, his military is continuing its air campaign against ISIS. The White House claims it already has the authority to target Islamic State terrorists using the 2001 war powers resolution that was passed after the September 11 attacks. But Obama has said a new authorization is necessarily to put forward a united front in the fight against the Islamic State. Ultimately, the White House says it's exhausted its options in pushing the measure forward. ""I think we've done just about everything that is imaginable that an executive branch can do to try to move a law through the Congress,"" Earnest said. ""The president has higher expectations for elected leaders."" This birth certificate from the Halab Health Department records information for babies born in the ISIS-created province or ""wilayat."" Mothers are reminded how important children are to God and are then instructed to follow a vaccination timetable against polio, measles and other ailments. This notice declares that the University of Mosul will open on October 18, 2014, but that the philosophy and archeology departments, among others, will remain closed. Staff are told to replace all mentions of the ""Republic of Iraq"" with ""Islamic State."" A schedule for final exams at the Mosul College of Medicine shows areas to be tested included students' knowledge of obstetrics, parasites, X-rays and ethics. This notice criticizes the greed of some fishermen and lays out new rules, including no fishing during spawning season and no use of electrical current to catch fish, as it harms other creatures, too. This document poses a question on playing foosball. Readers are told that it's OK, provided that there is no gambling, no cursing or resentment and that the figurines have no heads. This message quotes the Quran, and speaks in favor of charity and helping those in need. It then details how rents above 100,000 dinars (about $85) must be cut.",REAL
+4346,Hillary Clinton To Announce Presidential Bid On Sunday,"Updated at 11 a.m. ET
+
+Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will officially announce her intention to seek the 2016 Democratic nomination for president on Sunday afternoon, ending years of speculation over her plans to pursue the Oval Office, NPR has learned.
+
+People familiar with the campaign plan say that Clinton, long presumed to be the Democratic front-runner even without a formal announcement, will make the announcement possibly via a video and social media, some sources suggest.
+
+""So far, Mrs. Clinton faces scant competition for the Democratic nomination. Polls barely register former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley or former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb. One potential heavyweight — Vice President Joe Biden — has said he is considering a campaign but has taken few apparent steps to prepare for one. ""On Thursday, former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee surprisingly joined the field, and offered a biting critique from the left of Mrs. Clinton's record on foreign policy. 'The biggest question will be: What exactly did you accomplish in your four years as secretary of state?' he said in an interview. 'There was a lot of dust in the air. Not many concrete accomplishments.' ""
+
+Announcing now gives an edge to Clinton, who lost a bitter contest to then-Sen. Barack Obama for her party's nomination in 2008. The head start would give her fundraising team more time to generate the hundreds of millions of dollars typically necessary to mount a successful presidential bid.
+
+Following the Sunday announcement, Clinton is ""expected to travel to the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa early next week for campaign events. Democratic strategists and advisers spoke on condition of anonymity because Clinton has not yet finalized all aspects of her announcement plan,"" The Washington Post writes.
+
+NPR's Mara Liasson reports that Clinton is ""expected to stay [in Iowa] for at least a month of small, unscripted, events with small groups of voters.""",REAL
+5647,Social Justice Warriors Vow to Call the Police on People Wearing “Offensive” Halloween Costumes,"Social Justice Warriors Vow to Call the Police on People Wearing “Offensive” Halloween Costumes Zombie outfits or sexy Pocahontas costumes could get you in trouble Paul Joseph Watson - October 27, 2016 Comments 
+Social justice warriors have vowed to call the police on people wearing “offensive” Halloween costumes! 
+If you thought the ‘triggering’ last year was bad, wait until you hear about what’s happening this October 31st. 
+If you do celebrate Halloween, please make sure you wear the most tasteless, offensive costume imaginable. 
+Please share this video! https://youtu.be/H2ySty3ONkY 
+SUBSCRIBE on YouTube:",FAKE
+8349,The Only Way to Save the World is to Save Yourself,"Waking Times 
+“We are not here to save the world. We are here to save ourselves, but in doing so, we save the world.” ~ Joseph Campbell 
+As I write this, some shit is probably going down at Standing Rock . For anybody awake to the tyranny at hand, the events of the last few months have weighed heavily on our hearts. But the thing people need to remember is this: We’re all Native Americans. If you were born in the USA, and you love the land you were born on (which includes the entire fucking planet, by the way!), you are a Native American. You are a Native Earthling, for shit’s sake. It’s all connected. Their fight is our fight. Skin color is irrelevant. Where you were born or where you migrated to is irrelevant. The only thing relevant is this: are you for freedom, life, cooperation, and love; or are you for statism, profit, divisiveness, and violence? As Derrick Jensen said, “We are the governors as well as the governed. This means that all of us who care about life need to force accountability onto those who do not.” 
+The media (even the alternative media, mind you) is trying to spin this as a land issue, or a Native American issue. But it’s not. This is a freedom versus tyranny issue. This is an anarchy versus statism issue. This is a life versus entropy issue. All land is free. We just need to quit focusing on imaginary lines and think cooperation first, competition second. All human beings are free. We just need to quit being obsequious to state-driven authority and start asking (and answering) the tough questions. 
+The only way to save the world is to save yourself. The only way to save the land from being poisoned is to save yourself from being poisoned (and from poisoning the land, yourself). The only way to save the environment from pollution is to save yourself from pollution (and from polluting the environment, yourself). In other words: The only way to save the Crashing Plane that is the Human Race is to put the oxygen mask on yourself first before attempting to put it on anybody else, and especially before attempting to right the plane. The oxygen mask, if you haven’t gathered already, is a metaphor for health, awareness, and truth. Save Yourself 
+“Only the individual can rise to the heights of consciousness and awareness. The more you belong to the crowd, the deeper you fall into darkness.” ~ Osho 
+Saving yourself is putting on the oxygen mask of health, awareness, and truth. But what does that mean? It means questioning yourself to the nth degree , to the point of self-interrogation, and then questioning some more. It means psychosocial upheaval. It means getting uncomfortable. It means admitting you are wrong. In short: It means pain, existential pain of monumental proportions. 
+Why is it so painful? Because much cognitive dissonance must be navigated. Everything that you’ve taken for granted as a fundamental truth must be turned inside out and given proper scrutiny. After such scrutiny, you will likely find that you were wrong about a great many things. But the only tool you need to weigh yourself against your deep questioning is the following anonymous quote: “When an honest man realizes that he is mistaken, he will either cease being mistaken or cease being honest.” 
+The question is: Do you have the courage to be honest with yourself? Because if you honestly choose the moral side of freedom, life, cooperation, and love, then you’re going to have to admit that statism provides none of these. It only sells the illusion of these. 
+Statism is about profit, ownership, divisiveness, and violence. It steals people’s freedom by enforcing, and profiting on, outdated and unjust laws (but only if the person believes in the law). It stifles life and human flourishing through calculative debt slavery and by convincing people into believing in an illusory debt. It creates physical divisiveness by drawing imaginary lines in the sand and declaring them “borders.” It creates psychological divisiveness through xenophobic nationalism and conditioned flag worship, setting up an us-versus-them mentality. When, really, the only us-versus-them mentality that holds any moral weight and intellectual validity is the freedom versus tyranny position. 
+Statism is tyrannical. There’s simply no way to wiggle out of this fact. It teaches authoritarianism and oppression. It teaches the individual to oppress and to tyrannize him/herself and others. It teaches people to blindly follow and obsequiously respect authority. It teaches extortion and violence. For if the authority of the state is not obeyed, or its many outdated and immoral laws are not followed, the individual is forced, violently if need be, to acquiesce. Comply or die, is what it comes down to. Either that or your freedom is taken away from you. 
+So, when it comes down to it, saving yourself is, first and foremost, waking yourself up from the spell that statism has over you . And then it’s breaking that spell. Break that particular spell, and freedom is at hand. Break that particular spell, and ( your ) life begins. Break that particular spell, and you free yourself to learn how cooperation and love actually work, because you will finally begin taking responsibility for your own shit. No Masters. No rulers. That means taking responsibility for yourself and your own actions as a social creature on an interdependent planet. No more leaning on the crutch of authority. No more codependence on the state. Saving yourself is choosing freedom. Save the World 
+“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live,’ Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so, every one of us shares the supreme ordeal––carries the cross of the redeemer––not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.” ~Joseph Campbell 
+So, you’ve saved (freed) yourself from the grip of the state. What comes next? Freeing others, of course. But not so fast. Just because you’re free from the state, doesn’t mean the state isn’t still there, rearing its ugly head. It is still there, oppressing and extorting. It is still there, tyrannizing and destroying the planet under the guise of progress. It’s still there, trying to suck you back in. It is still Goliath and you are still David. And just because you recognize statism as tyranny and oppression, doesn’t mean that others do. Remember: most people are devoted statists who don’t even realize they are statists. Yes, the ignorance is that thick. But, I digress… 
+You’ve secured your “oxygen mask” on the crashing plane that is the human race. Now it’s time to start helping others to secure their own masks. The problem here is: you can’t control other people. And, really, you don’t want to. You want people to be free, after all. That means you’re going to have to convince them . You’re going to have to be creative. You’re going to have to use your imagination and come up with novel ways to persuade them into being healthy. Yes, sadly it has come to that. The only way to bring health to those who are all-too-well-adjusted to a sick society, is to sell it. 
+The real kick in the pants is: most people don’t want to hear what you have to say. People are wrestling with their own cognitive dissonance. People are caught up in their own state driven conditioning and brainwashing. Those cops “serving and protecting” the enforcement of the unhealthy, unsustainable, climate changing (game ender) North Dakota pipeline , are all wrestling with their own cognitive dissonance, conditioning, and brainwashing. They’re simply losing their own inner battle and coming up with the only thing they know: the cowardice and violence of a statist. 
+So, it comes down to this: What do we (those who are already free and have their oxygen mask securely fastened) do against the cowardice and violence of the inured statist? We teach. We use our imagination to persuade them away from the unhealthiness of the state and toward the healthiness of freedom. We lead by example, influencing them with our courageous words and our actions. We coax them into freely putting their own oxygen mask on. For we know that volition is paramount if freedom is to be had. Force is the way of the state. Violence is the way of the state. A free human being helping others to be free must never use force or violence, lest they wish to be a tyrant. An authentically free human being wishes other human beings to be just as authentically free. 
+But, and here’s the rub, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Your right to waive your fist ends one inch from my nose.” 
+This means that when our health and freedom are under attack, we are morally justified to defend ourselves. And so, the most important thing we can do as free people, as individuals who have our oxygen masks securely fastened, is to stand our ground. To protect ourselves. Which, by extension, means protecting that which immediately sustains us: water, and the land that grows our food. The worst thing we can do is back down and play the pacifist. Like Derrick Jensen said, “ Love does not imply pacifism.” The Goliath that is the state will trample all over pacifism. Indeed, the road to an unhealthy, unsustainable, immoral, and violent world is paved with pacifism. It’s paved with people turning a blind eye. It’s paved with the inaction of people who recognized evil and did fuckall with it. 
+At the end of the day, Goliath (the state) is going to be Goliath. But Goliath is only Goliath because people believe in it. We dismantle goliath by convincing people not to give into Goliath’s unhealthy and unsustainable song and dance. First, we extract ourselves from being Goliath by transforming ourselves into courageous Davids. Then, we attempt to extract others from being Goliath. And if we cannot, we stand our ground and point out their cowardice and violence as unacceptable. We draw a line in the sand. We stand our ground. We protect our water. We declare, right in the face of the Goliath state, these courageous words by Thoreau : “I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” Read more articles by Gary ‘Z’ McGee . About the Author 
+Gary ‘Z’ McGee , a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man . His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world. This article ( The Only Way to Save the World is to Save Yourself   Waking Times and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary ‘Z’ McGee and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright. 
+ ",FAKE
+555,Senate passes NCLB replacement: Will shift to states help or hurt students? (+video),"The Senate voted 85 to 12 Wednesday to pass the Every Student Succeeds Act. The replacement for the No Child Left Behind law next heads to the president's desk.
+
+Kelci Gouge teaches a third grade class at a summer reading academy at Buchanan elementary school in Oklahoma City in July 2014. Oklahoma lawmakers repealed Common Core standards for English and math instruction. The Senate was expected to vote Dec. 8 on a replacement for the No Child Left Behind law, which, among other things, would shift power to deal with failing schools toward states and away from the federal government.
+
+[Update: This story was updated at 12:01 p.m. to include the final vote.]
+
+Across Minnesota, the number of native American kids heading to college is on the rise. The reading and math scores of black students are catching up to those of whites. Low-income students, kids whose native language isn’t English, and kids with disabilities are meeting the higher expectations teachers have been setting for them.
+
+The state – a high performer by many education measures – still faces many academic gaps between groups of students. But it is well on its way toward a goal it set in 2012 to cut those disparities in half by 2017.
+
+Minnesota offers an example of what can happen when a state puts a priority on closing achievement gaps. It developed its approach through a waiver to some of the requirements of the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
+
+Now that old, and many say, broken, law is on its way out. State leaders for years have been clamoring for more flexibility in how they hold schools accountable for academic improvement – so they can prioritize and tackle issues as they see fit, not as the federal government dictates.
+
+And Wednesday, the Senate voted 85 to 12 to clear the long-awaited law that will finally grant them their wish. The bipartisan compromise known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) already passed the House by a wide margin Dec. 2.
+
+ESSA will leave the main tools in place to track achievement by categories such as race, income level, disabilities, and English-language learners. But a big question remains: Will this shift to empowering states help or hurt the equity agenda embedded in the original law from the 1960s civil rights era?
+
+Historically, not all states have shown the political will to set high standards for all students, and some observers worry they’ll again feel somewhat off the hook. “There probably will be less attention now on the achievement gap: The [new] law doesn’t force that conversation the way it did under NCLB,” says Chad Aldeman, an associate partner at the nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners.
+
+Others are more hopeful that many states will stay the course or come up with new innovations  to address achievement gaps – recognizing the impact those can have on their future workforce and economic health.
+
+Minnesota’s current accountability system uses a range of measures for school achievement, including how well individual student and subgroup test scores improve from year to year.
+
+The state legislature expanded the system in 2013 to cover all public schools, not just those that receive federal dollars for low-income students. It set up regional “centers of excellence” to provide assistance to schools that were struggling. And it’s dedicating more than $180 million in state funds to the effort.
+
+“We’re focusing on the strengths of our schools and teachers and asking them to do more,” says Brenda Cassellius, the state’s first African-American education commissioner.
+
+So far, two-thirds of the schools are on track to meet their gap-reduction targets.
+
+At TrekNorth, a charter middle and high school in rural Bemidje, the state goals align with a mission to prepare as many students as possible for college through participation in Advanced Placement courses.
+
+The school has been recognized five times in the state’s annual list of Reward Schools, recently scoring an 81 out of 100 on the Multiple Measurements Rating, which takes gap reduction into account.
+
+The more sophisticated accountability system has contributed to a healthy “pressure to hone the subtleties of the craft of teaching,” says the charter school’s executive director Dan McKeon.
+
+Many of the low-income or native American students that make up much of the TrekNorth population wouldn’t have access to AP at other schools, Mr. McKeon says. He helps teachers develop the ability to stop mid-lesson to do a “formative assessment” – checking to see that everyone’s getting the main points. Then they take that extra 10 minutes if they see some students struggling with a certain concept.
+
+The staff also works with families to help them understand the world of opportunity that can open up for students who put in the time on academics.
+
+On a recent trip to visit colleges around the state, McKeon says he watched as one 12th-grade girl -- from a low-income family where college has not been the norm – looked through a brochure about how college credit is calculated for students who have passed AP exams.
+
+“She starts counting up classes since she was in 10th grade … and she realizes that if she went to this college she’d walk in with 29 credits under her belt,” he says, and that would mean saving a year’s worth of tuition and possibly earning scholarships. “I could see the realization on her face of how big of an accomplishment it was.”
+
+As he has watched the new law move through Congress, McKeon says his cynical side worries that some educators might see it as a “release from accountability to underserved students.” On the other hand, he says, he’s “excited to see what gets created at state and local levels when professional educators get the freedom to do what they know works best.”
+
+Civil rights groups are gearing up to take a seat at the table as accountability systems take shape over the next year and a half leading up to full implementation of the new federal law.
+
+Many civil rights and education advocacy groups had pushed for the federal role to remain stronger.
+
+But when it comes to what states now must do in regard to English-language learners, ESSA actually strengthens accountability. Their progress has to be accounted for by all schools, whereas previously that happened only in schools with high percentages of such students.
+
+“States have been asking for a while now for more flexibility to own their state accountability plans, so we’ll be monitoring how this plays out, and calling out states that aren’t doing better by English learners” says Brenda Calderon, an education policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza. The number of English learners in the US has grown to about 1 in 10 students, she says.
+
+Civil rights and student advocacy groups are also pushing local conversations about “opportunity gaps” that lie at the root of lower achievement.
+
+A recent report in Boston, for instance, found that “black and Latino males were horrifically underrepresented in key opportunities,” as early as third grade, that largely determined whether students ended up on a college-prep track, says Dan French, executive director of the Center for Collaborative Education in Boston, which published the report.
+
+The report is helping inform a new task force in the city that’s exploring ways to address the gaps. One need is for greater “cultural competence” among school staff, to understand their diverse population of students.
+
+One school, for instance held a well-intentioned celebration of the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo. The problem: none of the Latino students at that school had Mexican heritage. “If you don’t know who your kids are,” Mr. French says, “you are going to have a hard time reaching them.”
+
+Local efforts to address stubborn gaps, like this nascent one in Boston – and state support for such efforts -- will become even more important under the new federal education law. And the degree of success states have could vary greatly.
+
+The equity agenda doesn’t get a significant boost from the new law, some education and civil rights observers say, because its definition of accountability is still too narrow. “They are focused on accountability by test scores, but really not focused nearly enough on the learning-opportunities part of the equation…. We still have so many kids in underfunded, underresourced schools,” says Pedro Noguera, an education professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.",REAL
+3292,Senate panel votes Tuesday on Iran bill that gives Congress say on nuclear deal,"How much say Congress has on a possible nuclear deal with Iran will be tested Tuesday as a controversial bill goes up for a vote in the Senate Foreign Relations committee.
+
+The Obama administration has been very critical of legislation that would give Congress a final say in approving or rejecting a deal.
+
+In an interview with The New York Times, Obama said the newly agreed on framework of a nuclear deal with Iran represents a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to prevent Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon and to move toward stabilizing the Middle East.
+
+On Monday, the administration stepped up its lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill.
+
+""The way the legislation is currently written is something that we strongly oppose,"" White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. ""But, again, we continue to have extensive conversations with members of Congress on Capitol Hill.""
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry postponed a foreign trip to meet with members of the House to discuss the negotiations. Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and senior officials in the intelligence community were holding classified briefings Monday and Tuesday with members of the House and Senate.
+
+Earnest said some Republicans are ""rigidly partisan"" and will reject any deal just because Obama supports it. He said that while there is some Democratic opposition, administration officials will continue to talk with members of his party. So far, the president and other senior administration officials have made more than 130 telephone calls to members of Congress to discuss the negotiations.
+
+""I think there are some Democrats who will listen to this pitch,"" Earnest said. ""I don't know if it will convince them all, but there is a strong case to make and it's one that we intend to continue making.""
+
+At the White House, Obama met with Jewish leaders. While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is intensely skeptical that international negotiators can reach a verifiable deal with Iran, which has threatened to destroy Israel, some American Jewish groups have backed the international negotiations.
+
+Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters that he spoke with Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, earlier in the day. McCarthy said he told Corker that if the Senate approves the bill, the House will vote on it.
+
+""It's my intention to bring it to the floor of the House and move it,"" McCarthy said at a news conference as Congress was returning from a two-week spring break.
+
+Republicans and Democrats maintain that Congress should have a say on an international deal with Tehran to curb its nuclear program and have lined up behind legislation. The White House has pushed back, threatening a presidential veto while warning that the bill could scuttle the delicate talks involving the United States, Iran and five world powers.
+
+""Lines in the sands have moved back,"" McCarthy said, claiming the U.S. has back-tracked on some of the demands it had at the beginning of the talks. ""A lot of the questions will be why have they moved back and will Iran ever be able to have the capability of having a nuclear weapon? That's a key question.""
+
+Under the bill, Obama could unilaterally lift or ease any sanctions that were imposed on Iran through presidential executive means. But the bill would prohibit him for 60 days from suspending, waiving or otherwise easing any sanctions that Congress levied on Iran. During that 60-day period, Congress could hold hearings and approve, disapprove or take no action on any final nuclear agreement with Iran.
+
+If Congress passed a joint resolution approving a final deal -- or took no action -- Obama could move ahead to ease sanctions levied by Congress. But if Congress passed a joint resolution disapproving it, Obama would be blocked from providing Iran with any relief from congressional sanctions.
+
+Iran says its program is for civilian purposes, but the U.S. and its partners negotiating with Tehran suspect Tehran is keen to become a nuclear-armed powerhouse in the Middle East, where it already holds much sway.
+
+The bill has led to a political tug of war on Capitol Hill, with Republicans trying to raise the bar so high that a final deal might be impossible, and Democrats aiming to give the White House more room to negotiate with Tehran.
+
+Senators of both parties are considering more than 50 amendments to the measure introduced by Corker and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5571,"Dems Try to Slander Comey After He Re-Opens Hillary Investigation, Then THIS VIDEO Surfaces","0 comments 
+FBI Director James Comey was the most beloved man in the country to Democrats after he recommended that no charges be brought against Hillary Clinton for the illegal use of a private email server while Secretary of State. 
+But now, following news that the FBI will be re-opening its investigation into the Democratic nominee, the left is singing a different tune. Now, they’re treating Comey like he’s some womanizing pedophile or something… Oh, wait. Never mind, that’s Bill Clinton and they LOVE him . 
+Just watch…",FAKE
+7045,"Black Turnout Soft in Early Voting, Boding Ill for Hillary Clinton","Black Turnout Soft in Early Voting, Boding Ill for Hillary Clinton Jeremy Peters et al., New York Times, November 1, 2016 
+African-Americans are failing to vote at the robust levels they did four years ago in several states that could help decide the presidential election, creating a vexing problem for Hillary Clinton as she clings to a deteriorating lead over Donald J. Trump with Election Day just a week away. 
+{snip} 
+The reasons for the decline appear to be both political and logistical, with lower voter enthusiasm and newly enacted impediments to voting at play. In North Carolina, where a federal appeals court accused Republicans of an “almost surgical” assault on black turnout and Republican-run election boards curtailed early-voting sites, black turnout is down 16 percent . White turnout, however, is up 15 percent. Democrats are planning an aggressive final push, including a visit by President Obama to the state on Wednesday. 
+But in Florida, which extended early voting after long lines left some voters waiting for hours in 2012, African-Americans’ share of the electorate that has gone to the polls in person so far has decreased , to 15 percent today from 25 percent four years ago. 
+The problems for Democrats do not end there. In Ohio, which also cut back its early voting, voter participation in the heavily Democratic areas near Cleveland, Columbus and Toledo has been down, though the Clinton campaign said it was encouraged by a busy day on Sunday when African-American churches led voter drives across the state. 
+{snip} 
+The Clinton campaign believes it can close the gap, especially in North Carolina and Florida, by Election Day. And Democrats are seeing substantial gains in turnout for other key constituencies like Hispanics and college-educated women, which have the potential to more than make up for any drop-off in black voting. 
+{snip}",FAKE
+9897,Top Black Lives Matter Activist: ‘We Will Incite Riots Everywhere if Trump Wins’,"BALTIMORE 2016 Bill the eighth 
+This guy is real genius isn’t he? He is too stupid to realize all of those tweeter posts and Youtube videos are going to come back and bit him in the rear? Oh well, he will have plenty of time to think about his stupidity while he sits in a jail cell. doodaa 
+Would you hire this guy? Lancifer Wildwood 
+You don’t need a job when soros the nazi funds you….geesh I don’t even live in the US and I know that! Koolz 
+Jews created Black Lives matter and these guys get paid pretty well for there acting up at any protest. Black Lives Matter the very name creates violence. Purple lives Matter Hunter 
+Bingo!!! 
+You know, I wonder if / when “somebody in the know”, were to release nasty-jew George Soro’s travel itinerary…to the “right people”… 
+…hey Georgie…watch-out…payback can be a BITCH Zone43 
+50 Rabbis marched with them in Ferguson. owr 
+Jews are truly racist. M Saurette 
+so, the plan is to be more violent, more racist, more destructive. And the goal is to have blacks NOT be targeted by police? Good luck with that. owr 
+It won’t just be the police targeting rioting blacks.The average white is ready fearfully cautious of black thugs. The thugs know this and they try to intimidate whites by flaunting theirs MTV image of the ‘Gangsta’ by learning the right facial expressions, and wearing their pants on their ass. Stacking gang signs, even if not in a gang to appear knowledgeable about such things. It might work with some of the girls, but to the average young white male it is perceived as a potential threat. The primary difference between white males and black males is that only 30%, on average, black males are not convicted felons, and cannot legally possess a firearm. On the other hand nearly 80% of white males have no felony conviction, and can, or do possess legal firearms. Blacks are 13% of our population. Whites are a little under 70%. There are also a huge number of pissed off white veterans of Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, who would not mind a little domestic house cleaning. You can bet your ass, and not be afraid of losing it, that these Vets are Trump supporters. Be careful what you wish for. The real world is not MTV, or a gangsta movie. Cornczech 
+This morning on my walk to the Howard Redline stop in the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago, IL…..I was called out to by a black woman: “Hey, F* YOU, White B#tch!” The sad part, because I had to stop acting and looking scared a few years back when I first MOVED to this hood, (sometime after Obama became King), is that I am USED to this kind of thing, so I started to giggle after that outburst…yes, the abuse got worse …but…I get this at least once a week when I walk to the store, to the EL….to the bank……so (shrug). 
+I have never called a black man or woman a nigger…(I bet I get blasted or removed or censored for that…but I get called whitey, hillbilly…(I’m a Cracker, let’s get THAT straight!), and a myriad of other race specific names…..I have even been assaulted for being white and standing up for myself…(I am a female, by the way….so, I have OTHER stories about my lovely experience living in CHICAGO…the next Detroit….) 
+So how am I a racist? I grew up in Texas and never had problems or saw violence..or had violence perpetrated against me…..since I came here… 
+So tell me again how I am a racist? 
+My LAST question is: WHEN DID AMERICA come to such a SAD STATE? owr 
+My suggestion is to get out of Chicago, it will be a pure hell-hole in the coming depression. Go back to Texas, the economy is much better there, and race relations are as well. Ted Dura 
+oh joy Trump to dump 40 million mexicans and open season on rioting niggas–See its True ! 
+TRUMP WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN !! Guillotine_ready 
+Why wait? Burn your houses down now!! doodaa 
+And your liquer store! GORDON 
+Sheesh can we all just get along , we’ve seen how well having a black president worked out ? Thank God I live where it’s cold and the black populous is to a minimal ! Thank God all you do is kill each other anyway ! 
+Will the HUMAN RACE ever grow up? Sheesh! This is so stupid. Does a Siamese cat hate the Prussian Blue because it’s a different ‘breed’? Does and Irish Setter hate the Black Lab because. . . 
+Man, people are the most un-evolved, unreasonable. . . doodaa 
+Unfortunately, this has been going on since humans became self aware. Will we ever evolve? Not in our genes. Jo Peter 
+Actually the ‘good fences make good neighbors’ tendency toward self segregation followed by more or less peaceful voluntary trade appears more or less universal, and it’s only the radical liberal cultural Marxism nonesense that is making this unworkable in the west (and this is mostly to blame on the mechanations of one particular tribe that’s ‘white’ when it benefits them but who hold no actual allegiance to the white race, we all know who they are.) doodaa 
+Do you think maybe “GOD” knew what he was doing when he segregated races by continents? Jo Peter 
+That is certainly a valid way to look at it. Some people view the order of the universe as through an impersonal ‘nature’ force, and others consider it a conscious design by an intelligent creator. In the end there is little practical difference when it comes to the specifics like this, since either way it worked before we broke it. 
+Well, some of us are OK. I’ve dated outside my race, and I miss my buds of the past who I spent time with who weren’t fellow ‘honky-gringo-crackers’. fujak 
+typical….blacks want democracy but only if and when it suits them woody 
+This country needs a good cleansing, bring it on brotha! Bruce Regael 
+We need LA Riots everywhere with police standing down. I’d love for them to bring the riots to the nice white liberal neighborhoods where those agent provocateurs riling up minorities always tend to hide after they fan the flames. If anyone needs to pay its white liberals. They’ve been playing puppet master for far too long using racial politics against conservative white people. 
+Time is coming where we’re going to have to put the boots to their throats or force the minorities to kick their teeth in. doodaa 
+Black folks will be OK. There is no bag limit on dumb niggers. Jo Peter 
+Indeed. The ones that long ago accepted the cultural superiority of the west are allies. They can’t choose what genes they’re born with but they can side with good against radical liberal insanity. doodaa Zaphod Braden 
+AMEN !!! Sanders was born and raised in the New York City borough of Brooklyn and graduated from the University of CHICAGO in 1964. While a student, he was an active civil rights protest organizer for the CONGRESS OF RACIAL EQUALITY and STUDENT (not really)NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE. Bernie ran to Vermont in 1968, to get away from BLACKS to raise HIS family in SAFETY Sanders switched PARTIES, BETRAYED the Veterans, and instigates the Blacks and then RUNS AWAY. In January 1962, Sanders led a rally at the University of Chicago administration building to protest university president George Wells Beadle’s segregated campus housing policy. “We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments,” Sanders said at the protest. But then Sanders ran to SAFE LILLY WHITE VERMONT to raise HIS children far away from those Blacks he wants you to live with. doodaa Cindyejohnson1 “my .friend’s mate Is getting 98$. HOURLY. on the internet.”…. two days ago new Mc.Laren. F1 bought after earning 18,512$,,,this was my previous month’s paycheck ,and-a little over, 17k$ Last month ..3-5 h/r of work a days ..with extra open doors & weekly. paychecks.. it’s realy the easiest work I have ever Do.. I Joined This 7 months ago and now making over 87$, p/h.Learn. More right Here o!507 http://GlobalSuperEmploymentVacanciesReportsWorld/GetPaid/98$hourly …. .❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦:❖:❦ o!507………. Jones 
+This is the classic ” lets get dumb ass to do the dirty work for us” trick. This dude is being played by the same people who will drop his ass on the street when theyre done with him. Inciting race wars and turning people against each other. This dude is a total looser. The only rapping he should do is with some tape around his flappy mouth. Someone give this dude a hug and ask him if hes making the world a better place by being a dick. Jolly Roger 
+This moron is just a tool, paid by rich people to incite racial tensions, with the usual hollow threats designed to intimidate white people as part of their ongoing divide-and-conquer agenda. 
+“We don’t want to work. We don’t want to go to school. We demand to be handed everything we want, and if we don’t get it, we’ll attack white people.” 
+Shut up, you idiot, and go back to your zoo. 
+No intelligent debate. No civilized discussion. Just a gang of RACIST thugs trying to intimidate people based on their skin color. Tell me more about “equality”. 
+I hate to participate, or even respond to a racist tirade, but these Soros-funded useful idiots may make it necessary. Just be ready to mow ’em down along with the wetbacks, just in case they make that necessary. doodaa 
+Nigga’ just might get his ass shot. L Garou 
+Is that an admission of retardation, or shall we produce his test scores to prove it? doodaa 
+I thought all lives mattered until this dumb nigger started talking. Now I wonder. owr 
+They are being programmed by George Soros to be agent provocateurs to create racial tension to allow for martial law to occur in order to keep the establishment as is. Clinton will insure this if elected. 8s5s5 
+To help payoff my student-loans I worked as a NYC teacher in “troubled” neighborhoods for ten years. During those ten years I saw delinquents call each other “niggas” hundreds of times every single school day. If I had done it once, I would have been fired that same day. They punched each other, stole from each other, and from the faculty, vandalized the school, threw brand new text books out the window but the state and federal funds continued to pour in, very much contrary to popular belief. 
+They actually got more money then the nicer areas. When I was finally able to move to a “good” school district, I couldn’t believe it. When I told the children (99% Caucasians) to take a a book and read quietly they actually did it. No exaggeration, you good actually hear your own respiration, that’s how quiet it was!!! And yes, you can find some schools with 95-99% white student population. I was never a “racist” but this was too much. The difference is incredible!!! Unfortunately if you notice a obvious behavioral difference between races, you are labeled as some kind of a bad person and the general public has learned to accept this word “racist” as derogatory regardless of the evidences that may exist, and we all know that they do exist. This denial has successfully forced illogical integration, the destruction of our liberty and country and the rise of economic fascist billionaires. Donald Trump, the only billionaire to go against is fellow elites is being completely typecast as “the rich white guy that must be a racist.” He is probably the one and only chance the middle class and the poor class will ever see again for justice in this country. The last man to have had his courage was President JFK. owr 
+To actually be a nigger, one must learn to be one. They have plenty of role models to copy. It’s a matter of choice. nobody 
+Lol… what a dumb ass! It’ll be a hoot watching video of these “tough” guys(gals?) getting their butts whomped after they destroy mostly their own slums, and if we’re lucky a few other choice places. desertspeaks 
+“we will incite riots everywhere if trump wins” translation, we know if trump wins, we’ll have to get jobs to pay rent, food etc. and being societal parasites, we don’t want actual jobs, just free shit! owr 
+Culture is learned in the home, and in school. “Granny was on total entitlements, so was momma, so is sista, so is my daddy where-ever and who-ever he is. So why I has ta lern all this white shit in school, I quit when I’m 16 and be worken the streets, the man..he be givn me food-stamps evey month that I can sell fo beer and cigarettes. Man, we got it fucken made.” Zone43 
+They will stay in the cities, cry baby’s. Strayhorse 
+What government really fears is when other than people of color, were to take to the streets. That’s why the government and the controlled media hide the truth about crime, racist crime perpetrated against other than people of color. When other than people of color awakens to the truth about crimes against them, L.A., Ferguson, and riots of their kind would pale against the response levied against the government for allowing the crimes against other than people of color to continue as it does today. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 DOES NOT offer any protection for other than people of color. That’s NOT was it was passed for! Other than people of color have NO federal or state protections against prejudice, injustice and inequality. nightwisp 
+The 14th amendment and the civil rights act of 1964 made their rights equal to the white man. If the white man is gone, they are equal to nothing. They will have no rights. owr 
+We are all slaves to the corporations, debt slaves. owr 
+That is precisely why the libs began the fake and un-natural PC agenda, to erode the 1st amendment. Raymond McGraw 
+You are surely as you called it…“NIGGA’S.Does not make a hill of difference who.what where or why.You were just born to riot.You have failed to look at the true one who has enlslaved you the last 8 years in the liberals and there government.Now you have become pawns working for them.Of course you have not realized that either.When the true one wins this and he will. You can then say Gee! Mr .Trump wished I had listened to you. D Urge 
+He’s right WE have been too nice. 
+TRUMP 2016 Lancifer Wildwood 
+I’m not sure this person of colour knows what he/they (whatever the frick) are up against if it comes down to it? The inner city shit holes they are seemingly incapable of building up into prospering neighbourhoods are NOT the rest of the US from my travels there. nightwisp 
+* YAWN * please pass the popcorn… Josephine Dorion 
+NO, THE WHITES AIN’T SCAYRED OF YAH. BE PREPARED TO BE EXTERMINATED. Ed Troyer 
+I see bulldozers, flame throwers…. jake 
+wow, doesn’t this show how clueless, americans trully are. almost makes one want to tell the trump campaign how to beat the voting fix. where are these guys and gals going to wreak havoc? in the cities where unarmed gay and mainly democrats live, black people, spanish, and poor people in general. poop where you eat, that is a controlled serf. show how your an oreo banker slave. when you get to the rural areas, the black, white, and spanish, rural people will be waiting. you won’t stand a chance, against the unified rural people. after following the banking oversears orders, to destroy yourself and your families based on unknown fears, do you think you’ll be going to valhalla, for following the bloodcults, marching orders, to divide and conquer. killing people who don’t have any more say than yourself, because a banker said it was so, priceless. Michael 
+That would be instant death for the 3/5th’s, 14th amendment black United States citizens. This country was created by old white men to protect the white race. This is why the Jewish run media are promoting the blacks to riot. In fact black folks if your going to go after a group you might want to think about going after the Jews in the media. As they’re the one’s that have set you up to fail. Here’s a sweet piece of history the majority of the Negroes don’t know. Israel Cohen, the General Secretary of the World Zionist Organization, in his 1912 book “A racial program for the 20th Century”. And, read into the Congressional Record by Congressman Thomas Abernathy, U.S. House of Representatives Mississippi, 4th District on June 7, 1957, Volume 103, top of page 8559: Israel Cohen penned “We must realize that our party’s most powerful weapon is racial tension. By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races that for centuries they have been oppressed by the whites, we can mould them to the program of Negro minority against the whites, we will endeavor to instill in the whites a guilt complex for their exploitation of the Negroes. We will aid the Negroes to rise in prominence in every walk of life, in the professions and in the world of sports and entertainment. With this prestige, the Negro will be able to intermarry with the whites and begin a process which will deliver America to our cause.” So black folks before you embark on a suicide mission learn some real history and the true cause of your plight. As your anger is miss directed and you will be engaged as belligerents and enemy combatants. Live in peace, be well, and do your homework before you attempt something rash and dangerous. Rick 
+It’s coon hunting season once again! Allan Munroe 
+I don’t know what color you are but I do know you are a Fucking Nigger ,,,soon you will know what it feels to be without hope just as I felt since you Voted into office That Fucking Ass Kissing Brother of the Muslim Brotherhood , who did all he could do except suck the Dick of the King of Saudi Arabia on National T.V. , all while trying to completely destroy USA but he didn’t learn enough in school regarding the Constitution of the USA. Soon Mr. Trump will be writing down names & kicking ASS ———-Niger Clean Kut 
+Not only do Trumpets have the tactical military training, and are stockpiling ammo, bombs, grenades and other weapons… They’ve been WAITING FOR THE DAY they can legally open fire on blacks and liberals for DECADES. They are SO ready… Trump says he will pay their legal fees and they feel emboldened.? det0918 
+What a loser ….he is what you get when raise your children with violence, hit, beat and threaten your children, you get violent minds…who see no other way but to threaten other people and perpetrate on them what was done to them by their own parents- yes, it’s white people’s fault your life sucks. 
+…amazing how many blacks are able to live life like the rest of us…in peace…. but you can’t manage it …so it must be someone else’s fault …who do white people blame when their lives suck? C.A.Martin 
+Well Poe just remember there are ten times as many whites (many well armed) as blacks and your not exactly on good terms with the Hispanics as well. Self immolation is just not a good way to go. But go for it, burn baby burn. Maus 
+They will destroy America one liquor store, one Best Buy and one Footlocker at a time! Zaphod Braden 
+That nigga is the PROPERTY of George Soros. Zaphod Braden 
+This moron should go visit Bernie Sanders —— in VERMONT Sanders was born and raised in the New York City borough of Brooklyn and graduated from the University of CHICAGO in 1964. While a student, he was an active civil rights protest organizer for the CONGRESS OF RACIAL EQUALITY and STUDENT (not really)NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE. Bernie ran to Vermont in 1968, to get away from BLACKS to raise HIS family in SAFETY Sanders switched PARTIES, BETRAYED the Veterans, and instigates the Blacks and then RUNS AWAY. In January 1962, Sanders led a rally at the University of Chicago administration building to protest university president George Wells Beadle’s segregated campus housing policy. “We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments,” Sanders said at the protest. But then Sanders ran to SAFE LILLY WHITE VERMONT to raise HIS children far away from those Blacks he wants you to live with. Zaphod Braden 
+He just qualified — as a DOMESTIC TERRORIST: Hussein Obama claims Congress “must do it’s Constitutional DUTY” by accepting his nominee, but Hussein REFUSES to do HIS Constitutional DUTY of evicting illegal invaders and securing OUR borders “during a time of war on terror”. Hussein is the Chief Executive. Hussein’s PRIMARY CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY is to enforce the laws, yet he REFUSES to do so. 
+“our” politicians take oaths to uphold the LAW and the Constitution. When they REFUSE to, when they openly DEFY and circumvent the LAW, they FORFEIT their “Governmental Immunity”. Every Politician who goes on record as supporting ILLEGAL INVADERS should be held financially responsible for PAYING REPARATIONS for the crimes done by the ILLEGALS. Start CIVIL FORFEITURE on the assets of Politicians that cover for ILLEGAL INVADERS. RESOURCES",FAKE
+3588,Taliban claims responsibility for fatal attack on Americans in Kabul,"The Taliban claimed responsibility Friday for a shooting incident at a military base attached to Kabul’s international airport Thursday that killed three American civilian contractors and wounded a fourth, saying the attacker had infiltrated the ranks of the security forces.
+
+The contractors worked for Praetorian Standard Inc., or PSI, a small firm based in Fayetteville, N.C., with offices in Maryland and Virginia. According to its Web site, the firms says “it specializes in providing innovative strategic planning, logistics, operational and security management support services in challenging environments around the world.”
+
+In a statement Friday, the company confirmed that “three employees of Praetorian Standard, Inc. were killed and one was wounded in Afghanistan while supporting the efforts of the U.S. Government.” It added: “This was a terrible day for the families involved, our company and the United States. We are shocked by the tragic nature of these deaths and offer our deepest condolences to the families of these brave men.”
+
+The company has worked in Afghanistan since 2010, mostly providing logistics, transportation and security support to a Defense Department and U.S. Geological Survey program that is exploring potential mineral deposit sources in Afghanistan.
+
+The victims, whose names have not yet been released, were working out of the firm’s Kabul office.
+
+In Twitter messages and a subsequent statement, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid identified the shooter as Ihsanullah bin Mullah Rahmatullah, from Laghman province in eastern Afghanistan. He said the man had infiltrated the ranks of the Afghan security forces in anticipation of an opportunity to attack Americans and was working at Kabul’s airport.
+
+“He managed yesterday evening to attain his goal and opened fire with his rifle on a group of American occupiers,” the spokesman said. The attacker was then “martyred by return fire,” Mujahid said.
+
+“The martyr was able to successfully defend his religion . . . and the glory of his country, and by giving himself away as a sacrifice, he cast a number of the occupying disbelievers into the abyss of hell,” Mujahid said.
+
+He gave a higher casualty figure for the attack, claiming that “three American soldiers died and four others were critically wounded.”
+
+Authorities said Thursday that an Afghan national was also killed in the attack, but it was not immediately clear whether that person was the shooter or an additional victim.
+
+Immediately after Thursday’s attack, suspicion fell on a possible “insider attack” perpetrated by a member of the Afghan security forces who also had access to the military base at the airport. An unidentified Afghan air force official told the Reuters news agency the shooter was an Afghan soldier.
+
+It was not immediately clear how the contractors were attacked.
+
+Referring to the attacker as an “infiltrator,” Mujahid used a term often used by the Taliban for an insurgent who had penetrated the Afghan army or police for months or years, waiting for an opportunity to strike.
+
+When asked Thursday whether the incident was an insider attack, a U.S. military spokesman, Col. Brian Tribus, declined to comment. He said there would be no further comments on the incident until the investigation was complete.
+
+The sprawling base where the shooting occurred is protected by tall concrete blast walls and filled with hangars, office trailers and maintenance buildings. It is a hub for the coalition’s air operations, as well as the main base of the Afghan air force.
+
+As of last year, before a drawdown of U.S. combat forces, it was home to as many as 4,000 foreign military personnel and civilian contractors from more than a dozen nations, including the United States. Top U.S. commanders spent much of their time there.
+
+Insider attacks have long plagued the relationship between Afghan forces and their U.S. and international allies, breaking down trust and reducing interaction. The assaults by rogue Afghan soldiers or police particularly rose in the last years of the NATO combat mission, which formally ended in December. Assaults reached record levels in 2012, when there were 37 such attacks that killed 51 people, including 32 U.S. troops, according to the Pentagon.
+
+Since then, U.S. and coalition forces have tightened vetting procedures for Afghan security forces and required that all foreign troops be armed at all times. The efforts have reduced the number of insider attacks, but they nevertheless remain a major concern.
+
+The killings were a reminder of the threats faced by the roughly 10,600 U.S. troops and thousands of American contractors who remain in Afghanistan, mostly to train and advise Afghan security forces. Such tasks require close interaction with Afghans, and it remains to be seen whether the attacks will have an adverse impact or restrict such relationships.
+
+“We can confirm that there was a shooting incident at North Kabul International Airport complex 29 January at approximately 6:40 p.m.,” Tribus said in an e-mailed statement. “Three coalition contractors were killed as was an Afghan local national. This incident is under investigation.”
+
+A U.S. defense official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the nationalities of those killed, said the contractors were all Americans and that the fourth one had been wounded.
+
+In August, a gunman wearing an Afghan army uniform opened fire at a military training school near Kabul, killing U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene. He was the highest-ranking U.S. officer to be killed in 13 years of war in Afghanistan and the first general to be killed in the line of duty since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that prompted the United States to intervene militarily in Afghanistan, combining with Afghan resistance forces to topple the radical Islamist Taliban regime.
+
+Virtually everyone on the base at the Kabul airport is armed. But that did not stop U.S. military officials from worrying about insider attacks during a flag-lowering ceremony in early December that marked the official end of the coalition’s combat mission. Before the ceremony, the officials warned journalists that if any rockets landed, or if anyone started shooting, to run and take cover.
+
+With the U.S. military drawdown, civilian contractors have become more visible. Even though their numbers have also sharply decreased, thousands of contractors remain in Afghanistan, most of them based in Kabul.
+
+As of mid-2014, about 17,400 U.S. citizens were working in Afghanistan as civilian contractors for the Defense Department, according to military figures reported by the Web site Danger Zone Jobs. Other private contractors work for various international relief and development organizations. A year earlier, the Congressional Research Service put the number of Pentagon contractors at about 33,000.
+
+Thursday’s killings broke a roughly three-week lull in violence in the capital. In the last two months of 2014, the Taliban intensified its attacks in Kabul and other parts of the country, targeting foreigners as well as influential Afghans and symbols of government authority.
+
+The shooting was the first suspected insider attack since U.S. and NATO forces formally terminated their combat mission in Afghanistan. Under an agreement with the Afghan government, the previous coalition force is being replaced by a follow-on mission dubbed “Resolute Support,” which began Jan. 1 and consists of about 12,000 mostly U.S. troops focused on training.
+
+Earlier on Thursday, a roadside bomb killed a police commander and three other people in the eastern province of Laghman, and a suicide bomber targeted the commander’s funeral later in the day, according to Afghan officials. They said 16 people — four policemen and 12 civilians — were killed and 39 were wounded when the bomber mingled with mourners in the town of Mehtar Lam and detonated his explosives.
+
+Ryan reported from Washington. Daniela Deane contributed from London, William Branigin from Washington.",REAL
+10399,Fighting Ghost Fascists While Aiding Real Ones,"2016 presidential campaign by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
+An architect of regime-change, coups, no-fly zones, rule of the rich and mass incarceration is about to become Commander-in-Chief, yet the bulk of what passes for the Left is “engaged in a 1930s-style ‘united front’ against a ‘fascism’ that was never a threat in 21 st century America.” Donald Trump, the orange menace, didn’t have a chance of becoming president. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a 21 st century fascist and threat to life on Earth. Fighting Ghost Fascists While Aiding Real Ones by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
+“Trump’s anti-“free trade” stance and opposition to regime change and military confrontation with Russia and China drove most of the Republican-allied section of the ruling class straight into Hillary Clinton’s imperial Big Tent.” 
+Hillary Clinton’s impending -- and totally predictable -- landslide victory on November 8 will prove only that there never was any danger of a “fascist” white nationalist takeover of the U.S. executive branch of government in 2016. That was always a red (or “orange”) herring, a phony “barbarians at the gate” threat that -- as Wikileaks documents confirmed -- John Podesta and Hillary’s other handlers fervently hoped would convey “lesser evil” status to their manifestly unpopular candidate. 
+There was nothing particularly devious or out of the ordinary in the Hillary camp’s favoring Donald Trump or, alternatively, Ted Cruz. It is standard Democratic Party practice to position themselves just to the left of the Republicans. In a duopoly electoral system, victory lies in where the cake is cut. By hugging close to the GOP’s flanks, national Democratic candidates can lay claim to a “center-left” spectrum of political space that encompasses a clear majority of U.S. public opinion on most issues. By this calculus, Democrats are supposed to win, unless they are tripped up on the closely related issues of race (failure to “stand up” to the Blacks) and foreign policy (failure to “stand up” to whoever is the designated foreign enemy). 
+Race is the trickiest part of the equation, since white supremacy is embedded in the American political conversation, hiding just beneath the surface of most discourse on social and economic policy. 
+“His overt racism probably weakened his appeal to whites.” 
+Trump thought he could win by combining an overt white racist appeal with an anti-corporate message that laid the blame on Wall Street for (white) American job losses and falling living standards. He also calculated -- correctly, it turns out -- that in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown, many white Americans were more upset about their own economic and social status than they were angry at Russians; that they wanted regime change at home more than abroad. 
+Both of Trump’s central policies backfired, dooming his campaign. His overt racism probably weakened his appeal to whites, who have given majorities to national Republicans since 1968 but whose self-image is that they are not, as individuals, racist. (Certainly, white women found further reason to reject his candidacy.) Much more spectacularly, Trump’s anti-“free trade” stance and opposition to regime change and military confrontation with Russia and China drove most of the Republican-allied section of the ruling class straight into Hillary Clinton’s imperial Big Tent. 
+At the national level, the duopoly system, as we had known it, virtually ceased to exist – a fact dramatically driven home by the near-universal corporate media rejection of Donald Trump, the candidacy they had done so much to create. The near-collapse of the duopoly system was the great fracture of the 2016 election, a potential historic opening to a far wider space of progressive political struggle, including on the moribund electoral level. With the ruling class gathered in one Big Tent, and the overt racists occupying the imploded shell of the GOP, the system itself was in disarray. What was once two vibrant parties of the ruling class, with a virtual monopoly on the totality of the electorate, had become one ruling class party plus a hollowed-out husk, at least temporarily occupied by white nationalists under the leadership of a narcissistic and incoherent billionaire, yet without enough funds to mount a competitive general election campaign. 
+“The near-collapse of the duopoly system was the great fracture of the 2016 election.” 
+In these pages, we had been saying since last year that Donald Trump could not win; that Bernie Sanders’ fate would be sealed in the southern primaries; and that, although ruling class money would insure Clinton an election by landslide, it could not buy her legitimacy among a significant section of the Democratic “base,” who would now be pushed to the latrine area of her Big Tent. As we wrote on May 18 of this year: 
+“Outsized fear of Trump is hysteria. These days, the ‘brown shirts’ wear blue. Hillary is the candidate of Wall Street, War and Austerity – not Trump, the racist America Firster. And, he can’t win, anyway – not with tens of millions of ‘moderate’ Republicans and most of the party’s funders rushing into Hillary’s welcoming embrace.” 
+But sadly, hysteria does reign in most of the “left” precincts of America. Those who did not hesitate to kick Hillary when she appeared to be “down” -- in those heady days when they imagined it was possible she could lose to Sanders -- are terrified to kick her when she is “up” and primed to take the helm of the hyper-power. They are engaged in a 1930s-style “united front” against a “fascism” that was never a threat in 21 st century America, where a different kind of dictatorship of the rich (but also a fascism) has made brown-shirts (and Klansmen) utterly superfluous. These trembling leftists refuse to oppose the modern manifestation of fascism, which is now firmly entrenched in power with Hillary as its champion, in favor of a crusade against an “orange” menace that did not have a ghost of a chance of seizing national power. They have made themselves perfectly irrelevant and useless -- except, of course, to the fascists-in-charge. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected] .",FAKE
+3515,"Bomb maker linked to Paris attack died in Brussels airport bombing, sources tell","The shadowy terrorist believed to have made the explosives used in Tuesday's attacks in Brussels and the November massacre in Paris was one of two suicide bombers who died at Zaventem Airport, sources told Fox News.
+
+Morrocan-born Najim Laachraoui, 24, was identified by law enforcement sources as one of two Islamic terrorists seen pushing suitcase bombs and wearing single ""dead man's hand"" black gloves - in a surveillance photo. The gloves are believed to have hidden detonators. A third man seen in the photo is believed to have escaped the scene and is being hunted.
+
+
+
+Laachraoui is suspected of also making the bomb used in a blast 79 minutes later at a Brussels Metro station, as well as the explosives used to kill 130 in the the Nov. 13, 2015, attacks in Paris.
+
+ISIS has claimed credit for Tuesday's carnage in Brussels.
+
+The announcement came following a day of uncertainty regarding the explosives mastermind. At a midday news conference, Belgian authorities appeared not to know of his fate and he was believed to be the subject of a nationwide dragnet.
+
+Raids on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning uncovered his suspected factory, turning up bomb-making materials in a Schaerbeek apartment, including detonators, nails and 15 kilos of acetone peroxide, a highly unstable chemical which is favored by Islamists because it's easy to make. The chemical also was found in the explosives used in the Paris attack.
+
+Laachraoui was raised in Brussels' Schaerbeek neighborhood, a predominantly Muslim area, according to The Washington Post. He's believed to have attended a local Catholic high school where he studied electro-mechanical engineering.
+
+Laachraoui traveled to Syria in February 2013, prosecutors said, and it was not clear when he returned to Europe.
+
+Prosecutors have said Laachraoui played a key role in recruiting and training attackers for ISIS, according to The Wall Street Journal. He was checked by guards at the Austria-Hungary border on Sept. 9 while driving in a Mercedes with Abdeslam and one other person, Belgium's federal prosecutors said in a statement.
+
+Using a false identity, Laachraoui also rented a house under the name of Soufiane Kayal in the Belgian town of Auvelais. That residence was allegedly used as a safe house, where prosecutors said traces of his DNA were found. That same DNA was later found on the Paris explosives. The house was searched Nov. 26.
+
+On Monday, Van Leeuw said officials wanted to interview Laachraoui, who was ""someone who must explain himself.""
+
+On Tuesday, coordinated terror attacks ripped through Brussels. Investigators reportedly believe attacks already being plotted were expedited in light of Abdeslam's arrest -- and word that he is cooperating with authorities.
+
+Earlier Wednesday, two men suspected of taking part in Tuesday’s bombings were identified as Khalid and Ibrahim El-Bakraoui.
+
+Khalid is believed to have blown himself up on the Metro, an attack which killed at least 20 and injured more than 100, while Ibrahim is believed to have been the other airport bomber. The fourth bomber, the man in the far left of the airport photo pushing a cart next to Ibrahim, has not yet been identified.
+
+The brothers were well-known to police. In a raid Tuesday at Ibrahim's address, Van Leeuw said ""there was a paper where he described that he is insecure, that he is lost and he does not know what to do and he might end up in jail.""
+
+Both Ibrahim and his brother were Belgian citizens and born in Brussels, authorities said.
+
+A March 15 raid on an apartment rented by Khalid, 27, led to Friday's arrest of Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam after one of Abdeslam's fingerprints was discovered in the apartment. Politico Europe, citing a senior Belgian official, reported that Abdeslam was supposed to take part in Tuesday's attacks. The report did not specify what role Abdeslam would have played.
+
+DH reported that in October 2010, Ibrahim, 30, was convicted of shooting at police with a Kalashnikov during an attempted robbery. He was sentenced to nine years in prison. In February 2011, the paper reported, Khalid was sentenced to five years' probation in connection with a string of carjackings.
+
+Turkey said Wednesday that Ibrahim had been detained on the Syrian border last summer, and that Ankara warned Brussels officials that he was a militant before sending him home.
+
+",REAL
+1572,Republicans discussed possibility of brokered convention,"Watch the CNN Republican debate Tuesday, December 15 at 6:00 p.m. ET and 8:30 p.m. ET.
+
+Washington (CNN) Top Republican Party officials have discussed the possibility of a brokered convention , sources told CNN Thursday, a new recognition that the GOP nominating contest could be protracted well into the summer.
+
+At a monthly dinner meeting this week, Republican Party brass decided it would be prudent to plan for a contested convention, which would be triggered if no candidate has enough delegates to win the nomination.
+
+Five sources insisted that while the topic came up during the dinner, it did not dominate the discussion.
+
+Republican strategists have long theorized about the possibility of the brokered convention , which hasn't happened in decades, but the dinner meeting appears to be the first active planning taken by the GOP to prepare for it.
+
+American president Gerald Ford (left) listens as future American president Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004) delivers a speech during the closing session of the Republican National Convention on August 19, 1976 in Kansas City, Missouri.
+
+The plans, first reported by The Washington Post , come as 14 Republicans plan to duke it out in the Iowa caucuses, a historically large field that has winnowed slowly. Republicans are worried that -- given that many delegates are awarded proportionally -- there is a possibility that a brokered convention could happen.
+
+Another contributing factor to concerns about a brokered convention is a new Republican National Committee rule that requires any GOP nominee win a majority of delegates from eight different states, a hurdle that could potentially be too high in such a fractured field.
+
+""No one is quite sure what will happen,"" one of the sources said about the meeting, which was attended by about 20 party leaders, including Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
+
+Despite persistent worries from Donald Trump's campaign that Republican party officials may try to elbow him out of the nominating contest, the source said Trump, who has sat atop GOP polls for five months, was not the focus of the planning.
+
+It had ""nothing, zero, nada to do with Trump except he may be one of the candidates standing at the end,"" said the source. ""It was not aimed at anyone.""
+
+Ben Carson responded to the report Friday morning, putting out a press release warning he may consider punishing the GOP for any efforts to rig the game against outsider candidates.
+
+""If the leaders of the Republican Party want to destroy the party, they should continue to hold meetings like the one described in the Washington Post this morning,"" Carson said. ""If this was the beginning of a plan to subvert the will of the voters and replace it with the will of the political elite, I assure you Donald Trump will not be the only one leaving the party.""
+
+Tensions over planning for a potentially brokered conventions came amid reports that Republican National Committee officials on Wednesday met with Trump staffers, to discuss logistics -- including where staff is allocated, hiring plans and digital strategy.
+
+Sean Spicer, RNC chief strategist and communications director, downplayed the significance of the dinner on Friday.
+
+""It was a dinner where the subject was how the delegate selection process works,"" Spicer told CNN's Kate Bolduan. ""At the end of that dinner, there were a lot of questions asked.""
+
+As for why the idea came up at all? ""It's great cocktail conversation,"" Spicer said.
+
+""This is really, to be honest, with you quite silly.""",REAL
+5669,DC Leaks Exposes Soros Plan to ‘Counter Russian Foreign Policy and Subvert Traditional Russian Values’,"By wmw_admin on October 29, 2016 Richard Brandt — Russia Insider Aug 14, 2016 
+The recent George Soros hacks show plans/conspiracy to subvert Russia’s traditional values. 
+George Soros’ Open Society’s Foundation is responsible for funding many “civil rights organization” that promote “Western values” in Russia. 
+Soros is one of the 30 richest people in the world, known for supporting Cultural Marxist organizations around the world, using his billion dollar wealth to wield enormous influence in society. 
+Here is a damning quote from the leaked files of Soros’ Open Society Foundation: 
+“Our inclination is to engage in activities that will … counter Russian support to movements defending traditional values” 
+The language in Soros’ internal communication read as if his Foundation sees itself as a full-scale warrior in a global conflict, “the stakes are high”, and “we should avoid entering directly into the geo-strategic warfare…” 
+Enjoy these choice excerpts from the leaks” 
+Full leaks here: http://dcleaks.com/index.php/srs_reserves/ Click to enlarge 
+Seems Uncle Vlad has been supporting traditional values around the world…Time to start a colored revolution to bring liberalism and cultural decline to Russia! Click to enlarge 
+And they said the 5th column was a myth! Click to enlarge 
+The rise of Patriotic resistance in the West is a problem for Soros and his foundation",FAKE
+8251,"Saudi ambassador to the UAE: Any contact with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon should be checked","Email 
+
+According to a report by an Emirati media website, Emarat Al-Youm, Saudi ambassador to the UAE said in a press interview that any contact with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon and even making telephone conversations with these countries’ officials by the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, should first be checked carefully and approved by the General-Secretariat of the organization in Riyadh.",FAKE
+8875,Huma Abedin’s Muslim Dad, ,FAKE
+9373,"John Pilger: Inside The Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton And Trump","John Pilger: Inside The Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton And Trump   
+The American journalist, Edward Bernays, is often described as the man who invented modern propaganda. 
+The nephew of Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psycho-analysis, it was Bernays who coined the term “public relations” as a euphemism for spin and its deceptions. 
+In 1929, he persuaded feminists to promote cigarettes for women by smoking in the New York Easter Parade – behaviour then considered outlandish. One feminist, Ruth Booth, declared, “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” 
+Bernays’ influence extended far beyond advertising. His greatest success was his role in convincing the American public to join the slaughter of the First World War. The secret, he said, was “engineering the consent” of people in order to “control and regiment [them] according to our will without their knowing about it”. 
+He described this as “the true ruling power in our society” and called it an “invisible government”. 
+Freud had a cousin called Edward Bernays, who has since earned the title “father of Public Relations”. Bernays took Freud’s idea and applied it to consumers. If desire is our driving force, then appealing to emotions is the most powerful way to persuade consumers to act. The idea was to short circuit their rational conscious and get them where they were most vulnerable – the unconscious 
+Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged. 
+Imagine two cities. Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country. Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people. But there is a vital difference. In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes. There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory. There is scant mention of civilian casualties. 
+In the second city – in another country nearby – almost exactly the same is happening. Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics. 
+The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by “us”– by the United States and Britain. They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America. 
+Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city – which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city. 
+Confusing? Not really. Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda. I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia. One is good; the other is bad. 
+Iraq War as portrayed on two popular American news magazines. Terrorists and hero savours are typical propaganda images 
+What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria. 
+Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today. 
+Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications.The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?” 
+He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq”. 
+It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question — Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous. 
+In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul. 
+There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps. 
+When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”. That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak. 
+“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.” 
+The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country. 
+The same fate awaited Slobodan Milosevic once he had refused to sign an “agreement” that demanded the occupation of Serbia and its conversion to a market economy. His people were bombed, and he was prosecuted in The Hague. Independence of this kind is intolerable. 
+As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked. 
+From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage. 
+Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.” 
+
+Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia — and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post. 
+These organisations are known as the liberal media. They present themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist. They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT. 
+And they love war. 
+While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny the rights of countless women, including the right to life. 
+Daily Mail 25 Oct 2011: reports that “A Libyan revolutionary fighter has bragged in a leaked video that he was the man who killed Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, that country’s despotic former ruler. The young man, who is pictured but has not yet been identified, said he killed the fallen dictator because he could not bear the thought of taking him alive.” 
+In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people. That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie. 
+In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa. Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence were intolerable. 
+So he was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died!” 
+The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian: “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.” 
+Intervention – what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction. 
+According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. The Unicef report on the children killed says, “most [of them] under the age of ten”. 
+As a direct consequence, Sirte became the capital of ISIS. Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. 
+All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato. 
+This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war. Once again, the Ruskies are coming to get us, led by another Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil. 
+The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The fascists who engineered the coup in Kiev are the same breed that backed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Of all the scares about the rise of fascist anti-Semitism in Europe, no leader ever mentions the fascists in Ukraine – except Vladimir Putin, but he does not count. 
+Many in the Western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian-speaking population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, as agents of Moscow, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government. 
+There is almost the joie d’esprit of a class reunion of warmongers. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. 
+To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the 21st century. 
+This is to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia, and, if possible, China. 
+To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he wants to talk with the president of China. 
+In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over.” That was not news. 
+Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the United States, regardless of who is in the White House. 
+Anti-Trump Boston Globe Sunday Edition Crosses the Line From News into Propaganda 
+The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to the rulers of the world – unlike Clinton who has left no doubt she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China. 
+Clinton has the form, as she often boasts. Indeed, her record is proven. As a senator, she backed the bloodbath in Iraq. When she ran against Obama in 2008, she threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran. As Secretary of State, she colluded in the destruction of governments in Libya and Honduras and set in train the baiting of China. 
+She has now pledged to support a No Fly Zone in Syria – a direct provocation for war with Russia. Clinton may well become the most dangerous president of the United States in my lifetime – a distinction for which the competition is fierce. 
+Without a shred of evidence, she has accused Russia of supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public. 
+That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important. As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all cylinders. 
+Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War Two is under way – in the Caucasus and eastern Europe, on the border with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target. 
+Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its finale on November 8th, If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defence drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays’“torches of freedom”. 
+George Bush’s press spokesman once called the media “complicit enablers”. 
+Coming from a senior official in an administration whose lies, enabled by the media, caused such suffering, that description is a warning from history. 
+In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.” 
+
+Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger Share This Article...",FAKE
+4640,New emails under review in Clinton case emerged from Weiner probe,"WASHINGTON — FBI Director James Comey said Friday that investigators had found new emails related to the bureau's previously closed inquiry into Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information, restarting a long-simmering debate over the Democratic nominee's conduct as secretary of State in the closing days of a presidential campaign that Clinton appeared to be putting away.
+
+In a letter to senior lawmakers explaining his decision, Comey said ""the FBI cannot yet assess"" whether the information is ""significant"" nor could he offer a timetable for how long it will take investigators to make an assessment.
+
+But an official familiar with the matter said Friday that the new materials, perhaps thousands of emails, were discovered in the ongoing and separate investigation into sexually charged communications between former New York congressman Anthony Weiner and a 15-year-old girl. Comey was briefed on the findings in recent days, resulting in the director's notification to Congress, said the official who is not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
+
+The emails were discovered in a search of a device or devices used by Weiner, who is separated from longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Abedin also had access to the same device or devices.
+
+The official said it was not likely that the FBI's review of the additional emails could be completed by Election Day.
+
+In a brief news conference in Iowa on Friday evening, Clinton said, ""The American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately,"" a position earlier outlined in a statement from her campaign chairman, John Podesta. The Democratic nominee called on the FBI ""to release all the information that it has.""
+
+""As you know I've had plenty of words about the FBI lately, but I give them great credit for having the courage to right this horrible wrong. Justice will prevail,""  Donald Trump said at a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Thursday night.
+
+During a speech in New Hampshire earlier in the day, the Republican presidential nominee gleefully discussed the ""breaking news announcement.""
+
+""Hillary Clinton's corruption is on a scale we have never seen before,"" Trump said, and her ""criminal scheme"" should not be allowed in the Oval Office.
+
+""Perhaps justice will be done,"" the GOP nominee said of the development.
+
+In his statement, Podesta demanded that the FBI director ""provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter'' to lawmakers.
+
+""Upon completing this investigation more than three months ago, FBI Director Comey declared no reasonable prosecutor would move forward with a case like this and added that it was not even a close call,'' Podesta said. ""In the months since, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have been baselessly second-guessing the FBI and, in both public and private, browbeating the career officials there to revisit their conclusion in a desperate attempt to harm Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
+
+""It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election,"" Podesta added.
+
+Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One Friday, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said nothing had ""surfaced to change the president's opinion and views of Secretary Clinton.''
+
+""He's going to be proud to support her from now until Election Day,"" Schultz said.
+
+In July, Comey announced that while Clinton and her aides during her tenure as secretary of State had been ""extremely careless"" in the way they'd handled classified information, he recommended that no criminal charges be filed.
+
+In her press conference Friday, Clinton said she was ""confident"" whatever is included in the new messages under review ""will not change the conclusion reached in July.""
+
+In July, Comey testified before skeptical Republican lawmakers to explain the bureau's recommendation, which had been adopted by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
+
+“We’re mystified and confused by the fact pattern you laid out and the conclusion you reached,"" House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Comey.
+
+Comey, however, was unequivocal in maintaining that the conclusion of investigators was not a close call.
+
+“There is no way anybody would bring a case against John Doe or Hillary Clinton for the second time in 100 years based on those facts,"" he told the House panel on July 7.
+
+Trump has cited the closed FBI probe as evidence that the election was ""rigged"" against him, and at a recent debate the GOP nominee said that, if he's elected president, he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton.
+
+""Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame,"" said House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
+
+""This decision, long overdue, is the result of her reckless use of a private email server, and her refusal to be forthcoming with federal investigators,"" Ryan said in a statement, adding that he was again calling for Clinton to no longer receive classified briefings, a traditional courtesy afforded major-party presidential nominees.
+
+Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said the timing of the decision, so soon before the election, demonstrated ""how serious this discovery must be.""
+
+Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, wrote on Twitter that ""a great day in our campaign just got even better.""
+
+Meanwhile, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said in a statement that ""without knowing how many emails are involved, who wrote them, when they were written or their subject matter, it’s impossible to make any informed judgment on this development.""
+
+She added: ""The FBI has a history of extreme caution near Election Day so as not to influence the results. Today’s break from that tradition is appalling.”
+
+House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi accused Republicans of attempting to ""misrepresent'' the FBI's work.
+
+""Sadly but predictably, Republicans are doing their best to ... warp the FBI’s work to serve their partisan conspiracy-mongering against Hillary Clinton,'' Pelosi said.
+
+The uncertainty of what the new FBI review will yield, and when it will be completed, leaves open the question of how much of an impact it will have on the presidential campaign, as Trump looks to mount what would be a historic comeback, as polls show him trailing nationally and in key battleground states.
+
+""Unless the FBI closes this new investigation one way or the other next week, the likely impact will be to cut into Clinton’s margin, with the bigger effect being on down-ballot races than on the outcome of the presidential election,"" said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, in an emailed statement.
+
+Whatever the long-term impact, the short-term jolt to Trump and his supporters, at least, seemed clear.
+
+In his New Hampshire speech, the GOP nominee suggested the rest of his message for the day would no longer matter as much, given the FBI announcement.
+
+""The rest of my speech is going to be so boring,"" he joked.
+
+Contributing: David Jackson in Manchester, N.H., and Gregory Korte in Washington.",REAL
+5558,"Modi effect: Facebook to abolish fake troll accounts, users can transfer content till 31st Dec","Tweet (Image via intoday.in) 
+Just as the Indian economy is facing the evil of black money , Facebook and Twitter have seen the menace of fake and anonymous accounts growing in the past few years. As per the latest data, Facebook has approximately 71 million active Indian users out of which 15 million are anonymous/fake while Twitter has 22 million active Indian users out of which 7 million are anonymous/fake, posing a big threat to the idea of troll-less (white) social media. 
+Announcing this historic move, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter issued a joint statement: “All anonymous / fake accounts with more than 500 friends / 1000 followers will be suspended at 12 midnight of 9th November. These friends/ followers along with content can be transferred to the original account till 31st December 2016.” 
+Here are some of the highlights of the historic speech: 1. No content can be posted / tweeted / shared / re-tweeted from the anonymous/fake account after 12 am of 9th Nov. 2. The content of the anonymous account can be transferred by submitting an original DP/ original name. The last date for the same is 31st Dec. 3. In case of an emergency post (like trolling a politician / cricketer / film celebrity), user can login using his original login details and post for the next 72 hours. 4. All users with less than 100 followers will continue to exist and be spared from suspension. 5. A daily withdrawal cap of 2000 tweets/day has been put which will be later increased to 4000 tweets/day 
+“Your content and followers will remain yours. No need to panic. You have 50 days to submit the proof,” assured Zuckerberg. 
+The decision elicited mixed reviews: some predicted that social media will see a downfall in the coming few days while others welcomed the move considering its effects in the long run.",FAKE
+2903,"As Iran talks intensify, Boehner and Netanyahu warn against deal","Trump will also meet with retiring Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, former Georgia Gov. Sonny Purdue and Linda McMahon, a prolific Republican donor, two-time Senate...",REAL
+6747,Joel Skousen on Scenario World War 3 NWO 2016 Is Coming,source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments,FAKE
+9686,"Hillary Won More Votes, Lost The Election","On Tuesday night, in a scenario that has only occurred four times in American history, the presidency was won by a candidate who lost the popular vote . Comment on this Article Via Your Facebook Account Comment on this Article Via Your Disqus Account Follow Us on Facebook!",FAKE
+9087,"Feds: 275,000 born to illegals in 1 year","Feds: 275,000 born to illegals in 1 year 7% of all U.S. births, would fill city size of Orlando Published: 1 min ago 
+(WASHINGTON EXAMINER) Moms in the United States illegally gave birth to 275,000 babies in 2014, enough birthright U.S. citizens to fill a city the size of Orlando, Florida, according to an analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics. 
+The data showed that newborns to illegals accounted for 7 percent of all births in 2014, according to the analysis from the Pew Research Center.",FAKE
+2209,Iran nuclear agreement: Is a 'better deal' possible – and at what cost? (+video),"Critics say the shock of congressional rejection of the nuclear deal is a path to bring Iran back to the negotiating table. Secretary of State John Kerry calls that view 'a fantasy.'
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry listens while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the impacts of the nuclear deal with Iran on Capitol Hill Wednesday.
+
+The television ads are airing across the country, from Washington to Honolulu: The Iran nuclear deal is a “bad deal,” the ad says, before concluding, “We want a better deal.”
+
+As Congress debates the complex international agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear program in anticipation of a September vote, the option of rejecting this deal in favor of a “better deal” appears to be catching on. On Wednesday, Rep. Grace Meng (D) of New York announced she would oppose the deal on the table, believing “the world could and should have a better deal.”
+
+But what is the likelihood that an agreement negotiated over several years between six world powers and Iran could indeed be renegotiated and toughened up if Congress rejects the current deal and overcomes a promised presidential veto?
+
+The deep divisions over that question come down, more than anything, to people’s perception of Iran: whether or not it is a country the United States should be entangled with in such a complex deal, whether or not it should be allowed to possess any uranium enrichment program at all.
+
+Critics of the Iran deal say there is plenty of historical precedent for renegotiating and amending international agreements. They argue that Iran is so intent on getting a deal with the US that Tehran could be brought back to the negotiating table after the shock of a congressional rejection.
+
+“There is an alternative to the current [deal], it is an amended deal,” says Mark Dubowitz, an international sanctions expert and executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington.
+
+Citing nearly 80 multilateral agreements Congress has either rejected or for which it has required amendments, he says, “Congress should require the administration to renegotiate certain terms of the proposed [deal] and resubmit the amended agreement to Congress.”
+
+But senior administration officials involved in the Iran negotiations say there is no chance the deal could be renegotiated – and they warn that instead of tighter controls on Iran’s nuclear program, rejection of the deal would very likely result in a ramped-up uranium enrichment program. That, in turn, would mean a shrinking “breakout” time for Iran to rush to produce a nuclear weapon, if it chose to, they add.
+
+Calling the prospect of a “better deal” a “fantasy,” Secretary of State John Kerry told senators last week that those demanding a renegotiated deal, including in the TV ads he’d seen, were proffering “some sort of unicorn arrangement involving Iran’s complete capitulation” – something he said is not going to happen.
+
+Some nonproliferation experts echo that position, saying the Iranian nuclear program was already too advanced years ago to reduce it any more than what the deal reached July 14 does.
+
+“Sure I’d like a better deal – I’d like a pony, too, but it’s not realistic,” says Jeffrey Lewis, director of nonproliferation studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Calif. “The most important thing now is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon in the next 10 to 15 years, and this deal does that.”
+
+Others are much less certain the deal blocks Iran’s paths to a nuclear weapon, but they believe a renegotiated deal could.
+
+FDD's Mr. Dubowitz says he sees three different directions the Iran nuclear issue could take if Congress rejects the current deal and holds out for an agreement “renegotiated on better terms.”
+
+Iran could go ahead and implement its commitments under the deal, he says. It could also “abandon its commitments” and escalate it nuclear program. Or it could try to do both, complying with certain commitments while abandoning others – and thus attempt to divide world powers while advancing its nuclear program.
+
+But under any of those scenarios, Dubowitz says, the US could work to “persuade the Europeans to join the US” in demanding a renegotiation of key parts of the deal.
+
+Yet many regional experts say that prospects for wooing the Europeans to join the US in pressing for a tougher deal, if Congress rejects the one now before it, are dim.
+
+“European and Asian partners would feel frustrated and misled” in the wake of a US rejection of the deal, Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the House Armed Services Committee this week. European allies would likely join countries like China and India in investing in Iran’s energy sector, he added.
+
+“Broadly, the action would create distance between the US and the world and diminish distance between Iran and the world,” Dr. Alterman added, “after more than a decade when the reverse was the case.”
+
+Looming large over the calls for a return to negotiations are strong suspicions on the part of deal supporters that the “better deal” advocates really have no interest in a stronger deal at all, but instead want to thwart any US agreement with the Iranian government.
+
+“We had a ‘better deal’ in Iraq after 1991 [following the Gulf War], there were no restrictions, inspectors could go where they wanted when they wanted, and that deal wasn’t good enough,” says Dr. Lewis, adding that “we still went to war. So really I don’t believe them when they say they just want a ‘better deal’ this time.”
+
+Other doubters of the sincerity of the seekers of a “better deal” say it’s telling to note that the sponsor of the TV ad campaign demanding a better deal is a group called Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, which is backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel organization lobbying Congress hard for the deal’s defeat.
+
+“There really is no ‘better deal’ for [such critics] in the sense of an agreement that leaves any nuclear program in the hands of the current Iranian government,” Lewis says. “Any deal is bad because it means living with the Islamic Republic.”",REAL
+422,Income Inequality Is a Problem—When Caused by Government Meddling,"Income inequality is back in the news, propelled by an Oxfam International report and President Barack Obama's State of the Union address. The question is whether government needs to do something about this—or whether government needs to undo many things.
+
+Measuring income inequality is no simple thing, which is one source of disagreement between those who think inequality is a problem and those who think it isn't. But it is possible to cut through the underbrush and make some points clear.
+
+We can identify two kinds of economic inequality, and let's keep this in mind as we contemplate what, if anything, government ought to do.
+
+The first kind we might call market inequality. Individuals differ in many ways, including energy, ambition, and ingenuity. As a result, in a market-oriented economy some people will be better than others at satisfying consumers and will hence tend to make more money. The only way to prevent that is to interfere forcibly with the results of peaceful, positive-sum transactions in the marketplace. Since interference discourages the production of wealth, the equality fostered through violence will be an equality of impoverishment.
+
+Is it better that people be equally poor or unequally affluent? This is the important question that political philosopher John Tomasi, author of Free Market Fairness, puts to his classes at Brown University. Would they prefer a society in which everyone has the same low income, or one in which incomes vary, perhaps widely, but the lowest incomes are higher than the equal income of the first society?
+
+Which would you choose? Let's remember that it is entirely possible for the poorest in a society to become richer even as the gap between the richest and poorest grows. Imagine an accordion-like elevator that is rising as a whole while being stretched out, putting the floor further from the ceiling. Would such a society be objectionable? Why is the relative position of the poorest more important than their absolute position? Is concern about relative positions nothing more than envy?
+
+We could argue about that all day, but a much more urgent subject is political-economic inequality. This is the inequality fostered through the political system. Since government's distinctive feature is its claimed authority to use force aggressively (as opposed to defensively), this second sort of inequality is produced by violence, which on its face should make it abhorrent.
+
+Political-economic systems throughout the world, including ones typically thought to be market-oriented (or ""capitalist""), such as in the United States, are in fact built on deeply rooted and long-established systems of privilege. Favors, which the rest of us must pay for one way or another, typically go to the well-connected, and prominent business executives have always been well represented in that group.
+
+In the United States this has been true since the days of John Jacob Astor, the fur trader who had the ears of such influential politicians as James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. Government was little more than the executive committee of leading manufacturers, planters, and merchants (to risk opprobrium by paraphrasing Marx). As Adam Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, ""Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters.""
+
+While business interests today are not the only ones that get consideration in the halls of power, it's a mistake to think they do not retain major influence over government in economic and financial matters. ""Regulatory capture"" is a well-known phenomenon, and ostensible efforts to limit it always fail.
+
+Unlike market inequality, political-economic inequality is unjust and should be eliminated.
+
+How? By abolishing all direct and indirect subsidies; artificial scarcities, such as those created by so-called intellectual property; regulations, which inevitably burden smaller and yet-to-be-launched firms more than lawyered-up big businesses; eminent domain; and permit requirements, zoning, and occupational licensing, which all exclude competition. These interventions and more protect incumbent firms from conditions that would lower prices to consumers, create self-employment and worker-ownership opportunities, and improve bargaining conditions for wage labor.
+
+Instead of symbolically tweaking the tax code to appear to be addressing inequality—the politicians' charade—political-economic inequality should be ended by repealing all privileges right now.
+
+This column originally appeared at the Future of Freedom Foundation.",REAL
+1956,Sen. Rand Paul Announces 2016 Presidential Run,"Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., announced today that he will seek the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.
+
+""I have a message — a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words,"" he told supporters in Louisville, Ky. ""We've come to take our country back.""
+
+Earlier, in a statement on his website, he said: ""I am running for president to return our country to the principles of liberty and limited government.""
+
+Paul also released a video with the opening line: ""On April 7, a different kind of Republican will take on Washington.""
+
+Paul faces what is likely to be a crowded Republican field for 2016. Although Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, his colleague in the Senate, is the only other prominent Republican to have announced his intention to run for president, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, as well as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, are expected to join the fray.
+
+Polls show Paul in a three-way tie for third place in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Bush and Walker lead the most recent average of polls.
+
+Paul, the son of longtime libertarian Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010 in the Tea Party wave. An ophthalmologist by training, Rand Paul is pitching himself as a ""different kind of Republican."" When he was first elected, he was seen as a candidate whose libertarian ideas, in the words of The Washington Post, ""could make him the most unusual and intriguing voice among the major contenders in the 2016 field."" It adds:
+
+As he prepared to announce his presidential ambitions, Paul adopted a more muscular defense policy and reached out to religious conservatives. (For more on the former, you can listen to Paul's interview with NPR's Robert Siegel last September.) Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV, told NPR's Scott Simon in a recent interview that Paul could be called ""libertarian-ish.""
+
+""You know, I think he is talking what he believes. But I think he draws a lot of ideas from his father generally without some of the baggage, to be honest. ""And people are more interested, I think, now than even a few years ago of being allowed to make more choices that are important in their lives. And you see that reflected in things like the growth in pot legalization and gay marriage. Then at the same time they're very skeptical of government, whether it's a conservative Republican government under Bush or a liberal Democratic government under Obama.""
+
+Following his rally today in Louisville, Ky., Rand travels to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada — the four states where the presidential nominating contests begin.
+
+You can follow more detailed coverage of this story on our It's All Politics blog here.",REAL
+2474,ObamaCare 2015: Harvard faculty outraged over health care hikes,"Turns out there’s no free lunch, even if you’re among those lucky few dining at the Harvard Faculty Club.
+
+The New York Times is feasting on the delicious uproar created by Harvard professors who are now outraged to be hit with higher health care costs as a result of ObamaCare. I hardly know where to start on this one. Perhaps with the fact that the article appears in the New York Times? I will let that one go for the moment.
+
+Here’s what’s clear: Health care costs at Harvard are going up. Immediately. And they are rising directly as a result of ObamaCare.
+
+The explanation written right at the top of Harvard’s health care enrollment guide for 2015 states that the university “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by health care reform.” The guide even highlights, in a special little box in the margin, the exact “Impact of Health Care Reform,” explaining that “The Affordable Care Act has brought new benefits and opportunities to many people but with added costs to sponsors.”
+
+Say what?? Who could have predicted that? Anyone who can do math.
+
+Still, the special little box goes on to point to such benefits as keeping offspring on your plan until they are 26 and the Cadillac tax as added costs. And as a result, they say premiums and deductibles are rising.
+
+One French history professor gasps without a hint of irony that rising premiums are tantamount to a pay cut! Welcome to our world.
+
+Still the rising costs aren’t necessarily news to everyone. Several years back, Harvard’s own provost, Dr. Alan M. Garber, sent an open letter to President Obama praising the Cadillac tax as a way to rein in health care costs and premiums. In subsequent interviews, he’s defended his stance and the higher costs he and co-workers are now facing.
+
+I’m betting he’s having a hard time finding a tablemate at the Harvard Faculty Club this week.
+
+Provost Garber should not be confused with another economist with a similar sounding name working about a mile down the Charles River at MIT, Jonathan Gruber.
+
+Gruber infamously counted on the “stupidity of the American voter” to overlook the obvious math that’s now confronting Harvard’s staff. Harvard faculty may be a lot of things, but stupid ain’t one of them.
+
+In fact, Meredith Rosenthal, a professor of health economics and policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, told the Times she was “puzzled by the outcry. The changes in Harvard faculty benefits are parallel to changes all Americans are seeing. Indeed they have come to our front door much later than others.”
+
+No, I don’t think these folks are surprised by the math. I am a graduate of the Harvard Economics Department, and I have sat in these classrooms. I would bet the faculty just didn’t believe they would have to foot the bill. Costs may rise, but they would somehow be absorbed in the system. Donors, someone … someone else, that is … would pay.
+
+And that is, in fact, one of the main problems in American politics. We all want life to be better for everyone. Who wouldn’t want all of their fellow Americans, or all of humanity for that matter, to have good health care? But are you willing to personally take a pay cut to pay for the policy you are advocating?
+
+That’s the hard question the president and proponents of ObamaCare did not want you to grapple with, because they were afraid your reaction would be akin to the screams now echoing through Harvard Yard.
+
+Melissa Francis is the host of ""MONEY with Melissa Francis"" (2 PM/ET), a program that breaks down the day's top stories and how they impact the American taxpayer. Like her on Facebook at MelissaFrancisFOX and follow her on Twitter@MelissaAFrancis. Click here for more information about Melissa.",REAL
+8072,When the River Ran Red,"When the River Ran Red Arthur Kemp, American Renaissance, September 2008 
+The year is 1838. Dodging a flurry of spears, the Boer commander, Andries Pretorius, rides forward to seize a Zulu warrior. In the midst of an epic battle between more than 15,000 warriors and just 468 Boers, Pretorius has decided to take a Zulu alive. He wants to send the captive back to his king, Dingaan, to convey surrender terms to the Zulu nation. 
+The warrior has no intention of being taken alive, and jabs viciously at Pretorius with his assegai. This is a Zulu spear, normally a long-shafted throwing weapon, but the warrior broke its shank earlier for close-quarter stabbing. Pretorius gives up on capturing the Zulu, and tries to shoot him. 
+With a single-shot, muzzle-loading musket, he has only one chance of a hit. There is no time to reload in close combat. To his horror, Pretorius sees the smoke-trailing ball whiz past the Zulu’s ear. At the same time, the Zulu lunges forward, causing Pretorius’s horse to stumble backwards, throwing the white commander to the ground. 
+Leaping to his feet, he meets the attacking Zulu, who knows he is now on equal terms with the white man, who can no longer use his magic shooting stick and carries no weapon comparable to the assegai. Pretorius is now fighting for his life. He just manages to sidestep the spear point, striking it away with the butt of his gun. 
+Spinning round, the Zulu raises his spear high above his head and thrusts down, as he has been trained to do in the Zulus’ disciplined army. It is a blow that will be fatal if it strikes home, but Pretorius sees it coming. He grabs the spear point with his left hand to ward it away from his chest. The sharp point cuts deeply into his palm, embedding itself at an angle that makes it impossible for the Zulu to pull it out. Pretorius seizes the Zulu by the throat with his free right hand and throws him to the ground in an attempt to strangle him. 
+The Zulu struggles, and with the help of two good hands is about to break free, when one of Pretorius’s men comes upon the scene. He pulls the assegai out of the commander’s hand, and plunges it into the Zulu’s side, ending the struggle. 
+Pretorius remounts and heads back to the Boer camp for treatment. He is not worried, as he knows by now that this greatest of all battles between Boers and Zulus has already been won. The main Zulu army has been broken in two, and the river that runs along one side of the Boer camp is stained red with Zulu blood. The place and the tributary known previously as the Ncome will be renamed Blood River. Pretorius knows that the Zulu defeat, which will include some 3,000 killed on the battlefield, is a fit revenge for the deception and murder committed by the Zulus 10 months earlier. 
+Prelude to War 
+The great clash between the Boer and Zulu nations was not, as leftist historians like to claim, the result of ruthless white colonialism suppressing an indigenous people. It came about because the Zulus rejected an extremely reasonable attempt at negotiation by the Boers. 
+The Boers, pioneers of Dutch, French, and German descent, were the people who opened up much of what was later to become South Africa. Their first antecedents had landed on the southernmost tip of Africa in 1652, only 45 years after the Virginia Company settled on Jamestown Island. 
+When they arrived in the area now known as Cape Town, whites came into contact only with Hottentots and Bushmen. As the number of Europeans increased, they expanded east and north, only meeting their first black tribe, the Xhosa, some 500 miles away, on South Africa’s east coast. The Xhosas were migrating south, fleeing the warlike Zulu to the north, who were engaged in imperialist expansion of their own. 
+For just under a century white settlement halted at this eastern frontier border formed by the coast and firm Xhosa settlement. It was not, however, a time of peace, as Xhosa were constantly raiding the Boers who lived on the border. This caused much harm and discontent among the farmers, who blamed the Dutch-ruled colonial government back in Cape Town for the lawlessness. 
+It only added to the border farmers’ grievances when the British took the Cape Colony from the Dutch in 1806 to prevent the colony from falling into French hands during the Napoleonic Wars. It was vital to control the merchant and naval refitting station on the way to the Far East. The new colonial masters not only started anglicizing the colony, when they abolished slavery they offered compensation that amounted to hardly a quarter of a slave’s value. 
+Exasperated by incessant Xhosa attacks and British attempts to suppress their language and culture, groups of frontier farmers, filled with a sense of manifest destiny not seen again until the opening of the American West, set forth to the north and the east in a movement known as the Great Trek. The trekkers (they became known as Voortrekkers, or pioneers, only after 1880) bypassed the Xhosa in search of new, unsettled territory, in which they could establish independent Boer nations. All told, it was only a small minority of no more than 12,000 Boers who made the trek to the future Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal regions. They traveled in several waves of covered, ox-drawn wagons much like the Conestogas in which Americans opened the West. 
+The Boer leader of the time, Piet Retief, had written the trekker “manifesto,” in which he spelled out the farmers’ long-held grievances against the British. By1836, the Boer wagons had crossed the great mountain range into Natal, in an act of audacity that few thought possible. The range, the highest in southern Africa, had been named the Drakensberg—the Dragon Mountains—because they were said to be impassable. 
+Retief had identified a large piece of uninhabited land to the north of the Zulu kingdom, which lay open to settlement. Retief knew that if he wanted the land for his people, he could take it unopposed. However, he wanted to live in peace with his Zulu neighbors, and before taking possession, he opened negotiations with the Zulu king, Dingaan. He wanted no misunderstanding between the two peoples. 
+He sent a letter to the Zulu king explaining why he wanted to speak to him, and first visited Dingaan’s capital—a large circle of reed and grass huts—on November 5, 1837. Retief left the main body of trekkers and went to the Zulu king’s capital, Umgungundhlovo (“the place of the elephant”), to negotiate a treaty that would allow Boers peacefully to settle land adjoining the Zulu kingdom. Dingaan said he would let the Boers live in Natal if they recovered cattle stolen by a Tlokwa chieftain. Retief and his men did so, and Dingaan agreed to give the land to the Boers. 
+Retief returned to Umgungundhlovo on February 3, 1838, to finalize the agreement. He arrived with 60 volunteers, including his own son and three children of other men—it was common for children to accompany their fathers on expeditions of this kind. The next day, Retief and Dingaan formally signed a treaty—the Zulu king made his mark by scratching an “X” on the document—giving possession of the land to the Boers. Delighted, the Boers sent scouts back to the main encampments to report the successful outcome and made ready to leave. As Retief and his party were about to saddle up, a messenger arrived from Dingaan inviting the Boer party to a special celebration to mark the signing. Retief was suspicious but did not want to offend Dingaan. As they had on previous visits, the Boers stacked their firearms neatly outside the reed walls and entered the royal enclosure unarmed. 
+As they ate and drank, a Zulu impi, or warrior unit, put on a dance for the guests. According to the account of a white missionary who was present, the dancing warriors drew ever closer to the Boers, till they were just in front of the seated whites. When the Zulu king leaped to his feet and shouted, “Kill the white wizards!” the impi fell upon the surprised Boers. Some of them drew their hunting knives and tried to fight off the attackers, but they were quickly overwhelmed. 
+The Zulu warriors bound the whites with reed ropes and dragged them to Hlomo Amabutho, the Hill of Execution, near the Zulu capital. There they clubbed the Boers to death, one by one, with Retief kept until last and forced to watch his son being murdered. After Retief’s heart was extracted and presented to Dingaan as proof that the Boer leader was dead, the bodies were left for the vultures, in accordance with Zulu custom. 
+Dingaan then gave orders for the full might of his army to attack the Boer camps. The settlers had received the message Retief had sent earlier and believed everything had gone well. They were therefore completely unprepared and badly undermanned. The 60 men in Retief’s party were all dead. Many other men had gone hunting, leaving only a light guard for the women and children. The Boers were so confident there would be peace that they had not even posted sentries. Just before dawn, barking dogs aroused the outlying wagons. Then, thousands of Zulu warriors attacked the several hundred trekkers — women, children, and old men — as they lay sleeping. 
+The Boer historian, Gustav Preller, who interviewed survivors, left a harrowing account of the aftermath: “All around dozens and dozens of bodies … babies who had had their heads smashed open against the wagon wheels, women, dishonored and in some Zulu custom, their breasts cut off … [I]n a wagon, blood filled to a height of several inches, the life blood of an entire family ebbed out where they lay … Jan Bezuidenhout, one of the few young men who had not gone ahead with the Retief party, grabbed his four-month-old baby daughter out of her crib and ran off through the undergrowth … [H]aving lost his pursuers a few miles away, Bezuidenhout checked for the first time on his daughter in his arms. She was dead; a single spear stroke had killed her.” 
+The slaughter became known as the Weenen, the Dutch word for weeping, and a town of that name still stands near the site. Of the 600 Boers camped in the area, Zulus killed some 300, including 185 children. The rest survived because grazing requirements for their animals meant that the Boer camps had to be widely dispersed. If Dingaan’s men had scouted more thoroughly, found all the encampments, and attacked them simultaneously, the slaughter would have been far greater. 
+Pretorius arrives 
+The Boers now faced their greatest challenge. Their camps were full of wounded men, orphaned children, and widows. The Zulus had stolen an estimated 25,000 head of cattle and sheep during the Weenen slaughter, and ammunition was running low. The Zulu armies might return at any time, and they were a formidable force, as the Boers discovered when they launched a raid to avenge the massacre. On April 6, 1838, 347 trekkers under a divided command of Piet Uys and Hendrik Potgieter rode into Zulu territory only to be defeated by some 7,000 warriors not far from Umgungundhlovo in what became known as the Battle of Italeni. 
+This new disaster forced the Boers to face reality: They had to either abandon their quest for independence and return to the Cape Colony, or find some means to fight their way through. The widows and orphans argued strongly for pushing on. They knew that if they fell back to the Cape they would have to live on charity, whereas if Dingaan could be defeated they could at least recover their livestock. Many Boers were also convinced that God favored them, and that setbacks were only a test of faith. 
+It was at this moment of indecision that a popular lawyer named Andries Pretorius answered the trekker call for reinforcements, and rode into camp with 60 men and a brass cannon. The Boers appointed him commander in chief on November 25, and he immediately began preparing a strike against the Zulu. 
+His means were few. A force of only about 468 Boers, including three Scotsmen, set out on November 27 seeking battle. For extra protection, the Boer column of 64 wagons traveled four abreast, instead of the usual single file. Each night, they formed a circular defensive formation, known as a laager. 
+Pretorius realized that even with two front-loading cannon, his force was too weak to defeat the Zulu army in an open field. He therefore decided to draw the enemy into an attack on the Boer encampment. Each day patrols and scouting parties rode ahead, sometimes led by Pretorius himself, to make sure no unexpected surprises were waiting over the horizon. 
+On December 9, 1838, the Boer party reached the Zandspruit tributary of the Waschbank River. It was here that the Boer chaplain, Sarel Cilliers, first pledged during his nightly sermon that if God helped them defeat the Zulus, they and their descendents would celebrate that day in honor of God, and that they would build a church in commemoration. The Boers repeated this oath, known in Afrikaner folklore as “the covenant,” every night until they met the enemy. 
+There appeared to be no movement from the Zulu side. On December 12, Pretorius decided to move camp to the Buffalo River, hoping to provoke the Zulus by moving farther into their territory. That day, he sent out two patrols, one under the command of his deputy, Commandant Hans De Lange, and another, under the Scotsman Edward Parker. This latter group saw action when they came upon a small group of Zulus. They killed the warriors and took the women prisoner. 
+Pretorius drew up a message for Dingaan on a white cloth, explaining that he was leading a commando to punish the Zulus. If, however, Dingaan was willing to cooperate, Pretorius wrote, he was still willing to make peace—a generous offer in light of the earlier betrayal. He freed the prisoners and told them to give the message to Dingaan. He received no answer. 
+On December 13, the Boers spotted Zulus and what appeared to be a large number of cattle near their camp. Piet Uys had been tricked by such a ploy at the Battle of Italeni. Zulu warriors, crouching behind toughened animal-skin shields, looked like cattle from a distance, and Uys dropped his guard. He was killed in a surprise attack by the “cattle.” 
+Pretorius did not make the same mistake, and he sent a 120-strong mounted unit to investigate the “cattle.” They turned out to be Zulus, and in the short fight that followed the Boers killed eight warriors but suffered no casualties. Pretorius now suspected that the Zulus were preparing for battle. 
+On December 15 he moved the Boer camp to a position alongside the Ncome River, itself a tributary of the Buffalo River. A scouting expedition that day confirmed the presence of two huge Zulu armies a short distance away. 
+Pretorius prepared for battle. His men drew the wagons into a D-shaped formation, one side overlooking a large hippopotamus path facing the Ncome River, another side facing a soil erosion ditch, and the third side facing the open plain. Pretorius chose the site to limit the directions from which the Zulus could attack. 
+The laager was large enough to contain all the horses and oxen. The defenders tied the wagons together with leather ropes, and closed off all openings between and below the wagons with a Pretorius innovation, so-called fighting gates, which were slatted wood fixtures through which defenders could fire. They left two small openings, sealed with removable fighting gates, so cavalry could leave the laager. Finally, they attached lanterns to the ends of large ox-whips planted upright in the ground. These dangled in front of the laager and were to serve as forward lighting during the dark hours when Zulu usually attacked. Zulus captured after the battle said they had believed the lights waving in the breeze above the Boer camp were spirits, and that fear of the spirits kept them from attacking that night. 
+Battle is joined 
+In Pretorius’s own account of the battle, he wrote that as the mist cleared on the morning of December 16, he saw that the Boer camp was completely encircled by tens of thousands of Zulu warriors, even where the terrain would have made an attack difficult. Estimates placed the number of Zulus at between 15,000 and 25,000, although no official count was possible. Whatever the figure, Pretorius wrote that it was a “terrible sight.” 
+The Boers had been ready and armed since two hours before daybreak. The two cannon were in position, and the fighting gates closed. The defenders expected to run out of ammunition for the cannon, and had stacked up suitably sized stones at strategic points along the perimeter to fire as a last resort. The Boers would fire stones that day. 
+The front lines of the Zulu force were still, squatting, only about 40 paces from the wagons, waiting for the signal to attack. Pretorius decided to strike first. At his signal, three bursts of fire from the Boer guns and two blasts from the cannon broke the silence. The Boers’ orders were to then hold their fire. As the billows of gunpowder smoke lifted, they saw that the surviving Zulus had fled some 500 paces from their former front line, leaving behind dozens of dying and dead comrades. 
+The Boers then heard the noise of the Zulus breaking their spear shafts to make them into short, stabbing weapons. A frontal assault was coming. A few minutes later, the Zulu force stormed the wagons, screaming wildly, shields held high, and assegais in readiness. Withering gunfire ripped through the Zulu ranks, and while some managed to reach the wagons, they were gunned down before they could cut through the wagon canvasses. 
+Another group of Zulus tried to attack from inside the erosion ditch by standing on each others’ shoulders and scrambling over the edge. Pretorius ordered Cilliers, the fighting churchman, to see off the attack. He led a group of men out of the relative safety of the wagon perimeter, and they proceeded to kill some 400 Zulus. One Boer, Philip Fourie, was wounded when an assegai struck him in the side. 
+The Boers then wheeled one of their cannon out of the laager, pointed it into the ditch, and fired a shot that literally blew apart the assaulting party. The survivors fled the ditch in disarray. This sparked a temporary retreat by the Zulu, and marked the end of the second unsuccessful attempt to break the Boer lines. The wounded Boer, Fourie, returned to the wagon circle for treatment. 
+As the Zulus waited for new orders, Pretorius ordered another burst of cannon fire into their ranks, provoking a spontaneous charge against the wagons. Although it was the longest single assault of the nine-hour battle, it was utterly defeated, as the Boers cut down wave after wave of attackers. Gun barrels got so hot men had to hold them with wet cloths for reloading. 
+As the third attack fell back, the Boers launched their first surprise counterattack, as the mobile fighting gates swung open and a cavalry unit charged the Zulu lines. Shooting from the saddle, the Boers tried to turn the Zulu lines to their left. Desperate Zulu resistance, which saw hundreds more of their number killed, stopped the encircling action, and the Boer horsemen rode back to the wagons. They regrouped and launched a second attempt, driving the Zulus further away. A third mounted charge finally broke through the Zulu lines. The Boer cavalry then turned and attacked the Zulus from the rear. Pinned between the cavalry and cannon fire from within the wagon circle, the main Zulu force facing the open plain scattered. 
+A reserve Zulu force tried to cross the Ncome River to attack the laager but so many warriors were gunned down that their blood stained the water red. Pretorius himself then led another cavalry charge from within the laager. Cut to pieces, with thousands dead, the Zulu army, which had courageously charged repeatedly against a better-armed enemy, finally broke ranks and fled. 
+Pretorius divided his cavalry into two units and sent them in pursuit. Mounted Boers killed hundreds of warriors during a three-hour chase. It was during this pursuit that Pretorius was wounded. Two other Boers, including Fourie, suffered nonfatal assegai wounds, but these were the only Boer casualties. An estimated 3,000 Zulus died on the battlefield, and many more died later from wounds. 
+The Aftermath 
+Early the next morning, Pretorius ordered the camp broken, and marched the commando straight to the Zulu king’s capital. He was confident the Zulus no longer posed any significant threat, but he hardly expected the sight that awaited him on December 20 at Umgungundhlovo. Dingaan had fled with his wives and cattle, leaving the circular camp of reed huts burning, as a symbol of the destruction of Zulu power. 
+On the outskirts of the capital the Boers found the skeletons of Retief and his men. “Their hands and feet were still bound fast with thongs of ox hide,” wrote Cilliers, “and in nearly all the corpses a spike as thick as an arm had been forced into the anus so that the point of the spike was in the chest.” Retief, who was identified by the remains of a satin vest he had worn, still had a leather bag draped over his shoulder bone. In it was the treaty, signed by Dingaan, giving the Boers the unoccupied land to the north. According to one of the Boers who saw it, the treaty was astonishingly well preserved—as if it had been “left in a closed box.” Pretorius’s men buried Retief and his party on Christmas Day 1838. 
+Dingaan fled north but was captured by a rival tribe, the Swazis. Earlier, he had persecuted the Swazis, and they murdered him in revenge. The new Zulu king, Mpande, was officially installed in 1840, and confirmed the contents of the treaty with the Boers, who established their first republic in southern Africa. Also in 1840, in fulfillment of their covenant, the Boers built a church to mark the Blood River victory. 
+The Battle of Blood River entered the Afrikaner psyche as a divinely-inspired victory, and December 16 became a public holiday in South Africa, celebrated each year with festivals, church services, and reenactments. The battle represented the victory of European civilization over the darkness of Africa, of Christianity over heathens. It helped justify white supremacy and the self-appointed right of Afrikaners to rule over, not apart from, the black tribes. 
+Yet the Battle of Blood River, in many ways, symbolized all that was wrong with the white settlement of southern Africa, and why that experiment failed. The Boers are to be praised for wanting to settle unoccupied land peacefully, and for seeking the friendship of neighboring peoples, but neither they nor their descendents understood that demography is the arbiter of nations. Those who form the majority population of a territory will rule that territory, no matter how powerful a ruling elite may be. They will determine its culture and society. A majority-European population will create a society that reflects European values and norms. A majority-African population will create a society that reflects African norms. 
+The Boers never understood this. Even at the Battle of Blood River they had at least 60 black servants and an indeterminate number of mixed-race servants, who helped load weapons. Parker, one of the Scotsman, had more than 100 black servants. 
+To the present day, the overwhelming majority of Afrikaners have black servants who work on farms, in factories, and in homes. Afrikaners failed to understand that by giving the native population the benefits of European civilization, blacks would grow in numbers and overwhelm their society. The Cape Colony and the original Boer republics, which were largely uninhabited by natives when they were settled by Europeans, are today home to tens of millions of Africans. 
+The Church of the Vow, built by the Boers in 1840, still stands in the town of Pietermaritzburg, named after Piet Retief. But Pietermaritzburg, supposedly the symbol of the Boer victory over the Zulus, is today part of a municipality called Umgungundhlovo, named after Dingaan’s capital. It is also the capital of the South African province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, and its population is more than 95 percent black. 
+The Church of the Vow stands alone, graffiti-scarred and abandoned, in a dirty downtown slum. Its decay illustrates the fatal error made by the victors of the Battle of Blood River, that of ignoring the demographics of race. If whites had taken possession of those unoccupied lands and kept them for themselves alone the history of South Africa would have been entirely different. 
+If the Boers had inhabited and worked their own land rather than rely on black labor, the states they created might still be strong and independent today. Their decision to use non-white labor was a critical error that undid all of the sacrifices of the early pioneers. 
+The only way to maintain a civilization is for the majority to occupy its own land with its own people, and to do its own manual labor. This law governs the rise and fall of civilizations, and the victors of Blood River ignored it, to their cost.",FAKE
+149,'Selma' sets off new fight over Martin Luther King's contested legacy,"Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died young — at age 39 — and ever since his assassination in 1968 there has been a contest over his legacy.
+
+I’ve met black radicals who sneer at the national holiday celebrating his birth. They see the King holiday as white America’s preference for celebrating a moderate, non-violent black leader instead of a militant, violent young Malcolm X.
+
+On the other side are critics who see the King holiday as political correctness taken to new heights. King was not a president, like Washington and Lincoln, so they ask why he is deserving of a national holiday. Blinded by racial bitterness, they suggest President Reagan signed the King holiday into law in 1983 as a token political gesture.
+
+Now a very good, emotionally powerful new movie — “Selma” — about Dr. King’s historic role in the struggle for voting rights has set off a new fight over his legacy.
+
+This dramatic film by  director, Ava DuVernay, will be remembered less as a record of Dr. King’s greatness and more as a sign of the racial power struggles of the early 21st century.
+
+I know the real civil rights story. I’ve written two best-selling histories of the period. The greatest social movement of the last century belongs to all Americans. But some people prefer to play racial games.
+
+This movie fits in with the racially divisive discussion about who owns the history of the civil rights movement. It fits with polarizing racial figures like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. They regularly exploit the history of the civil rights movement for their own personal gain — hosting television shows and getting money from corporations — while not doing the hard work of addressing high rates of black crime, school dropouts and family breakdown.
+
+It is also fits with many white politicians who blame the poor for every problem and find it easy to push minority voters out of their districts while ignoring the nation’s history of denying black people the right to vote.
+
+Now a version of the same race hustle is on display in Hollywood. To celebrate King as a hero, the director, who is black decided to make President Lyndon Johnson into a white villain.
+
+In one scene Johnson erupts in anger at Dr. King, telling the civil rights leader, “You’ve got one big issue, I’ve got one hundred and one.” People who were in the room, black and white aides to the president and Dr. King, say no such confrontation ever happened.
+
+The movie also has Johnson approving of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s scheme to send Dr. King’s wife an audio recording of her husband having sex with another woman. The historical record is clear. Yes, the tape is real. No, Johnson had nothing to do it. And the tape had nothing to do with events in Selma.
+
+All of that is what Bill Moyers called “the worst kind of creative license suggesting the very opposite of the truth.”
+
+And when the director, DuVernay, was called on the distortion, she said people who care about history are the problem. She argued that crediting Johnson with supporting the Selma march was “jaw-dropping and offensive” and amounted to ignoring “black citizens who made it so.” To her, the fact that Johnson explicitly endorsed the idea of taking the movement to Selma in a recorded phone call to Dr. King is just a nuisance.
+
+White directors have similarly distorted civil rights history. The 1988 film “Mississippi Burning” featured two heroes, both white and both FBI agents. That was an incredible distortion of a story about the bravery of civil rights workers who dared to go south to stand with beleaguered black heroes against racial oppression. In truth, the FBI was often in league with local police departments in covering up racially motivated murder.
+
+In 1988 that distortion was rationalized as a smart box office decision to offer white heroes to white audiences.
+
+Now that a black director has a chance to make Hollywood’s first big movie about Dr. King, she sees it as time for payback and her own brand of distortion.
+
+Race retains a powerful grip on American guilt, fear, lust and anger. That’s why controlling the narrative is so important. And the key to the narrative is in the facts of slavery, legal segregation and the fight for equal rights. That is why facts about Dr. King are subject to a constant power struggle. DuVernay is saying she will tell her story as a black story for black audiences with a black hero, and she will twist facts as she pleases.
+
+Mark Twain said: “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as much as you please.”
+
+The facts are that mostly white students went south for Freedom Summer; white ministers and rabbis took great risks and even died for the cause; white government officials like John Doar and Nicholas Katzenbach put themselves between racist mobs and black people. None of this diminishes the contributions of black people.
+
+The truth is that President Johnson worked to make the movement a success. The president famously brought tears to Dr. King’s eyes in 1965 when he told a joint session of Congress and a television audience of 70 million that every American should stand up for equal voting rights. “Their cause must be our cause, too,” the president said. “Because it’s not just Negroes, but it’s really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”
+
+And then, in a rhetorical crescendo, the president said: “And we shall overcome.” He used a phrase that told the nation he was on the side of civil rights for black people.
+
+ 
+
+ As the author of a history of the civil rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize — America’s Civil Rights Years,” I’ve done enough research to know that any fair account of the great social movement has to acknowledge Lyndon Baines Johnson  as a civil rights hero.
+
+And Dr. King doesn’t need to have anyone put down so he can look heroic. He really is a hero. That’s a fact.
+
+Juan Williams is a co-host of FNC's ""The Five,"" where he is one of seven rotating Fox personalities.
+
+",REAL
+4074,"In Kenyan town where students were massacred, 'it's not safe'","GARISSA, Kenya — Tension and anxiety remained high Friday as the Kenyan military launched a campaign to flush out terrorists linked to the Garissa University College massacre.
+
+The campaign came as Kenyan Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinett imposed a curfew on the borderlands with Somalia from 6:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. local time.
+
+Few businesses remained open early on Friday evening before the curfew took hold. Some said the heavily armed Kenyan troops were overly zealous in rooting out Al Shabaab terrorists who have claimed responsibility for the attacks.
+
+""It's not safe here for us as residents,"" said Abdikadir Adolwa. ""The soldiers are whipping residents to force them to identify terrorists. The military have terrorized this area and we fear going to the streets of the town.""
+
+Many residents who could stay outside the town opted to leave while the troops were present.
+
+""They're arresting people who have no national identity cards,"" said Nathar Abdkir Balza, a mother of five, who owns a hotel in Garissa. ""You can be arrested for loitering.""
+
+Ethnic Somalis especially have deserted the area. Al Shabaab hails from nearby Somalia.
+
+""The Somalis like miraa but they are now afraid to come to town and buy it,"" said Kevin Kariuki, who sells miraa, or khat, an African plant that has slightly intoxicating effects when chewed.
+
+Earlier Friday, the Kenyan government appealed for help in capturing nine men, described as ""bloodthirsty, armed and dangerous,"" in the wake of an attack on Garissa University that left 148 people dead.
+
+Attackers from the Somali-based terror group al-Shabab told university students before they were killed that ""this is the beginning of more attacks"" targeting schools and universities in the country, the Kenya-based Standard reported.
+
+The four gunmen were killed Thursday as security forces moved to end the 15-hour siege, which appeared to target Christians and Islamic converts. Two security guards, one policeman and one soldier were among the dead. At least 79 people were injured, and more than 500 students held hostage were rescued.
+
+Interior Minister Joseph Nkaissery updated the casualties figures Friday, saying the gunmen killed 148 people. He said 142 of the dead were students, three were policemen and three were soldiers. Nkaissery added that 104 people were wounded.
+
+Survivor Claire Mumo, a student, was in the college when the terrorists attacked on Thursday.
+
+""I was woken up by gunshot sounds inside our dormitory. The four gunmen I noticed ordered everybody to lie down before they started shooting at us,"" said Mumo. ""The blood of my friend spilled on my head when she was shot. The gunmen thought they had shot and killed me.""
+
+The gunmen left her alone because they thought she was already dead, she said. As she lay on the floor, she heard them carry out their plans.
+
+""I heard them asking and separating Muslims and Christians students. Then shortly I heard sounds of gunshots,"" Mumo added. ""I only came out when I saw our security forces collecting bodies. I will never forget this attack. I'm lucky to be alive.""
+
+Survivor Helen Titus said one of the first things that the al-Shabab gunmen did when they entered the campus early Thursday was to head for a lecture hall where Christians were in prayer. Al-Shabab is a Somalia-based Islamic extremist group with ties to al-Qaida.
+
+""They investigated our area. They knew everything,"" Titus told The Associated Press outside a hospital in Garissa where she was being treated for a bullet wound to the wrist.
+
+Titus, a 21-year-old English literature student, said she smeared blood from classmates on her face and hair and lay still at one point in hopes the gunmen would think she was dead.
+
+The gunmen also told students hiding in dormitories to come out, assuring them that they would not be killed, said Titus, who wore a patient's gown as she sat on a bench in the hospital yard.
+
+""We just wondered whether to come out or not,"" she said. Many students did, whereupon the gunmen started shooting men, saying they would not kill ""ladies,"" Titus said. But they also shot women and targeted Christians, said Titus, who is a Christian.
+
+Esther Wanjiru said she was awake at the time of the attack. Asked if she lost anyone, she said: ""My best friend.""
+
+Another survivor, Nina Kozel, said she was awakened by screaming and that many students escaped by sprinting to the fences and jumping over them. Some suffered bruises, she said. Many men were unable to escape, and hid in vain under beds and in closets in their rooms, according to Kozel.
+
+""They were shot there and then,"" she said.
+
+The mortuaries in Garissa, near the Somali border in northeastern Kenya, were so overwhelmed they had to ship many of the bodies to the capital of Nairobi, 200 miles away, the BBC reported.
+
+The government began evacuating students who survived the Thursday terror attack, but many parents still don't know about their fate of their children.
+
+""I phoned my daughter Susan since yesterday in the morning when I received bad news about the attack, but she didn't pick my calls,"" said Eunice Wangari, a mother of three. ""I don't know if she's still alive or not. The government is taking too long to identify the bodies. I am very stressed.""
+
+Judith Musyoka, 45, and Boaz Musyoka, 55, are still searching for their son, Sammy Mutiso Musau in the wake of the attack that killed 147 students and staff.
+
+""I don't know if my son is still alive,"" said Boaz. ""When I heard the news about terror attack I called him several times but his phone was not going through. I need to know his fate.""
+
+A curfew was imposed for two weeks on Garissa and three neighboring counties. Cabinet Secretary of Education Jacob Kaimenyi ordered the university closed for an unspecified period, sending many students lugging suitcases onto buses Friday.
+
+The Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) advised teachers in the region to leave immediately if they felt unsafe.
+
+""We will not allow our teachers to risk their lives working in an insecure environment,"" said Willison Sosion, chairman of KNUT, who called for Garissa University to be closed permanently.
+
+Some Kenyans were angry that the government didn't take sufficient security precautions. The attack came six days after Britain advised ""against all but essential travel"" to parts of Kenya, including Garissa.
+
+A day before the attack, President Uhuru Kenyatta dismissed that warning as well as an Australian one pertaining to Nairobi and Mombasa, saying: ""Kenya is safe as any country in the world. The travel advisories being issued by our friends are not genuine.""
+
+Garissa Gov. Nathif Jama Adam condemned the attack and demanded the government address security in the region to stop locals from leaving.
+
+""I want to plead with Kenyans to stay here as we work with the government to boost security in our region,"" he said, in particular appealing to Christians in the region. ""We'll not allow terrorists to divide our people on religion lines.""
+
+Kenyan officials offered a $220,000 bounty for Mohammed Mohamud, who they suspect planned the attack. On social media, the Interior Ministry called him ""the mastermind.""
+
+Mohamud, who goes by other aliases, may have been assisted by two youths who conducted surveillance on the university, Kenya's The Star newspaper reported. He reportedly has claimed responsibility for a bus attack that left dozens dead late last year.
+
+National chairperson of the National Muslim Council of Kenya, Nazlin Umar Fazaldin Rajput, criticized the government for failing to shore up security after Somali-based militants attacked civilians in retaliation for Kenyan military operations against their base in Somalia. Kenya began those operations in 2011 after a spate of kidnappings.
+
+""All it took was four poorly armed terrorists against our entire intelligence and armed forces. This is a shame,"" she said. ""It is not the terrorist who is an enemy, the enemy is our failed security apparatus and the officers charged with those dockets.""
+
+Rajput said the Kenyan military can do a better job guarding the borders and the people.
+
+""Until we replace inefficient officers with efficient ones and address the root cause of our suffering, we will not win the battle against terror,"" she said. ""We have the U.N. and foreign countries giving Kenya intelligence reports, but there is no efficient execution, save to harass innocent Muslims.""
+
+Others said Muslims, like all Kenyans, must cooperate with authorities, pointing to another terror attack near Dadaab camp for refugees — 10 miles from Garissa University — on Thursday.
+
+Dadaab Deputy County Commissioner Albert Kimanthi said an unknown number of gunmen wearing balaclavas and armed with AK-47 rifles stormed the camp around 3 a.m. and killed a teacher. The gunmen injured four guards.
+
+""It's our responsibility to give intelligence necessary information to curb such attacks,"" he said. ""The joint operation that involves the regular and administration police officers has been working hard to nab the criminals.""
+
+At Garissa University, Maureen Manyego, 21, hid in a wardrobe in a women's dormitory during the attacks. She said the terrorists lectured their victims on why they were about to die.
+
+""We are here to kill and die with you,"" the militants said, she told the Standard. ""We are not afraid of death.""
+
+They told the students they were being killed ""to pay for the arrogance of your political leader"" who refuses to remove troops from Somalia.
+
+""As long as Kenya's military is in Somalia, it will be paid with its citizens blood,"" the militants said, according to Manyego.",REAL
+1873,"“He’s filling the government with Muslims”: Hanging out with Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul inside New Hampshire’s wacky GOP 2016 cattle call","The official candidates — Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz — gathered at Nashua, New Hampshire’s Crowne Plaza hotel this Friday and Saturday for the First in the Nation Republican Leadership Summit. The summit also featured unofficial candidates who are almost certainly running but can’t quite say so yet for legal/fundraising reasons: Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Huckabee, to name a few. You also had your for-pretend candidates, like Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham. Beneath them are the YOLO candidates, like former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, former New York Gov. George Pataki, and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton. All here. Former Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich occupies whatever tier is beneath Gilmore and Pataki, and he was here, too. At the very bottom of the pile is this guy. Here.
+
+New Hampshire Republicans are not the same as Iowa Republicans. They’re blunt and talk fast and are in no way intimidated to ask a governor or senator or ambassador whatever’s on their mind, in a shrewd, distrusting what’s your angle here? sort of way. There’s a libertarian bent to the state’s conservative politics and, by and large, no one wants to waste any precious time talking about, say, gay marriage.
+
+This is not to say that the conservative die-hards in New Hampshire don’t have their own quirks. The ones in attendance at the FITN summit, at least, care a lot about ISIS establishing beachheads on the continent and the scourge of “illegals.” If you were wondering last fall why New Hampshire GOP Senate candidate Scott Brown kept going on about ISIS fighters crossing the southern border to infect Americans with Ebola, a few conversations at the Crowne Plaza in Nashua would make it quite clear. There’s a paranoid style to New Hampshire politics.
+
+“He’s trying to destroy the country,” a woman in black-and-white shoes and a Diane Keaton-style tie/vest combination, whispered to me during the speech from former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. She was referring to the current Democratic president — or “Democrat president,” in the parlance of right-wing conferences. Bolton had just said that the “principle responsibility of the President of the United States is to protect the country,” and for this woman, and presumably everyone else in the room, Barack Obama has performed poorly on that score.
+
+Bizarrely enough, I’m more familiar with Bolton’s talking points than any other candidate’s, and the man presents a terrifying view of the world. Everyone is trying to bomb us and our president won’t bomb them, and Bolton can’t stand this, and he’s going to make America care about his particular brand of foreign policy and not all these wishy-washy foofoo issues like education or health care. ISIS is coming for us, Russia is coming for us, China, you name it. And oh, this Iran deal? “The most serious act of appeasement in American history.” Bolton likes to close with a dose of levity, about how he has a special understanding of Hillary Clinton since he was a year apart from Bill and Hillary at Yale Law School. Hillary was a “radical” then, and she’s a radical now. According to Bolton, the way people are in graduate school is pretty much the way they are the rest of their lives, and Hillary Clinton is every bit the leftist that Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama are. Scared yet?
+
+“I read an article in the Investor’s Business Daily that scared the crap out of me,” an older man began his question to Bolton. Turns out ISIS is setting up training camps in New Mexico, or maybe it’s Mexico-Mexico, and they’re pouring across the border. (The article in question cites a report from Judicial Watch, a right-wing paranoiac crank website, saying ISIS has “spotters” in New Mexico to aid in deadly terrorist crossings.) This news didn’t surprise John Bolton at all. John Bolton is never surprised. John Bolton has seen some things.
+
+“I’ve been reading some things about ISIL,” another older man says. He’s been reading the Internet and you just won’t believe the stuff he’s finding. ISIS is trying to establish a Caliphate and, according to the Koran, once the Caliphate is established, all Muslims are required to pledge allegiance to it and kill all non-participants. Why aren’t we stopping Islam? John Bolton is of course aware of this, and not surprised by it, and to him the fact that Barack Obama won’t even name the enemy gives the enemy enormous power.
+
+But these two questioners were warm-up acts for the Greatest Question Ever. It came from the woman sitting next to me, the same one who had whispered to me earlier that Obama is “trying to destroy the country.” She didn’t mean this metaphorically. She had evidence — proof so ironclad that it could only have come from a weird multicolor-font chain email that old people forward to each other.
+
+“What do you think about the War on Terror within?” She asks? Obama has been “filling the government with Muslims. He is filling the State Department with the Muslim Brotherhood.” It gets worse. This woman has also heard that Barack Obama is “amassing tanks and artillery weapons” to stage a revolution “in the streets.” He may have several four- and five-star generals who are going along with this. And then there’s the–
+
+“The answer is no,” John Bolton cut her off, laughing nervously. She had managed to surprise John Bolton, and that’s an accomplishment.
+
+“Well, you’re probably nicer to me than the conservative media,” Mike Huckabee told me, after I was introduced to him as a reporter from a liberal news outlet.
+
+I had been watching him on Fox News from the hotel lounge, announcing that he announce his presidential decision in early May. Right after the segment aired, Mike Huckabee walked through the lounge on his way to something else. Like a moron, I pointed at the TV and said to him “YOU WERE JUST ON THE TV,” as though bewildered that someone can climb out of a television set and into real life.
+
+Can’t say I’ve ever been very nice to Mike Huckabee, but it’s true that he’s about to go to war with conservative media. Small-government fiscal conservatives have never liked Huckabee. For all outspoken social conservatism and a foreign policy informed by fundamentalist interpretation of Revelation, he’s never been much of a budget-cutter. (He’ll claim that a lot of this had to do with the Democratic legislature he dealt with when he was governor of Arkansas.) And in the past few days, he’s been the (unofficial) presidential candidate coming out hardest against Chris Christie’s plan to cut Social Security.
+
+He’s not framing it in liberal terms — about how means-testing Social Security would welfarize the program and erode its support — and he looked sort of confused when I tried to explain that argument. But Huckabee has a problem, as a vast majority of those affected almost certainly will, with people paying into Social Security for decades and then not getting back what’s owed them, whether those cuts come in the form of means-testing, a raise in the retirement age, or linking cost-of-living increases to chained CPI. And since he’s a professional politician who understands his audience, he’s spinning it another way: the government is stealing the money of the people. You lent the government your money, and they’re not letting you have it back. It’s Big Government Theft. That’ll do.
+
+Huckabee is good with people. So is Chris Christie, in his own, unorthodox style. It’s an attribute he must have great strength in, since he’s preparing a campaign centered on yelling at people about cutting Social Security and Medicare. Christie came to the summit to continue selling his plan. Sharp cuts to social insurance programs are an extension of the overall Christie message of tough love, or a belief that in America’s heart of heart lurks a masochist. Christie said he is starting his run (Unofficially! Per the lawyers! ) with a 12-point proposal on cutting entitlement spending because he wants to run a campaign based on “strength, clarity, and hard truths.” “Leadership” is the other word Christie loves to employ. To Christie, “leadership” means the willingness to put forth these “hard truths,” like how Social Security needs a good whooping. It’s a testament to his skills that he’s even trying something like this. But in order for it to be successful he’ll need to convince people that what he’s saying, and the policies he’s pushing, are the only possible correct ones. That he’s telling the truth, and anyone who disagrees with him is a liar, and his plan is literally the only way to shore up Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for the long haul. If anyone can do this, it’s Christie. But it’s far from a sure thing that anyone can do this. Another plank of Christie’s big plan is to reform Social Security disability benefits. There are too many working-age people out there falsely claiming disability and we need to get them back in the workforce. Grr! During his Q&A segment, a woman took issue with this part of the plan. She told him that she has a 24-year-old son with Asperger’s syndrome and he can’t keep a job, so he really needs disability benefits. Christie assures her that her son’s case is legitimate and he has no intention of harming him The woman, having secured a pledge from Christie to protect her son’s bennies, then asked Christie what he’s going to do about all the illegals immigrants coming to take our jobs. Near the end of his answer Christie acknowledged, in another one of his hard truths, that the 11 or 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country cannot be relied upon to all “self-deport.” (Poor Mitt Romney.) Was this the part where humanity’s truthiest truth-teller was going to go all-in for amnesty? Not quite. He merely suggested that leaders of both parties are going to have to come together to find a solution for that. The reason it hasn’t happened already, according to Christie, is that there’s been “no leadership from the White House.” You might think that pushing with its political might a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill would count as some kind of leadership on this issue, but apparently not. That’s just another hard truth from Chris Christie. Independent Journal Review is a conservative viral news, politics and culture site that gets something like ten trillion visitors a day. Isn’t that neat? The outlet was a sponsor of the summit and held party at a nearby restaurant, in collaboration with Facebook. It was open bar and complemented by a sensational spread of fancy cheeses and little steak nibbly things (I am not a food writer) and fresh, raw oysters on the half shell. Free swag all over the place. Internet money is the best money. I walked out of the bathroom and there was Marco Rubio sitting at a big table all to himself, on a laptop, as though cramming a college paper about British Romanticism. He was fielding questions on Facebook. Rubio, 43, is considered the youthful, hip candidate in the field, the ’90s rap fan who really gets millennial culture. He’s all about these edgy, disruptive new technologies that allow politicians to respond to questions people submit on a website. “Facebook has gotten older, but Instagram has gotten younger,” Rubio said to an Instagram representative after the Q&A. He quickly corrected himself. “I mean, Twitter has gotten older, but Instagram has gotten younger.” Exactly. After Rubio, it was time for millennials’ real presidential standard-bearer, John Bolton, to do his Facebook Q&A. Scott Brown was also at this party for some reason. Ted Cruz shows no intention of dropping anytime soon his joke about how he would shut down the IRS and put all of its employees on the southern border, though now he includes a disclaimer to “the media” that he’s being tongue-in-cheek. Eliminating the IRS is part of his tax reform plan, which is to institute a flat tax where returns can be filed on a standard-sized postcard. (Which agency collects and enforces the flat tax postcards in our post-IRS utopia? Details, details, blah blah blah. We’re no fun, in the media.) Cruz would also “repeal every word” of Obamacare and “repeal every word” of Common Core. He makes it easy to remember, at least. You can fit Ted Cruz’s policy platform on a standard-size postcard. Cruz, the final speaker of the event on Saturday, was only able to take a couple of questions. The Crowne Plaza, in an aggressive pursuit of billings, booked the ballroom where the conference was taking place for a wedding reception at 5:00. Cruz finished speaking at 4:00. The tight booking made for some interesting scenes as conference hangers-on mingled with the newlyweds in their formalwear. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was speaking at a small dinner event for select guests at the other end of the hotel, but he took a respite from the dinner to congratulate the bridge and groom outside the bathroom. A few hours later, I walked out of my hotel with a few other reporters, and there was Ted Cruz getting out of his car. He looked exhausted, so naturally we harassed him with more questions. I asked him about Chris Christie’s Social Security plan and its many, many hard truths. He wouldn’t endorse the plan itself, of course, but he did lay out his broad outlines for Social Security reform. He supports gradually increasing the retirement age, and “having Social Security benefits grow to match inflation, rather than having growth exceed inflation.” (This is the idea behind linking cost-of-living increases to the slower-growing “chained CPI” measure of inflation.) Just as the questions wrapped up, with Cruz’s aides tugging on him to walk away from reporters and get inside the sanctuary of his hotel room — you get the sense that this is a common occurrence — Cruz turned back and said to me that he hasn’t given up on winning me over. (More tugging from the aides.) It turns out that Sen. Ted Cruz is familiar with Salon’s coverage of Ted Cruz, which is largely negative. Though he didn’t say so explicitly, Ted Cruz clearly understands that his fate in the New Hampshire GOP primary rests on his ability to woo Salon. The sooner they all realize this, the better. We take this gatekeeper role seriously and look forward to further engagement with him and our 18 other candidate-friends from the weekend. Good luck to all.",REAL
+8629,Lucifer's Banker: Bradley Birkenfeld on Corporate Crime in America,"Email 
+Bradley Birkenfeld held a book launch party at the National Press Club tonight. 
+And it is telling that he invited some of the nation’s top whistleblowers — including John Kiriakou who spent two years in prison — to be his guests. 
+One of the ironies that was not lost on anyone in the room is that increasingly, it’s not corporate executives but whistleblowers who are doing jail time. 
+Birkenfeld himself blew the whistle on his employer, the giant Swiss bank UBS, where the rich and famous stashed their millions in numbered accounts to evade U.S. tax authorities. 
+Guess who went to jail? 
+Birkenfeld. 
+A copy of Birkenfeld’s book — Lucifer’s Banker: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy — was given to each guest at the book launch. 
+And tucked inside was a book mark — a laminated copy of the check that Birkenfeld got from the U.S. government for helping recover over $15 billion from American tax cheats. 
+The government paid Birkenfeld $104 million as a bounty, but the check is made out to Birkenfeld in the amount of $75 million. (Why minus $29 million? Taxes.) 
+This is perhaps one of the best corporate crime books ever written. 
+And the reason is that it clearly exposes our system of no fault corporate crime. 
+Deferred prosecutions. Non prosecutions. Neither admit nor deny consent decrees. Executives rarely sent to jail. 
+Just have the corporation write a check. Thank you. 
+Birkenfeld exposes the perverse outcomes of that system at almost every turn. 
+It’s not just that whistleblowers are doing prison time and corporate executives are not. 
+It’s that when corporate executives are sent to jail — 
+Well, take the case of Joe Nacchio. 
+While doing his 30 months in prison at Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pennsylvania, Birkenfeld ran into Nacchio. 
+“Joe Nacchio had been the President and CEO of Qwest, a huge telephone company,” Birkenfeld writes. “He was close to the Bush people, even visiting the White House on occasion. Shortly after 9/11, the Bush administration had gone to all the phone companies and demanded their customer records and email. AT&T and Verizon had caved right away, but Joe told the Feds to fuck off.” 
+“We’re a private company,” Naccio said. “I can’t do that” 
+“Yes, you can,” said the Bushies. “Matter of national security.” 
+“It’s unconstitutional,” Joe protested. “Without warrants from a judge, on a case-by-case basis, I won’t do it.” 
+“Oh, really?” 
+“So the Bushies charged him with insider trading and put him away for seven years. Joe’s replacement at Qwest got the message, and the Feds got the records.” 
+I’m in Washington and I like this book because it exposes the system of no fault corporate crime enforcement. 
+But a lot of people in Washington are not going to like this book. 
+Birkenfeld asks some pointed questions — including — why was the Department of Justice so reckless as to allow UBS to disclose the identities of only 4,700 (including some relatively low income dentists) of the 19,000 illegal account holders? 
+Those protected probably included many names you would recognize. 
+Why were these names never made public? 
+That’s why Hillary Clinton is not going to like this book. 
+Birkenfeld recounts the deal Clinton cut with the Swiss that Birkenfeld says kept the big names secret. 
+Prior to Clinton’s deal with the Swiss, UBS had only seen fit to contribute $60,000 to the Clinton Foundation, “an amount that wouldn’t even cover the bank’s annual parking tickets,” Birkenfeld writes. 
+“Afterward the Clinton Foundation’s cash registers rang up $600,000 in UBS gifts,” he writes. “The bank also decided to partner with the Foundation on some inner-city development programs, issuing a $32 million loan at very reasonable rates. Oh, and suddenly UBS also thought that Bill Clinton would make a very fine paid speaker about global affairs, so they paid him $1.52 million for a series of fireside chats with the bank’s Wealth Management Chief Executive, Bob McCann. It was Bill Clinton’s biggest payday since leaving the office of the Presidency.” 
+Most of the lawyers who Birkenfeld ran into are not going to like this book because they are caught up in the corporate crime industrial complex that defines inside the beltway lawyers. 
+For example, when Birkenfeld approach Skadden Arps partner Bob Bennett to take his case against UBS, Bennett begged off. 
+“Don’t tell me Bob, they’re your client,” Birkenfeld asked. 
+“They’re everyone’s client,” Bennett tells Birkenfeld. “That’s what all the major financial firms do, especially if they have big interests and lobbyists here in Wonderland. They put everyone on retainer. It’s like buying lawsuit insurance.” 
+But most importantly, the Justice Department is not going to like this book because Birkenfeld says it’s not about the facts, the law and justice. 
+It’s about brute corporate power. 
+Why did the Department of Justice fail to fine UBS adequately — settling for only $780 million in 2009 — not even commensurate with the billions of dollars illegally earned in profits by UBS over many decades? 
+Why did the Department of Justice release from custody two of the most senior UBS executives who oversaw this massive fraud? 
+Birkenfeld says it’s about corporate connections. 
+Which he lays out in intimate detail. 
+At the book launch party, Birkenfeld said he had sent a copy of the book to the President Obama at the White House. 
+“The American taxpayers need to know why the Department of Justice took such extraordinary actions to protect the perpetrators of the largest tax fraud in history.” 
+“Why the keen interest to shield from the American public all of those getting a free ride off the backs of tax-paying, law-abiding citizens? I ask you Mr. President, what will you do to investigate these serious injustices?” 
+That question Birkenfeld asked sort of tongue in cheek. 
+After all, Birkenfeld knows about Obama’s UBS connection. 
+In August 2009, on the first Sunday after Birkenfeld was sentenced in prison, at the Farm Neck Golf Club in Martha’s Vineyard, President Barack Obama had strolled out onto the links. 
+“His golfing partner that day was Robert Wolf, Chairman of UBS Americas,” Birkenfeld writes. “I’m sure it was a fine day of patter and play, guarded by a throng of Secret Service agents, and I wondered if Obama and Wolf had high-fived over my downfall, or maybe sent a ‘good job’ text to (the sentencing judge.) But I’d never know, because much like Swiss bankers, Secret Service agents don’t talk.”",FAKE
+4171,Clinton clinches Democratic nomination – Sanders vows to fight on,"Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday night, becoming the first woman in American history to top the ticket of a major political party and putting immediate pressure on primary rival Bernie Sanders to step aside – though the Vermont senator vowed to keep fighting for “every delegate.”
+
+Fox News projected Tuesday that Clinton will win an outright majority of pledged delegates, while reaching the 2,383 necessary to clinch the nomination with help from free-agent “superdelegates.”
+
+As Clinton now launches a general election battle against presumptive rival Donald Trump, Sanders remained defiant at an early Wednesday morning rally in Los Angeles, where he awaited results of the California primary, which Fox News has yet to call. The results of the California vote could weigh heavily on Sanders' decision whether to go forward.
+
+Meanwhile, Fox News confirmed early Wednesday that Sanders was planning to lay off more than half his campaign staff.
+
+Far from bowing out, however, he vowed to campaign through the final primary next Tuesday in Washington, D.C., and then “take our fight for social, economic, racial and environmental justice to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” the site of the convention.
+
+The crowd erupted in cheers as Sanders announced he’d keep going, a decision he kept close to the vest right up until his remarks.
+
+Sanders closed by declaring: “Thank you all, the struggle continues.”
+
+In a potential move toward reconciliation, however, the White House revealed that President Obama called both Clinton and Sanders Tuesday night – and plans to meet with Sanders at the White House on Thursday, to discuss ""how to build on the extraordinary work he has done to engage millions of Democratic voters.""
+
+Clinton earlier claimed victory over Sanders – after attaining the delegates needed to claim the nomination outright with a New Jersey primary win – during a lofty speech to supporters in Brooklyn.
+
+Marking the historic moment, Clinton said: “This campaign is about making sure there are no ceilings, no limits on any of us.”
+
+
+
+ She also congratulated Sanders, calling his campaign and the debate he brought about income inequality good for the party – while also saying this is a moment to “come together.”
+
+Eight years to the day after she conceded to rival Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, the former first lady and secretary of state became the presumptive 2016 nominee with the help of delegates in New Jersey. She won the state's primary, and with it enough delegates to easily surpass the 2,383 needed to clinch the nomination. She also is projected to win New Mexico and South Dakota.
+
+Sanders' vow to stay in the race was based on his belief that his campaign could sway enough of Clinton's superdelegates to force a contested convention. Superdelegates are free to support any candidate and do not technically vote for a nominee until the Democratic National Convention next month. Pledged delegates, however, are bound to support the candidate who won the primary or caucus.
+
+Fox News projects that with the delegates Clinton is winning in California, she will have won a majority of all pledged delegates at the Democratic convention -- making it more difficult for Sanders to argue she’s winning only because of support from superdelegates.
+
+Sanders did notch projected wins Tuesday in North Dakota’s Democratic caucuses and the Montana primary. A total of six states were voting Tuesday.
+
+On the GOP side, Donald Trump -- the only major Republican left in the race – was projected to win the primaries in California, Montana, New Jersey, South Dakota and New Mexico. Trump also surpassed a new milestone in the primary contest Tuesday night, winning enough bound delegates alone to clinch the GOP nomination.
+
+Marking his victories during remarks at Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., Trump said: “Tonight, we close one chapter in history and we begin another.”
+
+Previewing the general election battle, he slammed the Clintons, alleging they “turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves.” He also appealed to Sanders supporters, saying, “We welcome you with open arms.”
+
+Clinton, in her victory speech, also took shots at Trump, claiming he would “take America backwards.”
+
+“The stakes in this election are high, and the choice is clear. Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president,” she said.
+
+The contests Tuesday largely conclude one of the most unpredictable and rowdy primary seasons in modern history – one that saw a brash billionaire clear through a formidable field of 16 rivals to defy the pundits and claim the GOP nomination, and the front-runner on the Democratic side locked in a fight to the end against a socialist-leaning senator from Vermont.
+
+Primary season formally ends next week when the District of Columbia holds its Democratic contest.
+
+Even before Tuesday’s races, both parties effectively had their presumptive nominees. Trump clinched the nomination last month as late support from unbound delegates put him over the top, and his remaining rivals suspended their campaigns. The Associated Press declared Monday night that Clinton had hit the 2,383-delegate mark, thanks to a burst of support from free-agent superdelegates.
+
+But unlike Trump, Clinton’s last remaining rival has not exited the race.
+
+“There is nothing to concede,” Sanders said in a TV interview Monday night.
+
+Sanders also had said he’d “assess” his plans after Tuesday’s elections, as he heads home to Burlington, but gave no indications of having second thoughts during his Los Angeles rally.
+
+The Democratic Party pressure on him, however, is sure to mount in a matter of days, if not hours. Obama reportedly is planning to get behind Clinton and start campaigning for her, and senior Democrats have been voicing mounting frustration with Sanders’ campaign.
+
+At the same time, the senator has touted general election polls suggesting he may be better positioned to go up against Trump in the fall. Over the course of the campaign, he mounted an unexpectedly strong challenge to Clinton, buoyed by the support of young and energetic voters whose enthusiasm at times echoed the spirit behind Barack Obama’s bid in 2008. Clinton was dogged all along by questions about her private email use while secretary of state – and a still-ongoing FBI investigation – though Sanders largely steered clear of the issue in his campaign.
+
+Trump, by contrast, will have no compunction about hammering Clinton for what he describes as “criminal” activity with her email use, as well as controversies surrounding her work as secretary of state -- in particular her role in the Benghazi terrorist attack that took the life of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Trump gave a preview of his attack strategy Tuesday night, ripping Clinton's use of a ""totally illegal private server.""
+
+Yet even as Trump has seen all 16 of his rivals fade away, he’s still struggling in a historic way to unite the GOP behind him. The tensions flared again this week as leading Republicans condemned his comments that a federal judge of Mexican heritage had a conflict of interest in a Trump University case. On Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan called it the “textbook definition of a racist comment,” while other Republican lawmakers condemned his comments.",REAL
+565,The U.S. government’s predatory-lending program,"Most parents will do just about anything for their children, especially when it comes to education. Predictably, at a time when college costs are exploding and students are staggering under more than $1 trillion in debt, one opportunistic lender is making huge profits on loans to their doting moms and dads.
+
+Less predictably, that lender is the United States government.
+
+The fast-growing federal program known as Parent PLUS now serves 3.2 million borrowers, who have racked up $65 billion in debt helping their kids go to school. The loans have much in common with the regular student loans that have created a national debt crisis and a 2016 campaign issue, but PLUS has much higher interest rates and fees, and far fewer opportunities for loan forgiveness or reductions.
+
+In fact, the PLUS program, which includes similar loans to graduate students, is the most profitable of the 120 or so federal lending programs. That sounds like a good thing, until you remember the government’s profit comes from its own citizens, often citizens of modest means.
+
+Parent PLUS was created in 1980 to provide small loans to help reasonably well-off families finance the American Dream of an undergraduate education. But in an era of skyrocketing education costs, it has grown to look a lot like publicly funded predatory lending, providing almost any borrowers with almost unlimited cash to attend any school with almost no regard to their ability to repay. Thirteen percent of undergraduates now rely on Parent PLUS, and many of their parents are falling into debt traps.
+
+“You feel so guilty that you haven’t done enough for your kid, and they make it so easy to get the loans,” said Elizabeth Hill, a 57-year-old property appraiser from the Boston suburbs with more than $30,000 in PLUS debt. “Then they’ve got you by the cojones. It’s like ‘The Sopranos,’ except it’s the government.”
+
+For all the controversy swirling around student loans, lending money directly to students at least has a “human capital” rationale, since recipients pursue degrees that can boost their earning power and help them fulfill their obligations. But when parents borrow, they’re often taking on new debts just as their earning power is starting to dwindle. They’re not building human capital. They’re just getting closer to retirement, mortgaging their futures on behalf of their children. And if they default, the government can garnish their wages and even their Social Security checks — less brutal than “The Sopranos,” but just as effective.
+
+According to the White House budget office, the expected recovery rate for defaulted Parent PLUS loans is a remarkable 106 percent, a testament to Uncle Sam’s unique power as a collection agency. Overall, the program is expected to return $1.23 on every dollar it lends this year, thanks to its relatively high interest rates and minimal opportunities for debt relief, as well as the government’s relentlessness in tracking down overdue education loans. The only federal loans that generate slightly better returns are the similar PLUS loans to graduate students, which have much lower default rates.
+
+POLITICO has been investigating the government’s bizarre $3.3 trillion loan portfolio, which is riddled with tensions between the interests of borrowers and taxpayers. Some credit programs are almost comically risky for the government, most memorably a rural broadband effort with an official default rate of a seemingly impossible 116 percent. Parent PLUS loans are the flip side of the coin, generating reliable profits for taxpayers but serious risks for moderate-income borrowers.
+
+Just about everyone I interviewed thought Congress should consider major reforms to Parent PLUS when it takes up a higher education bill this fall, but no one was too optimistic that reforms would pass, largely because of those profits.
+
+“Parent PLUS is classic predatory lending. It’s not a safe product for many of these families, and the debts will hound them forever,” said Rachel Fishman, an education policy analyst at the nonpartisan New America think tank. “But it’s a cash cow for the government, so it’s going to be extremely difficult to reform.”
+
+Parent PLUS is not a trap for everyone. The latest data suggest that only 5 percent of borrowers are defaulting within their first three years of repayment, although that figure is rising rapidly. The White House budget tables suggest the expected default rate over the course of the loans is well above 10 percent, which is still well below the rate for regular student loans. There’s a wealth of evidence that college degrees boost lifetime earnings, and defenders of Parent PLUS say it’s an important tool for increasing college graduation rates. PLUS loans have also become a key revenue source for many schools, particularly historically black colleges and for-profits that tend to serve lower-income families.
+
+But that just illustrates the increasingly tortured economic paradoxes at the heart of modern higher education, where schools have no incentive to provide affordable prices as long as they can count on federal dollars for making education affordable. Ultimately, Parent PLUS sluices more cash into the college-industrial complex, helping educators jack up their tuitions while pressuring parents to make up the difference with debt, while doing nothing to ensure they’re getting a real return on their investment. It enhances accessibility, but not really affordability, simply giving parents a way to punt the skyrocketing costs into the future. Even some advocates who fiercely defended Parent PLUS during a high-profile controversy in 2011, when the Obama administration briefly reined in loans to parents with sketchy credit histories, told me the program is deeply troubled and inherently flawed.
+
+When I spoke to White House education adviser Roberto Rodriguez about this conundrum, he emphasized that President Barack Obama has crusaded to make America the world’s leader in access to higher education, expanding Pell grants to low-income students and “income-based repayment” for burdensome student loans, while proposing to make community college free. Parent PLUS, he said, is another important tool to help young people pursue a better life. But he also said he's concerned that too many struggling parents are getting in too deep. When I asked him if the Education Department was running a predatory lending program, he didn’t say no.
+
+“That’s the heart of the matter,” Rodriguez said. “You want to expand access and choice, but you also want to make sure families can afford these loans.”
+
+HILL AND HER husband are solidly middle class and proudly thrifty; she drives a 15-year-old minivan and shops at TJ Maxx. She and her husband put away money for their son Aaron’s education, and though they burned through some savings when Hill lost her job early in the Great Recession, they figured they’d be fine when Aaron chose the University of Massachusetts at Amherst over several private colleges. He also won some academic grants and maxed out on federal student loans. But even a public school like UMass cost $25,000 a year. Hill just couldn’t make the numbers work.
+
+Until, suddenly, she could. Hill discovered she was eligible for Parent PLUS, which would cover whatever Aaron’s grants and loans didn’t. At the time, Hill felt like she had won something, even though the loans are entitlements for anyone without a recent history of “adverse credit.” She feels differently now that Aaron has moved back home with his degree and taken a job at a local liquor store — and her husband may have to postpone his plans for retirement to make ends meet.
+
+“You’re at your wits’ end, you want to help your kid, and this fairy princess appears on your computer and says: ‘Want some money?’” Hill recalled. “You’re like: Bingo! It’s more than you can afford, but dammit, education is important, right? Then four years later, you can’t believe how much you owe.”
+
+When Congress created Parent PLUS 35 years ago, the loans were capped at $3,000 per year, until that was lifted in 1992 so families could borrow as much as they wanted toward the cost of attendance at any public or private school. But the rules do not allow colleges to ask about their income or their ability to pay. And the borrowers don’t have to start making payments until the student leaves school, although the interest accumulates the whole time.
+
+Congress set the maximum interest rate at 9 percent in 1980, which seemed generous at a time when mortgage rates were skyrocketing toward 18 percent, but Parent PLUS is no longer a particularly attractive deal for families with other options. The current rates are about 7 percent plus a 4 percent origination fee, a lot lower than credit card debt or payday loans, but a lot higher than subsidized student loans.
+
+“I figured the rate wasn’t terrible, and the money was so easy to get,” said Debbie Hounanian, a 56-year-old office manager in the Los Angeles suburbs who racked up $54,000 in Parent PLUS debt. “I had no idea what I was getting into.”
+
+Today, the average Parent PLUS loan is about $13,000, and many parents pile up much larger debts now that some schools cost more than $50,000 a year. The loans are almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, just like student loans, but they’re ineligible for most of the income-based payment relief available for student loans. Consumer advocates compare them to subprime mortgages before the bust, encouraging families to bite off more debt than they can chew — except that Parent PLUS also has a government imprimatur.
+
+Toby Merrill, who runs a Harvard-affiliated legal services clinic that focuses on predatory lending, recalls one ready-to-retire borrower who contacted her after running up $150,000 in PLUS debt on three children.
+
+“The question was: What are my options?” Merrill said. “It was sad, because the answer was: You don’t really have options.”
+
+AS STATE AID for higher education has plunged while the cost of college has escalated, PLUS loans have become an increasingly routine method of filling the gap, with about 700,000 new loans every year. Some schools actually include PLUS in their financial aid offers, telling parents they’ve qualified to take out, say, $20,000 in PLUS loans, a rather disingenuous way of saying the actual offer will leave them $20,000 short of the school's official cost of attendance. Colleges with tight budgets have little incentive to tell students they can’t afford to enroll, and strong incentives to encourage students to load up on PLUS loans that pass directly into their coffers. The president of Albany State University in Georgia even admitted at a public hearing that cash-strapped colleges have been steering students from student loans into more onerous and expensive Parent PLUS loans, because they’re required to report default rates for student loans but not for Parent PLUS.
+
+The 2011 controversy over Parent PLUS, when the Obama administration temporarily tightened the program’s lax vetting process, illuminated the extent to which colleges and families have become dependent on the cash. It erupted after the Education Department’s financial aid office finally recognized a longstanding absurdity: the “adverse credit” reviews for PLUS applicants were flagging some delinquent debts, but not debts that were so delinquent they had been sent to collection agencies or written off. As a result, many applicants were getting loans with worse credit than rejected applicants.
+
+“It made no sense,” said Ben Miller, who was a senior policy adviser at the department during the PLUS flap and is now director of post-secondary education at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “But fixing the problem had a much bigger impact than anyone realized it would.”
+
+Quietly, the department started counting more bad debts in its credit reviews — and PLUS rejection rates soared. Students who couldn’t renew their loans began dropping out of school. And schools that relied heavily on PLUS revenue began hemorrhaging cash. At historically black colleges and universities, which had been particularly hard-hit by the recession, the number of PLUS recipients dropped 45 percent over the next two years, depriving them of an estimated $150 million. Three struggling black colleges—in Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina — ended up shutting their doors, and larger schools like Morehouse endured mass layoffs.
+
+“Our schools were screaming bloody murder,” said Thurgood Marshall College Fund President Johnny C. Taylor Jr., a leading advocate for historically black colleges and universities. “Forget salt — this was pouring acid in our wounds.”
+
+For-profit schools absorbed an even bigger hit, a 54 percent decline in PLUS enrollment. But for obvious political reasons, the black schools (with fierce support from the Congressional Black Caucus) led the fight to get the first African-American president to reverse or at least delay the changes. Taylor and other advocates had several tense meetings with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, repeatedly asking why a two-decade-old snafu had to be corrected immediately, why the tougher reviews couldn’t be limited to new PLUS applicants, why a secretary who had said expanding access to college would be his “North Star” was restricting access to college. Duncan emphasized that the changes weren’t directed at black schools, but Taylor shot back that they were having a disproportionate effect on black schools.
+
+“The secretary kept saying: My lawyers are telling us to do this; we’re doing our best to work it out,” Taylor said. “Give me a break! We were trying to revive a community with double the unemployment rate of the majority community.”
+
+Eventually, Duncan publicly apologized to black college leaders for the abruptness of the changes, acknowledging that “communication internally and externally was poor.” He promised to consider appeals from all rejected PLUS applicants, and launched a process to write new PLUS credit rules.
+
+“It was an operational screw-up of epic proportions,” said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “But it was a pretty good reminder that Parent PLUS helps a lot of people pay for college.”
+
+In 2014, the department announced the new PLUS rules, essentially reversing its efforts to tighten credit checks. Bad debts are no longer grounds for rejection if they’re less than $2,085 (versus $500 in the old rule) or less than two years old (versus five years). The department didn’t even require loan counseling for all PLUS borrowers, just those who managed to get loans despite adverse credit.
+
+“It’s a shame. Most parents would be better off taking a second mortgage,” said Natalia Abrams, director of the advocacy group Student Debt Crisis. “Instead, they’re getting trapped. They assume that if the government is offering these loans, they must be safe.”
+
+To my surprise, Taylor told me he agrees. Taylor was probably the most outspoken critic of the administration’s short-lived efforts to rein in Parent PLUS, and he still believes it was unfair to change the rules so suddenly after a brutal downturn. But he asked me not to describe him as a Parent PLUS defender. He said the program is so exploitative that he once investigated a class-action lawsuit, but found that debt-ravaged parents were too ashamed to go public.
+
+“It’s a horrible program, totally out of control,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out a way to make college affordable, but Parent PLUS is definitely not the answer.”
+
+OBAMA'S NEW CONSUMER Financial Protection Bureau has raised alarms about predatory lending by bankers and mortgage brokers. At a recent event, Richard Hunt, the president of the Consumer Bankers Association, posed a question to CFPB Director Richard Cordray: “Why aren’t you doing anything about Parent PLUS?” Cordray replied that he didn’t have jurisdiction over the federal government, but Hunt believes that if one of his members offered a similar loan product with similarly negligible underwriting standards, the bureau would be all over it.
+
+“The silence has been deafening,” Hunt said. “It’s sinister to see the government throw money at people with no clue if they can pay it back.”
+
+Hunt would like to see the private sector — that is, his members — take over the business. And some private lenders are starting to compete with Parent PLUS — one Rhode Island bank is offering a similar product with a much lower interest rate of 3 percent and no origination fees for the most creditworthy borrowers. But while PLUS loans don’t have the same protections as federal student loans, they do include some options most private banks won’t match, like the ability to defer payments for years.
+
+What PLUS lacks is flexibility. Parents who qualify can borrow whatever they need for their kids to attend whatever school they want, while parents who get rejected can’t borrow a dime. In another hearing, an administrator of a North Carolina college shared a sad vignette about a homeless woman who was denied a PLUS loan, implicitly suggesting the government should have extended her virtually unlimited credit. In fact, that’s exactly what would have happened if her credit had been clean. Nobody would have been allowed to try to gauge whether her income or assets gave her any hope of repayment. Parent PLUS suffers from a paradox that also afflicts government loans for agriculture, shipbuilding and just about everything else: It’s highly risky for borrowers who need it most desperately, while the borrowers who could most easily handle the debt could probably get by without it.
+
+Many critics argue that Parent PLUS should be abolished, and that the government should expand Pell grants and raise caps on student loans instead. But even those who want to continue the program — including Rodriguez in the White House and Republican staffers on Capitol Hill — seem to agree there are relatively obvious ways to strengthen it. The most evident would be real underwriting standards to evaluate the ability to pay of potential borrowers. Another would be strict loan caps. Or a combination of those reforms could link the creditworthiness of borrowers to the size of the loans they’re eligible to receive, the kind of calculation real banks make. Even Draeger, who represents aid administrators at 3,000 colleges and universities, said the system needs structural changes to protect vulnerable families.
+
+“We definitely support new underwriting standards. Parents are getting in too deep, and it’s affecting their ability to retire and enjoy life,” he said. “Right now, schools just have to follow the rules, and from a consumer protection standpoint, the rules are dangerous.”
+
+The major obstacle to reform, beyond Washington’s general dysfunction and polarization, is the immense profitability of Parent PLUS. These days, the government borrows money at almost no cost, so lending at 7 percent plus fees can add up: Parent PLUS could reduce the deficit by $3 billion this year. That means any effort to scale it back and restrict it to creditworthy borrowers would cost the government a lot of money. Politicians generally don’t like paying more money to provide fewer benefits, especially when a well-organized political coalition has defended those benefits in the past.
+
+“That’s the perversity of a loan program like this,” one senior GOP aide said. “It makes it that much harder to fix.”
+
+In other words, Washington has become as dependent on Parent PLUS loans as the schools that flack them and the parents who receive them. The status quo has tremendous power, because Congress likes profitable programs, schools like reliable revenue, and parents like to help their kids.
+
+Hill and her husband have another son getting ready to start Ithaca College, just as they’re starting to pay back Aaron’s loan, but they're determined to help out again. They haven't figured out how they're going to do that yet, because there's no way they're going back to the Parent PLUS well again.
+
+“Fool me once, right?” Hill said. “I don’t want to put my kid in a bind, but these loans are ridiculous. The guilt system only goes so far.”
+
+",REAL
+6202,Trump Reaches Out to Blacks; Blacks Riot in Philadelphia,"Posted on October 28, 2016 Trump Reaches Out to Blacks; Blacks Riot in Philadelphia Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, October 28, 2016 And DOJ prepares a politically motivated “civil rights” case in the death of Eric Garner. 
+This episode is available for download here . Share This View all posts by Jared Taylor Jared Taylor is the editor of American Renaissance and the author of White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century . We welcome comments that add information or perspective, and we encourage polite debate. If you log in with a social media account, your comment should appear immediately. If you prefer to remain anonymous, you may comment as a guest, using a name and an e-mail address of convenience. Your comment will be moderated. Commentary",FAKE
+3734,There is no nationwide crime wave (and police killings are not up),"Since 1991, murder and violent crime have plummeted in the U.S. But in a widely discussed op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled ""The New Nationwide Crime Wave,” Heather Mac Donald recently made a startling claim: “Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America.” She demonstrated this by citing murder rate increases in six cities.
+
+Murders of police were also surging out of control, she said; they had “jumped 89 percent in 2014.""
+
+Last week, Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at New York’s  Manhattan Institute  appeared on numerous TV channels, including Fox News and CNN. As is so common, the claims have become exaggerated, giving the impression that crime is on the rise all across the U.S.
+
+Fortunately, that’s all hype. Mac Donald simply cherry-picked those places that had experienced rising crime rates. Overall, the 15 largest cities have actually experienced a slight decrease in murders. There has been a 2 percent drop from the first five months of 2014 to the first five months of this year. Murder rates rose in eight cities and fell in seven. There is no nationwide murder wave.
+
+Murder rates fell dramatically in some of these cities. Comparing this year’s January-to-May murder data with last year’s, we find that San Jose’s murder rate fell by a whopping 59 percent; Jacksonville’s fell by 31 percent; Indianapolis’ by 28 percent; San Antonio’s by 25 percent; and Los Angeles’ by 15 percent. Presumably, we aren’t going to focus only on these cities and start claiming a national victory over crime.
+
+Mac Donald is undoubtedly correct that something unusual is happening in Baltimore. When comparing this May to last May, arrests have plummeted by 50 percent, murders have risen by 76 percent and overall violent crime is up by 15 percent. This surely has something to do with police officers’ hesitation to stick their necks out. Who can blame them, when they’re being labeled as criminals for doing their jobs?
+
+But there’s no evidence that what is happening in Baltimore is happening elsewhere. Murder rates have indeed gone up in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Chicago and Atlanta, but higher murder rates alone don’t mean a lack of effective law enforcement.
+
+Last Thursday, Mac Donald speculated in a New York Times piece that this year’s 15 percent increase in murders in New York City is due to a drop in arrests – ""arrests are down 17.4 percent through May 31 compared to the same period last year.” But, just as likely, part of the drop in arrests might be related to the overall drop in crime. While murder rates rose, the 5.5 percent drop in total violent crime and 7.5 percent decline in property crime are being ignored.
+
+These declines suggest something is occurring that is more complicated than police simply being afraid to do their jobs. After all, why would police pulling back from their jobs cause more murders but fewer robberies?
+
+Crime goes up and down for all sorts of reasons. It is too early to figure out why some cities are seeing more crime and others are seeing less. Sheer randomness will always cause a few outliers.
+
+Police do a dangerous job, and any dramatic increase in police killings would be horrible. But the nationwide spike in police killings is not all that Mac Donald claims it is. After averaging 55 police deaths per year for a decade, the number of deaths fell to 27 in 2013. The number went back up to 51 in 2014. Though that was a large increase, the unusual year was 2013, not 2014.
+
+But the biggest problem with these last numbers is that, unlike the crime numbers that compare periods clearly before and after the “Ferguson effect” and the Baltimore riots, the spike in police killings occurred too early. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, murders of police through May nationwide are down 38 percent this year compared to last year (16 versus 26).
+
+With misleading claims by left wing groups such as ProPublica claiming that police are shooting young black males at much higher rates than young white males, it was probably only a matter of time before some conservatives like Mac Donald made their own misleading claims.
+
+Fortunately, there has been no nationwide spike in murders or police killings so far this year. If there is a nationwide “Ferguson effect,” the data don’t show it. Cherry-picking half a dozen of the worst crime numbers from the largest cities might scare people and get massive media attention, but it doesn’t tell us anything about policy.
+
+John R. Lott, Jr. is a columnist for FoxNews.com. He is an economist and was formerly chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission. Lott is also a leading expert on guns and op-eds on that issue are done in conjunction with the Crime Prevention Research Center. He is the author of nine books including ""More Guns, Less Crime."" His latest book is ""The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies (August 1, 2016). Follow him on Twitter@johnrlottjr.",REAL
+1999,Can’t quit Mitt: Friends say Romney feels nudge to consider a 2016 presidential run,"Officially, Mitt Romney returned to Iowa, the quadrennial presidential proving ground, to give a boost to Joni Ernst. But at a closed-door breakfast fundraiser here Monday, the first question from a donor had nothing to do with Ernst’s Senate campaign.
+
+“When you get elected to the Senate, your job should be to convince Mitt Romney to run for president again,” a donor told Ernst, according to several attendees. The Republican candidate said she would, while Romney laughed.
+
+When Romney and Ernst gathered in a West Des Moines boardroom with about 40 agriculture executives Sunday night, one businessman after another pleaded with Romney to give the White House another shot.
+
+And at a rally for Ernst in Cedar Rapids on Monday, the state legislator who introduced Romney said, “If his address was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I would sleep a lot better.” After Romney and Ernst finished speaking, some activists chanted, “Run, Mitt, run!”
+
+Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee and now the tacit head of the Republican Party, visited Iowa as part of a feverish nationwide tour designed to help the GOP take control of the Senate. He has insisted that he is not interested in running for president a third time. But his friends said a flurry of behind-the-scenes activity is nudging him to more seriously consider it.
+
+Romney has huddled with prominent donors and reconnected with supporters in key states in recent months. Because of the vacuum of power within his party and the lack of a clear 2016 front-runner, confidants said Romney is grappling with this question: If drafted, would he answer the party’s call?
+
+Further juicing the speculation was a Des Moines Register-Bloomberg News poll released over the weekend showing that Romney is the only potential 2016 candidate who would beat Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) among likely Iowa voters, 44 percent to 43 percent.
+
+People in Romney’s vast political orbit who are waiting and wishing on him to launch another campaign said Romney has done little to quiet them and has been hazy about his plans following next month’s midterm elections.
+
+Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty (R), who briefly ran against Romney in 2012 before becoming a close ally, said he wants to see Romney give it another go.
+
+“There is a feeling that the country missed out on an exceptional president,” Pawlenty said. “If he runs, I believe he could win the nomination and the general election. It’d be the right person at the right time, and I would encourage him to do it.”
+
+Pawlenty noted that Ronald Reagan ran unsuccessfully for president twice before being elected in his third attempt “and was stronger for it.” In contrast with Romney, Pawlenty said, “the emerging class of Republican candidates is untested and unproven.”
+
+Within Romney’s political network, there has been informal chatter about a third run since early 2013, according to people familiar with the discussions. It bubbled up in phone calls and at dinners and has gained steam this year. Requests continue to pour in for him to appear on the campaign trail, and advisers said he is eager to mount a multi-state fly-around swing before Nov. 4.
+
+In Iowa, however, Romney seemed uncomfortable with the 2016 talk. At the West Des Moines rally, he spoke for only five minutes, criticizing President Obama on income inequality, foreign affairs and other issues. When reporters tried to question him afterward, he sneaked into a dark maze of cubicles.
+
+He also said that now that he was no longer a candidate, he had a joke to share involving Obama, golfer Phil Mickelson and tennis great Andre Agassi.
+
+As Romney told it, Obama shows up at a bank to cash a check without his ID. The teller asks him to prove who he is, saying that Mickelson proved his identity by hitting a golf ball into a cup and Agassi proved his by hitting a tennis ball at a target. “Is there anything you can do to prove who you are?” the teller asks.
+
+“I don’t have a clue,” Obama replies in the joke.
+
+The crowd ate it up.
+
+Former aides and senior Republicans say Romney appreciates the GOP masses crowing that he was right about issues such as Russia and health care. But what really intrigues him, they said, are the vulnerabilities among top-tier candidates in the Republican field. If Romney moves toward a race, it would be because he sees a path to victory.
+
+“It’s the market pulling him,” said Kent Lucken, a longtime friend and adviser who accompanied Romney to Iowa. “People look at Hillary as the likely Democratic nominee, and the party needs a strong leader who can stand up to her and who’s been through the process.”
+
+Romney is returning to Boston on Tuesday for a dinner that he and his wife, Ann, are hosting for former campaign advisers and business associates. The event — to benefit neurological research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — has Romney intimates abuzz.
+
+Save-the-date notices have gone out for the third annual Romney policy retreat in Park City, Utah, in June 2015 — a signal that he wants a platform to promote his issues as the presidential primary campaign season gets underway.
+
+Romney is also mingling privately with top donors who could fund a third campaign. Romney visited Sept. 23 with Joe Ricketts, a billionaire investor who finances the Ending Spending super PAC, at Ricketts’s palatial penthouse apartment covering the entire 78th floor of the Time Warner Center in New York.
+
+On Oct. 6, Romney also took part in a GOP fundraising dinner at the Manhattan apartment of Woody Johnson, the New York Jets owner and former Romney campaign finance chairman. Several 2016 hopefuls gave presentations to the donors, while Romney served as a co-host and made no pitch.
+
+At Johnson’s home, Romney and media magnate Rupert Murdoch spoke about Romney’s political future. According to two Romney allies familiar with the conversation, Romney was cagey with Murdoch but expressed concerns about the developing GOP field. Romney told Murdoch that he felt uneasy about the party’s non-interventionist drift on foreign policy and the base’s embrace of ideological hard-liners.
+
+Many Romney boosters believe that his window of opportunity will be in mid- to late 2015, should Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) or Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) ascend and party establishment types turn to Romney as a savior.
+
+If former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) opts out of a campaign, “there is going to be more pressure on Mitt to go,” said Tom Rath, an influential New Hampshire Republican.
+
+At a luncheon this month in Atlanta to help GOP Senate nominee David Perdue, “people sat up and paid attention” to Romney, said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.). “I pulled him aside afterward to thank him for coming. He said he’s not running, and I take him at his word. But I don’t think the door is entirely closed, and circumstances can change.”
+
+That phrase — “circumstances can change” — has been repeated by many Romney backers since the former nominee used it to describe his own thinking about 2016 in a radio interview last month with Hugh Hewitt.
+
+Spencer Zwick, Romney’s former national finance chairman, talks regularly with Romney and said he has been receiving daily calls from donors and other supporters. “There are still plenty of donors who hope circumstances will change and there will be an opportunity for Romney to run again,” he said.
+
+Zwick is part of a slimmed-down inner circle, including longtime advisers Beth Myers, Peter Flaherty, Stuart Stevens, Lanhee Chen and aides Kelli Harrison and Matt Waldrip, who are advising Romney on political activities this fall.
+
+Romney traveled through Iowa with three trusted advisers and friends: David Kochel, Ron Kaufman and Lucken. He also reunited with supporters from campaigns past. In Cedar Rapids, Romney spotted Jim Wilson, a Virginia man who logged more than 40,000 miles chasing the GOP nominee from coast to coast in his campaign-festooned GMC pickup. The two hugged. “You son of a gun,” Romney said.
+
+Another fan, Gary Chidester, 64, came to the West Des Moines rally with a full coterie of Romney paraphernalia for the former candidate to autograph: campaign placards, enlarged photographs and buttons of Mitt and wife Ann, and paperback and audio copies of Romney’s book “No Apology.” He also held a framed drawing that a friend gave him of a black cruise ship named Obama sinking into the sea and a white ship named Romney with the caption, “We’re here to save you.”
+
+“He’s the only qualified person to run this time,” Chidester said. “Mitt is a business genius. That’s why I’ve listened to this tape three times. He had it all down — he had Russia down, he had the debt down — and all the other Republicans are novices by comparison.”",REAL
+1851,Trump sees Biden the same as Hillary,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+1682,Now what? Where the Democratic candidates go from here.,GRAPHIC | A breakdown of what candidates talked about and who they interacted with.,REAL
+7826,"What If Consciousness Is a State of Matter, Just Like a Solid, a Liquid or a Gas?","What If Consciousness Is a State of Matter, Just Like a Solid, a Liquid or a Gas? Nov 5, 2016 0 0 
+As a young child, I would randomly pause in my daily activities to thumb through my perception of the world. Not only could I think about things, I could reason, decide and analyze things. Events in life left me with feelings of confusion, which caused me to dig further into the meaning of what I had witnessed. 
+All this sounds pretty normal and obvious, right? Well, to a child, realizing the existence of the conscious is a major thing. A child comes to the conclusion that they are an intelligent being living inside a meat shell. While thinking on this over and over, it becomes disturbing, so the child devises a way to understand what this means. 
+I guess this is the best way I can explain it, but basically, I want to know what the conscious is . Could our conscious be more than a set of thoughts? Could this part of our psyche be a completely separate form of existence? The conscious, a state of matter? 
+Another way to understand the conscious is by seeing it as the part of us that gives individuality , it separates us from other beings and gives us a sense of self. 
+All these explanations are interesting, but they still don’t tell us what the conscious really is. Neuroscientists like Max Tegmark of MIT believe the conscious is a state of matter. Could this be? What’s the matter? 
+Matter doesn’t necessarily mean liquid or sloshing substances. Matter, in this case, probably means mathematical conditions with varying degrees of consciousness. 
+As water, ice and vapor need conditions to exist, so does our conscious. After all, if the conscious is indeed a state of matter, it helps us understand why the world works in the way it does. It’s hard to understand the conscious, but it helps to see this being as the tool that gives us the ability to reason, process and retrieve information – this is how the brain is compared to a computer. A fact that we know about the conscious is that it cannot be broken down into smaller parts , unlike the computer. But like the computer, being pushed by artificial intelligence , the conscious can work independently from its neighboring processes. Perceptronium 
+Conscious as a state of matter is called perceptronium. It is seen as what gives us the ability to be self-aware . Our awareness is worked out exclusively within, offering no outside influence, at times. Perceptronium also has the ability to see parts as a whole as well as independent objects or entities. We take this ability for granted, but with a little work of our conscious, we can understand the mechanics of our own thought processes. 
+Tegmark said , 
+“The problem is why we perceive the universe as the semi-classical three-dimensional world that is so familiar. When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system.” 
+Quantum mechanics reminds us that the world we live in is just one of many possible planes of existence . Tegmark cannot explain why this is so but suggests that there is an incredibly close relationship between the conscious and other states of matter. 
+Could what we know, reveal the meaning of everything we already know? Could our sole purpose for living simply be the realization of self? 
+As a matter of fact, it really could be that simple. Vote Up Anna LeMind Anna is the owner and lead editor of the websites Learning-mind.com and Lifeadvancer.com , and staff writer for The Mind Unleashed . She is passionate about learning new things and reflecting on thought-provoking ideas. She writes about technology, science, psychology and other related topics. She is particularly interested in topics regarding introversion, consciousness and subconscious, perception, human mind's potential, as well as the nature of reality and the universe.",FAKE
+8570,"While You Were Watching the World Series Some Very, Very Big News Broke","While You Were Watching the World Series Some Very, Very Big News Broke Posted on Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » While You Were Watching the World Series Some Very, Very Big News Broke 
+While most Americans were captivated by last night’s World Series Game 7, some very, VERY big news broke. The real blockbuster came from Fox News’ Bret Baier, who released some serious information courtesy of two sources at the FBI. 
+
+Submitted by Michael Krieger : 
+Normally, I’d summarize the news and provide my perspective before highlighting source text, but in this case I want to provide the information first. 
+The real blockbuster came from Fox News’ Bret Baier, who released some serious information courtesy of two sources at the FBI. Real Clear Politics summarized Bret’s primary conclusions based on his conversations: 
+1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year. 
+2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time. 
+3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature. 
+4. Sources within the FBI have told him that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department. 
+5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information had been taken from it. 
+Here’s Bret Baier saying it in his own words: 
+While Friday’s bombshell alerted the American public to the reopening of Hillary Clinton’s private email server probe, the Clinton Foundation investigation is a totally separate beast. It’s now clear that Hillary Clinton, and much of her close circle, are subject to two very serious ongoing investigations. As I explained in the post, Another Black Swan Hits the U.S. Presidential Election , this is very material to the Presidential election for the following reason: 
+The problems with Hillary Clinton will never go away. They will always resurface or new problems will emerge, and it has nothing to do with a “vast rightwing conspiracy” (or Putin). It has to do with her. It has to do with the fact that her and her husband are career crooks, warmongers, and shameless looters of the American public. This re-opening of the FBI investigation just hammers all of that home for everyone. We know what 4 years of Hillary will look like. It’ll be Obama cronyism on steroids, plus endless investigations with a side of World War 3. I don’t think people want that, and so more Americans than the pundits realize will take a gamble on Trump. 
+The latest revelations about the Clinton Foundation investigation just further hammers home the above point. 
+Moreover, it’s becoming increasingly clear that political appointees at the Injustice Department like Loretta Lynch and Peter Kadzik (John Podesta’s close friend since the 1970s) have been trying to thwart probes into the dirtiness of the Clinton Foundation. I covered this earlier in the week in the post, The Story of How the DOJ Tried to Thwart an FBI Investigation Into the Clinton Foundation , but additional details have started to emerge. 
+As we learned from yesterday’s CNN article, Turmoil in the FBI: 
+Behind the scenes over the past 15 months, infighting among some agents and officials has exposed some parts of the storied bureau to be buffeted by some of the same bitter divisions as the rest of American society. 
+This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen officials close to the matter who spoke anonymously because they’ve been ordered not to speak to the news media. 
+Tensions have built in particular over the handling of matters related to Hillary Clinton. Some of the sharpest divides have emerged between some agents in the FBI’s New York field office, the bureau’s largest and highest-profile, and officials at FBI headquarters in Washington and at the Justice Department. 
+Some rank-and-file agents interpreted cautious steps taken by the Justice Department and FBI headquarters as being done for political reasons or to protect a powerful political figure. At headquarters, some have viewed the actions and complaints of some agents in the field as driven by the common desire of investigators to get a big case or, perhaps worst, because of partisan views. 
+Much of the turmoil centers not only on the handling of the probe into Clinton’s use of a private server while secretary of state, but also another case some FBI agents wanted to pursue into the Clinton Foundation and whether there was any impropriety in dealings with donors. 
+In both cases, some FBI investigators felt stymied by headquarters and Justice Department officials and they interpreted roadblocks as politically partisan. 
+During the Clinton email server investigation, investigators and prosecutors debated whether to issue subpoenas to Clinton’s aides, officials say. Leaders at the FBI and at the Justice Department thought it would be faster to come to voluntary agreements with aides. Subpoenas could cause delays, particularly if litigation is necessary, officials said. And the FBI and Justice Department wanted to try to complete the probe and get out of the way of the 2016 election. 
+Now here’s where the Clinton Foundation probe comes into focus… 
+In the Clinton Foundation probe, at least one FBI field office also received notification of a possible suspicious bank transaction. The transaction involving a Clinton Foundation donor was flagged in what is known as a suspicious activity report, routine notices sent through the Treasury Department’s financial enforcement arm. 
+By early this year, FBI agents from four field offices — Los Angeles, Little Rock, Arkansas, Washington, D.C., and New York — had open files on the Clinton Foundation and were seeking to get permission to formally conduct investigations of the Clinton Foundation. 
+In February, as CNN first reported, FBI criminal division leaders and lawyers met with the lawyers from the Justice Department’s public integrity section to present what was known so far and to seek permission to conduct full-blown investigations, including the ability to subpoena records. 
+At that time, the Justice officials in the meeting advised FBI officials that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to move forward and declined to give the authorization for overt investigative techniques. Some officials described a contentious meeting with strong disagreement on both sides. 
+Officials leading the meeting told the FBI that investigators hadn’t turned up much more evidence beyond that contained in “Clinton Cash.” 
+FBI lawyers at headquarters concurred with the Justice Department’s view that agents be allowed to continue their work with the option to return if they found more evidence. 
+In July, Comey made his announcement to recommend no charges against Clinton. 
+At a Capitol Hill hearing days later, Comey told members of Congress that he was proud there had been no leaks of his decision. 
+But blowback from some current and former agents was immediate. As Comey made his rounds of visits to field offices around the country, he heard stinging criticism, particularly from retired agents. 
+At one meeting in Kansas City, Comey was confronted with stinging criticism of the probe. He pushed back, saying the career agents who knew the most of the case arrived at the conclusion that the case against Clinton wasn’t even a close call. 
+FBI agents again pressed to take more overt steps in the Clinton Foundation probe, including possibly issuing subpoenas. 
+Justice Department officials again opposed such moves. They cited, again, a lack of evidence to warrant more investigative steps. And they expressed concerns that with the election close, any overt actions shouldn’t be made until after Election Day. 
+“It’s just a (message of) ‘hold right now until after the elections — no subpoenas issued, no interviews,” one law enforcement official familiar with the July decision said. 
+So what conclusions can we draw from the above? First, it seems to confirm some of what Fox reported, namely that there is an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation. That’s important in its own right for the reasons I explained earlier. The second bit of information is new. We learned that Justice Department officials “ expressed concerns that with the election close, any overt actions shouldn’t be made until after Election Day.” The pieces are finally coming together… 
+Specifically, one of the more interesting aspects of last night’s news is the increased willingness of FBI agents to break protocol and speak to the media about ongoing investigations. Why would they do that? They seem to be doing it due to continued concerns over political interference from the Justice Department (and possibly FBI headquarters) into various investigations into the workings of an extremely powerful political-oligarch family. They are rightly troubled by what a President Clinton could do to any investigation if she’s elected. As such, they are trying to get their concerns out to the public ahead of time. 
+I’ve been watching all of this develop for some time, and I wrote two prior articles on the topic. Here they are in case you missed them: 
+October 7, 2016: Backlash Grows Months After the FBI’s Sham Investigation Into Hillary Clinton 
+October 18, 2016: Internal Anger at the FBI Over Clinton Investigation Continues to Grow 
+So what’s going on is extremely serious, and many within the FBI appear to be acutely concerned that the perception of the rule of law will be permanently destroyed if Clinton gets into the White House and shuts down all investigations into her and her inner circle. Martin Armstrong summarized the situation perfectly in a blog post earlier today: 
+The Department of Justice is so compromised with Lynch at the head it is getting to be absurd. Peter J. Kadzik is the Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs at the Department of Justice (DOJ). Clearly, there is an internal war going on as I reported. Now that the FBI has over the 650,000 emails uncovered in Anthony Weiner’s notebook, which Huma Abedin failed to turnover to Congress claiming she had no idea how they got there. The US Justice Department announced it is now also joining the probe to dedicate all necessary resources to quickly clear Hillary, up pops the conflict of interest. In the letter to Congress, the DOJ person to aid this investigation to clear Hillary by the election, is Assistant Attorney General Peter J. Kadzik who wrote to the House and Senate lawmakers. 
+This is Podesta’s friend for dinner who goes to his house. Plus, Peter Kadzik donated $250 to Hillary also noted in Podesta’s spreadsheet. Kadzik and Podesta were classmates at Georgetown Law School back in the 1970s and have been good friends ever since. In fact, Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation and Podesta wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.” It was also Kadzik who lobbied Podesta for Marc Rich to obtain a pardon for a fugitive when you have to show remorse to get a pardon. Never has a Pardon been granted to a fugitive in this manner. Then Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss of Weiss Public Affairs, worked on the 1992 Clinton/Gore Campaign as a Press Secretary. She was the Communications Director for the Democratic National Committee, and on top of that, she was White House Deputy Assistant to the President Bill Clinton. It gets better. Another email sent on May 5, 2015, Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign. This is the independent person appointed by Lynch to clear Hillary? Come on! This is outright in your face corruption. 
+Why would the DOJ pick such a conflicted person? The answer is obvious. They want to CLEAR Hillary no matter what. Kadzik is there to now counteract anything Comey does because there is really an internal war waging in Washington. The screams from behind the curtain are getting deafening. It is so disgusting that we are witnessing the complete collapse of anything pretended to be the rule of law. The status quo, including George Bush Sr, are all backing Hillary so there is NOTHING that will change and they all live fat and happy off of our taxes and legal oppression. This is really becoming a battle to save the country from the privileged establishment. They milk us like cows and send our boys into battle with lies and propaganda to enrich themselves. I lost half my school friends to Vietnam when Lyndon Johnson even said in 1965 the Vietnamese never attacked us; “For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there.” (source) 
+I’ve also covered the disturbing crony relationships between the DOJ/FBI and Clinton’s inner circle in recent weeks. For more on that, see:",FAKE
+1365,Jonah Goldberg: Hillary's Iowa 'win' is a big loss for Democrats,"Result signals a long war between Clinton establishment and the party's young base.
+
+Hillary Clinton’s asterisk-heavy victory in Iowa might have been the narrowest of wins for her, but it was arguably the worst of all possible outcomes for the Democratic Party.
+
+As of this writing, the result was a statistical tie, 49.9% for Clinton and 49.6% for Bernie Sanders. The margin of victory in the delegate count was decided by six coin tosses that “flip truthers” will forever remember as mysteriously biased toward Clinton.
+
+Clinton raced to the podium to declare victory, but the news media will continue to describe it as a tie, probably forever. Sanders' supporters won’t even make that concession, bitterly complaining about irregularities and, again, coins that seemed to be in Clinton’s pocket, figuratively speaking.
+
+A crushing defeat would have been worse for Clinton, of course. But this wasn’t much better. In fact, the nature of this victory will probably bring out the worst in Clinton. If she lost decisively, as she did in Iowa in 2008, she'd have the option of playing the victim. Maybe she'd even cry again, like she did in Portsmouth, N.H., in ’08, earning the sympathy vote. Instead, she won Iowa this time. But saying so requires lawyerly qualifications and caveats.
+
+Everyone knows this “win” was nothing to brag about. According to The New York Times, her “advisers said they did not know if a significant staff shakeup was at hand, but they said that the Clintons were disappointed with Monday night’s result and wanted to ensure that her organization, political messaging and communications strategy were in better shape for the contests to come.” That’s not exactly William Wallace in Braveheart shouting of victory.
+
+Clinton simply can’t go around talking about her “win” in Iowa without seeming ungracious and grasping. Every time she tries, it will, by the very nature of that victory, seem like spin. Already, her supporters are fanning out across cable news overselling the win and reinforcing the sense that Team Clinton is disconnected from reality. Also, any bragging from the Clinton camp will further antagonize Sanders' supporters, many of whom are already quite hostile to Clinton.
+
+But the real loser in all this is the Democratic Party.
+
+The ghost of Eugene McCarthy has hovered over the Democratic race for a year. In 1968, the left-wing senator from Minnesota challenged President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. McCarthy actually lost by a significant margin. But the mere fact that he got 42% of the vote against the sitting president was enough to ultimately knock Johnson out of the race and entice Robert F. Kennedy into it.
+
+These are different times, and Clinton isn’t an incumbent president. Even so, numerous observers raised the possibility that if Clinton suffered a devastating loss in both Iowa and New Hampshire, it might be enough to entice Vice President Biden, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg or someone else into the race to save the party from the prospect of a socialist nominee or a fatally flawed Clinton candidacy.
+
+There was never any question in my mind that Clinton will never drop out. Like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman, she’s got nowhere else to go. But there was some slim possibility that someone else would get in and beat her and Sanders. That won’t happen now. She will almost surely go on to lose in New Hampshire. After that, her best hope is to grind out a victory over many months, antagonizing Sanders' supporters, who are disproportionately made up of exactly the kind of young activists Clinton desperately needs to win in November.
+
+The window for a Democratic savior — if one ever existed — slammed shut Monday night. The Democrats are stuck with what they’ve got.
+
+Jonah Goldberg, American Enterprise Institute fellow and National Review contributing editor, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
+
+In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.",REAL
+26,House passes alternate abortion measure,"Washington (CNN) The GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed legislation on Thursday banning all taxpayer money for abortions. But that bill was a backup, after another proposal to ban so-called ""late -term"" abortions was suddenly yanked the late Wednesday night because of blow back from moderate Republicans who argued it was too extreme.
+
+The bill barring federal taxpayer funds was approved in the last Congress. On Thursday it passed 242-179, with three Democrats joining virtually all House Republicans to support the bill. GOP Rep. Richard Hanna of New York was the one Republican who voted against it.
+
+Earlier on Thursday, the White House promised to veto the legislation if it ended up on the President's desk.
+
+The vote came as tens of thousands of anti-abortion rights activists descended on the National Mall for the annual ""March for Life."" Thursday's event coincides with the 42nd anniversary the of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision which upheld a woman's access to abortion based on privacy rights in the Constitution.
+
+Republican leaders initially planned to pass the ""Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,"" a bill banning abortion procedures for women who are beyond 20 weeks into their pregnancy. A similar version of that bill was approved by the House in 2013.
+
+But a bloc of female GOP members - led by North Carolina Rep Renee Ellmers - opposed a provision in the bill that provided an exception for women who are raped, but required that that they show evidence they filed a police report in order to have access to an abortion. These members argued the vast majority of rapes go unreported, and some are the result of incest. Some male members agreed that provision shouldn't be included, and urged leaders to strip it out.
+
+""I'm pro-life,"" Florida GOP Congressman Carlos Curbelo told reporters on Thursday. But he added, ""I'm certainly not going to ever put myself in the position where I'm telling any woman that their account of a rape is valid or not.""
+
+House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi needled the GOP about the internal spat, saying, ""They didn't even have their act together.""
+
+And she criticized the GOP for spending time on the abortion debate instead of debating measures focused on job creation.
+
+""They're putting a bill on the floor that undermines the health of America's women. The bill is worse than the bill they pulled from the floor yesterday,"" Pelosi said in a news conference. ""That affected thousands of women, maybe, this affects millions of women. It not only affects their health, it affects the personal decisions of how they spend their own money for health insurance.""
+
+Religious activists pushing for more abortion restrictions were unhappy with the Republican leadership's decision to cancel the vote on that measure.
+
+""I have nothing but respect for the speaker but this was not the best moment for the House Republicans by far -- and happening on the day on the March for life,"" Dr. Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told CNN.
+
+The late-night decision to pull the bill was a unusual win for more centrist members, who argued that the bill sent the wrong message - especially to women and young people - at a time that the party was working to expand its support ahead of the 2016 national election.
+
+""This appeared to be messaging bill, and the message that was being sent was not a very good one,"" Republican Rep Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania said, noting that the bill was not going anywhere in the Senate.
+
+""I would prefer that our party spent less time focusing on these very contentious social issues, because that distracts us from broader economic messages where I think we have much greater appeal to the larger public,"" he said.
+
+Since Republicans took control of the House in 2011, House Speaker John Boehner has tangled with conservatives on a range of bills, and in some cases their opposition has thwarted Boehner's legislative agenda. After the 2014 midterm election, the GOP conference now has 246 members, including 22 female members. The willingness of many of these members, and those who represent competitive districts, to challenge their leaders may complicate future legislation.
+
+""There is a growing sentiment in the conference that we want to move legislation that can make a difference for the American people and not take an infinite number of symbolic votes that might be good for a campaign ad or get people riled up,"" Curbelo told CNN.
+
+North Carolina Republican Rep. Richard Hudson, who said he wasn't involved in the discussions about the bill, said, ""None of us saw it coming.""
+
+He pointed out that members voted on the same bill last year, and said, ""Now there is a concern, then there wasn't.""
+
+Much of the criticism from anti-abortion rights groups centered on Ellmers. Moore said activists at the Match for Life took notice of the North Carolina Republican's role.
+
+""I've heard the name Renee Ellmers once every 20 seconds this morning on the mall,"" he said.
+
+She issued a statement after Thursday's vote saying she still was still discussing bringing the 20-week abortion bill ban bill back to the floor.
+
+""Our goal is to find a way to get this legislation in its best possible form,"" she said.
+
+Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona, the author of the bill that didn't get a vote, told reporters he was ""disappointed"" and said he was confident the measure would have passed. He said he didn't question his leaders commitment to fighting for anti-abortion rights bills and said he had their ""word of honor"" the House would eventually hold a vote on it.",REAL
+10332,TOO MANY MILLENNIALS ARE COOL WITH COMMUNISM,"Home › SOCIETY | US NEWS › TOO MANY MILLENNIALS ARE COOL WITH COMMUNISM TOO MANY MILLENNIALS ARE COOL WITH COMMUNISM 0 SHARES [10/27/16] “We learn from history that we do not learn from history,” observed German philosopher Georg Hegel. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than a new survey showing that far too many “millennials” are not just cool to “capitalism,” but are actually cool with communism. As MarketWatch reports : 
+Of the 2,300 Americans polled by YouGov , 80% of baby boomers and 91% of the elderly agree with the statement that “communism was and still is a problem” in the world today. Millennials? Only 55%. 
+Furthermore, almost half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 20 said they would vote for a socialist, while 21% would go so far as to back a communist. 
+Capitalism, on the other hand, is viewed favorably by 64% of those over the age of 65, compared with only 42% of millennials. 
+Citing these results, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s Marion Smith stated, as quoted by MarketWatch , “One of the concerns [the foundation] has had since its establishment is that an emerging generation of Americans has little understanding of the collectivist system and its dark history.” For sure. This was evidenced when a teenager once naively asked me, “What’s so bad about communism?” Another registered a look of shock when I gave him part of the answer: During the 20th century, Marxist governments exterminated approximately 100 million people, making them history’s most murderous ideologues. 
+Related to this, MarketWatch also tells us that “a third of millennials say they believe more people were killed under George W. Bush than Joseph Stalin,” clearly oblivious to Stalin’s psychopathic actions having accounted for upwards of 20 million of the above number. Of course, 82 percent of millennials at least knew who Stalin was. This cannot be said regarding Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung; 42 percent of millennials were unfamiliar with this mass murderer of approximately 60 million. Forty percent didn’t know who Argentine Marxist and major Cuban Revolution figure Che Guevara was. With respect to Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx, the “unacquainted with” figures were, respectively, 33 and 32 percent. 
+Not surprisingly, this ignorance goes beyond history. While it’s troubling that almost half of those aged 16 to 20 would support a socialist, there’s good and bad news here. And they’re the same thing: 
+These young people generally don’t know what socialism is. 
+As I wrote in February, “People 18 to 29 just helped vault Senator Bernie Sanders to a resounding New Hampshire primary victory, not at all deterred by his socialist label. But while they view that positively, they don’t believe in socialist (in Sanders’) wealth redistribution. In fact, this research shows that they cotton to it little more than do average Americans and no more than their age group did 20 years ago. In other words, millennials may like the word socialism, but, as with so many others, they don’t understand well what it signifies or the nature of those for whom they vote.” 
+In reality, the label “socialism” is applied loosely today, yet it has a firm definition. Note that socialism was popularized via Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto . And under Marxist doctrine, “socialism” — or the socialist revolution — is the transitional phase that extinguishes economic freedom and ushers in communism. Moreover, there are no communist governments because “communism” is the culmination of socialism, the stage where, the fanciful theory goes, the government has melted away and everyone lives happily and harmoniously in a state of economic equality-induced bliss. Post navigation",FAKE
+5958,Trump Won’t Mention That Bush & Cheney Deleted 22 Million Emails,"Comments 
+With Donald Trump obsesses over Hillary Clinton’s e-mail “scandal”, one wonders why he never mentions the Bush Administration and the April 12, 2007 revelation that the White House had “lost” 5 million e-mails related to an investigation into the partisan firing of eight U.S. attorneys . Eventually, the true number was found to be over 22 million e-mails. 
+Salon reports that: 
+The emails had been run through private accounts controlled by the Republican National Committee and were only supposed to be used for dealing with non-administration political campaign work to avoid violating ethics laws. Yet congressional investigators already had evidence private emails had been used for government business, including to discuss the firing of one of the U.S. attorneys. The RNC accounts were used by 22 White House staffers, including then-Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who reportedly used his RNC email for 95 percent of his communications. 
+According to the Washington Post, “Under federal law, the White House is required to maintain records, including e-mails, involving presidential decision- making and deliberations.” But, of course, these millions of e-mails went missing — many of which were important evidence. 
+Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. 
+‘“That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive. The NSA (not to be confused with the National Security Agency, the federal surveillance organization) is a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and declassifying national security documents and is one of the key players in the effort to recover the supposedly lost Bush White House emails. 
+As Rove and others were investigated for the partisan “unmasking” of Valerie Plame, a CIA black market specialist, it came to light that Rove’s server was used for official communications — the exact sort required to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act. 
+“I wouldn’t rule out that there were a potential 5 million e-mails lost,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said at the time. By 2009, it was revealed that Perino’s numbers were a little off when 22 million missing e-mails were discovered. 
+The partisan nature of this Clinton email investigation is obvious. How is it not relevant that an administration notorious for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity was able to delete millions of emails without a word from Congress? For all their so called concern for our national security, the Republican Party has an appalling double standard.",FAKE
+2038,Poll: Hillary Clinton ahead in 5 potential match-ups - Politics.com,"A new poll released Monday indicates Hillary Clinton holds an advantage over five potential Republican opponents in hypothetical match-ups for the 2016 presidential election.
+
+If the contest were held today, 45% of likely voters say they would pick the former secretary of state over Mitt Romney, who garners 39%.
+
+She has a 43%-37% advantage over former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and a 42%-36% margin over New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
+
+All three of Clinton's margins over Bush, Christie and Romney fall within the sampling error of plus-or-minus 3.6 percentage points.
+
+When matched against Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, however, her lead widens. Forty-six percent of likely voters side with Clinton, compared to 33% who pick Cruz.
+
+In a head-to-head with Paul, who's been aggressive in reaching out to Democrats and independents, Clinton still comes out ahead, 45%-37%.
+
+Bloomberg conducted interview with 753 likely voters from December 3-5.",REAL
+10264,Just In Case: Preparing for the Evening and Day After Election 2016,"Just In Case: Preparing for the Evening and Day After Election 2016   Tweet 
+by James Wesley, Rawles | SurvivalBlog 
+There is a substantial risk that Hillary “Hitlery” Clinton will become our next President. She is notoriously anti-gun, and has made many promises to her gun-grabbing campaign donors to give “gun control” (read: civilian disarmament) her top priority. 
+Consider the guidance in this article just a contingency. You can simply ignore it, if Donald Trump is elected. (Since he is outspokenly pro-gun.) But if Clinton is indeed elected, then gun, ammunition, and magazine prices will surely start to rise immediately. And by the time she actually takes office, prices might well have already doubled or tripled, and shortages of some item–particularly standard military caliber ammunition and many 11+ round magazines–will be widespread. 
+To be ready for the possible Hill-ection, I recommend that you take the following steps: 
+Get Ready… Withdraw some substantial cash (but not more that $9,700 ), and keep it well-hidden, at home. Pay off your credit card balances, so that you will have your full purchase credit limit available. Consult gun show calendars , and make plans to attend local shows. Note that many gun shows are now run as three-day shows, open Friday through Sunday. Check the advertised hours closely, and call to confirm days and show hours with the gun show management, before traveling. You will want to be there on Friday , to avoid the Saturday mob scene. Expend a vacation day from your work, if need be. 
+Get Set… Make prioritized shopping lists Set bookmarks in your browser for ordering the particular items that you have in mind to purchase. Make detailed comparison price lists (or an electronic spreadsheet, if you are so inclined),in descending order of prices so you that won’t pay too much for what you buy. This research takes time , but that translates into saving money , so it is time well spent. 
+…Go! On Election Night immediately after announcement that Hitlery is the projected winner in the Electoral College, go online and place orders with Internet sellers that take orders 24 hours per day , such as : CDNN Sports , GunMagWarehouse , Brownells , KeepShooting.com , CheaperThanDirt , Midway , Cabela’s (now part of Bass Pro Shops), J&G Sales , Bud’s Gun Shop , Dan’s Ammo , Lucky Gunner , Able Ammo , Ammunition Store , Ammunition Depot , Cope’s Distributing , Centerfire Systems , and GlockPro . Our Editor At Large Mike Williamson recently mentioned that SlickGuns.com is now selling Federal .22 Long Rifle ammo for as little as 6 cents per round . (I suspect that .22LR will again become scarce and jump back up over 15 cents per round, if Hitler In Heels is elected.) Keep in mind that many manufacturers such as SIGArms , Beretta USA , and The Beta Company also take direct Internet orders. Stay up and complete as many of your planned orders as you can afford, late into the night. It you tarry and say: “I’ll do it tomorrow”, then you will probably be disappointed to to see “Out Of Stock” showing at many vendor web sites. 
+The Morning After Set your alarm clock, and start making calls to the mailorder vendors that don’t take Internet orders, starting right at 8 AM, Eastern Time. Be outside the door of your local gun shop before it opens. Bring lots of cash. 
+In The Weeks Following Attend guns shows in your state. If it is possible under your state and local laws, buy used private party guns , with no paper trail. If that is not an option in your state, then buy a pre-1899 antique cartridge rifle , such as a 7mm Model 1895 Chilean Mauser. These are exempt from paperwork, in most states.) Watch auction sites such as GunBroker.com and GunAuction.com closely, for guns that are on your purchase list. Concentrate on “Buy It Now” items , since the multi-day auctions will probably be bid up to stratospheric heights, in the panic period following election day. 
+What To Buy Start with your own needs, then with your children’s needs, and then with barter in mind, as follows: First Priority: Magazines and ammunition for your primary battle rifles Second Priority: Magazines and ammunition for your primary carry pistols Third Priority: Stripped AR-15 and AR-10 receivers (for later assembly) 
+saig Fourth Priority: Secondary firearms, plus magazines and ammunition, to match Fifth Priority: Magazines and ammunition for planned acquisitions that will expand your battery of guns–including guns for children and grandchildren Sixth Priority: Magazines and ammunition for barter or re-sale. 
+Note: Be sure to buy only either original military contract or original factory-made full capacity magazines– don’t buy aftermarket junk! 
+Any extra magazines that are intended for barter should be of the types that will be in the highest demand. Examples include: AR-15/M16, M14, Mini-14, AR-10, FAL, Glock, S&W M&P, Beretta, and SIG. In particular, I predict that 33-round Glock magazines , 30-round Beretta Model 92 magazines , 100-round Beta C-MAGs , and 40-round Mag-Pul AR-15 PMAGs will all be in particularly high demand.) 
+Potential Resistance In some families, a spouse might object to you making such purchases. Sit down and dispassionately show them the history of other “scare” and “ban”periods, and point out how much prices rose. (For example: stripped AR-15 lower receivers jumped from $60 each to $300 each, during the last big scare.) Tell them: “This is the equivalent of having the foreknowledge of what Dow Jones stocks will double or triple in price. It is wise to buy low and sell high.” If need be, promise your spouse that you will sell off half of what you plan to buy, after prices have doubled. That will leave the purchase cost of what you then retain, effectively at zero . 
+In Closing Don’t panic, but recognize that Hitlery Clinton will probably act swiftly to restrict privately-owned firearms and accessories, using Executive Orders. Her transition team might even prepare them before she takes office. Most likely would be an import ban on magazines that can hold more than 10 cartridges, for civilians. Another likelihood is an import ban on military style firearms and/or parts sets. Another possibility is reclassifying 80% complete receivers. She might also direct the BATFE to expand the definition of “Destructive Devices” to include semi-automatic shotguns with detachable magazines. (Such as the Saiga-12, which is already import banned.) Plan accordingly. 
+And regardless of the outcome of the upcoming election, you should have already spread out your guns, ammo, optics, and field gear between hidden places in several houses owned by members of your family, and in underground caches. DO NOT keep all your eggs in one basket! – JWR",FAKE
+6081,"The David Duke Show: The State of the Campaign, the Synagogue of Satan","David Duke October 26, 2016 
+Today Dr. Duke discussed the state of his campaign, including television commercials that he was preparing. He will be in a televised debate with the other leading candidates, which should be critical in putting him in the run off. 
+Pastor Mark Dankof took over the show at the break. He took calls from listeners. One call asked about Jesus’s warning about the Synagogue of Satan. Pastor Dankof ended the show with a passionate warning about the risk of World War III should Hillary be elections. 
+This is another great show that you won’t want to miss.",FAKE
+2767,"Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the Islamic State, and it is hurting the war","On the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion.
+
+Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting the Islamic State for a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil.
+
+“It is not in doubt,” said Mustafa Saadi, who says his friend saw U.S. helicopters delivering bottled water to Islamic State positions. He is a commander in one of the Shiite militias that last month helped push the militants out of the oil refinery near Baiji in northern Iraq alongside the Iraqi army.
+
+The Islamic State is “almost finished,” he said. “They are weak. If only America would stop supporting them, we could defeat them in days.”
+
+[Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine]
+
+U.S. military officials say the charges are too far-fetched to merit a response. “It’s beyond ridiculous,” said Col. Steve Warren, the military’s Baghdad-based spokesman. “There’s clearly no one in the West who buys it, but unfortunately, this is something that a segment of the Iraqi population believes.”
+
+The perception among Iraqis that the United States is somehow in cahoots with the militants it claims to be fighting appears, however, to be widespread across the country’s Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide, and it speaks to more than just the troubling legacy of mistrust that has clouded the United States’ relationship with Iraq since the 2003 invasion and the subsequent withdrawal eight years later.
+
+At a time when attacks by the Islamic State in Paris and elsewhere have intensified calls for tougher action on the ground, such is the level of suspicion with which the United States is viewed in Iraq that it is unclear whether the Obama administration would be able to significantly escalate its involvement even if it wanted to.
+
+“What influence can we have if they think we are supporting the terrorists?” asked Kirk Sowell, an analyst based in neighboring Jordan who publishes the newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics.
+
+In one example of how little leverage the United States now has, Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi pushed back swiftly against an announcement Tuesday by Defense Secretary ­Ashton B. Carter that an expeditionary force of U.S. troops will be dispatched to Iraq to conduct raids, free hostages and capture Islamic State leaders.
+
+[Is it too late to solve the mess in the Middle East?]
+
+Iraq’s semiautonomous region of Kurdistan, where support for the United States remains strong, has said it would welcome more troops. But Abadi indicated they would not be needed.
+
+“There is no need for foreign ground combat troops,” he said in a statement. “Any such support and special operations anywhere in Iraq can only be deployed subject to the approval of the Iraqi Government and in coordination with the Iraqi forces and with full respect to Iraqi sovereignty.”
+
+The allegations of U.S. collusion with the Islamic State are aired regularly in parliament by Shiite politicians and promoted in postings on social media. They are persistent enough to suggest a deliberate campaign on the part of Iran’s allies in Iraq to erode American influence, U.S. officials say.
+
+In one typical recent video that appeared on the Facebook page of a Shiite militia, a lawmaker with the country’s biggest militia group, the Badr Organization, waves apparently new U.S military MREs (meals ready to eat) — one of them chicken and dumplings — allegedly found at a recently captured Islamic State base in Baiji, offering proof, he said, of U.S. support.
+
+“The Iranians and the Iranian-backed Shiite militias are really pushing this line of propaganda, that the United States is supporting ISIL,” Warren said. “It’s part of the Iranian propaganda machine.”
+
+The perception plays into a widening rift within Iraq’s ruling Shiite elite over whether to pivot more toward Iran or the United States. Those pushing the allegations “want to create a narrative that Iran is our ally and the United States is our enemy, and this undermines Abadi, who is America’s ally,” Sowell said.
+
+[Police call him an ISIS recruiter. He says he’s just an outspoken preacher.]
+
+Iraqi government officials say they don’t believe the charges and point out that Abadi regularly pushes back against them. But Abadi’s own position has weakened in recent months. He is battling for his political survival against a variety of Shiite militia leaders whose power has been bolstered by the increasingly dominant role played on the battlefield by the militias, collectively known as Hashd al-Shaabi, or popular mobilization units.
+
+Iraqi officials complain that their task is hampered by what is universally perceived as the lackluster U.S. response to the threat posed by the Islamic State.
+
+“We don’t believe the Americans support Daesh,” said Naseer Nouri, spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “But it is true that most people are saying they do, and they are right to believe that the Americans should be doing much more than they are. It’s because America is so slow that most people believe they are supporting Daesh.”
+
+U.S. warplanes routinely fail to respond to requests for air support because of U.S. rules of engagement that preclude strikes if there is a risk civilians may be hit, he said. According to Warren, that standard frequently is not met. The United States has conducted more than 3,768 strikes in Iraq as of Nov.­ 19, according to the U.S. military, and the tempo of strikes has increased lately, U.S. officials say.
+
+But it also appears that the fighters are unaware when they do receive U.S. air support. The U.S. military reported near-daily strikes in support of the offensive to recapture Baiji last month and continues to respond regularly to requests for strikes in the vicinity, Warren said.
+
+[In the fight against the Islamic State, Iraq’s leader begins to look shaky]
+
+The fighters there insist there have been no strikes by the Americans at all. “We’d be better off without them,” said 1st Lt. Murtada Fadl, who is serving with the Iraqi elite forces in Baiji. He said that the only air support had come from the Iraqi air force and that he wishes the government would ask the Russians to replace the Americans.
+
+In a part of the world where outcomes are often confused with intentions and regional complexities enable conspiracy theories to thrive, the notion that the United States is colluding with the Islamic State holds a certain logic, according to Mustafa Alani, director of the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. Most Arabs are too in awe of American might to believe that the United States is deliberately adopting a minimalist approach, he said.
+
+“The reason is that the Americans aren’t doing the job people expect them to do,” he said. “Mosul was lost and the Americans did nothing. Syria was lost and the Americans did nothing. Paris is attacked and the Americans aren’t doing much. So people believe this is a deliberate policy. They can’t believe the American leadership fails to understand the developments in the region, and so the only other explanation is that this is part of a conspiracy.”
+
+On the streets of Baghdad, most Iraqis see no other explanation.
+
+“The image of the U.S. was damaged in the region, so they created Daesh in order to fight them and restore their image,” said Mohammed Abdul Khaleq, a journalist for a local TV station who was drinking coffee in a cafe favored by writers, most of whom said they agreed.
+
+A rare dissenting voice was offered by Hassan Abdul-Wahab, 23, selling luggage in a nearby shop. “It is true that most people believe that,” he said. “But it’s not based on reason. It’s based on racism — because Iraqis don’t like Americans in the first place.”
+
+Did these tweets encourage a Chicago teen to try joining the Islamic State?
+
+Why the Islamic State leaves tech companies torn between free speech and security
+
+With fight against the Islamic State in Iraq stalled, U.S. looks to Syria for gains",REAL
+6332,The Working Class Won The Election — Paul Craig Roberts,"By Paul Craig Roberts on November 9, 2016 It seems that the oligarchs were deceived by their own media propaganda. Donald Trump has won a stunning victory over Hillary Clinton, wrongfooting investors around the world and defying Republican and Democratic political elites with his populist “Drain the Swamp” and “Make America Great Again” movement. 
+by Paul Craig Roberts 
+The US presidential election is historic, because the American people were able to defeat the oligarchs. 
+Hillary Clinton, an agent for the Oligarchy, was defeated despite the vicious media campaign against Donald Trump. This shows that the media and the political establishments of the political parties no longer have credibility with the American people. 
+It remains to be seen whether Trump can select and appoint a government that will serve him and his goals to restore American jobs and to establish friendly and respectful   China, Syria, and Iran. 
+It also remains to be seen how the Oligarchy will respond to Trump’s victory. Wall Street and the Federal Reserve can cause an economic crisis in order to put Trump on the defensive, and they can use the crisis to force Trump to appoint one of their own as Secretary of the Treasury. Rogue agents in the CIA and Pentagon can cause a false flag attack that would disrupt   Russia. 
+Trump could make a mistake and retain neoconservatives in his government. 
+With Trump there is at least hope. Unless Trump is obstructed by bad judgment in his appointments and by obstacles put in his way, we should expect an end to Washington’s orchestrated conflict with Russia, the removal of the US missiles on Russia’s border with Poland and Romania, the end of the conflict in Ukraine, and the end of Washington’s effort to overthrow the Syrian government. However, achievements such as these imply the defeat of the US Oligarchy. Although Trump defeated Hillary, the Oligarchy still exists and is still powerful. NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. 
+Trump said that he no longer sees the point of NATO 25 years after the Soviet collapse. If he sticks to his view, it means a big political change in Washington’s EU vassals. The hostility toward Russia of the current EU and NATO officials would have to cease. German Chancellor Merkel would have to change her spots or be replaced. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg would have to be dismissed. 
+We do not know who Trump will select to serve in his government. It is likely that Trump is unfamiliar with the various possibilities and their positions on issues. It really depends on who is advising Trump and what advice they give him. 
+Once we see his government, we will know whether we can be hopeful for the changes that now have a chance. 
+If the oligarchy is unable to control Trump and he is actually successful in curbing the power and budget of the military/security complex and in holding the financial sector politically accountable, Trump could be assassinated.   Wars 
+Trump said that he will put Hillary in prison. He should first put her on trial for treason and war crimes along with all of the neoconservatives. That would clear the decks for peace with the other two major nuclear powers over whom the neoconservatives seek hegemony. 
+Although the neoconservatives would still have contacts in the hidden deep state, it would make it difficult for the vermin to organize false flag operations or an assassination. Rogue elements in the military/security complex could still pull off an assassination, but without neocons in the government a coverup would be more difficult. 
+Trump has more understanding and insight than his opponents realize. For a man such as Trump to risk acquiring so many powerful enemies and to risk his wealth and reputation, he had to have known that the people’s dissatisfaction with the ruling establishment meant he could be elected president. 
+We won’t know what to expect until we see who are the Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries. If it is the usual crowd, we will know Trump has been captured. 
+A happy lasting result of the election is the complete discrediting of the US media. The media predicted an easy Hillary victory and even Democratic Party control of the US Senate. Even more important to the media’s loss of influence and credibility, despite the vicious media attack on Trump throughout the presidential primaries and presidential campaign, the media had no effect outside the Northeast and West coasts, the stomping grounds of the One Percent. The rest of the country ignored the media. 
+I did not think the Oligarchy would allow Trump to win. However, it seems that the oligarchs were deceived by their own media propaganda. Assured that Hillary was the sure winner, they were unprepared to put into effect plans to steal the election. 
+Hillary is down, but not the Oligarchs. If Trump is advised to be conciliatory, to hold out his hand, and to take the establishment into his government, the American people will again be disappointed. In a country whose institutions have been so completely corrupted by the Oligarchy, it is difficult to achieve real change without bloodshed. 
+CrossTalk: Trump’s Triumph! Against almost all the odds Donald Trump wins the American presidency. This is a historic political earthquake for the United States and the world. Welcome to Trumpland! CrossTalking with Mark Sleboda, Gilbert Doctorow, and Rory Suchet. Published on Nov 9, 2016 Related Posts:",FAKE
+8002,What Does It Take to Survive Where You Live?,"License DMCA 
+How much does it take to get by where you live? A new report concludes that current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour doesn't come close, anywhere in the United States. It takes more than $15 per hour to earn a living wage in most states. When you throw in the rising cost of student debt, low-income Americans are even further underwater. 
+The report, "" Waiting for the Payoff: How Low Wages and Student Debt Keep Prosperity Out of Reach (pdf),"" was issued this week by the People's Action Institute. Among its findings: 
+* It takes more than $15 per hour to earn a living wage in 42 states and the District of Columbia. That figure is over $16 in more than half of the country, comes to nearly $20 per hour in California, and is more than $20 in New York state. 
+* New York State's minimum wage of $9 per hour provides only 44 percent of a living wage for a single adult and less than a quarter of the living wage for a single adult with two children."" 
+* Arkansas had the lowest hourly rate of any state, but at $14.58 per hour it was barely below the $15 per hour minimum proposed by Fight for 15 . - Advertisement - 
+* The situation is even more dire for working parents. A single adult with two children needs more than $26 per hour to get by in South Carolina, more than $41 per hour in New York state, and nearly $44 per hour in Washington DC. 
+* 43 states and Washington, D.C. have a lower minimum wage for tipped workers. Half of tipped workers are 30 years old or older, and tipped workers are three times as likely as other workers to be impoverished. 
+What's the price of a dream? For people who saw college as the way to a better life, this country's student debt crisis offers a harsh answer. More than 43 million Americans now carry some level of student debt. 
+Student loan debt in this country now totals more than $1.3 trillion -- and it's getting worse. Common Dreams' Deirdre Fulton points to a new study from the Institute of College Access and Success which shows that the average undergraduate borrower now graduates with $30,100 in debt, a 4 percent increase from last year's figure. 
+Living wage figures rise even higher when the cost of student debt is factored in. The national median payment for student debt comes to $242 per month. Student debt cost increases the national average living wage from $17.28 to $18.67 per hour. - Advertisement - 
+College graduates typically earn higher wages, but the discrimination faced by women and people of color contributes to ongoing wage inadequacy. For example, African Americans are considerably more likely to take on student debt that white Americans, and are more likely to go to higher-cost private institutions. Women and people of color are more likely to work in tipped occupations, so the sub-minimum wage affects these groups disproportionately. 
+Wage discrimination is also a critical problem, both for student debt holders and low-wage workers as a whole. As the report notes: 
+""... Majors with a high proportion of white males, such as computer and information sciences, see starting salaries of $65,000. At the same time, English and Psychology, which see more women and people of color, have median starting salaries of $35,000 and $32,750 per year, respectively -- lower even than the traditional living wage for a single adult."" 
+Discrimination in hiring and other systemic problems take a heavy toll. For each dollar paid to white male college graduates with degrees, black men are paid 78 cents; Latinos are paid 81 cents; black women are paid 72 cents; and Latinas are paid 69 cents.",FAKE
+8451,Homeschool Families Targeted In District’s ‘Operation Round Up’,"Off the Grid News – by Daniel Jennings 
+A public school official in Florida has urged citizens to fight truancy by reporting any children they suspect might not be in school or being educated — including homeschool families. 
+It is all part of an “anti-truancy” initiative called Operation Round Up, in which residents of Jackson County, Florida, are urged to be on the lookout for children not in school and to report them to school officials or to police. 
+A truancy report can lead to a home check by sheriff’s deputies or police and possibly the arrest of the parents, TV station WJHG reported. 
+The policy of the Jackson County School District is to send law enforcement to the homes of suspected truants. 
+“Sometimes if these citizens don’t call me, I have no way of knowing,” Shirl Williams, director of student services for the school system, told the TV station. “So if it’s a nosy neighbor, be a nosy neighbor. Just call me and let me check out the situation.” 
+Williams acknowledged that homeschool children can be mistaken for truants but urged citizens to report them so school authorities can investigate. 
+“Sometimes the community will see them around town and they think, ‘Hey, they’re not being educated.’ Sometimes the community is right,” Williams said. 
+Home School Legal Defense Association attorney TJ Schmidt wrote Williams and the Jackson County superintendent, saying that while truancy is a problem, homeschoolers should not be targeted. 
+“Your statements suggest that everyone should report children they think aren’t being educated,” the letter read. “In our opinion, this is a threatening practice, and will instill a spirit of suspicion and hostility against homeschoolers in the community.” 
+Schmidt wrote to Williams after a parent saw her on TV and complained to HSDLA. 
+© Copyright Off The Grid News",FAKE
+6185,New Report Finds Voters Have No Idea How Outraged They Supposed To Be About Anything Anymore - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"New Report Finds Voters Have No Idea How Outraged They Supposed To Be About Anything Anymore Close Vol 52 Issue 43 · Politics · Election 2016 
+WASHINGTON—Saying that at this point, they were just taking their best guesses at how they should react to each new scandal that emerged about the presidential nominees, voters across the country admitted Monday they had no clue how outraged they are supposed to be about anything anymore. “It seems like there’s a new revelation that comes out each day about Trump or Hillary, and to be honest, I couldn’t even begin to tell you which ones I should just shake my head at and which ones are worth actually getting worked up about,” said Tempe, AZ voter Jeffrey Wilborne, who noted that between the recent breaking news alerts he received about the FBI reopening an investigation into Clinton’s emails just days ahead of the election and the barrage of apoplectic posts from friends on Facebook aimed at either the Democratic candidate or the FBI director, it was hard enough to tell which side to actually be resentful toward, let alone how angry to get. “I felt like it was pretty clear that I should be mad at Trump for what he said on that bus and at Hillary for telling Wall Street completely different things than she was telling us. But what about all that Clinton Foundation stuff? Should I be furious or just let that slide? I’m completely lost over here.” At press time, the nation’s electorate had settled on being completely apathetic to everything from here on out. Share This Story: Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
+Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
+5269,"Republican National Convention: Speakers, including wife Melania, testify to Donald Trump’s readiness to be president; others savage Clinton","Republicans opened their national convention here Monday night by weaving savage attacks on Hillary Clinton into testimonials to Donald Trump’s compassion, strength and readiness to be commander-in-chief in the face of terrorist attacks on the homeland and around the world.
+
+After the Republican National Convention got off to a chaotic start because of an afternoon procedural skirmish, Trump made a splashy debut on the convention stage to introduce his wife, Melania, whose speech was a highlight of an otherwise uneven evening.
+
+“I have been with Donald for 18 years, and I have been aware of his love for this country since we first met,” she said. “He never had a hidden agenda when it comes to his patriotism because, like me, he loves his country very much.”
+
+But minutes after she finished, the Quicken Loans Arena began emptying out as retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn delivered a rambling and unfocused speech that dragged on for nearly half an hour.
+
+The result: Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, poised to deliver a breakout performance, could not take the stage until well after prime time and addressed a mostly empty arena.
+
+“Hillary Clinton has failed to stop the expansion of terrorism,” Ernst said, adding: “She is entirely unfit to serve as our nation’s commander-in-chief.”
+
+The Trumps were the stars of Monday night’s show, however. Donald strode onto the convention stage about 10:20 p.m., walking out in silhouette to Queen’s anthem, “We Are the Champions.”
+
+“We’re going to win so big,” the candidate vowed, as he introduced his wife, Melania, for her keynote address.
+
+A former fashion model born in Slovenia, Melania Trump has shied away from public speaking. Monday night, she spoke with composure and movingly talked about her husband’s love of family and country.
+
+“Donald thinks big, which is especially important when considering the presidency of the United States,” she said. “No room for small thinking. No room for small results. Donald gets things done.”
+
+Melania Trump sought to broaden her husband’s appeal to the general population, including groups that have been outright hostile to his candidacy, saying that love binds their family and that together they would bring compassion to the White House.
+
+“Donald intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people,” she said. “That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims. It includes Hispanics and African Americans and Asians and the poor and the middle class.”
+
+Afterward, Donald Trump returned to the stage, kissed his wife and pointed at her with his signature gesture, as if to show her off to the roaring crowd.
+
+Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani gave one of the night’s most impassioned addresses, strongly defending Trump, whom he has known for decades.
+
+“What I did for New York, Donald Trump will do for America,” said Giuliani, who steered his city through the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
+
+Many of the earlier speakers delivered hard-edged remarks seemingly designed to play to Trump’s base supporters. A trio of speakers railed against undocumented immigrants — whom they repeatedly called “illegal aliens” — for killing their loved ones and argued that only Trump could keep the country safe.
+
+“My son’s life was stolen at the hands of an illegal alien,” said Mary Ann Mendoza, mother of fallen police Sgt. Brandon Mendoza. “It’s time we had an administration that cares more about Americans than about illegals. A vote for Hillary is putting all our children’s lives at risk.”
+
+Others who took the stage in prime time here in Cleveland aimed at Clinton.
+
+Patricia Smith, whose son Sean died in the 2012 terrorist attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, reduced convention delegates to tears with an emotional address about her son’s death — which she said she blames on Clinton, the-then secretary of state.
+
+“I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son,” Smith said. She pointed out a delegate holding up a “Hillary for Prison” sign and said, “That’s right — Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes.”
+
+Smith served as the moving opening act in a series of presentations about Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi attacks, the subject of many congressional and other investigations. Giuliani accused her of “dereliction of duty” in Benghazi.
+
+“She loves her pantsuits,” said Darryl Glenn, a GOP Senate candidate in Colorado. “But we should send her an e-mail and tell her that she deserves a bright orange jumpsuit.”
+
+A few speakers aimed their remarks to the broader electorate. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), for instance, said twice, “Help is on the way” — a memorable line from conventions past, including the 2000 speech by former vice president Richard B. Cheney.
+
+A number of speakers of color echoed Trump’s core themes of grievance, including some racial provocations.
+
+“Frankly, somebody with a nice tan needs to say this: All lives matter,” said Glenn, who is black.
+
+David Clarke, the Milwaukee County sheriff, who also is African American, cried out “Blue lives matter in America.” His call of support for law enforcement officers was received with chants of “USA! USA! USA!” in the convention hall. Clarke went on to criticize the Black Lives Matter movement.
+
+Giuliani bemoaned the racial divisions on display across the country and that first responders “have a target on their back.”
+
+“When they come to save your life, they don’t ask if you are black or white,” the former mayor said. “They just come to save you.”
+
+An emotional high point early in the night was a speech from Marcus Luttrell, the former Navy SEAL immortalized as the “Lone Survivor,” who got involved in politics after former Texas governor Rick Perry and his wife, Anita, took him in as a surrogate son and nursed him to health.
+
+Luttrell said that after spending time with Trump, he is confident the business mogul could fix chronic problems in the Department of Veterans Affairs.
+
+“We’ve got to make sure the hell the veterans return from is not the hell the veterans come home to, okay?” Luttrell said. “That’s what was promised and that’s what’s deserved. Period.”
+
+The focus on national security and immigration comes at a perilous time. Recent terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad, coupled with police shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La., have created fear and worry.
+
+Willie Robertson, the long-bearded star of “Duck Dynasty,” took the podium wearing an American flag bandana around his head and vowed repeatedly that Trump would “have your back.”
+
+During the convention’s afternoon proceedings, anti-Trump forces expressed vocal dissent from the convention floor, though party officials snuffed out attempts to slow Trump’s march to the presidential nomination.
+
+A renegade group of delegates seeking to force a rules vote that would have embarrassed Trump fell short. They were hoping to register disapproval of new party rules that favor Trump, but a handful of state delegations backed out under pressure from party leaders.
+
+The outcome cleared the path for Trump, who touched down in Cleveland around 7:30 p.m., to accept the GOP presidential nomination later this week without having to clear new hurdles. But it underscored the deep rifts that continue to plague the Republican Party during a week that was supposed to reflect unity.
+
+The Trumps arrive in a convention city with Republican rifts ever raw, both on the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena and on the sidelines. Trump’s top backers on Monday aggressively disparaged Ohio Gov. John Kasich and other Republicans who have declined to support the celebrity mogul for president — an unusual provocation for a team hoping to foster unity.
+
+On the convention floor, pro-Trump Republicans dealt the decisive blow to anti-Trump Republicans in a pair of voice votes. That prompted an outcry and a disorderly sequence of events on that was broadcast live on cable news networks.
+
+“Roll call vote! Roll call vote!” angry delegates chanted, while Trump supporters sought to overpower them with chants of “Trump! Trump!” The Colorado delegation briefly walked off the floor.
+
+Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a Trump critic, expressed befuddlement and indignation that no roll call vote was held and that the podium was briefly abandoned.
+
+“There’s no precedent for this in parliamentary procedure,” Lee told reporters on the convention floor. “We are now in uncharted territory.” He called the outcome “surreal.”
+
+[Schedule: See who is speaking on the second day of the Republican National Convention]
+
+Earlier in the day, former senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire came to the convention floor claiming to be holding a packet of documents with the requisite number of signatures from enough states to force the vote they wanted. Trailed by dozens of reporters, Humphrey delivered the signatures to a convention official, who reviewed them.
+
+But that’s as far as it went, as three state delegations pulled back their support, according to Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas, who presided over the drama. That left the Trump foes below the threshold they needed to reach.
+
+Separately, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said it was “unacceptable” for former candidates who pledged to support the eventual nominee to hold out now. And Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort targeted Kasich, who is in Cleveland this week but refusing to step foot in the convention, and the Bush family, who are skipping the festivities altogether.
+
+The broadsides from Trump allies, which drew some swift rebuttals from Kasich backers, inflamed tensions at the start of the quadrennial confab, which will feature four days of speeches, meetings and parties that will culminate in Trump’s formal acceptance speech on Thursday night.
+
+“Certainly the Bush family, we would have liked to have had them. They’re part of the past. We’re dealing with the future,” Manafort told reporters Monday morning. Manafort said on MSNBC that Kasich was “embarrassing his state” by skipping the convention.
+
+Christie reminded Michigan Republicans that as a candidate for president, he and other GOP candidates pledged to support the eventual nominee.
+
+“It is unacceptable to me, and it should be unacceptable to you that anyone who signed that pledge is not now adhering to that pledge and supporting our party’s nominee,” said Christie. The governor, who is now a staunch Trump supporter and surrogate, didn’t call anyone out by name.
+
+[Seven things to watch at the Republican convention in Cleveland]
+
+As White House hopefuls, Kasich and former Florida governor Jeb Bush pledged loyalty to the eventual nominee before later backing away. So did Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.). Like Bush and Kasich, Cruz has not endorsed Trump. But Cruz is speaking at the convention.
+
+Kasich’s allies defended the governor on social media. Ohio GOP Chairman Matt Borges tweeted: “Manafort still has a lot to learn about Ohio politics. Doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Hope he can do better.”
+
+“Impossible to know ‘strategy’ behind this,” tweeted John Weaver, a top Kasich adviser in his presidential run.
+
+Christie added: “Everyone has a right to their own conscience and their own beliefs. But the fact of the matter is, as I said before, if you’re a Republican and you have voted for Republican nominees for president and you’re not working for Donald Trump, you’re working for Hillary. And that’s the bottom line.”
+
+For Trump, the convention comes at a crucial time. He is trying to put weeks of distracting feuds and staff turnover behind him and demonstrate to the country that he is the best-qualified candidate for the White House.
+
+Peter Holley, Jenna Johnson, Louisa Loveluck, Karen Tumulty and Laura Vozzella contributed to this report.",REAL
+2271,OnPolitics | 's politics blog,"Who has Trump appointed to his cabinet so far?
+
+Donald Trump added three new men to his list of cabinet picks Friday. Get to know them.",REAL
+2013,Romney exit widens establishment lane for Bush,"Washington (CNN) Mitt Romney's decision to pass on 2016 anoints Jeb Bush as the clear establishment favorite in the Republican presidential race and lays down a challenge to the party's divided conservatives.
+
+Though the first contests will not take place in early voting states for a year, Romney's swerve, announced on a conference call with supporters on Friday, is the most important moment yet in the nascent GOP contest. It removes the prospect of a bruising battle for big establishment donor cash and moderate, right of center, Republican primary voters between Romney, the 2012 nominee and Bush, heir to a dynastic political machine.
+
+""I think it is hard to argue that today's news did not help Gov. Bush,"" said Matt Moore, chairman of the Republican Party in South Carolina, which holds one of the crucial early voting primaries next year.
+
+Bush sent the Republican race into overdrive with his sudden announcement last month that he was actively exploring a run for president. Since then, he has been flying around the nation in an apparent bid to put up a formidable ""shock and awe"" early fundraising number to define the contest in his favor.
+
+Though Bush is seen as leading establishment Republicans, Romney's decision could improve New Jersey Gov. Christie's hopes of financing a long campaign.
+
+""Today's news certainly does re-open the fight for donors. I know many donors had been frozen in recent weeks, taking a 'wait and see' approach,"" said Moore. ""There's a finite amount of money that can be raised -- so every candidate benefits.""
+
+Kevin Madden, a one-time adviser to Romney who is now a CNN commentator, said his former boss's decision opened up an early trial of strength between Christie and Bush.
+
+""This becomes the first big test between those candidates, which one of them can quickly move to lock down those donors. It is a very successful, very large fundraising network. It's going to be an important asset.""
+
+Some party insiders also believe conservative candidates who can also straddle the line with the establishment could benefit from Romney's departure.
+
+A top adviser to one potential Republican primary contender said in an interview that Romney's exit likely helps both Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who both have strong conservative support but have also been warmly received by some establishment-minded donors.
+
+""They're acceptable to the establishment but they also have support within the various conservative bases — among economic conservatives, social conservatives and national security conservatives,"" the adviser said.
+
+Romney's decision not to run doesn't remove him from the 2016 calculus entirely — it sets him up to be a potential kingmaker in one of the most wide-open primary fields in recent memory.
+
+Though sources told CNN's Dana Bash not to expect a Romney endorsement of another candidate in the near future, contenders will be clamoring for his blessing.
+
+A top Rubio aide said ""any leading candidate would"" want Romney's support.
+
+Jim Merrill, Romney's top strategist in New Hampshire, said that his ""guess is [Romney] probably will"" endorse a candidate in the primary.
+
+Romney's statement, however, made clear that he was not stepping aside in favor of Bush. In fact he appeared to take a veiled swipe at the 61-year-old former Florida governor.
+
+""I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started, may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democrat nominee,"" Romney told his supporters.
+
+He appeared to be implying that the GOP would be best served by a younger candidate taking on Clinton, who will be 69 at the time of the general election in November 2016.
+
+Rubio, 43, quickly picked up on the idea of a generational shift, stressing repeatedly in a short statement praising Romney that he was close to the 2012 nominee.
+
+""He certainly earned the right to consider running, so I deeply respect his decision to give the next generation a chance to lead.""
+
+Walker, 47, also picked up the signals, thanking Romney in a tweet for ""opening the door for fresh leadership in America.""
+
+Romney may also be making a point by sitting down for dinner on Friday night with Christie, 52, in New York.
+
+His exit will also shift the terrain more practically in the early states, where his former staffers can now join the campaign of their choice.
+
+Merrill said he's been receiving calls from former Romney operatives in the state — and interested candidates — wondering what's next, but he wasn't yet leaning toward any candidate in particular.
+
+""[Romney's] not gonna be a candidate, so that means we are open for business,"" Merrill said.
+
+Reverberations are also being felt in Iowa, where voters will get the 2016 ball rolling next year and where Romney lost by only a handful of votes to Rick Santorum on the way to the GOP nomination in 2012.
+
+A Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll published Friday showed 57 percent of likely caucus goers had favorable feelings about Romney. But that figure was down from 65 percent in October.
+
+Romney may have calculated that he would have struggled to keep that level of support, fighting Bush and Christie for moderates and facing fresh faced conservatives like Walker and firebrand Sen. Ted Cruz.
+
+""There a lot of people who had second thoughts about Romney,"" said Steffen Schmidt, an Iowa State University Professor who is an authority on the state's fabled caucuses.
+
+""Mitt Romney would have had a much harder time in Iowa,"" in 2016, Schmidt said.
+
+Bush is basking in a second straight day of good news. On Thursday, he poached David Kochel, one of the state's most highly regarded political consultants for a possible post running his campaign.
+
+Kochel previously worked for Romney in Iowa, and his departure was seen as a serious blow to the former Massachusetts governor.
+
+The narrowing of the establishment field may hold a wake up call for conservatives who hoped a candidate preferred by the grass roots would emerge this cycle.
+
+But with candidates like Walker, Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Santorum and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul all tipped to appeal to certain sections of the conservative electorate, they face a familiar problem : the lack of a single right-wing favorite to take on the establishment's pick.
+
+Romney's announcement, which kept political pundits guessing until minutes before he spoke with supporters, was in keeping with the already rich drama of the 2016 race.
+
+Even a month ago, no one thought that Romney, who twice ran for president and lost, could find a rationale to underpin another shot.
+
+But in three frenzied weeks, Romney, apparently disdaining the quality of the crowded GOP race, and bumped into a swift decision by Bush's early move, appeared to be about to jump in. Bush had previously effectively forced out another possible establishment candidate Sen. Rob Portman, by getting into the race.
+
+Romney traveled to California to headline the Republican National Committee's winter meeting, and stoked speculation by consulting former staffers and party heavyweights about a possible run.
+
+For now, most of those close to Romney believe he will resume his role as the de-facto leader of the party until a nominee emerges, speaking out on key issues.
+
+""You'll see him do what he's already been doing post-2012 — be someone that stands up to President Obama, speaks the truth when the opportunity calls,"" Merrill said.",REAL
+1308,Panicky Hillary starts shouting,"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+Buzz Cut:
+
+ • Panicky Hillary starts shouting
+
+ • NYT dumps on Heidi Cruz
+
+ • Rubio touts pistol purchase
+
+ • GOP Power Index: Christie fades
+
+ • Driven by destiny
+
+ 
+
+ PANICKY HILLARY STARTS SHOUTING
+
+ You can turn the volume back up on your televisions, the Democratic debate is done and the shouting has ended.
+
+Apparently believing that commitment and sincerity can be measured in decibels, Hillary Clinton turned up the volume in Sunday night’s showdown with rival Bernie Sanders.
+
+She also matched her louder volume with sharper attacks on Sanders. But the Vermont socialist came ready to fight, counterpunching and even landing a few blows. You’d have to give him the win, if only narrowly, on the grounds that not only did he dominate the discussion but that she was strangely treating him as the frontrunner.
+
+Or maybe it was just that she was trying to fight on Sanders’ turf. He’s been shouting since before it was cool. Clinton seems to be abandoning the mantra of her campaign – “I’m a fighter” – for an effort to approximate the anger that candidates on both sides of the aisle have been trying, with varying degrees of success, to ape.
+
+But it’s hard to believe that Clinton is angry, or at least that she is angry about something other than the fact that her party seems to delight in spurning her. Life has been very good to the Clintons over the past 16 years, to say the least. Except for the politics part.
+
+Clinton and her crew could assuage themselves after her 2008 primary loss that they were victims of history – the sudden ascendance of a gifted, African-American candidate was more of a force of nature than a reflection of her political weakness.
+
+But what if she were struggling with a guy who was deeply white and five years older than her? What if the guy this time was not a gifted speechmaker but one who gave shout-y campaign boilerplate in a Brooklyn honk? What if he had been honking around Washington for 25 years and was generally written off as a crank?
+
+It has apparently all been enough to rattle Clinton, whose onetime indulgence of Sanders has turned into attacks and who seems to be on the verge of yet another campaign reboot.
+
+Tied or trailing Sanders in the first two nominating contests, it’s hard to say she’s wrong. A huge lead in South Carolina and what, last month at least, was a wide advantage in Nevada still suggest that Clinton isn’t yet in danger of being toppled a second time – and that her strategy of aggressively pursuing black voters and other parts of the Obama coalition is paying off.
+
+But would those leads look so stout if Clinton were to lose the first two contests? Certainly not. Just ask South Carolina Democratic powerbroker Rep. Jim Clyburn, who told the NYT, “The reality is, if Mrs. Clinton loses Iowa and New Hampshire, that could create new and real problems for her here.”
+
+As of now, you can still call Clinton the presumptive Democratic nominee, but we are now seeing a scenario in which she might have to waste several damaging months on a fight that will harm her general election chances and distract public attention from the bazooka blasts on the GOP side.
+
+WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…
+
+ America seems to owe an awful lot to high-living French noblemen. And if you like the idea of separation of power between branches of government, then say ‘Joyeux anniversaire’ to Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, born on this date in 1689. Montesquieu led something of a dissipated life as a young nobleman at court in Paris, but became increasingly serious about his political writing and philosophizing. A visit to England would open his mind further and give birth to a riot of political thought. But perhaps chief among his insights was the value of divided government. Britannica explains: “Dividing political authority into the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, [Montesquieu] asserted that, in the state that most effectively promotes liberty, these three powers must be confided to different individuals or bodies, acting independently… Though its accuracy has in more recent times been disputed, in its own century it was admired and held authoritative, even in England; it inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Constitution of the United States.”
+
+NYT DUMPS ON HEIDI CRUZ
+
+ The NYT digs deep into the life of Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi, with a focus on an incident 11 years ago in which a police officer found her, head in hands, sitting beside an expressway onramp. The article, which revisits the incident twice and at length, casts her as an unstable woman who has thrown away a promising career to support her husband. It is some really ugly stuff.
+
+Trump in free fire zone with Cruz attacks - ABC News: “With two weeks left before voters in Iowa cast the very first votes in the 2016 presidential election, Republican front-runner Donald Trump is turning up the heat on his fiercest rival in the Hawkeye State -– Sen. Ted Cruz. ‘I don't think Ted Cruz has a great chance, to be honest with you,’ Trump told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview on “This Week” Sunday. ‘Look, the truth is, he's a nasty guy. He was so nice to me. I mean, I knew it. I was watching. I kept saying, ‘Come on Ted. Let’s go, okay.’ But he’s a nasty guy. Nobody likes him. Nobody in Congress likes him. Nobody likes him anywhere once they get to know him. He’s a very –- he's got an edge that’s not good. You can't make deals with people like that and it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing for the country. Very nasty guy.’”
+
+[In a new digital ad, a pro-Cruz PAC uses Trump’s past praise of Cruz as narration for their spot.]
+
+Trump’s faith - Weekly Standard does a dive into the faith background of Donald Trump and whether or not his lack of an active membership in any faith will give pause to evangelicals with other options this cycle.
+
+Cruz begins aggressive campaign schedule in N.H. - Dallas Morning News: “U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is trying to beat the odds and pull out victories in both [Iowa and New Hampshire]…On Sunday he started a five-day New Hampshire tour packed with 17 events in all 10 of the state’s counties.”
+
+RUBIO TOUTS PISTOL PURCHASE
+
+ Tampa Bay Times: “Marco Rubio went shopping for a handgun on Christmas Eve, tying it to the threat of ISIS. ‘I have a right to protect my family if someone were to come after us,’ he said Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation. ‘In fact, if ISIS were to visit us, or our communities, at any moment, the last line of defense between ISIS and my family is the ability that I have to protect my family from them, or from a criminal, or anyone else who seeks to do us harm. Millions of Americans feel that way.’ Rubio first disclosed the gun purchase on Friday while visiting Sturm, Ruger & Co. in New Hampshire. He linked guns and ISIS again while in Iowa on Saturday.”
+
+Kasich lands endorsement of three N.H. papers - AP: “Three New Hampshire newspapers are endorsing Ohio Gov. John Kasich for president as the Republican aspires to a top-tier primary finish there. The Nashua Telegraph, Foster’s Daily Democrat and Portsmouth Herald all threw their support behind Kasich in Sunday editions.”
+
+What if it’s a two-man race? - What happens if Jeb Bush or Chris Christie can succeed in crippling Marco Rubio and leaves the Republicans with only two choices? One might assume that establishment support would flow to Cruz, a lifelong Republican and sitting senator. Not necessarily, says Molly Ball in a dispatch from the trail: “Some Republicans who have moved through the stages of grief from denial to bargaining, if not yet acceptance, have begun to suggest that Trump might be preferable to Cruz. Trump is, if you squint, a sort of moderate Republican; he’s a dealmaker; and surely he’s craven enough to reverse his most alienating positions and say what people want to hear if he gets to the general election. Cruz, on the other hand, is an ideologue. The scariest prospect of all is that he really means what he says, and might, if elected, take it upon himself to actually upend the establishment’s cherished status quo.”
+
+GOP POWER INDEX: CHRISTIE FADES
+
+ New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has painted himself a straight-talker since he was elected to the governorship in 2009, and has made it a cornerstone of his presidential campaign’s “Telling It Like It Is” slogan.
+
+Town hall videos of his early days as governor hit the Internet, and people around the country were drawn to this frank, no nonsense guy. When he took on the teacher’s unions, and was asked about his own children’s private education, he responded, “It’s none of your business,” which resonated with people tired of hearing exhaustive explanations from politicians.
+
+But his straight-talk attitude hasn’t quite delivered on is message of late. As Christie tries to find a path from the middle of the pack in New Hampshire to national viability, he’s come under increasing scrutiny. And voters are hearing a lot more run-on sentences than they were used to from Christie.
+
+In the Fox Business Network Debate last week, Christie claimed that he never supported Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court, but his statement at the time reads: “I support her appointment to the Supreme Court and urge the Senate to keep politics out of the process and confirm her nomination. Qualified appointees should be confirmed and deserve bi-partisan support.”
+
+It’s been the same of gun control. Although he has vetoed limits on clip-size and photo IDs for gun owners, Christie’s record on guns is scattered. National Review’s Jim Geraghty points out that in a 1993 race for New Jersey Senate, Christie issued a statement asserting that “we already have too many firearms in our communities. The issue which has energized me to get into this race is the recent attempt by certain Republican legislators to repeal New Jersey’s ban on assault weapons. In today’s society, no one needs a semi-automatic assault weapon.” In November 2015, Christie told Bret Baier in an interview for “Special Report” that he didn’t remember making that statement.
+
+On the radar - Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson and Rand Paul
+
+ 
+
+ [Watch Fox: Chris Stirewalt joins “The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson” in the 2 p.m. ET hour with the latest on who’s up and who’s down in the 2016 Power Index.]
+
+What would you say? - Give us your take on the 2016 Power Index. We will share the best and brightest with the whole class. Send your thoughts to FOXNEWSFIRST@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+DRIVEN BY DESTINY
+
+ On a day when we remember the legendary figure of Martin Luther King Jr., NPR shares the reminiscence of Tom Houk, King’s driver and body man at the peak of the Civil Rights movement. Houck headed to Atlanta to join the movement and was surprised at being picked up by Dr. King and his wife Coretta Scott King, with the reverend at the wheel. After lunch that day, she asked Houck if he might drive the children to school the following day: “[J]ust like that, Houck began his stint as the Kings' family driver. For nine months, Houck drove Martin Luther King Jr. around Atlanta, though King liked to drive himself often, too. ‘But he was a terrible driver,’ Houck says. ‘And he turned WAOK radio in Atlanta on full blast.’
+
+That wasn't the only puzzle presented to Houck. There were also the cigarettes. ‘Dr. King was a chain smoker, all right? But Coretta did not like the cigarettes,’ Houck says. ‘So when we would come back to the house, first thing Coretta would do, she would check Dr. King's pockets. So he started giving me his cigarettes.’ In the midst of the struggle, Houck found himself a co-conspirator in King’s vice. And with good reason: Houck idolized the reverend for his virtues.”
+
+Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+9988,Lara Trump Implies FBI Letter Politically Motivated – ‘My Father-In-Law Forced Their Hand’ (AUDIO),"Lara Trump Implies FBI Letter Politically Motivated –‘My Father-In-Law Forced Their Hand’ (AUDIO) By Carrie MacDonald on October 29, 2016 Subscribe 
+The latest “revelation” from the FBI just gets more and more curious by the hour. Now we have audio of Lara Trump, wife of Eric Trump and daughter-in-law of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, saying she believes her father-in-law was behind the latest letter from FBI Director James Comey. Lara Trump: ‘My Father-In-Law Forced Their Hand’ 
+In an interview on WABC Radio with Rita Cosby, Lara Trump came right out and said, proudly, that she believes Donald Trump was one of the people behind this whole thing: “I think my father-in-law forced their hand in this. You know, he has been the one since the beginning saying that she shouldn’t be able to run for president, and I commend him on that.” 
+Anyone who has been paying attention over the past 12 hours or so knows that this “scandal” died before it even had a chance to really breathe. The conservative media has, of course, attempted to spin this into something real, given the fact that their candidate’s chances of winning are less than 10 percent. But the emails are not from Clinton nor are they from Clinton’s server. Not only that, but Comey’s motivations behind sending the letter seem more and more likely to be politically motivated. Former DOJ Official: ‘You Don’t Do This’ 
+Comey’s actions are unprecedented for an FBI Director. In a piece discussing that very fact, Jane Mayer wrote for The New Yorker : “… His latest action is stirring an extraordinary level of concern among legal authorities, who see it as potentially affecting the outcome of the Presidential and congressional elections. ‘You don’t do this,’ one former senior Justice Department official exclaimed. ‘It’s aberrational. It violates decades of practice.’ The reason, according to the former official, who asked not to be identified because of ongoing cases involving the department, ‘is because it impugns the integrity and reputation of the candidate, even though there’s no finding by a court, or in this instance even an indictment.'” There was also the tweetstorm from former DOJ spokesperson Matthew Miller, in which he eviscerated Comey’s actions. He also wrote a more cohesive piece for the Washington Post , in which he said : “With each step, Comey moved further away from department guidelines and precedents, culminating in Friday’s letter to Congress. This letter not only violated Justice rules on commenting on ongoing investigations but also flew in the face of years of precedent about how to handle sensitive cases as Election Day nears.” All of this makes one wonder – what is Comey’s motivation here? Comey, a Republican appointed by President Obama, is breaking rules of tradition left and right. And Trump’s own daughter-in-law is on record saying that she believes the Republican nominee “forced their hand.” No matter the motivation, the “scandal” is dead in the water, no matter how much the Republicans and the Trump campaign wish it were truly the “October surprise” they’ve been waiting for … rather than another woman coming forward and accusing their nominee of sexual assault. That number stands at 12 and counting. The Clinton campaign, to their credit, is calling for complete transparency from the FBI in the matter. Listen to Lara Trump gleefully say she believes The Donald is behind this: 
+Featured Image via screenshot from YouTube video About Carrie MacDonald 
+Carrie is a progressive mom and wife living in the upper Midwest. Connect",FAKE
+4611,The Collectivist Election,"When Henry Adams wrote in the early 20th century that ""politics, as a practice whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds,"" there was ample reason to take him literally.
+
+The world back then was on the verge of a cataclysmic war that would kill 17 million people and help incubate both communism and fascism. Adams had come of age in London as the son of the American ambassador under President Abraham Lincoln, a man who knew all too well how political disputes can turn bloody. And Adams' great-grandfather, the second president of the United States, was accused by Thomas Jefferson's supporters during the famously acrimonious 1800 election of having, among many other unpleasant things, a ""hideous hermaphroditical character.""
+
+So maybe the one positive of the 2016 version of American political hatred is that it probably won't make people work double shifts down at the morgue. But everything else about this repellant contest between the two most reviled major-party nominees in modern history points to an alarming resurgence of that foul and dangerous defect of judgment known as collectivism.
+
+When we hear the c word nowadays it's usually in the context of Stalin's agricultural five-year plans or the rah-rah slogans on 1930s posters. But there's another, more personal meaning of the term that has dwindled in usage, even while its application to major-party politics seems to ratchet up each cycle. And that is: treating the disparate individuals within any given bloc as sharing a collective set of characteristics, intentions, and pathologies. It's what Hillary Clinton meant with ""basket of deplorables,"" it's what Donald Trump has done with ""Mexican heritage"" and its variants, and it's all too often the nightstick that our friends and loved ones grab for when talking about politics in a presidential year.
+
+What makes the Democratic version of collective antipathy particularly noxious is the fact that it often comes disguised as a treacly appeal to unity. Trump ""wants to divide us,"" Clinton lamented at the Democratic National Convention. ""We have to heal the divides in our country.…And that starts with listening, listening to each other. Trying, as best we can, to walk in each other's shoes.""
+
+Unless, of course, you have or work with large amounts of money. ""Wall Street, corporations, and the super-rich are going to start paying their fair share of taxes,"" Clinton thundered later in the same speech. ""If companies take tax breaks and then ship jobs overseas, we'll make them pay us back.""
+
+Clinton's vanquished Democratic opponent, the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, is even more tin-eared about his own hypocrisy. ""This election is about which candidate understands the real problems facing this country and has offered real solutions,"" Sanders said in his convention speech. ""Not just bombast, not just fearmongering, not just name calling and divisiveness."" But a few minutes later, Sanders engaged in some bombastic fearmongering of his own, bemoaning that ""the wealthiest people in America, like the billionaire Koch brothers…spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and in the process undermine American democracy."" (David Koch is a trustee of Reason Foundation, which publishes this magazine.)
+
+Clinton's most controversial instance of Othering during this season came at a September fundraiser in New York, where she said, ""to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.…Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."" While the irredeemable and un-American twists were new (as was the memorable metaphor), Clinton's behind-closed-doors sentiment only mirrored what the Democratic nominee has said routinely throughout this dreary campaign.
+
+At an October 2015 Democratic presidential primary debate, Clinton was asked by moderator Anderson Cooper, ""Which enemy are you most proud of?"" Her reply, after some throat-clearing: ""Probably the Republicans."" Some people laughed, but it wasn't really a joke. When Vox Editor in Chief Ezra Klein asked Clinton nine months later whether she regretted the remark, she said, ""Not very much,"" adding: ""You know, they say terrible things about me, much worse than anything I've ever said about them. That just seems to be part of the political back and forth now—to appeal to your base, to appeal to the ideologues who support you. We have become so divided."" Do tell.
+
+The best that you can say about Hillary Clinton's collectivism—and the Democratic habit of mind that accepts and repeats such formulations unblinkingly—is that at least the deplorables chose their own status, whether through true bigotry or mere party membership. Donald Trump's Others, by contrast, are often born that way.
+
+In June, Trump told The Wall Street Journal that District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was presiding over a case involving the failed Trump University, should have been disqualified by his ""Mexican heritage."" ""I'm building a wall,"" the eventual GOP nominee explained. ""It's an inherent conflict of interest.""
+
+In a follow-up interview, Face the Nation's John Dickerson asked Trump to clarify what exactly the Mexican parents of an Indiana-born judge had to do with Curiel's adverse rulings in the case. ""Excuse me, I want to build a wall,"" Trump shot back. ""I mean, I don't think it's very confusing.…Has nothing to do with anything except common sense. You know, we have to stop being so politically correct in this country.""
+
+Gross generalizations and shorthand stereotypes often make sense—until they don't. On the playgrounds and in the popular culture of my youth, Mexicans were lazy, Poles were stupid, and ""queers"" were people who you'd ""smear"" on a football field because they were so weak. Now, Mexicans are uniquely industrious, Poles win Nobel prizes, and the buffest guy at the gym is probably gay. The same thing Donald Trump now says about the Chinese, the entire political and journalistic class was saying about the Japanese in the 1980s. Yes, facts on the ground change, but stereotypes often recede when the dominant culture recognizes them as reductionist, shameful, even ridiculous.
+
+Reverting to that kind of collectivism, assigning negative value indiscriminately across an entire population, feels retrograde in a country so steeped in individualistic ethos. Once we start dismissing 20 percent of the population (or 47 percent, as with Mitt Romney), particularly in a discussion involving politics, we are playing with fire. Determinism, when wedded to state power, has produced some of the worst moments in American history.
+
+Ayn Rand's writing on this is hard to top. ""Like every form of determinism,"" Rand wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness, ""racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man's life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.""
+
+The problem isn't just racism's malign effects on the recipient. It also has rotting effects on the intellect of the originator: ""Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned,"" Rand wrote. ""It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men's characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment.""
+
+American political discourse in 2016 too is about bypassing the responsibility of judgment and trying to bludgeon people into line through insult comedy. Here's hoping that more and more of our fellow citizens will refuse to take the politicians' bait. And that Hillary Clinton starts reading some Ayn Rand.",REAL
+1651,Ben Carson slams reporters over questions about his past,"Washington (CNN) Ben Carson spent much of Friday aggressively rebutting media reports about his past -- a striking departure from the mellow personality he has displayed on the campaign trail.
+
+""There is a desperation on behalf of some to try to find ways to tarnish me because they've been looking through everything, they have been talking to everybody I've ever known, everybody I've ever seen,"" Carson told reporters at a media availability in Florida.
+
+""'There's got to be a scandal. There's got to be some nurse he's had an affair with. There's got to be something.' They have gotten desperate,"" Carson continued. ""Next week, it will be my kindergarten teacher who said I peed in my pants. It's ridiculous. But it's OK because I totally expect it.""
+
+Carson's personal narrative -- a centerpiece of his campaign and star power -- has long revolved around his accounts of his violent past and descriptions of the healing powers of his faith.
+
+In a story published on Thursday, CNN reported that childhood friends of Carson were surprised about violent incidents he has described in a book, public speeches and interviews and had no recollection of such events. Scott Glover and Maeve Reston spoke with nine friends, classmates and neighbors who grew up with Carson, and none had any memory of the anger or violence the candidate has described.
+
+Friday morning on CNN's ""New Day,"" he said the network's reporting of his past was a ""bunch of lies.""
+
+""This is a bunch of lies, that is what it is,"" Carson told Alisyn Camerota when she asked about the report by Glover and Reston in which they spoke to people Carson grew up with. ""This is a bunch of lies attempting to say I'm lying about my history. I think it's pathetic, and basically what the media does is they try to get you distracted.""
+
+Camerota pushed back on Carson's argument that the reporters did not talk to people who knew him earlier than high school, but Carson rejected that and launched into an aggressive attack on the media. He accused the media of not scrutinizing President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to the same degree.
+
+""The vetting that you all did with President Obama doesn't even come close, doesn't even come close to what you guys are trying to do in my case, and you're just going to keep going back, 'He said this 12 years ago' -- it is just garbage,"" Carson said. ""Give me a break.""
+
+Reston and Glover repeatedly approached the Carson campaign during their reporting and again before publication of the story. But the campaign staff declined to comment or to assist them in locating classmates or victims of violence who could provide insights about Carson's past.
+
+On ""New Day,"" Carson did not explain which aspects of the story he feels are incorrect.
+
+CNN's story pointed out that none of the people interviewed challenged the veracity of his accounts, but said they were surprised at them and did not reflect the youth that they knew.
+
+Friday night, Carson told reporters that the piece was a ""bold-faced lie.""
+
+In his autobiography, Carson did not explicitly say he applied to the school.
+
+""Afterward, Sgt. Hunt introduced me to General (William) Westmoreland, and I had dinner with him and the Congressional Medal winners. Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point. I didn't refuse the scholarship outright, but I let them know that a military career wasn't where I saw myself going,"" Carson wrote.
+
+Carson himself acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times that the scholarship offer was ""informal.""
+
+""It was, you know, an informal 'with a record like yours we could easily get you a scholarship to West Point,'"" he said.
+
+Armstrong Williams, Carson's business manager, said earlier in the day that the candidate has ""always been clear that he never applied. He gracefully let them know that medicine was his calling.""
+
+""It's clear that what the Politico writer, with what he was trying to gain with the headline, did not substantiate it with his article,"" Williams told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
+
+Politico also reported that West Point would have a record of whether he applied in 1969. But West Point spokeswoman Theresa Brinkerhoff told CNN there would be no records about Carson's interaction with the school unless he actually enrolled. Files on potential cadets from that time would have only been kept three years unless the person became a student, she said.
+
+""No matter what at this point, because the records were so many years ago, we wouldn't have anything on him,"" she said.
+
+While an official letter of admission would have come from the adjutant general of the Army, who was not Westmoreland, she said it was common for top military officials to recruit the best and brightest high school students. And she said she could imagine that the school's lack of tuition -- as a federally funded institution -- could have been communicated or interpreted as a scholarship.
+
+""I wouldn't find that odd, that a general would pursue a discussion to kind of talk to him and say, 'Do you know what West Point would offer you?' And if you're using general terminology to a 17-year-old, I could see how you would call them scholarships. We don't use that terminology, (but) I could see how that could occur,"" Brinkerhoff said.
+
+Speaking at a gala for the Black Republican Caucus of South Florida in Palm Beach Gardens Friday night, Carson was reflective on the ""dirty world"" of politics.
+
+""A lot of times people say, 'Why would someone who has had a wonderful career get involved in the dirty world of politics?' I frequently ask myself that when I wake up in the morning. It is a dirty world,"" Carson said.
+
+He did not mention the scrutiny on him during the remainder of the speech, but briefly alluded to how he is more forcefully pushing back now.
+
+""A lot of people think that I'm soft because I'm quiet. I think they're starting to find out that I'm not soft. And that I can be loud, particularly when the injustice is being done,"" he said.",REAL
+774,"Martha MacCallum: It's Donald Trump's moment. And this is how we got here, America","And then there was one.
+
+There is an expression on Wall Street for a stock that just keeps moving up and up, while everybody is scratching their heads trying to figure out what’s going on.
+
+They put their hands up and say “Don’t fight the tape.”
+
+It comes from back in the day when there actually was ticker tape, and when Wall Street wasn’t everyone’s favorite punching bag.
+
+But it helps explain what is going on right now in the mind bending age of Donald Trump.
+
+You can’t fight the tape and you can’t fight a phenomenon.  Donald Trump is a phenomenon.  Barack Obama was a phenomenon.  A phenomenon is a “happening” or an “experience.”   It doesn’t happen much folks, but it’s happening now.  So get ready for the ride of a lifetime.
+
+The point is all the wise old men and naysayers and chart readers in the world can’t stop a political phenomenon when it’s pulling out of the Trump Train station.
+
+Nobody was going to beat Barack Obama in 2008.  That’s a fact.  It was his moment.   It wasn’t that John McCain ran a bad campaign, or picked the wrong VP. It was just that it didn’t matter, it was over when it started.   It has to do with understanding your moment, reading the populace, knowing that they want exactly the opposite of what they’ve had in the White House.  They want a charismatic candidate to match what they are feeling and promise to give them exactly the big fat cheeseburger they’ve been wanting ever since they went on that awful diet.
+
+Michelle Obama told her husband it was Iowa or bust for them. She knew that if they couldn’t win Iowa, they couldn’t win America, but if they could – there would be no stopping them.  She told her husband it was now or never and that she would only do this thing once. Even though he was a new senator, she correctly assessed this was their “Moment” and they would not get a redo. She was absolutely right on.
+
+The country was war weary and the handsome young Senator promised “Hope and Change.”  Political pendulums swing hard and feed on stark contrast. He was not a Bush and not a Clinton.  Not at all. In fact, he was Barack Hussein Obama. He was Kennedy-esque, with a young attractive family.  He was Bobby Kennedy’s dream of how the Civil Rights movement crescendos. He was the man who perfectly matched the mood, and he grabbed it. That’s what it’s all about.
+
+Just ask Governor Chris Christie, who missed his moment. Had he run against Barack Obama in 2012,   he would have won.  The tough talking New Jersey Governor was getting a ton of attention in 2011. He’d shockingly won a blue state governor’s race when the odds were stacked against him. He was “telling it like it is” to anybody who crossed him.  He shouted down Teacher’s Unions for depriving kids of the education they deserved.  He told firefighters and policeman that the pensions they’d been promised would never arrive, if they weren’t willing to give back a little to keep the programs solvent.  These YouTube hits were going viral, getting coverage. The portly governor with his tie askew was the opposite of the snappily dressed lean and eloquent president, who’d lost his shine a bit, four years in.
+
+But while GOP leaders begged Christie to run, he demurred.  He said he wasn’t ready.   It wasn’t his time. But as it turns out, it was. And he never got it back.
+
+So now we have had 8 years of ObamaCare and Obamanomics.  Eight years of promising to end the “Era of War”.
+
+Still we are mired in rising costs, stunted economic growth and an epic battle with an enemy that is a “He Who Shall Not be Named.” Except that everybody knows his name is Radical Islamist Terrorist.
+
+In fairness, the president’s approval numbers have risen of late to 51 percent, many are satisfied. However, it may have something to do with the tenor of the sloppy primaries that have given him almost “former president” nostalgia points already. Still there is an undeniable restlessness in the country.  We see it in the crowds who turn out in droves for Bernie and Donald.
+
+As long as it took for Republicans to see, Donald Trump is the perfect storm of message “Make America Great Again” (genius simplicity) and Man. This brash businessman, Anti-Obama sold his brand brilliantly with his huge success on “The Apprentice.” Now Reality TV meets politics.  I bet Mark Burnett wishes he’d thought of it.  He was from the beginning the guy we all already knew. Love him or hate him, he leapt over the ‘name recognition’ hurdle like it was a parking curb. And it didn’t even cost him a dime.
+
+But surely he would not abide the rigor and tedium of the Campaign Trail.  What would he do fly his jet all around the country?  Yes.  Stay at Holiday Inns in places that don’t have Trump Hotels, um yes.
+
+Surely this rich guy, wouldn’t have a way with voters.  He’d rather be in his Tower,  as his beautiful wife sips champagne (he doesn’t drink),  not out there in flyover state diners and arenas pressing the flesh. Wrong.  He would say scandalous things!  Yes. Just think of all the tape and tabloid that already existed on this guy? There would be no way he’d get away with it.  Wrong again.
+
+Besides, the republicans had the deepest bench they’d had in a long time.  Superstars.  Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina the list went on. And on, actually. It even spilled across two debate stages, there were so many bright and talented options.   All they had to do was nominate the most conservative, electable one, as Bill Buckley had instructed. (See Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bob Dole).  And they must remember as Ronald Reagan warned, no shooting inside the tent guys.  Well, without apologies to Buckley or Reagan,  the guy who beat them all was not your textbook conservative to be sure and he shot up the tent until it fell down on top of them, as he slipped out the back flap and dusted off his suit.
+
+Here’s the thing. His message was right on for his audience.  He talked to them about what he felt was wrong with the country and how he wanted to fix it. Too many illegals stealing your jobs and committing crimes?  Build a wall. Your company went under?  We will get you a better job!  Sick of everything being so damned PC? Me too! He said.  Don’t worry, we are going to win again.  You’ll be so tired of winning.  That sounds awesome, they cried!  And then --  to top it all off -- he made them laugh.  He made them howl actually, at the off-color jokes and “craps” and “hells” he sprinkled in with his happy warrior rants.
+
+The pundits scoffed.   It’ll be over by summer… make that fall… The Super Bowl? The Conventions?  Forget it guys.
+
+Trump’s son Don Jr. nailed it. He said my Dad is a “blue-collar billionaire” “a common sense conservative,” none of this highfalutin panel jibber jabber.  Gimme Trump, the GOP voters said.
+
+The guy gets me.
+
+Donald has wanted this shot at the White House since the early ‘90’s when he took out full page ads and wrote letters railing against Japan and how they were eating our lunch and it needed to stop.  Now his handsome, well-educated and well-liked kids are taking the weight off him at the office, and he knows, this is his time. It’s now or never. And one other thing.  Don’t look for Mr. Trump to get all presidential on you any time soon.  Why would he?  As any good businessman knows, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And like he says, it’s too soon for that.
+
+But can he seal the deal?
+
+Buckle your seat belts, America.  It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
+
+Martha MacCallum currently serves as the co-anchor of ""America's Newsroom"" alongside Bill Hemmer (Weekdays 9-11AM/ET). She joined FOX News Channel (FNC) in January 2004. Click here for more information on Martha MacCallum.",REAL
+9881,The Biggest Secret: How Reptilian-Human Hybrids Run Our World,"“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King 
+
+Controversy has become the mantra of the whirlwind that is David Icke ’s life over the past few decades. 
+
+Since the early 90’s, he has challenged people’s parameters of reality suggesting that all is not what it seems in regards to how our world is run. 
+
+David’s verdict is clear; the people that lie at the top of our power structures are hiding a sinister secret, one that would make anyone sound crazy if it were verbalized.
+
+
+Since the dawn of civilized man, the ruling class have been controlled by extra-terrestrial/ dimensional beings, with an agenda which ultimately establishes the human race as mindless and robotic slaves to a system based on fear and control.
+
+It is easy to see why this theory has attracted so much back-lash. 
+“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King Controversy has become the mantra of the whirlwind that is David Icke’s life over the past few decades. Since the early 90’s, he has challenged people’s parameters of reality suggesting that all is not what it seems in regards to how our world is run. 
+
+David’s verdict is clear; the people that lie at the top of our power structures are hiding a sinister secret, one that would make anyone sound crazy if it were verbalized. 
+
+Since the dawn of civilized man, the ruling class have been controlled by extra-terrestrial/ dimensional beings, with an agenda which ultimately establishes the human race as mindless and robotic slaves to a system based on fear and control.
+
+It is easy to see why this theory has attracted so much back-lash. 
+
+Icke made an infamous appearance on a national television talk show in 1991 where he announced to the world that he was being channeled information which warned him of impending devastation by natural disasters. 
+
+The ridicule which proceeded after the interview was said by Icke to be a nightmare for him and his family. He couldn’t walk down the street without being laughed at. 
+
+Icke later states that the laughter had “set him free” in a sense, allowing him to move forward with his messages to the world without now having worry about what people thought about him. 
+
+In the decade that followed Icke pumped out book after book, traveling the world giving long lectures on the nature of reality, testing people’s truth’s in regards to who is really running our world (4).
+
+Today Icke leads a similar schedule, having just completed his 8 hour arena world tour which was sold out in multiple countries. 
+
+During the extended lecture he touches upon topics such as the holographic universe, the pseudo moon matrix, and his most infamous theory regarding a reptilian hybrid race that is controlling our world. 
+
+To begin to explain the complex theory, Icke discusses the current fear state of our world.
+“The fear of what other people think is the state of perception that stops people [from] making a difference… you can only make a difference in a world of uniformity if you operate outside of that uniformity… we either take that on or we don’t, in which case nothing changes. “We are now at this place where we can go down one track and experience freedom like we’ve never even understood what freedom is. We go down the other one, the one that the control structure wants, then we’re headed for an Orwellian-fascist global state.” David Icke, The Lion Sleeps no More (3). Icke proposes that mankind has been manipulated to become “unconscious” through the use of programming by media and politics, the tyrannical control over our food, water, and air supply, the dumbing down of the masses by pharmaceutical drugs and alcohol, and the list goes on. 
+“But the manipulation doesn’t stop there”, as Icke states about exploring the never ending depths of the rabbit hole. 
+Quetzalcoatl – the Mesoamerican human-eating, reptilian deity 
+The ruling class, the bankers, the royal family, the presidents and prime ministers , have created the illusion of being separate ruling bodies when in fact they have always been on the same “team” of sorts. 
+
+There is a bloodline that has been strategically kept intact for ages. The Burkes Peerage and Baronetage, a comprehensive aristocratic genealogy resource, reveals that all 44 U.S. presidents have carried European royal bloodlines into office over the course of history. 
+
+This includes Bill Clinton , the Bush family , Barack Obama, John Kerry, and so on and so forth (6). 
+Portion of the global elite’s family tree 
+If we truly live in a democratic system, how is it that every single person brought into office has been of French and European royal descent? What are the chances of this considering the U.S. fought for their independence of Europe in the 1700s? 
+
+The Burkes Peerage makes a strong suggestion that elections are not really based on a public voting system, but rather they are based upon the highest percentage of royal genes.
+
+To make things even more peculiar is the fact that Brad Pitt, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, and Tom hanks (some of Hollywood’s biggest stars) also descend from this lineage. What could all of this imply?
+
+Icke goes on to illuminate the theory of quantum physics, which states that our physical reality is a projection within our mind, and that at the most basic quantum level, the solidity of matter is false, existing as vibrations instead of atoms.
+
+When the light from matter reflects into our eyes, the cells pick up the light (which travels as a wavelength measured from 390nm-700nm, the visible light spectrum) and transmutes the vibrations or wave-forms into an image within the brain. 
+
+This is the same for sound; it is a vibration until it is decoded by the brain (Suddenly The Matrix plot doesn’t seem so far-fetched). 
+The human brain can only see an extremely limited spectrum of energy, as we know there are a plethora of different forms of energy in our universe and thousands of different frequencies around us at any given moment that we cannot see, such as radio and radiation waves. 
+
+Icke suggests that ET’s and other beings exist in our universe, but they operate at a frequency just above what the human mind is said to be able to detect(3). This could explain the strange sightings of UFO’s that seem to appear and disappear in an instant.
+
+Could it be that the UFO’s or ET’s are advanced enough that they can raise or lower their frequency to come in and out of the visible light frequency spectrum? 
+
+This is something that Icke says the ruling elite are aware of, knowledge that is used to manipulate mankind into thinking that our experience is limited to a 3D reality.
+
+Icke says the reptilians control the globalists extra-dimensionally  through the manipulation of human DNA 
+It is no secret today that the world is ruled by money and power. Corporations and banks have more power than the people do, and this is something that is beginning to become recognized by a large majority of the population. 
+
+There is a world government which oversees the regulation of the entire planet and all of its systems, says Icke. This world government is called the Illuminati by many, although there are multiple names for the different levels of this organization. 
+
+Behind the closed doors at the highest levels of government, secret societies rule with malevolence. The problem is that anyone who learns this information and speaks out publicly as a leading force against these secret societies is quickly silenced. 
+
+John Kennedy’s assassination is a perfect example of this. In his famous last speech, not too long before he was shot, he touches upon the subject of the secret ruling class,
+“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings… “For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence – on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.
+
+“It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.” – John F Kennedy (8) 
+In his arena tour, Icke discusses the disturbing events that take place behind closed doors at the annual meeting of the global leaders.
+“They follow a religion that dates back to the beginning of civilization”, he states. The secret societies take part in and worship a pocket of consciousness, that most call Satanism, in which they perform esoteric rituals that entail ceremonial chanting, gratuitous sexual activities, and even blood sacrifice. 
+
+Icke alludes to this in his seminar correlating the globalist cult to the chain of missing children and underground world of sex trafficking. 
+
+The Catholic Church is a big player in this disturbing hidden world, Icke says. Earlier in 2013, Pope Benedict XVI became the first Pope to resign since the 1400s. 
+
+Some argue that the real reason was due to Benedict being blackmailed for surfacing information about the Catholic Church’s ritual abuse of children and homosexuality within the Vatican (7).
+
+Neil Brick, a victim of satanic ritual abuse, founded S.M.A.R.T (Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today) in 1995, an organization which aims to expose and put to an end to the ritual abuse of children by the Vatican and other secret power circles. 
+
+Neil states that thousands of children are captured each year and are manipulated through mind control to perform grotesque acts involving sex and torture (5). 
+
+Chrystine Oksana’s 1994 book, “Safe Passage to Healing”, expands on this topic:
+“Ritual Abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful, humiliating, intended as means of gaining dominance over the victim. “The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members… most victims are in a state of terror, mind control and dissociation.” — Chrystine Oksana, Safe Passage to Healing Many have come forward with unsettling stories about their abuse by different power circles such as the Vatican or the secret men’s clubs like the one held annually at Bohemian Grove in California. 
+
+This information may be difficult to process for most. Human beings are naturally compassionate for one and other; we don’t want to believe that these sorts of things happen, especially not by the hands of the people that we’ve “elected” to power. 
+
+So what could be the true reason behind these real-life horror movie stories? Icke says that it goes far beyond the physical constraints of the visible light spectrum. 
+WATCH THE VIDEO: 
+Alex Jones’ secret footage of a Bohemian Grove Ritual 
+
+“We are clearly massively missing the point. The vast majority who investigate this will not go any further…because a.) Their belief systems won’t let them and b.) They fear what other people will think about them. There is the level we see unfolding in the news, and then there is the other dimensional non-human level.
+
+The rabbit hole goes deeper and deeper . 
+
+“It is all about the control and programming of perception… at one level we see the dark-suits sitting at the big round table making the decisions, then at the next we have the secret societies, and then we go beyond the frequency of visible light… Satanism is a network that interacts with the beings that are controlling our vibrational state from a frequency above us.”
+
+“Wolfgang and the Devil”, Michael Pacher, 1483 —  Note the reptilian form the devil takes on 
+Icke says that these extra-dimensional beings that the globalists worship stem from the constellations Orion, Sirius, and Draco. Thousands of years ago, the reptilian beings intervened on planet Earth and began interbreeding with humans. 
+
+Not physically, however, but rather through the manipulation of the human coding, or DNA. Icke states that it is no coincidence that humans have fundamental reptilian genetics within their brain. He refers to an excerpt from the Bible, which hints at the crossbreeding of men and “gods”,
+“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the songs of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bear children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” – Genesis, 6:4 
+Icke connects more biblical stories to the intervention of the reptilian race. He alludes to the “fall of man,” the story of how Adam and Eve became manipulated by the serpent. 
+
+The reason, he goes on to say, that 95% of human DNA and a large majority of our brain goes unused is due to this intervention of the reptilian race, placing a limitation on our potential as conscious beings. 
+
+These beings were more advanced in the technological sense, seeing our DNA as software which could be tainted with, creating a hybrid middle man to control the human population within the visible light spectrum. 
+
+Half human and half reptilian, they were perceived as demi-gods at the time by the people . Icke explains that the Caduceus, the common medical symbol we see today, is based around this DNA manipulation. 
+
+The Caduceus contains two serpents spiraling around a scepter that has wings, in the shape of the double-helix DNA strand. 
+
+Because these hybrids at the time possessed knowledge that most didn’t, they were able to slip into positions of power, specifically in the ancient areas of Sumer, Babylon, and Mesopotamia. 
+
+As these areas began to separate and colonize elsewhere, the reptilian bloodlines spread out, becoming the royal families of the world. 
+
+This is said to be why the royal family maintains their genetics. Similarly, the ancient Chinese emperors believed they had the divine right to rule because they were connected to the “serpent gods”. 
+
+Icke says there is a common theme between royalty and serpent worship around the world. This can be seen in early images of ancient cultures such as the Hindus, Cambodians, Greeks, Nordics, Africans, Native Americans, Koreans, and Australians to name a few (1).
+
+Icke recounts in his seminar about his discussions with Credo Mutwa , a South-African based Zulu shaman, during which Mutwa tells of African legends about the Chitauri, the reptilian like “gods” who ascended from the heavens in monstrous vessels which burned through the atmosphere. 
+
+These so called gods became the dictators of the people, taking away the potentiality and power of the human race (2, 3).
+“One other thing that our people say is that the Chitauri prey upon us like vultures. They raise some of us. They fill some of us with great anger and great ambition. And they make these people they’ve raised into great warriors who make terrible war.
+
+“But, in the end, the Chitauri do not allow these great leaders, these great war chiefs and kings, to die peacefully. “The warrior chief is used to make as much war as possible, to kill as many of his people and those he calls enemies, and then, in the end, the warrior chief dies a terrible death, with his blood being spilled by others.” (2), Credo Mutwa on the reptilian-hyrbid leaders. 
+Over time these bloodlines created a sort of trans-national web of control, and as history progressed they rooted themselves deeper and deeper into the systems and structures that were developed by man. 
+
+Today they make up the secret societies (Illuminati, etc.) which pull the strings in regards to the direction that society follows.
+
+Read: New (Reptilian) World Order — Complete History of Reptilian Control 
+
+They have created the ultimate prison, one without bars with the illusion of freedom keeping the masses from wanting to escape. They have created illusory lines separating countries to cause segregation among the people who are ignorant to the truth. 
+
+They have created massive distractions with media, politics and entertainment, and they have dumbed down the general population through the poisoning of our food, air, and water supply (3).
+
+So what is the ultimate goal of these hybrid bloodlines? Some argue it was originally for our planet’s supply of gold, which they need to stabilize the atmosphere of their own planet. Others suggest that it more has to do with tyranny. 
+
+The New World Order (NWO) isn’t a new concept to most. In the early 90’s President Bush publicly announced that the NWO was the eventual goal for the United States. A NWO is not the peaceful state of freedom that these leaders try to present it as. 
+
+The NWO is an Orwellian state based around absolute control in which the population is maintained under 500 000 million people. It takes away the power of the public, turning them into mindless robots who do the bidding of the fortunate ruling class; a more extreme case of the current state of the world. 
+
+It is a one world government that calls all the shots. This is what the hybrids want; power and control. Whatever the intention is behind the control structures, it is obvious that it is not in harmony with the well-being of mankind or the planet.
+
+Icke ends his seminar with a glimpse of hope for humanity, stating that its time for humanity to get up off of our knees and to take matters back into our own hands,
+
+“What if vast numbers of people say ‘well we’re not doing it’? They’d have no power whatsoever. Their power comes in our acquiescence. What we need isn’t compliance, what we need is a global non-comply-dance. [They] cannot grant our freedom, nor can [they] take it away.” 
+
+David Icke’s theories may be difficult to grasp for some, but what is undeniable is the fact that when you listen to his propositions, he makes a damn good argument with his case. In the end it is up to you to decide what truth you wish to believe. 
+
+We encourage you to do your own research. This is a time of great change in the world. The people have begun to wake up, deciding for themselves what resonates as truth and what doesn’t. 
+
+We live in an era of mass information sharing, thanks to advent of the internet. People are connecting from all over the world to share knowledge and create change on a massive scale. The most important thing for each of us to do during this time is to become informed as much as possible. 
+
+Ultimately it is we who have the power to create what we want as a society. When we tune into our true potential, anything is possible.
+
+Fear will not create this change; it will only feed the old systems which the ruling class have already established. Love will be the forerunner for the fast approaching new Earth. 
+
+Collective-Evolution 
+SOURCE ",FAKE
+7068,"If You Live HERE, Forget Christmas Lights – They’ve Been BANNED to Avoid “Offending Refugees”","0 comments 
+Perhaps no country has been more welcoming of Muslims refugees to their own detriment than Sweden. 
+Not only has the country accepted far more of these migrants than they can feasibly handle, but the nation has also bent over backwards to make them comfortable. Things have gotten so out of hand that Christmas lights have now been banned so as not to offend these devout Muslims. 
+The Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket) will not allow municipalities to erect Christmas street lights on light poles that the authority manages this year, which means that many towns will have no lights at all for the holiday. 
+What a sad time for the native Christians in Sweden. 
+To add insult to injury, Speisa called the decision “a victory for those who want to tone down the reminder of the country’s Christian traditions.” 
+Shockingly, even though the onslaught of Islamic culture has wreaked havoc on Sweden’s people and infrastructure, they want to “tone down” the Christian influence. How backwards is that?! 
+Authorities appear to be trying to sweep the decision under the rug by claiming it is a matter of “safety.” 
+“Poles are not designed for the weight of Christmas lights, and we have to remove anything that should not be there,” said Eilin Isaksson, national coordinator at the Swedish Transport Administration. 
+I’m not sure they’re going to be fooling anyone with this “safety” line. If they were really so worried about that, they wouldn’t be allowing millions of migrants to roam around raping their women and children. 
+MRC Blog expressed the same sentiment: 
+This argument that lights are too heavy and pose a safety risk is complete [sic] bogus, of course. Authorities in Sweden actually expect people to believe that lights normally held up by tree branches are now too weighty to be supported by metal poles. In reality, these lights have simply been banned to avoid offending Muslim “refugees.” 
+You can be sure that if Hillary Clinton is elected, we have a future similar to Sweden’s to look forward to. She has privately expressed her desire for completely open borders and she kowtows to Muslims the same way President Obama does. 
+SHARE this report if you think it is utterly absurd that Sweden has banned Christmas lights to appease Muslim refugees!",FAKE
+542,Fact Check: Did Hillary Clinton Introduce A New Approach To Early Education?,"Fact Check: Did Hillary Clinton Introduce A New Approach To Early Education?
+
+This week Hillary Clinton was in Virginia to talk about women, family and workplace issues. She met at the Mug'n Muffin coffee shop with local participants in a program called Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters.
+
+In HIPPY, as it's called, parents receive free books, educational materials and weekly home visits to coach them on how to get their young children ready for school — for example, by reading to them daily.
+
+A Clinton campaign video features Bill Clinton, in a speech, crediting his wife with bringing the program to the U.S. from Israel when she was first lady of Arkansas in 1985.
+
+""She comes in one day, jumping up and down happy,"" the former president says in the video. ""She says, 'I found it. A preschool program in Israel that teaches people to be their children's first teachers even if they're illiterate. I think it could work here.' ... Next thing you know it's in 26 states. It's still thriving and there are thousands of people in this country today who have better lives and learn more and grew up just because of her.""
+
+Hillary Clinton did bring the program to Arkansas, but she wasn't responsible for importing it to the United States.
+
+And it is national, in 21 — not 26 — states and D.C., but it's not very big — only 15,000 participants each year.
+
+""Clinton discovered the program many years ago when it came to the U.S.,"" says Margie Margolies, the chairwoman of HIPPY USA's board (no relation to Marjorie Margolies, Chelsea Clinton's mother-in-law). ""She was instrumental in growing the program in Arkansas when Bill was governor. She had been working for a way to boost the educational start of children in Arkansas, so she reached out to the Israeli founder to find out how to scale it up. Arkansas is still one of our largest programs.""
+
+Could HIPPY scale up nationwide? Should it?
+
+Decades of independent research, including randomized controlled trials, shows that children ages 3, 4 and 5 who participate in HIPPY are more prepared for school. Studies in four states found that higher reading, math and social studies scores persisted into third, fifth and sixth grades.
+
+Teachers report that parents who participate in HIPPY become more involved in their children's educations for years to come. HIPPY seems to blunt the impact on school performance of factors like being an English-language learner. Children who go through the program also seem to have better attendance, behavior, peer interactions and academic self-esteem.
+
+Although Margolies says that she wouldn't want to ""pit"" HIPPY against universal pre-K programs, the fact remains that the home-visit program seems to produce similar effects on kids at a lower cost per participant. And there are ancillary benefits, like connecting families to housing, health care and job assistance.
+
+Of course, it's hard to control for the enthusiasm factor. Low-income, working parents who are willing to sign up for 30 straight weeks of home visits, and then actually stick with the program (with no payments or other incentives beyond a few free books), must be exceptionally committed to their children's welfare.
+
+But, if nothing else, the success of HIPPY demonstrates that it is possible to close the notorious ""word gap"" and change parents' behavior.
+
+""It really makes a huge difference in people's lives,"" says Margolies, who has been with the program in Milwaukee for nearly two decades. ""I'm lucky enough to have seen in many years how much more confidence the parents have.""
+
+Many of the home-visit coaches, she says, began as parents in the program. ""We have a woman right now, it's her first job ever. She was a parent and she's being trained as a home visitor. ... It's a great start for parents too, not just for kids.""",REAL
+6439,Mark Ruffalo Reportedly Placed on U.S. Terrorist Watch List,"Mark Ruffalo Reportedly Placed on U.S. Terrorist Watch List 11/02/2016 
+CBS NEWS 
+Actor Mark Ruffalo has reportedly been added to the government’s terrorist watch list. 
+The “The Kids Are All Right” and “Zodiac” star was placed on the terror advisory list by Pennsylvania’s Office of Homeland Security earlier this year after helping to promote the documentary “Gasland” and speaking out about his concerns of natural gas drilling, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. 
+Written and directed by Josh Fox, the film, which premiered on HBO this summer, put a light on the communities that are impacted by the natural gas drilling boom in the U.S. 
+While Ruffalo, who will next appear as The Hulk in “The Avengers,” may now face tedious secondary screenings at airports, the 43-year-old isn’t too put off by the whole situation. 
+[It’s] pretty f–kin’ funny,” he tells the December issue of GQ magazine .",FAKE
+6229,Australian Site Could Rival Stonehenge As World’s Oldest Observatory,"posted by Eddie Scientists studying ancient stone arrangement alongside Aboriginal traditional owners in Australia’s Victorian bush say the site could pre-date Stonehenge and even Egypt’s Great Pyramids. But Wurdi Youang, as it’s known by the people of the Wada Warrung nation, is apparently not the only mysterious stone circle in Australia — just the most intact. Monash University astronomer Dr. Duane Hamacher has been studying Indigenous Australian astronomy for years, and told ABC’s Lateline he believes the Wurdi Youang structure could date back more than 11,000 years. If that’s proven, it will be yet another example of the world’s longest surviving culture’s innovations pre-dating their better known European equivalents. “Some academics have referred to this stone arrangement here as Australia’s version of Stonehenge,” Dr Hamacher said on the program Wednesday. “I think the question we might have to ask is: is Stonehenge Britain’s version of Wurdi Youang? Because this could be much, much older.” Traditional owners like Bryon Powell and the scientists they’re working with say the stones have possible solar indications, marking the movements of the sun over the year, including the summer solstice, equinox and winter solstice. A sacred sundial, if you will. The egg-shaped area is fifty metres wide and contains over 100 basalt boulders. After being noted by early European settlers and recorded by archaeologists in 1977, Wurdi Youang was only relatively recently given the attention it deserves as a site once sacred and significant. Local custodian Reg Abrahams sees the site as playing a role in contesting the increasingly-dated disproved notion that Indigenous Australians were simply nomadic hunter-gatherers. “If you’re going to have a stone arrangement where you mark off the seasons throughout the year with the solstices and equinoxes, it kind of makes sense if you’re at least most of the year in one specific location to do that,” he told the ABC. He continued: “You see a lot of agricultural and aquacultural practices, so evidence of this agriculture may go back tens of thousands of years, pre-dating what anthropologists commonly think of as the dawn of agriculture which is about 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.” Mysterious Mullimbimby site Wurdi Youang is just one of many stone arrangements created by Aboriginal nations that have been recorded across Australia, including in Carisbrook, Victoria and outside Mullumbimby, northern New South Wales. The site 40 kilometres outside of Mullumbimby is the stuff of legend. But a few amateur archaeologists say it’s based on much more than hearsay. It was said to contain 181 large standing pieces of sandstone — with the nearest sandstone deposit located over 20 kilometres away. In 2015, a teacher at the Brunswick Valley Historical Society, Richard Patterson unearthed letters from 1939 president of the Australian Archaeological and Education Research Society, Frederic Slater . “The mound is one of the oldest; I should say the oldest, forms of temples in the world and dates back to the Palaeolithic age with the advent of first man,” Slater is alleged to have written. Slater documented inscriptions from the site’s stones, which he said were made up of hand signs, letters and “sacred signs” that amounted to 28,000 words in the ancient language. In the 1940, the site was reportedly bulldozed by the farmer with a deed to the land, following government threats to seize his property, making further investigation virtually impossible. 
+A documentary on Indigenous astronomy called Star Stories of the Dreaming was released earlier this year, featuring the CSIRO’s Ray Norris and Euahlayi lawman Ghillar Michael Anderson sharing Indigenous belief systems associated with astronomy. Source:",FAKE
+3075,American democracy is doomed,"America's constitutional democracy is going to collapse.
+
+Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies — there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we're lucky, it won't be violent. If we're very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system. If we're less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen.
+
+Very few people agree with me about this, of course. When I say it, people generally think that I'm kidding. America is the richest, most successful country on earth. The basic structure of its government has survived contested elections and Great Depressions and civil rights movements and world wars and terrorist attacks and global pandemics. People figure that whatever political problems it might have will prove transient — just as happened before.
+
+But voiced in another register, my outlandish thesis is actually the conventional wisdom in the United States. Back when George W. Bush was president and I was working at a liberal magazine, there was a very serious discussion in an editorial meeting about the fact that the United States was now exhibiting 11 of the 13 telltale signs of a fascist dictatorship. The idea that Bush was shredding the Constitution and trampling on congressional prerogatives was commonplace. When Obama took office, the partisan valence of the complaints shifted, but their basic tenor didn't. Conservative pundits — not the craziest, zaniest ones on talk radio, but the most serious and well-regarded — compare Obama's immigration moves to the actions of a Latin-American military dictator.
+
+In the center, of course, it's an article of faith that when right and left talk like this they're simply both wrong. These are nothing but the overheated squeals of partisans and ideologues.
+
+At the same time, when the center isn't complaining about the excessively vociferous complaints of the out-party of the day, it tends to be in full-blown panic about the state of American politics. And yet despite the popularity of alarmist rhetoric, few people act like they're actually alarmed. Accusations that Barack Obama or John Boehner or any other individual politician is failing as a leader are flung, and then abandoned when the next issue arises. In practice, the feeling seems to be that salvation is just one election away. Hillary Clinton even told Kara Swisherthat her agenda as a presidential candidate would be to end partisan gridlock.
+
+It's not going to work.
+
+The breakdown of American constitutional democracy is a contrarian view. But it's nothing more than the view that rather than everyone being wrong about the state of American politics, maybe everyone is right. Maybe Bush and Obama are dangerously exceeding norms of executive authority. Maybe legislative compromise really has broken down in an alarming way. And maybe the reason these complaints persist across different administrations and congresses led by members of different parties is that American politics is breaking down.
+
+To understand the looming crisis in American politics, it's useful to think about Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria. These are countries that were defeated by American military forces during the Second World War and given constitutions written by local leaders operating in close collaboration with occupation authorities. It's striking that even though the US Constitution is treated as a sacred text in America's political culture, we did not push any of these countries to adopt our basic framework of government.
+
+In a 1990 essay, the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz observed that ""aside from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government — but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s.""
+
+The exact reasons for why are disputed among scholars — in part because you can't just randomly assign different governments to people. One issue here is that American-style systems are much more common in the Western Hemisphere and parliamentary ones are more common elsewhere. Latin-American countries have experienced many episodes of democratic breakdown, so distinguishing Latin-American cultural attributes from institutional characteristics is difficult.
+
+Still, Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, ""there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved."" The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote: ""the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.""
+
+In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found, a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a period of weeks, but there's simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.
+
+But within a presidential system, gridlock leads to a constitutional trainwreck with no resolution. The United States's recent government shutdowns and executive action on immigration are small examples of the kind of dynamic that's led to coups and putsches abroad.
+
+There was, of course, the American exception to the problems of the checks-and-balances system. Linz observed on this score: ""The uniquely diffuse character of American political parties — which, ironically, exasperates many American political scientists and leads them to call for responsible, ideologically disciplined parties — has something to do with it.""
+
+For much of American history, in other words, US political parties have been relatively un-ideological and un-disciplined. They are named after vague ideas rather than specific ideologies, and neither presidents nor legislative leaders can compel back-bench members to vote with them. This has often been bemoaned (famously, a 1950 report by the American Political Science Association called for a more rigorous party system) as the source of problems. It's also, according to Linz, helped avert the kind of zero-sum conflicts that have torn other structurally similar democracies apart. But that diffuse party structure is also a thing of the past.
+
+American politics is much more polarized today than it was 25 or 50 years ago. But not everyone buys the theory that today's era of party polarization spells big trouble. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein argues that it's ""not some sort of freakish un-American phenomenon."" The real exception, Bernstein says, the middle of the twentieth century, when the parties weren't polarized. Polarization is the norm, he says, and he's right.
+
+A long line of research starting with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, political scientists at the University of Georgia and New York University respectively, records all congressional votes and then analyzes the types of political coalitions that emerge. This system, known as DW-NOMINATE, lets you measure the degree of party polarization precisely. When Democrats all vote one way and Republicans all vote the other way, politics is highly polarized. When votes frequently scramble the parties, it is less polarized.
+
+What this research shows is that the steady march toward polarization over the past generation is a return to a situation that existed during an earlier period.
+
+The story here, like so much in American politics, is race. Southern Democrats had a range of views on non-racial issues but monolithically supported white supremacy and held together in the Democratic Party to maximize their leverage in Congress. The result was that the Democratic Party included Northern liberals who supported civil rights and Southern conservatives who supported segregation. So polarization temporarily went away in Congress. But as segregation receded as an issue in American politics, the parties slowly but surely sorted themselves by ideology, and so today, there is no Republican in Congress more liberal than the most conservative Democrat, or vice-versa. American politics has re-polarized. According to Bernstein, this change may be discomfiting but it's nothing to worry about. American politics has been polarized before and it was fine.
+
+What this story of reversion misses is the crucial role of ideology. Polarization and ideology are clearly related concepts, but simply counting congressional votes doesn't really tell us what those votes were about. Georgetown University Professor Hans Noel greatly improved our understanding of the relationship between the two by extending the DW-NOMINATE methodology to people who aren't elected officials.
+
+For his book Political Parties and Political Ideologies in America, Noel constructs ideological space scores for writers and political pundits — people who address the same issues as elected officials but who are not serving on Capitol Hill.
+
+What he found is that while Gilded Age members of Congress voted in a highly partisan way, their voting didn't reflect any polarization of ideas evident in broader American society. As Charles Calhoun, a leading scholar of Gilded Age politics has written, the main concern of actual members of Congress was not policy, but ""patronage power, the privilege of placing one's political friends and supporters in in subordinate offices."" In other words, a member of Congress would get to distribute federal jobs and contracts to his supporters and in exchange the beneficiaries of his patronage would support his party's ticket at all levels. For this reason, the obscure-sounding job of customs collector of the Port of New York was important enough in the 1870s that Chester A. Arthur leapt from it to the Vice Presidency. The first real filibuster was held over Whig efforts to assign a printing contract to friendly companies.
+
+Even though party discipline was strict in these days, it was not really about much beyond who held the spoils.
+
+Over the course of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s the rise of progressive and liberal ideology and the formation of a conservative ideology to counter it upended this system. So much so that by the 1970s it had become common to observe that American political parties were in decline. University of California Irvine political scientist Martin Wattenberg achieved the apogee of this literature with his 1985 classic The Decline of Political Parties in America (since updated in five subsequent editions), citing the waning influence of party professionals, the rise of single-issue pressure groups, and an attendant fall in voter turnout. But as historian Sam Rosenfeld writes, under-the-hood changes in the process for selecting presidential nominees and Congressional leaders ""ultimately helped to create a newly receptive institutional setting for issue-based activism within the parties,"" leading to the parties' reconstitution around modern ideological lines.
+
+Today's partisan polarization, in other words, is not the same as its Gilded Age predecessor. The old polarization was about control over jobs and money — the kind of thing where split-the-difference compromises are easiest. That polarization was eventually undermined by a new politics built around principles. For decades, politicians found themselves cross-pressured between their commitments to a national party network and to various ideological causes. Today, however, politicians are no longer cross-pressured. We have strong Gilded Age-style parties, but organized around questions of principle rather than questions of patronage.
+
+You can take this theory too far, of course. There have been moments in American life where questions of principle sharply split American politics. We had ideological parties (or at least one) in the 1850s when the anti-slavery Republican Party rose to the fore. But the example is not enormously encouraging — the constitutional process collapsed and we had four years of civil war, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and then, even after a Union victory, white supremacy was re-established in the South through a two-decade campaign of terrorism.
+
+Not all breakdowns of constitutional processes are as violent as the American Civil War.
+
+For a less catastrophic, more realistic view of the kind of thing that could happen here, it's useful to look to some less-familiar but more-recent events in Honduras. Back in late 2008, left-wing President Manuel Zelaya was locked in persistent conflict with an opposition-controlled congress. With neither side able to prevail within the context of the existing system, Zelaya decided he wanted to add a fourth question to the upcoming November 2009 election. In addition to voting for president, congress, and municipal offices, Zelaya would ask the voters whether they wanted to hold a constituent assembly to re-write the constitution — presumably to allow him to run for re-election.
+
+Unfortunately for Zelaya, Honduras' existing constitution made no provision for re-writing the constitution by plebiscite. Consequently, in March 2009, Zelaya determined that the solution was to hold another plebiscite. On June 28, Hondurans would go to the polls to vote in a non-binding referendum on whether the constitutional question should be added to the November ballot. This, he hoped, would give him the democratic legitimacy needed to go forward with the constitutional revision.
+
+Zelaya's opponents in congress, evidently concerned that the president would win, sued. They won a court case enjoining the president against holding the referendum. Zelaya pressed ahead regardless.
+
+In Honduras, the military typically assists with election logistics, so Zelaya ordered the army to begin distributing ballots. General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, the chief the Honduran military, refused to comply. On May 24, Zelaya fired the general. Several other commanders quit in solidarity. The Supreme Court ruled that the dismissal was unconstitutional. Throughout June, the constitutional process essentially broke down with protests and counter-protests dominating the capital. On June 28, the military deposed Zelaya in a coup, retroactively justified by a back-dated Supreme Court ruling. Roberto Micheletti, the president of the National Congress, was installed in his stead.
+
+The military quickly handed power over to a new group of civilians. The coup was legitimated by the National Congress and the Supreme Court. And its perpetrators argued with some justification that there was no constitutional alternative. Zelaya was trying to circumvent the rules, so they had no choice but to circumvent them too in response.
+
+The deadlock was ultimately resolved by force rather than legal procedure. Zelaya did not have enough support to amend the constitution through the existing process, and Honduras' constitutional system created no legal mechanism for impeachment of a president. The Supreme Court arbitrarily ruled that Zelaya's effort to circumvent the amendment process via referendum was illegal, while Congress' effort to circumvent the impeachment process was fine. There were quite a few injuries as protesters clashed with security forces, but no massive bloodshed.
+
+Honduras' coup is worth paying attention to not because the exact same scenario is likely to play out in the United States, but because it reveals how genuinely difficult it is to maintain constitutional politics in a presidential system.
+
+Presidents feel themselves to be accountable for steering the nation. And all the evidence indicates that the public and the media do in fact hold presidents broadly accountable for national outcomes. Throughout the United States' 2012 presidential campaign, for example, it was universally assumed that good news for the American economy (or for America more broadly) would redound to Barack Obama's benefit even though control of policymaking was split between the White House and a GOP-dominated Congress.
+
+As Obama put it in a November 2014 press conference, ""people are going to ask for greater accountability and more responsibility from me than from anybody else in this town."" The problem is the president is not only held accountable for things that are in part outside his ability to control (gas prices, Ebola, or shark attacks) but for things that are actually under the control of his political adversaries. ""I'm the guy who's elected by everybody,"" concluded Obama, ""and they want me to push hard to close some of these divisions, break through some of the gridlock, and get stuff done."" If you're going to be held accountable for outcomes, in other words, then you'd better act.
+
+In a parliamentary system, this is simply democratic accountability in action. A head of government who strongly believes the nation needs actions the legislature won't approve can dissolve parliament and hold a new election to decide the issue. In Honduras' presidential system, the very act of trying to schedule a vote to resolve the deadlock was itself unconstitutional.
+
+The United States, of course, is  a long way from a coup. What we are witnessing instead is a rise in what Georgetown University Professor Mark Tushnet labeled ""constitutional hardball"" in a 2004 article.
+
+Constitutional hardball describes legal and political moves ""that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understanding."" In other words, moves that do not violate the letter of the law, but do trample on our conventional understanding of how it is supposed to work.
+
+Tushnet's article is vital reading today in part because the different partisan context in which it was written can help shock people out of their entrenched positions. His lead example is from the George W. Bush administration, when liberals were concerned about the president taking power away from Congress. Tushnet describes the ""strained"" argument offered by Republican senators in 2005 that Democratic Party filibusters of Bush's judicial nominees violated the constitution. At the time, of course, Democrats found the view that Republicans might simply ban the use of filibusters for this purpose outrageous. ""The filibuster serves as a check on power,"" said Harry Reid, ""that preserves our limited government."" Joe Biden called the Republicans' attempt to end the fillibuster ""an example of the arrogance of power.""
+
+But ultimately the hardball tactic for ending filibusters was used by Democrats in 2013 to halt Republican obstruction of Obama's nominees. Republicans, Reid said, ""have done everything they can to deny the fact that Obama had been elected and then reelected."" He argued he had no choice but to abandon a principle that just a few years ago he said was crucial to preserving American liberty. Meanwhile, Republicans who had supported the 2005 effort to weaken the filibuster executed a perfect flip-flop in the other direction.
+
+Tushnet's other example from the mid-2000s — Texas' decision to redraw congressional district boundaries to advantage Republicans between censuses — seems almost adorably quaint by the standards of the Obama era.
+
+From its very first months, Obama's presidency has been marked by essentially nothing but constitutional hardball. During the Bush years, Democratic senators sporadically employed a variety of unusual delaying tactics to stymie his agenda. In 2009, Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans retaliated by using tons of them, constantly. Suddenly filibustering went from something a Senate minority could do to something it did on pretty much all motions. George Washington University congressional scholar Sarah Binder observes that ""leaders in the 1970s rarely felt compelled to file for cloture [to break filibusters], averaging fewer than one per month in some years"" while in recent years Reid has filed over once per week.
+
+As Jim Manley, a former aide to the Democratic Senate leadership, explained to The Atlantic, the obstruction not only prevented many of Obama's more controversial measures from becoming law; it also drastically altered the process of even routine governance.
+
+As a political strategy, McConnell's tactics were vindicated by the 2010 midterms, which showed that making the president look partisan, clumsy, and inept was a winning strategy.
+
+Republicans in Congress subsequently moved beyond unusual acts of obstruction to an unprecedented use of the statutory debt ceiling into a vehicle for policymaking. Traditionally a bit of oddball American political theater immortalized in a funny West Wing scene, in 2011 the GOP threatened to provoke an unfathomable financial and constitutional crisis unless the Obama administration agreed to sweeping spending cuts. Again, there was nothing illegal about what Republicans in Congress did here — it was just, in its intent and its scope, unprecedented.
+
+And it's fairly clear that these actions, while consistent with Republican Party electoral success, have not exactly produced a well-respected legislature. Congressional approval ratings are so low — and have been for so long — that it's become a subject of pollster humor. In 2013, Public Policy Polling found that congress was less popular than Genghis Khan, traffic jams, cockroaches, or Nickelback. In a less joking spirit, Gallup finds that the voters have less confidence in Congress than any other American institution, including big business, organized labor, banks, or television news.
+
+As relations with Congress have worsened, the Obama administration has set about expanding executive authority over domestic policy to match Bush-era unilateralism in the national security domain. This came to the fore most publicly with Obama's decision to protect millions of unauthorized migrants from deportation without congressional agreement.
+
+As Vox's Andrew Prokop has argued, the pattern is actually much broader. Obama's handling of K-12 education policy is in some ways an even more paradigmatic example of constitutional hardball. The George W. Bush-era education law No Child Left Behind laid out penalties for state education systems that didn't meet certain, rather unrealistic, targets. The law's authors assumed that when the law came up for reauthorization, the targets would be changed. In case Congress didn't act in time, the Secretary of Education also had the authority to issue waivers of the penalties. Since Congress no longer really functions, there has been no reauthorization of the law. So the Obama administration has issued waivers — but only to states that implement policy changes ordered by the Department of Education.
+
+University of Chicago political scientist William Howell told Prokop this was a ""new frontier"" for executive policymaking. Yale Law School's Bruce Ackerman says Obama used ""a waiver provision for modest experiments and transformed it into a platform for the redesign of the statute."" Obama's actions are clearly legal — but they are just as clearly a decision to creatively exploit the letter of the law to vastly expand the scope of executive power over the law.
+
+Those who like these actions on their merits comfort themselves with the thought that these uses of executive power are pretty clearly allowed by the terms of the existing laws. This is true as far as it goes. But it's also the case that Obama (or some future president) could have his political opponents murdered on the streets of Washington and then issue pardons to the perpetrators. This would be considerably more legal than a Zelaya-style effort to use a plebiscite to circumvent congressional obstruction — just a lot more morally outrageous. In either case, however, the practical issue would be not so much what is legal, but what people, including the people with guns, would actually tolerate.
+
+America's escalating game of constitutional hardball isn't caused by personal idiosyncratic failings of individual people. Obama has made his share of mistakes, but the fundamental causes of hardball politics are structural, not personal. Personality-minded journalists often argue that a warmer executive would do a better job of building bridges to congress. But as Dartmouth's Brendan Nyhan points out, ""Bill Clinton's more successful outreach to his opponents didn't keep him from getting impeached. Likewise, George W. Bush was more gregarious than Obama, but it didn't make him any more popular among Democrats once the post-9/11 glow had worn off.""
+
+There's a reason for this, and it gets to the core of who really runs American politics.
+
+In a democratic society, elected officials are most directly accountable to the people who support them. And the people who support them are different than the people who don't care enough about politics to pay much attention, or the people who support the other side. They are more ideological, more partisan, and they want to see the policies they support passed into law. A leader who abandons his core supporters because what they want him to do won't be popular with most voters is likely, in modern American politics, to be destroyed in the next primary election.
+
+The amateur ideological activists who eroded the power of the party professionals in the 1970s are now running the show. While Gilded Age activists traded support for patronage jobs, modern-day activists demand policy results in exchange for support. Presidents need to do everything within their legal ability to deliver the results that their supporters expect, and their opponents in Congress need to do everything possible to stop them. At one point, Republican congressional leaders were highly amenable to passing an immigration reform bill and the Obama administration insisted it had no means of circumventing the legislative process. But under pressure from their respective bases, Republicans found it impossible to compromise and Obama decided he had better find a way to go around Congress.
+
+It is true that the mass public is not nearly as ideological as members of Congress. But the mass public is not necessarily active in democratic politics, either. Emory's Alan Abramowitz finds that ""the American public has become more consistent and polarized in its policy preferences over the past several decades."" He also writes that ""this increase in consistency and polarization has been concentrated among the most politically engaged citizens.""
+
+This rise in ideological activism has a number of genuinely positive impacts. It makes politics less corrupt. The least-polarized state legislatures in America are in places like Rhode Island and Louisiana, bastions of corruption rather than good government. It's not a coincidence that the Tea Party surge led to the end of earmarked appropriations. But it heightened executive-legislative conflict and leads to what Linz termed ""the zero-sum character of presidential elections.""
+
+Looking back at Bush's election in 2000, one of the most remarkable things is how little social disorder there was. The American public wanted Al Gore to be president, but a combination of the Electoral College rules, poor ballot design in Palm Beach County, and an adverse Supreme Court ruling, put Bush in office. The general presumption among elites at the time was that Democrats should accept this with good manners, and Bush would respond to the weak mandate with moderate, consensus-oriented governance. This was not in the cards. Not because of Bush's personal qualities (if anything, the Bush family and its circle are standard-bearers for the cause of relative moderation in the GOP), but because the era of the ""partisan presidency"" demands that the president try to implement the party's agenda, regardless of circumstances. That's how we got drastic tax cuts in 2001.
+
+If the Bush years shattered the illusion that there's no difference between the parties, the Obama years underscore how much control of the White House matters in an era of gridlock. The broadly worded Clean Air Act, whose relevant provisions passed in 1970, has allowed Obama to be one of the most consequential environmental regulators of all time — even though he hasn't been able to pass a major new environmental bill. He's deployed executive discretion over immigration enforcement on an unprecedented scale. And he's left a legacy that could be rapidly reversed. A future Republican administration could not only turn back these executive actions, but substantially erode the Affordable Care Act.
+
+The lessons of the 2000 and 2008 elections make it unnerving to imagine a Bush-Gore style recount occurring in 2015's political atmosphere. The stakes of presidential elections are sky-high. And the constitutional system provides no means for a compromise solution. There can be only one president. And once he's in office he has little reason to show restraint in the ambitions of the legislative — or non-legislative — agenda he pursues. In the event of another disputed election, it would be natural for both sides to push for victory with every legal or extra-legal means at their disposal.
+
+Indeed, we ought to consider possibilities more disastrous than a repeat of the 2000 vote. What if a disputed presidential election coincided with a Supreme Court vacancy? What if the simultaneous deaths of the president and vice president brought to power a House Speaker from the opposite party? What if neither party secured a majority of electoral votes and a presidential election wound up being decided by a vote of the lame duck House of Representatives? What if highly partisan state legislatures start using their constitutional authority to rig the presidential contest? A system of undisciplined or non-ideological political parties has many flaws, but it is at least robust to a variety of shocks. Our current party alignment makes for a much more brittle situation, in which one of any number of crises where democratic norms and constitutional procedures diverge could bring us to a state of emergency.
+
+The idea that America's constitutional system might be fundamentally flawed cuts deeply against the grain of our political culture. But the reality is that despite its durability, it has rarely functioned well by the standards of a modern democracy. The party system of the Gilded Age operated through systematic corruption. The less polarized era that followed was built on the systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans. The newer system of more ideological politics has solved those problems and seems in many ways more attractive. But over the past 25 years, it's set America on a course of paralysis and crisis — government shutdowns, impeachment, debt ceiling crises, and constitutional hardball. Voters, understandably, are increasingly dissatisfied with the results and confidence in American institutions has been generally low and falling. But rather than leading to change, the dissatisfaction has tended to yield wild electoral swings that exacerbate the sense of permanent crisis.
+
+As dysfunctional as American government may seem today, we've actually been lucky. No other presidential system has gone as long as ours without a major breakdown of the constitutional order. But the factors underlying that stability — first non-ideological parties and then non-disciplined ones — are gone. And it's worth considering the possibility that with them, so too has gone the American exception to the rule of presidential breakdown. If we seem to be unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis, it's because we are unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. The breakdown may not be next year or even in the next five years, but over the next 20 or 30 years, will we really be able to resolve every one of these high-stakes showdowns without making any major mistakes? Do you really trust Congress that much?
+
+The best we can hope for is that when the crisis does come, Americans will have the wisdom to do for ourselves what we did in the past for Germany and Japan and put a better system in place.",REAL
+5782,Comey’s Blindside: You’re Just a Cop,"Email 
+Every day, it seems, we talk about Prison America; the profitable high growth industry that entombs millions of our people… stealing years, often decades, of their lives while destroying families and communities along the way… as we continue to subsidize a vicious, sagging economy built upon death… not life. Though the debate centers largely on the question of why we continue to prosecute and bury mostly young people of color and poverty for drug crimes and other non-violent offenses, the equation often misses a core component of the challenge concerning how to control willful cops… those in uniform and out… who cross the line with mostly unbridled power to dictate who goes to prison and who does not, whose reputation remains solid and whose becomes soiled, and then set about to do whatever it takes to see their view of justice be had. 
+In the US, result oriented justice is not new or even creative; it’s as old as the frontier sheriff with boundless power to rule with a firm hand to control who got to walk down the streets of Dodge and who did not. Of course, cops plant evidence, coerce statements and entrap folks… that’s a given. Torture, rendition and agent stings are very much now the norm. No breaking news here. Ultimately, when all else fails, it’s the modern day version of the old school way to ensure “case closed”… another “victory” for those who not only relish their power but see its arbitrary application as just fine as long as they get their man… or woman. 
+It seems most cops, from those directing traffic on the boulevard to the guy in the designer suit before Congress, lose sight along the way that their power is but power on loan… not owned by them to use and do with as they please when their own social, political or “security ends” justifies their means… or where they seek to lay the groundwork for future employment. 
+Once again, this past week, FBI Director James Comey proved that point. 
+Although finely polished and experienced, this lifelong Republican cop seems to feel that there’s one set of rules for all those he’s helped to send to prison and a completely different one for him… one blue book of conduct for all others in the Department of Justice but, apparently, not a volume to be found among the personal library of he who now occupies the Director’s desk of the FBI. 
+Time and time again, throughout the Clinton email scandal, Comey has proven himself to be not much more than an old fashioned ward healer… but with a badge… desperate for the feel of flesh or to see the flash of bulbs or, perhaps, a novice candidate for political office looking for a hook to, some day, launch his own career. 
+FBI Directors do not hold press conferences to discuss or explain why charges have not been pursued against a potential subject of interest or a target of an investigation. They just don’t. Inexplicably, he did. 
+As a matter of long settled policy, these matters are simply not offered up to the public for Monday morning debate or talking head analysis which can not only tarnish the reputation of persons cleared of criminal wrongdoing but expose investigative sources or techniques that can endanger the reliability of future investigations or the safety of agents. Indeed, legend is the cases where the door to on-going or post hoc litigation leads has been slammed shut, without hesitation, by federal judges for this very reason. 
+As well, the all too convenient mass publication by the FBI in this matter of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of its sensitive 302 reports (official FBI case progress memoranda) are simply unprecedented. Indeed, prisoners (and journalists) often spend years litigating access to this material which is challenged by the FBI, every step along the way, with endless technical statutory excuses for keeping it secret; even in cases, long closed, where its release might offer a ray of hope to those perhaps wrongfully convicted or overcharged. 
+Most stunning of all however was the cheap political ploy by Comey where but 11 days prior to the election he suggested, in a public writing to Congress, that he had uncovered newly discovered, potentially damning evidence with regard to the Clinton email scandal. The tenor and tone of the Director’s insinuation is remarkable, indeed astonishing, given the fact that apparently neither he nor any of his agents had, as of the time of the written press conference, reviewed the material itself. Can anyone say deceitful? 
+Even more disingenuous was the timing of this claim which not only rubbed up against firmly rooted and sound DOJ policy but, in fact, swallowed it whole as the Director slobbered away from the political dining table with a scheming smile on his face. 
+Although periodically ruptured, by design the mandate of federal law enforcement necessarily excludes witting participation in the political process, let alone becoming ensnarled in it, as an ostensible partisan or one consciously seeking to impact upon it one way or another. That’s the job of politicians not cops. 
+Indeed, the Department of Justice has, for decades, avoided taking actions that might be viewed as an attempt to influence an election. As noted in a 2012 Justice Department memo “… all employees have the responsibility to enforce the law in a neutral and impartial manner…which is ‘particularly important’ in an election year.” According to Matthew Miller, former Director of the Justice Department’s Public Affairs Office, this becomes all the more sensitive, nay, critical as Election Day draws near: 
+“Justice traditionally bends over backward to avoid taking any action that might be seen by the public as influencing an election, often declining to even take private steps that might become public in the 60 days leading up to an election.” 
+This rule finds firm footing in the position of a host of former and current Attorneys General and senior prosecutors. For example, it has been reported that former AG Janet Reno was “adamant… anything that could influence the election had to go dark,” as she suspended a politically sensitive investigation… one much further removed in time from Election Day than the most recent blindside, by the FBI Director, just 11 days before the vote to see who will lead this country for the next four years. 
+Remarkably, it appears Comey completely ignored the “preference” of current Attorney General Lynch… his boss… as well as her deputies that he adhere to a well established DOJ policy of remaining silent about on-going investigations and refrain from taking any steps that could influence the outcome of an election . This view has been shared by Republican prosecutors as well. As noted by George J. Terwilliger III, a deputy attorney general under President George Bush, “There’s a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election.” He added “Those guidelines exist for a reason. Sometimes, that makes for hard decisions. But bypassing them has consequences.” 
+Sadly, Comey’s palpable decision to charge full steam ahead and place his own view and reputation before that of the electoral process as so much the ultimate arbiter of what he believes the public should know and not… real or otherwise… on the eve of this election is not sui generis . Although different in approach, and context, he now follows a long and time tested tradition of corrupt and venal FBI directors who have not hesitated to implement personal political agendas ranging from the Palmer raids upon anarchists of the early 20 th century, to the blacklisting and perjury traps of McCarthy , to the murder of black activists under COINTELPRO . 
+Comey is many things. He is not however stupid or brash. He had to know that what essentially constituted a vaguely worded personal press release, in the final desperate days of a very ugly campaign, would be seized upon, by an opposing candidate, media pundits and the public, as newly discovered evidence of criminality, even without verification, that might very well alter the course of US history. 
+To him, it mattered not that the “new” emails were as yet unparsed. Nor did he care that their timed release would almost certainly have the consequence, if not the intended effect, to mislead the American people already battered and tired by unprecedented levels of empty rhetoric and unfounded accusations by both sides. 
+One can only wonder whether Comey’s blindside was simply breathtaking in its carelessness or… like the beat cop who has decided who goes to jail and who goes home… a calculated decision to place his own personal stamp of approval on who he wants to see as his next uber boss. 
+The path from street corners or, at times, even Board Rooms to prison cells is not a complicated walk at all. It seems these days the road to the White House is pretty much the same march… just a bit longer and nastier.",FAKE
+6427,False Flag Attack Coming in Syria as Americans Sleepwalk Into World War III - Isaac Davis,"Originally appeared at Waking Times 
+Americans are sleepwalking into World War III , and as events in Syria are shaping up it could come any moment as the biggest October surprise ever. At this stage in the conflict, we are one minor event away from all out war between the world’s major super powers, an event which would most certainly result in nuclear war. All that is needed is for the right type of false flag event to serve as provocation. 
+“In naval warfare, a “false flag” refers to an attack where a vessel flies a flag other than their true battle flag before engaging their enemy. It is a trick, designed to deceive the enemy about the true nature and origin of an attack.” [ Source ] 
+As the world pretends to be ruled by democratically elected governments, and as the world’s people feign freedom under an ever-expanding surveillance, police and warfare state, some semblance of pretext is needed in order to manufacture sufficient consent for the oligarchy’s standing plans of forcing us into expansion of the Orwellian Permanent War . A brief look at how this tactic has historically been used helps to predict what is certainly forthcoming in Syria, as paraphrased from James Corbett of the Corbett Report . 
+1780’s – The Swedish-Russian War of 1788-1790 began when Swedish troops were intentionally dressed up as Russian troops then sent to attack their own border with Finland, effectively tricking the public into believing Russia had attacked, thereby kicking off a war will killed thousands. 
+1931 – The Japanese army deliberately destroyed a portion of a Japanese owned railway, then blamed it on Chinese dissidents to justify the military occupation of Manchuria . 
+1939 – Nazi war engineers dressed up Polish prisoners in Polish military uniforms and directed them to attack a German radio station. They prisoners were shot dead and their bodies left on the scene as evidence of Polish aggression, leading to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, signifying the official start of World War II. 
+1954 – Operation Susannah was an Israeli effort to convince the British military to continue their military presence in the Suez Canal, in support of Israeli interests. Egyptian patsies were hired to detonate bombs in American and British civilian targets, then blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood. 
+1962 –“In 1962 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff authored a document called Operation Northwoods calling for the US government to stage a series of fake attacks, including the shooting down of military or civilian US aircraft, the destruction of a US ship, sniper attacks in Washington, and other atrocities, to blame on the Cubans as an excuse for launching an invasion. President Kennedy refused to sign off on the plan and was killed in Dallas the next year.” [ Source ] 
+1964 – A U.S. destroyer patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin was attacked by torpedoes, ostensibly by the North Vietnamese, thereby causing President Johnson the authorization of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, thus beginning U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. It is now known that no attack actually occurred and that the NSA was involved in fabricating this event. 
+1967 –“In June 1967 the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty , a US Navy technical research ship, off the coast of Egypt. The ship was strafed relentlessly for hours in an apparent attempt to blame the attack on Egypt and draw the Americans into the Six Day War, but amazingly the crew managed to keep it afloat. In 2007 newly released NSA intercepts confirmed that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship, not an Egyptian ship as their cover story has maintained.” [ Source ] 
+1999 – A series of devastating bombings on civilian apartment buildings in Russia were blamed on Chechen terrorists, although Russian FSB agents were later caught using the exact same type of bombs in what was publicly called a security exercise. 
+2001 – The 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington were blamed on 19 Al Qaeda terrorists and immediately used the pretext for beginning the Global War on Terror , of which the political doctrine for this was already in place and in play. 15 years later , information about the true nature of the attacks is still surfacing, proving that the 9/11 Commission was a whitewash to help catalyze public support still ongoing wars which were planned prior to 9/11 . 
+“Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor.” –[ Source ] 
+Furthermore, other examples of historical significance demonstrate how minor or ambiguous events are seized on and deliberately used as propaganda to achieve the greater objective of drawing nations into war. 
+1915 – The sinking of the British ocean liner The Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, which was carrying tons of war materials from America, was blamed on German u-boats, leading to a severe diplomatic row which brought the United States into World War I. Speculation remains as to what exactly happened to the Lusitania, however, the official explanation is highly suspicious , and the event was used to achieve the objectives of war financiers to broaden the conflict. 
+1933 – A German parliamentary building in the Reichstag was set ablaze one month after Hitler’s election to the office of Chancellor. It is believed that three Bulgarian communists were to blame, however this is contentious among historians. The event was heavily propagandized by the Nazi party to galvanize support for war. 
+One can also include in this list an ever-growing growing handful of European and American domestic terror attacks such as the London bombings of 2005 , and the Bataclan theatre massacre of Paris in 2015 . To further expand on the historical precedent of using false flag attacks to propel agendas of state aggression, many instances of assassination and military intervention into the politics of sovereign nations around the world in order create consent for militarism could be included. Final Thoughts 
+As the U.S. continues to aid and support ISIS, Al-Nusra and other terrorist organizations in its ploy to overthrow the Assad government for the primary benefit of Israel, a false flag event signaling the beginning of a direct confrontation with Russia could come at any time. At present it looks as though the most likely scenario would be something along the lines of the USS Liberty attack, which would involve the deliberate targeting of our own forces while creating the perception of a Russian attack on U.S. or NATO components. 
+The situation in Syria is ripe for exactly this kind of covert, subversive tactic. There is historical precedence to suggest that a Syrian false flag event is imminent, therefore people the world over must prepare to resist and to survive this. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount 
+If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire",FAKE
+2563,"Obama Hosts ‘Dreamers,’ Vows to Block Any Rollback of Immigration Actions","President Barack Obama held a meeting with six illegal immigrants in the Oval Office Wednesday, vowing to veto any legislation that would roll back his executive actions on immigration.",REAL
+5069,Did Bernie Sanders seal deal for Clinton?,"Raul A. Reyes, an attorney and member of the USA Today board of contributors, writes frequently for CNN Opinion. Follow him on Twitter @RaulAReyes . The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
+
+On Monday night, Bernie Sanders finally did what all runners-up for a presidential nomination are tasked with doing. It is not easy and it certainly is humbling (ask Hillary Clinton, circa 2008). But Sanders rose to the occasion at that Democratic National Convention and gave a full-throated, public endorsement of his rival Clinton before a national audience and the crowd in the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.
+
+The most awaited speaker of the evening took an awfully long time to mention Hillary Clinton, which probably made some Clinton advisors a bit nervous. He thanked Mrs. Obama, Elizabeth Warren, his delegates and supporters and donors, and the people of Vermont, among others, before finally getting down to business. ""Based on her leadership and ideas,"" he said, ""Hillary Clinton must become president of the United States.""
+
+His cannily crafted speech melded the familiar themes of his stump speech with an endorsement of Clinton -- and it seemed, at times, in doing so he was allowing his supporters one last moment of collective grief at the end of his movement. There were numerous shots of Sanders' supporters in tears throughout the hall.
+
+It might have seem unusual to some viewers, the amount of time devoted on Monday to bringing the party together. But remember, Sanders was a phenomenon, and nothing about his run for the nomination was conventional. He deserved every second that he took addressing his supporters.
+
+Consider that for all the negative press directed at Trump's convention, Donald Trump has received a bounce in national polls since last week. So the big questions going into the night was whether Sanders would be able to bring his supporters into the Clinton camp, and whether the DNC could stage a convincing show of party unity. At least on Day 1, it looks like the answer is yes on both counts.
+
+While the Democrats still have some healing to do -- as evidenced by the occasional dueling chants of ""Bernie!"" versus ""Hillary!"", and edgier variations on those themes -- there were significant differences on display between the Republican National Convention last week and the DNC. Unlike the RNC, every person who took the stage mentioned their party's nominee's name -- and often. Unlike the RNC, there was more diversity on the stage tonight than all week in Cleveland. And unlike the RNC, we saw some serious star power, from Eva Longoria to Demi Lovato to Paul Simon. Sorry, Chachi.
+
+Monday night also stood in sharp contrast to the RNC because so many of the speakers on stage -- which included a disabled person, Latinos, immigrants, and a Muslim American -- represented some of the very types of people that Trump has mocked. What's more, instead of simply making a case against Trump, speaker after speaker made the case for Clinton. This is how conventions should be run, and shows smart planning by the DNC.
+
+Perhaps the most courageous moment on Monday night -- one which lit up Twitter -- came, improbably, from comedian Sarah Silverman. As she and Al Franken vamped for time before Paul Simon's performance, she set off a fresh round of boos and chants with her sudden remark : ""to the Bernie or Bust people, you're being ridiculous!"" She was right -- and it was refreshing to hear her stating what so many Democrats have been thinking.
+
+But it was Michelle Obama who was unquestionably the star of the night. She managed to take down Trump without ever mentioning his name, and she made a rock-solid case for Clinton.
+
+""I want a president with a record of public service,"" she said, before noting, as she described the remarkable evolution of the country, that she wakes up every day in a house built by slaves. Michelle Obama made the critical point that the President has an impact on our children, which is something that undecided voters need to hear. She showed restraint and class in not joking about or referencing Melania Trump. Very wise, and gracious to boot.
+
+Up next: Elizabeth Warren, whose job was somewhat akin to following Beyonce. She was as upfront and persuasive as usual, pointing out the dearth of a plan for the country from Trump, and noting his opposition to the minimum wage and to lowering student debt. Yet she suffered from following the First Lady, and on the tail of such an uplifting speech, hers felt a bit flat.
+
+If there was one thing wrong with the program on Monday night, it was that perhaps Michelle Obama should have been scheduled last. Though Sanders' endorsement was necessary and long-awaited, it was Mrs. Obama's speech that was the real home run. Her speech was one for the ages, and should have closed out Day 1.
+
+Still, the overall the messages of inclusion and hope tonight likely left many viewers feeling more optimistic than they did after watching the doomful RNC.
+
+There were indeed legitimate concerns that the Democratic National Convention might not kick off with the harmony that the Clinton campaign envisioned.
+
+However, as it as it turned out, the takeaway from Day One of DNC 2016 seems to be that they are one raucous, if slightly dysfunctional, family.",REAL
+1031,This is only the beginning: Nate Silver explains how Donald Trump has “hacked the system” and created a roadmap for future political con men,"Donald Trump has a gift for managing news cycles. If his bloated head contains a spark of genius, this is where it shines. Trump understood as far back as 2013 what it would take to execute a political con of this scale: work the media, create controversy, become an impossible-to-ignore circus. This is what Trump meant when he said “it’s about the power of the mass audience.”
+
+He’s approached his campaign in the same way a producer would approach a reality TV show. It’s about spectacle, really. “They will never take the lights off of me,” Trump told a group of incredulous Republicans who didn’t believe he could run for president without paid advertising. He was obviously correct: We haven’t taken the lights off of him, and doing so is unthinkable at this point, given his position in the race.
+
+On Wednesday, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com dove a little deeper into the Trump coverage, trying to understand how this happened. “Trump has been able to disrupt the news pretty much any time he wants,” Silver wrote, “whether by being newsworthy, offensive, salacious or entertaining. The media has almost always played along.”
+
+Of course, the press has played along – it can’t do otherwise. A corporatized media has turned citizens into consumers, and politicians into products. Trump understands this and he acts accordingly – it’s really quite simple. His whole career has been about brand management, which is now all the training a national politician needs.
+
+Trump’s media-centric strategy has been wildly successful. He’s received what amounts to $1.9 billion in TV coverage despite having spent only $10 million on paid advertising. “By contrast,” Silver notes, “Trump’s Republican rivals combined have received slightly less than $1.2 billion worth of television coverage, meaning that Trump has been the subject of the clear majority (62 percent) of candidate-focused TV coverage.”
+
+Silver’s broader conclusion is that Trump has “hacked the system,” which is to say he’s exploited a broken process with a perverse incentive structure. He writes:
+
+“Put another way, Trump has hacked the system and exposed the weaknesses in American political institutions. He’s uncovered profound flaws in the Republican Party. He’s demonstrated that third-rail issues like racism and nationalism can still be a potent political force. He’s exploited the media’s goodwill and taken advantage of the lack of trust the American public has in journalism. Trump may go away – he’s not assured of winning the GOP nomination, and he’ll be an underdog in November if he does – but the problems he’s exposed were years in the making, and they’ll take years to sort out.”
+
+All of this is undoubtedly true. Our political institutions have failed us. The system is so corrupt, so inert, that it’s become more or less unresponsive to the general will. The Republican Party, for its part, has done nothing but stir the pot. By becoming a party of anti-government nihilists, they’ve conditioned voters to despise the state. “Washington” has become a euphemism for everything wrong. But that’s only because Republicans sought to break the government (via brinkmanship and obstructionism) in order to reproach the Democrats for mismanaging it. The result is a large bloc of voters who literally prefer anyone other than a politician – experience and credentials be damned! Thus it’s no surprise Trump has inched his way to the top of the GOP. Everything about our political climate incentivizes his approach. The Balkanized media guarantees people will continue to get the information they want, not the information they need, which further undermines trust in the institution. And the so-called mainstream media will persist in covering the circus, because that’s their business. It’s about shareholders and ratings – and nothing besides. Trump has indeed exposed these problems. What Silver doesn’t say, but certainly implies, is that this is only the beginning. Others will follow Trump. The problems he’s laid bare aren’t going away. So long as the system remains unchanged, a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin or a Herman Cain will inevitably emerge. Trump is a force of nature, and his blend of amorality and shamelessness is rare, but future hucksters will learn from his campaign. We may see the end of Trump in November, but we haven’t seen the end of the crisis he personifies.",REAL
+8841,Kenyan marathon runner Rita Jeptoo banned 2 more years for doping,"News Bulletin Rita Jeptoo celebrates with the trophy after winning the 2014 Boston Marathon. © Getty 
+Kenyan marathon star Rita Jeptoo has been handed another 2-year ban by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) for doping. This means she will be out of action until the 30th October 2018. The 33 year old was initially banned for 2 years by the Athletics Kenya, after testing positive for the performance enhancing drug EPO, during the 2014 Chicago and Boston Marathon. But the world athletics' governing body, the IAAF challenged the ban and appealed to CAS, for it to be increased. 
+This is while, the ban has also seen her lose her titles. In addition, she was ordered to pay 15,000 dollars, as a contribution to the IAAF's legal fees and expenses. Loading ...",FAKE
+7767,DISGUSTING Evolution Of Political Correctness From 200 To 2016,"You are here: Home / US / DISGUSTING Evolution Of Political Correctness From 200 To 2016 DISGUSTING Evolution Of Political Correctness From 200 To 2016 October 29, 2016 
+C.E. Dyer reports a so-called Christian humanist said one of the most ignorant and dangerous things that has probably ever been said regarding radical Islam and Christianity — that fundamentalist Christianity is more dangerous than radical Islam. 
+The Chicago Maroon reported : 
+A leading humanist scholar stressed symbolic Bible reading and warned of the radical right at a talk on Tuesday at the Seminary Co-Op. 
+For Catherine M. Wallace, faculty member at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine and author of the recently concluded book series Christian Humanism and the Moral Imagination , the Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States is more dangerous than Islamic terrorism. Wallace, a Christian herself, believes fundamentalist access to United States armaments is the number one threat to state security. 
+Wallace said, “If [anything Islamic] wanted to attack an American city, they had to hijack an airliner. If they want to blow up a concert, they need to put bombs on their own children and send young men in to kill themselves… that kind of radicalism [Christian fundamentalism] in control of nuclear codes was a much, much greater threat.” 
+“The religious right in its most contemporary form has an origin in Southern opposition to desegregation and to the Civil Rights Movement… a transparently racist appeal,” her ignorant interpretation of the “religious right” continued. 
+Wallace claimed that the literal interpretation of the Bible is problematic and that “nobody in the ancient world would have read the Bible literally.” She added that, “Christian fundamentalism is a malignant form of Christianity.” 
+This is what passes for a scholar in America. Scary, isn’t it? Even scarier than that is what radical Islamists are doing around the world. 
+Beheading, rape, crucifixion, torture, and more are all being carried out by radical Islamists around the world, but that can’t get in the way of the liberal attempt to tear down Christianity in America. 
+See, people like Wallace can get away with this kind of pseudo-intellectual garbage because fundamental Christians are nowhere near as bad as radical Islamists, and even people like Wallace probably know that on some level. 
+I doubt Wallace is going to take a flight to the Middle East and try to have a discussion with radical Islamists about how abhorrent their interpretation of Islam is, because she wouldn’t last too long. 
+Now, Wallace might argue that she was talking about the threat in this country, but that doesn’t hold water. Radical Islam is coming to America and is already here. There are radicalized mosques in this country that we can’t properly monitor because of political correctness. 
+Hey, maybe Wallace should have her next conversation at one of the radicalized mosques in this country and see how that goes over. Good luck!",FAKE
+6070,Are you taking your iodine?,"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 08:04 UTC © periodictable.com Are you taking your iodine? Everyone should be supplementing with iodine but if you live on the west coast of the United States, Canada or Mexico you better be taking your iodine and your children should be taking their iodine because: Thanks to the environmental disaster that was Fukushima and the incredibly long half-life of iodine-129, the Pacific coast may never be the same again. It will take about 16 million years for the contamination from the tremendous nuclear accident to dissipate . While a vast array of radioactive isotopes were released into the environment during the Fukushima meltdown, iodine-129 is a particularly concerning material, due to its incredibly long half-life. This means that basically any food that comes from the North American western coast will likely be contaminated with radiation for innumerable generations to come. Radiation in the oceans will inevitably enter our water supply, and consequently our food supply as well. According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), iodine from the ocean enters the air as sea spray or iodine gas. Once in the air, iodine can then combine with water particles and enter surface water and soil once the particles fall to ground. Iodine can remain in the soil for extremely long periods of time, because it can combine with organic material easily. Plants and vegetation that grow in this soil also have the potential to absorb the iodine. Iodine could potentially improve your health People who have low iodine levels are more likely to get thyroid cancer than those who do not. Low iodine levels also cause goiter (an enlarged thyroid) and this increases the chance of developing thyroid cancer. When faced with a radioactive cloud, as is everyone in the northern hemisphere thanks to Fukushima, it is absolutely imperative that we take iodine, whatever iodine you can get your hands on. If the only iodine available is topical iodine that is not suitable for oral use then you should paint your body and your children's bodies with it. Dr. Brownstein writes, ""If there is enough inorganic, non-radioactive iodine in our bodies, the radioactive fallout has nowhere to bind in our bodies. It will pass through us, leaving our bodies unharmed. It is important to ensure that we have adequate iodine levels before this fallout hits."" Dr. Michael B. Schachter says, ""The treatment dose when a person is iodine insufficient is generally between 12.5 mg and 50 mg daily. Preliminary research indicates that if a person is iodine insufficient, it takes about three months to become iodine sufficient while ingesting a dosage of 50 mg of iodine daily and a year to achieve that while ingesting a dosage of 12.5 mg of iodine daily. Women with a history of low iodine levels (hypothyroidism) face a significantly higher risk of developing liver cancer. Researchers led by Manal Hassan of Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas concluded that this finding suggested a clinical association between hypothyroidism and hepatitis C, which is contributing to the country's rising rate of liver cancer. ""At 6 grams daily (which is 6 million micrograms/day or 6,000 milligrams/day!), a much higher dose, iodine has been used to cure syphilis, skin lesions, and chronic lung disease ,"" says Dr. Gabriel Cousens . ""From a larger physiological perspective, it is important to realize that the thyroid is only one gland of many glands and tissues that needs iodine. Other glands/organs/systems with high iodine uptake are the breasts, ovaries, cervix, blood, lymph, bones, gastric mucosal, salivary, adrenal, prostate, colon, thymus, lungs, bladder, kidney, and skin. Iodine is found and used in every hormonal receptor in the body,"" he states. No one recommends that much iodine today but it is good to understand iodine so one is not afraid to take as much as one needs. Iodine prevents cancer especially in the breasts, ovaries and prostate gland. It is also extremely important in the age of antibiotic resistant infections for it kills viruses, bacteria and fungi. Breast tissue contains the body's third highest concentrations of this essential mineral, so shortfalls in iodine needs have a highly negative impact on breast tissue. Iodine shortfalls coupled with bromine and other toxic halogens cause fibrocystic breast disease and breast cancer . It is unbelievable that doctors nor the government recommends enough iodine to protect people from the harm that comes from not taking iodine. Makes me believe that most doctors have no idea how to practice medicine—not real medicine that helps more than it hurts. The iodine in salt is enough only to prevent goiter but nothing else. Comment: For more information on the benefits of iodine and how to take it, read:",FAKE
+4253,Mexico’s top diplomat calls Trump’s policies ‘ignorant and racist’,"In the sharpest official Mexican government comments to date on Republican front-runner Donald Trump, the foreign minister called Trump’s policies and comments “ignorant and racist” and his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border “absurd.”
+
+“When an apple’s red, it is red. When you say ignorant things, you’re ignorant,” said Foreign Affairs Secretary Claudia Ruiz Massieu, Mexico’s top diplomat.
+
+“It is impossible to think of a 2,000-mile border being walled off and trade between our two countries stopped,” Ruiz Massieu said. “It is impractical, inefficient, wrong and, frankly, it is not an intelligent thing to do.”
+
+As for Mexico paying for Trump’s proposed wall, she said: “It is not a proposition we would even consider. It is an impossible proposition.”
+
+Ruiz Massieu spoke Friday evening, capping a week in which two former Mexican presidents told The Washington Post that Trump’s policies and growing popularity are poisoning Mexican views of the United States.
+
+From the start of his campaign, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been promising that he will build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and that Mexico will pay for it. Not if these men have anything to say about it. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
+
+Former presidents Vicente Fox and his successor, Felipe Calderón, who ran Mexico from 2000 to 2012, have said the fact that Trump is winning Republican primaries and is a front-runner for the White House is damaging the image of the United States abroad.
+
+[Fox and Calderón take aim at Trump and his ‘stupid wall’]
+
+Trump’s comments, and how well they are playing with voters, are especially alarming in this country, which does more than $500 billion worth of trade each year with the United States and buys more U.S. goods than China and Japan combined.
+
+Trump’s call for deporting undocumented immigrants and building a massive wall along the length of the Mexican border is a central pillar of his campaign. Millions of Mexicans see it as insulting and racist and say he has specifically targeted Mexicans by saying Mexico is sending its worst citizens to the United States, including “criminals” and “rapists.”
+
+Mexican officials see Trump’s calls for tariffs on cars made in Mexico and his giant wall as a threat to the thriving trade that millions of jobs in both countries depend on.
+
+Fox used an expletive rarely heard from a politician in public to reject the idea of Mexico paying for Trump’s wall this week. Then Trump demanded Fox apologize for his language. On Friday, La Jornada, a leading left-leaning newspaper, published a cartoon of a furious-looking Trump shouting: “I demand respect. Only I can use bad manners and bad words!”
+
+Trump has become a popular target of scorn in Mexico, where he has been trashed in folk songs and in computer games in which players get to fling shoes, cakes and tomatoes at him.
+
+Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who was elected to a six-year term in 2012, has largely avoided responding to Trump directly, but he said in a meeting this week with Vice President Biden in Mexico City that building walls “only means isolating oneself and ending up alone.”
+
+Biden was in Mexico for high-level economic talks, which also included the U.S. secretaries of commerce, interior, transportation and energy, and the deputy secretary of homeland security.
+
+Biden’s comments this week were top news when he told Peña Nieto that Trump’s views about Mexico were “the exact opposite” of the position of the “majority of the American people.”
+
+“I feel almost obliged to apologize for some of what my political colleagues have said about Mexico,” Biden said. “The main message I wanted to say to you is that I understand that you can’t poison the well and, at the same time, work out a real estate arrangement to buy the well,” Biden said.
+
+[Trump’s border wall price tag would be a huge portion of the Mexican economy]
+
+In an interview late Friday evening in her office, Ruiz Massieu, said Trump does not represent the views of most Americans.
+
+“It sounds ignorant and racist because it is,” she said. “We are pretty sure that’s not the way most Americans feel. It was a country that was founded on tolerance, on openness, on taking in people from other places and enriching a society by embracing diversity. That’s the way American values are.”
+
+She said that saying the Mexican American community does not contribute to the United States’ well-being and growth is “ignorant” and “ignores the facts.”
+
+She added: “History has also shown that when anti-immigrant rhetoric turns into policy or laws, it is a bad idea. You lose money, you lose people, you lose trust.”
+
+She said the Mexican government would respond to Trump’s rise by urging Mexican Americans in the United States to “participate and become heard in the electoral process, which is not over yet.”
+
+“I’m optimistic that people will stand up for themselves and vote in accordance to their values and their views,” she said.
+
+“For Mexicans and many people around the world, what this has brought to light is that you have to continuously work to remind everyone that it is better to work together,” she said. “It is better to build bridges than to build walls.”",REAL
+2865,Iran Nuclear Talks Go To The Wire With 50-50 Chance of Success,"Negotiators have been hesitant to publicly share details, but there is obvious discord between Iranians and the U.S. on Iran's demand for sanctions relief. Iranians have long insisted that a final agreement, to be reached by June 30, should trigger an instant lifting of the broad sanctions imposed by the U.S., the European Union, and the United Nations. American negotiators have argued that sanctions relief must occur gradually, as Iran demonstrates compliance with terms of the nuclear agreement.
+
+Both sides are facing tremendous pressure back home to avoid compromising. Sanctions have crippled Iran’s economy, which is heavily dependent on oil exports. Perhaps more importantly, Iranians see the international sanctions as an injustice that should be reversed immediately as part of any comprehensive nuclear deal.
+
+Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) is pushing for a veto-proof majority on a bill that would allow Congress to vote on the final deal and strip the president of authority to temporarily waive sanctions. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) became the most recent Democratic senator to lend his support, tentatively putting the Corker bill about four votes shy of the 67 needed to override a presidential veto.
+
+Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) have formidable support for a separate bill, which would impose new sanctions on Iran if negotiators fail to reach an agreement by the June 30 deadline. Sensing hesitance from Democrats, Menendez agreed to delay voting on the bill until after the March 31 deadline.
+
+Obama has promised to veto both bills and has pleaded with lawmakers to hold off on legislation until the negotiations are complete. The president said either the Corker or the Kirk-Menendez bill would likely derail negotiations at this point. Failure to reach a political framework by Tuesday could prompt lawmakers to take action.
+
+Sanctions are far from the only hurdle. Iran currently has 19,000 centrifuges, including 10,000 that are spinning to produce uranium. While leaked details of the talks indicate that the parties have agreed to Iran keeping about 6,000 centrifuges in operation, there is disagreement about how sophisticated the remaining centrifuges can be, and where they can produce uranium.
+
+On Thursday, The Associated Press reported that Tehran may be able to continue running centrifuges at Fordow, a once-secret underground bunker that would likely be invulnerable to a military strike if it were to host illegal nuclear activity in the future.
+
+Menendez responded to the report with outrage. “We have pivoted away from demanding the closure of Fordow when the negotiations began, to considering its conversion into a research facility, to now allowing hundreds of centrifuges to spin at this underground bunker site where centrifuges could be quickly repurposed for illicit nuclear enrichment purposes,” he said in a statement. “My fear is that we are no longer guided by the principle that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal,’ but instead we are negotiating ‘any deal for a deal’s sake.’”
+
+The rumored concession at Fordow would be in return for increased limitations on centrifuges and research and development work at other nuclear sites, according to the AP. Fordow would be subject to international inspections and the centrifuges there would operate on zinc, xenon, or geranium, rather than uranium, which can be enriched to fuel a nuclear weapon.
+
+Regardless of the number of centrifuges ultimately left in operation, Iran’s stockpiles of uranium puts its breakout period -- the time needed to produce enough material for a nuclear weapon -- less than the one year baseline that the U.S. has insisted upon for any final agreement.
+
+At one point, Tehran appeared willing to ship its stockpile of uranium to Russia, where it would be converted to fuel rods. In recent days, Iranian negotiator Abbas Araqchi balked at the idea of sending uranium abroad, as first reported in The New York Times. An alternative to exporting uranium may be to dilute it into lower-grade material that could not be used for weapons.
+
+ 
+
+ Further complicating the goal of reaching a political framework is defining what that means. Because political and technical components of Iran’s nuclear program often overlap, there has never been a publicly shared list of benchmarks for Tuesday's deadline. In fact, it's unclear whether the political framework should produce a signed document, or simply an understanding between the negotiating parties.
+
+“The March 31 deadline for reaching a framework agreement is a soft target,” Davenport explained in an email to The Huffington Post. “Given that the expectation for the end of March is a broad framework outlining the major parameters of a deal, a signed document is extremely unlikely because there will still be technical annexes that both sides will want to see worked out.
+
+“While failure to reach a framework agreement by the end of March will certainly result in a backlash from those that want to derail negotiations and kill the prospects for a deal, the real focus must remain on completing an entire agreement by June 30,” Davenport added. 
+
+",REAL
+4766,Eric Trump ‘Charity’ Spent $880K at Family-Owned Golf Resorts,"The younger Trump swears his foundation gives all of its money away to good causes. Which is true, if you don’t count the cash spent on Trump-owned resorts. Or the plastic surgeon.
+
+Those are some of the beneficiaries of the Eric Trump Foundation, an eponymous public charity headed by the Republican presidential nominee’s third-born. Though Eric Trump—the executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, and one of his father’s top surrogates and closest political advisers—recently claimed his father had donated “hundreds of thousands” to his charity, the only available evidence seems to suggest payments, in fact, went the other way: the Eric Trump Foundation (ETF) paying hundreds of thousands over the last 10 years to host lavish fundraising events at Donald Trump’s golf courses.
+
+In promotional videos and press releases, ETF touts a 95 to 100 percent donation ratio and implies that by benefit of being a Trump, namesake properties are handed over for charity events at little or no cost. But according to a Daily Beast analysis of annual IRS reports and New York state financial disclosures from the charity’s inception in 2007 to 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, ETF spent $881,779 on its annual Golf Invitational at Trump-owned clubs, a portion of which—$100,000 in 2013 and $88,000 in 2014—was reported as paid directly “to a company of a family member of the Board of Directors.” In other words, Donald Trump himself.
+
+Donald Trump, and his private foundation, are already in hot water as reports swirl of suspected self-dealing, or using his foundation funds for private gain. Indeed, the man who considers a presidential run as an opportunity to turn a profit made headlines and invited criticism this week, after The Washington Post revealed that the self-professed billionaire had reportedly used monies from the Donald J. Trump Foundation to pay off $258,000 in legal disputes. Previous reports found Donald Trump had also used the fund—which he hasn’t personally donated to since 2008—to purchase portraits of himself, and gift $25,000 to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in a possible quid pro quo to head off an investigation into his shady Trump University, both of which may have violated federal and state tax laws. New York’s attorney general is currently investigating the reports.
+
+Of course, viewed through the prism of his father’s questionable philanthropic practices, Eric Trump’s foundation seems downright angelic. Eric Trump’s foundation operates with almost no overhead: Eric neither pays himself nor his board members and relies on Trump Organization employees who volunteer for whatever the foundation may need. Most importantly, Eric Trump’s charity has, over the last 10 years according to its tax reports, raised $6.5 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a beloved Tennessee-based nonprofit that treats children with catastrophic diseases free-of-charge. That figure nearly doubles, when you include the year-long fundraisers utilizing Trump hotels—where guests are encouraged to donate and buy special services, a percentage of which goes to St. Jude—and employees, who both contribute their money and volunteer their time by competing in company-wide contests and organizing events like car washes, bake sales, and walk-a-thons, to raise cash that goes straight to the hospital—over $600,000 this past year, according to ETF’s executive director, Paige Scardigli.
+
+“We pride ourselves on having an extremely low expense ratio and that is only made possible by leveraging off the Trump assets,” Scardigli wrote in an email to The Daily Beast. “Trump assets are not profiting from these ETF events, but instead they are donating their time and resources to the cause.”
+
+“We’re so lucky as Trumps to have the best hotels in the world, to have the best golf courses in the world, and other great assets, and we’re so lucky to be able to use those assets at our disposal for a great purpose. And that’s really what ETF is,” Eric says in a 2016 video.
+
+“It sounds like they were just making a number up,” said Elizabeth Keating, a Boston University professor who studies nonprofit finance. “They should have had a proposal that said, ‘These are the costs,’ for which there should be an invoice, detailing what the foundation was paying for. Instead it sounds like the golf course just said, 'Give us $100,000.'”
+
+Scardigli took the reins as ETF’s director in January, replacing a woman who left the organization after eight months. And hers wasn’t the only high-level dropout this year. The foundation’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee have each lost a member since March: Jeffrey Lichtenberg, a freelance real-estate broker and consultant with a history of bid rigging on construction projects, and Nathan Crisp, until recently, a Trump Hotels executive who police accused of twice slamming a Brooklyn mother to the ground on Easter.
+
+When asked why the Trump Organization didn’t donate the use of the courses, Michael Cohen, a longtime attorney to Donald Trump and board member on the Eric Trump foundation, said, “I believe there are certain rules that you do have to pay for certain things—they’re not marked up. It’s inexpensive. I think there’s some law that says you have to.”
+
+Trump National Golf Club Westchester, where ETF’s annual event is held, did not return a request for event pricing, but charities which have held fundraisers at Trump clubs showed similar expenses and revenue in their tax reports (known as 990s), suggesting Eric Trump indeed paid a standard rate—around $100,000—for use of his father’s property. Tic Toc Stop, a charity dedicated to funding Tourette Syndrome research, paid $51,700 for a smaller golf outing in 2014. And according to The Boston Globe, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute—which has held its annual gala at Trump’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, for the last six years—paid around $150,000 for a fundraiser with up to 600 guests. The most recent ETF fundraiser boasted 500 attendees.
+
+Though the Eric Trump Foundation’s website says, “We exclusively support St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,” that isn’t the case. In 2012, ETF began donating in earnest to other causes, cutting small checks to 40 individual charities in addition to the outsize donation given to the children’s hospital. Some of these small donations—like the $1,600 to the American Society for Enology and Viticulture, a California wine industry organization where Eric Trump once gave a keynote address—have seemingly little to do with the charity’s mission of helping sick children.
+
+The cat’s cradle of connections don’t end there. The GSM fund paid out $43,231 that same year for their golf tournament—an annual event held at Trump’s Hudson Valley course that cost nearly double what the charity gave out in grants that year. They, along with at least six other charities that have received donations from the Eric Trump Foundation since 2012, hold fundraising events at Trump golf clubs.",REAL
+434,Overdue change in overtime pay: Our view,"For most people, a salaried job paying $25,000 a year is far from exceptional. It corresponds to an hourly wage of roughly $14, which isn’t enough to live on in many pricey metro areas.
+
+But, according to existing federal labor rules, a $25,000 job can be classified as managerial or given another designation that exempts it from overtime pay. That's why the Obama administration moved this week to change those rules. As of Dec. 1, the minimum annual salary that can be excluded from overtime will be raised from $23,660 to $47,476, unless opponents manage to block the change in Congress or the courts.
+
+The move is long overdue. The percentage of people eligible for overtime has been in a free fall since its high in 1975. Then, 62% of salaried workers were paid overtime for work over 40 hours. Today the number is 7%. And it was even lower before 2004, when the Bush administration made some needed changes.
+
+Setting a new minimum salary is, to be sure, an inexact science. An annual salary of $23,660 might once have been called middle income, even managerial. Today, that does not pass the laugh test as a threshold for a management or professional job.
+
+The new level of $47,476 is slightly less than it would have been had it been adjusted for inflation each year since 1975. It would increase the percentage of workers who qualify for overtime to 35%. That seems like a reasonable place to start.
+
+It also seems reasonable that the new level should be indexed for inflation as well. But this and future administrations need to recognize that any action can produce unintended consequences, and should be willing to adjust the number if circumstances warrant.
+
+These new rules are the latest effort by the Obama administration to push up worker pay in the face of a decidedly hostile Congress. With Republicans refusing to budge on the federal minimum wage, Obama settled on overtime rules in part because he could alter them without legislation.
+
+In truth, the overtime rules are probably a better way to assist workers than by tweaking the minimum wage, now at $7.25 an hour. The minimum wage affects a small segment of the working population (about 1.5 million people, compared with 4.2 million people who'd qualify for overtime under the new rules). And if the minimum is raised too far too fast, employers could respond by eliminating jobs.
+
+The response to changing overtime rules is likely to be less severe. If employers don’t want to pay overtime, they are more likely to cut people back to 40 hours a week, or to bump their salaries up to the new annual minimum of $47,476, than they are to eliminate jobs.
+
+Critics of the new rules argue that they will turn millions of professionals into clock-punchers while adding rigidity to what have been flexible and collegial work environments. There might be some truth to this. But clearly the current system has not served the interest of workers well.
+
+Most people in the lower- to middle-income brackets would rather have fair pay for their long hours than a fancier job title.
+
+USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.
+
+To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter.",REAL
+5194,This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America,"It’s nearing midnight as Steve Bannon pushes past the bluegrass band in his living room and through a crowd of Republican congressmen, political operatives, and a few stray Duck Dynasty cast members. He’s trying to make his way back to the SiriusXM Patriot radio show, broadcasting live from a cramped corner of the 14-room townhouse he occupies a stone’s throw from the Supreme Court. It’s late February, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing, and Bannon, as usual, is the whirlwind at the center of the action.
+
+Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the crusading right-wing populist website that’s a lineal descendant of the Drudge Report (its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, spent years apprenticing with Matt Drudge) and a haven for people who think Fox News is too polite and restrained. He’d spent the day at CPAC among the conservative faithful, zipping back and forth between his SiriusXM booth and an unlikely pair of guests he was squiring around: Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-wing UKIP party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty adornment invited after A&E suspended him for denouncing gays, delivered a wild rant about “beatniks” and sexually transmitted diseases that upstaged them all, to Bannon’s evident delight. “If there’s an explosion or a fire somewhere,” says Matthew Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington political editor, “Steve’s probably nearby with some matches.” Afterward, everyone piled into party buses and headed for the townhouse.
+
+Bannon, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker, is the sort of character who would stand out anywhere, but especially in the drab environs of Washington. A mile-a-minute talker who thrums with energy, his sentences speed off ahead of him and spin out into great pileups of nouns, verbs, and grins. With his swept-back blond hair and partiality to cargo shorts and flip-flops, he looks like Jeff Spicoli after a few decades of hard living, and he employs “dude” just as readily.
+
+Ordinarily, Bannon’s townhouse is crypt-quiet and feels like a museum, as it’s faithfully decorated down to its embroidered silk curtains and painted murals in authentic Lincoln-era detail. When I first stopped by in January, about the only sign that I hadn’t teleported back to the 1860s was a picture on the mantle of a smiling woman on a throne with a machine gun in her lap (it was Bannon’s daughter Maureen, a West Point grad and lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division; the throne belonged to Saddam Hussein—or once did). Until Bannon showed up, the only sounds I heard were faint noises from the basement, which might have been the young women he calls the Valkyries, after the war goddesses of Norse mythology who decided soldiers’ fates in battle. More on them later.
+
+On this February night, however, the party is roaring. Along with his CPAC triumph, a secret project he’d conceived was nearing fruition: His lawyers were almost finished vetting a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s murky financial dealings that he’s certain will upend the presidential race. “Dude, it’s going to be epic,” he tells me. I sip my “moonshine”—his wink at the Dynasty guests—and wonder, as people often do, whether Bannon is nuts. On my way out, the doorman hands me a gift: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” printed above an image of a honey badger, the insouciant African predator of YouTube fame whose catchphrase, “Honey badger don’t give a s---,” is the Breitbart motto.
+
+Bannon’s life is a succession of Gatsbyish reinventions that made him rich and landed him squarely in the middle of the 2016 presidential race: He’s been a naval officer, investment banker, minor Hollywood player, and political impresario. When former Disney chief Michael Ovitz’s empire was falling to pieces, Bannon sat Ovitz down in his living room and delivered the news that he was finished. When Sarah Palin was at the height of her fame, Bannon was whispering in her ear. When Donald Trump decided to blow up the Republican presidential field, Bannon encouraged his circus-like visit to the U.S.-Mexico border. John Boehner just quit as House speaker because of the mutinous frenzy Bannon and his confederates whipped up among conservatives. Today, backed by mysterious investors and a stream of Seinfeld royalties, he sits at the nexus of what Hillary Clinton once dubbed “the vast right-wing conspiracy,” where he and his network have done more than anyone else to complicate her presidential ambitions—and they plan to do more. But this “conspiracy,” at least under Bannon, has mutated into something different from what Clinton described: It’s as eager to go after establishment Republicans such as Boehner or Jeb Bush as Democrats like Clinton.
+
+“I come from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats,” says Bannon, by way of explaining his politics. “I wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter f---ed things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer. Still am. But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that Bush had f---ed up as badly as Carter. The whole country was a disaster.”
+
+As befits someone with his peripatetic background, Bannon is a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde figure in the complicated ecosystem of the right—he's two things at once. And he’s devised a method to influence politics that marries the old-style attack journalism of Breitbart.com, which helped drive out Boehner, with a more sophisticated approach, conducted through the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute, that builds rigorous, fact-based indictments against major politicians, then partners with mainstream media outlets conservatives typically despise to disseminate those findings to the broadest audience. The biggest product of this system is the project Bannon was so excited about at CPAC: the bestselling investigative book, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Published in May by HarperCollins, the book dominated the political landscape for weeks and probably did more to shape public perception of Hillary Clinton than any of the barbs from her Republican detractors.
+
+Jeb Bush is about to come in for the same treatment. On Oct. 19, GAI will publish Schweizer’s e-book, Bush Bucks: How Public Service and Corporations Helped Make Jeb Rich, that examines how Bush enriched himself after leaving the Florida governor’s mansion in 2007. A copy obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek examines Bush’s Florida land deals, corporate board sinecures, and seven-figure salary with Lehman Brothers, whose 2008 bankruptcy touched off the financial crisis. “It’s not as cinematic as the Clintons, with their warlords and Russian gangsters and that whole cast of bad guys,” says Bannon. “Bush is more prosaic. It’s really just grimy, low-energy crony capitalism.”
+
+While attacking the favored candidates in both parties at once may seem odd, Bannon says he’s motivated by the same populist disgust with Washington that’s animating candidates from Trump to Bernie Sanders. Like both, Bannon is having a bigger influence than anyone could have reasonably expected. But in the Year of the Outsider, it's perhaps fitting that a figure like Bannon, whom nobody saw coming, would roil the national political debate.
+
+Most days, Bannon can be found in his Hyde persona, in the Washington offices of Breitbart News. Operating from the basement of his townhouse—known to all as the Breitbart Embassy—Breitbart’s pirate crew became tribunes of the rising Tea Party movement after Barack Obama’s election, bedeviling GOP leaders and helping to foment the 2013 government shutdown. The site has also made life hell for Democrats by, for example, orchestrating the career-ending genital tweeting misfortune that cost New York Representative Anthony Weiner his seat in Congress in 2011. Tipped to Weiner’s proclivity for sexting with female admirers, Bannon says, the site paid trackers to follow his Twitter account 24 hours a day and eventually intercepted a crotch shot Weiner inadvertently made public. The ensuing scandal culminated in the surreal scene, carried live on television, of Andrew Breitbart hijacking Weiner’s press conference and fielding questions from astonished reporters.
+
+On occasion, this partisan zeal has led to egregious errors. Just before our lunch in January, a Breitbart reporter published an article assailing Obama’s nominee for attorney general, Loretta Lynch—but went after the wrong woman. She wasn’t, as the site reported, the Loretta Lynch who was once part of Bill Clinton’s defense team. The embarrassed reporter asked for time off. Bannon, allergic to any hint of concession, refused: “I told him, ‘No. In fact, you’re going to write a story every day this week.’ ” He shrugs. “We’re honey badgers,” he explains. “We don’t give a s---.”
+
+But Bannon realizes that politics is sometimes more effective when it’s subtle. So he’s nurtured a Dr. Jekyll side: In 2012 he became founding chairman of GAI, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research organization staffed with lawyers, data scientists, and forensic investigators. “What Peter and I noticed is that it’s facts, not rumors, that resonate with the best investigative reporters,” Bannon says, referring to GAI’s president. Established in Tallahassee to study crony capitalism and governmental malfeasance, GAI has collaborated with such mainstream news outlets as Newsweek, ABC News, and CBS’s 60 Minutes on stories ranging from insider trading in Congress to credit card fraud among presidential campaigns. It's essentially a mining operation for political scoops that now churns out books like Clinton Cash and Bush Bucks.
+
+What made Clinton Cash so unexpectedly influential is that mainstream news reporters picked up and often advanced Schweizer’s many examples of the Clintons’ apparent conflicts of interest in accepting money from large donors and foreign governments. (“Practically grotesque,” wrote Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination. “On any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption.”) Just before the book’s release, the New York Times ran a front-page story about a Canadian mining magnate, Frank Giustra, who gave tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and then flew Bill Clinton to Kazakhstan aboard his private jet to dine with the country’s autocratic president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Giustra subsequently won lucrative uranium-mining rights in the country. (Giustra denies that the Clinton dinner influenced his Kazakh mining decision.) The Times piece cited Schweizer’s still-unpublished book as a source of its reporting, puzzling many Times readers and prompting a reaction from the paper’s ombudswoman, Margaret Sullivan, who grudgingly concluded that, while no ethical standards were breached, “I still don’t like the way it looked.”
+
+For Bannon, the Clinton Cash uproar validated a personal theory, informed by his Goldman Sachs experience, about how conservatives can influence the media and why they failed the last time a Clinton was running for the White House. “In the 1990s,” he told me, “conservative media couldn’t take down [Bill] Clinton because most of what they produced was punditry and opinion, and they always oversold the conclusion: ‘It’s clearly impeachable!’ So they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.” What news conservatives did produce, such as David Brock’s Troopergate investigation on Paula Jones in the American Spectator, was often tainted in the eyes of mainstream editors by its explicit partisan association.
+
+In response, Bannon developed two related insights. “One of the things Goldman teaches you is, don’t be the first guy through the door because you’re going to get all the arrows. If it’s junk bonds, let Michael Milken lead the way,” he says. “Goldman would never lead in any product. Find a business partner.” His other insight was that the reporters staffing the investigative units of major newspapers aren’t the liberal ideologues of conservative fever dreams but kindred souls who could be recruited into his larger enterprise. “What you realize hanging out with investigative reporters is that, while they may be personally liberal, they don’t let that get in the way of a good story,” he says. “And if you bring them a real story built on facts, they’re f---ing badasses, and they’re fair.” Recently, I met with Brock, who renounced conservatism and became an important liberal strategist, fundraiser, and Clinton ally. He founded the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America and just published a book, Killing The Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary and Hijack Your Government. Brock’s attitude toward Bannon isn’t enmity toward an ideological opponent, as I'd expected, but rather a curiosity and professional respect for the tradecraft Bannon demonstrated in advancing the Clinton Cash narrative. What conservatives learned in the ’90s, Brock says, is that “your operation isn’t going to succeed if you don’t cross the barrier into the mainstream.” Back then, he says, conservative reporting had to undergo an elaborate laundering to influence U.S. politics. Reporters such as Brock would publish in small magazines and websites, then try to get their story planted in the British tabloids and hope a right-leaning U.S. outlet such as the New York Post or the Drudge Report picked it up. If it generated enough heat, it might break through to a mainstream paper.
+
+“From their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus”
+
+“It seems to me,” says Brock of Bannon and his team, “what they were able to do in this deal with the Times is the same strategy, but more sophisticated and potentially more effective and damaging because of the reputation of the Times. If you were trying to create doubt and qualms about [Hillary Clinton] among progressives, the Times is the place to do it.” He pauses. “Looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus.”
+
+It wasn’t the only one. In June, when the Clinton Cash frenzy hit its apex, Bannon said: “We’ve got the 15 best investigative reporters at the 15 best newspapers in the country all chasing after Hillary Clinton.” There’s more coming, Bannon reveals, including a graphic novel of Clinton Cash, in January, and a Clinton Cash movie set to arrive in February, just as the presidential primary voting gets under way.
+
+In the ’90s, right-wing activists enjoyed a long period of ascendancy, and then collapsed. Then, as now, their prime target was a Clinton, their great ally the House Republicans. What halted this uprising was the sheer lunacy of its perpetrators. The classic example is House Oversight Chairman Dan Burton of Indiana, who became convinced that the 1993 suicide of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster was actually murder—a theory he sought to prove by reenacting the crime in his backyard with a pistol and a watermelon. Democrats seized on the episode to impugn his credibility, branding him “Watermelon Dan.” “We used the watermelon and the phantom Vince Foster sightings again and again,"" says Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House staffer and field marshal in the partisan wars of the ’90s. ""The phrase didn’t exist then, but that’s when the right-wing conspiracy jumped the shark.”
+
+Bannon believes that episodes like these killed conservatives’ credibility, and with it, their political influence. He’s set out to balance conservatives’ wilder impulses with professionalism, a running theme in his own life. Born into a working-class family within sight of the naval base in Norfolk, Va., he signed up straight out of college, and spent four years at sea aboard a destroyer, first as an auxiliary engineer in the Pacific, then as a navigator in the north Arabian Sea during the Iranian hostage crisis. By the time he arrived in the Persian Gulf in 1979, the U.S. was preparing its ill-fated assault on Tehran, and Bannon’s faith in his commander in chief had dimmed: “You could tell it was going to be a goat f---.” His battle group rotated out just before Carter’s Desert One debacle.
+
+Bannon became a special assistant to the chief of Naval operations at the Pentagon, earning a master’s degree in national security studies at Georgetown University at night. But he was restless. The siren of Reagan-era Wall Street capitalism drained the military life of its luster, so he resolved to make the leap. “Somebody told me,” he says, “if you want to go to Wall Street, you have to go to Harvard Business School.” HBS accepted him, and Bannon, at 29, matriculated in 1983.
+
+Bannon’s Harvard stint coincided with Wall Street’s boom, which fueled fantasies among his classmates of the full-on, debauched 1980s investment-banker lifestyle. Bannon became a grind, made first-year honors, and blanketed the top firms with applications for summer associateships. He was universally rejected. Classmates told him that his age and Navy background were obstacles—he hadn’t come up through the right schools.
+
+One day, a Goldman Sachs representative invited Bannon to a campus recruiting party: Thinking he could talk himself into a job, he donned a suit and headed over. “I get there, and there’s like 700 people jammed into this tent,” he says. “I said, ‘F--- it. There’s no chance.’ So I stood off on the side with a drink and these two other schmendricks standing next to me. And I talk to these guys. We have the greatest conversation about baseball, and I find out after half an hour it was John Weinberg Jr., whose dad runs the firm, and a guy named Rob Kaplan, who became a senior partner.” That night the Goldman executives gathered to discuss prospective hires. One later recounted the scene. “They said, ‘Well, Bannon, I guess we’re gonna reject him. He’s too old for a summer job,’ ” Bannon says. “And these guys say, ‘Oh no, we talked to him. He’s terrific.’ Literally, a complete crapshoot. But I got a job.”
+
+Bannon landed in Goldman’s New York office at the height of the hostile takeover boom. “Everything in the Midwest was being raided by Milken,” he says. “It was like a firestorm.” Goldman didn’t do hostile takeovers, instead specializing in raid defense for companies targeted by the likes of Drexel Burnham and First Boston. The first few years, he worked every day except Christmas and loved it: “The camaraderie was amazing. It was like being in the Navy, in the wardroom of a ship.” Later, he worked on a series of leveraged buyouts, including a deal for Calumet Coach that involved Bain Capital and an up-and-comer named Mitt Romney.
+
+Two big things were going on at Goldman Sachs in the late ’80s. The globalization of world capital markets meant that size suddenly mattered. Everyone realized that the firm, then a private partnership, would have to go public. Bankers also could see that the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial and investment banking was going to fall, setting off a flurry of acquisitions. Specialists would command a premium. Bannon shipped out to Los Angeles to specialize in media and entertainment. “A lot of people were coming from outside buying media companies,” he says. “There was huge consolidation.”
+
+After a few years, in 1990, Bannon and a couple of Goldman colleagues set off to launch Bannon & Co., a boutique investment bank specializing in media. At the time, investors preferred hard assets—manufacturing companies, real estate—and avoided things like movie studios and film libraries, which were harder to price. Bannon’s group, drawing on data such as VHS cassette sales and TV ratings, devised a model to value intellectual property in the same way as tangible assets. “We got a ton of business,” he says.
+
+When the French bank Crédit Lyonnais, a major financier of independent Hollywood studios, almost went bankrupt, Bannon & Co. rolled up its loan portfolio. When MGM went bust, it worked on the studio’s financing. When Polygram Records got into the film business, Bannon’s firm handled its acquisitions.
+
+And then, serendipitously, Bannon wound up in the entertainment business himself. Westinghouse Electric, a client, was looking to unload Castle Rock Entertainment, which had a big TV and movie presence, including Billy Crystal’s films. Bannon reeled in an eager buyer: Ted Turner. “Turner was going to build this huge studio,” he says, “so we were negotiating the deal at the St. Regis hotel in New York. As often happened with Turner, when it came time to actually close the deal, Ted was short of cash. ... Westinghouse just wanted out. We told them, ‘You ought to take this deal. It’s a great deal.’ And they go, ‘If this is such a great deal, why don’t you defer some of your cash fee and keep an ownership stake in a package of TV rights?’ ” In lieu of a full adviser’s fee, the firm accepted a stake in five shows, including one in its third season regarded as the runt of the litter: Seinfeld. “We calculated what it would get us if it made it to syndication,” says Bannon. “We were wrong by a factor of five.”
+
+After Société Générale bought Bannon & Co. in 1998, Bannon, no longer needing a day job, dove into Hollywood moguldom, becoming an executive producer of movies, including Anthony Hopkins’s 1999 Oscar-nominated Titus. He met a hard-partying talent manager named Jeff Kwatinetz who had discovered the band Korn and managed the Backstreet Boys. As Bannon was selling his company, Kwatinetz was launching one of his own, a management outfit called the Firm whose clients included Ice Cube and Martin Lawrence. Newly flush and sensing adventure, Bannon became a partner and a key player in the Firm’s great coup, its acquisition of former Disney chief Ovitz’s company, Artists Management Group. Ovitz had spent $100 million building a media giant he thought would conquer Hollywood, but AMG was bleeding money. Selling to the Firm was a last-ditch bid to save face. Instead, as Vanity Fair recounted, Bannon was dispatched to Ovitz’s Beverly Hills mansion to deliver the final humiliation in person, an offer for AMG of $5 million, less than the value of Ovitz’s home.
+
+The Hollywood ether soon convinced Bannon that his passion wasn’t financing films, but making them. He was souring on Wall Street and what it had come to represent. “Goldman in the ’80s was like a priesthood, a monastic experience where you worked all the time but were incredibly dedicated to client services, to building and growing companies,” he says. He underwent a conversion like the one Michael Lewis has described, watching with horror as staid private partnerships such as Goldman Sachs became highly leveraged, publicly traded companies operating like casinos. “I turned on Wall Street for the same reason everybody else did: The American taxpayer was forced to cut mook deals to bail out guys who didn’t deserve it.”
+
+Bannon’s political awakening was also spurred by the Sept. 11 attacks, which led him, in 2004, to make a Reagan-venerating documentary, In the Face of Evil (“A brilliant effort … extremely well done,” said Rush Limbaugh). This introduced him to Schweizer, a Cold War scholar whose book, Reagan’s War, was the basis of the film. It also brought him into Andrew Breitbart’s orbit. “We screened the film at a festival in Beverly Hills,” Bannon recalls, “and out of the crowd comes this, like, bear who’s squeezing me like my head’s going to blow up and saying how we’ve gotta take back the culture.”
+
+His films are peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloom
+
+Breitbart, who also lived in Los Angeles, had a profound influence on Bannon. When they met, Breitbart was starting his website, after having worked with Drudge and having helped Arianna Huffington launch the Huffington Post. Bannon lent his financial acumen and office space. He marveled at Breitbart’s visceral feel for the news cycle and his ability to shape coverage through the Drudge Report, which is avidly followed by TV producers and news editors.
+
+“One of the things I admired about him was that the dirtiest word for him was ‘punditry,’ ” says Bannon. “Our vision—Andrew’s vision—was always to build a global, center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site.” With this in mind, he set out to line up investors.
+
+Bannon continued making documentaries—big, crashing, opinionated films with Wagner scores and arresting imagery: Battle for America (2010), celebrating the Tea Party; Generation Zero (2010), examining the roots of the financial meltdown; The Undefeated (2011), championing Palin. In the Bannon repertoire, no metaphor is too direct. His films are peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloom. Palin, for one, ate it up and traveled to Iowa, trailed by hundreds of reporters, to appear with him at a 2011 screening in Pella that the press thought might signal her entrance into the 2012 presidential race. (No such luck.) Breitbart came along as promoter and ringmaster. When I spoke with him afterward, he described Bannon, with sincere admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.
+
+In 2010, Breitbart News hit a wall. The site published video, furnished by a conservative activist, of a speech to the NAACP by a Department of Agriculture official named Shirley Sherrod, in which she appeared to advocate anti-white racism. Within hours, she was fired, as the story blanketed cable news. It soon became clear that the Breitbart News video was misleadingly edited—that Sherrod’s point was the opposite of what was portrayed Fox News, which aggressively promoted the video, banned Andrew Breitbart as an on-air guest. Bannon, who was raising capital for the site’s relaunch, suddenly encountered “nuclear winter.”
+
+But in a gauge of how media standards have shifted since the ’90s, the ostracization of Breitbart News didn’t last long. Less than a year later, when the site caught Weiner tweeting pictures of his genitals, Andrew Breitbart was welcomed back on Fox News. The experience taught Bannon the power of real news.
+
+On the morning of March 1, 2012, with the relaunch just days away, Andrew Breitbart was walking in his Brentwood neighborhood when he collapsed. He died soon after of heart failure, at 43. Bannon got the news while in New York pitching investors. At the funeral, Drudge asked Bannon what he planned to do. “We’re going ahead with the launch,” he replied. Bannon stepped in as executive chairman.
+
+Breitbart’s genius was that he grasped better than anyone else what the early 20th century press barons understood—that most readers don’t approach the news as a clinical exercise in absorbing facts, but experience it viscerally as an ongoing drama, with distinct story lines, heroes, and villains. Breitbart excelled at creating these narratives, an editorial approach that's lived on. “When we do an editorial call, I don’t even bring anything I feel like is only a one-off story, even if it’d be the best story on the site,” says Alex Marlow, the site’s editor in chief. “Our whole mindset is looking for these rolling narratives.” He rattles off the most popular ones, which Breitbart News covers intensively from a posture of aggrieved persecution. “The big ones won’t surprise you,” he says. “Immigration, ISIS, race riots, and what we call ‘the collapse of traditional values.’ But I’d say Hillary Clinton is tops.”
+
+The website, which Breitbart News Network CEO Solov says draws 21 million unique users a month, has often managed to inject these narratives into the broader discourse. It was Breitbart News, for example, that first drew attention to the child migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border last summer that killed any chance of Congress passing immigration reform. “They have an incredible eye for an important story, particular ones that are important to conservatives and Republicans,” says Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican. “They’ve become extraordinarily influential. Radio talk show hosts are reading Breitbart every day. You can feel it when they interview you.”
+
+Lately, the site has championed Trump’s presidential candidacy, helping to coalesce a splinter faction of conservatives irate over Fox News’ treatment of the Republican frontrunner.
+
+Tallahassee is about as far as you can get in the U.S., geographically and psychically, from the circus of the presidential campaign trail. That’s why Bannon chose to locate the Government Accountability Institute there—that, and the fact that Schweizer had moved down from Washington. “There’s nothing to do in Tallahassee, so I get a lot more work done,” Schweizer jokes, on my recent visit. GAI is housed in a sleepy cul de sac of two-story brick buildings that looks like what you’d get if Scarlett O’Hara designed an office park. The unmarked entrance is framed by palmetto trees and sits beneath a large, second-story veranda with sweeping overhead fans, where the (mostly male) staff gathers every afternoon to smoke cigars and brainstorm.
+
+Schweizer began his career as a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution, digging through Soviet archives. In 2004 he co-authored a well-regarded history of the Bush family, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, that drew on interviews with many of its members, including Jeb. But Schweizer grew disillusioned with Washington and became radicalized against what he perceived to be a bipartisan culture of corruption. “To me, Washington, D.C., is a little bit like professional wrestling,” he told me. “When I was growing up in Seattle, I’d turn on Channel 13, the public-access station, and watch wrestling. At first I thought, ‘Man, these guys hate each other because they’re beating the crap out of each other.’ But I eventually realized they’re actually business partners.”
+
+Schweizer’s interest turned toward exposing this culture, and his books became more denunciatory. In 2011 he published Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison. The book caught the attention of 60 Minutes and led Congress to pass a law, the STOCK Act, aimed at curbing the abuses Schweizer documented. Bannon encouraged these investigations and eventually offered Schweizer a job. “He told me, ‘I know people who will support this kind of work,’” Schweizer says. In 2012, GAI set up shop.
+
+Schweizer, 50, is friendly, sandy-haired, and a little pudgy, the sort of fellow you’d meet at a neighborhood barbecue and instantly take a liking to. (Bannon nurses this regular-Joe appeal by forbidding him from wearing a tie when he’s on TV.) Bannon and Schweizer had two principles when they conceived the Clinton Cash project. First, it would avoid the nuttier conspiracy theories. “We have a mantra,” says Bannon. “Facts get shares, opinions get shrugs.” Second, they would heed the lesson Bannon learned at Goldman: specialize. Hillary Clinton’s story, they believed, was too sprawling and familiar to tackle in its entirety. So they'd focus only on the last decade, the least familiar period, and especially on the millions of dollars flowing into the Clinton Foundation. Bannon calls this approach “periodicity.”
+
+As with many of the Clintons’ troubles, the couple’s own behavior provided copious material for investigators. When Clinton became secretary of state, the foundation signed an agreement with the White House to disclose all of its contributors. It didn’t follow through. So GAI researchers plumbed tax filings, flight logs, and foreign government documents to turn up what the foundation withheld. Their most effective method was mining the so-called Deep Web, the 97 percent or so of information on the Internet that isn’t indexed for search engines such as Google and therefore is difficult to find.
+
+“Welcome to The Matrix,” says Tony, GAI’s data scientist, as he maps out the Deep Web for me on a whiteboard (we agreed I wouldn’t publish his last name). A presentation on the hidden recesses of the Web follows. “The Deep Web,” he explains, “consists of a lot of useless or depreciated information, stuff in foreign languages, and so on. But a whole bunch of it is very useful, if you can find it.” Tony specializes in finding the good stuff, which he does by writing software protocols that spider through the Deep Web. Since this requires heavy computing power, Tony struck a deal to use the services of a large European provider during off-peak hours. “We’ve got $1.3 billion of equipment I’m using at almost full capacity,” he says. This effort yielded a slew of unreported foundation donors who appear to have benefited financially from their relationship with the Clintons, including the uranium mining executives cited by the New York Times (who showed up on an unindexed Canadian government website). These donations illustrate a pattern of commingling private money and government policy that disturbed even many Democrats.
+
+Clinton Cash caused a stir not just because of these revelations, but because of how they arrived. GAI is set up more like a Hollywood movie studio than a think tank. The creative mind through which all its research flows and is disseminated belongs to a beaming young Floridian named Wynton Hall, a celebrity ghostwriter who’s penned 18 books, six of them New York Times best-sellers, including Trump’s Time to Get Tough. Hall’s job is to transform dry think-tank research into vivid, viral-ready political dramas that can be unleashed on a set schedule, like summer blockbusters. “We work very long and hard to build a narrative, storyboarding it out months in advance,” he says. “I’m big on this: We’re not going public until we have something so tantalizing that any editor at a serious publication would be an idiot to pass it up and give a competitor the scoop. ”
+
+To this end, Hall peppers his colleagues with slogans so familiar around the office that they’re known by their abbreviations. “ABBN — always be breaking news,” he says. Another slogan is “depth beats speed.” Time-strapped reporters squeezed for copy will gratefully accept original, fact-based research because most of what they’re inundated with is garbage. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” says Bannon. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”
+
+The reason GAI does this is because it’s the secret to how conservatives can hack the mainstream media. Hall has distilled this, too, into a slogan: “Anchor left, pivot right.” It means that “weaponizing” a story onto the front page of the New York Times (“the Left”) is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart.com. “We don’t look at the mainstream media as enemies because we don’t want our work to be trapped in the conservative ecosystem,” says Hall. “We live and die by the media. Every time we’re launching a book, I’ll build a battle map that literally breaks down by category every headline we’re going to place, every op-ed Peter’s going to publish. Some of it is a wish list. But it usually gets done.”
+
+Once that work has permeated the mainstream—once it’s found “a host body,” in David Brock's phrase—then comes the “pivot.” Heroes and villains emerge and become grist for a juicy Breitbart News narrative. “With Clinton Cash, we never really broke a story,” says Bannon, “but you go [to Breitbart.com] and we’ve got 20 things, we’re linking to everybody else’s stuff, we’re aggregating, we’ll pull stuff from the Left. It’s a rolling phenomenon. Huge traffic. Everybody’s invested.”
+
+“We’ve got $1.3 billion of equipment I’m using at almost full capacity”
+
+Over the summer, Hillary Clinton failed to emerge as the overwhelming frontrunner everyone expected. She’s been weighed down by the Clinton Foundation buckraking and the revelation that she kept a private e-mail server as secretary of state and destroyed much of her correspondence. Recently, the scandals have merged. In August e-mails surfaced showing that Bill Clinton, through the foundation, sought State Department permission to accept speaking fees in such repressive countries as North Korea and the Congo. A poll the same day found that the word voters associate most with his wife is “liar.” On Oct. 22, Hillary Clinton will testify on these matters before the Select Committee on Benghazi. Her troubles aren’t going away.
+
+Veteran Democrats such as Lehane concede that Bannon and his ilk have been more effective than conservatives who targeted Bill Clinton 25 years ago. “They’ve adapted into a higher species,” he says. There’s more on the way. “We’ve got two more waves of stuff on Clinton corruption,"" says Bannon, including a focus on how the donors highlighted in Clinton Cash violated many of the principles liberals hold dear: “You look at what they’ve done in the Colombian rain forest, look at the arms merchants, the warlords, the human trafficking—if you take anything that the Left professes to be a cornerstone value, the Clintons have basically played them for fools. They’ve enriched themselves while playing up the worst cast of characters in the world.”
+
+While this is surely unwelcome news for Clinton, Lehane argues that where the Clintons are concerned, their opponents invariably become consumed by partisan zeal and undermine their own cause. “Remember the old Pink Panther movies when Clouseau would walk in and the chief inspector would be there, and he’d just start losing his marbles, no matter what?” he says. “That’s how these guys are.”
+
+Bannon does, indeed, have a touch of Clinton Madness. When we met in January, Bill Cosby’s serial predations had just exploded into the news after laying dormant for many years. Bannon was certain this signaled trouble for Bill Clinton, whose own sexual history some conservatives long to revive as a way of hampering his wife’s campaign. His conviction stems from the group of young, female Breitbart News reporters whom he’s dubbed the Valkyries. When I expressed skepticism about the value of reintroducing old scandals, Bannon countered that the Valkyries—a sort of in-house focus group of millennial voter sentiment—were unfamiliar with Clinton contretemps that most older people consider settled. ""There’s a whole generation of people who love the news but were 7 or 8 years old when this happened and have no earthly idea about the Clinton sex stuff,” he says.
+
+It’s impossible to predict how Bannon’s plots and intrigues will ultimately affect the presidential race. It’s not even clear on whose behalf he’s acting—his own or someone else’s? Are Seinfeld royalties enough to take on Clinton and Bush? Or do others have a stake? Solov, the CEO, won’t say. “I can’t go into that,” he says. “It’s privately owned.” Bannon wouldn’t comment either. However, a prominent conservative says Robert Mercer, the reclusive co-founder of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and a major donor to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, has invested $10 million. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, is listed in 2013 tax documents as a GAI board member.
+
+Even without knowing the identity of his backers, Bannon’s designs are clear enough. While he’d blanch at the comparison, he’s pursuing something like the old Marxist dialectical concept of “heightening the contradictions,” only rather than foment revolution among the proletariat, he’s trying to disillusion Clinton’s and Bush’s natural base of support, recognizing, as Goldman Sachs taught him, that you’re more effective if others lead the way.
+
+To succeed, Bannon will need to activate the anger and disgust with cronyism that’s as powerful among supporters of Sanders as it is among fans of Trump. In Tallahassee, as GAI’s phone keeps ringing, the vehicle for achieving this is clear. Editors and reporters at prominent magazines and newspapers, including ones that had passed when approached with Clinton Cash revelations, are calling to ask when the next salvo will arrive—and might they arrange an exclusive?
+
+For many, the answer will be yes. “We’re going to go to the investigative units, not the political reporters, and just give them the stuff,” says Bannon. “We have faith they’ll take the stories and do the additional reporting.” The thought pleases him, and he grins. “Just like last time, we’ll go out and say, ‘Hey, here’s what we’ve got. You guys take it from here.’ ”
+
+Update, Oct. 13: An earlier version of this story stated that James O'Keefe supplied the videotape of Shirley Sherrod. He did not.",REAL
+5907,PressTV-Russia cancels request to fuel ships in Spain,"Russia This photo taken from a Norwegian surveillance aircraft shows Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov in international waters off the coast of Northern Norway on October 17, 2016. (Via Reuters) 
+Russia says it has cancelled plans for a fleet of its warships to refuel at a Spanish port on their way to Syria. 
+Vasily Nioradze, a spokesman at the Russian embassy in Madrid, said on Wednesday that the request was canceled, without giving further details, the Associated Press reported. 
+The Spanish Foreign Ministry also confirmed that Russia had withdrawn its request for the warships to refuel in the Spanish port of Ceuta. 
+""The Russian embassy in Madrid has just told us that it is withdrawing its demand for permission to stop over for the boats, which means that the stopovers have been cancelled,"" the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. 
+The development came after Spain, a NATO member state, said it was reviewing Russia's request to refuel its naval fleet at Ceuta after passing through the Straits of Gibraltar en route to Syria, where Russian forces are engaged in an anti-terror campaign in support of the Syrian government. 
+In a statement released on Wednesday, the Spanish Foreign Ministry said that Spain had been allowing Russian navy ships to dock in Spanish ports for years, but that it treated such requests on a case by case basis. 
+The naval group, which passed through the English Channel on Friday, is made up of Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, as well as a nuclear-powered battle cruiser, two anti-submarine warships and four support vessels, escorted by submarines. 
+The fleet will join around 10 other Russian vessels already off the Syrian coast. 
+Ceuta sits on the tip of Africa’s north coast, across the Straits of Gibraltar from mainland Spain, and bordering Morocco. The port is part of the EU, but its NATO status is unclear. Since 2011, at least 60 Russian warships have docked in Ceuta. 
+NATO irked by Spain’s announcement 
+NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg claimed that the Western military alliance was ""concerned"" by the deployment of the Russian warships. 
+""It is each up to each nation to decide, as has been NATO policy for many years, but we are concerned about the potential use of this carrier group to increase attacks… in Aleppo,"" Stoltenberg said, adding, ""All allies are aware of our concerns."" 
+Britain echoes NATO’s stance 
+British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon also said on Wednesday that London would be ""extremely concerned"" if Spain refueled the Russian carrier group heading through the Mediterranean towards Syria. 
+""NATO should be standing together,” he added. 
+Since March 2011, Syria has been hit by militancy it blames on some Western states and their regional allies. Russia has been conducting air raids against Daesh and other terrorist groups in the Middle Eastern country at the Damascus government’s request for more than a year now. 
+Russia boosts Baltic Fleet 
+In another development on Wednesday, a report said that Russia was reinforcing its Baltic Fleet in Kaliningrad with two small warships armed with long-range cruise missiles to counter a worrying NATO build-up in the region. 
+The report by Russia's daily Izvestia quoted an unidentified military source as saying that the vessels, the Serpukhov and the Zeleny Dol, had already entered the Baltic Sea and would soon become part of a newly formed division. 
+Kaliningrad shares land borders with Poland and Lithuania. 
+The deployment comes at a time when NATO is planning its biggest military buildup on Russia's borders since the Cold War. Loading ... ",FAKE
+2254,EXCLUSIVE: Kentucky Clerk: 'This is a fight worth fighting',"UPDATE: A federal judge has ordered a defiant Kentucky clerk to jail after she refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.
+
+U.S. District Judge David Bunning told Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis she would be jailed until she complied with his order to issue the licenses. Davis said ""thank you"" before she was led out of the courtroom by a U.S. marshal. She was not in handcuffs.
+
+Bunning also warned deputy clerks around the state that they could suffer the same fate should they refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.
+
+Davis has refused to issue marriages licenses for two months since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. She argues that her Christian faith should exempt her from signing the licenses.
+
+Liberty Counsel attorney Mat Staver, who is representing Davis,  called the ruling “outrageous.”
+
+“If this country has come to this point where a judge jails someone like Kim Davis for their religious convictions – then we have lost our religious liberty,” Staver told me.
+
+He said Davis will be fingerprinted and photographed “just like a criminal.”
+
+“This cannot be tolerated,” he said. “This is ultimately going to spark a huge debate around the country. This is not the kind of country – this is not the America that our founders envisioned.”
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Kim Davis could become the first Christian in America jailed as a result of the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage.
+
+“I’ve weighed the cost and I’m prepared to go to jail, I sure am,” Mrs. Davis told me in an exclusive interview. “This has never been a gay or lesbian issue for me. This is about upholding the word of God.”
+
+“This is a heaven or hell issue for me and for every other Christian that believes,” she said. “This is a fight worth fighting.”
+
+Click here to join Todd’s American Dispatch –a MUST-READ for Conservatives!
+
+Davis is the clerk of Rowan County, Ky. – a small patch of earth in the northeastern part of the state. She was elected last November – taking the place of her mother, who held the position for nearly 40 years.
+
+It’s fair to say that issuing marriage licenses was something of a family business – until the day the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.
+
+Davis is a devout Apostolic Christian, and she knew that should gay marriage become legal, she could not and would not sign her name on a same-sex marriage certificate.
+
+“I would have to either make a decision to stand or I would have to buckle down and leave,” she said, pondering her choices. “And if I left, resigned or chose to retire, I would have no voice for God’s word.
+
+So when that day came, she issued an edict: No more marriage licenses would be issued in Rowan County. It was a decision that would bring down the wrath of militant LGBT activists and their supporters.
+
+“They told my husband they were going to burn us down while we slept in our home,” she said. “He’s been told that he would be beaten up and tied up and made to watch them rape me. I have been told that gays should kill me.”
+
+Liberty Counsel, the public interest law firm that represents Davis, says forcing her to issue same-sex marriage licenses violates her religious beliefs. But the courts don’t seem interested in that argument.
+
+A federal judge ordered her to issue the licenses, an appeals court upheld that decision and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene. Should Davis continue to defy the law, she could be fined or sent to jail.
+
+No matter what the court decides, Davis says she will not violate her religious beliefs – and she will not resign her post.
+
+“I’m very steadfast in what I believe,” she told me. “I don’t leave my conscience and my Christian soul out in my vehicle and come in here and pretend to be something I’m not. It’s easy to talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?”
+
+The mainstream media and the activists have been ruthless. They’ve portrayed her as a monster – a right-wing, homophobic hypocrite. She’s been smeared by tabloid-style reports on her checkered past. They’ve written extensively about her failed marriages.
+
+It’s true, she’s been married four times. But what’s missing in the mainstream media coverage is the context. Her life was radically changed by Jesus Christ in 2011, and since then she has become a different person.
+
+“My God in heaven knows every crack, every crevice, every deep place in my heart,” she said. “And he knows the thoughts that are in my mind before I even think them. And he has given me such a beautiful and wonderful grace through all of this.”
+
+She once lived for the devil, but now she lives for God. She’s a sinner saved by grace.
+
+“I had created such a pit of sin for myself with my very own hands,” she told me.
+
+So how does she handle the reporters and talking heads who call her a hypocrite?
+
+“All I can say to them is if they have a sordid past like what I had, they too can receive the cleansing and renewing, and they can start a fresh life and they can be different,” she said. “They don’t have to remain in their sin, there’s hope for tomorrow.”
+
+Davis did not seek the national spotlight. She had no intention of becoming a spokeswoman for religious liberty, and she bristles at the idea that she is a hero of the faith.
+
+“I’m just a vessel God has chosen for this time and this place,” she said. “I’m no different than any other Christian. It was my appointed time to stand, and their time will come.”
+
+Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is ""God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values."" Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.
+
+",REAL
+4968,Donnie’s little lies are yuuuge: Trump has redefined what it means to be deceitful on the campaign trail,"An old saying asserts that falsehoods come in three escalating levels: “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Now, however, we’ve been given an even-higher level of intentional deception: Policy speeches by Donald Trump.
+
+ Take his recent highly publicized address outlining specific economic policies he would push to benefit hard-hit working families. It’s an almost-hilarious compilation of Trumpian fabrications, including his bold, statesmanlike discourse on the rank unfairness of the estate tax: “No family will have to pay the death tax,” he solemnly pledged, adopting the right-wing pejorative for a tax assessed on certain properties of the dearly departed. Fine, but next came his slick prevarication: “American workers have paid taxes their whole lives, and they should not be taxed again at death.” Workers? The tax exempts the first $5.4 million of any deceased person’s estate, meaning 99.8 percent of Americans pay absolutely nothing. So Trump is trying to deceive real workers into thinking he’s standing for them, when in fact it’s his own wealth he’s protecting.
+
+What a maverick! What a shake-’em-up outsider! What an anti-establishment fighter for working stiffs!
+
+Oh, and don’t forget this: What a phony!
+
+Sure, The Donald sounds like a populist on the stump, bellowing that the systems been jerry-rigged by and for the corporate and political elites, which is killing the middle class. Well, he’s right about that, but what’s he going to do? Don’t worry, he says smugly, I’ll fix it, I’ll make the system honest again — trust me!
+
+As Groucho Marx said, “To know if a man is honest, ask him — if he says he is, he’s a crook.” Or, in the case of this phony populist, just look at the specific policies he laid out as his fixes for our economy. Trumpeting the package as his blueprint for the “economic renewal” of America’s working class.
+
+But Trump’s idea of “working class turns out to be millionaires and billionaires, for that’s who would get the bulk of benefits from his agenda — rewarding the very corporate chieftains he denounces in his blustery speeches for knocking down middle-income families and grabbing all of the new wealth our economy is creating. His proposed tax cuts, for example, don’t benefit low-wage workers at all and provide only a pittance of gain for those with middle-class paychecks, but corporations are given a huuuuuuuge windfall with over a 50 percent cut in their rate. His tax giveaway will also take $240 billion a year out of our public treasury — money desperately needed for such basics as expanding educational opportunities and restoring our nation’s dilapidated infrastructure.
+
+In his policy speech, he offered a new tax break to help hard working people reduce their cost of child care “by allowing parents to fully deduct [such] spending from their taxes.” Trump even gave this push a personal touch, saying his daughter Ivanka urged him to provide a helping hand to working parents because “she feels so strongly about this.” Before you tear up over their show of dad and daughter working-class empathy, however, note that 70 percent of American households don’t make enough to warrant itemizing tax deductions. Thus, the big majority of Americans that are most in need of child care help get nothing from Trump’s melodramatic gesture. Once again, his generosity is for his own elite class, for the tax benefits would flow uphill to wealthy families like his who can purchase the platinum packages of care for their children. What we have here is the same old failed, establishmentarian, economic elitist hokum that Republicans have been peddling for decades, only bigger and more extreme. Rhetoric aside, the reality of Trump’s plan is to replace Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down theory with his own arrogant, anti-worker scheme of tinkle-down economics. As an early 19th Century labor leader noted, “Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.” That fits The Donald perfectly.",REAL
+4781,"Day after debate, Clinton gloats and Trump fumes","Raleigh, North Carolina (CNN) As soon as the first debate of the 2016 presidential election was over, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were quick to claim victory.
+
+But by the next morning, one of them had become far less cheerful.
+
+Just hours after Clinton and Trump clashed on stage at Hofstra University in one of the most highly anticipated political events in modern history, the two presidential nominees took markedly different tones as they reflected on the previous night's debate.
+
+Clinton and her aides showed all of the outward signs of a team riding high.
+
+The Democratic nominee boarded her plane at Westchester County Airport to applause and cheers from her staff. Before taking off to Raleigh, North Carolina, for a campaign rally, a smiling candidate walked to the back of the plane to gloat to reporters about a ""great, great"" evening
+
+""One of my favorite baseball players growing up, Ernie Banks, used to get so excited about going to play that he would say, 'Lets play two,'"" Clinton said. ""So I am looking forward to the next debate and the one after that.""
+
+And taking a dig at Trump's complaint after the debate that he was given a ""defective"" microphone, Clinton quipped: ""Anybody who complains about the microphone is not having a good night.""
+
+And in fact, the Republican nominee did not appear to be having a good morning.
+
+Calling into Fox News' ""Fox & Friends"" early Tuesday, Trump rattled off more than one complaint about the debate.
+
+Those compliments were long gone.
+
+""I had some hostile questions,"" Trump said on Fox News. ""He didn't ask her about the emails at all. He didn't ask her about her scandals. He didn't ask her about the Benghazi deal that she destroyed. He didn't ask her about a lot of things she should have been asked about. There's no question about it.""
+
+Trump was still irritated -- and even conspiratorial -- about his microphone.
+
+""My microphone was terrible,"" Trump complained. ""I wonder: was it set up that way on purpose?""
+
+To top things off, Trump unloaded on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, who has alleged that the businessman's disparaging treatment of her had led to eating disorders and depression.
+
+With no apparent consideration for the political recklessness of his crude comments, Trump once again went after Machado's physical appearance, bringing her up on his own.
+
+""That person was a Miss Universe person, and she was the worst we ever had. The worst. The absolute worst,"" Trump said. ""She gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem. We had a real problem.""
+
+Those remarks could prove to be detrimental for a candidate already struggling with women voters and with the perception that he lacks the temperament to be president.
+
+Late Monday, the Clinton campaign released a new video featuring Machado. ""He'd tell me, 'You look ugly,' or, 'You look fat,'"" Machado says in the video. ""Sometimes he'd 'play' with me and say: 'Hello, Miss Piggy,' 'Hello, Miss Housekeeping.'""
+
+Machado also held a press call Tuesday afternoon to respond to Trump's comments and express her support for Clinton. She told reporters that watching the 2016 election was like a ""really bad dream.""
+
+""I never imagined in 20 years later I will be in this position,"" she said. ""Watching this guy again doing stupid things and stupid comments.""
+
+Speaking in Raleigh Tuesday afternoon, Clinton continued to make digs at Trump's debate performance, saying it was ""very clear that he didn't prepare.""
+
+""What we hear from my opponent is dangerously incoherent,"" she said. ""It's unclear exactly what he is saying, but words matter.""
+
+Marguerite Scott, a retired 68-year-old woman from Cary, North Carolina, who attended the Raleigh campaign event, said she was struck by Trump appearing to lose his composure during the debate. Scott lso chastised the GOP nominee for his comments Tuesday about Machado.
+
+""Men in general should stop objectifying women. If she is fat, that is her business,"" Scott said. ""And to put her on blast like that shows what a misogynist person he is.""",REAL
+6925,CAN IT GET MORE CORRUPT? Bill That Bans Naming Officers Involved in Shootings Goes to Pennsylvania Governor,"Editor’s Note : Disgusting. This country just gets more and more corrupt by the day… it’s insane. Pretty soon it will collapse of its own weight under so much disgusting corruption.
+
+The Pennsylvania legislature has passed a law prohibiting the release of officers’ names for up to 30 days after a police-related death has occurred. It was backed by Philadelphia police unions and will become law if signed by Democratic Governor Tom Wolf.
+The measure passed Thursday after the Republican-controlled legislature voted along party lines. If the bill becomes law, it will prevent public officials from releasing the names of officers involved in shootings which cause death or “ serious bodily injury ” for up to 30 days after the incident, or until the conclusion of an official investigation.
+The bill, HB 1538, was sponsored by state Rep. Martina White (R-Philadelphia) and is a direct contradiction of the Philadelphia Police Department’s policy of releasing names within 72 hours of a shooting.
+The 72-hour rule was created by the Department of Justice and put into place by former police commissioner Charles H. Ramsey in 2014, after it was recommended. Speaking in support of the rule at the time, Ramsey said : “ I don’t think you can reasonably expect to shoot people and remain anonymous. ”
+However, the influential Philadelphia Police Union has defended HB 1538.
+“ We’re just asking to put a lid on the boiling pot until things calm down, especially if it’s an investigation that could lead to protests in the community, ” John McNesby, president of the 14,500-strong union, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
+White claims the bill is needed, due to the dangers faced by police officers
+“ I was watching the television and just saw how officers are being gunned down and other officers in different states had been subjected to harassment and the very things that they are trying to protect citizens like ourselves from experiencing, and to me the 72-hour rule is really just an arbitrary number, ” White told the Post-Gazette.
+However, neither McNesby nor White could identify any instances of officers or their families being harmed due to being publicly identified.
+McNesby told the Post-Gazette that he was unaware of any direct threats that had taken place, but said “ that’s what we’re looking to stop before it becomes a reality. ”
+The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania has criticized the bill, calling it “ a policy that will heighten tensions between the police and the communities they serve” and accusing it of being “completely tone deaf to the needs of communities that are impacted by police brutality. ”
+Rep. Margo Davidson (D-Delaware County) has also spoken out against the bill, saying it undermines “ the bridges that have been built between law enforcement and communities of color. ” She added that “ this legislation will do nothing but breed suspicion. ”
+Davidson, along with many other Philadelphia Democrats, opposed the bill in the 151-32 vote.
+Governor Wolf has yet to comment on whether or not he will sign the bill, which passed the Senate and House with a veto-proof majority. If Wolf still decides to veto, an override of that veto would only be able to take place after the next election.
+
+Read Also: War on Cops Debunked: More Cops Died by Accident Than Violence in 2015 
+Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by RT.com of RT.com . ",FAKE
+9420,Breaking: We Have Proof That Hillary Clinton Rigged Half the Voting Machines In America!,"This is really, really bad guys. Hillary Clinton has found a guaranteed way to rig the vote, and America is completely clueless. 
+Via AlternativeNews 
+
+Now, we at Liberty Writers have come across indisputable proof that Dominion Voting Systems, the biggest voting machine owner in the US, has been rigged by Hillary Clinton!
+Scroll Down For Video Below! So let’s start off with a little fact from Wikipedia. Back in 2010, just in time to help Obama get elected again, Dominion Voting Machines bought out the right to own the machines in 22 different states.
+
+The same company has also been caught red-handed donating enough money to the Clinton Foundation to make it to the top of their online donor list. Just take a look at the Clinton Foundation’s website itself.
+
+Wow. That is just such a strange coincidence, don’t you think? Right around the same time Hillary Clinton was deciding to retire as Secretary of State and focus on her campaign, this company bought out half the voting machines in the country.
+And if that is not bad enough, one of the top owners of Dominion Voting is none other than the king of corruption himself, George Soros. So if you think this is as important of information as I do, then share this out immediately! Time is of the essence…
+",FAKE
+4472,Cruz Touts Himself as Only Viable Conservative in Race | RealClearPolitics,"BROOKLYN, Iowa - Ted Cruz has made a name for himself losing big political fights. Now, facing down his biggest battle yet as a candidate for president, Cruz is grappling with the new challenge of assuring voters that he can not only fight, but win.
+
+That pressure on Cruz shone through Friday, as he presented himself for the small crowd at a town hall here as the only conservative in the Republican field who is also a viable candidate.
+
+“There are sixteen Republican candidates. Of the sixteen, do you know which campaign raised the most hard money? We did,” Cruz boasted, to loud cheers. “Three months ago, if someone had suggested to you that Cruz was going to outraise Jeb Bush, you’d have told them, ‘Look, I think you need to lay off the bottle a little bit. That ain’t gonna happen.’”
+
+Indeed, the latest round of campaign finance reports confirmed that Cruz raked in $14.3 million, not including an independent haul on the super PAC side. Although Jeb Bush brought in much more on the super PAC side, making him the undisputed GOP money leader, his campaign brought in $11.2 million - three million less than Cruz.
+
+But the idea of the noted firebrand Cruz pushing political pragmatism can be jarring. He cemented his national reputation as a scorched-earth conservative in 2013, playing a leading role in shutting down the federal government over a quixotic bid to block funding for Obamacare.
+
+In his campaign for president, Cruz isn't glossing over that and other bruising battles he has waged, even as he is being implicitly called out by other candidates for having consistently come up short.
+
+“There are really two kinds of candidates,” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told reporters in Davenport, Iowa, on Friday. “There are fighters in Washington who prefer fighting but have yet to win those fights largely, and then there are winners, people who have won elections but haven’t consistently been involved in the fights of the last few years that really matter.”
+
+“What makes us unique is...we can do both,” Walker continued. “We can fight and win.”
+
+When presented later Friday with these remarks, Cruz insisted: “Republican primary voters are going to ask of every candidate in the field: Show me where you’ve stood and led on the great battles of the day.” And he ticked off issues: Common Core, Obamacare, the Religious Freedom Act in Indiana, the president’s executive orders on immigration, the Iran deal, and more.
+
+“There are many good people in this race who I like and respect. But there is a stark difference in the records of the candidates,” Cruz said. “There are campaign conservatives, who talk conservative when they’re on the campaign trail, and yet their record isn’t conservative. I am the candidate in this race who is the consistent conservative over and over again.”
+
+Even Cruz’s steadfast, vocal conservatism is not without political calculation, of course. In a broad field of Republican candidates, he and his campaign team see a lane for a no-compromise conservative, in particular one who can harness grassroots support while cultivating larger donors.
+
+Cruz’s model builds on what he sees as the mistakes of conservative candidates in 2012 to take advantage of deep misgivings about Mitt Romney during the Republican primary, which manifested in multiple candidates — Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum — having their moments in the spotlight and at the top of the polls.
+
+“But none of them were in positions to be able to raise substantial sums of money,” Cruz said in an interview prior to his town hall Friday. “So, every time one of them popped up to the polls, they’d get hit with $10 million in attack ads, and they’d be road kill.”
+
+To supporters and the press, Cruz is making the case that establishment Republicans hope to win in the primary by “splintering” the conservative vote — and that he, with his robust campaign infrastructure, is the antidote to that.
+
+“The Washington establishment’s plan is simple. They want to divide conservatives,” Cruz added in the interview. “That is the only way the moderate establishment candidate sneaks up the middle with 23 percent of the vote and runs away with the nomination. If conservatives unite, it’s game over.”",REAL
+436,What if the minimum wage increase is a fraud?,"What if the latest craze among the big-government crowd in both major political parties is to use the power of government to force employers to pay some of their employees more than their services are worth to the employers?
+
+What if this represents an intrusion by government into the employer-employee relationship? What if this consists of the government's effectively saying that it knows the financial worth of employees’ services better than the employers and the employees do?
+
+What if the minimum wage, now on the verge of being raised to $15 per hour everywhere in the land, is really the government's using threats of ruin and force to transfer wealth? What if the $15-per-hour figure is based on a political compromise rather than on free market forces or economic realities?
+
+What if these wealth transfers will have profound unintended economic consequences and will negatively affect everyone?
+
+What if one of the politically intended consequences is that the employees whose salaries will rise will show gratitude not to their employers, who will be paying them more than they earn, by working better but to the politicians who will have forced the employers to pay them more by voting for those politicians?
+
+What if the right of an employee to sell labor by going to work and the right of an employer to purchase that labor by paying a salary are part of the natural right to exchange goods and services, which the Constitution was written to protect? What if during America’s most prosperous periods, that right was protected by the courts?
+
+What if there are clauses in the Constitution that protect that right but the modern courts have ignored them? What if the Constitution prohibits the government from interfering with freely entered-into contracts but the government does so anyway? What if the courts have approved this?
+
+What if the Constitution prohibits the government from taking property from people without charging them with wrongdoing and proving the charge to a jury but the government does so anyway? What if the courts have declined to interfere with all this theft?
+
+What if it is none of the government’s business how an employer and an employee decide on salary? What if the employer and the employee know far more about the worth of the employee’s services and the needs of the employer than the politicians in the government do?
+
+What if the government has fundamental misunderstandings of the way businesses earn money, create wealth and pay salaries? What if the government's mindset is stuck on the governmental economic model? What if that model has no competition, guaranteed revenue and no creation of wealth?
+
+What if that governmental mindset is one of control and central planning rather than appealing to the needs of consumers by providing goods and services better, faster and more cheaply than the competition? What if the government has no need to be better, faster and cheaper because taxpayers are forced to pay it for services they often don’t use and the government has no competition?
+
+What if forcing employers to pay employees more than their services are worth results in higher prices for the goods and services the employers produce? What if the effect of the minimum wage rise is to transfer wealth not from employers to employees but from consumers to employees? What if the rising prices of goods and services, caused by the forced increase in wages, put some of those goods and services beyond the reach of some folks who rely upon them?
+
+What if the folks who can no longer afford some goods and services on which they have come to rely are the very same people whom the politicians have boasted they are helping by the increase in the minimum wage? What if the politicians who have done this do not know what they are talking about? What if they believe they can use minimum wage increases to bribe the poor for votes -- just as they bribe the wealthy with bailouts and the middle class with tax cuts?
+
+What if there are other unintended consequences to the governmental imposition of a minimum wage? What if, rather than pay employees more than they are worth, employers stop employing some of them? What if this results in higher unemployment? What if the rise in the minimum wage has the unintended consequence of harming the folks it is supposed to help?
+
+What if the poor are better off being gainfully employed and earning less than $15 an hour, with an opportunity for advancement, than not working, earning nothing and relying on welfare? What if that welfare burden adds to already overtaxed state budgets?
+
+What if states raise taxes to care for the newly unemployed? What if the newly unemployed lose the self-esteem they once enjoyed when they were gainfully employed?
+
+What if all this came about not because of market forces, such as supply and demand, and not because people worked harder and produced more but because of lawless, greedy politicians -- heedless of basic economics -- who think they can write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event without adverse consequences?
+
+What if the politicians who caused this did so just to win the votes of those they promised to help? What if these politicians only helped themselves? What if the minimum wage increase is a fraud? What do we do about it?
+
+Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.",REAL
+4731,Mike Pence enabled Donald Trump. Stop saying he’d make a good president.,"Implausible schemes to put Mike Pence, rather than Donald Trump, on the top of the ballot have been flying since a once-secret recording of Trump’s lurid boasting about sexual assault leaked to the public on Friday evening.
+
+Pence has issued a public statement on Trump’s remarks, saying he “does not condone his remarks and cannot defend them” — but accepted Trump’s apology and suggested he’d stick by him through the second presidential debate on Sunday night. Anonymous sources say privately Pence is “beside himself” over the details in the leaked audio.
+
+Meanwhile, multiple prominent Republicans — from former rival for the nomination Carly Fiorina to former Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a number of members of Congress — have called for Trump to step aside and allow Pence to be the nominee.
+
+On some level, the Republican longing for Pence in the face of these new details about Trump’s past makes sense. He’s an experienced politician with a long track record. He has impeccable social conservative credentials. He’s the governor of a state. He can pay attention in a debate long enough to land punches on Tim Kaine. And he has almost certainly never been secretly recorded talking about a woman’s “tits” or “pussy” or bragging about kissing women against their will.
+
+But if Republican politicians are really horrified by Trump’s remarks — and not just by the possible electoral implications — Pence made one decision that should disqualify him in their eyes, too: Mike Pence agreed to be Donald Trump’s vice president.
+
+Pence lent Trump the legitimacy he needed to unite the Republican Party. He spent months apologizing for Trump, explaining what Trump really meant, and doing everything he could to put Trump in the Oval Office.
+
+Trump himself pointed to “party unity” as one of the key reasons for choosing Pence as his running mate in the first place, making no secret of the role he viewed the Indiana governor as playing in the campaign.
+
+It’s not as if Pence didn’t know what he was doing. By the time Trump picked him as his running mate on July 14, Trump had already:
+
+Nor was Trump’s rampant sexism a secret. His public feuds with celebrities aside, the New York Times had already published a long article on times Trump was accused of crossing boundaries with women in his private life.
+
+And, of course, Trump had spent years publicly doubting that President Obama was born in the United States.
+
+This is not a complete list. But by the time Trump was picking a running mate, it was clear that he was a man with a history of bigoted, racist, sexist behavior and remarks. This is what Pence agreed to make palatable to the Republican establishment, to social conservatives, and to swing voters.
+
+Pence was going against his own principles, as these tweets from before he joined the ticket show:
+
+And Pence has stood by Trump throughout the ensuing controversies — Trump’s fights with a Gold Star family and the 1997 Miss Universe among them. He’s watched Trump tell black voters that they should vote for him because “What do you have to lose?” and say that the Central Park Five, proved innocent by DNA evidence, should have been executed anyway.
+
+To characterize Pence as a paragon of respect and decency who happened to wake up one morning and, through no fault of his own, be Trump’s running mate ignores the role Pence played in trying to make Trump palatable to voters and the establishment in the first place.
+
+If the case against Trump’s presidency is his poor judgment and his lack of respect for women, what does Pence’s tacit approval of all of this say about him?",REAL
+8138,Russia’s patrol ship Yaroslav Mudry arrives in Cuba on visit,"Russia’s patrol ship Yaroslav Mudry arrives in Cuba on visit October 28, 2016 TASS cuba , navy The patrol ship Yaroslav Mudry. Source: Mil.ru 
+The Russian Baltic Fleet’s Project 11540 patrol ship Yaroslav Mudry and the tanker Lena have arrived in the Cuban port of Havana on a business visit, fleet spokesman Roman Martov said. 
+""The patrol ship Yaroslav Mudry and the tanker Lena have arrived in Cuba on a business visit,"" Martov said. 
+""In the capital of Freedom Island, the Baltic Fleet sailors will replenish water and food supplies, carry out a planned check of the ships and have a rest after a trans-Atlantic passage,"" he added. 
+In mid-October, the patrol ship Yaroslav Mudry left the Mediterranean Sea where it made part of the Russian Navy’s permanent grouping. 
+The patrol ship was performing anti-piracy tasks in the Indian Ocean over several weeks. After that, the ship crossed the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. 
+The patrol ship started its long-distance voyage on June 1.",FAKE
+669,Bernie's California endgame,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+8279,"Rwanda & The Philippines rate better than UK for gender equality, study shows","Rwanda & The Philippines rate better than UK for gender equality, study... Rwanda & The Philippines rate better than UK for gender equality, study shows By 0 127 
+Britain is lagging behind countries including Rwanda, the Philippines and Nicaragua in a global ranking of gender parity, slipping to 20th place on the World Economic Forum (WEF) index. 
+Read more 
+The WEF, a not-for-profit based in Switzerland, analyzed data from 144 countries. It found the global gender gap has widened to its largest extent since 2008. It estimates economic gender parity won’t be achieved for at least another 170 years. 
+The US and Australia are even further behind than Britain, however, at 45th and 46th place respectively. 
+The UK’s 2016 rankings – which take into account key areas such as the economy, politics, education and health – mark a slide from ninth position in 2006. 
+Britain sits at number 53 for economic participation. This reflects a drop in the number of women in senior and technical positions, as well as a reduction in the estimated income women earn compared to men. 
+The UK is ranked 24th for political empowerment, because of a fall in the number of women parliamentarians, the WEF said. The figures do not take into account Prime Minister Theresa May’s rise to Downing Street. 
+Read more 
+Rwanda, by contrast, has the highest share of women in parliament globally at 64 percent. 
+Jemima Olchawski, head of policy and insight at the Fawcett Society, told the Express: “It’s unacceptable that Britain is languishing at 53rd in the world for economic participation, is only 24th for political empowerment and performs below average compared to our region. 
+“The moral case for gender equality should be enough alone to motivate us to speed up the pace of change, but with evidence suggesting that improving gender equality could add £150 billion [US$183 billion] to our GDP it’s also clear that we simply can’t afford to wait.” 
+The Philippines scored full marks on a measure of the birth ratio and life expectancy of women. 
+WEF says the top 10 countries for gender parity are: Iceland",FAKE
+3621,"'Charlie' draws historic crowd, world leaders to Paris","PARIS — A historic crowd of more than a million people including more than 40 world leaders jammed the streets Sunday, proclaiming ""Je suis Charlie,"" expressing solidarity against terrorism and paying homage to victims of last week's deadly attacks.
+
+French President François Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel were among the leaders who linked arms to start the march amid intense security. The U.S. representative was Jane Hartley, the ambassador to France.
+
+The gathering brought together leaders of nations and causes often at odds, such as Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
+
+The emotionally charged rally came just days after 17 people and three Islamic extremist gunmen were killed in three horrifying days of terror in France.
+
+France's Interior Ministry described the demonstration as the largest in the nation's history. More than 3.7 million marched throughout the country, including between 1.2 million and 1.6 million in the capital. The ministry said a precise number was impossible to determine given the enormity of the turnout.
+
+""Today, Paris is the capital of the world,"" Hollande said. ""Our entire country will rise up toward something better.""
+
+Hollande and Netanyahu later visited the Grand Synagogue in Paris, which for security reasons did not hold Sabbath services this weekend for the first time since World War II.
+
+""Today I walked the streets of Paris with the leaders of the world to say enough terror -- the time has come to fight terror,"" Netanyahu said. He also stressed that the enemy is not Islam, but extremists.
+
+The attackers' primary target was the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly publication that has published spoofs of the Islamic prophet Mohammed. The slogan ""Je suis Charlie"" — I am Charlie — has swept across France and around the globe.
+
+Twelve people were killed when brothers Said, 34, and Cherif Kouachi, 32, stormed the offices magazine's offices Wednesday. Two days later police tracked them to a printing house near Charles de Gaulle Airport where they were killed.
+
+On Thursday, Amedy Coulibaly, 32, shot and killed a policewoman. On Friday he killed four people -- all Jewish -- at a kosher market and threatened more violence unless the police let the Kouachis go. He was killed later in the day during a police assault.
+
+French prosecutors said Coulibaly is also linked to the shooting of a jogger on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Video emerged showing Coulibaly pledging allegiance to the Islamic State and claiming he coordinated the attacks with the Kouachi brothers.
+
+Sunday was a day for healing and for unity. Rallies in support of freedom of expression were held across France and in major cities around the globe.
+
+In New York, the Empire State Building was lit in the colors of the French flag as a solidarity gesture. The lights were to be darkened at 8 p.m. ET in memory of those killed in the Paris attacks.
+
+In Paris, the military and police were out in force, with more than 2,000 police officers patrolling the area, French officials said. Another 2,000 officers and 1,300 soldiers were protecting key buildings, landmarks, transportation hubs and Jewish sites.
+
+The rally, featuring family members of those who died in the attacks, drew French celebrities, Christian, Jewish and Muslim community leaders, and politicians from across the French political spectrum.
+
+Paris public transport operator RATP made travel on its metro, bus and tram network free to reduce traffic in the center of the capital. Crowds began gathering hours before the rally started at 3 p.m. local time (9 a.m. ET) in central Paris.
+
+The boulevards and streets leading to Place de la Republique soon became blocked by the throngs, but a cheerful spirit pervaded among demonstrators. ""Today is not the day to be grumpy Parisians,"" said one woman sporting a bright-red French beret.
+
+Hawkers sold buttons and banners reading ""Je Suis Charlie"" as well as ""Je Suis Ahmed"" and ""Je Suis Juif (Jewish)."" Banners and signs in honor of those who died, cartoons drawn on posterboard and plastic, and mosaics on the ground made from pens, were also being sold.
+
+The display of world leaders did not impress Reporters Without Borders, which issued a statement saying it was ""appalled"" by some of the countries represented in a rally so closely tied to freedom of expression.
+
+""Journalists and bloggers are systematically persecuted (in) Egypt, Russia, Turkey and United Arab Emirates,"" the statement said. ""We must demonstrate our solidarity with CharlieHebdo without forgetting all the world's other Charlies. ... We must not let predators of press freedom spit on the graves of Charlie Hebdo.""
+
+Some rallies kicked off earlier Sunday. In Dammartin-en-Groele, the small industrial town northeast of Paris where the Kouachi brothers were killed by police, tens of thousands of people came out and sang La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, and chanted ""Je Suis Charlie.""
+
+Blandine Siet, 51, who lives in the Montparnasse neighborhood in south Paris, said she would join the capital city's rally with a group of friends and neighbors to protest the restrictions to freedom of expression that she fears may result from the attack onCharlie Hebdo.
+
+""France is a free country with strong (democratic) values and I want it to stay that way,"" she said.
+
+Meanwhile, thousands of people gathered Sunday for the funeral of Ahmed Merabet, the police officer shot as he lay wounded on the ground just after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Mourners waved signs reading ""Thank you, Ahmed"" and ""Je Suis Ahmed.""
+
+Bacon reported from McLean, Va. Contributing: Jane Onyanga-Omara in London; Jabeen Bhatti in Berlin; the Associated Press",REAL
+857,Ted Cruz Drops Out Of The 2016 Presidential Race,"WASHINGTON -- Facing an increasingly narrow path to the nomination and failing to thwart Donald Trump's dominance, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) withdrew from the 2016 presidential race on Tuesday. ""Tonight, I'm sorry to say that path has been foreclosed,"" Cruz said in a speech Tuesday night in Indianapolis, ""but the voters chose another path."" ""We are suspending our campaign,"" he added. As Trump barreled toward the 1,237 delegates required to win, Cruz's campaign in recent weeks resorted to increasingly desperate measures, mounting a last-ditch effort to win the Indiana primary, one of the only remaining primary states that gave Cruz a chance of winning. But Indiana turned out to be the final nail in the coffin -- Trump won handily in the Hoosier State, including among social conservatives, a demographic that in theory favored Cruz. To reinvigorate his campaign, Cruz last week named former presidential candidate and Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his running mate, even though candidates typically do not name their running mate until they have amassed enough delegates for the nomination.
+
+His campaign also announced a plan to coordinate with the campaign of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the other remaining candidate. Kasich's team agreed to pull resources out of Indiana and cede the race there to Cruz. However, this effort quickly backfired, when each candidate caused confusion by diminishing its importance. Kasich said voters in Indiana should still vote for him. Like many of the GOP candidates and party leaders, Cruz underestimated the strength of Trump's appeal. Initially, he often defended Trump instead of attacking him, strategizing that he could pick up Trump’s supporters if the businessman exited the race. But when it became apparent that Trump's populist and nationalist rhetoric was resonating with Republican voters, with the reality television star dominating the majority of the primaries, Cruz began to target Trump on the debate stage and on the campaign trail -- to little avail. Once positioned as a strong threat to become the Republican presidential nominee, the Texas senator was the first candidate in either party to officially declare his intent to run for the presidency in 2016. Bypassing the typical first step in a presidential campaign -- the exploratory committee -- he kicked off his campaign in March of 2015 with a rousing speech at Liberty University, the Christian university founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. ""What is the promise of America? The idea that -- the revolutionary idea that this country was founded upon, which is that our rights don’t come from man. They come from God Almighty,” he said in his announcement speech.
+
+A star of the tea party movement, Cruz made social conservatism and religious liberty a fundamental part of his pitch to voters. He highlighted his staunch opposition to gay marriage on the basis of religious freedom, particularly after the Supreme Court decision in June 2015 that legalized gay marriage nationwide. In response, Cruz said he would introduce a constitutional amendment to hold elections for Supreme Court justices. Over the summer, he held a religious freedom rally in the key state of Iowa, during which he proclaimed that “there is a war on faith in America today, in our lifetime” and bemoaned the “persecution” of Christians. But despite touting his conservative credentials and fashioning himself as an anti-establishment candidate, Cruz never quite managed to rally conservatives around him. The Texas senator was hugely unpopular among his colleagues, with most GOP lawmakers reluctant to endorse him until it became clear he was the only viable option to potentially halt Trump's momentum. Only then did Republicans begin backing him, though many gave tepid reasons for doing so and perceived him merely as the lesser of two evils when compared to Trump. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced his support of Cruz just weeks after joking that he wanted to murder him. Former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told students at Stanford University that Cruz was ""Lucifer in the flesh"" and ""a miserable son of a bitch."" Cruz's campaign never had the enthusiasm and fervor of Trump's insurgency. For example, when Cruz introduced himself at the second GOP debate in September, the audience responded with silence.
+
+And while Cruz portrayed himself as an outsider, most voters viewed him as an establishment candidate, compared to the brash, take-no-prisoners Trump.  As the reality of Cruz's downfall and Trump's presumptive nomination begins to sink in, the Republican party faces a serious dilemma: whether to support Trump as the party's nominee and potentially hand Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton the presidency, or risk further damage to the party with Trump at the helm. Soon after Cruz's announcement Tuesday, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus urged his party to unite around Trump.",REAL
+25,Planned Parenthood gets over $500 million annually in public funds. Here's where it goes.,"Republican legislators have repeatedly tried to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood — questioning why the non-profit gets money from the government in the first place.
+
+In the wake of sting videos taped inside Planned Parenthood clinics, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) promised to use ""all legislative vehicles at his disposal"" to force a vote defunding the organization. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) made similar promises to file an amendment that would, according to the Hill, ""eliminate all federal funding for Planned Parenthood.""
+
+Planned Parenthood receives more than $500 million annually in government funding, mostly through Medicaid and grants. Most of this money goes toward providing low-income women with family planning services like STD screening and contraceptive coverage. Planned Parenthood is, without a doubt, one of the largest providers in this space: Of the 6.7 million women who rely on public programs to pay for contraceptives, 2.4 million of them — 36 percent — do so at Planned Parenthood's 817 clinics across the country.
+
+If Congress did defund Planned Parenthood, it would be a huge blow to the group: About 40 percent of its budget comes from government grants, and much of that spending gets done on the federal level. Because Planned Parenthood is such a large provider in this space, it's hard to see other clinics stepping in to fill the gap that it would leave.
+
+Just over 40 percent of Planned Parenthood's budget comes from government grants and reimbursements, the organization's most recent budget report shows. Between June 2013 and 2014, Planned Parenthood received $528.4 million in public funding, a big chunk of its $1.3 billion national budget.
+
+That $528.4 million figure covers both state and federal funding, and Planned Parenthood does not publicly break out how much money it gets just from federal funding. The best estimate arguably comes from the Government Accountability Office, which estimated that Planned Parenthood received $105 million in federal funding in 2012.
+
+There are two main ways Planned Parenthood receives public funds. One is through Medicaid, the public health insurance program that covers 71 million low-income Americans. Whenever a Medicaid patient has an appointment at a Planned Parenthood clinic, the nonprofit will bill the health plan for whatever services the patient uses.
+
+The other source of funding is grants, largely through the Title X Family Planning Program — the only domestic grant program dedicated to family planning. Organizations like Planned Parenthood often use Title X grants to subsidize birth control, STD screenings, and other reproductive health services for low-income patients who may lack health insurance coverage.
+
+Planned Parenthood receives Title X funds both directly from the federal government and from states, which will sometimes make the nonprofit's health center a subgrantee for the dollars they receive from the federal government.
+
+Both Title X and Medicaid provide low- to middle-income women with financial assistance to cover family planning costs. Medicaid might, for example, reimburse Planned Parenthood when it provides a patient with an HPV vaccine. And a Planned Parenthood clinic could use Title X grants to subsidize the placement of an IUD, which can cost upward of $500 for an uninsured patient.
+
+The exact family planning benefits that Medicaid covers varies from state to state. But generally, many states will cover contraceptives, STD screenings, HPV vaccines, and cancer screenings as well as sterilization and reversal procedures — and will reimburse Planned Parenthood when it is the provider.
+
+Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have Medicaid programs that will pay for abortions, although those health plans are barred from using federal dollars — and have to use the state's share of funding to pay for the procedure.
+
+Title X often covers the same type of services as Medicaid, except for women who are not on the public program. One important difference: Title X funds are never available to be used for abortions, even in states where the Medicaid program covers the procedure.
+
+Federal law expressly prohibits the use of Title X funds to pay for abortions — while abortion providers like Planned Parenthood can qualify for grants, the government requires that no federal dollars go toward the termination of pregnancies.
+
+No legislation to defund Planned Parenthood has ever passed, so its a bit hard to know — and even how, exactly, Planned Parenthood would lose its fund varies in different legislative proposals.
+
+Historically, when congressional Republicans have talked about ""defunding Planned Parenthood,"" they've meant barring the group from receiving Title X funds.
+
+This is the type of bill the House passed in 2011. It would have disallowed any abortion providers — Planned Parenthood clinics or otherwise — from getting Title X grant funds.
+
+That type of bill would put a dent in Planned Parenthood's budget, but it would be far from ending the group's federal funding. They would still receive funding through Medicaid, a much larger program than Title X — and near certainly a bigger chunk of Planned Parenthood's budget.
+
+Planned Parenthood does not provide a breakdown of its government funding, but separate data suggests it almost certainly gets way more public revenue from the Medicaid patients it sees. One analysis from the Guttmacher Institute shows that Medicaid, a program jointly funded by states and the federal government, pays for 75 percent of publicly funded family planning services in the United States — while Title X covers 10 percent.
+
+In order to fully defund Planned Parenthood, Congress would need to pass a law that bars Medicaid from reimbursing its clinics for patient visits there. This type of amendment hasn't historically come up in congressional debates about cutting Planned Parenthood's budget, perhaps because it's a much more drastic move than proposing cuts to Planned Parenthood's Title X funding.",REAL
+1249,Chicago court to hear 'natural-born' case to knock Ted Cruz off ballot,"CHICAGO — A judge will hear arguments on Friday from an Illinois voter alleging that Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz is not a ""natural-born citizen"" and should be disqualified for the party's nomination.
+
+Lawrence Joyce, an Illinois voter who has objected to Cruz's placement on the Illinois primary ballot next month, will have his case heard in the Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago. Joyce's previous objection, made to the state's Board of Elections, was dismissed on February 1. He appealed the decision and was granted a hearing for Friday before Judge Maureen Ward Kirby.
+
+Joyce challenges Cruz's right to be president in the wake of questions put forth by GOP rival Donald Trump about being born in Canada. Cruz maintains he is a natural-born citizen since his mother is American-born.
+
+""What I fear is that Ted Cruz becomes the nominee, come September, Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida will go forward with his threats and probably several other Democrats will file suit to prevent Ted Cruz from being on the ballot,"" Joyce, a pharmacist and attorney from Poplar Grove, Ill, told USA TODAY.
+
+Grayson, a Democrat, has told reporters that he will file a lawsuit contesting Cruz's citizenship if the senator from Texas wins the GOP nomination.
+
+""What Democrats will do at that point is cherry pick which county courthouse they are going to show up in order to file these petitions,"" Joyce said. ""And at that point, I fear they'll get a string of victories in the lower courts and the funding for Ted Cruz would dry up, his numbers would plummet in the polls, he may be forced to give up the nomination.""
+
+Joyce, who said he is backing Republican contender Ben Carson, said he has not spoken to the Trump campaign. But Joyce did say he raised the issue with the Carson campaign, which he said was uninterested in pursuing the matter.
+
+The Illinois man said he was hesitant to file the lawsuit out of concern that getting involved in such a high profile case could be detrimental to his own law practice.
+
+""I tried to talk myself out of it and was unable to do so,"" Joyce said. ""It's plain as day that Ted Cruz is not a natural born citizen of the United States.""
+
+Cruz, at a CNN-hosted town hall meeting Wednesday night, defended his citizenship and right to run, saying he was born in Canada to a U.S. citizen, making him an automatic U.S citizen. His mother was born in Wilmington, Del., Cruz said.
+
+“I never breathed a breath of air on this planet when I was not a U.S. citizen,” he said. “It was the act of being born that made me a U.S. citizen.”
+
+He added: “There will be some who try to work political mischief on it, but as a legal matter, this is clear and straightforward.”
+
+Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said Thursday night he had no comment about the lawsuit. The Trump campaign could not immediately be reached for comment.
+
+A federal lawsuit was filed in Texas last month asking for a determination of Cruz's eligibility to run. And voters in New York, who raised similar concerns about Cruz's citizenship, on Thursday filed a challenge with the state Board of Election challenging the senator's eligibility to be on the ballot.
+
+Sanford Levinson, constitutional law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said Joyce would have to prove standing – or why Cruz’s potential ineligibility affects him specifically – for the judge to proceed with the case.
+
+Even if the judge declares Cruz to be ineligible to run, the GOP candidate’s campaign would undoubtedly file an appeal, potentially tying the case up for months, he said.
+
+It’s surprising that a lower court would even agree to hear the case, which is entangled in broader constitutional issues, Sanford said.
+
+“I’d be very, very surprised if [the judge] were to say he’s ineligible,” he said. “At that point, all hell would break loose.""",REAL
+3293,NYDN Calls Out 'Traitor' Senate Republicans,"Rudy Giuliani And The Price Of Milk
+
+While running for president in 2007, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told a reporter at a Montgomery, Ala., supermarket that he estimates ""a gallon of milk is probably about a $1.50, a loaf of bread about a $1.25, $1.30, last time I bought one."" It must have been a few election cycles since his last trip: The grocery store's website listed milk for $3.38 and bread up to $3.49.",REAL
+649,"As Sanders refuses to bow out, Millennials urge him to keep fighting","While Bernie Sanders has been mathematically eliminated, the ability to appeal to Millennial attitudes is only going to grow more crucial in future elections, political scientists say.
+
+Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders is hugged by a supporter after addressing the crowd following the closing of the polls in the California presidential primary in Santa Monica, Calif., June 7.
+
+Garner Jarrett never used to care much about politics.
+
+The massage therapist and actor, who is in his late 20s, had been an indifferent voter at best and never before voted in a presidential primary.
+
+But the promise of change that Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders brought to the national stage – and the access to information about him that the Internet made possible – moved Mr. Jarrett enough to not only cast his vote at his neighborhood polling station in Koreatown on Tuesday. It also propelled him to reevaluate his view of the American political process, he says.
+
+“This election changed the way I participate on a deeper scale,” he says. “I started seeing stuff about a candidate I cared about. It inspired the hope that things could get better.”
+
+Jarrett’s remarks articulate in part the attitudes that are coming to define Millennial voter concerns and behavior. Those attitudes first emerged in the 2008 presidential election: a tendency to lean toward liberal values; a drive to champion social justice issues and call for change in established processes; and a reliance on the Internet and social media for information, communication, and political mobilization.
+
+As the generation comes into its own – already Millennials match baby boomers in their share of the US electorate – those perspectives will more heavily inform the issues and processes that determine future elections, political analysts and generational experts say.
+
+What has grown more pronounced since 2008 and 2012 – and which Senator Sanders’s campaign underscored – is a push away from even the perception of being part of “the establishment,” whether it’s Washington or Wall Street. Such a drive, if sustained, could have lasting influence on the way Millennial voters engage in elections and the kinds of issues toward which they steer conversation, says Jan Leighley, a professor who specializes in political behavior at American University in Washington.
+
+“The likely consequences of Millennial support of a Bernie candidacy is that a) you may have mobilized a generation more than they would have otherwise, and b) you may just have pulled Hillary to the left,” she says.
+
+Tuesday, Hillary Clinton made history as the first woman to top a major party ticket by securing the number of delegates she needed to clinch the Democratic nomination – even before the last six states went to the polls, according to the Associated Press. Three of the states – New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota – have been called for her, while she holds a commanding lead in the night's biggest delegate prize, California.
+
+“Tonight caps an amazing journey – a long, long journey,” Mrs. Clinton said in her victory speech. “Thanks to you, we’ve reached a milestone. The first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major party’s nominee.”
+
+Sanders, who won in Montana and North Dakota, refused to bow out, vowing to fight on until Washington, D.C., goes to the polls June 14. While he has been mathematically eliminated, his success in galvanizing young people like Jarrett speaks to the value of a politician’s ability to verbalize Millennial concerns in a passionate way.
+
+“[Sanders] struck a chord that this generation is receptive to,” says Michael Hais, a veteran market researcher and co-author of three books on Millennials. More and more, he notes, leaders will have to speak in a language and communicate using methods that this generation understands – as the senator has done.
+
+“They’ve had these basic attitudes … and that’s going to persist,” Mr. Hais adds. “They are going to shape the policy of the future.”
+
+Despite their numbers, only 46 percent of Millennials, 18-to-34 year olds, are likely to vote. They make up just  17 percent of likely voters in California.
+
+That’s not unusual, as voters tend to participate more in elections as they grow older. Baby boomers today have higher rates of voter turnout than Millennials, but boomers came out to vote at about the same rate as Millennials when they were the same age, according to data from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a nonpartisan research institute at Tufts University in Boston.
+
+“The reality is youth are very small percentage of the vote,” says Professor Leighley. “That’s true even in [presidential] election years … [and] even under the most generous assumptions.”
+
+Still, Millennials did show up at polling stations across Los Angeles on primary day – making it more likely that they will vote again.
+
+“The biggest predictor of participating in a future election is if you participate in a previous one,” says Jeff Gulati, a political science professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass.
+
+And those Millennials who spoke with the Monitor echoed Jarrett, the Koreatown resident, when it came to their hopes for and expectations of a leader – and the reasons they came out to vote.
+
+“This [election] makes me want to be more aware,” says Serenity Self, 26, as she walks out of Bellevue Recreation Center, which served as a polling station in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood. “Bernie bringing up delegates and superdelegates made me question the whole [electoral] process. I think finally people are seeing the light.”
+
+“This is the most active I’ve ever been in a campaign,” says David Hemphill, 33, a children’s book publisher who spent primary day canvassing for Sanders in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. “He gave a voice to things that I have felt for a long time and haven’t really heard someone speak to.”
+
+“I’m looking at our power structure in this country through a different lens than I was a year ago,” he adds.
+
+Elementary school teacher Angelo Gonzales, 28, says he wavered between Mrs. Clinton and Sanders, but ultimately chose the latter because of his bold vision.
+
+“I guess I wanted to make a statement,” he says. “Ten years ago I would’ve scoffed at Bernie Sanders. I would have said he wanted too much change. But change is good. It’s a powerful thing. We want someone to step up.”
+
+Some political analysts are wary of making definitive statements about the long-term impact of this election – and of Sanders’s campaign – on Millennial attitudes, and vice versa. Though the senator did manage to energize a large swath of the demographic, Professor Gulati says, not all Millennials are Sanders supporters, or Democrats for that matter.
+
+They’re also young, and therefore still developing their views and political stances, says Professor Leighley at American University.
+
+“You’re talking about individuals who don’t have firmly-held attitudes and don’t have much experience,” she says. “The issues that they’re raising are issues that every other age group are raising – economic security, jobs, some aspect of maybe the role of government in allowing or helping individuals to get ahead. That’s not much different from what elections usually are about.”
+
+Another enduring effect of this election, analysts say, is the role of the Internet and social media – not just in terms of how candidates are reaching potential voters, as they did for Obama during his campaigns, but also how voters are informing themselves about the candidates and their issues.
+
+They are, says Hais, the generation expert, “the best way of appealing to Millennials, more than anything.”
+
+“There’s so much information out there,” video editor Andrea Otto, 27, says. “You can look into the money of campaigns, you can be better informed. You don’t have to take what mainstream media outlets are telling you.”
+
+“I think this election is unique in that social media is coming to be huge,” adds Jarrett from Koreatown. “You can take a person nobody knows about, and through social media, he’s able to become an important candidate.”
+
+Mr. Hemphill, the children’s book publisher, goes a step further.
+
+“We’re the most educated, connected generation in the history of the world,” he says. “We have the Internet at our fingertips. We can look at things that any leader said five years ago, 10 years ago. We can track someone that easily.”
+
+“People really discount what the Internet voice is. I think it’s very short sighted,” he adds. “I think that people are [now] awake and alive and I can only hope that it continues. We can’t go back.”",REAL
+4503,"Supreme Court races the clock on gay marriage, Obamacare and more","WASHINGTON — The future of same-sex marriage and President Obama's health care law hang in the balance as the Supreme Court's 2014 term draws rapidly to a close this month. But those aren't the only big issues on the justices' plate.
+
+Free speech and fair elections. Religious liberty and racial discrimination. Clean air and capital punishment. All await rulings over the next three weeks as the court completes action on 20 cases remaining this term. The next decisions will come Thursday morning.
+
+Here's a look at the Elite Eight:
+
+• Same-sex marriage. In a decision likely to come on the term's last day — possibly June 29 or 30 — the court will decide whether gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry or whether state bans against same-sex marriage can remain in place.
+
+Six cases from Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee and Kentucky have been consolidated for the court's consideration. In them, 32 total plaintiffs are asking for the right to marry or to have marriages licensed elsewhere recognized in their home states. Most legal experts predict the court, led by Justice Anthony Kennedy, will rule in favor of the gay and lesbian couples.
+
+• Obamacare. The future of Obama's health care law is on the line for the second time in three years, and it's anyone's guess how the court will rule.
+
+Passed in 2010 and narrowly upheld by the court in a 5-4 ruling in 2012, the law has extended health insurance to 12 million Americans. But four words in its lengthy text — ""established by the state"" — now endanger federal subsidies relied upon by 6.4 million participants in 34 states that did not create their own exchanges or marketplaces. The justices must decide whether the law prohibits that financial aid.
+
+• Clean air. Environmental regulations approved by the Obama administration regularly come before the Supreme Court, and this year is no exception. A major rule requiring coal- and oil-fired power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic air pollutants hangs in the balance.
+
+The justices appeared closely divided on the central issue in the case — whether the Environmental Protection Agency should have considered the nearly $10 billion annual cost in relation to the potential benefits before approving the regulation — when it was argued. A decision in favor of objecting states and utilities could send the EPA back to the drawing board.
+
+• Housing discrimination. The third time could be the charm for the court's conservatives, who tried twice in recent years to consider cases challenging the way housing bias claims are decided.
+
+Under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, minority groups have been able to win lawsuits by showing that housing practices — such as sales, rentals, zoning and lending — have a disparate impact on minorities. Housing industry opponents challenging the law say it was intended only to ban intentional discrimination.
+
+• Lethal injections. The death penalty also is never far from the high court's docket. After a steady diet of cases and emergency appeals on issues such as claimed intellectual disabilities and the actions of defense lawyers and prosecutors, the court now must rule on a relatively new method of execution.
+
+The case involves the use of a sedative called midazolam as part of a three-drug cocktail used by several states, including Oklahoma, where three death-row inmates are challenging its use. Unlike stronger barbiturates that are in short supply, the drug has failed in some cases to block pain and suffering during the lethal injection process.
+
+• License plates. This is a free speech case that hinges on who is speaking — the state government issuing specialty license plates or the vehicles' owners.
+
+Texas, which like every other state issues such plates to produce revenue while promoting a variety of causes, refused to approve the Sons of Confederate Veterans' request for a plate featuring the Confederate flag. The justices must decide if the government has the right to suppress its own speech or must allow private speech by motorists, no matter how offensive.
+
+• Political maps. In the second case to reach the court this year on political redistricting, the justices must decide whether nonpartisan commissions can replace state legislatures in drawing congressional district maps every 10 years.
+
+Those commissions are used in seven states, including California, to take the redistricting process out of the hands of politicians with a vested interest. But the Arizona state Legislature's Republican majority argued that the Constitution gives that power solely to state legislatures. A majority of the court's justices appeared to agree during oral arguments.
+
+• Religious signs. Also from Arizona comes a case combining religious freedom and highway clutter. Tiny Good News Community Church is challenging the town of Gilbert's sign ordinances, which restrict signs advertising upcoming events — such as church services — far more than political and ideological signs.
+
+While acknowledging that local governments can regulate for the purposes of beautification, the justices likely will rule that the town went too far in limiting church event signs to 6 square feet and 13 hours. That would be good news for Good News.",REAL
+1330,Gloves off for top tier in GOP race after debate,"While the full field of Republican presidential candidates resumed campaigning Friday, it was Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio who emerged from last night's Fox Business debate the apparent main challengers to front-runner Donald Trump -- though New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's feisty exchanges may have left some thinking what was once a 17-candidate scramble, now is a four-man showdown.
+
+Or, maybe five, as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who managed to get in a few shots at Trump, picked up the endorsement Friday morning of former candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham.
+
+Trump, though, quickly dismissed the backing, tweeting that Bush’s “chances of winning are zero,” the same as Graham’s polling.
+
+The exchanges all marked a newly aggressive campaign heading into the final stretch before Iowa.
+
+For Trump and Cruz in particular, the Fox Business Network debate in South Carolina marked the first where real tensions showed through. Before, the two top-polling candidates essentially refused to attack each other, preserving a détente that extended to the campaign trail.
+
+Trump, after the debate, acknowledged in one TV interview that their “bromance” is over.
+
+The debate could set the tone for the final two weeks before the leadoff Iowa caucuses, with the leading candidates now searching aggressively for weak spots in each other’s records.
+
+On Friday, the candidates spread all over the early-voting state map.
+
+Trump is following on his strong performance with an Iowa rally Friday morning. Cruz is charging through South Carolina, while Rubio is in New Hampshire.
+
+Trump also has rented out space at an Iowa theater and is giving residents free tickets to a showing of “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” Friday evening, according to The Des Moines Register. The movie depicts the 2012 terror attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, a topic that has haunted Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.
+
+With the polls tightening in the middle in the Granite State – and at the top in Iowa – nearly a half-dozen candidates are now firing at each other on a regular basis.
+
+Rubio sustained his attacks going into Friday, launching a new TV ad that calls accusations from Bush “desperate” – and reprising his criticism on Cruz’ consistency in an interview with Fox News.
+
+“I like Ted, we’re friends, but he campaigns as a consistent conservative. … That is not his record; he has flipped his position on birthright citizenship, on legalization of illegal immigrants,” he told Fox News.
+
+When Rubio launched that same attack at Cruz Thursday night, though, Cruz deftly countered.
+
+“I appreciate you dumping your oppo research folder on the debate stage,” Cruz said, maintaining that he opposes “amnesty” while Rubio backs citizenship for illegal immigrants.
+
+Through most of the debate, Cruz showed off his skills as practiced debater. He employed this early on to fend off a challenge from Trump over the Canada-born senator’s eligibility to seek the presidency. He accused Trump of pushing “birther theories” because the polls are tightening.
+
+Then, in a retort reminiscent of Reagan’s famous “youth and inexperience” quip, Cruz tried to flip the script by noting some “birther theories” say a candidate must have two parents born on U.S. soil to be eligible.
+
+Pointing out Trump’s mother was born in Scotland, Cruz said: “On the issue of citizenship, I’m not going to use your mother’s birth against you.”
+
+Trump said, “But I was born here … big difference.”
+
+But Trump, though, was seen as landing a decisive retort when Cruz criticized him for “New York values.” Recalling memories from after 9/11, Trump passionately described the “horrific” clean up and the “smell of death” in the city.
+
+“It was with us for months, the smell,” Trump said. “And everybody in the world loved New York, loved New Yorkers -- and I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement.”
+
+Not to be overshadowed, Rubio and Christie both broke through on several occasions.
+
+While Rubio and Cruz tangled over their immigration records and voting consistency, Rubio also accused Christie of endorsing “many of the ideas that Barack Obama supports, whether it is Common Core or gun control or the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor or the donation he made to Planned Parenthood.”
+
+“I stood on the stage and watched Marco … rather indignantly, look at Governor Bush and say, ‘someone told you that because we're running for the same office, that criticizing me will get you to that office,’” he said. “It appears that the same someone has been whispering in old Marco's ear too.”
+
+Often left on the sidelines of the rhetorical battles were Ohio Gov. John Kasich and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
+
+Carson has seen his numbers steadily slide in Iowa, though Kasich is still polling strong in New Hampshire.",REAL
+8348,Trump’s Camp Manager DESTROYS Hillary By Pointing Out 1 Thing We All Missed,"Trump’s Camp Manager DESTROYS Hillary By Pointing Out 1 Thing We All Missed Posted on October 30, 2016 by Amanda Shea in Politics Share This Fox News Host (left), Trump’s Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway (right) 
+From the moment the FBI announced they’re investigating Hillary Clinton again, her ship of supporters quickly became lighter with people bailing out to protect themselves from being associated with her as a criminal. Donald Trump’s campaign couldn’t have asked for better vindication that the witch could soon be incarcerated, but the Republican candidate’s campaign manager just put the final nail in Clinton’s coffin. 
+In the wake of this latest development that could save Western civilization, Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News to discuss it, but she delivered more than viewers were expecting. In a statement that didn’t just decimate Hillary’s campaign, she brought the entire Clinton family down with it in one perfectly stated sentence. 
+When the FBI cracks a case back open that they had previously closed, there’s a legitimate reason to be terrified for the outcome of that investigation, and it’s almost guaranteed to end in incarceration. Former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom validated this when he said after the announcement that the final bomb is about to drop on Hillary within the next ten days. Adding to everything coming back to haunt Hillary since Friday, is what Conway said on Fox News: 
+“What we are reminded of is this cloud of corruption that always follows Hillary Clinton and we are having this entire conversation about a renewed FBU investigation because Hillary Clinton did what she always does, put Hillary first…we can never get the stench and the stain of the Clintons off if us it turns out.” 
+Call it karma or the combined forces of WikiLeaks, James O’Keefe, and now the FBI, who are all working together to bleach this “stain” from the White House, but things just aren’t looking good for Hillary who had it coming. Hopefully, the FBI who failed the American people after the first investigation that ended with her still being able to run for president, make good on that mistake by actually arresting her after round two. 
+The investigation now is entirely different than the first, considering the fact that it was reopened. For that reason alone, Hillary shouldn’t feel comfortable about the outcome.",FAKE
+8686,EU using taxpayer money to give Muslim invaders in Turkey free debit cards and cash transfers to keep them out of Europe,"BNI Store Oct 29 2016 EU using taxpayer money to give Muslim invaders in Turkey free debit cards and cash transfers to keep them out of Europe As many as one million illegal alien Muslim colonizers in Turkey will receive debit cards and monthly cash transfers to help pay for food and housing under a new €348 million ($393 million) humanitarian program from the European Union. ZeroHedge The EU’s largest-ever humanitarian program is part of a €3 billion package of assistance the bloc promised Turkey to support some three million refugees the country hosts, mainly from Syria. The new EU program will be overseen by the World Food Program, in cooperation with the Turkish Red Crescent. Each family’s need will be assessed individually and there are additional funds available for education or supporting elderly family members. Step-by-Step Progression into a sinkhole for the EU More refugees will seek free handouts. Turkey will complain €3 billion is not enough. The refugees will complain €1,000 is not enough. EU citizens will wonder why refugees are getting €1,000 and they are not. Demands for an EU-wide helicopter drop of free debit cards will soar. The amounts demanded will soar. Some economist will propose the debit cards will expire if not used quickly. And then, and then ….Under Eurozone rules the ECB cannot simply print money and give it away. Countries have budget constraints. So, either taxes go up to pay for the scheme, or the EMU rules have to change. Western media are reporting on the Muslim refugee crisis as a humanitarian problem for the West only. But where are the media questions about the huge financial and land resources available in the Arab Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE? So far, the richest Arab Muslim countries in the Middle East have taken in virtually no Muslim refugees. Liveleak The world is often lectured to about the urgency of respecting Arab and Islamic brotherly love, but where is the Arab action to rescue fellow Muslims and Arabs from the claws of ISIS? Where are the mighty Arab armies who waged dozens of wars against Israel? Why aren’t they fighting ISIS and building tent cities in the vast deserts of Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the wealthy Gulf States? Where is the wealthy Arab League to coordinate safe cities on Arab land that extends from Morocco to Iraq and from Northern Syria to Sudan? Kuwaiti official explains why Kuwait will NOT take in any Syrian refugees “Kuwait and other oil-rich Muslim countries are too valuable to accept low-class Muslim refugees who we will have to support because they don’t want to work. We don’t want people who are different from us.”",FAKE
+4319,Carly Fiorina is more dangerous than Donald Trump: Her brazen demagoguery puts his to shame,"This is partly a function of her recent climb in the polls, while Donald Trump has begun to slide. It is also partly a function of her strict adherence to right-wing ideology on issues such as abortion and national security, and partly a function of the affect she’s developing on the campaign trail. Of the top three current candidates – Fiorina, Trump and Ben Carson – it is the former HP executive who has emerged with the steely resolve and chest-thumping, unapologetic jingoism so beloved by conservatives. Combine this with specific policy prescriptions and you get a formidable candidate who, unlike someone like Jeb! Bush, seems to grow, not wilt, in the spotlight.
+
+Full disclosure: Two weeks ago, I wrote an entire column arguing the exact opposite of what I’m about to say. But Fiorina’s debate performance and her ongoing defense of her comments on Planned Parenthood, combined with polls indicating the air really has started leaking out of the Trump balloon, have me rethinking my position.
+
+Her MTP interview was a textbook example of Fiorina’s effectiveness in appealing to the right wing, particularly when she’s in the cross hairs of a mainstream media outlet. (That she was questioned by Chuck Todd, an interviewer so hapless he might as well have been my 2-year-old nephew asking “But why?” after every Fiorina answer, certainly helped.) Asked why she’s sticking to the well-documented fictions she keeps telling about the infamous Planned Parenthood videos, Fiorina smiled like a shark, shook her head, condescended to and talked over Todd, and reiterated with all the assurance of a champion bullshit artist that yes, there is no question that “Planned Parenthood is aborting fetuses alive to harvest their brains and other body parts. That is a fact.”
+
+It is useless to point out how many times this garbage has been debunked. Fiorina not only either believes it or can convincingly pretend to, but she also gives the antiabortion movement on the right some additional credibility. While one expects, say, former Baptist minister Mike Huckabee’s strident antiabortion rhetoric, Fiorina does not wear her religion on her sleeve. Nor does she, as nearly every other candidate does, come from a legislative background where she has wrestled with the abortion issue. She can plausibly claim to be a secular true believer, making antiabortion positions not just the province of evangelicals and other religious conservatives.
+
+Fiorina also has an advantage over the openly religious Ben Carson in this area, one created by the latter’s soft-spoken demeanor. The Republican base is in a fighting mood. The more spark she shows, the more she can draw conservatives away from the retired neurosurgeon who is currently a hair behind Donald Trump in the polls.
+
+But where Fiorina’s demagoguery becomes even more dangerous is in its specificity about policy. Compare her talk on foreign policy to those of Trump and Carson. When asked during the debate how she would interact with Vladimir Putin, Fiorina told CNN’s audience, What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message. Imagine you are a Russian hard-liner sitting in Moscow watching this debate and hearing the GOP’s third-leading candidate promising a foreign policy aimed at your country that is so muscular, Ronald Reagan’s corpse just got an erection. You’re not thinking that Fiorina sounds more unhinged than General Buck Turgidson or the fact that Barack Obama is also conducting aggressive military exercises in the Baltics and the Sixth Fleet is as big and strong as ever. You’re thinking Comrade Putin will stand strong against this foolishness when Carly Fiorina is in the Oval Office. And if you are a conservative voter in America, you’re thinking, Carly won’t be a chump like that wimp Obama, who has let Putin walk all over him. That swelling in your chest is a jingoistic pride that you haven’t felt during the long, dark years that the Kenyan Usurper has been destroying America from within. Compare Fiorina to the boastfulness of Donald Trump, who talks in generalities: I’ll make us great again, I get along with everyone so I’ll get along with the Russians and Chinese, I’m a successful businessman, I’ll make fantastic deals and everyone will be very happy. Trump also promised he would actually talk to Putin instead of ordering the Sixth Fleet into the Turkish Straits practically the moment he takes his hand off the Bible at his Inauguration. Despite all his bluster, Trump at the end of the day wants to be the friendly executive strolling across the construction site and shaking hands with all the hardhat-sporting workers. Fiorina wants to be the one yelling at them to quit staring at her and get back to work. After all, talking and making friends is also what that community organizer Barack Obama does.",REAL
+3490,What's in Donald Trump's tax returns?,"On 23 September 1952, vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon gave a speech laying out ""everything I have earned, everything I have spent and everything I own"".
+
+He concluded by challenging the Democratic candidate for president, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, to do the same. Governor Stevenson took the challenge one step further, releasing his personal tax returns - the clearest account of an individual's income for the year.
+
+The move was not reciprocated by Nixon or his running mate for president, Dwight Eisenhower.
+
+Two decades later though, at the height of the Watergate scandal and under audit by the US tax authority - the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) - then-President Nixon made his tax returns public in hopes of clearing the air.
+
+The move did not work, but it set a precedent for making tax filings public.
+
+""It's proof you have nothing to hide,"" says Joe Thorndike, a tax historian at Tax Analyst.
+
+Donald Trump says he needs no such proof.
+
+Claiming to face his own audit the presumptive Republican nominee has refused to release his tax returns, even as public pressure mounts for him to do so.
+
+Every US presidential candidate since 1976 has released their tax returns, but there is no law requiring it.
+
+Mr Trump's refusal to release them has led to mounting speculation about what he could possibly be hiding.
+
+""Tax returns are sort of black and white and you sign your name to say this is accurate. It's not open to interpretation,"" says Mr Thorndike.
+
+The first thing the public would find is what tax rate Mr Trump pays. The candidate has bragged about paying a very low tax rate and taking advantage of the complex US tax code with its many loopholes.
+
+""Mr Trump is proud to pay a lower tax rate, the lowest tax rate possible,"" one of his top aides has said.
+
+An investigation by the Telegraph newspaper found Mr Trump was involved with a deal to evade $20m (£13.5m) in US taxes.
+
+It's possible his returns may hold similar bombshells, but Mr Trump's admission that he does his best to avoid taxes will likely make these less explosive.
+
+One line of thinking has it that the returns would give a better sense of how much Mr Trump is worth. The New York billionaire has given several different figures for his net worth, which have all been higher than estimates by financial experts and publications like Forbes magazine.
+
+But discovering whether Mr Trump is inflating his net worth may not be as easy as some hope from his tax returns.
+
+Tax forms focus on income for the year, not total worth.
+
+It may be possible to tell how much income Donald Trump made in a given year, but the complex way his companies earn money will still make this difficult. US real estate professionals can take tax losses based on the depreciation and other expenses for their buildings. This could allow Mr Trump to report having less income and therefore place him in a lower tax bracket.
+
+While we may not get an exact number for Mr Trump's wealth, it is likely the returns would give a more detailed picture of his businesses.
+
+The forms would show how much profit and loss the companies he owns distributed to him in a year. It would not give a full account of the worth of those businesses because not all profit is distributed to the owners - some is put back in to grow the business - but it would give a sense of the activity.
+
+One thing a tax return would definitely show is how much Mr Trump gives to charity.
+
+Mr Trump claims to give millions to charitable causes and organisations; if true, his tax form would prove that. Americans are allowed to deduct charitable donations of over $250 (£170) from their tax bill. If the real estate mogul donated as much as he claimed, it should appear on his tax deductions form.
+
+Mr Trump has said he will release the returns after the audit, but doing so before would hurt his interaction with the IRS.
+
+A person is not prohibited from releasing their tax returns during an audit - President Nixon was facing an audit when he released his - but many tax professionals do advise against it.
+
+""Everyone is going to look at them and find something suspicious. If the statute of limitations is open the IRS might feel pressured to do an audit,"" says Robert Kovacev, from the law firm Steptoe.
+
+The IRS has three years in most cases to decide whether to audit a person. Mr Trump claims to have faced audits on a continuing basis for nearly a decade.
+
+But others argue Mr Trump would have to be particularly unlucky or bad at filing his taxes to come under the IRS's microscope so often.
+
+The IRS uses a computer program which scores tax filings. If there are a number of unusual signals on a particular form, it is then evaluated by a human who decides whether to do an audit.
+
+Individuals who are audited are also typically given a pass in the following year if the same issues are flagged by the computer, because IRS officials have already looked into them.
+
+As audits can take months, and even years, Mr Trump's tax returns may not be made public until after the election - if at all.
+
+The bombastic candidate has bucked most political precedents until now, and it's possible releasing his tax returns could be yet another.",REAL
+939,Time Is Running Out for Bernie Sanders,"It certainly feels like Bernie Sanders is winning. Judging from his soaring rhetoric, celebrity endorsements, and huge rallies, the Vermont senator lately seems like he could ride his political revolution all the way to the Democratic nomination without breaking a sweat. Of the last eight primary contests, Sanders has won seven. On Sunday, more than 28,000 people turned up to hear him speak in Brooklyn, and on Monday, a new national poll showed him virtually tied with Hillary Clinton, 48 to 50 percent—a 4-point increase that puts him within the margin of error.
+
+And yet, Sanders is well on his way to a resounding defeat. On Tuesday, he is expected to lose New York, where state law prevents independents, some of his strongest supporters, from voting in the Democratic primary. (“Nothing much I can do. It’s bad New York state election law,” he groused on Monday.) A series of recent polls indicates that Clinton, despite a spate of bad press, is still solidly on track to secure the presidential nomination based on her commanding delegate lead.
+
+To be fair, Sanders has beaten the odds before. In Iowa, he overcame a double-digit deficit to virtually tie with Clinton, and in Michigan, he shocked pundits by leapfrogging her 20-point lead to win the entire state. But even if he pulls off similar victories in every single state left in the race, Sanders would still trail Clinton among delegates, who are awarded proportionally, and super-delegates—party leaders who can side with either candidate, irrespective of their state’s vote, and who have largely sided with Clinton. “Bernie Sanders would have to win landslide after landslide starting in New York to change that math,” David Axelrod, President Obama’s former campaign strategist, said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday. “He’s run a splendid campaign . . . but at this point, it just looks like time is running out.”
+
+At the moment, Sanders lags Clinton by double digits in all the major upcoming states, New York included, making those landslides highly unlikely. While pointing to the Michigan model as their pathway to victory, the Sanders campaign has quietly begun dialing back expectations for Tuesday. “Here’s the truth: we don’t have to win New York on Tuesday, but we have to pick up a lot of delegates,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said in an e-mail Sunday pointing to polling showing the candidate within 6 points of Clinton. “This poll shows that if we keep fighting, we may actually have a chance to do both.”
+
+The other major reality check facing the Sanders campaign is his lack of super-delegates, the majority of whom have backed Clinton, extending her delegate lead from 244 to 682. Even if Sanders manages to win a series of landslide victories—rather than a more likely scenario in which he merely prevents her campaign from surging ahead—he’ll be hard-pressed to swing those uncommitted delegates over to his side. Much like Ted Cruz with Donald Trump, Sanders’s only realistic shot at fighting on to the general election involves blocking Clinton from securing the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination (2,382, for the Democrats) and then persuading them to vote for him at a contested convention.
+
+Should it get to that point, Sanders may have a viable argument that he is the more electable candidate. Nationwide, he’s virtually tied with Clinton in the polls, and several (albeit unreliable) surveys show him soundly beating the presumptive G.O.P. nominee, Trump, in a general-election matchup. But if Sanders stays too long in the primary and loses, his moral victory will be a pyrrhic one. The surge of Democratic passions surrounding the self-styled socialist, fueled by rising anger against wealthy interests, has exacerbated a widening rift in the party, decreasing Clinton’s favorability rating and damaging her reputation before the general election even begins. One in four Sanders voters say they won’t vote for Clinton if she is the nominee. Soon, that conviction may be tested: with less than a day to go before the New York primary, voters will decide whether the dream of Sanders’s political revolution will live another day, or die.",REAL
+10464,Chips ‘do not need to be cooked three times’,"Chips ‘do not need to be cooked three times’ 03-11-16 ONCE-COOKED chips are perfectly fine, it has been confirmed. Researchers at the Institute for Studies decided to forego the now-standard ‘triple-cooking’ of chips and found that potatoes only need to be fried once to produce the desired result. Professor Henry Brubaker said: “If you slice potatoes and fry them a single time, you get chips. Perfectly delicious chips. “I have no idea why you’d do it twice more, unless you are some sort of imbecile.” Professory Brubaker confirmed that even if you were deep-frying a horse you would only need to do it once. He added: “Get oil, make hot, put thing in oil, take thing out, eat thing. “If Heston Blumenthal told you to punch yourself in the ear would you do that too?” 
+Share:",FAKE
+5196,Protests Continue as Donald Trump Gears Up for the White House,"President Barack Obama and Republican leaders are rolling out the red carpet to help President-elect Donald Trump transition to the White House, but in several big cities, the election results are still being met with opposition on the streets.
+
+From Philadelphia and New York City to Oakland and Portland, Oregon, anti-Trump crowds flooded the streets for a second night of protests.
+
+  
+
+ In Portland, the situation was so bad that police declared it a riot.
+
+""These people, unfortunately, have to get over the results. He won. He won,"" one resident said.
+
+Trump answered the protests with this tweet:
+
+
+
+The president-elect met with Obama for the first time at the White House Thursday, laying the groundwork for his transition into the Oval Office.
+
+""We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed,"" Obama told his successor.
+
+Congressional Republicans are also joining forces to help Trump succeed.
+
+House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., gave Trump a tour of Capitol Hill, showing him exactly where he'll be sworn as the 45th president of the United States.
+
+""We are now talking about how we are going to hit the ground running to make sure that we can get this country turned around and make America great again,"" Ryan said.
+
+Republicans are putting together an ambitious agenda for Trump's first 100 days in the White House.
+
+Trump is gearing up for a strong beginning to his presidency. With Republican support and control in the House and Senate, he has three key issues at the top of his list.
+
+""We're going to look very strongly on immigration, health care and we're looking at jobs, big league jobs,"" he said.
+
+However, Trump will face extremely strong opposition from Democrats on key issues, like Obamacare.
+
+Additionally, one of his first and most important presidential decisions will be nominating a new justice to fill the late Antonin Scalia's place on the Supreme Court.
+
+While Trump was touring the White House, his former opponent was spotted in Chappaqua, New York, taking a walk with her husband and their dogs.
+
+There is still uncertainty for Hillary Clinton with ongoing Capitol Hill investigations into her private email server.
+
+Trump's team says he hasn't ruled out his promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the former secretary of state.",REAL
+890,Ted Cruz Says He Can Woo Donald Trump's Supporters,"Ted Cruz has a message for Republican delegates: I can win over Donald Trump's supporters even if I don't win over Trump himself.
+
+""If it ends up, as I think probably will happen, at a contested convention that we earn a majority, it's going to be critically important then to keep the Donald Trump supporters energized and engaged,"" the Texas senator told Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in an interview for Bloomberg Television's With All Due Respect.
+
+Cruz posited that one of the reasons he's ""the last man standing"" against the front-runner is that he's ""the only candidate who's competed effectively"" for the blue-collar workers who form the heart of Trump's base.
+
+""The issues that energize and excite the Trump voters—illegal immigration, securing the border, keeping this country safe and bringing jobs back to America—bringing them back from China, back from Mexico—those issues are right at the heart of our campaign,"" he said. ""So I believe if I earn a majority of the delegates in Cleveland, that we are going to be able to continue to energize and unite those Trump supporters and get them to come out and vote in November.""
+
+Although Trump has dominated in most contests among voters who haven't graduated from college, Cruz won those voters in Wisconsin, the most recent primary.
+
+Trump has warned of ""riots"" and suggested his supporters will abandon the GOP en masse if he's blocked from the nomination at the July convention. Cruz acknowledged that ""there's no doubt at a contested convention that's something you naturally worry about—is having divisions in the party.""
+
+At the interview in Cicero, New York, Cruz also pointed out an ""encouraging"" sign for his ability to bring together Republicans, leaders and rank-and-file voters alike.
+
+""Look at the 17 Republican candidates who started this race,"" Cruz said. ""Five of them are supporting my campaign now. We've been endorsed by Rick Perry, by Lindsey Graham, by Jeb Bush, by Scott Walker, by Carly Fiorina. That really is indicative of the Republican Party uniting.""
+
+Cruz also said his campaign is ""in the process of examining potential vice presidential nominees,"" mentioning the original GOP field as evidence of an ""abundance of good choices"" for the position.
+
+The socially conservative candidate declined to offer his opinion on Bruce Springsteen's decision to cancel a concert in North Carolina due to a state law—known as the ""bathroom law""—that the musician said ""attacks the rights of LGBT"" Americans.
+
+""Bruce and everyone else has a free speech right,"" Cruz said, arguing that the people of North Carolina also have a right to pass laws that reflect their values. ""I do think a lot of Hollywood and entertainment latches on to whatever is politically correct at a given moment,"" he said. ""He's entitled to be a liberal, and most rock and rollers, most of Hollywood, they’re liberals. That's their entire culture.""
+
+The full interview is set to air Friday at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Bloomberg TV's With All Due Respect.",REAL
+3609,First 'Charlie Hebdo' issue since attack sells out,"PARIS — The first edition of Charlie Hebdo since terror attacks in Paris last week left 17 people dead sold out at newsstands across France shortly after going on sale Wednesday.
+
+Residents in Paris formed lines at dawn and by mid-morning kiosks sported signs that said ""No more Charlie Hebdo"" and ""Out of stock."" Local French media reported scuffles broke out as people realized copies were selling quickly. A black market quickly developed, with copies selling on eBay for thousands of dollars. One auction ended Wednesday evening with a bid of $20,000.
+
+""Normally they sit in a box in front of the kiosk and you just help yourself — and normally, the Charlie Hebdo box always has some copies in it,"" said Marie Dupont, 22, who was passing through Gare du Nord train station on her way to work in Paris.
+
+Wednesday's 16-page issue of the satirical newspaper featured a cartoon on its cover depicting the prophet Mohammed. He is crying and holding a sign in his hands that says, ""Je suis Charlie"" (""I am Charlie"") — a reference to the slogan adopted by anti-violence and free speech campaigners in the wake of the attacks. It is forbidden under Islam to show images depicting the prophet.
+
+Three million copies were printed — 60,000 are usually published— and that may be extended to 5 million, local French media reported. It has been translated into six languages and is being distributed internationally for the first time.
+
+A week ago, gunmen linked to radical Islam murdered eight staff members at the newspaper along with four other people. Five more people were killed in separate attacks on a policewoman Thursday and at a kosher supermarket Friday.
+
+Benoit Redureau, a veterinarian in Paris, called the cover ""cheeky"" and also ""very brave.'
+
+""Their cover is militant, they don't let go, despite the pressure, despite the dead, they remain loyal to their (editorial) line, to their soul…to what we like about them,"" said Redureau.
+
+Another Parisian, Yann Legall, 58, called the issue funny as well as sincere but also restrained.
+
+""I wonder: did they refrain themselves? Did they go half-measure on this publication? They could have gone a lot further on this, when you have people who get executed like dogs, they could have done something more drastic, they could have been accusatory,'' Legall said.
+
+On pages two and three of the newspaper Wednesday were drawings created by four cartoonists killed in the attack. One by Bernard ""Tignous"" Verlhac depicts two Muslim jihadists with one saying: ""We shouldn't attack Charlie Hebdo people."" The other replies: ""(yeah), they will become martyrs and once in paradise, will steal all our virgins.""
+
+Distributors said they would try to get more copies by Thursday or even later Wednesday. Printer Messageries Lyonnaises de Presse decided to increase the print run following the fast depletion of stock, French daily Le Figaro reported.
+
+""I feel very concerned over what happened (to Charlie Hebdo) and I want to read what the surviving journalists wrote this week,"" said Anne Brisson, 59, trying to get a copy. ""Still, it's the type of collective craziness in which I don't want to take part — it's like suddenly there is no more sugar so everyone buys 10 kilograms of sugar for the next 10 years.""
+
+Fabrice Perticoz, 48, who was manning a Paris newsstand, echoed many others selling the magazine Wednesday when describing how people lined up at 6:15 a.m. for his 120 copies. ""By 6:45, they were all sold out,"" he said.
+
+At his stand, a woman begged. ""Please keep one for me tomorrow, I pay for it, really,"" she said. But Perticoz refused to take her money. ""It gets too complicated, I might forget,"" he said. ""One man wanted to call the cops claiming I refused to sell to him.""
+
+The publication of Charlie Hebdo's controversial new cover comes as France's government was preparing tougher anti-terror laws. The French government announced Wednesday that 54 people had been detained in a crackdown on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism.
+
+Among those arrested was Dieudonne, a controversial but popular comic who defended terrorism in comments posted on Facebook earlier this week.
+
+In Turkey, police searched trucks carrying the entire print run of the daily Cumhuriyet newspaper early Wednesday to make sure none of the newspapers reprinted cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that depicted the prophet Mohammed.
+
+""When the police proceed to check in advance the copies without a clear decision of the court, I think it is an alarming procedure reflecting perfectly disproportional interference in press freedom in Turkey,"" said Erol Onderoglu, a Reporters Without Borders representative in Turkey.
+
+In a separate development, al-Qaeda in Yemen on Wednesday reiterated claims of responsibility for the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
+
+The group released a video in which Nasr al-Ansi, a top commander of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP as the branch is known, said the attack by Said and Chérif Kouachi on the Paris newspaper was in retaliation for insulting the prophet Mohammed.
+
+The video was briefly available on YouTube before being taken down. Last week, the same group released a statement to the Associated Press in which it claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo killings.
+
+In the video, Al-Ansi says France is part of the ""party of Satan"" and warns of further ""tragedies and terror."" Al-Ansi says Yemen's al-Qaeda branch ""chose the target, laid out the plan and financed the operation.""
+
+Amedy Coulibaly, who held hostages at the Jewish supermarket, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a video released Sunday.",REAL
+2584,"Netanyahu blasts ‘very, very bad’ Iran nuclear agreement","Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the framework agreement reached by world powers to curb Iran's nuclear program, repeatedly calling it a ""free path to a bomb"" that will spark an arms race in the Middle East.
+
+Under the framework announced last week, international sanctions would be lifted in phases if Iran meets its commitments. The International Atomic Energy Agency would conduct inspections to monitor significant limits on Iranian nuclear facilities, and the restrictions would be in place for at least a decade.
+
+In a series of interviews on Sunday political talk shows, Netanyahu called for world leaders to strike a ""better deal"" that significantly — and permanently — rolls back Iran's nuclear infrastructure. Sanctions should be ratcheted up — not lifted — to pressure Iran until it stops its ""aggression in the region,"" he said. Netanyahu questioned whether inspections would be effective, saying Iran has shown that it cannot be trusted.
+
+""I wouldn't bet the shop on inspections,"" the Israeli leader said on CNN's ""State of the Union."" ""It's not a country that you can place your trust in. And it's not a country that you're going to resolve its congenital cheating. You're just not going to replace it by placing more inspectors there.""
+
+The ""very, very bad"" agreement only allows Iran to build a vast arsenal by placing temporary restrictions and lifting sanctions that had crippled the country's economy, Netanyahu said. He repeatedly said the agreement would ""pump up their terror machine worldwide."" Echoing concerns among skeptics of the framework, Netanyahu said it would spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, with Sunnis states already seeing Shiite Iran as a major threat.
+
+""I think this is a dream deal for Iran and a nightmare deal for the world,"" Netanyahu said on NBC's ""Meet the Press.""
+
+Netanyahu did not outwardly criticize President Obama, but he said there is a ""legitimate difference of view"" between the two leaders. Netanyahu said he believes Obama is doing what is best for the United States. But the agreement will jeopardize not only Israel but also surrounding countries in the Middle East, the Israeli leader said on ABC's ""This Week."" The framework agreement does not block Iran's path to nuclear weapons, and instead paves it, he said.",REAL
+2155,GOP avoids showdown over EPA climate change rules,"The party looks to Kamala Harris, Catherine Cortez Masto, Tammy Duckworth and Maggie Hassan to help lead it out of the abyss.",REAL
+8269,"Liberal MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Makes Unbelievable Speech, MUST WATCH!","0 comments 
+In case you didn’t already know the glaringly obvious, MSNBC is widely considered to be one of the most liberal cable news channels of all the mainstream media. Now, in a stunning segment on his show, MSNBC host Chris Matthews basically endorses Donald Trump. Hillary must be feeling pretty crappy about herself because this latest scandal appears to have been pushed Matthews onto the Trump train. A liberal. That’s sad Hillary. 
+Matthews reviews a string of Obama’s failures, then goes on to say that if you like them, vote for Hillary. If you want to change those failures, the only option is to vote for Trump. This is HUGE! 
+You know you are on the losing end when staunch Democrats even hate you. 
+He even stated that we have the chance to change the status quo unless we’ve become too “dainty” to do that. I seriously can’t believe I heard that from Chris Matthews on MSNBC! Related Items",FAKE
+4282,"FOX News Poll: Trump gains, Carson slips, Cruz and Rubio climb in GOP race","GOP front-runner Donald Trump widens his lead in the nomination race, while Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz threaten to overtake Ben Carson for the number two spot.
+
+Those four once again constitute the top tier in the latest Fox News national poll on the 2016 election.
+
+In addition, Rubio joins Carson as the only candidates at least half of voters say are honest and trustworthy -- though Carson’s honesty rating has taken a hit.  More on that later.
+
+First, here’s how the GOP race stands: Trump remains in the top spot with a record 28 percent support from Republican primary voters.  He was at 26 percent in the last Fox poll, which was completed before the last debate and the Paris attacks (November 1-3, 2015).
+
+Carson drops from 23 percent to 18 percent in the new poll.  Cruz and Rubio are both up three points and garner 14 percent each.
+
+All others are in the low single digits:  Jeb Bush gets 5 percent, while Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Huckabee each get 3 percent.  John Kasich and Rand Paul receive 2 percent a piece.
+
+CLICK HERE TO READ THE POLL RESULTS
+
+Three key GOP constituencies put the four favorites in the upper-tier:  the Tea Party, white evangelical Christians, and talk radio listeners.
+
+Among GOP primary voters who are part of the Tea Party movement, Trump is the first choice (38 percent), followed by Cruz (30 percent).  Carson (14 percent) comes in third -- receiving less than half of Trump’s support. Rubio rounds out the quartet with 9 percent.
+
+About a quarter of white evangelical Christians back Trump (25 percent) and Carson (24 percent), while Cruz gets 18 percent and Rubio receives 11 percent.
+
+Cruz (31 percent) is the preferred pick among those who listen to conservative talk radio daily.  Trump (24 percent), Rubio (16 percent) and Carson (11 percent) also get double-digit backing.
+
+Earlier this month, Carson was the only 2016 candidate deemed honest and trustworthy by a majority of voters: 60 percent said he was (November 1-3, 2015).  Since then, some reporters -- and Trump -- have questioned whether everything in Carson’s new book is true.
+
+The attacks seem to have pushed Carson’s honesty ratings down:  today 53 percent of all voters say he is honest, while 34 percent say he isn’t.  Still, that’s a net positive of 19 points, which gives him the second highest honesty score (the total percentage points of those saying you’re honest minus those saying you’re not) of the candidates included in the poll.
+
+Rubio does a touch better on that measure. By a 51-31 percent margin, voters say he is honest and trustworthy (+20 points), up from 41-36 percent earlier this month.
+
+Cruz (+11 points), Fiorina (+5 points) and Bush (+4 points) also get positive honesty scores.
+
+Trump gets a negative 14 honesty score (41 percent honest vs. 55 percent not).  That still puts him ahead of Hillary Clinton.  She receives a net negative 20 score (38 percent honest vs. 58 percent not).  Clinton’s ratings hit a record low in early November when just 35 percent of voters said she was honest.
+
+Among self-identified Republicans, all of the GOP candidates tested have a positive net honest and trustworthy score: Carson (+56 points), Cruz (+51 points), Rubio (+46 points), Fiorina (+35 points), Bush (+32 points) and Trump (+24 points).
+
+Seventy-three percent of Republicans say Carson is honest, down from 82 percent in early November.
+
+The Fox News poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,016 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from November 16-19, 2015. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points for all registered voters, and 5 points for Democratic primary voters and 4.5 points for Republican primary voters.",REAL
+913,Has Hillary Clinton Outstayed Her Welcome?,"At this point, even amid one of the most captivating political upheavals in recent memory, the election process of 2016 is starting to feel like an extended car ride with a group of people after the conversational possibilities have run out. We’re all buckled up, with a long way to go, but everyone’s most irritating habits are already out in force. We’re feeling candidate fatigue, a malady first observed in the 1980s, perhaps earlier, and it’s the inevitable consequence of an exceptionally drawn-out political process combined with ample media coverage.
+
+Candidate fatigue strikes people at different times. People were already complaining of Al Gore fatigue in 1999, and the complaints were deafening by 2000. John Kerry fatigue—yes, there was that in 2004. But it plagues everyone eventually: Barack Obama, John McCain, Mitt Romney. Yes, yes, yes. And now it’s all-of-them fatigue. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich rotate seats regularly, each of them taking turns at the wheel. Each takes a different approach to driving, all of them tiresome.
+
+Donald Trump used to be the most interesting driver, because he took strange turns and it kind of worked. He also crashed through fruit stands, and that was fascinating, at first. Then it seemed like he was driving through fruit stands for no reason other than that it pleased him. Perhaps you thought Trump had a grander plan with this, that there were some shortcuts being taken now in order to get everyone somewhere worthwhile later. Perhaps you don’t think so anymore.
+
+Hillary Clinton is a more controlled driver, at first glance. She sits straight at the wheel, signals diligently, looks attentive. But she doesn’t seem to notice, or maybe care, that she’s weaving between lanes and belching up exhaust. Ask her about it and she smiles, sometimes laughs, and says she doesn’t know what you’re talking about. She sometimes sings, to project cheer. She does not have a good singing voice.
+
+Ted Cruz, when driving, moves his seat back, leans the seat-back down, and steers with just one hand, his right, resting his left arm in the open window. This is meant to look confident, manly, and controlled. But it’s 40 degrees outside and raining. Everyone is cold. Ted has planned everything out carefully. He doesn’t want you to touch his things. When you left your journal in the hotel room, though, he found it and said he intended to keep it, because technically he was in possession of it. Then he started reading it and smirking, occasionally pushing his hand in the air in a shushing gesture and telling you to calm down.
+
+John Kasich pulls his seat nearly all the way forward, and he places both hands on the very top of the wheel, elbows at the bottom. He fumes at other drivers, and he gets angry when he makes a wrong turn. If he feels people aren’t behaving themselves, he likes to pull over, park on a shoulder, and turn around in his seat to lecture everyone. No one can explain why he’s in the car or where he’s going.
+
+Bernie Sanders has two hands on the wheel and drives alertly but also, like Kasich, irritably. He yells a lot. He often lifts his arms and spreads his hands, upturned, into the air, to signal incredulity. When Hillary takes potshots at his driving, he tells her he’s driving fine. He looks tired, and the car’s running out of gas, but he thinks he can make it. People tell him to try some of the new features or do some reading to get up to speed on the auto world, but he has an approach to driving and he’s sticking to it.
+
+Candidate fatigue can be a dangerous thing, actually. In 2000, journalists who were stuck with Al Gore got so sick of him that they got unfair, amplifying every one of his missteps and inventing some more to boot. That’s one reason reporters are rotated more often now. It makes them less likely to fall in love with the candidate or descend into hate. So one must keep that in mind. Especially since there are over six months to go.
+
+In any case, we must be grateful to these candidates on the presidential car ride, as they weather the madness of a presidential campaign. It’s rough enough to watch them. Imagine how much rougher it is to be them.",REAL
+3362,Republicans blast Kerry for suggesting Iran could skirt new visa rules,"Republicans on Monday blasted Secretary of State John Kerry for suggesting in a letter to his Iranian counterpart that the administration could help the country get around new visa restrictions passed by Congress.
+
+“Instead of bending over backwards to try to placate the Iranian regime, the White House needs to be holding it accountable for its recent missile tests, its continued support for terrorism, and its wrongful imprisonment of Americans,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said in a statement to FoxNews.com.
+
+At issue are tightened security requirements for America’s visa waiver program, which allows citizens of 38 countries to travel to the U.S. without visas. Under changes in the newly signed spending bill, people from those countries who have traveled to Iran, Iraq, Syria and Sudan in the past five years must now obtain visas to enter the U.S.
+
+Top Tehran officials, however, complained the changes violate the terms of the nuclear deal, which says the U.S. and other world powers will refrain from any policy intended to adversely affect normalization of trade and economic relations with Iran.
+
+Kerry responded to these concerns in a Dec. 19 letter to his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif -- and suggested the administration could simply bypass the rules for Iran.
+
+“I am also confident that the recent changes in visa requirements passed in Congress, which the Administration has the authority to waive, will not in any way prevent us from meeting our [nuclear deal] commitments, and that we will implement them so as not to interfere with legitimate business interests of Iran,” he said.
+
+Kerry’s letter to Zarif assured that the U.S. would “adhere to the full measure of our commitments.” As for changes to the visa program, Kerry floated several alternative options for easing any impact on Iran – including waiving the new requirements.
+
+“To this end, we have a number of potential tools available to us, including multiple entry ten-year business visas, programs for expediting business visas, and the waiver authority provided under the new legislation,” he wrote.
+
+The legislation indeed includes a provision allowing the Homeland Security secretary to waive the requirements if the secretary determines this “is in the law enforcement or national security interests of the United States.”
+
+But House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., voiced concern on Monday that Kerry was proposing a “blanket” waiver to accommodate Iran’s complaints. He said that is not Congress’ intent.
+
+“Contrary to what the Secretary of State seems to be saying to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, it was not and has never been Congress’s intent to allow the Administration to grant a blanket waiver to travellers from Iran in order to facilitate the implementation of the Iran deal,” he said in a statement.
+
+McCarthy said the point of the legislation was to strengthen security and “keep the American people safe from terrorism and from foreign travelers who potentially pose a threat to our homeland.”
+
+Kerry’s assurances also raised concerns that the U.S. may be backing down to Iran’s complaints while at the same time reluctant to punish Tehran for its own potential violations.
+
+“Instead of undermining Congressional intent regarding the visa waiver program, the White House should instead focus on Iran’s repeated violations of the U.N. Security Council's bans on missile tests,” McCarthy said. “Iran’s unwillingness to follow these international agreements should be a red flag that the Iran nuclear deal isn’t worth the paper it is written on.”
+
+Omri Ceren, with the Washington, D.C.-based Israel Project, also told The Washington Free Beacon, “According to the Obama administration’s latest interpretation, the nuclear deal allows Iran to test ballistic missiles in violation of international law, but does not allow Congress to prevent terrorists from coming into the United States.”
+
+The same article noted that the State Department official in charge of implementing the nuclear agreement warned Congress last week that the new visa rules “could have a very negative impact on the deal.”
+
+Indeed, Kerry’s letter came as top-ranking Iranian officials accused the U.S. of flouting the nuclear agreement.
+
+Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday that the change “contradicts” the nuclear deal.
+
+""Definitely, this law adversely affects economic, cultural, scientific and tourism relations,” Araghchi was quoted by state TV as saying.
+
+Asked about Kerry’s assurances at Monday’s daily briefing, State Department spokesman John Kirby said the secretary made clear they would “implement this new legislation so as not to interfere with legitimate business interests of Iran.”
+
+Kirby said the law would be followed, but there are a “number of potential tools” to ensure this does not violate the nuclear deal. As for the DHS waiver authority, he said it’s too soon to say “if and when” that might be used.
+
+The Kerry letter initially was obtained and published by the National Iranian American Council.
+
+The State Department confirmed the document’s authenticity on Monday.
+
+FoxNews.com’s Judson Berger and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+133,The Walter Scott outrage nobody is talking about,"The horrific story of the unarmed Walter Scott’s death at the hands of Officer Michael Slager continues to reverberate. Aside from the incontrovertible evidence on the tape that the accused officer shot him in the back as if he were doing target practice, there has since emerged more tape of the traffic stop itself and audio of the officer speaking with his superiors on the phone raising even more questions about his state of mind at the time of the shooting. But as journalists have gone back and studied the officer’s record and found that he was previously investigated for taser abuse. And on even further investigation it was found that this jurisdiction is known as “Taser town”:
+
+Until the eight shots heard ’round the world, cops in North Charleston, South Carolina, were primarily distinguished by their zesty use of Tasers. As computed by a local newspaper in 2006, cops there used Tasers 201 times in an 18-month period, averaging once every 40 hours in one six-month stretch and disproportionately upon African Americans. The Charleston Post & Courier did the tally after the death of a mentally ill man named Kip Black, who was tasered six times on one occasion and nine times on another. Black died immediately after the second jolting, though the coroner set the cause of death as cocaine-fueled “excited delirium syndrome.”
+
+It’s important to note that Taser International has spent large sums convincing local coroners that this syndrome (which primarily seems to kill people in police custody) makes it the victim’s responsibility if they have the bad luck to die from being shot full of electricity with a taser. It’s not just illegal drugs in the system which can allegedly cause it. Adrenaline can as well. So if a person fails to remain calm in face of an arrest and finds the feeling of 50,000 volts going through their system to be stressful they have no one to blame but themselves if they die.
+
+Those who have been following the story of Walter Scott understand the significance of the taser. It’s not just that the officer evidently lied about Scott taking his taser, thus somehow justifying his using lethal force, or the fact that he appears to have tried to plant the taser next to the slain man’s body to cover his tracks. The man who filmed the shooting said this:
+
+It’s not unusual for people to try to escape from a taser if they can. It is, quite literally, a torture device designed to force compliance with terrible pain. The people of Taser Town, particularly African American men, undoubtedly understand exactly what is going to happen if they find themselves in the custody of a police officer. Here’s one example of how it would likely go down, as reported by The Guardian:
+
+Slager is among three patrolmen named in a lawsuit filed by Julius Wilson, who said he was arrested after being stopped in his car in August last year. Wilson is also suing the city of North Charleston, the city police department and police chief Eddie Driggers. Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Wilson described Slager and his colleagues as “bad, corrupt cops”. He said: “The use of excessive force or punishment to torture suspects is not something that should be tolerated by the North Charleston police department.”[…]
+
+Wilson, who has a criminal record, said he was stopped on 25 August because his vehicle had a broken tail light. Scott, 50, was stopped for the same reason on 5 April before fleeing and being shot dead by Slager. Wilson was stopped by an Officer Edwards, he said, who was joined 10 minutes later by Slager and an officer Clemens despite Wilson calmly “making small talk and laughing”. After refusing to step out until he was told why he was being arrested, Wilson claimed, he was forcibly pulled out of his vehicle by Slager and the two other officers. The three then “forcibly restrained Wilson on his stomach on the pavement face down,” the lawsuit stated. Despite Wilson “not moving, nor resisting” and lying with his hands above his head, the lawsuit claimed, Slager broke a silence among the officers by shouting: “Watch out! I’m going to tase!” He then allegedly “shot his NCPD-issued taser into Wilson’s back”. The lawsuit alleged Wilson “writhed in pain from the electric shock”. It said when Slager warned his colleagues he was about to fire his taser, “Wilson was cooperating fully” and allowing the two other officers to place his hands behind his back.
+
+Tasers guidelines vary by department and jurisdiction, but generally their use is only considered reasonable when the subject poses a safety threat. Clearly, shooting an unarmed 50-year-old man when he runs from the taser is not one of those cases. The video of the Scott incident shows that Officer Slager is confused on that issue, to say the least. And it’s just as clear, based on that same standard, that nobody could ever claim such force is justified when presented with an unarmed suspect facing down on the ground, with his hands behind his back. Using a taser in that situation is simply a form of unofficial street justice, a little torture at the hands of the authorities to make a point. Tasers are not simply used in place of lethal force, and they’re not always used to force compliance. They are very often used as on-the-spot punishment by police who want to teach citizens a lesson. Take the now notorious California incident that happened to be filmed by a local news station, in which  a man on horseback led police on a chase through the desert. When he fell from the horse, police swarmed and he very clearly laid down on his stomach and put his hands behind his back. Then the police beat the hell out of him and tasered him repeatedly. This footage has garnered widespread criticism because of the beating, and for good reason. It’s brutal, primitive behavior. But you won’t find many people expressing outrage about the electric shocks being administered to this man over and over again. Here’s a typical news report of the incident: In video captured by cameras aboard a helicopter for KNBC, deputies gather around the man after he falls from a horse he was riding to flee from them. The video shows deputies using a stun gun on him and then repeatedly kicking and hitting him. KNBC reported that the man — identified by authorities as Francis Pusok — appeared to be kicked 17 times, punched 37 times and hit with a baton four times. Again, if you look at the footage, Pusok was on the ground, face down with his hands behind his back before anyone tasered him or physically assaulted him. And yet the tasering is apparently considered a-ok. At the very least, it isn’t mentioned as something that shocks the conscience the way the beating does.Perhaps this is because the searing pain of electro-shock doesn’t leave much in the way of a mark. But hideously painful it is. Yet for some reason, delivering this particular agony to a suspect is not something people reject when there is no danger to police or bystanders, and the suspect is compliant. But police do it routinely, and are rarely sanctioned for it. Some of this undoubtedly stems from the fact that popular culture has turned tasering into slapstick comedy. Movies and TV shows and countless Youtube videos portray it as a hilarious joke. “Don’t tase me bro” became as national catch phrase. But it’s not funny. Tasers can kill people. And regardless of what level of respect and compliance one thinks police are entitled to get from the public, they are not entitled to torture and punish citizens to teach them a lesson. Walter Scott ran from the pain of the taser and he was shot in the back numerous times for doing it. Francis Pusok was compliant and was tasered and beaten repeatedly anyway. It appears that such shootings and beatings, when captured on film anyway, are still considered beyond the pale in America these days. In both cases, officers will have to face some sanction for their behavior. Slager is facing a murder charge. It’s unknown what the California cops will face, but the FBI is investigating, so there may be some federal civil rights charges. It will be very interesting if any of the officers are charged with assault for using the taser. Let’s just say it will be among the vast minority of cases ever brought if they are.",REAL
+5713,Hillary Clinton celebrates her birthday on Spanish TV show and spins her eyes for our entertainment... | Opinion - Conservative,"(Before It's News)
+I'm about to be seriously un-PC.
+Hillary Clinton appeared yesterday on El Gordo y la Flaca, a Univision TV show. I would never ask my loyal readers to watch these videos in their entirety. However, it is clear Hillary does not have custody of her eye movements. In the first video you can stop at 7s, 15s, and 31s to witness her whacked out eyes.
+At the 1:35 mark of the second video, Hillary is introduced by a “little person” who conveniently helps her down the stairs on to the set. Hop up to 4:12, 6:01, 6:10, and 6:21 to see her eyes scramble. It is particularly noticeable at 6:10.
+Does the following make me a racist?
+If you'd like to know what Hillary is talking about in the second video you'll have to be able to speak Spanish since the translator speaks over Hillary. What happened to immigrants having to speak English to become a citizen? If the people watching this need to have it translated in order to know what Hillary is saying, then why are they allowed to vote?",FAKE
+3014,What's the Answer to Political Polarization in the U.S.?,"A&Q is a special series that inverts the classic Q&A, taking some of the most frequently posed solutions to pressing matters of policy and exploring their complexity. In modern politics, nothing brings people together more than talking about how far apart they are. Twelve years ago, a speech denouncing political polarization thrust Barack Obama into the national spotlight, and that very premise will outlast him when he leaves the White House next January. The American public is divided—over economic policy, social policy, foreign policy, race, privacy and national security, and many other things. A host of factors, from partisan gerrymandering to exclusionary party primaries, are driving them further apart. Here we break down those factors behind our polarized politics, along with some of the most common proposals to fix it. Political polarization is worse now than it’s ever been. Let’s stop right there: Is this really true? It’s a common cry of politicians, government-reform advocates, pundits, journalists, and disaffected voters to bemoan the state of politics and declare that “Washington is broken,” perhaps irrevocably. But people often forget that American history is rife with examples of debilitating polarization that make the partisan battles of today pale by comparison. This was a key point President Obama made in his recent speech to the Illinois General Assembly, where he said that “it isn’t true that today’s issues are inherently more polarizing than the past.”
+
+A fundamental dispute over the institution of slavery plunged the nation into a civil war a century-and-a-half ago. In 1856, violence over slavery erupted in the august chamber of the U.S. Senate, when an anti-slavery lawmaker from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, was caned on the Senate floor by a member of the House from South Carolina, Preston Brooks. Fans of the Broadway hit, Hamilton, have also been reminded of another black mark on U.S. political history, when the nation’s first Treasury secretary was killed in a duel by the sitting vice president, Aaron Burr, in 1804. More recently, look at the emotional debates over racial equality and the Vietnam War during the 1960s and 1970s. The country witnessed the assassinations of John F. and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. The segregationist former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, was shot and paralyzed while he campaigned for president in 1972. Rioting and civil unrest plagued major cities and college campuses across the countries for long stretches at a time. Fine, the 1860s and the 1960s were bad. But the fact that the nation hasn’t fallen into civil war and our leaders haven’t been gunned down is a pathetically low bar for a first-world country with the greatest military and strongest economy on Earth. Even during the tumult of the 1960s, Congress created Medicare and Medicaid, enacted landmark civil-rights legislation, and passed a sweeping education bill that still serves as the foundation for federal funding of public schools today.
+
+Ever since Obama’s first two years in office, Congress hasn’t done anything except shut down the government and come close to tanking the economy with a near-default on the nation’s debt. Immigration reform stalled. Gun reform went nowhere. Congress can’t even agree to declare war on ISIS, and now that Antonin Scalia has died, it might leave the Supreme Court short-handed for more than a year. Congress is hopelessly gridlocked, and we need major political reform to fix it. What’s wrong with Congress? Or more precisely: Is anything actually wrong with Congress, or is it simply functioning how it was designed to function? The confrontations over the last few years have led to rampant complaints that the national legislature is “dysfunctional,” which in turn has contributed to a stunningly-low approval rating for Congress. (It sunk to single digits and has recently hovered in the low-to-mid teens.) For one, lawmakers in Washington have struggled not only to pass big bills, but they’ve had trouble completing even the most routine tasks of governance. In 2011, Republicans refused for months to raise the debt limit and nearly caused an unprecedented default that could have sunk the fragile economic recovery. Two years later, conservatives forced a two-and-a-half week government shutdown over funding for the healthcare law. In the Senate, both parties—and particularly Republicans until last year—have used the filibuster more frequently than ever before to stall legislation and presidential appointments. This has led to calls to either reform the filibuster or scrap it entirely as a way to speed up the legislative process and make it easier for Congress to reflect the will of the people. In 2013, Democrats did change the rules to make it easier to confirm executive and judicial appointees (below the Supreme Court), and Republicans didn’t bother to reverse those changes when they took control last year.
+
+Yet for all of the consternation, if you are a Democrat, Congress functioned quite well in the first two years of Obama’s term. The House and Senate passed so much significant legislation—the stimulus bill, health care, student loans, and Wall Street reform—that the White House and congressional Democrats had trouble explaining it all to voters. Then came the Tea Party wave of 2010, and the American people elected a Republican House to serve as a check on the Obama administration. It’s only natural that divided government would lead to some gridlock, because Congress was designed to only pass laws if there is a consensus in favor of them—especially in the Senate, which was created as a check on the inflamed passions that would lead to political overreactions by the House. So if you don’t like how Congress is working, blame the Founders—which is exactly what my colleague Yoni Appelbaum did last year, when he wrote that the gridlock on display in recent years may be “a product of flaws inherent” in the Constitution’s design. Sure, but the Founders never imagined that partisan gerrymandering would render the House of Representatives so polarized that most lawmakers now fear a primary challenge from the right or left more than they fear losing to the other party in a general election. They have no incentive to compromise. We need non-partisan redistricting commissions to redraw the lines and make House members more accountable to people other than the extremes of each party.
+
+Well, the Founders never imagined political parties at all—but that doesn’t mean the system can’t work. Is redistricting reform possible, and would redrawing House districts help reduce polarization? The 435 congressional districts are redrawn every 10 years after the Census, and historically, it has been the purview of state legislatures to determine the districts in their state. Naturally, the party in power tends to draw them to maximize its advantage, a process that over time has resulted in some totally ridiculous-looking districts that stretch horizontally or diagonally across states, or connect two population centers with a strip as thin as a single road. The Washington Post did a good rundown of the most oddly-shaped districts in 2014. The Republican wave election in 2010, which extended from Congress down to governorships and state legislatures, gave the GOP significant power in redistricting after the decennial Census that year. The results were obvious in 2012, when Republicans retained a large majority in House seats, 234-201, despite the fact that Democrats won 1.4 million more votes than GOP candidates in House races. Yet complaints about gerrymandering cross party lines. When Obama spoke in Illinois, it was the Republicans in the state legislature who cheered his call for reform, knowing that in the Land of Lincoln it is Democrats who draw the districts. And two retiring members of the GOP's Tea Party class of 2010, Representatives Richard Hanna of New York and Scott Rigell of Virginia, blamed gerrymandering for some of the hyper-partisanship they experienced during their years in Congress.
+
+Good-government groups have been pushing for states to turn over their redistricting process to non-partisan—or at least truly bipartisan—commissions as a way to keep politicians from “picking their voters” rather than the other way around. This past June, the Supreme Court gave a boost to these efforts by upholding the congressional map drawn by an independent commission in Arizona that had been created through a successful ballot initiative. The Republican-controlled state legislature had tried to invalidate the commission's map by arguing that the Constitution vested the power to draw districts in the legislature’s hands, not the voters’. In a 5-4 opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the high court sided with the voter-empowered commission. A dozen states, including California, currently use some form of a commission to draw districts, and New York will turn to one after the 2020 Census. According to NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, there are “serious reform efforts” underway in an additional nine states. Given the intense interest state legislators have in keeping power over redistricting both on the local and federal level, even reform advocates acknowledge it is difficult to see the total elimination of partisan gerrymandering across the country anytime soon. As for whether redistricting commissions actually lead to less polarization, that answer also is likely a long way off. When California implemented its new map in 2012, there was a big increase in turnover in the state’s congressional delegation. But it will take a while to assess whether those new legislators are any less partisan or more accountable to their constituents than their predecessors.
+
+It’s the parties themselves that are the problem. They were never supposed to have this much influence over elections. More and more voters consider themselves independent, but in many district and statewide elections in heavily Republican or Democratic areas, the only race that matters is the primary, and independent voters often find themselves shut out. Every state should follow the California and Nebraska model and adopt non-partisan elections, which empower more voters earlier in the electoral process. Would non-partisan elections, in place of party primaries, re-empower the political center by engaging more independent voters? That’s the argument from the advocates behind Open Primaries, a group that is pushing states nationwide to replicate the models in California, which went to a “top-two” primary system in 2012, and Nebraska, which has had a non-partisan state legislature since 1936. “Top-two” or “jungle primaries” are tailor-made for districts or states that are dominated by one party. In those elections, whether in deep-red rural areas or heavily-liberal urban districts, often the party primary is the only competitive race, and the general election becomes a one-sided affair. If the primaries are reserved only for registered Republicans or Democrats, independents are effectively shut out of the voting process, and the election becomes a race to the right or left, and rarely the center. The idea behind creating a top-two primary that’s open to everyone is that voters would have two opportunities to legitimately weigh in. And in districts or states where two members of the same party end up going up against each other, it would force them to compete in the general election for the votes of the entire electorate, not just the party base.
+
+Advocates hold up Nebraska as an exemplar, citing the fact that even though it’s a conservative state, its non-partisan legislature has been able to reach agreement on bills to raise the gas tax, abolish the death penalty, and give driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants—policies that would be unthinkable in many Republican-dominated states. There are now efforts to enact non-partisan elections through ballot initiatives in Arizona and South Dakota, although supporters acknowledge that the idea hasn’t yet gained much support in Congress or reached a tipping point in many other states. And opponents argue that non-partisan elections would disproportionately benefit wealthy candidates who want to circumvent the party system, as Michael Bloomberg did when he was elected mayor of New York and promptly tried—and failed—to implement non-partisan elections in the city. The solution is automatic voter registration, or even compulsory voting like they have in Australia. Would more engagement decrease polarization? It’s possible. One big critique of the current state of politics is that because such a low percentage of people typically vote, those that do hold more power, and they are more likely to be either very liberal or very conservative. This is especially true in party primaries, which often determine the winner in lopsided states and districts and in which the most motivated people are likeliest to vote. Oregon and California have enacted laws to automatically register people who have driver’s licenses and who are otherwise eligible to vote. Hillary Clinton has endorsed the policy nationally. Why Americans Are So Polarized: Education and Evolution Two Versions of America Emerge in the Presidential Campaign In Australia, eligible citizens are required to vote and can face a fine or a court date if they don’t. Not surprisingly, the turnout rate there is more than 95 percent. In a 2010 policy paper, William Galston of the Brookings Institution recommended that states experiment with compulsory voting as a way to reduce polarization and force candidates to appeal to a broader electorate. Needless to say, that is unlikely to happen in the United States on a large scale anytime soon. Even the push for universal registration, with the potential to opt out, has drawn opposition from Republicans who argue that people shouldn’t be forced to participate if they don’t want to.
+
+There is also skepticism among conservatives that the effort is more about Democrats trying to increase voting among minority and young voters, who tend to lean their way and who vote less frequently than older, white citizens. Let’s be honest. The real issue isn’t gerrymandering or the parties: It’s money. The influence of wealthy donors has only gotten more pronounced over the years, and the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in the Citizens United case only tilted the scales even more in the direction of corporations and billionaires. We need to overturn Citizens United and fully adopt public financing of elections. Isn’t money the root of all that’s wrong in politics today? Do we have any hope of reducing polarization if we can’t get rid of the corrupting influence of money? There’s no denying that politics is awash in money: The presidential campaign is now a billion-dollar industry, and it takes millions of dollars to win races for governor, senator, and even some for the House. The Citizens United decision allowed wealthy interests to spend unlimited sums of money to run ads in support of or in opposition to candidates, and the result has been an even greater flood of negative ads on television around election time. Yet while there are legitimate concerns about candidates being beholden to the billionaires supporting them, money in politics doesn’t flow entirely in the direction of polarization. Take Bloomberg, for example: Inarguably, the billionaire businessman would not have been mayor of New York without the tens of millions he spent to win his elections. But he is seen as a centrist figure in politics and has spent money on the national level decrying partisanship and dysfunction (even though he has taken partisan positions on certain issues, like guns and climate change).
+
+Big-business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce also spend large sums of money to influence elections. But while the Chamber ardently opposes Obamacare and environmental regulations costly to industry, it sides with the establishment against the Tea Party in other areas and has spent heavily to back compromises on things like infrastructure bills and immigration reform. Money may tip the scales in favor of corporate interests and the whims of the wealthy, but that doesn’t always benefit the extremes. In the end, there may not be any one-shot solutions or simple answers. The present degree of political polarization didn’t arise overnight, and seems unlikely to dissipate that quickly, either. But even if they don’t solve the entirety of the problem, many voters are drawn to particular solutions—and there’s evidence that some can make at least an incremental difference. These are some of the intriguing questions left to consider: What does the shocking popularity of Donald Trump say about political polarization? Is his success a reflection of a deep split, or does it actually transcend polarization because he is winning support among Republican voters despite having so many positions that contradict conservative orthodoxy? If the Republican Party really does split this summer, what are the chances of a viable third-party or independent candidacy, and what impact could that have on political polarization? Beyond this election, is the creation of a viable third party or centrist movement another possible solution to polarization? Is polarization strictly a national problem? Does the fact that we see more bipartisanship in state government offer hope that polarization in Washington will begin to soften? On what issues are Americans—and their elected representatives—actually not polarized? What are the remaining areas of consensus? Maybe there’s an answer we haven’t considered yet. Drop your thoughts into an email to hello@theatlantic.com.",REAL
+9015,"Clinton, FBIGate and the true depth of the ObamaGeddon","Clinton, FBIGate and the true depth of the ObamaGeddon 31.10.2016 Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a problem. Just over one week before the Mother of All Elections, we have information which shocks us to the core, freezes our hearts and sends chills shuddering through our spines. Ladies and Gentlemen, the problem is not FBIGate, it is the mechanisms behind the scenes which have not been reported. Read on. First off, how many times has President Obama blocked investigation into Hillary Clinton's affairs? You will never know. You will never, ever know because the system is rigged, there is no paper trail. There are telephone calls, there are meetings behind closed doors, there are threats. This time however, Obama was caught by surprise. The Nobel Peace Prizewinner, the one who insulted the Nobel Institution, the international community and all those who believed in his shitfaced lie ""Change"", the one who blasted Libya from the African country with the highest human development index back to the stone age, riddled with terrorists, including Islamic State, the one who stood back as Islamic State appeared under his nose... this one this time was unable to stop an FBI investigation because it happened behind his back. Trying to get at the truth Print version Font Size Ladies and Gentlemen, this truth will not come out in the next few days. For those with their political knives a-glistening and a-gleaming behind Hillary's back, waiting for some knock-out soundbites from those documents, it is not going to happen. Not because the FBI investigation failed to unveil juicy stuff, but because that juicy stuff will never reach the public domain. ObamaGeddon to the rescue, FBIGate quashed. And while FBIGate is quashed, watch what happens behind the scenes with the electoral system. George Soros is firmly in the Clinton camp, so they say. Does anyone know how many States use electronic voting systems run by George Soros? Does anyone know how easy it is to hack or rig these voting machines? These machines churn out votes. There is no accountability, there is no paper trail, the vote will not be verified. There will be numbers, statistics the day after, rigged. This is American democracy? The collective answer is no, the collective response is we all know this is true, we all know this is happening. Nobody likes Hillary, nobody trusts Hillary. So why vote for her? Investigating FBIGate Now let's see what my friend Nancy O'Brien Simpson turned up. She lives in the United States of America, she is a political commentator and she is a political activist: Secretary Clinton fell for the oldest hack in the book. This hack entails something called the ""Buffer Overflow Exploit"" that involves ""stacking"" a malicious computer virus in an area on your hard drive where virus protection software can't find them. Then it steals the files from the hard drive. A friend of mine who has been on the wrong side of these kinds of situations explained what he has read about how it all went down- Huma and Anthony are sharing a laptop at their home. Huma receives classified information from her boss, Hillary Clinton, in various e-mails and texts. She testified to the F.B.I. that she often emailed classified files over her unsecured Yahoo account in order to print them out at home on the laptop she shared with her husband Antony. When Huma goes to bed, Carlos Danger sneaks out in his pajammies and prowls 4chan all night looking for young teen girls to send them naked photos. One of these photos contains a computer virus that infects the laptop. This virus hides in photographs stored on a computer's hard drive by exploiting a photo's bandwidth. When the recipient receives photos in return, the photos contain information from the computer it has infested. The ironic part is every time Carlos Danger send photos of his ""wiener"" his nasty photos contained ALL the emails his wife received from Hillary as well as the classified documents she printed out.. This means some hackers out there on the net has EVERYTHING Huma brought home.. If the hackers are ""White Hat"" they probably told the F.B.I. to examine every one of Carlos Danger's nasty photos he sent over that laptop. If the hackers are ""Black Hats"" you can bet some foreign government has a lot of classified documents. The Clinton Crime Family will blame the Russians, which is laughable and serious at the same time.. You know they reopened the investigation BEHIND Obama's back because he has blocked the investigation of her at every turn. I heard the rank and file FBI were about to mutiny because they know she is guilty as sin and Comey would not prosecute because she is protected by Obama AND Clinton gave his wife half a million for her political campaign. This might be big, but Obama will stop it to protect her and his globalist masters. I rest my case. Nancy O'Brien Simpson Ms. Simpson was a radio personality in New York. She was a staff writer for The Liberty Report. A PBS documentary was done on her activism for human rights. She is a psychotherapist and political commentator.",FAKE
+1128,Democratic debate: 5 takeaways - Politics.com,"Miami (CNN) There were few softballs Wednesday night for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
+
+Clinton was asked whether she lied about Benghazi, whether she might be indicted over her emails and why she's seen as so untrustworthy. Sanders was pressed on comments he made in the mid-1980s about Fidel Castro and pushed to defend his 2007 vote against an immigration reform bill.
+
+One day after Sanders' stunning win in Michigan, both candidates were on their game in their only debate before next Tuesday's critical votes in Florida, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina.
+
+Here are five takeaways from Wednesday night's debate, hosted by Univision and The Washington Post:
+
+No more middle ground on immigration
+
+Clinton and Sanders both broke with the Obama White House and pledged to halt the deportations of undocumented immigrants who don't have criminal records.
+
+""I can make that promise,"" Sanders said.
+
+""I do not want to see them deported. I want to see them on a path to citizenship. That is exactly what I will do,"" Clinton said.
+
+And both candidates dismissed Donald Trump's proposal to build a ""big, beautiful wall"" along the U.S.-Mexico border as bluster.
+
+""As I understand him, he's talking about a very tall wall -- a beautiful tall wall, better than the Great Wall of China,"" Clinton said. ""It's just fantasy.""
+
+It exposed a huge divide between the two parties: The Republican front-runner wants mass deportations. The Democratic contenders want no deportations at all. There's no middle ground anymore.
+
+The evaporation of any sort of common ground on the issue of immigration helps explain the political plight of Republican candidates who have supported comprehensive reform measures, like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and the departed South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
+
+It also underscores why 2016's election is so much about motivating each party's base, rather than appealing to voters in the middle. The center didn't hold.
+
+It was just days ago that Clinton, riding a wave of Super Tuesday victories, was dropping her attacks on Sanders, looking for ways to appeal to his supporters and casting her eyes on Republicans -- particularly Donald Trump.
+
+If she'd pivoted into general election mode, she went right back to the primary on Wednesday night.
+
+On the heels of her loss in Michigan, Clinton was set on attacking Sanders on every question -- and most of the time, Sanders gave her the clash she wanted.
+
+Clinton cast Sanders as an enemy of liberal icon Ted Kennedy, noting that he'd voted ""against Ted Kennedy's immigration reform which he'd been working on for years before you ever arrived.""
+
+She hit him for opposing the auto bailout, even though fact-checkers had already pointed out that attack amounted to cherry-picking one item out of a much larger bank bailout bill -- using that issue to frame Sanders as someone so rigid in his ideology that he can't get things done.
+
+""I'll tell you, it was a hard vote. A lot of the votes you make are hard votes,"" Clinton said. ""But the fact is the money that rescued the auto industry was in that bill.""
+
+It was all a reminder that the Democratic presidential contest might not be anywhere near its end. Next Tuesday -- when Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois and Missouri vote -- was the day Clinton hoped to knock Sanders out. Now, Sanders poses a serious threat across the Midwest.
+
+Sure, both candidates took their shots at Trump. Clinton called him ""un-American"" and Sanders called him someone who ""insults Mexicans, who insults Muslims, who insults women, who insults African-Americans.""
+
+But Clinton's strategy was all about taking down Sanders.
+
+Clinton made an unusually frank admission when she was pressed on why so many Americans find her untrustworthy.
+
+""I am not a natural politician, in case you haven't noticed, like my husband and President Obama. So I have a view that I have to do the best I can,"" Clinton said, adding that she hopes ""people will see I am fighting for them.""
+
+It was an effective moment -- an introspective acknowledgment from a politician who has struggled to project authenticity.
+
+And it came right on the heels of a touching moment between Clinton and a woman who had discussed her hardships after her undocumented husband was deported.
+
+""Please know how brave I think you are, coming here with your children to tell your story. This is an incredible act of courage that I'm not sure many people really understand. And I want you to know that,"" Clinton said.
+
+It wasn't Bill Clinton personalizing the national debt in a 1992 debate by talking about the people he knows who have lost jobs. But Hillary Clinton doesn't necessarily need that knack for making the audience feel a struggling American's pain the way her husband did. She just has to make sure her economic message connects.
+
+When Clinton attacks, she lays out a detailed, point-by-point case on why Sanders was wrong -- as if she were delivering the audience a PowerPoint presentation.
+
+And then Sanders just changes the subject.
+
+The simplicity of his overall message, and the skillfulness with which he deploys it when he's under attack, makes it difficult to land an effective blow on the Vermont senator.
+
+For the second straight Democratic debate, Clinton tried to hit Sanders for opposing the Export-Import Bank -- noting that he'd broken from Democrats and joined with hardline conservatives and Koch brothers-backed groups in voting to abolish it.
+
+His rebuttal? ""It is corporate welfare, and yes, I oppose corporate welfare.""
+
+She attacked his support for a Medicare-for-all health insurance system, arguing that Sanders' idea is too pie-in-the-sky and that Democrats just won a hard-fought battle for Obamacare.
+
+""What Secretary Clinton is saying is that the United States should continue to be the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all of its people,"" Sanders shot back, getting the crowd roaring with a rant about prescription drug companies' hold on Capitol Hill.
+
+It's not just a stylistic difference. Sanders' policy positions are uncompromising and Clinton's aren't.
+
+Sanders showed what an asset that can be on the debate stage for most of the night -- and then what a liability it can be, if not among Democrats then in the general election, in the closing minutes.
+
+He was shown a video of himself in the 1980s and asked about the differences between socialism and communism. Sanders answered that he was opposing U.S. intervention in Latin America.
+
+The episode opened the door for an attack from Clinton's campaign over Sanders' refusal to disavow the Castros -- whom he had praised decades earlier -- and served as a reminder that his activist past is fertile ground for attacks.
+
+It was the most tedious unloading of opposition research on a presidential debate stage yet this year.
+
+The candidates even seemed to sense it -- tip-toeing into their attacks initially before throwing their best punches.
+
+Clinton hit Sanders for his vote against a 2007 comprehensive immigration reform bill.
+
+""Just think -- imagine where we would be today if we had achieved comprehensive immigration reform nine years ago. Imagine how much more secure families would be in our country no longer fearing the deportation of a loved one, no longer fearing that they would be found out,"" she said.
+
+Sanders responded by blasting that 2007 measure's guest worker provisions, saying that workers were abused ""and if they stood up for their rights, they would be thrown out of the country. Of course that type of effort leads to a race to the bottom for all of our people.""
+
+He also hit Clinton for opposing driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants, and Clinton hit Sanders for voting in 2006 to protect a vigilante border group, the ""Minutemen.""
+
+It felt like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie -- famous for bashing his Senate colleagues' tussles over the exact details of bills and amendments on the Republican debate stage -- might have been about to dart onto stage to shout them both down.
+
+Their debates about old bills were all beside the point when it comes to where the candidates stand in 2016. They largely agree on immigration-related issues. In fact, their real target within the Democratic Party is Obama, who's been much more aggressive about deporting undocumented immigrants than Sanders and Clinton say they'd be.",REAL
+8998,How Soon Before We Become Venezuela?,"MarcFaberBlog.com November 1, 2016 
+It’s nonsense to claim that inflation is only going up 1 percent per year in the United States. The cost of living of a typical family is going up much more than that—insurance, transportation, schooling are all going up. 
+For example, health care premiums for insurance policies [are rising], so the typical household is being squeezed. The central banks don’t care about that; they don’t look at it.. 
+I suppose the system will collapse before we become like Venezuela. In the West, if they start to print money, the end game will be brief. Within five years, I expect the system to implode. 
+You better ask the bureaucrats what their plans are. They had zero rates since December 2008; soon eight years [passed], and that hasn’t boosted economic activity for the average household, not in Japan nor the United States nor the EU. Now they talk about fiscal spending. 
+You better ask the bureaucrats what their plans are. They had zero rates since December 2008; soon eight years [passed], and that hasn’t boosted economic activity for the average household, not in Japan nor the United States nor the EU. Now they talk about fiscal spending. 
+Then they will find some academics who will blame wealth inequality on the evil capitalists who made so much money out of asset bubbles. 
+They will blame the economic woes on these people. To some extent this is true. But the rich people did not create the inflated asset values; it was the central banks, by slashing interest rates to zero and negative interest rates in many countries. 
+First, you create mispricings through artificially low rates and negative interest rates and you boost the income and wealth of the super-rich. It’s at best the 0.1 percent that really benefit from asset inflation, at the cost of all the people that have no assets and so you have this rising wealth inequality. So we have to tax the rich people and tax them more. 
+Taking money from the rich is appealing if you go to voters, and you say to them, “Look, the reason the economy is doing so badly, it’s because of the rich people, the billionaires. We have to take 20 percent away from them and give it to you.” You can be sure that everybody will vote for that because the wealthy are a minority. This is what happens after monetary policies completely fail. 
+Some well-connected people will hide their wealth but a lot of people won’t. Even if they take 50 percent from the richest, it’s not going to help. The next step will be to take money from less wealthy people; the interventionists will go all the way. 
+- Source, The Epoch Times",FAKE
+4513,France launches fierce assault on ISIS targets in Syria,"French warplanes launched a ferocious retaliatory assault late Sunday on targets in Raqqa, Syria — the Islamic State’s de facto capital — after coordination with U.S. defense officials who helped with the targeting.
+
+The French Defense Ministry said that 10 aircraft dropped 20 bombs on facilities used by the militant group, which has claimed responsibility for Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris, striking a command center, a militant-training facility and an arms depot.
+
+Opposition activists reached in Raqqa said they counted at least 30 bombs, which they said had hit, among other things, a soccer stadium, a museum and medical facilities. They said the strikes had knocked out electricity in the city of about 200,000 people.
+
+The French statement said the operation, launched from bases in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, was conducted in coordination with U.S. forces, which have compiled an extensive target list in Raqqa. American officials, speaking at the Group of 20 summit here that President Obama is attending, said the French operation was discussed between the two militaries, as well as in telephone calls Saturday and Sunday between Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and his French counterpart.
+
+U.S. planes have repeatedly struck in and around Raqqa, in north-central Syria, in recent months.
+
+In Iraq on Sunday, Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari said Iraqi intelligence had obtained information before the Paris attacks that the Islamic State was planning an imminent terrorist strike overseas that may have been aimed “in particular” at France, the United States and Iran.
+
+“We notified these countries and warned them,” Jafari said in a statement, which did not include specifics of when the Iraqis acquired the information. U.S. intelligence officials did not confirm the report.
+
+Administration officials said the United States would not alter its strategy against the Islamic State in response to the Paris attacks, despite evidence that the terrorist group was expanding its ability to hit Western targets. In recent weeks, Obama has approved the escalation of airstrikes in Syria and Iraq and has authorized the deployment of 50 Special Operations troops to assist Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces pushing toward Raqqa.
+
+Officials said that, in response to the attacks in Paris, the administration was seeking renewed global commitment to that intensified military action, and to a negotiated settlement of Syria’s civil war.
+
+France’s retaliation came as Obama held talks with allied leaders and with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin at the summit being held in this Turkish Mediterranean resort city.
+
+Obama vowed again on Sunday to help France hunt down the perpetrators of the attacks. Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Obama agreed with French President François Hollande that the rampage, which killed at least 132 and wounded more than 350, was an “act of war.” But he and others disputed suggestions from Republicans that Obama, who said in an interview last week that the U.S.-led coalition had contained the Islamic State, has consistently underestimated the adversary.
+
+[Manhunt in Europe for at least 1 suspect ‘directly involved’ in Paris attacks]
+
+The president was referring to recent setbacks for the militant group on the battlefield in Iraq, Rhodes told reporters. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, a derogatory term in Arabic, has long harbored ambitions to sow bloodshed farther from its home base in Syria, he said, emphasizing that Obama has been realistic that the fight would be long and difficult.
+
+“It’s the manifestation of what has been the ambition of ISIL for some time now — to conduct attacks beyond Iraq and Syria,” Rhodes said. “The president indicated when he launched the counter-ISIL strike campaign that he knew ISIL had those ambitions, which is why we have always focused on the threat of foreign fighters.”
+
+The highly coordinated assaults on several locations in Paris on Friday evening have shaken the gathering of global leaders here. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks, which intelligence officials said were carried out by three teams of terrorists affiliated with the extremist group.
+
+The attacks prompted Hollande to declare that France would lead a “merciless” fight against the Islamic State, a move that could increase pressure on the Obama administration to take stronger actions to ensure that the Islamic State cannot attack the United States directly.
+
+GOP leaders, including some presidential candidates, have faulted Obama’s strategy as too limited to contain the Islamic State. The Paris attacks, along with the recent bombing of a Russian commercial plane claimed by the group, have thrust the administration’s approach in the Middle East into the 2016 campaign for the White House.
+
+Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, who served as secretary of state in Obama’s first term, has struggled to articulate how she would deal with the threats. Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the United States “should declare war and harness all of the power the U.S. can bring to bear.”
+
+[In Paris, a soccer game, an Asian dinner, a concert — and then terror]
+
+After a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the summit host, Obama said that the attacks in Paris, and last month in Ankara, were attacks “on the civilized world,” and that the United States would “stand in solidarity” with the victims in “hunting down the perpetrators of this crime and bringing them to justice.”
+
+Rhodes emphasized that the attacks did not change the White House’s reluctance to establish a massive ground force of U.S. troops in the region, saying the administration remains confident that it can push back the Islamic State by relying on local forces it is training and advising in Iraq and Syria, along with punishing airstrikes.
+
+“The further introduction of U.S. troops to fully re-engage in ground combat in the Middle East is not the way to deal with this challenge,” Rhodes said.
+
+In Vienna on Saturday, diplomats from the region and from Europe, the United States and Russia agreed to press the various factions they back in Syria’s civil war to come together no later than Jan. 1 to begin talks on forming a transitional government.
+
+Once that process starts, participants agreed, they will support a U.N.-monitored cease-fire between forces of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, and a wide array of rebel groups variously backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others.
+
+[Coordinated assault seems to mark new chapter in terrorism]
+
+The administration has said that settling the ongoing civil war would allow global competitors to focus on defeating the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq.
+
+The Paris attacks, Rhodes said, “can serve to create a greater sense of urgency in the international community behind supporting various elements of the counter-ISIL campaign and support for a diplomatic resolution of the Syrian conflict.”
+
+Obama met with Putin on the sidelines of the summit. White House officials said that they spoke for 35 minutes and that the discussion “centered around ongoing efforts to resolve the conflict in Syria, an imperative made all the more urgent by the horrifying terrorist attacks in Paris,” and on the “diplomatic progress” achieved in Vienna. While the United States has insisted that Assad must relinquish power, Russia, Assad’s main backer, has bombed rebel forces in a bid to help him remain in control.
+
+Obama and Putin were joined in their meeting, held in the lounge area of a hotel conference center, by U.S. national security adviser Susan E. Rice and a man who appeared to be an interpreter. A closed-circuit video feed showed them sitting around a coffee table, with Obama leaning forward in his chair and talking intently with Putin, who was also leaning in, as other world leaders milled about.
+
+The president also met here with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman.
+
+In Brussels, NATO dropped the flags of its 28 member nations to half-staff to honor the French dead. NATO officials said that France so far has declined to invoke the alliance’s Article 5, which would oblige all members to join its fight against the militants.
+
+The only time Article 5 has ever been invoked — at the request of the United States — was after the September 2001 al-Qaeda attacks.
+
+“We support the French authorities in their determination to deal with the terrorist threat,” a NATO official said Sunday, “and a number of allies are already working with France on their ongoing operations and investigations in the wake of the attacks.”
+
+Loveday Morris in Dahuk, Iraq, and Hugh Naylor in Beirut contributed to this report.",REAL
+9912,Speaker At Trump Rally Says He Hopes Hillary Clinton Dies In A Fiery Car Crash (VIDEO),"Speaker At Trump Rally Says He Hopes Hillary Clinton Dies In A Fiery Car Crash (VIDEO) By Andrew Bradford on October 30, 2016 Subscribe 
+When historians write accounts of the 2016 race for the White House, it’s very likely that one of the things which will get special attention is the level of violence–both physical and verbal–which has emanated from those who slavishly support GOP nominee Donald Trump. 
+If you doubt this fact, consider what was said earlier today at a Trump rally being held in Las Vegas. Author and self-described “capitalist evangelist” Wayne Allyn Root was giving a rambling speech as a warm-up before Der Fuhrer Donald took the stage, and while portions of it were comparable to the rantings of Charles Manson after too much caffeine, it was the language Root used (highly militaristic and warlike) that you cannot help but notice. At various points in his unhinged diatribe, Root used the following phrases : “Trump warriors” “Trump army” “Trump revolution” 
+Then, in full psychotic rant, Root attempted to mix together plot elements from the O.J. Simpson case with the movies Driving Miss Daisy and Thelma and Louise , telling the ecstatic crowd : “It’s Hillary in a White Ford Bronco. She’s got Huma driving and they’re headed for the Mexican border. I have a name for the future TV movie. It’s called Driving Miss Hillary. And the ending, if we all get our wish, is like Thelma and Louise!” 
+Finally, Root ended his echo of Nuremberg by declaring: “I will give you my country when you pry it from my cold dead hands.” 
+When I listen to Wayne Allyn Root (or any of the other fanatical Trumpkins), the movie that comes to mind for me is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 
+Featured Image Via Right Wing Watch About Andrew Bradford 
+Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect",FAKE
+4387,Huckabee: Resisting the Supreme Court on gay marriage?,"NEW YORK — Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a likely contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination and a leading voice for Christian conservatives, said Thursday that governors and state legislatures should consider ways to resist a Supreme Court decision that recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.
+
+On USA TODAY's Capital Download, Huckabee likened such a possible decision, on an issue now being weighed by the high court, to the notorious Dred Scott case before the Civil War that ruled African Americans couldn't be citizens. Pushing back against such an opinion ""is not without historical and judicial precedence,"" he said in an interview promoting his new book, God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy, published Wednesday by St. Martin's Press.
+
+If he were still governor, he said, ""I think I would put it before the legislature. I mean, we would ask, 'We have a constitutional amendment in our constitution. Do we want to hold to that? Do we want to put it before a referendum of the people?' I mean, there are a lot of different angles to pursue it. (Or) you could just surrender and say, 'OK, we just agree that the court is right.' ""
+
+Whatever the legal basis for Huckabee's stance — and constitutional scholars question whether there is one — as a political matter his fervent opposition all but guarantees that the issue of gay marriage will be prominent in the GOP presidential debate. While other leading contenders also oppose gay marriage, some of them, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, have said court decisions recognizing the right make it a settled question.
+
+""Rather than just immediately capitulate to nine people in robes, and what it will probably be is five people in robes against four people who disagree ... then you have a very, very divided court,"" he told the weekly newsmaker series. ""Do we really surrender the entire American system of government to five people, unelected, appointed for life, with no consequences for the decisions they make? The founders never intended for there to be such incredible, almost unlimited power, put in the hands of so few people.""
+
+However, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Law School, Irvine, said states would have no options if the Supreme Court decided that laws prohibiting same-sex marriage violated the Constitution.
+
+""There have been efforts by states to circumvent or ignore Supreme Court decisions, most notably the intense Southern resistance to Brown v. Board of Education and desegregation,"" Chemerinsky said. ""The Supreme Court made it clear that its ruling was the law of the land. This will be no different.""
+
+The issue has been joined, he noted. ""Already, marriage equality exists in 36 states, mostly because of court decisions, and there has not been the type of resistance Huckabee suggests.""
+
+Still, it is a sign of Huckabee's appeal to the evangelical Christians who are among the GOP's most loyal voters that his new book immediately shot to No. 1 in sales among political books on Amazon and into the top 100 among books of all sorts. In his folksy, conversational style, he unfavorably contrasts New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — places he dubs ""Bubble-ville"" — with those from the heartland, which he dubs ""Bubba-ville.""
+
+At one point in the book, he discussed how ""goooood"" it is to eat game. ""I'm sorry if that sounds cruel to any vegan readers,"" he added. ""(And are there any? Raise your hands, if you have the strength.)""
+
+In the interview, Huckabee also:
+
+• Acknowledged he was likely to make his second bid for the White House. He also ran in 2008. ""If everything continues to work well and I sense that there is, say, the proper financial and political support, then I think it's a given that that's where the destination is.""
+
+• Predicted former president Bill Clinton would be an asset to his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, if she runs for the Democratic nomination. ""I mean, he had a good presidency. I'm a Republican but I admire good governing.""
+
+• Dismissed as overblown a furor over comments in his new book criticizing Beyonce and Jay-Z for using sexually explicit lyrics, and the president and first lady for allowing their daughters to listen to them. ""I do think they're good parents,"" he said of the Obamas, adding he has some of Beyonce's songs on his iPhone. ""She's an incredibly gifted singer and dancer. She doesn't need to get into the vulgar in order to be successful and influential.""
+
+He also denied charges of hypocrisy, leveled this week by Jon Stewart in a combative interview on The Daily Show, because he had played bass backing up rocker Ted Nugent as he sang ""Cat Scratch Fever,"" a song with sexually suggestive lyrics of its own.
+
+• Discussed reports that the FBI had decided not to pursue civil-rights charges in the police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., saying the Justice Department would have proceeded if it could have found any standing to do so. ""It was obvious that (Attorney General) Eric Holder wanted to be able to bring charges,"" he said. ""It was almost evident from the beginning that he was hoping that they would be able to find some way to indict or bring some charges against officer Darren Wilson.""
+
+Now, he said, ""I hope that (civil rights activist and MSNBC anchor) Al Sharpton will have a rally and apologize for having incited so many people to actions that were hurtful to the people of Ferguson, hurtful to many minority business owners whose businesses were burned and looted because passions were inflamed.""",REAL
+9602,Trump Announces Massive Expansion Plans For NASA,"Trump Presents Plan To Expand U.S. Navy To 350 Ships 
+Under the Obama administration, NASA has mostly focused on research and development. Space exploration has ground to a halt, thanks to ridiculous restrictions imposed on NASA by Washington politicians who don’t know the first thing about space travel. 
+Trump wants America to lead in space once again, and with that in mind he promised more investment in NASA as well as the expansion of current private-public partnerships to maximize America’s potential. 
+“I will free NASA from the restriction of serving primarily as a logistics agency for low-Earth orbit activity,” Trump stated. “Instead, we will refocus its mission on space exploration.”   
+Years ago, America led the world in space innovation. Astronauts like Neil Armstrong inspired generations of Americans to shoot for the stars . Science and technology programs flourished because America’s children wanted to achieve the impossible. 
+That dream has faded as our government has scaled back space programs over time. NASA used to regularly redefine the word “wow,” but now all it does is maintain the status quo. 
+What Trump is promising is a bright future for America. A revitalized space program would create thousand of jobs, spur advanced technological developments and inspire America’s children to achieve the impossible once again. 
+That’s what America needs right now.  ",FAKE
+8040,Shocking! Scientists Reveal The Universe Could Delete Itself At Any Moment!,"The end of everything is nearing us all! Or perhaps not, but we won't know when it's here.
+
+It's a mysterious universe we are living in, so magnificent and complex that researchers and experts have come up with hundreds of theories on how it originated, how it works and when it ends.
+
+The infinite questions that we hold about the universe will keep us thrilled for the rest of our lives, and the universe will probably end before we can even figure it out.
+
+We fear the universe will trigger either a Big Crunch or a Big Rip during it's course, colliding into a singularity state or ripping itself apart . 
+
+
+Scientists have revealed that the universe could delete itself, without anyone even noticing it. Experts believe that our universe has reached it's lowest state with every particle in existence except for the ""Higs Field"".
+
+Watch the following video to know more! 
+
+
+Disclose TV SOURCE ",FAKE
+2734,Another Brian Williams Story Comes Into Question,"As the Washington Post points out, Williams told two different versions of a story about covering the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. In one interview, he said he was nearly hit by rockets while flying in a helicopter over northern Israel. However, when he had originally written about the experience, that detail never came up. In fact, he only described activity that occurred nowhere near his helicopter.
+
+He also told the Daily Show that rockets were ""1,500 feet beneath us.""
+
+Amidst a media firestorm, NBC is investigating Williams' Iraq coverage and his Peabody Award-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Williams is taking a temporary leave of absence from the network, and cancelled a planned appearance on CBS' ""Late Show with David Letterman.""
+
+Other anecdotes Williams has told over the years are getting the magnifying glass treatment as well, including a tale he repeatedly shared about being mugged at gunpoint back in the 1970s.
+
+During a 2005 story in Esquire and a profile in New Jersey Monthly three years later, Williams talked about how he was robbed while selling Christmas trees out of the back of a truck to help a church in Red Bank, N.J. However, longtime residents say they doubt the story is true.
+
+“I find it hard to believe anyone was held up in this area in the ’70s. It was very safe,"" Danny Murphy, former owner of Danny's restaurant, told Pagesix.com. ""I doubt he was robbed at gunpoint,"" Les Carbone, 85, told The Daily Mail. ""I was born in Red Bank, there were no crimes like that. Tell Brian Williams to stop lying.'",REAL
+3332,Why Hillary Clinton is unlikely to be indicted over her private email server,"For those of you salivating — or trembling — at the thought of Hillary Clinton being clapped in handcuffs as she prepares to deliver her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention this summer: deep, cleansing breath. Based on the available facts and the relevant precedents, criminal prosecution of Clinton for mishandling classified information in her emails is extraordinarily unlikely.
+
+My exasperation with Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state is long-standing and unabated. Lucky for her, political idiocy is not criminal.
+
+“There are plenty of unattractive facts but not a lot of clear evidence of criminality, and we tend to forget the distinction,” American University law professor Stephen Vladeck, an expert on prosecutions involving classified information, told me. “This is really just a political firestorm, not a criminal case.”
+
+Could a clever law student fit the fact pattern into a criminal violation? Sure. Would a responsible federal prosecutor pursue it? Hardly — absent new evidence, based on my conversations with experts in such prosecutions.
+
+There are two main statutory hooks. Title 18, Section 1924, a misdemeanor, makes it a crime for a government employee to “knowingly remove” classified information “without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location.”
+
+Prosecutors used this provision in securing a guilty plea from former CIA director David H. Petraeus, who was sentenced to probation and fined $100,000. But there are key differences between Petraeus and Clinton.
+
+Petraeus clearly knew the material he provided to Paula Broadwell was classified and that she was not authorized to view it. “Highly classified . . . code word stuff in there,” he told her. He lied to FBI agents, the kind of behavior that tends to inflame prosecutors.
+
+In Clinton’s case, by contrast, there is no clear evidence that Clinton knew (or even should have known) that the material in her emails was classified. Second, it is debatable whether her use of the private server constituted removal or retention of material. Finally, the aggravating circumstance of false statements to federal agents is, as far as we know, absent.
+
+The government used the same statute in 2005 against former national security adviser Sandy Berger, who was sentenced to probation and fined $50,000. Here, too, the conduct was more evidently egregious than what the public record shows about Clinton’s. Berger, at the National Archives preparing for the 9/11 investigations, twice took copies of a classified report out of the building, hiding the documents in his clothes.
+
+For Clinton, the worst public fact involves a 2011 email exchange with aide Jake Sullivan. When she has trouble receiving a secure fax, Clinton instructs Sullivan to “turn [it] into nonpaper [with] no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” But Clinton has said she was not asking for classified information. In any event, it does not appear her instructions were followed.
+
+Another possible prosecutorial avenue involves the Espionage Act. Section 793(d) makes it a felony if a person entrusted with “information relating to the national defense” “willfully communicates, delivers [or] transmits” it to an unauthorized person. That might be a stretch given the “willfully” requirement.
+
+Section 793(f) covers a person with access to “national defense” information who through “gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust.” The government has used the “gross negligence” provision to prosecute a Marine sergeant who accidentally put classified documents in his gym bag, then hid them in his garage rather than returning them, and an Air Force sergeant who put classified material in a Dumpster so he could get home early.
+
+The argument here would be that Clinton engaged in such “gross negligence” by transferring information she knew or should have known was classified from its “proper place” onto her private server, or by sharing it with someone not authorized to receive it. Yet, as the Supreme Court has said, “gross negligence” is a “nebulous” term. Especially in the criminal context, it would seem to require conduct more like throwing classified materials into a Dumpster than putting them on a private server that presumably had security protections.
+
+My point here isn’t to praise Clinton’s conduct. She shouldn’t have been using the private server for official business in the first place. It’s certainly possible she was cavalier about discussing classified material on it; that would be disturbing but she wouldn’t be alone, especially given rampant over-classification.
+
+The handling of the emails is an entirely legitimate subject for FBI investigation. That’s a far cry from an indictable offense.
+
+Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.",REAL
+1941,"As Hillary Clinton heads to Iowa, 5 questions she'll face","DES MOINES, Iowa —True-blue Democratic activists at a party fundraising dinner Friday night were positively giddy to have two possible presidential contenders there live and in person — Martin O'Malley and Jim Webb — and their frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, ready to dive into the race.
+
+But they've got plenty of questions on their minds for Clinton, who kicked off her campaign Sunday, and her potential challengers for the Democratic nomination. Here's what they had to say in interviews with The Des Moines Register at the Polk County Democrats' Spring Dinner:
+
+1. WILL CLINTON START TO STAND FOR SOMETHING?
+
+It has been nearly eight years since Clinton campaigned here, and no one knows what to expect, said many of the activists gathered at a labor union hall in Des Moines.
+
+They're wondering: Has she grown into a more conservative Democrat over the years? Or will she take cues from ultra-left heartthrob Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and have the guts to stand tall on progressive issues? Will she have what it takes to capture the aspirations of the people?
+
+""I'm a Hillary supporter, but I haven't closed my mind to say, 'It's Hillary or nobody,'"" said Joan Thorup, a Des Moines Beaverdale resident who has already met O'Malley three times. ""Things may have changed since the last time I saw her on the campaign trail.""
+
+Several union members taking a smoke break outside the United Auto Workers hall where the dinner was held said the last time they heard Clinton speak, at the Harkin Steak Fry in September, she said nothing substantive.
+
+Asked how she can reignite a blaze of passion in Iowa, Earl Agan Jr. answered, ""I don't think she can."" He's business manager for the Operative Plasterers & Cement Masons' International Association Local No. 21 and Area 561 Iowa. ""We've had too many Clintons and Bushes. I won't vote for her.""
+
+Agan blanches at news reports about Clinton's family foundation accepting millions of dollars from Middle Eastern countries known for violence against women, sex discrimination and other human rights abuses. ""It doesn't play well,"" he said.
+
+But several of Agan's fellow labor activists said if Clinton gives some home-run speeches detailing how she'd deal with income inequality, she could win allegiance.
+
+Other Iowa Democrats said they're confident that the corporate marketing geniuses who have taken leaves of absence from their high-powered jobs to help the Clinton campaign will know how to refresh an older brand.
+
+2. WHAT WILL THE DIVIDING LINES BE?
+
+What tack can possible Democratic challengers like former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley and former senator Jim Webb of Virginia take to successfully pry Iowa voters away from Clinton?
+
+""I'm not sure how they'll draw distinctions,"" Patty Judge, a former lieutenant governor, said after listening to both men's speeches. ""They're both great guys, and they both have a great story to tell, but how they're going to distinguish themselves, I don't know.""
+
+Several Democrats, describing the economy and personal prosperity as base issues, said the dividing line will be ideas for championing the middle class. Some have voiced misgivings about Clinton's corporate connections, said Rick Smith, an Urbandale-based Democrat known as a super-activist.
+
+Other Democrats said they'll be hunting for the contender who's most fierce on climate change.
+
+Another likely litmus test will be the Iraq war and what Clinton says about dealing with the Islamic State and the instability it has spawned. Some anti-war Iowans will never forgive Clinton for her ""yes"" vote 12 years ago in favor of going to war in Iraq, several activists said.
+
+And the general election may well turn on foreign policy, Smith predicted.
+
+In Webb's Iowa speech Friday night, his refrain was that he took principled stances. It wasn't easy to be one of the earliest to say the Iraq war was wrong, he said. But five months before the vote, he wrote a guest piece for the Washington Post saying the war was going to be a ""strategic blunder,"" he said.
+
+3. WILL ANY LABORERS MIGRATE TO THE GOP?
+
+A moderate GOP presidential candidate who supports construction of projects like the Keystone XL and Bakken pipelines could attract Democratic building trades workers tired of the Big Environmental lobby blocking projects that could put Iowa laborers to work.
+
+Several union members told the Register that the reality is that the United States isn't going to divest from oil, and they believe the country can have pipelines and a clean environment at the same time.
+
+O'Malley opposes the Keystone line and told the Register he didn't know details about the Bakken line, which would cross Iowa, but likely opposes it. Clinton has yet to fully explain her position on the Keystone pipeline. Webb is a proponent of it.
+
+Iowa activists are also worried that Republicans will out-Democrat the Democrats with compelling populist ideas. Republicans will argue that the GOP can best help working people improve their lives.
+
+""I often hear people say there's no difference in the parties. I try not to get mad but say, 'Can we talk'?"" Smith told the dinner audience.
+
+4. WILL CLINTON ENGAGE IN A REAL BATTLE WITH FELLOW DEMOCRATS?
+
+Every activist the Register interviewed at the dinner proclaimed joy that O'Malley and Webb appear on the cusp of presidential bids. They also still hope Warren and Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders run, partly to pull Clinton to the left.
+
+""I'm open to them all,"" said Desmund Adams, a Clive businessman. ""I don't think the passion is connected to the candidate. The passion is connected to the politics.""
+
+""Folks want to see a Democrat win. That's what pays the bills,"" said Adams, who has launched an exploratory committee as he considers running for Congress in Iowa's 3rd District.
+
+Several Democrats said they will be watching to see whether Clinton engages in a real battle with her challengers, rather than ignoring them or pussy-footing around them with kind words.
+
+5. WILL CLINTON SHOUT DOWN THE GOP?
+
+Not only do Iowa Democrats want a vigorous Democrat-on-Democrat fight for the caucuses, they want to see their presidential contenders play hard with the GOP, hitting back with satisfying, quotable one-liners.
+
+""We cannot let them get away with these misstatements, these constant misstatements of the facts,"" Smith said.
+
+Des Moines Democrat Sophia Douglas noted Republicans' furor over Clinton using a private email server as secretary of State, which has thwarted public scrutiny of her messages. After dealing with plenty of ""faux scandals"" like that, she said, ""The Clintons should know better by now.""
+
+Douglas said the GOP battle cry over the Benghazi, Libya, terrorist attacks that killed four Americans didn't seem to rattle Clinton. ""I loved how she was looking at them like, 'I can eat you for breakfast, lunch and dinner,'"" Douglas said. ""She knows how to throw a punch, and she knows how to take a punch.""
+
+When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker goes on his anti-labor rants, the Iowa activists said they want their candidates to stand up to him and explain to Iowans how repugnant that is.
+
+And they're fed up with the GOP contenders dominating the newspaper headlines and airwaves.
+
+""It drives me crazy,"" said Jerry Tormey, an Urbandale Democrat. ""We're not getting equal time. and they're saying such ludicrous stuff. So we need Hillary.
+
+""And we need Martin O'Malley,"" Tormey added. ""And we need Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.""",REAL
+6182,On The Fault Lines of Change: Globalization-v-Localization,By Julian Rose Virtually everything that conventional wisdom teaches about ‘economics’ is undergoing changes of an almost seismic nature at this time. Albeit mostly beneath... ,FAKE
+7766,Trump: A people’s ‘new world order’ taking shape?,"Trump: A people’s ‘new world order’ taking shape? By Eric Walberg   Eric Walberg 
+A populist wave that began with Brexit in June became a tsunami as Trump’s cyclone hit Washington Tuesday night, leaving the capital in a shambles. His is a story straight out of Grimm’s fairytales. the peasants rose up. The phony civility of the neoconservative nightmare that Americans (and the world) have endured for years is cracking. 
+Trump’s victory is pure protest by the masses. Exciting, but disturbing, as Trump is just another billionaire. He will be sure to look after his own, but then again, maybe he can stare them down. Fortunately, there is the Republican Congress and Senate to provide stability as the upstart get his feet on the ground. The weakened Democrats will have to fight extra hard after years of complacency under the nice, liberal Obama. 
+For critics of media control by the Israel lobby in the US, and the sham elections where money rules, the victory shattered this paradigm. “Though the ‘Masters of Discourse’ control the entirety of world media, and they decide what people may think and say from Canada to Hong Kong, only you, American citizens, can defeat them. Trump has a great quality making him fit for the task: he is impervious to labels and libels. He had been called everything in the book: anti-Semite, racist, women hater, you name it. And he still survived that flak. Such people are very rare,” writes Israel Shamir. 
+Almost all presidents since Jimmy Carter have campaigned as outsiders. Reagan, Bill Clinton, Bush jr, Obama. But they were all seasoned politicians and all disappointed. 
+President Trump—think: Governor Ventura 
+There is a precedent of a boorish outsider, made famous and pilloried in the media, who catapulted into the political world. His name is Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler who served as the 38th Governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003. He was the first member of the Reform Party to win a major government position, now in the Independence Party of Minnesota. 
+He surprised everyone with a sober, uncorrupt term in office, reforming taxation and constructing the METRO Blue Line light rail in Minneapolis–Saint Paul. He shattered the Republican-Democratic stranglehold and no one suffered. Trump has shattered it again. He makes a path open to a third party or independent candidate in the future. 
+Trump’s trump card 
+Trump’s final ad, a 2-minute masterpiece of populist rhetoric infuriated the ADL for hinting the obvious: the forces of international finance that have their own agenda for the US, behind our backs, and whose agent is/was Hillary Clinton. He depicted a “global power structure” that is “bleeding America dry” with horrible trade deals that enrich elites and open the gates to mass immigration. 
+The people behind this globalist takeover include George Soros, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein, with the implication that Clinton is their minion. “The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this first hand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors,” charged Trump. 
+That jab alone was worth more than all of Hillary’s millions spent on ads attacking him for peccadilloes. Now the intelligent Republicans are waking up. Trumps’ words are branded in their minds. That alone makes the election historic. 
+The ADl’s slander of Trump—this ad touches on images and rhetoric that anti-Semites have used for age—merely alerted Americans to the emptiness of the ‘anti-Semitic’ slur. If something is true, pointing it out is not bigotry. 
+Senior House deputy whip Dennis Ross of Florida lauds Trump for his known ability as negotiator. “Sure, he might toss out statements like ‘build a wall,’ or ‘no Muslims,’ and say something sensational. But then he knows how to give in a bit and come up with a solution.” 
+House Speaker Paul Ryan publicly disowned Trump during the campaign, and now has to eating crow. The closest modern comparison of an outsider president and a speaker of the same political party may be the fractious relationship during the late 1970s between Democrats President Jimmy Carter and House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Carter’s team didn’t have an appreciation for how the system worked in Washington and struggled to advance his agenda. 
+New American ball game 
+The Republican win in the Congress and Senate, with a Republican president, offers a chance to produce meaningful change. Will Trump develop more concern for the environment and work to help the millions of poor Americans who put their trust in him? He has a huge responsibility to repay his voters and give hope for reconciliation with his opponents. There is much soul searching to be done now, on both sides of the divide in American political life. 
+The election represents a call to action for people to fight hard to save the environment, rebuild a county falling apart, and demand a responsible US foreign policy. 
+Democracy only works when we all take part. People are awakening from their Wall St induced sleep. Look for a new ‘Occupy Wall St’ and peace campaigning. 
+That’s the bright side. Trump’s policies on the Middle East and Iran are confused and incoherent. Let’s hope that his friendship with Vladimir Putin portends realism, and the ability and intent to change the US imperial mindset that plagues the world. The French are just as furious with the same scenario there. Trump’s victory makes a victory for the Front National’ s Marine Le Pen more likely. “The American people—free!” Le Pen tweeted as Trump’s count reached the threshold of victory. 
+It also gives energy to Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Protest candidates throughout Europe have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government coalitions in 11 Western democracies, including in Austria, Italy and Switzerland. 
+This wave of protest is gathering momentum. The American people have the chance now, and the responsibility, to help shape where Trump will take his ‘revolution.’ Whether he can work with his foreign counterparts to create a people’s ‘new world order’, not the one Bush Sr. promised in 1991 and that Bush Jr. failed to achieve. Foreign policy has too long been off limits, done by elites behind closed doors. 
+Government has to listen to the people now, after years of passivity and policies shaped by the elite. Trump made serious promises to revitalize American. People will now hold him to them. 
+Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s. He is author of “ Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games ” and “ From Postmodernism to Postsecularism: Re-emerging Islamic Civilization .” You can reach him at ericwalberg.com .",FAKE
+3392,State Department says Netanyahu twisted Kerry's words in speech to Congress,"The State Department accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of taking congressional testimony by Secretary of State John Kerry out of context in Netanyahu's address to a joint meeting of Congress Tuesday.
+
+In a statement released early Wednesday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki quoted in full an article written on the website FactCheck.org that claimed certain remarks made by Netanyahu about Iran's nuclear program ""misrepresented what Kerry had said"" in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Feb. 25.
+
+In his address, Netanyahu said Kerry had disclosed that Iran could ""legitimately possess"" 190,000 centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium by the time a deal designed to restrict Iran's nuclear capability for a decade would expire. The Israeli leader, who referred to Kerry as ""my long-time friend"" in his speech, said that amount of centrifuges could put Iran ""weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons and this with full international legitimacy.""
+
+However, the FactCheck.org article circulated by Psaki noted that Kerry had only said that a peaceful nuclear power program could use that same number of centrifuges.
+
+""[I]f you have a civilian power plant that’s producing power legitimately and not a threat to proliferation, you could have as many as 190,000 or more centrifuges,"" Kerry told committee members.
+
+Later in his speech, Netanyahu described the proposed agreement as one that ""doesn't block Iran's path to the bomb; it paves Iran's path to the bomb.
+
+""So why would anyone make this deal?"" the prime minister asked. ""Because they hope that Iran will change for the better in the coming years, or they believe that the alternative to this deal is worse? Well, I disagree.""
+
+The State Department statement was the latest salvo in an ongoing war of words that marked the run-up to Netanyahu's address and climaxed with harsh criticism for the Israeli leader from congressional Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who branded the speech an ""insult to the intelligence of the United States.""
+
+President Obama himself told reporters Tuesday afternoon that he didn't watch Netanyahu's address but read the transcript and it contained ""nothing new."" Obama claimed the prime minister did not offer any ""viable alternatives"" to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
+
+As Netanyahu spoke Tuesday, Kerry was holding a three-hour negotiating session with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in the Swiss resort of Montreux in hopes of completing an international framework agreement to curb Tehran's nuclear program. However, in that same Feb. 25 hearing, Kerry said Netanyahu ""may have a judgment that just may not be correct here"" in initially opposing an interim agreement reached this past November.
+
+Negotiators from the so-called P5+1 countries, a group which includes the U.S., Britain, Russia, China, Germany, and France, are scrambling to meet a March 31 deadline to finalize the framework of a permanent deal, with a July deadline for a final agreement.
+
+During his speech, Netanyahu urged negotiators to keep pressuring with economic sanctions because Tehran needs the deal most.
+
+""Now, if Iran threatens to walk away from the table — and this often happens in a Persian bazaar — call their bluff,"" Netanyahu said. ""They'll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do.""
+
+In a sign that Netanyahu's speech was resonating outside the chamber of the House of Representatives, Zarif decried comments that President Barack Obama made on Monday — as part of an administration-wide effort to push back on the Israeli's criticism — in which he said that Iran would have to suspend its nuclear activities for at least a decade as part of any final agreement.
+
+Zarif, in a statement quoted by Iran's official news agency IRNA, said Obama's remarks were ""unacceptable and threatening,"" aimed at attracting U.S. public opinion while reacting to Netanyahu ""and other extremist opponents of the talks.""
+
+For his part, Kerry told reporters Tuesday that both sides were ""working away, productively.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9460,Are you shitting me !! A dindu flavor 24 - 'Jack Bauer??,"Are you shitting me !! A dindu flavor 24 - 'Jack Bauer?? ..PASS!!! 01/31/07 5 01/12/09 11 Mail with questions or comments about this site. ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.006s (8 queries)",FAKE
+4241,"'It's getting harder every day,' Rubio says of possible Trump support","Presidential candidate Marco Rubio Saturday warned fellow Republicans against the party being defined by Donald Trump, and suggested he may have to disavow the GOP frontrunner if Trump becomes the nominee.
+
+""I still at this moment intend to support the Republican nominee,"" Rubio said. ""But … it's getting harder every day.”
+
+Later, during a rally at an industrial park in Largo, Rubio told supporters of Trump:
+
+""If he is our nominee, this is what our party is going to be defined by.""
+
+Citing Trump's comments that he would like to punch a protester in the face, or that he would pay the legal fees of supporters who do so, Rubio said Trump's rhetoric is feeding into people's anger and encouraging behavior that leads to violence.
+
+Rubio supporters said professional protesters appeared to start the problems at the Trump rally, but the billionaire's rhetoric has created a toxic atmosphere.
+
+""It's kinda nice he says what he thinks,"" said April Powers, 54, an accountant from Pinellas Park, Fla. ""But sometimes he's just way over the top -- he's too much.""
+
+Janet Rontos, 79, a retired school teacher from Largo, said Trump encourages rough stuff with his rhetoric.
+
+""'Punch 'em in the face! Get 'em out of here!'"" she said, imitating Trump.
+
+Rontos added, however, that ""he'll get away with it"" because Trump's supporters are so fervent.
+
+After a strong showing in Thursday's Republican debate in Miami, Rubio is positioning himself as the anti-Trump vote in the Florida primary. Rubio had this message for the Florida supporters of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
+
+""I don't blame people in Ohio if they conclude that, while they like me, the only way to stop Trump there is to vote for Kasich,"" Rubio said in Naples Friday. ""I have made the argument here in Florida that If you're a Ted Cruz supporter or a John Kasich supporter, voting for them in Florida means you're voting for Donald Trump because I am the only one who can beat him in Florida.""
+
+He talked directly about the high stakes of Florida's outcome. ""I've always felt that the winner of the Florida primary is probably going to be the nominee,"" he said.
+
+But he stopped short of saying he would drop out if he lost the primary in his home state. ""We haven't even thought about that,"" he said. ""We're just focused on winning Florida.""
+
+In the chaos of a heated campaign, however, Rubio admited that he regrets the tone of his political attacks on Trump, although he said they were in response to Trump's own negativity.
+
+Rubio spent about 15 minutes greeting people eating late lunches at the Yabba Island Grill and a crowd of about 200 supporters who crowded into Sugden Plaza with Rubio bumper stickers, signs and copies of Rubio's book 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida in downtown Naples on Friday afternoon. The crowd was made up largely of snowbirds, some from as far away as Iowa and Massachusetts, although a few locals ducked out from work to see their home state political celebrity.
+
+""Marco gave me a hug,"" squealed Lindy Connor, a Massachusetts resident who is wintering in Sarasota. ""I told him I was from Massachusetts and I voted for him and he said wow and then I guess that he just had to give me a hug. I told him he has people who love him, even up in liberal land.""
+
+Not every one in the crowd was a supporter, however. John Moore of Naples came out with a handmade sign held high urging Rubio to drop out of the race to give Cruz Florida's 99 delegates.
+
+""I voted to send Rubio to the Senate,"" Moore said. ""He was the Tea Party's guy then and I gave him my vote. But now, he needs to reinforce his dedication to the cause and prove to me that he is really a patriot and step down in time to give Cruz our delegates.
+
+“That is what a true conservative would do. He wouldn't let his ambition hurt the cause. He wouldn't let his political ambition serve up Florida, and most likely the United States, on a silver platter to Donald Trump.""",REAL
+6011,Iranian Military Commander Claims Rogue Nation Sending Elite Fighter’s to Infiltrate the US and Europe,"A military commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has reportedly told the country’s state controlled media that Iran will soon be sending elite forces into the United States and Europe in an effort to thwart potential plots against the rogue Islamic Republic.
+As the Washington Free Beacon has reported, the commander stated that at the direction of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the IRGC will soon send their elite forces to operate in both the US and Europe under the goal of bolstering Iran’s hardline regime.
+“The IRGC is [the] strong guardian of the Islamic Republic… The Fedayeen of Velayat [fighting force] are under the order of Iran’s Supreme leader. Defending and protecting the Velayat [the Supreme Leader] has no border and limit.” Salar Abnoush, deputy coordinator of Iran’s Khatam-al-Anbia Garrison stated.
+Abnoush’s provocative comments come at a time where Iran is actively upgrading their military hardware and attempting to strengthen their presence throughout the Middle East with funds provided by the Obama Administration.
+Via Washington Free Beacon 
+“The whole world should know that the IRGC will be in the U.S. and Europe very soon,” Salar Abnoush, deputy coordinator of Iran’s Khatam-al-Anbia Garrison, an IRGC command front, was quoted as saying in an Iranian state-controlled publication closely tied to the IRGC.
+Iranian military and government officials have continued to advocate violence against the U.S. and its allies, despite the nuclear deal and several secret side agreements that gave Iran $1.7 billion in cash.
+Iran accuses the U.S. of violating its end of the agreement by not helping the Islamic Republic gain further access to international banks and other markets.
+“Our enemies have several projects to destroy our Islamic revolution, and have waged three wars against us to execute their plans against our Islamic Republic,” Abnoush said. “The IRGC has defeated enemies in several fronts. The enemy surrendered and accepted to negotiate with us.”
+“And now all of our problems are being solved and our country is becoming stronger in all fronts. Some believe the holy defense ended,” the military leader added. “They are wrong; the holy defense continues, and today, it is more complicated than before.”
+Another source who advises congressional leaders on Iran sanctions issues told the Free Beacon that the Obama administration is blocking Congress from taking action to stop this type of infiltration by Iranian forces.
+“Iran is ideologically, politically, and militarily committed to exporting the Islamic revolution through terrorism, which is why even the Obama administration says they’re the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” the source said. “Congress wants to act, but Obama officials keep saying that new laws are unnecessary because the U.S. has enough tools to block Iranian terror expansion. Instead of using those tools, though, they’re sending Iran billions of dollars in cash while Iran plants terror cells in Europe and here at home.”
+",FAKE
+2388,There’s an infection hospitals can nearly always prevent. Why don’t they?,"There’s an infection hospitals can nearly always prevent. Why don’t they?
+
+By one estimate, 210,000 deaths every year are associated with preventable harm caused by hospitals. Our multimedia feature ""Do no harm"" explores how different attitudes toward patient harm can make a difference between life and death for a patient. Vox reporter Sarah Kliff invited me along to document the reporting, which resulted in the following video.",REAL
+1477,Donald Trump says he has no questions about Marco Rubio's eligibility to be president,"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump drew a distinction between eligibility questions surrounding Marco Rubio's run for the presidency versus those clouding Ted Cruz's bid, saying the Florida senator is qualified because although his parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of his birth, he was born in the U.S. -- unlike Cruz.
+
+""It's a different, very different thing because he was born here. He was born on the land,"" Trump told CNN's Jake Tapper on ""State of the Union."" ""Ted was not born on the land, and there's a very strict reading that you have to be born on the land. (Harvard Law professor) Laurence Tribe actually said based on Ted's views, he would have to be born on the land.""
+
+Cruz was conferred American citizenship at birth because his mother is an American citizen, and legal experts have largely agreed that would qualify him for natural-born citizenship. The Texas Republican also had Canadian citizenship until he renounced it in 2014.
+
+""He was born in Canada. He was a Canadian citizen until 15 months ago, if you can believe that,"" Trump said.
+
+""He says he didn't know,"" Tapper replied.
+
+""He didn't know. Well, he didn't know about his financial papers either. You know, how are you going to be president if you didn't know about a million dollar loan from Goldman Sachs,"" Trump asked, referring to a controversy that surfaced earlier this week over Cruz's 2012 Senate bid. ""And you said it's something you don't know about. Now he doesn't know that he was a Canadian citizen? I mean that's in a way maybe worse than all the other things we're talking about.""
+
+""There have been lawsuits filed. And I said lawsuits are going to be filed,"" he said. ""The Democrats are going to file lawsuits. They filed lawsuits. Now, he's got a problem.""
+
+Trump also hammered Cruz over his criticism of ""New York values,"" which the Texas senator said referred to the Empire State's support of abortion rights, same-sex marriage and a focus on money and greed. Trump called those remarks ""very, very insulting.""
+
+""I immediately thought of the World Trade Center, and the bravery of New Yorkers and the genius of New Yorkers to be able to take that whole section and rebuild after the tragedy,"" he said.
+
+Asked if Cruz was making a subtle ethnic dig with his ""New York values"" comment, Trump said he didn't know, adding, ""probably you would have to ask him.""
+
+But, Trump said, ""I thought it was disgraceful that he brought that up ... I think he came across badly. Some people gave him pretty good reviews on the debate. I think he came across as very strident and not a nice person, and people don't like that.""
+
+Trump said the ""only place (Cruz) is doing fairly well is in Iowa.""
+
+""I you look at these other places, he's not doing well, and certainly not doing well nationally,"" Trump added.
+
+Still, he doesn't want to take any chances, which is why he's been spending on ads recently.
+
+""I'm going to start spending money for two reasons. Number one, I feel guilty because I'm $35 million under budget,"" he said. ""Number two, I don't want to take a chance.""
+
+Trump pointed out that spending millions has not helped former Florida Jeb Bush emerge as a leading candidate.
+
+""Jeb is spending so much money. Think of it, he spent $69 million, I spent nothing. He's at the bottom of the pack, I'm at the top of the pack,"" he said.
+
+He then attacked former presidential candidate Lindsey Graham for endorsing Bush.
+
+""I think it's incredible. First of all, Lindsey Graham got out with zero. He had zero. He had nothing. That's number one, so he's not gonna get any voters and I think it's a very bad thing for Lindsay Graham,"" Trump said.
+
+""A lot of people think that was a shameful chapter in American history, though,"" Tapper said.
+
+""Well, some people do, and some people think it was a very effective chapter, and what happened was when they removed some, meaning brought them back, when they brought them back, they removed some, everybody else left,"" Trump said. ""And it was very successful, everyone said. So I mean, that's the way it is. Look, we either have a country, or we don't. If we don't have strong borders, we have a problem.""
+
+Trump said the American political process is in need of campaign finance reform, adding that he -- a candidate who has repeatedly touted his decision to self-fund his campaign as a selling point for his candidacy -- hasn't decided if he would accept public financing for the general election.
+
+""I don't know yet. I haven't thought of it. I am thinking about this one,"" he said.
+
+""That's the way it is. Somebody gives them money. Not anything wrong, just psychologically, when they go to that person, they're going to do that,"" he said. ""They owe them, and by the way, they may therefore vote negatively towards the country. That's not gonna happen with me.""
+
+The American political process is in need of campaign finance reform, Trump said.
+
+""Well I think you need it, because I think PACs are a horrible thing,"" he said. ""First of all everybody is dealing with their PAC. You know, it's supposed to be like this secret thing -- they're all dealing.""
+
+Trump says he wasn't mocking reporter with disability
+
+Trump was previously criticized for appearing to mock Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter with arthrogryposis, a chronic condition which limits the movement of his arms.
+
+At a South Carolina rally in November, Trump waved his arms in an awkward manner while discussing a comment made by Kovaleski. But Trump said he wasn't mocking him.
+
+""If you could go back and do it again, would you do it differently?"" Tapper asked.
+
+""Yes, I would. But let me just tell you something. I had no idea what this reporter looked like or that he had difficulty,"" Trump said.
+
+Trump told Tapper he would never mock a person with a disability.
+
+""I was not imitating. I would never -- who would ever do that? If somebody had a disability, who would mock a disability? I would never. I'm a smart person ... Who would ever mock somebody, especially if you're running for office?"" Trump said.
+
+""I would have not done it, because it's confusing,"" he added. ""Some people believe me when I say it, I mean, I swear to you, that's true. I had no idea.""
+
+""No, I have a great relationship with God. I have a great relationship with evangelicals,"" he said.
+
+Trump said he doesn't ask for forgiveness because he doesn't do a lot of bad things.
+
+""I don't like to have to ask for forgiveness. And I am good, I don't do a lot of things that are bad, I try and do nothing that's bad. I live a very different life than probably a lot of people would think,"" Trump said.
+
+Tapper asked Trump how it felt to be implicitly criticized by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in her Republican response to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address last week.
+
+""It was my great honor because I'm angry and they both said I was angry. And I get along very well with Nikki, and you know, Nikki said we're friends and we are friends. I supported her, but I am angry,"" Trump said. ""And when she said there's an anger that we shouldn't have, I said, well, I disagree with one thing. There's an anger that we should have. Our country is going to hell.""",REAL
+6719,Amazing baby! 4-year-old Bella from Moscow easily speaks 7 languages,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 12 + 15 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
+10196,"News: Major Headache: The Blue Angels Got Trapped Inside A Costco, And No One Knows How To Get Them Back Outside","Email 
+Well, this isn’t good. 
+Most people think of Costco as the place that sells bulk quantities of pretty much everything. But the warehouse superstore is now making headlines for a very different reason, and it could serve to tarnish their brand: The Blue Angels accidentally flew into the Costco in Augusta, GA and are currently stuck flying around inside the discount retailer. 
+Worst of all, it doesn’t seem like Costco has any idea how to get the airplane stunt squadron to leave. 
+The Blue Angels were performing at a routine air show in Augusta, GA earlier today when they veered too close to the Costco and zipped through the automatic doors as they slid open for a customer. Before Costco employees could react, the diamond formation of five F/A-18 Hornets had entered the store and began performing death-defying aerial feats right over the shelves of bulk cereals and jumbo-size ketchups. 
+Customers are trying to ignore the roaring jets overhead, but it’s hard to concentrate on your shopping list when sonic booms keep knocking over pallets of Kirkland-brand dog food. It’s usually a welcome treat to see the Blue Angels conduct synchronized barrel rolls, but inside Costco, the elite pilots are proving to be a serious nuisance. 
+So far all attempts to evict the Blue Angels have proved unsuccessful. At first, Costco staff just propped the front door open with a bucket, assuming the Blue Angels would find their way back out eventually. After an hour, when choreographed smoke trails continued to plague the store, the manager grabbed a lacrosse stick from a sporting goods display and tried to shoo the planes toward the exit. Unfortunately, that only caused the Blue Angels to accelerate to 700 mph and perform several loop-the-loops in the freezer aisle, where the pilots hit a truly exhilarating 8 G’s. 
+Your heart just has to break for this poor manager. 
+With the store set to close in only a few hours, Costco better think up a solution fast, or Blue Angels will be locked in overnight. If that happens, then tomorrow’s customers will be aggravated by more of the same world-class aeronautic showmanship. What an absolute hassle.",FAKE
+3931,The controversial test that's poised to replace the Pap smear,"In new ""interim guidance"" — published today in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology — experts from influential medical groups such as the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology and the Society of Gynecologic Oncology argue that doctors should consider replacing the Pap smear with the HPV (human papillomavirus) test in women ages 25 to 65.
+
+The Pap smear would still be the primary screening method in women under 25, and would be used to look for irregular cells in some older women who get a positive result from the HPV test.
+
+This is a change from the current guidelines, which recommend Pap smears alone at three year intervals for women under 30, or the additional option of ""co-testing"" with both the Pap and HPV test at five year intervals for women ages 30 to 65.
+
+The rationale is that we now know most all cervical cancers (between 90 and 99 percent) are caused by HPV. This more sensitive test will detect more cancer in women and potentially save lives.
+
+Our concern is that there’s a lot of cervical cancer that's being missed on the Pap test ""In women who have a negative [HPV test] result,"" said lead author on the interim guidance Dr. Warner Huh, ""their risk of developing cancer is extraordinarily small over a three year window. You can't make that same claim with a Pap test. We know the false-negative rate for a Pap test is about 50 percent. It's a coin toss.
+
+""Our concern is that there’s a lot of cervical cancer and pre-cancer that's being missed on the Pap test.""
+
+But not everybody agrees with the new approach. The main point of contention is this: not all HPV actually leads to cancer — a lot of it is benign and clears up without any treatment at all — so expanded use of the HPV test could lead more ""false positives,"" or women being treated for cancers that would have never harmed them.
+
+""So many women get HPV who will never, ever get cancer,"" Diana Zuckerman, head of the National Center for Health Research, told NPR.
+
+The new interim guidance also drops the age for HPV testing from 30 to 25, which could theoretically lead to more unnecessary testing and treatment among young women.
+
+Dr. Huh's group believes the benefit-harms ratio lies in favor of earlier and more aggressive HPV screening.
+
+""We fully recognize that [detecting more HPV] substantially increases the number of procedures that will be required, like colposcopies,"" he said. ""But we felt that increased disease protection would be meaningfully important to women and health-care providers.""
+
+He explained that the group convened to come up with the new advice after a Food and Drug Administration panel suggested last year that a new HPV test become the standard of care for women. For now, the interim guidance is meant to guide doctors' and patients' decision-making until new, official guidelines arrive in the next few years.
+
+Until then, here is what you should know about Pap tests and HPV tests:
+
+Pap smears have been the primary cervical-cancer test for women for decades. The test was invented in the US in 1941 by none other than George Papanicolaou. (Weird fact: He actually established the technique by examining vaginal debris from guinea pigs and then translated that knowledge to humans.) 
+
+
+
+At the time, it was a game changer and model for cancer screening: it was the first effort to detect early cancer and it turned cervical cancer into a largely curable disease.
+
+
+
+But the test isn't perfect. It involves scraping the walls of the cervix and vagina for cells, which are placed on a slide and sent off to cytologists who look for abnormalities under microscopes. Sometimes the doctor doesn't scrape the area of the cervix where bad cells are harbored, sometimes she doesn't transfer them to the slide properly.
+
+That's why the doctors who drafted the interim guidance about the HPV test (and the FDA panel last year) are pushing for expanded use of the new test.
+
+""We know the Pap test is not very reproducible. If you get a Pap test, three different pathologists will give you three different interpretations of the results,"" said Dr. Huh. ""The HPV test is either positive or negative, like a pregnancy test.""
+
+According to the current guidelines, women ages 30 and above (or 25, according to the interim guidance) should consider another option: the HPV test.
+
+The HPV test works like a Pap test. Doctors use a speculum to open the vaginal canal and reach the cervix, and then they gently scrape the cervical canal to collect a cell sample.
+
+The difference, however, is how the sample is screened. The HPV tests looks for the presence of the virus, not abnormal cells. And the bottom line about the HPV test is this: it's more sensitive than Pap smears at catching cancer-causing HPV, meaning it can more accurately detect the virus.
+
+The authors of the interim guidance want to see this test used first in women ages 25 to 65. Then, for women who test positive for some strains of HPV, they want the Pap test used second to detect whether the HPV is associated with cell abnormalities in the cervix.
+
+But, again, there is a risk here and one that the medical community will be debating: whether 25 is too young to start routinely screening women for HPV. That's because HPV is not always deadly, and in most women, clears within a year or two. Running this ultra sensitive test at an earlier age could mean sending patients into tests and treatments that will have no positive impact on their lives or health outcomes. (For this reason, until now, doctors have said this test has a ""low predictive value"" for cervical cancer in women under 30.)
+
+Until more consensus emerges in the medical community about a new age cut off, if you're between 25 and 30, you might want to talk to your doctor about getting an HPV test.
+
+If you're over 30, the current guidelines already recommend ""co-testing"" or getting both the HPV and Pap test at the same time. That's because HPV in older women is more likely to be related to cell abnormalities that could become cancerous. So having a sensitive test is a good thing.
+
+Whatever approach you chose with your doctor, remember that getting any sort of screening is the most important first step.
+
+""At least half of the cases of cervical cancer in the US occur because women have not had appropriate screening or follow-up,"" said Dr. Michael LeFevre, who chairs the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.",REAL
+9526,Hillary is Sick & Tired of Suffering from Weiner Backup, ,FAKE
+391,Philadelphia To Host 2016 Democratic National Convention,"Leading up to the decision, Philadelphia was one of three cities -- including New York and Columbus, Ohio -- vying for the opportunity to host.
+
+Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the DNC, announced in a Thursday statement that the committee had signed a final contract with Philadelphia earlier that morning.
+
+“I am thrilled to announce that Philadelphia will host the convention where we will nominate the 45th President of the United States,” Wasserman Schultz said in the statement. “In addition to their commitment to a seamless and safe convention, Philadelphia’s deep rooted place in American history provides a perfect setting for this special gathering. I cannot wait to join Democrats across the country to celebrate our shared values, lay out a Democratic vision for the future, and support our nominee.”
+
+The Democratic National Committee decided in late January that the convention would take place July 25, 2016, just one week after the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
+
+The last time Philadelphia hosted a presidential convention was in 2000, when Republicans nominated then-Gov. George W. Bush. The last time the Democrats hosted their convention in Philadelphia was in 1948.",REAL
+9246,10 tips to improve your life #117,"Next Swipe left/right 10 tips to improve your life #117 
+Together with Twop Twips we present you with another ten totally useless tips to help you live your life to the full. 
+1.",FAKE
+9820,England players controversially allowed to wear three lions,"England players controversially allowed to wear three lions 02-11-16 FIFA has turned down a request to stop the England team disrespecting the England crest by wearing it. Many fans believe the current team’s wearing of the three lions shows a lack of respect to those who had gone before them and managed to pass a ball ten yards. England supporter Wayne Hayes said: “Is this what Terry Butcher ran around with his head pissing blood for? Is this why Gazza cried? Is this why Geoff Thomas shanked that shot against France? “To see the crest besmirched by Wayne Rooney wearing it while wandering around the pitch like he’s in IKEA is a disgrace.” England manager Gareth Southgate said: “The decision whether to wear the three lions should be a personal one, unless you fuck up a vital penalty you’re inexplicably taking in a major tournament, in which case you should be allowed nowhere near them.” Funds raised by the sale of England shirts with the crest help to fund various causes, such as firing managers and staging doomed bids to host the world cup. 
+Share:",FAKE
+7888,Anti-Hillary Ad is so Powerful She’s SUING to Get it Taken Down – WATCH Before It’s Too Late!,"0 comments 
+A damning new political ad titled “Can’t Run Her House” has been released by the Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC, a subsidiary of the Make America Number 1 PAC. 
+It features vintage footage of Michelle Obama from 2008, when her husband was campaigning against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. 
+“One of the important aspects of this race is role-modeling what good families should look like. And my view is, if you can’t run your own house, you certainly can’t run the White House. You can’t do it,” says the First Lady in reference to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. 
+Watch: 
+According to The Political Insider , the Clinton camp is so concerned over the release of the 8-year-old video clip that their lawyers are sending letters threatening to sue those who air it. 
+On Monday, cease and desist letters were sent to WFLA-TV in Tampa, Cox Cable in Gainesville, Bright House Cable in Orlando, and WESH-TV in Orlando demanding that the stations stop airing the ad. 
+Make sure to SHARE this video before it is taken down forever!",FAKE
+5129,Meet Hillary Clinton's Potential Vice Presidents In 100 Words,"Hillary Clinton will already make history with her nomination for president, becoming the first woman to lead a major presidential ticket. Now the question is whether she wants to do it again with her choice of running mate.
+
+Clinton is expected to name her vice presidential pick sometime after the Republican National Convention ends and before her own convention begins in Philadelphia on July 25.
+
+On her list are several Hispanic lawmakers, African-Americans and at least one woman.
+
+Latino politicians like Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro offer an appealing contrast to Donald Trump's controversial comments on Mexican immigrants, plus he would bring youth to her ticket.
+
+She also has a close relationship with Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who is beloved by labor unions.
+
+Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren would excite supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Brown has been a vocal opponent of free trade agreements and is one of the Senate's most liberal members, while Warren was the original progressive hero who has long railed against Wall Street.
+
+But both Brown and Warren, along with New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, have a big complicating factor — they come from states with Republican governors who would nominate their replacements if the Clinton ticket wins. And with control of the Senate hanging in the balance this November too, losing a Senate seat may be too risky of a gamble for Democrats.
+
+Ultimately though, Clinton may go with a safer, non-historic pick. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine is a solid choice who was a finalist in President Obama's search eight years ago. Kaine himself has admitted he is a ""boring"" choice, but boring isn't necessarily a bad thing in politics, and he does come from a swing state too.
+
+That's the same with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has emerged as a late, top possible pick for Clinton. The former Iowa governor comes from an important state and is a longtime friend of the Clintons too.
+
+Below are some of the potential candidates Clinton's team is weighing. Check out Trump's potential VPs here.
+
+Becerra is the current chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, making him the highest-ranking Latino in the House. Elected to Congress in 1992, he previously served in the state Assembly and was the California deputy attorney general. In 2008, President Obama offered him the position of U.S. trade representative, but he turned it down, saying he would have more influence in Congress. Becerra has stumped for Clinton in both English and Spanish and could be a powerful voice for her on issues of immigration. Once a supporter of NAFTA, he now says he opposes it and voted against CAFTA.
+
+Booker cultivated a popular social media presence and a national profile even before he was elected to the Senate in 2013. During his seven years as Newark mayor, he became well-known for shoveling residents' driveways after snowstorms, rescuing a woman from a house fire and living on food stamps. Booker could energize African-Americans and young voters. But as a freshman senator, his experience will be a question (even though he has served the same amount of time that Barack Obama did before becoming president). His attention-getting tactics also make him something of a wild card who could upstage Clinton.
+
+Brown, two-term senator of one of the most critical swing states, would bring a geographic advantage to a Clinton ticket. He also would help with reaching blue-collar Democrats who might be swayed by Donald Trump's populist appeal. He has been a strong surrogate for Clinton when it comes to labor issues. Brown is also a vocal opponent of free trade and critic of NAFTA, an issue where progressives who backed Sanders are skeptical of Clinton's recent conversion. Before being elected to the Senate in 2006, he served in the House for 14 years and was previously the Ohio secretary of state.
+
+The current secretary of housing and urban development, Castro is a rising star in the Democratic Party. In 2009, when he was just 35, he was elected the mayor of San Antonio — the youngest mayor of a major U.S. city. He delivered the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. He would be the first Hispanic on a presidential ticket and would provide a contrast to Trump's controversial remarks about Latinos. But recent reports say he has slipped on Clinton's list owing to concerns he lacks the experience to step into the presidency if necessary.
+
+Kaine would be a more traditional choice for vice president, but that may be exactly what Clinton needs. Last month, he even admitted he lacks the pizazz of some other candidates, telling Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, ""I am boring."" He's an effective surrogate, comes from a swing state and has good relationships on both sides of the aisle. He has arguably the most political experience of her possible running mates, including service as mayor of Richmond, governor of Virginia and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He is fluent in Spanish and was an early Clinton endorser.
+
+A former two-term governor of Massachusetts, Patrick would add diversity to the Clinton ticket. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed Patrick as an assistant attorney general, putting him in charge of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. Later, he went into private practice as general counsel of Texaco and Coca-Cola. He endorsed President Obama in 2008; Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, consulted on Patrick's 2006 gubernatorial race and later helped in his tough 2010 re-election. While Massachusetts isn't a swing state, Patrick's business and executive experience could be useful as a counterpoint to Trump.
+
+Perez has long been mentioned as a possible running mate for Clinton. The current secretary of labor was first appointed by Obama as an assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. The son of Dominican immigrants, he would help excite the Hispanic electorate. He is also beloved by labor unions — so much so that they campaigned against his nomination to replace Eric Holder as attorney general in 2014 because they wanted Perez to stay at the Labor Department. He is less well known than some of Clinton's other possible picks, though, but has been unafraid to attack Trump.
+
+A newly-floated name Clinton is reportedly vetting, Stavridis would lend considerable military experience and national security credibility to a Clinton ticket. He spent over thirty years in the Navy and rose to the rank of a 4-star Admiral. For four years, he served as the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, where he oversaw operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Balkans, and piracy off the coast of Africa. He is currently the Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He has criticized Donald Trump, calling his foreign policy ""naive and dangerous.""
+
+Vilsack has served at almost every level of government, beginning as mayor of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa in 1987. He went on to serve as a state senator and the two-term the governor of Iowa. He's the current Secretary of Agriculture and is the only remaining member of President Obama's original cabinet. Like Kaine, he's a safe pick for Clinton and was already vetted for the vice presidency by John Kerry in 2004. He briefly ran for president in the 2008 cycle but dropped out in early 2007. He endorsed Clinton and served as her national co-chair.
+
+When Warren campaigned with Clinton last month, it was many Democrats' dream ticket. She has been a ferocious Trump attack dog, firing back as the presumptive GOP nominee derided her with nicknames such as ""Pocahontas."" Even before she was elected, she became a hero for progressives after creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and speaking out against Wall Street influence. Many liberal groups urged her to run for president herself this year, but she rebuffed their advances. Now, Warren on the ticket could be an olive branch to Sanders supporters. Others think that an all-woman ticket would alienate some male voters.",REAL
+5518,"The media chooses our president (Hillary), because we're a nation of morons.","Report Copyright Violation The media chooses our president (Hillary), because we're a nation of morons. If the media said, ""Trump's a genius, women like him, he's a man's man, he's dynamic, he's vibrant... but Hillary is crooked and she's a criminal and no one likes her"" Blah Blah... if that happened, women would support and vote for Trump, etc.Think about that. Just flip the whole thing.There's never been a pile-on in MSM history like the one against Trump.While he had a few unforced errors, I don't think it would matter much what he did. They would trash him, or drag up 10 year old Tweets and play them 24/7 all day, even if he had pivoted to being presidential.If they wanted to prop up Trump and destroy Hillary, we would have seen the opposite happen.This entire election has been nothing more than an exercise in mass propaganda. Hillary is the chosen candidate of the Establishment, and she shall win. Early voting totals already show the Democrats are showing up in big numbers for Hillary, and Republicans are lagging behind.The election IS rigged, but largely by the media and voting scams may not be necessary if the Sheeple are compliant . ""Being easily offended is indicative of your own guilts and neuroses regarding your self."" - AC 25018606""Easily the best poster on this site and never afraid to speak the truth."" -Ronin""You're the most politically incorrect person on the site. Keep on speaking the truth brother."" - Anon""You're still on the ball, Cigarette Man! God bless.""- Helios Maximus",FAKE
+7987,A Martian Looks at Election Day,"by Lambert Strether 
+By Lambert Strether of Corrente . 
+Tomorrow, election day will be only one week away. In this post I want to talk about two distinct subjects. First, I want to talk about the sort of calculation that a Martian might make when confronted by the choice we will face in the voting booth. Then, I’d like to paint a brief picture of what election day would look like, in a world where I didn’t want to claw out my eyeballs. 
+A Martian Looks at Election Outcomes in 2016 
+I say “Martian,” because a Martian is so detached that the 30,000-foot view looks like a close-up, and I think in this election detachment is a virtue (see above at “claw out my eyeballs”). 
+So a Martian would feel that despite the all the sound and fury, the numbers have not been that crazy (assuming one trusts them). Among registered voters: Emphasizing how remarkably stable the &#39;16 race has been — going back to Sept. 2015 https://t.co/odFykkIm8m pic.twitter.com/2CKuS9Qi9G 
+&mdash; Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) October 31, 2016 
+RealClearPolitics has a similar chart averaging all the polls with a vertical scale that makes the swings a lot bigger. To me, the pattern of the race is that Clinton starts out with, and retains, a natural institutional advantage of around four points. Again from the head-to-head RCP chart, Trump has closed and then pulled even six times: September 2015, December 2015, February 2016, May 2016, July 2016, and September 2016. And each time either Clinton’s institutional advantages have re-asserted themselves, or Trump has shot himself in the foot (take your pick). Trump is closing now. Can he pull ahead and close the deal? Unknown. Based on past performance, no. Then again, as I remarked before the latest email eruption, “a week is a long time in politics,” Wikileaks has yet to drop its final shoe, and each campaign probably has a garbage truck full of oppo fired up and ready to go. 
+Paradoxically, Martians are not warlike, since the thin air, small population, and harsh conditions on Mars make war a species-threatening event. For the same reason, Martians prize the deep memories of elders while treating every child as precious. And Martians resist “Marsization,” because the one time there actually was a single, Mars-wide, cosmopolitan class of elite overlords they tried to invade the Earth, and who knows where that would have led! So if you were a Martian, and you believed that Clinton’s election would lead to a new war , and you believe that endorsing Bowles-Simpson and “hemispheric trade” in a speech at Goldman Sachs mean a Grand Bargain and TPP passage respectively, then you might look askance at a likely Clinton victory. What do do? If you had a Martian friend who followed American elections obsessively — this is similar to Southeast Asian countries where people obsessively follow English Premier League football — this is what your friend might tell you: 
+The last thing you want is for Clinton to be able to enact her (real, private) agenda. Sure, she might make some small good changes, but if you throw war, a Grand Bargain, and the surrender of national sovereignty with another so-called trade deal on one side of the scale, it’s hard to see what outweighs them on the other, at least in terms of concrete material benefits.[1] So, working on the assumption that Clinton will win, what you need is: 
+A Republican House . Here, the checks and balances built into the American system favor gridlock, and gridlock is your friend, since little legislation will get passed. Whether the House Republicans impeach Clinton if the Senate is in Democrat hands is an open question, but with Clinton having privatized the email server for her public office and the shenanigans at the Clinton Foundation , the Clinton administration will provide a target-rich environment. I woudn’t put it past them to try to take Clinton’s security clearance away! 
+A Democrat Senate . The emergence of left(ish) party barons with independent power bases is the untold story of election 2016. Warren is at least sound on banksters and financial power, and Sanders, while not a Bolshevik, is well to the left of the Democrat mainstream. That’s a Good Thing. Both are prolific fundraisers who don’t need the DNC. If the Republicans hold the Senate, the tendency will be for Democrats to stick together. If the Democrats do, then Baron Warren and Baron Sanders (and allies like Sherrod Brown ) will feel more free to drag the party left. 
+A close race . If Clinton wins, she’ll claim a mandate if the margin is a tenth of a percent. But in the same way that anybody can print money, but the trick is getting other people to accept it, others will be less likely to accept her claim the closer the result is. (I think the result would have to be better than the four points Obama beat Romney by — 51.1% to 47.2% — and as of today, Clinton’s margin is 2.8% in RCP’s four-way average .) Of course, Bush claimed a mandate in 2004, too — true story: I managed to Google-bomb “Bush mandate” to Mandate magazine, back in the day when Google-bombing wasn’t hard — and proceeded to try to gut Social Security, whereupon the Democrats promptly gutted him and went on to win the 2006 mid-terms. But why make it easy? 
+So, that’s the Martian perspective on the race. Surprisingly or not, the personal characteristics of puny Earthling candidates are not a factor! Nor are cultural or class markers! 
+Elections on Mars 
+Here is how Election Day works on Mars. Again because of planetary and cultural characteristics, Martians reserve tricky and complex electronic devices for important things, like distributed Martian parallel chess, or space operas. They are also convivial, and they hate to be manipulated by large and opaque forces (that time the Jovians invaded). Obviously, I can’t provide links for most of this — the Uniform Resource Locator is a global standard, not an interplanetary one — but in short form: 
+1. On Mars, Election Day is a national holiday. That’s because Martians, unlike American Earthlings, think that everybody should have an equal opportunity to vote. Voting is equally easy for almost every Martian, whether they work or not. 
+2. The Martians use hand-marked paper ballots, hand-counted in public. This is remarkably similar to international standards on Earth (which the United States does not use): 
+Last March, the country’s highest court found that secret, computerized vote counting was unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the country was Germany, and the Constitution violated by e-voting systems was the one that the U.S. wrote and insisted Germans ratify as part of their terms of surrender following WWII. 
+Paul Lehto, a U.S. election attorney and Constitutional rights expert, summarized the German court’s unambiguous, landmark finding : “No ‘specialized technical knowledge’ can be required of citizens to vote or to monitor vote counts.” There is a “constitutional requirement of a publicly observed count.” “[T]he government substitution of its own check or what we’d probably call an ‘audit’ is no substitute at all for public observation.” “A paper trail simply does not suffice to meet the above standards. “As a result of these principles,…’all independent observers’ conclude that ‘electronic voting machines are totally banned in Germany’ because no conceivable computerized voting system can cast and count votes that meet the twin requirements of…being both ‘observable’ and also not requiring specialized technical knowledge. 
+Hand-counting paper ballots is no good at all, argue critics, unless you really want to know who the actual winner of the election was… 
+After the verdict in the case — filed by a computer expert and his political scientist son — Lehto wondered how it could be that open, observable democracy is seemingly an inviolable right for “conquered Nazis,” but not, apparently, for citizens of the United States… 
+3. The Martians throw a big party at the precinct after the paper ballots have all been hand-counted. That’s partly because Martians are convivial, but also because the Martians think that democracy is important and ought to be celebrated. (Again, because the Martian population is small, they wish to begin the conciliation process between winner and loser immediately, lest fratricidal violence result, and there’s no better way to do that than over food.) 
+4. The Martians regulate all forms of political advertising for size (small) and frequency (not often), whether for candidates or policies. That’s because the Martians wish to minimize manipulatio by encouraging face-to-face forms of persuasion and deliberation in public venues wherever possible. 
+5. The Martians ban published polling data thirty days before the election. That’s because Martians believe that they each should vote for their own reasons, and that elections (unlike markets) are not (manipulative) beauty contests. 
+Conclusions 
+Crazy Martians! What are they thinking? 
+NOTES 
+[1] Sadly, the time for an all-out assault on Republican “obstructionism” was 2009, when all the stars had aligned: The Republicans had no credibility, and the Democrats had the House, the Senate, the most powerful orator of our time (so it was said), in the White House, and a mandate for “hope and change.” Of course, Obama (assuming good faith) squandered this opportunity, starting with his inaugural speech, if not before. 
+APPENDIX 
+And then there’s Evan McMullin, doing well in Utah . I haven’t seen any actual evidence that he’s Mitt Romney’s straw in case of some kinda electoral college debacle…. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+9285,Talk Nation Radio: James Marc Leas on Canceling the F-35,"https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-james-marc-leas-on-canceling-the-f-35 
+James Marc Leas is a founding member of the Stop the F-35 Coalition in Burlington Vermont. He has published some two dozen articles on the F-35 and F-35 basing. To highlight the F-35 issue statewide, he ran for the office of Vermont Adjutant General, the leader of the Vermont National Guard, in 2013, which is elected by the legislature. 
+Before becoming a patent attorney James was an engineer at IBM, and he holds over 40 patents for his inventions. While an IBM employee he led a vigorous campaign among employees to end IBM sales to South Africa. He also served as a staff physicist for the Union of Concerned Scientists in its Washington, DC office for a year in the aftermath of the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. He is a graduate of MIT and completed all but the dissertation toward a PhD in physics from the University of Massachusetts. He is a member of the Vermont Bar Association, the American Bar Association, and the National Lawyers Guild. 
+Sign the petition to cancel the F-35:",FAKE
+8412,Vladimir Putin – Straight From The Horse’s Mouth,"in: War Propaganda , World News If it’s not Islamophobia, it’s Russophobia. Tired of Western propaganda? Get Vladimir Putin’s perspective with words straight from the horse’s mouth. Vladimir Putin in particular, and Russia in general, have been the focus of an intensive high-drama propaganda campaign of late. Are you buying it? For the time being, Russophobia has replaced Islamophobia as the driving force behind the lies. Various US officials have been frantically warning Americans that the Russians are behind everything: hacking the DNC, controlling Trump, influencing the election and breaking the Syrian ceasefire agreement. They might as well add making your girlfriend break up with you, making your toast get burnt and making your car run out of fuel for all the evidence they have presented. Many of these totally unfounded allegations stem from (naturally) the Clinton campaign, home to career criminals Bill and Hillary Clinton , who are desperately seeking to find something to gain some sort of shred of popularity or advantage over Trump, who fills up arenas with 1000s of people more easily than Clinton can fill a high school gym with 50. Many US officials and war hawks are trying to get in on the action; CIA man Mike Morell indicated it would be a good idea to covertly kill Russians to make them “pay a price” ; Hillary Clinton called Vladimir Putin the “grand godfather of extreme nationalism” and blamed him for the rising popularity of right-wing leaders; and even standing VP Joe Biden came out and said that, “We’re sending a message to Putin … it will be at the time of our choosing and under the circumstances that have the greatest impact” . It seems there is no depth to which some US leaders won’t stoop in order to gain some political advantage, even it means lying, demonizing and destroying geopolitical partnerships in order to garner a few brownie points. Russophobia is in full swing before the US Presidential Election to distract American voters. Vladimir Putin: It’s All About Distraction During Election Season You would think Russian President Vladimir President would be agitated by all of this mud-slinging. At times he has been, for instance when he issued a warning a few months ago about an impending WW3 due to NATO’s constant aggression and advancement towards Russian borders. However, judging by his own words and mostly calm demeanor, he has seen through the agenda and understands what is going on. Putin spells out how it’s all inflamed rhetoric before an election season, an old trick used by politicians to distract when they have no meaningful solutions for internal and domestic problems. Here is Vladimir Putin in his own words : “You can expect anything from our American friends … the only novelty is that for the first time, on the highest level, the United States has admitted involvement in these activities, and to some extent threatened [us] – which of course does not meet the standards of international communication. As if we didn’t know that US Government bodies snoop on and wiretap anyone? Everyone knows this … Apparently, they are nervous. The question is why. I think there is a reason. You know, in an election campaign, the current government carefully crafts a pre-election strategy, and any government, especially when seeking re-election, always has unresolved issues. They need to show, to explain to the voters why they remain unresolved. In the US, there are many such problems … for example, the massive public debt is a time bomb for the US economy and global financial system … more examples can be cited in foreign policy … in these conditions, many choose to resort to the usual tactics of distracting voters from their problems … try to create an enemy and rally the nation against that enemy … Iran and the Iranian threat did not work well for that. Russia is a more interesting story.” And that’s exactly what this whole thing is: a giant story. However, as Voltaire once said, if you can make someone believe absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities. Let’s see what else Vladimir Putin has to say on other topics of interest. Russian Hacking: A Laughable Claim so the Clintons and DNC Can Try to Avoid Culpability Let’s face it: the whole Russophobia affair is about avoiding blame, dodging responsibility and evading liability. Thanks to WikiLeaks, Project Veritas and many other sources, we know the entire Hillary Clinton campaign has been rigged beyond belief. Fake primaries, fake speeches, fake images, fake videos, fake crowds, fake supporters and fake debates. There is seemingly no depth of criminality to which that woman won’t sink. She’s selling out the presidency before she even gets there, such as the stunt of trying to promise future presidential executive orders to mega donors. There is not a shred of evidence that Russia is affiliated with WikiLeaks or behind any of the DNC hacks. As this Zero Hedge article NSA Whistleblower: US Intelligence Worker Likely Behind DNC Leaks, Not Russia states: “On “Judge Napolitano Chambers,” the Judge said that while the DNC, government officials, and the Clinton campaign all accuse the Russians of hacking into the DNC servers, “the Russians had nothing to do with it.” Napolitano then mentioned Binney, arguing the NSA veteran and whistleblower who “developed the software that the NSA now uses, which allows it to capture not just metadata but content of every telephone call, text message, email in the United States of every person in [the country]” knew the NSA had hacked the DNC — not the Russians. If Judge Napolitano and Binney are right and the NSA did hack the DNC, what was the motive? According to the Judge, “members of the intelligence community simply do not want [Clinton] to be president of the United States.” “She doesn’t know how to handle state secrets,” Napolitano continued. And since “some of the state secrets that she revealed used the proper true names of American intelligence agents operating undercover in the Middle East,” some of these agents were allegedly captured and killed, prompting NSA agents to feel compelled to act. Whether NSA agents hacked the DNC or not, one thing is clear: there’s no real evidence linking the DNC and Arizona and Illinois voting system hacks to the Russian government.” The Mythical “Russian Threat” Vladimir Putin directly addressed another mythical story, that of the so-called Russian threat and Russian aggression , at the recent Valdai forum in Sochi from October 24-27, 2016: “There is another mechanism to ensure the transatlantic security, European security, the OC security and their attempt at turning this organization (NATO) into an instrument of someone’s political interests. So what the OC is doing is simply void. Mythical threats are devised like the so-called Russian military threat. Certainly this can be (used to) gain some advantage, get new budgets, make your allies comply with your demands, make NATO deploy the equipment and troops closer to our border … Russia is not trying to attack anyone. That would be ridiculous … The population of Europe is 300 million … and the population of the US is 300 million, while the population of Russia is 140 million, yet such menaces are served as a pretext. Hysteria has been fueled in the US with regard to Russia’s alleged influence with the current presidential election. Is there anyone who seriously thinks that Russia can influence the choice of the American people? Is the US a banana republic? The US is a great power. If I’m wrong please correct me.” Here’s what he had to say about who the real aggressor is when it comes to the US and Russia: “Is it known to you that Russia, in the 90s, completely halted (as did the USSR) any strategic aviation in the further afield regions of patrol, i.e. not in the closer abroad. We halted such activity completely. US geostrategic aviation however, with nuclear weapons on board. They continued to encircle us! What for? Who are you concerned about? Or why are you threatening us? We continued with the non-patrol year after year. It is only since about 3 years ago that we restarted aviation patrol further abroad. Which party is the provocateur here? Is it us? We have only 2 military bases abroad. They are known areas of terrorism dangers … US bases on the other hand are all over the world. And you are telling me that I am the aggressor? Have you any common sense? What are US forces doing in Europe, including nuclear weaponry? What business have they got there? Listen to me. Our military budget, while increased slightly from last year, in the dollar equivalent, is about US$50 billion. The military budget of the Pentagon is almost 10 times that amount. $575 billion, I think Congress singed off on. And you’re telling me I’m the aggressor here? Have you no common sense at all? Is it us putting our forces on the border of the US? Or other states? Is it NATo, or who, that is moving their bases closer to us? Military infrastructure! It’s not us. Does anyone even listen to us? Or try to have some kind of dialogue with us? The repeated answer we get is ‘mind your own business’ and ‘each country can choose its own security measures’. Very well, so will we … And finally, on the antiballistic missile defense system, who was it that exited from the treaty which was vital to the entire system of international security? Was it us? No. It was the States. In a one-sided way, they simply withdrew from the treaty. Now they are threatening us, turning their missiles towards us, not only from Alaska, but also from Europe too … We want to develop normal relations in the sphere of security, in the fight against terrorism, in the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. We want to work together with you … so long as you want that too.” US Repeatedly Broke Its Promises to Russia and Destroyed Trust The Western MSM is so one-sided in its coverage of geopolitical events like Ukraine and Syria. Anyone not toeing the line with US-UK-NATO interests is painted in a bad light. In point of fact, it has actually been the US who has been breaking agreements with Russia since the end of the Cold War. US leaders lied to Russian leaders at the time, by promising that NATO would not extend any further eastward, and possibly even hinting that Russia could join NATO. As Eric Zuesse explains in his article America Trashes NATO Founding Act; Rushes Weapons to Russia’s Borders : “The NATO Founding Act was agreed to between the US and Russia in 1997 in order to provide to Russia’s leader Boris Yeltsin some modicum of assurance that America wouldn’t invade his country. When his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev had ended the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991, the representatives of US President GHW Bush told him that NATO wouldn’t move «one inch to the east» (toward Russia), but as soon as Gorbachev committed himself to end the Cold War, Bush told his agents, regarding what they had all promised to Gorbachev (Bush’s promise which had been conveyed through them), «To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t». In other words: Bush’s prior instructions to them were merely his lies to Gorbachev, his lies to say that the US wouldn’t try to conquer Russia (move its forces eastward to Russia’s borders); but, now, since Gorbachev was committed and had already agreed that East Germany was to be reunited with and an extension of West Germany (and the process for doing that had begun), Bush pulled that rug of lies out from under the end of the Cold War …” Bill Clinton carried on the great American legacy of exceptionalism (that is, excepting themselves from obeying international law) spearheaded by Daddy Bush of surrounding and dominating Russia by allowing NATO into the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Russia got shafted by trusting the US numerous times after the fall of the Soviet Union. Here’s Vladimir Putin once again on America’s broken promises (in April 2016): “In the early 2000s, we agreed with the Americans to destroy weapons-grade plutonium, on both sides. We were talking about the excessive amounts that were manufactured by both the US and Russia. This is the enriched uranium from which nuclear weapons are made. 34000 tonnes, from both sides. We signed an agreement, and decided that this material would be destroyed in a specific manner. It would be destroyed in an industrial way – for which special plants needed to be built. We fulfilled our obligations – we built the necessary plant. Our American partners did not. Moreover, recently they announced that rather than destroy the enriched material in the manner that we agreed, and signed an international agreement on, that they would dilute it and store it in a holding capacity. This means they retain the potential to bring it back … Surely our American partners must understand that, jokes are one thing, such as creating smear campaigns against Russia, but questions of nuclear security are another thing entirely … they must learn to fulfill their promises. They once said they would close down Guantanamo. And? Is it closed? No.” Incidentally, this is the exact same plutonium agreement which made the news last month, when as reported on October 3rd, 216, Russia suspended their deal with the US on disposal of plutonium from decommissioned nuclear warheads. A decree signed by Vladimir Putin lists “ the radical change in the environment, a threat to strategic stability posed by the hostile actions of the US against Russia, and the inability of the US to deliver on the obligation to dispose of excessive weapons plutonium under international treaties, as well as the need to take swift action to defend Russian security” as the reasons for why Russia chose to suspend the deal. Conclusion: Wake up and Smell the Russophobia Expect Vladimir Putin and Russia to keep being demonized by the Clintons – and more importantly the NWO manipulators who so desperately want them in power. Although the Clintons are a powerful modern American mafia family, replete with a long body count behind them, it’s important to remember they are lackeys for far greater and more pervasive powers (check out some of Hillary’s lovey-dovey letters to Lynn Forester de Rothschild here ). There’s a lot at stake here. Right now, Vladimir Putin and Russia are being used with the sole purpose of getting Clinton elected. Although Putin is not perfect and has his own dark side, he deserves respect for standing his ground and refusing to become another US puppet. If we are to believe his own words, he has no qualm with Americans or even America itself, but rather the selfish, imperialistic and murderous agenda of the NWO agents running the USA: “We have a great deal of respect and love for the United States, and especially for the American people … [however] the expansion of jurisdiction by one nation beyond the territory of its borders, to the rest of the world, is unacceptable and destructive for international relations.” It’s up to the American public to switch off CNN (Clinton News Network) and all the other duplicitous MSM channels and get truly informed. Vladimir Putin is reaching out his hand to America, in the hope that enough Americans can reclaim their country and work together with other nations in peace. On the issue of Vladimir Putin and Russia, the MSM is not just one-sided, it’s outright lying.",FAKE
+3080,Partisan voters treat politics and elections like a competitive sports rivalry.,"The rise of political polarization in the U.S. government has been mirrored by a similar trend of growing animosity between people who support different parties. But how have these – often uncivil – rivalries arisen? Using data from two representative surveys of Americans in 2010 and 2012, Patrick R. Miller find that partisans treat politics as they would a sports rivalry, with parties viewed in terms of good and evil, with a strong motivation to win at any cost, often independent of policy outcomes. He also finds that not only are those that view politics as a rivalry the most politically knowledgeable, they are also the most vicious, uncivil, and party-driven voters. This hostile mindset is made worse by a combination of competitive elections and politicians who further fan the flames of partisan rivalries.
+
+Americans are justifiably cynical about politics. Congress is more polarized than ever, leaving ideological extremists to govern a more centrist citizenry. Lawmakers seem incapable of civil compromise on even uncontroversial issues; leaving Washington gridlocked on pressing policy problems. But an ugly truth of American politics today is that average citizens too readily condemn politicians for our political problems without owning their role in enabling that dysfunction. If our politicians are aggressively and uncompromisingly uncivil, they make just be reflecting the voters who elected them.
+
+My coauthor, Pamela Johnston Conover, and I have been researching the nature of political party identities in America since 2010. Political scientists around that time began researching a growing social distance between average Republicans and Democrats, even in nonpolitical respects like comfort with one’s child marrying someone of the other party. What is it about parties, we wondered, that could elicit such intense hostility between everyday people?
+
+For us, the answer is in how people construct their sense of self. All of us are attached to identities—national, racial, religious, schools, and even parties—that shape who we believe we are and how we perceive the world. Like our religions, many Americans inherit party attachment from their parents. Many of us learn that we are Democrats or Republicans long before we learn that those loyalties mean that we should be liberal or conservative, pro-choice or pro-life, or for or against the social welfare state.
+
+In new research we focus on average partisans—everyday Democrats and Republicans—and their potentially unhealthy political attitudes. Politics in an intensely polarized era like today reinforces for citizens that the parties are not just distinct, but starkly different in belief and who they favor. And our regular elections ensure that our party team always has another “game” with the other team looming. We show that this creates an environment where many partisans treat politics like a sports rivalry, akin to Kansas-Missouri or UNC-Duke in college sports. Partisans with that mentality view politics in stark good-evil terms and are motivated to participate in politics foremost by a strong desire to win at any cost.
+
+We conducted two nationally representative surveys of Americans in 2010 and 2012. Before fielding the surveys, we conducted extensive interviews with average partisans to better understand the mentality that our surveys would assess. When we asked what motivated them to vote, many partisans seemingly did not connect that a party must win an election to advance policy. Instead, many talked about victory and policy ends as if they were disconnected or competing motivations (lesson: be wary of assuming that average citizens think strategically about politics).
+
+Accordingly, we asked partisans about their electoral motivations. The survey showed that 41 percent of partisans agreed that simply winning elections is more important to them than policy or ideological goals. Just 35 percent agreed that policy is a more important motivator for them to participate in politics. Only 24 percent valued both equally.
+
+Troublingly, 38 percent of partisans agreed that their parties should use any tactics necessary to “win elections and issue debates.” When those who agreed with this view were asked what tactics they had in mind, the most common ones they offered were: voter suppression, stealing or cheating in elections, physical violence and threats, lying, personal attacks on opponents, not allowing the other party to speak, and using the filibuster to gridlock Congress. Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to express this incivility.
+
+These sentiments about victory and incivility were most common among partisans who most strongly viewed the opposing party as a “rival.” These most hostile partisans also expressed the strongest partisanship and the greatest anger at the other party. And curiously, these same citizens were also the most politically knowledgeable when asked a battery of basic political knowledge questions, meaning that our most informed citizens are also the most vicious, uncivil, and party-driven voters. These effects were also independent of ideological or issue positions, which means that once a partisan develops a sense of strong interparty rivalry, it turns into a hostile dynamic with a psychological life of its own.
+
+So there is a certain type of voter—thankfully not all—for whom politics is primarily about group loyalty and using any means to claim victory over their rivals. Not about issues per se. Not about ideology or candidates. Just “we’re good, they’re bad, and let’s win.” But so what? Two other results from our research imply a lot about American politics today.
+
+First, competitive elections exacerbated these hostile attitudes toward the other party. Using Cook Political Report rankings for both survey years, we found that partisans voting in the most competitive races reported the highest levels of rivalry, desire to win, and incivility. What does that say about political campaigns? For some voters, sure, elections are about issues and selecting a compatible candidate. But for many partisan voters, those same elections are just red meat riling them up over the symbolism of party labels. Rather than bringing us together to discuss our differences and deliberate, our elections are alienating many of us from one another.
+
+Second, these most hostile partisans were also the most likely to participate in campaigns (volunteer, donate money, persuade friends, etc.) and vote. Think about the implications of that. Candidates depend on others’ resources and votes to win, especially from their own parties. So if the most mobilized partisans are also the most hostile toward the other party, then a major incentive for politicians is to placate that hostility even if it poisons the political environment. They can do that in campaigns with vitriolic and often relatively issueless partisan appeals, but also by acting as “partisan warriors” in office: not compromising, abusing the filibuster, or stridently partisan press appearances on Fox and MSNBC.
+
+Easy as it is to blame politicians for dysfunctional politics, citizens have some responsibility for enabling that ineptitude. In reality, the intense polarization of American politics likely results from a two way give and take: electorates produce uncompromising and uncivil politicians partly because those politicians may best appeal to the most mobilized partisan voter. But through campaigns and the partisan press, politicians also lead partisans to a hostile mindset where they view the other party as an evil rival.
+
+Obviously, many believe that fierce partisanship is a good thing. In practice, though, our Founders designed a government to force compromise between factions, and a system where it is unlikely that any one party will gain such complete control of government that compromise is unnecessary. It is easy for partisans who never shoulder any responsibility for making government policy work to view politics as a sport where purity, loyalty, and contempt for the opposition make a good game. But whether they make good government is a whole other matter.
+
+This article is based on the paper, “Red and Blue States of Mind: Partisan Hostility and Voting in the United States” in Political Research Quarterly.
+
+Please read our comments policy before commenting.
+
+Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USApp– American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.
+
+Patrick R. Miller – University of Kansas
+
+ Patrick R. Miller is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas. He specializes in American public opinion, political psychology, elections, and survey and experimental methodology. His current research focuses on civility and partisan identity in the U.S. He tweets about politics at twitter.com/pmiller1693.",REAL
+9678,Chinese political dissidents are having their organs cut from their bodies for 'transplant tourists',"Chinese political dissidents are having their organs cut from their bodies for 'transplant tourists' 
+Tuesday, November 01, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes Tags: China , organ harvesting , political prisoners (NaturalNews) In the U.S. these days, supporting GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump will earn you an assault from Left-wing cowards and bullies who support Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton . But in China, being a political dissident and opposing the ruling Communist government could earn you a trip to a hospital operating room.Where you'll have your organs removed for waiting ""transplant tourists.""As reported by the Epoch Times , Chinese officials began persecuting the 100 million practitioners of Falun Gong in July 1999, and have continued to do so ever since. To the Chinese communists, there is no such thing as a religious deity or belief, because communists insist that their form of government should be the only thing requiring loyalty and faithfulness.Not long ago this kind of treatment of Chinese ""dissidents"" would draw loud rebukes from the U.S. government, the United Nations and various human rights organizations around the world, as well as major media coverage. But since the Chinese manufacturing economy has become such an integral part of the economies of most of the world's advanced countries, outrage has been muted.The lack of outrage and subsequent media coverage and pressure by governments has essentially given the Chinese communists a green light to treat Falun Gong – and anyone else deemed a political dissident – in any barbaric way they choose. 'A new form of evil' Hence, the creation of a cottage industry of sorts – Transplant Tourism. As the Epoch Times noted, this is essentially "" murder on demand "" for an organ that is purchased ahead of time by someone who then travels to China for a transplant operation. It is a huge source of revenue both for the Chinese military and for private hospitals around the country, according to Nobel Prize nominees and investigators David Matas, an international human rights attorney, and David Kilgour, a former Canadian foreign secretary for Asia-Pacific.Matas and Kilgour published their first investigative report in 2006 , and evidence about forced harvesting of organs in China from prisoners of conscience has only mounted in the years since. The investigators found that the overwhelming majority of the pool of victims did not come from prisoners sentenced to death but rather from prisoners of conscience, primarily followers of Falun Gong – the largest group in China's prisons.In their 2006 report, Matas described the systematic harvesting of organs from Falun Gong adherents by the Chinese Communist Party as ""a new form of evil we have yet to see on this planet.""One of the founding board members of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), Dr. Dana Churchill, spoke at rallies in Los Angeles and Santa Monica Beach earlier this month. She said that to this point the world had never witnessed a ""more horrific and barbaric crime as the Chinese Communist Party has committed against Falun Gong."" 'Crime against humanity' She added that it wasn't just Falun Gong adherents who were being victimized, however. Others include Christians, the Uyghurs and Tibetans, all of whom have also had their organs harvested ""while they are alive, unwilling, and between 20 and 40 years old, the prime of their life,"" Churchill – a naturopathic doctor from Pasadena, Calif., said. Epoch Times noted that recently released findings on the number of Chinese prisoners who have been murdered go way beyond original estimates collected from various investigators and organizations.Churchill said: ""With Falun Gong, approximately 65,000 have been murdered, and that is according to DAFOH, our organization.""At a Washington, D.C., rally on July 17, 2015, following nine years of investigation, the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong announced that it had ""concluded that since July 20, 1999, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), lead by its former head Jiang Zemin, has utilized China's entire state apparatus to harvest organs from living Falun Gong practitioners,"" as a way to ""physically destroy"" the group as a whole.""This is genocide and a crime against humanity,"" the organization concluded. Sources:",FAKE
+5764,Michelle Obama Promotes Lewd Rappers,"Michelle Obama Promotes Lewd Rappers
+From Gerald Celente’s Trend Alert
+Michelle Obama’s ‘rap’ more disgusting than Trump talk
+KINGSTON, NY, 26 October 2016—Hitting the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, Michelle Obama made headline news lashing out at Donald Trump’s boast on a 2005 tape that as a star he could “do anything to women.” Calling Trump’s statements so “shocking and demeaning” that “I can’t stop thinking about this; it has shaken to me to my core,” Ms. Obama said she was campaigning against “hateful language about women.” 
+Ms. Obama also chastised Mr. Trump for “speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior,” and “using language so obscene that many of us were worried about our children hearing it when we turn on the TV.” 
+Bad Rap
+While Trump’s statements were offensive to women, they pale in comparison to the loud chorus of rappers’ filth and denigration of women that Michelle and Barack Obama have continually promoted, championed, wined and dined at the White House. And, while she has condemned Trump’s lewd remarks – including how “loving fathers are sickened by the thought of their daughters being exposed to this kind of vicious language” – the Obamas have hosted in the “The People’s House,” where their two daughters reside, rappers who obscenely rap about date rape and sexual predatory behavior.
+Indeed, it is not the presidential race that “little girls” are tuned into to hear “about who they should look like, how they should act,” or hearing “language so obscene that many of us worry about our children hearing it when we turn on the TV,” as Obama claimed in her speech. Young people are not watching TV with mommy and daddy. They tune into the music/entertainment world that promotes “hateful language about women” performed by White House guest rappers such as:
+Rick Ross, “U.O.E.N.O.”
+Put Molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it
+I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it…
+(Molly is a street name for ecstasy, a ‘love drug’) 
+Big Sean, “Mona Lisa” 
+I believe in God and rubbers
+Even if we sex you are not my lover
+Hit you on the couch and not the covers 
+And if you bring you friend then we got to f#ck her…
+When they go low, we go high
+Beyond the rappers, Michelle Obama also has elevated Beyonce´ – a performer who dresses and dances in sync with her sexually explicit lyric library – as a “role model for young girls around the world,” and is “proud to have my daughter grow up in a world where she has people like you, to look up to.”
+Thus, while the first lady continually brags about raising the moral bar of integrity while condemning Trump’s words and deeds, the media have ignored the far greater of two evils: The blatant hypocrisy of Michelle Obama, who supports a deplorable, debased entertainment industry drenched in debauchery that is poisoning the planet.
+Publisher’s Note: We are political atheists and support neither presidential candidate.
+The post Michelle Obama Promotes Lewd Rappers appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
+8418,"Fearing Election Day Trouble, Some US Schools Cancel Classes","Fearing Election Day Trouble, Some US Schools Cancel Classes Newsmax, October 26, 2016 
+Rigged elections. Vigilante observers. Angry voters. The claims, threats and passions surrounding the presidential race have led communities around the U.S. to move polling places out of schools or cancel classes on Election Day. 
+The fear is that the ugly rhetoric of the campaign could escalate into confrontations and even violence in school hallways, endangering students. 
+“If anybody can sit there and say they don’t think this is a contentious election, then they aren’t paying much attention,” said Ed Tolan, police chief in Falmouth, Maine, which decided to call off classes on Election Day and put additional officers on duty Nov. 8. 
+{snip} 
+Schools are popular polling places because they have plenty of parking and are usually centrally located. It’s difficult to say how many school-based polling places have been moved this year, given how decentralized the voting process is across the country. 
+But state and local officials say voting has been removed or classes have been canceled on Election Day at schools in Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere. 
+“There is a concern, just like at a concert, sporting event or other public gathering, that we didn’t have 15 or 20 years ago. What if someone walks in a polling location with a backpack bomb or something?” said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, co-chairman of the National Association of Secretaries of State election committee. “If that happens at a school, then that’s certainly concerning.” 
+{snip} 
+Easton Superintendent John Reinhart wanted to get voting out of schools altogether but was rebuffed by county election officials. So the school board canceled classes on Election Day. 
+“If you take the personalities away and cast the emotion with the election aside, one has to ask the question: ‘Are our schools the best places for that activity to take place?'” he said. “I just think we’ve reached the point where we need to look at other locations.” 
+{snip}",FAKE
+7920,"State that fired pastor demands his sermons, notes","State that fired pastor demands his sermons, notes 'This is an excessive display of the government overreaching its authority' Published: 3 mins ago About | | Archive Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially. Print Dr. Eric Walsh (Photo: First Liberty) 
+The state of Georgia is demanding copies of the sermons and related notes of a lay pastor who was fired by the Department of Public Health after it investigated what he said in his church. 
+But Dr. Eric Walsh is resisting, issuing a statement via his legal team that he will not comply with the demand from state lawyers. 
+The state’s demand is in response to a lawsuit filed by Walsh against the Department of Health charging discrimination based on his religion and other civil rights violations. 
+He’s getting support from a pastor who successfully fought off a demand by Houston officials for copies of his sermons. 
+Walsh’s ordeal began in May 2014 when he accepted an offer as to become district health director with the state agency. Only a week later, a state official asked him to provide copies of sermons he had preached as a lay minister with a Seventh-day Adventist Church. 
+Lee Rudd, the agency’s human resources director, then assigned staff members to listen to the YouTube recordings immediately. Two days later, Walsh was fired. 
+At that point, lawyers with First Liberty Institute joined forces with the Atlanta legal team of Parks, Chesin & Walbert to file a federal lawsuit against the state agency. 
+“Police State USA: How Orwell’s Nightmare Is Becoming Our Reality” chronicles how America has arrived at the point of being a de facto police state, and what led to an out-of-control government that increasingly ignores the Constitution. Order today! 
+Now, in response to Walsh’s lawsuit, the state delivered a “Request for Production of Documents” that demands, among a flood of other paperwork, “copies of his sermon notes and transcripts.” 
+“This is an excessive display of the government overreaching its authority and violating the sanctity of the church,” said Jeremy Dys, senior counsel for First Liberty. 
+“No government has the right to require a pastor to turn over his sermons,” said Walsh in a statement released by his lawyers. “I cannot and will not give up my sermons unless I am forced to do so.” 
+Officials with the Georgia Department of Health declined to respond to a WND request for comment, instead referring a reporter to the state attorney general, who did not respond to a request for comment. 
+Walsh’s lawyers scheduled a news conference as a display of support. 
+On the guest list was Pastor Dave Welch of Houston, one of five pastors whose sermons were demanded by a lesbian mayor during her campaign to establish protections for her sexual preferences in city code. 
+WND broke the story when the city launched its action against the pastors and also reported when Rush Limbaugh described Parker’s actions as possibly “one of the most vile, filthy, blatant violations of the Constitution that I have seen.” 
+The mayor at the time, Annise Parker, withdrew the demands amid a flood of protest . 
+In a prepared statement Wednesday on Walsh’s case, Welch said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Georgia’s demand is even worse than when the mayor of Houston demanded 17 different categories of materials, including sermons, from … us.” 
+Welch, the executive director of the Texas Pastor Council, said what is happening to Walsh is “worse than what happened in Houston for multiple reasons.” 
+“First, this is state government coming after a pastor, not just a rogue mayor in one city,” he said. “Also, the state is demanding much more material: sermons, sermon notes, all documents without even topical or time limits. It could even include margin notes in this pastor’s preaching Bible. It’s almost as if they are ransacking the pastor’s study. This sweeping demand is ominous and a threat to every pastor, every church, every denomination, and every citizen of faith in America.” 
+Leaders of Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, part of the nation’s largest public policy women’s group with 500,000 members, also came to Walsh’s defense. 
+Penny Nance, CEO, said: “The words of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ still reverberate today – especially as we witness the ‘Gestapo-like’ tactics of his native state. The state of Georgia’s blatant attack on religious freedom, as they discriminate against another pastor, Dr. Eric Walsh, is indeed a threat to every American, whatever our religious beliefs. 
+“Can there be a clearer violation of our First Amendment right to religious freedom than for the state to monitor, examine, and retaliate against a person because of the sermons they share?” 
+WND reported earlier on the case brought against the state after its officials reviewed Walsh’s sermons and then fired him. 
+“No one in this country should be fired from their job for something that was said in a church or from a pulpit during a sermon,” Dys told Fox News when the case was filed. “He was fired for something he said in a sermon. If the government is allowed to fire someone over what he said in his sermons, they can come after any of us for our beliefs on anything.” The original state investigation of Walsh’s sermons apparently was sparked by “one complaint” from an official with a county Democratic Party and “gay activist.” 
+State officials also joked about informing Walsh of his firing. 
+The telephone call was between Dr. Patrick O’Neal, an agency official, and Kate Pfirman, an agency financial officer. The call was captured on an answering machine, which also caught their conversation after they thought they had hung up. 
+Pfirman said: “And I’m gonna be very – I’m gonna try to come off as very cold, because I don’t want to say very much. If I try to make it warm – I’ve thought that through, it’s gonna just not – there’s no warm way to say it anyway.” 
+Then there was laughter from both parties. 
+O’Neal then said to inform Walsh, “You’re out,” and there was another round of laughter. 
+“It’s very funny,” Pfirman said. 
+The voicemail: 
+In the Houston dispute, voters ultimately soundly rejected Parker’s ordinance giving “gays” and transgendered people special rights.",FAKE
+9677,Clinton’s Email Narrative Just Fell Apart,"Posted on November 3, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 
+Clinton and her supporters have tried to blame Russia for hacking her emails and making them a focus in this election. 
+In reality, it’s likely that American intelligence and defense workers are the source for at least some of the leaks. 
+The Guardian reports today: 
+Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election. 
+*** 
+The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “ the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.” 
+*** 
+The leaks have not exclusively cast aspersions on Clinton. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, is the subject of what is said to be a preliminary FBI inquiry into his business dealings in Russia. Manafort has denied any wrongdoing. 
+Moreover, Clinton supporters have claimed that the emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop are only duplicates of emails the FBI has previously seen. 
+However, CBS News reports : 
+The FBI has found emails related to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state on the laptop belonging to the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner, according to a U.S. official. 
+These emails, CBS News’ Andres Triay reports, are not duplicates of emails found on Secretary Clinton’s private server. 
+*** “These emails have never been seen before”",FAKE
+7123,An Identity-Politicized Election and World Series Lakefront Liberals Can Love,"An Identity-Politicized Election and World Series Lakefront Liberals Can Love An Identity-Politicized Election and World Series Lakefront Liberals Can Love By 0 9 
+It’s the perfect time to be an affluent white and politically correct North Side Lakefront – or other kind of – Liberal and sports fan in the Chicago area. Think about it. Your beloved Chicago Cubs are finally going to their first World Series since 1945 and they will be doing a battle against a team with the worst racist Native American logo in major U.S. professional sports: the Cleveland Indians – yes, the “Indians.” The Indians’ Chief Wahoo – a wild grinning caricature – is the single most offensive, politically incorrect image in sports today. 
+It’s enough to make folks forget that the Cubs are owned by a politically active right-wing Republican family, the Ricketts, one of whom recently contributed $1 million to the racist and sexist bigot Donald Trump. And that the Cubs’ storied ballpark Wrigley Field will be jammed with rich white people who can swallow up secondary market World Series tickets selling for as high as $18,000 . And that the Cubs owe no small part their ability to overcome their “ Billy Goat curse ” (proclaiming that they’d never go again to the final championship series) largely to massive infusions of big Ricketts money required to purchase free-agent veterans to go along with their younger stars. 
+Meanwhile, the liberals’ party has a presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who is about to become the national government’s first female chief executive after trouncing the aforementioned bigot Trump in the November 8 th …",FAKE
+2112,"EPA unveils comprehensive water regs, critics decry 'power grab'","The Obama administration issued controversial new rules Wednesday aimed at protecting the nation's drinking water but decried by congressional critics as a regulatory ""power grab.""
+
+The Environmental Protection Agency, in announcing the finalized Clean Water Rule along with the Army Corps of Engineers, said the changes mark a ""historic step for the protection of clean water"" and would help roughly 117 million Americans who get drinking water from streams not clearly protected before these regulations. The rule would clarify which smaller streams, tributaries and wetlands are covered by anti-pollution and development provisions of the Clean Water Act.
+
+But the rules have run into deep opposition from farm groups and the Republican-led Congress. The House voted to block the regulations earlier this month, and a similar effort is underway in the Senate. Critics argue the rules could greatly expand the reach of federal regulators, making every stream, ditch and puddle on farmers' and others' private land subject to federal oversight.
+
+“The administration’s decree to unilaterally expand federal authority is a raw and tyrannical power grab that will crush jobs,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a written statement following the rules release.
+
+Boehner said more than 30 governors and government leaders rejected the EPA’s water rule. “These leaders know firsthand that the rule is being shoved down the throats of hardworking people with no input, and places landowners, small businesses, farmers and manufacturers on the road to a regulatory and economic hell.”
+
+North Dakota Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer said in a statement the rules ""trample on the rights of private property owners as well as local and state governments"" and vowed to work with colleagues to overturn it.
+
+EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, however, said the rule will only affect waters that have a ""direct and significant"" connection to larger bodies of water downstream that are already protected. The EPA said the rule focuses on streams, not ditches -- limiting protection to ditches constructed out of streams or those that ""function like streams and can carry pollution downstream.""
+
+Two Supreme Court rulings had left the reach of the Clean Water Act uncertain. The EPA has said 60 percent of the nation's streams and waterways are vulnerable, and these rules clarify which of those waters are protected. The regulations would only kick in if a business or landowner takes steps to pollute or destroy those waters.
+
+McCarthy has acknowledged the proposed rules issued last year were confusing and said the final rules were written to be more clear. She said the regulations don't create any new permitting requirements for agriculture and even adds some new exemptions for artificial lakes and ponds and water-filled depressions, among other features.
+
+These efforts were ""to make clear our goal is to stay out of agriculture's way,"" McCarthy said in a blog posted on the EPA website.
+
+But after the rules were released, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said his panel will consider the Senate bill to force the EPA to withdraw and rewrite the rules this summer and “continue our work to halt EPA’s unprecedented land grab.""
+
+Inhofe said the rule makes it ""more important than ever for Congress to act."" Among other concerns, he said the final rule allows the EPA to regulate isolated waters -- even ponds in farmers' fields -- by declaring them a ""regional water treasure.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+1350,Democratic debate: 6 takeaways,"Durham, New Hampshire (CNN) No more fake niceties. No more patience. No more Martin O'Malley to get in the way.
+
+Hillary Clinton re-launched her campaign Thursday night, going directly after Bernie Sanders regarding his attacks on her record, stressing her foreign policy experience, and making the case to Democrats that it's time to stop dreaming and get real.
+
+Sanders didn't hold back either, continuing to rail against the political establishment and campaign finance system. And he hit Clinton again on her Wall Street connections and vote for the war in Iraq.
+
+Here are the takeaways from the intense MSNBC Democratic debate:
+
+Clinton goes after Sanders for his 'artful smear' campaign
+
+In her second presidential campaign, Clinton clearly doesn't want to win through a war of attrition. She's sick of Sanders casting himself as the protector of the progressive realm against the corrupting influence of the Clintons, and she is ready to extinguish the Bern now.
+
+After yet another Sanders swipe at Clinton as part of a political establishment bankrolled by Wall Street and drug companies, she unloaded.
+
+""Time and time again, by innuendo, by insinuation, there is this attack that he is putting forth which really comes down to, you know, anybody who ever took donations or speaking fees from any interest group has to be bought. And I just absolutely reject that, senator, and I really don't think these kinds of attacks by insinuation are worthy of you. And enough is enough,"" Clinton said.
+
+Then she challenged him: ""If you've got something to say, say it directly, but you will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation I ever received.""
+
+And finally, Clinton made it just a little bit more personal, saying: ""I think it's time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out in recent weeks.""
+
+And she follows with the definition of 'progressive'
+
+It's been a struggle for months for Clinton to find a way to tell Sanders' supporters that she's on the same page with them policy-wise -- it's just that their big ideas could never, ever make it through Congress.
+
+She tried a new way of explaining their differences on Thursday night, and it was her best yet.
+
+""A progressive is someone who makes progress,"" Clinton said.
+
+It was easy to see Clinton's exasperation with Sanders. The pattern repeated itself: He'd propose a liberal policy and be cheered. She'd say she agrees, and then add that she has a specific plan to make it happen.
+
+""I'm fighting for people that cannot make those changes and I'm not making promises that I cannot keep,"" Clinton said.
+
+But Sanders' response is potent, too
+
+In going right at Sanders, Clinton took a big risk.
+
+She is hoping to pick up a few points in New Hampshire, and slow Sanders' momentum nationally. But in doing so, she could infuriate the young voters who Sanders has drawn into the political process.
+
+At first those young voters were fine with Clinton -- liked her, even. They just saw Sanders as more genuine. Now, the tone at Sanders' rallies makes clear, she will have significant work to do to win them over should she win the nomination.
+
+Sanders didn't hit Clinton directly when he responded, but he didn't shrink, either. He lambasted 1990s-era Wall Street deregulation (under Bill Clinton, of course), the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil.
+
+""That is what goes on in America,"" Sanders said. ""There is a reason, you know, there is a reason why these people are putting huge amounts of money into our political system,"" he said, ""and in my view it is undermining American democracy and it is allowing Congress to represent wealthy campaign contributors and not the working families.""
+
+Wall Street continues to be full of potholes for the former secretary of state.
+
+Her pragmatism and her accusations of an ""artful smear"" on Sanders' part don't erase the political problem caused by her paid speeches at Goldman Sachs -- which she had joked about in a CNN town hall the night before, saying with a laugh that the $675,000 in speaking fees she received was what they'd offered.
+
+""I may not have done the job I should in explaining my record,"" she said, arguing that she was tough on bankers behind closed doors and has been in the 2016 campaign, as well.
+
+Thirteen years and two presidential campaigns later, Clinton's vote to go to war in Iraq still haunts her. Her experience on foreign policy -- as Sanders himself admits -- is much deeper. But just like then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in 2008, Sanders keeps using that Iraq vote as Kryptonite on the subject.
+
+She finally found an answer to Sanders' criticism: ""A vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS.""
+
+It allowed Clinton to finally capitalize on a significant weakness of Sanders.
+
+There's a reason Clinton's campaign decided to embrace four more Democratic debates: She's a bare-knuckle brawler, and she's not going to lose the nomination because she wasn't willing to hit Sanders hard enough.
+
+Sanders, meanwhile, will pull his punches -- especially on subjects where he's tepid.
+
+The big one is foreign policy. It never comes up at his town hall meetings, and it's not at the top of his supporters' priorities. On the debate stage, it shows.
+
+The email issue continues to hang over the Clinton campaign -- and the question of whether there's some ticking timebomb there that could decimate her campaign in a general election after she wins the nomination.
+
+Asked directly whether she could ""reassure"" Democrats on this, Clinton said: ""Absolutely I can.""
+
+MSNBC's Chuck Todd pressed further regarding an FBI investigation into the matter. ""I am 100 percent confident. This is a security review that was requested. It is being carried out. It will be resolved.""
+
+Sanders -- as he has before -- declined the opportunity to take a direct shot at Clinton on the emails. But he did remind viewers that he could attack her if he wanted to.
+
+""The secretary probably doesn't know that there's not a day that goes by when I am not asked to attack her on that issue,"" he said, ""and I have refrained from doing that and I will continue to refrain from doing that.""",REAL
+3647,2015: It's time to fire the IRS,"Imagine what would happen if a retail store or company like Best Buy or Home Depot announced it has plans to slash customer service, that it will make people stand in lines for at least a half hour, and that any customer due a refund will have to wait several weeks.
+
+Oh, and it may not be able to prevent identity theft.
+
+That company would probably soon find itself in chapter 11 bankruptcy as shoppers fled to other banks or stores or restaurants where they can get first class service.  That's what America is about and every businessman and woman knows the customer always comes first.
+
+But the Internal Revenue Service now says that taxpayers had better get used to shabby service from the tax collection agency. And the IRS is hardly an agency known for warm and friendly service to begin with.
+
+ 
+
+ Complaining about belt tightening budget cuts, this week IRS Commissioner John Koskinen lectured: ""People who file paper tax returns could wait an extra week—or possibly longer—to see their refund.  Taxpayers with errors or questions on their returns that require additional manual review will also face delays.” It says it will cut enforcement efforts to root out identity theft.
+
+ 
+
+ Another IRS official went even further, suggesting wait times of at least half an hour to get through on the 1-800 help line. She warned that people who call in might want to bring some knitting, and that by the time you get through to a live human being, ""you might be able to knit a sock."" And they call this a ""help"" line!
+
+ 
+
+ There's not much taxpayers can do about this because after all, the IRS is a government monopoly. You can't file your tax return or have it processed by anyone else.  Though it is interesting that the president of H&R Block, one of the nation's largest tax preparation firms, said on Fox News on Wednesday that ""this is a story that will obviously help our business.""
+
+ 
+
+ Congress needs to hold the IRS accountable and demand the firing of Mr. Kostiken because he has he admitted openly he can't do his job. The IRS is nearly an $11 billion a year agency with some 100,000 employees.  Congress wants to cut its budget by less than 4 percent and the agency says it can't function. During the recession many businesses took cuts of 30 and 40 percent and they did it by becoming more efficient and cutting waste.
+
+ 
+
+ Meanwhile the IRS has spent millions of dollars on conferences at exotic resorts for its employees with some suites costing $3,000 a night. And Mr. Koskinen says he can't find places to cut.
+
+ 
+
+ The IRS has been rocked by scandals of targeting, abusing and financially harming individuals and conservative groups it doesn't agree with.  Maybe it could shut down that division and use those resources to help taxpayers.  Instead of showing signs of remorse the agency brass is petulant.  The attempt to extort more tax dollars out of taxpayers is the so-called Washington Monument ploy and Congress should demand an immediate private audit of the agency's spending habits.
+
+ 
+
+ What is amazing is that Washington demands full accountability and accuracy from tax filers, but the tax collection department is the least accountable agency of government. If the IRS can't administer the tax code with 100,000 employees - it sounds like we need a new IRS and a new tax system.
+
+Stephen Moore is a Fox News contributor. Moore is the Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Project for Economic Growth, at The Heritage Foundation. He is also an economic consultant with Freedom Works. Prior to joining Heritage he wrote on the economy and public policy for The Wall Street Journal.",REAL
+7575,Re: Don’t worry about Hillary: BuzzFeed confirms she remained totally super awesome while under siege,"Don’t worry about Hillary: BuzzFeed confirms she remained totally super awesome while under siege Posted at 5:54 pm on October 29, 2016 by Brett T. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
+Well, this wasn’t altogether unexpected. After news broke Friday that the FBI had uncovered new information pertinent to its investigation into Hillary Clinton, it wasn’t long before reporters, as predicted, began filing stories about Republicans “pouncing” on the news . 
+That’s all well and good — everyone knew those mean Republicans would attack. As always, Clinton put up a brave front, challenging the FBI to go public with whatever it had, possibly including classified documents related to an ongoing federal investigation. 
+But did anyone think to really check on the Democratic candidate? How was she holding up behind the scenes? Pretty well, it seems. BuzzFeed’s Ruby Cramer provided readers with an insider’s look at Hillary’s super-weird day under siege. Your guide to the *weirdest* yet most totally normal day on the plane w/Clinton—a candidate unfazed when under seige https://t.co/i3xwJ1T4Bn 
+— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) October 29, 2016 
+So relax, everyone: there’s no need whatsoever to lose sleep on Clinton’s behalf. Even while besieged by the continuing fallout of a scandal of her own making, she was “almost bizarrely unfazed by crisis.” @rubycramer @maggieNYT this woman is tougher than any man i no of 
+— allen stubbs (@NASTY4HRC) October 29, 2016 
+OMG, right? Totally. @rubycramer ""a candidate unfazed when under siege"" 
+That's what I like. 
+— Jaymes Winn (@jaymeswinn) October 29, 2016 @rubycramer @maggieNYT This woman is a rock of strength! That is the mark of a true leader! 
+— M. Stein (@MStein2016) October 29, 2016 @rubycramer @BuzzFeedNews good piece. She's made of steel, our Hillary.",FAKE
+1142,Sparks Fly Between Clinton And Sanders At Flint Debate,"Sparks Fly Between Clinton And Sanders At Flint Debate
+
+In their seventh debate, this time in Flint, Mich., Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders agreed on the root causes of that city's drinking water crisis. They both called for a massive federal intervention and investigation of the lead poisoning there and urged that the state's Republican governor, Rick Snyder, either resign or be recalled.
+
+But the two Democratic candidates also clashed over the role of trade deals in the deterioration of Michigan's economy, the usefulness of the Export-Import Bank and the state of manufacturing in America generally.
+
+They also disagreed about gun control and the best way to expand health care coverage to the maximum of Americans. They had predictably different views of whether President Bill Clinton helped or hurt African-Americans during his eight years in office.
+
+Sometimes, the contrast between their positions, aims and personalities created visible tension. When Clinton talked about cracking down on U.S. companies that move jobs overseas or move their corporate headquarters to duck U.S. taxes, Sanders was contemptuous.
+
+""I am very glad,"" Sanders said, ""that Secretary Clinton discovered religion on this issue. But it's a little bit too late.""
+
+At another juncture, Clinton noted Sanders' vote against the 2009 bailout for the auto industry as a contrast between them.
+
+""If you are talking about the Wall Street bailout where some of your friends destroyed this economy,"" Sanders began. Clinton began to interrupt, then Sanders said: ""Excuse me, I'm talking.""
+
+""If you're going to talk, tell the whole story,"" said Clinton.
+
+""Let me tell my story, you tell yours,"" he responded.
+
+There were also hostile exchanges on the issue Clinton's team regards as Sanders' greatest vulnerability in the primaries. Clinton noted that Sanders voted against a bill making gun manufacturers liable for crimes committed with their products, calling it a blanket immunity enjoyed by no other industry.
+
+Sanders said Clinton was talking about a position whereby no guns could be manufactured in the U.S. at all, adding that he disagreed with that.
+
+Both candidates admitted they did not and could not really know how it felt to be a person of color in the U.S. Each related experiences in their youth that brought them into confrontation with the racial schism of their time. Clinton spoke of exchanges between her suburban church and the youth of inner-city churches in Chicago. Sanders related his own arrest for protesting discrimination in housing in the same city, when he was a student at the University of Chicago.
+
+But despite the frequent disagreements and reliance on sarcasm, the debate between these two candidates was a broadly collegial affair when compared with the two most recent Republican debates.
+
+""I just want to make one point,"" said Clinton near the end of the evening. ""We have our differences and we get into vigorous debate about issues. But compare the substance of this debate with what you saw on the Republican stage last week.""
+
+Sanders agreed, saying either he or Clinton would invest ""a lot of money into mental health, and when you watch these Republican debates you know why we need to invest.""
+
+If you have watched all six of the previous debates among the Democratic candidates, you know well the arc of the contest thus far.
+
+Initially, the Democratic National Committee wanted only four debates and scheduled this small number in time slots all but guaranteed to minimize the audience watching in real time. Pressure to expose the candidates and create more competition between them led to additional debates.
+
+The stage at first included not only Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders but three other contestants as well: former Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, former Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland and former Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island.
+
+Webb dropped out on Oct. 20, complaining about his scant speaking time. Chafee also suspended his campaign three days later. O'Malley lasted until the Iowa caucuses, where his minor fraction of the vote indicated he was not connecting with voters.
+
+Since then, Sanders and Clinton have met several times, and their encounters have been progressively less cordial. Sanders had been generous toward the former secretary of state in the first debates, even helping her deflect criticism for keeping official business on her private server while in office.
+
+But as the Sanders campaign matured into a major competitor for Clinton, Sanders became more challenging, even hostile. In February in Milwaukee, he interjected a quick jab: ""You're not the president yet.""
+
+The Flint debate featured several similar moments when, without becoming overtly nasty, Sanders managed to assert his presence and challenge the air of dominance Clinton has sought to project.
+
+On this occasion, Sanders could also note, as he did, that he had won three of the four states where voting took place over the weekend: Kansas, Nebraska and Maine. Big margins in these states had given him a slight edge over Clinton in the delegate allocations for the weekend, despite her overwhelming win in Louisiana, a primary state where far more votes were cast than in the three caucus states combined.
+
+Clinton could say she won more votes over the weekend than any of her rivals in either party, and she could say she'd won a million more votes than Donald Trump thus far in all the primaries and caucuses around the country.
+
+Clinton's margin among ""pledged delegates,"" whose vote is allocated according to primaries or caucuses, is still near 200. When so-called superdelegates (elected officials and party leaders) are included, her advantage swells to more than 600.",REAL
+6889,Cast Your Vote: Whose Foreign Policy Position Do You Prefer?,"Cast Your Vote: Whose Foreign Policy Position Do You Prefer? Posted on Oct 28, 2016 Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton argued over foreign policy during the third presidential debate. (Screen shot via YouTube ) 
+We are only 10 days away from Election Day, and the two mainstream candidates are steamrolling through the swing states in an effort to court votes. Over the past week, WikiLeaks provided some revelations on how Clinton and her husband used the Clinton Foundation to their advantage. Donald Trump, meanwhile, continued to close in on Clinton in the polls. 
+The week began on a somber note, when news broke that longtime peace activist and California legislator Tom Hayden died at age 76. His original Truthdig reports , which have been reposted throughout the week, reinforce the importance of an anti-war foreign policy. “Our systems—politics, media, culture—are totally out of balance today because of our collective refusal to admit that the Vietnam War was wrong and that the peace movement was right,” he said in 2016 . 
+Many of his reports written back in 2006 focus on American foreign policy in the Middle East. Although written over a decade ago, Hayden’s words of caution still ring true, as in this piece on a potential U.S. withdrawal from Iraq : 
+Many activists are learning for the first time, or perhaps all over again, what it means to be winter soldiers in a long war. All the wasted lives can never be brought back, all those squandered tax dollars will never be redistributed, true enough. But if the war itself was never going to be a cakewalk, why should ending it be any different? It may still be far from over, with the simmering question of Iran on the immediate horizon. 
+As Hayden warned, U.S. involvement in the Middle East is far from over, and throughout this election season a new player has entered the arena: Russia. 
+Earlier this week, Trump stated that Clinton, if elected, would cause World War III with Russia. Truthdig contributor Juan Cole argued that “[s]uperpowers don’t fight one another in the nuclear age…[they] fight proxy wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan.” Cole asserts that Clinton’s experience as secretary of state will make it easy for her to communicate with the Russian government and the Pentagon alike. 
+Others, however, don’t feel too positive about a potential Clinton administration’s foreign policy. Clinton has proposed a “no-fly” zone over Syria as part of her foreign policy plan, alarming security experts . 
+As Lauren McCauley writes, reports also surfaced this week showing how a Clinton administration “will likely usher in a more aggressive, bipartisan foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond.” She quotes Greg Jaffe: 
+The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork for a more assertive American foreign policy via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House,” the Washington Post’s White House correspondent Greg Jaffe reports. 
+One such study, published Wednesday by the Center for American Progress (CAP)—which is run by president Neera Tanden, policy director for Clinton’s presidential campaign—recommends the next administration step up its “military engagement” amid a more “proactive and long-term approach to the Middle East.” 
+But what of Trump’s foreign policy? Juan Cole also argued earlier this week that when it comes to Trump’s assertions on the U.S. presence in the Middle East, “he doesn’t have the slightest idea of what he is talking about.” 
+Truthdig’s own Bill Boyarsky expressed a similar concern in his column this week, labeling Trump “a threat to democracy.” 
+“Trump’s scorn for the electoral system and democratic institutions is reason enough to fear a Trump presidency,” Boyarsky writes. “Added to that is his racist rabble-rousing against Muslims, those of Mexican descent and other immigrants.” 
+And of course, the discussion on foreign policy doesn’t solely revolve around just two presidential nominees. This week, NATO urged “all allies to deploy more troops and military equipment to Russia’s borders” in a move that Common Dreams staff writer Nika Knight called “shortsighted.” 
+There is also an inherent problem with the American military spending, says William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “Through good times and bad, regardless of what’s actually happening in the world, one thing is certain: in the long run, the Pentagon budget won’t go down,” he writes. “As long as fear, greed, and hubris are the dominant factors driving Pentagon spending, no matter who is in the White House, substantial and enduring budget reductions are essentially inconceivable.” 
+So although there are broader, deeply embedded institutional factors responsible for American foreign policy, whoever wins on November 8 will certainly make an impact. Given the events of the past week—the focus on increased tensions with Russia, and the tightening race between Clinton and Trump—we turn to you, our readers. Which candidate has a foreign policy position worth pursuing? Will Clinton’s experience, although “war hawkish,” serve in her favor, or will Trump’s business acumen serve him better as Commander in Chief? 
+Let us know in the poll below. One vote per person, please. (Make your selection and then click on “Vote.” To see results of the polling, click on “Results.”) Which presidential nominee’s foreign policy position do you prefer? Hillary Clinton",FAKE
+10455,Freedom Rider: Dump the Democrats for Good,"2016 presidential campaign by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley 
+Donald Trump, the white nationalist that claimed to oppose the corporate establishment, appears to have won the U.S. presidency. But, “even the victory of the openly bigoted Trump poses an opportunity to right our political ship.” The Democrats were not “our” party, but the party that thought they owned us. Their “rejection must be complete and blame must be laid squarely at their feet” for raising those chickens that have come home to roost. Freedom Rider: Dump the Democrats for Good by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley 
+“The Democrats were so entrenched in their corruption and self-dealing that they didn’t see the Bernie Sanders campaign for modest reform as the savior it might have been.” 
+This columnist did not see a Donald Trump victory coming. The degree of disgust directed at an awful candidate was more than I had predicted. Neither the corporate media, nor Wall Street nor the pundits nor the pollsters saw this coming either. Their defeat and proof of their uselessness is total. Those of us who rejected the elite consensus and didn’t support Hillary Clinton should be proud. 
+Black people are now in fear and in shock when we ought to be spoiling for a fight. All is not lost. Even the victory of the openly bigoted Trump poses an opportunity to right our political ship. Not the electoral ship, the political one. For decades black Americans have been voting for people who have done them wrong. Bill Clinton got rid of public assistance as a right, and undid regulations that kept Wall Street in check. He put black people in jail and yet black people didn’t turn on him until he and his wife tried to defeat Obama. But Obama gave us more of the same. Bailouts of Wall Street, interventions and death for people all over the world, and a beat down of black people who still loved him. Despite the fear of Republican victory we end up losing whenever a Democratic presidential candidate wins. 
+“Obama bailed out banks, insurance companies, Big Pharma and even Ukraine.” 
+Victory is ours if we dump the Democrat Party and their black misleaders. The Democrats were so entrenched in their corruption and self-dealing that they didn’t see the Bernie Sanders campaign for modest reform as the savior it might have been. Instead they marched in lock step with a woman who was heartily disliked. Sanders went along as the sheep dog who led his flock straight over the cliff. The Democrats inadvertently galvanized people who had stopped participating in the system and who want change from top to bottom. 
+One of our biggest problems lies not in facts but in perceptions. What did Democrats do for black people? The Democrats ship living wage jobs off shore in corrupt trade deals like NAFTA and TTP. They don’t prosecute killer cops or raise the minimum wage. Trump will be hard pressed to deport more people than Obama did. The list of treachery is very long. 
+When Donald Trump asked black people, “What have you got to lose?” his words were met with derision. But in reality he posed a good question. What do we have to show for years of Democratic votes? Obama bailed out banks, insurance companies, Big Pharma and even Ukraine. But he didn’t rebuild Detroit or New Orleans. The water in Flint, Michigan is still poisoned and the prisons are still full. 
+“There may be opportunity in this crisis if we dare to seize it.” 
+The outpouring of love for Barack Obama was purely symbolic. In state after state, black people who gave him victory in 2008 and 2012 stayed home. They loved seeing him and his wife dressed up at state dinners but they were never fully engaged in politics because that is not what Democrats want. The love was phony and void of any political intent. Donald Trump will be president because of that veneer of political activism. 
+As for white people who voted for Trump, of course many of them are racists. However they are not without valid complaints. They don’t want neoliberalism but black people don’t either. They don’t want wars around the world and neither do black people. We corrupt our own heritage of radicalism in favor of shallow symbolism. While we slept walk in foolish nostalgia for Obama and cried at the thought of him leaving office, white people kept their hatred of Hillary to themselves or lied to pollsters. They want America to be great again, great for them. White nostalgic yearnings are dangerous for black people, and we must be vigilant. But there may be opportunity in this crisis if we dare to seize it. 
+Republicans have been the white people’s party for nearly 50 years. Trump just made it more obvious. He didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. We don’t have to be the losers in this election. Let us remember what we have achieved in our history. Half of black Americans didn’t even have the right to vote in the 1960s yet made earth shattering progress in a short time. But we must understand the source of that progress. It came from struggle and daring to create the crises that always bring about change. 
+“The dread of redneck celebration should not be our primary motivation right now.” 
+Yes white people will strut for president Trump but that doesn’t mean we must submit as if we are in the Jim Crow days of old. We have ourselves to rely on and we can reclaim our history of fighting for self-determination. The dread of redneck celebration should not be our primary motivation right now. Before we quake in fear at white America we must send the scoundrels packing. 
+The black politicians and the Democratic National Committee and the civil rights organizations that don’t help the masses must all be kicked to the proverbial curb. The rejection must be complete and blame must be laid squarely at their feet. 
+Those of us who voted for the green party ticket of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka must stand firmly and proudly for our choice. We must strategize on building a progressive party to replace the Democrats who never help us. We must applaud Julian Assange and Wikileaks for exposing their corruption. There should be no back tracking on the fight to build left wing political power. 
+“We must strategize on building a progressive party to replace the Democrats who never help us.” 
+The black people who didn’t return to the polls shouldn’t be blamed either. Those individuals must have personal introspection that is meaningful and political. Their lack of enthusiasm speaks to Democratic Party and black misleadership incompetence. We should refrain from personal blame and help one another in this process as we fight for justice and peace. 
+The end of the duopoly is the first step in liberation. Staying with a party that literally did nothing was a slow and agonizing death. Sometimes shock therapy is needed to improve one’s condition. If we don’t take the necessary steps to free ourselves this election outcome will be a disaster. Instead, why not bring the disaster to the people who made it happen? The destruction of the Democratic Party and creation of a truly progressive political movement is the only hope for black America. Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.",FAKE
+848,Starnes: Donald Trump is not a conservative,"What sort of man is lurking deep inside Donald Trump’s innards?
+
+We were led to believe that Mr. Trump was one of us -- a conservative of the gun-toting, Bible-clinging variety.
+
+But friends, Mr. Trump is no conservative. His talk is far different from his walk.
+
+Click here to join Todd’s American Dispatch: a must-read for Conservatives!
+
+Fox News confirms that senior campaign aides assured Republicans in private that the Trump we’ve seen on the campaign trail is not going to be the same Trump we get in the White House.
+
+“When he’s out on that stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose,” Trump strategist Paul Manafort said behind closed doors.
+
+“You’ll start to see more depth of the person, the real person,” he added. “You’ll see a real different guy.”
+
+The Associated Press reported that Trump’s aides mentioned the need to “moderate his brash personality.”
+
+“The part that he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expected, but he wasn’t ready for, because he had first to complete the first phase,” Manifold said. “The image is going to change.”
+
+Back in the South those are code words for snookered, two-faced and phony-as-a-two-dollar-bill.
+
+Oh, Donald. What have you done? Say it isn’t so.
+
+“Donald Trump is telling the American people that he’s lying to us,” Sen. Ted Cruz said on the campaign trail Friday. “His campaign is now run by Washington lobbyists.”
+
+If true, Mr. Trump is no different than the Establishment Republicans who so effortlessly betrayed and abandoned the base of the party.
+
+The man is campaigning as a conservative — but I’d be willing to bet a pair of Corinthians that he’s secretly plotting to govern as a liberal.
+
+So the question must be asked. When will we see the “real” Donald Trump?
+
+Will he still send the illegals back from whence they came? Will he still make Mexico pay for the wall? Will he really bring jobs back to the United States? Will he defend the American working man?
+
+And what does it mean when his campaign says he will “moderate” his message?
+
+Mr. Trump promised to “Make America Great Again.” Does he really mean that — or does he just want to “Make America Average”?
+
+In just the past few days we’ve seen him begin to waffle on issues like abortion and religious liberty.
+
+Pro-life groups are extremely concerned by comments he made about rewriting the party’s pro-life platform.
+
+He also spoke out against North Carolina’s decision to strike down Charlotte’s so-called bathroom bill.
+
+“The problem with what happened in North Carolina is the strife and the economic punishment that they’re taking,” he said on the ""Today Show.""
+
+
+
+With all due respect, the problem in North Carolina was big business trying to bully and intimidate moms and dads who want to protect their daughters.
+
+“In the last 48 hours, Donald Trump has come out for grown men going into the bathrooms with little girls,” Cruz said. “That is politically correctness on steroids.”
+
+In the Broadway musical, “The Music Man” the good-hearted people of River City got snookered by a fast-talking swindler named Harold Hill.
+
+Hill enthralled the town folk with tales of depravity – of a culture gone astray. There’s trouble in River City, he famously proclaimed. Trouble with a capital “T”.
+
+He promised that he had the cure for what ailed their town — and they bought what he was selling hook, line and sinker.
+
+And I’m afraid conservatives have suffered the same fate as the good people of River City.
+
+Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is ""God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values."" Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.
+
+",REAL
+3503,Obama on future of terror after bin Laden raid,"Washington (CNN) On the fifth anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death, President Barack Obama sharply defended his targeted approached to fighting terror -- and said the next president would most likely follow his lead rather than his predecessor's.
+
+""The kinds of Special Forces and intelligence-gathering that we saw in the bin Laden raid is going to be, more often than not, the tool of choice for a president in dealing with that kind of threat,"" he said.
+
+""The ideology has not been extinguished,"" Obama acknowledged in an exclusive interview with CNN's Peter Bergen on Monday night. ""The world is still dangerous. In many ways, the Middle East is in a more chaotic situation.""
+
+But -- without directly referring to President George W. Bush's decisions to send U.S. troops into Afghanistan and then Iraq -- Obama said such large-scale operations, which continue to reverberate in the current presidential race, would only make the fight against extremism harder.
+
+Obama said the idea of ""sending 100,000 troops to invade every country where an organization like this appears going be counterproductive and, in some ways, feeds the kinds of ideology that we're fighting.""
+
+Obama offered the assessment as part of three hours of conversations Bergen had with the President and his top circle about details of the raid that killed bin Laden for the Anderson Cooper 360 special ""'We Got Him,' Obama, Bin Laden and the War on Terror.""
+
+While Obama spoke with confidence of the decision to launch the raid despite the odds being ""probably 50/50"" that that the U.S. was correct that the target in the Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound it was tracking was bin Laden, he did speak about the difficulty in making wrenching decisions, especially with the expanded use of drones during his presidency.
+
+Unmanned aircraft have become an invaluable tool in areas tough to reach with U.S. soldiers, Obama said. Within the first two years of his presidency, though, Obama said he felt the legal architecture and control systems in place to use them weren't enough.
+
+""It became so easy to use them without thinking through all the ramifications,"" he said. ""What we've tried to do is make sure that we are accountable at the highest levels for how we're using Predators.""
+
+The standard is of ""near certainty"" that the target is an active terrorist threat and that civilian casualties are being avoided, the President said.
+
+""Having said that, you always lose sleep because you know there's always the possibility in a kinetic action that somebody who shouldn't be killed is killed,"" he said.
+
+And he spoke of the risks of the bin Laden operation in the shadow of U.S. history.
+
+Reminded that former President Jimmy Carter had lost a chance at a second term because he'd taken a similar risk in trying to free U.S. hostages from revolutionary Iran -- and failed -- Obama responded, ""if I hadn't thought of it on my own, it was raised by a number of my advisors.""
+
+Still, Obama said that he didn't consider aborting the mission, even when it started with a downed helicopter.
+
+""My initial concern there was extraction. That if something happened to the helicopter that we could make sure that we got our guys out,"" he said, pointing to the backup helicopters that had been prepared as part of their ""plan B.""
+
+""Nevertheless, it gave you a little jolt,"" Obama said. ""I think it reminded you that no matter how well you plan, there's always going to be something that comes up.""
+
+Obama said U.S. Special Forces had developed a deep capacity during years in Iraq and Afghanistan that meant this wasn't completely foreign terrain for them.
+
+""It was uniquely complicated because the stakes were so high,"" Obama said, ""and we were operating inside of Pakistan. But these guys had been through a lot of harrowing moments.""
+
+""One thing about having been through a lot of this previously, and everybody sitting around this table had been through the ups and downs of any wartime situation,"" the President said. ""It's interesting the degree to which nobody cheered or nobody high fived, because we couldn't be sure at that point.""
+
+Obama said it wasn't until the helicopters had landed in Afghanistan with bin Laden's body ""that all of us breathed ... a sigh of relief.""
+
+Obama and his team said that now, any future terror-fighting formula will have to include working with allies to address the political resentment and economic frustration that give extremist groups such fertile ground.
+
+The case of Pakistan has proved particularly thorny. There has continued to be speculation that the government was aware of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad.
+
+Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CNN that she believes that senior Pakistanis knew bin Laden was there.
+
+Clinton said it was ""just too much of a coincidence ... that that house, that unusual-looking house would be built in that community near the military academy, surrounded by retired military professionals,"" even though ""we couldn't prove it.""
+
+""There was never any evidence that we could uncover that led directly to the top of the Pakistani military and intelligence service,"" Clinton said. ""I believe Pakistanis knew.
+
+Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, will have to evaluate what's needed to continue the fight against al Qaeda should she take the White House. But Obama's aides stressed that the next commander in chief will for sure need a blend of the fine-grained intelligence work and surgical force that defined the lethal 2011 strike against al Qaeda's mastermind.
+
+In the years since the raid on bin Laden's Abbottabad compound, the U.S. has worked systematically to degrade core al Qaeda and go after its leadership, Obama said. Meanwhile, the ability of organizations like ISIS or al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to carry out a catastrophic attack is much lower, he said.
+
+But Obama and his advisors acknowledged that the fight against terrorism didn't end with bin Laden's death. If anything, they said that despite their efforts, that battle is now more complex with social media fueling the proliferation of groups and extending their reach.
+
+The President praised the ""incredible structure of cooperation"" between intelligence, military and law enforcement ""that has hardened the homeland,"" but he didn't directly mention the controversy surrounding measures such as National Security Agency surveillance and the use of drones, though both are central to Obama's terror-fighting approach.
+
+John Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said that ""if counter-terrorism is going to be effective and you're going to take offensive action, you need to have the care and the precision of a surgeon's scalpel.""
+
+Obama said the scalpel has only gotten sharper and more precise since he took office. He said that U.S. intelligence gathering as well as the accuracy and lethality of Predator drone strikes have ""increased significantly"" in the past eight years.
+
+The next president, whether Republican or Democrat, will have to think strategically about the battle against terrorism, Obama said, a long-term undertaking that doesn't involve just force, but ideas.
+
+While he didn't address the current presidential race directly, Obama and his officials offered an indirect criticism of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump's proposal that American Muslims be denied entry to the U.S. if they leave the country.
+
+""We have to make sure that we're not engaging in the kind of knee-jerk anti-Muslim sentiment that we've heard from some politicians,"" Obama said. American Muslims' success and integration has insulated the U.S. from some of the terrorism Europe is seeing, he added. Broadly speaking, the U.S. should ""not react in ways that make the problem worse rather than better,"" Obama said.
+
+The current occupant of the Oval Office dismissed the possibility of Trump taking over from him, saying, ""I don't expect that to happen.""
+
+Obama concluded with his belief that the American people can draw a reassuring lesson from the raid that will endure beyond his tenure.
+
+""We've got really effective people and a government that knows how to do this,"" he said. ""And as long as we operate from a position of confidence and strength and are true to who we are, groups like this or individuals like this can't defeat us.""",REAL
+8789,"HILLARY WILL LAND IN PRISON, NOT THE OVAL OFFICE","HILLARY WILL LAND IN PRISON, NOT THE OVAL OFFICE Posted on Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » HILLARY WILL LAND IN PRISON, NOT THE OVAL OFFICE 
+FBI Director James Comey has caved to the pressure of his outraged employees at the FBI, and re-opened the CRIMINAL investigation of Hilary Clinton. With less than two weeks until the election, it would seem that Hilary is more likely to enter a prison cell than the Oval office: 2017 Gold Pandas and 2017 Silver Pandas Are Now Available! Secure Your 2017 Panda Coins Today at SD Bullion! You must be logged in to post a comment. Today's Top Articles Privacy Policy THE ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION PROVIDED ON SILVERDOCTORS IS FOR YOUR EDUCATION AND ENTERTAINMENT ONLY, IT IS NOT RECOMMENDED FOR TRADING PURPOSES. THE DOC IS NOT AN INVESTMENT ADVISER AND INFORMATION OBTAINED HERE SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN FOR PROFESSIONAL INVESTMENT ADVICE. THE COMMENTARY ON SILVERDOCTORS REFLECTS THE OPINIONS OF THE DOC AND OTHER CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS. YOUR OWN DUE DILIGENCE IS RECOMMENDED BEFORE BUYING OR SELLING ANY INVESTMENTS, SECURITIES, OR PRECIOUS METALS. WE DO NOT SHARE IN YOUR PROFITS, AND THUS WILL NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR LOSSES AS WELL. Search",FAKE
+6395,Chelsea Clinton Hired Eric Braverman As CEO Of The Clinton Foundation To Clean House. Now It Is Being Said He Is Asking For Asylum In Russia.,"https://twitter.com/eric_braverman 7. On Doug Band of the Foundation: He was the CEO of Teneo, a global advisory firm which allowed him to mix Clinton donors, foreign companies with Clinton’s work as Secretary of State. Huma Abedin was a paid advisor to the company. The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating the alliance between Abedin, Teneo, and the Clinton Foundation aides. There are many articles online saying Braverman had fled to the Russian Embassy in New York asking for asylum, but I do not feel comfortable with stating that as a FACT now. 
+Now, new WikiLeaks emails reveal additional details behind the the man, Eric Braverman, who was brought in as CEO by Chelsea to change the controversial practices of the Foundation but abruptly resigned a short time later after being pushed out by long-time Clinton loyalists who had apparently grown very comfortable with the status quo. Below is the new email exchange which begins when Neera Tanden warns John Podesta to “keep tabs on Doug Band” who she assumed was the insider who told NBC to “follow the money and find the real HRC scandal.” Interestingly, John Podesta writes back quickly to identify the real source as former Clinton Foundation CEO Eric Braverman which seems to be shocking to Tanden who replies simply, “Holy Moses.” 
+Posted October 25th, 2016 by Iron Mike CAUTION: Since we can’t trust the media, we report this story from non-mainstream sources …. Eric Braverman – a Yale lawyer – was brought into the Clinton Foundation “to clean it up” . His salary in 2015 was $395K plus bonuses. Of course the Clintons didn’t really want it cleaned up, – just to LOOK cleaned up …. Braverman was dumped after 2 years. 
+http://rabidrepublicanblog.com/is-eric-braverman-terrified-for-his-life/ 
+Eric Braverman was chief executive officer of the Clinton Foundation from 2013 to 2015. At the Foundation, Braverman led an effort to help ensure long-term sustainability – securing an endowment, transforming the organization’s use of data, establishing governance practices to reflect changing laws and public expectations, consolidating entities, and creating professional development for staff. Previously, Braverman served as a partner at McKinsey & Company, where he advised leaders in the public, private, and non-profit sectors on strategy, organization, and operations. Named by Fortune magazine in 2010 as one of the “40 Most Influential Leaders in Business” worldwide under 40 years old, Braverman co-founded McKinsey’s public sector practice and directed its work on government innovation globally. He also served as an advisor on performance management and technology for President Obama’s transition team in 2008.",FAKE
+6163,UN failed to organize evacuation of civilians from rebel-held Aleppo – Russian envoy,"READ MORE: US-led coalition killed 300 Syrian civilians in 11 probed strikes – Amnesty 
+The ambassador added that the UN work with various opposition groups in Aleppo and the local council was “left to take care of itself.” He stressed that the UN personnel did not “exert the necessary pressure” on “sponsors” of illegal armed groups to convince them to cooperate with the aid workers on the ground. 
+Besides criticizing the UN team, the Russian envoy also accused entities that have influence over fighters in besieged neighborhoods of Aleppo of not applying enough pressure on the militants to make the most of the Russian-Syrian humanitarian pause. 
+“External patrons of entrenched groups in eastern Aleppo could not or did not want positively influence the fighters and convince them to stop the shooting, to release civilians or leave the city themselves,” Churkin said. 
+The ambassador noted that militants in Aleppo continue to get supplies and arms, including portable surface-to-air shoulder launchers (MANPADs) and missiles. 
+READ MORE: No Russian, Syrian flights around Aleppo for 8 days – Moscow 
+The humanitarian pause was introduced in Aleppo on October 20, as Syrian and Russian jets halted all strikes in the vicinity of the city. While only an estimated ten percent of the city’s populace live in terrorist-held Eastern Aleppo, Moscow is doing everything possible to secure the evacuation of civilians. 
+Those civilians who want to leave jihadist-held areas may use six humanitarian corridors. Fighters can also leave the city with their weapons by using two other corridors established by the Russians and the Syrians. However, terrorists have refused to leave and instead resorted to shelling the civilian escape routes. 
+Russian and Syrian planes have stayed out of the city for eight consecutive days. In that time, only a few dozen civilians managed to escape the terrorist-held areas. Meanwhile, the Russian reconciliation centers continued to pour aid into Aleppo. Our colleague @ISedkeyICRC shot this video in Ramousseh, on her way to western #Aleppo . The level of destruction is staggering. pic.twitter.com/fqwNChL45E — ICRC (@ICRC) October 26, 2016 
+During the Security Council session, the UN official in charge of humanitarian aid defended the world organization’s actions in Syria, laying blame at both the rebels, Damascus, and Moscow for not allowing the UN humanitarian assistance to take place. 
+“The United Nations were ready to launch our operations on Sunday, 23 October. However, objections by two non-State armed opposition groups, namely Ahrar as-Sham and Nureddin Zenki, scuppered these plans. The United Nations made every effort to get assurances from all parties, only for the parties to then fail to agree on each other’s conditions about how evacuations should proceed,” said Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Stepen O’Brien. 
+In the meantime, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent teams working in Aleppo have complained that delivering the humanitarian aid and treating the wounded has been a challenge, as the ICRC failed to “secure the security guarantees of some armed groups.” محاولات إجلاء الجرحى والمرضى من #حلب لم تنجح. هذا ما تحتاج أن تعرفه عن الأمر: pic.twitter.com/hsdfmqLVRK — اللجنة الدولية (@ICRC_ar) October 26, 2016 
+Back at the UNSC, O'Brien painted a clear picture for the members of the UN Security Council of human suffering in Eastern Aleppo where terrorists use civilians as human shields. 
+In a graphic yet poetic account, O’Brien said that civilians – mostly children and elderly – are stuck in basements where “the stench of urine and the vomit caused by unrelieved fear never leaving your nostrils” is omnipresent. Read more No Russian, Syrian flights around Aleppo for 8 days – Moscow 
+“Or scrabbling with your bare hands in the street above to reach under concrete rubble, lethal steel reinforcing bars jutting at you as you hysterically try to reach your young child screaming unseen in the dust and dirt below your feet, you choking to catch your breath in the toxic dust and the smell of gas ever-ready to ignite and explode over you.” 
+“These are constant, harrowing reports and images of people detained, tortured, forcibly displaced, maimed and executed,” O’Brien added. 
+While mentioning the destructive role of terrorist on the ground, the UN envoy to Syria went out of his way to blame Damascus and Moscow for their air raids. 
+“Aleppo has essentially become a kill zone. Since my last report to this Council less than a month ago, 400 more people have been killed and nearly 2,000 injured in eastern Aleppo. So many of them – too many of them – were children,” O'Brien said. 
+“Never has the phrase by poet Robert Burns, of ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ been as apt. It can be stopped but you the Security Council have to choose to make it stop,” the envoy added. 
+Taking the mic at the UNSC meeting, Churkin criticized O'Brien’s report, which he said lacked factual information and failed to stress the cessation of Syrian and Russian air raids on the city. He asked O’Brian not to recite poetry but base his reports on concrete facts. 
+“If we wanted to hear a sermon, we would go to church. If we wanted to hear poetry, we would go to a theater,” Churkin said. 
+READ MORE: 60 civilians killed, 200 injured as US-led coalition strikes Mosul residential areas – Russian MoD 
+Security Council members wanted to hear “objective analysis” of the situation on the ground from O’Brien, the Russian ambassador stressed. 
+“You clearly did not achieve this,” Churkin said, reminding O'Brien that no strikes have been conducted over Aleppo since October 18. Calling O'Brian's statement “provocative and unacceptable,” Churkin pointed that in the past eight days Syrian and Russian planes had not flown over Aleppo, staying at least 10 km away from the city. 
+“This moratorium on the flight lasted eight days [now]. Mr. O 'Brian, you did not mention a single word about it. You have built your speech so to paint a picture that aerial bombardment did not stop for one day and that it is happening now, as we speak,” said Churkin.",FAKE
+8115,Awakening from the Living Dream,"Leave a reply 
+Frank M. Wanderer – While dreaming, it has been proven that vital signs are influenced by the occurrence within the dream and that our bodies respond in some ways to what we’re witnessing. 
+Allow me to draw your attention to an apparently surprising thing. If I told you that now, when you are reading these lines, you are in fact asleep, you would certainly believe that I have gone mad. 
+You are awake , you are concentrating your attention to reading, and you are aware of your environment as well. You can see the furniture of your room, you can hear the call of the birds from the nearby forest. You are also aware of your thoughts and emotions. How can anyone claim that you are asleep at this very moment? 
+Naturally, you – just like everyone else – sleeps at night. Yes, sometimes you see dreams while you sleep, but right now it is daytime, you are awake. So how could you see dreams? You Imagine a Whole World Around Yourself 
+I believe that you do not only sleep at night, but also during the daytime. I believe that in your present state of consciousness, your greatest illusion is that you think you are awake. I believe that in your present existence, your greatest illusion is when you think that you are alert. What I see is that in your present state of consciousness you are asleep, and at present you are dreaming, and what you see and hear are all parts of your dream. 
+Your nighttime sleep is only different from your daytime sleep in that in the night your dreams are less active. During the day, you imagine a whole world around you, and you play an active role in that dream. Your personal history takes place in that world, and identifying with that world shapes your personal identity. 
+At present, you are dreaming that as a part of your personal history you are reading these lines while identifying with the role of the spiritual seeker, and you are outraged by what you are actually reading. 
+The question may arise, ‘why do I claim that you are asleep and dreaming now?’. Well, from the state of consciousness I call Alertness, I can see that you are asleep, you believe yourself to be a separate self, you are a captive of the works of your mind. You are not Present 
+What is the evidence for me to say that you are now asleep and, as a citizen of a dreamland, you are dreaming that you are awake? 
+It is because you are not present. To be present means that you are fully alert, attentive, and conscious in the present moment. Whatever you do, you do that fully consciously, you focus your entire attention on that particular activity. 
+Do you feel free to declare that you are present in every moment of your life? 
+What does it mean to be awake? It has happened to all of us that we have come under the spell of a moment, at some time during our life. A beautiful landscape, a sunset, a beautiful piece of art, the rhythm of music enchanted us. It may even happen that we are just lost in the silence of a peaceful moment. The identification with the forms and shapes loosens a little bit for a short while, and in that instant, we may experience an entirely different state of Consciousness. You Live in a Separate World 
+How deep you sleep may depend on how realistic you find your dreams, how much you identify with your identity embedded in your personal history. The less alert you are, and the deeper you submerge into your dreams , the more isolated, solitary and individualistic you will become. 
+Every sleeper –including you– has a separate world, only those who exist in the state of Conscious Alertness (the true Lucid Dreaming) have a common, shared reality. All those different and separate worlds are created by the mind, which generates the state of separateness: the Ego, which appears as the focus of our identification with our thoughts and emotions. Thus everybody has a separate identity, personal history, individual world view and methods of action. 
+Sometimes suffering alarms you from your sleep, but then you hasten to return to it, and start a new dream, a new objective in life, new ideals, passion, ambition that confirms your connection with your identity, rooted in your personal history. The Reasons of Your Sleep 
+The reason of you sleeping is that you are not alert, only awake. Only one dimension of Alertness is present in you. Although you are able to focus your attention on your internal emotions and your environment, in your present state of Consciousness you are still powerfully identified with your mind and its functions. 
+You are therefore drifting on the stormy ocean of your thoughts and emotions day by day, and the space necessary for the emergence of a contemplating Witness is missing from you. You still identify with your thoughts and emotions. These generate the dreams of the Mind , in which you live as a separate self, and try to find the ways of safely navigating your life on the stormy sea. Longing for Freedom 
+In this separate state of Consciousness, the lack of Alertness may appear as a desire for freedom. This desire emerges from your real self, as your mind remembers its origins. This atavistic memory of the ancient past is the quiet attraction that will eventually take you back to Silence. 
+This deep desire will only cease if you become alert again, that is, you will not be awake but also alert. Then the Consciousness awakens to its own existence in the human form you at present call yourself. 
+Only giving up the struggle with the thoughts and emotions and the recognition of the futility of insisting on them will bring you the real freedom, The freedom of independence of the functions of the mind. 
+Alertness, the awakened Consciousness , the world of internal silence are all beyond the functions of the mind. If you wish to reach beyond the identification with your thoughts and emotions, if you recognize the functions of the mind and the intensity of your identification with them loosens, you may become alert again, in the quiet, pure space of Consciousness. 
+In this way, the third dimension of Alertness, that is, the contemplating Consciousness, appears in your life. This the original state of our existence, the pure Consciousness, the state of the witnessing Presence. SF Source Dreamcatcher Reality Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+5013,"Trump, in series of scathing personal attacks, questions Clinton’s mental health","Donald Trump unleashed a series of personal attacks Saturday against his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, mocking her appearance and questioning her mental health several times during a New Hampshire campaign rally and on social media.
+
+""She is a totally unhinged person. She's unbalanced. And all you have to do is watch her, see her, read about her,” Trump said during a campaign rally in Windham, N.H., Saturday evening. “She will cause — if she wins, which hopefully she won't — the destruction of our country from within.""
+
+The GOP presidential nominee called Clinton unstable and incompetent several times throughout the rally. At one point, he also called her “Hillary Rotten Clinton,” a play on her maiden name, Rodham.
+
+“I think the people of this country don’t want somebody that’s going to short-circuit up here,” Trump said, pointing to his head. “Not as your president, not as your president.""
+
+“Now you tell me she looks presidential, folks. I look presidential,” he said in another instance.
+
+Trump said Clinton is a ""dangerous liar"" and accused her of failing to achieve anything during her long career in public service — except, he said, avoiding criminal charges for using a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
+
+The FBI cleared her of criminal wrongdoing after a lengthy investigation but nonetheless sharply criticized her handling of classified information over email. Clinton was blasted by reporters for recently mischaracterizing FBI Director James B. Comey's comments about whether her public statements about the emails were truthful. She explained during a question-and-answer session in Washington that she had ""short-circuited"" when giving the initial response, a phrase which Trump repeatedly parodied Saturday.
+
+“Honestly, I don’t think she’s all there,” Trump told the crowd in Windham.
+
+Clinton was referring to the answer she gave when she said she might have ""short-circuited it""; she does not appear have said that she herself had short-circuited.
+
+Trump’s most forceful policy-oriented attack centered on Clinton’s support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, using her vote as a U.S. senator from New York to call her foreign-policy judgment into question. Trump wrongly claimed, as he often does on the campaign trail, that he did not support the Iraq War. That claim has been repeatedly proved false.
+
+The real estate mogul has regularly used Clinton's support for the war in Iraq and her support for intervening in Libya — both of which he supported — to question her qualifications for the presidency. Attempting to neutralize her attacks against his character and qualifications, Trump has sought to undermine her decision-making skills while painting her as an out-of-touch member of the Washington political establishment.
+
+“I’ve always had a great temperament. And you know, I win. I have a winning temperament. We’re going to win, we’re going to start winning again,” he said. “But I’ve won. My whole life has been about winning. I win. She can’t win. She’s not a winner. She can’t win.”
+
+His remarks onstage came after his campaign released a video on social media suggesting that Clinton is a malfunctioning robot.
+
+""Is Robot Hillary melting down?"" said the video’s opening caption.
+
+The short video features Clinton misspeaking and correcting herself on several occasions. The video eventually cuts to a clip of Clinton's ""I may have short-circuited” quote from Friday.
+
+At the end of the footage, video graphics render sparks spewing from Clinton's mouth.",REAL
+9837,‘Solar Winds’ Spur Geomagnetic Storm That May Affect Power,"‘Solar Winds’ Spur Geomagnetic Storm That May Affect Power
+25 October 2016 , by Brian K Sullivan (Bloomberg)
+http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/-solar-winds-spur-geomagnetic-storm-that-may-affect-power-lines
+- Geomagnetic storms can cause voltage corrections, false alarms
+- Space weather center lowered alert to “moderate” level storm
+Also see:
+Preparing for Power Grid Collapse, Obama Signs Executive Order On EMP, Space Weather Events
+https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/10/13/executive-order-coordinating-efforts-prepare-nation-space-weather-events",FAKE
+4063,"Yemen's president, cabinet resign amid rebel standoff","Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has resigned under pressure from Shiite rebels who seized the capital in September and have confined the embattled leader to his home for the past two days.
+
+Presidential officials said Hadi resigned after being pressured to make concessions to the rebels, known as Houthis. He had earlier pledged political concessions in return for the rebels withdrawing from his house and the nearby presidential palace, but Houthi fighters remained deployed around both buildings throughout the day.
+
+Military officials close to the president, who like the other officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters, said Hadi resigned after the Houthis pressured him to give a televised speech to calm the streets.
+
+State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Thursday that the U.S. is assessing and seeking confirmation of the report.
+
+""We are seeking a peaceful transition,"" she said.
+
+The Yemeni government also submitted its resignation Thursday.
+
+Prime Minister Khaled Bahah's resignation came as the U.N. envoy to the Arab world's poorest country met with representatives from the rebels, known as Houthis and other political factions to try to implement a deal reached Wednesday to end the crisis.
+
+Under the agreement, the group's militias were to withdraw from the presidential palace and key areas of the capital they have overrun in recent days in return for political concessions.
+
+It remains unclear who really controls the country.
+
+Twenty-four hours after signing the deal, heavily armed Shiite rebels remained stationed outside Hadi's house and the presidential palace.
+
+Bahah's technocratic government was formed in November as part of a United Nations-brokered peace deal after the Houthis overran the capital in September.
+
+Bahah, a political independent, posted his resignation on his official Facebook page, saying he had held office in ""very complicated circumstances."" He says he resigned in order to ""avoid being dragged into an abyss of unconstructive policies based on no law.""
+
+""We don't want to be a party to what is happening or will happen,"" he added.
+
+In an attempt to end the logjam, U.N. Envoy Jamal Benomar arrived to the country and held a meeting with Houthis and other political factions to push for implementation of the deal.
+
+In a brief press conference before the meeting, Benomar told reporters that the deal -- in essence an activation of the previous UN-brokered agreement struck in September when Houthis overran the capital -- is ""the only solution for Yemen.""
+
+Yemen's emerging power vacuum has raised fears that the country's dangerous Al Qaeda branch, which claimed the recent attack on a French satirical weekly, will only grow more powerful and popular as the nation slides toward fragmentation and the conflict takes on an increasingly sectarian tone. The Shiite Houthis and the Sunni terror group are sworn enemies.
+
+While the capital was free of violence, clashes did erupt southeast of Sanaa between Houthi gunmen and local tribesman. Tribal leaders said two tribesmen and four gunmen allied with Houthi rebels were killed in Khawlan-Watadah, 30 miles from Sanaa.
+
+The violence appeared to subside by midday, but a serious flare-up in the region lying along the road to Marib province, an oil-rich area in central Yemen and a haven for Al Qaeda fighters, could torpedo peace efforts. At the entrance of Marib itself, clashes also erupted between Houthis and local tribesmen over new checkpoints erected by tribal fighters.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+922,Hillary Torches the Bern in NY Blowout,"The Democratic frontrunner won decisively to take a stranglehold on the race despite all of Sanders’s rallies and celebrity endorsements.
+
+Sanders spent the week sowing the seeds of doubt within Clinton’s coalition—blistering her for her association with Wall Street, holding a series of mega-rallies, collecting a host of celebrity endorsements, and out-spending her by 2-1 on TV ads.
+
+
+
+He needed a win, or a very close finish, to maintain the momentum in his unlikely bid to upset Clinton, but the Brooklyn native was defeated by more than 15 points.
+
+“Victory is in sight!” declared Clinton at a New York rally. Staffers near the back of the room hugged each other—visibly relieved that this particularly ugly part of the primary campaign had concluded.
+
+The Democratic race had taken a turn for the combative in New York—a family feud that played out in prime time last week during the debate in Brooklyn.
+
+At about a quarter to 10, “Another One Bites the Dust” blasted through the Sheraton ballroom—at the same moment Clinton tweeted her thanks to New York for electing her statewide yet again. With 98 percent of the precincts declared, she was leading 57.9 percent to 42.1 percent.
+
+
+
+Clinton even tried to knock the assumption that the Sanders campaign had a monopoly on excitement. “Tonight I want to say to all of my supporters and all of the voters: You have carried us every step of the way with passion and conviction that some critics have tried to dismiss,” she said, a campaign version of a “We’ve Got Spirit” taunt.
+
+After days of massive, confidence-boosting rallies, most Sanders supporters were were likely in no mood to listen, but Clinton also tried to reach out. “I believe there is much more that unites us than divides us,” she said.
+
+
+
+Judging by Sanders’s fundraising email blast as the results came in, the Vermont senator is not about to give up and unite behind the frontrunner.
+
+
+
+“Sisters and Brothers,” it began. “We didn’t get the victory we had hoped for this evening, but what’s important is that it looks like we’re going to win a lot more delegates in New York than any state that voted or caucused before tonight.”
+
+He entered to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” bathed in the red and blue lights that have decorated each of his victory speeches to date. He shook hands and hugged bystanders before taking to the lectern, surrounded by his family and friends like Carl Paladino, the failed gubernatorial candidate.
+
+Ten months ago, on June 16, Trump was in this very room. In what he now believes to be an iconic scene, he came down the escalator with his wife, Melania, and into a sea of reporters and paid extras pretending to be fervent fans. Back then he seemed like a sideshow, and Beltway analysts and pundits predicted he would fizzle out quickly.
+
+This time the escalator was frozen. His fans stood on it and peered down at him as he spoke. He had just won his 20th contest—with more than 60 percent of the vote—and added to his substantial delegate lead, on his way to the 1,237 needed to secure the Republican nomination.
+
+The event was billed as a “press conference” by Trump’s campaign, but he didn’t take any questions, instead giving a condensed version of his stump speech that focused primarily on jobs. He promised not just to Make America Great Again, but to make it “really, legitimately, so great.”
+
+“We’re going to go into the convention, I think, as a winner—and nobody can take an election away the way they’re doing it in the Republican Party,” he said.",REAL
+5255,Trump’s unraveling Republican Party: How we reached this point,"Leading Republicans say the party of Abraham Lincoln is facing disruption because in the past few decades it has lost its commitment to 'unifying ideals,' such as freedom and human dignity.
+
+Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump holds a Purple Heart given to him by a veteran during a campaign event at Briar Woods High School in Ashburn, Va., on Aug. 2, 2016. Mr. Trump's denigration of a Muslim immigrant couple's loss of their son, Humayun Khan – who died fighting for the American military in Iraq – has triggered a backlash from some prominent Republicans.
+
+A report that the Republican National Committee is preparing for the possibility that Donald Trump might drop out of the presidential race has set the political world alight.
+
+There’s no evidence that Mr. Trump, in fact, is on the verge of dropping out. But there are reports of deep discord within his campaign, and signs of an unraveling of the party’s fragile unity that had lasted through the GOP convention in Cleveland until now. The moment is so fraught with discord that major Republicans increasingly are giving up on the party altogether.
+
+Trump's most controversial move was his repeated denigration of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the immigrant parents of a fallen Muslim-American soldier, after Mr. Khan spoke out against Trump at the Democratic National Convention last week. But it's also an accumulation of brash moves – a daily unwillingness both to show the kind of restraint expected of a presidential candidate and to behave as a loyal Republican.
+
+How has the Grand Old Party, founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists, come to this point? It may not be all Trump's fault, though he personifies the problem. Leading Republicans say the party of Abraham Lincoln is facing disruption because in the past few decades it has lost its commitment to ""unifying ideals,"" such as freedom and human dignity.
+
+In recent days, a Republican member of Congress, Richard Hanna of New York, and a well-known business executive and Republican fundraiser, Meg Whitman, announced their support for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Congressman Hanna is the first sitting member to endorse Mrs. Clinton.
+
+Other stalwarts of the Republican establishment are beginning to write off their beloved party.
+
+“I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way,” Republican intellectual Avik Roy told Vox last week. “There’s going to be a disruption.”
+
+Mr. Roy, a health-care expert and past presidential campaign adviser, said he believed the GOP had lost its moral authority to govern, because it was no longer committed to equality for all Americans.
+
+And that was before Trump’s latest uproar.
+
+Trump’s decision to spend days verbally attacking the Khans may wind up being the biggest blow of all to his tenuous relationship with the GOP.
+
+Trump exacerbated his schism with the party Tuesday when he refused to endorse Ryan and another senior Republican running for reelection, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. In another unusual move, Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, announced Wednesday that he is endorsing Speaker Ryan.
+
+""I strongly support Paul Ryan, strongly endorse his reelection,"" Governor Pence said emphatically Wednesday on Fox News.
+
+Both Ryan and McCain had endorsed Trump, despite their clear discomfort with his candidacy over both his bombastic style and positions that don’t square with party orthodoxy.
+
+But the Republican Party is a club, and the rules are the rules, unwritten though they are. When the party appears headed toward selecting a nominee, the party closes ranks around that person, for better or worse.
+
+With Trump, there’s been a whole lot more “worse” than “better” lately.
+
+It has reached the point where allies of Trump – RNC chairman Reince Priebus, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani – are reportedly plotting an intervention with the candidate to get him to “reset” his campaign.
+
+But few have serious hope that Trump is really willing to change his ways. Trump has said that he knows how to be “presidential” – but chooses not to. His current shtick has taken him far, he says, so why change? He’ll be presidential after he defeats Clinton, he adds.
+
+In other words, this Trump – the unpredictable, populist, mesmerizing, profane Trump – is the nominee, and the one the party will ride all the way to November. Or maybe not.
+
+Word on Wednesday morning that RNC officials were contemplating the possibility that Trump might quit – leaving it up to the 168-member RNC to find a replacement – seemed to send public discourse into the realm of political science fiction.
+
+But really, the idea that Trump may not last three more months as the GOP nominee seemed to reflect more the confusion and frustration of party leaders over Trump’s behavior than any real prospect that the hyper-competitive Trump might actually drop out.
+
+The GOP arrived at this point, in part, by happenstance.
+
+When 17 candidates ran for the Republican nomination, there was nothing the party leadership could do to winnow the field, and anoint an “establishment” favorite who could take on the outsiders – not only Trump but also Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. The “invisible primary” – in which fundraising, debates, endorsements, and poll numbers present an early picture of candidate strength – left the field large right up until the first caucus.
+
+Trump’s distinct style and populist message broke through the clutter of the large field, and sent him to the top of the heap.
+
+But a large field in and of itself wouldn’t necessarily lead to the potential demise of the Republican Party. It is Trump himself who is taking the GOP to the point of no return, some say. In the view of Avik Roy, it is the party’s dark racial past that has been its own undoing – a past that Trump has played to in courting white working-class voters.
+
+Roy traces the problem back to 1964, when the party nominated Barry Goldwater for president – the original “movement” conservative. He calls Senator Goldwater’s nomination a “historical disaster,” because “for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.”
+
+Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, tells the same story in a different way. He writes of visiting the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis on the same day that Trump was attacking the Khans. Mr. Gerson sees in that attack a repudiation of what Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, and the Rev. Martin Luther King stood for.
+
+“Those who support Trump are setting the Republican Party at odds with the American story told by Lincoln and King: a nationalism defined by striving toward unifying ideals of freedom and human dignity,” Mr. Gerson writes.
+
+At this point, that’s unlikely to happen. Most Republicans say they’d rather stick with the nominee they have, no matter how flawed, than blow up the party before Election Day by abandoning him. But if Trump loses, a period of time in the wilderness may be beneficial to the party, they add.",REAL
+2476,ObamaCare's future: 11 ways the health care law could be dismantled in 2015,"“Everything you have seen here has been an illusion.” Those are not the words of President Obama. But given what we now know about ObamaCare, they well could have been.
+
+Instead, they are the words of Eisenheim, a 19th century master magician in the fictional film, “The Illusionist.” And, just like Obama, he uses his abilities to fool the masses into believing that his artifices are quite real.
+
+The president sold his health care plan on the promise that it would help Americans who had no insurance, but all others would remain unaffected. It proved to be an illusion.
+
+Millions of Americans lost their insurance, their doctors, and their hospitals. Average premiums did not go down by $2,500, as promised. They went up appreciably, rendering the term, “ Care Act,” an oxymoron.
+
+The tax was cleverly disguised as a penalty because, as Jonathan Gruber the so-called architect of the ACA confessed recently, Americans are stupid. And the quintessential cover-up obscured the identity of those who would pay for it:young, healthy individuals subsidizing older, sick people. It was a scheme of deception designed to fool Americans. An artifice. In a court of law, it would be called fraud.
+
+Either the president knew his promises were untrue and deliberately set out to deceive Americans or he inexplicably believed it was true but did not bother to read or understand the bill he signed into law. Which means he was both naïve and incompetent, but slightly better than malicious. No mea culpa will ever undo the damage.
+
+What can be undone are key parts of ObamaCare. Republicans are vowing to try. Some Democrats, fraught with buyer’s remorse, may join them.
+
+All the impassioned rhetoric about repealing ObamaCare in its entirety is nothing more than political phantasm.The new Senate does not have a veto-proof majority of 67 votes. It's simple math.
+
+Republicans will, of course, pursue the charade because that is one of Washington’s quaint traditions. But once the symbolic pretense is over, the new Congress may go about disassembling ObamaCare, piecemeal. How exactly? Here are some of the ways:
+
+1. Revisit the employer mandate. Under ObamaCare, companies with at least 50 full-time employees are required to provide insurance. Under pressure from businesses and even members of his own party, Obama delayed implementation. Republicans would like to kill it completely, but this is a long shot.
+
+2. Revisit the individual mandate.All Americans are forced to buy health insurance or face a tax penalty. Although it remains the most unpopular part of ObamaCare, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld this provision. Removing it from the health care law would undermine the premise and financial stability of ACA which means the president would surely put ink on a veto. So this is the longest of long shots.
+
+3. Repeal the medical device tax. The tax on medical devices helps generate revenue to pay for low-income subsidies. But the 2.3 % tax also hurts manufacturers and has a negative impact on the economy. There is bipartisan support for repealing the tax and it probably has the best prospect of passage.
+
+4. Revisit what constitutes ""full time"" employment. Changing the definition of “full time” employee from 30 hours to 40 hours per week would allow many businesses to hire more people without being forced to provide employer coverage. It would help stem job losses caused by the law. This idea is gaining traction.
+
+5. Federal reimbursements. The federal government is required to reimburse insurance companies when their costs end up higher than anticipated. Derided as a blatant “bail-out,” it could be on the chopping block.
+
+6. Medical board. Written into the ACA law is an Independent Payment Advisory Board which oversees health care pricing.The much maligned board has yet to be activated, so repeal stands a decent chance of happening.
+
+7. Lowering subsidies. ObamaCare could be made more affordable to the government if subsidies given to low-income enrollees were reduced. Obviously, this would increase the cost to participants, but modifying the subsidies has some support.
+
+8. New “copper” plan. Creating a new, lower cost category of ObamaCare coverage would reduce the high price of premiums, but increase out-of-pocket expenses born by participants.This would attract those who must comply with the law but desire the lowest cost available. It might also spawn creation of additional low cost plans which consumers crave. It is doable.
+
+9. Withhold funding.Not all ObamaCare funding is mandatory.Some administrative costs, for example, are funded through discretionary appropriations. Congress could vote to stop funding for certain provisions, making full implementation difficult. However, the president could veto such a spending bill even in the face of another government shutdown.
+
+10. Republican alternatives.With both houses of Congress now in its control, the GOP will likely intensify the push for its own alternative ideas: bills that would allow people to purchase insurance across state lines to increase competition and lower premium prices, promote health savings accounts, permit small businesses to “pool” their employees together to gain better insurance rates and coverage, tax credits for those individuals without employer provided insurance, limiting medical malpractice awards which are a driver of overall health costs, and Medicaid reform.
+
+11. Supreme Court decision. Beyond congressional action, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to hear a formidable challenge to ObamaCare which could seriously destabilize the law. A key provision requires that subsidies be given to eligible individuals enrolled through an “exchange established by the state.” It was purportedly designed as an incentive for states to set-up their own exchanges. However, 37 states chose not to do so, relying, instead, on federal exchanges. Supporters of ObamaCare claim it was merely a hasty mistake -- some have called it a ""typo.""
+
+If the high court disagrees by ruling that some 5 million people on federal exchanges are not eligible for financial assistance under the plain meaning of the statute, this could shatter the financial underpinnings of ObamaCare.
+
+Of course, predicting how the Supremes will rule is a fool’s errand. But one thing is certain, the president cannot now go back to Congress to try to fix the textual language of his signature achievement. Republicans will control both houses in 2015.
+
+There have been 42 significant changes to ObamaCare so far, 24 of them ordered unilaterally by the president. Setting aside the question of his legal authority to do, all these revisions underscore what an ill-conceived and poorly crafted law this was from the outset. But it also belies another promise averred by Obama that his new law would be fair.
+
+It is hardly fair to enforce the mandate on individual Americans, while granting a myriad of waivers, exemptions, exceptions and delays for select businesses and unions who supported the president.
+
+Polls show that Americans were overwhelmingly against ObamaCare before it ever passed.Their antipathy has remained constant, as people continue to recoil from an unpopular law that deprives them of their freedom of choice in matters which are inherently personal -- their health. They resent such decisions being made for them by their government. A new Gallup poll finds a majority of Americans (56 %) disapprove of ObamaCare, while 37 % approve.
+
+Obama has only himself to blame for the manifest flaws in his grand illusion. Driven by an authoritarian impulse, he forced ObamaCare through a compliant Democratically controlled Congress, never giving anyone a chance to digest the 2,700 page bill and what it might portend for America.
+
+Obama’s promised transparency was a concomitant fraud epitomized by then-House leader Nancy Pelosi when she sputtered one of the most baffling and incomprehensible lines in American politics, “we have to pass the bill, so that you can find out what’s in it.”
+
+Well, now we know.
+
+The wreckage wrought by ObamaCare is strewn across the landscape of American lives. People have seen their premiums rise, deductibles escalate, benefits decline, quality of care diminish, plans cancelled and doctors vanish.
+
+For what? When he began his first term, President Obama vowed his health care law “will cover every American.” Yet, 41 million Americans are still uninsured.Is the law worth the $2 trillion dollars in taxpayer expense and the loss of 2.5 million jobs, as estimated by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office?
+
+Our president thinks so. He insists he is proud of the pejorative, “ObamaCare.” If so, he is a modern-day Eisenheim, America’s “illusionist,” fooling no one but himself.
+
+Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News Anchor and former defense attorney.",REAL
+8602,CBD-Infused Cannabis Milk Soothes Anxiety And Is Hitting Stores Soon,"By Amanda Froelich For a long time, green juice and green smoothies were considered to be the ‘peak’ of what one seeking to nourish their body could consume. While both offer numerous benefits,... ",FAKE
+3672,Motive elusive in deadly San Bernardino rampage as FBI takes over probe,"SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Authorities were still trying Thursday to establish a motive for the deadliest U.S. mass shooting in nearly three years, even as they revealed that the two attackers had amassed a large stockpile of explosives and ammunition.
+
+The rampage killed 14 people, wounded 21 and locked down a swath of Southern California for much of the day Wednesday as investigators scrambled to determine whether they were looking at a terrorist attack or an extremely unusual and lethal case of workplace violence.
+
+The killers were a young husband and wife who welcomed the birth of a daughter just six months ago and showed no outward sign of Islamist radicalization, psychological distress or a desire for mayhem. The couple were slain in a wild police shootout on a residential street four hours after the massacre.
+
+The FBI, which has authority to investigate potential terrorism, announced Thursday that it had taken over the investigation. Authorities were carefully picking through three crime scenes: the Inland Regional Center, where the mass shooting occurred; the San Bernardino street where the couple died in the gun battle with police; and the couple’s rented home in Redlands, Calif., where robots helped investigators root out an arsenal of pipe bombs and thousands of bullets.
+
+Police identified the shooters as Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, a county health worker born in Chicago, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, his Pakistani wife, who was in the United States on a visa.
+
+[‘I’ll take a bullet before you do': Scenes from the San Bernardino shooting]
+
+Farook, who had a college degree in environmental health and a steady job as a health inspector, traveled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan last year and returned with Malik, whom he had met online. They were married in the United States, police said.
+
+Authorities have said the two were not on any watch lists. A senior U.S. law enforcement official said that Farook was in contact with persons of interest with possible ties to terrorism but that these were not “substantial” contacts.
+
+Farook’s supervisor, Amanda Adair, who also went to college with him at California State University at San Bernardino, said he “got along with everybody, but he kept his distance.” She said that she “can’t imagine [the shooting] was about work” and that she had no inkling that Farook had the capacity for such violence.
+
+Without a firmly established motive, authorities said Thursday that they could not determine whether they were dealing with terrorists, a disgruntled worker who had enlisted his wife in his cause, or some kind of hybrid of those two scenarios.
+
+“We do not yet know the motive,” David Bow­dich, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said at a news conference. “It would be irresponsible and premature for me to call this terrorism.”
+
+The case doesn’t fit any familiar template. If it was terrorism, why would the shooters target co-workers in a small city that many Americans couldn’t find on a map, rather than some more spectacular target? If it was workplace violence, why build up an arsenal of bullets and pipe bombs?
+
+[“I’ve never witnessed something so sad in my life': Stories of the San Bernardino victims]
+
+“It is possible this was terrorist-related, but we don’t know,” President Obama said Thursday in somber remarks in the Oval Office. “It is also possible this was workplace-related.”
+
+Mark Pitcavage, director of the Center on Extremism for the Anti-Defamation League, said that “based on what is known now about the case, it certainly is unusual and does not fit neatly into any of the traditional models of violence that we’re familiar with.”
+
+Police said Farook and Malik were dressed in tactical gear and armed with rifles, handguns and multiple ammunition magazines when, at about 11 a.m., they strode into a conference room where about 80 people were gathered for a staff training session that was transitioning into a holiday party.
+
+They opened fire, spraying 65 to 75 rounds and hitting more than a third of the people. A bullet struck a sprinkler head, and the sprinklers began soaking the room as the fire alarms went off. The shooters fled in a rented black Ford Expedition, leaving behind a bag with three pipe bombs designed to be triggered with a remote-control device from the SUV. The device malfunctioned.
+
+San Bernardino police Lt. Mike Madden, the first law enforcement officer to arrive at the center, described the fresh scent of gunpowder and a horrifying scene for which years of training had not fully prepared him.
+
+“The situation was surreal,” Madden said Thursday. “It was unspeakable, the carnage we were seeing.”
+
+Farook had been with his colleagues at the party earlier in the morning, police said. Authorities could not say conclusively whether there had been a dispute that led Farook to leave the party. But police said a survivor of the shooting told them that Farook slipped away before the massacre.
+
+That tip led police to check Farook’s name, which led to the discovery that he had rented an SUV that matched the description of the getaway car.
+
+Soon, authorities were staking out the couple’s home in Redlands, a suburb 15 minutes to the east. Several hours after the shooting, the SUV rolled by and then sped away, and police gave chase.
+
+The SUV stopped on San Bernardino Avenue, a few miles from the massacre. Cellphone videos captured the furious gun battle that followed. Police said the couple fired 76 rifle rounds; police fired 380.
+
+Farook and Malik died at the scene. Two officers were injured, but the wounds were not life-threatening. The SUV, so riddled with bullets that it looked as if it had been hit with a bomb, was due back at the rental agency that day, police said.
+
+Police found more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition on or near the couple, suggesting that they were prepared for a long siege. Police recovered two assault rifles and two 9mm pistols, all legally purchased, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Two of the weapons were traced to one of the assailants, said Dannette Seward, an ATF spokeswoman, while the other two were traced to another person who has not been publicly identified.
+
+[The striking difference between the San Bernardino suspects and other mass shooters]
+
+“The FBI is chasing down any contacts these two may have had and whether those contacts are indicative of radicalization or external plotting or are purely incidental,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
+
+Schiff, who was briefed Thursday on the attack, said that “on the basis of what I heard and where the [FBI] was, I wouldn’t conclude that there was radicalization here.”
+
+The congressman said the shooting also did not appear to be “an act of spontaneous workplace violence.” But, he said, it could have been the culmination of a longer-term grievance.
+
+“There appears to be a degree of planning that went into this,” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said. “Nobody just gets upset at a party, goes home and puts together that kind of elaborate scheme or plan.”
+
+[Hours before San Bernardino shooting, doctors urged Congress to lift funding ban on gun violence research]
+
+At a morning news conference, authorities said they had gathered a number of items that were being analyzed to investigate the couple’s digital trail, including thumb drives, computers and cellphones. But the two had left behind remarkably little in the way of a digital record — no apparent criminal record, no Facebook page, no Twitter account.
+
+Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, co-workers who knew Farook described him as a quiet, polite man who held no obvious grudges­ against people in the office. The office had recently held a shower for the couple’s baby, and the two seemed to be “living the American Dream,” Patrick Baccari, a fellow inspector who shared a cubicle with Farook, told the Times.
+
+[It is incredibly rare for there to be multiple mass shooters — or for them to be women]
+
+A number of families in this city were shattered by Wednesday’s violence. On Thursday, officials released the names of the 14 people slain at the holiday party. The eight men and six women ranged in age from 26 to 60. One ran the coffee shop in the building. Twelve of the 14 were county employees.
+
+Shaken, too, were Muslims in Southern California. At the Islamic Society of Corona-Norco, Ray Abboud said Muslims were horrified by the shooting. He said he fears people will paint Muslims with one brush.
+
+“It breaks our hearts to see 14 people die,” Abboud said. “We feel sorry for everything that happened, but we can’t blame ourselves for being Muslim.”
+
+He said people in the community were keeping a close watch on their children “to make sure they don’t fall into any crazy stuff.”
+
+Before the attack, Farook and Malik dropped off their 6-month-old daughter with Farook’s mother, saying they had a doctor’s appointment, according to Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles. The council organized a news conference late Wednesday featuring Farhan Khan, who is married to Farook’s sister.
+
+“I have no idea why he would do something like this,” Khan said of his brother-in-law. “I cannot express how sad I am today.”
+
+[The inspiring work done at the disability center]
+
+Berman and Achenbach reported from Washington. Freelance writers Martha Groves and William Dauber in San Bernardino and staff writers Greg Miller, Brian Murphy, Adam Goldman, Lindsey Bever, Niraj Chokshi, Ann Gerhart, Sari Horwitz, Elahe Izadi, Wesley Lowery, Eli Saslow, Kevin Sullivan, Julie Tate, Justin Wm. Moyer, Yanan Wang, Sarah Kaplan and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.
+
+[This story has been updated. First published: 11:30 a.m.]",REAL
+3011,Orrin Hatch explains friendship with Muhammad Ali,"Muhammad Ali was beloved around the world, but perhaps one of his unlikeliest friends was Sen. Orrin Hatch, who remembered the three-time heavyweight champion at his funeral on Friday.
+
+The Utah Republican said Ali's commitment to finding common ground with people different from himself was one of his greatest gifts.
+
+Speaking at Ali's funeral in Louisville, Kentucky, Hatch said the two met 28 years ago when an assistant told him he had a visitor in his Senate office. The two bonded over their love of boxing, as Hatch was once an amateur boxer.
+
+""I was very surprised that it was none other than the champion,"" Hatch said. ""The friendship we developed, I think it was puzzling to many people -- especially those who saw only our differences.""
+
+""But where others saw difference, Ali and I saw kinship,"" he added. The two men shared humble childhoods in working-class cities, a high value of family and deep devotions to their faiths. Hatch said these things were the foundation of ""a rich and meaningful relationship."" ""True, we were different in some ways, but our differences fortified our friendships, they did not define it,"" Hatch said. ""I saw greatness in Ali's ability to look beyond the horizon and our differences to find common ground.""",REAL
+5996,What Is Operation Bluebeam? Will It Derail the Election?,"
+ 
+
+More rumors are surfacing on Operation Bluebeam. Are the globalists desperate enough to unleash a fake alien invasion. Operation Bluebeam is real and it has been around since the 1970’s in operation form. However, I first giggled when I heard this rumor. I tracked down some of the rumor. This is a real possibility if the globalists think that Clinton will not win the election.
+Here is what we know.
+
+P lease Donate to The Common Sense Show 
+ 
+PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US 
+
+ 
+
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.
+
+ 
+",FAKE
+8750,MSNBC Makes Huge Mistake After Trying To Catch Black Family Calling Trump Racist,"[LISTEN] Clinton’s Shocking Response To Claim He Slept With Black Beauty Queen 
+Rascon spoke with Gloria and her daughter, Trina, who were apparently waiting in line to vote early, about what they thought of Trump. Neither of the women had anything negative to say. 
+“Well, I think Trump is reaching out all citizens, including African-Americans,” Trina said. “He’s trying to address a problem… That’s what a president should do for us. He should reach out and try to help people and address problems that’s going on in our country.” 
+When asked about how Trump has appealed to blacks by telling them they had nothing to lose by voting for him, Gloria agreed, and said that African-American should not be deceived. Advertisement - story continues below 
+“Look at the record, look at the promises that have been made over the past from the Democratic Party. We are not voting for a party. We are voting for a man who’s been standing by all citizens ,” she told Soboroff. 
+“He loves America. That’s what I love about him. We need somebody that loves America. And he also loves all people. All people,” she added. 
+She also added the there is a deception out there that Trump has no black supporters. 
+“Wrong! He does,” she concluded. Advertisement - story continues below ",FAKE
+7476,Freedom Center Urges College Presidents to End Aid to Campus Supporters of Terror,"Freedom Center Urges College Presidents to End Aid to Campus Supporters of Terror “We ask that you withdraw all university privileges granted to SJP.” October 31, 2016 Frontpagemag.com 
+Editor’s Note: The following letter was sent to the presidents of the ten campuses named in the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists.” In alphabetical order, the ten campuses are: Brooklyn College (CUNY), San Diego State University, San Francisco State University, Tufts University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Irvine, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Chicago, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Vassar College. 
+October 27, 2016 
+University of California 
+Dear Dr. Napolitano, 
+Your school purports to promote the values of diversity, inclusiveness and tolerance yet provides resources, funding and legitimacy to Students for Justice in Palestine. Students for Justice in Palestine is a campus organization whose sole purpose is to conduct hateful propaganda against Jews and the Jewish state for the terrorist organization Hamas. The explicit goals of Hamas are the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state and genocide against its Jewish population. For these reasons, among others, three campuses of the University of California—Irvine, Los Angeles, and Berkeley—have been named among the “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists” by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. You may read the full report here: http://www.stopthejewhatredoncampus.org/news/top-ten-schools-supporting-terrorists-fall-2016-report 
+While it masquerades as a typical campus cultural group, SJP is an integral part of Hamas’s efforts to annihilate Israel through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. This is an insidious effort that attempts to delegitimize Israel, and smear it as a rogue “apartheid” nation. These claims are ludicrous. More than a million Palestinians enjoy Israeli citizenship including the rights to vote and to sit on the Israeli courts and parliament. Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz has said of the BDS movement, “It is anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, anti-human rights, anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-negotiation, anti-peace, anti-compromise, and anti-Palestinian workers when they are denied opportunities to work.” Both Larry Summers and Hillary Clinton have denounced BDS as anti-Semitic Jew hatred. Yet your school provides a platform and funding for its sponsors. 
+With university support, SJP also conducts “Israeli apartheid” hate weeks on campus quads. These events feature pro-Hamas advocates, the construction of “apartheid walls” featuring pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic propaganda, and the creation of mock checkpoints and die-ins that disrupt student movements on campus. SJP actively disrupts pro-Israel campus events—a threat to free speech and a violation of your university’s stated values and rules of conduct. 
+In addition to being scripted by Hamas terrorists, SJPs pro-terror campaign is funded and guided through a Hamas front called American Muslims for Palestine. In recent testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jonathan Schanzer, who worked as a terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury from 2004-2007, described how Hamas funnels large sums of money and provides material assistance to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) through the Hamas front group American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) for the purpose of promoting BDS campaigns on American campuses. AMP was created by SJP co-founder Hatem Bazian, a pro-terrorist lecturer at UC Berkeley who called for a suicide bombing “Intifada” inside the United States. It employs high-ranking officials from other Muslim “charities” that were previously shut down for providing material assistance to terrorists. 
+Schanzer described AMP as “arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is the most visible arm of the BDS campaign on campuses in the United States.” He detailed how AMP “provides speakers, training, printed materials, a so-called ‘Apartheid Wall,’ and grants to SJP activists” and “even has a campus coordinator on staff whose job is to work directly with SJP and other pro-BDS campus groups across the country.” Furthermore, “according to an email it sent to subscribers, AMP spent $100,000 on campus activities in 2014 alone.” 
+Students for Justice in Palestine continues to accept funding and aid through the Hamas front group American Muslims for Palestine. Despite its links to terrorist organizations and agendas, Students for Justice in Palestine continues to receive campus funds and campus privileges, including university offices, and the right to hold events preaching the genocidal values of Hamas on university property. These privileges would normally be denied to groups that preach hatred of any other ethnic group, let alone one that supports barbaric terrorists who slaughter men, women and children with the goal of cleansing the earth of people who disagree with them. 
+In light of these facts, we ask that you withdraw all university privileges granted to SJP and other campus groups who promote the genocidal Hamas agenda, and that you put an end to the terrorist influences which have infiltrated your campus and which threaten the security not only of Jewish students on your campus, but of all Americans. 
+David Horowitz ceo The David Horowitz Freedom Center Sherman Oaks, California",FAKE
+5276,Could Trump switch gears? The line of attack against Hillary that could hurt her path to the White House,"On Wednesday, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump delivered a planned speech on his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, and according to Slate columnist and Clinton supporter Michelle Goldberg, it was “probably the most unnervingly effective one he has ever given,” in which he skillfully combined “truth and falsehood into a plausible-seeming picture meant to reinforce listeners’ underlying beliefs.”
+
+Though packed with fabrications as usual, the Republican presidential nominee avoided blatant and obvious lies, bizarre conspiracy theories (although he did claim that foreign governments may have a “blackmail file” on Clinton while discussing the email scandal, which is entering Alex Jones territory), and personal insults — all of which he had previously employed in his attacks on Clinton. Again, the speech was extremely dishonest in many parts, but the falsehoods were more subtle and less downright loony, and thus much more effective.
+
+Over the past couple of weeks, Trump has done a lot to sabotage his own campaign — from his racist attacks on the Hispanic judge overseeing the class-action lawsuit against Trump University to his shameless Tweet congratulating himself after the Orlando mass shooting. This has led some to conclude that the billionaire doesn’t really want to be president (and really, who can blame him?) and is deliberately running his campaign into a wall. Since becoming the nominee almost two months ago, his already atrocious favorability ratings have continued to drop, and according to a Bloomberg survey from last week, 66 percent of Americans now view him unfavorably.
+
+There is no doubt that the election is Clinton’s to lose. The former Secretary of State’s campaign is a well-oiled machine that currently has about forty times as much cash on hand as the Trump campaign. And while Clinton is overwhelmingly distrusted (and disliked) by the public, the idea of a Donald Trump presidency tends to scare more than half of Americans, and he has done a great job at repelling women and people of color over the past year.
+
+However, if Trump can refrain from attacking Bill Clinton’s infidelities and accusing the couple of plotting the murder of a friend and colleague (Vince Foster), and instead make substantive criticisms (and there are plenty of substantive criticisms to be made), he could potentially make Clinton’s life much more difficult in the months ahead.
+
+Of course, it is unlikely that Trump will actually do this — he has proven time and again that he has a natural aversion towards substantive debate, and prefers touting conspiracy theories and making personal attacks. He is an impulsive bully whose propensity for pettiness knows no bounds. But the sheer political baggage of Clinton does make her very vulnerable indeed.
+
+From her ties to big Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs (whether in campaign contributions or paid speeches) to the Clinton Foundation’s financial connections to foreign governments like Saudi Arabia, along with ugly and inconvenient truths — like the fact that Clinton’s state department approved massive arms deals with the aforementioned country after it had donated millions to her and Bill’s non-profit, or the fact that Bill earned the highest paid speeches of his post-presidency career while his wife was Secretary of State, most of which were sponsored by foreign governments and foreign organizations.
+
+If Trump sticks to these kinds of facts in his criticisms of Clinton — without straying into Alex Jones (or Donald Trump the mindless bully) territory — Hillary’s path to the White House could become increasingly complicated. It does make you wonder: after being dogged by scandals and conspiracy theories ever since they entered the national spotlight, did Hillary and Bill think that giving high-priced speeches for publicly despised  companies like Goldman Sachs and General Electric, accepting millions of dollars from foreign governments and organizations for their foundation, or cozying up with shady donors like Sant Chatwal and Frank Giustra (all of these companies, individuals, and governments are interested in buying influence, and to say otherwise is delusional) would be ignored by their opponents? As I have previously noted, it takes a special kind of arrogance to think this way, although it’s possible that Hillary expected her Republican opponent to be even more tainted by big donors (being a Republican and all).
+
+Of course, Donald Trump is an entirely different kind of corrupt. He hasn’t been in politics his entire life and doesn’t have a history of accepting big donations from Wall Street and corporate America. Instead, the billionaire is simply a charlatan and a fraud — whether it’s swindling vulnerable working people into buying sham Trump University degrees or fear-mongering, bullying and flagrantly lying his way to the nomination. Trump is the lovechild of P.T. Barnum and George Wallace; a shameless self-promoter with an ego that makes Kanye West look humble and a temperament that makes Joe McCarthy seem refined.
+
+And these qualities will probably get the better of him in the months ahead. The buffoonish billionaire will most likely continue rambling incoherently about conspiracy theories that he’s read on Infowars.com and mocking Bubba’s infidelities, and for this, Clinton should be grateful.",REAL
+4313,How Republicans saved Hillary Clinton. Again.,"For months, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign labored listlessly under a cloud of doubt after revelations that she had a private e-mail server during her time as secretary of state.
+
+Then, Republicans, as they so often do, overreached on their Clinton attacks and handed the Democratic front-runner a message and momentum that she had struggled mightily to build on her own.
+
+First, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) went on Fox News and, floundering to prove his conservative bona fides to be speaker of the House, said this to Fox News host Sean Hannity: “Everybody thought that Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
+
+Then there was the hearing last week — more than two years in the making (Clinton last testified before Congress on Benghazi in January 2013) — that flopped mightily for Republicans. Eleven hours worth of questions left the GOP looking small and Clinton looking calm, cool and collected. Even Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, admitted in the hearing’s wake, “I don’t know that [Clinton] testified that much differently today than she has the previous time she testified.”
+
+For longtime Clinton watchers — and I count myself in that category — the pattern was remarkably familiar. Republicans, handed a potent issue (and the controversy over Clinton’s private e-mail server is one), try to knock the Clintons out and instead swing, miss and fall on their collective face.
+
+Think back to the late 1990s, when, after admitting to an extramarital affair with a White House intern, Bill Clinton found himself more popular than ever — particularly among Democrats — after congressional Republicans tried to impeach him despite the public’s skepticism about whether such a punishment was warranted.
+
+Eerie similarities echo between that moment and this one for Republicans in Congress. Unquestionably, the revelation that Clinton exclusively used a private e-mail address and server while she was the nation’s top diplomat had damaged her front-running campaign for the Democratic nomination. Her lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had shrunk, and large majorities of the public said she was neither honest nor trustworthy.
+
+Most important for Clinton was that establishment Democrats began to openly fret that perhaps she simply wasn’t up to the race and that someone else — such as Vice President Biden — needed to step into the breach.
+
+McCarthy’s comments provided Clinton with overwhelming proof (at least to Democrats) that the Benghazi committee was effectively political theater designed to damage her chances of winning in 2016.
+
+The hearing itself allowed Clinton a platform that was perfectly suited to her strengths — preparation and a remarkable tirelessness — and on which she, unsurprisingly, shined. Clinton looked in control, poised and smart. The majority of her Republican interrogators looked outmatched.
+
+Democrats noticed. The hour after the end of the committee hearing — 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time Thursday — was the most lucrative 60 minutes of fundraising in Clinton’s campaign.
+
+And suddenly Clinton wasn’t the boring candidate of the status quo anymore. She was the target of — wait for it — a vast right-wing conspiracy aimed at, yet again, playing politics in hopes of hurting her chances of being elected to office.
+
+The campaign is — and this is so obvious that it is probably not worth saying — far from over. The Iowa caucuses aren’t for about 100 more days, and the general election is a year away. Lots can, and will, change.
+
+It is also obvious that the past two weeks have been the best two weeks of Clinton’s campaign. She has gone from flagging front-runner to rejuvenated fighter — a much better look if you want to, you know, win.
+
+Not all of the Clinton renaissance can be credited to or blamed on Republicans. Her strong performance in the first Democratic presidential debate was all her doing, and Biden’s decision not to run seems only tangentially tied to her strengthening of late.
+
+But the Clintons have always been at their best when under fire from the other side; Hillary Clinton, in particular, is a better counter-puncher than a first-strike player.
+
+For some reason, Republicans have never learned that lesson. Over the past month, they have pulled off a trick that Clinton never could seem to do herself: They have turned her into a sympathetic and more appealing figure for Democrats and lots of independents — whom she will need in a general election.
+
+If she wins the White House in November 2016, Clinton should send thank-you notes to McCarthy, Gowdy and the rest of the House Republicans. They may have saved her candidacy.",REAL
+2571,The best evidence yet that Republicans won't do anything on immigration in 2015,"Are Republicans going to use their control of Congress to pass immigration reform in 2015? The short answer is no.
+
+Here's the best reason to think that they won't: if Republicans were serious about passing immigration reform next year, you'd at least see Republican officials and pundits saying so on Spanish-language media, to reach out to Latino voters. But they're not.
+
+On the election night edition of Univision's nightly news broadcast (which only lasted an hour, from 11:30pm to 12:30am Eastern, rather than the all-night orgy of English language news networks), immigration was the first issue that came up in any segment. And while everyone on the broadcast agreed that immigration reform needed to happen, no one was willing to say that the Republican Congress would take it on.
+
+When Univision interviewed an actual Republican member of Congress — newly elected Florida congressman Carlos Curbelo (who beat one-term Democrat Joe Garcia, a big supporter of immigration reform) — he was openly supportive of immigration reform, saying (in Spanish) ""I'm ready to go to Washington to work with Republicans and Democrats to achieve it."" But he didn't make any promises that Republicans are about to take up the issue. In fact, Curbelo wasn't terribly eager to defend his colleagues-to-be: ""We have to be honest. Yes, there are Republicans in the House who've blocked immigration reform. I've criticized them — just like I've criticized the president for using the issue for politics, and failing to keep his promises.""
+
+During an analysis segment (also in Spanish), host Jorge Ramos pressed Republican analyst Mercedes Schlapp on whether Republicans would really do immigration reform. Her response began with ""Bueno, yo espero que hagan algo"" — ""Well, I hope they do something."" Instead of making any predictions about whether the Republican Congress would, she made a point that Univision viewers are very familiar with: that Republicans ""tienen que, en alguna manera, buscar solución"" — ""they have to find some sort of solution"" — if they want to compete for the Latino vote in the 2016 presidential election.
+
+Schlapp did say that the Republican leaders of both chambers of Congress — incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Speaker of the House John Boehner — understood the need for Republicans to take up immigration. But Republican leaders in Congress, themselves, haven't been so clear. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who's laid out the most detailed agenda so far for a Republican Congress in 2015 and 2016, didn't do anything more than ""(leave) open the possibility"" of some unspecified immigration bill.
+
+What Republicans on Congress appear to agree on, however, is that any executive action by Obama on the issue of immigration is going to ""poison the well"" (in Speaker Boehner's words) for Congress to do anything about it. On Wednesday, incoming Majority Leader McConnell compared executive action on immigration to ""waving a red flag in front of a bull."" If congressional Republicans plan to make an exception to their recalcitrance so that they can get a border-security bill passed, they're certainly not mentioning it. (Bulls aren't known for only busting through particular aisles of china shops.)
+
+Schlapp mentioned executive action on immigration as a possible obstacle to a Republican immigration bill. Curbelo didn't. But neither of them left Spanish speakers on Tuesday night with any impression that the incoming Republican Congress is committed to immigration reform.",REAL
+4951,Axelrod: Can Ailes tame Trump?,"David Axelrod is CNN's senior political commentator and host of the podcast "" The Axe Files. "" He was senior adviser to President Barack Obama and chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
+
+(CNN) About a half century ago, a journeyman ballplayer named Rocky Bridges made his debut as the manager of the San Jose Bees, a desultory California League team.
+
+The day was marred, however, when the hapless Bees missed signs, dropped balls and were generally routed.
+
+""I managed good,"" a frustrated Bridges recalled in a Sports Illustrated profile, ""but boy did they play bad.""
+
+All of this is to say: good luck to Donald Trump's new managers.
+
+Trapped in what appears to be a political death spiral, the bilious billionaire has once again shuffled his leadership team.
+
+Paul Manafort, a veteran political operative who took over in the spring from the loyal but volatile Corey Lewandowski, apparently has been shoved aside for a new ruling junta.
+
+We're told that Manafort will also be part of the junta. But having been an adviser to deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Philippines strongman Ferdinand Marcos, Manafort surely recognizes a coup when he sees one.
+
+But in fairness, Trump's precipitous slide in the polls since the conventions in July could hardly be blamed on the manager.
+
+Hours after the gavel fell at the Democratic convention, Trump kicked off a dizzying 10-day spasm of off-the-wall comments and tweets that seemed to confirm the thesis advanced by the Democrats in Philly: He's not ready for the nuclear codes.
+
+I am certain that none of this came at the suggestion of Paul Manafort, though Manafort gamely defended his man in the ensuing uproar. But there really was no adequate defense.
+
+Attempts by the campaign to tether Trump to a TelePrompTer and script provided only intermittent relief. Arming him with charts to discipline his presentations also failed.
+
+Trump's appalling distemper following a well-executed Democratic convention transformed what had been, at least in polling, a relatively close race.
+
+Now he has brought in a new management team, led by Stephen Bannon , a former Goldman Sachs banker and chairman of Breitbart News. Bannon has never run a campaign at any level, much less one for president, which is a highly complex and specialized challenge.
+
+His new governing partner, Kellyanne Conway, has extensive campaign experience -- but as a pollster, not a manager.
+
+Trump also reportedly is consulting Roger Ailes, the former CEO of Fox News who was recently forced out amid sexual harassment charges, to help coach him for the impending presidential debates.
+
+Ailes is what the other new additions are not.
+
+The brutal, negative ad campaign Ailes ran against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis remains a classic of political advertising.
+
+Ailes knows campaigns, television and presidential debates, which could be an asset to Trump. Stellar debate performances may now be his only chance.
+
+But that would presume the candidate's ability to listen, work, study, internalize and execute, a capacity we have not seen in this campaign.
+
+The presence of Ailes, whose edgy television channel became a rallying point for conservatives, and Bannon, whose right-wing news website is also notoriously pugilistic, portends a bloody fall campaign. And in the ever-combative Trump, they will find a willing deliverer of missiles.
+
+The question with Trump is always, where will they land?
+
+Even if Trump were adding the greatest political team in history, which he is not, the problem is not the campaign. The problem is the candidate, whose allergy to substance and impulse to react angrily -- and often tastelessly -- to any provocation has unnerved voters.
+
+In the primaries, his ""shoot first, ask questions later"" style was enough to ignite his base, but that very quality has become a liability now that he has to expand beyond it.
+
+Maybe ""Trump Team Three"" has the magic elixir.
+
+More likely, however, they will be left shaking their heads like old Rocky Bridges as they watch their candidate play.",REAL
+1879,How Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign machine will kick into gear,"This story has been updated.
+
+Hillary Rodham Clinton will formally enter the presidential race with an announcement on Sunday followed by appearances on the campaign trail next week, three people familiar with her plans said on Friday, ending months of anticipation surrounding the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination.
+
+Clinton plans to launch her campaign via social media and with a video on Sunday articulating her rationale for seeking the White House. She'll then travel to the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa early next week for campaign events, these people said. She is expected to hold mostly small discussion events with voters designed to help the former secretary of state connect with ordinary Americans and listen to their concerns, forgoing the large rallies and traditional announcement speeches of some of her Republican rivals.
+
+Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Clinton's fundraising machine is revving up. Her top bundlers are plotting aggressive outreach to thousands of Democratic donors over the weekend and into next week urging them to immediately send checks and make donations online as soon as the Clinton campaign's Web site goes live.
+
+Democratic strategists, advisers and fundraisers described Clinton's plans only on the condition of anonymity because she and her team have not yet finalized all aspects of her campaign rollout. Her official spokespeople declined to comment.
+
+Clinton's Sunday announcement would come one day before the expected campaign launch of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is planning a major speech to supporters on Monday afternoon at Miami's iconic Freedom Tower. Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Rand Paul (Ky.) are the only two major Republican candidates who already have officially entered the race.
+
+For months, Clinton, like many Republican contenders, has been assembling a campaign-in-waiting. Widely considered by Democrats to be the heir apparent to President Obama, Clinton has hired several of Obama's top campaign strategists to work on her 2016 bid and dozens of staffers, including in the early caucus and primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Last week, the Clinton team signed a lease on office space in Brooklyn, N.Y., as her national campaign headquarters.
+
+Ahead of the campaign launch, Clinton released a new epilogue on Friday for ""Hard Choices,"" her State Department memoir that is coming out this month in paperback. The chapter touches on an array of issues, from her relationship with Obama to economic mobility to childhood education. She writes about her desire for every American in the 21st century to have an equal and fair shot at economic success, a theme she has highlighted in her public speeches over the past year.
+
+Clinton ends the epilogue by ruminating about a ""memory quilt"" she received as a gift after her granddaughter's birth: ""I wondered for a moment what a quilt of my own life would look like. . . . There was so much more to do. So many more panels waiting to be filled in. I folded up the quilt and got back to work.”
+
+[A new campaign slogan for Hillary Rodham Clinton: Think small]
+
+Using a social media launch for her campaign, rather than a boisterous and celebratory rally, is a deliberate attempt by Clinton and her advisers to avoid the pitfalls that tripped her up in her 2008 presidential campaign, when she was heavily favored at the outset but ultimately defeated by Obama. Clinton suffered from criticism then that she appeared as if she felt entitled to the nomination and often came off as flat and uninspired on the stump in front of large crowds.
+
+The go-slow, go-small strategy, Democratic advisers say, plays to her strengths, allowing her to meet voters in intimate settings where her humor, humility and policy expertise can show through.
+
+That approach is modeled on the listening tour she conducted across New York state at the start of her successful 2000 Senate race. Longtime advisers and allies said Clinton wants to reestablish the connection with voters and regular people she had in that campaign, when she traveled into diners and people’s living rooms and kitchens to listen to their concerns.
+
+Jay Jacobs, a former New York Democratic Party chairman and longtime Clinton friend and supporter, said the 2000 listening tour became “a two-way conversation that impressed voters not by just what she said, but by how intently she listened. I think that’s Hillary. That’s something that has worked before, and it’ll work again.”
+
+Jacobs, who recently met privately with Clinton when she addressed his group of the American Camp Association in Atlantic City, N.J., said Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign will not be “reactive.”
+
+“It will be one that really presents Hillary Clinton to the voters as she is known by people who are close to her: as a very warm, genuine, thoughtful, certainly intelligent, regular person,” Jacobs said. “There’s been so much that we’ve seen that seems to create an image, by the press and by others, those who are looking to derail her, but now the voters are going to hear from Hillary and they’re going to see Hillary.”
+
+Within hours of news reports Friday morning that Clinton would launch her campaign this weekend, the Republican National Committee announced an online ad as part of its ""#StopHillary"" campaign to highlight scandals over her use of private e-mail at the State Department and foreign donations to her family's charitable foundation.
+
+“From the East Wing to the State Department, Hillary Clinton has left a trail of secrecy, scandal and failed liberal policies that no image consultant can erase,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. “Voters want to elect someone they can trust and Hillary's record proves that she cannot be trusted. We must 'Stop Hillary.'”
+
+Clinton's fundraising team is standing by for the launch of her Web site, when the campaign can begin accepting donations online. One priority is creating a robust small-donor network similar to the Obama campaign's vaunted list from his 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and Clinton advisers see her announcement period as a ripe opportunity.
+
+“We’re going to have to raise as much money as possible,” said one Clinton fundraiser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the campaign’s internal plans. “We’re not going to take it slow. The announcement is a good time to raise money, and we’ll have everyone out there asking people to support her candidacy.”
+
+Several Clinton fundraisers described a rush of major donors wanting to get checks in the door on Day One of the campaign.
+
+“All the horses are in the gate just waiting for those gates to open,” said John Morgan, a prominent Florida donor and Clinton fundraiser. “That’s how I describe the fundraising efforts. There’s really nothing to do until the gate opens. But the gate could open Sunday, and it could be the flood gate. The only issue they’ll have is how fast can they raise the money, because the money is pent up. And if they start holding events, the line will be around the block to host an event.”
+
+Clinton's fundraising efforts are being directed by Dennis Cheng, who had been finance director at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. But the campaign is not expected to give titles to top bundlers or announce a list of finance committee chairs or members, according to Democrats with knowledge of the Clinton strategy.
+
+Clinton’s focus for now will be on raising money just for the primary – with a cap of $2,700 a donor – through Internet appeals. That will free her up to spend time on the trail, talking to voters, rather than wooing wealthy donors at high-priced fundraisers.
+
+“I don’t think the first thing out of the gate she should be doing is a bunch of big fundraising events,” said one senior party strategist.
+
+This is a notable contrast to former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who has spent the better part of four months crisscrossing the country holding closed-door finance events for his Right to Rise political action committee and super PAC with tickets costing as much as $100,000 each.
+
+“I think she’ll be in Iowa eating corn on the cob instead of clinking champagne flutes with donors,” Morgan said. “She can do this much quicker, much more efficiently because she’s not fighting for donors. Rubio, Bush, that whole crowd is in mortal combat for dollars. She’s not. That’s her advantage.”
+
+Without a strong Democratic challenger on the horizon, Clinton does not feel the pressure to match the kind of “shock and awe” fundraising effort that Bush has been undertaking to scare off other Republican hopefuls. “They have the luxury of doing this the right way, and not trying to just see how much money they can hoover up,” the senior party strategist said.
+
+In fact, Clinton’s team is wary of raising too much money too quickly -- creating a bulging war chest that could play to the inevitability theme she wants to avoid this time around.
+
+Clinton will not be able to seed her new campaign with a major cash infusion as she did at the start of her 2008 campaign, when she transferred $10 million from her Senate reelection committee. That helped her post a record $36 million haul for her first fundraising quarter. Her 2008 presidential committee is shut down, and her Senate committee has just $158,000 left in reserves.
+
+But her campaign this time will be able to build on the efforts of Ready for Hillary, an outside group started in 2013 to lay the groundwork for Clinton's campaign, which has held more than 1,000 grass-roots events across all 50 states in the past two years. In the process, the group amassed a donor pool of more than 135,000 people, the vast majority of whom gave contributions of $100 or less, according to super-PAC officials. Ready for Hillary also has cultivated a network of local organizers who could sign on for similar roles with the official campaign.
+
+That could give Clinton a sizable head start over some of her Republican rivals in building a small-donor operation. Ready for Hillary will not be able to coordinate with Clinton once she announces, but it could share its list of supporters with her campaign through a list swap, campaign finance lawyers said.
+
+But the group may not even have to take that step. Once Clinton declares her candidacy, the super PAC can simply direct its supporters to her Web site, allowing her campaign to quickly build a small-donor list.
+
+And once she’s officially in, Ready for Hillary plans to post online the names of hundreds of donors who have given or raised more than $5,000, according to a person familiar with the plans. That list — which includes at least 222 donors who gave $25,000 — would be valuable not just for Clinton’s campaign but for Priorities USA, the high-dollar super PAC planning to finance a pro-Clinton television advertising campaign and now faces pressure to kick-start its fundraising.
+
+Dan Balz and Matea Gold contributed to this report.",REAL
+5729,Comment on 500 Year Old Map Was Discovered That Shatters The “Official” History Of The Planet by 500 Year Old Map Discovered Shatters The Official History Of The Human Race,"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Human history is quite an enigma. We know so little, and much of what we think we know seems to be highly questionable in the wake of new evidence, as well as pre-existing information that challenges our current understanding of the world.   Our world is no stranger to unexplained mystery, and there are numerous examples of verified phenomenon, ancient monuments, books, teachings, understandings and more that lack any explanation and counter what we’ve already been taught. We are like a race with amnesia, able to put together small bits and pieces of our history yet unable to provide any sort of verified explanation. There are still many missing pieces to the puzzle. One great example is the Piri Reis map, a genuine document that was re-made (copied from older documents) at Constantinople in AD 1513, and discovered in 1929. It focuses on the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America, and the northern coast of Antarctica. It was drawn by the military intelligence of Admiral Piri Reis of the Ottoman era. He is a well-known historical figure whose identity is well established. The Admiral made a copy of it, and the original was drawn based on documents that date back to at least the fourth century BC, and on information obtained by multiple explorers. Why The Map Is So Compelling Right off the bat, one of the most compelling facts about the map is that it includes a continent that our history books tell us was not discovered until 1818. Secondly, the map depicts what is known as “Queen Maud Land,” a 2.7 million-square-kilometer (1 million sq mi) region of Antarctica as it looked millions of years ago. This region and other regions shown on the map are thought to have been covered completely in ice, but the map tells a different story. It shows this area as ice free, which suggests that these areas passed through a long ice-free period which might not have come to an end until approximately six thousand years ago, which again, totally goes against what is taught and currently believed. Today, geological evidence has confirmed that this area could not have been ice-free until about 4000 BC. Official science has been saying all along that the ice-cap which covers the Antarctic is millions of years old. The Piri Reis map shows that the northern part of that continent has been mapped before the ice did cover it. This means that it was mapped a million years ago, but that’s impossible, since mankind did not exist at that time. Quite the conundrum isn’t it?   Professor Charles Hapgood, who was a university history professor, wrote to the United States Air Force Reconnaissance Technical Squadron (SAC) and they also confirmed that “this indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice-cap.” (1) They also went on to state that “we have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state of geographical knowledge in 1513.” (1) (The reply was from Harold Z. Ohlmeyer, a Lt Colonel, USAF) 
+Here’s what Professor Charles Hapgood had to say about it: “It appears that accurate information has been passed down from people to people. It appears that the charts must have originated with a people unknown and they were passed on, perhaps by the Minoans and the Phoenicians, who were, for a thousand years and more, the greatest sailors of the ancient world. We have evidence that they were collected and studied in the great library of Alexandria (Egypt) and that compilations of them were made by the geographers that worked there.” (1) 
+Furthermore, the map is very detailed and includes mountain ranges in the Antarctic. which were not even discovered until 1952. “His idea is original, of great simplicity, and – if it continues to prove itself – of great importance to everything that is related to the history of the Earth’s surface.” – Einstein on Hapgood’s interpretations of the map (1)(2) (From a forward Einstein wrote for Hapgood in one of his books) Hapgood and mathematician Richard W. Strachan have also provided more mind-boggling information. For example, a comparison with modern day photographs that are taken from satellite images shows remarkable similarities; the originals of Piri Reis’ maps might well have been aerial photographs taken from a very high height. (2) I’ll let you think about that for a second. How is that possible for a map that was made millions of years ago? “A spaceship hovers high above Cairo and points its camera straight downward. When the film is developed, the following picture would emerge: everything that is in a radius of about 5,000 miles of Cairo is reproduced correctly, because it lies directly below the lens. But the countries and continents become increasingly distorted the farther we move our eyes from the center of the picture. Why is this? Owing to the spherical shape of the earth, the continents away from the center “sink downward.” South America, for example, appears strangely distorted length-ways, exactly as it does on the Piri Reis maps! And exactly as it does on the photographs taken from the American lunar probes.” – (Erich Von Daniken 92) Changing Our View of The Past The fact that this ancient map could have been made with some sort of arial technology is quite a thought, isn’t it? Even if this isn’t an option, who had the technology to undertake such an accurate geographical survey in Antarctica a couple million years ago? How would they have known to detail the map as if it were taken from above, with knowledge about the earth’s shape? It remains a mystery how the Sumerians, Mayans, and others were aware of bodies in space that are impossible to detect without modern technology, and were able to make calculations based on that awareness. This map is another example of just such a mystery, and suggests that the existence of some sort of ancient advanced civilization, with all the tools (or possibly more) of modern day civilization, is indeed plausible. 
+For more detailed information regarding this truly fascinating map, I suggest you check out source # 1 for starters. 
+I’d also like to mention that this map is part of a very large body of evidence suggesting that extremely intelligent, very advanced ancient civilizations once roamed the Earth. Sources: (1) Hancock, Graham. Fingerprints of the Gods: Canada: Anchor Canada, 2005 (2) Daniken, Erich. Chariots of The Gods. New York: Berkley Books, 1970 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+6952,Why are celebs staying silent about politics? Esquire editor answers own question by naming and shaming,"Why are celebs staying silent about politics? Esquire editor answers own question by naming and shaming Posted at 7:53 pm on October 26, 2016 by Brett T. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
+As Twitchy reported, cameras were out in force on campus last weekend to capture some door-to-door vote canvassing by young celebrities like nasty woman Katy Perry, 32, and Miley Cyrus. 
+It’s no surprise both were trying to coax millennials to vote for Hillary Clinton. But what about Taylor Swift, asked no one? Hang on one second; someone did ask. In a piece published by Esquire Wednesday, editor Matt Miller asks , “Why are influential celebrities remaining silent this election?” Taylor Swift has 156,147,879 social media followers. Why is she remaining politically silent? https://t.co/SRqu5kNo1r 
+— John Hendrickson (@JohnGHendy) October 26, 2016 
+Why do these select entertainers get to keep their political opinions to themselves? “Maybe these artists are protecting their brand?” Miller posits, adding, “Fuck that! If their brand means to sacrifice the very values that make them human and a contributing member of this society, then they live a sad, hollow life.” 
+Before making some remark about Taylor Swift being a singer and not a politician, consider this: Taylor Swift is not a private citizen. Her opinion matters to more people than Paul Ryan's opinion ever will. 
+— John Hendrickson (@JohnGHendy) October 26, 2016 
+Someone’s living a sad, hollow life. Though Miller wrote the piece, Esquire deputy editor John Hendrickson took most of the heat for it after publicizing the article by tweeting quotes from it. @JohnGHendy @esquire Because she's a pop star and not a political pundit? What do I win? 
+— Randy Wortinger (@randicus79) October 26, 2016 Maybe because she wants to sell music to both sides, you simpleton. @JohnGHendy @esquire 
+— Yes, Nick $earcy! (@yesnicksearcy) October 26, 2016 @JohnGHendy @esquire Because this is one of the most divisive elections of all time and she doesn't want to alienate 1/2 of her audience.",FAKE
+8003,YOUTUBE BANS ‘CLINTON’S BLACK SON’,"YOUTUBE BANS ‘CLINTON’S BLACK SON’   Tweet 
+NEW YORK –YouTube on Wednesday suspended the account of Danney Williams, the 30-year-old man who has claimed since the 1990s to be the black son of former President Bill Clinton. 
+YouTube, citing “repeated or severe violations of our Terms of Use and/or Community Guidelines,” declared the account “cannot be restored.” 
+The YouTube decision blocked the nine-minute feature “BANISHED – The Untold Story of Danney Williams,” which had received 1.2 million views since Williams posted it last week. Produced by filmmaker Joel Gilbert, it drew nearly 100,000 views per day and more than 1,000 viewer comments, with the overwhelming majority expressing support for Williams and outrage at the Clintons for not being willing to allow a DNA test to determine paternity. 
+Sign the precedent-setting petition supporting Trump’s call for an independent prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton! 
+“My YouTube account has been deleted, but the same video appears in 50 other places on YouTube alone,” Williams said on his Facebook page after being notified of YouTube’s decision. “[YouTube] can’t handle the truth! Please share #BillClintonSon.” 
+Twitter also continues to allow Williams to post the “Banished” video on Danney Williams’ page , but the Twitter link to YouTube displays the message : “This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated. Sorry about that.”",FAKE
+7235,French Jews urged to rally over UNESCO resolutions,"October 28, 2016 French Jews urged to rally over UNESCO resolutions 
+The main Jewish groups in France urged members to rally in front of the headquarters of the country’s Foreign Ministry to protest its failure to oppose UN resolutions that ignore Jewish ties to Jerusalem, JTA reported on Thursday. 
+On Wednesday, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee passed a resolution denying the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. 
+On October 13, the executive board of the UNESCO passed a similar resolution which refers to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount only by their Arabic-language names. 
+France was among 26 countries that abstained from voting during the first resolution. 
+CRIF, the political lobby group representing French Jewish communities, was joined in a rare move by the Consistoire, French Jewry’s organ responsible for religious services, in organizing a protest rally for Thursday opposite the Quai d’Orsay in Paris in reaction to the passing of the two resolutions on Jerusalem. 
+“We were shocked by the anti-Israeli obsession of UNESCO and are now revolted by its disavowal of its own values,” CRIF President Francis Kalifat wrote Wednesday in his call for French Jews to rally outside Quai d’Orsay.",FAKE
+4004,"Iranian troops prepare to aid Russia with Syrian ground assault, officials say","More Iranian troops have arrived in Syria for an upcoming ground operation to accompany Russian airstrikes, defense officials confirm to Fox News.
+
+“It has always been understood in this building that the Russians would provide the air force, and the Iranians would provide the ground force in Syria,” one official said.
+
+Army Col. Steve Warren told reporters, “We know the Iranians are a part of this. We've known that since day one.”
+
+The officials speaking to Fox News could not disclose the size of this new Iranian force due to the sensitivity of the information.
+
+These Iranian forces are under the command of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the Quds Force commander in charge of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s international operations, which runs a network of proxy forces throughout the Middle East, including Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon.
+
+Fox News first reported a secret meeting between Soleimani and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which took place in late July.  Part of the discussions between Soleimani and Putin was the future Russian build up in Syria, coordinated closely with Iran.
+
+In addition, sources tell Reuters that Lebanese Hezbollah forces will soon arrive to aid in the ground operation. Hezbollah, a Russian and Iranian ally, has fought alongside President Bashar al-Assad's forces since early in the Syrian civil war.
+
+The goal of the operation would be to recapture territory the Syrian government lost to rebels, not specifically to target ISIS, those sources tell Reuters.
+
+Meantime, Russia’s foreign minister maintains Moscow and the US coalition “see eye-to-eye” on the targets in Syria.
+
+“We have the same approach,” Sergey Lavrov said Thursday. “We fight terrorists. The [US-led coalition] announced ISIS as the enemy, and the coalition does the same as Russia.”
+
+But Col. Warren added, “We don't believe"" that [Russia] hit ISIS targets.
+
+Human rights groups say Russian airstrikes in Syria targeted US-backed rebels on Thursday. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claims the targets of Russian airstrikes included US-backed group Tajamu Alezzah.
+
+There have also been reports Russian airstrikes killed civilians, but President Vladimir Putin has denied the accusations, calling them ""information attacks.""
+
+Russian Defense Ministry Igor Konashenkov acknowledged in televised comments that unidentified groups were being targeted in addition to ISIS, but said Thursday’s airstrikes damaged or destroyed 12 ISIS targets, including a command center.
+
+The head of the Syrian National Council, an anti-Assad group, said at the United Nations that at least 36 people had been killed by airstrikes in the western city of Homs, including five children, since Wednesday. Khaled Khoja, the SNC's leader, said none of the four areas targeted by Russian planes Wednesday contained ISIS fighters.
+
+Putin also said he expects Assad to talk with the Syrian opposition about a political settlement, but added he was referring to what he described as a ""healthy"" opposition group.
+
+Putin and other officials have said Russia was providing weapons and training to Assad's army to help it combat ISIS. Russian Navy transport vessels have been shuttling back and forth for weeks to ferry troops, weapons and supplies to an air base near the coastal city of Latakia. IHS Jane's, a leading defense research group, said last week that satellite images of the base showed 28 jets, including Su-30 multirole fighters, Su-25 ground attack jets, Su-24 bombers and possibly Ka-52 helicopter gunships.
+
+Fox News' Jennifer Griffin, Lucas Tomlinson and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5577,Comment on NOT GUILTY: Oregon Standoff Leaders Acquitted for Malheur Wildlife Refuge Takeover by Richard Johnson,"Posted on October 28, 2016 by Jay Syrmopoulos 
+Portland, OR – The group of men who seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge , in rural Oregon were found not guilty late Thursday, vindicating brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy after the 41-day standoff that brought nationwide focus to long-running dispute over federal control of rural land in the Western United States. 
+According to a report in by the Associated Press : 
+A jury found brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy not guilty a firearm in a federal facility and conspiring to impede federal workers from their jobs at the 300 miles southeast of Portland where the trial took place. Five co-defendants also were tried one or both of the charges. Ammon Bundy has a house in Emmett. 
+Despite the acquittal, the Bundys were expected to stand trial in Nevada early next year on charges stemming from another high-profile standoff with federal agents. Authorities rounding up cattle at their father Cliven Bundy’s ranch in 2014 because of unpaid grazing fees released the animals as they faced armed protesters. 
+The Bundy family initially made headlines in 2013 when the Bureau of Land Management brought armed agents in to seize rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle after his refusal to pay federal authorities a massive debt – which he claims is illegitimate. 
+In response to the militarized response in Nevada by the BLM, militia from across the U.S. mobilized and coordinated a response which saw hundreds of armed Americans stand up to what they perceived as vast federal overreach. 
+What the government thought would be an open-and-shut case was anything but. The group never denied they seized the refuge while armed or that they made demands of the government. 
+“Ladies and gentlemen, this case is not a whodunit,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan Knight said in his closing argument, making the argument the group illegally commandeered a federal building. 
+The AP reports: 
+On technical grounds, the defendants said they never discussed stopping individual workers from accessing their offices but merely wanted the land and the buildings. On emotional grounds, Ammon Bundy and other defendants argued that the takeover was an act of civil disobedience against an out-of-control federal government that has crippled the rural West. 
+Federal prosecutors took two weeks to present their case, finishing with a display of more than 30 guns seized after the standoff. An FBI agent testified that 16,636 live rounds and nearly 1,700 spent casings were found. 
+Ammon Bundy spent three days testifying in his own defense, focusing on the fact that federal overreach is destroying rural Western communities that have relied on the land — for generations in many cases. Bundy made clear that the plan was to simply take control of the refuge by occupation, while eventually returning it to local control. 
+Originally, 26 occupiers were charged with conspiracy. Eleven pleaded guilty, while another had the charge dropped. Seven defendants have not yet been tried. Their trial is scheduled to begin February 14, according to the AP. 
+Shortly after the verdict was announced, an Oregon-area reporter posted to Twitter that Ammon Bundy’s attorney Marcus Mumford was tackled by U.S. Marshals after insisting that Bundy should be allowed to be released from custody, with the judge subsequently ordering the courtroom cleared. 
+The armed occupiers took control of the remote bird sanctuary on January 2, in response to the prison sentences given to two local ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, after being convicted of arson in relation to an ongoing dispute with the BLM. Upon occupying the refuge the group demanded that the father and son be freed and that federal officials cede control of publicly held lands to local control. 
+Ultimately, the Bundy brothers and a number of their fellow occupiers were arrested in an ambush style attack, while on the way to negotiate with a Sheriff. It ended with officers gunning down Robert “LaVoy” Finicum – a charismatic group spokesman. Currently, numerous federal SRT agents are under investigation for lying about firing at the occupiers’ vehicle during the ambush. 
+The majority of the remaining occupants left the refuge in the wake of Finicum’s killing , with four holdouts negotiating their surrender until February 11. 
+In the wake of the verdict, both the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office also expressed disappointment. 
+U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams said his office “respects the verdict of the jury and thanks them for their dedicated service during this long and difficult trial.” 
+“For many weeks, hundreds of law enforcement officers — federal, state, and local — worked around-the-clock to resolve the armed occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge peacefully. We believe now — as we did then — that protecting and defending this nation through rigorous obedience to the U.S. Constitution is our most important responsibility. Although we are extremely disappointed in the verdict, we respect the court and the role of the jury in the American judicial system.” – Greg Bretzing, Special Agent in Charge, FBI Oregon 
+Regardless of the sentiments of those in government and law enforcement, the jury carried out justice — with this verdict solidifying that the killing of LaVoy Finnicum was nothing less than criminal . 
+Revealing exactly why the 2nd Amendment is so important to a free people, Bundy testified that the reason occupiers chose to carry guns was because they understood that they would be immediately arrested otherwise and needed to protect themselves against possible government violence. 
+There is no mistaking the difference in law enforcement’s response to unarmed protestors — versus those that exercise their right to bear arms. One need look no further than the ongoing protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock – which has been met with numerous militarized and violent crackdowns on non-violent water protectors – to see exactly how differently armed protesters are treated. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+2168,US lifts Vietnam arms embargo in move to counter China,"President Obama lifted the decades-long U.S. arms embargo against Vietnam on Monday in an apparent effort to shore up the communist country's defenses against an increasingly aggressive China – though he faced criticism that the move takes away U.S. leverage to press for human rights freedoms.
+
+Obama announced the full removal of the embargo at a news conference in Hanoi alongside Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang. The president said the move was intended as a step toward normalizing relations with the former enemy and to eliminate a ""lingering vestige of the Cold War.""
+
+The embargo was imposed in 1984. The United States partially lifted the ban in 2014, but Vietnam pushed for full access as it tries to deal with China's land reclamation and military construction in nearby seas.
+
+Obama, in announcing the agreement Monday, said every U.S. arms sale would be reviewed on a case-by-case basis going forward. Vietnam has not bought anything, but removing the remaining restrictions shows relations are fully normalized and opens the way to deeper security cooperation.
+
+""At this stage both sides have developed a level of trust and cooperation, including between our militaries, that is reflective of common interests and mutual respect,"" Obama said.
+
+U.S. lawmakers and activists, though, had urged Obama to press for greater human rights freedoms in the one-party state before lifting the embargo. Vietnam holds about 100 political prisoners and there have been more detentions this year.
+
+""In one fell swoop, President Obama has jettisoned what remained of U.S. leverage to improve human rights in Vietnam -- and (has) basically gotten nothing for it,"" Phil Robertson, with Human Rights Watch, said.
+
+In Beijing, China's Foreign Ministry outwardly praised the move, with a spokeswoman saying China hoped ""normal and friendly"" relations between the U.S. and Vietnam would be conducive to regional stability. China itself remains under a weapons embargo imposed by the U.S. and European Union following 1989's bloody military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations centered on Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
+
+Obama said the United States and Vietnam had mutual concerns about maritime issues and the importance of maintaining freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. He said that although Washington doesn't take sides on the territorial disputes, it does support a diplomatic resolution based on ""international norms"" and ""not based on who's the bigger party and can throw around their weight a little bit more,"" a reference to China.
+
+Lifting the arms embargo will be a psychological boost for Vietnam's leaders as they look to counter an increasingly aggressive China, but there may not be a big jump in sales.
+
+Obama was greeted Monday by Quang at the Presidential Palace, where Obama congratulated Vietnam for making ""extraordinary progress."" Quang praised the expansion in security and trade ties between ""former enemies turned friends"" and called for more U.S. investment in Vietnam.
+
+Obama also made the case for stronger commercial and economic ties, including approval of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that is stalled in Congress and facing strong opposition from the 2016 presidential candidates. The deal, which includes Vietnam, would tear down trade barriers and encourage investment between the countries that signed it.
+
+Critics worry it would cost jobs by exposing American workers to low-wage competition from countries such as Vietnam.
+
+Obama and Quang earlier attended a signing ceremony touting a series of new commercial deals between U.S. and Vietnamese companies valued at more than $16 billion. The deals included U.S. engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney's plans to sell 135 advanced engines to Vietnamese air carrier Vietjet, and Boeing's plans to sell 100 aircraft to the airline.
+
+Obama is the third sitting president to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Four decades after the fall of Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, and two decades after President Bill Clinton restored relations with the nation, Obama is eager to upgrade relations with an emerging power whose rapidly expanding middle class beckons as a promising market for U.S. goods and an offset to China's growing strength.
+
+The United States is eager to boost trade with a fast-growing middle class in Vietnam that is expected to double by 2020. That would mean knocking down auto, food and machine tariffs to get more U.S. products into Vietnam.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6568,How The Elites Are Using “Divide And Rule” To Control Us,"It wasn’t long ago that the Left represented the anti-establishment wing in politics. They used to fight against globalism (remember the anti-globalization movement?) even if their motives were different from those of today’s anti-globalists, as well as being against censorship, imperialist wars, and the expanding powers of governments and corporations. But today, you see leftists protesting against Brexit, attacking and censoring anyone who disagrees with the establishment (using Twitter on their Apple products while sipping on their Starbucks coffee), and are calling for war in Syria to challenge the Russians. So, just how the hell did did they end up becoming the patsies for the elites?
+
+To understand, we must go back to 2011 when the Occupy movement was ongoing. The Occupy protests, which now seem like ages ago, came about as a response to the economic downturn with the people realizing that they were being screwed by the system. We can debate endlessly about exactly who these people were and the motives behind them, but the important fact is that, to the elites, it was a sign that the people were waking up and challenging their power.
+The elites were in a panic as this was the first time in post-war history that the people of West mobilized in mass to threaten their rule. So, the cabals decided that they needed to act fast before the whole movement evolved to a full-blown revolution. And they already had a plan in mind: the never antiquated strategy of divide and rule.
+The Diversion 
+When the people are discontent and angry from being powerless and dispossessed, the pressure will mount and it won’t go anywhere. The people want to vent out their frustrations. The elites know that responding directly with repression only inspires greater desire to rise up, so instead of fighting it, they prefer to re-channel that pent up energy elsewhere.
+On February 2012, with the Occupy movement still raging, the elites were given that golden opportunity—or, rather, they created one—when a black teenager was shot dead in Florida: the none other than the infamous Trayvon Martin case. The shooter wasn’t even a full white, but the elites jumped at the chance and used their control of the media to throw everything they had on it; anything to divert the public attention away from them. With their efforts, it quickly became the biggest story of America.
+But they didn’t stop there. Police shootings, which have always been happening and to all races, were also highly publicized by the mainstream media to stoke liberal outrage and racial tensions that led to the creation of Black Lives Matter movement—a movement that is financed by George Soros and others to stir up unrests across America.
+Did the elites convert Occupy protesters into SJW patsies?
+The diversion was complete as the people were now more interested in racial issues than the “1%” who were dictating their lives. The Occupy movement faded away and the people were now venting out their anger elsewhere. Although I don’t have as much proof as with the rise of BLM movement, I strongly suspect that the resurgence of social justice warriors around the same time is also the work of the elites who want the Leftists to target fellow citizens over asinine cultural issues rather than the established order.
+The Strategy 
+Back in 19th century, Karl Marx claimed that religion and nationalism was being used to distract the masses from the fact that they were being oppressed under capitalism. If we were to apply this concept to the world today, the culture wars going on now are distractions to keep the masses from undermining the power of the elites.
+The goal the elites is simple: divide the masses and let them fight each other so that they will never come together to topple those in power. Meanwhile, they themselves focus on expanding their own wealth and continue to implement institutional control to further their globalist plans. The worst case scenario the elites want to avoid is to have the common people unite as one, so they must do everything they can to fragment them by creating as many divisions as possible.
+My understanding of their modus operandi is this: 1) Use hot-button issues to stir up controversy (something that doesn’t affect them like gay marriage, race issues, and all other politically correct nonsense). 2) Have the Leftists either get outraged or do something that will provoke a reaction from the Right. 3) Let the people vent out their anger onto each other and get at each other’s throats. 4) When the issue fades away, foment a new controversy to repeat the whole process. By cycling through them over and over again, the elites are able to maintain the status quo and keep the people from uniting against them.
+Thus, we have our current situation where the masses are divided with blacks against whites, women against men, Islam and atheism against Christianity, Left against Right, and so on, but no more anti-globalization, Tea Party movement, or Occupy Wall Street.
+As long as those on the left continue berating the right as racists, sexists, and bigots who are controlled by corporations and the right in turn accuse the left of being degenerate, socialist slackers who just want freebies from a nanny government, nothing will change. As long as the two sides see each others as enemies who are stupid and ignorant, and getting in the way of creating a decent society, the people will remain divided. As long as the rest of the population go berserk over wedding cakes for homosexuals, the latest “misogynist” outrage, or how a lion named Cecil got shot, the elites will continue to win.
+A Couple More Points To Consider I know they look like an occupying army, but there’s nothing to be alarmed about. They’re just your friendly neighborhood police doing their jobs to protect you from the “terrorists.”
+First, while this article has been focused on how the Left has been toyed by the globalist elites, let’s not forget that the Right are not totally immune to their influence either. Remember how Neo-cons ( globalists puppets disguised as conservatives ) effectively lured the conservatives in America through faith and patriotism? The support they got from that base was the impetus to launch their war against Iraq based on bullshit evidences of WMD’s and Saddam–Al-Queda link. While the Right has changed a lot since then, there are still “conservatives” today who are itching for a war with Russia because… USA! USA! USA! .
+Second, it is crucial to remember that although the main goal is to maintain divide and rule, it is not the end of it. The elites have far more sinister aims. By raising hell in societies through demographic conflicts and terrorism, the elites are preparing for a total social control. I get the feeling that the elites are letting the chaos and violence run its course so that the people from the two opposing camps will join together in their approval of new government measures for social control.
+No matter their differences, when the people get terrified of savagery and disorder, they’ll welcome the state to intervene in the name of security. Europe is already getting used to large military presence on their streets while the US government is seemingly preparing for a war against their own citizens . A leaked Soros memo also reveals that the BLM movement is potentially being used to federalize the US police . While many people seem to be concerned about violence and terrorism, it seems those are just tools used by the elites to justify a totalitarian state in the near future.
+The Culture Wars: Necessary Fight Or Engineered Distraction? 
+The issue of culture wars is not an easy one as they are important in many ways, but are still forms of distraction implemented by the elites.
+On one hand, we are playing into the hands of elites by raging against social justice and feminist pigshits instead of trying to stop the globalists, Zionists , bankers, mega-corporations , and the governments from undermining our existence. Really, do the issues of politically-incorrect Halloween costumes and whatever bathroom trannies use matter more than the fact that the middle-class is being destroyed, revelations of massive corruption in the DNC, the coming police-state, and the globalist wars that are causing death and destruction around the world? All the drama of outrage and counter-outrage is silly when the elites are snickering as their new world order is taking shape.
+On the other hand, culture does matter in many ways. Uncontrolled immigration, anti-male laws, and censorship are all very relevant issues. And as much of the Leftists are now serving as pawns of the establishment, the situation isn’t exactly the divide and rule model I described above. In a way, we are now forced to fight the Left and everyone else who are getting in the way of fighting the globalist elites.
+So, does this mean we should ally with those who scorn us? Or should we continue playing the elite’s games and bicker with their SJW drones? I don’t have a good answer, but whatever we choose to do, I believe it is crucial for us to focus our battles and not get trolled into petty issues that the mainstream media wants us to focus on. We should always keep in mind that it is always those at the top who are the true enemies of mankind.
+Conclusion: Is There Still Hope? 
+Although we no longer see grassroots movements and popular mobilization, the current US election has shown that the people are still awake and sick of the establishment. To me, that alone is a hopeful sign that people are still willing to challenge the ruling class.
+With Bernie Sanders brought down by the establishment and his supporters scattered into different camps, the only anti-establishment movement now is the presidential campaign led by Donald Trump. This is why we are seeing unprecedented efforts by the elites to bring down Trump and use disgruntled Leftists against his supporters.
+I have my doubts about Trump , but he is thousand times preferable to the certain nightmare that Hillary Clinton will bring to America and the world if she gets elected. But besides voting, I believe that it is more important for the people themselves to wake up and be aware of the methods of control that are being implemented upon us. We can’t constantly expect some knight in shinning armor to come rally us; we must take the initiative ourselves and be willing to fight for our own destiny.
+Read More: The Elites Have One Rule For Themselves, And One Rule For The Rest Of Us 
+",FAKE
+285,John Boehner says House Republicans have a difference in ‘tactics.’ That’s not entirely true.,"On Sunday during an appearance on ""Face the Nation"" on CBS, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) tried to downplay the differences between the GOP leadership and the conservative rank and file in the House.
+
+""We do have some members who disagree, from time to time, over the tactics that we decide to employ,"" Boehner said at one point. ""We get in an argument over tactics from time to time,""  he said at another. ""The goals are all the same."" That line was echoed by House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) during an interview with Chuck Todd on NBC's ""Meet the Press."" ""We have a difference of opinion in strategy and tactics, but in principle we are united,"" McCarthy said.
+
+Those statements are only half true.
+
+The true part is that Boehner, McCarthy and the rest of the House GOP leadership team do have a broad strategy and a series of tactics they try to employ to both accomplish their legislative goals and pressure President Obama. Whether that's ""Plan B,"" Boehner's attempt to avert the fiscal cliff while simultaneously forcing Obama's hand, or the latest attempt to extend funding for the Department of Homeland Security for three weeks, Boehner, McCarthy and the rest have a strategy behind most of these big legislative fights. (The lack of a back-up plan, on the other hand, is a little odd.)
+
+The untrue part is that the rump Republican resistance — led by a handful of tea party-aligned conservatives — has its own alternative strategy or even tactics. Think back to the vote for speaker earlier in this Congress.  The establishment had a plan to get Boehner reelected to the House's top job. The resistance? Not so much. They nominated three alternatives to Boehner — Dan Webster of Florida, Ted Yoho of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas — ensuring that the anti-Boehner vote was splintered. What did that reveal? That even in making a purely protest vote, there wasn't a whole heck of a lot strategy going on in the not-Boehner crowd.
+
+Fast forward to Friday's vote on the three-week extension backed by Boehner. Yes, the conservative coalition in the House was absolutely the key to killing that measure. But to what end? What is the broader strategy of voting that extension down? The answer that group will give you is to tie the repeal of Obama's immigration executive orders to funding DHS. But that is never going to happen. Even if Senate Democrats allowed a vote on such a joined package and it passed, which wouldn't happen, Obama would veto it without a second thought. And we would be right back where we started.
+
+This is a classic letting-the-perfect-get-in-the-way-of-the-good approach. It is neither a strategy nor a tactic to say ""we will get everything we want or there will be no deal."" Saying ""no"" isn't a strategy. Jeb Bush addressed that reality during his question-and-answer session at CPAC last week. ""It's good to oppose bad things,"" Bush said. ""We need to start being for things.""
+
+That's what Boehner — and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — have been saying for quite some time. The problem for Boehner and, to a lesser extent, McConnell, is that they are not dealing with a group of members who see the world as they do. While Boehner et al are trying to draw up a broad strategy of how to approach the final two years of Obama's presidency, the resisters in the House are taking it issue by issue — and always standing on ideological ground to oppose Obama.
+
+Opposition without a plan of what to do next is neither a tactic nor a strategy. That's why John Boehner may have the most difficult job of any speaker in modern history.",REAL
+1016,"Could RNC delegates be bought? Legally, maybe","Washington (CNN) Buying votes is illegal. But, it turns out, buying delegates might not be.
+
+This summer's Republican National Convention is shaping up to be an all-out brawl for every delegate's vote -- and legally, that could mean plying some of them with gifts, experts say.
+
+There are federal and state laws prohibiting bribery of elected officials -- and restrictions on campaigns themselves -- but there isn't much on the books governing what private citizens serving as delegates at their parties' conventions can take in exchange for their votes on a nominating ballot. And in a fight between Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and perhaps an alternative not currently in the race, every delegate vote will matter.
+
+""I think the legal term is s*** show,"" said Ken Gross, an election law specialist at Skadden and former associate general counsel of the Federal Election Commission. ""I think it's going to be a circus, to say the least.""
+
+The GOP candidates are battling to win the 1,237 delegates needed to win the party's nomination and avert a floor fight in July at the convention in Cleveland. Trump holds a lead of 739 delegates to 466 for Cruz and 145 for Kasich, according to a CNN estimate.
+
+Opponents of Trump are especially worried about the potential resources of the billionaire businessman.
+
+Trump's senior adviser, Barry Bennett, has indicated the campaign is exploring how to bring delegates to its side but made clear there is a limit.
+
+""There's obviously a big line -- we're not going to do anything immoral, illegal or unethical,"" Bennett told CNN. ""Most of the time all they want is some access to the candidate or a visit to their state. It's just a prioritization on your schedule, nothing more heavy than that.""
+
+""We're not offering seats on the Trump airplane or anything like that,"" he offered, saying that the type of person who would seek such a deal wouldn't be a delegate the campaign would want.
+
+He also doubted other campaigns would engage in such tactics.
+
+Of course, campaigns and candidates are not the only entities that have funds they are looking to spend on a political process — and the rules and scrutiny on those outside groups and individuals are much murkier.
+
+There are a variety of laws and regulations that could come into play for delegates going to this year's convention. Elected officials are bound by so-called honest services statutes, and party officials also are restricted by their role.
+
+But many of the thousands of individuals who will be trekking to Cleveland as one of the 2472 delegates with a vote on nominee will be private citizens, eager to engage in what is shaping up to be a historic contest.
+
+Aside from the limits of who can give, the FEC is mostly silent on what delegates may or may not accept. And it doesn't speak to any sort of negotiation for positions in an administration or, say, the promise of reciprocal campaign support.
+
+The Republican National Committee rules are also quiet on what can be done to curry favor with delegates, but the party pointed to the need to comply with FEC rules.
+
+""The RNC rules do not specifically address this, however there are FEC implications once you start expending money related to attempts to influence a federal election,"" RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said. ""It is up to the individual delegates and campaigns to ensure that they are in compliance with any applicable federal regulations.""
+
+Part of the murkiness is simply the novelty of the race. There hasn't been a contested convention in decades, since Ronald Reagan challenged the incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1976, and most people involved in the process haven't witnessed one in their professional lives.
+
+Though Trump is far ahead in the delegate count, there is serious doubt he will be able to reach the majority mark needed to clinch the nomination outright. And that could mean that after two ballots at the convention, as many as 8 in 10 delegates could become unbound from their state votes -- freeing them to vote for whomever they wish.
+
+The catch, legal experts say, is that a ballot at a party convention is not the same thing as a vote in a local or federal election. And horse-trading is de rigueur in politics.
+
+""If you're going to hand somebody a grease-stained sandwich bag filled with cash under a table, you better hope nobody's got a cell phone nearby who's videotaping it,"" said Richard E. Berg-Andersson, a researcher and historian for The Green Papers blog, which covers the nominating process in depth. ""As for positions, that's historical. There were always delegates who wanted better support if they were running for a congressional seat, especially if they were already party operatives or politicians. That's actually part of the political process. In fact, I don't even really think it's unethical.""
+
+""This is kind of uncharted, but I think a lot of the discussions and deals that are cut are more political in nature rather than monetary,"" said Michael Toner, a partner at Wiley Rein and former FEC chairman.
+
+Any candidate, individual or super PAC looking to curry favor with delegates would have to pay attention to all 50 states' laws and every state party's rules.
+
+But several state party chairmen interviewed by CNN were not aware of any explicit prohibitions on accepting gifts or travel help.
+
+""There aren't many rules or laws on this issue,"" acknowledged South Carolina GOP Chairman Matt Moore. ""I have said the process should be above board and honest and transparent. I highly discourage our delegates to take anything in exchange for their votes -- it's a slippery moral and legal slope.""
+
+But he's limited to those powers of verbal persuasion, he said.
+
+""That's all you can do, beyond electing an honest and fair set of delegates,"" he said.
+
+The question, then, will come down to those 2,472 men and women, a few of whom when contacted by CNN immediately ruled out accepting any material support.
+
+Tom Lundstrum, a former Arkansas state GOP rules chairman who served on the 2012 RNC rules committee, is running to be one of Cruz's delegates. He said he hoped campaigns and independent entities couldn't do much to influence delegates.
+
+""I would hope that there's very little they can do,"" he said. ""They couldn't do anything for me. I have heard that it is OK for campaigns to pay the travel expenses of their delegates to the convention. But beyond that, I don't know.""",REAL
+9083,Exploding E-Cigarette Engulfs Man in Flames on CCTV Footage,"posted by Eddie More evidence has emerged that e-cigarettes can be bad for your health after a French nightclub manager suffered second-degree burns when the vaping device in his pocket dramatically exploded. Terrifying CCTV footage from outside the Toulouse club shows Amine Britel suddenly being engulfed by flames as he chats to fellow smokers. Two men rush to his aid, frantically attempting to put out the fire while Britel leaps about in panic. 
+
+Moments earlier, he could be seen vaping on the e-cigarette before placing it back in his trouser pocket. While the flames were brought under control within a matter of seconds, Britel was left with significant burns to his hand and hip area “I heard what sounded like a firecracker but ten times louder,” he said of the incident which occurred in late October. “After the shock of the explosion, I realized I had caught on fire.” He believes the e-cigarette’s hot battery came into contact with coins in his pocket and the resulting sparks caused the explosion. Though the name of the device’s manufacturer has not been disclosed, Britel confirmed he has reported the incident to the China-based firm. 
+The Toulouse case is the latest in a string of serious incidents involving e-cigarettes in recent years. In February 2016 a woman in Bayonne suffered burns when the device she was using suddenly caught fire inside her car. The flames went on to engulf and destroy three other nearby vehicles. In 2014 a man in Merseyside, England died when the e-cigarette charging in his bedroom exploded, igniting the oxygen concentrator he was using. Earlier this year a 19-year-old man working at a California convenience store was treated for burns when the e-cigarette he was carrying in his pocket exploded, propelled itself 15ft (6 meters) into the air and tore his pants to the knee. CCTV footage has also captured the moment a charging e-cigarette exploded right in the face of a barmaid in the UK in 2014. From Around the Web Founder of WorldTruth.Tv and WomansVibe.com Eddie ( 8981 Posts ) 
+Eddie L. is the founder and owner of www.WorldTruth.TV. and www.Womansvibe.com. Both website are dedicated to educating and informing people with articles on powerful and concealed information from around the world. I have spent the last 36+ years researching Bible, History, Alternative Health, Secret Societies, Symbolism and many other topics that are not reported by mainstream media.",FAKE
+4755,Mike Pence won the debate by throwing Donald Trump under the bus,"Republican Party elected officials in contested races around the country have been grappling with a basic but profound issue all year — how do you stand up for the GOP and conservative principles and against Hillary Clinton without getting sucked into defending every crazy, offensive, or weird thing Donald Trump has said? It can be a tough line to walk, as New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte learned this week.
+
+Debating Tim Kaine Tuesday night, Mike Pence taught a master class in how it’s done. Every time Kaine attacked, Pence parried and deftly shifted the conversation to something else entirely.
+
+When Kaine demanded that Pence defend Trump’s secrecy on his taxes, Pence ducked and talked about how low taxes are good for economic growth. When Kaine offered an extended list of Trump insults that he said he couldn’t believe Pence would defend, Pence didn’t defend them — he pivoted to complaining about Clinton and the “basket of deplorables.” Pence was tight, disciplined, and focused on his talking points. He never took the bait, never let himself get dragged into unfavorable terrain, and simply ignored subjects he didn’t want to discuss.
+
+It was a genuinely bravura performance, one that a passel of GOP senators and Congress members running in tough races ought to study. The problem is Trump is at the top of the ticket.
+
+The crowning moment of the debate came at around 9:45 pm, when Kaine launched into a devastating foreign policy attack on Donald Trump:
+
+Donald Trump cannot start a Twitter war with Miss Universe without shooting himself in the foot. He does not have a plan. He said ""I have a secret plan,"" and then he said, ""I know more than all the generals about ISIL,"" and finally he said, ""I am going to fire all the generals."" He does not have a plan. He trash talks the military, John McCain is no hero, the generals need to be fired, I know more than them. NATO is obsolete. And third, he loves dictators. He has a personal Mount Rushmore of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Saddam Hussein. He believes — Donald Trump believes that the world will be safer if more nations have nuclear weapons. He said Saudi Arabia should get them, Japan should get them, and Korea should get them. When he was confronted with this, he said, ""Go ahead, folks, enjoy yourselves."" I would like Gov. Pence to say what is so enjoyable or comical about nuclear war.
+
+Pence simply could not and would not defend any of this. Instead, he tried to deflect, saying, “That had a lot of creative lines in it.”
+
+Kaine pressed again: “See if you can defend any of it?”
+
+I want to give this president credit for bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, but the truth is, Osama bin Laden led al-Qaeda. The primary threat today is ISIS. Because Hillary Clinton failed to renegotiate a forces agreement that would have allowed some American combat troops to remain in Iraq and secure the hard-fought gains that the American soldier has won, ISIS was able to be literally conjured up out of the desert, and it has overrun vast areas. My heart breaks for the likes of Corporal Lebowski. He fought hard, through some of the most difficult days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and paid the ultimate sacrifice to secure the nation. That nation was secured in 2009. Because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama failed to provide a status of forces agreement and leave sufficient forces, we are back at war. We are back at war in Iraq. [...]
+
+It was a deftly executed move. And while the substance of the critique is somewhat unfair, it’s not crazy. The Obama administration’s attempted withdrawal from Iraq pretty clearly has not worked out nearly as well as it hoped.
+
+But Pence utterly failed to take up Kaine’s challenge to defend Trump’s affection for Putin, dislike of NATO, or willingness to entertain nuclear proliferation. Pence simply shrugged off the entire reality of Trump’s 2016 campaign and slammed Obama, Clinton, and Kaine as soft on Russia — a smooth extension of the foreign policy messages of John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
+
+If Kaine and Pence had been debating for an Ohio Senate seat, any fair-minded person would have to conclude that Pence won in a landslide. He was focused on his key points, while Kaine was focused on dragging the conversation into personal attacks on a man who wasn’t even standing on the stage.
+
+The problem, obviously, is that they aren’t running for an Ohio Senate seat.
+
+They’re running for vice president. Or at least Tim Kaine is. That’s why he loyally defended Clinton when Pence hit the Clinton Foundation issue instead of pivoting away to his own talking points. He played the somewhat awkward role of loyal number two. Pence, by contrast, focused on making Mike Pence look good and happily left Trump’s eccentricities on the cutting board.
+
+For Republicans sitting at home, Pence’s largely effective performance should serve as a powerful reminder that a generic Republican candidate would probably win the 2016 election. Trump, by contrast, is losing currently, has been losing from the beginning, and probably will lose in the end.
+
+When he does, Republicans will be searching for their next nominee. When they do, they’ll see that Pence — the guy I used to think they would pick for 2016 — doesn’t quite have the pizzazz or superstar quality of a Donald Trump, but he’s also a much better, more focused, more disciplined, less crazy politician. The kind of guy who could actually win.",REAL
+9049,"Syrian War Report – November 2, 2016: ISIS and Al-Nusra Attempt to Cut Off Govt Supply Line to Aleppo","SouthFront Syrian War Report Leave a Reply 1 Comment on ""Syrian War Report – November 2, 2016: ISIS and Al-Nusra Attempt to Cut Off Govt Supply Line to Aleppo"" Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. JJ Today 8:31 pm 
+Russia truth Facebook has a post re australiannationalreview.com. via conservative daily post .publishing a Wikipedia full list of isis contributors, donors to Clinton…and Obama…… Claiming that in exchange for donations….isis was set up, supported by them for usa purposes……. Not only but also… Iraq has threatened to dismantle Turkey should it invade…..Turkey is currently building an airbase in northeast Syria..and says it’s deployment of tanks to Iraqi borders is only for self protection……could get tricky folks….remember Syria has said any Turkish planes unauthorised in Syrian airspace will be shot down too. Reply - Share",FAKE
+8315,Bush Admin Just Got Involved In FBI’s Probe Into Clinton’s Emails And It’s Game Changing (IMAGE) – New Century Times,"Share on Facebook 
+When you imagine partisan government overreach, it’s hard not to think about the Bush administration, especially when it comes to ignoring the law to accomplish their goals (think “enhanced interrogation”). When they tell the FBI they’ve gone too far, well, the FBI had better listen. 
+In an Op-Ed in the New York Times , Richard Painter, George W. Bush’s White House ethics lawyer from 2005 – 2007, wrote about his problems with the FBI’s latest investigation of Hillary Clinton and, most surprisingly, he’s taking legal action to stop it. According to Painter, it’s an abuse of power. 
+(I)t would be highly improper, and an abuse of power, for the F.B.I. to conduct such an investigation in the public eye, particularly on the eve of the election. It would be an abuse of power for the director of the F.B.I., absent compelling circumstances, to notify members of Congress from the party opposing the candidate that the candidate or his associates were under investigation. It would be an abuse of power if F.B.I. agents went so far as to obtain a search warrant and raid the candidate’s office tower, hauling out boxes of documents and computers in front of television cameras. 
+The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election. 
+Beyond that, Painter says it’s against the law, the Hatch Act in particular, to try to influence the outcome of an election. On that basis, Painter is taking action. George W. Bush's ethics lawyer filed a complaint yesterday against the FBI for violations of the Hatch Act. Via NYT: https://t.co/cXbs2xFYxj pic.twitter.com/3FbVRCPTyi 
+— Nick Gourevitch (@nickgourevitch) October 30, 2016 
+And that is why, on Saturday, I filed a complaint against the F.B.I. with the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations, and with the Office of Government Ethics. I have spent much of my career working on government ethics and lawyers’ ethics, including two and a half years as the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, and I never thought that the F.B.I. could be dragged into a political circus surrounding one of its investigations. Until this week. 
+The Hatch Act specifically prohibits government officials, with the exception of the President, the Vice President and a handful of others from engaging in political activities. Painter is particularly concerned about the fact that FBI director James Comey has made comments about Hillary Clinton in the past, such as his statement that Clinton’s handling of classified information was “extremely careless.” 
+What seems “extremely careless” is the way Comey has handled this investigation. 
+On Friday, the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, sent to members of Congress a letter updating them on developments in the agency’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, an investigation which supposedly was closed months ago. This letter, which was quickly posted on the internet, made highly unusual public statements about an F.B.I. investigation concerning a candidate in the election. The letter was sent in violation of a longstanding Justice Department policy of not discussing specifics about pending investigations with others, including members of Congress. According to some news reports on Saturday, the letter was sent before the F.B.I. had even obtained the search warrant that it needed to look at the newly discovered emails. And it was sent days before the election, at a time when many Americans are already voting. 
+Painter notes that Comey’s intent doesn’t matter. He violated the rules simply by taking the actions that could influence the election and frankly, there was no reason for Comey to release those emails, which aren’t even directly tied to Clinton, now. 
+He finished his op-ed with a dire warning to Americans: 
+This is no trivial matter. We cannot allow F.B.I. or Justice Department officials to unnecessarily publicize pending investigations concerning candidates of either party while an election is underway. That is an abuse of power. Allowing such a precedent to stand will invite more, and even worse, abuses of power in the future. 
+Painter isn’t alone in sharing this concern about Comey. Before these latest emails, Politico published an op-ed comparing Comey to the notorious J. Edgar Hoover , who was the first FBI director, who was perhaps best known for using questionable tactics to bring down dissidents. 
+Since taking office, Comey has repeatedly injected his views into executive branch deliberations on issues such as sentencing reform and the roots of violence against police officers. He has undermined key presidential priorities such as crafting a coherent federal policy on cybersecurity and encryption. Most recently, he shattered longstanding precedent by publicly offering his own conclusions about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email. (The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.) 
+It would be difficult to argue—in terms of temperament, manner, or motivation—that he is, or ever will be, the next J. Edgar Hoover. But increasing numbers of critics believe he has displayed a worrying disregard for the rules and norms that have constrained all but one of his predecessors, straying with blithe confidence—and with increasing regularity—across the fine line that separates independence from unaccountability. 
+If nothing else, this election year has shown us something completely unprecedented and completely undemocratic. It’s not just that Comey is influencing the election, he’s using emails stolen by a foreign government to influence an election. As Donald Trump says, this is “ worse than Watergate ,” just not in the way Trump thinks. ",FAKE
+3439,Obama should act with restraint on court: Jonathan Turley,"A recess appointment to fill the Scalia vacancy would cement the president's troubling legacy of going it alone.
+
+The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has served to highlight the divisions that characterize so much in Washington. First, and foremost, the Supreme Court itself has long been as divided as the country itself. Split 4-4 with a conservative-leaning swing voter — Justice Anthony Kennedy — as a frequent tiebreaker, in Scalia's absence the court is left in a dead heat in areas ranging from affirmative action to union dues to abortion.
+
+Scalia was a critical part of the 5-4 conservative majority in a litany of major cases. However, it is the division in the Senate that could produce the next constitutional crisis. Faced with a refusal of the Republican senators to move forward with a nominee for the court in the last year of the Obama Administration, President Obama could use the nuclear option: a recess appointment to the Supreme Court.
+
+Under Article II of the U.S. Constitution a president is allowed to temporarily fill vacancies that “may happen during the Recess of the Senate.”  I have long been a critic of recess appointments to the judiciary. While far less common than appointments to the Executive Branch, such appointments have occurred historically (including 12 to the Supreme Court).Yet judicial recess appointments undermine the integrity of the courts by using the equivalent of a judicial temp for a position that was meant to be held by a jurist with lifetime tenure.
+
+The framers wanted a president and the Senate to come to an accord on such appointments, including the need to compromise to achieve such goals. Obama, however, made it clear years ago that he was willing to go it alone when Congress failed to give him legislation or confirmations that he demanded. His unilateral actions have already produced a constitutional crisis over the fundamental guarantees of the separation of powers. This includes a unanimous 2014 decision of the Supreme Court that Obama violated the recess appointments clause in his circumvention of the Senate.
+
+For a president who has shown a tendency to “go it alone” when denied action by Congress, a recess appointment may prove an irresistible temptation for Obama. The Republican leadership has already signaled that it has no intention of moving forward with such a nomination, objecting that (in 80 years) no president has moved such a nomination within his final year in office. While there is ample time to vote on a nominee, the president could make an appointment if his nominee is denied or if his nominee is left to languish in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
+
+The Republicans may have unnecessarily tripped the wire by saying that they would not move forward on a nomination as opposed to slow walking and rejecting a nomination. The failure to even consider the nominee could give the president the rationale for a recess appointment. Ironically, the justice who tended to favor executive assertions of power and limit the ability of Congress to challenge such assertions was Antonin Scalia.
+
+The president could claim that his power is in full effect with the current recess of the Senate. He could also claim such authority with the end of the annual session. Generally, the authority to make a recess appointment has been recognized with a recess of greater than three days. The Senate can avoid that trigger by remaining in technical session with little or no business being transacted. That could push the target recess to the end of the session where Obama would make the appointment before the next Congress assembles in January — an appointment made in literally the waning days of his term.
+
+I happen to think Obama is well within his rights to make the nomination. As hockey great Wayne Gretzky said, you miss every shot that you never take. And this is a shot most presidents would take. If blocked, however, Obama should recognize that a new president will enter office in a matter of months (or weeks with an end-of-session appointment) with a national mandate. Such a decision would undermine the integrity of the court with a display of raw muscle by a departing president. It would cement Obama’s troubling legacy as a president who waged an unrelenting campaign against the separation of powers that is the foundation of our constitutional system. The difference between a statesman and a politician is often the exercise of restraint. It is not enough to say that you can do something, but whether you should do something. This is something Obama should not do.
+
+Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. He has written and testified before Congress on the role and limits of recess appointments.
+
+In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.",REAL
+3241,AP Interview: Santorum Undecided About 2016 Bid,"The once and perhaps future presidential candidate Rick Santorum has lots of policy ideas for fellow Republicans seeking public office.
+
+He's just not sure he'll be one of those hopefuls ever again.
+
+""Yeah, I don't know if I can do this. It's just tough,"" Santorum said about another White House run.
+
+The former Pennsylvania senator tells The Associated Press in an interview that he isn't ruling out a 2016 candidacy.
+
+But, he says, there are plenty of reasons why he wouldn't do it.
+
+He is enjoying a second career as a movie studio executive. His daughter's health remains a concern.
+
+And, Santorum writes in a new book, he can help shape his party's future from offstage.
+
+In the interview, Santorum said the GOP will struggle to win races unless candidates came up with policies that help working Americans.
+
+Victories will be tough, he said, unless elected officials stop being obstructionists.
+
+Santorum said the libertarian streak running through his party distorts the definition of freedom, and that politicians wrongly look to President Ronald Reagan's policies to address today's challenges.
+
+Then there's Santorum's slap at Republicans who demonize social welfare programs.
+
+""Do Republicans really care less about the person at the bottom of the ladder than Democrats do? To be painfully honest, I would have to say in some ways 'yes,'"" Santorum writes in his book, ""Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works.""
+
+The tough talk raises questions about Santorum's viability in what could be a crowded 2016 primary field.
+
+Also, he's not rushing to camp out in early nominating Iowa or New Hampshire again.
+
+""A while. A year at least, probably,"" he said of his timeline to decide on a 2016 bid.
+
+Santorum ran an upstart campaign in 2012, surviving long enough to be Mitt Romney's last remaining rival. He struggled to raise money or support among establishment-minded Republicans, but his socially conservative profile drew enough backing for Santorum to pick up victories in 11 states.
+
+Even in victory, his disorganized campaign cost him, including failing to qualify for the ballot in Virginia.
+
+""We cannot run the campaign we ran last time if we run this time,"" Santorum said.
+
+How Republicans win is the focus of Santorum's latest book, to be released Monday.
+
+Santorum offers ideas on energy, education, the economy and health care. It comes across as part think tank policy paper, part campaign playbook and part communications advice on how to connect with working-class voters.
+
+For instance, Republicans should not focus exclusively on business leaders and ""job creators"" and should speak to employees, Santorum said.
+
+Anxiety among those voters remains high, and Republicans have for too long talked to the top earners and not the workers.
+
+""A rising tide lifts all boats — unless your boat has a hole in it. A lot of Americans, we've got holes in our boats,"" Santorum said. ""Millions and millions of Americans (are) out there who want good lives but have holes in their boats. ... They just see the water level going up and their boat sinking.""
+
+That's why, he argues, candidates need to put forward policies to help those voters.
+
+""I'm looking at 2014 and I'm thinking the Republican Party is heading toward No-ville, which is 'we're against this, we're against that, we're against this.' We're not painting a positive vision for America,"" Santorum said in the interview.
+
+After the 2012 campaign, he signed on as CEO of EchoLight Studies, which produces movies rooted in faith and family.
+
+""I saw an opportunity to do something in the space where we need to have movies that have a faith message in them that are better than the movies that have been done,"" Santorum said.
+
+At home, 5-year-old daughter Bella keeps Santorum busy. She has a genetic disorder, Trisomy 18, which causes brain, heart and internal organ developmental abnormalities. Almost all children die within the first year of life.
+
+Bella turns 6 in May and the senator is at work on a book about his daughter. Her difficult nights have sometimes kept Santorum at her bedside.
+
+Santorum said family issues would drive his decision to run or not, and Bella would be a key factor.
+
+His other six other children, Santorum said, are ""all very open to dad doing this again.""
+
+But Santorum isn't rushing into anything. A primary might feature the libertarian wing of the party, led in part by two prominent tea partyers, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas.
+
+""There's a strain within the Republican Party now that smacks of the no-government conservatism,"" Santorum said. ""That wasn't Ronald Regan. It wasn't Teddy Roosevelt. It wasn't Abraham Lincoln. It wasn't any Republican that I'm aware of. It wasn't Calvin Coolidge. And yet there seems to be this creation of this strain of conservatism that has no basis in conservatism.""
+
+Santorum said Republicans should respect Reagan, but he doubted the former president would offer the same policies today that he did during the 1970s and 1980s.
+
+Santorum also includes plenty of incendiary rhetoric in his book that he acknowledges could haunt him should he run again.
+
+In addition to the sentence about Republicans and social safety nets, Santorum writes that poor voters ""took their lie about sex without consequences as gospel"" and calls climate change a ""hyped-up crisis.""",REAL
+295,House GOP obsessed with Boehner's future,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+9522,"The Oil-Gas War Over Syria, in Maps","The Oil-Gas War Over Syria, in Maps Eric Zuesse Turkey’s Anadolu News Agency, though government-run, is providing remarkably clear and reliable diagrammatic descriptions of the current status of the U.S-and-fundamentalist-Sunni, versus Russia-and-Shia-and-NON-fundamentalist-Sunni, sides, in the current oil-and-gas war in the Middle East, for control over territory in Syria, for construction of oil-and-gas pipelines through Syria supplying fuel into the world’s largest energy-market: Europe. Russia is now the dominant supplier of both oil and gas, but its ally Iran is a Shiite gas-powerhouse that wants to share the market there, and Russia has no objection. Qatar is a Sunni gas-powerhouse and wants to become the main supplier of gas there, and Saudi Arabia is a Sunni oil-powerhouse, which wants to become the major supplier of oil, but Saudi oil and Qatari gas would be pipelined through secular-controlled (Assad’s) Syria, and this is why the U.S. and its fundamentalist-Sunni allies, the Sauds, and Qataris, are using Al Qaeda and other jihadists to conquer enough of a strip through Syria so that U.S. companies such as Halliburton will be able safely to place pipelines there, to be marketed in Europe by U.S. firms such as Exxon. Iran also wants to pipeline its gas through Syria, and this is one reason why Iran is defending Syria’s government, against the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-jihadist invasion, which is trying to overthrow and replace Assad. Here are the most-informative of Anadolu’s war-maps: The first presents the effort by many countries to eliminate ISIS control over the large Iraqi city of Mosul. A remarkably frank remark made in this map is “An escape corridor into Syria will be left for Daesh [ISIS] so they can vacate Mosul”— an admission that the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari team want the ISIS jihadists who are in Mosul to relocate into Syria to assist the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari effort there to overthrow and replace the Assad government: The second is about the Egyptian government’s trying to assist the Syrian government’s defense against the Saudi-U.S.-Qatari invasion of Syria, at Aleppo, where Syria’s Al Qaeda branch is trying to retain its current control over part of that large city. The Saud family are punishing the Egyptian government for that: Here is Russia’s proposed gas-pipeline, which would enable Russia to reduce its dependence upon Ukraine (through which Russia currently pipelines its gas into Europe). Obama conquered and took over Ukraine in February 2014 via his coup that overthrew the democratically elected neutralist Ukrainian President there : In addition, there is the following map from oil-price.com : That map shows the competing Shia (Russia-backed) and Sunni (U.S.-backed) gas-pipelines into Europe — the central issue in the invasion and defense of Syria. On 21 September 2016, Gareth Porter headlined “The War Against the Assad Regime Is Not a ‘Pipeline War’,” and he pointed out some errors in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s account that had been published under the headline “Syria: Another Pipeline War” . Porter argued: “It’s easy to understand why that explanation would be accepted by many anti-war activists: it is in line with the widely accepted theory that all the US wars in the Middle East have been ‘oil wars’ — about getting control of the petroleum resources of the region and denying them to America’s enemies. But the ‘pipeline war’ theory is based on false history and it represents a distraction from the real problem of US policy in the Middle East — the US war state’s determination to hold onto its military posture in the region.” Porter ignored the key question there, as to why “the US war state” has a “determination to hold onto its military posture in the region.” Opening and protecting potential oil-gas-pipeline routes are important reasons why. Clearly, Kennedy’s documentation that the CIA was trying as early as 1949 to overthrow Syria’s secular government so as to allow to the Sauds a means of cheaply transporting their oil through Syria into Europe, remains unaffected by any of the objections that Porter raised to Kennedy’s article. The recent portion of Kennedy’s timeline is affected, but not his basic argument. Furthermore, any military strategist knows that “the US war state” is intimately connected to the U.S. oil-and-gas industries, including pipelines (“oilfield services”) as well as marketing (Exxon etc.). And Porter got entirely wrong what that connection (which he ignored) actually consists of: it consists of U.S. government taxpayer-funded killers for those U.S. international corporations. Here is how Barack Obama put it , when addressing graduating cadets at West Point, America’s premier military-training institution: Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. And even as developing nations embrace democracy and market economies, 24-hour news and social media makes it impossible to ignore the continuation of sectarian conflicts and failing states and popular uprisings that might have received only passing notice a generation ago. It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world. The question we face, the question each of you will face, is not whether America will lead, but how we will lead — not just to secure our peace and prosperity, but also extend peace and prosperity around the globe. He was saying there that America’s military is in service to U.S.-based international corporations in their competition against those of Russia, Brazil, China, India, and anywhere else in which “rising middle classes compete with us.” Those places are what Gareth Porter referred to as “America’s enemies.” Economic competitors are “enemies.” Obama thinks that way, and even a progressive journalist such as Porter doesn’t place into a skeptical single-quotation-mark-surround, the phrase ‘America’s enemies’ when that phrase is used in this equational context. On both the right (Obama) and the left (Porter), the equation of a government and of the international corporations that headquarter in its nation — the treatment of the military as being an enforcement-arm for the nation’s international corporations — is simply taken for granted, not questioned, not challenged. RFK Jr. was correct, notwithstanding some recent timeline-errors. Syria is “Another Pipeline War,” and Obama is merely intensifying it. (On 9 November 2015, I offered a different account than RFK Jr. provided of the recent history — the Obama portion — of the longstanding U.S. aggression against Syria; and it links back to Jonathan Marshall’s excellent articles on that, and to other well-sourced articles, in addition to primary sources, none of which contradict RFK Jr.’s basic view, “Syria: Another Pipeline War.”). Another portion of Porter’s commentary is, however, quite accurate: America’s ‘Defense’ (or mass-killing-abroad) industries (such as Lockheed Martin) are not merely servants of the U.S. government, but are also served by the U.S. government: “the US war state’s determination to hold onto its military posture in the region” is protection of the major market — the Middle Eastern market — for U.S. ‘Defense’ products and services. It’s not only America’s firms in the oil, gas, and pipelines, industries, which benefit from America’s military; it is also America’s firms in the mass-killing industries, that do. To the extent that the public (here including Barack Obama and Gareth Porter) do not condemn the presumption that “the business of America is business,” or that a valid function of U.S.-taxpayer-funded military and other foreign-affairs operations is to serve the stockholders of U.S. international corporations, the hell (such as in Syria) will continue. Gareth Porter got lost among the trees because he failed to see (and to point to) that forest.",FAKE
+4301,"Trump, Bush, Fiorina: Three questions, three answers at second GOP debate","If they’d known the 2016 Republican contest would end up this way – a monument to one billionaire’s ego – CNN and its GOP partners could have switched Wednesday’s presidential debate from the Reagan Library to a more appropriate venue: Hearst Castle, just up the California coast.
+
+After all, William Randolph Hearst and Donald Trump have this much in common. Each ran for president (Hearst, as a Democrat, in 1904). Neither was a fan of those who habla español (Hearst cheerleading for the Spanish-American War). Both plutocrats would have you believe they cared about ordinary folks (Hearst’s slogan: “the people who work for a living”).
+
+Hearst turned out to be a political flop. And Trump? It’ll take a few more GOP debates to see what fate has in store for the man who builds not castles but towers and resorts bearing his name.
+
+There were three threshold questions going into Wednesday night’s festivities:
+
+1. Could the GOP’s troika of non-politicians – Trump, Dr. Ben Carson and business executive Carly Fiorina – show they’re more than a protest vote?
+
+2. Could former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush put forward a passion and wit that his friends insist he possesses, but he seems loath to display?
+
+3. Could Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a hot commodity earlier this summer, breath new life into a campaign that’s stalled in the early-primary states?
+
+The answers to those questions:
+
+1.  Trump showed no growth – same old Donald; same vagaries about domestic and foreign policy. Carson spoke only when spoken to, a startling low-key alternative to other attention-starved debaters (maybe it’s part of Carson’s strategy that social media trumps television). We’ll get to Fiorina in a moment.
+
+2.  Bush showed improvement over his performance in the Cleveland Fox News debate (granted, a low bar to clear). Two moments to remember: when he stood up to Trump and stood up for his brother (“he kept us safe”); at the end of the debate, when he chose “Eveready” as his Secret Service name (“it’s very high energy, Donald”). That should quell his nervous financial base – for now.
+
+3.  Another rough night for Walker, already not popular in California GOP circles for bailing on the state party’s convention. Back to Wisconsin for the governor and figuring what to do in Iowa.
+
+If we can call two occurrences a trend, then here’s a big problem with the GOP debates thus far. Instead of a level playing field for the candidates, imagine a radial spoke with Trump at the center of the scheme. For the non-Donalds, the close-up moments tend to be Trump-related – and in a bad way (Bush, for example, asked to respond to Trump’s comments about his wife’s Mexican heritage). Is this because what Trump has to say is all that compelling, or are the moderators trying to keep the big audiences from clicking their remotes?
+
+And that leads us to Carly Fiorina, the star of the Reagan Library debate.
+
+Five weeks ago, I wrote this column about the former Hewlett-Packard executive after her bravura performance at the first of the two debates in Cleveland. Her performance that night jump-started her campaign, bumped her poll numbers and (with the candidate’s persistent shaming of CNN) landed her a spot in prime time.
+
+On Wednesday in Simi Valley, as in Cleveland, she aced it. No other GOP hopeful could match Fiorina’s depth and clear conciseness on defense strategy (missile defense, strengthen the 6th Fleet).
+
+No one was tougher on Hillary Clinton (who else could get away with repeatedly calling her a liar?). Fiorina had the good sense to handle the Trump face-slap with dignity – saying, in effect, that voters are smart enough to know what the man intended (Trump’s feeble attempt to close out that segment by saying he thought she was attractive? Maybe his flattest moment of the night).
+
+Bonus points for Fiorina: she was the only one of the bunch who didn’t pander to the question about a new face on the $10 bill, spinning it into a call for women to be recognized as equals, not an interest group.
+
+Trump, in fact, had several flat moments – taking a swipe at Rand Paul’s hair; saying he didn’t mean to slur Columba Bush, then refusing to apologize to her in person. Most disturbing of all: the ideas cupboard is still lightly stocked.
+
+Does this mean we’ve reached the end of Trump Fever? One doubts it. The GOP is headed for an uncomfortable stretch during which the party will be at odds with itself over government shutdowns, Planned Parenthood funding and fallout from the Iran deal. That’s fuel for the fire for an anti-politician like Trump (it might also give Texas Sen. Ted Cruz a needed boost).
+
+Besides, Trump is good for ratings, which might be why CNN began the debate with an uncomfortable Donald-related question (as did Fox News in its debate). But CNN took matters a step further: clumping the candidates close together; keeping them on the stage for long stretches between bathroom breaks, preventing candidates from speaking for long stretches – all ways to elevate tension.
+
+Maybe Trump isn’t going away anytime soon. But on Wednesday night, there were signs that the act’s beginning to wear thin.
+
+And Carly Fiorina? On the debate stage, she wears it well.
+
+Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
+2490,Senate votes to block 'sanctuary cities' bill after tense debate on floor,"The Senate on Tuesday voted to block the controversial legislation cracking down on the so-called ""sanctuary cities"" that shield residents from federal immigration authorities.
+
+Following an impassioned speeches by Texas' Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and New Jersey's Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez arguing, respectively, for and against the Sanctuary Cities Bill, the Senate voted 54-46 against the legislation.
+
+The bill has divided Congress along partisan lines and gained national attention in the wake of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's harsh words on immigration and the shooting death of a California woman over the summer by an undocumented immigrant.
+
+""We are witnessing the most overtly nativist and xenophobic campaign in modern U.S. history,"" Menendez said on Tuesday. ""We've hit a new low with the extraordinarily hateful rhetoric that diminishes immigrants' contributions to American history — and particularly demonizes the Latino community by labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.""
+
+The bill, which went up for procedural vote on Tuesday, was authored by Louisiana Sen. David Vitter. It would have punished jurisdictions that prohibit the collection of immigration information or don't cooperate with federal requests, blocking them from receiving certain grants and funds.
+
+Republicans have pushed the bill since the July 1 shooting of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco. The man charged in the killing was in the country illegally despite a long criminal record and multiple prior deportations. The man, Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez, had been released by San Francisco authorities despite a request from federal immigration authorities to keep him detained.
+
+""Today, the Senate had an opportunity to send the message that defiance of our laws will no longer be tolerated,"" Cruz said in a press release after the vote. ""While Senate Democrats chose partisan loyalty over protecting the lives of Americans, I will continue fighting to stop illegal immigration.""
+
+ 
+
+ He added: ""Defiance of our immigration laws is inexcusable. Sanctuary cities and the illegal reentry offenders that they harbor are a threat to the safety of the American people. And they must end now.""
+
+Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said before the vote that the bill would threaten cities' ability to police and compared it to Republican presidential candidate Trump's comments earlier this year that some immigrants in the country illegally are ""criminals"" and ""rapists.""
+
+""This vile legislation might as well be called 'The Donald Trump Act,'"" Reid said.
+
+San Francisco and hundreds of other jurisdictions nationally have adopted policies of disregarding federal immigration requests, or ""detainers,"" which advocates say can unfairly target innocent immigrants and hurt relations between immigrant communities and law enforcement authorities.
+
+The House passed legislation similar to Vitter's bill this summer, which the White House also threatened to veto. In its veto threat of the Senate legislation, the White House said the bill could lead to mistrust between the federal government and local governments.
+
+The Obama administration has said that the best way to get at the problem is comprehensive immigration overhaul, something House Republicans have blocked for years.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Like us on Facebook
+
+ Follow us on Twitter & Instagram",REAL
+7142,Comment on Congress: Attorney General Lynch ‘Pleads Fifth’ on Secret Iran ‘Ransom’ Payments by marlene,"Print This entry was posted in Uncategorized . Bookmark the permalink . Leaked Audio Catches Clinton Red-Handed Talking About Rigging Elections → marlene 
+If she didn’t, she’d not only incriminate herself, but would have to incriminate obama and wind up as dead as his other victims. RockyMtn1776 
+THIS corrupt, inept and totally lawless administration is entirely the fault of the Obama voters. They wanted this so badly they voted for it TWICE ! They got their wish, the rest of us got screwed ! Bear Bear 
+Black Woman should be removed for Pleading on a Fifth. Many Moon ago, Indian got drunk on a Fifth of cheep white man whiskey Screw Buffalo Now Indian lands are populated with two-legged hippy with HAIR that look like buffalo and think about daily handouts from Obama and how Hillary will continue. Mollie Norris 
+Hacked Messages of #BlackLivesMatter Leader Reveal Obama Admin’s Plan for ‘Summer of Chaos’ and Martial Law July 8, 2016 
+“On June 11, 2016, a Twitterer who calls himself The Saint (@TheSaintNegro) tweeted a direct-message conversation on June 10 between KcKesson and another BLM leader Johnetta Elzie (Netta), in which the two discussed talking with Attorney General Loretta Lynch about plans to bring on martial law by causing chaos at the upcoming Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, PA, so as to keep Obama in office. JE: “Have you spoken with Mrs. Lynch [Attorney General Loretta Lynch] recently about the plan for the summer and fall leading up to the elections.” 
+DM: “We spoke two weeks [ago] and they want us to start really pushing how racist Trump is now instead of waiting so the others can start getting the protesters ready to shut both conventions down.” 
+DM: “If we can get both conventions shut down for messing over Bernie and for having racist Trump, then get martial law declared so Obama can stay in office we will win. Call you soon when I get to my dads so I can use his landline and we can talk more on this.” 
+DM: “We have to make sure that we use our voices to keep people disrupting Trump all summer and through the fall so martial law can be declared.” Kingdom Ambassador 
+QUESTION: Had the18th-century founding fathers (like their 17th-century Christian Colonial predecessors) established government and society upon Yahweh’s moral law (including biblical qualifications for civil leaders), would any of those in Crime Hill’s den of thieves (donkeys and elephants alike) be in office today? 
+ANSWER: Of course not! 
+Consequently, there must be a definitive moment in America’s history when her Christian character and biblical course were formally altered. That point was in 1787 when the constitutional framers replaced the 17th-century Colonials governments of, by, and for God established upon His immutable moral law for their own humanistic government of, by, and for the people based upon capricious man-made Enlightenment and Masonic traditions. 
+For more regarding these two polar opposite forms of government, see online Chapter 3 “The Preamble: WE THE PEOPLE vs. YAHWEH”  pt3.html   Mollie Norris 
+I agree, and it also applies to Israel and the ME, but it actually began in 1776, when Illuminati/Zionist Code author Adam Weishaupt was banned from Bavaria and came to the US. The founders were Freemasons, an innocuous organization before Weishaupt added his Luciferian (above 30) levels of freemasonry. George Washington wrote of his fear that Weishaupt’s Illuminati, illuminated by Lucifer, had infiltrated US government. The Federalist Conspiracy , here http://www.hermes-press.com/completing.htm , 
+was an Illuminati conspiracy. Subscribe TODAY and Never Miss Another D.C. Clothesline Article Email Address",FAKE
+2743,Angry right’s secret playbook: How it uses a good story to peddle an agenda America hates,"This recent midterm election was my first real setback since I became a committed liberal (after years on the other side), and what I don’t understand is why so many well-meaning liberals refuse to fight dirty.  Sure, some Democratic politicians “sling mud,” but the “professional left” (as they are often derisively called) spend too much time debating the exactitude of certain issues and not enough time shutting down the bad ideas of the opposition. It might speak well to one’s character, but it’s an ineffective way to do battle. There is a place for self-examination, but it’s not on the battlefield. Sometimes the proper reaction to cruelty or stupid ideas is disgust or even a well-timed insult. For many on the left this art is sadly as dead as the late hero of mine quoted above.
+
+I got married, dropped out of college, joined the military and became a father all before I was 21 years old, and I spent the next 20 years dealing with my early missteps. It was a painful climb, but one benefit of the circuitous route I took is that I understand the angry, white and rural right wing of America better than most. It’s a group that grows ever more desperate and irrational no matter which way the electoral winds blow.
+
+As a member of the frothing right wing, I always spouted nonsense, even when I wasn’t sure I believed it. Sometimes I would throw out really crazy stuff just to see how it fit the big picture and sometimes to get a rise from the opposition. Rhetorical bomb throwing is well respected on the right, and it’s not always a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with trying out ideas, letting them roll off the tongue to see how they sound. I’m always playing with ideas, most of which get discarded before I let myself believe them or write them down. There is one caveat to this and that’s the racist, hateful and homophobic rants that have become too common among the worst of the Tea Party. This ugly side of conservative rage is one of the major factors that drove me (and many others) away from right-wing politics.
+
+When I lived conservative values, I attended many events with like-minded people. Conservative movements foster a herd mentality. Even when someone stood up to “lead,” he or she often regurgitated well-accepted talking points while crowds nodded in unison. Listen to talk radio or watch Fox News, and you can barely tally the number of times you hear, “yes, I think that’s true.” A perfect example of thoughtless regurgitation is when callers on talk radio mention “Saul Alinsky Democrats.” Still others like to sling the insult of “Obama’s Chicago political machine,” with no context whatsoever. I’m going to make the obvious point that few if any of these callers have read one word of Alinsky, and fewer still have any direct, pointed or even third-hand knowledge of “Chicago politics.” These goofy phrases have become totems of the insider, and like children, these listeners mindlessly repeat what someone else has said as if they had insight.
+
+Now that I’ve been in the liberal camp for a few years, I’ve noticed the complete opposite with the politically engaged left. They often identify as “contrarian.” They question everything and have a hard time taking a firm stand, even when 70% of the public is with them (on minimum wage, for instance). In an ideological battle, the tendency toward inclusion and reflection can become a handicap. As a side effect of all this soul-searching, the left becomes ineffectual at fighting even the worst excesses on the right. I’m boiling this down to a false dichotomy to illustrate a point. Of course there is every gradation of political belief on the right and left; yet our system itself is incapable of nuance, because only one side has even heard of the word.
+
+Most people know that individuals will suffer because of the results of the latest midterm election. People won’t get health care and some will lose food stamps. Discrimination will find a better foothold and the advance of science will lose ground. People I love, personally, will be vilified for being gay, because conservative voices of discrimination will feel empowered to act like jerks. Much of the latest loss stems from an inability to talk to regular people — especially working-class men — about liberal ideas. If Homer Simpson is America (he is), then liberals should learn to talk to him.
+
+Rich people have won over the white working class even though those same wealthy people don’t do shit for the working class, ever. The wealthy have bought elections and government, wholesale. Working-class Americans are scared, battered and desperate. They are ready to listen to liberal messages, but not if we act like “wimps.” The thing conservatives can’t stand the most is what they charmingly call “pussy liberals.” A white, conservative man would walk through hot coals or swallow shards of glass to prove to a stranger on the barstool next to him that he’s not one. (My wife, a nuanced liberal, vehemently objects when I use the term. As a feminist I totally understand. It’s offensive. But I didn’t create this usage. I’m only pointing it out.) One of the reasons I became a liberal is not only because they have better ideas but also because they are willing to reconsider them, sometimes ad infinitum. The debates and discussion and endless self-examination appeal to me, because of who I am. Liberals do a lot less yelling and a whole lot more making everyone feel welcome. Yet the same strength in debating, self-awareness and the Socratic Method are the enemies of a good story. The retired guy in a modest home on a fixed income defends the rights of billionaires to exploit him, because he’s been sold a narrative. The story matters, and Republicans spin a hell of yarn about America and “freedom,” even though most of it is bullshit or a straight-out rewriting of history. They talk about Jefferson, Madison and Washington, men who would despise the science-hating, ignorant and reactive group the right has become. But it doesn’t matter what or who you really stand for, it’s just a matter of what you can sell. People with a billion dollars in the bank who benefit from low taxes and who exploit American labor could give two shits about patriotism, but they sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as loud as possible while owning sprawling mansions in five countries. Alice Walton, Wal-Mart heiress and professional layabout, is hardly your relatable, average American. Certainly the left should be able to find an explanation for why her brand of capitalism is evil. If liberals want to win the war of ideas they can’t be afraid to use the word “evil.” If Ms. Walton is not an evil person, we should at least not be afraid to call the practices of Wal-Mart by that powerful and often factual label. Too harsh? Have you heard the dreck slung at immigrants lately? How about the word “traitor,” so easily thrown at the president almost daily, every day for six years? If you think those on the right are reasonable, wish one “happy holidays.” You might get your ass kicked. The worst part is that people do not prefer conservative ideas. In the last election they voted to increase the minimum wage in red states, to impose gun background checks and to legalize marijuana. The problem with all three of these issues is that Democrats refuse to stand up for them or do so only tepidly. They won’t fight, argue and, if necessary, insult the increasingly unbalanced platform of the opposition. I call on my fellow liberals to embrace the rough stuff. Engage in battle with people who hate you and feel free to throw crazy right back, even if you only half believe it. Let it out and taste it on the way by. See if it flies. If it doesn’t, screw it — just fix it up next time. Refer to your political opponent as “the honorable shithead from New Jersey.” Use the words, images and for god’s sake, the passion of the street. People who hate and fear you will always hate you unless they die out, change their minds or we can beat them in a heated contest of ideas. You’re not playing checkers — and they’re winning by giving zero shits about reality, so cut the crap and fight like you mean it.",REAL
+5966,6 Natural Herbs To Prevent Mental Disorders,"6 Natural Herbs To Prevent Mental Disorders Antioxidants are found to play an important part in this regard. Herbs having antioxidant properties cancel the effects of oxidative compounds that are already present in the body. Since our body is incapable of producing antioxidants that can cancel the effects of all the oxidative free radicals, these have to be taken in the form of dietary supplements. Many herbs have been used since ancient times, for the prevention and treatment of almost every disease known to man. They can either be encapsulated or taken in form of herbal teas. The good thing about herbal treatments is that they do not pose any serious threats to one’s health as they have minimal side effects. MULUNGU BARK Mulungu bark is used in Central and South America for calming the nerves, improving the mood and aiding sleep. Mulungu contains erythravine, an active alkaloid which helps in anxiety reduction and protecting brain function. The flavanoids found in Mulungu are one of the best antioxidants and help in having a healthier brain. They are found to inhibit anxiety without any side effects and do not affect basic motor skills. Another effect of Mulungu is the strong physical sensation of well being. It elevates the mood as well. It is known to be helpful with brain diseases like epilepsy, insomnia and anxiety. Studies have shown that all these diseases lead to major brain disorders and other brain degenerative diseases. Mulungu can be taken on its own or with a stimulant like green tea to amplify its effects. It gives mental clarity and improves brain function. MUCUNA PRURIENS Mucuna has been used in ayurvedic medicine since 1500 B.C and is also known as the velvet bean. Mucuna contains L.dopa which is a biochemical precursor to several neurotransmitters. Dopamine happens to be one of these neurotransmitters in addition to adrenaline and noradrenalin, and it supports improved brain function and increased memory. It also regulates the mood and cognition. Mucuna is widely known as an anti aging herb. The antioxidant properties make it anti inflammatory and effective towards the protection of neurons. It protects brain function by keeping a check over cognitive and neural functions. Mucuna’s secret benefit is that it fights redness in brain, which is one of the symptoms of brain degradation. PASSIFLORA INCARNATA (PASSION FLOWER) Passion flower, also called apricot vine, was found in 1956 in Peru. Passion flower is used in herbal medicines to promote calmness and relaxation. It is also found to be very helpful in reducing anxiety. In synergy with other forms of treatment, it is found to be effective in reducing anxiety, irritability, insomnia and agitation. It also helps with psychiatric disorder called adjustment disorder with anxious mood. Passion flower also helps with sleep disorders and seizures. The best way to take passion flower is, as an herbal tea. According to the NYU Langone Medical Center, you should drink one cup of passion flower tea, three times a day. SCUTELLARIA LATERIFLORA (SKULLCAP) A natural tranquilizer, Skullcap is an American perennial herb found from New York to Virginia and southwards to South Carolina, Alabama and Missouri. Skullcap is a very powerful medicinal herb. It is used in treatments of many nervous related disorders like epilepsy, hysteria, insomnia and anxiety. It is also used in the treatment of ADD and a number of other nervous disorders. It is anti inflammatory, antispasmodic, febrifuge, sedative and tonic in nature. It contains volatile oils, tannins and scutellarins that are very helpful in mental disorders. Research suggests it possesses mood enhancing properties and protects brain against damaging effects caused by inflammation. According to HerbsList , Skullcap eases muscle spasms, muscle twitching and may help in ailments that involve involuntary limb movement, such as Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy. PIPER METHYSTICUM KAVA From the roots and stem of the piper methysticum plant, a non-alcoholic beverage is made. This herb is found in the islands of South Pacific. It is being used since the early 90’s as the herbal medicine for stress and anxiety. It contains kava lactones which are responsible for its psychoactive qualities. They work in the brain to produce non narcotic action against anxiety. Kava is beneficial for anxiety and doesn’t affect heart rate or blood pressure. Other disorders where Kava has been found beneficial are migraines, ADHD, psychosis, depression and chronic fatigue syndrome. GINSENG Ginseng, also called Panax ginseng, and is a widely used herbal remedy, all over the world. Its health benefits have been known for over thousands of years. It is used as a tonic to balance, stimulate and relax the nervous system. It brings strength and wisdom. Ginseng is an adaptogen. Adaptogens are known to make us more resilient to mental and physical stress. They reduce the stress hormone cortisol and increase the adrenal gland. Adaptogens can calm you down and boost your energy without over stimulation. It has the same relaxing effect and increased alertness as experiences after green tea. It helps in getting better sleep, increased energy levels and greater personal satisfaction. It is also helpful with the treatment of depression by regulating serotonin, dopamine and noreprinephrine. It works as brain booster and protector. It improves brain function and concentration. It helps with memory issues and protects against age related mental issues. Ginseng also works as an antioxidant and helps in protecting the brain cells against free radical damage. Increasingly large numbers of people are suffering from brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and Dementia . A number of medicines are also available to help with the symptoms, but they are heavy on the pocket and come with many side effects. These herbs have been in use since hundreds of years and do not pose any health threats. Continuous use of these herbs will ensure a healthy brain, strong enough to fight away any disease. By Alma Causey http://mobile.dudamobile.com/site/preventdisease/default?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpreventdisease.com%2Fnews%2F16%2F102516_6-Natural-Herbs-To-Prevent-Mental-Disorders.shtml#3037  ",FAKE
+9591,The Retirement Nightmare: “There Will Be Life Altering Ramifications For Those Who Can’t Or Won’t Adapt To New Realities”,"We live in a brave new world and change is coming whether we like it or not. Economies around the world are being centrally managed, technology is advancing at a rapid pace, and the human population continues to expand by the billions. The next 40 years could see super powers turn to third world countries, while formerly third world countries rise to become global influencers. We’re already seeing these effects around the world. 
+The time to prepare for these changes is now. Those who refuse to see the future or fail to understand the signs will be relegated to what Wealth Research Group calls the “perpetual poor.” 
+Like all tectonic changes in human history, there will be life altering ramifications for those who can’t or won’t adapt to new realities…No one is sure how this will all play out… what is certain is that you can’t afford to bury your head in the sand… Assuming responsibility and taking massive action is the only way to avoid being added to the perpetually poor who won’t have jobs, income or assets as this wave shifts the power structure of world finance in the next few years. 
+No matter your age – whether you are approaching retirement or just entering the workforce – the future will be difficult to navigate. Watch the following micro-documentary to understand what’s coming and how to position yourself for a global paradigm shift: 
+( Watch At Youtube ) 
+Article posted with permission from SHTFPlan Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . shares",FAKE
+120,"After S.C. police shooting, a radically different response (+video)","The swift action taken against a white police officer accused of fatally shooting an unarmed black man in South Carolina speaks to the compelling nature of the video, but also to how much has changed since Ferguson.
+
+A man holds a sign during a protest for the shooting death of Walter Scott at City Hall in North Charleston, S.C., Wednesday. Mr. Scott was killed by a North Charleston police office after a traffic stop on Saturday. The officer, Michael Slager, has been charged with murder.
+
+The Rev. Arthur Prioleau of Goose Creek, S.C., carried a sign at a rally in North Charleston, S.C., April 8, 2015. Demonstrators rallied on Wednesday against what they described as a culture of police brutality in South Carolina in the case of white officer Michael Slager, who was caught on video killing 50-year-old Walter Scott, a black man, by shooting Scott in the back as he ran away after a traffic stop. Slager was charged on Tuesday with murder in the death of Scott.
+
+This time, the fatal shooting of an apparently unarmed black man by a white police officer resulted in something different: a swift, decisive, and broad-based consensus that the officer should be charged with murder.
+
+A bystander video that surfaced Tuesday appears to show Patrolman 1st Class Michael Slager of North Charleston, S.C., shooting Walter Scott in the back after a routine traffic stop on Saturday. Mr. Scott was attempting to flee.
+
+Certainly, the compelling nature of the video evidence led to Mr. Slager being arrested, quickly charged by prosecutors, and then fired from the force.
+
+But the reaction by local authorities also hints at how much has changed in the seven months since a white police officer fatally shot a black teenager in the streets of Ferguson, Mo.
+
+There was no attempt to close ranks around the officer. Instead, the mayor and police chief visited the victim’s family on Wednesday morning and announced they would provide a police escort for Scott’s funeral. The mayor also issued an executive order that all the city’s police officers must start wearing body cameras.
+
+Slowly, and perhaps inconsistently, the wide latitude that society has long given police officers who say their lives are in danger is beginning to change.
+
+The victim’s father said on NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday that without the bystander video, “It would have never come to light. They would have swept it right under the rug, like they did with many others.”
+
+But the existence of the video, along with the momentum for reform spawned by a half-dozen other recent incidents from Los Angeles to Madison, Wis., – some with videos of their own – is threatening the traditional deference given to police.
+
+“There is – and police departments are starting to know this – there is a crisis of legitimacy,” says Jeannine Bell, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law who studies policing and hate crimes. “And this crisis does not help the difficult job that police officers already have of fighting crime and protecting citizens – it absolutely does not.”
+
+For the most part, the majority of white Americans have long given police the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the use of force. Combining data from 2011 to 2014, for example, a Gallup study last August found that nearly 60 percent of whites had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in police departments, ranking them just below the military and small businesses as the nation’s most trusted institutions. By contrast, only 37 percent of blacks expressed such confidence – a fact well known even before the incidents in Ferguson and New York.
+
+Charging a police officer with murder remains extremely rare. During the past five years, police in South Carolina have shot at 209 suspects, killing 79, according to a report in The State. Only three officers were accused of wrongdoing in these shootings, however, and none of them was convicted. Indeed, such numbers reflect the same picture from jurisdictions around the country, in which police officers are rarely charged when accused of misconduct.
+
+The police killings during the past year have shed light on a system, including grand jury procedures, that is run by police and prosecutors who work closely together on a day-to-day basis – a fraternity, one former prosecutor told the Monitor last year, that creates a “challenging environment for a prosecutor to seek an indictment, let alone a conviction, of a police officer.”
+
+It is this situation that is coming under such intense scrutiny now.
+
+“There is no question that people’s attitudes will continue to change with respect to police agencies and the presumed honesty of police officers, especially if laws don't change,” says Martin Lijtmaer, a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles, via e-mail. “Existing laws foster a culture of secrecy.”
+
+He notes that in California, defense attorneys have to overcome substantial hurdles to get a court to order the disclosure of misconduct complaints against police officers. “Even then,” he says, “the information one gets is limited and subject to burdensome protective orders which prevent wider disclosure.”
+
+Scathing reports this year by the Justice Department on the behavior and culture of several police departments and criminal justice systems have only added to the pressure.
+
+“The bottom line is, these incidents are a wake-up call, not just for law enforcement, but the community as well,” says Tod Burke, professor of criminal justice at Radford University in Virginia.
+
+A former Maryland police officer, Dr. Burke emphasizes the need for officer support, even in the face of public outcry.
+
+“But if the officer is in the wrong, the police agency needs to be the first to recognize it,” he says. “It shouldn’t take the public going, ‘Hey, your officers are messing up.’ It should be, ‘We’re messing up, and we need to correct it.’ ”",REAL
+10197,The Danger of Germany’s Current Account Surpluses,"by Yves Smith 
+Yves here. Germany seems determined to test the Eurozone experiment to destruction. As we’ve long said, it insists on contradictory aims: running large trade surpluses, not being willing to finance them, and not permitting high levels of fiscal spending to serve as another mechanism to provide for transfers to “deficit” countries. By contrast, people in New York and California don’t even think much about the fact that they are getting less out of the Federal government than they pay in taxes and are effectiely supporting consumption in places like Mississippi. 
+By Wouter den Haan, Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Centre for Macroeconomics, London School of Economics; Martin Ellison, Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford; Ethan Ilzetzki, Assistant Professor, London School of Economics; Michael McMahon, Associate Professor of the Department of Economics, University of Warwick; and Ricardo Reis, A.W. Phillips Professor of Economics, LSE. Originally published at VoxEU 
+The October 2016 expert survey of the Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM) and CEPR invited views from a panel of macroeconomists based across Europe on Germany’s trade surplus, its impact on the Eurozone economy, and the appropriate response of German fiscal policy. More than two-thirds of the respondents agree with the proposition that German current account surpluses are a threat to the Eurozone economy. A slightly smaller majority believe that the German government ought to increase public investment in response to the surpluses. 
+Germany posted a record-high current account surplus of 8.5% of GDP in 2015; indeed, the German surplus has overtaken China’s surplus as the largest in the world. Germany’s current account was slightly in deficit when the euro was created in the late 1990s, it steadily increased in the early 2000s and has continued to rise since the Global Crisis of 2008. Since 2010, the increase in the current account has been accompanied by fiscal surpluses, with the German government moving from a deficit of 4% of GDP in 2010 to a surplus of 1.2% in the first half of 2016. Global Imbalances 
+Through the prism of the trade balance, the current account surplus can be viewed as a symptom of Germany’s economic success. German exports increased from 30% of GDP in 2000 to 47% in 2015. But with imports at merely 39% of GDP, this implies that Germany is providing capital to the rest of the world at a very high rate. Indeed, German savings have increased from roughly 20% to nearly 30% of GDP, while domestic investment has remained roughly constant at around 20% of GDP. 
+One view, harking back to Keynes, is that such large capital flows could be very destabilising, particularly within a system of fixed exchange rates (or a currency union). The argument is that while countries with current account deficits may come under severe pressure to adjust, countries with surpluses face no corresponding pressures. 1 Keynes’s solution – which was part of the inspiration for the creation of the IMF – was that occasional exchange rate adjustments might be necessary in order to rebalance international credit flows. 
+A number of commentators have suggested that Germany’s large current account surpluses reflect such imbalances. Paul Krugman attributes the Eurozone crisis in part to Germany’s current account surplus. The capital flows that this current account financed dried up as the crisis unfolded. But the burden of the adjustment fell solely on the Eurozone periphery, which closed their current account deficits, without the aid of Germany where the current account has only increased. In this view, German fiscal surpluses are an international version of the paradox of thrift. 2 
+The IMF (2016) and the European Commission (2016) have both warned of the risks of Germany’s current account surpluses; and both have urged Germany to take actions to reduce its external surplus, for example, by increasing public investment. 
+While the nature of the Eurozone makes exchange rate adjustments impossible, the IMF reckons that Germany’s real exchange rate is now 15-20% undervalued (IMF 2016, p. 7). The US Treasury has gone so far as to add Germany to its ‘monitoring list’ of countries engaged in ‘unfair currency practices’, even though Germany does not have a national currency (US Treasury 2016). 
+In contrast, Jens Weidmann, President of the Bundesbank, has argued that German net capital outflows are primarily structural, resulting from Germany’s high level of economic development and ageing population. He also argues that the Eurozone’s common monetary policy allowed slower current account adjustments, thus mitigating the Eurozone crisis (Weidmann 2014). The German economics ministry claims that Germany’s surplus is “a sign of the competitiveness of the German economy and global demand for quality products from Germany”. 3 
+The first question in the October 2016 expert survey of the Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM) and CEPR addressed the question of whether large German surpluses are reasons for concern. 4 To focus the question, we asked the experts about its consequences for the Eurozone, but they were free to address wider implications in their comments. 
+Q1: Do you agree that German current account surpluses are a threat to the Eurozone economy? 
+
+
+Sixty-seven panel members answered this question and a large majority (69%) agree or strongly agree with the proposition. A number of panel members point to evidence of the risks of current account balances. Ricardo Reis (LSE), for example, says that “current account imbalances during 2000-08 played a central role in the Eurozone crisis of 2010-12” (see Obstfeld 2012 and Lane 2013). 
+Other panel members suggest that German current account surpluses are a symptom of the common European currency. Michael Wickens (Cardiff Business School and University of York) warns that “the main underlying problem is the single currency. Germany’s current account surplus reflects its competitiveness, but due to the single currency, it can’t appreciate against the Eurozone countries with chronic current account deficits. It is all reminiscent of the failures of the Bretton Woods system, which of course eventually collapsed due to currencies becoming misaligned.” 
+Simon Wren-Lewis (Oxford) agrees that “the surplus represents an undervalued real exchange rate in Germany, which requires more inflation in Germany relative to the rest of the Eurozone”. 
+Wouter Den Haan (LSE) suggests that the problem is exacerbated by conditions in the Eurozone periphery: “There is a very good chance that the Eurozone is in a bad equilibrium in which consumers do not spend because they are concerned about future earnings and firms are hesitant to hire workers and raise wages because they are concerned about demand for their products. Even if this is not behind the high savings rate in Germany, it does make this increase in precautionary savings more problematic in the periphery.” 
+A number of panel members (Charles Bean, LSE; Jonathan Portes, National Institute of Economic and Social Research) warn that Germany’s current account surplus is not uniquely a Eurozone problem, but is also large enough to contribute to the low global real interest rates. 
+The global dimension is also the main counter-argument of the panel members who think that the German current account is not a threat to Eurozone stability. Robert Kollman (Université Libre de Bruxelles) points out that “the German current account surpluses do not represent a threat to the Eurozone economy, because Germany trades more with the rest of the world than with the rest of the Eurozone”. 
+Pietro Reichlin (Università LUISS G. Carli) caveats his concern about the German current account with the view that “part of the surplus is due to exports to extra-European countries and these benefit some EU peripheral economies that are exporting intermediate inputs and parts to Germany”. 
+Others do not feel that there are theoretical grounds for concern about the German current account. Francesco Lippi (Università di Sassari) argues: “I do not see why the savings of my neighbour should be a problem for me. Rather, they are a potential source of financing my investment. I do not know a single reasonable model where current account surpluses are a problem.” 
+Robert Kollman points to research that the key shocks driving the German current account shocks are not central to the Eurozone’s ills (see Kollmann et al. 2015, 2016). Nezih Guner (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) agrees that German current account surpluses are structural: “current account surpluses partly reflect positive supply shocks (such as labour market reforms that lowered wages and made German economy more competitive) and the current demographic structure that results in high savings rates.” Germany’s Fiscal Policy 
+With exchange rate adjustment off the table within a currency union, the main policy recommendation to reduce Germany’s current account surplus has been a change in German fiscal policy. Martin Wolf points out that the current account surplus is driven primarily by an increase in the supply of savings of German households and thus reflects insufficient aggregate demand. 5 He warns that Germany isn’t carrying its weight in the global economy and has failed to contribute to global aggregate demand. 
+By this view, the German government’s move to fiscal surplus is a direct drag on the global recovery. The argument is that with interest rates at zero and other governments in worse fiscal positions, the German government should do more to contribute to European and global demand. 
+The IMF has called on Germany to “focus on raising potential growth and reinforcing rebalancing, which will also support the fragile recovery in the euro area”, including the use of fiscal resources to “boost high quality public investment”. 
+The European Commission concurs that “weak investment has contributed to the high and persistent current account surplus and poses risks for the future growth potential of the German economy”. The Commission joins the IMF in suggesting that “there continues to be fiscal space for higher public investment, while complying with the rules of the stability and growth pact”. 
+In contrast, Jens Weidmann suggests that an expansionary German fiscal policy will do little to spur demand in the Eurozone periphery as the import component of Germany public spending is merely 9%. And while Willem Buiter agrees that Germany’s current account surplus is excessive, he thinks that fiscal expansion may not be consistent with German inflation stability and that the European Central Bank should finance fiscal expansions elsewhere. 6 
+The second question in our survey asked the experts whether the current account imbalance is a reason for the German government to increase public spending. We were not asking whether public spending should increase for other reasons (say low interest rates), although current conditions may – of course – affect the answers given. 
+The question was explicitly conditioned on the fact that Germany is part of the Eurozone and we asked the respondents to answer from the point of view of the Eurozone. That is, when countries’ fiscal deficits are high, the Eurozone regularly demands that action is taken to reduce public spending: so does it similarly make sense for the Eurozone to ask Germany to increase public spending given its large current account surplus? 
+Q2: Do you agree that the German government should increase public spending given its persistently large current account surplus and given that it is part of the Eurozone? 
+
+
+Sixty-seven panel members answered this question with a large majority (67%) agreeing or strongly agreeing that the German government ought to increase public spending in response to the current account surpluses. 
+Panel members who think that the German current account poses risks to Eurozone stability largely supported policy action. The main policy recommendation is an increase in public investment. Stefan Gerlach (BSI Bank) proposes that “more public spending on specific public infrastructure projects that pass a careful cost-benefit analysis and contributes to economic growth would be desirable.” 
+Sweder van Wijnbergen (Universiteit van Amsterdam) notes that “Germany’s (public capital)/GDP ratio is HALF of the comparable ratio in the Netherlands”. In contrast, Nezih Guner thinks that public investment might be counterproductive: “Public spending on investment incentives or infrastructure, for example, can further enhance the productivity advantage of German economy and can very well make the situation worse.” 
+Another argument in favour of a German fiscal expansion relates to the asymmetry of fiscal rules in the Eurozone. Costas Milas (University of Liverpool) points out that “the EU Treaty talks about ‘corrective’ fiscal measures when the deficit exceeds 3% of a country’s GDP. There is no similar mechanism in case of a (relatively) big fiscal surplus”. 
+Ricardo Reis, on the other hand, states that “the Treaties do not put the European institutions in charge of aggregate demand management. Therefore, it makes perfect sense for there to be a pronounced asymmetry between requiring the reduction of fiscal deficits, but having nothing to say about fiscal surpluses.” But he does suggest that discretionary policy is desirable at this point in time: “It seems likely that both Germany and the rest of the Eurozone would benefit from some fiscal expansion in Germany… Given the increase in the primary surplus since 2004, there also seems to be some room to do so.” 
+A number of panel members support policy action, but not an increase in public spending. Francesco Giavazzi (IGIER, Università Bocconi) and Nicholas Oulton (LSE) advocate tax cuts. In addition, Jürgen von Hagen (Universität Bonn) warns that fiscal action is desirable at the federal level, but not at the state level: “Lander public finances are mostly unsustainable and an increase in spending is not called for.” Wendy Carlin (University College London) proposes increasing incentives for women to participate in the labour force. 
+Panel members who are opposed to German fiscal action largely point to the limited evidence that such action would reverse the current account surplus. Gernot Müller (Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen) points out that “evidence to date suggests that the link between fiscal policy and the current account is weak. In fact, not even the sign of how a fiscal expansion impacts the current account is clear (see Kim and Roubini’s 2008 paper on twin divergence).” 
+Evi Pappa (European University Institute) adds: “In my own research, I also show that fiscal consolidation, as a means to induce an internal devaluation in a two country model works, but it affects very little economic activity in the periphery. A more effective way for correcting current account imbalances is transferring resources from Germany to the periphery” (see bandiera et al. 2016). 
+See original post for references 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+4998,Gary Johnson picks up his first congressional backer,"Washington (CNN) Republican Rep. Scott Rigell is voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson for president over his party's nominee, Donald Trump.
+
+Rigell, who has announced he will not run for re-election this year in his Virginia district, is the second Republican member of Congress to announce that he'll vote for someone other than Trump. Retiring New York Rep. Richard Hanna wrote in an op-ed for Syracuse.com this week that he'll instead back Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
+
+Rigell's announcement came in an interview with The New York Times published on Saturday, and Kaylin Minton, a spokeswoman for Rigell, confirmed the report's accuracy to CNN.
+
+Hanna and Rigell's defections come as other notable Republicans have said they will either not vote for Trump or will back other candidates. Earlier this week, longtime Chris Christie aide Maria Comella told CNN's Jamie Gangel she plans to vote for Clinton , and Sally Bradshaw, Jeb Bush's top adviser, told Gangel she's leaving the Republican Party over Trump and will vote for Clinton in Florida if the race there is close.
+
+And major GOP donor Meg Whitman announced earlier this week she'll support Clinton over Trump as well.
+
+Amid Republican infighting over its anti-establishment nominee, the Clinton and Johnson campaigns have sought to grow their bases of support. For example, Whitman said she backed Clinton following a direct phone call from the former secretary of state.
+
+Johnson said his campaign has reached out to Republican 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who has pointedly refused to back Trump and said he's considering voting Libertarian.
+
+A spokeswoman for Rep. Mike Coffman, a Republican who hails from a competitive district in Colorado and recently put up a web video saying he ""doesn't care"" for Trump, said the congressman had spoken with Libertarian vice presidential nominee William Weld. Coffman has yet to declare his support for any candidate.",REAL
+9108,UK Doctors Create List of Procedures You Don’t Need,"UK Doctors Create List of Procedures You Don’t Need They believe many regular treatments are unnecessary Image Credits: DarkoStojanovic/Pixabay . 
+Doctors have drawn up a list of dozens of treatments they say are of little or no use. 
+It is part of a campaign to cut down on unnecessary procedures with the warning that “more doesn’t always mean better”. 
+Tips include using tap water to clean up cuts and grazes is just as good as saline solution and a plaster cast is not always needed for children’s wrist fractures.",FAKE
+4956,"For Trump, turning this around won't be easy","Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and a New America fellow. He is the author of "" Jimmy Carter "" and "" The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society ."" The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
+
+(CNN) Donald Trump is trying to orchestrate a pivot in his troubled campaign. He began by shaking up his campaign staff by bringing in Stephen Bannon, an executive from Breitbart News, to take on the top post, effectively demoting Paul Manafort, who then chose to resign.
+
+In one of the more shocking moments of his campaign, Trump admitted to saying the ""wrong thing"" at some points in his presidential quest and said he regretted doing so.
+
+There is good reason for him to attempt to change the dynamics of this campaign. Right now, everything seems to be coming apart. Trump is doing horribly in the polls -- in swing states, in red states and in blue states. Each remark manages to alienate more voters and stirs greater doubts about his capacity to be president. The New York Times reported that he is now even struggling with his core of supporters, white men.
+
+At this point, Democrats might be heading toward a landslide victory, capturing the White House by large margins, securing control of the Senate for the first time since 2010 and possibly, just possibly, taking over a majority of the House of Representatives (though the odds of that remain low). Republicans are running scared and there is ample reason for them to feel this way.
+
+Pivoting to a ""New Trump,"" as some are calling it, won't be easy. It isn't easy for any candidate at this point in the campaign and it certainly won't be easy for Donald Trump. Making a statement and shaking up his campaign team, which he has done before, won't be enough to do the trick.
+
+There is a reason that social scientists have pushed back against ""game change"" accounts of presidential campaigns. The most difficult challenge that Trump currently faces is the overwhelming evidence from aggregate poll numbers which point to big problems for the Republican ticket.
+
+While there are always a few polls that emerge to suggest the race might be tightening, a broader look at the data suggests that Trump is consistently struggling in almost every part of the country, including in very red states like Utah.
+
+My colleague at Princeton, Sam Wang, has shown how when you put all the polls together, Trump doesn't really stand much of a chance of winning. Right now, Clinton is running 5.8 percentage points above President Obama's standing versus 2012 GOP candidate Mitt Romney at the same point in the campaign four years ago. Although pundits love to remind audiences of famous polling errors such as ""Dewey Beats Truman"" in 1948, Wang reminds us that those moments are quite exceptional.
+
+Nervous Republicans must also face the fact that Trump is the person who he is. Although people have speculated for months that Trump would pivot to a mode more appealing to the wider audience of general election voters, as opposed to the conservative base of the GOP, he has continually failed to stay that course. Occasionally he gives carefully calibrated speeches using a teleprompter, but then immediately reverts to his more extreme messages.
+
+Trump has shown no interest in backing away from the kind of provocative style that brought him to the dance. His advisers have not been able to push him in a different direction and as he slips in the polls, his instincts seem to be to double down on this kind of behavior.
+
+Always the showman, Trump has little personal incentive to back away from what has now become his brand of speaking. And an adviser such as Bannon is likely to favor the ""let Trump be Trump"" approach, rather than try to craft a new candidate at this late stage. In fact, he might push him even further in his provocation, given what Breitbart.com has specialized in.
+
+African-Americans won't start turning to Trump after the kinds of statements he has made over the course of his campaign, including his slow response to calls to dissociate himself from white supremacist supporters.
+
+Nor will the GOP as a whole easily reverse its disadvantage with African-American voters unless it works to reverse the damage that has been caused by the party's positions on key issues like voting rights, economic inequality and police violence. The fact that Trump hired an executive from the polemical Breitbart News is not evidence he moving toward a different mentality.
+
+As the summer comes to a close, we are pretty late into the election game. There are some moments in US history, such as Hubert Humphrey's surge in the fall of 1968, when candidates have been able to rapidly gain ground on their opponents (of course Humphrey still lost the election). But by and large those comebacks don't happen too often. Given the chaotic and underdeveloped state of Trump's campaign field operation in the swing states, it will be extremely difficult for him to achieve anything of this sort.
+
+Of course politics can take surprising and unexpected turns, as Trump's nomination proves. The three presidential debates, which begin in late September, offer an opportunity to change the direction of the race. And the possibility of some kind of crisis or data dump creates room for campaigns to shift course. Most often, however, there is no October Surprise.
+
+Fundamentally changing the direction of the campaign is going to be extremely hard for the GOP. The recent comments and new campaign staff won't be enough. Republicans might conclude that they will be better off focusing on the Senate and House races than placing too much hope in the idea that the man at the top of the ticket has a big trick up his sleeve.",REAL
+2981,Senate Blocks Bill To End Government Collection Of Phone Records,"The Senate worked late into the night Friday and early Saturday, but still failed to agree on extending government surveillance programs under the USA Patriot Act before the Memorial Day holiday.
+
+Lawmakers blocked votes on both a House-passed bill and a short-term extension of the Patriot Act provisions that allow government surveillance programs.
+
+Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says lawmakers will try again on May 31, the day before the provisions expire.
+
+The Senate first took up the House bill, which would end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of domestic phone records. That bill, passed overwhelmingly by the House and supported by the Obama administration, required a 60-vote majority to proceed. It fell three votes short.
+
+The Senate then failed to advance a two-month extension of the expiring Patriot Act provision that would extend the NSA phone records program. That vote was seven short of the required 69 votes, reports NPR Washington desk senior editor Shirley Henry.
+
+Sen. Majority Leader McConnell tried to secure unanimous consent agreements on a number of measures aimed at preventing the program from lapsing on June 1, when the Patriot Act provision expires, Henry reports.
+
+McConnell first proposed a measure to extend the act to June 8. But Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican presidential contender, objected, saying he wants two amendments debated and voted on.
+
+""Our forefathers would be aghast,"" Paul said.
+
+Henry reports that McConnell then tried for an extension to June 5, but there was an objection. His proposal for June 3 met another objection; then Paul objected to a June 2 extension, Henry says.
+
+Unable to get agreement on any extension, McConnell said the Senate will come back at 4 p.m. on May 31 to try again, beginning with a vote on the House bill. That gives lawmakers only a few hours to prevent the Patriot Act provisions from expiring.
+
+The majority leader stressed that it's a dangerous time to allow the law to expire, given the threats overseas and attempted attacks here, and urged the Senate to act ""responsibly"" to protect the country, Henry reports.
+
+The Justice Department has said the NSA would begin winding down collection of domestic phone records this week if the Senate failed to act, according to the Associated Press.",REAL
+2206,New tensions erupt between the White House and Netanyahu,"Tensions between the White House and Benjamin Netanyahu escalated Wednesday as top administration officials condemned the Israeli prime minister’s plan to address Congress next week and Netanyahu accused six world powers, including the United States, of “giving up on their commitment” to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
+
+The unusually public spat marked one of the lowest points in a relationship that has long bonded the two countries. Although the new round of recriminations reflected the frosty personal relations between President Obama and Netanyahu, it came at a critical juncture in multilateral talks designed to prevent Iran from using a civilian program to develop a nuclear weapon.
+
+The prime minister has said the unfolding deal — to which Iran has not yet agreed — could pose an existential threat to the Jewish state. Obama, however, considers a deal a potential legacy that could ease nuclear tensions, lift trade restrictions on Iran and alter the region’s strategic calculus.
+
+Congressional Democrats have been caught in the middle of the dispute. On Wednesday, Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (D-Va.) became the fourth senator to say he would skip Netanyahu’s speech, calling its timing “highly inappropriate.” Several members of the House also have said they will boycott the speech.
+
+The latest volley of high-level criticism began when national security adviser Susan E. Rice, appearing Tuesday night on “Charlie Rose,” condemned Netanyahu’s decision to accept the invitation of House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to appear at a joint meeting of Congress shortly before Israel’s elections.
+
+By bypassing the White House, dealing only with GOP leaders and scheduling the speech just before Israelis vote, Netanyahu had “injected a degree of partisanship, which is not only unfortunate,” Rice said, “I think it’s destructive of the fabric of the relationship.”
+
+At a Likud political convention in the Maale Adumim settlement just east of Jerusalem, Netanyahu fired back. “I respect the White House and the president of the United States, but on such a critical topic that could determine whether we exist or not, it is my duty to do everything to prevent this great danger to the state of Israel,” he said.
+
+Congress could play a critical role in the Iran talks. It is weighing whether to add new sanctions to the current ones.
+
+The existing sanctions, and those adopted by the European Union, are widely viewed as having helped push Iran to the bargaining table.
+
+But Obama has vowed to veto any new sanctions and has urged Congress to wait at least a month for the outcome of the negotiations. Obama has said that if the talks fail, he will move to tighten economic restrictions.
+
+Secretary of State John F. Kerry defended the administration’s negotiations in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee — and took a swipe at Netanyahu.
+
+“I’ll tell you, Israel is safer today with the added time we have given and the stoppage of the advances of the Iranian nuclear program than before,” Kerry said. Referring to the accord that eased sanctions slightly while negotiations took place, he said: “We got that agreement — which, by the way, the prime minister opposed. He was wrong. And today he’s saying we should be extending that interim agreement.”
+
+No love has been lost between Obama and Netanyahu.
+
+“This is clearly the most dysfunctional relationship between an American and Israeli leader,” said Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Wilson Center and a former U.S. negotiator and adviser in Republican and Democratic administrations. Moreover, he said, “the durability is troubling.”
+
+He said that earlier tensions preceded incremental peace accords but that Obama and Netanyahu remain far apart on basic issues and that Kerry’s efforts to bring Israel and Palestinians together failed.
+
+Now their personal tensions have put Democratic lawmakers in awkward positions that threaten bipartisanship when it comes to Israel.
+
+Democrats have been wrestling over whether to boycott the speech, as senior Obama administration officials plan to do. This will be the third time Netanyahu has addressed the full Congress, tying Winston Churchill’s record.
+
+Because Netanyahu did not arrange his visit through the White House, Obama has said that he will not meet with him, and Vice President Biden has made plans to travel abroad.
+
+“This puts Democrats in a position where they have to choose between their support for Israel and their Democratic president — and do it in a very visible way,” said Martin Indyk, a vice president at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. ambassador to Israel.
+
+“There is no reason to schedule this speech before Israeli voters go to the polls on March 17 and choose their own leadership,” Kaine said in a statement Wednesday. “I am disappointed that, as of now, the speech has not been postponed. For this reason, I will not attend the speech.”
+
+Kaine will join Senate colleagues Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) in skipping the address.
+
+According to an unofficial estimate by one Senate Democrat, about 30 members of that caucus are expected to attend the speech and nearly 15 others are still deciding whether to boycott. One such Democrat is Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a freshman who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee.
+
+“It’s really offensive, but I think it’s a protocol breach, not a policy break,” he said.
+
+Generally an ally of Israel, Murphy said his biggest concern was the spectacle occurring so close to the Israeli elections. “I don’t want to be part of a campaign speech,” he said. “It makes the whole thing look more politics-based.”
+
+The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which said it didn’t know about Netanyahu’s plans ahead of time, said lawmakers should put aside the protocol issues and listen to the prime minister’s message on the Iran talks.
+
+Netanyahu was invited by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) to attend a separate event with Democratic lawmakers, but he declined. In a letter, he said that it “could compound the misperception of partisanship regarding my upcoming visit.”
+
+Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said: “It’s unseemly what the Democrats have done to try and make this a political issue. I think the president has acted like an oaf, an oaf. O-a-f. . . . I don’t even want to get into it. I’m just mad.”
+
+Meanwhile, leaked details about Iran nuclear negotiations have made many lawmakers more interested in what Netanyahu has to say.
+
+“I think his voice will resonate more credibly if that’s the deal that’s in the making,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “Both the president and prime minister share the goal of preventing Iran from going nuclear. How to get there is what separates them.” Foxman initially called Netanyahu’s speech “ill-advised” but now says he will attend.
+
+Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), one of Obama’s strongest allies on the Hill, plans to attend Netanyahu’s speech. “I’m interested in what the prime minister is going to say,” Reed said. “I think it’s already been made an unnecessarily complicated political issue, but there is still this need to learn as much as we can about the situation.”
+
+Many will hear Netanyahu on Monday, when he addresses the annual AIPAC convention. AIPAC expects 16,000 people to attend, including about 50 lawmakers.
+
+Katie Zezima and Mike DeBonis in Washington and William Booth in Israel contributed to this report.",REAL
+2501,Supreme Court divided on Obama's immigration actions,"Washington (CNN) The Supreme Court appeared closely divided along ideological lines during oral arguments Monday in a case that could determine President Barack Obama's legacy on immigration.
+
+Conservative justices questioned Obama's authority to use executive actions to shield some 4 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito seemed particularly concerned with language in the administration's guidance that said the program's recipients would be ""lawfully present,"" which they suggested would contradict immigration law.
+
+""How is it possible to lawfully work in the United States without lawfully being in the United States?"" Alito asked.
+
+Roberts added: ""I mean, they're lawfully present, and yet, they're present in violation of the law?""
+
+Liberals on the bench seemed sympathetic to the administration's arguments. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted at one point that there are 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the country and Congress has provided funds for removing about 4 million. ""So inevitably, priorities have to be set,"" she said.
+
+Justice Sonia Sotomayor said there are not enough resources to deport everyone. ""They are here whether we want them or not,"" she said.
+
+Obama announced the moves to great fanfare in late 2014, as a response to congressional inaction on immigration reform. But a federal court blocked them after Texas and 25 other states sued.
+
+Busloads of immigrants' rights activists -- some of them undocumented -- appeared on the court's plaza to support the policies. The moves are meant to shield them from deportation and allow them work permits.
+
+Nancy Garcia, a U.S. citizen from Milwaukee, who was protesting with the Wisconsin group Voces de la Frontera (Voices from the Border), said she became active on the issue after Wisconsin lawmakers tried to crack down on undocumented immigrants.
+
+""We're not drug lords. We're not rapists. We're good people,"" Garcia said.
+
+Tea Party Patriots member Gregg Cummings said he arrived at 6 a.m. to find a spot in front of the court to protest the executive actions. Cummings, from Lamoni, Iowa, said he is concerned about the prospect of Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, changing the ideological balance of the court.
+
+""Our number one purpose of being here is supporting the senators better standing strong on no votes on the new Supreme Court justice,"" he said.
+
+Critics of Obama's moves say they are part of a pattern of the White House looking to go around the Republican Congress.
+
+""Basically the President has stepped in and taken over what normally would be associated with Congress,"" Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in an interview. ""Congress makes the laws.""
+
+Roberts also seemed concerned with the scope of the government's argument defending Obama's moves. ""Under your argument, could the President grant deferred removal to every unlawful -- unlawfully present alien in the United States right now?"" he asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli.
+
+At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that the president might have strayed into Congress' territory. ""It's as if -- that the President is setting the policy and Congress is executing it,"" he said. ""That's just upside down.""
+
+The GOP Congress was involved at oral arguments as well. The House of Representatives, in an unusual move, intervened in the case against the administration, and had 15 minutes before the eight justices.
+
+That only eight justices are hearing the case -- due to the death in February of Justice Antonin Scalia -- could impact the final result. A split court between the four Democratic-appointed justices and four GOP-appointed justices would mean the programs remain blocked and the case is sent back to the district court in Texas that blocked them in the first place.
+
+For the administration, a key argument before the court is to say that the states do not have the legal right to bring the case in the first place. If it can convince a majority of justices on that issue, the court may not even get to the merits of the immigration debate.
+
+All eyes were on Roberts, who has in past cases sometimes limited who can bring challenges to court. On Monday, he asked some critical questions of the government's position, but it was unclear how interested he might be in dismissing the case on standing.
+
+""The question is: Does Texas have the right to bring this case?"" said CNN Senior Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin. ""Texas says if you give legal status to these people, then we'll have to give them drivers licenses. The federal government says there's nothing in this law about drivers licenses. This law is directed entirely at the immigrants themselves, it does not impose any obligations on the states. So the states should not have the right to challenge it. That's the standing argument. I think the Obama administration thinks they have a better chance at winning over one of the conservatives on standing than they do on the merits of the case.""
+
+Elizabeth Wydra, President of the Constitutional Accountability Center, who filed a brief in support of the government says she wouldn't write off the chief justice on the merits of the case or on the issue of standing.
+
+""On the merits, Chief Justice Roberts' concerns seemed to be alleviated when the Solicitor General clarified that undocumented immigrants—given relief under the programs -- are simply afforded deferred action but none the less are subject to removal proceedings at any time the executive changes its enforcement priorities,"" she said.
+
+Should it win on that count, the injunction would be lifted, and the programs would be able to go into effect during the final months of the Obama presidency.
+
+However, because the actions can be changed or reversed by the next President, immigrants would have to decide whether to come forward for the remaining months of the Obama administration or risk doing so with the possibility of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the White House.
+
+""There's no question that the ultimate fate of the deferred action policy hangs in the balance of the upcoming election,"" said Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor of law at American University and CNN Legal Analyst.
+
+""Like any other executive order, it can be modified, rescinded, or expanded by the next President, and codified or overruled by the next Congress,"" Vladeck added. ""But the fact that the Supreme Court expedited its consideration of the Obama administration's appeal so that it could resolve the dispute by June suggests that, even short-handed, the justices want to have their own say first.""
+
+The White House announced the programs in November 2014, issuing a five-page guidance memo enabling qualifying undocumented workers to receive temporary relief from the threat of deportation and to apply for programs that could qualify them for work authorization and associated benefits.
+
+The Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) targets the nearly 4.3 million undocumented parents of citizens and lawful residents, and the second rule expands Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), initiative aimed at non citizens who came to the country as children.
+
+""We'll bring more undocumented immigrants out of the shadows so they can play by the rules, pay their full share of taxes, pass a criminal background check and get right with the law,"" Obama told an audience in Nevada after the programs were announced.
+
+The programs remain frozen nationwide. They were first blocked by a federal judge in Texas and a divided federal appeals court later upheld the preliminary injunction.
+
+Obama's lawyers argue in court papers that the lower court rulings threatened great harm, ""not only to the proper role of federal courts and to federal immigration law, but also to millions of parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, aliens who are the lowest priorities for removal yet now work off the books to support their families.""
+
+As a threshold issue, Verrilli says that the states don't have the legal right to be in court, because the Constitution ""assigns the formation of immigration policy exclusively to the National Government precisely because immigration is an inherently national matter.""
+
+He stressed that the guidance from the government does not provide any kind of lawful status under immigration law as the aliens remain removable at any time.
+
+""Immigrant communities fought for these programs,"" said Marielena Hincapié, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. She says that her groups have been informing people about the risks of the rules being changed by the next president and she believes many will come forward should the Obama administration win.
+
+Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller argues that the states have standing to bring the challenge in part because DAPA would create a new class of recipients for state subsidized driver's licenses in Texas. He says that Texas would stand to lose millions of dollars if even a small fraction of DAPA eligible aliens applied.
+
+""DAPA is an extraordinary assertion of executive power,"" Keller wrote in court papers. ""The Executive has unilaterally crafted an enormous program -- one of the largest changes ever to our Nation's approach to immigration,"" he said. ""In doing so, the Executive dispensed with immigration statutes by declaring unlawful conduct to be lawful.""
+
+He points to the guidance and says that the eligible undocumented immigrations would be permitted to be ""lawfully present in the United States,"" which would make them eligible for work authorization and some types of Social Security and Medicare benefits.
+
+Texas is supported by the GOP-led House of Representatives, who say that the programs went forward after the President failed in his attempts to persuade Congress to revise immigration laws.
+
+Erin E. Murphy, a lawyer for the House, called the administration's position, ""the most aggressive of executive power claims.""
+
+Andrew Pincus, a lawyer who supports the administration's position, says that allowing Texas to bring the case would have broad implications.
+
+""If a state can sue every time the federal government does something to increase the state's costs, states could sue to challenge almost anything the federal government does,"" he said.
+
+Pincus points out that Texas is not objecting to the administration's use of prosecutorial discretion, it just doesn't want the undocumented workers to be able to work legally.
+
+""You are saying to these people, you can stay here, but we are keeping you in a bubble,"" he said.",REAL
+2433,The Freakout From An Obamacare Ruling Could Be Unlike Anything We've Seen,"WASHINGTON -- Experts have a pretty good sense of what will happen if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell, cutting off Obamacare’s tax credits in roughly two-thirds of the states. Without that financial assistance, most of the people now buying insurance through healthcare.gov, the online marketplace run by the federal government, wouldn’t be able to pay for their coverage anymore.
+
+ 
+
+ A ruling wouldn’t affect people living in states like California and Kentucky, which operate their own insurance marketplaces. But the results in the rest of the country would be dramatic and visible. More than 8 million people would end up uninsured, according to estimates by the non-partisan Urban Institute. Economic disarray would follow, as panicked insurance companies hiked premiums and pulled out of markets suddenly bereft of customers.
+
+What the experts can’t say is how people would feel about such a shock, because it’s hard to think of a time when government took away benefits from so many people, across such a large swath of the country, within such a short time. There just isn’t a great historical analogue for predicting how people would react -- or, for that matter, how that reaction would affect politics. Even veteran strategists seem stumped.
+
+ 
+
+ But one recent episode may offer some clues. It comes, ironically enough, from Obamacare’s own history.
+
+ 
+
+ In the fall of 2013, insurance companies canceled coverage for millions of Americans, either because the old policies weren’t up to Obamacare’s standards or because the insurers decided the old policies were no longer profitable to sell. The cancellations surprised most Americans, not least because President Barack Obama had famously promised that people who liked their old insurance plans could keep them. You couldn’t turn on the television without hearing from somebody dismayed, angry, or scared about what was happening. Looking back at 2013, it’s hard to remember a time when, for better or worse, a change in domestic policy created so much turmoil.
+
+ 
+
+ The differences between 2013 and a potential Supreme Court decision are large enough to make direct comparisons impossible. That’s particularly true when it comes to figuring out who an angry public would hold responsible this time around. The court’s conservative majority, for issuing such a decision? Republicans, for backing this case and trying to take away people’s insurance? Obama and the Democrats, for creating the law in the first place?
+
+ 
+
+ But if the 2013 controversy doesn’t indicate much about the shape of a reaction to a Supreme Court reaction, it may say something about the scale -- and why the intensity of reaction this time, whatever its direction, is likely to be even larger than it was last time.
+
+ 
+
+ One reason for this is the raw numbers involved. Nobody knows exactly how many policies insurance companies actually canceled in the fall of 2013. At one point, The Associated Press compiled an estimate, based on reports from state insurance officials, suggesting that the number was close to 5 million. But subsequent estimates suggested that number was far too high. One of the most thorough examinations available came from Lisa Clemans-Cope and Nathaniel Anderson at the Urban Institute. They concluded that cancellations probably numbered around 2.6 million. Jon Gabel, from the University of Chicago, came up with an even smaller number: 1.9 million.
+
+You shouldn't take either figure as gospel. In both cases, the scholars in effect juxtaposed survey data with estimates of the number of people with “non-group” insurance, which itself has been difficult for experts to measure. But even if the Urban Institute and Gabel estimates are low by a million or two -- which would be a huge error -- it’d still be far less than the 7.7 million who would instantly lose insurance from an adverse ruling in King v. Burwell -- to say nothing of the millions more who would have to pay higher premiums in the future because state insurance markets would be in such trouble.
+
+ 
+
+ And the people who got cancellation notices last time didn’t necessarily end up in worse shape. On the contrary, a large percentage of the people with canceled policies became eligible either for Medicaid, which is basically free, or subsidized insurance, which cost much less than the old, unsubsidized policies. Exactly how many has been difficult to pin down, because the data on what people were paying before the change -- and what they were getting for that money -- is so spotty. But some of the best information available comes from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which surveyed people buying coverage in the new markets. Forty-six percent of respondents who’d lost non-compliant plans said they had found new policies that cost less, while another 15 percent said they found new policies that cost roughly the same. Just 39 percent -- a significant fraction, but still a minority -- ended up paying more.
+
+By contrast, if the Supreme Court yanks tax credits in the states using healthcare.gov, then 100 percent of the people who were receiving that assistance will see their premiums go up. The increases will not be small. Calculations from the Kaiser Foundation suggest that, for people who now rely on tax credits, premiums would rise on average by $268 each month -- enough, again, to make the cost of maintaining coverage prohibitive.
+
+And that, ultimately, is the biggest difference between the 2013 cancellations and what would happen, this summer, if the court strikes down subsidies in the healthcare.gov states. Two years ago, if you were one of those people who lost your coverage, you were still able to find an alternative. And thanks to the law’s regulations -- yes, the same ones that sometimes made coverage more expensive -- you at least knew that your new policy was comprehensive. It had to include all essential benefits, including mental health and prescription coverage. And it had to limit your out-of-pocket expenses. This summer, if the Supreme Court takes away your coverage, you'll end up with ... nothing. Just like that, you’ll go from the ranks of the safely insured to the ranks of the uninsured -- a far more drastic, and hazardous, transition than people experienced because of plan cancellations in 2013.
+
+To be clear, forcing millions of people to change insurance policies back then was plenty disruptive, far more so than the law’s advocates realized it would be. But that disruption was part of a transition to a new environment for health insurance -- one in which more people had coverage and those with coverage were more secure. By contrast, the (considerably) greater disruptions from a Supreme Court decision eliminating tax credits would signal a return to the pre-Obamacare status quo -- an environment in which many fewer people had insurance and those with coverage couldn’t be as confident it would pay for their needs. 
+
+ 
+
+ Such a transformation could be a nightmare for whichever politicians the public holds responsible -- to say nothing of the people who suddenly find themselves with no way to pay their medical bills.
+
+",REAL
+1482,Why Trump may be winning the war on ‘political correctness’,"Cathy Cuthbertson once worked at what might be thought of as a command post of political correctness — the campus of a prestigious liberal arts college in Ohio.
+
+“You know, I couldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And when we wrote things, we couldn’t even say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ because we had transgender. People of color. I mean, we had to watch every word that came out of our mouth, because we were afraid of offending someone, but nobody’s afraid of offending me,” the former administrator said.
+
+All of which helps explain why the 63-year-old grandmother showed up at a recent Donald Trump rally in Hilton Head Island, S.C., where she moved when she retired a year ago.
+
+The Republican front-runner is “saying what a lot of Americans are thinking but are afraid to say because they don’t think that it’s politically correct,” she said. “But we’re tired of just standing back and letting everyone else dictate what we’re supposed to think and do.”
+
+In the 2016 Republican presidential primary season, “political correctness” has become the all-purpose enemy. The candidates have suggested that it is the explanation for seemingly every threat that confronts the country: terrorism, illegal immigration, an economic recovery that is leaving many behind, to name just a few.
+
+Others argue that growing antipathy to the notion of political correctness has become an all-purpose excuse for the inexcusable. They say it has emboldened too many to express racism, sexism and intolerance, which endure even as the country grows more diverse.
+
+“Driving powerful sentiments underground is not the same as expunging them,” said William A. Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar who advised President Bill Clinton. “What we’re learning from Trump is that a lot of people have been biting their lips, but not changing their minds.”
+
+[Donald Trump’s provocative first TV ad raises the temperature of GOP race]
+
+One thing is clear: Trump is channeling a very mainstream frustration.
+
+In an October poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University, 68 percent agreed with the proposition that “a big problem this country has is being politically correct.”
+
+It was a sentiment felt strongly across the political spectrum, by 62 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 81 percent of Republicans. Among whites, 72 percent said they felt that way, but so did 61 percent of nonwhites.
+
+“People feel tremendous cultural condescension directed at them,” and that their values are being “smirked at, laughed at” by the political and media elite, said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt.
+
+“ ‘Political correctness’ are the two words that best respond to everything that a conservative feels put upon,” added pollster Frank Luntz, who has advised Republicans. The label is, he said, a validation that what many on the right see as legitimate policy and cultural differences are not the same as racism, sexism or heartlessness.
+
+“Allegations of racism and sexism have turned into powerful silencing devices,” Galston agreed. “You can be opposed to affirmative action without being a racist.”
+
+The PC backlash does not necessarily mean that people support the kinds of things that Trump is saying, or the way he says them.
+
+When the Fairleigh Dickinson pollsters added his name to the same question — prefacing it with “Donald Trump said recently . . . ” — the numbers dropped sharply. Only 53 percent said they agree that political correctness is a major problem.
+
+This is not a new debate. It has raged since at least the early 1990s, when college campuses began adopting speech codes. Some went well beyond obvious slurs — with animal rights activists contending, for instance, that the word “pet”was disrespectful and should be changed to “companion animal.”
+
+More recently, the PC wars have flared again in academia, where there is an ongoing argument over whether campuses should be a “safe space” where students are protected from upsetting ideas, and receive “trigger warnings” when course material contains distressing information.
+
+Few would argue that it is wrong to confront and eliminate prejudice. But even some liberals have called political correctness a form of McCarthyism aimed at stifling free expression.
+
+Trump has brought the question from the university quad to the political arena in a way that no leading candidate has in the past.
+
+For many, “it’s satisfying to have a loud tribune like Trump,” said David Axelrod, who was President Obama’s top campaign adviser. “But I don’t think the hunger for authentic plain speech is Trump-specific. One of the appeals of [Democratic presidential candidate] Bernie Sanders is that people think he says exactly what he thinks and is not passing it through a filter. There is a fundamental yearning for authenticity that is probably felt more broadly.”
+
+The edgy liberal comedian Bill Maher, who for nearly a decade hosted a talk show called “Politically Incorrect,” has said that Trump’s ideas sound “a little ­Hitler-adjacent.”
+
+But he has also noted a yearning for “somebody to say, ‘You know what, I just don’t bend to your bull----.’ And Donald Trump, I’ve got to say, I don’t agree with him on a lot, but I kind of get him. We’ve been doing the same thing.”
+
+Trump sounded the anti-PC clarion call at the first Republican debate in August, when moderator ­Megyn Kelly of Fox News challenged him on comments that he had made disparaging women.
+
+“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he said. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.”
+
+[Donald Trump says we’re all too politically correct. But is that also a way to limit speech?]
+
+It is hard to follow the logic of an argument that insulting women could somehow make the country stronger overseas. But the sentiment behind it came through clearly.
+
+And it has been picked up by other GOP contenders.
+
+“Political correctness is killing people,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), because it prevents the Obama administration from focusing on the communications and activities of potential terrorists who are Muslims.
+
+“Political correctness is ruining our country,” said former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, after he was criticized for saying a Muslim should not be president.
+
+It is corrosive, Carson said in an interview, because “many people will not say what they believe because someone will look askance at them, call them a name. Somebody will mess with their job, their family. This was not supposed to be the way it was in America.”
+
+Last month’s terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., carried out by a Muslim couple who appear to have been inspired by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has become a case in point for many conservatives.
+
+They say political correctness has made the Obama administration too timid in calling it what it is — which is why Cruz and other Republicans taunt the president for not uttering the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”
+
+“What animates ISIS is an ­apocalyptic religious philosophy. People look at that and don’t understand the unwillingness to say red is red and blue is blue,” Schmidt said. “We live in a post-fact America, where the facts are subordinate to the advancement of an ideology.”
+
+Political strategists and others say a number of other forces are behind the backlash. It has both a cultural and an economic component, and it also reflects the continuing polarization that has grown deeper during Obama’s presidency.
+
+“For many of these people, they played the game by the rules, and essentially, they got shafted,” Democratic pollster Peter Hart said.
+
+Trump is “the voice of an aggrieved cohort in our society — lower-middle-income working whites who have taken the hit from the big changes in the economy, and are angry about it,” Axelrod said. “He creates a permission structure for others.”
+
+Cuthbertson, for instance, made a connection between her frustrations over political correctness and the other things she sees going on around her.
+
+“I look at what I get every month — and thank God, I was financially savvy and saved. I can’t live off Social Security. And you look at these people who have never worked and they’re having babies and they’re getting free rent and free food stamps and free medical care,” she said. “I couldn’t afford what they have on my Social Security, and I worked 50 years.”
+
+“Something has to be done because we’re shrinking, we’re being taken over by people that want to change what America is,” she added. “You can’t say it nicely.”",REAL
+6772,Trump Promises ‘New Deal for Black America’,"Trump Promises ‘New Deal for Black America’ Ben Kamisar, The Hill, October 26, 2016 
+Donald Trump called for a “new deal for black America” in a Wednesday afternoon address as he works to bridge the gap he faces with the crucial voting bloc less than two weeks from Election Day. 
+Speaking in Charlotte, N.C., the GOP presidential nominee criticized years of Democratic rule for leaving black America behind and outlined his plan to help. 
+My “deal is grounded in three promises: safe communities, great education and high-paying jobs,” Trump said, speaking off what appeared to be scripted remarks 
+“Whether you vote for me or not, I will be your greatest champion. We live in a very divided country, and I will be your greatest champion.” 
+{snip} 
+“African-American citizens have sacrificed so much for our nation. They fought and died in every war since the Revolution and from the pews and the picket lines, they’ve lifted up the conscience of our country in the long march for civil rights. Yet too many African-Americans have been left behind.” 
+Trump called for incentives to move companies into blighted neighborhoods to bolster employment, help African-Americans get better access to credit and push cities to declare “blighted communities” disaster areas to help rebuild infrastructure. 
+He also said he’d support increasing the number of police officers in such areas, connecting a lack of officers to a rise in murder rate in major cities. 
+But while Trump’s call focused on removing “gang members and criminal cartels,” he blamed Clinton for promoting a “war on police.” He did not mention the accusations of police brutality by minorities who feel that they are disproportionately targeted. 
+{snip}",FAKE
+3483,House Republicans say IRS should blame itself for rough tax season,"It was a tough tax season for the Internal Revenue Service, but GOP lawmakers in Congress says the agency only has itself to blame.
+
+Last month, IRS commissioner John Koskinen said that years of budget cuts and staffing losses had led to “abysmal” customer service from his agency. But Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee say the agency’s financial problems stem from bad budgeting decisions, employee bonuses, and overspending on administrative costs.
+
+“The IRS’s spending decisions have real consequences for taxpayers,” the GOP representatives said in a report on Wednesday. “Wasteful spending and failure to prioritize taxpayer assistance led to millions of calls going unanswered for filing season 2015.”
+
+[In the IRS help line, dejection is standard]
+
+Committee Republicans found that the IRS spent $60 million on employee bonuses in 2014, an amount they said could have been used to field over 7 million customer calls. The report also points to a $134 million cut in user fees allocated to customer support as another area where the IRS could have better utilized its already tight budget.
+
+There is no denying that the agency budget has shrunk lately, with Congress cutting the IRS budget by more than $1 billion over the past five years. But the report found that the agency has reduced spending on customer service.
+
+The IRS has the authority to decide how it spends some revenue from user fees that the agency collects. The amount of discretionary funds available to the IRS increased from $310 million in 2010 to $481 million in fiscal year 2015, but total funding for taxpayer assistance fell by 6 percent, according to the report.
+
+In 2011, the agency spent $129 million on taxpayer services and $79 million on operations support. In 2015, taxpayer services funding was scheduled to drop to $49 million while support funds were set for $411 million. Committee Republicans argued that that shift in priorities could have been avoided.
+
+Koskinen predicted the tax year would be difficult for taxpayers and IRS employees alike as early as January, when he wrote a bleak warning letter to agency employees.
+
+“This year we are looking at a situation where realistically we have no choice but to do less with less,” he wrote.
+
+The result was a tax season riddled with confusion and long lines like those revealed in a Washington Post article this month.
+
+Koskinen is scheduled to testify before the Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday about the 2015 tax filing season and IRS operations.",REAL
+2739,5 worst right-wing moments of the week — Palin & Trump declare war on Bill O’Reilly,"It’s extremely lonely being Sarah Palin, lonely at the outer lunatic fringe of the right-wing universe. There are the voices stringing together those non sequiturs in her head, of course, but where are her Fox News friends? They’re faux friends, that’s what they are.
+
+After the universally ridiculed stream of nonsense that issued from Sarah Palin at last weekend’s conservative confab in Iowa, she came out swinging during an appearance on “Hannity.” Sean Hannity, it should be noted, is apparently conservative enough for Palin. That’s a relief. But O’Reilly, who dared question her seriousness about a possible run for president in 2016? He’s trouble.
+
+“There needs to be unity, understanding,” Palin told Hannity. “Conservatives have that strike against us right off the bat, that being the media. Even there on Fox, you know, kind of a quasi- or assumed conservative outlet ... and soon we have all day listening to the tease of Bill O’Reilly’s.""
+
+Hmmm, did Roger Ailes get the memo about the ""quasi-conservative"" operation he's running? Someone should really tell him. Palin then spewed some more sentence fragments that made sense to her:
+
+Hope away, Sarah. They all see you as a joke. All of them. Every last one of them.
+
+Donald Trump? Did someone say Donald Trump? Nothing gets Trump's attention like his own name.
+
+When he heard that Bill O'Reilly had questioned his seriousness as a presidential contender, the Trumpster took to Twitter, accusing O'Reilly of ""bad and very deceptive journalism."" This came as a complete shock to O'Reilly, who had no idea anyone considered what he does journalism. He thinks he is just bestowing wisdom on an adoring public.
+
+The two raging egomaniacs chitty chatted by phone Thursday during O'Reilly's show, and it was amicable enough up to a point.
+
+""I don't think you're going to run for president,"" O'Reilly told Trump. ""But if you decide to run, you've got to know that building the organization that you'd have to build is very difficult for someone who's never done it before.""
+
+No one tells Trump he doesn't know how to build things.
+
+""But how do you know I'm not building it now, Bill?"" Trump said.
+
+""Because you're playing golf in Miami, Donald,"" O'Reilly said.
+
+Isn't that what presidents do?
+
+Trump refused to ""take back"" the tweet, and O'Reilly advised him, ""Don't be a pinhead. Don't tweet.""
+
+This war within the conservoverse is very, very worrisome. This highly combustible combination of blow-hardism and hot air might just explode. Then conservative brain matter will litter the land like confetti, and hopefully be scooped up by scientists who will study the nature of this soon-to-be-extinct species.
+
+Aw shucks, and gosh golly. Mike Huckabee sure is shocked at how these city slickers act. The author of God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy, and presumed presidential contender, is all about wholesome activities like traveling to the local gun range and not listening to the ""mental poison"" that is Beyoncé, but he is shocked by the mouths on these big-city women. The cursing! The dropping of the F-bomb! Like it's normal and everything. Someone has to teach these ladies a lesson.
+
+""In New York, not only do the men do it, but the women do it,"" Huckabee said in an interview with Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson. ""You just are looking around saying, 'My gosh, this is worse than locker room talk.' This would be considered totally inappropriate to say these things in front of a woman. And for a woman to say them in a professional setting, we would only assume that this is a very, as we would say in the south, 'That's just trashy!'""
+
+Fellow Fox newsian, Megyn Kelly does not truck with ""trashy."" She invited her former colleage on her show this week to give him a quick update on ... women, women who work, life, and reality.
+
+“Well, I do have some news for you,"" Kelly said at the end of their little chat. ""We're not only swearing. We’re drinking, we’re smoking, we’re having premarital sex with birth control before we go to work, and sometimes boss around a bunch of men.”
+
+Huckabee kept that silly grin on his face, but when he realized with horror what she was saying (sex with birth control, egads!) he begged her to stop, said he hated to hear that, and presumably ran screaming into the New York night.
+
+4. Fox News has very nuanced discussion of sexual assault on campuses.
+
+Oh, hahahhahaha. Just kidding. They totally didn't. Several female Fox newsians did sit around on their half-circle couches and discussed the fact that the University of Virginia has suggested sorority women stay home this weekend since fraternities will be partying hard during something Greek-lifers call ""bid week."" They discussed and deplored it, and naturally pointed out again that sexual assault, when it does happen on campuses (although it basically does not happen on campuses because women always lie about these things), is women's fault. In a piece of sterling analysis, Stacy Dash pointed out, ""The good girls stay home."" ""Women,"" her co-hosts interjected. ""The bad girls—bad women,"" Dash snickered, ""the ones who like to play, go out and play and sometimes get hurt."" But that is okay, because, they are, you know, bad.  ""Alcohol is not to blame. It's the same thing with guns,"" Dash said, finally getting to her metaphor. ""Guns don't kill people. People do."" Also, could we just add, people who play with guns, people who have guns, people who have kids and guns, kids who have parents who have guns, etc....it's never the guns.  ""Alcohol doesn't get you drunk,"" she added. ""You get yourself drunk."" And to bring it all back home, then you get yourself raped. Because rapists don't rape people, people get themselves raped. Clear?
+
+There are definite perks to being a governor. One is that you can officially declare holidays whenever the hell you want.  Republican Texas governor Greg Abbott enjoyed this little perk this week when he officially declared February 2 ""Chris Kyle Day"" in honor of the real-life American sniper who killed many Iraqis, bragged about it, called all Muslims savages, and got a movie made out of his exploits starring Bradley Cooper.
+
+Chris Kyle is Gov. Abbott's kind of guy. “In honor of a Texas son, a Navy SEAL and an American hero, a man who defended his brothers and sisters in arms on and off the battlefield,"" Abbott said during a speech at the Texans Veterans of Foreign Affairs Mid-Winter Convention in Austin. ""I am declaring February 2nd Chris Kyle Day in Texas.”
+
+He left out the part where Kyle was killed by a disgruntled U.S. veteran on a Texas gun range in 2013. Nor did he say anything about the uptick in violence and violent rhetoric against Muslims who happen to make their home in Texas (and elsewhere) since the film's release. He had zero to say about the Republican lawmaker who proposed that Muslims in Texas take an oath of loyalty to the United States while sporting an Israeli flag on her desk.
+
+So, how exactly should people go about celebrating Chris Kyle Day? Perhaps by going to their local gun range.",REAL
+2235,Clinton campaign stiff-arms reporter in coverage pool,"To share the high costs of covering the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, more than a dozen news organizations banded together to form a press pool — essentially a collaborative in which reporters from contributing organizations take turns shadowing the Democratic front-runner and sending back e-mailed reports of her every move. The whole idea rests upon the expectation that the Clinton campaign will provide access to the pool reporter.
+
+David Martosko, U.S. political editor for the Daily Mail, sent an e-mail to his fellow pool participants early today alerting them to trouble on the trail: “Hillary pool report #1 — might be final for today,” noted Martosko in his first message. The pooler had shown up at 7:45 a.m. at the Puritan Backroom in Manchester ready for action. A press staffer with the New Hampshire Democratic Party told Martosko that he “wasn’t the approved print pool reporter for today’s pooled events.”
+
+A subsequent pool report from Martosko summarized a conversation that he’d had with Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill. Martosko writes of Merrill:
+
+He offered varied and contradictory reasons for this decision. First he confirmed that the concern had to do with the Daily Mail’s status as foreign press: “We’ve been getting a lot of blowback from foreign outlets that want to be part of the pool and we need to rethink it all, maybe for a day, and just cool things off until we can have a discussion.” Your pool informed him that the Guardian is part of the pool, and that the pool doesn’t discriminate on the basis of media ownership. He then said that the campaign’s position is that the Daily Mail doesn’t qualify because it hasn’t yet been added to the White House’s regular print pool – something the pool informed him was a timing issue, not a White House choice, since Francesca Chambers, our White House correspondent, has been vetted and has a hard pass. “We’re just trying to follow the same process and system the White House has,” he said. Merrill then insisted that the decision had “nothing to do” with the campaign considering the Daily Mail foreign press. “We don’t consider you foreign press,” he said. It’s your pooler’s understanding that this was the only reason given last night when Nick sprung this on Ruby Cramer of Buzzfeed, who coordinates the pool. Pool pointed out to Merrill that if the campaign is denying pool access to foreign press, but won’t take the position that the Daily Mail is foreign press, the position is untenable. Then he said: “This isn’t about you. It’s about a larger –” and didn’t continue his sentence. Merrill later insisted that his reasons were not based on the foreign-press question, but that the campaign simply wanted a day to “have a conversation” about how to proceed. “We’re going to make the decision,” he said, referring to choosing whether to give access to the designated print pooler. Your pooler told Merrill that he seemed to be contradicting himself, and pointed out the murky situation of foreign ownership interests in several outlets in the pool. He reiterated that the campaign could choose to decline pool coverage, and claimed that “it’s my understanding that the pool wasn’t sending a reporter today.” Your pooler informed him that “the pool sent me and I’m here,” and that the pool would show up at all the events today whether or not the campaign chose to grant access, and would request access each time. He offered that this afternoon’s launch party, one of three calendared events for the day, “is open press, so there’s no issue with that one.” The pool lodged one further objection and reminded him that the call was on the record since he’s a campaign spokesperson and there was no discussion about the on-off-background status of the call at any time.
+
+As the morning progressed, Martosko chauffered himself around to the campaign’s stops. At 11:00 a.m, he issued “Pool report #5 — denied entry at the Rochester, NH event.” In this dispatch, Martosko describes how he was carefully denied access to an early childhood education event at the YMCA of Strafford County:
+
+The Erik Wemple Blog placed the matter before Merrill in an e-mail, and the spokesman quickly replied: “We want a happy press corps as much as the press corps does. And we work very hard to achieve that in tandem with them. It’s a long campaign, and we are going to do our best to find equilibrium and best accommodate interest from as many news outlets as possible, given the space limitations of our events.”
+
+Everyone in the campaign world understands space limitations — and those space limitations are precisely one of the reasons that the pool exists in the first place. Why not have one reporter chronicling the quotidian travels of a top candidate instead of 12 or 15 reporters doing the same? In any case, Martosko is part of a pool that includes outlets such as The Washington Post, the New York Times, Buzzfeed and others.
+
+Martosko himself isn’t above adding a bit of media commentary to his work on the trail, as in this tweet from Saturday, following Clinton’s big speech:
+
+In landing at the Daily Mail, Martosko followed a colorful path. He formerly served as executive editor of the Daily Caller, a position in which he directed the outlet’s much-discredited reporting that Sen. Robert Menendez had romped with prostitutes on a trip to the Dominican Republic. And before that, he worked at the Center for Consumer Freedom, a nonprofit run by PR ace Richard Berman. In that position, Martosko used a phony Facebook account to gather dirt on animal-rights activists.
+
+The Daily Mail has issued this statement on the matter:
+
+“We can confirm that David Martosko, U.S. Political Editor, DailyMail.com was today denied access to Hillary Clinton’s campaign event and was prohibited from boarding a van that the Clinton campaign is using to transport pool reporters around New Hampshire. We are seeking an explanation from the Clinton campaign as to why this occurred as Mr. Martosko was scheduled to be the designated print pool reporter in New Hampshire this morning.”
+
+Scott Wilson, deputy national editor of the Washington Post, expressed concern with the sequence of events. “Who participates in the pool should be decided by the news organizations, not the campaign, and there can be no selective exclusions based on outlet or individual once the pool is set,” notes Wilson in an e-mail. “The campaign’s rules should be clarified as soon as possible and shared with pool representatives so that what happened to David yesterday is not repeated.” When asked whether a backup pool reporter was allowed to hop on board after Martosko’s denial, Merrill responded, “Absolutely,” though the pool “declined.”
+
+This post has been updated numerous times, given the rolling nature of the story.",REAL
+4939,Donald Trump: 'I'm not flip-flopping' on immigration,"Washington (CNN) It's still undecided whether Donald Trump will continue to support forced deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants living in the US, his campaign manager said Sunday. But Trump himself insisted Monday, ""I'm not flip-flopping.""
+
+""I'm not flip flopping,"" the Republican presidential nominee told Fox News on the issue Monday. ""We want to come up with a fair but firm process. Fair but firm."" He did not, however, provide any specifics or elaborate on his position further.
+
+When asked by repeated questioning by CNN's Dana Bash on ""State of the Union"" on Sunday whether Trump stood behind the idea of a deportation task force, Kellyanne Conway, Trump's new campaign manager, responded, ""to be determined.""
+
+Conway was responding to reports about what was said in a meeting Trump held on Saturday with a Hispanic advisory council. Sources in the room told BuzzFeed that Trump spoke about a ""humane and efficient"" way to work with undocumented immigrants in the country currently, which was characterized by BuzzFeed as a way to legalize some and let them stay.
+
+That would stand in sharp contrast with a central theme of the Trump campaign since the beginning, a hardline position on immigration focused on removing people in the country illegally.
+
+Conway disputed that Trump presented a reversal of his position in the meeting.
+
+""So what Donald Trump said yesterday in that meeting ... varied little from what he has said publicly,"" Conway said. ""What he supports is to make sure we enforce the law, that we are respectful of those Americans who are looking for jobs, and that we are fair and humane to those who live among us.""
+
+Bash played a clip of Trump speaking about a deportation force last fall, saying it would be done ""humanely,"" repeatedly asking if that was still the position of the campaign or whether Trump was backing off.
+
+That was when Conway responded: ""To be determined.""
+
+Early Sunday evening the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton released a statement scoffing and Trump's potential change of heart on deportation.
+
+""Donald Trump's immigration plan remains the same as it's always been: tear apart families and deport 16 million people from the United States,"" said campaign chair John Podesta.
+
+Jose Fuentes, a Trump supporter and the former attorney general of Puerto Rico, was at the roundtable with Trump on Saturday, and said he did not walk away with the interpretation that Trump was open to legalization for some undocumented immigrants.
+
+He said it was Trump who brought up the issue of those who are in the US illegally and asked the group to share their ideas on how to deal with them. Fuentes said that Trump used the language of wanting to handle the issue in a ""fair,"" ""humane,"" and ""legal"" way, but Fuentes said he didn't automatically take that to mean that Trump was going allow some to stay or have legal status.
+
+""He wanted to hear our ideas on how to deal with it. He requested that we put it in writing,"" Fuentes told CNN. ""But that doesn't mean he's going to take them or that he's changed his mind.""
+
+Fuentes, who said he was sitting right across the table from Trump, described the Republican nominee's interest in Hispanic issues as ""sincere"" and said he was ""impressed"" by Trump's understanding of the different issues important to Hispanic voters of various backgrounds.
+
+Fuentes said he didn't know why some walked away with the idea that Trump would change his position on deportations. He wondered whether it was because Trump seemed to place more emphasis on dealing with the issue than he has before -- that he was willing to hear different ideas and consider them.
+
+""That was very revealing,"" he said. ""That may have caused the wrong impression.""
+
+Beyond immigration, Conway on Sunday also reiterated the long-standing Trump campaign position that the candidate won't release his tax returns, saying they are under audit. She said the campaign would not release his 2008 returns that have already exited an audit, either, repeating the message of Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
+
+Conway also was asked about a 2005 comment she made about Clinton, and whether she was disparaging spouses who reconcile after cheating.
+
+But Conway said Sunday she wasn't making a statement about Clinton's marriage.
+
+""We don't need to conflate the two,"" Conway said, saying the question is about Clinton's leadership and her ability to stand up to enemies in the world.
+
+""Leaders show up where people in need are, and they hear them, and they help them, and you saw that on full display on Friday,"" Conway said referring to Trump's visit to Louisiana to tour flood damage in Baton Rouge.
+
+She also said former Fox News chief Roger Ailes does not have a ""formal or informal"" advisory role with the campaign, but said Ailes and Trump speak and are ""old friends.""
+
+Conway, on ""This Week,"" also answered questions about the campaign's organization. Particularly ongoing criticism about the campaign's structure and seeming lack of infrastructure in swing states.
+
+As Trump's new campaign manager, Conway said she would assess the situation, adding the Republican National Committee would be continuing to help.
+
+""We're working closely with the RNC, whether it's political, data, fundraising,"" Conway said. ""We've got a great relationship with Chairman (Reince) Priebus. Talk to him daily now. And we at the campaign are going to expect Sean Spicer, the director of communications and the chief strategist at the RNC to spend more time with us.""
+
+Conway did not say Spicer was formally joining the campaign.
+
+She also addressed Trump's statement last week -- for the first time -- that he has has ""regrets"" over certain, but unspecified, statements throughout his campaign. Conway was pressed on whether Trump was specifically apologizing for high-profile controversial statements, including disparaging Arizona Sen. John McCain's military record and comments he made about a Gold Star family that spoke at the Democratic convention.
+
+Conway demurred on who specifically Trump was expressing regret to, and said he hasn't made apology calls to individuals.
+
+""He's expressed his regret publicly and said, 'If I have caused you personal pain -- that can include me, that can include you' -- that he regrets that,"" Conway said.",REAL
+1412,Donald Trump throws a grand old party,"Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) No one ever really doubted that Donald Trump could pull off a major counter-programing feat -- even when competing with a GOP debate that was expected to draw millions of viewers.
+
+He did it Thursday night, dazzling a crowd of hundreds of enthusiastic supporters by announcing that he had raised more than $6 million for veterans in one day -- $1 million of it from his own checkbook. ""We love our vets,"" he said.
+
+""You know, my whole theme is make America great again and that's what we're going to do --- and we wouldn't have even been here if it weren't for our vets,"" Trump said.
+
+Even Trump seemed a bit surprised that he had pulled off his stunt: ""Look at all the cameras. This is like the Academy Awards,"" the real estate magnate said as he took the stage in an auditorium at Drake University about 20 minutes after the debate began a few miles away. ""We're actually told that we have more cameras than they do by quite a bit, and you know what that's really in honor of our vets.""
+
+The rally was a restrained performance by Trump standards. He dispensed with his usual riff about his poll numbers and mostly avoided jabs at his fellow candidates (with the exception of a ""low-energy"" shot at Jeb Bush).
+
+Instead he delivered a speech mostly focused on the problems veterans have faced when returning from Iraq and Afghanistan -- inadequate healthcare and housing, drug abuse, mental health issues and homelessness.
+
+""Our vets are being mistreated. Illegal immigrants are treated better in many cases than our vets and it's not going to happen any more. It's not going to happen any more.""
+
+Clearly enjoying his evening away from the debate, Trump also told the audience what could be another media sensation for his campaign: the fact that his daughter Ivanka is pregnant. ""Ivanka, I said, it would be so great if you had your baby in Iowa. It would be so great -- I'd definitely win!""
+
+In a somewhat extraordinary move for someone who has reveled in taunting his rivals, he invited Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum -- two candidates who had been relegated to an earlier undercard debate -- to join him on stage to speak about veterans issues. While appearing generous, it was also politically savvy maneuver given that the two men were the respective winners of the past two Iowa caucuses, but stuck in the bottom-tier this time around.
+
+Huckabee and Santorum are still well-liked and admired by core Republican voters here in Iowa, even if their campaigns have failed to ignite this time. And their presence on stage with Trump could go a long way toward negating the criticisms from Trump's rivals like Ted Cruz, whose allies have claimed that Trump will be punished by Iowans on Monday for skipping the debate stage.
+
+Santorum, who narrowly defeated Mitt Romney here in 2012, tried to stand to the side of Trump's podium, noting to laughter that he didn't want to be photographed in front of a Trump sign.
+
+""I'm supporting another candidate, but that doesn't mean we can't work together"" to honor America's veterans, Santorum said.
+
+Trump has regaled in the media spectacle that he created over the past few days after withdrawing from the Fox News debate with complaints that he'd been mistreated by the network. He told the crowd that he wished that he'd been able to participate, but once he had withdrawn -- no amount of cajoling, even by the likes of Fox News host Bill O'Reilly --- could bring him back.
+
+""When you're treated badly, you have to stick up for your rights,"" he said to cheers. ""And that's what our country has to do.... We have to stick up for our country when we're being mistreated.""
+
+""Once this started and it was for our vets there was nothing I could do,"" he added, reflecting on whether the pundits were right that his maneuver might damage his campaign. ""I don't know. Is it for me personally a good thing, a bad thing? Will I get more votes? Will I get less votes? Nobody knows. Who the hell knows.""
+
+He predicted that the amount of money that he had raised through a website and through personal calls to wealthy friends who contributed to the cause would impress Iowans. ""I think this money is going to continue to pour in.""
+
+The organizations run the gamut from groups focused on helping veterans with disabilities and mental health problems to those aimed at helping veterans reintegrate into civilian society.
+
+Trump supporters who waited hours in the cold to see him roundly disputed the notion that he would see any attrition in his support in Iowa, where he has led in recent polls.
+
+In interviews, many voters here said the controversy was yet another example of Trump bucking the establishment -- a trait that has endeared him to them from the beginning -- and that they were proud of him standing up to Fox News.
+
+Ernie Ratcliffe, an army veteran who served two tours in Vietnam, drove in from Kansas City for the rally, scoffed when asked for his thoughts on Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's contention that Trump skipped the debate because he was afraid of taunts or difficult questions from the Fox moderators or rival candidates.
+
+""Donald Trump isn't scared of anything. He's not scared of absolutely anything,"" said Ratcliffe, who has signed up with his wife to call New Hampshire voters on Trump's behalf next week. ""Donald J. Trump said he was going to do this and he's done it. He's a man of his word.""
+
+Ratcliffe said he was convinced that Trump was the only candidate who could clean up the Department of Veterans Affairs and that it would be ""one of the first things he does when he gets into office.""
+
+""He's going to get it squared away,"" he said. ""It's not going to take him very long to do it. He's going to put the right people in. He knows how to manage things. He's a very successful businessman. He's going to get it done very quickly and very, very well.""
+
+Randal Thom, a former Marine who was among the first admitted to Trump's event, said he loved it that Trump refused to back down.
+
+""When it came out yesterday that he was actually doing this (rally) in less than 24 hours, it was amazing,"" Thom said. ""It just shows he has the ability to rally and get things done.""
+
+Thom, who raises Alaskan Malamute and Pomalute puppies in Minnesota, and plans to spend Monday in Iowa volunteering for Trump, dismissed Cruz as ""a Canadian-born citizen"" and described the Texas senator, as well as the other GOP contenders as ""weak.""
+
+""Trump is a 100% strongman. He's bullet proof,"" Thom said. ""People say, 'Oh look at his background. Look at the number of wives he's had.' You know what? I don't care about that. What I care about is his future.""",REAL
+920,New York election results: 5 takeaways,"(CNN) Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton came home to New York and both won big.
+
+Trump used his dominating victory as an opportunity to make his case that the only way he'll be denied the Republican nomination is if the game is rigged.
+
+Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates.""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey.""
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23.""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant.""
+
+Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House.""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement.
+
+Clinton reveled in her win, which broke Bernie Sanders' string of successes in the West and Midwest.
+
+The victories pushed both candidates much closer to their parties' nominations, leaving their opponents no room for error if either is to be stopped.
+
+Here are five takeaways from New York's primary:
+
+New York truly is Trump territory.
+
+On stage at Trump Tower, the Republican front-runner surrounded himself with some of his high-profile business friends to cap what he called ""an amazing week.""
+
+And he set up the Republican contest as one that would have to be taken from him -- unfairly.
+
+""We don't have much of a race anymore, based on what I'm seeing on television,"" Trump said. ""Senator Cruz is just about mathematically eliminated.""
+
+The good news for Trump shouldn't stop. April 26 -- the next Super Tuesday — features Maryland, Pennsylvania and other northeastern states that should also be friendly to the front-runner.
+
+Clinton gets the resounding win she wanted
+
+It's a sure sign that Clinton is expecting to celebrate when her campaign announces she'll deliver a speech on the night of a big election.
+
+""This one,"" Clinton told supporters,"" is personal.""
+
+Her commanding victory helped Clinton build on her pledged delegate lead, and it denied Sanders a win that could have changed the dynamics of the Democratic race.
+
+Those advantages have been enough for Clinton so far -- and they don't bode well for Sanders in states like New Jersey and California, where he'd need to crush Clinton to have any chance of catching her in pledged delegates.
+
+Sanders hoped he'd win New York. In fact, as a pro-Clinton group gleefully pointed out Tuesday, he'd said at least 27 times that he expected to win. For two weeks he'd practically moved back to his hometown of Brooklyn.
+
+The closed primary, Sanders said Tuesday evening in Pennsylvania as the crowd booed New York's laws, is ""wrong.""
+
+""That has got to change in future elections,"" he said.
+
+Sanders, though, will face the same problem next Tuesday, when Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island vote. Of those five states, only Rhode Island allows independents to vote in the Democratic primary.
+
+If Sanders couldn't improve his performance with African-Americans in New York, it's not clear that he ever will.
+
+In Philadelphia on Tuesday night, Cruz spoke before New York's polls closed — sparing him, for the moment, the awkwardness of addressing his third-place finish and his zero delegate haul.
+
+He didn't say anything about the contest at all, aside from noting that it's not surprising for a candidate (in this case, Trump) to win his home state. He'd already campaigned in Maryland on Monday, and is fighting for conservatives in a district-by-district bid to deny Trump delegates.
+
+Everything Cruz did on Tuesday night -- from the location of his event to the 8:30 p.m. ET timing -- reinforced that he wasn't holding his breath for a good night in New York. Aides said if he could hold Trump under 90 of the state's 95 delegates, even that would count as an acceptable result.
+
+""We're going to be deadlocked"" going into the Republican National Convention, Kasich said Tuesday night in Maryland. ""Then what delegates are going to do is do something crazy -- consider who can win in the fall.""
+
+The Democratic contest has become increasingly heated and personal in recent days -- but even as Sanders amps up the attacks and Clinton's campaign frets over the potential impact, the party's primary voters don't seem worried.
+
+Sixty-seven percent of Democratic voters surveyed in early exit polls said the campaign between Sanders and Clinton has energized the party, while just 29% said it has divided the party.
+
+In the short term, the extended primary is frustrating Clinton's camp. Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri called Sanders' campaign ""destructive"" to the point that Sanders' continuation in the race is ""not productive to Democrats"" and ""not productive for the country.""
+
+But in the long run, Democratic voters' engagement and interest in the contest could help Clinton, who will need to consolidate Sanders' supporters if she clinches the nomination -- and could find it easier to do that if they're not turned off by an extended intra-party battle.
+
+Among New York Republicans, it's a different story.
+
+Sixty percent say the GOP campaign has divided the party, compared to 36% who say it has energized it.
+
+That could have something to do with the state's leading candidate, Trump, consistently declaring the nominating process ""rigged"" against him.
+
+The numbers show that Republicans could have the tougher challenge in bringing the party together behind its eventual nominee.
+
+Trump's Tuesday rout punctuated that reality. His victory made clear that no other Republican stands a chance of catching him at the polls -- even as party members fight to deny him delegates.",REAL
+5515,How To Lower Blood Pressure Naturally,"Bel Marra Health October 31, 2016 
+Here’s a snapshot of America’s health when it comes to the heart: Heart disease is the number one killer. High blood pressure is a contributing cause of about 1,000 deaths a day – and one in every three American adults has the condition. About seven in 10 don’t realize it, putting them at risk for heart attack, stroke, heart failure, and kidney disease. 
+About seven in 10 adults with high blood pressure use medication to control it. 
+That’s according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 
+While we’re not quibbling with the necessity for medication to get blood pressure under control, there are natural remedies for high blood pressure, including spices and herbs that can help. Since keeping your blood pressure in the healthy range is something you need to do all your life, it’s better to control it without drugs, if you can. 
+Natural home remedies for high blood pressure 
+You’ve likely heard a lot about lifestyle factors that can have a huge impact on your blood pressure, like stress, alcohol, lack of exercise, smoking, and diet. The most important of these, in our books, is a heart-healthy diet. Focus on watching your salt intake (and balancing it with more potassium from foods like bananas, lima beans, melons, and squash), limit your sugar, and cut down on caffeine. 
+As part of your heart-healthy diet, consider the following spices and medicinal herbs to lower high blood pressure. You can incorporate them into your cooking, baking, and meal prep – as a little extra something to help your heart. They’re nature’s way of providing us with the good things we need to stay healthy. 
+Medicinal herbs and spices to lower blood pressure quickly 
+Basil: This is good news for cooks and foodies. Versatile, fragrant basil for lowering blood pressure is a great addition to many culinary favorites. Tear some fresh basil leaves and sprinkle liberally on your next pizza or bruschetta, use for a Thai curry, or try it chopped and beaten into softened butter and melted over roast chicken or crushed boiled new potatoes. 
+Try keeping a small of the herb in your kitchen garden (for easy, fresh access) and then it’s even more convenient to add to your cooking on a regular basis. 
+Tasty, yes, and good for helping to lower your blood pressure. The U.S. National Library of Medicine reports that extract of basil has been shown to lower blood pressure, although only briefly. But that’s a start to get you on track. It may work in a similar way to medication by affecting levels of endothelins, which are proteins that constrict blood vessels. When blood vessels are constricted, blood flow is slowed down or partially blocked – not good! 
+You need good blood flow for circulation and overall health. Your body depends on the nutrients and oxygen in your blood to be carried efficiently through your veins and arteries. 
+Garlic: Another kitchen staple and one of the top natural remedies for supporting healthy blood flow, this pungent seasoning brings wonderful flavor to foods. Add it fresh to your dishes, like soups, stews, and stir-fries. 
+If it’s a little on the strong side for your preference, roast it first in the oven. Trim the end off the bulb and drizzle a bit of olive oil over each exposed clove. Then cover with aluminum foil and bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 to 35 minutes. Try spreading this deliciousness on party toasts at your next gathering. 
+Not only addictive and good to eat, garlic can help with healthy blood flow (good for your heart and blood pressure). 
+Cardamom: This seasoning comes from India (think fragrant chai tea) and is often used in traditional dishes of South Asia. It has a sweet flavor similar to grapefruit and ginger, if you can imagine that. Scientists in India have studied its effects on blood pressure, and recommend a teaspoon of cardamom powder taken with honey twice a day for healthy blood pressure. 
+Other options? Include cardamom seeds or powder in soups and stews, spice rubs, and in baked goods for a kick and a positive health benefit. 
+Cat’s claw: When it comes to medicinal herbs to lower high blood pressure, cat’s claw has been used in China for thousands of years. Studies have suggested its effectiveness. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), rhynchophylline, an alkaloid or certain organic compound in cat’s claw, has demonstrated an ability inhibiting both the formation of plaque on arterial walls and formation of blood clots in the brain, heart, and arteries. 
+You’ll find cat’s claw in supplement form in health stores and supplement sections at your supermarket. 
+Celery seed: Another herb popular in traditional Chinese medicine, celery seed has been used to help with hypertension. You can use the seeds to flavor soups, casseroles, and other savory dishes – and you can also juice the whole plant. It has a salty taste, making it a good mix with the sweeter fruit juices. Try carrot, apple, and celery first thing in the morning for a terrific pick-me-up. It’s a nutrient powerhouse in a glass. You might like it better than your morning coffee (we said might!). 
+Celery in your diet can act as a natural diuretic, so its potassium and sodium content helps to regulate body fluids. It also has a nutrient called phthalide, reported to promote cardiovascular health. 
+These are a few medicinal herbs to lower high blood pressure. As you can see, going the natural route is an appetizing one. So start with your diet, and spend more time in your kitchen preparing fresh, whole foods and sampling these heart-healthy herbs and spices. Tags:",FAKE
+5096,Why Debbie Wasserman Schultz failed,"The announcement of Debbie Wasserman Schultz's planned resignation as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee was sudden, shaking up an otherwise sleepy Sunday afternoon in which most of the political world was focused on making its way to Philadelphia for the party's quadrennial convention.
+
+But, if her departure was abrupt — Wasserman Schultz will resign her post when the Democratic National Convention ends on Thursday night — the fall that led to the end was anything but. Wasserman Schultz's tenure at the head of the DNC has been rocky almost since the moment she took over the job in 2011.
+
+Interviews with a variety of pro- and anti-Wasserman Schultz Democrats — and there are plenty of both — suggest that the Florida House member's problems were both personal and structural, and that she retains a relatively bright future even if this chapter of her political life left much to be desired.
+
+[Here are the latest, most damaging things in the DNC’s leaked emails]
+
+Where to start when it comes to the ""why"" behind Wasserman Schultz's struggles depends on who you believe is to blame for them.
+
+Several people I talked to put the blame — or at least a large portion of it — on President Obama and his inner circle of political advisers who never cared about the DNC in any meaningful way and, as a result, left Wasserman Schultz to wither on the vine as they worked around her time and again.
+
+""Obama and team never accepted the DNC or cared very much about it, and it showed,"" said one senior Democratic strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly. ""Obama was not into party building, or party anything. He never integrated his political operation into the DNC so she was in a very tough position always.""
+
+From the start, Obama was never a big ""party"" guy. He explicitly ran against the party infrastructure and elites in 2008 — Hillary Clinton was their candidate — and once he got into office was openly disdainful of many of the traditional apparatus of the party.
+
+Obama installed his loyal ally Tim Kaine — name ring a bell? — as the DNC chair. But, once Kaine decided to run for an open Virginia Senate seat in 2011, it was clear to anyone paying attention that the next DNC chair wouldn't be a member of the Obama inner circle as he began positioning himself for his reelection bid.
+
+Enter Wasserman Schultz, a Jewish woman from Florida who had a reputation as a dogged fundraiser and willing attack dog on TV. For what Obama imagined that job to be, she was a natural fit.
+
+""She wasn't anyone's first choice for chair,"" a veteran Democratic operative said. ""But I think most people thought she'd be fine.""
+
+[Schedule: Who will speak in Philadelphia during the 2016 Democratic National Convention]
+
+The counter to that story line is that Wasserman Schultz, from the jump, seemed dead set on using the perch to promote her own political interests rather than put what was best for Obama first.
+
+Even some of Wasserman Schultz's harshest critics acknowledge that part of that problem was structural: She was in elected office while also serving as the party chair. She was looking to move up the ladder in House leadership and saw the DNC job as a way to do that. Period.
+
+She was far from the only elected official who has struggled to balance the demands of the party chair job with more provincial interests. ""It wasn't great with [then Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd] or [then Philadelphia Mayor Ed] Rendell, and it wasn't great with her,"" said one leading Democratic consultant. ""There are always concerns about whose agenda gets put first, tensions between official duties (particularly votes) and political party duties.""
+
+But, Wasserman Schultz's emphasis on her own political future — and the need to make sure she was front and center when it came to media attention and interviews — rubbed lots and lots of people the wrong way.
+
+""She ignored infrastructure, instead focusing on why she wasn't getting more media hits,"" noted a longtime Democratic strategist familiar with the inner workings of the party committee. ""
+
+ ""Fundraising was anemic.""
+
+What everyone agrees on is that Wasserman Schultz suffered a series of self-inflicted wounds as chair. There was the time she broke with the White House about deporting children detained at the border. The time she said Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had given women ""the back of his hand."" Story after story about how she was feathering her own political nest first and then worrying about Obama and the broader party second — or not at all. How she found herself on the wrong side of Bernie Sanders and the party's liberal base.
+
+On and on it went. For much of the past two years, rumors of Wasserman Schultz's demise came across the transom with remarkable regularity. And yet, she persevered — occasionally via means that left made her detractors even more convinced that she needed to go.
+
+What her increasingly large enemies list could never find was a spark that could set all of the tinder they had gathered aflame. That long-awaited moment came late last week when a hacker group released more than 20,000 hacked DNC emails. The emails cast Wasserman Schultz and her senior staff in not only an unflattering light but also as abettors of Clinton's march to the Democratic presidential nomination — in effect confirming the suspicions of Sanders and his supporters.
+
+Within days, years of bad blood with Wasserman Schultz had been unleashed and she had been pushed out.
+
+What does the future hold for the Florida Democrat? She faces a primary from a Sanders-backed candidate but most political observers say she will win it. Beyond that, few people I talked to had any real sense for where she might go next although Dave Beattie, a Florida pollster and Wasserman Schultz ally, was optimistic.
+
+""I have worked with her a long time,"" he said. ""She is loyal, works hard, is a staunch advocate for Democrats and is not afraid to raise money.""
+
+Time will tell. But, it's hard to see Wasserman Schultz's time at the head of the DNC as anything short of a major disappointment for all involved.",REAL
+6716,"Trump Caught Again, Ripping Off Kids Charity This time","Vladimir Putin: The United States continues to sleep with al-Nusra ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Trump Caught Again, Ripping Off Kids Charity This time By GPD on October 27, 2016 Trump golf course sponsors charity fundraiser for kids — and then asks for half of the money DAVID EDWARDS Officials at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County complained this week after one of Donald Trump’s golf courses hit the charity with $20,000 in charges to hold a fundraiser that was expected to cost little or nothing. 
+The Palm Beach Post reported in July that the Trump International Golf Club is required to allow charities to use its facilities because the course is built on county land. Each year the charity is selected by a different county commissioner. This year, County Commissioner Melissa McKinlay selected the Boys and Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County to receive the benefit. And Trump’s course signed on to sponsor the fundraiser. 
+But McKinlay learned this week from Assistant County Administrator Todd Bonlarron that Trump’s people were requiring the charity to pay $20,000 in golf and catering fees. In the past, fees had reportedly been capped at $5,000. 
+In an email this week, Mark Casale, vice president philanthropy for the Boys and Girls Clubs, told McKinlay and Assistant County Administrator Todd Bonlarron that Trump’s course was effectively asking for half of the proceeds from the fundraiser. 
+Read more at Raw Story Related Posts:",FAKE
+10475,Florida Republicans Voting for Hillary Clinton · Guardian Liberty Voice,"On November 1, 2016, early voting polls in Florida indicate more than one-quarter of registered Republicans have cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton. Two states that the Democratic presidential nominee must win are North Carolina and Florida, which her campaign describes as checkmate states. She must carry the swing states to ensure the accumulation of electoral votes needed to be elected to the presidency.
+The CNN polls in October indicated that Clinton had an 18 point lead over Donald Trump among early voters.
+CBS reports the percentages of Florida’s Republicans who cast early votes break down as follows; 11 percent registered since 2012, 83 percent voted in the last presidential election, and six percent did not vote four years ago. Among registered Democrats the numbers were similar.
+Early voting, in person or by mail, is underway in 37 states. Experts predict that more than 46 million people will have voted before next Tuesday, November 8.
+As of November 2, at 12:56 a.m. EDT, The New York Times daily prediction is that Clinton has an 88 percent chance over Trump’s 12 percent to win. Hers are down 1 percent and his are up 1. from the day before.
+However, the paper indicates that the ROP candidate could win, although it is as unlikely as a professional football kicker missing a 35-yard field goal.
+Written by Cathy Milne
+Sources:
+The New York Times: Election Forecast; Who Will Be President?
+760 AM Radio: Early voting: More good signs for Clinton in key states
+Twitter Feed CNN : 17% of early GOP Voters Chose Clinton
+Image Courtesy of WEBN-TV’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License    #CMJournalist , clinton , Donald Trump , north carolina",FAKE
+1408,The Trump data card: Key to winning the White House,"You can call Donald Trump a lot of things – and heaven knows almost everyone has – but you can’t call him stupid. He’s the lead story on every newscast, the hashtag of all hashtags on social media. And he’s gotten there by defying every convention.
+
+The bombastic billionaire has generated controversy and widespread contempt since he announced his candidacy for president in June, yet the latest New York Times/CBS News poll gives him 35 percent of the Republican vote – more than double the 16 percent of runner-up Ted Cruz. Trump has defied the experts for six months, so have no doubt about it: He is very, very smart. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
+
+The Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses and the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary are right around the corner, but two months is an eternity in American politics. There’s nothing that can’t be turned upside down in a few short weeks. And that’s why every other candidate for president, whether Democrat or Republican, should be spending a lot less time right now condemning what Trump is saying. Instead, they should be devoting their time and effort to learning why he’s winning.
+
+All they need to do is look at the data.
+
+Politics is all about data now, and Trump is generating more of it every day than all the other candidates combined in a week. But every time he says something provocative – which is pretty much every time he speaks – he creates data that can be captured, analyzed and turned against him.
+
+We live in a world where data controls everything, and I spend all my time studying how and why. In my case, because I’m a physician, it’s health data. But the principles are the same, and they’re why whoever best corrals the data Trump is generating will be the next president of the United States.
+
+In an analysis of his strategy on Thursday, the Washington Post reported that “Trump uses his Instagram account, which has more than 650,000 followers, to deliver snarky messages and short videos of him scowling as he delivers pronouncements from his Trump Tower desk. On Twitter … Trump has posted more than 6,000 tweets since launching his campaign in June.”
+
+There’s your data. Trump – @realDonaldTrump – has 5.2 million followers on Twitter. Every tweet and retweet, every Facebook post and share, every Instagram blast, every newscast lead, every comment on everything … Everyone’s talking about Donald Trump, which means he’s generating a trove of data that his opponents should be mining to their advantage.
+
+Instead of climbing all over each other every day to condemn him, the other candidates should lean back, take a deep breath and learn from him – because the next president of the United States will be the man or woman who is smart enough to invest in the infrastructure that’s needed to organize and analyze the Trump data trove. And with Iowa and New Hampshire coming up fast, the time to make that investment is now.
+
+Does data analysis really work? Ask Barack Obama; it’s why he’s been living in the White House for the last seven years. He is the master of using data to win elections by analyzing and identifying undecided voters, learning everything he could about each and every one of them, and then persuading them to vote for him in the final days of the campaign. Jim Messina, who headed Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012, said recently that “Every night for 18 months, we did 66,000 computer simulations of the election, and that’s how we based our tactics…. [W]e based it all on big data.”
+
+Obama is the Big Data president, and Trump gets that. The other candidates think traditional rhetoric and campaign slogans appeal to voters, but Trump has tapped into something every TV producer and ad executive knows: Times have changed. To get the ratings or to make the sale, you need to know the audience and make it yours.
+
+When advertisers want you to buy something, they provoke you. They grab your attention and use the data on what you’re watching to understand your behavior and reel you in. The same applies in television. Nobody’s watching ""Little House on the Prairie"" anymore. The shows that get the ratings are the ones that are provocative, edgy, controversial.
+
+Trump gets that, and he’s brought it to the presidential race. He’s shaking up the electorate, forcing them to react. You may not like what he’s saying, but you can’t deny that it’s working. He’s been at the top of the polls for months.
+
+But that, oddly enough, opens a door for whoever is smart enough to walk through it. A savvy opponent, instead of jumping on what Trump is saying, should be jumping on how people are reacting to what he’s saying. Trump has opened up a gold mine of data that any of his opponents can analyze to understand what people like – or don’t like – and why. From Mexicans to McCain to Muslims, all the trash talk and all the responses to it create data that a tech-savvy opponent should pounce on. It’s there for anyone who knows how to use it.
+
+“We spent two years and about $400 million trying to build up a capacity to predict people’s behaviors and match that with social media,” Messina said, reflecting on Obama’s re-election. “The final 96 hours of the 2012 race, a majority of Americans, for the first time since 1972, went to the incumbent. And when you ask them why: 76 percent of those said because their friend or family member talked to them on social media and told them why they had to support Barack Obama.”
+
+Any candidate who wants to be standing when Trump falls should memorize those words. Use the data he’s generating to learn everything you can about his supporters, and then make them yours.
+
+Trump is smart. To beat him, an opponent has to be smart enough to move away from the chorus of critics and use the data he’s generating to defeat him.
+
+Keep your base, analyze the data, win over his supporters … and the White House will be yours.
+
+Dr. Sreedhar Potarazu is an acclaimed ophthalmologist and entrepreneur who has been recognized as an international visionary in the business of medicine and health information technology. He is the founder of VitalSpring Technologies Inc., a privately held enterprise software company focused on providing employers with applications to empower them to become more sophisticated purchasers of health care. Dr. Potarazu is the founder and chairman of WellZone, a social platform for driving consumer engagement in health.",REAL
+6342,Huge 'Hillary For Prison' Sign at World Series Game,"Huge 'Hillary For Prison' Sign at World Series Game # Isotrop 0 
+Baseball fans held up a large ""Hillary for Prison"" sign during the World Series Postgame Show which was impossible to ignore. Liberals quickly destroyed the sign. Tags",FAKE
+8111,David Duke Slams the NFL and Black Lives Matter in Monday NIght Football Game Senate Campaign Ads –NFL Bosses cringe.,"David Duke Slams the NFL and Black Lives Matter in Monday NIght Football Game Senate Campaign Ads –NFL Bosses cringe. November 7, 2016 at 8:40 pm 
+“David Duke Slams the NFL and Black Lives Matter in Monday NIght Football Game Senate Campaign Ads. NFL Bosses cringe.” 
+During the middle of Monday Night Football, Senate candidate Slams NFL for their salute to Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter in Superbowl which incited Black racist shootings in Dallas and our own Baton Rouge. 
+Thank God, under campaign rules, there is still some freedom of speech in America! 
+Don’t you love it!",FAKE
+380,Hillary’s leftward sprint cheers Dems,"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**
+
+Buzz Cut:
+
+ • Hillary’s leftward sprint cheers Dems
+
+ • Billionaire Steyer gets Hillary house call
+
+ • Rubio jumps in Iowa Q poll
+
+ • High expectations this time for Huckabee in Iowa
+
+ • Good dog, indeed
+
+HILLARY’S LEFTWARD SPRINT CHEERS DEMS
+
+ Why do politicians pander? Because it works. Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has been continually buffeted by scandal since March 2 and faces concerns among primary voters about her coming coronation. The response to the allegations against the candidate and her organization – payola for official favors as secretary of state and destruction of tens of thousands of emails from her time in office – has been a botch. Clinton’s husband and daughter are trying to defend the family’s buckracking, but they’re trying to do it whilst on a luxury African tour that highlights the family’s unsavory connections. So what’s the candidate – especially one who was upended as a frontrunner eight years ago – to do? Go left. And she is sprinting that way.
+
+ 
+
+ [‘Shred’ may not have been the word you were looking for - Bill Clinton in an interview with CNN reportedly said “suggestions of improper funding to the Clinton Foundation ‘won’t fly... not a shred of evidence.’”]
+
+ 
+
+ The latest and most aggressive flip is Clinton’s move on illegal immigration in which she vowed to go beyond the temporary executive amnesty from President Obama that’s currently being blocked by the courts. That’s a big veer. But she’s benefitting from such tactics. A new poll from NYT/CBS News found that while 81 percent of Democrats found Clinton honest and trustworthy, just 40 percent of independents did. This is the first time that the poll has asked the question, but it suggests that in addition to the “Faberge egg” phenomenon, Clinton may be helped by primary voters feeling better since she started running as an Obama Democrat.
+
+ 
+
+ [De Blasio warming up for Hillary endorsement - Appearing on MSNBC, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio praised Clinton’s increasingly liberal stances on issues like immigration and criminal justice.]
+
+ 
+
+ Perhaps this is Clinton revealing her true feelings. But if it is candor and not pander, though, there is still the character question of why Clinton previously misled voters. And there is the larger issue: The Clinton brand is based on pragmatic centrism, not ideology. As Mitt Romney found out, candidates who start with a trust deficit do not, in fact, get to shake their Etch A Sketches. Even a candidate who gets away with ducking the press for months at a time will eventually have to answer reporters’ questions about the scandals and her congressional testimony about the emails is coming up later this month. As the scandal stuff bumps and bruises its way forward, it seems unlikely that general election voters will be of a mind to take her word on questions of pinwheeling policy stances.
+
+ 
+
+ The 1 percent likes one of their own - A CNBC survey found 53 percent of millionaires would vote for Hillary Clinton while 47 percent would vote for the GOP hopeful.
+
+ 
+
+ O’Malley scoffs - “Governor O’Malley stood up when it mattered. When most leaders in the Democratic and Republican Parties were saying that we should close our border to children fleeing violence in Central America, he defied them and said that we could not send children ‘back to certain death.’ He was criticized for that position, but leadership is about forging public opinion, not following it.’ – Lis Smith, spokeswoman for former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.
+
+ 
+
+ Poll: N.H. lead gets a trim - Support for Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has dropped and her lead over potential Democratic rivals has slipped according to a new WMUR poll of likely New Hampshire primary voters. Clinton is the favorite of 51 percent to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 20 percent and Sen. Bernie Sanders at 13 percent. In WMUR’s February poll, 58 percent backed Clinton to Warren’s 14 percent and Sanders’ 6 percent. “‘Hillary Clinton is still the frontrunner,’ survey center director Andrew Smith [told WMUR]. ‘She is the frontrunner largely because Democrats think she is the most electable in November 2016. But there is evidence that a significant bloc of progressive Democratic primary voters are not happy with the Clinton candidacy.’”
+
+ 
+
+ Power Play: Dem debates will draw out challengers - The Democratic Party is sanctioning six presidential debates. That’s sounds like quite a few for a field currently consisting of presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton and a self-described socialist senator from Vermont who isn’t even a registered Democrat. But the debate announcement will change the shape of the field. Chris Stirewalt gives you the lowdown, in 60 seconds. WATCH HERE.
+
+ 
+
+ BILLIONAIRE DONOR STEYER GETS HILLARY HOUSECALL
+
+ Billionaire Tom Steyer and his wife Kat Taylor host Hillary Clinton at their home in upscale Pacific Heights-San Francisco today. The “Conversation with Hillary,” in which the presumptive Democratic nominee will likely be pressed for her position on the Keystone XL pipeline, kicks off a three-day California fundraising swing. Steyer is a green-energy mogul whose business depends on government subsidies and government regulation of his fossil-fuel competitors. Though Clinton has been officially non-committal on Keystone, don’t be surprised if her leftward shift continues as she plays up to West Coast donors.
+
+ 
+
+ [Down the tube? - An environmental group calling on Clinton to outline her plan for addressing climate change, including opposition to Keystone XL, is staging a rally outside the Steyer fundraiser today.]
+
+ 
+
+ The host with the most - Steyer has been touted as “the most influential environmentalist in American politics.” He pumped more than $73 million into PACS pushing climate change in the midterms – and has been cast as a liberal counterforce to the Koch brothers. Steyer’s prolific fundraising for President Obama and subsequent visits to the White House on environmental issues have gone hand-in hand with benefits to his ‘clean energy” interests. The scope of Steyer’s kingmaker status has driven Democrats to stage events like their one-party climate change talkathon in Congress last year and Sen. Harry Reid’s annual clean energy summit. Keynoting last year’s Las Vegas gathering of industry leaders – you guessed it: Hillary Clinton.
+
+ 
+
+ WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…
+
+ CNET: “In Tom Clancy's sensationalist novel ‘Debt of Honor,’ a disgruntled pilot decides to avenge his lost honor by crashing a fuel-laden 747 directly into the U.S. Capitol, causing the giant building to explode and collapse. The scope of that fictional disaster was hard to fathom prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But even before 9/11, anyone who had been in Lakehurst, N.J., on May 6, 1937, would have had a pretty good sense of just how big an explosion Clancy had in mind. Because that day, the Hindenburg, a German zeppelin that was famous the world over for ferrying the rich and powerful across the Atlantic, blew up as it attempted to land, a catastrophe that rocked the globe, kickstarted the news industry, and closed the book for good on a form of travel that, while far beyond the means of most people, unquestionably appealed to the romantic notions of the masses.”
+
+ 
+
+ Got a TIP from the RIGHT or LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM
+
+ 
+
+ POLL CHECK
+
+ Real Clear Politics Averages
+
+ Obama Job Approval: Approve – 46.0 percent//Disapprove – 49.9 percent
+
+ Direction of Country: Right Direction – 29.8 percent//Wrong Track – 61.2 percent
+
+ 
+
+ RUBIO JUMPS IN IOWA Q POLL
+
+ Marco Rubio’s post-announcement surge is paying off in Iowa where the latest Quinnipiac University poll shows him vaulting into the top tier for the state’s Republican caucuses. The poll, out today, shows the Florida senator gaining 9 points since February to finish in a second-place tie with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who remained at 13 percent. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also made big gains since his announcement, jumping 7 points to 12 percent. But the man to beat is still Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who again finished first. But Walker saw his lead shrink from 12 points in February to 8 points this month. The poll, taken before his Tuesday announcement showed no improvement for former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., who remained at 11 percent. Another newly declared candidate, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, saw his support slip from 11 percent to 7 percent.
+
+ 
+
+ [Watch Fox: Ben Carson will join Megyn Kelly tonight for his first television interview since declaring his 2016 candidacy. “The Kelly File” airs at 9 p.m. ET.]
+
+ 
+
+ Hawkeye voters shuck Jeb - The big loser in the new Q poll is Jeb Bush. The former Florida governor saw his support drop by half, falling to 5 percent. Bush did take the lead in another poll question, but not a good one: Which candidate would voters definitely not support? Bush came in first at 25 percent followed by Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., at 20 percent. Others joining Bush and Christie in 5-percent-or-less club: former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and former tech CEO Carly Fiorina.
+
+ 
+
+ [A Washington Post write up of the recent NYT/CBS News and WSJ/NBC News polls shows that even though Bush is not the resounding favorite he is gaining ground with primary voters.]
+
+ 
+
+ Sixteeners split on GOP budget vote - The three declared Republican presidential candidates in the Senate were divided in casting their ballots on the GOP budget plan Tuesday. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted against the measure, while Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., voted yea.  The 10-year non-binding blueprint passed 51-48 and will serve as a starting point for spending bills later this year.
+
+ 
+
+ Perry flips on Ex-Im bank - Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry details in this WSJ op-ed how he came to change his mind on Ex-Import Bank, and why he thinks there are other ways to create jobs. He writes, “Next month, the bank comes up for reauthorization again—but this time I can’t get on board. I have been deeply disturbed by recent revelations of corruption and bribery at the institution.”
+
+ 
+
+ [Starting May 16 Perry heads to Iowa for a series of nine events over the course of four days.]
+
+ 
+
+ Heading home - Ben Carson attends a private event today in Baltimore, says his campaign press secretary.
+
+ 
+
+ Download that, dude - Facing ridicule for leaving the “.org” version of her open to a cyber-squatter, former tech CEO Carly Fiorina turned the tables on “Late Night” host Seth Myers when she announced she had bought SethMyers.org. It cost the her a whopping $16. Watch their exchange here.
+
+ 
+
+ Snyder says he sees an opening - WSJ: “Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said Tuesday that he sees an opening for a presidential candidate with his track record, though it likely will be weeks until he announces whether he’ll join the race for the GOP nomination. In an interview on the sidelines of a job conference here, Mr. Snyder said while he is focused on ‘telling the Michigan story,’ he is ‘watching who is in the candidate race, because we need a problem-solver in Washington’…He said he was “watching the process, and I think you’ll find most of the candidates coming out by the June-July time-frame.’”
+
+ 
+
+ HIGH EXPECTATIONS THIS TIME FOR HUCKABEE IN IOWA
+
+ Des Moines Register: “If he wants to win Iowa again, however, GOP activists said Huckabee will have to adapt to higher expectations than he faced as a relative unknown ahead of his 2008 Iowa caucuses victory. He will also have to outlast a crowded field of candidates looking for a chunk of the conservative bloc that carried him to victory in 2008...a former Iowa legislator, recalls struggling to get a dozen people to show up to see Huckabee at a diner in 2007. This year, a pre-campaign stop by Huckabee at a Sioux City restaurant in March drew nearly 70.”
+
+ 
+
+ Chuck Norris fact: He still supports Huckabee - Roundhouse kick enthusiast  Chuck Norris, told NYT Tuesday that he believes Huckabee is, ‘the most qualified,’ candidate. Norris avidly supported Huckabee in the 2008 cycle.
+
+ 
+
+ [On his “Factories, Farms & Freedom” swing through Iowa Huckabee visits with employees of Clow Valve, and hosts a rally in Urbandale, IA.]
+
+ 
+
+ “…Bill Clinton was governor for 12 years…When I came into office, first as lieutenant governor, then as governor, every agency was populated with the people he had hired and appointed…My door was nailed shut as lieutenant governor…It was literally nailed shut. I couldn't get in for 59 days.” – Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., on “The Kelly File”
+
+ 
+
+ GOP KEEPS STATEN ISLAND SEAT HOUSE AFTER GRIMM DISGRACE
+
+ The Hill: “Staten Island district attorney Daniel Donovan (R) easily defeated Democratic City Councilman Vincent Gentile in the special election to replace disgraced former Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) on Tuesday night.”
+
+ 
+
+ BIBI IN A JAM AFTER ALLY DEFECTS TO OPPOSITION
+
+ AP: “With the clock ticking, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raced to put together a governing coalition Tuesday or face the prospect of being forced out of office by a former ally. Netanyahu’s Likud Party won March 17 elections, emerging as the largest single party in parliament. But he has had a tough time striking deals with other parties to secure a 61-seat majority in the 120-seat parliament. If he fails by the end of the day Wednesday, President Reuven Rivlin must give someone else the job.”
+
+ 
+
+ Down to the wire in U.K. - Sky News: “Overnight polls into the final day of campaigning suggest neither of the two main parties have managed to break the deadlock, with the race remaining neck and neck. One poll suggests the Tories have sneaked a 3% lead over Labour - with UKIP enjoying its highest vote share since January.”
+
+ 
+
+ GOOD DOG, INDEED
+
+ There have already been 41 American police officers killed in the line of duty this year, but Lt. Eric Eslary’s story may bring that statistic into more tangible terms for you. R.I.P., lieutenant. AP: “A western Pennsylvania police officer and father of six was killed in a head-on crash with a work van that was traveling the wrong way, police said. Lt. Eric Eslary's patrol SUV collided with the van about 2 a.m. on U.S. Route 30 in Ligonier, about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh. Eslary was a 17-year veteran of the Ligonier Township Police Department and often worked the overnight shift with his K-9 partner Blek, a German shepherd. Blek was also injured in the crash and had to be coaxed away from his partner’s body by Eslary’s wife, who came to the scene. The dog had refused to leave Eslary’s side, township Police Chief Michael Matrunics said.”
+
+ 
+
+ AND NOW A WORD FROM CHARLES…
+
+ “The other thing that strikes me is, where is [Hillary Clinton]? First they put out their stooges to go out and defend them. Then their daughter, then the husband and she’s sort of hiding in the bunker…The numbers in The Wall Street Journal poll are very telling. Democrats are hanging on to Hillary...They are all in either because they believe in her or they know that they've got no choice.” – Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Watch here.
+
+ 
+
+ Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News.  Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here
+
+Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
+1513,Donald Trump leads an insane white cult — and Pat Buchanan just explained how it works,"Donald Trump validates these feelings. As such, it is now fundamentally clear that Donald Trump is a hero and leader for many conservatives in the Age of Obama.
+
+Most members of the pundit class have been befuddled by the ascendance of Donald Trump. But, there is one person who has solved this riddle.
+
+In a little-discussed editorial written several weeks ago, Pat Buchanan offered the following analysis:
+
+His popularity is traceable to the fact that he rejects the moral authority of the media, breaks their commandments, and mocks their condemnations. His contempt for the norms of Political Correctness is daily on display. And that large slice of America that detests a media whose public approval now rivals that of Congress, relishes this defiance. The last thing these folks want Trump to do is to apologize to the press. And the media have played right into Trump’s hand. They constantly denounce him as grossly insensitive for what he has said about women, Mexicans, Muslims, McCain and a reporter with a disability. Such crimes against decency, says the press, disqualify Trump as a candidate for president. Yet, when they demand he apologize, Trump doubles down. And when they demand that Republicans repudiate him, the GOP base replies: “Who are you to tell us whom we may nominate? You are not friends. You are not going to vote for us. And the names you call Trump — bigot, racist, xenophobe, sexist — are the names you call us, nothing but cuss words that a corrupt establishment uses on those it most detests.”
+
+Pat Buchanan possesses gifted insight into powerful appeal of Donald Trump for the Republican base. Both men are nativist, xenophobic, right-wing populists who understand the allure of white alienation and racial resentment in the post civil rights era. Pat Buchanan is more of a “culture warrior” than Donald Trump. But like George Wallace in the 1960s, the Know-Nothings in the 19th century and the Black Legion in the 1930s, Buchanan and Trump are recent iterations in a long history of right-wing demagoguery and false populism in American politics.
+
+Nevertheless, the essence of Buchanan’s claim remains correct: the “political establishment” and “media” are viewed as discredited by Republicans.
+
+One does not need to read rigorous research by social scientists or mountains of polling data to prove this thesis. All one has to do is listen to Donald Trump’s supporters (who are really none too different from the Republican base writ large) and how they make sense of the political and social world.
+
+For example, in recent focus groups conducted by CBS and CNN, Trump’s backers told interviewers such things as “I don’t believe any one of (the politicians). Not one. I believe Donald”; “My president comes on TV and he lies to me … I believe Donald. I tell you, he says what I’m thinking!”; and “I think we’re all scared. I’m actually a little jumpy, I find Trump is the only one who would come out and say something like this, no one else would do it … You know what he says, he says something completely crazy and in inflammatory then he dials back (and) starts explaining it.”
+
+These people are divorced from reality. To listen to Donald Trump’s supporters is to peek into the mouth of political madness.
+
+One of the main challenges that responsible members of the pundit classes are having in making sense of the Republican Party in the Age of Obama—and movement conservatism in the post civil rights era, more generally—is that they still possess some faith in the merits of political discourse as based on mutually agreed upon facts, proceeding in good faith, the Common Good, and a belief in some version of normal politics in the service of responsible governance.
+
+Moreover, the commentariat has still not effectively grappled with how today’s brand of conservatism exhibits pre-Enlightenment era thinking, and uses what I (and others) have described as “the politics of disorientation” to confuse the American people through a coordinated campaign of outright lying and seductive disinformation.
+
+In short, they are using analytical tools and frameworks that are incapable of understanding the true nature of what Donald Trump and contemporary movement conservatism actually embodies.
+
+It is clear that Trump is the leader of a cult of personality.
+
+Donald Trump is a proto-fascist. He buddies up with Russian President Vladimir Putin for credibility in his role as a new il-Duce, a petit Mussolini for 21st century American politics. Donald Trump is a classic “strong man” political figure. To that end, he encourages violence by his followers against political opponents and those identified as the Other or somehow weak. Nor does Donald Trump deny that he is a “racist” or “neo-fascist.”
+
+Trump also brags about his “perfect health,” “high energy” and vitality. Here, the fit body and Trump’s egomaniacal narcissism are essential for his crafting the charismatic leader persona.
+
+But is Donald Trump actually something far worse? Is he a type of political cult leader?
+
+To understand Donald Trump’s appeal, one must seriously consider the possibility that his followers specifically, and movement conservatives and the Republican Party more generally, are exhibiting signs of political psychopathology.
+
+A cult can take many forms. They can be oriented around religion, politics or other needs and goals. On this point, noted American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton outlined some of the basic aspects of a cult as being:
+
+Donald Trump is using his campaign to garner more money and power. He is also promising his supporters that he will “make American great again,” and by doing so give them opportunities for economic uplift and other resources.
+
+I offer an important distinction and qualifier—one that is perhaps even more troubling than the notion of a person being conditioned into a “new” identity that replaces the “old” one. Donald Trump’s — and the Republican Party’s — base of low information voters are not being grabbed off of the street by his agents. Trump is providing a safe space and outlet for conservatives to validate their preexisting racist, xenophobic and bigoted attitudes. Their true selves are being actualized and “liberated.”
+
+The Republican 2016 presidential primary candidates are using a campaign of fear and anxiety about terrorism, “illegal immigrants,” changing racial demographics, “black crime” and “Islam” to gin up support among a frightened public. This is the Southern Strategy mixed with old-fashioned fear-mongering to win over the votes of scared, mostly older, white voters in a moment when a black man happens to be president of the United States. This tactic also leverages how the brain structures and political personal types of conservatives/authoritarians are much more responsive to anxiety, fear and feelings of disgust than those of liberals and progressives.
+
+Donald Trump is a master of manipulating the fears and anxieties of his public. This is a feature of the cult leader: he or she creates a sense of crisis and then offers a solution to it. Such a process was detailed in a New York Times story written at the height of the moral panic about cults in the United States during the 1980s: Dr. Cath defined a cult as a group of people joined together by a common ideological system fostered by a charismatic leader, where, he said, ”the expectation is that they can transcend the imperfections and finitude of life.” He said: ”Often they set up a we-they philosophy: We have the truth and you do not…” At some point during the experience, he said, ”the mark is placed in a panicky, disoriented state, and an emotional crisis is manufactured by the recruiters.” One response to this, Dr. Clark said, is that people can become psychotic… Contemporary conservatives exist within an echo chamber that has been created by Republican elites, Fox News, right-wing talk radio and other media. It has expanded to include online spaces. The worldview that is created there is one where basic facts about empirical reality are rejected, and the right-wing paranoid style of conspiracy theories and unfounded rumors have replaced substantive political discourse. Extreme political polarization and a broken American politics are the result of the epistemic closure that typifies the right wing in the United States. Cults also isolate their members and give them new ways to understand the world around them on terms agreeable to the cult leader: Third, cutting off the outside information sources. Once entering cults, consciously or unconsciously, people will gradually block sources of outside information to form a separate space, which might make them lost the ability to think independently. Although the United States is abundant in information, the cult members are isolated from the outside world completely… One important way for converting is to contact and exchange information with the outside world, so people can think independently. Bursting the information cocoon of those people in a traditional religious cult or who are immersed in the right-wing media echo chamber is not an easy task. They will resist. In political psychology, this phenomenon is called the “backfire effect.” It offers a chilling insight into the impact of extreme political ideology, polarization and the right-wing media on its followers. If Trump’s supporters—and movement conservatives en masse—are in fact exhibiting signs of political psychopathology, then the backfire effect is a powerful lens for understanding their behavior. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger… “The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.” If Donald Trump is the leader of a political cult, then his power exists relative to how the modern Republican Party and movement conservatism possess the traits of “a fundamentalist-style political religion.” In this worldview, compromise, negotiation and working together across party lines to serve the Common Good and create a vibrant democracy are unacceptable because to do so is to engage in an act of heresy. Preeminent historian Richard Hofstadter described how conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s were even then manifesting a belief in politics as a type of religious orthodoxy. His observations resonate even more strongly in the age of the Tea Party, an extreme and reactionary Republican Party and Donald Trump. Five decades ago Hofstadter wrote: He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician.  Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.  Nothing but complete victory will do.  Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated – if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. Politics as religious orthodoxy is a necessary precondition for the rise of Donald Trump as a type of political cult leader. If contemporary conservatism is a type of religion where faith—what is a belief in that which cannot be proven by empirical means—rules all things, then Trump is the head of an extremist cult, a group considered too “radical” even by the fundamentalist standards of the Republican Party. Donald Trump is not Jim Jones. He is also not Immortan Joe from the recent film “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Trump is something more mundane. He is a demagogue with money who can mine fear, white identity politics and right-wing populism where spoils and rewards are given to good “real Americans” and the Other is, by definition, punished and excluded. Donald Trump is a hero for the angry and resentful white “silent majority” and “Everyman” who feel that they are somehow marginalized in “their” country and that “the blacks,” immigrants, Muslims and terrorists are out to get them. Cults provide easy answers, direction and a feeling of belonging for their members. The cult leader offers a way for his or her devotees to feel better about themselves than they did before joining the community. This is not a form of healthy personal growth or behavior. In most cases, it is deleterious to the self. When such techniques are used in politics, on many millions of people, it is a form of mass psychosis. Donald Trump is a carnival barker, proto-fascist reality TV show host turned Republican 2016 presidential primary leader. And he may also be a Svengali or Rasputin-like figure for the low information Republican base.",REAL
+2804,"The biggest thing Iran deal critics get wrong, in one paragraph","According to critics of the Iran deal, Obama got played. If he had just waited, they argue, painful economic sanctions would have forced the Iranians to cave completely. And when that happened, the United States could have taken down Iran's nuclear program entirely, instead of just limiting it.
+
+This narrative sounds compelling. It's also a total fantasy. The way sanctions actually worked means that the longer the US waited to make a deal, the worse it would have been.
+
+Miles Kahler, a distinguished professor at American University, put this point really well in a piece for Brookings. Kahler's basic point is that the deal isn't just an agreement between America and Iran — it's a deal between America, Iran, and America's international partners. People who say there was a better deal don't really understand what countries like Russia and China wanted out of the negotiations:
+
+Each of [America's] negotiating partners—three European allies, Russia, and China—paid a higher economic price for these economic sanctions in trade and investment foregone than the United States, whose companies have had (and will continue to have) limited economic exchange with Iran since the revolution, prevented by layers of unilateral sanctions imposed by successive U.S. administrations. Without the support of its negotiating partners for extending or deepening sanctions, their effectiveness would be immediately undermined. Given the greater opportunity cost of sanctions for them—particularly for Russia and China—it is difficult to imagine that they would follow any U.S. pursuit of a tougher bargain. Thus, the deal that is on the table represents not only a bargain between the P5+1 and Iran, but also a bargain among the P5+1 partners themselves.
+
+In other words, the sanctions that led to this deal depended on the participation of those other countries. But because they previously traded a lot with Iran, they were also suffering a lot from the sanctions. America didn't have strong trade ties with Iran in the first place, so it felt much less economic pain. But Germany and China didn't want to give up the money they could make from Iran forever. If Obama walked away from this deal, these countries would likely have given up on sanctions altogether — and the prospect of a ""better deal"" would have vanished.
+
+This is a very basic, fundamental point, but no deal critic has been able to answer it in a remotely plausible fashion. That's probably because the supposed ""better deal"" is 100 percent fictional. It was never a real option — just a myth made up to obscure the truth that this deal was the best one available.",REAL
+2185,How A 2007 Debate Gaffe Paved The Way For A Deal That Will Define Obama's Legacy,"""I have no interest in sitting down with our adversaries just for the sake of talking,"" he explained. ""But as president of the United States, I would be willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at a time and place of my choosing -- if, and only if, it can advance the interests of the United States.""
+
+On Tuesday morning, seven years after that address, the logical endpoint of the worldview Obama outlined at AIPAC was achieved. Speaking from the White House at 7 a.m., Obama announced the conclusion of nuclear negotiations, in which Iran agreed to dramatically downsize its nuclear infrastructure in exchange for sweeping sanctions relief from the U.S. and the international community. Once the deal is implemented, Iran will have slashed the number of centrifuges it spins and disposed of the bulk of its stockpile of uranium, which can be enriched to use as fuel for a bomb. It will also be bound to intrusive inspections by the UN and subject to the reimposition of sanctions if it is found to be reneging on its commitments under the deal.
+
+""The president has staked his reputation on this foolish errand, and I predicted all along that they would cave in to whatever it was in the end. ... Over time, history will judge it very harshly,"" said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who hammered Obama for his foreign policy naivety during the campaign in 2008 and who, during that election, infamously sang to the tune of ""that old Beach Boys song,"" ""Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.""
+
+""If he had two main themes during the campaign, to put it simplistically, it was 'We aren’t going to get stuck in stupid wars' and that we are going to engage our adversaries in diplomacy,"" said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. ""He has more or less done both, and this Iran deal comes at the end of a prolonged diplomatic process with Iran but after a string of engagement with other countries.""
+
+When Obama first declared he'd negotiate with adversaries, it was by accident -- an unprompted declaration during a Democratic primary debate -- and it set his campaign into a minor tailspin. ""We did not expect him to say that,"" former Obama spokesman Bill Burton told The Huffington Post of that debate moment. ""We were like, 'Oh my God. How do we walk it back? [Former Secretary of State] Madeline Albright’s attacking us!'""
+
+After just two months in office, Obama took the unconventional step of sending Iranians a holiday message on Nowruz, the Iranian new year. “For nearly three decades, relations between our nations have been strained,"" he said. ""But on this holiday, we are reminded of the common humanity that binds us together.” Shifting his focus from the Iranian people to the Iranian leadership, Obama looked into the camera: “My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us.”
+
+“We managed to convince the world,” said Ilan Goldenberg, who worked on Iran at the Pentagon between 2009 and 2012. “Up until that point it was, ‘Is Iran being obstinate, or is it the U.S.?’ Obama was able to demonstrate that we were open and negotiating in good faith. Which, in turn, allowed us to build up support for the sanctions regime,” he added, referring to the eventual coalition of nations that agreed to sanction Iran -- including reluctant countries like Russia and China.
+
+But the Obama foreign policy portfolio was always more robust than just a pledge to negotiate with enemies. And even as he was reaching out to Iran, Obama’s instincts seemed to guide him away from the very positioning that defined his campaign. As Dr. Edward Levine, who spent over 30 years as a staffer on the foreign relations and intelligence committee in the Senate, put it: “Engagement is one tool in the toolbox.”
+
+When he won the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after taking office, Obama gave a speech that, to the surprise of many, served as a defense of war. On one of his first major decisions, he authorized a major escalation of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, to the gratification of his military advisers. Drone operations expanded dramatically, in both frequency and geographic scope. And in 2011 he signed off on U.S. airstrikes in Libya to both prevent a humanitarian slaughter and to expedite the ouster of Col. Muammar Gaddafi.
+
+According to advisers, it was the latter decision, more than the others, that prompted rethinking within the administration about overall foreign policy strategy. The ease of the intervention was eclipsed only by the messiness of the aftermath. And soon enough, the voices of those inside the administration advocating for caution, multilateralism and ""retrenchment"" -- to borrow the phrasing of critics -- were ascendent.
+
+""You had different schools of thought in the administration,"" said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. ""You've had humanitarian interventionism, which got you to do more in Afghanistan initially, and more in Libya. And then you had the retrenchment mentality, which led you to not follow up in Libya, to have these calendar-based withdrawals rather than condition-based withdrawals from places like Iraq and Afghanistan. So I think there's been competing impulses. You articulate a pivot to Asia but you don't do a whole lot to make it real. So I just think there is all along then a kind of duality to the foreign policy.""",REAL
+4001,Russian Passenger Plane Crashes In Sinai With 224 Aboard,"A Russian aircraft carrying 217 passengers and seven crew members has crashed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, according to Egyptian authorities. The Airbus A321 lost contact with both Egyptian and Russian officials after it took off from Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on a flight to St. Petersburg, Russia.
+
+The Russian Aviation Agency says the airliner was a charter flight carrying tourists back from a popular Russian vacation spot, NPR's Corey Flintoff tells our Newscast unit. The plane was operated by Metrojet, a small airline formerly called Kolavia.
+
+There were no survivors, both Egyptian and Russian officials say. Investigators are working to determine what caused the crash. The AP reports that during the brief flight, the airliner's pilot reported technical difficulties and said he wanted to make an emergency landing.
+
+We'll update this post as new information becomes available.
+
+Update at 2:25 p.m. ET: Russia Denies Group's Claim For Credit
+
+Russian Transport Minister Maksim Sokolov, who is now on a flight to Egypt along with several other high-ranking officials, says that reports that the Russian airliner ""was hit by terrorists in Egypt cannot be considered reliable,"" Russia's Interfax news agency reports.
+
+That statement came after the ISIS affiliate in the Sinai put out a statement claiming responsibility for the crash. Experts on the group have told NPR's Alice Fordham that they're skeptical of such claims, adding that the group provided neither proof nor details about how they might have downed the aircraft.
+
+With the cause of the crash under investigation, both Air France and Lufthansa say their planes will avoid flying over the Sinai Peninsula, as a precaution, the AP reports.
+
+Interfax also reports that the loved ones of those on board the Metrojet flight will receive financial compensation, citing the Ingosstrakh insurance company's pledge of a benefit worth at least 2 million rubles (around $31,226) for each passenger. In addition, the Labor Ministry says the families of those on board will each receive 1 million rubles (around 15,613).
+
+Russian investigators searched the airline's offices, to confiscate any documents related to the plane that crashed, Interfax says.
+
+Update at 8:18 a.m. ET: Black Box Found; Many Bodies Recovered
+
+At least 100 bodies have been recovered from the scene of the crash, according to Russia's Tass agency, which adds that at least one black box flight recorder has also been found. The state news outlet adds that the passengers included 138 women, 17 children, and 63 men.
+
+""I now see a tragic scene,"" an Egyptian security officer tells Reuters in a phone call. ""A lot of dead on the ground and many who died whilst strapped to their seats.
+
+""The plane split into two, a small part on the tail end that burned and a larger part that crashed into a rock. We have extracted at least 100 bodies and the rest are still inside.""
+
+The officer adds, ""We are hearing a lot of telephones ringing, most likely belonging to the victims, and security forces are collecting them and putting them into a bag.""
+
+A look at the plane's flight data on the Flight Radar site shows that after taking off from the Red Sea resort, it quickly gained speed and altitude after takeoff. But moments after it topped 400 knots and 33,000 feet, the airliner's speed abruptly fell to just 93 knots, with an altitude of 28,375 feet, according to the Flight Radar data.
+
+The flight tracker data shows the airliner's flight lasted only about 20 minutes, halting when the plane was northeast of the town of Nekhel, in the central Sinai region.
+
+Corey also notes that as the story developed early Saturday, conflicting reports emerged about the plane's crash site. Some Russian media outlets, he said, initially reported that the authorities lost contact with the aircraft over Cyprus.
+
+Russia's President Vladimir Putin has declared a national day of mourning for Nov. 1, ordering flags to fly at half-mast. Earlier, Putin sent his condolences to the families of those aboard the plane, directed Russia's emergency agencies to assist at the crash site, and formed a commission to investigate the crash.
+
+Egypt's President Abdel Fattah El Sisi issued a statement offering ""sincere condolences to the leadership, government and people of Russia as well as the families of the victims of the Russian plane crash that took place near Al-Hasana City in Sinai.""",REAL
+9502,"“When You Speak Up for the MOVE 9, You Speak Up for Yourself”","Tweet Widget by MOVE People 
+The Philadelphia-based MOVE family was horribly victimized by police in 1978 and 1985. The first atrocity led to the mass imprisonment of MOVE members; the second assault killed five adults and six children and burned down a city block. No cops have ever been punished, but the MOVE 9 remain in prison, and were this year once again denied parole. “They couldn't kill us that day, so they are trying to finish the job in these prisons.” “When You Speak Up for the MOVE 9, You Speak Up for Yourself” by MOVE People 
+This article previously appeared on Move 9 blogspot . 
+“The District Attorney never proved MOVE had killed a police officer.” 
+The MOVE 9 Have been eligible for Parole since August 2008, After being in prison for 30 years. We have repeatedly been denied. In June of this year (2016) , we were denied parole again , for a total of ten years past the time we should have been released. One of the reasons the parole board gave to justify not releasing us is that we are a threat to the safety of the community. This is not true. People are not afraid of MOVE People. Move People ain't strangling people to death, shooting people in the back. It ain't MOVE that killed a man in front of his fiancé and four year old child. MOVE is not drive by shooting, or terrorizing folks in the community. It's the community who is faxing, emailing, and calling the parole board asking for our release on parole. 
+It is the Parole Board and D.A. John Straub who continue to deny our release for no valid reason. On August 8th 1978, hundreds of cops attacked our home at 3:00am in the morning trying to kill us. They couldn't kill us that day, so they are trying to finish the job in these prisons but understand: John Straub and the Parole Board are not justified. MOVE did not go out to the Police's house to do them harm. The Cops came to our house, because a judge sent them to our house to serve bench warrants for not appearing in court not for rape, murder, kidnapping or abuse but for not appearing in court for a civil matter. Understand this: hundreds of cops were sent to our home, while we were asleep, dressed in swat gear, armed with all type of weaponry, semi -automatic weapons, fire fighters, smoke bombs, tear gas, a deluge gun, a crane and a bulldozer to serve bench warrants, for a housing code violation. 
+“Move People ain't strangling people to death, shooting people in the back.” 
+It was the Police who came to Move’s premises. They came armed to the teeth and in their frenzy to kill MOVE, they killed one of their own, and condemned us for it. We are not making this up. The evidence is clear. 
+The whole world witnessed the attack on the MOVE house May 13th 1985, where the house was bombed into a blazing inferno, the six adults were shot and killed and the five children were shot back into the house by police as they tried to escape the burning flames where they died . These are proven Facts. During the city’s investigation hearing, it was ruled that the cops used excessive force and the killings were wrongful deaths. Those children were our children in that house that day, yet not one cop or official connected to the bombing of our family were held accountable, responsible for these deaths like the parole board is telling The MOVE 9 we have to take responsibility for a crime when the District Attorney never proved MOVE had killed a police officer. 
+We have no weapons charges and the judge admitted on public radio to the caller, Mumia Abu Jamal [a radio journalist at the time], that he didn't have the faintest idea who shot the police officer. It's a fact that world renowned forensic experts Dr. Ali Hameli and Claus Speth ruled the deaths of the children HOMICIDES in a scathing report against the city, submitted to the assistant District Attorney Joan Weimer, but the grand jury did nothing. 
+“It's time for everybody to start speaking freely in protest of all this free wheeling injustice.” 
+The Move 9 have spent almost 40 years in prison for killing a cop, with no real proof. The whole world saw the Philadelphia police murder our children and family, and they have not spent a day in prison for it. But, what is the difference in these lives? Does a MOVE child not bleed, when they are shot? Does a MOVE parent not feel pain when their baby is killed, just because they are not cops or officials? Does the murder of a MOVE child, the pain of MOVE parent, the heartache of a black person's suffering still fall on deaf ears like the slaves who cried out when their babies, women and men were sold, killed, and whipped by slave owners? Ask yourself. Things may seem to have changed since those awful days, but the mentality is still very much existing. 
+Just look around and listen. Black lives (Don't) Matter. That's why these cops are getting away with killing Black Men, Women, and Children. That's why The MOVE 9 are still in prison almost 40 years for killing a cop, and the cops responsible for killing 11 MOVE people, five of them children, are walking around like they are clean and without guilt. It's the mentality that makes them feel nothing after killing people. Because to them MOVE lives (Don't) matter. It's time for everybody to start speaking freely in protest of all this free wheeling injustice. People must understand this necessity of speaking out now. 
+We are asking for people to sign The Petition we have aimed at United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch demanding that The United States Justice Dept open up an investigation into the ongoing and wrongful imprisonment of The MOVE 9. People can sign the petition at Https://causes.com/92454-free-the-move-9 . Speak out with the understanding that when speaking of MOVE, you are speaking up for yourself. It can't get better for MOVE without getting better for you. 
+Looking Forward To The May 2017 MOVE Conference In Philadelphia. 
+Ona Move",FAKE
+9981,Cheese shortage due to enlarged moon. More soon.,"Posted: Nov 14th, 2016 by Guest Click for more article by Guest .. More Stories about: Ticker",FAKE
+9904,"NATO Sends A Message To Russia, This Is Horrifying","Via UsualRoutine SPONSORED LINKS 
+They will simply point to the seizure of the Crimea and the Russian military’s continuing support for the rebels in eastern Ukraine as a sure sign of Moscow’s growing assertiveness. Mr.Putin also says that the Russian military threat is being exaggerated in the West to justify increased military spending. 
+Well there is certainly a good deal of hyperbole in some sections of the Western media. The transit of the small naval task force led by Russia’s sole and ageing aircraft carrier – the Admiral Kuznetsov – through the English Channel, for example, sent many British newspapers into a spin. Not a new Cold War 
+Frequent stories about the interception of Russian aircraft or Russian submarines all suggest a return to the more uneasy years of the Cold War. Russia has shown in the recent past that it is sometimes ready to use force in Europe to secure its goals Nato defence chiefs in Brussels want to reassure worried alliance members and send a clear message to Moscow that they can respond to aggression The recent transit of a small naval task force led by the Admiral Kuznetsov (above) through the English Channel sent many British newspapers into a spin 
+The simple fact is that this is not a Cold War Mark II – far from it. Russia with its declining economy is nothing like the Soviet Union, which aspired to establish a different world order to that pursued by the capitalist West. Russia is in many ways a weak country. Its leadership has a strong sense of encirclement – a view that the West is only eager to do it down – and, rightly or wrongly, this is driving Mr Putin’s more assertive approach. 
+That is what is making Nato allies like the three Baltic Republics and Poland so worried. That is why countries like Romania and Bulgaria worry about Russia’s behaviour in the Black Sea region. And that is why Nato has sought to provide visible and highly symbolic reinforcements to its northern and south-eastern flanks. Hard times 
+But Nato has to square a circle here. Despite Mr Putin’s barbs, there is no great enthusiasm for a new conventional arms race. Nato says it is responding to the threat posed by Russia through deterrence Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan argues the Nato alliance is coming together and operating with greater cohesion. The economies of the European allies, for a start, are generally not in great shape. Indeed Europe is distracted by the migrant crisis sweeping in from the Middle East and the self-inflicted drama of Britain’s planned exit from the EU. 
+So the problem here in Brussels has been to do enough both to reassure worried Nato members and to send a clear message of deterrence towards Moscow. The Americans are sending a heavy armoured brigade to western Europe, bringing the total number of US Brigade combat teams on the continent to three. 
+The new brigade will initially go to Poland and then elements will deploy to Romania, Bulgaria and the three Baltic republics. Equipment for a further US brigade will be pre-deployed in Europe. But the whole point of sending a signal of deterrence is not that the US shoulders all of the burden but that as many Nato countries as possible are involved. Still in business 
+The method of doing this is by the deployment of four multi-national battalions – one to each of the Baltic republics and the other to Poland. Each of these units will be about 1,000 strong, comprising in most cases mechanised infantry, with a few supporting arms. The UK, for example, will lead the battalion going to Estonia. 
+It will have Warrior armoured fighting vehicles, a small number of tanks and additional companies of French and Danish troops. The US will lead the battalion going to Poland, along with a small number of British and Romanian soldiers. Canada and Germany will lead the remaining two battalions again with small additions to give them a multi-national character. 
+Canada’s Minister of National Defence, Harjit Sajjan, told me his country would be commanding the battalion going to Latvia. In his view, the deployment of these multi-national units early next year demonstrates the alliance “coming together, showing the ability to operate together and greater cohesion”. “It is”, he said, “an open and transparent message of deterrence.” 
+But the reassurance effort is not just northwards. Canada will be participating in a new air policing operation in the south-east – probably based out of Romania – and a Canadian warship will also be dispatched to the Black Sea to help provide an enhanced Nato presence. But I put it to him that in practice these are very small forces. Enhanced battalions are surely not going to impress Moscow? Not surprisingly the Canadian defence minister disagreed, insisting that the multi-national model sent “a very strong message to Russia”. 
+Nato is taking small military steps to underline to Moscow that it still is very much in business and that despite all the clouds on Europe’s horizons it can make decisions swiftly and deploy forces accordingly. Of course, there is political and military theatre in all of this. This is not a Cold War Mark II but it is a sign of an increasingly assertive Russia Are Russian tank armies ready to sweep westwards, as they were at the height of the Cold War? Probably not. But is Russia ready to use force in Europe, where it can to secure its goals? Most certainly. Countries like Georgia and Ukraine still have far more to fear from Moscow than Nato. 
+But the alliance’s security rests upon meaningful guarantees that its member states are all in it together, both in good and bad times. This week has been about consolidating and underlining those guarantees – the message to Moscow is clear.",FAKE
+4495,"Regardless of who wins the confirmation battle, the big loser is the Supreme Court","In the time since Justice Antonin Scalia’s passing on Saturday, the hard-working folks at The Monkey Cage have already done some yeoman work, offering up five separate posts about the politics of it. The Volokh Conspiracy, not to be outdone, has 10 posts up on the topic. With apologies to all of them, their takeaway message is:
+
+I don’t disagree with a single thing that Mike Bailey wrote at The Monkey Cage or that SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein wrote about how to game out the strategies of both Obama and Republican senators. It all makes sense. It’s all very savvy and very political.
+
+[Supreme Court nomination process sure to be an epic debate]
+
+Reading through them, however, there was just one small, teeny, tiny detail that kept nagging at me: No matter how this plays out, the Supreme Court loses.
+
+The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has been banging on periodically about the erosion of trust in American political institutions. The Supreme Court has not been immune to that trend. Here’s the General Social Survey data:
+
+To be fair, the Supreme Court is still more widely respected than either Congress or President Obama. But if you think about it, that’s a really low bar.
+
+The sources of this decline are likely myriad, but a big part of it is that the court is increasingly viewed through a partisan lens, and no partisan has liked the Roberts court in recent years. Indeed, the combination of divided government and political polarization forced the Supreme Court into a more overtly political role, thereby guaranteeing it would serve as a wedge issue going forward. Democrats didn’t love this court because Republicans appointed a majority of the justices, leading to rulings like Citizens United and Heller. Republicans didn’t love this court because its rulings on gay marriage and Obamacare shifting the political status quo to the left.
+
+We’re at the point in this country where partisanship is now the last socially approved form of discrimination. As Paul Waldman noted over at The Plum Line, the trend on Senate confirmation votes of Supreme Court justices sustains this point:
+
+[Clarence Thomas excepted], through the Clinton administration, justices got near-unanimous votes. Then things changed starting with the George W. Bush administration. While Democrats did their best to find some dirt on John Roberts and Samuel Alito and Republicans did the same to Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, none of it amounted to much of anything. Yet in all those cases, most of the opposition party voted against the nominee. And it’s likely to get even worse.
+
+The GOP Senate caucus’s immediate reaction to Scalia’s passing is simply the latest iteration of this dynamic.
+
+Whether due merely to partisan sorting or true ideological polarization, the erosion of trust in the Supreme Court reflects decades-long trends, so the flapdoodles and argle-bargle of the past few days were probably inevitable.
+
+But as Dara Lind noted over at Vox, it’s a shame that political leaders haven’t focused a wee bit more on one of Scalia’s more gracious attributes. Scalia was clearly able to separate the political from the personal. His close friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Ralph to his Sam, attests to that. As Lind concludes:
+
+I get why this seat is such a high-stakes political battle for everyone involved. Politics ain’t beanbag. But the battle that is about to ensue over Scalia’s seat is going to be nasty. It’s part of a secular trend that will only further the erosion of public trust in the Supreme Court. And that’s the bigger problem with how this will play out.",REAL
+9069,U.S. Behind Huge Weapons Shipments To Saudi Arabia Prior to Yemen Funeral Attack,"The United States shipped hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons to Saudi Arabia just weeks prior to the Saudi-led coalition’s funeral bombing in Sanaa, Yemen, according to a new analysis of U.S. government data conducted by Shadowproof. 
+
+The October 8 bombing killed 140 and wounded over 500. It was widely condemned by human rights groups and exposed U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen to greater scrutiny. 
+In response to a query from Shadowproof about the funeral strike, State Department spokesperson Frankie Sturm replied, “ We have regularly expressed our concerns to the Saudi-led coalition, and urged them – as we have urged all sides, including the Houthis – to take all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians and civilian objects and return to a cessation of hostilities .” 
+Despite the US government’s purported desire for a “cessation of hostilities” and “concerns” for civilians, Shadowproof’s analysis shows that large quantities of U.S. weapons continue to flow to the Saudi government, impeding a sustained ceasefire and enabling civilian carnage. 
+
+In July and August, the U.S. shipped Saudi $8.8 million in bombs, $47.3 million in parts for bombs, 313 guided missiles worth $26 million, one military helicopter worth $15.7 million, and 334 armored fighting vehicles and 19 armored vehicles, which together are worth over $197 million. 
+
+From April to July, when peace talks were active, the U.S. shipped $50 million in armored vehicles and $82 million in parts for bombs. Talks broke down in July and were followed by a major increase in coalition air assaults in Yemen. 
+
+Following the attack on a funeral, the U.S. government announced it was “ reviewing ” its support for the Saudi coalition; however, as of October 10 , there were no changes to U.S. military support for coalition operations. 
+
+A UN-brokered ceasefire implemented in April ushered in a major reduction in fighting. Yet, U.S. weapons shipments continued. 
+
+In fact, over the course of President Barack Obama’s administration, it has approved a staggering $115 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia—including a $1.29 billion sale in November 2015, which included over 19,000 bombs and a $1.15 billion sale of tank components, ammunition, and other weapons. 
+
+The U.S. government has also provided logistical and intelligence support that has facilitated the Saudi coalition’s carnage. 
+
+Given Saudi’s dependence on the U.S. government for military support, it is difficult to overstate the degree of influence the U.S possesses over the Saudi government. For example, Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution said in April, “If the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow.” 
+Kristine Beckerle, who researches Yemen for Human Rights Watch, told Shadowproof, “The Saudi-led coalition’s air campaign in Yemen has been devastating for civilians, hitting marketplaces, factories, homes and hospitals. There is no question US weapons have been used in some of these unlawful attacks, including one of the most deadly. The US should be suspending arms sales to Saudi, until it not only curbs unlawful strikes but also credibly investigates those that have already occurred.” 
+A survey conducted by the Yemen Data Project found that, from the beginning of the Saudi coalition’s air campaign in Yemen in March 2015, through August of 2016, more than one-third of the coalition’s 8,600 strikes hit non-military targets. 
+“The coalition is responsible for twice as many civilian casualties as all other forces put together, virtually all as a result of air strikes,” UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said back in March. 
+
+Nasser Arrabyee, a journalist in Sanaa, told Shadowproof, “In the first weeks of the war the battle for Sanna was over, all the military sites were destroyed, yet the coalition strikes continue on a daily basis, often hitting civilians.” 
+
+The U.S. government continues to insist the Saudi coalition isn’t intentionally targeting civilians, but Colette Gadenne, who heads Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) Yemen mission told Shadowproof, “We’ve seen airstrikes hit civilian locations so often. For example, there was a strike on a crowded marketplace in Harad at 8 pm on July 4. It took place after people broke their Ramadan fast. And we only know about the strikes we see directly.”
+
+Three MSF hospitals, one MSF mobile clinic, and an MSF ambulance were attacked by coalition forces. 
+
+After the funeral attack, images appeared on social media allegedly showing fragments of a U.S-supplied tail fin for a JDAM guidance kit for a U.S-made Mark 82 500 lb. bomb. 
+
+Ali Al-Ahmed, an expert on Saudi Arabia at the Institute for Gulf Affairs and himself a Saudi, told Shadowproof the Saudis indeed target civilians. 
+
+“They couldn’t defeat [the Houthis] on the battlefield so they’re killing women and children, bombing schools, to get that result,” Ahmed explained. 
+Back in 2010, U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning disclosed a State Department cable from the same year that showed the U.S. government provided “imagery” of the Yemen border to the Saudi government, despite evidence Saudi aircraft were attacking civilians when attacking Houthis in northern Yemen. Assistant Minister of Defense and Aviation Prince Khaled bin Sultan appealed to a U.S. ambassador to give them a Predator drone to help limit civilian casualties.
+
+Another cable from 2009 that was also disclosed by Manning shows the U.S. government approved military assistance for Saudi Arabia or Yemen if aid was not used against Houthis. Since then, the U.S. government has allowed the Saudi Kingdom to pull them into an open-ended war. 
+With regard to al Qaida, Ahmed noted, “Hundreds of Saudi jets and their allies bombing Yemeni forces have avoided bombing…positions in Yemen of al Qaida.”
+
+“The Saudi air force is really becoming the air force for al-Qaida,” Ahmed said. “The Saudi bombings have helped mostly one group: al-Qaida.” 
+Ahmed also stressed the bombings fuel “anti-Americanism.” Prior to the war, the Yemeni government cooperated closely with the U.S. in counterterrorism matters.
+
+In a letter to President Obama, 36 members of congress urged him to block the $1.15 billion arms deal announced in August. The letter stated, “Amnesty International has documented at least 33 unlawful airstrikes by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition across Yemen that appear to have deliberately targeted civilians and civilians facilities, such as hospitals, schools, markets, and places of worship. These attacks may amount to war crimes.”
+
+According to a recent report by Reuters, the coalition has hit sites the U.S. government put on a “do not strike” list. The U.S. designated these locations as being vital infrastructure for delivery of food aid and for post-war reconstruction.
+
+The Saudi coalition declared as a target the entire Saada Governorate (measuring 4,000 square miles), which borders Saudi Arabia. It also reportedly used incendiary weapons, white phosphorous, as well as cluster weapons, which are banned by most countries. 
+Both of these weapons were supplied by the U.S.
+
+The war’s effect on civilians in Yemen is enormous. “The jets overhead scare the children. There is no place people can go to be safe, even hospitals are hit in strikes. The population is traumatized,” Gadenne said.
+
+More than 10,000 civilians have been killed since the Saudi-led coalition began, including more than 1,000 children. More than 80 percent of the population now requires some form of humanitarian assistance for survival.
+
+Beatriz Ochoa from Save the Children told Shadowproof, “The number of children that are severely malnourished has doubled to 370,000 since the beginning of the coalition bombing. 1.6 million women and children under 5 are suffering from acute malnutrition with over 14 million, or roughly half of Yemen’s population, are considered food insecure.”
+
+The coalition imposed a blockade, which has resulted in shortages of medicine and food, as well as price spikes and hoarding of goods.
+
+Recently, there was a reported cholera outbreak, which may exacerbate the already dangerous health crisis.
+
+Another serious concern is unexploded ordnance. “A 16-year-old girl was collecting firewood in Sadaa, and there had been an air strike in the area 3 months prior. An unexploded ordnance went off and she lost a leg,” Gadenne recalled.
+
+Ms. Gadenne said MSF has seen victims from unexploded ordnance all over the country. Research from Amnesty International found thousands of unexploded munitions in northern Yemen, following a 10-day tour of the region earlier this year. 
+The dire humanitarian crisis resulting from the war has given rise to a great deal of anger in Yemen, according to Arrabyee. “Yemenis see the war as an American war, as the coalition couldn’t carry out the strikes in Yemen without U.S. support. There is a big campaign saying Americans are the ones killing the Yemenis people.”
+
+William Hartung from the Center for International Policy told Shadowproof the U.S. is directly involved in Yemen, even if it’s not the one dropping the bombs. 
+“Without U.S. support there’s no way Saudi coalition could wage the war at this level,” Hartung said. “The large weapons deals and mid-flight refueling provided by the U.S. play an important role in Saudi’s ability to conduct strikes in Yemen.” 
+The post U.S. Behind Huge Weapons Shipments To Saudi Arabia Prior to Yemen Funeral Attack appeared first on Shadowproof .
+",FAKE
+6556,The Battleship Debate,"By Michael Shrimpton on October 30, 2016 Some Battleship Myths Busted 
+The comments on last week’s column (Aberfan – Disaster Or Attack?) threw up some unexpected comments about battleships, and the causes of World War I. As you can tell, it was a wide-ranging discussion! It also showed that that a number of myths about battleships, not to mention the causes of World War I, are still prevalent. First however, some comments on the exciting presidential race. Trump or Clinton? 
+I’m still predicting a win for Trump. The polls have tightened, which is not good news for Hillary, and the first straws in the wind suggesting a landslide for Trump have appeared. Some polls are still showing a lead for the Democrat, but the most reliable ones seem to be showing Trumpy ahead by 1 or 2 points. 
+A delighted Washington Post predicted this week that Trumpy has “next to zero” chance of winning. I’m not sure that’s true even if you accept the polls as accurate. The polls are suggesting a tight race. However pollsters have a history of getting it wrong when it comes to races involving conservatives. The margin of error in favor of liberal positions differs from one pollster to another, but between 2.5 and 5% seems about right. 
+Since the last two Republican candidates were scarcely conservatives, the reasonably good performance of most polling organisations in 2008 and 2012 has to be viewed with reserve. Polling performance breaks down when you have serious conservative opposition. They can be still an indicator, however, of momentum. The FBI (Photo credit: Hurricane Bianca) 
+I have heard of October surprises , indeed the Democrats sprang one over Bimbogate, or at least gave it the good old college try. It might have been better choosing bimbos who had actually met the Republican candidate, or at least met him without witnesses present, but there it is. 
+Having the FBI act with integrity when the suspect is the Democratic candidate for president and polling day is less than two weeks away wasn’t so much an October surprise as an October shock, no offense to the Fibbies intended. 
+Assuming – just assuming – that this wasn’t part of a deal between Mr O and Mr T, whereby Mr T agreed to keep quiet about Mr O’s Kenyan/Zanzibari origins in exchange for Mr O backing off the FBI, the timing of the FBI’s move was extraordinary. They are saying that it was due to fresh evidence coming into their possession, so it can’t have been that. 
+It is just possible that the boys in the Hoover building (that’s Hoover as in J Edgar, BTW, not as in the vacuum cleaner) were not aware of the large sums of money slushing, sorry finding, its way to the wife of their Deputy Director from the Clintons. It’s a bit of a mystery, and I don’t pretend to know the answer. Astonishing as it may sound, with respect, it may even be that the FBI have finally started to act with integrity and good faith. If so, that would be a positive development, although don’t expect the CIA to follow suit! If they did, the world really will have turned upside down. The CIA and Wikipedia WWI 
+People sometimes ask me why I write for VeteransToday, given the lousy pay (!) The short answer is that they are good people and don’t interfere with my freedom of expression. VT is also something of an intelligence clearing house, however. I hope readers learn something from my weekly columns (that’s why I write ‘em), but I also learn things. 
+One of the things I learnt this week via VT is that the CIA have a thing going with Wikipedia. I thought I was dealing with operatives – it was strange that so-called volunteer editors responded within minutes to any attempt by me to balance the Wikipedia attack piece on me. Turns out the CIA have an active interest in about 10% of Wiki sites, including mine. 
+Given that Director Brennan is an enemy of mine, with Jesuit connections, I helped expose the role of the Jesuit Order in providing the pretext for World War I and the Agency are heavily penetrated by my bitter enemies the DVD, via the Correa/COREA Group in Frankfurt, that would make sense. 
+The next installment in my WikiWar should be mediation. Goodness knows who they’ll suggest as a mediator – Angela Merkel probably, or the President of the European Commission. The mediator will definitely be driving a Volkswagen. The Naval Race Rear Admiral Sir Christoper Cradock 
+I’m inter alia an intelligence historian , so it’s nice to turn to an historical topic. It is incredibly important to get history right – otherwise we just repeat the same mistakes. 
+A number of commenters last week seemed to be laboring under the delusion, no offense intended, that World War I was started by the naval race between the British and German Empires. This nonsensical view, widely propagated since 1918 by German Intelligence and their allies, is still recycled on the BBC and by liberal faculty members, i.e. just about all of them. 
+World War I was not started by the British Admiralty, nor by accident. It was started by the Germans, who set up the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his lovely wife Sophie on June 28th 1914. The German army was already mobilising, implementing a war plan drawn up years before. 
+The build-up of the Imperial German Navy had similarly been underway for years, for purely offensive purposes. The German Navy was not designed to protect German interests abroad – its capital ships lacked the range and the habitability for that. It was aimed at bringing the Royal Navy’s Atlantic and Channel Fleets to battle in the North Sea (the famous Grand Fleet was only formed on the outbreak of war). 
+There is no way the German Navy could have matched the rapid, hemispheric deployment of a battlecruiser squadron to the farthest reaches of the South Atlantic in 1914, e.g., after the destruction of a weak British squadron under Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock at the Battle of Coronel. Vice-Admiral Sturdee’s great victory in the Battle of the Falkland Islands was of course made possible by the Naval Intelligence Department. 
+The boys had spotted that the First Sea Lord, von Battenberg, was a German spy and had deliberately refused to reinforce Cradock’s squadron. Von Battenberg was left in place and fed false position reports – no wonder the sight of the fighting tops of a British battlecruiser squadron in Port Stanley harbor so rattled the Hun commander, Graf von Spee, who was the runner-up in the battle which followed. The true position was stated millennia ago by the Roman general Vegetius: si vis pacem, para bellum. If you wan’t peace, prepare for war. Great Britain did not encourage the First World War by taking the limited steps that she did to prepare for it. 
+We needed more battleships and battlecruisers, not fewer. Sadly, the Liberal government decided to encourage German aggression by holding back spending on the Royal Navy. Had we been stronger, the Hun would not dare have invaded Belgium and Luxembourg in a flanking attack on the French army. Next Myth HMS Barham 
+The next myth propagated last week was that battleships were vulnerable to U-Boats. The truth is that the only British battleships sunk by U-Boat in both world wars, HMS Barham and HMS Royal Oak, were betrayed. 
+Royal Oak was sunk because the First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound was being blackmailed by Jerry and agreed to hold up the badly-needed block-ships requested for Scapa Flow by the C-in-C Home Fleet. 
+Had the block-ships been in place, as requested, Gunther Prien wouldn’t have got within five miles of Royal Oak. It is not even clear that the dear old Barham was actually sunk in November 1941 by U-331. It is more likely that her magazines were detonated by a radio-controlled IED set off by a German agent on the battleship ahead, which happened to have a cameraman ready to film the sinking. 
+All battleships after the turbine-powered Dreadnought were too fast for submarines, which until the advent of the first true submarine, the German Type XXI, had limited underwater speed and endurance. Forget the headline figure for underwater speed – at top speed a U-Boat’s batteries would be drained quickly. This made achieving a firing solution difficult. Battleships were also usually too well screened by destroyers. 
+They were such difficult targets that in practice only a U-Boat lying in wait could torpedo them. Then there was the difficulty in sinking them. Older battleships could indeed be sunk by a single submarine, even a single torpedo, ditto battleships whose design was held back by the absurd limitations in the Washington Treaty, designed to make the next world war winnable for the Bad Guys. 
+It is, however, intellectually dishonest to compare the latest subs with older battleships, or battleships, like the King George V class, designed to artificial limits. In World War II modern battleships designed without reference to the Washington Treaty, such as the wonderful Iowa class, incorporated excellent anti-torpedo protection. A single Jap sub, e.g. would have had trouble hitting an Iowa class fast battleship with enough torpedoes to sink her. 
+The King George V classic were a classic illustration of the dangers posed by the Washington Treaty. To save weight their outer prop-shafts weren’t armored, a weakness which proved fatal when HMS Prince of Wales was struck by a Japanese aerial torpedo in December 1941. In practice battleships were much less vulnerable to torpedo attack than any other type of warship. That is why all Japanese submarine attacks on American battleships in World War II failed, indeed the Japs only ever managed to sink American battleships in harbor in peacetime, and even then they only actually sank two. The other battleships damaged at Pearl Harbor were repaired, modernised and went on to avenge their sisters. Third Myth HMS Repulse 
+The vulnerability of battleships to air attack in World War II has also been greatly overstated. They were of course invulnerable to air attack in World War I, as no aircraft could carry an armor-piercing bomb heavy enough to sink them. No German or Italian battleship was sunk at sea by airpower in the whole of the war. 
+No American battleship was sunk at sea in either war, period. Only one British battleship, HMS Prince of Wales, was sunk by airpower in World War II, and she was betrayed. HMS Indomitable, the carrier designated as her escort, had been run aground, on Pound’s orders, whilst working up out of Kingston Harbour in Jamaica. 
+Attacking as they did outside fighter range, without combat equipment such self-sealing tanks, the Jap bombers would have been very vulnerable to Indomitable’s cannon-equipped fighters. 
+As I explain in Spyhunter, Force Z’s course had been betrayed to the Japanese in Saigon, via radio, by the German spy Rear-Admiral Palliser. Had Palliser not betrayed the British squadron it’s unlikely that the Japs would have found them. They had poor air reconnaissance, limited fuel reserves and could not just stooge around the South China Sea trying to find them. 
+HMS Repulse was a battlecruiser, not a battleship. Unlike her sister Renown, she had not been modernised. In particular, she lacked Renown’s modern 4.5” Dual Purpose (DP) battery, much more effective in the AA role than Prince of Wales’s DP fit. Bismarck firing at HMS Hood 
+HMS Hood , blown-up during the course of the Battle of the Denmark Strait, was also a battlecruiser and, like Repulse, she had not been modernised. The Chamberlain government and the Treasury denied the Admiralty the funds for her much-needed modernisation, precisely in order to make her easier for Jerry to sink. 
+As I explain in Spyhunter, it is very doubtful that Hood was actually sunk by KMS Bismarck and much more likely that she was blown up by an IED in either a 4” magazine, leading to secondary detonation of a main magazine, or a main magazine. 
+None of the broadsides fired by either Bismarck or her accompanying heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen is a good candidate for the alleged fatal shot. Prinz Eugen’s main battery was only 8”/60 caliber – her 270 lb shells were too small to have penetrated Hood’s heavy belt armor. 
+For decades, we have been favored with nonsense from pro-Germans about Hood’s main deck armor being much weaker than Bismarck’s (the true figures are 3” over the magazines for Hood and 4.7” for Bismarck) and Bismarck sinking her with plunging fire at long range. Bismarck, however, was photographed firing at Hood from the Prinz Eugen. As you can see from the photo, Bismarck’s main battery is nowhere near maximum elevation. 
+The Hun-loving editors of Wikipedia, BTW, still cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that the Bismarck was sunk by the Royal Navy. She was in fact finished off by torpedoes from the heavy cruiser HMS Dorsetshire, sinking shortly after the last torpedo hit, which Wikipedia would have us believe was a strange coincidence. HMS King George V 
+As I have mentioned, the King George V class , of which Prince of Wales was a member, suffered from design limitations imposed by the Washington Treaty. They also suffered from several design flaws, which would not have been repeated in later classes and partly flowed from the lack of cash given to the Admiralty in the 1930s. 
+They sacrificed AA firepower for spotter aircraft. Whilst the planes were well-protected in an armored hangar, it would have been better to rely on more powerful spotter/recon aircraft flown from escorting carriers. 
+The 5.25” DP secondary armament was an excellent anti-destroyer weapon, probably the best ever deployed on a battleship, but had too poor a rate of fire (around 12-16 rounds per minute) to be an effective weapon against aircraft. The dedicated AA gun, the multiple 2-pounder ‘pom-pom’, was the best in the world when it came into service in the late 1920s, but had been overtaken by the 40-mil Bofors. The mounts were not tri-axially stabilized and the class lacked tachymetric AA fire-control. These specific weaknesses however afford no grounds for saying that battleships generally were unduly vulnerable to aircraft. So far to the contrary, they were better able to stand up to bombs and torpedoes than carriers, were more stable gun platforms, had better firing arcs (this was particularly true of the US Navy – the Iowa class had superb firing arcs for their secondary and AA armament, e.g., whereas the firing arcs on the Essex-class carriers were limited) and better fire-control. Unsurprisingly, US fast carrier task forces in the Pacific used battleships to protect carriers against aircraft. HMS Inflexible 
+Of the five British capital ships sunk during World War II, two were unmodernised battlecruisers, two were probably sunk by IEDs and all five were betrayed in one way, shape or form. Without the assistance of the Abwehr, including interference by political assets in Number 10, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury with their design or modernisation, probably none of them would have been sunk at all. 
+The US Navy had the right idea. What was needed was balanced all-arms task forces, combining battlewagons, carriers, cruisers and destroyers. Admiral Henderson of the Royal Navy had in fact come up with the idea of fast carrier task forces protected by capital ships in the Mediterranean in the 1930s, but the Royal Navy lacked enough fast battleships and carriers to really make it work until 1945, with the British Pacific Fleet 
+Oh yes, we were in the Pacific alright , although the lack of defense expenditure and serious planning for war by pro-German weanies in Downing St before the war meant that it took three years for us to get there. Apart that is from our fine armored carrier HMS Victorious, which served briefly in the Pacific in 1943, flying USN squadrons, an episode which would make a fine war movie, if a movie-maker could be found with the guts to make it. 
+President Reagan also had the right idea in reactivating the Iowa class in the 80s. Had the Royal Navy not been forced to scrap HMS Vanguard, our last battleship, by the German asset Harold Macmillan, it is doubtful that General Galtieri would even have started the war. HMS Vanguard Falklands War 
+The very thought of that elegant and powerful fast battleship , virtually immune from the Exocet sea-skimming missiles (her belt armor was too strong for an Exocet to penetrate) emerging from the gloom of the South Atlantic to pulverise the Argentine Fleet or smash up Argentine forces ashore, would have given the Argies the willies. Vanguard’s deck armor, BTW, would have been too strong for any bomb the Argentine Air Force could carry. 
+No ship in the Argentine Navy could have remained operational after a single accurate broadside from HMS Vanguard, and she had fully-synthetic fire-control, i.e. could land her main battery guns on target whilst maneuvering. She was a formidable surface combatant. This Week’s Movie Review: Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016, dir. Edward Zwick) 
+This movie is huge fun . The first Jack Reacher movie, also starring Tom Cruise, was also huge fun, with the Bad Guys getting whacked all over the place. It’s always nice to see dirty cops getting their come-uppance! We could do with Jack Reacher in Thames Valley. No jury would convict. 
+Unusually for a sequel, this movie is as good as the original. If anything, it’s even better. Tom Cruise is excellent as the lead, although it was a disappointment for me that Robert Duvall was not retained. He’s one of my all-time favorite actors. Robert Knepper, as General Harkness, provides strong support, however, as does Cobie Smulders, who I think we’ll be seeing again. 
+The plot, based around bent military contractors, is more believable than most of the anti-military, anti-American rubbish emerging from liberal Hollywood, and the heroes come from the military. The movie moves at a cracking pace, and you are kept in suspense until the end about whether Jack is a father or not. I’m not going to spoil it for you by revealing the plot! It’s well worth going to see.",FAKE
+2274,Texas Bill To Add Barriers To Gay Marriage Dies In House,"AUSTIN, Texas, May 15 (Reuters) - Republican-backed legislation to put new blockades on same-sex marriage in Texas died in the statehouse on Friday after failing to win approval by a midnight deadline amid stalling tactics by the Democratic minority.
+
+The bill, called the ""Preservation of Sovereignty and Marriage Act,"" would block clerk's offices in the state's 254 counties from using tax money to issue licenses for same-sex weddings.
+
+Socially conservative backers have said the measure allows the state to exert its rights regarding marriage. The bill's demise comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide next month whether same-sex marriage will be legal nationwide.
+
+About a decade ago, voters in the largely conservative state overwhelmingly approved a Texas constitutional amendment that only allows marriage between a man and a woman. State Republican leaders have said they will fight to enforce the ban on same-sex marriage.
+
+The bi-annual Texas legislative session ends in about two weeks. All bills, except the budget, that did not pass in the Texas House of Representatives before Friday are not allowed to proceed.
+
+Before gay marriage became legal in the liberal northeastern state of Massachusetts in 2004, it was not permitted in any state. Now it is legal in 37 states and Washington. (Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Susan Heavey)",REAL
+9455,Arise President Trump (or Why it's not the End of the World as We Know it),"10 Shares
+4 5 0 1
+""USA! USA! USA!"" they chanted together in the Hilton Ballroom as the results came in. Who needs polls? They never gave him a chance but now we have it: President Donald Trump. Not only were the polls spectacularly wrong (who will ever trust this particularly bankrupt form of moralising presumptive analysis and telling us how we do and should feel?) but also the pundits who were not just arrogant about the fact that Trump had no chance but also were hopelessly out of touch with what America was thinking across its societal spectrum, what it wanted, what was felt deep in its blood.
+It is a rejection of the liberal consensus the entire West has wallowed in since the 90's and a rejection of Obama and the false hope he decried, the impotent nature of US political leverage around the world and the rejection of brazen corruption and questionable ethics as typified by ""Crooked Hillary"".
+The world must live with it; democracy has spoken and they're going to have to get over the words President Trump. Some will head for the hills, some will run to Canada, others will continue to cry but as Obama said yesterday, regardless of the result ""tomorrow the sun will still shine.""
+This is a cry for American exceptionalism and like him or not Trump typifies that. He is committed to education, and demands high performance. Selling well is an admirable skill for a President to have. Negotiating with Congress, internationally, etc., is exceptionally useful. Trump has taken beatings financially and come out smelling like a rose.
+Trump's business experience involves negotiations with business leaders and even governments around the world, and he likely has connections behind the scenes that surpass those of simply purely political candidates -- this gives him keen, realistic insights into economics in different parts of the world, as well as additional avenues to pursue trade agreements, and even perhaps some nuanced insights of particular financial weaknesses of possible global competitors, not to mention experience and insight into the partnerships and/or antagonism between different industries and particular governments.
+MORE... Trump's sexual predator characteristics - His Grandfather was a pimp, but at least he paid the women he hired The significance of the GOP's attempted purge of Donald Trump Trump, Turkey, and police tyranny: The crisis of Imperialism finds political expression An America in denial This vote comes down to the reckoning that for too long, politicians have sold the American people out to foreign nations and global industry. What Donald Trump is doing is representing the absolute heartbreak and anger and frustration at a government gone mad and it seems the Left completely underestimated that in their vitriol in crying #NeverTrump and portraying him as the devil incarnate.
+Although it is entirely true that Trump is ostentatious and has his mistakes, he brings something to the Presidential table no other candidate had before; he speaks his mind.
+America clearly is sick of weasel politicians who are too afraid to say what people want to hear, they want the facts straight.
+President Trump isn't cut from the political class, that class which is entrenched in its self-interest and has let the country down time and time again. Ross Perot once said that we need somebody to clean out the stables, a corrupted, ethically questionable President is therefore not the answer in order to accomplish that and I'm not talking about Donald Trump.
+Trump is a pragmatist in an era of rapidly approaching chaos, he is not a social engineer, a think tanker who wants to please those lining his bank accounts. The liberal Democratic policies of Obama, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid and their company created a climate that has led to this decision today.
+So what if his language is intemperate and insulting? Even lacking in nobility from time to time? How can a true changemaker be straitjacketed by politically correct chains if he or she must express the will of the people, uncomfortable concerns that lie dormant for far too long?
+Obama won because conservative voters stayed home. He had promise and he let so many down, what did Clinton have? And that is why conservative voters had to get out and vote.
+Trump prefers isolationism on a world scale, Clinton voted to take us to war in Iraq and to overthrow Libya's Gaddafi, all in the guise of being ""muscular.""
+Perhaps today's landmark and historic decision is not so much about Trump's strengths and power but more about the crippled weakness of the country in 2016 and you simply cannot blame him for that.",FAKE
+3724,"Suspect in 4 gruesome D.C. killings might not have acted alone, police say","Authorities said in court papers Friday that the brutal killings of the Savopoulos family in Northwest Washington probably involved a conspiracy of more than one person taking the victims captive and waiting more than 19 hours for a $40,000 ransom before killing them and setting fire to their multimillion-dollar home.
+
+Savvas Savopoulos, 46, his wife, Amy, 47, and their housekeeper, Veralicia Figueroa, 57, were beaten and stabbed, according to the court papers — the arrest warrant affidavit written by police. The couple’s 10-year-old son, Philip, was found dead on a charred queen-size mattress in his bedroom. He had been beaten, stabbed and burned, police said in the document, and his room and others in the house were doused with gasoline.
+
+The new details came as the first suspect identified in the slayings made his initial appearance in D.C. Superior Court. Daron Dylon Wint, 34, was arrested Thursday night after a two-day manhunt and charged with first-degree murder while armed.
+
+Police said in the affidavit that the elaborate crime probably “required the presence and assistance of more than one person.” The document also says that police think “all four decedents were held captive by Mr. Wint and others.” Police did not elaborate, but they have said other suspects have not been ruled out.
+
+Wint was captured in Northeast Washington after a task force of federal marshals and police tracked him to New York and back to the District over two days.
+
+Wint so far is charged only in the death of the family patriarch, a wealthy socialite and business executive who ran American Iron Works, a large supplier of iron and steel to construction projects. Officials said additional charges are likely in the deaths of the wife, son and housekeeper.
+
+Wint appeared in court with his wrists and ankles shackled, escorted by three marshals.
+
+He said only his name at the hearing. At times, he shook his shoulder-length dreads out of his eyes.
+
+His attorney, Natalie Lawson of the Public Defender Service, said in court that the case was “based on speculation and guesswork.” She added: “He is innocent. There is no link to the killings or the death of the decedent. There is nothing linking him to these deaths.”
+
+Magistrate Judge Errol R. Arthur ordered Wint held until his next court appearance June 23, saying there was “a lot of circumstantial evidence here, but it all points to the defendant.”
+
+The Savopoulos family on Friday thanked law enforcement for the arrest.
+
+“While it does not abate our pain, we hope that it begins to restore a sense of calm and security to our neighborhood and to our city,” they said in a statement issued by a family spokeswoman.
+
+The police affidavit filed in court Friday offers new details about how the family and Figueroa were held and killed in the three-story home on Woodland Drive NW, near the vice president’s mansion. Police have said that Wint once worked for Savopoulos’s American Iron Works firm in Hyattsville, Md., but have not offered a motive. D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier has assured residents that the family was targeted and the crime was not random.
+
+Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Miller said Wint’s DNA was found on discarded pizza left in the room where the three adults were found dead.
+
+She said police found a fingerprint on a water bottle at the house, and that prosecutors were seeking to compare it with Wint’s fingerprints.
+
+Police also have been examining confusing and mysterious text messages sent among the Savopouloses and another housekeeper, whom they repeatedly told to stay away from the home. They also investigated the actions of Savopoulos’s assistant, who delivered the $40,000 to the house May 14 in the moments before the killings.
+
+[The housekeeper who died, Veralicia Figueroa, wanted to return to El Salvador. ]
+
+In the affidavit, police said the assistant told detectives that Savopoulos called him on the morning of May 14 and told him to go to the iron company, pick up a package and deliver it to the D.C. house.
+
+The assistant told police two versions of how he obtained the package — a red bag filled with $40,000 that had been withdrawn by other Iron Works employees from one of the company’s accounts at Bank of America.
+
+The assistant said Savopoulos instructed him to take the money from the red bag and put it in a manila envelope, then place it inside a red car parked in the garage at the family home. The assistant then texted another person a photo of a red bag with what appeared to be two bundles of money wrapped in white bands. Authorities declined to comment on the assistant’s text or say who received it.
+
+The arrest affidavit says matter-of-factly that “after the money was delivered, the four decedents were killed.”
+
+Police said Wint took the family’s blue Porsche, which was found later that day burned in a church parking lot in Prince George’s County, two miles from Wint’s parents’ home.
+
+Wint’s capture was precipitated by the pizza the family ordered during the ordeal. The affidavit says Amy Savopoulos ordered two pizzas from a Tenleytown Domino’s at 9:14 p.m. May 13 and instructed the driver to leave the boxes on the front porch, ring the bell and leave, saying she was nursing a sick child. The delivery person reported seeing the house completely dark, except for the porch light.
+
+Police said they found two Domino’s boxes in the bedroom where the three adults were found.
+
+A cheese pizza had not been eaten, but a pepperoni pie had been partially consumed. Police used a federal lab to expedite a DNA test and said a match came back for Wint, who has an arrest and conviction record in Maryland.
+
+[Wint’s criminal history includes charges of assault in Maryland and New York]
+
+U.S. Marshals Cmdr. Robert Fernandez, who runs the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force, said his agents were summoned Tuesday after D.C. police learned Wint’s name for the first time.
+
+By Wednesday, they believed he had fled to Brooklyn, where he has family and friends. But a raid on an apartment there later that night turned up empty.
+
+“He had just left,” Fernandez said. “We barely missed him.”
+
+Fernandez said his team “worked through the night,” and Thursday they learned Wint might be back in the Washington area, at a Howard Johnson hotel in College Park, Md. By that time, D.C. police had released his name and announced a $25,000 reward.
+
+But as agents were trying to learn what room he was in, Fernandez said a surveillance team noticed Wint leaving in one of two vehicles that pulled out of the parking lot shortly before 11 p.m.
+
+Police followed a box truck and a white Chevrolet Cruze sedan heading toward the District. “It was obvious they were traveling together,” he said.
+
+About 25 unmarked police cars and a helicopter from Prince George’s County — tracking the vehicles with a thermal-imaging camera — followed them into the District. Near Rhode Island Avenue and 10th Street NE, Fernandez said an unmarked police car got between the truck and the sedan, and other cars pinned them. Officers, some armed with semiautomatic weapons, detained five people from both vehicles.
+
+Fernandez said Wint was in the back seat of the sedan, which had a female driver and passenger. He said two men were in the truck. They were seated on a curb and handcuffed. “They had no idea they were being followed,” he said.
+
+Authorities said they found $10,000 in the truck; Fernandez said he saw money stuffed into the side door. Court documents say authorities found money orders exceeding $10,000 and a large stack of $100 bills, the same denomination delivered to Savopoulos in the $40,000 delivery.
+
+D.C. police said only that Wint was arrested. A spokesman said none of the others were charged with crimes, but offered no explanation. Wint said everyone in the vehicles surrendered without incident.
+
+“They were in the face of overwhelming odds and force,” he said.
+
+Lynh Bui and Clarence Williams contributed to this report",REAL
+420,Fed lowers economic outlook but stays mum on rate plans,"The Federal Reserve lowered its economic outlook Wednesday after a harsh winter chilled the U.S economy's growth, reducing the odds for an initial interest rate hike as soon as the Fed's June meeting.
+
+In a statement after a two-day meeting the Fed gave no clear signal of when it plans to raise its benchmark interest rate for the first time since 2006 but policymakers have indicated they expect to act this year.
+
+The Fed statement was released at 2 p.m. ET.
+
+As of 2:55 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones industrial average was down about 55 points, or 0.3%, to 18,056 and the Standard & Poor's 500 index dropped 5 points, or 0.3%, to 2110. The Nasdaq composite was down 17 points, or 0.3%, to 5038. Yields on 10-year government bonds sprang above 2%.
+
+The Fed said economic growth ""slowed during the winter months, in part reflecting transitory factors."" Unusually cold weather, for example, hindered economic activity. The Fed said it expects the economy to rebound and grow at a moderate pace in coming months.
+
+With that optimistic view, the Fed didn't rule out a June rate increase, as it virtually foreclosed the chances of an April hike in its statement last month. Still, its assertion that temporary factors were only part of the reason for last quarter's slowdown suggests the central bank may want to hold off a few months before hoisting the target range for its federal funds rate, which has been near zero since the 2008 financial crisis.
+
+While a June rate increase ""does not look very likely,"" it ""remains an option if the data suddenly turn much stronger than expected,"" Jim O'Sullivan, chief U.S. economist of High Frequency Economics, wrote in a note to clients.
+
+Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics said ""it would take something quite spectacular to convince Fed officials to raise rates in June.""
+
+The Fed's statement noted that job growth ""moderated"" and household spending declined in recent weeks, though inflation-adjusted incomes ""rose strongly, partly reflecting earlier declines in energy prices.""
+
+Business investment, however, ""softened"" and exports declined, the statement said. The Fed added that inflation continued to run below the Fed's target, ""partly reflecting earlier declines in energy prices and decreasing prices of non-energy imports."" Fed policymakers said they expect inflation ""to rise gradually toward 2% over the medium-term as the labor market improves further and the transitory effects"" of low energy and import prices dissipate.
+
+A strong dollar has hurt manufacturers' exports and the plunge in oil prices has led energy companies to slash investment.
+
+The government said Wednesday morning that the economy grew just 0.2% at an annual rate in the first quarter, down from 2.2% in the October-December period and below the modest 1% pace expected by economists.
+
+Meanwhile, inflation remains well below the Fed's annual 2% target, with the government reporting that the Fed's preferred measure, which excludes food and energy costs, rose 0.9% last quarter. That's the smallest increase since 2010.
+
+And employers added just 126,000 jobs in March, compared to average monthly gains of 269,000 the prior 12 months.
+
+The Fed reiterated Wednesday that it will bump up its federal funds rate ""when it has seen further improvement in the labor market and is reasonably confident that inflation will move back"" to the Fed's 2% target ""over the medium-term.""
+
+The central bank has kept its benchmark interest rate near zero since the 2008 financial crisis, but with the economic recovery now almost six years old, the central bank has been preparing financial markets and consumers for a return to normal interest rate policy. Last month, the Fed dropped a pledge to be patient as it considers boosting the rate, signaling that it could make the move as early as June.
+
+Many economists say the Fed is unlikely to act until September at the earliest so it can assess whether the economy is regaining the momentum it had built last year. That timetable is consistent with Fed policymakers' median forecast in March as well as with recent speeches by Fed policymakers, including Fed Chair Janet Yellen.",REAL
+3604,Satellite Images Show 'Catastrophic' Destruction Of Boko Haram Attack In Nigeria,"Amnesty International has released stunning satellite imagery that it says ""show devastation of catastrophic proportions"" in Baga and Doron Baga, two towns in northeastern Nigeria that were attacked by Boko Haram.
+
+As we've pointed out in the past few days, there has been confusion over just how deadly this attack was. Amnesty International has consistently said that the Islamic militants tore through the towns, burning buildings and killing as many as 2,000 people. The government, however, has denied those claims, saying the death toll is closer to 150.
+
+The new images, the human rights group says, show the government estimates are wrong.
+
+""Up until now, the isolation of the Baga combined with the fact that Boko Haram remains in control of the area has meant that it has been very difficult to verify what happened there,"" said Daniel Eyre, Amnesty Nigeria researcher said in a statement. ""Residents have not been able to return to bury the dead, let alone count their number. But through these satellite images combined with graphic testimonies a picture of what is likely to be Boko Haram's deadliest attack ever is becoming clearer.""
+
+Here are two relevant photographs from the town of Doron Baga. The first was taken on January 2. The red represents healthy vegetation:
+
+The second image was taken January 7:
+
+According to Amnesty, those pictures show that more than 3,100 structures were damaged or destroyed by fire, ""affecting most of the 4 square kilometer town.""
+
+The Washington Post has a bit of background:
+
+Boko Haram has been in the news lately, because the Islamic extremists took responsibility for the mass kidnapping of schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in Borno last April.",REAL
+3747,May Day's meaning: How it unfolded in Seattle,"SEATTLE — Police say black-clad May Day marchers hurled wrenches and rocks at officers and hit police with sticks as a Friday night march through a Seattle neighborhood turned violent and injured three officers.
+
+""This is no longer demonstration management, this has turned into a riot,"" Seattle Police Captain Chris Fowler tweeted.
+
+Police responded with pepper spray and pepper balls, eventually arresting 15 people. Protesters damaged several dozen vehicles, officers said.
+
+""It became violent and destructive and we had to make a move,"" Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O'Toole said during a joint press conference with Mayor Ed Murray. ""I think (officers) were very professional about how they handled the situation.""
+
+The march was just one of several May Day demonstrations done to support workers rights and other causes in Seattle on Friday. Others were peaceful, including a Black Lives Matter March and an immigrant and workers' rights event, organized by the group El Comite.
+
+She said the department will do a comprehensive review to make sure the use of force was appropriate.
+
+She wouldn't go into details about the officers' injuries, but said one had a burn injury and another had an orthopedic injury. They are all ""conscious and in good spirits,"" she said.
+
+Bicycle officers shadowed the marchers — who changed directions often through Capitol Hill — keeping them off Interstate 5 and away from downtown. Police in riot gear eventually hemmed them in at the plaza at Seattle Central College.
+
+""We're all here for one reason and that's to unify the people,"" said Jessica Ramirez, who was one of thousands who marched through downtown Seattle.
+
+For University of Washington student Diana Betancourt, the day takes on a deep meaning.
+
+""At the age of five, my mom, two sisters and I came here, we crossed through the Arizona desert with no money, no food, in search of a better life, a better future,"" she said. ""Now I am here, a second year (student) at the University of Washington, my whole tuition paid up, making my dream come true.""
+
+She said she can't vote and is technically a ""legal alien.""
+
+""It was a shameful thing that you have to grow up with, not being able to tell other people this identity of you, you have to keep it inside,"" Betancourt said. ""We're forced to keep it a secret. You don't know who to trust. You don't know who's going to help you and who's going to report you.""
+
+Once the crowds made it to the federal courthouse in downtown, people came to the stage to discuss workers' and immigrant rights. Some speakers focused on how deportation breaks up families.
+
+""Seattle, everybody — I am so proud to see you all here, but we've got to keep the fight,"" said Jorge Baron of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. ""We've got to keep the fight. We've got to win. We're on the right side of justice. We are going to win.""
+
+Other discussions turned to Baltimore, where State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby filed charges earlier in the morning in the Freddie Gray case.
+
+""An indictment of those six cops is not justice for Freddie Gray nor is it equity for any of us oppressed people,"" Nikita Oliver told the crowd of demonstrators. ""I'm humbled by the youth and those in the streets of Baltimore. I'm humbled by the people across the nation who have taken to the streets for equity for black folks.""",REAL
+9661,Comment on Democratic Party operative Bob Beckel calls for assassinating WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange by truckjunkie,"New emails show Huma scheming for Hillary 
+Assange promises that WikiLeaks will release proof that Hillary has rigged the elections. 
+Yesterday, WikiLeaks sent out an alarming tweet that “Hillary Clinton strategist Bob Beckel called for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange to be assassinated”: 
+The tweet contains a video snippet of Beckel on FoxNews, saying: 
+“The way to deal with this is pretty simple — you get Special Ops (Operations) forces. I mean, a dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s [Assange] a traitor, treasonous, and and he’s broken every law of the United States. The guy ought to be — and I’m not for the death penalty, so if I’m not for the death penalty, the only way to do it is illegally shoot the son of a bitch .” 
+Blog and news sites, including big names like ZeroHedge and Pamela Geller , are reporting Beckel’s vile remarks as contemporaneous, in the context of WikiLeaks’ current exposés of Hillary and the DNC. 
+Not so. 
+Beckel actually made those remarks 5 years ago in December 2011. Here’s a longer FoxNews video, wherein Beckel was part of a panel discussing how the U.S. should deal with Assange and WikiLeaks for their release of the State Department’s diplomatic cables. Beckel’s “shoot the son of a bitch” remarks begin at the 0:57 mark: 
+That it was 5 years ago that Beckel had called for assassinating Julian Assange doesn’t make it less reprehensible. It’s also ridiculous for Beckel to call Assange “a traitor” and “treasonous,” because Assange is Australian, not a U.S. citizen. 
+So who is Bob Beckel? 
+According to Wikipedia , 67-year-old Bob Beckel is a political analyst-pundit who began his professional life as a Democratic administration official and Democratic Party operative. He was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State (1977) and Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs (1978) in the Carter administration; the campaign manager for Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign; founder of the consulting & lobbying firm Bob Beckel & Associates (1984); campaign manager of a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Idaho (2002); USA Today columnist (2005-2015); FoxNews “ token angry liberal ” co-host (2011-2015); and since October 2015, CNN commentator on the 2016 election. 
+Wikipedia makes no mention of Beckel being a Hillary Clinton strategist, nor have I found confirmation that he is a Hillary strategist, other than what the WikiLeaks tweet claims. But all that doesn’t mean he isn’t a Hillary Clinton strategist, given Beckel’s history as a Democratic Party operative. 
+There must be a reason why WikiLeaks sent out its tweet of Beckel’s 5-year-old call to assassinate Assange. Perhaps Assange has received death threats and does not want the same fate that befell DNC staffer and WikiLeaks informant Seth Rich. (See “ WikiLeaks ’ Julian Assange: murdered DNC staffer was source of leaked DNC emails ”) 
+H/t maziel",FAKE
+6281,Will an Anti-Trump Color Revolution engulf the US?,"November 11, 2016 -  By Eduard Popov for Fort Russ - translated by J. Arnoldski -  
+
+
+On November 9th, despite the overwhelming majority of forecasts, the eccentric billionaire Donald Trump won the US presidential elections, not the favorite of the American elites, Hillary Clinton.  
+But Trump’s joy is not shared by everyone. Many American citizens don’t consider him to be their president. A wave of demonstrations and protests has swept across America which are becoming stronger with each passing day. Today, November 11th, it was reported that a petition to the electors to recognize Hillary Clinton’s victory has already gathered 2 million signatures (over two, not even whole days!)  
+The situation unfolding today in the US is in some of its features reminiscent of the situation n Ukraine during the first “Orange Revolution” of 2004. Ukraine was split into two camps along geographic lines: the South and East were for the winner of the second round of elections, Viktor Yanukovych, and the West and Center were for Viktor Yushchenko, the leader of the liberal opposition. Of course, this comparison might be somewhat arbitrary, but what ties together the present situation in the US and Ukraine in 2004 is that Ukrainian and American society turned out to be split.  
+In the US, according to published statistics, 70% of the white population voted for Donald Trump along with most Protestants and slightly more than half of Catholics. For Hillary Clinton voted racial minorities - 88% of African Americans and 65% of people of Latin American origin. Clinton was also supported by religious minorities, such as Jews, Muslims, and atheists, sexual minorities, and supporters of “cultural revolution,” i.e., the intelligentsia living in the big cities. This is at least how the picture looks from Russia.  
+I will posit that Yanukovych’s victory in the second round of elections and Trump’s victory divided their nations insofar as the elections were polarized along the positions of citizens (whether geographical, racial, or cultural). The second, losing half of the population felt deceived and betrayed. In Ukraine, the situation was then transformed into the exact opposite: as a result of an unconstitutional “third round” of elections, the president’s victory was handed over to Western Ukraine’s candidate, Yushchenko. Then it was the South and East that felt betrayed.  
+Larger and larger masses of people in the US are protesting. I think that these protests will subside and won’t lead to anything big.  But the cultural-civilizational and racial split, not receiving any political solution, will only become deeper and create the basis for a genuine split of the nation. Something similar already happened in US history, when there was the split into the Federalist North and Confederate South. But now the situation seems much more complex and the contradictions are far more varied and not restricted to geographical borders. 
+Ironically, the first signs of a color revolution can be observed in the US - in the likes of all of such that the US has engineered in different countries. On social networks, the hashtag #Calexit is gaining popularity among California residents. This is a call to proclaim the independence of California and its secession from the US by analogy with Brexit in the UK. 
+Individual states in the US have talked about separatism before, but only now is separatism gaining a broad social basis after the presidential elections split American society into two maps: the white population, and racial and religious minorities including the supporters of multiculturalism. 
+But what has particularly struck me personally in the current situation surrounding the elections results is the reaction to Trump’s victory among EU leaders. It is a paradox that such a junior partner (if not vassal) of the US, the European Union, dares to criticize the will of the American people, and even support protests against Trump, i.e., a potential color revolution in the US! One Russian newspaper quoted an anonymous member of the European Parliament according to whom the destructive effect of the outcome of the elections has 10 times surpassed the aftermath of the referendum on Great Britain’s exit from the EU. Judging by everything, this is not only the personal opinion of one European MEP. This is the assessment of the overwhelming majority of the European political mainstream. 
+The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Germany, who perhaps might be the future Chancellor of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has urged the EU to prepare for Trump’s “unpredictable” foreign policy. The head of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, did not refrain from expressing himself when he compared Trump’s victory to Brexit. In his opinion, people turn to ""protest voting"" when they are not taken seriously. Thus, one of the leaders of the European Union supports a color revolution in the US! 
+
+Multicultural Europe is standing in support of the multicultural US. How far will the protests in America go and how far will European politicians go in supporting a color revolution in the US? In my opinion, the process is much more important than the result. The country is split, just like the Western elites themselves… 
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
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+
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+                               
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+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+2730,"Liberal media mocks Republican presidential candidates with ""clown car"" diss","Republicans never win with the media. Nominate a rich, old, white guy and media outlets complain he’s old and out of touch. Have the most vibrant and diverse field of candidates either party might have had in history? It’s a “clown car,” according to liberal and even some more traditional news outlets.
+
+The “clown car” criticism is a particular favorite of MSNBC, a network that finds itself somewhere between an Edsel and a Pinto. Since Jan. 1, hosts and guests at MesSNBC have used the expression 38 times. Obama “Thrill up my leg” fan and ""Hardball"" host Chris Matthews owns it, racking up 29 mentions since the beginning of the year.
+
+Although liberals have been using the term to describe the GOP for several years, Matthews claims it. “Well, speaking of the clown car, I think I invented that term and I will hold on to it,” he told the ""Hardball"" audience May 11. When he discussed the Republican field with guests, out came the “clown car” calls, like some parrot begging for a cracker. Even the Conservative Political Action Conference became that “clown car convention.”
+
+Matthews was far from alone. Sirius/XM Radio hard-left host John Fugelsang told “The Ed Show” on April 24, that Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana was making a “big public play to be the latest elf to jump in the big overcrowded clown car” that is the GOP.
+
+Left-leaning Susan Milligan, a political and foreign affairs writer for US News & World Report, got into the act in a big ""Hardball"" way May 20. “It’s interesting to me that you’ve got all of these Republican men and one woman running. And the only reason they have for running is that they have this double-decker clown car of candidates and think ‘well, why not me, if these guys can run?’” she asked.
+
+Esquire’s Charles Pierce, who authored “Idiot America,” upgraded the vehicle of choice. “You know, we all saw what the clown car looked like in 2012. And it looks like in 2016, we`re going to have a clown SUV,” he told the audience of the little-watched ""All In With Chris Hayes"" February 20.
+
+In March, New York Times opinion columnist Timothy Egan called it “the clown car holding a clutch of potential Republican presidential candidates continues to gasp along.” For Egan, who complained about “the landfill of Republican dimwittedness,” this was par for the course. He even upgraded his phrasing further to a “clown bus,” in a May column.
+
+Washington Post columnists Michael Gerson and Dana Milbank have both deployed the term. Milbank’s May 18, 2015 piece was headlined: “The Republican field is a clown car” and Gerson called it a “stretch clown car.”
+
+It doesn’t matter what they call it – car, bus, SUV or even a London double-decker – the media hates the GOP vehicle if it’s not making left turns. The election’s just getting started. Liberal news outlets are going to keep pulling the wheel that direction, even if the whole nation runs off the road.
+
+Dan Gainor is the Media Research Center's Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently about media for Fox News Opinion. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.",REAL
+3390,State Department challenges Clinton claim that emails to officials ‘immediately’ saved,"A State Department spokeswoman said Friday that the department did not start automatically archiving emails from senior officials until February of this year -- raising questions about Hillary Clinton's claim that her emails were ""immediately"" saved whenever she corresponded with colleagues.
+
+The former secretary of state made that assertion during her press conference earlier this week -- and in a lengthy statement put out by her office -- as she defended her exclusive use of personal email. Clinton downplayed concerns that official emails could have been lost by suggesting anytime she emailed anyone with a "".gov"" address, that email would be stored for posterity.
+
+""The vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department,"" she said Tuesday.
+
+But department spokeswoman Jen Psaki made clear on Friday that this was not the way the system worked.
+
+She said the department only started automatically archiving emails for other senior officials in February.
+
+""They have long been planning to do this. It's just something that it took some time to put in place,"" Psaki said, adding that they'll ""continue to ... take steps forward.""
+
+Before February, these senior officials would have been responsible for flagging their own official records for preservation. And as an inspector general report released earlier this week made clear, that often was not happening.
+
+The report said that in 2011, employees created just ""61,156 record emails out of more than a billion emails sent."" They created even fewer in 2013.
+
+The report said some employees aren't preserving emails ""because they do not want to make the email available in searches or fear that this availability would inhibit debate about pending decisions.""
+
+A central part of Clinton's argument in downplaying the impact of her personal email use has been that she sent most emails to government colleagues on their "".gov."" accounts. The written statement put out by her office said ""her work emails were immediately captured and preserved"" this way. Further, Clinton stressed that she cooperated with the department last year in handing over about 55,000 pages of ""work-related"" email documents from her time as secretary -- her office claimed 90 percent of them already were in the system since they had been sent to "".gov"" accounts.
+
+But Psaki's latest comments would appear to undermine those claims.
+
+Nate Jones, director of the FOIA project at the Washington-based National Security Archive, told Fox News he had doubts about Clinton's assertion from the start.
+
+""The most important claim she made on Tuesday was that emails were captured and preserved in real time. Knowing how far government email systems lag behind those everyone else uses, it was extremely doubtful this was actually the case,"" he said. ""The inspector general's report confirmed that just .00006 percent of State Department emails were saved, so it's very unlikely the people Secretary Clinton relied upon to save her records did.
+
+""Today's disclosure by spokesperson Psaki confirms that the vast majority of her emails were not saved at all.""
+
+Clinton also revealed earlier this week that while more than 30,000 emails were provided to the department, nearly 32,000 were deemed by her as ""private, personal"" records that she did not keep. She also said her personal server would remain private.",REAL
+7569,NewsThump declared an Enemy of the People,"Friday 4 November 2016 by Davywavy NewsThump declared an Enemy of the People 
+Treasonous lickspittle “comedy” website NewsThump has been declared an Enemy of the People today after expressing a general preference for the supremacy of Parliament. 
+The site, which was run by a cabal of international financiers, homosexuals and fencers from a light industrial estate just outside Kettering, treacherously suggested that a system of checks and balances within a Democracy was a pretty good idea and were immediately denounced by popular tribunes for their sedition. 
+Contributors to the site have been accused of supporting foreign interests, including buying expensive continental lagers in preference to Carling. 
+Managing Editor, Simon Williams, has been taken into custody and will be tried and hanged – because it’s important to have a trial even when the outcome isn’t in doubt. 
+A new editor has been democratically elected and will only run popular comedy stories, including the hilarious ‘Purge Parliament of Perfidy!’, “Buy British-made jams to further strengthen our economic progress!”, and “Let us thoroughly implement our Party’s policy of putting all the people under arms and turning the whole country into a fortress!”, which Kim Jong-Un has given his generous permission to use. 
+Speaking to reporters from loyal publications, a spokesman for The People explained that ‘The so-called law’ was merely ‘advisory’ and should be set aside at times when more important considerations over-ruled it. 
+“Yes, yes, Britain has a ‘constitution’ and ‘laws’ and ‘checks and balances’, but these are outdated, petty ideas from a less civilised time; a barbaric holdover from the past,” he explained. 
+“From now on we’ll just hold a vote on everything people want. There’s going to be one on Tuesday about everyone getting a pony. 
+“And if I’ve not got my free pony by Friday, heads will roll, let me tell you.” ",FAKE
+6338,NATO acknowledges Russia Moving Nuclear Missiles To Kaliningrad,"NATO acknowledges Russia Moving Nuclear Missiles To Kaliningrad Page 1 06/28/12 7 ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.006s (10 queries)",FAKE
+4510,"ISIS claims credit for terror attacks at Brussels airport, Metro station","DEVELOPING: ISIS has claimed credit for Tuesday morning’s rush-hour attacks in Brussels, which left at least 31 dead and more than 180 injured.
+
+As many as 31 people were killed and more than 180 injured as coordinated terrorist bombings rocked the Brussels airport and subway system during rush hour Tuesday morning in the Belgian capital.
+
+Two bombings at Zaventem Airport, where 11 people were reportedly killed, and another at the metro station in the Maelbeek section near the European Union headquarters, where the mayor's office said 20 were killed, were almost immediately confirmed as terrorism. The attack at the airport was reportedly accompanied by shouts in Arabic and gunfire, and an unexploded suicide belt was reportedly found in the aftermath.
+
+""What we feared has happened, we were hit by blind attacks,"" said Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel.
+
+""We are at war,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Tuesday. “We have been subjected for the last few months in Europe to acts of war.""
+
+The attacks, which Belgian authorities said were suicide bombings, came four days after the main suspect in the November Paris attacks was arrested in Brussels, and even as Brussels was braced for new attacks.
+
+A source told Fox News that a credible ISIS social media account posted the message, “Mosul revenge for the Kuffar capital Brussels,” but it was not definitive that the terror group was behind the attacks.
+
+The first two explosions rocked the departure hall at the Brussels airport shortly after 8 a.m. local time. Early reports placed the number of dead at 13, with as many as 81 wounded, although the death toll was later revised downward to 11. Witnesses told The Associated Press that one occurred at an American Airlines counter and the other near a Starbucks cafe.
+
+American Airlines said in a statement that none of its employees were among the dead or injured and later tweeted from its verified account that the blast did not occur at its check-in row.
+
+
+
+“There were two explosions in the departure area, one probably caused by a suicide bomber,"" said Belgian federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw of the attack on the airport.
+
+One of the airport bombs may have been in a suitcase, a U.S. official told The Associated Press, and local TV reported that it may have been loaded with nails.
+
+“First there was one explosion. Everyone started to run and panic broke out. Then a second explosion was heard,” one witness told The Brussels Times about the airport explosion.
+
+Zach Mouzoun, who arrived on a flight from Geneva about 10 minutes before the first blast, told BFM television that the second, louder explosion brought down ceilings and ruptured pipes, mixing water with blood from victims.
+
+""It was atrocious. The ceilings collapsed,"" he said. ""There was blood everywhere, injured people, bags everywhere.""
+
+""We were walking in the debris. It was a war scene,"" he said.
+
+Marie-Odile Lognard, a traveler who was lining up in the departures hall for a flight to Abu Dhabi, told BFM television that people panicked after the first explosion about 65 feet from her and that a second explosion about 15 seconds later caused parts of the ceiling to collapse.
+
+""I knew it was an explosion because I've been around explosions before,"" said Denise Brandt, an American woman interviewed by Sky television.
+
+""I felt the explosion, the way it feels through your body. And we just looked at each other and I said 'let's go this way.' It was over there. There was just this instinct to get away from it. Then we saw people running, crying, toward us. So I knew we were going in the right direction and away from it. ""
+
+Amateur video shown on France's i-Tele television showed passengers -- including a child -- running with a backpack dashing out of the terminal in different directions as they tugged luggage. Belgian news channel RTBF reports a Kalashnikov rifle was found in the departure hall at the airport.
+
+Marc Noel, 63, was about to board a Delta flight to Atlanta, to return to his home in Raleigh, N.C.
+
+A Belgium native, Noel says he was in an airport shop buying automobile magazines when the first explosion occurred about 50 yards away.
+
+""People were crying, shouting, children. It was a horrible experience,"" he told AP. He said his decision to buy the magazines might have saved his life. ""I don't want to think about it, but I would probably have been in that place when the bomb went off.""
+
+Three Mormon missionaires, identified by the church as Richard Norby, 66; Joseph Empey, 20, and Mason Wells, 19, all of Utah, were the only Americans known to have been injured in the airport attack.
+
+Moments later at the Metro station, another explosion was reported on a train that was stopped at the Maelbeek subway station, not far from the headquarters of the European Union. Ian McCafferty told The Irish Times he was just getting off the metro at the stop before Maelbeek around 8:20 a.m. when he heard a “loud muffled thud” but, because of construction at the metro, he “didn’t really think much of it.
+
+“There was a large military presence and mass confusion,” he said. “People started to run. Some people were crying. The two stations are only a stone’s throw apart. We were the last train through the station before the blast.”
+
+Rescue workers set up a makeshift treatment center in a local pub near the train station. Dazed and shocked morning travelers streamed from the metro entrances as police tried to set up a security cordon.
+
+Brussels Mayor Yvan Majeur put the number of dead at the train station at 20, with more than 100 more injured.
+
+Alexandre Brans, 32, who was wiping blood from his face, said: ""The metro was leaving Maelbeek station when there was a really loud explosion. It was panic everywhere. There were a lot of people in the metro.""
+
+First responders ran through the street outside with two people on stretchers, their clothes badly torn.
+
+The bombings in the European Union capital are certain to add new fire to the raging debate over refugees from Muslim nations where terrorist groups are active. Europe has taken in more than a million refugees, and terror groups including ISIS have said they are infiltrating the wave of migrants.
+
+After his arrest on Friday, Salah Abdeslam, who is suspected of taking part in the Nov. 13 Paris attack that killed 130 people, told authorities he had created a new network and was planning new attacks.
+
+After Abdeslam's arrest and before Tuesday's attacks, authorities were frantically hunting a suspect identified as 24-year-old Najim Laachraoui, who allegedly traveled to Hungary with Abdeslam before the Paris attack on Nov. 13. It was unclear whether Laachraoui played any role in Tuesday's bombings, but prosecutors say Laachraoui played a key role in recruiting attackers for ISIS.
+
+U.S. authorities were monitoring the situation, poised to assist in the investigation. A U.S. counter-terrorism source told Fox News the priority for investigators is identifying the suicide bomber or bombers through DNA because they cannot operate in isolation, and identifying them can lead to the broader network.
+
+Speaking Havana, President Obama mentioned the attacks before giving prepared comments on the thawing relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. Obama called the attacks “outrageous,” and pledged that the thoughts and prayers of Americans are with the Belgian people.
+
+“This is yet another reminder that the world must unite, we must be together, regardless of nationality or race or faith, in fighting the scourge of terrorism,” said Obama, who had also spoken to Michel by phone.
+
+Belgium's interior minister announced that the terror threat was being raised to its maximum level. All flights were canceled and arriving planes and trains were diverted.
+
+Authorities told people in Brussels to stay where they were, bringing the city to a standstill. Airport security was also tightened in Paris, London and other European cities. Flights due to land at Zaventem, which handles 21 million passengers a year, were sent to Antwerp, Liege, and Brussels Charleroi airports.
+
+French President Francois Hollande said ""terrorists struck Brussels but it was Europe that was targeted -- and all the world that is concerned,"" adding that ""this war will be long.""
+
+Paris announced it would light the Eiffel Tower in the colors of the Belgian flag, and security around France's nuclear plants was reportedly increased, though no specific threat was cited.
+
+Fox News' Catherine Herridge and Matthew Dean contributed to this report.",REAL
+3654,Orlando Attack Just Added More Fuel to Divisive Politics,"The FBI says 29-year-old Omar Mateen, an American-born Muslim, appears to be a ""homegrown extremist,"" saying there's no evidence the attack was directed from the Middle East.
+
+""I don't see anything in reviewing our work that our agents should have done differently,"" FBI Director James Comey said.
+
+  
+
+ But why was the killer allowed to walk into a gun store and buy firearms despite the fact that he had once been under FBI surveillance for nearly a year?
+
+Witnesses now say that Mateen was a regular at the Pulse nightclub and dated men. Officials say he also scouted Disney World for a possible attack.
+
+Meanwhile, as the investigation continues, the shooting has taken over the presidential campaign.
+
+  
+
+ After President Barack Obama refused to even utter the words 'Muslim' or 'Islamic terrorism' in his statement on the Orlando massacre, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump expanded his proposed Muslim ban.
+
+The billionaire says the doors to the United States should be closed to anyone from nations with a track record of Islamic terrorism, regardless of their religion.
+
+""I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats,"" he vowed.
+
+Trump accused Obama of being willfully ignorant about the issue of Islamic terrorism.
+
+""There's something is going on,"" he said of the president and Islamic terrorism,
+
+  
+
+ Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at first followed the president's politically correct line.
+
+""Inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric hurts the vast majority of Muslims who love freedom and hate terror,"" she said.
+
+But her opponent pounced. Trump said Clinton isn't strong enough on America's enemies.
+
+""Her continuing reluctance to ever name the enemy broadcasts weakness across the entire world,"" he said.
+
+  
+
+ Clinton finally uttered the words ""radical Islamism"" in an phone interview with CNN, but said she would not ""demonize an entire religion.""
+
+""We face a twisted ideology and poisoned psychology that inspires the so-called lone wolves,"" she later admitted.
+
+The Democratic response during a raucus session of Congress Monday wasn't on tougher anti-terror laws but gun control legislation. But Republicans stopped it.
+
+  
+
+ While politicians debate what should be done, investigators are still trying to learn more about the man who carried out the deadliest mass shooting in American history.",REAL
+7088,I Envy You,"By Israel Shamir on November 5, 2016 Israel Shamir — The Unz Review Nov 3, 2016 I envy you, American citizens. I do not care about your military might, nor for your supreme currency, the US dollar. I envy your chance to deal on 11/8 a decisive blow to the rule of the Masters of Discourse. Though the Masters control the entirety of world media, and they decide what people may think and say from Canada to Hong Kong, only you, American citizens, can defeat them. This is a great chance, a unique opportunity not to be missed. The Masters of Discourse can be defeated. They are not stronger than any ruler of past. Trump has a great quality making him fit for the task: he is impervious to labels and libels. He had been called everything in the book: anti-Semite, racist, women hater, you name it. And he still survived that flak. Such people are very rare. We know he is against the Masters because every newspaper is against him. I never saw a similar onslaught but once, in Russia in 1996. Then President Yeltsin, an old drunkard who had brought Russia to collapse, had to run for his second term. His popularity was next to zero. Two per cent of Russians intended to vote for him. And then the oligarchs turned on their propaganda machine. Yeltsin’s competitor Gennady Zyuganov, a mild church-going post-communist, had been presented like a Hitler of his days. All the Russian media of the day belonged to oligarchs, and all of it participated in the onslaught. Zyuganov surrendered. Perhaps he won the election, but he congratulated Yeltsin with his victory. It was said that he was threatened with assassination unless… Others say he was bribed. I do not exclude both explanations, but for sure the might of united media can crush a timid man. In the days of the Jewish Temple, there was a Magrepha, a wind instrument able to produce diverse and frightening sounds. There is no agreement among the scholars about what sort of thing it was. Whenever it sounded, people were scared. The media of our days is a new Magrepha. If all of its outputs are united, they produce a terrible roar. Yes, the onslaught of the media upon Trump had been exceedingly unfair, but he survived it. What is even more important, you survived it. It does not matter what the polls say: they say what the newspapers tell them to say. Even people answer the polls according to the media prognoses: they are shy of saying they would vote for a man who … But at the moment of actual vote, they do what they know is right for them. Not for transgenders, not for Muslim brokers, not even for single mothers, but for themselves. You have a very good chance to win, and to defeat the witch and her supporters. We learned that the British people voted for Brexit, though all the media said that proposal had no chance. But we also learned from Brexit, that nothing is over until it is over. The Masters of Discourse will try every trick to steal the elections, and only their fear of armed rising may finally force them to acknowledge their inevitable defeat. We know that in 2015, when Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, was afraid of losing the elections, he revealed that the American intelligence has some superior software which allows them to falsify the elections. Perhaps, but he won despite this magical software, despite Obama’s wrath. Even in Israel, that favorite son of the Masters, the Masters are hated. The New York Times is always speaking good about Israel, but still Israelis do not like the newspaper. Nobody likes them, nobody likes an old aunt who tries to tell us what we can say and what we can’t. If Netanyahu could win, Trump can win twice. After the first debate of Trump and Clinton, people said: She won! But we shall vote for him. This was a very encouraging sign. Indeed every woman worth its salt would win an argument with her husband or son-in-law, let alone a pretender. That is the way we are made. The story of sirens enforces the belief that if you listen to a woman, she will bewitch you. Sirens actually ate the bewitched sailors; our womenfolk do not go to such extremes, but they can cause us a lot of trouble. Trump seems to be almost pure of heart and deed, as even extremely prejudiced media could not find anything really incriminating about him but bragging about having his way with women. I shall not recount so many proven accusations against Hillary. All of that can be found in the emails revealed by Julian Assange and his great Wikileaks team. The media kept mum about it, but the secrets can’t be kept forever. There are many practical things Donald Trump will be able to fix. He can return industries home, he can return American GIs home from four ends of the world, he can improve lot of working men. But he surely will set all of us free from the annoying bondage of the Masters. Just for that reason, go and vote, for yourself and for millions of us who aren’t entitled to. 
+Israel Shamir can be reached at 
+This article was first published at The Unz Review .",FAKE
+3903,"Obama Addresses Vaccinations, Other Issues In NBC Interview","President Barack Obama on Sunday encouraged parents to vaccinate their children and said the U.S. is doing everything in its power to rescue a 26-year-old woman held by the Islamic State, speaking in a wide-ranging interview also covering football and politics.
+
+ 
+
+Obama's comments to NBC came as the U.S. grapples with a measles outbreak traced back to California's Disneyland theme park and a day after the release of video that purportedly showed the beheading of a Japanese journalist held by the militants.
+
+ 
+
+Obama says he has watched videos of hostages being beheaded. ""I think it would affect anybody who has an ounce of humanity. And it's part of the reason why I think we've been so successful in organizing such a broad-based coalition"" to go after the Islamic State, Obama said.
+
+ 
+
+Three Americans — aid worker Peter Kassig and journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff — were beheaded last year by the Islamic State. A fourth American being held is a woman captured last year in Syria while working for aid groups. U.S. officials have asked that she not be identified out of fears for her safety.
+
+ 
+
+""Obviously this is something that is heart-breaking for the family and we want to make sure we do anything we can to make sure that any American citizen is rescued from this situation,"" Obama said.
+
+ 
+
+On the measles outbreak that has spread to more than 100 people, Obama said children who are not vaccinated are putting infants and other people who can't get vaccinations at risk. ""You should get your kids vaccinated,"" Obama said directly.
+
+ 
+
+Some parents continue to believe debunked research linking vaccines to autism and refuse to vaccinate their children.
+
+ 
+
+""I understand that there are families that, in some cases, are concerned about the effect of vaccinations,"" Obama said. ""The science is, you know, pretty indisputable.""
+
+ 
+
+Obama spoke to NBC's Savannah Guthrie before hosting a Super Bowl party at the White House for his friends. His comments on terrorism and vaccinations were taped to air on The Today Show Monday, but NBC released excerpts in advance.
+
+ 
+
+Lighter topics were covered in a short segment that aired live in the pregame show. As Guthrie and Obama sampled White House-brewed beer from the executive mansion's kitchen, they mixed a discussion of the game's high-profile controversy — deflated footballs — with a brief discussion of politics.
+
+ 
+
+But the president ducked picking between possible 2016 Democratic presidential contenders Joe Biden and Hillary Rodham Clinton. ""Love 'em both,"" Obama said with a smile.
+
+ 
+
+He also wouldn't pick a favorite in the New England Patriots Super Bowl match-up against the Seattle Seahawks. ""I think it's always wise for me not to choose a team because then I just alienate one big city,"" Obama said.
+
+ 
+
+As the NFL investigates how the Patriots used the deflated balls in their 45-7 AFC championship victory, Obama said the team would have defeated the Indianapolis Colts ""regardless of what the footballs looked like.""
+
+ 
+
+""The one thing I did not realize — and I'll bet most fans didn't — was that each team prepares its own footballs and brings them to the game,"" Obama said. ""I don't think there's any other sport like that so I'm assuming one of the things the NFL is going to be doing just to avoid any of these controversies is figuring out how the officials are in charge of the footballs from start to finish.""
+
+ 
+
+Pressed on whether the Patriots were cheating, Obama said: ""I think that if you break the rules then you break the rules.""
+
+ 
+
+The president rejected the idea he was doing his own end zone dance with a defiant State of the Union address after Democrats lost seats in the midterm election. ""My job is not to trim my sails,"" Obama said, confidently arguing for his ability to win over even some of his political rivals. He spoke on the eve of his presentation of a budget to Congress, where his proposals are certain to get a rough reception from the Republican majority.
+
+ 
+
+""One thing I've learned over the last six years is that when I tell the American people very clearly what direction I think the country should go in, sometimes people change their minds,"" Obama said. ""And even Republicans occasionally start agreeing with me, although sometimes a little bit later than I would like.""",REAL
+9365,Scientists Say Universe Is Part Of 4th Dimension Born From Black Hole,"A new scientific theory claims our universe was born from an Event Horizon event as part of a second dimension in an enormous black hole gobbling up other universes in the fourth dimension. 
+Via YourNewsWire 
+
+At the very beginning of time, around 13.8 billion years ago, there was a hot dense energetic point where the laws of physics did not apply – something scientists today refer to as a ‘singularity’. The only other place where a singularity occurs in the Universe and all the known laws of physics are temporarily abandoned is at the event horizon of a black hole – which scientists cannot explain.
+Scroll Down For Video Below What is odd about black holes is that the even horizon is two-dimensional in an otherwise completely three-dimensional universe. This means that there is something that we are unable to perceive and the theory, which was first suggested in 2014 and is now under serious scrutinisation, claims that our Universe is the result of a singularity of a huge black hole.
+In simpler terms, there is a possibility that our three-dimensional Universe is surrounding the event horizon of a four-dimensional Universe. A 2014 study from the Perimeter Institute and University of Waterloo stated: “In this scenario, our Universe burst into being when a star in a four-dimensional universe collapsed into a black hole.
+Re-visiting the theory recently, Ethan Siegel, a professor of physics and astronomy at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, explained how a black hole could have formed in another universe which led matter to “fall” into our Universe.
+Dr Siegel wrote for Forbes: “As the black hole first formed, from a star’s core imploding and collapsing, the event horizon first came to be, then rapidly expanded and continued to grow in area as more and more matter continued to fall in.
+“If you were to put a coordinate grid down on this two-dimensional wrapping, you would find that it originated where the gridlines were very close together, then expanded rapidly as the black hole formed, and then expanded more and more slowly as matter fell in at a much lower rate.
+“This matches, at least conceptually, what we observe for the expansion rate of our three-dimensional Universe.”
+",FAKE
+59,Hillary Clinton Raised $45 Million In Latest Quarter,"WASHINGTON –- Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on Wednesday announced a massive fundraising haul in the quarter that ended on June 30, further cementing her status as the clear front-runner in the 2016 race.
+
+All told, the Democratic candidate and former secretary of state raised more than $45 million in primary campaign contributions between her campaign announcement in April and the end of June. That figure, according to a Clinton aide, is the most that any candidate has ever raised in their opening quarter, topping President Barack Obama's roughly $42 million in the first quarter of 2011.
+
+Clinton's haul would also shatter the previous record for an opening fundraising total by a non-incumbent presidential candidate, which she herself set in the first quarter of 2007. To set that record, she raised $26 million in the first three months of her first presidential campaign while transferring an additional $10 million from her Senate campaign account. At the time, Obama trailed closely behind with $25 million.
+
+The Clinton campaign will also report that 91 percent of the donations it received were $100 or less in value. However, the Clinton aide did not have a total for how many individual donors gave to the campaign.",REAL
+3395,State Department spokeswoman floats jobs as answer to ISIS,"What the West really needs to take on the Islamic State is ... a jobs program.
+
+That's what a top State Department spokeswoman suggested when asked in a TV interview Monday night about what the U.S.-led coalition is doing to stop the slaughter of civilians by Islamic State militants across the region.
+
+""We're killing a lot of them, and we're going to keep killing more of them. ... But we cannot win this war by killing them,"" department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on MSNBC's ""Hardball."" ""We need ... to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it's lack of opportunity for jobs, whether --""
+
+At that point, Harf was interrupted by host Chris Matthews, who pointed out, ""There's always going to be poor people. There's always going to be poor Muslims.""
+
+Harf continued to argue that the U.S. should work with other countries to ""help improve their governance"" and ""help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.""
+
+She acknowledged there's ""no easy solution"" and said the U.S. would still take out ISIS leaders. But Harf said: ""If we can help countries work at the root causes of this -- what makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47 instead of trying to start a business?""
+
+Asked about Harf's remarks on Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Harf was only making the point that fighting ISIS entails more than just a military solution.
+
+The comments come as the Obama administration takes heat from lawmakers for its approach to the Islamic State, whose self-proclaimed fighters in Libya recently executed 21 Coptic Christians from Egypt.
+
+The White House on Tuesday kicked off a three-day summit on ""countering violent extremism."" It began with Vice President Biden moderating a discussion on countering extremism with representatives from cities.
+
+This, though, follows a pattern of conferences and summits called by the administration to address urgent challenges. The administration is facing criticism for this approach -- and for describing the summit in general terms -- at a time when Islamic State militants are spreading, recruiting and executing prisoners from multiple countries in increasingly brutal ways.
+
+""The White House had to seem like it was doing something,"" said Jonah Goldberg, a National Review editor and conservative columnist, while claiming the summit won't achieve much.
+
+Senior administration officials, though, defended the conference, and their description of it, on a call with reporters.
+
+Asked whether Islamic extremists are in fact the focus of the summit, one official said extremism has spanned ""many decades"" and taken on ""many forms,"" but they recognize that those launching recent attacks ""are calling themselves Muslims.""
+
+""You can call them what you want. We're calling them terrorists,"" the official said.
+
+The New York Times reported Tuesday that as airstrikes continue in Iraq and Syria, the administration is boosting efforts to counter ISIS on social media. The plan centers around a small State Department agency that pushes against ISIS and other groups' online propaganda.
+
+""We're getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content,"" Richard Stengel, under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, told the Times.
+
+Officials reportedly plan to describe some of their social media strategy at the three-day counter-extremism summit.",REAL
+3207,GOP's nightmare: An Independent Donald Trump,"(CNN) Republicans dreaming of shooing away Donald Trump may want to think twice.
+
+By publicly rebuking the billionaire businessman for his inflammatory comments, the party may convince Trump to launch a third-party candidacy.
+
+That's a potential nightmare scenario for the GOP establishment: a populist outsider with unlimited resources attacking their nominee from the right in the general election, raising hell -- and attracting votes -- with his rhetoric on issues like illegal immigration.
+
+Ralph Nader, who has run for president multiple times as a third-party candidate and may have cost Democrat Al Gore the 2000 election by running to his left, said Republicans mishandle Trump at their own peril.
+
+""The Republican Party establishment is playing with nitroglycerine when it goes after Donald Trump and tries to minimize him and exclude him,"" Nader said in an interview Thursday. ""Because a jilted Donald Trump as a third-party candidate can blow the presidential race wide open and turn it into a three way race.""
+
+Launching a third-party candidacy is no small feat. It is a time-consuming and expensive process riddled with logistical hurdles, including massive signature-gathering requirements to gain ballot access in each of the 50 states.
+
+But if it's tedious, it's hardly impossible — particularly for a candidate with money to throw around.
+
+Republicans remember all too well businessman Ross Perot's independent candidacy for president in 1992. The Texan made an appeal to voters looking for an alternative to establishment candidates, and his campaign is widely considered to have complicated George H.W. Bush's effort to win reelection against Bill Clinton.
+
+Clay Mulford, Perot's son-in-law and political adviser, said a third-party run from Trump has the potential to energize a part of the electorate that's itching for a fresh face.
+
+""There is just a sense of ineffectiveness of the two-party system. So I think he would do better than expected if he were in the debates and if he were considered viable,"" Mulford said. ""And having money helps.""
+
+Indeed, poll numbers suggest that a third-party candidacy from Trump would damage Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a top-tier candidate in the current Republican field.
+
+Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton leads Bush, 50% to 44%, in a head-to-head match-up, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll out this week. But throw an independent Trump into that race, and Clinton's lead grows significantly to 46%, leaving Bush at 30%.
+
+""He'd be the one person that would probably fit the bill. He's not really a Republican, he's not a Democrat,"" said former U.S. Sen. Dean Barkley of Minnesota, who was appointed and served briefly as an independent by Gov. Jesse Ventura.
+
+Independents ""decide the election every four years and if all of them or most of them go to Trump, that leaves the Republicans too small of a base to have any chance of winning.""
+
+At a campaign stop in New Hampshire Thursday, Bush made sure to emphasize that he isn't dismissive of Trump's candidacy.
+
+""I think he's a serious candidate and he's going to have a lot of money. He's tapping into people's angst that are legitimate,"" Bush said.
+
+Meanwhile, during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in Laredo, Texas, Thursday, Trump said his preference is to run as a Republican and he was confident that he could win the party's nomination.
+
+But in many ways, a third-party run makes a lot of sense for Trump.
+
+The former host of the reality TV show ""The Apprentice"" was once a registered a Democrat, donated money to members of both parties, and considered running for president in 2000 as an independent.
+
+At the very core of his campaign is the idea that he is the anti-politician. Trump has never held public office and he loves to point out that thanks to his massive wealth — which he claims amounts to more than $10 billion — he is not beholden to anyone, including party leadership.
+
+This last point has already created massive headaches for the GOP.
+
+Trump sparked furious backlash by referring to some Mexican immigrants that enter the United States as ""criminals"" and ""rapists."" Republicans criticized Trump's choice of words as being hurtful and insensitive to the immigrant community, but many chose their words carefully — a sign of how delicate of an issue illegal immigration is.
+
+For many Republicans, Trump seemed to cross the line last weekend with his critique of McCain.
+
+""I like people that weren't captured, OK?"" Trump said of the Arizona Republican senator, who spent more than five years in as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.
+
+The RNC, which remains neutral in the GOP nominating process, took the unusual move of speaking out.
+
+""There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably,"" said RNC spokesman Sean Spicer.
+
+The RNC declined to comment for this story.
+
+Bill Hillsman, a political consultant who has worked for a number of independent candidates including in gubernatorial races in Massachusetts and Texas, said the party's condemnation of Trump is likely to have helped fuel Trump's unorthodox campaign.
+
+""I think the damage is already done to a large extent,"" Hillsman said. ""All the people who said well, his campaign is over now and blasted him for some of his previous comments, many of which he's walked back, they already have just pretty much dismissed this guy and the polls are saying otherwise.""",REAL
+5540,ISIS applies chlorine in Aleppo,"ISIS applies chlorine in Aleppo 01.11.2016 One man died and more than forty got injured as a result of a shelling of the Aleppo's Western part by fighters. The Al-Mayadeen satellite TV channel reported, that extremists applied projectiles rigged with chemical agents. The region of Al-Hamdaniya was struck. A military academy which is under control of the government forces is situated there. Both civilians and military men got poisoned. Later, Zahir al-Hajw, head of the Aleppo province forensic medicine, noted that symptoms of those injured evidence the use of chlorine. '41 people were delivered to hospitals after the attack. Among the symptoms are watery eyes, frothing at the mouth, vomit, nausea. There are mild and moderate severity categories. For the moment no one has been discharged from the hospital,' he said. The UN Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura had already expressed his indignation at the acts of the so-called opposition. According to him, ""credible reports... indicate that scores of civilians in west Aleppo have been killed, including several children, and hundreds wounded due to relentless and indiscriminate attacks from armed opposition groups"". Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+839,Ted Cruz: Protester would get spanking at my house,"Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has made no secret of the fact that he spanks his daughter when she misbehaves. He has also suggested the American people should deliver a “spanking” to Hillary Clinton.
+
+Now, he is prescribing the same discipline for a protester who interrupted him during a rally in Indiana on Sunday.
+
+“Apparently there’s a young man who’s having some problems,” Cruz said as the man yelled: “You suck!”
+
+“Thank you, son,” Cruz replied, before adding that he believes “children should actually speak with respect.”
+
+“Imagine what a different world it would be if someone had told Donald Trump that years ago,” he said. “You know, in my household, when a child behaves that way, they get a spanking.”
+
+The exchange comes as Cruz and Trump are stumping for every last vote heading into to the Republican primary in Indiana on Tuesday. Trump leads Cruz by roughly 9 percentage points, 42%-32.7%, in the RealClearPolitics average of recent Hoosier polls. A win there could help solidify Trump’s claim to the nomination, while dealing Cruz a formidable blow.",REAL
+5841,#muschniwogdowis of the day: business as usual.,"Photo by fsgm 
+The ‘defense’ budget is three quarters of a trillion dollars. Profits went up last year well over 25%. I guarantee you: when war becomes that profitable, we’re going to see more of it. – Chalmers Johnson 
+Until it is no longer the case that M ost US C itizens H ave N o I dea W hat O ur G overnment D oes O r W ho I t S erves , I am just going to continue to insist that #muchniwogdowis is simply the GREATEST ACRONYM EVAR ™!!!11!!! Today’s demonstration of its awesomeness is an Op-Ed in The Nation by former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) entitled Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? Look at Their Donors . He is “fed up with the DC policy elite who cash in on war while presenting themselves as experts, at the cost of other people’s lives, our national fortune, and the sacred honor of our country.” 
+It’s kind of adorable that Kucinich thinks our country has some sort of “sacred honor” going for it. Nevertheless, I have always liked this d00d. 
+Kucinich brought Articles of Impeachment against Dick Cheney and George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors in connection with the Iraq war. His efforts went precisely nowhere (“impeachment is not on our agenda.” -Nancy Pelosi). When he ran for president in 2008, Kucinich’s platform included : single-payer universal health care; bans on offshore drilling, toxic pesticides and privatizing Social Security; legalizing pot and ending the War on Drugs; and—my personal favorite—creating a cabinet-level “ Department of Peace ” to foster international cooperation. That last one naturally made him the laughingstock of the beltway press, punditocracy and Congress. There’s no money in peace FFS! Well, not for the right people anyway. NO ONE WANTS THAT. When Kucinich ran for a newly redistricted House seat in 2012, he was defeated in the Democratic primary by Marcy Kaptur (D- Forced Birth Brigades ). 
+In the Op-ed Kucinich goes after DC’s so-called “think tanks,” and the Brookings Institute in particular. He notes that Brookings, “ in a report to Congress , admitted it received $250,000 from the US Central Command, Centcom…Pentagon money to think tanks that endorse war?” And the Generals’ preferred war policies isn’t the only thing Brookings is shilling for: as Kucinich notes, the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of transportation and the US Department of Health and Human Services all give money—taxpayer money—to Brookings, which in turn promotes these agencies’ preferred policies to Congress and the press with the sheen of academic gravitas and objectivity. 
+Kuchinich says: 
+“It is our patriotic duty to expose why the DC foreign-policy establishment and its sponsors have not learned from their failures and instead are repeating them, with the acquiescence of the political class and sleepwalkers with press passes.” 
+Why? Because from their perspective these are not failures—not at all. See, what informed, rational citizens who value the security and wellbeing of humanity here and around the globe might call “fucking epic foreign policy disasters,” are instead for the bipartisan DC establishment wicked smart, wildly successful, solid business decisions. 
+Dennis Kucinich knows this of course; the point of his article is to shed some light on the real winners of our wars, and some of the dynamics at work that virtually ensure their continued victory. He’s just connecting the dots into a picture that anyone can see if we cared to look. Generally speaking, we don’t. It’s an ugly picture. 
+I think I’ll just close with the hallowed words of preeminent 20th century philosopher Boy George : 
+War is stupid, and people are stupid And love means nothing in some strange quarters. 
+Have a nice day. This is box title 
+Iris Vander Pluym is a writer, artist and activist based in New York City. A self-described “unapologetic, godless, feminist lefty,” she blogs at Perry Street Palace , is a regular columnist at TPJ Magazine , a contributor at Secular Woman , Worldwide Hippies / Citizen Journalists Exchange and Pharyngula , and has written professionally for Keyboard and Electronic Musician magazines (print editions). Indoctrinated with the notion that Nice Girls™ never talk about politics, sex or religion, it turns out these are pretty much the only subjects she ever has any interest in discussing. Follow Iris not being nice on Twitter @irisvanderpluym   =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. [email-subscribers namefield=”YES” desc=”” group=”Public”]",FAKE
+2487,Boehner's preparing to sue Obama again — over immigration,"It's hard to argue that the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has granted protection from deportation to about 600,000 unauthorized immigrants, is an acceptable use of presidential authority, but the new deferred-action program wouldn't be. After all, they both follow the same model: unauthorized immigrants who meet certain requirements will be able to apply for temporary protection, and have to renew that protection every few years. Any of the legal criticisms that apply to the new program apply to the existing one as well.
+
+But the DACA program wasn't controversial when it was first announced — it's only become politically controversial in retrospect, as Obama started contemplating (and eventually took) executive action to give relief to a broader set of unauthorized immigrants. So the GOP didn't sue Obama in 2012, or even in 2014, over the existing program.
+
+Suing him now over both programs would raise the question of why Congress is only now taking legal action over something that's been going on for years, if it really thinks it's such a dire threat to the Constitution. That's relevant to the GOP's legal case, and it's relevant to the politics of the issue as well — since the DACA program was pretty broadly popular when it was rolled out. (Polls are mixed on the new executive action. Depending on how the question is asked, Americans either favor letting Obama's actions stand — by amargin of 15 percentage points — or want it to be blocked, also by a margin of 15 percentage points.)",REAL
+6262,Republican Lawmaker Secretly Recorded Fantasizing To Gun Group About Shooting Hillary (AUDIO),"  
+Republicans just can’t quit fantasizing about doing bodily harm to Hillary Clinton. Over the weekend, Sen. Richard Burr noticed a picture of Clinton hanging in a gun shop and decided the owners should put a “bullseye” on it. 
+Speaking to GOP volunteers on Saturday , Burr joked that he had recently visited a gun shop and “nothing made me feel better” than seeing a magazine about rifles“with a picture of Hillary Clinton on the front of it.” 
+“I was a little bit shocked at that — it didn’t have a bullseye on it,” Burr told the crowd in Mooresville, North Carolina. “But on the bottom right (of the magazine), it had everybody for federal office in this particular state that they should vote for. So let me assure you, there’s an army of support out there right now for our candidates.” 
+Burr’s comments echo those of his party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who has called on the “Second Amendment people” to “do something” about his Democratic opponent. However, Burr is at least pretending that he feels bad about his remarks. 
+The Senate Intelligence Committee chairman issued an apology on Monday. “The comment I made was inappropriate, and I apologize for it,” Burr said. 
+A Burr campaign official said the Senator’s remark about feeling “better” had nothing at all to do with the idea of Clinton being shot. Really. He was just referring to the support other right-wing candidates have gotten from various gun rights groups. Honest. 
+Burr also said that if he is re-elected and Hillary should happen to win the White House, he will do all he can to continue obstructing the appointment of a ninth Supreme Court justice. When asked about the possibility of Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee, being appointed, Burr said, “it isn’t going to happen — period.” 
+“And if Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.” 
+Burr also made it clear that he considers being responsible for the “longest judicial vacancy in history” a badge of honor. 
+You can listen to Burr fantasize about “bullseyes” on Hillary Clinton, here : 
+Featured image via Gabriella Demczuk/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+5675,Questions Re Kim DotCom and Wikileaks,Questions Re Kim DotCom and Wikileaks Still no sign of 33K emails. So what Scenario is it?Sceanrio 1: Wikileaks still under Assange Control and DotCom is telling the truth. Kim DotCom Sent Hillary's Emails to Wikileaks. Wikileaks will release the emails to public today.- So where are the emails? - Why didn't wikileaks say we received the emails?Scenario 2: Wikileaks still under Assange Control and DotCom is not telling the truth. Kim DotCom did not Send anything to Wikileaks. - Why didn't wikileaks say we didn't get anything?Sceanrio 3: Wikileaks under .GOV Control and DotCom is telling the truth. Kim DotCom Sent Hillary's Emails to Wikileaks. Wikileaks doesn't release the emails to public today.- If Wikileaks doesn't release mail we know Assange no longer in control- DotCom will have to release the emails to public today or he loses all credibility.Scenario 4: Wikileaks under .Gov control and DotCom is not telling the truth. Kim DotCom did not Send anything to Wikileaks. - We don't see any emails and we have been rick rolled Page 1,FAKE
+4135,The Democratic Party Got Crushed During The Obama Presidency. Here's Why,"The Democratic Party Got Crushed During The Obama Presidency. Here's Why
+
+The GOP may be in the midst of an identity crisis, but the Democratic Party is also facing a political crisis that could be made a lot worse if it doesn't win the White House in November.
+
+Part of President Obama's legacy is the health of his party. He's had many successes in office — health care reform, climate change regulations, Wall Street reform — but his legacy will also include one huge failure: a diminished Democratic Party.
+
+Every president sees his party lose hundreds of positions — it's the price a party holding the White House pays — but no president has come close to Obama. During Obama's eight years in office, the Democrats have lost more House, Senate, state legislative and governors seats than under any other president.
+
+When Obama took office, there were 60 Democratic senators; now there are 46. The number of House seats held by Democrats has shrunk from 257 to 188.
+
+There are now nine fewer Democratic governors than in 2009. Democrats currently hold fewer elected offices nationwide than at any time since the 1920s.
+
+1. There are two different electorates in America
+
+There is Presidential Election America, where turnout is diverse. The electorate is younger, browner, more single, more secular — more Democratic. Then there's Midterm Election America, where the electorate is older, whiter, more rural, more church-going — in other words, more Republican. What's great for Republicans and bad for Democrats is that the vast majority of the governorships and state legislative seats are elected in the midterms.
+
+And those positions are the seed corn for a party — they're the farm teams for higher-level offices. Right now the Democrats are at a very low ebb.
+
+This is something President Obama lamented when he campaigned for Democrats in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014. Republicans manage to turn out their voters every two years, but Democrats, for some reason, only turn their voters out every four. Maybe, Obama mused, because Democrats just don't think midterms are ""sexy enough.""
+
+Democrats had one spectacularly bad piece of luck. The Republicans' Tea Party-fueled surge in 2010 was perfectly timed to coincide with the decennial census, after which new congressional and state legislative district boundaries are drawn by governors and state legislatures. Republicans' huge gains in the 2010 midterms put them in the driver's seat when it came time to draw new congressional districts in 2011. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell remembers what happened when Republicans took over the governor's mansion and the Legislature in his state:
+
+""When I left office in January of 2011,"" says Rendell, ""there were 13 Democratic congressman and six Republican congressman. As a result of redistricting in the 2010 election, that turned around and we now have 13 Republican congressmen and five Democratic congressman.""
+
+It's not only bad timing and gerrymandering that have hollowed out the Democratic Party. Mo Elleithee, a former Democratic National Committee official, says Democrats have never put enough effort and resources into state legislative races. Republicans, on the other hand, make those races a top priority.
+
+4. Too many Democrats live in cities
+
+This is another problem that makes it easier for Republicans to draw congressional and state legislative districts that disadvantage Democrats. Democratic voters are clumped together in urban areas. You could say that for the purposes of winning elections, Democratic voters are just not efficiently distributed.
+
+Its why even in red states like Texas and Utah there are cities that are solidly Democratic — and why lesbian mayors were elected in Houston and Salt Lake City. When Democrats cluster in and around cities, they win local elections, but that doesn't help them win suburban or rural congressional seats.
+
+This November, the stakes for Democrats couldn't be higher. Without the White House, assuming party control elsewhere remains the same, Democrats would be truly out in the cold.",REAL
+7543,TRANSPARENCY! Report: Loretta Lynch won’t tell Congress who approved $1.7 billion cash transfer to Iran,"  won’t   Posted at 12:07 pm   Doug P. 
+Somehow this isn’t very surprising: No one wants to own approving a $1.7 billion cash transfer to terrorists. https://t.co/375cl78E5V 
+— Omri Ceren (@cerenomri) October 28, 2016 
+The Obama administration’s promise of “historic” levels of transparency continues to be a joke, and true to form, AG Loretta Lynch reportedly is doing her part to contribute to that legacy: BIG BREAKING: Attorney General Lynch 'Pleads Fifth' To Congress on Secret Iran 'Ransom' Payments https://t.co/GhwL3QlNqU 
+— Adam Kredo (@Kredo0) October 28, 2016 Our Attorney General won't tell Congress – elected representatives of the people – who approved the transfer of $1.7 billion to terrorists. https://t.co/pbHEN4G5ea 
+The “historic” transparency keeps on coming : 
+Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. 
+Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) initially presented Lynch in October with a series of questions about how the cash payment to Iran was approved and delivered. 
+Full story here . Would Lynch instead be willing to discuss this in a private airport tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton? Maybe. It's almost as if they have something to hide. https://t.co/n9kIJKSUEW",FAKE
+1209,1 in 5 Americans say Hillary Clinton is “dishonest” or a “liar.” Here’s why that’s a big problem.,"On  Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that several top aides to Hillary Clinton during her time at the State Department were required to testify under oath about whether exclusively using a private email server while serving as secretary of state amounted to a deliberate attempt to shield information from the public.
+
+This is the latest in a series of developments regarding Clinton’s email server — and her decision to exclusively use it during her time as the nation’s top diplomat. (Clinton is the first and only secretary of state to only use a private server for her correspondence.) Almost weekly now, there is some news in one of the three ongoing investigations — two at State, one by the FBI — into Clinton. And the drip, drip, drip effect of these now-regular revelations continues to have a major impact on how Clinton is viewed by the voting public.
+
+Gallup released a fascinating bit of data Tuesday that speaks to Clinton’s trust problem. They asked people to offer up the first word or phrase that came to mind when the name “Hillary Clinton” was mentioned. Here’s what the results of that open-ended question looked like:
+
+One in five people — unprompted by the poll taker — offered up some version of Clinton as “dishonest” or a “liar.” That's somewhat remarkable given that these open-ended questions typically produce a gigantic muddle of something like 25 words or phrases — all of which garner somewhere between 5 and 8 percent support.
+
+That 21 percent of people unaided said something about the “trust thing” in regards to Clinton tells you how deeply the impression that she is not fundamentally honest has sunk into the electorate. Now, some of this can be directly attributed to the fact that Republicans do not like and do not trust the Clintons. Never have, never will. “Overall, 77 percent of Republicans’ top-of-mind impressions of Clinton are negative, with their most frequent responses focusing on views of her as dishonest and crooked,” write Gallup’s Frank Newport and Lydia Saad.
+
+But, that’s not it.  Sure, Republicans view Clinton negatively. But, as I’ve noted time and again, Clinton’s seeming belief that this whole trust issue surrounding her is simply the result of a right-wing smear job is inaccurate. Again, the Gallup data: A bare majority — 52 percent — of Democrats have some sort of positive first impression of Clinton; one in four (27 percent) have a negative one.
+
+The Gallup duo are right that impressions about Clinton are deeply held — particularly among partisans. But that doesn’t make the email story immaterial. Rather it reminds many people — Republicans, yes, but also independents and some Democrats — of what they don’t like or trust about the Clintons. The longer the email story stays in the news, the more chances to affirm peoples’ fundamentally negative perception of Clinton that she is just not great at telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
+
+For Clinton to escape that negative spiral, she needs some form of complete exoneration in the matter. (Worth noting: Clinton herself has not been named as a target in any of the trio of investigations.) Short of that — and if this pattern of drips and drabs of the story coming out continues — the trust problem is going to continue to dog Clinton all the way through the November general election.",REAL
+7536,Internationally-backed Libyan forces attack Daesh positions in Sirte,"Fighters loyal to Libya’s UN-backed government guard a look-out point in the city of Sirte, east of Tripoli, as they try to clear the last remaining Daesh terrorists from the al-Jiza al-Bahriya neighborhood, October 26, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
+Libyan forces have launched a fresh offensive against Daesh positions in the Mediterranean port city of Sirte. 
+On Thursday, fighters from the nearby city of Misrata, allied with forces of the UN-backed unity government in Tripoli, were pushing their way through the last pockets of resistance in the city’s Ghiza Bahriya District. 
+They were supported by tanks and armored vehicles during the renewed offensive. 
+“Bonyan Marsous forces and the Libyan army forces are advancing onto Ghiza Bahriya to free it ... The Bonyan [forces] have been advancing in Ghiza Bahriya and thank God there have been no causalities so far, there are only some wounded,"" said Hussien Edra, a member of the Bonyan Marsous Brigade. 
+In May, the internationally-backed pro-government troops started a large-scale military operation, including street-by-street fighting backed by heavy airstrikes and artillery fire, to eradicate Daesh militants in Sirte. They have so far recaptured most areas in the city. 
+Most of Daesh commanders in the city fled to other places and the remaining rank has been holding out via sniper fire, booby traps and car bombs. 
+Sirte is the only key base of the Takfiri militant group outside Iraq and Syria. Members of the forces loyal to Libya's UN-backed government gather in the coastal city of Sirte, east of the capital Tripoli, during their military operation against Daesh, on October 14, 2016.(Photo by AFP) 
+The city fell into the hands of Daesh Takfiri militants more than a year ago after the group extended their reach into North Africa by taking advantage of the chaos gripping Libya. 
+The North African country has witnessed unrest since 2011, when a NATO military intervention followed the uprising that led to the ouster and killing of long-time dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. 
+Liberating the key city would deal a major blow to the militant group in its drive to expand its influence to territories beyond the Middle East. Loading ...",FAKE
+9124,Putin’s Pro-Trump Online Trolls Just Spilled The Beans To Samantha Bee,"Comments 
+The conservative political machine has been working overtime to try to deny that the government of the Russian Federation is interfering with the American election in support of Republican nominee Donald Trump – but this explosive investigation by former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee proves once and for all that dictator Vladimir Putin is using every tool at his disposal to tilt the scale in favor of Trump. 
+Samantha Bee, now the host of her own show, traveled to Moscow to interview two of the “thinkfluencers,” members of Putin’s underground troll farms that pose as Americans online and flood social media with pro-Russian and pro-Trump propaganda. 
+“The reason I’m hired is to make simple people change their mind about their vote and also about Russia” said one woman, who admitted she identifies herself as a Nebraskan housewife online. When asked why they thought their propaganda was working, she replied it was because Americans are “lazy and they believe everything they read.”",FAKE
+575,"In Common Core, a larger battle over the size of government","Jindal said Monday that Common Core should ""absolutely"" be a starting point for a larger debate over the role of the federal government, a move that sets him up to go head-to-head with presumed Republican frontrunner former Gov. Jeb Bush, should both decide to run for the GOP's presidential nomination. Bush supports the increasingly controversial educational standards while Jindal, who once supported the program, is now one of the anti-Common Core movement's most prominent and vocal activists.
+
+While he rolled out more specific education reform proposals Monday, Jindal framed the debate over Common Core in broader terms in a conversation with reporters Monday hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
+
+""I think we'll have a bigger conversation first within the Republican Party, then with the American people about what's the proper role of the federal government,"" Jindal said, pivoting off of Common Core. ""I do hope that Common Core will be one more, one more reason for us to have this bigger debate, this bigger conversation about the proper role of the federal government in local education.""
+
+It's not just Common Core that would help Jindal get toe-to-toe with Bush, whose governorship was marked by a strong emphasis on education. Bush has also been a strong proponent of his brother's No Child Left Behind Act, which Jindal is at odds with.
+
+Jindal's visit Monday was his second trip to Washington in the last week, both times railing against Common Core and raising the profile of the issue as the presidential field takes shape and prospective candidates look to identify the top conservative issues. The Common Core issue already has its roots in the conservative movement and Jindal's juxtaposition of the issue with the role of the federal government could boost his appeal with the party base -- one that is skeptical about Bush's conservative credentials. ""When it comes to moving power away federal government, that's obviously the debate today about Common Core,"" Jindal said. ""I think this is a good debate and a good discussion within the Republican primary and the general election -- what is the proper role of the federal government."" But Jindal insisted that neither Common Core nor any other issue should be a disqualifier for a Republican politician considering entering the fray, insisting the process must play out and voters should get a chance to hear out both sides of the debate. He also wouldn't paint the issue as a litmus test for conservative credentials, sticking to calling it ""an important issue"" and calling it ""an example"" of where candidates stand ""not only on Common Core, but the role of the federal government in education."" Jindal published a series of education reform proposals Monday through his non-profit policy group America Next, outlining alternatives to Common Core which focus on school choice and local control over curricula. The Louisiana governor is also setting himself up for support from a core constituency: moms. In remarks Monday and last week at an American Principles Project event, Jindal honed in on the need for moms to have control over their children's education, a constituency that has been at the heart of the grassroots effort to repeal Common Core. ""I wouldn't bet against a mom when it comes to this Common Core debate,"" Jindal said.",REAL
+4232,Here comes the opposition book: Clinton and her allies prepare for Trump,"Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and her allies have begun preparing a playbook to defeat Donald Trump in a general-election matchup that will attempt to do what his Republican opponents couldn’t: show that his business dealings and impolitic statements make him unfit to be commander in chief.
+
+Both the Clinton campaign and outside supporters are confident that she and Trump will almost certainly face each other in the general election and that the focus is shifting past her hard-fought primary campaign against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
+
+They are now focused intently on researching the billionaire real estate mogul’s business record, dissecting his economic policies and compiling a long history of controversial pronouncements that have captivated and repelled the nation in this tumultuous election season.
+
+Neither the Clinton campaign nor several independent super PACs working on her behalf plan to respond with the same brass-knuckles style that Trump has taken with his Republican opponents, aides and outside supporters said. But in their view, Trump isn’t Teflon: Republicans waited too long to go after him, and they went about it the wrong way.
+
+“What the Republicans did was too little, too late,” said David Brock, who runs two pro-Clinton super PACs now engaged in researching and responding to Trump. “It was petty insults. It was not strategic.”
+
+Justin Barasky, spokesman for the large pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, said Republican candidates committed “malpractice” by failing to raise liabilities from Trump’s past or aggressively challenge him on offensive or incorrect statements.
+
+Implicit in the effort is real worry about Trump’s outsider appeal in a year dominated by ­working-class anger and economic anxiety. The prospect that Trump could compete for some of the blue-collar voters who have flocked to Sanders, for instance — or to reorder the map of competitive states to include trade-affected Michigan or Pennsylvania — has prompted Clinton’s allies to leave nothing to chance.
+
+[How Trump vs. Clinton could reshape the electoral map]
+
+Yet, they also believe that, although Trump has motivated a loyal plurality of supporters in primary contests, he has limited ability to expand that support once the Republican field clears. Because of the litany of controversial pronouncements he has made, they expect a Trump nomination to make it easier to rally women, Latino and African American voters to turn out for Clinton. In fact, her aides are planning for a historic gender gap between Clinton and Trump.
+
+Given Trump’s willingness to attack his opponents — and his pivot to going after Clinton in recent days — one clear presumption has emerged about the fall contest: It will be ugly.
+
+That’s one reason the former secretary of state plans to counter Trump with high-road substance, policy and issues, according to one senior campaign aide. The idea is to showcase what Clinton’s backers see as her readiness for the job without lowering her to what they describe as Trump’s gutter.
+
+The aide said the campaign’s day-to-day decision-making remains focused on Sanders. But Clinton swept all five states that voted Tuesday, and Trump did well, meaning both are far closer than any competitor to securing their respective party’s nomination. Clinton is also far ahead in polling in Arizona, a large contest this week, while Sanders is expected to pick up victories in other Western states that the Clinton campaign maintains will have little effect on her lead.
+
+A central lesson of Trump’s primary battle, the campaign aide said, is that he cannot be ignored — but also that he cannot be beaten at his own game. The key will be to maintain stature by focusing on her message of political unity and economic growth and by showing knowledge and strength on foreign issues. The aide spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about internal strategy.
+
+[Trump praises campaign manager after incident with protester]
+
+“It’s kind of mutually assured destruction: Both sides line up their nukes. It’s going to be just ugly and nasty and icky,” said another Democrat with longtime ties to the Clinton family. “The winner will not be the least bad of the two. The winner will be the one in the contest of that mutually assured destruction who also has a vision and a message about the future that is both inspiring and credible for the rest of the country.”
+
+At the same time, her infrastructure of outside supporters will be poised to respond to what they expect will be Trump’s all-out war against Clinton on everything, both personal and political. Clinton’s backers acknowledged that she is also a divisive figure and that controversies such as her use of a private email server while secretary of state will not evaporate during the general election.
+
+“We will not make the same mistake the Republicans made” by letting attacks go unchallenged, Brock said.
+
+Trump has repeatedly brushed off polling indicating that he would lose in a head-to-head contest with Clinton. But after his victories in Florida and elsewhere last week, he sounded like a ­general-election candidate who recognizes the challenge ahead.
+
+“We have to bring our party together,” he said. “We have something that actually makes the Republican Party probably the biggest political story in the world.”
+
+Trump has benefited in the primary season from the failure of Republicans to unite behind a single foil to his candidacy — and from his own strategy of picking off successive targets whom he viewed as weak. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson both made the mistake, Clinton supporters said, of trying to ignore Trump’s insults or wait out a Trump decline that never came. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made the other mistake of trying to use Trump’s own tactics.
+
+“You can’t beat him by being him,” Barasky said.
+
+In a one-on-one race against Clinton, Trump would have less room to parry or pivot the same way, the senior Clinton campaign aide said, because Trump would have one target and one target only.
+
+Barasky and others also predicted that Trump will emerge more damaged by his primary fight than Clinton, because of the deep divisions he has caused and exploited. Sanders supporters may not like Clinton, but their distaste for her doesn’t approach the antipathy or angst that many Republican voters harbor about Trump, they said.
+
+Trump satisfied his loyal supporters by playing a character — the bully, the iconoclast — but he turned off many in his own party in the process, said several Clinton supporters who are studying the Republican race.
+
+In fact, they believe Trump’s own words will make one of their central objectives easy: tearing him down in the eyes of women, notably Republicans and independents.
+
+Several outside groups — including Emily’s List, which supports Democratic women who favor abortion rights — are compiling dossiers of statements denigrating women that were taken from the candidate’s own mouth, not just in this campaign but far into his past.
+
+“You’re a mom and you’ve got your kids sitting on the couch and you watch the nightly news and you’ve got this guy saying things as a presidential candidate that you tell your kids not to say,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List. “You don’t call women bimbos; you don’t say that they’re fat.”
+
+Women, including independents who sometimes vote Republican, are going to be repulsed, Schriock said.
+
+Trump will also be a rallying point for Clinton’s message to black voters, particularly older ones, who view Trump’s rhetoric and his raucous rallies as reminiscent of the worst of America’s past.
+
+At an MSNBC forum Monday, Clinton said that Trump’s rallies and his exhortations to violence resemble the “lynch mobs” of the South during the Jim Crow era. The remark came after videos from a Trump rally in Fayetteville, N.C., were widely disseminated and showed a white Trump supporter punching a black protester in the face.
+
+“The secretary has hit on a really important chord that is running through the African American community: This community is 50 years or less from the civil rights images of dogs and hoses and frightening images,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.), who has endorsed Clinton. “That visual of the sucker punch is going to be ingrained in us forever. You can’t take it back.”
+
+Several pro-Clinton super PACs are compiling research on Trump from his long career in business and much shorter career in politics. The strategy is still a work in progress, and ongoing research through polling, focus groups and forensic accounting, among other tools, will continue through the spring.
+
+Much of the work is to search for vulnerabilities that in other years, with other candidates, would have already been exploited by other Republican candidates during the primary.
+
+Plans are well underway to present Trump’s bankruptcies and management history to voters — particularly to women and the working class.
+
+In addition, Trump opposes an increase in the minimum wage and has proposed tax breaks for the wealthy, positions that his Republican opponents could not go after but which Clinton supporters believe will play poorly in the general election.
+
+People who suffered from Trump’s business decisions will be featured in testimonial advertisements and media campaigns, Brock said. The media strategy is not unlike several successful efforts in 2012 to tie Republican Mitt Romney to the layoffs and business closures that his company, Bain Capital, was responsible for.
+
+“You’re definitely going to hear from a number of people who are former customers, clients, employees, who got the short end of the stick in various ways dealing with Trump,” Brock said. “That’s fertile ground.”
+
+Schriock also noted: “It’s about character. It all ties to what kind of character does this man have.”
+
+And it is about money. As the general election approaches, Clinton’s allies are preparing to draw from the discontent in Republican ranks to fill her campaign coffers.
+
+“I’ve gotten phone calls and emails from a few major Republican donors who have said, in effect, ‘I will let you know when I’m ready to have you make an introduction for me,’ ” said Andy Spahn, president of a Los Angeles consulting firm and a longtime Clinton adviser and top Democratic fundraiser. “There is certainly an element of the Republican Party, be it voters or high-net-worth donors, who are uncomfortable with what is happening.”
+
+Other Democrats also assessed that, in addition to GOP donors, Republican congressional candidates will run away from Trump in the general election, underscoring what they see as his thin qualifications — and the danger he poses to their own political fortunes.",REAL
+5702,Venezuela Throws In The Towel On Hyperinflation: Will Print 200x Higher-Denominated Bills,"Venezuela Throws In The Towel On Hyperinflation: Will Print 200x Higher-Denominated Bills   Zero Hedge 
+While several years ago it was perhaps debatable in polite society that Venezuela’s socialist economy would collapse ultimately unleashing hyperinflation, any doubt was put to rest early this year when the IMF’s own inflationary forecast confirmed as much. 
+However, while the international community had long accepted the inevitable fate of Maduro’s socialist paradise, the local government sternly refused to admit reality and to avoid confirming what the local population already knew, it insisted on keeping the highest denomination bill in circulation at 100 bolivars, whose worth is approximately 8 cents on the black market, turning the most basic transactions into logistical nightmares and saddling banks with crippling money-handling costs. Economists and central bank employees say Mr. Maduro didn’t want to acknowledge the country’s inflation problem by printing bigger notes. 
+This has finally changed, and as the WSJ reports , Venezuela’s government, slammed by hyperinflation has finally thrown in the towel, and is planning to issue new bills in December with larger denominations—up to 200 times higher than the current biggest bill, according to people familiar with the plans. The move marks an implicit acknowledgment by the government that skyrocketing prices have slashed the value of the currency 
+The new coins and notes will go up to 20,000 bolivars, according to people close to the central bank, the finance ministry, the country’s banks and bill suppliers. This would make the biggest note worth $15 on the black market. 
+And since by doing so the government will tacitly admit that it has lost control over prices, It will also create a self-fulfilling prophecy of even higher prices, sending the country’s hyperinflation into overdrive. 
+As the WSJ adds, earlier this year, the government began informally allowing shops in the outer provinces to sell food at free market prices, reducing shortages at the cost of higher inflation, which the International Monetary Fund expects to rise above 1,600% next year. Further liberalization followed after the state oil company gradually rolled out higher-priced gasoline at gas stations in the border regions to reduce the cost of subsidizing the cheapest car fuel in the world, according to the company’s executives. 
+Venezuela’s loss, however, is a big gain for the companies contracted to print the money: 
+In recent weeks, several companies, including U.K.-based De La Rue, the world’s largest commercial printer, won contracts to print the new set of notes, which the government wants in time for the annual December spending spree, according to a person familiar with contract negotiations. 
+“It’s a very big deal. It’s a big package,” the person said. 
+Meanwhile, the central bank remains stuck in denial and hasn’t published price statistics for almost two years. Instead, Mr. Maduro has blamed the skyrocketing prices on the “economic war” waged against his government by shopkeepers and financiers. This has forced people to brave one of the world’s highest crime rates by shopping with backpacks full of cash and spend hours lining up outside ATMs, which give out less than $10 per withdrawal. Many provincial banks have reduced daily withdrawals to 30,000 bolivars, which would buy a Venezuelan couple a lunch at a mid-scale restaurant. 
+Amusingly, as we reported last year, the high demand for nearly worthless currency notes has also presented a financial burden for the cash-strapped government, which also lacks raw materials to print its own money. Since last year, Venezuela has had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to printing companies to feed its economy with bolivar currency. The shipments arrived to Venezuela from private printing presses around the world on several dozen windowless Boeing 747 jets. Given the crime risks, the air shipments arrive at the Caracas airport at night before the notes are loaded onto armored trucks and transported to the central bank vaults in Caracas, protected on the 18-mile route by soldiers. 
+Indicatively, a fully stocked ATM is emptied in just three and a half hours on average now, according to the Venezuelan Banking Association. 
+The good news for the insolvent nation is that all local denominated debts are now just as worthless as the currency, which incidentally is what the BOJ’s Kuroda would call: mission accomplished. 
+Sadly, Venezuela is the canary in the coalmine for what will happen to all currencies in a world where there is now simply too much debt.",FAKE
+1040,Clinton allies urge campaign to torch Trump,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+1191,"Sanders, Republican governors eye comeback in New Hampshire primary","Residents of three small New Hampshire towns cast their ballots in the Granite State's first-in-the-nation presidential primary just after midnight Tuesday, kicking off a contest‎ where several candidates are eyeing a comeback.
+
+On the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders of next-door Vermont is looking to rebound from his narrow Iowa loss with a big victory over Hillary Clinton. And on the Republican side, nearly a half-dozen candidates are battling for position behind Donald Trump, with the race's governors – Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich -- looking for redemption after missing the leaderboard entirely last week.
+
+With votes in from residents of Dixville Notch, Millsfield and Hart's Landing, Trump, Ohio Gov. Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz shared the Republican lead with nine votes each. New Jersey Gov. Christie followed with three votes, while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida governor Bush each had two. Retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina each garnered one vote.
+
+On the Democratic side, Sanders led Clinton by 17 votes to 9.
+
+In a statistical oddity, the candidate who receives a plurality of the Republican vote in Dixville Notch (population: 12) has been the GOP nominee in every election cycle since 1968. This year, Kasich won the town's vote, 3-2, over Trump.
+
+With Trump leading the Republican race by double digits in most polls, the big question entering Tuesday's primary was whether the relentless attacks against Rubio during and after Saturday night’s Republican debate would be enough to bring the surging freshman Florida senator back to the pack in the race for second place.
+
+In the two-person Democratic race, Sanders has held an advantage over Clinton in New Hampshire for weeks. The state is friendly territory for the Vermont senator and a must-win if he's to have a chance of staying competitive with Clinton as the race moves to more diverse states that are seen as more hospitable to the former secretary of state.
+
+Christie has been unrelenting in questioning Rubio’s readiness and authenticity. At Saturday’s debate, he slammed the senator for repeatedly reciting anti-Obama “talking points.” He repeated the criticism Monday night in an appearance on Fox News' ""The Kelly File.""
+
+""You can't repeat the same thing over and over again,"" Christie said. ""[Is Rubio] going to do that sitting across from [Russian President] Vladimir Putin? There's no substance there.""
+
+""He's a nice guy, he has talent,"" Christie continued,"" [But] he's too young, too inexperienced and he has served not one day in a position of management in his entire life.""
+
+Rubio, though, has dug in and continued to repeat his criticism of President Obama that drew Christie’s scorn.
+
+""People said, 'Oh, you said the same thing three or four times.' I'm going to say it again,"" Rubio said Monday in Londonderry.
+
+“As far as that message, I hope they keep running it. And I'm going to keep saying it because it's true,"" Rubio said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” ""Barack Obama … said he wanted to change the country. He's doing it in a way that is robbing us of everything that is special.”
+
+Speaking on Fox News, Bush said he’s also going to continue taking on front-runner Trump, as he did during Saturday’s debate.
+
+“He’s not a conservative; he doesn’t have the temperament to be president and whenever I have the chance to describe what I think about him, I’m gonna do it,” Bush said Monday.
+
+Bush hammered Trump on Saturday for his broad support of eminent domain – and Trump's past attempt to use it to take a woman’s property for a project in Atlantic City. During that dispute, Trump tried to “shush” Bush, but was booed by the audience.
+
+Bush pointed to that exchange in questioning how Trump would do in a general election race.
+
+“You think he’s gonna shush Hillary Clinton?” Bush said. “He would lose.”
+
+Trump saved his harshest attacks Monday for Bush as well as Cruz, who bested him in Iowa. When an audience member at a rally in Manchester shouted out an insult directed at Cruz — a vulgar term for ""coward"" — Trump repeated the term and jokingly reprimanded the woman.
+
+Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler responded to the Associated Press via email, saying, ""Let's not forget who whipped who in Iowa.""
+
+""Jeb is having some kind of a breakdown, I think,"" Trump told CNN Monday, calling Bush, the son and brother of presidents, a spoiled child and an embarrassment to his family. ""I think it's a very sad situation that's taking place.""
+
+Kasich, meanwhile, has taken a less confrontational approach in the race, casting himself as a uniting force and touting his economic record as governor. The Ohio governor has seemingly pinned his hopes on New Hampshire and said Sunday he’s going in strong – while stressing he also has substantial resources on the ground in states like South Carolina and Nevada.
+
+Kasich also criticized Bush over an online video that hit Kasich for expanding Medicaid and what the Bush campaign called his ""liberal record"" in Ohio compared to Bush's two terms as Florida governor.
+
+""I'm really disappointed in Jeb,"" Kasich told ""The Kelly File."" ""Look, I mean, he's taken the very low road to the highest office in the land, and he's been negative all along, but that's okay.""
+
+Carson and Fiorina also are looking to do better than they did in Iowa, but have struggled to even break into the middle tier in Granite State polling.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+",REAL
+7659,Series of powerful earthquakes including 6.0 magnitude strikes central Italy,"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 17:26 UTC © Sandro Perozzi/AP The Church of San Sebastiano stands amid rubble in Castelsantangelo sul Nera following an earthquake. A 6.0 magnitude earthquake hit the Marche region in central Italy, just hours after a 5.4-magnitude tremor damaged buildings and cut power lines across the area. Buildings in the region have been damaged, but there have been no reports of fatalities. A series of powerful aftershocks between magnitude 4 and 4.9 struck the area about five hours after the first tremor. The strongest earthquake occurred 9.18 p.m. on Wednesday, 71 km (44 miles) east of Perugia. The United States Geological Survey reported it as a 6.0 magnitude temblor, while Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology said it was a 5.9. ""It was a very strong, apocalyptic earthquake - people were screaming in the street, and now the lights are cut off,"" said Marco Rinaldi, the mayor of Ussita, a community of 400 that was also affected by the initial earthquake. ""Many houses have collapsed. Our area is devastated."" Trains were stopped for checks, while police closed off some roads in danger of potential landslides. A football match was briefly suspended. Impact was felt as far away as Naples, Rome and Florence. In the capital, historical monuments were shaking from the shockwaves. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has returned from a trip inside the country to chair an emergency meeting in Rome, and has canceled a planned TV appearance. The first earthquake was detected at 7:11pm local time, about 66km to the southeast of Perugia, striking a mountainous part of the Marche region and lasting several seconds. The exact epicenter of the tremblor remains unclear, but it was relatively shallow, at about 9km below ground. Within an hour of the first earthquake, there was a series of small but noticeable aftershocks, ranging in magnitude from 2.5 to 2.8. After the second there were at least four after shocks exceeding 3 on the Richter scale. ""We're in the square, all the lights are out, we can't see, we're counting each other to see who's here, we still don't know how bad the situation is,"" Mauro Falcucci, mayor of Castelsantangelo sul Nera, the small commune closest to the epicenter, told Sky News by phone. ""The situation is delicate. It is important to remain calm."" The official said that the emergency is exacerbated by a downpour, and intermittent problems with mobile phone communication. Police say that the town is in ""crisis"" and have dispatched rescue teams, Castelsantangelo sul Nera. A video posted by a Huffington Post journalist shows rubble strewn through the streets of Visso, a commune less than 10 km from the epicenter. The Civil Protection Agency, which has been overseeing the response, says that so far only two injuries have been identified, in Visso. The first, smaller earthquake, may have served as a warning, as people were in open areas, and prepared, when the second temblor struck. Schools will be shut in some cities throughout eastern and central Italy on Thursday, and in Ascoli, local media is reporting that hundreds of people are gathering in public squares, and sleeping outside in cars. The earthquakes are in the same area of seismic instability in the Apennines as the one that struck the village of Amatrice this summer, killing almost 300 people. The strongest earthquake there was 6.2-magnitude on August 24. Seismologists now fear a multiplier effect from the increased disruption resulting from the twin natural disasters. ""The earthquake today has further disrupted the tectonic plates, and in the coming hours we may see aftershocks of today's earthquake on top of those from August 24,"" Salvatore Mazza, the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology told RAI News24. ""This earthquake is likely the activation of a new fault line, connected to August's calamity . But we need to get closer to the epicenter, before drawing conclusions,"" said Paulo Messina, for the Institute of Environmental Geology and Geoengineering of the Italian National Research Council.",FAKE
+3446,"Justices agree to hear dispute over union fees, reapportionment","The Supreme Court said Tuesday that it will consider next term whether public employees can be compelled to pay fees to unions they do not want to join, a provision that union leaders say is vital to their continued success.
+
+The justices will consider a case from a group of California teachers who say paying fees violates their free speech rights when they disagree with the positions the unions take.
+
+The Supreme Court nearly 40 years ago said states may allow unions to collect fees from non-members to pay for collective-bargaining costs, but not for the unions’ political spending. About half the states authorize unions to collect the fees, but federal workers are not affected.
+
+Some conservatives on the court have sharply criticized the 1977 ruling in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, but last year they came up a vote short of overturning it. Instead, the court decided a case from Illinois on narrower grounds.
+
+[Supreme Court says home health-care workers can’t be required to pay union fees]
+
+“This case is about the right of individuals to decide for themselves whether to join and pay dues to an organization that purports to speak on their behalf,” said Terry Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, which is representing Rebecca Friedrichs and other teachers.
+
+“We are seeking the end of compulsory union dues across the nation on the basis of the free-speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment,” he said.
+
+The teachers say that even if the fees are not used for political activities, they should not be compelled to fund even collective-bargaining techniques and positions with which they disagree.
+
+Union officials say that would not be fair. Because they are obligated to represent all employees in collective bargaining, the law should not allow “free riders” who benefit from union representation but do not pay for it.
+
+“The Supreme Court is revisiting decisions that have made it possible for people to stick together for a voice at work and in their communities — decisions that have stood for more than 35 years,” said a joint statement from the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the California Teachers Association, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the Service Employees International Union.
+
+The issue was debated at the court in 2014, and justices ruled 5 to 4 that Illinois health-care workers could not be forced to pay the fees, because of the unique circumstances of their hiring.
+
+But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. made clear that the court would look for a case offering a broader opportunity.
+
+He wrote at the time that the fees could be considered “an unprecedented violation of the bedrock principle that, except perhaps in the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support.”
+
+Justice Elena Kagan replied that the practice of allowing states to require the fees is “deeply entrenched” and is “the foundation for not tens or hundreds, but thousands of contracts between unions and governments across the Nation.”
+
+Kagan wrote that “the majority could not restrain itself from saying (and saying and saying)” that it dislikes Abood. Still “the majority could not, even after receiving full-dress briefing and argument, come up with reasons anywhere near sufficient to reverse the decision.”
+
+The court also will return to the issue of reapportionment in Arizona, just a day after validating an independent commission to which the state’s voters delegated redistricting powers.
+
+The case says that board, the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, did not properly reapportion the state legislative districts after the last census.
+
+On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld the decision of Arizona voters to create the commission to draw election districts in an attempt to reduce partisan gerrymandering. The court ruled 5 to 4 that cutting the legislature out of the redistricting process did not violate the Constitution’s Election Clause, which says that the times, places and manner of holding elections “shall be prescribed in each state by the Legislature thereof.”
+
+On Tuesday, the court accepted a challenge brought by a group of Republican voters who said the commission’s 2012 state legislative maps violated the “one person, one vote” requirement of population equality among districts because GOP voters were shifted to increase minority voters in others.
+
+The use of race and partisanship were attempts to persuade the Justice Department to approve the plans under the Voting Rights Act. But since then, the Supreme Court has done away with the pre-clearance requirement.
+
+Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote extensively about the new case in his dissent to the court’s ruling Monday.
+
+A district court panel ruled that partisanship played some role in the development of the legislative district plan but did not rise to the level of a constitutional violation.
+
+“A finding that the partisanship in the redistricting plan did not violate the Constitution hardly proves that the commission is operating free of partisan influence — and certainly not that it complies with the Elections Clause,” Roberts wrote.",REAL
+1639,"Trump in Vegas, Phoenix: Illegals 'Wreaking Havoc on Our Population'","Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump criticized U.S. immigration and trade policies on Saturday in speeches that veered from accusing Mexico of deliberately sending criminals across the border to professing respect for the Mexican government and love for its people.
+
+Speaking to a gathering of Libertarians in Las Vegas before headlining an event in Phoenix, Trump repeated his charge that Mexico was sending violent offenders to the U.S. to harm Americans and that U.S. officials were being ""dumb"" in dealing with immigrants in the country illegally.
+
+""These people wreak havoc on our population,"" he told a few thousand people attending the Libertarian gathering FreedomFest inside a Planet Hollywood ballroom on the Las Vegas Strip.
+
+ 
+
+ Saturday's two appearances seemed to leave many of his Republican rivals and critics scattered in disarray. On Sunday's morning talk shows, the reaction ranged from criticism to applause.
+
+ 
+
+ ""At the end of the day, for us to win a national election, we have to do better with Hispanics,"" presidential candidate and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham told CNN's ""State of the Union"" program.
+
+""And for us to have the moral authority as a party to govern a great nation, we have to reject this demagoguery. If we don't, we will lose, and we will deserve to lose.""
+
+With the Hispanic population rising, Hispanic voters are becoming increasingly important in U.S. politics. Their support helped Democratic President Barack Obama win re-election in 2012. Most illegal immigrants in the United States are Hispanic.
+
+Graham said Trump had ""hijacked the debate"" over immigration policy, adding: ""I think he's a wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party with the Hispanic community.""
+
+Graham has long advocated a comprehensive change in U.S. immigration laws, including providing a pathway to citizenship for some of the more than 11 million illegal immigrants.
+
+ 
+
+ South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a daughter of two immigrants and considered a potential 2016 Republican vice presidential candidate, said on NBC's ""Meet the Press"" she understands Trump's frustration on immigration but called for communicating with ""respect and dignity.""
+
+""We want someone that brings people together,"" Haley added. ""We want someone that understands that what unites us is a lot more than what divides us.""
+
+House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said on CBS's ""Face the Nation,"" other Republican presidential candidates ""have much more responsible positions"" than Trump's.
+
+""Most of the candidates have disagreed with his assertions with regard to our border. And, certainly, I disagree,"" he said.
+
+Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and presidential candidate Carly Fiorina seemed to embrace Trump's views.
+
+""Donald Trump taps into an anger that I hear every day,"" she told ABC's ""This Week"", adding that wanting to secure the nation's borders was ""not extreme, it's commonsense"". 
+
+ 
+
+ That anger was apparent on Saturday. 
+
+ 
+
+ Appearing in the 4,200-capacity Phoenix convention center packed with flag-waving supporters, Trump varied from hard-hitting attacks on Mexico to praise for the country's seemingly clever tactics. 
+
+ 
+
+ ""I love the Mexican people. I love 'em. Many, many people from Mexico are legal. They came in the old-fashioned way. Legally."" An estimated 15,000 people tried to get into the event, according to a Trump spokesman.
+
+He quickly returned to the sharp tone that has brought him scorn as well as praise. ""I respect Mexico greatly as a country. But the problem we have is their leaders are much sharper than ours, and they're killing us at the border and they're killing us on trade.""
+
+His speeches in both venues were long on insults aimed at critics and short on solutions to the problems he cited. When he called for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, the audience in Las Vegas groaned.
+
+In a break from the immigration rhetoric that has garnered him condemnation and praise, Trump asserted that he would have more positive results in dealing with China and Russia if he were president and said he could be pals with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
+
+Asked by an audience member in Las Vegas about U.S.-Russia relations, Trump said the problem is that Putin doesn't respect Obama.
+
+""I think we would get along very, very well,"" he said.
+
+Trump has turned to victims of crime to bolster his argument that immigrants in the U.S. illegally have killed and raped. In Las Vegas and Phoenix, he brought on stage Jamiel Shaw Sr., a Southern California man whose 17-year-old son was shot and killed in 2008 by a man in the country illegally. Shaw vividly described how his son was shot — in the head, stomach and hands while trying to block his face — and how he heard the gunshots as he talked to his son on the phone.
+
+Shaw said he trusted Trump, and encouraged the crowds in both cities to do the same.
+
+Trump's speeches were filled with tangents and insults leveled at business partners such as Univision and NBC that have dropped him in the wake of his comments that Mexican immigrants bring drugs and crime to the U.S. and are rapists. He also directed familiar barbs at other presidential contenders, including Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton (""the worst secretary of state in the history of the country""), news media figures (""lyin' Brian Williams"") and President Barack Obama (""such a divisive person""). He called journalists ""terrible people.""
+
+As Trump lambasted Univision for cancelling its broadcast of the Miss USA pageant, one of his many business enterprises, a group of young Latinos unfurled a banner pointed toward the stage and began chanting insults. They were quickly drowned out by the crowd, and nearby Trump supporters began to grab at them, tearing at the banner and pulling and pushing at the protesters. Security staff managed to get to the group and escorted them out as Trump resumed speaking.
+
+""I wonder if the Mexican government sent them over here,"" he said. ""I think so.""
+
+Arizona's tough-on-immigration Sheriff Joe Arpaio introduced Trump in Phoenix after outlining the things he and the candidate have in common, including skepticism that Obama was born in the United States. He went on to criticize the federal government for what he called a revolving door for immigrants, saying many of them end up in his jails.
+
+""He's been getting a lot of heat, but you know, there's a silent majority out here,"" Arpaio said, borrowing from a phrase Richard Nixon popularized during his presidency in a speech about the Vietnam War.
+
+A single protester standing outside the room where Trump spoke in Las Vegas was more concerned about the businessman being tied to the Libertarian Party.
+
+""I've been a Libertarian for 43 years and Trump ain't no Libertarian,"" said Linda Rawles, who asserted that including Trump in FreedomFest set back the party's movement.
+
+ 
+
+ Trump picked up on Arpaio's ""silent majority"" line.
+
+ 
+
+ “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the majority back, and we are going to make America great again.”
+
+ 
+
+ A Reuters-Ipsos poll released on Saturday showed Trump neck-and-neck with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush atop the large field of contenders for the Republican nomination.
+
+""How could I be tied with this guy? He's terrible!"" Trump said in his speech.
+
+""If you people go with Bush, you're going to lose,"" he said.
+
+Ahead of the rally, Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, said Trump was creating a ""circus"" that risked damaging the party.
+
+Outside the rally, Democrats from Tucson shared water bottles with about 100 protesters, who chanted ""No more hate! No more hate!"" to the beat of a drum.
+
+""The only thing I can tell you is that it is awakening the Hispanic community,"" said Eduardo Sainz, 22. ""We're keeping a tally of who is on our side and who isn't. The Hispanic community won't forget in 2016.""
+
+Protesters briefly raised a banner inside the speech reading ""Stop the hate"" but it was quickly pulled down amid pushing and shoving, and they were escorted out.
+
+""I wonder if the Mexican government sent them over here. I think so,"" Trump said.
+
+After the speech, Scottsdale, Arizona Republican Joan Ewart, 81, said she liked how Trump is not financially beholden to anyone.
+
+""That's the beauty of Donald Trump. He can say anything,"" she said. 
+
+ 
+
+",REAL
+556,"Behind The Shortage Of Special Ed Teachers: Long Hours, Crushing Paperwork","Behind The Shortage Of Special Ed Teachers: Long Hours, Crushing Paperwork
+
+There is a letter that school districts really don't like sending home to parents of special education students. Each state has a different version, but they all begin with something like this:
+
+""Dear Parent, as of the date of this letter your child's teacher is not considered 'highly qualified.' "" And then: ""This doesn't mean your child's teacher is not capable or effective. It means they haven't met the state standards for teaching in their subject.""
+
+In any other subject, that's an annoying problem that suggests students may not be well-served. In special education, it means the school district is breaking the law.
+
+The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, requires that every student have what's known as an IEP — Individualized Education Program. And almost always, those IEPs spell out that students — either some of the time or all of the time — must be taught by a teacher fully certified in special education.
+
+Yet around the country, that's exactly the category of teacher that's most in demand, as many states and districts are reporting severe shortages.
+
+""This crisis has been coming for a long time,"" says David Pennington, superintendent of Ponca City public schools in Oklahoma. Many teachers there are nearing retirement and he's not sure he can replace them.
+
+""Forget about replacing them with someone of the same quality,"" he says. ""I'm just worried about replacing them. Period.""
+
+Pennington's rural district of 5,300 students northwest of Tulsa has been hit hard by the shortage. He says it's extremely difficult to persuade newer special education teachers to stay beyond two or three years.
+
+""The job is not what they thought it was going to be,"" Pennington explains. ""They feel like they're under a microscope all the time.""
+
+On top of the normal demands of teaching, special education teachers face additional pressures: feelings of isolation, fear of lawsuits, and students who demand extra attention. Many are the only special-needs teacher in their grade or their school, or sometimes in the entire district.
+
+And then, there's the seemingly endless paperwork.
+
+""It is not uncommon,"" Pennington says, ""for a special ed teacher to tell me, 'I did not get a degree in special ed to do paperwork. I got a degree to help kids.' ""
+
+The IDEA and the IEP require hours and hours of filling out forms and writing reports documenting each student's progress.
+
+""And when do teachers do that paperwork? Sometime during the hours of 3 p.m. to 10 p.m.,"" says Deborah Ziegler of the Council for Exceptional Children, a special education research and advocacy group. ""It's like having two full-time jobs.""
+
+So what's the answer? Aggressive recruitment, says Trevor Greene. He's the human resources director of Highline Public Schools, a 19,000-student district south of Seattle.
+
+""Right now it's a buyers' market,"" he says. ""Districts can't afford to wait around for the right candidate."" And he's speaking from experience. When Greene started as HR director last July, he had 30 vacancies in special education to fill before school began in September.
+
+""It was pretty ominous at the beginning,"" he recalls.
+
+Greene reached out on every teacher-recruitment platform he could find. He even tracked applicants down on LinkedIn.
+
+Greene was even able to find certified special education teachers for all of the positions, which has become a rare occurrence. Many districts are able to fill vacancies only by hiring teachers trained in general education who are willing to make the switch to a special education setting.
+
+Betty Olson, the special education administrator for the Boise public schools in Idaho, says she was forced to hire a few general education teachers this year.
+
+As the school year approached she was prepared to send some of her district specialists, former teachers who now train new teachers, back into the classroom to fill vacancies.
+
+It didn't come to that. But she now has the challenge of helping a slew of new teachers adjust to the world of special education.
+
+Olson is getting some help from Boise State University, which has created a new program designed to prepare teachers with little or no experience in special education. Candidates are put on a fast track to complete a master's degree, and they receive one-on-one support as they begin their new career.
+
+Similar programs have popped up around the country. ""I'm hopeful things will get better,"" Olson says.
+
+Other administrators, like Pennington from Oklahoma, are less optimistic.
+
+He believes we're in for a rude awakening. He expects more and more teachers to look at all that responsibility, all that pressure, and conclude that it's not worth it.
+
+And so, he wonders, ""What happens when it gets so bad that you literally cannot find anyone to be in charge of a classroom?""",REAL
+2670,"Our meeting with Mark Zuckerberg: Conservatives need Facebook, and it needs us","S.E. Cupp is the author of ""Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity,"" co-author of ""Why You're Wrong About the Right"" and a columnist at the New York Daily News. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.
+
+(CNN) This week I went to a meeting at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. And then I became a bimbo, a cancer, and a scumbag. Behold Twitter:
+
+@Animal1984Farm: @secupp @CNN @facebook #NeverTrump cucks are a cancer. Some people love to be used and abused!
+
+@I_the_Prattler: @secupp <she is the EPITOME of everything that's wrong with the CORRUPT @GOP edifice These #scumbags help to keep in power the corrupt! @CNN
+
+To be clear, I am a conservative, and these tweets are from other self-described conservatives (or, at the very least, Donald Trump supporters).
+
+As has become boringly predictable these days, conservatives are mad at other conservatives for being fake conservatives.
+
+In case you have a life, and haven't cared to invest in the soap-operatic, teenage dramas between certain factions of the conservative movement (in which case, I'm envious), let me give you the basic synopsis:
+
+Trump is the only true conservative, and everyone who opposes him is the ""establishment.""
+
+Questioning the Trump orthodoxy (which, incidentally, is rarely intelligible if ever at all conservative) is the thing that now makes a conservative a ""cuckservative,"" a pejorative term to describe a weak, emasculated ""sell out"" to the establishment wing of the party. This now includes conservatives like me, with previously pristine records of right-wing fanaticism, at least as classified by the mainstream press, and ranging from Glenn Beck to the National Review, Ted Cruz to Paul Ryan.
+
+What's this got to do with Facebook? A lot, it would seem.
+
+In this kind of climate, where a lifelong Democrat and former Hillary Clinton donor is now the standard-bearer of authentic conservatism and everyone else a loser and a traitor, creating tribal lines of division is nothing short of a fetish, and one that has spilled over into the Facebook debate.
+
+After allegations surfaced that former Facebook contractors suppressed conservative trending topics, the company launched an investigation, promised transparency, and then reached out to several conservative thought leaders and personalities, including myself, to sit down and address these and other concerns with founder Mark Zuckerberg and top members of his executive team.
+
+Presumably, there would be two kinds of responses to this invitation:
+
+""I accept. This is a disturbing issue and I want to be part of solving the problem.""
+
+Or, ""I regretfully decline. That's the day of my grandmother's funeral.""
+
+I'll get back to the importance of attending this meeting in a minute. But first...
+
+I was surprised to learn there is apparently another option, which was to refuse to go, complain that no Trump representatives were invited (they were, one attended), slam Facebook's overture as a ""pat conservatives on the head"" session, blast the people who do attend as ""cucks"" and sit in the corner and sulk.
+
+Which is what a number of invitees decided, disappointingly.
+
+Breitbart, long in the tank for Trump, said it had no interest in participating in a ""Facebook photo op."" One headline blared: ""Cucked by Zuck: Establishment Conservatives Rock Up for Pointless Meeting with Facebook,"" already deciding the outcome.
+
+The American Conservative Union, which oversees the popular CPAC convention every year, issued a statement saying it would not attend, and then listed all of its grievances with Facebook's alleged anti-conservative bias, which included rejecting ""ACU's overtures for Facebook to play a meaningful role at CPAC.""
+
+Other outlets jumped on the people who did decide to attend, calling them ""conservatives"" in quotes.
+
+Is the important story that Facebook is meeting with conservatives? Or that it's meeting with ""conservatives""?
+
+This is not to suggest all of this is just about Trump. The distrust of Facebook and Silicon Valley among conservatives is real and hardly new. Most of the faces of the tech companies are outspoken liberals. Facebook has in the past had to defend against allegations that conservatives and conservative stories don't get as much reach as liberal stories, or as they do on other social platforms. I understand skepticism. Skepticism is my job.
+
+I'm also not naive. Of course this was part of a PR strategy for Facebook. You don't publicly invite a group of aggrieved people with large platforms to come to your fabled, sprawling campus and meet with the head honcho if you don't hope they will then go back to their large platforms and spread the good word.
+
+But isn't the fact that Facebook considers this a PR problem (as well as an actual problem, I believe) proof that it does not want to be perceived as a liberal organization? If it really didn't care about attracting and retaining conservative users, why would it need damage control?
+
+And if you have genuine concerns about bias and bad actors, don't you take an opportunity to help correct a problem?
+
+The bottom line is, staying home solves zero problems. And in fact, it creates one.
+
+My reason for attending the meeting was two-fold. One, I am deeply concerned about the effect of bias -- whether intentional or subconscious -- in alienating any group of people based on their beliefs, in this case mine.
+
+Zuckerberg and his team assured us they were investigating that issue, take it very seriously, and do not have any evidence it is systemic. The mission of Facebook is to provide as big a platform to as many people as possible. Subverting voices is anathema to that mission (as well as its business model, more to the point).
+
+This is a problem. I hope it is addressed. But I am frankly more concerned about conservatives' long-term relationship with Silicon Valley.
+
+The perception that Silicon Valley is liberal exists for a reason. It largely is, but only to the extent that anyone in tech ever gives politics a thought. The tech world's most vocal political voices lean left on social issues, but your average programmer and developer are probably more libertarian than liberal. And when pressed, even your average executive would align more closely with the right on issues that are crucial to their own industry.
+
+On issues like security, privacy, regulation and free markets, Silicon Valley has allies in conservative policies, not liberal ones. When I mentioned this in our meeting, there was broad agreement from the Facebook side that liberals have at times been more than just a pain on these issues, they've been a threat to their best interests.
+
+Silicon Valley, and in particular the share economy leaders, need conservatives on the Hill, on K Street, and in the media to keep their markets free and their products innovative. Tech leaders ignored this simple fact for years, but are finally realizing Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton may share their attitudes on gay marriage, but not regulation. Which matters more to their bottom line?
+
+But the questions the Facebook-objectors seem to be asking is, Does conservatism need Facebook and Silicon Valley? Well, only if wants to survive.
+
+Forgetting the fact that Facebook has 1.7 billion users and no one reads books or newspapers on paper anymore, conservatives have been combating the image that they are stuck in the past for, well, as long as there's been a past to be stuck in. Conservatives should be leading the way on innovation, instead of constantly ceding that ground to the ""hipster progressives with their gadgets and watch-phones.""
+
+Why we need Facebook
+
+Instead of insisting conservatism and Silicon Valley are East and West Berlin, ideologically exclusive and wholly uninterested in one another, both need to acknowledge each other's necessity. I went to this meeting because I want lifelong partnerships in Silicon Valley to connect conservative values and policies with as many people as possible, to make the world work more efficiently, to innovate around government bureaucracy and to empower the private sector.
+
+And I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Facebook wants partnerships with conservatives as well. For that, they will need our trust. And to earn our trust, we will need their respect.
+
+This is all a work in progress, and it will take time, open lines of communication and transparency. But progress is impossible when parties decide to stay home.
+
+I was glad Facebook reached out to us, and would have been just as happy had I not been included. This meeting was a necessary step in the right direction -- toward an alliance between two communities whose shared obsession with free markets could do a lot of good for a lot of people.",REAL
+2318,Mike Huckabee: Gay People 'Can Be My Friends',"Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said on Sunday that even though he opposes gay marriage for religious reasons, he has plenty of gay friends -- just like he has friends who drink, curse and enjoy ballet.
+
+""People can be my friends who have lifestyles that are not necessary my lifestyle,"" Huckabee said on CNN's ""State of the Union."" ""I don't drink alcohol, but gosh, a lot of my friends, maybe most of them do. I don't use profanity, but believe me, I've got a lot of friends who do. Some people really like classical music and ballet, opera -- it's not my cup of tea.""
+
+Huckabee, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, reiterated Sunday that he would like to run for the Republican nomination, joking that his ideal scenario would be for all other GOP candidates to drop out of the primary and let him win. He said his opposition to gay marriage is no more conservative than President Barack Obama's was when he won his first presidential term.
+
+""Obama had the same position I had when he spoke about it in 2008, and for the same reason,"" Huckabee said. ""He said it was because he was a Christian and because God is in the mix.""
+
+Obama's views on the subject have since evolved, and he said in 2012 that he supports same-sex marriage.
+
+Republicans, particularly younger ones, have also been warming to the idea of gay marriage. But Huckabee said his views won't change ""unless I get a new version of the Scriptures.""
+
+""This is not just a political issue, it's a biblical issue,"" he said. ""It's like asking somebody who's Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli.""",REAL
+9220,Hillary Is 70 Days Away From Controlling All Food and Water,"
+
+ 
+If Clinton is elected, Obama will hand her the power of a dictator.
+Upon Inauguration Day, Clinton will have the power to to the following:
+ 
+As President, Hillary Clinton Would Have the Power to Enact Slave Labor According to EO 13603, the President, or the head of any federal agency that he shall designate, can conscript “persons of outstanding experience and ability without compensation,” in both “peacetime and times of national emergency.”  I can hear the Obama supporters now as they will write to me and say, “Obama would never do that, you are drinking from the Kool-Aid”. Well, here it is, you can read it for yourself.
+Sec. 502.  Consultants. The head of each agency otherwise delegated functions under this order is delegated the authority of the President under sections 710(b) and (c) of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2160(b), (c), to employ persons of outstanding experience and ability without compensation and to employ experts, consultants, or organizations. The authority delegated by this section may not be redelegated. 
+Hillary Will Have the Power to Nationalize All American Food and Food Production Through Executive Order 13603, Obama has granted himself the authority control all food and now has the unique ability to starve America into submission as it relates to his handing the country off to the bankers in the name of perpetuating the New World Order and ridding the planet of the weak and those who will not willingly go along with the intentional destruction of America. Here are some of the key provisions of EO 13603 and its impact on the control of the American food supply.
+With the stroke of his pen, Obama has total and absolute control over all food where his EO 13603  states: 
+e) “Food resources” means all commodities and products, (simple, mixed, or compound), or complements to such commodities or products, that are capable of being ingested by either human beings or animals, irrespective of other uses to which such commodities or products may be put, at all stages of processing from the raw commodity to the products thereof in vendible form for human or animal consumption. “Food resources” also means potable water packaged in commercially marketable containers, all starches, sugars, vegetable and animal or marine fats and oils, seed, cotton, hemp, and flax fiber, but does not mean any such material after it loses its identity as an agricultural commodity or agricultural product. (f) “Food resource facilities” means plants, machinery, vehicles (including on farm), and other facilities required for the production, processing, distribution, and storage (including cold storage) of food resources, and for the domestic distribution of farm equipment and fertilizerâ€Śâ€ 
+This unconstitutional EO is particularly disturbing in that it clearly states that the government has control over anything that is “capable of being ingested by either human beings or animalsâ€Śâ€Â If you thought that you and Fido were going to get through the coming food crisis by storing and consuming dog food, think again.
+It is important to assess how devastating this Executive Order could prove to be to the American people though a brief assessment of America’s food vulnerability.
+This is only the tip of the iceberg. Listen to Dave Hodges describe just how dangerous Clinton could be if elected.
+
+ 
+L ike what we do? Please consider donating to The Common Sense Show – CLICK HERE 
+More Critical Reads You Need to See by Dave Hodges! Click Here! 
+Subscribe to My Website at: Â www.thecommonsenseshow.com 
+Check Me out On Youtube 
+Check out our radio show on Sunday nights which airs on Global Star Radio Network from 8pm-11pm Eastern. The following icon is located in the upper left hand corner of our 
+
+Next Guest:Â STEVE QUAYLE, DOUG HAGMANN, JOE HAGMANN 
+ 
+
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. FOR A SHORT TIME, WE ARE OFFERING 5% OFF OF ALL PURCHASES-USE COUPON CODE “hodgesnov5” Don’t wait until it is too late.  Click Here  for more information. 
+If the bad guy has night vision and you don’t he wins. Don’t be a victim, find out more by  CLICKING HERE   
+
+
+From the Hagmann blood sugar protocol to the Hodges joint protocol, Dr. Broer has helped hundreds of thousands of people. There is something for everybody at Healthmasters.com .   FOR COMMON SENSE SHOW LISTENERS YOU CAN TAKE 5% OFF ALL NEW ORDERS. SIMPLY USE THE COUPON CODE “HODGES” 
+Â Â 
+
+The sane alternative to Facebook 
+Seen.Life-The Facebook alternative- no censorship, no spying– SIGN UP HERE By Dave Hodges | N ",FAKE
+3149,"Obama at Prayer Event: Christians did terrible things, too","President Obama called on people of faith to reject those who use religion to justify evil – and in doing so – reminded people about the terrible things done in the name of Jesus Christ.
+
+Obama told a gathering Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast that we have seen “professions of faith used both as an instrument of great good but twisted in the name of evil.”
+
+“From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith – their faith – profess to stand up for Islam but in fact are betraying it,” he said.
+
+He did not mention radical Islam or jihadists or Islamic extremists. He did, however, call ISIS a “brutal, vicious death cult that in the name of religion carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism.”
+
+The president also issued a word of warning to Christians.
+
+“And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place – remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” the president said.
+
+Click here to follow Todd on Facebook for conservative conversation!
+
+He also chided the United States, “our home country.”
+
+“Slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ,” he added.
+
+Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas and the author of the upcoming book, “Countdown to the Apocalypse: Why ISIS and Ebola Are Only the Beginning,” said there are two problems with Obama’s comparison.
+
+“When Christians act violently they are acting in opposition to the teachings of their founder, Jesus Christ,” Jeffress told me. “They cannot cite a single verse in the New Testament that calls for violence against unbelievers. On the other hand, radical Islamists can point to a number of verses in the Koran calling for Muslims to ‘crucify the infidels.’”
+
+On Wednesday a United Nations watchdog group reported that Islamic militants were crucifying Iraqi children and burying them alive. Others had been sold as sex slaves and boys as young as 18 had been used as suicide bombers, Reuters reported.
+
+“They are following the example of their founder Muhammad who slaughtered and beheaded those who opposed him,” Jeffress said.
+
+While the Crusades were terrible, Jeffress pointed out they were a response to hundreds of years of Muslim aggression – an issue he writes about in his book.
+
+As you might imagine – the president’s remarks did not go over well among conservatives. My friend Michelle Malkin put it nicely:
+
+""ISIS chops off heads, incinerates hostages, kills gays, enslaves girls. Obama: Blame the Crusades,"" she tweeted.
+
+I was puzzled by something else President Obama said: ""We are summoned to push back against those who would distort our religion for their nihilistic ends.""
+
+What did he mean by “our religion”? Whose religion? And why did he compare the Crusades to ISIS?
+
+The Crusades ended some 700 years ago. Perhaps the president should be a bit more concerned with the Islamic jihad being waged in this century.
+
+Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is ""God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values."" Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.
+
+",REAL
+5257,"For Trump, a new ‘rigged’ system: The election itself","Donald Trump, trailing narrowly in presidential polls, has issued a warning to worried Republican voters: The election will be “rigged” against him — and he could lose as a result.
+
+Trump pointed to several court cases nationwide in which restrictive laws requiring voters to show identification have been thrown out. He said those decisions open the door to fraud in November.
+
+“If the election is rigged, I would not be surprised,” he told The Washington Post in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “The voter ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development. We may have people vote 10 times.”
+
+Those comments followed a claim Trump made Monday, to an audience in Ohio, that “the election is going to be rigged.” That same day, in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, he beseeched Republicans to start “watching closely” or the election will be “taken away from us” through fraud.
+
+Like much of what Trump says, the “rigged” riff defies the recent norms of politics. And it taps into fears that long predate his campaign. One is a growing and unsubstantiated worry that elections are being stolen. The other is a broader unease that regular Americans are being cheated by Wall Street, by Washington and by a duplicitous media.
+
+Those worries have found voice in both parties this year, with Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) both rallying their supporters during the Republican and Democratic primaries with the assessment that the system is rigged. Now, Trump is reviving the theme to highlight the possibility of voter fraud in November.
+
+Since the 2000 election, which ended in a legal battle that stopped recounts of ballots in Florida, paranoia about the nation’s election system has mushroomed. According to a Pew Research Center survey, just 48 percent of Americans were confident that “the votes across the country were accurately counted” in the 2004 election. After 2012, an election with a wider popular vote margin, that percentage fell to 31 percent. Among Republicans, it was 21 percent.
+
+“The idea that the person who won the presidency did so illegitimately is not new,” said Jesse Walker, the author of “The United States of Paranoia,” a history of conspiracy theories. “What’s new is the possibility of a possible loser in the presidential contest making an issue out of it. I can’t think of another example in the last century.”
+
+Jokes about Democrats counting votes from dead people or bused-in fraudsters are part of the Republican lingua franca. During his unsuccessful presidential bid, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) often encouraged his audiences to bring friends and family to the polls with a joke about Democratic election theft.
+
+“I want you to vote 10 times,” he would say. “Don’t worry — we’re not Democrats.”
+
+In his interview with The Post, Trump offered that his chief concern about fraud was that states without strict identification requirements would see rampant repeat voters. “If you don’t have voter ID, you can just keep voting and voting and voting,” he said. On Fox News, Trump’s only evidence for fraud consisted of “precincts where there were practically nobody voting for the Republican” in the 2012 election.
+
+In reality, voter fraud is rare. A 2014 study by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, found just 31 possible instances of fraud over 14 years of elections with a total of 1 billion votes cast. The low Republican vote in some urban centers squares with the low support black voters gave GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012.
+
+Still, the battle against “voter fraud” has made gains with Republican lawmakers and conservative journalists. Since the 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder undid some requirements of the Voting Rights Act, restrictive new voter ID and registration laws have passed through Republican-run states.
+
+[Obama: Trump is ‘unfit to serve as president’]
+
+Those laws have been challenged successfully in court, with North Carolina, North Dakota and Wisconsin losing cases in the days before Trump made his “rigged” comments. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory accused judges of “undermining the integrity of our elections.”
+
+In an interview Tuesday with CBS12 in Florida, Trump seemed to condemn the rulings against the states. “Some bad court cases have come down,” he said. Some of his more freewheeling supporters went even further, with the radio host Alex Jones warning listeners that the Obama administration might cancel the election, and off-again, on-again adviser Roger Stone telling Breitbart News that Trump needed to be ready for a violent post-election contest.
+
+“I think he’s gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be rhetorical,” Stone said. “I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in.”
+
+To Ari Berman, a reporter for the Nation and the author of the voting rights history “Give Us the Ballot,” Trump’s worry about “rigging” sounded like an adaptation of something already mainstream among Republicans.
+
+“There’s been a two-decade campaign on the right to drum up fears of ‘voter fraud’ stealing elections,” Berman said. “They’re trying to say that these voting rights victories will lead to more fraud. They want to spin these court victories not as something that’s good for democracy, but something that will hurt democracy. That’s what Trump is buying into.”
+
+At the same time, many supporters of Sanders’s presidential run have argued that the Democratic nomination was effectively stolen from him — another sentiment Trump has tried to exploit. Long before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Sanders supporters asked whether a purge of New York voters, California’s slow ballot count or the closure of polling places in Arizona’s largest county had suppressed their votes.
+
+“The Bernie Sanders folks don’t believe all the ballots were counted,” Chuck Pennachio, an academic and a Sanders delegate from Pennsylvania, said at a news conference last week. “They don’t believe that the process was clean. If you look at the exit polls, they don’t match up with the results in 11 of the 12 closest states.”
+
+Every theory about how the primaries were stolen has been debunked. The famous New York purge, for example, disproportionately affected nonwhite voters, who had been breaking for Clinton. The same was true of the long lines in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which resulted from a decision by the county’s Republican-run elections team.
+
+But in trying to explain how some early exit poll results diverged from vote totals, debunkers found themselves struggling to convince their listeners. Joe Lenski, the lead pollster for exit poll provider Edison Research, explained to the skeptical left-wing site Counterpunch that Sanders voters and young voters had been more likely to fill out the surveys. That did not stop the spread of theories that millions of Sanders votes might have been switched or suppressed. Last week, when more than 200 Sanders supporters invaded a media tent at the DNC, some left behind charts attempting to prove that vote-counters skewed the election.
+
+Clinton’s 2.9 million-vote margin in the primaries may have set the upper bounds for speculation that an American election had been stolen. Sanders supporters also latched onto internal emails between staff members at the Democratic National Committee, in which they speculated about a Clinton nomination even before the primaries were over.
+
+Trump, who previously accused Republicans of rigging primaries through the delegate selection process, found solace in the email scandal. Like Sanders, whose voters he wants to convert, he had found the idea of a rigged process syncing perfectly with his outsider brand. On Fox News, Trump tried to tell Sanders’s supporters that they already had seen an election wrested away by the political elite.
+
+“It was rigged a little bit [against] me, and we won,” he said. “It was rigged a little bit against Bernie Sanders.”
+
+“We know it was rigged,” Hannity said. “We’ve seen the emails.”",REAL
+9161,Comment on Sweden on the brink? Police force pushed to breaking point by violence amid migrant influx by Paul Blake,"  DCG | 5 Comments 
+Ain’t multiculturalism grand? 
+From Daily Express : The Scandinavian country is facing an existential crisis with on average three police officers handing in their resignations a day. If the alarming trend continues, and police officers continue to resign more than 1,000 officers will have quit the service by New Years. 
+Since the migrant crisis began last summer, Sweden has been hit by a series of brutal crimes and violent incidents . In 2015 alone Sweden, with a population of 9.5million, received over 160,000 asylum applications and the country is expected to take as many as 190,000 refugees, or two per cent of the population, by the end of 2016. 
+Since the Second World War Sweden has prided itself on helping migrants who cross their borders despite some moves to the political right in recent years. 
+But police have now admitted the force has reached breaching point as more than 50 areas in the country have now been placed on a “no-go zone” list . 
+In February a report from Sweden’s National Criminal Investigation Service announced there were 52 areas where officers would not cope with the levels of crime being committed . Sex assaults , drug dealing and children carrying weapons were just some of the incidents mentioned in the report. In September, Swedish officials were forced to add another three areas to the list. 
+Now the Police Association have said they need at least 200 new officers to regain control in the south-east of the country. 
+Thomas Stjernfeldt, from the region’s police association, told SVT : “We are missing extremely many officers in the operational sector, right now we need 200 more officers to be added to the force to establish a reasonable working environment in the southeast of Götaland .” Götaland is one of the regions in the country that has been hit hard by the car fire attacks, which have been occurring throughout Sweden. 
+On Monday, Express.co.uk reported a number of the arsonist attacks in the city of Växjö, in Götaland, had been committed by frustrated migrants . Currently there are more than 6,000 suspected crimes that are unsolved in the area and 400 of these cases are suspected to be rapes, murder or attempted murder. 
+Mr. Stjernfeldt said the figures are alarming and police officers are constantly forced to work overtime in an attempt to solve the reported crimes. 
+The Police Association admitted it fears the public will lose faith in the force and their ability to protect citizens if the situation is not resolved. 
+The union’s call for more resources echoes National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson’s February warning, where he said he needed a further 4,100 officers and specialist staff to reestablish law and order in Sweden. 
+DCG",FAKE
+9149,Mainstream Presidential Polls Fuel Illusion That Voters Are Stuck With Only Two Choices,"Mainstream Presidential Polls Fuel Illusion That Voters Are Stuck With Only Two Choices   
+By Meleiza Figueroa go digital / CC BY-SA 2.0 
+Editor’s note: Meleiza Figueroa is the press director for the Jill Stein-Ajamu Baraka campaign and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a longtime activist and organizer in California. 
+Corporate media are focused on Donald Trump’s accusations of “oversampling” on the part of Democrats against Republicans. He’s half right, because polls do oversample declared Democrats by up to 14 percent in polls that compose the RealClearPolitics average . 
+The deeper story is that mainstream polls skew against youth and independents, who are undersampled in most polls up to a whopping 30 percent. A recent CNN poll sampled few people under the age of 50. Not one major poll lists alternative-party identification in the breakdown of its sample. 
+The first problem with sampling involves definitions. Most polls sample “likely voters,” with a bit of expansion to count for a smattering of “registered voters.” So who are “likely voters”? Voters who (1) consistently vote—which automatically excludes people ages 18 to 22, who have no voting history, (2) identify with either of the two major parties and (3) say that they intend to vote in the next election. “Registered voter” polls don’t count first-time voters not yet registered to vote, so forget about the opinions of those college students who are signed up in enthusiastic campus get-out-the-vote drives. 
+  
+The questions asked in the polls reinforce established, dualistic views of the political spectrum. The presidential-preference questions in polls that deign to include Green Party nominee Jill Stein and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson don’t ask “Who is the candidate you want to vote for?” or “Which candidate is most aligned with your positions and values?” Nearly all the polls frame the presidential question as “If the election were held tomorrow, who would you vote for?” In a media landscape where we are told—through unbalanced news coverage , controlled debates and ceaseless cultural propaganda, down to the red and blue cups at 7-Eleven stores during election season—that only the Democratic and Republican candidates are considered viable, most people will, of course, hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils. It’s telling that the very next follow-up question reads, “If the election were ONLY held between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who would you vote for?” You might as well reword the questions to (1) “Which candidate do you think will win?” and (2) “Which of these two candidates do you hate the least?” Neither of these questions address the issue of who people want to be their next president. 
+The rest of the questionnaires wipe alternative candidates off the map completely. Third-party candidates are treated as if they don’t exist—while the approval ratings for the two parties in government and Congress as a whole are hovering around historic lows . What we can glean from the polls is that it’s clear people want change, but what kind of change they want is of no concern to the pollsters. 
+We did get a sample of the earth-shaking hunger for change during the 2016 primaries when the votes for Bernie Sanders turned the polling orthodoxy upside down. The most famous example was Sanders’ 21-point, poll-defying upset in the Michigan primary . The wild cards in this case were—you guessed it— independent and young voters , who turned out in droves in Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and other open-primary states to deliver a giant middle finger to the establishment candidate. 
+No one really knows how large the “Bernie or Bust” crowd is, but what we do know is that the floodgates opened during the tragic circus of the Democratic National Convention, and progressive Berniecrats began to burn Green. #Demexit became a trending hashtag on social media, and a recent nationwide survey of Sanders delegates found that 33 percent intend to vote for Stein . 
+Everywhere the Stein-Baraka campaign goes, we find an ever-growing base of support—not just among former Sanders supporters, but also among those “unlikely” voters who are underrepresented in polls: young people, Independents and people of color. These are all the demographics, when broken out in mainstream polls, that go about 4 percent to 10 percent higher for Stein. These voters compose a potentially game-changing, awakening “sleeping giant” that has the establishment working overtime to impose a media blackout on a third-party alternative. 
+The corporate media have shown themselves willing to lock out alternative parties. In fact, a recent video of a CNN focus-group taping caught them in the act. When a fair number of participants identified their preferences as Johnson or Stein, the scene was promptly reshot to exclude these choices, portraying these voters as “undecided.” 
+In this election year—when the largest voting block of registered voters are independents , and many people (especially millennials, lower-income voters and people of color) are fed up with the two-party system—the means of taking a temperature check on the state of our democracy denies a voice to those who choose to reject the establishment duopoly. Only 9 percent of Americans chose Clinton and Trump to be the major-party nominees, which puts a whole lot of people in a big margin of error. 
+A voter revolt could be happening right under our noses, but the establishment and their pollster apparatchiks don’t want you to notice. They want to maintain the illusion that voters are stuck with only two choices, a trap that the majority of Americans who want another major party are trying to escape.",FAKE
+1856,Bush's 2016 remarks kick other potential GOP candidates into higher gears,"Jeb Bush’s announcement this week that he’s considering a 2016 presidential run appears to have dropped the starting gate on the GOP primary, with other potential Republican hopefuls like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Ben Carson following with their own, telltale moves.
+
+The Facebook announcement Tuesday by Bush, a former Florida governor, that he is “actively” exploring a White House bid was followed within hours by two Google ads buys from Paul’s leadership political action committee.
+
+The first Rand PAC ad appeared in the search results of those who Google searched Bush’s name.
+
+The second appeared more like an attack ad, considering it included the line “We need leaders who will stand against Common Core,” the national school-curriculum standards supported by Bush but opposed by conservative-minded supporters of state autonomy and less government.
+
+Later that night, Paul, who says he’s “still a few more months” away from making a 2016 decision, said on Fox News’ “The Kelly File” that “Most of us believe in less federal government and more decentralized government, particularly with education. ... For Jeb Bush to run in the primary will be very, very difficult.""
+
+David Payne, a Republican strategist and a senior vice president at Washington, D.C.-based VOX Global, gave a mixed review of what he called the “digital shadow boxing,” suggested GOP 2016 hopefuls will have to do more and better.
+
+“Facebook is a part of the established media landscape,” Payne told FoxNews.com. “Jeb Bush wasn’t breaking any new ground with his announcement on this platform. He’ll need to be a lot more innovative to get Republican primary voters interested in him.”
+
+He also said Paul’s counter punch was “intelligent but the expectation” from the relatively tech savvy Paul followers.
+
+“It’s critical for (the candidates) to get smart about their balance of digital versus traditional media,” Payne also said. “Republicans running for president merely have to glance at the online campaign of Barack Obama in 2012 for the sobering reasons to significantly raise their investment in digital and social media.”
+
+The effort to get Carson elected also got in the mix before the end of the day.
+
+The National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee said it will on Saturday open an office in Iowa, which historically holds the first caucus of the presidential election cycle, then followed by the New Hampshire primary.
+
+“We are so far ahead of the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire,” John Philip Sousa IV, the SuperPAC’s national chairman, told FoxNews.com on Wednesday.
+
+Still, Sousa insisted that the announcement wasn’t prompted by Bush’s big news, saying his group had been looking for months for office space.
+
+Political strategists argue that if Bush indeed triggered a starting gun it was the one that forced big donors to get their money off the sidelines, particularly those waiting to see if Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney would try to become the party’s establishment candidate.
+
+“If you’re going to run, go do it,” Robert T. Grand, an Indiana-based Republican donor, who was one of the leading donors to George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, told The New York Times. “I think you’ve got a short period of time. This announcement triggers the start.”
+
+Still, other strategists argue that Bush’s announcement was not a 2016 turning point, in large part because he also plans to open a leadership PAC, which will help him travel around the county to speak but is not a full-fledged campaign PAC.
+
+Two others top 2016 GOP hopefuls also appeared to use Bush’s announcement to draw attention to their own efforts.
+
+Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz told Fox News’ “Special Report” that Bush is a “good man” but said he would wait until Bush officially decides in the coming months before assessing his potential impact on the GOP primary.
+
+Still, the first-term, firebrand senator subtly staked out his turf, ahead of a potential run.
+
+“It is not a surprise that Washington fights hard against anyone trying to change the culture,” he said. “But I can tell you, outside of Washington, people are frustrated … with politicians who say one thing and do another.”
+
+A spokesman for Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, another potential White House candidate, told reporters: ""Marco has a lot of respect for Governor Bush and believes he would be a formidable candidate. However, Marco's decision on whether to run for president or re-election will be based on where he can best achieve his agenda to restore the American Dream -- not on who else might be running.""",REAL
+3543,"Why ISIS's reign of fear has worked, and how it can be countered","The Islamic State is brutal, but for a purpose. It can succeed in the short term because locals don't appear to have any other options.
+
+Why is Angela Merkel calling for a ban on the full Islamic veil?
+
+This undated file image posted on a militant website last year shows fighters from the Islamic State marching through Raqqa, Syria.
+
+In the early days of the Islamic State, back when it was still taking shape from the remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Muslim scholars advised the group to take a page from the United States military’s playbook.
+
+During the Sunni Awakening of 2008, American troops had successfully nurtured tribal councils and militias as partners to eject murderous insurgents from their homeland in western Iraq.
+
+Al Qaeda in Iraq failed because of its “brutality, zealotry, and arrogant belief that it was a state,” said critics – both jihadi and non-jihadi – according to Will McCants, director of the Project on US Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
+
+So what did the Islamic State do? It doubled down.
+
+By 2014, “those were the very qualities that made the Islamic State so successful,” says Dr. McCants, author of the new book, “The ISIS Apocalypse.”
+
+It is well known that the Islamic State is now governing a wide swath of Syria and Iraq through a modern-day reign of terror. What is less well-known is why that approach has been so successful – even attracting tens of thousands of foreigners.
+
+The answer appears to be in how that brutality takes shape.
+
+Toward local populations that have little choice but to obey, the Islamic State can promise – and carry out – untold savagery. On Sunday, the Islamic State killed some 70 members of a tribe in Iraq that had tried to rise up against the group. To the foreign fighters who pledge their lives to the cause, by contrast, the Islamic State promises lakeside homes in Raqqa, Syria, and high salaries.
+
+The campaign of fear and intimidation that hangs over locals works largely because there are no other options. Sunni Muslims in IS-held territory trust the Syrian and Iraqi governments – which are run by other religious groups – even less than they trust the Islamic State. And no foreign power is likely to step in and tip the power balance toward local tribes, as the US did in the Sunni Awakening.
+
+The result is a pseudo-state that breaks all the modern rules – governing through a very calculated mix of opportunism and oppression.
+
+“It was a tough thing for me to see, because I had bought into the idea, put around by the western analytical community – but also by [former Al Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden himself – that if you’re going to wage an insurgency and create a long-lasting state, you need to win over popular support,” says McCants.
+
+“The Islamic State has done the exact opposite.”
+
+For all its wanton spectacle, the brutality of the Islamic State is not random. It is part of a carefully calibrated state-building strategy that the group has been ramping up for years.
+
+The group’s approach to establish control “began with infiltration and ended with conquest,” as a Rand Corporation report released this month put it. “Time after time, place after place, the group would establish an intelligence and security apparatus, target key opponents, and establish extortion and other criminal revenue-raising practices,” it noted. “Clandestine campaigns of assassination and intimidation have been part of the group’s playbook for more than a decade.”
+
+Reports from groups on the ground, as well as social media, show that “ISIS does rely on brutality much more than Al Qaeda,” says Harleen Gambhir, a counterterrorism analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, using a common acronym for the Islamic State. This includes “intentionally inspiring terror, pushing the bounds so that it can intimidate those under its control.”
+
+Sunday’s slaughter was a typical example, Ms. Gambhir says. “These sorts of mass executions come frequently for those even vaguely hinting at rebellion.”
+
+This summer, an uprising in Libya was brutally put down by an IS affiliate, which “mass executed those in local tribes,” she adds. This in turn “eliminated all hints of social rebellion.”
+
+What the Islamic State has shown is that, in the short term, “brutality … can be much more effective than worrying about others,” McCants says. “If you look at what IS has done, you can see examples where control has been established by extreme brutality and kept up by extreme brutality.”
+
+The question is whether the Islamic State can maintain such a state over the long term. Al Qaeda has long argued that its vision of establishing an Islamic caliphate is more sustainable.
+
+“It thinks ISIS is going to burn out, because of the way it treats locals,” Gambhir says.
+
+The Islamic State instead has put a priority on bringing in foreign fighters.
+
+“ISIS fighters … are given preference in obtaining food and basic needs of living,” she adds.
+
+There are clear signs that locals are chafing mightily under Islamic State rule, says McCants. But “unless they get help from the outside,” they are going to have trouble throwing off the group.
+
+That help is not likely to come from the US. “I have no doubt we could do it, should we choose to,” says McCants, but such an operation would necessarily include troops on the ground and embroil the US in the Middle East again.
+
+Moreover, it would “let the local governments off the hook,” especially in Damascus and Baghdad, McCants says. As a result, the problems that allowed the rise of the Islamic State in the first place, including Sunni disenfranchisement by Shiite-dominate governments, would continue.
+
+“This leaves us in the unsatisfying position of not having terrific options in the near term for destroying the IS,” McCants says.
+
+In some ways, the US might have more options in Syria, McCants says, because it is not working with the government. “Syria is always seen as the hard case, but we also have greater freedom of choice.”
+
+The US could work with Kurdish forces to clear areas, then build up local Sunni militias to hold them. Yet Turkish officials balk at the idea of empowering Kurdish forces, given the large Kurdish minority in Turkey.
+
+As in 2008, the most promising center of gravity for the fight against the Islamic State is the Sunni tribes. “Many Sunnis support the group either because of intimidation or because they view it as their only protection against other groups,” the Rand report notes. “Although this will be difficult, Iraq, at least, can start by ensuring fair treatment of the population when towns are recovered, and by speeding the reconstruction of those towns.”
+
+The question becomes how to empower them, given the limited tools the US has at its disposal.
+
+In theory, Iraqi government officials agree with the plan to engage Sunni tribal militias to some extent, “but there’s been a lot of foot dragging,” he adds. “We could start arming the tribes ourselves, but if they are not part of the Iraqi central government, we’re kind of pushing the state of Iraq in a particular direction of a more federal state.”
+
+Still, McCants says, the Sunni tribes “should be our center of gravity, too.”",REAL
+7257,Deepwater Horizon Continues to Impact Public Health,"Deepwater Horizon Continues to Impact Public Health Deepwater Horizon Continues to Impact Public Health By 1 135 
+It’s hard to believe that the Deepwater Horizon incident, which discharged over 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, happened six years ago. What’s not hard to believe is that the environmental health implications of the spill are stubbornly lingering. 
+Gulf residents of variety of species are paying a high price for it — so high that litigation against BP for its role in the spill, officially deemed “ negligent ,” is likely to continue for decades as people fight to get help with ongoing medical expenses. 
+Last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the spill was linked to an uptick in dolphin deaths , illustrating that this unprecedented release of petroleum products in the Gulf had a lasting health impact for animals. 
+Similarly, abnormalities in heart development among fish have also been connected to Deepwater Horizon exposure. Part of the problem is that sediments remain coated in oil and sludge . Because it was impossible to clean up every drop of crude from the Gulf, the oil that settled to the bottom continues to interfere with the embryonic development of a range of fish species. 
+But humans aren’t doing too well either. 
+In the aftermath of the spill, people were exposed both to crude petroleum and to Corexit , a chemical dispersant used in unprecedented volumes during the cleanup. 
+Subsequent research has shown that in addition to having some hazardous health effects on its own, the combination of Corexit and the type of crude spilled during the Deepwater Horizon incident packs a hefty punch for marine animals. 
+In the weeks following the spill, first responders reported symptoms like rashes, respiratory problems, headaches, seizures and depression. In response to the complains, agencies closely monitored these individuals. 
+As the years went by, enough significant health problems arose for a class action lawsuit against BP. The company eventually agreed to a settlement that included the potential for…",FAKE
+8291,French Politician Blames UK Welfare System For Calais Jungle Crisis,"Posted on October 26, 2016 by Edmondo Burr in News , UK // 0 Comments French authorities hope to clear all immigrants from the Calais jungle by Wednesday. 
+A French politician says the dismantling of the camp will have no effect on the thousands of refugees who seek to cross the channel to England for its generous welfare system. 
+RT.com reports: 
+Philippe Mignonet, the deputy mayor of Calais, believes the demolition of the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp will not stop the thousands of migrants from congregating in the French port town in the hope of crossing the English Channel. 
+“ The UK government says it does not want any more migrants but it never expels migrants who get there, ” Mignonet told the Daily Mail . 
+“ They claim benefits and housing, and all we get is the British-funded wall and fences. ” 
+For Mignonet, the £2 million (US$2.4 million) British-funded wall being built around the loading area of the Eurotunnel, which allows goods trucks to come from France into Britain, is simply not enough. 
+“ What English city would accept a fence and a wall being built by another country on their land? If the British government want to improve matters, they should come and talk to the city of Calais, ” he added. 
+Mignonet invited Prime Minister Theresa May to visit the town, and even offered to give her a covert ride from the airport. 
+“ I have a car with dark windows, so she doesn’t have to be seen, ” Mignonet said. 
+“ Calais was once part of England, and we have often worked together in the past. We can work together again. The people of Britain made their choice about Brexit, and some of those choices mean they will face difficulty, but putting walls and fences up here is not right. ” 
+The wall, which is seen as a blight on the coastal town, could also affect the price of the land once occupied by the Jungle camp, which will soon be ready for private development. 
+“ This is at the door of England, and near to the shuttle terminal for trucks, ” Mignonet said. “ What better place for British businesses to come? ” 
+Tighter border 
+The British public appears unmoved by French concerns. A new poll suggests most Brits would rather see their borders tightly secured than stay in the single market. 
+According to a poll commissioned by ITV, 58 percent of Brits approve of May’s Brexit strategy of prioritizing immigration controls over the negotiation of the UK’s access to the single market. Only a quarter were against. 
+Just over 40 percent of those asked insisted EU trade benefits should be prioritized throughout the divorce. However, a similar Sky News poll found the opposite to be the case. 
+A breakdown of the data, however, showed twice as many older Brits support May’s ‘hard Brexit’ and immigration control policies as the younger demographic.",FAKE
+9349,Syrian Refugee in Germany Gets $390K in Annual Benefits. And It's Because of Who He Takes Care Of,"
+The impact of the Syrian refugee crisis has been felt worldwide. 
+While it has helped make immigration a central issue in the U.S. presidential elections, one of the most affected countries has been Germany — with Pew noting that the nation received “442,000 asylum applications in 2015 alone.” 
+Now, a report has emerged from Germany that just one of these immigrants is claiming nearly $400,000 in benefits from the government, due to the fact that he arrived in the country with his four wives... and 23 children. Europe going mad: Syrian refugee in Germany claiming benefits for his 4 wives and 22 children. https://t.co/Cmcn550fym — Michael Heaver (@Michael_Heaver) October 26, 2016 
+The man — who has been identified only as Ghazia A. — is allowed to have multiple wives under Muslim tradition, but only if he can support them financially. 
+Upon emigrating to Germany, where polygamy is not officially permitted but officials have been 'looking the other way,' Ghazia was forced to choose just one of his four wives as his “main” wife. 
+He then split up his 22 children — one has since married and moved to Saudi Arabia — among the other three. These family members were placed in neighboring homes, some up to 31 miles away. 
+Ghazia explained to German newspaper Das Bild how his wide-ranging family responsibilities have left him unable to work: 
+""According to our religion I have the duty to visit each family equally and not to prioritize any of them. 
+I am practically always on my way to be with my family — yet I would gladly like to work."" 
+Noting that “regardless of how one evaluates facts morally, it is never wrong to know the hard numbers,” one German financial manager calculated the state benefits Ghazia would receive for his massive family. 
+According to his estimate , it comes out to roughly $390,000 per year in U.S. dollars. Germany: Syrian Refugee with 4 Wives and 23 Children Claims £320,000 a year in benefits https://t.co/lU2ED6dSn9 — Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) October 26, 2016 
+While much of the criticism surrounding America's acceptance of refugees has centered on concerns of terrorism , similar cultural clashes have also been seen in the U.S. 
+In August, one refugee family brought a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania school they were placed in, arguing it's not the school they “deserved.” Lawsuit: Expert calls pace at Phoenix Academy ‘totally inappropriate’ for refugee students https://t.co/8AW75hF7tY #LNPinsider #FridayReads — LancasterOnline.com (@LancasterOnline) August 19, 2016 
+Other, larger concerns have also emerged about the potential culture clash that could come as a result of accepting huge numbers of refugees, particularly involving women. 
+Some have argued that the “brutal ideology in Muslim majority countries” that many refugees were raised to practice places women in Western countries at risk of both sexual assault and violence. 
+In September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that she had lost control of her “open-door” refugee policy, even expressing that she would “turn back time” if she could. 
+With Ghazia's case representing just one situation causing backlash from her citizens, it's not difficult to see why. ",FAKE
+4017,Russia launches naval bombardment of targets in Syria,"Washington (CNN) Russia launched a naval bombardment Wednesday of ISIS targets in Syria, a senior Russian official said, ramping up a newly muscular presence in the Middle East.
+
+Shoigu said the strikes were launched from the Caspian Sea using precise long-range missiles that flew 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) to their targets.
+
+Russia says it launched missiles at Syrian targets from the Caspian Sea.
+
+Wednesday also appeared to mark new and closer military cooperation between Russia and the embattled Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad
+
+Russia and Syria launched coordinated attacks Wednesday on Islamist factions in towns in Hama and Idlib provinces in western Syria , with the Syrian shelling apparently conducted in concert with Russian airstrikes, according to an opposition group.
+
+If the report is correct, it could offer fresh evidence that Russia's primary goal is propping up al-Assad rather than fighting terrorism.
+
+Even as its ships and warplanes conducted fresh strikes, Russia said it was willing to cooperate with the United States in carrying out attacks in Syria.
+
+However, speaking to reporters in Rome, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called the Russian campaign of airstrikes in Syria a ""fundamental mistake."" He said the United States was not ready to cooperate with Russia on operations in Syria.
+
+A ministry spokesman, quoted by Russia's Tass news agency, said the ministry responded to a Pentagon request. It then ""swiftly considered"" the U.S. proposals to coordinate.
+
+""We just need to specify some technical details that will be discussed today by representatives of the Russian Defense Ministry and the Pentagon at the expert level,"" Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov told Tass.
+
+The U.S. military recently had to divert one aircraft over Syria to ensure it could maintain a safe flying distance from a Russian fighter, a Pentagon representative said. Until the two countries agree on mutual flight safety rules in Syrian airspace, U.S. pilots are under orders to change their flight path if a Russian plane is within 20 nautical miles, a senior defense official told CNN.
+
+Russian warplanes conducted heavy airstrikes Wednesday on Islamist factions, accompanied by shelling from government forces, according to the UK-based, anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
+
+The head of the observatory said there were no ISIS positions in the areas targeted and that fierce clashes were taking place on the ground between regime forces and their allies and armed Islamist rebel factions, including the Ahrar al-Sham and al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front.
+
+Wednesday's clashes are the fiercest in the last month, the observatory said.
+
+""According to our data, about 40 percent (was destroyed). In addition, a lot of terrorists have been killed. Now, they are retreating toward the Turkish border,"" Sputnik quoted Haddad as saying.
+
+But Turkey, Syria's neighbor to the north, cast fresh doubt Wednesday on whether Russia's goal was to go after SIS.
+
+A fraction -- 3.5% -- of Russia's airstrikes in Syria so far have targeted the terror group, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.
+
+""These air raids are not against ISIS. There were 57 air raids by Russian air forces. Fifty-five of them were against moderate opposition and only two were against Daesh, according to military information we received,"" Turkey's Anadolu news agency quoted Davutoglu as saying, reflecting government thinking. Daesh is another name for ISIS.
+
+The U.S. Embassy in Syria also questioned Russia's targets.
+
+""Russia can play a constructive role in this effort but that doesn't mean hitting moderate Syrian forces that are in opposition to Assad who has carried out a brutal, brutal crackdown on his own people.""
+
+""So we have seen a substantial military buildup by Russia in Syria, both in the air with the combat planes and air defense systems, but also an increasing number of ground troops,"" Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said. ""In addition to that, they have deployed naval assets, a large number of naval assets close to the Syrian shores. And they continue to do so.""
+
+Russian planes have also incurred into Turkish airspace twice, he said.
+
+""It's unacceptable, it's dangerous, and it's reckless behavior and it adds to the tensions,"" Stoltenberg told CNN.
+
+Stoltenberg said he doubted that Russia was interested primarily in fighting ISIS.
+
+""I'm also concerned that Russia is not targeting ISIL but instead attacking the Syrian opposition and civilians,"" he said.
+
+The Pentagon shares the same worries.
+
+The latest U.S. assessment indicates that Russia has moved ground combat weapons and troops to areas of western Syria where anti-regime forces are, according to two American defense officials. The United States sees the move as Russia ""stepping up its ground activity"" in Syria to attack those forces, rather than ISIS elements, according to one of the officials.
+
+But Russian officials deny ramping up military activity. Officials quoted by state media said there would be no ground operation in Syria and -- in contrast to what officials had said earlier -- Russia would try to prevent any ""volunteers"" from going to Syria.",REAL
+8967,TRUMP BOMBSHELL! — I’m reopening 9/11 Investigation,"By BAXTER DMITRI 
+Is the s**t is about to hit the fan? Is the fur about to start flying? Maybe! It’s too early to tell. With a new investigation promised into the true facts behind 9/11, there are already rumors surfacing . . . rumors that certain people in high places are getting a bit worried and thinking about buying one-way tickets to Tel Aviv. WHODUNIT?!? 
+Donald Trump’s plans for his first 100 days in office are raising eyebrows around the world, but of all the items on his agenda it is the reopening of the 9/11 investigation that will provide the greatest earthquake for the establishment. 
+Trump believes that 9/11 has not been properly investigated and he plans to get to the bottom of it. “First of all, the original 9/11 investigation is a total mess and has to be reopened,” Trump said. 
+The election of Donald Trump has rocked the establishment and things are only going to get rockier for them during his first term. There is a reason George W. Bush didn’t vote for Trump in the election, leaving the presidential line blank and voting Republican down-ballot. Trump has pledged to investigate 9/11 in a way it has not been investigated before. 
+For the first time 9/11 will be investigated by someone who isn’t part of the establishment, with skin in the game and plenty to lose. 
+“First of all, the original 9/11 investigation is a total mess and has to be reopened” Trump announced to supporters. “How do two planes take out three buildings in the same day? I never got my head around the fact that nothing is mentioned about the destruction of Building 7 in the 585 page document,” he explained, talking about World Trade Center 7 which also collapsed – inexplicably – during the September 11 attacks. 
+Donald Trump has also taken cracks at former president George W. Bush. There will be no covering up for former presidents on Trump’s watch. 
+“The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush,” he said in a February debate. “He kept us safe? That is not safe. That is not safe.” 
+“Why did the administration at the time not take legal means against Saudi Arabia? Weren’t 19 of the high-jackers from Saudi Arabia? Americans deserve answers and I will definitely request a new investigation so that this horrible tragedy never happens again.” Donald Trump and the 9/11 Truth movement 
+While Trump might be railing against the establishment in reopening the 9/11 investigation, he has received support on this issue from a number of public personalities who have demanded the case be revisited – and not behind closed doors. 
+Former Senator Bob Graham has been demanding a new, transparent investigation “For years I have been campaigning for the release of the 2002 Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee 9/11 Inquiry’s report, to no avail” explains the former Governor of Florida. “These missing pages point to the direct involvement of the government of Saudi Arabia. Why are these being kept secret? Who has to gain from these games of secrecy?” he asks. 
+“I have read these documents myself and if the American public knew what was in these documents, there would be a revolution tomorrow in the streets of America” he acknowledged during a radio interview. “Americans deserve to know the truth” he concluded, visibly angered by the whole affair. 
+Since 2002, the release of a number of 9/11 Commission Report documents is hindered because they are congressional records, hence they are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). 
+The long withheld 28 pages were partially released to the public this year – heavily redacted – and the Saudi government claimed the release proved they were not responsible for supporting or financing the attacks. But it’s not as simple as that. There are direct ties to the Saudi hierarchy in the 28 pages. There are a lot of questions that need answering, and they were never going to be addressed under a Clinton presidency with all her ties to Saudi Arabia. But with President Trump’s executive powers, everything has changed. The establishment are on edge. More than half the country doesn’t believe the official version of what happened that day. There is now a renewed belief that this biggest of lies and cover ups is about to be dismantled. 
+The establishment did all it could to destroy Trump’s election chances. 
+Now they are on edge. Like this? Share it now. 3 thoughts on “ TRUMP BOMBSHELL! — I’m reopening 9/11 Investigation ” Gilbert Huntly says:",FAKE
+6144,Brian Cloughley: “The Greatest Achievement of Mr. Trump would be Engage in Positive Discussions with Russia and China”,"18 Shares
+17 0 0 1
+Mohsen Abdelmoumen : Don't you think that we are in a continuation of the cold war between the USA and its allies in NATO on one side and China and Russia on the other, and who has interest to provoke a confrontation between these superpowers?
+Brian Cloughley: It’s not so much a continuation as a resurrection of the Cold War. After the Warsaw Pact disbanded in March 1991, NATO, although deprived of any reason to continue in existence, managed to keep going, and in 1999 added Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to its 16 members. As the BBC noted, these countries became “the first former Soviet bloc states to join NATO, taking the alliance’s borders some 400 miles towards Russia.” With good reason Moscow wondered what on earth the US-NATO military alliance might be planning.
+In spite of facing no threat whatever from any country in the world, NATO continued to expand around Russia’s borders, inviting Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia to join in 2002, which they did two years later.
+As President Putin observed in an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera “we are not expanding anywhere; it is NATO infrastructure, including military infrastructure, that is moving towards our borders. Is this a manifestation of our aggression?”
+The US is also implacably hostile to China and does what it can to provoke it in the South China Sea, but NATO has not yet ventured into Eastern waters.
+MORE... Arise President Trump (or Why it's not the End of the World as We Know it) Trump's sexual predator characteristics - His Grandfather was a pimp, but at least he paid the women he hired The significance of the GOP's attempted purge of Donald Trump Trump, Turkey, and police tyranny: The crisis of Imperialism finds political expression There is certainly confrontation — but it was originated by the western powers at the behest of Washington. It is dangerous to indulge in military menaces, but the US appears determined to continue such a policy, and the world as a whole will certainly not benefit from its posture.
+How do you explain the silence of the media and Western Governments on the infamous war led by Saudi Arabia against the people of the Yemen?
+The most important things are money and oil. Western governments and mainstream media may from time to time make statements that “regret” the Saudi war on Yemen, but they will never take action against the Riyadh royal dictatorship that might make it cease its merciless blitz on the Yemeni people. The US State Department records that in Saudi Arabia its “citizens lack the right and legal means to change their government” while there are “pervasive restrictions on universal rights such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and freedom of assembly, association, movement and religion; and a lack of equal rights for women . . .”, but Washington takes no action to encourage the Saudi monarchy to relax or even modify its domestic tyranny.
+Saudi Arabia is a valued ally of the United States and indulges in “torture and other abuses [and] arbitrary arrest and detention,” while “freedom of religion is neither recognized nor protected under the law.” It might be imagined that the President of the United States might feel it proper to indicate his disapproval of the fact that in Saudi Arabia “civil law does not protect human rights, including freedom of the speech and of the press.” — but no US president will ever do anything to discourage the Saudi monarchy from continuing its domestic tyranny and murder of so many innocents in Yemen.
+Don’t you think that, with Hillary Clinton President of the USA, we’ll have a total war, knowing that she is supported by the neocons and the military-industrial complex?
+Under a Clinton administration there would have been no cessation of US havoc-wreaking wars around the world, and desperate refugees would have died in their thousands. Her regime would have ensured that the Pentagon’s fleets continue to go down to the seas in confrontation, and the bombers would have streaked across the skies, deliberately provoking China and Russia. Remember that she is one of the Washington-Brussels war-drum beaters who planned the 2011 aerial blitz on Libya to destroy the government of President Gaddafi, about whose murder she giggled that “ We came; We saw; He died. ” The US-NATO attacks on Libya caused massive suffering and destruction, opened the way for feuding bands of militants to fight each other for control of parts of the country, and created a haven for the lunatic extremists of Islamic State [aka ISIS].
+Hillary Clinton has not criticised or questioned Obama’s years of aerial bombardment around the world and her foreign policy adviser, Jeremy Bash, told London’s Daily Telegraph that she would order a “full review” of US strategy on Syria as a “first key task” of her presidency, resetting the policy to emphasise the “murderous” nature of the government. He said that Mrs. Clinton would work to get Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, “out of there.”
+President Assad has been selected as another target for the Clinton policy of “We came; We Saw; He died,” and his country appears doomed to a rerun of the Libya fiasco.
+If Hillary Clinton had become President of the United States, as seemed only too likely, there would have been even greater emphasis on global airstrikes and military confrontation. Greater turmoil, chaos and catastrophe were to come.
+Several reports mention deliveries of Western arms to groups activated in Syria, weapons that ended up in the hands of terrorist groups, such as ISIS-Daesh and al-Nusra. How do you explain the miscalculation of governments that have delivered weapons to terrorists to find these weapons turned against them, as we have seen in various attacks on European soil?
+The US supplies weapons to many rebels and insurrectionists around the world. One of the most absurd of these supply chains was in the 1980s when they gave hundreds of Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, then had to buy them back for half a million dollars each when it was realised that the Mujahideen were about to use them against civilian airliners. The British have also supplied ground-to-air missiles to insurrectionists groups, with much less publicity but on occasions with serious results. The only explanation for the motives of western governments in doing this sort of thing is that they are poorly informed by their vastly expensive intelligence agencies.
+The Americans destroyed Iraq with their ally Tony Blair, Sarkozy made the same thing in Libya with David Cameron, how do you explain that these personalities are not judged, in particular via ICC, authority which judges only African despots?
+The International Criminal Court (ICC) “investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.” But the United States “is not at present a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court” and although Britain and France are in theory supportive of the ICC, there will never — ever — be a political leader of these countries arraigned before the Court for war crimes or anything else. The African despots it judges are no doubt guilty of heinous crimes, but they are also easy to arraign.
+How do you explain that Hillary Clinton's candidacy was maintained while she does not stop making headlines with multiple scandals?
+Because the Democrat Party desperately wanted a Democrat president. Members of the Party was prepared to hold their noses with one hand to keep out the stink of Hillary’s scandals while with the other hand pressing the button to Vote Hillary.
+In your opinion, why do Western Governments continue to support old leaders and despotic regimes and to destabilize others according to their interests under the pretext of ""human rights"", ""democracy"", etc.? Who gave them this right?
+Nobody gave them the right to support or destroy any government, anywhere, but Western politicians and generals continues to believe that, as in the old colonial days, they have a mission to alter the lives of those they consider inferior. There is flexibility in this policy, however, because if dictators are important for the economies of the West, they are permitted to torture detainees, treat women as chattels, forbid freedom of religion and imprison critics.
+Some of our European intelligence sources tell us that there was a mass movement of Daesh towards some countries of Northern Europe, result of the offensive on Daesh in Syria and Iraq. How do you explain that such redeployment towards Europe is possible with all the risks of attack that entails? Don’t you think that the coordination between European intelligence fails?
+I do not believe that there has been mass movement of Daesh/IS adherents to northern Europe.
+Libya is a terrorist sanctuary a few kilometers away from Europe. You have an experience in both military and diplomatic, how do you see the resolution of the Libyan equation, is a crisis that can only be resolved militarily or is the policy which should prevail?
+Unlike in Saudi Arabia, for example, in Gaddafi’s prosperous Libya there was freedom of religion and women were regarded as human beings. The entire population received free education and medical care. Then the country was reduced to anarchy by the US-NATO aerial blitz of March-October 2011 (Germany refused to join in), during which, among other devastation, water and oil pipelines and pumping stations were deliberately destroyed. Militia bands took over various parts of the country and continue to fight against each other, while extremist Islamic [Wahhabi] groups have grown in size and influence and the “Government of National Accord” is powerless.
+Many of those who energetically supported the war, such as the former secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, continue to claim that it was a success — “a model intervention” — and that it is the fault of “the international community” that the country is a shambles. But even US President Obama admitted that the war on Libya “didn’t work” and that failure to have a plan for the future of the country after the murder of President Gaddafi was “the worst mistake” of his presidency.
+Given that the Obama presidency is in its last months, it is unlikely he will order an invasion of Libya to try to eradicate the Islamic [aka Takfiri] terrorists and rebuild the country he and his allies destroyed. He and his supporters in Europe, notably France and Britain, will continue clandestine ground operations, drone attacks and conventional airstrikes to try to assassinate extremist leaders and destroy their gangs, but these will fail. It is difficult to predict the future in Libya, other than to say that it is most likely that its people will continue suffering the appalling effects of the US-NATO war, and that there will be no peaceful resolution of its problems.
+Is the era of the American domination a fatality? Doesn ' t humanity may find it beneficial to see the emergence of a multipolar world ?
+It should be remembered that in an August 2014 interview with the New York Times President Obama said “Our participation in the coalition that overthrew Qaddafi [emphasis added] in Libya. I absolutely believed that it was the right thing to do.” The name of the game is regime change, but America, the “indispensable nation” has failed in its military adventures all over the world and has created widening instability which in turn has led to growth in extremism and terrorism. Unipolarity, with the US possessing and exercising most military power, has not worked.
+It appears that multipolarity might be a better alternative, with other nations restraining Washington from unilateral intervention aimed at overthrowing governments, but it is apparent that the US is determined to do all it can to prevent interference in its world domination strategies. In consequence it has engaged in a deliberate policy of confrontation with China and Russia that is entirely counter-productive and could well lead to war. Multipolarity would probably benefit humanity, but that is irrelevant to the indispensable nation.
+What do you think of the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the victory of Donald Trump?
+Mr. Trump has not elucidated a foreign policy as such, and we can only hope that he will build on the positive indications he has given about America ceasing to meddle militarily all round the world. His greatest achievement would be engage in positive discussions with Russia and China, which would result in vastly diminished tension in east and west. The defeat of Clinton has meant that the threat of US international confrontation has at least diminished, because the world would have been a very dangerous place if she had got in to the White House.
+Interview realized by Mohsen Abdelmoumen
+Who is Brian Cloughley?
+Brian Cloughley is a British and Australian armies’ veteran, former deputy head of the UN military mission in Kashmir and Australian defense attaché in Pakistan.
+He studied South Asian affairs for forty years and is South Asia defense analyst for IHS/Jane's Sentinel, covering Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, updating material regularly. Other evaluations include updating of nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological developments in the region for IHS Global. He has a weekly column in Strategic Culture Foundation and contribute pieces elsewhere, including Counterpunch , Pakistan's Army Journal Hilal and the business magazine Blue Chip .
+Brian Cloughley wrote books including A History of The Pakistan Army: Wars and Insurrections; War, Coups & Terror: Pakistan’s Army in Years of Turmoil; Trumpeters: The Story of the Royal Artillery’s Boy Trumpeters; From Fabric Wings to Supersonic Fighters and Drones: A History of Military Aviation on both sides of the Northwest Frontier.
+His website: http://www.beecluff.com/",FAKE
+8603,Man punctuates high-speed chase with stop at In-N-Out Burger drive-thru,"Print 
+[Ed. – Well, that’s a new one.] 
+A man is in custody after leading police on a bizarre chase into the east Valley on Wednesday night. 
+Phoenix police began following the suspect in Phoenix and the pursuit continued into the east Valley, but it took a bizarre turn when the suspect stopped at an In-N-Out Burger restaurant’s drive-thru near Priest and Ray Roads in Chandler. 
+The suspect appeared to order food, but then drove away and got out of his pickup truck near Rock Wren Way and Ray Road. 
+He then ran into a backyard and tried to get into a house through the back door.",FAKE
+220,The right turns on Paul Ryan: Yesterday’s conservative savior is today’s moderate wimp,"Rush Limbaugh: “I don’t remember a vice presidential pick that has so energized a campaign as this choice of Paul Ryan.”
+
+Glenn Beck: “Mitt Romney has picked a solid, smart conservative for his vice-presidential running mate.”
+
+Laura Ingraham: “More than anything today, we need a man with courage and clear-thinking. Ryan has both.”
+
+Fast forward just three years and those same commentators are now raising doubts about Ryan, when not outright trashing him in public. Ryan’s sudden sin?  Not being sufficiently conservative; not passing the purity test.
+
+Limbaugh: “This whole Ryan thing hasn’t made any sense to me from the first moment I heard about it.”
+
+Beck: “The ‘fix’ the republic needs is Paul Ryan? The man who never met a bailout he didn’t like? A man who asked to be made king? 100% support and you can’t vote him out? Your solution is MORE POWER FOR THE SPEAKER?!?!?!?”
+
+Ingraham: “From misrepresenting the outrageous Fast Track &TPP to amnesty & foreign workers, list of demands, Ryan’s possibly the worst Spkr choice.”
+
+Ryan’s amazing free-fall from grace seems to be part of a larger race to the radical right, not only among powerful forces with the Republican Party, which now seem to be fundamentally opposed to governing and legislating, but also within key portions of the right-wing media. There seems to be a mini-stampede underway towards an extremist destination rarely seen in mainstream American politics. And for parts of the conservative media that means now demonizing former heroes like Paul Ryan.
+
+“Conservative talk show hosts, including Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, have already denounced him as a dangerous moderate,” according to Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times. “Tea party organizations are already raising money from supporters with appeals to stop any more Ryanesque budget deals.”
+
+One of the many layers of irony here is that in 2012, the right-wing media defended Ryan from Democraticclaims that he was too far to the right and outside of the mainstream. Today, many conservative commentators are attacking Ryan for not being far enough to the right.
+
+Yet “Ryan hasn’t undergone any sort of David Brockian-type worldview change that would warrant labeling him an apostate,” wrote conservative Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast. He added that while “Ryan’s voting record has its blemishes,” Ryan would “certainly be the most conservative Speaker of the House in modern history.” He still believes in privatizing social security and Medicare. He still believes that social programs are a “hammock.” He still believes that the Social Security survivor benefits that he and his family received throughout his adolescence cause dependency on other people and their families. A portion of the conservative press, of course, has never been in love with an establishment-type players like Jeb Bush, so his lack of support this year hasn’t been surprising. But Paul Ryan? He’s “the Republican party’s intellectual leader” as The Weekly Standard once touted. The conservative press could barely contain its universal glee when Ryan got the VP nod just three years ago. ‘He’s one of us,’ seemed to be the collective cheer. “Fox News, the most powerful right-wing media outlet in the country, has spent years praising Ryan as a ‘star,’ a ‘genius,’ and a man of ‘courage,'” Media Matters noted in 2012. -“He is the wrong man at the wrong time.”  [American Thinker] -“Paul Ryan represents one of the absolute worst outcomes for conservatives.” [Conservative Review] -“Despite his portrayal by the media as being conservative, most actual conservatives in the House know that Ryan isn’t a conservative.” [Breitbart] Breitbart, in particular, has become a clearinghouse of often-inaccurate analysis regarding Ryan, such as claiming the Republican’s bid for the speakership had recently collapsed. Breitbart even warned readers that Media Matters “has Paul Ryan’s back,” as proof the Republican cannot be trusted. In a sign of how fractured and radical the conservative movement has become, it appears fewer and fewer media players have Ryan’s back. Even though they cheered him as a savior in 2012.",REAL
+7851,"First Brexit, Now Trump … What’s Next?","  WashingtonsBlog 
+CNN’s Jake Tapper hit the nail on the head last night, as he was speaking about why people voted for Trump. 
+Tapper said that most Americans are sick of the income inequality, globalization, and politics-as-usual that the status quo have given us. 
+He even pointed out that only a handful of people have gotten rich off of globalization, and a lot of people have been left behind . 
+Indeed, exit polls last night showed that the economy was the number 1 concern for voters. The Guardian reports : 
+“It’s the economy, stupid” was a phrase coined by her husband’s adviser James Carville in the 1992 election and, in many ways, it ought to have helped Democrats again in 2016. Barack Obama helped rescue the US from the financial crash and presided over a record series of consecutive quarters of job growth. 
+Unfortunately for Clinton, many Americans simply did not feel as positive. Stagnant wage levels and soaring inequality were symptoms of the malaise felt by many voters. Trump successfully convinced them to believe this was caused by bad trade deals and a rigged economy. 
+Despite being pushed in this direction by Sanders in the Democratic primary, Clinton never really found a satisfactory response. Her volte-face on trade sounded – and was later proved by leaked emails – unconvincing at best; deeply cynical at worst. 
+Similarly, Brexit – the other recent vote which went against all political forecasts – was largely a vote by those who lost out on the benefits of globalization … that only a handful of fatcats really profited from. 
+Leaders of the Brexit campaign noted the confluence of the two votes: 
+Jeremy Corbyn described Mr Trump’s victory as “an unmistakable rejection of political establishment” . 
+Ukip leader Nigel Farage – who went to the US to appear at a Trump campaign rally – said he was handing over his mantle as the creator of political earthquakes to the new President, saying that 2016 was “the year of two great political revolutions”, adding: “I thought Brexit was big, but boy, this looks like it’s going to be even bigger”. 
+N igel Farage has issued this statement following Donald Trump’s victory. 
+“Today, the establishment is in deep shock. Even more so than after Brexit. What we are witnessing is the end of a period of big business and big politics controlling our lives. 
+Voters across the Western world want nation state democracy, proper border controls and to be in charge of their own lives. 
+I commend Donald Trump for the courage with which he has fought this campaign and I look forward to a closer relationship between the USA and the UK. We now have a President who likes our country and understands our post-Brexit values. 
+Prepare for further political shocks in the years to come.” 
+Voters in the UK and the world’s strongest nation, the U.S., have both rebuked the status quo, including neoliberal trade and economic policies. 
+What’s next? 
+The rebellion will spread … 
+For example, it’s so probable that Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party will be thrown out on its ear that Merkel is already trying to distract with silly claims that the Russians will hack the German election. 
+Postscript: There are, of course, other reasons that Trump won. But the economy is the main one.",FAKE
+5090,Hillary Clinton Keeps It Safe With Tim Kaine as VP Pick,"If you needed proof that Hillary Clinton will continue to run a cautious, stage-managed campaign, look no further than her VP pick.
+
+Hillary Clinton announced today that will be her presidential running-mate, pushing the mild-mannered Virginian into a glaring national spotlight. ""I'm thrilled to tell you this first: I've chosen Sen. Tim Kaine as my running mate. Welcome him to our team,"" the former Secretary of State said in a text to her supporters.
+
+
+
+Kaine, a former governor and current senator, was the —but that doesn't mean he won't have an impact.
+
+; the senator’s favorite conversation topic is his conviction that Congress needs to pass an authorization for the use of military force giving Obama the authority to go to war with ISIS. It’s certainly a topic of massive constitutional importance. But still ... not the sexiest issue.
+
+“Tim Kaine would be a perfect addition to the ticket, in that he would add no progressive backbone that might inconvenience Team Hillary when it's time to govern,” People for Bernie co-founder Charles Lenchner .
+
+And pro-choice groups about him, as his view on abortion rights is more moderate than Clinton’s. Kaine himself assured Meet the Press that he is “boring.” He’s also a devout Catholic who was a missionary in Honduras for 9 months and speaks fluent Spanish.
+
+That said, the senator brings an unusual—and heart-wrenching—resume to the ticket. He’s one of a small (though growing) number of national politicians to handle a mass shooting. He was governor of Virginia , and drew bipartisan praise for the role he played helping the community recover and heal.
+
+“By any standard, Tim Kaine provided the exact kind of leadership that VA needed during a tremendous crisis and tragedy,” said Tucker Martin, who was press secretary at the time for Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Bob McDonnell. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would say he didn’t rise to the moment.”
+
+“You can go beyond grief to isolation and feeling despair,” he said at the time, addressing victims’ families. “Those haunting words that were uttered on a hill on Calvary: ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ Despair is a natural emotion at a time like this. They’re all natural, they’re all appropriate. But let me ask one thing of you, this community, as you wrestle with your sadness, as you wrestle with your own feelings of anger, of confusion, as you wrestle with the despair—even you family members who have lost people close: You do not let hold of that spirit of community that makes Virginia Tech such a special place.”
+
+All told, the senator is an extremely low-risk pick for Clinton. So while her politics may not be conservative, her politicking certainly is.",REAL
+3725,Security Expert: My Fear is That More Churches Will be Targeted,"The gunman walked into the church sanctuary and opened fire.
+
+He showed no mercy – firing more than 100 rounds and exploding a pipe bomb in the balcony. There was nowhere to hide from the carnage.
+
+Click here to follow Todd on Facebook for conservative conversation!
+
+Seven people died that night. Seven others were wounded.
+
+It was Sept. 15, 1999 – the day a madman slaughtered Christians inside Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.
+
+That was the year Carl Chinn began compiling statistic documenting violent attacks on churches and synagogues and other houses of worship.
+
+Since 1999, he has recorded more than 1,000 such attacks – more than 150 so far this year.
+
+Chinn tells me the attack on the pastor and parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is the worst attack on an assembled congregation in American history.
+
+“This was a calculated attack,” he said. “It’s just awful. I hurt for those people.”
+
+And one of the nation’s foremost experts in church security fears the Charleston massacre could only be the beginning.
+
+“Violence directed against the church has been growing over the past decade,” said Tim Miller, the president of LionHeart International Services Group. “My fear is what we saw in Charleston is one incident of many more to come.”
+
+“Church security really matters,” he told me. “Churches are becoming more and more a major target. Dealing with this is really important.”
+
+Miller, a retired Marine, served nearly 30 years as a former Secret Service agent, police officer and counter-intelligence officer. His team includes former Homeland Security agents, FBI agents and special-ops personnel.
+
+“I spent my life learning how to protect others,” he said. “About three years ago, I realized the same threats we experienced overseas are now here. And we needed to pivot and direct our efforts to help those in churches and non-profits.”
+
+Miller said churches are soft targets and what happened in Charleston should be a wakeup call.
+
+“My first thought was to pray,” he said. “Having been in situations where that kind of carnage exists – the suffering is unimaginable. My second thought – was this is a realization of what we’ve been talking about and what we help churches prepare for.”
+
+The difficulty is making the church a welcoming place for hurting souls – while at the same time preparing to deal with those who might commit violence.
+
+“We welcome you on the one hand – while on the other hand if a gunman comes in – we have the resources to handle it,” he said.
+
+I do believe the Old Testament Book of Nehemiah addressed such an issue: “We prayed to our God and posted a guard.”
+
+Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is ""God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values."" Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.
+
+",REAL
+9451,Europe Mounts Historic Challenge to Google’s Domination of Tech Services,"Europe Mounts Historic Challenge to Google’s Domination of Tech Services Posted on Oct 31, 2016 Jon Russell / (CC BY-SA 2.0) 
+The European Commission has slapped Google with three sets of monopoly charges , starting a fight that could cost the company up to 10 percent of its annual revenue and show American firms that “there’s a bazooka in Europe that can be shot at companies” that seek to obtain dominant market positions. 
+The New York Times’ DealBook reports: 
+The cases relate to Android, Google’s mobile operating system, some of its dominant online search services and some of its advertising products. 
+While each response will be couched in legalese, Google’s main argument is that its business practices do not fall afoul of the region’s tough antitrust rules and that competitors can freely offer their own rival digital services to Europe’s more than 500 million consumers. 
+“Our search engine is designed to provide the most relevant results and most useful ads for any query,” Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, wrote in a blog post when previously rebutting some of Europe’s antitrust charges. “Users and advertisers benefit when we do this well. So does Google.” 
+The company’s detractors—including small European start-ups, some local politicians and significant American firms like Oracle—disagree with Google’s optimistic outlook. 
+“Google has taken its best shot, but the European Commission has decided that it’s still on the right track,” said Thomas Vinje, a lawyer for FairSearch Europe, which represents those of Google’s rivals that filed complaints against the company’s perceived dominance. 
+“I don’t doubt Google feels like it has a strong defense. But that’s what other previously dominant companies thought, too,” he added. 
+DealBook continues: 
+Whatever happens, Google’s battle in Europe will not end overnight. 
+European officials must first review the company’s rebuttals, and a final decision in any of the cases is not expected until midway through 2017, at the earliest. 
+If found to have breached the region’s rules, Google faces fines totaling up to $7.5 billion, or 10 percent of its annual revenue, and may be forced to change how it operates in the 28-member bloc. While any antitrust fine is not expected to reach the maximum possible, the company is likely to appeal any European ruling, further lengthening the process. 
+Yet it is this death-by-a-thousand-cuts regulatory limbo that arguably represents the biggest headache for Google.",FAKE
+8807,Statistical Tie: Latest Breitbart/Gravis Poll Shows Donald Trump Closes the Gap with Less Than Two Weeks Left,"Statistical Tie: Latest Breitbart/Gravis Poll Shows Donald Trump Closes the Gap with Less Than Two Weeks Left Clinton, at 46 percent, leads Trump at 45 percent by just one point Breitbart - October 28, 2016 Comments 
+NEW YORK CITY, New York — Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has closed the gap with his Democratic opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton with just a couple weeks left in the election, the latest national Breitbart News Network/Gravis Marketing poll shows. 
+Clinton, at 46 percent, leads Trump at 45 percent by just one point—inside the survey’s 2.3 percent margin of error. Libertarian Gary Johnson gets just 3 percent and the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein just 1 percent, while 4 percent are unsure. The survey was conducted from Oct. 25 to Oct. 26, sampling 1,824 registered voters across the United States. The poll was conducted using a combination of interactive voice response polling and an internet panel of cell phone users. 
+“Something has happened since the third debate,” Doug Kaplan, the managing partner of Gravis Marketing, said of the poll. “Conventional wisdom was after Trump said he wouldn’t promise to accept the results of the election and made the ‘nasty woman’ comment, many thought Hillary would gain—but Trump seems to be closing the gap. In every election in the last 30 years, this happens where the person behind closes the gap. Hillary still has a clear electoral advantage and many paths to victory. However, Trump is not out of it but Hillary is still the favorite.” 
+“This is a big story because it shows Trump really closing, importantly, as the other close polls are showing,” Democratic pollster Pat Caddell, who worked for President Jimmy Carter and is working with Breitbart News and Gravis Marketing on these polls, added. “He is closing with his favorability and unfavorability as well. 
+Caddell said he thinks Obamacare’s failures, where premiums are skyrocketing, is one of many reasons why Trump is surging. “Among other things, that is contributing [to Trump’s rise in the polls],” Caddell said. “When we are looking down the road at other things that may be influential, we are seeing the possibility of again on the immigration issue—that thing about concern on the border seems to be increasing as is opposition to Hillary and their plans to expand immigration and refugees, which is another big issue. But more importantly, at the end of the survey, we see both candidates have problems on their ability to unite the country and on whether or not they can have the moral leadership to lead. They’re basically about the same, which I consider a real improvement for Trump now that he’s that close.”",FAKE
+2666,MSNBC’s year of standing up straight,"There is an path for Democrats to regain the presidency — and it does not run through Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin.",REAL
+3172,The Libertarian Moment Is So Over That Libertarians Are Now The Single Largest Group: Gallup,"Yeah, yeah, with the rise of Der Trumper and the ascendance of Ted Cruz to serious candidacy, the Libertarian Moment is deader than Nancy Reagan's dream of a drug-free America. Right?
+
+In fact, as Cato's David Boaz has pointed out recently, the libertarian electorate is on the rise, according to Gallup's annual Governance survey from last fall. Gallup uses two questions to separate respondents into one of four categories: conservative, liberal, libertarian, and populist. The two questions are:
+
+Gallup finds that libertarian voters (those who think the government is doing too much and should NOT favor any particular set of values) account for 27 percent of respondents, followed by conservatives (26 percent), liberals (23 percent), and populists (15 percent).
+
+Boaz notes that 27 percent is the highest percentage recorded for libertarian sensibilities. In 2000, for instance, the figure was just 18 percent. So if libertarian sentiments are on the rise, then why are characters such as Trump, Cruz, and even Bernie Sanders doing so well? Boaz runs through various reasons, many of which involve the simple fact that neither the Republican nor Democratic Party does a decent job of representing libertarian values. If you take the two questions above equally serious, for instance, you couldn't in good conscience vote for any of the candidates running for president. And so we find ourselves in a situation where across many policy questions that define libertarianism—increasing immigration, say, or legalizing pot and gay marriage, deregulating business, and liberalizing gun laws—the country is becoming more and more libertarian even as the major political parties get more and more reactionary in their views.
+
+As the Republican Party begins its great implosion (thank you for that, at least, Donald Trump), the question in front of us isn't why hasn't the GOP ever been as libertarian as its rhetoric (40 years ago, for god's sake, Ronald Reagan famously told Reason, ""I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism""). It's whether the Republican Party will reconstitute itself along libertarian lines. If the party elders are serious about taking the party into the future, or even dragging it in the near-present, they should be breaking toward what Reason, founded in 1968, was calling ""Free Minds and Free Markets"" back when Reagan was still in his first term as governor of California.",REAL
+782,March 15 Exit Poll Results: The Polarization of Primary Electorates,"Political polarization has been a frequent topic of conversation among political observers over the past decade as Democratic and Republican legislators and voters appear to have moved further apart ideologically. The same pattern is visible in the electorates voting Tuesday. Voters in Democratic primaries are considerably more liberal than they were eight years ago, and Republican voters are more conservative than in 2008.
+
+According to the NBC News Exit Polls in the five Democratic contests Tuesday, there has been a 15-point increase since 2008 in the percentage of voters who describe their political ideology as ""liberal."" On Tuesday, about one-third of Democrats described themselves as moderate—an 9-point drop since 2008—and now fewer than one in 10 characterize their political thinking as conservative.
+
+Among Republicans in four of the five states Tuesday (North Carolina was excluded because it did not have the comparable trend data) there has been growth since 2008 in the percentage describing their political ideology as ""conservative."" In 2008, 63 percent of Republicans across the four states self-identified as conservatives. On Tuesday, 73 percent did so, an overall increase of 10 points. Slightly fewer now consider themselves moderates—down 4 points to 24 percent. And eight years ago, 9 percent of Republican primary voters in these states said they were liberal, a figure that has dwindled to 3 percent today.",REAL
+1317,Reuters Poll: Most Voters Don't Think Bill Clinton Big Factor in Election,"Bill Clinton simply is not wielding that kind of influence - good or bad - over voters so far this year, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. A majority of Americans, including 73 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans, said Bill Clinton does not factor into their opinion of Hillary for president.
+
+The poll, conducted Jan. 7 to 13, found that 12 percent of Americans are more likely to vote for Hillary, the former secretary of state, because of her marriage to Bill. Among Democrats, fewer than half said Bill Clinton should be more prominent in his wife's campaign, and less than half felt that his presence in the race would boost her chances of winning.
+
+Bill Clinton, who was widely credited for helping Barack Obama win a second term in 2012, has become much more active on the campaign trail this month, especially in New Hampshire, where Hillary Clinton trails Bernie Sanders in several recent statewide polls. Hillary called Bill her ""not-so-secret weapon"" when announcing the move, though his increased involvement created an opening for Republicans, especially Trump, to bring up allegations of sexual misconduct that dogged the Clintons in the 1990s.
+
+Despite two terms of strong economic growth and a trade surplus, Bill Clinton's legacy as president has been marked by several high-profile missteps. Several women came forward during his tenure in the White House with allegations of consensual sexual encounters.
+
+He also spent much of his tenure fighting accusations of unwanted advances toward women, including Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee, who later filed a lawsuit. In 1998, he was impeached by the House of Representatives after attempting to cover-up an affair with another woman, Monica Lewinsky.
+
+After Hillary said that Trump, the Republican front-runner, had shown a ""penchant for sexism,"" the real estate mogul took to Twitter to warn the Democratic front-runner against using her husband as a surrogate on the campaign trail.
+
+""If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women's card on me, she's wrong!"" Trump wrote in late December.
+
+Voters, however, do not seem to care. A majority of Americans in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, including 68 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of Republicans, said that Bill's past sexual misconduct ""made no difference"" in the current presidential race.
+
+Among women, 56 percent said it did not matter, while another 21 percent said it would hurt Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the election. A tiny proportion of women - 4 percent - said they thought the experience would actually help her chances of winning.
+
+Democrats who turned out to listen to the former president this week in New Hampshire dismissed the allegations of sexual misconduct as no longer relevant.
+
+""I just think it's none of our business,"" said Randall Ferrara, a retired pastor who came to listen to Bill stump in Keene, New Hampshire. ""It's old news and a weapon they use when they don't have anything else.""
+
+Ferrara said he is still deciding between Clinton and her chief rival, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of nearby Vermont. Shirley Ferrara, his wife, said that she would be supporting Hillary. She agreed with the roughly half of Democrats that told Reuters/Ipsos that the former president ""should take a prominent role"" campaigning for his wife and that it would help her.
+
+""I think he would be an asset to her,"" Ferrara said.
+
+Rachel Reekie, a Sanders supporter and Keen State University student who was in elementary school during Clinton's presidency, said she was ""fully aware"" of the allegations.
+
+""It's not a big deal; it's over,"" Reekie said. ""I don't think his presence will have an effect.""
+
+The online panel of 1,947 adults has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of about 4 percentage points.",REAL
+5756,Hillary Clinton FREAKED OUT Her Entire Campaign With This ONE MOVE,"Pinterest 
+It was over a year ago that the Clinton Campaign knew that Hillary Clinton had regularly used a private email server for official use, and they knew how incredibly stupid it was. 
+In an email released by WikiLeaks , the now infamous Clinton staffer John Podesta sent a message to Clinton surrogate Neera Tanden. Podesta told her she’d be shown a new poll showing how Clinton is doing against Hillary and Jeb Bush. 
+Tanden said she wasn’t familiar with what the poll results would be, but she thought the email would be rough, IJR is reporting . 
+“PS can you imagine what the Republicans would do to [Bernie] if he were the nominee?” 
+To which Tanden replied: 
+“Well, let’s see what the poll actually says. 
+Let’s hope the Democratic party is not suicidal.” 
+Then Podesta dropped the hammer: 
+“Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered? 
+Like whole thing is fucking insane.” ""Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered?"" https://t.co/jXc1mHi5vn 
+— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 27, 2016 
+There have been 33,000 emails released from Podesta’s server. They haven’t confirmed their accuracy, but they certainly haven’t denied them. It's been 3 weeks since @WikiLeaks began publishing Podesta emails. Not one doc has been claimed – let alone demonstrated – to be doctored. 
+— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 27, 2016 
+There’s more coming. We will have to see what comes of them, but there’s one takeaway from this: Clinton’s people have known for a long time that she was using a personal server.",FAKE
+8897,"Shame to waste Corbyn on a snap election, says May","Shame to waste Corbyn on a snap election, says May 04-11-16 
+THERESA May does not want a snap general election because it would be a waste of Jeremy Corbyn, she has confirmed. 
+The Conservative leader still has lots of policies she wants to pursue while she has an entirely ineffectual opposition and has no intention of rushing anything. 
+She said: “You don’t throw away your Get Out of Jail Free card at the first opportunity. You save it for when you really need it. 
+“And when it’s cast-iron bolted-on that you’ll win the next election at a walk, no matter what you do to the NHS or the public finances or whatever, then you take your time. 
+“The Brexit court thing is annoying – I have dinner plans for April 2019 I don’t want to change – but the last thing I need is the Labour party coming to their senses and getting in my way. 
+“I’ve got free licence to do whatever I want to Britain for the next nine years and I can’t do any of it without Jeremy. He’s not going anywhere until 2020.” 
+Corbyn said: “Thank Christ for that, I thought I was going to be out of a job.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+8022,A Coup Taking Place in the United States,"A Coup Taking Place in the United States 11/03/2016 In today’s video, Christopher Greene of AMTV reports on Steve Pieczenik controversial report that a coup d’état is taking place in the United States of America. Putin grants Steven Seagal Russian citizenship 11/03/2016 DAILY MAIL President Vladimir Putin signed off Thursday on a decree granting Russian citizenship to American action her ... New bionic eye implant connects directly to brain 11/03/2016 RUSSIA TODAY Scientists may have made a significant breakthrough in restoring human sight, as a woman who had been blin ... American Express disowns Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters because of pro-Palestinian views 11/03/2016 MONDOWEISS When it comes to aiding Israeli Apartheid, American Express is just another brick in The Wall, according ... AMTV Archives",FAKE
+4238,"Super Tuesday prizes: Candidates in fierce fight for Texas, other delegate goldmines","The Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are charging into Super Tuesday in a coast-to-coast battle for delegates across a dozen states -- but while they're looking for as many wins as possible, a few select states stand out as the crown jewels.
+
+At the top of that list, in both primary contests, is Texas. The Lone Star State has the biggest cache -- 222 Democratic delegates and 155 for Republicans.
+
+And perhaps no candidate is fighting harder for that prize than Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. The senator went all out on Monday, holding rallies in voter-rich Dallas, Houston and San Antonio in hopes of at least defeating national front-runner Donald Trump in Cruz's home state.
+
+“We are going to have a very good Super Tuesday,” Cruz assured the Dallas crowd. Cruz has maintained a polling lead in the state, but knows a surprise loss there could doom his campaign.
+
+For Republicans, the second-biggest prize is Georgia, with 76 delegates at stake. Both Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio put in face time with voters Monday in the final hours before polls open, while Cruz stayed rooted in Texas.
+
+On the Democratic side, too, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have focused their efforts.
+
+While Clinton declared Saturday night after her decisive win in the South Carolina primary that the campaign was going “national,” the former secretary of state was concentrating Monday on two delegate-heavy states -- the Democratic-stronghold of Massachusetts (91 delegates) and Virginia (95 delegates).
+
+Solid wins there and beyond on Super Tuesday could give her a nearly insurmountable delegate count toward the nomination.
+
+Clinton to date leads Sanders in the delegate count 543-to-85, including so-called superdelegates. They will compete for 865 delegates on Tuesday and a total of roughly 1,800 delegates over the next two weeks, with 2,382 needed to win the nomination.
+
+The delegates on the line in 11 states Tuesday represent a third of those needed to clinch the party nod.
+
+And on the GOP side, 595 delegates are on the line Tuesday across 11 states -- nearly half the number needed to secure the nomination.
+
+Sanders is focusing on Minnesota and Colorado, progressive states where he hopes his message of social and economic equality will translate into votes.
+
+“Americans don’t need crumbs, they need the whole loaf,” Sanders said at a rally in Minneapolis.
+
+He is expected on Tuesday to win his home state of Vermont, which has 16 Democratic delegates. Minnesota is worth far more, with 77 delegates.
+
+Still, many of these contests divide delegates proportionally, and so Sanders is poised to walk away with some, even where he loses. His strategy appears to be to at least survive Tuesday, with hopes of a resurgence later this month in Maine and Rust Belt states like Michigan and Ohio.
+
+On the Republican side, Trump has won three straight -- the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, and the Nevada Republican Caucus -- garnering 82 delegates.
+
+Cruz kicked off the 2016 balloting by winning the Iowa Republican Caucus. He has 17 delegates, ahead of Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio with 16.
+
+Though trailing in Texas, Trump holds big leads in other delegate-rich Super Tuesday states.
+
+The billionaire businessman leads by double-digits in Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia, according to RealClearPolitics poll averages. Roughly 53 percent of the GOP’s 595 delegates on Tuesday are in those states.
+
+Those polls were released before Trump over the weekend initially declined to disavow the backing of former KKK leader David Duke, which Rubio says makes him “unelectable.”
+
+Trump has since disavowed the support and blamed his original handling of the question on a faulty earpiece.
+
+The tough race is taking a toll on the candidates. Rubio, barnstorming the South to take hold of the GOP establishment mantle, temporarily lost his voice at a rally outside of Atlanta and needed South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who has endorsed him, to take the microphone.
+
+The two other GOP candidates, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, have six and four delegates, respectively.",REAL
+2886,How Obama Abandoned Democracy in Iraq,"W hen trying to explain the current unrest in the Middle East, from Iraq to Syria to Yemen, American officials often resort to platitudes about Sunni and Shia Muslims fighting each other for “centuries” due to “ancient hatreds.” Not only is this claim historically inaccurate, but it also ignores the unintended consequences that the Iraq War more recently leashed on the region. That war—and the manner in which the United States left it behind in 2011—shifted the balance of power in the region in Iran’s favor. Regional competition, of which Iran’s tension with Saudi Arabia is the main but not only dimension, exacerbated existing fault-lines, with support for extreme sectarian actors, including the Islamic State, turning local grievances over poor governance into proxy wars.
+
+Nothing that happened in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was pre-ordained; different futures than the one unfolding today were possible. Recall that violence declined drastically during the 2007 U.S. troop surge, and that for the next couple of years both Iraq and the West felt that the country was going in the right direction. But the seeds of Iraq’s unravelling were sown in 2010, when the United States did not uphold the election results and failed to broker the formation of a new Iraqi government. As an adviser to the top U.S. general in Iraq, I was a witness.
+
+“My greatest fear,” General Raymond Odierno, the then commanding general of U.S. forces in Iraq, told me in early 2010, “is that we stabilize Iraq, then hand it over to the Iranians in our rush to the exit.”
+
+General O (as he is known), had recently watched the 2007 movie Charlie Wilson’s War, which recounts how U.S. interest in Afghanistan ceased once the mujahedeen defeated the Soviet Army in 1989 and drove them out. Now, he had a premonition that the same could happen in Iraq. “I’ve invested too much here,” he said, “to simply walk away and let that happen.”
+
+I had first met Odierno in 2003, when he was the commanding general of the 4th Infantry Division responsible for the provinces of Salah al-Din, Diyala and Kirkuk in the early days of the Iraq War; I had been the representative in Kirkuk of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-led transitional government that controlled Iraq after Hussein’s fall. Now, as his political adviser, I was helping General O ensure that the United States kept its focus on the mission in Iraq while drawing down U.S. forces.
+
+Odierno wanted U.S. engagement with Iraq to continue for years to come, but led by U.S. civilians, not the military. He believed that, in order to train Iraqi security forces and provide the psychological support needed to maintain a level of stability, 20,000 or so U.S. troops needed to stay in Iraq beyond 2011, when all American troops were scheduled to be withdrawn. But the real engagement, General O believed, should be from the other instruments of national power, led by the U.S. embassy.
+
+Every time a congressional delegation visited us in Baghdad, General O put up a slide showing why the United States should continue to invest in Iraq through the Strategic Framework Agreement that the two countries had signed in 2008. General O knew that for the mission to succeed, there needed to be a political agreement between Iraqi leaders. Otherwise, all the security gains that the American troops had fought so hard for would not be sustainable. He took every opportunity to educate and communicate these complexities to the new Obama administration.
+
+For six months, General O had tried hard to support the leadership of Chris Hill, the new American ambassador who had taken up his post in April 2009. But Odierno had begun to despair. It was clear that Hill, though a career diplomat, lacked regional experience and was miscast in the role in Baghdad. In fact, he had not wanted the job, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had persuaded him to take it; she admitted as much to General O, he told me, when he met her in early 2010 in Washington to discuss the dysfunction at the embassy. General O complained that Hill did not engage with Iraqis or with others in the diplomatic community—his only focus appeared to be monitoring the activities of the U.S. military.
+
+It was frightening how a person could so poison a place. Hill brought with him a small cabal who were new to Iraq and marginalized all those with experience in the country. The highly knowledgeable and well-regarded Arabist Robert Ford had cut short his tour as ambassador to Algeria to return to Iraq for a third tour and turned down another ambassadorship to stay on in Iraq and serve as Hill’s deputy. But Hill appeared not to want Ford’s advice on political issues and pressured him to depart the post early in 2010. In his staff meetings, Hill made clear how much he disliked Iraq and Iraqis. Instead, he was focused on making the embassy “normal” like other U.S. embassies. That apparently meant having grass within the embassy compound. The initial attempts to plant seed had failed when birds ate it all, but eventually, great rolls of lawn turf were brought in—I had no idea from where—and took root. By the end of his tenure, there was grass on which the ambassador could play lacrosse.
+
+The national elections took place on March 7, 2010, and went more smoothly than we had dared hope. After a month of competitive campaigning across the country and wide media coverage of the different candidates and parties, 62 percent of eligible Iraqis turned out to vote.
+
+The European Union and others had fielded hundreds of international poll-watchers alongside thousands of trained Iraqi election observers, while the United Nations provided the Iraqis with advice on technical matters related to elections. All this helped to sustain the credibility of the process. Insurgents sought to create a climate of fear by planting bombs in water bottles and blowing up a house, but the Iraqi security forces stood up to the test.
+
+“We won the elections!” Rafi Issawi, the deputy prime minister, shouted excitedly to me on the phone. I could hear celebratory gunfire in the background. We had not expected Iraqiya—a coalition headed by the secular Shia Ayad Allawi and leaders of the Sunni community, and running on a non-sectarian platform—to do so well. The coalition had won 91 seats—two more than the incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition.
+
+I accompanied General O and Hill to a meeting with Maliki the next day. Maliki, a Shia, had been prime minister since 2006. Americans and Iraqis alike initially viewed him as weak, but his reputation grew after he ordered military operations against Shia militias. Since then, Iraqi politicians had become increasingly fearful of his authoritarian tendencies. He had insisted on running separately in the election—as State of Law rather than joining a united Shia coalition as had happened in 2005—in large part because the Shia parties would not agree on him to lead the list. Nobody wanted a second Maliki premiership.
+
+When Hill asked Maliki that day about his retirement plans, it was immediately apparent that he was not contemplating stepping down. Instead, he claimed there had been massive election fraud and that the Mujahideen al-Khalq, an Iranian opposition group locked away in eastern Iraq’s Diyala province, had used satellites to tamper with the computers used to tally the voting results—even though the computers were not connected to the Internet and thousands of election observers had monitored the voting. But Maliki’s advisers had told him he would win big with more than a hundred seats, so he demanded a recount. Maliki was becoming scary.",REAL
+2348,Obama gets away with some whoppers on guns at town hall event,"President Obama’s appearance at a town hall meeting Thursday night on “Guns in America” was an orchestrated performance by invitation only. But event, hosted by CNN at George Mason University, saw anchor Anderson Cooper continually surprise the president.
+
+Cooper demonstrated a deft command of the facts related to the gun issue and that came through with his guests and in his questions—though, as the evening unfolded, he continually let the president get away with untruths about his past positions.
+
+Surprisingly, both sides of the issue were present in the small room—though, judging by audience applause, most were anti-gun-freedom.
+
+Some of the moments were unintentionally revealing.
+
+Cooper began by asking President Obama if he’d ever owned a gun. Mr. Obama sat up in surprise and said “no.” But, after a search for words, the president said he shoots skeet sometimes at Camp David before adding that he’s not much “of a marksman.” When he said that anyone who enjoys the shotgun sports knew he must not have shot skeet much, as “marksmanship” is a term used for target shooting, not by those who shoot skeet, trap or sporting clays.
+
+When Cooper shifted the discussion to why the president chose to use executive actions on the gun issue, instead of working with Congress, Cooper asked the president if he would meet with the NRA. The president said, “I’m happy to meet with the NRA,” but as he said it he had this snarky smile on his face that would have been more fitting on one of his late show appearances.
+
+Now, CNN says they invited President Obama to this live “town hall” on guns at George Mason University and that they later invited the NRA. The NRA, however, said they’d rather not play along with a “public relations spectacle orchestrated by the White House.”
+
+The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for firearms manufacturers, also declined an invitation. Larry Keane, senior vice president and general counsel to the NSSF, told me, “We declined the invitation because it is a White House-orchestrated made-for-TV event and not an opportunity for a genuine dialogue or an effort to find common ground. We remain disappointed that the president has chosen to demagogue the issue for political purposes instead of providing real leadership like working to advance Rep. Tim Murphy’s bipartisan legislation to address the issue of mental health, which is the common denominator in mass shootings.”
+
+Given Obama’s—and CNN’s—attacks on the NRA and gun manufacturers in general, it is hard to blame them for passing on the invitation, but in retrospect Cooper might have made them wish they were there to help keep President Obama squirming.
+
+As squirm he did—with the facts and in his seat.
+
+Taya Kyle, the wife of the late “American Sniper” Chris Kyle, was the first person Cooper called on. Kyle recently won a gun competition using the latest in sniper technology. She is a confident straight shooter. She pointed out that while the murder rate is at an all-time low, gun ownership is at an all time high. And then she asked, “Why not celebrate who we are?”
+
+President Obama began shifting on his stool and searching for words to lawyer his way out of these basic facts. He finally pointed out that national trends don’t necessarily hold true in all locales, but he never had to answer why the areas with the strictest gun controls tend to have the highest murder rates.
+
+There was also a rape survivor, Kimberly Corban, who, when called on said, “I have been unspeakably vandalized once already” before asking why she shouldn’t be able to carry a gun to protect herself.
+
+President Obama was really uncomfortable then. He began back peddling and said his current executive actions won’t interfere with her right to carry a gun. But he never had to explain that he has supported bans on concealed-carry permits.
+
+President Obama also repeatedly said that people can “just go on the Internet and buy whatever weapon they want.” But he was never forced to explain that any gun bought from a dealer over the Internet has to be sent to a local dealer that by law has to perform a background check before they can transfer the gun.
+
+Later, Cooper actually did challenge President Obama by breaking in and asking “is it fair to call it a conspiracy” that people think he wants to take their guns away. “Yes, it is fair to call it a conspiracy,” said President Obama, who then claimed that he isn’t plotting take peoples’ guns away.
+
+But Cooper didn’t force the president to address his advocacy for a renewed “assault weapons” ban, or for his administration’s public desire to use black lists, such as the no-fly list, to take away citizens’ Second Amendment rights without giving them even the basics of due process.
+
+There were other questions that took President Obama aback, such as when Sheriff Paul Babue pushed Obama on how his proposals wouldn’t solve recent mass shootings. Cooper even broke in to say that “none of the guns used in recent mass shootings, I should point out, were purchased from legal dealers.”
+
+President Obama didn’t have a clear answer to say why he isn’t swayed by these facts. He meandered before saying, “The young man who killed those children in Newtown didn’t have a criminal record but he had access to an arsenal.” He referred to an attack in China where a person attacked people with a knife and said “the vast majority survived because he wasn’t wielding a semiautomatic.”
+
+Again, Cooper allowed President Obama to escape an obvious allusion to the fact that he would like to ban semiautomatic firearms.
+
+The president was also allowed to get away with a big lie on “smart-guns.”
+
+President Obama said, “[Smart Gun technology] has not been developed primarily because it has been blocked by the NRA” and firearms manufacturers.
+
+Cooper didn’t challenge this point and instead called on a person in the audience, which changed the topic.
+
+Nevertheless, this is a clear and provable fabrication by President Obama. As I detail, with interviews with many gun makers, law makers and gun experts in my book “The Future of the Gun,” the NRA and the NSSF, to name two pro-Second Amendment groups, have statements on their websites saying they are not opposed to “smart-gun” technology. All the manufacturers, the NRA leadership and more, point to laws that seek to mandate smart-gun technology—regulations previously backed by the Obama administration—that are what is impeding smart-gun development. Even “60 Minutes” noted this, and pointed out a New Jersey law on the books that would do this, in a recent report.
+
+President Obama said early on in the town hall event that “people occupy different realities.”
+
+Anyone who watched CNN’s “Guns in America” was certainly left with the conclusion that in Obama’s chosen reality he wishes he could, with a stroke of his pen, pass European-style gun controls in America.
+
+Frank Miniter is the author of The Future of the Gun"" (Regnery 2014) a book that gets to the basis of the gun issue. He is also the author of the New York Times Bestseller ""The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide"" (Regnery April 14, 2009).",REAL
+3753,Doubts Rise Over Report Freddie Gray Injured Himself,"The Washington Post reported on Wednesday night that a prisoner who was in the van with Gray allegedly told investigators he could hear Gray ""banging against the walls"" of the police vehicle, and said he believed Gray was ""intentionally trying to injure himself,"" according to a document written by a Baltimore police investigator.
+
+“We have reported for some time that by the time that prisoner is loaded into that van, Freddie Gray was unresponsive. Secondly we have no medical evidence that Freddie Gray suffered any injury that would indicate that he had injured himself,” Miller told MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Wednesday night.
+
+Gray was only in the van with the second prisoner for the final five minutes of the ride, Miller told Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday evening. There is “no evidence [Gray was] banging [his] head against van,” Miller tweeted. Jane Cook, an attorney for the Gray family, called the report “speculation” as she had seen no evidence supporting it.
+
+""We disagree with any implication that Freddie Gray severed his own spinal cord,"" Downs said. ""We question the accuracy of the police reports we’ve seen thus far, including the police report that says Mr. Gray was arrested without force or incident.""
+
+While the timeline of Gray’s arrest remains incomplete, Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said that before the second prisoner was loaded into the van, an officer had to “pick [Gray] up off the floor and place him on the seat.” Police said he asked for medical attention at this point. He had earlier been placed in leg irons after an officer felt he was becoming ""irate,"" police said.
+
+Another issue that arose from the Post’s report was the fact that the second prisoner was unable to see Gray, as he would have been separated by a metal partition in the van. The prisoner who allegedly gave the account is in jail, and the Post has not been able to reach him for comment.
+
+The affidavit obtained by the Post was in an application for a search warrant seeking the seizure of the uniform worn by one of the officers involved in the episode with Gray. The document is part of the investigation into Gray’s death, and the police investigator who wrote it is unnamed.
+
+As the Post notes, there is no other evidence supporting the purported claims of the second prisoner. There is no video of his time in the van either.
+
+As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said on Wednesday night, the leak to the Washington Post is the first information we have seen of the investigation into Gray’s death. “Leaks like this always serve somebody’s purpose,” Maddow said, “We have no idea who gave this to the Post.”
+
+Police have maintained that they do not know how Gray suffered the fatal injury, and have been joined in their investigation by the Justice Department. Police Commissioner Batts has admitted to mistakes in how Gray’s arrest was handled, saying he should have received medical attention and that he should have been secured while in the back of the police van.
+
+Baltimore residents have been joined by others nationwide in their demands for answers of how what happened to Gray during and after his arrest on April 12 for a weapons charge. Gray was pinned down by the officers making the arrest, and then loaded into the police vehicle for transport while conscious. When he arrived at the station, a medic was called and Gray was taken to the hospital. He died a week later. Gray “gave up without the use of force, “ Baltimore Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said. None of the six officers involved in the arrest described using force with Gray. A cell phone video showed officers dragging gray while handcuffed towards the police van. Video showed Gray on the ground conscious and talking, and police said he requested medical attention.",REAL
+6232,Public Support for the Euro,"by Yves Smith 
+By Felix Roth, Associated Research Fellow, University of Göttingen, Lars Jonung, Senior Professor, Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies, Lund University, and Felicitas Nowak-Lehmann, Senior Researcher at CEGE and IAI, University of Goettingen. Originally published at VoxEU 
+The euro as a common currency has recently been the subject of harsh criticism by economists from both sides of the Atlantic, including claims that citizens in some Eurozone countries are turning against the it. This column argues that, in fact, the euro currently enjoys comfortable popular support in each of the 12 original member states of the Eurozone and that potential upcoming referenda in any of these countries do not appear to pose a threat to the currency. In contrast, popular support for the euro has declined sharply in non-Eurozone EU member states since the recent crisis, with the UK standing out as the country with the most negative view. 
+Recently the euro as a common currency has been the subject of strong criticism by economists from both sides of the Atlantic (e.g. Stiglitz 2016, Sinn 2014). This criticism has been inspired by the financial and economic crisis in some Eurozone countries and by the slow recovery in the region after the Global Crisis of 2008. Scholars claim that a majority of citizens have turned against the euro in large member states of the Eurozone, such as Germany (Stiglitz 2016: 314) and Italy (Guiso et al. 2016: 292, Sinn in Kaiser 2016a). 
+In the wake of the vote for Brexit in the UK referendum in June this year, it is argued that knock-on effects in the form of potential upcoming referenda on the euro in the Eurozone (e.g. in Italy) might lead to its break-up (Feldstein 2016, Stiglitz in Martin 2016, Stiglitz in Kaiser 2016b). In addition, it has been postulated that animosity amongst EU member states is at a high (Alesina 2015: 78). This suggests a rising threat to the European project, including the common currency. 
+These claims concerning the standing of the euro raise the question: How does the public in EU member states actually look upon the common currency at this stage? We are able to provide an answer based on survey data on the popularity of the single currency, which are available from its creation, as polled by TNS-opinion (European Commission 2016). These data are provided through the Eurobarometer (EB). The euro is a unique currency in the sense that similar time series evidence does not exist for any other currency. 
+Our answer draws upon our previous contribution to this site (Roth et al. 2012), where we explored Eurobarometer survey data on public support for the common currency from 1990 to 2012. There we concluded that in the first four years of the crisis (2008-2012), public support for the euro declined only marginally. Now the question is: What has happened in the most recent years regarding public support for the euro? 
+Support for the Common Currency Within the Original Eurozone 
+We present an up-to-date picture of the evolution of public support for the euro until May 2016, adopting our approach in Roth et al. (2016). First, we focus on the original 12 Eurozone member states (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain – the EZ12) that adopted the euro as a physical entity in January 2002. Figure 1 shows average net support (in per cent) for the single currency in the EZ12 countries over a 27-year period from 1990 to 2016. 
+Figure 1 Average net support (in %) for the single currency in the EZ12 countries, 1990-2016 
+
+Note : The y-axis displays net support in percent. Since the figure depicts net-support, all values above 0 indicate that a majority of the respondents support the single currency. The dashed lines distinguish the introduction of the euro as a book keeping entity in January 1999, the actual circulation of the euro in January 2002 and the start of the financial crisis in September 2008. Data for EB45 were not available. Population-weights are applied. Net-support is measured as the number of ‘For’ responses minus ‘Against’ responses and is constructed according to the equation: Net-support = (For – Against)/(For + Against + Don’t Know). Source : Figure 1 is an updated version of Figure 1 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016; 948). 
+Figure 1 leads us to the following conclusions: Over the 27-year time period, a majority of citizens within the EZ12 has supported the single currency (with average net support exceeding 15% at all times). Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, a large majority of EZ12 citizens has supported the euro (with average net support exceeding 30%). In the 8th year (in May 2016) since the start of the financial crisis, average net support of 42% has surpassed the pre-crisis level of 40% in March-May 2008. 
+Figure 1 gives the aggregate picture. How has support for the euro evolved in the individual members of the EZ12? Figure 2 provides an answer. 
+Figure 2 Net support for the single currency in EZ12 countries, 1990-2016 (%) 
+
+Source : Figure 2 is an updated version of Figure A1 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 957). 
+Figure 2 suggests that: Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, aside from short periods in Finland and Greece before the crisis, a majority of citizens in each member state of the EZ12 supported the euro, even in times of crisis. From 2008 to 2016, significant increases in support in Greece, Portugal and Germany (26, 23 and 10 percentage points, respectively) have levelled out the fall in net support in other EZ12 countries, ranging from 11 percentage points in Ireland to 5 percentage points in Finland. Over the 27-year time period (1990-2016), Italy has always had a pro-euro majority, with the minimum net level of 17% in November 2013, clearly above the majority threshold of 0%. 
+Support for the Euro Among the New Members of the Eurozone 
+How has support for the euro evolved in the new member states that joined the euro after its physical introduction in January 2002, that is, in Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia? After adopting the euro, aside from short periods in Cyprus, a majority of citizens in each country has supported the euro. 
+Figure 3 Net support for the euro across seven EZ countries that joined the euro in the period 2004-16 (%) 
+
+Source : Figure 3 is an updated version of Figure A3 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 958). 
+Support for the Euro Outside the Eurozone 
+In our 2012 column, we highlighted the distinct fall in public support for the euro in EU member states outside the Eurozone (Roth et al. 2012). What has happened since then? Figure 4, displaying the evolution of net support for the euro outside the Eurozone from 1990-2016, gives an answer. 
+Figure 4 Net support for the single currency in non-EZ countries, 1990-2016 (%) 
+
+Source : Figure 4 is an updated version of Figure A2 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 958). 
+Figure 4 suggests: Outside the Eurozone, net support for the euro has declined in a pronounced manner. Whereas in Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Poland a majority of citizens supported the euro in the years preceding the crisis, a majority in those countries has turned against the euro after the crisis. The decline in support, ranging from 65 to 30 percentage points, is strong. In contrast, in Romania and Hungary, in spite of a fall of 35 and 28 percentage points, respectively, a majority of euro support still exists. In Denmark and Sweden, the majority has turned away from euro support after the crisis. Just before the crisis, there was for brief periods a majority for the euro. The UK is an exceptional case. For the 26 years from 1991 to 2016, a majority of citizens was always against the single currency. During the crisis, net support for the euro reached levels as low as -66% (in November 2012). Given the persistent rejection of the euro, the Brexit vote should not come as a surprise but rather as reflecting a long-running critical view towards the European project. Therefore, any knock-on effects of the Brexit vote in the form of a break-up of the Eurozone via potential upcoming referenda in the Eurozone are not likely to emerge. On the contrary, recent survey data from July 2016 by the French polling institute, Ifop, suggest an enduring majority support for the euro in the Eurozone (Fourquet et al. 2016: 52). 
+Conclusions 
+Our updated analysis of public support for the common currency over a quarter of a century, from 1990-2016, brings out four major conclusions. 
+First, in contrast to recent claims, a majority of citizens support the euro in each member state of the original Eurozone, including in Germany and Italy. This was the case even during the peak of the recent crisis. 
+Second, in contrast to some critical euro voices, we do not believe, on basis of Eurobarometer data, that any knock-on effects of the Brexit vote in any potential upcoming referenda on EU issues would pose an imminent threat to the euro. 
+Third, taking into account our earlier findings, which identify the unemployment rate as a key driver of public support for the euro in times of crisis (Roth et al. 2016), a strong job recovery in the Eurozone is likely to increase public support for the euro. 
+Fourth, popular support for the common currency has fallen sharply after the recent crisis in EU member states that have not adopted the euro. Here the negative sentiment is strongest in the UK. 
+We suggest the following bottom line: with the exception of short periods in Finland and Greece before the crisis, the evidence points towards majority support for the euro in each original Eurozone member state (including Italy and Germany) before, during and after the crisis. So far, the euro has clear backing from the public. It has adopted the common currency as its own currency. 
+See original post for references 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+7149,"Prof: Canoes reek of genocide, white privilege","Prof: Canoes reek of genocide, white privilege Craft has long been symbol of Canadian identity Published: 14 mins ago 
+(Heat Street) Forget Halloween costumes and yoga, there’s a new symbol of cultural appropriation—the canoe. 
+According to Misao Dean, Professor of English at the University of Victoria, the canoe can be a symbol of colonialism, imperialism and genocide due to history. She also accused the canoers of cultural appropriation because they are primarily white men and have a privileged place in society. 
+In a radio interview for CBC Radio, which wasn’t picked by the Internet until several months later, she claimed “we have a whole set of narratives that make the canoe into a kind of morally untouchable symbol, something that seems natural, that seems ordinary, and seems to promote values that we ascribe to.”",FAKE
+6668,"US-led Coalition Killed 300 Civilians in just 11 Air Strikes in Syria, Amnesty International Report Finds","US-led Coalition Killed 300 Civilians in just 11 Air Strikes in Syria, Amnesty International Report Finds Group calls on authorities to 'come clean' about full extent of casualties and damage Image Credits: BBC . 
+At least 300 civilians have been killed in just 11 air strikes by the US-led coalition, a report has found amid concern for families trapped in Isis’ stronghold of Mosul. 
+Amnesty International urged the Pentagon and its allies to “come clean” about the full extent of deaths in operations against the so-called Islamic State, with official inquiries so far acknowledging only dozens of casualties. 
+Assessing reports from the ground, eyewitness interviews, satellite imagery, photos and video footage, investigators said US Central Command (Centcom) may have “failed to take necessary precautions to spare civilians and carried out unlawful attacks” in Syria. 
+The 11 coalition attacks reviewed by Amnesty include strikes during operations to drive Isis out of Manbij over the summer, when more than 100 civilians, including children, where reportedly killed in the villages of al-Tukhar , al-Hadhadh and al-Ghandoura in their homes and at a market.",FAKE
+5873,Time: Investigating Hillary is an Attack on All Women,"Time: Investigating Hillary is an Attack on All Women November 1, 2016 
+Good morning. It's Tuesday. 
+Who's up for another silly attempt to claim that Hillary Clinton is only being investigated for her rogue email setup because she's a woman? This gem comes from Robin Lakoff, a Berkeley professor in sustained incoherence and special pleading. 
+Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women 
+'It's not about emails; it's about public communication by a woman’ 
+I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. 
+The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? 
+His name was General Petraeus. Thank you. Have a nice day. 
+Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around. 
+That escalated quickly. And incoherently. Also I'm pretty sure it's not the 20s or whatever decade Robin is parodying or channeling. But yes, Hillary Clinton is only in this mess because she's a woman. It has nothing to do with anything else. That must be why Albright and Rice weren't in the center of similar scandals. 
+If the candidate were male, there would be no scolding and no “scandal.” Those very ideas would be absurd. Men have a nearly absolute right to freedom of speech. In theory, so do women, but that, as the creationists like to say, is only a theory. 
+Emailing classified information on your server to avoid transparency regulations is not free speech. It's illegal for both public officials of both genders. 
+But here’s Hillary Rodham Clinton, the very public stand-in for all bossy, uppity and ambitious women. Here are her emails. And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do—engaging in high-level public communication—well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something. 
+Illegally... emailing... classified... information.",FAKE
+3383,State Department OK'd most Bill Clinton speech requests within days,"State Department officials under Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton moved quickly when aides to Bill Clinton asked them in March 2010 to approve plans for the former president to address clients of a multinational British bank, Barclays. Within four days, the department's ethics office signed off on the request -- as it did for hundreds of others from the former president during his wife's four-year tenure leading the agency.
+
+Its standard response, fired off in a short memo: ""We have no objection.""
+
+That decision remained unchanged even after the Justice Department announced just months later, in August 2010, that Barclays Bank agreed to pay nearly $300 million in penalties for violating financial sanctions against Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Libya and Burma. The long-running case had hardly been a secret: Barclays had openly acknowledged in its annual reports -- as recently as the same month as Clinton's 2010 request -- that it was under investigation by the Justice Department and others for sanctions violations, and it cautioned that the impact on its profits ""could be substantial.""
+
+In November, the former president mingled with top Barclays executives and clients at a bank-sponsored question session in Singapore. A little more than two months later, he again joined Barclays officers and clients at an exclusive dinner in Davos, Switzerland. The two appearances for Barclays netted Bill Clinton $650,000.
+
+During Hillary Clinton's tenure as the top U.S. diplomat, lawyers and other ethics officials in the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser gave near-blanket approval to at least 330 requests for Bill Clinton's appearance at speeches, dinners and events both in the U.S. and around the globe. More than 220 paid events earned the family nearly $50 million, according to a review of State Department documents and Hillary Clinton's financial disclosure forms by The Associated Press.
+
+Now, as Hillary Clinton moves forward with her presidential campaign, the ease with which her husband was repeatedly cleared to address companies and governments around the world highlights potential ethical complications that are likely to intensify if she becomes the country's next president.
+
+""It's politically going to be very treacherous,"" said Jan Baran, head of the government ethics group at Washington law firm Wiley Rein LLP, who served as general counsel to the Republican National Committee. ""It just becomes controversy all the time.""
+
+The potential ""first dude"" has said he intends to continue accepting speaking fees during the presidential campaign.
+
+""I got to pay our bills,"" he said in an interview with NBC's ""Today Show"" last week.
+
+Taken together, the State Department and financial disclosure documents show the agency sped through Bill Clinton's steady stream of requests for events while rarely raising concerns about potential conflicts. At the same time, the agency's ethics office, which had primary responsibility for the decisions, was hobbled by ""strained program operations,"" according to a 2012 report by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, the government's top ethics agency.
+
+State Department ethics officials gave quick approval, for example, for the two Barclays appearances and events paid by other international banks under legal scrutiny. Bill Clinton's $200,000 appearance in Florida for British-based HSBC in 2011 was cleared despite an ongoing federal money-laundering investigation that led to a 2012 settlement with prosecutors.
+
+Five U.S. events in 2011 and 2012 earned the former president $840,000 from the wealth management unit of UBS Bank less than two years after the Swiss bank had acknowledged a massive tax evasion scheme aiding American clients and paid $780 million in penalties. The banks declined to comment about their dealings with the former president.
+
+The State Department also green-lighted requests by foreign governments to hire the former president for events, despite potential complications for his wife's diplomacy at the time and for a future Hillary Clinton presidency. Similar concerns about foreign influence have been raised about the millions of dollars donated by foreign governments over the past decade to the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton family's global charity.
+
+The former president was paid $600,000 to appear at a government-sponsored event in the United Arab Emirates in December 2011. The State Department also approved a 2010 Clinton event in Bangkok co-sponsored by a Thai government energy ministry and state gas firm, but despite news coverage of the speech there is no record of payment in his wife's financial disclosure.  An aide to Bill Clinton said the Thai speech fee was donated to the Clinton Foundation.
+
+Not all appearances were approved: A request for Clinton to speak in Shanghai in 2009 was rejected because of State Department hesitation that a prospective host might be an agent of the Chinese government. The former president's team withdrew the request.
+
+The Clinton campaign declined to comment, referring questions to the State Department and Bill Clinton's private office.
+
+State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said last week the agency was not ""aware of any actions taken by Secretary Clinton that were influenced by donations to the Clinton Foundation or its offshoots or by speech honoraria and consultancies of former President Clinton."" Another spokesman, Alec Gerlach, declined to address specific cases such as the Barclays events.
+
+The State Department's scrutiny, which went beyond the standard ethics requirements for all federal officials, was the result of a voluntary process agreed to by both Clintons to avoid ""even the appearance of a conflict of interest,"" according to a January 2009 memo sent by David Kendall, Bill Clinton's personal lawyer, to Jim Thessin, who oversaw the vetting in the State Department. Clinton's office agreed to provide the names of organizations hosting the former president at least 14 days before the event, according to the memo. Lawyers at the agency would then aim to complete their review within five days.
+
+While most internal emails between State Department ethics officials about Bill Clinton's proposed appearances were redacted to protect internal legal considerations, snippets that survived the censoring depict a vetting process that appeared both strained by the workload and rushed by the former president's deadlines.
+
+""This is overdue and our host needs a signed contract today,"" wrote Terry Krinvic, Clinton's director of scheduling, in a March 2, 2011, email to State Department officials.  A State Department official working on a speech request described herself in a February 2011 email as ""totally stressed out, but will do it this afternoon.""
+
+In another memo from June 2010, an agency official dashed off a memo warning: ""URGENT RE: Clinton Foundation Issue."" The official told a State lawyer: ""I'd very much appreciate a turnaround this afternoon as former President Clinton is scheduled to arrive in Tanzania tomorrow and (diplomatic) Post needs to run out these details."" The issue, not identified in the redaction, was left unresolved overnight. ""Former POTUS Clinton is on the ground in Tanzania,"" the agency lawyer wrote the next morning. ""We need guidance fairly urgently to still be relevant."" The censored emails do not indicate whether the State officials resolved the issue in time. POTUS means ""president of the United States.""
+
+As State Department officials processed Clinton's event requests in September 2012, the Office of Government Ethics warned that the State Department's office ""has extremely limited capacity to respond to the increased demands on its program."" It said it was ""concerned about the lack of compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements in the areas of financial disclosure, annual training and ethics agreements.""
+
+Gerlach, the State Department spokesman, said the department's review of former President Clinton's speeches and consultancies was not within the scope of the review by the government-wide ethics agency.
+
+A former senior State Department official familiar with the vetting process in the early months of Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state described the department as often shut out from both relevant internal department information and ongoing investigations at other federal agencies that might have aided their reviews. The former official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the department's ethics work.
+
+On all sides, the process involved lawyers with long ties to the Clinton family -- and each other. Cheryl Mills was Hillary Clinton's chief of staff at the State Department and was frequently included on the other end of emails during the State Department review of the requests. Mills was a former White House deputy counsel who collaborated with Kendall on Bill Clinton's impeachment legal defense before working for Hillary Clinton at the State Department.
+
+Less than a month after Hillary Clinton was confirmed, a request to approve some of Bill Clinton's proposed private consulting work was sent by his long-time personal aide Doug Band, prompting Mills to prod the agency's deputy legal adviser to review the arrangement. Approval for the former president to enter into a consultancy arrangement with Band's corporate advisory firm, Teneo, came in 2011, allowing Clinton to offer ""services regarding geopolitical, economic and social trends"" for three years.
+
+Only a handful of proposed arrangements appear to have been rejected. A consulting contract with Saban Capital Group Inc., a firm headed by major Clinton donor Haim Saban, was rejected because of what the State Department deemed Saban's active involvement in foreign affairs, particularly the Middle East.
+
+Two other consulting contracts -- one with longtime friend Steve Bing's Shangri-La Industries and another with Wasserman Investments GP -- raised no such concerns. A corporate entity for Wasserman Investments GP could not be found, but California's Wasserman Media group is run by entertainment and sports executive and Democratic donor Casey Wasserman.
+
+On Thursday, Saban hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's campaign at his Beverly Hills home, raising at least $1.2 million from 450 attendees.
+
+Occasionally, the agency offered guidance to avoid a clear conflict. In the case of White & Case, an international law firm based in New York, a department lawyer signed off on the speech but noted for ""situational awareness"" that the firm was representing the 1979 U.S. hostages seeking damages from Iran -- a case the State Department was trying to have dismissed. ""We think it would be best to avoid being drawn into any discussion of the litigation,"" the lawyer wrote.
+
+Bill Clinton's November 2010 appearance for Barclays in Singapore was one example of the potential for conflict posed by the frenetic stream of requests.
+
+In March 2010, Krinvic forwarded a Clinton proposal to appear at two bank events, a Barclays Asia Forum in Singapore in November and Barclays dinner in Davos in January 2011. In Singapore, the plans called for Clinton to speak during a moderated question-and-answer session before 650 Asian investors and pose for photos. In Davos, Clinton would attend a similar session before 20 Barclays senior executives and 140 clients and their spouses.
+
+Thessin replied on March 23, telling Krinvic that ""we have no objection.""
+
+It was widely known by then that Barclays was under investigation by federal prosecutors for repeated illegal transactions with banks in Iran, Libya, Cuba, Sudan and Burma and for violating U.S. financial sanctions against those governments.
+
+Barclays had voluntarily disclosed four illegal banking transactions to federal and New York financial authorities in 2006. That led to an internal inquiry by the bank and investigations by federal and New York state prosecutors. The scrutiny resulted in Barclays' acknowledgement in federal court in August 2010 that it had violated U.S. sanctions. The bank also agreed to cooperate with the government under a deal that deferred prosecution for two years under supervision of a federal judge. Barclays agreed to pay $298 million in fines.
+
+The same week in November 2010 that Barclays' lawyers submitted a status report to the trial judge overseeing their case, Bill Clinton appeared at the Barclays forum in Singapore and mingled with clients who also attended a golf tournament sponsored by the bank. There is no documentation in State Department files whether officials had reconsidered their approval after Barclays acknowledged violating U.S. laws. Barclays declined to comment about Clinton's appearances or the investigation.
+
+""People admire the way he can take complex issues and break them down for a global audience,"" Barclays Plc CEO Robert Diamond said in an interview with Bloomberg News two days after Clinton addressed bank clients in Davos.
+
+While the Treasury Department administers oversees the administration of U.S. financial sanctions, the State Department has its own Office of Economic Sanctions Policy, which is responsible for developing foreign policy-related sanctions to counter threats to national security.
+
+The criminal case against Barclays also noted that the presidential orders for sanctions against Iran were authorized by the treasury secretary in consultation with the secretary of state.
+
+While the State Department's lawyers concluded that most of Clinton's speeches did not violate foreign policy interests, some of his appearances could pose political risk for his wife's presidential bid by giving Republican opponents an opening to depict the couple as beholden to powerful interests.
+
+Over a three-day period in November 2011, the Swedish telecom company Ericsson paid $750,000 for Clinton to address industry leaders in Hong Kong; Chinese executives paid $550,000 for a speech in Shanghai; and he made $260,000 addressing the annual meeting of HCL, an Indian outsourcing giant, at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. His total haul: $1.56 million.
+
+While the former president traveled the world, efforts to assure the ethics of his itineraries bounced around the State Department. A request to speak at a climate change summit organized by an Abu Dhabi government environmental group prompted an email to the UAE desk officer asking whether ""potential affiliation with it by high-level officials"" would pose ""any harm to foreign policy."" The response: ""No concerns here."" Bill Clinton was paid $600,000 by the group, the Abu Dhabi Global Initiative.
+
+When Clinton was invited to participate in the China Philanthropy Forum in November 2012, an event aimed at promoting Chinese charitable giving, the State Department raised concerns that the event's sponsor was an association made up of former and current senior Chinese government officials. ""We will need to further consider this one,"" it said.
+
+Clinton eventually spoke at the forum's annual conference -- nine months after his wife left office.",REAL
+10553,Obamacare Architect on Rising Premiums: It’s Not a Big Increase,"Washington Free Beacon October 26, 2016 
+Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, a chief architect of Obamacare, described the recent announcement of rising health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act as “not a big increase.” 
+Emmanuel served as a special health care policy adviser to the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House at the beginning of President Obama’s first term. 
+Emmanuel spoke with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on Tuesday and was asked about a recent government report that stated health care premiums were slated to rise by 25 percent next year in the 39 states served by the federal online exchanges. 
+Ruhle started by asking Emmanuel, “Why should Americans have faith in the Affordable Care Act?” This article was posted: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 7:36 am Share this article",FAKE
+574,No profit left behind,Argentine president Mauricio Macri's office rebutting a report from an Argentinian journalist that set off waves in the American media.,REAL
+10112,Hidden in plain sight – The global depopulation agenda,"October 26, 2016 “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.” ~ Georgia Guidestones 
+This is one of the first of ten commandments blazoned across the Georgia Guidestones, an occult monument for which no person or organization has taken credit. Though the monument was commissioned by someone named R.C. Christian more than two decades ago, the true identity of the person who built this specter is still unidentified, and the message is but one of the many examples of a cabalistic desire to cull the population. 
+There are many more ‘hidden’ in plain sight. 
+The Georgie Guidestones state : 1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. 2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity. 3. Unite humanity with a living new language. 4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason. 5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts. 6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court. 7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials. 8. Balance personal rights with social duties. 9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite. 10.Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature. 
+Though some of these commandments seem harmless enough, the very first describes the supreme sentiment of the mysterious group of masons who erected the stones. If you want further narrative for what they bode, you don’t have to look far. As Stanford University Professor, Paul Ehrlich , the author of The Population Bomb states , “The first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size.” 
+We can see clearly that the ‘elite’ class, intent on ridding the planet of its burdensome load, has already poisoned the water of 42 out of 50 states with lead . Pesticides and fertilizers poison the remaining states’ water along with the original 42 states. Male infertility is rising due to these contaminants, and premature births along with miscarriage are more common due to others. If the water doesn’t kill you, it will simply lobotomize you, or at least start the process. Harvard medical has pronounced that fluoridated water lowered IQ scores in children who drank it, and aluminum along with fluoride is a known neurotoxin, also contributing to the rising numbers of Alzheimer’s, Parkinsons, and similar neurodegenerative diseases. READ: 11 Common Symptoms of the Global Depopulation Slow Kill 
+Should poisoning the water be insufficient to keep the population down, we can look to the advice of David Brower, once Executive Director of the Sierra Club and founder of the Friends of the Earth. He suggests that, “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” 
+Forced and coerced sterilization at the hands of the Eugenics Board and other bodies is nothing new. Some investigators recently found that 148 female inmates in two California prisons were sterilized between 2006 to 2010 — and there may be 100 more incidents dating back to the late 1990s. One reporter wrote , “ The women were signed up for the surgery while they were pregnant and housed at either the California Institution for Women in Corona or Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, which is now a men’s prison. 
+Former inmates and prisoner advocates maintain that prison medical staff coerced the women, targeting those deemed likely to return to prison in the future. 
+Crystal Nguyen, a former Valley State Prison inmate who worked in the prison’s infirmary during 2007, said she often overheard medical staff asking inmates who had served multiple prison terms to agree to be sterilized. 
+“I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s not right,’” Nguyen, 28, said. “ Do they think they’re animals, and they don’t want them to breed anymore? ” 
+Today vaccines are used in a similar manner to help cull the population against their informed consent. Eugenicist, Bill Gates tried to ‘ field test ’ his HPV vaccine in India on indigenous young girls, but the Indian government eventually brought a stop to this. The Rockefeller family also quietly funds vaccines that alter a woman’s hormones to make her less likely to become pregnant or to maintain a pregnancy. A book titled Disciplining Reproduction by Adele E. Clark explains what the elites were planning as early as the 1930s. “ Other lines of current immunological contraceptive research continue to seek what, during the 1930s, Max Mason of the Rockefeller Foundation called “anti-hormones”: vaccines to block hormones needed for very early pregnancy and a vaccine to block the hormone needed for the surface of the egg to function properly .” 
+Barack Obama’s top science advisor , John P. Holdren has also said : “ A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men . The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.” 
+A simple look at the peer-reviewed Plos One site offers over 7,500 additional scientific articles that connect vaccines to sterilization. 
+Should vaccines or forced implants be insufficient to reduce the number of ‘useless eaters’ in the world, as Henry Kissinger has implied, then there is also the revealing text of Dr. John Colemann, who outlines the aims of a Committee of 300, otherwise known as the original hierarchical organization to plan a New World Order . Among their plans are genocide, war, the installation of dictators, the legalization of drug use, and the normalizing of pornography : “To bring about depopulation of large cities according to the trial run carried out by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. It is interesting to note that Pol Pot’s genocidal plans were drawn up in the US by one of the Club of Rome’s research foundations, and overseen by Thomas Enders, a high-ranking State Department official. It is also interesting that the committee is currently seeking to reinstate the Pol Pot butchers in Cambodia. “….To cause by means of limited wars in the advanced countries, by means of starvation and diseases in the Third World countries, the death of three billion people by the year 2050, people they call ‘useless eaters.’ The Committee of 300 (Illuminati) commissioned Cyrus Vance to write a paper on this subject of how to bring about such genocide. The paper was produced under the title “Global 2000 Report” and was accepted and approved for action by former President James Earl Carter, and Edwin Muskie, then Secretary of State, for and on behalf of the US Government. Under the terms of the Global 2000 Report, the population of the US is to be reduced by 100 million by the year of 2050. “……To encourage, and eventually legalize the use of drugs and make pornography an ‘art-form,’ which will be widely accepted and, eventually, become quite commonplace.” 
+Look no further than Syria , Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, and a myriad other examples of false flag terrorism . Look no further than the top twenty pharmaceutical companies (all U.S., Illuminati based ) that control almost 99 percent of the world’s massive, ‘legalized’ drug trade. See clearly, the genocide happening around the globe , and the child sex trafficking and pornography which is silently abided in Hollywood, Washington, and in every government circle run by cabal-funded individuals. 
+Look at the money usurped for the task of culling the masses, as former U.S. Secretary of State and presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton has stated : “This year, the United States renewed funding of reproductive healthcare through the United Nations Population Fund, and more funding is on the way. The U.S. Congress recently appropriated more than $648 million in foreign assistance to family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide . That’s the largest allocation in more than a decade – since we last had a Democratic president, I might add.” 
+Furthermore, weather modification, or geoengineering , also known as chemtrails , additionally help the slow kill , or fast degeneration of the human species. NASA has admitted to using these weather altering programs, so there is no sense denying their presence. Aside from spraying lithium, strontium , barium, nano aluminum-coated fiberglass [known as CHAFF], radioactive thorium, cadmium, chromium, nickel, desiccated blood, mold spores, yellow fungus, and more, these chemical concoctions act as a global pandemic to further population control. 
+Without mention of contaminated food, DARPA contrived control devices, and further attempts to make slaves of the remaining sheeple who live through these demonic efforts, know this; you are swimming in the depopulation agenda. The effects are all around you, and it is high time to put up some kind of resistance. Via Waking Times Image: sagesolar/Flickr Nathaniel Mauka is a researcher of the dark side of government and exopolitics, and a staff writer for Waking Times .",FAKE
+5950,JUST IN: Trump Camp Caught On Cam Bragging Of “Voter Suppression” Against Women & Blacks (VIDEO),"Comments 
+Consultant Jesse Benton of the pro-Trump Great America Super PAC was just caught on camera admitting that he and his associates have been conducting a voter suppression campaign targeting African-Americans and women. 
+“In Cleveland, if we can return Hillary to normal turnout levels … we can turn her to regular turnout levels she’s gonna lose about 60,000 votes in that area – that’s dead heat. So we have a voter suppression campaign quite frankly, targeting African-Americans, and sort of suburban moms, just bad stuff about Hillary, just trying to take their taste for her away.” 
+Benton is the same Trump operative who was convicted of purchasing the vote of an Iowa state Senator and was recently busted attempting to funnel $2 million in illegal donations from a Chinese donor who turned out to be an undercover Telegraph reporter. 
+The Donald Trump campaign has been accusing anybody who dares to speak against them – the Clinton campaign, the media, polling organizations – of “rigging” the election against them. But time and time again it’s been obvious that the Republican Party has been the one behind the scenes working to disenfranchis e the American voter – especially non-white, male voters . 
+Since the Republicans can’t win this game, they have elected to change the rules instead, by passing restrictive voter ID laws that disenfranchise a large number of voters – especially minorities – from exercising their right to vote, closing down polling stations. 
+They justify this in an underhanded appeal to “protecting the integrity” of our democracy by waving the imaginary specter of “voter fraud” over the nation’s head. This is an entirely manufactured crisis that does not exist, but has been used to deprive thousands of potential Democratic voters of their rights. The Republican Party is an enemy of American democracy, and we must punish them for it at the ballot box. 
+Watch it here:",FAKE
+2667,Think Facebook isn't political? Think again | Nellie Bowles,"There’s a conceit that says everything at Facebook is run by data, not people. And we prefer it that way.
+
+For the site’s billion users, believing there’s no human puppet master behind the scenes makes its growing control over life more palatable. It’s just a clever machine, reflecting our desires better and better with every interaction, right? For news producers, we have to believe that the platform treats everyone equally: that it’s a publisher not an editor.
+
+In retrospect, this was always naive.
+
+A conservative whistleblower at Facebook yesterday claimed in a report that the influential “trending news” tab was deliberately biased toward liberal news – something the social network denies.
+
+“I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz,” the former news curator told the tech blog Gizmodo.
+
+Silicon Valley loves using the word algorithm to cover the word judgment, but any platform built by humans is always political. The engineers building the products want to skew them toward “quality” content, but it’s hard to determine what quality is, exactly, without making a choice influenced by values.
+
+When I read suggestions that Facebook might be skewing its trending bar, my first reaction, as a San Francisco liberal, was to be slightly pleased (any help we can get against Trump, right?). But what if the tables were turned? 
+
+
+
+“I wonder what the psychological effects of it are,” said Vince Coglianese, editor of the conservative news site The Daily Caller. “Millions of Facebook users now have no idea that the things they’re concerned about are the concerns of a lot of people. It’s scary to think Facebook’s intentionally isolating vast swaths of the country.”
+
+Facebook’s in a tricky spot because curation is necessary. Truly viral news content tends to be terrible. The front page of Reddit’s ‘”hot” section, an imperfect but useful barometer for the viral stories of the day, currently has headlines like: “Chameleon unsure bug is food or not” and “These condoms are around 60 years old. (found in my basement)”. Meanwhile my Facebook trending bar has: “Federal Trade Commission: Judge Rules Against Agency’s Bid to Block Health Care Systems Merger”. It’s probably fair to assume that the FTC news was not going as viral as that old condom, but a Facebook employee decided it was more important.
+
+Facebook is the dominant player in the media today. As news websites lose relevance to readers who find content socially, and as stories are published directly onto Facebook as Instant articles, the company’s power will only grow. To turn Facebook’s trending bar into a Reddit page is not the answer. But Facebook has to be more honest about how it operates as an editor.
+
+“Just be transparent about how the words on the screen are getting there,” Coglianese said.
+
+If there’s one thing Silicon Valley loves more than the conceit of an amoral algorithm, it is secrecy. And as a social network with a newsfeed of vacation pictures, Facebook could get away with being secretive about their curation.
+
+As the most powerful publisher and now editor in the world today, Facebook owes it to its billion users to be clear about how the site plans on distributing news.
+
+",REAL
+39,"Here’s how a wealthy Trump supporter could give $783,400 to support his campaign and the RNC","Word of warning: The following story contains math.
+
+For the past six years, there's been one fundamental principle governing our otherwise freewheeling campaign finance system: Donations to candidates and parties were strictly capped, while contributions to super PACs and other independent group could soar to previously unimaginable amounts.
+
+That's beginning to change, thanks to legal changes in 2014 that have dramatically altered how the national parties are fundraising for this year's general election, as we wrote today.
+
+The new rules allow political parties to take in huge checks from rich supporters for jumbo joint-fundraising committees, made up of dozens of accounts linked together. So while the law caps annual donations to national parties at $33,400 a year, the reality is that those who can afford it can end up shelling out as much as 33 times that amount.
+
+[Trump’s deal with the RNC shows how big money is flowing back to the parties]
+
+Hillary Clinton was the first presidential candidate to take advantage of loosened restrictions, setting up a so-called ""victory fund"" with the Democratic National Committee and an unheard-of 32 state parties in the fall. A wealthy supporter can give up to $356,100 *annually* to the Hillary Victory Fund. By establishing the fund last year, Clinton and the DNC were able to hit up rich donors twice: once in 2015 and once in 2016.
+
+The victory fund that Donald Trump created with Republican National Committee this week can take in a larger annual amount, but just this year: $449,400. The joint fundraising committee currently only includes 11 states, a number that could expand, raising the possibility that the maximum contribution could grow even larger.
+
+And wait, there are even more ways to give! Both the DNC and RNC have rolled out expensive packages for their biggest backers that come with perks like access to top officials and premium convention passes. To reach the highest donor tier, supporters are being asked to fund new convention, legal and headquarters accounts that Congress created in 2014.
+
+Put all this together, and major donors can end up giving  six- and seven-figures to the national parties this cycle. Here's how the math works:
+
+Meanwhile, the top RNC donor tier asks for $668,000 in 2015-16 cycle per individual:
+
+Total possible give for one person in 2015-16: $668,000 (top RNC donor tier) + $115,400 (Trump Victory minus previously given RNC donations) = $783,400
+
+A DNC donor could end up exceeding $1 million this cycle, thanks to Clinton's decision to set up her victory fund a year early and bring on so many state parties.
+
+An individual can give the Hillary Victory Fund $356,100 a year ($712,200 for the cycle):
+
+Meanwhile, the top DNC convention donor convention package asks for $467,600 in the 2015-16 cycle per individual:
+
+Total possible give for one person in 2015-16: $712,200 (Hillary Victory Fund) + $400,800 (convention package minus previously given DNC general account donations) = $1.113 million per cycle",REAL
+4612,"Go Ahead, Throw Your Vote Away","I recently had a pleasant encounter with a great and outspoken American who, despite his libertarian leanings, supports Hillary Clinton for president. I congratulated him on making a tough call but allowed as how I was looking forward to casting my ballot for the Libertarian Party's flag bearers, Gary Johnson and William Weld. ""It will be unadulterated pleasure,"" I offered, ""as there is no opportunity cost.""
+
+My correspondent fired back: ""Opportunity cost is Trump gets elected.""
+
+Here's where the curious nature of the American Electoral College comes in handy. Even where my vote—or the votes of my 100 closest, most easily influenced ""inner circle""—might swing an election, there is simply no real chance that pushing either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton over the top in South Carolina, where I live, will determine the outcome of the presidential race. If Hillary wobbles to victory in my current state of residence, she would have already demolished The Donald in the Electoral College. Similarly, in Maryland (where our family lived until 2014), a squeaker for Mr. Trump would indicate that Ms. Clinton had been vanquished in a yuuuuuge landslide elsewhere.
+
+Now, it is extremely unlikely that any one person's vote will rock even one state's electoral outcome. In the closest state presidential election of the last half-century—New Mexico (no, not Florida) in 2000—the final margin for Al Gore came to 366. And even that did not swing the national prize.
+
+But set those slim odds of individual influence at the state level off to one (long-shot) side. Assuming that you live in a red or blue, and not a purple, state, you swing completely out of the loop. In its most recent election forecast, the prediction site FiveThirtyEight estimates that there is a 17.9 percent chance that Florida will decide the election (putting one of the candidates ""over the top""). Next in line are Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the chances are 11.5 percent each, followed by Michigan at 8.7 percent and Wisconsin at 6.2 percent. When you account for North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota, Georgia, Nevada, and Iowa, you've eliminated all the states with as much as an estimated 2 percent chance to determine the outcome. Multiply that by the probability that one's own vote can throw one's state from Hillary to Donald or back, and the prospect that your vote will crown the next chief of state is neatly forecast as equal to 0.0.
+
+This safe harbor protects 67 percent of U.S. population, that portion living beyond the aforementioned swing states. This logic is not lost on the general public, which tends to vote for third parties more often in ""one-party"" states.
+
+Citizens realize that they are not trekking to the polls to cast the deciding national vote but to do their patriotic duty, taking pride in affixing an ""I Voted!"" sticker to their lapels and relishing the thought of canceling out some barbarian's vote (or their spouse's). But why not go commando and check the ballot for a person you'd actually prefer to see as president? In most states, the Electoral College makes this a guilt-free option.
+
+Consequential outcomes from individual presidential votes are so unlikely that Americans cast their chief of state endorsements while investing far less in research about their choice than the investigative effort they sink to select a smartphone data plan or their next Pokemon Go venue. This is straightforward: Decisions that affect actual results generally invite more attention than those that do not. It is called ""rational ignorance.""
+
+In another sense, it's liberating. Because your one tally will not change the nation's fate, you can afford to exercise your judgment worry-free. You are not at fault if Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton should win. Meanwhile, you will have indulged your conscience.
+
+It is often said that voting third party is ""throwing your vote away."" It would be more accurate to say that living in a non-swing state is throwing your vote away. One tactic to recapture some modicum of vote value is to pad the total for an upstart candidate. Moreover, you might help (if modestly) to put the system on notice that the Big Two political party choices are being rejected. Even when the minor parties do not elect a president, they can thus wield power. The classic example is the Socialist Party, which garnered a paltry 880,000 votes in the 1932 election, barely 2 percent of the total cast, but over the course of the decade saw significant pieces of its platform co-opted by the New Deal. Within years, versions of the party's proposals for Social Security, a minimum wage, and large-scale public works were law.
+
+In this year's campaign, I am insulated from liability by the Electoral College. And the presidential festivities, in my view, feature two highly undesirable major party candidates. The Founders have spared me from having to precisely calibrate my coefficient of disgust. Voting for Libertarians who have an exceedingly slim chance of victory will be the least complicated choice I will make—until Saturday's Pokemon Go selections are available.",REAL
+6292,America Is Better Without Borders,"America Is Better Without Borders Steven Hahn, TIME, November 1, 2016 
+“A nation without borders,” Donald Trump has warned us , “is not a nation at all.” Trump was explaining the logic of the multi-billion dollar wall he promises to build along the U.S.-Mexican border, but he was hardly the first to make the case. Years ago, Ronald Reagan said much the same about the threat of illegal immigration, and others urging border vigilance have wrapped themselves in the high-flown rhetoric. Tee-shirts and coffee mugs have turned the idea into a saleable slogan. 
+{snip} 
+{snip} For much of its early history, the United States had hazy borders in good part because through war, conquest and diplomacy the country was constantly expanding and the shifting boundaries were not clearly marked. There was no agreement about how far west the Louisiana Territory reached or how far south the state of Texas stretched or how far north the Oregon Territory extended. Highly charged political words and brutal conflict followed (like the U.S.-Mexican War), while the imperial eyes of many leaders fell on Cuba, Central America and Hawaii. 
+What’s more, the borders that were agreed upon were remarkably porous. Until well into the nineteenth century, immigrants could come and go at will and even participate in electoral politics if they simply declared an intention to become citizens; indeed, for decades it was not at all clear what a citizen of the United States was. The only international migration policed was the African slave trade, which Congress outlawed in 1808 after nearly half a million captives had been forcibly deposited on North American shores. 
+{snip} 
+It is easy, when politics and ethnocentrism serve, to proclaim the principle of the nation with borders as the nation itself, while the borders are, in fact, regularly traversed by policy makers, investors and moneyed interests pursuing the main chance and wielding the big stick. Trump himself regularly touts, though refuses to reveal, his international dealings, many of which confound his goal of keeping jobs within American borders if they don’t outright violate American laws. 
+Truth is that the nation’s prosperity has long rested on the labor and resourcefulness of immigrants–voluntary and involuntary, free and slave–and that those who most loudly denounce a “nation without borders” are likely descendants of immigrants who were themselves harassed for their origins, faith and lifeways at some point in the past. We would do well to recognize that in a global economy such as ours, where the movement of people and goods are the lifeblood of our sustenance, a nation’s security is best maintained not by walling itself off but by lifting the prospects–and thereby creating political allies–of working people around the world.",FAKE
+3169,RNC Chair urges against changing convention rules before Cleveland,"WASHINGTON — Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is urging his colleagues not to recommend any changes to convention rules, leaving it to the convention delegates to address controversies swirling around the party's nominating process.
+
+As drafted for the 2012 Republican convention, the RNC rules would limit the number of candidates who can be considered for the nomination at the convention. Only Donald Trump and Ted Cruz would qualify under the existing rules, but there have been a variety of suggestions for changing the rules to allow other candidates to be considered at the July Republican convention. Ohio Gov. John Kasich would need a rules change to win the nomination.
+
+The RNC rules committee will meet this week in Florida, but Priebus said on CNN's State of the Union that he is urging rules committee members not to tinker with the convention rules.
+
+""I don't think that it's a good idea for us next week - before the convention - to make serious rules changes or recommendations of changes right now,"" Priebus said. ""I think we are in a politically charges environment, I think its too complicated, I think that the RNC rules committee going forward with making rules amendment suggestions — it is not a good idea.""
+
+Priebus emphasized that the convention will have its own rules committee that will propose rules for the convention and the full convention must vote to adopt the rules. The RNC ""can't actually change anything. Its up to the delegates at the convention. So the recommendations I think just confuse people, I think its a bad idea and the environment, I think, is not conducive to it.""",REAL
+7682,A Republican Representative Just Called For Hillary To Be Killed By Firing Squad,"Comments 
+Admitted racist Republican State Rep. John Bennett from Sallisaw, Oklahoma, is the next Republican to publicly call for the assassination of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. 
+“ 2 words … firing squad” read Bennet’s Facebok post, with a link to a right-wing blog blaming Clinton for the deaths of American soldiers in during the 2102 Benghazi terrorist attacks. 
+Half-heartedly back-peddling on the threat, Bennett, wrote in a text message to The Oklahoman that the comments were intended to be sarcastic, but that reiterated that Clinton was guilty of treason, punishable by death. 
+Rep. Bennet is an outspoken Islamophobe, who has openly bragged about his hatred of Muslims, claiming the Prophet Mohammed “only teaches violence” and paints Christianity as being dialectical opposition to Islam. Just last week, he presided over the waste of taxpayer dollars for an “interim study” on “radical Islam” in Oklahoma , a witch-hunt which ended with him declaring a local imam and the leader of the local Council of American-Islamic relations as “terrorists.” 
+Bennet’s hatred cannot be tolerated and his threats should be directly addressed; a public official who threatens the future president is not a sarcastic matter. The frequency with which right-wing politicians are actively repeating the conspiracies of radio-show wingnuts and calling for the murder of the Democratic nominee is absolutely appalling, and a sign of just how far our political system has fallen.",FAKE
+4969,Donald Trump and the $12.7 million Ukraine connection,"Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is linked to an undisclosed $12.7 million in campaign contributions from his previous work as political consultant.
+
+Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as his campaign manager Paul Manafort (c.) and daughter Ivanka (r.) look on during Mr. Trump's walk through at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, July 21, 2016.
+
+Following the recent alleged infiltration of the Democratic National Committee servers by Russian hackers, as well as the then ensuing though now-redacted statement by Donald Trump that Russian hackers should help find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, has raised questions about the Republican presidential nominee and his relationship with Russia.
+
+Those questions are now further complicated by the revelation of a secret ledger that allegedly connects Mr. Trump's campaign chairman and $12.7 million in undisclosed payments from his previous employer, the deposed former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who is currently exiled in Russia.
+
+Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chief spent the years from 2007 to 2012 working as a political consultant for the former ruling Party of Regions in Ukraine, where the party leader and the former President Yanukovych allegedly relied heavily on advice from Mr. Manafort until the president was forced into exile in Russia. He left after a popular uprising in 2014 – an uprising largely assumed to be conducted in opposition to Mr. Yanukovych and his government's close ties to Russia.
+
+According to the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which has obtained the ledgers, the records involve nearly 400 pages of handwritten figures, including some $12.7 million in undisclosed contributions designated for Manafort specifically, paid by the Party of Regions. The Bureau stated that Manafort’s name appeared 22 times over the span of five years, though the nature of the payments were not made clear.
+
+""Paul Manafort is among those names on the list of so-called 'black accounts of the Party of Regions,' which the detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are investigating,"" the Anti-Corruption Bureau said in a public statement quoted in The New York Times. ""We emphasize that the presence of P. Manafort’s name in the list does not mean that he actually got the money, because the signatures that appear in the column of recipients could belong to other people.""
+
+Manafort’s lawyer has stated specifically that he did not receive any cash payments. But the Clinton campaign is raising questions about the nature of the payments as well as the consistently complicated and opaque relationship between Manafort’s current employer, Donald Trump, and Vanukovych’s close ally, Russia President Vladimir Putin.
+
+Yanukovych, who initially disappeared following the 2014 uprising, had previously been accused of corruption and cronyism and even served a short stint on an Interpol wanted list for alleged embezzlement and financial wrongdoing. His palatial estate outside of Kiev made international news when, after his flight, protestors discovered the opulence he had been living in while the country was wracked with political turmoil.
+
+While employed by Yanukovych, Manafort never registered as a foreign agent with the United States Justice Department, something that would be required for anyone looking to influence American policy on behalf of a foreign client, something for which one of Manafort’s subcontractors did register. Though it is unclear whether Manafort's actions in Ukraine would have required such registration, doing so would have required he disclose how much he was being paid and by whom during his period abroad – information that may now be available because of the discovery of secret ledgers once held in an office at the former Party of Regions headquarters in Kiev.
+
+On Monday, Trump is expected to declare an end to nation building if he's elected president. In a speech in Ohio, his aides say Trump will outline his approach of ""foreign policy realism"" – a focus on destroying the Islamic State group and other terrorist organizations.
+
+Trump is expected to argue the country needs to work with anyone that shares that mission, regardless of other disagreements.",REAL
+2630,Obama Will Not Meet with Netanyahu During Trip to Washington,"President Barack Obama will not meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he travels to Washington in March, the White House said Thursday, one day after being caught off-guard by Republicans' invitation for the Israeli leader to address a joint session of Congress.
+
+Spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said that in keeping with ""long-standing practice and principle,"" the president does not meet with heads of state or candidates in close proximity to their elections.
+
+""Accordingly, the president will not be meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu because of the proximity to the Israeli election, which is just two weeks after his planned address to the U.S. Congress,"" Meehan said.
+
+Netanyahu is scheduled to speak to Congress on March 3 and will push for additional sanctions on Iran. He was initially scheduled to address lawmakers in February, but the date was changed so that it could coincide with Netanyahu's trip to Washington to address an annual conference held by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby group, in early March.
+
+The invitation was a coordinated effort by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., with staff discussions beginning last year, according to a senior Republican aide, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to publicly discuss the private talks.
+
+Boehner contacted the Israeli ambassador on Jan. 8 to assess Netanyahu's interest and received a positive response. The GOP leaders reached out to the Israelis without consulting with the White House or State Department, a move that appeared likely to deepen the White House's already tense relations with congressional Republicans as well as the Israeli leader.
+
+Obama has been urging Republicans, as well as some members of his own party, to hold off on passing new Iran sanctions legislation while the U.S. and international partners are in the midst of nuclear negotiations with the Islamic republic. Last week, British Prime Minister David Cameron said he had been making a similar case to U.S. lawmakers.
+
+White House chief of staff Denis McDonough said Thursday that the nuclear negotiations were at a delicate phase.
+
+""We ought to give some time and space for that to work,"" he said.
+
+Netanyahu stands to gain politically at home from the U.S. visit. He is in a tough fight to win re-election in Israel's upcoming March vote. Netanyahu's Likud Party is running behind the main opposition group headed by Yitzhak Herzog's Labor Party, which has been highlighting rancor in the country's critical relationship with the United States.
+
+House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said it was inappropriate for Boehner to invite Netanyahu to address Congress in the shadow of the election and give the appearance of endorsing the prime minister.
+
+""If that's the purpose of Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit two weeks before his own election, right in the midst of our negotiations, I just don't think it's appropriate and helpful,"" Pelosi said.",REAL
+7679,Let’s Be Clear – A Vote For Warmonger Hillary Clinton Is A Vote For World War 3,"Let’s Be Clear – A Vote For Warmonger Hillary Clinton Is A Vote For World War 3   
+By Michael Snyder 
+If you want to see war without end, vote for Hillary Clinton. It is tremendously ironic that Hillary Clinton and the mainstream media have attempted to portray Donald Trump as “dangerous” and “temperamental”, because it is Clinton that actually has a long history of being emotionally unstable. She has a temper that is absolutely legendary, and she has been cussing out the men and women in her security detail for decades . Hillary Clinton played a key role in starting the civil war in Syria, thanks to her Libya is a post-apocalyptic wasteland today, and now she is picking a fight with the Russians before she has even won the election. Of all the candidates there were running for president this election cycle, there was nobody that was even close to as dangerous as Hillary Clinton, and if she wins the election I am fully convinced that World War 3 will begin before her time in the White House is over. 
+Someone that shares this opinion with me is Donald Trump. According to Reuters , Trump recently stated that we are “going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton”… 
+On Syria’s civil war, Trump said Clinton could drag the United States into a world war with a more aggressive posture toward resolving the conflict. 
+Clinton has called for the establishment of a no-fly zone and “safe zones” on the ground to protect non-combatants. Some analysts fear that protecting those zones could bring the United States into direct conflict with Russian fighter jets. 
+“What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” said Trump as he dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.” 
+In order to have a no-fly zone in Syria, you would have to enforce it. 
+And in order to enforce it, you would have to be willing to shoot at the Russians. 
+According to National Intelligence Director James Clapper , that could have dire consequences… 
+Russia could shoot down a U.S. aircraft if a no-fly zone were imposed over Syria, National Intelligence Director James Clapper said Tuesday. 
+“I wouldn’t put it past them to shoot down an American aircraft if they felt that was threatening to their forces on the ground,” Clapper said, speaking with CBS’ Charlie Rose at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York about several national security issues. 
+Of course Clapper is not alone in that assessment. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Francis Dunford, says that imposing a no-fly zone over all of Syria “would require us to go to war” … 
+“Right now, Senator, for us to control all of the airspace in Syria it would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia,… That’s a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I’m not going to make.” ( Senate Armed Services Committee, September 22, 2016, emphasis added) 
+But Hillary Clinton is unwavering in her position that this is what she wants. 
+You see, the truth is that Hillary Clinton wants to win the war that she started in Syria. Back in 2011, she spearheaded an effort along with Saudi Arabia and Turkey to try to use the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East as an opportunity to try to overthrow President Assad in Syria. If it wasn’t for her meddling, millions of refugees would not be pouring into Europe and elsewhere, and there would be no “humanitarian crisis” in Syria at all. 
+Thanks to Russian intervention, the war in Syria is not too far from being over, but the Obama administration is desperate to keep it going. They understand that if Assad is victorious that all of their efforts for the last five years have been wasted, and that is why they are so determined to keep Aleppo from falling. Without Aleppo, many of the jihadist rebels that the Obama administration has been supporting won’t have anywhere to hide. 
+So the Obama administration has actually been considering direct strikes against the Syrian military, and the Russians have already said that they will not allow this to happen . If Obama is insane enough to order airstrikes against Syrian forces and the Russians start shooting back, that could set off a chain of events that could rapidly spiral completely out of control. 
+One recent survey found that current American leadership has a 1 percent approval rating in Russia right now, and the Russians dislike Hillary Clinton even more than they dislike Barack Obama. The Russians know that if Hillary Clinton is elected that it is quite likely that they will have to fight a war with us, and that is why they desperately want Donald Trump to win in November. You can see this outlook reflected in comments that Russian President Vladimir Putin recently made about the two candidates … 
+“Mrs. Clinton has chosen to take up a very aggressive stance against our country, against Russia. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, calls for cooperation – at least when it comes to the international fight against terrorism,” Putin said. 
+“Naturally we welcome those who would like to cooperate with us. And we consider it wrong, that we always have to be in conflict with one another, creating existential threats for each other and for the whole world,” Putin noted. 
+Anyone that watched the three presidential debates could see that Hillary Clinton is absolutely seething with animosity for Russia. The thought of her finger on the nuclear trigger is almost too terrible to contemplate, but it may soon become a reality. 
+And even now, the Obama administration and our NATO allies are shifting forces into position for a confrontation with Moscow. This week it is being reported that NATO troops will soon be sent to Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania … Nine hundred US troops are to be sent to eastern Europe next year as America’s troubled relationship with Russia enters new, uncertain territory. A US-led battle group of NATO allied soldiers will be sent to Poland as part of the multi-nation operation. British forces will lead one of the four battle groups in Estonia, Canada will spearhead the presence in Latvia and Germany will be present in Lithuania. 
+In addition, Infowars is reporting that U.S. Marines will soon be stationed in Norway near the border with Russia… 
+After accepting a Pentagon proposal, Norway will host US Marines at a base near the Russian border as Russia deploys nuclear-capable ships to Kaliningrad. 
+A rotating force of approximately 330 Marines will be stationed at an airfield in the city of Vaernes, just outside Trondheim, beginning in January. Norway and Russia share an 122-mile border in the Arctic. 
+“The US initiative to augment their training and exercises in Norway by locating a Marine Corps Rotational Force in Norway is highly welcome and will have positive implications for our already strong bilateral relationship,” said Norwegian Defense Minister Ine Eriksen Søreide. 
+Most Americans aren’t aware of any of this, nor do they really care about our relationship with Russia. 
+But in Russia things are completely different. The possibility of war with the United States is the biggest news story over there these days , and feverish preparations are being made for a potential nuclear confrontation … 
+Russian authorities have stepped up nuclear-war survival measures amid a showdown with Washington, dusting off Soviet-era civil-defense plans and upgrading bomb shelters in the biggest cities. 
+At the Kremlin’s Ministry of Emergency Situations, the Cold War is back. 
+The country recently held its biggest civil defense drills since the collapse of the U.S.S.R., with what officials said were 40 million people rehearsing a response to chemical and nuclear threats. 
+I know that I have been writing about this over and over , but the truth is that we are on a path to war with Russia, and the election of Hillary Clinton would greatly accelerate the march toward war. 
+In my controversial new book , I expressed my belief that war with Russia is coming, but at the time that I wrote it I didn’t know how the election would turn out. 
+At this point it looks like Clinton is very likely to win on November 8th, and that would be absolutely disastrous for our relationship with Russia. 
+If you are reading this and you are considering voting for Hillary Clinton, please don’t do it . We simply cannot afford to have an emotionally unstable warmonger with a violent temper in the White House at this critical time. 
+If the American people do choose Hillary Clinton this November, I believe that it will be a choice that they will bitterly, bitterly regret in future years.",FAKE
+6779,Video: How To Build A Simple Water Purifier That Turns Dirty Water And Even Salt Water Into Clean Fresh Pure Water,"Share on Facebook You've got to hand it to this guy for such an ingenious, yet simple design. The how-to example in the video below is made from approximately 12 feet of copper tubing plus a few fittings (the stainless steel tube option is shown too). Follow the instructions in the video below to learn how to build it yourself. If a torch isn't something you have in your tool kit you can find “push on” fittings from a hardware store that you won't need to solder. NOTE: It is absolutely imperative if you do choose to solder your device, that you use lead-free solder. Prior to 1986, solder in the U.S. contained an alarmingly high content of lead. Chances are, if you live in a house built before the 1980's your tap water is contaminated with the neurotoxin lead due to leeching solder on your water pipes. All the more reason to filter your water with a device like this! Lead solder was the industry standard after all. Watch below: We don't have a water problem. We have a salt problem! - Joe Rogan Related:",FAKE
+6869,THIS IS COMEY’S LAST CHANCE FOR REDEMPTION – TruthFeed,"THIS IS COMEY’S LAST CHANCE FOR REDEMPTION THIS IS COMEY’S LAST CHANCE FOR REDEMPTION Politics By TruthFeedNews October 29, 2016 
+By Gregg Jarrett 
+The most wounded man in Washington is James Comey. 
+Ever since his legally incomprehensible announcement that he would not recommend criminal prosecution of Hillary Clinton, he has been the equivalent of an extra on the set of “The Walking Dead”. His reputation tarnished. His legacy forever tainted. 
+His own agents turned against him in disgust. Those, including lawyers, who had worked exhaustively gathering the incriminating evidence were furious that Comey had publicly laid out their case of how Clinton was grossly negligence under the Espionage Act, yet decided not to prosecute. Comey had gone from revered to reviled, all in one day. 
+Now, his stunning announcement that he is reopening the criminal investigation of Clinton based on newly discovered evidence is, perhaps, the chance at redemption for which he may have been searching. He has disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner to thank for a second chance. 
+According to confirmed reports, the FBI seized electronic devices in the possession of Weiner during the course of an investigation into his sexting with an underage girl for which he is now in legal jeopardy. Since Weiner is married to Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, the FBI were legally entitled to access her emails on those same devices. Those are probably the messages that triggered a reopening of the Clinton probe. 
+Whatever the source of the new evidence, it may have provided the excuse or pretext that Comey so desperately needed to remedy the wrong perceived by so many. A legal “do over”, if you will. A mistake corrected. An injustice rectified. 
+Of course, it is altogether possible that Comey will reach the same conclusion as he did before –that prosecutors could not prove Clinton broke the law. His statement stressed he does not know the “importance” of the new emails. 
+But if this is Comey’s opportunity to atone, it is not good news for Hillary Clinton. The Director may now be more determined than ever to reverse his legal judgment of Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials. It’s like a first year law student getting to retake the final examination in criminal law after flunking the test. He can now change his legal analysis and arrive at a better conclusion. 
+After all, it was Comey himself who testified before Congress that more than 2,000 classified documents were found on Clinton’s personal server in her home –clearly an unauthorized place under the law. He described her explanations as untruthful and her conduct “extremely careless”. That would be more than sufficient for criminal charges against anyone else whose name is not Clinton. 
+What does all of this mean for Clinton’s chances of winning the election a scant ten days from now? At this early stage, it is impossible to know. Yes, at the moment, the electoral map favors Clinton substantially. But that could evaporate in a political instant. 
+On its face, the revelation seems extremely damaging to her candidacy. Perhaps fatal. Yet, it is premature to say how voters will react on November 8 th when they enter the voting booths across America. Some may view the resurrected FBI probe as patently unfair, coming a little more than a week before the election. Voters may feel she is being victimized and react with sympathy. The news may energize or motivate her supporters to cast their ballots in record numbers. 
+For others, a reinvigorated FBI investigation will serve as proof they were right when they concluded, perhaps long ago, that Clinton is chronically corrupt. As pointed out in my recent column , a Clinton presidency would probably be engulfed in scandal and endless investigations, even in the absence of today’s news. Do Americans want to cast a vote in favor of 4 years of acrimony and intransigence? 
+And what happens if a President Clinton is indicted for crimes under the Espionage Act? Would she resign, as Nixon did… or temporarily step aside under the incapacity provision of the 25 th Amendment until her criminal trial is concluded? How would Congress react? The entire sordid affair could devolve into an impeachment trial reminiscent of her husband, Bill Clinton. 
+Another national nightmare. 
+These are weighty decisions which voters are now suddenly forced to consider. It may not be fair or right. But, in a democracy, freedom of choice inexorably falls to the citizenry. 
+It brings both benefits and burdens. 
+Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News Anchor and former defense attorney. H/T – FoxNews 
+Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+9445,There Is Something Extraordinary Happening In The World – And You Probably Didn’t Realize It Yet,"Most of us haven’t quite realized there is something extraordinary happening. A few months ago I freed myself from standard-procedure society, I broke the chains of fear that kept me locked up into the system. 
+Via AnonHQ 
+
+Since then, I see the world from a different perspective: the one that everything is going through change and that most of us are unaware of that.
+Is Really Something Extraordinary Happening In The World? Why is the world changing? In this post I’ll point out the 8 reasons that lead me to believe it.
+1. No One Can Stand The Employment Model Any Longer We are reaching our limits. People working with big corporations can’t stand their jobs. The lack of purpose knocks on your door as if it came from inside you like a yell of despair. People want out. They want to drop everything. Take a look on how many people are willing to risk entrepreneurship, people leaving on sabbaticals, people with work-related depression, people in burnout.
+2. The Entrepreneurship Model Is Also Changing Over the past few years, with the explosion of startups, thousands of entrepreneurs turned their garages in offices to bring their billion dollar ideas to life. The vortex of entrepreneurship was to find an investor and get funded. To be funded was like winning the World Cup, or the Super Bowl. But what happens after you get funded?
+You get back to being an employee. You may have brought in people not sharing your dream, not in agreement with your purpose and soon it’s all about the money. The financial end becomes the main driver of your business. People are suffering with it. Excellent startups began to tumble because the money seeking model is endless. A new way to endeavor is needed. Good people are doing it already.
+3. The Rise Of Collaboration Many people have figured out that it doesn’t make any sense to go on by yourself. Many people have awakened from the “each man for himself” mad mentality. Stop, take a step back and think. Isn’t it absurd that we, 7 billion of us living in the same planet, have grown further apart from each other? What sense does it make to turn your back on the thousands, maybe millions, of people living around you in the same city? Every time it crosses my mind, I feel blue.
+Fortunately, things are changing. Sharing, collaborative economy concepts are being implemented, and it points towards a new direction. The direction of collaborating, of sharing, of helping, of togetherness. This Is Beautiful To Watch. It Touches Me.
+4. We Are Finally Figuring Out What The Internet Is The internet is an incredibly spectacular thing and only now, after so many years, we are understanding its power. With the internet the world is opened, the barriers fall, the separation ends, the togetherness starts, the collaboration explodes, the helping emerges. Some nations saw true revolutions that used the internet as the primary catalyst, such as the Arab Spring. Here in Brazil we are just starting to make a better use out of this amazing tool.
+Internet is taking down mass control. The big media groups controlling news by how it suits best what they want the message to be and what they want us to read are no longer the sole owners of information. You go after what you want. You bond to whomever you want. You explore whatever you may want to.
+With the advent of the internet, the small is no longer speechless, there is a voice. The anonymous become acknowledged. The world comes together. And then the system may fall.
+5. The Fall Of Exaggerated Consumerism For too long, we’ve been manipulated to consume as much as we possibly can. To buy every new product launched, the newest car, the latest iPhone, the top brands, lots of clothes, shoes, lots and lots and lots of pretty much anything we could our hands on. Going against the crowd, many people have understood that this of way off. Lowsumerism, slow life and slow food are a few excerpts of actions being taken as we speak, pointing out by contradiction how absurdly we have come to organize ourselves.
+Fewer people are using cars, fewer people are overspending, and more people are swapping clothes, buying used goods, sharing assets, cars, apartments, offices. We don’t need all of that they told us we needed. And this consciousness of new consumerism can take down any company living of the exaggerated end of it.
+6. Healthy And Organic Eating We were so crazy we even accepted eating anything! It only needed to taste good, and everything would be alright. We were so disconnected that companies started to poison our food and we didn’t say anything! But then some people started waking up, enabling and strengthening healthy and organic eating. This is only to get stronger.
+But what has this got to do with economy and work? Just about everything, I’d say. Food production is one of the basic fundamentals of our society. If we change our mindset, our eating habit and our way of consuming, corporations will have to respond and adapt to a new market.
+The small farmer is getting back to being relevant to the whole chain of production. Even people are growing plants and seeds inside their homes as well. And that reshapes the whole economy.
+7 .  The Awakening Of Spirituality How many friends do you have who practice yoga? What about meditation? Now think back, 10 years ago, how many people did you know by then who practiced these activities? Spirituality, for too long, was for esoteric folks, those weird-like and mystic people.
+But fortunately, this is also changing. We’ve come to the edge of reason and rationality. We were able to realize that, with only our conscious mind, we can’t figure out everything that goes by here. There is something else going on and I’m sure you want to get hold of that as well.
+You want to understand how these things work. How life operates, what happens after death, what is this energy thing people talk about so much, what is quantum physics, how thoughts can be materialized and create our sense of reality, what is coincidence and synchronicity, why meditation works, how it’s possible to cure using nothing but bare hands, how those alternative therapies not approved by regular medicine can actually work.
+Companies are providing meditation to their employees. Even schools are teaching the young how to meditate. Think about it.
+8 .  Unschooling Trends Who created this teaching model? Who chose the classes you have to take? Who chose the lessons we learn in history classes? Why didn’t they teach us the truth about other ancient civilizations? Why should kids follow a certain set of rules? Why should they watch everything in silence? Why should they wear a uniform? What about taking a test to prove that you actually learned?
+We developed a model that perpetuates and replicates followers of the system. That breed people into ordinary human beings. Fortunately, a lot of people are working to rethink that though concepts such as unschooling, hackschooling, homeschooling.
+Maybe you’ve never thought of that and even may be in shock. But it’s happening. Silently, people are being woken up and are realizing how crazy it is to live in this society. Look at all these new actions and try to think everything is normal we were taught so far is normal. I don’t think it is. There is something extraordinary happening.
+",FAKE
+4295,The media needs to stop telling this lie about Donald Trump. I’m a Sanders supporter — and value honesty,"Back in June, I first saw Mr. Trump announcing his candidacy for president. What he said about unauthorized immigrants seemed ridiculous so I laughed. I showed the video to friends, and I laughed again. His words were poorly chosen.
+
+But something worse happened. People interpreted Trump’s words in the most awful and offensive ways.
+
+In one of my courses, at the University of Texas at Austin, I asked my students: “What has Donald Trump said that you found most offensive?” One student raised her hand high: “He said that all Mexicans are rapists.” I asked a coworker the same question. He replied: “He said that all Mexican immigrants are rapists.”
+
+I explained that Trump said no such thing. This is what Trump said:
+
+You might well dislike Trump’s words. I did. But let’s not make it worse. He did not say that all Mexicans are rapists. Yet that’s what many commentators did. For example, Politico misquoted Trump by omitting his phrase about “good people.” They said he was “demonizing Mexicans as rapists.” They argued that Mexicans do not really commit more rapes in the U.S. than whites. But that’s not what Trump claimed.
+
+Similarly, other news sources misrepresented his words in offensive ways:
+
+Compare such words with Trump’s words. Which is worse? Writers excerpted the phrase: “they’re rapists,” as if it were about all Mexican unauthorized immigrants, or worse, about all Mexican immigrants, or even worst, about all Mexicans. But that’s not what he said. That’s not what he meant. It was just a remark about some of the criminals crossing the border.
+
+The trick for misrepresenting Trump’s words can be used against anyone.
+
+For example, on October 7, at a Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton answered the question: “Which enemy are you most proud of?” She replied: “In addition to the NRA, um, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, um, the Iranians.”
+
+If you do to her what the media did to Trump, then you should believe that Hillary Clinton is proud to be the enemy of 77 million citizens of Iran, plus millions more living outside Iran, including mothers, children, and disabled people. But that’s not what she meant.
+
+On November 6, at the MSNBC Democratic Candidates Forum, Bernie Sanders said: “we have to pass a constitutional amendment that everyone in America who is 18 years old or older is registered to vote.” He said everyone. Someone might then write: “He proposed that everyone who is in the U.S. should vote, everyone who is 18, even illegal immigrants, tourists, and terrorists.” But that’s not what he meant.
+
+It is no wonder that many people think the media is grossly dishonest. No wonder Mr. Trump’s critiques of the media make his followers cheer.
+
+Trump was discussing crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants. Is it true that some people who illegally cross the border from Mexico are good? Yes. Is it true that some others commit crimes? Yes. Is that a problem? People disagree. Some conjecture that unauthorized immigrants don’t commit more crimes than U.S. citizens. But crimes by unauthorized immigrants, even murders, would not have happened if those individuals had not entered the U.S.
+
+Time for a disclosure. I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Spanish is my first language. I voted for Obama. I live in liberal Austin, Texas, where I work as a tenured professor of history. I’ve never voted for a Republican. My preferred candidate for U.S. president would be Elizabeth Warren. Since she is not running, my preferred candidate is Bernie Sanders.
+
+Anyhow, discussions about illegal immigration are ruined by lack of data. I asked my friends, university faculty: “How many people do you think are deported per year in the U.S.?”
+
+There are two kinds of deportations: some are caught near the border and “returned,” others are “removed” by a court order. Consider the border patrol agents, personnel, the bureaucracy, the lawyers, the resources needed to find people and deport them. How many were deported in 2014?
+
+One of my friends guessed 3,000. Another guessed 10,000. Another guessed 50,000—which would really be a lot of people, imagine.
+
+Actually, in fiscal year 2014, the U.S. deported a total of 893,238 foreigners! That’s a huge number. It includes 577,295 deported by the Department of Homeland Security, plus 315,943 deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Among the latter, 2,802 were classified as suspected or confirmed gang members.
+
+Since 1990, the average is 1.2 million deportations per year. The highest in U.S. history was 1.86 million foreigners deported in the year 2000. That’s astonishing.
+
+How many were criminals?
+
+We don’t know because most criminals are not caught. Plus, many who are accused are not convicted because of a lack of evidence. Still, in 2014, the U.S. deported 177,960 convicted criminals. Surprisingly, 91,037 were already convicted criminals before they even entered the U.S.
+
+At the University of Texas at Austin, the football stadium can seat 100,119 people. I have seen it full. I’ve see more than 100,000 people at once—it’s an incredible sight. It’s a staggering swarm of people. I have seen them yelling all at once.
+
+It is utterly astonishing to me that this stadium would fail to seat all the convicted criminals deported in a single year. Back to Mr. Trump. Did he unfairly single out Mexicans when complaining about crimes by unauthorized immigrants? By far, most Mexicans are good people. However, since Mexico shares a large frontier with the U.S., and many Mexicans face economic hardships, most of the reported illegal immigration into the U.S. is from Mexico. Accordingly, in recent years roughly 76% of criminal unauthorized immigrants are from Mexico. What kinds of crime? It is strangely difficult to find national statistics on homicides, sexual assaults, and thefts, by unauthorized immigrants. But there is relevant data for some states. The Texas Department of Public Safety identified 207,076 foreign aliens who were booked into Texas county jails from October 2008 through August 1, 2014. Their term “foreign aliens” includes both foreigners who are in Texas legally and foreigners who entered illegally. They were accused of 357,884 crimes in those 70 months, including these charges: 4,413 terroristic threats, 60,973 robberies and larcenies, 6,636 vehicle thefts, 78,682 assaults, 12,869 sexual assaults and offenses, 1,113 kidnapping, and 3,089 homicides. That includes, an average of 1,383 charges of sexual assaults per year, in Texas alone. The real number of rapes and sexual assaults is larger since many victims do not report these crimes. According to the National Crime and Victimization Survey, 2008-2012, approximately 68% of sexual assault crimes are not reported. So I estimate that foreigners commit roughly 4,000 sexual assaults in Texas each year. In Texas, roughly 529 foreigners per year were accused of committing murder. Plus, the FBI reports that 36% of homicides nationwide remain unsolved. These crime rates are staggering and offensive. None of the women and men who were killed in by unauthorized immigrants in Texas would have died if the murderers had not entered the U.S. illegally. These are not just words. Pause for a moment to think about a Texas woman whose husband was murdered one night. Think about parents who never saw their son again because he was murdered. Think of the thousands of families standing at the cemeteries. I’ve only summarized murders and sexual assaults. Consider drugs and drug violence. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, most illegal drugs come from Mexico, including most cocaine and heroine. Most methamphetamines also are smuggled from Mexico. The 2015 National Drug Threat Survey finds that methamphetamines are the drugs that most contribute to property crimes and violent crimes. You get the point. There are tremendous problems of drugs, murders, and rapes caused at the porous border. Without knowing the data, it was easy to be offended by Mr. Trump’s crude words when he announced his candidacy. However, seeing the data above, I understand his concerns. Here’s what Trump said right after his words quoted above: “And it only makes common sense, it only makes common sense: they’re sending us not the right people, and it’s coming from more than Mexico, it’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably, probably from the Middle East. But we don’t know because we have no protection, and we have no competence. We don’t know what’s happening. And it’s gotta stop. And it’s gotta stop fast.” We can disagree about some points. Is the Mexican government really sending criminals to the U.S.? On July 5, Trump said: “The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” This claim might be false if Mexico does not intentionally send criminals to the US. At its best, this statement seems plausible if Trump meant that conditions generated in Mexico by its government lead some criminals to the U.S. In any case, Trump proposes to secure the southern border by implementing various security measures. His most recurring proposal is to build a wall, along areas of the border lacking natural barriers. His proposal has been widely criticized. Some people construed it as a sign of racism, xenophobia, etc. However, I can understand why many of Trump’s followers actually cheer: “Build the Wall! Build the Wall!” First, there are the worries about murders, drugs, crimes, and terrorism. Presently, countless many unauthorized immigrants walk into the country, unchecked. In fiscal year 2014, the Border Patrol made 468,407 apprehensions along the southwest border. By comparison, the Border Patrol only made 18,244 apprehensions in all other regions. But one point sticks in my mind. Namely this: there already exist a long series of fences and walls between Mexico and the U.S. These fences and walls span parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. As of early 2012, the Department of Homeland Security had completed 652 miles of fences and walls. Trump did not build all that. It was mandated by Congress. Walls are common along many countries’ borders, such as Spain, China, France, Greece, Pakistan, Israel, etc. The border between the U.S. and Mexico spans roughly 1,950 miles. Trump wants a wall that will be 1,000 miles long, including areas already covered. I’m not trying to convince you about a wall. My point is just that it’s neither impossible nor ridiculous. A main reason why many border areas have fences instead of walls is just that walls are more expensive. Trump says that everyone who didn’t enter the U.S. legally should return to their countries. “They have to go.” We might well disagree. But his view is closer to Immigration law. If you prefer amnesty then lawmakers have to create a law to that effect. Trump insists: “I want people to come in, but they have to come in legally.” Regardless, countless many people think that Trump is racist against Mexicans. I suggest that anyone who thinks that should count how many times Trump has praised Mexicans. Most unauthorized immigrants are good people. But still, the media wrongly blamed Mr. Trump for their own misrepresentations.",REAL
+374,"Do Democrats Want What Bernie Wants, Or Just What Bernie Has?","Do Democrats Want What Bernie Wants, Or Just What Bernie Has?
+
+For some weeks now, as Bernie Sanders has extended his remarkable and improbable run as a presidential candidate, people have been asking: ""What does Bernie want?""
+
+That question is a distant echo of ""What does Jesse want?"" a relic of the 1988 runner-up candidacy of Jesse Jackson, another ""outsider"" challenger with a dedicated hardcore following. But more about Jackson in a moment.
+
+This week, the question took a different form. After a rowdy convention in Nevada prompted death threats against that state party chair, the question suddenly became: ""Are the Democrats coming apart?""
+
+Uniting for the fall has always been an issue for both parties. But this year, it was supposed to be the Republicans, with their 17 candidates and their frustrated #NeverTrump rearguard action, who broke up over their differences.
+
+Now, it's working out quite differently. So we hear again that old nostrum: ""Democrats want to fall in love, Republicans want to fall in line."" A remarkable number of Republicans have accepted, if not embraced, Donald Trump as their nominee. But a large contingent of Democrats continue to feel the Bern, or at least remain very much out of love with Hillary Clinton.
+
+Which brings us to this past weekend, which proved that sometimes what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.
+
+The ""Nevada fracas"" has created a media meme and a conversational focus for the conflict roiling the Democratic Party. That is because it encapsulates the grievances felt on both sides.
+
+Sanders supporters see that some of their number were not seated in Las Vegas and see evidence that the system is rigged against them. Clinton supporters hear the epithets hurled at women on that stage, including the state party chair and Sen. Barbara Boxer, and perceive evidence of something else.
+
+Others will adjudicate what happened in Las Vegas, where both candidates' camps seem to think they were entitled to a majority of delegates. (Although Clinton won the initial round of caucuses back in February, Sanders had the upper hand in an intermediate round at the county level on April 2.)
+
+One camp wanted an open process; the other wanted respect for the rules. A voice vote was gaveled to a conclusion despite an uncertain outcome, which is bound to cause trouble. But in the end, the party chair herself has come to seem the principal victim — ""more sinned against than sinning"" — because of extreme phone and online harassment.
+
+Nevada's convention seems to have been an egregious case, an outlier. In other states where actual delegates are chosen in several phases, regular order has been followed without a similar outburst.
+
+But exceptions to the rule often make news. And in this case, cable TV and social media have endlessly repeated the raucous video shot at the convention and the toxic harassment that followed. As Nevada became a national story, Sanders was pressured to respond.
+
+The candidate has condemned violence generically, but has not apologized for his backers. Instead, Sanders and his retinue have denied responsibility for what happened and doubled down on their long-simmering resentments against Democratic Party officials.
+
+They say the entire process has been rigged against them, even parts that have been in place for decades. And the implicit message has been: Treat us fairly or expect there to be consequences. When this message is combined with Sanders' vow this week to ""carry our fight to the convention,"" it darkens the portents for the national convention in Philadelphia.
+
+So what does Bernie want?
+
+Let's start with the obvious: He wants to be nominated and elected. That's understood. Every candidate has a perfect right to continue fighting until the last ballot is cast, as Sanders vows to do.
+
+But even if he wins California, and several other states on June 7, Sanders would need vertiginous victory margins to win enough delegates to close the pledged delegate gap with Clinton. (The Democrats divide delegates proportionally according to the popular vote, which is just about as democratic a method as you can imagine.)
+
+So Sanders' one path is to persuade superdelegates to prefer him over Clinton, even though they currently prefer Clinton by more than 10-1. (The only superdelegate to flip so far deserted Sanders for the front-runner.)
+
+Sanders and his spokespersons say superdelegates should now ignore the overall vote and the pledged delegate totals and look at how much better Sanders does against Trump in hypothetical November matchups.
+
+The only problem is that hypothetical tests six months before the election are notoriously unreliable. Just ask President Perot.
+
+Moreover, many of the poll respondents who create this November differential right now are Sanders supporters who say they will shift to Trump in November. The likelihood of their actually doing so is problematic, given past experience with disgruntled backers of other candidates who fell short. (The most recent example would be the Clinton backers in 2008 who swore they would not vote for the man who beat her, Barack Obama, but wound up doing so in the fall.)
+
+So the ""path to the nomination"" for Sanders is not just uphill, it is essentially vertical.
+
+So what else might Sanders want?
+
+No one seems to think Sanders wants to be vice president or have any other role in a Clinton administration. He would return to the Senate, where he would be in a wholly new weight class of political influence.
+
+But he clearly wants to make a difference, to alter how the Democrats go forward in the fall campaign and beyond.
+
+And that is what the Clinton camp must manage. It is entirely possible that the Democratic convention in Philadelphia this July will vote to change party rules, shrinking the number of superdelegates or requiring them to follow the voting results in their states.
+
+It is also possible, if less likely, that the party would agree to allow more independents a role in its nominating process (although this would still depend on the will of the various states).
+
+Sanders supporters will also strive to make the party platform more progressive, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and expanding Medicare to cover people of all ages and perhaps calling for free tuition at public colleges. (The platform already calls for much of Sanders' program regarding the campaign finance system and other issues.)
+
+This might fall far short of the ""political revolution"" Sanders says his campaign is about. But it could still matter. And it could still point the party toward a far more progressive future.
+
+That is one way in which the 1988 precedent is relevant. Jesse Jackson arrived in Atlanta with about 30 percent of the delegates (not nearly as many as Sanders will have this summer). At the time, it was easily the best showing for an African-American presidential candidate. And although Jackson was not going to be nominated (Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis had a first-ballot majority), his message of racial and economic inclusion was popular and powerful within the party's base.
+
+The Dukakis forces recognized this and turned the proceedings over to Jackson on the second night of the convention. Thousands of Jackson supporters jammed the arena while delegates, alternates and journalists waited outside — unable to enter. Jackson gave an hourlong oration on the theme of common ground, a siege gun speaking for unity.
+
+Jackson did his part in the fall, helping Dukakis carry nearly 90 percent of the black vote and 70 percent of the then-minuscule Hispanic vote. Unfortunately for Dukakis, minority voters cast only about one ballot in seven in 1988.
+
+But by 2012, the share of the vote cast by people of color had nearly doubled. That stunning growth has turned a dozen states that were red in 1988 to blue in 2012 (California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, New Mexico, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware and Vermont).
+
+The same demographic trends have made Florida, Ohio and Colorado toss-ups in presidential elections. All had been solidly Republican in 1988.
+
+Sanders' hard base is not among minorities, of course, but among younger voters. His success has been built on winning three-fourths or even more of the voters under age 30. That is a group Clinton will need in the fall just as much as Dukakis needed Jackson's base in 1988.
+
+Sanders may not want a Jackson-style prime-time convention session all his own. He might be willing to settle for platform and rules revisions that would validate his campaign. But if he wants a Bernie night in Philadelphia when he can bring his political revolution to life — even for a few hours — it might be a small price to pay for peace.",REAL
+10182,"OCTOBER DIARY: Borjas No Bore; NOSTAR—”No Such Thing As Race”, Etc","  => Professor George Borjas at Harvard. Credit: VDare.com. 
+Borjas no bore . October 20th I went to an event organized by the Center for Immigration Studies to hear Professor George Borjas present his new book, We Wanted Workers . Borjas explains the title in his Introduction: 
+Reflecting on the European experience with the millions of guest workers [from the 1950s onwards], the Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch made perhaps the single most insightful observation about immigration when he quipped: “We wanted workers, but we got people instead.” 
+(In a footnote, Borjas gives us the German original: “ Wir riefen Arbeitskräfte, es kamen Menschen .”) 
+Borjas is a lively and engaging speaker. I bought a copy of his book, and stood on line to have him sign it. When I got to him, he immediately recognized me from a chance encounter eight years ago, which I had completely forgotten. 
+That was of course embarrassing, with a line of secondary emotions coming along behind the embarrassment: gratification (How nice that a bigfoot researcher, a Harvard professor, remembers me after so many years!); annoyance (If he can remember an obscure opinionator, why can’t I remember a serious and important scholar, working in a field that I often write about?); to anxiety (Am I losing my marbles? He’s only five years younger than me …) 
+I recommend the book in any case; and I further recommend Borjas in person, if you get a chance to see him speak. I only regret that he is, to borrow Dr Johnson’s self-description , “a retired and uncourtly scholar,” with no taste at all — with, in fact, I think, a strong dis -taste — for political contention. 
+Borjas lays out a solid, factual, quantitative basis for the kinds of arguments we make here, with gentlemanly good humor and scholarly rigor. I’d love to see him make his case in argument with the open borders shills, on TV talking-head shows or the campaign trail … but that’s not his choice. 
+All strength to Prof Borjas anyway, and all success to his new book. 
+Permalink 
+Two essays on race . This month produced two notable essays dealing with race. One was notable for dishonesty and incoherence; the other for its clarity and straightforward good sense. 
+The dishonesty and incoherence was of course in defense of the No Such Thing As Race dogma, hereinunder NOSTAR. 
+NOSTAR is a key axiom in our state ideology. It is, however, so contrary to everyday experience, common sense, and elementary biology that media outlets feel obliged to publish stern affirmations of it from time to time, rather as state newspapers in communist countries used to publish long editorials, for use in study sessions by the Party faithful, affirming the infallibility of Marxist-Leninism. 
+(The outstanding exhibit here, according to sinologist Simon Leys , was an editorial in the Peking People’s Daily at the time of the Lin Biao affair in 1971 , instructing readers that extreme leftism was a right-wing deviation.) 
+So here was science journalist Faye Flam [ ] laying down the Party line at Bloomberg News, October 3rd. 
+Race is perhaps the worst idea ever to come out of science. [ Science’s Biggest Blunder by Faye Flam; Bloomberg News , October 3rd 2016.] 
+Really? Worse than phlogiston ? Worse than spontaneous generation ? Worse than the luminiferous ether ? 
+“We never use the term ‘race,’” said Harvard geneticist Swapan Mallick, an author on one of the papers revealing the latest DNA-based human story. 
+So what term do Dr Mallick and his colleagues use when discussing l ocal common-ancestry variations within a species? If “race” was good enough for Darwin , why isn’t it good enough for him? 
+“We’re all part of the tapestry of humanity, and it’s interesting to see how we got where we are.” 
+Indeed we are, and indeed it is. It is equally true, though, that we are all part of the tapestry of the genus Homo , of the family Hominidae , of the order Primates , of the class Mammalia , of the the phylum Chordata , of the Animal Kingdom . All of that is pretty interesting, too. What’s your point? ORDER IT NOW 
+One of the world’s most prominent American scientists of the mid-1800s, Samuel Morton, collected skulls from all over the world and attempted to demonstrate that those of European ancestry had the world’s biggest heads and were, so he claimed, intellectually superior. 
+Except that “there is no evidence that Morton believed this or was trying to prove it.” [ Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim by Nicholas Wade; New York Times , June 13, 2011] 
+Scientists subsequently realized that Morton was wrong — about whose heads were biggest and the connection between head size and intelligence. 
+Leaving aside the fact that Morton was not much interested in such a connection, brain size (which correlates with head size) does correlate with intelligence. [ Neuroanatomical Correlates of Intelligence by E. Luders, K.K. Narr, P.M. Thompson, and A.W. Toga; National Institutes of Health, 2009.] 
+[Geneticist Joseph] Graves sometimes quizzes his students by showing them an image of a man and asking them to guess where he comes from. It appears to show someone most Americans would identify as a black man, and Graves says people assume he’s from Africa or an African American community in the U.S. But he’s from the Solomon Islands, which are in the South Pacific. 
+Are there really people who don’t know this sort of thing? Fifty years ago, in then-wellnigh-monoracial England, I attended classes at University College, London with a young man whose skin was black. He was from Burma. (I recall his name as Man Man Tin, although the internet records no trace of such a person. In those easy-going days, with no offense intended or taken — he was a cheerful and sociable fellow — we gave him the nickname Rin Tin Tin . That would have gotten us permanently rusticated nowadays.) 
+And so on. It gets wearisome refuting this mendacious gibberish. 
+How refreshing, then, a few days later, to see that Jared Taylor had posted the talk he gave to September’s press conference on the Alt Right . 
+Given the loose nature of the movement [i.e. the Alt Right], there are people who consider themselves “Alt Right” but who disagree on one or more of these points — except one. The entire Alt Right is united in contempt for the idea that race is only a “social construct.” This is an idea that is so wrong and stupid that only very intelligent people can convince themselves it is true. 
+Race is a biological fact. Does anyone think that the differences between Danes and Pygmies are a sociological illusion? … 
+There are countless race differences in such things as skull structure, twinning rates, and susceptibility to disease. It is even possible to tell a person’s race from the varieties of bacteria that live in his mouth! 
+Human races have been evolving separately for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, and evolution has marked their temperaments and mental abilities just as it has their physical characteristics. [ What is the Alt Right? by Jared Taylor; American Renaissance , October 11 2016.] 
+Ah, the sweet clear wine of truth! 
+Permalink 
+Slow day at the Pentagon . The other zone of our social life in which state ideologues demand that we pretend to believe preposterous things is of course sex — or, as we are now supposed to say, “gender.” 
+Most of the preposterous things they want us to pretend to believe are in aid of an assault on traditional concepts of manliness. It is therefore not surprising that a key target of the No Such Thing As Sex (NOSTAS) preposterentsia is the military. 
+A friend with military connections passed on to me a document recently published by the Department of Defense. Title: Transgender Service in the U.S. Military: An Implementation Handbook . 
+The wretched thing has seventy-two pages . Sample, from pages 60-61: 
+Scenario 11: Use of Shower Facilities 
+A transgender Service member has expressed privacy concerns regarding the open bay shower configuration. Similarly, several other non-transgender Service members have expressed discomfort when showering in these facilities with individuals who have different genitalia. 
+Key takeaway(s) 
+This scenario illustrates the importance of open lines of communication between the Service member and the commander. It also depicts steps a commander may take to permit privacy, based on Service policy. 
+Service member responsibilities If you have any concerns about privacy in an open bay shower setting, you should discuss this with your chain of command. Consider altering your shower hours. 
+Commander responsibilities 
+You may employ reasonable accommodations when/if you have a Service member who voices concerns about privacy. This should be done with the intent of avoiding any stigmatizing impact to any Service member. If permitted by Service policies, some of these steps may include: Facility modifications, such as installing shower curtains and placing towel and clothing hooks inside individual shower stalls. In cases where accommodations are not practicable, you may authorize alternative measures to respect personal privacy, such as adjustments to timing of the use of shower or changing facilities Take proactive steps through the chain of command to ensure that expressions of discomfort don’t escalate into harassment or hazing. Consult the SCCC for guidance on how to institute such measures. 
+I repeat, there are 72 pages of this. That’s more than half as many pages as the Seaman’s Pocket Book from which I learned all the essentials of service as a rating in the Royal Navy . 
+Oh, and if you’re wondering what an SCCC is, it’s a Service Central Coordination Cell: basically an email address to which you can send queries about policy in your service. 
+The SCCC e-address for the Army is . If you want to send frivolous or spoof questions to the Army, use that address. Don’t worry that you may be wasting their time; to judge by that 72-page handbook they’ve just put out on servicepersons confused about their sex, time is a thing they have plenty of in today’s military. 
+Antarius, The Planet With 12 Sexes . On a related theme (I guess), Greg Cochran mused on how things might be if there were more than two human sexes. ORDER IT NOW 
+Many species have several different kinds of males (a few have different kinds of females as well). For example, a lizard species in California has three different kinds of males — aggressive orange-throated guys that successfully dominate blue males, sneaky yellow guys that get past orange males guarding a big territory, and blue mate-guarding males (that are also cooperative — possibly a green-beard gene) that successful guard females from sneaky yellows. The population frequencies oscillate: scissors, paper, rock. [ The Third Sex by Greg Cochran; West Hunter blog, October 26th 2016.] 
+I’m sorry to say that what this brought to my mind was one of Ed Subitzky’s cartoons from the glory days of National Lampoon forty years ago. Title: “ Saturday night on Antarius (The planet with 12 different sexes ) .” 
+I think I’ll send that link to the SCCCs for all the different services. You never know; we may find ourselves at war with Antarius one of these days. 
+Permalink 
+Does he bill his patients via the web? Just one more on the (approximately) medical beat. 
+My better half works in Medical Billing, arguing over the phone all day long with doctors, hospitals, patients, and insurance companies. 
+The other day she reported having dealt with a radiologist named Kwak — Dr Kwak. My lady is unfailingly truthful, so I did not doubt her story, but I was curious to see that Dr Kwak looks like, so I Googled him. 
+Sure enough, there he is: No Bong Kwak, MD — Specialty : Diagnostic Radiology. No picture, though. Googling further, I find that Kwak is a not-uncommon Korean family name. 
+I am sure that the Kwaks are a proud and noble lineage, and that Dr Kwak discharges his radiological duties at the highest standards of professionalism. And yes, I know it’s childish to make fun of people’s names, which after all they can’t help. For all I know to the contrary, “Derbyshire” sounds screamingly funny to Korean ears. If so, I do not begrudge them their mirth. Still … Dr Kwak? 
+And while we are at the intersection of October with names Korean, let’s pause in respectful silence for a moment to remember the South Korean Secretary of State murdered by the Norks in the Rangoon bombing of October 1983 : Lee Bum Suk. 
+Permalink 
+Galaxies like grains of sand . For the longest time I carried around in my head the easy thumbnail tally of the cosmos: there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. 
+That second hundred billion crept up to two hundred billion when I wasn’t looking; and now suddenly it’s increased tenfold. 
+The scale of the universe, already unfathomable, just became even more so: There are about 10 times as many galaxies as previously thought. 
+The new number, two trillion galaxies, is the result of work led by Christopher J. Conselice, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham in England, published last week in The Astrophysical Journal . [ Two Trillion Galaxies, at the Very Least by Henry Fountain; New York Times , October 17th 2016.] 
+That’s just the observable universe, mind: the one little bubble of objects whose emitted light has reached us since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. The whole shebang is much bigger. It may in fact be infinite: There is an argument for this in Chapter Five of Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe . 
+There’s a downside and an upside to knowing stuff like this. 
+The downside is of course that it further dethrones us. It is only within living memory that we have known there are any other galaxies besides our own, let alone two trillion of the suckers. Not very long before that — a mere handful of generations — our little ball of rock was assumed to be the principal place in the cosmos, and its affairs the primary interest of the Creator. 
+The upside is that our consciousness, our civilization, our accomplishments seem all the more astonishing as it becomes more and more probable that there are no others like them anywhere, or at least anywhere within several billion trillion miles. 
+The arguments for this cosmic exceptionalism go back at least as far as Michael Hart’s 1975 paper An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth . Tegmark recycles them briefly in the last chapter of his book. (He is out at the most skeptical end of the spectrum for belief in extraterrestrial intelligence: “I’ve just argued that we’re probably the most intelligent life-form in our entire universe.”) British science journalist John Gribbin wrote an entire book arguing the skeptical case. 
+So we are utterly insignificant, but at the same time fantastically unique. There’s something to meditate on, a hundred years on from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity , which opened the way to serious, informed speculation about these tremendous matters. 
+Permalink 
+Warm happy glow of the month . Home maintenance chore this month has been spackling. I hate spackling. 
+This is to do with my property’s standalone garage. The garage has a loft. For our first 24 years in this house, we paid no attention to the garage loft. It was a dark, filthy place, clogged with junk from previous homeowners going back to the 1940s. 
+It didn’t even have a floor , only some random planks thrown across the joists. Nor was there any ceiling. If you went up there — there was a crude, rotting wooden access ladder from below — you risked having your scalp ripped open by roofers’ nails. It seems to be a cardinal rule of roofing to use nails two inches longer than necessary when fixing the roof tiles in place. ORDER IT NOW 
+As the main house silted up with accumulated stuff , though, I began looking for extra storage space. And there it was: a nice unused space, twenty feet square, crammed with the junk of strangers long since passed on to their celestial rewards. 
+I cleaned it out. I installed a proper pull-down access ladder . I laid a proper floor. I hauled up tremendous 8’×4′ panels of drywall and screwed them to the roof beams. I put in windows at each end. 
+Then, to seal up the seams between panels and hide the screw holes, you have to spackle that drywall . 
+It’s a tiresome business. You can learn the essentials from YouTube; but the instructors all disagree with each other. This one says to use fiber tape on the joints; that one says no, fiber tape is for pros, stick with paper tape. This one wets the paper tape, this one doesn’t. This one says to spread the joint compound like this ; that one says to spread it like that ; a third one says to spread it like that but with a turn of the wrist thus . This one uses a special trowel for inside corners; that one says no, just do one wall, let it dry, then do the other. I was getting flashbacks to my time in Ed School amid those endless tiresome arguments about the best way to teach math. 
+I made all the mistakes amateurs make: used too much mud and ended up sanding three quarters of it off, etc., etc. Still, when I’d finished it didn’t look bad. 
+I called in my neighbor Charlie to do site inspection. Charlie worked for years in construction. He is a scrupulously truthful man (and a Trump supporter!) After looking over my spackling he declared it “Not bad.” 
+Not bad! That was my warm happy glow of the month right there. Bob Dylan is welcome to his Nobel Prize : I’ll take “Not bad” from Charlie. 
+Permalink 
+Quote of the month . 
+Freedom of speech and thought, such as we still more or less have, are very delicate and easily smashed. 
+Watching our current elite’s treatment of liberty is like watching a baboon carrying a priceless Ming vase across a stone-paved floor. [ Trust judges? I’d rather ask a baboon to carry a Ming vase by Peter Hitchens; MailOnline , October 29th 2016.] 
+Permalink 
+The Americans . The Mrs and I have been binge-watching the TV series The Americans , recommended by a friend. 
+The premise of the show is that in the late Cold War years of the 1980s, the U.S.S.R. had agents deep embedded in American life, living as ordinary suburban American couples with kids, but on call to carry out espionage missions. Its psychological appeal is to the fantasy we all nurse, from early childhood onward, of living a secret life of excitement and danger while keeping up an outward mask of humdrum social normality. 
+The plotting and characterization is very good, with a narrative “pull” that keeps you wanting to rent the next clutch of episodes. The storylines teeter on the edge of absurdity without ever quite falling over into the void. 
+Unfortunately I find that I am now in love with Annet Mahendru . When I confessed this to Mrs Derbyshire, she counter-confessed that she is in love with Noah Emmerich . The balance of domestic affections thus remains undisturbed, and we continue to watch The Americans with guiltless pleasure. 
+Permalink 
+Math Corner . The number three doesn’t get the respect it deserves, in my opinion. 
+Two is all over. We inhabit a universe of pairs: positive and negative, up and down, male and female, liberal and conservative, … there’s no end to the twos. 
+Three has less of a public profile. Threeness doesn’t have the deep, fundamental quality of twoness. 
+Not that three is altogether neglected. The Christian god is tripartite; heroes in fairy-tales are granted three wishes; and no-one thinks ill of underwear manufacturers marketing their products as small, medium, and large. 
+Patriots of many nations celebrate the fact of their flag having three colors. The French actually name their flag for this feature, which keys to the three ideals of the Revolution: liberty, fraternity, equity. English children used to be taught to sing : “Red, white, and blue / What does it mean to you / …,” although I suppose this would be considered a racist outrage nowadays. I see an opportunity for arbitrage here #TeachEcon pic.twitter.com/lyuzQKFHZz 
+— Jadrian Wooten (@Wootenomics) October 28, 2016 
+In math, one of the most striking objects in elementary Measure Theory (dealing with the lengths, areas, volumes, etc. of mathematical figures) is Cantor ‘s set, which has uncountably many points in it (i.e. too many to match off one-one with the counting numbers 1, 2, 3, …) yet has measure zero. Cantor’s set is arrived at by repeated division of a line segment into three parts; it is best grasped via ternary (base 3) notation . ORDER IT NOW 
+There is a dark, negative side to threeness, though. Three is often used to slight and marginalize: third-rate, three’s a crowd, third arm inspection (ask one of the older generation of military veterans), etc. The word “triage” has positively sinister connotations. The Hound of Hell had three heads. 
+This dark aspect was explored at length in Chapter Four of Paul Fussell’s fine book The Great War and Modern Memory . Fussell fills seven pages exploring the role played by threeness in the WW1 combat experience as filtered by the human imagination. 
+For the poet Charles Sorley the transformation of man into corpse is a three-part action. First, man; then, when hit, animal, writhing and thrashing in articulate agony or making horrible snoring noises; then a “thing.” 
+The under-appreciation of three is best seen in the realm of fractions. It is possible to find a ruler marked off in thirds of an inch — I own one — but halves and quarters are far more popular. We say “a quarter of an hour” all the time; when did you last hear someone say “a third of an hour”? 
+Is there a VDARE.com-relevant angle to any of this? Of course there is! 
+Looking at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Clock the other day, I found myself wondering when the population of our republic will reach a third of a billion. It’s almost there. That day, October 6th, around noon, the clock showed 324,647,530. The rate of increase — births minus deaths plus net immigration — was shown as one person every twelve seconds. 
+With 8,685,803 to go until we reach the magic number of 333,333,333, and assuming linear extrapolation, we get to a third of a billion sometime in the late evening of January 25th, 2020 (assuming I have done my arithmetic correctly, which should by no means be relied on). 
+Will there be national celebration? A public holiday? Street parties? I doubt it. Thirdness gets even less respect than threeness. 
+John Derbyshire [ ] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books . He’s had t w o books published by VDARE.com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT ( also available in Kindle ) and From the Dissident Right II: Essays 2013 . His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com . (Reprinted from VDare.com by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+4345,Is Hillary Running for Bill’s Third Term?,"When Hillary Clinton announces her candidacy on Sunday, the Republicans will no doubt redouble their efforts to make the case that a vote for Hillary is a vote for Barack Obama’s third term—and the GOP believes no one wants that, for Pete’s sake. Clinton’s campaign, by contrast, will almost certainly make a very different case: If they vote for her, Americans will be getting something far closer to Bill Clinton’s third term.
+
+Tying her husband’s administration to her candidacy, Hillary Clinton has started to focus her language and her speeches on the continued struggles of the vast American middle class to adjust to a changed and still-changing economic landscape. That has ranged from addressing inequality of opportunity to less mobility to what she has called the “outrage that so many women are still paid less than men for the same work.”
+
+In comments she has made over the past year or so, she has portrayed the 1990s as a template for sound economic policies—even when compared with the record of the Republican Party’s modern-day hero, Ronald Reagan. “If you want a better future that is going to be reliant on making smart economic policies, compare my husband’s eight years with Ronald Reagan’s eight years—23 million new jobs, more than seven million people lifted out of poverty,” Clinton told PBS last June. At another point last year she declared in a speech:  “The 1990s taught us that even in the face of difficult long-term economic trends, it’s possible through smart policies and sound investments to enjoy broad-based growth and shared prosperity.” The eight years that followed her husband’s presidency, she said, showed how bad policy could turn budget surpluses into deficits and ""what happens when your only policy prescription is to cut taxes for the wealthy.""
+
+Given how widespread today’s economic concerns are, a new iteration of “It’s still the economy, stupid” could be a sound foundation for a successful campaign—one that creates just enough distance on the economy between Obama and Clinton (who, after all, spent her entire tenure in the Obama administration working on foreign policy). Even so, Clinton faces multiple challenges separate from those of her own making: the implied comparison between the economy of the 1990s and the utterly fuzzy nature of our economic world today defies easy characterization. How she threads those issues will likely determine her the outcome of her second quest for the White House.
+
+Twenty-four years ago, Bill Clinton campaigned to fix an ailing economy that had seen massive layoffs in manufacturing in the recession of 1991. He assailed then President George H.W. Bush for ignoring the suffering of the middle class. His campaign moniker, “It’s the economy, stupid,” helped propel him to victory over a sitting president.
+
+The situation today is arguably better than it was in 1991-1992, with the unemployment rate averaging 6.8 percent in 1991 and 7.5 percent in 1992 versus 5.5 percent over the past months. The end of the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the resounding American sense of triumph in those years, as well as victory in the war to evict Iraq from Kuwait, also placed the United States in a far stronger position internationally, though that is more clear in retrospect than it was just then, when uncertainty about international chaos lent an air of unease.
+
+But even though today looks statistically better than the early 1990s, the national mood is arguably worse, though mood gauges are the softest of soft statistics. Jobs numbers as well don’t adequately account for the much lower participation rate of American workers, with a smaller percentage of Americans working (nearly 67 percent then versus about 62 percent now). More important, and hence the reason for Hillary’s focus on the middle class, wages have barely budged since the early 1990s for the vast majority of workers.
+
+In contrast to the early Republican message that government has impeded the progress of the average American, the Clinton campaign looks to stress how government in conjunction with individual initiatives and businesses can help boost opportunities. The subliminal (or maybe not so) implication is that is just what happened throughout the eight years the other Clinton was president.
+
+It is undeniably true that between 1993 and 2000, the United States experienced a boom in both employment and economic growth. Sentiment as measured by Gallup polls about satisfaction with the economy also improved greatly, with just 24 percent expressing satisfaction in 1992 compared with 69 percent in 2000. The prevailing buzz was that of an economy firing on all proverbial cylinders, boosted by information technologies that were enhancing worker productivity and by a Wall Street and equity boom that saw tens of millions of Americans trading hot-dot stocks that promised not just wealth but connectivity, peace and happiness.",REAL
+9792,"Black Agenda Radio for Week of Nov. 7, 2016","News, information and analysis from the black left. Black Agenda Radio for Week of Nov. 7, 2016 Submitted by Nellie Bailey a... on Mon, 11/07/2016 - 19:35 Venezuela Hi-Tech Production in the Service of Humanity in Mississippi 
+Renaissance Jackson, the organization that briefly won the mayor’s office in predominantly Black Jackson, Mississippi, has launched a campaign to purchase a coding and programming capacity and a 3-D fabrication facility. They call it “Fab Lab.” This technology, “if it is democratically controlled, could actually serve humanity,” said Cooperation Jackson spokesman Kali Akuno . These kinds of projects are crucial, “first and foremost, to satisfy some of the basic needs of our community, and -- on a deeper level -- to really put this means of production directly in our community’s hands.” High tech is “one of these areas of the so-called ‘digital divide’ that Black people have been sorely and strategically absent from,” said Akuno. “So, we are doing it for ourselves.” Obamacare “Imploding and Beyond Repair” 
+The current wave of insurance rate hikes and medical service cutbacks is the predictable result of an Affordable Care Act (ACA) that “was pretty much a gift to the health insurance industry” when Congress passed it, in 2010, said Dr. John Geyman , professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, in Seattle. ACA “was never designed for affordability -- it’s a misnomer in the name of the bill,” he said. Obamacare is “imploding and beyond repair,” and unsustainable. “Tweeks cannot work in the long term. The main fight should be for what will save money and give universal coverage to everyone: namely, single payer national health insurance.” Dr. Geyman said single payer healthcare could save $500 billion a year -- about the same as the entire U.S. “defense” budget. The Fight for Education for Liberation in Detroit 
+At a “Community Conversation on the Crisis in the Schools,” Detroit activists, educators and parents gathered to address the question: “Who Created the School Crisis, and How are We Responding to it?” Among those wrestling with the issue was Dr. Thomas Pedroni , professor of Curriculum Studies at Wayne State University. He said the decline began with the state takeover of schools in the 1990s, and worsened dramatically after the imposition of state-appointed “emergency managers.” “School could be one of the most meaningful places for our communities, but instead, it’s deadened,” Dr. Pedroni told the crowd at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. “But, we’re going to fight to get back to the place where we have culturally relevant curriculum, not just producing a test score but to develop people who are self-empowered and who know how to fight for their community.” Venezuela Weathering Financial Storm, Despite Disinformation Campaign 
+“I challenge you to find one item of news that is positive to Venezuela in these last 16 or 17 years,” said Maria Paez Victor , a Venezuelan-born sociologist living in Toronto, Canada, and author of an article titled “Hating Venezuela.” Ms. Victor said the United States and its rightwing allies in Venezuela have kept up a non-stop disinformation campaign ever since the late Hugo Chavez and his Socialist Party were democratically elected in 1998. A crisis triggered by the collapse of world oil prices allowed the opposition to capture the legislature, last year, but Victor says the government is coping. “Venezuela has managed to weather a terrible financial situation, but this is bad news for corporate capitalism and for the United States, because they want Venezuela to be controlled by their lackies.” Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.",FAKE
+2224,Bibi's victory is Kerry's defeat,"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
+4008,Trudeau Elected Canada's Prime Minister As Liberals Assume Power,"Canada's Liberal Party won a decisive majority of parliamentary seats Monday, ending nearly a decade of Conservative Party rule. Voters gave Liberals nearly 40 percent of the overall vote compared to the Conservatives' 32 percent. The left-leaning New Democrats had just over 19 percent of the vote.
+
+Justin Trudeau, a 43-year-old former high school teacher and son of the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, assumes the office his father held from 1968 through 1984 with a short interruption.
+
+The youthful Trudeau ran an election that was optimistic in tone, which he said led to his victory.
+
+""We beat fear with hope,"" he said. ""We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together. Most of all we defeated the idea that Canadians should be satisfied with less.""
+
+The Associated Press notes the election results could strengthen ties between Canada and the U.S., at least for the remainder of the Obama administration:
+
+Conservative Stephen Harper was one of the longest-serving Western leaders. Reporter Dan Karpenchuk in Toronto reports on his loss:
+
+Trudeau's election gives Canada an approximation of a political dynasty. His father, also a Liberal, often drew comparisons with President John F. Kennedy. Justin Trudeau was born while his father was serving in office — in fact more than 40 years ago, then-President Richard Nixon predicted the 4-month-old Trudeau's future:
+
+""Tonight we'll dispense with the formalities,"" he said at a state dinner in Ottawa. ""I'd like to toast the future prime minister of Canada: to Justin Pierre Trudeau.""",REAL
+4897,What makes America 'exceptional'? Clinton and Trump trade places (+video),"Typically, 'American exceptionalism' has been a Republican talking point. But this election, it's Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump who's touting the idea – even as young Americans increasingly question it.
+
+Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the American Legion's 98th Annual Convention at the Duke Energy Convention Center in Cincinnati Wednesday.
+
+When Hillary Clinton spoke in front of a group of veterans on Wednesday, she invoked a concept that has long shaped how many conservative Americans have understood their country and its place within the world.
+
+“If there is one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of the way, it is this: The United States is an exceptional nation,” Mrs. Clinton told those gathered at the American Legion’s national convention in Cincinnati. “I believe we are still Lincoln’s ‘last best hope of earth,’ still Reagan’s ‘shining city on a hill,’ still Robert Kennedy’s ‘great, unselfish, compassionate country.’ ”
+
+Such lofty talk of “American exceptionalism” has been woven into the nation’s DNA since the time of the Puritans, many scholars say. The United States, many believe, is a unique nation with a special, perhaps God-ordained role to play upon the global stage.
+
+But within the crosscurrents of this topsy-turvy election cycle, the roles of the presidential candidates have flipped.
+
+On Wednesday, Clinton spoke of the value of the American military, both to secure American interests abroad and to act as “the global force for freedom, justice, and human dignity.”
+
+Meanwhile, Donald Trump has said the assumptions behind American exceptionalism are “insulting” to the rest of the world. “I don't like the term,” he said last year.
+
+The reversal comes amid a deeper shift within the country itself. The rising generation of Millennials more often sees American exceptionalism as connected to ideals than to the exertion of its power, polls find.
+
+“A new patriotism in American may be rising,” wrote Lynn Vavreck in The New York Times.
+
+In the context of this election, however, Clinton’s more traditional speech “makes perfect sense,” says Mark Naison, professor of African American studies and history at Fordham University in New York.
+
+She has just spent a month courting Republicans potentially alienated by Trump, after all.
+
+In general, underlined her long-held hawkish positions on the use of the American military. The United States is not only an exceptional nation, she said, it is also indispensable nation as a force for good.
+
+This is not a typical Democratic talking point.
+
+“On the left and in most precincts of the Democratic Party, the word is used sneeringly, while Republicans embrace it enthusiastically,” says Jerald Podair, professor of history and American studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.
+
+Indeed, Republicans explicitly trumpet American exceptionalism in their party platform.
+
+The Republican nominee, however, has expressed the view of many liberals over the years. In 2013, after Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized President Obama’s use of the phrase “American exceptionalism,” Mr. Trump agreed, calling it “insulting” to the rest of the world.
+
+Then in April last year, a month before he announced his candidacy, Trump repeated the critique, telling the Texas Patriots political action committee, a tea party group: “I don't want to say, ‘We're exceptional. We're more exceptional.’ Because essentially we're saying, ‘We're more outstanding than you…’ I don't like the term. I never liked it. When I see these politicians get up [and say], ‘the American exceptionalism’ ... I think, ‘You’re insulting the world.’ ”
+
+Trump’s position has hints of the growing generational shift, but Millennial ideals appear to go deeper.
+
+On the surface, Millennials report having fewer traditional notions of patriotism. Only 15 percent of 18 to 29 year olds describe the US as the greatest country in the world, while half of 30 to 64 year olds still make that claim.
+
+Yet as the Monitor reported this week on San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision not to stand for the national anthem, many Millennials see the country’s “exceptionalism” in acts of questioning, and through a desire to fix its flaws.
+
+This includes a vigorous critique of the idea of America as a special nation and a force for good in the world – especially by minority thinkers.
+
+“American exceptionalism has its roots in the ideologies and genocidal practices of land conquest, from Manifest Destiny to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Dylan Rodriguez, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside, in an email. “Inseparable from the history of US white supremacist thought – which includes eugenics and the legal edifices of Jim Crow apartheid – this is an exceptionalism that nurtures a dynamically racist commitment to social Darwinism.”
+
+Early in his tenure, Obama drew the ire of conservatives after he casually dismissed a question about American exceptionalism. “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” he said in 2009.
+
+But Obama now says he believes “in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being” – though on new terms that echo Millennials’.
+
+America’s exceptionalism is rooted in the history of American protests and battles for freedom, he says. In his speech for the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches last year, Obama gave a Whitmanesque litany, from “the hopeful strivers who cross the Rio Grande because we want our kids to know a better life,” to “the slaves who built the White House and the economy of the South,” and to “the countless laborers who laid rail, and raised skyscrapers, and organized for workers’ rights,” among others.
+
+“That’s what it means to love America,” he said. “That’s what it means to believe in America. That’s what it means when we say America is exceptional.”
+
+Clinton’s speech on Wednesday offered hints of that vision, though specifically as a means of contrasting herself with Trump.
+
+“My opponent misses something important,” she told the veterans. “When we say America is exceptional, it doesn't mean that people from other places don't feel deep national pride, just like we do. It means that we recognize America's unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity.”
+
+In that way, the idea of what makes America great could be a central campaign theme this November, says Professor Naison.
+
+“This vision of the US, not only as a beacon of freedom for nations, but as a place where oppressed people might want to move to, is precisely the vision she wants to juxtapose to Donald Trump's vision of the US as a walled society cutting back on its global obligations.”",REAL
+398,Hillary Clinton’s Countless Choices Could Hinge on 2016 Election,"For the moment, Mrs. Clinton may appear to be a figure of nearly limitless possibility, and her name has come up for prestigious jobs: president of Yale University, head of George Soros’s foundation. But being Hillary Clinton is never a simple matter, and her next few years are less a blank check than an equation with multiple variables. Her status is singular but complicated: half an ex-presidential partnership, a woman at the peak of her influence who will soon find herself without portfolio, and an instant presidential front-runner (a title that did not work out well last time).
+
+Mrs. Clinton may find that her freedom comes with one huge constraint. The more serious she is about 2016, the less she can do — no frank, seen-it-all memoir; no clients, commissions or controversial positions that could prove problematic. She will be under heavy scrutiny even by Clinton standards, discovering what it means to be a supposedly private citizen in the age of Twitter. With the election four years away — a political eon — she will have to tend and protect her popularity, and she may find herself in a cushy kind of limbo, unable to make many decisions about her life until she makes the big one about another White House try.
+
+“If you’re thinking about running for president, does that affect everything else?” asked former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York, who once agonized over the same choice and whose son Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo may find his own prospects shaped by what Mrs. Clinton decides. “Yes. Once you make your decision, everything clears up.”
+
+Still, Mrs. Clinton faces some immediate choices, which nearly two dozen current and former aides, friends and donors described:
+
+¶ Should she team up with her husband again?
+
+Last summer, Bill Clinton expressed doubt about whether his wife would join forces with him at the foundation that bears his name. “She has to decide what’s best for her,” he said in an interview. “It might be better for her and she might have a bigger impact if she has a separate operation.”
+
+The question is a fraught one. The climactic moment of Mrs. Clinton’s career came in 2000, when after years of supporting her husband’s campaigns and jobs, she struck out as a solo artist. Would rejoining his team be a step backward? Many aides said no. “She’s revered and admired as her own person,” said Lissa Muscatine, her longtime adviser.
+
+Still, some former aides said it was difficult to imagine Mrs. Clinton comfortable at the foundation in its current form. It is organized entirely around the former president, the endowment is small, and even supporters acknowledge that it lacks the organization of, say, the Gates Foundation. The group has made strides lately, with a new director of fund-raising and more involvement from Chelsea Clinton.
+
+Mrs. Clinton could do a trial run there, “testing the structure,” as one former aide put it. That way, she would have a home for the longtime advisers who are expected to stay with her. And by joining her husband’s operation, she could save the considerable time, money and effort it would take to start her own — which might be disbanded anyway if she runs in 2016.
+
+¶ Should she do what she wants or what makes the most political sense?
+
+Of all the issues Mrs. Clinton has worked on over the years, the one nearest her heart is improving the status of women and children around the world. As the first lady of Arkansas, she brought Dr. Muhammad Yunus, later a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to set up a microlending program there. She turned her tenure as secretary of state into a sustained argument that women’s welfare is central to security and economic stability, championing projects like milk cooperatives in Malawi and support networks for self-employed women in India. Now her desire is to be “a professional advocate,” as her daughter put it to a reporter.
+
+Ann Lewis, a longtime adviser, echoed that. “In the last four years, she has seen firsthand the difference she can make for women and girls,” she said.
+
+But even if Mrs. Clinton returns full time to her activist feminist roots, it is not yet clear exactly where she would begin: the topic is diffuse by its very nature. Nor is a campaign for, say, safer cookstoves in China the obvious way to win over voters in Iowa — and her work could touch on issues, including reproductive health, that could prove sensitive.
+
+But former aides say that Mrs. Clinton drew a lesson from her 2008 run: she believes that the country approves of her, and of female candidates in general, when they appear to be serving others rather than seeking power out of personal ambition. By that logic, Mrs. Clinton’s interest in helping poor women around the world would not hurt her politically in 2016 and might add to her current politician-above-politics luster.
+
+Her former aides also agree that she was too cautious in the early months of her last campaign and hurt herself by hiding her real passions. Regardless of whether she runs, telling Mrs. Clinton not to focus on women would be like “telling Al Gore not to talk about the environment,” said Paul Begala, a longtime adviser to Mr. Clinton. (Mr. Gore did not always emphasize his knowledge on the subject in 2000, which later looked unwise.)
+
+¶ What is the most dignified way for her to make money?
+
+Being a Clinton is expensive, and when the former secretary leaves office, she’ll want a staff and the ability to travel on private planes, friends say. The Clintons — who already own costly homes in Washington and Chappaqua, N.Y. — love renting in the Hamptons in the summer, according to friends, and buying their own home there could easily run well into the seven figures. Though friends say Mrs. Clinton could easily make a lot of money at a law firm, advising foreign countries on geopolitical risk, or at an investment bank or a private equity firm, none of those pursuits would be likely to wear well in a presidential campaign.
+
+Instead, Mrs. Clinton is expected to take on lucrative speaking engagements — maybe even joint speeches with her husband, which could command record prices — and write one or more books. After she lost in 2008, she was on the cusp of signing with her old publishing house, Simon & Schuster, for a book about her failed bid, for slightly less than the $8 million advance she earned for her 2003 memoir, “Living History,” according to someone involved in the negotiations. In meetings to discuss the book, that person recalled, she was quite critical of Mr. Obama. But then he drafted her for his Cabinet — and it is unclear if she will ever share her true feelings about that race.
+
+¶ How should she navigate the nonstop speculation about 2016?
+
+For her last presidential run, Mrs. Clinton declared her candidacy nearly two years before Election Day — but the timing did not feel right to her, because it made the race endless, say former aides who hint she would wait much longer if she made a bid again.
+
+The enormously disciplined Mrs. Clinton has stuck to the same story in public and private: She’s not running. That is what she told Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and an old friend, when she and her family dined with him recently, according to Mr. Wiesel. Others close to her emphasize that no one knows otherwise, not even Mrs. Clinton herself. “Be very wary of those pretending to bear actual knowledge,” said Philippe Reines, her State Department spokesman.
+
+Bill Clinton, however, sometimes cannot keep himself from verbally gaming out another campaign for her, said a friend who recently spent time with him. “Every indication is that he would really want her to run,” the friend said.
+
+The speculation is not without its advantages. If Mrs. Clinton is not running, she is a widely respected figure whose chief accomplishments are mostly behind her; if she may be running, she glows with White House and historic potential. “Nobody interacts with Hillary Clinton like she’s fading off into the sunset,” Mr. Reines said.",REAL
+7035,Terror Tots: We Must Prepare for the Child-Fighters of ISIS,"0 comments There are thousands of children who live under ISIS control and they are training them to kill and terrorize. They are teaching them to blow people up and shoot them. 
+These ISIS children are becoming suicide bombers and they are executing people. Many have yet to reach puberty. 
+Throughout history, evil has taken advantage of the innocence and pliability of children. ISIS has taken that to the extreme. 
+This video will tear your heart in half and make you angry at the same time. 
+If these children come to our shores, what do we do? How do we deal with this insanity? ISIS’ children have proven to be effective weapons. ISIS is extremely organized in the preparation of these children. The Observer reports : 
+While they learn the deadly art of warfare, the children are also schooled in the three Rs—readin’, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic. ISIS runs a network of schools that the children attend. A Foreign Affairs piece by Mia Bloom attests to two schools that cater to English-speaking students. 
+Some of the children are local, but many of them are foreigners, that is, not born and bred in Syria, Iraq or Yemen. The kids come from all over the world and the schools are set up to teach them in their native languages. They come from all over including China and Kazakhstan, from Belgium and Germany and England and the US. 
+They even come from Israel. 
+ISIS figured it out without our help. Children play a very large role in their own propaganda and recruiting materials. They also play central roles in their activity. Highly trained kids are referred to by ISIS elders as their “cubs.” These “cubs” are the crème de la crème. 
+We face a religion of evil. It is not a religion of peace.These men are pure evil and this latest tactic proves such. I hope those in our government are thinking of how to deal with these children if they ever reach our shores. It will not be an easy solution.",FAKE
+8893,LUCIFER in the Temple of the Dog II,"ISIS Takes Out M1A Abrams Tank with American TOW Missile (video) ‹ › Bio by Jack Heart : My earliest memories were of being surrounded by machinery and a constant deep mechanical humming rose and fell like the breath of fitful sleep. Maybe it was the ""mother ship"" or the ""Montauk underground"" like Preston Nichols author of the The Montauk Projects would later claim but I am inclined to believe it was the post natal care room at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn where I was born to a well to do family. I grew up in Brooklyn. My father had a Fur business on Twenty-Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. The city bought him and his partners out when they built the Fashion Institute of Technology. From grades one to five I attended the finest Catholic school in NYC. Before I was 12 my family moved to Amity Harbor Long Island and from there the volume on the strangeness was turned up full blast. My teenage years were spent working on fishing boats at Montauk Point where my father had been stationed at Camp Hero for the Korean War. Back home in Amityville we would wile away the night doing performance art for tourists milling around outside my best friend’s home gawking at the Amityville Horror House, some of you may have already met me I was one of the guys throwing beer bottles at you. Butchy to this day doesn’t know who was up in that room with him that night, nobody does but I can take a real good guess. By the time I was eighteen I realized that globalism had made the seas off Long Island barren and I would have to find a new way in life to make a living. I had always wanted to be a fisherman but I opened a landscaping business with my mother who was the top woman designer in her field. Our clients included many celebrities and denizens of Long islands gold coast. Back then it seemed life would always be good. I remember one day while dragging trees out some stock broker’s yard he pulled up his long driveway in his convertible sports car. I looked at his decaying body not much older than mine. Then I looked down at mine. Salty sweat encased sinewy bronze muscles pumped full of blood from the days exertion. I decided I was just where I wanted to be. He would make his 500$ for the day and he had to give it to me because there was no way he was dragging that tree down his long driveway. Little did I know that he and his tribal brethren had a plan. Over the next twenty years they would flood America with illegal “immigrants” to do my job for a hundred dollars a day. Things are not so good anymore even with an associate’s degree in architectural engineering I’ll never make 500$ a day again. He makes more because now the government that sold me out, not once but three times subsidizes his job. I wonder how many of his tribe are buried in veterans memorial cemetery’s. Practically every male member of my family is. I ended up on the wrong side of the law when I was 27 years old through no fault of my own. I was helping Geraldo Rivera film what I now realize must have been Ollie North's little cocaine contra excursion into NY. It was never aired. He quit his job but I was beaten and tortured by the police then branded as a felon for the rest of my life. In 1987 I was asked to remove the Pagans motorcycle gang from their clubhouse a strip club named Bogart’s. The person that asked me was Richard Capri who died abruptly a few years back. He owned Bogart's and a lot of other strip clubs on Long Island. He was a prominent figure in New York's underworld. Financially he dwarfed people like Gotti and the rest of the menagerie of mutts paraded on TV as “mob bosses.” It was during that period that I realized I was a member of a very elite unit. Some would call us soldiers of God others the army of Satan. You read what I write and you decide. LUCIFER in the Temple of the Dog II By Jack Heart on October 29, 2016 The Human Race has no worse Enemy than Institutional Academia, whose only real job is to Dissemble its Past By Jack Heart, Orage & Friends 
+It’s ironic, science finally knows enough about science to disprove itself. But as the Norsemen well knew, that is the fate of all things, just like their gods who in the end must annihilate themselves… Marcel Griaule with the Dogon 
+From 1931 – 1956 the legendary French anthropologist Marcel Griaule, along with Germaine Dieterlen – a brilliant and highly accomplished anthropologist in her own right – studied a West African tribe called the Dogon. After eighteen years of studies, they made their first breakthrough into the Dogon’s secrets in 1950 and published Un Systeme Soudanais de Sirius.* 
+What was in that document should have changed this world, but it was quickly countered by those in academia who are paid to keep this world just the way it is. 
+What Griaule and Dieterlen found in their quarter century of research, shockingly enough, as the holographic universe had not yet been proposed, was the source of its projection. They found the ‘Black Sun’ in the shadow of Timbuktu, the ancient seat of the anglophile’s most abyssal nightmare, there dwell the Dogon, pun intended. What the Dog people believe explains how the Holographic Universe works and gives a dissertation of the rock carving in Australia’s Blue Mountains; almost seven thousand miles from the eastern coastline of Africa… 
+Nobody noticed then and they haven’t yet . They are still trying to explain how a tribe of primitive Black farmers from Africa knew more about astronomy than the twentieth century’s best White scientists. All they can come up with to date is two of the greatest anthropologists the world has ever produced lied and falsified all their data. 
+The “proof” they cite for this kind of unprecedented scholastic slander is the “research” of Dutch Mormon and neophyte anthropologist; Walter E. A. van Beek. Van Beek converted to Mormonism in college when he started studying anthropology… 55 
+Van Beek’s research consisted of dropping in on the Dogon almost a half century after Griaule and Dieterlen, who studied them when they still had their independence through France. By the time van Beek got there, the Dogon lived in an Islamic State, at the same latitude in an Africa that in a little over a decade after he published would give the world Darfur. 
+In Darfur in 2003, Arab Sudanese Muslims displaced and murdered close to a half million Black Sudanese ‘infidels.’ 
+Van Beek asked a few questions about a secret tradition that the Dogon already knew was anathema to their Muslim overlords, then proceeded to publish a paper in 1991 that amounts to nothing more than an ad hominem attack on the two great anthropologists. In it, he repeatedly states that he could not confirm any of Griaule’s and Dieterlen’s findings and insinuates that they made the whole thing up.56 Although seemingly written with a crayon, van Beek’s paper has been given utterly unjustified academic status. This type of slander is typical of the Mormons, a powerful and extremely wealthy Christian sect. The Mormons act out their pathological hatred of Blacks academically. It is the foundation of Mormon theological doctrine that the Lamanites or Blacks once wiped out the Nephites or Whites in the Americas. 
+According to the Mormons, both Whites and the Blacks had settled America by way of Israel. They believe Native Americans are the descendants of Blacks. The Mormons also believe in and have been asked repeatedly by the ADL to stop baptizing their favorite dead Jews so that they too can go the heaven and become gods like good Mormons… The rest of the Church of the Latter Day Saints’ strange costumes and beliefs has been well documented… Sīrius A and below it to the left, Sīrius B 
+Every sixty years Sirius , or Sigi Tolo (Star of Yasigi) to the Dogon, appears between two mountain peaks and the Dogon celebrate Sigui which can last several years. The last Sigui began in 1967 and the festivities didn’t end till 1973. 
+Sirius is a star in Canis Major in the southern celestial firmament; it’s pronounced Sīrius in Latin, and is derived from the ancient Greek word Seirios, which means glowing or Scorcher. It is the brightest star in the night sky, just about twice as bright as the next brightest; Canopus in the southern constellation of Carina. 
+As it rose over the horizon of the Mesopotamian valley, Sīrius was known as the Dog of Orion, because it always trailed closely behind the constellation of Orion – called Nephîlā′ by the ancient inhabitants of a city currently known as Aleppo. Sīrius is now known in the West simply as the Dog Star. 
+Nephîlā′ was considered to be the origin of the Nephilim or Watchers, the Angels in the bible who came down to earth to interbreed with the daughters of men and teach the human race the art of civilization. As a reward for their altruism, the children of the Watchers were drowned in the deluge by a giggling Yahweh over the objections of the prophet Enoch. In the homeland of the Norse, Sīrius is known as Lokabrenna or Loki’s Torch. To the Tohono O’odham, a Native American tribe who live just south of the Hopi in Arizona’s baking Sonoran Desert; Sīrius is a dog that stalks the mountain sheep. In the East they have other names for Sīrius. The Chinese call it Tiānláng; the Celestial Wolf. In Sanskrit Sīrius is known simply as Lubdhaka; the Hunter… 
+In springtime around the Mediterranean and North Africa, Sīrius sinks below the horizon and disappears from the night sky for seventy days. It’s reappearance in ancient Egypt right before sunrise on the eastern horizon toward the latter part of July heralded not only the morning, but also the flooding of the banks of the Nile. Sīrius was both yearned for and feared, because it could cause great destruction and at the same time brought with it the rich volcanic topsoil of the Ethiopian highlands to fertilize the Nile Delta. The fertility of the Nile Valley was the driving mechanism behind the great Egyptian civilizations. 
+To the ancient Greeks , the first appearance of Sīrius right before the morning heralded the coming of the “Dog Days” of summer. The Greeks feared the sweltering heat of those days under its influence, days of madness in dogs, wilted crops, weakened warriors and lustful women. To the Aborigine of Australia’s Blue Mountains, July was the time where Sīrius set right after the sun and rose right before the dawn to announce the morning. 
+Un Systeme Soudanais de Sirius then introduces Po Tolo (Star of Fonio), which orbits perpendicular to the horizon of Sigi Tolo. When Po Tolo is closest to Sigi Tolo, it is at its most brilliant, and when it is furthest away, it gives off a scintillation that makes it appear as many stars. Irregularities of motion in Sirius star system X ray image of Sīrius and above it, slightly to the right, Sīrius B 
+In 1844, a German astronomer observed the tell tale irregularities in the motion of Sīrius through the firmament, indicating it is a binary star system, when two objects circle around each other in the night sky. 
+Twenty-first century scientists assert that this is due to their gravitational pull on each other, but no one has ever proven how gravity works, no one of course except the Marquis de Laplace. The late eighteenth century French mathematician had neither need nor use for intervention from Newton’s ‘Devine Artificer’ to keep the universe from destroying itself. 
+Instead of postulating that gravity was the result of an attraction between two points and which would require periodic adjustments by god to keep the heavens from self destruction, as Newton insisted, Laplace said the universe was held together by a fluidic field. Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (1745-1827) 
+Laplace then went on to prove it with a series of eloquently presented equations in Exposition du système du monde and the Mécanique céleste. His breakthrough mathematics in Théorie analytique des probabilities , published in 1812, would lead to the use of the probability equations that would culminate with the math of twentieth century Germany. 
+He was the first man to recognize that somewhere in the universe there must exist Black Holes, whose attraction was so great that not even light could resist the summoning their relentless call. 
+Objects do not attract each other; they distort the spacetime continuum through their mass. It’s this distortion that is perceived and measured as a force. It’s just a word. There is no gravity as Newton described it or any omnificent omnipresent god as Judeo-Christians describe “him…” 
+Binary star systems were by then already well known to scientists, but whatever Sīrius was rotating around, it could not be seen with the lenses available at the time. Dubbed Sīrius B by academia, the Dark Stars existence would not be optically confirmed till 1862 with a prototype eighteen and a half inch refracting telescope being field tested by its American inventor. 
+Scintillation usually occurs through atmospheric conditions, but in the Holographic Paradigm it is the collision of spherical frequency waves that generate photons — the points of light that constitute what academia erroneously call particles. As Sīrius and Sīrius B perpetually circle around each other in the inky darkness, spherical frequency waves are exactly what are being generated, just like they are by this world’s Sun. The Dogon told Griaule that Polo Tolo is the origin of all things and that its contents are ejected by centrifugal force in infinitely small particles which upon exiting Polo Tolo can grow to the same size as Polo Tolo within a day. They told him Polo Tolo is the smallest of all things, yet the heaviest of all stars. They calculate the orbit of Polo Tolo around Sigi Tolo in doubles which is a hundred years for every two orbits and it turns on itself every year. The Dogon believe Polo Tolo is white where as Sigi Tolo is red. 
+Most of that will be the subject of endless conjecture by guys who wear glasses an inch thick, never in their pathetic excuses for a life slept with a cheerleader and can’t think outside of a text book. It’s all possible but not provable. 
+Other than mapping the movements of points of light through the firmament, most of what is left in astronomy is a quintessential pseudoscience. It operates outside all established laws of empirical science. Its current best known proponent is Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman. As it is now practiced twenty-first century astronomy’s founding father Carl Sagan dressed and acted more like a Detroit pimp than an Ivy League scientist. 
+To borrow a quip from Frank Zappa about the relationship of politics to the military industrial complex; NASA is the entertainment division of Jet Propulsions Laboratory (JPL). 
+JPL is an organization founded through the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) by master Magi Jack Parsons and Theodore von Kármán, blood heir to the Maharal of Prague; one of the two most powerful Qabalists to ever walk the earth. The other was Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons’ mentor in Magick… 
+Optical observation has determined that Sīrius and Sīrius B orbit each other at a separation of about 50.1 years. As they do, they emit an unexpectedly high level of infrared radiation, with Sīrius B being brighter in the infrared spectrum than Sīrius. 
+Sīrius B has been described by scientists as a white dwarf . It’s about the same size as the earth; and by 1910, its mass had been determined by observations of its binary orbit around Sīrius to be about the same as the sun, making it a million times denser than the sun. A tablespoon of Sīrius B would weigh five tons. 
+Sīrius was described as red by Roman astronomer and astrologist; Claudius Ptolemy. His observations are backed by the writings of the poet Aratus, the orator Cicero, and general Germanicus. Seneca the Younger described Sīrius as being a deeper red than even Mars. These observations by notable historical figures at the dawn of the Common Era are backed by Lombard prayer manuscripts from as late as the eighth century. During the same period, Sīrius was the standard star for the color white to Chinese astronomers. In present times, Sīrius glows a vivid white-blue in every far off corner of the world, but to the naked eye, it sometimes appears to be flashing with red, white and blue hues when near the horizon. 
+According to Einstein’s general relativity, because of its extreme density, the light waves from Sīrius B should be gravitationally red-shifted. This was confirmed in 1925. Gravitational red-shifting is when electromagnetic radiation, emanating in spherical frequency waves from a source in the gravitational field, is reduced in frequency when seen from a place that has a higher gravitational potential. Red-shifting is a direct result of gravitational time dilation which is the difference of elapsed time between events to observers at different distances from the gravitational mass they are observing. 
+This manifests itself as a change in the color perception of light toward the red part of the light spectrum as the wavelength is increased. An increase in the frequency observed from a position that has a lower gravitational potential than the source results in a shift to the blue part. Due to its extreme density, the only thing with a higher gravitational potential than a White Dwarf would be a Neutron Star, a Dark Star or a Black Hole… 
+Systeme Soudanais de Sirius goes on to say that there is another star the Dogon call Emme Ya (Sorghum Female). It is four times lighter than Polo Tolo and follows a vaster trajectory in the same direction and the same time, also taking fifty years to complete an orbit. Their positions are where their rays make right angles. Emme Ya emits rays which have the quality of solar rays and is accompanied through its orbit by a satellite named Nyan Tolo (Star of Woman). 
+Data began piling up at the dawn of the twentieth century; “observational as well as physical and dynamical indications” that “led to the hypothesis of the existence of a third body in the system.” 57 By 1932, it was pretty well established through orbital calculations that something was revolving roughly every 6.3 years around either Sīrius or Sīrius B. 
+During the previous decade a tiny star had been sighted about twenty times by some of the best astronomers in the business. However the star was like a “phantom,” nobody ever saw it twice or long enough to confirm it.58 
+By 1995, using additional data and three different systems of math figures of 6.4 years, six and finally six using Fourier analysis were arrived at for a complete revolution of the –as of yet– unidentified star. Further analysis of the possible orbital scenarios indicates that “stable orbits with a period of about 6 years exist only around Sirius A.”59 Because it cannot be optically observed, the mass of Sīrius C would have to be about twenty or thirty times larger than Jupiter, which is the bare minimum to support thermonuclear fusion.60 What the math and optical observation says about the 3-star system of Sīrius, the question mark is for Nyan Tolo, in English the Star of Woman [or the Moon] Unless of course, the third star in the Sīrius system is a Black Hole or what Newtonian physics calls a Dark Star. Black holes are a generic prediction of general relativity; no one’s ever actually seen one. How could you? The black hole is a point in the spacetime continuum where the gravitational effects are so strong that not even electromagnetic radiation such as light can escape.
+There is nothing to see. But in general relativity, a black hole does have mass and angular momentum, so its presence can be detected through its gravitational interaction with other stars and its effects on electromagnetic radiation such as light. 
+In 1974 Stephen Hawking, by applying quantum field theory to general relativity, predicted that black holes would emit small amounts of thermal radiation, light in a perfect black body spectrum… Many other famous mathematicians and scientists have since verified Hawking’s results… 
+According to general relativity , there is a singularity in the center of a black hole that is infinitely dense. Once across the black holes event horizon nothing can escape that singularity. The inevitable can be prolonged by an object accelerating away maybe even by jumping through time, but sooner or later it will reach freefall and be torn apart in a process so violent that it is sometimes referred to as spaghettification or the noodle effect by scientists. In the end, it is crushed into something so dense it is infinite. 
+In general relativity, there is a yawning black hole at the center of the galaxy sustained by the essences of the all the worlds that it has destroyed. Everything corporeal is destined to one day be swept over its event horizon. The black hole sits like an ever expanding open drain at the bottom of the ocean. 
+All matter must, in due time, be crushed into the infinite density that feeds its primordial singularity. It is the fate of all that is to be crushed back into what H. P. Lovecraft called “the crawling chaos…” 
+There really is not much difference between a black hole and a wormhole, if any at all. In relativity, they both have a singularity in the center and all that crosses their event horizon ends by being crushed into Lovecraft’s crawling chaos. In 1988 scientists working out of the Caltech found loopholes in the math that predicts singularities and Lorentzian traversable wormholes became a mathematical probability. Lorentzian traversable wormholes 
+Lorentzian traversable wormholes allow travel in both directions from one part of the universe to another very quickly. They also allow travel from one universe to another… 
+According to the math that JPL uses, teleportation is far more likely than dissolution for an object that passes through a worm hole or a black hole. To quote well-known television physicist Michio Kaku, there is no reason why an object could not “pass freely back and forth. In fact, for one solution, the trip through a wormhole would be no worse than riding in a plane.” 61 
+The Dogon believe that Sirius B once occupied the place where our Sun is now. Twenty-first century astronomers object. They say that this is impossible! But it should be apparent by now that the Dogon know more about the universe than twenty-first century astronomy. 
+The thousand year war Truth has waged against academia and all the other agents of the great Abrahamic lie ends with the Dogon. The Dogon are the remnants of ancient Egypt. The Egyptians were Black! To paraphrase Aleister Crowley in the Holy Books they were Black as Nubian slaves so they could absorb more of the light of God… 
+It is fitting to paraphrase Crowley because he himself was a product of the Plymouth Brethren, the same rabidly anglophile and ruthlessly committed fundamental Christian sect that gave the world Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie. 
+‘Sir’ Flinders Petrie was the most prominent archeologist of the nineteenth century and the British Empires academic heavyweight champion, despite the fact that Wallace Budge was a far better scientist. Petrie’s racism and Christian fanaticism have been immortalized in books. Many have chuckled over the fact that when Petrie died he would donate his head to science, and science would lose it. What Petrie and all his academic allies were pedaling directly in the face of far more accomplished scientists like Frenchmen Auguste Mariette and Gaston Maspero along with their English counterpart the great Wallace Budge, was Anglo-Israelism. 
+Since the day of John Dee, Anglo-Israelism has been the unseen current driving the tides of blood and war that have swept first England then America to world hegemony. It is the fanatical belief by the British and their progeny that they are the lineal descendents of the Israelites and that the throne of England can be traced back to the House of David. Therefore the people of the British Isles are Yahweh’s chosen people in the bible. 
+Anglo-Israelisms adherents believe that the “Ten Tribes were transferred to Babylon about 720 B.C.; and simultaneously, according to Herodotus, the Scythians, including the tribe of the Saccæ, appeared in the same district; the progenitors of the Saxons afterward passed over into Denmark—the “mark” or country of the tribe of Dan—and thence to England. 
+Another branch of the tribe of Dan which remained “in ships” (Judges, v. 17) made its appearance in Ireland under the title of “Tuatha-da-Danan.” Tephi, a descendant of the royal house of David, arrived in Ireland, according to the native annals, in 580 B.C. From her was descended Feargus More, king of Argyll, an ancestor of Queen Victoria, who thus fulfilled the prophecy that “the line of David shall rule for ever and ever” (II Chron. xiii. 5, xxi. 7). 
+The Irish branch of the Danites brought with them Jacob’s stone, which has always been used as coronation stone of the kings of Scotland and England, and is now preserved in Westminster Abbey. Somewhat inconsistently, the prophecy that the Canaanites should trouble Israel (Num. xxxiii. 55, Josh. xxiii. 13) is applied to the Irish. The land of Arzareth, to which the Israelites were transplanted (II Esd. xiii. 45), is identified with Ireland by dividing the former name into two parts, the former of which is ereẓ, or “land”; the latter, Ar, or “Ire.””62 
+As the agents of Anglo-Israelism , what Petrie and the rest of academia were teaching at western universities was the systematic destruction of an entire races’ heritage in the name of another races’ fantasy. No one ever really got it, except R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz — there are things in Egypt far older than Egypt… 
+The institutionalized racism is blatant and it is unprecedented in everything that is known of Greek and Roman history. The Romans considered the Ethiopians a people beloved by the gods. But even for the most committed anglophile there is a blind rage, a fanatical meanness to it that borders on stupidity. 
+Blacks are not intelligent enough to have built anything besides a mud hut and surely an unknown “Dynastic Race,” a “fine” lighter-complexioned race had invaded Egypt from the south in late predynastic times conquering the “inferior” and “exhausted” indigenous dark skinned savages. 63 
+This Aryan race of fine White men, no doubt the Israelites of the bible, then slowly introduced dynastic civilization through interbreeding with the local “mulatto” race and culminated it from the fourth dynasty on with the building of all the great edifices in Egypt.64 
+Viewed under this lens of religious fanaticism , Colonel Howard Vyse’s sacking and defiling of the Giza plateau toward the middle of the ninetieth century and academia’s enshrinement of him for his acts of wanton vandalism –although still totally unacceptable– are at least understandable, as is Thomas Young’s forgery, when he inserted the glyph for Ra to complete Khafra’s name on the Dream Stele. 
+Literacy had always been frowned upon by Christianity, but with the advent of the printing press, it became unavoidable. If a world that knew how to read was ever to believe the outlandish lies that are told in the bible, it wouldn’t do to have evidence that contradicted the bibles’ narrative staring that newly literate world dead in the face. 
+Dr. J. J. Hurtak was NASA’s guru in the latter quarter of the twentieth century, and the man the authors of the Stargate Conspiracy point to as the supreme puppeteer of the Giza plateau in that same period. During that stretch of time in the eighties and nineties Hurtak was secretly teaching close friends “the pyramids are hundreds of thousands of years old…” 
+France was pushing back at Anglo-Israelisms’ deliberate dissembling and falsification of history with Auguste Mariette and Gaston Maspero, who in tandem managed to control the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities until WWI. 
+Germany was already at war with the Jewish impersonators, but even before that, as the center for Panbabylonism in Europe, German scholars had quietly seethed and trained a blue-blooded scholar like James Henry Breasted. James Henry Breasted 
+Breasted could not just be dismissed like a common academic, not with friends like Gertrude Bell, who was the British master spy that along with Lawrence of Arabia established the Hashemite dynasties, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, the men charged with looting the Tomb of Tutankhamen, Lord Allenby the man who would wrest control of the middle east from the Ottomans and the Arab leader Faisal whom they would eventually crown king of Iraq. 
+The battle of the pyramids was coming to a head by the time a seizure prone psychic with a Masonic pedigree named Edgar Cayce showed up promoting Anglo-Israelism as a journey through Atlantis and a time forgotten to a New World Order. 
+War had already broken out between the Saxons, a war which would finish the Ottoman Empire for good and leave the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Jews in complete control of the Giza plateau and all the rest of the Middle East. 
+Control of the Giza plateau is maintained to this day through the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), a legacy of the seizure-prone psychic. Control of the rest of the Middle East is maintained through instigation of perpetual war and unrest. 
+France was still pushing back hard when Harvey Spencer Lewis would found the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC) in America on behalf of the French Rosicrucian’s. In the thirties AMORC, allied with big money, started printing ancient maps detailing a network of tunnels and chambers beneath the Giza plateau and distributing them to anyone who bought their books. 
+Lewis of course claimed they were ancient Rosicrucian secrets but French archaeologist Emile Baraize had been to the Giza plateau by 1926, almost a decade before the maps were published. Baraize during a period from twenty-six onwards had done extensive explorations beneath the plateau that were never published for academia. At the same time Lewis was peddling his maps, Griaule and Dieterlen showed up at the Dogons doorstep… 
+In The Shadow out of Time, Lovecraft wrot e about a man troubled by strange dreams and visions of a race hundreds of thousands of years old. They had driven an even older race that had long preyed on them into the labyrinth of the earth’s interior. The most ancient race had long since evolved to prefer the labyrinth and no longer needed anything from the surface, but they had never forgotten that they required revenge. It is in Australia’s great western desert where the man to his eternal horror finds the entrance into the labyrinth. 
+If Anglo-Israelism has a poet laureate, it is HP Lovecraft. They are not ignorant of the occults deepest secrets. It was their great high priest Charles Piazzi Smyth who orchestrated Waynman Dixon and Dr. James Grants “discovery” of the shafts in the Queens Chamber in 1872. Dixon and Grant knew almost exactly where those shafts were, shafts that had been walled up before history begins. Occult knowledge like that shows there are those in Anglo-Israelism that know their way around the labyrinth all too well… 
+It was Lovecraft’s job to take those things which they knew were in the labyrinth and which they saw as their enemies and paint them in colors of the most abyssal horror the human soul is capable of. Lovecraft did this with almost supernatural efficiency in stories like the Shadow over Innsmouth, the Dunwich Horror and many many more. In the Call of Cthulhu Lovecraft creates his own mythos about the “old ones” and the “unspeakable terror” they are poised to bring back to the world of White Christians when the stars, on an inevitable day of doom, align in their favor. 
+Lovecraft saw terrifying conspiracies to bring back these old ones everywhere he looked… But outside of bat winged humanoids and certain blue blooded families sequestered around the New England countryside, Lovecraft saw secret societies among the colored races as the primary high priests and harbingers of the old ones. Lovecraft detests and fears all dark-skinned people as the people of Cthulhu and the old ones. 
+In Herbert West-Reanimator Lovecraft expresses his revulsion at the idea of bringing a Black man back to life when he writes: “and Buck Robinson, “The Harlem Smoke.” The Negro had been knocked out and a moment’s examination shewed us he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling forelegs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life – but the world holds many ugly things.” The Stonehenge of Australia 
+In 1939, Frederic Slater , the President of the Australian Archaeological Research and Education Society and an eminent academic, came across an artificially constructed mound that he described as “the Stonehenge of Australia.” 65 He claimed that “the mound is one of the oldest; I should say the oldest, forms of temples in the world and dates back to the … advent of first man.”66 He felt the positioning of the rocks, signs and symbols on the mound may have been “the basis of all knowledge, all science, all history and all forms of writing.”67 
+A decade later, de Lubicz would echo similar sentiments about Hieroglyphics in The Temple In Man when he insisted that they should instead be referred to by “the Egyptian term Medu-Neteru, the Greek translation of which, “hieroglyphs,” distorts the Egyptian meaning. Medu-Neteru is the Neters, or the principles conveyed by a sign.”68 De Lubicz was arguing that the Hieroglyphics themselves were Jungian archetypes and they were being mistranslated, because this was not being accounted for. 
+A year after Slater’s initial discovery, government officials contacted the farmer whose land Slater had found the mound on and told him that his land was in danger of being confiscated to protect the artifacts that Slater had been exuberantly discussing with his colleagues. In a preemptive strike, the farmer bulldozed the artifacts into dust and Slater was left with only his notes.69 
+As the founder and president of the Australian Archaeological Society, Slater was more than qualified academically to interpret the meaning of the mound. The translation he came up with was a creation story that ended by saying “man came to earth through darkness from the light of life that shines far off.”70 
+Almost seventy years later, Aboriginal tribal elder Kevin Gavi Duncan ends The Wisdom Keepers on almost the exact same note. “We are the extra-terrestrials, our body is made up of this earth but our spirit comes from the Morning Star. We come from another place, from another world.”71 Gosford Glyphs (Ref.: Herschel’s The Hidden Records) 
+Academia shrieks that they are a fraud at the mention of the Gosford Glyphs, but the fact is the glyphs are not far from Baiame in the Brisbane Water National Park. They are clearly hieroglyphic and have also clearly been tampered with. People who have researched them are claiming that partial deciphering by experts tells of pilgrimages made from a predynastic Egypt to an Australia that was a Mecca to those who worshiped the old ones five thousand years ago.72 The fact is that it would be expected for the Aborigine to have maintained those glyphs and restored them when necessary over the last 5000 years. That is what they do, that is their culture. Academia’s summary rejection of the glyphs authenticity on the grounds that they have been tampered with is not good science but it is a good sign of academia’s duplicity. 
+From the very first days in 1770, Captain James Cook arbitrarily declared Australia Terra nullius; a Latin term meaning nobody’s land. Cook knew the land was inhabited. He was already shooting the natives. The designation is made even more inexplicable by the fact that at the time of Cooks voyage, the British had already accepted the principles of native title in their colonies. “An Imperial proclamation of 1763 lay down that Native Americans owned their hunting grounds.”73 
+Even if it was an honest mistake, by 1790 as British colonizers moved inexorably inland and everywhere met fierce resistant from Blacks already there “the days of genuine miscalculation were at an end. The concept of empty land was no more than a convenient fiction.”74 
+By 1863 the pseudoscientific theories of Charles Darwin had been adapted to rationalize the final victory of the White races over the Blacks, a euphemism for the genocide of the colored races. A speech given at the time in Queensland parliament articulates the prevailing sentiment among White Australians. 
+“That the aboriginal population must eventually disappear entirely is surly a matter that the study of evolution, the study of biology, the study of ethnology would convince. The law of evolution says that the Niger shall disappear in the onward progress of the White man.” 75 
+This was no rhetorical speech. Whites had been acting out on this philosophy for almost a hundred years by then and would continue to act out on it for almost a hundred more. Sustained efforts were made to breed the Aborigine out of existence. Actual government policy was enacted and Aborigine children were taken from their mothers and forcibly “educated” in the White man’s ways. Kevin Gavi Duncan 
+By the time Aboriginal tribal elder Kevin Gavi Duncan stood in front of the ancient rock carving depicting Baiame and gave his explanation for what the petroglyph meant, he is lucky that he even remembered Baiami’s name. 
+A far better explanation would have included the three star system of Sīrius, the progenitor of the Three Stars Each texts which came out of ancient Babylon and are the earliest known star catalogues. That is what is under the Moon in Baiami’s left hand. 
+At the end of a cycle Sīrius B, the source of this world, gets caught in the gravitational pull of Sīrius C, a Black Hole and exchanges places with the Sun. That is what the dagger symbolizes; the reversal of worlds. The boat off to the left is the boat which in the religion of old ones carries the Sun on its celestial journey… 
+Frederic Slater had nailed it, which is why his evidence was immediately destroyed and everything he did or said after that marginalized by pasty-faced academics who couldn’t get a job in a Seven-Eleven if this world worked on merit. Australia is the ancient and venerable Mecca of the old ones; The Temple of the Dog. The place where Sīrius the hunter and the true morning star, is also the evening star. The place where Lucifer is God, as he was always meant to be… 
+As it stands right now the human race has no worse an enemy than institutional academia whose only real job is to dissemble its past. 
+Those who seek solace in the embrace of a benevolent Christian god, place their fate in the hands of an impotent chimera they fashioned from pieces of a discarded sun god. They condemn him, they strip him naked, they mock him and they torture him. Then they nail him to a stick and murder him. The mesmerized minions now kneel before the craven images of this obscene blasphemy singing “eat his body, drink his blood” and perpetuate this horror by forcing it upon their children. 
+The Muslims are no better if not even worse. They have taken the 114 meditational verses of the Secret Gospel of Thomas and turned them into a field manual for savagery. 
+When Jesus walked the earth, if he ever did, forbidden knowledge was still available for those who sought it out. Alexander the Great was just such a man, a student of Aristotle and the son of a Macedonian King and a high Priestess of the Dionysian mystery schools. Alexander was an initiate by birthright and conquered most of the known world in his insatiable quest to learn more. 
+Scrolls from all the far flung corners of the East were the most priceless of the spoils appropriated by Alexander’s invincible armies. The scrolls were gathered together in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Although the library was accidently burned by Julius Caesar in 48 BC, the manuscripts were saved and dispersed throughout the city. 
+What was in those manuscripts gave rise to Gnosticism; a doctrine of self enlightenment diametrically opposed to the Judaism of the Pharisees and their tyrannical God with his 613 Commandments. Later, many of the tenets of the ancient religion were presented as parables and allegories and became the teachings of Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas is the oldest known written record of those teachings. There are 114 verses. A few centuries later Mohammad’s Quran would be composed in 114 suras. 
+In the thirteenth verse Jesus whispers something into the ear of Thomas. The other apostles, curious, question Thomas as to what Jesus told him that he could not tell them. Thomas replies to them that if he told them, they would pick up rocks to stone him and the rocks would turn to fire and consume them. 
+But it is known anyway that what Jesus whispered into the ear of Thomas was Isaiah; 28, 13. “And the word of the lord will be to them precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little, that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.” 
+The priests of this deceitful god could not tolerate the likes of a Gnostic Jesus exposing their lies. A relentless campaign was launched to extinguish all traces of the fire where the light of the most ancient truth always burns. Paul dissembled everything the Gnostic Jesus had said. Irenaeus made the real Jesus a heretic in the name of the fake Judaic Jesus. And finally Theodosius burned all that could be found of the manuscripts, which were the source wisdoms wonders. 
+When even that was not enough, Pope Innocent III unleashed his Dogs of War. In what is called the ‘Albigensian Crusade’ the brave knights of France slaughtered every man, woman, and child they could in the south of France. The Cathars, called Albigensian’s for their preeminent city of Albi, bore witness to a very different Kristos than the pope’s pathetic Christ. For centuries all that seemed to remain of their testimony were rumors of a Gral with the power to change the world and a Knight who must quest for it… 
+It was a desperate effort in genocide to wipe from the face of the earth the still flickering flames of Zarathustra’s fire. It’s said that when one of his battle-hardened Princes dared question the slaughter he was being asked to perpetrate on his own countryman in the name of god; ‘Innocent’ quipped “kill them all and let god sought them out.” 
+Most painful of all perhaps is the ignorant slander in what has been a relentless campaign to vilify Lucifer’s name and make it synonymous with evil by the very people who nailed god to a stick and ate him. Others have used Lucifer’s eternal quest for a reckoning with a tyrant to validate their own avarice and depravity. In a reckoning, all accounts are settled and no doubt they all will be held libel. 
+The hour of that reckoning is now at hand, the Equinox of the Gods. Those who have eyes to see have been allowed to see the truth. Only they may enter the Temple of the Dog. The very same year WWII was concluded, the Gnostic tracts, which Theodosius thought he had expunged from history, as if by Magick suddenly reappeared. 
+The manuscripts, many of them fragmented, were unearthed by peasants scavenging ancient gravesites on the west bank of the Nile in a city called Nag Hammadi, after being buried for almost two millennia.’ That is the story, but the fire of Zarathustra can never be completely extinguished. It was rekindled anew with the blood of valiant men spilled in the opening battle of a War whose last battle will be fought by gods. Dead Sea Scrolls 
+The Dead Sea Scrolls , two-thousand-year-old Judean writings, started turning up the next year. They tell a tale of theological differences among the Jews at that time that made the apocalyptic carnage that was about to take place inevitable. 
+The War Scrolls actually tell Jews how to dress for it. Pivotal too much of the writings are a passage from the Torah called the “Star Prophecy” a vision of the future revealed in Numbers 24:17 where a Star will come out of Israel to “smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth.” 
+Jesus may have never made any resurrection, but then Jesus was only just a metaphor at best. What Jesus represents, the real Jesus unadulterated by the Vatican, has resurrected as the Nag Hammadi Tracts and the Dead Sea Scrolls. 
+All the would-be luminaries who read from their “good book” without ever having bothered to learn Latin or Hebrew are no more than the metaphorical monkeys praying to a nuclear missile in the Planet of the Apes movie. Lucifer means light bearer in Latin, Sīrius; the Morning Star. In Hebrew it is HYLL. 
+There is no historical evidence to prove that Jesus ever really existed but there is much that proves Hillel (HYLL) the Elder did. He was born in Babylon in 110 BCE and died in Jerusalem in 10 CE. He was the greatest of all the Hebrew sages and quickly gained a following that rivaled the Pharisees of the Temple. A story is still told among the Rabbi’s about how when threatened by his teachings, which were diametrically opposed their own; the Pharisees summoned Hillel to the Temple. 
+It was in the Temple where the Shammai (ShMY) Pharisees, the high priests of the god of No, challenged the prophet of On about his knowledge of the Torah. Hillel told them he could sum the entire Torah up while standing on one leg. When the Shammai Pharisees told him to go ahead and do so he stood on one leg, looked at them and said “do unto to others as you would have others do unto you” then walked out of the Temple followed by his entourage… 
+Rome would finally conclude its four decade long war with the Armenian Empire in 63BCE when Mithridates VI, at least as formidable as Hannibal and known to history as the Poison King because of his fascination with poisons, fled to a stronghold above the Black Sea after being defeated in battle by Pompey. There the Poison King would murder his son, King of the Crimean Scythians, for disloyalty. Then, rather than be taken by the Romans, he killed himself and his daughters. Sometime later that same year, Pompey would march his legions through the gates of Jerusalem, opened in welcome by his own Jewish allies, and lay siege to the Temple. He would sack it in a great slaughter shortly thereafter. 
+Internecine warfare in and around Jerusalem, sometimes held in check only by Roman armies, would continue for almost a century and a half, culminating with the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In viscous hand to hand combat between the various Jewish sects, woman and children fighting right alongside the men, supplemented by the gratuitous violence of the Roman legions, the Temple was burned to the ground as it remains to this very day. 
+Eyewitness Josephus –a Jewish historian noted for his integrity– put the number of dead at 1.1 million Jews in that incident alone. The Jews were never of one mind, let alone of one god… ____",FAKE
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+7176,"The Email Mess, Comey’s quandary and the expanding brawl in Washington","patrick martin & barry grey, wsws.org Political warfare explodes in Washington 31 October 2016 J ust a week before Election Day, the crisis gripping the American ruling class and its state, marked by intractable and bitter internal conflicts, has erupted into open political warfare. Last Friday’s letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey to Congress announcing new “investigative steps” in the probe of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, itself a manifestation of the crisis, has brought the underlying tensions to the boiling point. It has exposed raging conflicts within the FBI and, more broadly, the national security apparatus as a whole. Comey’s cryptic letter acknowledged that the FBI has not actually reviewed a new batch of emails that “appear to be pertinent” to its previous investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server for official business while she was secretary of state. The agency, he wrote, “cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant.” This astonishing admission makes all the more extraordinary Comey’s decision to make the discovery of the new emails a public issue only eleven days before the election. In a rapid-fire series of developments this weekend, Justice Department officials revealed that they had opposed Comey’s decision to send the letter, arguing that it violated a longstanding principle that no Justice Department or FBI action that might impact on a candidate should be announced within 60 days of an election. The Clinton campaign and congressional Democrats lashed out at Comey for the timing of the letter. At a campaign rally in Daytona Beach, Florida, Clinton said Comey’s action is “not just strange, it’s unprecedented.” She also tweeted that “FBI Director Comey bowed to partisan pressure,” suggesting that the letter was an effort to appease congressional Republican leaders opposed to Comey’s determination last July that there was no basis for criminal charges against Clinton over her use of a private email server. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to Comey suggesting that he had violated the law forbidding government employees to use their official positions to influence the result of an election. “I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act,” he wrote. “Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law.” He added that Comey had “demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be clear intent to aid one political party over another,” because he had made public the renewed FBI interest in Clinton’s emails, but was silent on what Reid called “explosive information” supposedly connecting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to Russian government officials. Here Reid was resorting to the Russia-baiting that has been the Clinton campaign’s main response to the publication by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of emails and other documents sent or received by campaign chairman John Podesta, including devastating information on Bill Clinton’s use of the Clinton Foundation to obtain lucrative speaking engagements with corporations and business associations. Campaign spokesmen have refused to discuss the contents of the emails, claiming that they were hacked by Russian government agents and then handed over to WikiLeaks to damage Clinton and help Trump. NBC News reported Sunday that the FBI has now obtained a search warrant to go through all 650,000 emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin. Weiner is under FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually explicit text messages to an underage girl. The Wall Street Journal gave details, in a story posted on its web site Sunday afternoon, of the explosive internal crisis within the FBI that led to Comey’s letter to Congress. By this account, there has been a fierce battle within the FBI and between the FBI and the Justice Department not only over the Clinton email investigation, but over separate investigations involving four FBI field offices (New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Little Rock, Arkansas) into the operations of the Clinton Foundation. AG Lynch: A Democrat apparatchik like the rest of the top tier of the Democratic party mafia, and typical of the Black misleaders that ice African American radicalism in a conflicted age. More than eight months ago, FBI agents presented plans for a more aggressive investigation of the foundation to career prosecutors in the Justice Department, only to have the proposal blocked on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence. The FBI offices nonetheless continued their investigations, which were intensified after the Clinton email investigation was wound up in July. The Journal report suggests that either a substantial faction within the FBI was convinced that top FBI officials were covering up criminal activities on the part of Hillary and Bill Clinton, or the FBI dissidents were politically motivated to use agency resources to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, or both. When top officials in the FBI and Justice Department opposed these efforts, open rebellion followed, expressed in leaks to the Wall Street Journal centrally targeting FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whose wife was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for state senate in Virginia last year. According to some press reports, Comey sent his letter to Congress last week because he was convinced the information would become public anyway through further leaks by FBI subordinates. The open warfare engulfing Washington on the eve of a presidential election reveals that the entire political system and the state apparatus itself are riven by tensions and conflicts so deep and bitter that they cannot be contained within the traditional framework of bourgeois elections. Fueling these tensions is the convergence of crises on the economic, geopolitical, internal political and social fronts. The US and world economy remain mired in stagnation more than eight years after the 2008 Wall Street crash, and there are growing fears that central bank policies designed to buttress the banks and drive up stock prices are leading to a new financial disaster. The economic crisis is fueling social anger and alienation from the entire political system, as reflected in different ways in the mass support for the anti-Wall Street campaign of the self-styled “socialist” Bernie Sanders and the “America first” pseudo-populist campaign of Donald Trump. Twenty-five years of unending war and fifteen years of the “war on terror” have failed to secure US hegemony in the Middle East and only heightened fears within the ruling elite that US imperialism is losing ground to rivals such as Russia and China. The disarray of US policy in Syria, in particular, has led to bitter conflicts and recriminations over US policy, and demands for a major escalation of military violence, not only in Syria, but throughout the Middle East. These are combined with calls for a more aggressive confrontation with Russia and China. The great danger is that these conflicts are being fought out behind the backs of the working class by different factions of the same reactionary ruling class. Unless the working class intervenes as an independent political and revolutionary force, fighting for its own interests in opposition to all parties and factions of the capitalist class, the crisis will inevitably result in ever more right-wing policies at home and ever wider wars abroad, leading inexorably to a new world war. The capitalist two-party system offers only two reactionary alternatives: the fascistic billionaire Trump, who demands a vast increase in military spending and authoritarian methods of rule, and the multimillionaire Clinton, the favorite of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, who would continue and escalate the right-wing policies of the Obama administration. All factions of the ruling elite agree on concealing the implications of the world capitalist crisis from working people. Hence the degraded character of the bourgeois election campaign, with any serious discussion of the social crisis and the war danger drowned out by media sensationalism over a succession of sex scandals and anti-Russian propaganda. The Socialist Equality Party entered the 2016 elections to prepare the working class for the political convulsions that have already begun, even before the ballots are counted on Election Day. Our candidates, Jerry White for president and Niles Niemuth for vice president, have consistently warned that the capitalist campaigns are aimed at concealing the crisis and disarming working people. The SEP election campaign is not fundamentally about votes, but about building a political leadership in the working class for the great struggles to come. —Patrick Martin and Barry Grey The FBI intervenes in the 2016 election 
+Dateline: 29 October 2016 
+I n an extraordinary and unprecedented action, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has stepped into the 2016 presidential campaign only 11 days before Election Day, sending a letter to Congress announcing new “investigative steps” related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. 
+The three-paragraph letter by FBI Director James Comey to eight congressional committees on Friday is remarkably vague. It states that “in connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” of Clinton’s personal email server, which, Comey notes, he had previously told Congress was “completed.” 
+He states that he has agreed to “allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” He acknowledges that the FBI “cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant.” 
+The obvious question that arises is why, given the fact that the FBI has no idea whether these additional emails contain any significant information relative to the Clinton email case, the agency should make them a public issue within days of the election. Media commentators noted that the letter violates a longstanding informal FBI ban on making politically sensitive announcements within 60 days of a US election. 
+Following the report of Comey’s letter, the news media, citing unnamed federal law enforcement officials, said the emails in question were found on a laptop computer shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband, former Representative Anthony Weiner. 
+Weiner is under FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually explicit text messages to an underage girl. Abedin announced her separation from Weiner earlier this year after the latest episode involving Weiner and sexually explicit Internet activity became public. 
+Comey’s letter was hailed by Donald Trump and Republican Party spokesmen as tantamount to an official reopening of the FBI investigation and rescinding of the decision announced by Comey in July that no charges would be brought against the Democratic presidential candidate. 
+Clinton spoke to the press briefly Friday evening, demanding that the FBI provide more information about the substance of what it was reviewing, including whether there was any connection to her use of a private email server. She pointed out that more than 15 million people have already voted and that many millions more will be going to the polls over the next week as early voting continues. In response to questions, she indicated that the FBI has not contacted her and that she first learned of the letter through the media. 
+It is at this point impossible to determine with precision the motivation behind Comey’s letter and the political forces for which he is speaking. However, his attempt to present the letter as a politically disinterested response to the discovery of new information lacks any credibility. 
+This direct intervention into the election by the top police-intelligence agency can only be an expression of deep crisis and profound tensions within the American ruling class and the state. The election as a whole has been dominated by the growth of social anger and antiestablishment sentiment, yet it has ended in a contest between two right-wing representatives of the richest 1 percent who are despised by huge sections of the electorate. 
+It has plumbed the depths of political debasement on the part of both candidates—the fascistic billionaire Trump seeking to channel discontent along the most right-wing, chauvinist and racist channels; the multimillionaire Clinton relying on sex scandals and a McCarthyite attack on Trump as an agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin to bury incriminating revelations of corruption and lying and to swing public opinion behind a policy of military escalation and confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. 
+The entire process has been surrounded by an aura of violence and a breakdown of public confidence in the political system. It has unfolded under conditions of deepening economic crisis, mounting international tensions and worsening crises for US imperialism around the world, i.e., the ongoing debacle of Washington’s war for regime change in Syria, the signs of disarray in the anti-Chinese “pivot to Asia,” the emergence of open conflicts with imperialist “allies” in Europe, particularly Germany. 
+The convergence of these crises is generating bitter conflicts within the American ruling class over policy questions, magnified by fears of a rising tide of social opposition at home. 
+Whether the intention of Comey’s letter was to inflict fatal damage to Clinton’s candidacy, shore up endangered Republican majorities in the Senate and House, or fire a shot across the bow against an incoming Clinton administration, it makes clear that the next administration will be mired in crisis from the day it takes office.[if gte mso 9]><xml><w:WordDocument><w:View>Normal</w:View><w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom><w:PunctuationKerning/><w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/><w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid><w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent><w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText><w:Compatibility><w:BreakWrappedTables/><w:SnapToGridInCell/><w:WrapTextWithPunct/><w:UseAsianBreakRules/><w:DontGrowAutofit/></w:Compatibility><w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel></w:WordDocument></xml><![endif][if gte mso 9]><xml><w:LatentStyles DefLockedState=”false” LatentStyleCount=”156″></w:LatentStyles></xml><![endif][if gte mso 10]><style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style><![endif][if gte mso 9]><xml><o:shapedefaults v:ext=”edit” spidmax=”1026″/></xml><![endif][if gte mso 9]><xml><o:shapelayout v:ext=”edit”><o:idmap v:ext=”edit” data=”1″/></o:shapelayout></xml><![endif] 
+One former Justice Department official suggested that Comey was under intense pressure from within the FBI over his previous declaration that no competent prosecutor would bring charges against Clinton over her use of the private server. If true, this means that sections of the federal police agency are in open revolt against the candidate who may shortly become their nominal “commander-in-chief.” 
+The FBI intervention on the eve of the 2016 election represents an acceleration of a trend in US politics that first came to the surface in the series of Republican-led investigations into the Bill Clinton administration, culminating in his impeachment in 1998. This was followed by the stolen election of 2000, when the Supreme Court intervened and by a 5-4 majority halted the recounting of ballots in Florida in order to award the White House to George W. Bush, the loser in the popular vote. 
+The two-party system in the United States has always been an instrument of class rule, dominated by corporate America. The unprecedented growth of social inequality over the past four decades has widened the gulf between the political system and the great majority of the population. More and more, official political life revolves around palace intrigues, in which the media and the military-intelligence apparatus play critical roles. The methods of scandalmongering, calculated leaks and political stink bombs prevail. 
+One thing is clear: none of these strokes and counterstrokes between rival capitalist factions has anything to do with defending the democratic rights and social interests of working people. As far as the capitalist two-party system is concerned, the American people are merely an object of manipulation, to be stampeded by demagogy and scandal. 
+Patrick Martin PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR The authors are senior editorial writers for wsws.org, a socialist organization. They naturally endorse their party, the Social Equality Party (SEP), as a solution to the existing political crisis. The SEP is a Trotkyist formation. The Greanville Post does not endorse any political faction. Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
+We apologize for this inconvenience. 
+What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda? =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.",FAKE
+474,Wall Street Flies Higher for Second Day of Gains,"U.S. stocks rallied for a second day on Thursday, boosted by expectations the U.S. economy will continue to improve and by hopes for more aggressive action from the European Central Bank.
+
+The S&P 500 added 3 percent over the last two sessions, retracing most of its 4.2 percent loss in the previous five trading days, leaving the index in positive territory for 2015. The Dow and Nasdaq also turned up for the year so far.
+
+The advance was broad, with the S&P materials, energy and technology sectors each rising more than 2 percent, leading the day's gains.
+
+Though slightly above expectations, initial claims for state unemployment benefits slipped from the prior week, pointing to a firming labor market ahead of Friday's key monthly payrolls report.
+
+""We're at the point where the jobs reports have been coming in consistently in the 200,000 or 200,000-plus range. I think that just keeps the Fed on track for everything we're expecting,"" said Michael O'Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading in Greenwich, Connecticut.
+
+Also boosting sentiment, continued weak euro zone data has been lifting optimism that the European Central Bank will take more aggressive action.
+
+U.S. crude oil, whose free-fall was among the catalysts for the recent selloff in stocks, gained for a second day, settling at $48.79 per barrel. The S&P energy index rose 2.2 percent.
+
+Signs that oil prices may be stabilizing have boosted investor sentiment, although market analysts were still not ready to say prices had found a floor.
+
+The Dow Jones industrial average rose 323.35 points, or 1.84 percent, to 17,907.87, the S&P 500 gained 36.24 points, or 1.79 percent, to 2,062.14 and the Nasdaq Composite added 85.72 points, or 1.84 percent, to 4,736.19.
+
+The S&P 500's two-day gains were its biggest since the Dec. 17-18 Federal Reserve-fueled rally of 4.5 percent. Minutes from that December Fed meeting released Wednesday reassured investors the central bank was in no hurry to start raising interest rates.
+
+The S&P also snapped back above its 50-day average, a technical support level it fell below on Monday.
+
+""Weak hands are being forced to chase. There's a fear of missing out on the rally,"" O'Rourke said.
+
+About 7.1 billion shares changed hands on U.S. exchanges, above the 6.7 billion average for the last five sessions, according to BATS Global Markets.
+
+Biotechs were among the most active shares. Bind Therapeutics shares surged 37.1 percent to $7.06, a day after the company said it enrolled its first patient in a mid-stage trial for its lung cancer drug.
+
+Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by 2,396 to 718, for a 3.34-to-1 ratio; on the Nasdaq, 2,048 issues rose and 702 fell, for a 2.92-to-1 ratio.
+
+The S&P 500 posted 60 new 52-week highs and 8 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 88 new highs and 32 new lows.",REAL
+2379,Alaska scrambles to prevent Obamacare collapse,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+1160,"The Daily 202: Ted Cruz might be the last, best hope for conservatives to stop Donald Trump after Super Tuesday","The Texas senator has suffered through a string of rough news cycles, from losing evangelicals to Donald Trump in South Carolina to firing his communications director and finishing behind Marco Rubio in Nevada.
+
+[Get more must-read campaign news and analysis delivered directly to your email inbox with The Daily 202]
+
+But Cruz finally caught a few big breaks last night, and he could now emerge (once again) as the best bet to stop Trump. He won his home state of Texas by 17 points (the day’s biggest delegate prize), the neighboring state of Oklahoma (in a surprise) and the caucuses in Alaska (underscoring his appeal to libertarians and in spite of Sarah Palin’s support for Trump). He lost Arkansas to Trump by just 2 points.
+
+-- Rubio, meanwhile, had a very disappointing night and continues to not live up to his potential. He won only the Minnesota caucuses and wound up losing Virginia, which was fertile territory and where he campaigned hard.
+
+Besides the obvious reality check that the Florida senator has won just one of the first 15 states (that’s a 1-14 record in football terms), he finished third yesterday behind Cruz in several states where he ought to have finished second, including Tennessee (where he had the backing of Gov. Bill Haslam and Sen. Lamar Alexander) and Massachusetts. Top Rubio campaign officials told donors before results came in yesterday that they might win outright in Arkansas and Oklahoma. He finished third in both of those places too.
+
+Despite campaigning hard in Alabama over the weekend, Rubio only pulled in 18.7 percent. And he got a point less than that in Texas, where he campaigned and his team expected to do better. This means he fell beneath the 20 percent threshold to collect any delegates from those states. And it bears noting that, in several states, Democrats voted for Rubio to try embarrassing Trump.
+
+-- Cruz today has far more delegates than Rubio, and he doesn’t have Gang of Eight baggage. He has well-funded super PACs. He’s invested in building organizations for the upcoming caucus states and to collect delegates from places like Guam and the Virgin Islands.
+
+-- To be clear: On the day with the most delegates at stake, Trump won seven of 11 states. He romped in the Deep South while proving again that he’s not a regional candidate. His strongest performance actually came in Massachusetts, where he took 49 percent of the vote.
+
+The Post’s Dan Balz declares that the window for stopping Trump has now ""closed almost completely."" He explains that the demoralized anti-Trump forces are very unlikely to agree upon a strategy to stop the New York billionaire. “There’s this fallacy that some small group can get together and decide the outcome of this,” former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt told him. “That does not exist.”
+
+That stipulated, Balz argues, “Cruz can now claim, with more credibility, the mantle of the true conservative in a conservative party against a front-runner with no clear ideology and views at odds with GOP orthodoxy.” Whether that’s enough to win in Northern states is an open question.
+
+The Fix’s Chris Cillizza also declares Cruz a winner and Rubio a loser of the night: “Suddenly Cruz looks like the favorite to be the alternative to Trump. Plus, the votes between Tuesday and the March 15 primaries -- Louisiana, Kansas, etc. -- look like potential Cruz wins.""
+
+The establishment loathes Cruz, but they may reconsider if faced with a binary choice between Trump and Cruz. ""Cruz is not my favorite by any means … but we may be in a position where we have to rally around Cruz as the only way to stop Trump. I’m not so sure that would work,"" Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on CBS. Asked if he would recommend rallying behind Cruz to stop Trump, Graham said yes. ""I can't believe I would say yes, but yes,"" he said.
+
+-- By all accounts, the GOP field will stay scattered (which works to Trump’s advantage).
+
+Kasich came within three points of winning Vermont. “We have absolutely exceeded expectations,” he said, promising to fight on in Michigan and Ohio.
+
+Rubio, in Miami, claimed a late surge and predicted he’ll win Florida on March 15. His home state is winner take all. If he loses there, he’s done. Polls show him trailing, and it’s not a sure thing he can pull it out:
+
+Ben Carson said he’s not ready to quit “quite yet,” which means he’ll continue to dilute the anti-Trump evangelical vote.
+
+As Cruz himself correctly pointed out during his speech in Houston, “So long as the field remains divided, Donald Trump’s path to the nomination remains more likely.”
+
+-- As of today, the Republican National Convention in Cleveland seems like the only place Trump can still be stopped:
+
+-- Importantly, though, Cruz’s success is showing palpable signs of galvanizing not just his supporters, some of whom were thinking about jumping ship if he had a bad night, but other movement conservatives:
+
+David Bossie, the president of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, told David Weigel that it is now time for Rubio to end his campaign and let Cruz take Trump on.
+
+Erick Erickson (formerly of RedState, now at The Resurgent): “It is time for Rubio, behind by double digits in his home state … to accept he will not be the nominee. It is time for Cruz to accept we need a unity ticket and for Rubio to agree to be Cruz’s Vice Presidential pick, uniting the outsider and insider factions of the party and stopping Trump in the process. The non-Trump faction has the delegates to stop Trump. But now there must be unity.”
+
+Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz: “Cruz is the only one who can win back enough of the conservative voters Trump is winning … Rubio lacks the ability to make inroads to those voters, and many of Cruz’s voters would go to Trump instead of Rubio were Cruz to drop out. [The Florida senator] dominated the media coverage and endorsements for the entire week, yet he failed…”
+
+Bill Kristol, the executive editor of the Weekly Standard, was a little more sanguine. “Cruz and Rubio together have won more votes and more delegates than Trump so far,"" he said. ""So they just have to combine. Simple. Cruz-Rubio 2016.”
+
+For Democrats, the political revolution is not to be—
+
+Hillary Clinton accelerated her march to the Democratic nomination. She swept the South, with the exception of Oklahoma (which has few delegates). After getting whooped in New Hampshire, she showed she can win in New England by carrying Massachusetts. It was the closest contest of the night on the Democratic side (she prevailed by a point), but a win is a win.
+
+Bernie Sanders did not make the inroads he needed to among minority voters. None of the states with large African American and Latino populations were even close. HRC extinguished the Bern in Alabama (78-19), Arkansas (66-30), Georgia (71-28), Tennessee (66-32), Texas (65-33) and Virginia (64-35).
+
+But, but, but: By winning four states, Sanders got a rationale to carry on. He prevailed in the Colorado and Minnesota caucuses, demonstrating that he can continue forcing Clinton to spend money and tack leftward. Speaking in his home state of Vermont, which he won handily, he pledged to stay in until all 50 states have voted. Delegates are awarded proportionally, so Sanders will still get some from the states where he got blown out. The Sanders campaign invited reporters to a “path forward” breakfast later this morning, where they’ll outline a theory of the case. By Saturday, the senator will campaign in Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Ohio. And he’ll have the money to stay in as long as he wants: he raised $42 million in February, including $6 million on Monday alone.
+
+Still, all the pundits are calling the race for Clinton. “The Sanders challenge was doomed by a fatal flaw: Democrats aren’t as unhappy as he needed them to be,” Dana Milbank writes. While 89 percent of Republicans think we’re on the wrong track, only 34 percent of Democrats do.
+
+Our exit poll in Virginia found that six in 10 Democratic voters wanted to continue Obama’s policies. Clinton won those voters by about 60 points, while Sanders held a 2-to-1 lead among those who wanted more liberal policies. “Experience” was the most desired quality. About a third of voters picked it as the most important attribute in choosing who to vote for, and Hillary won nine in 10 of them.
+
+-- Every Republican incumbent with a primary challenge survived: Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby avoided a runoff by pulling 65 percent of the vote. So did GOP incumbent Reps. Martha Roby and Bradley Byrne, The Birmingham News reports. And, in Texas, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady and Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions each easily won. (Kelsey Snell)
+
+-- Rubio’s suburban strategy did pay some dividends. He came within 3 points of winning Virginia because of his strength in the suburbs outside D.C. and Richmond. “But Trump overwhelmed his competitors in more rural areas, including the Shenandoah Valley to the west and the Tidewater region in the south, and drew enough votes in the suburbs to emerge victorious,” Paul Schwartzman explains. “Trump was able to hold off Rubio in part because Kasich also took votes in Northern Virginia, including 16 percent in Fairfax City and 12 percent in Falls Church.”
+
+From our Virginia exit poll: 55 percent of Republican voters said they would be dissatisfied with Trump becoming the party’s nominee. Those who made up their minds in the past week broke for Rubio over Trump (39-19). Trump won men by 10 points but lost women to Rubio by five points. Trump won voters who have no more than a high school diploma by 29 points. Rubio won Republicans with college degrees.
+
+-- Ken Cuccinelli has relatively little juice in his home state: The former Virginia Attorney General, who nearly won the governorship in 2013, went all in for Cruz. He even showed up at a Rubio event on Sunday to criticize him, wandering around the press pen unstaffed. In the end, Cruz got just 17 percent. He even finished third among evangelicals (Trump got 37 percent to Rubio’s 28 percent and Cruz’s 19 percent.)
+
+-- More record turnout numbers for Republicans: Four times as many voted in Virginia as in 2012 and more than twice as many as voted in 2008.
+
+-- Trump tried to act like the presumptive nominee during a half-hour press conference: He painted Clinton as a D.C. insider and called himself a common-sense conservative. “I am a unifier,” he said. “When we unify, there’s nobody, nobody that’s going to beat us.”
+
+But, in Trump’s always unorthodox fashion, the first-time candidate declared victory on his own terms. “There was no watch party with supporters,” Jenna Johnson notes. “No packed suburban hotel ballroom lined with televisions blaring results and commentary. No open bar, passed appetizers or themed drinks. No lengthy victory speech with his wife at his side. No balloons.” He still does not have a pollster or a speechwriter.
+
+-- Hillary also focused her victory speech on the general, with an eye on Trump: “America never stopped being great,” she said in Miami. “We have to make America whole; we have to fill in what’s been hollowed out.” She added, “It’s clear tonight that the stakes of this election have never been higher. And the rhetoric we’re hearing on the other side has never been lower.” (In a taste of what the general election could feel like, Trump said during his speech that he thinks “Make America great again” has a much better ring to it than “Make America whole again.”)
+
+THE MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT OF LAST NIGHT
+
+Chris Christie's pained expression as Trump spoke totally dominated the online conversation. ""Christie spent the entire speech screaming wordlessly,"" Alexandra Petri writes. ""I have never seen someone scream so loudly without using his mouth before. It would have been remarkable if it had not been so terrifying. ... It was not a thousand-yard stare. That would understate the vast and impenetrable distance it encompassed. He looked as if he had seen a ghost and the ghost had made him watch Mufasa die again. He had the eyes of a man who has looked into the heart of light, the silence. A man who had seen the moment of his greatness flicker, and seen the eternal footman hold his coat, and snicker. In short, he looked afraid.""
+
+Here's some reaction to a moment that will fuel the New Jersey governor's fall from grace with conservatives just as much as hugging Obama after Superstorm Sandy did:
+
+WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
+
+Correction: this list has been updated to include a corrected version of item 14. The previous version said that Israeli troops were carrying out attacks in Palestianian areas using the Google-owned Waze app.
+
+MORE ON THE REPUBLICAN RACE:
+
+Trump was dealt a blow by the New York Supreme Court, which ruled that the $40 million fraud suit against Trump University could move forward, putting the case one step closer to a nasty public trial. (Emma Brown)
+
+Former Jeb Bush communications director Tim Miller joined the anti-Trump super PAC Our Principles. (The Hill)
+
+Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.), a retiring moderate whose district was decisively won by Trump, posted an open letter on a Virginia conservative blog yesterday promising not to vote for Trump. “My love for our country eclipses my loyalty to our party,” Rigell wrote, “and to live with a clear conscience I will not support a nominee so lacking in the judgment, temperament and character needed to be our nation’s commander-in-chief.”
+
+Quote du jour, from historian Jon Meacham to Joe Scarborough (who has just signed on as a WaPo contributor): “Trump has managed to hijack an entire political party, and the pilots are asking why no one is on their side. The passengers are cheering for the guy who took over the plane.”
+
+Tom DeLay said Trump would “tear the Republican party apart” and he would not back him should he win the nomination. “I think he’s very dangerous for the country, for the party,” said the former House Majority leader. Maybe The Hammer is not the most credible messenger?
+
+Paul Ryan denounced Trump over David Duke, saying the GOP nominee must reject “any group or cause built on bigotry.” He did not, however, walk back his earlier promise to support the front-runner should he become the nominee. (Paul Kane)
+
+…Trump, meanwhile, had an ultimatum of his own for the Speaker: “I’m going to get along with Paul Ryan,” said Trump. “And if I don’t, he’s going to have to pay a big price.”
+
+A group of African American students escorted from a Trump rally in Georgia said they were “outraged” and claim, backed up by several witnesses, they were kicked out for no reason. (Lindsey Bever)
+
+A state judge ruled Cruz can remain on the Illinois primary ballot, throwing out a complaint saying the senator’s Canadian birth disqualifies him from being president. Similar legal challenges have since been filed in Alabama, Texas and New York. (USA Today)
+
+Kasich told Fox Business news there is “zero chance” he’ll consider being someone’s vice president.
+
+Rand Paul said he will skip CPAC this year, focusing instead on upcoming caucuses in Kentucky. (David Weigel)
+
+Bernie is on the cover of DOPE magazine (here's the story):
+
+Meet the Press made a mistake with this one:
+
+Ben Carson called for the candidates to meet and discuss the tone of the race:
+
+Scott Walker started a weird meme, especially in the wake of Rubio mocking Trump for having small hands.
+
+DPCC chair Steve Israel slammed nine House Republicans for voting against naming a post office after Maya Angelou:
+
+Here are statements from two of the Republicans:
+
+President Obama is excited to attend a baseball game in Cuba:
+
+Finally, a throwback photo of Kasich's first visit to the Oval Office -- when he was a freshman at The Ohio State University:
+
+GOOD READS FROM ELSEWHERE -- How last night's results are playing in the Super Tuesday states:
+
+Boston Globe: “Voters across Massachusetts had turned out in high numbers, fueled perhaps by the unpredictable natures of the races in both parties … Clinton staved off an insurgent bid by Sanders. Among Democrats, however, Sanders’s progress here, from a distant second to Clinton last fall to Tuesday’s finish, was eyed as a key metric of his campaign’s durability.”
+
+Montpelier Times-Argus: “Sanders swarmed Clinton in Vermont as voters ignored national trends … demolishing Clinton in just about every voting category. Experience didn’t help Clinton as much as an advantage on honesty helped Sanders.”
+
+The Baxter (Ark.) Bulletin: “Early voter turnout doubled that of the 2012 election [as] Clinton defeated Sanders in the state where she served 12 years as first lady … Democratic Party Chairman Vince Insalaco said Arkansas could be winnable for Democrats if Clinton faces Trump in the general election, though Arkansas hasn't voted for a Democrat for president since 1996.”
+
+Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News: “Trump and Clinton steamrolled to wins in Alabama as GOP voters lashed out at Washington insiders and Clinton capitalized on her support among African-American voters. Eight in 10 Alabama voters who said they want a candidate who ‘tells it like it is’ picked Trump … and Clinton won the support of 9 in 10 African-American voters.”
+
+Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Trump’s march toward the Republican nomination did not slow as it came through Virginia as rural voters propelled the business mogul to a victory  … Virginia’s status as a centrist bellwether led many to believe it offered the best chance for the Republican establishment to lift Rubio to his first win. … Trump won military-rich Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Hampton, Chesapeake and Newport News … He was particularly dominant with Southwest and Southside Virginia.”
+
+Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Sanders and Rubio won Minnesota's caucuses, as voters handed both a badly needed boost as they try to hold off the surging campaigns of Clinton and Trump.”
+
+Denver Post: “Sanders surged to victory in the Colorado caucus, giving him some breathing room to continue his battle with Clinton.”
+
+The Tennesseean: “With nearly all precincts reporting, Clinton enjoyed a more than 2-to-1 advantage over Sanders in the Volunteer State, with the liberal Vermont senator winning as few as three of the state's 95 counties. And Trump finished with 39 percent of the vote … spoiling last minute efforts from the GOP establishment to try and stop his rise. But their help came after a record 254,659 Tennesseans had already voted early in the state’s Republican primary — historic turnout that, following Tuesday’s results, was shown to be driven foremost by Trump.”
+
+Norman Transcript: “Cruz regained some momentum with a victory in Oklahoma, and Sanders earned a sizable advantage over favorite Clinton … This year marked a more than 100 percent voter increase [in Oklahoma]… occurring mostly on the Democratic side.”
+
+Alaska Dispatch News: “Cruz won Alaska’s Republican ‘Super Tuesday’ contest, edging out Trump who came into the contest with the endorsement of former Gov. Sarah Palin … GOP spokeswoman Suzanne Downing said in an email that volunteers manning polling sites were somewhat overwhelmed by the ‘unbelievable’ turnout.”
+
+Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Clinton’s victory in Georgia was another sign she has consolidated support of minority voters, a key constituency in the Democratic base. Support from African-Americans helped power her rout … Trump got the bulk of delegates up for grabs in Georgia, the second-biggest trove of the sweep of states.”
+
+On the campaign trail: Several of the candidates are in Michigan. Here's the rundown:
+
+At the White House: President Obama participates in an ambassador credentialing ceremony. Later, Obama welcomes the Alabama Crimson Tide to the White House to honor their championship title win.
+
+On Capitol Hill: The Senate meets at 9:30 a.m. to work on the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. The House meets at noon for legislative business, with first votes on the Ensuring Access to Quality Medicaid Providers Act expected between 1:15 and 2:15 p.m.
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+-- Remember that nice little break we had from winter weather? Well, the cold is coming back with a vengeance. The Capital Weather Gang: “After the overnight clouds and showers, skies turn partly to mostly sunny today, but gusty winds from the northwest bring in a blustery chill. Temperatures are mainly steady in the upper 30s to mid-40s through the day.”
+
+-- D.C. mayor Muriel E. Bowser said she can no longer support the Pepco-Exelon plan, effectively killing a $6.8 billion merger that would have created the nation’s largest electricity utility. (Aaron C. Davis)
+
+-- Maryland’s House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on a bill that eliminates criminal penalties for seven common narcotics, including cocaine, heroin and LSD. (Josh Hicks)
+
+-- Maryland's Senate gave preliminary approval to a bill that could send adults to jail for letting underage teens drink. (Ovetta Wiggins and Josh Hicks)
+
+-- So terrible: Fairfax county police are looking for a woman who stole a purse containing $10,000 cash – money that was to be used for a daughter’s college tuition. Maria Esteves, a maid who works 6-day weeks to put her children through college, says she hopes the woman will be identified by video footage. (Victoria St. Martin)
+
+Bernie Sanders sang This Land is Your Land:
+
+Here are three things the new Osama bin Laden documents reveal:",REAL
+6710,Will Barack Obama delay or suspend the election if Hillary is forced out by the new FBI email investigation?,"VIDEOS Will Barack Obama delay or suspend the election if Hillary is forced out by the new FBI email investigation? An A.I. system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of #Hillary By Michael Snyder - November 3, 2016 
+Just when it looked like Hillary Clinton was poised to win the 2016 election , the FBI has thrown a gamechanger into the mix. On Friday, FBI Director James Comey announced that his agency has discovered new emails related to Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information that they had not previously seen. According to the Associated Press , the newly discovered emails “did not come from her private server”, but instead were found when the FBI started going through electronic devices that belonged to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband Anthony Weiner. The FBI has been looking into messages of a sexual nature that Weiner had exchanged with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, and that is why they originally seized those electronic devices. According to the Washington Post , the “emails were found on a computer used jointly by both Weiner and his wife, top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, according to a person with knowledge of the inquiry”, and according to some reports there may be “potentially thousands” of emails on the computer that the FBI did not have access to previously. Even though there are less than two weeks to go until election day, this scandal has the potential to possibly force Clinton out of the race, and if that happens could Barack Obama delay or suspend the election until a replacement candidate can be found? 
+Let’s take this one step at a time. On Friday, financial markets tanked when reports of these new Clinton emails hit the wires. The following comes from CNN … After recommending earlier this year that the Department of Justice not press charges against the former secretary of state, Comey said in a letter to eight congressional committee chairmen that investigators are examining newly discovered emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the email probe. “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote the chairmen. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” 
+At this point, we do not know what is contained in these emails. But without a doubt Huma Abedin is Hillary Clinton’s closest confidant, and I have always felt that she was Clinton’s Achilles heel. Journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) is fully convinced that the FBI would have never made this move unless something significant had already been discovered … We don’t know what this means yet except that it’s a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that’s where we are… Is it a certainty that we won’t learn before the election? I’m not sure it’s a certainty we won’t learn before the election. One thing is, it’s possible that Hillary Clinton might want to on her own initiative talk to the FBI and find out what she can, and if she chooses to let the American people know what she thinks or knows is going on. People need to hear from her… 
+If the FBI has indeed found something explosive, would they actually charge her with a crime right before the election? 
+It is possible, but we also have to remember that government agencies (including the FBI) tend to move very, very slowly. If there are thousands of emails, it is going to take quite a while to sift through them all. And of course Barack Obama has lots of ways that he could influence, delay or even shut down the investigation. 
+So those that are counting on this to be the miracle that Donald Trump needs should not count their chickens before they hatch. 
+But if Hillary Clinton were to be forced out of the race by this FBI investigation, the Democrats would have to decide on a new candidate, and that would take time. The following is from a U.S. News & World Report article that examined what would happen if one of the candidates was forced out of the race for some reason… If Clinton were to fall off the ticket, Democratic National Committee members would gather to vote on a replacement. DNC members acted as superdelegates during this year’s primary and overwhelmingly backed Clinton over boat-rocking socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. DNC spokesman Mark Paustenbach says there currently are 445 committee members – a number that changes over time and is guided by the group’s bylaws, which give membership to specific officeholders and party leaders and hold 200 spots for selection by states, along with an optional 75 slots DNC members can choose to fill. But the party rules for replacing a presidential nominee merely specify that a majority of members must be present at a special meeting called by the committee chairman. The meeting would follow procedures set by the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee and proxy voting would not be allowed. 
+It would be extremely challenging to get a majority of the members of the Democratic National Committee together on such short notice. If Clinton were to drop out next week, it would be almost impossible for this to happen before election day. 
+In such a scenario, Barack Obama may attempt to invoke his emergency powers . Since the election would not be “fair” until the Democrats have a new candidate, he could try to delay or suspend the election. There would be a lot of controversy as to whether this is legal or not, but Barack Obama has not let the U.S. Constitution stop him in the past. 
+Meanwhile, new poll numbers show that the Trump campaign was already gaining momentum even before this story about the new emails broke. According to a brand new ABC News/Washington Post survey, Donald Trump is now only trailing Hillary Clinton by 4 points after trailing her by as much as 12 points last weekend. 
+And CNBC is reporting on a highly advanced artificial intelligence system that accurately predicted the outcomes of the presidential primaries and which is now indicating that Trump will be the winner in November… An artificial intelligence system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House. MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It takes in 20 million data points from public platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. and then analyzes the information to create predictions. The AI system was created in 2004, so it has been getting smarter all the time. It had already correctly predicted the results of the Democratic and Republican Primaries. 
+Without Hillary at the top of the ticket, the odds of a Trump victory would go way, way up. 
+So if Hillary is forced out of the race by this investigation, Barack Obama and the Democrats will want to delay or suspend the election for as long as possible if they can. 
+At this point there is probably not a high probability that such a scenario will play out, but in this crazy election year we have already seen that just about anything can happen.",FAKE
+4753,'Understudies' Kaine and Pence add value in VP debate (+video),"In the first and only VP debate Tuesday night, Tim Kaine and Mike Pence made up for lost opportunities in the first presidential debate.
+
+Democratic vice presidential nominee Senator Tim Kaine (l.) and Republican vice presidential nominee Governor Mike Pence discuss an issue during their vice presidential debate at Longwood University in Farmville, Va., on Oct. 4, 2016.
+
+No vice presidential debate has ever swung a presidential race. And in 2016, with two larger-than-life characters at the top of the Republican and Democratic tickets, that truism will surely hold.
+
+But on the biggest night of their political lives, Gov. Mike Pence (R) of Indiana and Sen. Tim Kaine (D) of Virginia still performed a valuable service for Republican Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. They advanced the story, lobbing fresh attacks on each other’s bosses and delving into policy differences.
+
+For Governor Pence, the debate was a welcome opportunity to move beyond the worst week of the Trump campaign. Mr. Trump was widely seen as having lost to Mrs. Clinton last week in their first debate, and made matters worse by continuing for days to go after a former Miss Universe whom he had once mocked. Then The New York Times got hold of bits of an old Trump tax return.
+
+Pence faced a barrage of incoming from Senator Kaine, and in many cases, declined to defend Trump. That, in fact, may have been the smart strategy. Otherwise, Pence might have spent the entire debate playing defense, responding to accusations about Trump’s taxes, admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, demeaning comments about women, and birtherism.
+
+Instead, Pence deflected and ignored much of Kaine’s assault. When Kaine asked Pence why he wasn’t defending Trump, Pence replied, “I’m happy to defend him” – and then continued to not defend him on many of the points.
+
+When Kaine accused Trump of running an “insult-driven” campaign, Pence ignored the vast catalog of evidence and turned the slam back on his opponent. “Ours is an insult-driven campaign?” Pence interjected, with mock incredulity.
+
+Then he ran for daylight: What about Clinton calling half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables”? Pence countered.
+
+It was a comeback that Trump had failed to make in his debate against Clinton – one of many missed opportunities that night. But one by one, Pence checked off those boxes, also raising the controversies around Clinton’s private email server and the family’s charitable foundation.
+
+In a way, for Pence, it was a do-over debate – a way to score some points against Clinton that Trump failed to do last week, and show him how to keep his cool during a debate. (Clinton and Trump face off again on Oct. 9.)
+
+And if Pence has his eye on 2020, as many observers suspect, he may well have helped himself. At the very least, Pence is now positioned to play a major role in helping the Republican Party pick up the pieces if Trump loses.
+
+For Kaine, the debate was a chance to unload a torrent of sound bites against a Trump candidacy loaded with vulnerabilities. But he came in so aggressive, and interrupted so much, especially at first, that Pence was widely seen as winning on temperament – an important measure of whether a candidate is “presidential.”
+
+Kaine got off some obviously rehearsed one-liners that may turn up in future Clinton campaign ads. More than once, he referred to Trump as the “you’re fired” candidate and Clinton, the “you’re hired” candidate. And he accused Trump of having a “personal Mount Rushmore” – President Putin, Kim Jong-un, Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein.
+
+The tenor of the debate shifted markedly when the subject of faith came up. Both men are deeply religious – Kaine is Roman Catholic, Pence is a born-again Evangelical – and they spoke from the heart.
+
+Moderator Elaine Quijano of CBS News asked each to discuss a time when faith conflicted with governing. Kaine spoke of his struggle, as governor of Virginia, with the death penalty, which he opposes.
+
+“It was very, very difficult to allow executions to go forward, but in circumstances where I didn't feel like there was a case for clemency, I told Virginia voters I would uphold the law, and I did,” Kaine said.
+
+Pence didn’t offer a similar example, and instead used the opportunity to speak on “the sanctity of life.” He also offered warm words for Kaine. “I have a great deal of respect for Senator Kaine's sincere faith. I truly do,” he said.
+
+Pence then turned to the Clinton-Kaine ticket’s support for abortion rights, including so-called “partial-birth abortion” (which Kaine had, in fact, once opposed).
+
+But it was a respectful critique. And in a campaign nearly devoid of discussion on issues that matter to religious conservatives, a crucial element of the Republican base, Pence surely in that moment did his ticket some good.",REAL
+9045,Russian Oven: Millet pumpkin porridge,"350 ml (12 fl.oz.) milk One pumpkin, big enough to produce 400g (1.6 cup) pumpkin pulp – without seeds 50g (0.3 cup) dried apricots, 50g (0.3 cup) raisins (feel free to use other dried fruit to your taste) Spices to taste (we used nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger) 
+To cook this awesome millet pumpkin porridge, just follow these 3 simple steps: Step 1. Cut out the lid and open the pumpkin. Remove the guts and seeds. Carve out the pulp and store it for the time being. Rub the empty pumpkin with spice and put it into the oven. Bake for 25 minutes at 170C. Step 2. While your pumpkin is in the oven, let's prepare the millet. Boil water in the pot, put the millet in the boiling water and cook at low heat for 25 minutes. Take another pot and boil milk in it, then add the chopped pumpkin pulp and cook for 10 minutes. When the millet porridge is ready, mix it with the pumpkin blend and cook on low heat for another 10 minutes. Step 3. Put the porridge inside the pumpkin cavity. Put dried fruit on top. Enjoy! 
+
+Russian Oven is a video series devoted to Russian pastries, featuring traditional age-old pies and cakes, inventive cookies and tarts of recent years, plus Soviet classics and much more. Stay tuned!",FAKE
+1824,Biden's Latest Signal He Won't Run For President,"Joe Biden doesn't sound like a man who's preparing for a grueling presidential campaign.
+
+The vice president's latest remarks on a potential 2016 bid came Thursday night, questioning whether he has the ""emotional energy"" to run so soon after his eldest son, Beau, died from brain cancer in May.
+
+For all the chatter and predictions of the past month that Biden was eagerly readying a run, the vice president has put forth a different face when he has spoken about a campaign. And it's one of a grieving father, a not-yet-healed family and someone who certainly doesn't sound mentally prepared for the emotional rigors of the campaign trail.
+
+""I will be straightforward with you. The most relevant factor in my decision is whether my family and I have the emotional energy to run,"" Biden said in Atlanta, where he was speaking on the Iran nuclear deal. He was asked after his remarks about his intentions for a possible campaign. ""Some might think that is not appropriate. But unless I can go to my party and the American people and say that I am able to devote my whole heart and my whole soul to this endeavor, it would not be appropriate.""
+
+Biden, 72, said there were other concerns, too — whether he can ramp up a competitive organization with such a late start, wooing donors and staff and building infrastructure in early states. But those weren't driving his decision.
+
+""That's not the factor,"" a visibly drained Biden told the crowd in a Georgia synagogue. ""The factor is: Can I do it? Can my family undertake what is an arduous commitment that we'd be proud to undertake in ordinary circumstances? The honest-to-God answer is I just don't know.""
+
+Biden is no stranger to tragedy, and he has soldiered on in the face of it before. Shortly after his election to the Senate in 1972, his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident and his two sons — Beau and Hunter — were badly injured. He had to be convinced to even take the oath of office, and he did, in the hospital beside his children.
+
+The vice president referenced that first deep loss on Thursday night, but said he had learned ""there's no way to put a timetable on"" recovery from the scars.
+
+""If I can reach that conclusion that we can do it in a fashion that would still make it viable, I would not hesitate to do it,"" Biden continued. ""But I have to be honest with you, and everyone who's come to me, I can't look you straight in the eye and say, 'Now I know I can do that.' That's as honest as I can be.""
+
+This was an even more honest and raw assessment than Democratic insiders heard last week from Biden. On a closed conference call with the Democratic National Committee to sell the Iran deal, Biden again opened up about his presidential decision-making — and didn't sound any closer to pulling the trigger.
+
+""If I were to announce to run,"" Biden said, ""I have to be able to commit to all of you that I would be able to give it my whole heart and my whole soul, and right now, both are pretty well banged up. ... I've given this a lot of thought and dealing internally with the family on how we do this.""
+
+Multiple reports have said that Beau encouraged him to run before he died, and while the idea of a presidential campaign at that point may have seemed feasible, it's clear the elder Biden is still not ready — and there's no sign when he will be.
+
+Unfortunately for the vice president, the clock is ticking. He initially said he would make an announcement by the end of the summer. The unofficial end is this Monday on Labor Day, but technically by that deadline he has until Sept. 22.
+
+But it's actual deadlines that are important instead of symbolic ones. The first Democratic debate on Oct. 13 is on the horizon, and filing deadlines are approaching. It may be true that Hillary Clinton has stumbled, but it's insurgent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, not Biden, who's been the beneficiary of those foibles.
+
+Only someone with the name identification and built-in political advantages like Biden's could even make such a late play, and if he did pull the trigger, he would be a formidable candidate. He's the last wild card on either side before the 2016 field is crystallized. And a superPAC backing him, Draft Biden, has staffed up in recent weeks with notable hires and close Biden allies.
+
+Biden may give a more direct answer next week, when he will appear on one of Stephen Colbert's first Late Show episodes on CBS. The more relaxed, comedy setting may be one where Biden feels more comfortable and more free to be frank.
+
+But Biden has already been pretty transparent already — and all signs so far point to him not getting in.",REAL
+9922,Nation Still Struggling To Come To Terms With Terrorist Living In Ireland,"0 Add Comment 
+THE Nation is still struggling to come to terms the fact an Irishman could ever join a terrorist organisation, several days after Irishman Khalid Kelly allegedly blew himself up in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq. 
+Kelly, originally from Dublin, recently lived in Longford and had been fighting for ISIS in Iraq, the news of which shocked communities that previously had no exposure to terrorism or terrorist organisations to their core. 
+“You just can’t credit it, can ye, some lad running around with guns and the like. Spouting all sorts of shite about redrawing maps and taking back what is rightfully theirs. Gas all the same,” shared Louth native Trevor Gorman, whose uncle would periodically go up north for something called ‘training’ in the 90s. 
+“Look, you’ll just have to give me some time. People in the Middle East are well accustomed to violent loonies hiding behind a religion to commit horrible acts, but this is all new to us, and him being Irish… that’s mad,” said Cavan man Sean Dignam, from the comfort of a stool in an IRA owned pub. 
+The view from across the country found people similarly shocked that an Irishman could find himself part of a morally compromised, ideologically bankrupt outfit. 
+“Their followers out there, they’re bold a pup from what I hear, but Muslims lads here shoudl really out denouncing that right now,” shared Dubliner Ciaran Mackey. 
+“The Jihadis go on and on about how there only concerns are Islamic terror and that, but then ya read they’re selling drugs too, which goes against everything they be saying or beliefs and that. And they do other awful stuff like abusing girls. I tell ya, we don’t have any terrorists in Ireland, but if we did, they wouldn’t be at that craic at all,” added Mackey.",FAKE
+8793,The Destruction of Reason in West,"Dublin, Ireland.
+The West is feeling more and more like an irrational maze. The banks are mad. The austerity too. But the anti-Russia hysteria is the final straw. It’s not just “anti-Russia”: it’s anti-truth, anti-rational and anti-modern. It’s the end result of postmodernism. What began as irony is now systematic madness.
+Everything is upside down. Or maybe at last it’s the right side up. Maybe the West to begin with never was the Free World. Wasn’t that the whole point of modernism? Modernism was self criticism. Modernism was critical of the West. And then along came postmodernism. And the West suddenly was off the hook. The West wearing the clothes of postmodernism went on the attack again.
+The end result is that anything goes as long as the West wins. Forget the truth. Forget the facts. And forget history. Everything apparently is fiction. The West can say what it wants because everything is interpretation. That’s the beauty of postmodernism. You can contradict yourself a million times and laugh it all off. As long as you’ve the power. And that’s the key word: power. Because postmodernism was from the word go a political project. One that was made in the West for the West.
+The end result is hatred for Russia. And love for “Al-Qaeda”. Why? Because Russia attempted to rationalise the world. It attempted to apply reason to the 21st century. And so the irrational West had to punish it. Listen to Putin in 2007 when he spoke in Munich:
+“However, what is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making.
+It is [a] world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.
+And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. Because, as you know, democracy is the power of the majority in light of the interests and opinions of the minority.
+Incidentally, Russia – we – are constantly being taught about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves.
+I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world. And this is not only because if there was individual leadership in today’s – and precisely in today’s – world, then the military, political and economic resources would not suffice. What is even more important is that the model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation.”
+And listen to him in New York in 2015 when he spoke in the UN General Assembly:
+“ and so the export of revolutions, this time of so-called democratic ones, continues. It would suffice to look at the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, as has been mentioned by previous speakers. Certainly political and social problems in this region have been piling up for a long time, and people there wish for changes naturally.
+But how did it actually turn out? Rather than bringing about reforms, an aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions and the lifestyle itself. Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster. Nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life.
+I cannot help asking those who have caused the situation, do you realize now what you’ve done?”
+Did you hear the plea for reason? Did you hear the cry for modernity? Did you hear the demand for “moral foundations” – for universal values – for international law? Did you hear the defence of national sovereignty and the defence of the UN Charter? The West didn’t. In these two key Russian speeches (Munich ’07 and New York ’15) the West only heard a threat to it’s power.
+The West’s reply to Russia’s rationalism was and continues to be irrationalism. Media madness, “Presidential” paranoia and Islamic insanity is the West’s response to the truth. And the truth is no secret. But the West just shrugs it’s shoulders and laughs it all off. The truth is Western imperialism: the unipolar world, full spectrum dominance, neo-con mendacity, hybrid warfare, sanctions, speculation, special forces, the CIA, fundamentalism and American Exceptionalism. In short: Putin hit the nail on the head.
+And the West hit back. Why? Because the West can’t defend itself rationally. There is no good reason for all the wealth found in the West. So there can only be a bad reason: imperial power. And modernism proved beyond doubt that it was bad. However as this power was rolled back in modern times – as the victims of Empire succeeded in liberating themselves – postmodern times came to the rescue of the West. In Nietzsche the West found it’s champion. The will to power was the West’s trump card. And with Nietzsche’s blessing it played it.
+For Nietzsche all that mattered was power. And whoever had it needed no justification or reason. Truth was a lie. And morality was only for the weak. However if this intellectual climate only emerged and became hegemonic in the late 1970s (think of Reagan and Thatcher) it of course was ever present behind the scenes in the dark corners of Western imperialism. For instance: America’s leading strategist (and Russian “expert”) after World War Two, George F. Kennan, famously put it into words in Memo PPS23 (1948):
+“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population….Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality….We should cease to talk about vague….unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
+Nietzsche could not have said it better himself. The question is though: has this elite Western approach to the world changed since Kennan wrote Memo PPS23? No – it has only become more crass. As a result this Nietzschean worldview is what Russia is up against today. But haven’t we seen this before? Hasn’t Nietzsche in another guise attacked Russia already? Have not the forces of irrationalism invaded Russia before? And did Russia not for our benefit defeat those forces of irrationalism? We still owe Russia.
+So let’s support it today it by burying Nietzsche. And by resurrecting universal reason and all the ideals which are built upon it. Give modern secular life another chance. Not just in Syria but in the West too.
+ Aidan O’Brien is a hospital worker in Dublin, Ireland.",FAKE
+1234,The Man Who Will Not Bow to Fearmongering,"While others try to brag their way to the Oval Office, one Republican has quietly, thoughtfully, paying attention to what matters.
+
+BEAUFORT, S.C.  —  On Boundary Street leading into the city, Sgt. White’s Diner is just past the lights at the intersection of Ribault Road across from Municipal Court and alongside a vacant Bail Bonds office. Hours before the polls opened and people voted in the Republican primary here there was a steady stream of customers for the pit cooked barbecue chicken and barbecued ribs and, it seemed, more interest in what might happen over the long haul leading to November than who would win Saturday.
+
+The woman behind the counter put Ms. Jenkins’s order in a bag and Ella Mae walked to her car parked in a lot alongside a Piggly Wiggly market that’s been out of business for some time. She spoke briefly about her husband’s disability due to being badly wounded nearly 50 years ago at a place called Quang Tri City in a country then called South Vietnam.
+
+She said she had little interest in politics and paid hardly any attention to what the candidates were saying and that she would be happy when the campaign went to another state: “Then I can watch my shows without seein’ all these fools on my TV.”
+
+In the sky above, two F-18 Hornets cut through a low ribbon of haze heading to Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort just up the road from Sgt White’s Diner. The noise and power of their engines filled the air but Ms. Jenkins never looked up because their appearance is part of daily life here, where the reality of America’s military, its cost and duties as well as its existence are the framework for so many proud families who are charged with paying the price for loose political rhetoric.
+
+A few miles east, past the causeway above the Harbor River and down Malecon Drive, is the main gate at Marine Corps Recruit Depot East at Parris Island. Here the pine trees line much of the approach, some stretching 50 feet and higher and, then,  on the Island there are fewer of them and the wind, warm now in mid-February, meets no obstacles as it whips through the day fluttering flags on the buildings that house the young who someday will be asked to fight for the dreams of the old who send them to war.
+
+Here, in South Carolina, memory is part of the cement of a culture rooted in service to the country. And here on Parris Island with roads named for bloodshed and lives lost in places like Chosin, Guadalcanal, Bataan and Quang Tri, the cheap chatter of candidates talking tough is merely muffled noise when measured against the drills and preparation of those who could be sent to places where polls and political ambition are meaningless. Here, the dreams and desires of those on the ballot live in a universe totally estranged from the future of the men and women who might one day face a bullet.
+
+Listening to some of the Republican candidates for president is like eavesdropping on men trying to earn their letter sweater with worthless phrases: carpet bombing, crushing ISIS, as if words alone will accomplish the mission and the lives of those sent into the fight are merely an anonymous squadron of props used to advance a political agenda. The world is on fire, a dangerous place, and too many seeking to lead appear to be clueless or ignorant of what is required to keep the country secure.
+
+In the harbor, Fort Sumter is a constant reminder of the first shots fired in the Civil War. And the distant echoes and impact of that war can sometimes still be felt in the air all these years later.
+
+The USS Yorktown is also here at Patriots Point Naval Museum here. It was commissioned in 1943, named after the Yorktown sunk by Japanese at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. Today it is a museum and Friday night, hours before South Carolina voted, John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, came to talk to about 300 people who had gathered below deck.
+
+Kasich is an interesting candidate. He knew his chances in a state dominated by evangelicals and anger were not great but he arrived with a smile on his face and a sound of contentment in his voice because it was not in him to feed the beast of those filled with rage and despairing of the future.
+
+He stood on a stage with a huge American flag hanging behind him. He told the people he’d been at a Town Hall rally earlier in the day and could sense the worry that many have about the direction of the country and the frustration and failure of politics in Washington.
+
+“I looked out in the crowd, looked at the faces in that room and I saw my family. Right there in the third row. Saw my family sitting there listening to me. Oh, they weren’t my family but I knew them. I know what worries them and I know what worries you but we live in the greatest country God ever created and we’re going to be even greater if we stop listening to all this doom and gloom we’re getting. I’m here to tell you we can do this, but we have to do it together. Together. All of us. Together.”
+
+“I meet with them one on one,” Kasich was saying. “And I cry with them. I’m not embarrassed to tell you I cry. I just wish we’d pay more attention to what war costs and I wish more of us would talk about what it means to be Commander-in-Chief. That phrase is more than words. It’s the ultimate responsibility of a president. We’re cheating people by not talking enough about that role. Shame on us and shame on this process we have of electing a president the way we’re doing it now. We’re better than this and people deserve more than what they’re getting from us. From all of us.”",REAL
+1256,The Destroyer Cometh,"Donald Trump is running riot in the GOP china shop and gleefully tearing the place up.
+
+Consider the strength of Trump’s position: If he wins South Carolina by a big margin, he goes into Nevada with momentum, and the latest poll there has him leading by 26 points and pushing 50 percent. If he enters Super Tuesday a week later having won three out of the past three states — and with Cruz diminished by a South Carolina loss and Rubio having won nowhere — he could easily win, say, 10 contests that day.
+
+It might still be possible to beat Trump at that point if the field is narrowed (states don’t become winner-take-all until March 15), but doing so would involve wrestling to the ground a candidate who will have cut a formidable swath through the first month of the nomination battle.
+
+Even now, it's hard to imagine a happy outcome for the party from the three likeliest scenarios:
+
+— If Trump wins the nomination outright, many Republican voters may stay home, and senators and members of the House up for reelection will probably scurry their own way, seeking cover from the loose cannon of a nominee.
+
+It is certainly possible that Trump will prove a better general election candidate than expected, just as he has proved a much more potent candidate in the primary than nearly anyone thought (and he will presumably be facing a very weak Hillary Clinton). But it is also likely that the general public will be less enamored or forgiving of those qualities in Trump that have charmed or at least not bothered a plurality of the Republican electorate — the lack of political experience, the foul mouth, the constant psychodrama, the spotty business record. Surely, the first Democratic ads against him will portray him as a “vulture capitalist” like Mitt Romney, except without the manners.
+
+— If Trump is dragged to an open convention and leads in delegates, but falls short of a majority, and is denied the nomination, there will be a bloodbath. Trump will make Andrew Jackson’s angry cry of a “corrupt bargain” after Old Hickory lost the presidency in the House of Representatives in 1824 — despite leading in popular and electoral votes — look like a measured, cool-headed response. Trump will stomp off, and no doubt take a lot of his supporters with him.
+
+— If Trump is beaten prior to a convention, it will presumably require an all-out war against the mogul. Well-heeled Republican donors will have to pour money into an thermonuclear advertising campaign to destroy his image. The party will have to rally around a Trump alternative, doing everything in its power to bolster him and tear down Trump. Such an effort will no doubt strike Trump as “unfair,” and he will do all he can to delegitimize it and find targets to sue over it. Needless to say, none of this would be conducive to keeping Trump voters inside the Republican tent.
+
+Has any political party ever had a candidate who is such a wrecking ball, and who isn’t a fringe candidate, but a dominant one?
+
+The Republican front-runner is threatening to sue one of his challengers, Ted Cruz (who is now daring Trump to file suit and saying he would relish the prospect of himself questioning Trump under oath — this is really happening). The Republican front-runner thinks the last Republican president was guilty of impeachable offenses and lied the country into war. The Republican front-runner routinely attacks his own party for its perfidy — he claims the Iowa caucuses were stolen from him and the debate audiences are stacked against him — and insults his competitors in the harshest, most personal terms.
+
+We’ve grown used to how Trump has treated Jeb Bush in the debates, but that doesn’t make it any less appalling a breach of political norms or basic decency. The faces he makes while Bush talks, the constant interrupting, the petty put-downs — all of this would have been thought unworthy of the lowest political guttersnipe but have become an accepted part of the landscape thanks to Donald J. Trump.
+
+And no one has figured out a way to handle Trump’s bullying. Bush has gotten stronger on stage but has never put Trump in his place. Even Ted Cruz has shrunk before Trump at key moments — for instance, painfully in the New Hampshire debate, when he refused to repeat a critique of Trump’s temperament, prompting the mogul to comment, “people back down with Trump.” The Donald has a way of making needling, “when did you stop beating your wife?” attacks that are inherently difficult to counter. When he stands next to Ted Cruz and says no one likes him, how is the senator supposed to respond? “No, Donald, let me assure you, I really do have friends”?
+
+The key to Trump’s strength, which buttresses all his outrageousness, is that his supporters want someone to blow up the system. So there's almost nothing he can say or do that will discredit him in their eyes, and the least destructive scenario for his defeat — Trump blows himself up — will take some doing on his part.
+
+It’s all very entertaining — but so are demolition derbies.
+
+",REAL
+7974,U.S. Elections Shockwaves Hit Europe,"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
+Donald Trump’s startling and explosive victory has not only shaken America’s oligarchy to its core, it’s also sending shock waves across Europe and scaring the top hats off plutocrats and their tame politicians. 
+The great Mark Twain wrote early in the 20th century: ‘if you don’t read newspapers you are uninformed. But if you do read them, you are misinformed.’ Amen. 
+As with the 2003 war against Iraq, the US media totally dropped its mask of phony impartiality and became a cheerleader for the Clintons and their financial backers. Media was clearly revealed as a propaganda organ for the ruling elite. No wonder its disgusted clients are decamping to online sources or just ignoring the biased media. 
+Amazingly, working class men and women rose up and overthrew the oligarchy, led by the corporate media and the self-enriching, war-promoting Clinton dynasty and its Davos friends. There was plenty of anguish among leftist groups and weepy young women, but America breathed a gigantic sigh of relief. 
+So did the stock market. So did ordinary white Americans royally fed up with the elite’s promotion of ‘diversity,’ which they believe is a euphemism for mixing races, pushing junk popular culture, and advocating homosexuality, lesbianism, and bisexuality. 
+Across the Atlantic, political nerves were just as tense. Three major votes will be held in the coming 10 months in France, Germany and Italy, Europe’s economic, political and cultural core. The old order is scared to death by Trump’s crashing victory. 
+France holds a presidential primary in a month in which sitting president, François Hollande, is expected to be thrashed. Hollande’s public support now is struggling to reach 4%. 
+Former prime minister Nicholas Sarkozy has risen from the political dead and is preaching a farrago of populism, nationalism and Islamophobia. Many French don’t trust or like Sarko. He may shortly face charges for accepting illegal campaign money from Libya’s late Mummar Khadffi, in whose murder Sarko may be deeply implicated. Dead Libyans tell no tales. 
+Sarko’s rivals are former foreign minister Alain Juppé, a moderate conservative and ally of the ailing former president Jacques Chirac, who remains France’s most liked politician. Juppé, dignified, sensible, and moderate, is just what France needs after the disastrous socialist president François Hollande. 
+But adding a wild card to the primary is the youthful ex-banker and rightwing socialist Emmanuel Macron, a former economy minister under Hollande. He used to work for the French Rothschilds, arousing suspicions on the left and far right. Macron is expected to shortly announce his candidacy for president. 
+Add in former prime minister François Fillon, a solid moderate with a reputation for strong ethics who may be able to stand up to France’s thuggish unions. Fillon, Juppé and Macron are all considered leftwing conservatives who can restore France’s staggering economy and fight the bureaucracy, teachers and, of course, the unions who can quickly shut down all key sectors of France’s economy. 
+Lurking in the background is the nemesis of France’s current political system, Madame Marine LePen, leader of the hard right National Front. Anti-EU, anti-globalization, and anti-Muslim, she is a modern day version of France’s WWII Vichy Catholic far right. Le Pen, like her aged father Jean-Marie, is very popular and can articulate, like Trump, the anger and dismay of working whites. 
+She may knock the hapless Hollande out in the first round of voting in 2017. But Le Pen would then have to go on to defeat the moderate candidate – Sarkozy, Fillon, Macron or Juppé. This will be very tough because, as in previous elections, leftist and centrist voters will gang up to defeat her. 
+Such is conventional logic. But after Trump nothing is certain. Good! Our stagnant western economies and corrupt political systems badly need shaking up and refreshing. I say, ‘vive Monsieur Trump.’ 
+On Dec 4, Italy holds a very important referendum to modernize its rickety political structure. If voters reject it, Italy’s young, reformist prime minister, Matteo Renzi, has vowed to resign. This would likely plunge Italy into political confusion and encourage a looming banking crisis. 
+Finally, in Germany, Angela Merkel’s coalition government looks increasingly fragile. Many Germans are tired of the ultra-moderate Merkel and her cautious government which is often accused of being an American vassal. If Germany ever wakens from its post-1945 stupor, all Europe will shake. 
+So enter Donald Trump just at a time when Europe may be coming to a boil. (Reprinted from EricMargolis.com  ",FAKE
+6898,"All Governments Lie, The Movie","Posted on October 30, 2016 by DavidSwanson 
+Picture, if you will, video footage of vintage (early 2016) Donald Trump buffoonery with the CEO of CBS Leslie Moonves commenting on major media’s choice to give Trump vastly more air time than other candidates: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” 
+That’s the introduction to a powerful critique of the U.S. media. A new film screens in New York and Los Angeles this week called All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone . 
+The website AllGovernmentsLie.com has screening dates , a list of lies , and a list of good journalists who expose lies . The lists on the website are not identical to the content of the film, but there’s a good deal of overlap — enough to give you a sense of what this project is about. 
+I’d have made various changes and additions to the film. In particular, I’m tired of all the focus on Iraq 2003. This film touches on war lies since then, but still gives that one particular set of war lies prominence. 
+Still, this is a film that should be shown in cities, homes, and classrooms across the United States. It includes and is driven by Noam Chomsky’s analysis of how the media system is “rigged” without those doing the rigging believing they’ve done anything at all. It’s a survey of skullduggery by corporate media. It’s an introduction to numerous journalists far superior to the norm. And it’s an introduction to I.F. Stone. It includes footage of a presentation of the annual Izzy Award which goes to journalists acting in Stone’s tradition. 
+One of the lies listed in the film and on the website is that of the Gulf of Tonkin (non-)Incident. Anyone paying attention knows of it now as a war lie. And it was a transparent war lie at the time in a particular sense. That is: had the North Vietnamese really shot back at a U.S. ship off their coast, that would not have been any sort of legal, much less moral, justification for escalating a war. I’d love it if people could grasp that logic and apply it to the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and every other part of the earth today. 
+But the Gulf of Tonkin lies about Vietnamese aggression against the U.S. ships innocently patrolling and firing off the coast of Vietnam were not transparent to people with faith in the U.S. role of Global Policeman. Someone had to make the lies transparent. Someone had to document that in fact the Secretary of So-Called Defense and the President were lying. Sadly, nobody did that in the first 24 hours after the Congressional committee hearings, and that was all it took for Congress to hand the president a war. 
+And it was decades before White House transcripts came out and before the National Security Agency confessed, and additional years before former Secretary Robert McNamara did. Yet, those revelations simply confirmed what people paying attention knew. And they knew it because of I.F. Stone who just weeks after the (non-)incident published a four-page edition of his weekly newsletter exclusively about Tonkin. 
+Stone’s analysis is useful in looking at the incident or lack thereof this past month in the Red Sea off Yemen. And in fact it is to Yemen that Stone immediately turned on page 1 in 1964. The United Nations, including its U.S. ambassador, had recently condemned British attacks on Yemen that Britain defended as retaliatory. President Dwight Eisenhower had also warned the French against retaliatory attacks on Tunisia. And President Lyndon Johnson, even at the time of Tonkin, Stone notes, was warning Greece and Turkey not to engage in retaliatory attacks on each other. 
+Stone, who tended to look even at written laws that nobody else paid any heed to, pointed out that three of them banned these sorts of attacks: the League of Nations Covenant, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the U.N. Charter. The latter two are still theoretically in place for the U.S. government. 
+The United States in Vietnam, Stone goes on to show, could not have been innocently attacked but itself admitted to having already sunk a number of Vietnamese boats. And indeed the U.S. ships, Stone reports, were in North Vietnamese waters and were there to assist South Vietnamese ships that were shelling two North Vietnamese islands. And in fact those ships had been supplied to South Vietnam by the U.S. military and the good old American tax payers. 
+Stone did not have access to closed committee hearings, but he hardly needed it. He considered the assertions made in speeches by the only two senators who voted against the war. And then he looked for any rejoinders by the chairmen of the committees. He found their denials to be non-denials and nonsensical. It made no sense that the U.S. ships simply happened to be randomly hanging around in the vicinity of the South Vietnamese ships. Stone didn’t believe it. 
+Stone also filled in the background information. The United States had been supporting guerrilla attacks on North Vietnam for years prior to the non-incident. And Stone raised numerous suspicions, including the question of why the U.S. ships had supposedly made sure they were out in international waters for the (non-)incident to (not) occur, and the question of why in the world Vietnam would take on the United States military (something nobody could explain, though Eugene McCarthy proposed that perhaps they had been bored). 
+Missing from the film and website of All Governments Lie is I.F. Stone’s work on lies about the outbreak of the Korean War. We’ve learned more since he wrote it, but seen little more insightful, relevant, or timely for our understanding of Korea and the world today. This entry was posted in General . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
+9091,Woodward On Clinton Foundation “It’s Corrupt”,"Abby Martin Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Woodward On Clinton Foundation “It’s Corrupt” By VNN on October 28, 2016 He’s correct: The Clinton Foundation is corrupt, and voters should be troubled by Clinton’s role in the unethical pay-for-play scandals. 
+Conservative Tribune 
+Voters have been concerned about Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the scandal-ridden Clinton Foundation. 
+Liberal journalist Bob Woodward legitimized those concerns Sunday on Fox News by pointing to the Foundation’s “ pay-for-play ” scandals while Clinton served as secretary of state as something that should trouble voters. 
+Woodward, who broke the Watergate story that led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon, told host Chris Wallace in no uncertain terms that the Clinton Foundation is “corrupt” and a “scandal.” 
+Watch Woodward’s comments on Fox News Sunday here: 
+“There are allegations about the Clinton Foundation and pay-for-play,” Wallace said. “When you see what seems to be clear evidence that Clinton Foundation donors were being treated differently than non-donors in terms of access, when you see this new revelations (sic) about the $12 million deal between Hillary Clinton, the Foundation and the King of Morocco, are voters right to be troubled by this?” 
+“Yes,” Woodward responded. “ It’s corrupt . It’s a scandal.” 
+Wallace had attempted to get answers from Clinton about the issue at the final presidential debate with Republican candidate Donald Trump. 
+But of course Clinton ducked the moderator’s question and instead talked about the organization’s charitable donations rather than its extreme conflicts of interest — something Woodward took note of and criticized her for. 
+“She didn’t answer your question at all,” Woodward told Wallace. “And she turned to embrace the good work that the Clinton Foundation has done.” 
+Woodward apparently didn’t want to discredit the “good work” done by the organization, but pointed out that even its “good work” is compromised by the overwhelming evidence of corruption. 
+“(T)he mixing of speech fees, the Clinton Foundation and actions by the State Department — which she ran — are all intertwined and it’s corrupt,” he argued. 
+He’s correct: The Clinton Foundation is corrupt, and voters should be troubled by Clinton’s role in the unethical pay-for-play scandals. 
+Unfortunately Clinton has an acute ability to avoid being held accountable for her scandals, but we have faith in the American people and their desire to be led by a person with integrity and respect for the office he holds, not someone who continuously looks for ways for his political power to benefit his personal life. 
+Like and share on Facebook and Twitter if you agree with Bob Woodward about Hillary Clinton and her family’s scandal-ridden Clinton Foundation. What do you think about Woodward’s criticism of Clinton? Scroll down to comment below!",FAKE
+8308,"Re: WE’RE NOT NASTY! Like all Democrats, Sally Kohn proves how little she thinks of women with this tweet","WE’RE NOT NASTY! Why does Sally Kohn hate women so much? Posted at 4:56 pm on October 27, 2016 by Sam J. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
+So tired of the notion that women have to be nasty to make a dent in this world, that women have to be hateful or mean to get things done. 
+Women who do not live life as a caricature are fully capable of getting “sh*t” done without having to be unkind, mean, disingenuous OR nasty. 
+And the fact that Sally Kohn and other Democrats don’t get this is just more evidence of how little they really think of women in general. 
+Take for example this tweet from Sally herself: 
+— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) October 27, 2016 
+Oh look a mom with her daughter instilling in her the same awful idea, that women have to be nasty to get something done. Trending The McAuliffe -- FBI -- Clinton payoff story just got a whole lot worse 
+Stupid. Moms are fully capable of teaching their daughters how to get things done without being horrible. Of course that probably just confuses the Left but the stereotypical “ME WOMAN ME ROAR” is ridiculous in the real world and most moms know this. 
+Awww, but then the Left doesn’t really live in the real world now do they? @sallykohn @RebeccaSoffer And exactly what has Hillary gotten done? 
+— Calamity Jan (@janetbfitzgeral) October 27, 2016 
+Besides set women back years with this nonsense about being nasty? 
+She did leave four Americans to die in Benghazi and illegally keep a server in her home before deleting tens of thousands of emails, but we digress.",FAKE
+7539,Herbs to Grow in Winter and Fall,"Chives 
+
+It takes only a few weeks for these herbs to grow so you can harvest them for many of your meals. This is a great way to add some fresh flavor to your kitchen during the usual off season for growing. 
+
+Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science. Follow her adventures on Instagram.",FAKE
+243,‘Supermajority’ of House Freedom Caucus to back Paul Ryan’s speaker bid,"Hard-line conservatives cleared a path Wednesday for Rep. Paul Ryan to become House speaker when some of his most disgruntled fellow Republicans signaled that they would support his bid for the top job.
+
+The decision to back Ryan by the House Freedom Caucus, a group of nearly 40 lawmakers that has risen in power and stature since its founding this year, came after the Ways and Means Committee chairman spent much of his day courting its support.
+
+The group stopped short of an official endorsement, which would have required 80 percent support, but members said a “supermajority” of the caucus would back a Ryan bid for speaker. Ryan set out a series of conditions Tuesday under which he would consider seeking the speakership; the most challenging of those was unity among all of the House Republican Conference’s warring factions. The support of the Freedom Caucus was regarded as one of the huge obstacles to meeting that condition.
+
+In a statement, Ryan said he did not view the lack of a formal endorsement as a rejection: “I believe this is a positive step toward a unified Republican team.”
+
+Rep. Raúl R. Labrador (R-Idaho), a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus, emerged from a lengthy evening meeting Wednesday and said there was “consensus that we need to move forward because it’s time for the conference to unite.”
+
+“It’s time for everybody to work together and make the Republican Party stronger,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do even with the reservations that some people have about Paul Ryan being speaker.”
+
+[Paul Ryan tells House Republicans he’s willing to run, if conditions are met]
+
+Ryan could still decide not to serve as speaker, and some conservative activists have engaged in a vigorous campaign to cast doubt on his record, which might give some members cold feet before votes are cast next week.
+
+But the level of Freedom Caucus support represents the first thaw in the increasingly frosty relationship between tea party conservatives and establishment Republicans. It also paves the way for fresh GOP leadership heading into imminent clashes with President Obama over the national debt and federal spending.
+
+The Freedom Caucus met with Ryan for an hour in the Capitol earlier in the day. Many of its members had balked at the conditions Ryan attached to his decision to serve as speaker, and the meeting represented their first chance to question him directly about his plans.
+
+The meeting broke up without resolution, setting up a high-stakes decision for a group that played a key role in easing the current speaker, John A. Boehner, into retirement and blocking Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid to succeed him.
+
+The group reconvened in the evening to debate whether to abandon their previous endorsement of Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) in favor of Ryan, who signaled Tuesday that a Freedom Caucus endorsement would be a prerequisite to him agreeing to serve as speaker.
+
+Ryan’s declaration that he would serve as House speaker if and only if he receives formal backing from major House GOP factions — including the Freedom Caucus — effectively gave the group veto power over his ascent. It also exposed fissures in the typically close-knit caucus.
+
+Some, citing Ryan’s demand to jettison the House rule allowing a simple majority to oust a speaker at virtually any time, said it would be nearly impossible for him to earn their support. Others argued that Ryan could be the type of transformative leader that House Republicans need.
+
+The Freedom Caucus was also facing the prospect of further alienating the rest of the House GOP, and a potentially crippling loss of credibility, if it were to reject Ryan. Many mainstream conservatives saw Ryan as the best chance, maybe the only chance, to unite their fractious party.
+
+“It would be an embarrassment to them” if the Freedom Caucus dismissed Ryan, said Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee. “What he’s doing is selfless.”
+
+Ryan appeared to calm some nerves in the afternoon meeting, making clear that he did not want to end the ability of the House membership to remove the speaker — only change the procedures for doing so. He also gave reassurances that he would respect the “Hastert Rule” — the informal practice of former speaker J. Dennis Hastert that required the majority support of the Republican conference before moving legislation to the House floor.
+
+Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said Ryan agreed that legislation should be moved only with the support of the majority of the majority. In particular, he said, that calmed immigration hawks wary of Ryan’s past support for measures that would offer illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.
+
+But Ryan faced a big challenge in getting the group’s endorsement, Brooks said: “Paul Ryan probably made some progress . . . but to get 80 percent of Freedom Caucus to switch from Daniel Webster?” he said. “It’s going to be difficult for Paul Ryan to shift that in two, three days.”
+
+Ryan said little upon departing the afternoon meeting, calling the gathering an “exchange of ideas on how to make Congress work better.”
+
+Earlier in the day, Boehner announced that Republicans will vote internally to nominate a speaker next Wednesday, with a floor vote to follow Thursday. The announcement was made after Ryan said Tuesday night that he would run for speaker only if his terms were met.
+
+“This is not a job I’ve ever wanted, I’ve ever sought,” Ryan said. “I came to the conclusion that this is a very dire moment, not just for Congress, not just for the Republican Party, but for our country.”
+
+Those demands include not only the endorsements and the rule changes, but also giving Ryan time with his young family.
+
+By the time the meeting wrapped up Wednesday night, only a “small handful” of members had reservations, said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), signaling that Ryan had secured the 218 House votes necessary to prevail in the floor vote.
+
+“I think he satisfied many of us that he was going to change business as usual in Washington, D.C.,” Mulvaney said.
+
+Another sticking point for Freedom Caucus members was their endorsement of Webster, which was made earlier this month and played a role in ending McCarthy’s bid for the speakership.
+
+[A little-known Florida man may keep Paul Ryan from meeting his conditions to be speaker]
+
+Webster’s focus on procedural reforms, honed during his years as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, has won him an avid following among hard-liners who feel marginalized by the GOP’s establishment.
+
+“You’ve got a bunch of alpha people in here,” said Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), a Webster supporter. “You don’t need another alpha leader.”
+
+Webster made clear Wednesday that he would not stand aside for Ryan: “People are responding to what I’m saying. They’re sick of how this place is run, of the dog-and-pony shows on committees. They want a return to bills from members being considered, rather than approving the leadership’s bills.”
+
+But Ryan’s near-bulletproof reputation among conservatives as a visionary and policy expert allowed hard-liners to look past his 16-year congressional tenure and trust him in a way that they never trusted Boehner or McCarthy.
+
+“We’ve got a little way to go,” Rep. Marlin A. Stutzman (R-Ind.) said during the Freedom Caucus deliberations. “But I’m willing to start those conversations because I trust Paul. He’s earned my trust. I’m willing to keep talking.”
+
+Two other major GOP caucuses have yet to weigh in, but neither is seen as an obstacle to Ryan.
+
+Ryan met Wednesday with the Republican Study Committee, a more mainstream conservative group that counts more than two-thirds of the Republican conference as members. Its members were surveyed by secret ballot Wednesday, and its steering committee is expected to decide Thursday whether to grant an endorsement.
+
+Also Thursday, Ryan is set to meet with the centrist Tuesday Group, which is expected to embrace his speaker bid.
+
+Karoun Demirjian, Kelsey Snell and David Weigel contributed to this report.",REAL
+7496,Journalism Startup Newsbud Launches Critical 2nd Crowdfund - Richard Brandt,"Newsbud does great work, so send them a few bucks if you can. They're the real deal. 
+Here is a message from the founder of Newsbud, Sibel Edmond: 
+We have launched our new Kickstarter campaign, and we need your help again. We have 35 days to raise $130,000, and we know we can do it with your support! 
+We have taken an enormous step forward thanks to your funding of our Phase 1 campaign. Now we need your help to achieve this next step so we can continue building our 100% people-funded independent media outlet. 
+Please help. Make a pledge and put the word out by telling everyone in your social-media networks. 
+Without you, we cannot achieve our dream of a media outlet that is nonpartisan and accountable only to its viewers and to the truth. Make a donation, subscribe, and activate others. They have rendered we the people irrelevant; together, we will make them irrelevant! 
+Thank you for all your support,Sibel Edmond",FAKE
+4624,How To Win The Presidency With 23 Percent Of The Popular Vote,"How To Win The Presidency With 23 Percent Of The Popular Vote
+
+It's that time again: time for Americans to figure out how, exactly, their presidential election works. ""Electoral College"" searches spike every four years, just before Election Day, according to Google ... and the search volume is picking up right now.
+
+Long story short: To win the presidency, you don't have to win the majority of the popular vote. You have to win the majority of electoral votes — that is, 270 of them.* In most states, a candidate wins electoral votes by winning the most voters.
+
+So. Win a state by just one vote, and you win all of its electoral votes (unless you live in Nebraska or Maine, which divvy up their votes a little differently).
+
+This can lead to off-kilter election results — in 2000, for example, Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote by a few hundred thousand votes, but lost the presidency by five electoral votes. So we wondered: Just how few votes would a candidate need to win 270 electoral votes?
+
+We decided to find out. A candidate only needs to win the 11 states with the most electoral votes to hit 270. Assuming only two candidates (a big assumption; see below) and that one candidate won all of those states by just one vote, and then didn't win a single vote in any of the other states (or D.C.), how many votes would that candidate have to win? It depends on how you do the math. Either way, it's far less than half.
+
+Initially when we did this story, we found that if you start with the biggest-electoral-vote states, the answer is 27 percent. However, we have an update: as Andrej Schoeke very nicely pointed out to us on Twitter, there's another way to do it (via CGP Grey) that requires even less of the popular vote: start with the smallest-electoral-vote states. Our math went through a few iterations on this but by our final math, in 2012 that could have meant winning the presidency with only around 23 percent of the popular vote.
+
+The idea here is that a voter in a low-population state like Wyoming counts for a larger share of electoral votes than popular votes.
+
+And if one were to start with the largest states, it would be 27 percent. Here's a look at that math:
+
+We're making a lot of assumptions here — we're using vote totals from 2012, for one thing. Moreover, we're assuming there are only two candidates in the race.
+
+And let's be clear about the obvious here: This kind of an extreme election isn't going to happen. And if it did — if there were somehow a bunch of 1- or 2-vote wins, you can bet the recounts would stretch into 2017.
+
+And we're also sure that with any number of tweaks to the math (like plugging in a third or fourth candidate), you could come up with results that are slightly-to-moderately different. But that's not really the point here. The point is that the Electoral College can skew election results to a fantastic degree.
+
+This kind of popular-electoral vote discrepancy is why some articles about the 2008 election had to be careful to call Obama's win an electoral landslide — he won 68 percent of the electoral vote but only about 53 percent of the popular vote.
+
+Skewed wins like this happen regularly in U.S. elections — a modest popular vote margin can yield a ridiculously large Electoral College margin. For example, in 1984, Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in the popular vote by 18 points — a sizable gap, but nothing like the Electoral College walloping: Reagan won 525 electoral votes, beating Mondale by 95 percentage points.
+
+Here's what those gaps look like in every election going back to 1960's race, in which John F. Kennedy only squeaked past Richard Nixon in the popular vote by around 100,000 votes:
+
+Ironically, the 2000 election — whose outcome struck many people as unfair because Gore won the popular vote but not the electoral vote — also has the electoral-vote margin that most closely reflects the popular-vote margin. In that sense, one could call it one of the ""fairest"" elections in modern politics.
+
+Well, maybe. But then, come Nov. 9, there will be no difference for the losing candidate between getting 250 electoral votes or 150 — a loss is a loss.
+
+The Electoral College and current demographics mean that both parties often take particular electoral votes for granted: Democrats regularly win California and New York, while Republicans win Texas and Georgia (however, things have been closer than usual in those states this year).
+
+And that means that candidates regularly spend a disproportionate amount of time in high-electoral-vote battleground states like Florida and Ohio as they plot their ""paths to 270."" This means voters in Los Angeles or San Antonio (or Cheyenne or Honolulu) don't get that much attention.
+
+If the Electoral College disappeared tomorrow, campaign strategy would probably shift dramatically; Democrats might campaign more in Austin, Texas. Republicans might do more outreach in conservative parts of California. Either way, the people of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania might get some respite from the onslaught of rallies and ads every four years, as candidates try harder to win bigger parts of the country.
+
+*Before you fire off an email, yes, we know: You can still win the presidency without winning 270 electoral votes. If no candidate hits 270, then the House votes. But we're talking outright on election night.",REAL
+2520,Farmers: Trump 'terrible for agriculture',"During the campaign, Trump had threatened to impose a large tariff to keep the jobs in the United States.",REAL
+9298,Cyrus Mistry joins AAP; Tata Sons shortlists candidates for chairman’s post,"Cyrus Mistry joins AAP; Tata Sons shortlists candidates for chairman’s post Posted on Tweet (Image via intoday.in) 
+Ousted Chairman of Tata Sons Cyrus Mistry today joined the Aam Aadmi Party. Speaking to the media Cyrus Mistry said, “The media, government, regulators or politicians, no one is supporting me in fighting against the injustice I have faced. Kejriwalji is my only hope. So I joined the AAP.” 
+Speaking at the occasion, AAP supremo and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal said, “Having worked at Tata Steel several years ago, I have firsthand experience of how the board of directors of Tata Sons did not allow me to work. That is the reason I quit Tata Steel.” 
+“Just like Cyrus Mistry, I also took up the top job in Delhi because there were no other suitable candidate. I empathize with Cyrus Mistry when he says that Ratan Tata did not allow him to do work. In a similar way, Narendra Modi and Najeeb Jung do not allow me to do work in Delhi,” he added. 
+“Why should someone be fired for choosing to close loss making UK Steel business? First take care of Indians before subsidizing British citizens. Ratan Tata is a British agent. Even AAP does not fire its leaders so fast,” he declared 
+Meanwhile, our correspondent overheard this discussion between Cyrus Mistry and Rajdeep Sardesai. 
+Rajdeep Sardesai: So what I understand Mr. Mistry is that you are concerned about the rising intolerance by the majority against the minorities in India?” 
+Cyrus Mistry: No, I only said that I am concerned about the rising intolerance of the majority shareholders in Tata Sons against minority shareholders like me. 
+Meanwhile, AAP leader Ashutosh took to Twitter to blast Tata Sons. 
+“As per Cyrus Mistry, Tata Motors’ Nano plant in Gujarat is making losses. Even industrialists in Gujarat are losing money. Is this the Gujarat Model? Will Modi answer?” he tweeted. 
+“Cyrus Mistry spoke about risk of impairment in Tata Steal? Will Ratan Tata answer?” read his second tweet. 
+“Why was Cyrus Mistry not given a free hand to run Tata Suns? Will the Bored answer?” said his third tweet 
+A source who did not wish to be identified told our correspondent that Tata Sons is also planning to fire Cyrus Mistry from the board of directors and has already found his replacement. 
+After Ratan Tata asked for a versatile candidate with expertise in several fields and who is not afraid to speak his mind, a consultant suggested the name of Justice Katju. But Ratan Tata was not pleased at the prospect of being called an idiot in a board meeting and so vetoed the proposal. Instead Congress leader Ahmed Patel will be filling this post. 
+According to our source, the Tata Sons board was very impressed with Ahmed Patel after he told them that rather than abrupt firing, they should have kept planting stories in the media like “Ratan Tata unhappy with Cyrus Mistry’s decision to close down Tata Steel UK Business.” 
+This along with his ability to effectively manage a family trust and also manage a professional CEO without letting him drift from the group’s ethos and culture earned him a board seat. 
+Further, according to our source, several names came up during the latest board meeting to pick a new Chairman. Ahmed Patel suggested the name of Dr. Manmohan Singh but Ratan Tata vetoed it saying he wanted a person who could be a brand ambassador for the Tata Group. 
+Currently, there are 2 persons who are front-runners in the race for Chairman. One is Arvind Kejriwal. Several board members think that he will be a suitable candidate because he can just give speeches, visit offices and be a brand ambassador while the actual work could be left to the board. 
+Another name doing the round is Chetan Bhagat. Given his IIT, IIM qualifications along with his versatile persona of being an author, columnist, screenwriter, television personality and motivational speaker, several board members think he is the perfect candidate for the heavily diversified salt to software conglomerate. Further, he is good with numbers, an area the Tata Group is struggling at this point in time.",FAKE
+2391,Obama to Supreme Court: You wouldn’t dare kill Obamacare,"President Obama uttered more than 3,600 words on the stage of Washington’s Marriott Wardman Park ballroom on Tuesday, but his message could be summed up in three: You wouldn’t dare.
+
+He was speaking not to the hundreds of hospital administrators assembled for the Catholic Health Association’s conference but to five men not in the room: the conservative justices of the Supreme Court, who in the next 21 days will declare whether they are invalidating the most far-reaching legislation in at least a generation because of one vague clause tucked in its 2,000 pages.
+
+Obama’s appeal to the justices, devotees of judicial modesty all: Do they really wish to cause the massive societal upheaval that would come from killing a law that is now a routine part of American life?
+
+“Five years in, what we are talking about is no longer just a law. It’s no longer just a theory. It isn’t even just about the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare,” he said. “This is now part of the fabric of how we care for one another. This is health care in America.”
+
+Without mentioning the looming decision, Obama warned of its devastating potential. “Once you see millions of people having health care, once you see that all the bad things that were predicted didn’t happen, you’d think that it’d be time to move on,” he said. “It seems so cynical to want to take coverage away from millions of people, to take care away from the people who need it the most, to punish millions with higher costs of care and unravel what’s now been woven into the fabric of America.”
+
+The appearance had been scheduled long ago, but White House officials elevated the importance of the speech to keep pressure on the Supreme Court, which Obama said at a news conference in Germany on Monday shouldn’t have even taken up the case. Obama said trashing the federal health-care exchanges, as a hostile Supreme Court ruling would do, is “not something that should be done based on a twisted interpretation of four words.”
+
+The conservative justices, like conservative critics of the law generally, are unlikely to be persuaded by Obama’s recitation of the merits of the law, which he repeated at length Tuesday. But they may well be reluctant to upend a law that now has broad acceptance in American society.
+
+The Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks public opinion on the matter, found in April that more Americans had a favorable view of the law than an unfavorable view (43 percent to 42 percent) for the first time since 2012. That difference is not statistically significant, but the favorable view is up 10 points since the botched HealthCare.gov rollout in 2013 and the unfavorable view is down seven points. Forty-six percent favor keeping the law as is or expanding it, compared with 41 percent who favor scaling it back or repealing it.
+
+More evidence of the acceptance of Obamacare: Health care is fading as an issue. Gallup found last month that only 5 percent called it the country’s most important problem. That compares with 26 percent in September 2009.
+
+Certainly, those numbers could change if premiums jump as expected. But the recent improvement in the law’s standing comes even though most Americans aren’t aware that the law has cost the government less than forecast.
+
+With such broad acceptance of (if not fondness for) the new health-care status quo, it’s difficult to imagine the Supreme Court justices taking away health coverage for 6 million or 7 million Americans, causing costs to skyrocket for millions of others, and likely plunging the entire American health-care system into chaos. That’s not just judicial activism — it would be a judicially induced cataclysm.
+
+Such a cataclysm has no place in the catechism of Sister Carol Keehan, head of the Catholic Health Association and a key early supporter of Obamacare who broke with the Catholic bishops to support the law.
+
+“It would be unspeakably cruel,” she said when I asked her after the conference Tuesday what an adverse Supreme Court ruling would produce. Millions of people — pregnant women, cancer victims, heart patients — would lose coverage, she said. “The panic is going to spread, the confusion. It’s going to be incredibly chaotic.” And, with Congress unable to agree even on little things, the chaos would persist.
+
+“It makes me crazy just to think of it,” Keehan said, urging me to “light a candle” as the justices prepare their opinion.
+
+I’ll leave the votive offering to Sister Carol. I have faith that the conservative justices, even if they detest Obamacare, have no wish to throw the country into chaos.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+7301,An Alabama Reader Is Pleased To Report That Jeff Sessions Reads Ann Coulter!,"November 7, 2016, 7:46 pm A+ | a-   
+From: Benjamin In Alabama [ ] 
+During a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire, Jeff Sessions, the majestic Senator from my adopted state of Alabama was gearing up (with apparent pleasure) to talk about Ann Coulter’s most recent article when he was interrupted by a woman who was, judging by the sound of her voice, an immigrant. 
+The interruption was a happy one, however, since the woman was down from Massachusetts, where she said Trump has a lot of support. Sadly, Sessions did not recover his train of thought regarding Coulter’s article, but immediately began to talk about immigration, which more than made up for the loss. 
+I think he must be the very best Senator. So noble and sincere. And the fact that he reads Ann Coulter adds to his charm.",FAKE
+7250,Pa. lawmakers approve ban on naming officers in shootings,"Print 
+As cities nationwide grapple with fatal police shootings, many involving unarmed black men, Pennsylvania’s legislature on Thursday passed and sent to Gov. Wolf a bill that would block public officials from immediately releasing the names of officers involved in such incidents. 
+The measure, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Martina White of Philadelphia and approved by the GOP-controlled legislature, stoked sharp opinions and drew votes largely along partisan lines. 
+Supporters say the bill, supported by several local police unions, is necessary to protect police officers and their families after such incidents. 
+“We are the protectors of our protectors,” said one proponent, Rep. Dominic Costa, a Pittsburgh De mocrat. 
+Opponents said the bill flies in the face of transparency, which they believe is even more critical in tragic circumstances involving police shootings. 
+“Do not undermine the bridges that have been built between law enforcement and communities of color,” said Rep. Margo Davidson (D., Delaware) during a floor debate. “This legislation will do nothing but breed suspicion.”",FAKE
+10477,Why the Jobs Aren’t Coming Back. The “modern day marvel.”,"Why the Jobs Aren’t Coming Back. The “modern day marvel.” The machines are taking over The candidates in the current campaign – or any campaign – are all promising to “bring back good jobs” to “create good jobs.” When asked how they would do that, they are all a little light on details.About a year ago, Joe Biden was in Michigan to celebrate the opening of a new manufacturing plant that made “small metal clamps” used in all kinds of industries to hold wiring, hoses. Etc. in place. The largest market is the auto industry but they are sold to hundreds of other manufacturers. Depending on size, shape, and material, these parts sell for a few pennies or less. You have to make a lot of these parts to have any substantial billing numbers.This new plant is fully automated and runs 24/7/365 with just 14 people. Joe was quite happy saying “manufacturing is returning to America.”However, there is a backstory. That plant had been around for years. It had employed 600 people on two shifts. Then, the Chinese began to undercut the pricing, and the plant was no longer profitable and closed. Two years later, it reopened as a fully automated plant and regained the business because it could now manufacture cheaper than the Chinese.There are several stories inside the main story.The first story is about the initial plant closing. Anytime 600 people lose their jobs, you know that some employee ended up losing their home, that some cars were reprocessed, that some college kid had to quit school, etc. Retailers got hit. Utilities at the plant were no longer needed. Suppliers got hit too.More at [ My mom said the only reason men are alive is for lawn care and vehicle maintenance."" 09",FAKE
+4926,Donald Trump's Real Problem Is With White People,"Donald Trump needs to stop the bleeding.
+
+Since the two parties' conventions, he has plummeted in the polls — both nationally and in the states.
+
+His campaign knows this. His new campaign manager, KellyAnne Conway, is a veteran Republican pollster well aware of Trump's deficiencies with certain voting groups.
+
+That's why there's been a concerted effort in the Trump campaign to reach out to black and Hispanic voters, even if it's been poorly received by many nonwhites.
+
+But the outreach might not be entirely to gain the support of minority voters, who are deeply skeptical of Trump and indicate they are supporting Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly.
+
+It might be aimed, in large measure, at white people, in particular suburban whites with college degrees. You know, people who traditionally vote Republican. They might be persuadable, given their past voting history, but they don't want to vote for someone who is viewed as a racist or a bigot.
+
+So his campaign is trying to change that. Trump has been speaking specifically about black voters at multiple events over the last week or so (though in front of predominantly white crowds) in Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas and Florida. He held an event Wednesday night in Jackson, Miss., where 4 in 5 residents are black.
+
+That outreach continues Thursday at an event at Trump Tower, where black and Latino leaders are supposed to join Trump. And there will perhaps even be a tour of Detroit led by Ben Carson, who grew up there, in early September.
+
+But how can it be, that Trump has a white people problem? Isn't he supposed to be the candidate who appeals squarely to whites?
+
+Let's take a look at the polling. What it shows is that Trump is underperforming with whites compared with Mitt Romney's performance in 2012:
+
+White women: Romney won white women by 14 points — 56-42 percent, according to national exit polls.
+
+Trump, in the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released this month, is down a point with the group, 43-42 percent.
+
+That's a 15-point shift. No Republican can afford that.
+
+Trump is supposed to drive up the score with white men. But, according to NBC/WSJ, he's only up 13 points (49-36 percent), far less than Romney.
+
+And, let's remember, Romney lost in an electoral landslide to President Obama.
+
+A big problem for Trump is when education is factored in. He is struggling to win the margins he needs with whites with college degrees. Just look at this chart of Trump's massive deficit with white women with college degrees:
+
+What's stunning about this is that Democrats have never won a majority of white voters with college degrees since exit polling began in 1976.
+
+And when it comes to white voters without a college degree, even here Trump is only doing about as well as Romney did. Romney won 61 percent of whites without a college degree. Trump, in the latest, CNN/ORC poll, gets the support of 59 percent.
+
+Yes, Romney lost by big margins with nonwhite groups, too, but white voters made up 72 percent of the electorate in 2012 (likely to be slightly less this year.) Trump's campaign has to think there's nowhere to go but up with minority voters — except, right now, Trump is doing worse (or almost similarly bad) with both African-Americans and Latinos also.
+
+Maybe Trump's outreach to minorities can change his standing somewhat with those groups. But an important group he needs to reach are those white voters, who should be traditionally open to voting Republican but are not behind him right now.
+
+That's a point Republican pollster Whit Ayres made as well this week to the Washington Post.
+
+""After 15 months of denigrating every nonwhite minority in sight, it's hard to believe that he can actually do significantly better among nonwhites,"" said Ayres, who wrote the book 2016 and Beyond: How Republicans Can Elect a President in the New America. He joined Marco Rubio's campaign as his pollster. ""But he may be able to soften his image a bit with some Republican and maybe a few independent whites who have been put off by his harshness thus far.""
+
+But this is a big hole to climb out of in less than 11 weeks.",REAL
+8008,"Florida’s “deceptive” solar initiative, backed by utilities companies, loses support","Florida’s “deceptive” solar initiative, backed by utilities companies, loses support ‘It's a monopoly wolf in solar sheep's clothing’ By Nika Knight Posted on November 4, 2016 by Nika Knight 
+As utilities companies funnel millions of dollars into a last-ditch effort to convince Florida voters to pass an anti-solar initiative, the latest polling data shows support for the measure falling . 
+Florida’s Amendment 1 is “ deceptive ,” environmentalists argue, as it is written in pro-solar language but would in actuality block widespread adoption of solar power in the Sunshine State. 
+The measure is backed by a political committee formed by utilities companies, which has so far raised more than $26 million to fund the campaign. 
+“As we like to say, ‘it’s a monopoly wolf in solar sheep’s clothing,’” Dr. Stephen Smith, executive director of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and a founding member of Floridians for Solar Choice, told the Sierra Club’s Sierra magazine. “We are in a pitted battle to stop the utilities from choking off citizen-owned solar.” 
+The initiative would “write people’s right to own or lease solar panels and other equipment into the state constitution,” InsideClimate News explains . “But it would also make it unconstitutional to require a utility’s non-solar customers to subsidize those who do go solar. Those subsidies have helped make home solar affordable and are the best incentive to push the fast-growing energy source to widespread use.” 
+Support for the measure fell markedly after an audio recording leaked to the public last month in which a lobbyist working for electric companies bragged about the measure to industry insiders. 
+The Miami Herald/Times , which released the recording, reported : 
+Sal Nuzzo, a vice president at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, [ . . . ] called the amendment, which has received more than $21 million in utility industry financing, “an incredibly savvy maneuver” that “would completely negate anything they [pro-solar interests] would try to do either legislatively or constitutionally down the road,” according to an audio recording of the event supplied to the Herald/Times . 
+He offered others a recommendation: “As you guys look at policy in your state, or constitutional ballot initiatives in your state, remember this: Solar polls very well,” he said. 
+“To the degree that we can use a little bit of political jiu-jitsu and take what they’re kind of pinning us on and use it to our benefit either in policy, in legislation or in constitutional referendums—if that’s the direction you want to take—use the language of promoting solar, and kind of, kind of put in these protections for consumers that choose not to install rooftop. 
+“I’m discouraged as a citizen how far we have slipped and see Amendment 1 as a means of accelerating that decline in solar in Florida,” Graham said, according to the Miami Herald 
+And Graham’s far from the only prominent voice to condemn the measure: “Former Vice President Al Gore, speaking at a rally for Hillary Clinton, described the amendment as ‘ phony baloney. ‘ Carl Hiassen, Florida’s best-known opinion journalist, has called the proposal a ‘ slick, oily fraud, ‘ and even the usually apolitical Jimmy Buffett has urged a no vote, noted 
+Such statements from opponents of the initiative have gone far to quell support, according to a new poll 
+One of those voters was “Barbara Waks, a retiree who had already mailed in her early-voting ballot when the Herald story appeared. She said that she thought she was supporting renewable energy,” the New York Times reported 
+“I felt so stupid,” she told the Times. “I’m familiar with the political arena and the garbage that exists, but this is beyond the pale. 
+Nika Knight is a Common Dreams",FAKE
+3244,Which Republicans have come out against Boehner for speaker? Here’s a list.,"A growing group of rogue conservative House Republicans has come out against reelecting John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) for another term as speaker.
+
+So far, the list of defectors is up to nine. At least two of them have offered themselves as alternatives.
+
+To be elected speaker, Boehner must win a majority of all members -- Democrat, Republican or otherwise -- who cast votes. When the new Congress is sworn in Tuesday, there will be 246 Republicans (since Michael Grimm is resigning) and 188 Democrats for a total of 434 members. If some members don't cast votes, the threshold for clinching a win will be lowered.
+
+Boehner's office appears confident he will win. But the expanding list threatens to inject some drama into the proceedings.
+
+""Rep. Boehner was selected as the House Republican Conference's choice for Speaker in November, and he expects to be elected by the whole House next week,"" Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said in an e-mail Sunday.
+
+In 2013, Boehner faced 12 Republican defectors, several of whom are opposing him again.
+
+Here's a list of the nine Republicans who have come out against Boehner so far. We'll update it as it changes:
+
+Rep.-elect Dave Brat (Va.) (op-ed)
+
+ Rep. Jim Bridenstine (Okla.) (statement)
+
+ Rep. Louie Gohmert (Tex.) (statement; also offered himself as speaker candidate)
+
+ Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.) (statement)
+
+ Rep. Walter Jones (N.C.) (remarks)
+
+ Rep. Steve King (Iowa) (Tweet)
+
+ Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.) (statement)
+
+ Rep. Marlin Stutzman (Ind.) (statement)
+
+ Rep. Ted Yoho (Fla.) (statement; also offered himself as a candidate for speaker)",REAL
+9436,WE TOLD HER! Budweiser Hits “DELETE” On Beer Ads Featuring Amy Schumer Because…,"0 comments 
+Well, here’s a lesson for ya! Comedy and politics DON’T mix! So if you’re a comedian and you want to be successful- don’t bring politics into your act! Seriously, it just kills the mood, no one will be up to laughing after you insult them over who they are supporting for President, or whether or not they view abortion as murder. 
+Who would find any humor in that? 
+This should be common sense, but for Amy Schumer …twas not. Now she’s learning the hard way, what many of us were warning her about for a while now! 
+According to AdWeek, Budweiser came in under expected profits in their third quarter, prompting the company to pull the Schumer ads ahead of schedule. The ads themselves were not at all doing well, and the last one received such negative attention on YouTube that it currently has more than 1,900 “thumbs down,” compared to only 300 “thumbs up.” 
+Fox News reported that, at one time, the YouTube video had comments disabled, but that has since been changed. Many comments are negative toward Schumer herself, who has recently been in traveling around promoting feminist ideals and social justice causes. 
+Schumer’s attitude on politics has alienated many people over the past few years, however. Many would say that the comedian’s negative views on men, and hypocritical outrage, is often in complete contrast with inclusivity. This could have further attributed to the decline in Bud Light’s sales, as having a wildly unpopular figure represent your product will devalue it to the public. 
+Sorry Schumer. Either be a comedian, or a social justice warrior…the two however, do not play well together. Somewhere along the line you got that very obvious truth, twisted. Related Items",FAKE
+9106,DEVELOPING: FBI Reopens Investigation into Clinton Emails After New ‘Pertinent’ Evidence Discovered,"The Clinton email scandal has taken an unexpected twist Friday as Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey notified key members of Congress that the agency will be reopening their investigation against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
+In a letter to Congress, Comey wrote that the FBI has recently “ learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” regarding Clinton’s use of a private server during her tenure at the State Department.
+While Comey did not elaborate on what those emails contain, the director that the emails were discovered “in connection with an unrelated case.” 
+Via FoxNews 
+He told lawmakers the investigative team briefed him on the information a day earlier, “and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”
+He said the FBI could not yet assess whether the new material is significant and he could not predict how long it will take to complete “this additional work.”
+Trump, speaking to cheering supporters Friday afternoon in Manchester, N.H., praised the FBI for having the “courage” to “right the horrible mistake that they made” – saying he hopes that is “corrected.”
+“Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before,” Trump said. “We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.”
+In a nod to the significance of the FBI’s announcement, Trump quipped: “The rest of my speech is going to be so boring.”
+We will continue to update as new details surface. 
+",FAKE
+7887,"Project Veritas 4: Robert Creamer's Illegal $20,000 Foreign Wire Transfer Caught On Tape | RedFlag News","
+Zero Hedge 
+Project Veritas has just released Part IV of it's multi-part series exposing numerous scandals surrounding the DNC and the Clinton campaign, including efforts to incite violence at Trump rallies and, at least what seems to be, illegal coordination between the DNC, Hillary For America and various Super PACs. 
+Part IV focuses on a $20,000 foreign donation made by an undercover Project Veritas journalist to Americans United for Change (AUFC). Ironically, shortly after the $20k donation wire was released, the contributor's ""niece"" was offered an internship with Creamer's firm, Democracy Partners. 
+In the new video, Creamer says: “Every morning I am on a call at 10:30 that goes over the message being driven by the campaign headquarters … I am in this campaign mainly to deal with what earned media with television, radio, with earned media and social media, not with paid media, not with advertising.” He also mentions a conference call discussing a woman potentially coming forward to accuse Trump of inappropriate behavior. 
+Creamer, a seasoned Chicago activist who is married to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), whose Republican opponent, Joan McCarthy Lasonde has called for her to resign over her husband’s activities, also talks about his work with Barack Obama, whom he says he has known since the 1980s, when Obama was a community organizer in Chicago: “He’s a pro, I’ve known the President since he was a community organizer in Chicago.” 
+Elsewhere, Creamer adds: “I do a lot of work with the White House on their issues, helping to run issue campaigns that they have been involved in. I mean, for immigration reform for the… the health care bill, for trying to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence issues.” ",FAKE
+7120,‘Solar Winds’ Spur Geomagnetic Storm That May Affect Power,"« on: Today at 08:41:54 PM » ‘Solar Winds’ Spur Geomagnetic Storm That May Affect Power 25 October 2016 , by Brian K Sullivan (Bloomberg) - Geomagnetic storms can cause voltage corrections, false alarms- Space weather center lowered alert to “moderate” level storm Also see:",FAKE
+7978,Company that Supplied Voting Machines to 22 States Donated to Clinton Foundation,"
+No wonder they’re so confident!
+Dominion Voting Systems brags on its home page that “Together with our customers, we strive to change elections for the better!”
+Wikipedia currently reports that Dominion provides voting machines to 22 states.
+If you hit the link to this statement, however, the supporting post has now been taken down.
+Dominion Voting Systems is owned by George Soros an internationalist billionaire who is openly supporting Hillary Clinton and donated to her campaign dozens of millions of dollars.
+
+We now know that the machines are already flipping out votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton in Texas, Illinois, North Carolina and other states. The people working at the voting boots always find out some WHATEVER excuses while so far there hasn’t been a single vote switched from Hillary to Trump.
+Soros is also said to control a British company called Smartmatic, which had something to do with election fraud in Venezuela. Thanks to the Smartmatic machines, communists “won” the elections over and over again.
+Smartmatic is tied to Soros’ Open Road Foundation and it used to have a subsidiary called Sequoia. Sequoia electronic voting machines are used in the US general election. Sequoia was eventually sold to Dominion Voting Systems.
+How do you like that people? The man in charge of counting your votes happens to have a favorite.
+This is exactly like Joseph Stalin’s famous quote: “The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do.” 
+It does’t matter that you go out and vote for Trump, what matters is that Soros is gonna count votes the way he wants to and that’s just not right to have a private person in charge of the elections basically.
+Soros needs to have his entire fortune confiscated by the US government, nationalized and included in the state budget and have him locked up for the rest of his miserable life. Remember how those commie SJWs call for equality and taking from the rich and giving to the poor? Sure lets start with this high-profile thief right here.
+The system is rigged people and Trump is right! Voting should only be on paper not on machines which can be manipulated easily!
+",FAKE
+2827,How global terror network will get a boost from Iran nuclear deal,"While the nuclear arms accord with Iran is being hailed as a historic agreement, it should be regarded as only one piece of an increasingly complex patchwork of foreign policy challenges presented by Iran and its network of allies. As a result of this deal, Iran stands to reap a potential windfall of billions of dollars that has been held up by international sanctions designed to cripple the Iranian economy and bring Tehran to the negotiating table.
+
+Even if most of this money is channeled to Iran’s domestic economy, the bounty will nevertheless help resuscitate the Iran threat network—a nefarious web of insurgent, criminal and terrorist allies—and revitalize Iranian meddling worldwide. Iranian sponsorship of terrorist organizations cannot be divorced from the negotiations because the sanctions that will be lifted provide new sources of funding to reinforce the Iran threat network.
+
+The fact that the nuclear agreement does not address the threat network means that Iran remains a serious threat to stability in the Middle East.
+
+Formed in the 1980s, the Iran threat network has expanded from a ragtag militia to an enterprise with global reach—and operatives who are active in dozens of countries. Over the last three decades, Iranian largesse has provided the Shiite group Hezbollah with hundreds of millions of dollars, training, weapons and modern equipment.
+
+The network now includes proxies in Yemen and Iraq, where the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its elite Quds Force are training sectarian militias. Also of concern are Iranian accomplices including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon (and more recently, Syria). Hamas has increasingly relied on financial support from Iran since the Syrian civil war began in 2011.
+
+In addition to Iran’s growing battle with Saudi Arabia for regional hegemony, the mullahs that comprise the core leadership of Iran—and are considered the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution—have also pushed to develop a fairly sophisticated cyberwar capability. The Saudi-Iranian rivalry is playing out through the sponsorship of proxies in Yemen and Syria.
+
+Over the past several years, Iran has devoted more resources to cyber warfare, perhaps in response to a destructive software attack—reportedly initiated by the United States and Israel—that effectively targeted Iranian nuclear-enrichment equipment. The Iranians have already penetrated American and Saudi networks and successfully seized and destroyed sensitive data.
+
+Going forward, U.S. policy toward Iran must reflect the nuanced nature of the relationship. While the nuclear agreement is a positive step toward resolving the most serious potential threat posed by the Islamic Republic, the Iranian regime is still a major sponsor of terrorist groups opposed to the United States and its key allies throughout the Middle East, North Africa and the Persian Gulf region.
+
+Designing and implementing a global strategy to address the Iran threat network is essential to stability in the Gulf and will require the exercise of American power to deter Iran while reassuring allies in the region and wider world. Even though the United States welcomes Iran’s help combating ISIS, Washington must keep pressuring Tehran to cease its support for terrorist and insurgent groups in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen.
+
+The United States and its allies must continue to combat the financing of terrorism by working through the Treasury Department and collaborating with private-sector entities to identify and then take action against Iranian funding of terrorist groups. The United States also should keep trying to build partner capacity in at-risk nations like Lebanon and Yemen—thus depriving Iran of the political legitimacy afforded external state sponsors of terrorism—while working to build a force in the region capable of providing at least a modicum of stability. Finally, the United States must continue to closely monitor Iranian behavior to ensure that relief from sanctions does not allow Iran the flexibility to exacerbate conflicts in already fragile nations throughout the Middle East.
+
+After pausing to celebrate the Iran nuclear deal as a “move in a new direction,” the Obama administration should capitalize on it to gain the momentum needed to contain the regional and global ambitions of the Iran threat network.
+
+Colin P. Clarke is an associate political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and the author of “Terrorism, Inc.: The Financing of Terrorism, Insurgency and Irregular Warfare” (2015).",REAL
+8529,Elon Musk to Completely Revolutionize the Energy Industry with New Tesla Solar Roof,"Home / Be The Change / Elon Musk to Completely Revolutionize the Energy Industry with New Tesla Solar Roof Elon Musk to Completely Revolutionize the Energy Industry with New Tesla Solar Roof Jay Syrmopoulos October 31, 2016 Leave a comment 
+Los Angeles, CA – While the battle over the future of energy plays out in places like Standing Rock, where the Native Americans are fighting to protect their water sources from the environmental dangers associated with oil pipelines, Elon Musk was doing his part by unveiling a revolutionary new clean energy technology – the Tesla Solar Roof. 
+While people typically perceive Tesla as an electric-car company, the actual goal of Elon Musk’s company has been to accelerate the large-scale adoption of sustainable energy. 
+This past week, Musk made good on the company’s vision by unveiling the Tesla Solar Roof, made of textured glass tiles with integrated solar cells that are nearly indistinguishable from conventional tiling. In concert, he also announced an upgraded model of the company’s energy-storing Powerwall. 
+The Powerwall 2 is a battery for homes and small businesses that stores the sun’s energy and delivers clean, reliable electricity, even when the sun isn’t shining. 
+According to a report by Wired : 
+A couple hundred invited guests, mostly Tesla owners, ooh-ed and ahh-ed as Musk revealed that a row of suburban American houses on Wisteria Lane—the old set of Desperate Housewives—were all, in fact, topped with solar roofs. Each house’s old roofing material had been stripped away, and replaced with one of four new styles of solar tile. From the street, it was virtually impossible to tell; the roofs retained a variety of traditional looks, from textured slate shingle to terra cotta tile. 
+Musk said the secret to the tiles’ appearance is a special coating that becomes more or less see-through depending on your viewing angle. He described it as a series of micro louvers that work like a privacy screen on a laptop, and said the company is working with 3M on the tech. The effect is dramatic in person. From shallow angles, the tiles appear nontransparent. But as your viewing angle approaches 90 degrees, the underlying solar cell becomes more and more visible. The result is a tile that permits the passage of sunlight from overhead, but still looks opaque to anyone at ground level. 
+During the presentation, Musk revealed the durability of the glass tile by showing drop tests that showed the tiles to be tougher than commonly used roofing materials, such as slate or clay. 
+“It’s never going to wear out, it’s made of quartz, it has a quasi-infinite lifetime,” Musk said. “We need to make solar panels as appealing as electric cars have become,” added Musk. “It needs to be beautiful, affordable, and seamlessly integrated. If all of those things are true, why would you go any other direction?” 
+The solar roof is designed to be used in concert with the Tesla Powerwall 2.0, which Musk also unveiled at his Los Angeles presentation. The new version of the Powerwall will cost $5,500 for 14kWh of storage and 7kWh peak power draw, which is enough to power a four-bedroom home for one day. No details on pricing, availability, or the installation process for the solar roof was announced. 
+Musk envisions a day when people can walk into a Tesla store and buy an entire energy system, which includes a solar roof/panels, a Powerwall battery for energy storage and an electric car. 
+The reality is that Musk is creating a system that could eventually replace the entire traditional electrical grid, and allow for true off-grid energy independence. The idea is that you can generate and store energy by day, which then lights up your house at night – without any pollution or environmental damage. 
+“In order to make his vision move forward, Musk is using design with a big D,” Andy Ogden, Chair of the Industrial Design Department at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California told Wired. “He’s thinking about an overall strategy, in how these things interact and support each other, so there’s some synergy.” 
+Ogden believes that Musk’s plan has the potential to work. “If he can make it easier, and less expensive and more attractive for roofs to be solar, then that will drive the uptake of battery systems” 
+This latest revolution in the energy industry comes as Musk’s merger with SolarCity (the largest provider of solar power systems in the country), which is run by Musk’s cousin and of which Musk is already the majority stockholder, will be voted on by shareholders on November 17. Musk’s recent announcement of the new Tesla solar tiles would seemingly be a perfect fit with the Solar City brand. 
+Thanks to Elon Musk the future of clean energy has never looked brighter. 
+Please share this amazing story about the coming energy revolution! Share",FAKE
+8126,Barrel Bomb: The Cataclysmic Close of Campaign 2016      : Information," Barrel Bomb: The Cataclysmic Close of Campaign 2016 By Chris Floyd
+ Well, here we are: at the bottom of the barrel under forty feet of slag. In a few days’ time, we’ll know our fate: the five-alarm fire of Trump Rule (oh, how those police unions are chomping at the bit!) or the Clinton Age of Hyper-War (oh, how those neocons are chomping at the bit!). In either case, the entrenched coagulation of corporate interests and war profiteers that have strangled the peace, prosperity and prospects of the American people will not be budged an inch. The change that people are so desperately hungry for — so hungry that that some of them might well elect an Establishment insider whose sinister clowning makes him appear to be a ‘rebel’ — will not come. Thus their bitterness will grow deeper, more sour, erupting more and more often in physical violence: from militarized police against protestors, from Trump-empowered racists (if he wins or loses), from extremist militias, from angry, maddened people on every side. And of course there will be more — much more — of the horrific, never-ending, globe-spanning violence of the bipartisan Terror War that churns on and on, no matter who is sitting temporarily in the White House.
+There’s no use in pretending that’s not what we face. But there’s also no use in pretending that this situation is somehow sui generis , some terribly unlucky conflation of unforeseen circumstances coming together at this particular time. It is in fact the culmination and embodiment of the deliberate choices of the most powerful forces in society: the choices to enrich themselves beyond all reason and extend their military and economic dominance over the earth.
+It doesn’t matter that many if not most of the practitioners and functionaries of this system “believe” in its rightness. It doesn’t matter that brutal neoliberal nostrums and extremist imperial notions have become religious dogmas for those who see themselves as the “meritocracy.” It doesn’t matter if the leaders and factotums genuinely believe in the “exceptionalism” they preach or if they are cynical power-seekers. It doesn’t matter if they actually believe their rapacious financial machinations are reflections of the “natural law” of the “the market” that will eventually benefit all, or if they know themselves to be what they really are: ugly souls disfigured by greed. The end result has been the same: a long series of deliberate choices by a bipartisan elite that have hollowed out the lives and communities and futures of millions of Americans, and created a living hell of war, ruin and hatred over much of the earth.
+This is a system that has delegitimized itself, a system that has undermined its own institutions. Through its own actions, it has rotted out the foundations of trust and reason which once upheld it. Some might say, “Oh, but there’s been a decades-long, concentrated effort by right-wing billionaires and corporate forces to foment ideological and religious extremism to undermine the legitimacy of secular government, which might restrict their profiteering or let more people have a share in power.” And that’s true. But it’s been accompanied at every step by the collusion and cowardice of the putative opposition. The so-called New Democrats, exemplified by the Clintons, jettisoned concern for the common good to embrace “centrist” and “technocratic” policies: i.e., to adopt the neoliberal dogma that unbridled pursuit of private profit by a connected elites will somehow, someday, lead to general prosperity. The idea that the party should fight to improve the lives of ordinary people in the here and now, to fight for their quality of life in a genuine, substantive way, came to be seen as old-hat, a quaint and fusty notion of has-beens and dreamers who didn’t understand the way the world really worked. A true, savvy “moderate” knows you must compromise every ideal, show yourself to be a willing and avid servant of the monied interests and the militarists, in order to gain power so you can make a few cosmetic changes around the edges, a few little social improvements here and there (but only — of course! — in “partnership” with private interests), but never, ever challenge the system at its core.
+This is the only deal in town: outright, unvarnished right-wing rule, or simpering, cowardly “moderate” management of a violent, rapacious system. That’s been the choice on offer since 1976. That’s the choice on offer today. The only difference is that the system has metastasized to a monstrous degree over the years: lacking any genuine opposition, the system has grown more violent, more rapacious.
+Establishment collusion — and Democratic cowardice — finally and completely degraded and delegitimized the American electoral process 16 years ago, when the Supreme Court — with two members who had direct family ties to the Bush campaign — stopped a recount that would have resulted in the actual winner of the election to take office. This outrageous action was accepted by every single organ and institution of the American system. (With the momentary exception of the Black Congressional Caucus, whose members tried, in vain, to get a single Democratic senator to challenge the result.) Instead, Americans were encouraged to applaud the fact that power had changed hands “without tanks in the street.” That is, we were to celebrate that an actual coup d’etat had taken place before our eyes without the slightest show of resistance.
+Once in place, the coup regime — staffed at the highest levels by extremists who a year before had publicly called for a vast militarization of American policy and society, even if the public had to be “galvanized” by “a new Pearl Harbor” — led the nation into a disastrous war based on false pretenses, a vast crime that not only killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people but has led directly to unbridled turmoil, extremism, conflict and corruption around the world. The elite-supported coup regime instituted torture programs and death squads, and launched an orgy of war profiteering unprecedented in world history. The regime then presided over the worst economic collapse in generations.
+Not a single member of the regime was ever tried — or even investigated, at even the most preliminary level — for a single crime committed during its time in power. There were no high-profile Congressional investigations into the hideous carnage and ruin and instability they wrought; not even a “Chilcot Commission” into the origins of the war, as the UK belatedly launched. Instead the regime’s leaders and top factotums were heaped with honors and wealth. Today their endorsement is eagerly sought — and gained — by the “progressive” Democratic candidate for president.
+In 2008, the desperate electorate turned to a figure presented to them as an outsider who would at last bring real change. He had the trappings of difference — a black man with a Muslim name, who spoke eloquently of peace and social justice, who most people thought was far to the left but voted for him anyway. But Barack Obama was of course a meritocratic “centrist” to his core. Riding an enormous wave of popularity, and a strong Congressional majority, he proceeded to bail out Wall Street fraudsters and finaglers with tax money and create a health care system based on the plan of a rightwing think-tank that prioritized corporate profit — and probably killed the chance for a genuinely public health care system for generations, if not for good. He also doubled down on the Terror War, expanding it to more countries, extended Bush’s death squads, helped destroy nations like Libya and Yemen (thus spawning more chaos and terror), expanded illegal surveillance of the populace (and the world) to an extent beyond the wildest dreams of the Stasi or KGB. And after saving Big Money from itself and securing the guaranteed profits of the healthcare-insurance corporate complex, he spent most of his time on the domestic front trying to strike a “grand bargain” with Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare.
+Again, all hopes of any real change were thwarted. So now the nation swings from being ready to embrace a perceived leftist to the brink of voting in a bellicose rightist as it seeks the genuine change no one will give them. Of course, after the scorched-earth tactics of bipartisan neoliberalism and the inevitable moral degradation and brutalization that comes from year after year after year of vicious aggressive war, the choice for Trump is more nihilistic. It’s as if people believe positive change is no longer possible — so let’s tear everything down and see what happens. (This is the actual, open philosophy of the Breitbart gang, who are now directing Trump’s campaign.)
+Even if Clinton wins, this nihilism will still be rampant. And given that she happily embodies the bipartisan Establishment now roundly despised on all sides for its many depredations, the nihilism will grow even worse — especially as she has given no indication whatsoever that she will even try to make substantive changes in the neoliberal-militarist system that is strangling us. Quite the contrary.
+So yes, this has been a campaign like no other — but mostly because it has brought the systematic decay of the Republic into the sharpest possible relief, and has shown, more clearly than before, that the neoliberal-militarist ascendency offers no hope for a better life, a better world; indeed, that it offers nothing at all — except more violence, more bitterness, more ruin, more degradation for us all.
+Chris Floyd blogs at www.chris-floyd.com .",FAKE
+3511,6 detained in raids in Belgium,"Brussels, Belgium (CNN) Police detained six people in raids Thursday night as investigators raced to uncover the network behind this week's terror attacks in the Belgian capital .
+
+The Belgian federal prosecutor's office didn't provide details about who had been detained in the Brussels raids, why they had been apprehended or whether they will face charges.
+
+""It will be decided tomorrow if these people will remain in custody,"" the office said in a statement released late Thursday.
+
+Two people were taken into custody in Brussels' Jette neighborhood, one person was detained in a different part of the capital, and three people were in a vehicle in front of the federal prosecutor's office when authorities apprehended them, public broadcaster RTBF reported.
+
+So far, authorities have said they believe five men played a part in Tuesday's bombings in Belgium that killed 31 people and injured 330. Three of the attackers are dead. Two of them could still be on the loose.
+
+Investigators are combing over evidence from surveillance footage and the explosives stash they seized from an apparent hideaway in a suburb.
+
+Sweeps where investigators detain people first and ask questions later are likely to become an increasingly common tactic, CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem said.
+
+""There will be lots more of them,"" she said. ""They are going to be what's called overbroad. They are going to just try to find people or evidence that may stop the next terrorism attack, and they will figure out who they have under custody.""
+
+Khalid El Bakraoui, one of the terrorists who bombed a train near the Maelbeek metro station, is dead. Authorities believe a second unidentified person was also involved in that attack, a senior Belgian security source told CNN. But investigators don't know where that suspect is -- or whether he's dead or alive.
+
+Surveillance footage shows the man holding a large bag at the station, according to Belgian public broadcaster RTBF. It's not clear if he was among the at least 20 killed in that blast, RTBF said.
+
+Authorities have released a grainy image of another suspect who they believe is on the run.
+
+That man, they say, shown in photographs wearing a black hat, was one of three attackers at Brussels Airport. Authorities say he planted a bomb at the airport and left. The other two men in the photographs are believed to be the suicide bombers.
+
+Fair to ask whether 'we missed the chance'
+
+Did Belgian authorities miss a chance to stop at least one of the suspects involved in the attacks?
+
+Bakraoui had been sentenced to nine years in prison in Belgium back in 2010 for opening fire on police officers with a Kalashnikov during a robbery, according to broadcaster RTBF and CNN affiliate RTL. Needless to say, he didn't serve all that time.
+
+""Given the facts, it is justified that ... people ask how it is possible that someone was released early and we missed the chance when he was in Turkey to detain him,"" said Jambon, whose offer to resign was rebuffed by Prime Minister Charles Michel.
+
+Investigators suspect Abdeslam planned to be part of an attack by the same ISIS cell that lashed out Tuesday, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official told CNN's Paul Cruickshank.
+
+Authorities looked Wednesday at the Brussels homes of the Bakraoui brothers. Those two searches ""were not conclusive,"" the federal prosecutor's office said.
+
+Homes were searched Thursday in several areas in and around the city, officials said.
+
+One operation in the neighborhood of Schaerbeek stretched for hours into Friday morning. Investigators sealed off streets for several blocks. It was not immediately clear why such a large area had been cordoned.
+
+Masked teams in hazmat gear could be seen exiting a building and heading toward a police van.
+
+As investigations continue, a larger question looms: What could happen next?
+
+Not long ago, Western authorities believed ISIS was focused on taking territory in Syria and Iraq, not lashing out elsewhere. But U.S. officials now think the extremist group has been sending trained militants to Europe for some time.
+
+These men don't necessarily follow orders directly from ISIS headquarters. But they build on what they've learned, as well as a shared philosophy and approach, to develop their own terror cells and hatch their own plots.
+
+How many more ISIS militants are in Europe, poised to attack? That's not clear.
+
+For now, though, the top priority is tracking down the two men linked directly to Tuesday's terror.",REAL
+1788,Top Senate Democrat urges Clinton to address private email controversy,"The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee urged former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to give a full explanation of why she used a private e-mail account for all her official correspondence during her four years as America's top diplomat.
+
+Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told NBC's ""Meet the Press"" Sunday that Clinton ""needs to step up and come out and state exactly what the situation is,"" adding that from ""this point on, the silence is going to hurt her.""
+
+Feinstein is the first major Democrat to urge Clinton to share details of the account's contents, some of which have been subpoenaed by a special House committee investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
+
+Clinton, thought to be the near-unanimous frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has kept mostly silent on the private e-mail story, which was first reported by the New York Times last Monday. Her use of the account may violate federal rules requiring officials to keep all their communications for record-keeping purposes. The controversy grew later in the week when the Associated Press reported that the account's server had been traced to an Internet service registered to her Chappaqua, N.Y. home.
+
+This past week, Clinton said in a Twitter message that she had asked the State Department to make public all emails she had previously turned over to them, a total of approximately 55,000 pages. However, The Times reported that those messages previously had been selected by members of her staff and were not a complete record of her four years at Foggy Bottom.
+
+She did not address the issue in her most recent public appearance Saturday night during an event in Coral Gables, Florida, for the Clinton Global Initiative University.
+
+Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the chairman of the Benghazi committee, told CBS' ""Face The Nation"" ""there are gaps of months and months and months"" in the emails the committee had previously received. ""It's not up to Secretary Clinton to decide what's a public record and what's not,"" Gowdy said.
+
+""We're not entitled to everything,"" Gowdy continued. ""I don't want everything. I just want everything related to Libya and Benghazi.""
+
+For his part, President Obama said Sunday that he first learned of Clinton's private account through news reports. He went on to praise Clinton for requesting the release of the 55,000 pages of e-mail by the State Department, called her ""an outstanding public servant"" and defended his administration's record on transparency.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2940,Obama opens door to 'limited' ground combat operations against ISIS,"President Obama on Wednesday opened the door to ""limited"" ground combat operations against the Islamic State, as he asked Congress to formally authorize military force against the terrorist network.
+
+The president, in a proposed resolution and a letter to Congress, underscored the ""grave threat"" posed by ISIS.
+
+""If left unchecked, ISIL will pose a threat beyond the Middle East, including to the United States homeland,"" Obama said.
+
+Speaking later at the White House, Obama vowed to defeat the terror group. ""This is a difficult mission, and it will remain difficult for some time,"" Obama said. ""But our coalition is on the offensive. ISIL is on the defensive, and ISIL is going to lose.""
+
+His proposal includes limitations that would bar ""enduring offensive ground combat operations"" and let the authorization lapse after three years. The letter from Obama says the authorization would not allow ""long-term, large-scale ground combat operations like those"" conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan.
+
+But the request includes no restrictions on where U.S. forces could pursue the threat. And while the current military campaign centers on coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, the proposal clearly allows U.S. ground troops to engage in limited circumstances.
+
+""The authorization I propose would provide the flexibility to conduct ground combat operations in other, more limited circumstances, such as rescue operations involving U.S. or coalition personnel or the use of special operations forces to take military action against ISIL leadership,"" Obama wrote in his letter to Congress. ""It would also authorize the use of U.S. forces in situations where ground combat operations are not expected or intended, such as intelligence collection and sharing, missions to enable kinetic strikes, or the provision of operational planning and other forms of advice and assistance to partner forces.""
+
+At the White House, Obama made clear that he would be willing to order special forces to act against ISIS leaders if necessary.
+
+""It is not the authorization of another ground war,"" Obama said, adding: ""We need flexibility, but we also have to be careful and deliberate.""
+
+The request kicks off what is likely to be a drawn-out debate in Congress, with hawkish lawmakers sure to push for a broader authorization and anti-interventionist voices seeking more limits.
+
+Already, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said he is ""concerned about the breadth and vagueness of the U.S. ground troop language and will seek to clarify it.""
+
+On the other side, House Speaker John Boehner said he was ""not sure that the strategy that's been outlined will accomplish the mission.""
+
+Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he appreciated the president seeking the authorization and would quickly begin holding ""rigorous hearings"" on the White House request.
+
+""Voting to authorize the use of military force is one of the most important actions Congress can take, and while there will be differences, it is my hope that we will fulfill our constitutional responsibility, and in a bipartisan way, pass an authorization that allows us to confront this serious threat,"" Corker said.
+
+The White House insists it already has the authority to launch airstrikes against ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria, as the U.S. has been doing for months, but wants Congress to sign off in order to demonstrate American unity.
+
+In a letter to lawmakers accompanying the request, Obama urged them to ""show the world we are united in our resolve to counter the threat.""
+
+The proposed resolution listed ISIS atrocities in the region, including executions of American hostages and the ""abduction, enslavement, torture, rape and forced marriage"" of women and girls in the region.
+
+""It threatens American personnel and facilities located in the region and is responsible for the deaths of U.S. citizens James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Abdul-Rahman Peter Kassig, and Kayla Mueller,"" Obama said in his letter, listing the American hostages who died in ISIS custody.
+
+Obama's proposal launches an ideological debate over what authorities and limitations the commander in chief should have in pursuit of the extremists, with the shadow of lost American lives hanging over its fate. Confirmation of the death of 26-year-old humanitarian worker Mueller on the eve of Obama's proposal added new urgency, while the costly long-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a caution to some lawmakers against yet another protracted military campaign.
+
+Obama is offering to limit authorization to three years, extending to the next president the powers and the debate over renewal for what he envisions as a long-range battle. He is proposing no geographic limitations where U.S. forces could pursue the elusive militants. The authorization covers the Islamic State and ""associated persons or forces,"" defined as those fighting on behalf of or alongside IS ""or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.""
+
+The proposal bars ""enduring offensive ground combat operations,"" an ambiguous term intended as compromise between lawmakers who want authority for ground troops and those who don't.
+
+Obama's resolution would repeal a 2002 authorization for force in Iraq, but maintain a 2001 authorization against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, although Obama said in his letter to lawmakers his goal is to refine and ultimately repeal that authorization as well.
+
+Obama argues the congressional authorizations President George W. Bush used to justify military action after 9/11 are sufficient for him to deploy more than 2,700 U.S. troops to train and assist Iraqi security forces and conduct ongoing airstrikes against targets in Iraq and Syria. Critics have said Obama is overstepping outdated authorities to target the new threat from militants imposing a violent form of Shariah law in pursuit of the establishment of an Islamic state.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+7683,"Washington's Embargo on Cuba Not Effective, Isolated US - White House","Get short URL 0 43 0 0 The White House spokesperson explained why Washington abstained from a UN resolution ending the US blockade of the Carribean nation. 
+WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The United States abstained from a UN resolution against the US blockade of Cuba as a demonstration that the decades-old policy of isolation of the Caribbean island nation did not work, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest told reporters on Wednesday. ""The [United Nations] resolution is an excellent example of why US policy of isolation toward Cuba didn’t work. It was in place for five decades and, as measured by actions within the United Nations, served to isolate the United States, not Cuba,"" Earnest told reporters. ...",FAKE
+4420,"Fox News built a f**ked-up Frankenstein, dumb, angry and divorced from facts. Now Donald Trump will devour them","Donald Trump is practically a mirror image of the Fox News psyche. Most of his speeches consist of repackaged stupidities plucked right out of the conservative mediascape. It’s kind of brilliant, really. Trump knows his audience, and he beams back at them every idiotic thing they want to hear. Which, of course, is exactly what Fox News does.
+
+The wonderful irony of all this is that the conservative media have ruined conservative politics, far more than liberals ever did. And the results speak for themselves. It’s true that Fox News has promoted the conservative brand and very likely energized grass-roots conservatism in some sense, but at what cost? The GOP, increasingly, is no longer a national party – it’s confined more and more to the South and to pockets of rural America.
+
+The Republicans have had their share of electoral successes in recent years, and Fox News surely aided in that, but if you look closely you’ll see that the political success of conservatives have not led to policy successes. On the contrary, liberalism is winning. Obama, for instance, has been one of the most consequential presidents in modern American history. Both politically and culturally, the country is more liberal today than it was a decade ago. And this has happened in spite of the triumph of Fox News and conservative media.
+
+Conservatism, as a practical political philosophy, is dead in this country. Sure, there are intelligent conservative voices in the whirlwind, but they’ve been overwhelmed by the xenophobic hysteria peddled by the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. These are the people who define conservatism today. These are the people who’ve poisoned the conservative brand, made it synonymous with backwardness and cultural isolation. And Fox News has been their most significant stage, the ultimate echo chamber.
+
+As a consequence, conservatives (on the whole) are now dumber, angrier and more divorced from the facts. To the extent that Fox News has nurtured the idiocy Trump represents, they’re responsible for his political life – they made it possible. The bile spewed by Trump might as well be Fox News talking points; it’s the kind of garbage you hear every day on their programs. And because so many conservatives get their news from Fox, Republican policymakers are forced to parrot those arguments to voters. This plays well with the base, but it alienates most of the country – as it should. It will be fascinating to watch how Fox News handles Trump, particularly as we move along in the process. It will be a delicate balancing act. The longer Trump hangs around, the more ridiculous the Republicans look. At the same time, Trump is a boon for ratings; the delightful dolts on Fox and Friends can’t get enough of him. Which makes perfect sense. The right-wing media machine – led by Fox News – has created a demand for his insane ramblings. As the chief supplier, Fox News has an interest in covering Trump, in extending his ruse for as long as possible. Promoting Trump is a disaster for the GOP, though. His bombast, left unchecked, will undermine the Republican primaries and jeopardize their shot at the White House. How Fox News manages Trump’s ascendance will therefore tell you all you need to know (if you didn’t already) about where their loyalties lie. I suspect we’ll discover what most observers have long known: Fox News cares about conservatism about as much as it cares about the news.",REAL
+8991,Comment on 184 U.S. generals and admirals endorse Trump for Commander-In-Chief by Tonya Parnell,"Have you seen that pro-Hillary TV ad of disgraced Gen. John Allen? 
+Nauseating. 
+You should know that in 2011, Allen, then a 4-star general in the U.S. Marine Corps, was nominated to be NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, pending confirmation by the Senate. On November 13, 2012, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta suspended Allen’s confirmation hearing, pending investigations into the general’s “inappropriate communication” with a woman named Jill Kelley. Gen. John Allen (l); Jill Kelley (r) 
+As part of the fallout of the Gen. David Petraeus -Paula Broadwell affair, the FBI uncovered 20,000 to 30,000 pages of correspondence — mostly email — between Allen and Kelley from 2010 to 2012. Reportedly, their correspondence was “flirtatious” and “inappropriate” as Allen and Kelley were both married at the time, but not to each other. 
+Seriously, how can a 4-star general even have so much free time as to write 20,000 to 30,000 emails in the space of two years to ANYONE? 20,000 emails mean an average of 28 emails a day exchanged between Allen and Kelley; 30,000 emails mean an average of 42 emails a day. There is no one with whom I’ve exchanged 28 emails a day, even less 42 emails. 
+The upshot: Not only did John Allen lose his confirmation as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, he also lost his job as Commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan — a post to which he was promoted to replace the disgraced Gen. Petraeus. (See “ Obama purges U.S. military command (Part 1) ”) 
+Allen retired from the military in February 2013, but was appointed Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (or ISIS) — a post and title created for Allen by Obama, which Allen held for about a year from September 2014 until October 23, 2015. 
+Allen was a featured speaker at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. He criticized Donald Trump and endorsed Hillary Clinton — who abandoned four Americans to die in Benghazi — for President. 
+Like the New Yorker that he is, Trump fired back, calling Allen “a failed general.” 
+Trump does have the endorsement of 184 non-failed and non-disgraced U.S. generals and admirals, including at least four 4-star and fourteen 3-star flag officers, as well as the endorsement of 14 Medal of Honor recipients. 
+The endorsements began with an open letter on Sept. 6, 2016, from 88 retired U.S. general and admirals : 
+“The 2016 election affords the American people an urgently needed opportunity to make a long-overdue course correction in our national security posture and policy. As retired senior leaders of America’s military, we believe that such a change can only be made by someone who has not been deeply involved with, and substantially responsible for, the hollowing out of our military and the burgeoning threats facing our country around the world. For this reason, we support Donald Trump’s candidacy to be our next Commander-in-Chief. 
+For the past eight years, America’s armed forces have been subjected to a series of ill-considered and debilitating budget cuts, policy choices and combat operations that have left the superb men and women in uniform less capable of performing their vital missions in the future than we require them to be. 
+Simultaneously, enemies of this country have been emboldened, sensing weakness and irresolution in Washington and opportunities for aggression at our expense and that of other freedom-loving nations. 
+In our professional judgment, the combined effect is potentially extremely perilous. That is especially the case if our government persists in the practices that have brought us to this present pass. 
+For this reason, we support Donald Trump and his commitment to rebuild our military, to secure our borders, to defeat our Islamic supremacist adversaries and restore law and order domestically. We urge our fellow Americans to do the same.” 
+Two days later on Sept. 8, another 21 retired U.S. generals and admirals joined the list, followed by 31 more the next day, on Sept. 9, and another 44 on Sept. 16, bringing the total number of flag officers who have endorsed Trump to 184. 
+Below is the list, as of Sept. 16, 2016, of the retired U.S. generals and admirals, who are endorsing Trump for President and Commander-In-Chief: General Burwell B. Bell III, US Army, Retired General Alfred G. Hansen, US Air Force, Retired Admiral Jerry Johnson, US Navy, Retired Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General Marvin Covault, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General Brett Dula, US Air Force, Retired Lieutenant General Dan Duren, US Air Force, Retired Lieutenant General Harold T. Fields, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, US Air Force, Retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General Gordon E, Fornell, US Air Force, Retired Lieutenant Jay Garner, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General Ron Hite, US Army, Retired Lieutenant Generals John I. Hudson, USMC, Retired Lieutenant General Harley Hughes, US Air Force, Retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General Timothy A. Kinnan, US Air Force, Retired Lieutenant General Joe Kinzer, US Army, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General Bennett L. Lewis, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General Frederick McCorkle, US MC, Retired Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, US Air Force, Retired Lieutenant General Clifford H. Rees, Jr. US Air Force, Retired Lieutenant James C. Riley, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General Hugh G. Smith, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General John B. Sylvester, US Army, Retired Lieutenant General David J. Teal, US Air Force, Retired Lieutenant General William E. Thurman, US Air Force, Retired Lieutenant General Jack Woodward, US Air Force, Retired Vice Admiral Mike Bucchi, US Navy, Retired Vice Admiral Edward Clexton, Jr. US Navy, Retired Vice Admiral Bernard M. Kauderer, US Navy, Retired Vice Admiral J. Theodore Parker, US Navy, Retired Vice Admiral R.F.Schoultz, US Navy, Retired Vice Admiral Robert Spane, US Navy, Retired Vice Admiral Donald Thompson, US Coast Guard, Retired Vice Admiral Howard B. Thorsen, US Coast Guard, Retired Vice Admiral John Totushek, US Navy, Retired Vice Admiral Jerry Unruh, US Navy, Retired Major General Joe Arbuckle, US Army, Retired Major General John Bianchi, CSMR, Retired Major General Pat Brady, US Army, Retired Major General Bobby G. Butcher, US Marine Corps, Retired, Major General Henry D. Canterbury, US Air Force, Retired Major General Carroll D. Childers, US Army, Retired Major General Jeffrey Cliver, US Air Force, Retired Major General Tommy F. Crawford, US Air Force, Retired Major General Harley Davis, US Army, Retired Major General Felix Dupre, US Air Force, Retired Major General Neil Eddins, US Air Force, Retired Major General David W. Eidsaune, US Air Force, Retired Major General John R. Farrington, US Air Force, Retired Major General Dave Garza, US Marine Corps, Retired Major General William A. Gorton, US Air Force, Retired Major General Kenneth Hagemann, US Air Force, Retired Major General Gary L. Harrell, US Army, Retired Major General Geoffrey Higginbothan, US Marine Corps, Retired Major General Kent Hillhouse,US Army, Retired Major General Jerry D. Holmes, US Air Force, Retired Major General John A. Leide, US Army, Retired Major General James E. Livingston, USMC, Retired Major General John D. Logeman, Jr., US Air Force, Retired Major General Homer S. Long, US Army, Retired Major General Billy McCoy, US Air Force, Retired Major General Robert Messerli, US Air Force, Retired Major General John Miller, US Air Force, Retired Major General Ray O’Mara, US Air Force, Retired Major General George W.“Nordie” Norwood, US Air Force, Retired Major General Robert W. Paret, US Air Force MC, Retired Major General James W. Parker, US Army, Retired Major General Richard Perraut, US Air Force, Retired Major General R.V. Secord, US Air Force, Retired Major General Sidney Shachnow, US Army, Retired Major General Edison E. Scholes, US Army (Retired) Major General Richard A. Scholtes,US Army, Retired Major General Mark Solo, US Air Force, Retired Major General James N. Stewart, US Air Force, Retired Major General Michael Sullivan, US MC, Retired Major General Thomas R. Tempel, US Army, Retired Major General Richard L. Testa, US Air Force, Retired Major General Paul E. Vallely, US Army, Retired Major General John Welde, US Air Force, Retired Major General Kenneth W. Weir, US Marine Corps, Retired Major General Michael Wiedemer, US Air Force, Retired Rear Admiral Phillip Anselmo, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Peter Booth, US Navy,Retired Rear Admiral Thomas F. Brown III, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral James J. Carey,US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral, Larry Chambers, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Robert C. Crates, SC, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Mimi Drew, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Ernest Elliot, SC, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral James H. Flatley III, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Vance H. Fry, SC, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Byron Fuller, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral George M. Furlong, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Albert Gallotta, Jr. US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Michael R. Groothousen US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral William A. Guereck, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Dale Hagen, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral John G. Hekman, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Charles F. Horne III US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral William P Houley, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Grady L. Jackson, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral J. Adrian Jackson, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Frederick C. Johnson, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Pierce J. Johnson, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Jack Kavanaugh, SC, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Charles R.Kubic, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Rich Landolt, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Don Loren, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral William J. McDaniel, MD, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral E.S. McGinley II, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Fred Metz, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Douglas M. Moore Jr. SC US Navy. Retired Rear Admiral John A. Moriarty, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral David R. Morris, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral James A. Mozart, SC US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Ed Nelson, US Coast Guard, Retired Rear Admiral Philip R. Olsen, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Robert S. Owens, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Robert Passmore,US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral W.W. Pickavance, Jr., US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Leonard F. Picotte, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Brian C. Prindle, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Mike Roesner, SC USN, Retired Rear Admiral William J. Ryan, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral William L. Schachte, Jr., US Navy JAGC, Retired Rear Admiral William R. Schmidt, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral William H. Shawcross, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Hugh P. Scott, US Navy, MC, Retired Rear Admiral Gregory Slavonic, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Paul Sutherland, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Charles Williams, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral H. Denny Wisely, US Navy, Retired Rear Admiral Theodore J. Wojnar, US Coast Guard, Retired Brigadier General Charles L. Bishop, US Army, Retired Brigadier General Remo Butler, US Army, Retired Brigadier General Jimmy L. Cash, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General George P. Cole, Jr. US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Philip M. Drew, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Jerome V. Foust, US Army, Retired Brigadier General Norman Ham, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Thomas W. Honeywill, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Charles Jones, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Gary M. Jones, US Army, Retired Brigadier General James M. Johnston III, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Thomas J. Lennon, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Bruce Miketinac, US Army, Retired Brigadier General Bert Mizusawa, US Army, Retired Brigadier General Harold C. Morgan, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Stephen Mundt, US Army, Retired Brigadier General Mike Neil, US Marines Corps, Retired Brigadier general Robert V. Paschon, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Mark D. Scraba, US Army, Retired Brigadier General George L. Schulstad, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Richard M. Tabor, US Army, retired Brigadier General Hugh B. Tant III, US Army, Retired Brigadier General Troy Tolbert, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Robert F. Titus, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General William O. Walsh, US Air Force, Retired Brigadier General Robert V. Woods, US Air Force Retired Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, Retired",FAKE
+6922,Police across the country are being equipped with ‘Christian’ facial recognition cameras,"Police across the country are being equipped with ‘Christian’ facial recognition cameras   Source: MassPrivateI 
+Soon, cops across America will be wearing body cameras equipped with facial recognition software. 
+Watchguard Video (WGV) claims their new “ Redactive ” software will enable law enforcement to identify anyone. (WGV is really, Enforcement Video LLC ) 
+Redactive quickly scans the entire video clip first, automatically recognizing faces, so the user [officer] spends much less time manually performing the task. 
+Police cameras automatically identify everyone’s face 
+Redactive’s advanced facial recognition technology automatically detects and identifies human faces , minimizing the elements of the video which are falsely detected as human, thus reducing the overall time spent manually searching and marking the video for redaction. Users begin the redaction process by instructing the software to auto-detect any face in the video. Once auto-detection is complete, the software allows the user to select and redact the face or faces throughout the video. 
+6,000 spying law enforcement agencies and growing 
+How long, before every law enforcement agency in America is equipped with facial recognition cameras? 
+Nearly 1 Million spying cops in America 
+According to the Skeptical Libertarian there are close to a MILLION cops in the U.S. Think about what’s happening. 
+Soon, America will have 18,000 law enforcement agencies and a MILLION cops using facial recognition software! 
+How long before firefighters are equipped with facial recognition cameras? 
+In Modesto, California firefighters are being equipped with heat-resistant helmet cameras. 
+WGV’s ‘Christian’ facial recognition cameras 
+According to WGV’s company profile, God wants to give cops facial recognition cameras! 
+WGV is a God-guided company that is committed to serving our employees and customers through servant leadership . 
+Are they listening to God or the cops? 
+“ Our team spends a lot of time listening to the needs of law enforcement as it pertains to video evidence. With VISTA WiFi, I think they’ll find we not only surpassed their needs, we’ve leapfrogged the market’s expectations” Robert Vanman , Founder and CEO of WatchGuard Video said. 
+WGV works closely with Homeland Security 
+Join Grants Office, LLC and WatchGuard Video as we explore various [DHS] grant programs that will fund BWCs, as well as other solutions such as in-car video. In addition to gaining an understanding of the funding available and tips to secure grants, participants will learn about the latest and greatest video technology available to public safety agencies. 
+WGV helps police get $1.8 Billion in grant money from DHS 
+WGV published a 2016 Grant Funding Guide that identifies funding sources and helps them write grants that’ll get approved.",FAKE
+3122,Ky. clerk says won’t personally authorize gay marriage licenses -- or interfere,"The Kentucky county clerk at the center of a national firestorm over her refusal to issue same-sex marriage licenses vowed Monday -- just days after her release from jail -- that she would not prevent her office from issuing such licenses but would not personally authorize them either.
+
+Kim Davis, the clerk for Rowan County, detailed what she described as a ""remedy"" during a brief press conference as she returned to work for the first time since her jailing.
+
+Whether that ""remedy"" satisfies the courts -- or undermines the legal validity of the licenses -- remains to be seen. Asked if the licenses issued by Davis' office without her name would still be valid, a spokeswoman in Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway's office told FoxNews.com that both Conway and the county attorney have ""said publicly that they believe the licenses are legal."" The spokeswoman added, ""We have not provided an official opinion on this issue.""
+
+Under Davis' new plan, her deputy clerks will be allowed to issue gay marriage licenses if they choose. She said she would not take action against them.
+
+But the licenses ""will not be issued or authorized by me,"" Davis said. ""Any license will not have my name, my title or my authority on it ... instead, it will say it's issued pursuant to a federal court order.""
+
+Davis added that she has ""great doubts whether a license issued under these conditions is valid.""
+
+Last Tuesday, U.S. District Judge David Bunning, ordered Davis released from jail after finding the court was ""satisfied"" that her office's deputy clerks were issuing marriage licenses ""to all legally eligible couples.""
+
+At the same time, Bunning directed Davis not to ""interfere in any way"" with the marriage licenses being issued by her office. Should she interfere, the judge said, ""that will be considered a violation of this Order and appropriate sanctions will be considered.""
+
+Davis on Monday appealed to the legislature to provide for an accommodation in situations like this.
+
+""My simple request for an accommodation has gone unheard,"" she said. Choking up, she said she's faced with a ""seemingly impossible choice"" of ""my conscience or my freedom.""
+
+""I do not want to have this conflict. I don't want to be in the spotlight,"" she said.
+
+Afterward, one reporter tweeted a picture showing Davis' office, with its blinds closed and a sheriff's deputy standing outside.
+
+On Friday, Davis' attorneys filed an appeal asking for another delay in issuing the licenses. They argued in their motion to the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that all the same-sex couples who sued Davis for a license received one from her deputies while she was in jail. Therefore, they said, her office should not be required to issue them to any more couples once she returns to work.
+
+The American Civil Liberties Union initially filed a suit against Davis on behalf of four couples, two straight and two gay, who were denied licenses after the Supreme Court in June effectively legalized gay marriage nationwide. When Davis refused Bunning's order to issue licenses, the judge declared the clerk in contempt of court and jailed her for five days.
+
+In her absence, her deputy clerks issued licenses and both same-sex couples who sued her received one. But Bunning clarified his order to include all eligible couples who request a marriage license.
+
+In the appeal filed Friday, Davis' lawyers, with the Christian law firm Liberty Counsel, argued that Bunning issued the clarification improperly and once again asked the appeals court to delay the mandate that she issue licenses.
+
+The appeals court has already dismissed Davis' primary argument that her religious faith should exempt her from licensing a gay marriage. ""It cannot be defensibly argued that the holder of the Rowan County Clerk's office, apart from who personally occupies that office, may decline to act in conformity with the United States Constitution as interpreted by a dispositive holding of the United States Supreme Court,"" a panel wrote two weeks ago when it rejected her last appeal.
+
+Since Bunning first ordered Davis to issue the marriage licenses, the clerk and her attorneys have made several attempts to legally get around it. One of their strategies was to ask Bunning to stop Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear and Library and Archives Commissioner Wayne Onkst from directing Davis to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Bunning denied that request on Friday.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2101,Jeb Bush Among Conservatives Criticizing Pope For Climate Change,"GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush criticized Pope Francis on Tuesday after a draft of his encyclical on climate change was leaked by an Italian newspaper.
+
+In the leaked draft, the pope attributes ""the majority of the global warming in recent decades"" to human activity.
+
+During a town hall event in New Hampshire, Bush said he thinks religion ""ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting into the political realm.""
+
+“I hope I’m not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope,” Bush said, according to the New York Times. “And I'd like to see what he says as it relates to climate change and how that connects to these broader, deeper issues before I pass judgment.""
+
+Other Republicans came out against the pope after he first spoke on climate change in January.
+
+""I don't know if it is all [man's fault] but the majority is, for the most part, it is man who continuously slaps down nature,"" the pope said, according to Reuters.
+
+“The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality,"" he said.
+
+While many haven't yet spoken out about the pope's views, several Republican presidential hopefuls have question climate change and its origin. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has said “humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of these people out there are trying to make us believe.” Business mogul Donald Trump has called global warming a ""hoax."" Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has compared climate change activists to ""flat-Earthers.""",REAL
+88,Major donors consider funding Black Lives Matter,"“You can’t be in a rush to do the wrong thing, either,” she said. “This is serious stuff.”",REAL
+5409,LDS Church’s new ‘Mormon and Gay’ website wins cheers and some jeers for ignoring controversial policy,"October 26, 2016 LDS Church’s new ‘Mormon and Gay’ website wins cheers and some jeers for ignoring controversial policy Much has changed for gays and lesbians since 2012 in the U.S. and many parts of the world — same-sex marriage is legal, for starters — so the LDS Church decided it was time to redo, revise and reboot its website addressing that population. Among the biggest changes? The letter “s.” The previous site was known as “Mormons and Gays” — as if those two groups were separate or even opponents. The one that launched Tuesday is “Mormon and Gay,” signaling the notion that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can be — and are — both. 
+Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,",FAKE
+5376,"Exhausted, Defeated Voters Finally Beginning To Relate To Hillary Clinton - The Onion - America's Finest News Source","Exhausted, Defeated Voters Finally Beginning To Relate To Hillary Clinton Close Vol 52 Issue 44 · Politics · Politicians · Hillary Clinton · Election 2016 
+WASHINGTON—Explaining that they have finally started to feel a connection with the Democratic Party nominee, millions of defeated and utterly exhausted voters admitted to reporters Wednesday they are now starting to relate to Hillary Clinton. “I never thought I had much in common with her before, but after waking up today feeling so drained and beaten, I think I’m beginning to see that she and I really are a lot alike,” said 34-year-old Chicago resident Anthony Pallister, echoing the sentiments of Americans across the country who claimed that over the course of the last 24 hours, the feeling that they had suffered through a long, wearying ordeal only to be summarily rejected had caused them to notice many similarities between themselves and the 69-year-old presidential candidate. “The more I think about how dejected and overcome I feel, the more I begin to see myself and my viewpoints in Hillary Clinton. In fact, I don’t know the last time I’ve related to a candidate this much.” Many Americans went on to confirm that their perception of Hillary Clinton being completely out of touch with the majority of the country has now made the former secretary of state far more likable. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
+Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
+319,Kate Steinle's death and sanctuary cities: What good are our laws without enforcement?,"According to the Wall Street Journal, the last serious attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws appears to have been made in 1982 by a retired Justice Department official named Ronald Gainer. He failed, but the estimate then was “…50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Many more laws have been added since then.
+
+One thing is certain: If you violate federal law you are likely to be punished with a fine, imprisonment or both. These laws are supposed to apply to everyone, unless, it seems, you are an illegal alien living in San Francisco, or any of the other sanctuary cities around the country.
+
+By now, anyone not preoccupied with stories about shark attacks, the Confederate flag or singer Ariana Grande “maliciously licking” donuts she did not buy, has heard about 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle gunned down by an illegal alien while walking on a San Francisco pier with her father. Her accused killer is Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a felon from Mexico, who had been deported five times but always managed to sneak back in, choosing San Francisco, he reportedly said, because he knew it was a “sanctuary city” that would not deport him.
+
+The concept of a sanctuary city comes from the Old Testament.
+
+“…if someone deliberately kills another person, then the slayer must be dragged even from my altar and be put to death. (Exodus 21:14). But if it was simply an accident permitted by God, I will appoint a place of refuge where the slayer can run for safety. (Exodus 21:13). These cities will be places of protection from a dead person’s relatives who want to avenge the death. The slayer must not be put to death before being tried by the community. (Numbers 35:19) “Then the congregation shall judge between the slayer and the blood avenger. ... The congregation shall deliver the manslayer from the hand of the blood avenger, and the congregation shall restore him to his city of refuge to which he fled; and he shall live in it until the death of the high priest who was anointed with the holy oil…” (Numbers 35:24-28).
+
+This ancient concept for a sanctuary city was not to shield a suspect from justice, but to guarantee justice was done. The suspected murderer would be given safe haven only until a trial was held. If he was found guilty, he was executed. If he was acquitted he was set free. But if he left the sanctuary city before the trial, “the avenger of blood” could kill him.
+
+Officials in “sanctuary cities” pervert the concept of sanctuary by helping suspects evade the law. Congress should deny federal funds to these cities as long as they continue to ignore the law. President Obama is unlikely to speak, much less lead on this issue, because the Democratic Party thinks it can win the Hispanic vote in 2016. Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce want cheap immigrant labor, so they will huff and puff but do nothing, hoping the controversy goes away. The public must not let this happen.
+
+According to the Washington Post, there are an estimated 60 sanctuary cities around the country, including major cities like New York, Los Angeles and Houston, and these cities are unlikely to change their sanctuary policies anytime soon.
+
+In fact, writes International Business Times, “…a number of local leaders in U.S. cities have renewed their efforts to foster welcoming and inclusive communities for illegal aliens. So-called ‘sanctuary policies’ … are intended to signal to the undocumented community that it’s safe to come out of the shadows without the fear of being reported to federal authorities.”
+
+If laws are not enforced, what is the point of having them?
+
+If politicians are so afraid of losing the Hispanic vote that they do nothing in response to the murder of Kathryn Steinle, they should be removed from office. The notion that Hispanics won’t vote for a party that stands for justice is racist.
+
+Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated op-ed columnist. He joined Fox News Channel in 1997 as a political contributor. His latest book is ""What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America"" is available in bookstores now. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.",REAL
+3068,Everything you need to know about our polarized politics (in the palm of your hand),"In Jonathan Chait’s interview with departing White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer in New York magazine, Chait describes how the Obama administration “lost its illusions” about overcoming partisan polarization.
+
+“I think [Obama] believes, and I certainly believe, that while we can always do better, this is a case where structural forces are the large actor here,” he told me. Pfeiffer cited three of them. The first is rising polarization—“the great sorting,” as he called it—which, over a period of decades, has driven white conservatives out of the Democratic Party and moderates out of the Republican Party, creating two ideologically homogeneous political organizations.
+
+This is quite a belated discovery of well-established finding in political science.  As I’ve noted before, the Obama administration has been remarkably slow to understand the nature and origins of our polarized politics.
+
+Here’s a new resource on that subject. We’re pleased to announce the first book based on content from The Monkey Cage: “Political Polarization in American Politics.” The book is based on the many contributions to our series on American political polarization in January-February 2014, and edited by Dan Hopkins and me.
+
+As Dan and I write in the introduction:
+
+The result is a collection of pieces from leading experts on polarization that cover nearly every facet of the issue: how American politics became more polarized over time, how much that trend is manifest in different places (Congress, state legislatures, activists, and citizens), what factors are driving that trend, and what reforms might mitigate it. These pieces puncture some of the myths that frequently appear in casual punditry about polarization—such as the notion that it’s mostly driven by politicians who simply don’t like each other, or that we can blame it primarily on partisan news media. Instead, polarization has deeper structural and historical roots. Indeed, it may even be the norm in American politics. As such, there are no easy solutions—certainly none as easy as having politicians sit down to dinner with each other.
+
+Below is a list of the chapters and contributors.  It might be a bit late for Obama, but we hope that you’ll find the book worth reading.
+
+How are we polarized?
+
+Why are we polarized?
+
+What Can Be Done?",REAL
+3028,FEC head under fire for women’s forum ‘stacked’ with Dems,"The chairwoman of the supposedly nonpartisan Federal Election Commission is under fire for planning a forum next month on women in politics ""stacked"" with Democrat-leaning speakers and apparent Hillary Clinton supporters.
+
+One conservative lawyer already is calling for an inspector general investigation; another group is urging Chairwoman Ann Ravel to call off the event.
+
+To Ravel's detractors, the forum is yet another example of the allegedly partisan turn being taken by the FEC under her leadership.
+
+""There are so many things wrong with this,"" Cleta Mitchell, a prominent conservative lawyer in Washington, D.C., told FoxNews.com.
+
+The FEC is supposed to act as an independent regulatory arm to enforce campaign finance law. So it raised eyebrows when Ravel put out a notice on the May 12 forum at FEC headquarters in Washington, D.C. The event is described as an ""open discussion"" with scholars and others on why women are ""significantly under-represented in politics.""
+
+Mitchell said this alone goes beyond what the FEC should be doing. She questioned how it would reflect on the agency's impartiality going forward -- in, for instance, a case involving a male and female candidate.
+
+But the roster of invited participants raised more questions.
+
+Ravel's office defended the planned forum in an email to FoxNews.com.
+
+""We selected participants for the FEC's Women in Politics Forum because of their expertise and experience in this field with no regard to political affiliation, if any,"" her office said.
+
+Ravel pointed out that ""two distinguished Republican women, Christine Matthews and Rep. Mimi Walters, have agreed to be panelists at the event, as have international experts on women in politics.""
+
+Indeed, Walters is a Republican California congresswoman. And Matthews is a Republican campaign consultant.
+
+But they appear to be outnumbered. The Daily Caller reported on the affiliations of other invited participants, including Marni Allen, once part of a group that backed former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich for Massachusetts governor.
+
+Mitchell said she thinks the forum is an effort to boost Clinton's presidential candidacy.
+
+She told FoxNews.com she wants to see an inspector general investigation, and is considering filing a formal complaint.
+
+""It is a misuse of taxpayer money,"" she said.
+
+Independent Women's Voice, a nonprofit tied to the conservative Independent Women's Forum, put out a statement saying the FEC event is ""stacked"" mostly with ""women with one ideological view.""
+
+The group said the forum ""seems outside the scope of the FEC's mandate"" to begin with, and should either be overhauled or called off.",REAL
+6099,The Yale Review Did Not Endorse Hillary. The Reason Why Is Hilarious,"Posted on October 27, 2016 
+The editorial board at the Yale Review gave the most curious non-endorsement of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton this election season has yet seen – and with a lesson that most of the Republican political complex and especially nominee Donald Trump should learn, quickly, if he wants to keep himself out of even more legal trouble. 
+In its 144-year history, The Yale Record has never endorsed a Democratic candidate for president. In fact, we have never endorsed any candidate for president. This is, in part, due to our strong commitment to being a tax-exempt 501(c)3 organization, which mandates that we are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” 
+This year’s presidential election is highly unusual, but ultimately no different: The Yale Record believes both candidates to be equally un-endorsable, due to our faithful compliance with the tax code. 
+In particular, we do not endorse Hillary Clinton’s exemplary leadership during her 30 years in the public eye. We do not support her impressive commitment to serving and improving this country—a commitment to which she has dedicated her entire professional career. Because of unambiguous tax law, we do not encourage you to support the most qualified presidential candidate in modern American history, nor do we encourage all citizens to shatter the glass ceiling once and for all by electing Secretary Clinton on November 8. 
+The Yale Record has no opinion whatsoever on Dr. Jill Stein. 
+Tax-exempt organizations like The Yale Record and the Donald J Trump Foundation must obey certain rules to keep their tax-exempt status – rules that the Trump Foundation has been flouting for its entire existence. Trump’s been using his private foundation – which is funded almost entirely by the donations of other people – to purchase the political support of different groups throughout his campaign , among other more personal purchases like a $20,000 painting of himself , in clear violation of the tax-exempt rules. 
+Trump’s foundation has already been suspended from operating in New York for not having the right certification to solicit donors . Such a flagrant disrespect for the laws of the land and of the spirit of “charity” reveal just what kind of man Donald Trump is – a greedy narcissist with no regard for the well-being of others. So take this non-endorsement to heart and applaud their respect for the rules governing tax-exempt organizations. OccupyDemocrats, however, is under no such restrictions, and we heartily encourage you to help shatter the glass ceiling and make former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton our next president. ",FAKE
+6088,"FEAR OF TRUMP: BUSH, OBAMA, CLINTON ALL BUYING PROPERTY IN NON-EXTRADITION NATIONS","Email 
+
+It appears Bill and Hillary Clinton are making plans to flee the country in the event Donald Trump wins this election. 
+Reports are circulating that the Clintons have transferred 1.8 Billion dollars from the Clinton Foundation to the Qatar Central Bank, via a facilitation/abatement of JP Morgan Chase & Company for reasons not revealed. 
+This move of such a large sum of money to the country of Qatar says in itself, Hillary Clinton knows she is going to lose the election, and she doesn’t plan to allow herself to be prosecuted for various high crimes and treason under a Trump Administration. 
+The country of Qatar happens to be one of a handful of countries that does not have an extradition treaty with the United States, thus would be a perfect place for her to run to in escaping justice. 
+Donald Trump has said many times during his campaign and at the Presidential debates that once he gets into office, he intends to prosecute her on various high crimes from her latest crimes of sending classified material via a personal e mail server. All the way to gun running to terrorist groups in Syria resulting in the deaths of 4 Americans in Benghazi. 
+Apparently, Hillary is not the only person in Washington who has made plans to escape justice under a Trump Administration. John Kerry has quietly been selling his property in the US for millions of dollars of late, with an announcement of the sale of his $25 million dollar Nantucket mansion in June 2016, as well as the sale of his yacht for $3.9 million in July 2016. 
+President Barack H Obama has also apparently been making exit plans with his purchase of a $4.9 million dollar seaside mansion in Dubai in January 2016, another non extradition country. 
+Snopes and other supposed fact checking sites have debunked both the story of Obama’s purchase of the mansion and the firing of Rear Admiral Rick Williams. However, over the last several months, these sites have been busted for lying in trying to debunk such information as the before mentioned, when in fact the information is true. 
+Snopes and other sites try their best to keep incriminating information from being believed, but the truth has a way of coming out on its own, as it always has.",FAKE
+3732,"Nine dead, 18 wounded after Texas biker gang shootout (+video)","A Waco restaurant was the scene Sunday where motorcycle gangs came to meet and ended up shooting one another.
+
+Police in Waco, Texas said on Monday that 192 people were being arrested in connection with a biker gang shootout that left nine dead and 18 injured a day earlier.
+
+A shootout among rival motorcycle gangs at a popular Central Texas restaurant left nine bikers dead and 18 injured, and it sent panicked patrons and bystanders fleeing for safety, a police spokesman said Sunday.
+
+The violence erupted shortly after noon at a busy Waco shopping center along Interstate 35 that draws a large lunchtime crowd. Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said eight people died at the scene of the shooting at Twin Peaks restaurant and another person died at a hospital.
+
+The nine killed were all members of biker gangs, he said, as were the 18 people who were taken to hospitals with injuries that include stab and gunshot wounds. Some victims are being treated for both, he said.
+
+""This is probably one of the most gruesome crime scenes I've ever seen in my 34 years of law enforcement,"" Swanton said, later adding, ""I was amazed that we didn't have innocent civilians killed or injured.""
+
+At least 100 people have been detained for questioning, Swanton said late Sunday night.
+
+Swanton said at least five rival gangs gathered at Twin Peaks for a meeting that he said focused on turf and recruitment, two areas where the groups have often clashed. Preliminary findings indicate a dispute broke out in a bathroom, escalated to include knives and firearms and eventually spilled into the restaurant parking lot, he said. There were 150 to 200 gang members inside the restaurant at the time. Shots were fired inside and outside the restaurant, he said.
+
+McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara, whose office is involved in the investigation, said all nine who were killed were members of the Bandidos or Cossacks gangs.
+
+Swanton described the interior of the restaurant after a Sunday night walk-through, saying it was littered with bullet casings, knives, a club, bodies and pools of blood. Authorities would be working the rest of the night to process the reams of evidence, he said.
+
+Police were aware of the meeting in advance, Swanton said, and at least 12 Waco officers in addition to state troopers were outside the restaurant, part of a national chain that features scantily clad waitresses, when the fight began.
+
+""We've been made aware in the past few months of rival biker gangs ... being here and causing issues,"" Swanton said.
+
+Officers shot armed bikers, Swanton said, adding that the actions of law enforcement prevented further deaths. It was not known if any of the nine dead were killed by police officers.
+
+Swanton said that the restaurant's operators also were aware of the meeting in advance, and he described the management as uncooperative with authorities in addressing concerns.
+
+""Apparently the management (of Twin Peaks) wanted them here and so we didn't have any say-so on whether they could be here or not,"" Swanton said.
+
+A statement sent Sunday night on behalf of Jay Patel, operating partner for the Waco franchise, said, ""Our management team has had ongoing and positive communications with the police,"" and added that the restaurant was cooperating with the investigation.
+
+Rick Van Warner, a spokesman for the Dallas-based corporate franchisor, said the company is reviewing the circumstances surrounding the shooting and is ""seriously considering revoking"" the Waco location's franchise agreement.
+
+Van Warner said he couldn't address what the franchise owners ""did or didn't do leading up to this,"" but added that the company is ""very upset that clearly our standards of safety and security were not upheld in this particular case,"" he said.
+
+Doug Greeness, a biker from Belton, Texas, was near the scene Sunday evening. He said he's a member of a family riding club and was waiting for friends to be released from custody so he could return home.
+
+Greeness, who was not inside the restaurant when the melee broke out, described the event as a meeting of a biker association called the Texas Confederation of Clubs and Independents. He said the group meets to ""discuss issues within the biker community.""
+
+Officers with numerous law enforcement agencies were seen parked along the service road for I-35 near the city and were stationed in several points in downtown Waco around the local convention center. Swanton said authorities are increasing security in the area to prevent further violence among the gangs.
+
+In addition to local and state police, agents from the FBI and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were also at the scene about an hour and a half south of Dallas.
+
+According to the Austin American-Statesman, McLennan County Sheriff McNamara said Sunday night area law enforcement had been aware of bad feelings amongst biker gangs recently.",REAL
+9627,"American Tourist Can’t Get Over Dirty, Decaying & Dangerous Charm Of Dublin City","0 Add Comment 
+A VISITING American tourist has heralded the charm of Dublin, particularly the areas which seem to be boarded up, in disrepair and completely neglected, WWN can confirm. 
+“I tried one of your pints of the black stuff in the Guinness storehouse and was struck by how you don’t seem to give a shit about the bits of the city I’m not supposed to visit,” Gary Mackey, a Boston native shared when talking to WWN. 
+Sticking to the designated ‘tourist zones’ of the city on the first day of his trip, Mr. Mackey was struck by the city’s vibrancy and understated charm but spoke warmly of the lesser spotted parts of the city. 
+“I like how you guys just let buildings decay, it’s a great look, so quaint. And don’t get me started on that adorable thing you do, pretending people living in squalor openly on the streets and down lanes just don’t exist,” Mr. Mackey added, full of effusive praise. 
+As dictated by the ‘America is better than us’ provision in the constitution, the Irish media are obligated to report en masse when an American is praising Ireland in any shape or form, which has resulted in huge coverage of Mr. Mackey’s thoughts on the unique charm of Dublin city’s degradation and poverty. However, there is no obligation to mention the fact Mr. Mackey has been robbed three times during his visit. 
+Tourism Ireland has yet to confirm if they will fine the American for straying outside the designated tourist zones. Each street thought to contain anything unpalatable which approaches conveying the reality of Dublin in 2016 is marked by a no tourist sign which consists of a large X through an image of an overweight American clutching money. 
+“We have no idea what Mr. Mackey is talking about, has he visited the Leprechaun Museum yet?” A Dublin tourism spokesperson confirmed.",FAKE
+7358,"“You Ruined Your Own Communities, Don’t Ruin Ours”–Chicago Whites Demonstrate Against Black Lives Matter After Black Shot","- < “You Ruined Your Own Communities, Don’t Ruin Ours”–Chicago Whites Demonstrate Against Black Lives Matter After Black Shot > November 8, 2016, 10:08 am A+ | a- Warning   
+Commenter Muse points out that last weekend there was a cops-shoot-black-man-in-white-neighborhood story that would have been huge national news a few months ago, especially because local whites counterdemonstrated against Black Lives Matter with signs such as: 
+You ruined your own communities 
+Don’t ruin ours 
+#BlueLivesMatter 
+But this news is being sat on by the national press. Muse writes: 
+Over the weekend in Chicago, an off duty fireman approached a car that was blocking the entrance to a firehouse. A dispute ensued, and two off duty policemen became involved and the African American driver was shot to death. He reportedly was brandishing a gun. Crickets from the national media. Here we have a cop shooting a black man, and all of a sudden no one except local Chicago media wants to talk about it. Who called the dogs off on election night eve? 
+Mt. Greenwood is an interesting neighborhood. Mostly ethnic Irish city workers. Cops, fireman, Streets and San (water department) etc. These are the best jobs in the metropolitan area for the blue collar workers, but they have to live in the city due to the residency requirement for Chicago workers. They have nowhere else to go on he southside, so it looks like they are making a stand. There was a face off yesterday between local residents and BLM yesterday.",FAKE
+2718,CNBC moderators get bipartisan drubbing for debate performance,"Analysts across the political spectrum may be at odds over who won the third Republican presidential debate, but they seem to agree on one thing: the CNBC moderators had a very bad night.
+
+The negative reaction to the debate questions and other factors has become a story unto itself, almost overshadowing the actual policy debates that broke out in between the candidate-moderator rancor Wednesday night.
+
+The Republican candidates and observers complained the questions were demeaning, silly, and designed to provoke confrontation rather than genuine policy discussion. Others took aim at the debate format, and wondered about  the moderators’ professionalism.
+
+On several sites aggregating Twitter reaction, the moderators were declared the losers, “hands down.”
+
+The Washington Post declared it “CNBC’s really bad debate night.”
+
+“The moderators had a worse night than the New York Mets … this was a trainwreck,” Fox News' Howard Kurtz charged Thursday, referring to Game 2 of the World Series, and calling the debate questions “condescending, snide, hostile and borderline insulting.”
+
+While it might not have hurt CNBC during the broadcast -- the network touted 14 million viewers the following day, a network record -- it got a drubbing from candidates and party leaders during and after the prime-time event.
+
+""While I was proud of our candidates and the way they handled tonight’s debate, the performance by the CNBC moderators was extremely disappointing and did a disservice to their network, our candidates, and voters,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement, calling the questioning “deeply unfortunate.”
+
+CNBC’s John Harwood was blasted for asking Donald Trump whether he was running a ""comic book"" campaign, and asking Mike Huckabee if he thought Trump had “the moral authority” to be president -- a question Trump called ""nasty."" Moderator Carl Quintanilla later called Marco Rubio a “young man in a hurry” in reference to his age and his experience in the Senate.
+
+Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, told Fox News Thursday morning that “it was very frustrating to be on stage.” He faulted the moderators for not sticking to the issues and promises to divvy time equally. “They lost control of the debate,” he said.
+
+At varying times, the audience booed the moderators, giving the candidates space to draw together for the attack against what they said was their common enemy: the liberal media.
+
+The criticism took off after Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was asked whether his opposition to raising the debt ceiling indicates he may not be the “the kind of problem-solver American voters want.” Cruz unloaded on the moderators, blasting them for asking questions like, “Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?” After the cheers for Cruz died down he suggested the moderators were Democrats.
+
+“Nobody watching at home believes that any of the moderators has any intention of voting in a Republican primary,” he charged. Cruz used the debate to send out a fundraising letter to supporters afterward, “declaring war on the liberal media,” and went on to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight. As for the focus groups following the debate, the candidates who took on the media and the moderators directly -- namely Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie -- seemed to benefit the most.
+
+“It was brutal takedown, and CNBC’s smarmy moderators had it coming. Cruz is far from the first conservative to rail against liberal media bias, but he did it about as effectively as it can be done in 30 seconds,” said the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby. “The clip of that moment will go viral.”
+
+Even some in the entertainment world, like comedian Patton Oswalt, began agreeing with Cruz and others on stage by the end, in spite of their fundamental dislike for the GOP candidates.
+
+Not everyone thought the moderators went too far. Some analysts argued the questions were par for the course for the debates. And Ohio Gov. John Kasich said he “thought they did a good job,” saying he was “very appreciative of how they did their job.” He felt he had time to speak and that it “wasn't a circus.""
+
+When asked over Twitter by The Blaze about the widespread criticism, Harwood said simply, ""it comes with the job.""",REAL
+8580,"Project Veritas Video 4 - 20K Bribery to DNC, Chaos at Trump Rallies","
+
+In the effort to prove the credibility of the undercover donor featured in the videos and to keep the investigation going, Project Veritas Action made the decision to donate twenty thousand dollars to Robert Creamer’s effort.
+Project Veritas Action had determined that the benefit of this investigation outweighed the cost. And it did.
+In an unexpected twist, AUFC president Brad Woodhouse, the recipient of the $20,000, heard that Project Veritas Action was releasing undercover videos exposing AUFC’s activities.
+He told a journalist that AUFC was going to return the twenty thousand dollars.
+He said it was because they were concerned that it might have been an illegal foreign donation.
+Project Veritas Action was pleased but wondered why that hadn’t been a problem for the month that they had the money.
+",FAKE
+4801,'Specific info' forces WikiLeaks to move anticipated announcement to Berlin,"Julian Assange canceled a dramatic London balcony address on Tuesday in favor of a video presentation in Berlin after WikiLeaks developed ""specific information"" regarding Assange's safety, the leaked emails clearinghouse tweeted on Monday afternoon.
+
+Some believe the video announcement by the WikiLeaks founder could be an ""October surprise"" geared towards the U.S. presidential election. Supporters of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump have said they believe the announcement will be damaging to the candidacy of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
+
+Assange, 45, who has lived in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for five years as officials in Sweden have sought him on criminal charges, is set to address supporters in Berlin via a video link at 3 a.m. ET.
+
+“I don’t want to give it away,” Assange told Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly in August, when he indicated he had a major scoop that could influence the race. “But it’s a variety of documents, from different types of institutions that are associated with the election campaign, some quite unexpected angles, some quite interesting, some even entertaining.”
+
+In a subsequent interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity last month, Assange said his next round of revelations was coming “reasonably soon.”
+
+“The first batch is reasonably soon,” he told Hannity. “We are quite confident about it now.”
+
+Assange has already played a key role in the presidential race, with the release of 20,000 internal emails that indicated the Democratic National Committee appeared to conspire to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. Those revelations surfaced in August, just before the party’s convention, proving embarrassing to Clinton’s campaign. They also led to the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
+
+Though no recent public revelations directly tie to Assange's security fears, various U.S. officials and pundits have made threatening statements directed at him in the past. WikiLeaks on Monday tweeted an alleged quote from a 2010 State Department meeting at which then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked if Assange could be killed in a drone strike. That same year, former Democrat strategist Bob Beckel said on Fox News Channel that ""a dead man can't leak stuff.""
+
+Assange also has hinted that deceased DNC staffer Seth Rich may have been a source for WikiLeaks. Rich, 27, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to the back at a Washington, D.C., intersection in July. He died soon thereafter. Authorities believe Rich was the target of a botched robbery, but his death has inspired conspiracy theories.
+
+
+
+WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million leaked emails, including sensitive information about prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and a cache of diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world.",REAL
+8365,"Trump Elected President, Thanks to 4 in 5 White Evangelicals","November 9, 2016 Trump Elected President, Thanks to 4 in 5 White Evangelicals 
+Exit polls suggest that “Never Trump” was never a likely outcome for white evangelical voters, who showed up to support   Trump at their highest margin since 2004. Despite reservations expressed by many evangelical and Republican leaders, white born-again/evangelical Christians cast their ballots for the controversial real estate mogul-turned-politician at an 81 percent to 16 percent margin over Hillary Clinton. Evangelicals of color—who represent 2 in 5 evangelicals, but aren’t segmented out in most national political polls—largely preferred Clinton leading up to the election. But she ultimately underperformed among Hispanics and African Americans compared to President Barack Obama before her. “The story here continues to be continuity in the strength of evangelical support for GOP candidates, rather than greater intensity,” said Kevin den Dulk, political science professor at Calvin College. “I suspect there’s some underlying changes in polling responses that would make Trump’s evangelical support seem greater than it has in the past.”",FAKE
+8361,US calls for end to Saudi airstrikes in Yemen,"November 1, 2016 US calls for end to Saudi airstrikes in Yemen 
+The US has called for an end to airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen at a UN security council meeting, but critics pointed out that Washington continues to supply arms and provide other military support to Saudi Arabia. 
+The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, condemned missile attacks by Yemeni Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabia and said the kingdom had a right to defend itself. 
+But she added: “It is also incumbent on the Saudi-led coalition and the forces of the Yemeni government to refrain from taking steps that escalate this violence and to commit to the cessation of hostilities. 
+“After 19 months of fighting, it should be clear that there is absolutely no military solution to this conflict. Airstrikes that hit schools, hospitals and other civilian objects have to stop. In many cases these strikes have damaged key infrastructure that is essential to delivering humanitarian aid in Yemen.”",FAKE
+3531,Iowa Christians struggle to square faith with fear over refugees,"Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) As Christians, they want to be compassionate. As Americans, they want to be safe.
+
+That's the message from Iowa Republicans as they come to terms with the Syrian refugee crisis that has quickly dominated the presidential race. Nearly the entire Republican field has taken a hardline stance toward admitting any more Muslim refugees, raising the specter that Islamic militants could infiltrate the refugee population and therefore immigrate easily to the United States.
+
+For conservatives on edge after the attacks on Paris, the rhetoric resonates.
+
+But at least half of the votes cast in next February's primary here will come from those who come from the evangelical tradition. And some here say they're not watching the plight of persecuted Syrians as Republican primary voters but as Christians whose faith tells them to be compassionate -- and that could mean accepting refugees who have nowhere else to turn.
+
+""I'm not trying to cast aspersions on Muslims in general, because I'm sure the vast majority of Muslims are good people just like the vast majority of Christians are,"" said Richard Tucker, sitting alone an hour before a major Iowa faith conference began Friday.
+
+""You can be very compassionate towards people, but to me, my first responsibility is to my family, my community,"" he said. ""No matter how much compassion I may have for some other group, if I don't think I can allow that group into my community or near my family and be safe,"" then they can't be let in.
+
+The attacks in Paris last week immediately rocked the Republican race, and the entire field spent much of the week telling voters how tough they would be toward ISIS and the Syrian refugee population. Several GOP candidates said they would openly accept Christian refugees but that Muslims posed too great a risk.
+
+Late this week, several Republican presidential candidates raced even further to the right. Ben Carson compared some in the refugee population to ""rabid dogs."" And Donald Trump said he was open to the idea of a national registry of all Muslims in the United States.
+
+For Iowans jittery that a Paris-like attack could happen here at home, that language might be a political winner.
+
+""I really don't want to get blown up by them SOB's,"" said Carl Arson, a small farmer who came to Ted Cruz's town hall in Harlan, Iowa on Friday to decide between Cruz and Trump. Arson said he supported sending all Muslims currently in the U.S. out of the country. ""I don't trust them. Isn't this a Christian nation? Am I wrong?""
+
+The refugee crisis has hung over all of Cruz's events for the past week as the Texas Republican tried to take the harshest anti-ISIS position. At the Harlan town hall, state Rep. Steve Holt said Cruz's advocacy was another reason why he supported Cruz for president.
+
+Holt told CNN that the U.S. should consider another Trump proposal this week -- closing down some mosques that foster Islamic extremism or anti-Americanism.
+
+""I'm a 20-year Marine, I'm a Republican. I'm not afraid of widows and orphans. I do fear for the safety of my country and the safety of my children,"" Holt said. ""I'll tell you, the compassionate thing to do would've been for President Obama to have a policy that would not lead to what were dealing with right now.""
+
+Other Iowans of faith struggled more openly with the balance. Michelle Steen, a 61-year-old greeter at the faith forum here, said she does want the Muslim refugees to eventually be sheltered by the West but that she understands the need for a short-term pause.
+
+Steen, who supports Carson, said she appreciated his analogy of airplane passengers securing their own oxygen mask during an emergency before helping their children or friends.
+
+""Let's get our country secure, and then we can help others,"" she said as evangelicals streamed into their seats. ""It'd be better to wait and just be safe about it.""
+
+A few feet away, Josh Byers, a 37-year-old pastor at Willowcreek Baptist Church in West Des Moines, said he too believed the U.S. put national security challenges before the dictums of his faith. He said he supported not allowing Syrian Muslims into the United States.
+
+But that doesn't mean the church can't forcefully back Syrians in need, helping to house the homeless and feed the hungry, even if they are not Christians.
+
+""The church's role is not to be the state. The state's role is not to be the church,"" Byers said. ""It's very clear scripiturally that that's the case, and practically, it works out pretty well, too.""",REAL
+7923,"Look out, Paul Ryan! Masochist Paul Nehlen is gunning for House speakership","— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) October 26, 2016 
+It wasn’t enough to go down in flames this past August when he ran to unseat Rep. Paul Ryan in Wisconsin; Aspiring congressman Paul Nehlen is apparently in the throes of full-on masochism. This just in: Paul Nehlen, defeated by Ryan in primary, to challenge @SpeakerRyan for House speaker. Ok then… pic.twitter.com/0Hq3vB2GIV 
+— Eliana Johnson (@elianayjohnson) October 26, 2016 Wow. Paul Nehlen announced he's challenging Paul Ryan for House Speaker pic.twitter.com/GDJ5cOW3qL 
+— Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) October 26, 2016 
+Speaker Ryan must be terrified right now. NOT A PARODY: Guy who Lost to Paul Ryan By 70 Points Announces Bid For Speaker https://t.co/tlDyib2Uio via @RightWisconsin 
+— Real Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) October 26, 2016 @elianayjohnson @Olivianuzzi @SpeakerRyan Well he only lost to Paul Ryan by 70% ""It was rigged"" 
+— Stacy R (@In2why) October 26, 2016 
+Wow. With such a proven track record, it’s no wonder Nehlen’s brimming with confidence. Apparently this is a Paul Nehlen from a parallel universe where Paul Ryan didn't kick his ass in the primary https://t.co/K2xIHqOMFQ",FAKE
+9208,Hillary and Bill Clinton: The «Bonnie and Clyde» of American Politics,"Wayne MADSEN | 03.11.2016 | WORLD Hillary and Bill Clinton: The «Bonnie and Clyde» of American Politics Whether the information originated from hacked e-mails and computer files or Freedom of Information Act requests, the revelations about the political and business activities of Hillary and Bill Clinton and their cronies hearken back to another era, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the crime spree of another unscrupulous couple: bank robbery desperados Bonnie and Clyde. Aside from Hillary Clinton running her own lucrative «off-the-books» foreign policy via her private email servers and e-mail chain of associates and flunkies, it was her and her husband’s joint Clinton Foundation and Teneo Capital operations that scream out the word «corruption.» The servers were merely a mechanism by which the Clintons ran their own «pay-to-play» racketeering operation, something that would have been the envy of a contemporary of Bonnie and Clyde, Chicago crime boss Al Capone. Teneo, which runs a hedge fund operation and a «private intelligence» service jam-packed with former Central Intelligence Agency operatives, is where Mrs. Clinton’s «gal pal» and aide Huma Abedin worked simultaneously to her government employment with the State Department. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe of 650,000 emails found on the laptop computer of disgraced former New York Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Abedin, is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg. While FBI agents pore through Abedin’s emails that were discovered on the laptop and looking Mrs. Clinton’s emails that were either not destroyed by her aides or which were never accounted for, the real story is the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation and Teneo. Five FBI field offices are investigating the racketeering of the foundation and the foreign connections of Teneo. The offices include New York; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Miami. Little Rock is the home of the Clinton Foundation, while New York is the home base of Teneo. The addition of the Miami field office to the Clinton probe is significant. One of Teneo Intelligence’s many global offices is located in Bogota, Colombia. A secretive Colombian private equity fund, «Fondo Acceso», financed by Mexican mega-billionaire Carlos Slim and Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, is run out of the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office. Tracking the money being fed into the Clinton Foundation may include proceeds from the illegal narcotics traffic in Colombia and other nearby countries. The Bogota activities of the Clinton Foundation, «Fondo Acceso», which ironically means «Access Fund», and Teneo appear to be concentrated in the Chico Business Park in the Colombian capital. Therefore, the involvement of the Miami office, in investigating Clinton Foundation funding, including the major donations from Slim and Giustra, makes a world of sense. Teneo was co-founded by longtime Bill Clinton associate Doug Band, who served in Clinton’s White House Counsel’s Office and later as Clinton’s chief aide in the Clinton Foundation and its associated Clinton Global Initiative. Band’s brother is Bill Clinton’s medical doctor who accompanies the ex-president on foreign trips. Doug Band was the point person who lobbied the incoming Barack Obama administration in 2008 to appoint Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at State ensured that there was little separation between her department, the Clinton Foundation and Global Initiative, and Teneo. Abedin served as Mrs. Clinton’s «transition team» leader as the Secretary of State left the department to launch her presidential candidacy after the November 2012 election. From that time on, Mrs. Clinton, Abedin, Doug Band, Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta, and others engaged in an email flurry to 1) ensure that the files in the private servers were either scrubbed or sanitized; 2) to officially sever all links between them and the Clinton Foundation and Teneo; and 3) to paint a picture for the public that all was well and legal with Mrs. Clinton’s term as America’s chief foreign policy executive. Unfortunately, the entire Clinton team has been exposed with the publication of emails from Mrs. Clinton’s swearing in as Secretary of State in 2009 to after she launched her campaign for the White House in 2013. The picture painted by the emails is one of modern-day gangsters milking everything they possibly could out of supposed public service. The FBI’s New York field office is also likely looking at Teneo’s dealings with other Clinton allies. It was Teneo that advised former New Jersey Democratic Governor Jon Corzine's MF Global investment firm as it was collapsing amid charges of major fraud by Corzine, a Clinton loyalist. It is also known as Mrs. Clinton communicated with President Obama over her private server and that Obama used a pseudonym. Obama lied to the American people when he stated that he first learned of the existence of Mrs. Clinton’s server from news media reports. There is little wonder why Obama has refused to condemn FBI director James Comey for re-launching his probe of the Clinton emails, based on the discovery of the additional traffic on Weiner’s laptop. Presidents who dug themselves deep into scandals by lying about «what they knew and when they knew it» helped sink the administration of Richard Nixon and almost cost Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton their presidencies. Obama was wise not to interfere in the FBI’s many criminal cases now building up like a tidal wave against Mrs. Clinton. The many Clinton scandals also involve the illegal shipment of U.S.- and foreign-manufactured weapons to jihadist rebels in Libya and Syria against U.S. law. When Clinton and Abedin oversaw the jihadist rebellions in both countries, the U.S. was subject to imposing a United Nations arms embargo directed against both civil war theaters. The sudden decision on October 5, 2016, by the Justice Department to drop all charges against the State Department-licensed Turi Defense Group of Arizona and its owner, Marc Turi, for violating U.S. law by shipping unregistered weapons to Libyan rebels, some of which were transferred to Syrian rebels by the CIA station in Benghazi, indicates that Attorney General Loretta Lynch wanted the Turi case to disappear before the November 8th election. The federal trial of Turi and his company was due to begin on November 8th. The indictment of Turi was brought in the U.S. Court for the District of Arizona in Phoenix. Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport was the scene of an impromptu and highly-questionable tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Lynch on June 27, 2016. Turi claims that approval for the secret weapons shipments to Libya and onward to Syria were personally approved by Mrs. Clinton and had a green light from the CIA. Any new email or other evidence that Mrs. Clinton authorized illegal weapons shipments to jihadist terrorists would have required the FBI to broaden its investigation of both Hillary and Bill Clinton, as well as Lynch. Mrs. Clinton may have violated federal law by permitting the shipment of weapons to belligerent parties in Libya and Syria; Mr. Clinton may have obstructed justice in talking to the Attorney General; and Lynch may have violated her oath of office in misusing her position as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. The Clinton scandal, in many ways, resembles the Iran-Contra episode more than it does Watergate. In Watergate, the cover-up by Nixon and his cronies, in many respects, was worse than the original crimes. In Iran-Contra, the arms and drugs smuggling crimes were equal to the cover-up, including the criminal role of then-Vice President George H. W. Bush in the entire affair. With the Clintons’ «E-mailgate», shipping U.S. weapons to terrorists and accepting foreign campaign donations from dodgy regimes in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Qatar are every bit as bad as the obvious ensuing cover-up by Hillary Clinton and her and her husband's cronies. If these many cases are what the FBI and its offices in Washington, New York, Little Rock, Los Angeles, Miami, and possibly Phoenix, are now looking at, the FBI director had every right and a constitutional responsibility to inform Congress and the voting public. And FBI director Comey has every right not to tip off to the Clinton gang what he and the bureau may have on them, evidence demanded now by Mrs. Clinton and her supporters. This evidence may become material to the impeachment of Mrs. Clinton from the office of president of the United States should she be elected on November 8 th . ",FAKE
+630,A Combative Donald Trump Shows Up at Tampa and Pittsburgh Rallies,"Some people who know Republican presumptive presidential nominee say he has two aspects: a thoughtful, charming private demeanor and an impulsive, inflammatory public persona. But now, two public images of Mr. Trump appear to be emerging: the scripted candidate who affirms conservative ideals and attacks presumptive Democratic nominee , and the free-wheeling headliner at rallies […]",REAL
+1971,First Take: Can a 'wacko bird' take flight in the GOP?,"He's combative. He rejects compromise as ""the mushy middle."" He's not inclined to wait his turn. And he doesn't seem to mind annoying his Republican elders with tactics that critics see as destructive and short-sighted.
+
+So perhaps it's no surprise that little more than two years after he was sworn in to the Senate, the 44-year-old Texan on Monday became the first contender to officially announce his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He skipped the one-step-at-a-time tradition of announcing an ""exploratory"" committee to declare flatly that he was in the race.
+
+""It's going to take a new generation of courageous conservatives to help make America great again,"" Cruz said in a 30-second video he posted on Twitter early Monday morning, followed by a speech at Liberty University, ""and I'm ready to stand with you to lead the fight.""
+
+He won't be lonely for long. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is slated to announce his candidacy in two weeks, likely followed in short order by yet another Republican senator, Marco Rubio of Florida. That's not to mention the governors (Wisconsin's Scott Walker, New Jersey's Chris Christie, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal), the former governors (Florida's Jeb Bush, Texas' Rick Perry, Arkansas' Mike Huckabee), the former senators (Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum) and the others who already are visiting Iowa and New Hampshire and hiring staffers for nascent campaigns.
+
+At his speech, a handful of students in a prominent front row sported red ""Stand With Rand"" sweatshirts.
+
+Cruz has been overshadowed in recent months by Bush, Walker and other contenders who have more muscular fundraising networks and stronger institutional support. In the Senate, he has been more of an agitator than a legislator. Arizona Sen. John McCain, the GOP's 2008 nominee, once called him a ""wacko bird.""
+
+That said, Cruz is worth watching.
+
+For one thing, the skills he honed as a college debater at Princeton — he was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year in 1992 — should serve him well in the series of crowded primary debates.
+
+For another, while his Tea Party credentials might be a mixed blessing in a general election, in the primaries they align him with the most energized forces in the Republican grass roots today. That helped him upset the establishment's favorite, lieutenant governor David Dewhurst, for the Republican Senate nomination in 2012.
+
+What's more, the locale Cruz chose to make Monday's announcement reflects his efforts to broaden his electoral base by wooing Christian conservatives, another key group in the GOP coalition. He spoke at the Lynchburg, Va., school founded by evangelical leader Jerry Falwell that describes itself on its website as the largest Christian university in the world.
+
+His speech had the ring of the religious testimony of an evangelical church. He declared his opposition to abortion and his support of traditional marriage. He emotionally described how his father's embrace of Jesus saved his parents' marriage. His father, Rafael, a pastor at a suburban Dallas church, fled Castro's Cuba in 1957.
+
+Cruz's Cuban-American heritage would be a selling point for the Republican Party as it tries to reach out to Hispanic voters, although his hardline stance on immigration could be a complication with those voters. And speaking of biography, he has an education that might surprise those inclined to dismiss him: He was graduated from Princeton and then from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, before clerking at the Supreme Court for Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
+
+At one point, he urged his audience to ""take out your cellphones"" and text the word ""Constitution"" or ""Liberty"" — ""we're flexible,"" he said — to a number linked to his campaign.",REAL
+4444,Bernie Sanders Got Republicans To Make His Argument For Universal Health Care,"WASHINGTON -- In their ongoing efforts to roll back or hamstring Obamacare, Republicans probably weren't hoping that the first Senate hearing on the matter this year would feature a self-described ""democratic socialist"" getting GOP witnesses to back a key argument for universal health care.
+
+Thursday's hearing of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions was devoted to the question of moving the full-time work standard under the Affordable Care Act from 30 hours a week to 40 hours, and whether more workers would be hurt by the higher or lower limit.
+
+But to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has long supported the creation of a universal health care system, battling over that particular point began to seem absurd, and he opened his remarks by noting that in every other developed country, such a debate would make no sense at all.
+
+""The argument of whether you provide health insurance to people who work 30 hours a week or whether they work 40 hours a week -- whoa,"" Sanders said. ""In every major country on Earth, health care is a right of all people.""
+
+With that as his premise, he then asked three of the hearing's witnesses -- two business owners and a school superintendent -- whether their lives and daily endeavors would be improved if government lifted from them the burden of providing health care to their workers.
+
+And despite all the GOP's cries and criticisms of ""socialized medicine"" when the Affordable Care Act was making its way through Congress years ago, the two Republican panelists agreed nearly as readily.
+
+""A question like that -- sure,"" said Betsy Webb, who runs the Bangor School Department in Maine. ""But what is the reality?""
+
+""The reality is that maybe it should not have to be the responsibility of the Bangor school district to provide health care, that maybe it should be a right of all of our people, whether they work at McDonald's in Bangor, whether they work for the school district, to have health care,"" said Sanders, before taking up the question with the next witness, Andrew Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants, which runs the Carl's Jr. and Hardee's chains.
+
+""If what you're saying, Senator, is that if we had a bill that was debated, that was vetted through congressional committees, and we looked at the health care system and really tried to come up with a more rational solution, I would say you're absolutely right,"" Puzder said.
+
+He allowed that he and Sanders ""might not agree on the ultimate solution,"" but when Sanders pressed Puzder on whether he would rather not have to worry about providing health care and instead focus on his products, the CEO was emphatic.",REAL
+9599,Saudi Arabia poised to be reelected to UN Human Rights Council,"Saudi Arabia poised to be reelected to UN Human Rights Council   Source: RT 
+As the death toll in Yemen surpasses 10,000, Saudi Arabia, one of the principal parties in the conflict, is poised to be reelected to the UN human rights body. Saudi airstrikes are responsible for the majority of the nearly 4,000 civilian deaths in Yemen. 
+A secret ballot vote at the UN General Assembly on Friday will select the 14 members of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), or a third of its 47 members. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, China, and Japan are running for the four seats from the Asia-Pacific region, and are all expected to secure seats. 
+Riyadh’s term at the UNHRC would be the third in a row, and its presence at the body has been increasingly puzzling to human rights groups, given its record of twisting arms at the UN to hush up its rights abuses. 
+In June, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon publicly admitted that Saudi Arabia threatened to withdraw funding from numerous programs due to an upcoming report on violations of children’s rights. The report would list the Arab kingdom among violators over the toll its military campaign and blockade of Yemen has taken on children. The threat resulted in Saudi Arabia’s removal from the blacklist, even though Riyadh’s tactics had been exposed. 
+“The report describes horrors no child should have to face,” Ban Ki-moon told reporters at the time. “At the same time, I also had to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would defund many UN programs.” 
+“It is unacceptable for UN member states to exert undue pressure,” the secretary-general added, pledging to review the removal of the Saudis from the list. 
+This incident of Saudi Arabia working against UN human rights efforts is far from being isolated. In Yemen, the kingdom used control of air traffic to prevent foreign journalists, employees of international aid organizations, and UN officials from visiting the war-torn country and reporting on the situation there. 
+In September, it used diplomatic pressure against the Netherlands after it introduced a resolution at the UNHRC that would launch an independent investigation into airstrikes on Yemen. The Dutch proposal failed and an Arab version was passed, one which entrusted the probe to the exiled Yemeni government, which the Saudis want to put back into power through its military actions. 
+Domestically, Riyadh’s policies often run against those of the UN human rights body. Seven petitions to allow special rapporteurs for the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights to investigate abuses in Saudi Arabia remain pending , some for over a decade. 
+The kingdom was also reported to persecute its own subjects who cooperate with UN investigations. For instance, human rights defender Mohammed al-Qahtani, who contributed to several UNHRC reports, was accused of things like “distorting the reputation of the country” and “provoking international organizations to adopt stances against the kingdom.” He is currently serving a lengthy prison term. 
+While far from being the only authoritarian regime with a seat at the UNHRC, Saudi Arabia maintains some of the most restrictive domestic policies. Homosexuality and conversion from Islam to another religion are punishable by death. Sentences include corporal punishment, as highlighted by the case of blogger Raif Badawi who is to be flogged 1,000 times while serving a 10-year sentence for “insulting Islam.” 
+Saudi Arabia is also one of the world’s most enthusiastic executors. The number of beheadings spiked under King Salman with 157 executions reported in 2015, and 124 between January and September 2016. Share This Article...",FAKE
+2984,"Boehner, McConnell split over NSA bill","With less than two weeks to go before the National Security Agency surveillance program's authority expires, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell -- who both stress the need for the program -- are at odds over how to renew it.
+
+The disagreement centers on whether it should be the responsibility of the government or telecommunications companies to store phone records. McConnell wants to see the current law extended as it is. Boehner, however, favors the USA Freedom Act, a law overwhelmingly passed by the House last week that would have the companies hold onto the data, which could only be accessed by intelligence agencies through authorization from special courts.
+
+Both Democratic and Republican proponents of the law admit that they aren't confident the dispute will be resolved in time to avoid a disruption in the program that was put in place after the 9/11 attacks.
+
+""The House had an overwhelmingly large vote for the USA Freedom Act. It's time for the Senate to act,"" Boehner said Tuesday after he was asked about McConnell's opposition to the law. ""I don't try to suggest what the Senate should or shouldn't do. But the Senate needs to act, and when they act, we'll get the next step.""
+
+Boehner sidestepped a question on whether he would support a short-term extension of the current law or another compromise proposal, repeating that the Senate needed to deal with the issue. It's an argument being echoed by Senate Democrats. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the third highest-ranking Senate Democrat, said McConnell was ""alone on an island"" and that the broad support for the USA Freedom Act in the House was like a ""boat"" being offered to McConnell to get off that island. Minority Leader Harry Reid also pointed to the strong bipartisan vote for the reform bill in the House and called the path in the Senate ""extremely clear."" Reid also referred to the current law as ""illegal,"" a reference to a recent federal appeals court ruling that Congress had not specifically authorized the data collection program when it approved the Patriot Act in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks. ""We should reform the NSA's illegal spying powers. Extending an illegal program would be deeply irresponsible, especially when bipartisan reform is on the table,"" Reid said. ""One hundred and ninety Republicans voted for it in the House. How can Republicans over here say that's not good enough?"" McConnell said Tuesday there would be a vote on the USA Freedom Act in the Senate this week, but while Schumer said ""almost all the Democrats"" would vote for the legislation, it is not clear the bill can get the 60 votes needed to clear the chamber. McConnell has put forward a bill to extend the current law as is for 60 days, a move supported by top Senate Republican leaders, but it is not clear whether that bill has enough support to pass, either. Sen. Mitch McConnell speaks to members of the media after a weekly Senate Republican Policy Luncheon in December 2014 in Washington. For 30 years, McConnell has represented Kentucky in the Senate, and this year he went from minority leader to majority leader after the GOP swept to power in the midterm elections. Click through to see other moments from McConnell's political career. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, left, McConnell, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Senate Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, pose for photos at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on March 3, the day of Netanyahu's controversial speaking engagement before a joint session of Congress. President Barack Obama sits beside McConnell before a meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House on January 13. A voter gives a thumbs-down as McConnell votes in the midterm elections in November 2014 in Louisville, Kentucky. McConnell waves to a crowd while riding with his wife, Elaine Chao, in the Hopkins Country Veterans Day Parade in November 2014 in Madisonville, Kentucky. McConnell and Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, his Democratic opponent in the 2014 election, sit with ""Kentucky Tonight"" host Bill Goodman before their debate in October in Lexington. McConnell talks with supporters at a campaign rally in Hindman, Kentucky, during a two-day bus tour of the eastern part of the state in August 2014. McConnell walks with ""America's Got Talent"" contestant Jimmy Rose to a news conference on the economic ramifications of the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed power plant rules in July 2014. McConnell and Chao wave to supporters at a victory celebration following McConnell's victory in the Republican senatorial primary on May 20, 2014, in Louisville, Kentucky. McConnell carries a musket onstage before his speech during the American Conservative Union's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, in March 2014. McConnell and fellow Republican Rand Paul, Kentucky's junior senator, attend an event in the East Room of the White House in July 2013. McConnell points to a stack of papers representing what he says are the regulations associated with the Affordable Care Act as he speaks at the 2013 CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and McConnell listen during a dedication ceremony of the statue of former President Gerald Ford at the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in May 2011. McConnell answers questions from reporters at the Capitol in September 2007. McConnell introduces then-President George W. Bush at a National Republican Senatorial Committee Reception in Washington in October 2006. Then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, center, is flanked by McConnell, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and then-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, as he speaks to reporters after a Senate vote in May 2005. McConnell poses with wife Elaine Chao at the 128th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville in May 2002. McConnell, left, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, Vice President Dick Cheney, President George W. Bush, Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-South Carolina, and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois, are pictured during Bush's inauguration to his first term on January 20, 2001. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Connecticut, and McConnell hammer the ""first nails"" into a piece of wood during a nail-driving ceremony in December 2000 on Capitol Hill. Both senators participated in the ceremony to signify the beginning of construction of the 2001 Inaugural platform on the West Front Terrace of the U.S. Capitol. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, and McConnell enter the ""Old Senate Chamber"" in January 1999 to attend a bipartisan caucus to possibly establish rules and guidelines for the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. House leaders say they plan to wrap up work and leave town Thursday for a week-long recess for the Memorial Day holiday, potentially before the Senate votes. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr said Monday he is trying to find a compromise that would keep the data in the hands of the government for now but eventually transition it to the phone companies. He said if the Senate passes that bill or a separate short-term extension, the House could approve it when it reconvenes June 1 and not cause significant disruption to the surveillance program. Such a plan is not likely to sit well with House members, who feel their big vote last week was a clear signal of what the House feels should become law. ""They ought to take the House-passed bill, which was passed overwhelmingly in bipartisan fashion, and pass that bill,"" said Maryland Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer, the second highest-ranking House Democrat. But he said he didn't believe the Senate would be able to pass any NSA bill this week, citing a threat from Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul to filibuster an extension. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, who supports a clean extension of the Patriot Act, downplayed Paul's ability to block the bill. ""He'll get a lot of publicity for a day or so, but it won't affect the process overall,"" he said. McCain was also asked what the split over the issue says about the Republican Party. ""It says that we ought to get our act together,"" McCain replied. John Boehner has been the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2011, making him second in line for the presidency, behind the vice president. On September 25, Boehner told colleagues he's stepping down as speaker and will leave Congress at the end of October. Look back at his career in politics so far. Pope Francis walks with Speaker Boehner and Vice President Joe Biden after delivering a speech to Congress in Washington on September 24. Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani (right) expresses his country's gratitude for America's fiscal commitment and military sacrifices during an address to a joint meeting of the United States Congress with Vice President Joe Biden (left) and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol March 25 in Washington. U.S. President Barack Obama walks with Speaker of the House John Boehner as they depart the annual Friend's of Ireland luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 17. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House John Boehner await the arrival of President Barack Obama for the State of The Union address on January 20 in the House Chamber of the Capitol. The image of the Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) is displayed in a monitor of a camera as he talks with reporters in his office in the Capitol in November 2014 in Washington. Boehner blasts conservative groups during a press conference in December 2013 after passing a compromise budget deal aimed at removing the threat of another government shutdown. Fed up with criticism from conservative advocates, Boehner said they were ""misleading their followers."" He followed up with: ""Frankly, I just think that they've lost all credibility."" Reporters question Boehner as he arrives at the U.S. Capitol as the government stalemate continued in October 2013. President Obama signed a bill on October 17 that ended the 16-day shutdown and raised the debt ceiling. Boehner speaks to the media after a meeting with President Obama at the White House in October 2013, the second day of the federal government's recent shutdown. The White House squared off with Republican rivals in Congress over how to fund federal agencies, many of which were forced to close, leaving a fragile economy at risk. Boehner is sworn in as the speaker of the House after his re-election in January 2013. Boehner presents golfing legend Arnold Palmer with the Congressional Gold Medal at a special ceremony in the Rotunda of the Capitol in September 2012. On January 5, 2011, Boehner wipes away tears as he waits to receive the gavel from outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, during the first session of the 112th Congress. Boehner hugs his wife, Debbie, after addressing the crowd at the NRCC Election Night watch party on November 2, 2010, when Republicans took back control of the House of Representatives. Boehner met his wife in college, and they have been married since 1973. Boehner voices his concerns about the health care reform bill championed by Obama during a news conference in Washington on October 29, 2009. Boehner, an avid golfer, talks with Tiger Woods while golfing at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2009. Boehner, center, looks on as President Barack Obama speaks with then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in the East Room of the White House on February 23, 2009. Boehner and Obama have butted heads over the years. Boehner, center, and fellow Republican House members sing Boehner's birthday song during a news conference on Capitol Hill on November 17, 2006. Boehner served as the House Minority Leader from 2007 to 2011. Boehner answers questions during an interview with Bloomberg in Washington on June 29, 2005. President George W. Bush signs into law the federal education bill No Child Left Behind at a high school in Hamilton, Ohio, in 2002. The law offered the promise of improved schools for the nation's poor and minority children and better-prepared students in a competitive world. Boehner, second from right, backed the bill. Boehner and House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, listen to House Speaker Newt Gingrich at a 1997 news conference with entrepreneurs promoting the GOP tax relief plan. Boehner dumps out coal, which he called a Christmas gift to President Clinton, during a news conference about the federal budget on December 21, 1995. Many government services and agencies were closed at the end of 1995 and beginning of 1996 as a Republican-led Congress battled Clinton over spending levels. Boehner at a Capitol Hill news conference on February 6, 1995. He has had a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1990. Before that he was a member of the Ohio State House of Representatives for six years. Boehner, R-Ohio, holds a copy of the Constitution on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 7, 1992, as Sen. Don Nickles, D-Oklahoma, looks on. Both men proclaimed it was a historic day when the Michigan House ratified the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, which would require that any Congressional pay raises not go into effect until after the next election.",REAL
+1830,Rick Santorum hopes 99-county Iowa tour leads to success,"Lyon County gave the former Pennsylvania Senator his biggest margin of victory in the 2012 Iowa caucuses, winning by 62%. The county, Santorum said, ""Stood with us from the very beginning ... I'm just coming back to say thank you, Lyon County, for the wonderful support.""
+
+A visit to all 99 counties, dubbed ""the full Grassley"" after Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who visits every county every year, is an important organizing tactic to candidates looking to get to know voters in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. Santorum is the first 2016 presidential candidate to complete the challenge, his second time personally completing the feat
+
+Republican Party of Iowa co-chairman Dr. Cody Hoefert told CNN a visit to all 99 counties is ""critically important"" for candidates.
+
+""It quite often turns out that the candidate that spends the most time, effort, and energy in Iowa tends to get rewarded on caucus night,"" Hoefert said.
+
+If that's true, his efforts have yet to show in the polls. In a recent CNN/ORC poll of likely caucus-goers, Santorum had just 1% of support. In that same poll, 66% of respondents said they were still trying to decide who to support. This cycle, Santorum faces competition from other social conservatives in the race, including neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who won the caucuses in 2008. The former senator defended his standing in the polls to reporters, noting that his 99-county tour has been focused on building out the campaign's organization at the grassroots level. ""It's a long, arduous process... People say, 'Oh, you're just trying to check a box.' No, no, no. This is how you win caucuses,"" Santorum said. ""You meet people and you connect with folks like we have here in Lyon County, and then you recruit other folks to be your caucus chairs, to recruit other folks to speak for you in the caucuses. All of those things are sort of the nuts and bolts go unseen in a race like this that don't pay off five months before the election, they pay off five days before the election and on caucus night."" In his pitch to the 200 or so Iowans assembled, Santorum focused on his record and work in elected office, particularly on social issues. ""Let me assure you if you look at my track record, for 15 or 20 years, I have been standing up and taking the slings and arrows, not just for the right to life, not just on partial birth or things like the Born Alive Protection Act. But for marriage,"" said Santorum, who served in the House and Senate from 1995 until 2007. Asked about the support for outsider candidates during what's been called the ""summer of discontent,"" he said, ""People are ticked off."" ""They're understandably saying we just want someone new, somebody that can shake things up and then you'll hear candidates who for one reason or another are folks that they trust will actually do something different.""",REAL
+8198,FBI Director Comey Ignored DOJ’s Warning Against Releasing Info On Hillary Email (TWEETS),"Subscribe 
+On Friday, FBI Director James Comey told Congress that his agency had discovered emails that could potentially be related to the flap over Hillary Clinton’s email server. In the 24 hours since then, most of the discussion hasn’t been over the emails, but over whether Comey acted appropriately when he made this disclosure. Well, a front page story in Sunday morning’s edition of The New York Times reveals that Comey’s bosses at the Justice Department believed this letter was manifestly improper . 
+The reason? Comey’s letter risked running afoul of a longstanding DOJ policy that strongly discourages commenting on politically sensitive investigations within 60 days of an election. It is a policy that has been maintained by both Democratic and Republican administrations in order to avoid even the appearance of partisanship. We can all agree, however, that if there is any case for an exception, it would be if there was a potentially earth-shaking development in a politically-charged investigation. 
+But based on what has emerged since Friday, Comey’s letter didn’t even begin to meet that standard. According to The Times, the FBI is in the process of getting court permission to review emails it seized from the laptop of longtime Hillary aide Huma Abedin while investigating her estranged husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner, for sexting with a North Carolina teenager. Investigators don’t know as of yet whether those emails contain classified information, or whether it even potentially rose to the level of criminal misconduct. Additionally, there is virtually no chance that such a review will be complete before the election. 
+That explains why Comey’s draft letter, which was prepared on Thursday, sent eyebrows into hairlines at the DOJ. According to CNN, department staffers told Comey that Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates opposed sending the letter . They told Comey in no uncertain terms that under the circumstances, the letter ran counter to the longstanding policy about politically sensitive investigations. However, according to The Times, Comey believed that the emails would almost certainly be leaked–and the FBI would be accused of misleading Congress. 
+However, a number of former DOJ officials think Comey made an egregious blunder. I already told you that Matthew Miller, the former chief spokesman for the DOJ under Lynch’s predecessor, Eric Holder, condemned the letter in the strongest terms on Friday. But Comey has been condemned by veterans of Republican administrations as well. One of them, George Terwilliger III, the deputy attorney general for the last two years of the George H. W. Bush administration, was particularly baffled by Comey’s move. Terwilliger said that while the guidelines on politically sensitive investigations can make for “hard decisions” at times, there was “a difference between flying independent and flying solo.” 
+Kurt Eichenwald of Vanity Fair and Newsweek revealed on Twitter that a number of FBI agents are up in arms over this letter as well. Word from inside @FBI . FURIOUS at Comey, think he's mishandled public revelations from get go. ""Outrageous incompetence"" one agent told me. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 If Comey doesn't get ahead of this, going to have a mutiny at @FBI . ""This is why u say 'We dont talk about investigations'"" one told me…. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 …his original decision to lay out info on clinton case, then opine on what it meant outside of criminal findings, infuriated these folks.. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 Re: anger within @FBI at Comey. I am getting this at the Special Agent, ASAC and SAC level. Those are the troops. (Most of em GOPrs)…. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 …for Comey to have so angered ppl at the field office level is really, really bad. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 If Comey's improper comment on ongoing investigation changes polls, @FBI reputation as apolitical will never recover cause of his screwup. 
+— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 
+Based on what we now know, this anger is easy to understand. Apparently Comey was so worried about the potential fallout that he felt compelled to brief Congress before his people even knew whether there was any there there, let alone before getting a court to allow them to find out what was in those emails. If that’s the case, then Comey’s judgment appears curious at best. You would think the FBI would be able to keep a lid on an investigation this explosive. 
+Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, suggested that the Donald forced Comey’s hand . If Comey was so afraid of being the victim of a Twitter attack from Trump and his alt-right army that it felt the need to throw fundamental fairness and time-honored precedent out the window, as well as leave his own agents on an island, then there is something fundamentally wrong. 
+( featured image courtesy FBI Flickr feed, part of public domain) About Darrell Lucus 
+Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC . Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook . Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello. Connect",FAKE
+4520,Bill Maher on Charlie Hebdo attacks: “There are no great religions; they’re all stupid and dangerous”,"The political comedian, who is promoting the upcoming season of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” was responding to the attack on Charlie Hebdo, which left 12 people dead, 11 wounded and is viewed as a direct attack on freedom of speech.
+
+“This has to stop, and unfortunately, a lot of the liberals, who are my tribe — I am a proud liberal–” Maher began.
+
+“He’s about to turn on you,” Kimmel joked.
+
+“No, I’m not turning on them,” Maher continued. “I’m asking them to turn toward the truth, as I have been for quite a while. I’m the liberal in this debate. I’m for free speech. To be a liberal, you have to stand up for liberal principles. It’s not my fault that the part of the world that is most against liberal principles is the Muslim part of the world.”
+
+Maher contended that most Muslims would not carry out such an attack, but claimed that “hundreds of millions of them” support attacks of this manner. Maher called for a complete condemnation of the attack, and broadened his view to the dangers of all religion. “We have to stop saying when something like this that happened in Paris today, we have to stop saying, well, we should not insult a great religion,” Maher said. “First of all, there are no great religions; they’re all stupid and dangerous. And we should insult them, and we should be able to insult whatever we want. That is what free speech is like.”",REAL
+2555,Judge orders Obama administration to release illegal immigrants from 'deplorable' facilities,"A federal judge in California has ruled that hundreds of illegal immigrant women and children in U.S. holding facilities should be released, another apparent setback for President Obama’s immigration policy, according to The Los Angeles Times.
+
+U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee said Friday that the conditions in which the detainees are being held are “deplorable” and violate parts of an 18-year-old court settlement that put restrictions on the detention of migrant children.
+
+The ruling also raises questions about what the administration will do with the estimated 1,700 parents and children at three detention facilities, two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania.
+
+Last year, tens of thousands of women and unaccompanied minors from Central America arrived at the Southwest border, with many believing a rumor that unaccompanied children and single parents with at least one child would be allowed to stay.
+
+More than 68,000 of them were apprehended and detained while officials decided whether they had a right to stay.
+
+Many were being released and told to appear at immigration offices until the administration eventually opened new detention centers.
+
+Gee said in her ruling that children in the two Texas facilities had been held in substandard conditions and gave the administration until Aug. 3 to respond.
+
+“We are disappointed with the court's decision and are reviewing it in consultation with the Department of Justice,” Marsha Catron, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in a prepared statement given to The Times.
+
+Many of the Central Americans who crossed the Southwest border illegally last summer said they were fleeing poverty and escalating gang violence.
+
+The Texas facilities are run by private companies, while the one in Pennsylvania is run by a county government.
+
+In February, a federal judge blocked Obama's 2012 executive action to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from being deported.
+
+And a federal appeals court in New Orleans refused three months later to allow the program to go forward, denying an administration request to lift the lower court decision.
+
+Gee’s decision is also seen as a victory for the immigrant rights lawyers who brought the case.
+
+The ruling upholds a tentative decision Gee made in April and comes a week after the two sides told her that they failed to reach a new settlement agreement as she had requested.
+
+The 1997 settlement bars immigrant children from being held in unlicensed, secure facilities. Gee found that settlement covered all children in the custody of federal immigration officials, even those being held with a parent.
+
+The Justice Department had argued it was necessary to modify the settlement and use detention to try to deter more immigrants from coming to the border after last year's surge. The department also said it was an important way to keep families together while their immigration cases were being reviewed, but the judge rejected that argument in her decision.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5792,Fierce Homeless Woman Guarding Trump's Star from Future Vandals Flashes 'Trump-Worthy' Reason for It,"Share on Twitter 
+Earlier this week, someone claiming his name was Jamie Otis vandalized Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood “Walk of Fame.” 
+He pretended to be a construction worker, and attacked the terrazzo and cement star early Wednesday morning with a pickaxe and a sledgehammer. Donald Trump's Walk of Fame star destroyed, police investigate https://t.co/xFfCOdz1iZ pic.twitter.com/qJOsbbjTHp — FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) October 27, 2016 
+While police searched for Otis, who is likely to be charged with a felony, the star was surrounded by caution tape. Police have monitored the scene as well. But for one homeless woman, that wasn't enough ... 
+The unnamed woman now stands guard at the star, protecting it from further damage and showing her support for Trump through a number of handwritten signs: Very powerful!Homeless Trump Supporter guards Trump's star on Hollywood Blvd... ""20 million illegals and Americans sleep on streets"" pic.twitter.com/XsDmiMCUNs — America First! (@America_1st_) October 27, 2016 
+“20 million illegals and Americans sleep on streets in tents.” Homeless woman guards Trump's Hollywood star, surrounded by iPhone &sack of cheap Forever21 clothes, all foreign-made. — Deplorable KYGrifter (@KyGrifter) October 27, 2016 
+""Did Hillary have sex with that woman senator Weiner's wife. 
+Can Americans go to Mexico for jobs housing medicine."" A homeless person guards Trumps star in Hollywood. Even the homeless love Trump. #AmericaFirst #MAGA pic.twitter.com/s4sJ1rNElO — Deplorable Vet (@KGBVeteran) October 27, 2016 
+“You racist mother-f**kers vote Trump.” — Apafarkas Agmánd (@ApafarkasAgmand) October 27, 2016 
+“U mother-f**kers know!!! Take care home first. Vote Trump. F**k Mexico.” — Sunflower Girl (@X5MSport15) October 27, 2016 
+According to the LAPD, vandal James Otis was arrested on Thursday. ABC News reported that Otis — heir to the Otis Elevator family and grandson of the man who invented Listerine — remains unapologetic for his actions. He gave a brief statement with his attorney present: 
+""I'm not at all ashamed of what I've done. What Mr. Trump has done is he's derailed the entire election. I got so upset. I got so frustrated and angry and that's why I did this. 
+I admitted my mistakes. And I'm now dealing with my consequences. Unlike Mr. Trump who has never admitted what he's done."" 
+Otis also claimed that his intent was to auction off the Trump nameplate after he removed it from the sidewalk, giving the proceeds to the women that Trump has allegedly sexually assaulted. However, he was forced to return the nameplate upon his arrest Thursday. ",FAKE
+10311,"Saudi ambassador to the UAE: Any contact with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon should be checked","Email 
+
+According to a report by an Emirati media website, Emarat Al-Youm, Saudi ambassador to the UAE said in a press interview that any contact with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon and even making telephone conversations with these countries’ officials by the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, should first be checked carefully and approved by the General-Secretariat of the organization in Riyadh.",FAKE
+3952,14 dead as Islamic rebels attack in Philippines,"MANILA, Philippines — Christmas attacks by Muslim rebels in Christian villages in the southern Philippines left at least 14 people dead and may have been partly influenced by the notoriety of the Islamic State group, officials said Saturday.
+
+The dead included nine Christian villagers separately gunned down by Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighter insurgents and at least five rebels killed by government forces in clashes in three provinces on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, said regional military spokeswoman Capt. Joan Petinglay.
+
+About 200 rebels took part in at least eight attacks on Thursday and Friday, Petinglay said by phone. She said the military learned about the impending attacks and secured towns and villages and warned villagers not to venture out, preventing a larger number of casualties.
+
+""We learned that the BIFF had plans to attack civilians and our detachments so we went on heightened alert even before Christmas,"" Petinglay said. ""That prevented the rebels from attacking villages and inflicting more casualties.""
+
+Despite warnings from the military, five farmers went to their farms Thursday to spray insecticide on their crops in Maguindanao province and were captured and gunned down by the rebels, she said.
+
+In a nearby village in Esperanza town in Sultan Kudarat province, rebels fleeing from army troops took a family hostage on Thursday, freeing a mother and her child but killing three men. A village official was also gunned down by the militants late Thursday in a village in North Cotabato province.
+
+Villagers in one area hid in a Roman Catholic church after word of the rebel assaults spread, Petinglay said.
+
+At least four rebels died in a clash when they assaulted a military outpost in Esperanza town on Thursday, sparking a gunbattle, the military said. One other wounded rebel was reported to have died in a village clinic, according to Petinglay.
+
+Two homemade bombs were left by the militants in a jungle trail where pursuing army troops would pass, but the soldiers found the explosives, she said.
+
+The hard-line rebels broke off from the larger Moro Islamic Liberation Front several years ago when they opposed the latter's decision to hold peace talks with the Philippine government, opting to continue to fight for a separate homeland in the south for minority Muslims in the predominantly Catholic Philippines.
+
+A Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighter spokesman said last year that his group supports Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq.
+
+Government peace talks negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer said the breakaway rebels may have carried out the attacks to ride on the restiveness fostered by the Islamic State group and to exploit delays in the enforcement of a peace deal signed by the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front last year.
+
+""They're riding on the ferment of (the Islamic State) and, second, they see uncertainties precisely because of the delay and they want to generate some momentum,"" Ferrer told The Associated Press.
+
+The latest attacks were the most brazen by the breakaway rebels since a military offensive against their group left more than 100 gunmen dead early this year. The rebel faction still has about 100 armed fighters who may have been joined by relatives and new recruits to stage the attacks, the military said.
+
+Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.",REAL
+3431,"Political paralysis is the new normal: The GOP’s Scalia gamble may be suicidal, but it’s not illogical","According to numerous scholars who have weighed in since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia over the weekend, historical and constitutional precedent indicates that the president of the United States is elected for a four-year term, and does not stop being president until he or she, um, actually leaves office. That’s a hot take on a controversial topic, I know! It’s nearly as confusing as the question of who was president at the time of the 9/11 attacks, which Marco Rubio seems to think took place during some extended Bill Clinton prequel to “The Hangover,” while George W. Bush wore funny costumes and did non-alcoholic Jell-O shots and kept forgetting he had taken the oath of office.
+
+But history’s bunk, as Henry Ford sorta, kinda said nearly a century ago. And so is reality, at least when it comes to politics in 2016, a year whose revolutionary strangeness demands a new descriptive term. “Postmodern” is way too old-fashioned, too ‘90s. Our politics are increasingly post-partisan, post-rational, post-factual and even post-political. Even the New York Times has noticed. In a story published Tuesday about the running battle over judicial appointments between the Obama administration and the Republican leadership of the Senate, reporter Charlie Savage wonderingly observed that “history is no longer a guide in a polarized Washington, where partisan warfare over judicial nominations has been escalating for more than a generation.”
+
+That qualifies as what Friedrich Nietzsche would have called a “daybreak” moment, the dawning of a new awareness. (I agree that I quote him too much; that’s it for now.) Please notice the inherent contradiction in Savage’s sentence: “History” is no longer a guide because it is no longer history, that is, because the lessons that a mainstream commentator is supposed to draw from history no longer reflect what has actually happened. The Republican Party’s long-term strategy of paralysis, refusal and denial — of crushing all lingering vestiges of democracy under a sodden weight of nihilism and apathy — is the new normal.
+
+That strategy stretches back at least as far as the Bill Clinton years, and has gone into Koch-funded steroid overdrive in the Citizens United era. As its zillionaire funders clearly grasp, that strategy represents the GOP’s best hope for repeated midterm victories and a stranglehold on congressional power into the indefinite future. It’s the strategy that produced the Koch brothers’ greatest single victory, to set against their more visible record of bankrolling losers like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush (and, most likely, Marco Rubio). That victory was, of course, the 37 percent turnout in the 2014 midterms, when both Democrats and moderate Republicans stayed home in droves and the GOP won its largest congressional majority since 1931.
+
+So I don’t think it’s quite right to describe the Republican leadership’s vow to reject any possible Supreme Court nominee put forward by President Obama during his last year in office as unprecedented or particularly surprising. It’s useless to talk about precedent as if that word meant something these days, for starters. There is no relevant precedent for anything happening in American politics right now, except perhaps for some limited parallels one could identify in the severely divided nation of the 1850s, on the cusp of the Civil War.
+
+As far as surprise goes, give me a break. Do I take a cynical view of all the expressions of amazement and righteous indignation from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and every other leading Democrat and the entire leftward half of the commentariat? Sure I do: They sense political opportunity and the chance to shoot a flattering selfie with the Constitution behind them. Which is fair play and all, but let’s not mistake it for high-minded principle. It might be fair to give Sanders an asterisk on this one, but the Democratic Party as a whole has been a junior partner or fellow traveler in the politics of paralysis, and has done virtually nothing to resist it.
+
+It’s no secret that the current Republican leadership in Congress is essentially held hostage by the most extreme elements of its base. We have all forgotten about John Boehner, for understandable reasons, but please remember that the duly elected speaker of the House was forced to quit for being not enough of a do-nothing obstructionist. For any elected Republican to offer a fair hearing to any Obama nominee at any level of government is tantamount to treason; half the Republican electorate apparently believes that Obama is not a United States citizen and not the lawful president in the first place. What proportion of them believes that Obama had Scalia murdered in order to ban all guns, open the borders and institute Sharia law remains unclear. (“I’m hearing it’s a big topic,” says Donald Trump, fueling a new bump in the polls.) And here we are, facing a Supreme Court vacancy after the death of the most conservative justice in recent history — or ever, quite likely — under the aforementioned lame-duck Islamo-Democratic so-called president.
+
+Whether the Republicans can successfully run out the clock on the Obama administration without paying a devastating political price remains to be seen. It’s a massive gamble, a game of Russian roulette played with four or five bullets in a six-shooter. But their vow to do so is the logical fulfillment of their party’s long-term commitment to paralysis as politics, and it comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody in Washington. If that tactic poses unknowable hazards for the GOP in general and its presidential nominee in particular, that’s not because it is qualitatively different from what they’ve been doing for years. It’s only because it thrusts the nihilistic strategy of the right-wing conserva-trolls who have eaten the Republican Party’s soul into the public’s face in blatant and unavoidable fashion. Honestly, it was more surprising to hear Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, take half a step back from the GOP hive-mind on Tuesday and suggest he might actually fulfill his constitutional role to hold hearings on an Obama nominee. Once upon a time, Grassley came off as a right-wing zealot among Senate Republicans. Now he’s a congenial bipartisan man of reason, not to mention an 82-year-old incumbent who faces a tough reelection fight in a purple state that Obama carried twice. Let’s not waste any compassion on Grassley, because he deserves to ride the slippery slide of ignominy however that happens. But I feel sorry for the folks who are fielding all the outraged phone calls in his Capitol Hill office right now. I don’t know whether it’s too late for some Tea Party firebrand to mount a Republican primary challenge in Iowa, but I guarantee that question is being pondered right now. It’s tempting to express delight at the current GOP dilemma, where Republicans would seem to face death by fire from the pitchfork-bearing faithful if they move forward with an Obama Supreme Court nominee, and death in the frigid ocean of a national election if they don’t. It’s tempting if you’re wearing ideological blinders, that is, and if you assume that the Democratic Party, even in its divided and eviscerated state, is guaranteed to reap a glorious victory after a lemming-like wave of Republican mass suicide. I don’t think that’s a safe assumption. Our entire bipartisan political system is in dire and potentially terminal condition, and as I keep insisting there are ample reasons to believe that the virus that has destroyed one party has also infected the other, albeit in less dramatic fashion. We’re already in a year when the Republicans seem likely to nominate a lunatic demagogue who is despised by the entire party leadership — and who, whatever he is, is not a “conservative” by anyone’s definition — and when a septuagenarian Jewish socialist is one or two victories away from being the Democratic front-runner. What will come of Obama’s impending Supreme Court nomination, and who will inherit the resulting mess next January? I have no idea. But if you still think political normalcy is about to reassert itself, any minute now, I have two words for you: Hi, Jeb!",REAL
+949,Donald Trump’s avenging angels: How the orange-haired monster has rewritten the history of American conservatism,"Now, historians must begin to consider alternate genealogies of the American right: lineages for the orange-haired monster that no one saw coming. Our received narrative of the movement encompassed by Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley and Strom Thurmond and Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan just doesn’t cut it any longer.  I’ve done my best to begin the work—thinking through, for instance, Trumpism’s connection to fascism, a political tradition not heretofore considered all that relevant in the American context. Other bodies, however, are buried closer to home.
+
+No history of modern conservatism I’m aware of finds much significance in the 22,000 Nazi sympathizers who rallied for Hitler at Madison Square Garden in February 1939, presided over by a giant banner of General George Washington that stretched almost all the way to the second deck, capped off by a menacing eagle insignia. Nor the now-infamous Ku Klux Klan march through the streets of Queens in 1927, when The New York Times reported “1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all,” in which according to one contemporary news report all the individuals arrested were wearing Klan attire, and that one of those arrestees was Donald Trump’s own father.
+
+In the specter of the son’s likely ascension as Republican nominee, however, such events gather significance. Consider the subsequent history of Fred Trump’s career as a developer of middle-class housing in the outer boroughs of New York City. We now know Fred Trump was notorious enough a racist to draw the attention of Woody Guthrie, who wrote a song about him in the 1950s: “I suppose/ Old Man Trump knows/ Just how much/ Racial Hate/ he stirred up/ In the bloodpot of human hearts/ When he drawed/ That color line/ Here at his/ Eighteen hundred family project.”
+
+Twenty years later—by which time he had brought his son in as his apprentice—the hate Old Man Trump stirred in the bloodpot of human hearts became a matter of legal record, when the United States Justice Department sued Trump père et fils for violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in operating 39 buildings they owned. Testifying in his own defense, young Donald (who would soon be seen around town in a chauffeured limousine with a license plate reading “DJT”), testified that he was “unfamiliar” with the landmark law. As the evidence in the federal case against the Trump organization became close to incontrovertible, he told the press the suit was a conspiracy to force them “to rent to welfare recipients,” a form of “reverse discrimination.” This proud and open refusal to rent to welfare recipients—whom he said contribute to “the detriment of tenants who have, for many years, lived in these buildings, raised families in them, and who plan to live there”—was Donald Trump’s defense against racism.
+
+It is in this saga that we locate the formation of Donald Trump’s mature political vision of the world, in continuity with America’s racist and nativist heyday of the 1920s, and within the context of a cultural world much more familiar to us: New York in the 1970s, that raging cauldron of skyrocketing violent crime, subway trains slathered with graffiti, and a fiscal crisis so dire that even police were laid off in mass—then the laid off cops blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, deflating car tires, and yanking keys from car ignitions.
+
+Think of Trump coming of age in the New York of the 1977 blackout, the search for the Son of Sam, and Howard Cosell barking out “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” during game two of the World Series at Yankee stadium as a helicopter hovered over a five-alarm fire at an abandoned elementary school (40 percent of buildings in the Bronx were destroyed by the end of the 1970s, mostly via arson—often torched by landlords seeking insurance windfalls).
+
+Think of Trump learning about the ins and outs of public life in this New York, a city of a frightened white outer-borough middle-class poised between fight or flight, in which real estate was everywhere and always a battleground, when the politics of race and crime bore all the intensity of civil war.
+
+In The Invisible Bridge I wrote about what it was like in this New York in 1974, the summer when the federal lawsuit against the Trumps was approaching its climax, the summer when a controversial new movie began packing theaters across the five boroughs.
+
+Two years later came an even darker, and considerably more critical, portrait of New York City’s escalating culture of vigilantism. In Taxi Driver, a deranged Vietnam veteran speaks what must have been the unspoken inner monologue of any number of real-life New Yorkers who felt trapped in an urban sewer: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Pistol in hand, he rehearses his revenge in the mirror: “Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it any more. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up.”
+
+When, around that time, Wall Street Journal columnist Irving Kristol coined the phrase “a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality”—a bowdlerization of the older adage “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”—he probably didn’t have Charles Bronson in mind, let alone taxi driver Travis Bickle. Nonetheless the politics is all of a piece. Charles Bronson conservatism, Travis Bickle conservatism, the conservatism of avenging angels protecting white innocence in a  “liberal” metropolis gone mad: this is New York City’s unique contribution to the history of conservatism in America, an ideological tradition heretofore unrecognized in the historical literature. But without it, we cannot understand the rise of Donald Trump.
+
+Trump’s political debut, after all, came in response to a mugging. Following the infamous attack on a female jogger in Central Park, Trump purchased full pages in four New York newspapers demanding, “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” All the hallmarks of his present crusade against “political correctness” were in evidence, such as the harkening to that bygone day when men were men, cops were cops, and punks were punks. He concluded: “I miss the feeling of security New York’s finest once gave the citizens of this City.” As I previously reported, these same police straight-jacketed by liberal timorousness had already coerced the rape suspects into confessions later proven to be false.
+
+That’s N.Y.C.’s avenging-angel conservatism in a nutshell. And now that Trump is gliding toward an expected landslide in the New York primary on Tuesday, April 19, we must begin the work of excavating its history.
+
+We might start with William F. Buckley—though other scholars can surely date it back further. The National Review editor’s quixotic campaign for New York mayor in 1965 is best remembered for a self-effacing quip. (“What will you do if you win?” he was asked. “Demand a recount.”) Buckley himself is now celebrated as the genteel warrior of the conservatism of a more civilized age: The New York Times, upon his death in 2008, averred of that 1965 race, “He injected a rare degree of lofty oratory into city politics.”
+
+What he also injected was an unprecedented reactionary thuggishness. Like his idea to “undertake to quarantine all addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague.” Or “relocating chronic welfare cases outside the city limits”—in what his critics described as concentration camps for the poor. The campaign might have begun as a lark. He received hardly more than 10 percent of the vote. But in a harbinger of things to come, he finished second in some Catholic neighborhoods in Queens. Cops wore “Buckley For Mayor” buttons. When the election’s winner, the very liberal John Lindsay, campaigned in those same neighborhoods, young white men waved “Support your Local Police” placards in his face.
+
+The stage was set, in 1966, for the next New York City law-and-order melodrama. Lindsay, now mayor, fulfilled a campaign pledge by establishing a Civilian Complaint Review Board to protect citizens from abusive cops, the better to restore trust in a police force whose utter rot was the subject that year of a bestselling book about a cop named Frank Serpico, whose reward for refusing to break the law was an attempt by fellow cops on his life.
+
+The president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association responded to Mayor Lindsay’s new board: “I am sick and tired of giving in to minority groups and their gripes and their shouting.” After a Brooklyn riot in which cops had been ordered not to use their nightsticks, the PBA got 96,888 signatures to put a referendum on the November ballot to dissolve the review board (they only needed 25,000). Their TV commercials brayed, Trump-like, Bronson-like, “The addict, the criminal, the hoodlum: only the policeman stands between you and him.” Buckley—who had orated on the campaign trail, “We need a much larger police force, enjoined to lust after the apprehension of criminals,” unencumbered by “any such political irons as civilian review boards”—might only have received 10 percent of the vote. But 12 months later, the anti-CCRB referendum won 63 percent of the popular vote. Even Jews, who were supposed to be liberal, opposed it 55 percent to 40 percent. Two years later, George Wallace brought his independent presidential bid to Madison Square Garden. “We need somemeanness,” Wallace brayed. And he got it: police had to rescue black protesters from a mob that surrounded them and chanted, “Kill ‘em!” The New Republic observed, “Never again will you read about Berlin in the ’30s without remembering this wild confrontation of two irrational forces.” The confrontation is the key: one of the things that makes New York’s conservatism of avenging angels so feral is its proximity to so many damned left-wingers. Left-wingers like Mayor Lindsay—who only won reelection in 1969 because the white ethnic backlash vote was split between two candidates, one of whom, Mario Procaccino, helped popularize the phrase “limousine liberal” in describing Lindsay. In 1971, Lindsay elected to build publicly subsidized housing in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills, partly upon the presumption that its largely Jewish population, only two and half decades on from the Holocaust, would be relatively free from racism of the Fred Trump sort. Apparently hizzoner wasn’t paying attention to the growing following behind Rabbi Meir Kahane, the domestic terrorist who was another of New York City’s sui generis contributions to the history of the American right. Village Voice columnist Jack Newfield reported from one of the mayor’s damage-control sessions at the Forest Hills Jewish Community Center, where Jews called “Lindsay redneck names under the shadow of the Torah.” The Voice’s Paul Cowan heard a picketer boast, “If Lindsay ever gets to be president, I’ll kill him. I’ll do just what Oswald did to John Kennedy.” His companion replied, “You won’t get the chance. Lindsay is going to get shot right here in New York.” Donald Trump, 25 years old, was just then beginning his apprenticeship in his father’s real estate organization. He made the acquaintance of Roy Cohn, who represented the family against the federal racial bias lawsuit, devising the defense that Fred Trump had no intention of excluding black tenants, just welfare recipients. Trump became a student of the legendarily reptilian thug who came to prominence as Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer. Long-time Trump-watcher Michael D’Antonio has explained: “Both were members of Le Club, a private hot spot where the rich and famous and social climbers could meet without suffering the presence of ordinary people.” Writes D’Antonio, “Cohn modeled a style for Trump that was one part friendly gossip and one part menace. . . . Trump kept a photo of the glowering Cohn so he could show it to those who might be chilled by the idea that this man was his lawyer.” It was Cohn, indeed, who introduced Trump to the nearly-as-reptilian Roger Stone, the professional dirty trickster and sexual adventurer with the giant tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back—and who, even though Trump has called him a “stone-cold loser,” has managed to hang on to a position of influence in the Trump presidential campaign. He certainly maintains an influence on Donald Trump’s view of the world. “When somebody screws you,” Stone told a reporter, “Screw ’em back—but a lot harder.” Figures like Cohn and Stone represent another branch in the New York conservative tradition: flashy, hedonistic right-wing operatives who gargle with razor blades and wear their shiny silver three-piece suits like armor. Next comes an avenging angel named Ed Koch. A former liberal, Koch won his underdog mayoral victory in 1977 in a madcap electoral free-for-all whose tenor was set on the night of July 13, when a series of lightning strikes shut down transmissions lines, the city shuddered to black, and so much crime ensued that buses filled with men in chains shuttled from jailhouse to jailhouse in search of available cells. Neoconservative Midge Decter wrote in Commentary that it was like “having been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one’s house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away.” The supposedly liberal readership of The New York Times wrote letters to the editor like this one: “The Puerto Ricans can go back to Puerto Rico. They belong there anyway, and if the blacks do not shape up they can go to the South.” Ed Koch was virtually unknown outside his Greenwich Village neighborhood, but with a pledge to restore the death penalty, his campaign took off like a rocket. Never mind that the New York mayor had no power over capital punishment. The people had spoken: a mere 25 percent opposed bringing back what New York Daily News called “little hot squat.” Meanwhile Koch berated the “poverty pimps” and “povertitians” holding a broke city hostage, demanded the abolition of the Board of Education (a “lard barrel of waste”), denounced alleged welfare fraud, decried “the nuts on the left who dump on middle class values.” He promised, too, to unwind New York’s experiments with free college, generous welfare, and subsidized housing, which its cheerleaders on the left called “socialism in one city.” One of those cheerleaders was the one-time front-runner in the race, the very liberal Congresswoman Bella Abzug. After the blackout riots, her campaign went into a tailspin; she didn’t even make it into the runoff. An underdog did instead: the young Mario Cuomo. He said, “the death penalty cannot provide jobs for the poor. The electric chair cannot balance the budget. The electric chair cannot educate our children. The electric chair cannot give us a sound economy or save us from bankruptcy or even save my seventy-seven-year-old mother.” And besides, he would add, America was better than that. Or was it?  One time when he tried to make that same point, an old lady in Brooklyn spat in his face. Another time, someone stood up and cried, “Kill them!” Koch won, of course, and then served as New York’s mayor for the next dozen years. Although to outer-borough reactionaries like state Senator Chris Mega of Brooklyn, he was just another liberal sellout on gun control. At a December 1984 press conference, Mega demanded to know: “When will Mayor Koch provide the same level of protection to the citizens who ride the subways and pay their taxes that he enjoys surrounded by a phalanx of New York’s finest, guns at the ready?” That particular press conference was called by the National Rifle Association in support of Bernhard Goetz, an electronics salesman from Kew Gardens, Queens, who shot five young men on a graffiti-encrusted subway car who, depending on whom you believed, were either preparing to mug him or aggressively panhandling for $5. Like the character played by Charles Bronson, Goetz made the cover of Time magazine. Celebratory bumper stickers bloomed: “Ride With Bernie—He Goetz Them.” In a later interview he reflected, Travis Bickle-like, “The guys I shot represented the failure of society. . . . Forget about their ever making a positive contribution to society. It’s only a question of how much a price they’re going to cost. The solution is their mothers should have had an abortion.” One of Goetz’s biggest backers was Bob Grant, who beginning on WMCA in 1970, and then on WOR (until he was fired in 1979 for saying the only reason a black woman got her job was that “she passed the gynecological and pigmentation test”), virtually invented right-wing talk radio—and when you think about it, it hardly could have been invented anywhere else but New York. Grant won the first live radio interview with Goetz, in 1986, lamenting that he had not “finished the job by killing them all.” Three years later, after the assault in Central Park, Donald Trump offered his memorable argument to bring back little hot squat. “What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we know it. . . . How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS.” In 2011, Bob Grant, impressed with Donald Trump’s campaign to force President Obama to produce his birth certificate, announced he had found his presidential candidate for 2012. Grant died in 2014, but two years later, his brand of vigilante conservatism has gone fully national. The wall Fred Trump sought to build in Queens in the early 1970s has been relocated 2,000 miles south. On Tuesday, Donald Trump will win a landslide in his home state. And somewhere, Bob Grant will be smiling. This story first appeared on the Washington Spectator",REAL
+37,GOP and Abortion in Age of ObamaCare: Time for new strategy,"As thousands descended on Washington last week for the annual “March for Life,” the Republican House of Representatives was busy watering down an anti-abortion bill that restricted abortions after 20 weeks, except in cases of rape or incest, with exemptions allowed only after a police report had been filed. This after a small group of moderate Republican lawmakers challenged the bill and lobbied for a less restrictive measure.
+
+It seems these moderate Republicans, fearing the bill could revive the Democrats’ phony “War on Women” mantra, erred on the side of expedience so as not to, as the Washington Post writes, “…expose Republicans in swing districts to a barrage of attack ads in 2016 from women’s rights groups and Democrats.”
+
+The symbolism behind such a bill on the 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision is understandable, but if Republicans are serious about advancing protection for the unborn in the age of ObamaCare, they will adopt a different strategy. They might start by looking back 50 years to the civil rights movement.
+
+People who are old enough to remember, or have seen the film “Selma,” recall how pictures and personal stories helped move the hearts and change the minds of many Americans in support of civil rights legislation. Pictures of blacks being beaten by white police officers or being denied service at lunch counters or forced to use separate restrooms — even murdered — shocked much of the nation.
+
+As Black History Month begins next week, the Republican Congress should hold a series of hearings on the impact the elimination of 55 million unborn lives has had on our culture. They can begin with testimony from black women and men like J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state and currently a policy board member of the American Civil Rights Union.
+
+In a recent column for The Washington Times, Blackwell cited figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and wrote: “black women continue to have the highest abortion rate of any ethnic group, with a gruesome 483 abortions for every 1,000 births.” That’s nearly one black baby in every three, according to 2010 figures compiled by the CDC.
+
+If “black lives matter” — and they do and should — they need to be protected in the womb, as well as in the streets.
+
+Congressional hearings should also include people who survived abortions and are glad they did. Women who regret having had abortions can testify that if they had had more information they might have made a different choice. I have met such women and heard their stories. They are legion and can be easily contacted.
+
+This is the key to advancing the pro-life argument. Republicans should be about “empowering women,” giving them more information so that they will be fully informed before choosing whether to sustain a life, or end one. Sonogram technology is the best tool for providing that information. Some studies found that abortion-minded women changed their minds about having an abortion after seeing their child growing in their wombs. Others found the opposite to be true. Still, women should have the choice.
+
+Choosing an empowerment strategy will put pro-choice advocates on the defensive. They then may be the ones seeking to keep women uninformed. Don’t we have federal laws requiring truthful information on food labels so that consumers can make informed decisions about what they put in their bodies? A sonogram requirement would give a woman the information she might need to make an alternative choice and spare the life of her child. Her access to this information should not be restricted.
+
+This is the smart way to advance the pro-life vs. pro-choice debate and change the dynamic and direction from its current stagnation. Republicans will try it if they are smart. But that, too, could be debatable.
+
+Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated op-ed columnist. He joined Fox News Channel in 1997 as a political contributor. His latest book is ""What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America"" is available in bookstores now. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.",REAL
+19,Planned Parenthood does damage control as GOP demands answers,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+3187,The GOP has become the party from George Orwell’s nightmares,"In a recent  column  by Dana Milbank, the Washington Post columnist addresses what has become the ultimate straw man for Republican presidential candidates this year. Ever since Donald Trump dodged Megyn Kelly’s question on his derogatory comments about women at the first debate with his declaration that “the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” political correctness has been the go-to boogeyman for the entire field of GOP candidates. Whenever challenged on controversial or offensive comments, political correctness is to blame. Whenever the media fact-checks a statement, political correctness and that other boogeyman, “liberal media bias,” is to blame — and not their factually challenged statements.
+
+“Once a pejorative term applied to liberals’ determination not to offend any ethnic or other identity group, it now is used lazily by some conservatives to label everything classified under “that with which I disagree.” GOP candidates are now using the “politically correct” label to shut down debate — exactly what conservatives complained politically correct liberals were doing in the first place.”
+
+When an entire field of candidates tend to thrive on bullshit (especially the current front-runners), it is not at all surprising that they have certain reliable terms that vilify critics of their bullshit and shut down debate. The truth is, Republicans have long utilized a manipulative phraseology, full of euphemisms and doublespeak, used either to shut down criticism and debate, as shown above, or to acerbate the listener’s emotional state — think “baby parts” and “death panels” — or provide a positive light on something that is generally frowned upon. (Ergo: Tax-avoiding billionaires become “job-creators.”) The GOP has become truly masterful at distorting political discussion through language, and at each Republican debate, just about every candidate showcases this manipulation. In George Orwell’s classic essay on this subject, “Politics and the English Language,” he seems to describe modern Republicans to a tee, repeating the same tired, yet convenient phrases (the phrases have changed, of course). Orwell writes:
+
+“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has the curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine.”
+
+In a country where getting elected to public office requires massive amounts of private funding (“bribery” has become “donation”), is it really so shocking that the majority of politicians resemble machines? Republicans (and many Democrats) have become appendages of the corporate state apparatus, serving the interests of private industry before even considering the interests of the people. Of course, the United States is still technically a “Democratic Republic,” and politicians must at the very least put on a show and act like they serve the people. Creating a new lingo used to purposely deceive the people, full of enough euphemisms and phrases to fill up a dictionary, has been quite beneficial. Just to name a few of the most popular: “energy exploration” for oil drilling, “job-creators” for capitalists, “right to work” for anti-union laws, “trickle down economics” for tax cuts for the rich, “death tax” for an estate tax, “job-killing” for tax increases on the rich or corporations (or cracking down on corporate tax avoidance, for that matter), and so on.
+
+The Republican Party has become the Orwellian party, and Fox News’ Frank Luntz is perhaps the most notorious GOP spin-doctor. “[Politicians] are living, breathing embodiments of the language they use,” said Luntz during an NPR interview. “When you’re selling a product or service it doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect. When you’re a politician, one wrong word changes the … meaning of something.”
+
+When it comes down to it, Donald Trump (who called Luntz a “low class slob” for supposedly picking “anti-Trump panels” after the infamous Fox News debate) has done us all a favor for being so blatantly dishonest. It is actually refreshing to see a Republican politician distort the truth without the usual duplicity. Trump is a complete bullshit artist, but not in the usual mechanical way that we typically see from other politicians. Indeed, this is one of the qualities that has made him so popular (and unpopular), and his dishonesty has been contagious. Other GOP candidates have quickly jumped on the bullshit bandwagon, and as PolitiFact rulings reveal, the more dishonest the GOP candidate is, the more successful he or she becomes.
+
+It was only a matter of time until the lies and distortions caught up with Republicans. The party has built its modern platform on deception, and has carefully crafted an entire phraseology to back it up. But there is no amount of spin that can make Trump look honest. And Trump is, after all, the new face of the GOP.",REAL
+5299,"Poverty Rose in 96% of U.S. House Districts, During Obama’s Presidency","Posted on November 5, 2016 by Eric Zuesse. Eric Zuesse On November 3rd, Morning Consult’s Jon Reid bannered, “Poverty on the Rise in Nearly All House Districts” and he reported that, “A Brookings Institution study , released less than a week before the election, shows that the number of people living in poverty has increased in 96 percent of congressional districts between 2000 and 2010-2014.” That finding fits along with others, such as that the economic ‘recovery’ after Barack Obama came into the White House in 2009, went virtually entirely to the very rich. According to the top experts on wealth-inequality in the United States, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, American wealth-inequality soared faster during 2003-2013 than ever since the period 1923-1928, right before the Great Crash of 1929. Their study “Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913” , published in the May 2016 Quarterly Journal of Economics , reported that ever since the remilitarization of the U.S. from the 2003 invasion of Iraq onward (and continuing under Obama, with boosts to NATO, and invasions such as of Libya in 2011), the percentage of total wealth owned by the richest .1% of American families (those families whose net worth was $111 million or higher) rose from 15% of the total in 2003, to 22% of the total in 2013, and this means that the percentage going to the lower 99.9% declined from 85% down to 78% during that time. America’s soaring inequality during the George W. Bush Presidency continued unaffected by the 2009 change of Presidential Administrations. In fact: whereas Bush’s stock-market plunge in 2006-2008 hit the richest the hardest, Obama’s coming into oiffice restored their lost wealth rapidly, while the wealth of the bottom 90% of the U.S. population flatlined throughout his Presidency. The Obama economic recovery was no recovery at all for the bottom 90% of Americans. Not just wealth but personal income also soared for the super-rich under Obama. The “Share of income earned by top 0.1% wealth holders” soared throughout Obama’s Presidency, at least up through 2012, which is the latest figure shown there for that. So: at least the bottom 90% of U.S. families have experienced none of the Obama economic recovery; what ‘recovery’ from the ‘recession’ there is, went only to the very rich. Findings such as those are consistent with, and might help to explain, the finding in the new Brookings study, that 96% of House districts have experienced increased poverty under Obama. The nation’s poor have gotten political rhetoric, but not much else, and the middle class also have received no net benefit, under Obama.",FAKE
+10222,Obama Talks About HIMSELF 207 Times In Speeches Supposedly About Hillary,"Go to Article 
+President Barack Obama has been campaigning hard for the woman who is supposedly going to extend his legacy four more years. The only problem with stumping for Hillary Clinton, however, is she’s not exactly a candidate easy to get too enthused about.  ",FAKE
+1703,Marco Rubio Strong Favorite in Sheldon Adelson Primary,Third morning in a row Marco Rubio has been on the cover of Israel HaYom. He seems to be winning the Adelson primary. http://t.co/KwxkrpPRaH,REAL
+10440,New Male Birth Control Method Tested - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Cleveland Indians Worried Team Cursed After Building Franchise On Old Native American Stereotype CLEVELAND—Having watched in horror as their team crumbled after a 3-1 World Series lead, members of the Cleveland Indians expressed concern Thursday that the organization has been cursed for building their franchise on an incredibly old Native American stereotype. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Nurse Reminds Elderly Man She’s Just Down The Hall If He Starts To Die DES PLAINES, IL—Assuring him that she’d be at his side in a jiffy, local nurse Wendy Kaufman reminded an elderly resident at the Briarwood Assisted Living Community that she was just down the hall if he started to die, sources reported Tuesday. ",FAKE
+1725,What To Watch For At Democrats' First Debate,"What To Watch For At Democrats' First Debate
+
+A bruised Hillary Clinton will have much to prove as she takes the debate stage Tuesday evening alongside four of her Democratic presidential challengers. The former secretary of state has been damaged by lingering questions about her private email server and doubts about her trustworthiness.
+
+That has partly enabled Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to ride a wave of progressive support to a lead over her in New Hampshire and an impressive $25 million fundraising haul last quarter.
+
+Sanders, too, will need to impress in his most high-profile appearance so far. This will be the first chance for many voters to see him on stage, and they'll be watching to see if he's someone they want to be president.
+
+""It's certainly not going to be as entertaining as some of the previous Republican debates, but it will be important, especially for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, to finally show the broader public what exactly they're made of,"" said Jim Manley, a longtime Democratic strategist and former top Senate aide.
+
+Of course, there's also the elephant — or, rather, the donkey — in the room: Vice President Joe Biden. He's not yet announced his intentions, as he continues a public flirtation with a bid. CNN has left open the possibility of allowing Biden on stage, even if he were to decide as late as Tuesday. He has given no indication that he will do so.
+
+But perhaps the most important thing for Democrats is that it's finally their turn in the political spotlight. After two rollicking GOP debates and a cycle that's largely been dominated by the outsiders in the Republican field, party loyalists have worried they are being overshadowed.
+
+""This is the first real opportunity for a Democratic message to break through,"" said Mo Elleithee, a former Democratic National Committee communications director who now directs the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service. ""The numbers game is working against us right now, and the Republican message is penetrating far more than the Democratic message.""
+
+Here's what to watch for from each candidate in the first Democratic debate. CNN's coverage begins at 8:30 p.m. ET, while the debate is expected to start at 9 p.m. ET Tuesday on CNN.
+
+Need: Appear likable and straightforward, especially when talking about those emails and recent policy positions
+
+She will be center stage and the center of attention. She's the most experienced campaign debater on stage — there were 25 primary debates in 2008 — and that will be an asset. But Clinton still has some of the same struggles she had eight years ago — trying to appear likable and not scripted to a public very skeptical of traditional politicians.
+
+""In Hillary's case, she has to be more likable and come across as genuine and down to earth,"" said Dan Payne, a Democratic strategist and debate coach. ""She is those things, from what people say who know her well. She can talk to day-to-day people about their lives and share experiences, but somehow it doesn't come across when she's on camera. She gets stiff and stern, and not likable.""
+
+She wasn't that way during her cameo on Saturday Night Live last week, Payne noted, and that should be an instance her team should draw from.
+
+""She was self-aware,"" he added. ""She was poking fun at herself and doing it with a laugh. If she can do that in the debate occasionally, it can help.""
+
+One of the first questions directed to her will likely be about her email server. She has yet to put to rest questions about why she had the private server and whether it was a security threat. Last month she finally apologized for the decision, but it may have been too little too late.
+
+In an interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday, President Obama said the server was not a national-security threat. But he did not forcefully defend Clinton, instead directing questions back to her.
+
+""I would hope that, if pressed, she would again apologize for allowing this to be an issue in the first place,"" said Manley, who is a Clinton supporter.
+
+It's no mistake that in the run-up to the debate, Clinton came out against both the Keystone XL Pipeline and Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership, something she once called the ""gold standard"" of trade agreements. Clinton was trying to clean up messy policy positions ahead of the debate.
+
+But Clinton will still likely have to answer whether the moves were politically calculated. Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley have been against both for some time; expect them to point out the disparity.
+
+Need: Convince a national audience he's presidential material and that he can branch out beyond his core economic message
+
+While Sanders may not have had much campaign debating experience — he has faced mostly safe elections in Vermont — he does have more than two decades of congressional experience to draw from. He brings skills debating on the House and Senate floor and in committees to Tuesday's event.
+
+His challenge will be translating the considerable enthusiasm he's been generating on the campaign trail to the debate stage. Filling arenas is quite impressive, but facing questions from moderators and elbows from his rivals is another thing entirely.
+
+""He can give a line or two or three and get a roar from the crowd,"" Payne said, ""but you have much longer in a TV debate — you have to sustain your argument for 45 seconds to a minute.""
+
+Don't expect Sanders to go for the jugular against his chief rival, though. As much as the moderators might try to goad him into it, the Vermont senator has largely avoided direct attacks on Clinton, and his team has telegraphed to expect the same on Tuesday. Instead of focusing on lobbing hits, Politico reported, his somewhat limited debate prep has instead been policy-heavy.
+
+Ultimately, Democrats say, they don't anticipate fireworks between the two top candidates.
+
+""I suspect that neither one is really going to go after the other,"" predicted Elleithee, who worked on Clinton's 2008 campaign. ""They may disagree, and they will point out where they disagree. That's normal, and that's fine. But I don't think you'll see either one come in and try to tear the other one down. That would be a bad strategy.""
+
+But Sanders will have to keep his cool throughout the debate, too. He's been testy with reporters when pressed in the past, and that type of reaction might not play well in front of a national TV audience.
+
+""In Bernie's case, he has to be in control and not appear unpleasant — be a man who you could conceivably believe is president,"" said Payne, the debate coach. ""If you're angry, it may come across as extremely harsh.""
+
+Need: Show he belongs in consideration as a top-tier candidate
+
+Avoid: Debating about debates and getting on a high horse
+
+Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has struggled to catch fire, but has also proven to be the most dogged Clinton attacker of the bunch — another element Clinton will have to manage.
+
+Ultimately, O'Malley may have the most to gain and the most to lose during Tuesday's debate. Once seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party, he was supposed to have been the top alternative to Clinton. Instead, that distinction has gone to Sanders (or possibly even Biden, if he does indeed run).
+
+Now, O'Malley needs to give a rationale for his candidacy and prove he can be an able sparring partner with both Clinton and Sanders. O'Malley has vigorously pushed for more debates instead of the scheduled six face-offs, and he needs to show why that's a good idea for him.
+
+""This could be his Scott Walker moment,"" Elleithee said, comparing O'Malley to the Wisconsin governor whose presidential campaign was doomed after a dismal performance in the second GOP debate.
+
+""O'Malley can either break through and show he deserves to be considered as a top-tier candidate,"" he continued, ""or if he doesn't break through, his advisers are going to have to circle up, re-calibrate, and figure out what they're going to say to donors. The rationale for his candidacy is not very evident.""
+
+That doesn't mean O'Malley should come in being a bomb-thrower, which could backfire on stage. Instead, he needs to draw well-reasoned contrasts with his opponents.
+
+One top issue where he could do that is on gun control, which is back in the news after yet another mass shooting last week. O'Malley has, by far, the most progressive and far-reaching plan of any Democratic candidate. He also stands in contrast especially with Sanders, who has had a mixed record on the issue.
+
+Need: A breakout moment to show they're serious candidates
+
+Avoid: Getting left out of the conversation
+
+The other two candidates on stage — former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee — have been almost entirely absent from the campaign trail and will simply need to explain why they're in the race. Both need to introduce themselves to voters, as expectations are already very low.
+
+Webb, the only veteran on the stage, could bring a valuable voice in terms of foreign policy and national security.
+
+""He needs to tell his story,"" Payne said. ""He was a star in the making eight years ago, but once he left the Senate, his star has all but extinguished.""
+
+Chafee, a former GOP senator turned independent turned Democrat, could still have to explain his liberal bona fides and defend a controversial tenure as Rhode Island governor. Expect him to needle Clinton on her vote for the Iraq War — and to point out that even as a Republican, he opposed it from the start.
+
+Both Webb and Chafee need a breakthrough moment.",REAL
+2105,How climate change is spawning a new view of conservation,"Conservation has long been about protecting communities of plants and animals where they are. But climate change is leading to a nascent form of conservation that embraces change and seeks to provide a thriving stage on which it can happen.
+
+Gobble Mountain in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts is distinct in that its soil and bedrock are volcanic in origin, as opposed to the limestone formations elsewhere in the Berkshires. That distinction has led the Nature Conservancy to protect it.
+
+It's a late-July morning, and Andy Finton works his way up a trail in western Massachusetts' Berkshire Hills, walking beneath a canopy of sugar maple, ash, beech, and basswood.
+
+At one point, Mr. Finton pauses and announces with a chuckle: “Congratulations! You’re on a steep slope.”
+
+Finton, who works for the Nature Conservancy, was pointing out something more profound than his announcement might suggest. A steep slope is a crucial element of an emerging vision to help plants and animals survive and adapt to a warming world while maintaining high levels of biological diversity.
+
+Conservation efforts typically have focused on maintaining a pristine forest or wetland, or preserving specific species or communities of species where they are.
+
+Yet a growing body of research shows that when you scratch the surface of a biodiverse region, you'll generally find diverse soil types, elevation ranges, bedrock types, and features such as canyons, cliffs, ravines, and Finton’s steep slopes.
+
+The new approach focuses on conserving landforms in a region that incorporate these diverse geophysical traits – which act as stages on which biological diversity thrives. And it focuses on setting up corridors between the “stages” to allow for species migration.
+
+As the scientific evidence of global warming has mounted, conservation often has focused on finding ways to help species or communities of plants track their preferred climate conditions, where possible. For example, a certain tree species might need to move about 30 miles a year higher in latitude to stay within its preferred climate range.
+
+By focusing instead on conserving diverse settings, species may be able to find refuges closer to home.
+
+The tree species might not have to move 30 miles a year to survive, Finton says. “It just needs to move around to the north side of the mountain.”
+
+The approach is just now gaining momentum. The Berkshire Hills trail winds up a hill at the southern end of one of four areas from West Virginia to Maine being targeted for “nature’s stage” style conservation by the Open Space Institute.
+
+The Nature Conservancy is using the approach in its land-acquisition decisions and advocacy, and states such as Maine, Massachusetts, and Tennessee are beginning to embrace the idea.
+
+Adoption is slow, acknowledges Peter Howell of the Open Space Institute in New York. But “you’re starting to see an uptick” as scientific information is making its way to conservation groups and the foundations that help fund them, he says. [Editor's note: The original version misstated Mr. Howell's name.]
+
+The concept initially appeared in conservation circles in 1988. At that point, ecologists were already moving from efforts to save individual species to efforts to preserve the broader communities in which species lived.
+
+A trio of scientists from the University of Maine and Brown University suggested that, given climate change, physical environments – not plant communities – provided the best basis for identifying land to conserve. They noted that the plant communities that emerged since the last ice age still haven't stabilized; change is the norm and this would become even more pronounced amid an era of global warming.
+
+Instead, the team argued, the focus should be on conserving physical settings and corridors connecting them. That approach will embrace the communities you're interested in conserving.
+
+The approach recognizes that changes to climate alone don't determine where plants, insects, and ultimately animals will migrate, if they can. Soil types, topography, underlying bedrock types, and latitude exert the most significant influence on a landscape's potential to host a rich mix of species.
+
+In western Massachusetts, the journey up the steep slope reveals the relationship between biological diversity and landforms. The basswood and ash trees, for example, prefer the accumulated soils and nutrients found at the hill's base. Higher up slope, these and other trees give way to mountain maple and oak, which eventually yield to pitch pine. The pitch pine can survive in the shallow, dry soils at the summit.
+
+Later in the day, along a dirt road that tracks Sanderson Brook, Finton points to patches of stinging nettle and explains that the plant is found in flood plains, but not on the hill's slopes.
+
+Climate still plays an important role on a range of scales – from the regional down to individual mountainsides. Diverse settings can set up their own microclimates, which can provide refuges for plants threatened by regional climate change.
+
+The new approach offers hope for helping existing species cope with climate change, up to a point.
+
+If climate change is too severe, no strategy is going to work, says Mark Anderson, science director for the Nature Conservancy's eastern region.
+
+But how do you determine which physical settings you want to preserve?
+
+In 2010, two different research groups came to similar answers and published their conclusions within 45 days of each other.
+
+""It was uncanny,"" says Paul Beier, a forest ecologist at Northern Arizona University.
+
+His team gauged what it called geodiversity by an area’s underlying bedrock, topography, and specific landforms.
+
+Meanwhile, Dr. Anderson used satellite data to map different landscape types across the US Northeast and eastern Canada to see which factors best corresponded with biological diversity.
+
+His team found, for example, that range of elevations across a landscape and high limestone levels in the bedrock were among the four best predictors of high biodiversity.  And all four factors were geophysical.
+
+For its part, the Open Space Institute is using these principles – and a $12 million grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation – to help build a network of climate-resilient landscapes in four areas in the US Northeast and Southeast.
+
+The institute parcels out the money as grants to local land trusts that want to set aside land and have adopted nature's-stage criteria. They also work with state and local agencies.
+
+For all its recent progress, however, the nature's-stage concept carries caveats, notes Jacqueline Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine.
+
+For instance, climate change itself can change landforms as more-frequent and more-intense rains accelerate erosion in some regions.
+
+Moreover, the approach may not be appropriate for keystone species, which still may require species-specific intervention.
+
+""The ice-age record tells us that losing large keystone animals like mammoths and giant ground sloths has significant consequences for the rest of the ecosystem, and we're only just beginning to understand those consequences,"" she says.
+
+Elephants represent one current example of keystone species that require a custom conservation touch. Elephants create a great deal of habitat on which a range of plants and animals relies, Dr. Gill notes.
+
+""It's not a popular idea necessarily, but not all species are created equal"" she says.
+
+And scientific questions about the approach have yet to be answered.
+
+“The question we'd really like to answer,” says Gill, “is whether geodiversity has corresponded to biodiversity through time – and how landform durability influences biodiversity.”
+
+A project in the Amazon could begin to provide answers. The project aims to test the idea that the rise of the Andes Mountains some 10 million years ago essentially doubled the diversity of plants in Amazonia by, among other effects, providing a narrow slice of unique microhabitats along the range's eastern slopes as it rose.
+
+The region hosts some 90,000 plant species, says Christopher Dick, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan and one of the project's co-investigators. Of those, 45,000 appeared with the uplift of the Andes. The rest appear in the Amazon basin, which by some estimates is between 50 million and 100 million years old.
+
+The basin is something of a museum for large numbers of very old species, Dr. Dick says. The slopes of the Andes are where more-recent evolutionary action has occurred ­– driven, the team posits, by changes in the geophysical setting.
+
+Back in the Berkshires, Finton sums up the goals behind conserving nature's stage: “We're trying to prevent extinction in the face of climate change.”",REAL
+5781,Did Hillary Clinton Cheat At The Debate? (VIDEO),"in: Multimedia , Politics I know the debate was a couple of weeks ago, but I just came across this video that certainly makes a good case for the fact that someone may have been feeding her answers, statistics, and information. If she can’t even ad lib a televised debate against Donald Trump, how are negotiations with foreign powers going to go when someone takes away her tablet or other telepromptish device? Not only did Trump win the last debate , he won it without reading the answers and information that someone else was feeding him. Really, with Hillary Clinton, is there any type of dishonesty that seems too far-fetched? See for yourself and let me know in the comments what you think. Article first posted at DaisyLuther.com Submit your review",FAKE
+10163,"FBI “Insurrection” to Scuttle Director, Rig Election","By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on November 1, 2016 By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor and Ian Greenhalgh, Managing Editor 
+John F. Kennedy memorably stated that he was going to smash the CIA into ‘a thousand pieces’, he had very good reasons for doing so; half a century later, it can reasonably be assumed that similar phrases are being darkly muttered within the corridors of power about the FBI. 
+President George W. Bush “lost” 22 million emails, many involving criminal investigations, and the FBI has said nothing, though the emails involved the White House used an illegal private server owned by the Republican Party for official government business. 
+The FBI is out to get Hillary Clinton, it’s not Director Comey, Obama put him in there to clean up the mess, they’ve been after Obama for 8 years. The ‘birther’ hoax began, no we aren’t kidding, inside the FBI – it was the FBI that originated the wild rumour that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster and that President Obama is not only a Muslim but many in the FBI actually say he’s the anti-christ. 
+Legal Analyst Paul Callan of CNN just published the following: 
+Lately, the FBI, while acting without the customary supervision of the Justice Department, appears to be a runaway train on a collision course with the concept of fairness in next week’s presidential election. Democratic Senator Harry Reid and former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter have accused FBI Director James Comey of violating the Hatch Act by illegally using his office to influence the election. While the claim of a Hatch Act violation is a stretch, the appointment of an independent prosecutor and the replacement of Comey are nonetheless urgently required, if not outright overdue. The tangled relationship between the Clintons and Attorney General Loretta Lynch should have prompted appointment of an independent special prosecutor long ago.. 
+Here’s what Callan knew but wasn’t able to write. The same informants that went to Callan also came to us and what they had to say was frightening. Here is how it began; an FBI insurrection and this is the exact term used by sources deep inside the FBI cabal, an FBI insurrection against, Comey, Hillary Clinton and Obama can no longer be safely ignored. This is why Senator Harry Reid has called for a criminal investigation of the FBI for violation of the Hatch Act. 
+The FBI, and this isn’t Comey, it is the rank and file, the insurrectionist rank and file, a very powerful organisation that includes case managers, deputy directors that run not only counter-terrorism but financial crimes as well have not only targeted what they see to be dangerous liberal and progressive leaders, including of course the American president, but have continually protected criminals from prosecution as well. Those they have protected, possibly including names like Adelson, Trump and Romney, are funding moves against the US government, moves against American foreign policy and may well actually be funding recognised terror organisations as well, we have been specifically told this by sources within the FBI. 
+This insurrectional group within the FBI, which we are told includes the majority of FBI agents, has little idea what they have gotten into, some are aware they are taking orders from the shadowy Federalist Society, that ‘right-wing conspiracy’ Hillary Clinton referred to so many years ago as trying to bring down her husband’s presidency, but it goes deeper, it gets scarier; it isn’t just ‘birthers’. 
+The public face of this is blocked court appointments and a government in paralysis, but it’s far deeper and far more threatening, it all became possible when two branches of government fell under the control of organised crime. It took a five/four rigged Supreme Court and a rigged election in 2000, covered up by the FBI, to subvert for all times the independence of America’s legislature. Rigged by Richard Mellon Scaife, funded by Sheldon Adelson, a cabal calling themselves ‘Neocons’, in reality a front for organised crime, reapportioned Congressional districts across the US in clear violation of equal protection provisions of the constitution and backed by five mob-controlled members of the Supreme Court, bolstered by vote flipping software from the CIA, control of the legislative/investigative branch of government was permanently placed in the hands of a minority, destroying any hope of separation of powers and undermining all constitutional protections. Any hope of Americans influencing their own destiny disappeared with a rigged legislature running endless witch hunts and a mob-controlled Supreme Court backing them up. 
+Making it worse, so much worse, was the creation of a massive security bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, laws authorising torture and illegal surveillance and the destruction of the FBI. 
+No public scandal can be investigated, no regulation enforced, no-one is left to speak up, no-one is safe from illegal arrest and imprisonment, a nightmare from the pages of Kafka become reality, all this has become clear in the last few days. 
+When a prominent US senator calls for the prosecution of America’s national police force, is it perhaps time to take note? 
+There was a reason the constitution prohibited the creation of the national police force, just as the constitution prohibited the creation of a central bank; there is no mechanism capable of controlling a central bank, as the failures of the Federal Reserve board and a cursory study of American history since 1913 will establish. 
+Similarly, no provision was established within the constitution to regulate or oversee a national police force, it didn’t take long for the FBI to become the Cheka within a short period after it’s creation, J. Edgar Hoover, turned ‘the bureau’ into a monstrosity blackmailing politicians and cosying up to crime figures while Hoover’s FBI chased ‘commies’ both real and imaginary, it protected not only the mafia but powerful international crime cartels as well, becoming the real ‘Murder Inc.’ Taxpayer financed strong-arm thugs supported by a disinformation campaign. 
+Hoover gained control of the press almost immediately, keeping files on his press enemies, threatening and blackmailing; some of this was to protect his own secrets – mob ties and his notorious penchant for sexual deviance, now long in the public domain, but it went further – it was all about power. 
+‘Mary’ Hoover liked to dress as a woman and was infamously covertly photographed along with his longtime companion and lover Clyde Tolson in flagrante delicto; those photographs came into the possession of mob kingpin Meyer Lansky, thus ensnaring Hoover, and by extension the entire FBI in a dangerous marriage with the mob. There is no evidence they ever got divorced, though from time to time the relationship may have been somewhat rocky. 
+Simply put, given these facts, any sense of surprise at FBI misconduct or calls for investigating or even disbanding the FBI, should be no surprise to anyone. Nearly every current television series that features scenarios involving the FBI invariably focuses on FBI corruption, the FBI’s illegal involvement in politics and gross incompetence. 
+Sit at a table and have lunch with the FBI, it can go one of two ways – you can have brilliant, dedicated and relentless law enforcement officers who complain about being shackled by a corrupt bureaucracy, or like as not, a pack of delusional nutcases mouthing wild conspiracy theories and ranting about dangerous liberals; neither group, though widely divergent, make a case for the survival of the FBI. Then when you realise the Dept. of Homeland Security is entirely composed of conspiracy nutcases and other agencies are worse, it becomes clear that Harry Reid’s demand to clean up the FBI is far from enough.",FAKE
+411,Democrats hand Obama a stinging defeat on trade deal,"Could this be the populist moment?
+
+A seemingly unstoppable coalition of the powerful assembled to advance the Trans Pacific Partnership trade bill: A Democratic president aligned with the Republican majority in both chambers of Congress and the full lobbying might of Corporate America.
+
+But on Tuesday afternoon, the Senate Democratic minority delivered a surprise defeat to President Obama and a severe setback to one of the last few items on his presidential agenda. They blocked consideration of “fast track” trade authority – a crucial vehicle to get the Pacific trade pact through Congress.
+
+The victors: the ascendant populist wing of the Democratic Party, and its spiritual leader, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. “Over and over, America’s workers have taken the brunt of bad trade deals,” the former Harvard professor and scourge of big business told a gathering of the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, hours before Tuesday’s vote.
+
+“We can’t keep pushing through trade deals that benefit multinational companies at the expense of workers,” she added, with theatrical urgency. “Government cannot continue to be the captive of the rich and powerful. Working people cannot be forced to give up more and more as they get squeezed harder and harder.”
+
+Warren masterfully undermined the trade bill, by highlighting the administration’s obsessive secrecy (the details of the proposed agreement are classified) and the role of corporate interests in drafting the deal (500 non-government advisors participated, she said, 85 percent of them industry executives or lobbyists).
+
+“And now this trade deal is getting the full court lobbying press from those same giant multinational corporations,” she said. “The middle class is on the ropes and now is the time to fight back.”
+
+Under intense pressure from the Warren wing, 44 of the 45 Democrats present Tuesday afternoon defied Obama. Even Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chief Democratic advocate for the fast-track bill, buckled. Proponents fell eight votes short of the 60 they needed to take up the fast-track bill.
+
+Senate free-traders will likely find a way to revive the bill, but Tuesday’s defeat will embolden opponents in the House, where the free-trade package already faced trouble. However the trade debate is resolved, Tuesday’s defeat in the Senate is likely to be a turning point, because it shows that the populists are now firmly in control of the Democratic Party. Anger over growing inequality has reached critical mass, and a backlash has begun against a political system that has, over the last three decades, allowed 100 percent of all income growth to go to the wealthiest 10 percent.
+
+The trade deal has for now become the victim of that anger – less because of the details of the TPP than because it hasn’t been accompanied by more protections and assistance for American workers.
+
+“I believe in this,” Obama said of the trade deal, “the same way… that I believe in a higher minimum wage. The same way that I believe in stronger protections for workers who are trying to get a voice in their company. The same way I believe in equal pay. The same way I believe in paid sick leave.”
+
+But Obama’s actions haven’t matched his words, and he didn’t require Republicans to accept any of those priorities before he joined them in pushing for free-trade legislation. Senate Republicans drove more Democrats into opposition when they declined requests to bring up other trade-related bills other than legislation offering a meager (and reduced) amount of training funds for workers who lose their jobs.
+
+At the White House, press secretary Josh Earnest called Tuesday’s vote a “procedural snafu.” But Obama was undone by more than procedure. His would-be successor, Hillary Clinton, was not courageous enough to take a position on the trade legislation, but her silence gave Democrats more freedom to oppose it. And Democrats in Congress bristled at Obama’s disparagement of opponents of the trade bill as emotional, illogical and dishonest.
+
+“The president is making some fairly nasty remarks about people on the other side, that they don’t understand we’re in the 21st century,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, said at the Roosevelt Institute gathering, at the National Press Club. “Actually we do. I don’t think he understands.”
+
+Warren, at the same event, took a shot at those Democrats who have “floated along with the idea that economic growth is in direct opposition to strengthening the wellbeing of America’s working families… That claim is flatly wrong.”
+
+Tuesday’s 44-to-1 vote against Obama’s position confirms that Warren’s populists now dominate the Democratic Party – and if Obama wants to retain a semblance of relevance, he’ll join them.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+5972,Former DEA Prescription Head Drops a BombShell — Congress Protects Big Pharma & Fuels Opioid Crisis,"Former DEA Prescription Head Drops a BombShell — Congress Protects Big Pharma & Fuels Opioid Crisis   Source: Claire Bernish Congress would rather protect the profits of pharmaceutical companies than the health of those addicted to dangerous opioid drugs, says a former head of the DEA responsible for preventing abuse of medications. 
+Joseph Rannazzisi, former Deputy Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, asserts Big Pharma and its lobbyists have a “stranglehold” on legislators in Congress and have engineered the protection of a $9 billion per year industry over the health of American citizens, according to a report from the Guardian . 
+“Congress would rather listen to people who had a profit motive rather than a public health and safety motive,” he said, according to the outlet. “As long as the industry has this stranglehold through lobbyists, nothing’s going to change.” 
+Rannazzisi explained lobbyists have spent millions thwarting legislative and policy efforts to provide guidelines for reducing the prescribing of opioid medications closely related to heroin — and helped limit the DEA’s powers to discipline those who dispense unusually high dosages of the same. 
+A pharmacist himself, Rannazzisi severely criticized lawmakers he claims hold a double standard — publicly vowing to combat the opioid epidemic, while essentially working on behalf of pharmaceutical companies to ensure the industry’s profits. 
+“These congressmen and senators who are using this because they are up for re-election, it’s a sham,” he told the Guardian . “The congressmen and senators who are championing this fight, the ones who really believe in what they’re doing, their voices are drowned out because the industry has too much influence.” 
+With the unique insight of having been an insider, Rannazzisi excoriated the duplicity evidenced between legislators’ public lamentation of addiction and deaths from the opioid crisis during election years, and private efforts to protect drugmakers from liability. 
+And he would know. According to Rannazzisi’s LinkedIn profile, as Chief of Diversion, he had been tasked with “oversight and control of all regulatory compliance inspections and civil and criminal investigations of approximately 1.6 million DEA registrants”— but if the standards are lowered by Congress to allow greater leeway in prescribing opioids, the threshold of criminality is raised. 
+As the Guardian points out, legislation to fight the opioid epidemic, Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act , did, in fact, pass in July — but partisan controversy erupted when Republicans failed to provide funding to give the law sharp teeth. Democrats then issued a report titled “ Dying Waiting for Treatment ” in response, which “likened the Republican response to the opioid crisis to ‘using a piece of chewing gum to patch a cracked dam.’” 
+Indeed the report sharply criticized the bill, equating its policies to ‘empty promises’ for the lack of financial follow-through. 
+As the Washington Post detailed in a report earlier this month, the DEA launched an aggressive campaign to rein in distribution of opioids by pharmaceutical manufacturers to illegal ‘pill mills’ and corrupt pharmacies, who cared little whether the drugs wound up on the streets. 
+Headed by Rannazzisi, the Office of Diversion Control sent investigators into the field, and began issuing hefty fines and filing lawsuits against the distributors responsible for the proliferation of opioids on the streets. 
+But the disproportionately powerful pharmaceutical industry — fearing a potential significant loss in profits — fought back. Hard. 
+According to the Post , the deputy attorney general summoned Rannazzisi to a meeting in 2012, concerning the cases of two unnamed major drug companies. 
+“That meeting was to chastise me for going after industry, and that’s all that meeting was about,” the now-retired DEA official told the Post . 
+Then, in 2014, came what constituted a hand out to the pharmaceutical industry by the Department of Justice and congressional legislators: the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act — legislation initiated by the Healthcare Distribution Management Association — the industry group representing distributors at the heart of the controversy. 
+An analysis of lobbying records by the Post found “the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, spent $13 million lobbying House and Senate members and their staffs on the legislation and other issues between 2014 and 2016.” 
+Rannazzisi argued his case to congressional staffers in a phone conference in July 2014, and recalled telling them, “This bill passes the way it’s written we won’t be able to get immediate suspension orders, we won’t be able to stop the hemorrhaging of these drugs out of these bad pharmacies and these bad corporations.” 
+Stunned at the massive — and ultimately successful — effort to take the bite out of DEA attempts to hold distributors and drugmakers responsible for their role in an epidemic estimated to take 19,000 lives every year, Rannazzisi likened the legislation to a “free pass” for legal drug pushers. 
+“This doesn’t ensure patient access and it doesn’t help drug enforcement at all,” he told the Guardian. “What this bill does has nothing to do with the medical process. What this bill does is take away DEA’s ability to go after a pharmacist, a wholesaler, manufacturer or distributor.” 
+“This was a gift. A gift to the industry,” he added. 
+After heading the diversion office for a decade, Rannazzisi retired in 2015 — likely disgusted over legislators’ dedication to the legal drug industry, rather than the people whose interests they’re ostensibly obligated to protect. 
+“The bill passed because ‘Big Pharma’ wanted it to pass,” he told the Guardian in no uncertain terms. “The DEA is both an enforcement agency and a regulatory agency. When I was in charge what I tried to do was explain to my investigators and my agents that our job was to regulate the industry and they’re not going to like being regulated.” 
+Big Pharma relies overwhelmingly on lobbyists filling the coffers of politicians to ensure they ignore the crisis gripping the nation. As the Center for Public Integrity found , the Guardian noted, Purdue Pharma — at the heart of the epidemic for its highly-addictive drug introduced in the late 1990s, OxyContin — spent a breathtaking $740 million in the last ten years on congressional lobbying efforts. 
+However, Big Pharma’s power to influence policy and legislation extends far beyond simple but effective lobbying — the government-run Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (IPRCC) has been accused by Sen. Ron Wyden of being a tool to “weaken” CDC guidelines for limiting overprescribing of opioids. 
+Wyden wrote to Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell of his concerns the IPRCC had been staffed with ‘experts’ with conflicts of interest for their close ties to Big Pharma, including a scientist with a $1.5 million endowment from Purdue, reported the Guardian . 
+“You’ve got a panel that’s certainly got a fair number of people that have a vested interest in this problem of overprescribing. That’s something you’ve got to root out,” Wyden asserted . “The role of the pharmaceutical companies on these advisory panels troubles me greatly. Science is getting short shrift compared to the political clout of these influential interests.” 
+Families of countless addicts and victims of the opioid industry would undoubtedly find the direct influence of Big Pharma’s pro-opioid cash appalling — yet it continues to this day. Policies and legislation have not yet been given the appropriate funding needed to effectively combat the problem, which swirls out of control while politicians and drugmakers reap blood-tainted profits. 
+“Corporations have no conscience,” Rannazzisi flatly told the Guardian . “Unfortunately, with my job, I was the guy who had to go out and talk to families that lost kids. If one of those CEOs went out there and talked to anybody, or if one of those CEOs happened to lose a kid to this horrible, horrible domestic tragedy we have, I’d bet you they’d change their mind. 
+“When you sit with a parent who can’t understand why there’s so many pharmaceuticals out in the illicit marketplace, and why isn’t the government doing anything, well the DEA was doing something. Unfortunately what we’re trying to do is thwarted by people who are writing laws. Share This Article...",FAKE
+1647,Carly Fiorina Says Donald Trump 'Taps Into an Anger',"Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said Sunday she could see how competitor Donald Trump's immigration rhetoric, which has gotten him in some hot water over the past few weeks, resonates with some voters.
+
+Asked on ABC's This Week whether she would support him if he became the nominee, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO said, “I have been in New Hampshire now for six days, and I have not been asked a single question about Donald Trump.” Last week in the first-in-the-nation primary state, she said Trump didn't represent her or her party.
+
+On the other hand, she said on ABC, “I think Donald Trump taps into an anger that I hear every day. People are angry that a commonsense thing like securing the border or ending sanctuary cities is somehow considered extreme. It's not extreme, it's common sense. We need to secure the border.”
+
+While decrying illegal immigration in his campaign announcement speech on June 16, Trump called the Mexican immigrants entering the the U.S. criminals and “rapists.” The remark has caused business partners and fellow Republicans (though not all) to cut ties with or denounce the real estate mogul and reality TV star.",REAL
+10064,MOBILE PASSES DESKTOP FOR THE FIRST TIME…,"Home › SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY › MOBILE PASSES DESKTOP FOR THE FIRST TIME… MOBILE PASSES DESKTOP FOR THE FIRST TIME… 0 SHARES 
+[11/1/16] More users around the world are accessing the internet from mobile devices than from desktop computers for the first time, according to internet monitoring firm StatCounter . The combined traffic from mobile and tablet devices tipped the balance at 51.2 percent, vs. 48.7 percent for desktop access, marking the first time this has happened since StatCounter began tracking stats for internet usage. 
+It’s a huge moment for the web overall: this means going forward, companies that haven’t yet decided to focus on a mobile-first approach to their internet services and web properties really should, as the trend line is unlikely to reverse. 
+StatCounter also found that the maturity of the market impacts which is the dominant means of access, and as you might have guessed, mobile platforms are far and away the method of choice for internet access when it comes to emerging markets like India, where they account for 75 percent of use. More mature markets including the UK, the US and Ireland still see use swinging in favor of desktop, but the trend is still showing a narrowing gap. Post navigation",FAKE
+3800,Fact checking the 2016 State of the Union address,"A State of the Union address is often difficult to fact-check, no matter who is president. The speech is a product of many hands and is carefully vetted, so major errors of fact are relatively rare. But State of the Union addresses often are very political speeches, an argument for the president’s policies, so context is sometimes missing.
+
+Here is a guide through some of President Obama’s most interesting claims, in the order in which he made them. We also checked one claim in the GOP response. As is our practice with live events, we do not award Pinocchio rankings, which are reserved for complete columns.
+
+While President Obama often has touted what he often calls the “longest streak of private-sector job creation in history,” the average number of jobs created in this 70-month period is significantly lower than under either Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. (When you exclude a single month of decline, in fact, Clinton and Reagan had streaks of 85 and 71 months, respectively.)
+
+The low point in jobs was reached in February 2010, and there has indeed been a gain of 13.6 million nonfarm jobs since then, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But it’s worth remembering that in the same period, the number of federal, state and local government jobs has actually declined by nearly 500,000.
+
+The unemployment rate was 7.8 percent when Obama took office in 2009, and now it is 5 percent. The president says it was cut in half by measuring from the high point reached during his presidency: 10 percent in October 2009.
+
+Still, even with the massive jobs losses at the start of his presidency, Obama can claim that nearly 9.3 million jobs were added since he took office. At this point in George W. Bush’s presidency, the comparable number was 1.3 million; and for Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, the figure was 21.2 million and 12.7 million, respectively.
+
+The low point for manufacturing jobs was reached in February 2010, and there has been a gain of 878,000 jobs since then. But Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that the number of manufacturing jobs is still 230,000 fewer than when Obama took office in the depths of the recession — and 1.4 million fewer than when the recession began in December 2007. Indeed, the United States only gained 30,000 manufacturing jobs in all of 2015.
+
+Here’s a graph that shows the trend over the last 10 years:
+
+The improvement in the economy, coupled with the spending cuts in the sequester, has yielded a significantly lower deficit than just a few years ago. The deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was $439 billion.
+
+For economists, raw numbers mean less than the percentage of the gross domestic product, and here, too, there has been an improvement. As a percentage of the GDP, the deficit in fiscal year 2015 was 2.5 percent, the lowest level since 2007.
+
+For fiscal year 2009, when Obama took office, the deficit was 9.8 percent of GDP, so that’s a 75 percent reduction.
+
+The president used to say “roughly 10 nations” when making this comparison, but cuts in U.S. defense spending and increases in estimates of Chinese spending appear to have shifted the calculation.
+
+The mostly widely cited public source for this claim is the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tallies public numbers each year. SIPRI urges caution in how its data is used, saying that “attempts to draw conclusions about a country’s level of military capability from its level of military expenditure should be regarded with considerable skepticism.”
+
+That’s because raw numbers can be misleading. The official Chinese figures are believed to be understated — and it costs China less money to buy the same goods and services as the United States. A rough calculation of purchasing power parity suggests the correct figure for Chinese defense spending could be double official estimates.
+
+The comparison to China also does not include the fact that because it is not a global power, Beijing may actually spend more on its military in the western Pacific than does the United States.
+
+Moreover, the United States ranks ninth when military spending is measured as a percentage of the gross domestic product, according to the CIA Factbook. Percentage of GDP is a good indicator of how a country chooses to use its resources — the top ranks of the list are dominated by oil-rich Middle Eastern countries and Israel — but the statistic does not shed much light on the effectiveness of a country’s military. So there are also limitations in that comparison.
+
+In lauding his achievements in energy, the president made a reference to the dramatic decline in gasoline prices. But the White House graphics that accompanied his speech in its posting on Medium included a sentence that made a claim based on much higher gas prices.
+
+The graphic claimed that “Americans will save nearly $8,000 at the pump in 2025 thanks to doubling the fuel efficiency of our cars and light trucks.” But there are two big caveats to that figure, which comes from official government estimates of the savings over the lifetime of a car between 2012 and 2025.
+
+First, gasoline was presumed to cost about $3.42 before taxes, so obviously any savings from fuel efficiency would be significantly reduced if gasoline stays at current $2-a-gallon levels. Second, the cost of the rules was estimated to amount to $3,000, thus reducing the savings to car owners to $5,000 even before the impact of lower fuel prices is considered.
+
+According to the Solar Foundation, an independent energy research nonprofit, the median wage for solar designers is about $27 per hour, and solar installers earn a median wage of $21 per hour. (Solar installers’ hourly median wage was $19.24, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent, May 2014 figures.) Workers in solar assembly earn $18 per hour. These figures are, indeed, higher than the median hourly wage for all occupations as of the most recent figures in May 2014, at $17.09. (However, the median hourly wage for employees in the mining industry — including coal mining — is also higher than the median hourly wage for all jobs — at $48.54.)
+
+The group reported in its 2015 Census that the solar workforce is larger than the coal industry and other fossil fuel generation sectors. It used Bureau of Labor Statistics figures to compare coal industry employees to solar industry employees, as measured through its survey of more than 7,600 U.S. businesses.
+
+As of October 2015, the coal mining industry had 65,000 jobs. Per the Solar Foundation’s 2015 figures, there were 119,931 people employed in solar installation.
+
+Obama’s statement comes from the Department of Energy’s website, which cites the Solar Foundation’s wage figures. But the source is unclear for the claim that solar is saving “tens of millions of dollars a year” on energy bills for Arizona and New York residents. Solar power is, indeed, growing rapidly in New York and Arizona. While the Department of Energy appears to attribute the savings figures to the Solar Foundation, the claim that solar customers are saving $13 million in Arizona and $11 million in New York every year is not in the nonprofit’s most recent annual report.
+
+It’s worth noting that in Arizona, there is an ongoing controversy over whether residents truly are getting lower rates on solar energy. Energy regulators in the state are battling utility companies over net metering, which is the process through which solar customers get a credit for a certain amount of electricity that they send back to the grid. Regulators are working on a compromise deal that could result in a cost-shift for non-solar customers.
+
+Texas and Iowa lead the nation in wind power, and the cost of wind power surely is lower in those states than in others. But this claim overlooks the impact of the federal tax credit that has driven much of the cost of wind power down.
+
+The average price of coal and natural gas power ($65 per megawatt-hour) is still cheaper than newer sources of energy like wind ($80) and solar ($107), according to the Dallas Morning News.
+
+In particular, the Production Tax Credit is a crucial subsidy that allows wind energy to compete with energy from fossil fuels. This tax credit is the driving force behind negative wind power pricing in Texas, according to a 2015 report by the Institute of Political Economy at Utah State University and public policy research organization Strata. Texas also provides many state-level financial incentives for wind power generation. [Update: Supporters of wind power energy noted this report is backed by wind power critics, and said it’s unfair to criticize the tax credits because fossil fuels have received many more government incentives than renewables over a longer period of time. They pointed to other sources showing wind’s costs to be lower than for other electricity sources.]
+
+The Department of Energy estimates that within a decade, wind power will become cost-competitive with fossil fuels without a federal tax incentive. The White House noted that solar and wind energy prices are now becoming competitive with energy from conventional fuel sources.
+
+Actually, federal government employment has dropped during the Obama administration; at one point in 2014 federal employment reached the lowest level since 1966. There has been a slight uptick since then, but even so, as a percentage of total employment, the federal government now has the smallest share since World War II.
+
+Here’s a graph that shows total federal employment since 1939. The spikes every 10 years reflect temporary hiring for the U.S. Census.",REAL
+2246,Alabama's Top Judge Faces Ethics Charges Over Gay-Marriage Order,"The Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission charged Chief Justice Roy Moore, an outspoken opponent of same-sex unions, with violating the state's judicial ethics laws, an allegation that could potentially remove him from office, according to news website AL.com.
+
+The legality of gay marriage had been at the center of a national debate for years until the Supreme Court ruled in June that the U.S. Constitution provides same-sex couples the right to marry, handing a historic triumph to the American gay rights movement.
+
+Despite the ruling and a federal court ruling that made gay marriage legal in Alabama, Moore issued in January an administrative order to state probate judges, ordering them not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, according to court documents.
+
+""Chief Justice Moore flagrantly disregarded and abused his authority,"" the complaint said. ""Moore knowingly ordered [probate judges] to commit violations...knowingly subjecting them to potential prosecution and removal from office.""
+
+Moore said in a statement that the commission has no authority over administrative orders or the court's ability to prohibit probate judges from issuing same-sex marriage licenses.
+
+""We intend to fight this agenda vigorously and expect to prevail,"" he said.
+
+Moore wrote in his order that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling was at odds with a decision in March 2015 by the Alabama Supreme Court that instructed probate judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
+
+The conflicting opinions had resulted in ""confusion and uncertainty,"" Moore said, with many probate judges issuing marriage licenses to gay couples while others refused to do so.
+
+Until the Alabama Supreme Court decides the matter, probate judges ""have a ministerial duty not to issue any marriage license,"" he said.
+
+The complaint said Moore's order ""was contrary to clear and determined law about which there is no confusion or unsettled question.""
+
+Moore, a Republican, has been a hero of conservative causes before. In 2003, he was removed from office after a federal judge ruled he was placing himself above the law by refusing to take down a Ten Commandments monument.
+
+He won the chief justice job back in 2012, vowing not to do anything to create further friction with the federal courts.",REAL
+10480,Police Officers Face Backlash After What They Did To Hillary In Photo,"Share This A photo of Hillary Clinton with some police officers popped up on social media over the weekend, but people were divided in their reaction to it. The post on the Facebook page for the Medford Police Patrolmen’s Association caused controversy and backlash online over the content and what the was seen being done to crooked Hillary. The post showed Medford Police officers at the Fall Festival in Haines Square on Saturday. The photo was done in fun and captioned, “Look who MPD grabbed at the Fall Festival in Haines Square today…” This image is an accurate depiction of what we all would like to see: Hillary in handcuffs. As you can plainly see, the photos show police officers with a woman in an orange jumpsuit, handcuffed. It appears that they are arresting someone, who wore a mask in the likeness of Hillary Clinton. Screenshot from the Medford Police Patrolman’s Facebook page 
+In a second photo, the police officers posed with a person in a Donald Trump mask, with the caption, “Making America GREAT again in West Medford Square!!” Screenshot from the Medford Police Patrolman’s Facebook page 
+Since a fair amount of overly sensitive pansies made a big deal about the posts, Harry MacGilvray, president of the Medford Police Patrolmen’s Association, decided to apologize for making the post. 
+“These were Halloween costumes. It was meant totally as a joke. I apologize if this offended anyone in any way,” MacGilvray said in a statement. “I never expected this sort of reaction. It was poor judgment on my part.” 
+The posts have been removed to avoid hurting the feelings of overly-sensitive liberals. While most of us see the humor in these images and understand how insane it was to apologize for the posts that were clearly done in jest, liberals don’t see things this way. 
+They go out of their way, looking to be offended. If the police posed with a handcuffed Trump, it’s pretty obvious that there would have been no outrage, because conservatives aren’t easily offended by free speech. However, a liberals sole purpose seems to be finding things to be offended over, and they have done it again.",FAKE
+5372,Texas Cop Fired For Feeding ‘Feces’ Sandwich To Homeless Man,"Videos Texas Cop Fired For Feeding ‘Feces’ Sandwich To Homeless Man The San Antonio officer was reported by at least two fellow officers for his attempt to feed a homeless man a feces sandwich.   A homeless man sleeps on the steps of St. Bartholomew’s Church, Tuesday, June 23, 2015 in New York. 
+The San Antonio Police Department — known for its strict measures against homeless people — announced that it had fired a five-year veteran police officer after he attempted to feed a homeless man a “fecal sandwich” in May. 
+According to the department’s statement, police officer Matthew Luckhurst bragged to a fellow officer about trying to feed the man human feces before his unnamed colleague reported the incident to the internal affairs in July. 
+“This was a vile and disgusting act that violates our guiding principles of ‘treating all with integrity, compassion, fairness and respect,’” Chief William McManus said in a statement Friday. “The fact that his fellow officers were so disgusted with his actions that they reported him to Internal Affairs demonstrates that this type of behavior will never be tolerated.” 
+In 2014, however, McManus wanted to make giving money to homeless people a crime but the idea was shelved after public outcry. 
+The decision to fire Luckhurst was based on recommendations by two separate review boards which were upheld by McManus. The Associated Press reported that at least two officers reported the incidents to internal affairs. 
+However, Luckhurst’s lawyer told the San Antonio Express-News, which first reported the story, that his client would appeal the decision and denied that the incident had taken place ever and his comments were a “joke.” 
+According to the local San Antonio Current, the police issued more than 12,000 citations in 22 months between 2013 and 2014 related to “violations of city laws aimed at discouraging the homeless and poor from hanging out downtown or asking for donations.” 
+The newspaper said homeless people were charged with aggressive solicitation — seeking donations in an intimidating manner — solicitation within forbidden zones, camping in a public place, littering, spitting, urinating or defecating in public, disorderly conduct and sitting or lying in manners obstructing the public’s right of way. 
+According to Haven For Hope, there are almost 3,000 homeless people in the city, of whom 42 percent have no shelter and sleep in the streets.",FAKE
+8865,The Deceptive Nature of Hillary Clinton is Right in Line with Communism,"Email 
+Much to the surprise of the American electorate, both on the right and left, the FBI is reopening it's investigation into Hillary Clinton's email scandal. Whether this will amount to anything meaningful, or it is simply a distraction is any body's guess. Many are speculating that this could be the issue which would cause President Obama to cancel the elections. In my recent article ""Corrupting One's Self is the Ultimate Morality in the Pursuit of Utopia,"" I discussed the possibility that the blatant corruption is deliberately being thrust in our face to create the necessary attitude for social change. This idea of course, is based on the writings of Alinsky and other ""social engineers"" skilled in the arts of propaganda and psychological manipulation. Looking at it from this perspective, cancelled elections are a possibility. The truth is, with Hillary Clinton you never know what to expect because she is operating from an ""ends justify the means mentality,"" and she is willing to do anything to see her dreams of a collectivized America move forward. 
+According to Elizabeth Harrington from the Washington Free Beacon, the Clinton campaign began conducting focus groups to determine which approach Hillary should take concerning her run for the presidency. Hillary is diehard ideologue whose beliefs are right in line with Communists dictators like Stalin and Mao. She believes that ordinary people have no idea how to best conduct their personal business and the state should be involved in every aspect of our lives. The goal of these focus groups was to determine the attitudes of the electorate in order to mold her message and her personality into something they would vote for. Many people would attempt to ridicule and discredit anyone associating Hillary Clinton with communists because she comes across as compassionate and caring, always blaming everything on a vast, right wing conspiracy. 
+This has always been the modus operandi of the communist movement and it explains why so many young people have no idea about the atrocities committed under the regimes of communist rulers. Today's millennials are well aware of the holocaust and the millions of Jews murdered by Adolph Hitler. They may not however, know that Hitler murdered more than Jews. He started by eliminating the sick and disabled, then he murdered Christians, homosexuals and anyone else essentially, that didn't go along with his national socialism. The belief is that fascism is an extreme right wing world view. This explains the hostility towards today's conservative movement. They have been branded as fascists, when in fact, the truth is the exact opposite. On the true political scale, national socialism or fascism is to the right of communism, which represents complete state control, but it is still way left of center. A true, extreme right wing world view would be complete absence of government control over anything. With this being said, and understanding that the horrors of communism have all been forgotten simply because they are no longer being taught, the communists have been very successful in deceiving people because like Hillary Clinton, they pretend to be something they are not. 
+Millions of young people in America, due to left wing indoctrination in our universities, are falling for the communist propaganda under the guise that communism is a more fair, compassionate system of economics. Left wing professors, refusing to acknowledge the failures of communism because they believe the right leader has not come along to implement it the right way, have failed to teach these young minds that the pursuit of total equality has led to the death of 100,000,000 people under communist controlled governments. Communists, believing not in God but in evolution and science, believe that man can be trained into submission and a refusal to accept communist ideals is in fact, a sign of mental deficiency. Therefore, it is justifiable to eliminate them. To understand this read ""Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics."" Communists also hide this belief by claiming their pursuit of equality is motivated by a pursuit of social and economic justice when in fact, it is motivated by a pure desire to control every aspect of human being. 
+The Black Book of Communism references the historical debate over the evil natures of both Communism and Nazism. Adolf Hitler, despite his cruelty was open about what his intentions were. He set out to create a perfect race that understood its role was to serve the state and nothing else. This isn't any different than the goals of communism truthfully, only insofar as communists seek to accomplish this on a global scale, (using the economic class issue as opposed to race) while national socialism focuses on achieving such a goal for the country itself. The communists on the other hand, as mentioned above, pretended to be compassionate about the poor and oppressed when in reality- they use these groups to organize for power while hiding behind the guise of compassion and the struggle to achieve social justice, while in reality-they are systematically imprisoning and murdering all that don't go along with their agenda. This, according to the Black Book of Communism, makes the communist ideology, if you could really assign degrees of evil, more evil than Nazism because of its deceptive nature. 
+We all know Hillary Clinton is a liar, and she wrote her college thesis on Saul Alinsky but do we know anything else about her? Given the fact that she conducted focus groups to help mold her campaign message it is obvious she is hiding something. Over the past several weeks we have seen references to leaked emails which show she has an obvious disdain for the average American and the common beliefs in liberty that most of us share. She has referred to many of us as ""irredeemable deplorables"" in an effort to brand us as the uncompassionate ones while pretending to care about the poor and so called oppressed. In fact, this is the whole strategy of the Democrat party because as we all know, they have taken a hard turn left and do not represent the views of most Americans. They will however, pretend to in order to get in office. What are her intentions if she were to assume office? Are the massive dehumanization campaigns where conservatives are labeled as fascists and whites as automatic racists a first step to a repeat of history where millions were slaughtered because they were deemed as undesirable by their own government? Looking at the deceptive nature of Hillary Clinton and the violent nature of the left, it sure seems like a distinct possibility. 
+The number of deaths under communist regimes from the Black Book of Communism Soviet Union- Vladimr Lenin and Joseph Stalin-20 million deaths China-Mao- 65 million deaths Vietnam- Ho Chi Mihn- 1 million deaths North Korea- 2 million deaths Cambodia- Pol Pot- 2 million deaths Eastern Europe- 1 million deaths Latin America- 150,000 deaths Africa- 1.7 million deaths Afghanistan (under soviet control) 1.5 million deaths 
+These are not deaths represented by wartime or revolutions, but by outright murder committed by evil men intent on creating perfect societies based on social justice and equality. I guess the question remains. Is man capable of bringing about a perfect society? 
+Article posted with permission from In Defense of Our Nation  ",FAKE
+5759,DNC Head Leaked 2nd Debate Question to Hillary,"DNC Head Leaked 2nd Debate Question to Hillary October 31,   
+We're not talking about Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the ex-muppet in charge of the DNC who was forced to resign because of the way the DNC rigged the process to favor Hillary. This is Donna Brazile who was brought in to replace her to bring back integrity to the DNC. Since Brazile is another Clinton loyalist, that was never going to happen. 
+But the latest leak reveals that Brazile had passed along a second debate question to Hillary. All this just emphasizes how fraudulent and rigged the whole debate process was. 
+Another leaked email has emerged showing Democratic National Committee boss and former CNN contributor Donna Brazile sharing a debate question in advance with the Hillary Clinton campaign -- despite Brazile's persistent claims to the contrary. 
+CNN announced in a statement soon after the email became public Monday that Brazile had tendered her resignation and the network accepted it on Oct. 14, days after the controversy over Brazile tipping off the Clinton campaign initially broke. 
+According to documents released Monday by WikiLeaks, Brazile sent Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri an email titled, “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash,” the night before the March 6 CNN primary debate in Flint, Mich. 
+“Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint,” Brazile wrote. 
+The following night, Lee-Anne Walters, a mom whose twin boys stopped growing and whose daughter lost her hair during the Flint water contamination crisis, posed a question to both Clinton, the eventual Democratic presidential nominee, and her primary opponent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. 
+Clinton responded with a lengthy answer that moderator Anderson Cooper had to twice interrupt in an attempt to keep to the agreed-upon time limit. 
+How pervasive is this kind of thing in the process? We're getting a snapshot of how Clinton's people rigged the process and faked the results to favor them at every turn.",FAKE
+1859,‘Paid for by O’Malley for President’ — and 9 other signs O’Malley is in,"Martin O’Malley’s presidential campaign-in-waiting has sought to maintain some suspense about a “special announcement” he has planned for May 30 in Baltimore.
+
+An email sent out Thursday by O’Malley’s team asked “Is he in or is he out? Will he run or won’t he?,” and promised people who put their names on an e-mail list that they could be the first to know -- “before the media, the politicians and the Washington establishment.”
+
+Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but the answer is already pretty clear. Here are 10 signs that O'Malley is running:
+
+1) During one of a series of conference calls Thursday night, O’Malley directed former staffers to a Web site -- www.omalleyannouncement.com -- where people can sign up to attend his May 30 announcement in Baltimore. A line at the bottom of the page says the site is ""Paid for by O’Malley for President.”
+
+2) O’Malley aides put out word that he has leased 7,200 square feet of office space -- the right size to lunch an insurgent campaign -- in Baltimore near Penn Station, the city’s rail hub. Promoting a Baltimore Sun story about the move on Twitter, O’Malley communications maven Lis Smith, currently a New York resident, wrote, “Baltimore, here we come.”
+
+3) Several aides now employed by O’Malley’s political action committee have been looking for places to live in Baltimore.
+
+4) In another conference call Thursday night, O’Malley aides outlined plans to begin fundraising for a federal committee, i.e. one that could be used to pay for a presidential bid. O'Malley has been using a political action committee to fund his activities, which will no longer be legal once he is officially a candidate.
+
+5) During the call, aides advertised a working lunch on May 21 where supporters can help O’Malley dial for dollars. They emphasized the need to make a good financial showing before a June 30 reporting deadline.
+
+6) Supporters on the conference call were told of two key members of O’Malley’s financial team: Terry Lierman, a former Maryland Democratic Party chairman, as treasurer; and Martin Knott, a Baltimore-area businessman, as finance chairman.
+
+7) O’Malley has further expanded his press staff in recent days. A tweet sent out by Smith earlier this week announcing the latest two hires -- both females -- referred to O’Malley’s “#ladyboss press team.”
+
+8) Last week, O’Malley’s PAC announced the addition of its latest high-profile member: national political director Karine Jean-Pierre.
+
+9) O’Malley, joined by Jean-Pierre and other aides, made a daylong swing Wednesday through New Hampshire, the nation’s first presidential primary state.
+
+10) O’Malley's entourage that day included media consultant Jimmy Siegel and a camera crew. Siegel, who worked for Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 presidential cycle, specializes in campaign-style videos.
+
+Of course, there's always the possibility that all of this could be for naught. As longtime O’Malley watchers may recall, in 2002, when he was mayor of Baltimore, O’Malley held a press conference to announce he would NOT run for governor that year, avoiding a primary fight with well-known Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.
+
+As one longtime O’Malley associate put it Thursday, however, “there’s a different vibe this time.” Look for an email from O’Malley for confirmation.",REAL
+6051,"Woman Buys Lotto Ticket to Prove to Husband Nobody Wins, Wins $1 Million","Get short URL 0 3 0 0 Buddy Blackwell asked his wife Glenda, 57, to pick him up two Powerball tickets over the weekend. Annoyed with her husband wasting money, she bought a $10 Carolina Millions scratch ticket for herself, just to prove that nobody ever wins. © Photo: Pixabay ""I was going to be ugly and buy a scratch off to show him they didn’t hit,"" Blackwell told WLOS . ""Sometimes I get aggravated with him, so I tell him, 'You're just wasting your money.'""
+But her plan to teach him a lesson backfired when — she won a million dollars. 
+""I had to eat my words, but they were worth eating,"" Blackwell said while laughing. ""So, I was very happy."" 
+The Blackwells traveled to Raleigh to collect their check, opting to take a lump sum of $415,000 after taxes. Their other option would have been 20 yearly payments of $50,000, but Glenda was concerned that she would not live that long, due to health issues. ""We've struggled a lot, so now we can buy our own home and our own land. It'll be paid for and I don't have to worry about that no more,"" Glenda Blackwell said. ""So, that's what I plan to do with some of the money and the other part I plan to help my daughter and to put money up for my two granddaughters for college."" 
+Glenda said that she and her husband will not purchase any more lottery tickets. ...",FAKE
+4604,Exclusive Trump op-ed: We must clean up this corruption,"Why you should vote for me.
+
+For 17 months, I’ve traveled this country and met countless Americans from every walk of life. Your hopes have become my hopes and your dreams have become my dreams.
+
+I’ve been inspired on this journey by the millions of you who came to cheer a simple idea: that we can make America great again.
+
+Real change begins with immediately repealing and replacing job-killing Obamacare — Americans are experiencing soaring double-digit premium hikes, insurers are leaving, doctors are quitting, jobs are fleeing, and deductibles are through the roof.
+
+It also means immediately fixing our terrible trade deals, which have killed American jobs and crushed American incomes. This means renegotiating Bill and Hillary Clinton’s disastrous NAFTA and China deals that have deindustrialized the United States — importing unemployment and exporting our wealth.
+
+It means we don’t have to keep kids trapped in failing schools — that we can give every parent the right to send their kids to the school of their choice, including millions of low-income African-American and Hispanic children who have been failed for generations by Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton.
+
+Real change also means draining the swamp of corruption in Washington. We must fix a rigged system in which political insiders can break the law without consequence and where government officials put special interests above the national interest. If we want to make America great again, we must clean up this corruption.
+
+Hillary Clinton has been the subject of an FBI criminal investigation into many crimes against this nation. Were she ever to be elected, it would trigger an unprecedented constitutional crisis — Hillary is likely to be under investigation for a long time, grinding our government to a halt.
+
+America has too many problems, too many things to fix, to mire our government in years of sordid corruption and criminal investigation.
+
+It is time to cut our ties with the failed politicians of the past, and embrace a bright, new future for all of our people.
+
+That’s what I’m offering in my Contract with the American Voter, a 100-day action plan to clean up corruption and bring change to Washington. It’s there for you to read at www.TheTrumpContract.com.
+
+In my Contract with the American Voter, I offer a historic pro-growth plan to create 25 million good paying jobs. We will cut taxes on middle-class Americans by 35%. We will eliminate every needless job-killing regulation. We will repeal and replace catastrophic Obamacare with new reforms that dramatically expand choice, substantially lower costs, and significantly improve the quality of care. And we will end the offshoring of American jobs.
+
+In my contract, I also offer a detailed plan to immediately secure the border, stop illegal immigration and keep radical Islamic terrorists out of our country. Hillary has pledged “open borders,” mass amnesty, and a 550% increase in Syrian refugees. America’s immigration officers described Hillary’s extremist plan as “the most radical immigration agenda proposal in U.S. history.”
+
+I will restore the constitutional rule of law and nominate Supreme Court justices who will do the same.
+
+Finally, I pledge to fight for the right of every child in American to grow up in safety and peace, and undertake a national effort to bring jobs, security and prosperity to our inner cities.
+
+I am asking for your vote, and to be your champion in the White House.
+
+Together, we will take our government back from the special interests — and we will Make America Great Again.
+
+Donald J. Trump is the Republican nominee for president.
+
+You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.",REAL
+5443,Best Magic tricks ever revealed 2016,"Best Magic tricks ever revealed 2016 # www.youtube.com 0 
+List Top 10 Youtuber brings top 5 magic tricks & how magician do or you can say Technic behind magic . 
+Don't miss to watch & also try to do at your home, school or party. Let people be shock to find a new magician & you can let them know how these tricks are performed & how easily illusion creates. 
+magic tricks revealed show, magic tricks revealed youtube, magic tricks revealed cards, magic tricks revealed agt, magic tricks revealed reddit, magic tricks revealed videos, magic tricks revealed on netflix, magic tricks revealed easy, magic tricks revealed drawing, magic tricks revealed penn and teller, magic tricks revealed, magic tricks revealed america's got talent, magic tricks revealed and explained, magic tricks revealed at home, magic tricks revealed axn, magic tricks revealed amazing, magic tricks revealed at school, magic tricks revealed advanced Tags",FAKE
+8176,"New Wikileaks emails: Bernie is a Jerk, Megyn Kelly a Bimbo and More","
+WikiLeaks has published its 33rd tranche of emails from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
+The whistleblowing organization has now published more than 55,600 emails in a series of daily online releases which it said were building towards the November 8 presidential election.
+Emails released Sunday included messages accusing Chelsea Clinton of using Clinton Foundation funds for her wedding as well as leaked transcripts of Bill Clinton’s fundraising speeches.
+WikiLeaks has claimed its email publishing servers suffered a sustained DoS attack after it released #DNCLeak2 over the weekend.
+THERE ARE 2 ADDITIONAL LEAKS ADDED TO THIS STORY COMPARED TO THE STANDARD RT STORY. THEY ARE AT THE BOTTOM.
+Goldman Sachs speeches 
+In an email from January 23, 2016 Clinton Research Director Tony Carrk quoted the Democratic presidential nominee apparently expressing little appetite for prosecuting rogue Wall Street bankers.
+In the mail to Clinton campaign Director of Communications Jennifer Palmieri, Press Secretary Brian Fallon and Podesta, Carrk said he was sending excerpts from Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches.
+“I’m not interested in, you know, turning the clock back or pointing fingers,” Clinton is reported to have told Tim O’Neill, formerly of SJU Wall Street Trading Room and Credit Suisse, following a paid speech.
+Clinton apparently then went on to recommend that the financial sector take a leading role in setting out regulations for their own troubled industry: “The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry. There’s nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad.”
+Less than one year earlier, Democratic media adviser Mandy Grunwald suggested to Podesta in another communication leaked Monday that Clinton should take a conciliatory tone with regard to Wall Street.
+“I would include something from the Maggie Haberman piece on HRC’s Goldman Sachs speech,” writes Grunwald.
+“Something like, “When HRC recently spoke to bankers at Goldman Sachs, instead of holding them accountable for their activities that crashed the economy, she told them that banker bashing was foolish and had to stop. She said “soothing” that we all got into our economic problems together.”
+‘Illegal ivory’ as leverage on China 
+Hillary Clinton directed her now-campaign chair Podesta to use reports of illegal elephant tusk smuggling by Chinese government officials as “leverage” during a 2014 White House visit to the nation.
+Three days before President Obama’s visit to Beijing in November 2014, the former secretary of state highlighted a NY Times article on how Chinese delegates reportedly smuggled home poached ivory from Tanzania.
+A message from Clinton’s hrod17@clintonemail.com opens by praising Podesta’s “teasing” of reporters and “flashes” of a smile at a recent press conference before asking the then-White House adviser to raise the ivory story with China’s president directly.
+“On China, I know you’ll be in Beijing next week, so am sending a news report about how Xi’s official party on its visit to Tanzania loaded up their planes w poached ivory, likely w full knowledge of [President Jakaya] Kikwete’s government,” Clinton writes.
+“Please raise this issue directly w XI, both because it is critical on the merits but also because it’s another way you can gain some leverage with the Chinese.”
+The email subject line was, “Below is what I sent POTUS on election and China poaching.”
+A ‘fact sheet’ provided by the White House regarding Obama’s visit shows discussions centered on the ebola crisis, economic relations, and a “shared vision for Afghanistan.” An effort to work together to “stop the trade in illegal wildlife products” is also mentioned.
+Clinton ‘totally blew’ crime question 
+New York Mayor Bill de Blasio thought Clinton “totally blew” a debate question about her support for a controversial federal crime bill passed by her husband.
+In a March 2016 email , de Blasio was less than impressed with Clinton’s attempt to pass off a question on mass incarceration to her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders back in March.
+“Hillary was fantastic on the gun control answer, then totally blew the mass incarceration question,” de Blasio wrote to Podesta.
+The question was posed during a live CNN debate by anchor Don Lemon, who asked Clinton why black people should trust her to end a pattern of mass incarceration when she supported a 1994 law which many blame for “locking up a generation of black men.”
+Clinton began her answer by reminding people that Sanders also supported the bill, a tactic which appears to have irked Mayor de Blasio.
+“Why on Earth did she say ‘Are you going to ask Senator Sanders that question?’ instead of just addressing the issue,” de Blasio wrote.
+“When she makes it about her, she loses the high ground. Stating the obvious, I know, but she keeps doing itâ€Śâ€
+Podesta brothers plan to influence India on NGO clampdown 
+Podesta sought to enlist the help of his lobbyist brother to influence an Indian Intelligence Bureau crackdown on Greenpeace and a key donor, the Ford Foundation, Monday’s leaked emails reveal.
+Correspondence between John and Tony Podesta from May 2015 show the pair planned a lunch with the Indian ambassador to discuss a “very serious situation” facing Greenpeace in which the Indian government accused the group of financial irregularities. The claims eventually led to the cancellation of its license to operate there.
+The bid to influence India’s decision-making came at the request of Karen Sack, managing director of conservation group Ocean Unite, who asked if John Podesta could get in touch with his brother at The Podesta Group.
+“Apparently The Podesta Group has the contract for the Republic of India in the US, but Kumi [Naidoo, Greenpeace executive director] has no way to reach Tony or another principal,” Sack writes.
+John Podesta forwarded the “small request” to his brother, highlighting Kumi Naidoo’s large following globally.
+“Want to talk to the head of Greenpeace? Kumi Naidoo is a very well known South African with a big international following, but I think the GOI [Government of India] likely to stick it to them.”
+He also explained he was trying to use his influence to help the Ford Foundation charity, which had similarly “got on the wrong side of GOI”. However, he expressed a belief that their issue “can be more easily resolved.”
+A reply from Tony Podesta proposes a lunch with an Indian ambassador as well as confirmation he would be “happy” to talk to Greenpeace.
+A leaked July 2015 email about funding shows Podesta describing global charity the Ford Foundation as a “ mainstay ” for the Center for American Progress think-tank, which he founded in 2003.
+Clinton’s emails could ‘either win 49 states, or lose 49 states’ 
+As previously reported , in March of 2015, Clinton’s camp were debating whether Hillary should make a joke about her “email situation”.
+Staffers were “nervous” about the “potentially nuts” move and, in freshly leaked correspondence, sought advice from Philippe Reines – a former senior adviser from Clinton’s days as Secretary of State and someone who was likely privy to the contents of said emails.
+“Trust me, most of the email themselves are funnier than any joke we can come up with. Read in total by America she would either win 49 states, or lose 49 states. I go back and forth,” said Reines.
+“But I would not make a joke just for the sake of making a joke, because email retention = Benghazi,” he warned.
+“We can’t jam State to release them at this point, but if Dan [Schwerin, Clinton’s speech writer] can think of a light way to say “I am proud of the work we did at State and hopefully at some point everyone will be able to read what’s in them as a way to better understand that workâ€Śâ€ Reines suggested.
+Bernie Sanders is a Jerk 
+We have previously reported about the agreement between Bernie Sanders and Clinton Campaign. We have also previously reported about Hillary’s others insults about Bernie’s supporters: basement-dwellers, bucket of losers, stupid millennials, etc. but now here’s another one.
+This email is part of the DNC Leaks not of Podesta. DNC insider Hilary Rosen was caught emailing Jon Reinish and telling him that “Bernie Sanders is a petty jerk”: yes, she has a statement coming out. he is a petty jerk
+Trump is right, Megyn Kelly is a Bimbo 
+Another DNC Leak email says that Donald Trump is right about Megyn Kelly. Yes she is a BIMBO! Well well well but you freaks of nature were saying Trump is a sexist for saying that. Then that means you too are sexists you Democrat liars.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+9831,Debunked: The Photo Of Obama With A Speech Balloo... | ClickHole,"Email 
+In an age where information can be spread to millions of people within seconds, it’s often difficult to separate fact from fiction. That was certainly the case a few months ago when a controversial photo of President Obama began to circulate online, with many insisting that the image was the real, unedited deal. But today that picture was officially debunked: The photo of Obama with a speech balloon saying “Islam is my main thing” has been proven to be doctored. 
+Wow. This is a good reminder to take everything you see on the internet with a grain of salt! 
+Take a look at the photo in question above. In it, you can clearly see Obama proudly declaring his unshakeable Islamic faith. 
+At first glance, the photo looks like pretty clear evidence that Obama may be Muslim and confirms the suspicions of his most far-right critics, who insist the president has been dishonest with the public about his true religious beliefs. But when the image went viral on Twitter, one user pointed out a possible sign of doctoring: 
+Many users agreed that the photo appeared to have been manipulated in some way and asked for an expert to weigh in. A graphic designer named Brendan McCann, whose Twitter bio says he’s been in the industry for over a decade, quickly answered the call. 
+But it was Snopes that officially put the matter to rest. After scouring the internet far and wide, they were able to dig up the original version of the photograph, taken during one of the president’s official White House photo ops, and there’s no speech balloon upholding the teachings of the Quran anywhere in sight. 
+Take a look at the two images side by side to see how the effect was achieved: 
+Well, there you have it. It looks like whoever made this image took some of the space from above the president’s head and used it to overlay the speech balloon on top. It’s a powerful effect, but it’s definitely not real. Remember: When it comes to the internet, always question your sources! ",FAKE
+430,Maryland has passed one of the nation’s strongest equal pay laws,"Maryland is on a roll right now when it comes to lawmaking on women's issues, passing two major laws in two weeks that advocates for women's economic security have spent years pushing for.
+
+On Thursday, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) signed an equal pay law that advocates are calling one of the nation's strongest. It strengthens existing laws that prohibit discrimination based on gender, and also includes gender identity.
+
+""It really makes Maryland a leader in the equal pay movement,"" said Charly Carter, executive director of Maryland Working Families, in an interview with Vox. Carter helped push the bill through the legislature, along with other advocates.
+
+The equal pay law comes right on the heels of Hogan signing the Contraceptive Equity Act last week, which makes birth control more consistently affordable. That law goes further than the Affordable Care Act by forbidding insurers from charging any copays on any federally approved birth control, including emergency contraception and vasectomies.
+
+It might seem surprising that Hogan, a Republican, would be willing to sign both of these fairly progressive bills that feminist advocates have been pushing for. And the new equal pay law in particular was a hard-fought battle against Republicans who didn't want it passed, or who didn't want it to go as far as equal pay advocates did. But Carter said it's ""politically smart"" for Hogan to do so, since the measures are so popular with Maryland voters.
+
+Carter says one part of the law closes loopholes and makes it harder for employers to justify pay disparities between men and women.
+
+The law also says you cannot forbid your employees from discussing their salaries. It also makes it much easier for workers to sue if their boss unjustly fires or retaliates against them for discussing their pay.
+
+Some employers either explicitly or implicitly ban the discussion of salaries, because they're afraid of stoking resentments or revealing inequities. And advocates say that this lack of pay transparency contributes to the wage gap. Unconscious bias means women are frequently offered lower salaries for various reasons, and sometimes employers have no idea that they're consistently paying women less than men until they conduct pay audits.
+
+The way the system is currently set up is also incredibly unfair to low-wage workers, most of whom are women, Carter said. For practical purposes, many of them have little or no legal protection against retaliation. All they can do is appeal to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — a lengthy process that not even all workers can avail themselves of.
+
+""If you're making minimum wage, if you're making $30,000 a year, you don't have two years and lawyers' fees to go after your employer for treating you badly,"" Carter said.
+
+A national law that's pretty similar to Maryland's, the Paycheck Fairness Act, is going nowhere in Congress — like most progressive initiatives these days. That's why advocates are turning to the states to try to build momentum for national action, and help the workers they can in the meantime.
+
+Carter says that now only California has an equal pay law that's stronger than Maryland's. But both provide excellent models for other states, and the country as a whole, to follow.
+
+Several other states — Illinois, Minnesota, North Dakota, Tennessee and Vermont — also have very strong equal pay laws, said Amy Becker, political media manager with the American Association of University Women (AAUW). And Massachusetts may soon pass a bill that would rival California's.
+
+Maryland's law does have one thing that California's doesn't — a provision that tries to go after the ""mommy track,"" where women's careers get systemically stunted after they take some time off to have children.
+
+The law does this by saying an employer can't offer less favorable job opportunities based on gender or gender identity. For instance, if you work in a supermarket and the only real way to become a manager is to work the closing shift, but you never put women on the closing shift because you think it's too dangerous, you either have to give women the chance to work that shift or change your promotion criteria.
+
+Advocates in both California and Maryland tried and failed, but plan to try again, to forbid bosses from asking prospective employees about their salary history before an offer is made.
+
+This practice is a problem since women make less than men across the board even just one year out of college. If you start off underpaid, and every job pays you based in part on what your last job paid you, you'll pretty much be screwed until retirement — and you'll have less saved up for that, to boot. (Hogan also approved a new state-run retirement savings program, though, which will especially help women in low-wage and part-time jobs who don't have a 401(k).)
+
+Equal pay laws are just one part of a multipronged women's agenda that advocates are pushing at the state level. This agenda also tends to include things like paid family leave, paid sick days, flexible scheduling, and affordable child care.
+
+These proposals often come in packages, because advocates don't want to split them up and dilute their political power.
+
+""It's easy to get caught up in issue policy silos,"" Vivien Labaton, co-founder of the advocacy campaign Make It Work, told Vox this month. ""But the issues people fall asleep worrying about aren't paid family leave over here, affordable child care over there. It really is an interconnected set of problems that people deal with on a day-to-day basis.""
+
+Correction: This article originally misstated the contents of California's equal pay law. The salary history provision was a separate bill that the legislature passed, but that Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed. We regret the error.
+
+Update: This article has been updated with a comment from AAUW's Amy Becker, and a link citing AAUW vice president of government relations Lisa Maatz's testimony before Congress on the effect of salary transparency on the wage gap.",REAL
+709,The real reason Hillary Clinton's VP shortlist is so short,"Sherrod Brown looks in some ways like a very tempting vice presidential pick for Hillary Clinton.
+
+He doesn't have an enormous national profile, but inside the Beltway he's known as a stalwart of the liberal wing of the party's congressional caucus. Unlike Bernie Sanders, he's a loyal party man. But he has a similar disheveled populist anti-fashion to go along with an extensive track record of support for labor unions and skepticism of the forces of globalization.
+
+And as a white dude from Ohio, he's ideally suited in demographic terms to help Clinton stem her losses of working-class whites in the Midwest — a key area of weakness vis-à-vis Donald Trump.
+
+But there's a huge problem. Ohio has a Republican governor, so creating a vacancy would cost Democrats a Senate seat. Elizabeth Warren has the same problem. So does Tammy Baldwin. And Cory Booker. And Debbie Stabenow.
+
+Fear of losing a Senate seat with a VP pick isn't unique to the 2016 election, of course. But with polarization in Congress steadily rising, it's an increasingly important consideration — particularly in a year when Democrats are hoping to retake a Senate.
+
+And Clinton's problem is that Democrats right now are doing terribly in terms of winning state and local elections. The Southwestern swing states of Nevada and New Mexico are in Republican hands. So are Iowa and Ohio, the Midwestern swingers. So is Florida. But so are a bunch of blue states, ranging from Michigan and Pennsylvania to comically safe states like Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois, and New Jersey.
+
+This severely constrains the roster of senators she can responsibly select, while also directly denuding the party of governors who could fill the job.
+
+Trump, by contrast, has a smorgasbord of plausible options with conventional political résumés. He could pick a moderate Latino like Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval* or a more conventionally conservative one like Marco Rubio. He could pick an old-school hard-right Southern senator like Jeff Sessions, or a young African-American hard-right senator like Tim Scott, or a swing state governor like Rick Scott, or a deeply conservative governor of a blue-leaning state like Scott Walker. Or he could avoid men named Scott altogether!
+
+Clinton's very short shortlist likely won't make a huge difference in November. Much was made over the course of 2015 of the Republican Party's deep bench in the presidential field, and the GOP ended up with Trump.
+
+VP picks do matter. It's very common for a vice president to go on to become president or at least his party's nominee. The generally dismal standing of the overall party during Obama-era midterms cut short the careers of many seemingly talented politicians.
+
+Clinton's limited range of choices and inevitable need to mix substantive and political considerations in making her choice reduces the chances that a truly excellent figure will be available. Landslide GOP wins in 2010 and 2014 have consequences that not only continue through today but will keep ricocheting forward into future cycles.
+
+* Correction: The governor of Nevada is Brian Sandoval. Richard Sandoval is the chef behind El Centro D.F. and other restaurants.",REAL
+765,Inside Planned Parenthood's $30 Million Campaign For 2016,"PITTSBURGH, Pa. -- Donald Trump may think Planned Parenthood does ""good work,"" but its members have few nice things to say about the presumptive GOP frontrunner in return.
+
+""Asshole,"" ""racist,"" ""chauvinist,"" ""dangerous,"" ""unqualified"" and ""pendejo"" were all words Planned Parenthood volunteers used when asked to share their thoughts about Trump. One woman said she thought a fart noise would be more appropriate than an actual word.
+
+Nearly 1,000 of Planned Parenthood's most active volunteers gathered in Pittsburgh this past weekend for an intensive Power of Pink grassroots training, the kickoff for the organization's 2016 work. The group has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton, so mobilizing against Trump will be a major focus.
+
+""He says in the same breath that he loves Planned Parenthood, we do great work and at the same time vows to defund us because we provide abortion access. That's no friend of ours,"" said Deirdre Schifeling, who leads the group's national organizing and electoral work.
+
+Trump recently promised that if elected president, he would also name anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court.
+
+Planned Parenthood aims to spend close to $30 million in the 2016 election cycle to make sure he doesn't get that chance. That amount would be the most money it ever spent in an election and double what it spent in the last cycle, according to Schifeling. The focus will be on reaching 5 million voters known as ""swing women"" -- women who view access to reproductive health care as a core issue but are independents and flip between the parties.
+
+On Saturday morning, the Power of Pink attendees gathered for a final rally that, at times, felt like a Purim carnival. Whenever, someone mentioned Trump, inevitably, the entire room would erupt in boos.
+
+""Every election has stakes. This one has some serious stakes, ya'll. Serious stakes. I'm just going to say it again: Donald Trump. If those are not stakes, I don't know what else is,"" said Marlon Marshall, the Clinton campaign's director of state campaigns and political engagement.
+
+""We cannot trust Donald Trump with our lives, and we can't trust him with our future and we can't trust our country in his hands,"" said Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards. ""He seems to live in a world where bullying and stoking fear and anger is the only way to get ahead and where cutting down others is the only way to get on top. And for us, that's all too familiar how that feels,"" she continued. Richards then read off some of the terms Trump has used to describe women -- ""bimbos,"" ""dogs"" and ""pigs.""",REAL
+8333,Technology Blackout Feared As Solar Storm Hits Earth,"  Edmondo Burr in Sci/Environment // 0 Comments Yesterday the sun erupted with a huge solar flare sending streams of particles bombarding towards Earth. 
+A solar storm can wreak havoc on electricity power lines and technologies that rely on satellites. 
+People are warned to prepare for the worst in coming days. 
+The Daily Express reports: 
+Solar storms can affect technology here on Earth as the radiation thrown at our planet heat the outer atmosphere, resulting in it expanding. 
+As a result, satellite communications struggle to penetrate the atmosphere, essentially blocking communications which could lead to a lack of GPS navigation, mobile phone signal and satellite TV such as Sky. 
+Furthermore, higher currents in the magnetosphere – the Earth’s magnetic field – could result in a surge of electricity in power lines, which can blow out electrical transformers and power stations leading to a temporary loss of electricity in a region – although this usually only occurs in areas that are in high altitude. 
+The solar storm is predicted to carry on until October 27 and officials are telling citizens to prepare for the worst. 
+The US Space Weather Prediction Center said: “Voltage corrections may be required, false alarms triggered on some protection devices. 
+“Drag may increase on low-Earth-orbit satellites, and corrections may be needed for orientation problems”. 
+The storm was originally described as a “serious” G3 level storm, although it was later downgraded to a G2. 
+The UK Met Office said: “Elevated solar winds are expected throughout the period, with G1-G2 minor to moderate geomagnetic storms forecast.” Greenland 
+However, on the plus side, solar storms can lead to the Northern Lights being visible. 
+As the magnetosphere gets bombarded by solar winds, stunning blue lights can appear over the upper reaches of the Northern hemisphere and the lower parts of the southern hemisphere.",FAKE
+5620,Deutsche Bank LIVES: Shock profits posted in Q3,"Deutsche Bank LIVES: Shock profits posted in Q3 October 27, 2016 A green traffic light is seen next to the logo of Germany's largest business bank, Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, October 27, 2016. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach 
+Deutsche Bank chief John Cryan has shocked the financial sector by posting a quarterly profit after expectations sent economists running for the hills Wednesday. Deutsche Bank posted an unexpected quarterly profit, likely due to staff and bonus cuts. Deutsche announced an unexpected net profit of 278 million euros ($303 million) in the third quarter. Profit attributed to a modest rebound in bond trading that boosted all Wall Street banks. Cryan: The quarter had been overshadowed by talks over the DOJs settlement proposal relating to sales of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS). Uncertainty had also taken its toll on ""financial planning and strategy execution”. Cryan’s letter to Deutsche staffers: The situation ""will stay difficult for a while,” and I am working to finalize the settlement ""as soon as possible”. Deutsche will also intensify major restructuring to counter a deteriorating environment for EU banking. Top ten shareholder: ""Fixed income is still oversized in terms of cost and on group level there are still 10,000 staff too many."" Deutsche Bank's CFO Marcus Schenck: Expect the fourth quarter trading business overall to exceed last year's performance. Cryan: Spending at least an hour a day explaining the bank's position to clients. ""To dispel any myths, I don't just sit poring over spreadsheets"". In Deutsche Banks retail and wealth management: Had assets of almost 440 billion euros, clients withdrew 9 billion euros in the third quarter. Deutsche has liquidity reserves of 200 billion euros, down from the 215 billion outlined on Sept. 30, and 223 billion euros in June. Deutsche increased their litigation reserves to 5.9 billion from 5.5 billion at the end of June. Deutsche revenue grew slightly at 7.5 billion euros, with bond trading earnings up 14 percent. Morgan Stanley analysts: ""Top down, revenues were stronger and the bank is delivering on costs with this quarter being a fourth consecutive one of declining operating expenses.” In contrast: Barclays on Thursday reported a 40 percent spike in its business. 
+(FRANKFURT, GERMANY) Deutsche Bank chief John Cryan pledged to redouble restructuring efforts on Thursday, warning that it faces tough times finalizing talks with U.S. justice authorities over a multi billion dollar fine. 
+Germany's biggest lender earlier posted an unexpected quarterly profit, benefiting from a modest rebound in bond trading, but failed to dispel the cloud of uncertainty that drove clients to withdraw billions of euros. 
+Cryan said on a conference call that the quarter had been overshadowed by talks over the U.S. Department of Justice’s settlement proposal relating to sales of RMBS (residential mortgage-backed securities) which had caused uncertainty. 
+As well as having an impact on investor and client views of the bank, this uncertainty had also taken its toll on ""financial planning and strategy execution"", Cryan added. 
+Cryan warned Deutsche Bank employees in a letter that the situation ""will stay difficult for a while"" and said he was working to finalize the settlement ""as soon as possible"". 
+Deutsche Bank would also intensify a major restructuring to counter a deteriorating environment for banking in Europe and elsewhere, Cryan said. 
+However, a top ten shareholder called on the bank's management to make deeper cuts in its trading activities. ""Fixed income is still oversized in terms of cost and on group level there are still 10,000 staff too many."" 
+Despite weeks of negative headlines, Deutsche was able to announce an unexpected net profit of 278 million euros ($303 million) in the third quarter, lifted by a surge in bond trading that boosted all Wall Street banks. 
+This sent its shares to a more than one-month high, but they retreated in line with the market to be down 0.3 percent. 
+Deutsche Bank's Chief Financial Officer Marcus Schenck also struck a positive note, saying he expects the fourth quarter trading business overall to exceed last year's performance. 
+SPREADSHEET MYTH 
+
+Cryan said he was spending at least an hour a day explaining the bank's position to clients, adding: ""To dispel any myths, I don't just sit poring over spreadsheets"". 
+Negotiations over a $14 billion demand from the U.S. DoJ for misselling toxic mortgage-backed securities before the 2007-2009 financial crisis have set a bleak backdrop for Cryan. 
+Thursday's results gave some insight into how this demand has rocked confidence in Deutsche Bank, which plays a critical role in financing some of Germany's biggest companies. 
+In retail and wealth management, which had assets of almost 440 billion euros, clients withdrew 9 billion euros in the third quarter, Deutsche Bank revealed. Outflows had since abated, it said, although its global markets trading business was also hit. 
+Cryan said the bank had liquidity reserves of 200 billion euros, a fall from the more than 215 billion he had outlined on Sept. 30. In June, the bank had 223 billion euros. 
+Deutsche Bank set aside more money for its legal bill for numerous past missteps. Litigation reserves rose to 5.9 billion from 5.5 billion at the end of June. 
+However, Deutsche Bank has so far not made a specific proposal for what it would be willing to pay to settle the RMBS case and has therefore not upped its provisions for it. It had hoped to settle the case for about $3 billion. 
+Revenue grew slightly at 7.5 billion euros, ahead of analysts' expectations, mainly driven by Deutsche's trading, while business declined in other operating areas. 
+""Top down, revenues were stronger and the bank is delivering on costs with this quarter being a fourth consecutive one of declining operating expenses,"" analysts at Morgan Stanley noted. 
+Its bond trading, which has volatile earnings and tough capital requirements to meet, revenues were up 14 percent. But the rebound was less pronounced than at peers because of cuts Deutsche has made to the division. Barclays on Thursday reported a 40 percent spike in its business. 
+In equities trading, Deutsche saw revenue fall as low stock market volatility gave investors less reason to trade, while revenue from corporate and investment banking fell by 1 percent. 
+($1 = 0.9173 euros) 
+This article was contributed by Reuters Please contact TRUNEWS correspondent Edward Szall with any news tips related to this story. Email: | Twitter: @EdwardSzall | Facebook: Ed Szall DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP on Apple and Google Play ! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+3157,Anti-Trump forces seek last-ditch delegate revolt,"Washington (CNN) The faction of the GOP that is unhappy with Donald Trump as the party's presumptive nominee has one last plan to stop the mogul: staging an all-out delegate revolt at the Republican National Convention.
+
+The far-fetched idea is the latest reflection of a campaign cycle that has been anything but ordinary, and stems from a continuing dissatisfaction among some conservative stalwarts with how Trump is behaving and running his campaign. But two longtime GOP veterans says they wouldn't bet on the effort working.
+
+The effort comes at a rough time for the GOP. As the Democratic Party's heaviest hitters, including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, line up behind Hillary Clinton and against Trump, Republicans have been forced to criticize their own nominee. Recent comments from Trump about a federal judge's Mexican heritage have drawn widespread rebuke and put GOP leaders in a corner as they defend their endorsement of Trump while disavowing his comments.
+
+One of the vocal advocates for a delegate revolt is conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who has also been actively seeking a candidate to mount an independent bid against Trump, thus far to no avail.
+
+Kristol tweeted late Thursday that the idea of a ""conscience convention,"" where delegates are free to vote for whomever they want to, is also appealing.
+
+""I've been focused on independent candidacy, & still am. But struck by sudden level of interest in possible delegate revolt at convention,"" Kristol tweeted. He added: ""A Convention of Conscience in Cleveland would be quite something. Made easier by fact Trump only won minority of total primary votes anyway.""
+
+Bob Vander Plaats, the head of The Family Leader, an influential social conservative group in Iowa, told CNN's Kate Bolduan Friday morning that ""everything does need to be on the table"" at the convention, though he stopped short of calling for a revolt on the convention floor.
+
+""We want a principled conservative and disciplined candidate who is the standard-bearer of this party,"" said Vander Plaats, who backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz during the primaries. He said Trump has time before the convention to ""have the concerns laid to rest.""
+
+""All I'm doing is adapting to the circumstances,"" Kendal Unruh told ABC. ""I certainly believe Trump's demagogic racist comments are hurting him.""
+
+The rules enacted by the previous convention, which govern in 2016 until delegates pass a new set of rules, state that even if a delegate casts a ballot for a candidate other than one they are bound to, the convention secretary will record their bound vote.
+
+In order to change that rule, the 112 delegates (two from each state and territory) on the Rules Committee would have to pass different rules and bring those to the floor of the convention, where a majority of delegates present would have to approve them.
+
+Rules expert and RNC veteran Jim Bopp, an Indiana delegate who serves as special counsel to the RNC Rules Committee, said he has spoken with people who want to ""keep the option open to manipulate the rules in some way to deny Trump the nomination,"" but he said he wouldn't bet on any changes.
+
+""I would put money on no rules changes that would affect the outcome of the nominating process,"" Bopp told CNN. ""I think it's highly likely that no rules changes would be adopted that would affect the nomination.""
+
+Bopp said there's also a counter movement within Rules insiders to pass a rule that would prevent any other rules changes from going into effect until the close of the convention.
+
+Rules Committee and Oregon RNC member Solomon Yue is behind that effort, and has been pushing the RNC this year to adopt rules that give less power to the party and more to the delegates. He tried but failed to get the party to adopt rules that would require bigger majorities to pass business at the convention.
+
+Yue says with roughly 80% of the convention delegates being either Trump or Cruz backers, the anti-Trump forces don't have much strength.
+
+""The common denominator of the delegates is anti-establishment, anti-Washington,"" Yue said. ""And if you think about 'Never Trump' people, they are representing Washington and the establishment.""
+
+Part of the philosophy for a delegate revolt comes from longtime RNC veteran Curly Haugland, from North Dakota, and a book he co-wrote with public policy consultant Sean Parnell. ""Unbound"" uses the history of the RNC to make the case that RNC rules dictate that delegates be allowed to vote their conscience.
+
+""What Curly and I are contending is that because of RNC rules, there is no such thing as binding,"" Parnell told CNN, saying the binding rules that currently are in place are in a part of the rules package that govern pre-convention during the delegate selection process.
+
+But Parnell also acknowledged that any effort to make the interpretation stick would require at the very least a handful of state delegations if not a majority of delegates on the floor.
+
+""It would be messy. Good television though,"" Parnell said. ""I would not call it likely. My hope is that delegates are free to vote however they want to vote, and it's going to be up to the chair whether or not to allow that. But I think unless Donald Trump actually does go shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, I don't think this is going to cost him the nomination.""
+
+Neither the Trump campaign nor Republican National Committee immediately responded to a request for comment on the chatter about a delegate revolt.
+
+There has been intense focus on the Rules Committee for months, going back to when there was a possibility of no Republican candidate getting enough delegates to clinch the nomination outright. With the prospect of a contested convention, the Cruz campaign made a concerted effort to stock the Rules Committee and state delegations with loyalists who would support Rules that would benefit Cruz in a bid to win the nomination on multiple ballots.
+
+But after Cruz lost Indiana soundly and suspended his campaign, the prospect of a contested convention vanished and Trump rolled to the magic number to clinch the nomination.
+
+Meanwhile, the Cruz campaign urged supporters to continue to become delegates and earn leadership spots to influence the platform at the convention.
+
+Though some in the party have never warmed to Trump, the intensity of finding a way to prevent his formal nomination has grown in recent days after Trump's comments about a federal judge inflamed even the leaders of his own party.
+
+Trump questioned the impartiality of the district court judge overseeing a lawsuit related to his venture Trump University, saying the Indiana-born judge's Mexican ancestry could bias him against Trump. The mogul cited his campaign promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico in making the comments.
+
+Though the presumptive nominee has repeatedly stood behind and doubled down on the comments, his stance has drawn outrage from the likes of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who called the remarks ""the textbook definition of a racist comment.""
+
+Still, only a small handful of Republicans have withdrawn or withheld their endorsements of Trump. Vulnerable Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk disavowed Trump this week and said he could not endorse the party's nominee after all, but Ryan, McConnell and others have stood by their endorsements, saying Clinton would be a worse choice.",REAL
+8585,Alien Visitors? No Explanation for Mysterious Lights in Night Sky Over Arizona,"Kaboom! Meteor Turns Night Into Day in Arizona (VIDEO) The National Weather Service did not report any calls regarding the matter, but based on videos provided to them by ABC15 they stated that the lights appeared to be “very far away and flying at a high altitude.”
+Nearby Luke Air Force Base stated that they did not have any aircraft flying after 5:30 PM, and that they were not the source. 
+Witnesses tweeted videos at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who stated that ""it is not known what may have caused them to occur."" 
+In June, a massive asteroid zoomed over Arizona skies, and entered the Earth’s atmosphere east of the Arizona town of Payson. ""There are no reports of any damage or injuries — just a lot of light and few sonic booms,"" Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center said in a statement at the time. ""If Doppler radar is any indication, there are almost certainly meteorites scattered on the ground north of Tucson."" 
+That meteor was estimated to be approximately 10 feet in diameter and travelling at roughly 42,000 mph. ...",FAKE
+190,Lawmakers fuming over report Capitol police left guns in bathrooms,"Lawmakers are fuming over claims that Capitol Police officers left their service weapons in bathrooms and other spots across the Capitol complex three times this year.
+
+In one instance, a child visiting the Capitol reportedly found a loaded Glock.
+
+""The fact that dangerous weapons were left in the open, potentially within reach of the general public, is unacceptable,"" said House Administration Committee Chairwoman Candice Miller, R-Mich., and Ranking Member Robert Brady, D-Pa., in a written statement.
+
+Fox News is told lawmakers will have a briefing on the incidents next week.
+
+For Washington's embattled security agencies, it's the latest embarrassing episode. The Capitol Police and other agencies already are under scrutiny over the incident last month where a man breached restricted airspace and landed a gyrocopter next to the Capitol.
+
+The incidents involving misplaced firearms were detailed in a report being reviewed by the Capitol Police Board.
+
+The newspaper Roll Call, which first reported the incidents, said one of the guns -- allegedly left by a member of House Speaker John Boehner's detail in a bathroom in March -- was found by a 7- or 8-year-old child.
+
+Another was found stuffed in a restroom stall in the Capitol Visitor's Center in January. It was discovered by a Capitol worker and belonged to a member of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's security detail.
+
+Custodial staff located a third weapon two weeks ago at the Capitol Police headquarters.
+
+These firearms are Glocks and do not have conventional ""safeties"" on them -- they will fire if the trigger is pulled.
+
+The concerns come as congressional officials are closely scrutinizing USCP Chief Kim Dine. Dine offered to resign recently but is staying aboard for now despite lawmakers questioning his oversight of the force.
+
+""We will be looking for a full briefing on these incidents, how they happened, what corrective action has been taken, and how we hopefully do not have similar instances in the future,"" Miller and Brady said.
+
+Their committee oversees security for the House.
+
+Capitol Police spokeswoman Lt. Kimberly Schneider said the department takes security breaches very seriously. However, she declined to comment on the specific incidents.
+
+""Each disciplinary matter is thoroughly investigated and reviewed, employees are held accountable for their conduct, and they are provided due process in adjudicating these matters,"" Schneider said in an email. ""Depending on the nature and seriousness of the violation, an employee's record, and other required considerations, an appropriate penalty is applied, up to and including termination of employment.""
+
+""As a matter of policy,"" she added, ""the department does not routinely discuss internal personnel matters, in order to maintain the integrity of the department.""
+
+Fox News' Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+786,"Trump, Ryan tout unity in wake of meeting","Washington (CNN) Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan concluded their highly anticipated meeting Thursday amid signals that the Republican Party will work to piece itself together after a fractious primary.
+
+""While we were honest about our few differences, we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground,"" Trump and Ryan said in a joint statement. ""We will be having additional discussions, but remain confident there's a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall, and we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal.""
+
+Ryan, speaking with reporters during his weekly press briefing, sought to portray his openness to Trump, despite withholding his endorsement.
+
+""This is our first meeting, I was very encouraged with this meeting, but this is a process. It takes some time, you don't put it together in 45 minutes,"" he said.
+
+The speaker called Trump's achievement of earning more votes than any Republican candidate in history ""really kind of unparalleled,"" and clearly hopes to channel the support for the presumptive nominee into support for a conservative policy agenda writ large.
+
+""The question is ... how we unify it all? How do we keep adding and adding and adding voters while not subtracting any voters?"" he said. ""Most Americans do not like where this country is headed.""
+
+Trump tweeted his thoughts while his plane taxied on the runway before taking off for New York, ""Great day in D.C. with @SpeakerRyan and Republican leadership. Things working out really well!""
+
+""I thought it was a great meeting,"" Trump said in a Thursday evening interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity.
+
+Trump suggested the two sides would eventually come together.
+
+""I don't mind going through a little bit of a slow process,"" Trump said. ""We're getting there.""
+
+Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus -- who helped broker the meeting -- told CNN's Dana Bash the meeting was ""great,"" and ""a good first step toward unifying our party.""
+
+""This was not a usual election, it was a very contentious, tough primary,"" he said. ""I think they had very good chemistry between the two of them.""
+
+Speaking later in the day to CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Priebus said Trump and Ryan plan to be back in contact and that could be as soon as Friday.
+
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters his meeting with Trump was ""constructive"" and that they spoke about a ""variety of things, both campaign related and issues.
+
+For Trump, the meeting tested his ability to reconcile with the Washington establishment that he and the voters have scorned.
+
+For Ryan, it will help shape his own future with a party increasingly impatient to get behind its nominee and win back the White House.
+
+A top Trump aide had said there are ""no expectations at all"" of an immediate Ryan endorsement, describing the Thursday session as an ""opening conversation"" in an ongoing process of party unification.
+
+Senators who met with Trump said they discussed a range of issues from immigration to tax policy and were impressed at how ""genial"" and ""affable"" he was in person. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn said he understood that Trump is more of a ""showman"" in public.
+
+He said he suggested to Trump that he find a new way to talk about immigration, and referenced his experience as a border state senator.
+
+""There's some issues that Trump is clear on, but they shouldn't be scary for our members. Our members have always said they believe in ending the lawlessness of illegal immigration and always said we have to have trade agreements that are good,"" said Sen. Jeff Sessions, the first senator to endorse Trump who has served as a liaison between the campaign and his Senate colleagues.
+
+According to a source familiar with the meeting, Trump told House leadership he would come out with a list, assisted by conservative groups The Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, of judicial nominations he would make if he had the opportunity to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Trump also said the members present at the meeting should submit names to him and he would put them on the list.
+
+A few of the House leadership members pushed Trump on abortion -- he has voiced views to the left of the GOP on the issue -- and Trump confirmed repeatedly that he was not interested in changing the party's platform.
+
+Hordes of reporters mobbed the front entrance of the GOP headquarters and gathered across the street from an alleyway behind the building, but Trump's motorcade evaded the glare of the cameras and led the presumptive GOP nominee to the back entrance.
+
+Inside, Trump was slated for a slew of meetings, the first of which was with Ryan and Priebus, who brokered the meeting in hopes of gluing the GOP's jagged divisions back together after Trump became the presumptive nominee and Ryan dropped a bombshell last week by refusing to back the brash billionaire.
+
+Trump also met with the rest of the House Republican leaders, only one of whom -- Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington -- has not yet endorsed Trump and is holding out alongside Ryan.
+
+Trump then headed to meet with Senate Republican leadership before he departs Washington around 2 p.m.
+
+Democrats, meanwhile, were more than happy to paint Trump and congressional and party GOP leaders as already united.
+
+""I guess he should be giddy about a Trump presidency. Donald Trump is everything that (McConnell) and his party could ever want in a nomination,"" said Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid on the Senate floor, adding that Trump's ""positions are identical to the Republican Party platform.""
+
+Immigration activists and other protesters were on site Thursday morning to reinforce the division Trump has sowed in the country, holding signs calling the presumptive nominee ""dangerous,"" ""divisive"" and ""deceitful."" A Trump impersonator with a bullhorn held bags with dollar signs printed on them.
+
+But Priebus left the meeting reassured that Trump would be able to appeal to communities of color that Trump largely alienated during the primary season.
+
+""Tone and tenor matter, and I think Donald Trump understands that, too,"" Priebus told Blitzer on ""The Situation Room,"" saying that real estate magnate ""absolutely"" could do well with minority voters.
+
+In private and in public, Ryan is sending the message his party wants to hear: The GOP will be united this fall.
+
+In a private meeting in his office Wednesday, Ryan told his colleagues who support Trump that his high-profile sit-down with the billionaire businessman would be the start of a continual dialogue between the speaker's office and the presidential campaign, sources said.
+
+Speaking to the full House GOP Conference in the basement of the Capitol, Ryan suggested that the party's focus this fall will be on defeating Hillary Clinton -- not the internal GOP bloodbath.
+
+""The United States cannot afford another four years of the Obama White House, which is what Hillary Clinton represents,"" Trump and Ryan said in their statement following the meeting. ""That is why it's critical that Republicans unite around our shared principles, advance a conservative agenda, and do all we can to win this fall.""
+
+But according to several allies of the speaker, Ryan went into the meeting seeking some assurances for himself.
+
+He wants to ensure Trump will not hurt his House Republican majority by undermining his colleagues and the carefully crafted election-year agenda the GOP is painstakingly trying to create. He wants Trump to communicate a positive vision, avoid using foul and incendiary rhetoric and keep the party united on its core conservative principles. And as Ryan told reporters Wednesday, he just wants to ""get to know"" Trump.
+
+Yet, his strategy -- to publicly announce last week he won't yet back Trump -- also has put Ryan on the firing line, including among his own members who say they were blindsided that the leader of their party undermined their presumptive nominee just as the GOP was trying to heal after a divisive primary.
+
+""Well it sure doesn't make it look like we're all on the same page, does it?"" Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nevada, said of Ryan's public stand. ""What's the matter with saying, 'I disagree with him on this and that but we're all wearing the same jersey. So guess what? We want to win the game, and we go have a fight in the locker room.'""
+
+Asked if Ryan's comments bothered him, Amodei said: ""Yes, it does. I'm trying to figure out what the upside is.""
+
+Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, a friend of Ryan's, was surprised by the speaker's lack of endorsement.
+
+""It just seemed like he could have said, ""I""m going to support whoever our nominee is that comes out of Cleveland,"" Westmoreland said. ""Why do you want to make mad who you are trying to go into a room and negotiate with?""
+
+On the Senate side, McConnell told reporters this week that Trump could be ""competitive"" in the fall, a show of support from the party leader.
+
+Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican who has not yet said she'll back Trump, said she has a point to make with the front-runner during the Thursday meeting.
+
+""The other thing is the tone that he has had,"" Capito said. ""I'm going to express that I don't think that's a productive tone for the rest of the campaign, and I think it would affect the intensity in which people campaign for him.""
+
+Already, other meetings between Trump and other House factions are in the works, including with the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Many conservatives expect that group and others to get behind Trump. The longer Ryan holds out, the more isolated he could become in his conference.
+
+But Trump's detractors on Capitol Hill believe Ryan has provided cover to his colleagues in tough races by showing some distance from the candidate.
+
+Rep. Carlos Curbelo -- one of the most endangered House Republicans in the country -- said: ""I'm very grateful for the speaker for doing this.""
+
+After the Trump meeting, Senate GOP leaders briefed their conference in Mansfield room near the Senate floor. Former Trump rival Ted Cruz didn't say much there, other than a joke, according to a senator in the room.
+
+""To be honest with you, I didn't want to come back,"" Cruz said.
+
+Arizona Sen. John McCain responded: ""We didn't want you to either.""",REAL
+6759,Fukushima – The Untouchable Eco-Apocalypse No One is Talking About,"Waking Times – by Alex Pietrowski 
+The most important ecological crisis of the world has ever seen has been underway since March 11th, 2011, yet there is nary a mention of it in the corporate media, and no political body in the world is championing its resolution. Widespread Denial and Willful Ignorance 
+The effects on nature are already being seen, yet even among the environmentalist factions of media, there is strong denial of the damage already done and of what is to come as the crisis approaches its sixth year. Some 300 tons of radioactive water are dumped into the Pacific Ocean each day , and signs are showing that this catastrophe is gravely affecting sea-life and wildlife in and around the Pacific . 
+The FDA maintains that there is no evidence of contamination by Fukushima borne radionuclides in the American food supply, yet this opinion is contested by some independent researchers. A report by the Fairewinds Energy Education says that cancer is on the rise in areas around the failed power plant, and that millions will die in coming years as a result. “[T]he second report received from Japan proves that the incidence of thyroid cancer is approximately 230 times higher than normal in Fukushima Prefecture… So what’s the bottom line? The cancers already occurring in Japan are just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sorry to say that the worst is yet to come.” [ Source ] 
+As election year in the U.S. approaches its dramatic climax, it has been striking to observe that neither of the major two-party candidates, or third-party candidates for that matter, have mentioned this crisis at all during the entire election run up. It is a non-issue in American politics, and if you’re listening, the silence is deafening. The 40-Year-Plan 
+Thus far, all plans to stop radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean and the Japanese Islands have failed, the most impressive of which is the construction of a $320 million underground wall of frozen dirt to block the seepage of groundwater into surrounding areas. 1oo feet deep and over a mile long, the ‘ land-side impermeable wall ‘ is already failing as rainfall from recent typhoons has caused partial melting of sections of the ‘ice wall.’ Workers examine pipes for the wall of frozen soil at the embattled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Image Credit: http://www.asahi.com/ 
+A previous and ongoing cleanup effort requires the on site storage of contaminated water near the Fukushima Daiichi is merely a band-aid as radioactive water continues to accumulate by the day , with no long term plan for proper disposal. 
+“…the filtered water is still full of tritium , a radioactive version of hydrogen. (When two neutrons are added to the element, it becomes unstable, prone to emitting electrons.) Tritium bonds with oxygen just like normal hydrogen does, to produce radioactive “tritiated water.” It’s impractical—or at least extremely difficult and expensive—to separate tritiated water from normal water.” [ Source ] Storage tanks at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. 
+The reality here is that this crisis is untouchable in its scope and unparalleled in its lethality, and TEPCO’s 40-year-plan to decommission the plant will be a failure. Final Thoughts 
+No one of significant import is talking about this crisis or working to elevate it as a national and international priority. The American political scene is focused instead on the selection of the next president being chosen between two candidates who clearly have zero interest in addressing this dire issue. 
+Is this because nothing can be done about it? Is this because the energy industry is controlling the conversation and covering up the truth ? Or is this because the agenda for the U.S. at present is geared to destabilization and a push for expansion of the Orwellian Permanent War , and ecological disasters are supportive of the global depopulation scheme in play? 
+In any case, the Fukushima meltdown is a slow-burning apocalyptic event that desperately needs our attention. 
+For more background, please view the following video summary: 
+Read more articles from Alex Pietrowski . About the Author 
+Alex Pietrowski is an artist and writer concerned with preserving good health and the basic freedom to enjoy a healthy lifestyle. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and Offgrid Outpost , a provider of storable food and emergency kits . Alex is an avid student of Yoga and life. 
+This article ( Fukushima – The Untouchable Eco-Apocalypse No One is Talking About ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to AlexPietrowski and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.",FAKE
+2702,Former Facebook staffers say conservative news is deliberately suppressed,"Facebook is being accused of fiddling with its formulas to suppress conservative news.
+
+That’s what some unnamed former Facebook contractors told the tech site Gizmodo—and it’s an accusation that strikes at the heart of the social network’s credibility.
+
+Facebook relies on computer algorithms to determine what is “trending,” an influential designation that inevitably boosts traffic for what are deemed the hottest topics. But unbeknownst to much of the public, Facebook hires journalists to tweak these formulas, and this is where the question of political bias has erupted.
+
+Gizmodo reports that Facebook “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers,” according to a former journalist who worked on the trending designations. And several former Facebook “news curators” told the website that they were told to “inject” certain topics into the trending list, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant making the crucial list.
+
+Depending on who was on duty, said the unnamed conservative ex-curator, citing fear of retribution from the company, “things would be blacklisted or trending … I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”
+
+Facebook denies any political bias. A spokesperson said in a statement: “We take allegations of bias very seriously. Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. Trending Topics shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives.”
+
+The Gizmodo account is based on interviews with a handful of ex-employees who chose to remain anonymous and could be pushing their own views. Other former curators told Gizmodo they did not consciously make biased judgments on trending topics, and no one is alleging that Facebook management ordered such actions.
+
+But as Facebook has mushroomed into a mighty media force, one that has content-sharing arrangements with major news organizations, Mark Zuckerberg has always cast his global operation as a neutral platform. If there is a cooking of the digital books that penalizes conservatives, Facebook could face a considerable backlash.
+
+A former curator gave Gizmodo notes he had made of stories that were omitted from trending topics. These included the allegations that former IRS official Lois Lerner improperly scrutinized conservative groups, and stories involving Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the Drudge Report and Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was killed three years ago.
+
+All this, said the unnamed curator, “had a chilling effect on conservative news.”
+
+The sources also told Gizmodo that stories reported by such conservative-leaning news outlets as Breitbart, the Washington Examiner and Newsmax, which were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm, were excluded unless so-called mainstream sites like the New York Times, CNN and the BBC followed up on those stories.
+
+Facebook’s political stance has been called into question during the presidential campaign.
+
+Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and CEO, took an obvious shot at Donald Trump last month, saying: “I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as ‘others.’ I hear them calling for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, for reducing trade, and in some cases, even for cutting access to the Internet.” Zuckerberg has also signed a legal brief asking the Supreme Court to uphold President Obama’s executive action limiting deportation of illegal immigrants.
+
+And in March, as part of a weekly internal poll, some Facebook employees asked Zuckerberg: “What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?”
+
+That prompted a statement from Facebook: “We as a company are neutral — we have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote.”
+
+With more than 1 billion users worldwide, Facebook wields tremendous influence. The controversy over trending topics could cause some users to question whether the social site is subtly tampering with people’s news feeds to promote or minimize certain political stories or viewpoints.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+6979,US Drone Pilots May Be ‘Illegally’ Acquiring Targets From UK Bases,"US Drone Pilots May Be ‘Illegally’ Acquiring Targets From UK Bases   Source: Motherboard 
+
+Creech Air Force Base , Nevada, is widely known to be the heart of the United States’ overseas drone operations, from where more than 100 drone flights per day —mostly in the Middle East—are controlled. Notions of this base’s overworked drone pilots, sitting in stuffy trailers monitoring and killing targets 8,000 miles away, have been popularized by movies such as Good Kill and Eye in the Sky. 
+But a British human rights campaign group says it has uncovered documents that show the US is also conducting its military drone operations from within Royal Air Force (RAF) bases in the UK, an act that would be deemed in breach of international laws , argues the group. The British government denies this however, stating , “the US does not operate RPAS [remotely piloted aircraft systems] from the UK.” 
+Publicly available job listings and résumés, shown to Motherboard by human rights campaign group Reprieve, show that US military personnel based in the UK have been working on drone missions at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire near London. Another job ad is looking for a “targeting analyst” to work at Molesworth “for conducting thorough analysis on traditional and non-traditional targets for the purposes of creating electronic target folders for nation state and non-state actor systems.” A further job ad from private military contractor Leidos is looking for a video intelligence analyst to be based at Molesworth. 
+While the Molesworth base belongs to the RAF, parts of it are currently leased to the US for its European Command’s intelligence analysis operations, known as the Joint Analysis Center. US operations at Molesworth are in fact currently preparing to merge with operations at Croughton RAF base, where a $160 million US operations center will be established . ""The British Government has questions to answer"" 
+“Simply to say that drones are not flown from the UK is missing the point, if it is personnel on British soil that are at the top of the so-called ‘kill chain’ and British agencies who are feeding targets into those lists,” said Jennifer Gibson, staff attorney at Reprieve. “The US drone programme, conducted in the shadows, has killed hundreds of civilians without any accountability. The British Government has questions to answer over its own involvement in this secret war and how much responsibility it bears for those deaths.”",FAKE
+5403,Russia Is Hoarding Gold at Breakneck Pace — The Next Global Conflict Will Be Fought With Currencies - Jay Syrmopoulos,"Citizen journalism with a punch Russia Is Hoarding Gold at Breakneck Pace — The Next Global Conflict Will Be Fought With Currencies 
+The fastest-growing gold reserve in the world Print Originally appeared at The Free Thought Project 
+With all eyes on Russia’s unveiling their latest nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which NATO has dubbed the “SATAN” missile , as tensions with the U.S. increase, Moscow’s most potent “weapon” may be something drastically different. 
+The rapidly evolving geopolitical “weapon” brandished by Russia is an ever increasing stockpile of gold, as well as Russia’s native currency, the ruble. 
+Take a look at the symbol below, as it could soon come to change the entire hierarchy of the international order – potentially ushering in a complete international paradigm shift – and much sooner than you might think. bankofrussia-e1475520013798.png 
+The symbol is the new designation of the Russian ruble, Russia’s national currency. 
+Similar to how the U.S. uses the dollar sign ($), the U.K. uses the pound sign (£), and the European Union uses the euro symbol (€), Russia is about to begin exporting its symbol internationally. 
+After the failed “reset” in U.S./Russian relations by the Obama administration, and the continued deterioration of the countries relationship, Washington began targeting entire sectors of the Russian economy, as well as specific individuals, meant to impose an economic burden so severe that it would force Moscow into compliance. 
+Instead of decimating Russia, what it precipitated was a Russian response of gradually weaning themselves off of the hegemony of the U.S. petrodollar, and working with China to create an alternative to the SWIFT payment system that isn’t solely controlled by Western interests (see Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank , New Development Bank). 
+According to the Corbett Report : 
+New reports indicate that China is ready to launch its SWIFT alternative, and for those who have their ear to the ground this is the most significant move yet in the unfolding process of de-dollarization that is seeing the BRICS-led “resistance bloc” breaking away from the financial stranglehold of the US-led “Washington Consensus.” 
+For those who don’t know, SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication and is shorthand for the SWIFTNet Network that is used by over 10,500 financial institutions in 215 countries and territories to transmit financial transaction data around the world. SWIFT does not do any of the clearing or processing for these transactions itself, but instead sends the payment orders that are then settled by correspondent banks of the member institutions. Still, given the system’s near universality in the financial system, it means that virtually every international transaction between banking institutions goes through the SWIFT network. 
+This is why de-listing from the SWIFT network remains one of the primary financial weapons wielded by the US and its allies in their increasingly important financial warfare campaigns. 
+Recently, financial guru Jim Rickards, author of the book “Currency Wars,” wrote that “Russia is poised for a major comeback in its economy. Russian bonds and stocks and the Russian currency, the ruble, will all benefit.” Rickards believes a “strong turnaround” is coming within Russia, and that this comeback will benefit the ruble. 
+While still suffering from the economic warfare being waged by the U.S., Russia has realized that as long they are subservient to the petrodollar, there remains a clear and present danger of the Russian economy being devastated by the whims of Washington. 
+The Bank of Russia, that nation’s central bank, is extremely clear about its mission, and monetary policy declaring on its website: 
+Monetary policy constitutes an integral part of the state policy and is aimed at enhancing well-being of Russian citizens. The Bank of Russia implements monetary policy in the framework of inflation-targeting regime, and sees price stability, albeit sustainably low inflation, as its priority. Given structural peculiarities of the Russian economy, the target is to reduce inflation to 4% by 2017 and maintain it within that range in the medium run. 
+In layman’s terms, that means that monetary policy, similar to nuclear weapons and the military, are “an integral part of the state policy” in Russia. While many analysts have noted the increased build-up in Russia’s military arsenal, seemingly few have highlighted the massive build-up of Russian gold reserves over the past decade. 
+Below is a chart showing Russian gold reserves between 1994 and last year, 2015: russiangoldchart.jpg 
+Since 2006, there has been a year-on-year increase that reveals a significant upward trend. The chart clearly reveals that Russia’s state policy of increasing state monetary assets, in the form of gold. Additionally, the Russian government has been converting state rubles into gold assets. From 2006 to 2015, Russia’s state holdings of gold tripled. 
+Within just the past year Russia has substantially increased its gold holdings 
+According to the Business Insider : 
+In July of this year, the central bank of Russia added 200,000 ounces of gold to its reserves. The one-month uptick in Russian gold reserves — 200,000 ounces — is approximately equal to the entire annual output of Barrick Gold’s Turquoise Ridge gold mine in Nevada. 
+At that same rate — 200,000 ounces per month — in a mere five months, Russia would add to state gold reserves the equivalent of the entire annual output of Barrick’s massive Goldstrike mine in Nevada. 
+Currently, Russian gold reserves rank seventh in the world. It’s clear that there is a concerted effort by Russian authorities to build up the country’s gold reserves as part of a national strategy to negate the effects of economic warfare waged by the United States. Rickards, in his 2011 book “Currency Wars,” theorized that Russia and China could combine their gold reserves to form a global gold-backed currency to compete against the U.S. dollar. Currently, Russian reserves stand at roughly 1,500 tonnes, with Chinese reserves totaling over 1,800 tonnes (according to China — it’s likely more), which would amount to a combined total of roughly 3,300 tonnes of gold. 
+The U.S. is about to lose overarching control of policymaking within the International Monetary Fund (IMF), thus the U.S. lockup on global gold is about to vanish, according to Business Insider. Imagine for a moment the distinctly real possibility that Russian-Chinese alliance could exercise indirect (or even direct) control over the IMF’s gold reserve of over 2,800 tonnes. Russian, Chinese and IMF gold combined would equal roughly 6,100 tonnes, and would allow for direct competition with the U.S. gold reserves, estimated at 8,100 tonnes. 
+Russia and China have realized that the petrodollar is wielded by Washington as it’s weapon of choice when opposing a well-armed state, and clearly see the writing on the wall – thus working together to create a new global financial paradigm. 
+The reality is that the United States is $20 trillion dollars in debt, and eventually the time will come when the U.S. economy begins to implode — and all the fiat currency people are stuck holding will essentially be worth nothing more than the paper it’s printed on. Hard assets, such as gold and silver, should be bought and taken custody of while there is still an opportunity to do so, as a means of hedging against the potentially disastrous results of the U.S. using the petrodollar as a “weapon.” 
+Ultimately, the United States, Russia and China are all controlled by centralized power-hungry tyrants attempting to command powerful global bureaucracies like the IMF, the World Bank, SWIFT, New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. 
+It’s not Russian nuclear weapons that people should fear, as the policy of mutually assured destruction essentially voids any benefit of a state launching a first-strike nuclear attack. The true threat to America is our economic house of cards, built upon the back of a neoliberal trade policy that puts the “rights” of corporations over that of people .",FAKE
+3719,Does blood on shoe link suspect to Washington slayings?,"(CNN) First, DNA on a pizza crust led authorities to the man they accuse of killing three members of a prominent Washington family and their housekeeper.
+
+Now investigators say they have a new clue linking suspect Darron Dellon Dennis Wint to one of the victims: blood found on a shoe he was wearing when authorities arrested him.
+
+Forensic analysis matched traces of blood on Wint's shoe to at least one of the murder victims, two law enforcement officials said. The officials would not specify which victim's blood was allegedly found on Wint's shoe.
+
+It's too soon to say what role the evidence could play in the case authorities are building against Wint, who has been charged with first-degree murder in the killings last month of Savvas, Amy and Philip Savopoulos and housekeeper Veralicia Figueroa.
+
+Investigators said last month they don't believe Wint acted alone . But so far, no one else has been charged in connection to the killings.
+
+Police have said they're still investigating, and they haven't detailed exactly what they believe happened in the days leading up to the grisly killings, which came to light when the victims' bodies were discovered after a fire consumed the Savopoulos family's $4.5 million mansion last month.
+
+Investigators soon realized the massive fire wasn't the full story.
+
+The victims were bound with duct tape, and they suffered from blunt-force trauma, according to a source familiar with the investigation. And there were signs that 10-year-old Philip Savopoulos had been stabbed and tortured, according to the source.
+
+The public defender representing Wint has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
+
+Attorney Robin Ficker, a lawyer who has represented Wint in the past, has said he believes authorities have ""the wrong guy.""
+
+""I know him to be a kind, gentle, nonaggressive person; (he is) someone you wouldn't mind your grandmother going to lunch with,"" the Maryland lawyer said last month after Wint's arrest. ""... It's a rush to judgment. There's a presumption of innocence, which is not being mentioned by police.""
+
+Asked Tuesday about the alleged new evidence tying Wint to one of the victims, he said, ""I have a lot of questions about that. Why is this coming out now?""",REAL
+6807,Voting Against Peace in Colombia,"Email 
+Those of us who study how to end wars rather than find new ways to prosecute them must be stunned, like many Colombians, by a popular vote there on October 2 that rejected the peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). No one predicted that after over five decades of fighting and more than 200,000 deaths, a peace agreement that took six years to conclude would be rejected. It’s a lesson in how the power of emotion—vengefulness, specifically—and narrow self-interest can overcome good sense. The general perception of observers is that voters who suffered from the civil war wanted to see the FARC rebels punished rather than “rewarded” with the opportunity to reenter civil society and even hold a guaranteed number of seats in the national congress. 
+Most civil wars end in much the same way as Colombia’s—with one side badly hurting and willing to disarm under a cease-fire, provided the government promises assistance so that the rebellious soldiers can reintegrate in civil society. Negotiations to reach such an agreement typically are arduous and often seem to be on the brink of failure. Long-held grievances come to life again and again, and it is a tribute to negotiators that they were able to come to any substantive agreement at all. So it was with high expectations that an agreement was reached, and the decision of Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, to put it to a popular vote showed his confidence that citizens weary of war would accept it. Five days after the vote, he was rewarded for his efforts with the Nobel Peace Prize. 
+That Colombians did not endorse the agreement evidently owes much to the politicians who campaigned for a “no” vote, including former president Àlvaro Uribe, whose father was killed by the FARC. He argues that the peace agreement is too soft on FARC leaders, allowing them to avoid prison merely by confessing their crimes and promising to make restitution to victims. According to one observer who opposes the peace accord, “Essentially, FARC members would have received the same legal power to prosecute Colombian government officials and vice versa. The rejected deal would also have shielded an unknown number of FARC guerillas from jail for drug trafficking, recruitment of child soldiers, and other crimes.” The many thousands of people whose families were directly impacted by FARC killings and kidnappings obviously agreed. 
+The razor-thin “no” vote (50.2 percent to 49.7 percent) also may be attributed to the bizarre fact that only 38 percent of eligible voters voted . Perhaps this was a Brexit-like situation in which many people stayed away from the polls on the assumption a “yes” vote was fairly certain. But the “no” voters were well entrenched, including not only Uribe’s party but also “the majority of the churches, the ELN [the National Liberation Army, the second-largest guerrilla force], business sectors . . ., and the majority of landowners, who were all against the proposed changes.” The right-wing groups not only considered President Santos’ peace plan soft on FARC; they also objected to his support of gay rights, reforms of land policy, and investment in rural development. 
+It was under Uribe, not coincidentally, that the US became a major participant in Colombia’s civil war. Under “Plan Colombia” the US provided the Colombian military with advanced weapons (such as Blackhawk helicopters) and intelligence (under a top-secret multi-billion dollar CIA program) that escalated the violence and decimated the FARC’s ranks. A FARC leader is quoted as saying that it faced “an international intervention, and it took a toll.” Civilian deaths and the displacement of about seven million people followed, caused in no small part by officially sanctioned right-wing death squads. 
+Some US officials believe that intervention “saved” Colombia from endless civil war by forcing FARC to the bargaining table. That is hardly an argument for peacemaking; the “no” vote was actually a defeat for the US policy of peace through war. Plan Colombia was to a great extent responsible for destroying, either through deaths or displacements, the lives of roughly 15 percent of the total population. Now the US supports a negotiated settlement, but still keeps FARC on the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations List. The Santos government and FARC have agreed to continue a cease-fire until December 31 . 
+We may hope the parties will be guided by the need for rehabilitation and reconstruction rather than vengeance—for peace rather than retributive justice. 
+As President Santos said , “Making peace is much more difficult than making war because you need to change sentiments of people, people who have suffered, to try to persuade them to forgive.”",FAKE
+6282,Japan approves already dead TPP deal,"Ruling coalition lawmakers stand to approve the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal in the lower house of the parliament in Tokyo on November 10, 2016.
+Japan’s Lower House of parliament has passed the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement, despite the fact the deal is likely doomed after Donald Trump’s US presidential election victory. Even Barack Obama gave up on TPP according to The Wall Street Journal.
+The ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito backed the agreement, while most of the opposition boycotted the vote.The bill was sent to the Upper House for final approval, with the ruling coalition expecting it to be signed into law by November 30.
+TPP has been one of the key points in the economic program of Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, who wanted to boost the country’s exports. However, experts view the TPP approval by Japan as a more of symbolic gesture, as the deal is unlikely to ever get a green light under Trump.
+During the campaign, the newly-elected president slammed the TPP, which was pushed forward by Barack Obama to limit China’s economic power, calling the agreement a “disaster.”
+TPP was “dead and buried,” Marcel Thieliant, Japan Economist from Capital Economics, told Deutsche Welle, adding that “the upshot is that the long-term losses for Japan from the TPP not coming into force are substantial.”
+A former Chinese diplomat, now with the China Institute of International Studies, suggested that the TPP would be the “first casualty” of Trump’s success.“Since China isn’t in that bloc, we don’t have anything to lose,” Ruan is cited by Reuters as saying.
+The demise of the TPP prompted Beijing to intensify efforts to achieving its own free trade deal in the Asia-Pacific. China’s Vice Foreign Minister, Li Baodong, said that the country will be looking for support of its initiatives at the Asia-Pacific regional summit in Peru on November 19-20.
+“Trade and investment protectionism is rearing its head, and Asia-Pacific faces insufficient momentum for internal growth, and difficulties in advancing reforms,” Li told journalists.
+“China believes we should set a new and very practical working plan, to positively respond to the expectations of industry, and sustain momentum and establish a free trade area in Asia-Pacific at an early date,” he added.
+Beijing proposed the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) to regulate free trade in the area.
+According to Li, the presence of Chinese President Xi Jinping in Peru confirmed Beijing’s “confidence in promoting the FTAAP process.” Previously, Beijing was concerned the TPP would be used by Washington to make China open it’s markets by becoming part to the agreement or isolating the country from other economies in the region.
+Obama had framed TPP, which excluded China, as an effort to write Asia’s trade rules before Beijing could, establishing US economic leadership in the region as part of his “pivot to Asia”.
+Besides the US and Japan the TTP deal included Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.
+The agreement was part of Washington’s “pivot to Asia,” with Obama hoping it would establish US economic leadership in the region by formulating Asia-Pacific trade rules before Beijing does it.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+4828,Trump: 'President Barack Obama was born in the United States',"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump finally admitted Friday that ""President Barack Obama was born in the United States,"" reversing himself on the issue that propelled him into national politics five years ago.
+
+Trump sought to end his longstanding attempt to discredit the nation's first African-American president with just a few sentences tacked on at the end as he unveiled his new hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
+
+But the issue isn't likely to die down any time soon -- especially as Trump continues to falsely blame Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for starting the ""birtherism"" controversy. Clinton said earlier Friday that Trump's acknowledgment of Obama's birthplace doesn't go far enough and that he must also apologize.
+
+""For five years, he has led the birther movement to delegitimize our first black president,"" Clinton said at an event in Washington. ""His campaign was founded on this outrageous lie.""
+
+Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961.
+
+Trump offered no apologies for his leading role in the birther movement and didn't explain what drove him to change his mind. The President dismissed Trump's criticism Friday, joking with reporters at the White House and saying, ""I was pretty confident about where I was born.""
+
+Speaking at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, Friday, First Lady Michelle Obama addressed the controversy head on.
+
+""There were those who questioned and continue to question for the past eight years up through this very day whether my husband was even born in this country,"" she said. ""Well, during his time in office, I think Barack has answered those questions with the example he set by going high when they low.""
+
+The birtherism controversy exploded the previous night when Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post that he still wasn't prepared to acknowledge Obama's birthplace. Within a few hours, the campaign released a statement -- attributed to his spokesman -- that said Trump now believes Obama was born in the United States.
+
+Trump finally said the words out loud Friday morning.
+
+""President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period,"" Trump said, ignoring reporters' questions despite earlier indications he would hold a press conference. ""Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.""
+
+The developments over the past day were steeped in political motivations. With 53 days before the presidential election, Trump is moving into a margin of error race with Clinton and trying to broaden his appeal while maintaining his grip on the GOP base. Trump has tried to improve his dismal standing among minority voters and moderate Republicans in recent weeks, many of whom see birtherism as racially motivated and an insult to Obama.
+
+He is also aiming to take the issue of Obama's birthplace and legitimacy off the table by the time of the crucial debate with Clinton September 26.
+
+Trump has declined other opportunities during the past two weeks to refute his original birtherism.
+
+When local Philadelphia TV station WPVI asked Trump on September 2 about his past statements, Trump replied: ""I don't talk about it anymore. I told you, I don't talk about it anymore.""
+
+He repeated the same line when asked about it during a gaggle with reporters aboard his plane last week.
+
+And in an interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly last week, Trump again said, ""I don't bother talking about it.""
+
+Trump's extraordinary attempt to prove Obama was not a natural-born US citizen and was therefore not qualified to be president started on the conservative fringe but gathered momentum and became a major issue. The White House initially tried to ignore the birtherism movement as the work of conspiracy theorists, but Trump's huge media profile propelled the issue through conservative media and it eventually gained traction.
+
+The saga only ended in a surreal and extraordinary moment in American politics when the sitting President went to the White House briefing room in April 2011 and produced his long-form birth certificate.
+
+""We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers,"" Obama said at the time, in a clear reference to Trump.
+
+In his statement Thursday night, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said, ""Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised.""
+
+He was referring to a controversy from the 2008 Democratic primary fight between Obama and Clinton. In a March 2008 interview with ""60 Minutes,"" Clinton said she took then-Sen. Obama's word that he was not a Muslim, but when pressed if she believed he was, she replied, ""No. No, there is nothing to base that on -- as far as I know.""
+
+Clinton, however, was not questioning Obama's birthplace.
+
+Clinton slammed Trump's comments to the Post while speaking at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute event in Washington Thursday, saying he needs to stop his ""ugliness"" and ""bigotry.""
+
+""He was asked one more time: Where was President Obama born? And he still wouldn't say Hawaii. He still wouldn't say America. This man wants to be our next president? When will he stop this ugliness, this bigotry?"" she said. ""This is the best he can do. This is who he is. And so we need to decide who we are.""
+
+Clinton's campaign later tweeted, ""President Obama's successor cannot and will not be the man who led the racist birther movement. Period.""
+
+Trump's embrace of the birther controversy seemed outlandish when it began. In retrospect, it looks like a template for the fact-challenged approach he has adopted in his presidential campaign.
+
+After Obama's news conference, the real-estate developer claimed credit for getting the President to produce evidence of his birthplace.
+
+""Today I'm very proud of myself because I've accomplished something that nobody else was able to accomplish,"" Trump said in New Hampshire, after Obama's news conference.
+
+In subsequent years, Obama poked fun at the birtherism controversy and used it to ridicule Trump, most memorably in a savage takedown at the White House Correspondent's Dinner in 2011.
+
+""Now, I know that he's taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,"" Obama said.
+
+""And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter -- like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?""",REAL
+7689,Scientists have heard unusual messages from deep space probably coming from aliens,"Scientists have heard unusual messages from deep space probably coming from aliens Please scroll down for video 
+Recently scientists have heard unusual messages from the most distant stars in the observable universe that they think are extra-terrestrial. Upon new analysis of strange modulations in a tiny set of stars, 234 out of 2.5 million stars that have been observed during past surveyance of the sky, new evidence has been found that this tiny fraction of stars is behaving oddly. Aliens Are Trying To Make Contact With Us From Distant Stars. Scientists Say 
+The new study reports the finding of specific modulations in just 234 out of the 2.5 million stars that have been observed during a survey of the sky. The work found that a tiny fraction of them seemed to be behaving strangely. No obvious explanation has been concluded for what is going on, leaving the scientists observing these phenomena theorizing that aliens are in fact trying to alert us to their existence. 
+“We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis, ” write EF Borra and E Trottier in a new paper on this study. 
+The Astronomical Society of the Pacific has published the journal under the title 'Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar-type stars'. Originally it was suggested that it be named 'Signals probably from Extraterrestrial Intelligence,' according to a pre-print version of the paper hosted online . 
+Like with all scientific theories, further research will need to be undertaken to confirm or deny that hypothesis. This will be achieved by watching for the same signals using different technology so that many other possibilities of what it could be can be eliminated. 
+Earlier this year an initiative called 'breakthrough listen' was set up to search for alien life which has even been supported by both Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg. Although they agree this news is promising, they also state that further evidence must be found before these signals can be “unequivocally attributed” to aliens. 
+“The one in 10,000 objects with unusual spectra seen by Borra and Trottier are certainly worthy of additional study, ” the team said in a statement. “However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."" In fact, Internationally agreed-upon protocols for searches for evidence of advanced life beyond Earth (SETI) require anomalies to be confirmed by independent groups using their telescopes, and extraterrestrial agents can only be considered as an explanation when all natural phenomena are ruled out. 
+This article (Scientists have heard unusual messages from deep space probably coming from aliens) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
+1258,Republican Debate: Trump's absence leaves three winners and two losers,"The intentional winner of the Fox News Republican debate Thursday night was Marco Rubio. He had a really good debate.  He was substantive and sharp, clear and polished.  He came across as likable.  He came across as someone who knows foreign policy.
+
+The accidental winner, though, was Ted Cruz.  The debate got off to a rough start with Cruz. The other candidates were piling on the man in the center seat.  His campaign had expected it. His engagement with the moderators made him seem less likable. But the moderators, unintentionally and accidentally, solidified Cruz’s support for him and got fence sitters between Trump and Cruz off the fence.
+
+“What about ObamaCare?” the moderators asked Cruz.  He wanted it repealed and replaced.
+
+“Why does Washington hate you?” they asked Cruz.  That question let Cruz give a dissertation on his efforts to clean up and shrink Washington.
+
+Then there was the issue of the ethanol lobby that gave Cruz a minute of clear answers on level playing fields and ending government subsidies.
+
+Cruz could not have asked for a better set up of questions at a time when his favorables are vastly higher than other Republicans in Washington.
+
+Without Donald Trump, the tone of the debate was lower energy, but filled with much more optimism.
+
+The “Megyn Kelly Accountability Project” was a welcome addition to the debate and forced the candidates to own their records or flip-flops.
+
+Jeb Bush had a far better night without Trump there. I was surprised there was not a clash with Kasich, given his rise in Iowa.  But Bush held his own and Kasich annoyed as always.
+
+The ultimate winner, however, was Megyn Kelly.  After days of being beaten up by the Trump forces, she showed she is a sharp, credible journalist who is willing to ask tough questions and hold the candidates accountable for their prior statements.
+
+The video montages and prior records of the candidates were fair game and she forced them to answer.
+
+Overall, though the debate had lower energy than prior ones, it was wonderful to have the candidates have to own their records.
+
+As for losers, that had to be Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who had their “kneel before Zod” moment showing up at a Donald Trump rally where everyone treated Donald Trump as the conquering hero.
+
+It was like conquered kings being traipsed before Rome. Their campaigns are over.
+
+Erick Erickson is a Fox News contributor. He is host of ""Erick on the Radio"" and founder/editor of The Resurgent. He is the founder of RedState.com. Follow him on Twitter @EWErickson.",REAL
+8047,Montenegrin PM resigns shortly after suggesting Russia behind alleged coup plot,"Thu, 27 Oct 2016 15:03 UTC © EPA Montenegro's Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic has resigned, hours after suggesting that Russia was involved in an alleged coup attempt on the country's election day and accusing the opposition of collaborating with the Kremlin. Djukanovic said on October 25 that there was ""a strong connection of a foreign factor"" in the October 16 vote, which was marked by the arrest of 20 people suspected of planning armed attacks against the prime minister and his supporters after parliamentary election results were announced. Comment: 20 Serbs arrested in Montenegro over planning armed attacks on election day - police Russia has strongly opposed Djukanovic's bid to join NATO and the European Union while opposition leaders made frequent visits to Moscow ahead of the vote. The Montenegro prosecutor's office has alleged that the detained group planned to attack people in front of parliament after the vote results were proclaimed, then storm the building and arrest Djukanovic. Opposition parties cried foul, however, charging that Djukanovic -- whose pro-Western party won the election but did not secure a parliamentary majority -- staged the alleged coup attempt to try to extend his quarter century of dominance over Montenegrin politics. But, not long after implicating Russia in the plot, Djukanovic announced he was stepping down and would not continue as prime minister. His Democratic Party of Socialists said it would nominate his deputy Dusko Markovic to replace him. It is not clear if there is any connection between Djukanovic's claims of a coup attempt and his sudden departure. Among those arrested in the purported coup plot was a former commander of Serbia's special police forces. Djukanovic said authorities would investigate the extent of the involvement in the alleged coup attempt both by Russia and Serbia. Montenegro split from Serbia after an independence vote in 2006. ""There should be no panic... We will find out the facts,"" Djukanovic told reporters. Russia has launched a propaganda campaign to keep both Montenegro and Serbia, which is also seeking EU membership, within its sphere of influence. Both countries are traditional Christian Orthodox allies. After first denying that Serbia was involved in Montenegro's election, Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said on October 24 that an unspecified number of people were arrested in Serbia who provided evidence of a plot in Montenegro. Vucic said the people arrested were not connected to politicians in either country, but had ties to a third country and criminal groups. He did not name the country.",FAKE
+1316,US election 2016: New Hampshire polls close in key primary,"Polls have closed in the New Hampshire primary, where voters are selecting Republican and Democratic candidates for the US presidential race.
+
+State officials have predicted a historic turnout, with more than half a million people coming out to vote.
+
+Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders are favourites to win their respective parties' races.
+
+New Hampshire is the second major test after Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton won the Iowa caucuses last week.
+
+Opinion surveys conducted before the vote suggest Mr Trump is the Republican frontrunner, leaving Senator Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush to vie for second place.
+
+On the Democratic side, a large victory was predicted for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
+
+Most polls closed at 19:00 local time (midnight GMT), though some are to remain open for an extra hour.
+
+Votes are already being counted and results are expected in the next few hours.
+
+Live results as they are counted
+
+The tiny town of Dixville Notch cast the first votes at midnight on Tuesday, favouring Bernie Sanders and John Kasich.
+
+Under New Hampshire state law, towns with populations of under 100 can apply to cast their vote as the clock strikes midnight and close the polling station as soon as everyone has voted.
+
+Of the handful of voters in Dixville Notch in the early hours, four Democrats chose Mr Sanders, while of the Republicans two picked Donald Trump and three went for Ohio Governor John Kasich.
+
+Mr Sanders, a senator from neighbouring Vermont and a self-proclaimed ""Democratic socialist"", is hoping for a victory in New Hampshire over Hillary Clinton.
+
+Mrs Clinton, who has more support from the Democratic establishment, narrowly won in Iowa.
+
+""For those of you who are still deciding, still shopping, I hope I can close the deal,"" she said at a campaign event in Manchester on Monday.
+
+Meanwhile Mr Sanders told cheering supporters: ""We have come a long way in the last nine months. There is nothing, nothing, nothing that we cannot accomplish.''
+
+The Republican race has been particularly fractious. Several candidates tore into Florida Senator Marco Rubio - who came a strong third in Iowa - during a televised debate at the weekend.
+
+New Jersey Governor Chris Christie accused Mr Rubio of being inexperienced and scripted. ""You have not been involved in a consequential decision,"" he said.
+
+How the US elects its president
+
+Mr Rubio was also assailed by billionaire Donald Trump and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
+
+On Monday Mr Trump repeated his pledge to strengthen harsh interrogation technique to terrorism suspects, vowing to bring back waterboarding and ""a hell of a lot worse"".
+
+Mr Cruz, an evangelical conservative from Texas who like Mr Trump is running on an anti-establishment platform, has called his win in the Iowa caucuses a ""victory for the grassroots"".
+
+Several of the seven Republicans on stage have staked much on New Hampshire, analysts say.
+
+Despite its small size, the state's place in the primary season gives it special importance as candidates try to build an early momentum.
+
+Over the coming months each US state will pick delegates who pledge to endorse a candidate at their party's convention in July. The victor on each side will compete in the November presidential election.",REAL
+5077,Haywire over Hacking: Media refuse to believe Trump's Russia comments were sarcastic,"The uproar over Donald Trump’s latest comments is a classic case of media-generated outrage.
+
+All over the newspapers, all over the airwaves, there is shock and horror that Trump would appeal to Russia to furnish Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails.
+
+The lines seemed so obviously sarcastic to me, as I watched Trump’s presser from the Democratic convention here in Philadelphia, that I didn’t see the tsunami coming. Maybe I’m wrong, but as a longtime Trump-watcher, that’s how it came off to me.
+
+But think about the media coverage for a minute. To believe that the Republican nominee was dead serious in urging an adversary of the United States to commit or complete an act of espionage against his Democratic opponent is to believe that Trump is clinically insane.
+
+And I do think many journalists and commentators view him as a bit unhinged. That’s why this makes sense to them. They think Trump is so off the wall that it seems perfectly plausible.
+
+Others, I believe, don’t believe Trump really meant it, but they think he stepped in it with the remarks and are happy to bash him over it.
+
+Look, Trump says a lot of incendiary things. His comments on Mexicans and Muslims and the like get him into trouble and are more than fair game for criticism. But this one is different.
+
+“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. He added that the press would love that.
+
+Trump is a master, of course, of saying things that are just far enough over the line that he drives a story for days. In this case, it means keeping a focus on the 33,000 emails that Clinton deleted from her private server as pundits and politicians debate whether he crossed a line—siphoning covering from the convention speeches by President Obama, Vice President Biden, Bill Clinton and others.
+
+Trump now says he was being sarcastic and we don’t even know whether the Russians are behind the hacking.
+
+What’s striking about the coverage is that it barely acknowledges that this could be an open question:
+
+The New York Times headline: “Donald Trump’s Appeal to Russia Shocks Foreign Policy Experts”:
+
+“There is simply no precedent for this: A presidential candidate publicly appealing to a foreign adversary to intervene in the election on his behalf.”
+
+The Washington Post lead: “Republican nominee Donald Trump pleaded directly Wednesday with the Russian government to meddle in the U.S. presidential election by finding and releasing tens of thousands of private emails from his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton — an extraordinary and perhaps unprecedented maneuver in American politics.""
+
+Politico’s lead: ""Donald Trump's call on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails has shocked, flabbergasted and appalled lawmakers and national security experts across the political spectrum, with one saying it was ‘tantamount to treason.’” 
+
+
+
+“Is it possible that Trump was being sarcastic? That he was joking?” CNN’s Carol Costello asked her panel. The response was no, and even if he was, it wasn’t funny.
+
+This is why professional politicians avoid sarcasm, to avoid uttering words that create an uproar. But Trump delights in it, which is why his supporters love him, his detractors view him as reckless and the media can never seem to get enough.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+9649,MMR Vaccines Cause 340% Increased Risk of Autism in African American Infants,". MMR Vaccines Cause 340% Increased Risk of Autism in African American Infants Vaccines do cause autism, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been lyi... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/mmr-vaccines-cause-340-increased-risk.html Vaccines do cause autism, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been lying about this fact for years, according to newly uncovered information. As it turns out, the CDC fudged some numbers in a 2003 study it conducted on the MMR vaccine that, if honestly reported, would have revealed   of autism among male African American infants.But the CDC instead shrunk down the sample size of this study to conceal any possible correlation between MMR and autism, in the end publishing what amounts to fraudulent data that has repeatedly be used as ""evidence"" that vaccines do not cause autism. To the contrary, there are major effects of the MMR vaccine that at least three CDC officials who supported the bogus study are now culpable for withholding from the public, possibly resulting in untold thousands of cases of autism .The Focus Autism Foundation (FAF), a nonprofit group committed to raising awareness about autism, broke the news after speaking with a CDC whistleblower who at first came forward in anonymity but has now been revealed as epidemiologist Dr. William Thompson. Dr. Thompson helped lead several studies, including the one in question, that were used by the CDC to conceal   autism.In an interview with the FAF's Dr. Brian Hooker, the father of a child with vaccine-induced autism, Dr. Thompson broke down the history of deception within the CDC dating back to the days of the Tuskegee experiment, which involved government officials withholding treatments from African American men with syphilis as part of a medical experiment.According to Dr. Thompson, a 2003 CDC paper on autism, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics the following year, intentionally obscured data showing that MMR significantly increases a child's risk of autism, particularly when administered before the age of three. And African American boys, he says, have the highest overall risk. ""It's the lowest point in my career, that I went along with that paper,"" confessed Dr. Thompson. ""I went along with this; we didn't report significant findings."" CDC has known since at least 2001 that age when MMR is given affects autism risk Dr. Thompson's bold confession is rocking the health world, a significant portion of which bought into the CDC lie that vaccines do not cause autism: case closed. In truth, the CDC has engaged in a massive fraud against the American people, and really the entire world, by falsely claiming that scientific data debunks the vaccine-autism connection, when it actually shows the exact opposite.It is what famed gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield tried to tell the CDC and other government officials more than a decade ago, only to be slandered and falsely accused of fraud himself. But as he explains in a new film, top CDC officials had actually vindicated his original findings, only to eventually succumb to political pressures seeking to bury all evidence of a connection   ""Over a decade ago, Dr. Scott Montgomery and I put forward a hypothesis for MMR vaccine and autism,"" explains Dr. Wakefield in the film. ""The age that you receive the vaccine influences the risk. This makes sense. For some infections like measles, the age of infection changes the outcome. We shared this hypothesis with vaccine officials.... ""A group of senior vaccine safety people at the CDC studied it. It panned out. We were right."" ""By November 9, 2001, nearly 13 years ago, senior CDC scientists knew that younger age of exposure to MMR was associated with an increased risk of autism. In 2004 they published, but they hid the results."" Be sure to watch Dr. Wakefield's film here . By Jonathan Benson  ",FAKE
+7618,JUST IN: Republicans Sued Over Trump’s Call To Intimidate Minority Voters,"  
+The Democratic National Committee just hauled Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee into a federal court demanding that they cease the program of minority voter intimidation that Trump has inspiring his supporters to carry out. The DNC’s lawyers asked a New Jersey federal judge to hold the Republican Party in contempt for violating a 35-year old consent decree to enforce the Voting Rights Act, and to issue an injunction to enforce the terms of the agreement, which will force Republicans to cease their efforts to suppress votes in minority communities during this year’s general election. The DNC lawyers cited Donald Trump’s frequent statements to supporters, as well as one of vice presidential nominee Mike Pence’s speeches where he admitted that the RNC was directly coordinating “ballot integrity” initiatives, which are explicitly banned under the agreement. 
+Trump’s overt actions to call his supporters to watch polls in “certain areas” are a classic attempt to concoct an illegal “ballot security program,” which is why we exclusively predicted this lawsuit could happen three weeks ago. Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) weighed in with an op-ed published in the Washington Post urging the party to take action. This week, the Democratic Coalition Against Trump also took it upon themselves to lodge a new FBI complaint , over Trump’s voter suppression campaign which violates the same Voting Rights Act provisions covered by this recent DNC action which could land Republicans involved in the illegal campaigning – like Roger Stone – in criminal court. However, the Democratic Party’s action is based on a legal decision, so it’s going to be expedited in court, and is likely to yield a rapid order from the federal judge against the Republican party and Trump. 
+Here’s a summary of what the DNC’s lawyers filed in federal court today: (see below for complete document ) 
+Defendant Republican National Committee (“RNC”) has violated the Final Consent Decree… by supporting and enabling the efforts of the Republican candidate for President, Donald J. Trump, as well as his campaign and advisors, to intimidate and discourage minority voters from voting in the 2016 Presidential Election. Trump has falsely and repeatedly told his supporters that the November 8 election will be “rigged” based upon fabricated claims of voter fraud in “certain areas” or “certain sections” of key states. 
+Unsurprisingly, those “certain areas” are exclusively communities in which large minority voting populations reside. Notwithstanding that no evidence of such fraud actually exists, Trump has encouraged his supporters to do whatever it takes to stop it—“You’ve got to get everybody to go out and watch . . . and when [I] say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about, right?”—and has been actively organizing “election observers” to monitor polling stations in “certain areas.” Trump has even encouraged his “watchers” to act like vigilante law enforcement officers. 
+Although certain RNC officials have attempted to distance themselves from some of the Trump campaign’s more recent statements, there is now ample evidence that Trump has enjoyed the direct and tacit support of the RNC in its “ballot security” endeavors, including the RNC’s collaboration on efforts to prevent this supposed “rigging” and “voter fraud.” 
+In a rally in Denver, Colorado, on August 3, 2016, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, admitted that the RNC was directly coordinating with the Trump campaign on “ballot integrity” initiatives, stating that “the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are working very very closely with state governments and secretaries of states all over the country to ensure ballot integrity.” 
+The RNC’s support of Trump’s efforts to recruit “watchers” who are intended to intimidate voters at their polling places violates this Court’s Consent Decree as modified in 2009, which explicitly forbid the RNC from engaging in so-called “ballot security” measures directly, indirectly, or through its agents or employees. The RNC’s conduct also violates the Consent Decree under well settled law prohibiting defendants from evading court orders by acting in concert with third parties. 
+Donald Trump’s master of dirty tricks, Roger Stone is specifically named in the complaint because is the very same political operative, whose minority voter intimidation tactics landed the Republican party in hot water for 35 years in the first place for rigging a close New Jersey gubernatorial election! (which was won by the GOP candidate) 
+Roger Stone, one of Trump’s top advisors, has amplified Trump’s message. Stone was a key advisor to the 1981 campaign of former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, in which a “ballot security” force wearing black armbands engaged in widespread voter intimidation in Newark, Camden, Paterson and other minority neighborhoods in the State, leading to this very action and the Consent Decree that Stone is helping to violate today. 
+Stone is currently running a website called “StopTheSteal.org” that is actively signing up Trump supporters to “volunteer” to fight “voter fraud.” #StopTheSteal is a popular hashtag among Trump supporters on Twitter, and Stone’s group maintains an active Facebook presence. On October 23, 2016, Stone sent out a (now deleted) message via his Twitter feed deliberately designed to mislead Democratic voters by representing—using Secretary Hillary Clinton’s likeness and logo—that supporters can “VOTE the NEW way on Tues. Nov 8th” by texting “HILLARY to 8888,” after which voters would apparently “receive official confirmation. 
+Even worse, Roger Stone is trying to hide his voter suppression plan behind the facade of exit polling. DNC lawyers slammed the lunatic Republican political operative for his deception, and the court could order him to jail for contempt of court for his behavior. 
+Stone is also using social media to promote the common plan that Trump supporters—and particularly those who have agreed to engage in vigilante “ballot security” efforts—wear red shirts on Election Day. Further Stone is actively recruiting Trump supporters for “exit polling,” specifically targeting nine Democratic-leaning cities with large minority populations. This “exit polling” serves no legitimate purpose: Stone does not run a polling operation. Rather, the plain purpose of this plan is to intimidate minority voters. 
+If Donald Trump does not cease his open calls for voter intimidation, the DNC’s legal action could land him in contempt of court – and facing a jail term. 
+The RNC is working in active concert with Trump, the Trump campaign, and [Roger] Stone to intimidate and harass minority voters in violation of this Court’s Consent Decree. The Court should use its inherent contempt powers to remedy those violations , and enforce future compliance with the Consent Decree, with sanctions. 
+Upon a finding that the RNC has violated the Consent Decree, this Court should issue an order extending the Consent Decree for another eight years, according to the terms of the Decree. 
+Republicans have spent a massive amount of time and money litigating to escape this Consent Decree just seven years ago, and obtained a new concession to limit it’s term from infinite – which they agreed to in the 1980s – down to an eight year term which would’ve expired next December. Now that the DNC has taken Trump and the Republican Party back to court, it’s very likely that the terms of the decree will be extended for another eight years through 2025, which will take it through the next two Presidential election cycles. 
+Donald Trump has wasted the entire last month complaining about a “rigged election” and encouraging vigilante poll watchers to visit minority neighborhoods. Now, a federal judge will have to step in to keep his campaign from breaking election laws across the country, and the Republican party will pay the price for his ignorance of election law for years to come. 
+“The notion of widespread voter fraud in modern American politics is itself a fraud,” said the DNC, “Every attempt to verify the presence of voter fraud has proven fruitless.” 
+Read the full complaint here:",FAKE
+6370,"You’re Fired! Trump Wins Big, Clinton Is Going To Jail","Via Yournewswire 
+Let the swamp draining begin. And when the murky stench begins to clear we all know what we will see – a bloated, slimy creature called Hillary Clinton shivering in the shallows. SPONSORED LINKS 
+Removed from the corridors of power, she won’t be able to say “I don’t recall” 357 times to FBI investigators and get away with it. Her people won’t be able to plead the fifth every time they are asked an incriminating question. Hillary is going down, and a lot of her cronies are going with her. 
+The arrogance of the Democratic establishment in thinking the country would endorse these people is staggering. Podesta, essentially a foreign agent for Saudi Arabia – with a brother, Tony, a Spirit Cooker who is actually on Saudi books as an agent. You can’t make this stuff up. 
+And don’t forget Huma Abedin, thrown off the the campaign in a disastrous, scandal-riddled final week, exposed as being lax with national security – and having close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Her only experience prior to employment as a Hillary State Dept aide? 10 years working at a radical Islamic journal with links to jihad. The Democrat campaign was a dumpster fire. Burn, baby, burn. 
+The Democratic establishment should never have nominated such a liability for president. The people wanted Bernie Sanders. The DNC should have let the primary election play out democratically, as their name suggests they would. But no, they interfered, suppressed the voice of their people, and forced a flawed, roundly disliked and distrusted candidate into the full glare of a brutal election season. 
+On election night the Democratic establishment got the pounding they deserve. 
+Never let the mainstream media’s disgraceful collusion with the Clinton campaign be forgotten. May the ignominy live forever. Funneling questions to Clinton so she could defeat her primary rival in debates, colluding with Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta – at his house – to “frame the message” and “frame the race,” lying to the American people about their first amendment rights, attempting to scare the population away from being informed. 
+CNN is a PR firm, the propaganda arm of the establishment, not a member of the fourth estate. They have been thoroughly exposed by WikiLeaks in 2016. RIP Clinton News Network. Go to hell. 
+Don’t forget about the ongoing FBI investigation into the corrupt Clinton Foundation. When Comey cleared her of wrongdoing this week, he was referring to her email scandal. The less publicized Clinton Foundation investigation is still ongoing. The probe was going to hound her into the White House, but now it’s going to throw her in the jailhouse.",FAKE
+5076,Sources: US officials warned DNC of hack months before the party acted,"(CNN) Federal investigators tried to warn the Democratic National Committee about a potential intrusion in their computer network months before the party moved to try to fix the problem, U.S. officials briefed on the probe tell CNN.
+
+The revelation raises questions about whether the DNC could have done more to limit the damage done by hackers suspected of working for Russian intelligence.
+
+The DNC brought in consultants from the private security firm CrowdStrike in April. And by the time suspected Russian hackers were kicked out of the DNC network in June, the hackers had been inside for about a year.
+
+A person briefed on the DNC's response says the warning from the FBI and other agencies wasn't specific, and that the extent of the problem wasn't clear when the initial warnings came. DNC officials hired outside help after additional indications surfaced that their systems were compromised.
+
+The DNC breach occurred around the same time as breaches of U.S. government systems at the State Department and the White House. Analysts from the National Security Agency found signatures in those breaches that led them to suspect there were other intrusions outside the government, including at the DNC.
+
+""I talked to the general counsel of the DNC today and he assures me that every step along the way when we were notified of these issues that we changed systems, changed procedures,"" said DNC vice chairwoman Donna Brazile to CNN's Wolf Blitzer. ""But these hackers are so sophisticated that they changed procedures. So yes, it went on for more than a year, but at no time did we ignore the warning from the FBI or any other federal officials.""
+
+Earlier on Monday, the FBI confirmed it was investigating a hack into the DNC, the first acknowledgment from the agency that they are probing the incident, which U.S. officials suspect came from a Russian cyber attack.
+
+Fallout over the emails led DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to announce her resignation Sunday.
+
+""The FBI is investigating a cyber intrusion involving the DNC and are working to determine the nature and scope of the matter,"" the agency said in a statement. ""A compromise of this nature is something we take very seriously, and the FBI will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace.""
+
+The FBI has sent experts to meet with the Republican National Committee, as well as the major campaigns, to discuss their security measures, the officials say. No similar intrusions have so far been detected at the RNC or the campaigns of the two major party candidates, the officials say.
+
+""I don't think it's coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here, and I think that's disturbing,"" he said.
+
+Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., denied that his father's campaign had anything to do with encouraging Russians to hack the DNC.
+
+""I can't think of bigger lies, but that exactly goes to show you what the DNC and what the Clinton camp will do,"" Trump told Tapper on ""State of the Union"".
+
+Even before the emails were posted on Wikileaks, the White House convened a security meeting to review what was known, U.S. officials told CNN.
+
+Democrats, including some in Congress, are trying to pressure the White House to publicly name Russia as the perpetrator, in the way the government named North Korea in the Sony hack and China for hacking various U.S. companies. The Obama administration has resisted publicly naming Russia despite evidence gathered by U.S. government investigators showing Russian behind cyber-attacks on U.S. government agencies and even the public release in 2014 of a hacked phone call between U.S. diplomats in Ukraine that was caused embarrassment for the U.S.
+
+At the State Department Monday, spokesman John Kirby refused to say Russia was responsible, citing the ongoing investigation.
+
+""It goes without saying that issues of cyber security will be a topic of discussion between us and our Russian interlocutors on a continuous basis. I don't have any specific conversations to speak to and nor would I as this matter's under investigation by the FBI,"" Kirby said. ""I think we need to let the FBI do their work before we try to form any conclusions here in terms of what happened and what the motivation was behind it. The FBI's spoken to this. We're going to respect that process.""
+
+James Trainor, assistant director for FBI's cyber division, told CNN in a recent interview that the bureau has been working with political organizations and think tanks to put more resources into the security of their computer networks. He wouldn't discuss the DNC or the role of Russia, but spoke generally about the increased number of such intrusions.
+
+""There's been aggressive targeting of that sector, the various campaigns, think tanks in the Washington, DC area,"" Trainor said.
+
+The ""targeting of any candidate or any party (that) has political intelligence,"" Trainor said. ""There's value in information there if you're a nation state actor, so (it) shouldn't be surprising.""
+
+Private-sector cyber security investigators hired by the DNC concluded that hackers working for the Russian government were behind the year-long breach of the DNC. The investigation found intrusions by two Russian hacking groups.
+
+Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, however, dismissed claims. When asked by a reporter, ""What do you say of the U.S. accusations that Russia hacked the Democratic Party emails?,"" Lavrov replied ""Well, I don't want to use four-letter words.""
+
+At least one of the DNC intruders is believed to be behind other breaches of non-classified U.S. government systems at the White House, State Department and other agencies, security experts believe, based on an analysis of malicious software in the breaches.
+
+The FBI and other U.S. agencies involved haven't yet officially attributed the DNC attack to Russian government hackers. But evidence gathered by the FBI so far points to groups that are known to U.S. counter-intelligence for carrying out intrusions for the Russian government, the officials briefed on the probe say.
+
+The release of the emails over the weekend, however, raised new questions among government and private sector security officials.
+
+It's possible that other hackers took advantage of the DNC's vulnerabilities and also stole information, U.S. officials said. But the intrusion so far appears to bear the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.
+
+Foreign spy agencies routinely try to collect information on U.S. elections, and there were some cyber attacks against political campaigns detected during the 2012 election cycle.
+
+Typically, spy agencies collect such information to try to better inform their governments about U.S. politics. U.S. spy agencies do the same overseas.
+
+Russian spy agencies have published embarrassing information to try to influence political events in countries they consider part of their sphere of influence. But to publicly release vast troves of stolen data to try to influence a U.S. election is beyond the scale of what U.S. counterintelligence officials have seen.
+
+Whether Russian intelligence agencies provided the stolen information to Wikileaks, either directly or through middlemen, is now a top issue for U.S. investigators to resolve, the U.S. officials briefed on the probe say. The answer won't likely come until well after the election.
+
+The impact of the release of the DNC hacked emails was almost immediate, prompting the ouster of the head of one of the two major political parties.
+
+Since the hackers were in the DNC systems for about a year, U.S. officials expect more data releases.",REAL
+2409,HHS to Congress on ObamaCare court ruling: It’s your problem,"President Obama's top health official testified Wednesday that if the Supreme Court issues a ruling that upends the Affordable Care Act, it's up to Congress and the states to figure out a solution.
+
+Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee, addressed questions over what will happen if the court rules against the administration on the health law.
+
+A decision is expected in days on whether insurance subsidies can legally be distributed to customers who buy insurance through the federal HealthCare.gov -- as opposed to those getting insurance through state-based exchanges. If the court rules against the administration, millions of people stand to lose their current subsidies.
+
+Burwell made clear that the administration is not offering an alternative plan at this point, and instead wants Congress and the states to work it out.
+
+""If the court says that we do not have the authority to give subsidies, the critical decisions will sit with the Congress and states and governors to determine if those subsidies are available,"" she testified, adding that the administration would be ""ready to communicate"" and work with states to ""do everything we can.""
+
+In advance of a decision, Republican congressional leaders say they are preparing for the possibility that a huge chunk of the subsidies could be invalidated. While Obama would want Congress to simply tweak the law to allow for subsidies to cover Americans in all exchanges, it's unclear whether the congressional response would be that simple.
+
+""Depending on what the Supreme Court decides, we will have a proposal that protects the American people from a very bad law,"" Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Fox News' Bret Baier on Tuesday, without going into detail.
+
+On Wednesday, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., also said there is no ""quick fix.""
+
+""Whatever the Supreme Court decides this month, I think the lesson is clear. Obamacare is busted. It just doesn't work. And no quick fix can change this fact,"" Ryan said in prepared remarks, renewing the call to ""repeal and replace"" the law.
+
+His criticism comes as health insurers in many states have proposed double-digit rate increases for next year -- which Republicans cite as evidence of the law's failures, an assertion Democrats reject.
+
+More than 30 states use the federal website and millions of their residents could lose subsidies -- which they receive as tax credits -- and be forced to drop health coverage they'd find too expensive.
+
+Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, top Democrat on the Ways and Means panel, said in prepared remarks that ""predictions of doom and gloom from the other side have certainly not come to pass. No rationing, no destroying Medicare, no bankruptcy.""
+
+Obama also said Tuesday that his law was now embedded in the country's health care system and said the court shouldn't have accepted the case. He also mocked ""unending Chicken Little warnings"" from opponents who warned that the law would abridge people's freedom.
+
+""There's something, I have to say, just deeply cynical about the ceaseless, endless partisan attempts to roll back progress,"" Obama said at the Catholic Hospital Association conference.
+
+A court victory by the conservatives could put disproportionate political pressure on Republicans to help those who've lost subsidies. Of the 34 states likeliest to be most affected by such a ruling, 26 have GOP governors. And 22 of the 24 GOP senators up for re-election next year are from those same states.
+
+Obama has said a ""one-sentence provision"" could repair the problem if the court bars subsidies for states without their own marketplaces, but Republicans have rejected that approach.
+
+Instead, top House and Senate Republicans have been working privately toward legislation restoring aid to those losing it until sometime in 2017. It would also eliminate parts of the health overhaul, such as its requirement that companies insure workers. That would almost certainly draw a veto from Obama.
+
+Republican lawmakers say they will unveil their plan once the justices rule, though there are no indications they have united behind a particular plan. They hope a Republican will inhabit the White House in 2017 so they can repeal the current law and enact one less expansive.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+9513,Renowned Harvard Psychologist Says ADHD is Largely a Fraud,". Renowned Harvard Psychologist Says ADHD is Largely a Fraud Viewed by academics as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, Jerome Kagan r... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/renowned-harvard-psychologist-says-adhd.html Viewed by academics as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, Jerome Kagan ranked above Carl Jung (the founder of analytical psychology) and Ivan Pavlov (who discovered the Pavlovian reflex) in a 2002 American Psychological Association ranking of the eminent psychologists. He is well-known for his pioneering work in developmental psychology at Harvard University, where he has spent decades documenting how babies and small children grow, and is an exceptional and highly-regarded researcher.So it may be surprising to learn that he believes the diagnosis of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is an invention — and only benefits the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatrists. Mislabeling Mental Illness “That is the history of humanity: Those in authority believe they’re doing the right thing, and they harm those who have no power,” says Jerome Kagan.In an interview with Spiegel, Kagan addressed the skyrocketing rates of ADHD in America , which he attributes to “fuzzy diagnostic practices.” He illustrated his point with the following example:Say fifty years ago you have a 7-year-old who is bored in school and exhibits disruptive behavior. Back then, he would be labeled as lazy. But today, that same child is said to suffer from ADHD . That’s why we’ve seen such a dramatic increase in the disorder.Every child who is having problems in school is sent to see a pediatrician, who then claims it’s ADHD and prescribes Ritalin . “In fact, 90 percent of these 5.4 million kids don’t have an abnormal dopamine metabolism. The problem is, if a drug is available to doctors, they’ll make the corresponding diagnosis,” he said.“We could get philosophical and ask ourselves: “What does mental illness mean?” If you do interviews with children and adolescents aged 12 to 19, then 40 percent can be categorized as anxious or depressed. “But if you take a closer look and ask how many of them are seriously impaired by this, the number shrinks to 8 percent. Describing every child who is depressed or anxious as being mentally ill is ridiculous. “Adolescents are anxious, that’s normal. They don’t know what college to go to. Their boyfriend or girlfriend just stood them up. Being sad or anxious is just as much a part of life as anger or sexual frustration,” Kagan told Spiegel.What are the implications for the millions of American children who are inaccurately diagnosed as mentally ill? Kagan believes it’s devastating because they think there is something fundamentally wrong with them. He’s not the only psychologist to raise the alarm about this trend, but Kagan and others feel they’re up against “an enormously powerful alliance: pharmaceutical companies that are making billions , and a profession that is self-interested.”Kagan himself suffered from inner restlessness and stuttering as a child, but his mother told him: “There’s nothing wrong with you. Your mind is working faster than your tongue.”He thought at the time: “Gee, that’s great, I’m only stuttering because I’m so smart.” If he had been born in the present era, he most likely would have been classified as mentally ill.ADHD isn’t the only mental illness epidemic among children that worries Kagan, depression is another. In 1987, about one in 400 American teenagers was using an antidepressant. By 2002, the numbers leaped to one in 40. He feels it’s another overused diagnosis, simply because the pills are available. Instead of immediately resorting to pharmaceutical drugs, he thinks doctors should take more time with the child to find out why they aren’t as cheerful, for instance. At the very least, a few tests should be carried out — and an EEG for certain, especially since studies have shown that people who have heightened activity in the right frontal lobe respond poorly to antidepressants.Kagan remembers going into a textbook-type depression after a major research project he was involved with failed. He had insomnia and met all the other clinical criteria for depression. But since he knew what the cause was, he didn’t seek professional help. After six months, the depression was gone. Under normal circumstances, he would have been diagnosed as mentally ill by a psychiatrist and put on medication. By Carolanne Wright / Reference: Spiegel.de Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+9672,"We Came, We Saw, He Died: How Gaddafi Was Hunted And Ruthlessly Killed","Email Exactly five years ago, Libya’s ex-leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was brutally murdered by rebels who discovered him in drainage pipes following a NATO air strike that hit his convoy on the outskirts of his hometown, Sirte. The following day, his body was put on display in a storage freezer in the city of Misrata. Via CollectiveEvolution 
+This probed a controversial response from then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who remarked, “We came, we saw, he died.” On April 2, 2011, she received an email from Sidney Blumenthal, who served as her unofficial intelligence operative. The message discussed France’s reasoning for joining the war against Gaddafi in Libya. Blumenthal wrote in the email that Gaddafi had “nearly bottomless financial resources” for pursuing his campaign against the rebels. And while Libya’s frozen bank accounts had become an obstacle, he still had nearly 143 tons of gold and a similar amount in silver that accumulated to a total of $7 billion. SPONSORED LINKS Scroll Down For Video Below! 
+The email goes on to say that Gaddafi had taken the gold before the rebellion in order to “establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar.” The idea was apparently to present a currency in the African region in order to compete with the French Franc. Blumenthal said, “French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.” 
+Just months later, on October 20, 2011, Gaddafi was murdered . Now, five years later, the once successful Arab country is in a state of chaos filled with tribal wars, leading to tens of thousands of Libyans dead, and displacing hundreds of thousands more. Gaddafi’s death immediately led to an intense power struggle that turned into a civil war. Ultimately, Islamic militant and terrorist groups, like ISIS, carried out attacks on Libyan oil and other important groundwork. 
+Gaddafi had, prior to his reign, advocated socialist ideas. Upon graduating from a military academy in Benghazi, he joined a plot to throw out King Idris I, which eventually happened in September 1969, leading to Gaddafi being promoted to Colonel, and his officers taking on a grand campaign to overturn Western capitalism. British and U.S. military bases in Libya were then closed down, and Western oil companies were immediately nationalized. 
+Gaddafi promised to rule out corruption and enact serious changes in the country’s social, economic, and political life. He created the Jamahiriya, which is an Arabic term that translates to “state of the masses.” His republic vowed to incorporate anarchist, Marxist, and Islamist practices. 
+By March 1977, Gaddafi called for a “people’s republic” referred to as the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Gaddafi served as president, banning all political organizations, with the exception of his devised Arab Socialist Union. 
+By 1979, Gaddafi resigned in order to work for a “continuation of the revolution,” and changed his title to the Leader of the Revolution. The government took advantage of oil money to create extensive and seemingly outlandish social reforms. He proposed that women be allowed to study, serve in the army, and move up the social ladder, for instance. 
+The West and conservative Arab countries remained hesitant of the successful and passionate leader, and remained hands-off until the 2011 region was hit with Arab Spring “revolutions.” 
+The protests-turned-armed-conflict in Libya came about in February 2011, with people demanding Gaddafi to resign after 40 years of ruling the Libyan Arab Republic. Eventually, opponents gained control over almost all of Libya. On March 17, 2011, the U.S. and Western allies proposed a settlement by the UN Security Council that implemented a no-fly zone over Libya which caused Western airstrikes on Gaddafi’s forces. Gaddafi was accused of bombing his own people, and using foreign mercenaries to halt anti-government protests. 
+On March 19, 2011, NATO airstrikes commenced, led by France, and then followed by the US, the UK, and several other countries. NATO jets eventually targeted Gaddafi’s home on April 29, where he survived, but his youngest son and three children were killed. 
+On June 27, the International Criminal Court granted a request to issue a warrant for the arrest of Gaddalfi, as well as his son, Saif al-Islam. 
+By August 21, rebel fighters from Libya’s National Transitional Council bombarded the capital Tripoli to take over the government compound. Gaddafi refused to back down and leave the capital, and called for his loyalists to fight until the bitter end. By the 23, NTC fighters had overrun Tripoli, and taken Gaddafi’s reign out from underneath him. This caused Gaddafi and his loyalists to flee the capital 10 days later, ending up in his hometown of Sirte. 
+Throughout September 2011, Gaddafi loyalists were overrun, and by October, all of Sirte had been captured by the rebels, except for a northern neighborhood referred to as Number Two, where Gaddafi was hiding out. But by October 20, the Libyan rebels had pinpointed Gaddafi’s location there. 
+With Tripoli in ruins, and Number Two under attack, Gaddafi’s life seemed a ticking time bomb. That day, the once leader was injured from a NATO air attack, but many others were killed. Gaddafi sought refuge in a nearby drainage facility along with some of his closest aids. 
+His hideout was soon discovered by a unit of the National Transitional Council, who then assaulted him, including sexually, and then took him prisoner, and are believed to have tortured and killed both him and his son before they were murdered.",FAKE
+2454,After Obamacare: The next Democratic health agenda,"The Affordable Care Act has now survived three Supreme Court challenges and countless Republican repeal votes in the House. With Obamacare's place seemingly cemented in history, the law's architects are quietly crafting the next Democratic health-care agenda: lowering costs.
+
+A half-dozen key Democratic policy influencers, from the head of Hillary Clinton's 2008 policy team to former Obama administration officials, are starting to plan for a post-Obamacare Washington. In recent interviews, they describe twin goals — improving quality of care while making it cheaper — that will require building a coalition quite different from the one that supported health reform in 2010.
+
+""The ACA is here to stay and we should assume that, but that doesn't mean everyone is satisfied,"" says Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, who has close ties to Hillary Clinton after running her policy staff in 2008. ""Health expenditures are a big problem from the individual perspective. If you look at public opinion and what people are most anxious about, it's still health care costs.""
+
+""The ACA is here to stay, but that doesn't mean everyone is satisfied""
+
+Obamacare faced ferocious opposition from the right, but the underlying idea — get more people signed up for coverage — was one that public health advocates and liberals could rally behind. Now, as the priority shifts to quality and cost, the policy problems become much more difficult to tackle and the solutions less clear.
+
+Policies that reduce cost systemwide often leave consumers paying more out-of-pocket for health care. That can split coalitions that came together around the more unifying goal of covering the uninsured.
+
+""We're trying to get groups that represent consumer-type constituencies to begin a much more significant focus on quality and cost,"" says Ron Pollack, president of the non-profit Families USA, a group that was instrumental in organizing advocates and industry in support of the Affordable Care Act.
+
+the policy problems will become more difficult — and solutions less clear
+
+Building coalitions in the multi-billion health-care industry, where each stakeholder has different priorities, is excruciating work. A litany of failed attempts at health reform (including Hillary Clinton's own 1994 efforts) provide a gloomy backdrop. So some are skeptical that, after the Obamacare battle left many badly bruised, health care will become a prominent agenda item on the next Democratic president's docket.
+
+""They will do everything they can to not use the phrase health care, Obamacare, Medicare, period,"" says Bob Kocher, a former Obama administration official. ""The standard talking points will be that we're proud we expanded coverage to all Americans and that we want to protect that.""
+
+There are myriad thorny health policy issues that Democrats could tackle, everything from getting coverage to the millions of Americans still uninsured to reforming medical malpractice laws. But the increasing consensus is that the next effort will have to focus on reducing costs for one simple reason. Health care in the United States is expensive. Insanely, outlandishly expensive.
+
+The United States spends $2.8 trillion on healthcare annually. That works out to about one-sixth of the total economy and more than $8,500 per person — and way more than any other country. The average American spends $735 annually on out-of-pocket health care costs (which is spending above and beyond monthly premiums).
+
+The past five years have brought a glimmer of good news: health-care costs have grown at a slower pace. After years of rising faster than the economy, health spending has grown at the same rate as other sectors since 2009.
+
+But consumer advocates are concerned that the individuals aren't seeing enough of that slowdown show up in their wallets — that health insurers and hospitals, rather than consumers, have reaped most of the benefits.
+
+Workers' contributions to their insurance benefits have increased 81 percent over the past decade, the Kaiser Family Foundation recently found. Employers' contributions rose too, but more slowly (65 percent).
+
+The percent of workers in a plan with a deductible over $1,000 has risen from 6 percent in 2006 to 32 percent in 2014, the same study showed.
+
+This is the paradox of cost control in the health-care system: so much of the spending is hidden from patients, and so many of the cost-control efforts rely on making that spending more visible to patients, that successful efforts to cut costs can feel to patients like cost increases.
+
+""We want to ensure that the benefits of slower cost growth actually drive towards individuals,"" Tanden says. ""They're the only people who aren't benefiting right now.""
+
+Just like Obamacare, the battle to lower costs will require new coalition building, and risks turning one-time friends into enemies. The doctors and hospitals who benefit from expanded coverage — and a wave of new consumers — are the exact same constituencies that stand to lose the most if America spends less on medicine.
+
+In the lead-up to the Affordable Care Act debate, Families USA organized a series of ""strange bedfellows"" meetings with health care groups across the political spectrum. This helped get everyone from unions to insurers to doctors onboard behind the concept of expanding coverage.
+
+Four years later, in 2013, Pollack quietly worked on what he calls a ""mini-version"" of the same meetings. He held about a dozen meetings with Karen Ignagni, chief executive of America's Health Insurance Plans, and officials from the Pacific Business Group on Health, which represents employers.
+
+""Some of these groups aren't necessarily the ones who were our strongest allies on the Affordable Care Act,"" Pollack says. Insurers were a bit leery of the health reform effort, which would force them to accept the very sick customers that their individual market plans typically rejected.
+
+""the bedfellows get re-arranged depending on what is going on""
+
+But in this new round of reform, insurers arguably stand to be one of the biggest winners. They benefit if costs go down because they can sell less expensive coverage — and that makes them the more natural partner of Democrats in this new era of reform.
+
+""This is an issue where the bedfellows get re-arranged depending on what is going on,"" says Zeke Emanuel, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former Obama advisor on health policy. ""Doctors and hospitals are a big part of the area where we have to reduce costs. They may not be so friendly to every industry on that score.""
+
+The hospitals who embraced Obamacare quickly may approach this new effort skeptically: cuts to overall health spending could translate into cuts to their bottom lines.
+
+Exactly how to control health care costs will be a matter of debate among policy experts over coming months, but some ideas are already beginning to emerge in advance of the 2016 election.
+
+Families USA outlined its priorities in a January 2015 paper tiled ""Health Reform 2.0,"" which included ideas like giving public programs the authority to negotiate lower drug prices and putting lower caps on deductibles in Obamacare plans.
+
+Tanden says CAP will release a similar paper later this year, though she declined to comment on particular policy approaches until then. But there is a paper that Tanden and many other CAP fellows co-authored in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2012, which gives some clues about their current thinking.
+
+The list of 23 authors on the paper, titled ""A Systemic Approach to Containing Health Care Spending,"" reads like a who's who of the Democratic health policy establishment. At least half have spent time in the Obama administration. It suggests full transparency on health care prices, allowing the government to competitively bid for the medical equipment it buys Medicare patients, and increasing the scope-of-practice for lower-level providers like nurse practitioners.
+
+""To effectively contain costs,"" they write, ""solutions must target the drivers of both the level of costs and the growth in costs. Solutions will need to reduce costs not only for public payers but also private payers. Finally, solutions will need to root out administrative costs that do not improve health status.""
+
+Papers like this come out all the time in Washington. But one with so many CAP co-authors is especially important because of the think tank's close ties to Hillaryland. Its founder, John Podesta, has already been announced as the chair of her not-yet-existent campaign. And Tanden was policy director for Clinton's 2008 campaign.
+
+Most groups, CAP included, are also enthusiastic about proposals that would tether more health care dollars to the quality of care that patients receive — an idea the Obama administration has taken up in recent months. In January, Health and Human Services set a goal of having at least 90 percent of all Medicare payments related to quality by 2018.
+
+A new Democratic administration would likely take leadership on how to make sure hospitals and doctors actually hit that benchmark.
+
+How quickly Democrats could — or would – move on health care remains an area of debate. The president and Democratic legislators have had to spend five years now dealing with the fallout of passing a divisive law that has not become more popular since the day it passed.
+
+But others argue that health care is an inevitable agenda item for any president, Democratic or Republican. The fact that health care costs consume one-sixth of the American economy makes them a huge budgeting concern — whether a president is enthusiastic about the inevitable political battles or not.
+
+""There is sometimes a Washington perspective that 'the Democrats did health care,'"" Emanuel says. ""You don't 'do' health care once. You do health care forever. It's not a marathon. It's life.""",REAL
+289,House Democrat Introduces ISIS War Authorization Bill,"WASHINGTON -- Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) introduced legislation Wednesday to authorize military force against Islamic State militants -- a step aimed at forcing Congress to take responsibility for a war it's been funding for nearly six months with almost no debate on its duration, costs or potential toll.
+
+Lawmakers have put no parameters on the U.S. military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, since it began in August. Since then, the U.S. has spent more than $1 billion, participated in more than 1,700 airstrikes, and authorized sending roughly 3,000 U.S. troops to Iraq. All of this has happened without new war authorization.
+
+Schiff's proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force would do three things: limit military action against ISIS to three years; prohibit the use of U.S. ground troops; and immediately terminate a still-active 2002 AUMF tied to the Iraq War. It also would end, in three years, a sweeping 2001 AUMF that President Barack Obama says gives him the authority to go after ISIS without new war authorization. Some in Congress disagree that Obama has that authority and insist he needs new authorization, which the president says he would welcome.
+
+""There is no doubt that our current offensive amounts to war,"" said Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. ""Congress should take action both to authorize its prosecution and to set limits on that authorization so it may not be used by any future administration in a manner contrary to our intent.""
+
+Schiff is a lonely voice in the House. Even progressives, like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), have treated the need for new war authorization as an afterthought. It's not much better in the Senate, where Democrats hastily passed an AUMF out of a committee in late December, knowing it was going nowhere. They did so to show their frustration over the lack of attention to the issue.
+
+If the new Congress has revealed anything, it's that nobody in Washington wants to go first when it comes to authorizing a war. The White House typically submits draft AUMF language to Congress as a first step to moving a bill, but administration officials say they want feedback from Capitol Hill before moving. Lawmakers, meanwhile, are grumbling about waiting for draft language from Obama when they could be moving forward with legislation on their own.
+
+""There is plenty of responsibility to go around,"" Schiff told The Huffington Post. ""I place more responsibility here than at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. They don't have to make the first step. There is nothing holding us back except political timidity.""
+
+For now, Schiff is on the lookout for co-sponsors for his bill. He doesn't have any yet, but he said he plans to reach out to lawmakers in both parties. Nobody in the Senate has introduced AUMF legislation, though Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a vocal proponent for passing new war authorization, has called for using last year's committee-passed bill as the base for new legislation in this Congress.
+
+Schiff acknowledged that his proposal is probably more narrow than the White House wants, and that Obama will likely look to Republicans to give him broad authority. Secretary of State John Kerry told senators in December that the administration would oppose an AUMF that explicitly prohibits U.S. ground troops, which some Democrats have insisted on. Republicans appeared more amenable to Kerry's request.
+
+""Many of us are skeptical of another broad AUMF considering what's happened with the last one,"" Schiff said. ""There will be some interesting bedfellows on this.""",REAL
+3617,Defiant Charlie Hebdo to print 3M copies of latest edition with Muhammad on cover,"Muhammad will be back on the cover of the next edition of Charlie Hebdo, along with a message of forgiveness from surviving staffers at the French satirical magazine where 12 people were killed last week by a pair of Islamist brothers angered over the publication's penchant for showing images of the prophet.
+
+The decimated, but uncowed magazine upped its usual print run of 60,000 copies to 3 million for the magazine, due out Wednesday but released to the French newspaper Liberation. Fierce bidding on eBay had editions commanding as much as $500 following the outpouring of support for Charlie Hebdo, whose four top cartoonists were among the dozen killed. Editor-in-chief Gérard Biard said in a Tuesday radio interview the decision to run a cartoon if Muhammad holding a a “Je Suis Charlie” sign with the caption ""Tout est pardonne,"" or ""All is forgiven,"" and said the message was not that Muhammad was offering forgiveness, as some initially assumed.
+
+""It is we who forgive, not Muhammad,” he told France Info.
+
+Eight Charlie Hebdo staffers were killed in the attack, including the magazine's editorial director, Stephane Charbonnier, who drew under the name ""Charb.""
+
+Biard said tomorrow's issue is meant as both a memorial to fallen co-workers and proof that the magazine's mission of irreverence has not been compromised.
+
+""We needed to figure out how to continue laughing and making others laugh,"" he said. ""We wanted to analyze, say something about the events. This drawing made us laugh.
+
+He continued: ""We did not want masked men on the cover. We didn't want more of that. That's not us. We didn't want to add to the gravity. It helps to be able to breathe a little.""
+
+The cover was created by cartoonist Renald Luzier, who draws under the name ""Luz,"" and created what Biard called a “moving but not sad” work.
+
+""Seen by Luz, Mohammed is much more sympathetic than even the Muslims see him. He's a 'nice little guy' as Luz, puts it. Those assassins killed people who draw nice little guys. We wanted to show the ludicrousness of it.”
+
+The New York Times reported late Monday that when Luz showed the drawing to staffers, he was greeted with laughter, applause and ironic shouts of ""Allahu akbar!""
+
+But one of Egypt's top Islamic authorities has warned Charlie Hebdo against publishing the cartoon.
+
+Egypt's Dar al-Ifta, which is in charge of issuing religious edicts, on Tuesday called the planned cover an ""unjustified provocation"" for millions of Muslims who respect and love their prophet.
+
+The statement said the cartoon is likely to cause a new wave of hatred in French and Western societies and called on the French government and others to reject ""the racist act"" by Charlie Hebdo.
+
+Charlie Hebdo's past caricatures of the Muslim prophet appear to have prompted last week's attacks, part of the worst terrorist rampage in France in decades. A total of 12 people were killed at the newspaper's offices by Said and Cherif Kouachi, French-born brothers who had trained with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
+
+Some witnesses reported that the attackers at the paper's offices shouted ""We have avenged the prophet."" Many Muslims believe all images of Muhammad are blasphemous.
+
+French police said Monday that as many as six members of a terrorist cell involved in the attacks may still be at large.
+
+France saw its biggest demonstrations in history Sunday as millions turned out to show unity and defend freedom of expression.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+644,Can the Democratic party find unified path to the general election?,"Bernie Sanders’s protracted campaign may actually help Hillary Clinton’s general election campaign in the long run, say some political analysts and generational experts.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) is looking for assurances that presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party won't turn their backs on his progressive agenda.
+
+Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton secured enough delegates to be the Democratic candidate for president Tuesday, but competitor Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I) remains in the race leaving the party in flux.
+
+""We just ended – sort of ended – our primary season,"" President Obama told Democratic donors in a New York City apartment Wednesday, quickly catching his mistake. ""I am concerned about us doing the hard nuts-and-bolts work of turning out people to vote, particularly young people, particularly low-income people.""
+
+But doesn’t mean the president thinks Senator Sanders should immediately end his campaign. The Vermont senator has ""more than earned his right to make his own decision about the course of his campaign,"" White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Wednesday.
+
+""What happens during primaries is you get a little ouchy,"" Obama told late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon in a taping of NBC’s ""The Tonight Show"" Wednesday set to air Thursday night. ""The main role I’m going to be playing in this process is to remind the American people that this is a serious job. This is not reality TV.""
+
+So while Sanders supporters may feel frustrated that Mrs. Clinton clinched the nomination for president Tuesday they will eventually see the light, say Democrats.
+
+""Clinton people are going to have to be patient, and they’re going to have to let Sanders and his campaign work their way through this. There’s going to be a little bit of back and forth regarding the platform and probably rules,"" veteran Democratic strategist William Carrick told the Christian Science Monitor’s Linda Feldmann Wednesday. ""Millennials are disappointed that he’s not the nominee, but then they begin to sort through it. Instead of taking their bat and ball and going home, I think they’re going to say, 'Better finish the job. No Donald Trump.' ""
+
+Sanders’ sustained campaign may even help Clinton’s general election bid in the long run, say some political analysts and generational experts.
+
+""The likely consequences of Millennial support of a Bernie candidacy is that a) you may have mobilized a generation more than they would have otherwise, and b) you may have just pulled Hillary to the left,"" Jan Leighley, a professor of political behavior at American University in Washington, told the Monitor’s Jessica Mendoza earlier this week. ""The reality is youth are very small percentage of the vote. That’s true even in [presidential] election years... [and] even under the most generous assumptions.""
+
+Although the Millennial generation has surpassed Baby Boomers as the country’s largest living generation, and matched the Boomers’ share of the electorate, only 46 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 to 34 are likely to vote.
+
+But Sanders has rallied young voters to show up at the primary polls, suggesting they will turn out again during the general election.
+
+And a Clinton endorsement by President Obama – who has high favorability ratings at the moment – may effectively speed up this party solidification process.
+
+Sanders is set to meet with President Obama at 11:15 am Thursday, but the White House has been vague on the meeting’s purpose.
+
+""I think the president will also convey his appreciation for the kind of agenda that Senator Sanders has run on,"" Earnest told reporters Wednesday. ""And I think they’ll have a conversation in the Oval Office tomorrow about how Senator Sanders can build on the progress that he has made in bringing attention to those issues and ensuring that the next president of the United States shares those priorities.""
+
+As long as the next president is not a Republican reality TV star, the White House implies.
+
+This report contains material from the Associated Press.",REAL
+1314,How Trump and Sanders Broadened Their Bases in New Hampshire,"Voters in the nation's first primary delivered resounding victories to Donald Trump and Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders, who both found a wider appeal with New Hampshire voters than polls had predicted.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich emerged from a crowded pack of Republicans to take second place.",REAL
+3176,Is The Republican Party On The Verge Of A Historic Crackup?,"Is The Republican Party On The Verge Of A Historic Crackup?
+
+Something is happening in the Republican Party that has not happened in living memory.
+
+The party of unity, tradition, order and hierarchy is breaking apart over one man who personifies the concept of disruption.
+
+Donald Trump's so-far inexorable advance toward the Republican presidential nomination has divided the party. This divide is not like the garden variety primary fights of recent cycles. It goes beyond the familiar squabbles of the party's postwar era (center versus right, moderate versus conservative, eastern versus western).
+
+What is coming looks more like the historic schism of 1912, when former President Theodore Roosevelt came back to challenge the re-election of his successor and fellow Republican, William H. Taft. That schism was exploited by Woodrow Wilson, the only Democrat elected between 1896 and 1932.
+
+On Thursday, the Grand Old Party's most recent presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, delivered a stunning denunciation of its current presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, calling him a fraud and a phony who was ""playing the American people for suckers"" and who would be a disaster in the White House. John McCain, the Arizona senator who had the party's nomination in 2008, immediately signaled his support of his ""friend"" Romney.
+
+Trump responded with a rambling takedown of Romney's 2012 campaign. Major figures from the party's officialdom and from the conservative media space lined up on one side or the other to be interviewed by journalists. Some thought Romney's move would finally break the dam on Trump criticism within the party. Others thought it would ultimately harden Trump's voter base all the more.
+
+A few hours later, a televised debate pitting Trump with his last three rivals turned so raucous and unruly that observers all across the political spectrum had cause to avert their eyes.
+
+The 11th meeting of the GOP candidates may have been the most bruising to date for Trump, the first-time candidate whose message and persona have dominated media coverage of the campaign since summer. Rivals Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz largely ignored each other to concentrate on the man standing between them, offering a target for their crossfire.
+
+Among other low points was Trump's reaction to Rubio joking about his anatomy. ""He referred to my hands,"" said Trump. ""If they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee.""
+
+At one juncture, with Cruz and Trump talking over each other, Cruz tried to break the tension.
+
+""Donald, learn not to interrupt,"" he said. ""It's not complicated. Count to 10. Breathe, Donald, breathe.""
+
+That prompted Rubio to ask when ""the yoga"" would be over, and then to needle Trump for being ""very flexible"" — a reference to Trump's earlier explanations for his shifting positions on issues.
+
+The exuberant and unrestrained crowd in Detroit hooted and jeered throughout the evening, as Trump gave as good as he got with Rubio (""Little Marco"") and Cruz (""Lying Ted""). But Trump was often at a loss under questioning by the three Fox News moderators. The Fox team came loaded for bear, and Trump had more trouble with their inquiries than anyone else onstage.
+
+John Kasich, the Ohio governor and fourth wheel in the debate, received far less attention from the moderators and got almost no rebuttal time because the other candidates never attacked him.
+
+That flaw in the format, much decried by Kasich and a raft of other prospects who have already left the field, may have been the one failing of the Fox production. Moderators Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier and Chris Wallace drilled in with challenging questions, backed up with copious facts and at times illustrated with video clips
+
+Kelly, who has crossed swords with Trump before, stuck with one line of questioning about former students who sued Trump's online business college, Trump University. Rubio had raised the issue a week earlier in another debate, and Romney had returned to it in his summary of Trump's failed ventures (which also included Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, Trump Mortgage and Trump Vodka).
+
+Still, the most memorable moment in the two-hour debate in Detroit's historic Fox Theatre came near the end, when the candidates were asked if they would commit to supporting the party's nominee in November.
+
+The question might have seemed unnecessary in previous election cycles, but nothing has been ordinary about this one. In fact, on this occasion, the question of party unity was not only relevant but painfully salient.
+
+Each of the four used the moment to get in a final pitch for himself, but all four also wound up saying, yes, they would support the nominee even if the party chose someone else.
+
+That was the ""right"" answer, of course, in the traditional world of politics. But little about this debate followed tradition. And one had to wonder how committed all four really were to the pledge — and whether protestations of party loyalty would hold up under the strains now showing in the party's coalition.
+
+After the debate, lively media commentary continued well into the wee hours of the new day, with conservatives as divided as the candidates. Trump had his defenders, as did Rubio (who has been a magnet for endorsements from elected officials) and Cruz (who has the backing of many ""movement conservatives"" and Tea Party activists).
+
+""There was no winner at the debate,"" wrote Matthew Continetti, editor-in-chief of the staunchly conservative Washington Free Beacon. ""But there was certainly a loser: The GOP. It started this election cycle in a strong position, and is now on the precipice of nominating a political neophyte ... whose unfavorable ratings are sky-high and who loses to Hillary Clinton in practically every poll.""
+
+The possibility of Trump winning enough delegates to assure his nomination for president on the first ballot in Cleveland in July has caused many GOP and conservative leaders to scramble in search of any means to stop him. Suddenly, there has been open talk of an open convention, with strategies that might thwart the wishes of pro-Trump primary voters and force the convention to consider alternatives.
+
+Randy Barnett, a professor at Georgetown University's law school, has proposed that Cruz and Rubio form a partnership, with each pledging to support the other at the convention. They would then become a team and a prospective ticket, with the one who gets the most primary votes running for president and the other being guaranteed the vice presidential slot. Not a bad deal given that both men are still in their mid-40s.
+
+Others, including Romney, are suggesting that the three remaining rivals to Trump should defer to each other in states where one has a natural advantage, such as Kasich's Ohio and Rubio's Florida. That would not secure the nomination for any of them, but it would prevent Trump from amassing the 1,237 delegates he needs for a first-ballot nomination. After that, delegates are no longer committed to vote for their candidate and anything could happen.
+
+For many veteran politicos, all this seems not just tall talk but crazy talk. No convention of either party has needed even a second ballot for the nomination since 1952, and Republicans have not needed multiple ballots since 1948. The last time a Republican convention had any semblance of suspense was in 1976, and on that occasion the shadow of doubt was dispelled shortly after the opening gavel.
+
+Since then, conventions have become duller with each quadrennial renewal, offering no suspense other than the choosing of a vice president or the debate over a plank in the platform. Even these elements have usually been drained of potential controversy.
+
+Few thought 2016 would be any different.
+
+But when things happen that cannot happen, it is time to reassess what is possible.
+
+Or, as Hunter S. Thompson once wrote of another presidential campaign: ""When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.""",REAL
+9355,"Our bad-tempered behaviour is not a cry for help, say old men","Our bad-tempered behaviour is not a cry for help, say old men 15-10-14 ELDERLY men have warned the public not to try making friends with them. As it emerged that many men will spend their declining years alone, aged males confirmed that beneath their crusty, irascible exterior there was only more irascibility. 79-year-old Roy Hobbs said: “Some people seem to think that when I tell them to fuck off I actually mean ‘I crave companionship, come and have some cake’. “What I actually mean is ‘fuck off’. “I spent most of my middle years hiding alone in a shed. Now I’m a widower and the kids have left home I can at last come in the house, because there’s nobody else in it.” Hobbs warned especially against anyone trying to pick him up in a minibus and take him to some kind of community centre. “I’ve got a small hostile dog and a cupboard full of Fray Bentos pies and I am fine with that.” 
+Share: ",FAKE
+5517,How to Support Standing Rock and Confront What It Means to Live on Stolen Land,"Truthout 
+A month after President Obama told the Army Corps of Engineers to pause construction on the Dakota Access oil pipeline, the Standing Rock Sioux and those supporting them still find themselves in a dire struggle to protect their water and land. With winter approaching, the 300 tribes that are now represented at the Camp of the Sacred Stone in North Dakota are preparing for a lengthy battle. 
+In their effort to protect water, life, ancestors and future generations, indigenous peoples are also demanding that corporations, the US government, and settlers respect the treaties and indigenous self-determination. This is widening an existing dialogue and expanding ties of solidarity to include more of us who are of white European descent occupying indigenous land. 
+As support for those at Standing Rock grows, it is important that allies also confront the fundamental questions of what it means to live on stolen land and how to transform colonial relations in a way that creates a viable and just future for all communities and the planet. After almost a decade of engaging in request-based, volunteer solidarity organizing with indigenous groups fighting relocation in Black Mesa, Arizona due to coal mining , we have learned and honed a list of action steps for non-Native individuals just getting involved, as well as a set of best practices for activists already working on other organizing efforts. 
+As people of European descent who benefit from both white privilege and settler privilege, we understand that our work and writing is most effective when it is developing and acting upon a mutual stake in decolonization. This means focusing on the responsibilities specific to our position, which is inherently different from that of indigenous and non-Native people of color. Nevertheless, their organizing, along with much activist scholarship — some of which is linked to below — has helped inform this list of action steps and set of best practices. 
+1. Know whose land you are on. There are plenty of resources out there to help you educate yourself about the land that you, your school or place of worship are occupying and its original inhabitants. Here is one . Find out if the tribes or nations are still in that area. If they are not, find out why. Have they been forcefully relocated or pushed out in another way? Acknowledge that you are on occupied land when you say where you are or where you are from. This is an important way to disrupt the myth of the “disappearing native.” 
+2. Know your family’s history. How did your family end up in the United States? Was it through a colonial process in another country? If your ancestors are from a colonizing country, what was your family’s connection to land, spiritual traditions, economies, etc., before that country began colonizing other places? Does your family own land in the United States? If so, how did they come to acquire it? 
+3. Learn together. Encourage learning that is personal, emotional, spiritual, embodied and communal. Host reading groups and discussions that build an understanding of settler colonialism and your community’s relationship to it that is tied to indigenous solidarity. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” is an enormously helpful place to start, and there are numerous resources, such as the book “Unsettling America,” the website for Black Mesa Indigenous Support, the Colors of Resistance archive , the journal Decolonization , the No One Is Illegal network , queer indigenous studies, critical indigenous studies and more. 
+4. Ask permission. Asking permission fundamentally shifts the entitlement inherent to the settler experience. Cultural appropriation is an extension of genocide, forced removals, and land theft, as settlers take what does not belong to them as if it is rightfully theirs. This can be countered by asking permission to be on indigenous peoples’ traditional lands. This practice can be extended in a variety of ways and open up new modes of relating and relationships. As one of the first steps of planning, ask permission for any gatherings, marches, etc., from an indigenous representative of the land you are on. Invite them to collaborate in planning around gatherings, conferences, actions, and campaigns for justice work on their traditional homeland. Be open to the work shifting because of such collaboration. 
+5. Know where your water, heat, electricity and other resources come from. Lands that were relegated to indigenous use under the reservation system often because of their perceived barrenness are now resource colonies for the settler state. Indigenous communities in the United States are among the hardest hit by the negative impacts of climate change because of the extractive projects and processing that take place on their lands. Coal mining and burning, uranium mining and copper mining are just a few of the extractive projects that leave toxic legacies for generations to come. The profit from extraction on Native lands is rarely returned to the community that has paid the cost in destruction of lands and sacred sites, damage to health, and devastation of local economies and lifeways. 
+6. Take responsibility for Christian privilege/Doctrine of Discovery. If you’ve grown up in Christian culture, you may be unaware of all the ways that Christianity is culturally dominant in the United States. Work with your faith community to raise awareness about the violent legacy of Christian hegemony and move resources to shift power. If you are part of a Christian denomination that has not yet repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery — the theological justification for the theft of indigenous land — start or join a movement to do so. Challenge the notion that the settler church was divinely ordained within your church community. Start conversations about saints or lauded leaders of faith who were directly responsible for conquest. Learn how your church acquired its land and whose land it was originally. Learn the history of your denomination’s relationship to conquest. Consider that within Christian traditions there are built-in practices for atonement and reparations. Get creative with your spiritual community about what atonement and reparations might look like. If it is possible, try and connect with the indigenous tribe or nation in your area to work on this. 
+The Christian and Catholic Churches are incredibly well resourced not only in cash but also in land. Many, if not all, indigenous-led movements across Turtle Island — the indigenous term for North America — call for return of land to indigenous stewardship. How can the church leverage its many resources in solidarity with indigenous-led efforts for land return? There is a new project in California that is working for the return of urban land to indigenous stewardship. Could your church start a conversation about putting land in trust and working with a local indigenous group to steward it? 
+7. Engage in local struggles and build relationships. There are ongoing indigenous-led struggles for land and self-determination taking place all over Turtle Island. Not all indigenous spaces and organizations are looking for outside support, but many are. Educate yourself on this history of the area and current struggles. Reach out and take principled and accountable action by centering relationships in your work. The work will often be request-based and/or take on various forms of asking for permission, seeking guidance and input. This is a nuanced dance of taking initiative while ensuring there is guidance and the work upholds, not undermines, community self-determination. Your participation in decision making and giving input should be determined by the indigenous people you work with and will depend on the specific goals. For example, an indigenous community addressing its own tribal government has different objectives and requests from non-Native people than if cross-community power is being built to challenge federal and or state policies, energy policy, corporate power, etc. 
+8. Work for repatriations of land, upholding treaties, and funding Indigenous-led struggles and efforts for land return. This entails supporting Standing Rock, and other indigenous-led struggles in your region, building power to force the state to respect treaties, and doing creative fundraising campaigns like door knocking for reparations, as members of Resource Generation did in the Bay Area in solidarity with Poor Magazine’s “Stolen Land and Hoarded Resources Tour.” Read more here . 
+*** 
+While these are helpful tips for individuals entering the sphere of solidarity work, there are also things activists already engaged in other organizing efforts can do to amplify indigenous-led struggles or incorporate a decolonial analysis into their work. It begins with incorporating an analysis of settler colonialism into all of your organizing work. 
+Settler colonialism is the kind of colonial control that exists in “settler states” like the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Israel/Palestine, Canada, Argentina and other countries. It incorporates elements of external colonialism — in which a colonizing power exports indigenous peoples (as slaves or laborers), resources, knowledge, plants, metals, and/or animals to increase the wealth of the colonizer — as well as internal colonialism — which is marked by the violent management of an underclass of people and lands within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation. So, when Europeans began colonizing what is now known as the United States, settlers came for good — not just to take things and return to an imperial center based in Europe. This is why scholar Patrick Wolfe called settler colonialism a process of “destroying to replace.” It’s our responsibility as settlers to work to dismantle the settler colonial project. 
+Here are our tips — based on research and experience — for how to do just that, while also continuing your organizing work in other areas. 
+If your primary area of organizing is around the environment, recognize that indigenous cultures and lifeways are deeply tied to land, and most contemporary indigenous-led struggles center around access to land or land return. If you engage in environmental work: Consider how the environmental framework of land (or wilderness) as separate from people is an inherently colonial mindset that pits environmentalists not only against labor but also indigenous people, whose lifeways are inseparable from land. 
+If you engage in climate justice work, recognize the ways that indigenous communities have been disproportionately impacted by extreme extraction and climate chaos, as well as how they are resisting. Globally, indigenous communities are living as frontline blockades against extreme extraction. 
+If you engage in anti-racist work, consider doing the work of understanding settler colonialism as a structure and logic distinct (although interlocking) that is defined in terms of self-determination rather than being solely rights-based. A stance of self-determination signifies that indigenous nations pre-date the existence of the United States and aren’t always looking for recognition from the colonizing force. Rights and “equality” frameworks are most often based on the idea of the individual as the social actor and view equality under the law for all individuals as the end goal. Many indigenous frameworks don’t fully fit this and are centered more on the ideas of the collective (nation, tribe, people), as opposed to the individual. They also prioritize responsibility (to land, and future generations) as opposed to rights. 
+If you engage in labor justice work, familiarize yourself with the history of exploitation of indigenous labor in this country and consider ways in which your work for just workplaces may invisibilize the original inhabitants of the land your workplace occupies. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States” and Andrés Reséndez’s “The Other Slavery” are good places to start. 
+If you are involved in queer and trans organizing that isn’t yet connected to two spirit/Native queer and trans perspectives and movements, learn from and build with queer and/or Two Spirit Native organizers, cultural workers and scholars. Learn the history of non-Native (particularly white) LGBTQ appropriation of indigenous alternative sexualities, genders and kinship structures. The article “ Settler Homonationalism ” by Scott Morgensen is a great place to start. Envision and enact queer and trans liberation that is anti/decolonial. 
+If you engage in food justice, or permaculture, herbalism, building alternative economies, and more broadly alternatives to capitalist institutions and modes of organizing reproduction and social life, familiarize yourself with the existing alternatives indigenous people have maintained through surviving, resisting, adapting and decolonizing. Consider the potential for connecting your work to questions of land and unsettling settler desire. As Scott Morgensen explores in the essay “Unsettling Settler Desire,” the desire to replace Native peoples and inherit their land, lifeways, alternative economies, spiritualities, modes of kinship and sexuality runs deep in settler society and permeates various alternative and radical subcultures. These desires for connection to land and land-based practices are often seen as a much needed antidote to the disconnection inherent in settler society. If, however, these connections and practices aren’t cultivated in relationship to indigenous peoples’ struggles to maintain their connections, responsibilities and traditions, then the forms of connection settlers are fostering can replicate “settler desire” and further entrench colonialism. 
+For non-Native people, walking a path of decolonization is the work of envisioning and enacting reciprocal relationships. Through this we can be humbled. We hold discomfort, knowing it is part of our work and our process of rekindling our dignity and interconnectedness. We can work to stop violence and environmental degradation. We can organize to build our communities’ capacity for self-determination, while struggling alongside indigenous communities as they maintain their responsibility to their homelands and future generations. We can shift entitlement and the normalizing of theft, as well as the narrative of “disappearing Indians”— the dominant colonial story that says indigenous peoples, lands and lifeways are inevitably disappearing as part of the natural passing of time. It is the narrative that relegates all things indigenous to the realm of history. We can move away from Western, colonial modes of existing as we restore traditional economies and modes of relating, community to community and nation to nation. Moving towards decolonization allows us to reckon with the violence of our collective inheritance and commit to healing, restoring and transforming our present, so as to ensure that we have a viable and liberatory future. 
+This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.",FAKE
+3283,Lynch vote deal reached on human trafficking bill,"Washington (CNN) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced Tuesday that negotiators had reached a ""bipartisan"" deal on the anti-human trafficking bill, clearing the way for a vote to confirm attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch in the coming days.
+
+An agreement would end the latest Washington standoff, which has tied the Senate in knots for weeks. A skirmish over a provision in the anti-human trafficking bill quickly grew into a larger debate over abortion and race that resulted in the longest delay of an attorney general nominee in decades.
+
+On Tuesday, McConnell seemed ready to move on.
+
+""I'm glad we can say there is a bipartisan proposal that will allow us to complete action on this important legislation, so we can provide help to the victims who desperately need it,"" he said on the Senate floor.
+
+Minority Leader Harry Reid said Republicans had ""agreed not to expand the scope of the Hyde language,"" the abortion provision that had been the sticking point for Senate Democrats who had been filibustering the bill.
+
+McConnell said Tuesday that ""as soon as we finish the trafficking bill,"" they'll take up Lynch's confirmation vote — ""hopefully in the next day or so."" Reid and McConnell thanked Senators Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, and John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, as the lead negotiators on hammering out a compromise.
+
+Lynch's nomination has taken on historic significance — and not just because she would be the first African-American woman to lead the Justice Department. No other nominee for attorney general has had to wait this long for Senate confirmation — 165 days, and counting — since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Lynch supporters have accused Republicans of delaying in part because she's an African-American woman, a charge they dismiss.
+
+At issue was the addition of the so-called Hyde Amendment to the anti-human trafficking bill, by Republicans without the knowledge of most Democrats. The amendment is a common provision attached to most government funds for health programs that bars such funds from being used to pay for abortions, but Democrats said it was an unprecedented expansion to non-taxpayer dollars.
+
+The deal is essentially a cosmetic fix that lets both parties claim a win. It allows Republicans to say they've won their battle against funding abortions with government money, and Democrats to say they've avoided expanding the Hyde Amendment.
+
+According to sources in both parties, the Murray-Cornyn deal pools two sources of funding to support victims of human trafficking, and each is subject to distinct restrictions.
+
+One funding stream, from fines levied against sex traffickers, could be used for survivor services that do not include health care or medical services, like legal aid and law enforcement. That effectively bars the money from being used to fund abortions, but does not technically include the Hyde Amendment.
+
+The latter funding stream, which comes from community health center funds included in the doc-fix bill President Barack Obama signed into law this week, is already subject to the Hyde Amendment.
+
+While the agreement paves the way for the Senate to move past the controversies, there are still a number of procedural hurdles in the way of a final vote on both the anti-human trafficking bill and Lynch's confirmation.
+
+Republican and Democratic leaders are still hammering out which amendments to the anti-trafficking bill to bring up, but votes on those amendments could begin as early as Tuesday night, with a final vote on the bill expected Wednesday.
+
+Lynch is still facing a filibuster from GOP opponents in the Senate, but McConnell is expected to take procedural steps Tuesday to set up a Thursday-morning vote to break the filibuster. That would pave the way for a vote on full confirmation later that day. Both face just a 51-vote threshold are expected to easily win approval.
+
+The movement on the paired issues is the latest signal that the years of gridlock that ground legislative business in the Senate to a halt may be lifting, and further evidence McConnell wasn't merely bluffing when he promised to prove the GOP could govern when they took control of the Senate this year.
+
+The deal was a rare legislative compromise on abortion that drew praise from both sides of the debate.
+
+Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, used the announcement of the deal to praise Reid and Murray for preventing expansion of the Hyde Amendment.
+
+""Thankfully, Sens. Reid and Murray and other women's health champions held the line and today's agreement prevents Hyde from being extended even further into other funding streams, and provides survivors of human trafficking with immediate access to needed health care services,"" Richards said in a statement.
+
+And Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, said the group is ""pleased"" with the proposal.
+
+""This deal ensures no money in the fund is used for abortion and that any funding for health services is subject to the longstanding Hyde amendment. It ensures taxpayers will not be in a position of facilitating human trafficking by keeping victims on the street,"" she said.
+
+Lynch's nomination faces a few GOP critics, but has enough votes to get confirmed.
+
+Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who plans to vote against Lynch's confirmation, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on the ""Situation Room"" Monday he expects a vote ""fairly soon.""
+
+McCain pushed back against the notion that Republicans' five-month refusal to bring Lynch's nomination up for a vote was a form of retribution against Democrats.
+
+Earlier on Monday, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow called the delay ""politics at its worst.""",REAL
+5559,Rogue Journalist Has 'October Gift' for Hillary Campaign We're All Sure She Just 'Can't Wait' to Open,"Share on Twitter The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
+Following Monday's release of the Project Veritas video in which Democrat operatives are seen discussing Hillary Clinton’s personal involvement in a stunt to embarrass Donald Trump for not releasing his tax returns, James O'Keefe began to troll Hillary on Twitter over his next release—a “birthday surprise.” Today is Hillary's 69th birthday. — James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) October 26, 2016 
+O'Keefe also tagged Americans United for Change director Brad Woodhouse, whom he taunted yesterday about the pending video release. If you notice @woodhouseb is nervous & losing his temper on TV. Stay tuned tomorrow Brad, because you’re going to have a busy busy day. pic.twitter.com/P63xAhMlB7 — James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) October 25, 2016 Hi, @HillaryClinton & @woodhouseb . When you were coordinating, did you take money from a bank in BELIZE and then return it AFTER first vid? — James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) October 26, 2016 
+Independent Journal Review will update this post as soon as Hillary Clinton's “birthday gift” drops. And... here it is. ",FAKE
+3620,White House: 'Higher profile' person should have gone to Paris,"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama's administration admitted it erred by failing to send a higher-ranking representative of the United States to the Paris unity march on Sunday.
+
+""I think it's fair to say that we should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there,"" White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Monday afternoon.
+
+He said Obama himself would have liked to attend the march ""had the circumstances been a little different."" But planning began Friday night, 36 hours before the event began, and there wasn't enough time for the ""onerous and significant"" security work that needed to take place ahead of a presidential visit, Earnest said. He said Obama's presence also would have meant extra restrictions on the people who were there.
+
+""That said, there is no doubt that the American people and this administration stand foursquare behind our allies in France as they face down this threat,"" he said. ""And that was evident throughout last week.""
+
+More than 40 world leaders, including the British, German and Israeli heads of state and Russia's foreign minister, joined at least 1.5 million people on the Paris streets Sunday for a unity march that became France's biggest-ever public demonstration.
+
+But Obama and his administration's top hands were nowhere to be found -- an absence that triggered complaints that he missed a key leadership opportunity.
+
+The United States appeared to have options to send to the march: Obama spent Sunday at the White House with no public events on his schedule. Vice President Joe Biden was at home in Delaware for the weekend, also with a blank public schedule. Outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder was already in Paris for security meetings -- and even recorded interviews with several U.S. Sunday morning programs -- but he didn't attend the march.
+
+A Secret Service official said the agency was not asked to draw up security plans for a potential presidential trip to Paris in advance of Sunday's march.
+
+""We weren't asked or notified about a trip,"" the official said. But the agency had Secret Service agents on the ground in Paris, per its standard operating procedure.
+
+""It would have been a challenging advance ... based on what we know,"" Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary said. But Leary did not say that such an advance would have been impossible.
+
+During the White House briefing, Earnest suggested security challenges were a factor in not having the president travel to Paris. But Earnest acknowledged the Secret Service could have pulled it off. An agency official noted previous ""last minute"" presidential trips have happened during the Obama presidency, including a hurried visit to South Africa in December 2013 for the memorial service for Nelson Mandela.
+
+The White House noted that it was represented in Paris on Sunday -- and has offered support to France in recent days.
+
+U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley was in the march, as was assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. At a security summit, Holder was joined in those security meetings by deputy Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
+
+Obama personally visited the French Embassy in Washington last week to offer his support.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry, meanwhile, will visit Paris on Friday.
+
+Kerry skipped Monday's march because he was in India on Monday for a long-planned event there with new Prime Minister Narendra Modi -- a key relationship as the United States tries to improve long-strained trade ties with the country.
+
+Kerry brushed the criticism off as ""quibbling,"" saying he'll visit Paris on his way back to the United States to make ""crystal clear how passionately we feel"" about the attacks and response.
+
+""The U.S. has been deeply engaged with the people of France since this incident occurred,"" Kerry told reporters, adding that the United States has offered intelligence and law enforcement help.
+
+""This is sort of quibbling a little bit in the sense that our assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was there and marched, our ambassador was there and marched, many people from the embassy were there and marched.""
+
+France's ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud, sought to show there are no hard feelings, tweeting on Monday: ""I am extremely grateful for the overwhelming support France has received from everybody here, from the President to the ordinary American.""
+
+The White House's push-back comes as Obama takes heat -- particularly from Republicans considering 2016 presidential bids -- for his absence.
+
+Rick Perry tweeted that Obama ""should have stood with France in person to defend Western values and show support for victims.""
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wrote for Time: ""Our President should have been there, because we must never hesitate to stand with our allies.""
+
+And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Monday that ""it was a mistake not to send someone.""
+
+Rubio said on CBS' ""This Morning"" that he understands that the President's security detail can be problem in mass gatherings like the rally, but suggested Holder or Kerry should have gone in his place.
+
+""I think in hindsight, I would hope, that they would do it differently,"" Rubio said.
+
+Who did go
+
+British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were among those who attended, along with religious leaders.
+
+Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN's ""Global Public Square,"" called the absence of top U.S. officials a mistake.
+
+France is the United States' ""deepest ideological ally,"" he said, and it would have been a meaningful image to have a senior administration member, or the President, standing shoulder to shoulder with other leaders.
+
+Zakaria noted that security concerns didn't dissuade Netanyahu or Abbas or other leaders from showing up. But Obama's absence did show that the struggle against radical Islam is ""not all about America,"" Zakaria said.
+
+""Many people have tended to think that Islamic terrorism wouldn't exist without America,"" Zakaria said. ""This is really a struggle between the civilized world and a band of extremists. Even if you take the U.S. out of it ... the civilized world is up in arms.""
+
+Tapper not only called out the President and his administration, but also prospective 2016 hopefuls from both parties, for missing the opportunity to share in the global moment.
+
+Obama spoke about the Paris attacks on Friday, saying he wants the people of France to know the United States ""stands with you today, stands with you tomorrow.""
+
+The White House also announced Sunday that it will host a February 18 summit aimed at countering violent extremism.
+
+Earnest said that event will ""highlight domestic and international efforts to prevent violent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting or inspiring individuals or groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence, efforts made even more imperative in light of recent, tragic attacks in Ottawa, Sydney and Paris.""
+
+He said the summit will include presentations, panel discussions and small group meetings, focused on the local, state and federal government levels.",REAL
+2568,House votes to roll back Obama's immigration actions,"During the campaign, Trump had threatened to impose a large tariff to keep the jobs in the United States.",REAL
+9127,IRANIAN MISSILE ACCIDENTALLY DESTROYS IRANIAN SHIP AIMED FOR SYRIA!,jewsnews © 2015 | JEWSNEWS | It's not news...unless it's JEWS NEWS !!! Proudly powered by WordPress — Theme: JustWrite by Acosmin Join the over 1.4 million fans of Jews News on FB…It’s NOT news unless it’s Jews News!,FAKE
+8680,Tom deLonge: Changing the cynical views of youth towards government,"link IMO, here is what is happening. you guys are jumping to conclusions by not having any context and taking this at face value. I've been into this a very long time, and with that perspective I see some repeating patterns. To the point of the op, this is the same old same old--with a new generation of players. We've seen the same exact thing over the last 70 years with people like George Adamski, David Fry, Billy Meier, William Moore, and Steven Greer. It's the same story: A privileged individual is given the keys to open a few doors about what ""really is happening."" Tom DeLonge believes (and that's all it takes) he has been given these keys, and he's running with it, as his handlers knew he would. Tom sees this whole ""Sekret Machines"" schtick as a ""franchise."" That's how he talks about it. when he says ""franchise"" he's talking in George Lucas Star Wars terms with movie tie-ins, merchandise, graphic novels, coffee cups, t-shirts, and back packs. That's his vision for this. He sees opportunity to make this thing BIG. Now, he's been writing to Podesta and who knows who else, but he and we know Podesta has an interest in UFOs. So Podesta is seen by Tom as an ""in"" for what he perceives as the new administration and he is offering himself as a legitimate representative of his generation. His statement to Podesta is one of POSITIONING HIMSELF as a natural go-between for these issues--especially with ""young people."" It has nothing really to do with young people being disenfranchised and cynical and everything to do with Tom DeLonge taking an important position vis-a-vis ""Disclosure."" If DeLonge pulls this off it won't be Stephen Bassett of the Paradigm Research Group or Steven Greer, who ""once had dinner with the head of the CIA"" whose name is forever associated with ""Disclosure."" The name everyone will remember is Tom DeLonge. THAT'S what is happening here. DeLonge is attempting to position himself to take major advantage of what he now thinks is reality, and which also includes a major Star-Wars-sized ""franchise"" that has the potential of turning him from a mere multi-millionaire into something much larger. Of course, he may also be a dupe and or delusional, but he may not know that yet. edit on 10/27/2016 by schuyler because: (no reason given)",FAKE
+4607,"Nevada politics expert: ""Trump is dead"" in the state","When national media outlets need to know what’s going on in Nevada politics, they often turn to Las Vegas–based journalist Jon Ralston, who’s developed a strong track record of calling elections in the state.
+
+And now that Nevada early voting has come to a close, Ralston isn’t mincing words about how he sees Donald Trump’s prospects. “Trump is dead,” Ralston tweeted Saturday. He elaborated on his blog that from the early voting numbers so far, the GOP nominee would need a “miracle” to win Nevada at this point.
+
+The polls have tended to put Nevada as a pure toss-up state, and a few recent ones have even shown Trump ahead there. Accordingly, it hasn’t generally been considered part of Hillary Clinton’s swing state “firewall.”
+
+But Nevada is a famously difficult state for national pollsters to get right. Its population is transient, and many work at night. Furthermore, its population is more than one-quarter Hispanic, and it’s often challenging for English-language polls to sample Hispanic voters accurately.
+
+In both of the past two presidential elections, polls underestimated Barack Obama’s eventual margin of victory in the state. And in Harry Reid’s 2010 Senate campaign, the polls utterly whiffed, suggesting he’d lose to his challenger Sharron Angle when he ended up winning by nearly 6 points.
+
+So in previous years, analysts like Ralston have found success in reading tea leaves from Nevada’s early voting numbers instead. And all week, Ralston has been warning of danger signs for Trump. The partisan and geographic breakdown of early voting turnout has looked similar to 2012, when Obama won the state by 6.5 points. But the final day of early voting Friday was, Ralston writes, “cataclysmic” for Republicans.
+
+Ralston is looking at two main things — the numbers of registered Democrats who have voted compared with registered Republicans, and the geography of the turnout.
+
+Though the statewide early voting numbers aren’t yet finalized, Ralston estimates that registered Democrats will have a 6-point lead on registered Republicans among early voters. Since registered partisans tend to overwhelmingly vote for their own party, Trump probably either needs to dominate among early voters associated with neither party or else make up the gap on Election Day.
+
+Ralston flags the numbers from Clark County, which contains Las Vegas and three-quarters of the state’s population and is where Democrats have drawn much of their support. So far, he writes, 73,000 more registered Democrats turned out than registered Republicans in Clark — and if those voters back their party’s candidates, that’s a big lead in raw votes that will be very difficult for Republicans to overcome with the more sparsely populated counties elsewhere. (In 2012, Obama beat Mitt Romney statewide by about 70,000 votes.)
+
+Anecdotally, there appears to have been very high turnout among Hispanic voters in Clark on Friday, which led Ralston to tweet:
+
+We should caution that we do not technically know whom these people voted for. If these registered partisans did not vote overwhelmingly for their own party, if non-party-affiliated voters break overwhelmingly for one candidate, or if Election Day turnout looks dramatically different, Ralston’s call might not pan out.
+
+But ballots equivalent to well over two-thirds of the total 2012 turnout in Nevada have already been cast. So if Trump has indeed fallen significantly behind in the early vote, it will be very challenging for him to catch up.",REAL
+4836,3 explanations for why Donald Trump is suddenly doing better in the polls,"Just one month ago, Hillary Clinton had amassed a 9-point lead over Donald Trump in national polls and had an even bigger advantage in several swing states. Her eventual victory seemed to many to be all but assured, and Democrats were so confident of winning that a landslide victory even seemed like a possibility.
+
+But it’s all been downhill for Clinton from there. Starting in mid-August, her leads in both national and swing state polls began to gradually shrink. And the events of this past weekend seem to have made her margin narrow even further, as Trump has been getting some of his best state polls of the entire general election campaign.
+
+Importantly, Clinton still appears to be narrowly ahead both nationally and in enough states to win. But the recent trends have not been good for her, and make a remarkably dramatic contrast with where the race appeared to be last month.
+
+So what’s happened? Why has this race gotten so close all of a sudden?
+
+Matt Yglesias offers the big-picture point that Clinton is simply quite unpopular. But that still leaves open the question of why things have changed so quickly. Inconveniently, a month of a campaign is a complex thing, with many different events unfolding either concurrently or one after another, which makes it difficult to test a clean theory about what’s made the difference.
+
+Some combination of all this is most likely responsible for the shift we’ve seen, due to voters changing their minds and, perhaps, differences in poll response rates — though it’s unclear which of these factors is most important. What is clear is that a race Democrats hoped would be a landslide is now looking more like a nail-biter.
+
+In the weeks following the Democratic convention in late July, Trump’s poll standing plummeted. This was probably partly because Clinton got a convention bounce, but another factor was likely Trump’s high-profile attacks on the family of the late Capt. Humayun Khan. The Kahn controversy was heavily covered in the press and earned Trump a new round of condemnations from high-profile Republicans.
+
+But around August 17, Trump decided to make a change. He installed a new campaign team. He stopped doing constant TV interviews where he’d end up putting his foot in his mouth. He started doing more traditional and message-driven campaign events, as the Wall Street Journal’s Monica Langley writes.
+
+And perhaps most importantly, Trump has managed to avoid embroiling himself in any major new, campaign-consuming controversies (well, until Thursday’s birther flap, which hasn’t yet played out in the polls). Of course, he is being graded on a curve here — as Matt Yglesias writes, even uneventful Trump interviews usually contain several untrue or offensive statements that would shock us if any other politician were involved.
+
+Trump still isn’t doing as well as we would expect a generic Republican nominee to be doing. Vox’s fundamentals-based elections forecast suggests that he should be winning 50.9 percent of the two-party vote, and he’s currently 3 points behind that. Still, Trump has generally spent the past month hammering home his critique of Clinton rather than being dogged with questions about one offensive statement or another. And that could be helping bring some reluctant Republicans back into his camp.
+
+There’s also one other big thing that’s changed for Trump in this time period: He finally started spending money on swing state campaign ads. Until mid-August, Hillary Clinton had been spending millions on the airwaves essentially unopposed in every key state, but now the Trump campaign has been investing millions in ads as well.
+
+Now, these ads are only seen by swing state voters, so we wouldn’t expect them to make a dent in national polls. And Trump has improved nationally, so they’re not at the heart of what’s going on. Still, they could be making a difference at the margins in his performance in the swing states that will decide the election.
+
+As Trump has been improving his operation, Clinton has been dogged by a series of negative news stories that could be hurting her to some extent.
+
+On September 2, the FBI released a report of its findings in its investigation into Clinton’s emails. There wasn’t really much “news” here, but it quite understandably led to a new spate of news stories with “Clinton” and “FBI” in the headlines. And considering that the last time Clinton sank this badly in the polls was in the weeks after FBI Director James Comey first announced his findings in early July, it seems that when the topic is in the news, Clinton’s poll standing suffers.
+
+Over this same late August/early September time period, a series of negative-sounding stories about the Clinton Foundation also were published. Most of these stories didn’t seem to amount to very much if you read their details closely. But the very fact that a bunch of negative-sounding stories about Clinton appeared in the news helps create an aura of “corruption” around her, particularly when Trump dubs her “crooked,” regardless of the fine details. (Most voters aren’t retaining the fine details here.)
+
+Meanwhile, Clinton kept a relatively light campaign schedule in August so she could focus on fundraising instead. The side effect, though, was that she didn’t have the opportunity to “counterprogram” those negative news stories with positive events putting her message out there.
+
+“Clinton’s decision to lay low in August … will be debated for years,” Politico’s Glenn Thrush writes. “If she wins, her summertime fundraising blitz, meant to unleash a torrent of anti-Trump advertising at campaign’s end, will be regarded as strategic genius; lose and her decision is up there with Michael Dukakis in the tank.”
+
+I find that to be a bit overheated and doubt this made that much of a difference, but, hey, when voters did see a lot of Clinton and her message during the week of the Democratic convention, they did seem to like them well enough.
+
+So the race had already gotten a good deal closer since mid-August. But then, the events of this past weekend seem to hurt Clinton even more — though it’s not clear which mattered most.
+
+First was “deplorables-gate.” At a fundraiser last Friday, Clinton disparaged “half” of Trump’s supporters at a fundraiser as belonging in “the basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” Clinton soon gave a semi-apology, saying that “half” was too much but reiterating that Trump does indeed have many racist supporters. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign and much of the media quickly portrayed her remarks as a devastating gaffe akin to Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments from 2012.
+
+Afterward, things got worse for Clinton, as she felt faint and had to leave a 9/11 commemoration event on Sunday, was recorded nearly collapsing while being led into her car, and belatedly admitted that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days earlier. All this seemed to some to vindicate rumors Trump and his allies had been trying to spread about Clinton’s health for some time, and made Clinton appear less than fully forthright.
+
+This is speculative, but, like Brendan Nyhan of the Upshot, I suspect the health news is hurting Clinton more than deplorables-gate. Yes, the Trump campaign has seized on her remark, but the Clinton team probably has better data and they now seem eager to discuss the topic (after the candidate’s initial semi-apology).
+
+Furthermore, the deplorables comment seems like the type of inside-baseball campaign story that ordinary voters won’t really care about, whereas Clinton’s health is far more striking. Search data also suggests that people are far, far more interested in Clinton’s health than in the “deplorables” controversy.
+
+Now, it’s possible that this sudden swing in the polls is affected somewhat by differential non-response rates, a phenomenon Vox’s Jeff Stein wrote about earlier this year. That is to say, the news of Clinton’s illness may have made her supporters less enthusiastic about even answering polls, so they’d naturally show up less often in the results even after demographic weighting.
+
+Similarly, Trump supporters may have been disproportionately less likely to respond to polls back in early August, when Trump was under fire for his attacks on the Khan family. That could have made Clinton’s poll leads look artificially large then, and a change in Clinton supporter response rates could be making the race look unusually tight now. As Stein wrote, Andrew Gelman and Alan Abramowitz have compiled evidence showing that what looks like big poll swings can often be explained partly by this effect.
+
+Yet if Clinton voters truly are feeling so unenthusiastic about the race that they won’t answer phone polls, that in itself indicates a major underlying enthusiasm problem her campaign needs to solve. Furthermore, finding creative reasons to dismiss poll results that may not fit with your preconceptions has generally been a bad idea this year, as Trump’s primary rise and Brexit have both shown.
+
+As for whether this is the harbinger of a new normal in the race, well, we don’t really know, of course. There are still 53 more days until Election Day, and much can happen in that time. (Everything mentioned above happened in just the past month!) Clinton’s health could get better or worse. Trump could avoid more gaffes or start backsliding like he did with birtherism on Thursday. The media could cover Trump more harshly now that it seems more likely he could win. The debates could go well or disastrously for either candidate.
+
+What is clear is that a race Democrats briefly thought they had in the bag no longer looks like such a sure thing.",REAL
+7479,Earth To Ammosexuals: NRA Admits No One Is Coming For Your Guns! (VIDEO),"Earth To Ammosexuals: NRA Admits No One Is Coming For Your Guns! (VIDEO) By Natalie Dailey   
+For decades, gun-toting, ammosexual Right Wing Nut Jobs have claimed that the government is going to take their guns away. 
+The National Rifle Association (NRA) has been preaching this kind of crap “news” for years, and blaming it on Democratic presidents. It turns out that the organization has finally admitted that this is a lie. 
+When asked about it, President Barack Obama said : “I’m about to leave office. There have been more guns sold since I’ve been president than just about any time in U.S. history. There are enough guns for every man, woman and child in this country. And at no point have I ever proposed confiscating guns from responsible gun owners. So it is just not true.” 
+The NRA responded with : “Congress writes the laws, not the president. He could then have listed the many attacks on the right to bear arms — from Operation Fast and Furious to Operation Choke Point to Obama’s attempted ban on common ammunition for AR-15-type rifles to his using a ‘pen and phone’ to push anti-gun executive actions. But Rhude respectfully stayed silent.” 
+Even if Congress and the president were able to pass such a law, the Supreme Court would rule it unconstitutional if challenged since they would be going against the Second Amendment. 
+Not only has the NRA lied about taking away guns, but Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is spreading that BS as well. He said this about it back in May: “Hillary Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment. She wants to abolish it. Hillary Clinton wants to take your guns away and she wants to abolish the Second Amendment. She wants to take the bullets away. She wants to take it.” 
+Americans really need to stop listening to these fear-mongering idiots. No one is coming after your guns. We need to keep guns out of the hands of people who abuse them and commit crimes with them. 
+Here is a clip from The Daily Show about Obama’s last batch of gun control executive orders : 
+Featured image via YouTube screenshot . About Natalie Dailey 
+Hi, I'm from Huntsville, AL. I'm a Liberal living in the Bible Belt, which can be quite challenging at times. I'm passionate about many issues including mental health, women's rights, gay rights, and many others. Check out my blog abravealabamaatheist.com. Check out my other blog weneedtotalkaboutmentalhealth.com Connect",FAKE
+8662,Economic upgrade: Russia receives multiple endorsements for rapidly improving business conditions,"Thu, 27 Oct 2016 16:35 UTC © UPI.com Successful eurobond sale in September, credit upgrade by Fitch, and sharp improvement in World Bank Ease of Doing Business ranking, all confirm effectiveness of Russian government's economic policies, amidst strengthening recovery. As economic recovery in Russia continues to gain hold, Russia has received authoritative endorsement both for its successful macroeconomic policies and for its rapidly improving business conditions. The US credit rating agency Fitch on 14th October 2016 upgraded Russia's rating from BBB- (negative) to BBB- (stable). Normally I pay no attention to ratings decisions by US credit rating agencies, which have been proved repeatedly wrong, and which in Russia's case are blatantly politicised. Back in 2015, during the worst period of the recession, I pointed out how obviously and completely wrong the decisions of the US credit rating agencies to downgrade Russia's credit rating at that time were. The market clearly agrees with me. Fitch's Russia rating is only just investment grade, whilst those of S&P and Moody's actually give Russia a junk rating. In spite of this - and as I predicted - Russia's last eurobond issue in September was six times oversubscribed, with almost the entirety of the issue on this occasion sold to US investors . Even the Western financial media has been finally forced to admit that Russia's latest eurobond issue was a success . If I refer to Fitch's latest upgrade of Russia's rating, it is not because I agree with Fitch's rating of Russia (I don't) but because of what Fitch has to say about Russia's economic policy ""Russia has implemented a coherent and credible policy response to the sharp fall in oil prices. A flexible exchange rate, inflation targeting, fiscal consolidation and financial sector support have allowed the economy to adjust and domestic confidence to return gradually. The strength and quality of the policy response stands out relative to those of other oil producers similarly affected by the oil price shock. (bold italics added) In other words Russia has responded to the oil price fall intelligently and successfully - more so than have the other oil producers. In his State of the Union address of 20th January 2015 US President Obama famously gloated ""today, it is America that stands strong and united with our allies, while Russia is isolated with its economy in tatters."" Judging by the success of its latest eurobond issue, and the credit upgrade Russia has just been given by Fitch, neither the market nor even Fitch agree with him. Meanwhile Russia's World Bank Ease of Doing Business ranking continues its rapid rise. In 2011 Russia's ranking was 123 in the survey out of 183. By 2014 it had risen to 62 out of 189, by 2015 to 51 out of 189, and in this year's survey it has risen again to 40 out of 190. When I discussed last year's survey I made the point that the dramatic improvement in Russia's World Bank Ease of Doing Business ranking is simply incompatible with Russia being the corrupt kleptocracy of the West's imagination ""In corrupt kleptocratic oligarchies courts do not function efficiently, contracts are not performed and enforced, rights of minority shareholders are not protected, and people are not able to register their property easily and do not pay their taxes."" Comment: Putin's record for fighting corruption is world-class but the Western media will never tell you I also pointed out that the rapid improvement of Russia's World Bank Ease of Doing Business ranking proves that the claim that Russia is not ""reforming"" its economy is quite simply wrong. Russia is not only continuously reforming its economy, but it is doing so successfully "" the demand for more and more ""reforms"" simply ignores the fact that reforms are in fact being carried out. Anyone who reads through the World Bank's annual surveys will see that they are all about ""reforms"". It is precisely because Russia is carrying out ""reforms"" that its ranking is rising so fast. To be clear, modernising the court system, introducing a new bankruptcy law, simplifying procedures for connecting to the electricity supply, and passing laws on registering property and on administering bankruptcy, are reforms. They may lack the drama of breaking up Gazprom, but academic research, historical experience and the World Bank all say the same thing: it is these sort of unexciting reforms that in the end are the ones that make a difference and which produce results. In other words Russia is reforming, and it is doing so successfully, in a methodical and purposeful way. Doing so requires hard work and unremitting attention to detail. The Russian authorities deserve credit for successfully doing it, not the criticism for doing nothing that they normally get."" I also made an extended point about what Russia's ranking in the World Bank Ease of Doing Business survey says about the overall level of Russia's society and economy. The continued advance in Russia's ranking to 40th in the world shows that this point remains valid, so I reproduce it here in full ""The second point is that if one looks at what sort of countries now outrank Russia in the survey, it turns out that they are - broadly speaking - the three Asian industrial giants: Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, the two Asian city states of Hong Kong and Singapore, and the traditional and well established industrialised societies of the West: the US, the three rich countries of the British commonwealth (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and most (though not all) the states of the EU - in sum what was once called ""the first world"". If one removes the one indicator where Russia scores especially badly, Trading Across Borders - for which there are special reasons (see above) - Russia becomes even more clearly aligned with these ""first world"" countries rather than with those countries that make up what used to be called ""the third world"". The Russian government's target is to achieve 20th place in the World Bank's ease of doing business survey by 2018. That may be too optimistic, though it is worth pointing out that the target for this year was 50th, which Russia only missed by one place. If Russia does achieve a ranking of 20th in the world by 2018 then it will be right in the middle of the ""first world"" group of countries rather than just outside it. At that point it will also have one of the best business climates in the world. Even if Russia does not achieve 20th position by 2018, the pace of improvement in the rankings is so fast it suggests Russia will break in fully in terms of quality of its business climate into the list of ""first world"" countries before long."" Inevitably, as Russia's position in the World Bank Ease of Doing Business survey has rapidly improved, some commentators both in the West and Russia have cast doubt on the survey, even though its methodology is rigorous (originating apparently with Harvard University) and even though it is based on thorough field work. Needless to say these are the same commentators who regularly cited the survey when Russia's ranking in it was poor. There is in fact no reason to think the rapid rise in Russia's position in the survey does not reflect actual business conditions. As I said in my discussion of last year's survey, its results were anecdotally confirmed to me in a meeting I had with a group of local businessmen in Perm. A far more authoritative person has now come forward and said the same thing. This is German Gref, the single individual who is perhaps best informed about conditions for businesses in Russia because he is the CEO of Sberbank, Russia's biggest bank, which is the national (as opposed to local) bank that small businesses in Russia are most likely to look to for credit. Gref stands politically at the farthest liberal end of the spectrum of Russia's political and economic establishment, and he is far from shy about criticising the government, which he does frequently. Yet in a meeting with Putin on 4th August 2016 he confirmed the improvement in business conditions in Russia ""I think that the environment that we will have in place by the end of 2016, when all of the legal amendments take effect, will mean that Russia will be offering one of the most interesting and technologically convenient environments for small businesses. "" (bold italics added) Because of the extremely poor relations between the West and Russia, Russia's economy and its economic management are continuously and relentlessly criticised in a way which plays well to Western prejudice but which grossly distorts understanding of the country and its government. Russia's highly conservative macroeconomic policies emphasising tight budget discipline (the federal budget deficit at the peak of the recession was 3% of GDP, roughly the same as that of the US and below that of Britain during their 'recoveries', with the Russian government planning to cut the deficit by 1% of GDP over each coming year), low taxes (income tax is levied at a flat rate of 13%), high real interest rates (currently around 4% above inflation), open financial markets, low debt (government debt in Russia is 17.7% of GDP compared to 104% in the US, 229% in Japan, 89% in Britain, 96% in France and 71% in Germany), low external debt (roughly 20% of Russia's GDP, compared to 114% of the US's, 570% of Britain's, 220% of France's, 145% of Germany's and 60% of Japan's) and floating exchange rate, have in reality enabled Russia - as Fitch says - to adjust rapidly and very successfully to the fall in oil prices. At the same time the rapid improvement in business conditions shown by the rapid rise of Russia's ranking in the World Bank Ease of Doing Business survey shows that Russia is also working hard and successfully at getting its microeconomic conditions right. In other words the people who run Russia's economy know their job and by and large they do it well. That does not mean they are infallible. In my opinion interest rates are far too high, with the 4% inflation target for next year in danger of becoming a fetish. However compared to the appalling mismanagement one sees elsewhere, far from being the collapsing kleptocratic empire of Western fancy, Russia looks like an island of stability and good sense.",FAKE
+6023,Football Follies 2016: NCAA Week 9,"Print 
+Of all the weeks to turn in a late Follies post from your LU Football Commentary Service. 
+We’ve already had two outcomes for our Inner Circle (more below, in case you’re still in suspense). 
+But we’re also in a position to ask the eternal question: if Cal and USC play and no one pays attention, did anything happen? (FWIW, USC won, 45-24. Another Storied Rivalry settled for 2016. Cal ballcaps back in the closet, folks.) 
+Next week: CFB rankings to lampoon. 
+Tennessee whupped up on Jacksonville Thursday night in the pros. As nature seems to have intended this year. Get a defense, Jags. 
+Inner circle 
+The University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane (4-2), which beat Notre Dame 28-27 on 30 October 2010, will be at Memphis Saturday for an American West showdown. The Tigers are giving 6.5, but we think TU has a better shot than that. Should be a good game. 
+Oklahoma, holding steady at #16, hosts Kansas (motto: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”) on Saturday evening, while laying a ridiculous 40.5. Has the betting fraternity been held in isolation for the last six weeks? Kansas isn’t nearly as bad as they were a year ago, and Oklahoma’s defense couldn’t stop a gum-wrapper chain if it were barreling down the field. Anything could happen, but this is just the sort of situation where Oklahoma ends up struggling in the final 2 minutes to stay on top of a 3-point lead. We’ll believe 40 when we see it. 
+Oklahoma State gets to host #10 West Virginia, pride of the Big 12, in Stillwater early Saturday. As befits a ranked visitor facing a Gundy squad, the Mountaineers are giving, but not a lot – 3.5. That said, WVU could well find a way to rattle Cowboy QB Mason Rudolph. Game by game, the Mountaineers have tended to be a one-trick pony on defense this year, but they keep finding the right trick to get the job done. 
+New #22 Navy will be squaring off with South Florida at Ray-Jay in Tampa by the time this goes to post. The 6-2 Bulls top the American East at the moment, while 5-1 Navy leads the American West, so there will be a lot of talk about a conference-champ preview. The Bulls scored 35 on Florida State in a wild early-season loss, but just took a bad dive last game against Temple. They’re favored by 6, but Navy’s likely to cover. (Umm. Well, any minute now, Navy’s going to start getting in the same hemisphere as “covering.” Good grief, Navy’s secondary just can’t keep up with these guys.) 
+Army will be in Winston-Salem to take on Wake Forest Saturday, on the short end of 7. Wake could more than cover, but Army took a drubbing from North Texas last week, and will be out for blood. Key week to see if this year’s Black Knights are for real. 
+Air Force , also coming off a painful loss to Hawaii, heads to Fresno State Friday evening for the late game. Falcons give 14.5. We think the Bulldogs will cover. 
+Virginia Tech , back at #25 (for now), knocked off Pitt 39-36 in a rock-‘em-sock-‘em slugfest last night in Pittsburgh. Hard-fought battle with major yardage on both sides, but some intermittently impressive defense poking through as well. See what you can do, Hokies, when you don’t eat yourselves alive with penalties and turnovers? 
+Nevada , we’re happy to say, has the week off. New #19 LSU is off this week as well, preparing for the rivalry bout with Alabama next week. 
+For all you offense fans out there, TCU hosts Texas Tech on Saturday. We, personally, are going to be extremely disappointed if the combined total points clock in anywhere south of 130. Toads give 9.5. 
+Kansas State is off to Iowa State to see what the Wildcats can do with the 1-6 Cyclones’ bad habit of losing. K-State is 4-3 and a solid shot for a bowl bid – but, still facing OK-State, Baylor, rival KU, and TCU down the stretch, they really want to add to the “W” column this weekend. 
+Toledo is our other Thursday night winner, because we just know they had a Great Learning Experience coming in second to Ohio last night (31-26, for those with a thirst for data). Apparently it’s been quite a while since the Bobcats won in Toledo. Seemed to be all anybody could talk about. Rockets go to 6-2; their biggest conference game at division-leader (and #20) Western Michigan will be Thanksgiving week, and when they win that one, they may just get another crack at Ohio for the MAC crown. 
+Wyoming hosts #13 Boise State, and it’s a measure of the Cowboys’ improved performance this year that the Broncos are only laying 13.5. It wouldn’t surprise us, exactly, for the Pokes to cover. 
+Top 10 
+#1 Alabama is off, preparing as any sensible team would to meet LSU. 
+New #2 Michigan heads to East Lansing for something they’ve been wanting to do since 2012: win the Paul Bunyan Trophy back from Michigan State. This is the year they can do it. The Wolverines give 24 at the moment. The 2-5 Spartans will play them tough, of course, but we’re figuring on Blue from out here in the cheap seats. And who cares if the trophy looks like a manly man’s Hummel figurine? There’s nothing foofy about, you know, collecting. 
+In default of better options, Clemson is cycling back through #3, and takes on #12 FSU in Tallahassee, in the marquee slot on Saturday evening. Tigers give only 4, even though the ‘Noles haven’t been all that, recently. The one and only Paul Bunyan Trophy, in play once more. (Image: Wikipedia) 
+New #4 Washington is at #17 Utah, giving 11. 
+New #5 Louisville heads to Charlottesville with a gift of 33 for hapless Virginia. 
+New #6 Ohio State, which owes us all an apology for upsetting the top 10 in this incontinent way, hosts Northwestern, giving 27.5. 
+New #7 Nebraska will be at #11 Wisconsin, facing the real probability of losing top 10 standing in their Storied Rivalry game, not to mention the Freedom Trophy. Which may be Just A Trophy, but is discreetly attractive at least. Badgers give 9.5. Why they fight. (Image: UW Athletic Communications via Fox Sports) 
+New #8 Baylor is at Texas, giving 3.5, and better watch its six. 
+#9 Texas A&M hosts New Mexico State, which makes for a meeting of Aggies but doesn’t seem to have a lot of other merits. A&M is laying 43.5. 
+Best of the rest 
+We can’t vouch in advance for the football, but it’s always an exciting weekend when Florida (#14) and Georgia meet in their Storied Rivalry to fight for the Okefenokee Oar. 
+#15 Auburn at Ole Miss might be kind of interesting. Miami at Notre Dame holds possibilities, featuring a tight 1.5-point spread (Arsh) and the usual primo slot on the Notre Dame Broadcasting Channel. The Okefenokee Oar’s glamour shot from its Facebook page. 
+Other ranks 
+In FCS, McNeese State hosts Abilene Christian for the Cowboy Homecoming on Saturday evening. Abilene Christian is 1-7 and sucks royally, but they are coming off their one win (over Incarnate Word), and McNeese has whiffed on some softballs this season. But Go Pokes! 70s and clear for the 6 PM game start. 
+In Div II, Slippery Rock (5-3) heads to Clarion to take on PSAC rival Clarion U. on Saturday. The Eagles are 2-6 and have already had their obligatory losses to ranked powerhouses California U. (PA) and IUP. We don’t want to say it’s cake for Clarion from here on, but we do suspect SRU may be a tad more motivated. Little Clarion P-A (pop. 5,000) is northeast of Pittsburgh (and Slippery Rock), and just southwest of the Allegheny National Forest, where it will be in the 60s and clouding up something fierce for the noon kickoff. 
+In Div III, Rose-Hulman , AKA The Bomb, is now 6-2 and perched atop the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference after the epic win over Franklin. The Fightin’ Engineers host Bluffton U. (OH) in Terre Haute on Saturday, in a game that could be a showstopper. The Beavers come in 6-1 (4-1 conference), and although they lost to Franklin, they beat RHIT’s archrival Mt. St. Joe in September. Fight hard, Engineers. 70s and overcast for the 1:30 PM kickoff. 
+Christopher Newport , now 5-2 after the owwie at Frostburg State, could do itself some major good hosting Salisbury U. (MD) for Homecoming Saturday night. Salisbury (6-1) is second in the NJAC, behind Frostburg, but also ranked #17 in the Coaches’ Poll. See how easy? Vault Salisbury and Wesley (which CNU beat a few weeks ago) in the NJAC, and maybe surge back into the top 25. Well, it’s a goal. Topping out at 70, with clear skies, for the 4 PM game start. 
+Merchant Marine has the week off. 
+Pros 
+Our Redskins lead us off Sunday morning, playing Cincinnati at the ungodly hour of 6:30 AM PDT because they’ll be at Wembley Stadium in London. Bengals give 3. 
+New Orleans hosts Seattle (-2.5) in the (godlier) early slot. 
+San Diego and Denver are going to get right back on that horse in Sports Authority at Mile High, and we’d like to see the Broncos do something with their 4-point give this time. They did wallop the Texans, for what that’s worth. 
+Dallas has a big one coming up Sunday night, hosting Philly in Arlington. The 5-point Cowboy advantage isn’t completely unjustifiable. 
+Steelers have the week off. 
+Monday night gives us Minnesota (-4.5) at Chicago.",FAKE
+6401,"They Said What?!: Find Out What Paul Krugman, Aretha Franklin, And Willie Nelson Have To Say","Email Ever wonder what’s on the mind of today’s most notable people? Well, don’t miss our unbelievable roundup of the best and most talked about quotes of the day: “ If I’m going to your birthday party, you sure as hell better have some cake, free booze, and at least some piece of evidence indicating that you’ve had a birthday within six months. ” —Paul Krugman On rigor “ When I was 15, my father told me I had a choice to make. He outstretched his arms. In one hand he held a microphone, representing a career in music, and in the other, a single sock, which I assume represented a career in something sock-related. Anyway, I chose the microphone, and I’ve regretted it ever since. ” —Aretha Franklin On her career “ All I need is my guitar, my friends, my health, my vast collection of rare stamps, and a pistol to ward off stamp bandits. ” —Willie Nelson",FAKE
+4435,Joe Biden praises Iraqi military,"Washington (CNN) American officials attempted to explain on Monday the claim made over the weekend by Defense Secretary Ash Carter that Iraqi defense forces ""showed no will to fight"" prior to the ISIS siege of Ramadi.
+
+The comment, made in an exclusive interview with CNN, was the harshest public criticism of the Iraqi security forces to date from the Obama administration. The United States has said local fighters, rather than U.S. forces, must lead the fight against ISIS, a strategy that has come under withering criticism as the terror group gains ground in Iraq and Syria.
+
+The remark surprised Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who told the BBC that Carter was ""fed the wrong information.""
+
+In a Monday phone call with Abadi, Vice President Joe Biden ""recognized the enormous sacrifice and bravery of Iraqi forces over the past 18 months in Ramadi and elsewhere,"" according to a statement from the White House.
+
+Biden, who told Abadi before Ramadi's fall that shipments of weapons were being expedited to help protect the city, explained to the prime minister on Monday the U.S. was planning to ramp up training to combat ISIS truck bombs, which were deployed in brutal fashion during the group's takeover of the Anbar capital.
+
+Meanwhile, U.S. officials were parsing what precisely Carter meant when he told CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr that ""we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight ISIL and defend themselves,"" despite outnumbering ISIS forces.
+
+A senior administration official said Carter's remarks were in reference to the Ramadi siege specifically, which came after months of fighting and was hastened by a rash of ISIS suicide bombings, some of them at the same magnitude as the 1995 Oklahoma City blast.
+
+""The reference to lack of will was in relation to this specific episode, which followed 18 months of fierce (Iraqi Security Forces) attrition against ISIL in Ramadi, coupled with what the Iraqi government has acknowledged were breakdowns in military command, planning, and reinforcement,"" the official said.
+
+A senior defense official pointed to specific factors that may have contributed to Iraqi troops' lack of fighting will in Ramadi, including the absence of regular payments, the inability to visit family members and a general sense that commanders weren't looking after their battalions.
+
+According to this official, the U.S. has grown increasingly concerned about a lack of leadership skills within the Iraqi ranks, seen as crucial to winning the support of troops in combat situations like the battle for Ramadi.
+
+The White House has consistently ruled out sending American combat forces back into Iraq after the decade-long war begun by President George W. Bush. Instead, the U.S. is relying on a strategy of empowering local forces to beat back ISIS where they've made gains.
+
+President Barack Obama, speaking to The Atlantic magazine last week, said that ""if the Iraqis themselves are not willing or capable to arrive at the political accommodations necessary to govern, if they are not willing to fight for the security of their country, we cannot do that for them.""
+
+Officials say in Anbar province, the equipping and training of Sunni tribes is a priority as Iraqi forces regroup and attempt to retake Ramadi.
+
+""The rapid integration of the Sunni tribes into the fight alongside other Iraqi forces is essential as they will be the most invested in fighting for their areas,"" an administration official said.
+
+Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense who Obama considered naming to the top Pentagon post, said on CNN Sunday the administration has ""under-resourced"" its counter-ISIS strategy.
+
+""We need to provide more fire power support, more intelligence surveillance,"" she told CNN's Jim Acosta on ""State of the Union.""",REAL
+6800,Automation: Robots from Korea to America Are Replacing Workers, ,FAKE
+5046,"Clinton And The DNC: A Crisis Not Merely Survived, But Transcended","Clinton And The DNC: A Crisis Not Merely Survived, But Transcended
+
+When all was said and done, Team Hillary had to be pretty happy. Their four nights in Philadelphia turned out better than almost anyone expected.
+
+Thursday night featured an orchestrated symphony of praise for Hillary Clinton and a precision-bombing of her opponent, Donald Trump.
+
+Clinton's own remarks at the conclusion will not enter the pantheon of great American prose or political rhetoric. But no one had been reserving a place there. More importantly, she provided a fitting conclusion to the proceedings, meeting her own mark and cutting a convincing figure as the nation's first female president.
+
+Think of it this way: She got it done. No, she didn't seem to be having fun doing it. Not half as much as Barack Obama did when setting the table for her the night before (and not to mention her husband, Bill, on Tuesday night). She did not have the magic Michelle Obama flashed on Monday night, when she moved the delegates and set the tone for a winning week.
+
+Yet Hillary Clinton's moment was the most important of all, the one that marked paid to the entire enterprise. And it played even better on TV than inside the convention hall. (More on why that was so, in a moment.)
+
+Whatever the judgment of the polls in the days ahead, the party's quadrennial confab represented an achievement in careful and effective political management. It was not just crisis survived, but crisis transcended.
+
+Let us reflect for just a moment. Team Clinton and the Democratic National Committee hit town last weekend facing all kinds of bad weather.
+
+First, literally: A heat wave studded with violent thunder, lightning and downpours.
+
+Second: A flood of bad publicity was unleashed with WikiLeaks' release of nearly 20,000 emails from DNC staffers that revealed bias against rival candidate Bernie Sanders. Long assumed, though often denied, this evidence of the DNC tilt broke the dam on Sanders fans' bitterness and resentment — and at that worst possible time.
+
+Third: Gale winds carried in the hot allegations and abuse from the Republican convention the previous week in Cleveland, where the catchphrase chanted regularly by the crowds was: ""Lock her up.""
+
+All in all, a troubled forecast.
+
+But as people filed out of the Wells Fargo Center on Thursday night, most all of them seemed remarkably satisfied. Even many of the Sanders folks seemed resigned, or, at least, not overly disappointed. Most were also willing to vote against Trump, even if they couldn't quite vote for Clinton.
+
+The intervening days brought tense moments. The first afternoon, the Sanders forces were in full cry — booing every mention of Clinton's name. There seemed to be little prospect for peace, and many opportunities for disruption and chaos.
+
+Sanders' delegates arrived lacking the votes to contest the nomination, yet many seemed to believe Sanders might still win. They thought the release of the DNC emails proved Clinton's nomination was rigged, and they imagined this would be enough to pry open the delegate allocations or persuade superdelegates to switch to Sanders.
+
+These reactions overestimated the importance and power of the DNC, which was important in many ways, but far from critical, in determining who voted or how. Still, the WikiLeaks release served to confirm the suspicion that party rules and party rulers were somehow overruling the popular will of the people.
+
+It was obvious that the DNC controversies fed into a Rules Committee decision to reduce the future numbers of superdelegates (elected officials and party leaders who are uncommitted participants in the nominating convention and may vote their own conscience). In 2020, such delegates will be reduced from 720 to 250.
+
+But negotiations were going forward even then. Sanders' people were talking, and there were delegation leaders willing to work overtime to heal wounds. Sanders himself, having already formally conceded, intervened to urge his delegates to show respect, if only to preserve the gains they had made as a movement.
+
+By Thursday night, the convention organizers had perfected their defense against the hardcore of holdouts. Where the Sanders people wore bright yellow shirts to set themselves apart and held up signs protesting fracking or trade deals, the Clinton delegates sprouted American flags to wave about. There were also much larger American flags on poles that seemed to appear just in front of the more visible concentrations of Sanders people.
+
+Outside, throughout the four days, there were thousands of protesters from Black Lives Matter and anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-fracking and just plain anti-Clinton groups.
+
+They were kept away from the hall by barriers and police, but they did dump a mock coffin labeled ""DNC"" over one fence. Police arrested a handful and issued citations to dozens more. They did not manage to make much impression on those inside the arena.
+
+Despite all this, there remained the thought that ""more unites us than divides us,"" to quote candidate Clinton in one of her early appeals to Sanders supporters.
+
+For many Democrats, the ""more unites us"" argument matters but does not truly motivate. What focuses their minds is the prospect of losing the White House this fall. While never welcome, that prospect has become truly disconcerting to them with Trump's takeover of the GOP.
+
+Whenever the energy of the week seemed to flag, a fresh assault on Trump revitalized the proceedings. On the final night, the program reached an early emotional peak with the testimony of Khizr Khan, the father of a young U.S. Army captain killed protecting his troops from a truck bomb.
+
+The father stood onstage with his wife and calmly, haltingly voiced his rage at Trump's proposed ban on Muslim immigration.
+
+Khan held up his personal copy of the U.S. Constitution to offer it to Trump, questioning whether the Republican had ever read it. He also wondered whether Trump had ever visited Arlington Cemetery to see what other people had sacrificed for their country, adding: ""You have sacrificed nothing and no one.""
+
+In fact, much of the program on stage this week in Philly was clearly meant to appeal to disaffected Republicans left feeling a chill last week in Cleveland. A basic element of this appeal was the robust embrace of traditional patriotism, its rhetoric and symbols.
+
+For example, on Thursday night the program offered retired Marine Gen. John Allen, an old-school combat commander who stood onstage with 37 other veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Allen announced his support for Clinton in full-throated and almost apocalyptic terms, while his silent chorus nodded and applauded behind him.
+
+Rich Galen, a longtime Republican operative who was a spokesman for former Vice President Dick Cheney, sent a tweet saying he was watching from his kitchen Thursday night in tears because the Democrats' convention looked more like his party than the event he saw in Cleveland last week. He was far from alone.
+
+Longtime GOP strategist and campaign handler Stuart Stevens tweeted that Thursday night looked more like the last night of the 2004 convention in New York than anything he had seen in Cleveland. That was the last year the Republicans won the presidential election.
+
+For those who spent weeks and months — and then critical hours — making the 2016 Democratic National Convention a success, it was not just a job. But in the first predawn hours after it ended, they could at least congratulate themselves on having done their job well.",REAL
+7619,Pardon Power: The Obamamometer’s Options,"by Jerri-Lynn Scofield 
+By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She now spends most of her time in India and other parts of Asia researching a book about textile artisans. She also writes regularly about legal, political economy, and regulatory topics for various consulting clients and publications, as well as writes occasional travel pieces for The National . 
+Since FBI Director James Comey’s bombshell announcement Friday that the bureau was reviewing new evidence regarding Hillary Clinton’s email tar baby, many questions have arisen– among the Naked Capitalism commentariat, as well as more widely– about the scope and details of the President’s pardoning powers. There are a few things to clear up right away, because I’ve seen a considerable amount of misinformation bandied about as to what the United States Constitution permits. Readers will please indulge me if in the interest of keeping this post short and sweet, I don’t debunk each and every wrong argument I’ve seen since Friday. If I responded to all the crazypants stuff out there– tempting as that might be– I’d never get to my main points. 
+Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution says that the President “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment …” 
+So allow me to summarize the salient points. 
+Absolute Power, Can Neither Be Reviewed nor Overturned As a Matter of Law 
+The President’s pardoning power is absolute. Pardoning decisions are not subject to judicial review, nor can any individual pardon be overturned by an act of Congress. The pardoning power’s also unlimited as to offenses against the United States, so in theory, at least as a matter of law, a President could pardon someone for committing any offense against the United States ( I leave to one side the question of whether such an action would be politically possible). A President could also, at least in theory, pardon him or herself– for anything except in cases of impeachment. 
+No Indictment Necessary 
+It’s not necessary for someone to be charged or convicted of a crime against of the United States for the President to pardon that person. The most famous example of a President granting a pardon in a case where no indictment had been brought is President Gerald Ford’s September 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon shortly after he resigned the office of President. Allow me to quote at length from Proclamation 4311 Granting Pardon to Richard Nixon : 
+Richard Nixon became the thirty-seventh President of the United States on January 20, 1969 and was reelected in 1972 for a second term by the electors of forty-nine of the fifty states. His term in office continued until his resignation on August 9, 1974. 
+Pursuant to resolutions of the House of Representatives, its Committee on the Judiciary conducted an inquiry and investigation on the impeachment of the President extending over more than eight months. The hearings of the Committee and its deliberations, which received wide national publicity over television, radio, and in printed media, resulted in votes adverse to Richard Nixon on recommended Articles of Impeachment. 
+As a result of certain acts or omissions occurring before his resignation from the Office of President, Richard Nixon has become liable to possible indictment and trial for offenses against the United States. Whether or not he shall be so prosecuted depends on findings of the appropriate grand jury and on the discretion of the authorized prosecutor. Should an indictment ensue, the accused shall then be entitled to a fair trial by an impartial jury, as guaranteed to every individual by the Constitution. 
+It is believed that a trial of Richard Nixon, if it became necessary, could not fairly begin until a year or more has elapsed. In the meantime, the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States. The prospects of such trial will cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States. 
+NOW, THEREFORE, I, GERALD R. FORD, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974…. 
+What Can Congress Do? 
+Article, section 4, of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to impeach any federal officeholder: 
+The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. 
+Further, note that, Article I, Section 1, specifies: 
+The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present. 
+Judgment in Cases of Impeachments shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust, or Profit under the United States, but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to Law. 
+A few considerations to note here, even though an extended discussion of impeachment is beyond the scope of this post. First, impeachment is a political process, with the penalty (to reiterate from above) limited to “to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust, or Profit under the United States.” A party that has been convicted by the Senate in an impeachment proceeding “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to Law.” 
+Second, although we’re all well aware of the history of impeachment proceedings and the presidency (e.g., involving Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton), Congress can actually pursue impeachment proceedings against all civil officers of the United States. And in fact, there’s a long common law tradition of such proceedings. I mention impeachment only in passing because such power lurks in the background, particularly in divided government situations– but I defer a more comprehensive discussion of impeachment issues in the current context until we know who has been elected President, and what the partisan composition of each house of Congress will be. 
+What Will the Obamamometer Do? 
+Back to the pardoning question. So, now that I’ve outlined the constitutional authority for pardoning, the main issue I wish to address is: What Will the Obamamometer do? 
+On first glance, it’s obvious that a President who has been, at least to my mind, unduly concerned with his legacy, and who also fetishizes the concept of bipartisanship, would not want to touch the issue of pardoning Hillary Clinton with a barge pole. I should also point out that the Obamamometer has been an unusually timid politician, and has often articulated soaring rhetoric that’s never backed by bold action. In other words, all hat, not cattle. 
+What the Obamamometer wil do, I believe, hinges on the outcome of the election. 
+If Hillary Clinton Wins 
+If Hillary wins next Tuesday, I believe the Obamamometer will not grant her a pardon, for the simple reason that she won’t ask for one. To accept a pardon from Obama would be tantamount to an admission of guilt for her email practices, the Clinton Foundation’s activities, , influence peddling, and pay-to-play, among other issues . 
+Hillary Clinton as President can probably get away with foregoing a pardon, at least with respect to herself. After all, does anyone seriously believe that she will nominate candidates for high-level Department of Justice positions that will vigorously pursue investigations into her and hear activities prior to becoming President? I don’t think so. 
+The more interesting question is whether she’ll be able to contain investigations that have already started and will no doubt draw in members of her inner circle. I’m going to put these questions aside for the time being– I promise readers I will revisit them if they’re not moot, after the election. But in the interests of keeping this post short, and confining its focus on the main question at hand– the Obamamometer’s options– I’m not going to delve further into these issues now. 
+If Donald Trump Wins 
+If Donald Trump wins, we’re in a completely different ballpark. 
+Trump promised in the second debate to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s (alleged) corruption (although I think the Wikileaks revelations should dispense with the need to put in an alleged, even in parenthesis). I believe he will have to follow through on this pledge. His smart move would be to ask his Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor– nominally a Democrat– who has extensive experience investigating complex financial frauds, misuse of information, and influence peddling. And if Hillary Clinton also understands this to be Trump’s next move, this would leave her in the market for a pardon. 
+Now, there’s a lot of chatter out there that suggests the Clintons hate the Obamas and that the Obamas hate the Clintons. I’ve also heard it said that they’re all great pals. 
+For the purposes of my argument, however, it really doesn’t matter one way or the other. I think Hillary will ask for a pardon, and the Obamamometer will grant it. It will be justified on the grounds that she’s suffered enough in losing the election, and that she’s been the subject of an unprecedented political vendetta. The Democratic nomenklatura laid the groundwork for this point in the immediate aftermath of the second debate, where Trump was lambasted for calling for appointing a special prosecutor, if he were elected, into Clinton’s activities. This pledge was taken as a beyond-the-pale statement of vindictiveness rather than as a logical follow-through to investigations launched during the administration of a President of the same party as the candidate, into serious allegations involving mishandling of classified information and other offences. And I might add, Comey’s late innings interjection should suggest that these investigations were neither comprehensively conducted, nor concluded. 
+Given that Trump’s next move is fairly obvious, I predict that the Obamamometer’s is too. Hillary will seek, and he will grant, a pardon, while promoting the line that she’s suffered enough in not getting her turn to be President, and that further, she’s exposed to extreme vindictiveness from Team R. The unlikely outcome of a Trump victory will undoubtedly shake up the political, economic and cultural elite. It will trigger widespread concern that they might have to pay for their past sins. In order to forestall the possibility that punishment will indeed be meted out to fit crimes, wagons will be circled. The Obamamometer covets a reserved place at the top table, and to attain that, will have to deliver on a solution, and protect poor Hillary. Otherwise, no more summers on the Vineyard. 
+The more interesting question is how far the Obamamometer’s pardoning power will extend: will he provide get-out-of-jail free cards to Huma Abedin, John Podesta, Doug Brand, Cheryl Mills, any other Clinton minions, even the Big Dog himself? (I do of course realize Bill is probably untouchable). I don’t think so. Because although I have and will continue to criticize the Obamamometer for being politically timid– not to mention intellectually not all he’s been touted as being– I don’t think he’s personally corrupt in the narrow influence peddling sense. So let’s hope he takes the legacy stuff seriously enough to hold the line at a tightly-drawn pardon for Hillary only, in the unlikely event Trump wins next week. 
+As for the broader political issues– what Congress will do to address these issues– these will depend on the election results. Again, I defer further analysis until we see the election returns.",FAKE
+5897,Ahead Of Tomorrow’s Fed Meeting There Are Some Very Strange Things Happening,"6 Views November 01, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+Ahead of tomorrow’s Fed meeting, there are some very strange things happening. 
+By Bill Fleckenstein President Of Fleckenstein Capital October 1 ( King World News ) – Overnight bond markets continued their recent losing ways again last night, with 10-year German bunds now yielding a massive 18 basis points. That doesn’t sound like much, but it is a long way from the -15 bps it yielded a couple of months ago. Meanwhile, world equity markets more or less looked the other way, although they were slightly lower. The early going here saw the market modestly weaker as well, and acting funky enough that I put on a few shorts… IMPORTANT: To find out which company Doug Casey, Rick Rule and Sprott Asset Management are pounding the table on that already has a staggering 18.1 million ounces of gold that just added another massive deposit and is quickly being recognized as one of the greatest gold opportunities in the world – CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored 
+Around midday the leakage accelerated somewhat and the market was 0.5% lower by early afternoon. With a couple of hours to go, when I had to leave, the decline was about 0.75% (but it felt like it might accelerate, so check the box scores). Away from stocks, green paper was a bit weaker, led by a bounce in the euro, oil lost 1%, fixed income was a bit lower, and the metals came to life, led by silver, which popped 3% to gold’s 1%. The miners similarly had a pretty strong day, just as they did yesterday. I didn’t note Monday’s action because I was suspicious it might have something to do with end-of-the-month tape painting, but obviously that was not the case. 
+Gold Dog, New Tricks Given the fact that the Bank of Japan did nothing new and the Fed is expected to make hawkish comments tomorrow regarding a December rate hike, it was an interesting time for the metals to pop. I’m sure today’s action has a number of people scratching their head as to how this could be. And I have to admit, I thought there was little chance for gold to start moving until we got past tomorrow’s promise from Fed heads to hike rates, assuming the data continues to be, in their words, “strong enough” (a phrase that is naturally open to subjective interpretation on their part). Having said that, I don’t feel there is going to be a hike because I don’t think the stock market or the economy are going to cooperate. 
+Make It Stop There is also the wild card of the election next week and despite the mainstream media and the polls suggesting that Trump is a long shot, I think the tally will be much closer and his chance of winning is nontrivial, although certainly not expected. I mention that because, were Trump to win, I think a lot of markets would be put in motion. 
+The stock market has been an accident waiting to happen, and considering how much Wall Street seems to be enamored of a Clinton victory, an upset would probably be enough of a catalyst to send the indices tumbling, which by extension would be a positive for gold — and take a rate hike off the table. On the other hand, in the event Hillary wins, I don’t think the stock market could really go up much. 
+In any event, I don’t want to get into too much of a discussion about what is liable to happen, as we will have the data in a few days and can decide exactly what to do in the wake of it from a stock market perspective. Besides, a precious metals position can do well under any number of potential scenarios we may see, and they may have already discounted a rate hike, which we probably won’t get. Included below are three questions and answers from the Q&A’s with Bill Fleckenstein. Bonus Q&A Question: If the bond market has “topped”, isn’t it irrelevant who wins the Presidency. In other words the bond market will be in full control and politicians will be late and simply be responding with desperate measures? Answer from Fleck: “ Yes, the President is irrelevant to a large degree versus the bond market.” Question: Dear Bill, Happy Halloween! If you were going to dress as something scary for Halloween would it be– a) deflation, b) a creepy clown, or c) one of the presidential candidates. Of course b) and c) aren’t mutually exclusive, since clowns can be either gender… Answer from Fleck: “ If I was going out to a party, I would dress as Mr. Politically Incorrect, and I’d try to wear a small bit of any/every costume that is deemed to be “offensive,” (i.e. part Chinese, Japanese, black, Arab, gay, trans, Indian, Mexican, angry clown, Hitler, etc.) I am so sick of microagression and related censorship. We have a right to free speech in this country, but there is no right to “not be offended.” People need to get over themselves. We have far bigger problems in this country than being offended.” Question: Yesterday you wrote “as the belief that the central planners have accomplished what they set out to, nothing can go wrong, and the election will go whichever way it needs to for us to live happily ever after.” I think the S&P 500 being flat for 22 months with fits and starts says something doesn’t it? Frustrating for bulls and bears alike. Answer from Fleck: “ Yeah, it does say something, which is, “without QE, the stock market can’t go up.” *** To subscribe to Bill Fleckenstein’s fascinating Daily Thoughts CLICK HERE. 
+***KWN has now released the remarkable audio interview with Nomi Prins CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+***ALSO RELEASED: Today’s Upside Move In Gold Is Nothing Compared To What Is Coming CLICK HERE. 
+***KWN has also released Rick Rule’s timely audio interview CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
+2114,This Is What Happens When You Elect Climate Change Deniers,"WASHINGTON -- Scientists are balking at major cuts to NASA's budget that the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology approved last week, cuts that critics say will imperil climate change research in the U.S.
+
+The committee-approved 2016 and 2017 NASA budgets would cut the agency's earth science funding by at least $323 million. Climate is a major part of the agency's earth science work, and NASA plays an important role among government agencies in helping to develop our scientific understanding of how the planet works.
+
+The budget contains two different funding possibilities: ""aspirational"" and ""constrained."" Under both scenarios, the budget would be cut significantly, to figures lower than the $1.947 billion that the Obama administration had requested for fiscal year 2016.
+
+NASA’s earth science program is funded at $1.773 billion in FY2015. The request for FY2016 is $1.947 billion. Under the bill’s aspirational scenario, it would receive $1.450 billion in FY2016. Under the constrained scenario, it would receive $1.199 billion. Using current funding and the aspirational scenario for FY2016, it would be an approximately 18 percent cut. Compared to the President’s request, it would be a roughly 26 percent cut. If the BCA caps are not removed and the constrained scenario plays out for FY2016, it would be about a 32 percent cut compared to current funding or a 38 percent cut compared to the President’s request.
+
+The supposed rationale for the committee's cuts is that the members believe NASA should be focusing on space, not on earth science. Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas) argued that the budget will ""restore balance"" and ""ensure the U.S. continues to lead in space for the next 50 years."" The budget does allocate more funding to other areas of research.
+
+But it's also no secret that Smith is not into climate change. Smith has referred to environmentalists and others who worry about climate change as ""global warming alarmists"" and criticized the media for not airing enough ""dissenting opinions"" on the subject. He recently penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that decried ""the climate-change religion.""
+
+""Instead of letting political ideology or climate 'religion' guide government policy, we should focus on good science,"" Smith wrote. ""The facts alone should determine what climate policy options the U.S. considers.""
+
+But in practice, funding decisions such as the one regarding NASA's earth science budget actually help ensure that government scientists are unable to discern new facts about the planet. That's what scores of earth scientists have been reiterating since the cuts were proposed.
+
+NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement that the budget ""guts our Earth science program and threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate, and our ability to prepare for and respond to earthquakes, droughts, and storm events.""
+
+“NASA leads the world in the exploration of and study of planets, and none is more important than the one on which we live,"" Bolden said.
+
+""The research performed and supported by the division helps us understand the world we live in and provide a basis for knowledge and understanding of natural hazards, weather forecasting, air quality, and water availability, among other concerns,"" wrote Christine W. McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union, which represents space and earth scientists, in a letter to the committee. ""The applicability of these missions cannot be overstated given their impact on your constituents.""
+
+Democrats on the committee have also criticized the cut. ""It’s hard to believe that in order to serve an ideological agenda, the majority is willing to slash the science that helps us have a better understanding of our home planet,"" wrote committee member Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) in a column for The Hill last week.
+
+Nor has Smith seemed particularly interested in learning more on the subject. In his first year as chairman of the committee, he held more hearings on aliens than on climate science.
+
+And last fall, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the preeminent international scientific body assessing climate science -- released its latest report, Smith dismissed it in an interview, despite only having read the summary.
+
+""We don’t know enough yet to make decisions that are going to hurt our economy or hurt the American people,"" he argued, adding, ""Let’s continue to gather the facts, make sure the science is correct.""",REAL
+7477,GOP has a day of reckoning coming,"License DMCA The face of the Republican Party. 
+There is a light at the end of this tunnel called a presidential election campaign and, if the gods are not playing a cruel trick on us, that light is not on an engine with TRUMP emblazoned on its sides. In any event, the end is near and I am as weary of writing about this ugly affair probably as you are of reading about it. 
+The problem is, that's all most of the mainstream and social media care to talk about these days. In case you missed the other news: 1) The Cubs and Indians are in the World Series. 2) Heavily armed police in North Dakota attacked hundreds of protesters who joined the Standing Rock Sioux tribe trying to block construction of a pipeline they say threatens water supplies and sacred sites. 3) Soupy Sales, master of the pie-in-the-face, died. And 4) Tim Tebow is apparently just as good at baseball as he was at playing quarterback in the NFL. 
+But really, the only thing the media want to talk about are Donald Trump's repeated claims that the election is rigged and that the press -- meaning all the news outlets who report accurately on his words and actions -- lie. 
+These are claims that losers and demagogues resort to when everything else -- lies, threats, lies, threats, lies, threats -- fails. Honestly, it is disheartening to feel a need to point out to, apparently, millions of Americans, that Trump's claims are nonsense. It is even more disheartening to realize that many of the people who still support his candidacy don't seem to care. There is a major issue to address some day soon in that. 
+Meanwhile, as to his two claims: Voter fraud is virtually non-existent in America. You can check this with any legitimate news provider. The real threat is voter intimidation -- keeping some people from voting through excessive (illegal) regulations and perceived threats. Suggesting rigged elections is a serious threat to the very foundation of a free, democratic society -- an orderly transfer of power. This is something about which Trump knows little and seemingly cares less. As far as he's concerned, if he doesn't win, the powers that be must be against him. The press. Ah, the press. ""They can say anything they want,"" he complained the other day. No kidding, Sherlock. You just noticed? He says if he's president he's going to change that and strip the major media companies of their power. He can try, of course. It won't be easy though. You see, Donald, those same forefathers who were so wise as to guarantee Americans the right to bear arms in that Second Amendment you and your followers are so fond of spouting and shouting about thought the idea of a free and unfettered press was so important to a functioning democracy that they wrote it into the First Amendment of the Constitution. That's one ahead of the guns amendment, which some might say suggests it is more important. Since a civics lesson is apparently in order for Trumpers, it should be noted that the First Amendment also guarantees everyone freedom of religion. Which is also to say, freedom from your religion. 
+But these are mere facts and Trump and the folks at Fox News have demonstrated the power of repeating false news over and over again until listeners -- like the inhabitants of Orwell's ""1984"" -- simply take it for fact. We have always been at war with Eurasia. We have never been at war with Eurasia. Love is hate. War is peace. I know Putin well. I never met the man. - Advertisement - 
+We are told that many Trump supporters -- virtually all of them white and the majority male -- are angry and frustrated with their lives. Somehow, goes the argument, all those black, brown, Muslim, Mexican, gay, Jewish, Arab, Asian people who don't belong here -- and some pushy American women as well -- have prevented these Trump fans from realizing the American Dream. They took all the jobs and live on welfare. Love is hate. Up is down. Bigotry has nothing to do with it. We just want to make America great again, like before all those other people said they wanted to enjoy the American Dream, too. 
+Enough already. At some point in a person's life, if he or she is lucky, the opportunity presents itself to take responsibility for one's actions. To take stock of how things are going. Not materially, but really. It can be frightening. It can also be rewarding. Among other things, this look in the mirror allows one to say -- if one can be honest -- ""I've made some mistakes. I sincerely regret them. I hope to do better from now on."" A lot of people never do this. 
+With that runaway train called Trump menacing the trust and tolerance that are the pillars of our, yes, already great nation, I'm thinking that a lot of people -- a lot of white, Republican people -- have a date with a mirror. It's far too late to undo the damage Trump has done or to deny any part in it, but it's not too late to admit the mistake of supporting him in spite of all the hateful, false things he said. It's not too late to admit to acting as if he didn't say them because, well, maybe because you were angry or confused or frightened or thought it would be disloyal. Maybe you feel you were lied to. Or maybe you just wanted to believe the lies. 
+Republican politicians who have stuck with Trump have no such out. The McCains and Ryans and Cruzes and Rubios knew Trump was bad news from day one. But he was their bad news and his lies became their lies even when they disagreed with him, because they never had the courage -- the humility, the simple decency -- to look in the mirror and say: ""Enough. This man is obscene. He is an insult to our party and our nation. We made a grave mistake in pandering to the worst instincts of some of our party members in order to get their votes. Our pride kept us from admitting this. Fear drove our decisions. We allowed him to make fools of us. Indeed, we made fools of ourselves."" 
+Speaking, if I may, for the rest of an angry, resentful nation, that day of reckoning can't come soon enough. - Advertisement -",FAKE
+10465,Legendary US Gymnastics Coach Bela Karolyi May Have Known for YEARS That Team's Doctor Sexually Abused Girls,"Share on Twitter 
+An unidentified former Olympic gymnast who competed on the U.S. team from 2006 - 2011 just filed a lawsuit with the Los Angeles Superior Court—and it contains a bombshell accusation. 
+She alleges that longtime USA Gymnastics coaches Marta and Bela Karolyi turned a blind eye in allowing Olympic Dr. Larry Nassar to sexually abuse her and other athletes. Image Credit: IOPP/Getty Images 
+The 60-page lawsuit, filed Thursday by the unidentified athlete who goes as “Jane LM Doe” in court papers, states that the alleged abuse occurred at a Karolyi-run facility in Texas, which also served as the training site for the USA Gymnastics team. Dr. Larry Nassar, Michigan State University #MSU & fmr USA Gymnastics doctor fired & accused of sexual assault https://t.co/rMLFx9bLqv pic.twitter.com/5PtnYFaSBY — Michael Harris (@michaelharrisdr) September 21, 2016 
+According to reports, the new suit is just one of many filed against Dr. Nassar. 
+Dr. Nassar is said to have committed the abuse over several years. He would perform “intravaginal adjustment,” where he would “digitally penetrate” the victim's vagina in order to “adjust her bones.” More abuse claims against former USA Gymnastics doc: Dr. Larry Nassar is accused of sexually abusing at least... https://t.co/cm2t6lA9C6 — Mohamed Bakchich (@Bakchich073) September 25, 2016 
+The allegations against Dr. Nassar in the lawsuit claim: 
+“These vaginal examinations were well outside any recognized and/or accepted technique and were done for Nassar's own sexual gratification.” 
+The suit also states that Dr. Nassar was able to assault the athletes, many of whom were minors, due to his “unfettered and secluded access” to the girls. 
+He even lived and slept in the same quarters as the athletes: 
+“Using his position as team physician, Nassar would interact with [the alleged victim] under the guise of providing her care and treatments necessary for her to compete as a world-class, Olympic medal-winning gymnast.” — GNN Team (@GNNgymnastnews) September 22, 2016 
+To make matters even worse, the suit states the abuse was able to continue for so long because of the legendary coaches. 
+According to the reports, the Karoylis instilled intimidation and fear in the athletes by striking and scratching them as well as depriving them of food and water. 
+This suit, in particular, is unique because not only is Dr. Nassar being accused of assault, but so are the legendary coaches: Image Credit: Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images 
+The lawsuit states that this “toxic environment” gave Nassar the opportunity to commit sexual abuse. It also alleges that the Karoylis knew about the sexual abuse but concealed it in order to uphold their reputation and keep their program running. 
+This is not the first time Dr. Nassar has been accused of these crimes. 
+Over 20 women have come forward with accusations of sexual assault, but no criminal charges have been filed against him. Dr. Larry G. Nassar: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know https://t.co/vIaGiThwbf #News pic.twitter.com/gCjCsZFboM — PoliticallyCorrect (@EEUU_Politic) September 12, 2016 
+Just last month, Olympic gymnast Rachael Denhollander of Louisville, Kentucky filed a lawsuit against Dr. Nassar. She claims he sexually abused her in 2000 while she underwent treatment for lower back pain at Michigan State University, where Nassar is a faculty member. 
+According to Denhollander, Dr. Nassar assaulted her five times, the first time occurring when she was just 15. 
+As for why she never came forward, the gymnast stated she not only feared him but was ashamed: 
+""I was ashamed. I was very embarrassed. And I was very confused, trying to reconcile what was happening with the person he was supposed to be. 
+He's this famous team doctor. He's trusted by my friends. He's trusted by these other gymnasts. How could he reach this position in the medical profession? How could he reach this kind of prominence and stature if this is who he is?"" 
+In Denhollander's lawsuit, she claimed that Dr. Nassar inappropriately touched her breast and vagina. She also said he brought up oral sex and even stated he had an erection while meeting with her. 
+Since the allegations were brought to light, the USAG released this statement to The IndyStar: 
+“As we have made clear when USA Gymnastics first learned of athlete concerns regarding Dr. Nassar, we dismissed him from further involvement and reported those concerns to the FBI. 
+Still, the allegations that have been made are troubling. USA Gymnastics is committed to promoting a safe environment for our athletes. Due to the pending litigation and ongoing investigation, however, we are unable to comment further.” 
+So far, Dr. Nassar has denied all allegations against him. 
+You can check out an interview with Denhollander below: ",FAKE
+1395,Cruz 'thrilled' despite drop in Iowa Poll,"SIOUX CITY, Iowa — Texas Republican Ted Cruz on Saturday brushed off the most recent poll results showing him behind businessman Donald Trump in Iowa by 5 points.
+
+""If you had told me a year ago that two days out from the Iowa caucuses we would be neck and neck, effectively tied for first place in the state of Iowa, I would have been thrilled,"" Cruz told reporters.
+
+The latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll, released hours before Cruz held a rally here, showed Trump retaking his lead in Iowa. Cruz previously held the poll's top spot.
+
+The latest Iowa Poll showed Trump at 28% support among likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers and Cruz at 23%.
+
+Even so, Cruz considers himself in a ""dead heat"" with Trump for the top spot. Cruz pointed to an increase in attacks against him as proof that he still has strong political standing in Iowa.
+
+""Everyone in the field is running millions of dollars in attack ads. We saw it in the last debate where everyone lined up to toss their attacks. That’s fine. That goes with the territory,"" Cruz said. ""I’ll tell you I’d be a lot more worried right now if nobody was attacking me. Then that would be concerning: What do they know that we don’t?""
+
+The U.S. senator and presidential hopeful was ending a five-stop day. Cruz had set the rally here as the location for a one-on-one debate he challenged Trump to earlier in the week. Trump did not show up.
+
+Throughout the day, Cruz gave a version of his usual stump speech, laying out his agenda for what he'll do if he makes it to the White House. It includes repealing Obamacare and Common Core, opening an investigation into Planned Parenthood, instituting a flat tax, and eliminating the IRS and a slate of other federal agencies.
+
+Linda Imsland, of Hubbard, said she supports Cruz, during his stop in her town 25 miles north of Ames.
+
+""He believes with all his heart that the Constitution needs to be upheld,"" she said.
+
+""I believe he’s a very patriotic man. I believe that he cares about the country, and I think it scares him to death to see where we’re headed, and it does me, too.""
+
+Cruz has been making his final pitches throughout Iowa while counting down the hours to caucus night.
+
+“This is now your time. This is the men and women of Iowa, the time to look candidates in the eyes and make the judgment: Who do I trust? Who do I know is going to defend the Constitution, is going to repeal Obamacare, is going to stop amnesty, is going to kill the terrorists and keep this country safe?” Cruz said.",REAL
+10495,"Social Media Blackout? FBI Emails Are Not ‘Trending’ On Twitter, Facebook, Buzzfeed, Or Snapchat","Buzzfeed…“Trending Now” 
+* * * 
+As Liberty Blitzkrieg’s Mike Krieger recently asked (and answered) , why are these things happening in the first place? 
+Apple claims not to endorse candidates, but their actions suggest otherwise, and some of their executives – including CEO Tim Cook – actively support Clinton’s campaign. Buzzfeed recently obtained an invitation to a private $50,000-per-plate fundraiser Cook is hosting for Clinton with his Apple colleague, Lisa Jackson, at the end of this month. 
+
+Apple isn’t the only corporation doing Clinton’s bidding. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Clinton made a deal with Google and that the tech giant is “directly engaged” in her campaign. It’s been widely reported Clinton hired Eric Schmidt —chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google—to set up a tech company called The Groundwork. Assange claims this was to ensure Clinton had the “engineering talent to win the election.” He also pointed out that many members of Clinton’s staff have worked for Google, and some of her former employees now work at Google. 
+Of course, I covered Groundwork earlier this year. See: Meet “Groundwork” – Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Stealth Startup Working to Make Hillary Clinton President 
+Twitter is another culprit. The company has gotten a lot of slack for banning conservatives and Trump supporters such as Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos and, most recently, rapper Azealia Banks after she came out in support of Trump. Twitter has provided vague answers as to why conservative voices have been banned while they’ve allowed other users to call for the killing of cops. 
+
+Just yesterday, Buzzfeed revealed that the social media giant’s top executive personally protected the President from seeing critical messages last year. “In 2015, then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama.” 
+
+The founders of some of the most popular pro-Trump Twitter handles – including @USAforTrump2016 and @WeNeedTrump—insist Twitter is censoring their content. They’ve pointed out that Twitter changes trending hashtags associated with negative tweets about Clinton (which has been reported before ). On August 4, shortly after the hashtag “HillaryAccomplishment” began trending, it was taken over by anti-Clinton users, who used it to mention Benghazi or Emailgate. Eric Spracklen, @USAforTrump2016 founder, noticed the hashtag was quickly changed—pluralized to #HillarysAccomplishments. 
+Many people have pointed out the exact shenanigans described above for other Clinton-related hashtags. In fact, it’s been my self-described progressive friends who have been most up in arms about it. 
+“They take away the hashtag that has negative tweets for Clinton and replace it with something that doesn’t so the average person doesn’t see what was really trending,” Spracklen said. “This happens every day.” 
+
+This new strand, where one cannot even search for alternative viewpoints amid technology companies who stand to benefit from the free-trade policies and eased immigration regulations of a Clinton presidence, represents a dangerous sea change. There’s absolutely no question the digital forums we use every day are censoring conservatives and favoring Clinton. You can’t simply scroll through photos on Instagram, look for a video game in the App Store or do a quick Google search without being fed anti-Trump and pro-Clinton propaganda. 
+Personally, I’ve definitely noticed a big-time pro-Clinton bias in my Twitter stream on a daily basis, and I don’t follow people/organizations that would define themselves as overtly pro-Clinton. That’s my honest perception, and I don’t have a dog in this fight. 
+* * *",FAKE
+6817,‘I Don’t Rent To N s’: Smoking Gun Proves Trump Family Racism (VIDEO) | Addicting Info | The Knowledge You Crave,"on October 25, 2016 10:41 pm · 
+New video has surfaced adding to the mountain of evidence that while working alongside his father, Fred Trump, young Donald Trump was part of a real estate business that discriminated against minority applicants. 
+As part of an investigation by NBC News, Stanley Leibowitz, who worked as a rental agent for the Trump Organization, told the news network that he personally witnessed the elder Trump explicitly lay out a racist policy for their apartment properties. 
+In the interview, Leibowitz said that Trump told him “I don’t rent to the n-word,” and indicates that Trump made this statement with Donald Trump in the room and that the younger Trump affirmed the policy. 
+The revelation comes at the same time that the Clinton campaign has released a video highlighting Trump’s run-in with the federal government over discrimination. 
+Undercover investigators were sent to Trump properties, and there they repeatedly ran into a policy where black applicants with identical financial backgrounds to white applicants were systematically denied housing. The white applicants were allowed into the Trump properties. 
+One bit of testimony determined that Trump property managers indicated applications from blacks by putting a “C” on the documents for “colored,” and that was a sign that they should be denied. 
+The Trumps denied the allegation, but later settled with the government over the policy without admitting wrongdoing. 
+Donald Trump’s involvement with his father’s business is key to the entire story of his rise to prominence in the real estate world and the media, as is his father’s $14 million dollars that he gave to Trump to start his business. But if you accept that, the Trump Organization’s history of racial discrimination and the legal entanglements that come with that are also part of the story, and no matter how Trump may try to wave it away – it’s still there. 
+Featured image via screen capture Share this Article! Author: Oliver Willis I was one of the first political bloggers in the world (since 2000), and was among the first bloggers to interview President Obama at the White House. I am on Twitter @owillis and write at OliverWillis.com Search ",FAKE
+4564,Russia Begins Airstrikes In Syria After Assad's Request,"Updated at 11:20 a.m. ET
+
+In a new development that could change the dynamic of Syria's civil war, Russian military began carrying out airstrikes in Syria on Wednesday. Russia says it will target ISIS fighters as part of a plan to fight terrorism.
+
+U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby says a Russian official informed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad about the missions and also requested that American military aircraft avoid Syrian airspace during Russian operations.
+
+While Russia said the airstrikes would aim at ISIS elements, Syria's state news agency says many of the targets hit today were in western Syria, north of the city of Homs — an area known for anti-government sentiment that's also miles away from ISIS strongholds such as Raqqa or Palmyra.
+
+Some towns that were hit today have large opposition contingents — including Talbisah, which Radio Free Europe calls ""a stronghold of anti-Assad militants and the Free Syrian Army.""
+
+RFE adds that opposition sources in Syria claim that Talbisah suffered ""tens of casualties, including to children and infants, and heavy damage.""
+
+The Islamic State's Areas of Influence, August 2014 to August 2015 ISIS has been forced out of parts of northern Syria and Iraq but still controls a wide swath of land, stretching from just outside Aleppo in Syria to Fallujah in Iraq and north to Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city. The group also seized two provincial capitals this year: Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. Russia has deployed dozens of warplanes, tanks and armored vehicles to a new base in Syria's Latakia province. But the Russian base is far from any ISIS-controlled areas. On Sept. 29, Russia launched its first airstrikes in Syria. Russian drones with a radius of about 75 miles have started flying reconnaissance missions in Idlib and Hamah provinces, where a mix of non-ISIS rebels are operating, including the al-Qaida affiliate Nusra Front. Other rebels include Free Syrian Army units that are allied with the U.S. There are also a number of Central Asian jihadi elements, including some from Chechnya, a particular foe of Russia. The fear among U.S. officials is that Russia will not discriminate and will bomb all rebel groups — including those with ties to the U.S. — to keep Syrian President Bashar Assad in power.
+
+The Russian military involvement follows a request from President Bashar Assad to President Vladimir Putin, according to Syria's state news agency, which reports that Assad asked for Russia's intervention in a letter that cited Russia's efforts to fight terrorism.
+
+Russia says it will provide only ""aviation support"" to Syria's army, according to the Tass news agency. Russia's Federation Council, the upper parliamentary house, gave Putin the authority to send a military force to Syria on Wednesday.
+
+""A buildup of Russian air power began in Syria earlier this month,"" NPR's Alice Fordham reports. ""Assad said in a previous speech that his forces are overstretched and has long counted on Russian support.""
+
+Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko says Russia chose to involve itself in Syria after receiving a request from ""legitimate Syrian authorities,"" according to Tass.
+
+Matviyenko added, ""In this situation, we could not refuse Syrian President Bashar Assad and continue watching how people die, how women and children die, how historical and cultural sites are being destroyed.""",REAL
+9906,November supermoon biggest in nearly 70 years,"November supermoon biggest in nearly 70 years 11/03/2016 
+USA TODAY 
+Supersized! November supermoon will be biggest in nearly 70 years. The supermoon occurs when the moon is slightly closer to Earth than it typically is, and the effect is most noticeable when it occurs around the same time as a full moon. 
+It can appear 14% bigger and 30% brighter than usual, according to NASA. 
+The word supermoon was coined in 1979 by astrologer Richard Nolle, AccuWeather’s Mark Paquette says. Nolle used the term to describe a new or full moon that occurs when the moon is at or near its closest approach to Earth. 
+Instead of a supermoon, astronomy site Slooh.com is calling it a “mega beaver moon,” which includes the moon’s folklore name for November. 
+According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac , the November moon was named the beaver moon partly because, “for both the colonists and the Algonquin tribes, this was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs.” 
+Contributing: Mary Bowerman, USA TODAY 
+Follow @MaryBowerman on Twitter. Follow Doyle Rice at @USATODAYWeather . Share On:",FAKE
+4857,"Ex-Defense Chief Gates: Trump 'Beyond Repair' on Foreign Policy, But Hillary Needs Work","The next president is most likely to face an international crisis shortly after taking office — and both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton ""have a credibility problem in foreign affairs,"" former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.
+
+""Clinton was the senior-most advocate for using the U.S. military to bring ill-fated regime change in Libya and, further, failed to anticipate the chaos that would follow,"" Gates, who has served eight presidents over 50 years, wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. ""The same failure she and other Democrats hung around the neck of the Bush 43 administration in post-Saddam Iraq.""
+
+Regarding Trump, ""when it comes to credibility problems, though, Donald Trump is in a league of his own,"" Gates said.
+
+""He has expressed support for building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico; for torturing suspected terrorists and killing their families; for [Vladimir] Putin’s dictatorial leadership and for Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent successes against terrorism.""
+
+Gates, who most-recently worked under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, sized up the candidates on a variety of global national security issues — from China to North Korea, to Iran to Russia.
+
+""Our new president had best be prepared for an early test of U.S. resolve in the Persian Gulf and Iran’s continuing regional subversion,"" Gates said.
+
+Though he has serious concerns with both candidates, Clinton fares slightly better than Trump, he said.
+
+""Clinton has time before the election to address forthrightly her trustworthiness, to reassure people about her judgment, to demonstrate her willingness to stake out one or more positions on national security at odds with her party’s conventional wisdom, and to speak beyond generalities about how she would deal with China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the Middle East — and international trade.
+
+""Whether and how she addresses these issues will, I believe, affect how many people vote —including me,"" he said.
+
+However, Trump ""is beyond repair"" on national security issues, Gates said.
+
+""He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform.
+
+""He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.""",REAL
+9017,PA Kids’ Drawings: Israel Drinks Blood of Palestinians,"Reprinted from Palestinian Media Watch . 
+Fatah has posted several children's drawings on Facebook. The drawings clearly show the success of PA and Fatah brainwashing children to believe that Israel only seeks to harm them, violence is good and that all of Israel really is ""Palestine."" Labeling the drawings ""innocent drawings"" that ""express the feelings of children of #Palestine,"" Fatah posted the drawing above showing Israel, as indicated by a Star of David, eating a Palestinian body wrapped in the Palestinian flag. Blood is seen coming from the body, and a glass of blood is next to the plate.Another drawing by a Palestinian child showed a crucified woman wearing the colors of the Palestinian flag, with her body in the shape of the PA map of ""Palestine"" that presents all of Israel as ""Palestine"" together with the PA areas. The crucifixion also repeats the analogy that Palestinians are Martyr victims like Jesus . Yet other drawings showed support for violence as legitimate means of Palestinian opposition to Israel. One child drew a Palestinian with a slingshot, another drew a hand with a rifle (see below). These drawings echo the PA and Fatah's encouragement of the use of violence against Israel and their glorification of terrorists as heroes. Palestinian Media Watch documented that summer camps organized by the PA Ministry of Education and the PLO educated children to see terrorist stabbers as role models . 
+Other drawings repeated the world view that all of Israel is ""Palestine,"" showing the PA map of ""Palestine"" which completely erases the existence of Israel and its legitimacy (see below). This message is repeated endlessly by the PA and Fatah. Children are told that "" it will all return to us "" on kids' TV programs. The PA National Security Forces regularly post photos from all over Israel presenting the places as ""Palestine,"" and even crossword puzzles portray Israeli cities as ""occupied Palestine."" 
+The PA's exploitation of Palestinian children's innocence is precisely what PMW has been highlighting and warning about for years. The PA and Fatah repeatedly demonize Israel as a monster whose only intention is to harm Palestinians. Israel is "" Satan with a tail "" on PA TV children's programs and "" Satan's project "" fighting ""Allah's project"" in sermons delivered by Mahmoud Abbas' advisor. Similarly, Palestinian terrorist murderers are being portrayed as innocent victims of alleged Israeli "" executions ."" A few of the drawings included doves, some calling for ""peace and freedom."" A major focus of Palestinian Authority policy today is to demand freedom for all imprisoned Palestinian terrorists including murderers. One drawing specifies ""Freedom for Ahmad Manasrah"" - a child terrorist who stabbed and critically wounded two Israelis, one of them a 13-year-old boy.",FAKE
+1632,Gov. Kasich enters GOP White House race touting 'skills and experience',"Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Tuesday announced he will join the 2016 Republican primary race for the White House, telling voters he has the “skills and experience” to restore the American dream.
+
+“I am here to ask you for your prayers, your support, your efforts because I have decided to run for president of the United States,” said Kasich, a two-term governor who also spent 18 years in Congress.
+
+The 63-year-old Kasich became the 16th GOP candidate -- and perhaps not the last -- when he declared his candidacy at the Ohio State University.
+
+“The American Dream is pivotal to the future of our country,” he said. “But I have to tell you, a lot of people are not sure that dream is still possible, not sure that dream is still alive. … I have the skills and experience” to restore that dream.
+
+Kasich, known for his bluntness, was overwhelmingly re-elected last year to a second term as governor, winning bipartisan support for cutting taxes and improving the state economy.
+
+Prior to becoming governor, Kasich served in the U.S. House from 1983 to 2001, where in 1995 he ascended to chairman of the chamber’s Budget committee. In 1997, he helped seal a federal balanced budget deal.
+
+Kasich also made a White House bid in 2000, but dropped out before the Iowa Straw Poll.
+
+""He's certainly going to be a viable candidate,"" Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins told FoxNews.com on Monday. ""No one's more qualified than he is. No one has more knowledge about the federal government. ... He was an extraordinary governor.""
+
+Kasich enters the race facing long odds. But he will likely use the situation to his advantage -- telling voters he understands tough challenges, considering he was the only Republican elected to Congress in 1982, and that he's eager to lead the fight for the middle class.
+
+He was also the youngest person to be elected to the Ohio Senate, when he won a seat in 1979 as a 26-year-old.
+
+On Monday, Kasich was ranked No. 12 among the top 15 GOP candidates with 1.5 percent of the vote, according to an averaging of polls by the nonpartisan website RealClearPolitics.com. Former New York Gov. George Pataki is not listed in the poll average. Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore is also expected to enter the GOP race.
+
+No Republican has won the White House without carrying Ohio.
+
+Kasich, a former Fox News Channel commentator, is now one of four governors in the GOP field -- joining New Jersey’s Chris Christie, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
+
+One of his biggest challenges will be getting into the top tier of Republican candidates to qualify for some early debates. And he must convince primary voters who question his conservative credentials that his decision to expand ObamaCare in Ohio was a moral imperative to help the poor.
+
+""John Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid in Ohio in 2013 was a costly mistake,” said David McIntosh, president of Club for Growth. “Medicaid enrollment in Ohio has far outpaced Kasich’s projections and more than doubled in cost. The Club for Growth is concluding its research into Kasich’s broader record on issues of economic freedom. But, our presidential white paper on the Ohio governor will, no doubt, warn of the long-lasting consequences from his decision to burden Ohio with an ever-growing price tag for Medicaid expansion.”
+
+Unions that turned back an effort by Kasich and fellow Republicans to limit public workers' collective bargaining rights say Kasich's successes have come at a cost to local governments and schools, and that new Ohio jobs lack the pay and benefits of the ones they replaced. They plan a protest outside Tuesday's launch.
+
+Kasich’s parents were killed by a drunken driver in 1987, an event that purportedly strengthened his religious faith. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State in 1974.
+
+As a freshman political science major in 1970, he audaciously wrote a letter that landed him a 20-minute audience with President Richard Nixon.
+
+New Day for America, the group supporting Kasich's White House bid, recently said it has raised more than $11.5 million in just over eight weeks.
+
+That's in line with several of the better known Republican presidential contenders, though former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's team recently announced a fundraising haul exceeding $114 million.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2694,Bernie Sanders vs. the Lamestream Media,"Tuesday’s first-of-the-season Democratic debate is unlikely to be what Bernie Sanders thinks it should be: a high-minded and nuanced discussion about the policies and prescriptions that would help Americans. But that’s because the media are running the debate—and the media’s chief goal, he believes, is to create a “nation of morons.” It’s not exactly a new complaint of his. In fact, his complaints about the media predate the birth of most of the reporters who’ll be covering the Las Vegas bout.
+
+Sanders possesses “the consistency of a piston,” as my colleague Michael Kruse recently put it. In his four decades of politicking, Sanders has remained faithful to his original views on labor, Wall Street and the banks, poverty, socialism, education, the environment, women’s rights, income disparities, foreign policy and the woes of the middle class.
+
+Nor have Sanders’ ideas about media—especially what he calls the “corporate media”—wavered since he entered Vermont politics in the 1970s. In his view, the media tend to trivialize the important issues if they cover them at all. They want to cover campaign fights, not campaign debates. They over-rely on entertaining soundbites. Their news agenda is about generating profits, not producing quality journalism that will “educate” the voters. And as powerful as the corporate media are, they seek even more concentrated power through acquisition and consolidation.
+
+Politicians have been tying the press to the whipping post for centuries, so Sanders hasn’t discovered anything new. In this campaign cycle, hardly a day goes by without Donald Trump calling reporters “clowns” or “dishonest,” sometimes singling out by name those he considers the worst offenders. Hillary Clinton's disdain for the “scorps” in the press is legendary. When not playing duck and run, she marginalizes press inquiries with dismissive or evasive answers or by calling the questions “distractions.” But no presidential contender in memory has confronted the media quite the way Sanders has—and no candidate’s media criticism is as central to his or her core beliefs as Sanders’ complaints. He calls into question not only the product but also the capitalist structure upon which Big Media subsists.
+
+Sanders never shrinks from speaking what he considers to be truth to media power. During an August campaign swing through Iowa, Sanders once again confronted reporters over the content of his questions, coming across as a press critic.
+
+“The corporate media talks about all kinds of issues except the more important issues,” Sanders said, hitting the trivialization check-box. “And time after time, I’m being asked to criticize Hillary Clinton. That’s the sport that you guys like,” he continued.
+
+As one press critic to another, I can inform Sanders that asking a politician to criticize another politician’s views or actions is not necessarily “sport.” The conflict he seeks to avoid helps voters decide which candidate better represents their views and interests. But I know Sanders is too dug in on this point to ever surrender. The public, he continued in his hallway reprimand, had tired of “gotcha questions” from the press and the effort of reporters to “make conflict between the candidates rather than talking about the real issues impacting the American people.” And with this flourish, he filled the confrontation and entertainment check-boxes to overflowing.
+
+The media have never been Sanders’ highest priority—they don't, for instance, rate a mention on his Bernie for president issue page. But the topic has never been far from his lips at any time during his career. Sometimes he criticizes the press, as in the Iowa example, to fend off questions he thinks are beneath him, that don’t advance his campaign or that he regards as too personal. In a perfectly Sandersian world, he’d be allowed to both ask and answer all the questions. Other times, the Sanders media critique verges into Noam Chomsky territory, denouncing the press for adhering to its corporatist agenda.
+
+Sanders expressed his early views—largely unchanged to this day—on media in a 1979 piece for Vermont’s Vanguard Press, “Social Control and the Tube.” The goal of the corporate TV masters was to “intentionally brainwash people into submission and helplessness,” making them easier marks for salesmen of “underarm spray deodorants, automobiles, beer, cat food, politicians or whatever.” (The deodorant menace is a recurrent Sanders theme, too.) Sanders continued:
+
+""With considerable forethought [TV capitalists] are attempting to create a nation of morons who will faithfully go out and buy this or that product, vote for this or that candidate, and faithfully work for their employers for as low a wage as possible.""
+
+Asserting that the “controllers of that medium have far more power than almost any politician,” Sanders called for a “democratically owned and controlled” TV system populated with “dozens of channels of commercial-free” broadcasting to replace the existing order. I’m sure that Sanders finds little consolation in the fact that half of his wish came true: Dozens of commercial-free channels such as the Disney Channel, HDNET, porn channels, the various flavors of HBO, Starz and Showtime and more have been established since his Vanguard Press manifesto. While commercial-free, the channels are still corporately owned.
+
+A politician can ignore the press, co-opt it, take the lumps as they’re distributed, or —as many conservative politicians do—fight it like a punching bag to their advantage. Following the conservative example, Sanders fought the press for all these decades, and it has done much to burnish his image as a rebel and an independent. In every one of his political campaigns—from his hopeless third-party candidacies in the 1970s through his current run for president—Sanders has cast himself as David fighting the Goliaths of the major parties. He extends this underdog persona by relating to the media as if they were another Goliath, making it easier for him to deflect the press corps’ criticisms as unfair corporate manipulation.
+
+But whereas Clinton or Trump might parry with the press for sport (as Trump, in fact, did Thursday night, devoting much of his speech in Las Vegas to media complaints), the Sanders press critique doesn’t stand separate from his critique of capitalism: In fact, his complaints about the media are part of the central animating principle of his entire political career. “We live in a nation in which a handful of very, very wealthy people have extraordinary power over our economy and our political life and the media,” he said in an August speech, reducing the corporate media to a mouthpiece for the rich. And we know how he feels about the rich.",REAL
+573,Common Core standardized tests begin Tuesday,"New standardized tests based on Common Core standards will begin Tuesday in Ohio, requiring hours more test time for kids, and will be computer and tablets accessible.
+
+In this photo taken Feb. 12, 2015, sixth grade teacher Carrie Young, back center, answers questions from her students about an exercise on their laptops as they practice for the the Common Core State Standards Test in her classroom at Morgan Elementary School South in Stockport, Ohio.
+
+STOCKPORT, Ohio – Sixth-grader Kayla Hunter considers herself pretty tech savvy. She has a computer at home unlike about half her classmates at her elementary school. And it matches up well with the one she'll use this week to take a new test linked to the Common Core standards.
+
+Still, the perky 11-year-old worries. During a recent practice exam at her school in Ohio, she couldn't even log on. ""It wouldn't let me,"" she said. ""It kept saying it wasn't right, and it just kept loading the whole time.""
+
+Her state on Tuesday will be the first to administer one of two tests in English language arts and math based on the Common Core standards developed by two separate groups of states. By the end of the school year, about 12 million children in 29 states and the District of Columbia will take them, using computers or electronic tablets.
+
+The exams are expected to be more difficult than the traditional spring standardized state exams they replace. In some states, they'll require hours of additional testing time because students will have to do more than just fill in the bubble. The goal is to test students on critical thinking skills, requiring them to describe their reasoning and solve problems.
+
+The tests have multimedia components, written essays, and multi-step calculations needed to solve math problems that go beyond just using rote memory. Students in some states will take adaptive versions in which questions get harder or easier depending on their answers.
+
+But there's been controversy.
+
+The tests have been caught up in the debate playing out in state legislatures across the country about the federal role in education. Although more than 40 states have adopted Common Core, which spells out what reading and math skills students should master in each grade, several have decided not to offer the tests - known as the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC. Some states are introducing other new state standardized tests this year.
+
+The Common Core tests fulfill the requirement in the federal No Child Left Behind law for annual testing in reading and math in grades three to eight and again in high school. But as Congress seeks to rewrite the education law, there's debate over whether the tests should be required by Washington, and whether students are being tested too much. Parents in pockets of the country have joined a movement to ""opt out"" of these standardized tests.
+
+Questions also have been raised about students' keyboarding skills and schools' computer capacities.
+
+In the Appalachian foothills where Kayla attends Morgan South Elementary School, administrators and teachers worry that they don't have the bandwidth to provide reliable Internet connectivity on testing day. Both tests offer a paper option. PARCC officials anticipate that about a quarter of students will use the paper version; Smarter Balanced officials estimate roughly 10 to 20 percent will take it on paper.
+
+Just eight days before the test, the Morgan Local School District in rural southeastern Ohio ordered 200 more Chromebooks, which worked best during the practice run.
+
+The week before the test, Kayla and her classmates huddled in pairs sharing what devices were available at the school. ""They'll be more comfortable with the technology, but it is a worry of mine that, as far as the content that's on it, there's still stuff I could be doing to prepare for the test,"" says their teacher, Carrie Young.
+
+Eleven-year-old Colton Kidd says the screens on the Chromebooks are too small. Classmate Josie Jackson, 12, prefers pencil and paper. But Liam Montgomery likes computerized tests: ""It's easier to get the answers down, because I don't have to flip back and forth.""
+
+In some places, school administrators and state leaders are only grudgingly moving forward.
+
+Referencing federal law, Illinois State Board of Education officials threatened to withhold funds from any district that didn't administer the PARCC exam. Chicago Public Schools officials cited technology concerns in announcing they won't give the exam in a majority of its schools.
+
+Trisha Kocanda, superintendent of the Winnetka Public Schools in Illinois, told parents that she's concerned about the length of the tests and the ""excessive rigor.""
+
+""We grow wary,"" Ms. Kocanda said, adding, that they believe ""this test continues the over-emphasis on standardized assessments as evaluation tools for students and schools.""
+
+In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal's effort to stop the PARCC exam was derailed by a state judge who said the governor's actions were harmful to parents, teachers and students. Jindal has said he took the action because he opposes what he views as federal intervention in the adoption of the standards.
+
+Officials from the testing groups stand by the tests. In each of the states, students will see something that's familiar and something that's ""new, different and exciting,"" said Tony Alpert, executive director for Smarter Balanced.
+
+""Smarter Balanced took the best of what states had in their previous systems and we made sure each state had access to that,"" Mr. Alpert said.
+
+Laura Slover, the chief executive officer of PARCC, said the tests have an important equity component because parents can compare how their students are doing in comparison to students in other states.
+
+Education Secretary Arne Duncan said states are going to ""figure this out together.""
+
+""I think change is hard but anyone who thinks we should just do fill in the bubble tests and not look at critical thinking ... I don't quite understand that,"" Duncan said.
+
+Hefling reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Melinda Deslatte in New Orleans contributed to this report.",REAL
+8262,21 Things We’ve Learned About Hillary Clinton From Wikileaks That The MSM Won’t Share…But YOU Can!,"in: Government Corruption , Mainstream Media , US News , Whistle Blowers Let’s talk about Wikileaks. First of all, the organization was founded by Julian Assange back in 2006. Their website explains what they are all about: “WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying, and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses.” In the 11 years that they’ve been publishing documents, they have not been disproven a single time. Their record for authentication is perfect. (Learn more here and here .) So this means that a person would be pretty silly to disregard anything in the reams of information about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, the Clinton Foundation, and the political shenanigans that would put the Machiavellis to shame. Here are 21 of the most important things that have come out about Hillary Clinton, that unfortunately, no one is reporting on in the mainstream. In the interest of brevity, each topic has a link to an article that goes deeper into the leak. (In no particular order.) John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign had a nice cozy dinner with Peter Kadzik, one of the top officials in the Department of Justice…the day after the Benghazi hearing . Kadzik’s son also asked for a job on the Clinton campaign, and, the icing on the corruption cupcake? Kadzik led the effort to nominate Loretta Lynch, who famously met with Bill Clinton on her private plane right before Hillary’s interrogation about Emailgate. ( source ) We all knew that the Clinton Foundation was just a way for the Clinton family to launder money, and now there’s proof. Zero Hedge writes, “…today’s Wikileaks dump included that memo which reveals, for the first time, the precise financial flows between the Clinton Foundation, Band’s firm Teneo Consulting, and the Clinton family’s private business endeavors.” A pundit called this leak “The Rosetta Stone of the Clinton Foundation,” meaning that with this document, all of their shady financial dealings could be unraveled and translated. ( source ) Clinton is unable to speak for very long without a podium to lean on . Numerous leaked emails reference how certain interviews have to be kept short because she’d be without one. And this article references a very interesting reason why this may be the case – surprisingly it isn’t related to her health. ( source ) The leaks also show that Clinton intends to do her best to restrict the Second Amendment. Brian Fallon, the national press secretary for the Clinton campaign, wrote, “ Circling back around on guns as a follow up to the Friday morning discussion: the Today show has indicated they definitely plan to ask bout guns, and so to have the discussion be more of a news event than her previous times discussing guns, we are going to background reporters tonight on a few of the specific proposals she would support as President – universal background checks of course, but also closing the gun show loophole by executive order and imposing manufacturer liability .” According to an analysis on The Daily Sheeple, “Imposing manufacturer liability means that after Sandy Hook, Bushmaster and Remington Arms would have been prosecuted for having a hand in the murder of children and school staff members for firearms that were legally sold.” ( source ) The campaign was concerned that the sexual escapades of Bill Clinton could be likened to those of another disgraced celebrity, Bill Cosby . Political operative Ron Klain sent an urgent email saying that Hillary should anticipate the following questions, ” How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did? Is his conduct relevant to your campaign? You said every woman should be believed. Why not the women who accused him? Will you apologize to the women who were wrongly smeared by your husband and his allies?” ( source ) Clinton’s campaign deliberately leaked an embarrassing photo of a swimsuit-clad Bernie Sanders to the press, ironically insinuating that it was proof he was bought off by Wall Street. Perez Hilton wrote, “ Bernie Sanders lounges at elite Martha’s Vineyard pool, summer 2015 after helping raise money from Wall Street lobbyists .” ( source ) Clinton admitted she is out of touch with the middle class in a speech to Goldman-Black Rock in 2014. “And I am not taking a position on any policy, but I do think there is a growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged. And I never had that feeling when I was growing up. Never. I mean, were there really rich people, of course there were. My father loved to complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had accessible health care. We had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, didn’t believe in mortgages. So I lived that. And now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy , but I haven’t forgotten it.” ( source ) She made this rather NWO remark at a 2013 paid speech to Brazilian bank Banco Itau: “ My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders , some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” ( source ) In a leak of yet another paid speech, this time to the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago in 2013, Clinton said that Jordan and Turkey “ can’t possibly vet all those refugees so they don’t know if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees.” Meanwhile, if Clinton has her way , we will be warmly welcoming 65,000 refugees a year, which makes Obama’s 10,000 a year look like small potatoes. ( source ) Clinton blackmailed the Chinese by telling them that the US would base missiles in the region if they didn’t exert some control over North Korean aggression. “ So China, come on. You either control them or we’re going to have to defend against them ,” she purportedly told the audience at a Goldman Sachs conference in June 2013. ( source ) In May 2015, Clinton was no longer Secretary of State but was ready to announce she was running for President when she was invited to attend a summit in Morrocco. The implication from the leaked emails was that a $12 million “donation” from the king of Morocco was dependent on Clinton attending the summit. Human Abedin, usually loyal to her boss, had concerns . “ If HRC was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter. She created this mess and she knows it. Her presence was a condition for the Moroccans to proceed so there is no going back on this,” Abedin wrote to Robbie Mook in a November 2014 email. Incidentally, Clinton didn’t attend. Bill and Chelsea went instead and the $12 million donation was not forthcoming. (source ) Podesta attacked Clinton’s primary election rival Bernie Sanders for criticizing the Paris climate change agreement. “ Can you believe that doofus Bernie attacked it? ” said Podesta. ( source ) Clinton told a Goldman Sachs conference she would like to intervene secretly in Syria . “ My view was you intervene as covertly as is possible for Americans to intervene,” she told employees of the bank in South Carolina, which had paid her about $225,000 to give a speech. “We used to be much better at this than we are now. Now, you know, everybody can’t help themselves. They have to go out and tell their friendly reporters and somebody else: Look what we’re doing and I want credit for it. ” (source ) There is indeed a definite link between the Clinton campaign and what MSM is allowed to say. The campaign has colluded directly with media spokespersons that read like a Who’s Who in American Media : Dan Merica from CNN, Haim Saban of Univision, John Harwood of CNBC and the NY Times, Rebecca Quick of CNBC, Maggie Haberman of NY Times and Politico, John Harris of Politico, Donna Brazile formerly of CNN, Roland Martin of TV-One, Marjorie Pritchard of The Boston Globe, and Louise Mensch of Heat Street. ( source ) As everyone knows, the DNC deliberately screwed Bernie Sanders out of the nomination ( Bonus: Wikileaks also released some of the DNC’s voicemails on the topic ). There are emails that prove who is actually pulling HRC’s puppet strings and that puppeteer is George Soros . The shadow government is not just a conspiracy theory – it really exists and Hillary’s job is to keep George Soros happy. ( source ) Excerpts from her speeches to Wall Street read like a guide to two-faced treachery. In them, she clearly points out that sometimes you “need” to lie. “If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.” ( source ) Wikileaks emails show that back when she still worked for CNN and before she became an employee of the Clinton campaign, Donna Brazile gave Hillary the questions in advance for her “impromptu” CNN Town Hall questions. ( source ) The campaign got to “approve” articles in influential publications like NY Times, HuffPo, CNN, NBC, CBS, NYT, MSNBC, and Politico, showing a massive collusion with the mainstream media, who has hounded Trump relentlessly in an effort to distract from HRC’s abysmal candidacy. ( source ) Through the treasure trove of Wikileaks emails, we can gain an accurate picture of how Hillary really feels about us all (spoiler: basket of deplorables, basement dwellers and right wing conspirators) ( source ) President Obama knew the whole time that her emails were not coming from the secure State Department server. Cheryl Mills wrote to John Podesta, “W e need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov .” You see, Obama’s emails all have to be from”whitelisted”addresses. So someone, somewhere, added her nonsecure email to his whitelist. ( source ) And finally, here’s the real reason that treacherous shrew is involved in politics. And let me tell you, it isn’t because she yearns to make things better for anyone but herself. (emphasis mine.) At the Goldman Sachs Builders and Innovators Summit, Clinton responded to a question from chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, who quipped that you “go to Washington” to “make a small fortune.” Clinton agreed with the comment and complained about ethics rules that require officials to divest from certain assets before entering government. “ There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives, ” Clinton said. ( source ) Together, we cannot be ignored. I am on a mission between now and the Presidential Election on November 8th and I hope that you will join me. I am going to work day and night to provide the coverage that the mainstream media is not. It isn’t until we combine all of our voices that we can make people listen to the scandals, the rigging, and the corruption, not only in this election but in the system in general. Please join your voice with mine by liking, sharing, and spreading the word. Together, we cannot be ignored. Together, we are an army. Article first posted at DaisyLuther.com Submit your review",FAKE
+7143,"Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Too Big to Fail, Hillary-Style","(30 fans) - Advertisement - 
+This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com . To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here . 
+Donald Trump has long campaigned on the promise of running the country the way he's run his businesses. On that basis, we essentially already know what it would mean if he entered the Oval Office and applied his personal business acumen to this nation (and the rest of the world). There's a surprisingly full record to cite. Who can forget, for instance, what happened to his signature gambling resorts in Atlantic City? Who can forget their serial failures in what was still relatively good times in that city, including the repeated trips to bankruptcy court and the way he stiffed local contractors and suppliers, running them out of business? As Russ Buettner and Charles Bagli of the New York Times summed it up : ""He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses, and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen."" 
+In his pre-political years, he perfected what Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek dubbed ""the art of the bad deal"": ""lost contracts, bankruptcies, defaults, deceptions, and indifference to investors."" And from every bad deal for those who supported him, he's almost always walked away better off. All in all, it's quite a record (and don't even mention Trumped Up University ). There is no reason to believe that this pattern of behavior would change in the White House. After all, The Donald's record shows a remarkable consistency, so it's possible to imagine with a fair degree of accuracy what you're going to get. 
+Take election night 2012 when The Donald was still a Mitt Romney supporter. CNN recently reported on his tweets that night and judging by his comment on the Chinese invention of climate change, his complaints about polling violations, his outburst about ""sham"" elections, and in the wake of Romney's loss his call for ""revolution,"" there hasn't been much truly new under the Trumpian sun in 2016 -- not even his last tweet of that night four years ago: ""We have to make America great again!"" In other words, his record should be considered remarkably predictive. So count on this: from the Oval Office, he'll walk away a richer man, leaving the rest of us holding the bag, and his supporters, particularly white working class men, in a striking version of hell. 
+Then, of course, there's the other candidate. You know who -- the woman who never saw a bank CEO she couldn't get a couple of hundred thousand dollars from for giving thoroughly unsurprising speeches. Today, TomDispatch regular Nomi Prins, author of All the Presidents' Bankers , explores what our world might be like if The Donald goes down in flames and Hillary Clinton enters the White House next January. Consider this, economically speaking, the definition of a hold-onto-your-hats election, no matter who wins. Tom 
+Waking Up in Hillary Clinton's America Wall Street in the Saddle By Nomi Prins 
+As this endless election limps toward its last days, while spiraling into a bizarre duel over vote-rigging accusations, a deep sigh is undoubtedly in order. The entire process has been an emotionally draining, frustration-inducing, rage-inflaming spectacle of repellent form over shallow substance. For many, the third debate evoked fatigue. More worrying, there was again no discussion of how to prevent another financial crisis, an ominous possibility in the next presidency, whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton enters the Oval Office -- given that nothing fundamental has been altered when it comes to Wall Street's practices and predation. 
+At the heart of American political consciousness right now lies a soul-crushing reality for millions of distraught Americans: the choices for president couldn't be feebler or more disappointing. On the one hand, we have a petulant, vocabulary-challenged man-boar of a billionaire, who hasn't paid his taxes, has regularly left those supporting him holding the bag , and seems like a ludicrous composite of every bad trait in every bad date any woman has ever had. On the other hand, we're offered a walking photo-op for and well-paid speechmaker to Wall-Street CEOs, a one-woman money-raising machine from the 1% of the 1%, who, despite a folksiness that couldn't look more rehearsed, has methodically outplayed her opponent. - Advertisement - 
+With less than two weeks to go before E-day -- despite the Trumptilian upheaval of the last year -- the high probability of a Clinton win means the establishment remains intact. When we awaken on November 9th, it will undoubtedly be dawn in Hillary Clinton's America and that potentially means four years of an economic dystopia that will (as would Donald Trump's version of the same) leave many Americans rightfully anxious about their economic futures. 
+None of the three presidential debates suggested that either candidate would have the ability (or desire) to confront Wall Street from the Oval Office. In the second and third debates, in case you missed them, Hillary didn't even mention the Glass-Steagall Act, too big to fail, or Wall Street. While in the first debate, the subject of Wall Street only came up after she disparaged the tax policies of "" Trumped-up, trickle down economics "" (or, as I like to call it, the Trumpledown economics of giving tax and financial benefits to the rich and to corporations). 
+In this election, Hillary has crafted her talking points regarding the causes of the last financial crisis as weapons against Trump, but they hardly begin to tell the real story of what happened to the American economy. The meltdown of 2007-2008 was not mainly due to ""tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy"" or a ""failure to invest in the middle class,"" two subjects she has repeatedly highlighted to slam the Republicans and their candidate. It was a byproduct of the destruction of the regulations that opened the way for a too-big-to-fail framework to thrive. Under the presidency of Bill Clinton, Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era act that once separated people's bank deposits and loans from any kind of risky bets or other similar actions in which banks might engage, was repealed under the Financial Modernization Act of 1999. In addition, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was passed, which allowed Wall Street to concoct devastating unregulated side bets on what became the subprime crisis. 
+Given that the people involved with those choices are still around and some are still advising (or in the case of one former president living with) Hillary Clinton, it's reasonable to imagine that, in January 2017, she'll launch the third term of Bill Clinton when it comes to financial policy, banks, and the economy. Only now, the stakes are even higher, the banks larger, and their impunity still remarkably unchallenged. 
+Consider President Obama's current treasury secretary, Jack Lew. It was Hillary who hit the Clinton Rolodex to bring him back to Washington. Lew first entered Bill Clinton's White House in 1993 as special assistant to the president. Between his stints working for Clinton and Obama, he made his way into the private sector and eventually to Wall Street -- as so many of his predecessors had done and successors would do. He scored a leadership role with Citigroup during the time that Bill Clinton's former Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs co-Chairman ) Robert Rubin was on its board of directors. In 2009 , Hillary selected him to be her deputy secretary of state. - Advertisement - 
+Lew is hardly the only example of the busy revolving door to power that led from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration via Wall Street (or activities connected to it). Bill Clinton's Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs , Timothy Geithner worked with Robert Rubin, later championed Wall Street as president and CEO of the New York Federal Reserve while Hillary was senator from New York (representing Wall Street), and then became Obama's first treasury secretary while Hillary was secretary of state . 
+One possible contender for treasury secretary in a new Clinton administration would be Bill Clinton's Under Secretary of Domestic Finance and Obama's Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman, Gary Gensler (who was -- I'm sure you won't be shocked -- a Goldman Sachs partner before entering public service). These, then, are typical inhabitants of the Clinton inner circle and of the political-financial corridors of power. Their thinking, like Hillary's, meshes well with support for the status quo in the banking system, even if, like her, they are willing on occasion to admonish it for its ""mistakes."" 
+This thru-line of personnel in and out of Clinton World is dangerous for most of the rest of us, because behind all the ""talking heads"" and genuinely amusing Saturday Night Live skits about this bizarre election lie certain crucial issues that will have to be dealt with: decisions about climate change, foreign wars, student-loan unaffordability, rising income inequality , declining social mobility , and, yes, the threat of another financial crisis. And keep in mind that such a future economic meltdown isn't an absurdly long-shot possibility. Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve, the nation's main bank regulator, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation , the government entity that insures our bank deposits, collectively noted that seven of our biggest eight banks -- Citigroup was the exception -- still have inadequate emergency plans in the event of another financial crisis.",FAKE
+1401,"HUFFPOLLSTER: Trump And Clinton Lead, But Iowa Polling Remains Volatile With A Week To Go","Donald Trump has regained the lead in Iowa but things can still change. On the Democratic side, young voters could tip the caucus toward Bernie Sanders, but only if they turn out. And many people who say they’re independents are just embarrassed partisans. This is HuffPollster for Monday, January 25, 2016. TRUMP PULLING AHEAD AGAIN IN IOWA - The last four GOP polls from Iowa show businessman Donald Trump with substantial leads of 5-11 percentage points over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. The HuffPost Pollster average has shifted to showing a more than four-point lead for Trump again, after the two were essentially tied just a few days ago. [CNN, Emerson College, CBS/YouGov, Fox News]
+
+Expect more upheaval in Iowa GOP polls over the next week. - Philip Bump: ""Earlier this month, Fox News released a poll showing Ted Cruz leading Donald Trump by four points. The two had a sizable lead over everyone else in the state, and the poll was confirming what others were showing: Cruz had an advantage. On Sunday, Fox released another Iowa poll, with substantially different results. Now, Trump is up by 11 points, a 15-point swing in the two weeks between surveys. This poll, too, mirrors the recent trend: Trump has regained the advantage. It's still a surprising development. Trump's gained a lot, across the board, while most of his competitors have slipped. So what's going on? This is the same polling firm and the same methodology….The story of this new poll is that Iowa has changed. And over the next eight days, it will change more.""  [WashPost] HUGE AGE GAP AMONG DEMOCRATS IN IOWA - A new CBS/YouGov poll shows Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders up by 1 percentage point over Hillary Clinton, mirroring the very tight race the HuffPost Pollster average shows. But unlike many other polls, YouGov released vote preference by age, revealing an enormous gap between younger and older voters.
+
+There’s more evidence for a wide age gap. - Most primary polls have small sample sizes, making it difficult to break the results down by age group and find additional support for YouGov’s numbers. But the latest NBC/WSJ/Marist poll reported vote preferences among those under and over 45 years old. In the younger cohort, 62 percent support Sanders, while in the older group, 60 percent support Clinton. [NBC/WSJ/Marist]   Why the age gap matters in Iowa: In general,people below the age of thirty are less likely to turn out to vote in elections. They have especially low voter turnout in the Iowa caucus. With the exception of 2008, in the last five presidential elections, only 3-4 percent of eligible caucus goers under the age of 29 voted in the Iowa caucus, making up between 9-17 percent of the overall caucus goers. But sometimes younger voters do show up to vote, as was evident in 2008 when 13 percent of eligible caucus goers under 29 turned out to vote. [CIRCLE] DES MOINES REGISTER ENDORSEMENT OF CLINTON AND RUBIO UNLIKELY TO CHANGE THE RACE MUCH - Harry Enten: ""Let’s look at how past candidates were doing in the polls before getting the Iowa paper’s endorsement and how they did once all the votes were counted….Seven of the nine candidates [since 1988] did, in fact, do better than we expected them to do before getting the paper’s endorsement….The paper’s endorsement is credited for greatly improving the fortunes of 2004 Iowa runner-up John Edwards, but most of these candidates haven’t gotten anything like the Edwards bounce. The average post-endorsement bump has been a statistically insignificant 3 percentage points."" [538] A RACE FOR SECOND IN THE NEW HAMPSHIRE GOP PRIMARY - Trump remains firmly at the top of the New Hampshire GOP polls, but Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are battling for second. Rubio and Cruz are basically tied in the HuffPost Pollster average, with a little more than 12 percent support each. Kasich isn’t far behind.
+
+NEW HAMPSHIRE DEMOCRATS HOLD STEADY - Bernie Sanders still has a solid lead in the New Hampshire polls. The new CBS/YouGov poll shows him with a massive 19-point lead, while Suffolk shows a more moderate 9 point lead. [HuffPost] MORE AMERICANS ‘INDEPENDENT’ THAN EVER, BUT WITH A CAVEAT -- Samara Klar and Yanna Krupnikov: “[W]hat distinguishes independents from partisans is not their political positions. In fact, most independents aren’t independent at all. They hold clear partisan preferences, but they utterly refuse to identify with their preferred party….We find that many Americans are largely ashamed of the dysfunction in Washington. Rather than associate with candidates and politicians who are portrayed by media as stubborn and aggressive, a plurality of Americans would rather present an image of calm, cool independence. Not only are Americans likely to present themselves as independent but they also prefer that others do the same.” [Vox]   That limits a third-party or independent candidate’s chances. - More from Klar and Krupnikov: “In order for political independents to rise up and elect a third-party candidate, two things would have to occur. First, people who say they are independent would have to truly believe that neither of the two parties can effectively represent them. Second, the group of people who report that they are independent would have to have sufficiently coherent interests so as to coalesce around the same candidate. Both of these criteria suggest it is unlikely that people who call themselves independents will move America toward a third party.” [Vox]   OBAMA FINISHES UP FINAL TERM WITH MIXED PUBLIC FEELINGS ON HIS LEGACY - Pew Report: ""Overall views of Obama’s legacy – like his job approval ratings – fall roughly between those of George W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s. About as many say, in the long run, Obama will be a successful president (37%) as say he will be unsuccessful (34%), while 26% think it is too early to tell....In general, Democrats view Obama’s legacy in similar terms as they saw Clinton’s in 1999. Nearly two-thirds (65%) say Obama will be a successful president….But Republicans are much more critical of Obama’s legacy today than they were of Clinton’s then. And in their assessments of whether Obama’s accomplishments will surpass his failures, Republicans express even more negative views today than Democrats did about Bush in 2007."" [Pew] HORSE RACE POLLING HAS A LIMITED LIFE SPAN - Kirby Goidel and Keith Gaddie: ""Surveys of public opinion typically take place over two or three days; then the results can start to age. If the immediacy of information is unimportant, the aging of a poll is not of great concern. This is especially the case if the information sought is unlikely to change due to outside events. During political campaigns, however, the information environment is dynamic, so poll results tend to age quickly. Depending on the information of interest to the reader, an aging poll might still be useful. But, if you are following the horse race (who is leading an election in a hypothetical matchup) and want to know the support for candidates or issues in a dynamic environment, a poll grows less valuable as it ages. In some elections where voters have limited information about the issues and don't know the candidates very well, horserace polling may be useless within a day or two of being completed."" [HuffPost] HUFFPOLLSTER VIA EMAIL! - You can receive this daily update every weekday morning via email! Just click here, enter your email address, and click ""sign up."" That's all there is to it (and you can unsubscribe anytime). MONDAY'S 'OUTLIERS' - Links to the best of news at the intersection of polling, politics and political data: -Donald Trump regains a double digit lead in Iowa and remains strong in New Hampshire. [Fox News] -Donald Trump leads in four out of five key primary states. [YouGov] -Bernie Sanders continues to duke it out with Hillary Clinton in Iowa, widens his lead in New Hampshire and gains in South Carolina. [YouGov] -Americans are less satisfied with the field of 2016 presidential candidates than they were in 2000 and 2008. [Gallup] -Alex Seitz-Wald explains how geography might rule in favor of Hillary Clinton in Iowa. [MSNBC] -Not sure how the Iowa caucuses work? Here’s a primer. [PBS] -Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute argues abortion isn’t going to be a deciding issue in the 2016 elections. [Forbes] -The Monkey Cage is holding a contest to forecast the 2016 election. [WashPost] -Sarah Palin’s endorsement could help Trump gain support among Tea Party supporters. [Monkey Cage] -Frank Bruni says the media is addicted to polls at a time when polls are least reliable. [NYT]",REAL
+6782,Wikileaks,"Whales, elephants of the deep with fins the size of sheds and flukes prepared to consecrate nearby trollers. 
+Queen of clubs, thin, black hair razored at edges slinking hats and vests, Fells Point. 
+A hat, Napoleonic or Yellowbeard typhoon, skink darting palmettos, hummingbird at Roth’s feeder hanging above the lake house deck just before, just before its earth curved beak injects ink into twilight, just before the tightly wound shatters the silence, just before wings crackle and refuel themselves, of Italian cabinet members misbehaving with washer women, just before a tumor threatened civilization as we know it, just before the curtain was made of iron, just before we found the bomb and the bomb found the money, or was it the other way around? 
+with new technology: tape recorders, answering machines and Pentagon Papers; governments took things for granted, until things got out of hand Most are regrouping, reincorporating, in hopes of positive returns on their investments. 
+You didn’t think they were complete idiots, now, did you?",FAKE
+3674,GOP contenders nearly silent on Colorado Springs shooting,"The Republican presidential field, which for much of the year has been full-throated in its denunciations of Planned Parenthood, has been nearly silent about the shooting in Colorado at one of its facilities that left a police officer and two others dead.
+
+In contrast, all three of the leading Democratic contenders quickly issued statements in support of Planned Parenthood.
+
+President Obama, meanwhile, focused on the episode as more impetus for a renewed push to stop “the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough.”
+
+Not until much more is known about alleged gunman Robert Lewis Dear Jr. and his precise motivations will the political implications of his actions become clear. It was suspected, according to a law enforcement official, that heated rhetoric surrounding the issue of abortion influenced Dear’s actions.
+
+The setting he chose was one that has developed particular resonance this election cycle, after an antiabortion group released a series of secretly filmed videos in which Planned Parenthood officials discuss the techniques and financial aspects of harvesting fetal tissue samples for scientific research.
+
+The videos, which Planned Parenthood noted were heavily edited, showed the officials talking about gruesome details with clinical detachment. Many Republicans have also accused Planned Parenthood of selling such tissue, which would be illegal and which the organization vehemently denies.
+
+[Undercover video shows Planned Parenthood official discussing fetal organs used for research]
+
+Stopping federal funding of the organization has become a rallying cry of Republican politicians and a battle flag in the larger, decades-long political struggle over abortion rights. Democrats have also been vociferous in their defense of the organization, which they say is a crucial provider of women’s health services.
+
+As a presidential campaign issue, criticism of Planned Parenthood reached a crescendo during the Sept. 16 GOP presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.
+
+“I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain. This is about the character of our nation,” former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina said during the debate.
+
+Her characterization of the video was incorrect, conflating the image of a fetus with a voice claiming to witness another scene. But it packed an emotional wallop, and Fiorina has continued to insist that it was accurate.
+
+[Fact-checking the second round of GOP debates]
+
+Fiorina has not said anything publicly about the shootings at the clinic, but a campaign spokeswoman noted that she is scheduled to appear on “Fox News Sunday.”
+
+The only GOP contenders to make reference to the Colorado shooting as of late Saturday were Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
+
+All expressed sympathy for the victims, though none of the three mentioned Planned Parenthood. Bush, however, said: “There is no acceptable explanation for this violence, and I will continue to pray for those who have been impacted.”
+
+Cruz tweeted Saturday morning: “Praying for the loved ones of those killed, those injured & first responders who bravely got the situation under control in Colorado Springs.”
+
+The reactions of Colorado’s two senators were also telling of the political sensitivities.
+
+Democrat Michael F. Bennet tweeted: “Our thoughts tonight are with the victims and their families, Planned Parenthood, and the city and police department of Colorado Springs”
+
+The state’s junior senator, Republican Cory Gardner — who defeated incumbent Mark Udall last year in an election that Democrats tried to make a referendum on reproductive rights — issued a statement Saturday night that did not mention the site of the killings.
+
+Gardner said that he and his wife, Jaime, were “deeply saddened by the events that unfolded in Colorado Springs earlier today. This senseless act of violence is truly tragic and our hearts are with the victims and their families during this difficult time.”
+
+At a rally Saturday in Sarasota, Fla., GOP front-runner Donald Trump stressed his opposition to gun control but talked only about the terrorist attacks in Paris.
+
+“If some of those folks that were just slaughtered in Paris, if a couple of guns were in that room that were held by the good guys, you would’ve had a different story, let me tell you,” Trump said.
+
+Leading Democrats expressed support and sympathy for Planned Parenthood, but most stopped short of asserting that the gunman was motivated by animosity toward the organization and one of the services it offers. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, however, seemed to be edging in that direction.
+
+“While we still do not know the shooter’s motive, what is clear is that Planned Parenthood has been the subject of vicious and unsubstantiated statements attacking an organization that provides critical health care for millions of Americans,” Sanders said. “I strongly support Planned Parenthood and the work it is doing, and hope people realize that bitter rhetoric can have unintended consequences.”
+
+His rivals for the Democratic nomination, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, contained their comments to tweets that included the hashtag “#StandWithPP.”
+
+In Saturday’s statement, Obama said, “We don’t yet know what this particular gunman’s so-called motive was for shooting twelve people, or for terrorizing an entire community, when he opened fire with an assault weapon and took hostages at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado.”
+
+“What we do know is that he killed a cop in the line of duty, along with two of the citizens that police officer was trying to protect,” he said. “And we know that more Americans and their families had fear forced upon them.”
+
+Rebecca Sinderbrand in Sarasota, Fla., contributed to this report.",REAL
+2,Study: women had to drive 4 times farther after Texas laws closed abortion clinics,"Ever since Texas laws closed about half of the state's abortion clinics in 2013, researchers have been trying to understand just how much burden those laws place on women who are trying to access abortion. That's important because the Supreme Court is now considering those laws as part of Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, the court's most consequential abortion case in decades. If it finds that the laws place an ""undue burden"" on women, they'll likely be struck down.
+
+Researchers with the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP), looking into exactly that, have already found that some women had to wait as much as three weeks longer for an appointment. Some women they've interviewed weren't able to secure an abortion at all, due to the logistical and financial barriers.
+
+Now, TxPEP has published a significant study, in the American Journal of Public Health, on the effects of HB2, the omnibus anti-abortion bill that the Court could end up partially striking down. The study shows just how many burdens were placed on women as a result of the clinics closed by the law.
+
+Researchers surveyed 398 Texas women, comparing women whose nearest abortion clinic was closed in mid-2014 with those whose nearest clinic was still open in April 2013, shortly before the Texas legislature debated HB2.
+
+The results were striking. Of the women surveyed, 38 percent lived in a zip code where the closest clinic was open in 2013 but closed in 2014.
+
+One key finding: Women whose nearest clinic hadn't closed had to travel an average of 22 miles, while women whose nearest clinic had closed traveled an average of 85 miles — almost four times as far. And a quarter of women in the latter group had to travel more than 139 miles to get an abortion.
+
+This was the case even six months after HB2 went into effect, when abortion providers would have had at least some time to adjust to the initial chaos of closures.
+
+Women whose nearest clinics closed had a tougher time by just about every measure: They had to travel farther and pay more out of pocket for things like gas, hotels, and child care.
+
+They were less likely to be able to access medication abortion instead of surgical abortion if they wanted it — probably because Texas law requires four different doctors' visits for medication abortion, which is a lot tougher to manage when you live far away.
+
+Unsurprisingly, they were also more likely to report that it was ""somewhat hard"" or ""very hard"" to get care.
+
+Women whose nearest clinics closed also faced more burdens — for instance, they were more likely to both travel more than 50 miles and spend more than $100 on the trip. Twenty-four percent of women in the closure group reported facing three or more different kinds of burdens, compared to just 4 percent of women whose clinics remained open.
+
+And the study only looked at women who eventually got their desired abortion — so it couldn't account for the women who weren't able to get one at all because the burdens were too high.
+
+""This study is unusual in its ability to assess multiple burdens imposed on women as a result of clinic closures, but it is important to note that the burdens documented here are not the only hardships that women experienced as a result of HB2,"" said study author Liza Fuentes in a statement.
+
+Strangely, there was no significant difference between the two groups of women in how far along they were in their pregnancy when they had an abortion. That's inconsistent with other TxPEP research that found, after HB2 passed, a small but significant increase in second-trimester abortion procedures, which are not quite as safe and a lot more expensive compared to the first trimester procedures.
+
+But that could be explained by a couple of things, the researchers wrote. Either the long wait times forced by HB2 are affecting everyone equally, or the differences were too small to show up in this study.
+
+It's still clear, the researchers said, that the clinic closures after HB2 passed ""resulted in significant burdens for women able to obtain care.""",REAL
+6444,Another Saudi War Crime in Yemen as 43 Prisoners Dead in Airstrike,"Another Saudi War Crime in Yemen as 43 Prisoners Dead in Airstrike Posted on Oct 31, 2016 
+By Juan Cole / Informed Comment 
+Saudi airstrikes targeting a judiciary building in al-Hudayda, a port on the western coast of Yemen under Houthi control, have killed some 43 people and wounded dozens of others, most of them prisoners. 
+The strike on the judiciary building, which had a prison attached, could have been predicted to kill civilians. It is therefore a war crime in international law. It isn’t that hard, Riyadh. If you think taking the shot will possibly kill non-combatants, especially a lot of non-combatants, you can’t take it. 
+Prisoners are especially vulnerable since they are restrained. 
+Whoever ordered that airstrike should be hauled before the International Criminal Court in the Hague. 
+h/t wikipedia 
+Advertisement Square, Site wide 
+In the past, the US military has warned the Saudis against hitting civilian infrastructure (including the port of al-Hudayda and a key bridge at that city) and Riyadh has blown Washington off and hit them anyway. Which makes me want to ask why the US hasn’t completely dissociated itself from this bloodbath. 
+In mid-September, jets of the Saudis and their allies killed 25 people in their private residences when they struck the residential al-Hunoud district (they were trying to hit a governmental building in the hands of the Houthis). 
+On October 8, the Saudis struck a civilian funeral from the air . The US said it was reviewing its involvement then, but nothing changed. 
+The Houthis have also committed war crimes, sending rockets on civilian neighborhoods in Najran, e.g., but in the nature of the case a small guerrilla group can’t wreak the kind of havoc that an America-equipped state of the art air force can. 
+The Saudi war on the Houthis of north Yemen has been going on for 18 months and for the past 14 months the Saudis and their allies have had exactly zero success. This is because you can’t win a guerrilla war from the air, and there aren’t enough Yemeni troops willing to fight for deposed president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to take even major Sunni cities from the Zaydi Houthis. 
+The Houthis bear a lot of the blame for the conflict, since they interrupted Yemen’s constitutional process and made a coup, hand in glove with deposed president Ali Abdallah Saleh, in January of 2015. They then tried to take over the whole country, which wasn’t plausible. 
+The Houthis are a religious extremist movement hailing from the Shiite Zaydi branch of Islam. Part of what started their rebellion was Saudi proselytizing in Yemen for the anti-Shiite Wahhabi branch of Islam. 
+About a third of the 22 million Yemenis are Zaydis, mainly in the northwest of the country. It was never very likely these 7 million could rule the 15 million Sunnis, or Sunni cities like Aden, and they were fairly swiftly kicked back out of it by the Arab coalition, in summer of 2015. (In fact, most of the 7 million Zaydis aren’t pro-Houthi, so their ambition is even more overweening than this demographic suggests). 
+The Houthis are braggarts who say they will overthrow the Saudi government. They have imprisoned many human rights workers. The Saudis accuse them of being Iranian puppets but that frankly is silly. They are an indigenous Yemeni movement and they got most of their weapons by raiding Yemeni army depots for American arms. Iran has probably given them a little help, but configuring what is going on as Saudi v. Iran in Yemen is ridiculous. 
+Apparently the population in Sanaa, the capital, has swung behind the Houthis on nationalist grounds, and they’ve held big demonstrations against Saudi Arabia (Saudi bombed the demonstration). 
+The Saudi-led war on Yemen has produced enormous hunger and displacement, which is likely only to get worse. 
+The reason the Saudis keep committing these war crimes is that their tactics are unsuited to the struggle the want to wage. And if they go on like this, they will come to regret it. TAGS:",FAKE
+4064,Rescue Brings A Bit Of Good News To Nepal's Capital After Earthquake,"Rescue Brings A Bit Of Good News To Nepal's Capital After Earthquake
+
+There hasn't been much to cheer about in Nepal this week as it copes with a devastating earthquake — but cheers and applause broke out in Kathmandu Thursday after a teenager was pulled alive from a collapsed building.
+
+For five days, the teenager was covered in the rubble of a seven-story building hit by Saturday's powerful quake. Rescue workers who got him out included an American disaster response team that arrived in Nepal this week.
+
+""The leader of the USAID-sponsored American team was quoted as saying they sent in a camera to find the safest way to extract the teen,"" NPR's Julie McCarthy reports.
+
+""It's what we call an entombment,"" Andrew Olvera, who leads the American team that was involved, tells The Associated Press. ""So, he wasn't specifically crushed. What he was, was inside of a box — a box with heavy concrete all around him.""
+
+Rescuers had to use jacks to pry away the building's concrete and free the teen, whose age has been variously reported as 18 or 15. The teenager was strapped to a stretcher and was reportedly ""dazed"" but responsive.
+
+Olvera said his team worked alongside the Nepali crew. The U.S. team includes emergency workers from Los Angeles County and Fairfax County, Va., CBS News reports. USAID said this week that it sent nearly 130 people to Nepal.
+
+Earlier, there had been reports that a second person had been rescued, but those reports have not been confirmed.
+
+The good news comes along with reports of fuel shortages, heavy traffic on the roads around Kathmandu and congestion at its airport — a situation that aid officials say is hampering the relief effort.
+
+Relief aid group Oxfam ""says it is looking at ways to transport essential goods overland from India,"" the AP reports. ""It says challenges include getting aid to remote mountain villages, many of which are connected to the outside world by a single dirt road that may now be blocked by landslides.""
+
+The U.N. launched an appeal for $415 million in emergency funds on Wednesday, to help Nepal cope with the disaster that has killed more than 5,500 people and injured more than 11,000 others, destroyed 70,000 houses and damaged an additional 530,000. Hundreds of thousands of people are reportedly living in rudimentary shelter.
+
+""Emergency health services and medical supplies and facilities, and safe drinking water and sanitation facilities are also urgently needed for up to 4.2 million people,"" the U.N. says.",REAL
+6250,Long-term Effects of the Presidential Election,"November 10, 2016 Long-term Effects of the Presidential Election 
+The reverberations from Donald Trump’s election as the 45th president of the United States are being felt around the world. A number of Hollywood’s celebrities are saying they will move out of the country. Many political pundits are decrying the overthrow of the international order that globalists have worked so hard to build since World War II. 
+On the other hand, one politician from Israel is saying that Trump’s election heralds the coming of the Messiah. One thing is certain. The election of Mr. Trump to lead the world’s greatest nation will definitely change things dramatically. What will the long-term effects of America’s election actually be? We’ll talk about on today’s edition of End of the Age. Join the Conversation",FAKE
+813,How Ryan decided to ditch Trump,"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
+6931,Trump Rally On Hollywood Boulevard 10/29/16,"Trump Rally On Hollywood Boulevard 10/29/16 Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] , MSNbot Media , Yahoo [Bot] and 68 guests Display posts from previous: Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. ~ Ayn Rand 
+Rubiks & Rubik’s Cube ® used by special individual permission of Seven Town Ltd. Write down this number and report to your Kommissar at the nearest railroad station. Don't forget warm clothes and a shovel! Channel list 
+Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually 
+Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida 
+Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote 
+The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush 
+Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food 
+Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI 
+Obama ​​captures rare Pokémon ​​while visiting Hiroshima 
+Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say ""It's creepy"" 
+Barack Obama: ""If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"" 
+White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party 
+President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism' 
+Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech , stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman' 
+Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber 
+Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend 
+Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line 
+As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards 
+John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom 
+Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right' 
+News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: ""My work here is done"" 
+Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign 
+Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009 
+National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman 
+National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruz’s basement 
+Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response 
+Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican 
+Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check 
+Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing 
+Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first 
+Susan Sarandon: ""I don't vote with my vagina."" Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer 
+Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote 
+New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to ""Live FOR Free or Die"" 
+Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president 
+Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two 
+Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence 
+Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men 
+In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas 
+TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons 
+Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats' 
+Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with ""This is for Paris"" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with ""Return to sender"" 
+University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities 
+Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island 
+Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a ""safe space,"" changing Missouri motto to ""The don't show me state"" 
+Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy 
+State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery 
+NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget 
+College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action 
+ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios 
+Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic 
+'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break 
+ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood 
+Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans 
+Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people 
+Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's ""unfettered capitalism,"" demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need 
+John Kerry accepts Iran's ""Golden Taquiyya"" award, requests jalapenos on the side 
+Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone 
+John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons 
+Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend 
+Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles 
+State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider 
+Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons 
+Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations 
+Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals 
+US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?' 
+NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy 
+China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: ""The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"" 
+Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be' 
+Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1% 
+America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith 
+Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine 
+Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET 
+Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths 
+Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do' 
+Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State 
+President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise 
+Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market 
+Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males 
+NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record 
+People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services 
+Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba 
+White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet' 
+CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate 
+Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson' 
+Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city' 
+Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers' 
+Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first 
+The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office 
+White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders 
+Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time 
+Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy 
+Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents 
+Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences 
+Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity 
+Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow 
+African countries to ban all flights from the United States because ""Obama is incompetent, it scares us"" 
+Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it 
+Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses' 
+BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama 
+Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free 
+Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness 
+President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser 
+Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members 
+White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos 
+Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency 
+Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole 
+Harry Reid: ""Sometimes I say the wong thing"" 
+Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids 
+Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution 
+Obama draws ""blue line"" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon 
+""Hard Choices,"" a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original 
+Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts 
+Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks 
+100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, ""the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"" 
+Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news 
+""Anarchy Now!"" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence 
+Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours 
+Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues 
+""Free Speech Zones"" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes 
+Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed 
+Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account 
+Joe Biden to Russia: ""We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"" 
+In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea 
+Al Sharpton: ""Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"" 
+Mardi Gras in North Korea: "" Throw me some food! "" 
+Obama's foreign policy works: ""War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"" 
+US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: ""We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"" 
+Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help 
+The 1980s: ""Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."" 
+In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook 
+MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine 
+Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants 
+Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America 
+North Korean voters unanimous: ""We are the 100%"" 
+Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout 
+Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss 
+Feminist author slams gay marriage: ""a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"" 
+Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district 
+Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend 
+Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle 
+North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party 
+White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare 
+Kim Jong Un executes own "" crazy uncle "" to keep him from ruining another family Christmas 
+OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea 
+President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy 
+Obama to Iran: ""If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"" 
+Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC 
+Obama: ""I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"" 
+Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week 
+Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message 
+NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: ""Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"" 
+Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough 
+The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: ""I didn't build that"" 
+Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare 
+Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation 
+Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans 
+Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy 
+GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords 
+Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare 
+Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria 
+Sharpton: ""British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"" 
+DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women 
+Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees 
+Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left 
+Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel' 
+FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp 
+Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies 
+GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election' 
+Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!' 
+Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism 
+News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota 
+Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith 
+Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page 
+Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment 
+White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria 
+Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent' 
+Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins 
+Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date 
+IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history 
+After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot 
+Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence' 
+Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program 
+US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration? 
+Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy 
+This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester 
+White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras 
+Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse 
+Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school 
+Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition 
+Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State 
+Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good' 
+Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners' 
+Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested 
+Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead 
+Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending 
+Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances 
+Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons 
+Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago 
+Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections 
+Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country 
+Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps' 
+White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out 
+New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen 
+White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class 
+To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead 
+State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations 
+Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward 
+President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward 
+Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects 
+World ends; S&P soars 
+Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood 
+Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes 
+Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway 
+Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013 
+Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama 
+As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list 
+Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves 
+Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium 
+Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future 
+Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs 
+Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet 
+Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt' 
+Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties 
+Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years 
+Obama attends church service, worships self 
+Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending 
+Historical revisionists: ""Hey, you never know"" 
+Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh 
+Israelis to Egyptian rioters: ""don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"" 
+Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness 
+Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears 
+Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke 
+Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights 
+Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse' 
+Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: ""Too few words"" 
+Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't 
+Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost 
+Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity ""Religion of Peace,"" praises ""moderate Christians,"" promises to send one into space 
+Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck 
+White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus 
+Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed 
+Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book ""The Road to Smurfdom"" 
+Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere 
+Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: ""When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"" 
+Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college 
+Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill! 
+Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!' 
+Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration' 
+Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome 
+People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies 
+Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, ""only 1% allowed to reach Israel"" 
+Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans 
+Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law 
+Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond 
+Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics 
+Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof 
+Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels 
+Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party 
+Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend 
+May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above 
+Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel ""50 Shades of Hay"" 
+Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name 
+Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich 
+Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag 
+Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its ""President for Life"" 
+Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory 
+Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off 
+Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named ""Fat And Furious"" 
+Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed 
+White House: ""Let them eat statistics"" 
+Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama",FAKE
+2061,"If you really want to save energy at home, forget about your light switches","Keeping an eye on your own energy use is the ""duh"" approach to a smorgasbord of environmental problems, up to and including climate change. As a reporter, I can obsess over research funding for renewable technology, or streamlined permitting for solar installations, or more public transit, or better roads for cyclists and pedestrians, or how much fuel is burned in schlepping and refrigerating my food before it gets to me. But if I actually want to feel like I have control over one small corner of the world, I turn off the lights when I leave the room.
+
+When the downstairs neighbors in my apartment building turn on all the lights in the basement, because they are little weenies who are afraid of the dark, I go downstairs, turn them off myself, and generally think uncharitable thoughts about them and their various lifestyle choices.
+
+In all this light-switch obsessing, I am a textbook illustration of a phenomenon explored recently by the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Chris Mooney over at the Washington Post does a good job of summarizing the study:
+
+You know what this means: I have been judging my neighbors for all the wrong reasons. This is pure tragedy.
+
+The lead author of the study, Ohio State University psychology doctoral student Dan Schley, hypothesizes that people tend to focus on switches because they’re always touching the damn things. As he told the Post:
+
+As a consequence, we tend to relatively underestimate just how much energy it takes to keep the air and water in our homes at a temperature we like.
+
+In general, people estimate that the appliances they interact with the most (computers, light switches, televisions, stoves) use the most energy, and that the ones that they just leave running in the background (like the furnace and the hot water heater) use less. In fact, home heating is one of the biggest energy sucks out there — about 20 percent of home energy use, on average, instead of the 7 percent that the participants in one study estimated, on average.
+
+Home heating is one of the biggest energy sucks out there
+
+The only highly interactive household appliance for which the study’s participants tended to underestimate energy consumption was the car. (On average, Americans use even more energy driving around than they do heating their homes.) But then, most people don’t think of driving as household energy consumption — possibly because most cars live outside houses and don’t show up on the monthly utility bill (unless they’re plug-in electrical cars).
+
+What is the smartest use of this information about our own psychology? Can we make appliances of the future nag us more? Will energy-sucking appliances flamboyantly display their habits instead of being tucked away in utility closets? (Schley suggests having a light somewhere visible in the house that switches on every time the water heater does.)
+
+Most importantly, if blinking lights are such an attention-getter, can I program my household appliances to throw me a disco party if I meet energy conservation goals? Because that’s the kind of future I can totally get behind.
+
+Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.",REAL
+9452,MEDIA SHAME - These 65 Journalists are Now Presstitutes. Their Madam is Hillary Clinton.,"originally posted by: carewemust October 27, 2016 It's a disgrace that such prominent media people, like Wolf Blitzer, George Stephanopoulos, John King, Et al., are willing to go before millions of viewers, and shamelessly report what Hillary's campaign tells them to report. Story w/List of 65 Corrupt Journalists: thefreethoughtproject.com... It's always been obvious that CNN-MSNBC-NBC-ABC in particular, go out of their way to HELP Hillary Clinton and HURT Donald Trump. Now, thanks to the Podesta e-mails provided by WikiLeaks, we can see ""behind the curtain"". If mentally imbalanced Hillary becomes President, imagine the leverage she will have, to bring groups, organizations, companies, and people to their knees, if she doesn't like them! -CareWeMust Those news channels have always been Democrat. Newspapers over 100 years have picked a side and given a slant. You just notice this now? edit on 27-10-2016 by reldra because: (no reason given)",FAKE
+1815,Biden takes his pre-campaign to Clinton’s turf,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+9374,Police Depts. Paid AT&T Millions To Scrutinize Our Texts & Chats: EFF,"  Edmondo Burr in News , US // 0 Comments Adam Schwartz, a senior lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). explains how the government spies on people using a powerful phone surveillance tool built by AT&T called Hemisphere. 
+Every day AT&T stores billions of call records and sells the information to Sheriff’s and police departments around the country who each pay upward of $1 million a year for the communications metadata. 
+In his article AT&T Requires Police to Hide Hemisphere Phone Spying Schwartz says law enforcement officials kept Hemisphere “ under the radar ” for many years—hidden from courts, legislators, and the general public—until the New York Times exposed the program in 2013. 
+Democracy Now interviews Adam Schwartz: 
+New details are emerging about how AT&T has been spying on Americans for profit with a secret plan called Project Hemisphere. 
+The Daily Beast reports AT&T is keeping private call records and selling the information to authorities investigating everything from the war on drugs to Medicaid fraud. 
+AT&T reportedly has been retaining every call, text message, Skype chat or other communication that has passed through its infrastructure. Some of the records date back to 1987. 
+Sheriff’s and police departments each pay upward of $1 million a year for access to the call records. 
+No warrants are needed, and AT&T requires governmental agencies to keep secret the source of the information. 
+JUAN GONZÁLEZ : Well, all of this comes as new details are emerging about how AT&T has been spying on Americans for profit. The secret plan is called Project Hemisphere. The Daily Beast reports AT&T is keeping private call records and selling the information to authorities investigating everything from the war on drugs to Medicaid fraud. AT&T reportedly has been retaining every call, text message, Skype chat or other communications that passed through its infrastructure. Some of the records date back to 1987. Sheriff and police departments across the country each pay upwards of a million dollars a year for access to the call records. No warrants are needed, and AT&T requires governmental agencies to keep secret the source of information. 
+AMY GOODMAN : A 2014 statement of work from AT&T to the city of Atlanta published by The Daily Beast outlines the secrecy AT&T demanded. It reads, quote, “[T]he Government agency agrees not to use the data as evidence in any judicial or administrative proceedings unless there is no other available and admissible probative evidence. The Government Agency shall make every effort to insure that information provided by the Contractor is non-attributable to AT&T if the data is provided to a third-party.” 
+Well, for more, we want to bring in Adam Schwartz to this conversation, senior lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His latest article , “AT&T requires police to hide Hemisphere phone spying.” 
+So, explain. What is this Project Hemisphere? 
+ADAM SCHWARTZ : [inaudible] the largest known, possibly the biggest, database of telephone metadata that the government is using to spy on us. Every day, the database grows by literally 4 billion records. As you said, it has records going back to the 1980s. And police are using powerful algorithms to scrutinize this database of everyone that we are having telephone and other digital communications with, to discover our personal relationships, whether we’re talking to a psychiatrist or a criminal defense lawyer or a union organizer on the telephone. We view this as a menace to our privacy. And one of the most disturbing features of it is how it has been kept a secret, so that the public and the courts and Congress cannot scrutinize this program and decide whether we even want it. 
+JUAN GONZÁLEZ : Well, and how are they able to do this? Why are they not—why are the law enforcement agencies not required to have court-ordered subpoenas to obtain these records? 
+ADAM SCHWARTZ : Well, that’s a great question. Under federal statutes that protect our privacy, ordinarily, the police do have to go to a judge and get some kind of approval before they get this metadata of who we’re talking to. What AT&T has required the police to do, through the provision of the contract that you just read, is what the police call “parallel construction” and what the EFF calls “evidence laundering.” And what this means is, after the police find evidence against someone in the Hemisphere database, they “wall it off,” quote-unquote from their training manual, and then they use a traditional subpoena to recreate the exact same evidence trail. And when it comes time to put the person on trial, they present the second set of cleaner evidence, and no one is the wiser that they were using this massive, disturbing digital database to spy on all Americans, including the criminal suspect. 
+JUAN GONZÁLEZ : But wouldn’t there be a requirement for the company to at least notify their consumers that they’re participating in something like this? 
+ADAM SCHWARTZ : Yeah, unfortunately, there isn’t. You know, AT&T, in its public comments about Hemisphere, has suggested they are merely responding to government requests for information, the same way that all kinds of providers of consumer services have to respond. In fact, as we see through the contract that AT&T wrote, which came to light earlier this week in The Daily Beast, it is AT&T who was demanding of government that the program be kept a secret. We don’t know what AT&T’s motive is to demand the secrecy. Perhaps it’s because AT&T is literally making millions of dollars a year from government agencies in exchange for providing this unique database of telephone records to the police for their scrutiny. 
+AMY GOODMAN : So the police might pay up to—one police department somewhere might pay like a million dollars to get this information? 
+ADAM SCHWARTZ : Yeah, just to be clear, there is a task force of federal, state and local officials called the HIDTAs, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, and it is funded by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. And the HIDTAs have three regional centers across the country, where AT&T employees are posted along with DEA agents and other law enforcement. And that is the entry point for law enforcement to the AT&T Hemisphere database. And the funding is a little bit shadowy, but it is clear that at one of these three HIDTA centers, White House funds, to the tune of a million dollars a year, are going to the HIDTA, in turn, going to AT&T. So it’s not a million dollars from each agency, but it is millions of dollars in total. 
+JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And, Adam Schwartz, am I correct on this, that AT&T is not—does not only provide information on their own customers, but on other carriers who possibly may be going through the AT&T infrastructure, as well? 
+ADAM SCHWARTZ : That’s exactly correct. Any consumer, whether they are not—whether or not they are with AT&T, when a call goes through an AT&T switch, it goes into the Hemisphere database. So, for example, if you’re using roaming, away from your own carrier’s network, and you’re using AT&T’s network, then your call goes into the Hemisphere database—again, 4 billion records per day from American consumers and for international calls into the Hemisphere database. 
+AMY GOODMAN : And the significance of broadband internet providers having to ask permission if they want to sell customers’ private data to third parties, the ruling that was just adopted Thursday by the FCC? 
+ADAM SCHWARTZ : You know, I think that the critical principle here is that consumers should have control over their data, and corporations should not be diverting that data for their own profit reasons. We think that a program like— 
+AMY GOODMAN : That they could sell it to other companies, you’re saying. They could—not only to police agencies, but to corporations, they could sell your—you know, our texts to each other. 
+ADAM SCHWARTZ : Right. The ruling yesterday from the FCC, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation was strongly in support of and lobbied for, says that they have to get each individual consumer’s permission before they divert their private information to anything other than providing the standard broadband service. So there’s a parallel between that issue and the Hemisphere issue, which is that, you know, consumers have a right to privacy. And AT&T should not be undermining that privacy, in the case of Hemisphere, by creating the world’s biggest, if—or one of the world’s biggest databases to allow the government to scrutinize our private relationships based on who we are having digital correspondence with. 
+JUAN GONZÁLEZ : And, Craig Aaron of Free Press, your sense of how this information on the Hemisphere program—whether this is going to become now part of the overall discussions on AT&T’s increased market power if it has this merger? 
+CRAIG AARON : I think it has to be. You know, this is just yet another example of why we can’t trust AT&T and its promises. And, you know, I think it’s very concerning that AT&T is literally, you know, putting employees right alongside sitting law enforcement to willingly mine their data, to help them out and then sell it. So they’re taking their own customers’ private information, selling it back to the government for a hefty profit, while violating their privacy. So, this is the kind of company AT&T is. You know, EFF has exposed for years and years and years, through their legal work, everything AT&T has been up to supporting the DEA, the NSA, etc. I think this is something to be concerned about, when a company gets even bigger and when a company is about to take over a major news network. Who’s going to hold AT&T accountable when these kind of stories are out there? Are we going to even hear about them? 
+AMY GOODMAN : We want to thank you both for being with us, Craig Aaron, president and CEO of Free Press, and Adam Schwartz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Of course, we’ll continue to follow this. The decision is not finally made. In fact, Craig Aaron, just what’s the timetable on this? 
+CRAIG AARON : I think this merger, we’re probably talking about a year, which means this is a decision that’s going to be made by the next presidential administration, by the Justice Department, which gives us time to organize, but it’s very, very important that we get started now, because this is going to be a fight that will be going well into next year. 
+AMY GOODMAN : Well, thanks so much to both of you. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we head to North Dakota to the standoff at Standing Rock. Well over a hundred people were once again arrested yesterday, as Native Americans and their allies faced off against a heavy—a heavily militarized police department. Stay with us.",FAKE
+2756,Can Israelis And Palestinians Change Their Minds?,"Can Israelis And Palestinians Change Their Minds?
+
+What makes people change their minds? About the really hard stuff.
+
+Covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past three years, I've often wondered if people here ever do.
+
+This conflict is frequently described as ""intractable,"" with neither side willing to give up their historical perspective or their entrenched positions to end it. And it does not take many interviews to hear repetitions of the same sweeping narrative repeated on each side. Palestinians from different places cite the same historical events to back their views. Israelis who have never met each other use similar turns of phrase.
+
+""People have a lot of [psychological] resources invested in what they believe about the conflict,"" says Thomas Zeitzoff, a political scientist at American University in Washington, D.C., who has researched Israeli and Palestinian attitudes.
+
+He says the high political stakes and emotional involvement make it hard for Israelis and Palestinians to change their minds.
+
+But there have been certain shifts – in public opinion and in individual beliefs - during the 68 years of Israel's existence and almost half-century of the Israeli military control over Palestinian territories.
+
+Why? Experts list a range of influences that – to varying degrees – can move or even flip deeply held views.
+
+""You can point to major events, either in the world or people's lives, changes in their social context, as well as changes in the kind of messages they get from politicians and other elite sources,"" says Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor at Dartmouth College who researches politics and misperceptions.
+
+Other factors include repeated exposure to a new idea, whatever the source, scientific research, and direct personal experience.
+
+Four people – two Israeli and two Palestinian – told me their stories of personal, radical belief change related to the conflict. They not only changed their minds, but, a higher hurdle, their behavior.
+
+Here are some triggers that led these people to see the world differently than they had before, even in the midst of a larger impasse.
+
+Many groups supporting co-existence advocate for exposure to the other side. Knowledge develops empathy, they say, which can broaden an individual's perspective as well as pique curiosity.
+
+Maayan Poleg is a Middle East program director for the group Seeds of Peace, which brings Palestinian and Israeli teens together for summer camp in Maine. She says the group does not advocate a particular political position and is not directly aiming to change minds.
+
+But time together, deliberately discussing the conflict, humanizes the enemy, she says, and helps participants question their assumptions, as well as navigate the onslaught of opinions from politicians, family and media to clarify their individual beliefs.
+
+""They become open to accepting the fact that what they know as truth is a narrative. That's a huge step,"" Poleg said. ""People spend a lot of time defending a specific fact. And it takes them a long time to understand that their fact is actually a narrative. It doesn't mean that it's wrong. It just means that there's another way to view it.""
+
+Palestinians and Israelis used to interact with some regularity, often in the workplace or the marketplace. But over the past 15 years, they have been increasingly separated physically. They now spend very little time together.
+
+But one Palestinian who went from throwing stones at Israeli soldiers to teaching non-violence says he began to change his mind about violence while in an Israeli prison. While behind bars, he learned Hebrew, saw his first movie about the Holocaust, and got to know Israeli prison guards.
+
+""It's a process,"" says Bassam Aramin, who became one of the co-founders of Combatants for Peace, a group of former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian ex-militants. ""You never wake up in the morning and say, 'Oh my God, we are wrong. The Israelis are right. I give up fighting.'""
+
+He remembers the first time he and other ex-combatants – Israeli and Palestinian - sat down together. He was scared.
+
+""We don't trust them. I think they're from the Israeli intelligence. Maybe they are coming to arrest us,"" Aramin recalls.
+
+He saw fear in the eyes of the Israeli men who sat down with him.
+
+""It's the first time they're coming to meet a Palestinian terrorist. And they have this fear of maybe one of us will kidnap them and kill them.""
+
+Trust did build trust over time and many conversations. They built an organization that teaches empathy and understanding.
+
+But empathy is also vulnerable to a change of heart.
+
+Many Israelis and Palestinians reached out to each other eagerly after leaders signed their first-ever peace plan back in 1993.
+
+People were hopeful, and more open than ever to the idea they could live together peacefully, says Palestinian sociologist Nader Said.
+
+""It was highly euphoric and highly exciting times,"" he remembers.
+
+But that peace deal, the Oslo Accords, did not deliver on its promise. Violence returned with a vengeance when the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, broke out in September 2000.
+
+Said, who has polled Palestinians since the mid-1990s, says by then Palestinian support for co-existence had already begun to fall, as people grew disillusioned by the gap between expectations and reality.
+
+""While they felt [Israeli] settlement activity would decline, settlement activity has increased,"" he says. ""They felt maybe they'll have more access to Jerusalem, they have less access now.""
+
+Palestinian Abla Masrujeh is part of this societal shift. Now 54, she invested her time, money and reputation in joint projects with Israelis in the 1990s. She organized Israeli visits to her hometown of Nablus, in the West Bank, where they shared meals and visited Palestinian homes. She helped present a Tel Aviv exhibition of handcrafts done by women from both sides.
+
+But when violence broke out once again, she felt her new Israeli friends did not understand her experiences as Israeli soldiers swept through the West Bank, or her point of view.
+
+""All this made me rethink my position and my opinion of Israelis,"" Masrujeh says.
+
+Israelis went through the same reversal of hope, says pollster Tamar Hermann.
+
+""The repeated failures in achieving something tangible, and then the huge waves of terror, this made people think maybe it's not workable,"" she says. ""People started to doubt whether the cognitive change which opened the door for the two-state solution was justifiable.""
+
+Many Israelis cite repeated suicide bombings, in cafes and on buses during the second intifada, from 2000 to 2005, as the beginning of a national shift in attitudes toward Palestinians.
+
+American social psychologist Jay Van Bavel says accumulated experience often leads to change.
+
+""Like a rat pressing a lever. If it gets a pellet, it will press the lever again. People are the same way,"" he says.
+
+Over a decade, Israeli Tamar Asraf's mind and lifestyle turned 180 degrees around. She describes the process not as repetitive feedback, but as digging deeper.
+
+Once secular and opposed to Israel's West Bank settlements as an obstacle to peace, Asraf is now religious and a spokesperson for Eli, a growing settlement in the central West Bank.
+
+""It works like this. You get more connected to yourself, you get more connected to your private roots, then you get more connected to your national roots,"" Asraf says of her journey.
+
+Exposed to religious Jews during her army service, Asraf began to feel her secular upbringing left huge gaps. When she began to study Judaism, her sense of connection to biblical places in the West Bank grew, trumping Palestinian claims to the same land.
+
+Israel's political power base has shifted to the right over the past two decades, says Avi Dgani, an Israeli expert in mapping social and political dynamics.
+
+But even though identity politics, magnified by frequent violence and international attention, play a large role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Dgani says big personal swings such as the one Asraf experienced aren't all that common.
+
+That's because many people don't deeply question their personal beliefs, or, subsequently, their politics, Dgani says. He cites last year's re-election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an example.
+
+A third of Netanyahu backers chose him simply because ""me and my father and my forefather, we always voted right,"" Dgani says.
+
+Once people change their minds, one of the most powerful ways to maintain that new belief is to find new friends who share it.
+
+Asraf moved to a settlement because the people there followed the same religious practices she had recently adopted. Once there, she started voting for right-wing leaders, as do most of her neighbors.
+
+Another Israeli, Noam Chayut, shifted to the left politically. He says small jolts shook his beliefs briefly along the way, but real change took off when he found like-minded people.
+
+Chayut wrote a book, The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust, about his change from Zionist soldier to co-founder of Breaking the Silence, an organization of former soldiers who share anonymous stories critical of Israel's military occupation of the West Bank.
+
+Time and a great deal of reflection were key to Chayut's realization that his core beliefs had changed.
+
+""Soldiers get orders, they obey,"" he says. ""You just do things. But reflecting on it, I did things that were close to my moral boundary.""
+
+People can be pushed to change their minds when they sense a clash between their beliefs and actions has become too strong.
+
+But change is hard because people protect themselves against internal dissonance, especially in situations as emotionally and politically laden as this conflict, says Thomas Zeitzoff, the American political scientist who has studied how narratives can change here.
+
+""We think people engage in what psychologists would call 'motivated cognition,'"" says Zeitzoff. ""To avoid things that may threaten our own view of selves or others, maybe motivated in a benign way to remember certain facts more than others, and selectively ignore things that contradict beliefs.""
+
+And that's just one of the reasons it's so hard to change.",REAL
+10430,NASA Admits: Someone Took Control Over Space Probe Voyager 2 And Sent Data In An Unknown Language,"NASA have revealed that a curious incident in 2010 might be firm evidence that an alien species is attempting to create communication links with humanity.
+
+
+In 2010, Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft powered by human beings to leave the known solar system. According to NASA expert Kevin Baines, at the time that the craft entered interstellar space, it became to send communications to the base on Earth in a language that was totally incomprehensible to the scientists who received it.
+
+
+NASA spacecraft hijacked by aliens? 
+
+Baines said that the team immediately assumed that the spacecraft was malfunctioning in some way and proceeded to run a full assessment of its systems. However, they could find nothing wrong with it except that one component in the binary code system had been changed from 0 to 1. After running further investigations, they were left with no alternate explanation except that someone or something had taken temporary control of the spacecraft . 
+
+The minute change in the binary code suggested that someone or something deliberately tried to alter aspects of Voyager 2’s computer system. This suggested to the team on the ground that the spacecraft had been temporarily taken over by computer hackers. However, they didn’t think it was likely that the hackers were of terrestrial origin as they would not have been able to make contact with the spacecraft at such an enormous distance.
+
+WATCH THE VIDEO: 
+It took the experts at NASA three weeks to be able to reassert control over the spacecraft’s computer system and correct the era. Officially, NASA has conceded that they have absolutely no idea about who or what could have taken temporary control over Voyager 2 and sent the incomprehensible message to their team on the ground. However, German scientist Hartwig Hausdorff has not been so coy in revealing what he thinks was behind the incident – he is confident that the message was sent by an alien species.
+
+Disclose TV 
+SOURCE ",FAKE
+9670,Liberty or State Control? You Decide,Op-Ed by Laraine C. Abbey President Obama’s statement “giving up some freedom in exchange for security” [1] was a lance through my heart. Give up... ,FAKE
+7450,Illinois Senator Draws Fire for Racially Charged Attack on Opponent’s Family,"Illinois Senator Draws Fire for Racially Charged Attack on Opponent’s Family Alexandra Jaffe and Traci G. Lee, NBC News, October 28, 2016 
+Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk is again under fire for making racially-charged comments, this time for questioning the military service of his Democratic opponent’s family. 
+During Thursday night’s debate between Kirk and challenger Rep. Tammy Duckworth, Duckworth spoke about her desire to be in the Senate as a voice of reason and referenced her family’s history of service, saying, “My family has served this nation in uniform, going back to the Revolution. I’m a daughter of the American Revolution. I’ve bled for this nation. But I still want to be there in the Senate when the drums of war sound. Because people are quick to sound the drums of war, and I want to be there to say this is what it costs, this is what you’re asking us to do. . . . Families like mine are the ones that bleed first.” 
+Kirk responded: “I had forgotten that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.” Tammy Duckworth is a vet who lost both legs in Iraq. Her family has served since the Revolutionary War. And yet… pic.twitter.com/DHd3kWrUsN 
+— Anthony Breznican (@Breznican) October 28, 2016 
+Though Duckworth, who was born in Thailand to a Thai mother of Chinese descent and an American father, did not respond on the stage, she tweeted a photo after the debate of herself with her parents–her father displaying medals of service on his coat. “My mom is an immigrant and my dad and his family have served this nation in uniform since the Revolution,” Duckworth wrote. 
+Duckworth’s late father, Franklin, served in World War II and has “traced his lineage back to an ancestor who fought in the American Revolution,” according to a 2012 Mother Jones profile on Duckworth’s run for Congress. 
+{snip} 
+On Friday, Kirk tried to tamp down the backlash and tweeted “sincere apologies to an American hero.” 
+It’s not the first time the Illinois senator has courted controversy with racially-charged comments–he previously said President Obama was “acting like the drug dealer in chief” for the administration’s cash payment to Iran in exchange for the release of American prisoners, and talked about fostering opportunities for African-American entrepreneurs so “that the black community is not the one we drive faster through.” 
+{snip}",FAKE
+1995,"Jeb Bush to lay out foreign policy: Will he be dad, brother – or himself? (+video)","In a speech in Chicago Wednesday, Jeb Bush will offer his views on foreign policy. As a former governor of Florida, he has a clear record on domestic policies, but his views on foreign policy are less known.
+
+When Jeb Bush steps to a Chicago podium Wednesday morning to deliver a speech on his foreign policy views, the question on many minds will be which other Bush the not-quite-yet-declared presidential candidate sounds more like.
+
+Will Jeb Bush offer a hawkish, America’s-way-or-the-highway vision of foreign policy, suggesting he’d follow in his brother George W. Bush’s interventionist, neoconservative footsteps? Or will he offer hints – through references, for example, to America’s leadership of broad coalitions to address global challenges – of a more cautious and internationalist approach, reminiscent of his father, George H.W. Bush?
+
+Or then again, will he meld the two visions, which do, after all, represent the two most prominent camps of Republican foreign policy thinking? Or will he somehow manage to sound like neither the father nor the brother?
+
+Such questions almost never arise when it comes to Mr. Bush’s domestic policy vision, since the former Florida governor has a record and established, public views on issues ranging from education and fiscal policy to immigration.
+
+Indeed, when Bush speaks of a ""right to rise"" and share in America’s economic opportunities, no one asks whether that sounds more like the father’s or the brother’s domestic economic approach. But on foreign policy, he is much more of a clean slate – and so the question of which former Bush president he would more likely emulate can’t help but come up.
+
+""Every candidate has to pass the commander-in-chief threshold test, and every candidate faces certain mine fields in passing that test,"" says Peter Feaver, professor of political science and public policy at Duke University in Durham, N.C. ""The particular mine field for Jeb Bush is the advantage and the burden of his family name.""
+
+For starters, Bush will have to watch not to ""overreact to the media pressure, particularly on foreign policy, to answer the question, 'Are you your brother or are you your dad?’ "" Professor Feaver says.
+
+Furthermore, the memory of pitched foreign policy battles in the George W. Bush White House between father Bush’s pragmatic, internationalist wing (think then-Secretary of State Colin Powell) and the muscular neoconservatives behind the Iraq War (Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, then vice president and secretary of Defense) is sure to be on the minds of the foreign policy experts who will parse every word that Jeb Bush utters Wednesday. His talk is at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
+
+One hint of Bush’s preferred foreign policy course comes from the former officials he admires and those he is consulting with as he explores a run. Bush is said to particularly value the contributions of former Secretary of State James Baker and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft – two pillars of the first President Bush’s pragmatic and internationalist foreign policy approach. (Neither Bush I icon was particularly welcome at the Bush II White House.)
+
+Word has leaked out that Bush is consulting with former Deputy Secretary of State and former World Bank president Robert Zoellick (the mild-mannered Mr. Zoellick left the George W. Bush administration in 2006 after failing to rise to No. 1 at either State or Treasury) and Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
+
+Bush is also said to be considering making Meghan O’Sullivan, who served in George W. Bush's National Security Council advising on Iraq, as his campaign’s chief foreign policy adviser. Ms. O’Sullivan, who now teaches the practice of international affairs at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, is closely associated with the Iraq War – which might be considered a negative, given the war’s low marks among the American public.
+
+But O’Sullivan is also credited with the “surge” strategy of 2007 that is viewed as having stabilized Iraq, and in some books she gets a star for weathering the demands of then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that she be removed from the post she held in post-invasion Iraq.
+
+Yet while some foreign policy experts see a preference for the father’s foreign policy in the people Jeb Bush is consulting with, others see a tendency toward the brother’s vision in the few speeches he has made on foreign affairs. In a  December speech in Miami to a Cuba pro-democracy group, Bush said that instead of lifting the embargo on Cuba, “I would argue that we should strengthen it to put pressure on the Cuban regime.”
+
+He also faulted President Obama’s “indecisiveness” on Syria and other issues for bringing on more instability and increasing threats to the United States.
+
+Any association with George W. Bush’s Iraq War might seem to spell political doom, since large majorities of Americans continue to say that the heavy sacrifices and costs of the war were ""not worth it."" But on the other hand, what may be riding to Jeb Bush’s rescue is the recent shift in US public opinion on foreign policy – increasingly away from a ""mind our own business"" approach that had been gaining ground in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to a growing preference for more American intervention.
+
+""Public opinion has turned around significantly over the last 14 months to favoring a much more robust US role in the world,"" says Robert Lieber, a professor of government and international affairs at Georgetown University in Washington. ""I would assume that Jeb Bush would choose to tap into that as he lays out his foreign policy.""
+
+Duke University’s Feaver, who served in a national security capacity in George W. Bush’s White House, says Jeb Bush will have to answer the ""Iraq War question"" at some point – and that he’ll have to do a better job than simply saying, ""I’ll talk about the future.... It’s not about re-litigating anything in the past"" – as he did in response to a question last week.
+
+""He needs a better answer than that on Iraq,"" Feaver says. ""He needs to explain how he would have done things differently – and better.""
+
+But he doesn’t expect that to be part of what Bush says in Chicago.
+
+""The first big speech is about identifying the big questions around foreign policy today, laying out who we are and what’s our role in the world, what are the big challenges we face, and how we can do a better job over the next four years,"" he says. ""I wouldn’t expect him to spend a lot of time on how he’s different from his father or his brother.""",REAL
+2933,Egypt says it hit ISIS targets in Libya after killings,"(CNN) Egypt's military carried out a series of airstrikes against ISIS militants in Libya on Monday in retaliation for the slaughter of 21 Egyptian Christians by the jihadist group.
+
+The bombing raids pulled Egypt deeper into the widening international fight against ISIS and highlighted the extremists' growing presence in North Africa
+
+The warplanes hit 10 targets used for training and storage in ISIS' Libyan stronghold of Derna, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told CNN.
+
+""Avenging Egyptian blood and punishing criminals and murderers is our right and duty,"" the Egyptian military said in a statement that was broadcast on state television.
+
+There were conflicting claims about what the bombs had struck.
+
+""These were surgical strikes based on very accurate intelligence and related to degrading the capabilities of ISIS within the city of Derna,"" Shoukry told CNN's Erin Burnett.
+
+But an umbrella group of Islamist militias in Derna issued a statement saying that the city ""woke up to a disaster today as Egyptian military jets targeted civilians in residential areas in the city.""
+
+The statement reported that the bombings had killed women and children, and it warned the Egyptian government of a ""harsh and painful"" response to come.
+
+CNN couldn't independently verify what damage and casualties the airstrikes had caused.
+
+The footage, bearing many of the hallmarks of previous ISIS videos of the killing of hostages, has intensified international concerns about ISIS' deepening reach into countries far beyond its strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
+
+The slickly produced video shows the apparent mass killing, with jihadists in black standing behind each of the victims, who are all dressed in orange jumpsuits with their hands cuffed behind them.
+
+Twenty-one Egyptian Christians were kidnapped in the Libyan coastal city of Sirte in two separate incidents in December and January. They were reportedly from impoverished villages and went to Libya looking for work.
+
+Although the ISIS video showed around a dozen men being beheaded, Egyptian officials said that all 21 Christians were believed to have been killed.
+
+Some of the hostages cry out ""Oh God"" and ""Oh Jesus"" as they are pushed to their knees.
+
+The five-minute video, released by ISIS' propaganda wing al-Hayat Media, includes a masked English-speaking jihadi who says, ""The sea you have hidden Sheikh Osama bin Laden's body in, we swear to Allah, we will mix it with your blood.""
+
+The video threatens Egypt, which shares a long border with Libya, and also Europe, whose shores lie across the Mediterranean Sea.
+
+'The right of retaliation'
+
+Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had warned Sunday that his country ""reserves the right of retaliation and with the methods and timing it sees fit for retribution for those murderers and criminals who are without the slightest humanity.""
+
+He also declared a week of mourning in the Muslim majority nation for the slain Christians.
+
+In a statement, Egypt's Foreign Ministry called for other nations battling ISIS to support Egypt's efforts and to target terrorists in Libya, as well.
+
+The U.S. government condemned the killings, saying ISIS' ""barbarity knows no bounds."" U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry on Sunday to offer condolences, the State Department said.
+
+Concern has increased over ISIS' rising influence in Libya amid the power and security vacuum prevalent in the country since the 2011 uprising that overthrew former dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
+
+Jihadists with allegiance to ISIS had also expanded their presence westward along the Libyan coast, forming chapters in cities including Benghazi, Sirte and even Tripoli, the capital, according to Noman Benotman, a former Libyan jihadist now involved in counterterrorism for the Quilliam Foundation.
+
+""There's been a real radical Islamist presence in Libya for some time,"" said Lt. Col. Rick Francona, a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer. ""What's worrying is now they are self-identifying with ISIS.""
+
+Questions remain over how much direct command and control the ISIS leadership in Syria and Iraq has over its North African affiliates.
+
+The killings of the Egyptian Christians has filled in some of the detail. Before the grisly video was released, ISIS had released photos in its English-language magazine Dabiq, claiming they had been killed.
+
+""There's certainly communication between the Libyan affiliate and the affiliate in Syria about matters of importance to both of them,"" said CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen.
+
+He said the ties between Libyan jihadists and ISIS' precursor, al Qaeda in Iraq, ""go back a very long time.""
+
+""While we can come up with a military solution or a military operation in a restricted area like Syria and Iraq, what do we do when it expands to North Africa?"" Francona asked.",REAL
+3973,Possible suicide vest found in Paris suburb,"Paris (CNN) Security forces sealed off streets in a Paris suburb Monday, and a bomb squad headed to the scene after investigators found a possible suicide vest in a garbage can.
+
+Paris police told CNN that authorities were trying to determine whether the article found in the Paris suburb of Montrouge contained explosives. CNN affiliate BFMTV reported that the item, which resembled a suicide vest, contained bolts and TATP, the same explosive found in the suicide belts used by Paris attackers
+
+Could there be a connection between the garbage-can find and the November 13 series of shootings and bombings that killed 130 people in Paris?
+
+Authorities haven't said. But BFMTV and the French newspaper Le Monde reported Monday night that suspect Salah Abdeslam 's cell phone was tracked to the area soon after the attacks.
+
+""The big question is going to be: Is this the suicide vest that Salah Abdeslam was tasked to use?"" CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said.
+
+And there are other questions, too, Cruickshank said. If it was a vest belonging to Abdeslam, why would it just have been discovered 10 days after the attacks? And if it wasn't, then whose is it?
+
+""It is possible that somebody else may have jettisoned it, an attacker that we don't know much about at this point,"" Cruickshank said. ""So they'll be doing all sorts of forensics, trying to establish who this belonged to, and that will be a huge priority for French investigators.""
+
+Abdeslam is thought to be using a support network in Belgium to avoid being captured, more than a week after an international arrest warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the Paris terror attacks.
+
+Sources in France close to the ongoing investigation believe Abdeslam could not have survived a week on the run without help. They say that extensive raids in Belgium on Sunday and Monday , in which 21 people were detained in several locations, targeted individuals suspected of a role in the network that organized the attacks.
+
+Fifteen of those arrested have since been released. Authorities charged one man with participating in the activities of a terrorist group in connection with the Paris attacks.
+
+French authorities have said the Paris attacks were organized in Belgium, with jihadists taking advantage of intelligence gaps and the absence of border controls between the two countries to slip into France undetected.
+
+The nation's prime minister said Brussels will remain at the highest terror level until at least next Monday. And in Brussels, fears of a terror attack will keep schools and the metro closed until Wednesday at the earliest, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel announced Monday.
+
+""The worry is that there's another attack team out there, that they have explosives, that they have weapons,"" Cruickshank said. ""Belgian police don't have a handle on where these guys are and that's why they're shaking the tree so hard.""
+
+According to the bulletin, a cell phone recovered from a garbage bin near the scene of the Bataclan concert hall and believed to belong to one of the terrorists contained a map of the theater.
+
+The bulletin, which was described to CNN and confirmed by other U.S. officials, advises local law enforcement to be on the lookout for suspicious people conducting surveillance of potential targets.
+
+Meanwhile, France launched its first airstrikes from an aircraft carrier against ISIS on Monday as President Francois Hollande began a diplomatic offensive to persuade world leaders to join a coalition fighting the terror group.
+
+The latest wave of airstrikes come as the French President pushes to form a multi-national force to fight ISIS after the terror organization claimed responsibility for the November 13 attacks that left 130 dead in Paris.
+
+Hollande will visit Washington to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday, then meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday and travel to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.
+
+Hollande met with British Prime Minister David Cameron earlier Monday and they agreed to a pan-European effort for stronger external EU border controls, a more effective way of screening people and greater information sharing, Cameron said.
+
+Cameron will make a case for the United Kingdom to start bombing ISIS positions in Syria on Thursday, he said Monday as he presented the country's defense spending review in Parliament.
+
+Russia may be showing signs of warming up to a coalition with France. The Russian Defense Ministry released photos on Monday that showed the words ""For Paris"" written on Russian missiles that will target ISIS positions.",REAL
+9315,PressTV-NATO pushes military buildup plans near Russia,"NATO pushes military buildup plans near Russia Wed Oct 26, 2016 6:7AM EU NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg speaks during a news conference at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, October 25, 2016. (Photo by Reuters) 
+The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is pushing for its biggest military buildup near Russian borders, as the Western military alliance continues to harbor perceptions of a Russian “threat” since the days of the Cold War. 
+NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will discuss the plan for military deployments to the Baltic states and eastern Poland at a two-day meeting of NATO ministers in Brussels on Wednesday. 
+The military alliance aims to send “battle groups” to the Baltic states and Poland early next year. The groups will consist of 40,000 forces. It will be the biggest military buildup near Russia since the Second World War. More forces would also be deployed if necessary. 
+“This is credible deterrence. Not to provoke a conflict, but to prevent conflict,” Stoltenberg claimed contradictorily on Tuesday, referring to the planned deployments near Russia. “Concrete proof that NATO can and will deploy thousands of forces to support our allies. And a clear demonstration of our transatlantic bond.” 
+The United States, Germany, Britain, and Canada have already agreed to contribute forces to the “battle groups,” which are to be deployed to Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Norwegian and Italian fighter jets patrol over the Baltics during a NATO air policing mission from an airbase in Lithuania, May 20, 2015. (Photo by Reuters) 
+France, Denmark, Italy and other NATO members are expected to contribute forces of their own but have been reluctant so far. 
+Anti-Russia by default 
+Russia had previously warned that it would take unspecified measures to respond to the increased activities by the Western military bloc. 
+It also moved nuclear-capable missiles to its westernmost region of Kaliningrad, near its border with the Baltic countries and NATO member states earlier this month. The Iskander-M cruise missiles are capable of hitting targets across Poland and the Baltics. 
+NATO was formed during the Cold War as a means of countering the former Soviet Union. 
+The military alliance suspended all ties with Moscow in April 2014, after the then-Ukrainian Crimea Peninsula voted in a referendum to join Russian territory. 
+Shortly afterwards, an armed conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine, areas inhabited by an ethnically-Russian population. The Ukrainian government, which militarized the originally peaceful unrest in the regions — known as the Donbass — has ever since been accusing Russia of having a hand in the conflict there. Moscow denies the claim. 
+The conflict has so far claimed the lives of more than 9,200 people and left over 21,000 others injured. Loading ... ",FAKE
+1378,Trump spurns a powerful player in GOP politics in falling-out with Fox,"They’ve called each other names. They’ve mocked, belittled, skewered and slimed.
+
+And now that oddest of couples — Donald Trump and Fox News — is engaged in a tit-for-tat feud like none seen in the annals of modern American politics.
+
+The greatest show on Earth — or at least in Iowa.
+
+If things go as promised, Trump won’t be there Thursday when Fox hosts the final Republican debate before Monday’s Iowa presidential caucuses. He says he’s backing out because of a taunting statement from Fox, though his detractors accuse him of dodging a last showdown with his chief rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.). Instead, Trump has made plans to materialize elsewhere in Iowa, hosting a benefit for wounded veterans — counterprogramming on a Trumpian scale of swagger.
+
+His threatened absence from the debate stage is a demonstration of Trump’s perception of his own self-worth, his verifiable status as a ratings-generating gargantuan whose screen persona can translate into millions of advertising dollars. In a sense, it’s an act of subversion by a candidate who has broken all the normal rules of modern campaigns. But it’s also a manifestation of Trump’s philosophy about getting what he wants when he wants it.
+
+“The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have,” Trump wrote in his career-
+
+defining and profile-elevating 1987 bestseller, “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “Leverage is having something the other guy wants.”
+
+Fox, a network that has reigned as a kingmaker in Republican politics, now seems faced with an adversary who is acting as if he’s already the king and doesn’t need it.
+
+The sniping peaked this week when the billionaire developer appeared to taunt Fox by polling his social media followers on whether he should appear at the debate. He also stepped up his attacks on Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, whom he wanted to have removed as debate moderator.
+
+The poll and the Kelly criticism irked Fox News chairman and chief executive Roger Ailes, according to an executive at Fox, and the network chief personally crafted a statement in response: “We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.”
+
+According to the Fox executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, Ailes “put together a tongue-in-cheek statement to take the heat off Megyn.”
+
+On Wednesday, Trump — via Twitter, naturally — said Fox went too far.
+
+“It was the childishly written & taunting PR statement by Fox that made me not do the debate, more so than lightweight reporter, @megynkelly.”
+
+While publicly feuding with Trump, the cable news behemoth also seemed to be at cross-
+
+purposes with itself, toggling between the competing goals of taking a hard line with the recalcitrant candidate and wooing him.
+
+Fox executives did not respond to multiple interview requests.
+
+Trump and Fox have been poking at each other for months. Their needling and gnashing began face-to-face at the first Republican presidential debate in August, when Kelly pressed Trump about calling women “fat pigs” and other derogatory names. Trump parried back the next morning by huffing that Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever.” Critics said that was a reference to the anchor’s menstrual cycle, but the candidate said it was merely a reference to her demeanor.
+
+The tangle soon devolved into long-distance warfare, a series of snippy news conferences and social media taunts, periodically interrupted by detentes. Even as Trump has pounded away at Kelly, retweeting claims that she is a “bimbo” and calling her “average in everyway,” he has frequently appeared on Fox News programs.
+
+A defiant Trump appeared on Fox host Bill O’Reilly’s show Wednesday night, his 133rd appearance on the network since announcing his presidential run, according to a Fox tally. When O’Reilly suggested that Trump was making a mistake by skipping the debate, the GOP front-runner said, “I think you’re wrong.”
+
+Trump’s camp denied that the candidate was afraid to debate. “He loves debating. He has participated in six debates,” said Trump spokesman Corey Lewandowski. “He welcomes the opportunity to debate.”
+
+Fox has claimed that the Trump spokesman leveled a threat against Kelly on Saturday in a conversation with one of the network’s executives. “Lewandowski stated that Megyn had a ‘rough couple of days after that last debate’ and he ‘would hate to have her go through that again,’ ” a Fox spokeswoman said in a statement. “We can’t give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees.”
+
+When asked about the Fox claim, Lewandowski said: “I didn’t do anything of the sort. . . . I did not threaten anyone.”
+
+Jill Olmsted, a journalism professor and media critic at American University, said the cable channel’s “unnecessarily snarky comments” mean that “Trump has won this round with Fox — big time.”
+
+“They took the low road and made Mr. Trump look like he is being targeted by Fox,” she said. “I am quite surprised that grown-up media spokespersons for a major media outlet didn’t know better, or at least weren’t more practiced in holding their tempers when giving public comment.”
+
+But John Carroll, a communications professor at Boston University, said: “This may be a situation where Donald Trump was too clever by half. It may have been a gambit to get concessions, but when Fox rightly told him to take a hike, he was boxed in. To save face he had almost no choice.”
+
+Rush Limbaugh, the influential nationally syndicated radio host, concluded that Fox is underestimating Trump.
+
+“I heard people on Fox last night talking about this. ‘Who does he think he is? He can’t control the media,’ ” Limbaugh said on his program Wednesday. “I got news for you: He is controlling the media, and it’s his objective . . . He controls the media when he’s not on it. He controls the media when he is on it. He controls the media when he’s asleep. Nobody else has been able to do anything like this short of the Kennedys, and they’re pikers compared to the way Trump is doing this.”
+
+For the umpteenth time in this strange Republican primary season, Trump has made the race all about one thing: Trump.",REAL
+9658,Wikileaks: Bill Clinton BOASTS of Hillary’s ‘Working Relationship’ with Islamic Terrorist Organization,"Wikileaks: Bill Clinton BOASTS of Hillary’s ‘Working Relationship’ with Islamic Terrorist Organization Oct 29, 2016 Previous post 
+The bombshells about this criminal are now breaking daily. It’s not a question of Trump, it is an imperative that Hillary be defeated. If the people choose Hillary, then they must and will be punished. 
+“Wikileaks: Bill Clinton Boasts of Hillary’s ‘Working Relationship’ with Muslim Brotherhood,” By John Hayward , Breitbart, October 26, 2016: 
+In a speech Bill Clinton gave at the home of Mehul and Hema Sanghani in October 2015, revealed to the public for the first time by WikiLeaks, former President Bill Clinton touted Hillary Clinton’s “working relationship” with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in Egypt as an example of her diplomatic skills.President Clinton also gave his wife a lot of credit for negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, in a passage that began with the standard Democrat “stuff happens” shrugging defense for foreign policy failures: 
+Finally, we live in a world, as I said, that’s full of good news and bad news. The United States cannot control it all, but we need a president who’s most likely to make as many good things happen as possible, and most likely to prevent big, bad things from happening. You can’t keep every bad thing from happening; who’s most likely to be able to get people involved in a positive way. Even the people who don’t like the Iran nuclear agreement concede it never would have happened if it hadn’t been for the sanctions. Hillary negotiated those sanctions and got China and Russia to sign off – something I thought she’d never be able to do. I confess. I’m never surprised by anything she does, but that surprised me. I didn’t think she could do it. The Chinese and the Russians to see past their short-term self-interest to their long-term interest and not sparking another nuclear arms race. 
+And when the Muslim Brotherhood took over in Egypt, in spite of the fact that we were (inaudible), she developed a working relationship with the then-president and went there and brokered a ceasefire to stop a full-scale shooting war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which on top of what was going on in Syria and the (inaudible) Jordan would have been a calamity for the world. 
+And when we were trying to reset our relations with Russia under President Medvedev, she and her team negotiated a New START Treaty, which limits warheads and missiles. And she lobbied it through the Senate. She had to get 67 votes, which means a lot of these Republicans who say 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+7976,US Military Notifies Russia Of “Sustained Alert Status” Due To “Presidential Election Threat”,"
+A very sobering Ministry of Defense ( MoD ) report circulating in the Kremlin today says that the Federation has been officially notified by the United States North American Aerospace Defense Command ( NORAD ) that their military forces are now on “ Sustained Alert Status ” due to unspecified threats directly related to their upcoming 8 November presidential election. [ Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]
+According to this report, under the protocol and procedures outlined in the New Start Treaty that came into force on 5 February 2011 between the Federation and the United States, one of the obligations of the signing parties to reduce the risk of war is a notification process to take place when “ aberrations/sudden changes ” (departure from normal) are made—and that occurred this past week when NORAD unexpectedly expanded its 17-21 October air defense exercises with Canada to now include the California region where just yesterday US warplanes conducted what they call “ security exercises ”.
+As to the American’s “ explanation/reasons ” for expanding the use of their warplanes over the continental United States (CONUS) with no foreign threat being known, this report explains, the Pentagon explained as being a “ National Special Security Event ” due to unspecified threats being posed to the national leadership of the US government and directly related to their presidential election.
+Deputy Defense Minister Tatiana Shevtsova , however, and shockingly, writes in this report that the American government is currently undergoing a “ silent coup ” pitting forces loyal to President Obama against those aligned with Hillary Clinton—who was the former disgraced US Secretary of State and is facing an estimated 20 year prison sentence for obstruction justice and who, also, is being “ closed in upon ” by Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) who have launched a staggering 5 different criminal investigations against her and everyone of her inner circle .
+Deputy Minister Shevtsova further notes in this MoD report that the vast criminality of Hillary Clinton, and everyone associated with her, has been so exposed to the American public that President Obama’s greatest fear now is that even if she were able to be elected, she could singlehandedly destroy the Democratic Party for decades to come—an observation, curiously, supported by American experts who believe the same .
+Equally to be as feared by the Obama regime as Hillary Clinton, this report continues, is her campaign chairman John Podesta who is described as being adept at earning extraordinary sums of money via selling out the American public , and who Wikileaks revealed yesterday gave the order to destroy all of Hillary Clinton’s emails that were under subpoena by the US Congress and that a US Federal Judge had, likewise, ordered to be returned to the US State Department.
+With London’s Guardian News Service having gone through all of Podesta’s Wikileaks released emails , this report notes, even this far-leftist publication has been appalled at the level of corruption of Hillary Clinton and all who surround her—and who wrote yesterday that the level of criminality surrounding Hillary Clinton “ points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else ”.
+As the six biggest US-based corporations supporting Hillary Clinton control some 90% of tens of thousands media outlets, including television channels, newspapers, magazines, radio stations and online editions (which means that the US media market is monopolized to a great extent and alternative outlets cannot be accessed in many towns), this report continues, the American people have awoken to the fact that their nation has fallen to 41 st out of 180 countries in the latest Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index to both their shame and amazement of what their criminal elites have done to them.
+And in the American peoples “ response/reaction ” to the horrors that their Hillary Clinton supporting criminal elite class has put them through, this report notes, they are even now massively rejecting the manipulation of polling data designed to keep them from voting —and have, also, reacted in horror to YouTube, yesterday, censoring a Wall Street Journal video telling these people how they are being lied to and deceived.
+With more empirical evidence showing Donald Trump is poised to win next weeks US presidential election in a landslide , and the Obama regime itself now turning against Hillary Clinton , this report grimly concludes, anyone believing that Hillary Clinton and her desperate criminal forces won’t strike back to retake control of America would be gravely mistaken—and the worst may be yet to come.
+ 
+",FAKE
+4035,"India is building millions of toilets, but that’s the easy part","Rameshwar Natholi received an unexpected gift from the government recently when workmen descended on his modest home in this rural village in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and built a brand-new toilet in his front yard.
+
+Natholi, a farmworker, said he never wanted one. Most people in his village have been relieving themselves in the open fields for years.
+
+But as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Clean India” campaign to provide new sanitary toilets to more than 60 million homes by 2019, Mukhrai has been in the midst of a toilet-building boom since April.
+
+More than 53 percent of Indian homes — about 70 percent in the villages — lack toilets. Poor sanitation and contaminated water cause 80 percent of the diseases afflicting rural India, and diarrhea is a leading killer of children younger than 5, UNICEF says.
+
+Modi says that this is a shame for a country that has global aspirations and that the lack of sanitary conveniences is demeaning to women.
+
+But building toilets is the easy part. Getting people to use them is the real challenge, officials say.
+
+“We never asked for a toilet. Now we are stuck with it,” said Natholi, 22, as he opened the squat toilet to show that it has not been used. His 62-year-old father peered in and shook his head. “Having a toilet so close to the house is not a good idea. The pit is too small; it will fill up quickly. I don’t want the bother of cleaning it up frequently. Going out to the open field is healthier. The open breeze outside is better than sitting inside this tiny room.”
+
+Modi has made toilet-building and sanitation a rallying cry since October. He has enlisted large companies to help. In the past year, his government has built more than 5.8 million toilets — up from 4.9 million the previous year. But reports show that many of them have gone unused or that they are being used to store grain or clothes or to tether goats, thwarting Modi’s sanitation revolution.
+
+“Even as we accelerate toilet construction now, much more needs to be done to persuade people to use them,” said Chaudhary Birender Singh, India’s minister for rural development, sanitation and drinking water. “For long, we assumed that if the toilets are built, people will automatically use it. But we have to diligently monitor the use over a period of time and reward them with cash incentives to the village councils at every stage. Only then will it become a daily habit.”
+
+The government budget for raising awareness largely remained unspent for years. Thousands of villages were declared to have ended open defecation since 2006, but many have since returned to the practice.
+
+Critics also say that the government’s great toilet race has turned into a vortex of corruption in which villagers and middlemen siphon money by creating fake ledger entries about toilet construction.
+
+After years of promoting toilet use by advocating the health benefits, many regions of India began using women as toilet ambassadors. Prospective brides were urged to shun potential grooms whose villages did not have toilets. Now, the campaign has begun to promote toilets as key to women’s security.
+
+Numerous television ads and signs on village walls ask families to forbid their daughters and daughters-in-law to defecate in the open.
+
+But an unintended consequence of this campaign has been the perception that toilets are just for women.
+
+“Men can go out to the open fields, but for women who wear veils all day, a toilet in the home is a good idea,” said Sarvesh Sharma, 28, speaking with her face covered in Mukhrai, in front of her half-built toilet.
+
+In the southern state of Karnataka, a film about responsible fathers of adolescent daughters was used to get men to build toilets in their villages.
+
+“Whether you like it or not, it’s the men who make the decisions. And sanitation is just not a priority for the men. So we had to convey a message about toilets that enhances their manliness,” said Jayamala Subramaniam, chief executive of Arghyam, a group in Bangalore that works on sanitation and water projects.
+
+In many villages, the new toilets are being used by women and the elderly. Researchers say that families use toilets sparingly because they do not want the pits to fill up quickly.
+
+Natholi said he wants a toilet pit so large that he can forget about emptying it for 20 years.
+
+India’s poor toilet habits have little to do with income or limited access to water. They are influenced more by India’s centuries-old caste system, in which members of the lowest group — formerly called “untouchables” — would clear away human waste.
+
+“The act of emptying the pit latrine is associated with the socially degrading caste system,” said Sangita Vyas, managing director at Rice, a New Delhi-based research group that studies sanitation issues. “People fear a situation when their pit fills up and there is nobody willing to clean it because of the social stigma. That fear discourages sustained use of toilets. ”
+
+A Rice survey in 300 villages last year showed that more than 40 percent of homes with working toilets still showed evidence of open defecation. The report said that toilets built by the government, typically smaller, are least likely to be used.
+
+But conversations about caste are not part of the government’s toilet and sanitation campaign, activists say.
+
+“How can you speak about ­toilets for everyone without first freeing certain caste groups from the degrading work of cleaning human waste?” said Bezwada Wilson, founder of the Sanitation Workers Movement. “For any sanitation program to be successful in India, the government has to first mechanize the entire cleaning activities of the pit latrines, sewer lines and septic tanks.”
+
+Sanitation is not just a rural problem in India. Even in big cities, only 30 percent of sewage is treated and disposed of.
+
+“If all of us begin to use toilets in India tomorrow, India will still not be in a position to solve the public health problem,” said Madhu Krishna, senior program officer for sanitation at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation based in Delhi.
+
+Meanwhile in Mukhrai, Man Pal Chaudhury, the Mukhrai village chief, said the 114 new toilets will bring change, but slowly. “The goal is to free my village of open defecation. But for that, each and every person has to fall in line,” he said. “That is several years away.
+
+For a new American ambassador, India is a kind of homecoming
+
+India’s Narendra Modi completed one year in power. Here’s how he did.
+
+India’s roads are among the deadliest in the world. Can new laws tame drivers?
+
+Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
+5110,Donald Trump doesn’t want to make America great. He wants to make it afraid.,"Donald Trump is not a candidate the American people would turn to in normal times. He’s too inexperienced, too eccentric, too volatile, too risky. Voting Trump is burning down the house to collect the insurance money — you don’t do it unless things are really, really bad.
+
+Here is Trump’s problem: Things are not really, really bad. In fact, things are doing much better than when President Obama came into office.
+
+Unemployment is 4.9 percent nationally — a number Trump knows is far from a crisis, because it’s lower than the unemployment rate Mike Pence is presiding over in Indiana, and Trump keeps bragging about his running mate’s economic record. The deficit has gone down in recent years, and the stock market has gone up. The end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars mean fewer Americans are dying abroad. A plurality approve of the job Obama is doing.
+
+So Trump needs to convince voters that things are bad, even if they’re not. He needs to make Americans afraid again. And tonight, he tried.
+
+""Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation,"" Trump said. ""The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.""
+
+As Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Obama, wrote on Twitter, this was Trump’s ""Nightmare in America"" speech. The address had one goal, and one goal only: to persuade Americans that their country is a dangerous, besieged hellscape, and only Donald Trump can fix it.
+
+And so Trump spoke of the ""illegal immigrants with criminal records"" who are ""tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens."" He warned of the gangs, violence, and drugs ""pouring into our communities."" He invoked ""the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our border.""
+
+Perhaps the night’s ugliest moment came when he spoke of Sarah Root, a college student killed by a drunk driver who was also an unauthorized immigrant. ""I’ve met Sarah’s beautiful family,"" Trump said. ""But to this administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn’t worth protecting. One more child to sacrifice on the altar of open borders.""
+
+For the record, almost 10,000 people were killed in America by drunk drivers in 2010 — the overwhelming majority of them by American citizens. Trump had neither answers for nor interest in their deaths.
+
+And it is when you tug on these threads that Trump’s speech unspools and its grossness, and uselessness, becomes clear.
+
+There are many ways in which Americans are actually not safe. More than 600,000 Americans died of heart disease in 2015, many of them unnecessarily. More than 130,000 Americans died in accidents. More than 40,000 died by suicide. There were a record number of drug overdoses in 2014, and gun deaths in America are far beyond those in any developed country.
+
+These tragedies can be ameliorated by policy. Cigarettes can be taxed, alcohol regulated, addicts treated, guns made less accessible. But Trump wasn’t interested in making Americans safer, and so he did not mention any of these policies. He was interested in making Americans more afraid, and so he focused on the dangers that scare us, as opposed to the ones that truly threaten us.
+
+""The first task for our new administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities,"" he said.
+
+""Liberate."" The America Trump speaks of requires an occupying force sent by a strongman to free and stabilize cities that have fallen into anarchy. But our cities have not fallen into anarchy. Our borders are not swarming with illegal immigrants. Murder rates remain far below what the America of the '70s, '80s, and '90s experienced. Terrorism is a horror, but successful terrorist attacks are a rarity, and one that would be most straightforwardly addressed through gun control. No liberation is necessary.
+
+""In this race for the White House,"" Trump said, ""I am the law and order candidate."" And the law and order candidate can only win if there is a crisis of lawlessness and disorder. But there isn’t. Trump isn’t worried about your safety. He is worried about his own electoral prospects.
+
+And this is what made Trump’s speech so truly ugly. It is one thing to whip up fear of the Other when the Other is a threat. But it is fully another to try to scare the shit out of Americans because you’re afraid they won’t vote for you unless they’re terrified. It is demagogic to warn, on national television, of foreign criminals ""roaming"" our streets simply because you’re behind in the polls. It’s telling that Trump fears only the threats that can be blamed on outsiders while ignoring the more lethal, more pervasive killers that afflict the citizenry.
+
+Trump’s speech was a procession of horrors for which he did not even bother to propose real solutions. He has no actual fix to immigration, no theories on how to reduce crime. Here, his statement bordered on self-parody. ""I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,"" he said. ""Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.""
+
+But then, perhaps there’s truth to his absurd promises: When the crisis is invented, the solution is simpler. Once Trump no longer needs the nation to be afraid, he will stop scaring it. It is his nightmare, and only he can wake us from it.",REAL
+6846,Prowling Amur tiger nabbed near Vladivostok,"Prowling Amur tiger nabbed near Vladivostok October 27, 2016 TASS animals , russian far east , vladivostok The Amur tiger is on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Source: Yuri Smityuk/TASS 
+A full-grown Amur tiger has been caught near the Russian Far Eastern city of Vladivostok and sent for rehabilitation to a special center. The large feline predator is a male weighing 170 kilograms (roughly 375 pounds) that had killed a cow in the town of Artyom about 40 kilometers from Vladivostok, the Amur Tiger Center’s press service reported. 
+""On the morning of Oct. 26, a resident of the Artyom town suburb reported to the police that a tiger had killed a cow… That same evening a response team from the hunting supervision agency spotted the tiger using an infrared camera. The predator was immediately caught and brought to the Tiger Rehabilitation and Reintroduction Center in the Alekseyevka settlement,"" the Amur Tiger Center said. 
+The tiger will stay at the rehabilitation center while experts determine his future. He may be released into the wild in an area far from human settlements but inhabited with enough ungulates (or hoofed mammals). Ecologists had a similar experience last year, when a tiger named Uporny (or ‘Persistent’) who had been attacking dogs in the Khabarovsk region, was caught and later released into a distant area. Tiger cub found prowling the streets of Vladivostok 
+Only a few days ago, another male tiger was caught 20 kilometers away from Vladivostok. The predator not only walked near the city but also entered the city territory. He, too, has been sent to the rehabilitation center. It is a young male tiger weighing 140 kilograms (roughly 308 pounds) who is likely to be released into the wild. 
+Several weeks ago reports of a tiger were received from Vladivostok’s neighboring town of Artyom but the search ended without any success. 
+The Amur tiger is on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. According to the last year’s data, at present only 480-540 members of this species live in the wild, with 90 percent of them inhabiting Russia’s Far Eastern Primorye and Khabarovsk regions.",FAKE
+1844,Clinton clearing primary field for potential 2016 run could leave her vulnerable,"Hillary Clinton appears to have scared away much of the competition should she seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. But her early and practically all-encompassing effort also presents the potential liability that she will sail through the primary season largely untested for the bare-knuckled general election.
+
+And it could deny Democrats the chance to define themselves to Americans, strategists say.
+
+“It's not good for a party because the Democratic Party needs a real debate about what it's for, who it's for, what it's about and where we'll take the country,” says Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic congressman, presidential candidate and a Fox News contributor.
+
+The 67-year-old Clinton plans to make an official announcement in early 2015, leaving some doubt about whether she will indeed run. But her frontrunner status is unquestionable.
+
+She has roughly 62 percent of the likely vote and leads all potential Democratic challengers by a numbing 49.5 percentage points.
+
+And those numbers combined with an ambitious public-speaking schedule and the fundraising and cheerleading group Ready for Hillary are making it difficult for potential primary challengers to raise money.
+
+In addition, Clinton’s most formidable, likely primary challenger now, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, insists she’s not running, leaving the Democratic field so wide open that 73-year-old Bernie Sanders, an independent and junior senator from Vermont, is now fourth behind Clinton, Warren and Vice President Biden, according an averaging of polls by RealClearPolitics.com
+
+“I think you miss the chance to vet ideals,” says Richard Fowler, a Democrat and host of the progressive-leaning “Richard Fowler Talk Show.” “I think that's what elections are about. Elections are about ideals and how ideals … would then turn into policy that will then turn into how we govern.”
+
+Clinton, a former first lady, secretary of State and New York senator, hasn’t been in a campaign-style debate since 2008, when she lost the Democratic presidential primary to President Obama, then a freshman Illinois senator.
+
+Still, a relatively easy 2016 primary, if Clinton indeed runs, would likely save her from the pummeling she took last time.
+
+“You’re likeable enough, Hillary,” Obama said on stage to Clinton, who was the early Democratic frontrunner in that race, too.
+
+Among the tough questions she will likely face, and needs to answer well, include what she knew about security at the U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed in a 2012 terror attack.
+
+Clinton, who is worthy millions of dollars, also will likely have to make a strong case that she will champion the country’s poor and working class, after saying on her 2014 book tour: “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.”
+
+“Hillary Clinton, I think, has proven that when you're off the trail for a while, you come back rusty,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “She certainly came back rusty on that book tour.”",REAL
+6305,Wendy Kennedy on being a channel for The 9th Dimensional Pleiadian Collective [VIDEO],"Wendy Kennedy on being a channel for The 9th Dimensional Pleiadian Collective (1:2) Published on Oct 12, 2016 Wendy Kennedy is an intuitive, empath, and channel. For two decades she has used her gifts and abilities to work with beings in other realms and dimensions, assisting others in recognizing and releasing old patterns and helping them to live a more whole and integrated life. The clear and compassionate wisdom shared through Wendy facilitates a shift in perspective from that of separation and limitation to connection and multidimensional existence. 
+In 1995 Wendy began channeling, working first with her own angelic guides before becoming reacquainted with The 9th Dimensional Pleiadian Collective, whom she primarily channels at her public events and in private sessions. In addition to the Pleiadians, she works with beings from Sirius, Lyra, and Arcturus as well as other higher dimensional, celestial beings. 
+Wendy currently lectures and channels for clients around the world. She was one of the six channels featured in the movie and book, Tuning in: Spirit Channelers in America. Her work can also be found in the newly released book compiled by Martine Vallée, The Great Human Potential: Walking in One’s Own Light, which is now available in six languages. 
+Watch part 2 here: https://youtu.be/4bDMT0cAly8 
+Did you appreciate this video? Become a Co-Creator today and help me create more inspiring videos here: http://wisdomfromnorth.com/donation/ Thank you so much for your support!! 
+Follow me on Social Media:",FAKE
+1144,The power of Trump’s call to free America from political correctness (+video),"Donald Trump voters praise him for 'telling it like it is.' But the appeal of his plain-speaking runs much deeper.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Ron Herndon needs more than 10 fingers to count the ways Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump rubs him the wrong way, not least the billionaire’s quest for personal aggrandizement via the White House.
+
+So why is the small-town barbecue shack owner, a registered Democrat, likely voting for Mr. Trump if he wins the GOP nomination?
+
+“America is at the point where she needs someone who speaks the truth, to say what we all think but won’t say around strangers,” says Mr. Herndon. “Sometimes the truth makes you smile – and sometimes it hurts.”
+
+Herndon’s view is that America needs a straight-talking president to tackle real-life problems long ignored by Washington. It has become a common refrain.
+
+The views of this African-American pit master suggest that many Americans are curious about Trump not just because he brazenly breaks the rules of political rhetoric but also because the key to tackling America’s problems, they say, requires people to stop taking offense at the drop of a hat.
+
+In that way, Trump is the symbol of a broader cultural tension. As many Millennials, in particular, become more militant in their desire to make public discourse inclusive, they are coming up against those tired of “wars against Christmas” or tentative talk about Islamic extremism.
+
+For Millennials, who have grown up in the language of political correctness, speech is a weapon, and curtailing words that can be seen as offensive or hateful is a new civil-rights frontier. But Trump’s unfiltered speech encapsulates a potent backlash, with many conservative Americans trying to draw the line on how cautious and careful public conversation becomes.
+
+“The big difference with Trump is, his language is not coded,” says Henry Giroux, a political scientist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and author of the upcoming book “America At War With Itself,” which largely focuses on the rise of Trump.
+
+Trump’s words “tap into is a nation that really has been suffering, particularly since 9/11, from a kind of national insecurity state, mobilized by a massive sense of fear,” he adds. But Millennials see in such language a “darkness lurking beneath the surface.”
+
+On Super Tuesday, Trump continued his trend of underperforming among voters age 18 to 29. But he did well among New England suburbanites, Southern Evangelicals, small businessmen, and blue-collar workers, among others.
+
+At least partly behind Trump’s success is the perception that political correctness has morphed into “soft totalitarianism,” wrote James Kalb wrote in Chronicles Magazine late last year.
+
+“The domination of public life by PC elites has … made it impossible for ordinary people to assert their complaints publicly in an acceptable way, so their objections can easily be shrugged off as the outbursts of ignorant bigots who will, in any event, soon become demographically irrelevant.”
+
+Antipathy toward political correctness spans a wide spectrum of Americans, many whom use the phrase as a pejorative.
+
+Seventy-one percent of Americans say political correctness is a problem in the United States, up 10 percentage points from 2014, according to an August 2015 report by Rasmussen Reports.
+
+At the Pawn Depot, situated on a lonely stretch of US 278 in Lithonia, Ga., that concern is front-of-mind.
+
+Elizabeth Langbecker, the owner, is a Trump fan because he “refuses to tip-toe” around immigration, the economy, and terrorism.
+
+“We need someone who is not afraid to step up to the plate and say what a lot of us want to say,” she adds.
+
+She weighs the Obama administration's efforts to downplay the phrase ""Islamic extremism” against the San Bernardino, Calif., shootings last year, where a Muslim couple killed 14 people and injured 22 others. “How can we deal with all these problems if we can’t even have an honest conversation about the root cause,” she says.
+
+In the 2016 race, political correctness has played out in a number of ways. On one hand, Hillary Clinton apologized for using the term “illegal immigrant” as opposed to “undocumented migrant.” But there have been examples on the right, too. Republican orthodoxy has long held that candidates should not criticize past Republican presidents.
+
+Trump has torn that to shreds.
+
+“Yes, it’s true that on college campuses there’s a lot of silliness about not wanting to offend someone,” says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. “But it’s also on the conservative side – which Trump has also been violating – where you couldn’t say the Iraq War was a mistake or … that Romney was going to lose” the 2012 election.
+
+Now those things are being said loudly. One difference is a sense of desperation in many rural, red-state areas.
+
+“Populism needs to be a loud message, and political incorrectness is high volume,” says Dave “Mudcat” Saunders of Roanoke, Va. The backdrop “is not just anger, but survival – we’re in survival mode out here where 93 percent of counties are still in recession. A hungry dog will bite your [rear], I can tell you that.”
+
+That desperation has matched the militancy of Millennials looking to reshape the national conversation with the militancy of conservatives pushing back against it. The answer, says The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, is to prune political correctness back to its original essence.
+
+“Citizens who oppose Trumpism are going to have to take a careful look at everything that falls under the rubric of political correctness; study the real harm done by its excesses; identify the many parts that are worth defending; and persuade more Americans to adopt those norms voluntarily, for substantive reasons, not under duress of social shaming or other coercion,” he writes.
+
+Working on the set of the vampire series “The Originals” in downtown Conyers, Ga., last week, 20-something Michael Sanders says, to him, political correctness is a “force from on high” – the media, government, and academia – that has pervaded his life.
+
+“Me and everyone I grew up with have always used the language of political correctness,” he says. “When we talk about phrases like ‘illegal immigrant,’ my dad says, ‘That’s just the way people used to talk.’ ”
+
+On one hand, it enforces common courtesy. But there is an appeal, he adds, to someone who comes out and baldly talks from the standpoint of the worldview that used to be dominant.
+
+“I think many Americans like to hear the language of someone not only willing to complain about the end of white dominant culture, but someone who says he can do something about it. That’s when [political correctness] goes out the window.”",REAL
+9240,Putin blasts Clinton & Tells U.S. Govt to STOP Criticizing Russia,"In the clip – filmed in Russia – Putin, 64, tells a group of journalists that the US is creating a “distraction” aiming “to distract voters from the country’s problems” by creating “an enemy and uniting the nation against them”. He references both Iran and Russia as the potential enemies.
+But when asked whether he prefers Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton his response says a lot about ongoing World War 3 fears.
+The President responded: “Mrs Clinton has chosen to take up a very aggressive stance against our country, against Russia.
+“Mr Trump, on the other hand, calls for cooperation – at least when it comes to the international fight against terrorism.
+“Naturally we welcome those who would like to cooperate with us. And we consider it wrong, that we always have to be in conflict with one another, creating existential threats for each other and for the whole world.
+“Would Mrs. Clinton delivers on he threats and harsh rhetoric against Russia if she became President? Or will she correct her position against us?”",FAKE
+8667,Charity Paid For Chelsea’s Wedding! Clinton Foundation Fraud [Video],"Leave a reply Chelsea Clinton’s wedding was paid for with charity money meant for the poor! Crooked Hillary used Clinton Foundation funds to illegally pay for her daughter’s wedding! That is called ‘charity fraud.’ 
+Wikileaks busted Chelsea and Hillary Clinton today by leaking an email from (Clinton advisor) Doug Band to (Hillary campaign chairman) John Podesta. In the email, Band accuses Chelsea of charity fraud (paying for her own wedding with charity cash laundered thru the rotten clinton foundation racket). How many Clinton crimes will it take for Hillary voters to awaken? Many never will. But the world isn’t run by naive simpletons. Clinton crimes run so deep that adults are stepping up to squash Hillary and round up her crooked henchmen. Will that happen in time to stop Hillary from stealing the rigged 2016 election? SF Source Barry Soetoro  ",FAKE
+7329,Is Trump winning? The future of America depends on a few states,"Is Trump winning? The future of America depends on a few states 09.11.2016 | Source: AP photo Republican Donald Trump has 95 percent of chances to become the next US president, The New York Times wrote on the basis of preliminary voting results. Donald Trump has surprisingly managed to win the support of 168 electors, while his rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, has succeeded to the votes of only 109 electors. Trump is projected to win the election in a number of ""wavering"" states, such as Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina. To win the election, a candidate needs to enlist the support of 270 electors. The procedure for their formal vote will be held on December 19, while on January 6, 2017 Congress will approve its results. The inauguration is scheduled for January 20, when the US president-elect takes office. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
+5333,Migrant Thug Beats 87-Year-Old To Bloody Pulp For Making 1 Simple Request,"Share This An 87-year-old man was beaten nearly to death after giving a ride to a migrant. 
+A sweet 87-year-old man offered a young migrant a ride to the train station, hoping to show him a small act of kindness. However, as soon as they pulled up to his stop, the migrant thug attacked the elderly man, beating him to a bloody pulp and punching a hole in his eye after he made one simple request. 
+An elderly Swede saw just how far tolerance and open-mindedness reaches with other cultures after giving a 27-year-old Colombian migrant a ride from Gnosjö to Gislaved. Graciously obliging the Hispanic migrant, the old man and his wife took him 20 minutes away to the local train station. Unfortunately, the pensioner made a nearly fatal mistake when they arrived at their destination. 
+According to Fria Tider , the 87-year-old unnamed man pulled up to the station and politely told the migrant that they had arrived at his destination. Simply informing the foreigner that it was time to exit the vehicle apparently sent him into a rage, causing him to brutally beat the driver almost to death. 
+Repeatedly punching him in the torso and head at least a dozen times, the migrant beat the old man so badly that he broke his rib and punched a hole in his right eye, damage that was so extensive that doctors worried he would go completely blind even after 3 weeks in the hospital. 
+“He can no longer read newspapers or see on television,” according to the court report. “It is unclear if he will ever see again. Before the beating, he was alert and active in the community. Now, he needs the help of four times a day.” 
+When police arrested the migrant, whose identity is protected by the liberal Swedish government, he told authorities that his victim had sparked the beating by calling him “little” and a “negro.” It wasn’t long before the thug admitted that he lied about the accusations and simply beat the sweet old man because he knew he’d get away with it. 
+The convict laughed during his interrogation, telling police that he was amused that a man just over 5 feet tall could take down a feeble, elderly man a foot taller. “It is what it is,” the migrant heckled. “A man of 6 feet getting knocked out — me leveling a man of 6-feet is really laughable. I cut him down like a tree,” he added, telling police that it doesn’t matter if he’s convicted because “I’ll be on the loose. I will come out soon again. You can’t lock me up for very long,” according to Expressen . Left-leaning Swedish authorities protect the identity of the migrant thug, forcing the media to censor his face and the Colombian flag patch on his jacket. 
+Sickeningly enough, the migrant thug was right. Thanks to the politically correct justice system, he received just over 2 years in prison for aggravated assault, a sentence that will likely either be appealed, overturned, or reduced with good behavior. In fact, his appeal is currently being heard by a higher court, which is considering reducing his sentence based because he was located on social media and forced to go into hiding because of his brutal crime. 
+Unfortunately, this type of racially-motivated violence is nothing new to Europe. Just over a week ago, Mad World News reported that a group of 5 white men, 3 U.S. citizens and 2 Danes, were approached by 8 to 10 Muslim migrants who asked if they were Americans. When the 3 admitted that they are, the asylum seekers attacked all 5 of them, brutally beating and threatening to kill them with a knife. 
+The victims received no help from the Danish government and have been ignored by local authorities. Even the central investigating police headquarters refused to take the case. 
+As the elderly Swedish man discovered, it doesn’t matter if you extend tolerance and respect, many of these migrants see Westerners as inferior humans who must be forced to submit. This is exactly what a bleeding-heart liberal found out after volunteering at the Calais “Jungle” camp. 
+Last week, Mad World News reported that a 38-year-old female interpreter was helping a male journalist make a documentary about the plight of migrants when a group of 3 Afghan asylum seekers attacked them at knifepoint. One of the migrants raped her while the others restrained the journalist and stole his equipment. 
+Those who despise our culture, values, and laws won’t have a change of heart when we show them just how progressive and open-minded our society is. They know this, and it’s the very reason they hate us. In fact, they see our kindness as an opportunity to impose their oppressive and violent values on us without fear of being opposed. After all, we wouldn’t want to be considered racist, would we?",FAKE
+4389,Why Hillary Clinton's gun control proposal is all wrong,"Americans desperately want something done about mass public shootings. Hillary Clinton took a page from President Obama’s playbook Monday, vowing that as president she will bypass Congress and use executive action to change how guns can be purchased.
+
+She is angry that Republicans ""refuse to do anything"" about mass shootings.
+
+But that isn’t accurate. Clinton isn’t the only one to speak out boldly on this topic. On Saturday, Donald Trump said: “And by the way, it was a gun-free zone. ... I’ll tell you, if you had a couple of the teachers or someone with guns in that room, you would have been a hell of a lot better off.” Others such as Sen. Marco Rubio have made a similar point.”
+
+The Republican push has at least the virtue of potentially stopping these crimes. The Umpqua Community College in Oregon shooting shows yet another case where guns were banned. With these killers explicitly picking places where victims are defenseless, at some point it should be impossible to ignore.
+
+Clinton’s proposals wouldn’t have stopped these attacks. The “universal” background checks on private transfers may raise the cost of law-abiding citizens getting guns.
+
+They wouldn’t have stopped any of the mass public shootings during Barack Obama’s presidency, including last Thursday’s in Oregon. At some point an enterprising reporter might ask Obama or Clinton to name just one of the cases they have used to push this law where the law would have stopped the attack.
+
+Clinton is proposing three other measures:
+
+1. Prohibiting domestic abusers and stalkers from buying and possessing guns. This sounds reasonable, but the change from existing law would allow people to have their guns taken from them without a court hearing. If people are committing crimes, they should be prosecuted for felonies or misdemeanors, but Clinton’s solution is to take away their guns even when they aren’t being prosecuted.
+
+2. Closing the “Charleston Loophole,” where the federal background check worker didn’t contact the right law enforcement agencies. But the truth is more complicated. First, even a perfectly functioning background check system very likely wouldn’t have stopped the suspect, Dylann Roof, from getting a gun. Second, the current background check system is a much worse mess than Clinton recognizes.
+
+Roof allegedly planned his attack for at least six months, so it’s hard to believe he couldn’t have figured out some way to obtain a gun. Indeed, he stole the gun he used in this attack.
+
+The truth is, the databases the government uses to determine eligibility for gun purchases are rife with errors.
+
+FBI Director James Comey’s comments in July about the FBI’s background check system focus on one type of error, where someone who should have been prohibited from getting a gun wasn’t stopped. But a much more common error involves people who should be able to buy guns but are stopped.
+
+3. Repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents the manufacturers and dealers of firearms from being held liable for crimes committed with their weapons. It might be hard to remember, but gun makers were being sued because they ""specifically geared"" their weapons to make them attractive to gang members. Among the offending characteristics listed are low price, easy concealability, corrosion resistance and high firepower. Suing an industry for making affordable products shows how far the liability-litigation madness has gone.
+
+The lawsuits were simply an attempt to raise the costs of doing business and to bankrupt the companies. Hillary may claim she cares about the poor, but poor people in the highest-crime areas benefit the most from gun ownership, and they are the people who would be priced out of owning guns for protection.
+
+Vowing to do something concrete about mass public shootings on the campaign trail may be popular. But Clinton’s proposed gun-control solutions refuse to address the obvious problem of gun-free zones and will make ultimately make Americans less safe.
+
+John R. Lott, Jr. is a columnist for FoxNews.com. He is an economist and was formerly chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission. Lott is also a leading expert on guns and op-eds on that issue are done in conjunction with the Crime Prevention Research Center. He is the author of nine books including ""More Guns, Less Crime."" His latest book is ""The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies (August 1, 2016). Follow him on Twitter@johnrlottjr.",REAL
+2594,Netanyahu enters never-never land,"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was eloquent, moving and intelligent in identifying the problems with the potential nuclear deal with Iran. But when describing the alternative to it, Netanyahu entered never-never land, painting a scenario utterly divorced from reality. Congress joined him on his fantasy ride, rapturously applauding as he spun out one unattainable demand after another.
+
+Netanyahu declared that Washington should reject the current deal, demand that Tehran dismantle almost its entire nuclear program and commit never to restart it. In the world according to Bibi, the Chinese, Russians and Europeans will cheer, tighten sanctions, and increase pressure — which would then lead Iran to capitulate. “Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough,” said Peter Pan.
+
+We have some history that can inform us on the more likely course. Between 2003 and 2005, under another practical president, Mohammad Khatami, Iran negotiated with three European Union powers a possible deal to place its nuclear program under constraints and inspections. The chief nuclear negotiator at the time was Hassan Rouhani, now Iran’s president.
+
+Iran proposed to cap its centrifuges at very low levels, keep enrichment levels well below those that could be used for weapons and convert its existing enriched uranium into fuel rods (which could not be put to military use). Peter Jenkins, the British representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the Inter Press Service , “All of us were impressed by the proposal.” But the talks collapsed because the Bush administration, acting through the British government, vetoed it. It was certain, Jenkins explained, that if the West could “scare” the Iranians, “they would give in.”
+
+What was the result? Did Iran return to the table and capitulate? No, the country withstood the sanctions and, unimpeded by any inspections, massively expanded its nuclear infrastructure. Iran went from 164 centrifuges to 19,000, accumulated more than 17,000 pounds of enriched uranium gas and ramped up construction of a heavy water reactor at Arak that could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
+
+Harvard University’s Graham Allison, one of the United States’ foremost experts on nuclear issues, pointed out that “by insisting on maximalist demands and rejecting potential agreements, the first of which would have limited Iran to 164 centrifuges, we have seen Iran advance from 10 years away from producing a bomb to only months.”
+
+If the deal now being negotiated fails, the most likely scenario is a repetition of the past. Iran will expand its nuclear program. If the other major powers believed that Iran’s offer was serious but U.S. and Israeli intransigence torpedoed it, they would be reluctant to enforce sanctions — and all sanctions start to leak over time anyway. Netanyahu worries that with this deal, 10 years from now Iran might restart some elements of its programs. But without the deal, in 10 years Iran would likely have 50,000 centrifuges, a massive stockpile of highly enriched uranium, new facilities, thousands of experienced nuclear scientists and technicians, and a fully functioning heavy water reactor that can produce plutonium. At that point, what would Bibi do?
+
+The theory that Iran would buckle under continued pressure ignores certain basic facts. Iran is a proud, nationalistic country. It has survived 36 years of Western sanctions through low oil prices and high oil prices. It endured an eight-year war with Iraq in which it lost an estimated half a million fighters. The nuclear program is popular, even with leaders of the pro-democratic Green Movement.
+
+As Allison points out, Iran already has the capacity to build a nuclear weapons program and got it in 2008 when it mastered the ability to produce centrifuges and enrich uranium. And yet, Iran has not done it. For almost 25 years now, Netanyahu has argued that Iran is on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon. In 1996 — 19 years ago — he addressed the Congress and made pretty much the same argument he made this week. Over the last 10 years he has argued repeatedly that Iran is one year away from a bomb.
+
+So why have Bibi’s predictions been wrong for 25 years? A small part of it has been Western and Israeli sabotage that impeded Iran’s progress. But even the most exaggerated claims by intelligence agencies would not account for a delay of more than a few years. The larger part is probably that Iran has always recognized that were it to build a bomb, it would face huge international consequences. In other words, the mullahs have calculated — correctly — that the benefits of breakout are not worth the costs. The key to any agreement with Iran is to keep the costs of breakout high and the benefits low. This is the most realistic path to keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state — not Peter Pan dreams.
+
+Read more from Fareed Zakaria’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+6108,The Dark Art of Political Intimidation,The Dark Art of Political Intimidation  ,FAKE
+1678,Republican debate: Six things to watch,"Boulder, Colorado (CNN) The Republican presidential campaign is entering a decidedly more combative phase as candidates prepare to take the debate stage on Wednesday night.
+
+The GOP field is seeing a shake-up after remaining static for weeks. Long-time front-runner Donald Trump no longer appears invincible, thanks to the climb of Ben Carson. Jeb Bush has hit hard times, but promises to show a more muscular side. Carly Fiorina failed to turn her strong debate performances into winning poll numbers. And since the last debate in mid-September, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has left the race.
+
+Here are six things to watch in the CNBC debate:
+
+From his perch at the top of the Republican field, Trump had largely declined to go after Ben Carson, training his fire instead on other more seasoned politicians like Bush, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Referring to Carson as a ""good"" person who he admires personally, Trump has even fueled speculation the retired neurosurgeon could be on his vice presidential short list.
+
+But those days of playing nice are over.
+
+An abrupt shift in tone came after a series of consecutive polls showed Carson had overtaken Trump in Iowa, relegating the businessman to second place. Then, on Tuesday, Trump even lost his first place spot in a national poll, trailing Carson 26% to 22%, according to Tuesday's CBS/New York Times poll.
+
+If the last week offers any indication, Trump is expected to throw multiple punches at Carson on the debate stage. The attacks could get personal. The real estate mogul appeared to suggest over the weekend that Carson's religious affiliation — he's a Seventh-day Adventist — was extreme.
+
+But it will take a whole lot more to get Carson firing back. Known for his reserved and calm demeanor, the candidate has repeatedly said he has no interest in becoming an attack dog.
+
+""Ben has said he's going to stay who he is and he wouldn't want to get elected being somebody else,"" said Ryan Rhodes, Carson's Iowa state director. ""He does not need to tear someone else down to build himself up.""
+
+When Bush steps onto the stage Wednesday night, there will be visual confirmation of his recent struggles. Rather than take the podium immediately next to Trump, Bush will be two spots removed from the GOP front-runner for the first time.
+
+The former Florida governor's national poll numbers seem permanently stuck in the single digits behind political novices like Trump and Carson. Last week, the campaign announced new cost-cutting measures, followed by a weekend Bush family confab in Houston.
+
+""He needs to have a performance that stands out from the crowd. He won't be center stage this time so he need to, in words and actions, figure out how not to fade into the wings,"" said Katie Packer, deputy campaign manager for Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign. (Packer is neutral in the race but is a founding partner of WWP Strategies, which works for Rubio in Michigan.)
+
+Bush's advisers are suggesting Bush may try to do just that on Wednesday, by showing off his more fiery and loose side. The campaign is ""tearing up the script"" and preparing to simply ""let Jeb be Jeb,"" sources told CNN's Jamie Gangel.
+
+There's no question that Carly Fiorina is the star of the Republican debate team.
+
+What's less clear is whether she can translate the momentum from her prime-time performances into a lasting boost for her candidacy.
+
+The former Hewlett-Packard CEO used a breakout performance in the last CNN GOP debate to propel herself from a little-known, first-time presidential candidate to a top-tier contender. But that surge in the national polls has all but vanished; she fell from 15% in September to 4% in last week's CNN/ORC survey.
+
+Her campaign has pushed back on any suggestion that Fiorina may be going from one breakout moment to the next, and instead emphasized that she's focused on winning over voters at a slow and steady pace.
+
+""I'm glad people liked her debate performance and liked her message, but one debate does not win the thing,"" deputy campaign manager Sarah Isgur Flores said.
+
+Debt ceiling: To raise or not to raise
+
+In a debate that's promising to focus on jobs and the economy, one issue could divide the Republican candidates on the stage Wednesday: the debt limit.
+
+Raising the debt ceiling is a Congress-approved maneuver that essentially allows the U.S. government to carry more debt in order to allow the Treasury Department to continue paying its bills. The issue has become highly divisive among Republicans in recent years: Fiscal conservatives argue they would rather let the country default on its financial obligations than increase national spending.
+
+This week, congressional leaders and the White House reached a two-year budget deal that would raise it through early 2017.
+
+""Raising the debt ceiling is politically explosive on the right. Some candidates pander and say they never will raise it,"" said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and economic adviser to John McCain in 2008. ""Others will invoke something like the Boehner rule and argue that spending cuts will make it worth it. But the real test is who will say 'yes, we have to raise it'.""
+
+Of the 10 Republicans participating in the prime-time debate, these four rank at the bottom: Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, John Kasich and Rand Paul. And they've been there most of the race.
+
+According to CNBC's average of recent national surveys, each of those Republicans poll around 3%. With the Iowa caucuses now just three months away, these candidates are under pressure not only to boost their rankings, but also to persuade donors to keep funding their bottom-tier campaigns.
+
+Christie's campaign raised just over $4 million in the third quarter while Kasich raised around $4.4 million since launching his campaign. That's not much more than the $3.9 million Trump's campaign raised without actually trying. Meanwhile, Rand Paul raised $2.5 million last quarter, while Mike Huckabee pulled in $1.2 million.
+
+Will there be much of a debate?
+
+Every candidate faces a shared challenge Wednesday night: persuading viewers not to change the channel.
+
+After coming under fire from candidates like Trump and Carson, CNBC agreed to keep Wednesday's prime time debate to just two hours, commercials included. The network also agreed to allow opening and closing statements for each candidate, which means even less time for the White House hopefuls to tackle questions, go after rivals and make a splash.
+
+The first two GOP debates were record-setting blockbusters, pulling in an unprecedented 24 million and 23 million viewers each.
+
+Not only are those numbers becoming increasingly hard to beat as the novelty of the debates wears off, but the debate also happens to collide with Game 2 of the World Series between the New York Mets and the Kansas City Royals.",REAL
+3857,The White House Easter Egg Roll exists because Congress banned fun,"Today the White House will hold the annual Easter egg roll. Kids will roll their eggs along the lawn, hunt for eggs, and enjoy other fun activities. It's a benign, heartwarming event.
+
+So where did this lovable tradition come from? It all started when Congress made kids get off its lawn.
+
+The Easter egg roll goes back a long time — some say Dolley Madison began the tradition, though that's probably just legend. There are reports of various egg rolls occurring throughout the mid-1800s, but by the 1870s, there weren't a lot of places for kids to have fun in Washington, DC. The city was very much under construction — the Washington Monument had been left half-finished for 23 years — and contained a lot of dirt and mud.
+
+That led a lot of kids to play near Capitol Hill. The only problem? Their presence uprooted some of the tender grass that was just starting to grow near the Capitol Building. The annual Easter egg rolls they held there upset the national landscaping.
+
+So on April 21, 1876, Congress passed the Turf Protection Law, which banned Easter egg rolls on Capitol Hill. In 1877, bad weather kept the Easter egg roll from happening, and 1878 didn't look much better. In the days leading up to Easter, the Washington Post warned kids not to roll their eggs on the Capitol's lawn or they'd encounter the large Capitol police force:
+
+Things looked bleak for the Easter tradition until the president stepped in.
+
+At some point in April 1878, a child from the neighborhood saw President Hayes on a stroll. He asked Hayes when he'd allow kids to roll eggs on his new White House lawn. Hayes looked into it and told the guards that if any kids showed up to roll eggs on the White House lawn, it was fine.
+
+It's tempting to interpret the egg roll as a political battle. After all, the leader behind the Turf Protection Law, William Holman, was a Democrat, and that party regularly called Hayes ""Rutherfraud"" because of his disputed election in 1876. So perhaps Hayes was just trying to show up Democrats?
+
+More likely, it was that the president wanted kids to have fun. Nancy Kleinhenz is the communications manager at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, where they've been re-creating the egg roll for years. She says it wasn't politics but fatherly instincts that inspired Hayes to save the day. After all, Hayes had two children who were still young: Scott and Fanny, who were 10 and seven. ""Politics wasn't a factor,"" Kleinhenz says. ""He was a dad."" Since then, the Easter Egg Roll has become a tradition at the White House, with only brief pauses during wartime.
+
+The Easter egg roll probably isn't a story about partisan battles. But in Washington, everything becomes political when federal resources are involved — and that includes which lawn gets trampled by children playing with eggs.",REAL
+6773,WORLD WAR 3 – HILLARY V.S. TRUMP, ,FAKE
+1575,Donald Trump’s dangerously circular logic,"There was a remarkable -- and telling -- exchange Sunday morning between NBC's Chuck Todd and Donald Trump over the Republican presidential frontrunner's much-debunked claims about ""thousands"" of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
+
+Here it is -- in close to its entirety:
+
+TRUMP: Chuck, I saw it on television.  So did many other people.  And many--                                                                              DONALD TRUMP: --many people.  I said hundreds. In the area.  I-- CHUCK TODD: --you saw during Jersey City?  Okay. DONALD TRUMP: --heard Patterson.  Excuse me.  I've heard Jersey City.  I've heard Patterson.  It was 14 years ago.  But I saw it on television.  I saw clips.  And so did many other people.  And many people saw it in person.  I've had hundreds of phone calls to the Trump Organization saying, ""We saw it.  It was dancing in the streets.""  Now, he tried to pull back, but the Washington Post reported tailgate parties and reports of tailgate parties. Tailgate parties means, like, for a football game where you have hundreds and hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of people having tailgate parties.  I saw it at the time.  I stick by it.  Hundreds of people have confirmed it.  You look at @realdonaldtrump, where I have millions and millions of people on there, between Facebook and Twitter.  I have 10 million people between the two of them.  You look at that.  And I'm getting unbelievable response of people that said they saw it.  Now-- DONALD TRUMP: --you know, just go a step further.  All over at the world at the time it was reported that Muslims were celebrating the downing.  All over the world, forget about New Jersey for a second.  All over the world, it was reported that Muslims were celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center. Two days ago, three days ago, there was a soccer game and there was a minute of silence in honor of the people that were slain, horribly, viciously slain in Paris, France.  And a huge amount of people, a tremendous number of people started screaming out Muslim phrases.  And all of the players on the field didn't know exactly what to do.  That was well reported.  I suppose nobody saw that either.  I'm sure you reported it and you saw it.          DONALD TRUMP: So, there is a problem here, Chuck, of hatred that is unbelievable. CHUCK TODD: But Mr. Trump, this didn't happen in New Jersey.  There were plenty of reports.  And you're feeding that stereotype. DONALD TRUMP: Chuck, it did happen in New Jersey.  I have hundreds of people that agree with me. CHUCK TODD: But they want to agree with you--
+
+It goes on (and on) but you get the idea.
+
+Trump's argument boils down to this: I don't care what published fact-checks say. I have heard from people on Twitter who tell me they saw the same thing I did.
+
+Trump uses the social media response he gets to the outrageous claims he makes as justification that those claims are correct. That is, of course, ridiculous. As Chuck rightly notes, many of the people who follow Trump simply want to see the world as he sees it and function and yes-men for him.
+
+And, even if they aren't simply looking to agree with Trump, the idea that anecdotal evidence offered by un-vetted sources via Twitter can or should be used to directly rebut stories written by reporters who went to these alleged ""parties"" after Sept. 11 and found little or nothing makes no sense. (Yes, I am well aware of the story that Serge Kovaleski wrote in the Post following 9/11; go read our Fact-Checker on the story and get the, um, facts about it.)
+
+Trump is far from the first presidential candidate to use anecdotal evidence as fact. During the 2012 campaign, then Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann repeatedly told the story of a woman who approached her on the campaign trail and insisted that the HPV vaccine caused mental retardation in her daughter. Bachmann used the story as evidence that the HPV vaccine was, in fact, broadly dangerous despite scads of scientific evidence that it wasn't.
+
+Trump appears to not grasp the difference between being a wealthy businessman and a leading contender to be the Republican nominee for president. In the former role, popping off based on limited information or wrong information or a story someone told you that they heard from their uncle has a limited impact.  In the latter role, popping off is far more dangerous. ""You're running for president of the United States,"" Chuck, who gets the difference, told Trump on Sunday. ""Your words matter.  Truthfulness matters.""
+
+Donald Trump has created a perfect circle of illogical logic. Facts are fungible.  The tweet from someone he has never met (and never will meet) about something he/she allegedly ""saw"" on 9/11 carries the same weight as actual information gathered by reporters hewing to journalistic standards.
+
+I don't have to tell you that down that path lies real danger.
+
+Update 7:27 a.m. Monday: Also appearing on TV on Sunday, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson addressed her boss's many inflated claims and his apparent mocking of a New York Times reporter's physical disability, which Trump has denied doing.
+
+""Here's the thing, if you don't like Mr. Trump, then, yes, you're going to side with that part of the story,"" Pierson told CNN.
+
+Pierson also argued that denying thousands of Muslims celebrated on 9/11 is essentially tantamount to denying there are radical Muslims in the United States.",REAL
+2970,White House says Obama will ask Congress to authorize military force against ISIS,"President Obama is expected to formally ask Congress to authorize the use of military force against the Islamic State terror group in the coming days, even as lawmakers said crafting and passing such a measure would be a challenge.
+
+The U.S. has been carrying out airstrikes against the terrorists, most commonly known as ISIS, in Iraq and Syria since August and September, respectively. In doing so, Obama has been relying on congressional authorizations that President George W. Bush used to justify military action after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Critics have called the White House's use of post-9/11 congressional authorizations a legal stretch, though Obama has previously argued that a new authorization isn't legally necessary.
+
+White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday that the administration is dedicated to getting a new authorization with bipartisian support. He declined to comment on specific provisions, including how long the authorization will last, what geographical areas it will cover and whether it will allow for the possibility of ground troops. Earnest said those details were still being worked out.
+
+""When it comes to fighting a war, the Congress should not tie the president's hands, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters Thursday morning. However, Boehner later added, ""It's also incumbent on the president to make the case to the American people on why we need to fight this fight. This is not going to be an easy lift.""
+
+House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said talks with the administration are focusing on an authorization time frame of three years, while the other issues are still being worked out. Pelosi added that she ultimately expects a compromise on the outstanding issues to be reached and added that she hopes Congress will repeal the 2002 congressional authorization for the war in Iraq while retaining the 2001 authorization for military action in Afghanistan.
+
+""I'm not saying anybody's come to an agreement on it,"" Pelosi said. ""I think it's going to be a challenge, but we will have it.""
+
+The developments come after Islamic militants released a grisly video of the murder of a Jordanian Air Force pilot by burning him alive. Pelosi also said that the U.S. should ""move quickly"" to steer military aid to Jordan, which has begun a stepped-up campaign against the militants, including a series of air strikes in Syria.
+
+Republicans generally want a broader authorization of military action against the militants, who have overrun wide swaths of Iraq and Syria, than Democrats have been willing to consider. Obama has said he does not intend to have U.S. ""boots on the ground"" in combat roles, while many Republicans believe that option ought to be available to the military.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry has testified that any new authorization should not limit U.S. military action to just Iraq and Syria or prevent the president from deploying ground troops if he later deems them necessary. Kerry also said that if the new authorization has a time limit, there should be a provision for it to be renewed.
+
+Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House intelligence panel, has already introduced legislation rather than wait for Obama's version. His bill would authorize the use of force against ISIS in Iraq and Syria for three years, but prohibit the use of ground forces in a combat mission in either nation. He has said if the president later decided to deploy ground troops, he could return to Congress to ask for new authority.
+
+""It is my hope that the administration will be willing to accept important limits in a new authorization as well as the sunset or repeal of the old [authorizations], as this will be necessary to ensure strong bipartisan support and meet the goals the president set last summer of refining and repealing the prior authorizations,"" Schiff said in a statement Thursday, using the acronym for authorization for use of military force.
+
+Fox News' Chad Pergram, Nicholas Kalman, and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+195,Homeland Security deal: Will Boehner follow McConnell's lead? (+video),"The Senate voted Wednesday to clear the path to fund DHS, after Republicans agreed to withdraw immigration restrictions from the bill. But it will be tougher to get it through the House, where member districts are more homogeneous.
+
+No question, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky blinked when it came to funding the Department of Homeland Security.
+
+With the clock ticking toward a DHS shutdown Friday night and Democrats repeatedly blocking debate on a funding bill because it contained immigration “poison pills,” the Senate leader gave Democrats what they wanted on Wednesday: a “clean” funding bill, minus the toxic measure to block President Obama’s executive immigration action on immigration in November. That will be taken up separately.
+
+Will House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio also blink, and bring the clean bill – expected to pass the Senate with a strong bipartisan vote – to the floor? Such a move would put him at odds with many in his caucus, and possibly prompt a challenge to his leadership.
+
+As weeks of struggle over DHS funding have shown, Republican control of both chambers doesn’t necessarily mean smooth sailing for the GOP. Even when the two leaders agree on policy – as they do in this case – they work under very different conditions, with each chamber having its own political climate and ways of doing things.
+
+Majority leader McConnell for instance, faces the unique challenge of the filibuster – the Senate blocking device that requires 60 votes to overcome. With Republicans holding 54 seats, he needs at least six Democrats to pass any controversial legislation, an incentive for at least a minimally bipartisan approach.
+
+He also has 24 senators up for reelection in 2016 – several of them from blue states. That encourages political flexibility. Most GOP House seats, on the other hand, are secure in gerrymandered districts and red states. That promotes rigidity.
+
+“McConnell has his own challenge. Having won a majority, and a bigger one than he expected, he still has a challenge in holding it. And holding it means showing he can govern and providing some protection for senators who are up in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, in New Hampshire,” says Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
+
+House Republicans, on the other hand, “dominate” in states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, Mr. Ornstein points out. “These individual House districts are themselves homogeneous echo chambers.”
+
+You can hear the difference when talking with Republicans from these two worlds. Republican Sen. Mark Kirk is up for reelection in Illinois, which Obama easily won in 2012 and 2008. He was an early supporter of a “clean” bill to fully fund DHS without the immigration riders. He wanted nothing to come between his state and the funding.
+
+Senator Kirk recalls traveling through Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, which is a known potential terrorist target. “Boy did I get an earful from the people I represent,” Senator Kirk says in a brief interview in the Senate basement, on the way to his office. “Chicago doesn’t work unless US military protects the United States. We gotta have DHS.”
+
+Kirk says he’s tried to be the consistent “lone voice in the wilderness” on DHS funding, and “if our party doctrine was to mess the bill up, then to say that the party doctrine was wrong, and we should just pass clean DHS.”
+
+But just a five-minute walk away, on the House side of the Capitol, Rep. John Fleming (R) of Louisiana holds the opposite view. A tea party favorite, he faced no Democratic opponent in his reelection bid of 2010, but he did face a Libertarian one.
+
+In a scrum of reporters, Congressman Fleming said a potential DHS shutdown did not come up at a closed GOP House conference Wednesday morning. The real question, he continued, is the president’s November executive action that would shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. That’s executive overreach and unconstitutional, he and other Republicans say. In January, the House GOP passed a DHS funding bill that also blocked funding for that program.
+
+“The only tool we have in Congress to block an unconstitutional act that would severely damage Americans for generations to come is to deplete the funding of that very executive action, and that’s what our bill does and that’s what we intend to do,” he said.
+
+When asked what his constituents think should be done about the funding issue, he said, “We don’t get a lot of calls because they know my position on this. If I deviated, they’d be very upset.”
+
+Indeed, conservatives such as Fleming would be very angry if Boehner decided to bring a clean DHS bill to the House floor.
+
+Many have said they would not vote for a bill that did not also block the president’s immigration action, and they’re supported by conservative bloggers and outside groups who are already screaming about a cave-in.
+
+Some House Republicans might even try to stage a leadership coup. In January, 25 Republicans voted for someone other than Boehner for speaker.
+
+While McConnell faces his challenge of 60 votes, the speaker’s challenge is to keep his diverse caucus in line so he can reach the magic target of 218, the number of votes needed to pass a bill in the House.
+
+Republicans hold 247 seats, but with a diverse caucus, it’s a challenge getting to 218. Boehner likens it to keeping frogs in a wheelbarrow, and on controversial legislation – such as the budget – he’s had to turn to Democrats for votes.
+
+“For Boehner, just as it has been for the last few years, his challenge is how many times can he bring up things for passage that will require more Democrats, and when he brings those up, can he be sure he’ll get enough Republicans to add to the Democrats?” Ornstein says.
+
+If DHS is to be fully funded, a bill that kills the president’s executive action won’t be part of it – that much has been made clear by the Senate showdown. Boehner will either have to bring his caucus around, or turn to House Democrats to buttress his numbers, with a fallback position being a stopgap continuing resolution.
+
+“I think Boehner in his gut knows that he’s going to have to face reality here,” says a Republican House member, speaking on background. “It’s just a matter of the speaker being able to articulate this to those members – to the ‘hell no’ caucus, who are going to be unhappy with anything short of a complete and total victory.”
+
+In other words, he'll have to blink.",REAL
+7926,"The Modern History of ""Rigged"" US Elections","License DMCA 
+The United States is so committed to the notion that its electoral process is the world's ""gold standard"" that there has been a bipartisan determination to maintain the fiction even when evidence is overwhelming that a U.S. presidential election has been manipulated or stolen. The ""wise men"" of the system simply insist otherwise. 
+We have seen this behavior when there are serious questions of vote tampering (as in Election 1960) or when a challenger apparently exploits a foreign crisis to create an advantage over the incumbent (as in Elections 1968 and 1980) or when the citizens' judgment is overturned by judges (as in Election 2000). 
+Strangely, in such cases, it is not only the party that benefited which refuses to accept the evidence of wrongdoing, but the losing party and the establishment news media as well. Protecting the perceived integrity of the U.S. democratic process is paramount. Americans must continue to believe in the integrity of the system even when that integrity has been violated. 
+The harsh truth is that pursuit of power often trumps the principle of an informed electorate choosing the nation's leaders, but that truth simply cannot be recognized. 
+Of course, historically, American democracy was far from perfect, excluding millions of people, including African-American slaves and women. The compromises needed to enact the Constitution in 1787 also led to distasteful distortions, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation (although obviously slaves couldn't vote). - Advertisement - 
+That unsavory deal enabled Thomas Jefferson to defeat John Adams in the pivotal national election of 1800. In effect, the votes of Southern slave owners like Jefferson counted substantially more than the votes of Northern non-slave owners. 
+Even after the Civil War when the Constitution was amended to give black men voting rights, the reality for black voting, especially in the South, was quite different from the new constitutional mandate. Whites in former Confederate states concocted subterfuges to keep blacks away from the polls to ensure continued white supremacy for almost a century. 
+Women did not gain suffrage until 1920 with the passage of another constitutional amendment, and it took federal legislation in 1965 to clear away legal obstacles that Southern states had created to deny the franchise to blacks. 
+Indeed, the alleged voter fraud in Election 1960, concentrated largely in Texas, a former Confederate state and home to John Kennedy's vice presidential running mate, Lyndon Johnson, could be viewed as an outgrowth of the South's heritage of rigging elections in favor of Democrats, the post-Civil War party of white Southerners. 
+However, by pushing through civil rights for blacks in the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson earned the enmity of many white Southerners who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party via Richard Nixon's Southern strategy of coded racial messaging. Nixon also harbored resentments over what he viewed as his unjust defeat in the election of 1960. - Advertisement - 
+Nixon's ""Treason"" 
+So, by 1968, the Democrats' once solid South was splintering, but Nixon, who was again the Republican presidential nominee, didn't want to leave his chances of winning what looked to be another close election to chance. Nixon feared that -- with the Vietnam War raging and the Democratic Party deeply divided -- President Johnson could give the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a decisive boost by reaching a last-minute peace deal with North Vietnam. President Richard Nixon with his then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in 1972. License DMCA 
+The documentary and testimonial evidence is now clear that to avert a peace deal, Nixon's campaign went behind Johnson's back to persuade South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to torpedo Johnson's Paris peace talks by refusing to attend. Nixon's emissaries assured Thieu that a President Nixon would continue the war and guarantee a better outcome for South Vietnam.",FAKE
+6827,FCC Passes Sweeping Internet Privacy Rules in ‘Big Win for Civil Rights’,"FCC Passes Sweeping Internet Privacy Rules in ‘Big Win for Civil Rights’ Posted on Oct 27, 2016 Shutterstock 
+The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday passed sweeping new privacy rules designed to keep broadband providers from giving customers’ private data to third parties. 
+The rules, approved by a vote of 3-2, require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to get customers’ explicit consent before using or sharing behavioral data like browsing history, location, and other sensitive information with marketing firms or other companies, the Washington Post reports . 
+“It’s the consumers’ information,” FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said. “How it is used should be the consumers’ choice. Not the choice of some corporate algorithm.” 
+Advertisement Square, Site wide 
+According to the Post’s Brian Fung: 
+Also covered by that requirement are health data, financial information, Social Security numbers and the content of emails and other digital messages. The measure allows the FCC to impose the opt-in rule on other types of information in the future, but certain types of data, such as a customer’s IP address and device identifier, are not subject to the opt-in requirement. The rules also force service providers to tell consumers clearly what data they collect and why, as well as to take steps to notify customers of data breaches. 
+However, the new rules do not require providers to get clear permission before using the data themselves. 
+Still, watchdog groups praised the announcement, with the digital rights organization Fight for the Future calling it “a big win for consumers [and] civil rights.” 
+Chris Calabrese, vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said , “This rule represents a significant step forward in protecting internet users, who have no choice but to expose massive amounts of information to broadband providers. It reflects the reality that where we go online is private and the people we pay to carry it should treat it as private.” 
+Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said the vote was “a historic win for privacy and free expression and for the vitality of the internet. Just as telephone companies are not allowed to listen in to our calls or sell information about who we talk to, our internet providers shouldn’t be allowed to monitor our internet usage for profit.” 
+Still, he noted, “The FCC’s order is not airtight. We can expect the industry to try to exploit every crack in these protections, and hope that the spirit of vigorous oversight and consumer protection that has animated this proceeding will continue.” 
+The racial justice group Color Of Change, which advocated for stronger privacy protections as a safeguard against data collection—which disproportionately affects communities of color—also welcomed the announcement. 
+“When Color Of Change began their advocacy on behalf of communities of color, the FCC listened, and today ends the era of corporations having unfettered access to our personal data and information, which has been routinely used to take advantage of the vulnerable,” said the organization’s campaign director Brandi Collins. “Third party marketing and advertising entities can no longer shamelessly target and prey upon black people and communities of color. This ruling also takes a strong stance to eliminate schemes that require payment for data to be protected and safeguards our actions online.” 
+Dallas Harris, policy fellow at the media democracy group Public Knowledge, said the decision “marks a significant step forward in protecting consumer privacy. For the first time, [ISPs] will be required to get consumer consent prior to using the sensitive information they collect. While much remains to be done to protect consumers online writ large, the commission’s rules establish a baseline level of protection for all.” 
+“Thanks to the rules passed by the commission today, consumers now have more control over how their information is used online than ever before. Yet, consumer protection rules are only as strong as their ability to be enforced, so it is imperative that the commission follow these strong rules with strict enforcement,” Harris said. TAGS:",FAKE
+7594,Pres. Obama RUTHLESSLY Trolls Trump After His Own Campaign GROUNDS Him From Twitter (VIDEO),"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+On Sunday, President Barack Obama was on the campaign trail stumping for Hillary Clinton in Florida when he started brutally mocking Donald Trump upon learning that his campaign may have taken away his Twitter account in the final days leading up to the election. 
+The president couldn’t help himself; he just had to go after the man who he characterized as being too immature to step into his job. 
+“Apparently his campaign has taken away his Twitter,” Obama said during a Florida rally for Hillary Clinton , to laughs. 
+The president then used humor to make a point to remind everyone of just what was at stake in this election. “In the last two days, they had so little confidence in his self control, they said: ‘We’re just going to take away your Twitter.’ Now, if somebody cant handle a Twitter account, they can’t handle the nuclear code,” Obama continued. “If somebody starts tweeting at three in the morning because SNL made fun of you, then you can’t handle the nuclear codes.” 
+On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Trump no longer controls his Twitter account. Instead, the Republican nominee appears to have aides creating “Trump safe” messages on his behalf while he focuses his energy on whining and lying at his live rallies. 
+During the rally in the battleground state of Florida, Obama labeled Trump as being “uniquely unqualified” and “temperamentally unfit” to serve as Commander-in-Chief. “I’ve been in this office now almost eight years and here’s what I can tell you,” Obama said. “Who you are, what you are, does not change when you take office. It just magnifies who you are. It just shines a spotlight on who are you.” Every day there’s another example of how much of a complete joke Trump’s campaign has been over the past year. But as much as we would love to laugh at this clown, we must first make sure he doesn’t get elected. Or else the joke’s on us. Featured image via (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) and (Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images) Share this Article!",FAKE
+3815,Obama to focus on future in State of the Union speech,"(CNN) As White House officials began preparing for President Barack Obama's final State of the Union speech, they dug up past ""eighth-year"" speeches and found something in common -- nearly all of them looked back.
+
+It was tempting for the President to follow the lead of his predecessors, take a victory lap and mainly tout his administration's achievements. But Obama's instruction to his team was simple: Don't do that.
+
+""Don't take our foot off the gas,"" the President told a group of West Wing aides and speechwriters preparing drafts of the speech, according to a senior White House official who attended meeting.
+
+As his top aides have described it, Obama has chosen to deliver a ""nontraditional"" State of the Union.
+
+Gone is the laundry list of policy proposals funneled into the White House from agencies across the federal government. No more ""MyRA's,"" one official quipped, pointing to the previous idea for a new government savings account that was inserted into a past State of the Union.
+
+""It's not going to be 'check the box,' "" explained one senior White House official, insisting that the annual retrieval of recommendations from Cabinet members will not be shoehorned into the speech.
+
+Obama previewed his plan to talk about his vision for the future in a video teaser tweeted by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.
+
+""The big things that will guarantee an even stronger, better, more prosperous America for our kids. The America we believe in,"" Obama said in the video.
+
+Vision for U.S. leadership around the world
+
+One of those ""big things"" will be the President's vision for U.S. leadership in the world in the post-Obama years.
+
+A senior White House official said Obama will urge the nation to follow his preferred foreign policy approach of diplomacy and multilateralism. To illustrate that call, the President is likely to tout the administration's response to the Ebola outbreak, the climate change agreement in Paris and his decision to normalize relations with Cuba.
+
+In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, Obama will also seek to reassure Americans once again about their safety. Senior administration officials said Obama plans to devote part of the speech to his vow to protect the American home front and put the nation on a path to destroying ISIS, a mission aides concede likely won't be accomplished on his watch.
+
+The war on ISIS ""will be the overarching focus of everything we do this year,"" deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters earlier this year.
+
+Still, Obama will dedicate much of the speech to his late second-term agenda. In the coming weeks, the President is expected to deliver a plan to Congress for closing the terror detention center at Guantanamo. Obama will likely threaten to act on his own to shut down the facility if lawmakers balk at the proposal.
+
+In what will be an emotional high point in the speech, the President will also defend his executive actions aimed at tightening the nation's background check system for gun buyers. Obama will then point to the first lady's box at the address where an empty seat will represent the victims of gun violence.
+
+Still, a nod to the past
+
+Given that this is Obama's final State of the Union, aides believe the President will still take a few moments to look back on his two terms in office, especially its tumultuous beginning.
+
+Obama was sworn into office as the nation was on the verge of slipping into a second Great Depression, his aides often remind reporters.
+
+The President has already begun to recall his administration's handling of the financial crisis, pointing to the recovery of the U.S. auto industry in his weekly address to the nation on Saturday.
+
+There will also be a heavy dose of nostalgia in Obama's speech. Inside the West Wing, top officials who are veterans of the President's first campaign for the White House can hardly believe Obama's time in office is almost up.
+
+In a nod to those one-time campaign aides who made the transition to the administration and the scores of volunteers during both election cycles, Obama will point to Edith Childs, who will be sitting in the first lady's box during the speech.
+
+Childs, a county council member in Greenwood, South Carolina, coined the popular chant, ""Fired up! Ready to go!"" at one of Obama's rallies in 2007. Then-Sen. Obama was so struck by the cheer it was adopted as an unofficial campaign slogan for the rest of his White House run.
+
+""This is going to be an incredibly emotional moment,"" said Van Jones, a leading environmental official in Obama's first administration and now a CNN political contributor.
+
+""You think about speech after speech, and this is the last one. This is the last State of the Union. And there's no deceleration in this guy. There's no deceleration. This is the guy that we voted for,"" Jones added.
+
+Despite that rich election lore waiting to be tapped, the President won't spend too much time reliving his election glory years, aides insist.
+
+Top officials describe the graying but still youthful 54-year-old President as almost restless, eager to squeeze every moment he can from his remaining year in office.
+
+""The question is what are the kinds of decisions that we are going to make right now that are going to ensure that we're going to pass on our to kids and their kids the most prosperous, the most secure, the most fair United States that has ever existed,"" White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Friday.
+
+House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has also signaled an ambitious agenda for 2016, joked that Obama should spend his final State of the Union apologizing for his past policies.
+
+"" 'I take it all back -- that health care was wrong, we shouldn't have done Dodd-Frank, I want to actually lower tax rates, clear out crony capitalism and restore the Constitution to its rightful place in American life.' That's what I would encourage him to say,"" quipped Ryan.",REAL
+8843,WATCH: Anti-LGBT Attack At Equality House – SHOTS FIRED (TWEETS),"WATCH: Anti-LGBT Attack At Equality House – SHOTS FIRED (TWEETS) By Jordan Baranowski on October 28, 2016 Subscribe 
+Planting Peace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to spreading peace in the world, purchased the house across the street from the Westboro Baptist Church in 2013. The organization soon painted the house the colors of the rainbow, started flying pride flags, and dubbed the home The Equality House to show support for the LGBT community. 
+Over the last week, The Equality House has been targeted by vandals. It is yet another example of the anger and violence that has taken our country by storm during this ugly election season. Image Provided By Aaron Jackson , Via NBC News 
+Aaron Jackson, the president of Planting Peace , was in the house on Sunday, October 23, when he heard noises outside. He called the police and discovered the house’s pride flags had been thrown into the street. 
+In addition, vandals had graffitied the phrase “fuk fags” in black spray paint on the side of the house. 
+Just a few days later, members of Planting Peace discovered seven bullet holes in a window of the house. Luckily, no one was inside at the time. Police are still investigating. 
+The Equality House has long served as an important symbol for the LGBT community. Located in Topeka, the capital of Kansas, the house sits directly across the street from the Westboro Baptist Church. Westboro was founded by Fred Phelps, and members of the church regularly picket funerals, plays, and gay weddings, accompanied by a series of signs with offensive slogans like “God Hates Fags.” 
+There is currently no evidence that the Westboro Baptist Church or its members were responsible for the attacks. 
+Speaking with Huffington Post , Jackson said of the issues facing the country and the LGBT community: “The blatant acts of hate we experience at the Equality House mirror the acts of hate and discrimination our LGBT family experiences every day. Planting Peace has seen an increase in hate mail, death threats and physical acts of vandalism and violence over the past three months. According to the FBI, the LGBT community is more likely to experience a hate crime than any other minority group.” 
+Even as these attacks continue, Planting Peace will continue to preach peace, love, and acceptance. Not long after the attacks, they tweeted out the following : 
+— Equality House (@Equality_House) October 27, 2016 
+Thoughts and prayers are nice, but if you really want to help Planting Peace, check out their website and donate to their cause. 
+Featured Image By Aaron Jackson Via NBC News About Jordan Baranowski 
+Jordan is a writer and teacher based out of Kansas City. Connect",FAKE
+2944,ISIS launches attack on Kirkuk,"Amman, Jordan (CNN) ISIS militants have attacked Kirkuk in northern Iraq, an effort that might be an earnest attempt to capture the key oil-rich city or perhaps to divert Kurdish troops fighting to capture the Islamist extremist group's stronghold of Mosul.
+
+For months, ISIS has been facing off with the Peshmerga -- armed fighters who protect Iraqi Kurdistan -- to the west of Kirkuk. It had gone into areas on Kirkuk's outskirts, but not the central city.
+
+Heavily armed militants attacked an abandoned hotel in central Kirkuk that local police had used as their headquarters.
+
+Peshmerga and Kurdish anti-terror units later raided the hotel, wresting control of it from the militants and killing three of them, according to Peshmerga sources. In addition, two suicide bombers detonated themselves in an attempt to keep the Kurdish forces out.
+
+Also Friday, ISIS militants took over Maktab Khalid, an area about 12 miles southwest of Kirkuk, after heavy clashes with the Peshmerga.
+
+Among those killed was Brig. Gen. Shirko Fateh, the highest-ranking operational commander of the Peshmerga brigade located in Kirkuk.
+
+Photos posted by ISIS purportedly show the group's militants in control of parts of south and southwest Kirkuk, burning tents that had been used by Peshmerga troops.
+
+The U.S. military said Friday that an ISIS chemical weapons expert was killed during a coalition strike late last week.
+
+Abu Malik worked in Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons program before joining al Qaeda in 2005, U.S. Central Command said.
+
+He was killed January 24 near Mosul.
+
+""His death is expected to temporarily degrade and disrupt the terrorist network and diminish (ISIS') ability to potentially produce and use chemical weapons against innocent people,"" the military said.
+
+There is no public evidence that ISIS has a dedicated weapons of mass destruction program.
+
+But U.S. Central Command said: ""His past training and experience provided the terrorist group with expertise to pursue a chemical weapons capability.""
+
+Kirkuk is a strategically important city in the months-long fight, one that has pitted ISIS against the Peshmerga, Iraqi government troops and an international coalition that has carried out airstrikes against the terrorist group.
+
+It is one of the few notable cities -- apart from the region of Kurdistan and its capital, Irbil -- in northern Iraq that haven't fallen to ISIS. Part of its significance stems from the fact its oil reserves are almost as much as those in southern Iraq.
+
+The Kurds and the central Iraqi government in Baghdad have long wrangled over control of those reserves, with each side wanting to keep hold of them. ISIS, which relies heavily on revenue from oil smuggling to fund its operations, has been coveting them, too.
+
+Peshmerga forces took over the Kirkuk area in June when the Iraqi army crumbled in the face of ISIS' advances and have played a vital role in defending it from ISIS since.
+
+In December, ISIS claimed responsibility for a suicide car bomb attack there that killed at least 17 people and injured more than 20. The attack, according to ISIS, was meant to send a message to the Kurdish people and Peshmerga fighters.
+
+Still, Kirkuk is hardly the only place that has seen recent fighting -- which may be part of ISIS' rationale for Friday's attack there.
+
+The city of 1.5 million people on the Tigris River has been held by ISIS since June. ISIS has invested heavily in governing the city. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, pronounced his leadership of the caliphate at the Grand Mosque there in July.
+
+Kurdish officials say that as long as ISIS holds Mosul, it threatens Kurdistan. Likewise, neither the government in Baghdad nor its coalition partners can rest while terrorists occupy Iraq's second-largest city.
+
+Peshmerga forces have made steady progress against ISIS north and west of Mosul over the past two months.
+
+They have taken some 3,000 square kilometers (1,160 square miles) of the Sinjar area, as well as the area around the Mosul Dam, choking off access routes and threatening ISIS' main resupply routes.
+
+There's little doubt, though, that ISIS remains a very real force, and threat, in much of Iraq.
+
+The group, which calls itself the Islamic State, still controls a vast swath of that Middle Eastern nation and neighboring Syria. Its goal is to have a vast caliphate under its strict version of Sharia law, with its followers proving they will stop at nothing -- having been blamed for the large-scale killings of civilians, mass kidnappings and forcing women and girls to become sex slaves -- during its quest.
+
+That violent campaign continued Friday, and not just in Kirkuk.
+
+Dozens of gunmen believed to be from ISIS faced off Friday morning about 175 miles (285 kilometers) away in central Ramadi, police and health officials in that city said.
+
+Several hours later, that onslaught had been foiled and 20 gunmen were dead, according to the officials.
+
+Elsewhere in Ramadi, a suicide car bomb explosion at an Iraqi army checkpoint killed one soldier and wounded six others.
+
+Violence flared in other parts of Iraq as well that, while it hasn't been tied to ISIS, is further proof of the country's unsettled state.
+
+Six explosions went off Friday around Baghdad, leaving at least seven dead and 23 wounded, according to police officials.
+
+The deadliest such blast was in Bab Al Sharji, a busy commercial area in central Baghdad, leaving three dead and 10 hurt.",REAL
+1282,How Hillary Clinton lost young (white) women,"As the Clinton campaign turns its attention to South Carolina, its drubbing in New Hampshire suggests Hillary Clinton's feminist credentials simply don't appeal to young women.
+
+Explaining Hillary Clinton has long been a thriving subculture in American punditry. After New Hampshire, there’s a new wrinkle: Why are young women abandoning her?
+
+As a Wellesley College student in the late 1960s, Hillary Rodham exemplified a brash new model of the young woman activist. Her unscripted graduation speech blasting the commencement speaker – her former mentor and lone black United States senator, Edward Brooke – drew national attention.
+
+But this week, Clinton lost most of the women's vote in her 22-point defeat to Sen. Bernie Sanders, a rival she once led by 40 points in the polls, and the losses cut deepest among young women.
+
+“She just doesn’t seem as extremely truthful,” says Tayla Schipilliti, a bridal consultant and student at Nashua Community College, after voting in Merrimack, N.H.
+
+Evidence for this view includes “the whole e-mail thing,” the videos circulating on social media sites that challenge Clinton’s claim to have landed in Bosnia in 1996 under sniper fire, and stories Ms. Schipilliti's parents told her about how the Clintons treated people, she says. Like many in the first-in-the-nation primary, she tried to follow the race, including attending candidate events at her college and watching campaign videos on line.
+
+""Personally I obviously support equal pay for woman and all that, but just because that’s her main stance and she’s a woman I don’t feel that I have to vote for her. So I ended up voting for Bernie,” she says.
+
+New Hampshire exit polls show Clinton coming up short in virtually every demographic group, except for voters over the age of 65 or with incomes over $200,000. It's important to note, also, that there are too few nonwhite voters in New Hampshire to register in the exit polls – a demographic that will be much more a factor in the next primary votes in South Carolina, Nevada, and March 1 super primary states across the South.
+
+She is also on the losing slope of a 35-point gender gap with men and a 10 percent gap with women in Tuesday’s returns. On Primary Day, 55 percent of women voted for Sanders, including 69 percent of women under 45.
+
+Voters give Clinton high marks on leadership qualities (54 percent), experience (84 percent), and electability (79 percent), but few think that she cares about people like them (17 percent). While nearly 9 in 10 who voted in the Democratic primary say that Sanders is honest and trustworthy, less than half say the same for Clinton. Two-thirds of voters said they preferred Sanders's positions on the issues to hers.
+
+Polling on the eve of the vote shows an even stronger disaffection for Clinton among the youngest voters. Among women age 18 to 34, Sanders led Clinton 87 to 9 percent, according to final tracking polls.
+
+That antipathy, fed by social media, may extend to girls below the voting age, as well, if this encounter is any indication: Commenting on the election results, Vana Rizos, a waitress in Brookline, N.H., pulls out her cell phone to replay a video of her mother, Rika, walking into a voting booth on Tuesday. In the video, her daughter, Krysele – who is 14 and holding the camera – calls out to ask who she will vote for. At the answer –“Hillary Clinton, of course!” – the girl groans and stops recording.
+
+So, why the groan? “She thinks that Bernie is authentic and Hillary is fake, because she always travels with a big entourage,” said Vana Rizos, her mother.
+
+Both the Clinton campaign and many commentators were slow to appreciate how faintly Clinton’s persona as a champion of women’s rights would register with younger voters.
+
+One reason is that the electorate has changed since Clinton won the New Hampshire presidential primary in 2008, and young women don't have the same points of reference as Clinton's generation.
+
+“New Hampshire is a different state that it was in 2008,” says Andrew Smith, director of the Survey Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.  “Younger voters have a very different set of experiences that affect their political world than we have.”
+
+“Women under 35 probably have had women professors and bosses,"" he adds. ""They haven’t had the experiences that their mothers and grandmothers did. That’s why feminist messages just don’t resonate with younger voters.”
+
+By contrast, Sanders is talking about issues that resonate, “such as not having a job or not making the money you wanted to, or living in your parents’ basement,” he says.
+
+A similar assumption that doesn't pass generational muster is that Americans couldn’t possibly vote for a socialist. “Those that are my age know it’s a political death knell,” he adds. “But there is a significant part of the electorate who weren’t born when the Berlin Wall came down. Younger voters see socialism as their trip to Denmark or Sweden or Paris.”
+
+Feminist icon Gloria Steinem had to walk back  a comment on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” that young women back Sanders over Clinton because “that’s where the boys are.” A comment by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, at a rally with Clinton on Saturday, that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support women,” also fell flat among young women voters drawn to the promise of a social movement. They were not only annoyed at being scolded, but affronted by the idea they have to vote for Clinton just because she's a woman.
+
+During the Democratic debate on PBS Thursday night, Clinton shrugged off Ms. Albright's comment, saying, ""She's been saying that for as long as I've known her."" Clinton said she has ""no argument with anyone making up her mind about who to support. I just hope by the end of this campaign a lot more are supporting me.... I am not asking people to support me because I'm a woman,"" but ""because I think I'm the most qualified, experienced, and ready person to be the president and commander-in-chief.""
+
+In  an essay in Slate after the New Hampshire vote, cultural critic Camille Paglia maintains that one thing that's driving young women to Sanders is Clinton's ""over-use of 'I' in the current campaign, in contrast to Bernie Sanders's ego-transcending focus on sparking a populist movement of political reform.""
+
+Lost in the New Hampshire outcome is the fact that Clinton still has a core of supporters, especially among nonwhite voters, who credit her record as an activist.
+
+A get-out-the-vote rally for Clinton at Nashua Community College last week was packed with supporters waving “NEA Democrats for Hillary,” a reference to the largest national teachers union, which has long done much of the legwork in Democratic campaigns.
+
+“She’s been secretary of State. How could you think someone like that wouldn’t be a good president” says Faith Little, an online instructor of social work at Boston University. Commenting on all the support for Sanders among students, she adds: “She’s being realistic about what she can deliver.”
+
+Clinton also has the support of much of the party establishment. She has been campaigning in New Hampshire primaries since 1991, not only in the four Clinton presidential races (1992, 1996, 2008, 2016), but also to help other Democrats. In the process, she earned the gratitude of many Democrats here,  including US Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, who is running in a tight race to oust Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R).
+
+Critics say that establishment support doesn't count for much in what is an election defined by anger against the establishment. The support of a governor and US senator did little to avert a Clinton defeat in New Hampshire, but it is firing up controversy in the wake of that vote.
+
+Here's the issue: Governor Hassan, Senator Shaheen and four other “superdelegates” are now pledged to support Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. Despite her blowout loss to Sanders, Clinton could wind up with as many or more New Hampshire delegates than Sanders in Philadelphia.
+
+If social networking buzz is any indication, the issue is opening a new intergenerational fracture between Clinton and younger voters, who see the move as part of a rigged political system – a leading Sanders talking point.
+
+In a statement after the vote, Hassan reached out to Sanders voters. “No matter what the ultimate outcome of the nominating process, Senator Sanders has importantly voiced the frustration of many Granite Staters who know corporate special interests in Washington are holding our families and small businesses back,” she said in a statement.",REAL
+8447,"Geoengineering Watch Global Alert News, November 5, 2016","geoengineeringwatch.org 
+The power structure is continuing to fracture from within. Like feuding mafia families that no longer have enough turf to exploit, they will begin to turn on each other. There are many predicting the manner in which the dominos will fall, but who can know with any certainty? There are simply too many variables and too many factors that are already far beyond the breaking point. The noose is being tightened around all our necks from countless directions. The AT&T purchase of Time Warner (and thus CNN News) is just another sign of the rapid power structure consolidation. Those who attempt to stand up to the fascist state are treated brutally, as the Dakota pipeline protesters now know. The hypocrisy of environmentalists like Leonardo DiCaprio (and organizations like National Geographic) is perplexing and disappointing. The newly released film ""After The Flood (by DeCaprio and National Geographic) was disappointing and unfortunately only a half truth. The US military continues to bomb the forces that are actually fighting ISIS, why? Has the human race overshot the planet's ability to support the population? If so, who bears the blame, and where do we go from here? The latest installment of Global Alert News is below. 
+As the battle for the greater good becomes ever more difficult, and the horizon grows darker, many, unfortunately, abandon their post and passively sit down on the bench. There is no solace in walking away from the most important struggle ever faced by the human race and at the most critical time. We must never turn away, we must never yield, we must never give up, make your voice heard in the fight for the greater good.",FAKE
+1658,What's behind the debate over the Republican debates?,"Just three debates in, the saga over the CNBC Republican showdown in Colorado last week has dashed the hopes of party bosses that the storm of controversy and recrimination over debates that clouded the 2012 campaign -- and hampered eventual nominee Mitt Romney -- could be avoided.
+
+Last time around, candidates griped that there were too many debates -- there were 20 in all -- and that their frequency and need for preparation interrupted campaigns and elevated long-shot hopefuls who had no chance of winning the nomination in the media spotlight.
+
+This time, especially following the CNBC debate Wednesday, candidates are complaining that the moderators are taking too much airtime, keep interrupting those on stage and are biased against conservatives. Front-runners say that those stuck in single digits in the polls shouldn't even be in the debates while the dark horses complain that being confined to second-tier events is killing their campaigns.
+
+But while the candidates have been quick to jump on the moderators and the networks hosting them, in truth each candidate has reasons for wanting a different format that most suits his or her campaign. The result has been another round of controversy and recrimination.
+
+Sunday's meeting of campaign operatives produced a tentative truce with a modest set of demands for changes to the format of future debates, but even that initiative split the GOP field. By Monday night, Donald Trump, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina had declined to sign on.
+
+The issue is likely to persist as long as the GOP field remains bloated, guaranteeing constant tensions as each candidate jockeys for position -- whether for more time on screen or fewer minutes in the hot seat.
+
+Here is how the Republican White House hopefuls are playing the debate over debates for their own advantage.
+
+What he wants: Trump has made no secret of his desire for cuts in the size of the top-tier GOP debate. He's publicly warned the likes of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul they shouldn't even be sharing a stage with him.
+
+""There are too many people on the debate stage. It should be five. Let the other eight or nine or 10 go onto the second debate,"" Trump's special counsel Michael Cohen said on CNN's ""New Day"" on Monday. Trump, who faded during a three-hour-long debate on CNN in September, has also led calls for the events to be limited to two hours.
+
+Why he wants it: The billionaire front-runner is a master of manipulating the media and doesn't want to share his spotlight. The more candidates he can exclude from the stage, the less competition he has to confront head on at the top.
+
+What he wants: The former neurosurgeon has called for the GOP to abandon the current format for televised debates. He says journalist moderators ask ""gotcha"" questions and wants debates to be stripped from the networks and carried on YouTube or Facebook and become more of a forum-style event, according to The Wall Street Journal.
+
+Why he wants it: Since Carson is not a professional politician, he has far less experience in the cut-and-thrust of debate than many of his competitors. His soft-spoken, laid-back style seems a better fit for less adversarial settings. And some of his answers on the details of policy have been shaky during the past two debates, giving him even more incentive to avoid such scrutiny.
+
+What he wants: Rubio is happy to take the chance to turn tough questions or those he deems unfair into a chance to lash the ""liberal"" media. He's called the moderators of the CNBC debate biased and says they asked trivial questions. And he didn't wait until the showdown was over last week before castigating the media as a de facto arm of the Democratic Party.
+
+""The Democrats have the ultimate super PAC ... called the mainstream media for every single day,"" Rubio said while on the debate stage.
+
+Why he wants it: Rubio wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He's got strong political reasons to slam the media, as doing so delights conservative voters who harbor suspicions about his record, including on immigration.
+
+But the Florida senator also wants to ensure GOP debates remain on platforms such as cable television outlets that draw huge audiences and are introducing him to a wide spectrum of voters before a possible general election campaign.
+
+Rubio has improved his performance in each of the three Republican debates so far and his sharp political skills -- evidenced in his putdown of Jeb Bush in Colorado -- are ideally suited to such an adversarial setting.
+
+What he wants: Jeb Bush probably cannot wait until the next Republican debate, on November 10, to try to dispel memories of his lifeless and disjointed showing in the CNBC clash. He partly blamed the moderators of the CNBC debate for his woes, telling NBC's ""Meet the Press"" on Sunday that the event was ""weird"" and that he was stopped from answering a Rubio slapdown by moderators.
+
+Why he wants it: Bush is fighting a narrative of decay that is beginning to envelop his campaign after his disaster in the Rockies. He must seize on any and all debate opportunities to try to ignite a comeback narrative.
+
+What he wants: The New Jersey governor has one thing to say to those who complain that the debates are unfair: Bring it on.
+
+""Do not count me in this group that is doing this moaning and complaining about this,"" Christie told CNN's ""New Day"" on Monday. ""The presidency is almost never scripted. We shouldn't have these debates scripted either.""
+
+Why he wants it: Christie has his own comeback narrative to work on as he languishes at 1% in national polls. So any time he can get into a debate with the front-runners, he benefits -- as he did after a strong performance in the Colorado debate.
+
+Christie is another candidate who does well when the back-and-forth heats up, so he would join a debate every week if he could. Debate appearances also allow him to exploit the ""straight shooter"" persona he adopted as governor of the Garden State and which he is using to try to haul himself into contention in the New Hampshire primary -- his best chance for a decent result in an early voting state.
+
+What he wants: Thank the Texas senator for getting this ball rolling. Cruz, using the forensic debating skills honed at Harvard Law School and as one of the most talented Supreme Court litigators of his generation, lacerated the CNBC debate as it was still going on. He followed up that coup by demanding debates hosted by the high priests of the conservative talk radio scene -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.
+
+Why he wants it: Cruz, who is quietly building a strong challenge for the nomination, is keen to do anything he can to dominate the conservative voting bloc, which also happens to revere the trio of talk show hosts. Though his rivals appear unlikely to allow it to happen, such a spectacle would leave Cruz basking in reflected glory.
+
+What she wants: ""I'll debate anyone, any time, any place,"" the only woman in the GOP field tweeted Monday. Fiorina would also be keen to get key conservatives into the mix. In another tweet, she said that conservative radio host Glenn Beck should be considered.
+
+Why she wants it: In a sense, Fiorina's campaign barely exists off the debate stage. Her fiery showing in the undercard debate on Fox in August nudged her poll numbers up sufficiently to get her into the top-tier debate CNN hosted in September.
+
+But away from the debate stage, Fiorina has struggled to keep in the public eye, and her hopes of a future in Republican politics rely on as much exposure as possible.
+
+What he wants: The Ohio governor is another candidate who wants more debates and is seeking the moral high ground by being happy to take any question that comes up. He told CNN's Dana Bash on ""State of the Union"" Sunday that he is ""the governor of the seventh-largest state in America, and I have had so many questions thrown at me over the course of my time.""
+
+Why he wants it: Kasich is billing himself as the kind of candidate the Republicans need, someone who can win his own crucial general election swing state and others like it. So parrying hostile questions from moderators that other candidates consider biased and reaching out to the vast cable television audience watching the debates makes strategic sense.
+
+What he wants: Trust the libertarian Republican to have an idea far from the mainstream. The Kentucky senator and veteran filibusterer joked that he'd back a 13-hour debate and give each candidate an hour to talk. He says having no moderator at all would be worth looking at and hit out at ""gotcha"" questions.
+
+Why he wants it: At this point, with his campaign falling well short of expectations, the more time before a national audience Paul can get, the better.
+
+What he wants: Mike Huckabee, the former cable news pundit and Arkansas governor, said on Fox News after Wednesday's debate that changes that were needed in the debate format because running for president was a serious business and candidates shouldn't be part of a TV station's effort to drive up ratings.
+
+Why he wants it: Huckabee's campaign has barely made a ripple this time around, after he won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 on the way to coming second in the GOP delegate count. So any publicity is good publicity and Huckabee's brand of folksy humor is tailor-made for the debate stage.
+
+What they want: Each man, stuck in the purgatory of undercard debates, wants a chance to hit prime time. South Carolina Sen. Graham, for instance, wants two GOP debates of seven candidates each.
+
+""We have too many people on one stage and too few on the other,"" Graham told CNN on Monday.
+
+Former New York Gov. Pataki believes that if Americans only get to see him, they will view him as a potential commander in chief. As many Americans as possible must be exposed to the candidates, he said, as it's ""the best way to pick a president.""
+
+Why they want it: Survival.",REAL
+7334,Tiny Homes Banned in U.S. at Increasing Rate as Govt Criminalizes Sustainable Living,". Tiny Homes Banned in U.S. at Increasing Rate as Govt Criminalizes Sustainable Living As the corporatocracy tightens its grip on the masses – finding ever more ways to funnel wealth to t... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/tiny-homes-banned-in-us-at-increasing.html As the corporatocracy tightens its grip on the masses – finding ever more ways to funnel wealth to the top – humanity responds in a number of ways, including the rising popularity of tiny houses. These dwellings, typically defined as less than 500 square feet, are a way for people to break free of mortgages, taxes, utility bills and the general trappings of “stuff.” They’re especially attractive to millennials and retirees, or those seeking to live off-grid. But government and corporations depend on rampant consumerism and people being connected to the grid.Seeking actual freedom through minimalist living should seem like a natural fit for the American dream, but the reality is that many governments around the country either ban tiny homes or force them to be connected to the utility grid.“As of now, few cities allow stand-alone tiny houses. Most communities have minimum square footage requirements for single-family homes mandating that smaller dwellings be an “accessory” to a larger, traditional house. “Many also have rules requiring that dwellings be hooked up to utilities, which is a problem for tiny-house enthusiasts who want to live off the grid by using alternative energy sources such as solar panels and rainwater catchment systems.” Some of the more recent examples of explicit bans include Etowah, TN and Wasilla, AK , which don’t allow homes less than 600 square feet and 700 square feet, respectively. Boise, ID doesn’t allow homes less than a few hundred square feet, as Shaun Wheeler of Wheeler Homes found when he built a perfectly good and safe 310 sq. ft. home. Lawmakers spout slippery slope fallacies, saying that allowing tiny homes will lead to decay and “unsightly little cabins plunked down next to traditional homes.” Using government force to stamp out societal change in response to financial factors is this councilman’s idea of conservatism. Granted, some cities are actually encouraging tiny homes as a means of freedom or as a solution to homelessness, as in Detroit, MI . Some Los Angeles lawmakers don’t see it that way , calling tiny homes for the homeless “a threat in many ways to our public safety.” Wasilla residents are baffled by the tiny home ban, which seems to run contrary to Alaska’s wild and free nature. Tundra Tiny Houses is leading a new market of small home construction using renewable energy, and now they’ll have to tell customers Wasilla is not an option, in addition to Anchorage to Eagle River. A big priority for tiny home dwellers is their reduced environmental impact. Many are capable of producing all their own energy from solar and wind, collecting rainwater and reusing graywater. Not depending on utility inputs naturally makes a lot of sense, especially for a tiny home on wheels. Even those who put their tiny home on a piece of land away from crowded spaces – with the intention of living off-grid through renewable inputs – are considered outlaws if they don’t hook to the utility grid. This of course ensures that utility companies, which are big donors to political campaigns and profit immensely from government-enabled monopolies, will always get their cut from every household. In January we reported that sunny Nevada essentially killed its solar industry by increasing their tax on solar customers by 40 percent, causing solar providers to leave the state. The only beneficiary was NV Energy, whose energy monopoly was protected. Spur, TX was the first city to advertise being “tiny house friendly” as a “town that welcomes new pioneers”– proudly supporting “reducing costs and gaining freedom to operate according to your own plan, unfettered by onerous and unnecessary costs.” To have this “freedom,” you must secure your properly permitted tiny home to an approved foundation and be connected to city utilities. The property must always be mowed and the prime responsibility is “of course, paying your taxes!” “When cities require the same permitting for tiny houses on foundations as they do for traditional houses, it often doesn’t make financial sense to build tiny. “At that point it’s really more of a lifestyle choice than an economic choice,” said Nick Krautter, a real estate agent in Portland, Oregon, who abandoned plans for a tiny house development. 23-year-old college graduate, Sarah Hastings, built a 190-square-foot home on three acres of farmland in Hadley, MA, complete with a garden next to it. But the town found she was not in compliance with zoning ordinances, and now her home is in storage. Hastings proposed a change to the town’s laws to allow for her tiny home, but the measure was vote down “because some residents were afraid the town would be overrun with them.” There will be no minimalist, environmentally friendly living in Hadley. Clearly, the emergence of tiny homes is being met with fear, and the resulting banishment of freedom, by too many towns and cities across America that can’t quite fathom this shift in the way people think about living. It’s one thing to be concerned about safety issues, but the imposition of minimum square footage requirements and mandatory connections to city utilities is mindless authoritarianism. Let’s hope places like Fresno, CA and Rockledge, FL, which are specifically allowing tiny homes on wheels, can help their more “traditional” counterparts embrace the future. Reference: http://thefreethoughtproject.com Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+8481,Reflections on US Political Tragedies,"Reflections on US Political Tragedies November 14, 2016 
+Two very unpopular candidates made the 2016 presidential campaign an embarrassment for American democracy. Now, the outcome could become one more tragedy for U.S. politics, observes David Marks. 
+By David Marks 
+Mourning seems a strange response to election results; as I consider my feelings after the presidential election, I’ve realized it’s another chapter in a sequence of tragedies throughout my life. 
+I was eleven when the news of President Kennedy’s assassination came over the loudspeaker in our sixth-grade classroom. Our tough, yet inspirational teacher wept at her desk in front of us. Her tears taught me more than any explanation of those events could ever reveal. 
+Not many years later, I suffered the shock of the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and wondered at how these horrific events would shape the future. 
+I had wanted to be an astronaut, but soon realized that going to the moon as a U.S. Air Force pilot might have the prerequisite of bombing Vietnam. I began understanding the damage the U.S. was doing with its military interventions, and made a conscious decision to stay away from space and politics. It seemed you could only improve yourself to make a better world. Politics was not for the peaceful. 
+By 1973, the stench of Watergate drifted across the country. I was fascinated; a “smoking gun” is not needed in a murder prosecution, but somehow had become a necessity in political crime. But Nixon’s defenders could not counter undeniable evidence of illegal activity by both the President and his aides that was found in White House audiotapes. Most of the political “nobility” escaped the consequences while Nixon and a few accomplices took the fall. 
+We knew Nixon was a war criminal years before, but Watergate set a precedent that our leaders must be caught in the act of some far narrower and less consequential crime to prove they are scoundrels. We do know that Nixon feared and obsessed on the revelations of worse crimes in his past. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ The Heinous Crime Behind Watergate. ”] 
+Retreating from Politics 
+Ever more convinced of the darkness in U.S. politics, I retreated further, convinced that only personal actions and relationships could shape the world. Ronald Reagan and his 1980 vice-presidential running mate George H.W. Bush. 
+There was a glimmer of hope during Jimmy Carter’s presidency; he was a seemingly honest leader, supporting alternative energy and a cleaner environment, and allowing investigations into foreign and domestic assassinations of the previous decade. But few were moved or surprised by the contradiction of the Warren Commission’s findings and the Congressional pronouncement that JFK had been killed by a conspiracy. 
+In 1980, my first daughter was born during the northern California Indian summer. Even the election of Ronald Reagan two months later couldn’t eclipse my elation. I recall thinking about how the world might be different when she became a woman. I could only attempt to be a good enough father so that she would be kind and strong, and brave and bright enough to gain her equanimity. 
+It was only a month after the 1980 election that John Lennon died. It was then I mourned his murder and Reagan’s rise as a converged event. Lennon had been hounded by the junta that had taken over the country. He had once observed, “Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that.” 
+I recovered with the knowledge that the power of John’s music would stay with us, and knew his spirit would give perspective and strength to my daughter and the many children whose lives were just beginning. Despite his passing, John Lennon’s open-eyed idealism had been magnified. 
+The combination of Reagan’s rise and Lennon’s death in 1980, with the background of earlier assassinations of political leaders, continued to shape my world. Disgusted and repulsed by the “Reagan era,” it was a time for further retreat and the nurturing of ideas for a better future. 
+My second daughter’s joyful arrival in February of 1984, coincided with the U.S. “stabilizing” the Middle East, firing shells into Lebanon. Our “ally” Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people were fighting a horrific ground war with Iran. The conflict was far away, though I knew U.S. interests in oil resources in the region would eventually turn around to impact our lives directly. 
+Despite the violence perpetrated by our country, I was still resolved to make a better world for both daughters in my own small way. Although very young, I knew they were part of a generation of gifted, empowered women who might be able to change the course of the planet. 
+Hypocrisy of Reagan 
+In 1986-87, revelations of the hypocrisy of Reagan and his gang emerged during the Iran Contra investigation and hearings. I was fascinated that Reagan had sent a bible and cake (along with weapons, of course) to Iranian leaders when he had publicly invoked Iran as America’s greatest enemy. By helping Iran with sophisticated U.S. weapons for cash, Reagan and his team could secretly fund the Nicaraguan Contras in a dirty war outside the scope of Congress. Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush with CIA Director William Casey at the White House on Feb. 11, 1981. (Photo credit: Reagan Library) 
+The issue of foiling Congress seemed to distract from what was an important question: why was Reagan helping the strongest voices for Islamic Jihad in the region? I recall thinking how any Democratic president would have been impeached, drawn and quartered for such a betrayal to the country. Reagan came away from the “affair” largely unscathed; he wasn’t protected by Teflon, as the press claimed, he was surrounded by organized criminals of the highest order. 
+I could no longer bear just watching events unfold. The crimes of Washington pushed me to where I had to get involved. I offered my support and assisted with the work of a handful of dedicated journalists investigating the 1980 “October Surprise,” i.e., tracing back Reagan’s secret arms sales to Iran in the mid-1980s to an earlier arrangement in which Reagan secretly approved arms sales via Israel to Iran immediately after taking office in 1981. 
+The evidence pointed to Reagan’s presidential campaign having secretly made a deal with Iranian leaders to delay the release of the hostages until after the U.S. presidential election. Polls had shown that if the hostages were released before Election Day, Jimmy Carter would have won reelection. And, indeed, the Iranians held the hostages until Reagan had taken the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981. 
+But the statements and testimony of a couple of dozen witnesses including officials in Iran, Israel, Europe and the United States – along with important documentary evidence – failed to shake off Reagan’s Teflon. 
+In 1991-1992, I watched as a modern version of The Emperor’s New Clothes played before us. When faced with the possibility that an election would be revealed as a complete sham, Republicans and Democrats stood shoulder to shoulder to deny the possibility and limit the damage. No matter how much evidence emerged (smoking cannons), the truth did not matter when Washington’s status quo was threatened. I mourned for our loss of truth. 
+(To this day,   mainstream media outlets refuse to question the October Surprise conventional wisdom that Reagan must be innocent, although even the chairman of the congressional whitewashing investigation has now admitted to having second thoughts. ) 
+However, as the special prosecutor’s Iran-Contra investigation and the congressional October Surprise inquiry extended into 1992, they did cast enough doubt on the Reagan administration’s relationship with Iran (and the role of Reagan’s Vice President – and then President – George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director) that they affected the presidential election results of 1992. 
+Along with his approval ratings falling steadily due to the economy, incumbent George H.W. Bush lost the false gloss of being an honest politician. The end of 12 years of Republican presidents came to an end as Bush lost to moderate “New Democrat” Bill Clinton. 
+The Parties Blur 
+Fast forward through the Clinton years when the blur between Republican and Democrats became a thick haze. The Republicans, although vaguely different from President Clinton in some social policies and economic preferences, found they could only demonize him for his handling of sexual indiscretions. His real crime was winning a second term in office, which no Democrat had done since Franklin Roosevelt. Meanwhile, U.S. foreign policy only became more firmly aligned with international corporate priorities. President Bill Clinton 
+And then quickly (please) through the eight years of George W. Bush. Although the list is long, the penultimate disgrace of his presidency was the mis-applied vengeance over the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 by using the tragedy to justify the unjustifiable invasion of Iraq. 
+Bush’s horrific administration, staffed heavily with arrogant and incompetent cronies, conducted a war that gave foundation to a generation of angry young people in the Middle East who will always see the United States as a terrorist state. I realized at the beginning of the Iraq invasion that violence is not about politics; I thought, there’s a child in Iraq who in 20 years will say: “The U.S. killed my father, I’ll gladly walk into Washington with a nuclear backpack.” 
+There was a reprieve of sorts and certainly some refreshing changes with the Obama presidency. But the recognition that Barack Obama would continue the U.S. military enterprises in the Middle East overshadowed any of his more enlightened policies. Yes, his adversaries tried to foil him at every turn, but the priorities of the wealthiest Americans were rarely in question. Washington politics and its ugly international footprint are a continuing tragedy. 
+And then there is Trump. It took a few days to realize that I was in mourning again, as much as I mourned when leaders were killed or when Reagan came to power; I mourn particularly for my daughters and the younger generations of women and men who deserve better. My mother, born in 1925, president of her college class, a beloved teacher and still a strong bright woman, feels that the event horizon with Trump gives her more anxiety and fear than she experienced in all of her life, including World War II. She may not see a woman as president of the United States. I mourn for her loss. 
+Hope for Hillary 
+I recognize that in many ways Hillary Clinton represented a status quo that has worn on me, but I had some hope that her ascendance to the presidency might change her, and as the first woman in that office, she might take on a leadership role that embraced pacifism; or at least might be influenced by those who feel peace is the priority. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. 
+There is much concern for what Trump will do, but the greater pain and loss is about what he won’t do. Mourning is always about loss; in this instance, the possibilities of progress that have been taken away for the near future, assuming that Trump continues to align himself with reactionary pols – the likes of Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence – who stuck with him   Many Republicans see Trump as little more than a signature-writing machine who will sign whatever right-wing bills they send him. 
+So, we will mourn for a while, but a better world can still be realized. My mom and my daughters are no less powerful; and we all can be empowered by the blatant hypocrisy of this election – as we also recognize the hidden history that gave this travesty its foundation. 
+Political events may influence how we feel; but more importantly, who we are, and what we are willing to do for each other, determines our personal and political future. 
+David Marks is a veteran documentary filmmaker and investigative reporter. His work includes films for the BBC and PBS, including Nazi Gold , on the role of Switzerland in WWII and Jimi Hendrix: The Man they made God . He is writing a film screenplay, Extreme Ignorance , highlighting the need to turn electronic media into a creative force.",FAKE
+3824,President Obama has had an eventful year. His approval rating hasn't budged.,"2015 has been an eventful year for Barack Obama. He made a historic nuclear deal with Iran, two of his Supreme Court appointees voted to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, he's fought with the left to advance his trade agenda, and he gave a speech on race and gun violence that was hailed as the best of his presidency.
+
+And none of that has caused his approval rating to budge in the slightest, as you can see in this HuffPost Pollster chart:
+
+The full trend of Obama's approval throughout his presidency, which you can see here, has had many more ups and downs. This year's rating of 45 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval is mediocre historically, as you can see over at Gallup (it tops George W. Bush and Harry Truman's seventh-year approval, but is well behind Bill Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower's and slightly behind Ronald Reagan's).
+
+Obama's rating is slightly better than it was last year, when it was similarly steady at about 43 percent approval and 52 percent disapproval. But the broader change some expected would result from improving economic news isn't evident yet.
+
+Political scientist Alan Abramowitz has argued that unless Obama's approval makes it back up to 50 percent, the Democrat who's running to succeed him should be considered a narrow underdog. He predicted that Obama's current approval rating of 45 percent would likely result in the Democratic nominee getting 49 percent of the two-party vote share, and therefore losing.
+
+Now, elections aren't simply a referendum on presidential approval (Abramowitz's own ""time for a change"" model also incorporates GDP growth). And of course, it's possible that future news events could change Obama's approval rating. But all such news events this year have, so far, failed to do so.",REAL
+4288,GOP Power Rankings: Kasich gets a boost,"The Republican presidential race continues to be all about Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, but Ohio Gov. John Kasich may have put himself in position to make a mark when New Hampshire votes next month.
+
+In our weekly poll of 30 political experts — we ask who is strongest in the GOP field each week —  Kasich notched sixth place this week, his highest standing in the 21 weeks we have been running the survey.
+
+Now, it's not first place — that's still Trump. But Kasich's upward movement reflects some thought that he could score second place in the Granite State's first-in-the-nation primary. That would plant him firmly in the national headlines and give his campaign fresh life.
+
+""This week Kasich feels like a 'positive alternative' possibility in NH, amid all the negativity between (Jeb) Bush, (Chris) Christie, and (Marco) Rubio,"" said University of New Hampshire professor Dante Scala. Polls in the state have consistently shown Kasich among a cluster of candidates vying for second place behind Trump, and over the weekend he picked up endorsements from three newspapers in the state.
+
+Kasich also benefits from other candidates — namely Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson — dropping out of the top tier over the past several weeks.
+
+""The conventional wisdom is that it's either Trump or Cruz.  However, surprises occur when actual people start to vote,"" warned former Democratic congressman Dan Maffei.
+
+Pollster Peter Fenn added, ""The knives are out between Trump and Cruz. The question is: does this give a Rubio, Christie, Kasich or Bush a chance to come up the side and emerge as an alternative?""
+
+Former Republican party official Frank Donatelli agreed, ""Trump, Cruz and Rubio have most potential for the long run,"" Donatelli said. ""There may be one more ticket available if Bush, Christie or Kasich can finish first or second in New Hampshire. Iowa is most important for Cruz as he is lagging in New Hampshire.""
+
+On other odd item worth noting this week: Rand Paul held his spot in eighth place despite being relegated to the happy hour debate that he refused to attend. Paul turned his relegation into a positive by launching a social media storm during the debate that garnered a lot of attention. He was among the top five candidates in growth of Twitter followers during the debate for the first time despite not being on stage.
+
+Participants in USA TODAY's GOP Power Rankings:
+
+Kristen Soltis Anderson, Republican pollster and author of The Selfie Vote
+
+Henry Barbour, Republican strategist, Mississippi
+
+Paul Brathwaite, principal, Podesta Group
+
+Dianne Bystrom, director, Center for Women and Politics, Iowa State University
+
+Herman Cain, talk show host and former GOP presidential candidate
+
+Maria Cardona, Democratic strategist and CNN Commentator, The Dewey Square Group
+
+Frank Donatelli, former RNC deputy chairman and Reagan advisor
+
+Sara Fagen, partner, DDC Advocacy
+
+Peter Fenn, Democratic political strategist, Fenn Communications
+
+Denise Feriozzi, deputy executive director, EMILY’s List
+
+Karen Floyd, CEO, The Palladian Group and former South Carolina GOP chair
+
+Aaron Ghitelman, communications manager, HeadCount
+
+Andra Gillespie, polling analyst and political science professor, Emory University 
+
+Nathan L. Gonzales, editor, The Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report
+
+Lilly J. Goren, political science and global studies professor, Carroll University
+
+Doug Gross, Iowa attorney and previous Republican gubernatorial nominee
+
+O. Kay Henderson, news director, Radio Iowa
+
+Ken Khachigian, senior partner, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck
+
+Carl Leubsdorf, Washington columnist, The Dallas Morning News
+
+ Deb Lucia, Topeka 912 – the Capital City Tea Party
+
+Matt Mackowiak, Republican consultant and president, Potomac Strategy Group, LLC
+
+ Dan Maffei, former Democratic congressman, New York
+
+Phil Musser, chairman, IMGE digital media agency
+
+Margie Omero, Democratic pollster, Purple Insights
+
+Jon Ralston, host, ""Ralston Live"" on PBS affiliates in Nevada
+
+Craig Robinson, founder and editor, TheIowaRepublican.com
+
+Alan Rosenblatt, Ph.D., Sr. VP of digital strategy, turner4D
+
+Dante Scala, political science professor, University of New Hampshire
+
+Adam Sharp, head of news, government and elections, Twitter
+
+Alex Smith, national chairman, College Republicans
+
+Todd Spangler, Washington correspondent, Detroit Free Press
+
+Kathy Sullivan, DNC committeewoman and former Democratic Party chair, New Hampshire
+
+Special thanks to the Palladian Group for building our survey platform.",REAL
+5698,Study: Swift birds fly non-stop for 10 months every year,"News Bulletin A common swift. 
+A new study has revealed that a small bird known as the common swift can fly for 10 months without landing. The study in the US journal Current Biology has confirmed an old hypothesis that these birds spend most of their lives in the air. 
+Scientists believe the birds which stop while flying does so only for a moment, and spent 99.5 percent of the 10 months in the air. They save energy during the day by sliding in upward currents of warm air. 
+It’s still unclear how the birds sleep during the time. But researchers believe they might catch a few winks when they fly to high heights. Loading ...",FAKE
+8947,How the internet is making even Ukrainian Nazis into Russians...,"November 3, 2016 - Fort Russ -  Yurasumy, PolitRussia - translated by J. Arnoldski -  
+
+
+On October 27th, 2016, the heads of the Verkhovna Rada committee on culture and freedom of speech, Ruslan Knyazhnitsky and Viktoriya Syumar, put forth a bill which, besides guaranteeing new preferences for the Ukrainian language, proposes to ban Russian-language print products. It’s not difficult to understand this Russophobia. For 25 years, they have been struggling to oust the Russian language from official usage in the country, but the last decade has shown the futility of their attempts. The Russian language is becoming the language of communication among the youth of Ukrainian cities, even those who earlier spoke Ukrainian. 
+Language is the beginning of everything  
+When in the middle of the 19th century the construction of Ukrainian self-identity began, its foundation was largely based on the language principle. It was then that scholars of the Russian Empire began to create a map of the Russian language with its division into dialects. For theorists, the geographical distribution of the Malorossiyan dialect (in the terminology of the late 19th-early 20th centuries)  was the first wave of the construction of the Ukrainian ‘nation’, the place where experiments in creating the “Ukraine is not Russia” theory began.  
+It was in this time that a literary language and grammar were created. Literature and community began to take shape around them. This process coincided with another process: the mass exodus of villagers to the city.  
+From the village to the city 
+In this article, we will not consider the economic causes of this displacement, but note that it was this relocation that allowed the Ukrainian intelligentsia to very quickly find followers and consistently maintain their number. The mass exodus of Ukrainian-speaking masses of people to the cities allowed for the formation of an interlayer very easily subjected to “Ukrainianization.”  
+This was largely a poor mass of people, only recently serfs, who saw in Russian-speaking city-dwellers some kind of other, alien group of people. Naturally, they felt a kind of alienation towards this group. Language became their main criterion of “us vs. the other.” Circles and communities appeared, the ultimate result of which was the emergence of the idea “Ukraine is not Russia.” 
+The first to systematize this in a globally historic work was Mikhail Grushevsky, who before 1917 started to write his History of Ukraine-Rus . No one should be deceived by the title of this book. Its main leitmotif was that Ukraine is not Russia and that the two have always been antagonistic ever since the time of princely quarrels.  
+The city wins 
+During the second half of the 19th century, masses of peasants poured into the cities. Their children went to schools and colleges, became workers and civil servants, and many even rose higher up the social ladder of the empire. But the vast majority of them in their first and at least second generations became Russian-speaking.  
+New and new masses of peasants came to replace them.  The melting pot of the empire worked fine until the empire itself ceased to exist. 1917 destroyed many of the state’s institutions, including integration ones. The resulting ideological gap was quickly filled with doctrines telling yesterday’s and today's Ukrainian peasants why they live so badly and who is to blame. Seventy years later, the supporters of the new theory “quickly found answers” to all the current issues of society and brought the country to ruin. The outbreak of bloody civil strife and more of the same ruin in the West did not allow the problem to drag on for decades, and was quickly resolved… 
+Even taking into account the early USSR’s acceleration of the process of Ukrainianization, strong resistance to this process in the cities was evident. The youth gradually Russified and the ongoing process of industrialization contributed to the rapid movement of the labor force and its linguistic unification, which was possible only on the basis of the Russian language. Nevertheless, in the 1950’s-1960’s, the problem of reteaching “Ukrainian” students in Soviet universities still existed. This was uncomfortable, so in the 1970’s the Ukrainian language was finally put on the back burner in the schools of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  
+At the time, it was normal in Ukrainian city families, in which the parents had left for the city from the countryside, to speak in Ukrainian or Surzhyk (in Eastern Ukraine). But at work and in schools, children grew up and communicated in Russian. Usually, the children of parents who moved to the city gradually moved on to communicating in Russian and it turned out that the melting pot of the USSR worked exactly like the Russian Empire did 100 years before, when Malorossiyan villagers were quickly made into Russians in the cities.  
+But history went down another roundabout... 
+Attempt #2 
+The collapse of the USSR, like the collapse of the Russian Empire, offered a second chance to the apologists of the idea of “Ukraine is not Russia.” They long and carefully planned “pedagogical” plans and, as soon as the iron curtain fell, the first wave of “teachers” came to Ukraine from the West. There is no point in dwelling in detail on the technicalities of the work of this and all other “reformer” groups, but their successes by the mid-2010’s were impressive.  
+Preschool, school, and higher education in Ukraine became almost entirely held in the Ukrainian language. Russian culture and language were driven off of TV and the radio. Russian speaking print was not only discouraged, but often persecuted. It would seem like this was the last nail in the coffin, but this time the Ukrainian “patriotic” intelligentsia began to all the more strongly demand that authorities fight for the purity of the Ukrainian logic because “all was lost.”  
+So what’s the deal? What do these “fighters” for the Ukrainian language lack today? 
+The 21st century against Ukrainianization 
+The point is that what has repeatedly happened in the history of Ukraine happened again. With each passing year, its territory began to feel the work of the empire’s melting pot. But where did this come from without an existing empire? Every child in Ukraine received their first mobile phone in elementary school and then their smartphone. Today, it is easy to imagine a student in school without textbooks or notebooks, but they never forget their smartphone.  
+The mobile phone was a window to a larger world, the world of social networking. And it just so happened that there were no popular Ukrainian-language social networks, but there were Russian-language ones. Just like there were English-language ones. The age-old affinity between the peoples of Ukraine and Russia played its role here. A child in elementary school doesn’t know foreign languages, but Russian is habitual and almost native for him. 
+Around 80% of Ukrainian children are on VKontakte, which is by and large in Russian. Thus, it turns out that in many provincial Ukrainian cities which logically should have long since been finally Ukrainianized, children spoke Ukrainian in elementary school only to speak Surzhyk in middle school, and then, in upper classes to a significant degree outside of their families, became Russians-speakers.  
+I studied this phenomenon in my own children and their friends and relatives….There are exceptions, but relatively few.  
+Children’s interests take their toll, and this is why the advocates of total Ukrainianization are in panic today. They see that they are losing and and cannot offer anything in return. They demand and demand, bringing the situation to insanity, and then still lose…. 
+Consequences 
+Thus, the information revolution has struck the bottom of the ship of “Ukraine is not Russia.” Youth are very quickly Russifying and there is no chance of stopping this process. Even people moving from the village, the eternal saviors of “patriots,” are drying up. Moreover, children from the cities have stopped going back to the villages and absorb the customs and culture of their ancestors, of whom there are none left alive. They have no one to go to. 
+
+The internet is teaching Ukrainian children, making them largely stupid, but also Russians. Hence why today such ugly formations as Azov, the Azov Civil Corpus, and its latest incarnation in the National Corpus have been born out of the bosom of the Maidan. The vast majority of people in them are Russians trying to find a basis for how to become Ukrainian nationalists. It is clear that confrontation can no longer be built on the basis of language. They have to find new reasons to be non-Russians or, rather, Russians who want to build on the territory of the former USSR and beyond its borders a new integration project - Greater Eurasia… 
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
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+       Follow us on Twitter! 
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+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+7286,Goldman Sachs Endorses Hillary Clinton For President,"Goldman Sachs Endorses Hillary Clinton For President   Shadowproof 
+He’s with her. On Sunday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earned the endorsement of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein —an endorsement she had been working toward for years. 
+As was revealed by Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton spent the run up to her presidential campaign giving speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks, where she praised their talents and explained her positions on financial regulation. 
+On October 24, 2013, Clinton told Goldman Sachs that Dodd-Frank had to be done mostly for “political reasons” because Congress needed to look like it was doing something about the crisis. She said, “There’s nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.” 
+Yes, she essentially endorsed Wall Street writing the rules because Wall Street knows its business best and complained to Goldman Sachs that regulations had frightened bankers. 
+“I mean, right now, there are so many places in our country where the banks are not doing what they need to do because they’re scared of regulations, they’re scared of the other shoe dropping, they’re just plain scared, so credit is not flowing the way it needs to to restart economic growth,” Clinton said. “So people are, you know, a little — they’re still uncertain, and they’re uncertain both because they don’t know what might come next in terms of regulations, but they’re also uncertain because of changes in a global economy that we’re only beginning to take hold of.” 
+Music to Wall Street’s ears. For Goldman Sachs, was there really any other choice this cycle? After all, they did pay Hillary Clinton $675,000 for those three speeches, and have generously supported her political career. 
+Despite her private comments to Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton has taken a tough public position on Wall Street during the campaign, likely due to Senator Bernie Sanders’ success in the primaries. Of course, Wikileaks also revealed that Clinton told the National Multi-housing Council in a private speech that “you need both a public and a private position.” 
+So the real question is, what do Blankfein and Goldman want in return and what is Clinton’s private position on giving it to them? Share This Article...",FAKE
+1302,Marco Rubio Short-Circuits During G.O.P. Debate,"After months of looking like bit players in the Republican presidential race, Governors Chris Christie, John Kasich and former Governor Jeb Bush all delivered their strongest debate performances yet Saturday night in New Hampshire. But the object of their attacks was not Donald Trump, the irascible billionaire who maintains a double-digit lead in the primary state. Instead, they focused their fire on Marco Rubio, turning his aggressively rehearsed talking points against him and exposing the vacuity of his campaign in a series of devastating exchanges that threaten to blunt his recent momentum.
+
+Rubio has long faced criticism for his robotic approach on the campaign trail, where he regularly reproduces the same practiced phrases. There is something to be said for staying on message, especially when that message appears to be working. But the Florida senator’s reliance on pre-scripted lines backfired dramatically when Christie called him out for using the same line twice, and Rubio responded, like a broken record, by repeating it again and again.
+
+“Let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing,” Rubio said early in the debate, arguing that Obama, far from being incompetent, was actually engaged in a “systematic effort to change America,” and that he would do a better job a president. Christie ripped the answer, calling Rubio inexperienced and drawing applause for accusing him of “truancy” in the Senate. Rubio shot back that New Jersey’s credit rating had been downgraded nine times under Christie. Then, inexplicably, he repeated his previous answer: “But I would add this. Let's dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing.”
+
+Christie pounced. “That's what Washington, D.C., does,” he said, deconstructing the Rubio machine in real-time. “The drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information and then the memorized 25-second speech that is exactly what his advisers gave him.” The crowd went wild as Christie twisted the knife: “See Marco—Marco, the thing is this. When you're president of the United States, when you're a governor of a state, the memorized 30-second speech where you talk about how great America is at the end of it doesn't solve one problem for one person.” Rubio appeared to panic, almost immediately returning to the same line a third time: “Here's the bottom line. This notion that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he's doing.”
+
+“There it is,” Christie interjected. “The memorized 25-second speech. There it is, everybody.” Rubio, unsure how to respond, went for round four: “I think this is an important point. We have to understand what we're going through here. We are not facing a president that doesn't know what he's doing. He knows what he is doing.” Christie quipped that he “gets very unruly when he gets off his talking points,” but that didn’t stop Rubio from repeating the line a fifth time before the debate ended. “I think anyone who believes that Barack Obama isn't doing what he's doing on purpose doesn't understand what we're dealing with here,” he said, apparently still rattled. “This is a president—this is a president who is trying to change this country.”
+
+It was a bizarre performance for the freshman senator, who has soared to second in the polls in New Hampshire after a surprisingly strong third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses last week. In the last several days, the Republican establishment has rallied to Rubio’s side, seeing him as the sole candidate capable of mounting a credible challenge to Trump and Ted Cruz, both of whom are considered unelectable by many party leaders. But with the New Hampshire primary just days away, the confidence-shattering exchange could derail Rubio’s shot at holding on to his second-place position, creating an opening for Christie, Kasich, or Bush to pull ahead and prolonging an already damaging intra-party fight to consolidate the crowded establishment lane.
+
+Rubio wasn’t the only one to come under attack Saturday night. In what is certainly a first in the history of presidential debates, Donald Trump lashed out at the audience after he was booed for trying to shush Jeb Bush. “That’s all of his donors and special interests out there,” he said, like a stand-up comedian taking on a heckler. “That’s who it is,” he continued, as the crowd grew louder. “The R.N.C. told us. We have all donors in the audience. And the reason they’re not loving me … excuse me. The reason they’re not loving me is, I don’t want their money. I’m going to do the right thing for the American public. I don’t want their money. I don’t need their money. And I’m the only one up here that can say that.”",REAL
+10491,PressTV-‘Clintons worked with US enemies’,"Interviews The FBI probe was inevitable “because of the metastasizing of the links and the connections that the Clinton Foundation had, most specifically and grievously to Saudi Arabia, to Qatar,” says American analyst Scott Bennett. 
+The ongoing federal investigation into the Clinton Foundation was expected because of the Clinton family’s ties with US enemies, says Scott Bennett, a former US Army psychological warfare officer. 
+The FBI has been probing possible pay-to-play schemes at the family foundation for over a year now and is “likely” to press charges against it, Fox News reported Wednesday, citing informed officials. 
+Bennett told Press TV on Friday that the probe was inevitable “because of the metastasizing of the links and the connections that the Clinton Foundation had, most specifically and grievously to Saudi Arabia, to Qatar,” and many other countries blacklisted by Washington. 
+It was revealed on Friday that the Clinton Foundation took a $1 million gift from Qatar during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as the US secretary of state, without her informing the State Department. 
+Hillary decided to not inform the department of the transaction, despite signing an ethics agreement with regards to the foundation when she became secretary of state. 
+According to the foundation’s website, Qatar has so far given the Clintons a total of between $1 million and $5 million over the years. 
+Aside from Qatar, Saudi Arabia has also been one of the Clinton Foundation’s biggest donors. It became known in 2008 that the kingdom had given them between $10 million and $25 million. 
+“So those terrorist entities, which have been labeled as the enemies of the United States, have been appearing as Clinton Foundation donors,” Bennett said. 
+“That is a serious crime, it is treason, it is corruption, it is bribery of officials,” said the analyst. 
+Bennett argued that all the leaks and investigations concerning the Clinton family were coming from “those personnel in the American government who have had enough.” 
+“They have stepped up, they have released emails, they have hacked into their own computers and in some cases they have provided it to WikiLeaks,” he added. 
+Whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks has released thousands of Hillary’s campaign chairman and top aide John Podesta’s emails since last month, exposing some of the well-kept secrets surrounding the Clinton family and Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House. 
+Bennett predicted that the case would “most probably” lead to indictments and some people would be arrested as early as this weekend. Loading ... ",FAKE
+7896,Juicing May Be the Answer to Many of Your Chronic Health Problems,"By Dr. Mercola
+As noted at the very beginning of this 26-minute health documentary by juicing expert Jason Vale: “More people die from chronic diseases than all other causes put together.”
+This is a remarkable state of affairs when you consider that the human body is actually designed to maintain healthy homeostasis, given half a chance.
+What’s worse, chronic diseases strike the very young as well as the very old. Children are now developing diseases previously relegated to seniors, such as type 2 diabetes , fatty liver, heart disease and even cancer.
+Toxicity appears to be a major factor driving this burgeoning wave of chronic disease. Toxins are in our food, in our water and air, in the medications we take, in the products we use each day to clean ourselves and our homes; they’re in beauty products and our furnishings and building materials.
+“All chronic diseases are caused by two, and only two, major problems,” Charlotte Gerson, founder of the Gerson Institute, says . “Toxicity and deficiency.” 
+TOXICITY AND DEFICIENCY ARE CORE PROBLEMS According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), PREVENTABLE chronic diseases are now the world’s biggest killers. And the combination of eating nutrient-deficient foods and being over-exposed to toxins is at the core of our current health crisis.
+The answer to this dilemma is certainly not to take medication to mask the symptoms of toxicity and deficiency. The solution is to remove toxins, clean up your system and increase the nutrient density of your healthy food.
+Plants — fruits, berries and vegetables — are “live” foods. Provided they’ve not been severely processed, or are eaten in excess and out of season. Ideally, the best time to eat fruit is in the summer when you have plenty of exposure to sunshine and can tolerate higher net carbs.
+They contain many phytochemicals your body can use to heal and nourish your cells. The appeal of juicing is that you can consume more nutrient-dense vegetables than when you eat them whole or Vita Mix them in a blender.
+This allows you to consume far greater amounts of vegetable nutrients than you would normally be able to eat whole or blended with the fiber.
+JUICING IS A GREAT WAY TO BOOST NUTRIENT INTAKE Some will argue that consuming more veggies than you could normally chew through is unnecessary, but when you consider how nutrient levels in most foods have dramatically decreased since the introduction of mechanized farming in 1925, juicing really makes sense.
+Healthy soils contain a huge diversity of microorganisms, and it is these organisms that are responsible for the plant’s nutrient uptake, health and the stability of the entire ecosystem.
+The wide-scale adoption of industrial farming practices has decimated soil microbes responsible for transferring these minerals to the plants, and synthetic chemicals sprayed on the crops have further destroyed overall soil quality.
+For example, as explained by research scientist August Dunning , chief science officer and co-owner of Eco Organics, in order to receive the same amount of iron you used to get from one apple in 1950, today you’d have to eat 36 apples!
+How could you possibly get 36 apples into you? Even with juicing that would be a remarkable feat, and would likely overload you with natural sugars as well, so I wouldn’t recommend it.
+My point is that even when juicing, you may not get the same amount of nutrients our ancestors used to get from even a fraction of the foods they ate, so you’re unlikely to get superfluous amounts of nutrients by regularly drinking fresh vegetable juices.
+When you drink fresh, live juice, it’s almost like receiving an intravenous infusion of vitamins, minerals and enzymes because they go straight into your body without needing to be broken down. Since juicing is essentially “mainlining” live nutrients, it’s no surprise it can produce rapid and profound health benefits.
+FOOD ADDICTION IS A PROFIT CENTER There’s a conscious effort on behalf of food manufacturers to get you addicted to foods that are convenient and inexpensive to make. This system is detailed in investigative reporter Michael Moss’ book, “ Salt, Sugar, Fat ” — the top three substances that make processed foods so addictive.
+One of the guiding principles for the processed food industry is known as “sensory-specific satiety.” Moss describes this as “the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm your brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more.”
+The greatest successes, whether beverages or foods, owe their “craveability” to complex formulas that pique your taste buds just enough, without overwhelming them, thereby overriding your brain’s inclination to say “enough.”
+“Vanishing calorie density” is another term used to describe foods that melt in your mouth, which has the effect of making your brain think it doesn’t contain any calories. As a result, you keep eating.
+In short, as noted in the film, the big food companies are “manipulating our food so that we keep eating more, and more, and more.” And, as stated by Cherie Calbom, also known as “The Juice Lady:” “It’s corn and soy, and wheat and sugar and salt and chemicals — that’s primarily what people are eating.”
+So is it really any wonder that so many are so sick and overweight? Many health authorities make it seem as the obesity epidemic is a great mystery, and largely blame it on laziness. “If only people exercised more, they’d be fine,” the reasoning goes.
+But this simply isn’t true, and by sweeping the proverbial elephant under the rug and ignoring the fact that our food supply is the problem, these authorities have done us all a shameful disservice.
+Remember, it really isn’t about calories, it is about insulin resistance. And processed foods, sugars and high net carb foods will make it virtually impossible to normalize your metabolism and get lean.
+MODERN MEDICINE IS ANOTHER PROFIT CENTER Many times, even severe health problems have simple fixes. For example, in the film, Vale, who’s also the author of “The Juice Detox Diet,” explains that what prompted him to try juicing in the first place was a severe case of psoriasis — an autoimmune disease that causes cells to build up on the surface of your skin, leading to thick, unsightly scaly patches that are very itchy and often painful.
+He also had eczema and severe hay fever and asthma. For years he used steroid tablets and various inhalers to manage his symptoms, but he wasn’t getting any better. “Not once did anyone look at what might be causing the problems; they only wanted to treat the symptoms,” he said.
+The turning point came when one of his doctors suggested a coal-tar treatment for his psoriasis. He’d be slathered in coal-tar, the same gooey tar placed on roadways, and covered in bandages for six weeks. The idea of resorting to such a bizarre and clearly toxic intervention was the final straw. “There’s GOT to be another way,” he thought.
+Indeed, toxicity and a narrow focus on managing symptoms — not actually addressing the root problem, which might result in a full remission or cure — are hallmarks of modern medicine. This mode of operation has turned healthcare into a massive for-profit business that has become increasingly reluctant to embrace strategies that might actually remove an individual from the paying patient pool.
+This is tragic, since research exists showing that raising your vitamin D level, for example, can help heal psoriasis, especially if you’re vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D supplements are very inexpensive, and if you optimize your level by getting regular and sensible sun exposure, which is the preferred and ideal way, it’s free (provided you live in a sunny area and don’t use a therapeutic sunbed).
+In Vale’s case, juicing was the answer, and he no longer suffers from any of his previous problems. His asthma completely vanished within a month, and his skin gradually cleared up until there was not a trace of psoriasis or eczema left. His weight also dropped “at a rate I didn’t think was humanly possible,” he says. As noted by Dr. Dwight Lundell, author of “The Cure for Heart Disease,” who is featured in the film:
+“Not one single person will be cured of heart disease, pulmonary disease, stroke, arthritis, obesity and, of course, diabetes, with our current medical approach.” 
+INFLAMMATION IS THE DRIVING MECHANISM BEHIND MOST CHRONIC DISEASE Toxicity, nutrient deficiencies , processed foods, sugar and excess net carbs promote inflammation, and chronic inflammation is a hallmark of virtually every chronic disease there is. When your inflammation levels are low, it’s very difficult for disease to take root. When healthy, your body is simply too well-equipped to address foreign invaders and can easily clean out minor toxic exposures.
+As noted by Lundell, when we investigate what we’re doing differently today, when inflammation levels are high, compared to decades past when chronic disease rates were much lower, the main difference we find is the foods we eat.
+We’ve gotten away from eating fresh, whole foods, most of which come from the plant kingdom, and most of what we eat are processed foods laced with a myriad of chemicals that were never in our food supply before. “In my opinion, this dietary change is the cause of most chronic diseases,” he says.
+It may appear as though all these different chronic diseases are very different, and therefore would have different causes. But these variations are deceiving. In the vast majority of cases, the root problem can be narrowed down to inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction, caused by toxicity and insufficient amounts of “building blocks” (nutrients) to maintain optimal biological function. The differences in manifestation primarily relate to individual weaknesses.
+“It just stands to reason and common sense that if the vast majority of those diseases are caused by diet and lifestyle, then the simple answer, surely, is to change the diet and lifestyle, and they’ll just get better,” Vale says.
+Calbom adds: “We should be juicing, because so many people have impaired digestive tracts, and digestion is impaired because of the diet we’ve been on. Along come your beautiful juices; they go right into your intestinal tract, and those nutrients get absorbed into your system. 
+They’re going right to work within about 20 or 30 minutes. They’re there feeding your body, rejuvenating, giving you energy; giving your body life! This is why you should juice … Juice every day; this has got to be a way of life, because that’s when you’re going to notice your life changing.” 
+EAT ‘LOW HUMAN INTERVENTION FOODS’ Vale wisely suggests that if a food has a label, it probably shouldn’t be in your diet. What you’re really looking for is real food, or what he calls “low human intervention foods,” meaning foods that has passed through as few human hands and processes as possible. Ideally, you would be growing your own food and eating out of your garden.
+In the summer, the majority of my main meal comes from my garden: sunflower spouts, red bell peppers, oregano, rosemary, turmeric and spinach. If you are unable to grow your own, your next best bet would be to get locally grown organic produce that has not been waxed, cut up or processed in any way.
+“When you look at the fact that the food you eat really creates the life that you live, everything starts to change,” Philip McCluskey, author of “Weight Loss Blueprint,” says.
+‘SUPER-JUICING’ FOR 28 DAYS CURED DIABETES AND CHRONIC PAIN 
+In a previous documentary, Vale recruited eight people who collectively suffered from 22 different chronic diseases and put them on a juice-only diet for 28 days (plus exercise) in order to explore juicing’s potential benefits for reversing chronic disease. He filmed their experience, which resulted in the documentary “Super Juice Me,” which I’ve included above for your convenience.
+The health improvements seen by those eight individuals are nothing short of astounding. Every participant felt energized and lost weight, and most reported a drastic reduction in their symptoms and the number of medications they needed to use. One man completely resolved his diabetes in those 28 days. A woman went from years of chronic pain to being completely pain-free, and others suffering from asthma, colitis and sleep apnea enjoyed a profound reduction in symptoms.
+It was not an easy journey, as several experienced detoxification reactions, food cravings and, for some, a temporary increase in symptoms as their bodies began to purge toxins they’d accumulated, but those reactions were relatively short-lived, and they felt immensely better on the other side — better than they’d felt in years.
+THE MANY HEALTH BENEFITS OF JUICING There are many reasons to consider incorporating vegetable juicing into your health plan. Whether you use it as an occasional cleanse, or as the start of every morning, juicing:
+Helps you absorb all the nutrients from your vegetables. This is important because most people have impaired digestion as a result of making less-than-optimal food choices over many years, which limits your body’s ability to absorb all of the nutrients in whole, raw vegetables. Juicing helps “pre-digest” them, so you won’t lose any of this valuable nutrition. Makes it easier to consume a large quantity of vegetables. Virtually every health authority recommends that you get six to eight servings of vegetables and fruits per day, but very few actually get that. Juicing virtually guarantees you’ll reach your daily target. Makes it easier to get a wider variety of vegetables into your diet. Juicing greatly expands the number of different phytochemicals you receive, as each vegetable offers unique benefits. Juicing also allows you to consume vegetables that you may not normally enjoy eating whole. Boosts your immune system. Raw juice supercharges your immune system with concentrated phytochemicals and biophotonic light energy, which can revitalize your body. The nutrients in fresh juice also feed your body’s good bacteria and help suppress potentially pathogenic ones. Increases your energy. When your blood is flooded with nutrients and your body’s pH is optimized, you’ll feel energized. Since juice is absorbed and utilized by your body very rapidly, juicers report feeling an almost instantaneous “kick” of energy. Supports your brain. In the Kame Project, 1 people who consumed juice more than three times per week were 76 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those who consumed juice less than once a week. Provides structured water. Vegetable juice is one of the purest sources of water and actually qualifies as water. Vegetable water is structured water (living water), which is different from regular water — H3O2 rather than H2O. Water from vegetables is the best quality water you can drink!On a side note, sun exposure is also important for structuring the water in your cells. Part of the energy your body requires can actually be obtained from sunlight, but you must expose your skin directly to it. The ultraviolet (UV) radiation increases nitric oxide (NO) release, which can direct more than half your blood flow to your skin. Once your blood is exposed to the sun, it can absorb UV and infrared radiation, which help to structure the water in your cells and energize your mitochondria. 
+ 
+
+Download Interview Transcript Keep in mind your juices should consist mostly of green vegetables. You’ll want to minimize fruits in order to keep the fructose and net carb content low. The bulk of your juice should come from organic green veggies. Spinach, celery, kale and Swiss chard are common juicing staples.
+If you’re new to juicing, you can start with more mild-tasting veggies, like celery and cucumbers. From there you can work your way up to red leaf lettuce, romaine, spinach and escarole, along with parsley and cilantro. Kale, collard, dandelion, mustard and other greens can be bitter, so you’ll want to start slowly and add just a few leaves at a time.
+Some of the most nutrient-dense veggies are the strongest tasting, but don’t avoid them. Just use a lesser quantity in your juice until your taste buds acclimate. Selecting organic, non-GMO produce is very important when juicing, but the price can be a challenge for some. One alternative is to grow your own, making sure to avoid toxic garden chemicals (synthetic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers).
+If you’re using non-organic vegetables, your best bet is to peel them, to avoid juicing pesticide residues. This is particularly important for fruits and vegetables that have been waxed, as this seals in the chemicals. It can be difficult to discern if a vegetable has been waxed or not, because the wax can be applied in a very thin, transparent layer.
+Beware that even organic produce sold in grocery chain stores will typically be waxed. For unwaxed fruit and vegetables, you typically have to get them from a local source.
+TIPS THAT CAN MAKE YOUR VEGGIE JUICE MORE PALATABLE If you’re not used to eating a lot of vegetables, the taste may take a little while to get used to. A great trick to make your juice more palatable, especially in the beginning, is to add one or more of these elements:
+Limes and lemons: You can add one half to a whole lime or lemon for every quart of juice. Limes are my favorite for cutting bitter flavors. Cranberries: You can also add some cranberries if you enjoy them. Limit the cranberries to about 4 ounces per pint of juice. Fresh ginger : This is an excellent addition if you enjoy the taste. It gives your juice a spicy “kick.” Limited amounts of apple and carrot (just be mindful of your overall sugar content). HOW TO MANAGE CRAVINGS AND DETOX SYMPTOMS Changing your diet or any other aspect of your lifestyle is sometimes stressful, and stress can sabotage your success. As some of the people in Vale’s super-juicing experiment discovered, you might feel a little worse before you feel better, as detox symptoms and food cravings can arise. Addressing your emotional and mental health is a very important aspect of total body health, so please do not ignore stress.
+The Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) can be helpful when anxieties strike, including emotional struggles surrounding dietary changes. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful tools for reducing stress and anxiety that I know of. In 2012, a triple blind study 2 found that EFT reduced cortisol levels and symptoms of psychological distress by 24 percent, more than any other intervention tested!
+If you worry that you won’t be able to get the juice down or you won’t take the time to do it, or your food cravings will be unbearable, EFT may be able to help. The first couple weeks of a new eating routine are typically the most challenging, while your body is making the necessary biochemical adjustments. Tapping can be extraordinarily beneficial for reducing anxiety, cravings and detox symptoms during this time.
+EFT is easy to learn and once you do, it’s always at your fingertips, whenever and wherever you need it. You can even adapt this intermittent fasting EFT video by Julie Schiffman for juice fasting. Just as juicing helps reduce your body’s toxic burden, you can think of EFT as detoxification for your mind. By combining the two, your healing will have the greatest chance of success.
+
+Source: Mercola 
+",FAKE
+9459,"Riots Getting out of Control, They are now shouting ""Kill Trump""","
+Illegals waving Mexican flags, blacks, communists, white social justice warriors burning American flags, gays, transgenders and basically all degenerated freaks of nature united in violent riots across the US, shouting and tweeting assassinate Trump chants. The photos and videos you are about to see should make your stomach turn upside-down. After you finish reading, scroll down and watch.
+As an advice, avoid provoking these wild beasts unless you want to get beaten down badly, hospitalized or even killed, if they ask you who you voted for, lie to them, tell them Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. We have seen countless aggravated assaults and even down-right murders in the last days against patriotic Americans who voted for Donald Trump. Do NOT engage these wild beasts no matter how much sorrow you may feel in your heart when you see different kind of scenes, such as burning of the US flag, torching stores, cars, chanting hate, etc. Let them go wild and do what they do until January 20th. After that, the law will crack down on them like you never seen before.
+The American people have swallowed enough, soon retribution will come and millions upon millions will finally get deported and arrested. These people need to be punished. California in particular is worst. The millions of Mexicans who invaded California are now calling for “Calexit”. Sure after illegally invading that state, they now call for it to secede so they can later unite it with Mexico. These people must think the Americans are stupid. Getting their hands on Silicon Valley and Hollywood for free? IT’S NOT GONNA HAPPEN MEXICANS! According to Wikipedia, there are only 38% whites living in California as of 2015 after decades of ongoing invasion. Due to the that the state is permanently locked as a blue Democrat state. Republicans can sit on their tongues and eat their own eyeballs and that state will never go red in the current condition it is. This makes the road for Republicans extremely difficult since California holds the larges number of electors, 55. Non-Hispanic whites decreased from about 76.3 – 78% of the state’s population in 1970 to 38.0% in 2015 making them a minority in their own country. Its not like they committed suicide, they are still there but the number of migrants surpassed them, making them a minority now.
+According to a census from 2010 when California had 37.2 million population in total (in 2015 it had 39.1 million) only 15.7 are white and 2.6 mil black. The rest is South American, mostly illegals. Those who are legal, are illegally legal if you understand what we mean. They’ve got their citizenship through Obama’s amnesties. These people will always vote Democrat, riot and demand free stuff. They need to be deported immediately or America will lose California forever which would be a shame! America must not allow Calexist. Imagine losing Hollywood and Silicon Valley! You can’t just immigrate to a foreign nation, then demand secession, then later demand unification with your country of origin.
+You think this is a joke? Have a look! The media is telling you however that “Americans are calling to secession”. No! These are South American invaders, mostly Mexicans! They need to get deported, all of them! Both LEGAL and ILLEGAL because most “legals” obtained their citizenship illegally.
+
+So who is fomenting this? Go to minute 1:33
+
+We know for a fact that most of these riots are planned and paid for by globalist billionaire George Soros. He too needs to be arrested along with his entire family and have his entire fortune seized and nationalized into the US federal budget. America could use his money, after all its dead broke! The bastard is already old, 83 years old to be exact and he may not live for much longer but still he should face justice for all the riots, calls to assassinations and violence he is provoking.
+See these buses? They brought thousands of protesters to Austin, Texas! Yes, the riots are ORGANIZED, PAID, SPONSORED, etc. George Soros and his entire family needs to be locked up.
+
+
+
+They are even running ads on Craigslist searching for more rioters:
+
+Whites who are doing this are suffering from what is known as the Stockholm Syndrome . They do not even realize what they are doing.
+These people look like they are straight from Noah’s times, when God flooded the Earth because he had enough:
+
+
+Man attacked for voting for Trump…
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Cher! Didn’t this harlot said that she will leave America if Trump is elected? Now she’s pushing for riots and violence?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Look at this sorry retard! She got more votes? So what? He got more electors! Besides she got millions of ILLEGAL votes from illegal border crossers which shouldn’t even be allowed to vote.
+
+Confront whiteness? What if someone would say confronting blackness? Hmm? What about confronting Jewishness? Ahh yeah: dats rayyysist!
+And we thought Jews were our friends… perhaps we were wrong!
+Look at how this moronic liberal mother is installing fear into this poor child! I bet she told her something similar to this: “There’s a big fat blonde boogieman living in the tower of Sauron, and we here are the warriors of God, we have been sent by Jesus himself to purify America, we need to kill him because he wants to kill us all.” Where’s CPS when you need them?
+
+
+Look at the guts these Mexicans have! Instead of laying low and pretending like they are not even there, look at what they are doing. It’s like basically: look at how disgusting, disturbing and violent I am, don’t you wanna deport me?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To the woman in the left, yes Trump is NOT your president. Pena Nieto is, go back to Mexico.
+If you’re Chinese and refuse to acknowledge Trump as your president then go back to your Communist president Xi Kingpin.
+
+
+Perhaps these Socialists should move to Venezuela or North Korea.
+
+
+
+Sure they do! In Mexico! :)
+No granny, he’s not YOUR president, but who cares? Hillary wouldn’t have been other people’s president. Trump won despite having your evil which stealing millions of votes. Don’t like it? Pack your bags and get out! It’s time to clean America! Venezuela and Cuba would suit your better, they have multicultural socialist hellholes. Just the way you like it!
+The electoral college is part of the Constitution but who cares? Viva la Che Guevara Chaos and communism, hammer and sickle!
+
+Muh feelings! What a disturbing feminazi character… who would date this creature?
+Indeed, he’s not your president, Pena Nieto is, go embrace him!
+Watch what this woman did to her own child:
+
+Here’s the full video:
+
+Peaceful leftists teaching 11 year old boy how to be tolerant:
+
+More peace and tolerance:
+
+",FAKE
+5633,What Happens If Trump Refuses To Concede Election - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Hillary Clinton Waiting In Wings Of Stage Since 6 A.M. For DNC Speech PHILADELPHIA—Saying she arrived hours before any of the members of the production crew, sources confirmed Thursday that presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been waiting in the wings of the Wells Fargo Center stage since six o’clock this morning to deliver her speech at the Democratic National Convention. Depressed, Butter-Covered Tom Vilsack Enters Sixth Day Of Corn Bender After Losing VP Spot WASHINGTON—Saying she has grown increasingly concerned about her husband’s mental and physical well-being since last Friday, Christie Vilsack, the wife of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, told reporters Thursday that the despondent, butter-covered cabinet member has entered the sixth day of a destructive corn bender after being passed over for the Democratic vice presidential spot. DNC Speech: ‘I Am Proud To Say I Walked In On Bill And Hillary Having Sex’ A friend of the Clinton family describes a Hillary who America never gets to see: the one he saw having sex. Trump Sick And Tired Of Mainstream Media Always Trying To Put His Words Into Some Sort Of Context NEW YORK—Emphasizing that the practice was just more evidence of journalists’ bias against him, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stated Thursday that he was sick and tired of the mainstream media always attempting to place his words into some kind of context. Who’s Speaking At The DNC: Day 4 Here is a guide to the major speakers who will be addressing attendees on the final night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention Bound, Gagged Joaquin Castro Horrified By What His Identical Twin Brother Might Be Doing Out On DNC Floor PHILADELPHIA—Struggling to free himself from the tightly wound lengths of rope binding his wrists and ankles together, bruised and gagged Texas congressman Joaquin Castro was reportedly horrified by what his identical twin brother, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, might be out doing on the floor of the DNC Thursday. Obama: ‘Hillary Will Fight To Protect My Legacy, Even The Truly Detestable Parts’ PHILADELPHIA—Emphasizing the former secretary of state’s competence and tenacity during his Democratic National Convention address Wednesday night, President Barack Obama praised Hillary Clinton as someone who would work tirelessly to defend and advance the legacy he had built, even the “truly repugnant parts.” Tim Kaine Clearly Tuning Out In Middle Of Boring Vice Presidential Acceptance Speech PHILADELPHIA—Describing the look of total disinterest on his face and noting how he kept peering down at his watch as the speech progressed, sources at the Democratic National Convention said that Virginia senator Tim Kaine clearly began tuning out partway through the boring vice presidential acceptance address Wednesday night. Cannon Overshoots Tim Kaine Across Wells Fargo Center PHILADELPHIA—Noting that the vice presidential nominee had been launched nearly 100 feet into the air during his entrance into the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night, sources reported that the cannon at the back of the Wells Fargo Center had accidentally overshot Tim Kaine across the arena, sending him crashing to the stage several dozen feet beyond the erected safety net. Biden Regales DNC With Story Of ’80s Girl Band Vixen Breaking Hard Rock’s Glass Ceiling PHILADELPHIA—Devoting a large portion of his speech to the “pioneering, stiffy-inducing” all-female quartet, Vice President Joe Biden regaled the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night with the rousing story of the metal band Vixen breaking hard rock’s glass ceiling in the late 1980s. ",FAKE
+6823,Breaking: A Counter Coup To The Clinton Attack is Happening Now… FBI Quietly Releases Documents Via Julian Assange and Wikileaks. | EndingFed News Network,"Email Print This is WHY Comey wrote the letter. This is WHERE are the documents we have all been waiting for and expecting from WIKILEAKS are coming from. NOT the Russians…. the US Intelligence Community is staging a Coup against the Clinton Corruption. Watch this now!! VIA TD News Wire Steve Pieczenik was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker. His expertise includes foreign policy, international crisis management and psychological warfare. He served the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the capacity of deputy assistant secretary. This is no joke. This is happening RIGHT now. SHARE this everywhere before Facebook takes it down. 
+If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
+2212,Obama reportedly snubs NATO chief as Russia makes new threats against allies,"President Barack Obama reportedly will not meet with NATO's new secretary general when he is in Washington this week, despite requests from the alliance chief's staff for a get-together.
+
+Bloomberg View reported Tuesday that Jens Stoltenberg's office requested a meeting with Obama in advance of his scheduled visit, but did not receive any response from the White House. Instead, Bloomberg View reported that Stoltenberg had to settle for a last-minute meeting with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.
+
+The White House on Wednesday dismissed the report about the snub as inaccurate.
+
+""Those reports are entirely false,"" Press Secretary Josh Earnest said.
+
+Earnest also said the White House has been in touch with Stoltenberg's office and dismissed the assertion that Carter was a late fill-in because Obama was too busy.
+
+Stoltenberg is scheduled to be in Washington through Thursday, primarily so he can attend a strategic brainstorming session involving military officials and experts from the U.S. and NATO.
+
+Stoltenberg, who replaced Anders Fogh Rasmussen as head of the world's largest military alliance in October, was able to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper Monday, the day before Harper announced that Canada would expand its participation in the U.S.-led military campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
+
+The report of Obama's snub comes amid Russia's growing willingness to test NATO's military readiness. On Tuesday, NATO jets were scrambled after four Russian military planes were spotted flying over the Baltic Sea with their transponders turned off. Over the weekend, a Danish newspaper published remarks by the Russian ambassador to Denmark in which he hinted that Russian missiles could target Danish warships if Copenhagen joins NATO's missile defense system.
+
+But the most far-reaching example of Russian belligerence came Tuesday, when Britain's Daily Telegraph reported that Moscow was preparing to lease 12 long-range bombers to Argentina in exchange for shipments of beef and wheat. The report comes after a round of rhetoric from Russian officials questioning Britain's claim to the Falkland Islands.
+
+The Telegraph reports that Russia's ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovenko, compared a 2013 referendum in which 99.8 percent of Falklands inhabitants voted to remain part of the U.K. to last year's vote which formalized Crimea's annexation by Russia. Britain, along with the U.S. and NATO, denounced the Crimea referendum as a sham orchestrated by Moscow.
+
+British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond repeated those claims earlier this week, prompting the Russian embassy to respond, ""In its rhetoric [the] Foreign Office applies one logic to the referendum in the Malvinas/Falklands, and a different one to the case of Crimea.""
+
+Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Duma’s committee of international affairs, was even more blunt in a Twitter message that read, in part, ""Crimea has immeasurably more reason to be a part of Russia than the Falkland Islands to be part of the U.K.""
+
+The Russian position echoed remarks made last year by Argentina president Cristina de Kirchner, who said, ""The Malvinas [Argentina's name for the archipelago] has always belonged to Argentina, the same way that Crimea also belonged to the Soviet Union until it was given to Ukraine.""
+
+On Tuesday, British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said that Britain would send two Chinook troop-carrying helicopters and a new surface-to-air missile system to the islands.
+
+Click for more from the Daily Telegraph.",REAL
+2299,Alabama begins issuing marriage licenses to gay couples,"Alabama began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples Monday, despite an 11th-hour attempt from the state's chief justice -- an outspoken opponent -- to block the weddings.
+
+The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday morning that it wouldn't stop the marriages from beginning in the state, and shortly after, Jefferson County probate judge Alan King issued several licenses.
+
+He did so despite Chief Justice Roy Moore's Sunday night order to all probate judges, directing them to refuse to issue the licenses.
+
+One of the licenses went to Dee and Laura Bush, who have been together for seven years and have five kids between them.
+
+""It is great that we were able to be part of history,"" said Dee Bush. After receiving her license, she and Laura walked outside to a park where a minister was performing wedding ceremonies to cheers from crowds.
+
+By issuing licenses, King says he was abiding by the federal court order from January that determined Alabama's statutory and constitutional bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Callie Granade had put her order on hold until Monday to let the state prepare for the change. The state attorney general has requested that the hold be extended, but the U.S. Supreme Court refused to do so.
+
+Moore's order to probate judges was a dramatic return to defiance for the chief justice. He was removed from the post in 2003 for refusing to obey a federal court order to remove a washing machine-sized Ten Commandments from the state judicial building. Critics lashed out that Moore had no authority to tell county probate judges to enforce a law that a federal judge already ruled unconstitutional. He's been one of the state's most outspoken critics of gay marriage; in 2002 he called homosexuality an ""evil"" in a custody ruling.
+
+""This is a pathetic, last-ditch attempt at judicial fiat by an Alabama Supreme Court justice--a man who should respect the rule of law rather than advance his personal beliefs,"" said Sarah Warbelow, legal director of the Human Rights Campaign.",REAL
+4007,Russian plane crash in Sinai: All 224 on board killed,"Russian state media reported that many of the 217 passengers on Kogalymavia Flight 9268 were Russians returning from vacation. The passenger manifest included 17 children but Russian officials said there were 25 aboard. There were seven crew members.
+
+Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin tweeted that four victims were Ukrainian nationals.
+
+The cause of the crash still is unknown, but it is most likely due to a technical failure, and there is no evidence of any terrorist action, Egyptian Airports Co. chief Adel Al-Mahjoob told CNN Arabic.
+
+An Egyptian soldier prays as emergency workers prepare to unload bodies of victims at a military airport north of Suez, Egypt, on October 31.
+
+An Egyptian soldier prays as emergency workers prepare to unload bodies of victims at a military airport north of Suez, Egypt, on October 31.
+
+Journalists and spectators wait for ambulances to arrive at the Zeinhom morgue in Cairo on October 31.
+
+Journalists and spectators wait for ambulances to arrive at the Zeinhom morgue in Cairo on October 31.
+
+Employees with the Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations wait in Moscow for their flight to Egypt on October 31.
+
+Employees with the Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations wait in Moscow for their flight to Egypt on October 31.
+
+People light candles and leave flowers at the Russian Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, on October 31.
+
+People light candles and leave flowers at the Russian Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, on October 31.
+
+Villagers watch an ambulance as it drives to unload bodies on October 31.
+
+Villagers watch an ambulance as it drives to unload bodies on October 31.
+
+The tail of the jet sits in a field on October 31.
+
+The tail of the jet sits in a field on October 31.
+
+An item of clothing lies at the site where the plane crashed on October 31.
+
+An item of clothing lies at the site where the plane crashed on October 31.
+
+Ismail, center, and other officials visit the site of the plane crash on October 31.
+
+Ismail, center, and other officials visit the site of the plane crash on October 31.
+
+Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail, third from right, visits the site of the plane crash with military and government officials on October 31.
+
+Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail, third from right, visits the site of the plane crash with military and government officials on October 31.
+
+Egyptian paramedics load the bodies of victims into a military plane at a military air base by the Suez Canal on Saturday, October 31.
+
+Egyptian paramedics load the bodies of victims into a military plane at a military air base by the Suez Canal on Saturday, October 31.
+
+People place flowers and messages in front of the Russian Embassy in Cairo on November 1.
+
+People place flowers and messages in front of the Russian Embassy in Cairo on November 1.
+
+Candles, toys, flowers and portraits are left at Pulkovo International Airport outside St. Petersburg on November 1.
+
+Candles, toys, flowers and portraits are left at Pulkovo International Airport outside St. Petersburg on November 1.
+
+Debris from the airliner is seen on November 1.
+
+Debris from the airliner is seen on November 1.
+
+More debris is shown on November 1. The crash site is in a remote area of a region plagued by a violent Islamic insurgency.
+
+More debris is shown on November 1. The crash site is in a remote area of a region plagued by a violent Islamic insurgency.
+
+Debris belonging to the Russian airliner is shown at the site of the crash on November 1.
+
+Debris belonging to the Russian airliner is shown at the site of the crash on November 1.
+
+Egyptian army soldiers guard the luggage and other belongings of passengers piled up at the site of the crash on November 1.
+
+Egyptian army soldiers guard the luggage and other belongings of passengers piled up at the site of the crash on November 1.
+
+A piece of the engine sits on the ground at the crash site on November 1.
+
+A piece of the engine sits on the ground at the crash site on November 1.
+
+Egyptian military personnel stand near the tail of the jet in Hassana on Sunday, November 1.
+
+Egyptian military personnel stand near the tail of the jet in Hassana on Sunday, November 1.
+
+Russian emergency personnel collect personal belongings of victims at the crash site in Hassana, Egypt, on November 2.
+
+Russian emergency personnel collect personal belongings of victims at the crash site in Hassana, Egypt, on November 2.
+
+People visit a makeshift memorial at the airport in St. Petersburg on November 3.
+
+People visit a makeshift memorial at the airport in St. Petersburg on November 3.
+
+The wreckage of Flight 9268 is seen in this image provided on Tuesday, November 3.
+
+The wreckage of Flight 9268 is seen in this image provided on Tuesday, November 3.
+
+The militant group ISIS published this image of what it claims is the bomb that brought down Metrojet Flight 9268 on Saturday, October 31. The photograph shows a soft-drink can and two components that appear to be a detonator and a switch. Flight 9268 crashed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula en route to the Russian city of St. Petersburg. All 224 people on board were killed.
+
+The Airbus A321 had a routine check before flight, showing everything was OK to proceed, Mahjoob said.
+
+The so-called black boxes -- the flight data recorder and voice data recorder -- have been recovered and transported to Cairo for analysis, Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Hossam Kamel said at a news conference.
+
+""There was nothing abnormal before the plane crash,"" he said. ""It suddenly disappeared from the radar.""
+
+Air traffic control recordings did not show any distress calls, Kamel said.
+
+The plane departed the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, near the southern tip of the Sinai, on a flight to St. Petersburg, Russia. It vanished from radar 23 minutes into the flight, at 6:20 a.m. local time.
+
+Egypt has been battling insurgents in the Sinai aligned with the terrorist group ISIS.
+
+Islamists militants in the Sinai linked to ISIS claimed responsibility for the crash, according to an online statement.
+
+But Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov said the claim that terrorists brought down the plane by using an anti-aircraft missile ""cannot be considered reliable,"" according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.
+
+German air carrier Lufthansa and Air France have decided to reroute aircraft due to fly over the region.
+
+""We will keep that measure in place as long as we are not sure of the circumstances and the reasons of the Metrojet crash,"" Lufthansa spokeswoman Bettina Rittberger said.
+
+At 2 a.m. Sunday, Russians were still going by Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg, dropping off red or white carnations and stuffed toys for children. A table held a dozen candles.
+
+Many of the mourners silently paused in front of the memorial before leaving.
+
+Inside the airport, psychologists were available for family members. Some of the relatives were waiting for the bodies of their loved ones to be returned.
+
+Officials said that would begin later Sunday. About 115 people had given DNA samples to help identify the dead.
+
+Among the significant, if preliminary, pieces of information to emerge Saturday were these:
+
+• The plane was flying above 30,000 feet when it disappeared from radar screens, the Egyptian civil aviation ministry said.
+
+• Russia 24, a state-owned news channel, and other Russian media outlets are saying the pilot reported technical problems and requested a landing at the nearest airport before the plane went missing. Officials have not corroborated those reports.
+
+• Russia 24 also quotes the FlightRadar 24 website as saying the plane was descending at a rate of 1,800 meters per minute, or 67 mph, before radar contact was lost.
+
+• Weather in the area was clear, CNN reported.
+
+• The plane was Kogalymavia Flight 9268. The airline is commonly known as Metrojet.
+
+• The crash site is in the northern part of Sinai, near a town called Housna -- 300 kilometers (185 miles) from Sharm el-Sheikh, the Egyptian Prime Minister's office said.
+
+• The site is reported to be in a mountainous area. Still, Egyptian rescue crews made their way there, and officials said 129 bodies have been found and are being flown to Cairo. Ambulances have so far moved 34 bodies to the official Zeinhom morgue and other hospitals in the Egyptian capital.
+
+Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail met with ministers and security officials as the cause of the crash remained a mystery. The most dangerous parts of any flight are the takeoff and landing; it is unusual for a plane to fall from the sky at cruising altitude.
+
+Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to open an investigation into the crash, the Kremlin said. And Putin declared an official day of mourning Sunday for the victims.
+
+Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called Putin to express his condolences, according to the Kremlin.
+
+Sisi ""assured Mr. Putin that conditions will be created for the broadest possible participation of Russian experts in the investigation of the plane crash,"" the Kremlin statement said.
+
+U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to express his condolences and offer American assistance if needed, according to the State Department.
+
+The Russian emergency ministry said it was sending five planes to the area to help with possible rescues and the investigation. And Russia opened a hotline for relatives, many of whom gathered at the airport in St. Petersburg, where they had expected their loved ones to arrive.
+
+About 115 relatives have given DNA samples to help identify the victims.
+
+At a St. Petersburg airport terminal, a makeshift shrine was set up for those who perished, with roses, candles and stuffed animals.
+
+Airbus, the plane's maker, issued a statement on Twitter: ""We are aware of the media reports,"" the tweet reads. ""Efforts are now going towards assessing the situation. We'll provide more information as soon as available.""",REAL
+5353,Trump Raises Concern Over Members Of Urban Communities Voting More Than Zero Times - The Onion - America's Finest News Source,"Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Cleveland Indians Worried Team Cursed After Building Franchise On Old Native American Stereotype CLEVELAND—Having watched in horror as their team crumbled after a 3-1 World Series lead, members of the Cleveland Indians expressed concern Thursday that the organization has been cursed for building their franchise on an incredibly old Native American stereotype. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Nurse Reminds Elderly Man She’s Just Down The Hall If He Starts To Die DES PLAINES, IL—Assuring him that she’d be at his side in a jiffy, local nurse Wendy Kaufman reminded an elderly resident at the Briarwood Assisted Living Community that she was just down the hall if he started to die, sources reported Tuesday. ",FAKE
+8746,Brexit Ruling Just Latest Tactic to Block Will of the People,"Brexit Ruling Just Latest Tactic to Block Will of the People November 3, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
+After the referendum made Brexit possible, I warned that the establishment would do everything possible to stop it. That should not come as a surprise to anyone. Brexit was very much a popular rebellion whose centers were well outside the centers of power. The establishment is culturally and politically hostile to it. And one of the most basic ways that the system has of sabotaging policies it doesn't like is to swamp them in procedural red tape and as much politicking as possible so as to make them unviable. Doing that to a Brexit is trickier, but it's still happening. The same old game plan is to just bog it down as much as possible until its motive energy runs down. It's worked in the past. It may not work this time. But that won't stop them from trying. 
+Rerun Brexit through Parliament and maximize the wrangling. The Court's ruling is certain to do that. Keep it going through the grinder long enough and maybe it'll go away.",FAKE
+886,What do voters see in Trump? His authentic phoniness.,"The chances of Donald Trump becoming the Republican nominee for president have gone from impossible to probable, while Hillary Clinton’s chances of being the Democrat have moved from likely to virtually certain. So, barring more surprises, it’s probably going to be Hillary vs. The Donald in the fall.
+
+There is no mystery about Clinton. Those who support her as well as those who oppose her have little trouble explaining why. Trump is another matter. No one I know would even consider voting for Trump. So who are all these millions who support him? Why, they are working-class white men, we are told, who feel betrayed by the failure of both parties to deal with stagnant incomes, growing debts and shrinking possibilities for their retirements and their childrens’ futures.
+
+It’s a plausible theory. And it may help to explain Bernie Sanders. But no one has ever associated Trump with these blue-collar issues. How has he become the tribune of the people in this election? Is he just the one who got there first?
+
+The explanation is not so difficult. In the opening paragraph of his novel “Ravelstein,” Saul Bellow writes, “Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it.” Clinton has been called many things, but “entertaining” is not one of them. This is not the case with Trump, who is an authentic American character like something out of Mark Twain. All the other candidates except Sanders had the character squeezed out of them when they decided they wanted to be president. Trump’s a phony of course (not to mention a racist), but his phoniness is authentic. He’s self-made — not in the financial sense, but characterologically.
+
+And what a character! You always want to know what he will say or do next. To be sure, it’s not really the president’s job to keep the citizenry entertained, although voting on the basis of entertainment value is not entirely irrational, given that entertainment is the main benefit you’re likely to get from our political system. Anyway, not knowing what he’ll do next does have its charms, and they go beyond entertainment.
+
+During the nuclear standoff of the 1960s and 1970s, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger took advantage of a doctrine out of the branch of economics known as game theory, which holds that sometimes it pays to be — or at least to be perceived to be — crazy. No rational person would ever start a nuclear war. So the one who can get the other side to back down in any future nuclear standoff is the one who convinces the world that he or she is more irrational. Vladimir Putin has done a pretty good job here, you have to admit. Imagine Putin and any of the American presidential candidates facing each other across the nuclear divide, each threatening to push the button unless their demands are met. Which of the Americans is crazy enough to actually do it?
+
+When Barack Obama proposes something, you know it’s been analyzed and balanced and weighed against the alternatives, tested in the laboratory and found to be a reasonable solution given the limitations and under the circumstances. When Trump faces some similar challenge, you don’t know what he’s going to say or do. And if he says he’s going to do something crazy, like get the Mexicans to pay for a wall across their own country to keep themselves out of ours, you can’t be sure he won’t actually try to do it.
+
+It’s clear now that the title of Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal ” actually reflects a philosophy of life: Trump believes that everything in life is a negotiation, a deal, and he believes that making deals uses skills that he has and his rivals lack. This is why he may even have been sincere in his puzzlement about why the media has been so insistent that he reveal his tax returns. Paying taxes, like so much else in life, is a negotiation — at least at Trump’s level. And why would you give your opponent a major document, whether it reveals misbehavior or not? What is misbehavior, for that matter? It’s all up for negotiation.
+
+People (read: liberals) are afraid of what Trump might do as president. All this silly talk about moving to Canada. But the thing to really worry about in a Trump presidency is what happens a couple of years from now, when people who have invested their hopes in Trump and his magic tricks discover that he is not the Wizard of Oz but rather the man behind the curtain.",REAL
+7568,Valentin Katasonov: America is in agony and Trump is the doctor,"
+
+November 12, 2016 - Fort Russ 
+
+Neyromir TV (Video)  - Valentin Katasonov - Translated from Russian by Kristina Kharlova 
+
+
+The heated discussion in the media is a diversion - focused on marginal issues appealing to emotions, while much graver issues that are at stake are hidden behind the scenes, explains Valentin Katasonov, p rofessor, associate member of the Russian Academy of Economic Science and Business. 
+
+
+
+
+Part 1 (00.00-14.00) 
+
+
+
+
+
+V.K: Trump understands the situation. I didn't expect him to be so open about revealing all the ills. He is revealing many of the secrets. This is better for America - to face the diagnosis, than to conceal it from  the patient.  
+
+As you know interest rates in the countries of the Golden billion are below the floor.  Last year when interest rates were slightly raised, this caused serious consequences . Christine Lagarde appealed to stop or the global economy will crash. They did not raise interest rates again as planned. Not in the first or the second quarter. They are in a very difficult situation. Trump said if interest rates are raised America will default, because most of the budget will go to pay for interest rates.  
+
+Trump probably wants to save capitalism, but capitalism without interest rates is nonsense. Trump  is a defender of capitalism. 
+
+Host: Who is Hillary Clinton? 
+
+V.K.: She doesn't say who she is, she is focused on some marginal subjects, like rights of minorities or climate change. We understand that these are silly games. 
+
+Host: But climate change is real? 
+
+V.K.: You know I was involved in this as part of World Bank and I know their schemes. Although there might be something going on, I can assure that they don't really care about it.  
+
+Host: What about the ruble? 
+
+V.K. It depends when this apocalypse will take place. The dropping of the ruble is part of the plan of the occupation. 
+
+Only God knows when this apocalypse will happen, may be not next week, could be few months of years for sure, because all the resources have been exhausted. Trump senses this very well, and he wants to save capitalism and America, and for this he wants to negotiate with the lenders and restructure American debt. In reality America is working on new technologies which don't require any negotiations, I am taking about Iran. As you know in the beginning of 2o16 Uncle Sam said we are finally cancelling sanctions and unfreeze Iran's foreign assets. 
+
+There are many conditions, some things are written down. Iran is not happy that America is writing off $2 billion to cover losses from terrorist act in Lebanon in 1983. I looked at some documents, Iran had nothing to do with it, but Uncle Sam found them guilty, just like those in 9/11. It turns out the culprit was Saudi Arabia.  
+
+Host: But Saudi Arabia threatened to sell treasuries and was taken off the list of culprits? 
+
+V.K. Who will let them sell it? Treasuries are in the depositories, it's a double key system, Saudi Arabia has one key and Uncle Sam has another key 
+
+Host: Why is Russia buying these treasuries while in a crisis? We did mention this is a levy, but if we don't develop our industry and science nothing will help us? 
+
+V.K. You know some of our elites hope they have an second base in the USA, the 'unsinkable'. We know some people have already set up base there, like the first deputy minister of finance. Some are closer, like the former minister of agriculture is in France. It is easier to count those who did not leave. This shows we are dealing with colonial administration which receives basic guarantees for citizenship in the US, France, GB. 
+
+Host: Their policies lead to total collapse, what if the owners are not happy? 
+
+V.K.: You know, lets not overestimate the masters, they act as parasites. Parsites keep feeding not thinking that the food will run out and they may also perish. They don't see beyond their nose. 
+
+Speaking of Iran, according to Iran, their foreign reserves comprise $130 billion, according to US - $100 billion, half of them are gold and currency reserves belonging to Iran's Central bank, or the Sovereign fund of Iran. I think they will eat up these 130 billion very fast, because after the $2 billion, US announced they will demand $11.5 billion for 9/11. The appetite comes during the meal. The Iranian parliament discussed a bill to allow the government to begin a case about damages to Iran by USA. A working group will inventory all the events and estimate them.  
+
+Today the world is entering a repatriation game, this is a commercialization of international relations and monetizing of our history. This is very important to Russian Federation. Baltic countries continue to work on such demands, especially Latvia. Ukraine is a little different. While the Baltics refer to Soviet occupation, Ukraine is talking about Crimea. Monetizing losses from events in Donbass and so on. I am just saying we should be a step ahead, we must prepare the same contra-measures. 
+
+
+
+Don't get caught up in the media's agenda, dig deeper and think with your own head! - KK 
+
+
+
+Part 2 coming soon... 
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
+                                                   
+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+9224,President-elect Donald Trump eyes Ovala Office with plans to erase Barack Obama’s achievements,"November 11, 2016 President-elect Donald Trump eyes Ovala Office with plans to erase Barack Obama’s achievements 
+President-elect Donald Trump was surprisingly gracious as he met President Barack Obama in the Oval Office on Thursday but make no mistake: He is already working to erase major parts of Obama’s legacy from the history books. 
+Trump will be able to change some of Obama’s policies with a quick stroke of the pen. Others will be much more difficult, requiring justification to pass legal hurdles or buy-in from lawmakers on Capitol Hill or foreign leaders. 
+“He can make a big difference at the outset of his administration, but it will take him years and support from dubious congressional factions and allies overseas to get a lot of other things done,” said Charles Tiefer, former solicitor and deputy general counsel of the House of Representatives and now a professor at the University of Baltimore law school.",FAKE
+9442,Trump Presidency Creates Mountains Of Salt From Butthurt Liberals,"Rejoice, gentlemen! The tears of liberals are flowing freely, as Donald Trump has recently been announced president. All of the hard work that we’ve committed ourselves to over the past year has finally come to a close. It’s truly an event of the ages: a hard working, American businessman beat out the globalist titans and Satanic elite.
+In the spirit of this great victory, I believe that we’re all entitled to some enjoyment. This article will be solely dedicated to bathing in liberal tears; and, mark my words, it will be glorious. This is the beginning of the end of SJWism, and I think it’s high time we soak in the fruits of our labor.
+Hillary HQ: Morale Obliterated Sorry guys, there’s no brakes on the #TrumpTrain
+As poll results came in, moving Trump from a measly 2% chance to a whopping 95% chance of seizing the presidency, libtards began crying all across the nation. Turns out that America does not, in fact, want their Lord and Savior Hillary Rodham Christ, to be president of the free world.
+Note the sour expression of the woman on the far right.
+Unfortunately for you guys, Trump has won the presidency. Sorry illegals—you’re out. SJWism is coming to an end, the mainstream media is dying off, and we’re going to make America great again.
+“You mean we won’t be letting in 60,000 violent refugees? Oh no!”
+Here’s a video compilation:
+
+#TheShakening 
+
+Too late. He won.
+
+
+
+
+#LiterallyShaking
+
+Literally Can’t Even Literally (Literally) Hitler 
+
+
+
+As am I, Frosty. As am I.
+
+The Regressive Left Can’t Cope with Reality 
+If you’re having this much trouble dealing with Trump’s presidency, you shouldn’t even be allowed to vote.
+
+
+
+She doesn’t realize that Democrats keep the black population down by giving them free handouts and encouraging squalor.
+
+
+
+
+Oh, the feels! How can these people lead our country when they can’t even contain their emotions?
+Professional Victim And Concern Trolling Olympics 
+
+
+Meanwhile At Trump HQ 
+Notice the general lack of high-estrogen men. Most of these guys don’t seem to be lacking in testosterone.
+
+This man is giving a toast to Donald Trump. “To making America great again!”
+
+
+
+Thank You Mr. President! Let’s #MAGA Read More: Wall Street, Hollywood, The Media And SJWs Fail To Stop Donald Trump From Becoming America’s Next President 
+",FAKE
+6630,FOX: Latinos Are Already CRUSHING Trump At The Polls,"Comments 
+Republicans are fond of blaming the media for their troubles, but never blaming voters for utterly rejecting their party’s platform of racism, hatred and economic inequality. To some Republican voters, it will even come as a surprise that Donald Trump loses next week’s election, but the signs were all there and here’s an excerpt from just one of the rare Fox News stories that admits it: “ ‘Sleeping Giant’ awake and roaring – early voting shows high Latino turnout “: 
+The tens of millions of early votes cast point to strength from Democratic-leaning Latino voters, potentially giving Clinton a significant advantage in Nevada and Colorado. With more than half the votes already cast in those states, Democrats are matching if not exceeding their successful 2012 pace, according to data compiled by The Associated Press. 
+Latinos, another group that Democrats have been banking on, are turning out in larger numbers than anticipated, and they very well may be the ones who give the party’s presidential nominee the margin of victory. “We are seeing the trajectory of the election change in some states, but Democrats are also making up ground,” said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor and expert in voter turnout. 
+They don’t let Sean Hannity or Lou Dobbs on to Fox News Latino, which is probably why it actually publishes some factual stories, unlike Fox News or Fox Business, who just today had to retract an entirely false story about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. 
+Meanwhile, Univision exit polling is showing that Latinos have the same high level of regard for Hillary Clinton in Florida that they have for President Barack Obama. This level of support is considered key to the Democratic nominee’s strategy to win the Sunshine State, which would act as a firewall, closing almost all of the Republican nominee’s paths to the presidency. The Miami Herald reports : 
+Hillary Clinton has hit a key marker among Florida Hispanics, according to a new poll: She’s reached the level of popularity that helped President Barack Obama win the nation’s largest battleground state in 2012. 
+Sixty percent of Florida Latinos favor Clinton, the Univision News poll shows. That’s the same number that voted for Obama four years ago, according to exit polls from that election. 
+The polls further indicate that Hillary Clinton will probably get at least 60% of the latino vote in Florida, but there’s 9% of the sample that is still not decided, so it could be much higher by the time election day finishes. 
+Politico is reporting that the Democratic nominee’s 30-point lead amongst Latino voters in Florida isn’t just a problem for Trump, but that for the entire GOP it’s a “terrifying” prospect. For the wing of the Republican party that likes to win elections, this poll is probably invoking the moment where they see their party’s entire electoral history as the party of Lincoln flash before its eyes, which can only mean that the end of the decadently twisted Grand Old Party is near. 
+Republicans wrote an autopsy of their party after their politics of division, hatred and the 47% blew the 2012 election, which declared the GOP dead in the water. Particularly, the report cited the Tea Party’s radical anti-immigration policies, racist dog whistles and the war on women. 
+Luckily, that spurred the rank and file GOP voters in 2016 to pick an orange zombie Presidential candidate, a man who has turned off women and latinos like a switch, and added muslims, finished off black people and finally convinced college educated voters to trust that the Democratic party is the only rational political actor that can be trusted. 
+Donald Trump’s “safe zone”– THE Fox News Network – is reporting a massive turnout in the latino communities the Republican candidate so despises. 
+Now, there is absolutely no way he can claim that the election is rigged next Tuesday night when all of the major news networks pronounce his campaign dead, and the Republican Party along with it. ",FAKE
+559,How Common Core quietly won the war,Argentine president Mauricio Macri's office rebutting a report from an Argentinian journalist that set off waves in the American media.,REAL
+1739,The rest of the field figured out how to make Trump not quite as dominant,"Something unusual happened here Wednesday when the Republican presidential candidates met for their second debate: For the first time since he joined the race, Donald Trump wasn’t the commanding presence on the stage.
+
+Not that Trump wasn’t the Trump whom Americans have seen nonstop on cable television. Among the first words out of his mouth was a personal and unprovoked attack on Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. He sparred at times angrily with Carly Fiorina over who was the better business executive. He and Jeb Bush, standing next to each other, had repeated exchanges.
+
+But at other times, particularly when the discussion shifted from what Trump has said about the others to issues of domestic and foreign policy, the candidate who has dominated the summer and leads the polls was far less a force.
+
+Unlike the debate in Cleveland last month, the other candidates arrived with no illusions about Trump’s candidacy — they take him seriously now — or the need for them to step up and show their own mettle, both in challenging Trump and in displaying their own attributes, records and character.
+
+Over three hours of lively, entertaining and at times angry debate, Trump was put on the defensive as much as he tried to stay on the offensive. Whether that will change the course of the nomination battle won’t be known for some weeks. After the last debate, despite missteps, Trump rose rather than fell. But Wednesday showed that his rivals are ready to engage him, when necessary, both from long distance and to his face.
+
+This was billed in advance as the debate that would highlight the current state of the Republican race, one in which the outsiders — Trump, Ben Carson and Fiorina — enjoy more than 50 percent of support against the insiders — the eight current or former elected politicians. Instead, it became a classic of debates past — poke the front-runner. It was Trump against the field, or rather the field against Trump.
+
+The ebb and flow of the debate, guided by CNN’s Jake Tapper with the help of CNN’s Dana Bash and conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, oscillated between personal exchanges, many of them with Trump involved, and discussions of issues.
+
+When immigration came to the fore, Trump was at the center of the debate, defending his hard-line stance that calls for deporting the millions of undocumented immigrants and challenging the 14th Amendment over the issue of birthright citizenship.
+
+Bush fired back at him over those proposals. He invoked Ronald Reagan’s optimistic vision in contrast to what he said was Trump’s approach “that everything is coming to an end.” He said Trump’s proposals would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and tear families and communities apart. Trump disputed Bush’s comment that those who have come illegally came out of an act of love. “This is not an act of love. He’s weak on immigration. He doesn’t get my vote.”
+
+Trump and Fiorina clashed memorably several times. Once was over their business records, and it was as pointed and sharp as any during the evening. He accused her of running Hewlett-Packard into the ground. She accused him of running up “mountains of debt” and filing for bankruptcy four times.
+
+The other exchange, one everyone was waiting for, came when Fiorina was asked about Trump’s comment, captured in a Rolling Stone profile, denigrating her looks by saying, “Look at that face!”
+
+Trump had earlier explained that he was talking about her “persona,” not her looks. Asked about that, Fiorina said acidly, “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.” The audience responded with one of the biggest rounds of applause of the night. Trump’s response: “She’s got a beautiful face, and I think she’s a beautiful woman.”
+
+Fiorina was the new addition to the main debate stage, after her performance in the undercard debate in Cleveland, and she came with the clear intention of making a memorable impression. She got another applause-meter moment with a ringing statement about Planned Parenthood and sought to project strength and confidence surrounded by 10 men in suits and ties.
+
+At times, others stepped forward. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, in danger after seeing his poll numbers plummet nationally and, critically, in Iowa, leapt into the conversation when the question on the table was whether Trump could be trusted with his hand on the nuclear codes. “We don’t need an apprentice in the White House,” Walker said. “We have one right now. . . . We don’t know who you are or where you’re going.”
+
+One reason Trump seemed a less commanding presence was that on some issues, he offered little substance beyond reassurances that he would be strong and tough, a negotiator par excellence and someone who would grasp the complexities of national security issues as president — and would find experts to help him.
+
+Challenged on how he would deal with the Russians putting military resources into Syria, he said he would know how to get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin, an answer that others seemed to find unsatisfying.
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who displayed his fluidity with foreign policy, challenged him implicitly on how much he knew about the world, saying he would be happy to have a longer discussion of the issues to see the depth of Trump’s knowledge.
+
+Rubio wasn’t the only one who had a moment. Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz sparred over what to do with the Iran nuclear deal. Paul expressed his support for diplomacy over war in dealing with Iran.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie upbraided Trump and Fiorina for talking about their business records and said the candidates should instead focus on the lives of middle-class Americans.
+
+Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, displayed the same low-key, sober demeanor that has found a growing audience over the past six weeks. And near the end, he showed humor, when he tweaked Trump for having called him “an okay doctor.” After Trump had spoken about vaccinations, Tapper asked Carson for his view of Trump’s ideas. “He’s an okay doctor,” Carson said.
+
+Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee defended his strong support for Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis for her resistance to giving marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
+
+The prelude to Wednesday’s debate was strikingly different than the buildup before Cleveland. Then, many of the other candidates still were clinging to the belief — or hope — that Trump would quickly burn himself out, that his candidacy would prove a short-lived, if entertaining, sideshow.
+
+By this month, that belief had disappeared. Trump’s continued strength atop the Republican field has forced all the others to rethink his potential and its impact on their hopes of winning the nomination. Some still believe he will sink under his own weight, and if they were not prepared to abandon their original strategies, they recognized that they had to make adjustments.
+
+Last month’s debate in Cleveland marked the beginning of the end of a long exhibition season. Wednesday’s forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library signaled a turn to the post-Labor Day phase of the campaign that, historically, brings more intensive campaigning, more debates, sharper engagement and heightened stakes for the candidates.
+
+It was clear throughout the evening that everyone on the stage understood what’s now at stake. Trump may continue to dominate the polls, but if Wednesday’s debate was any indication, he can expect a bumpier ride in the weeks and months ahead.",REAL
+3296,Trade bill clears Senate hurdle,"The 62-38 vote to end debate on the bill, moving it toward a final vote, was a victory for Obama, who had linked with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, to push the bill despite opposition from Senate Democratic leaders.
+
+""This last vote was a major step forward on this important legislation,"" said Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican who sponsored the bill.
+
+The Senate is now set to vote on changes to the bill, including one that would force the Obama administration to use trade deals to crack down on countries that manipulate the value of their currencies to give their exports a price advantage in the United States — an amendment the White House opposes because it would add a huge new complication into trade negotiations.
+
+Even though Senate passage is ultimately now much more likely, the House could be tougher. There, tea party conservatives are linking up with liberals to form a broader populist opposition than what existed in the Senate.
+
+The measure would hand the President six years' worth of ""trade promotion authority"" — the power to submit trade deals to Congress for an up-or-down vote with limited debate and no amendments. It's considered crucial to finalizing the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive trade deal that serves as the economic underpinning of Obama's ""Asia pivot."" It would link 40% of the world's economy, including the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada and Mexico. The trade deal has launched an obscure commerce policy discussion into a fiery political battle that has positioned the President at odds with most of his party, particularly Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and driven a wedge between the Democratic presidential front-runner, Hillary Clinton, and her primary challengers. The Senate is also looking to dispense with the trade votes to move forward and take up bills to reform or reauthorize the Patriot Act, an issue that considers to deeply divide the Senate and Republicans on Capitol Hill. The House overwhelmingly passed the USA Freedom Act, a bipartisan bill to reform the Patriot Act and effectively end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone data on millions of Americans. And while that bill was the result of a compromise between reform advocates and House Republican leadership, the bill is facing tough opposition in the Senate from powerful Republicans like McConnell, though the majority leader has vowed to allow a vote on the reform measure. He is pushing a competing bill to reauthorize the expiring Patriot Act provisions without any reforms.",REAL
+7770,MUFON International tracking multiple triangle UFO reports,"Four triangle UFO cases were reported to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) international desk in recent months from Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada and Iran. A Switzerland witness at Neuchatel recalled an incident from March 2011 when he and his wife were sitting in the living room of their apartment at Rue de la Cote.
+“My wife sat under a side window of the room from where you can see the Rue Auguste Bachelin,” the witness stated.“It was already dark outside and there were nearly no cars in that road anymore. There is anyway not much traffic in that road. It was very silent outside and inside we had no light switched on as we were watching TV. It is impossible that this is any reflection from the inside. Then I turned around to talk to my wife and I saw a huge triangle with three lights under each corner.”
+The witness described the object.
+“It was approximately 15-20 meters wide and maybe 1.5 meters high. The edges were rounded and there were no windows or anything to see. Maybe there was something on the top, but that was not visible from that angle. The object was flying/hovering maybe 10 meters or lower from west to east, following the street.”
+The witness was able to watch the object for between 10 and 20 seconds.
+“The speed was very low, but I cannot tell how fast it was. It seemed to me like it was searching something like a police helicopter, but it was sure no helicopter. I am a FPV drone pilot myself and I know how a helicopter flies and that it has to make a lot of sound when flying so low. Surface was black matte without any symbols or markings as far as I have seen it.”
+The witness submitted one illustration with the report.
+“The next week I have searched in Google for a triangle UFO and it looks nearly exactly like the one described in the ‘Belgium UFO Wave’ from 1989 but without the red light in the middle. My wife asked me what was wrong, but before I could answer the object was gone. She was making jokes of me so I didn’t talk to anybody about that until now. But I am nearly sure that someone else must have seen it. Please let me know if there are other reports so I know I am not crazy.”
+MUFON International CAG team member Wolfgang Stelzig closed this case as an Unknown.
+A New Zealand witness at Christchurch recalled a UFO event from 1990 when a V-shaped UFO about 120 feet long moved overhead on November 12.
+“I could see the struts quite clearly,” the witness stated.“It was the shape of electrical pylons on its side. As it passed over there was no noise. I could see part of blue light /disc upfront and two light blue lights at the rear.”
+A New Zealand witness said the triangle UFO had blue lights. Pictured: Christchurch, New Zealand. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
+The witness explained his position.
+“We lived on Cashmere Hills quite high up. After viewing this object for about 20 minutes, I asked my wife to get the video camera. I filmed it for 10 minutes. It somehow turned into a circular light jumping all over the place.”
+The object the moved toward the witness.
+“When the craft passed over, it was a huge triangle shape with light blue discs on the rear and front. There was no noise.”
+The witness stated that he was later visited by “three men in suits” and questioned about the events.No images or videos were included with the MUFON report.
+New Zealand MUFON National Director and STAR Team Member Roger Stankovic is investigating.
+A Canadian witness at Estevan reported being overcome with fear after watching two, triangle-shaped UFOs move to the ground level at 8:15 p.m. on August 20, 2016. The witness was at his kitchen table when the lights on the objects caught his eye.
+A Canadian witness at Estevan reported being overcome with fear after watching two, triangle-shaped UFOs move to the ground level . Pictured: Estevan. (Credit: Google)
+“They formed a triangle,” the witness stated.“There was a bright, orange-red light at the corner of each of them forming a triangle. These triangles that were formed were big. The size, location, and what had appeared they were doing scared me. They were floating, came down to the ground and appeared to be doing something. They were there for some time.”
+The witness watched for about 20 minutes.
+“I stopped watching them and closed the curtains. I felt that if I continued to watch them, that they would sense my presence there, even perhaps pick up on what I was thinking. At first I thought that a couple of semi-trucks took a wrong turn and had to turn around on our property. As I kept watching I soon realized I was wrong. I was stricken with fear and panic as I had watched what they were doing. I tried to calm myself. I was so worried that they would sense my presence being so close.”
+Canadian MUFON Field Investigator Peter Derrick is investigating.
+An Iranian witness at Shiraz reported watching a triangle UFO emitting an intense, red light that quickly disappeared about 3:30 a.m. on September 14, 2016.
+The Iranian witness said the low flying triangle UFO shone blue light on the area below. Pictured: Shiraz is in southwestern Iran. (Credit: Google)
+“I was awake studying for my post PhD exam,” the witness stated.“I did what I used to do every night. I went out in front of the house and stood right beside the dry river that is just in front of the house. That is when it happened. I saw a red light in distance. It came closer and closer. OMG, I still get goosebumps when I think about it. I couldn’t move at all. I mean I was just like a statue staring at that thing. I am usually very brave compared to my friends and family, but that was the most frightening event of my life.”
+The witness said the object was emitting light.
+“It then started scattering a red light over the area. I mean everywhere was red. After a minute, it came up and just disappeared in a second. I mean, the way it disappeared was even scary, like blinking. I have never said this to anyone because I think it will probably sound crazy. I didn’t know what to do, who to tell. I just found this site and reported what happened. I also never went back to that spot for smoking. Anyway, just writing about it here made me feel better already. Thank you.”
+MUFON International is investigating.
+Please remember that most UFO sightings can be explained as something natural or man-made. The above quotes were edited for clarity. Please report UFO activity to MUFON.com.
+Source: Open Minds 
+Related: TR-3B Black Triangle: Man Made Anti Gravity Craft Is This the TR-3B? New Footage Of Alleged “Triangle UFO” Surfaces Secret Space Program: TR-3B Triangle-Shaped Craft Spotted in Apollo 17 Mission Images Mysterious Triangular UFO Appears Again Over England Authentic Image: NASA Astronauts Snaps image of Triangular UFO in Space NASA Hacker Claims USA Has War Ships In Space Astronaut Scott Kelly Tweets Photo of UFO from ISS A Video Shows Mysterious Lights of Unknown Black Triangle UFO in San Diego Seen Over Northern California Witness with military background videotapes triangle UFO (Video) Silent, low flying triangle UFO moves over Austin ",FAKE
+4941,"Trump makes biggest ad buy to date, hammers Clinton on economy","Donald Trump’s campaign is planning to drop up to $10 million on its biggest ad buy to date, hammering Democratic rival Hillary Clinton on her economic proposals in a slew of battleground states.
+
+The Republican nominee is trying to make up for lost time in the ad wars, after being significantly outspent by Clinton on that front over the summer. But he’s also kept an active campaign schedule over the past week as his Democratic opponent mostly has stayed off the trail.
+
+With its latest ad buy, the Trump campaign plans to cover nine battleground states.
+
+They are: Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, where the campaign has already been on the air, along with New Hampshire, Virginia, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada.
+
+His campaign’s second general election ad, unveiled Monday, hits Clinton on economic issues, claiming the middle-class would be “crushed” under a Clinton presidency amid tax increases and more spending.
+
+“It’s more of the same, but worse,” the narrator says. “In Donald Trump’s America, working families get tax relief. Millions of new jobs created. Wages go up. … Change that makes America great again.”
+
+Trump has so far been badly outspent by Clinton and groups supporting her. Since clinching her party's nomination in early June, Clinton has spent more than $77 million on television and radio advertising, largely targeting voters in battleground states, according to Kantar Media's political ad tracker.
+
+Trump finally hit the airwaves earlier this month with his first ad, focused on immigration, and so far has only spent about $5 million.
+
+Amid conflicting signals over his latest immigration platform, Trump now says he’ll deliver a detailed speech Wednesday on his proposal to crack down on illegal immigration.
+
+The announcement came late Sunday in a tweet by the Republican presidential nominee after days of wavering -- and at least one canceled speech -- on a question central to his campaign: Whether he would, as he said in November, use a ""deportation force"" to eject the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally.
+
+Trump's immigration speech in Arizona will come after he and Clinton spent last week trading accusations on racial issues. Trump called Clinton ""a bigot;"" Clinton accused Trump of allowing hate groups to take over the Republican Party.
+
+Clinton is starting this week by announcing her proposals for dealing with mental health issues. She is stressing the need to fully integrate mental health services into the U.S. health care system. Her plan stresses early diagnosis and intervention and calls for a national initiative for suicide prevention.
+
+“Donald Trump’s reckless approach to business has devastated working families and communities. He will do and say whatever is in his interest, even if it means swindling working families to make millions for himself,"" Campaign Deputy Communications Director Christina Reynolds said in a statement. ""Now Trump is promising the same reckless, self-centered approach to running the country’s economy – with large tax breaks for the wealthy, and a plan that independent experts say would cost millions of jobs.""
+
+Late Sunday, America's only African-American owned and operated national Christian television network also announced that its president and CEO, Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, would interview the Republican nominee Saturday in Detroit.
+
+This comes as the Republican’s campaign vows the candidate, who has been appealing lately to minority voters for support, plans to go into African-American communities to seek their vote.
+
+The new investment in advertising comes amid signs that Trump's lagging poll numbers may be improving against Clinton's following a campaign reboot.
+
+Trump senior communications adviser Jason Miller said in a statement that the billionaire businessman's ""positive message of economic opportunity is working and we see the national and battleground state polls all moving in the right direction.""
+
+""With Hillary Clinton off the campaign trail yet again this week and continuing to take many communities' votes for granted, we see this as the right time to show voters the benefits of an American economy under the leadership of Mr. Trump,"" he added.
+
+Clinton will be spending much of the week in private fundraisers in the Hamptons, the wealthy enclaves of eastern Long Island, New York.
+
+Fox News’ Nicholas Kalman and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+2383,McConnell Promises 9/11 First Responders Will Get Healthcare Bill,"McConnell said Congress will not leave for the holidays until there's a deal.The Senate and House earlier in the week passed a five-day extension, pushing the deadline for a final budget agreement to the middle of next week.""We're certainly going to finish, both that and the tax bill,"" McConnell told Politico.Former ""Daily Show"" host Stewart targeted McConnell during a guest appearance on his former show on Monday. Stewart also pushed for the legislation by impersonating GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump in bit on ""The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.""",REAL
+9236,Shocking Questions About the FBI & the ‘News’ Media,"Posted on November 6, 2016 by Eric Zuesse. Eric Zuesse At 2:47 in this video about a key moment in the 7 September 2016 “Town Hall” ‘debate’ between Trump and Clinton where Matt Lauer has asked her about her privatization of her State Department emails, Ms. Clinton says, “but the real question is the handling of classified materials, which is I think what the implication of your question was.” Lauer did not deny that; he was following the line of Comey, that only the classified emails could pose a criminal problem for her. However, that assumption is flat-out false, and both Hillary Clinton knows it (which is why she tried there to narrow the meaning of his question to the classified-information issue ), and also Comey knows it (which is why he has his FBI exclude from its consideration the illegality of her privatization of official email itself — her theft of U.S. government information, her abuse of even non-confidential information, her destruction of evidence by destroying her government emails, etcetera — there are several laws she broke which have nothing to do with “confidential information,” but both the FBI and the ‘news’ media (at least until Comey’s about-face on October 28th) were ignoring them, and they still do ignore each one of them. Here are six of those laws . They describe what nobody denies that she did, and the maximum sentence under all of them, if the FBI were to “throw the book at her,” would be 72 years. Conviction of her under them would be a slam-dunk, but all of these laws are being simply ignored. So, the questions here are: Why is the FBI ignoring those criminal laws, which she clearly did violate? Why are America’s ‘news’ media ignoring the FBI’s ignoring these laws?",FAKE
+631,"Trump, and what he might say next, is burning up GOPs political capital in Washington","Doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes
+
+-- “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” from the Tony award winning Broadway musical “Avenue Q”
+
+Congressional Republicans might not be capable of directly measuring their tolerance of Donald Trump. But there is certainly a metric that helps them gauge the amount.
+
+Most Republicans have gone along grudgingly with Trump -- if they support the presumptive presidential nominee at all. Some of those lawmakers are now reviewing that political quotient as they wonder what Trump might say next.
+
+They ponder how many more times they’ll have to condemn Trump’s remarks. They ask themselves if they’ll again have to awkwardly criticize Trump’s comments about a judge or women or Muslims -- yet reaffirm allegiance to him in the next breath.
+
+Only Trump knows what lies in his heart when it comes to race, ethnicity and religion. But some of his comments give people pause and perhaps make them think of the lyrics in the Avenue Q tune. No, Trump doesn’t “go around committing hate crimes.” But his comments certainly sound “a little bit racist” to some and “a lotta bit racist” to others.
+
+House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, says he’ll vote for Trump. But he adds that Trump needs to alter his rhetoric. And if Trump keeps it up?
+
+“It causes a lot of us to think,” Sessions responded.
+
+Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune, South Dakota, said Trump’s “going to have to adapt. … This is not working for him.”
+
+This has been an unconventional election year because it flips political norms on their ear. But political capital still exists and isn’t unlimited.
+
+Republicans cannot repeatedly find themselves crossways with the top of their ticket, blasting Trump’s provocative language yet failing to disavow that person and their ideals. Political capital is fungible, and some of Republicans could see their own stock plunge if they are linked too closely to Trump.
+
+“I’m not going to be sucked into talking about Trump 24/7,” protested Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, when asked about the Trump’s views that federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel is incapable of fairly adjudicating a lawsuit involving Trump University because he is “Mexican.”
+
+Never mind that Curiel was born in Indiana to Hispanic parents.
+
+Cornyn says Republicans should focus instead on policy and the issues. But try as they might, the GOP fights a powerful political news vacuum that insists on focusing on Trump and his missteps “24/7.”
+
+At the Senate Republican leadership press conference Tuesday afternoon, just outside the Senate chamber, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke about plans to finish a defense bill this week (which didn’t happen).
+
+The leader mentioned opioid and energy measures. Cornyn then spoke about defense and North Korea. Thune cited the Iran nuclear deal and ISIS. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, discussed the economy and job numbers.
+
+And then reporters ignored the leadership boilerplate and asked four consecutive questions about Trump.
+
+“I’m going to let you all try one more time,” beseeched an exasperated McConnell to the press corps.
+
+Naturally, journalists fired a fifth sidewinder interrogative at McConnell about Trump’s invective “overshadowing” the GOP agenda and the ability of Congress to legislate.
+
+“OK. I’m going to wrap it up with this,” huffed McConnell, who turned his ire on Trump. “It’s time to quit attacking various people that you competed with or various minority groups in the country and get on message. He has an opportunity to do that. This election is eminently winnable.”
+
+“We’re all anxious to hear what he might say next,” said the Kentucky Republican.
+
+House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., didn’t fare much better when he spoke Tuesday in inner-city Washington at an event rolling out the GOP’s anti-poverty plan.
+
+Naturally, the first question focused on Trump, forcing the speaker to characterize the remarks about Curiel as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
+
+One Republican lawmaker hit the ceiling with Trump earlier in the week.
+
+Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., faces perhaps the most-challenging re-election campaign of any GOP senator this fall.
+
+Kirk this week dropped his support for Trump. He said the first-time candidate and billionaire businessman “has not demonstrated the temperament necessary to be president.”
+
+Kirk also said he wouldn’t support Hillary Clinton for president. When asked who he might back, Kirk initially said “no one” before quickly adding he would “write-in David Petraeus.”
+
+Trump then published a statement that failed to extinguish the flames on the Curiel comments. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., doesn’t support Trump. The new statement vexed the senator.
+
+“This is a new level,” Flake said. “He needs to retract.”
+
+A reporter asked Flake whether he thought Trump had sufficiently “walked back” the Curiel remarks.
+
+Not all congressional Republicans are able or willing to tell Trump to take a hike.
+
+Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., says Trump would throttle Clinton in his district on eastern Long Island. Zeldin wants reporters to focus on the issues and not Trump’s words.
+
+“It’s a disservice for any presidential campaign and those following it who is not doing a deep dive on substantive issues,” argued Zeldin.
+
+But it was Zeldin who found himself crossways in a CNN interview about his own word choice.
+
+“You can easily argue that the president of the United States is a racist with his policies and rhetoric,” he said.
+
+When confronted by reporters in a congressional hallway the next day, Zeldin wanted to revert to substantive issues.
+
+“There’s a lot more to this presidential race then just analyzing what the most provocative thing of the day was said,” Zeldin said.
+
+Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., defended Trump when reporters asked whether the candidate’s statements disqualified him for president.
+
+Reporters pressed Perdue on whether Trump’s comments could wound him with voters.
+
+“People back home aren’t worried about that,” said Perdue, noting that he disagreed with Trump’s “tonality.”
+
+Tone is indeed an issue for Trump. And as McConnell and even Zeldin suggested, so is substance.
+
+After the weekly Capitol Hill huddle of the pro-Trump caucus Thursday morning, Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., remarked that Trump would “be on message on policy.
+
+He’s going to take the fight to Hillary Clinton.” Collins also asserted “we’re going to be disciplined.”
+
+Exiting the same session, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said that Trump was now playing ball in “a much tougher league.”
+
+“You’ve got to be more careful and you’ve got to think through
+
+ what you’re going to say,” he said.
+
+Within hours, Trump reverted to name-calling. He upbraided Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and called her “Pocahontas,” referring to a 2012 dispute about whether she has Native American roots.
+
+Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, had an idea on how to fix things for Trump.
+
+“You folks in the media need to give him a little more leeway,” suggested Hatch, third in line to the presidency as the Senate’s resident pro tempore.
+
+Sen Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., isn’t supporting Trump. He argues there’s a limited threshold for how much political capital some GOPers are willing to burn if Trump continues the trash talk.
+
+“If he keeps doing this he’s really dishonoring that support,” Graham said.
+
+That’s the political risk Trump poses to his own supporters -- especially in Republicans in Congress.
+
+Lawmakers don’t want the public to perceive them like someone out of Avenue Q. As the song goes, no one’s going around “committing hate crimes.”
+
+But if Trump continues the rhetoric, lawmakers worry voters could label Republicans “a little bit racist.”",REAL
+9515,Non-GMO 'crop circles' showing up in corn fields in Nebraska,"Non-GMO 'crop circles' showing up in corn fields in Nebraska 
+  Daniel Barker Tags: anti-GMO , crop circles , Our Little Rebellion (NaturalNews) An American company has hit on a novel way to promote its non-GMO corn snacks while raising awareness concerning the dominance of GM agriculture in the country – by using crop circles as an advertising medium.Our Little Rebellion – a company that sells a line of non-GMO corn snack products called PopCorners – has joined up with Nebraska farmer Jim McGowan to create a giant message in his cornfield urging people to ""Join The Corn Revolution.""The 9-acre crop artwork also features a large-scale version of the PopCorners website address and the logo of the Non-GMO Project, an organization that verifies Our Little Rebellion's products.Courtney Pineau, associate director of the Non-GMO Project, said:""It's super creative – we're really excited about it. I've never really seen a brand undertake an endeavor like this, so that's one of the things that we really loved about it.""The project involved some high-tech GPS mapping, a crop circle artist and a week of hand-cutting corn by a team of 15 people.A drone camera captured the creation of the artwork, as seen in the video below:Fifth-generation farmer McGowan said:""We're really excited to be able to see the whole circle here come into effect. Most of the time in production agriculture, it's treated as a regular raw commodity and you don't even know what happens to it. To see the actual chain complete with this product from that field is really special.""From Eco Salon :""The project seeks to draw attention to the baffling 92 percent of American corn acreage currently being grown with genetically modified seeds – and to Our Little Rebellion's efforts to source the 20 million pounds of corn it uses annually from the other eight percent."" Meeting a growing demand for non-GMO foods To manufacture its products, Our Little Rebellion has had to take a creative approach, partnering with dozens of small farmers like McGowan to restructure supply chains so that they can obtain enough non-GMO corn to keep production steady.The Non-GMO Project says that the growing demand for non-GMO corn, soybean and canola is encouraging more farmers to plant non-GMO crops.Despite massive lobbying and propaganda campaigns on the part of the GM agriculture industry, Americans have consistently spoken out in favor of GMO labeling and the right to have a choice between purchasing GMO and non-GMO foods.There is a market for natural, organic, GMO-free foods , and those who are willing to put the time and effort into developing these products and the supply chains to support them are likely to be rewarded in the long run. GMO industry lies exposed, public now facing the truth Public awareness of the issues surrounding GMOs is growing. More people than ever now realize that the industry has failed to live up to its promise to ""feed a hungry world.""GMO crop yields are not bigger, the GM agricultural model hurts small farmers and poisons the planet with glyphosate, and GM cross-contamination and the development of herbicide-resistant superweeds are threatening the entire agricultural spectrum – and the public is finding out about it.The GMO deception is no longer sustainable, just as GM crops are not a part of a truly sustainable agricultural system. The sooner food producers realize that and begin giving the public what it wants – i.e. healthy, organically-raised , sustainable food products – the more chance they will have to survive and thrive in an evolving and highly competitive marketplace.Smaller companies like Our Little Rebellion and established food giants like Dannon (which recently made a pledge towards GMO-labeling transparency and introducing non-GMO products) are likely to benefit over the long haul for having joined the ""non-GMO rebellion"" early on.The demand for healthy food is real, and the market will eventually be forced to meet that demand. Sources:",FAKE
+8209,Desperate Obama RIPS Comey: 'We Don't Operate On Innuendo' | Daily Wire,"Desperate Obama RIPS Comey: 'We Don't Operate On Innuendo' By: November 2, 2016 
+Barack Obama must be pretty worried. 
+Earlier this week, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told the media that FBI director James Comey’s decision to reopen an investigation into Hillary Clinton didn’t spring from bias or politics. He explained : 
+Director Comey is a man of integrity and principle and well regarded by officials in both parties and served as a senior position in the Bush administration and got bipartisan support when his nomination to be director of the FBI was considered by the United States Senate... they speak to his good character and the president's assessment of his integrity and his character has not changed. For example, the president doesn't believe that Director Comey is trying to influence the outcome of the election. And the president doesn't believe he's secretly supporting a candidate or political party. He's in a tough spot. He's the one who will be in the position to defend his actions in the face of significant criticism from a variety of legal experts including officials who served in senior justice position for presidents led by both parties. 
+Now, with the polls closing to within the margin of error, President Obama has had second thoughts. He told NowThisNews : 
+I do think that there is a norm that when there are investigations we don’t operate on innuendo and we don’t operate on incomplete information and we don’t operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made. When this was investigated thoroughly last time the conclusion of the FBI, the conclusion of the Justice Department, the conclusion of repeated congressional investigations was she had made some mistakes but that there wasn't anything there that was prosecutable. 
+It’s worthwhile pointing out the hypocrisy here – Obama’s entire administration has been built on innuendo. His Department of Justice has destroyed police departments around the country with unsubstantiated innuendo about systemic racism. His IRS used innuendo to destroy conservative 501(c)3s. His entire 2012 campaign was rooted in innuendo about Mitt Romney’s supposed secret evils. 
+But more than anything, the Obama flip here shows serious desperation. What changed? The polls. On Monday, it looked like the FBI scandal would detract from Hillary’s polling numbers, but wouldn’t kill her. Now it looks like she might go down in flames. This shows how faithless Obama is – Comey was wonderful just up until the point he threatened Hillary’s chances, at which point he became a slanderer trafficking in innuendo. 
+If Comey has any stones, he should resign in protest at Obama’s accusations. He’s already been thrown under the bus by his commander-in-chief for not playing dead for him long enough to move Hillary into the White House. He’s got no future in his position no matter what he does. It would be a final redeeming move of honor to tell Obama and his cronies to stuff it now. Tags ",FAKE
+341,Robert Durst on HBO’s ‘The Jinx': I ‘killed them all.’,"From the moment the HBO series “The Jinx” made its debut, it has been called “the new ‘Serial.'” Both the series and the podcast are about unsolved murders. Both let viewers into the process of uncovering what happened. Both tell stories so compelling, it’s easy to sometimes forget the characters are real.
+
+But on Saturday, HBO achieved something “Serial” never could. The subject of its six-episode documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” has been arrested.
+
+Robert Durst, a New York real-estate heir, is known for his alleged connection to three deaths: his wife, who went missing in 1982; his neighbor, who was dismembered in 2001; and a close friend, who was shot in the head in 2000. Until Saturday, the 71-year-old has walked free.
+
+On March 8, HBO aired the fifth and penultimate episode of “The Jinx,” which included a previously uncovered piece of evidence. On the eve of the finale, Durst was arrested in New Orleans in connection to the murder of his friend, Susan Berman, a little more than 14 years ago. Sunday night, the final episode aired. In its closing minutes, Durst says, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”
+
+He was not speaking to the camera and was seemingly unaware his words were being recorded — but he had left his microphone on while using the bathroom.
+
+[‘The Jinx’ director says he gave authorities the ‘killed them all’ audio months ago]
+
+Earlier in the day, Durst’s attorney, Chip Lewis, told The Post: “He’s maintained his innocence for 10 years now. Nothing has changed.” It is unclear whether Lewis knew about Durst’s bathroom comments, or whether the recording will be admissible in court.
+
+The attorney accused prosecutors and the documentary’s director, Andrew Jarecki, of timing the arrest as a publicity stunt for the last episode. In January, Jarecki all but promised TV critics and reporters that the “The Jinx” would end with a satisfying conclusion — something many thought “Serial” lacked because host Sarah Koenig ended the podcast with no concrete theory. The widely publicized arrest and the audio of what could be interpreted as a confession surely fits the bar he set.
+
+Durst has been a willing participant in the series that may have brought about his downfall. He spent more than 20 hours in interviews with filmmaker Jarecki, who has been researching Durst for eight years. Jarecki’s 2010 film “All Good Things” was a fictionalized version of the Durst story, in which Ryan Gosling played a somewhat-empathetic version of a killer.
+
+In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Jarecki said that Durst came to him after seeing the film, admitting it made him cry three times. The two have been working together ever since, with Durst agreeing to let Jarecki ask any question.
+
+It wasn’t a question that led to the arrest, however. In an episode titled “Family Values,” the filmmakers met with the stepson of Berman, Durst’s friend who was found dead on Christmas Eve, 2000. Police were led to her body by a letter that told them of a “cadaver” at her address.
+
+That letter was addressed “Beverley Hills Police” in block letters. Beverly is misspelled.
+
+At the end of episode five, Berman’s stepson shows the filmmakers a letter from Durst to Berman from the March before she was murdered. On the envelope, Durst wrote Berman’s address in block letters. He spelled “Beverly” as “Beverley.”
+
+Durst had known Berman, a writer and daughter of a known Las Vegas mobster, since they met at the University of California in the 1960s. When Durst’s wife Kathie went missing in from their house in New York in 1982, Berman asserted Durst’s innocence to the media. In the series, Jarecki seems to be hinting that Berman helped Durst hide Kathie’s body.
+
+He asks Durst about his habit of making collect calls to his family company, the Durst Organization. Soon after Kathie went missing, a number of collect calls were made to the company from an area known as the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. This heavily-wooded land had the reputation of being a dumping ground for the bodies of Mafia victims.
+
+“And what connection is that?” asks Kevin Hynes, the assistant district attorney on the case. “Well, Susan Berman who was very friendly with [Durst] at the time, had a lot of connections and a lot of friends in organized crime.”
+
+The filmmakers take you to the places Durst might have been, like the Pine Barrens, and what they can’t show you live footage of, they recreate. Durst appears on screen to rebut theories and allegations. Wearing a grey cable sweater and khaki pants, he nearly always speaks calmly, like an eccentric 71-year-old man recounting an old story, not a man from one of the richest families in New York trying to convince you he’s not a triple-murderer.
+
+Until the final episode, Durst has maintained in the series that he did not kill his wife and does not know where her body is. The camera crew had already packed up from the day’s interviewing but the recorder kept rolling as Durst went to the bathroom.
+
+It appears he was talking to himself, making comments that included: “There it is, you’re caught. You’re right of course, but you can’t imagine. Arrest him. . . . What a disaster. . . .I’m having difficulty with the question.” Then follows the “I killed them all” line.
+
+Filmmakers told the New York Times they didn’t find the recording for more than two years.
+
+Durst admitted to killing one of the three persons that “them all” could inlude: his 71-year-old neighbor, Morris Black. In 2001, Durst was living in Galveston, Texas, dressing as a female to avoid media attention about the reopened investigation of his wife’s disappearance.
+
+He testified that his neighbor, who he was friends with for a time, sneaked into his apartment. When a scuffle occurred between the two men, Durst shot his neighbor accidentally in self-defense. He then “panicked,” cut up the body with a bow saw and dumped it into Galveston Bay. Black’s head was never found.
+
+After four days of deliberation, the jury acquitted Durst.
+
+Judge Susan Criss, who oversaw the Galveston trial, told The Post Sunday she could not be more thrilled that Durst was arrested. “Presiding over that trial was like watching a slow train wreck. The prosecution dropped the ball every step of the way and the defense came prepared,” Criss said.
+
+
+
+Durst was eerily calm, the judge said, and there were times when he even seemed charming. She thinks she was dealing with an exceptionally cunning serial killer, a man made all the more dangerous by his financial resources.
+
+“I saw the pictures of the cut up body,” she said. “That body was cut up like it had been done by a surgeon. He knew what sort of tool to use for this bone and that muscle. It would have been impossible for someone to do that if it was their first murder attempt. That is a cold, calculating act.”
+
+The Durst Organization, his family’s prominent real estate company, also applauded the arrest. In a statement to CNBC, Durst’s brother Douglas said, “We are relieved and also grateful to everyone who assisted in the arrest of Robert Durst. We hope he will finally be held accountable for all he has done.”
+
+Durst has been estranged from his family for years: when his father cut him out of the line of succession for the family’s real estate empire in 1994, Durst is said to have urinated in his uncle’s waste basket.
+
+His penchant for theatrics might be what drove Durst to allow — and assist —  Jarecki in publicly dissecting his life.
+
+“He has a compulsion to tell his story, and frankly I think he enjoys the feeling of being at risk,” the filmmaker told the Los Angeles Times in February. “He knows that this is a very live ball, that he hasn’t been prosecuted for two of the three murders that he’s been accused of.”
+
+“We simply cannot say enough about the brilliant job that Andrew Jarecki and [producer] Marc Smerling did in producing The Jinx,” HBO said in a statement. “Years in the making, their thorough research and dogged reporting reignited interest in Robert Durst’s story with the public and law enforcement.”
+
+Coincidence or not, there’s no doubt the timing of Durst’s arrest will lead to a surge in viewers for “The Jinx.” The accused himself, meanwhile, will be sitting in a New Orleans jail cell or on his way back to California to face the murder charge.
+
+“We’ll saddle up and head west,” Durst’s lawyer said. “And handle this one just like we did this last one.”",REAL
+9159,UNSC Members Fail to Agree on New Zealand Draft Resolution on Aleppo,"Get short URL 0 28 0 0 UN Security Council members have expressed differing views and failed to agree on New Zealand's draft resolution on Aleppo, the country’s ambassador to the United Nations Gerard van Bohemen said after a Security Council meeting. 
+UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik) — New Zealand started working on a draft resolution on the Syrian city of Aleppo earlier this month after the French-Spanish and Russian draft resolutions were vetoed by the UN Security Council. © Sputnik/ Michael Alaeddin UN Failed to Carry Adequate Medical Evacuations in Aleppo - Churkin ""Earlier this week, we had the curious situation that one side of the debate said the key paragraph in our draft was not acceptable because it would stop all air attacks over Aleppo and the others said it was unacceptable because it would not. Both cannot be right. Yet for now, there is no prospect of navigating these mutually inconsistent positions,"" van Bohemen stated on Wednesday. 
+Van Bohemen expressed regret that ""geopolitics are being put ahead of people and once again preventing agreement on effective international action."" ...",FAKE
+3491,What liberals could learn from Ted Cruz’s flat tax,"Ted Cruz has developed a reputation as the most conservative of the major 2016 Republican presidential candidates, but he hasn't taken many specific policy positions to earn that moniker. One exception? His longtime support for a flat tax.
+
+The flat tax dramatically lowers the top tax rate and exempts capital gains and dividends from taxation. It's astonishingly regressive: the rich pay far less, hedge fund managers and private equity types like Mitt Romney would pay literally nothing, and while the exact rate varies from plan to plan, it's certainly not going to be as low as 10 or 15 percent, meaning the plan would likely raise taxes for middle-class people currently in those brackets.
+
+Cruz's flat tax proposal, as you would expect, drives liberals crazy. ""It's a fiscal fantasy for people who wish the US existed as it did before FDR was president,"" writes Wonkblog's Matt O'Brien. ""It's not an agenda for anyone who's interested in governing the country as it is today.""
+
+But liberals should take at least some of the ideas in the flat tax more seriously. Just as a monomaniacal obsession with growth has made conservative tax policy into a regressive disaster, an obsession with progressivity above all else is becoming an anchor on progressive tax thinking. It's easy to come up with a flat tax–like plan that's not crazily regressive but still benefits the economy, and the result would be substantially better than most of the tax plans Democratic politicians promote.
+
+When thinking about tax policy, you first have to ask what you ultimately want the taxes for. Sometimes — as with alcohol or carbon taxes — the tax does good in and of itself by deterring people from bad behaviors. But mostly you want taxes to pay for worthwhile programs, and liberals in particular need a tax policy that can raise a substantial amount of money to fund a large welfare state. And the experience of most European social democracies is that to do that, you can't just soak the rich. You need broad-based consumption taxes, such as value-added taxes (VATs), that everyone pays.
+
+In his book Growing Public, economic historian Peter Lindert notes that high-budget welfare states in general tax investment income less and consumption more. His argument is that European social democrats realized that income taxes of the scale they'd need to fund a comprehensive welfare state would have a deleterious effect on growth, and that the only way to sustainably pay for universal health care, generous education and pension systems, and so forth is to move toward more broad-based, pro-growth tax schemes.
+
+Which brings us back to Ted Cruz's flat tax.
+
+The term ""flat tax"" is mostly misleading. It makes people think the flat tax is just an income tax, but with one rate instead of many. It's not, really. Rather, it's a kind of consumption tax — very similar to a VAT of the kind social democracies depend upon.
+
+VATs work by taxing the difference between what a company paid on materials to make a product and what it sells that end product for: the value added, in other words. As the Tax Policy Center's Len Burman explains, the corporate tax side of a flat tax is just a VAT that also lets companies deduct the cost of wages. Individuals then pay taxes on those wages themselves.
+
+Economists tend to find that consumption taxes are better for the economy than income taxes, because income taxes discriminate against savers.
+
+To see why, imagine you make $50,000 in wages and there's a flat 20 percent tax on all income. You'd pay $10,000 in taxes on your wages. That leaves you with $40,000.
+
+Now you've got a decision to make: do you want to take $5,000 of the $40,000 you have left and invest it, or do you want to take that $5,000 and spend it on a really awesome television? If you invest it and make money off the stocks, then the thing you bought with your money — the profits those stocks made for you — will get taxed again. If you just buy the TV, the government doesn't tax you a second time.
+
+Under standard economic models, eliminating this double-taxing of savings promotes investment and thus boosts economic growth. And it's not just conservatives and libertarians arguing this; a highly influential model by Anthony Atkinson and Joseph Stiglitz, both noted lefties, gives this result. A widely cited 2001 paper by David Altig, Alan Auerbach, Lawrence Kotlikoff, Kent Smetters, and Jan Walliser estimates that switching from income taxation to consumption taxation boosts growth in the long run by 1.9 to 9.4 percent, depending on how you do it.
+
+The empirical evidence is murkier. UC Berkeley's Danny Yagan found that the 2003 dividend tax cut — meant to reduce double taxation of savings, just like consumption taxes — didn't do anything to help the economy. But a recent paper by Tulane's James Alm and the IMF's Asmaa El-Ganainy found that in 15 EU countries, increases in VAT rates decreased consumption and boosted savings — exactly the result you get from the models. The matter isn't open and shut, but at the moment the weight of the evidence suggests consumption taxes are preferable for growth. That gives credence to Lindert's argument that to raise taxes enough to fund a welfare state without hurting growth too much, you need to move to consumption taxation.
+
+The problem with consumption taxes is that they're usually regressive. VATs are sales taxes: they make everything more expensive by a set percentage, and because poor and middle-class people spend more of their incomes than the rich do, the end result is that the VAT hits them more than it does the rich. But there are a variety of ways to tax consumption without making the poor worse off.
+
+The simplest way would be to do take a flat tax but make it not, y'know, flat. Recall that the main feature of the flat tax is its business component — again, it's like a VAT that subtracts out wages. It's totally possible to pair that with a progressive tax on wages, rather than a flat tax on wages. The result is still a consumption tax, but it's a progressive one.
+
+This idea — known as the X tax and originated by the late Princeton economist David Bradford — has been promoted in recent years by the American Enterprise Institute tax expert Alan Viard, who along with Robert Carroll wrote an excellent book outlining a detailed X tax proposal. The 2001 simulation by Altig et al. found that replacing the income tax with an X tax would be better for growth then even the flat tax.
+
+The big problem with the X tax is that it doesn't touch capital income. Mitt Romney wouldn't pay a thing. So, alternatively, you could simply amend the income tax so that all savings is tax-deductible. This would effectively turn the income tax into a consumption tax, and do it in a way that makes sure capital income still gets hit.
+
+But the most reliable way to make a consumption tax progressive has nothing to do with the tax itself and everything to do with what the money it generates is used for. Europe's flat VATs are not themselves progressive, the way an X tax or personal consumption tax are, but they pay for transfer payments that are larger, relative to income, for lower- and middle-class people than for the rich. The overall system is progressive even if the tax isn't.
+
+So there's a way to change the tax and transfer system so that it's still progressive but doesn't punish savings, and the change would likely boost economic growth. Why aren't Democratic politicians jumping all over this?
+
+They flirt with the idea occasionally. Then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) stated that a VAT was ""on the table"" for funding health-care reform in 2009. President Obama expressed openness to the idea in 2010 after his adviser Paul Volcker signaled support. Volcker's comments provoked Congressional outrage, and the Senate voted 85–13 to condemn the idea as ""a massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income,"" but all but one of the 13 senators opposing that move were Democrats.
+
+But years of Republicans promoting flat taxes and sales taxes have left a residual distrust for consumption taxation among liberals. More to the point, supply-siders' insistence that marginal tax rates are the main determinant of the course of human history has done a lot to discredit, among liberals, the idea that taxes have much of an effect on growth at all.
+
+That's fair so far as the recent debates in American tax policy go: the idea that cutting the top tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent could boost growth by any significant amount is nutty, as are claims that big tax cuts like Ted Cruz's or Marco Rubio's would boost growth so much they'd pay for themselves. But the result of the backlash is that progressivity has become the only criterion by which many left-of-center people judge tax proposals, and more credible cases that tax reform could boost growth are ignored. That's really too bad, especially for those who want a dramatically larger welfare state. Realistically, that increase has to be paid for, and consumption taxes are the obvious way to do it.
+
+To quote Paul Krugman, ""if I can trade a somewhat regressive VAT for guarantees of decent retirement and universal health care, I’ll take it.""
+
+Correction: This post originally said that all 13 senators opposing an anti-VAT amendment were Democrats. Twelve were; the 13th was then–Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH).",REAL
+5412,Hillary leads Trump in dead fetuses and dead people,"Wednesday, 26 October 2016 This dead fetus early voted for Hillary. Then her brain was pierced. 
+New York, NY - The Clinton News Network (CNN) announced today that the election is over, called for Hillary. 
+According to CNN television reporting, early voting by late term aborted fetuses and deceased adults, all of whom died just after voting, has assured Hillary of victory in every state. 
+They point out that this will be the first election where ALL the electoral college votes go to one person. 
+As they pointed out, they didn't even need to rely on voting fraud to validate the Royal Reign of Queen Hillary, whose first executive order will be to retroactively reduce the voting age to zero. Make Aspartame Boy's  ",FAKE
+9430,Markets PANIC Over Trump Victory As FBI Reopens Hillary Email Probe | Harvey Organ,"4 EUROPEAN AFFAIRS 
+i)ENGLAND 
+The pound tumbles after a Northern Irish judge rejected a pair of challenges to the PREXIT process. This removes at least one obstacle to Prime Minister May’s plan as it begins to sever ties with the European Union by the end of March 2017: 
+( zero hedge) 
+ii)The crashing pound causes Apple and other companies to raise their electronic prices: 
+( zero hedge) 
+iii)London real estate is crashing 
+( zero hedge) 5. RUSSIAN AND MIDDLE EASTERN AFFAIRS 
+Sooner or later an accident is going to happen: Russia and USA jets in a “near miss” situation over Syria: 
+( zero hedge) NONE TODAY 7.OIL ISSUES 
+i)The oil producers have engaged in heavy hedging. If the oil price drops, they will survive but not necessarily the likes of Saudi Arabia and other producing nations: 
+( zerohedge) 
+
+ii)WHAT A JOKE!! Iraq and Iran refuse to freeze output and thus WTI plummets into the 48 dollar handle. (courtesy zero hedge) 8.EMERGING MARKETS 
+The extremely clever Horseman Capital calls it quits on an emerging fund. These guys are 100% short and now they cannot make money 
+(courtesy zero hedge) 9.PHYSICAL STORIES 
+i)A huge commentary from Alasdair tonight as he explains how China is manipulating the dollar through its exchange rate and how China is selling its dollar reserves to accumulate commodities like oil and gold. Alasdair is the one who 2 yrs ago claims that China may have over 20,000 tonnes of gold to its credit. 
+a must read.. 
+( Alasdair Macleod) 
+ii)Egon Von Greyerz explains correctly that gold denominated in any other currency than the USA dollar is at close to record levels or near their 2011 highs: 
+( Egon Von Greyerz) 
+iii)Barrick desperate to sell some of its prized assets. These clowns went to bed with the crooked banks and look at the trouble they are in 
+(courtesy Danielle Bochove/Bloomberg) 10.USA STORIES WHICH MAY INFLUENCE THE PRICE OF GOLD/SILVER 
+i)At first blush, the estimate for Q3 GDP climbs to 2.9% due to inventory and export gains. This will be adjusted southbound in the next two readings. 
+( zero hedge) 
+ii)We have pointed this out to you on several occasions: slumping used car prices will be catastrophic for the auto industry due to the heavy subprime auto securitization. Auto loan balances continue to rise. This will be a huge bubble when it burst: 
+( zero hedge) 
+iii)This kind of shows you the trouble the retail is having in the USA: American Apparel is now preparing a second bankruptcy filing in a year: 
+( zero hedge) 
+iv)The all important Michigan national consumer confidence crashes to a 2 yr low:The democrats are getting a little nervous. 
+( zero hedge/Michigan Consumer Confidence) 
+v)Another sign that there is trouble on the economic scene : Healthcare stocks tumble on terrible McKesson earnings; 
+( zero hedge) 
+vi) Finally we get the Wall Street Journal lashing out at the Clintons for their crimes: 
+( Wall Street Journal/.zero hedge) 
+vii) a. The big news of the day: the FBI reopens probe into Hillary’s emails 
+(courtesy FBI/zero hedge) 
+vii.b To complicate matters, Ryan issues a statement on the FBI re-opening of Hillary’s email scandal: “”Yet again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame. She was entrusted with some of our nation’s most important secrets, and she betrayed that trust by carelessly mishandling highly classified information. This decision, long overdue, is the result of her reckless use of a private email server, and her refusal to be forthcoming with federal investigators. I renew my call for the Director of National Intelligence to suspend all classified briefings for Secretary Clinton until this matter is fully resolved.” 
+and the election is 11 days from today: 
+( Paul Ryan/zero hedge) 
+vii c. Hillary refuses to comment on the FBI renewal of investigation on her email scandal 
+( zero hedge) 
+vii dThe new investigation by the FBI commences due to a “device” which contained new emails and these were discovered as part of an unrelated investigation 
+( zero hedge) 
+vii. e The odds for a Trump victory just shot up! 
+( zero hedge) 
+vii f) What a riot: the device is from Huma Abedin and the target is former congressman Weiner who texted sexual messages to an under aged 15 yr old. Obviously there was some good stuff on Hillary on that device 
+(courtesy zero hedge) 
+viii g Our good friend John Podesta is mighty angry with the re opening of the FBI probe: 
+( zero hedge) 
+
+vii h)Here is another strange one!! The White House had no prior knowledge of the new attack on Hillary by the FBI",FAKE
+7321,Trump swept to victory by fans of poor quality 80s action films,"Trump swept to victory by fans of poor quality 80s action films 09-11-16 MEN who love the films of Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal are responsible for Trump’s election victory, it has emerged. An unusually high voter turnout among people whose favourite films are Missing in Action , Death Wish 2 or Lone Wolf McQuade is believed to have sealed America’s fate. Trump voter Wayne Hayes said: “I believe masculine 80s action films, featuring a foreign baddie and one sex scene shot in silhouette, are the pinnacle of cinema and a template for how to live. “I particularly like it if they have a paranoid theme, like Invasion USA . I’ve even written a script called Blood Hunter II: Midnight Revenge Attack about a former POW killing gang members with his metal hand. “He has a dog called Maverick that wears an eye patch.” He added: “They should show Under Siege in schools, because if you’re a chef on a big boat and it’s attacked by terrorists, you need to be able to save the sexy woman.” 
+Share:",FAKE
+7726,Re: Something lighter: ‘Shiny’ legs optical illusion goes viral,"Something lighter: ‘Shiny’ legs optical illusion goes viral Posted at 2:22 pm on October 26, 2016 by Greg P. 
+If you need a quick break from the election madness, check this out. 
+A new optical illusion has gone viral via Twitter [email protected] These look like shiny legs, right? Once you see it you can't unsee it pic.twitter.com/5mREeJUhYV 
+OK … now look again, but this time look for white streaks of paint…. This just pissed me off like cmon https://t.co/KVDerfPk6b 
+— Mathew Fiorante (@Royal2) October 26, 2016 mindblowing – do you see shiny legs or painted legs? WHOA. I saw shiny and then painted and I can't unsee it! https://t.co/rVN3LDdYAc 
+— Carla Marie (@theCarlaMarie) October 26, 2016 Where have the shiny legs gone?? https://t.co/SLPKynGnjE 
+— Jane Bradley (@jane__bradley) October 26, 2016 
+Although the image went viral thanks to @msbreeezyyy, it looks like this might be the original: A photo posted by hunter 🧀 (i post a lot) (@leonardhoespams) on Oct 23, 2016 at 9:01am PDT 
+That image was posted a month ago as well with the caption, “i like the feeling of paint on my skin.” A photo posted by hunter 🧀 (i post a lot) (@leonardhoespams) on Sep 15, 2016 at 1:55pm PDT 
+***",FAKE
+1584,Trump again won’t rule out a third-party run,"Donald Trump is not ruling out a run for president as an independent if things go south for the front-runner in the Republican race.
+
+""I'm going to have to see what happens,"" he told George Stephanopoulos in an interview that aired Sunday on ABC's ""This Week."" ""I will see what happens. I have to be treated fairly.""
+
+Trump was responding to a Wall Street Journal report that Republican operatives are considering banding together donors from the other GOP campaigns in a bid to knock Trump off the top spot.
+
+Their efforts are taking on increased urgency as the first-in-the-nation Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses near and Trump leads the crowded GOP field for the fourth consecutive month, according to a new national Washington Post-ABC News poll. Some candidates, including Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida governor Jeb Bush, also are showing more willingness lately to directly attack Trump.
+
+On Sunday, Trump said his measure of whether he would support the eventual GOP nominee is whether he is treated ""fairly"" in the campaign, a line he often uses when talking about a third-party run.
+
+""When I did this, I said I have to be treated fairly,"" Trump told Stephanopoulos. ""If I’m treated fairly, I’m fine. All I want to do is [have] a level playing field.""
+
+Trump has given competing signals throughout the campaign about whether he would run as a third-party candidate. He didn't raise his hand in the Republican Party's first presidential debate, in August, when moderators asked the candidates whether they would pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee. But in September, Trump signed a pledge saying he would support the eventual nominee — instead of opposing him or her in a third-party run.
+
+If Republican operatives succeed in knocking Trump off his perch, their plan could backfire if he then runs as an independent.
+
+A July Washington Post-ABC News poll found that in a hypothetical general election matchup between Bush and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, Clinton led 50 percent to 44 percent. But throw a third-party Trump run into the mix, and the poll found that he would tear support away Bush and give Clinton a 16-point lead.",REAL
+4677,Why do people dislike Hillary Clinton? The story goes far back,"There is – and perhaps there always will be – a dedicated group of people who don’t know Hillary Clinton personally, but nonetheless hate her.
+
+Whether they are truly a “vast rightwing conspiracy” (as Clinton called them in 1998) or just many in number and conservative in outlook, there’s no arguing that they exist or that they continue to try to influence public opinion on the Democratic nominee.
+
+
+
+But even if people consider themselves savvy enough to reject the strangest conspiracy theories (sample claims include that she is a mass-murderer, a closeted lesbian faking her 40-year marriage, a member of the Illuminati and/or an agent of the devil himself), there seems little doubt that an undercurrent of hostility spanning decades has had an impact upon how she is viewed.
+
+Clinton’s unfavorability rating may not be as low as Donald Trump’s, but in an election year which has frequently degenerated into name-calling, she has attracted invective from both the left and the right. Polls have frequently cited the public view that she is not trusted, while Trump has rallied his supporters with the “Crooked Hillary” epithet.
+
+Her links to Wall Street, her missing emails and her supposed responsibility for the security failures that contributed to the attack on the Benghazi consulate are the ostensible reasons for some deeply personal attacks in 2016. But the roots of hostility towards her go much deeper.
+
+Craig Shirley, a Ronald Reagan biographer and historian who spent decades as a conservative political consultant, said that, when Hillary Clinton arrived in Washington DC as first lady, “she came from Little Rock with a reputation already established” as “such a militant feminist, difficult to deal with”.
+
+He noted that she faced hostility in Arkansas politics and media when Bill Clinton was first elected governor, because she kept her maiden name.“Here she comes, the feminist from Wellesley and Yale,” Shirley explained of the supposedly prevailing attitude of the time, “down to Little Rock and brings her attitudes with her”.
+
+So by the time she arrived on the national stage in 1991, during Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, the then-still-mostly-male press corps already had an idea of who they understood Hillary Clinton to be – a potential liability to her husband’s political career whose feminism and ambition were a bit unseemly. 
+
+
+
+And, as she noted in her first autobiography, she gave them plenty of material with which to support that narrative. First, there was her much-maligned “I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” comment in response to a reporter’s assertion that she and her husband had “some sort of understanding and arrangement” about his infidelity.
+
+Then, her out-of-context “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies” comment, which came in response to attacks, which the Clintons denied, by now-California governor Jerry Brown that she had only been a successful lawyer because her husband had steered business to her firm, implying that she should have confined herself to being a ceremonial first lady.
+
+And then, of course, came the scandals in which she was involved: Whitewater, a money-losing land deal in which she’d invested for their retirement with two friends who managed the investment illegally; and Travelgate, in which she – contrary to the then-normal practice of leaving the business of the White House to the president’s staff – was said to have ordered the firing of the head of the travel office, who coincidentally was popular with the mostly-male White House press corps whose travel he arranged.
+
+The key question raised about Whitewater and Travelgate was not whether Clinton had done anything actually wrong, but whether she had used illegal means to try to keep the media from finding out. The Starr investigation, which eventually resulted in Bill Clinton’s impeachment, found that she had not, but by that time her reputation was established as someone unfriendly to the media who also maybe did not do the right thing.
+
+Shirley conceded that “the press pounded on her” first in Arkansas and then in Washington, but did not believe that affected her relationship with the media, or that it was a driving factor in people’s attitudes towards her. “There’s something about her manner, persona, voice, smirk that just grates on a lot of people,” he said. “People don’t like to be talked down to, and she has a terrible habit of talking down to people, with that smirk.”
+
+However, Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served in Bill Clinton’s administration, said she did not think that people’s dislike of Hillary Clinton is her own fault. “This business of people ‘not liking’ her is shaped by expectations, by television, by what we think people in authority ought to look like, and not who she actually is,” she said.
+
+
+
+“She is absolutely as likable, or more likable, than many male politicians,” she said. But while it is rare that people will compare a male politician they do not like to their fathers Kamarck noted that Clinton “reminds people of their mothers, or the schoolteacher they didn’t like.” (References to a “nagging wife” and “bitchy wife” are also common.)
+
+“I think there’s some misogyny in that,” said Kamarck, noting that it’s exceedingly common for men who don’t hew to conventional standards of attractiveness to be on television or pursue political careers, while women are more likely to be granted that visibility when they are younger and if they meet traditional beauty standards.
+
+“We will overcome this but, right now, the world is accustomed to saying old men are fine, they’re strong, they’re wise,” she added. “Old women, we’re not so sure.”",REAL
+5181,2016 campaign takes strange twists after Orlando,"Washington (CNN) The ever-turbulent 2016 election is now just plain weird.
+
+The attack on an Orlando gay nightclub -- the worst strike on U.S. soil since 9/11 -- spurred a strange week of politics even by this year's standards.
+
+As always, Donald Trump was at the epicenter of much of the controversy. The presumptive Republican nominee, who opposes same-sex marriage, sought to portray himself as a ""real friend"" of the LGBT community while taking ambiguous positions on gun control that he later seemed to reverse and insinuating President Barack Obama has ulterior motives in responding to terrorism.
+
+After conceding the presidency to Trump in a phone call earlier, Clinton addresses supporters and campaign workers in New York on Wednesday, November 9. Her defeat marked a stunning end to a campaign that appeared poised to make her the first woman elected US president.
+
+Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Cleveland on November 6, two days before Election Day. She went on to lose Ohio -- and the election -- to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
+
+Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Cleveland on November 6, two days before Election Day. She went on to lose Ohio -- and the election -- to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.
+
+Clinton arrives at a 9/11 commemoration ceremony in New York on September 11. Clinton, who was diagnosed with pneumonia two days before, left early after feeling ill. A video appeared to show her stumble as Secret Service agents helped her into a van.
+
+Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.
+
+Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.
+
+After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""
+
+After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""
+
+Clinton walks on her stage with her family after winning the New York primary in April.
+
+Clinton walks on her stage with her family after winning the New York primary in April.
+
+Clinton is reflected in a teleprompter during a campaign rally in Alexandria, Virginia, in October 2015.
+
+Clinton is reflected in a teleprompter during a campaign rally in Alexandria, Virginia, in October 2015.
+
+U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""
+
+U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""
+
+Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.
+
+Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.
+
+Clinton, now running for President again, performs with Jimmy Fallon during a ""Tonight Show"" skit in September 2015.
+
+Clinton, now running for President again, performs with Jimmy Fallon during a ""Tonight Show"" skit in September 2015.
+
+Clinton ducks after a woman threw a shoe at her while she was delivering remarks at a recycling trade conference in Las Vegas in 2014.
+
+Clinton ducks after a woman threw a shoe at her while she was delivering remarks at a recycling trade conference in Las Vegas in 2014.
+
+Obama and Clinton bow during the transfer-of-remains ceremony marking the return of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.
+
+Obama and Clinton bow during the transfer-of-remains ceremony marking the return of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.
+
+Clinton arrives for a group photo before a forum with the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2012. The forum was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
+
+Clinton arrives for a group photo before a forum with the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2012. The forum was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
+
+Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.
+
+Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.
+
+In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
+
+In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
+
+The Clintons pose on the day of Chelsea's wedding to Marc Mezvinsky in July 2010.
+
+The Clintons pose on the day of Chelsea's wedding to Marc Mezvinsky in July 2010.
+
+Clinton, as secretary of state, greets Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during a meeting just outside Moscow in March 2010.
+
+Clinton, as secretary of state, greets Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during a meeting just outside Moscow in March 2010.
+
+Obama is flanked by Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference in Chicago in December 2008. He had designated Clinton to be his secretary of state.
+
+Obama is flanked by Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference in Chicago in December 2008. He had designated Clinton to be his secretary of state.
+
+Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.
+
+Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.
+
+Clinton and another presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, applaud at the start of a Democratic debate in 2007.
+
+Clinton and another presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, applaud at the start of a Democratic debate in 2007.
+
+Clinton holds up her book ""Living History"" before a signing in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in 2003.
+
+Clinton holds up her book ""Living History"" before a signing in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in 2003.
+
+Sen. Clinton comforts Maren Sarkarat, a woman who lost her husband in the September 11 terrorist attacks, during a ground-zero memorial in October 2001.
+
+Sen. Clinton comforts Maren Sarkarat, a woman who lost her husband in the September 11 terrorist attacks, during a ground-zero memorial in October 2001.
+
+Clinton makes her first appearance on the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee.
+
+Clinton makes her first appearance on the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee.
+
+Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year.
+
+Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year.
+
+President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999.
+
+President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999.
+
+The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998.
+
+The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998.
+
+Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
+
+Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
+
+The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
+
+The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
+
+The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook ""It Takes a Village"" in 1997.
+
+The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook ""It Takes a Village"" in 1997.
+
+The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President.
+
+The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President.
+
+Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
+
+Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
+
+Clinton unveils the renovated Blue Room of the White House in 1995.
+
+Clinton unveils the renovated Blue Room of the White House in 1995.
+
+Clinton accompanies her husband as he takes the oath of office in January 1993.
+
+Clinton accompanies her husband as he takes the oath of office in January 1993.
+
+During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus.
+
+During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus.
+
+In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.
+
+In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.
+
+Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of ""60 Minutes"" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992.
+
+Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of ""60 Minutes"" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992.
+
+The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President.
+
+The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President.
+
+Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985.
+
+Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985.
+
+In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea.
+
+In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea.
+
+Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974.
+
+Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974.
+
+Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School.
+
+Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School.
+
+Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.
+
+Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.
+
+Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, broke with Obama by uttering the words ""radical Islamism"" -- rhetoric that she has long resisted for fear that it would embolden terrorists.
+
+Terrorist attacks often have the potential to radically shift the political conversation. Trump's proposed temporary ban on Muslim immigrants in the aftermath of the San Bernardino, California, attacks, for instance, deeply resonated with GOP primary voters. But the responses this week -- in which Trump and Clinton made moves that would have been unexpected a week ago -- reflect the unusual confluence of gay rights, gun control and national security in the wake of Orlando and underscore the volatile nature of American politics this year.
+
+No one is more unusual at the moment than Trump.
+
+He started the week by tearing up the Terrorism 101 rule book used by most politicians who go out of their way to foster unity in the wake of such an outrage. Trump did the exact opposite.
+
+Hours after Sunday's attack unfolded, he issued a self-congratulatory tweet that noted his long stance that radical Islam leads to terrorism. On Monday, he implied Obama was somehow complicit or sympathetic toward the U.S.-born Muslim who went on the rampage and later snatched away the campaign credentials of The Washington Post when it reported on his comments.
+
+Trump has never been known for consistency and demonstrated his ability to hold several contradictory positions on issues that motivate the Republican base at the same time.
+
+After the Orlando carnage, Trump suggested that if the people in the nightclub had guns themselves, the story could have been different. And he stirred his audiences with false claims that Clinton wanted to ""take away Americans' guns.""
+
+But then, perhaps scenting a change in the political wind, Trump said he would meet with the National Rifle Association to discuss how to stop people on the terror watch list or FBI no-fly lists from buying guns, in contradiction with previous Republican positions. But during a Thursday rally in Dallas, he again seemed to take a hard line on guns, repeating his claim about Clinton and saying, ""I'm going to save your Second Amendment rights.""
+
+Trump repeatedly claimed that he was the best friend the LGBT community has in this election -- rather than Clinton who has been deeply engaged in LGBT issues for years and counts the community as a deep well of support and donor dollars.
+
+Clinton could not resist trolling her general election foe when CNN reporter Phil Mattingly quoted Trump on Twitter as saying: ""You tell me: who is better for the gay community and who is better for women than Donald Trump.""
+
+The former secretary of state's campaign account tweeted back, ""Hi.""
+
+Trump expounded further on his gun views Friday evening. At a Texas rally Trump argued, as he often has in the wake of terrorist attacks and mass shootings, that fewer gun restrictions would have lessened the death toll.
+
+""If we had people, where the bullets were going in the opposite direction, right smack between the eyes of this maniac,"" Trump said, gesturing between his eyes. ""And this son of a b---- comes out and starts shooting and one of the people in that room happened to have (a gun) and goes boom. You know what, that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks.""
+
+Trump also slammed President Barack Obama for arguing for action to change existing gun laws in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando.
+
+""President Obama is trying to make terrorism into guns and it's not guns, folks. It is not guns, folks. It is not guns, this is terrorism,"" Trump said.
+
+But Trump was not the only politician pulling off a role reversal toward the gay community.
+
+Iowa Rep. Steve King, who once warned his state could become a ""gay marriage Mecca"" after its Supreme Court lifted a ban on same-sex marriage, offered a striking shift in tone this week.
+
+""I think it was clear that gays were targeted in Orlando and it does matter and it's tragic that they were targeted because of their sexual orientation,"" King told CNN's Chris Cuomo on ""New Day.""
+
+That was a rare moment of conciliation in what was a largely divisive political week.
+
+In fact, the manner in which the Orlando attack immediately became political fodder contrasted with the numbing wave of shock that settled over the United Kingdom, where campaigning for next week's Europe Union referendum was put on hold after the murder of lawmaker Jo Cox.
+
+Trump and Clinton were hardly alone in the political fray this week.
+
+With seven months left in his term, Obama could have left it to the newly minted Democratic presumptive nominee to carry the fight to Trump. But he felt a need to respond -- especially to Trump's comments.
+
+""That's not the America we want,"" he said during an extraordinarily direct speech on Tuesday. ""It doesn't reflect our democratic ideals. It will make us less safe.""
+
+By wading so deeply into the presidential race, Obama was offering a preview of the kind of political assist he could provide Clinton as he hits the campaign trail soon as a surrogate. But on Tuesday at least, Obama completely overshadowed his preferred successor.
+
+The normal order is also disrupted on Capitol Hill.
+
+Republican leaders are stuck in an uncomfortable marriage with their can't-live-with-him, can't-live-without-him presidential nominee, who is showing no signs of cooling the polarizing rhetoric that many GOP elites decry.
+
+Lawmakers normally attracted to microphones like bees around a honey pot spent the week fleeing in the opposite direction. House Speaker Paul Ryan endured the latest round of questions about whether he would withdraw his recent endorsement of Trump.
+
+Ryan tried to explain his dilemma in an interview that will air on NBC's ""Meet the Press"" on Sunday.
+
+""I get that this is a very strange situation. He's a very unique nominee,"" Ryan said. ""But I feel as a responsibility institutionally as the speaker of the House that I should not be leading some chasm in the middle of our party.""
+
+Sanders is proving that piloting a soft landing to a political revolution is tough. While he vowed on Thursday to help Clinton defeat Trump, he still wants full reform of the Democratic Party and its policy platform.
+
+Still, there are signs that Sanders is losing his leverage, not gaining it: even one of his closest backers, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, signaled on Friday that the game was up.
+
+""I think there is a Democratic nominee at this point,"" Gabbard told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, though would not go as far as endorsing Clinton.
+
+Arizona Sen. John McCain also felt the political heat when blasted Obama as ""directly responsible"" for the mass shooting in Orlando.
+
+Then, like a character from a previous, more courtly political age, he had second thoughts, and issued a statement that clarified that he meant that the President's policies were to blame -- rather than the character of the man who beat him for the White House eight years ago.
+
+A politician who admits he was wrong. In the crazed world of the 2016 presidential election circus, what could be weirder than that?",REAL
+2982,Rand Paul wraps 'filibuster' over Patriot Act and NSA surveillance,"Washington (CNN) After 10 hours and 30 minutes, Sen. Rand Paul relinquished the Senate floor late Wednesday night, ending his ""filibuster"" over National Security Agency surveillance programs authorized under the Patriot Act.
+
+Paul, R-Kentucky, ran through several binders of material over the course of his marathon protest, and also got some help from 10 fellow senators -- three Republicans and seven Democrats.
+
+Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, were the biggest boons to Paul's efforts, joining Paul on the Senate floor several times to give the Kentucky Republican a chance to catch his breath -- and often grab a sip of water and pop a candy in his mouth. And one of Paul's rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, also ended up helping Paul's efforts late in the night.
+
+""There comes a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer. That time is now and I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts, go unchallenged,"" Paul said at the opening of his remarks, and those who joined him on the Senate floor shared his concerns and stressed the need to reform the Patriot Act.
+
+The Senate is considering whether to reauthorize or reform a crucial section of that law that gives the government sweeping powers to collect phone metadata on millions of Americans in an effort to thwart terrorist plots. The House last week overwhelmingly approved a bill to reform that law.
+
+The NSA's bulk collection program expires at midnight on June 1, and the Department of Justice warned in a memo shared by a GOP aide on Wednesday that the agency will have to begin preparing a week before the expiration date for a potential lapse in the law.
+
+Paul's talk-a-thon Wednesday came more than two years after his nearly 13-hour filibuster in 2013, which was widely anticipated and brought him national attention for delaying the confirmation of CIA chief John Brennan to draw attention to U.S. drone policies.
+
+But his speech Wednesday wasn't technically a filibuster because intricate Senate rules required him to stop talking by early Thursday afternoon for an unrelated vote.
+
+Still, Paul's office insists it was a filibuster, saying Paul prevented lawmakers from taking action to reauthorize the Patriot Act while he had the floor.
+
+""Sen. Paul will speak until he can no longer speak,"" spokeswoman Jillian Lane said Wednesday.
+
+Paul began speaking at about 1:20 p.m. ET. More than two hours later, Wyden, Paul's Democratic partner-in-crime on stopping the NSA's domestic surveillance programs, joined him on the floor to aid the effort.
+
+Paul slammed Congress for not scheduling enough time to debate whether to reform the Patriot Act and to debate the merits of NSA surveillance.
+
+""At the very least we should debate, we should debate whether or not we are going to relinquish our rights or whether or not we are going to have a full and able debate over whether or not we can live within the constitution or whether or not we have to go around the constitution,"" Paul said on the floor.
+
+And as his voice waned in the 10th hour of his time on the floor, Paul again emphasized the need for an open and ""honest"" debate about the Patriot Act and domestic surveillance.
+
+And he again hammered home the need for Congress to uphold the Constitution as it takes action on the Patriot Act.
+
+""There is absolutely no excuse -- no excuse not to debate this, no excuse not to vote on a sufficient amount of amendments to try to make this better, to try to make the bulk collection of records go away. It's what the American people want, it's what the Constitution demands,"" Paul said.
+
+The debate over NSA reform has pitted Republican leadership in the House and Senate against each other.
+
+House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, on Wednesday lamented that ongoing deadlock, slamming GOP leaders for failing so far to broker a deal to keep key provisions of the Patriot Act alive.
+
+""We go dark -- in a high threat environment, that's a very dangerous thing to do, that's dangerous politics,"" McCaul told reporters Wednesday. ""I'm disappointed that we're not able to work this out and now we're going to do this ping pong game and play politics with national security.""
+
+And McCaul added that Paul's ""filibuster"" drove home his point about the dangers of politics interfering with national security.
+
+""That's my point,"" he said.
+
+Paul and Wyden both talked up the amendments during Wednesday's so-called filibuster that they are proposing to add to the USA Freedom Act, a reform bill the House overwhelmingly passed last week. Paul and Wyden are pushing for additional reforms not included in the measure, a compromise bill between reform advocates in the House and House Republican leadership.
+
+Wyden added to Paul's lambasting of the NSA's bulk data collection programs and also slammed national security hawks in Congress who have repeatedly held back reforms, Wyden alleged.
+
+""They wait until the very last minute,"" Wyden said. ""They wait until the last minute and then they say, 'Oh my goodness it is a dangerous world we've got to continue this program the way it is!'""
+
+And Lee, who is the chief Republican sponsor of the USA Freedom Act, also joined Paul on the Senate floor, promoting his bill and slamming a dysfunctional Congress that he said isn't serving the American people well on surveillance and other issues.
+
+Passage on that bill is anything but certain though, with some senators supportive of moderate reforms hoping to weaken the bill, while others, like Paul and Wyden, want the bill to do more.
+
+Paul voted against allowing debate on a previous version of the USA Freedom Act last year, saying it did not go far enough.
+
+""The people don't want the bulk collection of their records. And if we were listening we'd hear that,"" Paul said.
+
+The Kentucky Republican was also using his ""filibuster"" as an opportunity to rally his supporters and raise money for his presidential campaign.
+
+While Paul was speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, his campaign sent an email to supporters asking for donations to support his presidential ambitions.
+
+And his marathon session on the floor also jolted his supporters, who posted photos of themselves watching Paul's speech throughout the ten and a half hours, using the hashtag #StandwithRand that had emerged during Paul's famed 2013 filibuster.
+
+Paul also slammed President Barack Obama for refusing to end the program through executive order, despite saying he opposes the bulk data collection program.
+
+""He has every power to stop it, and yet the president does nothing,"" Paul said of Obama.
+
+Paul repeatedly drew on the Founding Fathers as he laid out his arguments why the government should not be allowed to collect troves of information on innocent Americans in the name of counterterrorism.
+
+""If government were comprised of angels, we wouldn't need restrictions, we wouldn't need laws,"" Paul said quoting James Madison. He later quoted Ben Franklin as well.
+
+But Paul, a libertarian-leaning conservative, had his own words as well, insisting that Americans should always be wary of the government and increasing government power.
+
+""Anytime you give power to government, they love it, and they will accumulate more,"" he said. ""They will not live within the confines of power unless you watch them. Like a hawk, you've got to watch them.",REAL
+9700,Scrabble Spells Doom for the Racial Hypothesis of Intelligence,"11 27 
+Top three nations with elite Scrabble players on the WESPA ratings list. Nigeria is on top, despite constant travel visa rejections to play in world tournaments. 
+Besides Nigeria, countries like Kenya, Ghana and Uganda also contribute players to the world top 100. 
+An even more astonishing picture of African performance unfolds when we look beyond the English-speaking African countries. 
+Scrabble in French? 
+In 2015, Nigel Richards, an English-speaking professional Scrabble player from New Zealand, confirmed his reputation as perhaps the greatest Scrabble player in history by winning the French World Scrabble Championship, after memorizing the French dictionary in nine weeks. His goal in 2015 was apparently to hold both the English and French world championships simultaneously. He was robbed of his full glory by the Nigerian Wellington Jighere in the English version, but managed to pull off a more phenomenal victory in the language he does not speak! 
+Nigel Richards is said to have an authentic photographic memory . 
+What caught my eye in all the frenzied media reports was the name of the person Richards defeated in the finals (I was fully expecting a French name): Schelick Rekawe. An African (from Gabon) had reached the finals of the French world championships? How? 
+When I looked into the history of the French Scrabble World Championships, I was stunned to find that Francophone African countries have been even more dominant in French Scrabble, and over a longer period, than Nigerians have become in English Scrabble, despite a very active expert Scrabble club culture in France and other native French-speaking countries. 
+The full list of the top players in the 2015 French Scrabble championship that Richards won gives a clear picture of this African dominance: 2015 French World Championships final standings. Source: French Wikipedia 
+A look at Gabon’s demographics makes the Scrabble achievement of Gabon impossible to explain under the present racial hypothesis. 
+Gabon has a population of 1.7 million and a reported national IQ of 64. 
+If the world champion needs an IQ of just 140 (it should probably be higher than that, given the level of gender disparity at the very top), then there is statistically no one in Gabon who should ever come anywhere close to the world championship. Three made it to the top 10 in 2015. 
+Note that the strongest version of the genetic hypothesis is contradicted even before you do the math: the very existence of such high interest in a mathematical game can not be predicted from a genetic theory that claims heritability of (cognitive or other) human interests, if it is indeed true that Africans have the lowest genetic endowment in mathematical (or even verbal) ability. 
+Is French Scrabble perhaps less mathematical than English Scrabble? Not at all. The very fact that someone could successfully cross from English Scrabble to French Scrabble (Nigel Richards) should indicate that it requires similar cognitive skills. But I still looked at some profiles of the top French Scrabble players in Europe just to make sure, and found clear signs to confirm this. For example, the French Wikipedia entry on France’s best player (the last French player to keep the French World Championship from Africans, and the only one to have won it twice) says: 
+Christian Coustillas, professeur agrégé et génie des mathématiques, est un joueur français de Scrabble. 
+I do not know any French, but I can bet that there is the word ‘mathematics’ somewhere in there and perhaps even an academic career in it! 
+In 2016, Nigel Richards returned to defend his World Championship title and this time the Africans vowed to keep the crown from him. Like the year before Richards stole the French championship, the two finalists in 2016 were both Africans again; Richards was fourth, behind three Africans. The French math professor and former world champion, Christian Coustillas, could not make it to the top ten as more Africans dominated the chart: 2016 French World Championships final standings. 8 /10 positions are African. Source: French Wikipedia 
+Notice that the names of the 2016 top Gabonese players are different from the ones in 2015, which defies the probability projections from their population and national IQ even further. Senegal (population 13 million, IQ 76), which has probably had the most success at the world championships historically, achieved this with a literacy rate of only 40%! 
+Something Special about Scrabble for Africans Perhaps? 
+The man who won the French World Scrabble championship in 2014, Julien Affaton from Benin, also happens to be a top master draughts (checkers) player in his country. This should immediately suggest that whatever he is using to win his Scrabble games probably has something in common with what is needed to be a master in checkers, because it is highly improbable to be that exceptional in two different areas that require unrelated skills. 
+The question can then be asked: if this is true, then why aren’t Africans also very good in checkers at the world level, just as they are with Scrabble? Isn’t checkers an even more natural field for Africans since it is cheaper to make a checkers set? 
+Meet Baba Sy. 
+Baba Sy breaking world record for simultaneous draughts play. 
+Back in 1960, a draughts expert from France was visiting the French colony of Senegal when he decided to watch some of the street games in poor communities after the French settlers had introduced the game to the black natives. He could not believe the accuracy and speed of their calculations, despite their lack of exposure to theory, and he decided to expose one of the stronger players to his homeland of France where there was a strong checkers club culture among the mathematically-inclined elites. To the utter shock of everyone in France, the young Senegalese player, Baba Sy, defeated every single expert in France and instantly achieved national fame by becoming the national champion of France! 
+France had once been the most dominant nation in the world of international draughts, before the Netherlands (briefly) and then the Soviet Union (permanently) took this honor from them through the latter’s state-sponsored program of monetarily professionalizing chess and checkers careers. With the phenomenal rise of Baba Sy, the French thought they had the chance of recapturing the World Championship from the Soviets by using this brilliant talent from one of their colonies. 
+Baba Sy participated in the 1960 World Championship tournament and shocked the Soviets by coming second in the world, in a variant of draughts he had just been introduced to that was different from his Senegalese one. Sy was not convinced that there was a human who was better than him at any form of checkers, so he decided to challenge the world champion in a more decisive one-on-one World Championship match instead of an open tournament of cumulative points against different players. But by the time this match was supposed to happen, Baba Sy had gained enough mastery of this standard variant to convincingly demolish the best of the Soviets, including their reigning champion and best match play genius at the time, Iser Kuperman. This made the Soviet government reluctant to allow the official World Championship match to take place, apparently for fear of the international embarrassment this title loss would cause, given their heavy investment in the game (they had the same fears over Bobby Fischer in chess). On the day of the match, the Soviet champion simply did not show up, and thus began a long contentious diplomatic standoff between the governments of the Soviet Union and Senegal, as the world of international draughts hotly debated who the rightful champion of the world was for many years. It was only fully resolved posthumously for Baba Sy. List of Draughts World Champions. Source: Wikipedia 
+Again, a person like Sy should not exist outside the realm of science fiction if the racial hypothesis is correct. In 1960, Senegal’s population was 3 million, and IQ 76. The population of France was 47 million, and the population of Russia was 120 million, with national IQs of 98 and 97, respectively. 
+It should be impossible for a Senegalese champion to beat just the high school champions of either France or the Soviet Union. The reason we have never seen a child become world champion in checkers or Scrabble (or anything) is probably because their brains are not fully developed (brain development continues to 25 years of age); and yet the racial hypothesis tells us that the fully developed African brains are on average the mental age equivalent of the white 12 year olds. So why do (the smartest of) Africans produce world champion level players and the smartest of the white 12 year olds (or even the much more “superior” 18/19 year olds) never do? 
+Baba Sy was not some freakish anomaly in African draughts. Former African colonies of France have continued to offer the biggest challenge to Russia’s traditional dominance of the game, even though, like Scrabble players, most of them still have little access to international tournaments to raise their ratings (the fact that many of them come from lower income communities even by African standards makes it harder for them to obtain travel visas.) In 2015, Jean Marc Ndjofang , a Cameroonian player who has migrated to Europe, managed to qualify as the challenger to the Russian world champion (by defeating everyone else, including other Russians), and only came short of ending the iron grip of the Russians on the world title through a tie-break, as the two failed to beat each other after seven games of normal classical match play. The 2015 World Champion, Alexander Georgiev, in a heated tournament game against the Vice-World Champion, Jean Ndjofang. 
+American Checkers. 
+Americans play a different variant of draughts called English checkers or American checkers; the different variants mainly differ on the number of squares on the board. Although the game is mostly popular with children in the US, there is a whole world of professional checkers players who also have a clear endowment in mathematical ability. Thus, the most famous world champion in the history of American checkers was a distinguished math professor, Marion Tinsley . (There are now two variants of Anglo-American checkers: the normal Go-As-You-Play or GAYP and one called 3-move, in which the first three moves are pre-chosen, to prevent memorized opening plays that increase probabilities of draws). 
+After Tinsley’s indomitable reign, the most dominant English-checkers player in the world became the appropriately named Ron King, who won American championships and 12 world championships. At the height of his dominance, Ron King faced the biggest challenge of his career from an unknown player named Lubabalo Kondlo. King was able to retain the title after a grueling match that was later made into a documentary . Kondlo happens to be a black man from a very poor area in South Africa. Ron King is also black, from Barbados, and he is known as the Muhammad Ali of checkers for his “trash talking.” At the height of his career, King entered the Guinness Book of World Records for playing an unbelievable 350 simultaneous games and winning them all! 
+Ron King successfully defended his World Championship against strong Russian players who had shifted to the Anglo-Saxon checkers, including Alexander Moiseyev , a grandmaster in three variants of the game. Moiseyev, a computer programmer, finally snatched the crown from King in the 3-move variant in 2003. 
+Incredibly, Ron King held on to the World Championship of the GAYP variant until 2014, when he forfeited it to an Italian grandmaster, Sergio Scarpetta , when he failed to show up for the last four games of the World Championship match. South Africa’s Kondlo has continued his quest for the world title; he qualified again to play the World Championship match in 2015 in 3-move checkers (after defeating a strong field including Scarpetta), but lost the match to the world champion, Italian Michele Borghetti. 
+Canadian Checkers. 
+Canada also has its variant of checkers. The 2015 Canadian Champion is a Senegalese immigrant, Souleymane Keita. He defended his title against (a-Russian-immigrant-sounding name) Vladimir Lubarsky. 
+In summary, a player from sub-Saharan Africa was the finalist or world champion of 2015, in International Draughts, American checkers, Canadian checkers, English Scrabble and French Scrabble. 
+Why aren’t Africans also dominant in chess? 
+The simple reason seems to be that, unlike Scrabble and Checkers, master level chess requires access to a very large body of ever-growing literature in chess theory (even ignoring the difficulty of making homemade chess pieces); it’s no longer possible to teach yourself grand master level chess, without memorizing these long chess openings. Africans do not have this access to chess materials (which now includes computer programs) for the same reason that they have no access to mathematics text books and other educational materials in schools or public (I would be surprised if even 1 percent of Africans have ever seen the word “library” on a building anywhere; they simply don’t exist). Chess has become more resource-demanding than any school subject. 
+Fischer himself decried the increasingly heavy reliance of top-level chess on familiarity with professionally analyzed theoretical opening lines that the Soviet chess machine engendered (Fischer had to learn Russian just to keep up with the countless Russian opening analyses), and he ultimately invented a variant of chess (called Fischer Random chess) that basically rearranges the pieces at the start of a game. But standard chess continues to be the most popular in the world and Africans continue facing a training deficit for as long as there are no books there. 
+Thus when the New York Times reported on the incredible Grandmaster achievement of an amateur Zambian chess player in 2007, their article was revealingly titled “Zambian with Little Training Stands Poised to Make History.” (By contrast, re women in chess, a 1992 book about the best chess playing female trio in history, was skeptically titled “The Polgar Sisters: Genius or Training? ”). 
+The resource disadvantage of Africa in chess still does not mean, as some racial hypothesis bloggers seem to constantly suggest, that African chess teams relatively perform at a level that “confirms” their low national IQ scores. On the contrary, Zambia has a stronger national chess team than either Japan or South Korea, for example. Thus, Zambia (population 15 million, national IQ 78) quite easily defeated South Korea (population 50 million, national IQ 106) last time they met at the Chess Olympiads, with the former not even featuring its grandmaster. (China, on the other hand, is now an East Asian chess powerhouse, although it should be mentioned that they achieved this through a semi-Soviet-style professionalization program dubbed “ Big Dragon Project ”, initiated by an Asian billionaire in collaboration with Chinese officials, with the explicit aim of raising East Asian chess performance). South Africa’s first chess grandmaster, Kenny Solomon. 
+Even within some historically multiracial countries, you can find some hints of anomalies to the racial hypothesis: South Africa has produced only one chess grandmaster in its history, and he happens to come from the black community. The fact that the black population of South Africa is larger shouldn’t really matter; after all, the top swimmers in South Africa are all white (for likely genetic reasons), and the fastest runners in white majority multiracial societies are black. 
+What about American blacks? 
+The vast majority of observations that have led to the conclusions of the racial hypothesis are based on the intellectual performance of blacks in America, where a historical IQ gap of one standard deviation seems to be intractable. 
+Indeed the game of expert Scrabble itself appears to confirm the ethnic conclusions of Jensen et al within America because black Americans perform (on Scrabble) exactly as predicted by IQ data. Top black American experts generally perform lower than white American women at the top expert level. 
+The best male native black American Scrabble player, Marlon Hill, has apparently made it his open mission to beat whites at Scrabble, a story that has not escaped Rush Limbaugh ‘s amusement. He has so far failed to convincingly establish his racial “superiority.” His rating does not appear on the top 1000 players of the world (WESPA) or even on the top 100 rated players in North America (NASPA). (By contrast, Marlon Hill’s old training partner , Sammy Okosagah, a Nigerian immigrant, has been ranked as high as number one in North America at his peak in 2004, and was one of the highest performing American duo, with David Weigand, at the 2013 World Championships when he came third in the world.) Lisa Odom, the highest ranked native Black American player. 
+Quite surprisingly, there are some signs that the well-known gender reversal of intelligence that has been observed in black Americans may be slightly confirmed in Scrabble. A female black expert, Lisa Odom, does not appear on the recent international WESPA ratings list (although she has qualified in the past to play at the world championships) but she appears on the North American top 100 NASPA list . She is presently 59 th on that list (it changes frequently), which makes her not only the highest ranked native black American, but also one of the highest ranked women of any race in North America. (Incidentally, the third highest ranked player on the entire North American list at the time of this writing is a Kenyan immigrant, Patrick Gitonga Nderitu, who is ranked just above the Stanford wonderkid, Mack Meller.) 
+A Jewish Rule? 
+One simple informal test of the “g-loadedness” or cognitive intensity of any intellectual field is the presence of Jewish over-representation at the very top of the game, so to speak. This rule seems to work for the game of Scrabble. 
+One of the highest rated Scrabble players in the world, second only to the great Nigel Richards in official rating at the time of this writing, is an Australian player named David Eldar. Eldar attended a special school called King David High School, whose Wikipedia description sounds like it was exclusively formed to serve the Australian Jewish community. Ashkenazi Jews are only 0.5% of that country. Although Eldar has not yet won the world championship, the odds are highly in his favor, as the second highest rated player in the world. 
+Someone who has won the World Championship is Joel Sherman, who is one of only three Americans to have held the coveted title. Even without digging further for more Jews on the long list of highly rated players in North America, these examples are already sufficient to establish Jewish statistical over-representation on Scrabble super-achievement. And we have a strong reason to believe that there are even more. In a 2005 interview where he was asked to confirm his Jewish roots after he appeared on a list of Jewish sports figures, Sherman disclosed: 
+… Several other North American Scrabble ® Champs have been Jewish and they’re not listed, presumably because the Wikipedia contributor who compiled that list found my Jewishness mentioned in “Word Freak” and the same info is not readily available about them. I won’t “out” them because I don’t know how they would feel to share that listing as well. My own feeling is ambivalent: it’s nice to be noted, but I’d rather my born religion was not the criterion for my inclusion, as I have been an atheist since even before my Bar Mitzvah… 
+Seven years before Sherman’s statement, a 1998 New York Times report on computers playing Scrabble against human experts, contained a revealing sentence in the long article: “The leading Scrabble players, many of whom are Jewish, …” 
+The over-representation of Ashkenazi Jews at the top of such cognitively demanding games might also put in doubt any suggestions of steep declines in real Jewish IQ in the 20 th century. 
+The game of checkers does not escape this Jewish rule (no pun intended). I found that the greatest checkers match player in the Soviet Union at the height of Soviet sponsorship of the game, the man the Soviets were apparently shielding from Senegal’s Baba Sy, Iser Kuperman, was Jewish . This means that the two Russians who held the World Championship in chess and checkers at this time of Soviet dominance were both Jewish (the great Mikhail Botvinik was the chess world champion at this time in the early 1960s). 
+It is said that this ambitious Soviet promotion and glorification of chess and checkers was originally instituted by Stalin to keep the most intelligent elites of his country, especially the Jews, occupied with something that would keep them from meddling in politics (in more recent years, Gary Kasparov, an Ashkenazi Jew, has indeed become quite troublesome for the Russian government after retiring from chess). It was of course also later used for propaganda purposes to convey the intellectual “superiority” of the Soviet system internally and internationally. 
+Jewish brilliance has not left the world of checkers to this day. Alexander Moiseyev, the Russian who ended the World Championship reign (in 3-move American checkers) of the Barbadian Ron King, is of Jewish descent . (The 2015 finalist against Senegalese Souleymane Keita in Canadian checkers, Vladimir Lubarsky, is also almost certainly Jewish .) 
+The bottom line is that if the cognitive hierarchy under the racial hypothesis was true, there should be no single popular intellectual activity in the world in which Africans and Ashkenazi Jews are both over-represented at the top (just as there is no single world athletic activity requiring high speed, in which the slowest populations and the fastest populations are both over-represented at the top). Scrabble and Checkers are in violation of that logical axiom. 
+Jewish over-representation at the top of such games (checkers, scrabble, chess, etc) also puts in doubt any conclusions that the male advantage over females has to do specifically with visuospatial abilities, as Jews are not exceptional in that regard. It would seem that the advantage has to just do with general intelligence. 
+No East Asians in Scrabble? National School Scrabble championships, source: Wikipedia 
+East Asians have the reputation of being good at math in school and college, but their dominance does not extend to the highest award in math (the Field’s Medal), so it is not an anomaly for Scrabble that they are not over-represented at the world championships (especially those born in English-speaking nations). The question still is: why aren’t they good at Scrabble in school, since they are so conspicuously good in math at that stage? Does their failure at this stage pose a problem for Scrabble as a math game? 
+Actually, they do quite as well at Scrabble as they do in school mathematics. 
+It appears that there has been an East Asian name among the winners of the highly competitive National School Scrabble Championships in four of the last six years! (They are only 6% of the US population). Notice that only one female name has appeared (Aune Mitchell, 2007) even at this stage. I did not investigate the Jewishness of the other names, but it would not be surprising if there were a few. First team to win National Scrabble School Championship twice, Andy Hoang and Erik Salgado SAT math scores by gender and ethnicity in 2015. Source: AEI 
+Discussion 
+“For expert players, the game requires the simultaneous interplay of verbal, visuospatial, and mathematical abilities under speeded conditions. There are no other games that require the simultaneous, rapid use of all of these abilities.” Halpern and Wai, The World of Competitive Scrabble , Psychology Today. 
+Spearman’s hypothesis , an idea used by Arthur Jensen to demonstrate the biological nature of the black-white performance gap, predicts that the gap should expand the more you use a test that relies on more raw brain power or ‘g’. Scrabble involves much more mental manipulations than the simpler well-known “WordSum” Vocabulary test and the latter shows a wide gap between blacks and whites (in America). This gap does indeed appear to grow even further when you replace WordSum test with Scrabble, but only when you limit “black” to native black Americans. The gap appears to reduce and even reverse when you introduce black Africans, which is an anomaly for the racial hypothesis. The fact that we are talking about the most elite players should actually make it even more impossible for this to happen since the black-white gap should be even more conspicuous (in favor of whites) at higher ends of cognitive performance. 
+In the same vein, the game of draughts (especially its speeded up form, called “blitz draughts”) is much more g-loaded than a simple “ Reaction Time ” test that is used by cognitive psychologists to test natural brain power differences by comparing how long it takes one to react to certain simple stimuli. Blitz draughts does not only demand your quick reaction to the move of your opponent, it includes the added mental challenge of calculating your reaction move based on assessing a constantly changing position. Besides playing the World Championship match in the slow classical draughts, an African player reached the top two slots of the super-elite world championships in blitz draughts for both 2015 and 2016 . 
+If Africans are doing well on these games because of some special environmental reason, then that contradicts the genetic racial hypothesis. If Africans in Africa are outperforming others due to some environmental reason, then black American performance on Scrabble can also be raised by environmental methods; if black American Scrabble performance can be raised to equal whites, then black American math performance can also be raised by environmental intervention. If it can’t, then the fallacy of the hereditarian position has been to assume that native black Americans are cognitively representative of blacks everywhere. 
+The global racial hypothesis is therefore not just contradicted by these findings, it is logically refuted . Under this hypothesis, there should not be even one single cognitive field where the top blacks are equal or more over-represented than the top whites, especially when white participation in such fields is elite enough to result in a wide gender performance gap in favor of males even with relatively high numbers of female participants. The additional presence of Jewish over-representation at the top of a field should only reinforce the impossibility of black dominance or equality under that hypothesis. You have the opposite empirical result in Scrabble and checkers since you get increasing African over-representation with rising cognitive selectivity, suggesting a reversal of the gap, if anything. 
+The falsifiable part of the racial hypothesis is duly falsified. 
+REFERENCES Downie, J. (2011). Why are Most Scrabble Champions Male? New Republic Fatsis, S. (2002). Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players. Penguin. Halpern, D., Wai, J. (2007) The World of Competitive Scrabble: Novice and Expert Differences in Visuospatial and Verbal Abilities . Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 2007, vol.13 no.2 79-94 Lynn, Richard (1994). “Sex differences in intelligence and brain size: A paradox resolved”. Personality and Individual Differences . 17 (2): 257–71 Pinker, S. (2009). The sexual paradox: Men, women and the real gender gap . Simon and Schuster.",FAKE
+2936,"How Yemen Fits Iran Plans for Mideast Rule, Beyond","WASHINGTON – The remaining Americans have been evacuated from the country of Yemen. The United States closed its embassy because of the violence after a radical Islamic rebellion in the country.
+
+The news comes as Iran is expanding its influence in the Middle East while building a nuclear program that shows no signs of stopping.
+
+Yemen is an important part of Iran's strategy.
+
+When a radical Shiite Muslim group, called the Houthis, seized Yemen's capital city last year, it marked a dangerous phase for a country plagued by violent chaos.
+
+Located on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen is already home to an al Qaeda branch that has attempted several attacks against the United States and Europe.
+
+The rise of the Houthis opens the door to yet another terrorist presence.
+
+""You look at the fall of the government of Yemen, which was allied with the United States, helping us in our efforts to silence al Qaeda. And you see the Iranian Quds forces behind training and arming that effort,"" Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said.
+
+Iran has long been suspected of backing the Houthis, whose official slogan sounds very familiar to that of Iran's government: ""Death to America, death to Israel, damnation to the Jews.""
+
+Iran's support of the Houthis seems to point to a much a bigger goal.
+
+""That was not a local issue. Yemen is a historical invasion route to Saudi Arabia. Yemen controls the very critical access of oil tankers from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea to the Mediterranean,"" former Israeli Ambassador Yoram Ettinger explained.
+
+He said Yemen is an important piece in Iran's larger plan of regional domination.
+
+""Iran is leveraging Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, in order to further destabilize the region, in order to destabilize pro-American Arab regimes,"" Ettinger said.
+
+In addition to Lebanon and Gaza, Tehran is using allies to gain influence in Yemen, Syria, Hezbollah, and among Shiite leaders in Iraq. These moves leave Israel and another Iranian rival, Saudi Arabia, in unfriendly surroundings.
+
+Ettinger said the ultimate target, however, is the United States.
+
+""The Iranians are pursuing a very clear anti-American tactic and the reason is they consider the U.S. the major obstacle to attaining their major goal: namely, the domination of the Gulf,"" Ettinger told CBN News.
+
+""No country in the world but the U.S. can stop Iran from taking over the Gulf and then the Muslim world,"" he said.
+
+Iran is reportedly working to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles that could one day reach the United States.
+
+Yet the Obama administration has not demanded that Iran give up this missile program as part of ongoing nuclear talks. If Iran acquires a nuclear bomb, it could eventually be mounted on such a missile.
+
+""That ultimately is going to open up a Pandora's box of a whole new world situation that is going to very bad for the security of that whole region and ultimately, I think, the security of the entire world,"" Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, warned.",REAL
+4140,"No matter who it is, next president to face economic challenge","Bill Clinton rode into office 24 years ago on the campaign mantra, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – and apparently, it still is.
+
+In an election where dim economic prospects have fueled the campaigns of both Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Donald Trump, a new Fox News poll shows the economy still is far and away the top priority for voters. And faced with flashing warning signs of tepid growth, barely rising wages and factors that signal an even further slowdown, what would a President Trump or Clinton or Sanders do about it?
+
+The proposals span the gamut: Trump wants big tax cuts and tariffs on trading partners. Sanders wants a hike in the minimum wage and free college tuition. Hillary Clinton wants more infrastructure spending.
+
+And each candidate has taken the others to task on their positions and plans.
+
+Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling recently warned that if Trump was elected he would put the entire financial system at risk. That was after Trump said he could reduce the national debt by getting the government to pay back less than it has borrowed.
+
+Trump, though, has slammed his likely Democratic rival over trade policies, including the North American Free Trade Agreement that Clinton’s husband signed into law in 1993.
+
+""It has cleaned out our country of jobs,"" Trump told Fox News on Friday.
+
+Trump says he’d be the “greatest jobs producer in history” by slapping tariffs on Mexico, China and other trade partners.
+
+“The lines have been crossed,” Carroll Doherty, director of political research at Pew Research Center, said. “The Republicans were always known as the party of free trade and now they are less supportive of free trade than Democrats.”
+
+The stakes are high, as the next president is likely to face a lingering economic challenge all in the wake of the last recession.
+
+A Wall Street Journal survey of economists earlier this month showed an elevated risk (about 20 percent) of another U.S. recession in the next year. One of those economists, the National Association of Manufacturers’ Chad Moutray, cited: “Decelerating employment growth, growing uncertainty and sputtering GDP growth.”
+
+Income inequality continues to strike a deep divide between the haves and have-nots, which the candidates also have seized on.
+
+Clinton pledges to enact the “Buffett Rule” – a basic principle that ensures no household making more than $1 million annually should pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than a middle-class family pays.
+
+Clinton also promises to strip tax benefits from U.S. companies that move jobs to foreign countries to get a more favorable rate. And she says she’ll help small businesses by expanding access to capital and vows to invest $350 billion in secondary education.
+
+Clinton supports as well raising the federal minimum wage to at least $12 – currently, it’s at $7.25 for covered nonexempt employees. Clinton has also shown support for the Fight for $15 campaign which pushes for even higher minimum wages in individual states.
+
+It’s a fight Sanders has taken on since the start of his campaign. And he's accused Clinton of being late to the party. At a CNN debate in April, Sanders mocked Clinton’s declaration of support: “What has happened is that history has outpaced Secretary Clinton.”
+
+Sanders repeatedly has described tackling income inequality as the hallmark of his campaign. He also has vowed to break up big banks, cap credit card rates at 15 percent and limit ways some in the financial industry have been able to monetarily benefit from taxpayer bailouts.
+
+Trump, meanwhile, takes the opposite tack. Trump says dismantling the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul would be one of his top priorities. He’s also said he’d boot out Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen.
+
+While the candidates push for more economic changes, there are bright spots.
+
+When President Obama took office, the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month. The unemployment rate has since fallen dramatically, from 10 percent to 5 percent. During Obama’s two terms, the private sector has added jobs for 73 straight months.
+
+Still, hard economic realities face the country, putting pressure on the next Oval Office occupant to engineer a jump-start.
+
+The economy grew at its weakest quarterly pace in two years between January and March -- 0.5 percent -- as consumers spent cautiously. Businesses cut back on investments to levels not seen since the financial crisis of 2008. And there was a massive stock market sell-off at the start of the year which eroded consumer confidence.
+
+And while the budget deficit -- the federal government's annual shortfall -- has shrunk by nearly $1 trillion, Washington continues to spend far more than it earns, swelling the national debt beyond $19 trillion. It's a factor that could increasingly limit the government's ability to spend its way out of an economic downturn.
+
+Should the country find itself in another recession, James Pethokoukis, an expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says a Trump response would likely be based on a “truly massive tax cut” -- and more.
+
+“He also likes to do infrastructure. Fantastic, he can throw in some infrastructure in there as well. Doesn’t care about the debt? Who cares? Fine. So we have a massive tax cut, maybe massive infrastructure spending,” Pethokoukis said. “A Donald Trump presidency during a recession – assuming that his trade conflict doesn’t cause the recession – might just be like the Democratic dream president.”",REAL
+9467,"A Fifth Clinton Presidency? Hill, No!", ,FAKE
+9255,The Real Reason the Antidepressant Industry Does Not Want Psychedelics Legalized,"By Vandita For decades, the pharmaceutical industry poured millions into the pockets of crony lawmakers as they lobbied to keep marijuana illegal. We understand if marijuana — a plant that can... ",FAKE
+6867,Internet Erupts In Mockery After Sarah Palin Posts Something Monumentally Stupid Again (TWEETS),"on October 30, 2016 4:07 pm · 
+For like the eleventy-billionth time, Sarah Palin posted a broken link to a Facebook post on Twitter Sunday. Now, at first glance her months of posting dead links and not figuring out how to fix the problem might seem moderately stupid — until you see the content of the actual post on the half-term, half-wit former Governor of Alaska’s Facebook timeline. 
+Referencing Clinton’s recent, mundane campaign stop at a bar, Palin — who regularly appears to be heavily intoxicated whenever she has a camera in front of her and was involved in a drunken hillbilly brawl in 2014 — quipped, “she’s gonna drive us all to drink.” 
+Thinking she is clever, she then adds that Clinton should have been “thinking Sam Adams” rather than “drinking Sam Adams.” 
+Naturally, as Palin brought up drinking, the internet decided it couldn’t let this one go: @SarahPalinUSA I see you've already started 
+— Clodagh Smith (@Clodagh831) October 30, 2016 @SarahPalinUSA Any excuse to drink, eh Sarah? #Lush 
+— John Yuma (@JohnYuma) October 30, 2016 @SarahPalinUSA Have you been day drinking again? 
+— Mr. Wolfcastle (@tew156) October 30, 2016 @SarahPalinUSA oh Sarah, remember when you mattered?Me neither. Open another Box O' Wine.",FAKE
+7514,News: Democracy Win: Volunteers Across The Country Are Oiling Up The Sidewalks To Help Voters Slide Uncontrollably To Their Polling Place,"Email 
+Despite the fact that voting is the cornerstone of our democracy, only 60 percent of eligible voters turn out in a presidential election. But this year we may see that number spike, because groups of incredible volunteers are doing everything they can to get out the vote: They’re hitting the road and oiling up the sidewalks to help voters slide uncontrollably to their polling places. 
+Democracy FTW! 
+You might not know their names, but these hardworking men and women are out there in the trenches from Maine to California, slathering thick, black oil on the ground so every American can skid down the road, windmilling their arms wildly to try and stay upright, and careen straight through the doors of a voting booth. Republican or Democrat, these patriotic volunteers want every American to have access to a frictionless slick of oil that leads right to a polling place. 
+Yes! These incredible volunteers are absolutely killing it! 
+Rather than letting our election be decided by a select few, people from across the nation are volunteering their time to make sidewalks well-lubricated and slippery for as many voters as possible. As of this morning, footpaths have been oiled in all 50 states, giving people who would not otherwise have the time or desire to vote the opportunity to lose their balance and slide forward at alarming speeds with their arms flailing and legs kicking, until they crash face-first into a registered polling location. 
+We might live in a democracy, but we wouldn’t have a truly representative election without the help of a select few everyday heroes. So when the polling stations close and every last slippery, oil-covered voter has put their ballot in the box and slid back out the door, remember those brave volunteers, because we couldn’t do it without them.",FAKE
+9225,"Dear America, Let’s Now Unite and Flood Our Nation With Optimism","Dear America,
+Whether you voted for Trump or not, surely you can join me in admitting the past few years have been devoid of optimism. We’ve been pessimistic on the economy, on the social foundation of our country, our standing in the world, our concern over potential for war, our healthcare, our jobs and generally speaking… our future.
+For some of you Barack Obama may be a likable character. While many of us believe he’s corrupt and wrong in his way of thinking, it’s understandable that many of his voters found him to be generally likable. For those who do, the truth is he betrayed you. He betrayed all of us.
+His healthcare law was sold to you as a law that would make healthcare affordable and wouldn’t change the plan/doctor you have. Most of us are now finding that was a lie. We’re losing our plans and doctors, and costs are skyrocketing.
+His economic policy enriched the mega rich while crushing jobs. His environmental policy has pumped billions of our dollars into the pockets of special interests, killed off jobs and did absolutely nothing for the environment. His tax policy is painful. If you pay taxes you know this to be the case.
+He spends money like it grows on trees. For him it’s not an issue. He lives in the high castle and will never have to worry about money. But you and I? Yeah, it’s an issue.
+He dragged us nearly into world war with Russia. He collapsed the Middle East in a way that has rippled across the globe.
+We can disagree on issues, but surely we can agree this hasn’t been a good situation. Something has to change. Hillary Clinton wasn’t going to change anything. She was going to take Obama’s burning agenda and throw gasoline on it.
+We now have an opportunity. Donald Trump has his flaws. We all have concerns about it. No secret there. But his plan is something we should all get excited about. That is, of course, provided he actually follows through with it.
+Trump is likely to relax tensions with Russia. He’s likely to pull back our nonsensical involvement in the Middle East. He’s likely to repeal and replace Obamacare. He’s likely to initiate a tax and economic policy that WILL invigorate business growth.
+For businesses, Trump has a plan that will help create spenders. And for consumers his plan will help us earn and retain more financial stability.
+This is a good thing. It’s good for liberals, conservatives and independents. It’s good for America.
+Not long ago there was a time when Americans were optimistic, hungry for success and excited to work hard for it. We’ve exiting a period of time where that mentality has been non-existent. We’re entering a time where it can exist again.
+We’ve got a mess on our hands. There is much work to do to clean it up. But it can be cleaned up, and we can flourish as a result of it.
+That is, if we unify and optimistically strive for success as a nation.
+It’s time, America. It’s long overdue.
+Let’s make America great again.
+-Eric Odom 
+",FAKE
+4156,"With Common Core tests, a lot at stake for first-year principal","Principal Krystal Hardy has dedicated herself to improving the culture and upping the test scores at a struggling New Orleans charter school. Her third-graders, for one, take 14 standardized tests, including Common Core ones, each year.
+
+Third-grade students at Sylvanie Williams College Prep elementary school read individually in class, on Jan. 16, 2015, in New Orleans. Fifty percent of the children here started the academic year below grade level in reading and math. The goal is to help them catch up and keep making progress.
+
+This story is the third in a yearlong series following Krystal Hardy, a first-year principal trying to bring order and improve test scores at a struggling New Orleans charter school. The project is a partnership between The Christian Science Monitor and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet that covers inequality and innovation in education and is affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.
+
+A week before their final round of Common Core tests, the fifth-graders at Sylvanie Williams College Prep, a charter school in New Orleans, are reviewing the procedures for solving a multi-part word problem in math. Their principal, Krystal Hardy, looks on.
+
+“Pay attention! I’ve seen these kinds of questions on the PARCC test,” says math teacher Tiffany Labrie, referring to the Common Core tests that most students in Louisiana take this month. “This calls for converting ounces to pounds, so you can use your reference sheet,” she tells them, indicating a handout on every desk.
+
+“Don’t forget, you can use the reference sheet today, but also on the what?” asks Ms. Labrie, rhetorically.
+
+“PARCC!” echoes Labrie. “You’ll have those reference sheets during the PARCC tests. Remember to use them!”
+
+Ms. Hardy – who is in her first year as principal – has staked her career on improving the culture and upping the test scores at this struggling elementary school, located in a gritty part of New Orleans' Central City neighborhood. At the start of the academic year in August, 50 percent of the approximately 400 students, nearly all of whom are African-American and most of whom are poor, scored below grade level in reading and math. Their road to improvement is paved with tests.
+
+Indeed, like most public school students across America, pupils at Sylvanie Williams get tested often – although Hardy is trying to balance the “data-driven instruction” with a strong social justice curriculum.
+
+The earliest tests this year helped teachers figure out which students had learned the material and which ones needed that lesson again. After five months, Hardy and her staff began diving deeper, comparing test results with worksheets that students completed in class. When they saw patterns of errors, the teachers themselves worked through the problems, trying to figure out exactly where the students were going wrong.
+
+Their findings have already dramatically changed the way teachers teach. And the teachers are noticing that student achievement is picking up.
+
+“We were able to administer targeted medicine,” says Hardy.
+
+“Instead of saying, ‘Some of these students aren’t good at multiplying,’ ” she says, “we could start to say, for example, that 40 percent of these students in this class don’t seem to understand the place-value concept in three-digit numbers and about 40 percent, say, understand the concept but are not paying attention to details when they compute.”
+
+Students at Sylvanie Williams take annual tests in science and social studies aligned to the state’s standards, plus two rounds of Common Core tests in English and math developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). In some grades, students also take three sets of benchmarking tests three or four times a year. In the end, third-graders, who get tested the most, take a whopping 14 standardized tests per year, in addition to “exit tickets” – teacher-generated assessments at the end of a unit of study.
+
+Testing infuses many aspects of the school day. The walls of Hardy’s office and the teachers’ conference room are hung with posters sporting bar charts that show test results. Students and teachers talk about the test, the test day, and “reaching basic.”
+
+Outside a third-grade classroom, a colorful hand-drawn poster names the children who have achieved the advanced, mastery, and basic levels on one test. In another classroom, a teacher has written out in magic marker a several-foot-long list of standards (4.NF.5: Express equivalent fractions and add fractions with denominators of 10 and 100) – presumably to keep his own teaching on target for the Common Core math test.
+
+Although a vocal minority of parents whose children tend to be enrolled in more affluent schools around the country have refused to let their kids take the Common Core tests, no Sylvanie Williams families have opted out. And Hardy is predicting the final round won’t be a problem for her scholars. “They’re used to it,” she says simply.
+
+Early in the year, diagnostic test results helped distinguish what had been taught from what had been learned. Hardy keeps a close eye on lesson plans – teachers submit them to her each week – so she knows what material is being covered.
+
+By January, armed with more data, Hardy and her teachers and coaches were really poring over the test results. And that’s when the dialogue around instruction began to shift. The teachers started collaborating on how to quickly and directly backfill the specific foundational skills that students need to move forward.
+
+“After that point,” says fourth-grade teacher Terrance Mitchell, “I think as a school we really started to see the achievement of our students begin to accelerate.”
+
+Although Hardy is committed to running a test-driven school, the data focus has its frustrations. Because the Common Core exams are new this year, the PARCC administrators need to perform technical calculations on the results. This means that scores on the tests will be released to Hardy after Sylvanie Williams’s school year ends – too late for teachers to use that data to course-correct.
+
+State political leaders are maneuvering to scuttle or at least modify the use of the Common Core in Louisiana, so it’s not certain that the standards that the students are being asked to meet this year will even be around next year.
+
+The school’s relentless focus on standards and testing reduces time for less defined but often more meaningful types of lessons – ones that help kids understand themselves, their fellow students, and the world around them. But Hardy has tried to squeeze these kinds of experiences into the school day.
+
+In January, she took 40 students on a field trip to Selma, Ala., to join the commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the march to Montgomery. And one morning, she taught a unit on poverty in America, which included having third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders compare weekly expenses with median income for high school dropouts, college graduates, and those with a master’s degree.
+
+Recently, a fifth-grade blackboard showed the remnants of a vibrant discussion about young black men, police, and excessive force. “Because of the demographic our children come from, many will face immense challenges and unique realities,” Hardy says.
+
+“We need to prepare them to understand how the world will engage with them. They need to understand how to engage with it. And maybe, create the possibility that they will act as change agents in their world.”
+
+Hardy accepts that her school, and her tenure as principal, will be evaluated largely on test scores. But she is adamant about maintaining what she sees as crucial parts of education that no test will measure.
+
+• This project is a partnership between the Monitor and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news website focused on inequality and innovation in education and is affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University. © 2015 The Christian Science Monitor and The Hechinger Report.",REAL
+3025,Political polarization is getting worse. Everywhere.,"You've probably seen this chart.
+
+It uses analysis from VoteView to show how the House has grown more polarized over time. Democrats in the House have become more liberal; Republicans have become much more conservative.
+
+You may also have seen this chart -- but if you haven't, you probably at least are familiar with the concept.
+
+It shows the ranges of weekly approval ratings for President Obama over the course of his administration. In other words, each time 82 percent of Democrats approve of Obama, the 82 percent bar gets a little higher. For the most part, opinions of Obama haven't changed much among Democrats or Republicans; his overall approval rating is usually a function of how independents feel about him.
+
+Obama isn't the first president to see such polarization in his approval ratings. The first president to do so was the guy before him, George W. Bush. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton each had some polarization in their second terms, but it wasn't nearly as wide a gap.
+
+Which leads us to a natural question: How does the polarization of Congress -- which is a measure of the behavior of members of Congress -- compare with the polarization of approval of the president, a measure of public opinion?
+
+That's a question we can answer.
+
+Over time, the gap between the political leaning of Republican and Democratic caucuses on Capitol Hill has widened steadily (though not continuously). This compares DW-NOMINATE scores from VoteView, which is a measure of how liberal or conservative each member of Congress is against a baseline. The figures below essentially measure the distance between the two lines in the first graph above.
+
+Over that same period, opinions of the president have similarly widened -- again, with some fits and starts.
+
+There are two lines here, one using the first Gallup approval rating of the new year and the other averaging the ratings over the year. You can see how attitudes shift; the gap plummets as a president becomes equally popular or unpopular with each party.
+
+Anyway, this suggests that as Congress has gotten more polarized, so too have opinions of the presidents.
+
+But there's a clearer way to look at this. Plotting the gap in how Democrats and Republicans look at the president on one axis and the gap between the two parties in Congress on the other, you can see clearly how both the former and latter have grown more extreme. (The higher and further to the right a dot, the greater the polarization.)
+
+In other words, this polarization isn't only a function of Congress and gerrymandering. There's been a broader polarization that's taken place, reflected in how each party views the president.
+
+What it doesn't tell us is the cause. As complicated as these data are, this was the easier part of the analysis.",REAL
+428,"US economy adds paltry 38,000 jobs in May for weakest growth since 2010","The US economy added just 38,000 jobs in May – 122,000 fewer than expected and the weakest growth since 2010. The unemployment rate slipped down to 4.7%, the Department of Labor announced on Friday.
+
+The report added to concerns that the US economy is slowing, ahead of a crucial meeting of the Federal Reserve, and was immediately seized on by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. “Terrible jobs report just reported. Only 38,000 jobs added. Bombshell!” he wrote on Twitter.
+
+A strike by 40,000 Verizon workers impacted the numbers, the labor department said, and without the strike the number of jobs added would have been 72,000, which is still less than half the expected job growth.
+
+The unemployment rate is now the lowest it has been since November 2007, and job gains in 2016 have slowed sharply from the 240,000 average of the last two years. On Friday, the Department of Labor also cut its assessment of the number of jobs added in March and April by 59,000.
+
+“The weakness in May’s payrolls was widespread. Manufacturing lost 10,000 jobs, construction shed 15,000 jobs and temporary help fell by 21,000,” wrote Paul Ashworth, Capital Economics chief US economist, in a note to investors. “A June rate hike from the Fed is now very unlikely.”
+
+May’s report is the last before the Fed’s next meeting on 14-15 June, when the US central bank may raise interest rates again. The gain was the smallest since September 2010 and is sure to add to speculation that a rate hike could be delayed until July, already uncertainty about Britain’s referendum to exit the EU. That vote will take place on 23 June.
+
+After the economy added 160,000 jobs in April – 40,000 fewer than expected – economists expected the job growth in May to come in at 160,000. Over the past 12 months employment growth had averaged 232,000 jobs a month, but economists expected the 44-day strike of 40,000 Verizon workers to affect the May figures.
+
+
+
+The last time Verizon workers went on strike, for two weeks in August 2011, the department of labor reported that the economy added no jobs that month. The following month, however, it reported a growth of 103,000 jobs and noted that the spike partially “reflected the return to payrolls of about 45,000” striking workers.
+
+The recent strike ended last week after the labor department helped Verizon and the union representing the striking workers reach a tentative deal.
+
+As job growth slows, Barack Obama has moved to defend his economic legacy. Earlier this week, while speaking in Elkhart, Indiana, he described the US economy as the “strongest, most durable economy in the world” and pointed out that over the past six years, US businesses have created more than 14m new jobs.
+
+“Despite the drop in unemployment, wages are still growing too slowly, and that makes it harder to pay for college or save for retirement,” said Obama, before pointing out that so far this year, wages have grown at a rate of about 3%. Until recently, his administration had described wages as the unfinished business of this recovery.
+
+Economists believe that a wage growth of 3% to 3.5% is necessary to help reach the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation goal.
+
+Last week, Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen said that she expects the US labor market to continue to improve and that in the coming months it might be “appropriate” for the Fed to increase interest rates. In December, the Fed increased interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade.
+
+“I’m not sure it plays an important role in our policy making beyond us just monitoring the US data and general global financial conditions and having confidence that things are still on a good track,” Charles Evans, president of the Chicago Fed, told CNBC on Friday. Evans, who is a non-voting member of the Fed’s policy-setting committee, said that he expects two rate hikes this year.
+
+“As the labor market tightens we should see wage growth rise, however it’s clear that we are not at a level consistent with full employment. With wage growth this low, there is simply no threat of wage-led inflation,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “The Fed should bear this in mind when it meets later this month and not be too quick to raise rates and slow the economy.”
+
+A week ago, Yellen said that the US jobs market is nearing full employment.",REAL
+1696,Donald Trump attacks force Jeb Bush out of his malaise,"(CNN) The aggressive Jeb Bush that his allies have been waiting for emerged this week -- and it was an attack on his family that got him going.
+
+The former Florida governor launched his most forceful attempt yet to paint Donald Trump as an unserious candidate unfit for the foreign policy decisions that face the country's commander in chief.
+
+First, he punched back hard at Trump's suggestion that his brother, George W. Bush, bore responsibility for the September 11, 2001, attacks and that Trump could have prevented them.
+
+In a series of interviews, Bush then questioned Trump's intellectual heft and understanding of complex world events.
+
+Tuesday, he leveled his most blistering critique to date, with a National Review op-ed accusing the real estate magnate of echoing ""the attacks of (liberal filmmaker) Michael Moore and the fringe left"" on national security issues.
+
+""Let's be clear: Donald Trump simply doesn't know what he's talking about,"" Bush wrote, adding that Trump's ""bluster overcompensates for a shocking lack of knowledge on the complex national-security challenges that will confront the next president.""
+
+This is a critical moment for Bush, who like other establishment Republicans has been unable to break through against Trump. As much as Bush and his allies like to talk about having resources for the long game early next year, the next few weeks are key for whether his foreign policy message and electability arguments will click into place and capture the interest of voters.
+
+Polls have shown very little excitement about his candidacy in any sector of the Republican base. That fact is not only evident in polls, but also in interviews with voters on the ground in early states who often describe Bush as lacking dynamism, enthusiasm and energy.
+
+Despite heavy advertising in New Hampshire and an impressive list of endorsements in the early states, a CNN/ORC Poll released this week showed Bush tied in an unimpressive third place with Florida rival Marco Rubio at 8%.
+
+And even after raising $13.4 million last quarter, many heavy-hitting Republican donors -- particularly those who supported Mitt Romney -- are still on the sidelines, attracted to the candidacy of Marco Rubio and eying other contenders like John Kasich and even Chris Christie.
+
+As part of the campaign to assuage concerns of donors and allies who have watched in surprise as he struggles, Bush's longtime strategist Mike Murphy -- who runs the Right to Rise super PAC -- also emerged in a rare interview to blast Trump as a ""false zombie front-runner"" and outline his ""theory of the race"" on why Bush will outlast the other GOP candidates.
+
+""He's dead politically, he'll never be president of the United States, ever,"" Murphy said of Trump in an interview with Bloomberg Politics. Murphy, who is legally prohibited from coordinating with the Bush campaign, jabbed Trump by predicting that his bid would collapse and adding ""I don't think you can be a front-runner if you're totally un-electable.""
+
+Noting that he's worked with Bush for 18 years, Murphy argued that Bush ""builds slowly and gets better and better,"" pointing to his improved debate performances as an example of that.
+
+Some of Bush's most stalwart supporters have long felt that a pivot to foreign policy could help his standing in the field.
+
+His exchange with Trump after the real estate magnate called his brother's administration ""a disaster"" during the CNN debate was one of his strongest performances of the night, and this week's 9/11 debate seemed to help him sharpen his critiques of Trump.
+
+Bush allies still believe Rubio is vulnerable on the question of experience because of his short stint in the U.S. Senate and the ease with which his rivals could compare him to Barack Obama, who won the presidency just four years into his first term on Capitol Hill.
+
+And while his bungled response to questions about his brother's decision to invade Iraq created problems for Bush earlier this summer, the renewed debate over 9/11 this week offered Bush an opening to critique Bill Clinton's handling of Osama bin Laden in the 1990s.
+
+""The Clinton administration made a mistake of thinking bin Laden had to be viewed from a law enforcement perspective,"" Bush said in an interview with FOX's Sean Hannity. ""Similarly, President Obama's polices seemed to be focused on that as well.""
+
+Murphy appeared to use Bush's air war this week to emphasize the candidate's staying power.
+
+""He can outlast the noise, his candidate performance will be excellent and we're an amplifier,"" Murphy said in the Bloomberg Politics interview, alluding to the $100 million war chest raised by the independent group earlier this summer. Laying out the super PAC's strategy for navigating the primary, he argued that the group can keep Bush on the air and get his message out through the gantlet of primaries.
+
+""We see February 1 to March 15, 45 days, as our period to seize the nomination and get in front,"" Murphy said, outlining his theory of the race. ""We have the resources to pursue that campaign. Most of these other guys are all running on spec. We're at a point now where we're significantly funded for those 45 days, cash in the bank today. Nobody else is in that situation in this race. Nobody's close.""
+
+Still, outsider candidates Trump and Ben Carson led the pack in the CNN poll with 27% and 22% respectively, and their supporters expressed a far higher level of enthusiasm about their candidacies.
+
+Nearly a third of Trump supporters and a quarter of Carson backers said they were ""very enthusiastic"" about the two men's bids. When Bush's supporters were asked that same question, only 3% said they were ""very enthusiastic"" about his candidacy.
+
+Bush has not fared much better in early state polls despite having a sizable organization on the ground: a dozen staffers in Iowa, 13 in New Hampshire, seven in South Carolina and more than a half-dozen in Nevada.
+
+In what could be a sign of things to come for the campaign, one surrogate who recently has come to his aid on the fundraising front is his brother. Behind closed doors during a recent fundraiser, George W. Bush expressed confidence in his brother's slow and steady approach to the race and distaste for another rival, Ted Cruz, who worked on George W. Bush's campaign.
+
+The former president will also headline a fundraiser for his brother's presidential campaign while he's in town for a Bush-Cheney alumni event, according to an invitation obtained by CNN.
+
+While the elder Bush's presidency has created a headache for Jeb Bush by forcing him to constantly explain to voters how his leadership style would differ from his brother's, allies noted the irony this week of the fact that Jeb Bush seems animated and passionate when defending his brother.
+
+""I think as a general matter that Jeb Bush does not want to be engaged in combat with Donald Trump, because you're distracting from your own message and your own ability to get better known if you're just known for fighting with somebody,"" said Charlie Black, a Republican veteran strategist who advised President George H.W. Bush but is neutral in the 2016 race.
+
+""In this case, because Jeb's brother was attacked, there's no doubt that he's going to come out strong and be aggressive,"" said Black. But going forward Bush will need to move his message beyond Trump to show he can sustain his own spotlight. ""When Trump hits Jeb, Jeb should not respond, surrogates should respond and let Donald fight with the surrogates.""",REAL
+1372,Clinton ekes out win in Iowa against Sanders,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+2324,Hillary Clinton tributes fuel 2016 buzz,"Despite her repeated statements that she will leave public service once her successor is in place, buzz about a possible second run for the presidency by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in full force following the showing of a tribute video of her career.
+
+Before delivering remarks on U.S. and Israeli relations Friday, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution rolled out a video replete with soaring music and effusive praise of Clinton's career by high-profile leaders and luminaries, and with it, continued speculation about whether she really has run her last political race.
+
+""As someone who knows a thing or two about political comebacks, I don't think we have heard the last of Hillary Clinton,"" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the video.
+
+""I have an instinct that the best is yet to come,"" said Tony Blair, the Middle East envoy and former British prime minister.
+
+The video was part of the ninth annual forum by the Saban Center that focuses on the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and the U.S. role in dealing with it.
+
+Clinton has repeatedly said that she intends to retire to private life once her successor is confirmed by the Senate, and that another run for the White House is not in the cards for her.
+
+""Look, I'm flattered. I am honored,"" she told CNN's Wolf Blitzer this year about calls by other Democrats for her to consider another run in 2016. ""That is not in the future for me, but obviously I'm hoping that I'll get to cast my vote for a woman running for president of our country.""
+
+But with other notable figures like Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, adding a healthy dose of bipartisan praise for America's top diplomat in the video, the never-ending question of will she or won't she seemingly lives another day. The blogosphere and airwaves were full of predictions Monday that the video signaled Clinton would make another run for the White House.
+
+""The film was like an international endorsement four years in advance of the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary,"" wrote David Remnick of The New Yorker magazine.
+
+Clinton's onetime competitor and current boss added to the tribute.
+
+""A lot has been said about our relationship, and here's what I know,"" President Obama said in the video. ""You haven't only been one of my closest partners, you have become a great friend.""
+
+Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Israeli President Shimon Peres and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright added their praise for Clinton in the video as well.
+
+""I am somewhat overwhelmed, but I'm obviously thinking I should sit down,"" Clinton said to laughter as she took the stage to begin her remarks. ""I prepared some remarks for tonight, but then I thought maybe we could just watch that video a few more times.""",REAL
+9558,"If You're Tired of Carving Pumpkins the Old-Fashioned Way, Try It Like This Gal--with a .22 Rifle","Share on Twitter 
+It's the twelfth, or even better, thirteenth time you've carved pumpkins for Jack-O'-Lanterns and it's becoming a real drag. 
+Have no fear, trickshooter Kirsten Joy Weiss is here...with a way to brighten up your Halloween Day—while making it a bit smokier as well. 
+All you need is a .22 rifle, a few pumpkins, ammunition, and a safe space away from people (especially liberals) to do your worst to our favorite holiday gourd. 
+Oh, and this handy tip from our guide: You're not looking to carve a hideous grin on your pumpkin using the bullet entries, but rather you're going for the exit points to get that ghoulish appearance. 
+That's sure to make an impression on your trick-or-treaters. (Yeah, you bet they'll be picking “treat.”) 
+Our expert guide also recommends making it a game. But just like with Halloween trick-or-treating, always practice safety first. Happy Halloween! ",FAKE
+7122,Trolls 101 —- How To Identify Trolls And Forum Spies,"2061 Views November 08, 2016 32 Comments commenter-corner Saker-Admin The following comment was selected by mod-kl from this post . Mod-kl found this dissertation on the various troll techniques to be quite well written and very education. We think other members of the saker community would also enjoy it. by Anonymous How To Identify Trolls And Forum Spies (Cryptome) Cointelpro Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum. There are several techniques for the control and manipulation of a internet forum no matter what, or who is on it. We will go over each technique and demonstrate that only a minimal number of operatives can be used to eventually and effectively gain a control of an ‘uncontrolled forum.’ Technique #1 – ‘Forum Sliding’ If a very sensitive posting of a critical nature has been posted on a forum – it can be quickly removed from public view by ‘forum sliding.’ In this technique a number of unrelated posts are quietly prepositioned on the forum and allowed to ‘age.’ Each of these misdirectional forum postings can then be called upon at will to trigger a ‘forum slide.’ The second requirement is that several fake accounts exist, which can be called upon, to ensure that this technique is not exposed to the public. To trigger a ‘forum slide’ and ‘flush’ the critical post out of public view it is simply a matter of logging into each account both real and fake and then ‘replying’ to prepositined postings with a simple 1 or 2 line comment. This brings the unrelated postings to the top of the forum list, and the critical posting ‘slides’ down the front page, and quickly out of public view. Although it is difficult or impossible to censor the posting it is now lost in a sea of unrelated and unuseful postings. By this means it becomes effective to keep the readers of the forum reading unrelated and non-issue items. Technique #2 – ‘Consensus Cracking’ A second highly effective technique (which you can see in operation all the time at http://www.abovetopsecret.com) is ‘consensus cracking.’ To develop a consensus crack, the following technique is used. Under the guise of a fake account a posting is made which looks legitimate and is towards the truth is made – but the critical point is that it has a very weak premise without substantive proof to back the posting. Once this is done then under alternative fake accounts a very strong position in your favour is slowly introduced over the life of the posting. It is Imperative that both sides are initially presented, so the uninformed reader cannot determine which side is the truth. As postings and replies are made the stronger ‘evidence’ or disinformation in your favour is slowly ‘seeded in.’ Thus the uninformed reader will most like develop the same position as you, and if their position is against you their opposition to your posting will be most likely dropped. However in some cases where the forum members are highly educated and can counter your disinformation with real facts and linked postings, you can then ‘abort’ the consensus cracking by initiating a ‘forum slide.’ Technique #3 – ‘Topic Dilution’ Topic dilution is not only effective in forum sliding it is also very useful in keeping the forum readers on unrelated and non-productive issues. This is a critical and useful technique to cause a ‘Resource Burn.’ By implementing continual and non-related postings that distract and disrupt (trolling ) the forum readers they are more effectively stopped from anything of any real productivity. If the intensity of gradual dilution is intense enough, the readers will effectively stop researching and simply slip into a ‘gossip mode.’ In this state they can be more easily misdirected away from facts towards uninformed conjecture and opinion. The less informed they are the more effective and easy it becomes to control the entire group in the direction that you would desire the group to go in. It must be stressed that a proper assessment of the psychological capabilities and levels of education is first determined of the group to determine at what level to ‘drive in the wedge.’ By being too far off topic too quickly it may trigger censorship by a forum moderator. Technique #4 – ‘Information Collection’ Information collection is also a very effective method to determine the psychological level of the forum members, and to gather intelligence that can be used against them. In this technique in a light and positive environment a ‘show you mine so me yours’ posting is initiated. From the number of replies and the answers that are provided much statistical information can be gathered. An example is to post your ‘favourite weapon’ and then encourage other members of the forum to showcase what they have. In this matter it can be determined by reverse proration what percentage of the forum community owns a firearm, and or a illegal weapon. This same method can be used by posing as one of the form members and posting your favourite ‘technique of operation.’ From the replies various methods that the group utilizes can be studied and effective methods developed to stop them from their activities. Technique #5 – ‘Anger Trolling’ Statistically, there is always a percentage of the forum posters who are more inclined to violence. In order to determine who these individuals are, it is a requirement to present a image to the forum to deliberately incite a strong psychological reaction. From this the most violent in the group can be effectively singled out for reverse IP location and possibly local enforcement tracking. To accomplish this only requires posting a link to a video depicting a local police officer massively abusing his power against a very innocent individual. Statistically of the million or so police officers in America there is always one or two being caught abusing there powers and the taping of the activity can be then used for intelligence gathering purposes – without the requirement to ‘stage’ a fake abuse video. This method is extremely effective, and the more so the more abusive the video can be made to look. Sometimes it is useful to ‘lead’ the forum by replying to your own posting with your own statement of violent intent, and that you ‘do not care what the authorities think!!’ inflammation. By doing this and showing no fear it may be more effective in getting the more silent and self-disciplined violent intent members of the forum to slip and post their real intentions. This can be used later in a court of law during prosecution. Technique #6 – ‘Gaining Full Con-trol’ It is important to also be harvesting and continually maneuvering for a forum moderator position. Once this position is obtained, the forum can then be effectively and quietly controlled by deleting unfavourable postings – and one can eventually steer the forum into complete failure and lack of interest by the general public. This is the ‘ultimate victory’ as the forum is no longer participated with by the general public and no longer useful in maintaining their freedoms. Depending on the level of control you can obtain, you can deliberately steer a forum into defeat by censoring postings, deleting memberships, flooding, and or accidentally taking the forum offline. By this method the forum can be quickly killed. However it is not always in the interest to kill a forum as it can be converted into a ‘honey pot’ gathering center to collect and misdirect newcomers and from this point be completely used for your control for your agenda purposes. Conclusion Remember these techniques are only effective if the forum participants do not know about them. Once they are aware of these techniques the operation can completely fail, and the forum can become uncontrolled. At this point other avenues must be considered such as initiating a false legal precidence to simply have the forum shut down and taken offline. This is not desirable as it then leaves the enforcement agencies unable to track the percentage of those in the population who always resist attempts for control against them. Many other techniques can be utilized and developed by the individual and as you develop further techniques of infiltration and control it is imperative to share then with HQ. The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95",FAKE
+6930,"Re: What security threat? Huma Abedin doesn’t know how her emails got on her husband’s laptop, either","— Don't Panic (@dd42bb) October 30, 2016 @mattzap That sounds like the worst possible answer. 
+— DC Dude (@DCDude1776) October 30, 2016 
+That’s not entirely unbelievable, seeing as Weiner was up to all sorts of things he wasn’t eager to share with the wife. Then again, it’s not a great defense to mount when trying to counter charges that Hillary Clinton and her aides at the State Department were extremely careless with their handling of sensitive materials. Trending If Hillary wants to know what new information the FBI has, Sharyl Attkisson knows someone she could ask 
+That’s weird, though: the story before was that Abedin would forward government emails to her Yahoo mail account so she could print them for the boss, who liked paper copies so that she could relax to the familiar, comforting sound of the office shredder grinding away. But all someone had to do was log into her Yahoo account, and … @ktumulty She used his computer at least once to check her email or maybe he was checking her email. Spouses are known to do that.",FAKE
+8734,"“MODERATE” INDONESIA: Protest against a Christian governor turns violent as more than 100,000 Muslims demand death for Christian governor who “blasphemed” Islam","BNI Store Nov 4 2016 “MODERATE” INDONESIA: Protest against a Christian governor turns violent as more than 100,000 Muslims demand death for Christian governor who “blasphemed” Islam JARKARTA: The biggest street protest in years shook this sprawling capital today in a stark display of the more conservative, militant strain of Islam taking hold in the world’s largest Muslim country. ( Which Hillary Clinton has called a “shining example of a ‘moderate’ Islamic country” ) WSJ Police said an estimated 100,000 people turned out for a rally called by hard-line Muslim groups against the capital’s Christian governor, whom they accuse of having committed blasphemy. Blasphemy is a criminal offense in Indonesia and prosecutions have increased in the past decade. President Joko Widodo had met with other political leaders amid calls for calm, but critics say he has been too slow since taking office in 2014 to respond to worsening tension for fear of being labeled anti-Muslim. “Religiosity is rising, especially among the middle class,” said Yon Machmudi, an Islamic politics expert at the University of Indonesia. “A sense of identification is increasing.’’ Protesters were taking aim at Basuki Tjahaha Purnama, known as Ahok, who is the most prominent politician among the country’s often-persecuted, ethnic Chinese minority. He was elected deputy governor in 2012 and elevated to the top job in 2014 after his boss, Mr. Widodo, was elected president. Some hard-liners had tried to block his ascent then, saying Muslims shouldn’t be ruled by a “kafir,” or nonbeliever. Mr. Purnama, now running for re-election, angered the groups again by citing a verse of the Quran in a public address in late September. He has apologized and said he would cooperate with a police investigation, but has since been the target of protests. Vice President Jusuf Kalla met a group of protest leaders and said afterward that police would pursue a blasphemy case against Mr. Purnama. Nearly 90% of Indonesia’s 250 million people are Muslim and are becoming more radical every year as seen by head scarves for women, once rare, are now widely worn and Islamic schools are expanding. A movement to ban alcohol is gaining steam and sales have been banned from convenience stores. Travel to Mecca for the minor pilgrimage of umrah, once a relatively uncommon undertaking for middle-class Indonesians, is newly popular. Security experts say the rising conservatism paves the way for potential violence , pointing to some religious hard-liners who have rebranded themselves as cells of Islamic State. “What we’ve seen in the last 18 months to two years is increasing crossover from organizations that started out ‘nonviolent but hard-line’ to organizations which are now committed to using violence,” said Sidney Jones, director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict. Gang of Indonesian Muslim men (below) beat to death members of Ahmadiyah sect, which Muslims reject as part of Islam because of it’s call for non-violence.",FAKE
+4458,Facebook Isn’t Just Making Us Less Partisan. It’s Making Us Less Politically Engaged.,"When Facebook entered the news business in 2006, it set out to cover its own users. Facebook had launched as a static collection of profiles, but now, every time a user uploaded a new photo or changed her favorite quote, the development surfaced in a rolling stream of updates that Facebook called the “News Feed.” Every status update was a “news story”; the algorithm that chose which stories to boost was called “the publisher.” The publisher, Facebook told its users at the time, was interested in stories like “Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites” and “your crush is single again.” As David Kirkpatrick reported in his 2010 book The Facebook Effect, Mark Zuckerberg articulated the News Feed’s guiding principle to staff like so: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The New York Times would cover the African conflict. The News Feed would show you the squirrel.
+
+Now Facebook is poised to begin publishing New York Times stories directly to its own site. Last year the Pew Research Center deemed Facebook the second-most popular source for political and government news among American Internet users, just behind local TV. Facebook has officially entered the news-news business. What kinds of stories does its publisher value now?
+
+A new study published online in Science last week sheds some light. Three researchers, all Facebook employees, culled data from 10 million Facebook users, 7 million news articles shared on the site, and the users’ combined 3.8 billion “potential exposures” to that content in order to find out how “ideologically diverse news and opinion” spreads (or doesn’t) among liberal and conservative users. They found that the News Feed algorithm—which has long been accused of shielding users from politically oppositional content—decreased the visibility of ideologically “cross-cutting” news by 8 percent for liberals and 5 percent for conservatives. From there, liberals were 6 percent less likely to click on a story from a conservative source (like Fox News), while conservatives were 17 percent less likely to click over to a left-leaning site (like the Huffington Post). The Facebook researchers concluded that “[i]ndividual choice has a larger role in limiting exposure to ideologically cross cutting content” than Facebook’s engineers do. All in all, users are “exposed to more cross-cutting discourse in social media” than we had all thought.
+
+The study is a clever bit of misdirection. I don’t doubt its results—getting your news from Facebook isn’t as ideologically isolating as, say, watching Fox News or MSNBC. But its title, “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook,” makes Facebook sound like a pulsing marketplace of political opinion and news. Meanwhile, I’m scrolling down my News Feed and finding videos of Tina Fey faux-stripping and an orangutan cuddling an armful of tiger cubs. Facebook may help nudge liberals a little to the left and conservatives a little to the right, but its greatest influence over Americans is toward political disengagement.
+
+The “liberals” and “conservatives” tracked in the Facebook study actually represent a slim slice of the site’s users. The study included only people who proudly complete the “political views” section of their profile, and just 4 percent of adult Americans on Facebook fit the bill. That’s a curious group to focus on, because the generation that’s most active on Facebook is also the least likely to identify with a political orientation. Last year’s Pew report on the beliefs and behaviors of millennials—81 percent of whom are on Facebook—found that a full 50 percent of millennials consider themselves politically independent. Their political “disaffiliation” rivals or exceeds that of any group Pew has ever studied in its 25-year existence. Instead, millennials “are building their own networks,” Pew concluded—not “through political parties, organized religion or marriage” but “through social media.” Facebook isn’t just facilitating communication between members of different political parties. It is replacing political parties.
+
+Millennials, the New America Foundation found last year, are less likely to vote or pledge allegiance to a party, but they do engage in some “civic uses of social media.” (Slate has a publishing partnership with the New America Foundation.) Here’s one sad data point supporting that conclusion: Forty-four percent of millennials have “liked” a piece of political material on social media. Meanwhile, a study published last year in New Media & Society found that being active on Facebook does not encourage teenagers to become more politically engaged. It doesn’t inspire them to join protests or sign petitions or affix buttons or even post political thoughts on the Internet. But it does inspire them to spend more time entertaining themselves—chatting with friends, downloading songs, shopping online, and engaging in other “consumerist-oriented” activities. This is a convenient outcome for Facebook. It’s easy to see why Facebook would prefer young people to see Facebook as a shopping mall rather than a soapbox. These users are easier to monetize and less likely to offend.
+
+After Eli Pariser, Upworthy CEO and the author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You, parsed the Facebook study, he admitted that the algorithm’s contribution to the partisan divide was “smaller than I’d have guessed.” But he also noted that the study elided a more basic question: How does Facebook’s algorithm manipulate the spread of news in general? One of the more revelatory data points embedded in the study concerns the proportion of “hard content” (stories about stuff like campaigns, war, health care, and abortion) and “soft content” (links about sports, entertainment, food, gadgets, and fashion) shared on the site. After assessing millions of links, the researchers declared over 90 percent of them soft. Really soft: Examples include a Blind Melon video, a Cyber Monday sale, and a link to a collection of inspirational photos paired with motivational quotes. And the study assessed only the content that links off of Facebook. Consider all the engagement announcements and pet photos that dominate your News Feed, and Facebook’s journalistic priorities appear even fluffier.
+
+In theory, Facebook presents an unprecedented opportunity for political cross-pollination. In a 2012 study on polarization and social media, Stanford researchers cited studies dating back to 1967 showing that “people do not encounter attitude-challenging information in large part due to their social milieu, habits, and lack of perceived benefits for seeking out such information.” But on Facebook, users connect with friends, past friends, extended family members, co-workers, neighbors, and strangers, many of whom are likely to hold political beliefs that differ from their own. Just don’t expect them to talk about it on Facebook. Last year Pew studied how Americans discussed Edward Snowden’s leaking of NSA documents and found that while 86 percent of Americans would share their opinion among friends over dinner, only 42 percent of social media users were willing to post about it online. Americans were “more willing to share their views if they thought their audience agreed with them.” And the silence followed Facebook users even after they logged off: Facebookers were 50 percent less likely to discuss Snowden in person than nonusers were.
+
+So instead of sparking political debates, Facebook users convene over the soft stuff. The Facebook researchers found that while pieces of hard news tend to circulate in ideological silos, soft content percolates across the aisle. I may scroll past one liberal friend’s links expressing unconditional allegiance to Hillary Clinton, but I’ll stop and like her video of a Great Dane puppy throwing a temper tantrum. This makes Facebook a powerful force for human connection, but a poor destination for political engagement. The Facebook Effect’s Kirkpatrick put a rosier spin on the situation: Now that we include Facebook on our list of legitimate news sources, he said, journalists can boast that young people are reading more news than ever before. The one catch: “They’re just reading about their friends.”",REAL
+10245,Polling Site Corruption Enraged New Yorkers [Update] · Guardian Liberty Voice,"Polling site corruption enraged voters on November 8, 2016, at 6:00 a.m. EDT, as several New Yorker’s stood in line awaiting their chance to partake in this year’s presidential election.
+Brooklyn Located at 450 Pacific Street, at least 20 people were waiting for the doors of Public School 38, the Pacific School, for a half hour before leaving for work. Public School 9, Teunis G. Bergen, located at 80 Underhill experienced a 2-hour delay. Many New Yorkers were enraged with polling-site corruption, as they stood on long lines to no avail. Bronx Bronx County Supreme Courthouse, located at 851 Grand Concourse, could not adequately accommodate the voters with mobility impairments.
+New York City CS 154 Harriet Tubman Learning Center, located at 250 West 127th Street, only had one of four working ballot scanners. This produced a 2-hour delay for voters. Yorkville Community School located at 412 E. 88th Street, only had one of six ballot scanners working, producing a 2-block line. New Yorkers throughout the city are enraged about the polling site corruption they have experienced. Update: NY Daily News
+The Board of Elections has released that a mistake by an office clerk omitted 126,000 registered voters names from the list, in April. Written by Jhayla D. Walls
+Edited by Jeanette Smith
+Sources:
+Pix11: Broken Machines, Vanishing Names Leave New Yorkers Waiting for Hours at Polling Stations
+New York Times: Long Lines and Minor Glitches for Voters on a Peaceful Election Day
+NY Daily News: NYC Voters Complain of Long Lines, Broken Scanners
+Top and Featured Image Courtesy of Coventy City Council’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
+First Inline Image Courtesy of Subfinitum’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License    2016 Elections , New york , polling corruption , polling-site corruption",FAKE
+5806,Votes Being Switched In Multiple States To Clinton,"Votes Being Switched In Multiple States To Clinton Electronic voting machines switching votes across the country Owen Shroyer | Infowars.com   
+We now have reports in multiple states that a vote for Donald Trump is being switched to Hillary Clinton. 
+As reported by Infowars Friday, a woman in Hollywood, Maryland came forward this week to claim that her ballot was switched to Hillary Clinton after she had tried to vote for Donald Trump. Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS Victim Of Hillary Chicago Violence Speaks Out - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . Trump Responds To New FBI Investigation Of Hillary - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force",FAKE
+7230,WHAT EVERYDAY LIFE IS REALLY LIKE IN CUBA UNDER RAÚL CASTRO,"Home › WORLD NEWS › WHAT EVERYDAY LIFE IS REALLY LIKE IN CUBA UNDER RAÚL CASTRO WHAT EVERYDAY LIFE IS REALLY LIKE IN CUBA UNDER RAÚL CASTRO 0 [10/28/16] Cuba is like going back in time. 
+It’s old and dirty. 
+There’s no advertising, probably because there’s nothing to sell. The only billboards are propaganda for the dictatorship, with the faces of Fidel or Raúl Castro, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos. 
+You hear on the radio again and again “in 1958,” or “since the Revolution,” followed by news on Venezuela: ” …the monopolization of private supermarkets of the right and their allies…the international press…thanks to public policies of the Venezuelan government…famine has declined…” 
+Money is the key factor determining how a person is treated. If you are a foreigner, things are great, given that apart from having money, the regime forces Cubans to try to “make a good impression” — though it is difficult to pretend. The government behaves as if foreigners were royalty and Cubans were commoners. The same happens with Cuban-Americans who fled the island and return to visit, because they come back with purchasing power. 
+Cubans work for practically nothing. The average salary for a Cuban is US $20. A nurse earns $40 per month. A teacher earns $20 per month and a doctor earns $60 per month. 
+There are two markets in Cuba: the Cuban peso market and the dollar market. The dollar market has decent products, while poor quality products are valued in Cuban pesos. With the salary of a Cuban, the possibilities are limited to buying products in pesos, because only foreigners can buy products in dollars. 
+Usually, when one goes to the market looking for a food item, it is not available. Sellers say they might have it tomorrow, but they rarely do. Other times, sellers do not have any money for giving change to the customers, or no packaging like napkins, plates, cups, bags, etc. 
+Each family has its own “sales control for food items” book, which indicates the amount of food that families can buy from the government. Often, they are the only things accessible and reasonably priced for a Cuban salary. 
+Fruits, vegetables and meat are not part of the Cuban peso system, so not everyone gets to enjoy such things. The sales control book only includes rice, beans, sugar, coffee and pasta. Together, they still aren’t enough to form a healthy diet. Post navigation",FAKE
+3405,GOP's message to voters should be this: Supreme Court fight is about Obama's abuse of power,"Let us be clear: Republicans in the Senate are under no obligation to interview, vote on or confirm President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court. It does not matter that the president has nominated Judge Merrick Garland, who is widely admired as a competent jurist. It is not about the person, it is about principle – but the GOP leadership has been remarkably inept at framing what that principle is and why they are in the right.
+
+The point is this: President Obama has caused this conflict, by diminishing the role of the legislature and assuming unprecedented power for the executive branch. He has purposefully skirted Congress for the better part of seven years, instead pushing ahead on his mostly unpopular agenda through regulations and executive orders. As a result, the Court is being asked to act as referee, ruling on the legality of Obama’s “my way or the highway” presidency. You don’t change a referee in the middle of a contest.
+
+This isn’t about Judge Robert Bork, or the “Biden Rule” -- this is a fight about President Obama undermining the checks and balances established in the Constitution.
+
+For instance, President Obama has tried to essentially shut down our coal industry through new EPA regulations limiting carbon emissions. These rules would create a massive dislocation to our economy, which has long benefited from cheap energy, including abundant coal. That there is a significant cost to the economy is clear; Hillary Clinton recently said “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”  How right, and how cruelly nonchalant that statement is. As reported in the New York Times, “The plan could transform the nation’s electricity system, cutting emissions from existing power plants by a third by 2030, from a 2005 baseline, by closing hundreds of heavily polluting coal-fired plants and increasing production of wind and solar power.”
+
+Because of the sizeable cost to the economy, lower courts have ruled against the president’s anti-coal regulatory blitz. The Supreme Court, in an unprecedented move, issued a stay requested by 29 states and numerous other groups which prevents implementation of the carbon rule while a lower court  assesses its legality. In effect, the courts will rule on whether the White House is allowed to unilaterally punish one of our heritage industries and tens of thousands of workers.
+
+Another important issue before the Supreme Court is President Obama’s executive action allowing some 6 million people living in the country illegally to be protected against deportation. This unilateral effort to rewrite our immigration laws is opposed by a majority of Americans; but, it is a politically useful policy for Democrats hoping to win Latino votes. Because of possibly harmful consequences, 26 states sued to prevent the order from taking effect.
+
+Last fall, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of those states, upholding an earlier injunction that blocked implementation of the president’s executive order. At the time, Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas, which is leading the suit, said, ““Today, the Fifth Circuit asserted that the separation of powers remains the law of the land, and the president must follow the rule of law, just like everybody else.” That’s the point.
+
+For the Republican leadership, refusing to consider Mr. Obama’s nominee is a matter of principle, and also an opportunity to reward voters for having elected a Republican Congress. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and others have come under heavy criticism for not effectively countering President Obama’s policies. In fairness, substantial resistance from Congress led the president to go his own way, using whatever tools he could find to pursue his “legacy” agenda. Many think those tools went beyond the rightful scope of the executive branch. Now, it is up to the Supreme Court to decide.
+
+Because the Court will weigh whether Mr. Obama has overstepped, he cannot be allowed to put his thumb on the scale by adding another sympathetic jurist. This is the message that Republican leaders need to send to voters: the president has abused his authority, and we rely on the Supreme Court to reestablish the checks and balances that prevent an imperial White House. The GOP should not be cowed by the bloviating of the New York Times; they are on the right side of this battle.
+
+Liz Peek is a writer who contributes frequently to FoxNews.com. She is a financial columnist who also writes for The Fiscal Times. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter@LizPeek.",REAL
+6751,Progressive Hypocrisy On Tolerance BRUTALLY Exposed,"You are here: Home / US / Progressive Hypocrisy On Tolerance BRUTALLY Exposed Progressive Hypocrisy On Tolerance BRUTALLY Exposed October 27, 2016 Pinterest 
+Robert Gehl reports that, in her Washington Post article explaining why she and her lady friends decided to drive around the neighborhood and steal Donald Trump signs from private property, there’s one line that explains perfectly the leftist mentality. 
+The liberal idea that your feelings are more important than the law – your personal opinions, or grudges, or perceived injustices grant you permission to commit criminal acts with little regard to the consequences. 
+Betta Stothart wrote her article in The Post on Tuesday (she provided a link to her Twitter feed, which was brand new at the time she wrote it, but has already been taken down) confessing to driving around her Falmouth, Maine, neighborhood with two other compatriots stealing dozens of Donald Trump signs from people’s yards. 
+She was caught and arrested and now has to go to court. She tells us she’s sorry, but she’s not. Because her feelings about this campaign are more important. Read how she describes her situation: 
+I committed a crime this month, along with two of my friends. I’m not the lawbreaking type. In fact, as a 52-year-old mom, my life is pretty predictable and boring. But this election, a particular candidate’s boasts about women pushed me over the edge. 
+In the suburban, upper-middle-class part of Maine where I live, Republicans and Democrats live together mostly in harmony. In every election cycle, there’s some tension. But the 2016 presidential campaign has been different. Tensions in my town are running at a fevered pitch. 
+Which is how three middle-aged moms came to be running down the road, tearing up the Donald Trump signs along our version of Main Street. We’d been talking about the infamous Billy Bush tape and the women who have since come forward to share their own stories of abuse. We were angry. Getting Trump’s name off our median strip seemed like the best way to express our rage. 
+These three women must have been proud of themselves, probably laughing heartily as they committed theft, trespassing and violated the First Amendment of their neighbors. Why? Because she thinks she was assaulted by the signs. 
+In retrospect, I realize I shouldn’t be proud of my transgression. Hanging out with a bunch of moms, we started grousing about the proliferation of signs. Can you believe someone would put that many Trump signs so close together on our roads? It’s so rude. Who is this jerk? We felt assaulted by the number of signs . The idea of “cleansing” our streets seemed like the fastest way to restore balance and alleviate our election stress — at least, that night it did. 
+“ Assaulted” ? This is exactly why the Left is so dangerous. They are “assaulted” by ideas – by mere thoughts or opinions that are not their own. They will do anything- and Ms. Stothart did – to silence any dissent. 
+And she writes that “ in retrospect, I realize I shouldn’t be proud of my transgression. ” 
+She doesn’t say she isn’t proud, she merely tells us that in retrospect she shouldn’t be proud. 
+Which tells us that she is . She is proud of what she did. 
+When asked what she would say to the victims of her trespassing and theft, she offers no apology, merely a justification that Trump is bad, and that because she herself was a victim of an unwanted sexual advance, it justifies her behavior. 
+She claims she’ll go to court in December with some sense of humility and shame – she’ll “explain” and “apologize.” 
+But she’s not sorry. Not really. 
+To her – and the millions of Leftists like her – the ends justify the means. Silence dissent, crush the opposition, tear down and destroy any thing that strays from your worldview. 
+This is the world that Ms. Stothart lives in. She still lives in it today. She takes pride in suppressing the political view of her fellow Americans. 
+She writes that the “agitation and fear is rising on both sides.” 
+No, Ms. Stothart. I have yet to see a single story about a Trump supporter violating the Constitutional rights of a Hillary Clinton supporter by stealing yard signs. 
+This is liberal America. This is Ms. Stothart’s America. 
+This is not the America I want to live in.",FAKE
+3464,Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Says Supreme Court Decision On Marriage Equality 'Just the Beginning',"“Our fight for LGBT equality is not nearly over,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) stated emphatically in an interview with me last week on SiriusXM Progress. “And I’m hopeful, very hopeful, that the Supreme Court will say it’s unconstitutional to ban gay marriage. But that’s really just the beginning of fighting for our rights. We have to actually make sure all LGBT couples can have full parenting rights, have full social security and other federal benefit rights. We want to make sure companies can’t discriminate against members of the community because of who they love and who they are. And it’s really important [to take on] discrimination wherever it exists.”
+
+Toward that end, Gillibrand last week reintroduced the Every Child Deserve a Family Act, which she originally introduced in 2013 and which would bar adoption and foster care agencies that receive federal dollars from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Though Gillibrand says she's seeking bipartisan support in the Senate and will continue speaking with Republicans, so far co-sponsors include a handful of fellow Democrats, such as openly lesbian Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
+
+“Only seven states ban discrimination based on sexual orientation in adoption, and only five explicitly ban discrimination in foster care,” Gillibrand said in the interview. “So we have a long way to go. We only have a few states protecting LGBT parents. The reality is, there are two million LGBT individuals and families that are willing and able to take on these parenting obligations, to adopt these children or foster these children who desperately need it. Unfortunately, there are 400,000 children in the U.S. foster care system today and more than 20,000 of them are going to age-out before finding a permanent home. So we should be caring for these kids. We should give them the loving families they deserve.”
+
+The bill, if it becomes law, would only affect those agencies that take federal money, and they are free to opt-out from receiving funds.
+
+""If you’re getting the benefit of federal funds, you can’t discriminate,” Gillibrand said. “It’s unconstitutional, and you should not be able to use our taxpayer dollars to discriminate against individuals based on their sexual orientation and who they love. So I think it’s important we fight against it, particularly when our taxpayer dollars are being used.”
+
+“This legislation would prohibit adoption agencies and foster care agencies, including religious adoption agencies and foster care agencies, from providing services in many cases,” Lori Windham, Senior Counsel with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty told the Catholic news agency, EWTN News. Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council, is quoted in the same article saying there are “unique problems” with allowing gays and lesbians to adopt children. Claiming there is “overwhelming” evidence while not citing any studies, Sprigg said, “I think it’s legitimate to disfavor them or to exclude them altogether.”",REAL
+4209,After a terrible week Trump sticks with style over substance in Wisconsin,"Having just spent an hour on Sunday evening watching Donald Trump in a town hall setting with Fox's Greta Van Susteren moderating from Madison, Wisconsin, I am left with one impression: I don't want to buy a car from this guy.
+
+I have no idea what the final outcome of this nomination battle will be -- or whether Trump can be elected president of the United States -- but I do know this, he can dance and he's one hell of a salesman.
+
+After having experienced , for him, probably the worst week of this election cycle, I was curious if he would clean up or restate some of his controversial statements on abortion ( 4 different answers in a week), his dismissal of NATO and the United Nations, his comments suggesting Japan and South Korea might need to arm themselves with nuclear weapons  and -- along with Saudi Arabia -- pay the U.S. a lot more money for our services because they are all rich and we are $20 trillion dollars in debt.  Yes, it’s true, the United States is not the policeman of the world or nor should we be. Trump also didn't add any details for his plan to pay off the debt in 8 years by not raising taxes. He didn't restate or make any of it clearer.
+
+It was an hour of performance -- not substance -- and certainly not anything different from what we've heard him say in various debates or in the hundreds of hours he has performed on television.
+
+He's gonna repeal ObamaCare and put in a system of many options (not defined or explained ) that will be better, less expensive and everybody will be covered and everyone will be happy with their coverage.  And no one’s going to die in the streets.
+
+Taxes are going to be lower for everyone but the rich hedge fund guys who aren't paying their fair share. (OK, I agree with him on that one.)
+
+He's going to renegotiate all the bad trade deals starting with the most recent Iran deal. (Again, I agree with that one.) And he’s also going to bring all the jobs home from China and Mexico and any other countries that have stolen our them. Of course, I’m not quite sure how this is going to work because there were no details provided in his answers.
+
+He's going to knock out ISIS, stop airline mergers, fix the college education program because costs are too high and kids are being ripped off.
+
+He's gonna stop the drug epidemic in New Hampshire because they are good people and gave him his first real victory. He did give details on this one.
+
+He going to make one call into Mexico to someone (I assume to Enrique Peña Nieto who is the 57th president of Mexico. He's also the guy to talk to about paying for the $10 billion fence) and tell him to cut off the drugs or else.
+
+If you missed the hour on Sunday night don't worry you because you will see a similar version of the Donald Trump show again and the sound bites will be the same.
+
+Trump has said that one of his heroes is the great heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali who, at the end of his career, invented the ""Rope a Dope"" to keep from getting hit and to wear out his opponents by evading their punches.
+
+Donald Trump has perfected his own version of ""Rope a Dope"" -- keep talking and avoid specifics.
+
+Now, about that used car. Don't worry, it will be the greatest and it will be the cheapest and best looking and I will be very happy.
+
+Unfortunately, for Trump on Sunday night while he was ""Rope a Doping"" in Madison, the Cruz team was kicking his tail in North Dakota and picked up at least 18 of the 25 delegates who are either supporting Cruz or are against Trump.
+
+The long fight for the Republican nomination is a long way from finished and Donald Trump is still marching on.
+
+Cruz is running a great grass root campaign and Trump is running a great marketing effort. He is the product and he is the number one salesman.
+
+Edward J. Rollins is a Fox News contributor. He is a former assistant to President Reagan and he managed his reelection campaign. He is a senior presidential fellow at Hofstra University and a member of the Political Consultants Hall of Fame. He is a strategist for Great America PAC, an independant group that is supporting Donald Trump for president.",REAL
+4249,7 takeaways from the Republican debate,"(CNN) Republicans began their debate Thursday night with insults and ended with three candidates pledging to back Donald Trump should he win the nomination.
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz took more shots at Trump in Fox News' debate -- and through it all, the billionaire businessman seemed to relish standing center stage, defending himself against foes and moderators while showing his mettle to supporters.
+
+All three were happy to deflect efforts to drag them into sustained policy discussions and kept things personal. Ohio Gov. John Kasich was content to stand to the side and watch it all.
+
+Here are seven takeaways from Thursday's Republican debate:
+
+Minutes into the debate, Trump was boasting about the size of his penis.
+
+Clearly annoyed that Rubio had joked days ago about the size of Trump's hands -- suggesting, as Trump put it, that ""if they're small, something else might be small"" -- the Republican front-runner made a claim seldom heard during a presidential debate.
+
+""I guarantee you, there's no problem. I guarantee you,"" he said.
+
+It was a PG-13 start to a two-hour food fight that parents wouldn't have wanted their kids to watch.
+
+Early on, as Rubio pressed Trump for more policy details, the two gave each other nicknames. ""Don't worry about it, Little Marco,"" Trump said, to which Rubio responded, ""Let's hear it, Big Donald.""
+
+Trump said Florida wouldn't elect Rubio dogcatcher after all of his missed Senate votes. Cruz gave Trump instructions on letting go of his anger: ""Donald, learn not to interrupt, it's not complicated. Count to 10, Donald. Count to 10. Count to 10.""
+
+Later, when Cruz told Trump to ""breathe,"" Rubio jumped in and joked that the two were doing yoga.
+
+""I really hope that we don't see yoga on this stage,"" Cruz answered.
+
+And then Rubio pointed to Trump, who'd just admitted his flexibility on policies, and said: ""Well he's very flexible, so you never know.""
+
+It seemed as if Fox News had grown tired of Trump's opponents' inability to knock him down -- so the moderators decided to do it themselves.
+
+Chris Wallace had a real-time fact check queued up when Trump asserted he'd cut $500 billion in spending -- pointing out that his strategies, eliminating the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency (which Trump called the Department of Environmental Protection), would save just a fraction of that amount.
+
+It forced an awkward and unspecific claim about ""other things"" out of Trump.
+
+""I'm not only talking about drugs, I'm talking about other things,"" he said. ""We'll save more than $300 billion a year if we negotiate. We don't negotiate.""
+
+Megyn Kelly took her shot later on, setting up three clips of Trump taking one policy position and then, days later, taking the opposite position.
+
+Trump was unmoored, insisting he had logical explanations about his reversals on Syrian refugees, the war in Afghanistan and more -- and that by the way, it doesn't matter much anyway.
+
+""You have to have a certain degree of flexibility,"" he said.
+
+Ted Cruz needs Trump's momentum to ebb as much as anyone, but he didn't spend much of the night on the attack. For the most part, Cruz stood aside and watched Rubio and Trump rip each other to shreds, and then turned to the audience and threw up his hands.
+
+""Megyn, let me just ask the voters at home: Is this the debate you want playing out in the general election?"" he said.
+
+Cruz took his shots at Trump, too, but he let Rubio do the dirty work -- betting that he, rather than the Florida senator, will reap the benefits.
+
+Rubio, for instance, built on the attack line Mitt Romney started earlier in the day regarding Trump University, pressing Trump over and over to admit he was ripping off the people who paid $36,000 for his courses at a school that's now the subject of a class-action lawsuit.
+
+Cruz is trying to co-opt the angry electorate that Trump has tapped into, and his pitch is simple: Trump is the villain you've been mad at.
+
+""For 40 years, Donald has been part of the corruption in Washington that you're angry about,"" he said.
+
+It's entirely possible that the debate did nothing to change Cruz's fortunes. But he does have a big opportunity on the horizon.
+
+Of the four states to only allow Republicans to vote in GOP nominating contests, Cruz has won three, thanks to his strength among conservatives and the rules limiting Trump's ability to expand the electorate. And all four states set to vote Saturday -- Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and Maine -- have closed contests.
+
+Kasich will not, under any circumstances, engage directly with his foes on the debate stage.
+
+""As the Democrats tell me all the time, I can get the crossover votes,"" he boasted early in the debate, adding that he's often told at town halls that he seems to be ""the adult on stage.""
+
+""I've talked about issues. I have never tried to go and get into these kinda scrums that we're seeing here,"" he said.
+
+He demonstrated his experience on economic and budgetary challenges and foreign policy, and showed no signs of backing out of the race anytime soon -- especially not before Ohio's March 15 primary.
+
+For Rubio, that's all a big problem.
+
+The man who won the hearts of the Republican establishment by confronting Trump head-on in the last debate was ready to hit the billionaire again and again -- but a 1-for-11 Super Tuesday intervened, and some of the shine wore off.
+
+He confronted Trump once again, baiting the business mogul by calling him names, attacking his business ventures and accusing him of knowing nothing about policy -- even though he struggled with a raspy voice.
+
+On the campaign trail, Trump has proposed changing U.S. libel laws so that politicians can more easily sue journalists.
+
+But on Thursday night, Trump said the bond between reporters and politicians who agree to go off-the-record is too strong to break. That, he said, is why he won't ask The New York Times to release a transcript or recording of an off-the-record conversation he had with the newspaper's editorial board about immigration.
+
+""I think being off the record is very important. I will honor it,"" he said.
+
+Then, Trump allowed -- as his foes claimed -- that he might have softened his hard-line stance he has taken on the campaign trail that he will build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.
+
+""I will say that in immigration as well as with anything else, there has to be tug and pull. You have to be able to have some flexibility,"" he said. ""I may have said something like that with The New York Times. But I am not going to release something off the record.""
+
+Trump's opponents pounced on his remark, but they could be misreading his support. Many Trump backers say they know he can't achieve everything he proposes, but believe he'll fight for it more effectively than anyone else.
+
+In an interview with CNN's Dana Bash afterward, he defended that flexibility, saying: ""I'm flexible with everything. You can't just say, 'this is it and I'm never going to talk,'"" he said. ""With that being said, you have to make great deals.""
+
+Coming less than 12 hours after Mitt Romney launched a scathing broadside against Trump, the candidates' answer to the last question of the debate was particularly striking.
+
+Fox News moderators asked Rubio, Cruz and Kasich whether they'd back Trump if he wins the nomination.
+
+All three said yes.
+
+The moment won't help Rubio -- who had joined the #NeverTrump movement of Republicans vowing not to support Trump on Twitter last week -- with that crowd.
+
+More important, though, is what they didn't say.
+
+The premise of the question was that Trump had already won the nomination. But there are scenarios in which Republicans could have more chances to stop that from happening, even after all 50 states vote.
+
+A better question: Would the Republican field support the candidate who wins the most delegates?
+
+So what does this change?
+
+Trump struggled with policy details, butted in when other candidates were speaking and sparred with the moderators.
+
+So what else is new?
+
+His sharp, and sharply personal, exchanges with his rivals might have been amped up Thursday night, but still sounded much like Trump's first 10 debates.
+
+The front-runner doesn't get rattled or lose his wit, even when he is under attack from everyone else on stage. He often seems to relish it -- as if his foes' criticism gives him an excuse to stop holding back.
+
+None of the debates so far have changed the trajectory of the race -- in part because Trump is the master of the debate post-game, finding ways to deflect weak points and suck up media oxygen while branding his foes with nicknames like ""Little Marco"" and ""Lyin' Ted"" and claiming victory -- no matter what happened.",REAL
+1888,Clinton's super PAC fundraising irks progressives,"(CNN) Hillary Clinton's decision to personally raise money for a super PAC supporting her campaign is agitating her progressive critics, who see the move as further proof that the Democratic presidential frontrunner doesn't share some of their values.
+
+There was never any expectation that Clinton would renounce super PAC money this election cycle. But liberal activists determined to use the Democratic primary to pressure Clinton to embrace a progressive agenda say the idea of the former secretary of state personally wooing the wealthiest class of donors runs counter to the populist rhetoric she's employed this year.
+
+Within days of announcing her White House bid, Clinton had called out wealthy investors for paying too little in taxes and pledged to get big money out of politics. At the time, it was a welcome message for liberal Democrats who are uncomfortable with Clinton's close ties to Wall Street and find the prominent role of super PACs in elections utterly distasteful.
+
+But the recent revelation that Clinton will personally fundraise for a super PAC supporting her campaign -- a decision to play by the rules of a system she has condemned as ""dysfunctional"" -- has invited fresh eye-rolling. It has also exposed a core tension for Democrats, who have increasingly embraced super PACs at the same time that they decry the explosion of soft money in national politics.
+
+Clinton seems to be having fun on the campaign trail
+
+Clinton's campaign is explaining the decision as a matter of political necessity.
+
+""With some Republican candidates reportedly setting up and outsourcing their entire campaign to super PACs and the Koch Brothers pledging $1 billion alone for the 2016 campaign, Democrats have to have the resources to fight back,"" a Clinton campaign official said in an email, who spoke anonymously to discuss the sensitive topic of fundraising. ""There is too much at stake for our future for Democrats to unilaterally disarm.""
+
+Clinton's expected involvement with Priorities USA has highlighted the contrast between her and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who is Clinton's only declared rival to date for the Democratic presidential nomination, as well as other potential challengers.
+
+An independent from Vermont seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders has aggressively opposed super PAC donations. A long-shot candidate without a national fundraising operation, Sanders has no chance of matching Clinton's fundraising haul and has little to lose by going after millionaire and billionaire donors.
+
+On Capitol Hill last week, Sanders told CNN that Clinton's decision to personally court super PAC donors was ""unfortunate.""
+
+""We're living in a world since Citizens United where multi-millionaires and billionaires are playing a horrendous role in the political system,"" Sanders said, referring to the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling that paved the way for super PACs to direct virtually uncapped amounts of money to aid political candidates. ""That's why I believe that we need to overturn Citizens United and move to public funding of elections.""
+
+Phil Noble, a South Carolina Democratic activist and supporter of former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, a potential Democratic candidate for president, said the development underscores what progressives view as a ""fundamental disconnect"" between Clinton and middle class voters.
+
+""It's not that she raises a bunch of money for a PAC that causes her problems with middle class voters. That is a symptom as opposed to the ailment,"" Noble said. ""The larger illness is she is out of touch with middle class voters -- she does have a lifestyle and a history that is about as alien to middle class voters as corporate jets are to a Subaru.""
+
+And activists who are pushing Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to challenge Clinton see campaign finance reform as a major issue.
+
+""Being a true champion for working families like Elizabeth Warren is about clearly and unequivocally supporting such critical priorities as a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United,"" said Erica Sagrans, campaign manager for Ready for Warren, a movement dedicated to drafting Sen. Elizabeth Warren into the 2016 race.
+
+Clinton's personal involvement with Priorities USA marks the latest chapter in the Democratic Party's evolving relationship with super PACs.
+
+Democrats initially fiercely opposed Citizens United. But for all of their rhetoric against super PACs, and as much as the party continues to use the Supreme Court decision as a political rallying cry, over the years political interest has largely won out over progressive idealism.
+
+In 2012, President Barack Obama reversed course, declaring after years of keeping his distance from super PACs that his campaign would participate in raising money for Priorities USA.
+
+Now that tension is being brought to new heights as the party's next likely presidential nominee personally plans to drum up support for a super PAC backing her candidacy.
+
+Clinton allies also see that her fundraising prowess and the depth of her connections with the kinds of donors who can cut multi-million dollar checks will likely make her a formidable competitor against any Republican candidate she may face in the general election. Officials are careful to emphasize, however, that Clinton and everyone else involved with her campaign will strictly follow the law as they solicit funds for Priorities USA.
+
+The 2016 money race is well underway on the other side of the political aisle.
+
+Declared GOP candidates including Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as expected candidates like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, are on a fundraising tear. And they've shown no signs of distancing themselves from super PAC money. Cruz launched his campaign in March, and the senator's allies declared that an affiliated network of pro-Cruz super PACs had raised upwards of $30 million in just a matter of days.
+
+The stiff competition against Republican money is a reality that some progressive leaders say they cannot ignore.
+
+Former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said it would be unwise for Clinton to reject super PAC money.
+
+""Unfortunately, if you don't play by the same rules everybody else does, you end up losing elections,"" said Dean, founder of Democracy for America, one of the groups behind the draft Warren movement. ""The key is to change the rules, and I think we have a much better chance of doing that with her as president than we do with one of the Republicans.""",REAL
+8434,Clinton’s Policy On Syria Will Lead To WW3 Says Trump,"  Carol Adl in Middle East , News , World // 0 Comments 
+Donald Trump has warned that Hillary Clinton’s policy towards Syria would lead to World War III , arguing that the Democratic nominee would drag the US into a confrontation with nuclear armed Russia. 
+Trump said “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton” adding that “What we should do is focus on ISIS We should not be focusing on Syria” 
+The US Republican presidential nominee made the remarks on Tuesday during a Reuters interview in response to Clinton’s proposal for the establishment of a no-fly zone and “safe zones” in Syria. 
+Press TV reports: 
+On October 7, the Democratic nominee said a no-fly zone was required inside the war-ravaged country to stabilize fighting, a move that was opposed in Congress due to the risk of entering into conflict with Russia, since a US-enforced no-fly zone would mean the US could shoot down Russian fighter jets should they enter Syrian airspace. 
+Clinton also described the situation in Syria as “incredibly complex” since the intervention of Russia. 
+“You’re not fighting Syria anymore; you’re fighting Syria, Russia and Iran, all right? Russia is a nuclear country, but a country where the nukes work as opposed to other countries that talk,” Trump said. 
+The Republican nominee also referred to the removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power as a second-level priority to defeating Daesh. 
+“Assad is secondary, to me, to ISIL,” Trump said. 
+Russia might down US planes 
+Meanwhile, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also warned about the consequences of Clinton’s push for a no-fly zone in Syria that could spark a conflict with Russia. 
+Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, Clapper said Clinton’s proposal for the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria could lead to Russia shooting down American planes there. 
+“I wouldn’t put it past them to shoot down an American aircraft if they — if they felt that was threatening to their forces on the ground,” he said. 
+“I take stock in the nature of the weaponry that they deploy and why they — why they did that,” Clapper said of Russian weapons recently deployed to Syria. “The system they have there is a very advanced air-defense system. It’s very capable. And I don’t think they’d do it and deploy it unless they had some intent to use it.” 
+During the third and final presidential debate last week, Clinton reiterated her remarks on a no-fly zone that could save lives and hasten the end of the conflict in Syria. 
+A foreign-backed militancy has been going on in Syria since March 2011, with a plethora of armed groups — each supported by one foreign country or another — fighting the Assad government. 
+Since 2014, the United States, along with a number of its allies, has been leading a so-called anti-terror campaign in Syria and neighboring Iraq. 
+Instead of helping to rein in the Takfiri terrorists, the air raids have killed many civilians, and caused extensive damage to the country’s infrastructure.",FAKE
+1496,Rand Paul: I won the debate last night,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+5523,"A Pimp Just Revealed Trump Also Raped 12-Year-Old Girl, Threat To Kill Witnesses","Comments 
+Republican nominee Donald Trump is an admitted serial sexual predator. His own recorded words confirm as much, as do the dozen or so women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct. His campaign is desperately fighting to put a lid on the growing awareness that Trump will be testifying under oath during a trial in federal court under the accusation of raping a thirteen-year-old girl and a previously undisclosed second girl, who was even younger . 
+The case was thrown out in May due to a clerical error, but re-filed in June with two new witnesses –“Joan Doe” and “Tiffany Doe” who both say they worked as “party planners” for convicted child rapist and billionaire Jeffery Epstein. Part of that “planning” appears to have been procuring girls for the party, as “Joan Doe” revealed in her deposition that she convinced victim “Jane Doe” to attend four different parties with promises of money and “meeting contacts” in the modelling industry – a story that matches the account of another person who would arrange for underage women to attend Trump’s parties. 
+At one of these parties, “Jane Doe” was forced to perform oral sex on Trump with a twelve-year old named “Maria.” At the fourth and final encounter, Tiffany Doe says “ I personally witnessed Defendant Trump telling the Plaintiff that she shouldn’t ever say anything if she didn’t want to disappear like the 12-year-old female Maria, and that he was capable of having her whole family killed.” 
+“Maria” hadn’t been seen since the previous encounter. Trump then forcibly raped “Jane Doe,” who was then raped and sodomized again by Jeffery Epstein, who was apparently furious tha t Trump had ta ken her virginity and not him, beating her in his fury . 
+Donald Trump told New York magazine in 2002 that “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” 
+Epstein’s brother, Mark, also testified that “Trump flew on Jeffrey’s private jet at least once and records indicate that Trump called Epstein twice in November of 2004.” 
+Epstein eventually recieved a slap on the wrist – 13 months in prison and registration as a sex offender – for decades of abuse : 
+“according to law-enforcement officials and alleged victims, between the years 1998 and 2007—and possibly even earlier—he ran a particularly vile pyramid scheme that involved paying minors around $200 at a time to perform sexual massages nearly every day and then recruit even younger girls to do the same. (“The more you do, the more you are paid,” one said.) During these massages, girls as young as 13 told police they were instructed to get undressed. Epstein would masturbate or penetrate them, they said—with his finger, or a vibrator, or his allegedly egg-shaped penis.” 
+The details keep coming, and the picture they paint grows darker and more horrifying by they day. How much more evidence does America need? How many more stories need to be told before the word of one rich man is outweighed by literally dozens of contrasting accounts? Donald Trump is a sexual predator and a possible pedophile; he deserves a jail cell on Riker’s Island, not the White House.",FAKE
+6298,Rapper Lil Wayne: “My Life Was Saved by a White Man. I Don’t Know What Racism is.”,"0 comments 
+After catching all kinds of flack from his liberal counterparts for his opinion that racism is not as major an issue as race-baiting Democrats make it out to be, rapper Lil Wayne has doubled down and clarified his stance in an astounding video, sharing his memory of the day a white police officer saved his life at 12-years-old. 
+Watch:",FAKE
+5167,Evangelical Leader: Trump Campaign Broken from the Inside,"The Trump campaign is coming apart from the inside, according to Regent University's Dr. Gerson Moreno-Riano, and only the days ahead will show whether the candidate can bring people together, not only in his inner circle, but in the Republican Party.
+
+Regent Univerity's Dr. Gerson Moreno-Riano talks more about Trump's challenge with Evangelicals. Watch above.
+
+Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski Monday amid reports of disagreements and infighting among the staff.
+
+""I think what's happened with the Trump campaign is, I think it's fractured itself internally,"" Moreno-Riano said. ""I think that it is trying to meet a number of different objectives and keep a number of constituencies very, very happy and it has been unable to do so.""
+
+""And I think this is just symptomatic of a broader, a more deeper problem within the American electorate, particularly GOP evangelicals,"" he added.
+
+Moreno-Riano said the test for Trump is to find a way to bring his message under control and highlight the core concerns of GOP constituencies, including evangelicals.
+
+""The dilemma has always been whether Trump himself has what I'll call the internal character-based resources to pull this off,"" he explained. ""He is a man who is very direct, very strong-minded and the question is: Does he have enough discipline, both personally and professionally, enough political discipline to pull this off? I think at the end of the day, it's his question to answer.""
+
+The decision to fire his campaign manager comes just one day before Trump is set to meet with hundreds of evangelical leaders in New York City to answer their questions and lay to rest the many concerns they have about his conservative -- and Christian -- bona fides.
+
+Moreno-Riano listed abortion, religious liberty, and the Supreme Court as some of the most important issues he can address in the meeting, including the question, ""Are you truly someone who understands the evangelical mindset -- those areas of deep concern?""
+
+But he pointed out evangelicals themselves are not united.
+
+They need to ""bring unity to the table and I just don't see that,"" he said.
+
+Since the 1950s evangelicals have failed to rally around any candidate and ""that's too big a burden to place on Trump,"" he said. ""I think they're going to try to assess whether he's truly evangelical or not, so it's a big challenge for him to try and unite them around a common denominator. That's going to be difficult.""",REAL
+3047,These political scientists may have just discovered why U.S. politics are a disaster,"There's a lot of disgust in America with politicians' inability to get things done. In the race to win the Republican presidential nomination, that disgust has so far benefited outsider candidates. Non-career politicians Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson have all promised to ride in and fix Washington.
+
+But new research by Nolan McCarty, a professor at Princeton University, and other political scientists suggests this disgust — and America's political dysfunction — won't be that easy to fix. Working with political scientist Boris Shor and economist John Voorheis, McCarty has released a new study that shows that the growing ideological gap between the Republican and Democratic parties — a common obstacle to getting anything done in Washington — is not just due to politicians' incompetence or their unwillingness to work together. It's due, at least in part, to a deeper, structural problem: the widening gap between the rich and poor.
+
+McCarty says he shares some of the disgust that Americans feel about polarized politics and gridlock in Washington. ""But I think it’s important for readers and voters to understand . . . that these problems are not just simply because career politicians are acting in bad faith or, as Donald Trump would say, they’re stupid losers. They’re really deep structural problems,"" he says.
+
+By looking at extensive data on U.S. states over the past few decades, the researchers show that the widening gap between the rich and the poor in recent decades has moved state legislatures toward the right overall, while also increasing the ideological distance between those on the right and those on the left.
+
+This map below shows the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, for each state going back to 1997. A lower Gini figure indicates that people in the state are earning more equal incomes, while a higher one (marked here in darker green) shows that incomes are more unequal. (You can disregard the axes here — they just show latitude and longitude.)
+
+The paper argues that this trend has gone hand in hand with the growing political divide. The states that have the highest levels of inequality, or the fastest growth in equality, have also tended to see the most political polarization, the paper says.
+
+Using a scale of state legislator ideology that looks at annual surveys of the beliefs of candidates since the mid-1990s, the researchers map where Democrats have shifted to the left and Republicans have shifted to the right at the state level. The map below gives an ideological ""score"" in each state for each chamber — in most states, a House of Representatives and a Senate.
+
+A more negative score and a deeper blue color on the map indicate that the state chamber is more liberal, while a positive score and deeper red color show the state is more conservative. You can see that blue states have become bluer and red states redder since 1997. A look at party composition in each state shows the same trend.
+
+It's not just that these two trends of inequality and polarization are happening simultaneously. The researchers use statistical methods to eliminate other factors and show that a state's income inequality has a large, positive and causal effect on its political polarization. Furthermore, these results have increased in magnitude in recent years and seem to be concentrated in the states that are ""reddest"" by the end of the sample.
+
+In other words, growing inequality is a strong force pushing both parties farther from the center.
+
+The paper doesn't specifically say why this happens, except that politics gets more polarized with each election. It appears that people on either end of the economic spectrum have been developing even more different political preferences and electing people to represent those preferences.
+
+Interestingly, however, the study shows that inequality is affecting the two parties in different ways.
+
+First, the researchers find that Democrats as a whole have shifted farther to the left than the Republicans have to the right, with very liberal Democrats becoming even more liberal. But at the level of the state legislature, they find that ideology as a whole has shifted slightly to the right. The reason is that there has been a change in the partisan balance, with Republicans winning more seats from moderate Democrats over time.
+
+""As the Democrat party has shrunk nationally over the course of the last 15 years, the disproportionate effect has been the replacement of moderate Democrats with Republicans, and that has tended to happen most often in states with high levels of inequality, or where inequality is growing the fastest,” McCarty said.
+
+The map below, which shows the percentage of seats held by Republicans, illustrates how that has happened. The percentage of seats held by Republicans has increased, especially through the South and middle America, since 1997:
+
+This study offers evidence that inequality leads to political polarization. Though they have yet to produce definitive findings, the researchers also believe, as many others in their field do, that political polarization also in turn produces more inequality, creating a vicious feedback loop of inequality and polarized politics.
+
+How does that work? Not only are more conservative lawmakers less likely to favor redistribution, the political gridlock that results from having a more polarized system makes it harder to pass bills that might reduce income inequality, such as increasing the minimum wage, strengthening union bargaining power, or increasing redistribution through welfare, researchers say.
+
+The research suggests that political polarization is not just a product of gerrymandering, the way districts are drawn, or caused by features of the state political system, such as having closed partisan primaries, McCarty says.
+
+Instead, he argues that America's political polarization is a reflection of bigger, broader changes in the United States, in particular that the country has become much more diverse in terms of its economic, racial and ethnic makeup than it was in the 1950s. The diversity, unsurprisingly, has a direct impact on the political system, and we have yet to figure out how to repair the system to reflect a more diverse society, McCarty says.
+
+So what does this mean for average voters in the near term? For one, they should be skeptical of candidates who promise an easy fix to political dysfunction in Washington.
+
+""These are deep, complicated problems, and people need to think big picture about what underlies them. They weren’t solved by electing Barack Obama, they’re probably not going to be solved by electing Donald Trump,"" McCarty says.
+
+You might also like:
+
+What it’s like to be a part of the world’s richest 1 percent, in 15 incredible photos
+
+The growing wealth gap that nobody is talking about
+
+What people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like",REAL
+2294,"Jindal won't ""evolve"" on same-sex marriage","Jindal, a Republican who is considering a presidential run, suggested that politicians like President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton changed their views on gay marriage because of polling indicating more Americans in support of gay marriage.
+
+""I'm not one of those politicians,"" Jindal said on CNN's ""New Day."" ""My faith teaches me that marriage is between a man and a woman. I don't believe in discrimination against anybody. I'm not for changing the definition of marriage.""
+
+Jindal may be in the minority on the issue when it comes to the issue, but that won't be the case if he joins a crowded Republican primary expected to be full of same-sex opponents, like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
+
+Huckabee, a staunch social conservative who sought the GOP nomination in 2008, said Monday on CNN suggested he doesn't think he'll be on the ""wrong side of history"" when it comes to same-sex marriage. ""When you say 'the wrong side of history,' let's just be reminded that there's been a relatively, and I mean a very relative brief history of same-sex marriage. The overwhelming history is the natural law of marriage, biblical marriage,"" he said. ""So I don't think there's a side of history that's overwhelming at this point. People have their opinions."" But Huckabee, who's insisted social issues won't be the linchpin of his probable candidacy, argued that the presidential race will be focused on the economy and proposals to combat poverty. Jindal's comments came as he sounded off on the battle over same-sex marriage brewing in neighboring Alabama, where officials in dozens of counties refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples on Monday, the first day in the state's history same-sex couples have been allowed to wed after a federal court ruling overturned the state's ban. Same-sex couples wed in Alabama despite efforts to block them Jindal sidestepped questions about whether county officials should respect the federal ruling and lawfully issue same-sex marriage licenses. Instead, the governor said he hopes the Supreme Court will rule to uphold state's legislative bans on gay marriage when the court rules on the issue by this summer. Louisiana's legislature overwhelmingly amended the state's constitution in 2004 to define marriage solely as the union of a man and a woman. But if the Supreme Court overturns same-sex marriage bans around the country — which it may very likely do — Jindal said the U.S. Congress should pass a constitutional amendment upholding state's same-sex marriage bans, an all-but-impossible endeavor requiring two-thirds support in the House and Senate.",REAL
+6385,"New Report Blames Air Pollution For Deaths Of 600,000 Children Every Year","Most recent environmental concerns regarding pollution have been largely focused on water and land pollution. Though these are undeniably major concerns facing our planet, there has been a tendency... ",FAKE
+4028,Russia and Iran both propping up Assad. A balancing act?,"While Russia's increased presence in Syria gives the regime another leg to stand on, some in Damascus say Moscow could also temper Iran's influence.
+
+Starbucks will expand in China – and it looks like a smart idea
+
+This Sept. 15, 2015 satellite image with annotations provided by GeoNorth, AllSource Analysis, Airbus shows Russian tanks and armed personnel carriers at an air base in Latakia province, Syria.
+
+Russia’s increased military assistance to Syria provides President Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime with a welcome boost to its hold on power after a series of territorial losses this year to rebel forces.
+
+But while Russia appears to have coordinated its military expansion with Iran, Mr. Assad’s other key ally, the move could also serve as a counterbalance to Tehran’s powerful influence in Syria, a phenomenon that has generated ripples of unease in some circles of the Damascus regime.
+
+Russia and Iran are staunch allies of Assad and collectively have provided diplomatic, financial, military, and material support to help his regime stave off the challenge posed by opposition groups.
+
+Both countries have much at stake: Syria is one of the few Middle Eastern countries where Russia continues to wield influence, and it provides Iran with a vital geographical conduit to its Lebanese protégé Hezbollah. It is also a key component of the axis of resistance, an alliance of countries and parties opposed to Israel and Western regional interests.
+
+“Both Iran and Russia want to preserve the political system in Syria, to keep Assad in power” says Rajab Safarov, the director of the Moscow-based Center for Studying Modern Iran. “Assad’s defeat would have a serious impact on Iran and wouldn’t suit [the interests of] Moscow, either.”
+
+Still, despite the shared interest of Moscow and Tehran in the Assad regime’s survival, there are differences that Russia’s expanding military presence in Syria may expose in the coming months.
+
+“Until recently, the Iranians had much a bigger involvement on the ground than the Russians. So I think the increase in [Russian] arms supplies is probably an attempt to balance the situation on the ground,” says Nikolay Kozhanov, a visiting fellow of the Russian-Eurasia program at London’s Chatham House and nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
+
+Russia continues to work with the Syrian state, while Iran has set up a parallel security structure of local militias and foreign Shiite expeditionary forces from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, granting it prolonged influence in Syria if the Assad regime falls.
+
+Russia seeks to preserve the territorial integrity of Syria and prevent it from breaking into militia-run fiefdoms. That is a goal shared by the Assad regime, which continues to fight for distant and isolated areas in the far north, south, and east of the country despite a critical manpower shortage in the decimated Syrian Army.
+
+The priority of Iran, on the other hand, is to hold onto the western periphery of Syria, with access to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast. In recent months, Iranian-supported forces, including Hezbollah, have pulled back from outer-lying areas to concentrate on securing the key real estate from south of Damascus to Latakia on the coast in the northwest corner of the country.
+
+“The Russians see it as important that the country remain with its current borders ... [but] I think the Iranians will be satisfied with control over certain areas of the country with pro-Iranian groupings that would ensure their access to Lebanon and Hezbollah,” says Mr. Kozhanov, previously a diplomat at the Russian Embassy in Tehran. “That’s the difference, and that difference is clearly understood in Moscow.”
+
+The Assad regime owes Iran much for coming to its rescue with billions of dollars for the cash-strapped economy and deploying thousands of Shiite fighters against rebel forces. But that Iranian lifeline came at a price. Iranian military commanders, rather than Syrian Army generals, have been shaping much of the regime’s defense, according to Arab and Western diplomats in the region. Tellingly, Iranian and Hezbollah officers, rather than the Syrian Army, recently conducted cease-fire negotiations with a rebel group over the besieged opposition-held town of Zabadani, 17 miles northwest of Damascus.
+
+Furthermore, there have been allegations that Iran has been tampering with Syria’s demographic geography by settling Shiites, including the families of foreign fighters, in and around Damascus and preventing Sunnis from returning to their homes in some regime-held areas. Last year, the Assad regime passed a decree allowing Shiite doctrine to be taught in schools alongside Sunni Islam. Shiite mosques are proliferating as well as stalls selling Shiite books, pamphlets, and motifs in Sunni areas of Damascus.
+
+The level of Iranian influence has fueled unease in Damascus, reportedly even within the regime itself. There have been several reports in the past year of top Syrian figures grumbling that Syria was giving up its sovereignty to Iran.
+
+However, Russia’s expanded role in Syria could serve as a counterweight to Iran’s pervasive influence.
+
+“Some observers are reading the Russian intervention as an attempt to pre-empt the total 'Iranization' of the Syrian state, as much as it is an attempt to rescue the regime,” says Faysal Itani, resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.
+
+These differences aside, Russian and Iran continue to share a vested interest in the Assad regime’s survival. While the level of coordination between Moscow and Tehran is unclear at this stage, it may be no coincidence that signs of a Russian military buildup began shortly after a reported visit in late July to Moscow by Maj.-Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the external operations wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Lebanon’s As Safir newspaper reported Tuesday that Suleimani paid another visit to Moscow last week.
+
+“I believe Iran and Russia are getting closer in the course of the Syrian crisis, although they have had different approaches in dealing with the situation,” says Kayhan Barzegar, director of the Institute for Middle East Strategic Studies in Tehran.
+
+Still, their common interests should ensure continued cooperation.
+
+“In fact, it’s Russia that currently needs a powerful regional partner to shape its new political-security doctrine in the region,” says Mr. Barzegar. “I think Russia is careful to not upset Iran in the new circumstances, especially in a time that there is an ongoing thaw between Iran and the West.”
+
+Staff writer Scott Peterson contributed to this report from Tehran, and contributor Olga Podolskaya from Moscow.",REAL
+635,Elizabeth Warren Backs Hillary Clinton,"Warren, a hero of progressive Democrats, is the latest party leader to fall in line behind Clinton after she clinched the requisite number of delegates earlier this week over rival Bernie Sanders.
+
+Warren told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow tonight, ""I am ready to get in this fight and work my heart out for Hillary Clinton to become the next president of the United States, and to make sure that Donald Trump never gets anyplace close to the White House.""
+
+The endorsement comes the same day that President Obama also endorsed Clinton in a video and announced he would campaign with his former 2008 rival next week.
+
+But Warren's backing may be more politically important for Clinton than Obama's blessing. The Democratic senator, who remained neutral throughout the contest, championed many of the same economic inequality issues and Wall Street reforms Sanders drew attention to in the primary.
+
+She said tonight the 2016 election ""is not about one candidate, it's about all of us coming together coming together to fight to level the [economic] playing field.""
+
+In fact, she was urged by many progressive groups early on to challenge Clinton herself, and the ""Ready for Warren"" organization who tried to lay the groundwork for her run ended up endorsing Sanders.
+
+Even though she remained on the sidelines, Warren has emerged as a fierce attack dog against presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, calling him a ""nasty, thin-skinned fraud"" just Thursday. He, in return, has derided her as ""Pocahontas"" — an allusion to a controversy that emerged during her 2012 Senate run after she had claimed Native American ancestry.
+
+Tonight Warren said Trump had cheered for the 2007 economic crisis because he knew how to make a profit from it. ""What kind of a person does that?"" she asked, ""an insecure money-grubber who cares about nothing but himself. ... That cannot be the man who leads the United States of America.""
+
+Warren has been floated as a possible vice presidential pick for Clinton, a choice that could help allay some concerns among progressives about the former secretary of state's nomination.
+
+But there was immediate backlash online to Warren's anticipated nomination. Many supporters took to her Facebook page with profane comments, calling her a ""sell out"" for not endorsing Sanders.",REAL
+9476,Friend from university is an arse now,"Friend from university is an arse now 31-10-16 A MAN who bumped into an old university friend has discovered that he is now a total dickhead. Julian Cook lost contact with former housemate Martin Bishop for over eight years ago, during which time Bishop has become a money-obsessed macho twat who thinks he is the bollocks. Office worker Cook said: “Instead of talking about old times he kept asking me what sort of car I have. “Then he blathered on about ‘taking home serious Ks’ from ‘folio development resales’, assuming I knew what that meant because otherwise I would not be a proper man. “The worst bit was when he told me about some fringe political group he’s into called Libertarian England. No, actually it was when he said ‘pussy alert’ when a woman walked past. “He probably just works and socialises with dipshits, but I wouldn’t rule out one of those injuries that turns you into a psychopath. Maybe he fell off a raft at a team-building weekend and hit his head on the riverbed. “We parted on friendly terms but now he wants me to join his ‘weights oriented gym’ and go to a lapdancing club, which is odd because he used to be into Star Trek Generations .” 
+Share:",FAKE
+2227,"Critics on Islam: Time to Face Facts, Mr. President","President Barack Obama insisted Thursday that Islamist terrorist groups committing atrocities from the Middle East to Africa to Europe do not represent Islam, calling the idea that the West is at war with Islam ""an ugly lie.""
+
+The president addressed delegates from more than 60 countries at the closing session of a summit on ""Countering Violent Extremism,"" hosted by the U.S. State Department in Washington.
+
+Obama said the nations gathered ""must remain unwavering in our fight against terrorist organizations.""
+
+In one part of the address, the president appeared to be responding to administration critics, who have pointed out that the White House refuses to use the term ""Islamic"" when referring to terrorist groups such as al Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram, who are committing atrocities against Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims.
+
+""Obviously, there is a complicated history between the Middle East and the West, and none of us, I think, should be immune from criticism in terms of specific policies. But the notion that the West is at war with Islam is an ugly lie -- and all of us, regardless of our faith, have a responsibility to reject it,"" he cautioned.
+
+On Wednesday, the president explained he doesn't want to mention Islam when talking about terrorism because it would give Islamic radicals a tool they can use to recruit new fighters.
+
+""We must acknowledge that groups like al Qaeda and (ISIS) are deliberately targeting their propaganda to Muslim communities, particularly Muslim youth,"" he said.
+
+What can be done to be more effective in the fight against Islamic terrorism? Cliff May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, offers more insight to the president’s summit speech
+
+But even the president refused to admit any connection between the Islamic State terrorists and Islam, he said we need to ""tackle"" the issue head on.
+
+""We can't shy away from these discussions. And too often folks are understandably sensitive about addressing some of these root issues, but we have to talk about them, honestly and clearly,"" Obama said.
+
+But critics are mocking the president and his administration for not using phrases like ""Islamic terrorism.""
+
+Thursday's New York Post shows a picture of the president blindfolded with the caption ""Islamic Terror? I Just Don't See It.""
+
+Cliff May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, says the president and his administration need to acknowledge that radical Islam is behind terrorism and groups like ISIS.
+
+""We're kind of avoiding making decisions now and we're saying things that really nobody that's informed about these matters can actually believe,"" Cliff May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told CBN News.
+
+""He thinks he's doing it because he wants to avoid the impression that this is in any way a religious war – it was 21 Coptic Christians who had their heads taken off by the Islamic State,"" May said.
+
+This week's White House summit came after the State Department recently, and quietly, hosted a meeting with members of the Muslim Brotherhood -- much to the outrage of the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
+
+ 
+
+Israelis were also surprised.
+
+""We just don't understand because we know the history of the Muslim Brothers. We know exactly who they are,"" Zvi Mazel, former Israeli ambassador to Egypt, said.
+
+""So how come, the United States, the administration, in that case the president himself and the State Department, receive delegation of the Muslim Brothers?"" he asked.",REAL
+5746,Massive “Hillary For Prison” sign held up at World Series game 5 infuriates liberals,"Massive “Hillary For Prison” sign held up at World Series game 5 infuriates liberals See what made liberals so mad By Staff Writer - October 31, 2016 ( INTELLIHUB ) — A massive “ Hillary For Prison ” sign was held up at the post games show for the World Series game number five which made liberals furious Sunday night. 
+During the show the “sign was displayed prominently behind the commentators,” Youtuber Mark Dice reported. 
+#HillaryForPrison",FAKE
+5627,"Trump and Brexit Defeat Globalism, for Now Anyway","Trump and Brexit Defeat Globalism, for Now Anyway   14, 2016 
+Trumpism as a stress test for democracy …. A series of populist anti-globalism shocks is a test for Western democracies. Trump’s stunning ascent to the White House is the clearest signal yet of an anti-establishment revolt unfolding in major democracies, stretching across the Atlantic. – Swiss Info Tech 
+Was Trump’s victory actually created by the very globalist elites that Trump is supposed to have overcome? 
+There are some who believe the elites are actually splintered into numerous groups and that domestic US elites have positioned themselves against the banking elites in London’s City. We see no fundamental evidence of this. 
+The world’s real elites in our view may have substantive histories in the hundreds and thousands of years. US elites are basically in the employ of a handful of families, individuals and institutions in our view. 
+It is confusing because it is hard to tell if Hillary, for instance, is operating on her own accord or at the behest of higher and more powerful authorities. 
+It is probably a combination of both but at root those who control central banks are managing the world’s move towards globalism. History easily shows us who these groups are – and they are not located in America. 
+This is a cynical perspective to be sure, and certainly doesn’t remove the impact of Trump’s victory or his courage in waging his election campaign despite what must surely be death threats to himself and his family.. 
+But if true, this perspective corresponds to predictions that we’ve been making for nearly a decade now, suggesting that sooner or later elites – especially those in London’s City – would have to “take a step back.” 
+More: 
+The vote to propel Trump to the US presidency reflects a profound backlash against open markets and borders, and the simmering anger of millions of blue-collar white and working-class people who blame their economic woes on globalisation and multiculturalism. 
+“There are a few parallels to Switzerland – that the losers of globalisation find somebody who is listening to them,” said Swiss professor and lawyer Wolf Linder, a former director of the University of Bern’s political science institute. 
+“Trump is doing his business with the losers of globalisation in the US, like the Swiss People’s Party is doing in Switzerland,” he said. “It is a phenomenon which touches all European nations.” 
+Again, this article presumes that Trump has “won” and that he intends to attack the larger globalist enterprise and the bankers funding it. On the other hand, it could be that both Trump and Brexit have been engineered to look as if the tide is turning against globalism when it is not. 
+Why would those in charge want to portray this point of view when it may not be so? Because of what we call the “Internet Reformation” that has blasted open the secretive manipulations of the globalist elite in the past decade or so. 
+It is almost impossible for globalists to promote internationalist memes in this environment. Yet it is the secretive injection of internationalist memes into the body politic that moves society toward the globalist enterprise. 
+As we have suggested before, it is perfectly possible that a decision has been made to pretend to grant the larger society a “victory” over internationalism. 
+Following this analysis, certain trends would be identified and encouraged that would seem to portray globalism as falling back on its metaphorical heels. 
+In truth, if this analysis is correct, globalism’s retreat is a kind of pretense that will steer society less obviously in a globalist direction. 
+One way this could happen is by ensuring the splintering of Europe – but not in a way that actually reduces control from Brussels. It will APPEAR to be so but won’t actually happen. The same thing could take place in the USA under Trump. 
+Again, this is not to say that Trump is party to this plot or even approves of it. But the idea that Trump is part of a co-option is certainly a feasible alternative to an alternative analysis that takes what is happening at face value. 
+Nonetheless, even if an alternative elite strategy has been decided on to realize globalism in another fashion, it ought to be pointed out that things have changed. And the Internet and its revelations are surely responsible. 
+This is a very big deal and it is one that ought to be emphasized repeatedly. Brexit and Trump could be, somehow, the result of a different elite approach – but the approach HAS changed nonetheless. 
+Think of it this way: Hillary represented the blunt approach toward the realization of further globalism. Her way included an aggressively expanded war and the pursuit of other globalist trends. 
+Trump, rhetorically anyway, has a different approach in mind that would gut many internationalist trends. 
+If Trump follows through on his rhetoric, the trend toward an internationalist world will be reduced. And while there is controversy over Trump’s recent staff appointments we should also bear in mind that the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) both seem to be failing now. 
+If indeed Trump’s election has damped the progress of TPP, and TTIP, this is a huge event. As we’ve pointed out, both agreements effectively substituted technocratic corporatism for the current sociopolitical model of “democracy.” 
+The elites were trying to move toward a new model of world control with these two agreements. This is similar to what happened after the advent of the Gutenberg Press when the elites of the day moved away from royal control and apparently swapped in democracy. 
+It seems evident that internationalism is now going to take a longer time to realize than we thought. However, this observation may not be entirely accurate if Trump turns out to be something other than his rhetoric suggests – or if Brexit is denied in Europe. 
+Additionally, one of the elite’s most powerful, operative memes today is “populism vs. globalism” that seeks to contrast the potentially freedom-oriented events of Trump and Brexit to the discarded wisdom of globalism. See here and here. 
+The reality of these two events, the victories of both Trump and Brexit, stand as signal proof that elite stratagems have been defeated, at least temporarily. Though whether these defeats have been self-inflicted as part of a change in tactics remains to be seen. 
+Conclusion: But the change has come. One way or another the Internet and tens of millions or people talking, writing and acting has forced new trends. This can be hardly be emphasized enough. Globalism has been at least temporarily redirected",FAKE
+5584,Clinton ‘appalled’ by effort to recoup veterans’ bonuses,"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. Clinton ‘appalled’ by effort to recoup veterans’ bonuses By Arnaldo Rodgers on October 26, 2016 veteran 
+By Cristiano Lima 
+Hillary Clinton slammed the California National Guard and Pentagon on Monday for reportedly demanding soldiers who fought in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago to return enlistment bonuses they received for their service. 
+“I am appalled that National Guard officials are attempting to recoup money from soldiers who accepted bonuses a decade ago,” the Democratic nominee said in a statement released Monday night in response to the reports, which first appeared in the Los Angeles Times. 
+“These troops deserve our support and our deepest gratitude; they served admirably and upheld their part of the bargain,” she said. “It is unacceptable to now subject them and their families to undue financial burdens thanks to to mismanagement from the California National Guard and rigid bureaucracy on the part of the Pentagon.” 
+Read the Full Article at www.politico.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on October 26, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+9946,Is Your VACCINATED Child a ‘Haz Mat’?,"By Catherine J Frompovich What a question to ask: Is your vaccinated child ‘hazardous material’? Wow! However, that’s not flippant at all when one considers the amount of hazardous chemicals and... ",FAKE
+8586,"Distracted by Election 2016, No One Resisted the Deep State’s Patriot Act 2","
+By Nathaniel Mauka
+Congress overwhelmingly voted for the Patriot Act nearly 16 years ago, and our civil liberties have never been the same since. As if this singular bill, passed by George W. Bush, wasn’t invasive enough, allowing big banks to demand our internet data, and more — the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act ( CISA ) makes cyber-spying by the shadow government and the financial entities controlling it, a forgone conclusion.
+As with most shadow government legislation, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is packed with hidden surveillance allowances. CISA was quietly passed to allow government to demand that private companies hand over personal information to them at will. It also allows companies to mine data, under the auspices of government-created urgency.
+The mere fact that this act passed in late 2015 is monumental, since it has been before Congress in different forms for over a decade . The election seems to have offered the perfect cover, as Americans and activists were too busy arguing over Trump vs. Hillary. 
+Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government relations at the Electronic Transactions Association believes the value of sharing our personal data as a means to be alerted of ‘cyber threats’ outweighs any hazard to our civil liberties. Talbott states ,
+“The value is that everyone can be alerted to cyber threats and take precautionary countermeasures before they materialize and spread,” he said. “Before CISA, corrective measures could be taken only after the cyber threat had done its damage. CISA allows each company to serve as an early warning system to the entire economy.” 
+Who exactly would be determining if someone is a ‘threat’ is the meat of the sandwich, though. CISA is ripe for abuse, just as the Patriot Act has been.
+The Patriot Act has made it legal for law enforcement to spy on people, without probable cause – to enter their homes, or even to strip search them before they’ve been to court, had the opportunity to argue a case, or given ‘authorities’ a motive for this type of interrogation.
+The stated purpose of the Patriot Act was to deter terrorist acts in the United States, but what do you do when the terrorists have already taken over your country? CISA simply expands the reach of a shadow government which has already been proven to reach beyond the boundaries of constitutional law.
+More importantly, who specifically is CISA targeting? After multiple hackers have infiltrated computer systems at the White House , the State Department , the Pentagon , and the Office of Personnel Management, along with the Democratic National Committee , and numerous multinational banks run by the cabal, is the shadow government simply trying to create a stop-gap before their most elusive, yet damning information is made public?
+CISA certainly will expand the reach of government surveillance on citizens as it has been conducted by the the National Security Agency (NSA) before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed it.
+“I think this bill was meant to be a surveillance bill from the start,” said Justin Harvey, CSO of Fidelis Cybersecurity, adding that he is dubious that the stated intent of the bill – to use collective intelligence to warn of potential cyber attacks and possibly stop them before they occur – will result.
+Under the guise of ‘sharing cyber threats’ CISA allows companies to wholesale-collect information that may not even be a threat – and then pass it along for government bodies to determine if it is, indeed a threat. If this sounds like circular logic – it is just the beginning of the odd verbiage within the bill. It’s justifications for entering every possible orifice for data-gathering are more confounded than an octopus in a straight jacket.
+The government can already enter your personal property including your home, your body , your cell, and your computer , but now they will have a legal in-roads to declare you a cyber-threat, simply for sending an email . This begs the question – who is the real cyber-bully? CISA seems to be nothing more than a prevarication, covering the acts of an elite few who don’t want their secrets exposed.
+
+Nathaniel Mauka is a researcher of the dark side of government and exopolitics, and a staff writer for Waking Times . 
+This article ( Distracted by Election 2016, No-one Resisted the Deep State’s Patriot Act 2 ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Nathaniel Mauka and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution and author bio. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Waking Times of www.wakingtimes.com . 
+Waking Times is an independently owned and operated online magazine that seizes on the transformational power of information to trigger personal revolution and influence humanity’s evolution. ",FAKE
+4644,Republican women increasingly fear party is alienating female voters,"A growing number of prominent Republican women are worried that as members of their male-dominated party step up to defend Donald Trump against accusations of sexual assault, they are causing irreparable damage to the GOP’s deteriorating relationship with female voters.
+
+Trump has faced questions throughout his campaign about his crass comments about women, but concern escalated this month following the release of a 2005 video in which Trump boasted that he had sexually assaulted women and subsequent allegations by 11 women that Trump had inappropriately touched or kissed them. A series of mostly male Republicans have come to Trump’s defense — dismissing the accusers as liars and, some worry, further alienating the female voters that the party desperately needs to survive.
+
+“For next-generation professional women, the party is going to have to do something very, very drastic to change the course of where this candidate has taken us,” said Katie Packer, a deputy campaign manager for Mitt Romney in 2012. “I think the leaders in our party are going to have to aggressively reject this. Come November 9, they better be prepared to make very strong statements condemning all of Trump’s behavior.”
+
+This division within the Republican Party comes as polls suggest the nation is on the verge of electing its first female president even as misogyny remains a part of American life and culture. Ironically, it is Trump’s candidacy rather than Hillary Clinton’s that has brought sexism to the forefront of political debate.
+
+[The difference between talking about Donald Trump’s accusers and being ‘fascinated by sex’]
+
+The controversy also comes as the Republican Party continues to struggle to attract women, who make up a majority of the electorate and who have supported the Democratic presidential candidate in every election going back to 1992. President Obama won women by 11 points in 2012, and several polls show Clinton leading among women by an even bigger margin this year.
+
+A growing number of well-known female Republican strategists and politicians have had it with Trump. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) said earlier this month she “cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women.” Former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, whose looks Trump once mocked, said “Donald Trump does not represent me or my party.” And former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice wrote on Facebook earlier this month: “Enough! Donald Trump should not be President.”
+
+The latest flare-up came Tuesday night, when former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R) exploded at Fox News’ Megyn Kelly during an interview, repeatedly shaking his finger at her and accusing her of being “fascinated with sex” because she brought up allegations of sexual assault against Trump. In a scolding tone, Gingrich tried to tell Kelly which words she could or could not use.
+
+Gingrich once had a fascination of his own with Bill Clinton’s sex life, as he was a driving force behind the movement to impeach Clinton following a consensual sexual relationship he had with a young former intern. Clinton became the second president in American history to be impeached by the House, but he was acquitted by the Senate. Voters, meanwhile, punished the Republicans for what they saw as an overreach: The GOP lost five House seats in the 1998 midterm elections, which led to Gingrich’s resignation as speaker.
+
+Trump and his supporters deemed Gingrich’s interview a victory, with the campaign’s director of social media tweeting that Kelly is “not very smart” and telling his followers: “Watch what happens to her after this election is over.”
+
+“Congratulations, Newt, on last night. That was an amazing interview,” Trump said at a ribbon-cutting at his new hotel in Washington on Wednesday. “We don’t play games, Newt, right?”
+
+Two of the women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct piled on. Juanita Broaddrick tweeted: “Beauty is only skin deep. Megyn Kelly is ugly as hell on the inside.” Paula Jones wrote in a tweet that has since been deleted: “Woohoo, he slammed this nasty heifer!”
+
+But many other Republican women have concluded in recent weeks that this is not the party they know.
+
+“Looks like Newt Gingrich just proved my point again,” tweeted Amanda Carpenter, a conservative commentator and former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. Carpenter wrote this week in The Washington Post about how her party has left women like her behind by ignoring Trump’s chauvinism that was “well-documented in decades’ worth of publicly available smutty television, radio and print interviews long before he became the nominee.”
+
+“If the GOP has truly convinced itself that openly engaging in sexual assault fantasies is something normal that men do among one another, I have a suggestion. Relocate the Republican National Committee headquarters into a men’s-only locker room,” Carpenter wrote. “Eliminate all pretenses of wanting to let women in.”
+
+Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster, said in an interview that Democrats no longer have to push a “war on women” narrative because it’s playing out on its own thanks to Trump — and comments like those that Gingrich made on Tuesday.
+
+“It’s just one more clueless middle-age-to-older white guy taking to task a woman,” Matthews said. “It’s so unhelpful on every level.”
+
+[One GOP woman wonders why the men in her party won’t defend her]
+
+Nicolle Wallace, former communications chief for George W. Bush who is now a political commentator, tweeted that Republicans are now “engaged in a hot war against women that will end badly” for the party.
+
+“Men like @newtgingrich are a big reason the GOP has lost women,” Packer wrote in another tweet. “Men like him don’t make women like me want to share a ‘tent’ w/them.”
+
+Earlier this week, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager and the first woman to lead a GOP presidential nominee’s campaign, seemed to struggle when asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if she believes the women who have accused Trump of sexual assault.
+
+“I believe — Donald Trump has told me and his family, and the rest of America now, that none of this is true,” Conway said. “These are lies and fabrications. They’re all made up. And I think that it’s not for me to judge what those women believe. I’ve not talked to them, I’ve talked to him.”
+
+Trump has repeatedly denied allegations of abuse or sexism and has bragged about empowering female employees in his businesses.
+
+“Nobody has more respect for women than I do,” Trump said during the last presidential debate when asked about his accusers, prompting laughter from the crowd in Las Vegas.
+
+Carrie Almond, president of the National Federation of Republican Women, has traveled to 39 states in an RV this year, talking with thousands of women who enthusiastically support Trump and believe the party speaks for them.
+
+“It’s very important to not put all women into the same basket because not everyone sees everything the same way,” said Almond, who is from Missouri.
+
+When confronted with criticism, Trump tends to go after women in much more personal and demeaning ways than men, even though he insists he is an equal-opportunity counterpuncher. Trump’s attacks on female journalists, accusers and rivals over the past year have been heavy with criticism of their looks, their intelligence and their mental health.
+
+After the first debate during the Republican primary — which featured three moderators, two men and one woman, who all peppered him with uncomfortable questions — Trump zeroed in on the woman, Kelly, for asking him about comments he makes about women. After the debate, Trump said that Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
+
+[Donald Trump calls her ‘Crooked Hillary,’ but his fans just say ‘b----’]
+
+When the Muslim American parents of a soldier killed in Iraq in 2004 appeared at the Democratic National Convention in July in opposition to Trump’s candidacy, Trump zeroed in on the mother, Ghazala Khan, saying in an ABC News interview: “She had nothing to say. She probably — maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.” Khan later said it is still too difficult for her to talk about her son’s death.
+
+In early September, when the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” were critical of Trump, he zeroed in on the female host, Mika Brzezinski, tweeting: “Just heard that crazy and very dumb @morningmika had a mental breakdown while talking about me on the low ratings @Morning_Joe. Joe a mess!”
+
+Trump has told NBC’s Katy Tur to “be quiet” when she pressed him during a news conference, and snapped at CNN’s Dana Bash on Wednesday that she was “rude” to ask about the propriety of holding an event boosting his new Washington hotel. He urged his millions of Twitter followers to search for a seemingly nonexistent “sex tape” of a former Miss Universe whom he had criticized as fat. And he has accused Hillary Clinton of lacking “a presidential look.”
+
+When Trump made a similar critique of Fiorina during the primaries, she responded: “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.”
+
+Trump’s rallies have also been hotbeds of incendiary rhetoric around gender, including popular anti-Clinton T-shirts in many locales proclaiming, “Trump that ­b----!”
+
+John Weaver, a GOP consultant who worked on the presidential campaigns of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, said he is stunned by “the misogyny, the lack of understanding of where this country is now” coming from Trump’s campaign.
+
+“If you have a gender gap the size of the Snake River Canyon, why do you trot out Newt Gingrich, and [former New York mayor] Rudy Giuliani and your nominee to talk about it and further make it worse?” said Weaver, noting that all three men have been married three times. “The only ones I can see who seem to be obsessed about sex in this campaign are those three people.”
+
+Weaver continued: “He’s going to lose the general election, and the credit goes to the women of America who are saving us from this guy.”",REAL
+3596,Police arrest suspects across Europe in rush to minimize terror threat (+video),"A day after police killed two terror suspects in eastern Belgium, a bomb scare forced the evacuation of the busy Gare de l'Est train station in Paris, and Secretary of State Kerry joined French President Hollande in a visit to the sites of last week's attacks.
+
+Why is Angela Merkel calling for a ban on the full Islamic veil?
+
+French, German, and Belgian police arrested more than two dozen suspects in antiterrorism raids Friday, as European authorities rushed to thwart more attacks by people with links to Islamic extremists in the Middle East.
+
+Rob Wainwright, head of the police agency Europol, told The Associated Press that foiling terror attacks has become ""extremely difficult"" because Europe's 2,500-5,000 radicalized Muslim extremists have little command structure and are increasingly sophisticated.
+
+Highlighting the fears, a bomb scare forced Paris to evacuate its busy Gare de l'Est train station during Friday morning's rush hour. No bomb was found.
+
+Visiting a scarred Paris on Friday, US Secretary of State John Kerry met French President Francois Hollande and visited the sites of the attacks last week on the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. Twenty people, including the three gunmen, were killed.
+
+French and German authorities arrested at least 14 other people Friday suspected of links to the Islamic State group. Thirteen more were detained in Belgium and two arrested in France in an anti-terror sweep following a firefight Thursday in the eastern Belgian city of Verviers.
+
+Two suspected terrorists were killed and a third was wounded in that raid on a suspected terrorist hideout, and federal magistrate Eric Van der Sypt said Friday that the suspects were within hours of implementing a plan to kill police on the street or in their offices.
+
+Belgian authorities were searching for more suspects Friday, and found four military-style weapons including Kalashnikov assault rifles in more than a dozen raids, Mr. Van der Sypt said.
+
+""I cannot confirm that we arrested everyone in this group,"" he said.
+
+Belgian authorities did not give details of the people detained or even those killed, but said most were Belgian citizens.
+
+Belgian authorities stressed that the targets of their crackdown had no known connections to last week's attacks in neighboring France.
+
+Belgium has seen a particularly large number of people join extremists in Syria, and is ""the worst affected country in Europe relative to population size,"" said Peter Neumann of the London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalization. He estimates 450 people have left Belgium to fight with Islamic radical groups in Syria, and that 150 of them have returned home.
+
+Across Europe, anxiety has grown as the hunt continues for potential accomplices of the three Paris gunmen.
+
+The Paris prosecutor's office said at least 12 people were arrested in antiterrorism raids in the area, targeting people linked to one of them – Amedy Coulibaly – who claimed ties to the Islamic State group. Police officials earlier told AP that they were seeking up to six potential accomplices.
+
+Paris is at its highest terrorism alert level, and police evacuated the Gare de l'Est train station after a bomb threat. The station, one of several main stations in Paris, serves cities in eastern France and countries to the east.
+
+In Berlin, police arrested two men Friday morning on suspicion of recruiting fighters for the Islamic State group in Syria. Prosecutors said 250 police officers participated in the dawn raids on 11 residences that were part of a months-old investigation into a group of Turkish extremists.
+
+Mr. Kerry's visit to France came after the Obama administration apologized for not sending a higher-level delegation to Sunday's massive rally in Paris, which drew more than 1 million people to denounce terrorism.
+
+Mr. Hollande thanked Kerry for offering support, saying: ""You've been victims yourself of an exceptional terrorist attack on Sept. 11. You know what it means for a country.... Together, we must find appropriate responses.""
+
+In a separate speech to diplomats, Hollande said France is ""waging war"" against terrorism and will not back down from its international military operations against Islamic extremists in Iraq and northern Africa. France's Parliament voted this week to extend airstrikes against Islamic State extremists in Iraq.
+
+The Belgian raid on a former bakery was another palpable sign that terror had seeped deep into Europe's heartland as security forces struck against militants, some of who may be returnees from jihad in Syria.
+
+That investigation had started well before last week's rampage in Paris, but Belgian authorities are separately looking for possible links between a man they arrested in the southern city of Charleroi for illegal trade in weapons and Mr. Coulibaly, who killed four people in the kosher supermarket.
+
+Several other countries are also involved in the hunt for possible accomplices to Coulibaly and the gunmen who attacked the newspaper, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi. The Kouachi brothers claimed allegiance to Al Qaeda in Yemen; Coulibaly to the Islamic State group.",REAL
+10072,Russia Preparing for Nuclear World War III with NATO USA Breaking News November 5 2016,"November 6, 2016 at 10:31 pm 
+humans are stupid, especially Amerikkkans. while the sheep continue to consume irrelevant trinkets in there capitalistic society like sheep grazin on grass in an enclosed field, Russia is preparin to crush Amerikkka with a iron gauntlet. China, N.Korea, and Iran will play there parts too. it wont be this year, it wont be next year, and likely not even 2018, but by 2019, somethin really bad is goin to happen. mark my words.",FAKE
+549,Jeb Bush invokes MLK as he unveils education plan,"On Day 13, a video message and a meeting with media executives — but still no press conference, protective pool",REAL
+910,Trump tries to smooth things over with GOP insiders,"Hollywood, Florida (CNN) Donald Trump's new delegate guru told Republican Party insiders at a posh resort here on Thursday that the billionaire front-runner is recalibrating the part ""that he's been playing"" and is ready to work with the GOP to ""evolve"" as a candidate past the divisive primary.
+
+Meanwhile 1,100 miles away in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Trump told his supporters the Republican system is ""rigged"" and ""crooked.""
+
+This is the dilemma facing the Republican National Committee and its members meeting here this week: Can they cope with Trump, an unpredictable personality who has come this close to winning the presidential nomination with a campaign leaning heavily on direct anger at GOP officials and institutions?
+
+Paul Manafort, Trump's senior adviser and a long-time Republican operative, said that Trump understands the changing nature of the campaign and is prepared to ""evolve.""
+
+""He recognizes that things aren't static. That what is right to start the campaign isn't necessarily the way you finish the campaign,"" Manafort told CNN Thursday night after he met with RNC officials here.
+
+But Manafort did not want to call anything a ""détente"" between Trump and the GOP establishment. ""There's no reason to have a detente, I mean there's not a fight,"" he said.
+
+""I mean the Trump campaign and the RNC are working together on a bunch of different things ... but the focus has been on getting the nomination,"" he said. ""Now that we're approaching the nomination, the focus is on blending the party and the campaign so that we can run as a united team and that's what we started to do here this weekend.""
+
+The Trump campaign is approaching things here as if it already won the nomination. There was no focus in the closed-door meeting with Trump's people and the RNC on the effort to secure the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, a source inside the room said.
+
+Instead Manafort contrasted Trump with Hillary Clinton -- Trump has ""personality negatives"" that can be fixed by campaign consultants like him, but Clinton has deep ""character negatives"" dealing with issues of trust, he told the room, according to audio obtained by CNN from someone who attended Manafort's presentation.
+
+""The part that he's been playing is now evolving into the part that you've been expecting. The negatives will come down, the image is going to change, but 'Crooked Hillary' is still going to be 'Crooked Hillary,'"" Manafort told the packed room, which attendees described as too small and jammed with what appeared to be more Trump supporters than RNC members -- the intended audience.
+
+Trump, Manafort said, has been playing two roles in the campaign -- one in public, onstage with voters, and one in private that is more subdued and will start appearing more.
+
+""Trump is an outsider and that's why many of you don't know him, but when he's sitting in a room, he's talking business, he's talking politics in a private room, it's a different persona,"" Manafort told the crowd. ""When he's out on the stage, when he's talking about the kind of things when he's out on the stump, he's projecting an image that's for that purpose and the two you'll start to see coming together in the course of the next several months.""
+
+Shortly into a slide presentation that focused on Trump's ability to win a general election contest Manafort asked his assistant to end the slide-show and said, ""Actually, I know what I'm gonna say,"" Manafort said to some laughs, according to an attendee and meeting audio.
+
+After the meeting, Manafort said the message was received well.
+
+""I mean we had a very good meeting,"" Manafort told CNN. ""I think people were hungry to find out with the campaign's intentions were, what Donald Trump's intentions were. We answered all the questions. I think they left there, they have a better understanding of the integration of the campaign with the party as we move towards the general election.""
+
+Trump recently brought in Manafort and Rick Wiley, Scott Walker's former campaign manager, after it was clear Ted Cruz was winning delegates with an intense ground game. Manafort said the new hires also should calm nerves among jittery Republicans here.
+
+""They know Rick Wiley, they know me, so we're bridging that relationship while he goes about finishing the job for the nominee,"" Manafort told CNN earlier Thursday.
+
+Cruz, speaking on the Mark Levin Show Thursday night, said Trump is trying to snow over Republican voters. ""Donald is a New York liberal who is pretending to be a conservative to try to fool Republican primary voters,"" Cruz said.
+
+""He's telling us he's lying to us,"" Cruz added. ""What his campaign manager says -- you look at what his campaign manager is telling us: this is just an act, this is just a show, building a wall... when he talks about anything, it's all an act and a show.""
+
+Trump was the only candidate of the remaining three not to show up here in person. John Kasich and Cruz both spoke to party leaders at private receptions Wednesday night and hosted smaller groups for private meetings outside of the resort.
+
+And Trump himself is showing no signs of letting up. He is the only candidate who can reasonably get to 1,237 delegates before Cleveland, and has Cruz and other Republicans out to stop him on subsequent ballots.
+
+In Harrisburg, Trump compared the primary system to ""Crooked Hillary"" Clinton, getting two attacks against his enemies in one.
+
+""The system is rigged, the voting is rigged, the whole deal is crooked 100%, almost as crooked as Crooked Hillary. It's a crooked deal,"" Trump said. ""And that's why you have a case where I go in and win with the vote, and these guys go in, they buy delegates, they buy them dinners, they send them to hotels.""
+
+The continuing blasts against the party from Trump -- and pressure from Cruz and Kasich -- led RNC leaders earlier Thursday to back off proposed rules changes for the convention amid very vocal fears they would be perceived favoring one of the three.
+
+""The party is like the lawyer in a divorce court,"" said Holland Redfield, the RNC committeeman from the Virgin Islands.
+
+""Surely there's a lot of whining going on,"" Redfield said. ""Here you have candidates that have also said to each other they are not supporting whoever gets out of this process. I mean come on! So they put the party in the middle.""
+
+Kasich senior adviser John Weaver said that RNC members were pushing for the Ohio governor to stay in the race -- even with only one state victory (Ohio) and fewer delegates than Marco Rubio, who dropped out last month.
+
+""We've run into a lot of people here who are encouraging us to go the distance because the people at this meeting particularly have a charge of putting together a winning ticket,"" Weaver said.
+
+Ken Cuccinelli, Cruz's chief delegate hunter, said the death threats made against Colorado Republican Party Chairman Steve House came up repeatedly in meetings between Cruz and RNC members Wednesday.
+
+""They are definitely on the minds of lots of people here, especially when they saw Steve House, one of their colleagues, getting death threats. That comment was made, repeatedly, with various observations about it and those tactics in these meetings,"" Cuccinelli said. ""And this was the members making the comments, not us bringing them up.""
+
+Cruz kept his Wednesday presentation focused on his plan for winning the White House -- the party's ultimate goal -- and detailing his strategy in upcoming states like Pennsylvania, according to RNC members who attended his speech. And he added how he could help their own party efforts with his promised coattails.
+
+""He touched on that a little bit with the down-ballot effect, we come out of that election hopefully with some big wins"" said Oregon Republican Party Chairman Bill Currier, who attended the Cruz speech.
+
+Do leaders take Trump seriously?
+
+But with their options dwindling, some party leaders here said they could make the distinction between Trump's sharp attacks on the party and his political strategy.
+
+""I think that's just part of his persona, I never take that stuff seriously or personally,"" said Pennsylvania Republican Party Chairman Rob Gleason. ""He cannot be elected without the Republican Party. That's the long and short of it. He needs us. We need a candidate and he needs us, so we all need to work together.""
+
+Henry Barbour, a party national committeeman from Mississippi who has said in the past it would be ""very hard"" for him to vote for Trump, agreed.
+
+""I think that's Donald Trump being Donald Trump. He's an insurgent candidate trying to appeal on a populist level. I don't take it that he really means it,"" said Barbour.
+
+The populist furor sparked by Trump, along with his campaign message, that he is being cheated out of the nomination -- with the public's voice being ignored -- has exposed a deeper rift in the Republican Party which may have to be worked out after November, no matter who is their nominee and no matter which party wins the White House.
+
+""If somehow or another it comes to pass that the results of the primary choose our nominee ahead of the convention, as far as I'm concerned it's the end of the national Republican Party,"" said RNC Committeeman Curly Haugland, of North Dakota.
+
+Haugland and some other party veterans have argued that the public -- and some incredibly angry Trump supporters -- are simply learning what has been true of every previous nominating contest: The party picks its candidate for the White House.
+
+""It can't be rigged if the rules have been public and transparent for nearly a year and we've done it this way since 1856,"" Barbour said.
+
+But in 2016, it won't be Barbour deciding what's ""rigged"" and what not.",REAL
+6554,Deutsche Bank Considering Alternatives To Paying Cash Bonus,"By Zero Hedge
+It has been at least a few weeks since Deutsche Bank appeared in the flashing red breaking news sections of newswires, with news that was – mostly – negative. And while the stock has since rebounded materially, wiping out all losses since the DOJ’s $14 billion RMBS settlement leak, it appears that not everything is back to normal for the largest German lender. Because in what may be the worst news yet for DB’s employees, moments ago Bloomberg reported that the German Bank is exploring “ alternatives to paying bonuses in cash ” as Chief Executive Officer John Cryan seeks to boost capital buffers.
+According to Bloomberg, DB executives have discussed options including giving some bankers shares in the non-core unit instead of cash bonuses. Another idea under review is replacing the cash component with more Deutsche Bank stock.
+The supervisory board may discuss the topic of variable pay at a meeting on Wednesday though no final decisions are expected, the people said, the day before it reports third-quarter earnings. The measures, if pursued in the coming months, would mostly impact the investment bank, the people said . The Frankfurt-based lender is still considering other alternatives, they said.
+As Bloomberg adds, any bonus-related decision will depend on the size and timing of Deutsche Bank’s settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice over a probe into the the sale of faulty real-estate securities. Last year, Deutsche Bank awarded staff 2.4 billion euros ($2.6 billion) of bonuses for 2015, 1.45 billion euros of which was for the combined investment banking and trading unit. Of the 2.4 billion euros, 49 percent was deferred stock and cash while the remainder was paid out immediately. It appears that DB wants to take the 49% number and make it bigger.
+The idea echoes a similar move by Credit Suisse Group AG at the height of the financial crisis, when the Swiss firm used its most illiquid loans and bonds to pay employees’ year-end bonuses.
+The report is comparable to a similar announcement made exactly one year ago , when DB announced it may slash bonuses by as much as one third. Since then, however, DB’s aggressive cost cutting initative has made life for the bank’s employees progressively more miserable. Since taking over in 2015, Cryan has suspended the dividend, reduced bonuses, cut risky assets, frozen new hiring and announced plans to shed some 9,000 jobs. The CEO has already said Deutsche Bank may fail to be profitable this year after posting the first annual loss since 2008 last year. Now, DB bankers may end up getting “paid” in some of the billions in impaired tanker loans, carried quietly on the bank’s book, if not CDS or interest rate swaps. Those DB certainly has a lot of.
+Should DB be successful with this significant shift in compensation strategy without leading to an exodus of workers, it will likely be attempted at other banks as the core problems facing Deutsche Bank, namely declining profitability, have now become systemic across the entire banking sector. Which is bad news for investment bankers everywhere.
+Source: Zero Hedge 
+",FAKE
+8700,Black Trump Supporter: ‘We need somebody that loves America’,"Black Trump Supporter: ‘We need somebody that loves America’ ""My word to all black Americans: Let's not be deceived"" Infowars.com - October 27, 2016 Comments 
+Speaking with MSNBC outside a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, a family of black Donald Trump supporters who explained they like Trump because of his all-inclusive rhetoric, and because he actually cares about America. I delivered a speech in Charlotte, North Carolina yesterday. I appreciate all of the feedback & support. Lets #MAGA ! https://t.co/VQ8NgyUbjD pic.twitter.com/Obj1B6ZqDP 
+— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2016 
+“My word to all black Americans, one thing I would like to say: Let’s not be deceived,” a woman named Gloria told MSNBC. 
+“Look at the record. Look at the promises that have been made over the past from the Democratic party. We’re not voting for a party, we’re voting for a man who has been standing by all citiz… He loves America. We need somebody that loves America. And he also loves all people, all people. And there’s that perception out there that he has no black supporters. WRONG! He does.” 
+Trump admired Gloria’s comments so much he tweeted her statement out to his 12.8 million followers, saying he appreciated all the feedback and support. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
+3110,Pope Francis announces biggest changes to annulment process in centuries,"Pope Francis on Tuesday announced sweeping revisions to the Catholic Church’s marriage annulment process, changes that are designed to speed up and simplify the often lengthy procedure. The revisions, according to Vatican experts, appear to be the most far-reaching made to the church’s annulment process in centuries.
+
+The announcement, featuring changes that will make it easier for Catholics to remarry, comes about a month before a major meeting at the Vatican, where Catholic leadership will examine the church’s views on family issues, including divorce and remarriage.
+
+The changes will eliminate a requirement that all annulment decisions get a second judgment and will allow local bishops to expedite the annulment process for some cases. The annulment process will be free of charge, though many dioceses had already eliminated the administrative fees for marriage annulments, according to a Vatican spokesman. The revisions also expand the role of local bishops in judging nullification proceedings.
+
+Although dramatic, the changes do not alter the Catholic Church’s teaching that marriages are permanent.
+
+The revisions were announced in two Apostolic Letters from Francis, which, translated from their Latin titles, are called “The Gentle Judge, The Lord Jesus” and “The Meek and Merciful Jesus.” The documents were released in Latin and Italian at a Vatican news conference.
+
+Current Catholic teaching on marriage doesn’t recognize divorce. Catholics who are granted a civil divorce and then remarry are ineligible to take Communion, a key part of active Catholic life. Instead, a Catholic who wants to end his or her marriage must be granted an annulment, a process that many Catholics believe is too costly and complicated.
+
+[What has Pope Francis actually accomplished? Here’s a look at 8 of his most notable statements.]
+
+The pope’s changes don’t resolve whether divorced and remarried Catholics may take communion, the Rev. Thomas Rosica, an English-language spokesman for the Vatican, said in an e-mail; instead, they put the question “into a new context” for further examination by the church.
+
+The changes will probably split Catholic opinion between those who believe that a streamlining of the annulment process is needed and will help bring back more Catholics to the church, and those who worry that the revisions could make it too easy to move on from a marriage, which Catholic teaching dictates is a permanent sacrament.
+
+In a recent Pew poll, 62 percent of American Catholics said the church should allow Catholics who divorce and remarry without an annulment to receive Communion.
+
+The number of annulments in the United States has been on the decline in recent decades. Annulment procedures in the country dropped from 72,308 in 1989 to 23,302 in 2014, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
+
+[Vast majority of U.S. Catholics who left the church can’t imagine returning, study says]
+
+An annulment is granted by a Catholic tribunal if it agrees that a marriage originally thought to be valid was actually missing at least one crucial element from the start, meaning that it was never really a true marriage in the first place. The length of the process varies between dioceses but can take 12 to 18 months, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
+
+One of the changes implemented by the pope will eliminate the “second instance” of that tribunal, meaning that all couples seeking annulment will have to obtain only one sentence from a single tribunal. “The moral certainty reached by the first judge according to law should be sufficient,” the letter reads.
+
+“It’s a sweeping reform; it’s a dramatic reform,” said Chad Pecknold, a theologian at Catholic University. “It’s a reform which essentially takes away the whole judicial process for deciding whether a marriage was null or not.”
+
+Another change will reduce the process of that first tribunal down to one judge, Pecknold noted. Formerly, a tribunal consisted of at least two priests and one canon lawyer, who could be a layman or cleric.
+
+Francis has changed that and placed the responsibility of the “first instance” of the tribunal into the hands of a single judge, who must always be a member of the clergy. Pecknold added, “A lot of my canon lawyer friends want to quit today.”
+
+Austen Ivereigh, a papal biographer and commentator on the Vatican, called it “revolutionary” that Francis has granted bishops the power to nullify a marriage – a power that has rested with church courts. Bishops, he said, could also delegate that power to priests. This will make annulments more accessible, especially in much of the developing world, where, Ivereigh said, many areas have no church courts.
+
+“This is the most far-reaching reform to the Church’s nullity process in 300 years,” he added.
+
+Tuesday’s announcement is procedural and makes no change in the way the church sees marriage and its permanent nature. However, Ivereigh said, the change shows Francis has been listening to regular Catholics and “the reason for this change is that society has changed. This speeded-up procedure recognizes and reflects a new reality.”
+
+He predicted that some conservatives would be critical of this change because they will see it undermining the concept of marriage as a bond that cannot be dissolved. The best-known of this group is American Cardinal Raymond Burke, who led the Vatican’s supreme court until he was removed by Francis because, Ivereigh said, Burke opposed annulment changes.
+
+Another change announced  Tuesday will allow bishops the ability to further expedite the annulment process for some particularly straightforward cases — a process that Pecknold said would allow the bishop to essentially “write a note.”
+
+That process could be open to abuse, he added: “The moment that you put in an exception that makes everybody’s job easier, guess what everybody’s going to do?”
+
+Kurt Martens, a professor of canon law at Catholic University, said the expedited process would apply to Catholic couples facing certain conditions, including those who have an abortion, a grave contagious disease, children from a previous relationship or imprisonment. Essentially, Martens said, the church is providing a path that looks like the Catholic version of no-fault divorce.
+
+[VIDEO: Pope emphasizes forgiveness for abortions during ‘year of mercy’]
+
+The changes move the church away from a set of 18th-century safeguards meant to make sure that the annulment process wasn’t subject to abuse, Martens said. Those changes, set up by Pope Benedict XIV, included a provision that would require a mandatory appeal of the lower court’s decision.
+
+“What guarantee do you have for a fair trial if you take away those guarantees that were put in the past?” Martens said. “Sometimes you want to go so quickly, you miss elements and make mistakes. Procedure law takes time to unfold.”
+
+Martens said the way Francis changed the annulment process was unusual, because he did not go through the Synod on the Family, as expected, in October.
+
+“If I were a bishop, I would be upset,” Martens said. “It’s a bit strange and even a sign of contradiction that a pope who is big on consultation and collegiality seems to forget that on something like this. It’s highly unusual for legislation like this to get through that way.”
+
+Francis, for his part, acknowledged some of those concerns in his letters.
+
+“The extent to which an abbreviated process of judgment might put the principle of the indissolubility of marriage at risk, did not escape me,” Francis wrote. “Thus, I have desired that, in such cases the Bishop himself shall be constituted judge, who, by force of his pastoral office is with Peter the greatest guarantor of Catholic unity in faith and in discipline.”
+
+Despite those concerns, the changes come with a notable silver lining for Catholics seeking to annul their marriages and return to a closer relationship with the church.
+
+“In terms of the average Catholic who is seeking annulment, this makes an already painful situation easier, and that is Pope Francis’s intent,” Pecknold said. “You can see a clear pastoral eye on this decision. He doesn’t want any long waits; he basically wants the decision to come from the bishop.”
+
+Francis has spoken before of his desire to reform annulment in the past.
+
+“The sacraments give us grace,” he said earlier this year to jurists of the church’s final court of appeals for annulments. “And a marriage proceeding” — like an annulment — “touches on the sacrament of marriage.”
+
+“How I wish all marriage proceedings were free of charge!” he added.
+
+In August, Francis urged Catholic clergy to keep “open doors” and be more welcoming to divorced and remarried Catholics.
+
+Stay up to date on the papal visit. Sign up here to follow Washington Post stories about Pope Francis’s visit to the U.S. and we’ll e-mail you as they’re published.",REAL
+4474,"GOP Presidential Hopefuls Serve Up Ice Cream, Cheese And Red Meat To Iowans","GOP Presidential Hopefuls Serve Up Ice Cream, Cheese And Red Meat To Iowans
+
+GOP presidential hopefuls spent Saturday night serving up ice cream, cheese and political red meat to potential Iowa caucus voters.
+
+At the Iowa Republican Party's annual Lincoln Day Dinner fundraiser, the first part of the evening was rigid. Each of the 11 possible candidates present was given a strictly enforced 10 minutes to make their pitch before later wooing voters at their hospitality suites downstairs with home-state fare in a more relaxed environment.
+
+Some candidates served up surprises to the crowd, too, which could make a critical lasting impression for underdog candidates.
+
+Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., got the most laughs of the evening, declaring he was the ""halftime"" entertainment as he took the stage
+
+""The more you drink, the better I sound, so keep drinking,"" he joked. ""If you need to go to the bathroom, go ahead. Won't bother me a bit.""
+
+He jabbed at Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley's famously frugal ways: ""The one thing I learned about this dinner is it was free for Chuck or he wouldn't have been here!""
+
+He also ribbed freshman Sen. Joni Ernst's memorable 2014 ""hog castration"" ad: ""When I saw that ad with the pigs, I made sure I'd never offend Joni.""
+
+But the hawkish senator quickly turned serious, taking a jab at his frequent foe, Rand Paul, the libertarian-leaning Kentucky senator. Paul, who has already officially announced his candidacy, had used his own time to reiterate his opposition to the NSA's controversial wiretaps, telling voters, ""I want to catch terrorists, but I also want to protect the Constitution.""
+
+Graham, who could announce his 2016 plans June 1, promised that if someone under his watch as president was thinking of joining ISIS or planning a terrorist attack, ""I'm not calling a judge"" to get a warrant, as Paul called for, ""I'm calling a drone and we're going to kill you.""
+
+Graham also gave cover to another potential 2016 rival — former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who fumbled questions this week on whether he would invaded Iraq.
+
+The former U.S. Air Force JAG Corps lawyer blamed the deterioration in the Middle East on Obama's withdrawal of troops in the region, not on former President George W. Bush.
+
+""If you fought in Iraq,"" Graham said, ""it's not your fault it's going to hell. It's Obama's fault.""
+
+But Paul didn't spare Bush that scrutiny. Without mentioning his likely rival by name, he said the question of whether the Iraq War was a good idea was a ""valid question. Not because we're talking about history, but because we're talking about the Middle East, where history repeats itself.""
+
+Paul said the same question should be asked of Hillary Clinton. ""If she ever takes any questions,"" he quipped. He then pivoted to an indictment of Clinton's reaction to the 2012 consulate attacks in Benghazi, Libya, which he said should ""disqualify"" her as president.
+
+When Bush took the stage, he began by acknowledging his family in a nod to the controversy of this week.
+
+""You all know me as George and Barbara's boy, for which I'm proud,"" he said. ""Some of you all may know that Dubya is my brother. I'm proud of that, too.""
+
+Earlier on Saturday, Bush defended his answers this week when he was asked by Fox News' Megyn Kelly, ""Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion"" in Iraq? After saying he would, Bush tried to clarify the next day, saying he ""interpreted the question wrong"" before finally fully walking back the answer Thursday, saying he would not have gone into Iraq.
+
+""I misstepped, for sure. I answered a question that wasn't asked,"" he told voters at a town hall at Loras College in Dubuque on Saturday morning.
+
+Later that afternoon, when taking questions from reporters in Iowa City, he said all candidates were going to make mistakes.
+
+""If you're looking for a perfect candidate,"" he said, ""he probably existed 2,000 years ago.""
+
+At the Lincoln Dinner, Bush took aim at Obama's foreign policy, echoing part of his stump speech.
+
+""Name a country where the relationship is better than the day that Barack Obama came into office?"" he asked. ""Iran. Cuba. I rest my case.""
+
+Foreign policy hits against both Obama and Clinton were familiar refrains from other speakers, too.
+
+""Iran, enemy. Israel, friend. It's real simple,"" said former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who won Iowa in 2012.
+
+Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-La., assailed Obama for what he saw as not standing up for religious liberty in the face of threats abroad. ""The United States of America did not create religious liberty,"" he said. ""Religious liberty created the United States.""
+
+Ben Carson, who has never held political office, but is a Tea Party favorite, saw his first lead in a poll of Republican primary voters. ""While our enemies are magnifying and metastasizing, we're shrinking back,"" said Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon.
+
+Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry tried to offer a hopeful historical reminder: ""We made it through Jimmy Carter. We'll make it through Barack Obama.""
+
+His speech ran long, and like a scene out of an Academy Awards ceremony, music began to play.
+
+Another candidate, who got the proverbial hook, was Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO. Her microphone was cut off to the verbal frustration of the crowd. She briefly continued to speak while the audience could not hear her.
+
+Her speech, though, was well received, including getting the loudest applause of the night with this jab, recalling how she was asked when she announced her official campaign last week if a woman's hormones would affect her ability to do the job as president.
+
+""Can anyone think of a single instance where a man's judgment was clouded by his hormones? And in the Oval Office,"" she said, a not-so-subtle shot at former President Bill Clinton.
+
+Fiorina also got applause as she contrasted her own previous meetings with foreign leaders to Clinton. Fiorina boasted how she would stand up to Russian and Iranian leaders. As she's done in previous cattle calls, Fiorina drew notice as the only woman in the field and positioned herself as a natural foil to Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee.
+
+When the formal speeches concluded, GOP faithful mingled downstairs, meandering from room to room that candidates had set up. Some of the longest lines to meet candidates were in the suites of Graham and Fiorina, who attracted renewed interest after strong performances. The lines for Bush, Carson and Walker were winding, too.
+
+Several candidates turned to their home states for inspiration. Jindal's was Mardi Gras-themed, passing out green, gold and purple beads and promising bandanas for supporters of local ""Duck Dynasty"" star Willie Robertson.
+
+Clad in a red apron, Walker stood behind a table scooping ice cream and serving up Wisconsin cheese. A Harley-Davidson motorcycle was on display next to him — a nod to Ernst's inaugural ""Roast and Ride"" in a few weeks — while autographed ""cheesehead"" hats were on his book table in the crowded room.
+
+Perry also served ice cream, a nod to the favorite dessert he says he usually grabs at the end of a day spent campaigning. And as Iowa Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann noted, the event and likely caucus lineup offered something for everyone of all palates in the GOP.
+
+""It's like going into Baskin-Robbins and not knowing which flavor to take,"" he said at the end of the dinner. ""I want a taste of every single one.""",REAL
+3492,Lots Of Candidates Want To Simplify Tax Code; Here's What They Get Wrong,"Lots Of Candidates Want To Simplify Tax Code; Here's What They Get Wrong
+
+There's something almost Name That Tune-ish about the way the GOP candidates are talking about tax brackets these days. Currently, there are seven. Donald Trump wants four. Jeb Bush says he can get them down to three. Chris Christie and Marco Rubio want two. Ben Carson does them one better — one 10 percent rate, inspired by the Bible.
+
+They're not alone — President Obama has advocated fewer brackets as well.
+
+Why do this? One of the most common reasons they give is that it would make the tax code ""simpler.""
+
+As Rubio's tax plan puts it: ""The tax code is in desperate need of simplification, and bracket consolidation is an important first step.""
+
+He's right on the first part: The Internal Revenue Code is impenetrably, unfathomably complicated.
+
+But here's the reality: Cutting brackets won't really help that much.
+
+""It's a very mild form of simplification,"" said William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning Washington think tank. ""The real complication in the system is in the tax base, not in the rate structure. Figuring out how you calculate capital gains or figuring out whether you're eligible for the [earned income tax credit for lower-income Americans], given the child rules — once you've got that, then you just plug in the rates.""
+
+Think about your own taxes — it can be complicated to figure out how much you owe when you have things like investment income, wages from self-employment or lots of deductions. But once you fill in the boxes and subtract all that out, figuring out your rate is easy (and if you're using a program like TurboTax, the computer does it for you).
+
+Cutting taxes as a whole tends to be the real goal behind rate-cutting, said Ed Kleinbard, professor of law and business at the University of Southern California. After all, no one ever tries to simplify tax brackets upward.
+
+""The number of brackets has an almost imperceptible effect on the complexity of tax law as it is lived by the individual taxpayer,"" Kleinbard said. ""Taxpayers are not, left to their own devices, engaged in high-level mathematics.""
+
+What does simplicity look like?
+
+So reducing the number of brackets isn't the clearest path to simplification. What is? Making the rest of your tax preparation experience easier, says one expert.
+
+""[Simplification] does not necessarily mean that taxes are a simple mathematical function of income,"" said Matthew Weinzierl, a Harvard University assistant professor, who studies what optimal tax systems look like. ""After all, with TurboTax it's easy to have a computer do a complex calculation for you. Instead, what economists typically have in mind is that a tax system should be easy to understand, transparent and hard to game.""
+
+A lot of these bracket-cutting ideas come alongside proposals to limit deductions. And that, in its own right, is a great step toward simplification. Bush, for example, wants to cap the amount of total deductions most people can take (not counting the charitable deduction).
+
+""Most economists think a tax base with fewer such loopholes is less subject to evasion and less distortionary to economic activity,"" Weinzierl said.
+
+The idea is that these loophole closures offset the tax revenue lost from cutting brackets. But that's not how it always works.
+
+""The call for fewer tax brackets in every case has as its real motive lowering the tax burden on the highest-income Americans, not making life simpler for the middle class,"" Kleinbard argued. Consider Bush's tax proposal as an example. While it limits deductions, it also would overwhelmingly benefit the highest earners (and grow the national debt — unless there is unprecedented growth in the economy).
+
+Cutting deductions and loopholes makes for a great sound bite, but it's far tougher than it sounds. The politically popular mortgage-interest deduction is a great example of this. It tends to benefit higher earners more, but despite constant calls to ""simplify"" the tax code, it's so politically popular that it has proved impossible to eliminate.
+
+Cutting deductions isn't the only way candidates could fight for simpler taxes. They could also pledge to combat efforts of tax preparers to keep tax preparation itself complicated. Vox's Dylan Matthews and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Robert Greenstein have reported that H&R Block pushed for changes that would have quadrupled the earned income tax credit form's length, making it harder for low-income families to get the credit (that is, without H&R Block's help). (The company has defended itself here.)
+
+There are also unsexy opportunities to make the code less complicated. For example, Kleinbard argues that some long, hyperspecific definitions could be trimmed down.
+
+""If you really care about complexity, the place to look, for example, is the definition of who's a dependent,"" Kleinbard said. ""People fight over whether a child is a dependent of one parent or another. It turns out to be an incredibly complicated topic, and nonsensically so. If you look for simplicity, you'd actually want to look at things like a consistent and simple definition of 'dependent.' ""
+
+So there's plenty of room for simplification, and politicians often point to the so-called 70,000 page tax code as proof of that. However, railing against the page count may be a misguided line of attack.
+
+One (nitpicky) reason is that the tax code itself is not, in fact, 70,000 pages long, as Slate pointed out last year. That distinction belongs to a compilation of court decisions surrounding the tax code, according to the Tax Foundation. The statutes themselves are about 2,700 pages long.
+
+But far more important, Kleinbard said, some complexity is inherent to a tax code that tries to govern a complicated economy.
+
+""The tax code is thousands of pages long for a very simple reason: It is a model, in the economic sense, of all of economic activity,"" he said. ""Most Americans don't spend a lot of time worrying about the taxation of cutting timber or of being crew on a tuna boat. But there are rules for that, and you may find the rules irrelevant to you, but the rules are complex for a reason.""
+
+OK, so how many brackets should there be?
+
+Americans want a tax code that's simpler to some degree. And brackets aren't really going to simplify the code all that much. But that still doesn't answer one key question: Is there a ""right"" number of brackets?
+
+There's an entire branch of economics dedicated to this kind of question. (It's called optimal tax theory, and Google Scholar-searching it will dump you into an afternoon-long intellectual rabbit hole.) Weinzierl, who studies this, said there's no magic number.
+
+""The number of brackets is generally considered unimportant,"" Weinzierl said. ""Any desired level of progressivity can be obtained with a number of different bracket structures, so the specific number isn't that important.""
+
+But some experts believe that our current seven-bracket system could use some tweaking. Thomas Piketty (author of last year's best-selling Capital in the 21st Century) and University of California, Berkeley's Emmanuel Saez, for example, have argued that a higher top marginal rate would be best.
+
+Given the growth of uber-high-earners, Weinzierl said, that idea is popular among economists.
+
+""Many economists would argue that the lack of such a bracket is odd, since it means that a family earning $750,000 is likely to pay the same marginal tax rate as a family earning 10 times as much,"" he said. The basic idea here, he adds, is that ""if we're going to have more than one bracket, and thus allow ourselves something other than a flat tax, it's quite limiting not to have a bracket for the highest earners.""
+
+And here's another compelling complication: The U.S. may have already stumbled onto a pretty good system. Earlier this year, economists at the Minneapolis Fed found that the current U.S. system, warts and all, is, in fact, ""nearly optimal,"" beating out other ""optimal"" options like a flat-tax-plus-transfer system.
+
+Trying to understand all of these tax-policy contradictions at once might (understandably) make your eyes glaze over. But the ultimate takeaway is simple: When a politician advocates simplifying the tax system, there's usually a good reason to be skeptical.",REAL
+1587,Hillary Clinton explains why she won't say 'radical Islam',"Syrians wait near the Turkish border during clashes between ISIS and Kurdish armed groups in Kobani, Syria, on Thursday, June 25. The photo was taken in Sanliurfa, Turkey. ISIS militants disguised as Kurdish security forces infiltrated Kobani on Thursday and killed ""many civilians,"" said a spokesman for the Kurds in Kobani.
+
+Residents examine a damaged mosque after an Iraqi Air Force bombing in the ISIS-seized city of Falluja, Iraq, on Sunday, May 31. At least six were killed and nine others wounded during the bombing.
+
+A member of Afghanistan's security forces stands at the site where a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up in front of the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Saturday, April 18. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The explosion killed at least 33 people and injured more than 100 others, a public health spokesman said.
+
+A Yazidi woman mourns for the death of her husband and children by ISIS after being released south of Kirkuk on April 8. ISIS is known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public executions, crucifixions and other acts.
+
+On April 1, Shiite militiamen celebrate the retaking of Tikrit, which had been under ISIS control since June. The push into Tikrit came days after U.S.-led airstrikes targeted ISIS bases around the city.
+
+A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani on Friday, January 30, after the city had been liberated from the ISIS militant group. The Syrian city, also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September.
+
+ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday, October 23. The United States and several Arab nations have been bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the militant group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.
+
+Cundi Minaz, a female Kurdish fighter, is buried in a cemetery in the southeastern Turkish town of Suruc on Tuesday, October 14. Minaz was reportedly killed during clashes with ISIS militants in nearby Kobani.
+
+A Kurdish Peshmerga soldier who was wounded in a battle with ISIS is wheeled to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Duhuk, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 30.
+
+Syrian Kurds wait near a border crossing in Suruc as they wait to return to their homes in Kobani on Sunday, September 28.
+
+Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and some other Yazidi people are flown to safety Monday, August 11, after a dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar. A CNN crew was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. But only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.",REAL
+311,Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year,"Here's an interesting factoid about contemporary policing: In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did. Martin Armstrong pointed this out at his blog, Armstrong Economics, last week.
+
+Officers can take cash and property from people without convicting or even charging them with a crime — yes, really! — through the highly controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture. Last year, according to the Institute for Justice, the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion.
+
+Armstrong claims that ""the police are now taking more assets than the criminals,"" but this isn't exactly right: The FBI also tracks property losses from larceny and theft, in addition to plain ol' burglary. If you add up all the property stolen in 2014, from burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft and other means, you arrive at roughly $12.3 billion, according to the FBI. That's more than double the federal asset forfeiture haul.
+
+One other point: Those asset forfeiture deposit amounts are not necessarily the best indicator of a rise in the use of forfeiture. ""In a given year, one or two high-dollar cases may produce unusually large amounts of money — with a portion going back to victims — thereby telling a noisy story of year-to-year activity levels,"" the Institute for Justice explains. A big chunk of that 2014 deposit, for instance, was the $1.7 billion Bernie Madoff judgment, most of which flowed back to the victims.
+
+For that reason, the net assets of the funds are usually seen as a more stable indicator — those numbers show how much money is left over in the funds each year after the federal government takes care of various obligations, like payments to victims. Since this number can reflect monies taken over multiple calendar years, it's less comparable to the annual burglary statistics.
+
+Still, even this more stable indicator hit $4.5 billion in 2014, according to the Institute for Justice — higher again than the burglary losses that year.
+
+One final caveat is that these are only the federal totals and don't reflect how much property is seized by state and local police each year. Reliable data for all 50 states is unavailable, but the Institute of Justice found that the total asset forfeiture haul for 14 states topped $250 million in 2013. The grand 50-state total would probably be much higher.
+
+Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary. The total value of asset forfeitures was more than one-third of the total value of property stolen by criminals in 2014. That represents something of a sea change in the way police do business — and it's prompting plenty of scrutiny of the practice.
+
+The surprising reason more police dogs are dying in the line of duty
+
+Most Americans don’t realize it’s this easy for police to take your cash
+
+Police chases kill more people each year than floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and lightning — combined",REAL
+1346,"Trump launches 1st TV ad, as 2016 candidates barnstorm Iowa, NH","The Republican presidential candidates kicked off the 2016 election year on Monday with a burst of new attacks and advertising – including Donald Trump’s first TV ad of the season – as they entered the final sprint to Iowa and New Hampshire.
+
+As Trump rolled out his TV spot in both early-voting states, Ben Carson released a new tax plan, just days after shaking up his struggling campaign. Ted Cruz was launching an aggressive 36-county tour across Iowa, while Marco Rubio used a security speech Monday in New Hampshire to slam those who voted to rein in America’s intelligence efforts.
+
+The speeches, the ads, the bus tours and the proposals all reflect an effort by the campaigns in the still-crowded field to effectively re-launch, with less than a month to go until the lead-off Iowa caucuses, and after that the New Hampshire primary.
+
+Carson, who has endured a precipitous drop in the polls and switched up his top campaign staff last week, unveiled a plan Monday to scrap the tax code and replace it with a 14.9 percent flat tax.
+
+“No deductions, no loopholes -- it applies to everybody across the board,” the retired neurosurgeon told Fox News.
+
+Once the darling of Iowa conservatives, Carson has seen his numbers plummet there as Cruz, the Texas senator, has shot to the front of the field – nudging past Trump.
+
+Though Trump still holds the lead in most New Hampshire polls, the billionaire businessman is seeking to energize his bid by putting money behind his first TV ad of the race. His campaign announced it would be spending at least $2 million a week on the ad, split between Iowa and New Hampshire.
+
+The ad reprises Trump’s call to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and to take the Islamic State’s oil, but begins by defending the controversial proposal he made after the San Bernardino terror attack to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.
+
+The narrator in the ad says: “The politicians can pretend it’s something else but Donald Trump calls its radical Islamic terrorism. That’s why he’s calling for a temporary shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until we can figure out what’s going on.”
+
+Trump isn’t the only one talking tough in the final stretch.
+
+Florida Sen. Rubio, at an American Legion post in New Hampshire, took an implicit shot at candidates like Cruz in blasting lawmakers who voted to rein in the NSA – while vowing to “restore” such intelligence programs.
+
+“If ISIS had lobbyists in Washington, they would have spent millions to support the anti-intelligence law that was just passed with the help of some Republicans now running for president,” Rubio charged.
+
+He also blasted Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton as “incompetent,” and said, “She has lied” – referring to her public explanations regarding the Benghazi terror attack.
+
+Keep the Promise, a super PAC supporting Cruz, launched its own ad in Iowa that mocked Rubio over a video clip he put out in October joking about “fantasy football” – the pro-Cruz ad juxtaposes that against images of ISIS fighters and the refugee crisis to question his seriousness.
+
+Cruz, meanwhile, is keeping a packed schedule as he launches a six-day, 36-county bus tour in the Hawkeye State – and tries to maintain his lead there.
+
+Even the lower-polling candidates are taking another crack at breaking through. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who won the Iowa contest in 2012, launched his first TV ad in the state on Monday – also going after Cruz.
+
+The ad starts with a clip of the Texas senator reading a Dr. Seuss classic, ""Green Eggs And Ham,"" on the Senate floor, which he did during a filibuster-like speech opposing ObamaCare in 2013.
+
+""You want someone to read one helluva bedtime story, Ted Cruz is your guy,"" a narrator says. ""If you want to protect America, and defeat ISIS, Rick Santorum’s your president. Because serious times need serious people.""
+
+Santorum, though, is polling at under 1 percent in the state as Cruz and Trump maintain an unrivaled lead.
+
+New Hampshire, by contrast, is a much tighter contest. No fewer than five candidates are jockeying closely for the position behind Trump in the polls right now: Rubio, Cruz, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.",REAL
+7734,US uses Tunisia as drone base for Libya operations - report,"US uses Tunisia as drone base for Libya operations - report Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 20:53 Get short URL © U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Julianne Showalter / Reuters Washington has been secretly operating drones from a base in Tunisia since June, US officials have admitted. The unarmed US Air Force Reaper drones are said to be gathering intelligence on Islamic State targets in the neighboring Libya. Trends Arab world protests , Islamic State 
+Intelligence obtained by the drones flying out of the unspecified base in Tunisian territory has been used in more than 300 US airstrikes against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in the Libyan city of Sirte. Despite the airstrikes and a push from Western-backed Libyan militias on the ground, IS militants remain entrenched in the city. 
+The existence of a secret drone facility in Tunisia was admitted on Wednesday by US officials speaking to the Washington Post on condition of anonymity. There are some 70 US military personnel overseeing the drone operations in Tunisia, Pentagon officials told the paper. The US government has not officially acknowledged the operation, while the Tunisian embassy declined to comment to the Post. US military now flying Predator or Reaper drones from Tunisia, Niger, Italy, Djibouti, Jordan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE — Craig Whitlock (@CraigMWhitlock) October 26, 2016 
+The US sought access to an air base in Tunisia to close a critical “blind spot” for US intelligence operations in North Africa. Since the Western-backed rebellion against the government of Moammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has become a major base of operations for IS as well as Al-Qaeda militants. 
+US aircraft fly actual bombing missions from the Naval Air Station in Sigonella, on the Italian island of Sicily. Surveillance drones have also been based there, but the Italian government has refused to grant permission for armed drones until earlier this year, citing concerns of an “antiwar backlash” at home, the officials said. 
+Tunisia was the first North African country to overthrow its government in 2011, launching the so-called “Arab Spring” that led to upheaval in Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. The Obama administration has kept the negotiations secret because of concerns for “Tunisia’s young democracy” and possible terrorist attacks, officials told the Post. Read more Tunisia: From hope to disillusion 
+Islamic State has already claimed a number of attacks in Tunisia, including the June 2015 massacre of almost 40 foreign tourists at the beach resort of Sousse and the November 2015 bombing of a presidential escort bus that claimed 12 lives. It was an IS attack on a town bordering Libya in March 2016 that helped the Tunisians make up their minds about the drone base, the US officials said. 
+Under the terms granting the Pentagon access to the base, the US committed to help build up Tunisian intelligence collection capabilities, the Post reported. Though currently only unarmed surveillance drones are based at the facility, they could be armed in the future if the Tunisian authorities give their permission, US officials told the paper. 
+Washington has sought to expand the network of its drone bases across Africa. Last month, the Intercept obtained documents showing that the US has been building a $100 million drone base in the central Niger town of Agadez, from where the remotely operated craft could stage operations in Algeria, Libya, Chad, Nigeria and Mali.",FAKE
+1362,"For the Record: Iowa, why can't we quit you?","More debates! Fewer candidates! We're still talking about Iowa! It's your Thursday edition of For the Record ... let's get to it!
+
+Two more Republican candidates dropped out of the race Wednesday, leaving eight candidates (nine if you count Jim Gilmore, but that's like counting Pluto as still being a planet). Senator Rand Paul is out, dealing a blow to anyone who wanted to make political donations solely in Bitcoin; 2012 Iowa Caucus winner Rick Santorum also suspended his campaign.
+
+After careful consideration, Santorum threw his 0.4% worth of influence at Marco Rubio, while Paul says he won't make any endorsements in the primary — though he says he'll back the eventual Republican nominee.
+
+For Paul, he returns to Kentucky to focus full-time on his re-election campaign for Senate. A few months back, Paul said he'd give up to $500,000 to help pay for an early Kentucky caucus, which would have enabled him to run both for president and senator for a few months longer (here's hoping he kept the receipt).
+
+Rick Santorum, meanwhile, is heading home to binge-watch ""Touched by an Angel"" on Netflix.
+
+On the Kübler-Ross model of grief, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are stuck on ""denial"" about the Iowa results. (You might say that Trump is on ""anger"" but no, he's just like that.) On the Democratic side, the official results say Hillary Clinton edged Sanders by 0.29%, one of the closest caucuses in Iowa history; still Team Sanders is looking into how coin-flipping in some precincts affected the ultimate outcome. (One question still unanswered: If a coin landed on its edge, did those delegates go to Martin O'Malley?)
+
+On the Republican side, Donald Trump is calling for a complete do-over based on Ted Cruz staffers spreading rumors that Ben Carson was dropping out of the race, and encouraging Cruz's precinct captains to try to lure Carson supporters to their side. Trump is insisting actually won the caucuses based on his strong pre-debate poll numbers.
+
+So why were the polls and caucus results different? Experts are suggesting it was a strong get-out-the-vote effort by Cruz, plus a number of last-minute deciders, plus the decline of land lines and the increase in cellphone use, which actually makes a lot of sense because ""SORRY NEW PHONE WHO IS THIS"" was pulling in 8% support in late January.
+
+There's another Democratic debate tonight (9 p.m. EST on MSNBC), this time with only Hillary and Bernie on the stage. O'Malley, who dropped out of the race following the Iowa caucuses, will see no significant decrease in speaking time.
+
+""But wait, this debate wasn't on the original schedule,"" said no normal person anywhere. It's true, this debate is one of four added to the Democratic debate schedule just as the race gets more heated. Yesterday the two campaigns argued over Twitter about the definition of ""progressive,"" a debate that spilled over into last night's town hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire. The tl;dr version: Sanders says Clinton is too moderate on military intervention, the financial industry and trade; Clinton says compromise is needed because ""(a)n important part of being a progressive is making progress."" The fun part will be during the general election, when the Democratic nominee will spend months telling the country how centrist and mainstream they are.
+
+If the political gods formed a human out of campaign contributions and sadness and then made it run for president, this is what it would look like.",REAL
+5418,Gingrich slut-shames Megyn Kelly,"OUT OF LEFT FIELD Gingrich slut-shames Megyn Kelly Adele M. Stan: Misogyny isn't just baked into the Trump brand, it is the Trump brand Published: 26 mins ago 
+(American Prospect) — When, as a campaign surrogate and once-powerful white man, you answer allegations that your candidate may be a sexual predator with a sex-laced attack on your female interviewer, you’re probably a misogynist. A desperate misogynist. 
+That’s what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is looking like this morning. 
+During a Tuesday discussion of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s sinking poll numbers, Gingrich accused Fox News Channel host Megyn Kelly of being “fascinated with sex” when she dared to mention that Trump’s fortunes began falling after the now infamous Access Hollywood video, featuring Trump boasting about his self-proclaimed prerogative to sexually assault women, became public on October 7, and nearly a dozen women came forward to allege that Trump had either assaulted them or otherwise taken liberties with their bodies.",FAKE
+461,"US economy added 223,000 jobs in April","Really the only unusual or exciting thing about this jobs report is how unusual it is for something so thoroughly expected and non-game-changing to happen. Adding a bit over 200,000 jobs a month is both what analysts thought would happen, and also a trajectory that is consistent with a continued slow decline in unemployment but no real labor market boom.
+
+Dive deeper into the data, and the basic lack of surprises only continues. Labor force participation is up, but only very slightly. Hourly wages are up, but only very slightly.
+
+There's nothing about this jobs report that is likely to change the Federal Reserve's mind about anything, and therefore no reason to expect financial markets to have any particular reaction. Those who think the Fed's current course is dangerously inflationary will keep thinking that. Those who (more correctly!) think the Fed's current course is unreasonably inflation-averse will keep thinking that, as well. Janet Yellen will keep thinking she's on the right track.
+
+Wage growth appears to have settled into a steady pattern that is somewhat better than what we saw at the depths of the recession, but far below what was considered normal before the recession. Partially offsetting this, overall consumer price inflation has been abnormally low for a couple of years now. There are also some compositional effects pulling average wages down as a large cohort of inexperienced 20-somethings have been entering the workforce.
+
+Overall it is a little difficult to understand why some of the small upward bumps have been interpreted in some quarters as a sign of an imminent inflationary breakout. Even the strongest wage-growth months have been weak compared with 2006 or 2007, years that were not exactly halcyon days for the American worker.
+
+Perhaps the clearest sign of how not-yet-completed America's recovery comes from looking at the level of full-time jobs, which is still well below where it was in 2007:
+
+The population, needless to say, has grown in the intervening years, meaning that the failure to fully catch up in job growth makes it difficult for rank-and-file workers to gain bargaining leverage.",REAL
+560,Education Secretary Arne Duncan stepping down,"""He's done more to bring our education system -- sometimes kicking and screaming -- into the 21st century more than anybody else,"" Obama said at a White House ceremony. ""America is going to be better off for what he's done.""
+
+Duncan leaves the administration as the longest-serving education secretary in U.S. history, Obama said.
+
+""It's a record that I truly believe that no other education secretary can match,"" he said. ""Arne bleeds this stuff. He cares so much about our kids. And he's been so passionate about this work.""
+
+While speaking about the impact his parents -- both educators -- had on him, Duncan got emotional.
+
+""All our lives we saw what kids could do when given a chance, and that's why we do this today,"" he said. Obama has selected Deputy Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr. to replace him. In an internal memo to Department of Education staff, Duncan cited the commute between his home and family in Chicago in announcing his departure and called his job the ""greatest honor of my life."" ""We have been lucky to have an a amazing team here from Day One, but I honestly believe our team today is the strongest it's ever been,"" Duncan wrote. ""So it's with real sadness that (I) have come to recognize that being apart from my family has become too much of a strain, and it is time for me to step aside and give a new leader a chance."" Obama brought Duncan with him to Washington from Chicago, where he served as the city's schools chief. He's long been one of the president's closest friends in the administration, their relationship forged in the days before either came to national prominence. Duncan, along with Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and senior advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, formed a hometown crowd for the Obamas when they arrived to the White House. Jarrett remains in her post at the White House, though Axelrod and Emanuel have both returned to Chicago -- Emanuel as the city's mayor, and Axelrod as chair of a politics institute at the University of Chicago. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will step down in December, an administration official said Friday, October 2. Katherine Archuleta, director of the Office of Personnel Management, resigned July 10, a day after revealing a data breach of government computers was vastly larger than originally thought. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, announced February 5 in an email to staff that she was stepping down after six years as commissioner. Jennifer Palmieri, Obama's communications director, left in spring 2015. She now serves as the director of communications for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Dan Pfeiffer, one of Obama's chief strategists and closest advisers, departed from the White House in early March, officials confirmed. Marilyn Tavenner, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' top administrator who was involved in the roll-out of Obamacare, announced in an email to staff that she was resigning at the end of February 2015. Secret Service Director Julia Pierson resigned in October 2014 after multiple security breaches involving the President. The firestorm began after an intruder scaled the fence and entered the White House on September 19, 2014. Gen. David Petraeus stepped down as director of the CIA on November 9, 2012, after an FBI investigation confirmed he was having an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. He served the position for a little over a year. Gen. Eric Shinseki resigned in May 2014 after it was revealed that Veterans Affairs administrators had conspired to cover up wait lists that were months long, leaving sick and dying veterans waiting for care. Kathleen Sebelius resigned as secretary of Health and Human Services in April 2014 after months of backlash against her role in the faulty roll-out of Healthcare.gov. Shirley Sherrod, a former official with the Department of Agriculture, was forced to resign from her position in 2010 after a conservative blogger published a video of her questioning whether to help a white man losing his farm since "" so many black people lost their farm land"" before him. When it was discovered that the video was taken out of context, the USDA offered her another job, which she declined. In June 2010, Obama relieved Gen. Stanley McChrystal from his post as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after disparaging comments McChrystal made against the administration in Rolling Stone magazine. Three months after Tareq and Michaele Salahi crashed a state dinner in November 2009, Desiree Rogers stepped down as White House social secretary. Suzanne Barr, a senior Obama administration political appointee and longtime aide to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, resigned September 1, 2012, amid allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior lodged by at least three Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees. Duncan said he had not made a decision about his next steps besides spending time with his family and added that he expected to find work that involved ""expanding opportunity for children."" ""Over the years that I have known him, and especially in the months we have worked together here, I've come to recognize John as one of the most passionate, courageous, clear-headed leaders in our field,"" Duncan said. Duncan's departure means Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack will be the sole remaining Cabinet-level secretary who has been with Obama since 2009. Obama's Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan started in 2009 as his Housing and Urban Development secretary. In the early days of the administration, Duncan and Obama often played pickup basketball on the weekends in Washington — Duncan is among the group of close Obama confidantes who participated in the President's Election Day pickup game in 2012 -- though Obama's days on the court have waned in favor of days on the golf course. As education secretary, Duncan pushed reforms to improve the quality of education, including advocating for the controversial Common Core requirements. Many Republicans say the requirements provide unnecessary federal interference in school curriculum. He also implemented the administration's ""Race to the Top"" funding program that has states compete for federal school funding, as well as gone after for-profit colleges for predatory practices.",REAL
+7464,"Comment on Macy’s “dump Trump” backfires as 30,000 irate customers cut up their cards by MeThePeople","Posted on July 15, 2015 by Dr. Eowyn | 33 Comments 
+It’s a topsy-turvy world when law-breakers — those who illegally enter and stay in the United States — are sacred cows, while those who criticize the law-breakers are ostracized and demonized. 
+On June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump announced that he’s entering the crowded race to become the 2016 Republican presidential nominee, he made some remarks about illegal immigration which brought the wrath of the PC Left on his head. Trump said: 
+“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” 
+For saying that, one business after another severed their ties with Trump. Univision and Comcast’s NBCUniversal cancelled plans to broadcast Trump’s Miss Universe beauty pageant. Mattress giant Serta said it will stop selling Trump-branded products. Department store giant Macy’s also cut its ties with Trump. 
+Such righteous indignation! You would think Trump were a heinous mass murderer or a child-molester or serial rapist or bestialist! 
+But Macy’s anti-Trump move has backfired. 
+TMZ reports, July 13, 2015: 
+Macy’s is paying the price for sacking Donald Trump, because we’ve learned thousands of customers are cutting up their Macy’s credit card in protest. 
+Sources connected to the department store tell TMZ, Macy’s has received complaints from approximately 30,000 customers since ending its relationship with Trump nearly 2 weeks ago. 
+We’re told the store has been “inundated with complaints” from customers who believe the department store is unfairly punishing Trump for his views on immigration. 
+Our sources say thousands of customers have vowed never to shop at Macy’s again and many of them say they’re cutting up their Macy’s credit card to make a statement. 
+We’re told the complaints have come in various ways, including phone, Facebook and email. A Macy’s spokesperson would only say, “Our Facebook page is often times used by our customers to express their feelings or points of view. Many times it does not correlate to any action.” Join the boycott against Macy’s!",FAKE
+132,"Blood money, killer cops: How privatization is funding the racist logic of America’s police","As Harris lay struggling and dying, he told the surrounding officers, “I’m losing my breath.” One officer yelled back at him, “Fuck your breath!” Then he insisted that the dying man be handcuffed.
+
+“Fuck your breath!” encapsulates in only three words the systemic disregard that police regularly show to Black people in America. Just last week, we watched Michael Slager execute Walter Scott in South Carolina for daring to run away. Now this week, we are also tuning into the trial of former Chicago Police Officer Dante Servin, who is charged with involuntary manslaughter in the killing of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd in March 2012. In the cases of Eric Garner in Staten Island, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in South Carolina, and Eric Harris in Tulsa, we have seen video of law enforcement officers not only critically injuring citizens but also refusing to administer medical care, with fatal consequences.
+
+Given the origins of policing in this country and their connections to slave patrols and other forms of racialized social control, I am under no illusions that the police have ever held Black life in high regard. Police complicity and participation in lynchings and in the KKK make that clear. But the explicit, tacit refusal of Black people’s right to breathe is still significant. The fact that the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office is a pay-to-play force is significant. The fact that white men can sign up with government approval for the right to play cops and robbers on the weekends is appalling. That Black lives provide fodder for state-sanctioned sport should have us in the streets.
+
+There is something about the logics of self-governance under the terms of neoliberalism that make this moment feel more pessimistic than our trite narrative of linear progress on racial issues would have us conclude. In 2012, the United Arab Emirates gave $1 million to the New York City Police Foundation. According to an NYPD spokesperson, the money was used to upgrade equipment and aid in criminal investigations. In both New York City and Tulsa, private funding of law enforcement significantly impacts the way local policing is done. In Tulsa, it results in the pay-to-play scheme. In New York City, it allows for large infusions of cash donations whose specific uses do not come under public scrutiny because they are private funds.
+
+These forms of neoliberal policing — in which private citizens and private monies impact the culture of policing but escape governmental checks and balances — endanger us all.
+
+In New York, such actions enable the purchase of unspecified forms of “equipment” that might, for instance, be used to exacerbate the culture of militarized policing in the NYPD.  Part of this money allows the NYPD to travel to the UAE to learn counterterrorism measures. In the wake of 9/11, some external training might be helpful, but essentially, this sounds like a case of the NYPD being allowed money to play global cops and robbers, and to then test out these tactics on the Black and Brown people who are policed heavily within the city.
+
+In the case of Tulsa, this privately underwritten form of law enforcement placed an underprepared “pretend” deputy into a serious confrontation. As a result, Eric Harris lost his life.
+
+But he did not just lose his breath. As he lay dying, he was refused the right to breathe. That refusal came in a chorus of other taunts about how he was getting what he deserved because he chose to run. His breath seeped out of his Black body as public service officers taunted him in a barrage of profanity.
+
+Why is the refusal of breath to Black people endemic to the American condition? What about the Black body makes the life-breath that we all hold so dear — so sacred — such a profane and devalued thing in the hands of white people?
+
+In 1977, the famous writer and American prophet James Baldwin returned to America after living in France for more than three decades. In an interview at the New York Times, he said: “I left America because I had to. It was a personal decision. I wanted to write, and it was the 1940’s, and it was no big picnic for blacks. I grew up on the streets of Harlem, and I remember President Roosevelt, the liberal, having a lot of trouble with an anti- lynching bill he wanted to get through the Congress–never mind the vote, never mind restaurants, never mind schools, never mind a fair employment policy. I had to leave; I needed to be in a place where I could breathe and not feel someone’s hand on my throat.” Baldwin names a moment that sounds similar to our own. The vote is insecure from racial tampering. Indiana has just passed legislation that allows businesses (including eateries) to discriminate against customers based on “religious” assessments of their fitness to be served. Our public schools are in abysmal condition and throughout the country fast food workers are waging the Fight-for-Fifteen, a campaign for a $15 minimum wage. Baldwin illuminates for us the way that America exists as a place predicated on the refusal of Black breath and the denial of Black people’s right to move freely in the world without losing our lives for having a broken taillight or playing with a toy gun, or for standing on the street chatting with friends. This refusal of breath is not only anti-Black, but multigenerational, and harder to combat because of the way neoliberalism and acts of privatization have invaded police forces. As Eric Harris’ breath left him, other officers reminded him that “you ran!” Similar charges were levied against Walter Scott by pundits and commentators last week. “Why did he run?” Neoliberal structures of self-governance demand that we all control ourselves and “do the right thing,” in order to avoid negative consequences. Meanwhile, the conditions that enable us to actually do the right thing continue to slip away. Walter Scott ran because as a poor Black man who was in arrears on his child support, he did not want to be subject to a long prison sentence and fines he could not pay. The sense of precariousness about not being able to enjoy simple pleasures, like going for a ride on the weekend because you might find yourself in prison interminably for bills you can’t pay, is surely not just. These are not justifications for Walter Scott’s wrongdoing. They are reminders that many of us manage to do the right thing because we live in conditions that allow us to pay bills, adequately support our children, and find sufficient employment. Many, many Americans, a disproportionate number of them Americans of color, do not live in such conditions. Yelling at them or executing them for making bad choices in a system that offers limited options shows us how often we miss the point. Under this kind of logic, the supposed lack of control of working-class Black and Brown people justifies the stultifying overpolicing of our communities, the stranglehold of our prison system saddling Black people with jail time, fines, probation, parole and a constant sense of threat, and finally, the ultimate refusal of one’s breath by a trigger-happy police officer if you fail to submit in any way to this unjust state of affairs. Something must change. For we are all losing our collective breath. We all watch as the police and the state communicate their clear disregard for the value of Black life. The weight of historical injustice and present injustice constricts, makes us writhe in agony, makes us go out to protest. That the officers in each of these three killings are being tried is nothing to celebrate. We do not celebrate our country for doing the right thing. Charging those who unjustly kill others with murder or manslaughter is basic. Figuring out how to let Black people live is apparently far more complicated.",REAL
+10055,17 Shot Dead As Chicago Records Deadliest Weekend Of 2016,"17 Shot Dead As Chicago Records Deadliest Weekend Of 2016 Published:   Zero Hedge 
+After a summer of extreme violence, homicides in Chicago were supposed to slow down going into the fall and winter months. But, that certainly does not appear to be happening as the city just recording its most violent weekend of the entire year with 52 people shot and 17 of them killed. This weekend's violence brings the tally of year to date killings in Chicago to 646, an annual run-rate which implies the most violent year since the mid-90s. 
+According to the Chicago Tribune , of the 17 victims from this weekend's violence, 7 of them were under the age of 20, with the youngest victim being only 14. 
+The weekend toll also was deadlier than the three long summer holiday weekends when violence typically spikes because of the warm weather. Six people were fatally shot over the Memorial Day weekend, five over the Fourth of July weekend and 13 people over Labor Day weekend, according to Tribune data. 
+
+This past weekend there were shootings in every area of the city but the Far North and Northwest sides, according to police. Of the 17 people who were killed, seven were younger than 20. 
+
+The youngest was 14-year-old Demarco Webster Jr ., described by his grade school principal as one of her best students. Demarco had planned to run for student council and try out for basketball, and he was being recruited for an NAACP leadership program. 
+
+A little more than 24 hours later, 17-year-old twins Edward and Edwin Bryant were killed in an apparent drive-by shooting in Old Town. Police responding to calls about gunfire found one of the boys lying on the sidewalk in the 400 block of West Evergreen Avenue and another around the corner in the 1300 block of North Hudson Avenue. 
+
+""The two brothers, as far as we can tell, they didn't have any documented gang affiliation,"" said Johnson, who noted police recovered video of the shooting. ""But the individuals they were with did."" 
+While journalists suggested that the police department was caught off guard by gang violence linked to large crowds around Wrigley Field, police Superintendent Eddie Johnson insists that extra resources were deployed to the most dangerous neighborhoods around Chicago. 
+""It was a tough weekend, but that just goes back to what I've been saying all the time,"" he told reporters. ""Listen, until we start holding repeat gun offenders accountable for these crimes, we're going to keep seeing cycles of gun violence like this."" 
+
+Johnson denied that the department was caught off guard by the mostly gang violence on the South and West sides while deploying hundreds of extra officers for crowd control outside Wrigley Field for the Cubs' three World Series games over the weekend. 
+
+""We had canceled days off as well as (required) 12-hour shifts over the entire weekend, so I'm confident that we had the resources out there"" in the most dangerous neighborhoods, he said. 
+
+According to HeyJackass! , killings from this weekend bring YTD Chicago homicides up to 646, a 51% increase versus last year. 
+
+Meanwhile, YTD killings imply a run-rate of 775 homicides for the year which would be the highest since the mid-90s. 
+
+And, of course, the majority of the violent crime continues to occur in the gang-ridden South and West side neighborhoods. 
+
+Finally, roughly 95% of the violent crime committed so far in 2016 has been against minority citizens with nearly 80% of the shootings going unsolved. Share This Article...",FAKE
+8566,The New World Order is melting in the heat of its own contradiction,"2013: 7,157 [4] 
+Virtually no one in the Zionist media is asking for the perpetrators to be trialed and punished accordingly. But there is more. 
+Scholar Rebecca Gordon, who has corresponded with this writer last summer, has recounted in her meticulously documented study Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States : “When I had occasion in Jordan in 2006 to meet an Iraqi sheik who had been tortured by U.S. forces, his first question to our little group was whether all American women were ‘promiscuous sluts,’ like the ones who had tormented him by forcing him to look at their naked breasts during his detention…The psychological trauma of sexual humiliation had damaged this man sufficiently so that polite conversation with American women, even those who were likely to be sympathetic, was beyond him.” [5] 
+This is just the tip of the iceberg. Gordon discusses one case after another and describes what happened when politicians deliberately abandoned the moral order and pursued perpetual wars in the Middle East at any cost. “Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped” was just a fair game. [6] “Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture” was also quite common. [7] Detainees were also sodomized with chemical lights and broom sticks. [8] 
+Gordon writes on the very first page: “For many years, the United States had secretly funded research on torture at U.S. and Canadian universities. One product of this research was the Central Intelligence Agency’s KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual with its sections covering ‘non-coercive’ and ‘coercive’ techniques, first printed in 1963…. “The United States had also provided covert training and support to torture regimes in other countries around the world—from Greece to Uruguay, Chile to El Salvador, Indonesia to Vietnam. The Phoenix Program, implemented during the Vietnam War by U.S. armed forces and the CIA, involved the torture and deaths of tens of thousands of Vietnamese, as part of the U.S. counterinsurgency project designed to break the will of the Viet Cong. In the testimony before Congress, military intelligence officer K. Milton Osborne provided some details of the methods used: “‘The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the 6-inch canal of one of my detainees’ ears and the tapping through the brain until he dies. The starving to death of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages. They simply starved her to death in one of the hooches at that very counterintelligence headquarters. “‘There were other methods of operation which they used for interrogation, such as the use of electronic gear such as sealed telephone attached to the genitals of both the men and women’s vagina and the man’s testicles, and wind the mechanism and create an electrical charge and shock them into submission.’” [9] 
+Between 1968 and 1971, the Phoenix Program was responsible for torturing and killing more than twenty thousand people, [10] many of whom had nothing to do with terrorism. These were not isolated cases. The CIA conducted these essentially diabolical operations “on several continents.” [11] 
+If history is not enough, what about the recent charge by Amnesty International that the US-led coalition in Syria has killed at least 300 civilians? [12] And what about Saudi Arabia (a US ally) “deliberately targeting impoverished Yemen’s farms and agricultural industry”? [13] Stephen Kinzer, a visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, has recently written: “Anyone who believes the United States is not fighting enough wars in the Middle East can be happy this week. We have just plunged into another one. Twice in recent days, cruise missiles fired from an American destroyer have rained down on Yemen. The Pentagon, a practiced master of Orwellian language, calls this bombing ‘limited self-defense.’ “Since 2002, our drone attacks have reportedly killed more than 500 Yemenis, including at least 65 civilians. We are also supplying weapons and intelligence to Saudi Arabia, which has killed thousands of Yemenis in bombing raids over the last year and a half — including last week’s attack on a funeral in which more than 100 mourners were killed.” [14] 
+So the logic is pretty simple: the New World Order ideology does not and cannot make sense at all. And if we have to fight ISIS, then we have to support the Assad government; if we have to support the Assad government, then the whole idea that Assad is a “brutal ruler” loses its political force; if that idea goes down the tube, then the New World Order propaganda against Assad is categorically false. In short, we can ignore flaming Neocon Charles Krauthammer when he said last November that Assad is a “dictator and a destroyer.” [15] This brings us to another vitally important issue: New World Order agents spent millions upon millions of tax dollars supporting ISIS or al-Nusra in Syria for absolutely nothing. Barnes-Dacey and Levy concluded their article by saying, “Western leaders have defined ISIS as a threat to their national security. That should now translate into a more nuanced Syria policy, including working with Iran and encouraging the nascent Saudi-Iranian opening.” [16] 
+I simply could not hold my laughter. For decades, New World Order agents in America and Israel have hammered the spurious idea that Iran is a terrorist state and that it wants to “wipe Israel off the map”; [17] they also spent millions upon millions of dollars trying to destabilize the country both politically and ideologically. 
+Remember how Obama “secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran ’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyber-weapons”? [18] 
+Remember how New World Order agents in America and Israel developed Stuxnet specifically to attack Iran, a country that has zero nuclear weapons? [19] The New York Times itself acknowledged then that the cyberattack was “aided by Israel.” [20] 
+In the same vein, the Washington Post reported that Stuxnet was the “work of U.S. and Israeli experts.” [21] And it was developed way back in 2007 . 
+Remember how Bush also made false accusations against Iran and even trained the terrorist group the MEK right here in America? [22] Remember how he worked with Israel to perform a covert operation in Iran? “Mr. Kissinger, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you.” 
+So, all the tax dollars that were spent on destabilizing Iran for more than a decade was a waste. At the same time, decent American military hospitals continued to lack funding: 
+“many of the hospitals are so small and the trickle of patients so thin that it compromises the ability of doctors and nurses to capably diagnose and treat serious illnesses, much less take on surgeries … 
+“Two-thirds of the hospitals last year served 30 or fewer inpatients a day — less than a third as many as the typical civilian hospital. Nine served 10 or fewer — so few that Dr. Lucian L. Leape, a leading patient-safety expert at the Harvard School of Public Health, said, ‘I think they should be outlawed.’” [23] 
+Obviously New World Order agents don’t care either about military hospitals and even soldiers. In fact, they don’t care about anyone at all. They just care about spreading their essentially diabolical system. Soldiers are just pawns. As Henry Kissinger diabolically declared, military men are “dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” [24] 
+Once those “dumb, stupid animals” can no longer be of service to NWO agents, then they just dump them. They have already dumped at least 360,000 thousand veterans, who “may have brain injuries.” [25] 
+[1] Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy, “To Beat ISIS, Focus on Syria,” NY Times , September 1, 2014. 
+[2] In 2011, the Pentagon declared that the so-called “war on terror” could cost at least $5 trillion. “The $5 Trillion War on Terror,” Time , June 29, 2011. 
+[3] For a recent study on similar issues, see Rebecca Gordon, Mainstream Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 
+[4] Dan Murphy, “Iraq Violence More Than Doubles in 2013: Is Country Headed Off the Cliff?,” Christian Science Monitor , December 20, 2013. 
+[5] Rebecca Gordon, Mainstream Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 53.",FAKE
+8826,November 3: Daily Contrarian Reads,"November 3: Daily Contrarian Reads   My daily contrarian reads for Thursday, November 3rd, 2016.  ",FAKE
+7959,Living in a 5G World: Wireless Pollution is Getting Out of Control,"Email 
+In Drowning in a Sea of Microwaves , the late geneticist Dr Mae-Wan Ho – a visionary voice who opposed GMOs – identified pollution from wireless technologies as a pressing issue of our times. 
+Noting evidence for “DNA damage … cancers, microwave sickness, [and], impairment of fertility”, she concluded: “Evidence is emerging that the health hazards associated with wireless microwaves are at least comparable to, if not worse than, those associated with cigarette smoking.” 
+Since the advent of radar, followed by mobile phones and dense WiFi networks, such anthropogenic radiation has sky-rocketed. Although it is non-ionising, and does not destabilise molecules directly, evidence of other harm has been growing since 1950s studies on radar workers. 
+According to the updated Bio-initiative Report (2012+) by 29 precautionary scientists, effects on biology feature in several thousand, peer-reviewed papers. Yet troubling new findings rarely filter into the media. Or global Green discourse. 
+Though many studies have reported ‘no significant effect’, research by University of Washington biology professor Henry Lai, and others, reveals that wireless-industry funding is far more likely to yield such findings. 
+“Toujours ils créent doubte” (‘they are forever creating doubt’), explains former Luxembourg Green MP Jean Huss, whose research on the wireless industry inspired the Council of Europe to call for many precautions (2011), including protection of warning scientists, and wired internet in schools. 
+But wireless-product marketing has a loud voice. Few of us realise that genetic effects and free radical damage – both disease risks over time – are the most common, cautionary findings. Device-crowded spaces, such as our peak commuter trains or all-wireless classrooms, may be creating a subtly toxic environment. 
+Wide-ranging, oxidative harm to animals has been found from WiFi sources. And linked pre-diabetic and pre-cancerous changes. Ground-breaking work by biochemistry professor Martin Pall , Washington State University – winner of eight international awards – reveals a viable mechanism for such harm. But as with other ‘inconvenient truths’, it is going unheard. 
+Bee-whispers: the sensitivity of life on Earth 
+Life’s exquisite electro-physiology is still being discovered. Researchers at Bristol University reported in May that bees’ hairs are highly sensitive to flowers’ delicate EMFs. In controlled trials in Switzerland, bees reacted to mobile-phone signals with high-pitched ‘piping’: a cue to desert a hive. 
+Other studies show that mitochondria , the tiny power houses in our cells, are at risk from our new EMFs. And that even DNA , in its delicate antenna-like structure, may be frequency-sensitive. 
+The long-term, ecological implications of our new, anthropogenic radiation are not known. But peer-reviewed studies revealing harm to birds , tadpoles , trees , other plants , insects, rodents and livestock , offer clues. 
+Biology professor Lukas Margaritis, at Athens University, for example, uncovered harm to fruit flies from just a few minutes’ exposure to our everyday wireless devices, including cordless phones, Bluetooth, and even digital baby monitors. Reviewing research, India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests warned that sensitive habitats may need some protection. 
+The UK’s Digital Economy Bill , about to receive its final seal, has sensible proposals for increasing country-wide access to fibre broadband: a technology that does not, in itself, stoke microwave pollution, though wireless add-ons do so. But probe beyond the bill to Ofcom’s 5G consultations, and new EMF exposures emerge: part of global trend. 
+The worldwide rush towards 5G or ‘fifth generation’ wireless rollouts is set to raise our pulsing pollution to new levels. Untested, high microwave frequencies are being lined up to increase bandwidth, automation, and usage – at great profit to the industry. 
+These millimetre and centimetre waves, though too weak to heat us, may pose possible risks to our skin, and deeper surface tissue, including that of plants. High-density transmitters are envisaged. A troubling prospect for the many hundreds of patients seen by professor Dominique Belpomme ‘s clinic in Paris: patients whose disabling symptoms from wireless technologies are supported by new brain scans and blood tests . 
+A delegation of scientists have petitioned for such electrosensitivity to be recognised as an environmentally-induced illness , with an International Disease Code (2015). 
+Rip-tides: when profits outpace caution 
+Pushing for fast rollouts, the wireless industry is also in conflict with the Internatonal EMF Scientists’ Appeal to the United Nations. Signed by 223 scientists from 41 nations, it calls for remedial action – such as new safety limits, wave-free zones, and education of doctors – to protect our DNA, fertility, and nervous systems, plus children and pregnant women, from growing wireless exposure. And from rising, mains-electricity fields. 
+Signs that such caution may be needed are growing. The pulsed, polarized , microwaves used by wireless technologies pose more biological risks than smooth or natural waves. Weak millimetre waves have a known potential to increase antibiotic resistance : what ecological effects might they risk, perhaps, if used universally? 
+Studies also reveal a risk to skin pain receptors . Published associations between radio – masts and skin cancers, though at lower frequencies, plus mobile-phone masts and EMF-sensitive cancers (Adilza Dode, Minas Gerais University 2013), raise further questions. 
+In his summer press conference, Tom Wheeler – former head of the CTIA, the vast telecoms lobby- group, and controversial chair of the Federal Communications Commission – proposed unbridled “massive deployment” of commercial 5G transmitters, taking off in 2020. 
+Anticipating “tens of billions of dollars” of economic growth, with US telecoms “first out of the gate”, he warned “Stay out of the way of technological development! Turning innovation loose is far preferable to expecting … regulators to define the future”. 
+With no mention of health-testing, carbon costs, or corporate responsibility, the FCC voted unaminously to go ahead by releasing swathes of untested high frequencies for private sector exploitation – so setting a trend. To questionable ends: added to other issues, how will our communities be affected by addiction to 5G multi-stream videos? How will it impact our spiritual communion with Nature? 
+Many American health activists, and cautioning scientists, are aghast. Dr Joel Moskowitz, director of community health studies at the University of California, warns “precaution is warranted before 5G is unleashed on the world”. 
+Former government physicist Dr Ron Powell points out the plans “would irradiate everyone, including the most vulnerable to harm from radiofrequency radiation: pregnant women, unborn children, young children…the elderly, the disabled, and the chronically ill… It would set a goal of irradiating all environments”. 
+Fracking the air? Fault-lines in safety 
+This drive to mine the electromagnetic spectrum come-what-may has echoes of fracking, and other headlong trends. In Captured Agency , the Harvard ethics report on the FCC, and the wider wireless industry, Norm Alster exposes ruthless “hardball tactics”, supported by “armies of lawyers”, at expense to our health. 
+Microwaves, Science and Lies (2014), filmed by Jean Hêches across Europe, exposes similar patterns that are driving our pulsed radiation to risky levels. Western “safety limits”, based only on high levels that heat tissue, far exceed those of Russia , China, and some other nations. 
+Professor Yuri Grigoriev , long-serving chair of Russia’s non-ionising radiation protection body (RNCNIRP), warned the UK’s Radiation Research Trust “ionising radiation is monitored…[but] levels of non-ionising radiation are constantly increasing and ubiquitous: it is out of control … Urgent action is needed”. 
+Stealthy pollution-raisers, such as the 5G Internet of Things – with 30 billion tiny transmitters forecast for 2020 – and also, sadly, wireless smart-meters [ 1 , 2 *], vetoed by the American Academy of Environmental Medicine , may run counter to a cherished Green goal: that of nurturing healthy environments. 
+Can we manage our energy, perhaps, in more bio-sensitive ways? Court claims for wireless-meter health harm, supported by medical testimonies – including by neurology professor Andrew Marino (Louisiana) – are sweeping America. Professor Pall explains such meters’ “high intensity” microwave pulses may be more toxic than we realise: “We know from the nanosecond studies these can be very damaging”. 
+Data obtained by a judge revealed all-hour, house-piercing pulses every few seconds. New data-over-wiring innovations (if free of “dirty electricity”) may offer inspiring, alternative ways forward. 
+Chrysalis: a paradigm in waiting 
+To create – in Wheeler’s phrase – a global ‘5G ecosystem’ of wireless super-saturated environments, at insidious risk, over time, to living ecosystems, not least our own bodies, is dysfunctional. And spiritually disturbing. It suggests a mindset deeply at odds with the orchid-like beauty of the Earth. 
+But cleaner innovations, such as LiFi , ‘eco-dect-plus’ phones, and the latest fibre-optics, suggest a wiser course. A new paradigm – safer connectivity, plus more balanced use – is emerging. And reminds of other step-changes in awareness. From pesticides to organic, from smoke-filled to smoke-free. 
+We can accede, if we wish, to our rising, planetary smog. To safety limits as high as the moon, in many scientists’ eyes. And to wireless rollouts’ growing carbon costs. Or taking pause, we may begin to call the industry to account – plus governments lulled by it. 
+We may air helpful new findings, such as risks from tablet-like exposures ( Alexander Lerchl , Jacob Bremens University, 2015). And stark risks from passive exposure, bared by Leif Salford , medical professor at Lund University. We may defend DNA, if we wish, from ionizing and published non-ionizing risks , just as we defend our planet. 
+And alongside French Green Party MPs Laurence Abeille and Michèle Rivasi , plus the interntional Baubiologie movement, we can explore electromagnetic hygiene. Uplifting possibilities for a safer, cleaner world. 
+Lynne Wycherley is a nature poet with six published collections. Working in parallel with pioneering doctors, she has been investigating non-ionising radiation for 5 years. 
+This article originally appeared in The Ecologist . More articles by: Lynne Wycherley next -",FAKE
+1758,Trump vows to win: 'I'm not going anywhere',"""I'm not going anywhere, I'm leading every poll and I'm going to make our country great again,"" Trump told CNN's Chris Cuomo on ""New Day"" on Tuesday morning.
+
+""I'm not getting out. I'm going to win, OK?"" Trump added. ""The answer is: I'm going all the way and I'm going to win.""
+
+Trump said Sunday on NBC's ""Meet the Press"" that he would get out of the race if his poll numbers plummeted and he had no chance of winning, setting off speculation among pundits that Trump might soon drop out of the GOP presidential contest.
+
+Trump remains the leading contender for the GOP nomination in all the major polls, but that lead has slipped in recent weeks as contenders like retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and businesswoman Carly Fiorina gain on the billionaire candidate.
+
+The latest poll in Iowa from NBC News/Wall Street Journal shows Trump leading Carson by just 5 points, down from a double-digit lead just weeks ago. And in New Hampshire, Trump's lead has also slipped to 5 points ahead of Fiorina -- down from 10 points just two weeks ago. Trump also took the opportunity Tuesday to once again slam Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, as a ""total lightweight"" and even knocked Rubio for past financial difficulties: ""Take a look at his past, he's got $12 in the bank."" ""Rubio is not the guy that's going to be negotiating with the kinds of people you have to negotiate with to turn this country around,"" Trump said. RELATED: First on CNN: Trump sent prank care package to Rubio Trump has been jabbing at the Rubio campaign in recent weeks, as the Florida senator got positive reviews for his debate performance last month and has risen in the polls. His campaign sent a case of ""Trump Ice Natural Spring Water"" to Rubio's headquarters, a dig at the time Floridian who once took a memorable gulp from a water bottle while giving the Republican response to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address. Later on Tuesday, the Republican also defended his support for eminent domain, which allows government to seize private land and pays the owners in return. Some conservatives, such as the influential Club for Growth, which is attacking Trump for his position , oppose the power in order to protect property rights. ""Eminent domain -- when it comes to jobs, roads, the public good -- I think it's a wonderful thing,"" Trump told Fox News' Bret Baier. ""I fully understand the conservative approach, but I don't think it was explained to most conservatives.""",REAL
+10542,The Greatest Wealth Transfer In History Nears As ‘Deep State’ Now Pulling Out All The Stops,"43 Views November 08, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+On election day, today John Embry told King World News that the greatest wealth transfer in history nears as the ‘Deep State’ is now pulling out all the stops. 
+‘Deep State’ Desperation John Embry: “Eric, mercifully election day in the U.S. has finally arrived to put an end to the ugly spectacle which has been billed as the presidential campaign. The capper came on Monday, when in response to the FBI ending its investigation of Hillary Clintons email transgressions, the Dow magically rallied back to 18,200, a level which had been defended for months by the powers that be… Continue reading the John Embry interview below… Advertisement To hear what billionaire Eric Sprott & Rick Rule are doing with their own money and which $7 billion company John Embry & Dr. Marc Faber oversee click on the logo: 
+John Embry continues: “ Simultaneously gold and silver were viciously attacked, while virtually every other asset category, including oil and copper, which incidentally have terrible fundamentals, rose in price. This represents business as usual as the ‘Deep State’ pulls out all stops to have their candidate Hillary Clinton elected. 
+I suspect that in the fullness of time Monday will be seen as one of the most ridiculous days in market history, irrespective of who wins the election. The sad fact is that the U.S. problems now run so deep that no president has any ability at this stage to address the situation and bring back the good old days of sustainable growth and containable inflation. I believe that we are going to see rising inflation in conjunction with a steadily weakening economy as the staggering debt load takes its inevitable toll. 
+I laughed when I saw the headlines in the New York Times and the London Financial Times in the wake of last week’s lousy jobs numbers, which incidentally would have been a whole lot worse if they weren’t so heavily doctored. The New York Times headline screamed, ‘Unemployment Hits 2008 Low, Wages Increase.’ The FT stated, ‘Wage Data Underlines Solid Jobs Market As Poll Nears.’ These newspapers are now so compromised that they shouldn’t be referred to as newspapers, but rather government propaganda machines. The old Soviet Pravda operation would be green with envy. In reality, U.S. federal government tax withholdings are now falling, giving a much better indication of the true state of the U.S. economy. 
+The sharp fall in gold and silver on Monday provided yet another excellent buying opportunity. But irrespective of who is the next U.S. president, both metals will be heading sharply higher as financial reality overtakes the present pre-election fantasy. I would echo James Turk’s excellent advice on KWN yesterday when he said, ‘Own   assets.’ I believe he is dead right, and as I’ve said many times, before this saga is over we are going to witness the greatest wealth transfer in history and one best be on the right side of that transaction.” 
+  As The World Awaits The U.S. Election Outcome, Buckle Up For Some Rough Times  ",FAKE
+5993,Concert plus campaign: Clinton turns to celebrities in homestretch,"By Reuters   7:16 pm Heading into the homestretch of the presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is looking to harness some celebrity star power to help get out the vote and energize volunteers in battleground states.   
+By Roberta Rampton 
+DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (Reuters) – Heading into the homestretch of the presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is looking to harness some celebrity star power to help get out the vote and energize volunteers in battleground states. 
+Jennifer Lopez will headline a free concert for Clinton supporters in Miami on Saturday, giving the former secretary of state a chance to connect with the key demographic of millennials she has sometimes struggled to reach – and some visual counter-programming to the latest email controversy to roil her race for the White House. 
+The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Friday it is investigating more emails as part of a probe into Clinton’s use of a private email system – a late-breaking surprise that will likely continue to get extensive media play leading up to the Nov. 8 vote 
+Celebrity-driven events like the concert “can serve as a bit of a distraction” from the controversy, said Eric Kasper, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. 
+“It is a way to kind of take the edge off things because it tends to be more positive,” Kasper said. 
+The JLo concert is the first in a series. Next week, Clinton will take the stage with Jay Z in Cleveland, and then with Katy Perry in Philadelphia on Nov. 5. 
+A Harvard University poll this week showed that among likely voters aged 18 to 29, Clinton is leading Republican rival Donald Trump, a celebrity in his own right who starred in the reality television show “The Apprentice.” 
+But turnout is a concern. The exceptionally negative tone of this year’s race for the White House has soured young Americans on politics, Reuters/Ipsos polling shows. 
+Presidential candidates have long sought to create buzz with help from celebrity pals, said Tevi Troy, who chronicled the strategy in his book “What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Pop Culture in the White House.” 
+“Campaigns do it to reach out to people who are not necessarily interested in politics but are interested in pop culture,” said Troy, a presidential historian who worked in the George W. Bush White House. 
+The events are like a larger version of a campaign yard sign, a way to show a “groundswell” of support behind a candidate – and a way to appeal to fans of the musicians, said Kasper, who has studied the intersection between pop culture and politics. 
+“It can create a kind of psychological connection that we otherwise might not have when a politician endorses a presidential candidate, for instance,” Kasper said. 
+(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Leslie Adler) 
+Concert plus campaign: Clinton turns to celebrities in homestretch added by Reuters on Sat, Oct 29th, 2016",FAKE
+7307,Worst Of Saudi Economic Slump Yet To Come,"Worst Of Saudi Economic Slump Yet To Come 11/07/2016 
+PRESS TV 
+Experts say the outlook for Saudi economic recovery will remain murky for many months to come with some even warning that the worst of the economic slump for the kingdom is yet to come. 
+Reuters in a report quoted several Riyadh-based experts as saying that there would be a high degree of uncertainty over the status of the Saudi economy in 2017. That would mainly be a result of the remaining challenges from the private sector. 
+The Saudi economy may appear to have escaped a fiscal and currency crisis that loomed at the start of 2016. However, experts said, threats from certain basic problems still remain and will haunt the kingdom next year. 
+The government owes its success to temporarily escape crisis to unpaid bills rather than sustainable spending cuts. 
+The government has reduced or suspended payments that it owed to construction firms, medical establishments and even some of the foreign consultants who helped to design the economic reforms, Reuters added quoting the experts. The estimated unpaid dues for construction firms alone totaled 80 billion riyals. 
+Experts further warned that this could store up obligations for Riyadh in the future. 
+Reuters elsewhere emphasized that signs of the economic slump could be seen in Riyadh and other major cities, where discounts of 50 percent or more are offered by stores selling clothes and consumer electronics, and there is a surge in people offering second-hand cars for sale. 
+The biggest uncertainty may be how authorities can push through a key part of their reform drive, added the report. The most important issue for the Saudis may be determining how they plan to foster a vibrant private sector that does not depend on oil revenues while at the same pushing ahead austerity policies that are suppressing private demand. 
+Experts also warned that the status of the Saudi job market over the next few years. Between 1 million and 2 million of Saudi Arabia’s 10 million foreign workers may leave over the next couple of years as the economic slowdown causes lay-offs and the government seeks to steer Saudi citizens into jobs previously held by foreigners, Reuters added.",FAKE
+10148,HA HA! Look At Arkansas Today Trump +28,"HA HA! Look At Arkansas Today Trump +28 If the election were held in Hillary's home state today, Trump would be winning by a landslide. 02/08/16 5 08/14/15 11 Mail with questions or comments about this site. ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.008s (8 queries)",FAKE
+3344,State Department will not release 22 'top secret' Clinton emails,"(CNN) The State Department announced Friday that it will not release 22 emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because they contain ""top secret"" information, the highest level of government classification.
+
+The decision, coming three days before the Iowa caucuses, could provide fodder for Clinton's political opponents, especially Republicans, who are likely to make note of the emails' ""top secret"" designation. Clinton's email use has haunted her on the campaign trail since it became public early last year that she maintained a private server while leading the State Department.
+
+State Department spokesman John Kirby said the documents, totaling 37 pages, were not marked classified at the time they were sent, but are being upgraded at the request of the Intelligence Community because they contain sensitive information.
+
+But, Kirby said, a separate review by the bureaus of Diplomatic Security and Intelligence and Research is being held into whether the information in the emails was classified at the time they were sent and received. He would not say when the review began or how long it would go, and acknowledged it's possible there could be classified emails that weren't marked as such.
+
+""It's certainly possible that for any number of reasons, traffic can be sent that's not marked appropriately for its classification. That is certainly possible,"" Kirby said.
+
+But he added that he wasn't going to make any judgments about this particular case.
+
+""All I can tell you definitively is it wasn't marked classified at the time it was sent,"" Kirby said.
+
+A senior State Department official said the review ""began very recently"" and was initiated by the State Department, but the official wouldn't say what prompted it.
+
+A spokesperson for the Intelligence Community's inspector general declined to comment.
+
+Kirby also said 18 emails, comprised of eight email chains between Clinton and President Barack Obama, are being ""withheld in full"" to ""protect the President's ability to receive unvarnished advice and counsel."" But, Kirby said, they ""have not been determined to be classified"" and said they will ""ultimately be released in accordance with the Presidential records act.""
+
+""I'd love for people to see what I did and I hope that will happen,"" she said.
+
+Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton's campaign, said in a statement that Friday's announcement was a case of ""over-classification run amok"" and reiterated Clinton's position that the emails be made public.
+
+But later Friday, Fallon declined to say whether Clinton would ask Obama to declassify the emails when pressed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer on ""The Situation Room.""
+
+""The President easily could declassify all of these emails if she asked him and if he agreed, right?"" Blitzer asked.
+
+""I'd really be surprised if this has risen to the President's level,"" Fallon replied. ""Because, again, this a mundane matter of fulfilling a FOIA request.""
+
+Asked Friday if he had ""certainty and confidence"" that Clinton will not be indicted over the email controversy, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said any decision to prosecute Clinton would rest with the Justice Department.
+
+""That is a decision to be made solely by independent prosecutors,"" Earnest said. ""But again, based on what we know from the Department of Justice, it does not seem to be headed in that direction.""
+
+The State Department released more than 900 of Clinton's emails Friday -- 242 of which received classification upgrades: 11 to ""secret"" and 209 more to ""confidential,"" along with the 22 emails containing ""top secret"" information -- but the release fell well behind the judge-imposed timetable for producing all of her emails.
+
+Among the most interesting correspondence:
+
+This month's release was supposed to be the final one and include just over 9,000 pages of documents -- the largest number to date.
+
+That delay was then compounded by a huge snowstorm that shut down the federal government for several days, according to the State Department's motion.
+
+Several prominent Republicans, including presidential hopefuls, quickly condemned Clinton, the Democratic 2016 front-runner, over Friday's developments.
+
+""The new e-mail release is a disaster for Hillary Clinton. At a minimum, how can someone with such bad (judgment) be our next president?"" GOP front-runner Donald Trump tweeted.
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Clinton's email use was a ""disqualifier"" for the White House.
+
+""Hillary Clinton put some of the highest, most sensitive intelligence information on her private server because maybe she thinks she's above the law,"" Rubio said at a town hall event in Clinton, Iowa.
+
+Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that Clinton's email controversy would seriously imperil her presidential aspirations.
+
+""We are talking about serious offenses for which the Obama Justice Department threw the book at General (David) Petraeus,"" Cruz said. ""And justice needs to be enforced fairly and impartially.""
+
+And Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted that Clinton and the Obama administration have ""obfuscated and misled at every available opportunity,"" adding that she has ""removed all doubt that she cannot be trusted with the presidency.""
+
+But Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said classification determinations ""are often very complex.""
+
+""It's important to remember that none of these emails had any classification markings at the time they were sent, and Secretary Clinton and her staff were responding to world events in real time without the benefit of months of analysis after the fact,"" Schiff said.
+
+Meanwhile, Clinton's top Democratic 2016 rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, said in a statement that ""there is a legal process in place which should proceed and not be politicized.""
+
+""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,"" he said then to applause.",REAL
+1863,Hillary's Iowa reset: Is it enough?,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+5324,Huma’s Weiner Dogs Hillary, ,FAKE
+7531,A lawyer explains how Ariel could have got out of her contract with Ursula in The Little Mermaid,"Next Prev Swipe left/right A lawyer explains how Ariel could have got out of her contract with Ursula in The Little Mermaid 
+The internet is a wonderful thing, with all kinds of information – case in point, writer and lawyer Shon Faye has provided this comprehensive account of the legal ways Ariel could have annulled her contract with Ursula The Sea Witch in Disney’s The Little Mermaid . one of the cutest/saddest things I ever did was write out the legal ways Ariel could have annulled her contract with Ursula The Sea Witch pic.twitter.com/xyaGiuXW5U",FAKE
+8158,Obese Woman Loses More Than 100 Kilograms After Breaking Up With Her Feeder Boyfriend,"Patty Sanchez, 51, used to eat 13,000 calories a day and weigh more than 320 kilograms as she tried to satisfy boyfriend's fantasies
+
+Patty weighed more than 320 kilograms when she split from her feeder boyfriend, who was constantly encouraging and enabling her weight gain. 
+
+Patty Sanchez has gone from 320 kilograms to 215 kilograms after years of constant eating with the encouragement of her ex-boyfriend and online fat fetishists. 
+
+Having purposefully consumed up to 13,000 calories per day for years on end, it is a minor miracle in itself that Patty has made it to 51 and is in position to change her lifestyle. 
+
+After splitting from her boyfriend of ten years, Patty soon realized that she had become very isolated and vulnerable due to her size.
+
+
+The mother-of-four has spoken out about the positive effect weight loss has had on both her personal and family life, also allowing her to undertake a wide range of everyday tasks previously impossible to her. 
+""I was tremendous – and I was dying a slow death.I realized that the feeding relationship I was in and the squashing was benefiting others, but it wasn’t for me. The weight loss had a lot to do with my break up with my ex – I was being served every meal daily, and when we broke up I had to take care of myself.I never feared death before – it was something I never thought about when I was getting bigger and bigger. But when I reached my lowest and couldn’t walk to the bathroom without getting winded I was worried I wouldn’t be there for my kids and grand kids. My struggles didn’t fully surface until I was single and had no one to help me and couldn’t cook, bathe, or leave the house – it was very lonely,” she said in an interview. Today, with the help of her sons, Patty eats 3,000 calories a day and is more mobile. 
+
+She said: “I stay away from fast food and eat more vegetables, fruits and poultry. Now I can do things that people take for granted that I couldn’t do - like walk, bathe, and paint my toenails which I couldn't reach for years."" 
+
+
+“My children are very proud of me for changing my life around - we have a better relationship now,"" she added.
+
+
+Sizzling Feed SOURCE ",FAKE
+8593,Trump Supporter Arrested for Voting Twice…to fight “vote rigging”,"He who has no name speaks: Italian earthquakes were retribution for anti-Jewish UNESCO vote ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Trump Supporter Arrested for Voting Twice…to fight “vote rigging” By GPD on October 29, 2016 
+Terri Rote is seen in a police booking photo on Oct. 27, 2016. 
+DES MOINES, Iowa — Des Moines police have charged a woman with election misconduct, a Class D felony, after officials reported she voted twice. 
+Des Moines police Sgt. Paul Parizek says officers charged 55-year-old Terri Rote with first-degree election misconduct on Thursday after being notified by elections officials that she had submitted two absentee ballots. 
+According to an Iowa Public Radio report, Rote voted two times for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. 
+“I wasn’t planning on doing it twice, it was spur of the moment,” Rote said in an interview with the radio station before she added an oft-repeated line on the Trump campaign trail: “The polls are rigged.” 
+She was booked into the Polk County Jail and released after posting a $5,000 bond.",FAKE
+5191,"Do Trump's Groping, Clinton's Lying, &amp; Johnson's Honesty Disqualify Them from the Presidency?","""It's like we're testing the proposition that candidates themselves don't matter, that the only thing that matters is their party affiliation. We're offering up people two totally garbage candidates and then saying, 'OK, what if we made it worse.'""
+
+That's Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward kicking off a new Reason podcast hosted by me and featuring guest Eli Lake, who writes about national security for Bloomberg View.
+
+In the 40 minutes of fast-paced, wide-ranging conversation, we talk about whether alleged past assaults by Donald Trump should disqualify him from the presidency, how Wikileaks is confirming everyone's lowest opinion of Hillary Clinton, and how Gary Johnson's lack of guile may make him unsuited to be commander in chief. Also: Does the United States need to bust Russia's lip to maintain international order and are we living in a fully post-fact world?
+
+Produced by Ian Keyser. Listen by clicking below.
+
+Subscribe to our audio podcast at iTunes.
+
+Subscribe to our video podcast at iTunes.
+
+Like us on Facebook.",REAL
+282,GOP leadership race gets personal,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+4821,Frustrated Trump advisers pan him for lousy debate prep (anonymously),"Donald Trump believes he won the first presidential debate. He’s proclaimed that publicly and told me so himself.
+
+Some of his advisers disagree, and they believe his debate prep was something of a disaster.
+
+One well-placed source told me that there were too many people in the room during these sessions, as many as a dozen at a time, and some, including two generals, had no experience with debates or even campaigns. The result was that the candidate got lots of conflicting advice on what to say and do from a team that hadn’t even agreed internally on the best strategies.
+
+I’m also told that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, hardly unabashed Trump fans, provided debate advice by phone.
+
+The result, in this source’s view, is that Trump was overprepared, which left him without a clear plan to deliver his message or respond to Hillary Clinton’s jibes.
+
+A harsher indictment was delivered to the New York Times, one in which Trump advisers attempted to blame the boss.
+
+It’s striking that they would criticize their candidate from behind a curtain of anonymity. In effect, they’re saying, hey, don’t blame us, we tried to tell him but he wouldn’t listen.
+
+Or viewed another way, they are using the press to send him a message that he needs to change his approach for the second debate in St. Louis.
+
+Now much of this is inside baseball. Hillary Clinton is widely credited, even by many conservative commentators, as having delivered a strong performance at Hofstra and kept her opponent on the defensive. She will probably get a polling bump of a couple of points. But Trump’s supporters remain in in his corner after watching him go toe-to-toe with a former secretary of State without committing a major gaffe.
+
+When campaigns are in a tailspin, loyalty sometimes melts as its consultants and strategists scramble to salvage their own reputations at the boss’ expense. But Trump, against all the odds set by the pundits, is in an extremely competitive race against Clinton and could win the thing.
+
+“Campaign advisers to Donald J. Trump, concerned that his focus and objectives had dissolved during the first presidential debate on Monday, plan to more rigorously prepare him for his next face-off”—but that “whether he is open to practicing meticulously is a major concern.”
+
+Yes, that is the sound of some folks throwing the nominee under the bus.
+
+These unnamed sources “were privately awash in second-guessing about why he stopped attacking Mrs. Clinton on trade and character issues and instead grew erratic, impatient and subdued as the night went on. In interviews, seven campaign aides and advisers, most of whom sought anonymity to speak candidly, expressed frustration and discouragement over their candidate’s performance.”
+
+ 
+
+ The Gang of Seven is clearly ticked off.
+
+The last time this kind of internal carping hit the press, during the “let Trump be Trump” debate, Paul Manafort was gone and Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway were tapped to run the show.
+
+Trump’s fans are angry at the media coverage portraying him as having lost the debate, at least according to my Twitter feed. And who knows? It’s not like the press hasn’t been repeatedly wrong about Trump.
+
+But a story in which some of Trump’s own advisers are anonymously quoted as saying he was “erratic” in a debate watched by 84 million people doesn’t help the cause. Even if the Times reporters sought out these sources, you don’t usually see Hillary advisers anonymously griping about their candidate.
+
+Even successful campaigns go through near-death experiences. Clinton was sliding in the polls through her pneumonia period and Democrats were starting to panic. In the end, the burden is on Trump himself, and not his inner circle, to find a way to win.
+
+--Howard Dean standing by his ludicrous suggestion that Donald Trump might have a coke problem makes me want to ... scream. It’s outrageous for a doctor, ex-governor and former presidential candidate and party chairman to act like a smear merchant. Kudos to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough for calling on his colleague to apologize.
+
+--A former Chris Christie ally, David Wildstein, has testified that the governor laughed when he told him the George Washington Bridge lanes were being closed as an act of political retaliation. I don’t know if that’s true, and the former presidential candidate has denied it, but imagine if Trump had chosen Christie as his running mate.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+5902,Re: Are There 4 Million Dead Voters Waiting To Elect Hillary Clinton?,"Dead Coloradans are Lining Up to Vote for Hillary. Is the zombie apocalypse upon us? 
+According to a report by the Washington Examiner , 
+Local officials in Colorado acknowledged “very serious” voter fraud after learning of votes cast in multiple elections under the named of recently-deceased residents. 
+A local media outlet uncovered the fraud by comparing voting history databases in the state with federal government death records . “Somebody was able to cast a vote that was not theirs to cast,” El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Chuck Broerman told CBS4 while discussing what he called a “very serious” pattern of people mailing in ballots on behalf of the dead. 
+It’s not clear how many fraudulent ballots have been submitted in recent years. CBS4 reported that it “found multiple cases” of dead people voting around the state, revelations that have provoked state criminal investigations. 
+There are dozens of documented examples of dead people voting and they can be found all over the internet. 
+One thing is for certain. 
+The Clinton operatives seem to believe in the old adage… if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’… On October 1st it was reported “Young Virginia Democrat Andrew Spieles confessed this week to registering 19 dead people to vote for Hillary.” 
+You can’t stop these people. You can call the election rigged if you want, but how can we argue with people who have the power to summon the dead? 
+When I die, I plan to vote conservative. 
+OK, my attempts to be humorous are often lost in an overcrowded sea of stupidity. This would not seem to be the exception. 
+The only good Hillary voters are obviously the dead ones , because at least they have plausible deniability. Hey bro, “ I didn’t vote for Hillary — I died in 1960. ” 
+Likely story. 
+Article posted with permission from DCClothesline Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . shares",FAKE
+5886,Human Rights group alarmed at extra-judicial killings of MQM workers' by para-military force in Pakistan,"(7 fans) - Advertisement - Human right groups are alarmed at the spate of deaths of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) workers in the custody of para-military force in Karachi. The MQM has called these brutal deaths as extra-judicial killings. On September 30, Syed Abdul Naveed, a MQM worker who was killed in the custody of para-military force. According to MQM sources, Naveed was brutally and inhumanly tortured to death while in custody and his dead body was dumped by the para-military rangers in rural Sindh, area called ""Ounger"" in the District of Thatta. 24News-HD TV reported, on August 28, that a MQM worker was killed in police custody. Leader of the Opposition in the Sindh Provincial Assembly MQM's Khawaja Izhar-ul-Hassan called this terrorism by the government agencies. 
+In March, MQM leader, Dr. Farooq Sattar, said that some forty MQM workers were beaten up in Central Prison in Karachi by para-military force in order to extract 'favorable' statements from them. Not surprisingly in May,Director General (DG) Rangers, Major General Bilal Akber, accepted that a deceased MQM worker, Aftab Ahmed, was tortured by Rangers in custody for 90 days. General's statement came after pictures and videos were seen doing rounds on the social media, showing the corpse of the deceased MQM worker having major torture marks across his body. In June, Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) worker Waseem mysteriously died in custody at the Aziz Bhatti police station in Karachi. Waseem had been arrested by the police a few days back for allegedly possessing illegal firearms. According to DIG Police East Munir Sheikh, an FIR was filed in light of the findings of the post mortem report and all the concerned police officials have been taken into custody. Tellingly, in August, the Senate's Functional Committee on Human Rights rejected a report submitted by Sindh para-military Rangers regarding the human rights violations in Karachi Operation, declaring it ""fake and phony"". In the report, prepared by an unknown human rights organization called ""Human Rights Commission on South Asia"", Sindh Rangers were given a clean chit. Sindh Rangers has obtained a false report by a dubious NGO in a bid to convince the parliamentary body that ""it [Rangers] is not involved in human rights violations while conducting operation in Karachi"", Senator Farhatullah Babar said during the senate panel meeting. Rangers, commanded by Army Officers, are deployed in Karachi under the Anti-Terrorism Act, which provides broad powers to the Rangers and other state security forces that have facilitated serious human rights violations, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch. Soldiers are permitted to ""shoot to kill"" after giving a warning, but are not bound by human rights standards that permit the use of lethal force only in self-defense or to protect the lives of others. They can conduct arrests and searches of property without a warrant. - Advertisement - The Rangers are a border security federal force under the Ministry of Interior, but operate under the command of the Pakistan Army. Military control over the Rangers effectively transfers key law enforcement duties in Karachi to the armed forces, which has a long record of committing human rights violations with impunity, the Human Rights Watch said. The Rangers have been implicated in serious human rights abuses, including torture and other ill-treatment of criminal suspects, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearances. The Rangers have been implicated in abuses across the political spectrum, Human Rights Watch said. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), a nongovernmental human rights organization, has also criticized the Rangers for enforced disappearances and other violations of due process rights, and stressed ""the need for transparency in security operations."" The Human Rights Watch in its annual report pointed out that under pressure from the military leadership, the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ceded significant constitutional and decision-making authority to the armed forces in 2015, particularly in the areas of national security, foreign policy, and human rights. ""The military muzzled dissenting and critical voices in nongovernmental organizations and media. The Rangers, a paramilitary force, were given complete control over law enforcement in the city of Karachi, where there were reports of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture."" Shafi Burfat, exiled chairman of a nationalist group, Jeay Sindh Muttahida Mahaz (JSMM), in a statement published on his website criticized the operation against the MQM. He says: - Advertisement - ""Sindh is a permanent colony of Punjabi imperialism and Punjabi Army will savagely, brutally execute every Sindhi conscious person who stands against the occupation, oppression and aggression of Punjabi military establishment. We strongly condemn harassment, arrests, abductions, torture, enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings of MQM activists All the bloodshed, plunder, torture, law enforcement violations are state created phenomenon created by Pakistani military,(the intelligence agency) ISI and its local stooges to exploit the resources of Sindh."" About 90 percent of Pakistan army belongs to Punjab province. 
+Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) came in direct conflict with Army on August 22, when its London-based self-exiled leader Altaf Hussain criticized the army and government officials of systematically targeting his workers.",FAKE
+2033,Don’t underestimate Rand Paul as a 2016 presidential contender,"The first nine months of 2013 have convinced us of one thing: Rand Paul acts, and the rest of the potential 2016 Republican presidential field reacts.
+
+On drones, the senator from Kentucky led a 13-hour filibuster that drew Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), among others, to the floor in support. On Syria, Paul was out front in his opposition to a military strike — a position that more than two dozen of his Republican Senate colleagues came to share.
+
+Paul, in short, seems to be a step or two in front of the ongoing transformation of the Republican Party from a hawkish conservatism to a sort of populist libertarianism.
+
+That’s not to say, of course, that significant strains of resistance to the vision of the Republican Party that Paul is offering don’t remain. They do. And it remains to be seen whether the establishment, such as it is — elected officials and major donors, primarily — can unite to keep Paul from the nomination in favor of a politically “safer” choice such as Rubio or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
+
+And Paul, as he showed with his civil rights comments during his 2010 Senate campaign in Kentucky, holds some controversial views that can — and will — get him into trouble in the glare of the national spotlight.
+
+But anyone who laughs at Paul as a serious contender, dismisses him as just a carbon copy of his father — former representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.) — or otherwise writes him off would do well to study the year in politics so far. No one in the GOP has had a better year than Paul. And it’s not all that close.
+
+Below are our rankings of the 10 candidates with the best chance of winding up as the Republican presidential nominee. While this should go without saying, making predictions in 2013 about 2016 is something short of purely scientific.
+
+10. Mike Pence: The Indiana governor is flying way under the radar at the moment, but he has the makings of a potential 2016 dark horse. Social and fiscal conservatives like him, he’s a charismatic communicator and, perhaps most important, he doesn’t work in Washington.
+
+9. John Kasich: The Ohio governor’s poll numbers have recovered remarkably well from his first few years in office, and he now looks like a modest favorite for reelection against much-touted Democratic nominee Ed FitzGerald. If Kasich wins in 2014, he has a case to make as a swing-state Midwestern governor who previously served as the chairman of the House Budget Committee and who ran, albeit briefly, for president in 2000.
+
+8. Bobby Jindal: We believe that Jindal’s stock was probably a bit too high a year ago and is now a bit too low. His numbers in Louisiana still aren’t great, but they are better than earlier this year. Jindal’s decision to reject Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act will be a feather in his cap among conservative presidential-primary voters.
+
+7. Scott Walker : The Wisconsin governor may have a bit more of a reelection race on his hands than he originally thought with wealthy former Trek executive Mary Burke running for the Democratic nomination. And we hear from reliable Wisconsin sources that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is more interested in running than we believed. If Ryan runs, it’s hard to see Walker also getting in.
+
+6. Ted Cruz : Cruz is the biggest attraction among rank-and-file Republicans at the moment. He evokes genuine passion among the base — and that’s not ever to be underestimated. But it’s also worth remembering that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) held that title once upon a time, and she held it much closer to the time when people were actually set to cast votes for president.
+
+5. Jeb Bush: This is our holding-pattern ranking for the former Florida governor. If he announces that he’s running or even that he’s moving toward running — heck, we’d take a Bush trip to Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina — then he is probably our No. 1 on the list.
+
+4. Paul Ryan: See the note above about our previous underestimating of Ryan’s interest in running. The coming fights over the government shutdown and raising the debt ceiling are ready-made for Ryan and will (re)increase his profile nationally. We still are skeptical that he has the political chops to run a two-year-plus campaign for the Republican nomination, though.
+
+3. Marco Rubio: Rubio’s front-runner status has clearly come into question in the aftermath of his work to pass comprehensive immigration reform through the Senate. The bill’s fate remains decidedly uncertain in the GOP-controlled House and is still not popular among the party’s grass roots. For those who write off Rubio because of immigration, however, go back and watch his speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention. He is someone of considerable political talent.
+
+2. Chris Christie: Yes, Christie has something of a base problem given the false idea that he somehow cost Mitt Romney the 2012 election because of his embrace of President Obama after Hurricane Sandy. But Christie’s regular-guy populism is a nice fit for the times.
+
+1. Rand Paul: He’s not a clear front-runner. But, if you are looking for a candidate who can (a) raise the money, (b) has a clear and compelling message and (c) has an obvious edge in an early state (Iowa), then Paul is the only person in the top three who checks all three boxes. We repeat what we said above: Underestimate him at your peril.",REAL
+4557,Russia joins France striking ISIS stronghold in Syria,"Russian military might joined French warplanes Tuesday as the two nations struck back at the Islamic State four days after terror teams carried out coordinated attacks in Paris, leaving 129 people dead.
+
+10 French fighter jets carried out new airstrikes on ISIS targets in Syria, according to French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.
+
+Also, twelve Russian long-range bombers including supersonic Tu-22M “Backfires” flew from a base in Mozdok, Russia near the border of Georgia and Azerbaijan and launched cruise missiles inside Raqqa, a U.S. official with knowledge of the mission told Fox News.
+
+The supersonic bombers flew over the Caspian Sea, Iran, Iraq and into Syria before unleashing a volley of cruise missiles into Raqqa. The U.S. military is still assessing the damage.
+
+A defense official in the Middle East tells Fox News that despite the countries' shared objective of targeting ISIS, it is “highly unlikely” the French and Russians coordinated their strikes. That official also said he did not think the French would communicate with the Russians in secret.
+
+Fox News is told Russia did inform the U.S. before launching the new assault. The official characterized the Russian effort as “not devastating.”
+
+The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the crash of a Russian passenger plane over Egypt last month, killing 224 people. On Tuesday, Russia's security service said a homemade explosive device brought down the airliner, calling it a ""terrorist"" act.
+
+Cruise missiles were also fired Monday from the Caspian Sea from Russian Navy missile boats, some of the same vessels which launched a similar salvo into Syria last month.
+
+Russia's defense minister also said its warplanes fired cruise missiles on militant positions in Syria's Idlib and Aleppo provinces. Sergei Shoigu told reporters the missiles were fired from Tu-160 and Tu-95 warplanes. The Islamic State has positions in Aleppo province, whereas Idlib has the presence of the Nusra militant group.
+
+Meantime, President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian missile cruiser Moskva, currently in the Mediterranean, to start cooperating with the French military on operations in Syria. Putin said a French aircraft carrier task force is to approach the Moskva soon and the cruiser is to ""cooperate with them as with allies.""
+
+Germany and Italy ruled out any role in the air campaign against ISIS in Syria. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said ""it doesn't make sense if we add to the 16 nations which are carrying out air attacks.""
+
+Germany is providing weapons and equipment to Kurdish fighters battling ISIS in northern Iraq. Steinmeier said it ""was the right strategy"" because they are holding ground and making ""slight territorial gains.""
+
+Italian Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti said her country was already planning to beef up its actions in Iraq. While ruling out an Italian military role in Syria, she said Italy ""assured France of its maximum availability"" in other cooperation.
+
+Also Tuesday, France invoked a never-before-used article of the EU's Lisbon Treaty obliging members of the 28-nation bloc to give ""aid and assistance by all the means in their power"" to a member country that is ""the victim of armed aggression on its territory."" French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said EU partners could help ""either by taking part in France's operations in Syria or Iraq, or by easing the load or providing support for France in other operations.""
+
+The airstrikes came as The Wall Street Journal, citing two Western security officials, reported that 27-year-old Abdelhamid Abaaoud had been sought as a target for an airstrike, but could not be located. A Western intelligence official told the paper that efforts to monitor communications between Abaaoud in Syria and jihadists in Europe were complicated by an inability to tell whether Abaaoud or his teenage brother was speaking.
+
+Abaaoud was named by French officials as the key figure suspected of planning and organizing the Paris attacks, which included a series of suicide bombings outside the country's national stadium and a massacre at a concert hall.
+
+He came to public notice in Belgium last year for taking his then 13-year-old brother with him to Syria and appearing in an ISIS propaganda video in which he boasted about his pride in piling the dead bodies of ""infidel"" enemies into a trailer. At some point, Abaaoud returned to Belgium, only to escape the authorities in January of this year after police foiled a plot to attack officers he had masterminded on behalf of a cell based in the Belgian town of Verviers. In the ensuing gun battle, two of Abaaoud's alleged accomplices were killed, but Abaaoud somehow escaped.
+
+He told the monthly ISIS magazine Dabiq in its February issue that he slipped away from European intelligence agencies because “Allah blinded their vision."" He added, ""My name and picture were all over the news, yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them and leave safely when doing so became necessary.""
+
+French officials who identified Abaaoud as a prime suspect to The Associated Press cited chatter from ISIS figures that Abaaoud had recommended a concert as an ideal target for inflicting maximum casualties, as well as electronic communications between Abaaoud and one of the Paris attackers who blew himself up.
+
+Western officials told the Journal they had no knowledge of the planned attacks on the French capital as they sought Abaaoud, and admitted they did not know whether his death would have been enough to stop the attacks, which were carried out by seven suicide attackers, including a set of three brothers.
+
+A Belgian official told the Journal ""it is certain"" that Abaaoud knew Salah Abdeslam, who was being hunted by authorities across Europe early Tuesday on suspicion of his having been involved in the Paris terror. The two jihadists grew up not far from each other in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek and spent time in the same prison for petty crimes.
+
+People in Paris fought back in their own way -- by continuing to eat, drink and be merry. Bar and restaurant owners urged people to return to their local nightspots Tuesday, relaying the message online and on social media with the slogan ""Tous au bistrot"" -- Everyone to the bistro.
+
+The message is backed by restaurant website Le Fooding, which says people should go out to pay tribute to the victims, support the food and drink industry and show that ""France will not give in to fear.""
+
+Other Parisians are posting pictures on Twitter of themselves on the city's many cafe and restaurant patios, using the hashtag #JeSuisAuTerrasse -- I'm on the patio.
+
+Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from The Wall Street Journal.",REAL
+238,John Boehner's parting gift to Paul Ryan,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+6628,Six Gulf Protectors Arrested Challenging Gulf Oil Drilling,"Email 
+Six Gulf Protectors were arrested outside the New Orleans office of the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management . They were taken into custody by Federal Protection Service agents of the Department of Homeland Security during an action by Nonewleases.org urging President Obama to cancel oil drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico. 
+“We began the event in solidarity with those from the Sioux Nation who are standing up to the Dakota Access pipeline ,” said Anne Rolfes of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade , one of the organizations participating. “As Gulf Protectors we are calling on President Obama to live up to his climate legacy and permanently cancel future leases in the Gulf of Mexico.” 
+The six arrested were: Alicia Cooke, Danil Faust, Alison Kalnik, Ben Quimby, Noah Rahman, and Reverend Jim Vanderweele. Booked on federal charges of obstructing an entrance to a federal building, they were advised they have to each pay a fine of $530 or go before federal court for trial. 
+Alicia Cooke, a member of 350 Louisiana , explained why she was willing to be arrested. “To maintain a livable climate, experts estimate that around 80% of existing fossil fuel resources must stay in the ground. At current consumption levels, we need to place an immediate moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure projects and we also must scale back on existing projects. The industry and government executives who dismiss our concerns out of hand because we drive fuel-powered vehicles or use air conditioning are missing the point. A transition to a renewable energy economy at the speed required by science will not be easy for any of us. It will take a full-hearted acceptance of climate science and an enormous collective will. But when you look at the climate math, it is quite literally our only choice.” 
+Iris Carter of Concerned Citizens of Norco explained why she was there to protect the Gulf. “Oil is killing people. Just look at my own family. I grew up between a Shell refinery and a Shell chemical plant and when my mother and sister got sick, the doctors asked if we lived near pollution. It’s not fair. And now people have to go and fish in the Gulf – after oil companies leave all that mess. Look what they left from the spill that BP did. That was bad. And it’s no better. They keep going out and drilling and spilling in our Gulf. And that’s just not right.” 
+Cheri Fotlin of BOLD Louisiana challenged the feds for excluding the public. “The head of BOEM , Abigail Hopper, had promised to come down and meet directly with our communities who continue to be adversely affected by oil production in and along the Gulf. At the last minute, she backed out. Additionally, BOEM recently stopped allowing public participation at point-of-sale lease auctions. At every turn our voices have been oppressed by this federal agency. We deserve to be heard. If she won’t come to us, then we have no choice but to go to BOEM ourselves to make our wishes known. We want protection. We want respect for our lives. No new leases, not here, not anywhere!” 
+Four others were arrested in August at the same place and charged with state criminal trespass. Their trial is still pending. 
+The group promises to return and escalate their actions to protect the Gulf.",FAKE
+1674,Jeb Bush just proved that Dubya was the smart one all along,"The popular conservative argument that George W. Bush ""kept us safe"" from terrorism has always been somewhat undermined by the fact that the vast majority of domestic terrorism deaths in American history occurred while Bush was in office. But it turns out that it took Donald Trump to offer an argument that Democrats have always shied away from, telling Bloomberg TV, ""When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.""
+
+As phrased by Trump, the argument is provocative to the point of poor taste, but in attempting to rebut it, Jeb Bush went and made exactly the explicit claim that the doctrine of ""Bush kept us safe"" has always avoided — that the period of time during which Bush kept us safe includes 9/11 itself.
+
+Pre-Jeb, nobody made the argument in that way, because it's obviously ridiculous.
+
+Instead, kept-us-safe-ism has tended to indulge in the fantasy that Bush was inaugurated in mid-September 2001 rather than early late January. Through this metaphysical sleight of hand, the events of 9/11 themselves neither refute nor bolster the notion that the Bush years were a time of safety. With his clumsy effort to parry Trump, however, Jeb has given away the whole game.
+
+After all, ""we"" clearly were not safe on 9/11.",REAL
+5086,Bill Clinton makes powerful case for Hillary in personal speech at the DNC,"Hillary Clinton’s historic moment finally arrived on Tuesday night, accompanied by an intensely personal speech from her husband Bill, that sought to recast her image as a symbol of the political establishment.
+
+
+
+“She’s the best darn change-maker I ever met in my life,” insisted the former president, recalling decades of Hillary Clinton’s work as a social radical. “This woman has never been satisfied with the status quo in anything.”
+
+On a night when she became the first woman to be nominated by a major party to run for the White House, Hillary Clinton fully embraced the historic significance of the occasion.
+
+She joined the party by live satellite link from New York to the accompanying sound of breaking glass, disrupting a black and white montage of the 44 male presidents of the United States who have gone before her.
+
+“I can’t believe we just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet,” said Clinton. “If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch, can I just say, I may become the first woman president but one of you is next.”
+
+Amid a growing populist challenge from Republican Donald Trump and scenes of revolt from some Bernie Sanders supporters, her husband’s powerfully persuasive speech may go some way to restoring momentum to the campaign.
+
+“Hillary will make us stronger together,” he said. “You know it, because she spent a lifetime doing it. I hope you will do it. I hope you will elect her. Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows tend to think more about our children and grandchildren.”
+
+The speech capped a pivotal day for the party, as it sought to move on from scenes of division, and capitalise on Clinton’s symbolic breakthrough.
+
+She will address the crowd directly on Thursday in a formal acceptance of the nomination but for now, speeches first from Michelle Obama and now from Bill Clinton have done the most to counter a much darker vision of America presented by Republican candidate Donald Trump.
+
+
+
+“If she wins she’s coming back for you to take you along on the ride for America’s future,” said former president Clinton as he recalled campaigning with coalminers in West Virginia and urged to the party to do more to create more new jobs in the US economy.
+
+
+
+It was almost the only overtly political message of his own. In contrast with past speeches, where the former president has risked overshadowing the campaign, this one sounded more like the personal speeches made by the wives of male candidates.
+
+In an azure blue tie that picked out the colours of the arena, and with his hands shaking slightly, Clinton delivered a highly personal account of their courtship and marriage that seemed at times to be an attempt to make America fall in love with the girl he first met in the spring of 1971.
+
+Skipping over the awkward moments in a very public, and at times visibly flawed, marriage, Clinton instead said: “I married my best friend,” recalling two failed proposal attempts and then describing when Clinton’s water broke during her pregnancy with Chelsea – undoubtedly a first in a speech about a US presidential candidate.
+
+“The first time I saw her was in a class on political and civil rights … [she had] big blond hair, big glasses, wore no makeup and exuded a sense that I found magnetic,” said a clearly infatuated and somewhat awed Clinton. “I knew I might be starting something I couldn’t stop.”
+
+After spending nearly an hour describing her political and personal accomplishments he turned only briefly to her opponent. And he issued a direct challenge to the two-dimensional “cartoon” image of his wife which had been painted by her political foes.
+
+“How does this square with what you heard at the Republican convention? One is real, the other is made up,” said Bill. “You just have to decide which is which my fellow Americans … Good for you, because earlier today you nominated the real one.”
+
+
+
+The well-received speech, seeking to rewrite the accepted wisdom about her candidacy, may help galvanise the campaign in much the same way Bill Clinton helped revive Barack Obama’s listless 2012 effort.
+
+But the space was created by another reconcilation between competing Democrats earlier in the evening.
+
+Bernie Sanders left the arena with his head held high on Tuesday. In contrast to the chaotic scenes of protest from his supporters that marred attempts at unity on day one, the room largely came together for the historic night, with few boos at all.
+
+The healing was helped by fresh opportunities for the Sanders campaign to celebrate its success and vow to continue its fight for more radical social reform. “Because this is a movement fuelled by love it can never be stopped or defeated,” said Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as she formally proposed Sanders for the nomination.
+
+Shortly before calling for a suspension of the rules to move directly to the nomination of his former rival, Sanders appeared emotional as he listened to his tearful brother Larry announce delegates from the Democrats Abroad primary.
+
+The pageant of democracy hid some controversy too. A small group of Sanders supporters staged a sit-in of the media centre, largely in protest at the party’s use of superdelegates to bolster Clinton’s margin of victory in states where Sanders won the most votes.
+
+Clinton was at home watching events from her New York state home in Chappaqua, but her daughter Chelsea was on hand in a venue packed with rising female stars from the Democratic party and wider US society.
+
+Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, herself a noted breaker of glass ceilings, received one of the warmest welcomes of the evening for a commanding speech that listed Clinton’s foreign affairs experience. Trump, she claimed, “has already done damage just by running for president”.
+
+Oscar winner Meryl Streep signed off the night by asking: “What does it take to be the first female anything? It takes grit and it takes grace.”
+
+Placing Clinton in a lineage of great American women from Rosa Parks and Amelia Earhart to Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt, she told the delegates: “You people have made history and you’re gonna make history again in November because Hillary Clinton will be our first woman president … she’ll be the first but she won’t be the last.”
+
+Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO series Girls, led a series of celebrity endorsements that joined the dots between Clinton’s breaking of glass ceilings and Trump’s dismissive comments about women.
+
+“According to Donald Trump, my body is probably like, a two,” she began. “His rhetoric about women takes us back to a time when we were meant to be beautiful and silent.”
+
+“Donald Trump is not making America great again; he is making America hate again,” added fellow actor America Ferrera, from the TV series Ugly Betty.
+
+California senator Barbara Boxer emerged on stage to the soundtrack from Rocky, Philadelphia’s de facto theme tune. “Are you ready to elect the very first woman president of these United States of America?” “Yes!” came a reply that sounded less hesitant than usual, as confidence among Democrats grows.
+
+Some of the most powerful political messaging came via prepared video footage that interspersed live speakers with clips of Trump: exposing his lack of respect for women, or damning him with his own words as he described pregnancy as an irritant for employers.
+
+There were also the first hints of the national security issues, which are likely to be a big feature of the latter part of week. Republicans watching on television have criticised the Philadelphia convention for ignoring pressing safety issues, in a stadium devoid of the usual flags that tend to dominate US political sets.
+
+Survivors of the 9/11 attack on New York paid moving testimony to the support they received from Clinton as a local senator. “When New York needed her, she was there,” said Lauren Manning, a burns victim whose emotional speech provided some of the most powerful character testimony yet.
+
+Others tried a lighter tack in the campaign’s conscious effort to try to humanise a candidate still regarded as aloof and chilly by some Americans.
+
+Kentucky secretary of state Alison Lundergan Grimes began the night recalling that the soon-to-be nominee loves lifestyle TV “and can devour buffalo wings”. Barbara Mikulski said Clinton would fight for “macaroni and cheese” issues, boasting again of her taste for down-to-earth food.
+
+There were echoes of a similar attempt to add colour to the larger-than-life media image of Trump at last week’s Republican convention, as both campaigns grapple with the historically low favourability ratings of both candidates. But while Trump was pictured as a ruthless winner by his business associates, Clinton surrogates queued up to claim she was a people person – the opposite of the public stereotype.",REAL
+6373,CodeSOD: A Type of Test,"Remy Porter Remy escaped the enterprise world and now works as a consultant. Editor-in-Chief for TDWTF. 
+Unit tests are a wonderful tool for proving that your code works. Ideally, when you’re using other code, like say, the .NET Framework, you don’t write tests that test the framework itself. After all, didn’t Microsoft already do that? 
+David T ’s co-worker laughs at your naïveté . Why would you trust Microsoft ? You need to make sure the framework works as advertised. Which is why their unit tests are mostly made up of code like this: [Test] public void It_Converts_DataType_Text_Into_ConcreteType() { const string dataTypeText = ""System.DateTime""; var dataType = Type.GetType(dataTypeText); Assert.IsTrue(dataType == typeof(DateTime)); } [Test] public void It_Converts_String_Into_Given_DataType() { const string data = ""10-10-2014""; const string dataTypeText = ""System.DateTime""; var dataType = Type.GetType(dataTypeText); object newData = Convert.ChangeType(data, dataType); Assert.That(newData, Is.TypeOf<DateTime>()); } 
+Now, if the .NET Framework’s ability to load and recognize types ever breaks, David’s team will be the first to know. [Advertisement] Application Release Automation – build complex release pipelines all managed from one central dashboard, accessibility for the whole team. Download and learn more today!",FAKE
+5834,Man wildly optimistic ahead of flat pack assembly,"October 29, 2016 
+A man with no DIY experience has set aside around 15 minutes to assemble a 300 piece cabin bed this weekend. 
+Having glanced through the 36-page instruction booklet, 40-year-old Nick Ferguson plans to start the job at around 6pm on Saturday and will definitely be done by quarter past if not slightly before. 
+‘I’ll simultaneously be making a vegetarian chilli,’ he said. ‘And I’m going to complete both tasks in a cool and fun way that involves my three young children.’ 
+Meanwhile Mrs Ferguson was hastily making plans to take the kids to her mothers. 
+‘DIY with Nick is what you might call a journey,’ she said. 
+‘One that begins relatively calmly, progresses to high strength alcohol and ends with him screaming Rudyard Kiplings ‘If’ into the mirror at around 1.30am. 
+‘Usually with a serious injury to his face or hands.’ Matt Ward",FAKE
+473,Middle Class Decline Looms over Final Years of Obama Presidency,"The revival of middle-class jobs has been one of Obama's mantras since he took office in 2009 fighting the worst economic crisis in generations. It was a major theme of his last State of the Union address and is expected to feature in the one scheduled for Tuesday.
+
+Obama's administration can take credit for stabilizing the U.S. economy, which is growing again and last year added jobs at the fastest clip since 1999.
+
+But for the middle class the scars of the recession still run deep. Federal Reserve survey data show families in the middle fifth of the income scale now earn less and their net worth is lower than when Obama took office.
+
+In the six years through 2013, over the recession and recovery that have spanned Obama's tenure, jobs have been added at the top and bottom of the wage scale, a Reuters analysis of labor statistics shows. In the middle, the economy has shed positions - whether in traditional trades like machining or electrical work, white-collar jobs in human resources, or technical ones like computer operators.
+
+The trend is in plain sight in Dalton, Georgia, a manufacturing hub 90 miles (145 kilometers)north of Atlanta. Massive factories that made it ""the carpet capital of the world,"" were slammed by the collapse of the housing bubble. During the recession, with machines idle, they began investing heavily in new technology and are now laying plans to restore some lost jobs.
+
+But the new positions are more skewed to the high and low end, and there will be fewer of them per dollar of output than before the recession, said Brian Anderson, president of the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce.
+
+""We can produce a whole lot of new carpet with not a lot more people,"" Anderson said. Companies have spent between $1.5 and $2 billion on retooling and innovation, reducing demand for labor, while higher than average regional unemployment continued to hold down wages, he said.
+
+Firms like flooring giant Shaw Industries pared jobs - dropping 5,000 from a pre-recession labor force of 28,000 - but with new technology have rebuilt revenue to near previous levels. The company is boosting wages for master mechanics to around $30 an hour, but feels no pressure to increase wages for the unskilled positions it retains.
+
+The heavy investment in robotics and mechanization has raised expectations, said Paul Richard, Shaw's vice president of human resources. ""It has put more emphasis on associates that can bring technical skills.""
+
+Ahead of Obama's annual address, the business community is expecting the president to press for passage of the Trans-Pacific trade treaty, though a debate rages within the Democratic Party over whether that would create more middle class jobs than would be lost to increased imports.
+
+Others say he may seek more overtime pay for mid-level salaried workers, propose a higher federal minimum wage, or renew calls for major infrastructure spending.
+
+Obama has proposed expanded access to community college education and improved family leave policies, while some of his allies have called for an outright wealth transfer from the top to the middle.
+
+For Obama's legacy none of that may matter.
+
+The forces at work in the American economy appear so entrenched that Obama may be remembered as the president who pulled the nation from its worst downturn since the Great Depression, but failed to arrest deepening economic inequality.
+
+The Federal Reserve, under Obama appointee Janet Yellen, has put money in almost all Americans' pockets with near zero interest rates that have held down mortgage payments, allowed companies to reinvest, and boosted job creation.
+
+But the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances shows how uneven the distribution of that stimulus has been. Between 2010 and 2013, as recovery took hold and stock markets soared, the average net worth of families in the top 40 percent of income earners grew. For all others average net worth shrank, declining 19 percent for the middle fifth.
+
+Similarly, the average earnings for families in the top 10 percent grew more than 9 percent from 2010 through 2013, while those at other levels stagnated or shrank. For the middle fifth, average earnings fell 4.6 percent.
+
+Over the six years through 2013, the middle fifth's average annual family earnings fell to $47,243 from $53,008 while their average net worth dropped to $170,066 from $236,525.
+
+Obama ""had a good start in ending the recession and a good start to recovery and then we were knocked off that trajectory,"" said Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that advocates higher minimum wages and other policies to boost incomes.
+
+Bivens blamed the end of stimulus programs and a standoff in Congress over the federal debt ceiling that curbed government spending for the loss of initial momentum.
+
+To a degree the administration has also been a captive of broad technological and global trends. Automation and the offshoring of manufacturing and service jobs continue to transform industries and communities such as Dalton.
+
+Obama's changing rhetoric over time appears, increasingly, to acknowledge the magnitude of the challenge.
+
+In 2011, he called the erosion of middle class jobs a ""Sputnik moment"" that should energize the country to out-produce and out-innovate the rest of the world. By last year, the tone was more tempered: ""The cold, hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by - let alone get ahead. And too many still aren't working at all,"" Obama said in last year's State of the Union address ""Our job is to reverse these trends. It won't happen right away.""",REAL
+6520,Breaking Down the Crooked Clintons with Special Guest: ChangeDaChannel,"In this News Brief, Joe Joseph is joined by good friend and legendary YouTuber “ChangeDaChannel” to discuss the election and all the controversy surrounding the Clintons.
+It’s no surprise to most that the Clintons are as corrupt as they are, but it has been fairly surprising that with the abundance of evidence that has come forth, there isn’t more outrage.
+What can we expect in the days and weeks ahead? Joe and Ken muse about what’s to come.
+
+Watch on YouTube 
+Source: 
+BREAKING: I believe I have connected a convicted child abductor who was caught stealing children in Haiti with the Clintons from The_Donald 
+
+Check out ChangeDaChannel on YouTube . Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by The Daily Sheeple of www.TheDailySheeple.com . 
+This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.TheDailySheeple.com. ",FAKE
+4598,The 2016 election in 5 easy charts,"The race for president, the battle for control of Congress, and hundreds of state and local races are all being decided Tuesday.
+
+Here’s a guide to help you sort through what’s at stake and who might have the edge.",REAL
+76,America's racial generation gap takes an ugly political turn,"America's ongoing diversity explosion should be greeted with optimism because of the opportunities it presents for revitalizing our country, energizing our labor force and providing greater connectivity to the global economy. But there is a hidden danger lurking in the form of an emerging generation gap with strong racial overtones that, left unchecked, could become a significant obstacle to progress.
+
+This gap has been greatly inflamed by the rhetoric of the presidential primaries. Its potential harm was illustrated in the canceled Donald Trump event earlier this month in Chicago, which saw young people of mixed races protesting against the views of what one of them called ""white suburbanites"" who embrace, often angrily, a vision of America that would shut them out.
+
+With more than a subtle focus on race, each party's candidates have also been talking to different generations.
+
+Hillary Clinton emphasizes concern for children in Flint, Michigan, ending child poverty and deportation and reforming the criminal justice system. Bernie Sanders reaches out to young people concerned about student debt and jobs. In contrast, Trump continues to talk tough on immigration and keeping out Muslims, on maintaining traditional American values, backing strong policing and protecting the middle class from tax increases.
+
+These stances mirror generationally different attitudes revealed in a 2012 Pew Survey that showed that more than half of white baby boomers and seniors view the rise of newcomers from other countries as a threat to traditional American values and customs, a view that was held by a minority of the millennial generation born in the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Generations are also divided on the role of government, with older people eschewing more services and higher taxes, and younger ones embracing the programs those services support.",REAL
+4041,Video shows moment of 'El Chapo's' escape from prison,"(CNN) First he ducks into the shower of his prison cell, fully clothed. Then he leans down, but it's not clear what the infamous drug lord is doing; the short shower wall blocks him from the surveillance camera.
+
+Seconds later, Joaquin ""El Chapo"" Guzman gets back up, sits down on his cell bed and changes his shoes. He goes back into the shower and bends down again behind the wall -- but never resurfaces.
+
+Guzman, Mexico's most notorious drug kingpin, slipped through a hole under the shower and escaped through a mile-long tunnel to freedom, authorities said.
+
+And the newly released closed-circuit video shows how calmly and easily he did it.
+
+Mexican Interior Minister Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong said Guzman's cell was videotaped 24 hours a day. But the surveillance had two blind spots for privacy -- the toilet and the shower.
+
+Guzman didn't just evade the cameras; he also sidestepped another security measure with alarming ease.
+
+Guzman had a bracelet that monitored his every move, the interior minister said. But he left the bracelet behind before he crawled into the tunnel.
+
+'The hunt is back on'
+
+Investigators on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border are searching for signs of the fugitive drug lord. But it's no easy task, a top Drug Enforcement Administration official said.
+
+""The cartel headed by Chapo is probably the most well-financed, vicious, criminal entity we have ever seen, with unlimited resources both to bribe, corrupt and to transport,"" Deputy DEA Administrator Jack Riley said. ""So our job in this particular case, as much as it was over year ago when we captured him, is to use every legal tool we can, cooperate with our counterparts, and hit the ground. The hunt is back on.""
+
+The United States and Mexico are exchanging intelligence -- including details from informants -- in the manhunt, and the United States is providing technical support, a Mexican official said.
+
+Reports claiming authorities from the two countries aren't working together simply aren't true, Riley said.
+
+""Chapo is hoping and planning on the fact that the good guys, the cops on both sides of the border, don't talk to each other, don't connect the dots,"" Riley said. ""And I'm here to tell you we're doing that better now than we have ever done it. And if I was him, I'd be looking over my shoulder.""
+
+It's likely prison workers helped Guzman break out, the interior minister told reporters. Osorio Chong said he has already fired the prison director and other prison officials.
+
+They released what they said was a recent picture of Guzman, showing him with a shaved head and face -- but without his trademark mustache.
+
+How he did it
+
+The tunnel began with a 50-by-50-centimeter (20-by-20-inch) opening inside the shower of Guzman's cell, Rubido said. The tunnel stretched for about a mile and ended inside a half-built house.
+
+It's likely the Sinaloa cartel had spent years infiltrating the country's prison system, a Mexican official told CNN. Whoever helped in the plot likely had the architectural plans for the prison that pointed them toward the shower area, the official said.
+
+And this wasn't the first time.
+
+Nicknamed ""Shorty"" for his height, Guzman already had pulled off one elaborate escape from a maximum-security prison. In 2001, he managed to break free while reportedly hiding in a laundry cart. It took authorities 13 years to catch him -- closing in as he was sleeping at a Mexican beach resort.
+
+The Sinaloa cartel moves drugs by land, air and sea, including cargo aircraft, private aircraft, buses, fishing vessels and even submarines, the U.S. Justice Department has said.
+
+Guzman has been a nightmare for both sides of the border. He reigns over a multibillion-dollar global drug empire that supplied much of the marijuana, cocaine and heroin sold on the streets of the United States.
+
+Chicago has labeled him the city's ""Public Enemy No. 1.""
+
+And Riley, who spent years fighting Guzman's cartel there, said he's personally angered over the escape.
+
+""I spent nearly five years fighting what he was doing to the city, what he was doing to the communities by bringing heroin in and working a business relationship with street gangs,"" he said. ""For me, personally, it was a milestone to see him in jail. And when I got the call at 2:30 in the morning last Saturday, I about passed out.""
+
+But no matter what it takes, he said, investigators will find a way to capture him.
+
+""I am sure his security is probably second to none in the country. But that's not going to deter us. It didn't deter us the first time,"" Riley said. ""This guy is going to be back in jail.""",REAL
+4094,Charles Koch Pines For More Influence In Republican Presidential Primary,"WASHINGTON -- Despite leading a massive independent political operation and pumping untold millions into U.S. elections, billionaire Charles Koch is irritated at his extreme lack of influence in the Republican Party presidential primary.
+
+In a candid interview over a lunch of tilapia and pulled pork sandwiches with the Financial Times, Koch said he has presented the 12 remaining Republican candidates with a list of issues that he and his brother, David, care about -- to no avail. “[I]t doesn’t seem to faze them much,” he said. “You’d think we could have more influence.”
+
+Koch and his political operation announced they would spend approximately $889 million over the course of the two-year 2016 election cycle. This spending would not just cover electoral, lobbying and other political expenses, but also Koch’s gifts to universities so they'll teach curriculum adhering to his libertarian economic philosophy and to like-minded nonprofit think tanks influencing and expanding policy debates.
+
+Despite all this promised spending, both Charles and David Koch have declined to endorse a candidate in the primary -- which may be why they lack influence. Their refusal to endorse stems from a desire to save resources for the general election and avoid adding fuel to an internecine conflict within the party they most closely identify with. But, as Koch reveals in his comments to the Financial Times, he veers far from Republican orthodoxy on some basic policy questions -- notably, foreign policy.
+
+In his own statements, Koch has always adhered to a common libertarian position of non-intervention. He criticized the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq under President George W. Bush, which was backed by congressional majorities in both parties at the time. And now, he is criticizing Republicans for their belligerence towards Muslims and a certain GOP candidate's short-sightedness for proposing to carpet-bomb land held by terrorist groups.
+
+“We have been doing this for a dozen years,” he said. “We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Has that made us safer? Has that made the world safer? It seems like we’re more worried about it now than we were then, so we need to examine these strategies.”",REAL
+10022,"Private Equity Consultant Hamilton Lane Trots Out New Excuse, “Evil Populists,” for Already-Flagging Private Equity Performance","by Yves Smith 
+Private equity shills are readying the Blame Cannon for the industry’s widely forecast fall in returns. 
+Who are the allies of the private equity firms attempting to villianize as the cause of deteriorating performance? Not the 0.1% Masters of the Universe, who are always and every the sole cause of Good Things but never never to be found when Bad Things occur. No, it’s those evil “populists” interfering with the proper operation of the world according to private equity that is messing up returns. 
+We’re not making this up. From the Wall Street Journal : 
+The rise of “populist” politicians in western nations could challenge the ability of private-equity firms to do business and make money, according to a report from Hamilton Lane, one of the largest advisers to investors in the industry. 
+The backlash against globalization may cause higher taxes on private-equity firms, create more regulation, drive more volatility and restrict economic growth, Hamilton Lane’s annual review said. 
+This is utterly ludicrous if you’ve been paying attention. 
+From the first half of 2015, the average EBITDA multiple for PE purchases was over 10X, higher than the peak of the last cycle, in 2007. Even limited partners who are leery of saying a bad word about private equity, like CIO Chris Ailman of CalSTRS, described PE acquisitions as “priced to perfection” . The trading prices of the private equity firms that are public shows that equity market investors believe that private equity firms will not earn any carry fees over the next couple of years. 
+And as we’ve pointed out repeatedly, since the second half of 2015, senior officers of prominent private equity firms have increasingly been warning that private equity returns going forward will be lower than levels of the past. And none of them used Putin, um, Trump, um populism as the excuse for why returns were going to decline. 
+Hamilton Lane has more reason than most to blame private equity’s declining fortunes on external forces rather than the obvious factors of too much money chasing too many deals, and if the Fed ever pulls it off, rising interest rates being particularly punitive to high risk strategies like private equity, which is fundamentally levered equity. As we’ve pointed out, private equity has doubled its share of global equity from 2005 to 2014. 
+Hamilton Lane is not just a consultant to private equity; it is deeply conflicted by virtue of being a private equity fund of fund manager, which means it needs to play nice with the general partners in order to maintain access to funds. And the limited partners it has advised on private equity need excuses they can take to their boards and broader constituencies when private equity returns fizzle. So it’s easy to blame those nasty anti-capitalists rather than admit that private equity has always been a cyclical play and the end of a cycle is nigh. In fact, it should have occurred after the 2007 deal frenzy, but private equity was an accidental beneficiary of central banks’“rescue the financial system” emergency operations, and got a stay of execution. 
+In a sign that the public is getting smarter about private equity, 80% of the comments on the Wall Street Journal story were not buying what Hamilton Lane was selling. The other 20% were general criticism of populism rather than votes of support for private equity. 
+This skew should not be surprising given some of the strained claims Hamilton Lane made. Notice in the quote above that the first, and presumably therefore the most important problem for private equity was “higher taxes on private-equity firms,” which almost certainly refers to closing the carried interest loophole. But readers are supposed to believe that that would dent their ability to make money for investors, when those investors are almost without exception exempt from US taxes. 
+Now some private equity industry members have stomped their feet and said they’d quit if they had to pay more taxes. It’s hard to take this hissy fit seriously since there are not other lines of work in which they’d earn remotely comparable pay even with a bigger tax bill. At the largest firms, the typical annual pay is eight figures, and for the top dogs at big and some medium-large funds, nine figures. 
+And it’s not as if “talent” makes as much of a difference as the general partners would have you believe. Industry data shows that no one has a secret sauce. Top quartile funds are less likely to perform well in the next period then by chance. An investor in private equity should stop wasting time picking winners. They should try to avoid crooks and otherwise attempt to index. 
+So who might leave the industry if anyone? The departures are more likely to take place at the smallest funds or ones with mediocre performance, since the difference in tax treatment would have a bigger impact on the ability of the principals to maintain what is perceived to be an adequate lifestyle. 
+Ironically, thinning out the marginal players is if anything likely to be salutary for industry performance. With too much competition for deals, the winning bid is often made by someone who is desperate to win a deal (as in their investors perceive them to be too slow at putting money to work) or not well informed. 
+But the Hamilton Lane whinge is a harbinger of the sort of excuses you can expect to hear from both general partners and limited partners over the coming years, the tired old “whocoulddanode?” in new garb. 0 0 0 0 1 0",FAKE
+9380,Senator Mark Kirk Mocks Disabled Veteran Tammy Duckworth for Mixed-Race Heritage,"During a debate between Rep. Tammy Duckworth and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) for his U.S. Senate seat in Springfield, Illinois, Kirk mocked Duckworth’s ancestry, saying in rebuttal of her comments on the true cost of war, 
+“I had forgotten that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.” 
+His remark came in response to her statement that, “My family has served this nation in uniform going back to the Revolution. I am a Daughter of the American Revolution.” 
+Watch courtesy of Deadspin : Senator Mark Kirk mocks disabled Iraq war vet Tammy Duckworth in debate for her mixed-race heritage: https://t.co/3Znpd2Uvfq pic.twitter.com/cpWYBKri4l 
+— Deadspin (@Deadspin) October 28, 2016 
+Kirk, of course, has claimed to receive military honors he did not, in fact, receive. For him to attack Duckworth is not only the height of hypocrisy but mocking her ancestry is appalling. 
+The Republican position, as restated here by Kirk, is that it’s okay to come from another country as long as you’re white. Neither Kirk nor his campaign has apologized. Kirk has said Trump should quit over his misogynist comments; apparently, it’s okay to make racist comments. 
+When Duckworth said her family had served since the American Revolution, she wasn’t joking, and she set Kirk straight in a tweet : My mom is an immigrant and my dad and his family have served this nation in uniform since the Revolution #ILSEN pic.twitter.com/ehEBHswFMs 
+— Tammy Duckworth (@TammyforIL) October 28, 2016 
+The Illinois senator has unendorsed Donald Trump, one malignant clown calling another a malignant clown , and this latest move has given Kellyanne Conway a rare opportunity to gloat, tweeting , The same Mark Kirk that unendorsed his party's presidential nominee and called him out in paid ads? Gotcha. Good luck. https://t.co/IV7miL317s 
+— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) October 28, 2016 
+With a single sentence, Mark Kirk proved you don’t have to support Donald Trump to be a deplorable.",FAKE
+5204,The Daily 202: How Democrats are dominating early voting in Nevada,"LAS VEGAS — Katy Perry’s glamour, Tom Steyer’s money, Univision’s megaphone and organized labor’s muscle, along with a late assist from Barack Obama, each helped lubricate Harry Reid’s well-oiled political machine over the past 48 hours.
+
+The media tends to focus on the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton relative to President Obama, which is real, but a few thousand more ballots were cast in Nevada on Saturday — during the first day of early voting — than during the kickoff day four years ago, when there was a similar flurry of activity to propel Democrats to the polls. And that was before Air Force One touched down yesterday afternoon.
+
+It is a testament to the power of the organization that Reid, the retiring Senate minority leader, has built over three decades and that he is now using to get Clinton and his hand-picked successor, Catherine Cortez Masto, across the finish line.
+
+As much as 60 percent of the vote will be cast before Nov. 8 in the Silver State. Democrats for several cycles have dominated early voting, running up the score so that Republicans struggle to overcome it on Election Day.
+
+Since handily winning the Republican caucuses here in February, Donald Trump has been stronger in Nevada than in most other battlegrounds. The race remains tight here, a function of the relatively high percentage of low-income whites without college degrees.
+
+“Let's face it, Nevada is always close,” Obama, who carried the state twice, said during a rally at a high school in North Las Vegas. “Nevada always makes you a little nervous because you don't know what's going to happen. But that's what makes it exciting.”
+
+The bulk of Nevada’s Democratic voters are concentrated in Clark County, which includes Vegas. During a two-week window, the race is on to lock in Clinton’s narrow advantage in the polls by getting as many of her supporters as possible to one of 97 early voting sites. The Reid machine, fully activated, is a sight to behold.
+
+-- Unions play a huge role. Reid kicked off his Saturday with a 9 a.m. speech at the Iron Workers Union in the suburb of Henderson. Cortez Masto joined him. Then she went to the Carpenters Union training center at 10:15 a.m. and the Service Employees International Union's office on Sunset Boulevard a little after noon. A taco truck parked out front served dual purposes: the promise of free lunch built a crowd while trolling the Trump surrogate who warned during a recent cable interview that a Clinton victory would mean a taco truck on every corner. A shuttle bus ferried people to the nearest polling location.
+
+-- A few hours later, pop star Katy Perry drew a diverse, young crowd of 500 to the courtyard in front of the student union at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. The 31-year-old didn’t sing, but she did get right to the point. Perry talked about how she likes to procrastinate as much as anyone else, but that’s not okay when it comes to early voting. (“Let’s cut the crap. … We’ve all got excuses. Don’t put it off.”) She then lamented that votes in Nevada matter more than hers does in California. “I’m not just here to see a Cirque show,” she said. “You guys are important!”
+
+Perry wore a blue leather dress, red heels and a white T-shirt that said “Nasty Woman” — which is what Trump called Clinton during their debate right here on the campus of UNLV last Wednesday night. As she spoke about how she’s been campaigning for the Democratic nominee since “the cornfields of Iowa,” a guy in the audience yelled that Clinton should appoint her to be an ambassador. “Not yet,” she replied. “I’ve got to put out a record — or four!”
+
+Then Perry introduced Cortez Masto. “It’s important to not just vote for president,” the singer concluded. “We’ve got a crew. We’ve got a clique. We all run together. We need to vote for the right senators, too”
+
+She announced at the end of her speech that she would take sophomore Kendra Patterson, president of the campus Black Student Organization, to vote for the first time. Perry and her entourage piled into three black Escalades and headed for the nearest polling place.
+
+NextGen, the climate-change-focused super PAC bankrolled by liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, had a dozen volunteers working the Perry rally in orange T-shirts. They handed out water bottles and had a coach bus in front of the student union to shuttle anyone who wanted a ride to go vote.
+
+-- Early voting also gives Democrats more opportunities to turn out Latinos who have never voted before. Mi Familia Vota and Voto Latino co-hosted a four-hour block party Saturday afternoon in the parking lot of a mall that has an early voting site. There was live Spanish music and all-you-can-eat plates of free tacos from a popular local eatery. There were two bouncy houses, face painting and popcorn for the kids. Steyer’s group helped pay for the event, and Univision Radio — a co-sponsor — promoted it on the air. Staffers directed attendees to go inside the mall to vote. At around 6 p.m. Saturday, there were about 100 people in line for tacos and another 50 voting inside. They waited in a line between a candy store and a cosmetics shop.
+
+-- The Clinton team is investing heavily in door-to-door canvassing to run up her early vote numbers. Pilar Grullon, a field organizer for the Nevada Democratic Party, led a training session for 40 volunteers before Perry arrived at UNLV. The native of the Dominican Republic said her mom worked two jobs to make ends meet but that her family still relied on public assistance — including food stamps and Medicaid — to get by. She recently became the first in her family to graduate from college. “All of those services that my family depended on are at risk in this election,” she said.
+
+Grullon spent 15 minutes giving volunteers tips on how to give “a little extra push” to registered Democrats who might be reluctant to vote early. Everyone got “commit cards” to get people to write down exactly when and where they will vote. And they got leaflets with the number for a hotline that Clinton supporters can call to get a free ride to the polls. “You walk through, and you make a plan with the voter at every door,” Grullon said.
+
+She encouraged volunteers to be forceful: “If a mom tells you her daughter is voting for Hillary, don’t take her word for it.… Note that, and someone else will come back to find her.… Be scrappy. If there’s a gate, wait for someone to come to the gate.… If they speak Spanish and you can’t, mark it down and someone else will go.… Don’t engage anyone who wants to talk smack about our candidates. It is a waste of your time.” For good measure, she even told everyone to smile.
+
+-- Part of the Democratic strategy is to unashamedly pester people until they vote. The campaigns find out who voted at the end of each day. So they can stop targeting potential supporters once they have cast a ballot. During the training session, Grullon urged her door knockers to tell people that they won’t get bothered once they’ve voted. “If you don’t want somebody to knock on your door or call you anymore, go vote,” she said. “And it will stop. Seriously.”
+
+This turns out to be a powerful incentive in a state where almost every commercial is about the election. Beatriz Martinez, 27, voted Saturday inside a temporary trailer that has been set up in a Target parking lot in Las Vegas. Asked why she went on the first day, she said: “We got tons of texts saying early voting started this morning — from the Clinton campaign people, from the climate change people, from the party people.” She and her boyfriend, a law student, supported Bernie Sanders in the caucuses but rallied behind Clinton after she wrapped up the nomination.
+
+Martinez also brought her dad with her to vote. The 58-year-old was born in Mexico and speaks Spanish. He became a U.S. citizen more than a decade ago but had never voted before Saturday. The chance to vote against Trump changed that. He was very excited.
+
+At the end of Saturday, Democratic staffers celebrated news that 39,148 people had voted in Clark County — compared to 33,187 in 2012. Of those, 55 percent were registered Democrats and 27 percent were registered Republicans.
+
+-- Hitting the churches. The work continued early Sunday. Ruben Kihuen, a state senator challenging Republican Rep. Cresent Hardy, arrived at a Baptist church just before 8 a.m. to warn that all the progress of the Obama years could unravel if Democrats do not win. “I was trying to convey the sense of urgency of getting to the polls,” he said in an interview after the service, as he headed to a second church to deliver the same closing argument. “This election could be won during early voting if you run a strong campaign.”
+
+-- Five hours later, Obama arrived in Kihuen’s congressional district for a rally aimed primarily at turning out African Americans. The president took the stage at Cheyenne High School after Boyz II Men performed “The End of the Road.” Speaking in front of a giant sign that said “VOTE EARLY,” Obama told an audience of 5,100: “You've got the winning hand. You've got blackjack. But you’ve got to make sure to turn over the card by voting. … This game does not start on November 8th. The game ends on November 8th.”
+
+Bringing back a fictional character whom he invoked often in campaigns past, Obama added with a hint of nostalgia: “I need you to call up cousin Pooky and say, 'Pooky, it’s time to vote!’ I need you to go call Jesse and say, ‘Jesse, come on. Don't be sitting on the couch. It's time to vote.’ Everybody has got to vote early. That's how we won in ’08. That's how we won in 2012. That's how we're going to win in 2016!”
+
+-- The Republican effort to push early voting pales in comparison, and it certainly lacks the star power. The RNC-led victory program has 66 staffers spread across eight offices in Nevada, more than in 2012. The state Democratic Party declined to provide a staff count but said it has 17 field offices. But even GOP operatives marvel at the Reid machine. They are trying to play catch up, but they acknowledge that their only hope to carry Nevada is to win big among those who vote on Election Day. Starting this weekend, the GOP’s field staff pivoted to knocking on the doors of registered Republicans who are probably with Trump but do not routinely vote.
+
+Rep. Mark Amodei, chairman of Trump’s campaign in Nevada, hosted a modest early vote kickoff event at the RNC’s Reno office on Saturday morning. Republican Senate candidate Joe Heck, meanwhile, campaigned with Ted Cruz in Reno and Elko, less populated but redder areas of the state. Heck, a congressman from Vegas, alienated many Trump supporters by rescinding his support. So he campaigned with the Texas senator in an effort to shore up his conservative base.
+
+-- Many Republicans familiar with Nevada worry about this nightmare scenario: If Trump loses decisively along the Eastern seaboard — New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina and/or Florida — the networks could declare that Clinton is the president-elect before polls even close in Nevada. Many core GOP voters typically cast their ballots while commuting home from work. What if a couple percent of them decide that the election is over and it’s not worth waiting in line? Because Republicans are so reliant on these voters, and Democrats will have so many votes locked in from early voting, it could lead to a down-ticket bloodbath. At the very least, it could tip a close Senate race to Cortez Masto.
+
+-- Happening today at 10 a.m. Eastern — The 202 goes live with Gary Johnson: I just landed after taking the redeye back from Vegas so I can interview the Libertarian presidential nominee. Join us in-person at The Washington Post Live Center or watch a livestream of our hour-long conversation here.
+
+WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
+
+-- Fighting resumed in eastern Aleppo, appearing to shatter Moscow’s “humanitarian pause” in air raids that allowed rebels and civilians to temporarily flee the Syrian city. (Hugh Naylor)
+
+-- Scoop: “Plans to send heavier weapons to CIA-backed rebels in Syria stall amid White House skepticism,” by Greg Miller and Adam Entous: “As rebel-held sections of Aleppo crumbled under Russian bombing this month, the Obama administration was secretly weighing plans to rush more firepower to CIA-backed units in Syria. The proposal, which involved weapons that might help those forces defend themselves against Russian aircraft and artillery, made its way onto the agenda of a recent meeting President Obama held with his national security team. And that’s as far as it got. Neither approved nor rejected, the plan was left in a state of ambiguity that U.S. officials said reflects growing administration skepticism about escalating a covert CIA program that has trained and armed thousands of Syrian fighters. … The operation has served as the centerpiece of the U.S. strategy to press [Assad] to step aside. But U.S. officials said there are growing doubts that even an expanded version could achieve that outcome because of Moscow’s intervention. Obama, officials said, now seems inclined to leave the fate of the CIA program up to the next occupant of the White House.”
+
+-- Bill Murray received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center, playfully accepting the nation’s top honor for comedy after a two-hour salute. From Peggy McGlone: “My theme tonight is what is it like to be beloved,” a straight-faced Murray told the crowd as he accepted his award. “It’s hard to listen to all those people be nice to you. You just get so suspicious.” (Murray actively avoided receiving the award for weeks before the event, telling The Post’s Geoff Edgers, “I really thought if I don’t answer the phone for awhile, maybe they’ll just move on to someone else.”) The program will be broadcast Friday at 9 p.m. on PBS.
+
+-- AT&T announced a planned $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner on Saturday, a blockbuster merger that would radically reshape the media landscape. (Brian Fung)
+
+-- Today’s A1, “How mega-donors helped raise $1 billion for Hillary Clinton,” by Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy: “Determined not to fall behind in the money race, [she has] ramped up her appeals to rich donors and shrugged off restrictions that President Obama had imposed on his fundraising team. Even as her advisers fretted about the perception that she was too cozy with wealthy interests, they agreed to let lobbyists bundle checks for her campaign, including those representing some foreign governments ... Top aides wooed major donors for super PACs, taking advantage of the leeway that campaigns have to legally collaborate with the groups on fundraising. An analysis by [The Post] found that more than a fifth of the $1 billion donated to help her bid was given by just 100 wealthy individuals and labor unions — many with a long history of contributing to the Clintons.""
+
+-- Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s super PAC donated nearly $500,000 to the campaign of Jill McCabe, the wife of an FBI official who later helped oversee Clinton’s email investigation. From the Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett: “Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, who is married to Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of the FBI.” McCabe was the third-largest recipient of funds from the governor’s super PAC. The governor’s office strongly denied any potential connection, saying McAuliffe “supported Jill McCabe because he believed she would be a good state senator”: “This is a customary practice for Virginia governors,” a spokesman said in a statement. “Any insinuation that his support was tied to anything other than his desire to elect candidates who would help pass his agenda is ridiculous.”
+
+-- An increasingly confident Clinton touted herself as “listmaker in chief” at a North Carolina rally on Sunday, dismissing Trump with a few jokes as she focused primarily on her to-do list as president. From Anne Gearan: “We’ve got challenges, don’t get me wrong,” Clinton said at an outdoor rally on a sparkling fall afternoon. “I’ve laid out a whole agenda about dealing with those challenges,” she said, adding that she is sometimes criticized for the detail of those proposals. She spent relatively little time marking out the ways she claims Trump is unfit to be president, or even comparing herself with him, and she delved happily into discussions of technical education, student debt, infrastructure spending and economic growth.”
+
+-- HRC will rally in the Tar Heel State alongside Michelle Obama on Thursday, their first side-by-side appearance this year.
+
+-- The WikiLeaks emails show how many cooks are in Hillary’s kitchen. The Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey notes that there were at least 37 messages exchanged about just one tweet on the minimum wage. And the team considered 84 possible slogans before settling on “Stronger Together.” Also, seemingly everyone in Clinton’s orbit offers suggestions for how the candidate could connect better with average voters. Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, for example, wanted Clinton to try working in some low-wage service jobs to combat the perception that she is “out of touch.” Among her suggestions: Clinton could make hotel beds, clear tables at a Denny’s, mop floors in a school, or work in a day-care center or a nursing home for a day.
+
+-- The New Yorker endorsed Clinton, praising the Democratic nominee as a “distinctly capable candidate"": “The election of Hillary Clinton is an event that we would welcome for its historical importance, and greet with indescribable relief.""
+
+-- Trump held a rare Sunday rally in Naples, Fla., halting from his teleprompter speech to suddenly ask the crowd if he was “right to run for president.” From Jenna Johnson: “When I’m president, if companies want to fire their workers and leave — Are you okay? Listen. When I’m president, this is to me, like, this is why I started. Are we glad that I started? Are we happy?” Trump said, as the crowd encouragingly cheered him on. “Well, I’ll let you know on the evening of Nov. 8 whether I’m glad.”
+
+-- The Trump brand continues to take a huge hit because of the campaign, so the Trump Organization has decided to launch a new brand of hotels that will NOT carry his name. From Bloomberg’s Hui-Yong Yu  James Nash: “Scion, a line of hotels that will target younger clients, was unveiled last month in a press release that quoted three different Trump Organization executives, but not the candidate. The new brand is planned for use at city and resort locations … intended to appeal ‘to a new and different type of guest in more locations around the globe.’ He’s now a polarizing figure. When he was putting his hotels together, he wasn’t,’ said [consultant Bruce Himelstein]. ‘There’s definitely an impact.’”
+
+-- Trump received his first major newspaper endorsement from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a paper owned by casino billionaire and Trump donor Sheldon Adelson. In a statement, the paper’s editorial board acknowledged Trump “has his flaws” but will “bring needed disruption and change to Washington.”
+
+-- Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has now given $35 million to anti-Trump efforts. “If the first $20 million yielded cheers, the second $15 million generated stunned silence,” Gabriel Debenedetti reports in Politico. “The deeply private 32-year-old — who is worth $12.7 billion … is a long-time philanthropist but political newcomer. He hasn’t started to build contacts with local operatives. And he hasn’t said a word publicly about his political involvement.”
+
+-- Former ""Apprentice"" staffers said Trump forced them to come to work in the days immediately following Superstorm Sandy, even though a state of emergency was in effect following the deadly storm. From the Daily Beast’s Gideon Resnick and Asawin Suebsaeng: “We all had to come in right after Sandy,” a former staffer recounted. “We were in his building, and we fought with [a] manager, who said, ‘It’s not from me, it’s from [Donald Trump] himself’.… “We had to work straight through it,” another staffer said. “The city was shut down, no traffic lights, etc. I would bike from [Brooklyn] to [Trump] Tower,” he said of his first days back at work. (Meanwhile, Trump was publicly taking credit for giving storm refugees shelter in Trump Tower — something that he was required to do by law.)
+
+-- Breitbart News is planning to announce the hiring of former Red Sox pitcher and Trump supporter Curt Schilling to host a political talk show, six months after he was fired from ESPN for sharing an anti-transgender Facebook post. The news also comes as Schilling weighs whether to challenge Elizabeth Warren for her Senate seat in 2018. (New York Magazine)
+
+-- Trump traveled to Gettysburg Saturday to deliver what was billed as a “closing argument” for his campaign and outline plans for the first 100 days of a Trump administration — but he spent most of the speech airing a litany of grievances instead. From Jenna Johnson and Jose DelReal: Trump vowed to sue the women who have accused him of sexual assault — branding them all “liars” — and blasted the media for attempting to “poison” the minds of American voters. After more than 13 minutes on the subject, Trump read several numbered lists of things that he would do on his first day in office or during his first 100 days. (“Nearly all were things that he has repeatedly promised to do, but this was the first time he listed them in a speech,” Johnson and DelReal note.)
+
+Tim Kaine slammed Trump’s speech as evidence of the “self-interested campaign” he has run: ""At the end of the campaign, all along, he's been running a self-interested, me-first campaign, not an America-first campaign,” Kaine told reporters in Pittsburgh. “And here he is saying that in the first 100 days I'm not changing, I may be POTUS, but I'm really going to focus on settling scores, and, oh, by the way, now that I'm president, I could really settle some scores."" (Abby Phillip)
+
+-- Trump said in a 2012 interview that he does NOT believe in deporting undocumented immigrants. Asked on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” about his views on immigrant labor, Trump said he was “probably down the middle”: “I understand how, as an example, you have people in this country for 20 years, they've done a great job, they've done wonderfully, they've gone to school, they've gotten good marks, they're productive — now we're supposed to send them out of the country, I don't believe in that,” he said. (Clip uncovered by CNNs’ Andrew Kaczynski)
+
+-- Kellyanne Conway conceded that Trump’s campaign “is behind” on “Meet the Press,” but she pointed to enthusiasm at her client's campaign events as evidence that he can still win. ""Let me tell you something: You go out on the road with Donald Trump, this election doesn't feel over,"" Conway added on CNN's ""State of the Union."" Later, Conway distanced herself from Trump's lengthy tirade against women who accused him of sexual misconduct, telling host Jake Tapper, “Well, he delivers his own speeches. This is his candidacy. He’s the guy who’s running for the White House.”
+
+She outlined a potential path for the Republican nominee on “Fox News Sunday, saying they are focused on winning the states of Florida, Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina and, possibly, Nevada, while protecting the traditionally-red states of Arizona and Georgia. (Jenna Johnson)
+
+-- RNC Chairman Reince Priebus sought to minimize Trump’s claims of a “rigged” election, telling John Dickerson that he merely ""wants to reserve all options."" ""He's saying he wants to reserve all options, and 'if there is grounds for a recount, I will exercise my options,'"" Priebus said on CBS. ""He is not willing to not concede if he loses and there's no fraud.""
+
+-- Eric Trump said his father would accept election results if they are ""fair”: ""I think what my father is saying is 'I want a fair election,'"" the younger Trump said on ABC's ""This Week,"" rattling off statistics that reportedly show ""2 million people on the voter rolls right now who are dead” and ""14 percent of all noncitizens in this country are registered to vote.” ""If it's a fair outcome he will absolutely accept it, there's no question about it."" (Amy B Wang)
+
+-- Tim Kaine suggested Clinton would be open to exploring new Asian trade deals as president, despite her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “You never close the door if you can get a deal that's going to be good for American workers and our economy,"" the Virginia senator told Chuck Todd. ""We aren't against trade.""
+
+-- “As Clinton builds a lead, write-in campaigns flower and falter,” by David Weigel: “According to the [FEC], just 136,040 write-in votes were cast and tabulated in the 2012 election. But this year, that number could be much higher, with multiple campaigns underway to normalize the act of writing in a name. Evan McMullin, the independent conservative candidate who entered the race too late to appear on many ballots, will be an ‘official write-in candidate’ in most of the country. Several fringe candidates have earned similar status, and some of Sanders’s die-hard fans are spreading the word that many states will also count any ballot with his name scrawled across it. … Although Clinton’s favorability rating has ticked up in recent weeks, many voters are already casting ballots in an environment where both major presidential candidates are unpopular. One problem: Write-in votes are not treated the same as filled-in ballots. In many states, the votes are not counted or reported at all. In others, a misspelling or an alternate name — say, ‘Evan McMullen,’ or ‘Bernie’ instead of ‘Bernard Sanders’ — would not be tallied.”
+
+-- Obama will today endorse 30 more House candidates, is addition to some 150 state legislative candidates across 20 states later in the week. From Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere: “The endorsements—which will come along with a variety of robocalls, social media, mailers, photos of Obama with the candidates taken … and even a few radio ads—are Obama’s biggest investment in state races ever by far, and come as he gears up to make redistricting reform at the state level the political priority of his post-presidency.”
+
+-- From VIRGINIA, “They crossed the border illegally, and can’t vote. But they can knock on doors,” by WaPo's Antonio Olivo: “Unable to vote in the presidential election, a group of undocumented immigrants is knocking on doors in Northern Virginia in support of [Clinton] and other Democratic candidates, convinced that the outcome of the vote will determine whether they can secure a path to citizenship in the country they have known since childhood. The vote-seekers are some of the 750,000 recipients of temporary legal status under the Obama administration’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Four years after the DACA program was launched, many of the beneficiaries are still in a kind of limbo, unsure about whether their status would be renewed under a President Trump and concerned that their family members could be deported.”
+
+-- From NORTH CAROLINA, “Trump message clashes with GOP's most-endangered governor,” by Politico's Elena Schneider: “North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory is desperate to talk about his economic achievements after a year mired in contentious debate over social issues, including the state’s transgender ‘bathroom law.’ The only problem? [Trump] keeps coming to town and telling voters how terrible the economy is. It’s the most glaring example this year of the disconnect between Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric and the message of achievement that many Republican incumbents are trying to use to win reelection. It has been known to happen before — there was reportedly friction between affable Mitt Romney’s campaign and some recovery-touting GOP governors in 2012. But the gap between McCrory’s ‘Carolina Comeback’ theme and Trump’s doom-and-gloom assessments yawns particularly wide, as McCrory faces the toughest reelection challenge of any governor in the country in 2016.""
+
+-- From PENNSYLVANIA, “GOP frets over Trump’s down-ballot impact,” by the Boston Globe's Tracy Jan: “Here in the Pennsylvania suburbs, a political shift is underway: Republican leaders worried about [Trump’s] presence atop the ticket are focusing as much of their attention on state races as they are on their presidential nominee’s fate in a crucial swing-state battleground. With Trump trailing in the polls, the question of the hour is what effect his lack of support might have on other GOP candidates on the ballot.” Polls show Sen. Pat Toomey clinging to a narrow lead over Katie McGinty … [But] Trump has fallen more than six points behind Clinton in Pennsylvania — and is 28 points behind in the Philadelphia suburbs … creating a whirlpool that could swallow the Republican senator.”
+
+-- Trump is making a final push in FLORIDA, hunkering down in the Sunshine State as the race enters its final stretch. From the Wall Street Journal’s Beth Reinhard and Janet Hook: “He is slated to headline five rallies over three days in the nation’s largest battleground, where more than a million voters have already mailed in ballots. [But] in one potentially ominous sign for Mr. Trump, Democrats are holding their own against Republicans in mail-in ballots in Florida, a mode of voting that the GOP traditionally dominates … The more traction Democrats gain in early voting, the harder it will be for Mr. Trump to catch up, even if polls narrow near Election Day.” Trump will continue a push in northern and central parts of Florida for the next two days, while the Clinton campaign seeks to drive up turnout in the more liberal southern region.
+
+-- Also in the Sunshine State, former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe campaigned with Marco Rubio yesterday. He joined the senator at a Miami restaurant as he seeks to shore up support among expat Colombian voters. (Miami Herald)
+
+-- Several outside Republican groups are now explicitly breaking with Trump, urging voters to elect a divided government rather than giving Clinton a blank check. From the New York Times’ Alexander Burns and Amy Chozick: The Congressional Leadership Fund is slated to begin running ads that attack Democratic candidates as “rubber stamps” for Clinton. Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce and the Senate Leadership Fund have launched a wave of Senate commercials asking voters to limit Clinton’s power by supporting down-ballot Republicans instead.
+
+Here's an example from Missouri:
+
+-- An ABC News tracking poll finds Clinton up 12 nationally among likely voters (50-38). Clinton holds a 20-point advantage among women and has a three-point edge with men. Trump’s rhetoric has caused problems: 69 percent said they disapprove of Trump’s response to questions about his treatment of women, while 59 percent reject his suggestion that the election is “rigged” in Clinton’s favor. And he could face turnout problems: ABC's survey found a seven-point drop among Republicans who plan to vote on Election Day.
+
+-- A CBS News/YouGov poll conducted in Texas after the third debate showed Clinton within striking distance, trailing him by just 3 points in the state. The majority of his Texas backers are over age 45, the survey found. Meanwhile, he’s down by at least eight points among voters under 45. The CBS poll found Clinton up just 3 points in Florida (46-43), however.
+
+-- “Iceland, a land of Vikings, braces for a Pirate Party takeover,” by Griff Witte: “The party that could be on the cusp of winning Iceland’s national elections on Saturday didn’t exist four years ago. Its members are a collection of anarchists, hackers, libertarians and Web geeks. It sets policy through online polls — and thinks the government should do the same. It wants to make Iceland ‘a Switzerland of bits,’ free of digital snooping. It has offered Edward Snowden a new place to call home. And then there’s the name: In this land of Vikings, the Pirate Party may soon be king. The rise of the Pirates — from radical fringe to focal point of Icelandic politics — has astonished even the party’s founder, a poet, Web programmer and former WikiLeaks activist. But this, after all, is 2016. [The win] would offer a vivid illustration of how far Europeans are willing to go in their rejection of the political mainstream, adding to a string of insurgent triumphs emanating from both the far left and far right.""
+
+Let's start with this face from Hillary Clinton as she watches the Cubs win:
+
+Clinton, an Illinois native, grew up as a Cubs fan. Here are photos of her with legendary Cubs announcer Harry Caray:
+
+Bill Murray, also a Cubs fan, was in D.C. to collect the Mark Twain prize at the Kennedy Center. Here he is crashing the White House press briefing room to talk about his team:
+
+Here's a quick look at the state of the race:
+
+Katy Perry was out on the campaign trail for Clinton:
+
+A top lawyer at the powerhouse firm Gibson Dunn reiterated his offer to represent pro bono anyone who Trump sues for accusing him of sexual misconduct:
+
+The Los Angeles Times wrote about the time Trump threatened to sue the paper in 2008 for an accurate story about Trump University:
+
+Meanwhile, Trump is once again criticizing the U.S. military:
+
+The old, very awkward Trump-Pence logo was back:
+
+Breitbart is no fan of Paul Ryan's:
+
+And the Drudge Report continues to get nastier and nastier toward HRC:
+
+Meanwhile, a supporter told Mike Pence to tell Trump he's ""tired of the crap"":
+
+Like this, from GOP operative Doug Heye:
+
+Let's recap what it's like to be a reporter at a Trump rally:
+
+Plus, a note from Jake Tapper on that word ""lugenpresse"":
+
+John Kerry, Ban Ki-moon and other leaders attended a screening of Leonardo DiCaprio's climate change documentary, ""Before the Flood"":
+
+Shelley Moore Capito and Cheri Bustos are enjoying the first taste of fall:
+
+And finally, Jason Chaffetz is courting the Instagram likes with this photo:
+
+On the campaign trail: Clinton stumps with Elizabeth Warren in Manchester, N.H., while Kaine campaigns in Miami and Palm Beach, Fla. Biden stumps for Clinton in Dayton and Toledo, Ohio. Trump is in St. Augustine and Tampa, Fla.; Pence stops in Salisburg and Greensboro, N.C.
+
+At the White House: Obama is in California for fundraisers. He appears on ABC's ""Jimmy Kimmel Live"" tonight.
+
+On Capitol Hill: The Senate and House are out.
+
+NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:
+
+-- Partially sunny and breezy, today should be a quintessentially perfect fall day. The Capital Weather Gang forecasts: “A cold front sneaks through the region early on. It kicks up the wind a bit but has little effect on temperature. With lots of sunshine, highs still aim for the upper 60s.”
+
+-- The Redskins lost to the Detroit Lions 17-20.
+
+-- A D.C. police officer was arrested and charged with driving under the influence while on duty. Authorities said they were alerted to Arthur Thompson’s impairment by a supervisor investigating a citizen complaint early Sunday. (Spencer S. Hsu)
+
+-- “No worries for incumbent Rep. Don Beyer in Va. as Election Day approaches,” by Patricia Sullivan: “Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) has some quirky ideas about what legislation he would pursue if he wins a second term in Congress next month. He wants to push for a billion-dollar economic development project in hard-hit coal communities far from his suburban Northern Virginia district. He longs to revise the federal budget process … And he’d like to see larger, multi-member congressional districts, as was allowed before 1842. ‘I don’t want to be naive and I don’t want to be Don Quixote,’ said the affable auto dealer … ‘But I want to talk to 200 people about this in the next two years.’ When you are the incumbent Democrat in one of the country’s deepest blue districts, you can afford to dream. A bilingual millennial who describes himself as leaning libertarian on many social issues, Hernick, 35, has tried to appeal to young voters who want Congress to address the national debt, end political gridlock and speed the pace of change.”
+
+Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) provided The Post with a list of his 10 favorite political sketches on ""Saturday Night Live."" Among them are Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis in 1988, saying ""I can't believe I'm losing to this guy.""
+
+Here's the SNL take from this weekend on the final presidential debate:
+
+For his opening monologue as SNL host, Tom Hanks spoke to America like a dad:
+
+In this sketch, Hanks plays Doug, a white contestant (and Trump supporter) on Black Jeopardy:
+
+PBS debuted its behind-the-scenes Hamilton documentary, ""Hamilton's America,"" with cameos from Obama, George W. Bush, Paul Ryan, Elizabeth Warren and others. Here's the extended trailer:
+
+As a bonus, here are two 2016-themed Hamilton parodies from YouTube (the song is ""The Election of 1800""):
+
+Mark Cuban has a new business idea, per this Funny or Die video -- putting people into voluntary comas for the duration of a Trump presidency:
+
+Wyclef Jean dressed up as Sanders, Clinton and Trump for the video version of his updated track, ""If I Was President"":
+
+Terry Tate is back as the office linebacker -- only this time, he's taking down Trump:
+
+The Human Rights Campaign released this digital ad in Florida featuring a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting:
+
+Last but definitely not least, in this political ad, the wife of a candidate defending his seat on the Travis County Commissioners Court implores voters to reelect him so that he'll get out of the house:",REAL
+7897,New Exoplanet Discoveries Reveal Red-Dwarf Stars as Likely Hosts to Large Populations of Earth-Like Water Worlds,"In August 2016, the announcement of the discovery of a terrestrial exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri (artists impression above) stimulated the imagination of experts and the general public. This star is the nearest star to our sun, though it is 10 times less massive and 500 times less luminous. This discovery, together with the discovery in May 2016 of a similar planet orbiting an even lower-mass star (Trappist-1), convinced astronomers that such red dwarfs (as these low-mass stars are called) might be hosts to a large population of Earth-like planets.
+Computer simulations of the formation of planets orbiting in the habitable zones of low mass stars such as Proxima Centauri by astrophysicists at the University of Bern show that these planets are most likely to be roughly the size of the Earth and to contain large amounts of water.What might these objects look like? What could they be made of? Yann Alibert and Willy Benz at the Swiss NCCR PlanetS and the Center of Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern carried out the first computer simulations of the formation of planets expected to orbit stars 10 times less massive than the sun.
+“Our models succeed in reproducing planets that are similar in terms of mass and period to the ones observed recently,” Alibert says regarding the results of the study, forthcoming as a letter in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. “Interestingly, we find that planets in close-in orbits around these type of stars are of small sizes. Typically, they range between 0.5 and 1.5 Earth radii with a peak at about 1.0 Earth radius. Future discoveries will tell if we are correct,” the researcher adds.
+In addition, the astrophysicists determined the water content of the planets orbiting their small host stars in the habitable zone. They found that around 90 percent of the planets harbour more than 10 percent water. For comparison, the Earth has a fraction of water of only about .02 percent. The situation could be even more extreme if the protoplanetary disks in which these planets form persist longer than assumed in the models. In any case, these planets would be covered by very deep oceans at the bottom of which, owing to enormous pressure, water would be in form of ice.
+Water is required for life as we know it. So could these planets be habitable? “While liquid water is generally thought to be an essential ingredient, too much of a good thing may be bad,” says Willy Benz. In previous studies, the scientists in Bern showed that too much water may prevent the regulation of the surface temperature and destabilize the climate. “But this is the case for the Earth; here, we deal with considerably more exotic planets that might be subjected to a much harsher radiation environment, and/or be synchronous,” he adds.
+To start their calculations, the scientists considered a series of a few hundreds to thousands of identical, low-mass stars, and around each of them, a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas. Planets are formed by accretion of this material. Alibert and Benz assumed that at the beginning, there were 10 planetary embryos in each disk with an initial mass equal to the mass of the moon. In a few day’s computer time for each system, the model calculated how these randomly located embryos grew and migrated. What kind of planets are formed depends on the structure and evolution of the protoplanetary disks.
+“Habitable or not, the study of planets orbiting very low-mass stars will likely bring exciting new results, improving our knowledge of planet formation, evolution, and potential habitability,” summarizes Benz. Because these stars are considerably less luminous than the sun, planets can be much closer to their stars before the surface temperature becomes too high for liquid water to exist. Considering that this type of star also represents the overwhelming majority of stars in the solar neighbourhood and that close-in planets are presently easier to detect and study, it is easy to understand why the existence of this population of Earth-like planets is of importance.
+The Daily Galaxy via University of Bern 
+Source: Daily Galaxy 
+",FAKE
+10497,3 Charlotte Area Counties Report Voting Machines Picking Wrong Candidates,"MecklenburgCatawba 
+The complaints noted that the machines wrongly identified a voter’s choice, but in all reported cases, the voters were able to correct their ballots before casting them. 
+“To my knowledge, at this point, we don’t have any cases where elections officials noted significant problems with any machines based on these complaints. Of course they’re all looked into and that’s why we encourage people to immediately flag down an election official,” commented Gannon. 
+The NC State Board Of Election released the following statement regarding the complaints: 
+The N.C. State Board of Elections is aware that some voters have contacted advocacy groups or elections officials with concerns about touch-screen voting machines in several counties. 
+Similar reports have been made in recent elections, and we take them very seriously. 
+We want to ensure voters that safeguards are in place to ensure touch-screen machines accurately record voters’ selections. 
+Touch-screen machines are tested thoroughly before each election. They are recalibrated daily before voting begins to test and ensure accuracy. If a voter notices an issue with selection accuracy of a machine, they should raise their hand and notify an election official immediately. If needed, the machine may be taken out of service for recalibration, and the voter may be moved to a different machine. 
+Also, each touch-screen machine prompts voters to review their selections before casting their ballot. As with paper ballots, voters should check over their selections to ensure accuracy prior to casting their ballot. On touch-screen machines, voters also can review a real-time audit log that records all of their selections. 
+“We urge all voters to carefully review their selections before casting their ballots, and to immediately report any questions or concerns to elections officials,” said Kim Westbrook Strach, executive director of the N.C. State Board of Elections.",FAKE
+10240,"Clinton crime family must be taken down... ARREST THEM ALL: Clinton, Podesta, Abedin, Lynch, Mook, Stephanopoulos and all the co-conspirators","Clinton crime family must be taken down... ARREST THEM ALL: Clinton, Podesta, Abedin, Lynch, Mook, Stephanopoulos and all the co-conspirators 
+  Clinton corruption , John Podesta , crime family (NaturalNews) It's not just that the corruption and criminality of the Clintons knows no bounds; it's also that the democrat political machine trying to thrust her into power also has total disregard for democracy, truth and ethics. Their mission? Put our nation's worst political criminal into the White House by any means necessary, including systematic lying, fraud, money laundering, intimidation of opponents and even murder of those who might testify against her. The Clinton machine is a mafia operation , and every person involved in it must go to jail.That includes not just the deep operatives like Podesta, Lynch and Abedin, but also all the deep cover Clinton operatives pretending to be journalists , including Stephanopoulos, Maddow, Hayes, Milbank and all the rest ( see the list here ). Every one of these people has committed crimes of sedition against the United States of America and is guilty of attempting to defraud democracy, steal the election, and place a mafia criminal into power at the highest level of government through the deliberate pursuit of journalistic malpractice . Seditious Clinton operatives must be arrested and put behind bars to protect America We the People are beyond the stage of merely wanting to vote you out of power and turn off your broadcast networks. It's now time to seek your indictment and imprisonment so that you cannot be allowed to harm this society ever again.Every operative, journalist and co-conspirator with the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton corruption and the Clinton murders must be arrested, indicted and, if found guilty by a fair trial, sent to prison. This nation needs to heal itself from the Clinton nightmare , and the only way that's going to happen is if the criminal traitors, sellouts and corrupt backstabbers are marched away in handcuffs and put behind bars.""A former FBI official said Sunday that Bill and Hillary Clinton are part of a “crime family” and argued top officials hindered the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of State,"" reports TheHill.com : Kallstrom, best known for leading the investigation into the explosion of TWA flight 800 in the late '90s, said that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, was a “pathological liar.”He also blasted Attorney General Loretta Lynch, claiming that she impeded the investigation into Clinton’s private server.“The problem here is this investigation was never a real investigation,” he said. “That’s the problem. They never had a grand jury empanelled, and the reason they never had a grand jury empanelled, I’m sure, is Loretta Lynch would not go along with that.” “God forbid we put someone like that in the White House,” he added of Clinton.Kallstrom also said that FBI Director James Comey and the rest of the FBI’s leadership were responsible for holding back the investigation, not the rest of the bureau.“The agents are furious with what’s going on, I know that for a fact,” he said. Corrupt, pro-Clinton ""journalists"" should not be given any quarter in all this. Much like the propagandists of the Third Reich, they abuse their positions of power to operate in conspiracy with an outright criminal who acts against the interests of the American people. Did you know that Hillary Clinton sold off uranium mining rights to the Russians because the oligarchs who made billions off the deal turned around and donated millions to her Clinton Foundation? If you aren't aware of this, you need to watch Clinton Cash immediately . The simple truth is that the entire democrat party is a massive criminal cartel What America has now come to realize via the Wikileaks email dumps , the Project Veritas undercover videos and even the revelations of former FBI agents who know what's really happening inside the agency is that the entire democrat party is a massive criminal cartel .From the DNC (which actively conspired to sideline Bernie Sanders during the nomination process) to the left-wing media (which coordinates false smear attacks against Donald Trump), every element of the democrat party is hopelessly corrupt. Democrat political operatives abide by no laws, no ethics and no boundaries. They lie, cheat and steal their way into power at every election... and they're desperately trying to steal this election, too.It's not just that the Clinton crime family must be taken down, you see: It's that the entire democrat establishment should be disbanded or imprisoned . There isn't a high-level operative inside the DNC who isn't committing election fraud on a daily basis. The coordination and collusion, money laundering and pay-to-play ""influence for sale"" schemes are all illegal, yet they are the very foundation of the democrat establishment as it exists today.Every one of these people needs to be arrested, indicted and imprisoned. This is the only way genuine democracy can be restored across America. Aside from their criminality, democrats' policy ideas just don't work Even on policy alone, democrats are total failures . None of their ideas or policies actually work. Look at Obamacare, with its insurance costs now doubling every 2-3 years , with coverage options crashing nationwide and the entire failed idea now on the verge of imploding. This was hailed as an historic solution by Obama and the rest of the dummocrats who forced it through Congress and the Supreme Court. In reality, Obamacare was the dumbest idea ever attempted to solve the health care crisis, and I called it that from its inception.Democrats are parasites on society who know nothing other than how to survive as government blood suckers by promising big ideas that routinely fail. They confiscate money from taxpayers, waste it on the most stupid policy ideas ever dreamed up, while siphoning off billions for their own salaries, bonuses and luxurious lifestyles. Then, if you oppose their complete idiocy, they invoke the IRS to have you audited or arrested. This is Amerika today under Obama and the Clintons.This racket must end. The Clintons and all their co-conspirators must be sent to prison. Donald Trump is right when he says this is ""Bigger than Watergate."" There's no comparison. The crimes of the Clintons are a thousand times larger and more damning to democracy than anything Richard Nixon ever attempted. Corrupt leftist media still lying every hour in a desperate attempt to defeat Trump While all this is happening, the corrupt leftist media -- Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, Google News, Yahoo News, etc. -- has long since abandoned any pretense of engaging in journalism and is now all-in for the Clinton criminal mafia.They have thrown their reputations to the wind, betting everything on the most corrupt criminal to ever seek the office of the presidency. They're bleeding readers and viewers by the millions as fed-up Americans change the channels or turn off their cable TV altogether (who needs politicized ESPN, anyway?) to seek out more accurate news online from sites like Natural News and Breitbart.com .Even the mass censorship of political trends by Facebook and Twitter can't stop the avalanche of awakening now sweeping across America. Across every sector of society, the American people are saying ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! We will not allow the criminal democrats to steal this election and install a totalitarian dictator into the White House.We will vote against the establishment in record numbers. We will overwhelm the fraud, out-vote the brain-dead leftists and achieve a landslide victory for Donald Trump.And if the corrupt, criminal democrats still fake the numbers, bribe the electoral voters or commit massive fraud to steal the election, We the People will take to the streets and take our democracy back . We the People will NOT accept a Clinton presidency under these conditions of massive fraud, collusion and extreme media bias Based on everything we are seeing right now, there is no scenario under which Hillary Clinton will be accepted as the legitimate victor of this election. In no way has this been an open, fair and free election. It has been a warped, one-sided exercise in media collusion that isn't fooling anyone.In the minds of the real American people, Hillary Clinton is done for . The People will not stand for more corruption, collusion and criminals running our system. The revolt has begun , and it will sweep through the voting booths, the electorate and if necessary, the very streets of America to demand an end to the failed, corrupt political establishment run by sinister criminals who belong behind bars.Get ready, my friends, to take this country back. First, vote for Donald Trump as a vote against corruption and collusion of the leftist establishment.Secondly, demand the arrest of all Clinton-linked operatives , including those in the leftist lying media.Thirdly, do not tolerate the theft of your democracy by corrupt Clinton operatives who are trying to steal this election. If they steal the votes or steal the Electoral College outcome, prepare to march in the streets to take your country back .Yes, I'm calling for peaceful mass protests, everywhere across America, if the criminal democrats and corrupt leftist media steal this election through fraud. Bring plenty of rope because you may have to swing across moats and scale the walls of the castle to finally reach the inner layers of corruption and criminality in Washington D.C. (That's a metaphor, for the dumb-as-dirt left-wing media journalists who are too stupid to parse a sentence.) DEFEAT Clinton now or lose America to a totalitarian regime that will never let go of absolute power This is your LAST CHANCE to take America back. If you allow the Clintons and the corrupt democrats to seize power through widespread fraud and theft, there will never be an open, fair and free election in America ever again . All opponents of Clinton will be imprisoned or executed. All conservative media outlets will be taken offline or silenced. The borders will be opened to a massive wave of illegal aliens from all across the world, and they will overrun and occupy America, destroying it from within while the bigoted, intolerant democrats turn the entire nation into a ""sanctuary nation"" where illegals have absolute immunity while patriots are executed or imprisoned by the millions.That's the ""American Holocaust"" you're going to be witnessing if you allow these criminals -- Clinton, Abedin, Podesta, Stephanopoulos and all the rest -- to remain in power. Throw them behind bars if you want to see your country survive the next four years .",FAKE
+7555,SOME FLA. RESIDENTS PLAN ARMED TRICK-OR-TREATING AFTER CREEPY CLOWN THREATS,"Home › SOCIETY | US NEWS › SOME FLA. RESIDENTS PLAN ARMED TRICK-OR-TREATING AFTER CREEPY CLOWN THREATS SOME FLA. RESIDENTS PLAN ARMED TRICK-OR-TREATING AFTER CREEPY CLOWN THREATS 0 SHARES [10/20/16] Some residents unnerved by scary clown threats in their communities say they’ll be armed for Halloween trick-or-treating, while authorities warn that widespread clown fears may endanger someone dressing up as a clown as a joke. 
+There have been numerous clown sightings in Brevard County, and two men were arrested last week in Melbourne for allegedly threatening people while dressed as clowns and holding large bats, sticks or axes, according to a Florida Today reporter . 
+The incidents have made some residents so nervous that they planned to arm themselves when they go out Halloween night. 
+“Since I have no gun, I will be carrying a bat around on Halloween night,” said Pam Metz of Titusville. 
+Kimberly Kersey said she’d carry a gun while taking her sons trick-or-treating in Palm Bay. 
+“I’ll be carrying for sure,” she said. “I’m terrified of clowns already and if one messes with me or my kids it’ll be to the hospital or morgue they go.” 
+Police typically increase patrols for Halloween. Some law enforcement officials have urged people to reconsider dressing up as clowns to avoid inadvertently endangering themselves. 
+“The problem is that someone dressed like a clown could scare someone and there’s a possibility — a possibility — you could end up with someone getting shot,” said Palm Bay Police Lt. Mike Bandish. 
+Cassandra Closson of West Melbourne gave the same advice to her 15-year-old son and forbade him from dressing as a clown. 
+“Just not worth any drama,” Closson told Florida Today. Post navigation",FAKE
+5024,"Donald Trump, a fallen soldier, and the myth of game-changing moments","Donald Trump's criticism of a Muslim-American family that lost a son in Iraq has been called a potentially pivotal moment in the election. But for a host of reasons, such events are 'very, very rare.'
+
+Khizr Khan, father of fallen US Army Capt. Humayun Khan, speaks while his wife Ghazala Khan looks on during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on Thursday 
+
+In Election 2016, it could be called “the question.”
+
+It has been repeated from the moment Donald Trump entered the race, calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. And it has been raised again this weekend, after Mr. Trump criticized the parents of a fallen Muslim-American soldier.
+
+Has Trump gone too far and materially damaged his chances for the presidency?
+
+The reality is, voters don’t usually make up their minds that way, political scientists say. Single events rarely decide elections, and the constant attempts to forecast Trump’s demise speak both to the media’s continuing befuddlement over his popularity as well as a penchant toward hyperbole.
+
+The failed Iran hostage rescue mission in 1980 doomed Jimmy Carter’s campaign, perhaps. The stock market collapse in 2008 gave John McCain an almost impossible obstacle as the perceived heir of the Bush legacy.
+
+But Trump’s comments about the family of Capt. Humayun Khan, while perhaps more damaging than other past comments, probably won’t determine the winner in November.
+
+“A real … game-changer is very, very rare,” says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “But you wouldn’t know that from watching television.”
+
+The events began at the Democratic National Convention, where Khizr Khan, whose son died in Iraq, sharply criticized Trump. Trump responded by implying that the fallen soldier’s mother had been silenced, by equating his sacrifices in building a successful business with the Khans’ loss, and by trying to refocus the conversation on terrorism.
+
+Some pundits have called it a pivotal moment in the campaign.
+
+But at a moment when the American electorate is increasingly polarized, there is a question of whether game-changing moments can even happen this election. Though polls show that Trump and Hillary Clinton are the two most disliked presidential candidates of the past quarter century, that dislike can freeze voters in concrete – they don’t like their candidate, but they’re definitely not going to vote for the other one.
+
+Over the course of the campaign, Trump’s comments have often only hardened each side’s resolve instead of swaying undecided voters.
+
+“Large majorities are in concrete about their party and presidential choice,” says Professor Sabato. “The game is over for the vast majority of voters.”
+
+But others say that polls do show scope for some movement. Between 5 and 25 percent of voters are not choosing either Trump or Mrs. Clinton.
+
+“This means there is still fluidity there,” says Gary Nordlinger, president of a political consulting firm and adjunct professor at George Washington University’s school of political management.
+
+And despite the high unfavorable ratings for each candidate, some voters could still switch allegiances, suggests Tobe Berkovitz, a political media consultant and chair of Boston University’s department of mass communication.
+
+“I don’t think the cake is baked at this point. More important than the ‘undecideds’ are the ‘persuadables,’ ” he says. “They say they are voting for one or the other [now], but they can be pulled away. It’s a real hold-your-nose election. They are voting because this one is worse than that one.”
+
+The Khan episode could have an influence.
+
+“This could have teeth” compared with Trump’s other controversial remarks, says Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University. “There were multiple facets that people found offensive: the mother remarks, that the speech wasn’t heartfelt, questions as to whether the soldier was a hero. Take your pick. Most people found part of the discussion distasteful.”
+
+The effect will only become apparent after a couple weeks of polling, she says.
+
+One thing is for sure, however. The media are a poor judge of game-changing moments.
+
+The phrase “game changer” was used at least 19,600 times during the 2012 presidential campaign, according to research by Tim Murphy, a reporter with Mother Jones magazine. All three presidential debates were deemed “game-changers,” as were multiple monthly jobs reports and varying endorsements.
+
+“It’s in the media’s interest to make everything seem like a big deal – that’s what the media does and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy for everyone but the voters,” says Professor Berkovitz at Boston University.
+
+As John Sides and Lynn Vavreck point out in their 2012 book “The Gamble,” game-changers are emphasized by the media – not presidential campaigns.
+
+“The continual search for game-changers treats a campaign like a boxing match, where the momentum may be shifting back and forth with every punch and the knockout blow could come at any moment. In reality, there are few knockout punches, and most game-changers do not really change the game that much.”
+
+Added Mr. Murphy of Mother Jones: “The moral of the story is that we’re still really bad at predicting the future.”",REAL
+7784,"Putin Takes On The NWO, October 2016","Putin Takes On The NWO, October 2016 # thinkbig 18 
+Let me get this straight - if leaders of the world combined forces, we could alleviate poverty and the constant fear of terrorism? Could the Middle East be left alone, and not pillaged for oil, sending millions of refugees into Europe, creating an unprecedented cultural catastrophe in waiting? Could certain players on the global arena stop financing terror groups abroad, thus removing the threat entirely? But wait, there's more - Mr Putin is not calling for war with ""the others"", because only WE are the good guys? Unlike Nobel Peace Prize holder over there. Tags",FAKE
+8535,Zakharova: The US is protecting Al-Nusra from being destroyed,"November 4, 2016 - Fort Russ News -  RIA Novosti - translated by J. Arnoldski - 
+
+
+The US should get rid of the illusion that there is the possibility of “taming” terrorists, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated.  
+“Terrorism is like a snake: you turn your back on it and it bites you. Don’t play with it,” she said in an interview to China Radio International. 
+Zakharova remarked that Western and regional countries have invested a lot of forces and means in terrorist groupings. 
+“But these are terrorists, and they shouldn’t be flirted with,” Zakharova added. 
+In the diplomat’s opinion, the actions of the American side, which is not allowing Jebat Al-Nusra to be destroyed, “are a clear manifestation of the fact that they are protecting it.”  
+
+Zakharova also noted that this is not the first time that Russia is clashing with such an approach by the US.  
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
+                                                   
+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+10322,Eric Trump: A candidate under investigation is ‘unthinkable’,"The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by VNN on November 4, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Civil Liberties , Corruption , Election 2016 , Foreign Lobbies , Foreign Policy , Government , Legislation , Police State , Politics . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+4127,Texas troopers to ask drivers their race following investigation,"Texas state troopers have begun asking motorists their race and ethnicity after it was discovered that drivers — mostly Hispanics — were often misidentified during traffic stops because of flaws in an automated system meant to guard against racial profiling.
+
+Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told a state House committee that the change took effect Wednesday in an attempt to gather more accurate data.
+
+""What we can do better, and what we should have been doing better, is collect the data accurately as it relates to Hispanics. Plain and simple ... I would rather a trooper not have to ask,"" McCraw told lawmakers, according to a transcript of the hearing. ""But if the data doesn't work ... there is a problem.''
+
+KXAN-TV in Austin conducted a database review using millions of records going back to 2010 that showed troopers across the state inaccurately reported the race of Hispanic drivers.
+
+The television station's investigation of DPS traffic citation records also found the number of drivers stopped by troopers and recorded as Hispanic has gone up annually since 2010 — from nearly 208,000 to 351,000 last year — while the number of drivers recorded as white declined in the same time period from 1.9 million to about 1.2 million last year, the Associated Press reported.
+
+Among the most common surnames of drivers listed by troopers as white are Garcia, Martinez, Hernandez, Gonzalez and Rodriguez. While a Hispanic name doesn't necessarily mean a person is of Hispanic descent, the review of DPS records showed more than 1.9 million drivers with traditionally Hispanic names were listed as white. Over the same period, approximately 1.6 million were reported as Hispanic.
+
+In an effort to guard against racial profiling, state law requires authorities to document the race of drivers who are arrested, issued warnings or citations. But McCraw testified that coding on drivers licenses only allowed for identification as Hispanic since 2010. Prior to that time, Hispanic motorists were often identified as white.
+
+McCraw told lawmakers that he did not know how much it would cost to fix the automated system, leaving no other remedy but to direct troopers to specifically ask for the information.
+
+""Officers will advise the individual that the officer is required by law to inquire as to the individual’s race or ethnicity,'' a DPS memo outlining the new policy stated. ""The officer will record the race or ethnicity as stated by the motorist. Only in cases where an individual refuses to provide the requested information and the database reflects their race or ethnicity as 'other,' will the officer use best judgment or ability to determine the race or ethnicity of the motorists.''
+
+Despite the current lack of data, McCraw maintained that the agency does not tolerate racial profiling.
+
+""Bottom line, it's against the law,'' he said. ""There is no racial profiling within the DPS.''",REAL
+8864,Michael Hudson on Meet the Renegades,"Lambert Strether on 2:00PM Water Cooler 11/4/2016 > I don’t know how that private server... aab on 2:00PM Water Cooler 11/4/2016 My point was that it is completely outside... Lambert Strether on 2:00PM Water Cooler 11/4/2016 This is a coherent narrative, but I'm not... Lambert Strether on 2:00PM Water Cooler 11/4/2016 The story you can't place in Slate or... Waldenpond on 2:00PM Water Cooler 11/4/2016 Oh yes, the good ol' tradition of laundering... Topics",FAKE
+4832,Is This Trump’s Biggest Financial Con Yet?,"One of the biggest mysteries about the long con of Donald Trump's presidential campaign is how he has convinced millions of middle-class white Americans that he truly gives a shit about them. How can it be, I’ve often wondered, that a billionaire who lives in a pink-marble triplex high above Fifth Avenue, one who flies around in his own aging Boeing 757 and who owns a weekend home in Palm Beach and property in New Jersey horse country, can somehow become the hero of the people left in the wake of the new digital economy? These voters, indeed, have every right to wonder what happened to their American dream. They have every right to be worried about their livelihood and their future. They have every right to be equally terrified and aggrieved about the slow growth of the real economy, and how it has made the life that we have come to expect for generations all but unattainable.
+
+Trump, of course, has never quite evidenced sympathy for the common man. According to a recent bombshell report in The Washington Post, in fact, we now know that Trump’s own foundation reportedly spent $20,000 to purchase a six-foot portrait of Trump himself. Perhaps Trump’s appeal to the Rust Belt results, in part, from the fact that he is a former television star, who showed up in our living rooms every week in a fictitious corporate boardroom. Sara Flynn, a 55-year-old mother of four sons in Hebron, Kentucky, recently explained to reporters from The New York Times that she has liked Trump ever since she watched him on The Apprentice. She said that she believes Trump when he says he can “make America great again.” She seemed wistful. “That’s a bygone era, that’s when America was great,” she said of the old days. “It hasn’t been like that for me.”
+
+I suspect part of the reason that Flynn and others like her feel an affinity for Trump is because of the promises he makes in his speeches, like the one he gave on Thursday to the Economic Club of New York, at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, which is now owned by a Chinese insurance company. The speech was likely written by one of the Reagan-era economic disciples who whisper in Trump’s ears these days. Maybe it was Larry Kudlow, the ex–Bear Stearns economist and CNBC veteran (he was on the dais over Trump’s right shoulder)? Or maybe it was Stephen Moore, formerly a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, who is now a visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation? Trump’s words certainly sounded a bit like Reagan’s. Fresh from his two-hour photo-op in Flint, Michigan, the day before, he told the invitation-only crowd in New York, “It used to be cars were made in Flint, and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now, the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint.”
+
+It’s a good line, and Trump presumably knew it. He had, in fact, also used it in Flint the day before. Like some of what Trump says, it is funny. But like much of what he says, it isn't true. We make millions of cars, and car parts, in America. A recent study by the Center for Automotive Research, in fact, revealed that the auto industry accounts for about 3 percent, or nearly $75 billion, of all foreign direct investment in the United States.
+
+But Trump’s brand depends upon fever dreams more than realities. Trump laid the promises on thick at the Waldorf. “We are going to turn this around,” he continued. “My economic plan rejects the cynicism that says our labor force will keep declining, that our jobs will keep leaving, and that our economy can never grow as it did once before. We reject the pessimism that says our standard of living can no longer rise, and that all that’s left to do is divide up and redistribute our shrinking resources. Everything that is broken today can be fixed, and every failure can be turned into a great success.”
+
+Trump subsequently promised to create 25 million new jobs—more jobs than certain credible economists believe that there will be workers to fill. He promised to cut taxes. He promised to cut regulations. He promised to repatriate the trillions of dollars in corporate profit—he estimated the figure at $5 trillion—and to make child-care costs tax deductible. He promised to rip up the trade agreements that he despises, NAFTA and the T.P.P. He promised that the economy, which has been stuck at around 2 percent annual economic growth for the last 10 years or so, would start growing at 3.5 percent per year, and maybe 4 percent per year if everything goes as he predicts it will. Should that happen, Trump suggested, our $600 billion annual deficit would decrease.
+
+He also promised to cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent from the current 35 percent. “An explosion of new business and new jobs will be created,” he said. “It will be amazing to watch.” He then engaged in a little voodoo economics. “We are proposing a $4.4 trillion tax cut that will score as $2.6 trillion under a dynamic growth model, which is how taxes should be scored,” he said. (If Larry Kudlow is around, could he please translate that sentence into a language one of Trump’s supporters, or even mere journalists, might understand?) Trump then promised to put coal miners and steel workers back to work, despite the fact that so many of the companies that operate in the coal sector face existential struggles; and those that operate in the steel sector are a shadow of their former selves.",REAL
+7518,‘Conspiracy Theorists’ Believe They’ve Found Justice Scalia’s MURDER Plot,"‘Conspiracy Theorists’ Believe They’ve Found Justice Scalia’s MURDER Plot Posted on October 27, 2016 by Dawn Parabellum in Politics Share This 
+It’s troubling to uncover the dirty secrets in the emails leaked from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and it just keeps getting worse. Since the mainstream media refuses to do it, many “conspiracy theorists” are investigating for themselves, and internet sleuths believe they’ve uncovered the murder plot of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Unsurprisingly, the Clintons may have even more blood on their hands. Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia. 
+The evidence does look damning. In the email, where coded language and a disjointed writing technique was used, Podesta is offered a “script” to a “movie.” However, that’s the only normal part of this email. 
+The script writer of the movie is asking Podesta to fund the film, which right away makes the exchange odd since the movie isn’t political and Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, not a movie investor. It seems even more strange once the plot of the movie is revealed in the emails as well. What’s worse, this is not the first email thought to be about the assassination of Antonin Scalia, but I digress. 
+The movie is about a “Mexican” girl on a journey to find her mother. She crosses paths with a man named Alex who assists her on her journey. They end up at an isolated ranch house with a massive underground tunnel in Tecate, California. There is a Smithsonian map included in a link, which has a line pointing to the “setting” of the film, as seen below. Map included in the Podesta emails showing the “setting” of the “movie” 
+The map seems inconspicuous enough until it was realized that the pointer of the map is showing the exact location of the Cibolo Ranch where Antonin Scalia died. Below is a Google map showing the location of the Cibolo Ranch. Google map depicting the location of the Cibolo Ranch 
+The maps were enough to draw the attention of internet sleuths. Digging deeper, they have uncovered more in the same email discussing the details of this “movie,” and honestly, it doesn’t feel right. The entire script of the “movie” can be read in the leaked emails , but one part stands out in addition to connecting the dots with the maps. Ronald Reagan is discussed for some strange reason 
+It’s difficult to imagine what President Ronald Reagan has to do with a movie about a Mexican woman’s journey, other than the fact that Antonin Scalia was a Reagan appointee. However, it gets a little more creepy further down the slightly discombobulated email. A portion of the lengthy email conspiracy theorists believe details the murder plot of Antonin Scalia 
+His five “film projects” aren’t detailed. All he says are “two are political, one is spiritual, and two are just for fun.” Conspiracy theorists believe this is a list of his assassinations and the best way to describe who has been killed and why. 
+Could this all be an elaborate movie and the email sender a poor writer? That seems unlikely, considering he’s claiming to have written an entire script. But, could conspiracy theorists have jumped the gun? That’s also possible. 
+There’s still no absolute proof that this is the murder plot of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but with just over one week left until the nation decides who will be the president and Wikileaks still having many more John Podesta emails to release, it’s possible we may see more about this “movie” if that’s what was really being discussed.",FAKE
+8665,Re: Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Survey Finds That Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence,"Print 
+Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th? Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country. 
+At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day… 
+A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that. 
+More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square. 
+But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax… 
+Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first. 
+And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June … 
+This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day. 
+We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika. 
+There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece… 
+On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?” 
+Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt. 
+On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope. 
+There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating. 
+Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge. 
+For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election… 
+Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president. 
+Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” 
+And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today … 
+“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election. 
+Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another. 
+Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 . 
+If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then. 
+And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month … 
+As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be. 
+But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome . 
+Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House. 
+Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it. 
+Take a look at the future of America: The Beginning of the End and then prepare shares",FAKE
+3319,"Combat veterans face ‘cruel’ struggle to prove their service to VA, amid missing records","Stanley Friedman was shot at. The ship he was on was attacked by enemy bombers. He saw a landmine blow apart a truck carrying two dozen of his fellow soldiers. One of them died in his arms.
+
+But after he came home from World War II, he found himself embroiled in another battle -- this time, with the Veterans Administration, as he tried to get his benefits.
+
+In the decades that followed the war, Friedman suffered from anxiety, depression and nightmares which lasted his entire life, affecting his job and his family.
+
+Yet, as he sought treatment and benefits, the Veterans Administration told him the military records documenting his service couldn't be found. Despite the fact Friedman knew very specific details of the dates and places he experienced the most traumatic events, there was no proof, so he wasn't entitled to benefits, the VA said.
+
+""I have a huge box of letters that he sent to the VA over the years in his attempt to get benefits,"" said Friedman's wife of 61 years, Minna Rae. ""He tried over and over and over again to get help, but they just kept turning him down.""
+
+Friedman -- who, as he would later learn, suffered from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder -- was not alone.
+
+Veterans of all wars, from World War II to the present, are fighting similar battles to this day against the VA -- now called the Department of Veterans Affairs -- to prove their service and obtain benefits they believe they deserve, and finding out that the VA's records are woefully incomplete.
+
+The John Marshall Law School's Veterans Legal Support Center and Clinic, which works to assist vets with legal and other issues, has lists of former soldiers wrangling with the VA system.
+
+""It's an issue many, many vets have been suffering through for a long time, including recent veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan,"" said attorney James Garrett.
+
+Garrett had been a lawyer with the firm DLA Piper Global, in San Diego, which has a division that takes on pro bono work assisting veterans. The veteran support clinic emailed him in 2009 appealing for help for Friedman. Garrett said he was stunned to learn that six decades after the war ended, a soldier was still locked in battle.
+
+""I couldn't believe that after all this time, a WWII veteran was still having trouble getting benefits,"" he exclaimed.
+
+Friedman was 89 years old at that time.
+
+Garrett and his team began making calls, sending letters, searching the Internet, digging through documents and wading through reams of microfilm, just trying to find anything that would prove Friedman's claims.
+
+""Frustrating does not even begin to tell you the truth of the matter. I've found it incredibly unbelievable as a taxpayer the amount of bureaucracy and ineptitude that was occurring, not only in Stanley Friedman's case, but in other cases,"" Garrett said.
+
+Brian Clauss, who is executive director of the clinic at John Marshall, said missing records are especially a problem for veterans who served before 1973, when a fire destroyed millions of files at the National Personnel Records Center in suburban St. Louis, Mo.
+
+""No duplicate copies of these records were ever maintained, nor were microfilm copies produced,"" said Clauss. ""Neither were any indexes created prior to the fire.""
+
+A person would need to be a very good detective to come up with proof of service or experiences.
+
+""It can be particularly cruel -- an elderly veteran has to reconstruct their service record. They're forced to prove their qualifications,"" Clauss said.
+
+In addition to the fire, Clauss said records may not have been well kept during combat situations, especially if a person was injured and then evacuated. ""It is emergency treatment under extreme conditions,"" he explained. ""It is war, people are rushing through the chaos. They don't keep detailed records.""
+
+Critics also claim the VA is antiquated and behind the times technologically, and there's still a great deal of material on paper -- and not enough staff to deal with it all.
+
+The VA did not respond to requests from Fox News for comment for this report.
+
+Since Friedman's case came to light, there's been more attention paid to the problem of lost veteran records, but it continues to be a serious issue for many.
+
+Garrett said veterans told him, ""Everyone thought we were lying about things we said we had seen and experienced.""
+
+One Vietnam veteran, who didn't want his name used, said ""the more publicity we get for this problem, the better ... Americans need to know about it.""
+
+In 2012, Garrett was able to locate some of Friedman's lost records. And after three more years of legal wrangling with the VA offices, Friedman was finally able to obtain benefits, at the age of 92.
+
+""This validated him. It completely changed our lives,"" said Minna Rae.
+
+Once he got benefits, Friedman had greater access to care, which included long-awaited therapy for PTSD.
+
+""We're very fortunate he lived long enough to get verification for his service because many other World War II vets died before that happened,"" Minna Rae said.
+
+In the final years of his life, Stanley Friedman was eventually able to move to a veterans' residence not far from his suburban Chicago home, called the Green House homes at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center.
+
+He found peace among the caring staff and his fellow veterans.
+
+Friedman died in his sleep there at the age of 94.
+
+Ruth Ravve joined the Fox News Channel (FNC) in 1996 and currently serves as a Chicago-based producer.",REAL
+8156,This Is The Future: Tree-Shaped Vertical Farms That Grow 24 Acres Of Crops,"By 2050, the world’s population is estimated to reach 9.7 billion people. Already, 795 million people go to bed hungry each evening. Catching up to – and alleviating – the problem of... ",FAKE
+904,"Among this group of GOP primary voters, Trump is the Porsche of candidates","If Donald Trump were a car, he would be a Porsche. If he were an animal, he’d be a lion. And people like Porsches and lions.
+
+Or, at least, “Walmart moms” do, according to a focus group of Republican primary-voting Walmart moms conducted this past week in Pittsburgh by Democratic pollster Margie Omero and Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. (Walmart moms are defined as women who have children younger than 18 at home and have gone to the store at least once in the past month. The focus groups — the two pollsters did another one with swing moms in suburban Philadelphia — were funded by Walmart.)
+
+“Characterizing Donald Trump as a type of car or animal resulted in some fascinating descriptions — from the GOP group, women depicted him as a Porsche, a Ferrari, a muscle car, a boxer who stands his ground, a bulldog, an Escalade, a lion (fierce and king of the jungle) and as an unpredictable cat,” Newhouse and Omero wrote in a memo summarizing the results. “These Moms praised him as someone who speaks his mind, stands his ground, and is refreshingly politically incorrect.”
+
+[The most baffling moments from Donald Trump’s Washington Post ed board interview]
+
+The focus group, which was split evenly between Trump supporters and those backing another Republican candidate, provides a fascinating window into not only how Pennsylvanians view Trump on the eve of the state’s primary, on Tuesday, but also into how the real estate mogul is viewed more broadly.
+
+The findings should be comforting for Trump and deeply concerning not only for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, his rivals for the Republican nomination, but also for the “Never Trump” movement within the GOP establishment.
+
+“These GOP Walmart moms seem to want no part of the #NeverTrump movement,” Newhouse told me Sunday. “In fact, they respect his strength and his straight talk and believe he is the party’s best shot to beat Hillary.”
+
+Most importantly, the GOP primary race as seen through the lens of these Walmart moms is, effectively, Trump vs. everyone else. Neither Cruz nor Kasich make much of an impression with these women — even this late in the primary process.
+
+“Voters were generally unable to tell us much about either Cruz or Kasich, Republican primary voters seemed to dislike Cruz perhaps more than the swing Moms; he was generally described in both groups as ‘religious,’ ‘gorilla — almost human,’ or ‘like a neighbor’s dog — you don’t know if they’re going to bite,’ ” Omero and Newhouse wrote. “Kasich’s image was even thinner, ‘I think they like him in Ohio,’ said one, ‘too sane,’ or ‘Mild, like a kitten,’ said others.”
+
+Then there’s the fact that for all the attention paid to Trump’s comments about women during his long life in the public eye, the vast majority of these GOP Walmart moms seems strikingly unbothered by his views on women.
+
+“When these GOP Moms were pushed about Trump’s gender issues, there was some acknowledgment that he may be a ‘sexist,’ but general agreement among these women was that ‘I don’t really care, I’ve seen worse,’ ” Newhouse and Omero wrote.
+
+That’s an absolutely stunning finding — at least to me.
+
+[The new Donald Trump should scare the hell out of the GOP establishment]
+
+When it comes to the broader delegate fight, the women in the focus group think Trump is also in very good shape and think it would be deeply unfair for the person who enters the convention with the most votes and delegates not to be chosen as the Republican nominee.
+
+“I’d feel terribly misled,” one woman said when asked about the prospect. “Cheated,” another said. (Not surprisingly, this group was equally dismissive about the prospect of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan or some other “white knight” candidate riding to the rescue at the convention; “If convention turned to someone like Paul Ryan — shows that GOP leaders don’t really care about them,” Newhouse tweeted while conducting the focus group.)
+
+Finally, there’s a very strong sense that Trump represents the GOP’s best chance of beating Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in the fall — despite lots and lots of polling that suggests he would be a decidedly weak nominee against the former secretary of state.
+
+The Walmart moms said they would feel “relieved,” “concerned,” “good” and “optimistic” with Trump as the nominee — a remarkable set of emotions toward the business mogul. “There was no hesitation among the GOP women that Trump could beat Clinton and that they would support the GOP nominee — even if he hadn’t been their first choice,” Newhouse and Omero wrote.
+
+With Trump coming off a huge win in New York last Tuesday and almost certainly headed to a five-state sweep this Tuesday, these findings suggest that among the GOP rank and file, he is considered far more likely to be the Republican nominee than is commonly understood in Washington — a frightening prospect for party leaders, who believe that nominating Trump could be a massive electoral disaster for their side.
+
+“Pittsburgh’s not that far from Washington, D.C., but these GOP Walmart moms are a world apart from D.C. in their views on this race,” Newhouse said. “We’ve long passed Valentine’s Day, but among these women, it’s coming up all roses for Donald Trump.”",REAL
+4442,Jordan Strikes At ISIS; Obama Said To Be Preparing To Request War Powers,"Jordan Strikes At ISIS; Obama Said To Be Preparing To Request War Powers
+
+Repeated air strikes on the self-described Islamic State are ""the beginning of our retaliation"" for the extremist group's brutal killing of a captured pilot, Jordan's foreign minister says.
+
+Nasser Judeh made the remark on CNN, adding that Jordan will continue to target ISIS fighters and facilities in both Iraq and Syria.
+
+""We are upping the ante. We're going after them wherever they are, with everything that we have,"" Judeh said.
+
+The fight against ISIS is also a hot topic in Washington, where President Obama reportedly plans to ask Congress to authorize the use of military force against the extremist group. The Associated Press notes that the president has been relying on Sept. 11-era authorizations, and that the process of getting new legislation won't be simple.
+
+""His actions are going to be an important part of trying for us to get the votes to actually pass an authorization,"" House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday. ""This is not going to be an easy lift.""
+
+There's no word yet on the timing of the request, which the AP says would cover three years.
+
+In the meantime, the U.S. military is putting search and rescue crews closer to the fighting in northern Iraq.
+
+""After Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh was captured by the so-called Islamic State when his plane crashed in December, the United Arab Emirates withdrew its aircraft from anti-ISIS coalition airstrikes. ""A retired Jordanian air force general tells NPR that the UAE move was understandable, because search and rescue capabilities need to be improved. ""So news that U.S. search and rescue crews are moving to northern Iraq to be closer to the battle space has been greeted warmly here. Al-Kaseasbeh's brutal killing has many Jordanians backing their country's role in the fight against ISIS, and the king says Jordan's response will be harsh and ongoing.""
+
+As the Two-Way reported Thursday, a U.N. report issued this week gave more details about ISIS' brutal tactics, noting ""several cases of mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children and burying children alive.""",REAL
+4578,Clinton's emotional concession: This is 'painful and will be for a long time',"Hillary Clinton ended her historic presidential campaign Wednesday, saying it is “painful and will be for a long time,” as she urged for a peaceful transfer of power.
+
+“Donald Trump is going to be our president,” she said in her concession speech. “I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans,"" Clinton told a room of emotional aides and supporters, who gave her an extended round of applause.
+
+“We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America and always will. And if you do, then we must accept this” election outcome, she added. “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.”
+
+Clinton’s vice presidential running mate, Tim Kaine, introduced her and addressed the unique challenge the former secretary of State faced in her bid to become the nation's first female president.
+
+“She has been and is a great history maker,” he said, citing her work as a civil rights lawyer, first lady, senator and secretary of State. “She has made history in a nation that is good at so many things, but that’s made it uniquely difficult for a woman to be elected to federal office,"" adding that Clinton had become the first female major-party presidential nominee,
+
+He also noted that, just like Democrat Al Gore in 2000, Clinton appeared to have won the national popular vote.
+
+Clinton made it clear that while Americans must “cherish” the Constitution’s democratic tradition of a peaceful transfer of power, they should fight to protect its core values of the rule of law, equal rights and freedom of worship. These are all Constitutional protections her campaign had argued were at risk with a Trump presidency.
+
+In closing her remarks Clinton made a direct appeal to young people and women of all ages.
+
+To young people, she said: “This loss hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.”
+
+She concluded her concession urging the women who supported her not to lose faith in their dreams.
+
+“We have still not shattered that highest, hardest glass ceiling, but some day someone will. And hopefully sooner than we might think right now,” she said.
+
+“To all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your” dreams, she added.
+
+Several hours earlier, Clinton had called Trump to congratulate him on becoming the nation's president-elect. However, she did not make an appearance before backers gathered at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for what was expected to be a victory party.
+
+Instead, her campaign chairman, John Podesta, made brief remarks. “It’s been a long night, and it’s been a long campaign, but I can say we can wait a little longer,"" he told Clinton's despondent supporters in the late hours of election night.
+
+Outside the New Yorker hotel in Manhattan, where Clinton would deliver her concession remarks Wednesday, disappointed supporters, many still wearing their guest badges from the previous night's campaign event, tried to get in to see their defeated candidate.
+
+Anita Broccolino said she wanted to get into the event ""to show support for Hillary, to show her we love her.""
+
+The loss was a shock to the Clinton team after most major polls showed her with a comfortable lead in all of the major battleground states, including Pennsylvania, a blue-leaning state that Republicans hadn't carried since 1988 — until Trump's win there Tuesday.
+
+A few weeks ago, Clinton's lead was even more pronounced. Following the third debate in Las Vegas, in which Trump called Clinton a ""nasty woman"" and would not commit to honoring the outcome of the election, an ABC News tracking poll showed Clinton leading the GOP nominee by 11 points nationally.
+
+Later in the month, FBI Director James Comey announced that his agency was reviewing new emails that might be relevant to its investigation of her private email server, but just two days before the election, Comey said the emails were either duplicates or not germane and that he was making no change in his previous recommendation against criminal charges.
+
+Still, the move revived the one issue that had proved most damaging to Clinton's candidacy — and her poll numbers began to reflect it.
+
+Additionally, news organizations, including Fox News, falsely reported that she would be indicted in a separate investigation related to her family's charitable foundation.
+
+Clinton responded on the campaign trail by shifting her message to take aim at Trump, even warning at several rallies that the real estate mogul's temperament risked a global nuclear war. On the eve of the election, Clinton told supporters in Grand Rapids, Mich., that there was no veto over a presidential decision to launch a nuclear weapon and that it takes just four minutes to launch one.
+
+Democrats will now begin a long process of soul-searching. During the heat of the campaign, they had remained optimistic that a number of the setbacks they'd encountered, including the WikiLeaks email hack linked to Russia, were survivable.",REAL
+6036,Blind Mystic Who Predicted 9/11 Has Bad News About Trump,"Remember the blind Bulgarian mystic who predicted 9/11 and the rise of ISIS? Well, she’s got some bad news for, dare I say it, Commander in Chief Donald Trump. 
+Via UsualRoutine 
+
+Baba Vanga, who’s known to her followers as the ‘Nostradamus of the Balkans’, has claimed Obama is the last President of the United States of America. Vanga allegedly called the election of Barack Obama as well, predicting the 44th president of the United States would be an African American – also making the chilling claim that he would be the ‘last U.S. president’.
+Usually, I’d be happy to dismiss the reaction to Vanga’s prophetic prediction as the public clinging onto a ray of hope in today’s new political climate, but actually, the blind mystic has a pretty great track record with her visions. The prophetess, who died aged 85 in 1996, is alleged to have made hundreds of predictions about the future with an 85 per cent accuracy rate, from her home in Petrich, Bulgaria.
+
+These prediction include climate change and the melting of the polar ice caps, which she allegedly foresaw back in the 1950s, saying: “cold regions will become warm … and volcanoes will awaken”.
+Vanga’s followers also say she predicted the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, warning a ‘huge wave’ would descend on a “big coast, covering people and towns and [causing] everything to disappear under the water”. Back in 1989 she warned that the ‘American brethren’ will be attacked by ‘two steel birds’, a possible reference to the Twin Tower attacks in 2001.
+
+She also warned that a group of Muslim extremists would invade Europe by 2016, foreseeing a ‘great Muslim war’ that would be kick-started by the Arab Spring in 2010 and play out in Syria, eventually resulting in the establishment of a caliphate by 2043 with Rome at the center. According to The Mirror she claimed this ‘2016 invasion by Muslim extremists’ across Europe would mean the continent would ‘cease to exist’ by the end of the year. She specifically said: “[Extremists] would use chemical warfare against Europeans.”
+Vanga’s political predictions take on a new poignancy posthumously; could her assertions about the elusive 45th President equate to predicting an assassination attempt, or simply that Donald Trump is, as previously expected, a cyborg?
+Baba Vanga for President? Anyone?
+",FAKE
+1253,Inside Bernie Sanders’s quest to win over Nevada’s Latinos,"EAST LAS VEGAS — ""Nevada is especially important because we're a swing state. Who here knows what a swing state is?"" a Bernie Sanders campaign organizer had asked the room of 15 volunteers — overwhelmingly Latino and largely in their teens and 20s — during an introductory spiel that was part training and part pep rally.
+
+Silence. The question hung in the air just long enough to become awkward.
+
+""No one?"" the organizer asked. Clearly surprised but only slightly deterred, he barreled on with the rest of his pitch.
+
+Many of Sanders's enthusiastic supporters are people who are interested in the presidential race because they're interested in Bernie Sanders, not the other way around. That's a big asset for a campaign that's relying on motivated volunteers: The Sanders campaign needs these young Latinos to spread Sanders's message of economic populism, and his extremely progressive immigration platform, to the rest of the Latino community.
+
+But it's also an illustration of just how much work Sanders's people have cut out for them in a very short amount of time.
+
+The campaign hopes that this work will cause Latinos to caucus for Sanders on Saturday in high enough numbers to win a state in what's become an unexpectedly close race — and, in the process, prove to observers that Sanders can win with nonwhites.
+
+The campaign's office in East Las Vegas is strategically located in a neighborhood the Sanders organizer referred to as ""Little Mexico."" It is also a few blocks from Rancho High School, a school of nearly 3,000 students, more than two-thirds of whom identify as Latino. This isn't symbolic — it's an important way to make sure Sanders's most devoted supporters can come to the office to call voters and canvass neighborhoods.
+
+The Sanders campaign's ""Latino outreach strategy"" is a matter of who is speaking on the candidate's behalf — but it doesn't involve changing what those people are saying. Forty-one percent of America's Latino voters, and 44 percent of Nevada's, are millennials. And as far as the Sanders campaign is concerned, they're just like any other millennials: They care about a $15 minimum wage and free college tuition, and they want to get money out of politics.
+
+In other words, the Sanders campaign's ""pitch"" to Latinos is strikingly similar to its pitch to everyone else: In the words of Nevada state director Joan Kato, Sanders is ""someone who's always fought for equality and making sure the average person is not taken advantage of.""
+
+In Nevada, at least, this message appeals to many young Latinos who are excited about Sanders's ability to transform a political system they don't fully buy into. It's not just that they agree with the positions Sanders is espousing; it's that they believe he will be a reliable champion for them if he's elected.
+
+""Bernie is the only candidate that really believes in the Fight for $15 movement,"" a young organizer told the group of volunteers in East Las Vegas, referring to the fact that Sanders's opponent in the primary, Hillary Clinton, has embraced a $12-an-hour minimum wage but won't go as high as $15. ""We have to show that support just the way he's supporting us.""
+
+Even though Sanders's economic message has won enthusiasm from many young Latinos, the candidate's position on immigration is still a key part of his Latino outreach strategy.
+
+For many Latino voters, immigration is a ""threshold issue""; issues like health care, jobs, and education might be more important to them, but they won't even start evaluating a candidate — or party — on those issues if he or she doesn't support immigration reform.
+
+Early in Sanders's campaign, during an interview with Vox, he expressed skepticism about large-scale low-skilled immigration into the US — and it looked like he was setting himself up for attacks from the very vocal immigrant rights movement. But instead, the Sanders campaign turned his relative underemphasis on immigration prior to his candidacy into an asset for his campaign by bringing immigration activists in to craft an immigration platform that put him substantially to the left of Hillary Clinton.
+
+DREAMer activists Cesar Vargas and Erika Andiola joined the Sanders campaign last fall, with the task of designing the senator's immigration platform. Along with other Sanders staffers, and the candidate himself, they essentially crowdsourced the platform, asking immigrant activists and legal organizations for suggestions and input.
+
+""We were the people who presented the senator with this whole policy platform. They knew it was bold, and they accepted it,"" Vargas said.
+
+Vargas and Andiola had some good material to start with: Sanders's opposition to big business makes him a natural critic of private, for-profit prisons, and he'd already promised to abolish them. That wouldn't have as much of an impact on the overall prison population as most people think, but it would absolutely transform the immigration detention system — which is dominated by for-profit facilities. And for many grassroots immigration activists, curbing immigration detention and enforcement is a key goal.
+
+Many of the activists Vargas and Andiola talked to had personal experience with the detention system. One of them was Liz Hernandez, an activist with the United Coalition for Immigrant and Migrant Rights in Las Vegas. Hernandez was detained by immigration agents at the age of 10, along with her mother, 7-year-old sister, and 2-month-old brother. Her mother, who made and sold homemade cheeses to support the family, had to ask the agents for food and water for her children.
+
+Sixteen years later — and after having told her story countless times in her advocacy work — Hernandez crying as she recounts all of this for me: ""It's disgusting to know that there are kids being criminalized at such a young age."" Hernandez received protection from deportation and work permission under Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012; her mother is still at risk of deportation.
+
+Hernandez and other local activists met with Sanders himself while Vargas and Andiola were working on the platform. She told him about her family's experiences. And, she says, ""He was like, 'We're going to make something happen.'""
+
+His platform follows through on that commitment. While both Sanders and Clinton promise to go even further than President Obama in using executive action to protect unauthorized immigrants from deportations, Sanders puts a number on it: He'd protect up to 9 million unauthorized immigrants. And he'd even allow some parents who'd already been deported to return to the US and their families. It sounds like an immigration advocate's wish list — because it is.
+
+""I've never been asked to endorse a politician before,"" says Hernandez. ""It's really hard for me to talk about a candidate, to say, 'You have to support this person.'"" But Sanders won her over: The afternoon I meet her, she's the most diligent volunteer in the East Las Vegas office, calling voter after voter to urge them to caucus.
+
+As far as the Sanders campaign is concerned, their biggest problem is name recognition. Talk to some of their supporters, and you might think it's the only problem.
+
+Adriana Arévalo, an outreach strategist with the Sanders campaign, had a recent encounter with a woman at a soccer tournament who said she supported Hillary ""'because she's the wife of Bill Clinton.' I said, 'Okay, but do you know what she's offering for you, for your family?'"" Arévalo says the woman left the tournament as a Sanders supporter.
+
+But Sanders' campaign is making progress. One person I spoke to in Las Vegas (who asked not to be named because they're affiliated with a nonpartisan organization) said they're hearing from, ""like, Latina housekeepers: 'El viejito, he has some good ideas.'"" Viejito is an affectionate, even nicknamey way to say ""the old man."" ""That they already have a nickname for him, wow.""
+
+""There's barely any people who reject Bernie for his ideas,"" says Cynthia, a 17-year-old Rancho High School student and Sanders volunteer. Her confidence is brimming. ""If people were more politically aware, they'd already know who Bernie was.""
+
+This is an appealing narrative for the Sanders campaign in Nevada, because it presents their only problem as something they have the resources to solve: All they need is word of mouth, and they have an enthusiastic young volunteer core to accomplish that.
+
+Sometimes it can be hard to tell how big the groundswell of Latino support for Sanders really is. The campaign presents its Nevada operation as a response to popular demand: There are 12 offices in Nevada, multiple staffers took pains to mention, more than any other presidential campaign. But political journalist Jon Ralston (considered the ""dean"" of the local press corps) thinks that's mostly hype: ""Yeah, you have 12 offices, but if the lights aren't on in 11 of them..."" he says airily.
+
+Ralston is also skeptical of the campaign's claim that it's been endorsed by five Spanish-language publications in Nevada; when the campaign announced the first three endorsements, he called them ""three Spanish-language newspapers nobody has heard of, including an ad mag and an online news aggregator.""
+
+And in other cases, the campaign's aggressive enthusiasm can look like straight-up aggression. A student government leader at the College of Southern Nevada, who was initially listed among the Sanders campaign's ""steering committee,"" later said that she hadn't known signing up for the committee implied an endorsement of Sanders and that she would actually be supporting Hillary Clinton.
+
+The most powerful union in southern Nevada, the Culinary Union Local 226, also harshly criticized the Sanders campaign for sneaking into employee dining rooms and canvassing for Sanders while wearing union pins — a move that, several advocates in Nevada stressed to me, could have gotten the union in serious trouble.
+
+The Sanders campaign has a mixed record when it comes to conventional campaign tactics, which makes it all the more important that its word-of-mouth, passion-driven campaign succeed. The passionate Sanders supporters are the ones who are expected to spread the word to less politically engaged members of the community: that there is in fact a second Democrat running for president, and that he's the one who really wants to help them afford college and help their parents avoid deportation.
+
+The Clinton campaign urges its staff and volunteers to focus on maximizing ""voter contacts"" — ""the goal is that canvassers have knocked on your door four to five times in the last two months,"" Clinton communications staffer Jorge Silva tells me — and to develop spreadsheets of who needs a ride to the polls.
+
+The Sanders campaign also wants to reach as many voters as frequently as possible, of course — but it urges its volunteers not to use their scripts when calling potential caucus-goers, and instead to share their personal stories of why they support the senator.
+
+""We are the face of the political revolution,"" one staffer told the East Las Vegas volunteers, ""and that's why we gotta call everybody and their moms, like, 10 times.""
+
+Spreading the word is obviously important as a force multiplier. But there's a more basic reason for the focus on evangelism: Many of Sanders's most passionate supporters can't themselves vote.
+
+Some of the young volunteers can caucus — Cynthia, for example — will be 18 by Election Day in November, so Nevada law allows her to caucus in February. Furthermore, Nevada allows same-day voter registration for Democratic caucus-goers, something that was a major factor in helping Obama take more of the state's delegates than Clinton in 2008 (though he lost the popular vote).
+
+But even with early eligibility and same-day registration, many of Sanders's most fervent Latino supporters aren't eligible to caucus. That doesn't stop them from organizing for the candidate, as staffers stress time and time again. But it could still set a ceiling for the candidate.
+
+Sanders's best asset in the caucuses is the fact that his supporters are likely to be more informed about when the caucuses are and more passionate about showing up to them. Some of the most passionate of those supporters are young Latinos, of two very different types.
+
+The first are the kind who have been involved in politics long enough that they don't tend to fall in love with politicians but feel they've finally found someone to trust: the Cesar Vargases and Liz Hernandezes of the world. They're noncitizens (like many of their peers in the immigrant rights movement), and they can't vote. The second are the kind who aren't otherwise interested in politics — who don't know what a swing state is — but who see Sanders as a politician worth paying attention to. Some of them are eligible to vote like Cynthia; others are simply too young.
+
+At the East Las Vegas office, a campaign organizer tried to prepare a few young volunteers to call potential caucus-goers. When he turned to ask another staffer for clarification about something, one of the volunteers shyly raised his hand and gestured at the young woman next to him: ""We actually kind of have to leave right now."" Their ride had arrived.",REAL
+8946,Hillary’s #1 aide Huma Abedin: Undeniable ties to terrorists & 9/11 funders,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 8 + 7 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
+10032,Private Equity Energy Funds Did So Badly They Might Have to Do the Unthinkable – Pay Clawbacks,"by Yves Smith 
+The law firm Akin Gump issued a warning that might chill the bones of some private equity general partners: clawbacks may be a-comin’. From the firm’s website : 
+In recent months, managers of private equity funds in the energy sector have been facing a scenario they likely never imagined: having to return millions of dollars of their “carried interest” earnings back to investors. 
+For newbies to this private equity practice, private equity funds typically pay the profit share, prototypically 20% once a target rate of return has been met. What creates the possibility of a clawback is the fact that for most US funds, the profit computation and any payouts are made every time a portfolio company is sold. By contrast, in “European” deals, the carry fees are paid only at the end of the fund’s life. 
+The conventional US approach, combined with strong general partner incentives to realize profits on at least some promising deals early in the fund’s life, means that the general partners can pay themselves carry fees that are more than they deserved once the impact of doggy companies, which are sold late in the fund’s life, are factored in. Hence the limited partnership agreements provide for “clawbacks,” as in the recovery of overpayments of carry fees. 
+Yet as we’ve written, clawbacks are almost never paid in practice. Why? First, the clawback provisions have tax language that is very favorable to the general partners, and has the economic effect that they can hang on what are excessive carry fees based on raw cash flows. Second, possession is 9/10ths of the law. In those instances where the general partner owes limited partner clawbacks, the general partner usually goes to the limited partners and offers them a special deal (details often unspecified!) on their next fund. Needless to say, this approach has the desirable effect of pre-committing those limited partners. 
+Akin Gump flagged specifically the lousy performance of some unnamed energy funds. In light of the discussion above, the limited partners have been sufficiently burned that they have no intention of investing in energy funds any time soon, and may also be willing to be atypically forceful about getting money back. Recall that limited partners fetishize maintaining friction-free relationships with general partners. Again from the firm’s missive: 
+Several energy-related funds that were formed in nascent stages of the boom now have terms ending during collapse-protracted downturns. Managers may feel as though they could recoup some losses if they could delay liquidating assets until oil recovers further. Many fund agreements provide for a one or two year extension of the fund’s investment period at the manager’s discretion; however, to the extent that this option has already been exhausted, some managers are now going back to investors to seek additional time and, potentially, additional capital. To placate investors in such cases, a manager may need to reduce or eliminate management fees charged to a fund for the duration of any extension period. Unfortunately, apart from extending a fund’s investment or harvest period, managers have little recourse after a fund’s inception. 
+In other words, Mr. Market did not bail these funds out and a day of reckoning is coming. 
+Interestingly, Akins Gump uses pain in the oil patch to argue that general partners should consider building in better means for assuring that general partners can pay clawbacks back if they are due and owing. What this document reveals is that limited partners have signed up for clawback agreements that are likely to be empty in practice. The money went years ago into the firm’s carry pool, and hence for payouts to senior and mid-level staffers. The top dogs may have tied the money up in investments or property (houses, art) that they can’t readily liquidate. Or the funds may be beyond their reach entirely by having gone to outlays (political fundraising or a campaign, big gifts to charities) or an ex-wife. People below the senior level may have moved on. And perhaps as important, all the true partners (owners of the management company) have vis-a-vis everyone else who is in the firm is moral suasion. How far do you think that is going to go in getting people to write checks to disgorge monies they banked or worse spent, years ago? 
+What is striking about the Akins Gump article is that the firm is giving what amounts to marketing rather than legal advice: 
+The best way a manager can avoid the predicament of having to return a large sum to investors in respect of a clawback is to build preventative measures into the organizational documents of the fund or the vehicle earning the carry at the outset (i.e., escrows at the carry level or the contractual ability to get any distributions back from employees). 
+Mind you, the private equity business has been around for 40 years, and has had large and supposedly savvy institutional investors for 30 plus years. The general partners have always been expose to the risk of paying clawbacks when their limited partnership agreements allow for them. So what is different now? 
+Perhaps it is that investors are more acutely aware of the risk of investing at the peak of cycle than in the past, and the example of what happened to energy funds has made them realize that they could see problems like that on a broader basis. Moreover, given that the mainstream media is much less reverential in its treatment of private equity than in the past, if a meaningful minority of funds were to post overall crappy returns, resulting in meaningful clawbacks due, the press is more likely to expose the failure of investors like public pension funds to get insistent about getting their money back. Limited partner suing general partners is unheard of, but in a weak returns environment, private equity would no longer be a “must have” portfolio allocation. So Akins Gump appears to be alerting the industry to a risk that they had been able to cavalierly ignore that may start to bite them. 
+And another reason for concern: 
+Further, although Section 956 of the Dodd-Frank Act relating to executive compensation could impose a mandatory return-of-incentive compensation scheme on certain financial institutions, it is unlikely that the proposed rules, in their current formulation, would apply to carried interest distributions, but they are subject to further clarification. 
+The suggestions acknowledge that money-driven private equity professionals wouldn’t be happy with a “wait until the dust has settled” European structure. Some of the ideas include escrowing some carry but not so much as to demotivate staffers (30% was the suggested level), interim clawbacks that require the general partner “to reckon with any shortcomings as they occur.” A modified deal-by-deal structure would require the general partner to tally up losses and writedowns and earn back the shortfall before any more carry could be paid. 
+Akins Gump curiously omitted another option: a performance bond. It’s not hard to imagine that Wall Street firms would be willing to insure this risk (or at least after the general partners paid a first loss amount) for a suitable fee. 
+Nevertheless, this alert to general partners, as occurs so routinely in private equity, illustrates how remiss the limited partners have been. It would be gratifying if the underlying assumption in the Akins Gump piece were correct, that the deterioration in private equity profit generation is leading to contract terms becoming less one-sided in favor of general partners. But given the degree of complacency among limited, don’t expect these changes to take place any time soon. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+1367,Rand Paul drops out of White House race,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+6096,Open Thread (NOT U.S. Election) 2016-38,"Open Thread (NOT U.S. Election) 2016-38 
+News & views NOT related to the U.S. election ... 
+(Use thread below this one for election news & views) Posted by b on November 7, 2016 at 01:27 PM | Permalink Comments 
+Russia Says Ceasefire in Syria's Aleppo in Place Unless Militants Attack TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The Kremlin said Monday Russia's air force would stick to the ceasefire in Syria's Aleppo unless militants launch an offensive. 
+""The (Russian) president deems a regime when Russian air forces don't carry out strikes on eastern Aleppo as reasonable if militants don't start combat action,"" Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, according to Reuters. Posted by: schlub | Nov 7, 2016 1:37:48 PM | 1 
+Daesh Launches Chemical Attack in Iraq’s Mosul 
+November, 07, 2016 - 10:56 TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The Daesh (ISIL or ISIS) terrorist group has used mustard gas during a military clash with government troops in Iraq’s Mosul, a report said. 
+Daesh on Sunday fired mortar shells containing chemicals at positions of Iraqi troops who are advancing against the terrorist group in Mosul, Sky News Arabia said on Sunday, citing Kurdish sources. 
+The report added that the Takfiri group had also deployed small drones carrying chemical explosives to blow up the government troops. Posted by: schlub | Nov 7, 2016 1:43:21 PM | 2 Verify your Comment",FAKE
+1430,Why many black voters aren't flocking to Bernie Sanders,"Bernie Sanders has civil rights credentials, but many black thinkers are wary of his brand of liberal socialism, which they say ignores the role of racism in society.
+
+Tesla under Trump: How will electric cars fare under the next president?
+
+With just a week before the first votes are cast in the 2016 United States presidential election, black voters have yet to #feelthebern and embrace Bernie Sanders’s liberal vision for the country.
+
+And while the Vermont senator could upset former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the first two Democratic contests, in mostly white Iowa and New Hampshire, black voters could quickly stop the momentum of the self-described democratic socialist once the election heads to the South, many observers say.
+
+For one thing, Mrs. Clinton enjoys strong support from this constituency, perhaps because of her and her husband’s long involvement with the black community. But for some black thinkers, the issue is more Senator Sanders himself – and specifically, his class-based economic socialism.
+
+His outlook, they say, often ignores deeper questions about race and the divides that the country continues to face. And in that respect, they see Sanders as not warming up to the kind of radical actions that they’re calling for.
+
+“I think this is where some of the white liberal efforts have failed,” says Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University in New York. “In the rush to make it all about class, you turn on your blinders to certain things that quite frankly aren’t about class.... He’s missing a very large piece of the puzzle, and what makes some black voters nervous, there seems to be a huge gap in his understanding about race.”
+
+This summer, as the Sanders campaign’s message of economic populism first began resonating among many Democrats, especially Millennials, it ran into problems when targeted by Black Lives Matter protesters, many of them boisterous and disruptive. They were unimpressed that the radical democratic socialist responded to the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore primarily with a “long run” solution of better youth employment.
+
+“When a candidate points to high unemployment among black youth, as well as high incarceration rates, and then dubs himself a radical, it seems prudent to ask what radical anti-racist policies that candidate actually embraces,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic on Sunday. “Hillary Clinton has no interest in being labeled radical, left-wing, or even liberal,” he added.
+
+Mr. Coates’s much-discussed 2014 essay, “The Case for Reparations,” laid out a moral argument that even many conservatives found compelling, as it recounted the history of government “redlining,” which disqualified most black neighborhoods for federally supported mortgage lending.
+
+Over the weekend, Coates returned to the reparations issue, saying that Sanders’s radical bona fides actually reveal the failure of the “liberal imagination.”
+
+“Sanders’s basic approach is to ameliorate the effects of racism through broad, mostly class-based policies – doubling the minimum wage, offering single-payer health-care, delivering free higher education,” he wrote. “This is the same ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’ thinking that has dominated Democratic anti-racist policy for a generation.”
+
+Eradicating the deeper effects of white supremacy, Coates and other commentators believe, requires far more attention to race and much more radical action – such as correcting the devastating history of redlining.
+
+Yet even as some black thinkers and the young protesters of Black Lives Matter remain unimpressed with Sanders, experts say this doesn’t fully explain why black voters are increasingly putting their support behind Mrs. Clinton.
+
+While Clinton has seen her support fall among almost all Democratic constituencies this past month, that has not been the case among black and Latino Democratic voters. In January, their support for Clinton jumped to 71 percent, according to a Monmouth University poll released last week, up from 61 percent in December.
+
+A lot of this support, many say, is simply that black voters know both Hillary and Bill Clinton well after more than two decades on the national political scene.
+
+“Though he lived in Chicago and did all sorts of work with [Martin Luther] King, Sanders is a New England liberal,” says Randal Jelks, professor of African-American studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “In such a white state, he really doesn’t know a constituency that is diverse and has diverse needs.”
+
+“The Clintons have spent time with black people, in black churches, and have come out of a strong black presence in Arkansas,” he continues.
+
+These ties have long been established with black elites, especially influential black pastors around the nation, experts say.
+
+“If you’ve been friends with the Clintons, and have benefited from that friendship with the Clintons, this trickles down to voters,” says Professor Greer, an expert in urban politics.
+
+Blacks, she points out, can be pragmatic in their voting decisions.
+
+“What I think a lot of people tend to forget is that black and Latino voters – especially black voters, historically – have been strategic voters, as opposed to sincere voters at certain times,” she says.
+
+Professor Jelks concurs. “I’m not too fond of Ms. Clinton’s policies myself, but I’m a realist about politics,” he says, noting the Clinton administration’s role in a crime bill that led to an even greater disproportion of incarcerated black and Latino young men. “Sometimes you hold your nose and you vote for the devil-you-know over the devil-you-don’t-know.”
+
+This could change, however, if Sanders indeed pulls off upsets in Iowa and New Hampshire, and more black voters in the South take a closer look at the democratic socialist.
+
+Indeed, on Monday a South Carolina lawmaker and lawyer for the family of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man shot and killed by a police officer in North Charleston last year, withdrew his support for Clinton and endorsed Sanders instead.
+
+“Hillary Clinton is more a representation of the status quo when I think about politics or about what it means to be a Democrat,” said State Rep. Justin Bamberg (D), said on Monday, according to The New York Times . “Bernie Sanders on the other hand is bold. He doesn’t think like everyone else. He is not afraid to call things as they are.”
+
+The endorsement could help Sanders as he tries to make inroads among black voters before the critical South Carolina primary, experts say.
+
+Yet many thinkers remain unimpressed with his focus on economic solutions to the country’s racial problems.
+
+“It’s not just about poor black people living in cities,” says Greer. “It’s about, how did those black people get to those cities, and why are they poor? They were fleeing domestic terrorism in the South, they left everything behind and worked low-wage jobs in urban centers. And then people said, we can redline them and use more aggressive policing and all those sorts of things. These aren’t just issues of a class narrative – it’s also a race narrative.”",REAL
+707,Libertarian Party set to pick nominee at convention,"Orlando, Florida (CNN) They get the bronze medal every four years in what is really a two-person race.
+
+That's what it must feel like to be a third-party candidate in a two-party country.
+
+But between Donald Trump's abrupt takeover of the GOP and Bernie Sanders' climb from long-shot Democratic candidacy to head of a national progressive movement, 2016 has been a year for party outsiders. And Libertarians hope that could give them an opening.
+
+What gives them hope?
+
+The likely Democratic and Republican nominees each have historically high unfavorable numbers . Media attention for the party, both the national committee chairman and the party's political director say, is at unprecedented levels.
+
+So it is with an air of opportunity to break out of obscurity that Libertarians, members of the country's most prominent third party, have gathered for their national convention in Orlando, Florida, this weekend to officially pick a candidate to pitch to angry voters.
+
+Many expect former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian presidential nominee in 2012, to leave Orlando Sunday evening once again his party's standard-bearer.
+
+Since last week, Johnson has made the rounds touting his newly minted alliance with former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, who is seeking the party's vice presidential nomination. The two former governors, who both also happen to be ex-Republicans, are fielding a ticket of sorts, although the Libertarians elect their nominees separately and no formal ticket will exist at the convention until the party selects its presidential and vice presidential nominees.
+
+But Johnson and Weld first have to navigate an openly hostile convention, characterized by its insular proceedings and unwelcome to moderates.
+
+Weld will have to overcome meaningful differences between his demonstrated policy preferences, particularly past support for gun control measures, and his willingness to support Republican politicians. Just this year, the colorful former governor endorsed Ohio Gov. John Kasich for president.
+
+His supposed transgressions from Libertarian orthodoxy have earned him outright disdain from many of the party's attendees. He received loud boos at his introduction to the party's vice presidential debate, where he stuck to reciting his conservative bona fides and applauded his opponents on stage.
+
+""We are not Republican-light,"" Larry Sharpe, a vice-presidential candidate said in a takedown of the Johnson-Weld ticket mere inches away from the former Massachusetts governor.
+
+Asked after the debate, Weld said he thought such attacks ""were not an issue one way or another.""
+
+Despite his bruising reception, Johnson said he would strongly prefer not to continue his bid without Weld, arguing they were ""arguably the two most Libertarian governors that ever served.""
+
+Weld doubled down on this kind of rhetoric at the convention, saying that should Trump win the presidency, ""We will be the rogue nation. We will be the North Korea.""
+
+Johnson, meanwhile, has several serious challengers gunning for the top spot on the third-party ticket.
+
+Among them is Austin Petersen, a young, hardcore party advocate with strong backing in Libertarian Internet circles. He recently announced the endorsement of Mary Matalin and Erick Erickson, vocal anti-Trump conservatives.
+
+Petersen rolled through the convention, glad-handing delegates and circling back to his open-door suite, filled with meatballs and alcohol for supporters. He belted out insults for Trump, calling him ""Cheetos-faced"" and ""fascist"" as his supporters, who he called ""freedom ninjas,"" hollered in support.
+
+However, in a party that generally swings liberal on social issues, Petersen is unabashedly anti-abortion. He is also 35 years old.
+
+Also expected to post significant support is notorious entrepreneur John McAfee, a man who has forged an international identity after becoming a pioneer in the field of cybersecurity. Last fall, McAfee launched a presidential bid under the banner of his newly formed political organization, the Cyber Party. As the fall continued, McAfee declared his intention to seek the nomination of the Libertarian Party.
+
+Building off of his name, his intense personality and his sweeping command of Libertarian sweet spots, McAfee has made a serious bid for the top of the ticket.
+
+Although McAfee has little history with the party and no experience governing, his controversies -- including going into hiding following the shooting death of a businessman near his island compound in Belize -- and his lack of political experience may actually make up for it. In an election cycle dominated by a brash billionaire and reality TV star, McAfee's libidinous, shadowy, drug-fueled history and cavalier demeanor occasionally might not hurt much in a party built on opposing government control.
+
+The primary has become somewhat contentious and McAfee has repeatedly said that he will not support Johnson if the former New Mexico becomes the nominee.
+
+Petersen said he would ""pull it for Gary"" if the former New Mexico governor won the nomination. Weld said he wasn't sure what he'd do if Johnson was not the nominee.
+
+""I'm in this because of Gary Johnson,"" Weld said.
+
+The Libertarian nominee will appear in ballots in 50 states, but...
+
+Of course, securing the nomination is only one step -- and an extremely easy one, relatively speaking -- on the path to a Libertarian presidency.
+
+The eventual nominee, whoever it is, will have to compete in the general election, where the odds of victory for the Libertarian Party stand at roughly zero.
+
+If that performance repeats itself in the 2016 general election, it will mark the 12th cycle in a row where no third party has earned a single vote in the Electoral College.
+
+Compared to other years and other third parties, however, the Libertarians have plenty to feel good about. The Libertarian Party has navigated the multitude of onerous requirements for ballot access in all 50 states, a task unaccomplished by any other third party.
+
+Put more simply, the Libertarian nominee will be the only name outside of the mainstream choices on the presidential ballot in all 50 states on November 8.
+
+On the ballot, but not the debate stage
+
+Johnson, echoing many other third-party candidates, regularly stresses the Libertarian Party's need to join the presidential debates. Inclusion in the presidential debates requires strong poll performance, which, of course, requires inclusion in the polls themselves.
+
+From the ""Never Trump"" crowd to the nascent ""Bernie or bust"" movement, the eventual Libertarian nominee might have room to grow a base and shake up the already volatile presidential race.",REAL
+4646,Donald Trump's tough path to the White House,"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump got a morale boost this week -- but it likely won't be enough to propel him to the White House.
+
+After weeks of devastating headlines, the Republican nominee seemed to give himself a break. He largely avoided incessant talk about allegations of sexual assault by multiple women and claims that the election is rigged -- both of which made wavering Republicans nervous.
+
+The drumbeat of WikiLeaks disclosures yielded material to lambast Hillary Clinton and her family's foundation. And news of rising Obamacare premiums gave him an opening to criticize President Barack Obama's legacy that Clinton is running to inherit.
+
+Trump edged up in some state surveys and CNN moved two crucial states -- Florida and Nevada -- from lean Democratic to battleground status on its electoral map.
+
+But 11 days before the election, Trump is down six points in CNN's Poll of Polls. His path to the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the presidency remains daunting and it will be tough to overcome the deficit in the remaining time. Trump seemed to acknowledge the challenges Thursday.
+
+With the new changes, CNN's electoral college map leaves Clinton with 272 electoral votes from states either solidly or leaning in her direction. Trump has 179 electoral votes from states either solidly or leaning in his direction. That leaves 87 electoral votes up for grabs at the moment. Trump will have to pitch a perfect game to secure the ones he needs, especially as he struggles to pull states such as Virginia, Pennsylvania or Michigan out of Clinton's column.
+
+""To have a fighting chance in this election of getting to 270 electoral votes, he has to win North Carolina, Ohio and Florida. If he does win all three that still gives him only 253 electoral votes,"" said Ford O'Connell, a GOP strategist. ""The biggest problem for the Trump campaign is overall, where are you going to get 270? He basically almost has to run an inside straight and almost has to have them all fall into his hands.""
+
+Trump and his aides insist he has a path and momentum, citing huge crowds, long lines for early voting and the few polls in his favor. A Fox News poll Wednesday put the national gap to Clinton at only three points and a Bloomberg Politics survey in Florida said he was two points up.
+
+""I think we're going to have a tremendous victory,"" Trump told CNN's Dana Bash Wednesday. ""If I didn't think it, I wouldn't say it.""
+
+Trump's schedule shows that he knows the stakes.
+
+He spent several days in Florida earlier this week, was in North Carolina on Wednesday and spent Thursday in Ohio. Without that trio, Trump has no platform to mount what even then would be a long shot bid for the White House.
+
+Clinton is of the same mind. She was in Florida Wednesday and plans to go back Saturday. She campaigned in North Carolina with first lady Michelle Obama on Thursday. Clinton could effectively stop Trump in his tracks if she can win either state -- barring a huge and unpredictable upset elsewhere.
+
+If Trump does win North Carolina, Ohio and Florida, he can trace the narrowest of routes to 270 electoral votes by winning New Hampshire, a congressional district in Maine, Iowa and Nevada. But Clinton is leading or in a tight race in those states. Trump also cannot afford to drop any red state, and is already fighting rearguard actions in Arizona and Utah, and some Democrats believe that Georgia could be competitive.
+
+Again, Trump's travel is instructive -- he is campaigning in Maine, New Hampshire and Iowa on Friday.
+
+Some Democrats worry Clinton's biggest risk is that her voters think she has the presidency in the bag and will fail to show up to vote.
+
+""No complacency here,"" Clinton said Wednesday at a rally in Tampa, Florida. ""Donald Trump says he can still win and he is right. That is why it is so important everyone gets out and votes.""
+
+Clinton's advisers also warn that the race will probably narrow in the days to come.
+
+""Quite likely we are in store for one final round of tightening,"" Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon tweeted Wednesday.
+
+In essence, Trump's hopes rely on a huge turnout of his base voters, who are largely white and working class. He also needs significantly depressed enthusiasm among Clinton voters and a poll-defying shock on the scale of Brexit, the surprise British vote this year to quit the European Union.
+
+Trump has repeatedly said the polls are wrong. And it's true that some pre-election polls underplayed the size of Obama's re-election victory in 2012 and the Democratic mid-term election debacle two years later.
+
+But if he goes into Election Day with his current deficit, Trump would require a massive polling miss outside the margin of error in multiple states.
+
+The Republican nominee's own strategy makes his task even more difficult.
+
+Since he has likely alienated minority and educated women with his rhetoric and behavior, Trump must pull in vast numbers of new white voters — some who may have voted for Democrats in the past -- to make up for the shortfall.
+
+But the Fox News poll, like some other recent surveys, suggested Trump is underperforming 2012 nominee Mitt Romney among this core constituency. Romney won white voters by 20 points over Obama according to exit polls, but Trump is only 14 points ahead of Clinton in the poll with the same voting group.
+
+Trump's problems with educated white female voters have been well documented.
+
+If those numbers hold, it means that the GOP nominee must reverse trends in which white voters have become a smaller share of the electorate in recent elections.
+
+""There are just not enough white men in these battleground states for him to win this election,"" said Tharon Johnson, who ran Obama's southern states strategy in his 2012 re-election bid.
+
+Still, Bloomberg's poll of Florida does suggest Trump has some traction in the state he regards as a second home — even though most other recent surveys have given Clinton a lead of a few points. Some close observers of Sunshine State politics do believe his intense campaigning is having an impact.
+
+""I think it has moved some polls. He has been very strategic about going into some of the media markets where there are a lot of suburban voters,"" said Professor Susan MacManus of the University of South Florida, who does not rule out a late Trump surge. ""Never say never in our state. On paper, it should be Hillary's to lose. But it's not an on paper election. She has soft spots in her base, so does Trump.""",REAL
+279,Gavel Battle: Boehner resignation sparks House leadership scramble,"House Speaker John Boehner’s stunning announcement that he will resign his post and seat in Congress sparked chaos on Capitol Hill Friday, with lawmakers immediately jockeying for position ahead of the upcoming reshuffle.
+
+“This is going to be a barn burner of a leadership election,” one source said.
+
+The 13-term Ohio Republican shocked his GOP caucus early Friday morning when he informed them in a closed-door session that he intends to step down at the end of October. One lawmaker told Fox News he was ""stunned,"" and that there was ""some anger"" in the room ""against the people who caused this to happen.""
+
+But the drama didn't stop the almost-immediate scramble for his gavel.
+
+Some lawmakers swiftly hit the phones, making intense calls as they jockeyed for position ahead of what could potentially be an overhaul of the entire leadership team.
+
+The immediate favorite to inherit the gavel is House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., a Boehner ally. Fox News is told he's actively seeking the post.
+
+Asked about a potential successor, Boehner said that's ""up to the members"" but then gave McCarthy a near-endorsement: ""I think Kevin McCarthy would be an excellent speaker.""
+
+But it is far from a done deal, with Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas; Rep. Pete Roskam, R-Ill.; and  Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., thought to be potential candidates who could throw their hats into the ring.
+
+Fox News learned late Friday that Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La, are both looking at running for the leadership position.
+
+The leadership battle also begins as Congress still struggles over a budget measure and efforts by conservatives to defund Planned Parenthood as part of it. Even if that issue is resolved in the near-term, the next speaker will confront those same partisan divisions.
+
+Not everyone wants that responsibility. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the party's vice presidential nominee in 2012, has already ruled himself out of the race, calling the job “a great job for empty nesters.”
+
+For his part, Roskam attempted to become whip after then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary race last June, and was replaced in leadership by McCarthy – then the majority whip. However, Roskam was beaten by Scalise.
+
+Fox News understands Roskam is one of the lawmakers jockeying for position. When asked for comment, Roskam warned against merely “reshuffling the deck.”
+
+""I'm for somebody who can bridge the divide in our Conference. If we don't have a plan to get us out of this dysfunction, reshuffling the deck won't make anything better. I'm going to work hard to make sure we get the leadership we need, not just settle on the fastest, easiest choice,"" Roskam said.
+
+An aide to Hensarling told Fox News that he was considering his options and would expect to have a decision next week.
+
+Should McCarthy succeed Boehner, there would be an opening for House majority leader, as well as potentially further down the roster in positions such as majority whip.
+
+Boehner’s backing may help McCarthy’s chances with the establishment, but may hurt him elsewhere.
+
+“[Boehner’s backing] will help him with the establishment but not with the conservative House Freedom Caucus. He may face a challenge [from conservatives] but even the House Freedom Caucus admit they aren’t organized, and so they may not even put up a candidate,” GOP strategist Ron Bonjean told FoxNews.com. “Speed is the key. Waiting can hurt your chances. Members who can get members behind them can build momentum, and a snowball effect allows them to wrap things up. That’s what McCarthy is going for – there’s already a sense of inevitability that he’s getting the job.”
+
+If conservatives do put forward a candidate of their own, Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio and Rep. Ted Yoho R-Fla., are among the names that could be put forward.
+
+Democrats, too, will almost certainly run Boehner’s predecessor -- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. -- for the post.
+
+At a press conference Friday afternoon with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Obama also voiced his own general hopes for the next speaker:
+
+“My hope is there’s a recognition on the part of the next speaker, something I think John understood … that we can have significant differences on issues but that doesn’t mean you shut down the government,” Obama said.
+
+Boehner's resignation could make next week's budget battle easier to resolve in the short-term. Conservatives want to use the budget measure to defund Planned Parenthood, and Boehner previously had to worry about an internal party revolt if he tried to strike a deal with Democrats to pass a ""clean"" budget bill.
+
+However, it also could work the other way. A lame-duck Boehner could open a situation where aspiring GOP leaders are put on the spot and under even more pressure from the conservative wing.
+
+Once Boehner resigns, the total number of members in the House will be 434. An absolute majority of the House is required to elect a new speaker, not a simple majority -- meaning the magic number of votes that a candidate must get is 218.
+
+Once Boehner resigns, the House will be unable to do anything until it elects a new speaker.
+
+Boehner’s resignation is rare, but not unprecedented. The last speaker to resign in the middle of a Congress was Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas who resigned in 1989 amid an ethics scandal.
+
+Fox News’ Chad Pergram and FoxNews.com's Adam Shaw contributed to this report",REAL
+7941,UK announces new troop deployment near Russia's borders,"Military British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon (Photo by AFP) 
+British Defense Minister Michael Fallon says the UK is set to deploy hundreds of troops to the Baltic region in Europe to support its NATO allies in the face of a “more assertive Russia.” 
+Fallon told a NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels on Wednesday that Britain would send 800 soldiers to Estonia to fulfill its pledge to deliver one of four battalions to NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence in Eastern Europe. 
+“Backed by a rising defense budget, this deployment of air, land and sea forces shows that we will continue to play a leading role in NATO, supporting the defense and security of our allies from the north to the south of the alliance,” Fallon said. 
+NATO had announced in July that it would deploy, on a rotational basis, four multinational battalions to Poland and the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—to deter what it referred to as “any Russian incursion.” 
+During his address at the meeting, Fallon also said that four British Typhoon fighter jets would be dispatched to Romania under the NATO Southern Air Policing mission, which is supposed to protect the Baltic states' airspace against possible attacks from Russia. 
+“This is about two things: reassurance, and that needs to be done with some formidable presence, and deterrence,” Fallon had said in an earlier interview. “This is not simply a trip-wire….This is a serious military presence.” 
+The move is likely to draw criticism from Moscow, which has been angered by NATO’s military buildup on its Western borders. 
+The US-led military alliance cut its ties with Moscow in 2014 and has been reinforcing its presence near Russia’s borders ever since. 
+The UK and Russia have strong disagreements over a number of issues, mainly the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. 
+The two countries’ military forces have been involved in a series of aerial and naval confrontations, with Britain sending its jets and warships on several occasions to intercept Russian bombers and naval fleets. 
+The latest of those encounters occurred on Thursday, when the Russian aircraft career Admiral Kuznetsov and its seven-ship task force were “shadowed” by two British warships on a course to sail through the North Sea and English Channel, on their way to Syria. Loading ...",FAKE
+9470,Trump Campaign Says Hillary Supporter Tried Assassinating Trump – It Was A Republican With A Poster,"Donald Trump was rushed from a rally stage by his Secret Service detail after someone in the crowd made a ruckus. Within minutes, his campaign was claiming it was a Hillary supporter with a gun trying to kill their candidate. 
+Here’s Trump’s social media director spinning the tale: Trump social media director retweeted a tweet claiming this was an assassination attempt pic.twitter.com/TTUCH4Zbb8 
+— Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) November 6, 2016 
+Donald Trump Jr. followed suit, telling his followers on Twitter that his father had almost been assassinated. He offered zero evidence. 
+And, in fact, absolutely none of those details were true. The protester which is believed to have incited the panic was not trying to harm Donald Trump, not carrying a gun, and wasn’t even a Hillary supporter . He was a Republican protesting Trump. 
+Reporters tracked down the man, who says he was holding a sign and was attacked by Trump supporters after someone said he had a gun. This is the man who was ejected from the rally, sparking panic. He was holding a sign: ""Republicans Against Trump"" pic.twitter.com/bZ2JAZ2w88 
+— Paul Lewis (@PaulLewis) November 6, 2016 He says he's a Republican. He said he was terrified by how the crowd responded: ""I was in survival mode. I knew I could die at that moment."" 
+— Paul Lewis (@PaulLewis) November 6, 2016 
+The Secret Service clarified what happened, and while their actions were understandable given the circumstances, the idea that the Trump campaign could leap from the small amount of details to a full-blown Hillary conspiracy is idiotic and reckless. Secret Service statement: ""an unidentified individual shouted 'gun'…no weapon was found."" pic.twitter.com/msH2CPcclE 
+— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) November 6, 2016 
+Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall hit the nail on the head. This rush to exploit a non-story by Trump’s campaign is cynical and disturbing. It also led to Trump’s fired up mob seeking to avenge their candidate by attacking reporters – a group Trump has repeatedly demonized. 4: Clinton supporter. When a CNN reporter went into the crowd to try to learn more he was assaulted by feral Trumpers still amped up … 
+— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 6, 2016 
+There is something cultish about the way Trump’s campaign relished the idea that someone would attempt to hurt their candidate. The minor detail that none of it was true didn’t seem to slow them down. They want to portray Trump as a martyr without any of the inconvenience of an actual martyrdom. 
+Featured image via Scott Olson/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+2459,"Obama Slams Staples, Big Companies On Health Care: 'Shame On Them'","WASHINGTON, Feb 11 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama singled out office supply giant Staples Inc as undercutting his healthcare reform law and said large corporations should not use the health insurance issue as an excuse for cutting wages, the news website BuzzFeed reported.
+
+""It's one thing when you've got a mom-and-pop store who can't afford to provide paid sick leave or health insurance or minimum wage to workers  but when I hear large corporations that make billions of dollars in profits trying to blame our interest in providing health insurance as an excuse for cutting back workers' wages, shame on them,"" Obama said in an interview with BuzzFeed.
+
+The Affordable Care Act requires companies with more than 50 employees to pay for health insurance for people who work 30 hours a week or more. Reuters has reported that some businesses are keeping staffing numbers below 50 or cutting the work week to less than 30 hours to avoid providing employee health insurance.
+
+Staples, the No. 1 U.S. office supplies retailer, has told its employees not to work more than 25 hours per week, according to a Buzzfeed report on Monday.
+
+""There is no reason for an employer who is not currently providing health care to their workers to discourage them from either getting health insurance on the job or being able to avail themselves of the Affordable Care Act,"" Obama said in the interview Tuesday.
+
+""I haven't looked at Staples stock lately or what the compensation of the CEO is, but I suspect that they could well afford to treat their workers favorably and give them some basic financial security, and if they can't, then they should be willing to allow those workers to get the Affordable Care Act without cutting wages,"" Obama said.
+
+Nearly 7.5 million people have signed up for 2015 Obamacare health plans through HealthCare.gov with demand increasing as the Feb. 15 enrollment deadline approaches, according to government figures.
+
+Staples and No. 2 office retailer Office Depot Inc announced last week a $6.3 billion plan to join forces to compete against big box stores and online rivals. (Reporting by Doina Chiacu, Sruthi Ramakrishnan, Martin Howell; Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by W Simon)",REAL
+8857,AP fakes the news,"*Sent:* Tuesday, August 11, 2015 6:00 PM *To:* Kendall, David *Subject:* Hi again from AP (inquiry about thumb drive) Hi David, We have been told, and we are preparing to report, that the FBI has taken possession of the thumb drive that was once in your possession. This is what we have been informed, and we wanted to see whether there was any sort of comment that could be provided. If you wanted to steer us away and say that we are misinformed, then I would gladly accept that as well . But we have solid reason to believe this. We’d welcome any comment you can offer. Thanks very much. Eric Associated Press reporter says he knows it’s true, but will gladly print that it’s false 
+What’s truly astonishing in this email is how AP reporter Eric Tucker says he will gladly LIE to cover for the Clintons . In plain English, he explains that he has “solid reason” to believe the report about the thumb drive, but he will gladly publish a false narrative via the Associated Press , and he even suggests what that false narrative should be: “If you wanted to steer us away and say that we are misinformed, then I would gladly accept that as well.” 
+In other words, he’s not just corrupt, dishonest and fraudulent as a journalist, he’s also SUGGESTING the false narrative the Clintons should use! 
+This is the exact same way the AP talks to the CDC about vaccines and measles, by the way. Essentially, the Associated Press reporters say, “We are total media whores, we will bend over and grab our ankles while you shove your fake story down the throats of our readers who foolishly think we’re a credible news organization.” 
+You gotta love Eric Tucker for this. The guy takes the prize for finally spelling out in black and white what we’ve known for years: the AP is a total joke when it comes to real journalism . Note carefully that the AP won’t even fire Tucker for this admission. He’ll probably get a prize of some sort. How many other Associated Presstitutes have deliberately LIED to cover up Clinton crimes? 
+It all brings to mind the obvious question: How many other Associated Presstitutes deliberately lied to cover up Clinton crimes? 
+Just what percentage of AP stories about the Clinton scandals are actually FAKE NEWS pretending to be credible journalism? (Answer: Probably about 99%.) 
+It’s not just AP, either. It’s the same story at every other mainstream news organization across America: They’re all liars and crooks, and they’re all working for Hillary Clinton, the serial killer and rape excuser. SF Source Dreamcatcher Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+6866,COPS AMBUSHED IN IOWA,"by DML DAILY / November 2, 2016 / SOCIETY / DEVELOPING STORY. BREAKING NEWS – Two police officers are dead in Des Moines , Iowa after they were ambushed early Wednesday morning. The killings were in separate incidents within blocks of each each other. Police are on a manhunt to find the killer identified as Scott Michael Greene. The ambushes both happened as the cops were sitting in their patrol cars. #BREAKING : Police have identified the suspect in fatal shootings of 2 officers as Scott Michael Greene. pic.twitter.com/5ECsApJFcn 
+— Charly Haley (@charlyhaley) November 2, 2016 
+FROM FOX NEWS: The shootings occurred within minutes of each other in Des Moines. One Des Moines police officer and another from the suburb of Urbandale were found in their bullet-riddled cruisers, Des Moines police Sgt. Paul Parizek said. 
+“There’s somebody out there shooting police. There is a clear and present danger to police officers right now,” he said. 
+“In all appearances it looks just like that, that these officers were ambushed,” Parizek said. 
+Neither police officer was identified by officials and– as of a 5 a.m.– police were still notifying family members. Parizek said their names and details about their service would be released later Wednesday. 
+Sign up to get alerts about Dennis Michael Lynch's upcoming Donald Trump film and breaking news. Subscribe ",FAKE
+3191,Poll: Las Vegas debate doesn't scramble GOP field,"Donald Trump still holds a wide lead over the rest of the field, earning the support of 39% in a Fox News poll released Friday . His closest competitor, Ted Cruz, has 18%, Marco Rubio is at 11% and Ben Carson checks in with 9%. The rest of the Republican field has 3% support or less.
+
+The survey, fielded Wednesday and Thursday, largely syncs with other recent national surveys, showing Trump with a large double-digit lead over Cruz and the rest of the field lagging behind that quartet.
+
+Compared to the last Fox poll, taken in the wake of the Paris terrorism attacks, Trump has surged 11 points. He has similarly gained in other national polls amid increased terrorism fears.
+
+Trump has since called for banning all Muslims from entering the U.S., a policy that seven in 10 Republicans say they support.
+
+Two-thirds of Republicans now say they see Trump as a serious candidate (65%), a reversal from June when nearly that many described Trump as a sideshow (64%) rather than a serious candidate. Despite his dominance in the GOP race, Trump lags 11 points behind Clinton in a hypothetical general election matchup. Other Republicans fare better against the Democratic front-runner, but still, 47% of GOP primary voters think Trump is their best shot to beat Clinton.",REAL
+1149,"As Cruz Crushes Caucuses, GOP Establishment Needs a Drink And A Hug","Ted Cruz won more delegates than anyone else on Saturday night, further narrowing the race between Trump and Cruz, and weakening Marco Rubio as the race heads to Florida.
+
+Ted Cruz crushed the Kansas and Maine caucuses on “Super Saturday” while Donald Trump narrowly won the Louisiana and Kentucky prizes. But perhaps the biggest news was Marco Rubio fading in the field to a distant third place, despite racking up major endorsements across the map.
+
+Over the past six weeks, the GOP establishment has moved from denial to anger to bargaining in the stages of grief that have accompanied this outsider election. But with Rubio’s big fade, the Hail Mary of a brokered convention looks even less likely. And what’s left of the party’s center-right is heading for the next stage of depression. A hug and a drink are in order, as their party prepares to be wrested away from reform Republicans.
+
+The Florida Republican—struggling to present himself as the establishment-friendly alternative to Donald Trump—had perhaps his worst night yet, racking up zero wins, and failing to even snag a second-place finish anywhere.
+
+In fact, Rubio finished third in three of the four states contested on Saturday. And with just 8 percent, the Florida senator fell to fourth in Maine—failing to get the minimum 10 percent necessary to win any delegates.
+
+“Marco has to get out of the race. Has to,” Trump said.
+
+There’s now no question that Rubio’s decision to descend to Trump’s level of discourse has been a total failure. The attacks on the size of Trump’s hands, the jokes about him wetting himself, the “con artist” name-calling, have all fallen flat.
+
+And the losses on Saturday could rob his campaign of desperately needed momentum. Rubio has repeatedly stated that he expects to win in his home state of Florida on March 15. And, of course, that’s technically possible. But he has yet to lead in a single public poll of the state. And he doesn’t want to talk about what he’ll do if Florida doesn’t work out.
+
+The billionaire businessman, with the flair of a pro wrestler, said he hoped for a head-to-head match-up with Cruz.
+
+If Rubio takes Trump’s advice, then some hot Cruz/Trump one-on-one action could be in our future. Best election ever.",REAL
+8659,Re: Early Voting Results In Key Battleground States Appear To Favor Donald Trump,"Early Voting Results In Key Battleground States Appear To Favor Donald Trump   7th, 2016 
+If you want Donald Trump   then you have got to be encouraged by what you are seeing so far. Early voting has already been going on in a number of the most important battleground states, and up to this point the numbers seem to support the theory   doing significantly better in key swing states than Mitt Romney did in 2012. As you will see below, the latest numbers released by Florida, North Carolina, Colorado and Arizona all have good news for the Trump campaign. Without a doubt, I still have an   happen tomorrow night, but so far at least there are some encouraging signs. 
+Florida 
+Early voting has become extremely popular in Florida, and at this point close to half of all voters in the state have already cast their ballots . 
+Donald Trump cannot win the election without Florida’s 29 electoral votes, and so to say that this is a “must win” for the Trump campaign would be a massive understatement. 
+Fortunately, the Trump campaign appears to be doing much better in Florida than the Romney campaign did in 2012. The following comes from Politico … 
+Florida Democrats increased their lead over Republicans in casting pre-Election Day ballots to nearly 33,000 as of Sunday morning, but the sheer number of new voters and independents makes it tougher than ever for experts to say whether Hillary Clinton has a clear advantage over Donald Trump in the nation’s biggest battleground state. 
+Of the record 6.1 million in-person early votes and absentee ballots cast, Democrats have an advantage over Republicans of only 0.5 percentage points, with each party casting roughly 39 percent of the ballots. Though it’s a lead for Democrats, they’re not going to match their 3.7-percentage-point lead in early votes by Election Day they enjoyed in 2012. And Republicans tend to outvote Democrats on Election Day in Florida. 
+On Monday, updated numbers for Florida were released, and we found out that the Democrats had increased their lead to about 87,000 votes. But Trump is still doing much better than Romney was at this stage. 
+And the Trump campaign also has to be happy about the fact that first-time voters account for 25 percent of all the votes cast so far. Throughout this election cycle Trump has shown that he can bring out people that have never voted before, and so officials in the Trump campaign have to be smiling about this. 
+However, one sign of trouble for the Trump campaign is the fact that there has been a 100 percent increase in early voting by Hispanics in Florida compared to 2012, and this appears to be fueled by dislike for Trump. The following comes from the Miami Herald … 
+Through Saturday, 565,000 Hispanics had completed early in-person voting in Florida, a 100 percent increase over 2012, according to an analysis by Dan Smith, a University of Florida political science professor who tracks voting data. 
+Including absentee ballots, 911,000 Hispanics have voted — more than a third of whom did not vote in 2012. “We’re witnessing explosive early voting turnout of Hispanics — both those newly registered to vote as well as those who sat on the sidelines in 2012,” Smith said. 
+As discussed above, Republicans tend to outvote Democrats on Election Day in Florida, so the key for the Trump campaign will be to have the same kind of Election Day turnout that the Romney campaign had in 2012. 
+If Trump wins Florida, he will have a legitimate shot at winning the election, but if he loses the state it will be virtually impossible for him to make up those 29 electoral votes elsewhere on the map. 
+North Carolina 
+Another state that the Trump campaign desperately needs is North Carolina. Mitt Romney won this state back in 2012, and according to the Drudge Report the Trump campaign is doing even better than the Romney campaign did during early voting… 
+Another dramatic turn of events is being reported out of North Carolina this afternoon: Donald Trump has jumped past all expectations in early voting! 
+In 2012, Romney hit Election Day down 447,000 votes, based on early ballots. He went on to win the state by 97,000 votes. 
+Now, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal, Trump opens Election Day down 305,000! 
+North Carolina is another of the key battleground states that is going to help decide the election. While not as important as Florida, the truth is that Donald Trump pretty much has to have it to have a legitimate shot. 
+Colorado 
+All along, most of the pundits have pretty much assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to win Colorado. 
+Unfortunately for her, the Denver Post is reporting that the number of Republicans that have voted so far exceeds the number of Democrats that have voted… 
+Republicans took the lead in early voting in Colorado   Friday and held the advantage through the weekend despite robust Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts. 
+The latest early voting numbers released Monday morning show registered Republicans cast 652,380 ballots compared to 645,020 registered Democrats — a 7,360 vote GOP advantage. The breakdown looks like this: 35.2 percent Republican, 34.8 percent Democrat and 28.5 percent unaffiliated. 
+If Donald Trump could find a way to actually win Colorado, that would definitely lessen the pressure of having to win Nevada where he is not doing nearly as well so far. 
+Arizona 
+The state of Arizona used to be considered “deep red” territory, but during this election cycle it has been considered a battleground state. 
+Fortunately for Trump the poll numbers in Arizona have shifted in his direction in recent days, and the early numbers coming out of the state look very good for him … 
+The Republican lead in absentee ballots returned is 95,000. Bill Dunn, the party’s director of early and absentee voting, said Republicans lead with 36.5 percent of absentee ballots requested but have an even greater advantage in absentee ballots returned, at 40 percent of the total. 
+In the waning days of the campaign Donald Trump has been criss-crossing the country, and he continues to draw absolutely enormous crowds. Conservative voters are far more enthusiastic about Trump than they were about Romney, but will it be enough? The scene here in Sterling Heights, Michigan just before Trump’s next rally pic.twitter.com/1OxuTNeXuN 
+— Jill Colvin (@colvinj) November 7, 2016 
+Some Republican strategists are convinced that it will not be enough. In fact, one of them told CNN that he believes   going to win by “an electoral landslide”… 
+Hillary Clinton will win in an electoral landslide on Tuesday, but the political baggage she has accumulated over the past year-and-a-half will dissuade congressional Republicans from working with her administration, says longtime Republican political strategist John Weaver. 
+“I believe she’s going to win in an electoral landslide and be the most unpopular president in electoral history, which is quite the paradox,” Weaver told David Axelrod on “The Axe Files” podcast, produced by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN. 
+And ultimately it could be the establishment Republicans and the “never-Trumpers” that make the difference and deliver the election to Hillary Clinton. If you can believe it, some establishment Republicans are actually publicly announcing that they have voted for Hillary Clinton and are encouraging others to do the same. 
+If they can get just five percent of Republicans to follow them, they could completely alter the outcome of the election. So let us hope that does not happen. 
+On a positive note, on Monday we learned that Hillary Clinton has canceled her celebratory fireworks for Tuesday night. No reason was given for why the fireworks were canceled, but many are taking this as a sign that the Clinton campaign may not be as optimistic as they were previously. 
+In any event, we don’t have long to wait now until we find out who wins and who loses. 
+If you want Donald Trump to win, please go vote, because America may never be faced with this kind of a choice again. 
+I am absolutely convinced that this is a pivotal moment in American history, and on Tuesday night we find out what happens. 
+May God have mercy on the late, great United States of America. November 7th, 2016 | Tags: 2016 Election , Arizona , Colorado , Debts , Donald Trump , Election , Florida , North Carolina , Pain , Trump | Category: Commentary",FAKE
+9862,Hillary Personally Ordered ‘Donald Duck’ Troll Campaign,"Email 
+
+Hillary Clinton personally ordered a consultant to use a nonprofit group to troll the Trump campaign with a ‘Donald Duck’ mascot, according to the Democratic operatives who say they arranged it with a nonprofit organization. 
+When Breitbart News’ Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, confronted Mook about Creamer and his firm in the spin room after the third presidential debate, Mook claimed: “They’ve never worked for our campaign.” When asked if Clinton had ever discussed the controversial political operations with Creamer directly, Mook replied: “I don’t think so.” 
+Now, however, O’Keefe and Project Veritas have released video of Creamer claiming that Clinton directly approved one of his more bizarre plans — an effort to attract media attention and incite violence by dressing an activist in a Donald Duck costume and sending that activist into Trump events, emphasizing the argument that Trump was “ducking” releasing his tax returns. 
+The action, if true, would be a black-letter violation of federal election law, which prohibits presidential campaigns from coordinating activities with outside groups that can collect unlimited ‘dark money’ from contributors – and don’t pay taxes on what they collect. 
+Project Veritas Action video footage shows Robert Creamer, a convicted felon who was forced out of his executive role at the liberal consultancy Democracy Partners, saying Clinton chose the duck stunt. 
+‘In the end, it was the candidate, Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground. So by God we would get ducks on the ground,’ Creamer says in the video.",FAKE
+2875,"In rush to reclaim Yemen, exiled leaders risk fracturing it","Holed up in Saudi Arabia, the inner circle of President Hadi is rallying tribal leaders to resist Houthi rebels who control much of Yemen. The risk is that if and when they regain power the central government will emerge with little authority.
+
+Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?
+
+Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?
+
+From the gilded suites and granite lobby of a luxurious five-star hotel here, the remnants of Yemen’s embattled government sees a daily lineup of Yemeni tribal leaders, Western diplomats, and Saudi military commanders.
+
+Over countless cups of bittersweet coffee and dates, and lobster and seafood dinners, Yemeni ministers calmly toss out phrases like “national dialogue” and “institution building” as they talk up their postwar political plans.
+
+They lack the air of urgency or desperation of a government forced to take refuge with its powerful neighbor. To hear them tell it, they are a government poised to reclaim power from the Shiite Houthi militia and allied fighters that call the shots in much of their country.
+
+But their blueprint for victory may contain the seeds of defeat for a unitary Yemeni state. As in Libya, the arming of local militia to oust a common enemy could make it even harder to restore central authority in the aftermath of a civil war.
+
+Over the last two weeks, the UN-backed Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has been working feverously to patch together a broad coalition of Yemeni tribes backed by Arab military intervention against the Iranian-allied Houthis.
+
+The result is a tribal coalition of some 70,000 fighters – and the pledge of a Saudi-Egyptian expeditionary force. Yemeni officials say they are preparing to retake the southern port city of Aden “within days,” and thence fight for control over the rest of Yemen.
+
+“From day one, we have been building a coalition across all segments of Yemeni society to return the rule of law,” says Yasseen Makawi, a close aide to Hadi who has led several talks here with Yemeni tribal leaders. Hadi is currently in Riyadh, living under tight security.
+
+“We will be in Aden soon to start the long fight,” Mr. Makawi says.
+
+So far, the Saudi-led bombing campaign hasn’t stopped the advance of the Houthis, which are backed by military units loyal to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh. On Thursday, these forces captured Ataq, the provincial capital of oil-rich Shabwa province, after days of clashes followed by negotiations with local Sunni tribes, according to news reports.
+
+For Hadi’s exiled government, the stakes are high. In order to win over the support of dozens of tribes in south and central Yemen, officials have agreed in future to devolve more government powers to the provinces and tribal regions, threatening the unity of a state that was only reunified in 1990.
+
+Yemeni tribal leaders see the situation as an opportunity to press for greater autonomy – and perhaps independence.
+
+“We are all for a democratic Yemen with greater powers in the hands of the people,” says Abdullah Kathiri, head of the largest tribe in Hadrawmout, a wealthy province in eastern Yemen who speaks openly about independence. “With this understanding, tribes across the country are now willing to rise up.”
+
+Such ambitions speak to the centrifugal forces being unleashed in Yemen. Exiled officials concur that by arming and militarizing Sunni tribes across the country, they may create a “second Libya” where tribal militias roam unchallenged and refuse to answer to a weak central government.
+
+“We do not want to place heavy arms into the hands of tribes and have them act outside the army,” says Transport Minister Badr Mubarak Ba-Salma, who has led talks with tribal representatives.
+
+“We don’t want to finally rid ourselves of Ali Abdullah Saleh to find ourselves with dozens of more Ali Abdullah Salehs,” Mr. Ba-Salma adds, referring to the longtime ruler who stepped down in 2012. Hadi replaced him as president under a Saudi-backed transition that began to unravel last year.
+
+In private, Hadi’s inner circle concedes it may be a drawn-out, year-long war against the better-armed Houthi militias and military units loyal to Saleh, which swiftly descended from their stronghold in the northern provinces of Saada and Amran to claim over 80 percent of Yemen’s territory.
+
+The Houthis boast a fighting force of between 80,000 and 100,000, while forces loyal to Saleh number around 20,000, Yemeni government officials and observers say.
+
+The Houthi-Saleh fighters boast superior firepower due to the fact that Saleh’s supporters include entire military units with fierce allegiances to their political and financial backer. Some of this equipment is a legacy of US military aid to Yemen during Saleh’s rule, which continued under Hadi’s government.
+
+The Houthis control vital military installations outside Sanaa and warehouses of RPGs, tanks, and armor-piercing grenade and rocket launchers.
+
+Given this superior firepower, the Hadi government’s strategy is to overcome the militias with greater manpower and urge tribal and political factions to rise up town by town, village by village against what many Yemenis view as Houthi “invaders”.
+
+Six military councils – regional groupings of officers loyal to Hadi – have been tasked with coordinating with local tribal militias and the Saudi-led aerial campaign.
+
+The councils have succeeded in fostering armed uprisings in Aden, as well Taiz in the oil-rich province of Marib. However, due to the disparity in arms and lack of cohesive units, the pro-government militias have failed to even secure Aden, where Hadi had declared a provisional government after fleeing Sanaa.
+
+To recapture Aden, several hundred Egyptian and Saudi Arabian Special Forces are preparing to deploy in the port city. With fighting intensifying in Aden, Saudi and Yemeni official sources expect the operation ""within the next week.""
+
+However, weary of being dragged into a protracted fight, Riyadh and Cairo have stopped short of committing ground troops to a wider war across Yemen.
+
+“We are committed to liberating Aden and reinstalling the democratically-elected government, but that is all that is being discussed,” says a Saudi military liaison close to the operations.
+
+Instead, the joint Arab force would be used with “surgical precision,” say government insiders, using force only to turn the tide in key battles in southern Yemen.
+
+The Hadi government has also received little commitment from the US and its Western allies; officials say they left recent talks sessions with Western diplomats “frustrated” and “dismayed.”
+
+“They want us to lead the war against terrorism and extremism in Yemen, but they are allowing our country to be overrun by terrorist groups,” says a cabinet minister who refused to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.
+
+The US has begun conducting aerial refueling of Saudi-led coalition warplanes. It has also vowed to speed up delivery of weapons to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf powers.
+
+Should it regain a foothold in Yemen, Hadi’s government is bracing for perhaps the largest obstacle in restoring control: the north.
+
+Despite rounds of marathon talks with northern tribal and political leaders in Riyadh, Hadi and his team have reportedly failed to find “ready and willing partners” to stand up to Saleh and Houthi forces on their own home turf.
+
+“There are opponents to Saleh and the Houthis in the north, but they are afraid they are outmatched,” Ba-Salma says. “Only by breaking their military power, will we break the fear and see people in the north willing to stand up.”
+
+In return for their participation, northern leaders want guarantees of greater power and influence for their region, which was an independent republic during 1962-90. It received a privileged status and government jobs during Saleh’s three decades in power.
+
+The government has been non-committal so far on granting greater independence to the north beyond what it agreed in a national dialogue that ended two years ago. But it has agreed to permit it greater autonomy under the federal system.
+
+Hadi is also trying to peel away Saleh loyalists who might defect to the government side in return for an amnesty. As an olive branch, Hadi officials have promised not to dissolve military units that defect or to cashier their officers. Instead, they say the military must be reconstituted as an internal security service.
+
+“We don’t want to make the same mistakes in Iraq and turn thousands of Yemeni citizens into insurgents,” Mr. Makawi says. “We are prepared to include the supporters of Saleh as an integral part of a stable, federal Yemen state.”",REAL
+1704,Clinton charities reportedly will refile tax returns due to foreign donation reporting errors,"Charities with ties to Hillary Clinton will re-file at least five tax returns after errors in how donations from foreign governments were disclosed, according to a published report.
+
+Reuters reported early Thursday that the errors on form 990s include under-reporting or over-reporting by millions of dollars the amounts donated by foreign governments, as well as not disclosing the donations as separate from total revenue. Reuters also reported that officials may audit other returns filed by the Clinton Foundation as far back as 15 years ago in the event of more errors being found.
+
+The report will likely add a new layer of scrutiny to the foundation, which has been criticized by Republicans and ethics experts for its ongoing ties to several foreign governments during the early stages of Hillary Clinton's run for the 2016 Democratic nomination.
+
+According to Reuters, the discrepancies are not evidence of wrongdoing in and of themselves, but they do undermine the 990s purpose of holding charities accountable for their funding and expenditures.
+
+For example, between 2010 and 2012, the Clinton Foundation claimed on tax forms that it had not received any money from either the U.S. or foreign governments. In fact, several foreign governments gave the foundation tens of millions of dollars, which was noted on the foundation's updating donor list.
+
+In addition, Reuters reports the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) will re-file its Form 990s for 2012 and 2013 after failing to note government grants in a separate section from total revenue. CHAI had previously re-filed returns from 2010 and 2011 for over-reporting the amount received in government grants by over $100 million.
+
+Hillary Clinton resigned from the Clinton Foundation's board earlier this month ahead of announcing her presidential candidacy, though her husband and daughter both remain directors.
+
+Click for more from Reuters.",REAL
+9082,PSVITA Japan News : Moe Moe World War 3 + Chaos Child Love Chu Chu + Musou Stars,cant wait for musou star hopefully run well in portable.cause i wanna it for the vita.,FAKE
+5910,The 'Pit' in Mom's Stomach Turns to Anger When She Learns Why Her Son Isn't on the School Bus,"Share on Twitter 
+Nearly every day, Kathleen Hotard walks down her driveway to meet her son as he gets off the bus. Though he's only five years old, Kenneth has been taking the bus home from school for almost two years. 
+So when Hotard didn't see her son at the bus stop after school, she was afraid. When she learned why he wasn't there, that fear quickly turned to anger. Image Credit: Screenshot/WWL-TV 
+As WWL-TV News reports, Hotard had gone to the bus stop on Monday and waited for her son to appear. When he didn't, the worried mother immediately thought about the terrible things that could have happened. She tells WWL-TV: 
+“The driver opened the doors and my child was not on the bus. The driver informed me he was not there and that she didn't know where he was but that he had not gotten on the bus that day. You get this pit in your stomach because you don't know where your child is. You don't know if they're okay or if they're crying for you.” 
+Learning why her son hadn't gotten on the bus didn't make things better. Upset that the other children were throwing spitballs that sometimes hit him, Kenneth had told his teacher he had a note from his mother giving him permission to walk home from school. 
+Unfortunately, there was no note, but the school failed to confirm that fact with Hotard. She tells WWL-TV: 
+“I was informed my child had lied and said he had a parental note to walk home. I confirmed I never wrote a note, and they confirmed they never saw a note. He said he had misplaced it.” 
+After learning that a substitute teacher had taken Kenneth at his word with no follow-up, Hotard is now demanding action from the school. Though she says that she is angry with her son for lying, she also wonders why the school didn't check with her before allowing her son to walk home alone. 
+As for Kenneth, a call to the police from a concerned citizen helped find him. He was found about a half mile from school, heading in the wrong direction down a busy road. He admitted that he got “kind of” lost trying to get home. 
+The school superintendent has apologized and promised to investigate what went wrong. Hotard hopes that this will be followed by safeguards that will prevent the same thing from happening again. She tells WWL-TV: 
+“I don’t want any other parent to ever have to feel what I felt. I don’t want any other child to be on a side of a road by themselves scared.” ",FAKE
+3479,Supreme Court’s political stench: Why John Roberts will obviously base his Obamacare decision on politics,"“To reject the government’s defense of the law,” Greenhouse writes, “the justices would have to suspend their own settled approach to statutory interpretation as well as their often-stated view of how Congress should act toward the states.” She then addresses the conservative justices who would take Obamacare’s soul: “If you do, and you proceed to destroy the Affordable Care Act nonetheless, you will have a great deal of explaining to do — not to me, but to history.”
+
+Well, the conservative justices who comprise a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court probably do not care that much for the warnings of Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times. As she well knows. They have their own history to make, after all, and that is a political one: gutting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act while they have the chance. I would like to believe that they’re thinking about this in anything but political terms, but it’s doubtful, because they’re well-established political hacks. The Democratic and Republican parties understand that they’re political hacks, too, and it makes sense to play to that side of them.
+
+The decision likely comes down to John Roberts, again. Roberts, much to the enmity of his fellow conservative justices, upheld the individual mandate in 2012. Even if he didn’t go full-hack, this was not a neutral, balls-and-strikes reading of the law from our self-styled umpire. It was a careful weighing of political considerations. He decided then that he wouldn’t join Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Kennedy in going out of his way to wipe the entire law from the books. That would be too abrupt. So he upheld the individual mandate, but only on the grounds of taxation and not the Commerce Clause, as a way to needle the administration. And he also gutted Medicaid as a sop to conservatives.
+
+He may regret letting the Affordable Care Act live, and now he gets a second lick at the apple. That gutting Obamacare over this would “damage the court’s honor” is not very persuasive. It implies that there’s extant honor for it to lose. That train left the station when the court picked up this stupid case to begin with, if not much earlier.
+
+A top concern for Roberts, then, might be the extent to which a ruling against the government in King v. Burwell would send the country’s healthcare system into chaos. This shouldn’t be a concern for a justice who’s deciding on the merits of a case, but it is. And it’s a political consideration: his court would more easily get away with an inept ruling if he knew there was a safety net. Convincing Roberts that there is no safety net, then, is a priority for the White House, and convincing him that there is — that everything will be hunky-dory if he just goes ahead and ruins Obamacare — is a top goal for the Republicans.
+
+HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell appeared before the Senate Finance Committee in what turned out to be a testy hearing yesterday. Republican senators repeatedly pressed her for details on what the administration’s backup plan is should the court eliminate subsidies for insurance plans bought on federally facilitated exchanges. Burwell repeatedly dodged, saying that her focus now is meeting targets for the open enrollment period. Sen. John Cornyn went so far as to suggest she was acting in contempt of Congress. Does the administration have a contingency plan? Have they thought about what they’d do? Well, yeah! And two former Bush HHS officials who spoke with the Hill seem to nail why Burwell and the administration are keeping their plans close to the chest now: because they don’t want to signal “weakness” to John Roberts. “Of course, they have one, they should all resign if they don’t,” said Tom Scully, an HHS official under former President George W. Bush. “And they certainly should not discuss it either.” Former HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt, who left office in 2009, agreed. He added that he isn’t surprised that senior officials would rather face a day of bad headlines than signal weakness to the Supreme Court. “If the court thought they had a plan, they might think, they felt like their case was weak,” Leavitt, who also served as governor of Utah, said in an interview. The GOP, of course, would love for the administration to signal weakness — all while they, the party that controls both chambers of Congress now, signal strength, comfort and reassurance. That’s why they’re putting effort into developing an “alternative” to Obamacare after all these years. It’s all to show John Roberts: go ahead, guy, we’ll take care of everything else. There’s no way that any of this should have any bearing on what John Roberts will decide, but it’s a reasonable bet that it will, and it makes perfect, cynical sense to appeal to John Roberts this way.",REAL
+9490,Here is Elon Musk’s True Mars On Earth Plan,"Here is Elon Musk’s True Mars On Earth Plan 11/01/2016 
+GAME N GUIDE 
+Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX recently held a Reddit Ask Me Anything session at 6:00 p.m. ET on Oct. 23. The session was said to be a follow-up to the executive’s speech in Mexico last month. Musk unveiled his plans for a refueling site and eventually habitation in the methane-rich planet. SpaceX is said to have raised more questions lately than it has revealed. The inventor and conglomerate went to Twitter to announce the session, Engadget reported. For instance, the company’s plan on colonizing Mars is yet to be discussed as well as the reliability of its space rockets and how it can be improved. In addition, the company also previously revealed that it would be reusing their rockets but have kept mum on how. Previously, Musk had a speech at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico in September. In the said Congress, Musk revealed his plans of sending humans to Mars apparently costing a whooping $10 billion each. Moreover he stated that humans will be turned into a multi-planetary species within the span of 40 years to a century. Musk revealed his vision with massive reusable rockets launching into a parking orbit stating that the rockets may be refueled by propellant tankers. Additionally, Musk plans to launch a thousand spaceships with a hundred people each en masse for Mars. He further revealed that a refueling station would be placed on the red planet to harvest methane fuel so settlers may come back to Earth. Hence, the first rocket to be sent is the Dragon spacecraft to search for a site to plant the refueling station followed by a spaceship with equipment to build the refueling station, LA Times reported. Musk went on to describe his ideal vision for human habitation on Mars. Musk revealed that glass panels with carbon fiber frames would be brought to the red planet to build geodesic domes on the planet’s surface. Furthermore, several miner and tunneling droids would also be sent to Mars. The droids are expected to be used to build large quantities of pressurized space for industrial operations along with glass domes for green living. Watch Elon Musk’s Mars colonization event in 5 minutes.",FAKE
+6847,Donald Trump kicks off final campaign day with Fla. rally,"Donald Trump kicks off final campaign day with Fla. rally 11/07/2016 
+BOSTON GLOBE 
+
+Donald Trump is criticizing the FBI’s decision not to criminally charge Hillary Clinton. He says ‘‘now it’s up to the American people to deliver justice at the ballot box.’’ 
+Trump kicked off his Election Day eve blitz with a rally Monday in Florida. He told the Sarasota crowd that ‘‘the system is rigged, but at least we know it.’’ 
+He claimed that ‘‘our country is a laughing stock all over the world.’’ 
+The Republican nominee than pantomimed quotation marks when he said the word ‘‘justice’’ as he hit the FBI and the Department of Justice for their handling of the case. 
+FBI Director James Comey notified Congress Sunday that a review of new emails connected to Clinton’s servers did produce evidence that would warrant charges. 
+11:45 a.m. 
+An ex-aide to former President Bill Clinton alleged in a hacked email that Chelsea Clinton used the family’s charitable foundation to help underwrite her 2010 wedding. 
+The 2012 exchange between Doug Band and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was released by the WikiLeaks organization. Stolen messages have chronicled tensions within the Clinton Foundation between Band and the daughter of the Democratic presidential nominee. 
+Band told Podesta that Chelsea Clinton was gossiping to outsiders that she was investigating questionable spending. Band suggested that she is the one who should be scrutinized for ‘‘using foundation resources for her wedding.’’ He did not provide details about this. A Clinton Foundation spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 
+Band was later forced out amid issues with his outside consulting firm. 
+___ 
+11:40 a.m. 
+Donald Trump is kicking off his last, breakneck day of campaigning before polls open with a rally in Sarasota, Florida. 
+Trump is telling thousands of supporters packed into a local fairgrounds arena Monday that the election is now in their hands. 
+He told them: ‘‘Get out there. I mean, I did my thing. I worked.’’ 
+Trump is planning to continue a frenzied campaign pace, with rallies in five states Monday, including North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Michigan. 
+Trump is also continuing to paint rival Hillary Clinton as a corrupt and alluding to the scrutiny of her use of a private email sever as secretary of state. 
+Trump is also having some fun. At one point, he held up a mask in his likeness and complimented its hair. 
+___ 
+11:30 a.m. 
+The White House says it will ‘‘neither defend nor criticize’’ FBI Director James Comey’s decision to send a new letter to Congress about Hillary Clinton’s emails. 
+That’s the same phrasing the White House used when Comey initially announced that the FBI was looking into more emails related to its investigation of Clinton. In a follow-up letter Sunday, Comey said the FBI review was completed and it was standing by its recommendation that no charges be filed. 
+White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Monday told reporters aboard Air Force One that the White House hasn’t been briefed on the investigation and didn’t receive advance notice about Comey’s latest letter. 
+Earnest says Obama still has confidence in Comey. 
+___ 
+10:50 a.m. 
+Philadelphia’s public transit system will be up and running in time for Election Day now that a weeklong strike has ended. That’s a relief to the state’s Democrats. 
+Democratic city officials were worried that the strike could affect turnout at the polls Tuesday. Pennsylvania does not offer early voting, so Election Day turnout is key. 
+The state has favored Democrats in recent presidential elections, but polls suggest the race is tightening. Democrat Hillary Clinton is counting on strong support in the Philadelphia area. Both candidates are campaigning in the state Tuesday. 
+The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority and the union representing roughly 4,700 transit workers announced a tentative agreement early Monday. Subways were soon operating on a reduced schedule and limited trolled serve was restored. 
+___ 
+10:30 a.m. 
+The Justice Department says it will send more than 500 staffers to 28 states on Election Day to monitor the polls. That’s a 35 percent reduction from the number four years ago. 
+Department officials say personnel will be sent to 67 jurisdictions to watch for potential civil rights violations. Monday’s announcement comes amid rising concerns about voter intimidation, particularly aimed at minorities. 
+The number of personnel is less than the roughly 780 monitors and observers who were dispatched in 2012. 
+The Justice Department has said its poll-watching presence has been curtailed by a 2013 Supreme Court opinion that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. 
+In a statement, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the department is committed to ensuring that every eligible voter can participate in the election. 
+___ 
+10:25 a.m. 
+Hillary Clinton is departing on a multi-stop swing of the presidential battleground states on the day before the election. She’s telling reporters that ‘‘we’re just going to work until the last vote is counted.’’ 
+Clinton said Monday that while she thinks she has ‘‘some work to do to bring the country together,’’ she wants to be the president for those who vote for her and those who don’t. She was speaking to reporters at an airport outside New York City. 
+Clinton said she has ‘‘a big agenda ahead of us’’ and is vowing to ‘‘get a lot done’’ if she defeats Republican Donald Trump. 
+The Democratic presidential nominee was campaigning in Pittsburgh; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Philadelphia and Raleigh, North Carolina. 
+___ 
+8:55 a.m. 
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he doesn’t know if the George Washington Bridge lane closure controversy cost him the vice presidential nomination. 
+Christie said Monday on ‘‘CBS This Morning’’ that he was runner-up to be Republican Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick. He denied a report that Trump had offered him the job, then rescinded it. He said he thinks Trump thought Indian governor Mike Pence was the better choice. 
+Two of Christie’s former allies were convicted Friday for their role in re-aligning access lanes to the bridge in a political revenge plot against a Democratic mayor who didn’t endorse him. 
+Christie says he thinks Trump will defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton Tuesday because the momentum is on his side and the country wants change. 
+___ 
+8:35 a.m. 
+Ohio Democrats want the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in their voter intimidation lawsuit in the swing state. 
+The party has filed an emergency request for the nation’s high court to lift a Cincinnati-based federal appeals court order. That ruling Sunday granted the Donald Trump campaign’s request to block a federal judge’s restraining order Democrats said was needed to prevent voter intimidation. 
+A 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals three-judge panel said Ohio Democrats didn’t show ‘‘a likelihood of success’’ on their case’s merits. 
+The party told the U.S. Supreme Court the appellate judges ruled without reviewing ‘‘critical evidence’’ a lower court judge relied on in ruling that anyone engaging in intimidation or harassment inside or near polling places would face contempt of court charges. 
+___ 
+7:35 a.m. 
+Donald Trump’s campaign manager says it’s not true that his staff has stopped him from tweeting. 
+Trump has exhibited unusual restraint on social media in the final days of the campaign. The New York Times reported on Sunday that aides ‘‘have finally wrested away’’ his Twitter account. 
+President Barack Obama seized on the report at a voter rally in Florida, telling the crowd that anyone who can’t be trusted with a Twitter account shouldn’t be trusted with control of the America’s nuclear weapons. 
+When asked Monday about the Times report by NBC’s ‘‘Today Show,’’ campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said: ‘‘No, it’s not true.’’ 
+___ 
+3:15 a.m. 
+With the cloud of an FBI investigation lifted, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump struck strikingly different tones as they moved into the final hours of a volatile, nearly two-year-long presidential campaign. 
+After days of attacks on Trump’s qualifications and temperament, Clinton cast herself as the candidate of ‘‘healing and reconciliation,’’ perhaps a surprising position for one of the most divisive figures in American politics. Trump, meanwhile, voiced new confidence as he brought his campaign — and his dark visions of a rigged American economic and political system— to longtime Democratic strongholds. 
+Overshadowing the flurry of last-minute campaigning was FBI Director James Comey’s latest letter to Congress, informing lawmakers the bureau had found no evidence in its hurried review of newly discovered emails to warrant criminal charges against Clinton.",FAKE
+4809,A Complete Guide To Early And Absentee Voting,"For those who can't wait to get this election over with, there's good news — early voting is starting.
+
+The bad news: That only applies to you if you live in one of 37 states that offer some kind of early voting (in person, absentee or by mail) without an excuse needed.
+
+More than 1 in 3 people is expected to cast a ballot early this year. On Friday, voters in Minnesota and South Dakota can start turning in absentee ballots. On Saturday, they can do so in Vermont, and ballots will go out in New Jersey.
+
+Voters have already had the chance to go to the polls in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., which started holding early in-person voting Monday. (In Wisconsin, each municipality and county sets its early voting dates.)
+
+Over the next three weeks, voters in a third of the country will already be able to vote.
+
+Early voting could account for up to 34 percent of the vote this year, according to Michael McDonald, associate professor of political science at the University of Florida and founder of the Elections Project, which tracks turnout.
+
+He predicts that voting methods such as in-person and all-mail ballots will become the future of exercising democracy. There are even states that operate without physical polling locations, relying solely on the mail during an election — Washington, Oregon and Colorado. And as Americans start to cast their tickets (some as early as September), those votes will carefully be dissected by both campaigns.
+
+""Early votes will give us a good contour of who's enthused to show up to vote,"" McDonald explained.
+
+When the absentee ballots begin to flow in, a campaign could spin the numbers in whatever direction it wants. But those reactions will most likely be overwrought. The Trump campaign could spin mail-in votes as an indicator of the polls being wrong (if they still show Clinton ahead), but that would likely be a false reading, McDonald said. That's because registered Republicans tend to vote by mail in bigger numbers than Democrats, and Democrats tend to use early in-person voting more often.
+
+""Romney in 2012 put out records that he was crushing it in Ohio,"" McDonald said. ""They were saying the polls are wrong, look at how well he's doing there. Well, he lost Ohio.""
+
+A point-in-time comparison is a better indicator of how well a candidate is doing in a certain state. By comparing the data and trends of early voting from previous election cycles, the campaigns will know if citizens are passionate enough about their platform to participate in voting — and if campaigns are hitting their marks.
+
+""Early voters are people who have already made up their minds,"" McDonald said. ""Clinton and Trump supporters will vote right now, and it won't matter what happens until Election Day. They're well-educated and dedicated.""
+
+This could be a component for each of the campaigns' successes or failures, especially in battleground states that allow early and no-excuse absentee ballot voting. Florida, for instance, saw almost 4 in 10 people vote early (20 percent early in-person, 19 percent absentee). Professor Paul Gronke of Reed College and founder of the Early Voting Information Center told NPR's Scott Simon that Florida could see an even bigger early vote turnout this year.
+
+Early voting could also be a factor in Ohio and North Carolina.
+
+""This is going to change the dynamics in those states, so that you will expect to see early rallies timed when the early voting period opens up,"" Gronke said, adding that ""the candidates' travel schedule will reflect this because they want to follow up that kind of enthusiasm and get people to the polls right away.""
+
+It's not clear how the feelings toward these candidates will affect early voting. Partisan divisions are at their highest levels in decades, and although both candidates hold record-low favorability ratings, Clinton and Trump supporters tend to be pretty adamant about their candidate of choice.
+
+The earliest movement for absentee voting began during the Civil War. Soldiers on both sides wanted to cast their ballots in the 1864 election. Several state legislators hashed out the details: How would the votes be cast? How would voter fraud and coercion votes be curtailed? And how would the votes be delivered?
+
+Despite these sizable challenges, 25 Union states passed some form of absentee voting for soldiers battling in the muddy and bloody trenches.
+
+""Some say Abraham Lincoln might not have been elected if they weren't allowed to vote,"" McDonald said.
+
+Since then, the absentee ballot has evolved to include the sick and the elderly, business people who frequently travel and others who can provide valid reasons for being out of state, like students in college in a different state. There are currently 27 states and the District of Columbia that do not require any reason to request an absentee ballot.
+
+By the 1990s, many states took up early in-person voting measures, which allowed individuals to cast their ballots at a polling location during a specific period of time before Election Day.
+
+""The only way we can lose, in my opinion — I really mean this — in Pennsylvania, is if cheating goes on,"" Trump said at a campaign event in Altoona, Pa. ""I hope you people can sort of not just vote on the 8th, go around and look and watch other polling places, and make sure that it's 100 percent fine.""
+
+But, according to McDonald, the chances of voter fraud occurring at polling locations is slim.
+
+""If we look at the weakness in the election system,"" McDonald said, ""it's not at the polling places. There is impression fraud, but it's so rare.""
+
+So rare, in fact, that there were only about 31 separate incidents of possible voter fraud since 2000, based on data collected by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School. This includes general, primary, special and municipal elections from 2000 to 2014.
+
+To put that in perspective, there were 1 billion ballots cast in the general and primary elections during that time. That's 0.000000031 percent.
+
+Some of these incidents may not have been an attempt to actually participate in voter fraud, but could have resulted in data entry errors, a mix-up of matching different people with the same name — or someone accidentally signing in as the wrong person in a poll book.
+
+However, there is a bigger risk of voter fraud when it comes to absentee and mail-in ballots, McDonald pointed out.
+
+""Again, this is small, not a huge problem,"" he noted. ""Local elections are the most vulnerable, not presidential elections.""
+
+There were 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud from 2000 to 2012, according to an analysis by News21. If broken down, that's about 80 cases every two years.
+
+There are also checks to confirm the authenticity of these ballots. Certain states require people pick up a ballot in person with a valid ID. All absentee and mail-in ballots require a signature that is cross-verified against the voter's voter-registration signature. Any signatures that look suspicious are thrown out.
+
+While voter fraud is one issue, another is whether mail-in ballots are filled out and returned correctly.
+
+""Where most people make a mistake is through the mail,"" McDonald said. ""They won't sign the privacy envelope. People try to save the election board money by putting two ballots in one envelope, but they have to throw that away. It's vital for people to follow the mail procedures accurately.""
+
+Vote by mail: Washington state switched to an entirely vote-by-mail system in 2011. Officials noticed that by 1996, more than half of voters were casting their ballots through the mail. It didn't make economic sense for the state to keep its polling places open.
+
+The Internet: It's already being used for military members and certain citizens who live outside the country under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. In addition to the ability to return a mail-in ballot (which may be limited to military members who are serving in remote locations), electronic ballot transmission is another option.
+
+How it works, per McDonald: Voters request electronic delivery of the ballot, either by email or by a secured website where the ballot may be downloaded. The voter then prints out the ballot, completes it and signs it. Now, if the state permits electronic ballot return, the voter will scan the completed ballot and send it either by email or by uploading it to the secured website.
+
+If the state does not allow electronic ballot transmission, the voter must print out and assemble a privacy envelope to deliver the ballot, which McDonald said officials call the ""origami project."" When officials receive the ballot, they check the signature against the one on file with the voter's voter-registration application.
+
+This option is only available for uniformed military (stationed both abroad and domestically) and overseas citizens through the voting act. However, Alaska was the first state to extend the electronic ballot delivery and return option to everyone.
+
+""It starts in the military and goes down to the general public,"" McDonald said. ""That's usually how this stuff happens.""
+
+That seemed to be the case with absentee voting and the Civil War. ""I believe more states will follow Alaska's lead to expand ballot electronic delivery and return in the future,"" McDonald said.
+
+But don't expect the transition to occur anytime soon. With the recent hack in Arizona and Illinois voter registration databases and the Democratic National Committee's computer system, tackling the challenges of cybersecurity will likely take precedence over convenience.
+
+When can people start voting? (In-person or absentee drop-off without an excuse)
+
+Sept. 19 – Wisconsin Rapids, Wis. (town holding earliest voting in Wisconsin, where early voting is set by municipalities and counties)
+
+Sept. 24 – New Jersey (mail-in ballots sent out), Vermont (until Nov. 7)
+
+Sept. 29 – Illinois (goes until Nov. 7), Iowa, North Dakota (ballots mailed; due by Nov. 7), Wyoming (until Nov. 7)
+
+Oct. 10 – Los Angeles County, Calif. (early voting is set by counties/municipalities. LA County has earliest — until Nov. 7), Maine (until Nov. 7), Montana (absentee ballots set to be available; can be turned in in person), Nebraska (until Nov. 7)
+
+Oct. 19 – Kansas (counties can set earlier dates, goes until Nov. 7), Oregon (most voting is by mail — ballots mailed out, can be dropped off same day), Tennessee (until Nov. 3)
+
+Oct. 21 – Washington state (ballots go out that day and can be dropped off)
+
+Oct. 22 – D.C. (at Judiciary Square, until Nov. 7), Nevada, New Mexico (in person)
+
+Oct. 24 – Alaska (until Nov. 7), Arkansas (until Nov. 7), Colorado (until Nov. 7; ballots mailed out Oct. 17), Idaho (this is the last day a municipality can begin early voting; goes until Nov. 4), Massachusetts (goes until Nov. 4), North Dakota (until Nov. 7), Texas (until Nov. 4)
+
+Oct. 25 – Hawaii (until Nov. 5), Louisiana (until Nov. 1), Utah (until Nov. 4)
+
+States without no-excuse early voting: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia",REAL
+6193,Russia Has Shot From 124th to 40th in 'Ease of Doing Business',"The Central Bank sees Russia’s moving up in the Doing Business rating as a good sign, Deputy CEO of the Central Bank Vladimir Chistyukhin told reporters. 
+""That is a very significant leap and a very positive sign for us. It shows that the efforts we made in many fields, in particular in corporate management were not in vain,"" he said. 
+Earlier this week it was reported that Russia moved up to the 40th position in the Doing Business-2017 rating, which is annually prepared by the World Bank. 
+In 2012, Russia ranked 124th in that rating. 
+In his May decrees issued in 2012 President Vladimir Putin set the task for the country to reach the 20th position in the rating of the World Bank by 2018. 
+In 2016, Russia was on the 51st place in the Doing Business rating. 
+However the methods of calculation of the World Bank’s rating changed earlier this year. Taking into account these changes Russia could have been on the 36th place already in 2015.  ",FAKE
+5884,The Penalty For Treason Is… [Video],This is one of Sean’s most powerful videos. It is most definitely worth the 11 minutes it takes to listen. – G Grannum SF Source SGTreport.com Nov. 2016 Share this:,FAKE
+3379,Reported two-month gap in Clinton emails coincides with escalating Libya violence,"A reported two-month gap in emails from Hillary Clinton's private account during 2012 coincides with a period of escalating violence in Libya and the obtaining of a special exemption by her top aide, Huma Abedin, to work for both the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
+
+The Daily Beast reported late Tuesday that no emails between Clinton and her State Department staff for the months of May and June 2012 are among the estimated 2,000 messages that have been released from the Democratic presidential frontrunner's account.
+
+A State Department spokesman told The Daily Beast that only emails related to the security of U.S. diplomats in Libya or the consulate in Benghazi were turned over to the House select committee investigating the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 attack. If true, that means neither Clinton nor her staff communicated via e-mail during a period that saw three attacks on international outposts in Benghazi, including one on the consulate itself.
+
+That attack, on June 6, 2012, involved the detonation of an improvised explosive device outside of the consulate, prompting the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli to warn Americans about the ""fluid security situation in Libya."" Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed along with three others in the Sept. 11 attack, warned his superiors that ""Islamic extremism appears to be on the rise in eastern Libya.""
+
+Two weeks earlier, on May 22, the International Red Cross office was hit by rocket-propelled grenades. Five days after the consulate bombing, a convoy carrying Britain's ambassador to Libya was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades, injuring two bodyguards.
+
+The State Department plans to release Clinton's emails on a regular, monthly basis through January 2016 to comply with an order by a federal judge. The next release is tentatively scheduled for Friday. Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill released a statement saying ""More emails are slated to be released by the State Department next week, and we hope that release is as inclusive as possible
+
+The Daily Beast reports that the Benghazi committee has only received one e-mail dating from the two-month period. The message in question was sent in June 2012 by longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal and dealt mainly with his business interests in Libya. Security threats to the U.S. diplomatic presence were not mentioned.
+
+Another issue raised by the e-mail gap is the status of Abedin, a longtime aide to Clinton and the wife of former New York congressman and mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner. The Daily Beast reports that on June 3, Abedin was granted ""special government employee"" status, allowing her to remain employed by the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, a consulting firm founded by a Clinton ally, and by Hillary herself. The ""special government employee"" designation prevented Abedin from being subject to some ethics rules.
+
+On Tuesday, the Daily Beast reported that State Department lawyers identified 68 pages of ""potentially responsive"" documents in response to a 2013 Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated Press for details about how Abedin obtained her special employee status. That was the first time the department acknowledged having any documentation about Abedin's arrangement.
+
+Meanwhile Tuesday, Republicans on the House Benghazi committee insisted there was no agreement with Clinton over her possible appearance before the panel, despite an announcement by her campaign that she would testify Oct. 22. Federal investigators said last week they have alerted the Justice Department to a potential compromise of classified information arising from Clinton's private email server.
+
+A memo signed by the inspector general of the intelligence community said the IG's office had identified ""potentially hundreds of classified emails"" among the 30,000 that Clinton had provided to the State Department and that are now being processed for public release. None of the emails was marked as classified at the time they were sent or received, but some should have been handled as such and sent on a secure computer network, according to a letter to congressional oversight committees from I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for a collection of executive branch agencies that work on intelligence.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from The Daily Beast.",REAL
+9272,Letter to Judge in Bundy Case in Oregon,". 
+Your Most Honorableness, October 30th, 2016 
+I read in the papers and on the Internet that the Bundy’s and their cohorts were acquitted in your courtroom in Portland of all charges. 
+I also read that the defendants were not released. 
+I also read that their defense attorney, while asking for the papers that would keep his clients in jail, was attacked in your courtroom by the bailiffs and tasered on the floor after he’d been gang tackled. 
+Is this your idea of justice? 
+Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” said that, “The courts are the great levelers.” I don’t think that he meant the defense attorney should be leveled in the courtroom by government goons. 
+You numbnuts in the court system are losing all, and I mean ALL, of your credibility with the public. We don’t believe in your robes and badges and court orders and bits of paper demanding this and that. We look at you as robbers. 
+You have all become a farcical, dangerous, and way too powerful. 
+You and I are the same age. You should know better. 
+Sincerely,",FAKE
+595,"Koch-backed network aims to spend nearly $1 billion ahead of 2016 elections, may engage in GOP primaries","— A network of conservative advocacy groups backed by Charles and David Koch aims to spend a staggering $889 million in advance of the next White House election, part of an expansive strategy to build on its 2014 victories that may involve jumping into the Republican primaries.
+
+The massive financial goal was revealed to donors here Monday during an annual winter meeting hosted by Freedom Partners, the tax-exempt business lobby that serves as the hub of the Koch-backed political operation, according to an attendee. The amount is more than double the $407 million that 17 allied groups in the network raised during the 2012 campaign.
+
+The figure comes close to the $1 billion that each of the two major parties’ presidential nominees are expected to spend in 2016, and it cements the network’s standing as one of the country’s most potent political forces. With its resources and capabilities — including a national field operation and cutting-edge technology — it is challenging the primacy of the official parties. In the 2012 elections, the Republican National Committee spent $404 million, while the Democratic National Committee shelled out $319 million.
+
+The new $889 million goal reflects the anticipated budgets of all the allied groups that the network funds. Those resources will go into field operations, new data-driven technology and policy work, among other projects, along with likely media campaigns aimed at shaping the congressional and White House elections.
+
+The group — which is supported by hundreds of wealthy donors on the right, along with the Kochs — is still debating whether it will spend some of that money in the GOP primaries. Such a move could have a major impact in winnowing the field of contenders, but could also undercut the network’s standing if it engaged in intraparty politics and was not successful.
+
+The three-day conference was held at a luxury resort perched on a rocky hillside near Palm Springs, Calif., with stunning views of the palm-tree-speckled desert floor below. The event drew 450 attendees, a record number, as well as the largest number of first-time contributors to the network.
+
+Saturday’s opening dinner, held on the resort’s wide lawn under strings of twinkling lights, celebrated a crop of new U.S. senators whose victories helped put the Senate back in GOP control. Their bids were lifted by the Freedom Partners network, which had pledged to spend close to $300 million in the run-up to the November elections.
+
+Sens. Steve Daines (Mont.), Joni Ernst (Iowa), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), David Perdue (Ga.) and Cory Gardner (Colo.) were on hand to thank donors, according to people familiar with the event.
+
+But much of the weekend was spent looking ahead to 2016.
+
+Freedom Partners President Marc Short said in an interview that “2014 was nice, but there’s a long way to go,” noting that the group’s ultimate goal is to make free-market ideals central in American society. “Politics is a necessary means to that end,” he said, but not the only one.
+
+Much of the conclave served as an information-gathering exercise for network officials, who are assessing whether financiers will coalesce around a single candidate in the GOP presidential contest. At this point, some contributors have said they have little interest in putting money into a bloody internal fight, and many others are not yet set on a candidate.
+
+Few here suggested they would support 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who is considering another run in 2016. Among the favorites are Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.).
+
+“It’s not as if there’s one perfect champion and five bad individuals,” said one person familiar with donors’ views, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations.
+
+The Kochs’ moves are being carefully watched by operatives throughout the party, who are well aware of how the brothers could alter the trajectory of the race if they took sides in the primaries.
+
+“It’s not like a Chicago political boss where Charles would say, ‘We’re all for this guy,’ ” said conservative activist Grover Norquist, who has attended past Koch donor seminars. “But if he said, ‘I really like this guy’ and did an op-ed, it would matter.”
+
+The network’s influence was underlined by the number of prospective 2016 contenders who flocked to Rancho Mirage to mingle with the deep-pocketed crowd. Walker arrived Saturday from Iowa, after addressing conservative activists at a forum in Des Moines. That night, over an al fresco dinner of filet mignon, the Wisconsin governor thanked the Freedom Partners donors for their past support and touted his efforts to curb state spending.
+
+Sunday night, Paul, Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) were on hand to participate in a panel about the economy and foreign policy moderated by ABC’s Jonathan Karl.
+
+The three senators aimed some of their comments at the business leaders in the audience, touting their support for cutting taxes and regulations, and dismissed a question about whether wealthy donors have too much influence on politics.
+
+“There are a bunch of Democrats who have taken as their talking points that the Koch brothers are the nexus of all evil in the world,” said Cruz, calling that thinking “grotesque and offensive.”
+
+“I don’t know a single person in this room who has ever been to my office . . . asking from government any special access,” Rubio added. “By and large what they want is to be left alone.”
+
+The panel was available to news organizations via a live Web stream, part of a new posture of openness embraced by the usually private organization. For the first time, Freedom Partners shared details about the donor conclave, including excerpts of Charles Koch’s welcoming remarks.
+
+Still, some critics scoffed at the idea that the group was being transparent. On Saturday, a handful of protesters stood at the base of the curving driveway that leads up to the resort, waving a large American flag and holding signs denouncing the Kochs.
+
+“They claim they’re being more open,” said Tracy Turner, a 49-year-old retiree from Palm Springs, noting that the news media was barred from the event. “Clearly, that’s not the case. They’re scripting it very carefully.”
+
+Started by Charles Koch in 2003 and originally hosted by Koch Industries, the twice-a-year donor seminars are now sponsored by Freedom Partners.
+
+The network has evolved into a sophisticated political operation that mirrors those of the official parties. Along with its main political advocacy arm, Americans for Prosperity, the network finances groups such as Concerned Veterans for America, the Libre Initiative and Generation Opportunity. Last year, it added a super PAC to its arsenal, but most of the allied groups are nonprofits that do not disclose their donors.
+
+Network officials used the conference to lay out ambitious goals to promote free-market principles in government, business and the media. There were also frank assessments of what they need to do to refine their tactics.
+
+One area seen as a major improvement over 2012 was how the network uses data to improve its voter outreach. Another major 2014 investment — expanding a national field organization — was also viewed as promising, but officials believe it will take time to make it more effective.
+
+In the coming year, allied groups in the network will put a renewed focus on the issue of “crony capitalism” and will pressure Democrats and Republicans alike on issues such as tax-code reform and the Export-Import Bank, according to people familiar with the plans.
+
+Denver investor John Saeman, a veteran cable executive who has been a longtime supporter of the network, described the mood as “measured.”
+
+“It’s very much of staying the course,” he said during a break between sessions. “This is a battle for hearts and minds.”
+
+In his speech Saturday night, Charles Koch exhorted his fellow donors to deepen their commitment.
+
+“It is up to us,” he said. “Making this vision a reality will require more than a financial commitment. It requires making it a central part of our lives.”",REAL
+8464,"Syrian Army Enters Metro Damascus Town, Driving Rebels Further Back","Rebels Blame Internal Fights for Growing Losses by Jason Ditz, October 31, 2016 Share This 
+The Syrian Army has entered the town of Tel Kurdi , on the outskirts of Damascus, entering the area over the weekend and pushing into yet another rebel-held area, bringing their forces yet closer to the rebel city of Douma, the last major rebel holding around the capital. 
+Tel Kurdi, like all the remaining rebel areas in Ghouta, was under siege for some time, and the rebel forces within fell back almost immediately, with no reports of major fighting, and the rebels bragging of a “scorched earth” policy destroying everything of value on their way out. 
+One of the members of the rebel council blamed the mounting losses on internal fights among the fashions. Indeed, over the past several months a lot of towns and villages in the area have fallen, either in military offensives or in negotiated pullouts. 
+The negotiated pullouts have been the most effective way to displace large amounts of rebels lately, with the rebels getting sent north into Nusra Front territory around Idlib. This is increasingly boiling down to government control of the area around Damascus, and increased rebel influence in the north. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
+3473,Obamacare threatens John Roberts’s dream of a nonpartisan Supreme Court,"The first time the Affordable Care Act came before the Supreme Court, its constitutional foundation under attack, John G. Roberts Jr. was its unlikely savior. In a spectacular display of spot-welding, the chief justice joined fellow conservatives on some points and brought liberals on board for others. Roberts was the only member of the court to endorse the entire jerry-rigged thing, and even he made sure to distance himself from the substance of the law. (“It is,” he wrote, “not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”) Still, his efforts rescued President Obama’s signature achievement on grounds that many had dismissed as an afterthought.
+
+As long as Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is on the court, he will most often be the decider when the justices split along their familiar ideological fault lines. But, slowly and quietly, Roberts is the one trying to build its legacy. He sees it as somehow exempt from the partisan fugue that long ago enveloped Washington. Justice Stephen G. Breyer has worried that the public might see him and his colleagues as “nine junior-varsity politicians”; public approval of the Supreme Court is falling. But while all of the justices bristle at the notion of a political court, the eponymous head of the Roberts court has the most to lose. After all, its decisions cannot be respected if the court is not respected. “It is a very serious threat to the independence and integrity of the courts to politicize them,” Roberts said at his 2005 confirmation hearings.
+
+Roberts, 60, jokes about the “odd historical quirk” that gives the chief justice only one vote. But he has learned to use the tools that come with the job: He shapes the discussion at conference; he writes the court’s opinion, or assigns it strategically, when he is in the majority; he’s happy to settle for nonthreatening, incremental changes that may bloom later into something more. And last term, what Roberts has described as the chief justice’s “particular obligation to try to achieve consensus” paid off. The share of unanimous decisions soared to 66 percent, a level not seen since the 1940s. The share of 5-to-4 decisions, high during Roberts’s tenure compared with those of other chief justices, fell to 14 percent, the lowest since he joined the court.
+
+And then here comes Obamacare II. In King v. Burwell , to be argued Wednesday, plaintiffs say the text of the law must be interpreted in a way that would neuter it, canceling health insurance subsidies for about 7.5 million Americans in at least 34 states. Can Roberts’s portrayal of the Supreme Court as above politics survive another round with the most partisan issue of the decade?
+
+Roberts, of course, has not ceased to be a conservative. Before Obamacare — or since — it’s hard to think of a case in which he has not voted the way conservative activists had hoped when they recommended him to President George W. Bush. The Roberts court has been described as the most pro-business in history. Its liberals complain that consumers are on a losing streak and that the court has imposed new roadblocks for those trying to prove discrimination.
+
+And when the issue is important to the chief justice, or when there seems to be no chance for compromise, he has been decisive. In a suite of cases, for instance, the court has systematically dismantled campaign finance restrictions, calling them hostile to free speech rights — Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission being the most famous of several 5-to-4 votes. Roberts wrote the majority opinion in the most recent, which featured the Republican National Committee as a plaintiff.
+
+He has also forcefully opposed the government’s use of racial classifications, and he wrote to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts, unlike Kennedy or even Justice Antonin Scalia, had never been the lone conservative to join the court’s liberals to make a majority in a major case — until the Affordable Care Act.
+
+Yet chief justices tend not to see the court as a vehicle for advancing their unadulterated ideas. A transformation came over Roberts’s predecessor and mentor, William H. Rehnquist, after becoming chief. As an associate justice, Rehnquist wrote so many solo dissents that his clerks awarded him a Lone Ranger doll. But like chief justices before him, in his new role he felt a responsibility to guard the court’s precedents and image. The most famous example is his metamorphosis on the Miranda rule, requiring police officers to read suspects their rights. For years, Rehnquist had denounced the rule as constitutionally unsound. But after his ascent he voted to uphold it, saying the warnings “have become part of our national culture.”
+
+Roberts came to the court as chief, so there is no similar evolution to judge. But those who know him say his vision of the responsibilities of the chief is paramount. “Associate Justice Roberts would be much closer to Scalia than Chief Justice Roberts is in terms of their approach to cases,” says one lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he argues Supreme Court cases. Anticipating this approach, Roberts pledged himself to the principle of stare decisis at his confirmation hearings and preached a gospel of judicial modesty, saying he came with “no agenda.”
+
+While he can’t change Washington’s partisan warfare, Roberts does what he can to avoid becoming a weapon in it, those who know him say. Unlike his colleagues, he does not give interviews. He avoids partisan gatherings such as the Federalist Society’s annual gala (where Scalia and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. take turns providing the after-dinner remarks) or the American Constitution Society (where Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor have been honored). Even the bipartisan Gridiron Dinner, where the nation’s political elite gather for gentle roasts, may have proved too much for Roberts: There’s always a seat at the head table for the chief justice of the United States, but this one hasn’t attended since 2009.
+
+His protection of the court’s image extends to his colleagues. In the first Affordable Care Act case, conservative activists and pols demanded that Justice Elena Kagan recuse herself because of her work as Obama’s solicitor general, while liberal groups called for Thomas to step aside because his wife is a prominent conservative activist. Roberts, without specifically mentioning either, tried to shut down those complaints in his annual “state of the judiciary” report that year. “I have complete confidence in the capability of my colleagues to determine when recusal is warranted,” he wrote. “They are jurists of exceptional integrity and experience whose character and fitness have been examined through a rigorous appointment and confirmation process.”
+
+But the consensus compulsion is clearest when the court issues narrow opinions. With Obamacare, for instance, Roberts bobbed and weaved, agreeing with conservatives that Congress had exceeded its power to regulate interstate commerce but also siding with liberals to save the individual mandate by calling it a tax. In the last term, narrow rulings made it possible for the court to unite, at least on the bottom line, in striking down abortion-clinic buffer zones in Massachusetts and rejecting efforts to restrict class-action suits alleging security fraud.
+
+His efforts are not universally revered. “John Roberts, Thy Name Is Traitor,” one conservative news site blared after the Obamacare decision. Glenn Beck offered T-shirts with Roberts’s smiling face and the word “COWARD” underneath. John Yoo, a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, wrote that this coming week’s challenge gives Roberts a chance to “atone.” Scalia, a frequent Roberts ally, once mocked Roberts’s “faux judicial modesty.” And in last term’s case on the buffer zones, he dismissed the chief’s majority opinion as “Something for Everyone.”
+
+Roberts insists that the nation’s poisonous political climate, rather than anything the justices have done, is to blame for damage to the court’s reputation. But he lives in a universe with a gridlocked Congress, a combative president who calls out the court at his State of the Union address and colleagues identified as often by party affiliation as by their judicial philosophies. “Today’s partisan split, while unprecedented, is likely enduring,” says a study of the court by professors Neal Devins of William & Mary and Lawrence Baum of Ohio State. “A five-member Democratic Court will reach sets of decisions that are quite different from those of a five-member Republican Court.”
+
+Perhaps then political tensions are simply inescapable. But paradoxically, the court is hard to characterize precisely because of its close balance. The Roberts court has found rights for Guantanamo detainees; ruled that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to keep guns; handed gay rights activists some of their most important victories; drastically cut back on the ability of legislatures to restrict campaign contributions; and narrowed the options for punishing juvenile defendants. Alternating liberal and conservative victories on this term’s two most important cases — gay marriage and health care — offer similar chances for “balance” when the justices complete their work this June.
+
+The court’s conflicting messages usually depend on Kennedy siding either with the conservative justices or the liberal ones. But about two-thirds of the time, the Reagan appointee finds his natural home on the right. And while such snapshots can be misleading, in the last term Roberts agreed with Kennedy more than any other justice did. Kennedy was on the winning side in more opinions than any of his colleagues; Roberts was right behind.
+
+This hardly means that either side sees the court as a neutral arbiter. Most liberal analysts praised Roberts’s first Obamacare decision, but some forecast that his reasoning would be used to secure conservative victories in the future. Others speculated that it gave Roberts “cover” to move on to issues about which he felt more strongly. They felt vindicated a year later when he sided with his conservative colleagues and wrote the 5-to-4 opinion striking down a crucial component of the Voting Rights Act.
+
+Roberts appears to know this. At an appearance at the University of Nebraska law school last fall, he talked about how gridlock between Obama and congressional Republicans means collateral damage for the nine justices, too. “I don’t want it to spill over and affect us,” he said. “We are not Democrats and Republicans in how we go about it, and in nine years I’ve never seen any political issue like that arise between us.” He worried that the near-party-line confirmation of “somebody as eminently qualified as our newest member,” Kagan, could suggest that people perceive the court, too, as a political body.
+
+It is a perception that, despite Roberts’s zealous labors, the court could soon reinforce, at least on the left. “A 5-to-4 decision invalidating the premium tax credits” in King v. Burwell “would seriously call into question the legitimacy of the court,” Tim Jost, a Washington and Lee University law professor and health-care expert, said in a video distributed by the liberal Center for American Progress. “I think it’s going to be [decided] pretty transparently for political reasons.”
+
+Follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.",REAL
+3286,Obama's Trade Agenda Clears Key Senate Hurdle,"WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama's trade agenda has cleared a key Senate hurdle to move toward a final vote.
+
+The Senate has topped the 60 votes needed to begin substantive action on Obama's bid for ""fast track"" negotiating authority. The vote was 62-38.
+
+Obama says fast track authority will improve prospects for a trade treaty with 11 other Pacific-rim nations.
+
+Labor unions and other groups vital to Democrats strongly oppose Obama's trade agenda. They say free-trade deals cost U.S. jobs.
+
+Obama says U.S. producers need broader access to foreign markets.",REAL
+8165,"All Governments Lie, The Movie","October Boomerang ‹ › David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.com and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org . He hosts Talk Nation Radio . Talk Nation Radio is on VT Radio and is syndicated by Pacifica Network. The show also airs on WTJU, Charlottesville, VA; WCSX-Detroit, MI; KGHI, Westport, WA; WHUS, Storrs, CT; WPRR, Grand Rapids, MI; KRFP-LP, Moscow, ID; KZGM, Cabool, MO; KMUD, Garberville, CA; WAZU, Peoria, IL; WXRD, Crown Point, IN; Geneva Radio, Geneva, NY; KKRN, Round Mountain, CA; KSKQ-LP, Ashland, OR; WUOW-LP, Oneonta, NY; No Lies Radio, Pinole, CA; WYAP-LP, Clay, WV; The Detour, Johnson City, TN; WZRD, Chicago, IL; WEFT, Champaign, IL; WXPI, Pittsburgh, PA; WDRT, Viroqua, WI; Veracity Now, online; Liberty and Justice Radio, Shirley, MA; Ithaca Community Radio, Ithaca, NY; WMCB, Greenfield, MA; PRX.org; KAOS 89.3fm, Olympia, WA; WUSB 90.1 FM, Stony Brook, NY; WOOL-FM, Bellow Falls, Vermont; WSLR-LP 96.5 in Sarasota, Florida. He also blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org And is a prolific author. His latest books are; War Is A Lie , Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union , and When the World Outlawed War Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Read his full and complete biography at DavidSwanson.org and also visit book site at War Is Crime . All Governments Lie, The Movie By David Swanson on October 31, 2016 A Film About Liars and the Journalists That Expose Them 
+By David Swanson 
+Picture, if you will, video footage of vintage (early 2016) Donald Trump buffoonery with the CEO of CBS Leslie Moonves commenting on major media’s choice to give Trump vastly more air time than other candidates: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” 
+That’s the introduction to a powerful critique of the U.S. media. A new film screens in New York and Los Angeles this week called All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone . 
+The website AllGovernmentsLie.com has screening dates , a list of lies , and a list of good journalists who expose lies . The lists on the website are not identical to the content of the film, but there’s a good deal of overlap — enough to give you a sense of what this project is about. 
+I’d have made various changes and additions to the film. In particular, I’m tired of all the focus on Iraq 2003. This film touches on war lies since then, but still gives that one particular set of war lies prominence. 
+Still, this is a film that should be shown in cities, homes, and classrooms across the United States. It includes and is driven by Noam Chomsky’s analysis of how the media system is “rigged” without those doing the rigging believing they’ve done anything at all. It’s a survey of skullduggery by corporate media. It’s an introduction to numerous journalists far superior to the norm. And it’s an introduction to I.F. Stone. It includes footage of a presentation of the annual Izzy Award which goes to journalists acting in Stone’s tradition. 
+One of the lies listed in the film and on the website is that of the Gulf of Tonkin (non-)Incident. Anyone paying attention knows of it now as a war lie. And it was a transparent war lie at the time in a particular sense. That is: had the North Vietnamese really shot back at a U.S. ship off their coast, that would not have been any sort of legal, much less moral, justification for escalating a war. I’d love it if people could grasp that logic and apply it to the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and every other part of the earth today. 
+But the Gulf of Tonkin lies about Vietnamese aggression against the U.S. ships innocently patrolling and firing off the coast of Vietnam were not transparent to people with faith in the U.S. role of Global Policeman. Someone had to make the lies transparent. Someone had to document that in fact the Secretary of So-Called Defense and the President were lying. Sadly, nobody did that in the first 24 hours after the Congressional committee hearings, and that was all it took for Congress to hand the president a war. 
+And it was decades before White House transcripts came out and before the National Security Agency confessed, and additional years before former Secretary Robert McNamara did. Yet, those revelations simply confirmed what people paying attention knew. And they knew it because of I.F. Stone who just weeks after the (non-)incident published a four-page edition of his weekly newsletter exclusively about Tonkin. 
+Stone’s analysis is useful in looking at the incident or lack thereof this past month in the Red Sea off Yemen. And in fact it is to Yemen that Stone immediately turned on page 1 in 1964. The United Nations, including its U.S. ambassador, had recently condemned British attacks on Yemen that Britain defended as retaliatory. President Dwight Eisenhower had also warned the French against retaliatory attacks on Tunisia. And President Lyndon Johnson, even at the time of Tonkin, Stone notes, was warning Greece and Turkey not to engage in retaliatory attacks on each other. 
+Stone, who tended to look even at written laws that nobody else paid any heed to, pointed out that three of them banned these sorts of attacks: the League of Nations Covenant, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the U.N. Charter. The latter two are still theoretically in place for the U.S. government. 
+The United States in Vietnam, Stone goes on to show, could not have been innocently attacked but itself admitted to having already sunk a number of Vietnamese boats. And indeed the U.S. ships, Stone reports, were in North Vietnamese waters and were there to assist South Vietnamese ships that were shelling two North Vietnamese islands. And in fact those ships had been supplied to South Vietnam by the U.S. military and the good old American tax payers. 
+Stone did not have access to closed committee hearings, but he hardly needed it. He considered the assertions made in speeches by the only two senators who voted against the war. And then he looked for any rejoinders by the chairmen of the committees. He found their denials to be non-denials and nonsensical. It made no sense that the U.S. ships simply happened to be randomly hanging around in the vicinity of the South Vietnamese ships. Stone didn’t believe it. 
+Stone also filled in the background information. The United States had been supporting guerrilla attacks on North Vietnam for years prior to the non-incident. And Stone raised numerous suspicions, including the question of why the U.S. ships had supposedly made sure they were out in international waters for the (non-)incident to (not) occur, and the question of why in the world Vietnam would take on the United States military (something nobody could explain, though Eugene McCarthy proposed that perhaps they had been bored). 
+Missing from the film and website of All Governments Lie is I.F. Stone’s work on lies about the outbreak of the Korean War. We’ve learned more since he wrote it, but seen little more insightful, relevant, or timely for our understanding of Korea and the world today. 
+David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org . Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie . He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org . He hosts Talk Nation Radio .He is a 2015 and 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. 
+Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook . 
+Help support DavidSwanson.org, WarIsACrime.org, and TalkNationRadio.org by clicking here: http://davidswanson.org/donate .",FAKE
+3984,Fighting ISIS will be a long war,"Aaron David Miller is a vice president and distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of ""The End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President."" Miller, a Middle East negotiator in Democratic and Republican administrations, discusses the Paris attacks in this Wilson Center video . Follow him on Twitter @aarondmiller2 . The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
+
+(CNN) Anyone hoping that the Paris attacks will somehow transform the fight against global jihad and produce a quick and definitive defeat for the bad guys and victory for the good ought to take a deep breath.
+
+We must take advantage of the Paris carnage to mobilize international and regional allies in the fight; but we should have no illusions it will produce quick or even lasting victories.
+
+Even if the Paris attacks turn out to be transformative event; they're likely to represent another turn in the very long war against global jihad. Here are six reasons why.
+
+• It's a long war because 15 years after 9/11 and decades after Islamic suicide terror made its Middle Eastern debut in Lebanon with Hezbollah attacks against U.S. Marines and embassies, we're still fighting it. The dismantling of al Qaeda central and the killing of Osama bin Laden hasn't ended the threat; it has morphed and evolved into other groups such as ISIS, Khorasan and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
+
+• It's the long war because as necessary and vital as military airstrikes are, they can't provide the definitive answer to the problem. Indeed, 9/11 resulted in the two longest wars in American history and partly helped to create the situation we face today. Massive airstrikes and deployment of thousands of ground forces without securing an end state that ensures coherent and stable governance will not address the underlying conditions on which the jihadis feed. In fact, the budding grand alliance (France, the U.S. and Russia) will be perceived by radical Muslims as a war between the Christian West and Islam and will only feed jihadi propaganda and even boost recruitment.
+
+• It's a long war because key Arab states are melting down. In Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq there is neither good, stable nor coherent governance. Instead, you have large and empty and ungovernable spaces; sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shia empowering transnational actors willing and able to fill the vacuum. Even in a country like Egypt, we now see a home-grown insurgency affiliated with the Islamic State that has already destroyed a Russian commercial airliner. Even if the Syrian civil war ended, the jihadi insurgency would continue feeding on local grievances; Indeed, paradoxically you might see a surge of foreign fighters flocking to Egypt to continue the struggle.
+
+It's the long war because the West cannot win the fight against radical Islam until the Muslim majority begins to confront and deal with the cancer of the extremist ideology within its midst. The West continues to infantilize Muslims by somehow assuming that the war against the jihadis can be won with the great powers taking the lead role. ""Where is the panel... on the Sunday talk shows where you have Muslim leaders alongside Western leaders to talk about how they're going to conquer this problem,"" The West continues to infantilize Muslims by somehow assuming that the war against the jihadis can be won with the great powers taking the lead role. ""Where is the panel... on the Sunday talk shows where you have Muslim leaders alongside Western leaders to talk about how they're going to conquer this problem,"" asked Princeton Professor Amaney A. Jamal. Instead, we get Westerners talking at Muslims about how to resolve their problems. Indeed, Islam needs reform by Muslim reformers who can offer an alternative vision to counter the one the jihadis are peddling; and leaders of these countries need to engage in political and economic reform to eliminate the grievances on which the jihadis feed.
+
+• It's the long war because ISIS has jumped borders and morphed into an idea as well as a physical movement or proto terror state. And that idea can inspire the disenchanted, alienated and aggrieved and create a sense of aspiration -- violent though it may be -- in otherwise purposeless lives. Europe is a fertile breeding ground -- 20 million Muslims out of 1.4 billion; and fully a fifth of the recruits to ISIS hail from European lands. European security services are overwhelmed with the challenge of tracking and preempting terror attacks and will continue to be.
+
+And it may be a longer war, unless we start describing accurately the nature of the challenge we face. Sure this is violent, extremism producing heinous acts as both President Barack Obama and Secretary John Kerry have said. But it's also a particularly vicious kind of terror. It's driven by a global jihad of radical and extremist Muslims who draw on actual and perversions of Islamic texts to kill Muslims and non-Muslims in an effort to impose their twisted vision of the world. We need to delegitimize the radicals and also be careful with our words so that we don't alienate the vast majority of the world's Muslims who despise what a minority does in its name. John Kerry's Sure this is violent, extremism producing heinous acts as both President Barack Obama and Secretary John Kerry have said. But it's also a particularly vicious kind of terror. It's driven by a global jihad of radical and extremist Muslims who draw on actual and perversions of Islamic texts to kill Muslims and non-Muslims in an effort to impose their twisted vision of the world. We need to delegitimize the radicals and also be careful with our words so that we don't alienate the vast majority of the world's Muslims who despise what a minority does in its name. John Kerry's recent comments seemingly drawing an understandable distinction between the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks and those in Paris are just the kind of stumble we need to avoid.
+
+The global jihad cannot destroy Europe, America, Western civilization or fundamentally alter the contours of history. Global jihad is driven by a vicious, fascist ideology that can cause terrible suffering and destruction. And should these groups gain access to chemical or biological weapons, we'd face a catastrophe.
+
+Still, the Council on Foreign Relations' Micah Zenko notes that ""terrorism represents only a small fraction of overall violent deaths. The annual number of violent deaths worldwide is 508,000, according to the ""Global Burden of Armed Violence 2015: Every Body Counts"" report. In other words, less than 7% of violent deaths are a result of acts of terrorism. Compare the 32,727 terrorist fatalities to the estimated 377,000 people who were killed, collectively, in interpersonal violence, gang violence or economically motived crimes."" Some 63% of all attacks occurred in just six countries: Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Syria.
+
+This isn't yet a World War II-level scourge, even though the challenge of global jihad may well be the most critical national security challenge we face today. But, sadly, unlike the Second World War, this conflict will be far longer. We need to prepare for what promises to be the long war of the 21st century.",REAL
+5494,Hillary Clinton’s “Sudden Move” Of $1.8 Billion To Qatar Central Bank Stuns Financial World,"Email 
+
+An intriguing Ministry of Finance (MoF) report circulating in the Kremlin today says that elite Western bankers were stunned a few hours ago after the Bank For International Settlements (BIS) registered a $1.8 billion transfer from the Clinton Foundation (CF) to the Qatar Central Bank (QCB) through the “facilitation/abetment” of JP Morgan Chase & Company (JPM)—and for reasons yet to be firmly established. 
+According to this report, the Bank for International Settlements is the world's oldest international financial organization and acts as a prime counterparty for central banks in their financial transactions; the Qatar Central Bank is the bank of that Gulf State nations government and their “bank of banks”; JP Morgan Chase & Company is the United States largest “megabank”; and the Clinton Foundation is an international criminal money laundering organization whose clients include the Russian mafia. 
+With Hillary Clinton’s US presidential campaign Chairman John Podesta having longstanding ties to the Russian mafia and money laundering, this report continues, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) maintains complete surveillance of him and his criminal associates—including both Hillary Clinton and her husband, and former US President, Bill Clinton. 
+On Saturday 15 October (2016), this report notes, the SVR reported to the MoF that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta met with JP Morgan Chase & Company CEO Jamie Dimon at Clinton’s Chappaqua Compound outside of New York City—and who, in 2009, both President Obama and Hillary Clinton allowed to break US laws by his, Dimon’s, being able to buy millions-of-dollars of his company’s stocks prior to the public being told his JP Morgan bank was receiving a Federal Reserve $80 billion credit line—and that caused JP Morgan’s stocks to soar and that have had an astonishing 920% dividend growth since 2010. 
+Within 12 hours of the Hillary Clinton-John Podesta-Jamie Dimon meeting at the Chappaqua Compound, this report continues, the BIS registered the transfer of $1.8 billion from the Clinton Foundation to the Qatar Central Bank. 
+To why the Clinton Foundation transferred this enormous sum of money to Qatar, this report explains, is due to the longstanding ties between this Islamic neo-patrimonial absolute monarchy and then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who oversaw the “massive bribery scheme” that allowed this Gulf State nation to secure the 2022 World Cup—and that the Qataris were so appreciative of they donated millions to the Clinton Foundation, and incredibly, in 2011, gave former US President Bill Clinton $1 million for a birthday present—bringing Hillary Clinton’s total “cash grab” from these Persian Gulf sheiks of $100 million—all occurring as recently released secret emails revealed Hillary Clinton’s knowledge that both Qatar and Saudi Arabia were, and still are, funding ISIS. 
+To what Jamie Dimon said to Hillary Clinton that caused her to suddenly transfer $1.8 billion to Qatar, this report notes, revolves around his JP Morgan bank being told by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in April (2016) that this “megabanks” master plan to save itself had “serious deficiencies” that could “pose serious adverse effects to the financial stability of the United States”. 
+Two months after the FDIC’s warning letter to Jamie Dimon, in June (2016), this report says, he cryptically “sounded a warning” that the United States sub-prime auto loan bubble was nearing collapse and stated that “someone is going to get hurt”. 
+Unbeknownst to the American people, MoF experts in this report explain, is that just 8 weeks ago multiple warnings began to be issued that the United States $1 trillion sub-prime auto loan bubble was beginning to collapse—and that this past week became so severe the Bank of America issued a recession warning telling its elite customers that “this market is scary”, and the British-based multinational banking and financial services company HSBC, likewise, issued a “Red Alert” warning all of its clients warning them to “prepare for a severe market crash”. 
+With one of the first casualties of this sub-prime auto loan bubble being the German global banking giant Deutsche Bank that is “nearing its doom” and laying off tens-of-thousands of it workers worldwide, this report grimly states, the American mainstream propaganda media is failing to allow the people of that nation to know the full extent of this looming catastrophe—who unlike Hillary Clinton who has just protected $1.8 billion of her wealth, will be left defenseless once again at the hands of their elite rulers. 
+As Wikileaks secret Hillary Clinton emails have now proven that the US propaganda mainstream media is now totally controlled by her, and who continue their blackout on the “Clinton Crime Story of the Century”, this report continues, the absolutely horrifying statistics released this week showing that an astounding 35% of American who have been brutalized by the Obama-Clinton regime these past 8 years are so buried in debt they can no longer pay their bills is, likewise, being kept from these most innocent of peoples.",FAKE
+7273,"Hillary's 33,000 emails might not be 'missing' after all","THE DELETER OF THE FREE WORLD Hillary's 33,000 emails might not be 'missing' after all Files backed up on multiple platforms never subpoened by FBI Published: 19 mins ago 
+(New York Post) For months now, we’ve been told that Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails were permanently erased and destroyed beyond recovery. But newly released FBI notes strongly suggest they still exist in several locations — and they could be recovered, if only someone would impanel a grand jury and seize them. 
+In a May interview with FBI agents, an executive with the Denver contractor that maintained Clinton’s private server revealed that an underling didn’t bleach-clean all her subpoenaed emails, just ones he stored in a data file he used to transfer the emails from the server to Clinton’s aides, who in turn sorted them for delivery to Congress. 
+The Platte River Networks executive, whose name was redacted from the interview report, said PRN tech Paul Combetta “created a ‘vehicle’ to transfer email files from the live mailboxes of [Clinton Executive Services Corp.] email accounts [and] then later used BleachBit software to shred the ‘vehicle,’ but the email content still existed in the live email accounts.”",FAKE
+1268,Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare: Hint -- it's not Bernie Sanders,"Hillary Clinton’s nightmare is not the sudden resurgence of Bernie Sanders. It is the fidelity to the rule of law of the FBI.
+
+The recent revelations of the receipt by Clinton of a Special Access Program email, as well as cut and pasted summaries of state secrets on her server and on her BlackBerry nearly guarantee that the FBI will recommend that the Department of Justice convene a grand jury and seek her indictment for espionage. Here is the backstory.
+
+It seems that every week, more information comes to light about Clinton’s grave legal woes. Her worries are in two broad categories: One is her well-documented failure to safeguard state secrets and the other is her probable use of her position as secretary of state to advance financially her husband’s charitable foundation. The FBI is currently and aggressively investigating both. What I will describe below is in the state secrets category. It is apparently not new to the FBI, but it is new to the public.
+
+Among the data that the FBI either found on the Clinton server or acquired from the State Department via its responses to Freedom of Information Act requests is a top-secret email that has been denominated Special Access Program. Top secret is the highest category of state secrets (the other categories are confidential and secret), and of the sub-parts of top secret, SAP is the most sensitive.
+
+SAP is clothed in such secrecy that it cannot be received or opened accidentally. Clinton -- who ensured all of her governmental emails came to her through her husband’s server, a nonsecure nongovernmental venue -- could only have received or viewed it from that server after inputting certain codes. Those codes change at unscheduled times, such that she would need to inquire of them before inputting them.
+
+The presence of the SAP-denominated email on her husband’s server, whether opened or not, shows a criminal indifference to her lawful obligation to maintain safely all state secrets entrusted to her care. Yet, Clinton has suggested that she is hopelessly digitally inept and may not have known what she was doing. This constitutes an attempted plausible deniability to the charge of failing to safeguard state secrets.
+
+But in this sensitive area of the law, plausible deniability is not an available defense; no judge would permit the assertion of it in legal filings or in a courtroom, and no lawyer would permit a client to make the assertion.
+
+This is so for two reasons. First, failure to safeguard state secrets is a crime for which the government need not prove intent. The failure can be done negligently. Thus, plausible deniability is actually an admission of negligence and, hence in this case, an admission of guilt, not a denial.
+
+Second, Clinton signed an oath under penalty of perjury on Jan. 22, 2009, her first full day as secretary of state. In that oath, she acknowledged that she had received a full FBI briefing on the lawfully required care and keeping of state secrets. Her briefing and her oath specified that the obligation to safeguard state secrets is absolute -- it cannot be avoided or evaded by forgetfulness or any other form of negligence, and that negligence can bring prosecution.
+
+What type of data is typically protected by the SAP denomination? The most sensitive under the sun -- such as the names of moles (spies working for more than one government) and their American handlers, the existence of black ops (illegal programs that the U.S. government carries out, of which it will deny knowledge if exposed), codes needed to access state secrets and ongoing intelligence gathering projects.
+
+The crime here occurs when SAPs are exposed by residing in a nonsecure venue; it does not matter for prosecution purposes whether they fell into the wrong hands.
+
+Clinton’s persistent mocking of the seriousness of all this is the moral equivalent of taunting alligators before crossing a stream. SAPs are so sensitive that most of the FBI agents who are investigating Clinton lack the security clearances needed to view the SAP found among her emails. Most FBI agents have never seen a SAP.
+
+Shortly after the presence of the SAP-denominated email was made known, the State Department released another email Clinton failed to erase wherein she instructed her subordinates to take state secrets from a secure venue, to cut and paste and summarize them, and send them to her on her nonsecure venue. Such an endeavor, if carried out, is a felony -- masking and then not safeguarding state secrets. Such a command to subordinates can only come from a criminal mind.
+
+Equally as telling is a little-known 2013 speech that recently surfaced given by one of Clinton’s former subordinates. The aide revealed that Clinton and her staff regularly engaged in digital conversations about state secrets on their BlackBerries. This is not criminal if the BlackBerries were government-issued and secured. Clinton’s was neither. It was purchased at her instructions off the shelf by one of her staff.
+
+Can anyone doubt that Clinton has failed to safeguard state secrets? If her name were Hillary Rodham instead of Hillary Rodham Clinton, she’d have been indicted months ago.
+
+What remains of the rule of law in America? The FBI will soon tell us.
+
+Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.",REAL
+10160,Another Project Veritas Bombshell: Pro-Clinton PAC Accepts Foreign Donations,"We Are Change 
+In the fourth undercover video from the guerilla journalists at James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, Democratic operative Robert Creamer claims to be on daily calls with the Clinton campaign — and accepts a foreign donation.
+In the newly released footage, Creamer admits to working directly for the Clinton campaign — overseeing Donald Trump events. 
+“I mean frankly I spend most of my time overseeing the Trump event rallies, I mean that’s what I do for the Clinton campaign,” Creamer states. 
+In previous video releases from Veritas, Democratic operatives reveal how they had been working to incite violence at Trump rallies, using a tactic called “bird-dogging.” An operative also reveals to the undercover journalists their step-by-step voter fraud strategy. 
+The Clinton campaign originally denied working with Creamer and his firm, Democracy Partners. O’Keefe then released a video of Creamer stating that their “Donald Ducks” effort was at the request of the candidate herself. 
+“Every morning I am on a call at 10:30 that goes over the message being driven by the campaign headquarters … I am in this campaign mainly to deal with what earned media with television, radio, with earned media and social media, not with paid media, not with advertising,” Creamer says in the latest video. 
+He also admits to working directly with Barack Obama, statements that are backed up by his 340 logged visits to the White House — where he met with Obama 45 times. 
+“I do a lot of work with the White House on their issues, helping to run issue campaigns that they have been involved in. I mean, for immigration reform for the… the health care bill, for trying to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence issues.” 
+To gain access and trust, O’Keefe reveals that he had provided a $20,000 donation to the Americans for United for Change super PAC from Belize. 
+“The more money that was promised to Creamer, the more access Project Veritas Action journalists seemed to get,” Project Veritas said in their release .
+Following the release of the first Veritas videos last week, the PAC suddenly returned the donation — stating that they were concerned it may have been illegal. 
+“In an unexpected twist, AUFC president Brad Woodhouse, the recipient of the $20,000, heard that Project Veritas Action was releasing undercover videos exposing AUFC’s activities. He told a journalist that AUFC was going to return the twenty thousand dollars,” Project Veritas explained. “ He said it was because they were concerned that it might have been an illegal foreign donation. Project Veritas Action was pleased but wondered why that hadn’t been a problem for the month that they had the money.” 
+O’Keefe has filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission against both Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee based upon the shocking revelations that his team has uncovered. 
+During a rally in Gettysburg on Saturday, Trump promised that he would also be suing the DNC for inciting violence at his rallies, based on what he saw in the Project Veritas videos. 
+The post Another Project Veritas Bombshell: Pro-Clinton PAC Accepts Foreign Donations appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+8228,Memo to Trump: 'Action This Day!',"  => 
+“In victory, magnanimity!” said Winston Churchill. 
+Donald Trump should be magnanimous and gracious toward those whom he defeated this week, but his first duty is to keep faith with those who put their faith in him. 
+The protests, riots and violence that have attended his triumph in city after city should only serve to steel his resolve. 
+As for promptings that he “reach out” and “reassure” those upset by his victory, and trim or temper his agenda to pacify them, Trump should reject the poisoned chalice. This is the same old con. 
+Trump should take as models the Democrats FDR and LBJ. 
+Franklin Roosevelt, who had savaged Herbert Hoover as a big spender, launched his own New Deal in his first 100 days. 
+History now hails his initiative and resolve. 
+Lyndon Johnson exploited his landslide over Barry Goldwater in 1964 to erect his Great Society in 1965: the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid. He compromised on nothing, and got it all. 
+Even those who turned on him for Vietnam still celebrate his domestic achievements. 
+President Nixon’s great regret was that he did not bomb Hanoi and mine Haiphong in 1969 — instead of waiting until 1972 — and bring the Vietnam War to an earlier end and with fewer U.S. casualties. 
+Nixon’s decision not to inflame the social and political crisis of the ’60s by rolling back the Great Society bought him nothing. He was rewarded with media-backed mass demonstrations in 1969 to break his presidency and bring about an American defeat in Vietnam. 
+“Action this day!” was the scribbled command of Prime Minister Churchill on his notepads in World War II. This should be the motto of the first months of a Trump presidency. 
+For the historic opportunity he and the Republican Party have been given by his stunning and unanticipated victory of Nov. 8 will not last long. His adversaries and enemies in politics and press are only temporarily dazed and reeling. 
+This great opening should be exploited now. 
+Few anticipated Tuesday morning what we would have today: a decapitated Democratic Party, with the Obamas and Clintons gone or going, Joe Biden with them, no national leader rising, and only the power of obstruction, of which the nation has had enough. 
+The GOP, however, on Jan. 20, will control both Houses of Congress and the White House, with the real possibility of remaking the Supreme Court in the image of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. 
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan have indicated they are willing to work with President Trump. 
+There is nothing to prevent the new GOP from writing history. 
+In his first months, Trump could put a seal on American politics as indelible as that left by Ronald Reagan. 
+A partial agenda: First, he should ignore any importunings by President Obama to permit passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a lame-duck session — and let the trade deal sink by year’s end. 
+On Jan. 20, he should have vetted and ready to nominate to the high court a brilliant constitutionalist and strict constructionist. 
+He should act to end interference with the Dakota Access pipeline and call on Congress to re-enact legislation, vetoed by Obama, to finish the Keystone XL pipeline. Then he should repeal all Obama regulations that unnecessarily restrict the production of the oil, gas and clean coal necessary to make America energy independent again. 
+Folks in Pennsylvania, southeast Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia should be shown, by executive action, that Trump is a man of his word. And when the mines open again, he should be there. 
+He should order new actions to seal the Southern border, start the wall and begin visible deportations of felons who are in the country illegally. 
+With a new education secretary, he should announce White House intent to work for repeal of Common Core and announce the introduction of legislation to put federal resources behind the charter schools that have proven to be a godsend to inner-city black children. 
+He should propose an immediate tax cut for U.S. corporations, with $2 to $3 trillion in unrepatriated profits abroad, who will bring the money home and invest it in America, to the benefit of our economy and our Treasury. 
+He should take the president’s phone and pen and begin the rewriting or repeal of every Obama executive order that does not comport with the national interest or political philosophy of the GOP. 
+Trump should announce a date soon for repeal and replacement of Obamacare and introduction of his new tax-and-trade legislation to bring back manufacturing and create American jobs. 
+Donald Trump said in his campaign that that this is America’s last chance. If we lose this one, he said, we lose the country. 
+The president-elect should ignore his more cautious counselors, and act with the urgency of his declared beliefs. 
+ ",FAKE
+3053,Gerrymandering didn’t make politics this vicious. But vicious politics will soon make gerrymandering so much worse.,"It is endlessly suspicious when politicians control the process by which they and their allies are elected. Yet Arizona lawmakers had been battling their own citizens for precisely this power, in a lawsuit that culminated Monday in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision upholding the right of voters — not legislators — to control how electoral districts are drawn.
+
+In 2000, Arizonans voted to take the state legislature out of the redistricting process. They hoped to curb partisan gerrymandering by creating an independent, bipartisan commission that would handle the duty of redrawing state and federal voting districts after every Census.
+
+The commission’s redistricting plan led to Democratic wins in 2012, which upset the GOP-controlled legislature. Republicans claimed that the whole process was unconstitutional because the founding fathers specifically commanded state legislatures to run elections.
+
+They were referring to the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which reads as follows:
+
+Yes, this is another Supreme Court case that hinges on the meaning of a word. Here, the word is “legislature.” Does the Constitution refer solely to a state’s body of elected representatives? Or does the term “legislature” here lend itself to a broader interpretation, one that would allow citizens to have a direct say in how elections are conducted?
+
+Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued that the power of regulating elections should ultimately lie with the people — such is the spirit of democracy, after all.
+
+“[I]t would be perverse to interpret the term ‘Legislature’ in the Elections Clause so as to exclude lawmaking by the people, particularly where such lawmaking is intended to check legislators’ ability to choose the district lines they run in,” she wrote.
+
+In his dissent, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. accused his fellow justices of fudging the law to bless a policy that they liked. “The majority today shows greater concern about redistricting practices than about the meaning of the Constitution,” he wrote.
+
+Let’s stop there for a second. Regardless of how the decision was achieved, it protects an important attempt by citizens to ensure fair elections at a time when politics is become increasingly bitter and undemocratic.
+
+One unfortunate fact of American politics is that election districts are becoming more and more misshapen. Recently, Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor at Harvard, and Maxwell Palmer, an assistant professor at Boston University, crunched the numbers on the past 200 years of congressional district shapes.
+
+The researchers used several different ways to measure how convoluted a district’s borders are. All of the methods tend to agree that district complexity has substantially increased since the 1970s. The changes occurred across the board. Both simple and raggedy districts are starting to look weirder and weirder.
+
+Of course, just because a district looks ugly doesn’t mean it’s unfairly drawn. It’s important to create districts that represent natural communities, and communities often have irregular boundaries. It’s equally important to preserve minority representation, and sometimes districts look like spaghetti in order to prevent the minority vote in a state from being diluted.
+
+Partisan gerrymandering can’t be detected solely by examining geography and geometry. There’s culture and history to consider. That’s also why courts and lawmakers have struggled to define what is an unacceptable level of gerrymandering. The process is subjective.
+
+For instance, Ansolabehere and Palmer also found that the weirdest-looking districts tend to vote Democratic. That doesn’t prove that Democrats are the more shameless gerrymanderers, though.
+
+Besides, Democratic voters tend to concentrate in urban areas, which can make it hard to draw compact voting districts that are also fair.
+
+A 2013 paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science argued that the clustering of Democratic voters creates a natural Republican bias when districts are drawn up. Political scientists Jowei Chen, of the University of Michigan, and Jonathan Rodden, of Stanford, call the phenomenon “unintentional gerrymandering.”
+
+To demonstrate, Chen and Rodden used a computer to randomly draw district plans using data from the 2000 presidential election in Florida. Famously, the popular vote in Florida split more or less evenly between George W. Bush and Al Gore. So in a fair, representative plan, you might expect half the districts to go for Bush, and half for Gore.
+
+But across hundreds of versions of these randomly generated district maps — paragons of disinterested district making — a bias emerged. On average, three-fifths of districts went for Bush, even though half of the population was voting for Gore.
+
+The explanation, according to Chen and Rodden, is that Democratic voters are at a disadvantage by dint of their living patterns.
+
+Democratic voters concentrate either in big cities, or in Democratic enclaves (black suburbs, college towns) scattered across the state. The downtown districts are overwhelmingly Democratic, while the small Democratic outposts tend to get engulfed by their Republican neighbors.
+
+More equal representation might result if planners could better distribute Democratic voters — perhaps, say, by appending some solidly Democratic urban neighborhoods to purplish suburban districts.
+
+But at some point that starts to look like gerrymandering, doesn’t it?
+
+The complex, cross-cutting considerations involved in redistricting provide cover for partisan shenanigans. When legislators start to get creative with district borders, are they adjusting for a state’s uneven political geography? Or are they angling for an advantage?
+
+Putting the process in the hands of an independent body is one way to make matters a little more fair. Political scientists have generally observed that courts and independent commissions tend to design more competitive districts.
+
+In a study of congressional elections from 1972–2012, researchers at the University of Georgia and the University of Texas at Austin found that districts drawn by legislators are significantly less likely to result in close elections, even after controlling for polarization, candidate quality and regional differences. But this effect is only prominent from 1992 onward:
+
+The researchers suspect that computers deserve much of the blame. By 1991, all but four states were using geographic information programs to guide their redistricting efforts. Nowadays, any legislator with a laptop can call on software to concoct districts with whatever characteristics they like. Gerrymandering has never been this easy, or data-driven.
+
+Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that some of the most tortured-looking districts were designed in recent years, as these maps from Ansolabehere and Palmer show:
+
+Independent redistricting commissions are supposed to curb gerrymandering but most lack full control of the redistricting process. Some are restricted to making suggestions, which legislatures can vote down or amend. Others step in only after the legislature has stalemated. Like the filibuster, the power of redistricting is a political tool that both parties are loath to give up. Legislatures in 42 states still have the final say when it comes to determining districts for House seats in Congress. And in 37 states, legislators control the redistricting process for their own state legislative districts.
+
+In Arizona and California, citizens used ballot initiatives to wrest that power away from their legislators. The independent commissions in these states are completely in charge of redistricting. Their maps cannot be changed or overruled by the legislature. To keep politics at bay, these committees are kept strictly bipartisan, with reserved seats for Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Selection rules exclude politicians and those who work for them. California went as far to use a lottery to pick some of the commissioners.
+
+Despite the cautionary measures, these committees have been the site of considerable partisan bitterness. There have been allegations that the non-partisan members on the commission secretly favor one side, and that the technical staff assisting the commissions introduced bias into the process. For these and other reasons, the resulting district plans have consistently been challenged in court. As political scientist Bruce Cain writes:
+
+In fact, Monday’s case was merely the first of two GOP lawsuits before the Supreme Court involving redistricting in Arizona.
+
+Now after the Court has established that Arizona’s independent commission is constitutional, it will consider whether the commission’s most recent redistricting map apportioned Republicans fairly. On Tuesday, the Court announced that it will hear this second lawsuit some time next session.
+
+Many political scientists say that all the fuss over gerrymandering amounts to wasted breath. Recent decades have seen large decreases in the number of competitive House districts, and large increases in political polarization — but these twin trends can’t be blamed on gerrymandering alone.
+
+In a 2006 paper published in the Journal of Politics, Emory researchers pointed out that House elections have been getting less competitive even during years when district boundaries haven’t changed.
+
+If gerrymandering alone were the culprit, the number of competitive seats should plummet after each redistricting — between 1990 and 1992, or 2000 and 2002, or 2010 and 2012. But the changes that happen between redistricting years have been modest.
+
+Furthermore, Princeton political scientist Nolan McCarty has noted that political polarization increased just as fast in the Senate as in the House. Since senators are elected in statewide races, they aren’t affected by gerrymandering. Yet, the Senate, too, has been paralyzed by partisan rancor.
+
+[What we know and don’t know about our polarized politics]
+
+Gerrymandering, it seems, is a symptom of increasing viciousness in politics — not the root cause.
+
+But that’s even more of a reason for states to safeguard the district-making process from partisanship. The ongoing fight in Arizona has demonstrated that political parties will battle tooth and nail to tilt the electoral map in their favor.
+
+Arizona and California’s experiments in independent redistricting attempt to de-politicize redistricting by appointing citizen committees. It’s possible to take that idea one step further. These days, software and cheap computing gives every citizen the power to create their own district maps. Opening up the redistricting process to public participation and review would offer one more check against legislators acting in their own self interest.
+
+That tracks the spirit of Monday’s decision, in which Ginsburg borrowed liberally from founding father James Madison. “The genius of republican liberty seems to demand . . . not only that all power should be derived from the people, but that those intrusted with it should be kept in dependence on the people,” she quoted.
+
+She wrote: “The people of Arizona turned to the initiative to curb the practice of gerrymandering and, thereby, to ensure that Members of Congress would have ‘an habitual recollection of their dependence on the people.'”
+
+Independent redistricting commissions won’t heal the nasty rift in American politics. But at the very least, they would ensure that any nastiness be entirely representative of the American public.",REAL
+3649,"Guns, terror, and LGBT rights: Orlando shooting raises stakes for next president","Gun control, homegrown extremism, homophobic violence and the war against Islamic State have all been highlighted by the Orlando nightclub massacre, but deadlock in Washington means major legislation will probably have to wait until after the November election.
+
+Whoever wins the US presidency will find an in-tray where the threat of terrorism at home, and the commitment to wars abroad, grinds on 15 years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
+
+Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Senate Democrats went on the front foot on Monday, calling for laws that would make it harder for terrorists to get their hands on firearms, in particular assault rifles.
+
+In a vivid illustration of ideological division, however, Republican flag-bearer Donald Trump opposed gun control measures, lambasted the immigration system as “dysfunctional” and claimed vindication in his call for a ban on foreign-born Muslims entering the US.
+
+A landslide victory for Clinton or Trump, with reflected gains in Congress, could give one or the other a mandate for change lacking during the Obama years. In the meantime there is realpolitik. With Obama facing a Republican-led House and Senate, the prospects for action are remote even after the killing of 49 people in the worst mass shooting in American history.
+
+Even so, Senate Democrats lost little time on Monday in urging quick passage of legislation defeated last year to impose additional gun controls. The bill would prevent people on “terror watch lists” and other “suspected terrorists” from buying firearms or explosives.
+
+The killer in Orlando has been identified as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American-born Muslim, whose weapons included an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. FBI officials said they had investigated him in 2013 and 2014 on suspicion of terrorist sympathies but could not make a case against him.
+
+Obama himself weighed in on Monday. “The fact that we make it this challenging for law enforcement, for example, even to get alerted that somebody who they are watching has purchased a gun – and if they do get alerted, sometimes it’s hard for them to stop them from getting a gun – is crazy. It’s a problem. And we have to, I think, do some soul-searching.
+
+“But again, the danger here is, is that then it ends up being the usual political debate. And the NRA and the gun control folks say that, oh, Obama doesn’t want to talk about terrorism. And if you talk about terrorism, then people say: why aren’t you looking at issues of gun control?”
+
+At the start of his second term, Obama pushed legislation to expand background checks, ban certain assault-style weapons and cap the size of ammunition clips. That measure collapsed in the Senate and there has been little movement since.
+
+But if Trump provokes an electoral backlash, handing sweeping victories to Democrats, there could be new opportunities for Clinton, who has been more outspoken on the issue than candidates in previous years.
+
+On Monday, she told a rally in Cleveland, Ohio: “If the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links, you should not be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked. And you shouldn’t be able to exploit loopholes and evade criminal background checks by buying online or at a gun show. And yes, if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you are too dangerous to buy a gun in America.”
+
+Yet the watchlist argument is less simple than meets the eye. The no-fly list, for example, has come under fire from left and right. Drawn up by the FBI in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it contains 700,000 names, according to one estimate, and has mistakenly included infants, US military veterans and politicians, including Edward Kennedy and John Lewis. Analysts describe it as an unfocused and unwieldy blunt instrument.
+
+This is one reason why a Congress that blocked gun control measures after the shooting of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, seems unlikely to shift gear now. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, admitted: “I don’t know whether this profound tragedy will have more of an impact on the minds of members of Congress. Hopefully it will.”
+
+But Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the Senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs, disagreed that stricter gun laws were the solution. “I think there’s other root causes in play,” he told the Associated Press. “I think mental health is a huge issue.”
+
+These are the tangibles, more readily quantified. What the White House and Congress should do to promote harmony with both the Muslim and LGBT communities is a more textured long-term challenge, where tone is crucial.
+
+With characteristic bombast, Trump charged straight in on Monday. “When I am elected, I will suspend immigration from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies, until we understand how to end these threats,” he said.
+
+“We cannot continue to allow thousands upon thousands of people to pour into our country, many of whom have the same thought process as this savage killer.”
+
+He added: “The Muslim community’s so important. They have to work with us … and turn in the people who are bad.”
+
+At Clinton’s rally, the tone was very different. “We should avoid eroding trust in that community … inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric and threatening to ban the family and friends of Muslim Americans, and millions of Muslim business people, hurts the vast majority of Muslims, who love freedom and hate terror.”
+
+It is no coincidence, she added, that hate crimes against American Muslims and mosques have tripled since the Paris and San Bernardino attacks.
+
+She called on local leaders, teachers and communities to develop education to recognize signs of radicalisation. And in contrast to Trump’s proposed ban on individuals, she instead took aim at foreign governments, implying she would take a tougher stand than Obama. “It is long past time for Saudis, Qataris, Kuwaitis and others to stop their citizens from funding extremist organisations.”
+
+The Orlando attack has also focused attention on hate crimes against gay men and lesbians in America. The Obama administration has overseen great strides, including the legalisation of gay marriage, but, activists note, this can conceal ongoing hostility and prejudice in many communities. The recent political debate over transgender bathroom use is seen as one example that contributes to a hostile climate.
+
+It was reported on Monday that members of Congress plan to ask the White House to end a decades-old policy that prohibits many gay men from donating blood. Senators including Elizabeth Warren have long criticised the rule as discriminatory.
+
+Using the alternative term Isil, Obama acknowledged the targeting of LGBT people by Islamic State but gave little hint of new concrete measures. “Regardless of the particular motivations of this killer, there are connections between this vicious, bankrupt ideology and general attitudes towards gays and lesbians. And unfortunately, that’s something that the LGBT community is subject to not just by Isil but by a lot of groups that purport to speak on behalf of God around the world.”
+
+Trump, meanwhile, set himself up as an unlikely champion of the LGBT community. “Ask yourself: who is really the friend of women and the LBGT [sic] community – Donald Trump, with his actions, or Hillary Clinton, with her words? Clinton wants to allow radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country – they enslave women, and murder gays. I don’t want them in our country.”
+
+But Trump’s remarks met with scepticism from gay rights activists, who argue that he has vowed to appoint supreme court justices who would roll back nationwide marriage equality.
+
+Jay Brown, communications director of the Human Rights Campaign, said: “Let’s be clear: LGBTQ people are Muslims.
+
+“And make no mistake, Donald Trump is no friend of the LGBTQ community. Donald Trump has vowed to roll back marriage equality, pass Kim Davis-style discrimination and allow governors from coast to coast to pass laws like North Carolina’s HB2. Trump’s rhetoric today isn’t fooling anyone and what he is peddling isn’t protection. It’s poison.”",REAL
+395,"Barbara Mikulski , the longest serving female senator in history, to retire","The Maryland Democrat made the announcement Monday morning in her hometown of Baltimore.
+
+Mikulski, 78, is known as the ""Dean"" of the Senate women -- helping forge bipartisan relationships for decades that often result in compromise. Until Democrats lost control of the Senate, she was the chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.
+
+""I had to ask myself this question: Am I campaigning for me, or am I campaigning for my constituents?"" she said Monday. ""Am I raising money or raising hell?""
+
+President Barack Obama praised Mikulski as ""legendary"" and called her ""an institution in the United States Senate"" in a statement Monday that followed her announcement. ""Barbara's service to the people of Maryland spans decades, but her legacy will span generations,"" Obama said. ""Barbara is the longest serving woman in Congress, and her leadership serves as an inspiration to millions of women and girls across the globe to stand up and lead."" Her retirement could present an opening for former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who left office weeks ago and has been considering a 2016 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination -- though he could struggle to make waves in that race if, as expected, Hillary Clinton runs. It's not clear whether O'Malley would be interested in a legislative seat. But his mother has long served as Mikulski's receptionist in her Washington office. And O'Malley tweeted his praise for Mikulski on Monday. I got my start in Maryland politics on @SenatorBarb's '86 campaign. Very grateful for her service to our state as well as her mentorship. — Martin O'Malley (@GovernorOMalley) March 2, 2015 The state is also represented by seven Democratic House members -- including Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a member of the party's congressional leadership -- and they could all scramble for the seat, too. O'Malley's former lieutenant governor, Anthony Brown, is another contender. Also on the list of potential Democratic candidates are Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Labor Secretary Tom Perez.",REAL
+254,Gowdy and Cummings duke it out over Benghazi,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+388,Conservative watchdog group accuses Democrats of illegally coordinating through voter data firm,"A new conservative watchdog group filed a complaint this week with the Federal Election Commission against the private voter data firm Catalist and dozens of Democratic party and candidate committees, accusing them of operating “an illegal coordination scheme” that has allowed Democrats to instantly sync their voter information with that of independent groups.
+
+The Washington-based Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust  also alleged that Catalist -- whose president is Harold Ickes, a longtime Democratic strategist and ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton -- provides its data to candidates and parties below market rate, effectively making illegal in-kind contributions.
+
+FACT’s executive director, Matthew G. Whitaker, said Catalist and its Democratic allies “have operated outside of the law” and called on the FEC to investigate.
+
+“I expect that they will take this seriously and get some answers,” said Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney in Iowa who ran for the U.S. Senate there last year as a Republican.
+
+Amy Weiss, a spokeswoman for Catalist, said in a statement that the complaint was “a politically-motivated filing without merit.”
+
+It is common for parties and outside organizations to exchange voter lists. But Democratic party committees and allied interest groups do not conduct such exchanges close to an election, according to people familiar with the transactions. That’s because conveying non-public material related to a campaign’s activities through a common vendor could violate coordination rules.
+
+In its complaint, FACT challenged that notion, citing passages in Sasha Issenberg's 2012 book ""The Victory Lab"" that described how Catalist enabled ""seamless links"" between President Obama's 2008 campaign and activist groups on the left.
+
+The allegations against Catalist comes four months after a Democratic-allied watchdog group filed a similar complaint against a host of groups on the right, including the Republican National Committee, the super PAC American Crossroads, the private firm Data Trust and i360, a data management firm that works closely with advocacy groups backed by billionaires Charles and David Koch and other conservative donors.
+
+American Democracy Legal Fund, a group helmed by veteran operative Brad Woodhouse, charged that the RNC and outside groups were illegally coordinating by exchanging information about individual voters in real time through Data Trust. The RNC called the complaint baseless.
+
+Whitaker said he was not concerned that FACT’s arguments against Catalist could be used against the RNC and its allies, noting that the group was nonpartisan.
+
+“This type of behavior shouldn’t be allowed on either side,” he said.
+
+FACT was organized over the last several months as a response to watchdogs groups on the left such as American Democracy Legal Fund and Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington. The group is backed by $1 million in seed money from donors who support conservative legal causes, according to people familiar with its origins. Whitaker declined to identify the organization’s contributors, calling them “some freedom-loving Americans” who live outside of Washington.",REAL
+4057,"100 Years Ago, 1.5 Million Armenians Were Systematically Killed. Today, It's Still Not A 'Genocide.'","Soon, much of the empire’s Christian Armenian population would be targeted and nearly wiped out, accused of conspiring against the empire with the Russians. Many Armenians say the genocide was collective punishment for the actions of a few.
+
+In August, after a wave of deportations began that would force hundreds of thousands of Armenians on brutal death marches toward the Syrian desert, Varoujan was tortured to death, according to eyewitnesses at the time. Varoujan was just one of many men, women and children who lost their lives.
+
+This week, Armenians from around the world are gathering in Istanbul to commemorate the deaths of nearly 1.5 million Armenians who died in what would later be known by many -- but not by Turkey, the United States and some other countries -- as the Armenian Genocide. A century on, the killings are hardly a thing of the past, with sensitive geopolitics still fueling the controversy.
+
+“Rape and beating were commonplace,” wrote acclaimed historian David Fromkin in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Ottoman Empire’s downfall, A Peace to End All Peace. “Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed.""
+
+An Armenian man in Istanbul, who as a schoolboy discovered his family was Armenian, told The WorldPost one story passed down to him by his parents: His grandfather, too exhausted to walk any farther in the death march toward the Syrian desert, refused to go on. He would rather drown than walk another mile to his death, he told the Turkish Ottoman guards. And so, the man says, they held his grandfather under the water until he was dead.
+
+The number of intellectuals reportedly rounded up by Ottoman Turks on April 24, 1915, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), kicking off what would become a massive wave of arrests, deportations and killings. Many of these Armenians were later deported and in many cases killed. Armenians commemorate the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide every year on April 24.
+
+The number of dead bodies reportedly found in 1916 in a mass grave in Maskanah, a northern town in what is now modern day Syria, according to Jesse B. Jackson, U.S. consul in Aleppo. ""As far as the eye can reach mounds are seen containing 200 to 300 corpses buried in the ground,"" he said in a cable to Washington.
+
+The number of nations that officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. The list does not include the United States, Israel and many others who on the centenary are grappling with labeling the killings a genocide. Germany is expected to finally do so on the anniversary.
+
+If President Obama decided to label the 1915 killings as genocide, already strained relations would likely only worsen with Turkey, where the United States has an important air base in the south, close to Syria. Turkey and the U.S. government have butted heads over the Syrian crisis, with a U.S.-led coalition targeting solely Islamic State extremists, while Turkey insists military efforts must also focus on bringing down Syria's Bashar Assad. The United States has said Turkey, hosting over 1.7 million desperate Syrian refugees, has failed to do enough to counter extremists who often cross its border into Syria with ease.
+
+The decision angered many Armenians in the United States and abroad who say they had hoped President Barack Obama would use the centennial as an opportunity to put things right, considering his track record of acknowledging the genocide prior to assuming the presidency.
+
+A box that contains bones of Armenians who were killed in Syria during their exodus from persecutions by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 are displayed at the Vank Cathedral in the historic city of Isfahan, some 250 miles south of the capital, Tehran, on April 20.
+
+In a recent column in the Daily Sabah, a Turkish newspaper known for its staunchly pro-government rhetoric, one columnist wrote that the genocide claimed by Armenians is just a ruse by the Armenian diaspora and descendants in Turkey to tear apart the country and take over Turkish territory.
+
+While Turkey in recent years has taken more conciliatory steps towards addressing the killings of Armenians, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan making what was considered to be a groundbreaking speech last year in which he offered condolences to the descendants of those killed, tempers have recently flared.",REAL
+122,Millennials Are More Racist Than They Think,"News about race in America these days is almost universally negative. Longstanding wealth, income and employment gaps between whites and people of color are increasing, and tensions between police and minority communities around the country are on the rise. But many claim there’s a glimmer of hope: The next generation of Americans, they say, is “post-racial”—more tolerant, and therefore more capable of easing these race-based inequities. Unfortunately, closer examination of the data suggests that millennials aren’t racially tolerant, they’re racially apathetic: They simply ignore structural racism rather than try to fix it.
+
+In 2010, a Pew Research report trumpeted that “the younger generation is more racially tolerant than their elders.” In the Chicago Tribune, Ted Gregory seized on this to declare millennials “the most tolerant generation in history.” These types of arguments typically cling to the fact that young people are more likely than their elders to favor interracial marriage. But while millennials are indeed less likely than baby boomers to say that more people of different races marrying each other is a change for the worse (6 percent compared to 14 percent), their opinions on that score are basically no different than those of the generation immediately before them, the Gen Xers, who come in at 5 percent. On interracial dating, the trend is similar, with 92 percent of Gen Xers saying it’s “all right for blacks and whites to date each other,” compared to 93 percent of millennials.
+
+Furthermore, these questions don’t really say anything about racial justice: After all, interracial dating and marriage are unlikely to solve deep disparities in criminal justice, wealth, upward mobility, poverty and education—at least not in this century. (Black-white marriages currently make up just 2.2 percent of all marriages.) And when it comes to opinions on more structural issues, such as the role of government in solving social and economic inequality and the need for continued progress, millennials start to split along racial lines. When people are asked, for example, “How much needs to be done in order to achieve Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality?” the gap between white millennials and millennials of color (all those who don’t identify as white) are wide. And once again, millennials are shown to be no more progressive than older generations: Among millennials, 42 percent of whites answer that “a lot” must be done to achieve racial equality, compared to 41 percent of white Gen Xers and 44 percent of white boomers.
+
+The most significant change has been among nonwhite millennials, who are more racially optimistic than their parents. (Fifty-four percent of nonwhite millennials say “a lot” must be done, compared with 60 percent of nonwhite Gen Xers.) And this racial optimism isn’t exactly warranted. The racial wealth gap has increased since the 2007 financial crisis, and blacks who graduate from college have less wealth than whites who haven’t completed high school. A new paper by poverty experts Thomas Hirschl and Mark Rank estimates that whites are 6.74 times more likely to enter the top 1 percent of the income distribution ladder than nonwhites. And Bhashkar Mazumder finds that 60 percent of blacks whose parents were in the top half of income distribution end up in the bottom, compared with 36 percent of whites.
+
+As to how well whites and nonwhites get along, only 13 percent of white millennials say “not well at all,” compared with 31 percent of nonwhite millennials. (Thirteen percent of white Gen Xers and 32 percent of nonwhite Gen Xers agree.)
+
+In a 2009 study using American National Election Studies—a survey of Americans before and after each presidential election—Vincent Hutchings finds, “younger cohorts of Whites are no more racially liberal in 2008 than they were in 1988.” My own analysis of the most recent data reveals a similar pattern: Gaps between young whites and old whites on support for programs that aim to further racial equality are very small compared to the gaps between young whites and young blacks.
+
+And even though the gaps within the millennial generation are wide, as with the Pew data, there is also evidence that young blacks are more racially conservative than their parents, as they are less likely to support government aid to blacks.
+
+Spencer Piston, professor at the Campbell Institute at Syracuse University, used ANES data and found a similar pattern on issues relating to economic inequality. He examined a tax on millionaires, affirmative action, a limit to campaign contributions and a battery of questions that measure egalitarianism. He says, “the racial divide (in particular the black/white divide) dwarfs other divides in policy opinion. Age differences in public opinion are small in comparison to racial differences.” This finding is, he adds, “consistent with a long-standing finding in political science.” Piston finds that young whites have the same level of racial stereotypes as their parents.",REAL
+8565,"Apple Kindly Offer Full-Time Jobs To Remaining 1,500 Calais Refugee Children","0 Add Comment 
+TECH giant Apple has today kindly offered to relocate over 1,500 refugee children who were left behind at a Calais campsite, and to give them full-time work as general operatives in their many factories littered across the world. 
+The opportunity will help clear the remaining refugees from the ‘Calais Jungle’, while French authorities continue to demolish it from existence, like a red wine stain from a woollen rug. 
+It is understood the children will begin a series of in-house training courses before taking to the Apple floor to make phones, iPads and MacBook computers. 
+“I have always loved Apple’s sleek product design,” 9-year-old Hafez Mohammed, who was born in the same week as the first ever iPhone release, “I cannot wait to start work making such cool products with them as my father and mother are missing and I have no idea where they are”. 
+Apple CEO Tim Cook said he was more than happy to offer the children this fantastic opportunity as founder Steve Jobs was also Syrian, and believes he would have only been delighted to help out his fellow countrymen and women get through this difficult period of their lives. 
+“Who knows, we may have the next Jobs in one of the 1,500 new employees,” Cook told WWN. 
+The Apple offer could not have come at a better time as British Prime Minister May rejected a personal demand from Francois Hollande for Britain to accept 1,500 child migrants yesterday, leaving only child sex traffickers to pick up the tab.",FAKE
+7287,The Mystery Behind The Missing Capstone Of The Great Pyramid!,"The hidden secrets of the Great Pyramid of Giza have intrigued explorers and experts for a long time.
+
+
+There are probably many hidden chambers that are still left untouched which could give us a lead to the true purpose of this colossal pyramid.
+
+But one mystery surrounding the mega structure is the fact that the capstone is missing. How come? Was there a capstone in the first place?
+
+Some researchers say that the capstone may have been completely built in gold, so, if it was in fact made of such a solid material then how did they achieve on removing such a large massive piece with aproximately 9 meters in height?
+
+Another theory suggests that the pyramid had a large sphere in it's summit, which served as a conductor of cosmic energy and would turn the pyramid into a massive power plant. The sphere could also be associated with the ""Eye of Horus"" and the brightest star in the sky ""Sirius"" . 
+
+Watch the following video to learn more! 
+
+
+Disclose TV SOURCE ",FAKE
+799,"Trump replays Clinton 'woman card,' defends 'pull out' Middle East strategy","Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Sunday defended his criticism that Hillary Clinton’s campaign success is based largely on her being a female candidate and dismissed assertions about him having a soft foreign policy.
+
+“The only card she has is the woman card,” Trump told “Fox News Sunday.” “Even women don’t like her. If she were not a woman, she would not even be in this race.”
+
+The billionaire businessman resumed his Clinton attack following
+
+ his sweep in five Northeast primary contests, saying Tuesday that “the only card she has is the woman's card. And frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote.”
+
+
+
+The front-running Trump also dismissed criticism that he sounded like a liberal Democrat in his foreign policy speech last week by suggesting the United States scale back in the Middle East and focus on domestic spending.
+
+“We need to knock off ISIS and get out of there,” said Trump, who nevertheless continues to argue that overthrowing dictators has been a failed foreign policy strategy that has led to instability in the Middle East.
+
+“Every move we've made in the Middle East has been wrong,” he said, arguing other countries should pay more to protect the world and that more taxpayer money must go to U.S. infrastructure.”
+
+“We can’t have this anymore,” he said. “We are spending all of our money in the Middle East. We need to strengthen our military and pull back … In the meantime our country is becoming Third World. … I will be tougher than” Clinton.
+
+GOP primary rival Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told ABC’s “This Week” that Trump's policy speech “reflects a weak and naive approach to foreign policy.”
+
+Trump also argued that his attacks on Clinton are no worse than those of her primary challenger, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has questioned the former secretary of state’s qualifications.
+
+While both Clinton and Trump’s favorability ratings among women are low, Trump’s are worse, especially among female general election voters.
+
+However, Trump argued Sunday that his numbers will improve if and when he faces Clinton in the general election.
+
+“Once I start on Hillary, the numbers will change,” he said. “Watch what happens with Hillary. Watch what happens with her numbers.”",REAL
+6052,Hillary Clinton Maintains Swing State Leads As Comey Email Letter Flops,"By Jason Easley on Sun, Oct 30th, 2016 at 10:52 am Republicans hoped that FBI Director James Comey's letter about new Clinton related emails would swing the election for them, but a new series of CBS News Battleground polls shows Clinton keeping her lead and within 2 points of Trump in Arizona. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
+The CBS News Republicans hoped that FBI Director James Comey’s letter about new Clinton related emails would swing the election for them, but a new series of CBS News Battleground polls shows Clinton keeping her lead and within 2 points of Trump in Arizona. 
+Battleground tracker found that by a small margin Comey’s letter made Democrats more likely (net +7) to support Clinton. 
+In the individual battleground states, Clinton leads by eight points in Pennsylvania 48%-40%, North Carolina (48%-45%), and in Colorado (42%-39%). The only state of the four polled where Trump has a small two point lead in Arizona (44%-42%). 
+According to CBS News , “And the larger demographic difference defining the race between Clinton and Donald Trump has been a gender gap – slightly larger now than the last time in these states – that offsets a smaller movement of Republicans to Trump.” 
+To put it another way, Hillary Clinton’s support with women is going up at a larger rate than Republican movement towards Trump. 
+These are the first swing state polls to be taken since FBI Director Comey released his now infamous letter on Friday. The email story isn’t moving voters. It is reinforcing the partisanship of the election. Democrats are going to vote Clinton. Republicans are going to vote for Trump, and there aren’t enough undecided voters to swing the election to Trump. 
+Republicans were hoping for a Hail Mary touchdown to save Trump, but Clinton continues to lead in critical states with a little more than a week to go before election day. If the Comey letter is the big October surprise, it isn’t working on voters. 
+Hillary Clinton Maintains Swing State Leads As Comey Email Letter Flops added by Jason Easley on Sun, Oct 30th, 2016",FAKE
+1493,The GOP’s establishment candidates begin aiming at each other,"With less than five weeks before voters begin weighing in on the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, the establishment contenders — who until now have been relatively restrained — have begun aiming their fire at each other.
+
+The tactical shift on the part of the candidates and their allies reflects a long-standing assumption as to how this crowded nomination battle is likely to play out.
+
+Many believe the race will come down to a one-on-one contest between an “outsider” who channels the angry Republican base and a candidate more in line with the wishes of the party hierarchy. The establishment pick has almost always prevailed in the past, though it is far from certain that will be the case in 2016.
+
+The insurgent faction of the party appears likely to rally around either front-runner Donald Trump or the ascendant Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). The leading possibilities on the establishment side include three sitting or former governors and a Florida senator — all of whom are running far behind Trump. But before any of them can get a shot at taking him on, they must deal with one another.
+
+[Trump’s latest targets: New Hampshire’s largest paper and its favorite candidate, Christie]
+
+Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Tuesday found his record of Senate absences under attack from two directions: a blistering ad in Iowa by a super PAC supporting former Florida governor Jeb Bush and a taunt by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
+
+“Dude, show up to work,” Christie said during a town-hall meeting in Muscatine, Iowa.
+
+Rubio was making his own swing through Iowa, which is set to hold the first contest of the primary season on Feb. 1. He responded at a news conference hours later in the town of Clinton.
+
+“You know, Chris has been missing in New Jersey for half the time,” Rubio said. “But candidates, I think, as we get down the stretch here, some of them get a little desperate and a little nasty in their attacks, and that’s fine.”
+
+He dismissed the attack ad by the pro-Bush super PAC Right to Rise USA as “par for the course. I mean obviously you’ve seen that as we get closer to Election Day and millions of dollars of spending have not changed [Bush’s] fortunes, he’s become increasingly negative in his attacks.”
+
+Meanwhile, Right to Rise USA also launched a spot in New Hampshire contending that the gubernatorial records of Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich do not stack up against that of Bush. The ad was gentler in tone than the super PAC’s assault on Rubio, but it attempted to draw a contrast on the experience that all three of the candidates consider to be their greatest asset.
+
+New Day in America, a super PAC supporting Kasich, responded: “What Team Jeb has failed to address is the political baggage dragging behind Bush and Christie. The country doesn’t have an appetite for another Bush, or another Clinton, for that matter. As for Governor Christie, his mishandling of his state budget and the ‘Bridgegate’ scandal have earned him a 60 percent unfavorable rating from those who know him best — the people of New Jersey.”
+
+The crossfire, said GOP political consultant Alex Castellanos, is beginning to look like “a ‘Fistful of Dollars’ gunfight,” referring to the 1964 spaghetti western that launched Clint Eastwood to stardom.
+
+“It’s now down to the last five weeks here,” Christie told reporters in Muscatine. “We need to make distinctions between candidates, not just on issues but on experience, so I’ll be talking about it. I think it’s an important distinction to make.”
+
+The young and charismatic Rubio is regarded by many as potentially the strongest contender running in the establishment lane — if he can find an opening.
+
+“It’s pretty clear in this race that Marco Rubio is the candidate of the future. If he ever breaks through the line, he’s got a lot of running room,” said Castellanos, who is not working for any of the 2016 candidates. “The only one who everyone fears for his explosive potential is Rubio.”
+
+[Will Rubio work hard enough to become president? Some backers are worried.]
+
+Right to Rise USA said it plans to spend $1.4 million on the new ad in Iowa, in which an announcer says: “Over the last three years, Rubio has missed important national security hearings and missed more total votes than any other senator. Politics first — that’s the Rubio way.”
+
+Christie sounded a similar theme during a town hall in Muscatine, where he noted that Rubio had announced his opposition to a $1.8 trillion, year-end spending bill and tax package, but then failed to show up to vote against it. It passed the Senate 65 to 33.
+
+“Just show up to work and vote no,” Christie said. “And if you don’t want to, then quit.”
+
+Rubio spokesman Alex Conant said his campaign is unfazed, noting that Rubio’s skill at dealing with barbs during the candidates’ debates has only increased his stature.
+
+“Obviously, we feel very good about our campaign, and where we’re at. With success comes scrutiny,” Conant said. “We’ve been taking some incoming for several months now, and we’re not worse for the wear.”
+
+Rubio does have the worst attendance record of all the senators, including the five who have run for president this year — a fact he does not dispute. A C-SPAN analysis released last week found that Rubio cast votes for just 219 of the 339 recorded Senate roll-call votes in 2015 — a 65 percent attendance record. He spoke on the Senate floor eight times — just 5 percent of the days that the Senate was in session, C-SPAN said.
+
+“I’m running for president, because I want to change the direction of this country, and it will require me, for the time being, to miss some votes in the U.S. Senate, because I want those votes to matter again,” Rubio said.
+
+Before Tuesday’s exchanges, the most high-profile attack on Rubio’s attendance record had been launched by Bush during an October Republican presidential debate. Rubio shot back with a response that threw Bush off balance.
+
+“Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you,” Rubio told Bush, and then recounted how other senators who ran for president had equally bad attendance records that had not drawn much comment.
+
+In his own appearances recently, Bush has been focusing most of his attacks on Trump and Hillary Clinton.
+
+By law, candidates are not allowed to coordinate with the super PACs that support them; however, Right to Rise USA is run by political consultant Mike Murphy, who has been one of Bush’s closest political advisers for most of his political career.",REAL
+5300,"""Russia is concentrating"" 2.0: Putin's new policy of ""active defense""","October 28, 2016 -  By Eduard Popov for Fort Russ- translated by J. Arnoldski -  
+
+
+At yesterday’s session of the international Valdai Discussion Club, Vladimir Putin made a number of statements about the system of international relations. He reminded listeners that American hegemony has already left a long trail of military invasions of sovereign countries - Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc. This was followed by the reminder that Russia “opened up” in the mid-1990’s and hoped for equal dialogue, but did not receive the expected.  
+By this Putin had in mind the (naive) trust in Western countries during the decade of Yeltsin’s rule that was unprecedented in Russian history. The United States responded to Russia’s openness with attempts to maximally weaken Russia from within (including by means of ‘reforms’ and privatizations carried out with the participation of American specialists) and from without, such as by creating a chained perimeter of border countries controlled by Washington around Russia’s borders. Russia was forbidden from having its own interests beyond its borders while US’ interests stretched up to Russia’s borders and even inside the country.  
+President Putin also could have added that he himself, at the beginning of his presidency, pursued policies maximally open towards the West. After all, it was he who first lent a hand to the American people after the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001 by clearly condemning this act of terrorism and allowing America to establish air bases in Central Asia. Patriotic experts harshly condemned Putin for this. The Russian president also closed the country’s last military bases and intelligence stations in Cuba and Vietnam. After the closure of Russia’s last military bases abroad, NATO expanded its borders East and accepted the former Warsaw Pact countries and union republics (the Baltic states) into its ranks. If not for Russia’s tough diplomatic resistance, Georgia and Ukraine also could have been added to the list of NATO member countries. 
+This was a huge mistake on Moscow’s part, but the president gained invaluable experience and is now no longer inclined to trust the pseudo-democratic demagogy of Washington, now constantly calling on Eastern European countries (Poland and the Baltics) to defend against the mythical Russian threat. 
+In fairness, let us note that many serious observers in the West have spoken against the disastrous policy of pushing Russia into a corner. Very bold predictions were made (which seemed fantastical 16-20 years ago) that Russia would revive its military might and restore the country to the status of a great world power.  
+The semi-marginal, “light-heavyweight” American politician Patrick Buchanan, for example, called for relying on Russia’s remaining strength rather than constantly annoying it. Today, his views do not appear to be marginal even though, as far as we can see, they remain the ideology of the minority. On the other hand, in Russia there is the marginal liberal minority whose ideology is that of unilateral concessions to the West. Putin’s popularity lies in that he is supported in foreign policy issues and issues of national security even by opposing trends, from communists to nationalists.  
+In his Valdai speech, President Putin demonstrated a realistic understanding of the external and internal challenges and threats facing Russia. Russia has a number of domestic problems ranging from economic and social to demographic ones, but the US has no less such problems.  
+Hence why Russia is not going to pursue and is not pursuing an expansionist policy. Not only because this contradicts its principles, but also because it is contrary to Russia's national interests. In NATO itself there are those who don’t believe that Russia actually has plans to conquer the Baltic states or Poland. Pushing this line is, perhaps, in the interests of these countries (or rather, their comprador establishments), but not Russia's.  
+What Russia is interested in is searching for allies in Europe and even the US itself, mainly those outside of the these countries’ political classes that are so tightly controlled by Washington. 
+As shown by the legislation on ""plutonium disarmament"" and Putin’s speech yesterday, Russia is already tired of giving unilateral concessions and sacrificing its own interests without getting even moral compensation. Thus, Vladimir Putin’s strategy in recent years and even months can be called a transition to active defense. 
+Russia is outlining the (not too extensive) circle of its interests outside its borders and concentrating on its internal problems. As the foreign minister of the Russian Empire, Prince Gorchakov, said after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War and the signing of the humiliating Treaty of Paris in 1856, “Russia is concentrating.” After a long 20 years, Russia has come to pursue a policy of active defense, carefully avoiding occasions for war.  
+
+Russia has not suffered any defeats in 2016, but it still faces the same problems, such as concentrating on resolving internal tasks. But Russia does not intend to surrender its positions, whether inside our outside the country. This idea was the main message of Vladimir Putin’s speech on October 27th.  
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
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+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+8661,Study: More Vitamin B In Mother’s Diet Reduces Risk Of Colon Cancer In Offspring,"in: General Health (image: shutterstock) Few experts question the influence a mother’s diet can have on her children’s long term physical health. Yet, many believe this effect is mostly sociological, limited to positive or negative role modeling, and the development of general dietary habits later in life. However, research suggests that the foods moms eat could impact the health of their children much more directly. Scientists at Tufts University’s USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA), near Boston, have published findings of a study which shows a strong connection between the quantity of B vitamins pregnant mice consume and the likelihood of their offspring developing colorectal cancer as adults [ 1 ] . Breaking Down The Study Three test groups of pregnant and nursing mice, which were genetically engineered to be predisposed to develop colorectal cancer, were fed diets with either higher than normal, adequate, or slightly deficient amounts of folate and vitamins B2, B6, and B12. Once fully weened, all newborn mice were fed identical, nutritionally balanced diets through adulthood. The occurrence of tumor development appeared similar between both the adequate and B vitamin deficient groups, with about 60 percent of the mice in each of these two groups eventually developing colon cancer . In comparison, less than 20 percent of the mice in the group that was given larger than normal servings of B vitamins were found to have malignant growths. While these figures are impressive, the researchers caution that the study itself is only a preliminary investigation, and additional studies will be needed to further assess the correlation between maternal vitamin B consumption and reduced risk of cancer in humans. 
+Dr. Jimmy Crott, PhD, lead author of the HNRCA study: 
+“We saw, by far, the fewest intestinal tumors in the offspring of mothers consuming the supplemented diet. Although the tumor incidence was similar between offspring of deficient and adequate mothers, 54% of tumors in the deficient offspring were advanced and had invaded surrounding tissue while only 18% of tumors in the offspring of adequate mothers displayed these aggressive properties.” Most healthcare providers already recommend higher than normal intake of folate and other essential B vitamins during pregnancy and while nursing as part of routine prenatal care. And accordingly, most popular brands of prenatal vitamins> contain significantly larger than normal serving of all four B vitamins as compared to regular multivitamins. The standard reasons for this, however, have nothing to do with with the prevention of colon cancer. In addition to their potential for the risk of colorectal cancer, Vitamin B – folate, more specifically – has long been known to play an important role in the prevention of spina bifida and related defects of the neural tube (a sort of embryonic forerunner of the central nervous system) during fetal gestation. It’s also believed to have a strong influence on proper neurological development in very young children. References:",FAKE
+1814,Insiders: Clinton still on track to win Iowa and N.H.,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+4098,New poll finds 9 in 10 Native Americans aren’t offended by Redskins name,"Nine in 10 Native Americans say they are not offended by the Washington Redskins name, according to a new Washington Post poll that shows how few ordinary Indians have been persuaded by a national movement to change the football team’s moniker.
+
+The survey of 504 people across every state and the District reveals that the minds of Native Americans have remained unchanged since a 2004 poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found the same result. Responses to The Post’s questions about the issue were broadly consistent regardless of age, income, education, political party or proximity to reservations.
+
+[12 Native Americans talk about the furor over the Redskins name]
+
+Among the Native Americans reached over a five-month period ending in April, more than 7 in 10 said they did not feel the word “Redskin” was disrespectful to Indians. An even higher number — 8 in 10 — said they would not be offended if a non-native called them that name.
+
+The results — immediately celebrated by team owner Daniel Snyder and denounced by prominent Native American leaders — could make it that much harder for anti-name activists to pressure Redskins officials, who are already using the poll as further justification to retain the moniker. Beyond that, the findings might impact the ongoing legal battle over the team’s federal trademark registrations and the eventual destination of the next stadium. The name controversy has clouded talks between the team and the District, widely considered Snyder’s desired destination.
+
+[Native Americans’ indifference on Redskins name could reset D.C. stadium talks]
+
+“The Washington Redskins team, our fans and community have always believed our name represents honor, respect and pride,” the owner said in a statement. “Today’s Washington Post polling shows Native Americans agree. We are gratified by this overwhelming support from the Native American community, and the team will proudly carry the Redskins name.”
+
+But Suzan Harjo, the lead plaintiff in the first case challenging the team’s trademark protections, dismissed The Post’s findings.
+
+“I just reject the results,” said Harjo, 70, who belongs to the Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee tribes. “I don’t agree with them, and I don’t agree that this is a valid way of surveying public opinion in Indian Country.”
+
+Two other key leaders in the name-change movement did not challenge the validity of the poll, and instead issued a joint statement calling the responses from Indians “encouraging.”
+
+“Native Americans are resilient and have not allowed the NFL’s decades-long denigration of us to define our own self-image,” wrote Oneida Nation Representative Ray Halbritter and National Congress of American Indians Executive Director Jacqueline Pata. “However, that proud resilience does not give the NFL a license to continue marketing, promoting, and profiting off of a dictionary-defined racial slur — one that tells people outside of our community to view us as mascots.”
+
+[How The Post conducted the survey on the Redskins name]
+
+Since the nearly half-century-old debate regained national attention in 2013, opponents of the name have won a string of high-profile victories, garnering support from President Obama, 50 Democratic U.S. senators, dozens of sports broadcasters and columnists, several newspaper editorial boards (including The Post’s), a civil rights organization that works closely with the National Football League and tribal leaders throughout Indian Country.
+
+In response, Snyder vowed never to change the moniker and used the 12-year-old Annenberg poll to defend his position. Activists, however, have argued that the billionaire must act if even a small minority of Indians are insulted by the term. They have also maintained that opinions have evolved as his unyielding stance has been subjected to a barrage of condemnation by critics ranging from “South Park” to the United Church of Christ.
+
+But for more than a decade, no one has measured what the country’s 5.4 million Native Americans think about the controversy. Their responses to The Post poll were unambiguous: Few objected to the name, and some voiced admiration.
+
+“I’m proud of being Native American and of the Redskins,” said Barbara Bruce, a Chippewa teacher who has lived on a North Dakota reservation most of her life. “I’m not ashamed of that at all. I like that name.”
+
+Bruce, 70, has for four decades taught her community’s schoolchildren, dozens of whom have gone on to play for the Turtle Mountain Community High School Braves. She and many others surveyed embrace native imagery in sports because it offers them some measure of attention in a society where they are seldom represented. Just 8 percent of those canvassed say such depictions bother them.
+
+[A brief history of the word ‘redskin’ and how it became controversial]
+
+Even as the name-change movement gained momentum among influential people, The Post’s survey and more than two dozen subsequent interviews make clear that the effort failed to have anywhere near the same impact on Indians.
+
+Across every demographic group, the vast majority of Native Americans say the team’s name does not offend them, including 80 percent who identify as politically liberal, 85 percent of college graduates, 90 percent of those enrolled in a tribe, 90 percent of non-football fans and 91 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 39.
+
+Even 9 in 10 of those who have heard a great deal about the controversy say they are not bothered by the name.
+
+What makes those attitudes more striking: The general public appears to object more strongly to the name than Indians do.
+
+In a 2014 national ESPN poll, 23 percent of those reached called for “Redskins” to be retired because of its offensiveness to Native Americans — more than double the 9 percent of actual Native Americans who now say they are offended by it.
+
+A 2013 Post poll found that a higher proportion of Washington-area residents — 28 percent — wanted the moniker changed.
+
+[Column: In complex Redskins name debate, poll should give both sides pause]
+
+Halbritter, a key figure and financier in the fight against Snyder, has described the issue as one of the most important facing his people.
+
+“It is critical,” he wrote in a 2013 Post op-ed. “Indeed, precisely because it is so critical, this campaign is not going away, no matter how much the NFL or Snyder wants it to.”
+
+But an overwhelming majority of Native Americans disagree, with just 1 in 10 saying they consider the issue “very important.”
+
+“I really don’t mind it. I like it. . . . We call other natives ‘skins,’ too,” said Gabriel Nez, a 29-year-old Navajo who left his reservation last year to study criminal justice at a college in New Mexico.
+
+“The name is nothing to me,” said Jarvis Michael Horn, a 39-year-old member of the Winnebago Tribe who works at a corner grocery store in Iowa.
+
+“For me, it doesn’t make any difference,” said Charles Moore, a 73-year-old Oneida of Wisconsin who as a physician treated patients for four decades before retiring in Minnesota.
+
+The poll, which has a 5.5 percentage-point margin of sampling error, was conducted by randomly calling cellular and landline phones. It asked questions only of people who identified themselves as Native American, after being asked about their ethnicity or heritage.
+
+Those interviewed highlighted again and again other challenges to their communities that they consider much more urgent than an NFL team’s name: substandard schools, substance abuse, unemployment.
+
+“Let’s start taking care of our people and quit worrying about names like Washington Redskins,” said Randy Whitworth, 58, who lives on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana.
+
+But Harjo questioned the validity of the poll results and said they do not reflect what she has seen during her decades of involvement with the issue.
+
+“I don’t accept self-identification. People say they’re native, and they are not native, for all sorts of reasons,” she said. “Those of us who are leaders in Indian Country... know who we are representing. We also know if we are representing a minority view. And this is not the case here. Our experience is completely the opposite of the Annenberg poll and this one. I just reject the whole thing.”
+
+Others, including Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) and veteran NBC broadcaster Bob Costas, said The Post’s findings would not alter their view that the name is offensive.
+
+It remains uncertain how the poll will affect either the stadium discussion or the trademark case.
+
+Although the Redskins have a lease at FedEx Field in Landover, Md., until 2027, team officials have acknowledged that they hope to relocate well before then.
+
+Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) and Washington Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) have all expressed interest in making a deal with the team. Hogan has defended the moniker, while McAuliffe has avoided criticizing it. Bowser and some D.C. Council members have publicly condemned it as “racist and derogatory.”
+
+On Thursday, a spokesman for the mayor told The Post that “the concern about the team name is well documented and far reaching — from the Oval Office to the halls of Congress to the D.C. Council chambers.”
+
+But news that such a large percentage of Native Americans do not care about the name could provide the necessary political cover for District leaders to welcome Snyder’s club to return to the site of RFK Stadium, where the Redskins used to play.
+
+The federal government, however, would also have to approve because RFK stands on National Park Service land controlled by the Interior Department. The current secretary, Sally Jewell, has echoed Obama’s opposition to the name.
+
+Attorneys for the Redskins and Native American activists declined on Thursday to discuss the poll’s potential impact on the trademark case. Some experts say the survey’s results could help the team, but others argue that the data cannot be admitted as evidence because the case is no longer at the trial level.
+
+Lower courts have said that Indians’ opinions on the term matters only between 1967 and 1990, when the team’s trademarks were registered.
+
+Two years ago, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s appeal board ruled that “Redskins” offended a substantial number of Native Americans at the relevant time, violating the Lanham Act, which bars potentially disparaging names from trademark protection. A federal district judge upheld the order last summer. Now, the Redskins have petitioned the Supreme Court to weigh in, arguing that, regardless of whether the name offends Native Americans, the Lanham Act violates the team’s free-speech rights.
+
+Amid the legal maneuvering and name-change push, some Indians interviewed by The Post voiced resentment toward the activists. A small percentage of their community had, in their minds, spoken for the majority.
+
+“It’s 100 people okay with the situation, and one person has a problem with it, and all of a sudden everyone has to conform,” said New York resident Judy Ann Joyner, 64, a retired nurse whose grandmother was part-Shawnee and part-Wyandot. “You’ll find people who don’t like puppies and kittens and Santa Claus. It doesn’t mean we’re going to wipe them off the face of the earth.”
+
+But an important question remains: Is it appropriate for the name of a professional sports team to insult any percentage of a population that has historically been so mistreated by this country’s majority?
+
+Tara Houska, a tribal attorney who lives in the District and has organized protests against the name, argued that neither a majority opinion nor a fan’s passion should matter if the imagery hurts the psyches of young natives — and research shows that it does.
+
+“A tomahawk chop and a bunch of people wearing redface does not honor me in any sense of the word, and it certainly does not honor Native American children,” said Houska, a member of the Couchiching First Nation. “To me, it doesn’t matter if my feelings are hurt. Yes, it is offensive, and I don’t like seeing it everywhere. But what really matters is how this affects our youth.”
+
+Nowhere are the nuances of this complex debate more apparent than in a mobile home amid the mountains, rivers and forests on Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation, where Rusty Whitworth lives with his wife, Anita.
+
+Whitworth is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. A laborer who has worked on ranches most of his life, he said he does not mind the name.
+
+“Just let them keep it,” he said of the team. “It ain’t hurting nobody.”
+
+Anita Whitworth, 62, also belongs to the confederation. A mother of five who worked for years as a chemical-dependency counselor, she hates the name.
+
+She views it much the same way that many activists do. They argue that the central problems ravaging native communities — poverty, violence and addiction — can only be fixed if young people take pride in who they are.
+
+Her youngest, Whitworth said, is a dark-skinned 13-year-old who attends an almost entirely non-native school in a region long plagued by racial tension.
+
+When she looks at him, Whitworth thinks back to the years of disparagement she’s endured.
+
+She has seen store employees follow her because they suspect she will steal something. She has heard derogatory comments in restaurants.
+
+She has also been called a “Redskin.”
+
+“I don’t want to ever have my son experience anything like that,” she said. “It’s time to change. It’s time to move on.”
+
+Ian Shapira, Emily Guskin, Jonathan O’Connell, Aaron C. Davis and Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.",REAL
+8542,Comment on Invention Secrecy At All-Time High: Thousands Of Patent Applications Placed Under Secrecy Orders by Physicists Say Consciousness Should Be Considered A State of Matter: The “Non Physical” Is Real – Collective Evolution,"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Government secrecy is running rampant in an age where more and more people are demanding transparency. Did you know that the U.S. Government classifies over 500 million pages of documents each year? Justification for the mass classification of information is (apparently) done for the sake of “national security,” but as we know:   “The dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts, far outweigh the dangers that are cited to justify them. There is a very grave danger that an announced need for an increased level of security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of censorship and concealment. That I do not tend to permit, so long as it’s in my control.”– JFK ( source ) If a scholar wanted to research political, historical, scientific, or any other type of archival work, it would prove difficult and limiting seeing that most of their government’s activities are kept a secret. It is truly impossible to access the factual history of their country. The declassification of classified documents (a small portion) does not occur until decades after that information has been concealed, one great example of that is the UFO phenomenon, once believed to be a “conspiracy theory” by the masses before the substantial release of government documents showing otherwise. You can read more about that and access some of those documents here . Evidence is now pointing to the fact that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is no different. The office is supposed to legally protect the inventions of entrepreneurs and companies, some of whom have developed ground breaking technology. Unfortunately, that’s not the case as new documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal how the Patent Office has been using a secret system to withhold the approval of some applications. This 50-page document was obtained by Kilpatrick Towsend & Stockton, LLP, who commonly represent major tech companies that include Apple, Google and Twitter (to name a few). You can view that entire document HERE . ( 1 ) The program delaying patent applications is called the Sensitive Application Warning System (SWAS). Usually, when an application is submitted for a patent approval it requires a couple of examiners who work with the Patent office to go through their process of approval. This process usually takes approximately 1 to 2 years, but applications that are filed in SAWS must be approved from several people, and can be delayed for a number of years.   “There is no official channel to notify an applicant once their patent is placed in the system, and the Patent Office has denied requests to divulge what applications are on the SAWS list.” ( source ) The documents also indicate areas of technology that might have a patent application placed in the SAWS program – these include smartphones, internet-enabling systems and more. This information is set to be published in an online journal called “Law360” to inform the public. Tech Columnist Alyssa Bereznak at Yahoo News states that most companies are fully aware of this. I first came across this recent information in her article, which you can view here , but I felt compelled to add more information. As you will see below, there is more information that has surfaced prior to these documents that suggest this type of “invention secrecy” goes far beyond these technologies. One great example (out of many) of delayed patent applications comes from Dr. Gerald F. Ross. He filed a patent application for a new invention he had devised to defeat the jamming of electromagnetic transmissions at specified frequencies. It was not until June 17, 2014 (almost 37 years later) that this patent was granted. ( 2 ) Invention Secrecy Is Still Going Strong 
+As great as it is to see new information pertaining to invention secrecy come to light, it’s also important to note (as reported by the Federation of American Scientists; see annotated bibliography) that there were over 5000 inventions that were under secrecy orders at the end of Fiscal Year 2014, which marked the highest number of secrecy orders in effect since 1994.( 3 ) This is all thanks to an act many people are unaware of. It’s called the “Invention Secrecy Act” and it was written up in 1951. Under this act, patent applications on new inventions can be subject to secrecy orders. These orders can restrict their publication if government agencies believe that their disclosure would be harmful to national security.( 4 )( 5 ) As mentioned earlier, “national security” has become an excuse and justification for the classification of a large amount of information on a variety of topics that the public is deliberately kept in the dark about. Apparently, many of these projects and inventions go far above and beyond presidential knowledge. “It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars, have been spent on projects which both congress and the commander in chief know nothing about.” ( source ) – Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defense Minister. So what type of technology is under restriction under the Invention Secrecy Act? We don’t really know, but a previous list from 1971 was obtained by researcher Michael Ravnitzky. Most of the technology listed seems to be related to various military applications. You can view that list HERE . ( 6 ) As Steven Aftergood from the Federation of American Scientists reports: “The 1971 list indicates that patents for solar photovoltaic generators were subject to review and possible restriction if the photovoltaics were more than 20% efficient. Energy conversion systems were likewise subject to review and possible restriction if they offered conversion efficiencies in “excess of 70-80%.” ( source ) Secrecy is No Secret A couple of years before the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, the National Security Act was created. As a result, a number of intelligence groups and executive bodies followed. None of these groups had any active congressional oversight. The United States has a history of government agencies existing in secret for years. The National Security Agency (NSA) was founded in 1952, its existence was hidden until the mid 1960’s. Even more secretive is the National Reconnaissance Office, which was founded in 1960 but remained completely secret for 30 years. Along with this secrecy is the information these agencies obtained, and continue to obtain until this day. Special Access Programs are another great example of secrecy. From these we have unacknowledged and waived SAPs. These programs do not exist publicly, but they do indeed exist. They are better known as ‘deep black programs.’ A 1997 US Senate report described them as “so sensitive that they are exempt from standard reporting requirements to the Congress.” ( 7 )(8) We don’t really hear about black budget programs, or about people who have actually looked into them. However, the topic was discussed in 2010 by Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin. Their investigation lasted approximately two years and concluded that America’s classified world has: “Become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” (9) You can read more about the Black Budget in detail HERE . Today, it seems to be evidently clear that secrecy has lead to what Dwight Eisenhower warned us about: “In the council of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential disaster of the rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” ( source ) What Has All This Secrecy Led To? 
+The fact that so much information is concealed from the public domain has led to a kind of “breakaway civilization.” A term coined by Richard Dolan . 
+Someone, or some groups are “in the know.” This or these groups who have had access to information over many decades that the public hasn’t is no doubt living and perceiving the world in a different way from what the masses do. This has led to a world within worlds, a separate civilization apart of our own who have access to knowledge that we don’t. Who are they? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? What do they know? 
+You can read what Richard has to say about it here . 
+Sources:",FAKE
+1057,"The Trump Network sought to make people rich, but left behind disappointment","The salespeople at Ideal Health were thrilled when they heard Donald Trump would become the new face of their company. The New York real estate mogul, whose reality show “The Apprentice” made him famous, licensed his name to the firm, which was then rebranded as the Trump Network in 2009.
+
+“Oh, my god, people cried when they heard it was him,” says Jenna Knudsen, who worked as a high-ranking saleswoman for Ideal Health at the time. “They cried and looked at each other and said, ‘We’re going to be millionaires!’ ”
+
+Knudsen and her colleagues sold customized vitamins and other health products as part of a controversial business model known as multilevel marketing, in which companies pay salespeople commissions for selling products and recruiting more representatives.
+
+Trump, whose presidential campaign is based in part on his reputation as a businessman, is well known for licensing his name to golf courses, hotels, clothing, wine and many other products. But in this case, he became involved in an industry that consumer advocates had long criticized as promising financial independence to sales recruits but rarely delivering it. Ideal Health had already faced complaints about its practices.
+
+Trump says he was not involved in the company’s operations. But statements by him and other company representatives — as well as a plethora of marketing materials circulating online — often gave the impression of a partnership that was certain to lift thousands of people into prosperity. In fact, within a few years, the company fell on hard times, leaving some salespeople in tough financial straits. It ultimately was acquired by another firm.
+
+But when Trump joined forces with Ideal Health, he was enthusiastic about its future.
+
+“When I did ‘The Apprentice,’ it was a long shot. This is not a long shot,” Trump told a Trump Network convention of at least 5,000 people in Miami in 2009, his face projected onto a giant screen. “This is going to be something that’s really amazing.”
+
+“It’s going to be our company as a group,” he added.
+
+Sales people affiliated with the newly branded company also highlighted the relationship. “We’re working on projects behind the scenes every single day with Mr. Trump,” Kim Stone, who was one of the highest-level sales representatives in the company, says in a video that was posted online in early 2010. “Literally you will be able to set yourself up for the rest of your life, financially speaking, if you take advantage of the timing right now with this company.”
+
+In an interview, Stone said many salespeople believed Trump would be more involved. “Initially when the owners said we’re all becoming Trump Network, they kind of led the field to believe he was financially a part of it,” she said. “And technically it was just this branding deal.”
+
+Trump attorney Alan Garten said in a statement that Trump has always been transparent about his relationship with the network. Some materials, such as the company’s website, did contain fine-print disclosures.
+
+“His role in the Trump Network was limited to licensing the ‘Trump’ brand and providing motivational speeches to its members. Mr. Trump was never an owner of the Trump Network. He also was not involved in the manufacturing or sale of any of the Trump Network’s products,” Garten said. “To be clear, Mr. Trump’s role in the Trump Network was clearly disclosed, to everyone involved in the company and its members, whether it be in the member’s independent contractor agreements, the marketing materials, or on the products themselves.”
+
+Interviews with nine former salespeople and industry and academic experts — as well as court filings, Federal Trade Commission complaints and Trump Network documents and videos that remain online today — tell the story of Trump leveraging his name and reputation, only to leave some disappointed when imagined benefits did not materialize.
+
+Trump Network is not the first Trump-affiliated company to receive scrutiny. Another of Trump’s branding arrangements has become a topic in the campaign: Trump University, which has been sued, along with Trump, for promising to teach people unique ways to make money in real estate -- a program that would cost thousands of dollars -- without actually delivering any effective lessons. Students also say they were misled about the extent of Trump’s involvement. Trump has rejected the allegations.
+
+Some of Trump Network’s sales representatives who suffered after the company ran into trouble say the lack of commitment by Trump and the Trump Network’s owners let them down. Knudsen — who had reached one of the company’s top sales ranks, had thousands of people working under her and at one point was earning thousands of dollars a month — ended up losing her house. Her car, purchased as part of the company’s rewards program, was repossessed in the middle of the night. She said she was a single mother with no alimony and no child support, and her kids were traumatized.
+
+“They changed us to the Trump Network, so we thought we were his company, he was invested in us. But we were just an endorsement. We were just paying to rent his name,” Knudsen said. “Was Trump to blame? We don’t know, but he certainly did not do what he said. He did not support us, he did not make this company his baby company. And somewhere between [the owners] and Donald Trump, they devastated thousands of people. And no one ever apologized.”
+
+The road to the Trump Network
+
+When he set his sights on Ideal Health in the late 2000s, Trump did not hint at any qualms about the industry. “I’m a big fan of network marketing,” Trump said at the Miami convention in 2009, which featured circus performers on stilts and a massive dance party.
+
+Ideal Health was started in 1997 by Scott Stanwood, his brother Todd and Lou DeCaprio, who had worked together in the multilevel marketing business. Ideal Health’s flagship product — later the Trump Network’s — was a multivitamin, tailored for customers based on a urine test. It cost $139.95, plus $69.95 a month for the vitamins, plus $99.95 for additional testing every six months. Former salespeople praised the product, saying it helped customers live healthier lives. But some experts say it was of questionable value.
+
+“There’s very little evidence to suggest that this test is going to provide you with clinically meaningful information, or that the supplements they provide are going to make you healthy,” said Timothy Caulfield, a public health professor at the University of Alberta and longtime analyst of alternative medicine.
+
+But most of the controversy surrounding Ideal Health, and later the Trump Network, stems from how these companies rewarded and recruited sales representatives. Although many multilevel marketing companies are legal, the FTC has called some thinly disguised pyramid schemes.
+
+Scott Stanwood said he couldn’t comment because of confidentiality agreements with the Trump Organization. He said he was speaking on behalf of Ideal Health and the Trump Network’s other owners.
+
+As is common with the model, Trump Network sales representatives made money when they sold products, and when salespeople working under them made purchases. They weren’t employees, so they weren’t guaranteed a salary. And because salespeople paid upfront for products each month, they bore a lot of the risk.
+
+A Trump Network compensation plan shows that those in sales were promised big rewards for recruitment. A hypothetical example presented by the company showed that salespeople could build “levels” of salespeople under them and would earn commissions of $100, $25 or $20 each time a new recruit bought a business starter kit for $497. “Extraordinary growth on Level 7,” the plan says, “2,187 people x $20 = A Lot of Money.”
+
+In one complaint to the FTC, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by The Washington Post, one former sales representative recounted spending $1887.75 on starter kits and other materials. “[T]hey kept tricking me into believing that I will make money just by selling more products and inviting more people, but the rate of return is so low,” the consumer, who is not identified, wrote. “In other words, they are scamming and deceiving people, making them believe that if they ‘just hang in there’ they will make money.”
+
+Garten said the Trump Network did not receive any complaints from the FTC. Katie Baker, an attorney with the FTC, said that the FTC does not reach out to companies to resolve individual complaints, but merely analyzes and compiles them.
+
+Well before Trump got involved, Ideal Health had faced similar questions about its business practices, according to documents made public by a 2004 Freedom of Information Act request by the Minneapolis law firm Mansfield Tanick & Cohen.
+
+Sales representatives said they paid thousands of dollars for leadership programs, infomercials, starter kits and other materials that they never recovered in sales. One consumer said they joined the company expecting to make a five-figure monthly income, but instead ended up spending $8,956.20 on promotional materials. Another claimed they were encouraged to mortgage their home for $70,000 to buy shares in TV advertising.
+
+“They try to use people[’]s hopes and dreams to empty their wallets,” reads one complaint.
+
+Trump was not new to multilevel marketing. He already had been involved for several years with ACN Inc., a company that sells phone and other services. According to documents released earlier this year by his campaign, in 2014 and 2015 Trump received $1.35 million in fees for three speaking engagements with ACN. ACN said that Trump was a paid keynote speaker at several company events, as were many other industry and business experts, and that he was not involved in any other facet of the business.
+
+Trump was introduced to Ideal Health in early 2008 through Dean Blechman, a former chief executive of Ideal Health, and another associate, according to a court document from a subsequent separation lawsuit between Blechman and Ideal Health.
+
+Ideal Health was “under-capitalized,” Blechman said, and the company was seeking a partnership to expand its recognition. So he and two other business contacts arranged a meeting with Trump at his office in Manhattan. Blechman says Trump liked the idea of promoting health, as well as creating jobs and income for people through direct marketing.
+
+“I brought the company a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar revenue opportunity,” Blechman said. “There was nobody in the world, nobody, not a single person in the world, that was more perfect than Donald Trump.”
+
+At first, Trump considered taking a stake in the company, according to the court document. Trump’s attorney Garten said the billionaire “became involved with the Trump Network because he believed in the strength of the management team,"" but said only a licensing agreement was ever envisioned. Ultimately, in March 2009, the parties settled on an agreement in which Ideal Health would license Trump’s likeness and trademarks, and Trump would promote its products.
+
+Trump’s endorsement persuaded some salespeople to quit their day jobs and recruit friends, family and neighbors to join, according to interviews and contemporary news stories. The network grew to more than 20,000 people, from 5,000 before his involvement, the Boston Globe reported in 2010.
+
+As many Americans were confronting the aftermath of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, Trump touted the network as a salvation.
+
+“The economic meltdown, greed and ineptitude in the financial industry have sabotaged the dreams of millions of people. Americans need a new plan,” he said in an introductory video. “They need a new dream. The Trump Network wants to give millions of people renewed hope, and with an exciting plan to opt out of the recession.”
+
+Sara Harper, a former Trump Network saleswoman in San Diego, said the overall message she and her colleagues received made it easy to think that Trump was a substantial part of the business. “A picture was painted that he was involved at a level of business decision-making that I don’t think he really was,” she said.
+
+Several salespeople said that following in Trump’s footsteps was a major attraction.
+
+People saw the Trump Network as an opportunity to be associated with “the biggest business brand in the world,” says Lenny Izzo, a chiropractor who was one of the Trump Network’s top salespeople.
+
+“With Trump coming in, they hyped it up to make us believe, oh, it’s not going to take us long now; we’re going to make money so much faster,” said Yvonne Zook, who was a mid-level sales representative.
+
+But over the next few years, according to several of the salespeople, far fewer people started showing up at the annual conferences. And by late 2011, some suddenly stopped receiving their payments and began to leave the company.
+
+Garten said many people enjoyed financial success with the network. ""But, like with any business venture, you get what you put into it,” he said.
+
+He added that any problems at the Trump Network that came up ""were solely the result of the financial crisis.""
+
+Others, though, suggest alternative reasons for why the company struggled, including mismanagement and profligacy by the owners, such as spending on a new office and flashy promotional events, and an awkward fit between the Trump brand and a health and wellness product.
+
+Some sales representatives don’t criticize Trump for the business’s struggles, saying he did his best in a limited relationship. “He did exactly what he was asked to do. And I think that’s why people were excited, because they thought that this could be the turnaround for the company, because they felt that he had the business sense,” said Carolyn Connolly, a top saleswoman.
+
+According to public records, the Trump Network’s owners, Todd and Scott Stanwood and Lou DeCaprio, filed for bankruptcy. The trio lost the 8,000-square-foot home with an infinity pool where they lived together north of Boston.
+
+Around the end of 2011, Trump’s licensing contract ended, and in early 2012 the business was sold to another company, Bioceutica, for an undisclosed sum. Trump’s attorney says those in sales who signed on with Bioceutica received outstanding payments. Bioceutica declined to comment.
+
+Izzo says that Trump could have saved the company “if he had stepped in … but he didn’t have good reason to do that.” Izzo, who also went bankrupt, added: ""Could he have approached this differently? Absolutely. Could he have taken less fees, could he have stepped in and guided the company differently? He could have, but that wasn’t the choice.”
+
+The myth and the reality of Donald Trump’s business empire
+
+Donald Trump’s first Cabinet pick is just as controversial as he is, and a lot richer",REAL
+296,House GOP leaders desperate to avoid shutdown,Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
+8500,Comment on Chicago Tribune: Hillary Clinton should drop her campaign to be POTUS by stevor,"Posted on October 30, 2016 by Dr. Eowyn | 12 Comments 
+On Friday, FBI Director James Comey informed Congress that the agency is re-opening its criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s unsecured and illegal private email server, as a result of the FBI discovering 650,000 emails of Hillary’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, on a laptop computer that Abedin shares with her now-estranged husband, the disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner. See “ Weinered: FBI re-opens investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails “ 
+Experts, such as Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, say that only the discovery of something truly awful would lead the FBI to reopen its investigation at such a late date, with just days to go before the election. 
+Now, a major U.S. newspaper — the Chicago Tribune that endorsed libertarian candidate Gary Johnson for president — is saying what needs to be said: Democrats should ask Hillary Clinton to step down, or risk her being elected President who begins her term of office facing a criminal investigation. Note: Founded in 1847, Chicago Tribune is the 8th largest newspaper, by circulation, in the United States. 
+Below is Chicago Tribune reporter John Kass’ stunning article in its entirety. 
+Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside 
+by John Kass • October 29, 2016 
+Has America become so numb by the decades of lies and cynicism oozing from Clinton Inc. that it could elect Hillary Clinton as president, even after Friday’s FB I announcement that it had reopened an investigation of her emails while secretary of state? 
+We’ll find out soon enough. 
+It’s obvious the American political system is breaking down. It’s been crumbling for some time now , and the establishment elite know it and they’re properly frightened. Donald Trump, the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect. 
+FBI director James Comey’s announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious. 
+This can’t be about pervert Anthony Weiner and his reported desire for a teenage girl. But it can be about the laptop of Weiner’s wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and emails between her and Hillary. It comes after the FBI investigation in which Comey concluded Clinton had lied and been “reckless” with national secrets, but said he could not recommend prosecution. 
+So what should the Democrats do now? 
+If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process: 
+They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately , and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place. 
+Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea. 
+Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign boss John Podesta release another 15,000 emails. 
+What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands. 
+The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now . It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton’s political action committee — should begin demanding it. 
+But what will Hillary do? 
+She’ll stick and ride this out and turn her anger toward Comey. For Hillary and Bill Clinton, it has always been about power, about the Clinton Restoration and protecting fortunes already made by selling nothing but political influence. 
+She’ll remind the nation that she’s a woman and that Donald Trump said terrible things about women. If there is another notorious Trump video to be leaked, the Clintons should probably leak it now. Then her allies in media can talk about misogyny and sexual politics and the headlines can be all about Trump as the boor he is and Hillary as champion of female victims, which she has never been . 
+Remember that Bill Clinton leveraged the “Year of the Woman.” Then he preyed on women in the White House and Hillary protected him. But the political left — most particularly the women of the left — defended him because he promised to protect abortion rights and their other agendas. 
+If you take a step back from tribal politics, you’ll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She’d never be hired. 
+As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to the American people. She couldn’t remember details dozens of times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said they talked about was golf and the grandkids. 
+And there was no prosecution of Hillary. 
+That isn’t merely wrong and unethical. It is poisonous. 
+And during this presidential campaign, Americans were confronted with a two-tiered system of federal justice: one for standards for the Clintons and one for the peasants. 
+I’ve always figured that, as secretary of state, Clinton kept her home-brew email server — from which foreign intelligence agencies could hack top secret information — so she could shield the influence peddling that helped make the Clintons several fortunes. 
+The Clintons weren’t skilled merchants. They weren’t traders or manufacturers. The Clintons never produced anything tangible. They had no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions of dollars. 
+All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used our federal government to leverage it. 
+If a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about the candidates, then we’ll learn plenty about ourselves in the coming days, won’t we? 
+John Kass concluded his article with the observation that a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about the candidates . 
+So what do the comments from some of the readers of Kass’ article say about the people and this country? Below is a sample: 
+MerryPrankster: Real journalists should ask John Kass to step aside. 
+millekj61: Do you actually “think” before you write? There are 9 days to go before the election, who do you suggest they substitute for her? 
+pagewerks: Did you even do the slightest research? The email “scandal” you’re panting over is non-existent, and apparently has to do with another investigation. But don’t let that stop you from making a damn fool of yourself. 
+MChicago99: What is unfathomable about this column and the comments is how disconnected from reality and truth it and the comments are. There has been no reopening of the investigation. THE emails in question are probably all duplicates of emails the FBI has already examined. The FBI did not find anything illegal in Clinton’s use of the personal server. Just a desperate ploy to throw last minute obstacles into the election process. 
+Wavo: I believe it is time for you to retire from your “establishment” job at the Tribune John. Your shtick is tiresome and inflammatory. Maybe you should consider a second act over at Breitbart…they and their readers seem to love your work. 
+larry_wesbsite: You Trumpites actually want national socialism under a national socialist leader who will ride roughshod over the Constitution seeking what you think are simple fast answers to complex, difficult questions and problems. Maybe you will learn or just blame Trump and move on to the next demagogue. All of us will pay the cost for your mistakes. 
+dsm606: Sorry angry old white man. I’m still not voting for Trump. Nice try, though. 
+Jim Kaestner: I am tired of tribune columnists telling me how to vote, who to support. Go tell Trump to quit, he has admitted to sexual assault. 
+bluedemondan: Excuse me, you sure this isn’t The Onion? I usually confuse The Onion with the Trib’s editorials. 
+JNAlbukerk: Kass have you no shame sir? Convicting someone with no evidence? Clinton is the most vetted and experienced candidate in history. Until you have evidence otherwise it is you who should step aside as you have abused the power your employment has granted you. 
+You can reach reporter John Kass by email () or by Twitter (Twitter@John_Kass). 
+~Eowyn",FAKE
+8270,Hillary Clinton v Donald Trump in 2016,"With just four days left until election day, many Americans are still perplexed. Who should the people cast their vote for on November 8? 2016 has brought a variety of topics to the surface for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. However, Americans seem to miss a lot of information from both parties during the debates and rallies. Each person is preoccupied with defending themselves or offending the other. Believe it or not, during all the drama there are clear proposals from both Clinton and Trump on several concerns.
+A Few Prominent Proposals: Education: When it comes to higher education, Clinton and Trump cannot be more opposites. Clinton introduced the New College Compact. This would allow students entering a four-year college, within their state, not have to borrow money for tuition, books, and fees.
+Trump has opposed the New College Compact and claims he would fight any proposal for debt-free public higher education.
+Taxes: However, both do see eye to eye on many tax related problems. Clinton and Trump promised the working middle-class Americans a massive tax reduction. Also, they both ensure that the wealthy will pay their fair share in taxes.
+Gun Control: Another area that Clinton and Trump agree upon is gun control. This may come as a surprise for many, yet the similarities cannot be ignored. They both want to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals and the severely mentally ill. They also want to expand background checks. Trump goes as far as suggesting “that we empower all law-abiding gun owners to defend themselves because the police cannot be everywhere all the time.” With either candidate, all gun owners rightfully able to bear arms will be entitled to do so, no-one is threatening to disarm anyone.
+Immigration: This is one of the most talked about topics among the presidential nominees. Within the first 100 days of office, Clinton says she will set forth a plan that will treat people with respect, fix the family visa backlog, end the three and ten-year bars, and protect American borders.
+Trump claims he will have Mexico pay for a wall on the Southern borders and end the catch and release process. Trump also explained that he will deport illegal immigrants, who have committed a crime, in one day.
+By going to each of the candidate’s website, people can see a complete copy of their goals, as president of the United States. Determining which nominee would be a better fit as the commander in chief, is an opinion based on how much or how little voters relate to each candidate’s ideas.
+Unfortunately, getting acquainted with Clinton and Trump’s prospective plans is not an easy task. There has been chaos from the very beginning with these campaigns. There has never been a dull moment, that is for sure. However, now is the time to become serious and to remember that the world is watching.
+By Amy Weins
+Edited by Jeanette Smith
+Sources:
+NASFAA: 2016 Presidential Candidates’ Higher Education Proposals
+Hillary Clinton.com: A Fair Tax System; Gun Violence Prevention; Immigration Reform
+Donald Trump.com: Tax Plan; Second Amendment Rights; Immigration
+Featured Image Courtesy of Steven Bevacqua’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
+Top Image Courtesy of Matt Wade’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License clinton , hillary , presidential election , Trump",FAKE
+1163,"Clinton, Sanders clash over Obama, more at testy debate","Hillary Clinton launched her harshest attacks yet on Bernie Sanders during their debate Thursday night in Milwaukee, in a clear attempt to define their differences on major issues and win over black voters — but they had their most heated exchanges over campaign financing, who was the stronger supporter of President Obama — and who was a friend of Henry Kissinger.
+
+The debate fell at a time when Sanders is trying to build his momentum after his big New Hampshire win, while Clinton is trying to regain hers.
+
+As Sanders pointedly reminded her, “You’re not in the White House yet.”
+
+But the candidates at times offered a similar message. This was evident as they vociferously called for an overhaul of local police departments that they suggested are unfair to black people.
+
+“We need fundamental police reform,” Sanders said, adding he’s “sick and tired” of seeing unarmed black people shot by police. He likened heavily equipped police departments to “occupying armies.”
+
+Clinton, meanwhile, echoed those themes, joining Sanders in calling for sentencing reform while saying the country’s “systemic racism” goes deeper and must be addressed – in education, housing and the job market.
+
+“We are seeing the dark side of the remaining systemic racism that we need to root out,” she said.
+
+The comments were part of each candidate’s revived appeal to minority voters, a key voting bloc as the Democratic presidential primary heads to South Carolina.
+
+But even as they stressed those issues, differences were laid bare at the PBS-hosted debate in Milwaukee. And Sanders came prepared to counter Clinton’s attacks, showing a feistier side than he did at their last showdown.
+
+When Clinton used her closing remarks to suggest Sanders was taking shots at President Obama, Sanders called it a “low blow” and countered: “One of us ran against Barack Obama. I was not that candidate.”
+
+He even underscored his critique of Clinton’s foreign policy by pointing to a book where Clinton said she was mentored by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
+
+“I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend,” Sanders said, calling him “one of the most destructive” American diplomats.
+
+Clinton fired back that “we have yet to know” who Sanders listens to on foreign policy.
+
+The two also clashed sharply over Sanders’ high-cost, big-government plans.
+
+“We are not England. We are not France,” Clinton said.
+
+Clinton accused Sanders of pushing programs that would grow the federal government by 40 percent. She suggested his health care promises “cannot be kept “and will be far more costly than he admits.
+
+“We should level with the American people,” she said.
+
+She also said Sanders’ plans would upend ObamaCare – though Sanders said he would not “dismantle” it.
+
+“That is absolutely inaccurate,” he said, when she claimed his plans would leave many people worse off.
+
+“In my view, health care is a right of all people … and I will fight for that,” Sanders said, adding it would take “courage.”
+
+Clinton also criticized Sanders for voting against a 2007 immigration reform bill backed by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.
+
+Sanders explained that the bill had a guest-worker program that progressive groups opposed.
+
+“I think Ted Kennedy had a very clear idea of what needed to be done,” Clinton said.
+
+Yet the candidates agreed in their joint criticism of the Obama administration’s recent deportation raids.
+
+Sanders, meanwhile, once again hammered Clinton for her Wall Street ties, suggesting the financial sector’s big donations are meant to buy influence.
+
+“Let’s not insult the intelligence of the American people. People aren’t dumb,” Sanders said. “Why in God’s name does Wall Street make huge campaign contributions? I guess just for the fun of it.”
+
+They sparred on the issue as Sanders touted the fact he’s “the only candidate up here” who has no super PAC supporting him. A super PAC backing Clinton, he said, recently raised $15 million from Wall Street.
+
+Clinton countered by noting that Obama took Wall Street donations too, but “when it mattered, he stood up and took on Wall Street.”
+
+“Let’s not in any way imply here that either President Obama or myself would in any way not take on any vested interest,” she said, calling for more regulation of the financial sector.
+
+The showdown comes as Clinton tries to reset the race, which heads next to Nevada and South Carolina. Her narrow victory in Iowa and resounding defeat in New Hampshire have raised fresh questions about her candidacy, which at one point was seen as a sure thing for the Democratic nomination.
+
+Publicly, the Clinton campaign is voicing confidence. The campaign has been refocusing on the battle to lock down minority voter support, asserting that with their help, the former secretary of state can easily make gains against Sanders. But Sanders is at the same time making a bid to expand his own support beyond rural, white voters -- who largely decide Iowa and New Hampshire.
+
+While the Clinton campaign is banking on minority voters as it heads into South Carolina and other delegate-rich states down the primary calendar, Tuesday’s contest exposed serious problems for her. She lost in New Hampshire across almost every demographic, including women.
+
+Overall, she lost to Sanders by more than 20 points.",REAL
+7884,Yemen and YET another “False Flag” to Protect Saudi and US Interests in the Middle East | New Eastern Outlook,"Country: Saudi Arabia In Seth Ferris’ NEO article on Yemen back in April it was suggested that the only reason the US suddenly withdrew from Yemen, after staying there through thick and thin, was because the US had only taken over the country to supply arms to terrorists. Now it is back – its warships are patrolling the coast so that it can maintain a military presence in another form, having yet to be embarrassed by the stolen military files which Ferris claims will prove his case. It is these warships which are being attacked by the Houthis. These are the people the US claims looted those millions of dollars of weapons which mysteriously vanished. So anything can be blamed on them, because they are covered by a previous official story. However, no one has yet provided a clear link between these attacks and the rebels. Remains of American munitions have been found, but these were not necessarily looted ones. Nor were they found near the warships: most conveniently, they were found like discarded foreign passports in the rubble of factories, hospitals, bridges and power stations attacked by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, not the rebels. This stunt is so blatant that even the New York Times is prepared to report it . We remember that earlier this year the U.S. military launched cruise missiles at radar sites along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, after its ships were supposedly targeted by missiles fired from rebel-controlled areas. Therefore the justification for making more cruise missile attacks is simply sending warships to the coast during a time of conflict. Apparently the last cruise missile attacks didn’t work, because the rebels are still shooting, despite the deadly effect of cruise missiles highlighted so effectively by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament during its various waves of mass support . This suggests that neither the attacks on the warships or the US response were real, yet more false flags in support of failed US regional policy and the election campaign for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This whole story looks too bad to be true. Looted weapons which no one saw being looted, convenient enemies, an ongoing conflict the next president has no choice but to support the military in – Yemen is currently able to provide it all, without the long discussions which would take place if the same was happening in more debated hotspots like Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. These attacks suit too many of the wrong people to be taken seriously – unless you happen to be Yemeni, but as ever the people the US claims to be doing these things for are the least important part of the equation. Blame it on Iran The USS Mason, a destroyer of the US 6th fleet, allegedly came under attack by the Houthis not once, not twice, but three times within days. The US has struck back by targeting and destroying radar sites in Houthi territory, if reports are to be believed . The missiles used against US warships are claimed to be Iranian Zafzlal III models. Of course they are – the US public and politicians are used to denouncing Iran, as they have been brought up to take that as a default position. If the word “Iran” is associated with something controversial, like the gas heater that supposedly killed the former Georgian PM during the George W. Bush presidency, that is supposed to explain it all. Particularly when we understand that Alarabiya is a pro-Saudi site with a long history of trying to implicate Iran in everything. Older heads can recall the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, in which two attacks were allegedly made on a US destroyer by a North Vietnamese patrol boat. The second never happened, and the first was misreported as an attack by the Vietnamese boats, in whose territorial waters the destroyer was trespassing, whereas in fact the US fired first. These false attacks led to President Johnson being given the legal justification to launch open warfare against North Vietnam. This famously led to crowds following him everywhere chanting “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today ?” Gulf of Tonkin showed how is easy it is for a US president who presses the right verbal buttons to manufacture consent for his actions. The Houthis are a little-known and little understood force, and can thus be presented in any way the US State Department wants. All the vast majority of Americans are aware of is that they are Muslim separatists who are on the other side to the US, but that makes them a fair target as they are trying to destroy the American way of life, democracy and human rights. Perhaps Yemenis don’t aspire to the American way of life, even if they want the commercial benefits. But the US has to believe that everyone does to explain it own success, which would be a far more difficult process than assuming it is the product of some moral superiority. Shacking-up of convenience Saudi Arabia needs US support in Yemen because its adventures there have put the Saudi state itself at risk. The Yemen war has deeply damaged the Saudis, exposing the incompetence of both the military and the House of Saud—to the point that there is a risk it will cause a civil insurrection which will split the country in two. The eastern half, where Mecca and Medina are, wants to break away, as its inhabitants are from a completely separate tribal grouping to those of the eastern half, where the gilded rulers live. The US took advantage of that situation to enter Yemen and make it the regional dirty tricks capital. It is not going to leave until it has found another, as we saw when it stayed in Georgia, with a president it was happy to get rid of, until it could start moving its operations to Ukraine using the same individuals. The US still has a free hand in Yemen because the Saudis don’t have any other friends, apart from Bahrain, Qatar and Dubai, which are also run by despotic dynasties. Troops from those nations have fought alongside the Saudis in Yemen but have been no more effective than the Saudi troops, being nothing more than fodder for the Houthi’s cannons. So the US has no reason to leave, which is what made its sudden withdrawal after those documents were stolen all the more suspicious. But the US still has to manufacture consent not only to stay there, but justify its previous actions to its own public. If they were undertaken as part of a friendly intervention, this would be one thing. If US ships are attacked by Iranian weapons, this transforms the opponent into a known enemy and forces the US to intervene as a combatant in its own right. It also deflects any attention from how we got to this point – which can be excoriating, as Tony Blair has recently found to his cost . This desire also explains recent “independent” Saudi actions towards Iran. A senior Iranian military official has recently accused Israel and Saudi Arabia of collaborating on a plot to stir insurrection within the Islamic Republic. “We have thorough intelligence that Al Saud, in collusion with the Zionist regime, is hatching plots against our country,” Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari was quoted by Iran’s Press TV as saying . Calm before the storm Saudi Arabia’s major foreign policy decisions are often based on a general consensus among a number of senior princes. The operation in Yemen is no exception, and had the former King Abdullah still been alive, he would have most likely chosen exactly the same response to the current situation. Saudi Arabia’s goal is to reinstate the now-deposed President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. However Saudi troops have suffered major problems with various attempts to invade Yemen, and they know that any occupation is out of the question without the help of an outside power, such as the US military . Supply lines are stretched too thin, and are subject to attacks, as Houthi know how to fight a guerilla war under the harshest of conditions, and have successfully dealt with their neighbour for the last 80 years. Some claim that Saudi Arabia wants to sort things out with Yemen, come-hell-or-high water, in order to be able to have a greater impact at regional level. It hopes to weigh in on conflicts elsewhere in the MENA (Middle East and North African) countries. However to do this it needs political stability, and the reverses in Yemen have put that in question. Any long-term occupation of the country would come at too high a cost for the Saudis – financially, politically and in terms of human lives. Attention also needs to be diverted from the 28 pages of the 9/11 report that basically implicates the Saudi leadership in a terrorist attack on the American homeland, and the involvement of Saudi intelligence in Syria and Northern Iraq, where it has provided material support to known terrorists groups. The US knows it will stay in Yemen for as long as the Saudi monarchy is in danger of collapse, as the political systems of countries which lose wars often do. The worst of a bad job In Johnson’s time the US was expected to act unilaterally. Now it acts in partnership with other nations to cover its illegal acts – as if acting purely in response to their concerns, as a strategic partner, not from selfish motives of its own. Any temporary lull in such interventions provides an opportunity for all sides to lick their wounds and prepare for the next stage in the fighting, or allows the PR machine to catch up with the game plan on the ground, especially in an election year . But the Saudis have violated all ceasefires to date, and will likely try to continue doing the same now and into the future. As reported by the NYT, “millions have been forced from their homes, and since August, the government has been unable to pay the salaries of most of the 1.2 million civil servants.” Now that the Clinton influence peddling scheme has been exposed in the wake of the US presidential elections Saudi donations will dry up, as will their blank check to get away with murder. The Saudis will have fewer well-connected friends in the US State Department. But this is unlikely to prevent any further adventures in Yemen: on the contrary, the Saudis will need them all the more to prevent further embarrassments within the US, while the US military needs them to prevent its own embarrassment. Donald Trump has said several times that he doesn’t agree with the US spending all this money on all these foreign wars. Not only was a ramping-up of the Yemen conflict an attempt to support Clinton, it was an attempt to force Trump to support the military ad the general policy of fighting all these wars, should he be elected. Now that has happened, does anyone expect the military to just go home, with so many bases still in place and so many arms deals still being serviced? Trump can’t stop these things on his say-so, and is too much of a businessman to try and take on the whole capital structure of the US. The selling point of remaining in Yemen may well be that it reduces the Iranian direct involvement in protecting Assad and draws attention away from the movement of terrorist proxy fighters from Iraq back into Syria proper. It is much easier for Trump to continue demonising Iran, as a Muslim nation, than to stop this movement. But once this step is taken a precedent for this administration will have been set. Trump will either have to take on his military continually or find ways of justifying it – and Yemen, although not of Trump’s making, gives him every excuse to do the latter whilst still pretending to follow his campaign policy. Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” . Popular Articles ",FAKE
+6629,What is Comey up to and who is he working for?,"Posted on October 31, 2016 by Michael Collins FBI Director James Comey. Wikimedia 
+FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress on new evidence in the Clinton email scandal represents interference in the presidential campaign commensurate with his failure to indict candidate Hillary Clinton for crimes greater than those committed by citizens that are now serving time. His actions are a paradigm for the dysfunctional and dangerous state of the political system in the United States. 
+UPDATE : Two former Republican Attorneys General harshly criticized FBI Director James Comey for his letter to Congress on the Hillary Clinton email affair. Michael Collins 5:42 EDT Mukasey blasts Comey and attorney general over Clinton email case Louis Nelson 10/31/16 07:16 AM EDT 
+Director Comey’s letter to Congress of October 28 about “emails that appear to be pertinent in the [Clinton] investigation” was a deliberate, premeditated action that will harm Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s chances in the presidential election. His letter may have an even greater impact on Democratic Party down-ballot candidates in Senate and House races and, as a result, influence the post election balance of power in Congress. 
+There is no question that Comey knew that his actions would have significant political impact just days before the election. The fact that he defied established procedures of the Justice Department and instructions from superiors shows the intentional nature of his acts. 
+Comey’s abuse of power and illegal interference in the election is another major marker on the road to the total evisceration of constitutional rights and protection begun in earnest with the Patriot Act of 2001 . His actions should be judged as a blatantly illegal act by one of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement officials. It doesn’t matter if you support Clinton, Trump, Johnson, or Stein. Allowing the FBI to get away with this outrageous attempt to influence elections kills any hope of finally achieving the goal of an open political process and fair elections. 
+Comey’s Profound Insincerity 
+The Department of Justice has established policies for handling legal matters that may impact an election. Former Attorney’s General Janet Reno and Eric Holder outlined policies stating that the Justice Department should avoid prosecutions or other actions close to elections that might influence those elections. Attorney General Loretta Lynch made this point to Comey. Despite reports that FBI “agents had not been able to review any of the material, because the bureau had not yet gotten a search warrant to read them,” Comey somehow deduced that the emails might be significant. He took the unusual step of informing Congress about the emails he had yet to examine. 
+Former Assistant United States Attorney , Nick Ackerman, argued: 
+“Director Comey acted totally inappropriately. He had no business writing to Congress about supposed new emails that neither he nor anyone in the FBI has ever reviewed.” 
+Does Director Comey think we are idiots? Clearly, he went out of his way to influence the election in a conspicuous fashion. There can be no doubt about this assertion. 
+After some significant blowback from former Justice officials, Comey felt compelled to write an explanatory memo to FBI employees. He said: 
+“I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record [of the original email investigation]. At the same time, however, given that we don’t know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression. In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood, but I wanted you to hear directly from me about it.” James Comey memo to FBI employees, Washington Post, Oct 28, 2016 , 
+This passage from his letter is an admission that Comey knew his actions would influence the election. Before “know[ing] the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails,” he released an update to Congress that could easily be interpreted as an indication that there was a significant development in the Clinton case. Why else would he write the letter? 
+Comey told FBI employees, “I don’t want to create a misleading impression.” If Comey wanted to avoid a “misleading impression,” he might have told the truth if he insisted on writing a memo to Congress. Based on what we know now, he should have said: 
+There are some emails on the computer belonging to a close Clinton aid. No one at FBI has seen the emails. We don’t’ even have a warrant to download them. These emails might or might not be important enough to warrant reopening the investigation. 
+The fact that Comey failed to tell the truth about the status of the emails proves his ill intent toward the Clinton campaign. 
+Comey’s Violation of Law 
+The 1939 Hatch Act bars Federal employees from a broad range of political activities. 
+Richard Painter, a former lawyer in the Bush White House Counsel’s office, filed a formal complaint against FBI Director Comey for violating that act. He argued: “I believe that the Hatch Act and ethics rules are violated if it is obvious that the official’s actions [Comey’s] could influence the election, there is not another good reason for taking those actions, and the official is acting under pressure from persons who obviously want to influence the election.” 
+Comey’s actions will clearly influence the elections. There was no “good reason” to release the memo on evidence not yet reviewed or analyzed. And, Comey admits that he acted “under pressure” from critics in Congress, Republicans, who obviously “want to influence the election.” 
+In addition, Painter cited another law on the use of public office for private gain. Painter refers to the following section of the United States Code: 
+2635.702 Use of public office for private gain. 
+“An employee shall not use his public office for his own private gain, for the endorsement of any product, service or enterprise …” 
+Comey’s actions have the direct effect of endorsing the Trump campaign “enterprise.” Trump has insisted again and again that the email case be reopened. Comey reopened it on the flimsiest of grounds. The net effect of his actions props up the Trump campaign just when it looked like the enterprise was finished. 
+Comey’s Reports to … ? 
+Comey’s actions serve the Trump campaign and its donors. It wasn’t an easy form of service by the FBI Director. Comey had to ignore established policies, common sense, his superior, the Attorney General, and the Hatch Act in order to send his very high impact letter. 
+Will it be worth it? 
+If Comey acted on his own without any outside inducements or threats, we should all pause and say a short prayer for him. In that scenario, he is an utter fool playing in a league way above his skill set and doing great and memorable damage to the political process. 
+But, Comey is no fool. I wrote favorably about his willingness to stand up to the Bush White House in 2007, Comey’s Evidence of a Crime . Then, he seemed to have a quality not often seen in government or corporate environments – a willingness to “stand up to the boss.” That may have been true at the time. Today, however, Comey seems unable to decide who his boss is. He clearly caved in to the administration and the Clinton interests when he failed to indict Hillary Clinton for even a misdemeanor for her many violations of national security policies. Now, he’s caving into the interests of the Republicans and the repellant Trump campaign. 
+The key question is who got to Comey and how? 
+We know that both Clinton and Trump are unfit for the presidency or any other elected or appointed office in the United States. However, we need to know who has the type of power and force to make the FBI Director behave like a fool.",FAKE
+1391,"As first voting nears, Trump seems stronger","One week before the first votes of the 2016 campaign are cast, Donald Trump has solidified his standing nationally, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Republicans see Trump as the strongest candidate on major issues and by far the most electable in the large field of GOP hopefuls.
+
+The Republican electorate is in a sour mood as its members prepare to begin the process of picking a presidential nominee. Almost 9 in 10 say the country is seriously off on the wrong track, and more than 8 in 10 are dissatisfied with the way the federal government works, including nearly 4 in 10 who say they’re angry about it.
+
+Two-thirds worry about maintaining their current living standard, more than 6 in 10 say people with similar values are losing influence in American life, and about half say the nation’s best days are behind it. Half also say immigrants mainly weaken American society, compared with 55 percent of the overall population who say immigrants strengthen America.
+
+Amid this political climate, Trump has maintained his place atop the Republican field for six months. He now receives the support of 37 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, almost identical to the 38 percent support he enjoyed a month ago.
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas runs second in the national survey, with 21 percent, surpassing his previous high of 15 percent in December. Third place belongs to Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida at 11 percent, virtually unchanged from 12 percent a month ago.
+
+Rounding out the field are retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 7 percent, former Florida governor Jeb Bush at 5 percent, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at 4 percent, businesswoman Carly Fiorina at 3 percent, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Ohio Gov. John Kasich at 2 percent each, and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky at 1 percent. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum registered less than 1 percent.
+
+When first and second choices are combined, Trump is named by 49 percent, Cruz by 39 percent and Rubio by 32 percent — well ahead of the others.
+
+At this point in presidential campaigns, as the primary season is beginning, candidates’ support can be tenuous and shift quickly in response to the first state-level contests. Results in Iowa, which holds its caucuses Monday, and in New Hampshire, which votes eight days later, often scramble national numbers. Trump enters this crucial phase strong nationally, but it isn’t clear what a loss in Iowa would do to his support.
+
+But The Post-ABC survey offers some clues. Trump’s supporters appear more committed to him than do people backing other candidates. A majority (57 percent) of Trump supporters say they will definitely vote for him. For all the other candidates combined, 34 percent are as firmly committed, while nearly two-thirds say they could change their minds.
+
+Trump’s committed support exceeds what the previous Republican nominee received before the Iowa caucuses four years ago: 36 percent of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s supporters said then that they would definitely support his candidacy.
+
+The poll also finds no sign that Trump’s support wavers among the Republicans who are most likely to attend primaries and caucuses, which are typically low-turnout contests. Trump’s 16-point advantage among all registered Republican voters is similar to his lead among Republicans who say they are certain to vote, report voting in 2012 Republican contests or are following the race “very closely.”
+
+Although there was resistance to his candidacy at the beginning, Trump now is broadly acceptable to GOP voters. About 2 in 3 Republicans say they would find him acceptable as their nominee, a percentage almost identical to Cruz’s and Rubio’s. Rubio is seen as the least unacceptable, followed by Cruz, Carson and then Trump. Only about half of Republicans say Christie and Bush are acceptable, and Bush has the highest “unacceptable” percentage at 45.
+
+That fluidity underneath Trump is the other story of the Republican race to date. One after another candidate has been seen as surging, in Iowa or New Hampshire. Cruz surged into a narrow lead in Iowa and then got into a fight with Trump, after which Trump has regained a small advantage.
+
+Cruz, Christie and Kasich have claimed some momentum in New Hampshire. Rubio is seeking a clear third-place finish in Iowa and a strong finish in New Hampshire to use as springboards into the later contests. But whether Republicans are heading for a three-person race or a two-person race won’t be clear until the results are in from the first four states.
+
+The new Post-ABC survey suggests that a sizable majority of Republicans believe that whatever happens in those early states, Trump will emerge with the nomination — a dramatic shift from when he first entered the race in June to mixed reviews and overcame widespread unfavorable impressions among GOP voters before his campaign launched. Today, more than 6 in 10 Republicans say Trump is most likely to win the nomination, up from 4 in 10 in the late fall.
+
+Trump leads among nearly all demographic groups, including a narrow advantage among white evangelical Christians, a key target of the Cruz campaign. Trump’s strongest support comes from those with incomes below $50,000. Previous surveys showed Trump with significantly more support among those lacking a college degree, compared with those who have graduated from college. The new survey finds no significant difference.
+
+The reality TV star scores best among those who are most dissatisfied with government and the country’s direction and with those who say they prefer someone from outside the political system rather than a candidate with political experience. Overall, a bare majority of Republicans say they are looking for an outsider, while just over 4 in 10 who want someone with experience in politics.
+
+On a wide range of issues and candidate attributes, Trump dominates his rivals. Majorities of Republicans say he has the best chance of getting elected president and is most likely to bring needed change to Washington. More than a third say he is closest to them on issues. He and Carson are seen as the most honest of the GOP candidates, while Trump and Cruz are seen as having the best personality and temperament to serve as president.
+
+Half or more of all Republicans name Trump as the candidate best able to handle the economy and regulate the banks. More than 4 in 10 say he would be the best to handle immigration and the threat of terrorism.
+
+Trump is seen by about 3 in 10 as the most capable of the GOP candidates to handle a major international crisis. Cruz is second, named by almost a quarter of Republicans.
+
+Republicans are bullish about their chances of winning in November. Three in 4 say Trump would defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton, while just over 6 in 10 say Cruz or Rubio would defeat the former secretary of state. Republicans are even more optimistic about winning a general election against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
+
+Among the broader public, however, Clinton is seen as a favorite to defeat Trump, Cruz or Rubio. She is perceived as having a better chance of winning than would Sanders.
+
+Trump won the endorsement of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin last week, but her support appears to be mostly a non-factor in the race. About 8 in 10 of the Republican respondents in the poll said it makes no difference, and the rest split evenly on whether it makes them more or less likely to back Trump. Overall, 56 percent of Republicans have a favorable impression of Palin.
+
+The Post-ABC poll was conducted Jan. 21-24 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults reached on land-line and cellular phones. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; the error margin is 5.5 percentage points among the sample of 356 Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters.",REAL
+444,3 reasons the economy boomed in 2015,"December's job growth numbers are in, and they make it official: 2015 was the second-strongest year for job growth since the 1990s, and only slightly behind the big gains of 2014. Unemployment fell in 2015 from an already low 5.6 percent at the end of 2014 to 5 percent in December 2015. Wages grew 2.5 percent during 2015, which isn't a huge number but looks more impressive when you remember that inflation was close to zero for the year.
+
+So what accounts for the second straight year of strong economic results? The US economy is a complex system, so it would be a mistake to point to any single factor as driving economic growth and job creation. No one fully understands how and why economies grow. And to some extent, you could look at 2015's solid but not spectacular performance as the kind of thing that happens when there's nothing holding the economy back.
+
+But we can also identify several specific factors that positively influenced economic growth in 2015.
+
+Short-term interest rates fell to zero percent in 2008, and the Federal Reserve kept them there until December 2015. Lower interest rates tend to promote economic growth and job creation. Some people believe the Fed should have done even more — earlier in the recession the Fed ran a series of ""quantitative easing"" programs to pump even more money into the economy, which it phased out in 2014 — but there's little doubt that the Fed's decision to keep interest rates near zero percent for most of the year promoted faster job growth than an earlier interest rate hike would have done.
+
+In December, the Federal Reserve raised its target interest rate by 0.25 percent, and signaled that it may increase rates further in 2016. That may create a drag on the economy this year.
+
+Oil prices were high — around $100 per barrel from 2011 until mid-2014. But then prices started to fall, and they haven't stopped since. They were around $50 per barrel when 2015 began, and they've now fallen below $35 per barrel.
+
+Energy is an important input to lots of different products and services, so cheaper oil (and other fossil fuels like natural gas) meant that everyone not associated with the oil industry had a bit of extra cash in their pockets in 2015.
+
+It's hard to say exactly where that extra cash went — at least some of it went to boost people's savings and pay down debt — but consumers also spent some of it on other stuff. That provided a nice economic tailwind throughout 2015.
+
+Since the Great Recession, state and local governments have been tightening their belts. Early in the recession, this added to the magnitude of job losses; later, it partially offset job gains in the private sector.
+
+But as this data from the Brookings Institution shows, things started to change in mid-2014. After years of shedding employees, state and local governments started hiring again.
+
+Overall, Brookings estimates that federal, state, and local government spending and tax policies exerted a modestly positive effect on the growth of gross domestic product — that's after four years of spending cuts and tax hikes that Brookings argues imposed a net fiscal drag on economic growth.",REAL
+5913,Comment on Nomi Prins: Hillary Clinton Will Continue the Big Bank Protection Racket by EndOfTheWorld,"by Yves Smith 
+Yves here. It’s hardly a secret that the Clintons are deeply loyal to Wall Street. Bob Rubin and his numerous well-heeled followers are a powerful, arguably dominant, faction in the Democratic party, and they are tightly aligned with the Clintons. 
+Nomi Prins gives a useful overview of how Hillary has attempted to blame the financial crisis on everything but the deregulation that her husband supported and the reckless behavior that resulted and how her anti-bank noises, like her criticism of Wells Fargo, is tepid and late in coming. 
+However, I quibble with some of her article. It’s surprising to see her single out Gary Gensler, former head of the CFTC, as a bank crony. Gensler is widely seen as pushing for much tougher oversight and enforcement despite being in the disadvantaged position of being at a secondary regulator. Recall that he was up against Bernanke and Geithner, a weak Mary Shapiro at the SEC, and an indifferent-to-captured Obama at the helm. 
+It’s also surprising to see Prins fail to mention the cronies rumored to be Clinton’s top picks for Treasury Secretary: Larry Fink of BlackRock and Tony James of Blackstone. Both firms would profit ginormously if the Wall Street looting plan that Hillary supports and James is promoting, that of having all workers pay 3% of their pay into mandatory retirement accounts, were to become law. 
+As we’ve indicated, the cost of this “fix” is greater than any of the ideas proposed to shore up Social Security (as opposed to cut it by stealth). I hate to say it, but I believe Prins’ failure to flag this risk is due to her still hewing to orthodox financial views and thus believing that Federal deficits are a problem, as opposed to desirable, most of the time, and regarding senior members of the asset management heavyweights as less dangerous than executives of TBTF banks. Since even the modest re-regulation that has taken place since the crisis has increased shadow banking, and firms like Blackrock and Blackstone are major players, it would be naive to depict them as problem-free and disinterested. 
+By Nomi Prins, a former Wall Street executive and the author of six books of which the most recent is All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power (Nation Books). Originally published at TomDispatch 
+As this endless election limps toward its last days, while spiraling into a bizarre duel over vote-rigging accusations, a deep sigh is undoubtedly in order. The entire process has been an emotionally draining, frustration-inducing, rage-inflaming spectacle of repellent form over shallow substance. For many, the third debate evoked fatigue. More worrying, there was again no discussion of how to prevent another financial crisis, an ominous possibility in the next presidency, whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton enters the Oval Office — given that nothing fundamental has been altered when it comes to Wall Street’s practices and predation. 
+At the heart of American political consciousness right now lies a soul-crushing reality for millions of distraught Americans: the choices for president couldn’t be feebler or more disappointing. On the one hand, we have a petulant, vocabulary-challenged man-boar of a billionaire, who hasn’t paid his taxes, has regularly left those supporting him holding the bag , and seems like a ludicrous composite of every bad trait in every bad date any woman has ever had. On the other hand, we’re offered a walking photo-op for and well-paid speechmaker to Wall-Street CEOs, a one-woman money-raising machine from the 1% of the 1%, who, despite a folksiness that couldn’t look more rehearsed, has methodically outplayed her opponent. 
+With less than two weeks to go before E-day — despite the Trumptilian upheaval of the last year — the high probability of a Clinton win means the establishment remains intact. When we awaken on November 9th, it will undoubtedly be dawn in Hillary Clinton’s America and that potentially means four years of an economic dystopia that will (as would Donald Trump’s version of the same) leave many Americans rightfully anxious about their economic futures. 
+None of the three presidential debates suggested that either candidate would have the ability (or desire) to confront Wall Street from the Oval Office. In the second and third debates, in case you missed them, Hillary didn’t even mention the Glass-Steagall Act, too big to fail, or Wall Street. While in the first debate, the subject of Wall Street only came up after she disparaged the tax policies of “ Trumped-up, trickle down economics ” (or, as I like to call it, the Trumpledown economics of giving tax and financial benefits to the rich and to corporations). 
+In this election, Hillary has crafted her talking points regarding the causes of the last financial crisis as weapons against Trump, but they hardly begin to tell the real story of what happened to the American economy. The meltdown of 2007-2008 was not mainly due to “tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy” or a “failure to invest in the middle class,” two subjects she has repeatedly highlighted to slam the Republicans and their candidate. It was a byproduct of the destruction of the regulations that opened the way for a too-big-to-fail framework to thrive. Under the presidency of Bill Clinton, Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era act that once separated people’s bank deposits and loans from any kind of risky bets or other similar actions in which banks might engage, was repealed under the Financial Modernization Act of 1999. In addition, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was passed, which allowed Wall Street to concoct devastating unregulated side bets on what became the subprime crisis. 
+Given that the people involved with those choices are still around and some are still advising (or in the case of one former president living with) Hillary Clinton, it’s reasonable to imagine that, in January 2017, she’ll launch the third term of Bill Clinton when it comes to financial policy, banks, and the economy. Only now, the stakes are even higher, the banks larger, and their impunity still remarkably unchallenged. 
+Consider President Obama’s current treasury secretary, Jack Lew. It was Hillary who hit the Clinton Rolodex to bring him back to Washington. Lew first entered Bill Clinton’s White House in 1993 as special assistant to the president. Between his stints working for Clinton and Obama, he made his way into the private sector and eventually to Wall Street — as so many of his predecessors had done and successors would do. He scored a leadership role with Citigroup during the time that Bill Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs co-Chairman ) Robert Rubin was on its board of directors. In 2009 , Hillary selected him to be her deputy secretary of state. 
+Lew is hardly the only example of the busy revolving door to power that led from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration via Wall Street (or activities connected to it). Bill Clinton’s Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs , Timothy Geithner worked with Robert Rubin, later championed Wall Street as president and CEO of the New York Federal Reserve while Hillary was senator from New York (representing Wall Street), and then became Obama’s first treasury secretary while Hillary was secretary of state . 
+One possible contender for treasury secretary in a new Clinton administration would be Bill Clinton’s Under Secretary of Domestic Finance and Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman, Gary Gensler (who was — I’m sure you won’t be shocked — a Goldman Sachs partner before entering public service). These, then, are typical inhabitants of the Clinton inner circle and of the political-financial corridors of power. Their thinking, like Hillary’s, meshes well with support for the status quo in the banking system, even if, like her, they are willing on occasion to admonish it for its “mistakes.” 
+This thru-line of personnel in and out of Clinton World is dangerous for most of the rest of us, because behind all the “talking heads” and genuinely amusing Saturday Night Live skits about this bizarre election lie certain crucial issues that will have to be dealt with: decisions about climate change, foreign wars, student-loan unaffordability, rising income inequality , declining social mobility , and, yes, the threat of another financial crisis. And keep in mind that such a future economic meltdown isn’t an absurdly long-shot possibility. Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve, the nation’s main bank regulator, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation , the government entity that insures our bank deposits, collectively noted that seven of our biggest eight banks — Citigroup was the exception — still have inadequate emergency plans in the event of another financial crisis. 
+Exploring a Two-Faced World 
+Politicians regularly act one way publicly and another privately, as Hillary was “outed” for doing by WikiLeaks via its document dump from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s hacked email account. Such realities should be treated as neither shockers nor smoking guns. Everybody postures. Everybody lies. Everybody’s two-faced in certain aspects of their lives. Politicians just make a career out of it. 
+What’s problematic about Hillary’s public and private positions in the economic sphere, at least, isn’t their two-facedness but how of a piece they are. Yes, she warned the bankers to “ cut it out ! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors!”— but that was no demonstration of strength in relation to the big banks. Her comments revealed no real understanding of their precise role in exacerbating a fixable subprime loan calamity and global financial crisis, nor did her finger-wagging mean anything to Wall Street. 
+Keep in mind that, during the build-up to that crisis, as banks took advantage of looser regulations, she collected more than $7 million from the securities and investment industry for her New York Senate runs ( $18 million during her career). In her first Senate campaign, Citigroup was her top contributor. The four Wall-Street-based banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) all feature among her top 10 career contributors. As a senator, she didn’t introduce any bills aimed at reforming or regulating Wall Street. During the lead-up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, she did introduce five (out of 140) bills relating to the housing crisis, but they all died before making it through a Senate committee. So did a bill she sponsored to curtail corporate executive compensation. Though she has publicly called for a reduction in hedge-fund tax breaks (known as “closing the carried interest loophole”), including at the second debate , she never signed on to the bill that would have done so (one that Obama co-sponsored in 2007). Perhaps her most important gesture of support for Wall Street was her vote in favor of the $700 billion 2008 bank bailout bill. (Bernie Sanders opposed it.) 
+After her secretary of state stint, she returned to the scene of banking crimes. Many times. As we know, she was also paid exceedingly well for it. Friendship with the Clintons doesn’t come cheap . As she said in October 2013, while speaking at a Goldman Sachs AIMS Alternative Investments’ Symposium, “running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it. New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle.” 
+Between 2013 and 2015, she gave 12 speeches to Wall Street banks, private equity firms, and other financial corporations, reaping a whopping $2,935,000 for them. In her 2016 presidential run, the securities and investment sector (aka Wall Street) has contributed the most of any industry to PACs supporting Hillary: $56.4 million . 
+Yes, everybody needs to make a buck or a few million of them. This is America after all, but Hillary was a political figure paid by the same banks routinely getting slapped with criminal settlements by the Department of Justice. In addition, the Clinton Foundation counted as generous donors all four of the major Wall Street-based mega-banks. She was voracious when it came to such money and tone-deaf when it came to the irony of it all. 
+Glass-Steagall and Bernie Sanders 
+One of the more illuminating aspects of the Podesta emails was a series of communications that took place in the fall of 2015. That’s when Bernie Sanders was gaining traction for, among other things, his calls to break up the big banks and resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The Clinton administration’s dismantling of that act in 1999 had freed the big banks to use their depositors’ money as collateral for risky bets in the real estate market and elsewhere, and so allowed them to become ever more engorged with questionable securities. 
+On December 7, 2015, with her campaign well underway and worried about the Sanders challenge, the Clinton camp debuted a key Hillary op-ed , “How I’d Rein in Wall Street,” in the New York Times . This followed two months of emails and internal debate within her campaign over whether supporting the return of Glass-Steagall was politically palatable for her and whether not supporting it would antagonize Senator Elizabeth Warren. In the end, though Glass-Steagall was mentioned in passing in her op-ed, she chose not to endorse its return. 
+She explained her decision not to do so this way (and her advisers and media apostles have stuck with this explanation ever since): “Some have urged the return of a Depression-era rule called Glass-Steagall , which separated traditional banking from investment banking. But many of the firms that contributed to the crash in 2008, like A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers, weren’t traditional banks, so Glass-Steagall wouldn’t have limited their reckless behavior. Nor would restoring Glass-Steagall help contain other parts of the ‘shadow banking’ sector, including certain activities of hedge funds, investment banks, and other non-bank institutions.” 
+Her entire characterization of how the 2007-2008 banking crisis unfolded was — well — wrong. Here’s how traditional banks (like JPMorgan Chase) operated: they lent money to investment banks like Lehman Brothers so that they could buy more financial waste products stuffed with subprime mortgages that these traditional banks were, in turn, trying to sell. They then backed up those toxic financial products through insurance companies like AIG, which came close to collapse when what it was insuring became too toxically overwhelming to afford. AIG then got a $182 billion government bailout that also had the effect of bailing out those traditional banks (including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which became “traditional” during the crisis). In this way, the whole vicious cycle started with the traditional banks that hold your deposits and at the same time could produce and sell those waste products thanks to the repeal of Glass-Steagall. So yes, the loss of that act caused the crisis and, in its wake, every big traditional bank was fined for crisis-related crimes. 
+Hillary won’t push to bring back Glass-Steagall. Doing so would dismantle her husband’s legacy and that of the men he and she appointed to public office. Whatever cosmetic alterations may be in store, count on that act remaining an artifact of the past, since its resurrection would dismay the bankers who, over the past three decades, made the Clintons what they are. 
+No wonder many diehard Sanders supporters remain disillusioned and skeptical — not to speak of the fact that their candidate featured dead last ( 39th ) on a list of recommended vice presidential candidates in the Podesta emails. That’s unfortunately how much his agenda is likely to matter to her in the Oval Office. 
+Go Regulate Yourselves! 
+Before he resigned with his nine-figure golden parachute, Wells Fargo CEO and Chairman John Stumpf addressed Congress over disclosures that 5,300 of his employees had created two million fake accounts, scamming $2.4 million from existing customers. The bank was fined $ 185 million for that (out of a total $10 billion in fines for a range of other crimes committed before and during the financial crisis). 
+In response, Hillary wrote a letter to Wells Fargo’s customers. In it, she didn’t actually mention Stumpf by name, as she has not mentioned any Wall Street CEO by name in the context of criminal activity. Instead, she simply spoke of “he.” As she put it, “He owes all of you a clear explanation as to how this happened under his watch.” She added, “Executives should be held individually accountable when rampant illegal activity happens on their watch.” 
+She does have a plan to fine banks for being too big, but they’ve already been fined repeatedly for being crooked and it hasn’t made them any smaller or less threatening. As their top officials evidently view the matter, paying up for breaking the law is just another cost of doing business. 
+Hillary also wrote, “If any bank can’t be managed effectively, it should be broken up.” But the question is: Why doesn’t ongoing criminal activity that threatens the rest of us correlate with ineffective management — or put another way, when was the last time you saw a major bank broken up? And don’t hold your breath for that to happen in a new Clinton administration either. 
+In her public letter, she added , “I’ll appoint regulators who will stand with taxpayers and consumers, not with big banks and their friends in Congress.” On the other hand, at that same Goldman Sachs symposium , while in fundraising mode, she gave bankers a pass relative to regulators and commented: “Well, I represented all of you for eight years. I had great relations and worked so close together after 9/11 to rebuild downtown, and [I have] a lot of respect for the work you do and the people who do it.” 
+She has steadfastly worked to craft explanations for the financial crisis and the Great Recession that don’t endanger the banks as we presently know them. In addition, she has supported the idea of appointing insider regulators, insisting that “the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.” (Let’s not forget that former Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman Hank Paulson ran the Treasury Department while the crisis brewed.) 
+Among the emails sent to John Podesta that were posted by WikiLeaks is an article I wrote for TomDispatch on the Clintons’ relationships with bankers. “She will not point fingers at her friends,” I said in that piece in May 2015. She will not chastise the people who pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop to speak or the ones who have long shared the social circles in which she and her husband move.” I also suggested that she wouldn’t call out any CEO by name. To this day she hasn’t. I said that she would never be an advocate for Glass-Steagall. And she hasn’t been. What was true then will be no less true once she’s in the White House and no longer has to make gestures toward the platform on which Bernie ran and so can once again more openly embrace the bankers’ way of conducting business. 
+There’s a reason Wall Street has a crush on her and its monarchs like Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman Lloyd Blankfein pay her such stunning sums to offer anodyne remarks to their employees and others. Blankfein has been coy about an official Clinton endorsement simply because he doesn’t want to rock her campaign boat, but make no mistake, this Wall Street kingpin’s silence is tantamount to an endorsement. 
+To date, $10 trillion worth of assets sits on the books of the Big Six banks. Since 2008, these same banks have copped to more than $ 150 billion in fines for pre-crisis behavior that ranged on the spectrum of criminality from manipulating multiple public markets to outright fraud. Hillary Clinton has arguably taken money that would not have been so available if it weren’t for the ill-gotten gains those banks secured. In her usual measured way, albeit with some light admonishments, she has told them what they want to hear: that if they behave — something that in her dictionary of definitions involves little in the way of personalized pain or punishment — so will she. 
+So let’s recap Hillary’s America, past, present, and future. It’s a land lacking in meaningful structural reform of the financial system, a place where the big banks have been, and will continue to be, coddled by the government. No CEO will be jailed, no matter how large the fines his bank is saddled with or how widespread the crimes it committed. Instead, he’s likely to be invited to the inaugural ball in January. Because its practices have not been adequately controlled or curtailed, the inherent risk that Wall Street poses for Main Street will only grow as bankers continue to use our money to make their bets. (The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act was supposed to help on this score, but has yet to make the big banks any smaller.) 
+And here’s an obvious corollary to all this: the next bank-instigated economic catastrophe will not be dealt with until it has once again crushed the financial stability of millions of Americans. 
+The banks have voted with their dollars on all of this in multiple ways. Hillary won’t do anything to upset that applecart. We should have no illusions about what her presidency would mean from a Wall Street vs. Main Street perspective. Certainly, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon doesn’t. He effectively endorsed Hillary before a crowd of financial industry players, saying , “I hope the next president, she reaches across the aisle.” 
+For Wall Street, of course, that aisle is essentially illusory, since its players operate so easily and effectively on both sides of it. In Hillary’s America, Wall Street will still own Main Street. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+7773,Can't say under God at Hilary speech!?!??!??,"Can't say under God at Hilary speech!?!??!?? Looking for YouTube link and sorry on my phone first post and idk how to post videos.... But this is completely infuriating Anonymous Coward ( OP ) Re: Can't say under God at Hilary speech!?!??!?? Uhhh yea bump and pin rn Anonymous Coward ( OP ) Re: Can't say under God at Hilary speech!?!??!?? She must be defeated at all cost in the name of Jesus almighty Page 1 Mail with questions or comments about this site. ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.008s (7 queries)",FAKE
+9530,It’s Rigged! Voters Discover Shocking Mistake On Ballots: Don’t Let This Happen To You!,"So, if you don’t trust voting machines, and you have good reason not to, you must demand a paper ballot. 
+As it turns out, there may be some problems with paper ballots as well. 
+One Conservative mother of two in Illionois reported that she had been hearing rumors of voter fraud. She talked to her friend, in South Carolina, and found the following: 
+Would you look at that? The Democrat ticket of Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine is listed twice, with Pacific Green/Progressive of Jill Stein/Ajamu Baraka and Libertarian Gary Johnson/Bill Weld also list. 
+No Republican ticket of Donald Trump/Mike Pence listed! 
+Others went online after voting, only to find that their mail in ballots, who listed Donald Trump as their candidate of choice, were not counted, supposedly because the signature on the ballot did not match the signature on the letter! 
+Fortunately, these people checked and are taking action before it is too late. 
+The Clinton Foundation, leftist billionaire George Soros, and the Democrats have power, and they have been shown to be corrupt. 
+Do not let this kind of voter fraud happen to your vote! 
+We cannot prove, right now, that the system is rigged, but something is not right. 
+Make sure that your vote counts.",FAKE
+8870,8 POINTS VANISH IN 4 DAYS,"Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › 8 POINTS VANISH IN 4 DAYS 8 POINTS VANISH IN 4 DAYS 0 SHARES 
+[10/28/16] Donald Trump has gained on Hillary Clinton during the past week, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll , solidifying support among core Republican groups as well as political independents. 
+Roughly 6 in 10 still expect Clinton to prevail, while the poll finds shrinking concerns about the accuracy of the vote count and voter fraud in the election. 
+Clinton holds a slight 48-44 percent edge over Trump among likely voters, with Libertarian Gary Johnson at 4 percent and Green Party nominee Jill Stein at 1 percent in the survey completed Sunday through Wednesday. Clinton held a six-point edge in the previous wave and a 12-point edge in the first wave of the tracking poll by ABC News Sunday (50 percent Clinton vs. 38 percent Trump). In a two-candidate contest, Clinton holds a five-point edge over Trump, 50 to 45 percent. 
+Trump’s growth in support from 38 percent to 44 percent is fueled by shored-up support among Republican-leaning voting groups as well as a significant boost among political independents. Trump has made up ground among whites, particularly those without college degrees and women. Trump now leads by a 30 percentage point margin among white voters without college degrees, up from 20 points from this weekend. White women now tilt toward Trump by 48 to 43 percent after leaning 49 to 43 percent in Clinton’s favor before. 
+Trump saw his biggest gains among political independents, favoring Trump by a 12-point margin in the latest tracking poll, 49 to 37 percent, after giving Clinton a narrow edge in late last week. Neither candidate has maintained a consistent lead among independent likely voters in Post-ABC polling this fall. Post navigation",FAKE
+744,"Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and GOP 'unity.' It's all about the numbers, America","Just days after Donald Trump showed faint interest in building broad-based Republican support and House Speaker Paul Ryan seemed averse to his party’s nominee-in-waiting, the two have met and now there’s talk of GOP “unity.”
+
+Why this about face after a couple of hours of face time in the nation’s capital? Because Trump and Ryan are numbers guys (one with real estate, the other with federal budgets).
+
+And these numbers stand out: 93, 32 and 5.
+
+In 2012, Mitt Romney reaped 93 percent of the GOP vote. However, Republicans constituted only 32 percent of the national electorate. Trump doesn’t win in November without a better quantitative showing. And Ryan could be back in the minority should Trump lose by more than 5 percent in states with vulnerable Republican congressman.
+
+Simply put, it’s in both Trump's and Ryan’s short-term interests to be cordial at a minimum, even while maintaining serious policy differences that aren’t going away anytime soon despite this first attempt a little détente (you’ll know it’s a bromance if the hard-exercising Ryan agrees to a round of golf; or Trump goes bow-hunting in Wisconsin).
+
+Despite the hoopla surrounding this meeting, it doesn’t ensure Republican “peace in our time,” as a failed British prime minister famously said. Though Trump has on occasion shown signs of a willingness to alter stances (most notably, the mass deportation of illegal immigrants), publicly acceding to a congressional agenda undermines Trump’s brand of anti-establishment and anti-status-quo thinking that warned him the party’s nomination. Just as Ryan won’t publicly give up on his conservative principles – most notably: entitlement reform (which I’d guess is the closed-door promise he’s seeking from Trump in exchange for a public endorsement).
+
+Then again, would you rather be Donald Trump, trying to strike a deal with a practical fellow like Paul Ryan, or Hillary Clinton trying to come to terms with an irascible 74-year-old socialist?
+
+The more primaries he wins, the more Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders buys into the notion that he’s on a mission. Such self-deluded candidates don’t retire from the field gracefully. Good luck finding unity there. And good luck getting it — without having to further to socialist vision that work only in those parts of America where Whole Foods and marijuana dispensaries are plentiful.
+
+W.C. Fields had it wrong: I’d rather not be in Philadelphia, where the Democrats will convene for their national convention and try to settle their differences. 
+
+
+
+Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
+7806,Comment on Jury Finds Woman NOT Guilty of ‘Manufacturing Drugs’ Because the Pot She Grew Was Medicine by James Michael,"Jury Nullification!!! Live it….Love it…..Learn it maida.sweeney 
+I usually get paid around $6k-$8k monthly on the internet. So if you are prepared to finish simple at home task for some hours /a day at your home and make valuable checks while doing it… Then this invitation is for you… http://clck.ru/A54RG 
+sdfghjk norma.gregory 
+I currently gain roughly 6 thousand-8 thousand bucks /a month with an internet task i found on the internet. Everyone eager to finish simple computer-based tasks for 2-5 h daily from your house and gain solid benefit for doing it… Test this work http://korta.nu/NDe carmen_sandoval 
+I currently make roughly six to eight thousand dollars /month on the internet. Anyone prepared to finish easy freelance task for few h /a day from ease of your home and get solid benefit in the same time… This is a work for you… http://korta.nu/NDe barbara.austin.94 
+After losing my job 6 months ago, I was lucky to learn about this great website that was a lifesaver… They offer jobs for which people can work online from their home. Last paycheck after working for them for three months was $12k… Great thing about is that only requirement for the job is basic typing skills and internet access… http://korta.nu/MDe lynn_ortega 
+Earn 90 dollars each day for working on-line from comfort of your own home for couple of hr’s daily… Get regular payment every week… Everything you need is a computer, net connection, along with a little leisure time… http://korta.nu/NDe Vincent D’Emidio 
+This just proves that Americans are returning to the intelligence that they possessed in the Glorious 1970s. Stefanovitch 
+Which is WAY better than the witch hunts in the much more glorious Dark Ages. You know. When ignorance prevailed, and pain and suffering were the MD solutions of the day? Kind of like how people who oppose the legalization of MJ are not NEARLY so concerned about the harm bestowed on society by alcohol and prescription pharmaceuticals. Vincent D’Emidio 
+During the 1970s, the “Archie Bunkers” of society were losing, and it appeared that they were beginning to accept the World as it was turning out…as a Liberated society. Then, in 1980, after President Carter’s disastrous handling of the Iranian Hostage Crisis , The majority voted for Reagan as President elect. However, unknown to many of his supporters at the time, Reagan, and his bible-thumping fellow travelers had a different idea. Not only would they be tough on a foreign-policy level, they ACTUALLY thought that they could turn back the clock on Social issues, and reverse all of the advancements that were instituted during the 1960s and 70s. Ronnie came to Washington, and brought along his bible-banging butt-buddies, and they proceeded to undo all of the progress we had made. Thanks to the Democrats acting like jellyfish, they re-instituted the War on the American People — oops! I meant, the “War on”, ahem, “Drugs”— no, actually, I truly meant the TRUE, liberated American people. In doing so, they STOPPED progress in the Marijuana legalization area. Thank the TRUE God (the one that I pray to) that the American people never really bought all of the Republicans’ horror stories about herb, and we are finally returning to the path we were on during the 70s. tom browne 
+carter did not handle the crisis disastrously. the secret govt made a deal known as the “October Surprise”– the only way you could know that was by being there and you were not. the entire country went down after the 70’s as the secret govt sucked so much money out that homelessness became a fixture. govts today can not afford to fix road so much money is being absconded. we can’t afford a govt we cant control. flydon1954 
+Free Country but lawyers cannot even speak the words Jury Nullification in court ( If I remember right ,there is one State they can ) if they do the Judge will hold them in contempt . Think about that , a LAW on the books that THE COURT SYSTEM are withholding for Juries . The system has taken the rights of the people to know that law , WHY ? If there is a juror on a trial that knows this law they can inform the rest of the jurors of the law (JURY NULLIFICATION) and even though your found guilty of the crime the jury can set them free . Please inform every person you know of this law , post it on all your social media sites , the more Americans who become aware of it , the more we can go against punishments that are outrageous for the crime .There are thousands and thousands in jails across the country for nothing more then using or growing their own medicine . STOP THE TRYANNY ! Jake Seilman 
+That her former physician flew all the way from Maine for her defense makes him a hero in my eyes. Sending you a mental hug Dr. Dustin Sulak! Phil Freeman 
+How does one “manufacturer” a plant? Sirios",FAKE
+8362,Associated Press reporter admits faking news stories for Hillary Clinton.,"*Sent:* Tuesday, August 11, 2015 6:00 PM *To:* Kendall, David *Subject:* Hi again from AP (inquiry about thumb drive) 
+Hi David, 
+We have been told, and we are preparing to report, that the FBI has taken possession of the thumb drive that was once in your possession. This is what we have been informed, and we wanted to see whether there was any sort of comment that could be provided. If you wanted to steer us away and say that we are misinformed, then I would gladly accept that as well . But we have solid reason to believe this. We’d welcome any comment you can offer. Thanks very much. 
+Eric Associated Press reporter says he knows it’s true, but will gladly print that it’s false 
+What’s truly astonishing in this email is how AP reporter Eric Tucker says he will gladly LIE to cover for the Clintons . In plain English, he explains that he has “solid reason” to believe the report about the thumb drive, but he will gladly publish a false narrative via the Associated Press , and he even suggests what that false narrative should be: “If you wanted to steer us away and say that we are misinformed, then I would gladly accept that as well.” 
+In other words, he’s not just corrupt, dishonest and fraudulent as a journalist, he’s also SUGGESTING the false narrative the Clintons should use! 
+This is the exact same way the AP talks to the CDC about vaccines and measles, by the way. Essentially, the Associated Press reporters say, “We are total media whores, we will bend over and grab our ankles while you shove your fake story down the throats of our readers who foolishly think we’re a credible news organization.” 
+You gotta love Eric Tucker for this. The guy takes the prize for finally spelling out in black and white what we’ve known for years: the AP is a total joke when it comes to real journalism . Note carefully that the AP won’t even fire Tucker for this admission. He’ll probably get a prize of some sort. How many other Associated Presstitutes have deliberately LIED to cover up Clinton crimes? 
+It all brings to mind the obvious question: How many other Associated Presstitutes deliberately lied to cover up Clinton crimes? 
+Just what percentage of AP stories about the Clinton scandals are actually FAKE NEWS pretending to be credible journalism? (Answer: Probably about 99%.) 
+It’s not just AP, either. It’s the same story at every other mainstream news organization across America: They’re all liars and crooks, and they’re all working for Hillary Clinton, the serial killer and rape excuser.",FAKE
+4839,The no-transparency election,"(CNN) The 2016 election is setting new lows for presidential transparency in the modern era.
+
+Hillary Clinton is under fire for waiting until she nearly collapsed at a public event Sunday to disclose she was diagnosed Friday with pneumonia. She hasn't provided a full accounting of her health, though Donald Trump has revealed far less. The Republican nominee is departing with decades of tradition by not releasing his tax returns, which could provide key details about his investments and financial interests. And both candidates have declined traveling with a ""protective pool"" of reporters that follow them to provide continuous coverage of their activities.
+
+On Monday night, transparency questions surfaced again as PBS interviewer Charlie Rose grilled former President Bill Clinton about his family's foundation.
+
+In other words, Trump and Clinton have less than two months to close the sale, but most voters aren't sure exactly what they're buying.
+
+Few candidates relish throwing open their most intimate health and financial secrets. But the issue is particularly acute this year given Trump's decades of business dealings. And, of course, Trump, 70, and Clinton, 68, would be the oldest and second oldest presidents inaugurated for a first term in a job that comes with intense physical and mental demands -- making their health a highly relevant issue.
+
+""It's just the kind of thing that if it happens to you and you're a busy active person, you keep moving forward,"" she said. ""I think it's fair to say, Anderson, that people know more about me than almost anyone in public life. They've got 40 years of my tax returns, tens of thousands of emails, a detailed medical letter report, all kinds of personal details.""
+
+Trump has said he will soon release details of a physical exam he underwent last week. In an interview Monday with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on ""The Situation Room,"" Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence said both candidates should release detailed medical information.
+
+Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway fought back against the allegations Tuesday that Trump's campaign shared Clinton's lack of transparency.
+
+""As far as I can see, there are two major party candidates running for president and only one of them has pneumonia and lied about it, especially to the press because she always treats you all like second class citizens,"" Conway told CNN's Alisyn Camerota on ""New Day.""
+
+'People have a right to know'
+
+""People are vying for the highest office in the land,"" the Indiana governor said. ""People have a right to know.""
+
+But when it comes to taxes, Pence said Trump wasn't violating any laws by withholding the data, though he acknowledged ""there's a bit of a tradition here.""
+
+Trump has said he would release his returns once the Internal Revenue Service completes an audit. When pressed why Trump would not release topline information about previous returns now -- which would not interfere with the audit process -- Pence told Blitzer the Republican nominee would release his returns ""in totality"" and ""not parse them out piece by piece.""
+
+Still, the Clinton campaign is already trying to use her weekend misfortune to increase pressure on Trump.
+
+""We know more about Hillary Clinton in than any presidential candidate in history ... we know almost nothing about Donald Trump and he has got to come forward,"" Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told CNN's Jake Tapper.
+
+""I hope that there will be an even standard applied to getting them both to release sufficient information, not just on health but obviously we have the ongoing issue on taxes too,"" Kaine said in Ohio.
+
+Politicians have long tried to shroud themselves in secrecy to varying degrees.
+
+""You have had candidates that have been a little close to the vest before -- many of them if not all of them having something they would rather not talk about,"" said Bruce Buchanan, a presidential historian at the University of Texas at Austin.
+
+But this year threatens to set unprecedented levels for the lack of disclosure, Buchanan said, because the election matches up two candidates who have ""reputations in that vein.""
+
+Presidential candidates have not always been under such a spotlight.
+
+After all, President Franklin Roosevelt took extensive -- and successful -- measures to hide his paralysis during his 1932 election campaign and subsequent presidency. President John Kennedy, despite a conjuring a mythology of youth and vitality, was one of the most unhealthy presidents ever to hold the office -- but his multiple ailments were not common knowledge at the time.
+
+Clinton's case appears to have little in common with those two Democratic presidents -- and pneumonia is a fairly common complaint that should not impair her capacity to serve as President.
+
+But her wobbly exit from a ceremony Sunday commemorating the 15th anniversary of the September 11 attack in New York created a sudden political storm for two reasons.
+
+First, the episode and video of Clinton staggering into her van played into conservative conspiracy theories that she is hiding some kind of secret illness since sustaining a concussion while secretary of state and is not fit to serve -- a narrative without evidence that is often trumpeted by her opponent and his surrogates.
+
+Then, the length of time it took for her campaign to say what is wrong -- with journalists in the dark about where she was -- fostered the idea that something was being covered up.
+
+""It's not health itself that is the problem she has to deal with,"" CNN senior political analyst David Axelrod said on Monday. ""By allowing that six-hour gap they created this sense that they were trying to put one over on people and that is not helpful to her candidacy.""
+
+The incident also played out as the Clinton campaign has spent months rebutting arguments against the Clinton Foundation, which Republicans have argued was a conduit for access to Hillary Clinton's State Department. In the Monday interview with Rose, Bill Clinton insisted ""we have been as transparent as we can be"" when it comes to the foundation.
+
+""We've been more transparent than any other foundation -- more transparent than any other foundation has been asked to be, and certainly more transparent than anybody else in this line of work,"" he said.
+
+Transparency is often uncomfortable for candidates.
+
+But at the same time, people who run for President are assuming the ultimate public trust -- the Presidency of the United States, a position for which good health and a freedom from conflicts of financial interest are desirable if not essential. So any unwillingness to comply with what have become political norms for disclosure risks reflecting badly on a candidate's character.
+
+Clinton's campaign promised to do better going forward — and is planning to offer more details about her health later this week.
+
+In political terms, she now has little choice.
+
+""If they keep trying to hide and obfuscate her real condition, it is going to be a big albatross all the way to election day,"" said Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University on CNN's ""At This Hour with Berman and Bolduan.""
+
+For her part, Clinton's physician did issue a health statement last year certifying that she was fit to serve as President. Trump has offered no such information. His only health disclosure was a note from his doctor saying his health was ""astonishingly excellent"" and that he would be the healthiest person ever elected president.
+
+Neither candidate has approached the level of disclosure that another senior citizen candidate -- John McCain -- offered in 2008, when the cancer survivor invited select reporters to view over 1,000 pages of health records.
+
+Even if Trump offers more health details, he still risks setting an unprecedented example on financial disclosure for future candidates. The billionaire has steadfastly refused to match Clinton -- and previous presidential nominees -- by releasing years of tax returns.
+
+'Nobody cares about it'
+
+""Nobody cares about it except some of the folks in the media. Nobody cares about it,"" Trump said in a Fox News interview earlier this month.
+
+Trump has made his record in building a global business a pillar of his argument that he would be able to turn the economy around as President. Yet he has refused to publish tax returns that would allow voters to make their own assessment of his financial health or claims about his income.
+
+Such disclosures would also permit voters and reporters to view Trump's charitable giving, which he has said has been substantial without providing evidence.
+
+Trump did comply with election laws in May requiring candidates to release a financial statement, which claims a net worth of $10 billion and business interests all over the world. Trump also lists 16 liabilities for which he owes at least $315 million, according to the statement.
+
+But the information does not offer details on the source of Trump's annual income -- information that would more typically be available on a tax return. That's important for voters to size up whether Trump would face conflicts of interest as President given his vast businesses interests around the globe. Critics have suggested that Trump could be compromised as President if he has heavy exposure to US adversaries like China and Russia.
+
+It's also possible that Trump's returns show he paid a very low tax rate if his income comes mainly from capital gains or can be written off against property investments -- a factor that could be politically embarrassing.",REAL
+955,It’s on: Tensions between Trump and the GOP escalate in public fight,"Tensions between the Republican Party and its own front-runner erupted into a full-blown public battle as top party officials rebuked Donald Trump on Friday for alleging that the GOP primary system was “rigged” against him.
+
+The dispute, which has been simmering for days, centers on Trump’s failure to win any delegates last weekend in Colorado, which selected its 34 delegates at a party convention rather than a primary attended by voters. All went to Trump’s chief rival, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
+
+The outcome prompted a daily stream of complaints and allegations this week from Trump, who wrote in an op-ed published in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that the “system is being rigged by party operatives with ‘double-agent’ delegates who reject the decisions of voters.”
+
+A senior Republican National Committee official fired back with a thinly veiled response, writing in a Friday memo to reporters that “each process is easy to understand for those willing to learn it.”
+
+“It ultimately falls on the campaigns to be up to speed on these delegate rules,” wrote RNC communications director Sean Spicer. “Campaigns have to know when absentee ballots are due, how long early voting lasts in certain states, or the deadlines for voter registration; the delegate rules are no different.”
+
+The fight again pits Trump against a Republican establishment that is still broadly opposed to his candidacy and struggling to reconcile with the possibility that he could be the GOP presidential nominee in November. Veterans of past presidential campaigns warned that the feuding could have an adverse effect on down-ballot races and on the ability to defeat Hillary Clinton, seen as the likely Democratic nominee, in the fall.
+
+“Traditionally, this is the time that the party and front-runner come together and make the plans necessary to defeat the Democratic candidate in the fall,” said Michael Steel, who was an aide for Jeb Bush’s campaign and previously worked on the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012 and as spokesman for John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) when he was House speaker. “That’s clearly not happening, and it’s going to make it tougher to beat Secretary Clinton.”
+
+Ron Bonjean, a former top adviser to Republican congressional leaders, called the Trump-RNC showdown “unprecedented” and warned that “taking a flamethrower to the Republican Party machine” could backfire on Trump.
+
+“This is like a general severely criticizing his own special forces before ordering them to go into battle,” he said in an email. “Trump runs the risk of demoralizing grass-roots party organizers when he is going to need every asset to help him beat the Democratic nominee.”
+
+One of the keys to Trump’s success until now has been his willingness to harshly criticize the party establishment, but he will need the support of the RNC in fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts if he wins the nomination. This has left Trump boomeranging between fighting the party and trying to embrace it.
+
+Early this week, for example, Trump used Twitter and his rally speeches to call the nomination process “corrupt,” “rigged” and one that rewards candidates who “play dirty tricks in order to pick up delegates.” In an interview with The Hill on Tuesday, Trump said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus “should be ashamed of himself because he knows what’s going on.”
+
+Priebus responded on Twitter: “Nomination process known for a year + beyond. It’s the responsibility of the campaigns to understand it. Complaints now? Give us all a break.”
+
+At the same time, behind the scenes, Trump’s campaign staff was finalizing plans to send representatives to the RNC’s upcoming spring meeting in Florida and to open an office in Washington. On Wednesday, the real estate mogul had lunch at Trump Tower in Manhattan with Megyn Kelly of Fox News, a longtime target of Trump’s who has come to symbolize his ongoing fight with the party establishment. Later that day, Trump announced he had hired GOP strategist Rick Wiley, who has a long history at the RNC.
+
+By Wednesday night in Pittsburgh, where he held an evening rally, Trump seemed to have softened his tone. But then around midnight he complained about Colorado again in a series of tweets. “The rules DID CHANGE in Colorado shortly after I entered the race in June because the pols and their bosses knew I would win with the voters,” Trump wrote at 11:53 p.m.
+
+Steve House, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, said he has been angered by Trump’s assertion that Colorado Republicans changed their rules in an attempt to block his rise. State law bars them from holding a primary, so the party held caucuses at the local level and completed its delegate slate at a convention, he said.
+
+“I can’t believe people would think that Donald got in the race and we changed them because of him,” he said an interview. “No, we voted not to change our rules at all.”
+
+On Thursday, it was back to peacemaking as one of Trump’s top aides met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and the candidate attended two fundraisers for Republicans in New York. At a $1,000-per-plate dinner in Manhattan, Trump skipped his usual criticisms of his rivals and the Republican Party.
+
+But then, Thursday night, the Journal op-ed under Trump’s name went online, reigniting the fires.
+
+The fresh tension comes just as the party heads into another busy period of delegate allocation and selection. This weekend, seven states will hold meetings to select at least some of their delegates.
+
+Republicans will gather in Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia for meetings in congressional districts to award their delegates. And in Wyoming, Republicans are hosting a convention similar to the one held in Colorado, and Trump’s team concedes that they are again poised to lose to Cruz.
+
+Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly characterized how Colorado selects its Republican convention delegates.",REAL
+6368,The Pathologization of Dissent,"Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com 
+According to the mainstream media, in a recent speech in West Palm Beach, Donald Trump finally completely lost it. Sawing the air with his tiny hands in a unmistakeably Hitlerian manner, he spat out a series of undeniably hateful anti-Semitic code words … like “political establishment,” “global elites” and, yes, “international banks.” He even went so far as to claim that “corporations” and their (ahem) “lobbyists” have millions of dollars at stake in this election, and are trying to pass the TTP, not to benefit the American people, but simply to enrich themselves. He then went on to accuse the media of collaborating with “the Clinton machine,” presumably to benefit these “global elites” and “international banks” and “lobbyists.” 
+Now, a lot of folks didn’t immediately recognize the secret meanings of these fascistic code words, and so mistakenly assumed that “global elites” referred to the transnational capitalist ruling classes, and that “lobbyists” referred to actual lobbyists, and that “banks” meant … well … you know, banks. As it turned out, this was completely wrong. None of these words actually meant what they meant, not in anti-Semitic CodeSpeak. So the mainstream media translated for us. “Political establishment” meant “the Jews.” “Global elites” also meant “the Jews.” “Banks” meant “Jews.” “Lobbyists” meant “Jews.” Even “corporate media,” meant “Jews.” Apparently, Trump’s entire speech was a series of secret dog-whistle signals to his legions of neo-Nazi goons, who, immediately following Clinton’s victory, are going to storm out of their hidey holes, frontally attack the US military, overthrow the US government, and, yes, you guessed it … “kill the Jews.” 
+OK, maybe I’m exaggerating the mainstream media’s reaction just a little bit. Or maybe Trump’s speech really was that fascistic. Judge for yourself. Read the transcript. ( NPR offers a complete version of it here. ) Then compare the reactions of The Wall Street Journal , The New York Times , Washington Post , The Inquirer , The Guardian , and other leading broadsheets, and magazines and blogs like Mother Jones , Forward , Slate , Salon , Vox , Alternet , and a host of others, most of which rely on Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League and former Special Assistant to the President, as their authoritative source on Trumpian cryptology. (Mr. Greenblatt, incidentally, should know better, given the treatment he has received from hard-line Zionist publications for refusing to demonize Black Lives Matter, and for “taking sides against” the State of Israel.) 
+Look, I’m not defending Donald Trump, who I consider a self-aggrandizing idiot and a soulless huckster of the lowest order, and whose supporters include a lot of real anti-Semites, and racists, and misogynists, and other such creeps. I’m simply trying to point out how the corporate media have, for months, been playing the same hysterical tune like an enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument, and how millions of Americans are singing along (as they were before the invasion of Iraq, which posed no threat to the USA , but which according to the media had WMDs), and how terribly fucking disturbing that is. In case you didn’t instantly recognize it, the name of the tune is “This guy is Hitler!” and it isn’t the short vulgarian fingers of Donald Trump that are tickling the ivories. And no, it isn’t “the Jews” either. It’s the corporate media, and the corporations that own them, and the rest of the global capitalist ruling classes … in other words, those “global elites.” 
+The thing I find particularly disturbing is how these rather mundane observations — i.e., (a) that a global ruling class exists, (b) that it’s primarily corporate in character, (c) that this class is pursuing its interests and not the interests of sovereign states — how such observations are being stigmatized as the ravings of unhinged anti-Semites. This stigmatization is not limited to Trumpists. Anyone to the left of Clinton is now, apparently, an anti-Semite. For example, Roger Cohen, in The New York Times , riding the tsunami of condemnation of the insidious verbiage of Trump’s West Palm speech, executed an extended smear-job on Jeremy Corbyn and his “Corbynistas” (they’re fond of coining these epithets, the media), denouncing their virulent “anti-Americanism,” “anti-Capitalism,” “anti-globalism,” and “anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.” 
+Which, let me hasten to add, and stress, and underscore, and repeatedly emphasize, is not to imply that the Labour Party, or the British Left, or the American Left, or any other Left, is anti-Semitism-free. Of course not. There are anti-Semites everywhere. That isn’t the point. Or it isn’t my point. 
+My point is that this stigmatization campaign is part of a much larger ideological project, one that has little to do with Trump, or Jeremy Corbyn, or their respective parties. Smearing one’s political opponents is nothing new, of course, it’s as old as the hills. But what we’re witnessing is more than smears. As I proposed in these pages back in July , political dissent is being gradually pathologized (i.e., stigmatized as aberrant or “abnormal” behavior, as opposed to a position meriting discussion). Consider the abnormalization of Sanders, back when he was talking about “banks,” “global elites,” and other things that matter, or the media’s portrayal of British voters as racists in the wake of the Brexit referendum. And, yes, the charges being leveled against Trump, much as we might despise the man. Anti-Semitism, inciting violence, paranoid conspiracy theorizing, insurrection, treason, et cetera — these are not legitimate arguments one needs to counter with superior arguments; they are symptoms of deviations from a norm, signs of criminality or pathology, which is increasingly how the corporate ruling classes are dismissing anyone who attempts to challenge them. 
+A line is being drawn in the ideological sand. On one side of it are the decent people, the normal people, in their business wear, with their university degrees, and prescriptions, and debts. On the other side are … well, the deplorables, the ignorant, racist, anti-Semitic, neo-nationalist, populist extremists. This line cuts through both the Left and the Right … supersedes both Left and Right, making bedfellows of supposed adversaries like Obama, Clinton, Kagan, Wolfowitz, Scowcroft, and their ilk on the Normal team, and a motley crew of Trumpists, Putinists, European populists, Corbynistas, Sandernistas, socialists, anarchists, Wikileakers, anti-Zionists, anti-capitalists, neo-Nazis, Black Lives Matterers, angry Greek pensioners, environmental activists, religious zealots, the Klu Klux Klan, David Graeber, most of the contributors to CounterPunch, and various other “extremist” types, many of whom detest each other, in the Deplorables’ current starting line-up. 
+The corporate media is sending a message … a message aimed at a much broader audience than undecided American voters (assuming such creatures really exist). The message is, “get with the fucking program, or get stigmatized as an anti-Semite, or a racist, or a Russian spy, or whatever.” The message is, “drop the populist rhetoric, shut the hell up about the Wall Street banks, and the corporations, and the ‘one percent,’ and … actually … forget about politics completely, except for identity politics, of course. Go ahead and knock yourself out with that.” The message is, “you’re either with us or against us … and it doesn’t matter why you’re against us, or what it is you think you’re for. Right, Left … who gives a shit? It’s one big Basket of Deplorables to us.” 
+This message, of course, displays many of the hallmarks of the classic authoritarian mentality, the need for nearly total conformity, mindless allegiance to one’s so-called superiors, delegitimization of all opposing viewpoints, and the infantile type of hero-worship figures like Obama and Clinton inspire … not the old-fashioned authoritarianism that would-be despots like Trump represent, but, rather, a more attractive version, a hopey, changey, lovey version, where there are no frightening Hitlerian leaders barking out anti-Semitic code words, and no one is exterminating thousands of people in faraway countries they want to destabilize in order to entirely dominate the region. No, this is the version where Obama sells the TPP on the Jimmy Fallon show, and wars of aggression are not wars of aggression, but “humanitarian interventions.” It’s also the version where universal healthcare is, regrettably, “unrealistic,” but $38 billion for the State of Israel so it can operate its Apartheid State, and weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, so they can bomb the shit out of farmers in Yemen, and cut off people’s heads for blasphemy, is somehow in “America’s vital interests.” 
+But what do I know? I’m just a satirist. I should probably leave all this complex stuff, like what is and isn’t in my interest, and what words really mean and all that, to the experts in the mainstream media. Since they did so well decoding Trump’s speech, maybe they could translate some of these other code words I’ve been having trouble with, like the ones I put in scare quotes above, or other such code words, like “enemy combatant,” “free trade agreement,” “security barrier,” “indefinite detention,” “targeted killing,” or “troubled asset relief program.” 
+I could go on, but I probably shouldn’t. Odds are, I’m already on the list of Putin-worshiping, anti-Semitic, racist, misogynist, neo-nationalist, non-standing up for the National Anthem, conspiracy theorizing America-haters. The last thing I need to do at this point is start jabbering about how the United States is an authoritarian corporatist dystopia ruled by a global capitalist elite that couldn’t give less of a shit about Americans (or any other actual people living in any other actual countries), where the corporate media can whip up mass fanatical support for wars of aggression, or corporate puppets, by pointing their fingers at yet another bogeyman and shouting “Hitler” at the top of their lungs. Next thing you know I’d be writing about “banks,” and “global corporations,” and “national sovereignty,” and we all know what that’s about, don’t we? 
+C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (US). He can reached at his website, cjhopkins.com, or at consentfactory.org. (Reprinted from Counterpunch by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
+10505,Hillary Clinton Holds 6-Point Lead Despite FBI Probe [Update],"Despite the e-mail FBI probes currently ongoing, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton holds a 6-point lead over her rival Donald Trump. On October 31, 2016, at approximately 4:00 P.m. EDT, NBC announced, “James Comey, FBI Director, released a statement about the Democratic nominee having several emails on a nonsecure server.”
+The timing of the FBI probe, while Clinton holds a 6-point lead over Trump, remains coincidental. According to NBC: “A recent poll tracking the election asked voters whether or not the release of Comey’s letter was a publicity stunt to distract them or an attempt to address an actual problem. Due to the timing of the letter’s release, about 56 percent of voters believe the letter was to deter voters from voting for the Democratic nominee and remains unaffected.”
+Voters have spoken out about the need for the FBI to probe Clinton, as she poses a threat to Trump as she holds a national 6-point lead.
+Update: CNN Politics 
+A Poll conducted by CNN Politics shows that Clinton has a 5-point lead over North Carolina; a state Trump needs to win.
+Written By Jhayla D. Tyson
+Edited by Cathy Milne
+Sources:
+CNN Politics: New Polls Show Tight Clinton-Trump Race Nationally, Battlegrounds
+NBC News : Poll: Clinton Maintains National Lead Over Trump Despite FBI Letter
+Featured Image Courtesy of Michael Kovac’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License    clinton , Doanld Trump , fbi , Hillary Clinton , probe",FAKE
+823,"If Donald Trump wants to beat Hillary Clinton, he needs to win these 5 states","The Republican nomination is his. Now there's a new question: Can Donald Trump win the White House?
+
+With a decisive victory in the Indiana primary Tuesday, the billionaire businessman who was initially ridiculed as a reality-TV candidate was declared the presumptive nominee by Republican National Chairman Committee Reince Priebus. Trump's final two rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, called it quits, sealing the most remarkable political rise in modern American history.
+
+Now some of his primary rivals and other senior Republicans argue that Trump's lack of governmental experience and his unprecedented negative ratings — including among such crucial electoral groups as women, Latinos and young people — will doom his prospects in November. But as Trump likes to remind people, the conventional wisdom has been wrong about him from the start.
+
+""It's been some unbelievable day and evening and year,"" Trump declared in a victory speech Tuesday night in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, where he had announced his candidacy almost a year ago. “We’re going to win big league, believe me.""
+
+He faces what could charitably be described as an uphill battle. A national CNN/ORC poll, taken April 28-May 1, showed Clinton with a daunting lead over Trump of 54%-41%. To win the White House, he needs to hold all of the states Mitt Romney won in 2012, with a total of 206 electoral votes, then add at least 64 more to get to the 270 mark to claim the presidency.
+
+A look at five states that could hold the key to both how a Trump victory is possible and how difficult it will be. Here's one scenario that would give Trump 273 electoral votes — and the White House.
+
+In the past 16 presidential elections, Arizona has voted Democratic just once, in 1996. But Trump's characterization of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers and his vow to build a wall along the Southern border have energized Latino voters here. In the latest RealClearPolitics average of recent statewide polls, Clinton leads the state by 3.5 percentage points. She and Trump showed strength in Arizona in its primaries last month, each winning by double digits.
+
+Democrats say North Carolina has been moving in the party's direction, but after Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 he lost it in 2012. Now Clinton leads Trump by 2 points in statewide polls, and both husband Bill Clinton and daughter Chelsea Clinton have visited the state in recent weeks. Boosted by her solid support among African Americans, Clinton won the primary over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by 14 points in March; Trump edged Texas Sen. Ted Cruz by 3 points.
+
+Florida defines a swing state: In the last six elections, Democrats have carried it three times, Republicans have carried it three times. In statewide polls, Clinton now leads, but by just 2.2 points. She's already returned to the state for campaign-related events since the Democratic primary in March, which she won by more than 30 points. But Trump has roots in Florida, including his lavish Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach. He crushed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the primary by close to 20 points after pushing former governor Jeb Bush out of the race entirely. Would ""Little Marco,"" as Trump called Rubio, pitch in to help in the fall?
+
+No Republican has won the White House without carrying Ohio, and since 1960 the Buckeye State has had a perfect record of going with the national winner. At the moment, Clinton holds a lead in statewide polls, but it's narrow: 3.5 points. In March, she easily won the state's Democratic primary. Trump lost the Republican primary to the home-state governor, John Kasich. But Ohio's struggling manufacturing base and its hard-pressed blue-collar voters could provide a receptive audience for Trump's message in the general election. Kasich would be in a position to boost the GOP nominee, if he chose to do so. And where was Clinton campaigning Tuesday? Ohio.
+
+Pennsylvania hasn't voted Republican in the presidential race since 1988, but the state includes many of the white working-class voters who are Trump's most fervent supporters. In last week's primary, Trump won two-thirds of Republican voters who didn't have a college degree, defeating Cruz overall by more than 2-1. Clinton won the Democratic primary by 12 points. In statewide polls now, Clinton leads by 7.4 points. As in Florida and Ohio, Pennsylvania has a competitive Senate race that could also play a role.",REAL
+10392,CLINTON CAMPAIGN CHAIRMAN HAD MULTIPLE DINNERS WITH TOP DOJ OFFICIAL DURING HILLARY'S EMAIL INVESTIGATION,"Email 
+
+The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, the Democrat’s campaign chairman, met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, a top official at the Justice Department. 
+The dinner arrangement, revealed in hacked Podesta emails released by Wikileaks, is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices. 
+Podesta and Kadzik, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, were in frequent contact, other emails show. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign. 
+The post-Benghazi dinner was attended by Podesta, Kadzik, superlobbyist Vincent Roberti and other well-placed Beltway fixtures. 
+The exchanges are another example of the Clinton campaign’s “cozy relationship” with the Obama Justice Department, one former U.S. Attorney tells The Daily Caller.",FAKE
+616,Reid plotting to stay in power,Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan does a lot of media but only has 2 public supporters,REAL
+9465,Under the Surface - Naomi Klein and the Great Barrier Reef,"Under the Surface - Naomi Klein and the Great Barrier Reef Share on Facebook Tweet In Under the Surface, a special Guardian film, the award-winning writer and environmental campaigner Naomi Klein travels to the Great Barrier Reef with her son, Toma, to see the impact of coral bleaching caused by climate change. In a personal but also universal story, Klein tells how she wants him to bear witness. ‘Just in case, amid the coral that is still alive, he can find something... read more 
+In Under the Surface, a special Guardian film, the award-winning writer and environmental campaigner Naomi Klein travels to the Great Barrier Reef with her son, Toma, to see the impact of coral bleaching caused by climate change. In a personal but also universal story, Klein tells how she wants him to bear witness. ‘Just in case, amid the coral that is still alive, he can find something beautiful to connect with, something he can carry with him as he navigates life on a warmer, harsher planet than the one I grew up on. Because climate change is already here – and kids are on the frontlines’ [watch video below]",FAKE
+5001,"Trump shakes up campaign, prepares to roll out long-awaited ads","Donald Trump, hitting reset on his 2016 campaign, is preparing to roll out his first wave of general election TV ads in four pivotal battleground states after shaking up the top echelon of his team in a bid to focus his message and make up lost ground in the polls against Hillary Clinton.
+
+“I am committed to doing whatever it takes to win this election, and ultimately become President because our country cannot afford four more years of the failed Obama-Clinton policies which have endangered our financial and physical security,” the Republican nominee said in a statement early Wednesday announcing the latest staffing changes.
+
+In what was described as an expansion, Trump promoted pollster Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager and named Stephen Bannon, the co-founder of Breitbart News, as campaign chief executive. Trump said in the statement that Paul Manafort, who took over following the departure of Corey Lewandowski in June, will maintain his current title and work closely with Conway and Bannon on the campaign moving forward.
+
+Meanwhile, a senior Trump aide told Fox News the campaign will be rolling out TV ads Friday in the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and North Carolina.
+
+This would be three days earlier than Manafort originally planned – the campaign had been preparing to launch ads after the Olympics, which end Sunday. Clinton, though, has been plastering the airwaves with ads, while taking a significant post-convention lead in a number of battleground and national polls.
+
+Trump seems to be changing up his approach, amid concerns that his off-the-cuff style could be hurting him in the general election environment. In a shift, he delivered a scripted speech to a rally audience Tuesday night in Wisconsin, appealing to minority voters in part by accusing Clinton of ""bigotry"" and saying she sees African-Americans as no more than votes to be won.
+
+In an interview with Fox News, Trump voiced confidence in the state of his campaign.
+
+“We’ve got a lot of money in the bank and I haven’t spent any of it,” he said, while confirming his campaign would be airing ads soon.
+
+“We’ve got some pretty good ads,” he said.
+
+In a statement, Trump also called Conway and Bannon “extremely capable.”
+
+Conway told Fox News that “everyone else” on the campaign will remain in place.
+
+“This is an expansion during the busy homestretch in the campaign,” she added.
+
+Trump will step off the stump Wednesday in order to attend his first classified briefing from intelligence officials, at the FBI office in New York.
+
+On a conference call, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook suggested little would change for Trump despite the staffing changes.
+
+“What’s become clear from this is that no matter how much the establishment wants to clean Donald Trump up … and get him on message, he has officially won the fight to let Trump be Trump,” he said. “It’s time that we believe him.”
+
+Though Trump previously has resisted repeated calls from fellow Republicans to change his approach on the campaign trail that has powered his surge to the top of the GOP field in the primary season, recent poll numbers have showed that Clinton has a sizeable lead in several key states. It could force Trump to pivot as the campaign moves forward, though he still downplays that possibility.
+
+""You know, I am who I am,"" he told a local Wisconsin television station Tuesday. ""It's me. I don't want to change. Everyone talks about, 'Oh, well you're going to pivot, you're going to.' I don't want to pivot. I mean, you have to be you. If you start pivoting, you're not being honest with people.""
+
+The Associated Press reported that the moves were discussed at a lengthy senior staff meeting at Trump Tower Tuesday while the billionaire mogul was on the road. Additional senior hires are expected to come in the next few days.
+
+Trump, whose campaign is built on his persona as a winner, said several times that the campaign is ""doing well,"" and said his speech hours earlier in Wisconsin Tuesday was well-received.
+
+""We're going to be doing something very dramatic,"" Trump added.
+
+In the Wisconsin outing, Trump accused Clinton of ""bigotry"" and being ""against the police,"" claiming that she and other Democrats have ""betrayed the African American community"" and pandered for votes.
+
+Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri responded with a statement early Wednesday accusing Trump of being the bigot instead.
+
+""With each passing Trump attack, it becomes clearer that his strategy is just to say about Hillary Clinton what's true of himself. When people started saying he was temperamentally unfit, he called Hillary the same. When his ties to the Kremlin came under scrutiny, he absurdly claimed that Hillary was the one who was too close to Putin. Now he's accusing her of bigoted remarks -- We think the American people will know which candidate is guilty of the charge,"" she said.
+
+Fox News’ Christopher Snyder, Carl Cameron, Dan Gallo and Jason Donner and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5923,"Election: “Today, a kingdom will be toppled.”","Election: “Today, a kingdom will be toppled.” November 08, 2016 President Obama aboard Marine One departs on the last day of campaigning from the White House. 
+On Election Day Eve, Senior Editor of Charisma Magazine releases an Election Day dream, ""Today, a kingdom will be toppled."" 
+Jennifer LeClaire describes the dream as ""spiritually disturbing"". She shares of the many people that have contacted her with dreams they have had as well. The claims of prophetic messages range from declaring Donald J. Trump as the next commander-in-chief to Obama not handing over the keys to the White House. The visions of chaotic turmoil disrupting in the streets of America have also been very vividly shared. LeClaire like many of us admits that she has never seen such prophetic whirlwind over an election in her lifetime. 
+The night before Election Day she had a dream about the number of prophetic voices and among them she saw some with selfish agendas either for monetary gain or seeking accolades from man. During LeClarie’s time of reflection after this powerful dream she assures to have heard these words clearly: “Today, a kingdom will be toppled”. Although she is still praying over what she believes to have been divinely revealed, the urgency to share the dream was clear. 
+In an interview with TRUNEWS last week LeClaire clearly shared her position as one with a focus on intense prayer. She talked about the importance for the Church to be lead by the spirit and keep their faith on Christ. 
+Original article by Charisma News / TRUNEWS analysis. 
+Article by , Correspondent for TRUNEWS Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+9651,Donald Trump Elected 45th President Of The United States,"Via AP : 
+Donald Trump was elected America’s 45th president Tuesday, an astonishing victory for a celebrity businessman and political novice who capitalized on voters’ economic anxieties, took advantage of racial tensions and overcame a string of sexual assault allegations on his way to the White House.
+His triumph over Hillary Clinton will end eight years of Democratic dominance of the White House and threatens to undo major achievements of President Barack Obama. He’s pledged to act quickly to repeal Obama’s landmark health care law, revoke the nuclear agreement with Iran and rewrite important trade deals with other countries, particularly Mexico and Canada.
+The Republican blasted through Democrats’ longstanding firewall, carrying Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that hadn’t voted for a GOP presidential candidate since the 1980s. He needed to win nearly all of the competitive battleground states, and he did just that, claiming Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and others.
+Global stock markets and U.S. stock futures plunged deeply, reflecting investor alarm over what a Trump presidency might mean for the economy and trade.
+A New York real estate developer who lives in a sparking Manhattan high-rise, Trump forged a striking connection with white, working class Americans who feel left behind in a changing economy and diversifying country. He cast immigration, both from Latin America and the Middle East, as the root of the problems plaguing many Americans and taped into fears of terrorism emanating at home and abroad.
+Trump will take office with Congress expected to be fully under Republican control. GOP Senate candidates fended off Democratic challengers in key states and appeared poised to maintain the majority. Republicans also maintained their grip on the House.
+Senate control means Trump will have great leeway in appointing Supreme Court justices, which could mean a major change to the right that would last for decades.
+Trump upended years of political convention on his way to the White House, leveling harshly personal insults on his rivals, deeming Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers, and vowing to temporarily suspend Muslim immigration to the U.S. He never released his tax returns, breaking with decades of campaign tradition, and eschewed the kind of robust data and field efforts that helped Obama win two terms in the White House, relying instead on his large, free-wheeling rallies to energize supporters. His campaign was frequently in chaos, and he cycled through three campaign managers this year.
+His final campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, touted the team’s accomplishments as the final results rolled in, writing on Twitter that “rally crowds matter” and “we expanded the map.”
+The mood at Clinton’s party grew bleak as the night wore out, with some supporters leaving, others crying and hugging each other. Top campaign aides stopped returning calls and texts, as Clinton and her family hunkered down in a luxury hotel watching the returns.
+At 2 a.m., Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta told the crowd to head home for the night. “We’re still counting votes and every vote should count,” he said.
+Trump will inherit an anxious nation, deeply divided by economic and educational opportunities, race and culture.
+Exit polls underscored the fractures: Women nationwide supported Clinton by a double-digit margin, while men were significantly more likely to back Trump. More than half of white voters backed the Republican, while nearly 9 in 10 blacks and two-thirds of Hispanics voted for the Democrat.
+Doug Ratliff, a 67-year-old businessman from Richlands, Virginia, said Trump’s election would be one of the happiest days of his life.
+“This county has had no hope,” said Ratliff, who owns strip malls in the area badly beaten by the collapse of the coal industry. “You have no idea what it would mean for the people if Trump won. They’ll have hope again. Things will change. I know he’s not going to be perfect. But he’s got a heart. And he gives people hope.”
+Trump has pledged to usher in a series of sweeping changes to U.S. domestic and foreign policy: repealing Obama’s signature health care law, though he has been vague on what he could replace it with; building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border; and suspending immigration from country’s with terrorism ties. He’s also praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and spoken of building a better relationship with Moscow, worrying some in his own party who fear he’ll go easy on Putin’s provocations.
+The Republican Party’s tortured relationship with its nominee was evident right up to the end. Former President George W. Bush and wife Laura Bush declined to back Trump, instead selecting “none of the above” when they voted for president, according to spokesman Freddy Ford.
+House Speaker Paul Ryan, a reluctant Trump supporter, called the businessman earlier in the evening to congratulate him, according to a Ryan spokeswoman.
+Read the entire story 
+",FAKE
+2671,Unskewing Facebook will take all kinds: Column,"Shortages of women, minorities and conservatives are shaping digital content in ways you can't see.
+
+We’ve learned a lot this month about how Facebook picks its trending topics: A team of curators monitors lists of stories organized by an algorithm, boosting, banning and remixing headlines in real time. Those curators may or may not suppress conservative news, something that’s sparked questions about how the social network shapes the content users see.
+
+Facebook is, of course, free to decide what to publish, but a public conversation about its methods is still a good thing, especially if that discussion focuses on more than political leanings.
+
+Anyone troubled by the notion of bias at Facebook, including the conservative leaders who met with CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, should also be upset by its lack of diversity and the homogeneous workforces of many tech companies. These cornerstones of the social web play significant roles in determining what is and isn’t news. If the default worker is white, male, straight and liberal, that increases the risk that journalism’s future will repeat the mistakes of its past.
+
+It’s no secret that traditional journalism has a diversity problem. The American Society of News Editors’ most recent census found that just under 13% of daily newspaper journalists were non-white and 37% were female. Broadcast newsrooms are slightly more diverse, with 22% minorities and 41% women. As for ideology, only 7% of journalists in a 2013 Indiana University survey said they were Republicans. Four times as many said they were Democrats and over half were independents.
+
+A diverse press corps matters for lots of reasons, but here’s the most important one: There’s no such thing as an objective journalist. Most of us strive for fairness and accuracy in our methods, but every choice we make — who we interview, what details we include, where to deploy our newsroom resources — reflects our own subtle biases. So, when everyone shares the same cultural identity, it’s easier to overlook important stories or to misrepresent entire segments of the population.
+
+Practicing journalism means makes countless choices. The same it true when it comes to writing the computer code that powers Facebook and other digital platforms. Programmers, like journalists, help determine what goes viral and what vanishes into the deep recesses of the internet.
+
+Facebook is more racially diverse than typical newsrooms: 55% of employees are white and 36% are Asian. Blacks, Hispanics and people who identify as mixed race make up the remaining 9%. Women, meanwhile, represent 32% of the total Facebook workforce. They fill just 16% of tech positions and represent 23% of senior leadership. Facebook staffers also show signs of leaning to the political left: They've been far more likely to support liberal candidates and causes, according to one analysis of campaign donations.
+
+Just like good journalists strive for fairness, good programmers follow professional standards, but neither can escape subtle personal biases. Take, for instance, when software used by Little League Baseball to write game stories attached a male pronoun to (female) pitcher Mo’Ne Davis. There’s also evidence that programs used to screen resumes and loan applications may learn the biases of their creators.
+
+When it comes to the modern information ecosystem, these subtleties matter more than ever before. We are, as the Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote last year, awash in a “wave” of distributed content — material created for platforms other than the news organization’s website. SnapChat Discover, Apple News and Facebook’s instant articles are just some of the ways news now finds it audience.
+
+Groups like the National Association of Black Journalists, the Association of LGBT Journalists and the Journalism and Women Symposium (of which I’m a member) have worked for decades to diversify journalism. Yet the Facebook flap is a powerful reminder that pushing for change in newsrooms alone isn’t enough. Diversity matters for both the organizations producing the content and the organizations helping it find an audience.
+
+Facebook’s employees should continue choosing the topics they believe are the most relevant, but users must demand that the people who make those choices — and the people who write the computer code that helps determine what choices are available — represent the full diversity of the human experience.
+
+Meg Heckman, a writer on gender, politics and technology, is a lecturer in journalism at theUniversity of New Hampshire. Follow her on Twitter @meg_heckman.
+
+In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns, go to the Opinion front page and follow us on Twitter @USATOpinion.",REAL
+3020,State parties can reduce polarization and improve the political system | Institution,"Amid dizzying chaos in presidential politics (at least on the Republican side) and seemingly intractable dysfunction in Washington, it’s tempting to conclude that stabilizing influences are nowhere to be found. But that wouldn’t be true. Hidden in plain view, state parties continue to play a critical and distinctive role in politics, and strengthening them is an achievable way to improve the functioning of the political system.
+
+That is what Raymond J. La Raja (a political scientist with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and I conclude in a new Brookings report. In “The State of State Parties,” the two of us, along with U-Mass (Amherst) researcher Samuel VanSant Stoddard, looked up-close and in detail at the condition of state party committees, surveying all 100 of them (56 responded) and interviewing 15 of their leaders. We also compared our findings with earlier surveys, gathered national data, and interviewed national-level party officials. Our main conclusions:
+
+Beyond its conclusions, our report provides a rich account of what state parties are doing and how well they’re doing it in the real world. The report’s findings are data driven and complemented with rich quotations and stories.
+
+The disorganization of American politics is a generational problem that will take years to sort out. Being political realists, La Raja and I believe reforms need to be gradualist and doable, and they need to cut with, rather than against, the grain of everyday political incentives. State parties have been overlooked for too long, and they offer fertile ground for practical and attainable solutions for the growing dysfunction in American politics.",REAL
+2548,Immigration Puzzle Confounds Republican 2016 Field,"Republicans are girding for a 2016 campaign debate with Democrats on immigration, but their presidential candidates are still unsure of the best way to handle an issue that could make or break their party’s ability to win back the White House.
+
+Many of the contenders are equivocating or openly shifting their positions on the central question of how to handle the millions of people who are in the U.S. illegally, which Hillary Clinton...",REAL
+4507,"Washington, DC, workers to get 16 weeks paid leave under city hall plan that taxes businesses","Washington, D.C., is poised to give workers in the city the most generous family-leave benefits in the country -- a plan that is backed by the Obama administration and would side-step Congress on such issues.
+
+If approved, the legislation would give essentially every part- and full-time employee in the nation’s capital as much as 16 weeks of paid leave for such family matters as newborn care, illness or a sick relative.
+
+The plan would be funded by an employer tax and was introduced last week with support from seven City Council members, enough to pass in the 13-person panel, in one of the most liberal cities in the country.
+
+The Obama administration and other supporters argue lower-paid employees cannot afford to take off work for family matters and that 43 million U.S. private-sector workers have no employer-paid sick days.
+
+“It’s important for women to take time at home when they have a child and for people to take time off when they have a sick family member,"" Dave Alpert, publisher of the news website Greater, Greater Washington, told FoxNews.com on Thursday. ""But a lot of people cannot afford to go without pay to do that. This bill would allow them to not have to make the all-or-nothing choice.""
+
+Supporters also argue the United States lags far behind Europe in proving such benefits and that expanding such care would make the District of Columbia more competitive in the labor market.
+
+However, businesses and other critics say the plan would over-burden some companies, particularly smaller ones and perhaps force them to leave.
+
+“The D.C. Chamber of Commerce cannot support the legislation,” said group President Harry Wingo, suggesting, in part, a lack of adequate financial analysis. “This bill would be unprecedented and make the District of Columbia dangerously uncompetitive.”
+
+The administration has thrown its full support behind the effort, making at least $1 million in Labor Department grant money available this year for cities and states.
+
+In addition, agency Secretary Thomas Perez joined Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama, this spring on a cross-country promotional tour that also included blogs, web testimonials and an online Google Hangout chat.
+
+“Across the country, state and local governments aren’t waiting for Congress to take action,” Perez said in April, after the “Lead to Leave” tour stopped in Providence, R.I.
+
+He also reminded Americans that the administration is committed to expanding access to paid leave by “supporting cities and states seeking to enact paid leave policies” and that Obama in his 2015 State of the Union address called on them to pass legislation to expand sick pay for workers.
+
+Obama has made some headway in efforts to increase wages and narrow the country’s so-called income-inequality gap, in part by using an executive order to increase the minimum wage for federal contract employees.
+
+However, his efforts to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to at least $10.10 an hour have failed in the Republican-controlled Congress.
+
+“This is of national interest, and the District is leading the way,” D.C. Councilwoman Elissa Silverman, an Independent, said Thursday about the family leave proposal, which she is co-sponsoring.
+
+Silverman also pointed out that companies like Netflix and Facebook are offering similar deals to in part attract and keep employees, “not just out of the goodness of their hearts.”
+
+D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has expressed support for the proposal but has also raised concerns about its potential fiscal impact on the city.
+
+The D.C. plan, kick-started with at least $96,000 of the federal grant money, would create a fund by taxing city employers on a sliding scale.
+
+The average annual cost would be roughly $385 per employee.
+
+Employers would have to pay the equivalent of 1 percent of workers’ salaries of at least $150,000, or $1,500 a year.
+
+Companies that pay the minimum wage ($10.50 an hour in the District) would pay about 0.6 percent, or about $131 annually for each employee.
+
+Workers making up to $52,000 a year would be eligible for full wages or salary for a maximum 16 weeks. Those who make more would be eligible for the first $1,000 of their weekly income, plus a percentage of the remainder up to $3,000 a week.
+
+Among the exceptions are the self-employed and people who travel into the District to work for a federal agency or office because the city cannot tax the U.S. government nor impose a commuter tax.
+
+California, New Jersey and Rhode Island already have mandated policies on family leave, but the District’s offers more than twice as many paid weeks.",REAL
+176,House Committee Votes To Remind Congress Its Job Is To Authorize Wars,"During a House Appropriations Committee hearing, lawmakers added language to the 2016 defense spending bill stating that ""Congress has a constitutional duty to debate and determine whether or not to authorize the use of military force"" against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL or ISIS.
+
+The amendment, offered by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), has no binding effect. It does nothing to force a congressional debate on the duration, costs or endgame of the war. It simply states that it is Congress' responsibility to have that debate and then vote to authorize, or not to authorize, war.
+
+""We must recognize that Congress has an important role to play in matters of war and peace. It's way past time to reassert Congress' role in war-making,"" said Lee. ""We can't allow this policy of endless war to continue. This amendment just says Congress has a constitutional duty to debate and determine whether to use military force against ISIL. A debate. Doing our job. That's all this amendment requires.""
+
+President Barack Obama has been directing airstrikes against ISIS since August, and he's been doing so without new congressional authorization. The Constitution requires Congress to declare wars, but in this case, Obama said he doesn't need lawmakers' sign-off because a sweeping 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force covers his actions. Lawmakers have disputed that point for months, so the president sent them a new, Islamic State-specific AUMF proposal in February, saying he welcomed a vote on it, even though he doesn't think he needs it.
+
+Democrats say Obama's proposal is too broad, Republicans say it's too restrictive, and their differences have given way to complacency. That leaves the U.S. engaged in a military campaign with no end in sight. The U.S. has already spent more than $2.1 billion, participated in more than 4,000 airstrikes and sent 3,000 military personnel to Iraq in the effort.
+
+The reality is that many lawmakers don't want anything to do with a war authorization vote, for fear that if something goes wrong, their fingerprints will be on it. A handful of Democrats have been pushing for a debate and a vote, but neither GOP nor Democratic Party leaders are doing anything to make the issue a priority.
+
+Tuesday's committee vote at least showed there is bipartisan support in the House for debating and voting on war authorization -- something House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has signaled isn't going to happen on his watch.
+
+""We are not only evading this responsibility on both sides of the aisle, quite frankly … but we are handing over war-making authority to the executive branch, to all future presidents, with both hands. It is a gigantic mistake not to do our job,"" said Cole.
+
+Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) was among those who opposed Lee's amendment. He called it ""totally inappropriate"" to tie a war authorization measure -- even one that just states the role of Congress -- to the defense spending bill.
+
+Lee offered two other amendments that were rejected. One would have repealed the 2001 AUMF, with a cushion of eight months for Congress to pass a new, ISIS-specific AUMF in its place. The other would have repealed the 2002 AUMF that authorized the Iraq War. Neither of those AUMFs have an expiration date, and Obama has leaned on both as his legal justification for taking military action against ISIS on his own.",REAL
+2322,Jeb Bush Weighs In On Same-Sex Marriage,"""It ought be a local decision. I mean, a state decision,"" Bush told the Miami Herald. ""The state decided. The people of the state decided. But it’s been overturned by the courts, I guess.""
+
+""It's disappointing to see that Jeb Bush has the same opinion of marriage equality as the presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton,"" Angelo told The Huffington Post. ""Jeb had a chance to differentiate himself from her, and at the very least say that, in Florida, marriage equality is settled law and there are more pressing issues demanding attention. As it stands, Jeb tacks the same line as Hillary: that marriage is something that should be left to the states.""
+
+During an interview in June with NPR's Terry Gross, Clinton repeatedly said that for her, marriage had always been ""a matter left to the states"" but never clarified whether she believes same-sex marriage bans violate the U.S. Constitution.
+
+""I don't think people need to be discriminated against because they don't share my belief on this, and if people love their children with all their heart and soul and that's what they do and that's how they organize their life, that should be held up as examples for others to follow because we need it,"" Bush said. ""We desperately need it and that can take all sorts of forms, it doesn't have to take the one that I think should be sanctioned under the law.""
+
+UPDATE: 5:45 p.m. -- In a statement to The New York Times Monday, Bush acknowledged that marriage equality was now the law of the land in many places and seemed to express little appetite for working to repeal it.
+
+""We live in a democracy, and regardless of our disagreements, we have to respect the rule of law,"" he said. ""I hope that we can show respect for the good people on all sides of the gay and lesbian marriage issue -- including couples making lifetime commitments to each other who are seeking greater legal protections and those of us who believe marriage is a sacrament and want to safeguard religious liberty.""
+
+UPDATE: 8:10 p.m. -- In a 1994 oped in the Miami Herald, dug up by BuzzFeed, Bush argued against providing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals equal legal protections, writing, ""[Should] sodomy be elevated to the same constitutional status as race and religion? My answer is No.""
+
+Bush spokeswoman Kristy Campbell said Bush would no longer use that language: ""Gov. Bush believes that our society should have a culture of respect for all people, regardless of their differences, and that begins with preventing discrimination, including when it comes to sexual orientation. This opinion editorial from 20 years ago does not reflect Gov. Bush’s views now, nor would he use this terminology today.""",REAL
+1387,Insiders: Trump and Clinton will carry Iowa,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+8199,New RNC Ad Campaign Reminds Voters Obamacare Was Originally 'Hillarycare',"Share on Twitter 
+The Republican National Committee launched a new video advertisement Thursday hitting Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on her support for the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as “Obamacare.” 
+The 27-second video, which is part of a five-figure campaign on Facebook, details the recent developments surrounding increased healthcare premiums for individuals in certain states by reminding voters of Clinton's support for the landmark law. 
+The video, obtained by Independent Journal Review, also plays Clinton's quote taking credit for the Affordable Care Act's framework: 
+“Before it was called Obamacare, it was called Hillarycare.” 
+In a statement, RNC chairman Reince Priebus said, “Hillary Clinton’s tone deaf promises to expand Obamacare will only mean a greater strain on the finances of many American families,” adding: 
+“Hillary Clinton has for years touted her own botched healthcare plans as the blueprint for this trainwreck of a law that was designed to fail, and the almost daily reports of skyrocketing premiums, disappearing options, and collapsing state exchanges will remain a reality if she is president.” 
+Obamacare's struggles have been a prominent focus for Republicans in many down-ballot races across the United States. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has touched on the issue as well, releasing a brief healthcare position paper . 
+Because of Clinton's role in the framework and selling of the Affordable Care Act, Priebus said that voters should reject Clinton. 
+“The best way to hold Hillary Clinton and Democrats in Congress accountable for this mess is to elect Donald Trump president and return Republican majorities to the House and Senate so we can pass patient-centered healthcare reform that won’t cripple family budgets,"" he said. ",FAKE
+7772,"Comment on 5 Corporations Own The U.S. Media – We’ve Been Conditioned How To Think, What To Think, And What To Do by You’re Being Fooled: The Problem With ‘Alternative’ News Websites – Collective Evolution","  From the day we are born into this world, we are being taught what our parents have been taught, and what their parents have taught them, without asking many questions such as who we are, why we are here, and why things are the way they are. Existential questions are simply perceived as irrelevant in a left-brained society; in which money and career performance seem to be the primary focus. For those who seek a reason, countless financed religious institutions claim to provide the ultimate answers and a securing spiritual identity. From cradle to grave, we are following the guidelines of what authority defines as a state-of-the-art system, in which “success” seems to begin and end within the running wheel of education, career performance, debt management and retirement. A vibrant economy is the ultimate priority of our global hierarchy. However, a vibrant planet, the respect of all life forms, healthy foods, peaceful ways and conscious actions seem to remain a mere subject of conversation, often turned into a few fundraising campaigns with very little or no impact at all. After all, living consciously and in perfect harmony with nature certainly goes against the principles of industrialism. Generations have passed, trends have changed, technologies have emerged and a better communication has opened doors for alternative information and ideas that are pushing the envelope on society’s boundaries. Yet they all seem to remain in the “fantasy” section of our industrialist system, for in the good old ways of a governing establishment we ought to trust. “Authority knows best” is the slogan of our conventional wisdom, and we meanwhile can mind our own business, go on with our lives, get our needs met and attempt to live happily ever after as long as we conform to the expected norms of society. We then pass on this set of unquestioned beliefs and habits to our children, encouraging then to perpetuate the same cycle, because after all, it is all we’ve ever known. Is this all there is to life? Is this way of life forever sustainable?· Do we have to live this way? What is the purpose of our existence? Such questions are well worth asking, because to realize that there is more to us than what we’ve been led to believe is the first step towards uncovering answers. “The search implies that there is something more to life than what is presently the case.” – Jeff Foster Human Nature or Human Conditioning We have been told that the state of our world is purely the result of our inherent human nature. Some even say we are born ill intended, and learn the “good values” through stringent parental, educational or religious discipline. Even though this version of the story has been adopted and repeated by many, we are going to take the road less travelled. Instead of qualifying our true nature as predetermined and unchangeable, could it be that the current state of humanity is the result of a second nature? By definition, a “second nature” is an acquired behaviour that has been so long practiced to the point where it seems innate. It is a conditioning of consciousness, rather than a fundamental characteristic of consciousness. Considering the fact that humanity’s consciousness has been externally influenced for a very long time, shouldn’t this lead us to question how much of our behaviours and aspirations are actually ours? Without a doubt, our society is programmed to sell us on competing belief systems, political views, brands and products, and the list could go on forever. After all, maintaining the trend of such mindsets is what is profitable to the system. Whether it is a cream that promises beauty, a substance that promises relief, a car that promises attention, a career that promises prestige, or a luxurious lifestyle that promises eternal happiness, this system is an expert at creating billions of needs only to sell us on ideas and products that promises to satisfy them. The Mainstream media is the best example of a great influence on the human mind. TV shows, magazines, the news, politics, education, or organised religion all tend to either implement a sense of patriotism, materialism, idolism, conformism, or any compliant mindset that seem to fit the bill of an authority figure. We have been slowly yet surely trained to avoid critical questioning, and to allow what we call our “leaders” to decide of our individual and collective destiny. When it comes to the word “conspiracy” -or the simple thought that the ones in power may not have the benefit of the whole at heart -ridicule is a very popular reaction and is often the treatment that whistleblowers, experts or ex-government officials/employees receive when trying share such simple information. The word has even been paired with “theory”, because people in general have better things to do than to research information that is being labeled as theoretical. Yet the question that we should begin to ask ourselves is: Why would authority would give any credibility to those who challenge and question authority? In this article, we are going to bypass the scrutiny of information and the need to prove opinions or facts, because after all, it is no one else’s job to think for ourselves but ourselves. All information emerging from both sides of the coin in regards to our economic system, our governments or even events such as 9/11 is already out there for us to evaluate. It is therefore up to the individual to switch off the tendency to filter information out of acquired preconceptions, to step aside from “chain reactions” and to research throughly and intuitively. Then again, no matter how much data our brain may take in, it is not necessarily more information that shall make us more “enlightened”. As Einstein once said, “Information is not knowledge.” The point I am making is that constantly thinking in accord to the beliefs we cherish or the information we advocate is certainly not the extent of what knowledge and understanding is. In order to move forward, we have to look beyond competing beliefs and conceptual answers. Whether we are speaking of individuals who proclaim themselves as awake and aware, teachers, religious people or intellectuals; segregation will always cause us to fail to see the bigger picture -as long as we let ourselves be run by our egoic mind *. The Ego vs. The Observer Self The truth is, aside from all of the concepts, belief systems, patterns and behaviours we may have acquired since birth, we all possess a profound awareness that does not relate with our egoic mind. It is a pure awareness that does not filter information with acquired beliefs, and therefore does not have a clouded perception. This consciousness is what some call the intuition, the inner-knowing, the heart, the gut feeling or the soul, yet the word that shall be employed for the moment is the observer self While a teacher teaches what they have been taught, a priest preaches the bible’s teachings, and a politician reiterates the same system, the observer self is the awareness that is not manipulated by anyone or anything, for it does not depend on external factors to build up an identity. It only observes with a clear lens, and therefore see’s things as they truly are. 
+“Your original unconditioned consciousness exists only in you, so going elsewhere can never give you access to your essential nature, to who you really are.” – Byron Brown For example, a young child would naturally perceive a hierarchical government creating wars and the destruction of our planet for economical purposes, as utter nonsense. Yet generations who have been conditioned to believe and teach that war ends war, or that pieces of paper and digits on a computer are the only thing that can make the world go round, are more likely to ignore the self-destruction it implies and “run with the money”. “As things are interpreted or labeled by the mind they slowly cease to be what they are and start to become what is thought about them.”– John Greven Let’s bring forth our observer self for a moment an answer these following questions: Would an awake and aware population allow the damaging and destruction of our home -the Earth- for the sake of the economy? Would it perpetuate the use of petrol -despite the alternatives- for the sake of the economy? Would it allow war profiteering for the sake of the economy? Would it in-debt the poor for the sake of the economy? Would its thoughts be consumed by the obsession of material goods and superficial values? And finally, would an awake and aware population believe in waiting for world leaders to make the world a more harmonious place, when the priorities above are specifically what empower them? Simple observations are really all that is required to blatantly see and feel the imbalance of such a disconnected state of consciousness. However, this is exactly what we are collectively enabling while we keep ourselves busy and distracted over competing with each other’s social statuses, beliefs, race, identities, opinions, and so forth. All of which are often stances that we take on from the very system profiting from all of the priorities mentioned above. A sense of separation from each other, the earth and all other life forms is an obvious characteristic of our system, which has consequently reinforced humanity’s own sense of separation from everyone and everything. We willingly go at war and kill each other, passively accept poverty and famine as being normal while others over consume, and continue to obsess over financial profit despite the consequences. This sense of separation has gotten to the point where parts of the western world knowingly dump their toxic waste in developing countries, as if sending pollution farther away will hide the fact that we all live on the same earth. Yet despite our belief in being separated from the environment, from each other, and by imaginary borders, we all possess an inner knowing that remains unhampered by external indoctrination. This knowing -earlier referred to as the observer self -see’s all life as a whole. Instead of thinking in terms of what can serve or harm ME, it naturally thinks in terms of what can serve or harm US. Take for example a child who did not yet take on a patriotic identity that gives importance to illusory borders, who does not yet comprehend the “ownership” and price tagging of nature, and who does not hold any form of cultural belief system or prejudice. Would this child go to war with another earthling, destroy the planet in the name of pieces of paper and digits on a computer, or be too greedy to desire a world in which we all share the planet’s resources equally? Just like this child, the observer self too perceives purely, with no concept that taints its vision. 
+Many of our ideas and beliefs about ourselves and the world are so deeply ingrained that we are unaware that they are beliefs, and take them, without question, for the absolute truth. – Rupert Spira When we consciously choose to expand our awareness and to simply observe what our system stands for, we realize it does not have to be this way. It is simply erroneous to presume that it endorses a forever-sustainable way of living. It has no concern for respecting nature, or even human lives. It only profits through the promotion of unconsciousness . The simple act of turning on the TV or observing the magazines they sell us at the cashier’s waiting line should make the preceding statement very clear. We may think that an intellectual society offering a stringent education system -which has brought many individuals to a state of esteemed expertise- would naturally lead us to the peak of our human evolution. Yet when we look at the wars we still engage in, the increasing rate of health deterioration, the repetitive oil leaks in our oceans, and the amount of corrupted government regulations that won’t budge, shouldn’t that lead us to ask ourselves: What exactly are we learning? Will we need to experience the shutting down of the earth’s eco-system before we finally set aside our differences and awaken to our interconnectedness and equality with each other, the earth and all life forms? A Shift In Consciousness: Awakening to Oneness 
+“To me, spirituality is about two things: The liberation of consciousness from all illusion, so that the true nature can shine, and an embodiment in life that is an alternative to the patterns of manipulation and greed that dominate our current culture.” –Christian Opitz “ Oneness ” simply means the awareness of our inherent interconnectedness with each other, the earth, the animal kingdom, and essentially the entire universe. It is the profound understanding -beyond opinionated beliefs- that we are all equal facets of the same underlying consciousness in which all life arises. Some physicists call this consciousness “The Unified Field”, some call it a Universal Consciousness, others name it “God”, yet the word that shall be employed in this article is Source. Source is not a separate, superior and judgmental entity as our society’s endorsed religious institutions want us to believe, but is in fact the core essence of who we truly are beyond the experience of separation. Click here to watch the video ‘An Answer To Existential Questions’ For a long period of time, human consciousness has remained caught up within in a very limited archaic programming, which led us to perpetually seeing ourselves as separate from each other, from all lifeforms and from the earth. Hence why we have ended up passively enabling such ill-treatment between each other and the environment. The reality we have created for ourselves is the result of living our lives with our egoic minds in the driver’s seat. We are experiencing the projection of a strictly left-brained consciousness, where we believe there is nothing more to us than the individual physicality, mind, thoughts and emotions. Our society -which is a reflection of this state of consciousness- exclusively honors the ego-driven cleverness of the mind, instead of encouraging the reunification with our heart/soul consciousness. In this state, we have allowed division, fear, and control to keep us from taking responsibility for ourselves and awaken to our true nature, all while waiting for “saviors” or political dictators to outline our individual and collective destiny. Such a disconnected state of consciousness is unsustainable and if not shifted, would lead humanity to its own demise. 
+“Our species is far too clever to survive without wisdom.”– E.F.Schumacker Planet earth is currently undergoing a shift in consciousness. This awakening is leading an increasing amount of individuals to reconnect with their observer self, which is enabling them to perceive the world from a wider, more unified perspective. More are beginning to not only question the ego-driven structures controlling humanity, but to question the very purpose of their existence and of life itself. Such an existential crisis has purposefully guided many towards remembering to who they truly are beyond the mind and the physicality: Souls (the observer self) having a human experience . Because of a past collective soul agreement, we initially incarnated on earth into what is called the “experiential realm”. The purpose was of experiencing and evolving as souls, lifetime after lifetime, while being overruled by a thicker sense of individual identity, mind and ego, and having no direct remembrance of our essence of Oneness/Source. Our souls basically agreed for the experience of feeling what it is like to have a sense of total separation from each other and from Source, to the extent where even the concept of a separation from “God” was later believed as factual. This altogether created a rich and highly polarized sensorial experience. With the intention of certain beings, our experience was later altered with an additional challenge, which was to experience the limitation of a hierarchical structure ruled by separation and egoistical purposes. The elitist group of individuals at the very top of this hierarchy is often referred to as the “Illuminati”, and are pushing forward their agenda for global control with an intellectual “New World Order” (Totalitarian world government and one world currency) -all while being aware of this threatening shift in consciousness. Humanity has experienced and remained caught up in this dormant state for a long while. This undergoing shift in consciousness stems from the fact that we have collectively agreed -at the soul level- to move beyond this collective amnesia to create a new, more conscious, harmonious and expansive experience, all while uncovering our natural state of creative limitlessness , love and peace . This is not a matter of blaming an elitist group for where we are at. We have agreed to overcome such a challenge as souls having a human experience, for us to learn and “grow up” from it. It is simply about finally taking responsibility for what we have created, and move on. 
+“We are not called to fight the bad guy, harm it, or fear it. We are just called to dig within and find our sacred ground. To stand in full love by our bottom line. And as we do, the bad guy will very quickly scuttle away or drop its mask. Because it was never about the bad guy, but about us all along, about finding that essence inside, embracing all of who we are, when faced with any challenge. It is one of the ways in which we can honor the bad guy in his role of carrier of lessons, who is volunteering to wear a dark mask, so we may reach for more and find what was lost.”– Katie Gallanti Letting Go of the Old, Making Room for the New : A Shift of Vibration In the midst of these unique times of social upheaval and spiritual awakening, many individuals find themselves at a crossroad in their personal lives. Challenging situations are arising, and a discomfort in old routines is intensifying. Why is this happening? New energies of a higher consciousness are entering the earth plane, while our world is purging its energetic densities of a lower consciousness. This process is being sensed in our personal lives as well, bringing forth old emotional baggages or situations that challenge our traditional ways of thinking. Such emotions and discomforts will build up as long as we keep on missing the point of our soul’s call, which is to let go of the prevailing thoughts and beliefs that keep us from expanding towards the wholeness , love and infinite potential of who we truly are. As much as collective and personal challenges may feel like turmoil at first, it is merely a sign of old and unsustainable structures/comfort zones breaking down to make room for the new. If it is not about blaming and fighting this insanity and corruption, then where do we go from here? 
+“Peace cannot be kept by force ; it can only be achieved by understanding.”– Albert Einstein When we shift our awareness towards the quantum construct of reality, we understand that everything we can possibly feel and think of is essentially a form and rate of vibration. Quantum physicists accurately describe the fundamental particles of reality as “ wave functions” . The reason for this abstract description is precisely because fundamental particles behave in a most abstract manner. Their existence emerge in waves in which lies only the potentiality for measurable outcomes. The word potentiality is key, because we now know through a number of scientific experiments (such as the double-slit experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7YBmOk1nQw ) that the very presence of a conscious mind observing and/or intending to measure a particle, consequently determines the aspect and location in which it takes form. This quantum decoherence is scientifically known as “the measurement problem”. In other words, the fundamental nature of reality -the “Unified field”, consciousness, “God” or Source- is originally “open” to all potential outcomes. Yet our very consciousness is intimately hooked to the one that shall be experienced. As the physicist Dr. York Dobyns stated, “ Without us, (conscious beings) there would just be this expanding superposition of possibilities with nothing definite ever actually happening.” “Peace in ourselves, peace in the world.” -Thich Nhat Hanh That being said, everything in the universe and on earth vibrates at certain frequencies, including our thoughts, beliefs and emotions. We are literally molding our experienced reality via the power of our personal and collective perceptions, and our inner-state is reflected outwards. As Einstein said, we cannot solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it. This shift in consciousness is but a leap beyond the old dualistic consciousness we chose to experience as souls, towards the consciousness of Oneness, which is of a higher vibrational frequency -one of unconditional Love and understanding of who we really are beyond this physical realm. The angry, judgmental and reactive “egoic mind” actually attracts and emanates through it the same lower frequencies that keep humanity boxed in this low vibrational “matrix” of control. 
+“It’s just a ride and we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money, a choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.” – Bill Hicks Resuming It All In One Simple Analogy It is as if each and everyone of us are projectors responsible for the projections on our own blank walls. Most of us are unconsciously choosing to project a tape of violence, of hate, of segregation, of being powerless, and even of blame of the other 3 projectors for playing their hostile tape. Here lies the silliness, the ironicalness of justifying our own projection through blame. And this is where humanity is at: playing the same tape, over and over again, while most individuals are still blaming the projection instead of changing their own tape that is too playing a role in this projection. As much as we end up pointing fingers at the powers that be, they are no more or less powerful than we are. The only power they grant themselves, is through influencing our choice of the tapes we shall fill our projectors with. Yet we’ve always had the choice, despite us not being aware of it and taking responsibility for ourselves. This is the reason why Humanity is so slow in igniting true change. No one decides to look at their own tape. We seem to rather enjoy the comfort of holding on to the same stories and put them in “repeat” instead of transcending them; instead of BEING the change. The ego doesn’t want to know that it begins with ourselves, it doesn’t want us to dig into our own personal belief systems and let go of certain self-limitative mindsets or emotional baggages we carry. The ego is afraid of what can liberate us, and what can liberate us is ultimately ourselves. 
+“First realize that your world is only a reflection of Yourself and then stop finding fault with the reflection.”– Nisargadatta. This is the illusion so many are still buying into. It is the belief that we have no influence over others and the world. We even think we have no influence over our own lives, no influence as the very projector of our own “blank wall”. This belief stems from the fact that we do not see ourselves at one with the world, at one with the people, and at one with ourselves. We see ourselves as a tiny little separated specs of dust with no power whatsoever through the emanation of our own state of being. Yet we are indeed all interconnected, we are all one. Our own consciousness directly impacts the collective consciousness, which is literally the motor of our experienced reality, it is the “projector” of it. Just as we can change our tape and project harmony on our own blank wall, we can choose to be who we truly are -our unconditioned self- and therefore reflect Peace, Love, Awareness, and all that which uplifts and unveils a more conscious understanding. Or… we can play the tape of blame, anger, hatred, victimization, pointing fingers, and never, ever looking at our own projections. We ultimately have the choice, right here, and right now. 
+“Remember, you are constantly in the act of creating yourself. You are in every moment deciding who and what you are.” – Neale Donald Walsch Elina 
+The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
+You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
+""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
+5721,Black and a member of the 1% elite,"Black and a member of the 1% elite Page 1 Related Threads 1 10/21/16 9 10/22/16 10 ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.006s (8 queries)",FAKE
+8433,No Proof Russia Hacked Hillary's E-mail,"Email 
+""The Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans,” hacking “American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions … in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election,” Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton told Chris Wallace of Fox News in the third and final debate before the November election. 
+But Wallace did not even ask about who hacked her e-mails, some of which have been made publicly available by WikiLeaks. Wallace asked Clinton about a private speech she had delivered to bankers in Brazil, in which she said she dreamed of “open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere. But because Wallace had noted that the source was WikiLeaks, Clinton chose to discuss how the information had been obtained, rather than her shocking statement that she wants America’s borders to be open to any person in the Western Hemisphere who desires to come to the United States. 
+Of course, that would most likely include the majority of the population of North and South America. Certainly it would be millions of immigrants, at the very least. 
+Donald Trump countered Clinton’s bold claim that Russians hacked her e-mails, saying that she “has no idea whether it’s Russia, China, or anybody else.” 
+In rebuttal, Clinton simply repeated her claim, and chastised Trump for even questioning the integrity of U.S. intelligence officials who have taken an oath to defend the country. 
+Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the hacks were perpetrated by the Russian government, or at least that there was strong evidence for such. Should the Obama administration be announcing this to the general public? However, considering that the White House has demonstrated so little concern for the well-being of the United States, it is not surprising that Obama would opt to reveal this information less than a month before the election — an action designed to help the candidate of his political party. 
+Of course, Clinton defended U.S. intelligence agencies as above politics. But the reality is that politics has clearly played a role in some decisions of intelligence agencies, such as in 2012, when the CIA interjected itself in the last political campaign by creating Benghazi talking points. And then there was the distortion of analysis on ISIS and Syria by SOUTHCOM — the U.S. Southern Command, responsible for all military activities in South America and Central America — which conformed to Obama’s foreign policy position. 
+If the Russians were able to hack into Clinton’s e-mails when she was secretary of state, because she was so careless (at best) as to use a private e-mail server, then does that not offer a reason that she should have been indicted? 
+Hillary did not tell the truth when she claimed that 17 intelligence agencies had determined the Russians were responsible for the hacking. Only two agencies — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) — have even addressed this issue, and their conclusion is somewhat different from Hillary’s interpretation of it. The joint statement by DHS and DNI was that the hacks are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts, with the presumed intention to interfere with the election process in the United States. 
+Certainly, the Russians have a history of interfering in the internal affairs of other nations — the KGB and other Soviet agencies regularly used disinformation to plant stories in the Western media. And, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was a high-ranking KGB agent during the Cold War, has publicly stated that he would like to see the restoration of the Russian Empire of the Soviet Era. 
+But all that does not prove Russia had anything to do with this specific hack. 
+The accusation conforms with the narrative that the Clinton campaign has been spouting for the past few months: that Putin prefers Trump over Clinton. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Again, it is interesting that when it was clear that Soviet dictators preferred someone other than Ronald Reagan as president, the Democrats did not consider that a reason to vote for Reagan. Rather, they argued that the United States should “deal” with Brezhnev, Chernenko, Adropov, and Gorbachev, and were highly critical when Reagan did not do so in the early years of his presidency. 
+Clinton herself vowed to have a “reset” on relations with Putin and Russia when she became secretary of state; however, relations have clearly deteriorated with Russia since she and Obama took over American foreign policy. 
+Others do not buy the Russian-hacker theory, anyway. Willliam Binney, a former high-ranking intelligence officer with the National Security Agency, recently told radio host Aaron Klein that he believed it is more likely it was a “disgruntled U.S. intelligence worker” who is responsible. Binney even argued that the FBI has long had access to the database of the NSA, and because of that, “if the FBI really wanted [the e-mails of Clinton], they can go into that database and get them right now.” He insisted that the NSA has all of Clinton’s e-mails, including the deleted correspondence. 
+Judge Andrew Napolitano, speaking on Fox Business’s Judge Napolitano's Chambers , challenged the Clinton assertions, declaring bluntly, “the Russians had nothing to do with it.” 
+The entire discussion of the role of the Russians in passing the information on to WikiLeaks is a diversion from the startling statement Clinton made to Brazilian bankers: that she wants no borders in the Western Hemisphere. This means that it is highly likely that a President Hillary Clinton will follow the pattern of President Barack Obama, who has regularly ignored laws, such as those concerning immigration, with which he does not agree. 
+So, the entire discussion of whether WikiLeaks obtained its information from the Russians or someone else is important, but if Hillary Clinton’s “dream” of a borderless Western Hemisphere were to come true, no one would have much motivation to hack into the e-mail of an American secretary of state. After all, how long could the United States continue to exist, in any meaningful way, without borders? Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
+Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
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+Please post comments in English. 
+Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
+9167,It’s Over For Hillary After People See What She Snuck In Her Online Post,"It’s Over For Hillary After People See What She Snuck In Her Online Post Posted on November 1, 2016 by Amanda Shea in Politics Share This Hillary Clinton 
+Social media seems to be a tricky tool for Hillary Clinton, as she made a major mistake in what she shared online when she was either inebriated or hopped up on medication to treat what’s been plaguing her throughout this election. Shocked viewers couldn’t believe what was seen in her post, which she didn’t catch until it was way too late. 
+Although we’ve seen how good Hillary is at hitting the “delete” button, she didn’t get to it quick enough after what she mindlessly posted that proved what Americans have suspected. Evidently, she didn’t realize she was making a point against herself when she made the comment with the post that said, “A guide to help you make your choice for president,” which mad the mistake all the worse for her. 
+Either Hillary takes full responsibility for being corrupt by apparently admitting to it, or the person that does her social media is paying a big price today. Without reading what she was sharing, Hillary blindly posted an article from the super liberal news site, Slate, assuming that if it was from them, it was pro-Hillary, when the title of the piece called her out for being one of the “most corrupt, least popular candidates of all time.” A guide to help you make your choice for president. https://t.co/QzK7XZYmJW 
+— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 31, 2016 
+Urging her followers in the comment with the post to use it as a guide for making the best presidential pick, it was the best and most honest advice she’s ever given. It’s for this reason that the post was likely an accident since we all know that Hillary is incapable of being truthful, but karma, in this case, ensured she was. The irony of the situation isn’t lost on conservatives but apparently was on Slate, whose piece was actually meant to promote the Democratic candidate but came across as just the opposite. 
+The truth has a sneaky way of coming out as it did in this headline, which calls attention to this woman’s lack of character and qualifications for the presidency. For once, there’s finally some common ground conservatives have found within this liberal publication’s pages, and that’s that Hillary Clinton is corrupt and incapable of being a leader.",FAKE
+8571,"Core Wounds, Soul Family Reunions, and Time Glitches [AUDIO]","Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
+Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
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+By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
+Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
+1827,Christie launches PAC in significant step toward White House run,"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has taken a major step toward a run for president in 2016, forming a political action committee that will allow him to raise money for a possible White House bid.
+
+The creation of the committee, called Leadership Matters for America, was confirmed to Fox News by a Christie adviser. The paperwork was filed Friday before his address over the weekend to the Iowa Freedom Summit, a conservative gathering in Des Moines.
+
+The committee, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, also allows Christie to begin to hire staffers, build the foundations of a campaign operation and travel across the country as he weighs a final decision on a run. He plans to make such trips starting in February, Fox News has learned.
+
+The move comes one month after former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush announced that he was launching a similar organization, which kicked off an aggressive race to lock down donors and may have drawn 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney into the race.
+
+The PAC's staffers will include Matt Mowers, a former Christie aide, who is stepping down from his job as executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party at the end of the month. Christie is named as its honorary chairman.
+
+""We believe there's a void right now in leadership throughout the country,"" Christie's chief political adviser Mike DuHaime told The Journal. ""We aim to support candidates who are willing to take on tough problems and make tough decisions.""
+
+A mission statement on the organization's website echoes themes that Christie has focused in recent speeches, including remarks on Saturday in Iowa in front of conservative activists.
+
+""America has been a nation that has always controlled events and yet today events control us. Why? Because leadership matters,"" the mission statement reads. ""It matters if we want to restore America's role in the world, find the political will to take on the entrenched special interests that continually stand in the way of fundamental change, reform entitlement spending at every level of government, and ensure that every child, no matter their zip code, has access to a quality education.""
+
+Christie, a former federal prosecutor who passed up the opportunity to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012, turned quickly toward laying the groundwork for a 2016 campaign after winning a second gubernatorial term in the heavily Democratic Garden State in 2013.
+
+In the past several months, he has held meetings to court donors, convened late-night briefing sessions on foreign policy and made repeated visits to early-voting states, including in Iowa over the weekend, where he vaguely referred to himself as ""a candidate.""
+
+He takes his next step into the race with several advantages, among them having recently completed a banner year of fundraising as chair of the Republican Governors Association. The group raised more than $100 million on Christie's watch and helped Republican candidates win a series of unexpected races, including the nominally Democratic states of Maryland and Illinois.
+
+Serving as RGA chief also gave Christie the opportunity to travel across the country and build relationships with donors and activists. He is also one of his party's most talented retail politicians, reveling in the kind of one-on-one interaction that voters in the crucial early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire demand.
+
+But Christie also has challenges to overcome, including the still-pending federal investigation into accusations that former staff members and appointees created traffic jams as political payback against the Democratic mayor of a New York suburb by blocking access lanes to the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan.
+
+He's also dogged by questions about the economy of New Jersey, including several recent downgrades of the state's credit rating and sluggish job growth. Christie is also viewed with distrust in certain conservative circles, while other question whether his brash persona and habit of confrontation will play well outside his home state.
+
+While Christie has told supporters to ""relax"" about the timing of his entry into the race, he has faced mounting pressure to get started after Bush -- whose support and donor base significantly overlaps with Christie's -- said he would ""actively explore"" a run.
+
+Christie's campaign is likely to focus on many of the themes he's spent years developing in New Jersey, including a pitch that he can expand the Republican Party's tent by appealing to independent, women and minority voters.
+
+Fox News' Serafin Gomez and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from The Wall Street Journal.",REAL
+10075,Is it possible that Saudi King be tried in US courts by JASTA Law?,"Email 
+
+According to the JASTA law which allows government and leaders of foreign governments’ harassment by families of victims of the terrorist attacks, it is so likely that Saudi king be tried. According to experts, the passing of JASTA may cause international chaos. Especially after some governments threat they will pass similar legislation to prosecute US officials if US do so. 
+Is it possible that Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz being tried for potential liability in events of September 11? The trial is possible by the legislation of Jasta. By Jasta law the families of the victims could sue governments and this will lead to chaos in international relations. 
+In late September, United States Congress ignored President Obama’s advice and his veto and passed JASTA law, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. This law made US-Saudi relation more chaotic. 
+US confederate states expressed concern to JASTA legislation 
+Not just Saudi Arabia expressed concerns to JASTA, US confederate states also expressed concern about breaking the US quasi-sacred treaty with Saudi Arabia and asked for appealing. France and the Netherlands have threatened to pass similar laws which lead to a series of judicial complaints against USA and its military and diplomacy allies. 
+John Kerry, United States Secretary of State, showed his displeasure and called it a huge risk. A few days ago Kerry and Adel al-Jubeir discussed about the ramifications of JASTA and pointed out the negative impact on the diplomatic immunity of US interests. He said: “there are ways to fix the problem.” While experts agreed that it is only possible to reduce the strength of America in complaining by circumvent the law. 
+Even Saudi minister warned the danger of chaos in the international system. 
+According to Hussein ibish, an expert on the Persian Gulf littoral states, JASTA will cause chaos at the international level. 
+Last September, European Union warned: “Other countries may also want to pass similar legislation and discuss impunity. This threat was an addition written letters to US government. 
+Also France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom representatives discussed about the feedback of this law. The Gulf littoral states, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan and Japan Protested against JASTA. 
+The Saudi-US Relations in danger of Jasta 
+Bernard Haykel, Princeton University Professor, said: “If Saudi king does not appear in New York court to be interrogated, warrant will be issued against Saudi Arabia.” Riyadh and Washington relations declined over the past three years especially with Obama's policies on Syria.” JASTA shows Saudi ruling that Obama turned his back to its allies in the Middle East,” he added. 
+Riyadh strictly denies his involvement in 9/11, While 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia. Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, also comments:” America wants to invade his most loyal friend over the past 70 years.” 
+Jasta law does not refer to Saudi Arabia. It would allow families of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks to sue the perpetrators of the attack.",FAKE
+1076,Hillary Clinton had an amazing night — and not just because of her victories,"Tuesday night was an amazing night for Hillary Clinton, and not just because her wins in Florida and Ohio made Bernie Sanders's path to the nomination nearly impossible.
+
+Tuesday night was an amazing night for Hillary Clinton because Marco Rubio dropped out of the race and virtually ensured she will face either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the general election.
+
+A couple of months ago, Rubio's general election strength was conventional wisdom. ""I sometimes want to run around the country grabbing Republican voters by the lapels and screaming, 'You idiots! Don’t you realize Democrats are a hundred times more scared of Rubio than any of these other guys?'"" wrote Matt Yglesias back in January. Rubio was seen as a smart, nimble politician who could reassure moderates, appeal to Latinos (or at least blunt their turnout), and unify the fractious Republican Party.
+
+But his poor performance in the primaries has led to a split in opinions on Rubio. One view is that he was always a weak candidate — it was a mass delusion on behalf of the political establishment to ever pretend otherwise.
+
+The other is that the Republican Party has gone around the bend in ways that made Rubio, the party's strongest general election candidate by far, unacceptable to the Republican base.
+
+I hold the second view. Rubio's primary-season weaknesses were general election strengths. He does hopeful better than he does angry. His record includes occasional pivots toward the center, particularly on immigration. His résumé was relatively thin, and while that reminded some Republicans of criticisms they made of Obama, it also left less to attack in a general election. Rubio was acceptable to all wings of the Republican Party even if he was the first choice of few.
+
+The result is that Rubio could have unified the GOP while running to the middle. His rhetoric was often as partisan and fearmongering as anyone else in the race, but, crucially, he had a second speed, too — he was able to speak the language of optimism and uplift, he was able to come off more moderate than he really was, he was able to talk about the economy by making an argument about the future rather than just a divisive critique of the past.
+
+None of this fit the mood of the Republican Party in this moment, but these are the political skills you need — or at least traditionally have needed — to win a general election.
+
+Trump and Cruz don't have these skills. Cruz is the kind of hardcore conservative ideologue the Republican Party hasn't nominated since Barry Goldwater. Trump is an extremist with extraordinarily high unfavorables who could split the Republican Party, to say nothing of the kind of turnout he'll inspire among Hispanics, women, and young voters. Either candidate solves Clinton's turnout problems among Democrats, where she's faced a real enthusiasm gap compared with Obama.
+
+This is the race the Clinton campaign didn't dare hope for. In recent years, the Republican Party has always turned to the candidate that looks best suited for the general election. In 2000, they went with George W. Bush, the seemingly moderate governor of Texas who ran as a compassionate conservative; in 2008, they went with John McCain, a politician Democrats and independents once liked so much that John Kerry tried to add him to the Democratic ticket in 2008; in 2012, they went with Mitt Romney, who had been a moderate governor of a very blue state.
+
+There was nothing in this record to predict that Republicans would turn to a Cruz or Trump in 2016. But that's what they look to be doing.
+
+Could Clinton still lose the general? Sure. Donald Trump is winning elections all across the country. American politics is a magical land of surprises. But the Clinton campaign couldn't ask for weaker opponents than Trump or Cruz. This is an outcome that gives them a chance to win back the Senate, to pull off the kind of landslide that's rarely seen in modern American politics.",REAL
+594,"Election 2015 Highlights: Who Won, Who Lost?","With no presidential election or congressional seats on the line, Tuesday’s election watchers were focused on some high-profile ballot initiatives, a governor’s race in Kentucky and a handful of other races. Here are some of the highlights, compiled from the Journal’s reports across the country.",REAL
+2495,ICE spends millions flying illegal immigrant children across US,"The Obama administration has spent at least $18.5 million to fly “unaccompanied children” caught crossing into the country illegally to locations inside the United States, according to newly obtained figures.
+
+The numbers, shared with FoxNews.com by the Senate subcommittee on immigration, were provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to questions from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
+
+The numbers shed light on the extent of a program that has drawn scrutiny not just from lawmakers but the federal courts, amid concerns the U.S. government is effectively aiding smugglers.
+
+“This shows how fundamentally flawed our approach to immigration enforcement has been in the Obama administration,” a Senate aide who has seen the questions to and answers from ICE Director Sarah Saldana told FoxNews.com.
+
+The administration, which continues to grapple with waves of Central American migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and has gone to great lengths to ensure the safety of minors, has defended the practice as appropriate.
+
+But it comes with a cost.
+
+The ICE figures show that from June 8, 2014 to Sept. 30, 2015, ICE spent $4.8 million on charter flights for the children (ICE could not provide figures before that period). From March 2009 to Sept. 30, 2015, ICE spent $13.7 million on commercial flights for unaccompanied minors utilizing funds appropriated to ICE.
+
+In total, the cost reaches at least $18.5 million.
+
+“This admission by ICE demonstrates that the United States is a party to countless conspiracies by illegal aliens to violate our immigration laws, by facilitating their illegal journey into the United States,” the Senate aide said.
+
+Past accounts have said children have been flown from the U.S.-Mexico border to live with relatives, many of whom also are in the U.S. illegally.
+
+But an ICE official told FoxNews.com on Friday they’re only transporting minors to facilities run by Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, “as dictated by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA).”
+
+The official added: “ICE does not transport children directly to parents or final destinations. We should also be clear that Congress has appropriated funds for the sole purpose of transporting these unaccompanied minors—that funding is separate from ICE’s enforcement and other funding. ICE is directed in this process by laws that Congress enacts and with funds they appropriate for that specific purpose.”
+
+Separate questions to ICE posed by Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions’ office have yet to be answered.
+
+In its written response to Cruz, ICE said it was unable to provide specific data regarding the number of unaccompanied children transported via commercial flight but that it is “in the process” of expanding its use of “contractor-conducted escorts in FY 2016 and will be able to provide more reliable data going forward.” ICE reported that between June 2014 and September 2015, about 10,000 children were transported by charter flights.
+
+ICE has defended its role in transporting illegal immigrant children before -- namely, after U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen complained in a Dec. 13, 2013 order that federal agents were intercepting human smugglers transporting children at the U.S.-Mexico border and then delivering those same children to their parents.
+
+The comment prompted John Sandweg, ICE’s acting director at the time, to send an email to ICE employees defending the program and saying that the transportation of unaccompanied children by ICE personnel “is appropriate and legal.”
+
+Despite its legality, the practice still isn’t sitting well with some.
+
+“While ICE has spent millions of taxpayer dollars flying these young migrants to ... their chosen destination, it has not taken any action against their illegal alien family members who paid to have them smuggled to the United States,” the Senate source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.",REAL
+9331,2017 Stock Market Crash? Eric Dubin on Markets and the Election Shocker,"Tweet Home » Headlines » Finance News » 2017 Stock Market Crash? Eric Dubin on Markets and the Election Shocker 
+Phil Kennedy sat down with financial and geopolitical analyst Eric Dubin to discuss the Fed’s failure to raise interest rates…again. Eric explains that financial markets have levitated on artificial liquidity and 2017 will be the year market participants give up their blind faith that central bankers can support asset prices, indefinitely . 
+
+TND Podcast Spotlight: Kennedy Financial Podcast #78 
+Phil and Eric discuss how the FBI Clinton probe is impacting the US election and financial markets, and scenarios that can develop, following the election. 
+Phil and John introduce the show on the eve of game 7 of the World Series and managed to poking fun at millennials, the cost of owning a sports franchise and more before the first pitch. 
+# # # # 
+Philip and John Kennedy produce the Kennedy Financial podcast. Kennedy Financial is a volunteer-based non-profit dedicated to teaching families personal finance through the principles of free market capitalism and sound money. All services are FREE and confidential. Visit the Kennedy Financial website: Click here . Visit their YouTube channel: Click here . 
+Philip is an Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC®) and a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) candidate. Philip also has over fourteen years of audit, forensic accounting and fraud investigation experience in the public and private sectors. He is a Certified Public Accountant in the state of Maryland and Virginia, and he is a member of the American Institute of CPAs. Philip holds a Masters in Business Administration degree from George Washington University and a certificate as a Certified Fraud Examiner from the ACFE. He is a student of Austrian Economics and a member of the Mises Institute. 
+John is a graduate of William & Mary, and he has an extensive background in public, forensic and corporate accounting. As a student of the Austrian School of Economics, Mr. Kennedy possesses a strong desire to help clients manage their personal finances with sound money. John serves KF as Director of Communications and Marketing while the organization continues its steady growth. 
+This work is presented on The News Doctors with permission.",FAKE
+10140,US-led airstrike kills at least 30 Afghan civilians,"US-led airstrike kills at least 30 Afghan civilians 11/03/2016 
+PRESS TV 
+At least 30 Afghan civilians, including women and children, have lost their lives in Afghanistan in an airstrike carried out by the so-called US-led military alliance in the country’s volatile north. 
+Local Afghan officials said more than two dozen civilians were also injured in the aerial assault which took place in the northern province of Kunduz on Thursday. 
+“Afghan forces and coalition troops conducted a joint operation against the Taliban insurgents. In the bombardment, 30 Afghan civilians were martyred and 25 others were wounded,” media outlets quoted provincial spokesman, Mahmood Danish, as saying. 
+Airstrike sparks anti-US protest rally 
+Following the deadly airstrike, dozens of the relatives of those killed in the US-led raid staged a demonstration outside the governor’s office in Kunduz to condemn the attack as they were carrying the bodies of the victims. 
+“I am heartbroken. I have lost seven members of my family. I want to know, why these innocent children were killed? Were they Taliban?” said Taza Gul, a 55-year-old laborer, adding, “No, they were innocent children.” 
+Afghan government forces are engaged in fierce fighting against the militants in and around Kunduz. Relatives and members of civilians sit next the dead body of a man who was killed during clashes between Afghan security forces and the Taliban in Kunduz, Afghanistan November 3, 2016. (Photo by Reuters) 
+Taliban militants briefly overran the city of Kunduz, the provincial capital with the same name, in early October. They had briefly seized control of the city a year earlier but they were pushed out of Kunduz weeks later. They now seek to gain full control over the city. 
+Taliban militants were removed from power following the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan, but they have stepped up their activities in recent months, attempting to overrun several provinces. 
+Afghan forces have been engaged in fierce clashes with Taliban to contain the ongoing insurgency across various parts of the violence-wrecked country. 
+The rising violence in Afghanistan comes despite the presence of thousands of foreign troops in the country.",FAKE
+8880,US ‘Laying Groundwork’ For Raqqa Offensive In Syria,"  Carol Adl in Middle East , News , US // 0 Comments 
+The US- led coalition is preparing an offensive to oust ISIS from its de-facto capital Raqqa in Syria according to the US Defense Secretary. 
+Ash Carter said the operation will likely start before the battle for Mosul is won and Russia has not been invited to join the effort. 
+In an interview with NBC, Carter said the assault will start in the next few weeks. 
+“We have already begun laying the groundwork to commence the isolation in Raqqa,” the Pentagon chief said at a press conference in Paris. 
+RT reports: 
+According to Carter, the two officials agreed that the 13-state military coalition that gathered in the French capital would proceed with a sense of “urgency and focus” and confirmed previous statements that there will be a likely “overlap” with the assault on Mosul, which began earlier this month. 
+Earlier on Tuesday, French President Francois Hollande warned that many of the ISIS fighters in Mosul could simply sneak out among refugees and relocate to Raqqa, unless the coalition cuts them off. 
+There were up to 6,000 Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) fighters in the Iraqi city before fighting began, while Raqqa, which Carter described as “the nexus of much of [IS] operational planning,” will be defended by an estimated 3-4,000 recruits. 
+Carter stated that the bulk of the assault contingent would be assembled from “capable and motivated local forces that we identify and then enable.” 
+“The lasting defeat of [Islamic State] can’t be achieved by outsiders; it can only be achieved by Syrians enabled by us,” said Carter. 
+With the battle over Mosul – a city of 1.5 million people before it was conquered by Islamic State in 2014 – expected to last weeks or months, the Pentagon is not committing itself to a tight deadline. 
+“I think everything is trending positively, and that we should be able to commence that effort sometime in the near future. And again, I can’t even ballpark ‘near future’ right now but it’s imminent,” said a senior Pentagon official, speaking to Reuters and other media anonymously in Paris. 
+Russia has not been invited to join the effort. The US-led coalition has condemned Moscow’s involvement in Syria, which was officially invited by the government of President Bashar Assad. 
+“Russia is not a participant in our Raqqa plan,” said Carter, who insisted that despite the breakdown of a proposed US and Russia-mediated ceasefire and accusations over Aleppo the two sides have a shared interest in defeating IS. 
+“We do deconflict our coalition operations with Russia through a very professional military-to-military channel. That channel is active every day, and everyone behaves themselves very professionally on both sides in that channel,” Carter added. 
+The Kurds, another major faction that has played a key role in combatting Islamist threats in Syria, are expected to stay away from Raqqa, in part because it lies outside the area they view as their unrecognized homeland. 
+“Truthfully, the Kurds that I’ve dealt with don’t intend – they’re not comfortable going into Raqqa. They know they can play a role in shaping and isolating Raqqa but it’s not their intent to be involved in the actual seizure of the city,” said the Pentagon source cited by Reuters. 
+The Syrian administration has so far not reacted to the plan, though has previously condemned the international force – which has supported the uprising against President Assad since 2011 – for violating the country’s sovereignty. 
+The US-led coalition has executed air strikes on Raqqa since 2014, despite having no UN mandate to operate inside Syria. It has not been in position to carry out a full-scale ground assault. 
+Despite saying he was “encouraged” by the progress of the campaign against ISIS, both Carter and Hollande warned separately that the group may further evolve its tactics and redirect its efforts towards guerilla insurgency or suicide attacks in Europe.",FAKE
+7585,Is Something Wrong With Hillary? Will NOT Concede Tonight – Refuses To Speak To Crowd – Health Episode?,"Is something wrong with Hillary Clinton?
+In an unprecedented move and with just 6 electoral votes to go for a Donald Trump Presidency, Hillary Clinton refused to address the country and sent her aid John Podesta to address supporters at Javits Center.
+We can wait a little longer, can’t we? They’re still counting votes and every vote should count. Several states are too close to call so we’re not going to have anything more to say tonight.
+
+( Watch At Youtube )
+While the New York Times is now projecting a Donald Trump victory with 95% certainty, Clinton will not concede.
+A candidate would normally address the crowd if there was a question as to the validity of results. Or, in what is quite possible the most important Presidential election in American history, the candidate could at least stay up until the votes are counted.
+This begs the question: Did Hillary have another medical episode?
+Perhaps Hillary isn’t ready for that 3AM phone call after all.
+ 
+",FAKE
+8768,30 Civilians Die In US Airstrike Called ‘To Protect US and Afghan troops’,"Videos 30 Civilians Die In US Airstrike Called ‘To Protect US and Afghan troops’ Attack in Kunduz came after two US service members were killed and had been aimed at breaking siege/ | November 4, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! An Afghan man holds up the body of a child that was killed during clashes between Taliban and Afghan security forces in Kunduz province north of Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2016, Authorities say a joint raid by U.S. and Afghan forces targeting senior Taliban commanders killed two American service members and 26 civilians. Afghan officials said they were still investigating the attack and its civilian casualties, some of which may have been caused by the airstrikes. (AP Photo/Najim Rahim) 
+As many as 30 civilians were killed in an airstrike on Thursday morning called in to protect US and Afghan troops involved in heavy fighting with the Taliban near Kunduz. 
+The airstrike, requested after two US service members were killed, had been meant to break a siege around the village of Bouz Kandahari, three miles from the centre of Kunduz, according to Saeed Mahmoud Danish, the spokesman for the provincial governor. 
+He said the civilians got caught up in the line of fire because the Taliban were using their houses as cover. 
+The joint operation between Afghan and US forces began late on Wednesday and killed 26 Taliban fighters, including two prominent commanders, according to local officials. 
+It was not immediately clear who conducted the fatal airstrike. 
+Dawlat Waziri, a spokesman for the Afghan defence ministry, said Afghan special forces had conducted airstrikes around the village. The US and Nato mission in Afghanistan said in a tweet: “US forces conducted strikes in Kunduz to defend friendly forces. All civilian casualty claims will be investigated.” 
+Brig Gen Cleveland, a US military spokesman, said: “As part of an Afghan operation, friendly forces received direct fire and airstrikes were conducted to defend themselves. We take all allegations of civilian casualties very seriously. 
+“As this was an Afghan operation, we’ll work with our partners to investigate but refer you to them for additional details in the near term. We’ll provide updates as we have them.” 
+A US airstrike on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz in October 2015 killed 42 people . 
+The governor’s spokesman put the number of killed civilians in Bouz Kandahari at 30, while Gen Qasim Jangalbagh, a police official in Kunduz province, said 26 civilians had died. 
+According to an internal western security report, the US-Afghan forces came under fire and were surrounded until about 6am, when they broke the siege and escaped. 
+Cleveland said the US soldiers had been killed at about 3am or 4am, but did not release further details. 
+The Afghan ministry of defence said the two American soldiers, who were “advising” their Afghan counterparts on the ground, were killed in a fire exchange with insurgents, which also killed three Afghan special forces. 
+Early on Thursday, villagers who tried to transport the dead civilians to the city were reportedly stopped by security forces. Later in the day, residents staged a demonstration, protesting about the killings. 
+Laghmani, a prominent elder in Kunduz, said local media and community leaders had tried to go to the village where the airstrike took place, but had been stopped by security forces. 
+The security situation around Kunduz, which Taliban fighters managed to enter last month, a year after they briefly captured the city in their biggest success in the 15-year war, remains precarious. 
+Although US combat operations against the Taliban largely ended in 2014, special forces units have been engaged in combat, providing assistance to the Afghan army and police. 
+Thousands of US soldiers remain in Afghanistan as part of the Nato-led Resolute Support training and assistance mission and a separate counterterrorism mission. 
+A US service member was killed last month on an operation against Islamic State fighters in the eastern province of Nangarhar. 
+Afghan forces, largely fighting alone since the end of the international combat mission, have experienced thousands of casualties, with more than 5,500 killed in the first eight months of 2016. 
+This article originally appeared on The Guardian. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
+968,"Sanders sweeps in Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, but too little too late?","Sen. Bernie Sanders won nearly three dozen delegates more than Hillary Clinton Saturday in sweeping the Alaska, Washington and Hawaii Democratic presidential caucuses, but the strong, comeback victories failed to cut substantially into the front-runner's big lead.
+
+Sanders needs to win 67 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted super-delegates through June to clinch the Democratic nomination. And so far he's winning only 37 percent.
+
+There were 162 delegates at stake Saturday -- Washington with 101, followed by Hawaii with 25 and Alaska with 16.
+
+The Vermont senator won 55 delegates, compared to 20 for Clinton. However, more will likely be allocated to Sanders in several weeks, when the Washington state Democratic Party releases vote shares by district.
+
+Still, Clinton still maintains a wide advantage in delegates, winning 1,243 to Sanders' 975 based on primary and caucuses to date.
+
+Her lead is even bigger when including super-delegates, or party officials who can back any candidate they wish. Clinton has 1,712 to Sanders' 1,004, with 2,383 needed to win.
+
+Still, Sanders sounded optimistic Sunday about his chances.
+
+“Our calculations are that in fact we can win the pledge delegates,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We have the momentum. We have won five out of the six last contests in landslide fashion. … And the reason is the issues that we are talking about -- a corrupt campaign finance system, the disappearance of the American middle class, … kids graduating college $50,000 in debt.”
+
+To be sure, Sanders had a good Saturday, which he hopes will give him some momentum as the primary-caucus season moves to the Midwest, Northeast, then to the West Coast, including California with 546 delegates at stake in June.
+
+Sanders won Alaska 81-to-18 percent over Clinton; 68-32 in Hawaii and 73-26 in Washington, with all precincts having reported.
+
+The self-described democratic socialist on Saturday night acknowledged his struggles in earlier contests across the South, with its strong conservative voting bloc, but struck an optimistic tone.
+
+""We knew things were going to improve as we headed west,"" he said at a rally in Madison, Wis. ""We are making significant inroads in ... Clinton's lead. ... We have a path toward victory.""
+
+The next Democratic and Republican primaries are April 5 in Wisconsin. Other big, upcoming primaries include Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York, Clinton’s home state.
+
+Sanders is popular among younger and more progressive Americans but continues to struggle to connect with Hispanic and African-American voters.
+
+He was expected to do well in Washington, considering residents of Seattle, the biggest city in the Pacific Northwest, are among the most liberal in the country and major campaign contributors.
+
+He drew more than 10,000 supporters at an outdoor rally Friday evening in Seattle. And the state appeared to have a record voter turnout, similar to others that have helped keep alive Sanders’ insurgent campaign.
+
+Most of Washington’s Democratic leadership endorsed Clinton, including Gov. Jay Inslee, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell.
+
+Still, Sanders entered Saturday’s contests optimistic after winning more delegate than Clinton in three contests earlier last week -- nearly 20 in the Idaho and Utah caucuses, despite losing the marquee Arizona primary to the former secretary of state.
+
+Sanders has done significantly better in caucus contests, now winning 10 of the last 12.
+
+Most of his 15 primary-season wins have been in states with largely white populations and in the caucus contests, which tend to attract the most active liberal Democrats.
+
+While Sanders faces a steep climb to the nomination, Clinton’s recent losses highlight her persistent vulnerabilities, including concerns about her trustworthiness and weak support among younger voters.
+
+Clinton has been looking past the primary contests and aiming at potential Republican challengers.
+
+She did not hold a public event after the Saturday’s results were announced.
+
+But in interviews, rallies and speeches last week, she largely focused on Tuesday's deadly attacks in Brussels, casting GOP front-runner Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as unqualified to deal with complicated international threats.
+
+Her campaign sees the April 19 contest in New York as an important one, not just because of the rich delegate prize but because losing to Sanders in a state she represented in the Senate would be a psychological blow.
+
+She hopes to lock up an even larger share of delegates in five Northeastern contests a week later.
+
+Fox News’ Lauren Blanchard and Joseph Weber and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+5805,The Glorious New PC NFL Starts Next Monday!,"Afraid of ""dangerous"" Trump presidency, protesters pre-emptively burn America down to the ground 
+Clinton Foundation in foreclosure as foreign donors demand refunds 
+Hillary Clinton blames YouTube video for unexpected and spontaneous voter uprising that prevented her inevitable move into the White House 
+Sudden rise in sea levels explained by disproportionately large tears shed by climate scientists in the aftermath of Trump's electoral victory 
+FBI director Comey delighted after receiving Nobel Prize for Speed Reading (650,000 emails in one week) 
+U.N. deploys troops to American college campuses in order to combat staggeringly low rape rates 
+Responding to Trump's surging poll numbers, Obama preemptively pardons himself for treason 
+Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually 
+Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida 
+Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote 
+The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush 
+Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food 
+Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI 
+Obama ​​captures rare Pokémon ​​while visiting Hiroshima 
+Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say ""It's creepy"" 
+Barack Obama: ""If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"" 
+White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party 
+President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism' 
+Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech , stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman' 
+Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber 
+Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend 
+Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line 
+As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards 
+John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom 
+Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right' 
+News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: ""My work here is done"" 
+Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign 
+Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009 
+National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman 
+National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruz’s basement 
+Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response 
+Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican 
+Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check 
+Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing 
+Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first 
+Susan Sarandon: ""I don't vote with my vagina."" Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer 
+Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote 
+New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to ""Live FOR Free or Die"" 
+Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president 
+Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two 
+Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence 
+Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men 
+In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas 
+TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons 
+Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats' 
+Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with ""This is for Paris"" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with ""Return to sender"" 
+University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities 
+Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island 
+Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a ""safe space,"" changing Missouri motto to ""The don't show me state"" 
+Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy 
+State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery 
+NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget 
+College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action 
+ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios 
+Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic 
+'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break 
+ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood 
+Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans 
+Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people 
+Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's ""unfettered capitalism,"" demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need 
+John Kerry accepts Iran's ""Golden Taquiyya"" award, requests jalapenos on the side 
+Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone 
+John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons 
+Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend 
+Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles 
+State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider 
+Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons 
+Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations 
+Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals 
+US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?' 
+NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy 
+China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: ""The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"" 
+Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be' 
+Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1% 
+America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith 
+Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine 
+Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET 
+Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths 
+Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do' 
+Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State 
+President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise 
+Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market 
+Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males 
+NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record 
+People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services 
+Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba 
+White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet' 
+CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate 
+Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson' 
+Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city' 
+Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers' 
+Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first 
+The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office 
+White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders 
+Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time 
+Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy 
+Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents 
+Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences 
+Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity 
+Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow 
+African countries to ban all flights from the United States because ""Obama is incompetent, it scares us"" 
+Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it 
+Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses' 
+BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama 
+Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free 
+Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness 
+President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser 
+Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members 
+White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos 
+Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency 
+Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole 
+Harry Reid: ""Sometimes I say the wong thing"" 
+Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids 
+Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution 
+Obama draws ""blue line"" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon 
+""Hard Choices,"" a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original 
+Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts 
+Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks 
+100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, ""the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"" 
+Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news 
+""Anarchy Now!"" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence 
+Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours 
+Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues 
+""Free Speech Zones"" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes 
+Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed 
+Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account 
+Joe Biden to Russia: ""We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"" 
+In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea 
+Al Sharpton: ""Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"" 
+Mardi Gras in North Korea: "" Throw me some food! "" 
+Obama's foreign policy works: ""War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"" 
+US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: ""We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"" 
+Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help 
+The 1980s: ""Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."" 
+In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook 
+MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine 
+Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants 
+Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America 
+North Korean voters unanimous: ""We are the 100%"" 
+Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout 
+Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss 
+Feminist author slams gay marriage: ""a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"" 
+Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district 
+Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend 
+Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle 
+North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party 
+White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare 
+Kim Jong Un executes own "" crazy uncle "" to keep him from ruining another family Christmas 
+OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea 
+President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy 
+Obama to Iran: ""If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"" 
+Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC 
+Obama: ""I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"" 
+Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week 
+Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message 
+NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: ""Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"" 
+Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough 
+The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: ""I didn't build that"" 
+Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare 
+Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation 
+Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans 
+Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy 
+GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords 
+Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare 
+Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria 
+Sharpton: ""British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"" 
+DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women 
+Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees 
+Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left 
+Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel' 
+FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp 
+Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies 
+GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election' 
+Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!' 
+Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism 
+News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota 
+Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith 
+Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page 
+Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment 
+White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria 
+Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent' 
+Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins 
+Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date 
+IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history 
+After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot 
+Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence' 
+Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program 
+US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration? 
+Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy 
+This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester 
+White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras 
+Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse 
+Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school 
+Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition 
+Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State 
+Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good' 
+Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners' 
+Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested 
+Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead 
+Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending 
+Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances 
+Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons 
+Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago 
+Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections 
+Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country 
+Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps' 
+White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out 
+New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen 
+White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class 
+To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead 
+State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations 
+Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward 
+President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward 
+Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects 
+World ends; S&P soars 
+Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood 
+Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes 
+Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway 
+Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013 
+Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama 
+As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list 
+Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves 
+Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium 
+Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future 
+Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs 
+Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet 
+Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt' 
+Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties 
+Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years 
+Obama attends church service, worships self 
+Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending 
+Historical revisionists: ""Hey, you never know"" 
+Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh 
+Israelis to Egyptian rioters: ""don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"" 
+Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness 
+Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears 
+Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke 
+Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights 
+Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse' 
+Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: ""Too few words"" 
+Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't 
+Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost 
+Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity ""Religion of Peace,"" praises ""moderate Christians,"" promises to send one into space 
+Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck 
+White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus 
+Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed 
+Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book ""The Road to Smurfdom"" 
+Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere 
+Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: ""When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"" 
+Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college 
+Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill! 
+Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!' 
+Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration' 
+Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome 
+People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies 
+Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, ""only 1% allowed to reach Israel"" 
+Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans 
+Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law 
+Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond 
+Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics 
+Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof 
+Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels 
+Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party 
+Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend 
+May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above 
+Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel ""50 Shades of Hay"" 
+Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name 
+Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich 
+Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag 
+Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its ""President for Life"" 
+Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory 
+Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off 
+Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named ""Fat And Furious"" 
+Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed 
+White House: ""Let them eat statistics"" 
+Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama",FAKE
+2450,GOP searches for Obamacare fix,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+10325,How Grey are the White Helmets and Their Backers?,"15 Shares
+5 8 0 2
+While thousands of humanitarian organisations around the world are struggling fiercely with diminishing support from governments and the public, one has achieved a surprising amount of support from Western governments in a surprisingly short period of time and gained a surprising attention from mainstream media and ditto political elites: The Syrian Civil Defence or White Helmets.
+Their name of course makes you think of the UN’s Blue Helmet and white is the colour of those who should be protected in harm’s way – and the colour of innocence. However, for many years there has been an Argentinian relief organisation with the same name.
+The SCD or White Helmets counts nearly 3.000 rescue workers who operate in very dangerous areas in rebel-held territories in Syria and claims that it has, in three years, rescued about 70.000 lives according to its Twitter account (or 65 per day).
+Contrary to what you might think, it isn’t a Syrian organisation because Syria has its own organisation, incidentally also called Syria Civil Defence, which was established in 1953 and is registered with ICDO, the International Civil Defence Organisation , since 1972.
+The White Helmets seems to have an annual budget of US$ 30 million and has raised a total support of well over US$ 100 million. And it seems that they operate exclusively in war zones in which the fighting against the Syrian government and the Syrian Arab Army takes place, i.e. in ‘liberated’ areas where hundreds of groups and some 80 countries, mainly NATO members, Gulf states and Saudi-Arabia, operate.
+On the White Helmets’ briefing page it is stated that “funding for their humanitarian relief work is received from the aid budgets of Japan, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.”
+Here is how the Foreign Ministry in Copenhagen explains the roughly US$ 9 million to the White helmets from Denmark, a country that bombs in both Iraq and Syria.
+Other civil society and humanitarian organisations inside Syria have not been so fortunate. You’ve probably not heard that much about the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and its work ? How much/little support have they received from Western humanitarian-concerned governments? And in general, civil society organisations in Syria – women, peace, human rights, culture, etc. – have received nothing like US$ 100 million in a few years and no one has such a flashy media appearance as the White Helmets.
+The White Helmets was started in 2013 by James Le Mesurier who seems to have tried a little of everything everywhere, including the grey zones of special forces and intelligence in virtually all NATO wars, Yugoslavia in particular. He later set up a foundation in Holland to gather the funds. Here is a recent account by Scott Ritter , former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and weapons inspector in Iraq with tremendous knowledge of things Middle East:
+“The organizational underpinnings of the White Helmets can be sourced to a March 2013 meeting in Istanbul between a retired British military officer, James Le Mesurier—who had experience in the murky world of private security companies and the shadowy confluence between national security and intelligence operations and international organizations—and representatives of the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the Qatari Red Crescent Society. Earlier that month, the SNC was given Syria’s seat in the Arab League at a meeting of the league held in Qatar.
+At that meeting, the SNC assumed Syria’s seat, and the Arab League authorized member states to actively provide support, including arms and ammunition, to the Syrian rebels. The Qataris, working through the SNC, helped assemble for Le Mesurier $300,000 in seed money from Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom for a seven-day course designed to train and equip a 25-person rescue team, recruited by the SNC, for duty in so-called “liberated areas” of Syria. The SNC made available a pair of Syrian activists—Raed Saleh and Farouq Habib—to assist Le Mesurier in this work.
+The group is – as will be seen below – treated as uncontroversial in virtually all Western mainstream media. However, there is enough material with documentation to merit caution.
+If you read media reports about the White Helmets and do not see the author mention that this group’s real identity is disputed and functions controversial you can be sure that you are wasting your time with somebody who is politically incredibly naive, or gullible; someone who has not done his or her research or is knowingly part of a deceptive effort serving a one-sided political agenda.
+The White Helmets definitely is an controversial NGO – at the same time as it is (made) difficult to understand clearly what it really is.
+And until the whole picture has been developed, anyone ought to be cautious with taking information about them at face value. So much must be clear given the links below.
+Dual purpose?
+That said, this author has not been on the ground but has studied both the pro- et contra links provided below.
+Some observers draw the conclusion that the White Helmets – Syrian Civil Defence – is purely good guys rescuing lots of people, children in particular. The opposite advocacy claims that, all told, they are part of the terrorist groups, serve Western governments with intelligence and that their backers run political propaganda in their name and that they are simply executioners – murderers with a human face.
+But does it have to be either/or?
+An alternative hypothesis could be that the White Helmets is a dual-purposeorganisation. They claim to be ordinary Syrian volunteers who came together around the idea of saving lives and are truly altruistic “bakers, tailors, engineers, pharmacists, painters, carpenters, students and many more, the White Helmets are volunteers from all walks of life.” It could well be that some of them actually are, even a majority.
+That doesn’t preclude that other elements – not the least those operating outside Syria such as foundations, PR and marketing firms, change organisations, NATO government and NGOs are in it with less noble, war-promoting purposes.
+Link collection pro et contra
+Find below a link collection – long but fascinating in its wealth of information. We bring it as a help to those seriously interested in Syria’s fate and in studying how opinions are being built by means of connected actors in a rather opaque networking structure, in how NGOs have increasingly become Near-governmental organisations and for those who do not want to sound foolish when they discuss these matters.
+First some links to how the the White Helmets presents themselves. Second, some mainstream media articles in their favour of and praising it – including some that argue that the White Helmets ought to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (which happens to be nonsense, since they don’t even remotely qualify according to the criteria in Alfred Nobel’s very clear will and the prize is not a general do-good-prize. In addition, it must be doubted that the Nobel Committee will get more persuaded by the White Helmets’ – quite immodest – campaign in favour of their own candidacy).
+Third some links to the comprehensive network of organisations, including governments, that the White Helmets seem to be part of – and it is quite a confusing lot with absolutely no transparency – but quite a few investigations have been carried out.
+And fourth and final – the main links to investigative reports and other stuff that are sceptical in various degrees to the first three.
+1. The White Helmets present themselves
+The Syrian Civil Defence – The White Helmets
+The White Helmet Homepage
+On the front page you are asked to sign an appeal for establishing a No-Fly Zone (which would be a violation of international law).
+Wikipedia’s entry about the White Helmets
+The White Helmets’ media FAQs
+Syria Civil Defence on Facebook
+The White Helmets on Twitter
+Netflix
+Official Trailer about White Helmets
+The Atlantic
+The makers of the Netflix movie give their background
+Mayday Rescue
+Dutch foundation supporting the White Helmets
+According to its website it channels government funds to the White Helmets: “Syria Civil Defence receives funding (through Mayday Rescue and Chemonics) from the governments of the UK, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Japan, and the USA.”
+Chemonics
+A US global development corporation through which government funds for the White Helmets are channelled (according to Mayday Rescue).
+White Helmets themselves campaigning for the 2016 or 2017 Nobel Peace Prize
+2. Sources that promote the White Helmets without questioning
+Time
+How the White Helmets are being hunted in a devastated Aleppo
+Time
+The White Helmets of Syria
+The Economist
+The rise of Syria’s White Helmets
+Syria’s White Helmets
+A film by Danish journalist Nagieb Khaja shown on Al-Jazeera (30 secs into the film one learns that they have saved more than 56.000 lives “since the war began in 2011″ although the White Helmets were formed in 2013).
+Nominated for an Oscar
+The Nobel Peace Prize must go to the White Helmets
+The Guardian view on the Nobel peace prize: give it to Syria’s White Helmets – Editorial
+Syria’s White Helmets nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
+The White Helmets get the Right Livelihood Award
+The Right Livelihood’s motivation – almost a copy of the White Helmets’ own story
+3. Organisations in the network around the White Helmets
+Purpose
+A social movement creation and PR company that allegedly wants to change the world, co-founded by Jeremy Heimans – whose mainstream, politically correct background you see here . Jeremy – of course – began his career with the strategy consultants McKinsey & Company. He also happens to be a co-founder of
+Avaaz
+Avaaz means voice or song in several languages and the organisation is known by millions as a petition platform for many good/progressive causes. Avaaz has some 43 million members around the world and is thus easily the largest NGO in the world.
+Avaaz has also created Purpose.com. Here Jeremy Heimans, co-founder of Avaaz too, speaks to Forbes about his background and what the two companies do.
+Avaaz is very active in promoting a No-Fly Zone in Syria which it explains in a petition text with these words: “Let’s build a resounding global call to Obama and other leaders to stand up to Putin and Assad’s terror. This might be our last, best chance to help end this mass murder of defenceless children. Add your name.”
+The sad thing is that it has learnt nothing from its own campaign for a No-Fly Zone in Libya. John Hanrahan is a former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism and reporter for The Washington Post, The Washington Star, UPI and other news organisations has made this extremely interesting analysis about how odd it is that Avaaz maintains an interventionist war-agenda in spite of earlier experiences and resistance even by high-ranking militaries.
+Hanrahan Quote: s Avaaz’s campaign director, former State Department official John Tye, “that Avaaz shows 54,000 members in Syria in a population of 23 million – which means that even if every Avaaz member supported a no-fly zone, this would still mean that only one of every 426 Syrians had “voted” for one.
+Avaaz spearheads – at least in this matter – an extreme militarist policy while “Avaaz is a global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere”. Which people want a No-Fly Zone in Syria? Do they know it’s a violation of a sovereign state’s airspace, of international law? That it would embolden every terrorist on Syrian soil because they would get rid of the Syrian Airforce as their enemy? That it continued into regime change in both Iraq and Libya?
+Many questions unanswered by this peculiar “people power” organisation, more militarist than governments!
+But back to Purpose.com and one of its important clients:
+The Syria Campaign – home
+They maintain on their website that “The Syria Campaign is fiercely independent and has accepted no money from governments, corporations or anyone directly involved in the Syrian conflict. This allows us full autonomy to advocate for whatever is needed to save lives.” But they also say that they have accepted funds from the Asfari Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and other anonymous donors.
+The Syria Campaign also states that it is only pro-human rights and pro-freedom and takes no side. But they explain the conflict in these words:
+“The regime of Bashar al-Assad is responsible for crushing a peaceful uprising that has led to the deaths of over 450,000 people, the displacement of over 12 million – half the country – and the emergence of violent, extremist groups like Isis.
+Today the fighting in Syria has given way to a world war with more than eighty countries involved on all sides.
+The majority of Syrians want neither Assad nor Isis. They want an end to the violence and a democratic Syria.
+What is happening in Syria could be happening to any of us. No one is free until we’re all free.”
+I would characterise such a presentation as side-taking wrapped in substance-free marketing jargon; a very politicised statement wearing only black-and-white.
+About the Syria Campaign
+What the Syria Campaign is proud of: Impact page
+The Syria Campaign seeks all-stars senior campaigner and “You don’t need to know anything about Syria”
+The Syria Campaign on Facebook
+The Syria Campaign on Twitter
+Analysis, Research and Knowledge (Ark)
+A private company, headquartered in Dubai, that describes itself as “a research, conflict transformation and stabilisation consultancy”.
+In Syria “Ark has been at the forefront of the response to the conflict … for the past five years”. One of its two team members, Alistair Harris is described here advocating two years ago that “moderates” should be armed to fight ISIS and not only in Iraq but also in Syria.
+The British-based Asfari Foundation for change
+White Helmets, according to their website, received seed funding came from the Asfari Foundation – trustees of which are heavily related to the oil industry and corporate finance. The Asfari Foundation’s bonds with the Syria Campaign is dealt with here .
+4. Sources raising investigation-based questions about the White Helmets
+Vanessa Beeley
+Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception – Part I
+Scott Ritter at TruthDig
+The ‘White Helmets’ and the Inherent Contradiction of America’s Syria Policy
+Hands off Syria
+The White Helmets – al-Qaeda with a facelift (video)
+Rick Sterling
+The “White Helmets” Controversy
+Vanessa Beeley
+Who are Syria’s White Helmets?
+Vanessa Beeley
+The real Syrian Civil Defence
+Christina Lin, Asia Times
+White Helmets: Instrument of regime change in Syria?
+Jonathan Gornell
+Newsmaker: The White Helmets
+Syria Solidarity Movement
+Its list of humanitarian/human rights organisation that are pushing for war on Syria and its government
+Open Letter from The Hamilton Coalition To Stop War
+White Helmets should NOT be Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
+Max Blumenthal
+Inside the shadowy public relation firm that is lobbying for regime change in Syria (I)
+Max Blumenthal
+How the White Helmets Became International Heroes While Pushing U.S. Military Intervention and Regime Change in Syria (II)
+Rick Sterling
+Seven steps of highly effective manipulators
+The article contains this diagram:
+21st Century Wire
+CrossTalk: ‘White Helmets, Really?’ with Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett & Patrick Henningsen (video)
+Russia Today
+Multi-million funded – can’t be independent
+General reasons for concern about the real identity of the White Helmets
+Here are some of the reasons – numbers not indicative of priority:
+1. Huge funding by NATO/EU countries which are militarily involved.
+2. A degree of political lobbying – a very specific explanation of the conflict and how it started which points to a no-fly zone, weaponization of human rights issues and speaks strongly against the Syrian government and Russia and very critically of the UN – that is extremely unusual for a purely humanitarian organisation.
+3. Incredibly advanced public relation in terms of very professional websites, videos and PR strategy dropping the right stories and images at the right time – quite unique for a group of “bakers, tailors and students” etc..
+“Omram rescued from a Russian airstrike” – From the White Helmets’ homepage.
+4. Too professional wordings and images, too much playing to (exploitation of) emotions, too catchy smart formulations again and again; in short, lacking every sense of genuine local quality. Too many children – and cats – in the images speaking to an audience with little politically consciousness but surely a good heart. In short, populist marketing also in the sense of conveying the message: Look how good we are and how evil everybody else are.
+5. Guilt by association: If the White Helmets is a 100% humanitarian first responder organisation it must be extremely naive in ignoring that its integrity, credibility and noble purposes is put at risk with the specific network of organisations and governments that it has chosen to seek support from.
+6. Substance versus public relation: how does a humanitarian organisation justify that millions of dollars are spent on self-promoting public relation rather than on saving more lives in such a horrific war? And taking so many photos and shoot films of its own work in the midst of massacres and bombing raids?
+7. It’s very difficult to discern who actually manages the White Helmets in general and in terms of day-to-day operations. One looks in vain for something like an organisational chart secretary-general, board, executive director (although one is mentioned, Raed Saleh, whom the US has on one occasion actually denied entry into the US).
+8. How come that such an innovative organisation seems to have been started in circles that have to do with oil interests, British intelligence, mercenary/military operations and interventionist/bombing countries?
+9. How come it works only in rebel/terrorist/liberated areas? Could it do that without co-operation or co-ordination with some of these groups? It has been stated – naively – by the Right Livelihood Award Foundation that their vision is to operate also on government-controlled territory and later be a leader in re-building a new democratic post-war Syria. However, why should the sovereign state of Syria’s legitimate government accept a foreign-based and -financed civil defence territory there when it has had its own since 1953?
+Perhaps we should not be that surprised?
+Should we be surprised that humanitarian workers are involved in “something else” and are not exclusively devoted to doing no harm and doing good for humanity?
+Not really. I’ve met that sort of people and organisations during the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, among other places at the US Embassy in Zagreb where the humanitarian section people, most likely CIA operatives, after some talk with me about helping the people switched to talk about how good it would be if president Milosevic was killed.
+Are humanitarian organisations – like most other NGOs today – highly or completely dependent on governments? Yes, most are. And they should therefore always be checked for possible moral corruption and co-optation. Many are no longer Non- but Near-governmental and behave, at minimum, politically correct or serve/promote the interests of their governments one way or the other.
+Wasn’t Doctors Without Borders started by Bernard Kouchner who advocated military humanitarian intervention as an idea, did the dirty job for NATO in Kosovo and morally advocated the bombing of Libya as a “peace guarantee”? Here an interesting video debate with him at Oxford by Mehdi Hasan.
+Should it be so surprising that – even liberal, democratic – governments propagandise, construct concrete stories to appeal to the human heart in us all (for a good cause) and that they regularly lie, do fear-mongering, use stereotyping and demonisation, present black-and-white narratives – all of which serve their elites’ interests and may not always be that noble in reality?
+Think of the ugly shadow world of the global arms trade in which virtually all governments take part in?
+Of course not. No wars would be possible without one of more of these ingredients.
+Think of the – invented – story about the Iraqi soldiers who kicked out babies of incubators in Kuwait city – all invented as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign which was run by American Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government.
+Or, remember James Harf of the US public relations firm, Ruder and Finn , who in 1991 was hired by the Croatian and Bosnian governments as well as by the Kosovo-Albanians to create and promote an anti-Serb attitude in the Western media?
+Says Harf “We were able to equate Serbs to Nazis in public opinion…” Some kind of balance or truth didn’t interest him: “We are professionals. We have got a job to do and we do it.”
+If there is anything new in this field since the early 1990s it is the spectrum, the depth, the money and the intensity with which public opinion is being deceived about war and peace – that war today is peace and peace is preserved by violence. And the de facto replacement of knowledge and texts by purpose-driven, mediatized and emotionalised “narratives” and images and films – right down on you phone and into your mind.
+In summary: Illusions about our goodness that feed social narcissism and the MIMAC
+I do not believe that I know exactly what the whole story and the truth is about the White Helmets. But I know that quite a few things don’t feel right.
+As a sociologist and peace researcher with four decades of academic and practical experience of global affairs and work in conflict zones, the word spoken by the guard Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet at Kronborg Castle in my native Denmark come to mind: “There is something rotten in the state…” not only in the bombing state of Denmark (that supports the White Helmets) but also in the state of the – free – media coverage of conflicts and wars.
+If, thus, you are generally sceptical of Western media coverage of wars fought by the West and specifically of the story of the White Helmets as a purely brave humanitarian organisation – are you then automatically pro-Assad, pro-Russia or pro-bombing? If you are critical to A, must you automatically endorse everything B or C does?
+Given the “Zeitgeist” of these times, my hunch is that the anti-intellectual’s, the propagandist’s and the blamegamer’s answer is a roaring “Yes!” Personally, I couldn’t care less but there is reason to worry about the fact that our media are not free to take up the issues dealt with here.
+Pulitzer prize winner, Chris Hedges, talks about “the incessant manufacturing of illusions that feed social narcissism.” The – unwinnable – wars the West fights with the illusory ideology of spreading goodness, democracy, freedom and peace as well as the alleged good role of the White Helmets in it is little else but an expression of such an incessant manufacturing of illusions that feed social narcissism of the many while filling the pockets of the few in the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex (MIMAC).
+It’s time to give reality show politics and media a reality check. But who can and who will? And who dares now everything will get worse after November 8?",FAKE
+78,"Flint, Michigan: Neglected because city is black, poor?","(CNN) The contamination of drinking water in Flint, Michigan, has so outraged community advocates that they now pose a powerful question: Was the city neglected because it is mostly black and about 40% poor?
+
+Several advocates say yes. They charge that Flint residents are victims of ""environmental racism"" -- that is, race and poverty factored into how Flint wasn't adequately protected and how its water became contaminated with lead, making the tap water undrinkable.
+
+""Would more have been done, and at a much faster pace, if nearly 40 percent of Flint residents were not living below the poverty line? The answer is unequivocally yes,"" the NAACP said in a statement.
+
+Others go further.
+
+""While it might not be intentional, there's this implicit bias against older cities -- particularly older cities with poverty (and) majority-minority communities,"" said Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, who represents the Flint area.
+
+""It's hard for me to imagine the indifference that we've seen exhibited if this had happened in a much more affluent community,"" he said.
+
+NAACP President and CEO Cornell Brooks drew a direct connection between Flint's socioeconomic factors and the toxic drinking water.
+
+""Environmental Racism + Indifference = Lead in the Water & Blood,"" he tweeted.
+
+Brooks is pressing for a definitive plan of attack.
+
+""We're trying to take action that is specific, that's focused, that's urgent and speaks to the people's needs,"" he said. ""Talking with a deadline that has dollar symbols represents action, and that's what we're trying to do.""
+
+In an interview with CNN's Poppy Harlow this week, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder repeatedly said that he was taking responsibility for the crisis even as she reminded him that his then-chief of staff sent an email in July 2015 to a health department official warning of lead in the Flint drinking water. The email was released as part of a freedom of information request.
+
+In October 2014, General Motors stopped using Flint River water at its engine plant because the company was seeing rust of vehicle parts.
+
+Snyder said that General Motors' concern ""was not a lead issue.""
+
+Harlow responded, ""It was the same issue of the pipes being corroded by the water, chemicals in the water, just like it is (in Flint.) It's actually the same.""
+
+The governor said, ""These are very technical issues. But the lead came to my attention in October, end of September, early October of 2015. We took immediate action, need to do more, did more.""
+
+He said Flint has seen a 45% reduction in crime, and he touted a dental program for low-income children -- all moves his administration pushed for.
+
+""In terms of saying it happened because of the nature of the community here? Absolutely not.""
+
+Snyder compared Flint's unemployment struggles and other economic woes to what people in Detroit have endured in recent years, and he said his administration is responsible for improvements there.
+
+This week, Snyder was served with a subpoena by attorneys representing Flint residents who have filed a class-action suit. They have asked for the governor's emails and text messages going back to January 2011.
+
+Snyder has released some emails from 2014 and 2015.
+
+""Will you release all of those back to 2011, from personal and work accounts?"" Harlow asked.
+
+""I released the relevant emails, my emails, that address that issue for the relevant time period,"" said Snyder, who has released some emails from 2014 and 2015.
+
+""We are complying with every investigation in terms of being open,"" he added. ""We'll follow the appropriate legal process for subpoenas and other legal matters.""
+
+""Again, we're complying with every investigation,"" Snyder said. ""We'll follow the appropriate legal process for subpoenas and other legal matters. With respect to releasing my emails, I did that. This is an extraordinary case.""
+
+Whether Flint's water crisis happened because the city has poor residents has been discussed in social media, particularly by filmmaker and Flint native Michael Moore.
+
+""This is a racial killing. Flint MI is 60% black. When u knowingly poison a black city, u r committing a version of genocide #ArrestGovSnyder,"" Moore tweeted at one point.
+
+""Just to be clear: all 102K residents of Flint have been exposed to toxic water, all of Flint's kids have ingested lead, & 10 ppl have died,"" Moore tweeted on another occasion.
+
+The Black Lives Matter group said African-Americans, especially those in rural and poor areas, have long been denied equal access to clean drinking water.
+
+On Monday, state Attorney General Bill Schuette said he is appointing an ex-prosecutor and Detroit's former FBI chief to join the investigation into Flint's water crisis, creating a ""conflict wall"" between the state's inquiry and the lawsuits targeting the state.
+
+The prior announced investigation will determine ""whether any Michigan laws were violated in the process that created a major public health crisis for Flint residents.""
+
+Flint's state of emergency -- declared at municipal and state levels -- began years ago when the city suffered a financial emergency. The state took over the city's budget and decided to temporarily switch Flint's water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River to save money until a new supply line to Lake Huron was ready.
+
+The river, however, was long-known as befouled. Locals call it the ""General Motors sewer.""
+
+After the April 2014 switch, residents complained their water had problems. Virginia Tech researchers found the water was highly corrosive. A class-action lawsuit alleges the state Department of Environmental Quality didn't treat the water for corrosion, in accordance with federal law, and because so many service lines to Flint are made of lead, the noxious element leached into the water of the city's homes.
+
+The city switched back to the Lake Huron water supply in October, but the damage was already done to the lead pipes. The state is now handing out filters and bottled water with the National Guard.",REAL
+8131,Malala Announced That She Plans To Become Prime Minister Of Pakistan,"Malala Yousufzai is a remarkable young woman who has made headlines and is known globally for the brave work she does in Pakistan, her home country. Her fight for the right for everyone to have a... ",FAKE
+10380,A Mr. Clark Kent arrested for public phone box indecency. More soon.,"Posted: Nov 9th, 2016 by Guest Click for more article by Guest .. More Stories about: Ticker",FAKE
+2494,"Sanders, Clinton talk immigration, battle for Hispanic vote before big California primary","Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are spending their final weekend in California, before the state’s big primary Tuesday, rallying voters over immigration issues and warning the state’s diverse electorate about the perils of electing Republican Donald Trump.
+
+On Saturday, Sanders expressed confidence that he could win a majority of votes next week in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota and North Dakota.
+
+However, the Vermont senator acknowledged that he’ll need a high voter turnout, like those that have helped him win previous state contests.
+
+“It’s going to be an uphill battle” Sanders said a press conference in Los Angeles, repeating what he has said many times recently.
+
+Still, a report Friday by the state that a record 17.9 million Californians, or 72 percent of eligible state voters, are registered to vote in the primaries could help Sanders.
+
+Sanders on Saturday also repeated that the front-running Clinton will not have enough pledged delegates after polls close Tuesday to secure the nomination.
+
+He said she will have to instead rely on super-delegates, or those who have previously committed to Clinton, to claim the nomination and that he will continue to try to win over those delegates to take the nomination at the party’s convention in July.
+
+“We look forward on Tuesday to doing very well,” Sanders said. “There will be a contested convention. … Super delegates can and have changed their candidate choice in the past.”
+
+He also focused on the issue of immigration, as Clinton did earlier in the day in California, a state that borders Mexico and where Hispanics will be a key voting bloc.
+
+Sanders argued that Trump,  the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, should not be elected because his “bigotry” against Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans and others “cannot be tolerated.”
+
+“Donald Trump cannot be elected president,” Sanders said. He also spoke Saturday to supporters at his campaign headquarters in Los Angeles.
+
+Clinton, in a panel discussion in Slymar, Calif., expressed optimism about passing legislation to overhaul federal immigration law.
+
+Clinton argued that as U.S. senators she supported bipartisan Senate reform legislation while Sanders did not.
+
+“It was heartbreaking,” she said. “There were people from every part of the planet who were so hopeful. … I believe that after this election, if all goes well, we will have a chance to pass immigration reform.”
+
+She also said Trump plans to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, calling such talk “the most unfair and dangerous kind of conversation” that has veered off “toward anger and fear.”
+
+Other scheduled events for Clinton this weekend included a stop Saturday in Oxnard, Calif.
+
+Trump campaigned this week in California, despite having enough delegates to secure the GOP nomination, but held no events Saturday.
+
+Some of those events brought violent protests outside the venues.
+
+One of California’s most influential daily newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle, this weekend endorsed neither Clinton, Sanders nor Trump.
+
+That the Chronicle wouldn’t endorse Trump was not surprising, consider the editorial board for the paper, in liberal-leaning Northern California, had previously expressed its distaste for what it calls his “low-substance, high-insult candidacy.”
+
+The paper was also highly critical of the front-running Clinton, pointing out her refusal to meet with the board and her many fundraising forays in the state.
+
+However, the Chronicle declined to back Sanders in the neck-and-neck primary Tuesday, suggesting his “aggressively progressive promises” can never be realized with so many Republicans ruling Congress.
+
+Two other major California dailies -- The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union Tribune -- have endorsed Clinton. The Tribune this weekend sarcastically endorsed Ronald Reagan over Trump.",REAL
+349,Jesse Matthew charged in Hannah Graham slaying,"The murder charge against Jesse Matthew Jr. comes in addition to a count of abduction with intent to defile filed against him previously, Albemarle County Commonwealth's Attorney Denise Lunsford said.
+
+""These indictments signal the beginning of the next phase in what has been an incredibly difficult process for the family of Hannah Graham, for our community and for the men and women of the many departments and agencies who have worked on this matter since September of last year,"" Lunsford said.
+
+Lunsford's team decided not to charge Matthew with capital murder, which could have led to a death sentence if he were convicted. Lunsford said she wouldn't give details on what led to that decision, except to say that a ""great deal of serious thought"" went into it.
+
+Those considerations included ""the impact on the community, the Grahams, and the need to provide Mr. Matthew with a fair trial.""
+
+""I have discussed this matter with the Grahams on many occasions, and they are aware of the indictments,"" Lunsford said. Matthew also was charged with reckless driving in two incidents about a week after Graham's disappearance, Lunsford said. Matthew's first court appearance on the indictments is scheduled for February 18. His attorney, Jim Camblos, declined to comment Tuesday, except to acknowledge the February 18 court appearance and to say that he received news of the indictments late Monday afternoon. Graham, 18, went missing before dawn on September 13 after she was last spotted on surveillance video in Charlottesville's Downtown Mall area. In October, authorities found what turned out to be Graham's skull and bones on abandoned property 8 miles from where the college sophomore was last seen. Surveillance video and other accounts led authorities to identify Matthew as a suspect in her disappearance. Matthew, 33, was taken into custody on September 24 on a beach in Galveston County, Texas, about 1,300 miles away from where Graham was last seen. No link to another slaying Matthew's arrest in the Graham case prompted authorities to investigate his possible links to a string of unsolved killings and disappearances in the area. One of those cases involved 17-year-old Alexis Murphy of Lovingston, Virginia, who disappeared in 2013 and whose body has not been found. But on Friday, authorities said they had found no link between him and Murphy's slaying. in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2005; the trial in that case is scheduled for March. in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2005; the trial in that case is scheduled for March. Matthew is also charged in the sexual assault of a woman in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2005; the trial in that case is scheduled for March. Authorities said that in September 2005, a 26-year-old woman returning from a grocery store was grabbed from behind and sexually assaulted. The attacker was scared off by a passerby. Information from the 2005 victim led police to link Matthew to the case of another missing young woman, Morgan Harrington, a Virginia Tech student who vanished in Charlottesville in October 2009 and was found dead a few months later. Matthew has not been charged in that case. Investigators are looking into his possible connection to other similar cases in the area. They include the August 2009 killing of Virginia Tech students Heidi Childs and David Metzler and the October 2009 killing of 23-year-old Cassandra Morton of Lynchburg, Virginia. Police are also investigating Matthew's possible ties to the disappearance of 19-year-old Samantha Ann Clarke of Orange, Virginia.",REAL
+2575,Judge Blocks President Obama's Immigration Order,"A federal judge in Texas is working to block President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration.
+
+On Monday, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen issued a temporary injunction that gives a coalition of 26 states time to pursue a lawsuit that aims to permanently stop the president's orders.
+
+The White House said the Justice Department will appeal the decision.
+
+The ruling puts on hold Obama's orders that could spare as many as 5 million people who are in the United States illegally from deportation.
+
+On Tuesday, the White House issued a statement saying Monday's ruling ""wrongly prevents"" the president's ""lawful, commonsense polices"" from taking effect.
+
+House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the federal judge's ruling was no surprise, citing Obama's repeated comments about the limits of his authority.",REAL
+6231,Another Trump Surrogate Admits Trump Won’t Build That Effing Wall (VIDEO),"Another Trump Surrogate Admits Trump Won’t Build That Effing Wall (VIDEO) By Darrell Lucus on October 26, 2016 Subscribe Trump foreign policy surrogate and adviser Walid Phares with several Ethiophian-American Trump supporters ( image courtesy Phares’ Facebook) 
+Just after the Republican National Convention, I told you that a number of Donald Trump’s top surrogates have known for some time that the Donald’s signature policy proposal–a massive wall along the Mexican border– only exists in Trump’s mind . They have all but admitted what we already know–a 2,000-mile physical wall is simply not feasible. 
+Well, we got more confirmation earlier this week from another prominent Trump surrogate. Specifically, his chief foreign policy adviser admitted what we have long suspected–when Trump declares, “I’m building a wall,” he’s just engaging in campaign hype. 
+People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch noticed that on Monday, veteran foreign policy and terrorism expert Walid Phares sat down with France 24’s Surabhi Tandon to discuss Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Phares served as a top foreign policy adviser to the Mitt Romney campaign, and took up the same role with Trump. He is best known as an ardent Islamophobe who had close ties to extremist militia groups during the civil war in his native Lebanon. 
+The conversation soon turned to Trump’s wall. Right Wing Watch got a clip. 
+Tandon asked Phares how Trump’s planned wall would affect the United States’ relationship with Mexico; Trump has let it be known that one way or another, Mexico will foot the bill for the wall. Phares replied that Trump plans to build the wall along the American side of the border. However, as far as he knows, it won’t be a brick-and-mortar wall. “Now, will we see a physical wall on hundreds and hundreds of miles of border? I don’t know, and I don’t think so.” 
+According to Phares, what Trump has in mind is something like what exists in Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish enclaves in north Africa. He claimed that there was a simple concept in place in those cities for anyone who wanted to cross into Spain via Morocco–“you come, you knock on the door, you have your paper, and you come in.” 
+Tandon pounced, reminding Phares that Trump has been clamoring for a physical wall for the entire campaign. But this major Trump surrogate apparently didn’t get the memo. Phares claimed that Trump only talked about building a wall “to raise the attention.” However, since then, Phares has said that Trump has “evolved the concept” of a wall. How so? “Meaning, ‘If nothing is done, I’m going to go back to square one and build a wall. But if I can start talking with the Mexicans, I may not have to do all the wall everywhere because the Mexican government is going to finally send troops to stop these cartels.'” 
+But wait a minute. Trump himself has declared the wall will stretch along the entire border. And he even managed to get the wall into the Republican platform. See for yourself , on page 26: “(W)e support building a wall along our southern border and protecting all ports of entry. The border wall must cover the entirety of the southern border and must be sufficient to stop both vehicular and pedestrian traffic.” 
+And yet, a major Trump surrogate–indeed, his top surrogate on foreign policy–has effectively left his candidate on an island. 
+Watch the whole thing here ; the exchange about the wall begins at the 6:30 mark. As I write this on Wednesday night, I can find no evidence that either Trump or the RNC has spoken up to correct the record. And I can find no evidence that Phares himself has tried to clarify his remarks. I can only conclude one thing–Trump himself knows he’s not building a wall. About Darrell Lucus 
+Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC . Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook . Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello. Connect",FAKE
+6026,"Whether Clinton or Trump, Tensions Will Escalate with China and Russia Under Next U.S. President","by Jerri-Lynn Scofield 
+Jerri-Lynn here: There are many reasons to despair at the choice US voters face in tomorrow’s election. The danger that either candidate will goad Russia or China, without respect to consequences, is perhaps the most immediate and frightening. While many media hounds chase the false scent of alleged Russian manipulation of Trump, the election, and Wikileaks, to name just a few of the crazy allegations being discussed, this more serious threat has not been pursued nearly as vigorously. 
+In this Real News Network interview , journalist John Pilger and TRNN’s Paul Jay discuss why the very real prospect of another World War is not taken seriously by the US media. Pilger argues that whoever is elected, tensions with China and Russia will escalate. I tidied up the rush transcript as best I could. Please excuse any remaining errors. 
+PAUL JAY, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I’’m Paul Jay. 
+In a few days, Americans are going to decide who the next President of the United States is going to be. Of course, this is an issue of global concern, given that the United States considers itself hegemon of the world and acts that way. What will be the difference perhaps is the foreign policy of the next President, whatever it is, Clinton or Trump. Based on what we’’ve seen the last few years and how does one assess all of this? I think we’’re assessing the degree of danger to the world. There doesn’’t seem to be any other measurement here. 
+Now joining us to discuss all of this is John Pilger. John joins us from London. John is an award- winning very celebrated filmmaker and journalist. His films have been broadcast on major broadcast platforms and channels around the world. His latest film is The Coming War on China , which will be released in December. Thanks very much for joining us John. 
+JOHN PILGER: You’’re welcome. 
+JAY: So as I said in the opening, it’’s a kind of a question of who is more dangerous. There does’n’t seem to be any question. I think in most thinking people’s minds that one way or the other, US foreign policy is going to be dangerous for people of the world, particularly in the Middle East but not only. What is your assessment in this moment? 
+PILGER: Well it’’s always dangerous. I sometimes think that it’’s extraordinary I’’ve gotten to this stage in life and I haven’’t been blown up by US foreign policy. But so we all of us outside the US quake before a US election. That said, the US isn’’t run by presidents, it’’s run by a vast national security machine and that hasn’’t changed in the last 15 years or so. I think the other 2 candidates. One is clearly a rogue candidate and that’’s Donald Trump and the other, Hillary Clinton, is the candidate of this vast national security machine. 
+I think what’’s been a pity for all of us outside the United States and indeed for all Americans, is that the hysteria over Donald Trump has obscured the fact that Hillary Clinton may well turn out to be one of the more dangerous presidents, assuming she does win as the polls suggest, though she may not of course. Because she is the president. She is almost the embodiment of a status quo that since 9/11 has left us all in a very precarious state. It’’s left the Middle East in a precarious state. But above all, it’’s brought us to the brink of some kind of very serious confrontation with Russia and the taunting of Russia, the intimidation of Russia is now unabated and just over the horizon there is a similar baiting of the other great nuclear power, China. 
+Now this issue which of course amounts to the prospect of another world war, even another nuclear war, have not been touched on. 
+Well they have been touched on. Ironically in the first debate, Donald Trump was asked about this and he said words to the effect, words that I would not go nuclear. I would not do a first strike. This was’n’t used. It was’n’t published. Now I would’’ve thought for whatever it’’s worth, he might not have meant it. Trump says a lot of things he does’n’t mean. Contradicts himself. But I would’’ve thought that difference between Trump and Clinton on the issue of nuclear war, of war and peace was pretty critical. At least an issue to be debated. But it wasn’’t. 
+JAY: Yeah, the American media is totally involved in this salacious part of Trump’’s history and as usual, not very interested in any issues of polices of substance. You can find things on both of these candidates that would give one the chills. Starting with Trump, the great danger of Trump is that it won’’t be President Trump, it will be President Pence. Pence has been asked who he’’s going to model his Vice Presidency after and he says Cheney and in terms of foreign policy outlook, there seems to be no difference between him and Cheney. 
+PILGER: Well, what’’s the difference between any of them frankly? I mean neocon is a terrible word but it describes them all. Trump is perhaps more interesting because he seems to have upset all the establishment. The CIA wants him beaten, the Pentagon wants him beaten, the State Department wants him beaten, even his own party wants him beaten. I mean something recommends him and just his enemies do. So, whether there is a difference I think there’’s a difference of that much. I do emphasize this, that as you mentioned all these salacious stories about Trump but you know what do people want? Do they want to hear salacious stories or do they want to hear about the prospects of war and peace? Do they want to hear about whether we’’re entering an extremely dangerous period in relation to Russia or not? 
+These issues have not been addressed and I don’’t think there’s any doubt that Clinton who has very unusually named a cabinet already in a sense and a very good article by one of the independent journalists in Washington, Gareth Porter, listed these people and they’’re all war hawks. And she said it in the last debate. I’m going to have a no-fly zone in Syria. That means attacking Russian planes. 
+JAY: I think there’’s no doubt whichever of these people get elected president, in spite of Trump’’s rhetoric and if you look at what Pence says, I think both Clinton and I will say a Pence Trump, and I put Pence first because I think that’s the more likely scenario, are going to be looking for provocations with Russia. Both Clinton and Pence are using Russian rhetoric to try and engage but using more than rhetoric. There’’s this very interesting WikiLeaks that I don’’t think has received nearly enough attention which shows something about the State Department under Clinton’’s mentality. 
+It said in the WikiLeaks that it’’s not said who it’’s to or from but when I asked some of the people we know who have some expertise in this, they say it sounds like a State Department briefing. It says to get the Israelis in support or not in active opposition to the Iran deal we need to get rid of Assad. And essentially– and one assumes the reason for getting that will please Israel is to undermine Hezbollah– but it kind of shows what drives a lot of State Department thinking and I don’’t think it’’s a big stretch to think it drives Clinton thinking. 
+PILGER: Yeah, well, she hasn’’t hidden it. She’’s had an obsequious relationship with Israel– it’s well known. Her tough talking, her militarist talking, is all out there in the open. She’’s made it clear that she’’s going to face off Vladimir Putin. She’’s going to talk tough to the Chinese. As a kind of insanity about all this. I mean US foreign policy is actually run in a straight line since 1945. But it’s become more extreme in the last 10-15 years. That’’s what worries most of us outside the United States and ought to worry those of you in the United States that it’’s become so extreme now. So extreme that the prospect of an accidental war at the very least. Here we are at centenaries of the first world war where all the lessons of there are glaring out at us of not quite accidental war. Intended war that lit up and became a slaughter partly by accident. I don’’t for a moment think that this verbose provocateur who is currently the Defense Secretary, Mr. Carter, who is forever shouting his militarist slogans around the world. I don’’t for a moment think that he actually wants nuclear war. But he sure is trying to bring it on. I’’ve never known anything quite like his constant aggression. And this campaign of sending out these admirals and generals. Like Admiral Harry Harris in the Pacific speaking like Lord Palmerston in the 19th century. You know how much he runs from the world. You know what you say from Bollywood to Hollywood. You know these rather absurd people but with very great power. 
+JAY: The overall agenda of American dominance I don’’t think changes much between the various administrations or parties. But do you not think sometimes individual and specific agendas within the complexity of the America elites plays a role? I’’ll give you a couple examples. First of all, Cheney clearly drove the Iraq war. John Kiriakou, the former CIA agent said there was a morning meeting with the heads of all the major agencies and top Pentagon officials in the year leading up to the Iraq War and that that completely quite out of the ordinary, that morning phone call was chaired by Dick Cheney. And that in that phone call, and Kiriakou was apparently on it sometimes with some of the CIA people, most of the heads of agencies, most of the officialdom of the military complex were against invading Iraq. Cheney actually threatened these people saying resign or do what you’’re ordered to. 
+There are times when specific agendas can take hold. Like for example the people I guess that what the Real News, they heard us talk about Project for New American Century often enough. The very far right type of agenda. The other one where I think it did make a difference is if you look at the Obama-McCain election. This is not to say Obama has not been aggressive and has not committed war crimes because he has. On the other hand, this is John ‘Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran’ McCain and Obama does make a deal with Iran. I mean there are differences within these corridors of power which are sometimes important are there not? 
+PILGER: Obama decided not to attack Iran. I don’’t know about making a deal with Iran. They decided not to attack Iran. Attacking Iran would’’ve been a disaster of course for the people of Iran and in the Middle East. But it would’’ve also been a disaster for the United States. 
+JAY: As the Iraq War was. 
+PILGER: He decided not to attack them. So yes, but Obama has run probably more wars simultaneously than any other president. He’’s run probably the most comprehensive terror campaign in his drone warfare of assassination. You know we can sit here and say that one is slightly better. 
+JAY: I would’n’t even use the word better. I would say in specific circumstances. 
+PILGER: I was searching. I was going to say less insane than the other. Sure. But in the end, here we are in 2016 in a presidential campaign and I’ve covered 4 US presidential campaigns and I thought no you could’n’t have Nixon as president. Well looking back on Nixon compared with some of the others who have come since, maybe a little less insane there. I don’’t know. But here we are in 2016 with this political freak show in the United States that spells great danger for all of us. 
+JAY: John talk a little bit about the film you’re working on and why you think there’s such a looming confrontation with China, what’’s driving it? 
+PILGER: Well it’’s not what I think. The evidence is very clear. I mean Obama, the one who’’s done the deals, he’s announced that he went to Australia in 2011 and announced what was known as the pivot to Asia and that was the deployment, the transfer of almost two-thirds of US naval forces into the Asia Pacific region by the year 2020. And at the moment there are 400 US bases ringing China. They start in Australia and they go all the way through Asia, up through the Pacific, Korea, Japan, across Eurasia, Afghanistan, India. If you look at them on a map, you can understand why the Chinese have apparently changed their nuclear policy to a first strike policy. They never had that. They used to keep the missiles and warheads separate. They don’’t anymore. 
+In the informed literature, the Journal of Concerned Scientists and there have been a number of articles that have described in some detail how the Chinese have changed their nuclear profile. They’re worried. I was there not long ago and I spoke to a number of strategists and people are worried– rather confused actually– but worried and some of them are quite angry. The whole building of air strips on the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea was a defensive move. Last year the United States conducted possibly the biggest naval exercise in history. Talisman Saber in which it rehearsed a blockade across the Malacca Straits through which comes 80% of China’’s oil and its raw materials. 
+The Chinese understand all of this. They know all of this. If it’’s not explained to us through our media, they certainly know about it. This kind of provocation against China has been almost, I would’n’t say a sideshow but it’’s another chapter. The first chapter of course is the provocation of Russia. And that is probably the most dangerous. Does anyone in the United States know what the Russians are thinking? What people in Russia are thinking? That they’’re having civil drill exercises. What the Russian press is saying? What people think about this? 
+There is a sense in much of Russia that the United States is about to attack them. This is very, very dangerous because it puts a country in a defensive position, and that’’s when accidents can happen. There is no debate about this in what is it? Constitutionally the free-est place in the world, in the United States? Nothing. Read the New York Times for the last couple of days. It’’s become a sort of Cold War propaganda sheet. Stories that are clearly nonsense. 
+JAY: The objective seems to be one would think to weaken Putin but if anything’’s going to strengthen Putin it’’s this kind of threat that creates an increased amount of nationalism and such. 
+PILGER: Well I don’’t know if it will strengthen Putin at all. I don’’t know enough about Russia. But the little I do know suggests that Putin is one of those who is always talking about being a partner of the United States. He does want to be a partner. He sees Russia’’s future in Europe. There are others in Russia who have had enough of the talk of partnership and who drink in a deep well of Russian nationalism and Russian memory of all their great invasions of their country. So, I don’’t know whether it strengthens Putin or not. Perhaps it does’n’t. Whatever it is, it’’s dangerous. 
+JAY: You mean in other ways it could be strengthening far more nationalists and fascistic forces that could actually- 
+PILGER: Well not fascistic. In fact, there are plenty of fascists in Ukraine. You would’n’t know that reading the US press. There was a coup in 2014. Fascist led. Paid for by the United States. The truth of that is inverted and it has Russia invading Ukraine. I mean couldn’’t make it up but that’’s the received wisdom. Now I’’m not sure about the fascistic elements in Russia but there could be militarist elements and there could be those in the very powerful national security sector in Russia that say we have to prepare and they are preparing of course. Their weapons industry has been developing in a very sophisticated way in the last few years. Their air defenses and so on. But this is all war preparation. You know whether it’’s Clinton or Trump it’’s deeply worrying and deeply disturbing when reckless politicians like Hillary Clinton can stand up and beat every war drum that is put in front of them. That’’s reckless. 
+JAY: Alright thanks very much for joining us, John. 
+PILGER: You’’re welcome. 
+JAY: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+5157,Trump names three apparent vice-presidential possibilities on Twitter,"In a flurry of activity on Monday, Donald Trump named three Republican politicians seemingly in contention to be named as his vice-presidential pick at the party’s national convention in Cleveland later this month.
+
+Those named were the first-term Iowa senator Joni Ernst, the first-term Arkansas senator Tom Cotton – like Ernst a military veteran – and the governor of Indiana, Mike Pence. Trump spent time with Pence and his family on Sunday and was due to meet Ernst in New Jersey on Monday.
+
+Ernst was endorsed by the Tea Party and won her Senate seat in 2014, running an infamous ad featuring a boast of growing up “castrating hogs on an Iowa farm” and the promise that once in Washington she would “know how to cut pork”, thus making “big spenders … squeal”. In 2015, she delivered the Republican response to Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.
+
+Cotton, 39 and thought by some a likely post-Trump presidential candidate in 2020, has not been as often named among potential Trump VPs as Pence and Ernst. In his tweet, Trump said Cotton had been “great on Meet the Press yesterday. Despite a totally one-sided interview by Chuck Todd, the end result was solid!”
+
+Cotton gave little away in his NBC interview, saying Trump could “make the case for himself” as to why he should be president. He was more forthright in attacking Hillary Clinton, who he said had been “responsible for many of the worst decisions of the Obama administration”.
+
+Trump’s note of complaint about Todd’s questioning echoed another tweet sent on Monday, in which he blamed the “dishonest media” for a furor over a tweet he sent and then deleted on Saturday, which showed Clinton next to a six-pointed star against a background of dollar bills, prompting accusations of antisemitism. The image was later found by reporters on a white supremacist message board, in a post predating Trump’s tweet.
+
+The former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who has repeatedly said he is open to being Trump’s VP, may yet be considered too forthright. Last week, in words that echoed strongly on Monday in the controversy over Trump’s Clinton tweet, he told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival: “Trump’s job is, frankly, to quit screwing up and get the election down to three or four big issues.”
+
+The New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama have also been reported to be under consideration. Trump has said the pick will likely be announced at the convention in Cleveland, which starts on 18 July, but some sources suggest he may announce sooner, to help drum up excitement.
+
+As evidence of his management of a process which generates relatively positive publicity, Trump also tweeted on Monday: “The only people who are not interested in being the VP pick are the people who have not been asked!”
+
+Many of the Republican party’s biggest names are not willing to appear at the convention. The former presidents George HW Bush and George W Bush; the 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney; and the Ohio governor, John Kasich, all plan to avoid the four-day event.
+
+Possible speakers include the former Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight, the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and the boxing promoter Don King.
+
+“I’m going to be involved, definitely,” King, who lives in Cleveland, told the Associated Press. “He’s my man. I love him. He’s going to be the next president.”
+
+Some celebrities backing Trump have, however, passed on the convention. The Super Bowl-winning Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka told the Chicago Tribune last week: “I spoke with Mr Trump this afternoon, and he invited me. But I don’t think I’m going to go.”
+
+Trump’s campaign has also been in touch with aides to the man who challenged him most strongly in the primary, the Texas senator Ted Cruz, who has reportedly been trying to win a speaking slot. Others under consideration include the former United Nations ambassador and sometime presidential hopeful John Bolton, the West Virginia senator Shelley Moore Capito and the Washington representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
+
+Gingrich, a likely convention speaker who also spoke to the AP, said Trump “understands that if he can appeal to consumer America, he drowns political America”. He also recalled a recent conversation with a Trump family member who confidently told him: “We know how to do conventions.”
+
+Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, predicted in a recent radio interview the convention would be “a great combination of our great politicians, but also great American businessmen and women and leaders across industry and leaders across really all sectors, from athletes to coaches and everything in between.
+
+
+
+“I think it will be a convention unlike any we’ve ever seen,” she said. “It will be substantive. It will be interesting. It will be different. It’s not going to be a ho-hum lineup of, you know, the typical politicians.”
+
+A Trump spokesman, Jason Miller, told the AP: “This is not going to be your typical party convention like years past. Donald Trump is better suited than just about any candidate in memory to put together a program that’s outside of Washington and can appeal directly to the American people.”
+
+
+
+Matt Borges, the Ohio Republican party chairman, said: “[Trump] is going to have to bring all his skills to bear to make this work, not just in Cleveland, but for the next four months.
+
+“It won’t be easy, but that’s what he’s got to do.”",REAL
+6946,Google appoints Vice-President | Katehon think tank. Geopolitics & Tradition,"Главная » News » Google appoints Vice-President Google appoints Vice-President Tuesday, 1 November, 2016 - 09:30 
+Israel Meir Brand has become a new Vice President of Google Corporation. Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Google Inc reported this information. Brand was the first Google Israel employee and was appointed CEO of Google Israel. 
+At the same time Meir Brand will continue to rule Israel, the Middle East, Africa, Russia, Turkey, and Greece. 
+Against the background of the latest Wikileaks data about rigging custom queries of Google and Yahoo in favor of Clinton and other assistance provided by the corporation of the Democratic Party headquarters (also financing by Israeli billionaires), the appointment of Meir Brand means the strengthening Israel's role in the information space. 
+Despite the fact that Google has apologized for the changes on their maps (Palestine, for example, has not been marked as autonomy one, there was no Serbian monastery of Visoki Dečani), Tel Aviv is known to use actively possibilities of censorship in Internet. The recent changes are likely aimed to an active information attack including at strategically important areas, with which Meir Brand is familiar (Russia, Turkey, Middle Eastern countries). Related links ",FAKE
+2446,The accidental case against Obamacare,"Now, the sales pitch is over. The Supreme Court will rule this month in King v. Burwell. The lawsuit will determine whether the Obama administration has the legal authority to dole out billions in tax subsidies to Obamacare enrollees.
+
+Unlike the last time conservatives took Obamacare to the Supreme Court — when the Republican party, major activists, and 26 attorneys general joined forces — the new challenge has a more surprising backstory for a big case. It is the result of the key players working loosely, overcoming lawsuit fatigue in conservative circles, pushing an argument that seems more technical than substantive, and even a bit of luck.
+
+""I think people imagine a eureka moment. It was nothing like that.""
+
+""There is nothing very organized about it,"" Michael Greve, a law professor at George Mason University who supports the case, has written. ""The litigation has no single mastermind or man behind the curtain. The campaign is the product of a loose conservative-libertarian infrastructure.""
+
+The case now sits with the Supreme Court, despite the unusual route it took. So while supporters might have viewed it as a nonsense legal challenge — never taking it as seriously as the individual mandate case — they still find themselves back where they were three years ago: fearing that the law could fall apart with just one court decision.
+
+Tom Christina did not want to take on the Affordable Care Act.
+
+A former Reagan-administration official turned corporate lawyer, Christina is part of the 36-person employee-benefits practice at the law firm Ogletree Deakins. When Congress began to pursue health reform, his firm decided that somebody ought to read the actual bill. Christina got the assignment.
+
+""Someone had to follow the Act in case it got passed,"" he told me in a recent interview. ""I was volunteered for that job.""
+
+So, Christina read the law. And at a poorly attended conference at the American Enterprise Institute in December 2010, he spoke about his findings. No one cared too much.
+
+The conference was aimed at finding new ways to challenge the health-care law. There was a then-nascent challenge to the individual mandate winding its way through district courts that looked promising. Conservatives were still hungry to hedge their bets and find other ways to bring down Obamacare if the individual-mandate argument failed (as it ultimately did).
+
+""The bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene,"" Greve, then the director of the federalism project at the American Enterprise Institute, declared at the panel. ""I do not care how this is done, whether it's dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, or if we strangle it. I don't care who does it, whether it's some court someplace or the United States Congress, any which way, any dollar spent on that goal is worth spending.""
+
+Where Greve spoke in bold declarations, Christina gravitated towards more subdued legalese. When he dropped a bombshell in the form of a dark-blue PowerPoint slide, none of the attending wonks actually seemed to notice.
+
+The slide pointed out that the section of Obamacare that explained how tax credits work — Section 1401(a)(2), to be exact — specified that the financial help would go to those who purchased coverage on ""an exchange established by the state."" There was no similar provision, or call out, for people who got their coverage on a marketplace that the federal government set up.
+
+""I noticed something peculiar about the tax credits. There will be no tax credits for tax payers who live in non-capitulating states,"" Christina told the audience.
+
+Looking back on that presentation, Christina says he really didn't think much at the time about what this would mean for the health-care law.
+
+""I think people imagine a eureka moment,"" says Christina. ""It was nothing like that. I was assigned to do this for my firm.""
+
+The Affordable Care Act did not follow the normal procedure when it became law. Normally, one chamber passes its own version of a bill. The other chamber passes a separate version. The two bodies hold a conference, where they reconcile any differences between the two bills and generally clean up the language and tighten the statute. The merged bill goes back to both chambers, which vote again.
+
+This did not happen with the Affordable Care Act. As anyone who covered it at the time — as I did, working as a reporter for Newsweek — remembers, the law's passage was an absolute mess. Sen. Ted Kennedy's death in December 2010 lost the Democrats their supermajority in the Senate — and meant that the health law wouldn't survive a second vote in the Senate.
+
+Democrats were forced to stick with the Senate bill they had already passed; anything they sent back to the chamber for another vote would inevitably fail. A final conference never happened. All the messy language and loose ends that legislators expected to get ironed out simply became part of the law.
+
+During the days and nights I spent on Capitol Hill covering the debate, the idea of not offering subsidies to some enrollees just never came up. Staff who worked on the law say they always intended for all Obamacare enrollees to get health-insurance subsidies; the law simply wouldn't make sense without them.
+
+""The evidence of congressional intent here is overwhelming,"" John McDonough, who worked on the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions committee during the health-reform debate, wrote in an email. ""There is not a scintilla of evidence that the Democratic lawmakers who designed the law intended to deny subsidies to any state, regardless of exchange status.""
+
+As for the language that Christina highlighted, they see that as evidence of the health law's rushed passage. Nobody corrected the types of drafting errors that a conference committee would typically address.
+
+""At the end of the day, this should have never happened and is a product of the rushed way the law was passed,"" says Chris Condeluci, who worked as tax and benefits counsel for the Senate Finance Committee's Republicans during the Affordable Care Act debate.
+
+Jon Adler can't remember exactly when he came across Tom Christina's presentation. Sometime in late 2010 or 2011, he thinks. Adler, a Case Western University law professor, was preparing to present at a University of Kansas conference on the health-care law and was searching online for what others had said on the issue.
+
+He listened to the audio from Christina's presentation while driving and later clicked through the slides. Adler included the point about the subsidies in his February 2011 talk. ""It was something I highlighted in my presentation,"" Adler says. ""No one seemed particularly disturbed by it.""
+
+Adler wasn't particularly disturbed by it either; like Christina, he thought it was an interesting snafu in the law but not much more. He happened to mention the issue to Michael Cannon, the long-time health-policy director at the libertarian Cato Institute, over email a few months later.
+
+Neither Adler nor Cannon could recall what, exactly they'd been emailing about in the first place. Adler didn't care much about health policy; his expertise was in law. But he knew that Cannon had spent the past few years testifying before state legislatures about why they shouldn't implement Obamacare. So Adler mentioned one more argument he could add to his presentation.
+
+""He had been talking about how states shouldn't cooperate. And I responded to him with something like, 'If they don't create an exchange, they can't get the tax credits,'"" Adler recalls. ""He said, 'What?' And I told him, 'Read the statute.'""
+
+""I don't think Jonathan understood the significance of the feature when he told me, maybe because he wasn't a health-care wonk who talked about three-legged stools all the time,"" Cannon says.
+
+Cannon did: he's a health wonk who knew immediately that taking away subsidies would leave Obamacare with a giant hole.
+
+""What I recognized was that this allowed states to block one of the three legs of Obamacare’s three-legged stool: the subsidies,"" he says. ""And they could do so in a way that would increase pressure on Congress to re-open the law. So I started adding that into my list of reasons states shouldn’t establish exchanges.""
+
+There wasn't much that Cannon and Adler could do with their discovery at that point. The federal government still hadn't published the rules governing how the insurance subsidies would work; it was still possible that the Obama administration might come out and agree with them, saying state exchanges were the only bodies authorized to dole out funds.
+
+The Obama administration eliminated that possibility in May 2012: as everyone expected, they issued final rules stipulating that all exchanges, both those administered federally and those administered by states, could provide shoppers with help.
+
+The search for a plaintiff to challenge the rule was officially on.
+
+Over the past three years, Cannon and Adler's argument against Obamacare has evolved significantly.
+
+For about two years, they and other challengers made a purely textualist argument. The health-care law says, in plain language, that the government can only give financial help to those buying coverage in ""an exchange established by the state.""
+
+Put aside Congress' cries that they meant for any health-law enrollee to get subsides, this argument goes. The government has to live with the language in the law that it passed — and it says that subsidies only go to those enrolled in state-based exchanges.
+
+Cannon and Adler initially thought this way, too. They wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling it a ""glitch.""
+
+But their argument changed in 2012. Cannon and his research assistant spent months pouring over every mention of the word ""exchange"" in the Congressional record of the health-law debate. Cannon still keeps a thick, black binder with the whole thing in his office.
+
+The argument against Obamacare has evolved from one about a ""glitch"" to one over Congressional intent
+
+That effort, Cannon says, convinced him Congress expressly intended to use insurance subsidies as a way to entice states into building insurance marketplaces.
+
+""If you look at the tax-credit eligibility rules, they are very tightly worded,"" Cannon says. ""It’s not in one place, but in two places, it says that the credits are only available 'through an Exchange established by the State.'""
+
+This is where I and others who followed the legislative debate over Obamacare have trouble sticking with Cannon's version of the events. I covered the drafting of the health law in detail, and in every conversation I ever had with anyone involved, they always believed that Congress meant for every state to have subsidies.
+
+The whole point of the federal exchanges, after all, was to make sure Obamacare worked in states that wouldn't or couldn't build an exchange of their own. Congress always meant for residents of all 50 states to have access to financial help. It was never a question, during the five years I've spent writing about Obamacare, whether this would be the case.
+
+This is where judges, too, have found the challengers' case to be weak. ""It is clear,"" Judge Roger Gregory wrote in the Fourth Circuit decision against the plaintiffs, ""that widely available tax credits are essential to fulfilling the Act's primary goals and that Congress was aware of their importance when drafting the bill.""
+
+Some King supporters are skeptical of Cannon's argument, too. They question whether their efforts are best spent attempting to divine thoughts legislators had five years ago.
+
+""I don't think you have to get into that. It's really quite beside the point,"" says Jim Blumstein, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who has previously worked on health-law litigation. He says that in discussions with some of the King litigants, he's ""pushed hard for a focus to be on what the law actually says. The intent is not critical.""
+
+Finding a major flaw in the health-care law was only half the battle for conservatives. They also had to find a plaintiff — someone who the law had harmed, who could bring a lawsuit against it.
+
+The search for a new Obamacare challenger initially went quite poorly. The individual mandate case had failed earlier that summer and, among conservatives, there was lawsuit fatigue. There was no appetite for a lawsuit that appeared to hinge on a drafting error.
+
+Cannon badgered a half-dozen governors and attorneys general to take the case, especially those who had worked on the individual mandate. He's an energetic speaker with a quick wit and an appetite for a long fight. For much of 2011 and 2012, he was criss-crossing the country to testify before state legislatures (shortly after the birth of his twin daughters, he did switch to doing some testimony via video chat). Whether in Missouri or Maryland, Cannon was turning up at governors' doorsteps across the country, urging them that they should not, in any circumstances, help the federal government implement Obamacare.
+
+Now, Cannon had a way that he thought Republicans could in fact halt Obamacare, with a new lawsuit. The problem was, none of them believed him.
+
+""I couldn't interest Ken Cuccinelli or Pam Bondi,"" Cannon says. ""I think I mentioned it to Paul LePage. I spoke with Rick Scott, and he said he was interested but never did anything. Phil Bryant seemed excited, but no follow through.""
+
+Nothing worked until Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt became interested. He had, like many other Republican attorneys general, filed a challenge to the health law's individual mandate. It was still pending at a district court when the Supreme Court ruled that part of the law constitutional.
+
+The judge gave Pruitt a choice: he could drop the suit, given the Supreme Court ruling, or he could amend his complaint to challenge a different part of the law. Pruitt chose the latter. On September 9, 2012 — two years after the AEI presentation and three months after the Supreme Court ruling — his was the first lawsuit to challenge the legality of Obamacare's insurance subsidies.
+
+Initially, conservative health-policy experts hoped that the Oklahoma lawsuit would include private citizens challenging the health-care law alongside the government. But the state couldn't scrounge up additional plaintiffs before the deadline to amend its case and ultimately went it alone.
+
+This is part of the reason that, six months later, on May 2, 2013, a separate lawsuit arrived in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia: Halbig v. Burwell. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, had financed the lawsuit and recruited a plaintiff (Jacqueline Halbig von Schleppenbach, a former Bush administration official turned consultant) for the case.
+
+The newly filed lawsuit moved slowly. It irked Mike Carvin, the lawyer on the suit,  enough that he sent the district court's chief justice, Royce Lamberth, a letter asking him to reassign the case to one his colleagues.
+
+So Carvin filed yet another lawsuit in Virginia, King v. Burwell, on September 16, 2013. Eventually, one of them had to move.
+
+The initial rulings in King and Halbig did not go well for Carvin: in early 2014, he lost both district court challenges. District of Columbia Judge Paul Friedman described the plaintiffs' arguments as ""unpersuasive."" The Virginia judge who ruled in King said the challengers had ""no direct support in the legislative history of the ACA for Plaintiffs' theory that Congress intended to condition federal funds on state participation.""
+
+Carvin appealed both decisions. And on July 22, the subsidies argument got its first positive news. In the span of two hours — and by pure coincidence — the appeals courts for the District of Columbia and the Fourth Circuit issued conflicting rulings. The DC Court ruled against Obamacare's subsidies; the Fourth Circuit ruled for them.
+
+This was already a good day for the health-care law challengers. The circuit split gave Supreme Court a stronger reason to step in and resolve the conflict. CEI organized an impromptu celebration in its downtown Washington offices for that afternoon.
+
+As CEI's general counsel Sam Kazman was heading to the party, a co-worker pulled him aside. On his computer, he played a video of MIT economist and former White House consultant Jon Gruber essentially making their main legal argument.
+
+""If you’re a state and you don’t set up an Exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits,"" Gruber says in the video, taped at a 2012 speaking appearance.
+
+Gruber has disavowed the remarks, saying that he spoke ""off the cuff"" and made a mistake. There's reason to believe him: Gruber spoke regularly to dozens of reporters during this period and never mentioned this idea to any of them. So these comments are at odds with the bulk of his work on this issue.
+
+But in the video footage, Gruber appeared to be providing, at least in part, the evidence the Virginia judge said the challengers lacked: proof that Congress — or at least an outside advisor who worked with Congress — did intend to condition federal funds on state participation.
+
+""It was a holy shit moment,"" Kazman says. ""We quickly put it up on our website. It went viral overnight and was the subject of a question at a White House press conference the next day.""
+
+The Supreme Court agreed to hear King v. Burwell on November 7, 2014. Oral arguments occurred on March 4, and a decision is expected in June.
+
+The government has, so far, won three of the five court decisions on the subsidies issue. Court watchers thought the oral arguments went well for the administration.
+
+The government's argument has remained consistent throughout the process: of course Congress meant for all 50 states to have subsidies. If the legislative language is unclear on whether that is the case, then the judicial system ought to give deference to the executive branch in interpreting the law.
+
+""During the time the Act was under consideration, no Member of Congress ever suggested that tax credits would be available only in States that established their own Exchanges—even though the language on which petitioners rely was in draft bills for months before the Act was enacted,"" the government writes in its Supreme Court brief. ""Any such suggestion would have produced a firestorm of controversy, but there was none.""
+
+I've talked to about a dozen legal experts who have followed this case the closest. Some of them agree with the challengers' arguments; others don't. But none of them are writing off the case as a superficial challenge to the Affordable Care Act. A slim majority told me that, if they had to place a bet, they would expect the Supreme Court to rule against the Affordable Care Act.
+
+Yes, they say, the Supreme Court did save the Affordable Care Act three years ago by upholding the individual mandate. But the legal issues then were about the law's fundamental constitutionality. If the court had ruled against the mandate, it would have dismantled the law.
+
+In this case, the justices may be less likely to view their decision as equally dire: they're simply sending the law back to Congress, which would face no constitutional obstacle to changing the law to allow subsidies in all 50 states. When experts survey the court, they see a panel of justices that could react favorably to the textual arguments that the health-law challengers make.
+
+And they note that it took at least four justices to agree to hear the case. It only takes one more to create a majority against the health-care law. The idea of five justices finding the challengers' arguments compelling is well within the realm of reality for most observers.
+
+""When I read prominent people saying this case was frivolous, I winced a bit,"" says Nicholas Bagley, an assistant law professor at the University of Michigan who has written extensively on the King challenge. ""This is a serious lawsuit. This should make people worry.""",REAL
+2925,"ISIS Empire: Smuggling, shakedowns, donations feed swelling terror budget","As the Islamic State seeks to export its brand of barbaric terror to would-be affiliates, the U.S. faces a growing challenge to find the sources of ISIS funding and blunt its flow to allied militants.
+
+The terror army's most recent atrocity was the mass beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya. It remains unclear how closely tied those militants are to ISIS in Iraq and Syria, but the Islamic State's underground economy continues to thrive. Even as the U.S.-led coalition strikes at what was long the heart of ISIS' revenue stream -- oil fields and refineries -- officials say the terror network is making money in other ways.
+
+""We know that oil revenue is no longer the lead source of their income in dollars,"" Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said recently.
+
+But he added: ""They get a lot of donations. They also have a significant black market program."" How much money ISIS truly makes from donations is a matter of debate. But experts agree that ISIS receives significant revenue from black-market smuggling and other operations.
+
+""ISIS is selling anything they can get their hands on,"" Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in an interview with Fox News. Plus, according to reports, the group is even skimming Iraqi taxpayer dollars by shaking down government employees in areas they've conquered.
+
+In short, ISIS is set on building a terror empire, going so far as to tout its annual financials.
+
+Reportedly, ISIS released a $2 billion budget for 2015 including a $250 million surplus, though those numbers are disputed. After Mosul fell to the Islamic State in June, the International Business Times declared ISIS the ""world's richest terrorist organization"" after the central bank's vaults were looted of some $420 million. Estimates vary, but ISIS reportedly rakes in between one and three million dollars per day, though the strikes against its oil refineries have taken a toll.
+
+The United Nations last Thursday tried to strike at the money stream. The Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution aimed at cutting off millions of dollars in earnings from oil smuggling, antiquities trafficking and ransom payments to ISIS.
+
+The measure calls for sanctions against individuals and entities that trade in oil with ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates such as the Al-Nusra Front in Syria. The resolution was co-sponsored by more than 35 countries. It called for all 193 countries of the U.N. to take steps to prevent ancient artifacts from being smuggled and sold and to ban the direct or indirect sale of ransoms.
+
+U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said payments and donations to ISIS ""perpetuate a cycle of horrific brutality, giving these groups resources to carry out more murderous acts and incentivizing them to take more people captive.""
+
+How much ISIS really receives from donations is unclear.
+
+""Most charities [supporting radical Islam] in the Gulf are aligned with Al Qaeda, not ISIS,"" said Gartenstein-Ross.
+
+Gartenstein-Ross pointed to Abdulrahman al-Nuaymi, a Qatari who has been accused by the U.S. Treasury Department of transferring millions of dollars to Al Qaeda affiliates in Iraq and Syria, as a prime example of this arrangement. While many blame Qatar for playing a ""double game"" of supporting both radical Islamist groups and the coalition against ISIS, the Obama administration disputes the notion that wealthy Arabs from Persian Gulf countries give generously to ISIS.
+
+""ISIL derives a relatively small share of its funds from deep-pocket donors, and thus does not, today, depend principally on moving money across international borders. Instead, ISIL obtains the vast majority of its revenues through local criminal and terrorist activities,"" said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen in October, at The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
+
+""There is a lot of opacity,"" Gartenstein-Ross admitted. But he said the smuggling of black market goods, similar to the opium trade by the Taliban inside Afghanistan; taxation among the Iraqi population particularly in Mosul; and the sale of oil round out other areas of ISIS funding. Gartenstein-Ross pointed out that airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition against oil refineries in Syria have denied ISIS a large source of revenue. Looting and ransoms make up for some of the difference, however.
+
+Some experts point to the Iraqi government as unwittingly contributing to ISIS' coffers. Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst, said in a recent New York Times op-ed that the Iraqi government continues to pay its civil servants in Mosul, despite being controlled by ISIS.
+
+Peritz wrote, ""Baghdad provides about $130 million every month to pay all its workers in Mosul"" and estimated that Iraq's treasury has paid over $1 billion to these civil servants since Mosul fell in June 2014. He estimated that ISIS has taken half of those payments in the form of taxation.
+
+While efforts are currently underway to dismantle key revenue sources for the Islamic State, there are signs the caliphate is receiving setbacks from within. According to syriadirect.org, ""Assassinations, bombings and defections plague the Islamic State in Deir e-Zor,"" in oil-rich eastern Syria. The nonprofit news outlet based in Amman, Jordan, says that over the past month, assassination attempts against members of ISIS religious police have become more common.
+
+Lucas Tomlinson is the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News Channel. You can follow him on Twitter: @LucasFoxNews",REAL
+1068,Cruz wins CPAC presidential straw poll,"Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz on Saturday won the annual CPAC presidential straw poll, a gauge of where conservative voters stand.
+
+Florida Sen. Marco Rubio came in second and billionaire businessman Donald Trump came in third.
+
+Cruz got 40 percent of the informal vote, followed by Rubio with 30 percent, Trump with 15 percent and Ohio Gov. John Kasich with 8 percent.
+
+Trump at the last minute cancelled his appearance at the four-day CPAC event. Cruz and Rubio spoke at the event.
+
+Last year, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul won the informal poll with 25.7 of the vote, followed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Cruz, Ben Carson, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, Rubio and Trump.
+
+In 2012, the last CPAC straw poll in a presidential year, the winner was Mitt Romney, the eventual GOP nominee. He was followed by Santorum and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.",REAL
+2416,"Hawaii’s $205M ObamaCare system on life support, critics fear ‘complete waste’","Federal taxpayers dumped more than $205 million into Hawaii's ObamaCare insurance exchange, but after a steady downward spiral the once-highly praised Hawaii Health Connector is on life support.
+
+The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has already restricted grant funds to the Hawaii Health Connector, after telling officials in March it was out of compliance with the Affordable Care Act because of fiscal instability and ongoing IT issues.
+
+With state lawmakers also blocking additional funds, the system is struggling to stay afloat. The governor's office said it is doing what it can to salvage the situation, including approving $30 million to temporarily transition the local portal to the federal exchange, HealthCare.gov -- where residents could continue to enroll over the next year while problems with the local site are addressed.
+
+Laurel Johnston, deputy chief of staff for Gov. David Ige, claimed the state will ""negotiate the release of federal grant funds"" and ensure compliance with the law.
+
+Whether they will succeed remains to be seen. CMS still has to accept the governor's proposal -- and the exchange reportedly is making contingency plans in case the system has to shut down entirely.
+
+The drama has only hardened critics' concerns that millions of taxpayer dollars are going to waste.
+
+""The $200 million was a complete waste of tax dollars that could have been used for much more productive efforts,"" said Reg Baker, a well-known CPA in Hawaii who for many years was the chief financial officer for the health insurance plan, HMAA.
+
+The news about the Hawaii Health Connector's troubles went national this week when Hawaii's largest daily, the Star Advertiser, broke a story based on a ""leaked"" draft of the state's report to CMS, which reportedly said the exchange prepared a contingency plan to shut down local operations and transition to federal government control by Sept. 30. The plan purportedly directed that no new enrollees would be accepted by the local exchange after the end of this week, outreach services would conclude May 31, and a 73-member workforce, including staff and consultants, would be laid off by Feb. 28.
+
+The governor's office maintained that was just a draft report and said ""recent news reports based on confidential working draft documents have misrepresented ongoing discussions between the federal government, the state administration and Hawaii Health Connector.""
+
+The Connector's executive director Jeff Kissel said the first priority ""is to ensure the continuity of coverage for the 37,000 to 40,000 Hawaii residents who are receiving health insurance coverage through Hawaii Health Connector."" If CMS does not accept the governor's plan, Hawaii also risks losing $1 billion in matching federal Medicaid funds, according to Ige's office.
+
+Baker told FoxNews.com the state should just abandon plans to keep the local Connector open, and merge with the federal government website. ""Piggy-backing on the federal system is the financially smart thing to do,"" he said.
+
+While many of the state's Democrats praised the ObamaCare exchange when it launched in October 2013, it was riddled with trouble from the start. The web portal never worked properly despite the state spending $74 million on a contract with CGI to build and maintain it. The exchange experienced tremendous staff turnover, with three executive directors appointed in two years. Enrollment reached just over 8,500 in the first year, and as a result, Hawaii was ranked the most costly exchange in the nation at more than $$23,899 per person.
+
+Enrollment never reached the 300,000 number then-Gov. Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat, enthusiastically predicted at the opening press conference launching the Connector. The enrollment number also never hit 70,000, the minimum needed to stay financially solvent. At its peak, enrollment reached 37,000, a fraction of the state's 1.4 million people. Hawaii's uninsured population, at 8 percent when the exchange opened, dropped just 2 percent.
+
+""Some folks might suggest that the Connector was 'successful' because of the 30,000 people who signed up, but those numbers are questionable since many already had insurance to begin with, were transferred to the Medicare system or are no longer enrolled, and signups are not as important as the number currently enrolled in the insurance plans offered on the Connector,"" Baker said, noting each enrollee cost the federal government about $6,666.66.
+
+Millions of dollars went to the failed web portal developed by controversial Montreal-based company, CGI Federal, the same company that developed the botched federal web portal for HealthCare.gov under a $93.7 million contract, but was replaced in January 2014 after numerous enrollees had problems registering.
+
+Besides the fact that Hawaii's web portal did not function properly since the site launched, because it didn't sync with the state Department of Human Services website offering Medicaid, the site had another major technical problem: the Connector's Small Business Health Options Program targeted at small business owners sent garbled data to insurers preventing them from signing up small businesses and their employees.
+
+Hawaii is just the latest state that has struggled to sustain its ObamaCare exchange, at great cost to taxpayers, watchdog group Americans for Tax Reform notes.
+
+Despite the government investing $4.5 billion into state-run exchanges, Oregon, Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont, New Mexico and Nevada shut down their operations.
+
+""One wonders where these tens of millions of dollars actually go,"" ATR President Grover Norquist said.
+
+Baker said the system is failing ""for the same reason most businesses fail -- the customers did not see the value of the product they were trying to sell.""",REAL
+8930,"Biden Blames “Lazy American Women” For The Economy: “They Sit Around Doing Nothing, Only Hillary Can Force Them To Work”","Email 
+
+Democratic Vice President Joe Biden wants American women to get back in the workforce to help boost the economy. “If we just put all the women back to work, if they were able to afford childcare, we would increase the GDP in America by close to eight tenths of one percent,” he said. “That’s trillions of dollars over the next decade.” 
+Biden made his remarks during a campaign event for Hillary Clinton at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Tuesday. “The state of our economy could be characterized by a single word: pitiful,” he argued. “We’re still battling recession, I don’t care what the official stats are saying, America is still in recession. And we’re not doing anything about it.” 
+He added that it was “lazy American women” who brought about the downfall of the economy, because “they sit around on their behinds, doing nothing and squandering their days away when they could be improving the country that has given so much to them.” “I’m not sure how exactly we got to this point, but we’re here and we need to move. Like, yesterday,” he said. 
+“Mark my words and mark them well,” he addressed the crowd. “Hillary Clinton is the only one who can force American women to go to work. This is true because of a number of reasons. First, she’s a woman herself and not just any woman; she’s a self-made woman. So you better believe what she’s saying is true and has been tried and tested in practice plenty of times.” 
+“Second, Hillary Clinton understands how difficult it can be to give up the status of a free-loader when your husband is the bread-winner of the household and the wife is expected to tend to the house, the children, make sure dinner is served and always be in the mood for marital duties. She’s been all that and she’s learned how to break free from it, the hard way, I might add,” Biden continued. 
+“Today’s women are pampered and aren’t used to rolling up their sleeves and getting the job done on their own,” the vice president said. “They’re too dependent, too weak and too lazy to contribute to the economy. The reason for that is they’ve learned how to manipulate men by employing one of the most fundamental laws of economics: when a sought-after commodity becomes short in supply, the demand for it rises even higher.” 
+“Now, that’s all fine and dandy when it comes to their personal interests, but if you look at the big picture, it’s the economy that’s missing out on valuable workforce. And that’s why we need to get them off their lazy behinds and get them into their workplaces. And like I said, Hillary Clinton is the only one who can do it, which is what makes her the ideal candidate for the next President of the United States. We need to heal this country, folks, not run it into the ground even deeper,” Biden concluded.",FAKE
+7168,North Dakota Pipeline: Cell Service Blacked Out As Violence Against Protesters Increases,"As violence against protestors at the construction site of the North Dakota Access Pipeline escalates, social media outlets like Facebook show millions what is actually going on. 
+
+Arrests at the recently erected frontline camp in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline have begun and they are anything but non-violent. Police and military have moved in on Indigenous water protectors and their allies. 
+
+Law enforcement seem to have been interfering with cell signal, making it difficult for protestors to keep Facebook and other social media outlets updated on what is happening. Yet the social media users who were able to post videos and livefeeds have been able to spread awareness about the ongoing fight against the build of the Dakota Pipeline, a pipeline that could endanger the clean drinking water supply for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. 
+
+According to eyewitnesses, buses filled with law enforcement have been traveling toward the frontline. The indigenous water protectors and their allies are prepared to stand their ground even though crackdowns by law enforcement are getting more and more violent while the protesters have continued to use nonviolent tactics in their civil disobedience. 
+
+The Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners warned that demonstrators occupying land in the pipeline’s path must leave or face prosecution. This new frontline camp sits slightly north of the main protest camp on federal land near Cannon Ball. 
+
+Amidst potential arrests, violence, and legal charges, members of tribes from across the United States are standing with Standing Rock, ready to give their lives to the cause. While the protest is a fight to save tribal lands and fresh drinking water, it is also a fight to preserve indigenous rights, wants, and needs. 
+
+Meanwhile, Morton County sheriff’s office has been leading police response to the demonstration and it has also been conducting mass arrests like the one that just took place over the weekend. The sherif department announced that the use of dogs by private security guards against protesters last month may have been illegal. 
+
+The scare tactics used by law enforcement to get protesters out of the pipeline’s way are not working the way police forces had envisioned. Although protesters have been violently hurt by police use of force and violence, they are prepared. 
+
+Tribal leaders, led by Standing Rock Sioux tribe Chairman Dave Archambault II called on the Department of Justice to look into the use of an unnecessary amount of force by state and local law enforcement. He believes that the state has militarized the reservation. 
+
+With the rising amount of support through social media platforms, word about what is going on in North Dakota is beginning to get out to the public. Yet, with cellular service blacked out in the area, supporters are having trouble sharing what is going on. Violence against protesters was recorded on live-streams that were shared by thousands of people, highlighting what law enforcement is doing to protesters. Photos show bloody activists bit by dogs, shot with rubber bullets, and more. There have been canon attacks by police and military tanks have been brought out to disperse road blocks. 
+
+Although mainstream media is choosing to black out what is happening, social media is telling a story of people coming together to fight for water, land, and indigenous rights. What is happening at Standing Rock is history in the making. 
+
+ ",FAKE
+5797,"Break the Silence or Support Self-Determination? In Syria, the Answer Should be Obvious","B y Danny Haiphong S yria is “the target of one of the greatest misinformation campaigns in recent history.” The author regrets that left analyst Eric Draitser has contributed to the confusion. Draitser criticizes leftists who firmly support the Syrian government. Danny Haiphong counters that “the left must act with uncompromising dedication to the principle of self-determination in every case where US and Western imperialism wages wars of neo-colonial plunder.” PHOTO ABOVE: Western supported Takfiri primes field gun supplied via Turkey. “To claim that the left in the US should fight for ‘peace’ and at the same time oppose the Syrian government is an intentional attempt to remain neutral in a time of war.” Imperialism’s war on Syria may be the most important question on the order of the day for those fighting for a world free of exploitation and oppression. Syria is currently the battleground of imperialism’s last gasp of life. In nearly six years, Syria has been turned into a site of intense struggle between the forces of resistance and imperialism’s forces of reaction. It has also been the target of one of the greatest misinformation campaigns in recent history. The imperialist countries and their media lackeys have sewed deep confusion about the true character of the war being waged on Syria. Nowhere is this confusion greater than in the United States, and it appears someone I deeply respect has been overtaken by it. Imperialism’s war on Syria may be the most important question on the order of the day for those fighting for a world free of exploitation and oppression. Syria is currently the battleground of imperialism’s last gasp of life. In nearly six years, Syria has been turned into a site of intense struggle between the forces of resistance and imperialism’s forces of reaction. It has also been the target of one of the greatest misinformation campaigns in recent history. In a recent issue of CounterPunch, Eric Draitser dives head deep into the confusion [3] . He criticizes what he deems as two critical problems with the left’s stance. Draitser first criticizes the pro-imperialist left for their decision to align themselves with the foreign-sponsored terror groups in Syria, which have been labeled “revolutionaries” or “rebels” by the imperialist countries. He then goes on to criticize leftists who have positioned themselves firmly in support of the Syrian government. ERIC DRAITSER: Usually solid analysis, but suddenly a plunge into rank political collaboration with the forces of imperialism which he supposedly opposes. The question is why act like a liberaloid? Given his record, we refuse to believe he is that dumb. It is his criticism of the “pro-Assad left” that needs further examination. Draitser reveals his deep confusion when he asks: “Will you continue to delude yourselves by refusing to accept the plainly obvious truth that no state or group has the best interests of Syrians at heart?” Draitser’s question assumes that the Syrian and Russian governments are equally to blame for the chaos in Syria. Their bombs are assumed to be prolonging the war and committing atrocities against the Syrian people at the same rate of the imperialists. If this is not the case, he doesn’t state otherwise in the piece. In fact, Draitser sets out to prove true what has already been proven false by a wide range of independent and corporate media sources. “The imperialist countries and their media lackeys have sewed deep confusion about the true character of the war being waged on Syria.” First, Draitser claims that the war on Syria began as a genuine protest against “neo-liberal” reforms instituted by the Syrian government. This narrative is popular among the liberal-left media as well as the white left generally. However, those who make this claim rarely specify what neo-liberal reforms were made or how the confrontation all of a sudden became violent. Stephen Gowans reviews numerous reports from the corporate media [4] that describe the uprising in March of 2011 as immediately violent, ill-supported, and ultimately insignificant in the midst of reforms from the Syrian government that were broadly supported by the Syrian people. At the same time as the violent uprisings, thousands of Syrians were protesting in the streets [5] in support of President Assad. US/Saudi supported Takfiri fanatics operating in Syria, and depicted by the media as “moderates”. Furthermore, reports from the city of Daraa during the 2011 uprisings confirmed the presence of armed “rebels” who had freshly arrived from their US-NATO backed destruction of Libya [6] . These “rebels” have since infested the country through various channels of the Syrian border. Each group possesses a fundamentalist Wahhabi ideology and receives varying degrees of assistance from the Gulf monarchies, Israel, Turkey, NATO, and of course, the US. This is confirmed in Draitser’s article. Yet he still reinforces the claim that a popular uprising started the war even though Assad possessed broad support in 2011 [7] . The truth is that the war on Syria has little to do with neo-liberalism or popular discontent. It has been acknowledged by UN sources that despite reforms, the Syrian economy remains highly regulated and socialist in character [8] . Syria’s own form of socialism has brought many benefits to the Syrian people. Healthcare and education are rights guaranteed to all citizens [9] . Syria also possesses a secular government where Muslims, Christians, and all religious and ethnic groups lived peacefully prior to the war. Syria is thus a poor example of neo-liberalism. What economic struggles that do exist in Syria have largely stemmed from the harsh sanctions imposed by the US [10] in 2004. “The war on Syria has little to do with neo-liberalism or popular discontent.” Furthermore, Draitser cites numerous sources that support regime change to smear the Syrian government and, by extension, the Syrian people. One of the sources receives much of its information from the White Helmets. The White Helmets have long been exposed as an NGO that works directly in service of imperialism’s regime change operation in Syria. The organization receives approximately 33 million in funds [11] directly from the US and UK governments. Eva Bartlett recently visited Aleppo and witnessed many White Helmet workers sporting arms and fighting among the terror groups [12] . Draister also cites a source from the New York Post . The Post article relies heavily on documents collected by the dubious Center for International Justice and Accountability. This purported “international law” NGO [13] is run by a consortium of corporate lawyers, former or current Amnesty International staffers, and various other servants of empire. The organization specializes in “transitional justice.” In other words, the Center for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) provides a legal framework for regime change on behalf of its imperial funders. Draitser claims no group involved in the war has the interests of the Syrian people at heart yet cites directly from an organization dedicated to the promotion of war in Syria. The NGOs and their partners in the corporate media have worked together to distort the reality on the ground. Aleppo is case and point. A ceasefire was brokered by all parties in late October that was supposed to allow Syrians to escape safely from East to West Aleppo. However, the humanitarian corridors were repeatedly shelled by the Nusra Front [14] , the US-backed Al Qaeda affiliate . The media decided to ignore this and report instead that the ceasefire’s failure was due to the withholding of aid by Russia and Syria [15] . This is but one example of many where the Syrian government has been blamed for the rebel-sponsored terror inflicted on Syrian people. “His analysis uses an abstract, moral argument to violate Syria’s self-determination.” After five years of war on Syria, it is a wonder how anyone could believe a word that comes from the mouths of the imperialist countries. They lied about the origins of the conflict. They have continuously blamed the Syrian government for events that have all been traced back to the armed proxies they support. This includes the Houla Massacre [16] , the sarin gas attack [17] in Ghouta, and the so-called starvation of Madaya [18] . Aleppo is no different. The Syrian city has been under constant siege from NATO-backed terrorists. The terrorists are holding nearly 250,000 Syrians hostage in the Eastern side of war-torn Aleppo. This has been verified by journalists on the ground such as Vanessa Beeley [19] . These facts seem not to matter in Draitser’s newfound assessment of Syria. His analysis uses an abstract, moral argument to violate Syria’s self-determination. Calling those who unequivocally support the Syrian government “fetishists” assumes that the US left should take a position different from that of the Syrian people. Actual Syrians supported Bashar Al-Assad, and thus the Syrian Army, with 88.7 percent of the vote [20] in the 2014 elections. To claim that the left in the US should fight for “peace” and at the same time oppose the Syrian government is an intentional attempt to remain neutral in a time of war. As Howard Zinn brilliantly stated, one cannot be neutral on a moving train. And the imperialist war against Syria is moving dangerously toward a World War III scenario. Hillary Clinton will be elected the next President of the United States and has repeatedly expressed that she will pursue a no-fly zone [20] once in office. A no-fly zone would place Russian and Syrian military assets at risk of US-sponsored bombs and thus the world at risk of a global military confrontation not seen since World War II. How convenient it is then that Draitser should rebuke his former anti-imperialist stance in place of a stealth form of regime change. The world is on fire, yet Draitser has interpreted the situation as a chance to distort an already highly misunderstood situation . “Draister’s conclusions ultimately reinforce the Western assumption that the left must come to the rescue and save the Syrian people from their plight.” Positions such as Draitser’s are ultimately shaped by the material conditions of an imperialist empire in crisis and decline. White supremacy has been a principal condition of US imperialism since its inception. The war machine and white supremacy are deeply connected. The peoples and nations on imperialism’s hit-list are routinely depicted in a manner that justifies the need for US and Western military medicine. This notion has trickled down to the day-to-day actions of ordinary people, including what currently passes as the “anti-war” movement in the US today. Draister’s conclusions ultimately reinforce the Western assumption that the left must come to the rescue and save the Syrian people from their plight. Indeed, the Syrian people need allies and the left must be organizing toward an end to the war. But an end to the war cannot be achieved unless the left supports the will of the Syrian people. At the moment, this means the US left must align itself with the Syrian government and its allies. The left must act with uncompromising dedication to the principle of self-determination in every case where US and Western imperialism wages wars of neo-colonial plunder. Syria should be no exception. Of course, this critique should not be seen as a personal attack on Draitser himself. His body of work reflects a deep commitment to the struggle against war and Empire. He has often taken positions on international questions that are deeply unpopular with the US imperialist order. However, when mistakes are made, the left has a responsibility to correct them. There is too much at stake. Failure to step up in defense of Syria means another regime change scenario similar to what happened in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya. Draitser’s piece is a study into the path that all genuine anti-imperialists should avoid. But what is the correct path forward? Imperialism is the unquestionable cause of the war in Syria, so imperialism must be the primary target of an anti-imperialist movement. The US and its allies are risking world war over Syria’s destruction. On the other side, the Syrian and Russian governments (along with Iran and China) are doing as much as they can to find a peaceful solution to the conflict that also respects Syria’s national sovereignty. It is without question that this is the side where the left ought to be in the continued struggle to end the war once and for all. Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/haiphong_answers_eric_draitser",FAKE
+498,Walmart Boosts Minimum Wage to $9/Hour,"The biggest retailer in the world has agreed to boost its U.S. workers’ pay to $9 an hour, which is $1.75 above the federal minimum wage. Walmart announced the wage hike Thursday, adding that it expects employees to earn at least $10 an hour by Feb. 1, 2016. Both full-time and part-time employees will benefit from the increase. The retailer also announced that employees’ schedules will be set at least 2 1/2 weeks in advance and some workers will be given fixed shifts.",REAL
+9882,Trump is The Lesser Evil Because He’s Such a Narcissist      :," Trump is The Lesser Evil Because He’s Such a Narcissist By Prof. Michael Hudson
+She a vindictive dictator, punishing her enemies, appointing neocons
+Well, both Hillary and Donald Trump say the election is about the lesser evil. So, if that’s true, who’s the greater evil? Posted November 08, 2016
+Ross Ashcroft: You’ve got two candidates in the U.S. and one is very pro-Wall Street, specifically Goldman Sachs. She might as well be on the payroll. In fact, she is on the payroll. And the other is a rent-seeker -in-chief, and he’s built real estate and used the banks. So you’ve got Trump and you’ve got Clinton. Both of them are in bed with Wall Street, fundamentally. But the people get it now.
+Michael Hudson: Well, I think Hillary Clinton has a 79 percent disapproval rating, and Trump has an 81 percent disapproval rating. So you have the two most unpopular politicians in the United States as the choice. So basically, the voters in the United States are given a choice: “Yes,”—“Yes, please,” and “Yes, thank you.” I think Trump missed his big chance to make a populist push. Instead of saying he’s going to cut taxes on Wall Street, he can say, “Look, I stiffed the banks. I went bankrupt four or six times. I screwed the banks and they didn’t get paid and I can screw the banks for you people. Vote for me. I know how to do it.”
+Ashcroft: Yes, he’s missed that.
+Hudson: I think that would have been his winning ploy.
+Ashcroft: You should be his campaign strategist.
+Hudson: Well, except I don’t think I’d have many friends if I worked for Donald Trump. And we don’t know that if he agreed with me today what he’d do tomorrow. That’s part of the problem. He doesn’t play well with colleagues.
+Ashcroft: You sort of prefer him though—would that be right? Because he doesn’t play well with colleagues, because he’s awkward, because he’s a loner, because—because you’re saying you don’t want a resourceful, intelligent and influential type in the job because the job’s so powerful.
+Hudson: Well, both Hillary and Donald Trump say the election is about the lesser evil. So, if that’s true, who’s the greater evil? Hillary has a whole crowd behind her—the neocons, who basically want to be very confrontational toward Russia and continue what she was doing in Libya to Syria—militarily confrontational. Or you have Donald Trump, who doesn’t really know who he can appoint and whether he can get enough people to work with him. So if the direction of America is to try to hold on to a unipolar world—militarily confrontational—you want a president who is least able to do evil. And there’s no question, Trump is the lesser evil because he’s such a narcissist, and really sort of a blank slate. And I’d rather take a “pig in a poke” than someone who—you already know what Hillary will do. She’ll do what the husband does. And it’s—the Clintons have corrupted the Democratic Party. That’s what Bernie Sanders ran on against her—
+Ashcroft: And did very well.
+Hudson: And did very well. But then he didn’t realize that there really cannot be any progress by the labor unions, or consumers, or the 99 percent as long as the Democratic Party is controlled totally by Wall Street and by the Robert Rubin gang that they brought in. And they’re really like a mafia gang. If you think the financial sector and the banking sector as crime—and after all, remember, they’ve paid billions and billions of dollars in civil fines without a single banker being sent to jail—that’s what a criminal wants to do. When the criminals take control of the justice system and take over the police force and bribe the judges—all the Hollywood movies in the 1930s were that—then you’ve got the criminals in control. And you’ve got the financial sector criminalized. That’s what my colleague Bill Black at the University of Missouri at Kansas City has been emphasizing, and he’s convinced all of us that the business plan of the big banks—Citibank, Bank of America, we’ve just got, and Wells Fargo, with all of the huge frauds that are coming out—that was their business plan: fraud. And people are afraid to say that fraud is banking. They’re afraid to say just exactly what the evidence is because it’s considered impolite to talk about reality.
+Ashcroft: What sort of president then will Hillary Clinton be?
+Hudson: A dictator. She a vindictive dictator, punishing her enemies, appointing neocons in the secretary of state, in the defense department, appointing Wall Street people in the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, and the class war will really break out very explicitly. And she’ll—as Warren Buffet said, there is a class war and we’re winning it.
+Ashcroft: As in the one percent are winning it.
+Hudson: The one percent are winning it. And she will try to use the rhetoric to tell people: “Nothing to see here folks. Keep on moving,” while the economy goes down and down and she cashes in as she’s been doing all along, richer and richer, and if she’s president, there will not be an investigator of the criminal conflict of interest of the Bill Clinton Foundation, of pay-to-play. You’ll have a presidency in which corporations who pay the Clintons will be able to set policy. Whoever has the money to buy the politicians will buy control of policy because elections have been privatized and made part of the market economy in the United States. That’s what the Citizens United Supreme Court case was all about.
+Ashcroft: So that’s another example of rent-seeking.
+Hudson: Yes, political payoffs. And that’s the largest rent-seeking of all. Basically, for paying one penny, you get a whole dollar’s worth of special privileges. And rent is really payment for a privilege. It’s for a privilege that’s created from the private sector. And basically as Balzac said, every great fortune originates in a great theft that isn’t considered a great theft anymore because it’s all viewed as part of the market. It’s viewed as if that’s how the world works. So you’ll have a theft taking place and the Clintons will say, “That’s just how the world operates and GDP is going up because we’re getting richer, enough to offset the degree by which you 99 percent are getting poor.”",FAKE
+10074,Clinton Campaign Circulated Paul Ryan Relative as Possible Supreme Court Pick,"Another reason as to why Ryan tried to sabotage Trump’s campaign? 
+Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com October 27, 2016 Hillary Clinton’s campaign circulated the name of one of Paul Ryan’s relatives as a potential Supreme Court pick, suggesting a conflict of interest that could feed in to the Republican Speaker of the House’s dislike for Donald Trump. An email released in part 19 of the Wikileaks Podesta dump features an article sent by Hillary advisor Sara Solow to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and Hillary’s foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan on February 29, 2016. The piece draws attention to Ketanji Brown Jackson, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “She was confirmed by without any Republican opposition in the Senate not once, but *twice*. She was confirmed to her current position in 2013 by unanimous consent – that is, without any stated opposition. She was also previously confirmed unanimously to a seat on the U.S. Sentencing Commission (where she became vice chair),” reads the email. “Her family is impressive. She is married to a surgeon and has two young daughters. Her father is a retired lawyer and her mother a retired school principal. Her brother was a police officer (in the unit that was the basis for the television show *The Wire*) and is now a law student, and she is related by marriage to Congressman (and Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan.” Earlier this month, Ryan said that he would no longer defend or campaign for Donald Trump. A poll released this week found that nearly two thirds of Republicans trust Donald Trump more than Ryan to lead the GOP. Many Trump supporters speculated that Ryan was involved in the leaking of the infamous Billy Bush tape, in which Trump made lewd comments about women, as part of a plot to sabotage the Republican nominee’s campaign. Could the fact that one of his relatives is being touted as a likely Clinton Supreme Court pick be another reason as to why Ryan – who has been accused by many of being in bed with the Washington establishment – has abandoned his support for Donald Trump? 
+SUBSCRIBE on YouTube:",FAKE
+10229,WikiLeaks Bombshell: ‘There Is No US Election’,"Your News Wire WikiLeaks Bombshell: ‘There Is No US Election’ The whistleblowing organization also released Barack Obama’s personal emails, showing that President Bush organized his transition to the highest office in the land before the 2008 election. Posted on October 21, 2016 by Baxter Dmitry WikiLeaks couldn’t have made it clearer in a series of tweets on Thursday – the US election for the President of the United States is rigged. The establishment have selected their President and by hook or crook she will be “elected.” 
+Responding to allegations that WikiLeaks recent leaks have outed it as playing partisan politics, WikiLeaks fired back , “ You are not a fan of publishing true information about corrupt ruling power factions who will take power on Jan 20? ” 
+On the day WikiLeaks publicized the release of emails from Barack Obama’s personal account, their Twitter account then stated that the outcome of the election was planned from the outset: “ What election? It has been clear from the beginning who is going to win. This is, in effect, a power consolidation exercise .” 
+Considering what we now know about the behind-the-scenes rigging of the Democratic primary, the collusion between the DNC establishment and mainstream media, and the fact Hillary Clinton pushed for Donald Trump’s GOP nomination, can you possibly disagree? 
+Are Presidents elected or selected? 
+WikiLeaks emails from Barack Obama’s personal email account reveal that the Bush administration contacted the future president multiple times before the election, secretly organizing the transition of power. 
+The 2008 transition had gone down in history as surprisingly smooth. Martha Joynt Kumar, in a book about the transition, said it “ was the best in anyone’s memory, in part because 9/11 made everyone recognize that a transition is fragile time .” 
+Today’s revelations raise questions about why it was so smooth — suggestions Obama was selected by the shadow government, rather than elected by the people, are no longer tinfoil hat territory. 
+The most eye catching email in today’s leak contains a message from John Podesta about an invitation from President George W. Bush to the “President-Elect.” 
+Should that have read “President-Select?” Podesta sent the email to Obama before the election result was known. 
+But it gets even worse. 
+The emails show a transition plan was being worked on long before the 2008 election had taken place. According to an attached memo in one of the emails, Obama was already discussing his transition to office with members of the Bush Administration, including then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, prior to the election. 
+“ As you have observed in your interactions with Secretary Paulson, he is apparently eager to involve you and your transition team extensively in his policy choices following the election. “ Are Presidents elected or selected? 
+Another attached memo acknowledges that it was unusual to start the transition process so soon. 
+“ We are now at the point of deciding how to staff economic policy during the transition, who should be the point of contact with Treasury and how to blend the transition and campaign economic policy talent. 
+Normally these decisions could be made after the election, and ideally after the selection of a National Economic Advisor, but, of course, these are not normal times. “ 
+Not normal times? Perhaps not in 2008. But eight years later, it seems nothing has changed. What was “not normal” in 2008 has become very much the norm in 2016. 
+Thanks to WikiLeaks and the unprecedented peek behind the curtains of power they have granted us, the shadow government has been exposed to the light. 2008 wasn’t a smooth transition of power, it was silky smooth power consolidation. 
+WikiLeaks’ variety of journalism – cold, hard, pristine truth – has more than ruffled feathers. The entire henhouse has gone mad. The ruling party are slavering at the mouth, and mainstream media has never been so easy to see through. 
+Watch CNN’s Scott Cuomo , the same guy caught lying to Americans about their First Amendment rights, put himself in the running for a Razzie Award after the network pulled an interview with Rep. Chris Collins as soon as he mentioned WikiLeaks.",FAKE
+8164,Exposed: Stunning CNN Super Damage Control In Response To “Damning” Videos (VIDEO),"in: Mainstream Media , Multimedia , Propaganda , Sleuth Journal , Special Interests , US News “There is no evidence that anything described on these tapes actually took place”– CNN News Analyst, Gloria Borger Now is the greatest time ever to wake up politically to what is really happening in America and in the world. It’s the perfect time to wake up and see the corrupt ruling elite in action and in real-time. Mass deception is at an all-time high. Every day the deceivers speak on TV, boldly telling us more and more lies without shame. Your enslavement is at stake and they are the chosen mouthpieces to make this happen. These master deceivers and sorcerers are the reason humanity is where it is today. They are the reason why the 9/11 criminals got away with it and they are the reason for the post-9/11 march toward the new world order that we are in now. They (the deceptive mainstream media) are the reason for the alternative media and for the truth movement. I’m sure most readers already know this very well. It only follows then that historic revelations and leaks of corruption and lawlessness call for historic lies, deceit and counter propaganda in order to implement some level of damage control. And frankly that is exactly what we are seeing coming from CNN and the rest of the (Hillary supporting liberal left) corporate media in response to the recent Project Veritas Action bombshell revelation of corruption videos produced by James O’Keefe. The video tells a very clear story of corruption going all the way up to the DNC and now Hillary herself. The video conversation cannot expose Hillary and the DNC any more right? We’re all thinking, there is no way around these very damning videos right? Actually, there is one thing about the ruling elite and their play-along stooges, there is no situation, no accusation, no video or audio proof, no firsthand testimony, no form of evidence that is too much for them to outright deny, discredit, downplay, ignore or deflect. None whatsoever. So as truth seekers, rather than getting upset with the tactics employed by the criminal elite and their minions, let’s admire them and list them for all of us to see. The following are just some of the excuses and tactics being employed by the talking heads; in this case I will only quote two individuals from a recent CNN panel discussing the topic of the new revelations of Clinton, DNC corruption. First there’s Gloria Borger- CNN Chief Political Analyst who appears to be the “expert” propagandist being rolled out in front of the CNN cameras. The other being Van Jones- Clinton supporter and former Obama senior adviser. The quotes from these two individuals are not just a display of propaganda but examples of professional political damage control. That is, lies to keep the masses confused and in the dark to what is really happening: Below are some of Gloria Borger’s recent statements followed by my responses. 1- “We don’t know where the video was gotten” Since when does CNN carefully check their sources? Truth seekers that challenge the mainstream media’s sources all the time get accused of being “conspiracy theorists”, of “harassing” fake victim’s families and they get treated like criminals. All that aside, sorry Borger, but the source of the video is not the issue here to begin with. What is seen happening in the video and what is being said in the video is the main issue. We’re talking about DNC-Hillary associated criminals talking in front of the camera about things no one is supposed to know about corruption inside the Hillary-DNC team but now they do. 2- “We don’t know how it (the video) was edited” With this statement, senior CNN political analyst Gloria Borger attempts to push the conspiracy (without her actually saying it) that perhaps these videos are a fabrication with carefully constructed fake voice-overs, perhaps photoshopped images and video special effects that make this situation look like it’s really happening when it’s not. You know. The kind of stuff that THEY (the controllers) would do. Again, the authenticity of the video is not the issue. Remember this is the same CNN that tried to sell us on the laughable Bin Laden death hoax videos of 2011 and the fake ISIS beheadings in 2014. Did CNN question the authenticity of these videos? Now all of sudden all videos are hoaxes until somehow confirmed by CNN to be “authentic”. This may quietly be the most stunning thing Borger says here. Notice how they are slowly ushering a world where a firsthand video produced by we-the-people or the average person which SHOWS you their corruption is by default not “authentic” until proven otherwise by them (the mainstream media)! 3- “There are so many unanswered questions to this story” Really? What unanswered questions? This is Borger’s way of suggesting that there is a pile of “questions” out there that are not being asked that would immediately change the context of the reality of these damning videos. Of course we’re never told what are these “questions”. It’s like they are borrowing this term from the truth movement to defend themselves. When critical thinking truth seekers say they (we) have “questions” our questions are concrete and definitive. Borger thus floats the idea of “unanswered questions” without the need to be specific knowing that the concept of having “questions” sounds fundamentally very reasonable. 4- “You see this story, um, it first appears in Breitbart…” Again, Borger is appealing to the viewers emotions and hearts instead of their critical thinking mind by resorting to the notion that if the story first appeared on a website that our viewers are told not to believe or trust (“one of our enemies”) then the whole story is questionable solely on this premise. These are all tactics from a pro who knows how to twist the narrative to deceive the viewers who follow them. Of course Borger knows she’s blowing smoke at her viewers and that attacking the messengers in this case has no merit given the context of these videos but that’s all part of the propaganda tactic. 5- “I think however this is a story that needs a lot more reporting on it” As mentioned earlier, Borger is implying without actually saying it that since CNN or the Hillary-mainstream complex hasn’t acknowledged the videos then as a whole we are far from the point of being able to say these videos and thus the evidence in the videos are authentic. Because of this previously suggested delusional lie Borger adds to the point by suggesting that THEREFORE “a lot more reporting” needs to be done. In other words she’s saying- yeah, we’ve seen the videos but since CNN hasn’t approved it yet, who knows how real it actually is ? Now here is a statement made by Van Jones who adds his own layer of super damage control propaganda: 6 – Jones states that because the report comes from James O’Keefe that ALONE (get this) is “reason to withhold judgment”! Throughout the CNN report O’Keefe is repeatedly referred to as “discredited” and a “criminal” by several members of the CNN panel including Democratic strategist Maria Cardona and CNN Senior Investigative Correspondent Drew Griffin who tries to sound official when he announces the DNC official response that: 7 –“There is no evidence that anything described on these tapes actually took place” It’s amazing how the professional liars attempt to side-step reality in a generation (today in 2016) where the ruling elite are desperately trying to keep the masses dumbed-down smack in the middle of a historic information age where all corruption is now being fully revealed. How do you side-step reality under these circumstances? Question the authenticity of any evidence that exposes what you are doing. This is apparently the strategy including brushing off the revelations as “locker room talk” , another new term we can expect to see used much more frequently in the future (including “bar room talk” etc). The “locker room talk” tactic allows them to take anything said on camera and insert it into this imaginary box, the “locker room talk” box. The sheep will accept the new term not even knowing why. Because it’s what George Orwell described as newspeak . This was the biggest thing that jumped out at me after watching this CNN segment posted by Project Veritas Action. It doesn’t matter how much corruption and evil they (we) expose. We now know exactly how the establishment will respond every time. They will question the authenticity of that new revelation, they will demonize the messenger who exposes them, they will look to press criminal charges if possible on whoever exposes them, and they will present the evidence as “unproven” until they themselves approve of it. Then they will ratchet up their own counter “leaks” and allegations (beware, we should be expecting a huge counter propaganda move very soon!!) as a counterattack and to distract the public from the Clinton leaks that are coming out seemingly every day now. This, my friends, is how professional political propaganda works. This is similar to the careful skill and delicacy involved in the “plausible deniability” tactic described by Scott Foval in the recent videos. It’s subtle and it’s a skillful way of doing something without showing the strings that connect to the puppet master giving the orders, in this case Hillary and the DNC. What all of this means is that it really is time for everyone to wake up and realize once and for all that the mainstream media is constantly lying to us and we can’t expect them to turn on their own kind. We can’t expect the mainstream media to take our side and help us expose the corruption when they themselves are a large part of that corruption. It really is time to spread this awareness and to truly prepare for a new paradigm which is already well underway. Let’s signal to these liars at CNN that they are exposed and their time is coming. There is too much goodness in humanity for the dark and oppressive mainstream media led machine to continue doing what its doing to humanity. Their lies and deceit must be exposed. Endless wars must stop. The US empire and their global propaganda and information control must be acknowledged for what it is. Thankfully, one of the little things all of us can control which is very effective is our ability to share this information and help spread it across the globe. Let’s do that! Submit your review",FAKE
+4960,Did Gary Johnson Just Get Boxed Out of the Debates?,"When the Commission on Presidential Debates on Monday finalized its rules for determining which candidates get invited to this fall’s headline debates, it suddenly made Libertarian dark-horse candidate Gary Johnson’s job a whole lot harder.
+
+Johnson, a former Republican who has been picking up voters disaffected by Donald Trump, has had his eye on winning a debate slot all summer. Though he has conceded that “extraordinary things have to happen” for him to win, it’s the debates that matter for him: If he can get onstage, his strategists think, he has a chance to upset a race that has left a huge number of Americans unhappy with their choices.
+
+He already knew the threshold for a debate invitation: a 15 percent showing in polls, a hurdle no third-party candidate has overcome since the commission set the bar in the 2000 campaign. Johnson harbors hope of being the first. But the combination of the polls the commission just announced it will use to make the cut — and the decision of most of the sponsoring media outlets to include both Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein in those polls — effectively made the bar tougher for him to clear. With Stein siphoning off some of the anti-establishment vote he’s counting on, Johnson is probably going to end up watching the debates at home.
+
+The selection rules the commission just announced seem reasonable, in one sense, and not obviously designed to undercut a third-party run. It will use polls released by the five major television news networks: ABC/Washington Post, NBC/Wall Street Journal, CBS/New York Times, CNN and Fox News. These are the same five polls that were used in 2012, except last time Gallup was used instead of CNN. (Gallup, you may recall, predicted a Mitt Romney victory in 2012, then published what was dubbed a “mea culpa” exploring why its likely voter model was so wrong. This election cycle, Gallup hasn’t done any trial heats, taking itself off the table.)
+
+Third parties should be further pleased that all of those organizations have been including third-party candidates in their polling. A perennial complaint has been that third-party candidates can’t get to 15 percent in polls if they aren’t even mentioned in the polls as the campaign develops. But ABC/Washington Post, NBC/Wall Street Journal and CNN have been running four-way trial heats, while CBS/New York Times and Fox News have done three-way polls that include Johnson’s name. And upon the commission’s announcement, Fox News said it would include Stein in subsequent polls. That means at least four of the five will include all four candidates.
+
+That’s what hurts Johnson, however. As the former New Mexico governor picks up Republicans alienated by Trump — and even picks up some progressives excited about his anti-war, pro-marijuana and civil liberties stances — his numbers have been climbing into the range where the debate feels like a possibility. When Stein is left out of the polls, Johnson isn’t far short of the 15 percent bar — he hit 12 percent in the last Fox News and CBS/New York Times polls. (A late July CBS poll, sans New York Times sponsorship but using the same pollster, has Johnson at 10.) But in the most recent polls from the three media outlets tapped by the commission which have been running four-way trial heats, Johnson comes in at 8, 9 or 10, while Stein averages 5. Johnson performs just a bit worse with Stein in the mix, but in the race for 15, every inch counts. And Stein, who would need to triple her support to secure an invite, is taking an inch or two from Johnson.
+
+The bottom line: By including all four candidates, the commission’s sanctioned polling outfits are reducing the odds that a third candidate will make the cut.
+
+This leaves Johnson with a tough strategic choice to make: Does he continue to hold himself up as an amiable alternative to the status quo? Or does he turn aggressive and start boring into the candidates who are standing in his way: Donald Trump and Jill Stein?
+
+While both Johnson and Stein rail against the Trump-Clinton duopoly, in reality Johnson’s most immediate opponent is Stein, and vice versa. They’re each scrambling to claim as much of the small anti-establishment vote as possible. The most recent CNN poll found they both draw from independents, with Johnson winning 16 percent of self-identified independent voters and Stein 8 percent. They roughly split the pot of Bernie Sanders voters, as Stein takes 13 percent and Johnson 10. They also both get a little from disaffected partisans; Johnson wins 7 percent of Republicans to Stein’s 3, and Johnson edges Stein with Democrats, 3 percent to 2.
+
+Yet Libertarians have no ground to demand that Stein be left out of the polls, since the Greens may well get on the ballot in 44 states, breaking the party's record and far exceeding the commission’s ballot access requirement. Johnson has little recourse but to boost his standing, and fast.
+
+He doesn’t have much time to make up ground. The commission says it will issue invites “after Labor Day 2016, but sufficiently in advance of the first-scheduled debate [on Sept 26] to allow for orderly planning.” So he has about a month, give or take.
+
+To date, Johnson has largely sold himself as a tonic to the status quo. His ads and videos tread lightly on ideology and even lighter on policy prescriptions. For example, in his latest, Johnson says to millennials, “We may never agree on all the small things, but let’s agree on the big thing: both parties have blown it. … Working together, we’ll find fair, sensible and honest solutions.”
+
+Non-ideological platitudes may be enough to win some of the “throw the bums out” vote. But Johnson needs more. He needs to consolidate the left-wing anti-Hillary vote and the economically libertarian anti-Trump vote. And those two goals are in conflict.
+
+He could directly engage Green-leaners, employ the issues where he shares common ground with the left and say bluntly: “The truth is Jill Stein is not going to get into the debates, whereas I might, but only with your help. If you stand with me, I will ensure that there is a voice on the main stage calling for an end to the drug war, the abolishment of the NSA and a halt to drone strikes.”
+
+He could also use the issues where he distinguishes himself on the right, and tell conservatives squeamish about Trump but allergic to Clinton, “The truth is Trump is not a conservative, and he’s not going to win. He opposes free trade, rejects entitlement reform and supports budget-busting stimulus. Give me a shot to beat her. If you stand with me, I will be the only one on the main stage defending the Trans-Pacific Partnership, making the case for raising the retirement age and pledging to balance the budget, without tax increases.”
+
+Johnson hasn’t been this pointed on the issues in his advertising, precisely because the issues mentioned above are just a few of the “small things” on which people vehemently disagree. And he never mentions Stein, hoping to silently dismiss her. In one video, Johnson says, “All this talk about third-party? I’m it.” But that is simply untrue. He’s not the only third-party candidate in the race, and Johnson needs to deal with it.
+
+It’s certainly possible, even likely, that this is a box Johnson can’t get out of. It’s hard to win sufficient support with a thin gruel of non-ideological talking points, and it’s also hard with a gumbo of disparate policy specifics.
+
+Third parties loathe the commission’s 15 percent threshold, which was established in 2000. The commission is a private entity, unaccountable to the public, and its chosen number is literally arbitrary. Yet it does serve a public purpose. There are only so many debates that more than half of the electorate will sit through. It’s legitimate to ask that a candidate prove that he or she truly represents a significant faction of voters before getting such rarified face time, and pulling attention away from the one-on-one contest that is almost certain to decide the presidency.
+
+This time around, Johnson and Stein have been given every opportunity to prove themselves. They have been listed in the polls. They have been given exposure on mainstream media networks — Johnson has done two CNN prime-time town halls, and Stein gets her first on Wednesday. Both are even outspending one of the major-party candidates in television ads for the first time, since Trump has bizarrely refused to spend a dime. But the downside of being included in those polls, and getting those town halls, is that there are no more excuses. If you don’t get to 15 percent, it’s your own fault.",REAL
+5022,Trump campaign woes intensify amid questions over Melania's visa – as it happened,"Republicans face a lot of difficult decisions this year, but for the party to come back strong after Donald Trump’s divisive candidacy – for it to keep its brand as the free-market, democracy-loving, opportunity-focused alternative to the Democrats – the least-worst option is a major loss in the presidential race.
+
+By selecting a nominee that does not reflect the usual fiscal policies, a victory for Trump will mean a shift in the party’s focus. Even if the rest of the GOP holds fast to the platform or to traditional conservative values, the president’s policies always reshape the party.
+
+If you have ever promoted a local candidate to voters, you know this is true – the public looks at the top of the ticket first and judges the party by that person’s views. Many Trump supporters will see his win as a referendum on their policies and will work to make the party reflect that. Fellow Republicans will either need to accept that or leave. 
+
+
+
+We have no idea what a Trump presidency will look like, but based on his campaign, it will be filled with outrageous gaffes, inarticulate interviews on policy and offensive media blitzes focused on non-issues. Trump will most likely lose minorities and women, creating a wider divide that the GOP must bridge in the future. Many young voters will continue to associate Trump with the party long after he leaves office. This would only further damage Republicans and set us up for heavy losses in 2018.
+
+Not to mention the party will continue to hemorrhage its best and brightest. Candidates, staff and volunteers have already walked away from Trump, and there’s no question it will keep happening. If Trump gains a greater control of the party, these people might even be forced out.
+
+But let’s say Trump doesn’t win and Hillary Clinton claims the White House. If Trump only trails her by a few points, you can bet he will blame the Republicans who voted their conscience. Or he’ll kick up dirt over the “rigged” system, as he has already alluded to. Trump supporters in the party will go on a witch hunt, looking for anyone who acted disloyally to the Republican nominee. That in-fighting could destroy the party.",REAL
+6565,"Unbrexit! Parliament must vote on triggering article 50: the 9 funniest, most ironic reactions","Next Prev Swipe left/right Unbrexit! Parliament must vote on triggering article 50: the 9 funniest, most ironic reactions 
+Britain has exploded today the news that the Government must offer Parliament a vote on invoking Article 50. 
+Here’s the BEST 9 tweets, the ones most gleefully relishing the change in fortune. 
+1 So, next steps for #Brexit and #Article50 could be a UK Government appeal to the European Court of Justice. How hilarious would that be. 
+— James Doman-Pipe (@james_mdp) November 3, 2016 
+2 With this Article 50 ruling, I can see a real path back to our previous position as the graceless arrogant begrudging arseholes of the EU 
+— Jon Blyth (@disappointment) November 3, 2016 
+3 Glad to hear the Brexit saga has been resolved comprehensively to the satisfaction of all parties, and we won't be hearing any more about it 
+— Dai Lama (@WelshDalaiLama) November 3, 2016 
+4 The High Court has upheld Parliamentary sovereignty over Brexit vote, in a move so ironic it threatens to destroy the fabric of spacetime. 
+— Unnamed Insider (@Unnamedinsider) November 3, 2016 
+5 Brexit means Brexit but also not Brexit but kind of Brexit but that Brexit maybe this Brexit but with a hint of Brexit 
+— TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) November 3, 2016 
+6 Someone please publish an article explaining today's Article 50 decision that just says ""Article 50 decision is Article 50 decision"". 
+— reluctant ex baby (@mutablejoe) November 3, 2016 
+7 If there is a civil war do the remainers get to have the rest of europe on our side? 
+— Richard K Herring (@Herring1967) November 3, 2016 
+8 
+— James Herring (@itsjamesherring) November 3, 2016 
+9 Sneak peek at tomorrow's Daily Mail front page. They don't seem to be taking #unbrexit very well. pic.twitter.com/nQbDf1iNbZ 
+— The Poke (@ThePoke) November 3, 2016 
+And our favourite was UKIP party spokesperson Suzanne Evans frothing with, “How dare these activist judges attempt to overturn our will? It’s a power grab & undermines democracy. Time we had the right to sack them.” 
+Activist judges? Amazing. Those activist judges occupying democracy with their hippy laws.",FAKE
+8286,Allen West Reveals How Obama’s Pentagon Just Destroyed Recruiting Efforts for Decades,"UNREAL: Calif. Soldiers Billed for Thousands After Military Decides Not to Honor Decade-Old Enlistment Bonuses 
+Why, West wondered, would any sane citizen risk his or her life to serve in a military system so corrupt and backward that it would make its veterans pay back their rightfully earned bonuses? 
+What made this move by the Pentagon even more unsettling was how much money it had frivolously wasted on other things that the colonel believed did not deserve to be funded. 
+“Here we have a Pentagon stating it will pay for sex change surgery for those who are suffering from gender dysphoria,” he wrote. “I just want to know, how much money did the Department of Defense pay for those ‘ transgender handbooks ‘ and training materials?” Advertisement - story continues below 
+He asked a similar question regarding all the taxpayer funds wasted on providing welfare to illegal immigrants , on operating sanctuary cities and on importing “tens of thousands of Syrian refugees into the country, with benefits.” 
+“Why not cut that off and provide the funding for these men and women who’ve served?” West wrote. “This has been 10 years past and now we’re punishing those who’ve gone on with their lives?” 
+“They did nothing wrong, they didn’t seek to defraud our nation — heck, they put their lives on the line to backfill the manpower shortages made by politicians and government bureaucrats,” he continued. “Is this truly how we honor those who have served?” 
+No, it is not. Or rather, it should not be, though clearly Obama disagrees. Advertisement - story continues below",FAKE
+8030,UPLIFTING: Anaheim Ducks Honor Bomb Detection K9 During ‘Military Appreciation Night’,"It is no secret that our military forces make great sacrifices to ensure our safety at home and abroad, however, our nation’s four-legged often go forgotten. With this in mind, the Anaheim Ducks found a very special way to honor one K9 hero during Sunday night’s game against the Calgary Flames.
+As part of the Ducks “Military Appreciation Night,” one very special bomb-sniffing German Shepherd was honored with the duty of dropping the ceremonial opening puck.
+Watch below:
+
+H/T SmokeRoom 
+",FAKE
+10447,Comment on An ex-police Sergent tells how and why you should fight ALL speeding fines by Sinead,"Home / Badge Abuse / An ex-police Sergent tells how and why you should fight ALL speeding fines An ex-police Sergent tells how and why you should fight ALL speeding fines 
+DriftSpec.org 
+My name is Stan. I am a retired Sergeant of the Police force for 14 years. I was also a police prosecutor at times, so I know what I am talking about. I spent half my life in Magistrates Court during my time in the Force. I was only ever a very fair copper, and I am proud of my time in the job, looking after the interests of citizens, often to the detriment of my family and my health. 
+I never booked any driver for a trifling offence “ever”. People committing trifling offences commonly used to get a warning and a licence / vehicle check. It had to be serious before I booked anyone. 
+I am so annoyed at what is happening these days, in what I call “Indiscriminate revenue gathering” It is absolutely disgusting. The government and the Police Force need to hang their heads in shame. If you did a survey of current serving members of the police forces in this country, you would be hard pushed to find many who disagree with me. 
+I know how the legal system works, and I know how to beat the system. This is how to do it, and if about 10% of all drivers booked follow my specific instructions, then the entire system will crash and become unworkable to the extent, that the government will have no choice but to stop issuing fines for every type of traffic offence. The whole lot of them. Seriously. 
+I do not feel guilty about coming out with this information, as I think it’s about time someone stood up for hard working, civil minded, law abiding taxpayers in this country, who are being screwed. 
+This is very simple and very basic. The idea is to clog up the system in the traffic camera office and the courts by drivers exercising their rights to remain innocent until proven guilty. 
+SIMPLE BASIC LEGAL STEPS TO FOLLOW . 
+1. Do not accept the alleged offence. There are numerous valid reasons to dispute every single alleged offence. Often the charges are incorrect or the evidence is illegally or incorrectly gathered. 
+2. Challenge it, tell them that you are going to defend the matter. Make them earn their miserable $150 or $200 or whatever. They have to prepare evidence and witnesses. Just the wages for the camera operator or the Policeman on the day of the court, will be more than the actual fine. You are also taking a camera operator or a member of the Police Force off the street for the day. But it won’t get to that point…..read on…. 
+3. If a court date is ever set, and it does not suit you, do not accept it, ask for a delay to a time and place that suits you. 
+4. When they re set the date, delay it as often as possible. keep pleading not guilty all through the process. You have every right to be sick, or go for an adjournment if the day does not suit for any legitimate reason. For example you may have pressing family or work commitments which prevent you from attending a particular court on a particular day. 
+5. If it ever actually gets to court, (which is unlikely if everyone does this) and if you are unwell that day, ring the court in the morning and tell them that you cannot make it as you are sick. The camera operator, and a police prosecutor will already be at court, and will be greatly inconvenienced, by having to come back another day. The whole time this is going on, the amount of paperwork involved at the traffic camera office is huge. Several staff are involved, and it rapidly becomes very costly, probably running into thousands. …..with me so far…..keep reading……. 
+6. The court system is then placed under such a massive load by people who wanted “their day in court” that it simply will not be able to cope unless they open up about another 50 magistrates courts, and this is obviously going to cost the government a lot more than any revenue raised. If all the above fails, which is highly unlikely….and you actually go to court and get convicted……you have a right of appeal. Make sure you appeal the conviction. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see what happens. They are not going to spend millions chasing hundreds. 
+7 Tell everyone you know to challenge their alleged offences, and the entire system will crash within a few weeks. 
+8. Please pass this on. AND ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT YOU ARE INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY AND THAT THERE IS A VERY HIGH PROBABILITY THAT THE EVIDENCE USED AGAINST YOU IS WRONG. YOU HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO CHALLENGE ANY ALLEGED OFFENCE. THIS IS WHY COURTS EXIST….SO USE THEM……A LOT. 
+Regards, like, share, and comment. make a change! this isn’t hard to do, but it will help everyone. 
+The article originally published at Driftspec.org and although it is from our friends from across the pond, the information is invaluable as well as universally applicable. Share",FAKE
+4252,"After Trump’s Super Tuesday romp, GOP establishment seeks unity to slow surge","Donald Trump won GOP primaries in seven states and Sen. Ted Cruz took three in a Super Tuesday rebound, sparking renewed calls from some Republicans to unify around a single Trump rival as the billionaire tightened his hold on front-runner status.
+
+The contests in 11 states showcased Trump’s dominance over a crowded GOP field. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) was the winner in one state: Minnesota, his first victory of the 2016 primary season.
+
+[Live updates and results from across the U.S.]
+
+Trump won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia, according to Edison Media Research. In several states, his lead was in double digits, and his share of the GOP vote neared 50 percent. With those wins, Trump has more than doubled his victory total in this GOP primary season.
+
+But even as Trump basked in his Super Tuesday romp, a well-funded super PAC was ramping up its effort to discredit the New York businessman with a new television advertisement that portrays him as a predatory huckster who scammed working- and middle-class Americans.
+
+The 60-second ad, which will begin airing Wednesday on stations across the country at a cost of more than $1 million, centers on Trump University, the billionaire mogul’s for-profit enterprise that promised to teach students the tricks of the real estate trade and is now defunct and the subject of a fraud suit.
+
+The attack echoes themes that Rubio, who is trying to unite the GOP’s anti-Trump forces under his own banner, has advanced as he has addressed swelling crowds in suburban areas.
+
+Cruz won Alaska, Oklahoma and his home state of Texas just after 9 p.m. These are the second, third and fourth states Cruz has won in this race; he also won the Iowa caucuses, the first contest of all. The win in Texas, in particular, was vital: It saved Cruz from a humiliating home-state defeat and gave him part of the largest slate of delegates that was up for grabs Tuesday.
+
+[Live updates and results from across the U.S.]
+
+But this was not the Super Tuesday that Cruz had hoped for months ago. He had campaigned hard in Southern states, hoping to dominate among evangelicals and very conservative voters. Instead, in state after state, he saw those voters flock to Trump.
+
+For Rubio, the Minnesota win was a boost he sorely needed. Earlier in the night, Trump had mocked him for not winning any states so far. But overall, Tuesday was a disappointment for Rubio. He had attacked Trump sharply in the past few days and shifted some late-deciding voters into his camp. But outside of Minnesota, it wasn’t enough.
+
+Ohio Gov. John Kasich came in a close second to Trump in Vermont.
+
+The worry among the party establishment — which has put its last hopes on Rubio — was strong and growing after Trump’s Tuesday victories.
+
+Even Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), an outspoken critic of Cruz, said to CBS’s Charlie Rose on Tuesday night, “Well, I think we’re about ready to lose to the most dishonest politician in America, Hillary Clinton, and how could you do that?”
+
+“I made a joke about Ted, but we may be in a position to have to rally around Ted Cruz as the only way to stop Donald Trump, and I’m not so sure that would work,” he said, adding that when it came to that prospect,“I can’t believe I would say yes, but yes.”
+
+Cruz addressed his supporters at a venue called the Redneck Country Club in Stafford, Tex. He sought not so subtly to convince Rubio to drop out of the race, saying that a divided field was allowing Trump to succeed.
+
+“So long as the field remains divided, Donald Trump’s path to the nomination remains more likely. And that would be a disaster . . . for conservatives, and for the nation. And after tonight, we have seen that our campaign is the only campaign that has beaten, that can beat, and that will beat Donald Trump,” Cruz said. He spoke to primary voters in future states: “We must come together.”
+
+Rubio, the establishment candidate who had sharply attacked Trump in the past few days, ran close to Trump in Virginia, boosted by support among college-educated voters and Republicans in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. But he fell short, with Trump piling up large margins in the state’s rural South and West.
+
+[No Republican nominee has ever won all the states Trump has]
+
+Still, exit polls showed some good news for Rubio: In several states, he did well among voters who decided late, according to media reports. That could be taken as proof that Rubio’s late attacks on Trump worked — and it could encourage Rubio to continue them, hoping to win more primaries in the coming weeks.
+
+“Just five days ago, we began to unmask the true nature of the front-runner so far in this race. Five days ago, we began to explain to the American people that Donald Trump is a con artist. And in just five days, we have seen the impact it is having all across the country,” Rubio told supporters in Miami. “We are seeing, in state after state, his numbers coming down. Our numbers going up.”
+
+He looked ahead to the Republican primary in Florida on March 15, a “winner-take-all” contest that could vault Rubio back into contention — or, if he loses, doom him.
+
+Rubio’s campaign has sought to position him as the top alternative to Trump: the one who’d be waiting and ready when voters — or delegates, at a fractious GOP convention — finally turned on the front-runner. But Tuesday’s results showed that isn’t exactly true. In six of the nine states where polls have closed, in fact, Rubio was running third.
+
+Trump spoke to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., in an ornate ballroom. In his speech, he mocked Rubio, calling him “the little senator” and reminding his crowd that “[Rubio] didn’t win anything. He hasn’t won anything, period.”
+
+[Overshadowed by Trump and Rubio, Cruz sees Texas as his last stand ]
+
+Trump also called his campaign “a movement,” and sought to look ahead to a general election contest against Clinton, the former secretary of state.
+
+“I am a unifier. When we get all of this finished, I’m going to go after one person, Hillary Clinton,” Trump said. He rejected suggestions that his comments — about Mexican immigrants, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and a ban on Muslim foreigners entering the country — had divided his party.
+
+“We are going to be a much finer party. We’re going to be a unified party,” Trump said. “I mean, to be honest with you. And we are going to be a much bigger party. Our party is expanding.”
+
+Later, Trump responded to a question by saying he’d been watching all the big cable-TV news networks, and liked them all. “See, I’m becoming diplomatic,” he said.
+
+In a wide-ranging news conference that followed Trump’s speech, he issued a kind of threat to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who – before Trump came on the scene – had a claim to being the most popular figure in the GOP.
+
+“Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well,” Trump said. “I’m sure I’ll get along with him. And if I don’t? He’ll have to pay a big price.”
+
+It seemed possible, given Tuesday’s results, that Rubio, Cruz and Kasich could find a reason to remain in the race. So even where Trump lost Tuesday night, he may have won — reaping the benefits of a crowded field of candidates and splitting the anti-Trump vote into pieces.
+
+Former pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who has failed to win a single primary or caucus so far, told supporters he was dismayed with the state of the nation’s political system and not prepared to quit the race yet.
+
+“It is rotten; it is rotten to the core,” Carson told a crowd of supporters in Baltimore. “I’m not ready to quit untangling it quite yet.”
+
+Carson has called on the five remaining candidates to meet privately in Detroit in advance of Thursday’s upcoming GOP Fox News Channel debate. He has asked them to take “a pledge to talk about the many serious problems facing our country, instead of personally attacking each other.”
+
+In the Democratic race, with nearly all the votes counted,Clinton won the Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia Democratic primaries as she looks to dramatically widen her lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
+
+Sanders chalked up four victories: his home state of Vermont, as well as in Oklahoma, Minnesota and Colorado.
+
+At a polling place in Houston where Cruz cast his vote Tuesday, Francisco Valle, 74, held a sign depicting Trump with a Hitler-style mustache and his right hand raised; it read, “absolutely no Mexicans.” Valle also hung a sign with the letter T and word “Trump” in the shape of a swastika with “STOP” written beneath.
+
+“I am here because I want to make awareness of a movement that is very dangerous to all the minorities, because Hitler started the same way,” said Valle, who is Mexican American. “He blamed the Jews for all the problems, and now Trump is blaming the Mexicans for the problems.”
+
+Trump has suggested he is expanding the GOP’s base of support by appealing to Democrats and independents, even though some say he is alienating some traditional Republican backers.
+
+“We have tremendous numbers of people coming in, and the Republican Party is growing larger,” he said. If it fails to do that, he added, “it’s not going to win.”
+
+Wagner reported from Burlington, Vt.; Eilperin from Washington. Katie Zezima in Houston; Patricia Sullivan in Arlington, Va.; Laura Vozzella in Richmond, Va.; Abby Phillip in Minneapolis, Minn.; Scott Clement, Anne Gearan and Paul Kane in Washington; Robert Costa in Atlanta; Jose A. DelReal in Nashville; Fenit Nirappil in Norfolk, Va.; Ed O’Keefe in Alcoa, Tenn.; and David Weigel in Castleton, Vt., contributed to this report.",REAL
+3541,"74 children executed by ISIS for 'crimes' that include refusal to fast, report says","The blood-soaked executioners of ISIS have spared neither women nor children since the jihadist army established its caliphate a year ago, putting an estimated 74 kids and even more women to death for such offenses as practicing “magic” and refusing to fast during Ramadan.
+
+A total of 3,027 people have been executed by ISIS since it declared itself a state under strict Islamic law in Syria and Iraq last June, according to a new report by the UK-based group, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
+
+""Many of the charges against those executed are recorded as blasphemy and spying, but others include sorcery, sodomy, practicing as a Shia Muslim,"" the report states.
+
+Just this week, two children whose ages were not known were crucified in the Mayadin, Deir Ezzor province in eastern Syria after ISIS accused them of not properly fasting during Ramadan. The children’s bodies, put on public display on crossbars, each bore a sign explaining their violation during the holy month for Muslims that runs June 17 to July 17. With each execution justified by ISIS' medieval interpretation of the Koran, the group is attempting to portray itself as the true practitioners of Islam, say experts.
+
+“Underlying all these executions is the apocalypse ideology of the final battle between the believers and the unbelievers,” said Jasmine Opperman, the director of Southern Africa Operations at the Terrorism, Research & Analysis Consortium. “ISIS is using executions to show its followers -- and would-be followers -- that the group is the only true representative of believers, not only in word, but action, which is why executions are featured so prominently.”
+
+Other children died fighting for their lives.
+
+“The violent Islamist group appears to demonstrate a particular interest in children, releasing videos of children fighting in cages and undertaking military training,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights group said. “The report also details moves undertaken by the group to entice children to join, which include setting up offices called ""cubs of the caliphate"" that recruit children to fight for ISIS.”
+
+The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child released a report in February, documenting the many horrors ISIS has imposed on children who are Kurdish, Yazidi, Christian and even Muslim. Children – even those who are mentally challenged – are being tortured, crucified, buried alive, used as suicide bombers and sold as sex slaves, the report said.
+
+“ISIS is hoping to spur current supporters around the world who are dormant, of which there are millions, into joining their caliphate by advertising acts like these, of which there are millions,” said Ryan Mauro, national security analyst for the Clarion Project, a nonprofit organization that educates the public about the threat of Islamic extremism. “They know that they can greatly increase their numbers by appealing to current radicals rather than the broader masses.”
+
+Women are not spared the cruel brutality of ISIS, either.
+
+The Syrian Observatory found that the terror group carried out more executions this week, murdering two married couples by beheading them publicly with a sword for “sorcery.”
+
+“The Islamic State group executed two women by beheading them in Deir Ezzor province, and this is the first time the Observatory has documented women being killed by the group in this manner,” Rami Abdel Rahman, of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told the Daily Mail.
+
+Other citizens suspected of practicing black magic or sorcery also have been killed, the organization reports, including a magician beheaded in recent weeks in the Iraqi province of Salahuddin.
+
+“The practicing of anything that is not approved by Islamic State under their very strict interpretation of Islam is ‘Haram’ or forbidden,” said Veryan Khan, editorial director for the Florida-based Terrorism, Research & Analysis Consortium. “If the Islamic State thinks that sorcery is real, then black magic would be a threat to them and seen as a danger.”
+
+ISIS stepped up its killing spree this week as it celebrated both Ramadan and its one-year anniversary as a caliphate in Iraq and Syria with three straight days of ruthless public punishments and executions. On June 30, 11 workers from al-Miadin endured live crucifixion and were forced to wear signs saying ""70 lashes and to be crucified for 1 day for breaking the fast in Ramadan.""
+
+The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the most recent killing spree is less than a week, after ISIS released a video of 15 men executed in three terrible ways: Drowned in cages, having their head blown off with explosives and burning them alive in a car hit with a rocket launcher.
+
+Last Friday, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the death of 38 people in Tunisia who were gunned down, and another 27 people who died after a bomb rocked a Shia mosque in Kuwait.
+
+“Islamic State executions are not merely retribution by the state for behavior seen as illegal,” said Khan, noting executions by the Islamic State include everything from burning alive victims, firing squads, beatings and beheadings, to drowning, explosions, and throwing people off of buildings. “The Islamic State uses executions to intimidate and dominate the local population, for diplomatic communiqués to world leaders, for recruitment purposes and to demonstrate the organization is in complete control.”",REAL
+2808,"On Capitol Hill, deep skepticism persists as lawmakers react to Iran deal","The deal Tuesday to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons program came at the end of two years of an intricate ballet involving President Obama and the leaders of six other countries.
+
+But as the debate moved from the negotiating tables of Vienna to the halls of the U.S. Capitol, Obama faced a new and complicated task: to protect the agreement from opponents who would undermine it in Washington over the next two months.
+
+“I will veto any legislation that prevents the successful implementation of this deal,” Obama said Tuesday. “This is not the time for politics or posturing. Tough talk from Washington does not solve problems.” It would take two-thirds of both the House and the Senate to override such a veto.
+
+Most congressional Republicans remained deeply skeptical, some openly scornful, of the prospect of relieving economic sanctions while leaving any Iranian uranium-enrichment capability intact. And Democrats offered only cautious endorsements of the deal that represents a cornerstone of Obama’s foreign policy as Congress begins a two-month review of the agreement.
+
+Hours after the deal was announced, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) accused Obama of abandoning his own objectives for the negotiations and called the agreement “unacceptable.”
+
+“It’s going to hand a dangerous regime billions of dollars in sanctions relief while paving the way for a nuclear Iran,” he said. “If it’s as bad a deal as I think it is at this point, we’ll do everything we can to stop it.”
+
+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the deal “appears to fall well short of the goal we all thought was trying to be achieved, which was that Iran would not be a nuclear state.”
+
+Democratic leaders, meanwhile, mainly offered pledges to closely review the deal rather than outright endorsements. In a morning statement, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) called the agreement “historic,” but he did not address the deal at an afternoon news conference until he was prompted by reporters.
+
+“My staff hasn’t read it; I haven’t read it,” Reid said. “Let’s find out what we have first.”
+
+House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the deal “the product of years of tough, bold and clear-eyed leadership” from Obama but stopped short of a full endorsement. “Congress will closely review the details of this agreement,” she said.
+
+Not since George W. Bush sought the approval of Congress to go to war has a president turned to lawmakers for their support on a matter of such international importance. The congressional review of the deal will proceed according to a framework passed by Congress in May and signed into law by Obama. It provides for a 60-day review period, during which lawmakers could do nothing and allow the agreement to take effect, vote to approve the deal or vote their disapproval of it.
+
+Passing a disapproval measure would have to survive the veto that Obama promised Tuesday. Overriding that veto would require a two-thirds vote in both houses — with the decisive vote likely to come in the Senate, where the Republican majority is slimmer.
+
+Broad Republican opposition to the agreement is expected after months of pointed statements and political maneuvering from GOP leaders. Over Obama’s objections, Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a fierce critic of the negotiations, to address Congress in March. Shortly afterward, 47 of 54 Senate Republicans signed a letter addressed to Iranian leaders that was intended to undermine the talks.
+
+[Israel blasts Iran deal as ‘one of the darkest days in history’]
+
+At least 13 Democratic or independent senators would have to join with Republicans to override an Obama veto.
+
+Some Democrats expressed pointed skepticism Tuesday, starting with Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), who co-sponsored the congressional review legislation. In a statement, he said the agreement “ultimately legitimizes Iran as a threshold-nuclear state” and “doesn’t end Iran’s nuclear program — it preserves it.”
+
+Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.), the highest-ranking Jewish Democrat in the House, said he would “review every word, sentence and paragraph of the deal to ensure it satisfies my continued concerns.”
+
+“Until then,” he said, “you can continue to count me in the ‘skeptical’ column.”
+
+Few Senate Republicans indicated Tuesday that they were inclined to vote in favor of the deal.
+
+Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has for months struck a relatively measured tone on the negotiations but said Tuesday that the deal amounted to “managed proliferation.”
+
+“I would say the agreement has taken a downward trend,” he said.
+
+Corker said he expected to hold hearings over the coming weeks before Congress breaks for its August recess but said the votes would probably be held in September — giving skeptics crucial weeks to marshal opposition.
+
+Under the review law, the 60-day clock does not begin until the agreement is officially certified and submitted to Congress, but it begins no later than five days after the deal is reached. During the review period, Obama is not permitted to relieve any Iranian sanctions.
+
+[The historic nuclear deal with Iran: How it works]
+
+Lawmakers have laid out a wide array of concerns, including the terms under which international inspectors will be given access to Iranian facilities, the pace of sanctions relief, the extent that Iranians will be able to continue enriching uranium for peaceful purposes, and the Iranian regime’s support for terrorist activities in the Middle East and beyond.
+
+In recent days, there has been close attention to the prospect that a U.N. arms embargo, imposed in 2007 amid international concerns over the direction of the Iranian nuclear program, might be lifted. The agreement released Thursday set forth a path for the embargo on conventional weapons to be lifted in as little as five years and for those on ballistic missiles to be lifted in as little as eight years.
+
+Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that “under no circumstances should we relieve pressure on Iran relative to ballistic missile capabilities and arms trafficking.”
+
+Lawmakers have seized on Dempsey’s quote in recent days as it appeared more and more likely that the arms embargo could be eased under the final agreement.
+
+“Who thinks it’s a good idea, given the Iranians’ toppling of the Mideast, to give them a lifting of the arms embargo that was not even part of the deal?” asked Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) during a morning appearance on MSNBC. “I would have never done that until they changed their behavior.”
+
+The announcement of the deal also triggered a wave of criticism from policy experts seeking to sway votes in Congress. Experts at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy took aim at whether components of the deal would be sufficient to ensure Iran’s compliance and whether access to oil money now frozen in escrow accounts would allow it to make more mischief in the region.
+
+“While the nuclear issue and Iran’s support of terrorism are ostensibly distinct, they are in fact implicitly linked,” David Makovsky and Matthew Levitt wrote on the group’s Web site.Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) offered one of the most robust defenses of the agreement to be found on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and predicted that, even if Congress forced Obama to veto a disapproval, it would not be overridden.
+
+“Anything’s possible, but I just don’t think so,” Feinstein said. “I think people are going to understand that we’re in a deteriorating situation in the Middle East, and this offers the opportunity to turn the page. . . . You know, nations do change.”",REAL
+2455,"Heart disease kills way more people than war, murder, and traffic accidents combined","The scariest causes of death — war, murder, car accidents — are also some of the least common ways that we die. This fact is made abundantly clear in a graphic from Britain's National Health Service, which displays the leading causes of death in the United Kingdom:
+
+Much more mundane things, like circulatory and digestive disorders, are much more common causes of death murders or car accidents. While this data comes from the United Kingdom, the leading causes of death in the United States look pretty similar: heart disease, cancer, and chronic respiratory disease are the most common killers in America.
+
+""Every day we are told of lethal new threats to our health and lives,"" the NHS writes in an explanation of the graphic. ""Food additives, knife crime, pollution, terrorism ... It's not that these threats are not potential killers, but in this blizzard of health warnings it's easy to lose perspective and worry about small or insignificant risks while ignoring, or being unaware, of major threats.""
+
+The NHS has also put together a set of ""risk"" factors that looks at some of the leading behavioral decisions that cause death, whether that's smoking too much or consuming too few fruits and vegetables:
+
+You can also use an interactive version of the Atlas of Risk, which lets you break down the risks and causes of death for different demographics. For example, that data shows that traffic accidents are a much higher cause of death for people between the ages of 1 and 19 than for other age groups. This is what that chart looks like:
+
+You can find the Atlas of Risk here. (And thanks to Peter Ubel for pointing it out on Twitter.)",REAL
+9248,DOJ Tried Repeatedly To Kill FBI’s Clinton Foundation Investigation,"DOJ Tried Repeatedly To Kill FBI’s Clinton Foundation Investigation 11/01/2016 
+THE DAILY CALLER 
+Senior-level Justice Department officials pushed back heavily on an ongoing FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation, according to a bombshell report from The Wall Street Journal. 
+The newspaper laid out numerous examples, based on law enforcement sources, of senior DOJ officials intervening to quash the probe. 
+Prosecutors with the U.S. attorneys office in the Eastern District of New York — which Loretta Lynch led before taking over as attorney general last year — refused to allow FBI investigators probing the Clinton family charity to review emails found on devices turned over this year by two of Clinton’s lawyers during the separate investigation into the mishandling of classified information on Clinton’s private email system. 
+The rationale, according to The Journal , was that the devices were covered by partial immunity and limited-use agreements that the Clinton lawyers — Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson — agreed to with the DOJ. Information recovered from the laptops could only be used in the email investigation and not in others. 
+As part of the immunity agreement, the FBI and Justice Department agreed to destroy Mills’ and Samuelson’s devices, a revelation that sparked outrage from congressional Republicans when it was announced earlier this month. 
+The Journal’s report largely confirms reporting in August from The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Richard Pollock that the FBI and several U.S. attorneys offices were conducting an unorthodox, joint investigation into the Clinton Foundation. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: FBI-US Attorneys Conducting Joint Probe Of Clinton Foundation) 
+CNN reported at around the same time that a Clinton Foundation probe was tabled by the Justice Department. Pollock’s report and the new piece from The Journal undermine CNN’s reporting. 
+While the investigation has gone forward, the Justice Department has stymied the investigation at several turns, according to The Journal. 
+The DOJ refused to grant the FBI the power to issue subpoenas or conduct formal interviews. It also refused to convene a grand jury to weigh evidence in the case. 
+More pushback occurred in August, when a senior DOJ official contacted the FBI’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, to voice his displeasure that New York field office agents were continuing the investigation even though the DOJ had declined to provide investigative support. 
+The official was “very pissed off” that the FBI was continuing its efforts, according to The Journal. 
+The call occurred on Aug. 12, a day after CNN reported details of FBI-DOJ discord over whether to investigate the Clinton Foundation. It was also a day after Pollock reported that an investigation was underway. 
+McCabe figures prominently in The Journal’s reporting and in the overlapping Clintonworld investigations. 
+It was revealed last week that McCabe’s wife, Jill, received nearly $470,000 in contributions to a Virginia state senate campaign last year from Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s super PAC. 
+McAuliffe is a close Clinton ally and is the subject of a separate FBI investigation. 
+According to The Journal, McCabe refocused the Clinton Foundation investigation a week after FBI director James Comey announced in early July that he would recommend to the Justice Department that charges not be filed against Clinton for mishandling classified information in her emails. 
+The charity probe would be led by the FBI’s New York office with help from the Little Rock office, according to The Journal. FBI field offices in Los Angeles and Washington were also involved in the Clinton Foundation investigation. 
+The Los Angeles office subpoenaed bank records related to the Clinton Foundation after obtaining information during a separate public corruption case. The office in Washington was investigating McAuliffe’s financial relationships from before he joined the Clinton Foundation as a board member. 
+After Comey’s announcement on the Clinton email investigation in July, McCabe decided that the Washington FBI office would focus on the separate McAuliffe matter. He recused himself from that investigation because of the donations his wife received from McAuliffe’s super PAC in 2015. 
+While the FBI has insisted that McCabe is not compromised in any of the investigations — the email probe, the Clinton Foundation, or the McAuliffe matter — The Journal reports that some agents believe he has issued “stand down” orders in the Clinton Foundation inquiry. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch looks on after announcing federal action related to North Carolina, at the U.S. Department of Justice (Getty Images) 
+That claim came from FBI agents lower on the chain of command from senior-level officials. Still other sources denied that McCabe issued a “stand down” order. They asserted that McCabe ordered investigators to continue on their investigative path. 
+McCabe’s Aug. 12 phone conversation with the senior DOJ official would seem to suggest that he supported the investigation. 
+“Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” McCabe asked the DOJ official, according to a Journal source who was familiar with the conversation. 
+“Of course not,” the official reportedly said, after a brief pause. 
+The new report also details a presentation that FBI officials made to the Justice Department in February to lay out the case against the Clinton Foundation. 
+Some of the Journal’s sources said that the DOJ’s career public integrity prosecutors did not believe that the case was strong. 
+“Others said that from the start, the Justice Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive of the case,” The Journal reported. 
+DOJ officials told the FBI at the meeting additional investigative tools — subpoenas, interviews or a grand jury — would not be authorized.",FAKE
+1709,"#MemeOfTheWeek: The Strange, Sad Case Of #FeelTheChafe","A few hours before the start of this week's Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, the tweets started to pour in.
+
+They all had the same, strange hashtag: #FeelTheChafe, a reference to the #FeelTheBern Bernie Sanders supporters were using to rally around their candidate. But it had a snarky twist for Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island governor and senator, who's been, so far, a much less popular presidential candidate.
+
+By the end of the night, #FeelTheChafe had gone from being a hashtag Twitter assumed was made by Chafee supporters, to being one used to soundly ridicule the man:
+
+By the next day, the hashtag had even made it to TV, becoming part of a Jimmy Fallon riff on his late-night show. And a lot of people were asking the same question: who in the world on Chafee's team thought that hashtag was a good idea.
+
+Here's the thing, though: From what we can tell, it was not actually his team's idea. At some point over the last few months, the occasional Chafee supporter began using #FeelTheChafe, seemingly positively.
+
+How did it all change? And perhaps an even better question, how did it all start?
+
+Well, NPR found the first person on Twitter to actually use the hashtag #FeelTheChafe when talking about the Chafee campaign. That tweet occurred on May 29 of this year, from an account belonging to Greg Newburn. NPR reached out to Newburn, to see what inspired him.
+
+NPR: It seems as if you were the first person on Twitter to use the #FeelTheChafe hashtag in relation to Chafee's bid for president. Before that, it was used when ladies were talking about working out in yoga pants and stuff. So, talk about that first tweet you did with the hashtag. I think you posted it soon after Chafee announced he was running. Do you recall that?
+
+NEWMAN: ""Yeah, I do recall that. If I recall correctly, that was right around the time that the #FeelTheBern hashtag was just taking off, among some of Bernie Sanders' most die-hard and early supporters on Twitter. And I follow several of them, so I was familiar with the #FeelTheBern hashtag. And when Lincoln Chafee announced, someone tweeted it [his announcement], and it just sort of clicked; it just made sense to me. It was just some sort of throw-away joke, really.""
+
+Do you like Lincoln Chafee? 
+
+""Oh, I guess, from what I know about him, sure, he doesn't seem like a bad guy. But to tell you the truth, I haven't thought too much about him, one way or the other.""
+
+When you tweeted the hashtag for that first time, was it meant to be a positive thing, or a negative thing, or just a funny thing?
+
+""Yeah, it was not negative, nor positive. I thought it was funny, so I tweeted it.""
+
+Who are you supporting for President?
+
+""I don't really have a candidate to be honest. I like several of the Republican candidates.""
+
+But not the Dem candidates? 
+
+""No, I don't think I like any of the Democratic candidates. Jim Webb, I guess, a little bit. I'm a Republican; I'll probably vote Republican.""
+
+Have you been following the #FeelTheChafe hashtag? 
+
+""I was shocked at how many people have used it, 'cause, I didn't follow it. Like I said, it was a joke. And I tweeted it. I'm not even sure I saw anything about Lincoln Chafee between the time I tweeted that and then the debate the other night. I don't think I saw him in the news even once. I was surprised to see so many people using it ... I'm just under the assumption that someone else independently came up with the same hashtag, and it took off from there, probably someone with considerably more followers than I have.""
+
+You've seen what this hashtag has become. It's kind of been used to ridicule this guy. Does that make you feel bad? 
+
+[Laughter] ""I don't like it when anyone gets ridiculed, I guess. But he's a politician, and he's in the public sphere, so I assume he can handle this type of criticism. And I'm reasonably certain that whatever the intent, it's probably in good fun; it's probably in good faith.""
+
+If you were in a room with Lincoln Chafee, and he was like, 'Oh hey, you're the guy that did that hashtag,' what would you say to him? 
+
+""Well, I guess it would depend on what his reaction to the hashtag is. I would hope that he would understand that it was all in good fun and certainly not political in any meaningful way. And then I would probably ask him if he supports sentencing reform [Newman is the Florida State Policy Director of Families Against Mandatory Minimums]. And if he does, I would say, 'Yay, thank you!'""
+
+If you could do it all over again, and if you knew that your hashtag would take off so much, would you have crafted that tweet differently?
+
+""No, I would have written it the same way. I think it's funny.""
+
+NPR also reached out to the Chafee campaign, to see what it thought of the hashtag gone wrong. Team Chafee confirmed it did not start the hashtag, and did not know who did. When we asked if it had been following #FeelTheBern and how they felt about it, we got this from campaign spokeswoman Debbie Rich:
+
+""Governor Chafee applauds any political involvement, in general, and the creative attention to his campaign, in particular.""",REAL
+732,Donald Trump to Ben Carson: You’re Fired… From My VP Team,"After floating a series of ridiculous Vice Presidential picks, Carson was axed from Trump’s selection team, sources close to the campaign told The Daily Beast.
+
+Ben Carson has the ability to say everything he shouldn’t at exactly the wrong time.
+
+
+
+Since the former neurosurgeon has taken up the role of working on Donald Trump’s vice presidential team, he has suggested that the candidate may pick a Democratic running mate, dropped she-who-must-not-be-named Sarah Palin as a potential pick and earlier generally questioned a number of the presumptive nominee’s habits from his Twitter use to lack of pragmatism.
+
+Last week, Armstrong Williams (his business manager and close confidant), told The Daily Beast that Carson left the team of his own volition. Carson had bigger and more important things to do, according to Williams, like preparing Trump for his meeting with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
+
+But three sources close to the Trump campaign said Carson didn’t leave on his own. He was pushed.
+
+According to sources close to Trump’s campaign, Carson was demoted after Trump specifically wanted him to head up the VP selection team. He submitted names that he thought would be valuable picks and inevitably lost his top spot days later. Carson allegedly called Trump afterwards and was angry that the situation played out like this.
+
+In the absence of a person to head up the operation, embattled campaign manager Corey Lewandowski stepped in and took over the spot, as first reported by The Washington Post. The Daily Beast has confirmed that Lewandowski is still in charge of the process.
+
+The list of names Carson later provided to The Washington Post—which included Palin, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich—was apparently just taken from various conversations within the campaign and is in no way confirmed. One source claimed that Carson mentioned the list in order to get retaliation for Lewandowski taking his position.
+
+“Well that’s part of what Lewandowski would want you to believe but there’s no truth to that,” Williams said of the takeover.
+
+When asked about any possible rocky relationship with Barry Bennett, now a Trump adviser and Carson’s former campaign manager, Williams said there were no issues there either.
+
+And Williams doesn’t either, not since December at least when Bennett exited the campaign after internal disagreements with the business manager who he claimed was causing issues with the struggling presidential bid.
+
+Despite multiple people familiar with the matter confirming that a conversation took place to demote Carson, Williams asserted that the relationship between the real estate mogul and the doctor was going swimmingly.
+
+“Dr. Carson and Mr. Trump have a wonderful understanding,” Williams said. “Sometimes I along with Trump’s top people are not always aware of what they are strategizing. [Carson] doesn’t always share with me. That’s a good thing.”
+
+Williams has not always been an entirely reliable source of information about the goings-on inside the Trump campaign however. When he told The Daily Beast that Carson was off the VP team, a Trump campaign source told CNN that he had “fucked it up.”",REAL
+7717,"Christie Lost Republicans The 2012 Election. He May Be Losing Them The 2016 Election, Too.","Christie Lost Republicans The 2012 Election. He May Be Losing Them The 2016 Election, Too. By: Ben Shapiro November 4, 2016 
+Ambition can be dangerous. Not just for the ambitious man or woman, but for the country – for all those who ally with the ambitious person. 
+For the last eight years, one of the most ambitious men in politics has been New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Hailed as a conservative darling after taking on teacher’s unions in New Jersey – brash language about “punching them in the face” marked his rise as a political force and an up-and-comer in presidential politics – Christie has nearly singlehandedly destroyed the Republican Party in two straight presidential elections. 
+In 2012, Christie was considered and rejected for vice president by Mitt Romney – but then gave the keynote speech in primetime at the Republican convention. There, he spent the bulk of his time talking about his own wonders, ignoring Romney completely. Fox News’ Chris Wallace called the speech “the most curious keynote speech I have ever heard…For a moment I forgot who was the nominee of the party.” 
+Then, the week before the election, Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast. While New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told President Obama that his presence was unnecessary, Christie invited Obama to New Jersey, then hugged him and took him on a tour of Atlantic City, where they made political love along the boardwalk underneath the cloudy skies. “I cannot thank the president enough for his personal concern and compassion for our state,” Christie said, adding that it was “my honor” to introduce President Obama. Christie was, at the time, facing down rumors that then-Newark Mayor Corey Booker, who is black, would run against him. As The New York Times noted, “The scene played out on televisions around the country like a stirring campaign ad that hit themes of bipartisanship and crisis management – only it was run free of charge.” 
+Obama surged in the final days and beat Romney handily. 
+Fast forward three years. 
+Christie was running in the Republican primaries. He’d done nothing much in the polls; his only hope was to somehow do well in New Hampshire. He had no support in states like South Carolina or Nevada, or southern states dominated by support for Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. So, naturally, he used his presence at the debate before the New Hampshire primary – a state in which Rubio was surging following his Iowa showing – to destroy Rubio. Christie rightly labeled Rubio a robotic candidate, Rubio repeated himself, Christie hit him again – and Rubio fell apart in the polling. Trump ran away with the state. Almost immediately, Christie quit the race and fell in behind Trump. Thanks in large part to Christie’s help, Trump won the nomination. 
+Now, with Trump surging in the polls the week before his general election against Hillary Clinton, Christie has struck again: this time, two of his top aides have been found guilty on all charges related to Bridgegate, the scandal in which the Christie administration allegedly blocked bridges in order to punish a local Democrat who wouldn’t endorse Christie’s re-election bid . This story will allow the media to shift its focus to the Trump campaign, since Christie is leader of Trump’s White House transition team. In a tight election, it could be enough to hand Hillary the White House. 
+So thanks, Chris Christie. 
+The Democrats couldn’t have done it without you. Tags",FAKE
+6652,ObamaCare: Things Fall Apart,"Headlined to H3 10/26/16 - Advertisement - 
+The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka ""ObamaCare,"" was intended to dramatically increase the number of Americans with health coverage while ""bending the cost curve"" (that is, reducing the expected increases in price over time). 
+The plan managed the first goal, at least in the short term. Unsurprising, isn't it, that more people get coverage when the law requires them to buy it, penalizes those who won't, and subsidizes those who can't afford to? 
+But the progress on that metric is beginning to disintegrate and we're moving in the other direction. Bloomberg reports that 1.4 million Americans in 32 states will lose the health plans they now have next year as major providers pull out of the ObamaCare ""exchanges"" because they're losing money. Apaprently a business has to take in more than it spends if it wants to remain a going concern. I'm sure I've read that somewhere. 
+As far as ""bending the cost curve"" is concerned ... well ... according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, cited by US News & World Report , average premiums rose by 7.5% last year and will rise by 25% in 2017. Price inflation for most consumer goods over the 2015-2016 period averaged a little more than 1%. Forgive me for thinking that when costs increase at 7-25 times the rate of inflation, that's not really a lot of ""bend"" to the ""curve."" 
+In 2009, I described (the then notional, yet to be passed into law) ObamaCare as ""[g]overnment feeds you to the insurance companies, while simultaneously feeding the insurance companies to you. The state takes home a doggie bag."" Which is about the size of it, and I was far from the only person who noticed and warned that the plan not only wouldn't work, but COULDN'T work, if the goal was reducing costs and increasing access to health care. Artificially increasing demand relative to supply can only have the opposite effects. 
+Since 2010, Republicans (who, by the way, first proposed the ""individual mandate"" scheme) have slowly but surely retreated from the idea of repealing ObamaCare and replacing it with nothing, instead proposing various schemes for keeping government as involved as possible in health care while pretending to ""return"" it to ""the free market"" (there hasn't been a free market in health care for more than a century, since the American Medical Association got licensing schemes imposed by the states so that it could limit the number of doctors and thereby keep their salaries high). - Advertisement - 
+Most Americans are now worse off vis a vis health care than they were six years ago. The only winners have been government health bureaucrats. And unfortunately, the politicians don't seem to be interested in getting out of the way and letting the market fix things. Next stop: ""Single payer."" - Advertisement -",FAKE
+2236,There’s a good reason protesters at the University of Missouri didn’t want the media around,"Video of a confrontation between a news photographer and protesters at the University of Missouri on Monday led to a dispute between journalists and the activists’ sympathizers beyond the campus walls. In response to a series of racial issues at the university, a circle of arm-linked students sought to designate a “safe space” around an encampment on the campus quad. When they blocked journalist Tim Tai from photographing the encampment, reporters complained that media were denied access to a public space.
+
+Certainly, Tai – like any journalist – had a legal right to enter the space, given that it was in a public area. But that shouldn’t be the end of this story. We in the media have something important to learn from this unfortunate exchange. The protesters had a legitimate gripe: The black community distrusts the news media because it has failed to cover black pain fairly.
+
+As a journalist, I understand how frustrating it is to be denied access to a person or place that’s essential to my story. I appeared with other journalists on local media in New York City to discuss our frustration over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s sometimes standoffish attitude towards the press. He is a public figure whose salary is paid with tax dollars. He is obligated to be accessible to us.
+
+[Campus racism makes minorities drop out of college. Mizzou students had to act.]
+
+The student protesters Tai encountered, though, didn’t owe him anything. They did not represent a government entity stonewalling access to public information. They were not public officials hiding from media questions. They were young people trying to build a community free not only of the racism that has recently wracked Mizzou’s campus but also of the insensitivity they encounter in the news media: Newspapers, Web sites and TV commentary had already been filled by punditry telling black students to “toughen up” and “grow a pair.” Then, in the noisy conversation about First Amendment rights that Tai elicited, journalists compounded the insult by drowning out the very message of the students Tai was covering.
+
+As journalists, we should strive to understand the motivations of the people we cover. In this case, black students at the University of Missouri have had a string of racist encounters on campus: The president of the students’ association was called the n-word and other black students have been racially harassed while participating in campus activities. A Missouri journalism professor wrote in the Huffington Post that she has been called the n-word “too many times to count” during her 18 years at the university. In February 2010, black students woke up to cotton balls strewn over on the lawn of the black culture center on campus. The crime, carried out by white students, was designed to invoke plantation slavery. University president Tim Wolfe resigned Monday after graduate student Jonathan Butler went on a hunger strike and the school’s football players boycotted team activities to protest the very public racism he and many black students believe the school did little to address.
+
+Establishing a “safe space” was about much more than denying the media access; it was about securing a zone where students’ blackness could not be violated. Yes, the hunger strike, the safe space and other demonstrations were protests, and protests should be covered. But what was fueling those protests was black pain. In most circumstances, when covering people who are in pain, journalists offer extra space and empathy. That didn’t happen in this case; these young people weren’t treated as hurting victims. Instead, after the confrontation with Tai, aggrieved journalists responded with a ferocity usually reserved for powerful entities with the means to inflict lasting damage on their First Amendment rights.
+
+This wasn’t a problem with Tai’s character or his journalistic integrity; he was doing his job, and his past outstanding work speaks for itself. But in this conversation over “public space,” we’ve overlooked the protesters’ message — that conditions on campus make it an unbearable environment for black students to live and learn in. Their approach to creating a safe space should have been better conceived, but reporters should also feel a responsibility to try to understand and respect their pain, instead of rushing to judge them and panicking about an imagined assault on press freedoms.
+
+[Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?]
+
+Further, as reporters, we have to drop our sense of entitlement and understand that not everyone wants to be subjects of our journalism. Our press passes don’t give us the license to bully ourselves into any and all spaces where our presence is not appreciated. It’s one thing to demand access to public lands; it’s another to demand access to people’s grieving.
+
+In many communities that historically have been marginalized and unfairly portrayed by the media, there’s good reason people do not trust journalists: They often criminalize black people’s pain and resistance to racial oppression. We saw it in coverage of Ferguson and Baltimore, when news stations seemed more concerned with the property damage than with the emotional damage that prompted it. Though peaceful protests in Ferguson had been going on for days, reporters didn’t descend on the town in large numbers until there were clashes with police. Suddenly, coverage spiked, but most of it was about “cars vandalized” and “buildings burned.” On Fox News, the channel most watched for Ferguson coverage at the height of the unrest, protesters were called “thugs.” Reporting from the protests, CNN’s Don Lemon noted, “Obviously, there’s a smell of marijuana in the air.” We heard comparatively little about the residents’ long-held grievances about police harassment and brutality.
+
+The unfair portrayal of black people in the news media is well documented. One study analyzing news coverage by 26 local television stations, black people were rarely portrayed unless they had committed a crime. A 2015 University of Houston study found that this imbalanced coverage may lead viewers to develop racial bias against black people because it often over-represents them in crime rates. Recognizing this kind of bias in news media, black Twitter users started the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag to call out news images of Mike Brown that many felt criminalized him in his death.
+
+That black students would be skeptical of media is understandable. We’ve already seen the kind of headlines they undoubtedly feared. In an Atlantic piece headlined “Campus Activists Weaponize ‘Safe Space’,” Conor Friedersdorf calls the protesters a mob and insists they are “twisting the concept of ‘safe space.’” Again, a journalist criminalizes black people for expressing their pain. It was another piece centering the reporter’s privilege over the students’ trauma. Friederdorf’s piece completely ignores the intolerable racial climate that forced the students to establish a safe space in the first place.
+
+[Black college football and basketball players are the most powerful people of color on campus]
+
+There were other ways to cover these students’ protest without breaching their safe space and without criminalizing them.The human chain students formed provided ample b-roll and still photos. Students could have been interviewed outside of that space. I would have pitched a story to my editors with the headline, “Why Black Students Were Forced To Secure A Safe Space On A Public Campus.”  But to do that requires self-reflection and not a condescending, self-absorbed soliloquy about the First Amendment.
+
+For journalists, the Missouri protests are a big news story. For the black students we’re covering, however, it’s a fight for their humanity and liberation. Tai is correct: he was doing his job. But in that stressful moment he may have failed to realize that the space he wanted to enter was a healing one that black people had worked to secure.
+
+Black pain is not an easy subject to cover, but the lesson we can take from this encounter at Missouri is that our presence as journalists, with the long legacy of criminalizing blackness that comes with it, may trigger the same harmful emotions that led to the students’ protests in the first place.
+
+We used to count black Americans as 3/5 of a person. For reparations, give us 5/3 of a vote.
+
+Don’t criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did, too.
+
+This is what white people can do to support #BlackLivesMatter",REAL
+6691,"I'm Not Voting ""For"" Donald Trump. I'm Voting To Stop The Clintons From Consolidating Power.","Getty - Tim Sloan IJR Opinion is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
+A Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton presidency is rather mind-boggling to many of us. At last check, there are over 300 million people in the United States, and we can't find anyone better than HRC and 'The Donald'? 
+Sadly, we are watching the American presidential election devolve into a competition between the DNC and the GOP as to who can put forward the most corrupt, asinine, power hungry candidate possible. Although the race to the bottom is a voting conundrum for both sides, the extreme left has posited a unique argument that can help social conservatives when it comes to personal principles and the voting booth. 
+In a world where biological sex is gleefully separated from gender identification, shouldn’t it be acceptable that one might separate selecting a candidate from voting for him or her? Put another way: if having male genitalia doesn't necessarily make you male, then selecting someone for president doesn’t necessarily mean that you voted for that person. Right? 
+This type of disconnected reality is only fair if everyone can play the game. Wow - this is an existential moment! I feel better already. To quote The Kinks : “Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls. It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…” 
+Thank you, transgender community, for helping me work through this “mixed up, muddled up” election. Although I will select Donald Trump for President of the United States, I will not be voting for him. 
+That’s right. I’m voting for three reasons and three reasons only: 
+I’m voting to curtail the Clintons' power. 
+I’m voting to curtail the Clintons' power. 
+I’m voting to curtail the Clintons' power. 
+There you have it: three solid reasons for selecting Donald Trump without voting for him. It’s time to be pragmatic. It’s time to select a candidate who will create the greatest amount of disturbance within the system albeit with the least amount of power. 
+Who might that be? Let’s see: “ eeny, meeny, miny, moe , H-R-C has got to go! ” Really, people - how long are we going to elect the same old political hacks who have consolidated their power for decades? 
+It is amazing that in a “free” country we’ve allowed the Clintons to run the DNC (and thus a fair portion of Washington, D.C.) for nearly 30 years! They have manipulated the system for their personal gain to the tune of $110 million! They are willing to sell our country to the nation or company that will pay the highest speaking fee . They lie, cheat, and steal their way to the top. 
+Is this not problematic? Power - and the lack of - is the most important thing for the next president, yet the media isn’t discussing it. 
+Here’s the most substantial difference between Donald Trump and HRC. If elected, Donald Trump would have a fraction of the power of HRC. For crying out loud: 2/3 of the GOP is already against him . Do you hear any major resistance rising up against HRC by DNC insiders? No. Progressives should wake up to the fact that if they vote for HRC, then they prove that their Occupy Wall Street, stick-it-to-the-man gig is a complete sham. 
+Indeed, if progressives vote for HRC, then they’re either quintessential hypocrites who couldn’t care less about the American people or they’re complete idiots being played like a drum by the powers that be in the DNC. 
+Make no mistake about it. I’ll select Trump’s name for president, but I’m not voting for him. Rather, I’m voting to limit the power of the presidency; I’m voting to stop HRC’s quest to become the first Queen of America by wielding the power of her husband’s former kingship. 
+Wake up, America! We fought a revolution to prevent such a consolidation of power. I would like to think Americans are smart enough to stop the Clintons from gaining even more of it. 
+Proverbs 15:27 - “He who is greedy for gain troubles his own house.” ",FAKE
+8189,"As fixes for Obamacare begin, meet the hopelessly confusing ‘all-payer model’","Print 
+While Donald Trump talks of repealing and replacing Obamacare and Hillary Clinton talks of reopening the conversation about the public option , the state of Vermont has begun dealing its own personal health care crisis by invoking something called the “all-payer model.” 
+The Green Mountain Care Board on Wednesday voted to approve this methodology for paying for health care, but understanding what that means requires reading the fine print of the agreement. 
+By approving the all-payer model agreement, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin seeks to align incentives across Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance so health care providers are paid for keeping patients healthy, not for providing individual services and procedures. 
+The board’s approval makes Vermont the first state to pursue an all-payer model statewide. 
+In a statement sent from the governor’s office, Shumlin thanked President Barack Obama and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell for negotiating the agreement with the state, and he said the model would control health care costs and reward doctors for a more preventive approach to care. 
+“Vermont will now become the first state in America to ensure that your doctor can focus on keeping you healthy, rather than running tests or procedures,” Shumlin said, adding: 
+By shifting the focus away from the current fee-for-service system to one that rewards primary care and prevention, we will help Vermonters lead healthier lives and more effectively manage chronic diseases, allow doctors to better treat their patients and identify health issues before they become severe, and reduce costs in a health care system that, if left unchecked, will bankrupt our state and Vermont families. 
+Green Mountain Care Board Chair Al Gobeille called the event “an important next step in provider-led health care reform,” adding that the program will save Vermont $10 billion over the next decade. 
+However, the board’s action did little to address concerns raised by the Joint Fiscal Office. In a report released Friday , the JFO weighed the supposed benefits of the new system against a list of critiques and uncertainties. Among the uncertainties are the administrative costs of the program, as well as where funding will come from. 
+The JFO report also notes that the next governor could refuse to go forward with the program. Republican gubernatorial candidate Phil Scott has said he does not support the program. 
+In a statement sent to local media, State House Minority Leader Rep. Don Turner, criticized the plan. 
+“The proposal raises many important, but unanswered, questions regarding the ability to cap healthcare cost growth, the use of the ACO model … and the competency of the Shumlin Administration to successfully run another complex regulatory system given its dismal record with Vermont Health Connect,” he said. 
+Darcie Johnston, director of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, said she was shocked at the speed with which the board approved the draft. “Our legislators made a huge mistake in giving the GMCB so much power — the power to enter into contracts to further destroy our health care system.” 
+Amy Cooper, executive director of HealthFirst, an independent practice association representing over 250 medical professionals, told Vermont Watchdog she believes “the concept could be a good one” but nevertheless is “nervous about the State’s ability to implement it, especially with such a short timeline of reviewing the details that were only released a month ago.” 
+Shumlin will sign the revised draft document at 2 p.m. Thursday in his ceremonial office in Montpelier. 
+Over the past month, health care officials held public forums to explain Vermont’s 44-page draft agreement with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Still, many doctors and patients feel unsure of what the “all-payer model” will mean for them, in part because of the program’s many complexities. 
+For starters, despite the administration’s talk of an “all-payer waiver,” the draft document contains a waiver only for Medicare, not Medicaid or commercial insurance — the other two “payers” in Vermont’s health care system. Instead, the document gives state health care officials permission to operate accountable care organizations, or ACOs, under a restructured payment system. 
+For health care providers, the new payment system will start to replace current fee-for-service payments with a state-run global budget, the goal of which is to reward positive outcomes and overall population health. 
+Once the agreement is finalized, Vermont will start using its state-approved ACO, called the Vermont Care Organization. That network of health care providers is comprised of representatives from existing ACOs, including OneCare, HealthFirst and Community Health Accountable Care. 
+The smaller ACOs have not yet committed to being managed by the Vermont Care Organization. They have until 2018 to decide whether to remain as fee-for-service operators or transition to global budgeting within the Vermont Care Organization, as overseen by the Green Mountain Care Board. 
+Dr. Paul Reiss, chief medical officer at HealthFirst, told Watchdog his ACO is not recommending that physicians sign on with the Vermont Care Organization until details of the offer are known. 
+“There’s no proposal to change the way physicians are paid under Medicare in 2017,” Reiss said. “We’ll recommend signing on when there are actually offers on the table.” 
+At recent public forums, both Gov. Peter Shumlin and Al Gobeille, chair of the Green Mountain Care Board, said the Vermont Care Organization would be “risk bearing.” That means the umbrella ACO network, not individual providers, will absorb losses if providers exceed their budget for the year. 
+While the risk-bearing stipulation may allay providers’ worries about going over budget, page 8 of the agreement states that the ACO is responsible for “at minimum 30 percent” of shared losses. Put another way, providers in some cases will be responsible for paying up to 70 percent of the cost of exceeding the state-determined budget. 
+Delivering care under a global budget worries some doctors, who may not be able to survive under a budget cap and offer effective care at the same time. 
+When an audience member at the Norwich public forum asked what impact failing practices might have on the system, Shumlin replied, “You cannot be refused care. … It’s the ACO’s problem to deal with the bankruptcy. … It would not affect care in any way. It might not be the same provider, because they would be out of business theoretically, but someone would have an interest in caring for you.” 
+Gobeille agreed that private practices might face bankruptcy “because they couldn’t make it work in the independent practice world.” He added that such practices could be absorbed into the hospital system. 
+Since the draft agreement was announced , some physicians have criticized the plan on the grounds that hospitals may continue getting reimbursed for services at a higher rate, because of their bargaining advantage with insurance companies and the Green Mountain Care Board. 
+While it’s generally expected that the all-payer model will fix the payment reimbursement differential between Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurers, Reiss said he’s skeptical. 
+“There are no [plans] currently diagrammed on any drawing board to make that happen,” Reiss told Watchdog. 
+In fact, the draft agreement doesn’t fix the reimbursement differential. Instead, it says by 2020 the state must deliver “a report on options to narrow the Payer Differential between payers.” 
+The long delay could disappoint independent physicians, who have been told they don’t have to join the state-run ACO if they don’t want. That freedom of choice may be illusory at best, since financial pressure cited in the agreement could coerce doctors to join the network or face financial consequences. 
+Specifically, the draft agreement says the state will “encourage” providers and beneficiaries to participate. One “encouragement” includes a potential Medicare payment reduction for practices that remain outside of the ACO. 
+However, in an Oct.19 email exchange obtained by Vermont Watchdog, state Sen. Tim Ashe, told Burlington psychiatrist Robert Emmons that he contacted Ena Backus, health policy chief at the Green Mountain Care Board, and the financial penalty is now removed from the updated agreement. 
+Funding to help Vermont abandon a fee-for-service model includes a one-time payment of $9.5 million dollars from Medicare. The state also has a verbal agreement with Medicaid for $200 million — likely $110 million in federal money and $90 million in state funds. 
+It’s unclear where this money, and the administrative expense of Vermont Care Organization, will come from. 
+On Tuesday, Johnston unsuccessfully called for the board to delay its vote until outstanding questions are answered. 
+“We believe that doctors and patients have significant concerns, and that the delivery of health care to Vermonters could be significantly impacted. We are concerned about the rationing of care,” the Vermonters for Healthcare Freedom director said in a statement. “…There are too many questions that deserve answers before the Green Mountain Care Board should agree to support such a risky venture.” 
+Other concerns of Johnston’s include a lack of transparency and the model’s impact on Vermont’s doctor shortage. 
+A timeline of key events reveals the long road ahead for the all-payer health care model.",FAKE
+2201,Iran nuclear deal: why White House rules foreign policy,"When it comes to foreign policy, Congress sits in the audience and cheers or boos. But it seldom has any profound effect on the outcome of the action.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Speaker of the House John Boehner of Ohio, pauses while speaking about his opposition to the Iran deal during a news conference Sept. 9 on Capitol Hill in Washington. Even though opponents of the Iran nuclear deal can’t win in Congress, they aren’t going to go quietly. 'This debate is far from over, and frankly, it's just beginning,' Boehner said on Sept. 10.
+
+The almost-certain implementation of President Obama’s Iran deal despite heated opposition from most congressional Republicans and some Democrats is yet more evidence that, when it comes to major decisions of US foreign policy, it is the White House that runs the game.
+
+Congress sits in the audience and cheers or boos. But it seldom has any profound effect on the outcome of the action.
+
+And if anything, the influence of Capitol Hill on the nation’s diplomacy and military action may be declining in today’s highly partisan age.
+
+It isn’t obvious from the nation’s founding documents that the competing powers of the branches of government should lead to that result. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, after all. The Senate participates in the ratification of treaties. The power of the purse offers lawmakers a way to try and influence a wide range of foreign policy decisions.
+
+But in general, the unitary nature of the presidency allows it to make decisions and react to fast-moving foreign events while the legislature is still debating how to pull its boots on.
+
+“This is simply an arena of policy that works to the commander-in-chief’s advantage,” wrote Dan Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, earlier this year.
+
+Occasionally, Congress has taken command of the nation’s diplomacy. After World War I, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, keeping the US out of the League of Nations. In 1999, the Senate similarly blocked US accession to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
+
+But take the Obama administration’s bombing campaign against the Islamic State. Congress hasn’t voted to explicitly approve it. Instead, the bombing is being conducted pursuant to an authorization of use of force that lawmakers passed in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001.
+
+Both Republican and Democratic legislators would prefer that not be the case. They would like to move a newer war resolution. But after months of hearings and back-room wrangling they couldn’t agree on wording. Some wanted to authorize a full use of force, including the possible presence of US military boots on the ground. Others had a much narrower vision. So the push for a new resolution has produced nothing.
+
+Such partisan gridlock has similarly reduced congressional influence on slower-moving foreign developments. The deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program developed over months of negotiations. Almost to a person, Congress complains that it should have been tougher. But it became a partisan issue, particularly after House Republicans invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to denounce it at a joint meeting of Congress. As it became more overtly political, even some Democrats with reservations about its requirements lined up behind the White House.
+
+Eventually Congress approved a complicated review process that gave substantial power to the Democratic House and Senate minorities. For President Obama to win, all his party needed to do was maintain just enough cohesion to uphold an expected Obama veto of a disapproval resolution.
+
+But they won’t even have to go that far, apparently. On Thursday, Senate Democrats blocked the GOP’s effort to reject the deal. A procedural vote on a resolution of disapproval fell two votes short of the 60 needed to proceed.
+
+The White House was quick to declare final victory.
+
+“This vote is a victory for diplomacy, for American national security, and for the safety and security of the world,” said Mr. Obama in a statement.
+
+“This is a bad deal with decades-long consequences for the security of the American people and our allies. And we’ll use every tool at our disposal to stop, slow and delay this agreement,” said House Speaker John Boehner following the Senate vote.
+
+In truth, it seems to be all over but the suing. Some House Republicans are urging a lawsuit to try and block the accord. Speaker Boehner has said that’s “an option that is very possible.”
+
+Thus the Iran deal will stand as a major victory of President Obama’s second term, perhaps his signature accomplishment. Or that designation might go to the administration’s reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba after more than 50 years. That’s another foreign policy move on which Congress had little-to-no influence.
+
+Recognition of governments is something over which the president does have unilateral power. The Supreme Court affirmed that earlier this year on a 5-to-4 vote, ruling that the White House did not have to give US citizens born in Jerusalem the option of listing “Israel” as their place of birth on an American passport. (Why was that an issue? It’s complicated. For decades, US presidents have said the status of Jerusalem must be determined by Israeli-Palestinian agreement, which needless to say hasn’t happened.)
+
+This is an issue on which the US must “speak with one voice,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion. “That voice must be the president’s.”
+
+However, there is at least one presidential aspirant who has long said the White House advantage on foreign policy should be rolled back. It’s too easy for the Oval Office to drag the US into misbegotten wars, in this person’s view. Congress should resume its rightful role as the check and balance on the nation’s overseas adventures, he says.
+
+“One hopes Congress – both Republicans and Democrats – can regain the wisdom to reassert the authority that was so wisely given to it so many years ago,” he wrote in 2013 in a lengthy National Interest piece on the subject.
+
+That would be former Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, who served as Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and later opposed the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.",REAL
+5453,Russia Tests Stealth Hypersonic Nuke Capable of Wiping Texas or France,"
+Russian strategic missile troops reportedly launched an RS-18 ballistic missile on Tuesday. The launch may have been a test of the advanced hypersonic glider warhead, which would be able to defeat US anti-missile systems.
+According to previous reports this nuke is also going to be made STEALTH and impossible to be detected by any current radar systems and it will carry a payload capable of wiping off areas as big as France or US’s Texas state with a single missile.
+The test was conducted at midday from a site near the town of Yasny, Orenburg region, in the southern Urals, and the warhead reached the Kura test range in Kamchatka in Russia’s Far East.
+“The test was a success. The warhead was delivered to Kura field,” the Defense Ministry reported.
+Popular defense blog MilitaryRussia.ru says the launch was meant to test Russia’s hypersonic glider warhead, currently known by its developer designation, ‘object 4202’, or Aeroballistic Hypersonic Warhead.
+A select few countries are currently developing the technology. The US has the HTV-2, a device developed by DARPA that has two partially successful tests under its belt. The Chinese warhead using the same technology is called DF-ZF, with Beijing first confirming a test in 2014. India is also studying hypersonic flight technology, but unlike Russia, the US and China, it is reportedly not developing a strategic missile warhead.
+A hypersonic glider vehicle (HGV) is different from a conventional ballistic missile warhead in that it travels most of the time in the stratosphere rather than in space. It gives an HGV-tipped missile greater range and may give anti-missile systems a shorter window to respond to an attack.
+More importantly, an HGV can maneuver during the approach to a target at high speed, making interception significantly harder, because it makes guiding an interceptor missile towards the attacking vehicle challenging and potentially impossible with current rocket technology.
+Object 4202 is reportedly meant to be used with Russia’s next-gen heavy strategic missile the RS-28 Sarmat. Military experts estimate that the new ICBM, an image of which was first made public this week, may carry up to three HGVs as payload.
+A previous possible test of object 4202 was reported in April.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+5424,Russia's countersanctions for Syria will hit the West below the belt,"Russia's countersanctions for Syria will hit the West below the belt 08.11.2016 Print version Font Size The West and Russia are entering the third year of the war of sanctions . Washington threatens to impose new sanctions against Russia, this time for Syria. Russia will take ""painful measures"" in response, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said. Pravda.Ru offers the list of counter sanctions that we made up on the basis of experts' opinions. 1. Russia's first answer would be the abolition of neo-liberal economic policies and transition to a new economic development strategy . This will block channels of Western influence on our country and thus become the most asymmetric, but a tough answer to Western sanctions, said Ruslan Dzarasov, Doctor of Economics, head of the department of political economy at the Russian Economic University named after Plekhanov.The expert noted that ""we continue to adhere to the export growth model, taking capital to the West and forming the budget on the basis of financial interests of capital rather than domestic consumers."" Russia, the expert said, should introduce a combination of state planning and market sector, ""similar to what the USSR was doing during the 1920s .""""The state should ensure the financial transparency of corporations, expand the rights of trade unions and workers, strengthen social control over big business, show influence on the formation prices in economy to eliminate price disparity in favor of the mining export sector to the detriment of the manufacturing industry,"" Ruslan Dzarasov told Pravda.Ru.2. Russia could refuse from saving its reserves in US dollars . Russia does not take the first place in terms of dollar savings in the world, but it could still cause a serious blow on the Western financial system, Valentin Katasonov, Doctor of Economics, Professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Finance, the head of Russian Economic Society named after S.F. Sharapov, told Pravda.Ru.""A lot of Russia's liabilities in national gold and currency reserves are nominated in US dollars. Should they are put on the market, the US dollar will suffer greatly ,"" leading expert at the Union of Oil and Gas Industrialists, Rustam Tankan said. Noteworthy, some privately run Russian companies already abandon the US dollar in their activities. Megafon, one of Russia's three leading cellular providers, converted about 40 percent of dollar deposits in euros and Hong Kong dollars. The company transferred the funds to accounts in major Chinese banks. Norilsk Nickel took similar measures. The Hong Kong dollar is a Chinese foreign clone of the dollar, and the USA is unable to impose any sanctions on this currency . Russia has started abandoning from the US dollar as a reserve currency by opening the Raw Materials Exchange of St. Petersburg, where Russian energy carriers are traded in rubles. 3. Russia could freeze assets of US investors in the Russian economy . ""Foreign citizens are the ultimate beneficiaries of our shadow holdings. There are tricky financial mechanisms in the timber industry, for instance,"" Igor Gerasimov, member of the Committee for Business Security at the Chamber of Commerce, security expert, told Pravda.Ru. The shadow mechanism works as follows. A wood-working company does most of the work, while most of the profit goes to a ""general contractor."" The latter pays the company a relative price for production, plus a minimum profit. Most of the profit goes to specific individuals, to accounts of foreign companies. Therefore, Russia could adopt laws about the nationalization of natural resources and city-forming enterprises, said Igor Gerasimov.4. The State Duma of the Russian Federation has already discussed a draft law to relieve state-run and privately-owned Russian companies from debts totaling $700 billion . These debts are held by Western banks of the countries that threatened to impose sanctions against Russia.5. Sanctions in the field of high technology will be no less sensitive. ""Russian titanium will cease to arrive at European companies, and this will certainly be a very significant act of pressure on our partners,"" Alexei Mukhin, general director of the Center for Political Information told Pravda.Ru. Boeing and United Technologies, as well as Europe's Airbus Group, purchase most of their titanium from Avisma, a Russian company, which happens to be the world's largest titanium producer . Yet, it goes about only 30 percent of needs. The USA remains entirely dependent on Russia in the field of rocket engines . RD-180 is a six-ton ​​liquid rocket engine with a thrust of more than 400 tons. The USA has been using Russian rocket engines since 2000. US Congress passed the budget, which provided for the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase an ""unlimited"" number of RD-180 rocket engines. 6. Russia's sanctions against Western airlines would lead to their elimination . A great deal of airlines fly across the territory of Russia and save a lot of money on this, chairman of the Federation Council Committee on International Affairs, Andrei Klimov, told Pravda.Ru.""If all of a sudden, the Russian authorities try to do something in this field, it will generate huge profits to companies from such countries as the United Arab Emirates, but at the same time it will cause serious financial damage to German, French and other air carriers,"" - said the expert.7. Many large companies in the West have a strong lobby in legislative authorities. Therefore, the input of targeted sanctions under the pretext of violation of rules and regulations would be a very strong response . Starting from 1 November 2016, Russia banned imports of salt from the EU, the US, Canada, Australia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, Albania and Ukraine. On February 15, 2016 Russia banned imports of soybeans and corn from the United States, including through third countries. Russia still imports various food products from the United States, spending millions of dollars a year (PepsiCo, Starbucks, Cargill, McDonald's), pharmaceuticals (Pfizer), cosmetic products (Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson), plastics, machinery, textiles, footwear, automobiles (Ford, General Motors) as well as products under the ""secret code"" worth $554 million in the first half of 2016. Lyuba Lulko Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru Is Russia scared of Western sanctions?",FAKE
+5594,Will James Comey Change the Outcome of the Election?,"Will James Comey Change the Outcome of the Election? Is this the game-changing October surprise that many hope for -- and others dread? November 2, 2016 
+Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 
+FBI Director James Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Clinton’s emails has roiled once more the presidential election. Donald Trump has called the decision “courageous” and “bigger than Watergate.” Clinton, the DOJ, Democrat Senators, and their media flying monkeys are all having conniption fits over their quondam champion’s defection, calling the announcement “appalling,” “absurd,” “strange,” “deeply troubling,” an “attack,” and “unprecedented.” The bigger question is whether it will move enough voters over to Trump’s side and put him in the White House. 
+There’s no doubt that Comey’s announcement eleven days before the election is mystifying. Not because it is “unprecedented” as the Democrats keep squealing. They had no such qualms when the weekend before the 1992 election, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh indicted a poll-surging George H.W. Bush for his alleged involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. No, the mystery is Comey’s motives. Is Comey like Conrad’s Lord Jim, now sacrificing his FBI career––sure to be over if the notoriously vengeful Clinton is elected–– to atone for having besmirched his office, reputation, and the principle of equality before the law in service to careerist self-interest? Or was he facing a mutiny and leaks from disgruntled FBI investigators? To quote one of our candidates, “At this point, what difference does it make?” 
+The real question is whether it will make a difference to the voters. Right now we don’t know if the content of the 650,000 emails from the conjugal laptop used by serial sexter Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Clinton vizier Huma Abedin, will reveal something damning like, say, classified materials. But we already know that Clinton passed classified information over an unsecured server, which didn’t bother Comey back in July. So what could be in these new emails that rises above Comey’s sophistic “extreme carelessness,” and reaches the statute’s “gross negligence”? Or has Comey found new evidence of Hillary’s “intent,” his other exculpatory sophistry that had little to do with the law? There had to be something that made Comey subject himself to the scorched-earth wrath of the Democrats. 
+Whatever is found on the Abedin laptop, one wonders if will even matter to a sufficient number of voters. They have shrugged off so many scandals, lies, and failures that should have sunk a candidacy, that it’s hard to calculate what level of incompetence, unpleasantness, dishonesty, sleaze, and crime is disqualifying anymore. Here are the greatest hits from Hillary’s catalogue: Whitewater Missing billing records from her tenure at the Rose Law Firm Renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to donors Travelgate Illegal possession of FBI files Conducting illegal secret meetings of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform Cackling over keeping a pedophile rapist out of jail Hounding the victims of her husband’s sexual assaults and philandering Stealing $200,000 worth of china, furniture, and artwork from the White House Claiming she landed under “sniper fire” in Bosnia Claiming she and Bill left the White House “dead broke” Shaking down Wall Street while assuring the Orcs of capitalism that she’s got their back Charging exorbitant speaking fees for a half hour of banalities and bromides Calling 30,000 missing emails “personal” communications Lying about the Benghazi attack to the faces of the four dead Americans’ families Supporting the lie that the attacks were caused by an obscure Internet video when she knew the same night that they weren’t Perjuring herself before Congress and the FBI about the emails and her private server The disastrous overthrow of Ghaddafi in Libya The disastrous “reset” with Russia The disastrous nuclear deal with Iran The disastrous withdrawal from Iraq The corrupt Clinton Foundation and its wholly owned subsidiary, the pay-to-play State Department Using feminist rhetoric while taking cash from some of the planet’s most brutally misogynistic regimes Serially flip-flopping on issues like same-sex marriage, the Trans Pacific Trade deal, and the Keystone pipeline Promising to “raise taxes on the middle class” and “put coal miners out of work” Her campaign staff’s dirty tricks against Trump and his supporters Her campaign staff’s incestuous relationship with the media Her staff’s illegal destruction of incriminating evidence during the email investigation Her strong support of gruesome late-term abortions And, last but not least, the continuing unanswered questions about her physical and cognitive health 
+Back in the day, just a few of these gaffes, deceptions, and failures would probably have sunk a campaign for Congress, let alone the White House. 
+And Mr. Trump’s offenses? He’s talks exactly as you’d expect a New York real estate developer, casino owner, reality television star, and beauty pageant mogul to talk He’s condemned as a sexual assaulter for saying a decade ago what Bill Clinton and every White-House-visiting rapper, movie star, or rock star knows about the sexual perks of celebrity: “When you’re a star they let you do it,” as Trump bragged of his crude sexual advances He’s ignorant of policy He doesn’t understand the economics of global trade He doesn’t know what the “nuclear triad” is He’s addicted to a half dozen superlative adjectives He wants to build a wall with Mexico He takes legal advantage of tax law He’s not “suitable” for office He does not have the right “temperament” He’s used bankruptcy as a business tool He’s accused of groping over a dozen women, including a polymorphously perverse porn star He’s mean and insulting He has orange hair 
+In short, Trump lacks the superficial patina of rhetorical decorum and sober demeanor that most modern presidents and candidates spray over their public personas in order to hide their private flaws and vices. Just ask Hillary’s various Secret Service details how wide the distance between public and private personalities can be. 
+The voters will decide for themselves which candidate’s catalogue of sins is more disqualifying and dangerous. But whatever happens, it’s clear that we the people have lowered the bar of acceptability for presidential candidates. 
+This transformation happened decades before Trump and Hillary came along. After Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury related to his sordid sexual depredations in the White House, his approval ratings were 73%. He left the White House with a 66% rating, higher than any president since Harry Truman, including Ronald Reagan. Think about it: the president who sexually exploited an intern and was impeached for perjury left office with higher approval ratings than the president who rescued the economy and tossed the Soviet Union into its own dustbin of history. 
+That was the inflection point for our political culture. No wonder that Barack Obama’s lack of any real-world experience or achievement, left-wing views, self-confessed drug use, friends like the anti-American racist Jeremiah Wright and unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, and gaping holes in his biography were unimportant to 45 million voters. So why now are we shocked, shocked that off-brand candidates like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are vying for the presidency? Decrying these candidates is closing the barn door after the horses of virtue, wisdom, and decorum have already long gone. 
+So absent a smoking howitzer in the next WikiLeaks dump, Comey’s restart of the investigation, which in any case will take months to complete, will probably not be the game-changing October surprise many hope for and others dread, especially given a corrupt media’s studied indifference to anything that damages their candidate. Then again, the rapid erosion of Hillary’s support is drawing analogies to Reagan’s late surge against Carter. 
+Either way, on November 8, most people will vote their economic interests and their ideological passions, and decide based on subjective perceptions and silly criteria like “cares for people like me.” Or they might just finally realize that Hillary’s accumulated offenses are intolerable. But what that standard of selection will deliver is anybody’s guess.",FAKE
+6056,"Slavic Brotherhood 2016: Russia, Serbia & Belarus hold joint military drills","42   Shoina is a village drowned up to the waist in sand. Its denizens are quite fatalistic about it, and their only means of protection is leaving their door open for the night, as they can never be sure if they can open it in the morning. The village of Shoina is situated beyond the Arctic Circle, 1,400 kilometers north of Moscow. This tiny settlement is known for its sands, which appeared here over 50 years ago and have been waging a relentless offensive against humans ever since, depriving them of living space. How did they appear, and where else in Russia can you find unusual places like this? Solve the mystery, on RTDoc. SUBSCRIBE TO RTD Channel to get documentaries firsthand! http://bit.ly/1MgFbVy FOLLOW US RTD WEBSITE: http://RTD.rt.com/ RTD ON TWITTER: http://twitter.com/RT_DOC RTD ON FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/RTDocumentary RTD ON DAILYMOTION http://www.dailymotion.com/rt_doc RTD ON INSTAGRAM http://instagram.com/rt_documentary/ RTD LIVE http://rtd.rt.com/on-air/   Leave a Reply Login with your Social ID Your email address will not be published. Name",FAKE
+7,Obama Argues Against Goverment Shutdown Over Planned Parenthood,"President Barack Obama said Saturday night that Congress should not shut down the federal government at the end of the month over a dispute that involves funding for Planned Parenthood, describing such a move as a “self-inflicted wound that we’ve seen before on our economy.”",REAL
+8295,9/11 Firefighters Reveal Bombs Destroyed WTC lobby,"By anonews
+“Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance” – Albert Einstein
+Newly obtained video that was reluctantly released by NIST after a lawsuit by the International Center for 9/11 Studies shows two firefighters on 9/11 discussing how secondary explosions occurred immediately before the collapse of the twin towers, providing damning new evidence that explosive devices were used to bring down the buildings.
+Firemen discuss how bombs were going off in the lobby of WTC1 as they were staging to move up the building.
+They explain how the building had already been hit by the plane and fires were already burning. After two explosions in the lobby, a third went off and the whole lobby collapsed.
+Listen To 9/11 Firefighters Tell How Bombs Were Going Off In The Lobby Of World Trade Center 1:
+Even though it’s an old video, it’s useful to share given the fact that people are still waking up to the possibility that the official story presented to the public was false.",FAKE
+3448,Is the Supreme Court Too Powerful? - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com,"Opinions about the Supreme Court’s legitimacy and value usually depend on ideology. Conservatives shouted tyranny after the Supreme Court upended bans on same-sex marriage. Liberals were outraged when the court overturned campaign finance limitations in the Citizens United ruling and gutted the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case.
+
+But absent the ideological scoreboard, how can we judge the merit of the court? Is judicial review of laws the best way to avoid political influence? Or is major change more lasting and accepted when it’s accomplished legislatively?",REAL
+7721,THE CLINTON/VATICAN/TEHRAN AXIS,"Robert Spencer 
+Breitbart reported Saturday that among the many revealing and damning emails that WikiLeaks has revealed from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, one has “White House chief of staff Denis McDonough responding favorably to an email forwarded to him by Podesta from a leftwing ‘Catholic’ organization that said it was arranging meetings with Catholic prelates to urge them to press U.S. senators to vote for the Iran Treaty.” 
+This plan was apparently hatched by Fred Rotondaro, chairman of the far-Left and Catholic-in-name-only Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), as well as a senior fellow with Podesta’s Soros-funded “Islamophobia” propaganda organ, the Center for American Progress. 
+Rotondaro wrote to Podesta and others in the Clinton camp: 
+John, 
+I thought you might be interested in this report from the CACG exec director Chris Hale on efforts to have the Catholic org community promote the Iran Treaty. There is a tremendous amount of potential in these inter Faith orgs including the ability to reach some working class voters, 
+Fred 
+Hale wrote in his report: 
+Our advertisement began running on National Catholic Reporter and Commonweal yesterday. Right now, when you click the advertisement, the link takes you to MoveOn’s 60 Day to Stop A War Take Action website. From there, you are able to dial into your Member of Congress and request them to support the Iran Deal. 
+At some point today, that link will change to our own website, which will list all the groups’ names, simple talking points, and give people a chance to dial in three elected officials (their one US Representatives and two Senators). While the MoveOn site is very effective, ours will ensure that people calling into the offices identify as a person of faith, which is important in both our narrative creation (Catholics support the deal) and coalition building (the God Squad takes action). 
+Hale wrote about contacts with other legislators as well. According to Breitbart, “Podesta forwarded the report to McDonough at the White House, who 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+2552,House votes to block Obama’s immigration actions — but exposes new GOP divisions,"This item has been updated.
+
+House Republicans voted Wednesday to undo years of President Obama's immigration policies, launching a fresh attack on his executive actions as part of a plan to renew funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
+
+But in doing so, Republicans exposed fresh rifts in their expanded ranks as more than two dozen members, mostly from suburban districts in swing states, voted against plans to end a program granting temporary legal status to hundreds of thousands of “dreamers” — or children brought to the country illegally by their parents who have served as the emotional centerpiece of the years-long debate.
+
+House approval of the spending bill is just the opening act in a debate expected to stretch into late February, when homeland security expires. Legal challenges to Obama’s immigration orders, led by Republican state attorneys general, are underway. A senior GOP lawmaker suggested Wednesday that House and Senate leaders might also file suit.
+
+The bill passed 236 to 191 with the support of two moderate Democrats. But 10 Republicans voted against the final bill. Earlier, 26 Republicans — including several new members from suburban districts around Chicago, Las Vegas, Miami and Philadelphia — joined Democrats in voting against a proposal to end Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
+
+Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a veteran Miami Republican who was among those to vote against the bill and the DACA amendment, said that his party won't be able to settle the immigration fight until it negotiates a bipartisan compromise with Obama.
+
+“Regardless of what happens this week, this month, on this issue, it will not make the issue itself go away,” he said.
+
+But Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) said he was encouraged by the strong support the bill received from fellow Republicans. He was lead author of an amendment that would effectively invalidate the executive actions taken by Obama in November and his policy instructing federal immigration officers to focus their efforts on deporting illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds. The amendment passed with GOP support.
+
+“It was a strong vote. I think it sends a message to the Senate as it goes forward. And we're optimistic about it,” he said.
+
+In the wake of terrorist attacks in France last week, Republicans have faced criticism from Obama and congressional Democrats for delaying swift passage of new security funding. Some party leaders and operatives also worry that the aggressive nature of the bill will once again spoil GOP attempts to appeal to Hispanic and Asian voters in the 2016 president election. But GOP congressional leaders have said that the legislation is designed only to respond to Obama's ""executive overreach.""
+
+""We do not take this action lightly, but there is simply no alternative,"" Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said ahead of the vote as he recounted the 22 times he said Obama has raised doubts about his ability to change immigration policy through presidential powers. ""Enough is enough,"" he added later.
+
+The White House denounced the House vote, saying Republicans were putting homeland security funding, training and long-range planning at risk. Obama’s top domestic policy adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, reiterated Obama’s threatened veto.
+
+The House GOP “is interested in debating immigration but only interested in debating it if they undo the most significant and constructive actions that have taken place in many years,” she said in a conference call with reporters. Republicans are doing nothing on immigration that would “move the country forward.”
+
+Gil Kerlikowske, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said Obama’s executive actions are aimed at allowing the department to focus resources on deporting illegal immigrants who have committed felonies or have terrorist ties, rather than those who are living in the country illegally but do not break other laws.
+
+“Prioritization is critical for any law enforcement agency,” he said.
+
+While 218 Republicans voted for the amendment ending DACA, the ""no"" votes came from newly-elected Reps. Bob Dold (R-Ill.) from the Chicago suburbs; Cresent Hardy (R-Nev.) from the Las Vegas suburbs; Ryan Costello (R-Pa.) and Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) from the Philadelphia suburbs; Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who represents a Miami-area district; Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), who won her election by fewer than 200 votes; and Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) from an Upstate New York district that has switched parties several times in recent years.
+
+They were joined by senior Republicans in their state delegations, including Florida's Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen; Adam Kinzinger of Illinois; New Jersey's Chris Smith and Frank LoBiondo; New York's Chris Gibson, Richard Hanna and Peter King; Pennsylvania's Patrick Meehan and Charlie Dent; and Nevada's Mark Amodei and Joe Heck. Other members, including Reps. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), David Valadao (R-Calif.), Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), also voted no.
+
+In the Senate, Republicans control 54 seats, but 60 votes will be needed to advance the bill, and no Democratic senator has expressed support for it. The impasse means Republican leaders will need to negotiate a watered-down bill that can earn Democrat support, pass the Senate and be sent back to the House before current homeland security funding expires on Feb. 27.
+
+If Republicans fail to block Obama's immigration policies through legislation, House and Senate leaders may team up on a new federal lawsuit challenging him, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said Wednesday. Noting that several states are now challenging Obama's immigration actions in court, he said a similar suit might be brought by GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate.
+
+""No decision has been made about that,"" he said, at a reporter breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, adding that it's likely to be the subject of talks at a two-day GOP policy retreat that begins Thursday at a conference center in Hershey, Pa.
+
+""Congress has the right to write the laws and appropriate funds to programs under Article I of the Constitution, and if we are successful in using that legislation and make it clear that there is no legal authority for the president’s actions, then we don’t need to get to litigation,"" he added.
+
+Sean Sullivan and David Nakamura contributed to this report.",REAL
+1073,"Clinton takes four states, giving a big boost to her delegate total","Hillary Clinton won at least four of five primaries on Tuesday, pushing her closer to the Democratic presidential nomination as her considerably weakened rival Bernie Sanders vowed to press on with his insurgent campaign.
+
+Clinton won big in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, while claiming a narrower victory in Illinois. Missouri remained too close to call. Sanders’s campaign had hoped his raw message of economic justice would prevail in the industrial heartland.
+
+But with her victories, Clinton was on track to collect a large share of the more than 1,000 delegates she still needed to lock up the contest. Sanders ended the day further behind in the delegate count — and needing to win a slew of upcoming states by improbably large margins.
+
+“We are moving closer to securing the Democratic Party nomination and winning this election in November,” Clinton said at her victory party here Tuesday. As if to prove the point, she quickly pivoted to the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump.
+
+“Our next president has to be ready to face three big tasks: First, can you make positive differences in people’s lives? Second, can you keep us safe? Third, can you bring our country together again?”
+
+Clinton’s indictment of Trump’s policy positions sounded like a preview of arguments to come.
+
+“When we hear a candidate for president call for the rounding up of 12 million immigrants, banning all Muslims from entering the United States, when he embraces torture, that doesn’t make him strong, it makes him wrong,” Clinton said.
+
+Clinton has been eager to refocus her campaign to confront Trump more directly. But asked Tuesday if she was concerned that a protracted primary fight with Sanders would hobble Democrats ahead of the contest against a Republican nominee, she declined to encourage Sanders to leave the race.
+
+Her campaign emailed a fundraising pitch Tuesday evening warning of the dangers of a Trump presidency and of complacency among Democrats.
+
+“Tonight, Donald Trump could become the presumptive Republican nominee for president,” the donation request began. Too many Republicans tried to ignore him until it was too late, it said.
+
+“It’d be easy for us Democrats to do the same thing now — Trump is so offensive, so vulgar, so self-evidently awful. You could look at him and think, ‘there’s no way he’ll ever get elected,’ and then just wish him away. But we can’t.”
+
+Sanders held a rally before about 7,000 people in Phoenix on Tuesday night, a week ahead of Arizona’s primary.
+
+He said his campaign had “defied all expectations” but made no mention of the three states that had already been called in Clinton’s favor.
+
+“What excites me so much as I go around the country is to see the incredible energy of people who love this country but know we can do so much better,” Sanders said to loud screams.
+
+In a statement several hours later, Sanders vowed to fight on, saying: “With more than half the delegates yet to be chosen and a calendar that favors us in the weeks and months to come, we remain confident that our campaign is on a path to win the nomination.”
+
+Some of his die-hard supporters expressed hope that he could still pull out the nomination.
+
+“I still think the revolution is coming,” said James Homan, 55, a sound engineer for rock musicians, who has homes in Illinois and Arizona.
+
+Homan expressed frustration that, as he saw it, “the fix was in” for Clinton among Democratic Party leaders, but he said he could see paths for Sanders to prevail, including the possibility of more fallout from the FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
+
+Democratic primary voters were split on the candidates’ key attributes, with Clinton seen as more electable and Sanders as more honest, according to preliminary exit polls reported by ABC News.
+
+By roughly 2 to 1, voters across Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois and Missouri said Clinton had a better chance than Sanders of beating Trump in a general-election matchup. But roughly 8 in 10 said Sanders was honest and trustworthy, compared with about 6 in 10 who felt that way about Clinton. Sanders has dominated among honesty-focused voters all year, while Clinton has won by a wide margin those who care more about electability.
+
+Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, had scored an upset victory last week against Clinton in Michigan and saw Tuesday’s contests as a chance to pull off more come-from-behind wins in states where voters feel damaged by globalization.
+
+Repeating his playbook from Michigan, Sanders hit Clinton hard on her past support for “disastrous” trade deals, starting with the North American Free Trade Agreement when her husband was in the White House.
+
+After Clinton’s loss in Michigan called her economic message into question, her campaign moved to retool her stance on trade by strengthening her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and emphasizing support for manufacturing in her jobs plan. In Ohio, Clinton took specific aim at elements of the pending trade package seen as harmful to the auto and steel industries.
+
+Just over half of Ohio Democratic primary voters said free trade takes away U.S. jobs, according to the early exit polls. In Michigan, Sanders won among voters with that view by double digits. The anti-trade cohort was slightly larger in Michigan (57 percent) than in most states voting Tuesday, with less than half of Democrats in Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina saying trade costs U.S. jobs.
+
+“I lost my house when the stock market crashed,” said Williams, a member of the local cement finishers union. “I’m an angry voter, how ’bout that? I’m angry about the way the country is working for the blue-collar worker. Hillary gets a big, fat zero on that.”
+
+In Missouri, Sanders aides were optimistic in part because much of the state closely resembles Kansas, where the senator easily defeated Clinton in the Democratic caucuses early this month. It’s worth noting, however, that Missouri was the smallest of the Democratic delegate prizes Tuesday.
+
+Before the polls closed in Missouri, Clinton’s campaign announced that she had been endorsed by the mother of Michael Brown, the teenager whose 2014 shooting by police in Ferguson, Mo., brought more attention to officer-involved slayings of unarmed black men.
+
+Multiple polls in the days leading up to Tuesday’s contests showed Sanders closing in on Clinton in the three states in the industrial Midwest.
+
+In Chicago, where Clinton spent her childhood, Sanders sought to leverage support from voters disenchanted with the tenure of the city’s embattled Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, a Clinton ally. Emanuel’s approval ratings have dropped to all-time lows amid controversies over a police shooting and school closings, and his popularity with African American voters has taken an especially big hit.
+
+In the closing days of the race, Sanders blasted Emanuel’s decision to close schools in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods, and Sanders ran television ads featuring some of the mayor’s critics.
+
+And Tuesday, Sanders had breakfast with Cook County Commissioner Jesús “Chuy” García, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Emanuel in the Democratic primary last year.
+
+Clinton’s lead in Florida was never in doubt, and she ended up capturing almost the same number of votes as the Republican winner, Trump — perhaps a preview of how competitive the state will be in November.
+
+Florida posed several challenges for Sanders. It held a closed primary, meaning independent voters, who have propelled him to victory in other states, were not allowed to participate. The state’s voting population also includes a large number of older voters, who have sided with Clinton in previous contests.
+
+Sanders’s aides have argued that the back half of the nominating calendar is more favorable to him, with several potential victories in the West and no contests remaining in the Deep South, which has been Clinton’s strongest region by far.
+
+Sanders thinks he is well-positioned in all three states with contests next Tuesday: Arizona, Idaho and Utah. His decision to spend election night in Arizona signaled his intention to vigorously contest that state in the coming week.",REAL
+1862,"This man wants to become president, pass one law, and resign","Lessig says that his sole mission as president would be to persuade Congress to pass the Citizen Equality Act, which would implement three reforms to the political system. First, it would guarantee the “equal right to vote” by enhancing the power of the federal government to control how states conduct elections, requiring states to provide for online or automated voter registration, and shifting Election Day to a national holiday.
+
+Second, it would guarantee “equal representation” by banning gerrymandering of districts. Lessig also endorses an idea called “ranked-choice voting,” where voters rank the candidates rather than vote for just one. The candidate who receives the highest aggregate ranking wins. (You can find the somewhat complicated details here .)
+
+Third, it would provide for “citizen-funded elections.” All voters would be given vouchers that they could use to contribute to political campaigns, and small contributions would be matched from public funds. Rules blocking government officials from becoming lobbyists would be strengthened.
+
+Would these reforms give us “citizen equality”? Unfortunately, if money goes to the root of the problem, as Lessig says, these reforms would have little impact. In the best case, they would enhance the popular vote in elections by a little bit. They might enhance by a small amount cash contributions from low-income people. And Republican-dominated state legislatures would lose some of their power to create safe seats.
+
+But in the economy of political influence that Lessig describes in his book, none of these things can make much difference. Most Americans are terribly uninformed about the political process and rely on very crude proxies (such as endorsements or partisan identification) to determine how to vote.
+
+Many people fail to vote not because of barriers to voting but because they’d rather spend their time doing something else. Candidates who suited voters a bit better because of ranked-choice voting (assuming it works as advertised) and who received more small donations from low-income people would still need to rely on well-informed lobbyists with whom they had relationships and would still benefit from massive infusions of cash from big business. Lessig’s cure just doesn’t follow from his diagnosis.
+
+The current disaffection with the government probably reflects the ideological polarization of the electorate, which is an input, not an output, of the political process. People disagree with one another more than in the past, so—whatever compromises the government reaches over policy—they are more likely to be unhappy with it. If people feel that they have no influence on political outcomes, that’s in part because we live in a huge and diverse country, and so even in an ideal system where your vote counts as much as anyone else’s, it’s just one of more than a hundred million. So there is a mismatch between Lessig’s means—a dramatic run for office as an unprecedented “referendum president” who resigns as soon as his mandate is legislated—and his goal, which is at best incremental reform. In the past, he has argued with a great deal more persuasiveness that the only way to reform the political system is through a constitutional convention, and it is easier to see the logic of this position than to understand his campaign goals. Constitutional amendments really could go to the root of the problem—by limiting campaign contributions (and thus overturning Citizens United, which held that the First Amendment banned certain limits on political expenditures), restructuring the Senate (which is a highly unrepresentative body that favors rural interests), limiting the power of the Supreme Court, and perhaps creating a parliamentary system or something like it, which would avoid the twin problems of gridlock and presidential abuse of power that have long been troubling features of our system of separation of powers.
+
+But most calls for constitutional conventions come these days from conservatives, who want to impose a balanced budget on the federal government and who have no interest in adopting Lessig’s electoral reforms—nearly all of which would benefit the Democratic party in the short term. And the results of a constitutional convention—where moneyed interests as well as all kinds of interest groups would play a big role—are unpredictable. Well, not entirely unpredictable. Under the amendment process of the Constitution, state legislatures can play an important role in selecting delegates and ratifying amendments. And while there is a means to circumvent their formal participation, they would probably influence the outcome. This matters. Republicans have vastly more control over state legislatures than Democrats do—in part because of the gerrymandering Lessig wants to end—so we can be pretty certain about the ideological tilt of any amendments that might ultimately be ratified, if not their content. This is probably why Lessig has not adopted his earlier proposal of a constitutional convention to his presidential run. The rot goes too deep. But it also should raise doubts about whether the Citizen Equality Act can do any good. Even if Lessig can’t win, or can’t do much more than hand over the reins to his vice president if he does win, his candidacy would bring a rare level of intelligence and political sophistication to the election and much-needed attention to the problem of electoral reform. For that reason, you might donate a little money to his campaign. I did.",REAL
+5441,GOD Has Chosen Trump,"GOD Has Chosen Trump 
+
+Trump cannot win. The American people are lost. We are about to be totally destroyed. Based on what I have learned, these are logical conclusions. This is what my logical mind would have me believe and my logical mind is wrong! Against All Odds 
+To date, Donald Trump has defied all odds. He is the only candidate in the moderate era, with a chance at becoming President, who is still his own person. He owns himself and from a Christian perspective, that is problematic. However, this is clearly God’s plan. He is the only man who broke the choke hold on the GOP by the criminal Bush family. We are a nation whose ruler, at the moment, is planning to attack the American people with foreign troops after collapsing the economy. There are plans to attack the American military, who would dare stand with the people, in defense of our culture, Christian traditions and personal liberties. 
+In his march to the Presidency, Trump has overcome the following: Vicious and unrelenting attacks from the media. Vilification from both the left and the right. He has escaped assassination. He won a Presidential nomination when the entire leadership of his party, said he would never become President because “they” choose, not the people. Trump is not owned by any special interest and the special interests, despite their hit ads and secret meetings to plan on how to remove Trump for their personal reasons, cannot figure out how to marginalize Trump. 
+It doesn’t matter who comes against Trump, he only grows stronger with each successive victory. Just ask Glenn Beck how well he is doing after throwing all his resources behind Cruz. And ask lyin’ Ted and Heidi how their marriage is doing after going through this ideal. Hillary is headed to prison. “And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.” Revelation 19:15 God Will Choose Whom He Wishes 
+I know that Donald Trump is not running a Christian political campaign. But in case you have not noticed, God can, and has, used anybody to lead of his own choosing. And that this critical time in history, why would God choose a Christian leader? After all, America has become the most unchristian nation. We have murdered 60 million unborn citizens without a trial. We glorify every perversion, wickedness and intrusive behaviors. We live in a nation that kills innocents with drones. Our every move is spied upon. I have covered how Obama, a man of very low moral character, has placed “enemies of the state” (i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization) into key positions in our government (i.e. DHS). 
+Our church leaders have been recruited to abandon their flock and to lead them astray. Your pastor puts IRS tax laws ahead of the word of God. When was the last time your Pastor spoke to the congregation about the evils of abortion and how it needed to be stopped? Pedophilia is the last prohibition that remains intact in our Godless nation and that prohibition is about to be removed through the efforts of George Soros and Kevin Jennings (Hillary Clinton’s education lackey who happens to be transgender). America has not only become a Godless nation, it has become a despicable collection of perverts and murderers. The Common Sense Show exists thanks to perverts and criminals like Hillary Clinton. 
+Donald Trump is not a Christian and he does not have to be because he does not lead a Christian nation. Donald Trump is a modern day Jehoshaphat (see 2 Chronicles 20). His people were faced by three overwhelming armies. Jehoshaphat and his people had no chance to survive in the same manner as Donald Trump and the American people. Yet, God worked an amazing miracle and Jehoshaphat’s enemies attacked each and killed each other as Jehoshaphat’s men were signing praises to the Lord. And what followed was truly amazing: And when Jehoshaphat and his people came to take away the spoil of them, they found among them in abundance both riches with the dead bodies, and precious jewels, which they stripped off for themselves, more than they could carry away: and they were three days in gathering of the spoil, it was so much. And the fear of God was on all the kingdoms of those countries, when they had heard that the Lord fought against the enemies of Israel. So the realm of Jehoshaphat was quiet: for his God gave him rest round about. Serving God’s Will 
+Against all odds, we will soon have a leader who will soon serve God’s will, whether or not he realizes that this is chosen mission. 
+“And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.” Revelation 19:15 (KJV) Conclusion 
+I know our plight seems hopeless as we are outnumbered, outspent and out-gunned. However, my Lord does not know defeat. I just need to be silent and trust in the Lord, he will use who and what he needs to advance his will. So what do we do in this monumental time that we live in? Listen to the Lo rd and just keeping working the cause as God would wish it to be. This movement will sweep the planet. We already see a Trump wannabe in the Philippines. We seeing the stage set for the final days. Trump is a central figure in the fulfillment of prophecy.",FAKE
+9387,Indian princess watches over rare paleontological remains,"Indian princess watches over rare paleontological remains Thu Oct 27, 2016 3:12AM News Bulletin This picture taken on September 1, 2016 shows ""Dinosaur Princess"" Aaliya Sultana Babi holding a fossilised dinosaur egg at her palace in Balasinor. © AFP 
+A member of an Indian royal family is leading excavations in an area nicknamed India’s Jurassic Park. Aaliya Sultana Babi is a princess by birth. She has been dubbed the “Dinosaur Princess” because of her love for archeology. 
+Babi’s passion started when she accepted to decide a group of foreign geologists to a site in Balasinor which was formerly a princely state. The site is now a Dinosaur park and welcomes a large number of visitors every year. 
+Aaliya is pushing the authorities towards better preservation of the thousands of eggs and bones buried in the area. She believes with more coordination between government departments she can win the UNESCO Geo Park status for the site. 
+Tourists can enjoy a luxurious stay at Aaliya’s family’s palace and see her personal collection when visiting the park. Loading ...",FAKE
+6536,Colin is looking for a songwriting partner,"Next Swipe left/right Colin is looking for a songwriting partner Fancy getting into the music business but need a good lyricist to work with? Colin has written songs about dolphins, Giant Haystacks and Hitler.",FAKE
+5033,Did Trump go too far?,"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump's criticism about the Muslim parents of a slain American soldier has generated -- once again -- a backlash within his own party.
+
+Just 100 days from the election, Trump has responded in his standard fashion -- dig in, claim he's being treated unfairly and attack back.
+
+But the swift condemnation of Trump's response raises questions about whether this controversy is different from the ones that came before it.
+
+It certainly isn't going away - Khizr and Ghazala Khan appeared for a lengthy joint interview on CNN's ""New Day"" on Monday where Khizr accused Trump of ""ignorance and arrogance.""
+
+Khan also said he's received an outpouring of support for speaking out against the GOP presidential candidate, including from many Republicans. And he warned that Trump's attacks on Muslims are boosting terror recruitment. Khan said it is good Muslims who are the ones who can help stop terror and make American safer.
+
+""We are the solution to terrorism,"" Khan said on CNN Monday.
+
+Trump tweeted during the interview that the issue was not the Khans, it was stopping the spread of radical Islamic terrorism.
+
+The White House also weighed in with an implicit rebuke of Trump, saying that Gold Star families deserve only ""honor and gratitude"" for their loved ones' service.
+
+Speaking aboard Air Force One, spokesman Eric Schultz wouldn't provide a specific response to Trump's comments about the Khan family. But he said honoring Gold Star families should rise ""above politics.""
+
+""Families who make the ultimate sacrifice for this country's freedom and this country's safety deserve nothing but our country's honor and gratitude and deepest respect,"" Schultz said.
+
+Also on Monday, Hillary Clinton's runningmate, Tim Kaine, said, ""Is it OK to speak in a disrespectful way about the military, about a Gold Star mom and dad for God's sake, about people with disabilities, or saying offensive things about women, or trash people who are Latinos or immigrants more generally?""
+
+""We're either going to build a community that is a more perfect union, that is a community of respect or we're going to decide to do what has been done throughout American history but never to our advantage,"" Kaine said during a campaign stop in Richmond, Virginia.
+
+This time, attacks from the Republican presidential nominee on the parents of a soldier who died defending America have put new pressure on GOP leaders to decide whether they will continue to stand by him. Already, the party's leaders in the House and the Senate have distanced themselves from Trump's remarks, and other Republican figures are attacking their nominee forcefully.
+
+Sen. John McCain issue a very personal statement Monday blasting Trump's comments about the Khans and paying homage to their son Humayun's sacrifice. McCain noted that his son also served in the Iraq War and the McCains have been serving in the US military for hundreds of years.
+
+""It is time for Donald Trump to set the example for our country and the future of the Republican Party,"" McCain said. ""While our Party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us.
+
+""Lastly, I'd like to say to Mr. and Mrs. Khan: thank you for immigrating to America. We're a better country because of you. And you are certainly right; your son was the best of America, and the memory of his sacrifice will make us a better nation -- and he will never be forgotten.""
+
+Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said in a statement: ""This is going to a place where we've never gone before, to push back against the families of the fallen. There used to be some things that were sacred in American politics -- that you don't do -- like criticizing the parents of a fallen soldier even if they criticize you.""
+
+""If you're going to be leader of the free world, you have to be able to accept criticism. Mr. Trump can't,"" Graham said. ""The problem is, 'unacceptable' doesn't even begin to describe it.""
+
+The controversy is over Trump's response to the Khans, whose son was killed in Iraq by a suicide bomber in 2004. The Khans took the stage Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention, where Khizr Khan rejected Trump's proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States as unconstitutional, pulling a copy of the Constitution from his breast pocket and saying that Trump has ""sacrificed nothing and no one."" Trump has since responded by criticizing Ghazala Khan's silence and suggesting she wasn't allowed to speak.
+
+The incident recalls Trump's attack last year on McCain. Trump said at the time that McCain is not a war hero because he was captured and imprisoned in Vietnam. Many had speculated the criticism would spark Trump's decline in the GOP primary race -- it did not.
+
+But there are two key differences: Trump was not yet the GOP nominee and McCain -- himself the 2008 GOP standard-bearer -- is a long-time public figure with experience parrying on the presidential level. The Khans are not.
+
+""This is so incredibly disrespectful of a family that endured the ultimate sacrifice for our country,"" Jeb Bush, a Trump rival in the 2016 GOP primary, said on Twitter Sunday evening.
+
+""There's only one way to talk about Gold Star parents: with honor and respect,"" tweeted Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who skipped the GOP convention in his state and has declined to endorse Trump. ""Capt. Khan is a hero. Together, we should pray for his family.""
+
+Kasich's top strategist in his failed 2016 presidential campaign, John Weaver, tweeted a scathing attack on Trump's handling of the Khan controversy, saying: ""Trump's slur against Captain Khan's mother is, even for him, beyond the pale. He has NO redeeming qualities.""
+
+And both Republican congressional leaders took issue with Trump, issuing statements Sunday that praised the Khan family and reaffirmed their opposition Trump's proposed Muslim travel ban.
+
+""America's greatness is built on the principles of liberty and preserved by the men and women who wear the uniform to defend it,"" House Speaker Ryan, R-Wisconsin, said. ""As I have said on numerous occasions, a religious test for entering our country is not reflective of these fundamental values. I reject it. Many Muslim Americans have served valiantly in our military, and made the ultimate sacrifice. Captain Khan was one such brave example. His sacrifice -- and that of Khizr and Ghazala Khan -- should always be honored. Period.""
+
+""Captain Khan was an American hero, and like all Americans I'm grateful for the sacrifices that selfless young men like Captain Khan and their families have made in the war on terror,"" McConnell said in a statement Sunday.
+
+""All Americans should value the patriotic service of the patriots who volunteer to selflessly defend us in the armed services,"" McConnell said. ""And as I have long made clear, I agree with the (Khans) and families across the country that a travel ban on all members of a religion is simply contrary to American values.""
+
+But both men noticeably did not mention Trump by name in their brief statements, that came hours after Khizr Khan called on them to repudiate Trump.
+
+He told CNN's Jim Acosta those GOP leaders have a ""moral, ethical obligation to not worry about the votes but repudiate him; withdraw the support. If they do not, I will continue to speak.""
+
+Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton also criticized Trump on Sunday, speaking to reporters alongside Kaine, a Virginia senator.
+
+Asked if Trump's attack on the Khan family is a pivotal moment in the election, Clinton said: ""Well, he called Mexicans rapists and criminals. He said a federal judge was unqualified because of his Mexican heritage. He has called women pigs. He has mocked a reporter with a disability.""
+
+""That's right,"" Clinton said. ""And any one of those things is so offensive and then to launch an attack as he did on Capt. Khan's mother, a Gold Star mother, who stood there on that stage with her husband honoring the sacrifice of their son and who has in the days since spoken out about the overwhelming emotion that any mother would feel as her son was being honored and then to have Trump do what he did, I don't know where the bounds are. I don't know where the bottom is.""
+
+Like the dust-up over Trump's criticism of Indiana-born federal judge Gonzalo Curiel's Mexican heritage, Trump's reaction has been tinged with the stereotyping of Khan's Muslim family.
+
+""I'd like to hear his wife say something,"" Trump told Dowd.
+
+Then, he told Stephanopoulos: ""If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably -- maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me. But plenty of people have written that. She was extremely quiet. And it looked like she had nothing to say. A lot of people have said that.""
+
+""Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?"" she wrote.
+
+Responding to the backlash, Trump issued a statement Saturday praising Capt. Khan as a ""hero"" and saying the real problem is ""radical Islamic terrorists who killed him.""
+
+But in that statement, he again criticized the soldier's father.
+
+""While I feel deeply for the loss of his son, Mr. Khan who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things,"" Trump said in the statement.
+
+And Sunday morning, he again weighed in over Twitter.
+
+""Captain Khan, killed 12 years ago, was a hero, but this is about RADICAL ISLAMIC TERROR and the weakness of our ""leaders"" to eradicate it!"" Trump wrote in the first of two tweets.
+
+He followed up later by attempting to shift the focus from Khizr Khan's criticism of his proposed Muslim ban to the Iraq war in which Khan's son was killed.
+
+""I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq war, not me!"" Trump tweeted.
+
+As Trump pushed back, first asking whether Ghazala Khan's silence on stage was related to her faith, Khizr Khan again attacked Trump Sunday on CNN's ""State of the Union.""
+
+""He is a black soul, and this is totally unfit for the leadership of this country,"" Khan said. ""The love and affection that we have received affirms that our grief -- that our experience in this country has been correct and positive. The world is receiving us like we have never seen. They have seen the blackness of his character, of his soul.""
+
+On Sunday night Trump's running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, issued a statement offering praise for Humayan Khan as ""an American hero."" Pence also touted the Trump campaign's immigration plan, which would prevent newcomers from entering the US if they hail from countries ""that have been compromised by terrorism.""
+
+""Captain Khan gave his life to defend our country in the global war on terror. Due to the disastrous decisions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a once stable Middle East has now been overrun by ISIS. This must not stand,"" Pence said.
+
+""By suspending immigration from countries that have been compromised by terrorism, rebuilding our military, defeating ISIS at its source and projecting strength on the global stage, we will reduce the likelihood that other American families will face the enduring heartbreak of the Khan family.""
+
+Trump's advisers attempted to move past the controversy, downplaying the direct conflict between Trump and the Khan family.
+
+""What he's saying is that Mr. Trump has a right to defend himself, to make clear what he's saying is this is about Islamic terrorism, for him to be criticized like that he didn't think was fair,"" Trump aide Jason Miller told CNN's Brian Stelter on ""Reliable Sources"" Sunday.",REAL
+5342,Die Hard 3 Predicts Hillary Clinton To be President,"Hollyjood strikes again ! Quoting: Buck Bundy 73107416 They werent far off. DH3 came out in 1995. 43 was GWB. 44th was Obumbletard. #44 was supposed to be Hitlary, but they knew Obumbletard would cause even more damage so they let him go first. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 73154155 Thats true the more i think more about it = I think they meant because hillary was actually in charge when bill was president - which would make her the 43 rd kinda i guess ? Moulin",FAKE
+1841,Behind the Biden hype,"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
+1136,Primary election: What to watch on Super Tuesday 2,"(CNN) The two presidential front-runners are both eyeing Super Tuesday 2 as a chance to build on their momentum and pad their leads as they look to put the races away by the end of the month.
+
+And Donald Trump will try to run the table, with four Republican contests on tap. He leads in Michigan, and has done well in Southern states like Mississippi. Idaho and Hawaii vote Tuesday as well, a chance to pick up more delegates.
+
+Here's what to watch in the day's elections:
+
+Time is running out for Trump's opponents to turn things around before the winner-takes-all states start to vote and the GOP front-runner racks up enough delegates to lock the nomination up before the convention.
+
+Trump leads the polls in Michigan, the crown jewel of Tuesday's contests.
+
+Mississippi, meanwhile, will test whether Cruz's surge in Louisiana -- he closed a massive polling gap and finished within four points on Saturday -- expands to other Southern states, or Trump can finish running the table in the Deep South. Idaho could be better ground for Cruz, who has spent more time in the state than other candidates.
+
+All three states, though, pose problems for Rubio.
+
+Mississippi and Michigan each require candidates to reach 15% to accumulate delegates. Idaho requires candidates to top 20%. The stronger Trump and Cruz run, the tougher it becomes for Rubio to make any gains at all.
+
+What about the late deciders?
+
+Rubio has a history of doing well with ""late deciders"" -- voters who make up their minds in the last week. He picked up 39% of those voters in Virginia, for example, according to exit polls.
+
+But those voters, polls have shown, typically make up less than one-third of a state's electorate.
+
+In Michigan, a Monmouth University poll showed 23% of voters were undecided or only had a slight preference in the days leading up to the primary.
+
+And supporters of Trump, polls have shown, tend to be more locked-in on their candidate than supporters of Rubio.
+
+What Tuesday's contests could demonstrate is whether there's enough late movement to help Trump's rivals -- particularly since the week leading up to the debate featured the most explosive Republican debate yet.
+
+For Clinton, Michigan will put that claim to the test.
+
+She's increasingly eager to turn her attention to the general election -- and to do that, Clinton needs to turn the tide with white voters, and particularly run up her advantage among women. She has performed better in those demographics since Sanders won in New Hampshire just over a month ago, and Michigan is a good bellwether for Clinton. It's a heavily-populated, diverse state that Democrats absolutely have to have in order to win the general election in November.
+
+""Given the terrible pressures that the auto industry was under and that the middle class of this state and Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and Wisconsin and Missouri and other places in the Midwest were facing, I think it was the right decision to heed what President-elect Obama asked us to do,"" she added. ""You were either for saving the auto industry or against it. I voted to save the auto industry and I'm very glad that I did.""
+
+A victory in Michigan could set Clinton up for a huge March 15 -- when Florida, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina and Missouri vote. If Sanders can't win Michigan, he might not be able to win any of those states. A Clinton loss, though, means Missouri, Ohio and potentially Illinois could be in play.
+
+So imagine this scenario: Kasich beats Rubio in Michigan. Then, on March 15, Kasich wins his 66-delegate, winner-take-all home state of Ohio, and Rubio loses his 99-delegate, winner-take-all home state of Florida.
+
+Suddenly, Kasich would become the leading moderate, establishment-type Republican in the race -- and Rubio would lack a path forward.
+
+There are a lot of ""ifs"" for that to happen. But for Kasich to stand any chance of turning what's been a smaller-scale campaign that's been much choosier about where he tries to compete into one with a real shot at quickly racking up delegates, Michigan is where it has to start.
+
+Winning Ohio could help Kasich play a small role in denying Trump the delegates he needs to win the GOP nomination outright.
+
+But to have a shot at the nomination himself, Kasich has to win the Midwest -- states like Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, which have similarly-styled Republican governors and are often general election battlegrounds.",REAL
+6189,Soy should not be consumed in significant quantities unless it has been fermented or otherwise traditionally processed; industrially processed soy should be avoided,"Soy should not be consumed in significant quantities unless it has been fermented or otherwise traditionally processed; industrially processed soy should be avoided 
+  David Gutierrez, staff writer Tags: soy , fermentation , phytoestrogens (NaturalNews) The recent history of soy in the Western diet has been a turbulent one, from its status as a non-food item in the early 20th century through its transition to a health food in the last few decades of that century to current concerns over its high content of natural estrogen mimics.What many debates over the nature of soy fail to take into account is that soy-based foods are neither healthy nor unhealthy; it all depends on the processing.The soy bean itself is highly unhealthy for human consumption. In addition to potentially dangerous levels of phytoestrogens, it contains exceptionally high levels of chemicals that bind to the nutrients in the bean, preventing their absorption. Soy derivatives such as soy protein are even worse, as they are isolated from the rest of the nutrients in the bean and have usually been extracted with toxic chemicals.Traditional cultures developed two major ways to bypass this problem: fermentation and curdling. Both are ancient techniques for changing the fundamental nutritional makeup of foods. These processes are what transform soy (the dangerous food) into the healthful products of tofu, tempeh, miso and soy sauce that have played a major role in the diets of many Asian cultures for hundreds of years. Sources:",FAKE
+3129,Kim Davis's right to religious liberty has been grossly violated,"Today, September 8, I am holding a prayer vigil and rally for liberty in Grayson, Kentucky. I will call on Judge David Bunning to release Kim Davis on the grounds that her right to religious liberty has been grossly violated under the Constitution of these United States of America.
+
+When I warned that the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage would lead to the criminalization of Christianity in America I was dismissed by many as an alarmist and my comments were mocked by the chattering class. Now, just two months after the court's lawless ruling, an elected county clerk has been put in jail by an unelected judge for refusing to issue a “marriage"" license to a same-sex couple, removing all doubts about criminalization of Christianity in this country.
+
+When the people of Kentucky elected Democrat Kim Davis as county clerk, the state’s constitution affirmed that marriage is between one man and one woman. The amendment passed with 75 percent of the people’s vote.
+
+Today, I ask on behalf of Kim: “Under what law is she authorized to issue homosexual couples a marriage license?” Can you site the specific right in the Constitution?  Is there a statute, passed by Congress that actually says that the five unelected lawyers in the majority of the court’s opinion were right to throw out the very definition of marriage and make up one on their own?
+
+In the Obergefell decision, the Supreme Court ruled same-sex couples have the right to get married. Whether you personally agree with that or not doesn't matter in Kim’s case. What does matter, is that the Supreme Court cannot and did not make a law. It only made a ruling on a law.
+
+Kim's stand for religious liberty is a pivotal moment in our nation's history. Will we continue to pretend as though the Supreme Court is the ""Supreme Branch"" with the authority and ability to make laws? It most certainly is not. The Supreme Court is one of three co-equal branches of government under our Constitution. It is no more the ""Supreme Branch"" than it is the ""Supreme Being"" with the authority to redefine the laws of nature or of nature's God!
+
+What we know for sure is that The Judicial Branch is constitutionally prohibited from writing laws, there are religious liberty protections in the Kentucky constitution and Kentucky statute and the plaintiffs in the case did not seek Kim’s incarceration.  Despite these facts, Kim Davis was thrown in jail for contempt, which means she was given no possibility of bail.
+
+That seems even more ludicrous when you consider many of the America's most evil and notorious serial killers, murderers, rapists, mafia bosses and presidential assassins were actually let out on bail:
+
+All of these dangerous criminals were given bail.  A Democrat county clerk in Kentucky who is a Christian was not.
+
+No one went to jail when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered city clerks to issue same-sex marriage licenses in direct disobedience to California law. More recently, No one went to jail when San Francisco was set up as a sanctuary city – sheltering dangerous illegal immigrant felons in defiance of federal law. Not only did Newsom NOT go to jail, he’s now the lieutenant governor of the state!
+
+I am appalled at our government’s willingness to accommodate the religious beliefs of all religions,   Christianity.
+
+When I traveled to Guantanamo Bay, I was amazed by how well we treated foreign Muslim terrorist detainees. The U.S. government provides prayer mats and special meals that conform to Islamic restrictions, but we can’t accommodate the religious beliefs of a popularly elected Christian county clerk in Kentucky? We have lost our moral compass as a country when our government accommodates militant Muslims but not conservative Christians.
+
+As a governor for ten and a half years, I followed the Constitution of my state and of the United States. The rule of law is a foundation of our democracy.
+
+But the reason why our laws are respected by the American people is because our Constitution guarantees reasonable safeguards to protect the rights of dissenters.
+
+I refuse to sit silently as our Constitution is torched and the courts violate our fundamental rights. We did not fight a revolution against the tyranny of one unelected monarch so we could surrender our freedoms and abandon our Constitution to the tyranny of five unaccountable, unelected lawyers.
+
+This shredding of the most fundamental civil rights of our citizens cannot stand. I will fight for, and protect, the religious liberty of every American. This will go down as a seminal moment in American history if we do not free Kim Davis now and make sure this never happens again.
+
+Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was a 2016 Republican candidate for president of the United States.
+
+",REAL
+1336,"As Rubio stumbles, race for second place tightens in New Hampshire (+video)","Marco Rubio's uneven debate performance Saturday has emboldened a trio of governors seeking to stem his rise in the Republican race for president.
+
+Will Trump's plan to register Muslims make it to The White House?
+
+Tesla under Trump: How will electric cars fare under the next president?
+
+Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., answers a question as Republican presidential candidate, businessman Donald Trump listens during a Republican presidential primary debate hosted by ABC News at the St. Anselm College Saturday, Feb. 6, 2016, in Manchester, N.H.
+
+Marco Rubio's uneven debate performance just days before Tuesday's New Hampshire primary has emboldened a trio of governors seeking to stem his rise in the Republican race for president. But if Rubio's rivals can slow him in New Hampshire, they are likely to leave the GOP with a muddled mix of establishment contenders and no clear favorite to challenge Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
+
+At the heart of the battle between Rubio and Chris Christie, John Kasich and Jeb Bush is whether the freshman Florida senator has the experience and policy depth to serve as president — or whether he's simply a well-spoken lightweight. Christie unleashed withering attacks against Rubio in Saturday's debate, and the New Jersey governor tripped up Rubio by calling him out in real-time for his reliance on rehearsed talking points.
+
+The morning after, Christie declared the Republican contest a changed race.
+
+""There was a march amongst some in the chattering class to anoint Sen. Rubio,"" Christie said on CNN's State of the Union. ""I think after last night, that's over.""
+
+Christie and his fellow governors need that to be the case, given that they've staked their White House hopes on New Hampshire. Without a strong showing, each will face enormous pressure to drop out from Republican Party leaders eager to rally around a single candidate who can challenge Cruz and Trump, the top-two finishers in the lead-off Iowa caucuses.
+
+Trump has held a commanding lead in New Hampshire preference polls for months. Cruz is in the mix with Rubio and the governors, though his campaign is more focused on the Southern states that follow later in the primary calendar.
+
+The prospect of Trump or Cruz winning the GOP nomination has set many Republican leaders on edge, and that anxiousness is only likely to increase should New Hampshire voters leave Rubio and the governors clustered together in the primary results, failing to anoint one as their preferred challenger to the front-runners.
+
+A  Monmouth University survey released Sunday, still shows Trump with a commanding double-digit lead over his Republican rivals, with 30 percent of likely Republican primary voters saying they would vote for him. But there's a cluster of candidates statistically tied for second place: Kasich has 14 percent of would be voters, Rubio came in with 13 percent, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also had 13 percent, and Cruz had 12 percent support.
+
+While most candidates remained unchanged in their polling numbers from last month's Monmouth survey, Bush jumped nine points since January. The Monmouth survey indicated that just 9 percent of N.H. Republican voters are undecided.
+
+The poll was taken before Saturday's debate, but no other Republican candidates had double digit support.
+
+Rubio emerged from Iowa looking as though he was that candidate, with a third-place finish in Iowa that was stronger than expected. Rival campaigns conceded privately in the days leading up to the debate that he was pulling away from the governors.
+
+But the Florida senator stumbled in Saturday's debate when challenged about his qualifications, repeatedly falling back on a retort meant to distinguish himself from President Barack Obama, who also won the White House as a first-term senator.
+
+For Barbara O'Brien, an undecided voter who had been considering voting for Rubio, it was enough to convince her he wasn't the right choice.
+
+""He kept saying the same thing over and over again,"" said O'Brien, a 67-year-old from Manchester who is one of New Hampshire's many registered independents. ""He didn't look presidential""
+
+GOP voter Judy McKenna, 66, had been leaning toward Rubio, but said she was ""disappointed"" in his debate performance.
+
+""The governors all made great points about experience, especially Christie, and Rubio did not have any answer to counter that argument,"" McKenna said.
+
+Rubio acknowledged the criticism during a rally in Londonderry on Sunday morning. He then proceeded to repeat the same line that put him in Christie's crosshairs.
+
+""I'm going to say it again,"" he told the audience of more than 800 gathered in a school cafeteria. ""The reason why these things are troubling is because Barack Obama is the first president, at least in my lifetime, that wants to change the country. Change the country, not fix it.""
+
+Rubio senior adviser Todd Harris said the candidate's repetition underscores his laser focus on upending the Obama administration's agenda.
+
+""We're going to continue to attack Barack Obama's record over and over and over again,"" Harris said. ""I don't think there is any Republican primary voter who was watching that debate who was saying I wish he would lay off of Barack Obama.""
+
+Seeking to counter the notion of a misstep, Rubio's campaign said it raised $600,000 during the debate, three times more than it has brought in during previous debates. The fundraising numbers were unverifiable.
+
+The senator's crowds remained large and enthusiastic on Sunday, and some of the many undecided voters who attended his events said they were more bothered by Christie's aggressive demeanor.
+
+""It was tiresome. I've heard it before,"" said Katherine Bringhurst, a 66-year-old retired office manager. She's undecided heading into Tuesday's election, but leaning toward Rubio.
+
+Maria Tourlitis, an independent from Hudson, decided to vote for Rubio after hearing him speak in her hometown on Saturday. As she greeted the senator after the event, she leaned in and said: ""At the next debate, please stand up to Christie.""
+
+If Christie's aggressive attacks on Rubio result in his own standing tumbling, it could benefit Bush, the former governor of Florida, and Kasich, the current governor of Ohio. Both stepped back in the debate to allow Christie to take the lead in targeting Rubio, though they were happy to relish in the afterglow.
+
+""He's a great speaker,"" Bush said of Rubio, his one-time political protégé, on Fox News Sunday. ""But he came across as totally scripted and kind of robotic.""
+
+Kasich has prided himself on avoiding direct criticism of his rivals during the campaign, and kept up that strategy both in the debate and as he campaigned Sunday.
+
+""Wouldn't it be great if we could win being positive?"" Kasich said on Fox News.
+
+Associated Press writer Sergio Bustos contributed to this report from Salem, New Hampshire.",REAL
+7457,Crooked Hillary Campaign Used A Green Screen At Today’s Low Turnout Rally In Coconut Creek FL,"  Crooked Hillary Campaign Used A Green Screen At Today’s Low Turnout Rally In Coconut Creek FL When you watch this video of Crooked Hillary's speech from yesterday here in Florida, you will see some amazing things. First, you will see a background section that is in 2-D and not 3-D, like a projected image on a wall would look. Why would that be? Well, that happens in what we call green screen technology, and in this case, poorly done green screen.   26, 2016 Crooked HIllary holds phony rally with pretend background people via green screen 
+When you watch this video of Crooked Hillary’s speech from yesterday here in Florida, you will see some amazing things. First, you will see a background section that is in 2-D and not 3-D, like a projected image on a wall would look. Secondly, you see when anyone steps in front of that background, there appears a darkened halo around them. Why would that be? Well, that happens in what we call green screen technology , and in this case, poorly done green screen. Hillary Clinton Rally in Coconut Creek, Florida using green screen: 
+Start watching at the 1:03:00 mark to see where Crooked Hillary starts speaking. 
+Another salient clue that she used a green screen is that when she turns around to wave to these people, they are mere feet away and yet she shakes hands with none of them. Why, because they weren’t there. Liberal news rag CNN is infamous for pretending to be in a location but in reality it’s nothing more than green screen. CNN did it here , here , and also here . The handheld video camera exposes the lie: 
+Look in the viewfinder of the video camera filming Crooked Hillary – it’s black behind her yet in the official video it’s filled with people. Hmm…awake yet, America? 
+Lastly, if you look close at the end of the video , you will see the real people behind her with cameras, but then the main group of people behind them are flattened out in 2-D because they are not actually there. Hillary’s rally was uber-tiny so it’s little wonder they had to resort to green screen: Clinton supporters beginning to enter Broward College for Hillary Clinton early voting rally in Coconut Creek #tcpalm pic.twitter.com/8HhLkFltks 
+— Eric Hasert (@TCPalmHasert) October 25, 2016 
+ ",FAKE
+6302,Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence,"Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence 
+There is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. Voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, it may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country. 
+
+From Michael Snyder : 
+Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th? Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. 
+Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country. 
+At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day… 
+A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that. 
+More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square. 
+But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax… 
+Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Famewas destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first. 
+And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June… 
+This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day. 
+We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika. 
+There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece… 
+On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?” 
+Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt. 
+On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope. 
+There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating. 
+Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge. 
+For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election… 
+Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president. 
+Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” 
+And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today… 
+“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election. 
+Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another. 
+Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960. 
+If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then. 
+And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month… 
+As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be. 
+But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome. 
+Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House. 
+Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it. On Sale At SD Bullion… This Week Only…",FAKE
+9115,How to Build a Prepper’s Medical Emergency Kit on a Budget,"When disaster strikes, you want to know that you have done what you can to prepare for the worst. If an event such as a hurricane or nuclear disaster forces you and your family to leave your home without warning, you could easily find yourself in a serious situation where you will need first-aid medical attention. However, during natural or unnatural disasters, emergency medical attention might not be able to come to your location, so having the resources and knowledge to help yourself and your family members at a time like this can be the difference between life and death.
+In the midst of a catastrophe, having a functional medical emergency kit is essential for survival, and sometimes you have to plan for it on a limited budget. In this case, the best approach is to build your own, while utilizing only the most critical items you need for your survival.
+Prepare for any disaster step-by-step 
+Build Your Own: Four Essential Medical Categories to Concentrate On The four general categories you will want to take into consideration for your medical kit preparations are: ointment, bandages, tools and medicine. Knowing the necessary components for each category will help you to form the most cost-effective kit.
+Ointment The first and most important in this category is antiseptic wipes, like iodine wipes or alcohol-based wipes. In addition to wipes, you may also want to include an antibacterial ointment, like bacitracin. These are other ointments you may also find valuable:
+Hand-sanitizing gel Insect repellent Insect sting relief treatment Iodine liquid Sunscreen Lip balm Biodegradable soap Collapsible water sink or basin Water-treatment chemicals Bandages You want to have bandages that can address any possible injury that may arise. Keep in mind that a person can die after just 10-15 minutes if they are bleeding from a major artery; you will want to have sufficient bandages to stop blood flow and close the wound. Remember, the best thing you can do for an actively bleeding wound is to apply pressure until you are able to apply ointment or bandages. The Israeli Battle Bandage is a first-aid device commonly used for major wounds, and it’s only $9. You will also want to include the following bandages in your medical kit:
+Blood-stopping (hemostatic) gauze Triangular cravat bandages SAM splint and finger splint Stretch-to-form bandages Liquid bandages Medical adhesive tape Band-aids (various sizes) Tools You are definitely going to want a suture kit as well as scissors and fine-point forceps to deal with critical injuries. You may want to consider buying paramedic shears in order to cut through clothing for injuries that require fast response time. Cotton-tipped swabs will be helpful for applying iodine liquid to wounds. In addition to these items, here are a few other tools that will likely be useful:
+Multi-tool (or pocket knife) CPR mask Emergency heat-reflecting blanket Headlamp (or flashlight) with extra batteries Safety pins Industrial gloves (preferably non-latex) Needle-nose pliers Medicine There are a number of medications and treatments that you will want to consider packing in your medical emergency kit. Aloe Vera can be helpful as both as sun screen and a treatment for sunburns. You may also want injectable epinephrine, commonly known as an “ Epipen ” (only $7), to treat allergic reactions. Here are a number of other medications or treatments that one may require:
+Antihistamines for allergic reactions Prescription medications Glucose to treat hypoglycemia Eye drops Aspirin Iodine tablets for water purification Multivitamins Take into account the above mentioned items and each of the general categories as you compare prices on medical emergency kits that are prepackaged versus individual items. Many of the prepackaged kits have a great variation of items, but they may be lacking on some of the critical components previously mentioned, and this is why it often the most cost-effective strategy to build your own. 
+This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition 
+Originally published November 3rd, 2016 Make Your Own Natural QuikClot A Prepper’s Story: Life Threatening Emergencies Happen At… 10 Household Items That Have First Aid Uses Basic Emergency Trauma Supply Considerations From a Green… Building Your SHTF Gunshot Survival Kit ",FAKE
+7876,Sometimes Bill and Hillary Clinton Have the Worst Judgment - Wikileaks,"
+In the aftermath of one of the most memorable (c)october shocks in presidential campaign history, Wikileaks continues its ongoing broadside attack against the Clinton campaign with the relentless Podesta dump, by unveiling another 596 emails in the latest Part 22 of its Podesta release, bringing the total emails released so far to exactly 36,190, leaving less than 30% of the total dump left to go.
+As usual we will go parse through the disclosure and bring you some of the more notable ones.
+* * *
+In a February 2012 email from Chelsea Clinton’s NYU alias, aj66@nyu.edu, to Podesta and Mills, Bill and Hillary’s frustrated daughter once again points out the “frustration and confusion” among Clinton Foundation clients in the aftermath of the previously noted scandals plaguing the Clinton consultancy, Teneo:
+Over the past few days a few people from the Foundation have reached out to me frustrated or upset about (fill in the blank largely derived meetings Friday or Monday). I’ve responded to all w/ essentially the following (ie disintermediating myself, again, emphatically) below. I also called my Dad last night to tell him of my explicit non-involvement and pushing all back to you both and to him as I think that is indeed the right answer. Thanks
+Sample: Please share any and all concerns, with examples, without pulling punches, with John and Cheryl as appropriate and also if you feel very strongly with my Dad directly. Transitions are always challenging and to get to the right answer its critical that voices are heard and understood, and in the most direct way – ie to them without intermediation. Particularly in an effort to move more toward a professionalism and efficiency at the Foundation and for my father – and they’re the decision-makers, my Dad most of all.
+A February 2015 email from Neera Tanden lashes out at David Brock of the Bonner Group, profiled in this post: “ Money Laundering Scheme Exposed: 14 Pro-Clinton Super PACs & Non-Profits Implicated. ” As a reminder, the Bonner Group, as we showed last month, may be a money laundering front involving various SuperPACs and non-profit institutions:
+
+In the email Tanden says that:
+“Brock/Bonner are a nightmare: Really, Suzie Buell isn’t giving to the superpac? I wonder how that got in this story “ Big donors holding off making pledges to pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC “,
+and concludes by saying that “ Sometimes HRC/WJC have the worst judgement. ”
+
+In retrospect, she is right.
+* * *
+Speaking of “donor advisor” Mary Pat Bonner , the following email from March 2009 hints at potential impropriety in shifting money from one democratic donor group to another, the Center for American Progress :
+I have moved all the sussman money from unity ’09 to cap and am reviewing the others. I will assess it and keep you informed
+Something else for the DOJ to look into after the elections, perhaps?
+* * *
+And then there is this email from August 2015 in which German politician Michael Werz advises John Podesta that Turkish president Erdogan “is making substantial investments in U.S. to counter opposition (CHP, Kurds, Gulenists etc.) outreach to policymakers” and the US Government.
+John, heard this second hand but more than once. Seems Erdogan faction is making substantial investments in U.S. to counter opposition (CHP, Kurds, Gulenists etc.) outreach to policymakers and USG. Am told that the Erdogan crew also tries to make inroads via donations to Democratic candidates, including yours. Two names that you should be aware of are *Mehmet Celebi* and *Ali Cinar*. Happy to elaborate on the phone, provided you are not shopping at the liquor store.
+The email :
+
+This should perhaps explain why the US has so far done absolutely nothing to halt Erdogan’s unprecedented crackdown on “coup plotters” which has seen as many as 100,000 workers lose their jobs, be arrested, or otherwise removed from Erdogan’s political opposition.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+5166,Evangelicals Sing a New Tune on Trump: 'Meeting May Be a Tipping Point',"NEW YORK -- Donald Trump seemed to help his case after meeting with hundreds of evangelical leaders in Times Square on Tuesday.  He's going to need that crucial voting bloc to have a real shot at winning the presidency.
+
+From mega-church pastors to longtime stalwarts, they heard Trump speak out about defending religious liberty, including his desire to get rid of IRS restrictions that muzzle political talk from the pulpit. Trump said a repeal may be ""my biggest contribution to Christianity.""
+
+  
+
+ In that room, among the 900 or so evangelical leaders, there were quite a few who were not for Trump going into the meeting. After the meeting some minds seemed to change.
+
+  
+
+ ""The ball has moved forward a little bit. And I appreciate Mr. Trump's willingness to reach out to the evangelical community,"" said Matt Barber, founder and editor-in chief of BarbWire.com.
+
+  
+
+ ""After hearing him today, I will prayerfully consider it as a possibility, in light of the alternative,"" reflected Barber.
+
+  
+
+ That alternative is Hillary Clinton. Trump made clear his Supreme Court picks would make them proud, unlike what Clinton might bring to the table.
+
+Trump also talked about how evangelicals need to band together because their rights and values are under attack.
+
+What pleased some attendees was that Trump didn't appear to make any major mistakes or give reason for pause.
+
+  
+
+ ""I can't remember any time during the several hours this morning that his answer disappointed or that there was chagrin about it,"" recalled Gary Bauer, president of American Values.
+
+  
+
+ Trump's senior adviser, Sarah Huckabee, also attended the event.
+
+  
+
+ ""He did something that most Republican nominees in the past have refused to do and that's walk into this room and be willing to sit down, take their questions and really interact with them in a very big way,"" Huckabee told CBN News.
+
+  
+
+ With some evangelicals still wary, the brash outsider will need more outreach, but for now at least, it seems to be working.
+
+  
+
+ ""As it pertains to the evangelical vote and the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, today's meeting may very well be a tipping point,"" predicted Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.  
+
+  
+
+ A pro-family leader, Rodriguez says he knew plenty of pastors who were skeptical before the meeting, but inside, something changed, he said.
+
+  
+
+ ""After hearing his commitment, his very well-defined, articulated commitment to religious liberty and life, the Supreme Court especially, I think you saw a number of the same pastors walk out going, 'that's what I needed to hear,"" Rodriguez said.
+
+  
+
+ And that's something the Trump campaign needed to hear after a rough few weeks of headlines.
+
+It will be important for them to build on any progress here by getting evangelicals to move beyond words and work actively for Trump among their flocks.",REAL
+4290,"This is how Ted Cruz wins: Why the formerly unthinkable could really, actually happen","When Ted Cruz came to the Senate in 2013, after winning a squeaker of a Senate race the previous November, he didn’t waste any time in bringing himself to national attention. It wasn’t his style to use his freshman term to keep his head down and learn the ropes.  Just seven weeks after being sworn in, Cruz made a name for himself by accusing fellow Republican Chuck Hagel of taking money from communist North Korea during his confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense. This accusation startled virtually everyone and earned Cruz a rebuke from committee chairman John McCain. Senator Barbara Boxer drew an apt analogy when she said she was reminded of “a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such-and-such a date,’ and of course there was nothing in the pocket.” She was alluding, of course to the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy.
+
+As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker at the time, this was not hyperbole. She had personally heard Cruz claim that the Harvard School of Law had harbored a dozen communists on the faculty when he was a student there:
+
+Within seven weeks of becoming Senator, Cruz was a national figure who was being compared to one of the most reviled figures in American politics. He was often compared to McCarthy from that point forward, even including the likes of conservative David Brooks, who found him to be quite a distasteful character:
+
+The more establishment figures like McCain and Brooks loathed him, the more the right wing of the party loved him. He became a backroom advisor to the “Freedom Caucus” in the House and he led the charge to shut down the government in 2013. Many on the right attribute their victory in 2014 to his strategic leadership.
+
+When he threw his hat in the ring for president, the conventional wisdom was that he was a fringe player along the lines of Michele Bachmann in 2012 and was assumed to be so unpopular within the party that he couldn’t possibly raise any money. And even if he could  overcome those obstacles he had such a repellant personality that nobody in their right mind would vote for him for president. He was, after all, the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy, a man whose name is synonymous with political paranoia.
+
+That doesn’t seem to be happening. In fact, Cruz has shown himself to be a disciplined campaigner and a strategic thinker, managing the rough and tumble of this weird GOP primary campaign better than any of his rivals. He’s fended off attacks with aplomb and doesn’t seem to have been hurt by them. And as Dave Weigel reported yesterday in the Washington Post, he has not trimmed his ideological sails in the least:
+
+One questioner asked about the alleged influence of the Trilateral Commission and David Rockefeller, two bugbears of conspiracy theorists. “It’s a very good question,” said Cruz, pivoting to discuss the Medellin national sovereignty case, which is featured in some of his TV ads here. Another questioner asked whether the Federal Reserve was constitutional, prompting a short monologue by Cruz about why America should return to the gold standard. And another questioner asked about the potential threat of Muslim courts issuing their own sharia-based rulings within the United States. “Under no circumstances should sharia law be enforced anywhere in this country,” Cruz said. “We should do whatever it takes to prevent that.”
+
+It doesn’t get any more hardcore than that.
+
+But Cruz has done something else that hasn’t been noticed by most of the press corps. He’s lost that Joe McCarthy countenance, and many of his harsh edges have softened. He’s given one on one interviews in which he told personal stories that humanized him. He’s lightheartedly sparred with Trump and others on social media batting back criticisms with clever bon mots instead of engaging in combat. The Christmas ad that caused such a ruckus when a Washington Post cartoonist portrayed his daughters as monkeys only served to introduce the two darling moppets to many more people than would otherwise have seen them. And rather than get down and dirty with Trump, as the man is obviously baiting him to do, he has maintained a rather stately mein, insisting that he is in the race to speak about serious issues. The contrast with Donald Trump’s crude brashness has had the effect of making the awkward Cruz seem almost moderate in affect if not ideology.
+
+Meanwhile, polls continue to show a race with Trump at the top, then Cruz coming on strong in second and a cluster of so-called establishment candidates — one of whom everyone still expects to emerge as the “candidate to beat.” And perhaps that will happen as they predicted all along. After all, nobody has voted yet. But that is a unique way to analyze a race in January of an election year. If anyone but Cruz and Trump were in the number one and two position it would be assumed that they were the legitimate leaders and the race would be framed as a race between the two of them with some outside chance of a dark horse making a late move. But because they are both, in different ways, extremists, it’s assumed they both represent a minority faction and the “mainstream” Republicans will emerge as the majority. But there’s every reason to believe that in 2016 these two may actually represent most GOP voters while the Washington establishment types are the fringe. If that’s the case, the establishment is going to have a big decision to make. Do they back the hated Cruz to stop the loathsome Trump? Or do they back the detestable Trump to stop the odious Cruz? What a choice. Early indications are that some DC insiders are still living in hope that one of the establishment types will break through but, still also harbor so much animosity toward Cruz that they’ll take the risk of Trump rather than accept him as their leader. But they are in the minority. Jeb Bush, for instance, refused to say that he would vote for Trump if he were to get the nomination. More interestingly, it looks as though some of the mainstream conservative pundits are starting to make peace with the idea that Cruz may end up as the establishment candidate by default. Rich Lowry made this case in Politico by calling into question the conventional wisdom that Cruz is another Goldwater extremist who will necessarily go down in a massive general election defeat. And instead of finding parallels to his aggressive ambition in the repellant Joseph McCarthy, he compares him instead to another awkward, unlikeable politician who nonetheless got millions of people to vote for him for president in one very close loss, one very close win and one huge landslide: Richard Nixon. Obviously and most importantly, Cruz is not a paranoiac. He is more ideological than Nixon. And he has none of Nixon’s insecurity, in fact the opposite. Nixon went to tiny Whittier College and resented the Northeastern elite; Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard and could be a member of the Northeastern elite in good standing if he wanted to be. But Cruz is cut from roughly similar cloth. He wears his ambition on his sleeve and is not highly charismatic or relatable. In high school, he could have been voted most likely to be seen walking on the beach in his dress shoes. If Cruz wins the nomination, it will be on the strength of intelligence and willpower. He will have outworked, outsmarted and outmaneuvered everyone else. He has a point. Say what you will about Nixon — and there’s plenty to say — he was a very smart politician. In particular, he overcame the political disability of having an extremely unpleasant personality to win the White House twice. I’ve written about Cruz’s savvy strategy to appeal to the movement conservatives, the Carson evangelicals and the Paul libertarians here at Salon. And everyone knows he’s killing Trump with kindness in the hopes of attracting his angry xenophobes and nationalists over to his campaign if Trump falters or they end up being the last two men standing. He’s got important billionaires in his pocket. And now it appears that some of the Republican establishment is taking notice of his sharp political acumen and work ethic and are offering him the respect of recognizing that he’s very good at what he does. That’s the GOP coalition, right there. None of that means that Senator Ted Cruz is not a far right extremist. He is. But he is not just a canny politician, he’s also a lucky one. After all, without a maniac like Donald Trump being in the race it’s very unlikely he’d be in the position he is today no matter how hard he worked or how well he organized. And a smart and lucky extremist is a very dangerous one.",REAL
+9919,Disgraced Hedge Fund Manager Focuses on Aiding Veterans,"  Disgraced Hedge Fund Manager Focuses on Aiding   
+BY PAUL SULLIVAN Sitting at the circular table in his office, near an elliptical machine, treadmill and massage table, Steven A. Cohen struggled to find words to describe what motivates his new philanthropic effort. “You know what I think it is, I was looking for something unique, special, something that I could own,” said Mr. Cohen, the billionaire investor, in an interview at his family office, Point72 Asset Management. It is in the same building as his former hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, which in 2013 paid $1.8 billion in fines to federal prosecutors and securities regulators. “I wanted to do something big,” he added. “I wanted to do something that was all mine.” That something is a two-pronged initiative to help veterans who return from combat with post-traumatic stress or traumatic brain injuries and a separate nonprofit organization to do research into diagnostic tools and treatments for those conditions. 
+  www.nytimes.com  ",FAKE
+9691,Evidence Reveals Possible Link Between Voting Machines And Clinton Foundation,"Videos Evidence Reveals Possible Link Between Voting Machines And Clinton Foundation According to OpenSecrets, the company who provided the alleged glitching voting machines is a subsidiary of The McCarthy Group, a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. | October 28, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! A technician works to prepare voting machines to be used in the upcoming presidential election, in Philadelphia, Friday, Oct. 14, 2016. 
+Could these connections be enough to implicate the Clinton Foundation in the alleged early vote rigging in Texas? 
+As usual, the internet has come through as the ultimate watchdog while the supposed safeguards of our democracy have failed. 
+A Gab user by the name “Special Prosecutor Will Logan” has found some stunning information. Note: as Gab is a members only site, you’ll have to join to see his actual posts, but we included all pertinent information in the article. Click to enlarge 
+According to OpenSecrets, the company who provided the alleged glitching voting machines is a subsidiary of The McCarthy Group. 
+The McCarthy group is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation – apparently donating 200,000 dollars in 2007 – when it was the largest owner of United States voting machines. Or perhaps the 200,000 dollars went to paying Bill Clinton for speeches? 
+Either way, it doesn’t look good. 
+But there’s more. 
+As the same user notes in this post , Dominion Voting Systems and The Clinton Foundation did a 2.25 million dollar charity initiative in developing nations together called the DELIAN Project. 
+According to the project’s own website : In 2014, Dominion Voting committed to providing emerging and post-conflict democracies with access to voting technology through its philanthropic support to the DELIAN Project, as many emerging democracies suffer from post-electoral violence due to the delay in the publishing of election results. Over the next three years, Dominion Voting will support election technology pilots with donated Automated Voting Machines (AVM), providing an improved electoral process, and therefore safer elections. As a large number of election staff are women, there will be an emphasis on training women, who will be the first to benefit from the skills transfer training and use of AVMs. It is estimated that 100 women will directly benefit from election technology skills training per pilot election. 
+Of course, this is all speculation, and we are not making any claims of illegal activity by the Clinton Foundation. 
+However, it presents a very troubling conflict of interest. Most Americans would certainly agree that voting machines should have zero connection to presidential candidates and their foundations. 
+Consider the implications further abroad, as well. Could this DELIAN Project be designed to influence elections in developing nations? 
+It can certainly be argued that electronic voting machines do not in fact provide an “improved electoral process” or provide “safer elections” 
+Again, this is speculation. This work by Planet Free Will is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.",FAKE
+4336,Macy's is the latest to cut ties with Donald Trump,"WASHINGTON — Macy's said Wednesday that the Trump menswear collection — and the man behind the brand — are no longer a good fit for its stores.
+
+In a statement, the retailer denounced recent derogatory comments about Mexican immigrants made by real estate mogul and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying that they have ""no tolerance for discrimination in any form.
+
+""We welcome all customers, and respect for the dignity of all people is a cornerstone of our culture,"" the Cincinnati-based company said in a statement. ""We are disappointed and distressed by recent remarks about immigrants from Mexico. ... In light of statements made by Donald Trump, we have decided to discontinue our business relationship.""
+
+Trump's menswear collection, which includes ties, shirts, suits and accessories, has been sold at Macy's since 2004.
+
+Macy's is the latest company to distance itself from Trump, who's hoping to win the Republican presidential nomination. NBC and Univision have already cut ties following the comments he made during his presidential announcement speech on June 16, in which he said people coming into the United States from Mexico ""are bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.""
+
+Following Macy's announcement, Trump fired back at both the retailer and NBC in a statement released on his Instagram account, stating that he was the one who decided to cut ties with Macy's, and on Twitter.
+
+""Clearly, NBC and Macy's support illegal immigration, which is totally detrimental to the fabric of our one great country,"" Trump's statement said. ""Both Macy's and NBC totally caved at the first sight of potential difficulty with professional agitators, who are not looking out for the people they purport to represent, but only for themselves.""
+
+Later, Trump tweeted a reminder that Macy's last year paid a $650,000 New York state fine to settle complaints (including from a Treme cast member) that store staffers racially profiled shoppers accused of stealing.
+
+Trump overlooked the possibility the embarrassing fine might give Macy's a stronger reason not to be associated with Trump's rhetoric about Mexicans.
+
+And in other Trump trouble, his hotel organization confirmed to USA TODAY Wednesday that it is in the midst of an investigation concerning ""potential suspicious credit card activity.""
+
+Trump's statement on the end of his relationship with Macy's echoes his claims that he chose to quit from NBC before they had even fired him, according to The Wrap.
+
+""They wanted me to do The Apprentice,"" said Trump. ""And now with my statements on immigration, which happen to be correct, they are going to take a different stance and that's OK.""
+
+""As far as ending the relationship, I have to do that because my view on immigration is much different than people at NBC.""
+
+NBC announced on Monday that it would no longer air Trump's Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants and would remove him as host of the reality show The Apprentice.
+
+""Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBCUniversal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump,"" the statement said.
+
+The move came after Univision announced last week that it would no longer air Spanish-language versions of his pageants, and Mexico separately announced it would no longer send a contestant to the Miss Universe contest.
+
+And on Tuesday, Miss USA co-host Cheryl Burke announced she was ending her relationship with Trump.
+
+""I cannot in good conscience move forward with participating in this year's Miss USA Pageant as its co-host,"" Burke told USA TODAY.
+
+On Wednesday, more signs of damage to Trump's myriad business interests appeared as musicians lined up to dump Trump.
+
+Singer Ricky Martin added to his criticism last week of Trump's remarks by hitting the Donald where it really hurts: In his golf-course empire.
+
+Martin has cancelled plans to host his annual Ricky Martin Foundation charity golf tournament (supporting efforts to end child trafficking) at the Trump International Golf Club Rio Grande in Puerto Rico, in an act of ""solidarity for basic human rights and in support of the Latin-American community,"" according to a statement issued from his Puerto Rico office . Instead, the tournament will take place at the nearby Wyndham Grand Rio Mar Beach Resort on August 21.
+
+Meanwhile, reps for Flo Rida said the rapper will no longer perform at the Miss USA pageant in Baton Rouge later this month. He was followed out the pageant's door by Country singer Craig Wayne Boyd (winner of The Voice last year) and pop singer Natalie La Rose, who also pulled out. No other performers for Miss USA had been announced.
+
+Shakira, too, condemned Trump via Twitter. ""This is a hateful and racist speech that attempts to divide a country that for years has promoted diversity and democracy!"" she wrote, linking to a video of Trump's presidential announcement speech. ""No one living in this century should stand behind so much ignorance.""
+
+Adding on to Trump's woes, Ora TV, a television company backed by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, said it was cancelling a project in development with Trump.
+
+And this could only be the beginning, according to Larry Chiagouris, a marketing professor at Pace University's Lubin School of Business.
+
+""We are witnessing a jumping on the bandwagon by others who do not want to appear out of step with the trend to put distance between themselves and Donald Trump,"" Chiagouris says.",REAL
+7614,Globalization Expressway to Universal Slavery,"If humans were largely moral and ethical beings, then globalization could be a workable proposition. Unfortunately, the dark behavioral narcissism expressed by compulsive greed and an infinite appetite for power seems to have become the guiding precept of our collective nightmare. If only the desire to dominate others and have a lot more than them were not the prime motivations for the global elite on top of the human food chain, we could all have our respective modest slice of happiness on this planet. The Utopia of globalization through institutions such as the United Nations (UN), World Bank , and International Monetary Fund (IMF) was supposed to eradicate the universal pestilence of war, extreme poverty , hunger and slavery using the might of the above supranational institutions to prevent the rise of so-called rogue nations usually ruled by dictators.
+World order of chaos with misery for profit
+The opportunity of this push for a supranational form of government has to be understood in the psychological context of a world traumatized by World War II. Many public servants, who had fought against the Nazis and their Japanese and Italian allies, had genuinely the best intentions at heart when institutions like the UN were set up. If some of the original ideas were good and moral to some extend, a rot almost immediately contaminated and perverted most of the created institutions and quickly — using the pretext of the Cold War — allowed the birth of a monstrosity such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO ). The globalists have controlled and ultimately Wall Street has financed, supranational government instances such as the UN, IMF, World Bank and a myriad of non-governmental organization (NGO) little helpers. Not only have these done nothing to curtail the man-made disasters of war, climate change , slavery and poverty, but they have exacerbated them, all for the sake of profit.
+In this Orwellian time of moral decay, human misery is good for business. In a globalization controlled by Wall Street’s puppeteer sociopaths, who believe they are the masters of the universe, ordinary people everywhere have become canon fodder and slave labor. They are not even collateral damage but human lubricant, as viewed by the elite. One can see that if they are not stopped immediately, trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its Trans-Atlantic counterpart could seal the deal of the establishment of an atrocious world government, controlled by a few thousands, in complete disregard of not only national interest, but also cultural diversity.
+Look what happened to Detroit, Michigan, and countless other manufacturing towns in the United States that are all collateral damage of Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The massive trade agreements in the works, to be put in place by the globalists if they remain in power, are intended to annihilate any form of economic or political independence from the signatory countries and to scatter their populations to the wind, as in the case in the globalist-controlled demolition of the Middle East in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Displaced and disenfranchised populations are beaten into submission and used as docile worker bees.
+Drastic action or hell on earth
+If we let the globalists complete their worldwide coup already in progress, then all sovereignty would be lost, and most of the world’s population would become slave-wage laborers at the mercy of the global corporate empire. Countries with a diversified agriculture would be turned into one-crop wastelands to ensure that most of the food supply has to be imported. Pseudo local governments would merely officiate as the slave drivers for the global elite. This must be stopped at all cost and undone by all means necessary. If we allow this final coup by the geriatric psychopaths at the top of the current world order, thousands of years of our rich human experience would be wiped out. Like poorly made cheap electronic products, the cultural garbage of the lowest common denominator empire would flood the world. This cultural homogenization would affect primarily the information available to people. Since dissent is impossible without correct information and critical thought, the globalists want their propaganda to become the only source of information. With the UN, the World Bank and the IMF, the political and economic framework financed by a worldwide network of banksters is already in place. Influential nations, on paper, like France and the United Kingdom, which are still officially full fledged members of the UN Security Council, have de facto abdicated their sovereignty to become vassals and secondary enforcers of the globalist plan. We are at the edge of an existential threat of greater magnitude than ever before in human history.
+The semantics of deception
+Machiavelli is known for his cynical view of political power; however, the advice the author of The Prince gave to the powerful of his time seems innocent by comparison to the depravity of today’s puppet masters. Words and ideas are gutted of their meaning to signify, most of the time, the exact opposite. For example, globalist eminence grise George Soros’ Open Society Foundation is an opaque giant NGO, with more than 100 offshoots worldwide by its own admission, but its tentacles are in reality more far reaching. The recent publications of Wikileaks in the voluminous Podesta email files have been a revelation of the extent of deception victimizing United States citizens. John Podesta may be viewed as a Soros right-hand man in the US in charge of delivering the returns for the globalist’s investments in the US elections. The connection between the two men is not only obvious but also official considering that Soros financed Podesta’s so-called Center for American Progress, the fake left equivalent of the neocon think tanks. The term progress is a lure that signifies power, just like Soros’ open society is, in reality, an exclusive club as tight as oysters reserved only for Soros’ chosen associates to savor. What is apparent from the email treasure trove is that Podesta’s job is really to supervise Hillary Clinton on behalf of Soros. In this context, the expression, leader of the free world, to describe the US president becomes a lie. The current world order of the globalists is anything but free, and one applicant for the job, Hillary Clinton, is not a queen on the chessboard, but a pawn.
+Axis of resistance: Russia, China and Iran and lessons from Haiti’s revolution
+One could ask: isn’t this psychopathic globalist coup of financiers well on its way? Isn’t it a done deal, and how can we resist and salvage anything? The examples of Russia, China and Iran prove that, as national entities, we still can. Germany, Japan and South Korea could reclaim their independence and kick out their US occupation. France and the UK could stop being submissive nations and get out of NATO. That would be a start. The path of war rhetoric expressed by the globalist mouthpieces of the West against Russia, Iran and, to a lesser extent, China has to do with the national resistance of these three countries. The citizenry of Europe and North America should understand, that if such unprecedented conflicts occur, all countries will be on the front line, and there is more than enough fire power on each side to ensure massive destruction and no winning side. Russia, China and Iran are the last national obstacles to the globalist coup, and perhaps we are heading back to a bipolar two-block world order similar to the Cold War era. Other options, including the dismantlement, or at least the curtailment, of supranational organizations such as the UN, World Bank and IMF would surely be the side effects of what appears to be in many countries a revival of nationalism. The final plan of the globalists would be atrocious for all of us. Waving the white flag is not an option. At this critical time of our history, and before our collective enslavement, we should all emulate the brave Haitian slaves who beat not one, but three empires 212 years ago. Haitians were only the last ones to prove that it can be done; it must be redone.
+ Gilbert Mercier is the editor in chief of News Junkie Post and the author of The Orwellian Empire .",FAKE
+5108,The Awkward Arranged Marriage of Trump and Pence,"After a two-day botched rollout of his grand vice-presidential reveal, Donald Trump barely shared a stage with Mike Pence on Saturday morning.
+
+On Saturday morning, in the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan, The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” reverberated in the hall, symbolically announcing the new union of Donald Trump and his veep pick, Indiana Governor Mike Pence.
+
+
+
+After a whirlwind 48 hours in which the news of Pence’s pick leaked, and Trump reportedly waffled on the choice so much that he was making midnight calls on Thursday night to try to find an escape hatch, the two men—opposites in most qualitative respects—briefly shared the limelight behind a podium emblazoned only with Trump’s name.
+
+As the Indiana governor looked on from the side of the stage, the presumptive Republican nominee devoted much of his address to bashing “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and weighing in on recent global conflicts, including the attempted military coup in Turkey on Friday.
+
+""Great people, amazing people,” Trump said of the Turks, switching back and forth from prepared remarks to his usual riffing. “We wish them well. A lot of anguish last night but hopefully it'll all work out.”
+
+A day after the Trump campaign scrapped the initial scheduled rollout for his vice presidential pick—which was ultimately unceremoniously announced on Twitter—they quickly pulled together an event at the same location where Ronald Reagan announced his 1980 presidential bid, with all the pomp and circumstance of a man meeting a mail-order spouse.
+
+“Indiana Governor Mike Pence was my first choice,” Trump said despite the fact that he reportedly struggled to choose between an establishment-pleasing pick (pushed by campaign chairman Paul Manafort) and two men with whom he’s had better rapport: Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
+
+Much of Saturday’s speech, a rollout that was accompanied by a website redesign to include Pence’s face and a new logo—replacing a suggestive image that was mocked on social media on Friday—sounded like any other Trump address.
+
+“Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of corruption,” Trump said before suggesting that “she got away with murder” for not being charged after an investigation into her use of a private email server. He dropped typically braggadocious lines like “I was the one that predicted it,” in reference to Brexit, before seemingly remembering that Pence was supposed to be the man of the hour.
+
+“Back to Mike Pence,” he’d interject before beginning to discuss his success in the Republican primary again (“I dominated with evangelicals”). Trump conceded that one of the reasons Pence was selected was for “party unity” before adding “he looks really good.”
+
+When he finally called Pence to the stage, the two men shared a brief handshake before Trump waltzed off and gave the governor the floor—choosing not to stand beside him for a visual representation of the Republican ticket.
+
+“I’m a Christian, a conservative and a Republican in that order,” Pence said to applause in the room. The Indiana governor’s address and policy positions—which include much more conservative opinions on LGBT rights and abortion—were intended to assuage on-the-fence Republicans who can’t fathom a former reality television star being the standard-bearer of their party.
+
+He told the crowd that Trump had called him with the decision on Wednesday night, which runs counter to the narrative Trump himself presented to the media in various interviews on Thursday, during which time he proclaimed he hadn’t made his “final, final decision.”
+
+The tenuous relationship of the two men has developed over the past two months since Pence made a less-than-enthusiastic endorsement of Senator Ted Cruz ahead of the Indiana primary (today, Trump said that endorsement was essentially one for him).
+
+Their policy differences have played out on Trump’s favorite form of social media, with the Indiana governor tweeting his support of the Trans Pacific Partnership in 2014, something that the real estate mogul is adamantly against.
+
+In December 2015, Pence tweeted: “Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional,” in response to an initial proposal from Trump that the United States place a temporary ban on Muslims coming to the country after the attack in San Bernardino.
+
+But on Friday during his first interview as Trump’s vice presidential pick, Pence told Sean Hannity that he is “very supportive of Donald Trump's call to temporarily suspend immigration from countries where terrorist influence and impact represents a threat to the United States,"" a more recent iteration of the proposed ban.
+
+Before the two men appear together once again at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next week, the governor is returning to Zionsville, Indiana on Saturday for what is billed as a “Welcome Home Rally” according to the Trump campaign.",REAL
+7060,Now Malaysia Dumps US for Chinese Naval Vessels,"Now Malaysia Dumps US for Chinese Naval Vessels October 28, 2016 Now Malaysia Dumps US for Chinese Naval Vessels 
+Malaysia will sign a contract to purchase Littoral Mission Ships from China when Prime Minister Najib Razak visits Beijing next week, according to a Facebook posting by the country's Ministry of Defence. Malaysia follows the Philippines in this regional shift from the United States to China The text of a speech to be delivered by Malaysian defense minister Hishammuddin Hussein was posted on Facebook on Tuesday The statement was later removed after media asked a defense ministry spokesman for comment. The purchase of the patrol vessels, if it proceeds, would be Malaysia's first significant defense deal with China and comes amid rising tensions in the South China Sea and as the United States and China compete for influence in the region. Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
+We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
+7056,New NASA Footage Films UFO Flying Past,"New NASA Footage Films UFO Flying Past page: 1 link Here the video shows a very odd craft zooming past. It looks to be very direct on its movement and shows no sign of being as NASA love to use ''debris'' flying by. It is on its own and on its own path. Be nice to see what others think about this footage I have no idea whether this is coming from NASA hardware or not. It states on the video also 2016, I presume this is new. It would seem we are being visited all the time, by our visitors. Star people, ET's. edit on 27-10-2016 by BlackProject because: (no reason given)",FAKE
+6045,On Being Aloof and Democratic,"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / On Being Aloof and Democratic Essential Reading They Live By wmw_admin on August 19, 2012 
+Considered by some as prophetic, many will find eerie echoes of present day concerns in John Carpenters 24-year-old ‘They Live’. View the cult classic here The Essene Gospel of Peace II By wmw_admin on April 26, 2007 
+Translated by Purcell Weaver and Edmond Szekely from its original Aramiac, a language that today few know but 2000 years ago was the language that Christ spoke and taught with Bloody Bill Clinton – American Caligula By wmw_admin on September 1, 2006 
+The real legacy of Clinton’s term of office: the chilling body count of those connected with him, who died in unusual or suspicious circumstances Hellstorm – Exposing The Real Genocide of Nazi Germany (Full Documentary) By wmw_admin on May 10, 2015 
+What happened in the aftermath of World War II has been one of the darkest and best kept secrets in world history. Greg Palast is Related to Mossad Chief David Kimche By Christopher Bollyn on October 23, 2013 
+Greg Palast may well be a Mossad disinfo agent. Christopher Bollyn provides the hard documentary evidence to prove it runs in his family The Life of an American Jew in Racist Marxist Israel Part II By wmw_admin on October 27, 2006 
+Written nearly twenty years ago, Jack Bernstein’s words now have a prophetic ring which he paid for with his life Who Really Murdered Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman? By wmw_admin on February 28, 2015 
+Revelations that a US soldier was the killer would have jeopardised public support for the “War on Terror”. Hence a frame-up was required. A Joe Vialls classic recovered. 9/11 and Zion: What Was Israel’s Role? By Nick Kollerstrom on August 31, 2012 
+When Netanyahu said the very next day, ‘This is very good for Israel”, he wasn’t just blurting out something indiscreet, he was publicly congratulating the various agents who had worked so hard",FAKE
+8379,Ballot stuffing by fat obese feminazis,"Ballot stuffing by fat obese feminazis Caught on tape in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Illinois Re: Ballot stuffing by fat obese feminazis Disgraceful. Democracy in this country is a fucking joke. Page 1 & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.006s (7 queries)",FAKE
+1795,What advantages does Marco Rubio have?,"Every GOP presidential candidate, most especially those in a crowded field with lots of solid contenders, needs to answer a single question: Why me and not one of the 20 or so other hopefuls who are running? This is the second in our series looking at the unique qualifications and arguments for the 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls. Last week we looked at Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Today we turn to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
+
+Like President Obama was, Rubio is a first-term senator with great rhetorical skills. That however is where the comparison ends. The argument for his candidacy can be boiled down to 10 points.
+
+1. Unlike Obama, Rubio has a specific message that is more than “hope and change.” He is a more adept salesman for the reform agenda than, say, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) (“Ryan and Rubio are like-minded legislators who approach problems from a similar ideological perspective. The difference, they say, is that Rubio possesses the political skill to accomplish what Ryan has not: taking conservative reforms outside the halls of Congress and selling them to a national electorate.”)
+
+2. He is unmistakably the face of a new generation of Republicans, perfectly designed to take on the Social Security-eligible Hillary Clinton.
+
+3. Rubio is better able than any other contender to attack Clinton where she is weakest, namely on her foreign-policy record. He understands how and where she and the president failed and can articulate a hard-nosed alternative vision of U.S. leadership. Unlike other freshman senators vying for the nomination, he has consistently been on the right side of tough anti-terrorism measures (e.g., support for the NSA, willing to commit whatever force is needed to defeat the Islamic state). His knowledge of foreign policy issues and ability to outmaneuver opponents of a robust foreign policy was on display at a recent Koch brothers’ event when he slapped down Sen. Rand Paul (R-Fla.).
+
+4. He is no novice in politics. He was elected to the Florida state house in 1999 and to the speakership in 2003. Among other things, he helped lead a property tax overhaul.
+
+5. It will be hard to pass him on the right. He has an 89 percent lifetime conservative rating from Heritage Action and near-perfect ratings from other conservative groups.
+
+6. With the exception of Jeb Bush, he is the only fluent Spanish speaker who can reach the Hispanic audience without a filter and who  can converse directly with Spanish-language media.
+
+7.  He has a compelling immigrant story and the ability to identify with working people. At the 2012 RNC convention, he told the crowd:
+
+My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them. Many nights I heard my father’s keys jingling at the door as he came home after another 16-hour day. Many mornings, I woke up just as my mother got home from the overnight shift at K-Mart When you’re young, the meaning of moments like these escapes you. But now, as my own children get older, I understand it better. My Dad used to tell us: “En este pais, ustedes van a poder lograr todas las cosas que nosotros no pudimos” “In this country, you will be able to accomplish all the things we never could.” A few years ago during a speech, I noticed a bartender behind a portable bar at the back of the ballroom. I remembered my father who had worked for many years as a banquet bartender. He was grateful for the work he had, but that’s not the life he wanted for us. He stood behind a bar in the back of the room all those years, so one day I could stand behind a podium in the front of a room.
+
+8. While supporting the traditional definition of marriage, he does not sound like a zealot or Constitutional know-nothing. “I wouldn’t agree with [the Supreme Court] ruling, but that would be the law of the land that we would have to follow until it’s somehow reversed — either by a future Supreme Court, or a U.S. constitutional amendment, which I don’t think is realistic or foreseeable.”
+
+9. He is entirely at ease with the mainstream media as well as with conservative outlets, and he is adept at using self-deprecating humor.
+
+10. Compared with other GOP contenders, Rubio tends to do well with women voters.",REAL
+9975,Video: We Now Have Proof Obamacare Was Designed to Fail… and Here’s Why,"
+The oligarchy runs our society with Problem – Reaction – Solution.
+We all knew our government was disgustingly corrupt… but now it’s blatantly in-your-face written proof disgustingly corrupt at a time when most of us didn’t think it could get much worse.
+
+If anything, these leaks have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the two-party system is an illusion and the whole construct is one huge pay-for-play corporate sham. Obamacare was always meant to destroy the private health care system and usher in single-payer, government run socialist medicine. It was designed that way… and it’s “working”. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by Truthstream Media of TruthstreamMedia.com . 
+Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton created Truthstream Media.com as an outlet to examine the news, place it in a broader context, uncover the deceptions, pierce through the fabric of illusions, grasp the underlying factors, know the real enemy, unshackle from the system, and begin to imagine the path towards taking back our lives, one step at a time, so that one day we might truly be free… ",FAKE
+4628,"Post-ABC poll finds tight presidential race, with mixed reaction to FBI’s review of Clinton’s emails","Republicans' growing unity behind their presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has helped pull him just 1 percentage point behind Hillary Clinton and has placed GOP leaders who resist him in a vulnerable position, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News Tracking Poll.
+
+A majority of all likely voters say they are unmoved by the FBI's announcement Friday that it may review additional emails from Clinton's time as secretary of state. Just more than 6 in 10 voters say the news will make no difference in their vote, while just more than 3 in 10 say it makes them less likely to support her; 2 percent say they are more likely to back her as a result.
+
+The issue may do more to reinforce preferences of voters opposed to Clinton than swing undecided voters. Roughly two-thirds of those who say the issue makes them less likely to support Clinton are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents (68 percent), while 17 percent lean Democratic and 9 percent are independents who lean toward neither party.
+
+When asked about House Speaker Paul D. Ryan's decision not to campaign for Trump in the final weeks before the election, two-thirds of Republican-leaning likely voters disapprove of the Wisconsin Republican's move (66 percent), including nearly half who disapprove “strongly” (48 percent). Barely 1 in 5 approve of Ryan's decision (21 percent).
+
+The Post-ABC Tracking Poll continues to find a very tight race, with Clinton at 46 percent and Trump at 45 percent among likely voters in interviews from Tuesday through Friday. The two major-party nominees for president are followed by Libertarian Gary Johnson, at 4 percent, and the Green Party's Jill Stein, at 2 percent. The result is similar to a 47-to-45 Clinton-Trump margin in the previous wave released Saturday, though it is smaller than what was found in other surveys this week. When likely voters are asked to choose between Clinton and Trump alone, Clinton stands at 49 percent, and Trump is at 46 percent, a statistically insignificant margin.
+
+Greater Republican unity has buoyed Trump's rising support, which has wavered throughout the year. Trump's 87 percent support among self-identified Republicans, ticking up from 83 percent last week, nearly matches Clinton's 88 percent support among Democrats. Independents also have moved sharply in Trump's direction, from favoring Clinton by eight points one week ago to backing Trump by 19 points.
+
+Clinton maintains clear edge on qualifications, but not on empathy
+
+Clinton is still widely seen as more qualified for the presidency, leading that measure by an 18-point margin, 54 to 36 percent. She has held a clear advantage over Trump in qualifications throughout the campaign.
+
+But Trump receives more unified backing among those who see him as better qualified. Fully 99 percent of this group supports him, compared with Clinton's 84 percent support among those who see her as better qualified. Seven percent of this group supports Trump, while 4 percent are for Johnson and 2 percent are for Stein.
+
+Clinton also lost a once-large advantage on empathy, a trait on which voters now split 46 percent for her and 43 percent for Trump when asked which candidate understands the problems of people like them. Clinton had led Trump by an eight-point margin on this measure in early September among likely voters and by a 20-point margin among all adults in August.
+
+Clinton has a narrow eight-point edge over Trump on which candidate has stronger moral character, 46 to 38 percent. A sizable 13 percent said that neither candidate possesses this trait. A larger share of Trump supporters than Clinton supporters say that neither candidate has strong moral character (12 percent vs. 2 percent).
+
+Ryan's decision not to campaign for Trump this fall has proved unpopular among his fellow partisans. This comes as Ryan's status as House speaker is in peril because of Republican infighting.
+
+Rejection of Ryan's stance swells to 75 percent among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who identify as “very conservative” compared with smaller majorities of “somewhat conservative” Republicans (63 percent) and those who are moderate or liberal (56 percent).
+
+Ryan's stand against Trump is being handled differently by several other prominent Republicans. For one, Rep. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) has said that even though he could not endorse Trump or his actions, he still plans to vote for the Republican nominee.
+
+Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a popular Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, has spoken out against Trump, a move that was widely popular with independents and Democrats in the state, but Republicans were split on whether they approved of the decision.
+
+This Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone Oct. 25 to 28 among a random national sample of 1,781 adults, including landline and cellphone respondents. Overall results have a margin-of-sampling error of plus-or-minus-2.5 points; the error margin is plus-or-minus-three points among the sample of 1,160 likely voters. Sampling, data collection and tabulation are by Abt-SRBI of New York.",REAL
+4125,The GOP still has nothing to show for its anti-Planned Parenthood campaign,"At this point Republicans may wish to consider aborting to protect the health of the party.
+
+They have been going after Planned Parenthood over the past few months like so many Captain Ahabs. They threatened to shut down the government to defund the group. Their insistence on a Planned Parenthood showdown drove House Speaker John Boehner to resign. They’re about to appoint a special committee to investigate Planned Parenthood. The party’s presidential candidates have made Planned Parenthood a central part of the campaign, and House Republicans are manufacturing new legislative vehicles to cut off the group.
+
+And what do they have to show for it?
+
+A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that Americans have a more favorable view of Planned Parenthood than of any other entity tested, including the Republican Party and presidential candidates. The group’s favorable/unfavorable impression, 47 percent to 31 percent, is actually up slightly from July. What’s more, 61 percent oppose eliminating federal funding of Planned Parenthood. Even among the 35 percent who support defunding, only 9 percent favor shutting down the government to do it.
+
+Yet House Republicans pressed ahead with their quest Tuesday, hauling Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee for more than five hours of hectoring and finger-wagging about, among other things, her salary and the group’s travel expenses.
+
+The hearing came about because of videos released in July purporting to show that Planned Parenthood was harvesting body parts from aborted fetuses for profit. In their memo announcing the hearing, committee Republicans proclaimed that the “disturbing content” of the recently released videos “raises questions about [Planned Parenthood’s] use of taxpayer funding.” But the videos turned out to be doctored, and committee Republicans declined Democrats’ requests to have the video maker, David Daleiden, appear before the panel. The committee didn’t get the full unedited videos, Chairman Jason Chaffetz (Utah) said, because of California court proceedings.
+
+Two hours into the hearing, Chaffetz made the startling confession that “without the videos, we can’t have a good discussion about them.”
+
+But we can shut down the federal government over them?
+
+Dispensing with the videos, members of the panel got down to the larger purpose of the hearing: harassing Richards and her group.
+
+Chaffetz flashed a chart on the screens showing that since 2010, the number of abortions at Planned Parenthood has surpassed the number of its “cancer screenings and prevention services.”
+
+But no such shift occurred. The fine print on the chart showed that the number of abortions (327,000 in 2013) never came close to reaching the number of cancer screenings (935,573 in 2013) at any point.
+
+The bogus graph didn’t seem to matter to Chaffetz, who drew the witness’s attention to the crossing lines showing abortions overtaking screenings.
+
+Richards said the chart “absolutely does not reflect what’s happening.”
+
+“I pulled those numbers directly out of your corporate reports,” the chairman said.
+
+In fact, the chart said the source was the antiabortion group Americans United for Life — which Richards pointed out to Chaffetz.
+
+“Then we will get to the bottom of the truth of that,” the chairman said.
+
+The truth? Planned Parenthood gets money for women’s birth control, STD screenings and the like, not abortions — which Richards calmly reminded her inquisitors. She left it to Democratic lawmakers to proclaim their (exaggerated) outrage. “The misogyny!” wailed Rep. Gerald Connolly (Va.).
+
+Republicans tried to inoculate themselves against the inevitable “war on women” charges. Chaffetz admitted three Republican women to participate in the hearing (there is only one GOP woman on the panel) and he started his own remarks by emotionally invoking his wife’s work with breast-cancer patients. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) thought it helpful to say that “I’m wearing a pink tie in solidarity with women’s health issues.” The majority dodged an awkward moment when Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), a pro-life lawmaker who, according to court records, encouraged his wife and mistress to have abortions, yielded his time to a colleague.
+
+That colleague, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), told Richards “you’re profiting off death.” Likewise, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) proclaimed himself a “champion for the unborn,” while Walberg said “we’ve been brought into a frenzy and a concern about what happens to our babies,” and Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) asked what happens if “a child survives an abortion attempt.”
+
+This would appear to justify Richards’s contention that the controversy “isn’t about Planned Parenthood. It’s about allowing women in this country . . . to make other decisions about their pregnancies.”
+
+As if to confirm Richards’s suspicion, 28 minutes after the hearing ended, lawmakers went to the House floor to vote on legislation restricting abortion — for the 14th time this year.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+6116,Warning or threat? Hillary hints at second civil war if Trump wins,"Warning or threat? Hillary hints at second civil war if Trump wins 11/02/2016 
+While speaking to supporters in Cincinnati on Monday, Democrat Hillary Clinton hinted at a second civil war if GOP nominee Donald Trump wins, Breitbart.com reported. 
+Charlie Spiering wrote: 
+“He has a dark and divisive vision for America that could tear our country apart,” Clinton said to supporters in Cincinnati, Ohio on Halloween. 
+Clinton specifically referred to the Civil War, suggesting that the country faced a similar threat of divisiveness from Donald Trump. 
+“Abraham Lincoln understood a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that was over the greatest of challenges – the challenge posed by slavery – and we fought a civil war,” she said. 
+She warned voters that it was time for the country to take the divisions in the country seriously. 
+“But we also have to take stock of how divided we are today, the kinds of divisions that need to be healed to bring people together,” she added, failing to admit that her side is the one that has divided America by race, class and gender. 
+She also claimed that Trump would start a nuclear war if a foreign leader got under his skin. 
+“I know there are some who will say that any discussion of this topic could be fear-mongering, but I don’t think so,” she said at a rally in Kent, Ohio, earlier in the day. 
+A post at Barracuda Brigade observed: 
+Liberals especially the Clinton are always projecting. Anything that they accuse the other side of is what they are doing. She suggests that her message is one of “hope and change” when in fact it is just more of the same. 
+Moreover, Trump has spent a great deal of time talking about policies and issues while Clinton & Co. have done absolutely nothing but engage in fear-mongering and fingerpointing. 
+Still, we have to ask — was Clinton’s “hint” a “warning” or a “threat?” 
+Related:",FAKE
+4152,"Looking To 2015, Economists See 5 Reasons To Celebrate","Looking To 2015, Economists See 5 Reasons To Celebrate
+
+Each December, economists make predictions. And each new year, they get hit by unexpected events that make them look more clueless than prescient.
+
+This year's bolt out of the blue was the plunge in oil's price, which no one saw coming.
+
+Still, top economists' forecasts did get a lot right for 2014. One year ago, most were predicting healthy growth, tame inflation, low interest rates, rising stock prices and declining unemployment — and that's just what we got.
+
+Now they are looking ahead, and once again, their forecasts are brimming with good cheer. These are among the most common predictions for 2015:
+
+GDP will keep growing quickly. The gross domestic product — a measure of all U.S. goods and services — has been on a tear. The Commerce Department's latest revision shows GDP advancing at an astonishing 5 percent over July, August and September.
+
+That growth spurt suggests the U.S. economy has momentum heading into the new year. Lower energy prices will give consumers more money to spend, and that should help boost revenues for stores, restaurants, hotels and more.
+
+""Our assessment for growth in 2015 will now be around 3 percent,"" wrote Doug Handler, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight. For an economy in its sixth year of expansion, a 3 percent annual pace would be impressive.
+
+Employers will hire and pay more. In 2013, the unemployment rate averaged 7.4 percent. Last December, economists were predicting a slide to about 6.6 percent.
+
+As it turned out, the jobless rate tumbled to 5.8 percent, and now economists see the rate dipping to 5.5 percent or lower in the coming year.
+
+""With stronger economic growth, the U.S. will add about 230,000 jobs per month on average next year,"" according to the forecast of Gus Faucher, senior economist at PNC Financial Services Group. That would add up to about 2.8 million net new jobs in 2015.
+
+Currently, the country has 2.8 million people struggling with long-term unemployment. So if Faucher's prediction were to come true, workers finally could enjoy a healthy market where job openings and willing workers would match up. And the increased demand for workers would help push up stagnant wages.
+
+Inflation will be exceptionally low. Even though the economy has been heating up, the price of energy has been cooling. The year began with crude oil selling for about $110 a barrel, and is ending with the price at about half that. Oil's plunge has driven down prices for gasoline, home heating oil, jet fuel and more.
+
+Seeing that change, the Federal Reserve has sharply cut its forecast, saying that inflation will run between 1 percent and 1.6 percent in 2015. That's down from a September forecast of 1.6 percent to 1.9 percent.
+
+Interest rates will inch up. OK, you've heard this before. Time and again, economists have predicted that interest rates would tick up. And time and again, they have been wrong.
+
+For example, when this year began, the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was carrying an interest rate of 4.43 percent. Most economists thought that rate would rise. But as the year wound down, the 30-year rate was running at about 3.75 percent.
+
+Nevertheless, economists think this time is different and that rates really will rise in 2015. In a mid-December statement, Fed policymakers said they ""can be patient"" when it comes to timing a rate increase, but most economists figure patience will run out by midyear, and that will lead to a slow, steady ratcheting up of interest rates to more normal levels.
+
+When it comes to the strategy of holding down rates to stimulate growth, ""we believe the Fed's work is now done,"" said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist with The Economic Outlook Group.
+
+Stocks will go higher. The stock market has been zooming up for years now. The Dow Jones industrial average stood at 6,627 in early March 2009, during the worst of the Great Recession. But with the recovery going strong, the stock average has been pushing above 18,000.
+
+Some skeptics think the stock market is due for a ""correction"" that would knock down prices by 10 percent or more in 2015. But the more typical prediction is that with oil prices running so low, investors will want to keep putting money into companies that stand to benefit from increased consumer spending.
+
+Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, summed it up in a recent tweet, saying ""high-octane optimism once again prevails on the Street.""",REAL
+7889,Project Veritas Reveals Who Was REALLY Behind Romney’s 47% Video,"You are here: Home / US / Project Veritas Reveals Who Was REALLY Behind Romney’s 47% Video Project Veritas Reveals Who Was REALLY Behind Romney’s 47% Video October 28, 2016 Pinterest 
+Once again, the lengths to which the Democrats have to go to win elections was evidenced by a Project Veritas video released Wednesday night on Fox News’“The O’Reilly Factor.” In the video, we found out that the “bartender” who obtained video of former Gov. Mitt Romney’s infamous “47%” comments during his 2012 presidential campaign may have actually been part of a coordinated effort by Democrat operatives to tank Romney’s campaign — despite the truth of his comments. 
+Scott Foval, who was fired from his post at Americans United for Change after Project Veritas began releasing their videos, revealed that there may have been more behind the “47%” video than just a bartender at the fundraiser taking footage on his own, with no direction from anyone else. 
+Twitchy reported : 
+In Wednesday’s video release, Foval explains that the bartender who caught Romney’s devastating “47 percent” remarks on video during a fundraiser was part of a coordinated operation to sneak a video recording device into the event. That video eventually was passed along to David Corn of Mother Jones, who won a George Polk Award for his efforts. 
+The story at the time, of course, was that bartender Scott Prouty brought a camera along in hopes of perhaps getting a photo with Romney — which somehow involved setting down the camera and hitting the record button. Progressives hailed Prouty as a hero for coming forward with the video. 
+Yeah, not according to Foval. 
+“Bob [Creamer] got a hold of our guys who did the original insertions back in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns against Bush where they were inserting people and interrupting his fundraisers and rallies,” he told an undercover Project Veritas journalist. “And then, I don’t know if you remember, well from, they are the ones who negotiated to get that lawyer in in Florida who recorded the 47 percent video.” 
+“Wait, I thought that was a bartender,” the undercover PVA reporter responded. 
+“It was actually a lawyer at the event,” Foval said and added: “The lawyer took his phone and had the bartender walk around with it and set it up.” 
+Foval continued, “It was a whole coordinated operation to get the phone in because they had taken away all the cell phones from all the staff and so what they did was they set it up in the room.” 
+When Foval was asked about who the lawyer was, he claimed he didn’t know. “I have no idea who it is but they, the people who do the operations, they have a team of about 25 folks that this is what they do.” 
+Of course, Foval is walking back his comments, and Corn has claimed that it isn’t true. Then again, that’s what liberals always do when they’re caught — deflect, lie, pretend it didn’t happen, etc. etc. James O'Keefe's New Story About the 47-Percent Video Is Totally False. https://t.co/uFnbTTqOLk",FAKE
+1813,Rick Perry drops out of 2016 presidential race,"Washington (CNN) Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who insisted he learned lessons from his disastrous 2012 presidential campaign, dropped his second bid for the White House on Friday after just 100 days.
+
+""Today, I am suspending my campaign for the presidency of the United States,"" Perry said in an address in St. Louis that virtually mirrored his standard stump speech until the very end. ""Life is good. I am a blessed man.""
+
+The departure of Perry, who had little support in early-voting states or among the GOP donor class, is unlikely to alter the contours of the Republican race. But Perry nevertheless implored his supporters in an email to back a candidate who embodies the principles of conservatism.
+
+""The conservative movement has always been about principles, not personalities,"" Perry said, before making a not-too-veiled swipe at Donald Trump, the GOP's current front-runner. ""Our nominee should embody those principles. He -- or she -- must make the case for the cause of conservatism more than the cause of their own celebrity.""
+
+For almost two years, the swaggering Texan had prepared and studied for a second shot at the presidency. But in a 17-candidate field, Perry found himself weakened by fundraisers who ditched him for his rivals and by top surrogates who defected as his campaign crumbled. He raised only about $1 million in the first fundraising quarter, and he never had enough supporters for him to earn a spot in the premier GOP debates. Back in Texas, he remained under indictment on an abuse-of-power charge.
+
+And as it became increasingly clear that the campaign wouldn't be able to overcome deep financial problems that left him without enough money to win a competitive race, he became the first GOP candidate to leave it.
+
+Still, Perry's exit still comes surprisingly early. He was scheduled to appear next week at CNN's Republican debate, which his allies hoped would be a turning point for his troubled campaign. His super PAC sat on more than $17 million that it was investing in Iowa to fill the void created by his Austin-based campaign as its financial difficulties mounted. And Perry acted very much the candidate all day on Friday, authoring an opinion piece about terrorism in National Review in the morning and sharing his vision for his presidency for a half hour in his St. Louis speech in the afternoon.
+
+Some of his top supporters expressed shock that Perry bowed out so early. David Johnson, an Iowa state senator and the candidate's top backer in the Hawkeye State, said Perry may have prematurely pulled the plug.
+
+""Perhaps Governor Perry sees something that I don't,"" Johnson said, explaining that he heard about Perry's decision from the other Texan in the race -- Ted Cruz. ""I was certainly ready to go.""
+
+Perry was unable to reassemble the Texas political and financial base that made him, at one point, the party's front-runner in the last presidential cycle. In the 2012 race, his campaign was dogged by questions about his readiness, punctuated by an embarrassing moment in a debate when he couldn't name the third agency he planned to eliminate as president.
+
+And just as in his first campaign, the man who was once governor of the largest Republican state for 14 years, leaves the campaign trail disappointed and also politically damaged.
+
+The second campaign began to unravel this summer, with the operation essentially abandoning its efforts in Iowa and New Hampshire. Doug Deason, the son of a $5 million donor to the Perry super PAC, said Perry's campaign had only raised $100,000 in the two months since the last reporting period. Deason said Perry delivered the news of the suspension to him on Thursday.
+
+""He felt it coming. He knew there's only so much the super PAC can do,"" explained Deason, a powerful Texas donor who is part of the Koch Brothers' political network. ""After the word got out they were struggling, they did start getting donations in -- but it just wasn't enough to really make a difference.""
+
+Deason expects to get his millions of dollars returned next week.
+
+""The beauty, of course, of investing in a super PAC is you get the money back that doesn't get spent,"" Deason said.
+
+But Austin Barbour, the group's top operative, said it was not immediately clear if the law allowed the donations to be refunded.
+
+Nevertheless, other campaigns Friday evening were moving rapidly to poach top financial and political backers of Perry. Deason dined with Cruz a few evenings ago. Even while Friday's speech was going on, Deason was contacted by Cruz finance director Willie Langston and lieutenants from the Jeb Bush and Scott Walker campaigns. Johnson said in the hours after Perry's decision, he heard from aides representing Walker, Cruz and Rick Santorum.
+
+""Would you consider another Texan for president?"" asked Bryan English, Cruz's Iowa state director, according to Johnson.
+
+The departure of Perry speaks in part to the limitations of super PACs, which had been expected to save the cash-strapped campaign. Perry's well-funded group, Opportunity and Freedom PAC, depended heavily on a small group of Texas families, and the organization had indicated it was willing to hire field operatives and launch an aggressive advertising campaign.
+
+""In It For The Long Haul: Opportunity and Freedom PAC Is Back On The Air In Iowa,"" the group announced at 9 a.m. on Friday.
+
+""We all felt like we had really turned a corner in the past few days,"" said a disappointed Barbour, whose super PAC had knocked on 10,000 doors in Iowa so far. ""We wanted to fight. We felt like there was path, but again, it's not up to us.""
+
+But despite the super PAC's intentions, it cannot pay filing fees in early states or help the candidate raise the hard money needed to travel or operate a headquarters. The campaign had only raised $1.2 million in the first three months of the campaign, Deason said.
+
+Earlier this week, Perry shuttered his South Carolina campaign headquarters in the capital city of Columbia. And field staffers in Iowa and New Hampshire went without pay this month as the campaign tried to salvage its operation. About a month ago, Perry's campaign announced that it would no longer be paying staff across the country.
+
+Some Perry staffers had remained loyal to the campaign, and his super PAC was expected to play a growing, if not unprecedented, role in resuscitating the official campaign. Perry's support barely registered in polls, but his departure will likely create an intense fight for the dollars that have flooded his big-money group, which must spend the money independently.
+
+It is unclear which candidate, or candidates, will inherit the support of Perry's backers. In the past, Perry has repeatedly gone out of his way to lavish praise on another candidate with Texas roots: businesswoman Carly Fiorina.
+
+Soon after Perry announced the end of his bid, a flood of warm wishes came from his now-former GOP presidential rivals on Twitter -- perhaps in an effort to court his support, or that of his backers.
+
+"".@GovernorPerry is a terrific guy and I wish him well- I know he will have a great future!"" tweeted Trump, who has made antagonizing his GOP rivals, including Perry, a hallmark of his campaign.
+
+Cruz said he donated to The Lone Survivor Foundation and the Chris Kyle Frog Foundation, two of Perry's favorite charities, and praised his one-time boss.
+
+""The entire GOP field was unquestionably made stronger by the experience & wisdom @GovernorPerry brought to the race,"" he tweeted.
+
+"".@GovernorPerry has dedicated his entire life to his family, friends, and Jesus Christ,"" Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said.
+
+Bush praised Perry for his commitment to conservatism.
+
+""Amen. God bless Rick Perry for his continuing commitment to that cause,"" Bush said.
+
+""@GovernorPerry getting to know you and Anita has been a great joy for our family. Thank you for your service friend,"" Santorum tweeted.
+
+Other candidates, like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who have feuded with Trump, used Perry's departure to mock the GOP front-runner.
+
+"".@realDonaldTrump Attacked him one day. Praised him today. Sounding like a typical politician. Rick is a better man than you'll ever be,"" Jindal tweeted.
+
+""What does it say about GOP when a 3 & half term Gov w/ a successful record of creating jobs bows out as a reality star leads in the polls?"" Paul asked.",REAL
+4885,"'Basket of deplorables': For once, Hillary told the truth about what she really thinks","Hillary let the cat out of a bag Friday. For once, she told us what she really thinks. the truth. No lies, no filters, no politically correct editing.
+
+Hillary finally shared her true feelings at a fundraising event in Manhattan on Friday night, with her old pal Barbara Streisand hosting. Just like Mitt Romney exposed his true feelings about ""the 47 percent"" at a private fundraiser in 2012.
+
+Hillary said that half of Donald Trump’s supporters  belong in a “basket of deplorables.”
+
+This was the real Hillary -- raw and unfiltered. She must be taking lessons from Donald Trump.
+
+Of course, she now regrets saying it. Politicians often regret letting their true feelings out. But it's clear what Hillary meant. Hillary and her supporters despise and disrespect anyone who loves God, country, family and our Constitution.
+
+Hillary was talking about me and my friends. I’m Exhibit A for her rant. I’m the author of the new book “ANGRY WHITE MALE.” It’s my testimony about exactly what millions of angry white males who support Donald Trump believe in…and exactly what liberals like Hillary and President Obama think of us. How they are trying to target us, muzzle us, punish us and destroy us.
+
+Thanks Hillary. We already knew how you felt, but it's nice to get it out into the open. Now you're on record.
+
+Everything I love -- and millions of conservatives, Christians and patriots love -- is under attack from Hillary and the Democrats. They resent us. They disrespect us. They want to silence us. They want to financially cripple us (to redistribute our income in the name of ""fairness"" and ""social justice"").
+
+Millions of Trump supporters believe the things that made America great are simple: Faith in God, family, patriotism, American exceptionalism, capitalism, Judeo-Christian values, Constitution, military and police. But Hillary and the Democrats despise those symbols. To them, belief in those symbols makes you...""deplorable.""
+
+Well, I’m proud that Hillary and her socialist cabal see me as “deplorable.” Let’s look at who else is in this “basket"" with me.  Here is a list of my teammates in Hillary's ""basket of deplorables"":
+
+- The soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know they are Trump supporters. The latest poll shows Trump winning the military vote by a landslide. Hillary thinks they are ""deplorable.""
+
+-  Military veterans. These are the Americans who were willing to die for our freedoms. Vets were included in that military poll that showed Trump winning by a landslide.
+
+- Vets who came home from Iraq and Afghanistan with no arms, or no legs, or both. I’m betting most of them are for Trump too. Does Hillary think they’re “deplorable?”
+
+-  Policemen murdered in the line of duty -- like the five officers recently killed in Dallas, or the three who were killed in Baton Rouge. Most every police officer I meet is voting for Trump.
+
+-  The spouses and children of policemen murdered in the line of duty. What if they're voting for Trump? Are they “deplorable” to Hillary and her supporters?
+
+-  Every red-blooded regular church-goer on Sunday mornings in America. We know a large majority of regular church-goers are for Trump.
+
+-  A majority of the 28 million small business owners in America. This group will be voting overwhelmingly for Trump. They get up early, work 16 hour days, risk their own money, and create the majority of America's private sector jobs. But Hillary doesn't like them very much. She thinks if they vote for Trump they're ""deplorable.""
+
+Now Hillary is walking back her comment. She says she regrets calling us all ""a basket of deplorables."" But it's too late. We all know your first comment was the raw truth, Hillary. That was how you really feel about us.
+
+The only thing Hillary regrets is that she let the cat out of the bag.
+
+Well, I have news for Hillary…
+
+I am proud to be part of ""the basket of deplorables.""
+
+Wayne Allyn Root is a capitalist evangelist, serial entrepreneur, conservative national media commentator, and proud champion of the middle class. He is a former Libertarian vice presidential nominee, now back to the GOP. Wayne's latest book is ""Angry White Male"" (Skyhorse Publishing). He is a supporter of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. For more, visit his website: www.ROOTforAmerica.com. Follow him on Twitter@WayneRoot.",REAL
+5071,Clinton campaign scrambles to defend Rust Belt against Trump,"With the general election campaign just hours old, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump began focusing their attention this weekend on America’s Rust Belt -- hoping their separate plans to restore prosperity to the all-important region will sway enough voters there to help them win in November.
+
+“We’re going to create jobs in Pennsylvania and across America, especially in places that have been left behind,” Clinton said at a rally Saturday at a factory in Johnstown, part of Pennsylvania’s western, industrial region, home to a large conservative voting bloc that Trump needs.
+
+“I believe with all of my heart that the economy should work for everyone, not just the top 1 percent. … We’re going to support steel workers,” continued Clinton, who also touted her campaign promise to, in her first 100 days in the White House, make the largest investment in jobs since World War II.
+
+Clinton won the Democratic labor and blue-collar vote in her failed 2008 presidential primary bid. But those voters have been more difficult for her to reach in this election cycle.
+
+Primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders’ populist message repeatedly tried to portray Clinton as less receptive to middle class needs. The Vermont senator in fact scored a major suprise win over Clinton in the Michigan primay.
+
+Meanwhile, Trump, the Republican nominee, and running mate Mike Pence continued to argue that electing Clinton would continue the Obama administration's failed economic policies -- marked by stagnant wages and bad international trade deals that are sending manufacturing jobs oversea.
+
+“The second-quarter numbers came out -- 1.2 percent growth in the American economy,” Pence, Indiana's governor, said Friday night at a rally in Lima, Ohio. “We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect a different result … People are restless for change.”
+
+Most political analysts predict that the general election will again be decided by four so-called battleground states, among them Ohio and Pennsylvania.
+
+Clinton and Trump are deadlocked in those states, according to two recent Quinnipiac University polls, though an NBC survey released July 13 shows Trump trailing by 9 percentage points.
+
+“It will be interesting to see if Clinton can hold off Trump in the Rust Belt by going back to the blue-collar vote,” Caleb Burns, a Republican strategist and partner in the Washington law firm Wiley Rein, said earlier this week. “If she can, it will be extremely difficult for Trump to find a path to victory.”
+
+To be sure, Trump already has a narrow path toward getting the requisite 270 electoral votes to take the White House.
+
+Beyond winning the 13 states that GOP nominees have taken in the past six presidential races, Trump must also win some combination of battleground states -- including Colorado, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
+
+No Republican has won Pennsylvania since 1988, and no Republican nominee has won the White House without winning Ohio.
+
+“And this election will be no different,” Fox News contributor and senior Bush administration policy adviser Karl Rove recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages. “If Mr. Trump’s appeal to blue-collar, white swing voters is real, he could paint Pennsylvania red. If so, he is likely to win the White House with 273 electoral votes.”
+
+However, a loss in Pennsylvania would mean Trump would have to find wins in such Midwestern industrial states as Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, all Democratic strongholds.
+
+Clinton and Kaine continued their “Stronger Together” tour Saturday with a late-afternoon rally in Pittsburgh and an evening event in Youngstown, Ohio. Their tour concludes Sunday in Columbus.
+
+At a rally in Colorado on Friday, the day after Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination in Philadelphia, Trump went after Clinton and Kaine on economic issues.
+
+“We have to go over some numbers,” he said at a rally in Denver, a liberal stronghold. “Hillary was talking last night about how wonderful everything was. She didn’t talk about all of the unbelievable long-term unemployment, the fact house ownership is the lowest in 51 years.”
+
+He also argued that Kaine is “not popular” in his home state of Virginia, considering that unemployment nearly doubled in his one term as governor and that his first move after getting elected to the post in 2005 was to increase taxes by $4 billion.
+
+Trump plans to visit Columbus and Cleveland on Monday.",REAL
+5952,Clinton Emails Linked To Political Pedophile Sex Ring – FBI Insider | EndingFed News Network,"Email Print An FBI source has confirmed that evidence has emerged from the Clinton email investigation that a massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring operates in Washington. According to reports , at least 6 members of Congress and several leaders from federal agencies are implicated in the pedophile ring, which they say was run directly with the Clinton Foundation as a front. According to an NYPD source, emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop detail trips made by Weiner, Bill and Hillary Clinton on convicted pedophile pal billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s plane ‘Lolitta express‘ to a place known as “ Sex Slave Island “. Will this be the fatal shot? NYPD talking about Child Porn ring involvement. This is NOT confirmed, but would gut Dems. #GoHillary #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/ke8YTz4DMh 
+— ALWAYS TRUMP! (@Always_Trump) October 31, 2016 An archived thread on 4chan in which an FBI insider originally hinted that the Clinton email server investigation was merely a distraction from the more sinister Clinton Foundation and its connection to pedophilia: Are the people leading the investigation blackmailed pedophiles? > The people under the magnifying glass do have an affinity for children. Please before you sleep speak a little on the child prostitution ring. Sex rings are popular in all governments, but pedophilia is primarily in British parliament & Saudi Arabia, and that’s why HRC and BC love foreign donors so much. They get paid in children as well as money. Dig deep and you can find it. It will sicken you. Stay connected by subscribing to our news letter. Click on the button. ",FAKE
+6021,How this WWII airman is helping veterans heal with the help of 4-legged friends,"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. How this WWII airman is helping veterans heal with the help of 4-legged friends By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 10, 2016 veterans heal 
+By Alexandra Zaslow 
+Irwin Stovroff has received hundreds of thank-you cards since starting a nonprofit that pairs service dogs with veterans in need, but there’s one letter in particular that stands out to him. 
+An Army veteran named Tyson (who prefers to keep his last name private), had severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and wasn’t paying much attention to his wife, Adrienne, or his children. He then welcomed a service dog named Argon into his home, and it had a profound impact. 
+“When the days were so dark for Tyson, I wasn’t sure if I could get through to him,” his wife wrote in a recent letter addressed to Argon. “I am so glad you are here with us. You have brought life back into Tyson.” 
+Read the Full Article at www.today.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or   and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on November 10, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Health , Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+7159,Life: Lucky Break: This Teen Boy Just Got Another 4 Years To Plan His Viral Coming-Out Video,"Email 
+This kid just seriously hit the jackpot. 
+Fifteen-year-old Taylor Hutton has known that he’s gay for as long as he can remember, and over the past few months he’s been working up the courage to finally tell his friends and family the truth. Taylor even planned to film some of those moments and post them on YouTube, in hopes that they might help other kids going through a similar experience. But just when this teen was ready to stop hiding who he really is, something incredible happened: Donald Trump and Mike Pence were elected into the White House, and Taylor just got another four years to plan his viral coming-out video! 
+Um, luckiest teen ever? 
+Up until now, Taylor figured he’d just prop his iPhone up to record the moment he came out to his parents, but after watching the presidential election results come in last night, Taylor knew that he needed to scrap that plan immediately. This lucky teen now has until at least 2020 before he can safely come out of the closet, and that’s more than enough time to come up with the sort of next-level viral video idea that could seriously break the internet! 
+Instead of releasing some half-baked, hastily edited video on his YouTube channel this spring, Taylor will now get to spend at least the next four years of a Trump/Pence administration dreaming up the most heartwarming and totally shareable coming-out video imaginable. And depending on how the next election goes, this kid just might get the chance to keep brainstorming camera angles and staging options in his head until he’s well into his mid-20s or older. 
+So awesome! With cameras only getting better and better, it’s possible that four years from now we’ll even get to witness Taylor finally arrive at some sort of peace with himself in stunning, crystal-clear 8K resolution. 
+Best of luck to you over the next four years, Taylor! We can’t wait for you to release that coming-out video as soon as doing so doesn’t put you under immediate danger from your own government. With all that extra time to plan it out, it’s going to be so great!",FAKE
+6569,Paul Ryan Must Step Down as Speaker of the House,"
+Rep. Paul Ryan must step down as Speaker of the House.
+America rejected his big government, open borders globalism.
+Paul Ryan rejected Trump all year long.
+And now the majority are calling on Wisconsin lawmaker to step down.
+Americans deserve a Republican Speaker who will support President Trump. A bridge, not a wall.
+Sean Hannity spoke tonight on FOX after Donald Trump won the election for President of the United States. He noted that he spoke with Trump three times throughout the night after he said the following:
+And on every objective measure, you know thank God the American people this is about one thing. They see that Washington is broken and by the way Republicans are just as guilty. Paul Ryan is not going to be the Speaker off the House in January. I was going to save that for my program tomorrow. He’s not going to be the Speaker. His state went for Donald Trump tonight.
+I mean it’s an amazing turn of events because the establishment on both sides Republican and Democrat have lost touch with the real lives of real Americans that are really suffering and Donald Trump has now opened the door and said we’re going to fix it and we’re going to turn that table over and you know what, I wish him all the best cause it’s not going to be easy because it’s all the same people that opposed him in the lead up to tonight are going to be opposing him tomorrow.
+
+Source 
+",FAKE
+2637,Eric Holder bids farewell to Justice Department,"Hundreds of Justice Department staff and lawyers gathered in the Great Hall of the Robert F. Kennedy Building Friday to give the nation's first African-American attorney general a send-off.
+
+It was a more tightly-scripted version of the thunderous welcome he received in 2009 when Holder entered the building. The goodbye ceremony included a nine-minute video lauding the attorney general for his six-year tenure.
+
+""I think we can say now Eric Holder is free,"" the attorney general said to laughs, after tossing to the crowd wristbands he has been wearing as he waited months for his successor, Loretta Lynch, to win Senate approval . The wristbands, the idea of an aide, were an inside joke that read ""Free Eric Holder.""
+
+Holder was tearful, shaking hands, hugging and taking selfies with some of the crowd, which numbered about 200.
+
+This was his third going-away ceremony -- one in February included President Barack Obama and a performance by Aretha Franklin. As in his speech when he took office six years ago, Holder laid claim to helping restore the Justice Department's reputation, a tacit shot at the Bush administration and the political scandal that hung over former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales after the firings of U.S. attorneys. Holder said he was proud of the department's work, which he said was done ""free of politicization."" He told the Justice staffers they were responsible for a new ""golden age"" at the Justice Department. He cited the department's role in the Obama administration's decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, which has quickened the acceptance of same-sex marriage. He called same-sex marriage the ""civil rights issue of our time."" He also lauded the department's active role in civil rights enforcement, which has become a major focus in light of a national spate of police shootings and excessive use-of-force incidents. While Holder listed his accomplishments, much of the ceremony also served as a reminder of the rocky relationship he has had with Republicans, who made him the first sitting cabinet member to be held in contempt of Congress and who regularly used him as the stand-in to take shots at President Obama in political fights. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder attends a meeting with the My Brother's Keeper Task Force to receive a 90-day report on its progress in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in May 2014. Holder's resignation was announced in September 2014, but his replacement, Loretta Lynch, was not confirmed by the Senate until April 23, 2015. Holder talks with his father, Eric Holder Sr., after being sworn in as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in 1993. Holder shakes hands with then-President Bill Clinton as Attorney General Janet Reno, Holder's boss, looks on at an American Bar Association event at the White House in 1999. Holder walks with Caroline Kennedy, daughter of former President John F. Kennedy, in June 2008 after they were tasked with searching for a running mate for then-Sen. Barack Obama. Holder is sworn in as attorney general by Vice President Joe Biden in February 2009. Holder's wife, Dr. Sharon Malone, is by his side. Holder announces in November 2009 that five men accused of the September 11 terror attacks would be tried in a New York civilian court. He said the government would seek the death penalty against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others. Holder is greeted by members of Congress as he arrives at the U.S. House of Representatives in May 2010. Holder answers a student's question after a speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Duquesne University School of Law in February 2011. Holder talks to reporters after meeting with U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in June 2012. Issa and Holder met to discuss releasing documents related to the botched Fast and Furious investigation. Holder takes questions at a news conference in May 2013. He said he recused himself from a national security leak investigation in which prosecutors obtained the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Holder leaves after speaking of his disappointment in a Supreme Court ruling that declared a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional in June 2013. Holder talks with Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Holder traveled to Ferguson to oversee the federal government's investigation into a police officer's shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Holder wipes away tears in September 2014 as his resignation is announced by President Barack Obama in Washington. Holder, who led the Department of Justice for six years, stayed in the position until his replacement, Loretta Lynch, was confirmed. Holder testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, January 29, on oversight of the Justice Department and reform of government surveillance programs. Holder and his wife, Sharon Malone, look on as artist Simmie Knox unveils Holder's official portrait during a ceremony at the Justice Department in Washington on Friday, February 27. Holder delivers remarks about the shooting of two police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, at the Department of Justice in Washington on Thursday, March 12.",REAL
+6374,The Homo Economicus Straw Man,"Ryan McMaken https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/homo-economicus-straw-man/ 
+To understand the marketplace, it is not necessary to believe in the existence of a selfish, profit-maximizing human. 10:24 am on October 28, 2016",FAKE
+1267,Huckabee Appearing at Trump Event in Iowa,"Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has announced plans to attend Donald Trump's fundraising rally for wounded warriors, slated to take place in Des Moines, Iowa, Thursday night - the same time as the Republican debate.
+
+""He'll do the undercard debate on Fox News and then head over to the Trump rally, which is about 10 minutes away from the debate site,"" CBN's David Brody said.
+
+Read more about Huckabee's appearance at the Trump rally at The Brody File.
+
+
+
+The news comes as Trump reaffirmed his decision to boycott the GOP debate. That event will be hosted by Fox News, which he has accused of unfair treatment.
+
+""I don't like being taken advantage of,"" Trump said in an interview Wednesday on Fox, signaling he wasn't boycotting the highly rated network completely.
+
+Trump threatened to boycott the debate if Fox kept Megyn Kelly as debate moderator, but it was statement from Fox News that led him to make his final decision.
+
+That statement said the leaders of Iran and Russia ""both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president"" and that ""Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings,"" reports The Associated Press.
+
+The other GOP candidates are hoping they can emerge Thursday night from the shadow Trump has cast over the race.
+
+""I think it'll hurt him that he's not showing up in the Iowa debate four days before the Iowa caucuses,"" former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told CNN.
+
+ 
+
+Trump's absence will likely bring more attention to Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who is hoping for a third place finish in Iowa.
+
+Rubio said Republicans ""don't have time for these kinds of distractions.""",REAL
+7725,David Fry Released From Jail,"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 3 + 12 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
+3266,Why Sen. Mitch McConnell won’t budge on the Supreme Court nomination,"No matter how much pressure President Obama and Democrats try to apply, McConnell’s allies say the Senate majority leader will never agree to hold hearings on the nomination of Merrick Garland, a federal appeals court judge, to succeed Antonin Scalia as a Supreme Court justice.
+
+Even Republicans who disagree with him think that McConnell (R-Ky.) will not retreat from that defiant stance. “I don’t see the majority leader changing his mind on this issue. He believes strongly that this should be a decision made by the next president,” said Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), one of two Republicans to call for hearings on Garland.
+
+Since Scalia’s death, and McConnell’s pronouncement hours later, Democrats have been stunned by the senator’s determined position not to consider any nominee — and his flat-out refusal to extend the traditional courtesy of meeting with the nominee.
+
+They have long viewed McConnell as purely a political tactician who always does what is best for his party’s chances at controlling the Senate. With Garland’s introduction, Democrats began pillorying Republican incumbents for rejecting any Obama choice out of hand just because there is an election eight months away.
+
+[GOP leaders to give Garland the cold shoulder during visit today]
+
+By Wednesday afternoon, a few hours after Obama introduced Garland as his pick, Democrats asserted that the ground had shifted after several Republicans signaled they would at least meet with the nominee.
+
+“The ice is cracking,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said three hours after the Rose Garden ceremony. “You’ve got a whole number of Republicans who are now willing to sit down and talk to the nominee, and I think given how strong a nominee it is, more ice is going to crack soon.”
+
+For Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the Garland nomination fight could be his last big battle before he retires at the end of the year. Reid on Wednesday relaunched the Democrats’ “McConnell Backdown Watch” in news releases and on social media.
+
+But those who know McConnell say his strategy is the synthesis of two of his lifelong, overlapping interests: political machinations of the Senate in general and the Supreme Court confirmation process in particular.
+
+On Wednesday, the GOP leader delivered a speech at a lunchtime gathering of social conservatives. The Weyrich Lunch, named for the late Paul Weyrich, an original leader of the Christian conservative movement, draws leaders of top religious organization who often use the meeting to criticize McConnell for what they see as his traditional establishment views.
+
+But in a random quirk of the schedule, McConnell’s once-a-year appearance turned into a rally-the-troops event Wednesday to deny Obama the chance to replace Scalia, who was an iconic figure among movement conservatives.
+
+The presidential environment, with front-runner Donald Trump dominating the process, has left many social conservatives fearful that their standard-bearer won’t share their values. Republicans think that the Scalia vacancy will at least encourage the religious voters to show up in November — even if it’s just to save the Senate GOP majority as a check against the possibility that Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton wins and gets the opportunity to appoint more liberals to the Supreme Court.
+
+[The Fix: What picking a white, male, moderate Harvard grad says about Obama’s legacy]
+
+GOP advisers agree that public and private polling shows a 2-to-1 ratio in favor of holding hearings and possible votes on the Garland nomination. But at the same time, they say that the intensity level on this issue is low and that voters are focused on the economy and national security as the most critical issues. The backlash from conservative voters, Republicans say, would be far worse than the small gain from going through the process with the nomination.
+
+So far, endangered Republican incumbents remain on board.
+
+“I’m hearing a lot back home about this, from both sides. I mean, the intensity level is high on the Republican side, too,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who visited seven counties over the past week and heard “intense” views from liberals and conservatives. “What I hear is both sides expressing their strong views.”
+
+Schumer predicted that McConnell is making a temporary play to appease conservatives. “He’s probably better off first making the stand and then having to buckle to public pressure than not making the stand,” he said.
+
+But that also neglects McConnell’s own fascination with the Supreme Court since his stint as a staffer for Sen. Marlow Cook (R-Ky.), who appointed a 27-year-old McConnell as his point man for several of President Richard M. Nixon’s Supreme Court nominations.
+
+Cook served as Nixon’s lead defender of Clement Haynsworth, whose nomination was blocked in November 1969 amid questions about whether he should have recused himself in cases involving his stock holdings. Nixon’s next nominee also failed to make it past the Senate.
+
+Cook encouraged McConnell to write a piece for the Kentucky Law Journal soon after those nominations. The young Senate legislative aide wrote that too often senators hid behind false attacks on trumped-up charges when their real motive was simply the political blockade of an opposing president’s choice.
+
+“Senators sought to hide their political objections beneath a veil of charges about fitness, ethics and other professional qualifications,” McConnell wrote.
+
+Political considerations, he said in the paper, should not disqualify a nominee.
+
+Now, 45 years later, McConnell has reversed that position but has at least made clear the rationale for not even holding a hearing: the next election.
+
+“This person will not be ­confirmed,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said. “So there’s no reason going through some motions and pretending like it’s going to happen, because it’s not going to happen.”",REAL
+895,"Sorry Gov. Kasich, ‘Electability’ Is Bunk","No, not the number of primaries he’s won, or the number of votes he’s gotten, or the number of delegates he has. I mean the poll numbers that show the Ohio governor is well ahead of Hillary Clinton in a November matchup, while she beats mogul Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz. There’s even one that shows him dead even with Clinton in the deep, deep-blue state of New Jersey. Isn’t that exactly the kind of candidate delegates would and should turn to if they become unbound after the first ballot? Well, that’s his argument anyway.
+
+Sorry, Gov. Kasich, but history says you’re wrong. And there may be good reasons why the “I’m electable” argument is less potent than it might appear.
+
+For party delegates deciding how much “electability” matters, it’s important to remember that such springtime numbers have a fragile half-life. As Trump’s supporters keep reminding us, Ronald Reagan was running anywhere from 18 to 23 points behind President Jimmy Carter in the spring of 1980. One reason ex-President Gerald Ford flirted with entering the race—apart from a grudge from 1976—was that, as Time magazine noted at the time, “Ford shares the fears of many Republicans that Reagan cannot win if the Democrats re-nominate Jimmy Carter.”
+
+Then in 1992, even as Bill Clinton was firming his grip on the nomination, the polls told a dismal story about his prospective election. In June, he was running third behind President George H.W. Bush and—in first place—Texas businessman Ross Perot. (Note: Springtime polls often elevate independent candidates—in 1980, John Anderson was running as high as 24 per cent against Carter and Reagan.) So there’s reason for Republicans looking at Kasich to be skeptical about these numbers.
+
+Even if the numbers are sound, there’s a reason that they might spell out the wrong strategy for the campaign: ""Electability"" isn't the message that galvanizes a party base, and for good reason.
+
+In 2000, every survey showed that Sen. John McCain would run far better against Vice President Al Gore than did George W. Bush. Around the time of New Hampshire, McCain had an 8-point lead, while Bush and Gore ran even.
+
+But McCain was a heretic. He opposed the mammoth tax cuts proposed by Bush and congressional Republicans, preferring to see some of the surplus—yes, there was a surplus back then—go toward reducing the debt. And he’d teamed up with Sen. Russ Feingold, the most liberal Democrat in the Senate, to write a bill banning most soft money from campaigns (this was the law ultimately eviscerated by the Supreme Court).
+
+That’s one of the reasons McCain won Republican voters only in New Hampshire and in his home state of Arizona. His margins elsewhere came from independents. For Republicans, he did not represent them as well as Bush did.
+
+And that goes to the heart of the issue. A party is more than a collection of individuals looking for an appealing candidate: It's an organization searching for the person who the best embodies their beliefs. When the party faithful—the people who are delegates—pull the lever, they're going to be thinking about what kind of Republican Party they want, not just which horse is likely to finish first.
+
+It makes sense for the party to think this way. Why? Because choosing a nominee simply on the basis of electability may wind up impeding the goals of that party’s base. Dwight Eisenhower was far more electable than conservative hero Robert Taft in 1952, but his two landslide elections wound up solidifying the expansion of the federal government under FDR and Harry S. Truman rather than advancing the agenda of the Republican Party. From the perspective of a Republican loyalist opposed to that expansion, Ike’s victories achieved almost nothing. (And if you throw in his appointment of Earl Warren and William Brennan, two of the most liberal Supreme Court justices in history, you could well argue that Eisenhower’s terms greatly expanded the liberal cause.)
+
+That’s why The New Republic in 2012 could look back on that era and conclude that the “relationship between the 1950s conservative movement and its contemporaneous Republican president was one of mutual ill-will. Conservatives had expected that Eisenhower, as the first Republican president since 1932, would repeal the New Deal; instead he augmented and expanded programs like Social Security, thereby giving them bipartisan legitimacy. … He approved anti-recessionary stimulus spending, extended unemployment compensation, and raised the minimum wage. He pioneered federal aid to education and created the largest public-works program in history in the form of the interstate highway system. He levied gasoline taxes to pay for the highway construction, and believed that cutting income taxes when the federal government was running a deficit would be an act of gross fiscal irresponsibility.”
+
+From that perspective, it’s unimaginable that today’s GOP, which is far more conservative than it was in Ike’s time, would turn to such an ideologically suspect candidate no matter how “electable” he or she was. In that sense, the GOP base shares the view expressed by ex-Sen. Jim DeMint when he said he’d rather have 30 strong conservatives than 50 centrist Republicans. And a lot of Republican delegates will be thinking just that way as they head into the convention in Cleveland in July.
+
+By contrast, Bernie Sanders—who in some polls runs better against Trump and Cruz than does Clinton—has at least a plausible argument that his candidacy better reflects where the Democrats are going—left—and that the new, younger voters he would draw make a good fit with that direction. For Sanders, the electability argument could work—but only because he’s already made the liberal base happy.
+
+There is one thing that Kasich does have in his favor, however: the argument that Trump doesn’t really channel the party base either, at least when it comes to ideas. Trump too is an apostate on free trade, which has been a core GOP plank until now, and seemingly on health care. Trump also may have done himself no favors by embracing an exception to the draconian abortion plank of the GOP platform. It may appeal to independents, but that’s not where the base of the party is—at least, not if you judge by the past 32 years of party platforms.
+
+But despite his long history in the conservative movement, especially as a key player in the rise of Newt Gingrich as House speaker in the 1990s, Kasich has come to be seen as a heretic too; his decision to accept Medicaid expansion made him a pariah to those in his party who believe that anything associated with “Obama-health-care-idea” should be shunned like the devil’s brew. A year ago he told a few of us journalists that “I think I have the right to try to define what conservatism means.” But if the primaries are any evidence, he has failed to do that with the rank and file of his own party.
+
+Kasich’s argument that he has governed as a conservative has had no impact in a primary where the experience of governing is apparently seen as a liability (as Scott Walker, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush learned). He has tried, for example, to argue that his Medicaid expansion is conservative at heart—it saves money, it keeps lower-income workers off welfare, it gets drug addicts out of jail and into treatment, in the spirit of conservative support of prison reform. But this argument has found no resonance in his party.
+
+Moreover, Cruz’s constant pursuit of a “no enemies to the right” strategy has made it all but impossible for the Ohio governor to make any inroads among true believing conservatives.
+
+Kasich has almost no line to the nomination, but if he’s to have any hope at all he ought to minimize his electability pitch and rejuvenate the idea that he speaks for the base. Because they’re the ones who will decide, and right now they’re thinking of the vote that happens in July, not the one in November.",REAL
+2020,"For 2016, Hillary Clinton has commanding lead over Democrats, GOP race wide open","Hillary Rodham Clinton holds a commanding 6 to 1 lead over other Democrats heading into the 2016 presidential campaign, while the Republican field is deeply divided with no clear front-runner, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
+
+Clinton trounces her potential primary rivals with 73 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, reinforcing a narrative of inevitability around her nomination if she runs. Vice President Biden is second with 12 percent, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) is third with 8 percent.
+
+Although Clinton’s favorability rating has fallen since she stepped down as secretary of state a year ago, she has broad Democratic support across ideological, gender, ethnic and class lines. Her lead is the largest recorded in an early primary matchup in at least 30 years of Post-ABC polling.
+
+The race for the Republican nomination, in contrast, is wide open, with six prospective candidates registering 10 percent to 20 percent support. No candidate has broad backing from both tea party activists and mainline Republicans, signaling potential fissures when the GOP picks a standard-bearer in 2016.
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was at or near the top of the Republican field in many public opinion surveys last year, appears to have suffered politically from the bridge-traffic scandal engulfing his administration.
+
+The new survey puts Christie in third place — with the support of 13 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents — behind Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) with 20 percent and former Florida governor Jeb Bush at 18 percent. The rest of the scattered pack includes Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.), who are at 12, 11 and 10 percent, respectively.
+
+Among strong backers of the tea party — who make up about one-fifth of the Republicans polled — Cruz has a big lead, with 28 percent, followed by Ryan, at 18 percent. But Cruz, an iconoclastic freshman senator who rose to prominence during last fall’s partial government shutdown, registers just 4 percent among those who oppose or have no opinion of the tea party.
+
+Christie is weakest among the strong tea party set, winning 6 percent of that group, but he has the backing of 15 percent of other Republicans. Bush’s base of support comes from self-identified Republicans, while Ryan’s strength comes from white evangelical Protestants, young voters and less conservative wings of the party. Rubio does particularly well among Republicans with college degrees.
+
+Christie has benefited from the perception that he has unique appeal among independents and some Democrats, a reputation the governor burnished with his 2013 reelection in his strongly Democratic state.
+
+But that image has been tarnished, the survey finds. More Democrats now view Christie unfavorably than favorably, with independents divided. Republicans, meanwhile, have a lukewarm opinion, with 43 percent viewing him favorably and 33 percent unfavorably. Overall, 35 percent of Americans see him favorably and 40 percent unfavorably.
+
+Christie’s administration is under investigation for a plot last fall to shut down local access lanes to the George Washington Bridge and cause four days of gridlock in Fort Lee, N.J., in an act of apparent political retribution against a Democratic mayor.
+
+Among the public, 46 percent say they consider the bridge episode a “sign of broader problems” with Christie’s leadership, while 43 percent say they think it was an “isolated incident.”
+
+Most Republicans give Christie the benefit of the doubt, with 57 percent saying the bridge incident is isolated. Sixty percent of Democrats say it is indicative of broader problems, while independents are almost evenly split.
+
+The 2016 presidential campaign is not likely to start taking shape until the end of this year, when candidates are expected to begin declaring their intentions. Among the Republicans, Ryan and Bush appear to be the most ambivalent about a campaign. Other Republicans not named in the poll, such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, could gain steam as potential candidates.
+
+On the Democratic side, Warren has said she will not run, although she has a loyal following among some liberal groups hoping to draft an alternative to Clinton.
+
+Polling this far out in the cycle is poor at forecasting winners of party nomination battles, but it offers important clues about current voter attitudes. Major fundraisers and party activists in particular look to such polls as indications of potential candidates’ strengths and weaknesses on the national stage as they begin to pick their horses.
+
+In a theoretical head-to-head general-election matchup, Clinton leads Christie among registered voters, 53 percent to 41 percent. This is a far larger deficit than Republicans had in the popular vote in the past two presidential elections. In 2012, President Obama beat Mitt Romney by 51 percent to 47 percent, and he beat John McCain by 53 percent to 46 percent in 2008.
+
+Christie is hurt by weak support among independents — trailing Clinton by 48 percent to 43 percent — as well as by a less consolidated party base. Although 90 percent of Democrats say they would back Clinton, only 79 percent of Republicans say they would support Christie. By contrast, Romney beat Obama among independents by five percentage points, and he won 93 percent of Republican votes.
+
+Clinton, who would become the first female president if elected, shows enormous strength among women in the new poll. She leads Christie among female voters by 59 percent to 34 percent — more than double the 11-point margin Obama held over Romney.
+
+Christie tops Clinton by a slender three points among men, 49 percent to 46 percent; Romney won men by seven percentage points.
+
+Clinton is buoyed by net-positive favorability ratings and by the intense loyalty of her supporters. Fifty-eight percent view her favorably , including 32 percent who are “strongly” favorable, while 38 percent have an unfavorable view of her.
+
+This marks a decline from a Post-ABC poll last January, as Clinton prepared to leave the State Department. At the time, 67 percent said they viewed her favorably. The drop can be attributed to declining support among independents and Republicans, as Clinton inched back into partisan politics and the news media stopped covering her as a globe-trotting diplomat and focused on her presidential ambitions.
+
+Still, Clinton’s current popularity is as high or higher than at any point during her eight-year tenure as a U.S. senator from New York, when her favorable rating in Post-ABC polling mostly hovered in the high 40s or low 50s.
+
+Although Clinton was the front-runner heading into the 2008 primary season, she barely tipped over 50 percent in two Post-ABC surveys. Clinton’s standing heading into the 2016 Democratic primaries is considerably stronger. The poll shows her with remarkable strength across demographic groups. She wins nearly three-quarters of men and women, whites and nonwhites, young and old, as well as lower- and higher- income voters.
+
+The Post-ABC poll was conducted Jan. 20-23 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults, including interviews on conventional telephones and with cellphone-only respondents. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.",REAL
+2512,Surprise! Donald Trump is wrong about immigrants and crime.,"Donald Trump's two-week-old campaign has been pretty good at sticking to two core points: defending the candidate's anti-immigrant remarks at his announcement and pretending that the companies that responded to those comments by ending their business relationships with him were, instead, rejected by him first.
+
+As a result, we've gotten a wonderful look at the unassailable way in which Trump's mind works: He's always right, until he's not, in which case he was never wrong. You were.
+
+Take the statements that started all of Trump's troubles; they came within the first few minutes of his campaign kick-off, after he rambled for a bit about the crowd and the Islamic State and Japan.
+
+""When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best,"" he said. ""They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.""
+
+With all of the furor that resulted, it's worth noting the two hallmarks of classic Donald Trump that emerged from his response. First, he unfailingly stood by the comments, despite the fallout. And second, he's wrong.
+
+On CNN on Wednesday night, he offered a defense to anchor Don Lemon.
+
+""If you look at the statistics, of people coming ... I didn't say about Mexico, I say the illegal immigrants —if you look at the statistics on rape, on crime, on everything, coming in illegally to the country, they're mind-boggling,"" he told Lemon.
+
+Every part of that is incorrect. He did say his comments about Mexico — explicitly. And data show that new immigrants —  including illegal immigrants — are actually less likely to commit crime, not more.
+
+—""Foreign-born individuals exhibit remarkably low levels of involvement in crime across their life course."" (Bianca Bersani, University of Massachusetts, 2014. Published in Justice Quarterly.)
+
+Citing Bersani's work, Pew Research created this graph, showing crime rates among the immigrant community.
+
+""The crime rate among first-generation immigrants — those who came to this country from somewhere else — is significantly lower than the overall crime rate and that of the second generation,"" they write.
+
+Since undocumented immigrants are more than a quarter of the immigrant population, it's nearly impossible that the overall-immigrant crime rate could be so much lower if the undocumented-immigrant crime rate were significantly higher.
+
+— ""There’s essentially no correlation between immigrants and violent crime."" (Jörg Spenkuch, Northwestern University, 2014. Published by the university.) He did find a small correlation between immigration and property crime, but only a slight one.
+
+— ""[I]mmigrants are underrepresented in California prisons compared to their representation in the overall population. In fact, U.S.-born adult men are incarcerated at a rate over two-and-a-half times greater than that of foreign-born men."" (Public Policy Institute of California, 2008.)
+
+— ""[D]ata from the census and a wide range of other empirical studies show that for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are the least educated. This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans, who make up the bulk of the undocumented population."" (Ruben Rumbaut, University of California, 2008. Published by the Police Foundation.)
+
+— ""Analyses of data collected from four Southwest states and the U.S. Census show that the perceived size of the undocumented immigrant population, more so than the actual size of the immigrant population and economic conditions, is positively associated with perceptions of undocumented immigrants as a criminal threat."" (Xia Wang, Arizona State University, 2014. Published in Criminology.)
+
+How did Trump get a simple point so wrong? Consider the response he offered Lemon on his most contentious assertion. Trump offers a sort of ontological rationalization for the ""rapists"" claim: People are being raped, ergo it's the immigrants' fault.
+
+Trump cited an article from Fusion. ""Eighty percent of the women coming in ... "" he says, trailing off. ""You have to take a look at these stories. ... It's unbelievable, when you look at what's going on. All I'm doing is telling the truth.""
+
+Lemon correctly points out that the story was about immigrant women being raped. ""Well,"" Trump replies, ""someone's doing the raping, Don."" In apparent disbelief, Trump adds, ""How can you say such a thing?""
+
+And there you go. Trump completely misreads a media story, turns it into a mushy stat in his head, and uses that as an excuse to bash immigrants without cause. The stat is nowhere near accurate, but that doesn't matter. When he's presented with accurate data, he offers a weird rationale — and then criticizes his critic. Perfect.
+
+In the wake of his announcement, we dubbed Trump to be ""un-fact-checkable"" for the simple reason that he so often operates outside the bounds of logical discourse. Same here. Trump has septupled down on his bad argument — assuming, as has happened so many times before, that it will all go away.
+
+It probably won't until, almost invariably, his candidacy does.",REAL
+3346,The State Department hasn’t been authorized in 13 years,"Some of the biggest issues facing America this year have the State Department at the center: Iran, Cuba, the climate talks in Paris.
+
+One that hasn’t been resolved? The State Department itself.
+
+The department hasn’t been reauthorized by Congress in more than a decade. The last time Congress passed the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, which sets rules for State, was in 2002—so long ago that the law refers to www.state.gov as an “Internet website.”
+
+The lack of authorization doesn’t mean the department can’t operate; it still gets money every year. But every two years, lawmakers are supposed to update America’s overseas priorities and how they’re executed. The last time that happened, Saddam Hussein was still alive and the Department of Homeland Security didn’t exist.
+
+“If you have a reauthorization that’s 12 or 13 years old,” said Scott Adler, a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder who has written a book on reauthorizing agencies, “that was a completely different world.”
+
+Without a reauthorization bill, Congress exerts ad hoc power over State: appropriators can specify funding for different agencies and attach restrictions to the money; lawmakers also find other routes to push their foreign-policy agendas, like inserting provisions into the Pentagon authorization. Meanwhile, the 116-page document that’s supposed to govern State grows slowly obsolete.
+
+Whenever Congress does take up the law, it tends to get hung up on politics and then flame out—often over suspiciously domestic-seeming issues, like money for groups that favor abortions overseas. Partisan fights over the U.S.’s role in the United Nations have also killed legislation.
+
+A big problem is that the members of Congress who head the foreign-policy committees—like Joe Biden and John Kerry, when they were in the Senate—tend to ignore the grunt work of the law and instead focus on the theater of the hearing room.
+
+“Guys like Biden and Kerry cared less about an authorization bill and more about their ability to impact foreign policy by being a diplomat and being a part of the group of unique statesmen, apart from the administration, that could still represent the United States globally,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a senior fellow at a Center for a New American Security who has worked for State and Department of Defense and was previously a staffer at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
+
+[UPDATE: After deadline, a State Department official defended Kerry's work as chair, noting he introduced a reauthorization bill in 2012. ""The fact that the State Authorization bill wasn’t passed by the full Senate during his tenure is more a reflection of Senate dysfunction and politics than it is of his leadership and priorities as Chairman,"" the official wrote in an email. And Philip Arsenault pointed out that Biden chaired the foreign relations committee when the 2002 reauthorization passed.]
+
+In the past it’s been the Senate where the bill gets held up; in 2013, a year after the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, the House passed a State reauthorization that strengthened embassy security by a lopsided 384-37 vote. The Senate never took it up.
+
+This year there’s actually been some Senate movement on the issue. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on State Department reauthorization in April and unanimously passed legislation in June. Senator Bob Corker, the chair of the committee, wants to increase security for overseas embassies and streamline agency operations. Among other provisions, the bill requires the White House to designate an interagency hostage recovery coordinator (which the administration has created on its own), requires the government to create a “strategy for the Middle East in the event of a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran” and expresses concern about Russia’s actions while reaffirming support for post-Soviet nations.
+
+But Corker’s effort to attach the legislation to the National Defense Authorization Act failed, and his office declined to say what his next move would be.
+
+For State-watchers, it’s just another example of a long and humbling truth: Washington cares more about the military than statecraft. While State hasn’t been reauthorized in 13 years, the Department of Defense has been authorized every year for 53 years in a row.
+
+“I chalk it up number one to the American public and Congress cares, as a whole, less about funding the State Department and more about the Pentagon,” said Goldenberg.
+
+“The Pentagon,” he said, “is much sexier stuff.”
+
+",REAL
+1750,Will Wednesday’s GOP debate move the discourse from flash to substance?,"The last time Carly Fiorina was here, the former Hewlett-Packard chief ­executive sketched out her ­foreign policy blueprint. One thousand people heard her condemn the slow training of ­anti-Islamic State forces, the ambitions of China and the wonky “tooth to tail” ratio of military power to military bureaucracy.
+
+It was sober. It was serious. It was basically ignored. Like much of this summer’s political news, Fiorina’s July speech was subsumed by Donald Trump; it inspired only a fraction of the news searches that Rolling Stone attracted last week when it quoted Trump seemingly making fun of her looks, according to Google Trends data.
+
+The rise of Trump and of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, two first-time candidates who prefer broad strokes to policy debates, has left the Republican establishment looking confused and helpless. Originally expecting a clash of ideas among a diverse, talented field, the establishment’s national security Brahmins paired up with candidates and got to work — only to be blown out of the conversation by Trump.
+
+That has left some Republicans hoping that Wednesday’s debate will break the fever — and change the tenor of the race from flashy to substantive. Hugh Hewitt, the syndicated Orange County radio host who will co-moderate the event, has promised to grill candidates about geopolitics and world leaders. If that happens, the debate will become a crucial test for Trump and Carson — and for the staying power of their campaigns.
+
+[Trump in Texas: We are a dumping ground for the rest of the world]
+
+“If this isn’t the moment to finally get serious, when the hell will it be?” asked Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), another Republican presidential contender. “Is the next time we get serious about foreign policy going to be when we get attacked? Everybody criticizes Barack Obama’s foreign policy, everybody knows he has no strategy in Iraq and Syria, but we need something specific to replace that. If we don’t hear that from the candidates, this week will have been a waste of time.”
+
+Graham is an unwilling mascot for how foreign policy has fallen out of the primary debate. Just months ago, he was engaged in a near-daily debate with fellow GOP candidate Rand Paul, the libertarian-leaning senator from Kentucky, over issues including Iran and the Islamic State. “I’m running,” Graham said, “because the world is falling apart.”
+
+On Wednesday afternoon, Graham will join former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), another longtime Washington hawk, at the four-man second-tier debate. Santorum is at least invited to a policy-focused forum later this week in Greenville, S.C., hosted by Heritage Action for America; Graham, who lives near the venue, is not.
+
+That will leave the task of vetting Carson and Trump on Wednesday to nine other candidates and the moderators. Neither front-runner has laid out a specific plan for attacking the Islamic State; Trump consistently has told audiences that he has a secret plan that he cannot share lest the enemy find out. Both candidates have been light on strategies for other crises.
+
+Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, lamented how little attention has been paid to foreign policy.
+
+
+
+“There certainly hasn’t been very serious discussion of it, because of the nature of the campaign,” McCain said. “Just rhetoric.”
+
+McCain added about Trump: “He’s not been asked tough questions. He’s said he wants to deport 11 million people. How do you do that? He hasn’t answered that question. He said in the Middle East he would go, and quote, ‘take their oil.’ I’d like to know how you do that. I think the American people deserve an explanation.”
+
+Not all of them want one — at least not yet. Trump and Carson both bombed interviews with Hew­itt — to no appreciable effect. In March, Carson appeared not to realize that the Baltic states were NATO members. Asked about the fumble, he explained that a president would have “access to a lot of experts in a lot of areas” and that he would not be stymied by gotcha questions. “You don’t want to devote all your attention to learning facts on a fact sheet,” he said. His standing has grown dramatically since then.
+
+Trump, under more scrutiny, fared even worse. He’d previously told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd that his foreign policy advice came from watching Sunday talk shows and talking to national security hawks. Faced with Hewitt’s questions, Trump seemed to confuse Iran’s Quds forces for the decidedly non-Iranian Kurds, and he couldn’t describe the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas.
+
+It was a disaster, compounded by Fiorina’s largely adroit answers to the same questions. Yet like every “disaster” of Trump’s summer, it did not halt his momentum; in poll after poll, he has held his position as front-runner of the Republican field since early July.
+
+Hewitt, meanwhile, returned to his debate prep with some new thinking about how to really draw out the candidate.
+
+“I don’t think those questions, quiz questions about knowledge, tell you anything about understanding,” Hewitt said. “Knowing names is dumb. That’s not necessary. I wish I had phrased my question to Trump as: ‘General Soleimani, who leads the Quds forces, is about to get $100 billion. What will the impact of that be?’ That’s what I wanted to ask, and it went off the rails.”
+
+It’s true that Trump’s and Carson’s actual positions have been largely unexamined — and have remained room-shaking applause lines at his rallies. Trump offers audiences a vision of an America that’s always “winning,” that learned from the Iraq war (which he came out against 16 months after the invasion), that is ready to “take the oil” from conquered Islamic State territory.
+
+“We’re going to have so many victories,” he told more than 10,000 people in Dallas on Monday, “at some point it’s going to be coming out of your ears!”
+
+He offered no more detail Tuesday in Los Angeles when he delivered what was billed as a national security speech. “We’re going to make our military so big and so strong and so great — it’s going to be so powerful that no one is going to want to mess with us,” he said.
+
+Carson has offered a lower-decibel version of the same idea, minus the oil seizures. At a rally last week in Anaheim, Calif., Carson said that some generals had told him that the Islamic State could be defeated easily if the military’s “hands aren’t tied.” In Anaheim, and at a later rally in a Houston suburb, Carson said he would oblige.
+
+“I would use every resource, including financial resources, offensive and defense resources, covert and overt activities,” he said in Texas. “I would use everything possible not to contain them but to destroy them.”
+
+For the people who study foreign policy and try to shape the national conversation, the simple answers from Carson and Trump are frustrating — yet totally understandable. The rise of the Islamic State has stoked panic among some conservative voters, but it has not defined their conversations. In the most recent Gallup poll, conducted in August, only 19 percent of voters listed a foreign policy issue as “the most important problem facing this country today.” Only 3 percent said, specifically, that the biggest problem was the Islamic State.
+
+The GOP’s hawks have tried, with little success, to sober up the base. Former vice president Richard B. Cheney and his daughter Liz reemerged last week with a book, “Exceptional,” and an argument about how the party must rediscover its inner hawk. They sold 14,000 copies, according to Nielsen’s BookScan service.
+
+Yet they were stymied by a problem bedeviling former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s White House bid: lingering ill will toward the administration of his brother, George W. Bush. Both Trump and Carson tell voters they are right to be skeptical of military adventures in the wake of the Iraq war. The debate about what a “serious” foreign policy may look like has been paused, and every other candidate wants to change that.
+
+“We haven’t even begun the substance part of the campaign,” said Paul, who has fallen in most polls but will take part in the main debate. “It’s really been about celebrity and really sophomoric insults. I think the beginning of the decline of Trump is at hand, might have begun with Perry dropping out. The media and the voters may be starting to ask: ‘Oh, my goodness, we are promoting something bad for the country. Do we want someone this unserious in charge of our nuclear arsenal?”
+
+Mike DeBonis in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+1400,Carson threatens to leave Republican Party,"The retired neurosurgeon lashed out Friday morning at reports of a recent closed-door meeting of Republican establishment leaders focused on deep divisions within the GOP electorate, particularly the continued strength of billionaire businessman Donald Trump.
+
+The Washington Post reported that the group, including Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, discussed the possibility of a ""brokered national convention"" if there isn't a clear winner in the party's months long primary election season.
+
+""If this was the beginning of a plan to subvert the will of the voters and replace it with the will of the political elite, I assure you Donald Trump will not be the only one leaving the party,"" Carson said  in a statement that referenced Trump's repeated threats to leave the GOP if treated ""unfairly.""
+
+""I pray that the report in the Post this morning was incorrect,"" Carson added. ""If it is correct, every voter who is standing for change must know they are being betrayed. I won't stand for it.""
+
+The Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to questions about the meeting and Carson's threat.
+
+A third-party run by Carson or Trump would be a nightmare scenario for the GOP. While Carson is slipping in recent polls, an independent bid that siphoned even a few percentage points away from the party's nominee could make it all but impossible for the Republican nominee to win the general election.
+
+Spokesman Doug Watts said Carson was appalled at reports suggesting that Republican leaders were trying to manipulate the party's presidential nominating process. He acknowledged that Carson, like Trump and the rest of Republican field, signed a pledge not to launch a third-party bid.
+
+""The pledge isn't meaningless,"" Watts said. ""But he signed the pledge based on everybody playing by the rules.""
+
+",REAL
+3663,Mass shootings appear to be spiraling out of control. Are they? (+video),"The San Bernardino attack Wednesday marked the 355th mass shooting of 2015. The question, which divides experts, is whether such shootings are on the rise or whether the public is more acutely aware of them.
+
+Two women comfort each other near the scene of a shooting outside a Southern California social services center in San Bernardino, Calif., where 14 people were killed Dec. 2, 2015.
+
+Responding to the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday – the deadliest since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre three years ago – President Obama warned Americans that ""we should never think that this is something that just happens in the ordinary course of events.""
+
+Unfortunately, the 355th shooting that involved four or more victims this year suggested that already may be the case: In 2015, such occurrences have averaged more than one a day. In fact, the San Bernardino attack was Wednesday's second mass shooting – the first was in Savannah, Georgia.
+
+The immediate aftermath of the attack, which killed 14 people and injured 21, took on a familiar script, from the political rhetoric of the gun control debate to what some called empty calls for “thoughts and prayers.” Those reactions have become familiar during a span of two years in America when not a calendar week has gone by without an act of mass gun violence.
+
+“We’ve reached a critical saturation point with these mass shootings, and that’s part of the numbness and confusion we feel,” says Ron Astor, a University of Southern California professor of social work who has studied mass violence for more than 30 years. “But it’s not like we’ve accepted [the level of violence]. The problem is, we haven’t figured out what to do with that moral outrage that we all have.”
+
+Overall gun violence has declined, along with violent crime, over the past two decades. But the frequency with which mass shootings have been reported this year have led to perceptions that this one, particularly shocking, type of violence may be experiencing a surge. The question, which divides experts, is whether such shootings are, in fact, running above historical norms, or whether the public is simply more acutely aware of them, given the rise of social media and the 24-hour digital news cycle.
+
+“The only increase has been in fear, and in the perception of an increase,” says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, told The New York Times.
+
+A lack of a common definition of what encompasses a mass incident complicates the ability of criminologists to reach a consensus on how much of an increase 2015’s tally represents – or what the historical average for mass shootings has been.
+
+The FBI, in a report last year, counted 160 “active shooter” situations between 2000 and 2013, including the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut; the Aurora, Colo., theater shooting; and the massacre at Fort Hood in Texas. Its findings suggested a steady increase in frequency, with a peak in 2010 of 26.
+
+Research by Harvard University suggests that the frequency of mass shootings has increased threefold since 2011, based on a survey of news reports by the liberal-leaning Mother Jones magazine. That research looked at incidents in which the victims and shooter were strangers, and where the shooter killed four or more people. The Harvard researchers found that such shootings had occurred an average of every 200 days from 1982 to 2011. Since then, they've happened once every 64 days, on average.
+
+But Professor Fox, co-author of “Extreme Killing,” slices the data differently. He says that by including situations where the shooter knows the victims – such as domestic or gang violence – the rate of annual mass shootings actually declined slightly from 2011 to 2014 when compared with the previous four years. (Addressing critiques that his method is flawed, Fox told Huffington Post that to those slain “it hardly matters whether they were killed in public or in a private home.”)
+
+Two online databases that use news reports to track shootings where four or more are wounded or killed found that there have been 355 such shootings since January, spanning 221 cities and 47 states. That’s up from 337 mass shootings in 2014, according to one, shootingtracker.com. Those databases, which also include incidences of domestic and gang violence, were created in 2013 and differ from the FBI’s old definition of mass murder, which exclusively counted fatalities, making it difficult to compare historical trends.
+
+Where criminologists do agree is that, similar to the awareness of killings of unarmed citizens by police that spiked after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo., the public’s attention to such events has been heightened and led to a desire to take action – although there is no consensus on either side of the political aisle what such action should be.
+
+“The extent that fear and anxiety increases, that may make it harder for us to come to some sort of resolution, because people feel a greater need to protect themselves, be armed or take defensive action or blame certain people and contain those people,” says Frankie Bailey, a criminologist at the State University of New York in Albany. “And at the same time, we’re dealing with competing perceptions of causation of what’s happening. And until we can agree on that, even though there’s a broader moral imperative to stop it, it’s difficult to find common ground for deciding how to deal with it.”
+
+But in fact, says Mr. Astor, US cultural norms have shifted in other ways, specifically around the acceptance of violence. After all, he says, in just the past century, the US has eliminated lynching, reduced the number of police killed on the job, and dramatically decreased domestic violence.
+
+And while media coverage has increased awareness, he argues that it hasn’t resulted in public apathy.
+
+“Media coverage has, ironically, raised our intolerance for these kinds of events,” says Astor. “We already know through social science and religion that the way to get people to respond differently is to go against our instincts, to not only talk about [the perpetrator] and their motives, but to spend an inordinate amount of time on the totality of each of the victims and who they were. We move more to action if we actually feel more closely each of the individual lives that were lost.”
+
+While the polarization surrounding the gun control debate has made political solutions difficult to attain, others also argue there are areas where progress can be made.
+
+“There’s a sense of helplessness, but it’s in some ways misplaced,” says Jonathan Metzl, director of the Center for Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tenn. “The fact is, we are going to have a very hard time, given our gun culture, stopping mass shootings. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t stem the tide of gun violence, because everyday gun violence is incredibly preventable.”
+
+Correction: This article has been updated to change Ron Astor's title. He is a professor of social work at the University of Southern California.",REAL
+5137,Is Hillary Clinton too big to indict? (+video),"Many see a double standard in the FBI's recommendation not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her use of a personal email server. But some say there's good reason for that.
+
+US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has come under fire from the FBI for ""extremely careless"" handling of classified messages, which she kept on a personal server as Secretary of State.
+
+Is Hillary Clinton too big to fail? In other words, does her status as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president protect her from criminal charges related to her use of a personal server for State Department communications?
+
+That’s what top Republicans are saying in the wake of Tuesday’s announcement by Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey that the bureau won’t recommend prosecution of Mrs. Clinton for her handling of classified emails. It’s one reason why the GOP-controlled House will hold a hearing Thursday on the FBI’s decision.
+
+That hearing could be a pivotal forum for Clinton’s foes. They’d like to portray the former secretary of State as the undeserving beneficiary of what presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump labels a “rigged system.”
+
+After all, voters already give Clinton low marks for trustworthiness. Anything that reinforces that feeling could be good for the Trump campaign. Plus, it could keep the spotlight off Mr. Trump’s own controversies – at least, for a while. For Trump supporters, extending the period of Clinton’s troubles is now job one.
+
+“This is one of the reasons why people are so dissatisfied, so upset about government. They think that people live by a different set of rules, and the Clintons, they take the candle on this one,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan during an appearance Tuesday on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show.
+
+Mr. Ryan and other Clinton critics say that the split nature of Director Comey’s press conference was disorienting.
+
+At first, the FBI director listed what Clinton did wrong, noting among other things that on her private server she’d sent and received messages that were classified at the time. Her handling of secret material was “extremely careless,” Comey said.
+
+It seemed as if he might be leading up to a recommendation that the Justice Department prosecute Clinton, after all.
+
+And then he said, in essence, “never mind."" The agency would not urge the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton, he said. “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” according to Comey.
+
+Why not? President Obama’s Justice Department has a history of pursuing officials who leak secrets, points out journalist Glenn Greenwald, who wrote some of the initial reports on classified information provided by ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The Obama administration has brought more cases under the 1917-era Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined.
+
+While the Snowden case hinged on massive leaks, many of these prosecutions didn’t. Former Central Intelligence Agency employee Jeffrey Alexander Sterling and former NSA executive Thomas Andrews Drake were both convicted of various charges related to small amounts of classified material.
+
+“Had someone who was obscure and unimportant and powerless done what Hillary Clinton did – recklessly and secretly install a shoddy home server and worked with Top Secret information on it, then outright lied to the public about it when they were caught – they would have been criminally charged long ago, with little fuss or objection,” writes Mr. Greenwald at The Intercept.
+
+Perhaps. Motivation is a factor here, however. Both Messrs. Sterling and Drake leaked information to reporters. (As did Mr. Snowden, obviously.) Clinton did not.
+
+In Clinton’s case, there is no evidence of clear and willful mishandling of intelligence, or any inference of disloyalty to the United States, according to the FBI’s Comey. That’s a big reason why she wasn’t charged.
+
+“In looking back at our investigations into the mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts,” said Comey at his Tuesday press conference.
+
+But wasn’t isn’t the same as couldn’t. Under federal law, it’s illegal to handle classified information with “gross negligence.” And Comey himself said that Clinton acted with “extreme carelessness.” Aren’t those phrases descriptions of pretty much the same thing?
+
+They might be. However, Comey also emphasized that an examination of past cases played a large role in the FBI’s decision on Clinton. What that means, according to right-leaning Washington Post pundit Jennifer Rubin, is that the FBI did indeed think Clinton had violated federal law – but they could find no instances of anyone being prosecuted under the “gross negligence” standard. They weren’t about to set a new precedent and blow up US presidential politics in the bargain.
+
+“We actually do require a high level of proof for prosecuting high government officials so as to avoid politicized harassment of public officials,” writes Ms. Rubin. “Call that a double standard of justice, but frankly it’s one with which investigators and prosecutors are very familiar.”
+
+Rubin says this result will not satisfy everyone but might still be judicious. Comey’s description of Clinton’s actions regarding her email server was scathing. Many of her defenses have been exposed as untruths. Voters can now make up their own minds. It is not the fault of the FBI that Clinton’s electoral opponent is someone with even lower public approval ratings.",REAL
+10463,"‘Go Back to Where You Claim Home,’ Kansas Lawmaker Tells Protester","‘Go Back to Where You Claim Home,’ Kansas Lawmaker Tells Protester Dion Lefler, Wichita Eagle, October 25, 2016 
+Kansas state Rep. Joe Seiwert commented on Facebook that an African-American singer who knelt while performing “The Star Spangled Banner” at a Miami Heat game should “go back” to where she claims as home. 
+Seiwert, R-Pretty Prairie, posted that comment and a longer follow-up on an anti-black meme that was originally posted to a pro-Donald Trump Facebook group and then shared by one of Seiwert’s constituents. 
+Seiwert confirmed the comments were his and said he was exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, as he says the woman in the meme did when she wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and knelt while singing the anthem. 
+{snip} 
+The photo in the meme is of Denasia Lawrence, a Miami social worker and, according to the Miami Sun-Sentinel, a part-time game-night employee of the Heat professional basketball team. The team has issued a statement saying team officials were unaware that Lawrence planned to protest when they asked her to sing the anthem at Friday’s preseason game with the Philadelphia 76ers. 
+{snip} 
+To which Seiwert responded: “I am where I claim home and like it, they want to claim it and it is their right to go where ever they like, so if they don’t like it here, I believe that their freedom completely allows them to go wherever they believe is more free and non racist if that’s what they believe.” 
+Seiwert said he didn’t see the profanity in the meme when he commented and didn’t do anything wrong. 
+“I have a personal life besides a legislative life,” he said. “Maybe it was inappropriate; I don’t believe so, because I said nothing derogatory. And I believe that (if) people are that upset with the national anthem, they can do whatever they want to on their own time, but when they’re using it on national TV to make a statement, that’s not right. 
+“I said if she (Lawrence) doesn’t like it here, then go where she would like it. What’s wrong with that?” he said. 
+Asked why a person should leave rather than try to change things where they are, Seiwert responded: “Because maybe there’s other people who don’t want their place changed.” 
+He also said he did not think his comments had anything to do with race. 
+“It don’t make any difference if they’re black, white or green, it’s the disrespect to our country,” he said. “And why does everybody put the color to it?” 
+{snip} 
+The person who made the meme took a photo of Lawrence from the web and added, in capital letters, “KNEELING WHILE SINGING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM . . . I’M SO SICK OF THESE ANTI-AMERICAN BLACKS . . . (Expletive) BLACK LIVES MATTER.” 
+Seiwert’s comment, directed at Lawrence, was: “Go back to where you claim home than (sic).” 
+{snip}",FAKE
+7937,Sufism in the Service of Empire: the Case of the Maryamiyyah,"The Greatest Name shall do its things, O heart, be of good cheer For by wile and guile the demon shall never become Solomon. 
+~ Hafiz 
+In 2014, a former, estranged disciple of Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s — an ex-Maryamiyyah member — told me that Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Russian fascist Alexander Dugin and his organization are on quite intimate terms, apparently sharing similar long-term political aspirations, and not just where their purported Traditionalism is concerned. At the time this revelation struck me as a bit odd since Nasr (and specifically his son Vali-Reza) are staunch Atlanticists –- Vali-Reza Nasr being the veritable prized subaltern ornament of Neoconservatism in America — whereas Dugin and his Eurasianism ostensibly (at least where the rhetoric is concerned) stand at the very opposite pole. The complex details of this Nasr-Dugin nexus is a discussion better left for another day, only to say that –- and as recently outlined in one academic monograph [1] — this unlikely fellowship may actually have something to do with Frithjof Schuon’s (d. 1998) underlying ideological “Aryanism” with its “de-semitization” of the theosophical Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi: an ‘Aryanism’ and ‘de-semitization’ that Dugin’s brand of occult fascism would very much be in agreement with. But let us turn here to the checkered history of the Maryamiyyah Sufi Order itself, which Seyyed Hossein Nasr currently heads [2]. 
+The Maryamiyyah Sufi Order 
+The Maryamiyyah is the Sufi order created by the Swiss writer and esotericist Frithjof Schuon (d. 1998) which stems from an Algerian sub-branch of the Shadhiliyah Sufi Order [3]. After briefly visiting North Africa in the early 1930s to meet the charismatic Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi (d. 1934) [4], from the mid 1930s onward Schuon attracted disciples of his own in his native Switzerland while as of 1936 he also began claiming to be the successor to this same Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi. The actual successors of Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, however, have adamantly denied Schuon’s claims and instead maintain that Schuon only spent a sum total of a few days with their master in the early 1930s; that he was barely even initiated into their order, only authorized to transmit the Muslim confession of belief (i.e. the shahada ); let alone being the Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi’s actual successor. This, and other related controversies, soon led to a bitter schism within the ranks of the Traditionalist school and specifically a personal falling out between Frithjof Schuon and the leading intellectual light of the movement, the Frenchman Rene Guénon (d. 1951). One recent study published in Iran suggests that Guénon’s premature death in Cairo in 1951 may have even been somehow orchestrated by the Maryamiyyah itself, thus making of Guénon’s demise possibly a murder at their hands since, had he lived longer, Guénon’s rivalry with Schuon would have certainly proven deleterious to Schuon and the Maryamiyyah’s long-term political interests [5]. 
+Particularly after Rene Guénon’s death, Frithjof Schuon’s Maryamiyyah Sufi Order (based at the time in Basle, Switzerland and now operating almost like a quasi-Masonic order) began spreading among some elite Western intellectual circles, claiming in its ranks some notable figures among the academic Islamic Studies as well as the Comparative Religious Studies establishments of the time (eg. Huston Smith, Victor Danner, Cyril Glasse, to name few). During the 1960s Schuon now claimed mystical visions of the “Divine Feminine” in the naked form of the Virgin Mary who anointed him the Avatar of the Age, the Imam Mahdi, the Return of Christ, the Fifth Buddha, the incarnations of Kalki and Vishnu, etc. Within its specific Islamicate context, Schuon’s claims, his ‘universalist’ teachings, and some of the details of his visions of the divine feminine are eerily similar to those claimed by the Baha’i founder Mirza Husayn ‘Ali Nuri Baha’u’llah (d. 1892), with other striking similarities existing between Bahaism and the Maryamiyyah that deserves a detailed comparative analysis in its own right. Today both also enjoy a very cozy relationship with the state of Israel — with the former also sharing a cozy relationship with the Gulf potentates as well as the Moroccan elite. 
+One feature of the Maryamiyyah practice which they are noted for is that they pray to Schuon as well as the Virgin Mary; and, along with offering blessings ( salawat ) to the Prophet Muhammad and the Madonna, the order also offers daily blessings ( salawat ) to Frithjof Schuon –- a feature of their practice which would certainly scandalize any orthodox Muslim, Sunni or Shi’i. Much of the Maryamiyyah’s teachings and practices also seem to share common elements with the Indian Tantric Left-Hand Path tradition. Schuon’s ‘sacred nudity’ and his spin on the nature of the ‘divine feminine’ would be easily recognizable to any genuine Tantric initiate. Be that as it may, and even under the mountains of obfuscatory terminological mumbo-jumbo that the Maryamiyyah regularly use to conceal the fact, the Left-Hand Path is never mentioned nor is it remotely the ‘orthodoxy’ that Schuon insists upon in his books; but rather it is the very same ‘heterodoxy’ he incessantly decries. To date, the Maryamiyyah have never forthrightly acknowledged this fact or dealt with it in any honest manner. 
+That said, in 1980 Schuon, his family, entourage and disciples moved from Switzerland to Bloomington, Indiana, and henceforth made it the Maryamiyyah’s headquarters. A series of scandals and public defections rocked the cult throughout the 1980s, and in the early 1990s Schuon was even briefly indicted by an Indiana Grand Jury. These scandals stemmed from Schuon’s “Primordial Gatherings” in Bloomington were scantily clad members of the Maryamiyyah –- with Schuon sometimes appearing completely naked donning only a Native American Lakota head-dress — would publicly engage in activities resembling something between a Native American pow-wow, a Sufi majlis and a Tantric maithuna ceremony. However, the scandals were very swiftly covered up and the public prosecutors and attorneys involved against the Maryamiyyah were eventually intimidated and browbeaten by unknown, behind the scenes actors to drop the case against Schuon: a case, I might add, involving allegations by ex-members of criminal sexual impropriety in the presence of minors (including paedophilia and related felonies). Schuon was also accused of forcing some of his leading disciples to divorce their wives, which he would then promptly re-marry as his “vertical” or ‘spiritual’ wives [6]. 
+Schuon died in 1998 and left a splintered, scandal-ridden organization in his wake with one group gravitating towards the figure of Martin Lings (d. 2005) in the UK — who had served as Guénon’s secretary in Cairo while also being among Schuon’s earliest disciples — with another group congregating around the figure of Seyyed Hossein Nasr in the Beltway area of the United States. More diehard Schuonites stayed in Bloomington, Indiana, and refused to recognize either Lings or Nasr as Schuon’s putative successors and continued with their syncretistic, nudist “Primordial Gatherings” as before. 
+The Maryamiyyah After Schuon and Its Marriage to Empire 
+Both Nasr and Lings brought the Maryamiyyah closer to the circles of Western elites. To some degree this was already a process in full swing during Schuon’s own lifetime. But Nasr and Lings each in turn made closer alliances with the British establishment and the American deep state, going so far on occasion to operate in the capacity of covert and clandestine fronts for Anglo-American ‘soft power’ in numerous locales throughout the Muslim world [7]. Seyyed Hossein Nasr himself was already a royalist insider in Pahlavi Iran, especially during the last two decades and a half of the Pahlavi regime, earning his post at Aryamehr (now Shahid Beheshti) University due to his intimate connections with the Shah’s royal court and Farah Pahlavi specifically. It was as a consequence of this royalist connection that he was forced to flee Iran in 1979 following the Islamic Revolution. 
+That said, while not formally accounting himself among the ranks of the Maryamiyyah, Prince Charles, for example, considers himself to be some kind of (soft) Traditionalist as well as an avid fan of the writings of Guénon, A.K. Coomaraswamy, Schuon, Nasr and other Traditionalists. It should also be pointed out that the presence of Schuonian Traditionalists among assorted reactionary monarchist groups and organizations is a regular feature of their activities virtually everywhere around the world. This would also explain their proximity to the Moroccan royalty and elite. What is not widely appreciated is their alleged closeness to the various potentates and elites in the Gulf kingdoms (who are not usually known for their love of Sufism), and particularly those in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Due to his skills and vast connections, some ex-Maryamiyyah members even contend that Martin Lings himself may have been a life-long operative of the British SIS/MI6 [8]. Then there is Seyyed Hossein Nar’s long-time association and friendship with Henry Kissinger; the fact that prominent Turkish Maryamiyyah member Ibrahim Kalin has served as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s official spokesman in Turkey for some years now; not to mention the proximity of the Maryamiyyah to the Jordanian royal family and Prince Ghazi specifically who publishes “The Muslim 500” which regularly lauds the policies of the corrupt Gulf kingdoms and celebrates Anglo-American and Israeli policy against Iran and Syria [9]. Certainly the Russian occult fascist Alexander Dugin knows all about these linkages yet continues in his association with Nasr and the Maryamiyyah, which defies conventional explanation when he, his organization and the Russian state that Dugin advises pretend to stand as geopolitical adversaries to everything Nasr, his Maryamiyyah Sufi Order and these Atlanticist connections represent. 
+On the ground in North America, the Maryamiyyah’s rank-and-file is predominantly composed of upper middle-class professionals (monied and college educated) with white upper middle-class converts being the most preferred among recruits. Liberal, left-leaning and anti-establishment members entering the order are often required to become apolitical and focus instead on the “inner life” and forgo all politics, but over time they are turned conservative (or, rather, reactionary) and instead made to support the establishment conservatism of the Republican Party. One former member has alleged that Seyyed Hossein Nasr was actively canvassing for George W. Bush among his acolytes during both the elections of 2000 and 2004 and for John McCain in 2008, proving that father and son share identical political views and that the proverbial apple does not fall far from the tree. Be that as it may, so much for the ‘Traditionalism’ that ostensibly seeks to shun the convoluted and corrupt materialist politics of the ‘Reign of Quantity’, especially the politics of the West which Traditionalists are supposed to believe represents the epitome of this ‘Reign of Quantity’ – or, as they elsewhere like calling it, “the system of the Antichrist.” The same contact also reported rampant classism, racism and similar discriminatory, elitist attitudes prevalent throughout the Maryamiyyah Sufi Order together with an almost “congenital hatred” for all forms of liberal/leftwing and social justice causes, issues and charities [10]. To deflect and smokescreen from his own role in the Pahlavi regime, Seyyed Hossein Nasr has even gone on public record recently besmirching the memory of Ali Shariati (d. 1977) and accusing him of having been a SAVAK mole [11]; this, while some former members have alleged that the FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA and other agencies of American law enforcement and the US deep state are crawling all over the Maryamiyyah Sufi Order as either full-fledged members, affiliates or sympathizers [12]. 
+As a process that began under Schuon, the Maryamiyyah has also firmly entrenched itself within important segments of the Islamic/Mid East Studies establishment of the Western Ivory Tower as well as in parts of the Muslim world, strategically placing proverbial ‘gatekeepers’ in key places. Besides Seyyed Hossein Nasr himself, William Chittick, Terry Moore, Hasan Awan, Reza-Shah Kazemi and Alan Godlas are presently just a few of those names associated with the Maryamiyyah at its highest level [13]. The Iranian scholar Gholamreza Avani, who was also at one time a student of Henry Corbin’s — who, for his part, was either generally aloof, if not hostile, to the views of Guénon, Schuon and the Traditionalists — is the most eminent figure of the Maryamiyyah Sufi Order in Iran today. 
+In recent times, allegations of abuse and cult-like behaviour continue to bedevil the Maryamiyyah’s reputation. A noteworthy incident is the one cited by Koslow (and reiterated by Shahbazi in his book) regarding the initial publication schedule for Mark Sedgwick’s ‘ Against the Modern World ’ [14]. Apparently the book was supposed to have been published by Oxford University Press earlier than 2004. Koslow claims that Sedgwick wrote to him in 2004 to say that Oxford University Press had been “…threatened by the Schuon cult with legal harassment [regarding its initial publication draft]. Rather than face the mafioso tactics thrown at him by the Schuon cult, Sedgwick…backed down and published a rather weak assessment of Schuon’s polygamous activities, criminal actions, visions of nude Virgins and delusions of grandeur…” [15] 
+Withal, it should be underscored that Sufism has not always been (nor is it in all present circumstances) in the service of First World imperial, neo-colonial agendas. Historically many individual Sufis and Sufi orders have actually stood against Western imperialism, colonialism and their lackeys. Amir Abd al-Qadir Jaza’iri (d. 1883) in Algeria, Shamil Daghestani (d. 1859) in the Caucuses, Umar Mukhtar (d. 1931) in Libya and those Iranian Sufi masters with their disciples who stood on the side of the people during the period of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-09) and later with the Islamic Revolution of 1979 are just some prominent examples of Sufis who have stood against both authoritarianism as well as the colonial powers of their day. 
+Unfortunately Western (and specifically Anglo-American) Sufism has increasingly gone in another direction, allying itself more and more with the agendas of Western establishments and the core interests of Empire in the Muslim world (the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order is another notable example here). This turn to the darkside by organized Sufism in the West may also explain one of the heretofore unnoted factors in the growth of Islamist ideologies and organizations among countless disaffected, marginalized (immigrant) Sunni Muslim communities, since such a blatant infiltration of Sufism by the Western establishment, with the inevitable corruption it brings with it, is unquestionably as big a betrayal of the ‘Tradition’ as Islamism itself is. It certainly also explains why a country like the Islamic Republic of Iran is generally weary of the influence and activities of such organizations as the Maryamiyyah Sufi Order and similar. 
+Notes 
+[1] See Gregory A. Lipton, “ De-Semitizing Ibn ‘Arabi: Aryanism and the Schuonian Discourse ,” Journal NUMEN, forthcoming. 
+[2] Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s specific circle in Maryland is sometimes also hyphenated as the Maryamiyyah-Nasriyyah (private correspondence, 2014). 
+[3] Note that the order’s name ‘Maryamiyyah’ is a bow to the Virgin Mary since in Arabic Mary is Maryam . 
+[4] See Martin Lings, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Shaikh Ahmad al-‘Alawi , Cambridge, 1993. 
+[5] Abdollah Shahbazi, maryamiya: az frithjof schuon ta seyyed hossein-i-nasr , Tehran, 1393 solar/2014: 101-2 and passim ; an article on the site regnabit.com vaguely suggests the same thing regarding the underlying reasons for Guénon’s demise. 
+[6] See Mark Koslow, Frithjof Schuon: Child Molestation and Obstruction of Justice , http://www.naturesrights.com/knowledge%20power%20book/frithjof_schuon.asp (retrieved 28 October 2016). 
+[7] Private correspondence, 2014. 
+[8] Private correspondence, 2014. 
+[9] Private, correspondence, 2016; see The Muslim 500 site online at, http://themuslim500.com/ (retrieved 30 October 2016). 
+[10] Private correspondence, 2014. 
+[11] See (in Persian) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCf3ErXFjog (retrieved 30 October 2016). 
+[12] Private correspondence, 2014. 
+[13] Private correspondence, 2016. 
+[14] Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century , Oxford University Press, 2004 
+[15] Koslow, ibid.",FAKE
+5382,US Secret Service Struggles To Find Recruits Who Haven’t Used Adderall,"The US Secret Service, under pressure due to unprecedented demand and recent controversies, has been carrying out its most ambitious recruiting campaign in over a decade, looking to find over 1,000... ",FAKE
+8964,Hallowe'en - The Day of the Aos Si,"Hallowe'en - The Day of the Aos Si 31.10.2016 And so the agricultural year dies, the underworld and our world reach the same level and there begins the time of the crossing of spirits from below to above, walking among us through the darkness of Winter. Hence the need to light fires and celebrate with festivals of light, hence the children dressed up as demons and ghouls. Humankind 2016, repeating prehistoric rites. Hallowe'en, the Day of the Witches, All Hallows' Evening, Samhain. Day of the Dead. Pumpkins, chestnuts, new wine, mulled wine. A bonfire, to keep away the evil spirits, the Aos Sí and to bring the community together, the first festival of light in the dark winter with little or no agricultural produce. What is the meaning of all these symbols? The end, or death, of the agricultural year in Europe happens around this time and as the centuries wore on, the Celtic peoples (and probably others) stipulated that at sunset on October 31 begins Samhain (pronounced So'win). This was a ""boundary time"" when the Aos Sí (bad spirits) could move easily from the underworld into our world and so bonfires were lit to cleanse the Earth from evil and to protect communities against it. Print version Font Size From the earliest times, children would go ""mumming"" or ""guising"", wearing disguises as monsters, witches or bad spirits, going from door to door asking for offerings of food and drink - or else people placed these outside their homes for the Aos Sí to take and be appeased. A time of darkness and uncertainty It was a time of darkness and uncertainty, a time when survival depended on how much food had been stored from the harvest and in what conditions it was in, a time when the wine or beer barrel was opened and which hopefully would last until Spring. It was a time when the fattened pig would be slaughtered and salted, when sausages would be made, hams smoked. It was a time before the potato, which was brought to Europe from the region of the Andes in the sixteenth century. What substituted the potato at the time was the chestnut, especially in Southern Europe, where a chestnut festivity took place at the beginning of November around a Magnus Ustus, a Great Bonfire. As with Samhain , the date became institutionalized and was fixed on November 11, the Day of Saint Martin. Medieval festivals carried across the waters In Medieval times, these festivities were still very popular in Europe and were carried over to the Americas by the Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (rest of Latin America), French and British (North America), where they continued, while they became less popular in Europe and were celebrated locally by communities. In some cases, they took on a different meaning, as was the case with Guy Fawkes' Night, or Bonfire Night, in the United Kingdom. Guy Fawkes, an English Catholic, was part of a plot to blow up barrels of gunpowder under the House of Parliament when it was to be opened by King James VI of Scotland, James I of England (who became King of both countries upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603), on November 5, 1605. The plot was discovered, Guy Fawkes committed suicide just before he was hanged (he jumped from the gallows and broke his neck) and since then the day has been remembered throughout the UK with fireworks, bonfires, chestnuts and a stuffed doll representing the ""Guy"", children wheeling the doll around the villages asking for ""A penny for the Guy"". But this does not begin in 1605 - as we see, the symbology is the same as that coming from ancient times and the burning of the guy resembles the burning of the scarecrow in Iberian communities around this time. Humankind 2016, repeating age-old rites just because it is what you do at this time of year. You dress up, you light a fire, you dance, you celebrate, you go singing round people's homes. But you also come together and the community regulates itself during the darkest and most dangerous months of the year. A good example, togetherness. It is a pity that with all the resources at our disposal, we cannot perpetuate such moments throughout the year. Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey",FAKE
+5823,C праздником ребята и спасибо вам!,"Be the First to Comment! Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Search articles",FAKE
+3404,McConnell: No lame duck confirmation,"In an interview with CNN's Dana Bash on ""State of the Union"" Sunday, the Kentucky Republican stuck by his stance that Obama's successor ought to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
+
+""I can't imagine that a Republican majority Congress in a lame duck session after the American people have spoken would want to confirm a nominee opposed by the NRA, the NFIB, and the New York Times says would move the court dramatically to the left,"" McConnell said. ""This nomination ought to be made by the next president.""
+
+He also criticized Garland, arguing that opposition to his nomination from the National Rifle Association and the National Federation of Independent Businesses shows he's too liberal.
+
+Asked if he's ruling out the possibility of a lame duck confirmation entirely, McConnell said: ""Yes.""
+
+Democrats are prodding the GOP to give Garland a confirmation vote. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada called on Republicans to ""man up and do it now"" in an appearance on NBC's ""Meet the Press."" He also predicted that McConnell will back off his pledge not to give Garland a vote. ""Mitch McConnell has said a lot of things. But his Republican senators are not going to go over that cliff with him. They're not going to do it. As I told Merrick Garland, 'This is going to break. You're going to become a Supreme Court justice.' "" Reid added: ""And in addition to the people agreeing to meet, we have Republican senators and a veteran senator who said, 'Well maybe what we should do is do it in a lame duck.' Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham, others have said that. But if they're going to do it in lame duck, do it now."" The GOP's front-runner is currently Donald Trump -- but McConnell predicted Trump wouldn't be a drag on Republican candidates. ""All of those races will be run by candidates seeking to appeal to the voters in those states. Senate races are statewide races -- you can craft your own message for your own people,"" he said. Still, asked about the violence at Trump rallies, McConnell said candidates should encourage rally attendees to engage in ""peaceful discourse"" and that doing so ""would be a very important addition to the conversation.""",REAL
+9094,"UK Interested in Strong Energy Sector, Stable Int'l Market - Ex-Minister","Get short URL 0 5 0 0 A strong energy sector will serve as an economic driver for the UK's economy, Britain's former minister for energy and climate change told Sputnik. 
+MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The United Kingdom is interested in a strong energy sector as an economic driver for the whole British economy, and consequently in the stabilization of prices on the global oil market, Charles Hendry , a former UK Minister for Energy and Climate Change, told Sputnik on Wednesday. ""Oil consumers have enjoyed low oil prices, that's been good, but ultimately we need strong oil and gas sector because the economic driver which it creates and provides. So for the United Kingdom we have seen both the upside and the downside. … There is a beginning consensus of people [in the United Kingdom] recognizing that action needs to be taken [to stabilize oil market],"" Hendry said. 
+He added, however, that few countries could take steps that would contribute to stability of the global oil market, among them are Saudi Arabia and Russia . © AP Photo/ Vahid Salemi Russian Companies Set to Get a Slice of Iranian Oil Pie The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which comprises Saudi Arabia among other 13 major oil producers, is in ongoing consultations on finalizing a preliminary agreement on oil output cuts reached in late September and aimed at stabilizing oil prices, that may see non-OPEC oil producers also joining the deal.
+The agreement, which is expected to be finalized on November 30 during OPEC's next meeting in Vienna, was reached against the backdrop of decline in oil prices, which have dropped from some $110 a barrel to the below-$50 mark since mid-2014. ...",FAKE
+125,"In West Baltimore, some residents see rioting as a rational response to daily despair","Baltimore — When a few dozen members of the 300 Men March movement paraded somberly past William Stewart's West Baltimore stoop Tuesday afternoon, spreading their organization's message of peace and calm in matching black T-shirts, the 27-year-old rolled his eyes.
+
+He begrudgingly returned their ""Peace, brother"" and ""How y'all doing?"" greetings. But he doesn't really agree with the stance the men who've dubbed themselves ""Baltimore's anti-violence movement"" — pleading for a stop to the violence and even physically separating protesters from police — have taken.
+
+It's not that Stewart is completely for the riots that erupted Monday after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died on April 19 after suffering a spinal injury while in police custody. But his personal experiences with the police and general hopelessness about the way people like he and Gray — who he says was a neighborhood acquaintance — are treated won't let him be too strongly against them, either.
+
+""Do I condone what they did? Hell no. Am I okay with it? Yes, I am.""
+
+""At the end of the day I don't condone them setting stores on fire,"" he said from his perch just blocks from where Gray lived, in the city's Gilmor Homes (locals call it ""Gilmor Projects"") public housing development, on a dark street with faded multicolored rowhouses. ""But it got the point across. Do I condone what they did? Hell no. Am I okay with it? Yes, I am. Because at the end of the day, you mean to tell me it takes 3,000 people to go all around one town for the mayor and the president to say something about what goes on in Baltimore? It should have been happening for years.""
+
+Stewart is one of the everyday people in West Baltimore who are invisible in the narrative that tends to pit the young people Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called ""thugs"" and Obama called ""criminals"" against the ministers and civil rights leaders who've made desperate pleas at press conferences for ""positive change"" and ""working together."" Stewart and others like him see the story of Gray's death and the possibility that the officers will go unpunished as utterly predictable. They may not have participated in or celebrated the violence — the looting, the setting fires, the destruction of local businesses — but they're acutely aware that these things are exactly what forced a flood of national news outlets to show up where they live. Their real despair over the all-too-familiar topic of police misconduct means that the riots, to them, were understandable. And even, in some ways, right.
+
+""Y'all mad at the police! I know! I get it!"" a middle-aged woman with a scarf wrapped around her dreadlocks shouted into the mic at a West Baltimore block party when it was her speak from atop a box that served as a makeshift stage. In fact, just about everyone gets it: among black people in West Baltimore, there's simply no question about whether grievances with the police are legitimate.
+
+This problem is well documented. The Baltimore Sun reported last September that the city has shelled out more than $5 million in the past four years in lawsuits accusing police officers of assaulting citizens — most of whom were African-American and almost all of whom were ultimately cleared of criminal charges. The article chronicles outrageous brutality against victims including a 15-year-old boy, a pregnant woman, and a 65-year-old church deacon.
+
+""Rough rides"" — when police vans are driven recklessly, sometimes seriously injuring passengers who are handcuffed and not wearing seat belts — are common enough that the Sun reported police have multiple alternative nicknames for the practice, including ""screen test"" and ""bringing them up front.""
+
+In response to the Sun's investigation into brutality lawsuits, Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez, who leads the department's Professional Standards and Accountability Bureau, told the paper that officers are mandated to police in a manner that doesn't violate constitutional rights. ""We will not let officers get away with any wrongdoing,"" Rodriguez told the Sun in 2014. ""It will not be tolerated.""
+
+The people who are living it, though, don't talk about ""wrongdoing."" They don't talk about ""police misconduct,"" or use phrases like ""a few bad policemen"" or ""racially biased policing"" that you hear in media accounts of what's become a regular national story since Michael Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, last August. When they complain, they usually just say ""the police"" — suggesting that in their minds, lawless, cruel treatment is not a recent plague or a problem with a few bad apples, but rather a permanent characteristic of the entire department's identity.
+
+A 45-year-old woman hovering half behind the screen door of a rowhouse just across from the Gilmor Homes, who didn't want to give her last name, shot nervous glances at her 23-year-old son, who sat visiting a friend in front of the house two doors down. ""I worry about him every day, about something happening to him. [Freddie Gray] could have been mine. It could have been anyone's child,"" she said, adding, ""I'm as worried about something happening to him with the police as I am about anyone else. It doesn't matter who you are. They think we're all the same. ""
+
+Stewart, who remembered Gray as a ""nice kid"" and a ""totally regular guy who never hurt anyone"" said he himself could have easily been the one with the deadly spinal cord injury after an encounter with officers.  ""That's how they treat us,"" he said. ""They'll beat the shit out of you and lock you up. I've been arrested unjustly plenty of times.""
+
+His neighbor, a 27-year-old named Melvin who only wanted to give his first name, called the Baltimore City Police Department ""the biggest gang out here.""
+
+He ticked off their tactics rather casually: ""They've slapped my face for nothing ... they take us to other districts, just to get us beat up. They'll drop you somewhere far from where you live and leave you; they'll take the battery out of your phone... We're talking years and years of this shit. People's fed up with it.""
+
+The consensus that this experience is so commonplace — that being antagonized by the police without any remedy is simply part of life for black people in certain parts of Baltimore — is jarring.  ""I haven't met a young person in their teenage years who hasn't been harassed,"" said Noche Dias, a 26-year-old youth organizer from New York City who traveled to Baltimore after Gray's death. ""I've talked to mothers who have told me their sons were killed by police, and everyone says they've been treated like a criminal. Everyone.""
+
+Baltimore's mostly young protestors who were blamed for multiple police injuries and looting Monday night — police were also caught on video throwing rocks back at them — have been dismissed as everything from wholly irrational to purely criminal.
+
+By the end of the night, police said 20 officers were injured and over two dozen people were arrested. A CVS drugstore and a senior center had been destroyed by fire. The National Guard was called in, a state of emergency was declared in the city, Baltimore public schools were closed, and a weeklong curfew was put in place.
+
+An earlier statement by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake appeared to have been ignored. ""It is idiotic to think that by destroying your city, you're going to make life better for anybody,"" she'd said Saturday, as the protests first became violent. ""Too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs who, in a very senseless way, are trying to tear down what so many have fought for.""
+
+At a press conference Tuesday, Obama echoed these sentiments, saying rioters should be ""treated as criminals"" and accusing them not only distracting from ""multiple days of peaceful protests that were focused on entirely legitimate concerns,"" but of being wholly counterproductive. ""They're destroying and undermining opportunities and businesses in their own communities,"" he said.
+
+But according to Mark D. Smaller, the president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the psychology of rioting means it shouldn't be written off quite so easily as pointless destruction. ""These groups can become the vehicle for expressing anger, rage and helplessness,"" he said in an email to Vox. ""One must keep in mind that this behavior is not simply random, but a group or community's way of communicating their frustration at chronically not being listened to, responded to, and finally marginalized.""
+
+Raphael Blake, 40, who was walking somberly alone through Tuesday's block party, sees riots as more than random. That's why, he said, while the violence saddens him, the protesters have good reason to be skeptical of the refrain of political and religious leaders — and people like the members of the 300 Men March group — that the youth must calm down and look for peaceful solutions.
+
+""If you protest peacefully, they don't give a shit""
+
+""You want to ‘sit down and compromise and talk,' but about what? These mayors, these preachers, they're trying to sugarcoat it, but the youth don't want to hear that shit, 'cause they're rubbing elbows with the oppressors. The kids might not understand the policy and politics exactly, but they understand what's happening to them. They might as well shut down the system,"" he said with a shrug. ""They're already set up.""
+
+Stewart said his personal experience — and his disappointment with the recommended peaceful approach — won't allow him to criticize those who took the response to Gray's death in a more destructive direction. ""I was one of the ones who started the peaceful protests ... the first seven days [after Gray's death], when it was fine and dandy. I walked about 101 miles in peace. But if you protest peacefully, they don't give a shit,"" he said.
+
+Some even see the riots as rational. According to Heather Gautney, associate professor in Fordham University's department of sociology and author of Protest and Organization in the Alternative Globalization Era, this analysis makes some sense. ""Critics of the rioters claim there are alternative, more rational means of making social change and realizing justice, but what are these means?"" she asked. ""The rioters in Baltimore and elsewhere know that the chances of making change within the system are few — that the system has turned against them — so they react with rage, a sense of abandon and revenge, and desire to tear it down and start anew.""
+
+""Why would you destroy your own neighborhood?"" is a question that rang out on cable news as cameras recorded protesters destroying parts of Ferguson last summer, and again as buildings burned in Baltimore Monday. The implication is that the destruction and violence is a meaningless, illogical response — hurting one's own neighborhood to protest the actions of outsiders. But Gautney said it's wrong to paint all riots as irrational outbursts. ""Riots like the ones we are seeing in Baltimore, and before that in Los Angeles in 1992, should be viewed as rational responses to injustice,"" she said. ""Riots highlight the injustice and violence that's prevalent in impoverished neighborhoods in this country.""
+
+And Stewart — as someone who lives in one of those neighborhoods — can see how that could make the destruction ultimately worth it. ""The CVS? They got insurance, they can rebuild. Freddie Gray had insurance, but it's not gonna bring back his life.""
+
+The potential to highlight injustice is why Paul, a 50-year-old born and raised in Baltimore who initially dismissed this week's looting with a resigned, ""It's teenagers. What are you gonna do?"" said that when he saw the destruction to his community, it didn't particularly hurt him. ""It was coming,"" he said. ""They probably think this is gonna end up in the history books because they caused this ruckus. And you know what? They may be right.""",REAL
+2641,DOJ will not prosecute former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson,"The Justice Department announced Wednesday that it will not prosecute former Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of an unarmed black 18-year-old, while also releasing a report faulting the city and its law enforcement for racial bias.
+
+In the criminal investigation, federal officials concluded Wilson's actions ""do not constitute prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal rights statute.""
+
+Specifically, the DOJ said there was ""no evidence"" to disprove Wilson's testimony that he feared for his safety, nor was there reliable evidence that Michael Brown had his hands up when he was shot.
+
+The report said: ""Although there are several individuals who have stated that Brown held his hands up in an unambiguous sign of surrender prior to Wilson shooting him dead, their accounts do not support a prosecution of Wilson.‎ As detailed throughout this report, some of those accounts are inaccurate because they are inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence; some of those accounts are materially inconsistent with that witness's own prior statements with no explanation, credible or otherwise, as to why those accounts changed over time.""
+
+The decision in the Aug. 9 shooting had been expected, in part because of the high legal standard needed for a federal civil rights prosecution. Wilson, who has said Brown struck him in the face and reached for his gun during a tussle, also had been cleared by a Missouri grand jury in November and later resigned from the department.
+
+But the DOJ, in its evaluation of the police department itself, said blacks in Ferguson are disproportionately subject to excessive police force, baseless traffic stops and citations for infractions as petty as walking down the middle of the street.
+
+The report also cited ""evidence of racial bias"" in emails by Ferguson officials. They included one April 2011 email that ""depicted President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee""
+
+Attention now turns to Ferguson as the city confronts how to fix racial biases that the federal government says are deeply rooted in the police department, court and jail.
+
+""Now that our investigation has reached its conclusion, it is time for Ferguson’s leaders to take immediate, wholesale and structural corrective action,"" Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday.
+
+Holder said the Justice Department had two sets of immediate recommendations: increased civilian involvement in police decision-making and police misconduct allegations, and changes to the municipal court system, including modifications to bond amounts and detention procedures, an end to the use of arrest warrants as a means of collecting owed fines and fees, and compliance with due process requirements.
+
+Similar federal investigations of troubled police departments have led to the appointment of independent monitors and mandated overhauls in the most fundamental of police practices. The Justice Department maintains the right to sue a police department if officials balk at making changes, though many investigations resolve the issue with both sides negotiating a blueprint for change known as a consent decree.
+
+""It's quite evident that change is coming down the pike. This is encouraging,"" said John Gaskin III, a St. Louis community activist. ""It's so unfortunate that Michael Brown had to be killed. But in spite of that, I feel justice is coming.""
+
+Others said the federal government's findings confirmed what they had long known and should lead to change in the police department leadership.
+
+Brown's killing set off weeks of protests and initiated a national dialogue about police use of force and their relations with minority communities.
+
+The findings of the investigation, which began weeks after Brown's killing last August, were released as Holder prepares to leave his job following a six-year tenure that focused largely on civil rights. The report is based on interviews with police leaders and residents, a review of more than 35,000 pages of police records and analysis of data on stops, searches and arrests.
+
+Fox News' Jake Gibson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4614,"Pain, anger and fear: US voters deprived of a serious presidential election","The steak and eggs had just been served at Davie’s Chuck Wagon Diner, in the suburbs of Denver, when the discussion turned to conspiracy.
+
+“They’re gonna steal the election,” said Charlene Hardcastle, a nurse in a “Colorado Women for Trump” T-shirt. “I think we’ve all seen that on the internet.”
+
+There were nods and murmurs of agreement from the assembled Republican activists.
+
+This was not so much a campaign to elect Donald Trump – it was an effort, in Hardcastle’s words, to “shake the foundations of democracy” should Hillary Clinton be declared the winner.
+
+“We can get out the vote as much as we want, but if they recalibrate that voting machine, it’s like – forget it,” she said.
+
+That was three months ago, the first of dozens of times I would hear similar complaints as I traveled the country with my colleague Tom Silverstone filming the Guardian’s Anywhere But Washington series, a 4,500-mile trip to eight mostly battleground states.
+
+Trump has fueled talk of a rigged election in the final weeks of the campaign, but the loss of faith in America’s political system has been brewing for years and bestrides both sides of the political system.
+
+Recently a Bernie Sanders supporter cornered me in a cafe in Tucson, Arizona, to explain how she believed voting machines controlled by Dick Cheney awarded Clinton an additional 3 million votes in the Democratic primary.
+
+If there’s a single theme to emerge from my encounters in states as varied as Maine, Wisconsin and Nevada, it is abject disillusionment: a feeling everywhere that the country has been deprived of a serious election.
+
+Instead of a conventional campaign, voters feel they have witnessed a Netflix political drama, an outlandish plot consisting of a Republican who is a former reality TV host, and unmasked as a sexual predator, and a Democrat who, courtesy of an aide’s husband’s sexting habit, cannot shake the shadow of an FBI investigation.
+
+This is not politics – it is entertainment. The tragedy is that while America has been binge-watching this made-for-TV spectacle, many have failed to notice how this election has shifted the ground beneath their feet.
+
+There are few places where the political landscape is turning to quicksand as quickly as McDowell, the poorest county in West Virginia.
+
+A forlorn place dotted with shuttered coalmines and abandoned homes, McDowell was once a Democratic heartland but is quickly shifting allegiance – Barack Obama won there in 2008, but Mitt Romney took it by a wide margin in 2012.
+
+This year, it was the county in which Trump won his highest percentage of primary votes. There are more than 3,000 counties in the US – none voted for Trump as overwhelmingly as McDowell, where he secured 91.5% of the vote.
+
+How can it be that a tax-avoiding billionaire who flies around in a gold-plated private jet is most popular in a place where more than half the population lives off donations from a food bank?
+
+
+
+One reason is that there is hope in his promise – dismissed by energy experts as unrealistic – to revive a coalmining industry that is no longer profitable. “We’re going to put the miners back to work,” he promised 12,000 people at a rally in West Virginia days before the state’s primary. “We’re going to get those mines open.”
+
+But the roots of Trump’s popularity in places such as this precede his candidacy; indeed, they have been decades in the making.
+
+Democrats in McDowell have lost faith in their party, which has run the local government their entire lives and controlled the White House for most of the past quarter-century.
+
+“It’s our own fault,” said Martin West, the local sheriff, a Democrat who will vote for Trump. “You keep voting for people that never come to assist you.”
+
+The combined presidencies of Bill Clinton and Obama have done little to arrest soaring inequality in America, and some would argue both presidents accelerated it.
+
+
+
+The situation in McDowell, by almost every measure, has gotten progressively worse throughout that period.
+
+Life expectancy – the starkest gauge of all – has declined continually since 1981. The high rate of suicide and the impact of the opioid epidemic have combined to put McDowell’s rates of mortality on par with Ethiopia.
+
+“None of us are that blind to think that Trump is going to save all of us,” said Brian Harrison, a coalminer who switched from Democrat to Republican eight years ago. “But at least there’s some hope.”
+
+He added of Trump: “I think he’s more for the working person than Hillary is.”
+
+There is evidence of blue-collar Democrats fleeing to Trump this election in other pockets of the industrial rust belt, including battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Hampshire.
+
+
+
+Clinton still looks poised to win those states, all of which Obama won in 2008 and 2012. But even if Trump loses these places, his candidacy has peeled back the bandage to reveal Democratic heartlands reeling from industrial decline.
+
+Democrats might reassure themselves that Trump’s populist candidacy will not be easily repeated – that no conventional Republican will abandon free-market principles, as the real estate mogul has done, to embrace protectionist trade policy.
+
+But Trump’s appeal in parts of the country where manufacturing jobs have been outsourced overseas is not always connected to his specific opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership or denunciation of China’s currency manipulation.
+
+Many voters just seem to appreciate his acknowledgment that towns and cities that were once booming are now in decay.
+
+“People don’t understand trade policies,” said José Arroyo, who has been working with the United Steelworkers to stem the exodus of Democratic voters around Youngstown, an Ohio city surrounded by abandoned, crumbling factories.
+
+“What they do understand is that they used to work at a place that paid them $80,000 a year, and now they’re working two jobs to make $30,000 a year.”
+
+Ohio is one of the Obama states that Trump does look likely to win, in part through his appeal in places such as Youngstown to white, working-class voters without a college degree who previously identified as Democrats.
+
+“I used to call myself and others robot voters,” said Leo Conway, a union worker and Democrat voting Republican for the first time in his life. “It’s the definition of insanity,” he said of his previous party loyalty. “You keep putting the same people in the same job and expect a different outcome.”
+
+I met Conway at a Republican picnic in Ohio’s Mahoning County, known as ground zero for these crossover voters. But he was not drawn to Trump’s economic message so much as his muscular military rhetoric and his anti-establishment appeal. In fact, barely anyone mentioned the area’s industrial decline, which was most acute in the 1980s.
+
+Instead, I heard people complain that illegal immigration is out of control, law and order is unraveling in the inner cities and government assistance is creating a lazy, welfare-dependent underclass.
+
+There is often a racial connotation to all of these grievances, one that Trump has exploited, sometimes explicitly, but more often than not through an ugly brand of dog-whistle politics that has stoked racial tensions.
+
+Those surfaced during my interview with Trump’s local campaign chair, Kathy Miller, who was forced to resign when we broadcast her comments.
+
+“If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault,” Miller said. “You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.”
+
+
+
+“I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected,” she added. “We never had problems like this.”
+
+Eight years after the election of the first black president, some have framed Trump’s rise as some sort of “backlash” by a silent majority of mostly white men who resent their fading political power.
+
+There could be some merit to that analysis, but there seems to me an equal if not greater counterweight from the many people who feel offended and even threatened by the Republican nominee.
+
+Most of America is not in decay, and its increasingly diverse population creates a built-in advantage to any Democrat seeking the White House.
+
+The challenge for Clinton was always going to be reconvening the broad coalition of millennials, college-educated voters and minorities that twice helped elect Obama.
+
+Clinton, hamstrung by controversy, especially over her use of a private email server for government business, has struggled to articulate a positive vision of the future that could inspire these voters.
+
+The conversations I have had in supermarkets, churches and county fairs have made plain that while many voters see Trump as an almost comical liability, their concerns with Clinton take a more somber tone.
+
+She has frequently been described to me as untrustworthy, corrupt and uncaring, the epitome of a rotten political establishment.
+
+I’ve seen neighborhoods across America, from the affluent suburbs of Waukesha, Wisconsin, to Denver’s sprawling suburbs, where well-kept lawns are dotted with “Hillary for Prison” yard signs.
+
+“That’s where she belongs,” said Bob Howe, who had one such sign outside his hunting lodge in Maine. “Frigging lying, cheating, thieving.”
+
+In the face of such distrust, Clinton’s greatest asset has turned out to be her opponent, the only major presidential candidate in modern history who has been more unpopular than her.
+
+
+
+Trump’s extraordinary campaign has scrambled the electorate, winning unusual allies while giving many of the people I met a reason to vote.
+
+There was the woman in an Ohio restaurant who showed me a picture of her two-year-old son who is partially deaf and has cerebral palsy.
+
+
+
+Her voice shook and her eyes welled with tears as she recounted the rage she felt watching Trump mocking a disabled person on TV. “I’m not a violent person,” she said. “But I just felt like strangling him.”
+
+There was the barber in Milwaukee, a city reeling from a succession of police shootings of black men, offended by Trump’s claim African Americans like him have “nothing to lose”. “We have a lot more to lose,” he said, shaking his head. “Our lives.”
+
+And there are the many people like Carmela Perez, a Mexican American who has raised seven children in a mobile home on the outskirts of Las Vegas and has dedicated the past four months to electing Clinton.
+
+If the polls are correct, it is people like her – Latinos and women – who are poised to support the Democratic nominee in record numbers this election.
+
+Perez took a leave of absence from her job washing dishes at the MGM casino to join Clinton’s army of ground operatives in Nevada after she heard the Republican nominee insult Mexicans.
+
+She said Trump’s comments about women steeled her determination, canvassing for Clinton six days a week in the desert heat. By election day, she will have knocked on 5,000 doors.
+
+“For me, this is personal,” Perez said. “I feel very offended, wounded. He stabbed me in my guts.”
+
+No billionaire owner, no shareholders. Just independent, investigative reporting that fights for the truth, whatever the cost. Why not support it? Become a Guardian US member for $49 a year, or make a contribution.",REAL
+2245,"After Kim Davis is jailed, marriage license issued","(CNN) With the clerk who had refused them in jail, William Smith Jr. and James Yates on Friday morning became the first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license in Rowan County, Kentucky.
+
+In what was their sixth attempt this summer, Smith and Yates pressed through a throng of reporters and picked up the marriage license they'd been seeking since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in June
+
+They emerged holding hands shortly after the courthouse opened at 8 a.m., as opponents booed and supporters cheered and chanted, ""Love wins!""
+
+""We're just really ... happy right now to finally get married and have it recognized here,"" Yates, who proposed to Smith this summer after a 10-year relationship, said shortly before getting the license.
+
+But County Clerk Kim Davis sent word from the county jail that she considers marriage licenses void unless she approves them, according to her lawyer, Mat Staver.
+
+""They are not worth the paper they are written on,"" he said at a Friday afternoon press conference after visiting Davis in jail.
+
+A federal judge ordered her to jail Thursday, ruling she was in contempt of court for refusing to issue the licenses and not allowing her deputies to distribute them for her.
+
+U.S. District Judge David Bunning said Davis would remain behind bars until she complies. Five of her deputies agreed Thursday to issue marriage licenses in her absence, allowing Smith and Yates -- and any other couple -- to pick theirs up Friday.
+
+How long will Davis stay in jail?
+
+Staver said Davis has no plans to resign and would remain in jail until a compromise is reached. He said his client would be willing to issue licenses if her name and title were not on them.
+
+Davis' husband, Joe, told reporters Friday that his wife was willing to stay in jail until that proposed compromise happened.
+
+""As long as it takes,"" Joe Davis said. ""Hopefully (Kentucky Gov. Steve) Beshear will have the guts to do his job.""
+
+Staver also criticized Beshear on Friday, saying, ""She is incarcerated not because of anything she's done but because of what the governor has failed to do.""
+
+He said the governor could issue an executive order to solve the problem.
+
+The state legislature could pass a law removing clerks' names from the licenses, but it won't be in session until January.
+
+Beshear said this week he won't call lawmakers for a special session to deal with the issue, adding that to do so would cost ""hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money.""
+
+Beshear on Thursday welcomed the news that Davis' deputies agreed to issue the licenses.
+
+""The future of the Rowan County Clerk continues to be a matter between her and the courts. Deputy clerks have said they will commence issuing marriage licenses beginning (Friday),"" he said. ""It appears that the citizens of Rowan County will now have access to all the services from the clerk's office to which they are entitled.""
+
+But American Civil Liberties Union attorneys contended Davis has no legal basis to avoid performing her duties as a government clerk.
+
+A federal prosecutor said it was time for Davis and her county to comply.
+
+""Government officials are free to disagree with the law, but not disobey it,"" U.S. Attorney Kerry B. Harvey said in a statement. ""The county clerk has presented her position through the federal court system, all of the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It is time for the clerk and the ccunty to follow the law.""
+
+""Her good faith belief is simply not a viable defense,"" Bunning said.
+
+Jailing was 'not what everyone was hoping for'
+
+Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, which represented Davis, said he was stunned by Thursday's ruling ordering Davis to jail.
+
+""Knowing Kim Davis and her strong Christian resolve and convictions, she may be jailed behind bars, but her conscience remains free,"" he told CNN's ""The Lead with Jake Tapper"" on Thursday.
+
+Yates, who received the marriage license with Smith on Friday, said he, too, was shocked by Davis' jailing.
+
+""That's not what everyone was hoping for,"" Yates said, adding that same-sex marriage supporters were instead hoping Davis would be fined or that she would resign. ""It was a shock, but there have been so many things that we didn't anticipate.""
+
+Daniel Canon, an attorney who was working with the ACLU on the case against Davis, said his clients had not asked for Davis to be jailed. But now that she is, he said, there should be ""some assurance that Ms. Davis is not going to continue to impose her religious beliefs.""
+
+Ryan Anderson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank, said the state legislature should remove clerks' names from the licenses as Davis has asked.
+
+""Hopefully she'll get out of jail because the state of Kentucky will realize that there are compromises we can reach that will protect both the rights of gays and lesbians to receive marriage licenses and the rights of someone like Kim Davis not to have her name on that marriage license,"" he said.
+
+Anderson acknowledged that Davis could resign, but he said she shouldn't have to.
+
+""We have a rich history in the United States of accommodating conscientious objectors,"" Anderson said. ""Kentucky accommodates conscientious objectors for other types of licensings. ... The question should be: If we can accommodate someone, why shouldn't we?""
+
+Beshear, the governor, says he has no power to remove Davis from office.
+
+Smith said the license denials had taken an emotional toll. During the fifth and final time he and Yates were rejected, people were protesting against them outside the courthouse, he said.
+
+""We had our hearts broken. That's upsetting enough, and you come out the door and they start cheering and clapping, and I just started crying. I couldn't stop for a while -- I was pretty upset,"" Smith said.
+
+The couple looked wary as journalists surrounded them as they left the courthouse Friday. One said he didn't anticipate being the first to get the license, but instead believed two other couples had intended to arrive before them.
+
+They said they were happy and elated before asking reporters to make way so they could leave.
+
+Davis said she's a different person since becoming a Christian 4½ years ago.
+
+""I am not perfect,"" she said in a statement. ""No one is. But I am forgiven.""
+
+Staver said Davis occupies a cell by herself. She slept well the first night and has been studying the Bible, he said.
+
+""She has a clean conscience even though she's incarcerated behind these bars,"" he said.",REAL
+5998,Watch President Obama Full Speech on Donald Trump Win," Watch President Obama Full Speech on Donald Trump Win Video
+Obama has extended an invitation to president-elect Donald Trump to meet with him at the White House on Thursday. Speech begins at 2 minutes in ",FAKE
+8017,"API Reports A Build, DOE A Draw","API Reports A Build, DOE A Draw by IWB · October 26, 2016 Tweet 
+You cannot make this up…one could almost think an election was nigh… 
+The “”markets”” were selling off and the VIX had just crossed into important bear territory when – surprise! – the DOE completely reversed the API report (which reported a larger than expected BUILD) and reported a DRAW. 
+Now, I am prone to thinking that nearly all “”markets”” are in full shenanigan mode right now, I confess to that, but that comes from having a lot of context and possibly too much information. 
+I knew that a major 400,000 barrel per day pipeline taking oil away from Cushing had broken a few days ago, so I wasn’t surprised to hear of a build. 
+Pipeline remains closed following oil spill in Oklahoma 
+Updated: 3:50 PM CDT Oct 25, 2016 
+(AP) — A Seaway Crude Pipeline Co. pipeline that spilled oil at a storage hub in Oklahoma remained closed Tuesday, according to a spokesman for Houston-based Enterprise Products Partners, a 50 percent owner of Seaway. 
+“As of right now we don’t have an estimate of when it will be back up,” as officials are trying to determine the cause of the spill that happened shortly before midnight Sunday in Cushing, spokesman Rick Rainey said. 
+CUSHING, Oklahoma – While crews in Cushing continue to clean up oil after a pipeline break early Monday morning, the spill is stoking fears about what may be to come for the nation’s oil hub. 
+The Seaway Pipeline is one of the largest in the nation, running 500 miles from Cushing to refineries in Freeport, Texas. Because it’s two pipelines, the owning company Enterprise could shut down one and keep oil flowing, but only 450,000 barrels per day. 
+The section of pipe that burst can carry 50,000 barrels of oil or roughly 2.75 million gallons. 
+So right on top of the reported build and right on top of a major break in one of the largest oil pipelines carrying crude AWAY from Cushing, what’s a “”market”” manipulating government lackey to do? 
+Why report a surprise DRAW, thereby spiking oil, and indeed the entire US equity “”markets” because, such as. 
+This all feels about as believable as anything else this (s)election cycle. 
+Chris",FAKE
+5761,"No, Russia Is Not ‘Isolated’ Or The ‘Enemy’","0 
+
+Someone is getting anxious . With the Establishment’s preferred candidate losing the U.S. Election, more anti-Russia propaganda has appeared yet again in attempts to instill another “divide and conquer” type message to the U.S. masses. Before reading any further, note that this article is not to defend or support Donald Trump, but rather to dis-spell myths around Russia. 
+In what used to be an unbiased media outlet, the Huffington Post, thanks to emails from Wikileaks , has proven yet to only be another puppet outlet of the banking and political cabal. 
+In the cabal’s latest desperate attempt to smear Russia as the villain, the article labeled Vladimir Putin as a dictator ruling with fear and hate. In reality, the Russian Federation is an established multi-party representative democracy with Putin receiving a nearly 90% approval rating from it’s citizens . This is compared this to the 51% approval rating Barack Obama received from the U.S. in 2016. Vladimir Putin is systematically taking down the banking cabal. 
+The article goes on to claim that “Brexit, Trump and Putin are in isolation” while also defending NATO, a well-known hostile military tool of the U.S. and political cabal. However though, reason sets in and we see through the lies and spins of the media. Let’s take a look at some established facts and see how the dust settles. 
+NATO 
+The North Atlantic Trade Organization has 28 member states and has long been used as another military option by the U.S. to try and provoke Russia and prevent them from gaining more friends throughout Europe. In reality, take a look to see how many NATO bases exist around Russia and in Europe. So, who is actually looking to create war? Russia or NATO? An image mocking the alleged threat of Russian “aggression.” 
+Brexit 
+Brexit had very, very little to do with immigration and hate. It had everything to do with Britain reclaiming sovereignty from the EU. While there have indeed been many good things that have come from the creation of the EU, it served as a blueprint for how the globalist cabal wanted to create a one world government, in which all nations belonged to a single world order. Amazingly, this information made it into The Telegraph in late 2015 , which is a mainstream media outlet in the UK that gave detailed evidence that the EU was created and funded by the US State Department and the CIA, as written by Professor Alan Sked. In Alan’s word’s: 
+“Voters in Britain need to understand that the European Union was about building a federal superstate from day one.” 
+In fact, Brexit was a direct blow to the cabal’s globalist agenda. This was not an isolated move by “angry Britains.” It was a rejection of fascism from the people of the world and the rejection is only going to continue…and Russia is leading the way. 
+Alliances 
+While the U.S. has claimed several times that Russia is “isolated,” let’s ask ourselves a very logical question. Is is possible to isolate a country that exists in 11 different time zones? Is it logical to believe a nation this big, with industry, business and military presence across these times zones to be even possibly isolated? Is it logical to believe that Russia is isolated when over 3,000 German companies do active business Russia? Remember, Germany has the EU’s best economy and is the biggest reason the EU has not financially collapsed yet. Russia exists across 11 time zones. Good luck in attempts at isolation. 
+Further exposure of the “isolation” lies comes with Russia’s multiple alliances it has made with the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization(SCO), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Eurasion Economic Union, among others. Keep in mind too that the U.S. (who is the figurehead in the cabal’s agenda) was not invited to join the nearly 60 nation alliance of the AIIB, or the BRICS and the SCO. Remember, the West’s Russia bashing is all about finance and gold. “Who owns the gold makes the rules.” With India, China and Russia mining and holding a lot of gold, they have made it no secret as to their intention of resetting the world’s financial system to a gold and asset backed system. 
+To the cabal, this must be avoided at all costs as The Federal Reserve and European Central Bank continue to print money without it being backed by anything. This fiat currency allows the cabal to control entire nations with paper money that is backed by nothing but words. A gold-backed system on the other hand will allow for more transparency and will eliminate currency manipulation as a means to suppress entire nations and sometimes, entire continents (Africa). 
+Additionally, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are well aware of the global collateral accounts and their original humanitarian purposes. The banking cabal has been fraudulently abusing those accounts for decades and is the real reason JFK was assassinated. He had issued Executive Order 11110 and signed the Green Hilton Memorial Agreement with President Sukarno of Indonesia, which was to end the Federal Reserve and CIA and replace Federal Reserve Notes with Treasury Notes, and backing those notes with gold from the global collateral accounts. These accounts also relate to the events of 9/11 . 
+While the U.S. claims Russia is isolated, we see that a few former U.S. allies have turned their backs on the U.S. and are defying the cabal that controls the U.S. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Turkey and the Philippines pivot East. So again, who is isolated? 
+Syria 
+Despite the fact that the U.N. has yet to provide undeniable proof that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on it’s own people (the only proof that has been submitted is that chemical weapons have been used, but no evidence of who used them), the cabal and it’s media outlets continue to blast Russia for being in Syria as well as making claims Russia shouldn’t be in Syria. Keep in mind, Russia was formally invited by Syria and the U.S. was not. 
+The reason so much energy is focused around toppling Assad is not because he is a “dictator,” but because of oil and gas. 
+Back in 2009, two middle eastern pipelines were proposed: 
+One that started in Qatar and went through Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq then on to Turkey [then to Europe]. The second proposed pipeline was to go through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey [then also on to Europe]. Saudi Arabia said no to the first and Syria said no to the second. 
+This “no” from Assad in Syria was certainly done to protect his Russian ally, as well as to protect himself from being overthrown . The reason that Russia has a strong interest in protecting the Assad regime is that Assad is stopping natural gas from flowing from the Persian Gulf to Europe. And since Europe is dependent on and the biggest customer of Russia’s natural gas (from the Gazprom company which holds the world’s largest supply of natural gas), it is important financially and politically for Europe to remain that way, in the view of Russia. 
+A year after Assad said no to the Qatar, Saudi Pipeline (which was US and EU backed), he called for a pipeline running from Iran (who has the world’s second largest supply of natural gas, behind Russia) through Iraq and into Syria, which then could begin supplying Europe as well. This move was supported by Russia, Iran and Iraq, which now makes up a growing alliance throughout the Middle East. Syria is once again all about control of oil and resources. 
+Soon after Assad proposed this new Iran-Iraq-Syrian pipeline, was when the “civil war” broke out and ISIL began creating havoc in the Middle East and more specifically, Syria. Once again, this situation in Syria has nothing to do with chemical weapons, but everything to do with controlling resources and thus, money. It also has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin being a “ dictator.” In reality, Putin is taking a stand against the banking and political cabal who have deep and vested interests in control over Middle Eastern oil and gas. 
+ISIL 
+Back in mid-November 2015, Vladimir Putin told the world that Russian intelligence had gathered information that 40 countries were funding ISIL and that some of those countries are G-20 members. To make things more interesting, he made this announcement at the G-20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey. The cabal knows Putin and the growing alliance he is working with has the goods on the U.S./Saudi/Israeli trained and funded terrorist outfit known as ISIL. The charade is quickly coming to an end and international exposure is drawing near. 
+Monsanto and GMO’s 
+Last September, Putin made it known that Russia stopped producing genetically modified foods and were set on becoming the world’s largest exporter of organic foods by 2020. 
+“We are not only able to feed ourselves taking into account our lands, water resources – Russia is able to become the largest world supplier of healthy, ecologically clean and high-quality food which the Western producers have long lost, especially given the fact that demand for such products in the world market is steadily growing.” 
+Taking a stand against the cabal’s Monsanto was and is a big victory for Russia and for humanity. 
+With established facts, we can see the desperate attempts to vilify Vladimir Putin are falling short of their desired outcomes. The world is seeing through it. Unfortunately, there are still many Americans believing the lies and unknowingly supporting the agenda of the banking and political cabal. We must seek peace with Russia and all other nations. We must applaud and support any and all genuine attempts to mend ties and cooperate peacefully with Russia and all nations. We can not let emotional ties to political parties or candidates disable our instinctual drive for peace and harmony to be established with other countries. Peace it must be. 
+With humanity continuing to wake up and the world continuing to reject the cabal’s agenda, we must increasingly sharpen our skills at discernment. Attempts at propaganda will continue to come even quicker now and from more angles, as the lies are being revealed at an ever-increasing rate. 
+Remember the words of Malcolm X in the days ahead: 
+“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people doing the oppressing.” 
+Lance Schuttler graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Health Science and does health coaching through his website Orgonlight Health . You can follow the Orgonlight Health facebook page or visit the website for more information and other inspiring articles.",FAKE
+7802,Anonymous: Hillary Could Be In Handcuffs In 72 Hours!,"Obama and Michelle are out, she could be hauled off in handcuffs in 72 hours! Her only hope is Tim Kaine but he’s demanding a ransom in a Quatar bank. He wants a 130 foot boat. 
+
+Federal Marshalls have Hillary under surveillance 24 hours a day! She will NOT go quietly, she has a fortress up there in Chelsea’s apartment – stuff going to ISIS! Automated guns!
+It’s own power core and atmosphere.
+",FAKE
+3033,Place your bets now. How much does someone’s world view predict their other attitudes?,"Dan Kahan and his team at the Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition project have been doing a bunch of research recently on:
+
+That’s of obvious interest to Monkey Cage readers and students of politics more generally. To what extent are our attitudes on hot-button issues simple products of our political leanings?
+
+The question is important because political decisions are in part driven by public opinion. The answer can’t be simple. We know that the correlations between issue attitudes, partisanship, and ideology have changed over time. For example, conservatives are more likely than liberals and moderates to believe that vaccines cause autism.
+
+Our beliefs about science and ideology are themselves often rigid. One trick that Kahan uses to shake us up is what he calls the MAPKIA (Make a prediction, know it all!) challenge, in which he describes an experiment on public opinion, but without revealing the results, and then asks the reader to guess what will happen.
+
+For his latest MAPKIA challenge, Kahan brings up a question from a 2015 Pew Research survey on Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society. Here’s the survey item:
+
+How powerfully (if at all) will responses to the Pew Malthusian Worldview item predict beliefs and attitudes toward technological and environmental risks like climate change, fracking, nuclear power, and GM foods? Will it be a stronger predictor than political partisanship? Will responses interact with — or essentially amplify — the explanatory power of political ideology and party identification? What will the relationship be between the Malthusian Worldview item and science literacy? Will responses be correlated with it — and if so in which direction? Will higher science literacy magnify the correlation between responses to the Malthusian Worldview and opposing perceptions of environmental and technological risks, just as higher science comprehension magnifies cultural polarization on climate change, nuclear power, fracking, and the like?
+
+If you’re interested in political polarization and attitudes toward science and policy, this is a great question. And as Kahan writes, “Perhaps my framing of the question implies an answer. But if you think I have one, then obviously mine could be wrong!”
+
+As sociologist Duncan Watts has written, everything is obvious (once you know the answer). That’s why it’s a good exercise to commit first on this one before learning the answer.
+
+Here’s an example from the Monkey Cage a couple of years ago of researchers who jumped to conclusion about public opinion which turned out not to be borne out by the data. As I wrote at the time:
+
+[Alfred Moore, Joseph Parent and Joseph Uscinski] write, “When science means nuclear weapons, innovation and winning the space race, conservatives love it.” Actually, when I last looked at the data, I found that “support for the space program does not seem particularly associated with conservative or Republican positions.” There is indeed a logic to the idea that conservatives should support the space program (see my last paragraph here) but the data don’t seem to bear this out. My quick understanding of this is that political ideologies are interesting but ultimately you can’t make sense of them: any given person’s views are a tangle with many possibilities.
+
+To return to the Malthusian worldview challenge: My point here is that political ideology and issue attitudes are tangled. Attitudes are not always carefully thought through, nor are they the pure product of political ideology or partisanship.
+
+The Malthusian worldview seems like it might be a proxy for a simple liberal/conservative dimension, at least in the United States, but maybe it aligns with other aspects of people’s worldviews. In this post, I’m purposely not giving the answer (or, to be precise, I’m not giving data that would address this question) but am rather following Kahan by leaving it unresolved, to remind us of the uncertainty we should hold before seeing hard data on the relevant public opinion questions.",REAL
+8792,For People Who Are Worried About Druckenmiller Selling His Gold…,"25 Views November 10, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
+For people who are worried about Druckenmiller selling his gold… 
+Before we get to Druckenmiller selling his gold, look at the collapse in the 30-year bond market as interest rates continue to surge! A picture is worth a thousand words… 30-Year U.S. Treasuries Continue To Plunge Today, Hitting New Lows! 
+By Bill Fleckenstein President Of Fleckenstein Capital November 10 ( King World News ) – I am going to stick with yesterday’s format and try to make sense of the market motion, then turn to the action lower in the column, and I’m doing this in response to all the questions I’ve been getting about how various markets can possibly do what they’re doing, i.e., why are they behaving as they are… IMPORTANT: To find out which company Doug Casey, Rick Rule and Sprott Asset Management are pounding the table on that already has a staggering 18.1 million ounces of gold that just added another massive deposit and is quickly being recognized as one of the greatest gold opportunities in the world – CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored 
+Great Again: Well, That Didn’t Take Long In the first place, let’s be clear, this is all guesswork, and a lot of the motion is noise and the overlapping of extremely short-term time horizons with longer ones. Be that as it may, I will give it my best shot. What we have seen over the last 48 to 72 hours is a massive psychological sea-change — albeit, almost certainly temporary — from overwhelming pessimism to overwhelming optimism regarding the prospects for the U.S. economy and all things American. That has collided with fumes from QE here, and actual QE from other counties. Said differently, a massive change in psychology has collided with free money to spark euphoria, something that can generally only last a short time. 
+As that begins to take place people begin to factor in all the things that can go right and very few of the things that can go wrong, though they don’t handicap the amount of time it takes to accomplish said things, nor the degree of difficulty in accomplishing them. For instance, if Congress magically passed a $1 trillion infrastructure project, it would take quite a good deal of time to get the permits and design what needs to happen before the first shovels hit the dirt, so to speak. Not to say that the consequences of doing the project wouldn’t be economically positive, but there is quite a long lag between planning to do it and actually starting it. 
+That matters because, at the moment, the multiple on the stock market is very high (north of 20), and it is where it is because of zero-percent rates (and the ridiculous TINA rationale). As rates rise, that tends to put pressure on valuations while it potentially causes some TINA-driven buyers to think twice, especially if they start to lose money. Given my belief that the bond bull market is finished, and that a Trump administration would likely be very unfriendly to bonds, interest rates are headed higher, something that could really be exacerbated if people’s perceptions about inflation change. 
+Buy and Hold On? The bottom line is, given the valuation of the stock market and the likely decline in bonds, it will be rather difficult for the stock market to trade on the potential for good news long enough for the good news to hit. Therefore, it is quite likely this could be the final equity market blow-off, however far it may go, sort of matching the bond blow-off of last summer. 
+There is some precedent for just this sort of stock market action, as something similar occurred right after Ronald Reagan was elected. I touched on this yesterday (and please don’t send me any emails telling me Trump is not Reagan, I totally understand that), i.e., that we have a potential sea-change in psychology from a very negative macro outlook for the U.S. economy to one that is expected to be better. Again, that doesn’t necessarily translate to higher equity prices, due to the impact of rising rates on the current level of valuations to consider. Nonetheless, after Reagan was elected there was about a two-week 10% rally in the S&P, which then reversed and a substantial decline ensued. 
+I believe if and when the stock market rally finally is perceived to have ended we could see a lot of destruction very fast, given the brittle structure that I have talked about ad nauseam. And of course a reversal in the stock market would probably impact the dollar (and metals) and we might even get a kneejerk reaction in bonds. 
+Taking Some “You” Time Nearly all markets are currently in motion, so it is best to step back, try to figure out what is really going on, think about what you are looking for that would cause you to change any positions you have, but avoid taking any action unless you are fairly certain about what is happening and why. 
+Beneath the surface of the stock market one can see that tech is being sold (that sector, especially FANG, has the highest multiples and therefore is the most vulnerable to a change in the bond market, plus a strong dollar hurts them), while “Trump plays” are being purchased. I don’t see how the market can readjust itself and really hold together because I don’t think there will be enough buyers of tech to accommodate the sellers, and thus the market overall could easily come under pressure fairly soon, but we will just have to see how that plays out. 
+WallStreet.com Basically, while we’re in this period of quasi euphoria, the market for the moment is a concept stock, like biotech, and concept stocks don’t generally bother having fundamentals, nor do people worry about them until they do, and then they decline drastically as a consequence of basically being binary. 
+With all of that out of the way I will turn to the action. Overnight the SPOOs were about 0.75% higher and the market itself was higher in the early going. We then got a quick reversal both lower then back higher, at least for the Dow (the S&P was up fractionally). The Nasdaq, however, kept leaking. By day’s end the former added over 1% while the latter lost 0.75%. 
+Away from stocks, the euphoria playbook was in use and all the outside markets were very volatile, with green paper quite strong, while oil lost 1% and bonds were initially strong, then were beat up again. The 10-year lost another 8 basis points, as yields have now risen from 1.50% to 2.12% in five weeks. 
+Precious metals gave up an overnight rally and were lower. Part of that was exacerbated by Stan Druckenmiller, who said he’d sold his gold into the election-night rally (I have covered that all in Ask Fleck). After going negative silver climbed back into positive territory, gaining 0.3%, while gold lost 1.5%. Included below are six questions and answers from the Q&A’s with Bill Fleckenstein. Bonus Q&A Question: Hi Fleck – Hope all is well and you are enjoying the interesting times we live in now. Forget Trump … let’s talk about the Indian PM who has overnight banned large currency notes and is forcing people to deposit them in lieu of newer notes. I feel that this will help to thwart black money (nearly $2 Trillion) and terrorist activities (fake notes etc.) and will also curb real estate prices. But this could change how people view Gold even more. I suspect many Indians now are conducting transactions in Gold (or Crypto currencies such as Bitcoin) which could elevate Gold demand. Import of gold in the form of coins and medallions is prohibited. Ah well, another interesting bit of info in the ever changing times we live in. Narendra Modi Bans India’s Largest Currency Bills in Bid to Cut Corruption Enjoy Answer from Fleck: “ I suspect this will boost gold demand, after the initial shakeout in a scramble for cash by real estate guys. How can anyone trust the government at all after this?” Question: Fleck, I find it odd that SLV has not broken it’s Tuesday low, 11-8-16, while GLD has. Makes me believe that the down move in GLD is just “noise” unless, or until, SLV closes below the Nov. 8th low. Is this how you “analyze” price movement in the precious metal’s complex; that is, waiting for all assets to show a confirmation in movement? Thanks Answer from Fleck: “ Silver is benefitting from being an “industrial” metal, too. That is part of the concept that is working right now.” Question: Hey Bill, 
+1. In theory Trump should be good for ‘main street’ and I am wondering if this will cause inflation to tick higher? My inclination is that it will. 
+2. In the overnight Gold futures market it seems to be trading strong and then loses that strength when the U.S. opens. My guess is that more spec. longs are unwinding and this should bring open interest down to a more normal level. I know you don’t regard the COT data as too meaningful but if Gold holds above $1,200 while spec. long open interest declines, would this be a good set up for the next leg higher? 
+Thanks! Answer from Fleck: “ 1. Yes, plus psychology is changing. 2. There are many scenarios that could be positive, not just yours.” Druckenmiller Sells His Gold Question: As far as I know Soros does trade his positions whereas Druckenmiller keeps his positions for some time. What do you make of Stan selling all his gold? 
+[Speaking to CNBC this morning, fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller – who had been pessimistic about the U.S. economy, said that he is now “quite, quite optimistic” on the U.S. economy following the election of President-elect Donald Trump. “It’s as hopeful as I’ve been in a long time.” 
+“I sold all my gold on the night of the election.” Why? “All the reasons I owned it for the last couple of years seem to be ending”, namely, expectations that inflation is now set to spike, forcing money out of safe assets – like gold and Treasurys – and into the dollar.] Answer from Fleck: “ Druck is a trader and investor. Please see the other post on this topic.” Question: In India the gold prices have doubled in few cities due to the currency note issue. Wall Street and the moron Drunkenmiller does not have a clue. Chinese demand will also accelerate due to yuan fall. Gold demand is spiking up in Asia all over. Out of touch Wall Street can control the gold prices only for few days. If this continues I will load up gold bars here in America to sell in India and rest of the Asia. There are enough rich people in India who want gold. Maybe “Stan” should sell any coins left over to me. Answer from Fleck: “ You make worthwhile points about demand, but in the short run they can be “trumped” by the herd for a little while.” Question: Interesting….I don’t recall gold miners caring a hoot when Druckenmiller declared that he was long gold. Now that he says he’s out (of gold), they obediently pay attention??? Answer from Fleck: “ LOL, for this five minutes.” *** To subscribe to Bill Fleckenstein’s fascinating Daily Thoughts CLICK HERE. 
+***KWN has now released the extraordinary audio interview with Egon von Greyerz, where he gives KWN listeners a look what is really happening behind the scenes globally and in the gold market, and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
+***ALSO JUST RELEASED: If You Are Worried About The Action In The Gold Market, Just Read This… CLICK HERE. 
+© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
+3849,The joke was that Obama wasn’t joking,"The White House Correspondents' Dinner has become a strange event. It is, ostensibly, an evening when the president and the press can come together to share a few lighthearted laughs. But it's evolved into a recital of brutal truths — albeit one neither side ever really admits happened.
+
+The joke of President Obama's performance on Saturday was that he wasn't joking. Everyone just had to pretend he was. Take this section, from the official White House transcript:
+
+The tip-off there is, ""It's the right thing to do."" That's not a joke. That's Obama's actual justification for the aggressive executive actions of his second term — ""fuck it, it's the right thing to do."" But the norms of politics are such that he typically has to frame his actions as routine, dull, even necessary. He has to search for precedent and downplay the consequences.
+
+It's only on the evening of the White House Correspondents' Dinner when he can say what everyone already knows: his actions are huge, they are controversial, they push the norms of American politics, but fuck it, at a moment when American politics seems increasingly broken, Obama has decided to just go ahead and do what he thinks is right.
+
+Then there was this line:
+
+It's funny, sure. But he's not kidding. It's just the thing Obama can't usually say. The humor is in the shock of him actually saying it.
+
+But the place where Obama stopped being polite and started getting real was when he brought out Luther, his personal anger translator. This was, itself, a way of giving up the game. The Luther joke comes from the Comedy Central sketch show Key and Peele, and the point of it is that Obama, as the first black president, is not allowed to express his anger, as America is terrified of angry black men. And so he's got Luther — the angry black man who can say what he can't.
+
+On Key and Peele, though, it really is a joke. Key plays Luther. Peele plays Obama. It's two comedians commenting on race and politics. But at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, the whole point was that the joke isn't a joke at all. It was Key playing Luther, but it was Obama playing Obama. Obama's anger translator was actually translating for Obama, working off a script that had to be approved by Obama. And so when Luther spoke, now he really was speaking for Obama:
+
+THE PRESIDENT: In our fast-changing world, traditions like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner are important. LUTHER: I mean, really, what is this dinner? (Laughter.) And why am I required to come to it? (Laughter.) Jeb Bush, do you really want to do this? (Laughter.) THE PRESIDENT: Because despite our differences, we count on the press to shed light on the most important issues of the day. LUTHER: And we can count on Fox News to terrify old white people with some nonsense! (Laughter.) ""Sharia law is coming to Cleveland. Run for the damn hills!"" (Laughter.) Y’all, it’s ridiculous. (Laughter.) THE PRESIDENT: We won’t always see eye to eye. LUTHER: Oh, and CNN, thank you so much for the wall-to-wall Ebola coverage. For two whole weeks, we were one step away from the Walking Dead. (Laughter.) And then you all got up and just moved on to the next day. That was awesome. Oh, and by the way, just if you haven’t noticed, you don’t have Ebola! (Laughter.) THE PRESIDENT: But I still deeply appreciate the work that you do. LUTHER: Y'all remember when I had that big, old hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and then I plugged it? Remember that? Which ""Obama’s Katrina"" was that one? Was that 19? Or was it 20? Because I can’t remember. (Laughter.)
+
+There are no jokes there. There's just Obama saying what he has to say and Luther saying what Obama actually believes.
+
+And what Obama believes is that the press is often sensational, trivial, and fearmongering. He thinks they hype negative stories for weeks on end and then refuse to admit their mistake when the horror fizzles. He thinks he gets the blame for catastrophes but little credit for solutions. He thinks the media has a deep bias toward negative stories (which, of course, we do).
+
+But if Obama is annoyed at the press, he is appalled at Republicans who deny climate change — and are trying to block him from taking action to stop climate change. Obama believes global warming a generational threat, and so when he sees James Inhofe, the chair of the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works, throwing snowballs on the chamber's floor, well, his thoughts on that would likely be seen as unpresidential if he gave them voice.
+
+Except on the night of the White House Correspondents' Dinner:
+
+THE PRESIDENT: The science is clear. Nine of the ten hottest years ever came in the last decade. LUTHER: Now, I’m not a scientist, but I do know how to count to 10. (Laughter.) LUTHER: We’ve got mosquitos. Sweaty people on the train, stinking it up. It’s just nasty. (Laughter.) THE PRESIDENT: I mean, look at what’s happening right now. Every serious scientist says we need to act. The Pentagon says it’s a national security risk. Miami floods on a sunny day, and instead of doing anything about it, we’ve got elected officials throwing snowballs in the Senate! LUTHER: Okay, Mr. President. Okay, I think they’ve got it, bro. THE PRESIDENT: It is crazy! What about our kids? What kind of stupid, shortsighted, irresponsible bull -- (Laughter and applause.) LUTHER: All due respect, sir. You don’t need an anger translator. (Laughter.) You need counseling.
+
+So the joke here was that Obama is so angry about the Republican Party's climate denialism that he even managed to scare his anger translator. This isn't a joke. It's just Obama's opinion, delivered with a fury that's rarely allowed in American politics.
+
+Read these sentences again: ""Every serious scientist says we need to act. The Pentagon says it's a national security risk. Miami floods on a sunny day, and instead of doing anything about it, we've got elected officials throwing snowballs in the Senate!"" Is there a single one of them that you think Obama doesn't believe? He gets right up to the first syllable of calling it ""bullshit."" But since he said it at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, he can just say he's kidding, even though everyone knows he's not kidding in the least.
+
+To paraphrase Bruce Banner, Obama's secret is he's always angry, at least about this stuff — but the White House Correspondents' Dinner is the only weekend of the year in which he's allowed to show it, because the press has promised, for that one day of the year, to pretend they didn't notice.",REAL
+7521,Scientists say weird signals from space are 'probably' aliens,"Scientists say weird signals from space are ‘probably’ aliens A team of astronomers believes that strange signals emanating from a cluster of stars are actually aliens trying to tell the universe they exist. The study, which appeared in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, analyzed the odd beams of light from 234 stars — a fraction of the 2.5 million that were observed. The bizarre beacons led the paper’s authors, Ermanno F. Borra and Eric Trottier from Laval University in Quebec, to conclude that it’s “probably” aliens. “We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis,” wrote Borra and Trottier. They also note that their findings align with the Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) hypothesis, since the mysterious activity only occurred in a tiny fraction of stars. The hypothesis also suggests that an intelligent life force would use a more sophisticated optical beacon than, say, radio waves to reveal its existence. Click link for article... **MODS - If this is a duplicate please delete / and or lock ** So apparently signals detected from 230+ stars are fitting the hypothesized parameters established for extraterrestrial intelligence. The stars in question also fit the hypothesized parameters for supporting life. Since only a small amount of stars in the area being looked at are fitting the parameters they are using that as further evidence in support of their claims. Thoughts?",FAKE
+10100,Andrew Maguire,"140230 Views November 12, 2016 BROADCAST King World News 
+For those who would like to get more information about Maguire’s trading service and/or sign up CLICK HERE or email King World News FOR DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PLAY OR DOWNLOAD AUDIOS: CLICK HERE Andrew Maguire: Whistleblower, Independent London Metals Trader & Analyst – Andrew has 35 years trading experience, both as an institutional and independent trader. He is an accomplished veteran of the markets. In 2010 Andrew Maguire went public in an exclusive King World News interview and disclosed his notification to the United States regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) of fraud being committed and price manipulation in the international gold and silver markets. This put him at the center of a storm for exposing what could be the largest fraud in history involving countries, banks and government leaders. About Us – Andrew Maguire Gold Trading, is a trading name of Goldstar Global Ltd. – A service formed with the explicit purpose of the education of precious metals traders – A wholesale bullion trading company providing the most advanced solution for the trading and storing of precious metals 
+Andrew Maguire, Independent London Metals Trader and Analyst, internationally renowned for his unique ability to read the precious metals market with his specialist knowledge and experience gained over 35 years trading in financial and commodity markets is the expert in these highly complex and competitive fields. Andrew directly oversees all of Goldstar Global services. 
+Andrew sits on the advisory board of a global physical bullion exchange and is a consultant and advisor to many international hedge fund managers, bullion banks, directors and metal traders globally, all of whom rely on his highly recognised field of expert market analysis and incredibly accurate ability to forecast. He shares his expert knowledge through our services on this website. 
+In 2009, Andrew decided to go public and provided evidence to the United States regulators relating to fraud and price manipulation that was being committed globally in the international gold and silver markets. This put him at the epicentre of a storm for exposing what could be the largest fraud in history involving countries, banks and government leaders, which is still an on going investigation and does not deter him in his determination to see fair play for all on the trading fields. 
+Andrew is currently advising many other legal firms who are involved in bringing to justice criminal acts within the financial world and rely on his expert advice and Andrew is the only accredited whistleblower of market abuse to US regulators. Andrew is regularly featured in international media, international documentaries and is guest speaker at conferences. Andrew’s quotes are constantly used on numerous blog sites around the world and his whistleblower evidence and constant efforts and lobbying to bring market manipulation to the attention of the world’s media is the topic inside many financial publications and paperbacks. 
+Our Services – Andrew Maguire Gold Trading, is a trading name of Goldstar Global Ltd. – A service formed with the explicit purpose of the education of precious metals traders 
+We provide 2 levels of service to assist institutional money managers, investors and traders in making high probability trading decisions on short, medium and long term time frames. 
+MaguireLive is our premium service providing real time access to watch Andrew Maguire, a 35 year veteran of the gold and silver markets executing his own trading decisions using his vast experience, acute analysis and use of proprietary indicators to post his trades in real time allowing members to benefit from his insight into rapidly changing market dynamics. Andrew takes high probability low risk trades which come in two forms: 
+1. FastTrades – these are scalp trades, traded quickly with tight stops and are typically closed on the same day. 
+2. SwingTrades – these are longer in duration and seek larger returns that reflect Andrew’s core vaulted bullion positions. 
+MaguireLive also offers a comprehensive weekly full market analysis which includes:- 
+• Dissecting COT, BPR and other Government reports • Full Options analysis • An in depth summary of the prior Trading week and expectations of the upcoming week. 
+MaguireLive also includes full access to our London Calling service, where members are invited to join Andrew as he starts his trading day. This early morning strategy meeting, presented in video form, is where he shares his analysis and expectations for the upcoming trading day. For those who would like to get more information and/or sign up you can do so by CLICKING HERE or emailing King World News 
+London Calling will go live on February 1st-we are accepting subscriptions now. 
+London Calling is an early morning closed video presentation prioritising the key market and currency information relating to the upcoming trading day and represented on Andrew’s charts which he explains throughout his concise video. 
+Andrew analyses all relevant technical’s, chart patterns, pivots, trend lines, support and resistance levels and strips out all the unnecessary chart chatter so that the focus is on the most probable inflection pivots or trend lines for the up coming day which he presents in his London Calling video, saving you time by providing a clear, quick visual of gold and silver in all time frames. 
+This service is aimed at fund managers, investors and traders seeking to take control of their own port folios without the associated fees . 
+London Calling assists fund managers and professional traders to make educated, high probability low risk trading decisions for their portfolios, clients and trading accounts. 
+The objective for London Calling is for members to start their trading day, armed with information they would have obtained after attending a morning strategy meeting at a trading bank enabling them to focus on the most probable short, medium or long term opportunities. 
+London Calling includes:- 
+• Analysis of all relevant technicals, chart patterns, pivots, trend lines and support and resistance levels. • Stripping out all unnecessary chart chatter so that the focus is on the most probable inflection pivots or trend lines for the up coming day saving you time by providing a clear, quick visual of gold and silver in all time frames. 
+Plus information that you will not find anywhere else, by :- 
+• Netting out the currency crosses that influence gold and silver short term trends. • Providing insight into the physical markets support levels. • Identifying potential sovereign and central bank activity. • Providing feedback from global trading desks. • Analysing the probable impact that first, second and third tier news events are likely to have on the markets. 
+Andrew works toward having all of market information collated and ready to present in his video ahead of the Asian markets close and ahead of the London Open. 
+Join our meeting this morning. 
+This service is included in MaguireLive. For those who would like to get more information and/or sign up you can do so by CLICKING HERE or emailing King World News About author",FAKE
+2608,Netanyahu warns that nuclear deal ‘paves Iran’s path’ to a bomb,"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu forcefully argued against a nuclear deal with Iran, telling a joint meeting of Congress on Tuesday that such an agreement would have the opposite effect of what the international community intends because it would effectively supply Iran with the means to produce a nuclear weapon.
+
+The agreement being negotiated “doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb; it paves Iran’s path to the bomb,” Netanyahu said. “So why would anyone make this deal?”
+
+Netanyahu's speech generated a swirl of controversy before it was even delivered and laid bare fissures between the prime minister and the Obama administration. Netanyahu used the address to paint Iran as a sponsor of terrorism that is aggressively marching across the Middle East and would exploit a deal to satisfy its own nuclear ambitions.
+
+Netanyahu said the country's ""tentacles of terror"" pose a ""grave threat"" to Israel and the world. The prime minister expressed his concerns about enriched uranium and Iranian nuclear research and development, as well as his worries about the approach taken to the international nuclear talks.
+
+""This is a bad deal. A very bad deal. We are better off without it,"" he said. ""Why should Iran’s radical regime change for the better when it can enjoy the best of both worlds? Aggression abroad, prosperity at home?""
+
+He was greeted with raucous applause in the House chamber and was interrupted numerous times by standing ovations.
+
+“We must all stand together to stop Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation and terror,"" he said, asserting that Iran and the Islamic State are ""competing for the crown of militant Islam.""
+
+[The complete transcript of Netanyahu's address to Congress]
+
+Meanwhile, Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif were talking in Geneva on Tuesday ahead of a March 24 deadline on the framework for a nuclear deal.
+
+Speaking in the Oval Office, President Obama said Netanyahu ""didn't offer any viable alternatives"" to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Obama was on a teleconference call on Ukraine and other issues with other world leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, and did not watch the speech. ""I did have a chance to take a look at the transcript, and as far as I can tell there was nothing new,"" he said.
+
+""The central question is how can we stop them from getting a nuclear weapon?"" Obama said.
+
+A senior U.S. official said that ""simply demanding that Iran completely capitulate is not a plan"" and would not garner international support.
+
+This person said the United States has been using, and continues to use, the pressure of sanctions to try to achieve a deal, and it does not trust the Iranian regime. The negotiations are insisting on transparency and ""are not an opening to a rapprochement with Iran,"" this person said, and their clear objective has been to prevent Iran from acquiring a weapon.
+
+""The logic of the prime minister’s speech is regime change, not a nuclear speech,"" this person said.
+
+Netanyahu said a deal would only ""whet Iran's appetite"" for more nuclear material. He evoked Hemingway, asserting that a deal would be a ""farewell to arms control,"" and said it would cause the Middle East to be ""criss-crossed by nuclear trip wires."" He deployed a physics lesson on uranium and centrifuges to help make his case -- one the administration said was short on specifics.
+
+The prime minister spoke of the Jewish holiday of Purim, which begins Wednesday night. It celebrates the Jewish Book of Esther, which describes a high-ranking member of the Persian empire plotting to kill Jews -- a plot  foiled by Queen Esther, who is Jewish.
+
+""Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us,"" Netanyahu said.
+
+[How to tie Moses, ""Game of Thrones"" and Iran together in one speech]
+
+Netanyahu praised Obama, publicly attempting to paper over some of the tensions that erupted between the Israeli government and the administration since the speech was announced in January. The temperature reached a boiling point last week. Netanyahu also thanked Congress for approving money for Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system.
+
+""We appreciate all that President Obama has done for Israel,"" Netanyahu said to applause. Some of what the president has done, he said, isn't known publicly, but is known to Netanyahu.
+
+""I know that my speech has been the subject of much controversy. I deeply regret that some perceive my being here as political. That was never my intention,"" Netanyahu said. He thanked Democrats and Republicans for their support for Israel. The relationship between the two countries, he said, ""has always been above politics"" and ""must always remain above politics.""
+
+House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) invited Netanyahu to speak, without consulting the White House in advance; critics have described his decision as a breach of protocol. Obama said he would not meet with the prime minister because the visit comes too close to the Israeli elections on March 17. There is bipartisan legislation before Congress that would impose additional sanctions on Iran. Obama has said he would veto the bill because it would undermine the talks with Iran.
+
+Boehner said in a statement that the speech was one that ""the American people needed to hear, plain and simple. It addressed the gravity of the threats we face and why we cannot allow a nuclear Iran, or any semblance of a path to a nuclear Iran.""
+
+The Netanyahu speech was extraordinary, both for the content and the controversy which it has generated. Last week, national security adviser Susan E. Rice said the speech would be ""destructive"" to U.S.-Israeli relations and inject partisanship into their association. She and Obama tried to turn down the temperature Monday; Obama said it was a distraction that would not permanently undermine relations.
+
+Netanyahu's political future is at stake. He faces a potentially difficult reelection to an unprecedented fourth term on March 17. The speech was delayed by five minutes in Israel, where it ran in the evening, so that the country's electoral monitors could screen it for illegal campaigning.
+
+House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who left the chamber as Netanyahu was saying goodbyes, said in a statement she was ""saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States as part of the P5 +1 nations, and saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran and our broader commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation.""
+
+Most who did not show up cited a combination of factors, including a reticence to participate in what they described as the politicization of the U.S.-Israel relationship and as a protest to the perceived affront of inviting a foreign leader without conferring with Obama.
+
+Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who faced pressure from Israel supporters after he said he was undecided on attending, said he ""anguished"" over the decision but ""finally came to the conclusion that I can go without compromising any principle.""
+
+The U.S.-Israel relationship ""supercedes this prime minister and his behavior,"" Connolly said. ""I cherish and value that relationship and want to make a statement about that.""
+
+With nearly a quarter of the 232 congressional Democrats saying they would skip the speech, some Republicans seized on the division. On Monday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) called the no-shows ""petty"" and ""immature.""
+
+""I think it's a mistake for a member of Congress to miss a speech of this importance,"" Graham said. ""The politics of the moment pale in comparison to the long-term consequences of a bad deal with Iran.""
+
+Obama and Rice gave a glimpse Monday of what a potential nuclear deal could look like. Obama said in an interview with Reuters that the United States is prepared to agree if Iran ""is willing to agree to double-digit years of keeping their [nuclear] program where it is right now and, in fact, rolling back elements of it that currently exist.... If we’ve got that, and we’ve got a way of verifying that, there’s no other steps we can take that would give us such assurance that they don’t have a nuclear weapon.”
+
+Although rarely mentioned, another complication in the nuclear talks is Israel’s own undeclared -- but widely assumed -- nuclear program and its snub of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, which oversees the spread of nuclear technology around the world. Iran has repeatedly accused the West of applying what it calls a “double standard” on nuclear issues -- a clear reference to Israel. Iran is a signatory of the NPT; Israel is not.
+
+Publicly, Israel neither confirms nor denies that it has nuclear weapons. But many experts in nuclear arms believe that Israel has extensive capabilities. In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a disgruntled Israeli technician at a suspected nuclear facility, leaked photos to a British newspaper that led foreign experts to conclude that Israel had a large nuclear arsenal. Israeli intelligence agents later arrested Vanunu in Rome.
+
+Obama said the goal is to ensure there is a year-long lag between any potential decision by Iran to build a nuclear weapon and when it can actually produce one. Netanyahu said the position doesn't go far enough.
+
+""No country has a greater stake -- no country has a greater stake than Israel in a good deal that peacefully removes this threat,"" Netanyahu said.",REAL
+9245,Robert Vaughn dies after hearing Trumphole wins,"Man gets only one missed call from Mom Local Mom reportedly called her son just once, and hasn't left any messages whatsoever asking him to call her back when he gets this. Fort Wayne, IN - Worried sick, 29-year-old Barry Oldman reported Thursday he got just one missed call from his mo... Celebs ticked at Porn Knock-Offs Two, to be exact: Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington. Tom Cruise, out promoting his latest ""Jack Reacher"" fare on the Ricki Lake show, grew furious when he found out there's a new nudie flick called ""Jack Reach-around-er"", which caters to Gay men. Donald Trump Is The Boy Who Cried ""Wrong"" After being accused of trying to make America Great Again by grabbing another pussy, the man who is trying to break the Guinness Book of world records for the most lies told during a presidential campaign, Donald Trump is crying ""Wrong"" again! Ju... Bob Dylan Secretly Longs For Teen Choice Award New York, NY - After being announced as the winner of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize for groovy songs, sources close to legendary songwriter, Bob Dylan, say that all he really wants is a surfboard trophy from the Teen Choice Awards. ""Mr. Dylan couldn'...",FAKE
+5953,Fifth Varshavyanka submarine joins Russia’s Navy | Russia & India Report,"Fifth Varshavyanka submarine joins Russia’s Navy 26 October 2016 TASS By the end of this year the Russian Navy will have the sixth submarine in the series, The Kolpino. Facebook submarines , russian navy , black sea fleet 
+The fifth non-nuclear submarine of project 636.3, The Veliki Novgorod, has joined the Russian Navy, a TASS correspondent reports from the flag-hoisting ceremony at the Admiralty Shipyards in St. Petersburg, attended by the Russian Navy’s Deputy commander, Vice-Admiral Alexander Fedotenkov and the shipyards’ CEO Alexander Buzakov. 
+""The Veliki Novgorod submarine has been through all government certification tests. All of the previous submarines in that series built for the Black Sea Fleet have confirmed the expected parameters, too,"" Buzakov said. 
+The Veliki Novgorod is the fifth in the group of six submarines of project 636.3 (Varshavyanka) built for the Black Sea Fleet. The first two - The Novorossiysk and The Rostov-on-Don were delivered in 2014, and another two, The Stary Oskol and The Krasnodar, in 2015. By the end of this year the Russian Navy will have the sixth submarine in the series, The Kolpino. The flag-hoisting ceremony is due November 25. 
+Another six Varshavyanka subs will be built at the Admiralty shipyards for the Pacific Fleet. The contract was signed at the Army-2016 forum near Moscow. The last submarine in the second group is to be delivered in 2021. 
+First published by TASS . ",FAKE
+4978,Democrats see chance to reshape map as Trump stumbles,"Salt Lake City (CNN) In a less volatile election cycle, the notion that Democrats would be on offense in red states like Utah, Arizona and Georgia would suggest the presidential race was effectively over.
+
+No one is willing to make that kind of bet in a race that has defied all political norms. But as Donald Trump's downward spiral continues in round after round of battleground polls, and the Hillary Clinton campaign has begun to dabble in ruby-red states, Democrats are clearly feeling bullish. Some are now openly mulling the possibility of a Clinton blowout in November.
+
+Even Trump acknowledged Thursday that his campaign was ""having a tremendous problem in Utah,"" a reliably Republican state where Mitt Romney won more than 70% of the vote in 2012 and the hunger for another choice ushered independent candidate Evan McMullin, who has strong ties to Utah and the LDS community, into the presidential race this week.
+
+There are far too many variables at play over the next three months for anyone to say with certainty how the race will end. The two major candidates are intensely disliked by the electorate. This week, Clinton has once again been shadowed by the controversy over her emails and her ties to the Clinton Foundation as secretary of state. Trump is a contender who has shown an extraordinary level of resilience in overcoming controversy.
+
+But Mitch Stewart, who was the Obama campaign's battleground states director in 2012, said Clinton's strengthened position could dramatically reconfigure the electoral map for Democrats -- helping to lay groundwork for a Democratic transformation of states like Arizona and Georgia that were not expected to be competitive until 2020 or 2024.
+
+""In 2008 when we won by six or seven points, we got relatively close in a state like Georgia, and would have gotten close in a state like Arizona if John McCain hadn't been senator there,"" Stewart said. ""If you add three, or four, or five points on top of that -- which is where Secretary Clinton is right now --- it makes sense that Arizona and Georgia are basically tied. That's where the race is given the strength of her candidacy and the weakness of his.""
+
+Clinton could be looking at a sweep of the map that could net as many as 380 electoral votes, Stewart said: potentially ""a massive, massive win.""
+
+The Clinton campaign is taking pains not to look overconfident at this early juncture. It says she has always hoped to organize in all 50 states to aid down-ballot Democratic candidates. Moreover, Clinton and allies are not spending any real money in those three red states yet. But they are gearing up for a six-figure investment in field operations and voter registration in Arizona and Georgia that would force Trump to defend his position in those states.
+
+""Some states may flip and some states may not change overnight, but being focused on organizing is something that's important, particularly this year because it's a dynamic race,"" said Marlon Marshall, Clinton's director of state campaigns and political engagement. ""Our goal is to figure out how we get to 270 electoral votes in the most efficient way, and if that means that there's a couple different pathways that could potentially open up, we must explore them.""
+
+The race will be still be won or lost this year in the battlegrounds of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida where Trump looked competitive before his summer series of unforced errors. A new round of polls from Quinnipiac and NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist show that she has moved into a double-digit lead over Trump in Pennsylvania, while displaying a narrow edge over Trump in Ohio. The race in Florida is a virtual tie.
+
+Trump's advisers insist that they are still poised to win Arizona, Georgia and Utah, and that they have many paths to 270 electoral votes, but his weakened position in states that Romney won easily in 2012 raises serious questions about the viability of his candidacy.
+
+Before Trump ever entered the picture, Republicans were facing a difficult electoral map, because 18 states and the District of Columbia have voted Democratic in the last six presidential cycles --- essentially giving Democrats a base of 242 electoral votes on their path to 270.
+
+Trump has boasted that his unusual appeal will put some of those reliable Democratic states in play, including Michigan (16 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes), and Wisconsin (10 electoral votes). But so far there is little evidence that is true, and few political strategists can map out a path to victory for Trump unless he wins all the states that Romney won in 2012, including Arizona, Georgia and Utah.
+
+""Trump has driven away a big chunk of voters that used to be solid Republican voters. That puts states in play that should not be in play,"" said Republican strategist Kevin Madden. ""The electoral map was already hard to begin with, given the demographic shifts in battleground states likes Colorado and Virginia. Trump just made it harder by finding a way to be more unpopular and more unlikeable than the most unpopular and unlikeable Democratic nominee in modern history.""
+
+Arizona has long held potential for Democrats because of its growing Hispanic population, but the movement in their direction has been accelerated by Trump's divisive rhetoric about Mexicans and immigration.
+
+In Georgia, Democratic groups have made a huge push to register growing numbers of minority voters, particularly targeting black and Hispanic voters who live around Atlanta. (Romney won Arizona by 10 points and Georgia by 8 points in 2012.)
+
+But it is deep-red Utah that has revealed the deep vulnerabilities of Trump's candidacy this year. Romney's 2012 showing was in part because of the strength of his candidacy among Mormon voters who make up 60% of the state's population. Republicans George W. Bush captured 72% in 2004 and John McCain 63% in 2008.
+
+Trump and Clinton were virtually tied in some Utah surveys earlier this year, and Chris Karpowitz, co-director of Brigham Young University's Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, noted that Trump has been unable to break 40% in the most recent Utah polls. Libertarian Gary Johnson has been surging in Utah, and McMullin jumped into the mix this week.
+
+""Republicans begin any election in the state of Utah with an enormous advantage,"" Karpowitz said. ""But there are many Utahans who are very conflicted, and very ambivalent about his candidacy.""
+
+Trump's biggest hurdle is among conservative Mormon voters, who have been appalled by HIS tone, as well as his call for travel ban on Muslims -- the kind of singling out of a religious minority that carries echoes of the discrimination that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints faced historically.
+
+""There is a conflict between their political identity and some core religious values that they hold dear,"" said Karpowitz. ""So when Donald Trump talks about a religious test for immigration or talks about refugees in ways that seem disrespectful or dismissive of their concerns or needs, that resonates with some members of the LDS church.""
+
+Clinton attempted to tap into to the antipathy for Trump within that huge voting bloc, by writing in the in the Deseret News this week about her opposition to Trump's call for a Muslim ban and her work on religious liberty as secretary of state.
+
+Still, back in June, Utah voters were ready to give Trump a second chance even after giving him his lowest vote total of any primary or caucus, said Kirk Jowers, an election attorney who is the former director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah.
+
+""We wanted to vote for a Republican nominee as we have done in every election since 1964, and Hillary Clinton is certainly is not the one who could steal some of those votes away in a normal election,"" Jowers said. ""But his behavior, particularly in August, has been so outrageous. He doubled down on all the things that were most offensive to us.... This doubling down that he's been doing has made it close to impossible for us to get on board.""
+
+Many of the voters who gathered at McMullin's official launch Wednesday night expressed those kinds of sentiments and their disgust with Trump.
+
+At the event to recruit volunteers to gather signatures for McMullin, who needs 1,000 by next Monday to qualify for the Utah ballot, a number of attendees said they had heard about McMullin's candidacy on Facebook and were drawn to his conservative background and his biography as a former CIA operative.
+
+Even though McMullin has little -- or no chance -- of winning the presidency, given that ballot access deadlines have passed in all but 14 states, a number of voters said they were thrilled to have a candidate they felt comfortable backing.
+
+Victoria Bearden, a 36-year-old Republican from Salt Lake City, was one of many who approached McMullin after his speech to thank him for giving her a choice.
+
+Until McMullin, she had been planning to sit out the presidential race: ""I never thought I'd have to do that, because it just shows you how awful it is. And I know there's millions of people out there feeling the same way I do.""
+
+""I thought I was a Republican, but now I'm not sure what I am,"" added Bearden, a former ballet dancer who has two young children. ""I just feel like Trump is incompetent; he's crazy, and he's going to be more divisive than where we already are as a country. I just can't trust the man.""
+
+When she's discussed McMullin's candidacy with friends, she said, some have noted that she just might be throwing away her vote and helping elect Hillary Clinton.
+
+""At this point, it's like 'Why not?'"" she said. ""Donald Trump is not going to win, and I think people need to stand up and show that they're not happy with either [candidate] ... If we go with our conscience and our heart, then you never know -- it's America. Anything is possible.""",REAL
+2191,"One year after Obama embraced Cuba, what has changed?","The US and Cuba normalized relations one year ago Thursday. Small changes have begun to percolate, but there's debate over whether that's progress.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+Los Angeles Dodgers player Yasiel Puig, from Cuba, holds a young baseball player as he poses for photos before giving a baseball clinic to children in Havana, Cuba, Wednesday.
+
+When Yasiel Puig, the Los Angeles Dodgers rightfielder and Cuban defector, was able to return home for a baseball goodwill tour this week without fear of detention by Cuban authorities, it was a sure sign of progress a year into the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba.
+
+So is the expanded public Internet access that Cubans now enjoy, something the Cuban government agreed to as part of the deal struck between President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro a year ago Thursday.
+
+And so too is the agreement the two governments reached this week to resume direct commercial airline flights between the two neighboring countries for the first time in decades.
+
+But for all that has changed in a year between the two longtime antagonists, much remains the same, both supporters and detractors of Mr. Obama’s opening to Cuba say.
+
+The five-decade-old US economic embargo on Cuba remains, with little prospect of Congress lifting it anytime soon, while critics of normalization say the policy has yielded no improvement in the Communist government’s respect for human and political rights.
+
+“Certainly it was a big step forward and there was reason for the great elation last year when President Obama and Raúl Castro announced their intention to normalize relations, and we do have positive results to see from that,” says Wayne Smith, a former US diplomat in Cuba who is now a senior fellow of the Center for International Policy’s Cuba Project in Washington. “However it’s been something of a disappointment as well,” he adds, “mainly over the inability to lift the embargo.”
+
+Not just the embargo, but the status of the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and the resolution of property claims between the two sides dating from the Cuban revolution also loom as stumbling blocks, Mr. Smith says, “These big, complex issues have us somewhat stymied.”
+
+For their part, opponents of renewed relations say the Cuban government’s continued disregard for human rights and political freedoms is the strongest argument against closer ties – and proof that no amount of concessions will prompt the Castro regime to change.
+
+“What we’ve seen instead of improvements is a huge spike in repression and in violence against the political opposition, repeated arrests of the same dissidents, and churches being shut down,” says Ana Quintana, a Latin America policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “Because the Obama administration awarded these renewed relations without demanding anything in return,” she adds, “the US has lost its position of leverage.”
+
+Obama continues to call for an end to the embargo, which he considers a Cold War relic, but no one expects the Republican-controlled Congress to oblige him – particularly not in an election year.
+
+As a result, analysts like Smith say they expect “official” change to continue slowly – even as a transformation in the relationship between the two countries accelerates as “people-to-people” contacts expand.
+
+“A Congress rushing to lift the embargo isn’t going to happen,” Smith says, “but already we’ve seen a notable impact on the personal relations between Cubans and Americans, and that’s going to continue.”
+
+More Americans are traveling to Cuba – although the embargo still prevents them from visiting the island (and spending money) simply as tourists. Academic exchanges and “educational tours” are quickly expanding. At the same time, the improved public Wi-Fi availability in Cuba and eased travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans mean that contact between the island and Cuban communities in the US now is much like that for other immigrant communities from around the hemisphere.
+
+Some members of Congress marked the first anniversary of Obama’s opening to Cuba by hailing the impact of the “small steps” that Cubans and American have taken toward each other.
+
+“As American business leaders, scientists, academics, and artists are increasingly engaging in purposeful travel to Cuba, they are forging important new relationships with the Cuban people and supporting the country’s rising entrepreneurial class,” said Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, in a statement Thursday.
+
+He called on Congress to “take steps to make the Obama administration’s advances permanent and lift all restrictions on American citizens traveling to Cuba.”
+
+There is also evidence that the normalization of bilateral relations has prompted a surge in Cubans migrating to the US. A widespread fear in Cuba that “normal” relations will prompt the US to soon drop the special immigration status for Cubans reaching the US has led nearly 50,000 island residents to leave for the US this year. Cubans who reach US soil are allowed to stay and are granted residency, while those who are caught at sea are turned back. The number of Cubans arriving this year is more than double last year’s total – and about five times higher than in 2011.
+
+Senator Cardin said the normalization of relations has resulted in “small but important changes on the island.” But he noted that the government continues to jail political activists and restrict “the emergence of a free press,” and he called on the Cuban government to make “meaningful progress” in “the second year of renewed engagement.”
+
+Critics say there's no reason to expect Cuba to change.
+
+“A year of stepped-up attacks on the Cuban people’s freedoms should not leave anyone thinking that somehow there will be a positive transition in the second year” of renewed relations, says Ms. Quintana of Heritage.
+
+As for the power of people-to-people engagement, Quintana says she doubts it can have much impact in the case of Cuba, where she says a fearful government does its best to limit contact between average Cubans and visiting Americans.
+
+“Spending time with Americans is considered subversive activity, so anyone who does it in an unofficial setting is suspect,” she says.
+
+But there is one American she would like to see visit the island: Barack Obama.
+
+“President Obama says he hopes to visit Cuba in 2016, and I’m all for it – if he insists on meeting and marching with the dissidents,” she says. “That’s the kind of personal engagement that could be a transformative moment in this relationship.”",REAL
+5916,WATCH: Joe Biden senses ‘Danger’ for Hillary in this PRICELESS reaction to #WeinerGate development,"WATCH: Joe Biden senses ‘Danger’ for Hillary in this PRICELESS reaction to #WeinerGate development Posted at 9:14 am on October 29, 2016 by Doug P. 
+Joe Biden pretty much inadvertently summed up the fresh round of trouble that arose yesterday for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in just a few seconds yesterday: You gotta see Biden's reaction to #WeinerGate on CNN! pic.twitter.com/9jwYY9IKNa",FAKE
+7323,"Obama Throws Hillary Clinton Under The Bus, Supports Director Comey","October 31, 2016 White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest tells the press that President Obama stands with Director Comey. 
+President Obama made it clear today that he doesn’t stand with Hillary Clinton as much as we thought he did. President Obama made it clear he stands with FBI Director James Comey and his recent actions. Press Sec said that Director Comey’s actions have not changed Obama’s opinion on him or the FBI. White House: “President Obama does not believe FBI Director Comey is trying to influence election outcome.” 
+Press Secretary Josh Earnest also said that the White House won’t criticize the FBI or Director Comey. Josh Earnest on Comey's decision: ""I just don't have the independent knowledge of the decisions that are made"" https://t.co/dspAaoCcbL 
+— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 31, 2016 
+Obama doesn’t believe James Comey is trying to influence or change the election. This destroys all the claims the left has been making that this is somehow an influence to ‘fix’ the election. 
+Now that the President of the United States has declared the FBI is non-partisan to this election, where does Hillary move next? Having the President shut down your claims makes the ‘lying’ stigma more prominent with Clinton. The following two tabs change content below. ",FAKE
+4525,"Orlando probe intensifies as feds eye gunman's wife, possible ties to international terror","Federal authorities in Orlando and around the nation are scrambling to connect dots in the wake of Sunday's massacre by an Islamist terrorist, with potential charges looming for the gunman's wife as early as Wednesday and agents tracing possible ties to radical Muslims in the U.S. and abroad.
+
+The all-hands-on-deck probe is aimed at determining whether Omar Mateen acted alone when he gunned down 49 patrons in a gay nightclub or others knew of his deadly plans and possibly aided him. A federal law enforcement source told FoxNews.com Tuesday that prosecutors have convened a grand jury to investigate Mateen's wife, Noor Salman, who could be charged as an accessory.
+
+FBI agents have interviewed Omar Mateen's wife, Noor Salman, in the days since Sunday's massacre that also wounded 53 more. She is reportedly cooperating, but formal charges could help ensure she told the feds all she knows.
+
+Multiple reports said the Rodeo, Calif., home where Salman grew up was visited by the FBI Tuesday. The FBI has refused comment to the press outside of official media briefings.
+
+A federal law enforcement source additionally told Fox News that Salman knew of her husband's deadly plans and did nothing to stop him.
+
+Mateen died in a shootout with police early Sunday morning. While Salman has been widely referred to as Mateen's wife, the only proof of their marriage is her listing as his wife on a 2013 mortgage document and family members who said the two were married and had a 3-year-old son.
+
+On a separate front, the FBI is piecing together Mateen’s radical Islam roots, and two trips to Saudi Arabia could be a sign of his growing religious devotion. His stated reason for both the 2011 and 2012 trips was umrah, a Muslim pilgrimage to the Kingdom that is not as significant as the hajj, a trip all Muslims must make to Mecca at least once in their lives. Either or both of the trips could also have included a deadly diversion for terror training, according to experts who are dubious that a working-class Muslim-American would make the pilgrimage twice in two years.
+
+The FBI took a computer, camera and other equipment from Mateen's two-bedroom condominium in Fort Pierce, some 120 miles from the scene of the shooting and hours-long hostage situation that culminated in his death.
+
+Although ISIS has taken credit for the attack and lavished praise on Mateen, it is still unclear whether he received direction, or simply inspiration, from the terrorist group. However, Fox News reported Tuesday that Mateen was more than just an acquaintance of another radicalized terrorist who left Florida for Syria where he blew himself up in 2014.
+
+Fox News was told the relationship between Mateen and American suicide bomber Moner Abu-Salha -- who drove 16 tons of explosives into a Syrian government facility on behalf of Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, was ""complex."" The two frequented the same Fort Pierce mosque.
+
+Authorities are also probing Mateen's ties to Dwayne Robertson, a onetime New York gang leader who resurfaced in Orlando as an imam and is suspected by federal authorities of radicalizing Americans and sending them abroad to kill. Robertson, who was released from prison last year, denies inciting violent jihad.
+
+Finally, more information from relatives and people who knew Mateen in prior years continued to bring into focus a portrait of an angry and volatile bigot with conflicted feelings toward gays. His massacre is being treated as both an act of terror and a hate crime directed at the LGBT community, yet hist first wife reportedly believes Mateen himself was a closeted gay man.
+
+Patrons at Pulse, the nightclub where he killed dozens, say he had been seen there many times and one reportedly said Mateen had contacted him using a dating app popular with the gay community.",REAL
+3956,"Obama touts progress against ISIS, sets low expectations for Russian cooperation","President Obama used a press conference Tuesday at the Paris climate summit to once again claim progress in the U.S.-led coalition’s campaign against the Islamic State, while also setting low near-term expectations for gaining Russian President Vladimir Putin's full cooperation in the fight.
+
+The president, speaking before he departs the climate summit to return to Washington, said “it is possible” over the next several months that there will be ""a shift in calculation in the Russians and a recognition that it's time to bring the civil war in Syria to a close.""
+
+But he quickly tempered that prediction by acknowledging Russia is hitting Syrian opposition targets, some of whom are supported by the U.S.
+
+“I don’t expect you’re going to see a 180 turn on their strategy over the next several weeks,” Obama said.
+
+The president said the U.S. shouldn’t be under any “illusions” that Russia will start “hitting only ISIL targets.”
+
+Obama said that wasn’t happening before, and, “It’s not going to be happening in the next several weeks.”
+
+The comments demonstrate the potentially slow and plodding path ahead toward resolving the Syrian civil war.
+
+While Russia opposes the Islamic State – which claimed credit for bringing down a Russian flight over Egypt – Moscow also supports Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
+
+Obama, though, reiterated that the civil war cannot come to an end while Assad remains in power
+
+Obama suggested his hope is that diplomatic talks in Vienna result in a gradual change, including “pockets of cease-fires in and around Syria.”
+
+This, he said, could bring about a “conversation about politics.”
+
+Still, he conceded the extremist threat that has wrought fear across the Middle East and the West would not be eliminated in the short term.
+
+""ISIL is going to continue to be a deadly organization because of its social media, the resources it has and the networks of experienced fighters that it possesses,"" Obama said, using one of several acronyms for the extremist group. ""It's going to continue to be a serious threat for some time to come.""
+
+Concerns about ISIS have overshadowed Obama's two-day trip to Paris, where ISIS-linked attacks killed 130 people last month in the run-up to the climate negotiations. Obama had sought to turn the outrage over the Paris attacks and the group's shoot-down of a Russian passenger jet in Egypt into new resolve for stepping up the fight against ISIS.
+
+Yet those hopes have been dampened by the spiraling diplomatic crisis between Turkey and Russia, sparked late last month when Turkey shot down a Russian warplane it said had violated its airspace along the border with Syria. The U.S. sees both Russia and Turkey as critical to resolving the Syria crisis.
+
+Aiming to head off a rift between the two major Mideast players, Obama urged both to ""de-escalate"" their conflict and not get distracted from the campaign against ISIS. Yet in a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Obama also vouched for the NATO ally's right to self-defense, and he pledged a solid U.S. commitment ""to Turkey's security and its sovereignty.""
+
+Sitting down with Erdogan on the sidelines of climate talks, Obama said the U.S. was very interested in accelerating its military relationship with Turkey. He also praised Turkey for generously accepting refugees fleeing violence in Syria, and credited Turkey with strengthening security along its border.
+
+Turkey, too, hopes to avoid tensions with Russia, Erdogan told reporters as he and Obama finished their roughly hour-long meeting.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+1307,5 takeaways from New Hampshire,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+338,"Escaped killers' ride backed out, source says","(CNN) Investigators think a woman who worked with Richard Matt and David Sweat at the Clinton Correctional Facility planned to pick the convicted killers up after they escaped but changed her mind at the last minute, a source familiar with the investigation tells CNN.
+
+Joyce Mitchell went to a hospital this weekend because of panic attacks, the source said.
+
+Mitchell is one of several prison employees who has been questioned in the case. She has given a statement and is being ""somewhat cooperative,"" a source said. She has not been charged.
+
+Her cell phone was used to call several people connected to Matt, another source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN. It's unclear who made the calls or when the calls were made. Authorities are trying to determine whether Mitchell was aware her phone was being used.
+
+Her son, Tobey Mitchell, has come to her defense.
+
+He told NBC that she wouldn't ""risk her life or other people's lives to help these guys escape."" He said his mother was in a hospital with severe chest pains about the time of the escape.
+
+Authorities scoured farms and fields around an upstate New York town Tuesday, looking for the pair who escaped from a prison days earlier, a local official said.
+
+The search was prompted by someone who spotted two ""suspicious men"" walking down a road in Willsboro in the middle of a ""driving rainstorm"" overnight ""in an area that's all ... large farms and fields and wooded lots,"" Town Supervisor Shaun Gillilland said. As the citizen's car approached them, they took off.
+
+""They were walking down the road, not dressed for the elements,"" Gillilland said. ""They ran into the fields, from what I understand. So this behavior ... was suspicious.""
+
+Given the meticulous detail involved in the escape, there were concerns fugitives Richard Matt and David Sweat put a similar level of planning into their getaway, including transportation.
+
+Local, state and federal authorities set up a search perimeter there. As of 2 p.m., Gillilland wasn't aware that any clothes, vehicles or other evidence had been found, but it was still relatively early in the process.
+
+The stormy overnight spotting in Willsboro, a town of 2,000 people on Lake Champlain, is one of the first big potential breakthroughs since prison guards found Matt and Sweat's beds empty at 5:30 a.m. Saturday.
+
+Until then, the closest might have been an account from two Dannemora residents about two men, whom they now believe to be the escaped killers, walking through their backyard shortly after midnight Friday.
+
+""I go look at him (and) I say, 'What the hell are you doing in my yard? Get the hell out of here,' "" one of the residents told ABC's ""Good Morning America"" of that encounter.
+
+The two men complied, one apologizing that he'd been on the wrong street. It wasn't until the next day that the resident, who asked not to be named, and his female friend realized who the trespassers probably were.
+
+They are killers whom authorities fear could do so again to evade capture.
+
+Elizabeth Ahern, who lives in Plattsburgh, about five miles from the prison and 25 miles south of the Canadian border, isn't taking any chances. The North Country, she says, is a place where people usually don't bother securing their doors and have weapons to hunt, not to guard themselves against criminals.
+
+""It's a scary situation,"" Ahern told CNN's ""New Day."" ""We are now closing our doors and locking them, and making sure we have knives and guns ready to go, just in case.""
+
+Expert: 'They had to have help'
+
+Finding the two fugitives is job No. 1 for authorities. Job No. 2 is figuring out how they got out -- and who, if anyone, helped them become the first inmates to escape Clinton Correctional in its 170-year history.
+
+Matthew Horace, a law enforcement veteran who spent years with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said: ""They had to have help. ... I wouldn't be surprised if, when this all pans out, there's more than one, two, three or five people that helped them on the inside.""
+
+Matt and Sweat cut through a cell wall that included steel a quarter-inch thick, maneuvered across a catwalk, shimmied down six stories to a tunnel of pipes, followed that tunnel, broke through a double-brick wall, cut into a 24-inch steam pipe, shimmied their way through the steam pipe, cut another hole so they could get out of the pipe and finally surfaced through a manhole.
+
+If other people are proved to have played a role in Matt and Sweat's escape or their life on the lam, they'll pay a price. An accomplice could be convicted of a misdemeanor for helping introduce nondangerous contraband into a prison. Or they could get up to seven years in jail for the class D felony of ""hindering prosecution"" by providing ""criminal assistance"" to someone sentenced to 20 years to life for a violent crime.
+
+Slain deputy's brother: 'I just hope he doesn't come back'
+
+Matt and Sweat are convicted killers whose behavior is prison appears to have been good.
+
+Matt was convicted on three counts of murder, three counts of kidnapping and two counts of robbery after he kidnapped a man and beat him to death in December 1997, state police said. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
+
+In 1986, he escaped from an Erie County jail. Upon his capture, Matt was sent to a maximum security prison in Elmira, New York, on charges of escape and forgery. He was released from the Elmira Correctional Facility in May 1990.
+
+Sweat was serving a life sentence without parole for killing sheriff's Deputy Kevin Tarsia in 2002.
+
+It has been years since these murders. While at Clinton Correctional, they were in the prison's ""honor block"" for those who have gone years without significant disciplinary action, according to a state official briefed on the investigation.
+
+Being in an honor block carries privileges such as having hot plates and refrigerators in their cells and congregating for hours in a central gallery area each evening with fellow inmates, said Rich Plumadore, who worked at Clinton Correctional for 35 years. About 250 to 300 inmates are in this unit at the prison.",REAL
+6127,"Radio Derb: Peak White Guilt, PC Now To The LEFT Of Marxism, And Voices from the Mencken Club, Etc.", ,FAKE
+4333,Brace Yourself: The Presidential Election Is Going To Be All About Anger,"Brace Yourself: The Presidential Election Is Going To Be All About Anger
+
+Hillary Clinton laid out some lofty goals for her presidency in a speech on Friday.
+
+""My mission from my first day as president to the last will be to raise the incomes of hardworking Americans so they can once again afford a middle-class life,"" she said. ""This is the defining economic challenge not only of this election but our time.""
+
+So, she has her work cut out for her. But interestingly, that line came not from a populist barn burner of a speech, but from a policy-focused address about ending ""quarterly capitalism"" — the tendency for businesses to focus on short-term shareholder gains over long-term investment.
+
+The wonkier bits of her speech about capital-gains taxation might only interest a specific subset of people, but she couched them to attract a much broader audience of voters angered by what they see as an unfair economic system. Democrats and Republicans alike are trying to channel that anger, but are offering very different solutions — so much so that the leading candidates for both parties seem to be living in two economic realities.
+
+Voters are frustrated by a range of economic issues: inequality, stagnant incomes and debt, to name a few. That frustration is the driving narrative of the 2016 election, as candidates try to convince voters that they can forge an economy that won't make Americans feel stuck in neutral.
+
+Americans have barely seen their pay outpace inflation since the recession. Annual wage growth has been stuck at around 2 percent since 2009, and median household incomes are where they were in 1995.
+
+But that's not all that's wrong: Faith in the American Dream has dipped. In the late 1990s, 74 percent of Americans thought hard work was the way to get ahead in America. By January 2014, it was 60 percent. And since the recession, most Americans just haven't felt — for more than a handful of weeks at a time, anyway — that the economy is getting better.
+
+Politicians, of course, have taken notice. Indeed, to win any national election, they simply have to.
+
+""The longer we're kind of stuck in this rut of stagnating incomes and very low wage growth and a lot of slack in the labor market, the more people feel like this is just the way things are, and the less space there is for politicians to say, 'OK, well, we just need to wait for the recovery to take hold,' "" said Michael Strain, a resident scholar in economics at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. ""We've been waiting for the recovery to take hold for a while. Both parties are responding to that.""
+
+Jeb Bush earlier this year, in a speech about the middle class, acknowledged not only that Americans are frustrated, but that elbow grease can't fix everything.
+
+""Far too many Americans live on the edge of economic ruin,"" the former Florida governor said, ""and many more feel like they're stuck in place: working longer, and harder, even as they're losing ground.""
+
+He later added, ""Something is holding them back — not a lack of ambition, not a lack of hope, not because they're lazy or see themselves as victims. Something else. Something is an artificial weight on their shoulders.""
+
+That's the idea at the center of the election, and everyone in the race seems to have latched on. Now, politicians are peering at it through their respective philosophical lenses to decide how to fix it.
+
+""Republican rhetoric is much more growth-centric: 'The solution to this is economic growth,' "" said Steven Schier, professor of political science at Carleton College. ""That's a very common Republican theme, whereas Democrats are more regulatory and redistributive. In other words, they're reverting to type.""
+
+Bernie Sanders has advocated higher taxes on the rich, decrying what he calls ""casino capitalism"" in a May interview.
+
+""The people on top have lost any sense of responsibility for the rest of the society,"" said Sanders, an independent from Vermont, who has gained traction as the principal alternative to Clinton in the Democratic primary.
+
+Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, has a tax plan that will, among other things, dole out a heftier child tax credit to some families.
+
+Clinton believes that targeting ""quarterly capitalism"" and focusing on the American worker, via paid leave and helping keep mothers in the workforce, could be answers.
+
+Bush comes at it from the other, macroeconomic direction, saying if Americans can work more hours and if government stays out of the way of the ""gig economy,"" he can bring about 4 percent growth. That speeding train (or, perhaps, Uber car) of growth will bring everyone along with it, he contends.
+
+It's not just about presenting policies, of course. Presidential campaigns are about choices. And in the fight to make the choice clearer for frustrated Americans, the most pointed blows yet have been between Clinton and Bush.
+
+""Now comes Hillary Clinton, and her economic agenda could be summarized easily: Whatever Obama is doing, let's double down on it,"" he said in a speech earlier this month.
+
+The implicit message: If you hate the economy now, Clinton won't change it.
+
+For her part, Clinton and her affiliated groups have latched onto several Bush statements that could make him sound unsympathetic to workers — in particular, earlier this month, when he said that people would have to work longer hours in his economy. (His campaign later clarified that he was talking about part-time workers who want more hours.)
+
+""Well, he must not have met very many American workers,"" Clinton said in response. ""Let him tell that to the nurse who stands on her feet all day or the teacher who is in that classroom, or the trucker who drives all night. Let him tell that to the fast-food workers marching in the streets for better pay. They don't need a lecture. They need a raise.""
+
+While they're appealing to an exhausting stretch of stagnant wages for American workers, they're really tapping into a decades-old idea of how the economy should work.
+
+""We're still trying to figure out how wealth gets distributed in an economy where you've seen manufacturing and union jobs and what used to be the typical middle-class blue-collar jobs evaporate,"" said Leonard Steinhorn, a professor of public communication and history at American University.
+
+He continued, ""The bottom line is that [politicians are] dealing with a set of expectations Americans have about the economy, and a sense of acknowledging that frustration that a great many people don't feel that they're participating in the mythical rising tide that existed briefly after World War II."" (See chart.)
+
+Despite newfangled campaign trail rhetoric about things like the emerging sharing economy and, yes, Uber, very old roles are at work here: Democrats championing the downtrodden laborer; Republicans bemoaning regulation.
+
+Still, what's new in the 2016 election is really that Americans' anxiety about the economy is getting more entrenched by the day.",REAL
+2225,Why Netanyahu victory isn't likely to make US-Israel relations worse (+video),"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Obama don't see eye-to-eye on much. But there are ways for allies to get along even when their leaders don't.
+
+It’s safe to say that President Obama was hoping for a different outcome in Israel’s election Tuesday – just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did little to hide his preference for Mitt Romney in the last American presidential election.
+
+But Mr. Netanyahu will govern for an unprecedented fourth term that is likely to extend beyond Mr. Obama’s last day in office.
+
+No one anticipates a sudden dissipation in the bad blood between the two leaders, nor that a relationship long deemed dysfunctional will suddenly transform into a happy marriage.
+
+But a variety of constraints on both leaders suggest that United States-Israel relations aren’t likely to get worse, some diplomatic experts say. The US has had times when relations with other allies have degenerated, and they have recovered, at least to some degree.
+
+In the meantime, the US and Israel could create channels that allow the states to work together in important ways while allowing the two leaders to avoid each other. That’s what happened between the US and France when Presidents George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac had widely divergent worldviews and little use for each other.
+
+“It’s going to be a very heavy lift, given the history between these two leaders, but I think if we look at how relations got back on track between the US and France after the Iraq war, there is a lesson,” says Michael Singh, managing director specializing in US Mideast policy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
+
+In that case, the making up involved refocusing on vital mutual interests, including counterterrorism and national security issues. It was not carried out by the two leaders but by key aides, Mr. Singh says. “But what you did have was a commitment by the two leaders that this [repair of relations] was very important to do,” he adds.
+
+Singh says he can “envision a channel being created” through which these “key aides” would perform the same task as those in the Franco-American case more than a decade ago: “preventing sharp policy differences from precluding cooperation between two close allies in areas of vital mutual interest.”
+
+Obama’s pursuit of a nuclear agreement with Iran and Netanyahu’s campaign pledge never to allow creation of a Palestinian state while he is in office are two prime examples of the policy differences separating the two leaders.
+
+But neither of these divisions is really new – suggesting that relations have little reason to worsen and might remain more or less the same for the remainder of Obama’s term, some experts say.
+
+“It didn’t take Netanyahu’s reelection to convince anyone that while the Israeli-Palestinian process maybe wasn’t dead, it was frozen pretty hard, and no matter what happened [in the election] an Iran agreement appeared to be a done deal, or at least pretty close,” says Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert with the Wilson Center who has held government posts in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
+
+A number of factors will “tend to constrain what the administration is prepared to do to press the Israelis,” Mr. Miller says. These include unabated pro-Israeli congressional pressure, a US presidential campaign where all the candidates will be trumpeting their support for Israel, and shared US-Israel national security interests.
+
+Miller points out that the Obama administration has “never gone beyond words to demonstrate its dissatisfaction with Israel,” and he doesn’t anticipate that happening now – simply because he doesn’t see how the US benefits by getting tough with Israel. “I just don’t see what ratcheting up [to concrete steps] gets the administration,” he says.
+
+As a result, he says he can envision the US abstaining on (rather than vetoing) a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel over expanded settlement construction in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. Or the US might support a Franco-Arab resolution proposing a “framework agreement” for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and creating a Palestinian state, Miller says.
+
+And no matter how much the US and Israel may disagree on approaches to the Iran and Palestinian challenges, the reality is that they have common interests in how both play out, Singh says.
+
+Israel may not like any Iran nuclear deal, but if one is reached Netanyahu will have as much interest as Obama in seeing that Iran honors its terms and is not secretly circumventing it, Singh says. At the same time, he adds, the US will have as much interest as Israel in seeing that the “vacuum” left by the absence of a peace process is not filled by something much worse.
+
+“There’s no question it’s going to take hard work,” Singh says, “but I think it’s with sustained effort on these kinds of key mutual interests that you get the relationship back on track.”",REAL
+9885,Officials State New Clinton Emails Discovered as Part of Anthony Weiner ‘Sexting’ Investigation,"Following news of FBI Director James Comey’s decision to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure at the State Department, federal law enforcement officials have come forward with new details on recently discovered evidence in the case.
+More on this: DEVELOPING: FBI Reopens Investigation into Clinton Emails After New ‘Pertinent’ Evidence Discovered 
+While Director Comey declined to provide specific details on what the newly discovered Clinton emails contained, federal law enforcements officials speaking under anonymity have explained that the emails were found on the personal devices of Clinton aide Huma Abedin and disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner.
+The discovery came as part of investigation into yet another Weiner ‘sexting’ scandal, this time after he was alleged to have been engaging in sexually explicit conversations with an underage female.
+More on the latest Weiner scandal: ‘Carlos Danger’ Strikes Again: New Reports Allege Anthony Weiner Knowingly Engaged in Sexually Explicit Conversations with 15 Year Old Female Online 
+As reported by the New York Times, authorities discovered ‘pertinent’ emails related to the Clinton investigation on personal electronic devices belonging to Abedin and Weiner that had been seized by investigators as part of the investigation in Weiner’s alleged inappropriate conversations with a child.
+Via NYT 
+Federal law enforcement officials said Friday that the new emails uncovered in the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton ’s use of a private email server were discovered after the F.B.I. seized electronic devices belonging to Huma Abedin, an aide to Mrs. Clinton, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.
+The F.B.I. told Congress that it had uncovered new emails related to the closed investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton or her aides had mishandled classified information, potentially reigniting an issue that has weighed on the presidential campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less than two weeks before the election.
+More via FoxNews 
+Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com 
+We will continue to update as new details surface.
+",FAKE
+10063,Is Who Hacked Podesta’s Emails the Issue or the Fact they are True?,"Print 
+Ever notice how the criminals deflect from the real issue? That has been done by the Democrats and their useful idiots in the media. In the last debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton , there were mixed views about who was behind the Wikileaks release of Democrat emails, specifically those of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta . While Trumps said he wasn't sure, Clinton claimed it was the Russians, but the real question is not who was behind the leaks, but whether or not the emails are true. 
+This is the question that investigative journalist Ben Swann posed on Reality Check . 
+Clinton cited 17 agencies that claim that hacks were made by Russia. Among those she referenced are the following: CIA State Department Office of the Director of National Intelligence 
+Each of the agencies have credibility issues. Swann also pointed out that every one of those agencies also said the Iraq had weapons of mass destruction too, even though they didn't have them. 
+Trump was right to point out that those agencies don't actually know for sure if Russia was behind the hack or not. However, the issue is not really who is behind the leaks, but whether the information being leaked is true. 
+As of the report, 26,000 emails from John Podesta have been released by Wikileaks. Among those emails are many that point out the Clinton State Department and the Clinton Foundation engaged in pay-to-play schemes. 
+Swann referenced an email from Clinton's chief deputy adviser Huma Abedin who said that Moroccan authorities donated $12 million to The Clinton Foundation 's global initiative in order to gain access to Clinton while she was at the State Department. 
+Additionally, there have been numerous emails that demonstrate a collusion between the Clinton campaign and major media outlets. Boy, no one saw that one coming, did they? In fact, emails released by Wikileaks show at least 65 mainstream reporters working close with the Clinton campaign. 
+If that wasn't enough, Glenn Thrush, who is a senior staff writer for Politico, allowed John Podesta to proofread and edit his article. In writing to Podesta, Thrush said, ""Because I have become a hack [sic] I will send u the whole section that pertains to u [sic]… Please don't share or tell anyone I did this."" Now, we know you can't trust one word that Thrush puts out. 
+Also, Podesta's emails indicate that they were attempting to deceive Bernie Sanders supporters at the Democrat Convention earlier this year. 
+Additionally, Clinton's staff also discussed which e-mails to release and delete. 
+So, while the Clinton campaign attempts to deflect from the real issue by pointing to Russia as being engaged in hacking emails, the reality is that she is not wanting to discuss whether the information contained in the emails is true. 
+Swann asks, ""If they are [true], who cares where they came from? Who cares why? Because if the accusation is that the Russians are trying to influence this election by telling the truth, then what does that tell us about how American media is trying to influence the election?"" 
+I couldn't agree more. The American media has been bought and paid for, and it's not just on the Democrat side either. Several media outlets are just as guilty of hiding the truth about their own political heavy weights. It's up to Americans to be able to research for themselves and then come to a proper conclusion. However, with the way things have stacked up in the email releases, there is no doubt that the truth has been exposed. The real question is, will the American people do anything about the criminal activity that has taken place concerning Hillary Clinton and her minions? Well, if Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Sobarkah is any indication , we can expect absolutely no justice from Congress or the Justice Department. shares",FAKE
+6284,Paul Craig Roberts: Trump faces assasination,"Paul Craig Roberts: Trump faces assasination 09.11.2016 | Source: AP Photo 
+Donald Trump will be the new President of the United States of America. The Republican won 276 electoral votes with the necessary minimum of 270 votes and he has made himself to the post of the head of the United States. 
+Pravda.Ru has turned for a comment to Paul Craig Roberts who is an American economist, journalist, blogger and former civil servant. 
+The US presidential election is historic, because the American people were able to defeat the oligarchs. Hillary Clinton, an agent for the oligarchy, was defeated despite the vicious media campaign against Donald Trump. This shows that both the political establishment of both political parties and the media no longer have credibility with the American people.It remains to be seen whether Trump can select and appoint a government that will serve him and his goals to restore American jobs and to establish friendly and respectful relations with Russia, China, Syria, and Iran.It also remains to be seen how the oligarchy will respond to Trump's victory. Wall Street and its agent, the Federal Reserve, can cause an economic crisis in order to put Trump on the defensive. Rogue agents in the CIA and Pentagon can cause a false flag attack that would disrupt friendly relations with Russia. Trump could make a mistake and retain neoconservatives in his government.With Trump there is at least hope. Unless Trump is obstructed by bad judgment and obstacles put in his way, we should expect an end to Washington's orchestrated conflict with Russia, the removal of the US missiles on Russia's border with Poland and Romania, the end of the conflict in Ukraine, and the end ofWashington's effort to overthrow the Syrian government. However, achievements such as these implythe total defeat of the oligarchy. Although Trump defeated Hillary, the oligarchy still exists and is stillpowerful.Trump said that he no longer sees the point of NATO 25 years after the Soviet collapse. If he sticks tohis view, it means a big political change in Washington's EU vassals. The hostility toward Russia ofthe current EU and NATO officials would have to cease.We do not know who Trump will select to serve in his government. It is likely that Trump is unfamiliarwith the various possibilities and their positions on issues. It really depends on who is advising Trump and what advice they give him. Once we see his government, we will know whether we can be hopefulfor the changes that now have a chance. If Trump is actually successful in curbing the power and budget of the military/security complex and in holding Wall Street politically accountable, he could be assassinated. 
+Pravda.Ru Trump’s success shocks global markets",FAKE
+9556,"Homeland Security Chairman, “Hillary’s Mishandling of Classified Information is Treason” – TruthFeed","Homeland Security Chairman, “Hillary’s Mishandling of Classified Information is Treason” Homeland Security Chairman, “Hillary’s Mishandling of Classified Information is Treason” Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 7, 2016 
+People are rotting in prison for doing a FRACTION of what Hillary has done with our nation’s secrets. 
+Folks, she had her MAID printing off piles of classified emails. 
+Her server, which she kept in some bathroom closet, was HACKED by at least FIVE by foreign players. 
+Hillary Clinton DESTROYED 33 THOUSAND emails AFTER receiving a congressional subpoena. 
+Just because she’s rich and powerful and has a rigged system saying “She’s INNOCENT” doesn’t make it so. 
+Right now there are GOOD Americans rotting away in prison for doing the smallest fraction of what Hillary did. 
+She’s getting away with TREASON. 
+Those were the exact words expressed from the Chairman of Homeland Security said. 
+From the Washington Times: 
+Michael McCaul was among the first to call Hillary’s choice to carelessly have a personal server which she used for State Department business a treasonous act. 
+Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, on Thursday said Hillary Clinton’s exposing sensitive information to potentially multiple hacks from foreign actors amounts to treason. 
+“This is why you have security protocols — to protect classified information,” Mr. McCaul said on “Fox and Friends.” “She exposed it to our enemies, and now … our adversaries have this very sensitive information that not only jeopardizes her and national security at home, but the men and women serving overseas.” 
+“In my opinion, quite frankly, it’s treason,” said Mr. McCaul, Texas Republican. 
+This needs to end. 
+Our system is rotten to the core. 
+The ONLY way to fix it, is to vote for Trump and #DrainTheSwamp. This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+872,The case for a Clinton-Warren ticket,"Running mates? It’s not even May, and already we’re talking running mates? Then let me toss Elizabeth Warren’s name into the mix.
+
+I’m making several assumptions here — in a year when assuming anything is dangerous. First, I believe Ted Cruz’s desperate gamble of adding Carly Fiorina to his “ticket” will fail. He was right to throw some kind of Hail Mary, but I don’t see how Fiorina attracts enough new support for Cruz to win the Indiana primary on Tuesday. And if he loses there, he’s pretty much toast.
+
+Donald Trump’s landslide wins this week in the Northeast gave him a bigger haul of convention delegates than even his most optimistic boosters had expected. If momentum still counts for anything in politics, Trump has it. And if he wins Indiana — polls show him with about a six-point lead — his path to the Republican nomination looks wide enough to taxi the rest of the way in his Boeing 757.
+
+I’m also assuming that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. The delegate math is just brutal: There is simply no viable way now for Bernie Sanders to catch up. Sanders appeared to acknowledge reality this week when he announced that his campaign would lay off “hundreds” of paid staff members. He will use his clout at the convention, he said, to “put together the strongest progressive agenda that any political party has ever seen.”
+
+Which is where Warren comes in.
+
+It is absurd to claim that Clinton does not merit the “progressive” label; she has the scars from decades of attacks by the “vast right-wing conspiracy” to prove her bona fides. But on most issues — gun control being a glaring exception — Sanders is well to her left. And, as his surprising campaign has shown, that’s where the energy and excitement in the Democratic Party happen to be this year.
+
+If there is a specific issue on which Clinton is weak with the Democratic left, it is not the FBI investigation of her emails. It is her perceived coziness with Wall Street, highlighted by the six-figure speaking fees she was paid by investment bank Goldman Sachs.
+
+Sanders’s central theme is that the rich and powerful have distorted our political and economic systems to favor their own selfish interests. He blasts Clinton not only for the Goldman speeches but also for mining Wall Street for campaign cash. My assumption is that Sanders, should he fall short of the nomination, will give Clinton his full-throated support. But will his most ardent supporters follow?
+
+As Clinton’s running mate, Warren could erase this potential weakness with the Democratic base. She has spent her Senate career becoming known as the scourge of Wall Street. No political figure is more closely identified with efforts to curb the excesses of the financial system.
+
+Warren would also help address another potential vulnerability. If the general-election matchup is Trump vs. Clinton — and that seems increasingly likely — it is becoming clear that on the question of U.S. military involvement around the world, Trump will position himself to the left of Clinton.
+
+The foreign policy speech that Trump delivered Wednesday was, for the most part, vague and anodyne. His overarching theme is “America first,” he said. To the extent the phrase means anything, it seems to promise that a President Trump would be extremely reluctant to deploy U.S. combat forces in any sort of “world’s policeman” role. Trump has even questioned the viability of NATO in its present form.
+
+Clinton is a foreign policy traditionalist. As secretary of state, she was more hawkish than President Obama — she pushed for more vigorous intervention in Syria, for example. She has long since apologized for her vote to authorize the Iraq War, but Sanders continues to attack her for it. Trump would surely do the same.
+
+Warren wasn’t in Congress when the Iraq War began, and national security isn’t the issue with which she is identified. But her views fit squarely with those of the party’s progressive wing.
+
+Warren also has a compelling personal story of having risen from modest beginnings to become a Harvard professor and then a U.S. senator. The fact that she and Clinton would be the first all-female major party ticket should be irrelevant, but isn’t. To many voters, it would be thrilling.
+
+I can think of several other potential running mates for Clinton. Funny, but I draw a blank when trying to come up with a suitable partner for Trump. Maybe he’ll just go it alone.
+
+Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.",REAL
+6228,Black Lives Matter leader DeRay McKesson endorses Clinton,"Black Lives Matter leader DeRay McKesson endorses Clinton McKesson praised Clinton's platform for seeking to reform parts of her husband's 1994 crime bill Mallory Shelbourne | The Hill - October 26, 2016 Comments Top Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson on Wednesday endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. 
+“Clinton’s platform on racial justice is strong: It is informed by the policy failings of the past and is a vision for where we need to go,” McKesson wrote in a Washington Post op-ed . Clinton hosted a meeting with McKesson and other Black Lives Matter activists in the fall to discuss the Campaign Zero plan to end police violence. McKesson wrote that Clinton “didn’t appear to understand the urgency of the need to address racism” when she began running for the White House but that her position on racial justice is now “strong.”",FAKE
+745,"Democratic Party Leaders, Bernie Sanders Spar Over Nevada Convention Chaos","Divisions among Democrats are deepening over Sen. Bernie Sanders’s response to a chaotic state convention in Nevada, sparking fresh questions about how, exactly, the party might put itself back together again. Some top Democratic leaders have denounced Mr. Sanders’s reluctance to rein in his supporters after they disrupted the party’s Nevada convention. The Vermont senator […]",REAL
+1692,Joe Biden: He's right not to run (Opinion),"It's hard not to like Joe Biden. I've seen him speak in person several times, and his love for people and politics is downright infectious. I'm sad he announced Wednesday he is not running for president, because he's fun and he would have lit up the campaign.
+
+But I think he made the right decision.
+
+The path to winning the Democratic nomination certainly wasn't clear, let alone easy, and it's better for Biden to end his career at the high point of the vice presidency rather than try for the presidency once again and fail. And while Biden seems genuinely to relish campaigning, campaigns are getting less and less fun by the day. The truth is that a Biden candidacy would have been enjoyable for voters (and the media). But it probably wouldn't have been very enjoyable for Biden.
+
+More substantively, a Biden candidacy might simply have muddied the otherwise helpfully clear waters between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
+
+Take the first Democratic debate, where Clinton tried to argue that her plan for how to deal with the ills and excesses of Wall Street was ""more comprehensive"" and ""tougher"" than Sanders'. Sanders' response? ""Well, that's not true.""
+
+On this issue, Sanders is right. He is a lifelong economic populist, to the point where he's not afraid to criticize the structural failings of capitalism and change the underlying rules of the game to make sure the economy helps poor people and working families. Clinton, on the other hand, has certainly embraced some of the rhetoric of populism in her latest campaign. But the extent to which it courses through her bones -- let alone her policies -- is questionable. In the middle of this debate would have been Biden. The vice president has more populist street cred from the get-go, especially rhetorically. I don't think I've ever heard Biden speak without mentioning his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. More importantly, despite a lofty career since then, he's always managed to maintain a straight shooter, ""Regular Joe"" style. But on policies, he's more closely aligned with Clinton than Sanders. Biden voted in favor of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act , which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act, opening the door to banks to engage in the wild risk-taking that crashed the economy. Biden sided with big banks in making it harder for Americans to reduce their amount of student debt. And Biden supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (as Clinton did for a while before recently changing her view ). With a little more than a year until the presidential election, it's essential for Democratic voters -- and Americans in general -- to see a debate in the primaries in which conventional centrist economic policy is exposed and evaluated in light of a viable, populist alternative. Clinton and Sanders are having that very real and important debate. ""Regular Joe,"" who repeatedly promotes centrist policies that most help the country's elite, would have unhelpfully complicated things. ""I can die a happy man never having been president of the United States of America,"" Biden once told a reporter. ""But it doesn't mean I won't run."" Now, apparently he won't run. And while we should be grateful for his public service up until now, his decision is also a public service -- because the Democratic primary will run better without him.",REAL
+1404,"New York Times endorses Hillary Clinton, John Kasich for nominations","The Times said it picked Clinton over her top rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, due to her experience and policy ideas. It also cast doubt on Sanders' ability to enact several of his key policies, including breaking up large banks and creating a Medicare-for-all health care plan.
+
+""Hillary Clinton is the right choice for the Democrats to present a vision for America that is radically different from the one that leading Republican candidates offer -- a vision in which middle-class Americans have a real shot at prosperity, women's rights are enhanced, undocumented immigrants are given a chance at legitimacy, international alliances are nurtured and the country is kept safe,"" the Times said.
+
+The editorial board, however, expressed reservations about a no-fly zone in Syria, which Clinton has supported.
+
+The Clinton campaign's relationship with the Times has been troubled at times over the past year following the revelations that she maintained a private email server while leading the State Department.
+
+In July, the campaign accused the paper of ""egregious"" errors and the ""apparent abandonment of standard journalistic practices"" after initially claiming that federal inspectors general had requested a criminal investigation into Clinton's email use during her tenure at the State Department. Clinton herself was not the target, and the case was not criminal. A letter from the campaign asserted that the Times rushed the flawed story onto its website and front page despite ""questionable sourcing,"" and didn't do enough to contact Clinton before publication. Kasich, the governor of Ohio, deserves the Republican nod because he is ""the only plausible choice for Republicans tired of the extremism and inexperience on display in this race,"" the Times said. But, the paper contended, Kasich ""is no moderate,"" citing his battles with public-sector unions, support for limiting abortion rights and opposition to same-sex marriage. ""Still, as a veteran of partisan fights and bipartisan deals during nearly two decades in the House, he has been capable of compromise and believes in the ability of government to improve lives,"" the Times wrote. Kasich quickly tweeted his appreciation for the endorsement. ""Proud to have the support of the @nytimes - Together we can make America safer & stronger -John #Kasich4Us,"" he said. Proud to have the support of the @nytimes - Together we can make America safer & stronger -John #Kasich4Us pic.twitter.com/VfVRAOst72 — John Kasich (@JohnKasich) January 30, 2016 But in backing Kasich, the Times took swipes at the two candidates leading the Republican field, Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, saying they are ""equally objectionable for different reasons."" The paper accused Trump of disingenuously making promises to his supporters to win their backing, while it charged Cruz with alienating his Senate colleagues and criticized his positions on Syria and taxes.",REAL
+4310,“Your little brother is not the ultimate authority”: How Jeb Bush cheated America & helped deliver the presidency to W,"Anyone old enough to remember that election night, which was 15 years ago today, will remember that the outcome of the electoral college depended on that one state. And what came next is exactly what anyone would have predicted would happen when an election is so close it triggers a recount in a state in which the levers of power and the electoral machinery are run by one of the candidates’ brothers. That candidate was the one who became president.
+
+The road George W. and Jeb Bush took to get there was complicated and difficult, and in the end had to be decided by a couple of Supreme Court justices who happened to have been appointed by the Bush brothers’ dad when he was president. (Who says that dynasties have no clout in American politics?) But Jeb proved himself to be particularly adept at getting the job done without getting his hands dirty.
+
+The media played an interesting part as well.  The networks first called the election for Gore based on exit polls which later turned out to correctly predict for whom the people actually voted that day. Fox News, with one of it’s earliest political coups, was the first to call it for Bush. A consultant by the name of John Ellis, who later admitted to being on the phone with Jeb and George W. Bush throughout the evening, is the fellow who made that initial call for Fox. If his name sounds familiar it’s because John Ellis, is also Jeb Bush’s name; “Jeb” stands for John Ellis Bush. Ellis is George W. and Jeb’s first cousin.
+
+The Bush campaign knew that once they had established their “lead” they needed to keep it. The key was to be able to declare victory and then portray the Gore campaign as being sore losers who refused to accept defeat. On election night, they almost succeeded in getting Gore to capitulate without a fight. He was on the way to make his concession speech when his team told him to hold up, that the margin was ridiculously tight and that a recount would be mandated by state law. The phone call that happened next was a very telling exchange:
+
+“Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,” Gore told Bush. “The state of Florida is too close to call.” “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Bush asked. “Let me make sure I understand. You’re calling back to retract your concession?” “You don’t have to be snippy about it,” said Gore. Bush responded that the networks had already called the result and that the numbers were correct—his brother Jeb had told him. “Your little brother,” Gore replied, “is not the ultimate authority on this.”
+
+The networks had called the election based on his cousin’s decision and his cousin’s decision had been based on his brother’s numbers. How tidy that was.  Gore refused to accept the Bush family’s assurances and went on to contest the outcome.
+
+Jeb may not have been the ultimate authority but he had plenty of influence on the state’s electoral machinery, particularly the Secretary of State Katherine Harris who was in charge of the recount and who also happened to be one of George W. Bush’s campaign co-chairs. According to Jeffrey Toobin’s book “Too Close to Call” an angry Jeb awakened Harris at three in the morning to chastise her for allowing the assistant director of elections to go on TV and discuss Florida election laws, which required recounts and a standard of determining the intent of the voter.  Jeb had this foolish bureaucrat yanked from the air immediately and he assigned her a political advisor by the name of Mac Stipanovich, a close political associate and master of Florida politics and electoral machinery.
+
+Stipanovich gave interviews years later in which he admitted that he kept a very low profile throughout:
+
+“I would arrive in the morning through the garage and come up on the elevators and come in through the cabinet-office door, which is downstairs, and then in the evening when I left, you know, sometimes it’d be late, depending on what was going on, I would go the same way. I would go down the elevators and out through the garage and be driven—driven to my car from the garage, just because there were a lot of people out front on the main floor, and, at least in this small pond, knowledge of my presence would have been provocative, because I have a political background.”
+
+Jeb’s fingerprints were never directly on the machinations of the recount but he was always just a degree of separation from it. It was his state and he knew the buttons to instruct others to push. And there were plenty of them that made the difference in small ways and large.
+
+Was Jeb helping with all the various schemes and scams?  Who knows? There were a lot of crafty GOP election lawyers all over the state making sure that votes were not counted. But he was almost certainly involved in this, as reported by The Village Voice: James Baker, his tongue darting in the air, first raised the prospect of an end run around the courts by the Florida legislature hours after the state’s supreme court ruled unanimously on November 22 to allow manual recounts in three counties. His leathery face broke out in a smug smile when he said it. After the Florida court ruled a second time in favor of a recount on December 8, Baker invoked the legislature again. Having prophesied the legislative coup, however, Baker was quick to say the Bush team had nothing to do with it. “I haven’t talked to anybody in the Florida Legislature that I know is in the Florida Legislature,” he said, adding he’d never even met House Speaker Tom Feeney. Assuming that’s true, Baker was practically announcing that Brother Jeb had put the legislature in play. With Feeney’s majority approving the Bush slate the very day that the U.S. Supreme Court weighed its final decision, the First Family of Texas and Florida was making it clear that it was even prepared to circumvent a 7 to 2 Republican court if it didn’t like the ultimate decision. That may have been the single most important move by Jeb Bush during the whole recount period. By getting the legislature to provide the final backstop the media began the drumbeat that there was little point in further pursuing the recount. With the Florida Republicans prepared to use the arcane rules of the legislature to install George W. Bush no matter what the vote tally ultimately showed, the press now assumed Bush would be president. This was when they began to pat America on the back for being so civilized in the way it handles such disputes (there were no tanks in the streets!) and to tell Democrats to “get over it.” There were many PR and legal maneuvers the Bush team used throughout the recount. Some were probably illegal, some were legal but clearly undemocratic, others were just sneaky and manipulative. They weren’t as sexy as the famous Brooks Brothers riot in which a group of what were later revealed to be GOP staffers stormed the Miami Dade recount and demanded they “shut it down.” (This “riot” was directed from a van down the street by none other than famous Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone.) But the Bush strategy of holding on to their lead by any means necessary was successful. When the conservatives on the Supreme Court finally stopped the count, Bush was still ahead by 535 votes and he was declared the winner. Bush family consigliere James Baker (and current Jeb Bush advisor) was in control of the spin from the beginning and the Republicans had election lawyers flown in from all over the country within hours. They were prepared to fight it all the way. But there can be no doubt that if it hadn’t been for the ineptitude of the Jeb Bush electoral machinery, with its butterfly ballots and illegal voter purges, the vote would never have been as close as it was. It’s also a fact that Al Gore won the national popular vote and that more Floridians intended to vote for him than George W. Bush.  It’s unlikely that anyone will ever be able to prove beyond a doubt that Jeb Bush put his thumb on the scale to ensure that his brother never lost his lead or that behind the scenes he worked the levers of power in the state that brought W’s dubious victory. But let’s not kid ourselves. George W Bush was very, very lucky that his recount happened in Florida. Brother Jeb’s a fix it guy from way back. Watch how “Jeb Can Fix It” is backfiring:",REAL
+5611,Comment on What’s that strange lump embedded in Hillary Clinton’s face? by mildred.kraus,"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Dr. Eowyn 
+Hillary Clinton is like a chameleon . 
+Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams , who’s a trained hypnotist and observer of facial nuances, calls it an “unusual level of variability” in her physical appearance. In his words, Hillary “looks like an entirely different person every few days. See “ Chameleon Hillary Clinton is back to looking like sh*t — and the return of her medical handler ” and “ Hillary Clinton’s teeth, tongue-hole & now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t wrinkles ” 
+On Monday, October 24, 2016, Hillary Clinton was in St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire for a rally , accompanied by “Fauxcahontas” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). 
+Close-up images of her face show that she’s morphed again, back to yellow teeth and a face crisscrossed with wrinkles. What happened to the porcelain-doll Hillary with dazzling-white teeth of the July 2016 Democratic National Convention? 
+But this time, at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, there’s something even stranger. 
+Tuesday, Matt Drudge tweeted two close-up images of Hillary at the NH rally, which show something embedded under the skin of her right cheek . Here’s the tweet: 
+Here are the two images again, enlarged. I painted yellow arrows pointing to the lumps: 
+According to plastic surgeons , Botox injections don’t cause lumps under the skin. Dr. Richard Baxter explains that “Botox relaxes muscles that are hyperactive and so wrinkles caused by those muscles are smoothed,” but don’t lead to lumps. Dr. Janet Turkle says that although “Botox injections can result in temporary bumps due to the injection,” the bumps last “only a few minutes”. 
+According to the American Academy of Facial Esthetics , however, “some of the risks of facial injections are lumps (granulomas/nodules) which are a potential risks [sic] associated with Radiesse, Sculptra, Juvederm, and ArteColl.” 
+Facial injections are injections of facial fillers such as collagen, hyaluronic acid and calcium hydroxyl apatite that rejuvenate facial skin by reducing or eliminating wrinkles, raising scar depressions, enhancing lips and replacing soft-tissue volume loss. 
+H/t FOTM ‘s TPR 
+Dr. Eowyn’s post first appeared at Fellowship of the Minds Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+9813,"Hillary Clinton Tops ""Islamist Money in Politics"" List","Hillary Clinton Tops ""Islamist Money in Politics"" List   
+There are some very dubious awards out there that you just don't want to win. Being one of the top recipients of Islamic money in politics certainly tops that list. Hillary Clinton likes to complain about dark money. This is as dark as money gets. As the Middle East Forum's research shows . 
+Hillary Clinton tops the list, raking in $41,165 from prominent Islamists. This includes $19,249 from senior officials of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates on November 15, 2014. 
+For example, Mrs. Clinton has accepted $3,900 from former CAIR vice-chairman Ahmad Al-Akhras, who has defended numerous Islamists in Ohio indicted – and later convicted – on terrorism charges. 
+Among other current presidential candidates, Jill Stein has accepted $250. Donald Trump and Gary Johnson have not received any Islamist money. 
+Other top recent recipients of money from the enemy include Rep. Keith Ellison ($17,370) and Rep. Andre Carson ($13,225). 
+The top ten list includes nine Democrats, one independent (Sen. Bernie Sanders accepted $9,285), and no Republicans. 
+I don't think that's too surprising to anyone. Though you have to feel sorry for Jill Stein. She hates Israel and announced she wouldn't have killed Osama bin Laden. What's a girl gotta do to get ahead on Jihad Street anyway?",FAKE
+2613,Netanyahu poised for third straight term as Israel PM after chief rival concedes,"Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began working Wednesday to form a coalition government with nationalist and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties after his conservative Likud party scored a resounding and surprising victory following a fractious election campaign.
+
+Netanyahu said that he had spoken with the heads of five other parties that he hoped to bring into his government, adding that he hopes to complete the delicate task in ""two to three weeks.""
+
+""The reality isn't waiting on us,"" Netanyahu said in a statement. ""Reality isn't taking a break. The citizens of Israel expect us to quickly put together a leadership that will work for the sake of the country's security, economy, and society as we promised to do, and that is what I will do.""
+
+Netanyahu's main rival -- Isaac Herzog of the centrist Zionist Union -- confirmed Wednesday that he had called the incumbent to congratulate him on his victory.
+
+""I wished him luck, but let it be clear, the problems are the same problems, nothing has changed,"" said Herzog, who attempted to make economic and social issues the focus of the campaign in contrast to Netanyahu's focus on security. Herzog also vowed that his party would serve as ""an alternative in every area"" to Likud.
+
+According to official results reported in Israeli media early Wednesday, Likud had won at least 29 seats in the 120-member Knesset, five more than Herzog's centrist Zionist Union. No other party had more than 14 seats, and a party or coalition must have at least 61 seats to form a government. A key bloc that could sew up Netanyahu's premiership is Kulanu, another centrist party lead by former government minister Moshe Kahlon that was projected to earn 10 seats in the latest figures.
+
+Kahlon, whose campaign focused almost entirely on bread-and-butter economic issues, refused to take sides.
+
+""I am loyal to my way,"" he told his supporters, saying he would work to form a government committed to social justice.
+
+Likud significantly outperformed all the polls in the run-up to the election, all of which had predicted a second-place finish for the party behind the Zionist Union. Netanyahu claimed victory early Wednesday in a speech to cheering supporters at party headquarters in Tel Aviv.
+
+""Against all the odds we obtained a great victory for the Likud,"" Netanyahu told the gathering. ""Now we must form a strong and stable government that will ensure Israel's security and welfare,"" he added, in comments aimed at Kahlon.
+
+At a rally of his supporters, Herzog had vowed to do his utmost to form a government and said he too had reached out to potential coalition partners. However, his effort to build a coalition was complicated by the possibility of having to rely on support from a new Arab alliance that was projected to capture 14 seats. But Arab parties have never sat in an Israeli coalition before.
+
+Stav Shaffir, a leader of the Zionist Union, called the results a ""clear vote of no confidence in Netanyahu.""
+
+Netanyahu had ruled out a ""unity"" government with the Zionist Union that would give him a broader coalition, and Herzog had also been cool to the idea without explicitly dismissing the prospect.
+
+President Reuven Rivlin will now spend the next few days consulting with the various parties, whose leaders will all offer recommendations for who should be prime minister.
+
+The final weeks of the campaign had become a referendum on Netanyahu, a towering figure in Israeli politics who has spent more time as Prime Minister than anyone except the country's founding father, David Ben-Gurion.
+
+Netanyahu, who already has a testy relationship with President Barack Obama, took a sharp turn to the right in the final days of the campaign, staking out a series of hard-line positions that will put him at odds with the international community.
+
+In his most dramatic policy reversal, he said he now opposes the creation of a Palestinian state — a key policy goal of the White House and the international community. He also promised to expand construction in Jewish areas of east Jerusalem, the section of the city claimed by the Palestinians as their capital.
+
+Netanyahu infuriated the White House early this month when he delivered a speech to the U.S. Congress criticizing an emerging nuclear deal with Iran. The speech was arranged with Republican leaders and not coordinated with the White House ahead of time.
+
+In Washington, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama was confident strong U.S.-Israeli ties would endure far beyond the election regardless of the victor.
+
+The Palestinians, fed up after years of deadlock with Netanyahu, are now likely to press ahead with their attempts to bring war crimes charges against Israel in the International Criminal Court.
+
+""What Netanyahu is doing and stating are war crimes and if the international community wants peace it should make Netanyahu accountable for his acts,"" said Palestinian official Saeb Erekat. He said the Palestinian leadership will meet Thursday to discuss its next steps.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+Click for more from The Jerusalem Post.",REAL
+2055,Clinton says she'll decide about 2016 next year,"(CNN) - Hillary Clinton says she'll decide in 2014 about whether she'll make another run for the White House in 2016.
+
+""Obviously, I will look carefully at what I think I can do and make that decision sometime next year,"" Clinton said in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters that aired Wednesday night.
+
+Clinton, who was named Walter's ""Most Fascinating Person of 2013,"" was quite open in the interview about her feelings towards launching another presidential campaign, but also emphasized again that it's too early to be obsessing about the next race for the White House.
+
+""It's such a difficult decision and it's one that I'm not going to rush into ... and I don't think we should be looking at the next election,""Clinton said. ""I think we should be looking at the work that we have today. Our unemployment rate is too high. We have people getting kicked off food stamps who are in terrible economic straits. Small business is not getting credit, I could go on and on, so I think we ought to pay attention to what's happening right now.""
+
+Since Clinton stepped down as Secretary of State at the beginning of the year, speculation has mounted that she'll run again for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then-Sen. Clinton battled then-Sen. Barack Obama in a marathon fight for their party's nomination in the first half of 2008 before she bowed out in June.
+
+Now, for the first time in decades, neither Clinton or her husband, former President Bill Clinton, are in public office, which she calls a ""relief.""
+
+""I knew that I wanted to get off this high wire that I had been on for so long,"" Clinton said. ""To spend time just doing things that give us a lot of joy, playing with our dogs, going to movies, just hanging out.""
+
+Asked whether her husband wants her to run, Clinton said that Bill Clinton has been ""very respectful,"" adding that he wants her to ""do what I think is right.""
+
+Asked if she wants to see a woman in the White House, Clinton answered, ""of course,"" but said, ""I don't know the exact timing of it or who that might be.""
+
+If she decides to run, Clinton would instantly become the overwhelming frontrunner for her party's nomination, and she's been miles ahead of the other potential Democratic White House hopefuls in every public opinion poll.
+
+A new national survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University indicates that if the 2016 race for the nomination were held today, 63% of Democrats would back Clinton as their party's nominee, with no other possible contender even cracking  double digits. According to the poll, which was released Thursday, Clinton grabs the support of 66% of liberals, 61% of moderates and 58% of the smaller faction of conservative Democrats.
+
+The Fairleigh Dickinson University poll was conducted December 9-15, with 1,002 adults nationwide questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.",REAL
+9656,Humans Came Out Of Australia Not Africa,"Humans Came Out Of Australia Not Africa By DailyBellStaff - November 05, 2016 
+… Man searching for toilet in Australia’s outback makes astounding discovery of 49,000-year-old human settlement … Archaeologists working with traditional Aboriginal owners have discovered astounding evidence of the earliest human habitation of inland Australia. – Sutff, NewZealand’s Largest Online Source 
+Australian habitation keeps getting pushed back and this discovery mentioned above pushes it back farther. 
+But apparently not far enough. There are alternative explanations that claim Aborigines are somewhere in the area of 300,000 years old. 
+This theory claims that Aborigine people colonized the world including Africa. 
+The theory is supposedly based on inaccurate African DNA samples and more accurate Australian DNA samples 
+You can see a comprehensive article here. There are a number of fascinating YouTube videos on the subject as well (if YouTub hasn’t taken them down). 
+The article refers to a paper, Recent African Genesis of Humans, by Professors Alan Wilson and Rebecca Cann. This paper was said to have established that humans came out of Africa. It was the “final word,” but then came this: 
+Not long after their paper was published Rebecca Cann realised they were mistaken. In 1982 she examined the mitochondrial DNA of 112 Indigenous people, including twelve full-descent Aboriginals, and the results were in total opposition to what they assumed was fully resolved. 
+Nevertheless, Cann was obliged to contradict a central tenet of their paper, stating that “mitochondrial DNA puts the origin of Homo sapiens much further back and indicates that the Australian Aboriginals arose 400,000 years ago from two distinct lineages, far earlier than any other racial type.” 
+Not only was the emergence of Aboriginal Homo sapiens “far earlier” than any Africans, she provided a sequence and motherland. 
+The Australian racial group has a much higher number of mutations than any other racial group, which suggests that the Australians split off from a common ancestor about 400,000 years ago. By the same theory, the Mongoloid originated about 100,000 years ago, and the Negroid and Caucasian groups about 40,000 years ago. 
+Alan Wilson was “desperate” to reclaim validity for the paper’s initial conclusions and visited Australia twice. He sampled “mtDNA of 21 full-descent Australian Aboriginals and provided 15 different strands.” The results led Wilson to decide that there must have been “15 pregnant females on board.” 
+He tried again in in 1989 but was no more successful. The second sampling included a “similar percentage (70%) of mutation was present.” Wilson quit at this point, conceding that humans had not come out of Africa initially. 
+It seems too far out to admit, but while Homo erectus was muddling along in the rest of the world, a few erectus had got to Australia and did something dramatically different – not even with stone tools – but it is there that Homo sapiens have emerged and evolved… Homo sapiens would have evolved free from competition out of a small band of Homo erectus 400,000 years ago. 
+There are at least ten Australian sites claimed to be older than 60,000 years, granted every date is challenged by conservative critics, but even so, all are the products of respected academics. 
+What needs to be accepted is that if just one date proves to be correct, irrespective of whatever judgment is passed on the other nine, it can be confidently declared as a fact that Australia was not settled by African Homo sapiens 60,000 years ago. 
+The Aborigine culture is based on so-called Dreamtime narratives that provide a history of Aborigine society. In fact, Egyptian inscriptions have been found in Australian caves. It is perfectly possible that Egyptian culture was in some sense initiated in Australia. 
+The idea is that human culture generally is Australian. Illustrations of big, high-prowed boats have been found on rock walls in Australia. These are sea-going vessels. 
+It is fairly clear that Aborigines reached South America perhaps 40,000 years ago and were subsequently attacked by waves of immigrant Indians. The Aborigines retreated to the bottom of South America, and islands there, where their descendants remain. 
+Fascinating technology exists in Australia. Most significant are hand-sized “melted rocks” that also serve as star-maps. Even today we don’t have the technology to melt successive layers of rock, one on-top of the other. 
+And these melted rock maps have further elaborations. They seem to provide maps of the astrological heavens, hundreds or thousands of different constellations. 
+The aborigine culture yields up numerous secrets. The tribes owned their land for tens of thousands of years and thus we can see that ownership of land is an organizing factor of mankind. They had confrontations but these were often individual in nature. The aborigine culture existed in Australia without major, ongoing wars, apparently. 
+This is a larger lesson that indicates quite clearly that our current hyper-militarization is a kind of farcical propaganda. Human beings don’t have to live in a perpetual state of war. 
+The information about the Aborigine past is useful in other ways as well. It shows us more clearly than ever that there are two kinds of cultures in the world. 
+There is tribal culture that organizes itself in harmony with “nature” and is both inclusive and democratic. Then there is “urban” culture that seeks to put people into huge metropolises where every facet of person’s life can be controlled. 
+Currently urban culture is ascendant. And the more one contemplates it, the more it seems purposeful rather than coincidental. 
+Everywhere, tribal culture is under attack. In the Americas, tribal culture has been considerably diminished. Pacific cultures have lost tribal elements and these are only being gradually rediscovered. 
+It turns out that there was a pan-Pacific culture that included canoe travel without maps. The navigator steered using perceptions of the waves and the sky. 
+Often the navigator would supposedly go into a trance and stay in a semi-wakeful state for weeks at time. There was a whole culture associated with this sort of navigation and a pervasive education that could take decades to master. 
+It had nothing to do with “drifting rafts” visiting other islands coincidentally. 
+The aborigine culture has been virtually wiped out in Australia like other tribal cultures. But the more we understand about these cultures, the better. Unfortunately, there are considerable, organized barriers in the way. 
+For instance, it is surely likely that organized human habitation took place more than 5,000 years ago. It is possible that coastal cities exited 10,000 years ago or longer. These cities were wiped out in a huge flood, or so the hypothesis goes. 
+But there are evidences of this ancient culture including a city more than a mile offshore beyond India’s Western coast. The Indian government indicated it would investigate a decade ago but has not yet. 
+The current archaeological bias involves a narrative of human civilization that begins with Sumer and ascends from there. But it is perfectly possible that the story of humanity is a good deal more complicated and includes ebbs and flows. 
+The current archaeological bias militates against tribalism. We are supposed to believe that human society has ascended in perpetual progress. That makes anything that comes now better than what came before, which benefits elite strategies for continually organizing and manipulating humankind. 
+Conclusion: It’s perfectly possible that human history is a good deal different than what we’ve been told. One place to begin a reexamination is Australia.",FAKE
+8811,"Russia, China Look To Autonomous Financial System","Russia, China Look To Autonomous Financial System 11/07/2016 
+TASS.COM 
+Russia and China need to create an autonomous financial system which would be minimally subject to political risks and external pressure, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview with the Chinese Central Television (CCTV). 
+“As I see it, what should we be guided with in creating a modern financial system in the People’s Republic of China and in the Russian Federation?” he said. “We need to set up a modern, protected and simultaneously quite autonomous financial system, which would be subject to political risks to a lesser degree.” Nowadays, Russia and China are considering integration of Russia’s national payment system, the Mir bank cards, and China’s UnionPay system, he said. 
+“In our view, it would help to enhance the reliability of payments,” Medvedev said, adding that sometimes some countries were trying to exert “all sorts of political pressure.” European banks had been regularly fined by US financial authorities and financial companies, he added. 
+“They say ‘We will take ten billion euros from a French bank and seven billion euros from a German bank’. Our European partners agree with this,” Medvedev said. 
+“I am not speaking about the nature of these disputes but that we must protect our financial systems. China must protect its own system and Russia must protect its own system. Therefore, this cooperation is very useful as in this situation no-one will be capable of blocking the road of financial traffic,” he emphasized. Russia looks to predictability of China’s economic growth 
+Russia expects that China’s economic growth will be predictable and is set to cooperate with Chinese partners for the purpose, Russia’s Prime Minister said in an interview. 
+“We are interested in predictability of China’s economy growth and so we are ready to work with our Chinese partners,” Medvedev said, adding the Russian government was implementing a plan aimed to boost the economic growth. 
+“Actually, everyone needs it. Our country needs it as recently we have been plunged in a phase of such decline. Both European and US economies need it since they have not been gaining fast growth, to say nothing about Japan. Also, the Chinese economy needs it since it had been gathering speed in the past years but has slowed down later,” he said. “It is closely watched by everyone as China’s economy is the most significant factor of the world economic growth.”. Energy and high technology sectors 
+Russia and China may reach the goal of $200bln trade by 2020 but energy and high technology sectors along with traditional trade should move up a gear, Russian Prime Minister said. 
+“Indicators have been improving this year as a result of joint work of the two states, including our countries’ leaders, governments, ministries, agencies and businesses,” Medvedev said. Russia, China intend to develop small satellite for Wi-Fi network 
+“I am convinced that if we move ahead like this, by 2020 we will be able to reach the trade of $200 billion worth. However, attention should be turned to key aspects of cooperation,” he said explaining he implied the energy sector, with some projects like the Power of Siberia gas pipeline. 
+“In 2015 construction of an eastern stretch of the gas pipeline was launched,” he said. “Also, it includes oil supplies along the Skovorodino-Mohe (oil pipeline) extension and construction of large facilities, in particular the construction of Unit 3 at the Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant.” 
+Besides, high-tech projects should be enhanced, he said. 
+“I mean wide-body jets, heavy helicopters and other projects in the high-tech sector,” Medvedev said. “It seems to me that if we diversify trade like this, our countries will be quite capable of reaching the level which we agreed on several years ago,” he said in conclusion. Share",FAKE
+8503,"Biden Blames “Lazy American Women” For The Economy: “They Sit Around Doing Nothing, Only Hillary Can Force Them To Work”","Email 
+
+Democratic Vice President Joe Biden wants American women to get back in the workforce to help boost the economy. “If we just put all the women back to work, if they were able to afford childcare, we would increase the GDP in America by close to eight tenths of one percent,” he said. “That’s trillions of dollars over the next decade.” 
+Biden made his remarks during a campaign event for Hillary Clinton at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Tuesday. “The state of our economy could be characterized by a single word: pitiful,” he argued. “We’re still battling recession, I don’t care what the official stats are saying, America is still in recession. And we’re not doing anything about it.” 
+He added that it was “lazy American women” who brought about the downfall of the economy, because “they sit around on their behinds, doing nothing and squandering their days away when they could be improving the country that has given so much to them.” “I’m not sure how exactly we got to this point, but we’re here and we need to move. Like, yesterday,” he said. 
+“Mark my words and mark them well,” he addressed the crowd. “Hillary Clinton is the only one who can force American women to go to work. This is true because of a number of reasons. First, she’s a woman herself and not just any woman; she’s a self-made woman. So you better believe what she’s saying is true and has been tried and tested in practice plenty of times.” 
+“Second, Hillary Clinton understands how difficult it can be to give up the status of a free-loader when your husband is the bread-winner of the household and the wife is expected to tend to the house, the children, make sure dinner is served and always be in the mood for marital duties. She’s been all that and she’s learned how to break free from it, the hard way, I might add,” Biden continued. 
+“Today’s women are pampered and aren’t used to rolling up their sleeves and getting the job done on their own,” the vice president said. “They’re too dependent, too weak and too lazy to contribute to the economy. The reason for that is they’ve learned how to manipulate men by employing one of the most fundamental laws of economics: when a sought-after commodity becomes short in supply, the demand for it rises even higher.” 
+“Now, that’s all fine and dandy when it comes to their personal interests, but if you look at the big picture, it’s the economy that’s missing out on valuable workforce. And that’s why we need to get them off their lazy behinds and get them into their workplaces. And like I said, Hillary Clinton is the only one who can do it, which is what makes her the ideal candidate for the next President of the United States. We need to heal this country, folks, not run it into the ground even deeper,” Biden concluded.",FAKE
+6789,5.0 Quake Near Oklahoma Oil Hub Causes Substantial Damage,"5.0 Quake Near Oklahoma Oil Hub Causes Substantial Damage 11/07/2016 
+CBS 
+A magnitude 5.0 earthquake centered near one of the world’s key oil hubs brought down building facades and shattered windows in a central Oklahoma city, rendering century-old buildings unsafe and raising concerns about key infrastructure. 
+As the sun rose Monday, television news footage showed widespread, substantial damage to buildings, with piles of bricks and other debris littering the ground following the earthquake the previous evening. Cushing Assistant City Manager Jeremy Frazier told a news conference late Sunday that a few minor injuries had been reported. He said the damage appeared to be contained downtown. 
+Oklahoma has had thousands of earthquakes in recent years, with nearly all traced to the underground injection of wastewater left over from oil and gas production. Sunday’s quake was centered 1 mile west of Cushing and about 25 miles south of where a magnitude 4.3 quake forced a shutdown of several wells last week. 
+Fearing aftershocks, police cordoned off older parts of the city to keep gawkers away late Sunday, and geologists confirmed that several small quakes have rumbled the area. Frazier said an assisted living community had been evacuated after damage was reported. The Cushing Public School District canceled Monday classes. 
+“Stay out of the area,” said City Manager Steve Spears, who noted that while some damage was superficial, compromised foundations and other potential problems would be difficult to assess until daylight in the city of 7,900 about 50 miles northeast of Oklahoma City. 
+The Oklahoma Department of Transportation reported Sunday night that no highway or bridge damage was found within a 15-mile radius of the earthquake’s epicenter. 
+The quake struck at 7:44 p.m. Sunday and was felt as far away as Iowa, Illinois and Texas. The U.S. Geological Survey initially said Sunday’s quake was of magnitude 5.3 but later lowered the reading to 5.0. 
+“I thought my whole trailer was going to tip over, it was shaking it so bad,” said Cushing resident Cindy Roe, 50. “It was loud and all the lights went out and you could hear things falling on the ground. 
+“It was awful and I don’t want to have another one.” 
+Cushing’s oil storage terminal is one of the world’s largest. As of Oct. 28, tank farms in the countryside around Cushing held 58.5 million barrels of crude oil, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The community bills itself as the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World.” 
+Frazier said two pipeline companies had reported no trouble as of late Sunday but that the community hadn’t heard from all companies. Gov. Mary Fallin tweeted that no damage was reported at the storage tanks at Cushing’s oil storage terminal 
+Megan Gustafson and Jonathan Gillespie were working at a Cushing McDonald’s when the quake hit. 
+“It felt like a train was going right through the building, actually,” Gustafson, 17, said Sunday night as she and her co-workers stood behind a police barricade downtown, looking for damage. “I kind of freaked out and was hyperventilating a bit.” 
+Gillespie said the building shook for about 10 seconds, but that he wasn’t as alarmed as Gustafson because he lives in an area that has experienced multiple earthquakes, especially in recent years. 
+“I didn’t think it was anything new,” he said. 
+According to USGS data, there have been about two dozen earthquakes in Oklahoma in the past week. When particularly strong quakes hit, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission directs well operators to cease wastewater injections or reduce volume. 
+A 5.8 earthquake — a record for Oklahoma — hit Pawnee on Sept. 3. Shortly afterward, geologists speculated on whether the temblor occurred on a previously unknown fault. 
+“I was at home doing some work in my office and, basically, you could feel the whole house sway some,” Spears, the Cushing city manager, said Sunday night. “It’s beginning to become normal.”",FAKE
+5390,OpEds | Eric Zuesse: 34 Reasons This Bernie Voter Will Vote Trump,"“Why I Won’t Vote for Hillary Clinton | Evan Edinger” (but then he changes his mind on that) TO CLOSE : Evan Edlinger will vote for Hillary against Trump because he thinks that whereas Hillary’s actual track-record of policies (not mere statements) in public office have been horrific, Trump’s bad statements and lack of any track-record in public office at all, make Trump even worse. That’s what he thinks. I think it makes Trump better — the better choice — as opposed to the proven evil and catastrophically harmful public official, Hillary Clinton. Edlinger is preferring an evil record as a public official, to no record as a public official. Edlinger fails to make two crucial distinctions: One is that he fails to distinguish between mere political statements, versus actual political policies carried out as a public official (which show Hillary to be a proven neocon and tool of Wall Street); and the other is his failing to distinguish between a bad record in a person’s private or business affairs, versus a bad record as an actual public official. Only the bad record as a public official should be absolutely disqualifying — and that’s Clinton, not Trump, who has a horrific record as a public official. Trump has no record at all as a public official. Edlinger at 1:30 in his video says that when he contemplates voting for Hillary,”There’s always one thing that comes in the way, and that’s trust.” He says he doesn’t trust her — but what he doesn’t actually “trust” is her words; when he says he’ll vote for her, he’s simply ignoring her actions, he’s ignoring the real person-as-a-public-official, the person who is shown and displayed beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever. Proven selfishness in one’s private life is bad, but proven selfishness and evil in one’s public-office policies (such as “We came, we saw, he died. Ha, ha!” ) is utterly disqualifying. I argued in my “I’m a Bernie Sanders Voter: Here’s Why I’ll Vote Trump” , that Trump could possibly turn out to be a progressive President; but, even if he turns out to be a bad President, he won’t, on balance, be as horrific as will a President Hillary Clinton. With Trump, there is reason to have some hope for the future of the world; with Clinton, there is reason to expect unprecedented horrors . About the author Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records , 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity . NOTE: The Greanville Post editors have a clear position on this so-called election: If you MUST vote, vote Green, for the Jill Stein, Ajamu Baraka ticket, as a PROTEST VOTE. If that is not possible in your area, do not bother to vote, as all votes serve to legitimate a fraudulent process and the ongoing reign of the corporate/military/media complex. =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. [email-subscribers namefield=”YES” desc=”” group=”Public”] NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS Print this post if you want. Share This:",FAKE
+7749,BREAKING: Hillary’s State Department Spent $9.2 Million Hiring the Terrorists Who Attacked Americans in Benghazi,"“What difference, at this point, does it make?” 
+Remember those infamous and wretched words? Of course you do. We all do. Those were the words uttered by Hillary Clinton when she was desperately trying to spin her way through a committee hearing on Benghazi.
+And as anyone not named Hillary Clinton or anyone not on her corrupt payroll knows, it makes a lot of difference . This because Americans died. They died at the hands of terrorists on Hillary’s watch.
+New information is now out about some of the individuals who were paid to guard/protect state department employees at the special missions compound where the terrorist attack occurred and it’s not pretty. Turns out Hillary’s state department spent $9.2 million on a contract for guards, many of whom turned out to be the very terrorists who attacked the compound, killing our ambassador and other Americans in the process.
+Via Fox News .
+“Many of the local Libyans who attacked the consulate on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, were the actual guards that the State Department under Hillary Clinton hired to protect the Consulate in Benghazi,” Tiegen told Fox News. “The guards were unvetted and were locals with basically no background at all in providing security. Most of them never had held a job in security in the past.
+“Blue Mountain Libya, at the time of being awarded the contract by our State Department, had no employees so they quickly had to find people to work, regardless of their backgrounds,” he said.
+One former guard who witnessed the attack, Weeam Mohamed, confirmed in an email sent to the Citizens Commission on Benghazi and obtained by Fox News, that at least four of the guards hired by Blue Mountain took part in the attack after opening doors to allow their confederates in.
+“In the U.S. Mission, there were four people [who] belonged to the battalion February 17,” Mohamed wrote to the Commission, an independent body formed with Accuracy in Media to investigate the attack and the administration’s handling of it.
+Again, it makes a lot of difference.
+",FAKE
+4108,The 5 big things we learned about Congress in 2015,"Let's start with what we already knew when the 114th Congress gaveled in this January: Republicans were cheering their control of both chambers for the first time in eight years, including a historic majority in the House of Representatives.
+
+But they inherited a Congress suffering from serious morale problems. Congress had a reputation for being ineffective, unpleasant and unpopular. Americans told Gallup pollsters they thought car salespeople and telemarketers were more honest than their lawmakers in Washington, D.C. -- a distinction that remains at year's end:
+
+Amid that dismal back drop, Congress arguably got even worse as the year went on. There were shutdown threats, leadership crises and drama from nasty 2016 presidential primaries seeping into its halls. And then suddenly, at the end of the year, things came together.
+
+House Republicans got a new -- if initially reluctant -- leader in Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). Both sides can claim victories in a flurry of last-minute bipartisan legislation that funded the government, extended tax breaks and lifted the debt ceiling.
+
+There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about Congress next year as well, but thanks to the sudden change of events in the House, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle will tell you there's at least a glimmer of hope things will be less contentious in 2016.
+
+But to understand what might be to come, we have to first dissect what just happened. Here are five things we learned about Congress from this tumultuous year:
+
+1. The House is still broken …
+
+Consider these sobering statistics from Gallup: Those who pay attention to Congress actually like it less. In other words, it's not people who don't actually tune in who are dismissing Congress as a bunch of louts.
+
+And since July, Republicans have actually given the GOP-controlled Congress lower approval ratings than Democrats and independents, according to a November Gallup poll.
+
+It's not normal to have members of the party in control of Congress most upset with Congress. But maybe these voters are on to something. The story of 2015 on Capitol Hill is filled with congressional gridlock on just about every major issue, the government very nearly shutting down in October and the House leader's sudden resignation as his own members threatened to remove him.
+
+A growing and emboldened group of 30 to 40 conservatives played a big role in all this by holding up or stopping legislation they didn't approve of. By refusing to back down from their demands, the group became so influential it eventually ushered Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) out of his job.
+
+The Fix's Chris Cillizza has argued our current divided, outsider-driven political system is encouraging the drama. Lawmakers are able to take more hard-line stands without political consequences thanks to more polarized districts back home, while influential outside groups flush with cash are encouraging such behavior.
+
+Adding to the challenges is a group of about 70-100 Republican lawmakers who are nervous about primary challengers because they are otherwise in safe districts. They joined the conservative cause on many votes this year, from not funding the Department of Homeland Security to standing firm against a debt limit increase. Congressional leaders had fewer tools at their disposal -- like earmarks for pet projects -- to entice members to vote differently.
+
+These dynamics have been quietly forming and playing out for a few years , and in 2015 we finally saw the chaos burst to the surface.
+
+2. … But it can hobble along
+
+At least, the most optimistic of those in Republican leadership say so. They point to the spending bill and tax deal that Ryan and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) slapped together to avoid a government shutdown. It got a majority of votes from both parties, although congressional budget watchers mostly attribute the vote totals to goodies the leaders tacked onto the bill -- basically earmarks in everything but name.
+
+And let's not forget that on his way out the door, a beleaguered Boehner managed to strike a budget deal with Pelosi that lifted the debt ceiling through 2016 -- taking a potentially disastrous default debate off the table for the presidential election.
+
+Notice the figure central to both Ryan's and Boehner's deal-making: Pelosi. Even though House Republicans have one of the largest majorities since the Great Depression, Democrats played a significant role this year by helping pass just about every must-pass deal, sometimes even carrying the majority of ""yes"" votes.
+
+As such, Pelosi had a lot of leverage to shape outcomes. We named her one of the spending deal's winners after Democrats secured major victories, including getting domestic spending increased by the same amount as military spending. Republicans got some things to brag about too, like lifting the 40-year crude oil export ban.
+
+The back-and-forth is just what happens in a legislative body with a sizable minority -- or at least one empowered by a divided majority. ""Welcome to divided government,"" Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told me last week.
+
+And as long as conservatives in the House continue to split off from their party, a divided government is likely to be Congress's reality next year, too. Which means Ryan faces many of the same predicaments Boehner did -- the end-of-year agreements notwithstanding.
+
+One of the most interesting storylines in Congress this year is the goodwill conservatives extended to Ryan, their new leader, even though he arguably didn't produce results that different from Boehner's.
+
+Ryan managed to negotiate a spending bill with Democrats in the same manner and with largely the same outcomes that Boehner likely would have. But Ryan did it without earning the same kind of vitriol from the right flank of his party that Boehner likely would have. The group on the right didn't like the spending bill, and many didn't vote for it, but they didn't call Ryan names for negotiating it with Democrats.
+
+Knowing he was at risk of being compared to the politically toxic former speaker during these negotiations, Ryan did his best to subtly draw contrasts with Boehner outside of them -- Boehner smokes and drinks; Ryan works out every morning. Boehner stacked powerful committees with his allies; Ryan opened the positions up to the whole House.
+
+Cole told The Fix that Ryan also did a better job than Boehner explaining to Republicans why he was negotiating with Democrats and taking everyone's ideas into account -- even if they wound up on the cutting room floor.
+
+Ryan might be different enough in style from Boehner that some conservatives skeptical of their party's establishment were willing to forgive the two men's similarities in substance.
+
+On the other hand, it has only been two months.
+
+4. Republicans aren't the only ones with partisan drama
+
+A lot has been written -- including here on The Fix -- about the influence of the far-right on the Republican Party, pulling the party to the right both in Congress and on the campaign trail while rendering the House basically ungovernable.
+
+That, in broad strokes, is true. But there are signs Democrats are also moving closer and closer to the extreme of their party, too.
+
+Earlier this month, we named liberal leader Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one of the winners of the Democratic presidential primary so far, as front-runner Hillary Clinton picks up on some of Warren's economic populist rhetoric. The populist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is also having surprising success this year, for obvious reasons.
+
+Nonpartisan tech start-up Crowdpac (the ones who recently matched up the 10 most liberal and 10 most conservative cities by campaign donors) tried to put numbers to such anecdotal evidence. The company analyzed who has been giving money to lawmakers and tracked lawmakers' votes since 1980. Here's what they found:
+
+The findings, which combine political contributions and voting records of members of Congress, go back to our first point: Congressional lawmakers have little incentive to reach for the middle when politics is pushing them further and further apart.
+
+Earlier this year, one of Republicans' first challenges in their new position of power was to try to stop the president's executive actions on immigration. They didn't. However, a multi-state court challenge has held up those same immigration actions to the point where they might not be implemented before President Obama leaves office.
+
+A similar situation has played out with the president's 2010 health-care reform law. The House has voted more than 60 times over the past four years to repeal Obamacare. Such a bill has never made it to the president's desk.
+
+By contrast, there have been not one but two challenges to the law that made it to the Supreme Court. Even though the court upheld the law both times, the legal challenges got further than the legislation ever could.
+
+We could say the same thing for Republicans' attempts to roll back the Obama administration's regulations to cut power plants' emissions, which they haven't been able to stop in Congress either. But those regulations are facing a multi-state legal challenge. (In June, the Supreme Court narrowly ruled against the administration's attempts to regulate mercury from power plants.)
+
+In short, trying to stop or reverse Obama's agenda has confounded congressional Republicans, and that failure been a major source of frustration for the increasingly influential grassroots faction of the party.
+
+Perhaps trying to advance political agendas through this broken, partisan and often unpredictable Congress is the reason why.",REAL
+4902,Reuters/Ipsos Poll: Trump Closes in on Clinton's Projected Electoral Lead,"Republican Donald Trump appears to have carved out a wider path to the White House as a number of states including Florida and Ohio are no longer considered likely wins for Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project released on Saturday.
+
+The project, which combines opinion polls with an analysis of voting patterns under different election scenarios, still shows Clinton would have the best chance of winning the presidency if the Nov. 8 election were held today. Yet Trump has caught up to her level of support in several states.
+
+Clinton now has an 83 percent chance of winning the election by an average of 47 votes in the Electoral College, the body that ultimately selects the president. In late August, the States of the Nation estimated that Clinton had a 95 percent chance of winning by an average of 108 electoral votes.
+
+Over the past few weeks, Clinton's lead in the national polls has slipped considerably. Polls tend to narrow as Election Day nears, and the Clinton campaign has struggled to overcome controversy about how she handled classified information while serving as secretary of state.
+
+A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll of likely voters showed an 8-point lead for Clinton has vanished since the last week of August.
+
+Clinton is still favored to win 17 states, including many with large, urban populations such as New York, New Jersey and California that heavily influence the outcome of the election. Trump would likely win 23 states, many of them with smaller populations.
+
+The number of states projected for Clinton has dropped over the past few weeks. Two of those states, Ohio and Florida, were considered likely wins for Clinton in late August. Now the candidates are about even in support. Five more states, including Michigan and North Carolina are also up for grabs.
+
+The sample size was insufficient to determine the outcome in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska and the District of Columbia, though Alaska usually votes Republican and Washington D.C. for the Democratic Party candidate.
+
+The Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project is driven by an online survey that gathers responses from about 15,000 people per week. Their responses are weighted according to the latest population estimates, and each respondent is ranked according to their likelihood to vote.
+
+Once the poll is complete, the project tallies the levels of support and estimated error for both candidates, and then runs multiple election simulations given their respective support.",REAL
+6868,UN Chief urges South Africa to reconsider quitting ICC,"November 1, 2016 UN Chief urges South Africa to reconsider quitting ICC 
+The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon regretted the South Africa’s decision to leave the International Criminal Court (ICC) and expressed hope that it would reconsider the decision before the withdrawal takes effect. 
+Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,",FAKE
+9260,"“If Trump Loses, I’m Grabbing My Musket”: Former Congressman Ready to Go Full Revolution","324 324 likes 
+His heated rhetoric is a response to the endless episodes of fraud, dirty trick and foul play by the Hillary campaign, as it seems that she will stop at nothing to become the first female POTUS – just the sort of abuse of power that the founders warned about. 
+1775-76 erupted in response to a long train of abuses – acts of oppression and hostility listed in the Declaration of Independence that is being largely repeated in modern day America. 
+Could Hillary’s reported election victory – or Donald Trump’s defeat – signal civil unrest and a new wave of resistance, particularly if the results are widely viewed as fraudulent or “rigged”? Trump, for one, has certainly been talking up the possibility of a stolen election. 
+The scenario is plausible enough that the Pentagon and Homeland Security have been carrying out secret drills in the lead up to the election to prepare for the possibility of a martial law response to violence or civil unrest. 
+As SHTF detailed in an exclusive report, a whistleblower has come forward on the ominous contingency plan to keep and/or restore order if the populace revolt against the establishment’s “selection” for president: 
+If there is any truth to it, the 2016 election could be a kick-off for total tyranny. 
+According to an unnamed source – who has provided accurate intel in the past – an unannounced military drill is scheduled to take place during a period leading up to the election and throughout the month after. 
+Date: October 30th – 30 days after the election Suspected Region: Northeast, specifically New York 
+1st Phase: NROL (No Rule of Law) – drill involving combat arms in metro areas (active and reserve). Source says active duty and reserve service members are being vaccinated as if they are being deployed in theatre. 
+2nd Phase: LROL (Limited Rule of Law) – Military/FEMA consolidating resources, controlling water supply, handing out to public as needed. 
+3rd Phase: AROL (Authoritarian Rule of Law) – Possible new acronym or term for “Martial Law”. Curfew, restricted movements, basically martial law scenario. 
+Source said exercise involves FEMA/DHS/Military 
+At this point, no one can say for certain what will happen in the aftermath of November 8, but it is clear that millions and millions of Americans are dissatisfied with the status quo, troubled about the economic realities perpetuated by the Fed and angry that Hillary may be put in the Oval Office rather than a jail cell, despite a trail of corruption with virtually no end. 
+How far will things go? 
+And will things ever be reset without a new American Revolution? This entry was posted in World News and tagged Donald Trump , Mac Slavo , Revolution , SHTFPlan , Trump . Bookmark the permalink . Post navigation",FAKE
+4502,Drama On The Docket: High Court's Term Set To End With Slate Of Big Cases,"Drama On The Docket: High Court's Term Set To End With Slate Of Big Cases
+
+Major decisions are expected this month, as the U.S. Supreme Court works its way through several cases still pending before it closes out its calendar for the 2014-2015 term.
+
+Among the biggest issues hanging fire: the status of same-sex marriages, subsidies for health insurance under Obamacare and the drugs that states may use to administer the death penalty by lethal injection. But the court is also expected to weigh in on the drawing of lines for congressional elections, the right to put the Confederate flag on license plates and the right of a municipality to regulate outdoor signage.
+
+""Decision days"" are scheduled for each Monday this month, along with Thursday, June 18 — and there could be yet another day announced, as well. The court has not gone beyond June in more than 20 years.
+
+It is typical for the court to issue its most important and controversial rulings in the final days of its annual session. Many expect the same-sex-marriage and Obamacare decisions to come later in the month. But many court observers are expecting the lethal injection decision sooner, along with more than a dozen cases that carry considerable significance of their own.
+
+The court meets at 10 a.m. ET Monday and on the other decision days of the month. NPR will be covering the proceedings and reporting on the decisions as soon as they become available, on our regular radio programs, on NPR.org, NPR One and other platforms.
+
+Lethal Injection (Glossip v. Gross)
+
+As traditional methods such as hanging, firing squad and electrocution have fallen from favor, states with the death penalty have been injecting a ""protocol,"" or series of drugs, to execute death row prisoners. But pharmaceutical companies now refuse to provide sodium thiopental, the drug used at the beginning of the series to make the prisoner lose consciousness.
+
+States have looked for substitutes, including midazolam, which is a sedative and not an anesthetic. Inmates who have brought this case say that those who receive this drug may remain conscious after dosage, when they receive subsequent drugs. Some members of the court were clearly sympathetic to this viewpoint in the oral argument earlier this year. But some of the court's conservatives seemed to regard it as a ""backdoor"" means to undermine the death penalty itself.
+
+If the court sides with the inmates, states will have to scramble to find alternative means of execution, which may include a return to the more traditional methods.
+
+Obamacare (King v. Burwell)
+
+Plaintiffs have argued that only those states that have set up their own exchanges for the purchase of health care insurance are entitled to give subsidies to lower-income people. States that let the federal government set up their exchanges for them, they contend, may not accept the federal tax credits that subsidize those eligible in state-run exchanges. The administration argues that the intent of the legislators was clear, whatever the exact wording of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and that all exchanges are eligible for the subsidies.
+
+If the court rules for the plaintiffs, subsidies could go away for more than 6 million current recipients, although the timetable for their losing insurance is somewhat uncertain. Congress would be under pressure to act.
+
+Taking this many people out of the system would also affect the private health insurance market and the amount that people pay in insurance premiums. The degree of impact would depend on how sweeping the justices' ruling is. But it could affect individuals, small business, large business, the insurance industry, doctors and hospitals.
+
+Same-Sex Marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges and related cases)
+
+A series of recent rulings by the high court has led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in three dozen states, which are home to more than 70 percent of the U.S. population. This has happened despite many states' efforts to enact bans on such marriages, either by legislation or by referendum.
+
+These laws and state constitutional amendments have been consistently struck down by federal courts at the district and appellate levels — except for the Federal Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. This one court, sitting in Cincinnati, upheld the ban enacted in that state and several others and said states did not have to recognize marriages performed legally in other states. This ""circuit split"" between appeals judges brought the case before the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year.
+
+The court now has the opportunity to clarify the legal situation by legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states or to adopt any of several more complicated resolutions — leaving some states with legal same-sex marriage but others — perhaps most — without. The court is also deciding a related case regarding the right of a state to refuse to recognize a same-sex marriage that took place legally in another state.
+
+Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission
+
+Are state laws that put redistricting in the hands of independent commissions unconstitutional? Arizona voters created a commission by constitutional amendment, and some state legislators say that this strips them of their redistricting power, thus violating the U.S. Constitution.
+
+Walker v. Texas Division, Sons Of The Confederacy
+
+May states constitutionally ban the Sons of the Confederacy from displaying the Confederate battle flag on vanity license plates?
+
+Reed v. Town of Gilbert, Ariz.
+
+What should be the constitutional rules for municipalities seeking to limit sign clutter? In this case, a church posted signs that the town wanted to regulate or remove.
+
+Michigan v. EPA
+
+At what point does the federal Clean Air Act require the Environmental Protection Agency to take into account the costs that factory owners face in complying with EPA regulation? Should it be before or after deciding to regulate hazardous pollutants?
+
+Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project 
+
+The most significant race-related case of the term involves what's called ""disparate impact"" in housing. Must plaintiffs have proof of someone's intent to discriminate?",REAL
+3970,A liberal plan to defeat ISIS: Here’s how we avoid Ted Cruz’s religious police state,"The Islamist terrorist attacks that took place almost simultaneously in five locations across Paris last Friday night were shocking in scale and unprecedented in Europe over the past decade: 129 killed immediately, 352 injured (of whom 99 are in critical condition), a country-wide state of emergency declared, thousands of troops deployed to Paris, demonstrations forbidden in the Ile-de-France region encompassing the French capital, border checks reimposed.  The death toll would be bad enough alone, but that one of the assailants entered Europe (in October, via Greece) as a Syrian “refugee” compounds the fear and dread resulting from the massacre: Hundreds of thousands of migrants (two out of three of whom are male) have poured into Europe this year, and a majority are from (Muslim) Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of the other attackers were French- or Belgian-born Muslims.
+
+French President François Hollande, the following day, addressed his people, denouncing an “act of war that was prepared, organized, and planned from the outside, with complicity within our country that our investigation will allow us to establish.”  He named the entity behind the perpetrators: the “terrorist army, Daesh” — ISIS — “a jihadist army,” and promised that France would act “pitilessly against Daesh barbarians.”  The “barbarians'” motive?  They sought to strike at “the values we defend all over the world, at that which we are, a free country that speaks to the entire planet.”
+
+Of the other potential motives — avenging the ongoing French bombing raids against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, plus the two-year French anti-Islamist military intervention in West Africa — Hollande had nothing to say.
+
+ISIS “contained,” President Obama, for his part, having the previous day declared ISIS “contained,” called the ISIS massacre “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share” carried out by those with “a hateful vision.”  Just what sort of “hateful vision” he declined to specify.  (Not that we, by this point, expected him to.)  Clearly, though, our values are not as universal as he would have us think.
+
+ISIS, however, is never coy or evasive in explaining why it does what it does, and emitted a communique of arresting clarity explaining its motives: “a group of believers from the soldiers of the Caliphate . . . set out targeting the capital of prostitution and vice, the lead-carrier of the cross in Europe — Paris.”  They did so “hoping to be killed for Allah’s sake, doing so in support of His religion, . . . His Prophet . . . and His allies.”  They “cast terror into the hearts of crusaders in their very own homeland,” and then detonated their suicide belts with the result that “Allah granted them what they desired” — martyrdom.  France and its allies, the text went on to state, “will continue to be at the top of the target list for the Islamic State . . . as long as they partake in their crusader campaign, as long as they dare to curse our Prophet, and as long as they boast about their war against Islam in France and their strikes against Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets.”
+
+Any rational individual hoping to make sense of why so many people lost their lives in Paris last Friday night could do no better than dispense with the proclamations issued by presidents Hollande and Obama and just read ISIS’s explanation.  The facts it presents are clear and indisputable:
+
+ISIS attacked France because France is leading a “crusade,” bombarding it (in Syria and Iraq) and (unmentioned but surely relevant) crushing the Islamist insurgency in West Africa. On secularist constitutional grounds, France has banned Islamic headgear from schools as potentially divisive “ostentatious religious symbols” and outlawed wearing face-concealing veils in public places as threats to security and national cohesion, as well as being inimical to personal freedom — the equivalent, for ISIS, of waging a “war against Islam.” France stood behind the satirical cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo and free speech ideals after a pair of Islamist brothers assassinated 12 of them last January for repeatedly depicting the Prophet Muhammad, which, for ISIS, amounts to “cursing” him.  The ISIS assailants sought, and mostly received, death for the sake of their faith — martyrdom — just as the Quran promises.
+
+Note the communique’s defiant, triumphal tone — the tone of victors.  Note, concomitantly, the absence of all the factors to which Islamist apologists have ascribed as contributing to Islamist violence committed by French citizens of mostly North African descent in the past; nary a word about discrimination, racism, lack of opportunity, youth unemployment, police brutality, or poverty in Parisian suburbs.  This is not to say that these factors had no role to play in disposing the French-born assailants to play their role in the attacks — they may have.  But the primum mobile for ISIS transpires as unmistakably politico-religious (natural, given that  Islam blends faith and politics), buttressed, to be sure, by the virulent excoriations of infidels found in the Quran .  France is attacking ISIS in the Middle East (and thus acting as “crusaders”) and thwarting the unhindered observance of Islam in France.  France is, thus, impeding the advance of Islam, the True Religion, and thus must incur God’s wrath.
+
+Now no fair observer of the growing religion-inspired chaos we see around us today would contend that all Muslims, be they in Europe or elsewhere, crave martyrdom and are ready to kill for it, or even pose a security threat.  What is clear, though, is that the doctrine of jihad as laid out in the Islamic canon does repeatedly motivate lethal instances of terrorist violence.  We don’t need to furrow our brows and deduce this from abstruse pronouncements; ISIS jihadists themselves are telling us why they are acting, just as al-Qaida once did.  They are proudly showing themselves in action: check out, if you can stomach it, ISIS’s own videos.
+
+And lest you labor under the misconception that, as Obama has said , ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, read and share Graeme Wood’s exhaustive account in the Atlantic of the movement and its aims.  ISIS is not Islamic?  There exists no Islamic equivalent of the pope to make such a determination. Wood’s report shreds this ridiculous assertion anyway. That Hollande and Obama choose to avoid such blunt causal attribution makes (short-sighted) political sense.  France’s population may be, by now, 10 percent Muslim.  Obama does not want to alienate Muslim communities in the United States, whose cooperation he needs to track radicalized youths, nor does he wish to endanger American interests abroad by “demonizing,” as we are so often inclined to say now, Islam as a whole.  We get all that.  The underlying assumption, however — that Muslims must be placated or they may explode into violence — may be less obvious.  In any case, by avoiding the issue — the jihadist problems the generally accepted Islamic canon presents us with — our leaders hinder our having conversations we need to have, our asking questions we simply must ask. Namely, what are we to do about the strongly illiberal convictions held, the data demonstrate, by majorities of Muslims across the Islamic world, convictions that, surely, have stymied any united Muslim attempt to counter ISIS?  Muslim migrants are now entering Europe, unchecked in any meaningful way, in record numbers.  Given that Muslim majorities support making Sharia the official law of their lands, believe one must believe in God to be moral and that religious leaders should play a role in politics, hold that wives must obey their husbands, and favor stoning adulterers and putting to death apostates, how, if at all, are Western societies to adapt?  (Majorities, Pew found, also profess to approve of democracy and religious freedom, which are simply incongruous with the beliefs just canvassed.)  How will peace and comity in our increasingly multicultural, multi-confessional societies be possible if one group adheres to, and acts upon, violent and divisive dogmas inscribed in immutable ancient texts?  What is the best policy Western governments can enact in the Islamic world, given that military intervention has proved disastrous and counterproductive; supporting secular dictators has resulted, eventually, in morasses of strife and mayhem; and key Western “allies” (Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait) are clearly playing a double game by accepting Western backing yet propagating fundamentalist Islam? It’s a safe bet that neither Hollande nor Obama has answers to these questions. If we refuse to address these issues, terrorist attacks will likely multiply and push our politics ever further to the right.  We may well then end up in police states, with security organs even more pervasive and intrusive than they are now.  Or even more perniciously, confused about what is at stake, we may continue our slide into craven accommodationism, into accepting illiberal beliefs (and resulting behavior) as the off-limits patrimony of various religious and national groups, thereby consigning to the dust bin of history once-lauded ideals of universal human rights.  (This is just what “Islamophobia” denouncers are after.)  We should always bear in mind that there is only one Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and it grants no exceptions on the basis of religion or culture.  That one or another faith happens to boast a majority of nonwhite adherents does not make criticism of that faith racist.  Islam in particular has universalist pretensions and so must be liable to criticism by all.  We need to junk, finally, the preposterous claim, advanced by the religion’s apologists, that Islam cannot motivate violence. If our politicians won’t come clean about the parlous juncture at which we find ourselves, we have to.  We must regain confidence in, and appreciation for, our Enlightenment and Western values — reason, equal rights for all (regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or faith), and consensus-based decisions and the rule of law established not by ancient texts, but by elected legislatures operating under the aegis of a secular constitution.  The societies the West has built, as imperfect as they are, offer such grand prospects for human happiness and prosperity that they are drawing millions from less fortunate lands, millions who may have little understanding of what makes these societies work.  We cannot betray those seekers of a better (that is, more secular) life among them, especially women and children, by jettisoning our values under pressure from accommodationists, who often attack straight thinkers as “politically incorrect.” We either buck up and stand by our Enlightenment values, promoting them with zeal, or we will reap a savage whirlwind and lose all that we cherish.",REAL
+4121,Benghazi: The fundamental question that still hasn't been answered,"The Benghazi Committee set out to investigate why four Americans died in Benghazi September 11, 2012, not to damage a presidential candidate. Rightly or wrongly, their credibility has been called into question, including by statements from fellow Republicans.
+
+What I’ll be watching for on Thursday is not questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails; but the fundamental question:  What were the Americans doing in Benghazi in the first place?  Consulates and embassy annexes are where diplomats issue visas and find lost luggage, and that’s clearly not what former special forces Americans were doing.
+
+Who was Ambassador Stevens supposed to meet in Benghazi, and who was responsible for his security?
+
+Which Libyan militia groups were we partnering with and who vetted them?
+
+For over a year there have been unconfirmed reports that the Benghazi was a gun running operation to take Qaddafi’s abandoned weapons and turn them over to Syrian rebels. Is this what the American contractors were doing – running guns?
+
+Were we working with and arming Libyan rebels who turned out to be Al Qaeda-type terrorists?  If that’s true, then not only was this foolish, it was illegal.
+
+Some have said that all of this is reminiscent of Watergate. And yes, Secretary Clinton worked House Judiciary Committee as a 27-year-old staff attorney during the Watergate investigation.  But these are echoes not of Watergate, as some have claimed, but of the Iran-Contra affair.
+
+The committee should focus on what happened in the weeks leading up to the Benghazi attack.
+
+They should ask why Ambassador Stevens’ repeated calls for more security were ignored.
+
+They should question why there was no rescue mission mounted while our men were under attack.
+
+And, yes, they should ask who decided to lie about the events on September 11, 2012 being a planned terrorist attack and instead of using the lame excuse that they were the result of a YouTube video sparking a demonstration that got out of hand.
+
+These questions have all been asked before but they have never answered.
+
+Now, fast forward to October 22, 2015, the committee has new evidence, including Ambassador Stevens’ own emails. This time it will be difficult for any witness to keep dodging the questions.
+
+Finally, and perhaps the most fundamental question of all – was the fiasco of the Libyan war another example of the Obama administration’s love affair with moderately radical Islamists? Has the Obama administration been willfully blind -- from the start -- to the dangers posed by all radical Islamists in Libya, in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq, in Iran?
+
+There is an overwhelming temptation for any politician in today’s Washington to be partisan.  But it was the same forty years ago during the Watergate scandal.
+
+I know because I was there, working for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as a young aide in the West Wing.  It was a dark time not just for the Nixon team, but for the country.
+
+The nation’s business was put on hold for well over a year while we investigated the president and his closest associates.
+
+In the end, the system worked. Nixon resigned, a new president was sworn in and the rift was healed. It was due in no small part to the integrity of the Watergate Committee members – both Republican and Democrat.
+
+Most of them were able to rise above politics and serve the nation’s business. A few, however, learned a different lesson – not the lesson that no one is above the law, but as long as you don’t get caught…
+
+Was Secretary Clinton trying to hide something with her private email system? Perhaps. But that’s for the FBI to decide, not the House Republicans.",REAL
+8432,U.S. Near Bottom in Public ‘Confidence in Elections’,"MOST Voters Now Think Clinton Broke the Law … TWICE As Many As Think that Trump Did → kimyo 
+what is your interpretation of the following email from podesta re: a 2015 cnbc interview in which sanders stated “When you hustle money like that, you don’t sit in restaurants like this” and “That type of wealth has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world.” 
+podesta: This isn’t in keeping w the agreement. Since we clearly have some leverage, would be good to flag this for him. I could send a signal via Welch–or did you establish a direct line w him? Donate Recent Posts",FAKE
+4036,A surprisingly fascinating theory for why Canada is so boring,"Why is Canada so boring? It's a question that Canadian journalist Jeet Heer tried to answer in a series of tweets that are both quaintly earnest (this is a Canadian writing about Canadianness, after all) and surprisingly insightful. The question, it turns out, gets to the very core of what it means to be Canadian. That might sound to Americans like the setup to a joke, but to the country's 36 million citizens it's a very real — and not totally settled — issue.
+
+The full series of tweets is embedded below and well worth your time, but Heer lands on two theories. (As he clarifies, these apply to English-speaking Canada, not to the culturally un-integrated French-speaking Quebec.)
+
+The nice theory: Canadians have cultivated an identity of boringness as an alternative to the two other cultures that loom so large for them: the British, whose empire they were a part of until relatively recently, and the noisy Americans to the south. ""Canadian boringness isn't intrinsic: it's something we work at, cherish and reward,"" Heer writes. Because both of those cultural forces exert such power in Canada, cultivated boringness is another way of saying, ""We are not British and we are not American.""
+
+The less nice theory: Canada's self-made image of boringness is really just shorthand for whiteness. In other words, Canadian culture emphasizes ""look at how charmingly boring we are"" as a polite way of saying ""this is a white, Anglo nation."" Or, as Heer put it, ""The constructed mask of boringness is also the mask of whiteness."" This, he suggests, ""presents the county as being much whiter than it is"" and is a way to exclude First Nations and ethnic minorities from Canadian identity.
+
+There is probably real truth to both of these.
+
+One point I will add is that I've noticed Canadians frequently describe their culture in contrast to American culture. But talking so much about how you are different from Americans is really just another way of talking around all the ways you're similar, and this preoccupation with highlighting the differences and downplaying the similarities has always felt telling to me.
+
+Canadian writer Bruce McCall, in a great 2013 Vanity Fair piece on why Canada produces so many successful comedians, explained it as a kind of resistance to American culture. ""It is impossible to fully express Canadian resentment of America's cultural dominance, and the sense of impotence and helplessness,"" he writes. ""Humor — subversive, ironic, usually dark — is one of the very few weapons available to the oppressed."" But that's not just a reaction to American identity, of course; it's also a way of dealing with the fact that it leaves very little room for a distinct Canadian identity. Cultivated Canadian boringness is perhaps a way of owning that problem, and making it the identity itself.
+
+Here's Jeet Heer's full series of tweets on the subject:
+
+If you made it to the bottom, as a reward, here is a great old Jim Carrey standup bit on American conceptions of Canada that speak to my earlier points:",REAL
+5504,Will the next US president be a psycho lesbian? (plus 2 breaking news videos),"By Lasha Darkmoon on November 1, 2016 Tom Leonard — Darkmoon.me Oct 31, 2016 with pictures, captions, and comments by Lasha Darkmoon Hillary Clin­ton faced an up­set in her run for the White House two days ago af­ter the FBI an­nounced a fresh probe into her emails. In­ves­ti­ga­tors will examine new mes­sages to see whether she sent clas­si­fied in­for­ma­tion on a private server. Just ten days be­fore Amer­i­cans go to the polls, the Demo­crat candidate’s bid to be­come the first woman US pres­i­dent may be de­railed if it is de­cided she should face crim­i­nal charges. ‘I AM INNOCENT!’ Recent Polls sug­gest Mrs Clinton will trounce Repub­li­can ri­val Don­ald Trump, who has been strug­gling to fight al­le­ga­tions about grop­ing women. But Mrs Clin­ton will now be forced on the de­fen­sive her­self in the fi­nal days of their vi­cious elec­tion bat­tle. LD : The latest news is that Hillary’s 12-point lead has been “ wiped out ” within the last 24 hours, with Hillary now just one point ahead of Trump. This could of course change at any moment, with rapid fluctuations, depending on the volatility of the situation. FBI di­rec­tor James Comey had rec­om­mended ear­lier this year that the Department of Jus­tice not press charges over emails sent by Mrs Clin­ton when she was sec­re­tary of state un­der Barack Obama. But he said ‘re­cent de­vel­op­ments’ had prompted him to take an­other look. The agency has ob­tained new emails from an un­re­lated case that ‘ap­pear per­ti­nent’ to the in­ves­ti­ga­tion, said Mr Comey. A ju­bi­lant Mr Trump hailed the dra­matic de­vel­op­ment of a re-opened investigation as ‘big­ger than Water­gate’, a ref­er­ence to the cor­rup­tion scan­dal that brought down Richard Nixon. ‘Bigger than Watergate’ The con­tro­versy has weighed heav­ily on the cam­paign, chal­leng­ing Mrs Clinton’s key con­tention that – un­like her opponent – she would be a safe pair of hands in the White House. Mr Comey an­nounced in July that the FBI’s 12-month investigation into Mrs Clinton’s con­tro­ver­sial email traf­fic while secretary of state was over. She was crit­i­cised for us­ing a pri­vate email server rather than the of­fi­cial system to trans­mit clas­si­fied in­for­ma­tion, but escaped prose­cu­tion. In a harshly-worded crit­i­cism of her ‘ex­treme care­less­ness’ and ‘gross negligence’, Mr Comey said it was pos­si­ble that hos­tile for­eign govern­ments had gained ac­cess to her poorly-pro­tected ac­count. He also flatly con­tra­dicted var­i­ous Clinton claims al­though – in ex­plain­ing why he had not rec­om­mended pros­e­cut­ing her – he ac­cepted there was no evidence she had in­ten­tion­ally jeop­ar­dised state se­crets. The scan­dal has been bran­dished by Repub­li­cans as ev­i­dence of Mrs Clin­ton’s dis­hon­esty and in­com­pe­tence. Mr Comey informed Congress by let­ter that his agency had ob­tained new emails. They will be re­viewed to see if they are sig­nif­i­cant and if new ac­tion against Mrs Clin­ton is re­quired. Mr Comey did not give a time­frame for how long this in­ves­ti­ga­tion will take. The orig­i­nal FBI probe found that of 30,000 emails Mrs Clin­ton handed over to the State Depart­ment, 110 con­tained in­for­ma­tion that was clas­si­fied at the time she sent or re­ceived them. How­ever, an­other 33,000 emails went miss­ing. They were pre­sumed to have been per­ma­nently deleted but newly re­leased FBI notes sug­gested they still ex­ist in sev­eral locations and could be re­cov­ered. It is un­clear whether any of these are in­volved in the new FBI in­quiry. Law en­force­ment of­fi­cials said the newly dis­cov­ered emails were taken from the elec­tronic de­vices of se­nior Clin­ton aide Huma Abe­din and her dis­graced hus­band An­thony Weiner dur­ing an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in the lat­ter’s ‘sex­ting’ of girls. Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin. Click to enlarge Note by LD : Huma Abedin is an American Muslim of Indo-Pakistani descent. Weiner is a disgraced Jewish politician who has been involved in a series of sex scandals. When Huma found out about her husband’s sleazy sexual activities, she was forced to divorce him. This was in August 2016. The unlikely couple had been married for just over six years. As for Huma, her relationship with Hillary Clinton has been an extraordinarily close one for almost 20 years, so much so that there have been sensational rumors of a lesbian liaison . The view for popular consumption is that Hillary is Huma’s “mentor” and “mother figure”. Hillary once compared Huma to her own daughter Chelsea. “I have one daughter,” she said. “But if I had a second daughter, it would be Huma.” Huma’s real mother, noting that Hillary had now replaced her in her daughter’s affections, once told Hillary jokingly, “I’m jealous of you!” (See here ) John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono ( pictured ), claims to have had a lesbian affair with Hillary in the 1970s. “We met many times,” Yoko boasts, “and became very intimate ! ” (LD) TOM LEONARD continues : Weiner, a for­mer Demo­crat con­gress­man for New York, be­came em­broiled in a se­ries of scan­dals over ex­chang­ing sex­u­ally ex­plicit text mes­sages with a string of women. He sep­a­rated from Miss Abe­din, vice chair­man of the Clin­ton cam­paign, in Au­gust. It is un­der­stood the FBI is in­ves­ti­gat­ing Weiner af­ter it was re­vealed that he had been sex­ting a high school stu­dent who was 15 at the time. Mr Trump re­acted with de­light to Mrs Clin­ton’s 11th-hour elec­tion night­mare. Ad­dress­ing a ju­bi­lant crowd in New Hamp­shire, Trump said: ‘ Hil­lary Clin­ton’s cor­rup­tion is on a scale we’ve never seen be­fore. We must not let her take her crim­i­nal scheme into the Oval Of­fice.’ Mr Trump had pre­vi­ously crit­i­cised the FBI and Depart­ment of Jus­tice for not bring­ing charges against his elec­tion opponent. His run­ning mate, Mike Pence, called on the FBI to im­me­di­ately re­lease all the emails per­ti­nent to the investigation, adding: ‘The Amer­i­can peo­ple have a right to know.’ The Repub­li­can vice pres­i­den­tial can­di­date told a rally in Penn­syl­va­nia, that he and Don­ald Trump ‘com­mend the FBI for hav­ing the courage to re­open the case’. Chants of ‘Lock her up!’ came even be­fore Mr Pence ref­er­enced the FBI investigation. Mrs Clin­ton ig­nored shouted ques­tions from re­porters about the new FBI investigation as she walked off her plane in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. House Speaker Paul Ryan, the most se­nior Repub­li­can in Congress, said she had be­trayed Amer­i­cans’ trust for han­dling ‘the na­tion’s most im­por­tant secrets. HOT NEWS! (just sent in by our Far Eastern correspondent ‘FM’) LATEST! . . . 4-minute VIDEO",FAKE
+8426,"Word Via Ned Dougherty Nov 1, 2016","By wmw_admin on November 5, 2016 End Times Daily — Nov 1, 2016 St. Rosalie’s Parish Eucharistic Chapel, Hampton Bays, NY Our Lady of Light My dear son, On this very important feast day in the Church of My Son Jesus, the Redeemer of the world, I come to you with greetings from not only your Heavenly Mother, but also from your brothers and sisters, who are now united with us in the Eternal Kingdom of the Father in Heaven. You must know that your brothers and sisters are particularly saddened by the events that are taking place in your world, but your brothers and sisters in Heaven know resolutely that all will be fulfilled in the end according to the Word of the Father in Heaven. But your brothers and sisters know the challenges that you are going through in your world, particularly in the United States of America, where the evil one, the demon from hell, is currently waging his battle for the future of your country, and his minions are working overtime to keep the evil one in power and control over the rest of you. The challenge for you living here on Earth, not only in America, but throughout the world is to identify and defeat the minions of satan, who are stealthily going about their plans to create a draconian new world order to dominate and control the rest of you. Alas! Now the minions of satan are becoming exposed to the rest of you, as it has been ordained through the intervention of the Father in Heaven through His Son, the Redeemer of the world. In your governments, your institutions, your foundations, your places of higher learning, as well as through your commercial businesses and entities, and in your media and entertainment, you are seeing the work of the evil one stripped bare and the minions of the evil one fully exposed now. This dressing down of the minions of satan has been made necessary for the Father’s plans for mankind to be realized. However, the Father in Heaven and His Son, the Redeemer of the world, are relying on you, the sons and daughters of all that is good, to stand up to the challenge presented by those who are supporting all that is evil. Never before has it been so clear to you, who among your public figures have sworn their allegiance to the evil one, so it is imperative upon humanity in these times to remove these evilly motivated and controlled individuals from places of power and authority, for such is the will of your Father in Heaven. You have been given a unique opportunity in the history of mankind to reduce, nay to eliminate, all the evil in the world that comes from satan, but that is implemented and fueled by his minions. Do not avoid the truth at this point! Now is the time to remove the despots from their positions of power and authority and to replace them with those who can align themselves with the Heavenly Father and His Son to usher in a New Heaven and a New Earth, as opposed to the new world order of the evil one. So be it!",FAKE
+5179,Trump suggests 'profiling' of Muslims as response to terrorism,"Donald Trump, who has proposed a moratorium on Muslim immigration into the United States and possible surveillance of mosques, is now talking about ""profiling"" Muslims as a response to terrorism.
+
+""I think profiling is something that we're going to have to start thinking about as a country,"" Trump said on CBS' Face The Nation.
+
+While adding that ""I hate the concept of profiling,"" Trump said that ""we have to start using common sense and we have to use, you know, we have to use our heads.""
+
+Profiling is an oft-criticized law enforcement tactic. The National Institute of Justice -- the research and development of the Justice Department -- defined racial profiling as a ""practice that targets people for suspicion of crime based on their race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.""
+
+African-Americans and Hispanics have long protested police profiling that ranges from traffic stops to questioning about alleged crimes.
+
+Trump has stepped up comments about ""radical Islamic extremism"" in the wake of last week's mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, and his proposals have drawn criticism from opponents.
+
+Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said the Muslim migration ban and other proposals would help the Islamic State and other extremists recruit new members, and alienate Muslim nations who are helping the U.S. fight terrorism.
+
+Trump's approach ""is un-American,"" Clinton said last week. ""It goes against everything we stand for as a country founded on religious freedom. But it is also dangerous.""
+
+In his CBS interview, Trump said Israel and other nations use profiling. ""We're not using common sense,"" he said.",REAL
+4882,Gary Johnson snags newspaper endorsement,"Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson received the endorsement of a prominent Virginia paper in an editorial posted Saturday night, notching a Labor Day weekend win for his third party bid.
+
+The glowing appraisal of Johnson's candidacy by the Richmond Times-Dispatch's editorial board contrasts the former New Mexico governor with Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic standard-bearer Hillary Clinton, both of whom lack the proper character traits to be president, the paper said.
+
+""Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton meets the fundamental moral and professional standards we have every right to expect of an American president,"" the editorial board writes.
+
+The editorial board's backing of Johnson is also a break in its partisan leanings, as it has endorsed Republican candidates in every presidential election for the past 36 years.
+
+Johnson performed poorly in Virginia during his 2012 effort, securing less than one percent of the state's vote . The ex-governor has said he hopes to break out this year due to the low favorability ratings for Trump and Clinton, and the paper followed that line of thinking.
+
+The editorial also called for Johnson to join the nationally-televised debates alongside Trump and Clinton. The former governor has said repeatedly that he needs to make the general election debates to have any realistic chance at the White House. The presidential debate commission requires a candidate to reach an average of 15 percent in the polls it has selected. Johnson must rapidly improve his position to meet this threshold. CNN's latest poll of polls found Johnson sitting at an average of 9 percent nationwide, and a Quinnipiac poll from mid-August had Johnson at 12 percent in Virginia.",REAL
+2262,Gay Marriage Ruling Fallout: Christian Leaders React,"Christian leaders are responding with love, concern and warnings of civil disobedience in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's historical decision on marriage.
+
+The high court has declared that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry anywhere in the United States.
+
+They have already had the right in 36 states and the District of Columbia.  Now, the remaining 14 states will no longer be allowed to uphold their definitions of traditional marriage.
+
+*Click play to watch more of our extensive coverage as Christian leaders react to the court's decision.
+
+Former governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee tweeted that the ruling is ""an out-of-control act of unconstitutional judicial tyranny.""
+
+Bob Vander Plaats, a conservative activist in Iowa, told supporters the court ""succumbed to demands to invent a new constitutional 'right' never imagined by our Founders.""
+
+What impact with the gay marriage ruling have on religious liberty? CBN News spoke with Austin Nimocks of the Alliance Defending Freedom for his perspective. Click below to watch.
+
+
+
+ Rev. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, admonished followers in a tweet, ""the challenge for Christians now is to speak the truth in love and to speak love in truth.  Love of neighbor means we cannot lie about marriage.""
+
+Many Christian leaders believe the ruling will create a restricted role for people of faith in American society.
+
+""The Supreme Court has stripped all Americans of our freedom to debate and decide marriage policy through the democratic process,"" Jim Campbell, of the Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Legal Counsel, said. ""The freedom to democratically address the most pressing social issues of the day is the heart of liberty.""
+
+*** Many faith leaders believe the Supreme Court ruling recognizing gay marriage will put religious liberty will be at risk.
+
+In the weeks before the ruling came down, the Southern Baptist Convention partnered with the Alliance Defending Freedom to provide guidance for churches and other faith-based institutions called Protecting Your Ministry. CBN News interviewed Dr. Russell Moore about the booklet earlier this month. Watch our interview below.
+
+
+
+ Rev. Samuel Rodriguez says the decision ""serves as a defacto and legal catalyst for the marginalization of Americans who embrace a biblical worldview.""
+
+   
+
+ Many leaders, such as Liberty Counsel's Mat Staver, have already called for civil disobedience in response to such a ruling.  Others individuals and organizations are studying the ruling to determine the best ways to respond.",REAL
+1646,Should NBC have let Donald Trump host 'Saturday Night Live'?,"Although Donald Trump's punch lines drew few laughs, some critics are the most embarrassed for NBC, saying the network sacrificed comedic integrity for Trump-promised ratings.
+
+Will Trump's plan to register Muslims make it to The White House?
+
+Tesla under Trump: How will electric cars fare under the next president?
+
+This Nov. 3, 2015 photo provided by NBC shows, ""Saturday Night Live"" cast member Cecily Strong, left, and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in New York. Trump hosted the show on Nov. 7.
+
+For NBC’s late night comedy ‘Saturday Night Live,’ cameos by presidential candidates are pretty much expected.
+
+But a presidential candidate as host? That is more surprising. And as the Associated Press put it, “Despite a 40-year history of lampooning politicians while inviting some to mock themselves as on-air guests, booking a presidential candidate to host the NBC sketch-comedy show is almost unprecedented.”
+
+On Saturday, leading GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live, as protesters  picketed outside of the New York studio. And although Trump drew few laughs, some say his hosting appearance was a smart political move for the real estate mogul. Trump shaped the show to his advantage, and NBC let him.
+
+Before the show, Trump told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that he refused to participated in some skit ideas because they were “too risqué” and “I’m leading in Iowa, I want to stay leading in Iowa.”
+
+“I walk into the room, there are 100 [writers] – and they’re all about 17 years old, OK? They’re all young and all up in your face,” Trump told O’Reilly. “But they come up with many, many skits and you pick the ones you think you like.”
+
+According to a measurement by Variety, Trump was on screen for about 12 minutes – far less than past hosts’ time on screen, with Amy Schumer clocking in nearly 26 minutes for the Oct. 10 episode  she hosted and Miley Cyrus starring in almost 22 minutes for her Oct. 3 episode.
+
+Maybe NBC was conscious of Trump’s limited experience performing scripted comedy, or maybe they were hyper-aware of the FCC’s ‘equal time rule’ that requires television stations to grant equal air time to other presidential candidates who request it. Either way, Trump seemed confident that his SNL appearance would garner high ratings for NBC – no matter how they were won.
+
+Trump’s episode gave SNL its biggest ratings since 2012, close to 10 million viewers. Saturday’s episode beat the previous ratings high from the season premiere a few weeks ago with host Miley Cyrus by 47 percent. The ‘Trump effect’ is also evident in GOP debates, where the first three debates hit 61 million viewers, a statistic that took 13 debates in 2011.
+
+With the majority of Americans having ‘unfavorable’ views of Trump, the ratings are could be less of a signal towards political success and more proof of Americans fascination, morbid or otherwise, with the billionaire presidential contender.
+
+Hank Stuever, the Washington Post's television critic, called Trump's appearance ""almost certainly inappropriate"" for the network, as well as unfunny.
+
+""Having Trump host “SNL” is a tacit nod of approval — of his message, his antics and, yes, his campaign to be the Republican presidential nominee,"" wrote Mr. Stuever.
+
+""Bring back the old America,"" he writes, ""the one where our preeminent vehicle for topical satire would have ably skewered a hateful, nonsensical, vainglorious presidential candidate, rather than invite him into the club and give him more of the empty-calorie media attention he seeks.""",REAL
+4488,"Vital VA hospital project in limbo as price tag soars, lawmakers vow no ‘bail-out’","Nearly one year after a new VA secretary vowed to clean up a broken health care system for America's veterans, a vital new hospital hangs in the balance as lawmakers and the agency fight over how to pay for it.
+
+The dispute came to a head this week as construction on the medical center in Aurora, Colo., was poised to grind to a halt Sunday without congressional approval for more spending beyond the current $800 million.
+
+Just in time, lawmakers found a stopgap solution. After what one aide called grueling discussions between lawmakers and the VA, the House on Thursday was able to pass a temporary fix that would keep things moving -- for three more weeks. The Senate followed suit late Friday afternoon.
+
+But for a project whose estimated costs have ballooned to $1.73 billion, the funding Band-Aid does not solve the long-term issue.
+
+""This is by no means a solution to the problems in Denver, which VA leaders created and are refusing to take responsibility for,"" said Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. ""Rather it is a last-chance effort to convince VA and Obama administration leaders to take the department's problems seriously.""
+
+The latest agreement would raise the authorization cap to $900 million, though the estimated price tag for the hospital is expected to hit $1.7 billion. According to a spokesman for Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., who was against stopping construction for any reason, the deal would hand the VA another $20 million for now, as the project had already reached $880 million in costs since it began.
+
+""The VA ignored my warnings for two years that the Aurora hospital was out-of-control and their refusal to heed my warnings has made a bad situation much worse,"" Coffman said in a statement on Thursday.
+
+The hospital is meant to replace the city's aging, overcrowded facility, and could help relieve a system whose long wait times were at the center of last year's scandal over veterans' care. But the stand-off over construction was just the latest problem for the over-budget, behind-schedule project beset by allegations of waste and mismanagement.
+
+Original designs for the hospital, which is supposed to include a series of nearly a dozen outbuildings for specialty care, estimated a total cost of $328 million. Further changes led Congress to authorize $568 million for the project, and last year, the VA was still saying the facility would cost $630 million, and be complete in 2015. When it was clear the campus could not be finished for under $1 billion, the general contractor, Kiewit-Turner, walked off the job and sued the VA. A panel of judges sided with the contractor in December 2014. The project is now under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers.
+
+As the project was turned over to the Army, VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson apologized for the mess. ""I apologize to veterans and to American taxpayers for the delays and the added costs,"" he said at an April 2 news conference, blaming a lack of communication with planners and incomplete designs at the outset, among other things.
+
+Both sides in the VA-Congress dispute have been pointing the finger.
+
+""Right now, VA is essentially asking taxpayers to bail it out of a massive problem of the department's own creation,"" Miller said in a lengthy letter to VA Secretary Bob McDonald on May 20.
+
+Miller and others had been willing to turn off the spigot and let work stop this weekend on the project, which has been in the works since 2004. He's going along with the stopgap plan, but he and other lawmakers say they are still waiting for the VA to offer a plan for how it would pay for the rest of the construction.
+
+Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., who sits on the same committee, told FoxNews.com that the three-week extension is a Band-Aid, and he is firmly against continued funding if the VA does not show willingness ""to pay for their mistakes and their screw ups.""
+
+""They need to go back to the drawing board,"" he said. ""And I just don't see a bail-out coming from the House.""
+
+Several senators on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee also expressed frustration.
+
+But McDonald, who officially replaced former Secretary Eric Shinseki in July 2014 after it was revealed workers were falsifying records to cover up long wait times, rejected the idea that the VA has not offered detailed options on how to pay for the project.
+
+""I have provided multiple proposals ... the options were rejected and the result has been inaction. Our veterans deserve better than that,"" he said in a statement Wednesday. ""I have presented a plan. Congress has not proposed a counter plan.""
+
+McDonald said the VA wants to repurpose and reallocate fiscal 2015 funds. Lawmakers want to make sure the VA won't take money away from other projects or services for veterans to do that. There was talk earlier about dipping into the $5 billion fund that offers private care to veterans who need it, but that was opposed by lawmakers who told the VA it would have to concentrate on cost-cutting measures and other solutions. Lawmakers like Huelskamp and Coffman have suggested the money come out of top employee bonuses.
+
+Glenn Haggstrom, the VA construction chief, who earned $64,000 in bonuses as he was overseeing the project, was pushed into retirement in March. Critics said Haggstrom, though, should have been available for an ongoing investigation and instead was going home with a fat pension.
+
+""To date, not a single person has been fired for this blatant waste of taxpayer money,"" Miller said in his letter to the secretary. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in 2013 on the VA's largest medical center projects, including the Denver facility, showed that combined, all four were responsible for $1.5 billion in cost overruns and were an average of three years behind schedule each.
+
+House Speaker John Boehner expressed frustration Wednesday with what he said was the VA's inability to correct itself over the last year -- not just in the area of construction, but in its long wait times and backlogs for veterans seeking benefits and care.
+
+""At this point, the VA can't even build a hospital,"" he said on the House floor.",REAL
+301,House committee passes bill that cuts Amtrak funding,"Washington (CNN) A House panel approved a measure Wednesday that cuts funding for Amtrak, less than a day after a train derailment left at least seven people dead and many more injured.
+
+The Republican-led House Appropriations Committee voted 30-21 to reduce grants to Amtrak by $252 million -- a drop of about 15% from last year's level. The cut would apply only to Amtrak's capital spending and wouldn't touch funding levels for safety and operations. The measure still needs to clear the full House and Senate before it would go into effect in October.
+
+Democrats on the panel fought unsuccessfully to boost Amtrak funding by $1 billion, to $2.4 billion. But Republicans argued that such a spending increase would need to be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget, and they admonished Democrats for pointing to the derailment in an effort to increase funding for the passenger rail service.
+
+""Don't use this tragedy in that way. It was beneath you,"" Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said to Democrats.
+
+The derailment late Tuesday in Philadelphia is renewing focus on how the U.S. funds and maintains infrastructure. Amtrak has become a political hot button in recent years as Republicans have sought to reduce the rail service's funding and focus it more on the popular Boston to Washington Northeast Corridor.
+
+In March, the House approved legislation that would authorize Amtrak to pump more money into the Northeast Corridor route but that measure has yet to muscle its way through the Senate.
+
+In a separate House transportation committee hearing on Wednesday, Democrats like Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon complained about sspending cuts, saying Republicans should be ""cognizant of the real world out there, of what happened last night, of what the capital needs of Amtrak are, and will not engage in short-sighted budget cutting.""
+
+Republicans also brought up the derailment, but in more general terms, saying it needs to be studied.
+
+""It's critical we find out exactly what happened out there and make sure we take the appropriate response to make sure it doesn't happen again,"" said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Florida.
+
+White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday on CNN's ""New Day"" that investing more in transportation infrastructure ""is a common sense"" decision and said investing in Amtrak should not be a partisan issue.
+
+""There is clearly more that can be done when we're talking about a railway infrastructure that is decades-old,"" Earnest said. ""If there's an opportunity for us to make further investments in our infrastructure that would better safeguard the traveling public, then those are investments that we should make.""
+
+Vice President Joe Biden, perhaps the most famous Amtrak fan in the country, issued a statement saying that ""the victims could have been any one of our parents, children, or someone from one of our communities. Amtrak is like a second family to me as it is for so many other passengers.""
+
+Opposition to funding cuts isn't just coming from Democrats. Some Republicans representing districts in the Northeast Corridor are pushing back against conservatives who want to cut funding to Amtrak and privatize the rail service.
+
+Rep. Ryan Costello, R-Pennsylvania, said Congress should boost funding for Amtrak, rather than cutting into its budget.
+
+""If we're not investing in our safety for the Northeast Corridor, we're not doing what we should be doing down here,"" he said Wednesday morning on CNN. ""We need to continue to invest in our passenger rail system...a critical piece of the economy in the Northeast part of the country.""
+
+It is still unclear what caused the crash, though the derailment happened as the train rolled through a curve, which investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were inspecting Wednesday morning. The FBI is also at the scene assisting investigators, though there is nothing to suggest a terrorism connection at this point, a law enforcement official told CNN.
+
+The state's two senators, Democrat Bob Casey and Republican Pat Toomey, toured the crash site Wednesday.
+
+Some of the most gruesome images from inside the train came from a former Democratic congressman, Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania, who was onboard one of the seven cars that derailed.
+
+Murphy quickly tweeted images of injured passengers and first responders inside his overturned café car. He was not seriously injured, but his seatmate was knocked unconscious and was bleeding.
+
+Sen. Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, was also on the train but got off at a stop in his state before the train derailed in Philadelphia.
+
+Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pennsylvania, chair of the House transportation committee, and his Republican colleague, Jeff Denham, who chairs the railroads subcommittee, released a statement Wednesday saying they were ""saddened by the tragic accident.
+
+U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster R-Pennsylvania, Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee Chairman Jeff Denham (R-California).
+
+""Both the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Railroad Administration are on the scene, and while we don't yet know many details, we need to know how this happened and ensure the safety of the system and the millions of Americans who rely on the Northeast Corridor,"" they said in the statement.",REAL
+3838,Ohio delegation blasts Mount McKinley name change,"WASHINGTON — When it comes to getting around Congress, President Obama may not be able to move mountains — but he can rename them.
+
+The Obama administration's decision to rename North America's tallest peak to its original native name of Denali is drawing protests from Republican lawmakers in Ohio.
+
+That's because the mountain's previous namesake, President William McKinley, was also a Republican from Ohio.
+
+""This decision by the administration is yet another example of the President going around Congress,"" Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said, noting that Congress had been debating the name for years.
+
+Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, went even further, calling it another example of Obama's ""constitutional overreach.""
+
+""President Obama has decided to ignore an act of Congress in unilaterally renaming Mount McKinley in order to promote his job-killing war on energy,"" Gibbs said in a tweeted statement Sunday. ""This political stunt is insulting to all Ohioans.""
+
+Obama timed the announcement to coincide with a three-day trip to Alaska to highlight the problem of climate change in the Arctic. But the dispute over the name goes back decades.
+
+The 20,237-foot mountain was originally known as Denali, which means ""the great one"" in the Athabascan language of the original Alaskans. But that began to change when European-American prospectors and explorers arrived. A Seattle man, William Dickey,rediscovered the mountain in 1896 while prospecting for gold.
+
+""We named our great peak Mount McKinley, after William McKinley of Ohio, who had been nominated for the presidency,and that fact was the first news we received on our way out of that wonderful wilderness,"" he wrote in a dispatch to the New York Sun.
+
+McKinley was not yet president then, and the naming may have been a political stunt in itself: McKinley, in running against the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, favored the gold standard to back U.S. dollars.
+
+That name was formalized in 1917 when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Mount McKinley National Park Act, which required the park to be ""dedicated and set apart as a public park for the benefit and enjoyment of the people under the name of the Mount McKinley National Park.""
+
+But another law passed in 1947 gives the Secretary of the Interior and the Board on Geographic Names the power to ""provide for uniformity in geographic nomenclature and orthography throughout the federal government.""
+
+The Alaska government first petitioned the Interior Department to change the name to Denali in 1975. But because the Board on Geographic Names deferred to Congress if a name was under consideration by lawmakers, the Ohio delegation was able to prevent a name change for four decades simply by introducing bills to keep the McKinley name — even if those bills never passed.
+
+Friday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said that impasse had gone on long enough. In her order issued Friday, she noted that McKinley never stepped foot in Alaska.
+
+Still, House Speaker John Boehner, who hails from the opposite corner of Ohio, said he was ""disappointed"" in the decision.
+
+""There is a reason President McKinley’s name has served atop the highest peak in North America for more than 100 years, and that is because it is a testament to his great legacy,"" Boehner said in a statement.
+
+He recited McKinley's record, which included service in the Union Army in the Civil War, elections to the House of Representatives and to the Ohio governorship. ""And he led this nation to prosperity and victory in the Spanish-American War as the 25th President of the United States,"" Boehner said.
+
+It's unclear what the Ohioans can do about the decision. Gibbs said he would would work to overturn the decision legislatively; Portman said he would ask the National Park Service to find a way to ""preserve McKinley's legacy somewhere else in the national park that once bore his name.""
+
+The issue is not strictly a partisan one. Ohio Democrats, too, have introduced bills over the years to retain the McKinley name.
+
+And Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska — while critical of Obama on energy policy — praised the decision to rename the mountain. “For centuries, Alaskans have known this majestic mountain as the ‘great one,’"" she said in a statement Sunday. ""I’d like to thank the President for working with us to achieve this significant change to show honor, respect, and gratitude to the Athabascan people of Alaska.""",REAL
+6450,2:00PM Water Cooler 11/4/2016,"By Lambert Strether of Corrente . 
+TPP/TTIP/TISA 
+TPP: A Podesta mail where Nikki Budzinski, Labor Outreach Director, discusses Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson: “I have received four calls from labor about a district meeting that Congresswoman Johnson (a HRC public supporter) held in Dallas, Texas where she discussed TPP. She claimed in the meeting that she speaks with HRC 2-3 times a week and that she was told by the Secretary that the only reason she opposes TPP is to get ‘labor off her back’ and that once she is elected President she will reverse position. I have worked with our Western Political Director Jessica Meija, and she has connected with the Congresswoman’s COS to clarify the inaccuracy of what she said and push back on her comments. This was not helpful with labor. [ Wikileaks (attachment)]. “Inaccuracy.” Of course, of course. 
+TPP: “[Our Revolution,] the progressive group founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders has begun a targeted campaign to sway at least five House Democrats to oppose the TPP in hopes it could change the outcome of a ratification vote — and it’s getting some results” [ Politico ]. “Our Revolution, which Sanders formed in late August to support liberal candidates, has set its sights on at least five other fence-sitting lawmakers. In a vote that’s expected to have razor-thin margins, plundering just a few Democratic votes the White House hoped to gain could make all the difference. The target list includes Reps. Seth Moulton (Mass.), Ed Perlmutter (Colo.), Beto O’Rourke (Texas), Derek Kilmer (Wash.), and Pennsylvania state Rep. Dwight Evans.” 
+TPP: “In Thursday, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers published a report warning that if the TPP isn’t passed, a China-backed trade agreement will takes its place. That could put U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage when they try to sell to customers in Japan and other Asian nations. The report argues that if China’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership goes into effect, at least 35 U.S. industries as diverse as plastics, fishing and footwear will be at risk of increased competition from China in the Japanese market” [ FiveThirtyEight ]. So they’ve settled on this messaging, now? And: “[I]f Clinton wins, Obama might be able to put together a coalition of Republicans and trade-friendly Democrats* to support the treaty. In other words, TPP isn’t dead yet.” * Especially those looking for jobs on K Street. 
+TPP: “”If TPP is not passed and RCEP is enacted, which is what all these countries say they are planning to do, then U.S. businesses would face a direct loss of competitive position,” said Jason Furman, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers” [ Reuters ]. “This would displace U.S. goods and be worse than simply maintaining the trade status quo, Furman said. The study identifies 35 industrial sectors employing 4.7 million people with $5.3 billion in sales to Japan that would face such a disadvantage.” 
+TPP: “Japan’s ruling parties push TPP through committee after opposition walkout” [ Nikkei Asian Review ]. “The next hurdle for the trade deal is a vote during a plenary session of the House of Representatives, expected early next week. It will then be sent to the Diet’s upper house, the House of Councillors.” 
+TPP: “Working-class U.S. residents already lose about $1,800 annually because wages have been depressed by global competition on labor rates, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. TPP would deepen this problem” [ Detroit Free Press ]. I know the cheap goods are supposed to make up for this, but when your jobs and and what you can afford to buy are both crapified…. 
+2016 
+Days until: 3! 
+Corruption 
+“Two former Christie administration insiders charged in a bizarre scheme of political retaliation against a mayor who refused to endorse the governor for re-election were found guilty Friday on all counts in the long-running Bridgegate saga” [ Newark Star-Ledger ]. “‘In keeping with the disgrace that was this trial, one of the things the U.S. Attorney’s Office should be ashamed of is where it decided to draw the line on who to charge and who not to charge,’ Baroni’s attorney Michael] Baldassare said. ‘… They should have had belief in their own case to charge powerful people, and they did not.” Hmm. I wonder which “powerful people” Baldassare has in mind? 
+Our Famously Free Press 
+“Behind all the Times’ fawning profiles of Clinton — and the denigrating pieces not only on Trump but also Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders — was a cozy understanding between Times reporters and the Clinton campaign, WikiLeaks has shown us, that getting Clinton elected is something of a collaborative effort” [ MarketWatch ]. “Editors at the Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere justify this hostility because they have determined that Trump is an existential threat to democracy and the worst presidential nominee in history and can’t be treated as an ordinary candidate. So why do the polls show the worst nominee ever running neck-and-neck with the candidate President Barack Obama has praised as the most qualified person ever to run for president? Do these editors know something that tens of millions of American voters are missing? Whose job is it really to decide what poses a threat to our democracy — a handful of editors in the corporate media or the voters?” 
+The Voters 
+New Hampshire : Clinton 44%, Trump 44%, Johnson 5% ( UMass Lowell ) 
+Iowa : Trump 44%, Clinton 41%, Johnson 5% ( RABA Research ) 
+Virginia : Clinton 45%, Trump 38%, Johnson 5% ( Roanoke College ) 
+Georgia : Trump 48%, Clinton 46%, Johnson 4% ( Landmark ) 
+Missouri : Trump 52%, Clinton 41% ( PPP ) 
+New Hampshire : Clinton 48%, Trump 43% ( PPP ) 
+Nevada : Clinton 48%, Trump 45% ( PPP ) 
+Wisconsin : Clinton 48%, Trump 41% ( PPP ) 
+Pennsylvania : Clinton 48%, Trump 44% ( PPP ) 
+North Carolina : Clinton 49%, Trump 47% ( PPP ) 
+Wisconsin : Clinton 44%, Trump 38%, Johnson 7% ( Loras College ) 
+If I plug all the states where Clinton is ahead into the New York Times “paths to victory” calculator , Clinton wins — even if Trump wins Florida. Of course, last I checked, NH was dead even, not Clinton up 4, and I don’t have the chops to assess how good any of these polls are. 
+“Trump is finishing the race the way many Republicans wished he could have run it from the start: fiercely on message and on offense” [ RealClearPolitics ]. “Trump has largely adhered to his teleprompters and resisted controversial tweets this week. As Clinton campaigned a few days ago with Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe winner with whom Trump has infamously feuded, the GOP nominee focused primarily on higher costs for Obamacare and the revived FBI investigation into emails pertinent to Clinton’s private server. The campaign believes those issues bolster his closing argument that Clinton is corrupt and a vestige of old politics, while he says he’s an agent of change.” 
+“Our polling data suggests that the missing whites aren’t exactly conservative populists who support Mr. Trump. They’re just dissatisfied: They don’t like their candidate, and they don’t like the other party’s candidate much either” [ New York Times ]. “The registered white missing Democrats, for instance, support Mrs. Clinton by only 61 percent to 19 percent. The missing registered white Republicans support Mr. Trump by only 69 to 13.” 
+“Election Update: Why Clinton’s Position Is Worse Than Obama’s” [Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight ]. “In the table below, I’ve run a head-to-head comparison showing how many electoral votes each candidate was projected to have at various margins of victory or defeat. For instance, Obama had a lead in states (and congressional districts) totaling 332 electoral votes in our final 2012 forecast. Clinton leads in states totaling only 272 electoral votes, just two more than the minimum she needs to win the Electoral College.” In brief, Clinton is stronger than Obama among highly educated voters in states that she would win anyhow , and weaker among white voters without college degrees in states that are close. 
+War Drums 
+“The U.S. government believes hackers from Russia or elsewhere may try to undermine next week’s presidential election and is mounting an unprecedented effort to counter their cyber meddling, American officials told NBC News. The effort is being coordinated by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, but reaches across the government to include the CIA, the National Security Agency and other elements of the Defense Department, current and former officials say” [ NBC ]. ” Officials are alert for any attempts to create Election Day chaos, and say steps are being taken to prepare for worst-case scenarios, including a cyber-attack that shuts down part of the power grid or the internet. But what is more likely, multiple U.S. officials say, is a lower-level effort by hackers from Russia or elsewhere to peddle misinformation by manipulating Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. For example, officials fear an 11th hour release of fake documents implicating one of the candidates in an explosive scandal without time for the news media to fact check it. 
+The Trail 
+“With Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump breathtakingly close in polls of key states, analysts are beginning to factor in the possibility of recounts that would delay the outcome” [ MarketWatch ]. “Bear in mind that a candidate would have limited time to contest the vote. This year, the Electoral College is due to meet on Dec. 19. By law, electors meet on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December.” A recount would make Florida 2000 look like a walk in the park, especially because Clinton, bless her heart, is unlikely to let herself be rolled, unlike Gore. 
+Michigan: “Hillary Clinton is hanging onto a narrow 4-point lead over Donald Trump in Michigan heading into the last weekend before Tuesday’s election, with a new Free Press poll showing clear momentum for the Republican nominee in a state that several weeks ago was believed all but decided for the Democrat” [ Detroit Free Press ]. ” [T]he number of undecided voters — 13% — remains extraordinarily high for this late in an election cycle, speaking to the high unfavorable marks voters give both major party candidates.” Normally, I’d say a 4% lead is a lot, but those undecideds. Wowsers. 
+Realignment 
+“Who Broke Politics?” [Paul Krugman, New York Times ]. “So how did all our political norms get destroyed? Hint: It started long before Donald Trump. On one side….” Hint: You will read to the end of the column without finding the “On the other side” that “on one side” sets up. I mean, it wasn’t mean Republicans who prevented Obama from throwing the banksters in jail, was it? 
+“America and the Abyss” [Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine ]. Of course, if Trump really were a fascist, the Democratic Establishment would fight him tooth and nail. Right? 
+“Donald Trump didn’t break one of our two great and ancestral political parties. He won the nomination because the Republican Party was already broken, and those responsible for the party, the elected officials and thinkers, didn’t know. Now they do” [Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal , “Democracy’s Majesty and 2016’s Indignity”]. “Soon they will begin that stage of political mourning known as the symposia process. They’ll discuss how to repair, renew, keep the party together. Or the party will, over the next few cycles, split apart… The Democratic Party and its lobbyist/think-tank/journalistic establishment in Washington have long looked to me to be dominated by people devoted mostly to getting themselves in the best professional position and their kids into Sidwell Friends School. They want to be part of the web, the arrangement. They want to have connections, associates, a tong. They want to be wired in. They don’t want to be I.F. Stone, alone, reading the fine print of obscure government documents. And Clintonism—for years the biggest web, the securest source of money, a real tong with enforcers and reward-dispensers—has long been a sound route to all of this. You may have to bend rules to be part of it, accept unsavory deals and characters, but it is warm and cozy in there.” And: 
+One thing I saw this year was that sincere conservatives wholly opposed to socialism had real respect for Bernie Sanders because they saw his sincerity. He wasn’t part of the web and they honored him for it. 
+I never thought I’d find myself writing this, but for punditry I’ll take Nooners over Krugman’s hackery or Sullivan’s hysterical ranting. It’s been quite a year. 
+Democrat Email Hairball 
+“The Podesta Emails Part 29” [ Wikileaks ]. 
+“[A] meeting between POTUS and HRC at a critical time” [ Reddit (aliteralmind)]. From Podesta email drop #28. One of those timeline things that does make you go, hmm. Particularly the genesis of the meeting in previous meeting between Podesta and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough in an “offsite” Starbucks near the White House. If I were Putin, I’d have that Starbucks wired to the gills. 
+“What the WikiLeaks emails tell us about Hillary Clinton’s campaign (and what they don’t)” [ Los Angeles Times ]. Death of a thousand cuts. 
+“The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign” [Matt Yglesias, Vox ]. Oh, Matty. 
+Stats Watch 
+Employment Situation, October 2016: Unemployment Rate – Level (4.9 %); Participation Rate – level (62.8%) [ Econoday ]. “Solid payroll growth is not the whole story of the October employment report. Average hourly earnings are rising, up an outsized 0.4 percent in the month with the year-on-year rate, at 2.8 percent, suddenly near 3.0 percent and at its recovery peak… The unemployment rate is down 1 tenth to 4.9 percent and, for some, is already signaling full employment for the labor market.But negatives are scarce in this report, where strength is emphatically underscored by the unexpected acceleration in average hourly earnings which further includes an upward revision to September. Today’s report marks a solid opening to fourth-quarter data and will raise talk of a wage-inflation flashpoint…” Gotta take the punchbowl away from lower orders! But: ” The number of persons working part time for economic reasons was essentially unchanged in October. This level suggests slack still in the labor market” [ Calculated Risk ]. Moreover: “t’s also worth noting that the standard measure of unemployment — now at 5 percent — doesn’t capture the lingering weakness in the market seen in the broader U6 measure, which includes discouraged workers, other workers marginally attached to the labor force and those in temporary jobs because they can’t get full-time work. The conventional unemployment measure is a hair below its mean from 2003-7, which is 5.2 percent. The broader U6, however, at 9.7 percent is higher than its 2003-7 mean of 9.1 percent. This is just another sign that there’s still slack in the labor market.” [ Bloomberg ]. And: “Should we believe the employment numbers in this report? There is little evidence of political bias in past election cycles” [ Econintersect ]. “To sum this report up – employment is continuing to tread water – growing little better than the theoretical working population growth. However, note that the household survey removed 43,000 to the workforce (which is the reason the unemployment rate declined). There was really nothing good or nothing really terrible – although manufacturing declined. The year-over-year rate of growth significantly declined this month.” Again, the Econoday summary is just a little too breathless for this Maine bear. 
+International Trade, September 2016: “A decline in imports helped pull down the nation’s trade gap sharply in September, to $36.4 billion from a revised $40.5 billion in August. Imports, reflecting declines for capital goods and also consumer goods, fell 1.1 percent while exports, showing an especially strong gain for capital goods, rose 0.6 percent” [ Econoday ]. “Declining imports are a plus for the GDP calculation but are not signals of strength for domestic demand, whether business demand for capital goods or business expectations for consumer imports ahead of the holidays.” And: “Declining imports are a plus for the GDP calculation but are not signals of strength for domestic demand, whether business demand for capital goods or business expectations for consumer imports ahead of the holidays” [ Econintersect ]. 
+Jobless Claims: “However, comparing initial claims today with the past is the proverbial apples to oranges. An important fact in looking at claims data is that vastly fewer people today are eligible for unemployment benefits. In other words, the number of unemployed people who can’t receive jobless benefits — and thus are not in the initial claims data — has risen relative to those who have unemployment insurance” [ Bloomberg ]. As Mosler has been saying. 
+Housing: “Residential remodeling has recovered to 38% of the peak it attained prior to the Great Recession. New residential construction, on the other hand, is only at 17% of the peak” [ Econintersect ]. 
+Retail: “The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has just announced that Samsung is having to recall its top-load washing machines due to a risk of impact injuries. The exact hazard listed was that the washing machine top can unexpectedly detach from the washing machine chassis during use, posing a risk of injury from impact” [ 247 Wall Street ]. “What matters here is that this will not be a cheap recall. You can drive a smartphone back to the store or mail it in cheaply. Have you ever tried moving a washing machine, or just dealing with getting a technician out to deliver or fix one? And the size of this recall is huge — about 2.8 million total units!” Korea is really having its troubles, isn’t it? Samsung is a failing national champion, Hanjin went bankrupt, and there’s a ginormous scandal with their President. 
+Shipping: “In August, the Intermodal Association of North America (IANA) reported its first quarterly volume decline for the first time after 25 straight quarters of growth. Earlier this week, marked its second straight quarterly volume decline, officially extending more of an unwelcome streak” [ Logistics Management ]. “Total third quarter intermodal volume movements—at 4,348,634—were off 4.6 percent annually, following a 6.1 percent second quarter decline at 4,271,162. The first quarter of 2016 saw volumes rise 2.0 percent annually. … Like recent quarters, domestic containers were the lone metric to see an increase.” 
+Shipping: “Orders for heavy-duty commercial trucks in North America plummeted 46% in October from the same month last year, providing a grim outlook for truck manufacturers in the coming year” [ Wall Street Journal , “Truck Orders Tumbled 46% in October “]. “In an analyst note Thursday, Stifel said the October order total was the weakest since 2009, falling well below expectations. “October orders are critical as they represent the traditional start to the order season for trucks to be produced the next year,” the report said.” 
+Shipping: “After four days [!!!] firefighters have finally managed to douse the terrible tanker blaze that killed many workers at a shipbreaking site in Gadani, Pakistan. Rescue work inside the hull of the Indonesian ship cannot start however as the steel plates are still too hot” [ Splash 247 ]. “While there are now 21 confirmed dead, the eventual death toll could hit triple figures with many unaccounted for inside the hull of the ship and a number of the 60 workers sent to hospital deemed to have such severe burns that they are unlikely to survive.” The human cost of excess capacity. 
+The Bezzle: “GoPro’s forward statements are not believable, in light of its recent performance, and management’s ability to forecast. It is also essentially a one-product company, and that product does not sell very well” [ 247 Wall Street ]. 
+The Bezzle: “the app economy may have passed its peak. CB Insights analyzed the company descriptions of thousands of startup companies receiving VC funding for the first time between 2010 and today, scanning for buzzwords that describe the companies’ field of focus. While ‘app] is still the keyword that shows up in the most company descriptions, the share of startups working with apps in some way has declined for three straight years” [ Econintersect ]. “Looking at the terms with the largest increase in mentions in startup company descriptions between 2010 and 2016 possibly allows us to glimpse into the future and gives us an idea of what the next big thing might be. According to CB Insights’ analysis, these terms are ‘virtual reality’, ‘machine learning’ and ‘natural language.'” I think reality is quite virtual enough already, thank you. 
+The Fed: “Central bank independence ‘comes from an understanding of the macroeconomic policy problem that is not relevant to current times,’ Summers said in a speech at the International Monetary Fund” [ MarketWatch ]. “During the question-and-answer session, Summers said he did not think that entitlement reform should be on the immediate agenda for the next administration. He said that policy makers should focus solely on accelerating growth. If they are successful in sparking demand, the long-run debt-to-GDP ratio will be sustainable, he said. If policy makers fail, it will not be.” 
+Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 17 Fear (previous close: 18, Fear) [ CNN ]. One week ago: 46 (Neutral). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 3 at 11:31am. Still waiting for single digits. 
+Corruption 
+“Prosecutors in the Singapore trial of a former BSI banker said this week the defendant and other former employees of the Swiss bank helped launder up to $2.3 billion looted from the Malaysia sovereign wealth fund 1MDB” [ FCPA Blog ] and “Two former executives of a Singapore-based defense contractor have been extradited to the United States in the massive bribes-for-secrets scandal that has rocked the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Command” [ FCPA Blog ]. Wait, what? I thought Singapore was supposed to be squeaky clean? 
+Standing Rock and #NoDAPL 
+“SEE IT: Journalist shot with rubber bullet while conducting interview at Standing Rock protests” [ New York Daily News ]. The journalist says “officer,” but it’s not clear to me whether “officer” means “cop” or “mercenary.” 
+Gaia 
+“The average U.S. family destroys a football field’s worth of Arctic sea ice every 30 years” [ Science ]. “If both the linear relationship and current emission trends hold into the future, the study suggests the Arctic will be ice free by 2045—far sooner than some climate models predict. The study suggests that those models are underestimating how warm the Arctic has already become and how fast that melting will proceed.” 
+Guillotine Watch 
+“In the seven years since, terror threats in Europe and political uncertainty from Britain to the U.S. have helped make [New Zealand] — a day by air away from New York or London — a popular bolthole for the mega wealthy” [ Bloomberg ]. Great. Cut the undersea cables, and they might as well be on Mars. 
+Class Warfare 
+“Instacart workers are earning a lot less money after changes to the company’s pay structure — changes CEO Apoorva Mehta told BuzzFeed News are necessary for the company’s continued growth, but that hundreds of vocal Instacart shoppers say are threatening their livelihoods. According to a Buzzfeed News analysis of 15 workers’ pay stubs, shifts that once earned shoppers $100 or more in 4–8 hours have dropped closer to $60 to $80 for similar shifts. These shoppers estimate their earnings have fallen by around 30% so far” [ Buzzfeed ]. Should have filed this under The Bezzle, maybe. Yet another Silicon Valley darling whose valuation depends on screwing over working people. Oh, and this is good: 
+The vast majority of shoppers who spoke with BuzzFeed News for this article asked to remain anonymous out of concern that their accounts would be deactivated for speaking with the press; Instacart said it has never deactivated workers for speaking publicly about their experience with the company. 
+Yikes! 
+“The case for social insurance begins with the recognition that capitalist economies are subject to boom-and-bust cycles. With a managed, socialist economy, business cycles are much less severe (though they can’t be eliminated entirely, for example, in years when agricultural production is unexpectedly low due to the weather) because the government manages production and employment. But these economies tend to grow slower than capitalist economies, and they often have substantial inefficiencies in the way resources and labor are used” [Mark Thoma, CBS ]. 
+“”What Makes Scandinavia Different?” [ Jacobin ]. “The only way to get “Scandinavian levels” of redistribution and social protection is to start building powerful popular movements capable of advancing this agenda.” 
+News of the Wired 
+“Before Irv Teibel, listening to nature meant leaving the house. Here’s the story of the man who brought the rain, thunder, and crickets to your stereo, one satisfied, relaxed customer at a time” [ Pitchfork ]. 
+“The People’s Code” [ code.gov ]. We’ve got the U.S. Digital Service, but not a National Health Service. Seems odd. 
+* * * 
+Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here . And here’s today’s plant (b1whois): 
+That tree is a little ecosystem in itself… 
+Readers, Water Cooler is a standalone entity, not supported by the very successful Naked Capitalism fundraiser just past. Now, I understand you may feel tapped out, but when and if you are able, please use the dropdown to choose your contribution, and then click the hat! Your tip will be welcome today, and indeed any day. Water Cooler will not exist without your continued help. Donate",FAKE
+3587,Jordan signals escalation vs. Islamic State,"Jordan’s King Abdullah II vowed Wednesday that his military forces would hit Islamic State militants with “relentless” strikes upon “their own homes,” an escalation that could place Jordan in the middle of the Syrian civil war.
+
+The king huddled with his security cabinet and top generals Wednesday just hours after Jordan hanged two convicted terrorists in retaliation against the Islamic State, which posted a video Tuesday of its fighters burning alive a captured Jordanian pilot in a cage.
+
+The immolation prompted harsh condemnation from leaders across the Middle East and in the United States, with the White House speaking of Jordan’s “strength and commitment” to the international coalition against the Islamic State “in the face of this barbaric act.”
+
+[The chilling reason the Islamic State burned the pilot alive]
+
+In Jordan, the killing mostly silenced critics of the U.S.-led offensive against the Islamic State, the heavily armed al-Qaeda offshoot also known as ISIS or ISIL. It was used by the government to stoke patriotic sentiment, with billboard-size posters in Amman reading “We Are All Jordan” and a rally of flag-waving supporters greeting the king at the airport as he arrived back in the country from a visit to the United States.
+
+“We will be on the lookout for these criminals, and we will hit them in their own homes,” Abdullah declared, according to the state news agency Petra. “We are fighting this war to protect our faith, values and our humanitarian principles. Our fight will be relentless.”
+
+The hangings underscored the hardening stance by the monarch and his military in Jordan, a key U.S. ally in the fight against the Islamic State, amid street protests calling for revenge against the militant group.
+
+The backlash from the video — released while Abdullah was in Washington to sign a deal boosting the amount of U.S. aid to Jordan — appears to have drawn the usually cautious monarch into a direct confrontation with radical Islamists.
+
+The king, who claims to be a descendant of the prophet Muhammad and was educated in Britain and the United States, has previously avoided direct threats against the Islamic State and has sought to keep secret the number of bombing missions his air force has flown over Syria.
+
+But according to Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), Abdullah — who met with members of Congress before he left Washington — quoted the Clint Eastwood character William Munny, an aging gunslinger in the Oscar-winning film “Unforgiven” who exacts vengeance when his friend is tortured to death.
+
+Abdullah did not elaborate on where or how Jordan’s retaliation would be carried out.
+
+It is unlikely that Jordan would fly strike missions in Syria outside those coordinated by the U.S-
+
+directed coalition. Out of about 1,000 strikes in Syria since September, the vast majority have been by U.S. aircraft. But “the coalition is not going to turn their nose up at additional kinetic activity by one of the members,” said a senior U.S. defense official in Washington. “If they want to do more, we welcome it.”
+
+Overall, the coalition strategy and the pattern of strikes will not change, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity. But outside of coalition operations, “we can’t speak for Jordan,” the official said. “They might feel that for their own sense of national pride, they need to do something.”
+
+The Obama administration declined to join with the European Union — where there is no death penalty — in criticizing the rapid Jordanian executions. White House press secretary Josh Earnest noted that both individuals “had gone through the Jordanian justice system” and were “sentenced to death.”
+
+The administration did not immediately respond to a letter sent to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John F. Kerry by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which wrote that Abdullah, in a meeting with the panel in Washington before his departure Tuesday for Amman, had complained of “complications and delays” in providing defense items such as aircraft parts and munitions.
+
+Jordan’s chief government spokesman said the two prisoners executed Wednesday included Sajida al-Rishawi, an Iraqi woman sentenced to death for her role in a deadly 2005 terrorist attack in Amman. The Islamic State had sought her release as part of a possible prisoner swap. Jordan had offered to free Rishawi in exchange for the pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, and a Japanese journalist, Kenji Goto, held by the Islamic State.
+
+The other inmate was Ziad al-Karbouli, who was linked to a terrorist attack against Jordanians in Iraq in 2005 and whose freedom was also demanded by the Islamic State.
+
+The two were hanged less than 12 hours after the video of the pilot’s killing was posted online.
+
+Across Jordan, voices that recently called for the country to withdraw from the U.S.-led offensive against the Islamic State fell silent as Jordanians came together to denounce the militants.
+
+“This terrible act has created tremendous unity in Jordan,” said Jawad Anani, a senator and former foreign minister. “Ordinary Jordanians now see the threat to their own security.”
+
+Anani, who is close to Abdullah, suggested that airstrikes by Jordan and the coalition would intensify, and he said it was possible that Jordanian ground troops or special forces might be deployed in Syria.
+
+“The next logical step, you can intensify the conflict,” Anani said.
+
+But others doubt that the backlash will stir major changes in Muslim participation in the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State.
+
+“The killing’s impact on the coalition will not really be a game-changer, because the participation of countries depends on a variety of issues that are specific to each country,” said Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese general who teaches geopolitics at the American University of Beirut.
+
+“We won’t see Arab boots on the ground,” he predicted. “That’s for certain.”
+
+In his first public statement since the video, Safi al-Kaseasbeh, the pilot’s father, said Wednesday that he expects Jordan and the U.S.-led coalition to avenge his son’s death. Just last week, the elder Kaseasbeh had appealed for Jordan to pull out of the coalition.
+
+“I urge the government, I expect the government, to seek revenge, severe revenge, for the blood of Muath against this horrid organization, this criminal organization, this organization that is far from Islam and the spirit of Islam,” the pilot’s father said Wednesday.
+
+[Related: The Islamic State was dumped by al-Qaeda a year ago.]
+
+Members of the extended Kaseasbeh clan greeted a stream of visitors at their mourning tent outside the city of Karak, south of Amman. The family had no body to bury. In the video, Islamic State fighters are shown dumping a bulldozer load of cement rubble over the pilot’s body.
+
+Mosques across Jordan held prayers for the pilot at noon, with government-supported imams denouncing the Islamic State. Meanwhile, churches in Amman pealed their bells in interfaith solidarity. After noon prayers, Royal Jordanian Air Force fighter jets flew over Amman and Karak.
+
+But Jordan also faces tests on whether it can build on the displays of unity and resolve. There have been past signs of support for the Islamic State in Jordan — especially in poorer regions — although relatively few people have waved Islamic State flags or endorsed the group on the Internet.
+
+Labib Kamhawi, an Amman-based political analyst, said Abdullah is in “a difficult position” on how to frame the response.
+
+“The issue is whether he can transform this into a national issue that affects Jordanians, or whether it becomes a tribal matter with mounting calls for revenge and eye-for-an-eye attacks,” he said.
+
+Hugh Naylor in Beirut and Karen DeYoung, Brian Murphy and Greg Jaffe in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
+1866,Clinton's best defense -- there's no one else,"(CNN) She's staring down the worst polling numbers of her campaign, struggling to overcome the scandal surrounding her private emails and grappling with persistent chatter that Vice President Joe Biden might challenge her.
+
+But Hillary Clinton has one key advantage going into primary season: A firm perception that she's the only Democrat who can keep the White House.
+
+""Except for Hillary who is there?"" said Brent Budowsky, a Democratic insider who worked for party luminaries including former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. ""There is really no one else at this moment who has a chance of winning. That is a problem that Democrats face -- that is the problem progressives face.
+
+He added: ""If for some reason she dropped out, there would be chaos.""
+
+As progressives swoon for Bernie Sanders and Biden allies float trial balloons and even rumors of an Al Gore comeback swirl, Budowsky's sentiment points to the reality at the heart of Clinton's 2016 efforts. While grassroots Democrats might not love the former secretary of state, who often seems to the right of the party's increasingly liberal base, they appear ready to make a pragmatic choice that she is their best -- or only -- hope on Election Day.
+
+Though her lead has narrowed in some instances, Clinton is still on top of most polls of Democratic primary voters. And she beats potential Republican nominees in most match-up surveys.
+
+Such is the power and aura of the Clinton family that few Democrats will go on the record as criticizing the former first lady and many say they respect her and will ultimately support her if she is the nominee.
+
+But from multiple conversations with Democratic activists, it's clear that suspicion lingers over her true beliefs and instincts. Some fear, for instance, that she would prove to be more to the right of her current political position once in the White House.
+
+All the love in a party that tends to fall hard for its favored candidates is going to Sanders. And after all, there is a precedent -- 2008 -- for Clinton's primacy as her party's apparently unassailable front runner being undermined by a grass roots revolt.
+
+New polls are adding to the jitters.
+
+A survey this week for the first time put Sanders in the lead in a key nominating state -- New Hampshire -- and Clinton's negative ratings continue to rise over the email controversy that has haunted her candidacy and looks set on to drag on for months, giving a torrent of material for the GOP to brand her secretive and shady.
+
+Clinton's presidential campaign is hardly setting the party on fire either. She's failed so far to recapture the barnstorming persona which prolonged her battle against Barack Obama for the party nomination seven years ago.
+
+And Clinton often seems a ponderous campaigner -- the undeniable connection she has with individuals does not translate easily to the campaign trail and she frequently suffers by comparison with the political magnetism of her husband -- former president Bill Clinton.
+
+As she tries to prove that despite her wealth and life in the political bubble she's in touch with everyday Americans, Clinton's choice of campaign events also makes it hard to inspire.
+
+For instance, on Friday in Iowa, Clinton held a wonkish event on cutting college debt -- part of an emerging attempt to lay a policy foundation under her presidential bid. Asked later about her repeated focus on mental health -- one of the core of issues on which she likes to focus in depth -- she was unapologetic.
+
+""I think a president should try to help people have better lives,"" Clinton said, defending a strategy of narrowing in on issues that preoccupy everyday voters rather than big venue campaign events like the ones with which Sanders is packing out sports arenas.
+
+The former secretary of state has also sometimes seemed an uneasy fit with progressives in a party that has undeniably moved left since 2008. She's dodged taking a stand on issues that fire up the party base in united opposition like the Keystone XL pipeline and Obama's push for a pan-Pacific trade deal -- a pact she supported as secretary of state.
+
+Some Democrats are increasingly worried following Clinton's handover to the Justice Department of the private server she used as secretary of state, which is at the center of a controversy over classified intelligence.
+
+There is so far no evidence that Clinton is the target of an investigation or could face criminal charges and her campaign says she never sent email with information that was classified at the time. But the latent fear of the unknown may be one reason why Clinton communications chief Jennifer Palmieri sent an email to the Democratic frontrunner's supporters this week assuring them the so-called scandal was mere campaign ""nonsense"" trumped up by Republicans.
+
+Some senior Democrats believe it's too early to push the panic button for Clinton.
+
+""It's in the DNA of Democrats to worry and to freak out and a lot of folks out there are worrying and freaking out,"" said Mo Elleithee, who worked on Clinton's 2008 campaign and now leads the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service. ""Give it a couple of months. If the dynamics don't start to improve, then you start to worry but at this point there is no reason to worry.""
+
+There's another reason why the Clinton campaign is unlikely be to raising the alarm over nervousness in party ranks.
+
+Despite Sanders' rise -- he's basking in adulation and drawing huge crowds for a campaign based on blasting Wall Street, demanding campaign finance reform, free college, a battle against climate change and universal healthcare -- many party insiders doubt America is ready to elect a 75-year-old self declared socialist as president.
+
+And while Biden is beloved in the party, stirs deep sympathy following the death of his son Beau from a brain tumor, and enjoys the stature of office, there are still questions about his electability.
+
+That's not stopping supporters of the vice president -- who wrapped up his last presidential campaign in 2008 after barely registering in the Iowa causes -- from laying the groundwork for a possible run.
+
+A draft Biden movement has kicked into high gear, drawing more donations and support, at a time when reports say Biden is considering whether there is a path to run in 2016.
+
+The group took in roughly $200,000 in the first quarter and has amassed almost 200,000 signatures.
+
+But, those figures pale next Clinton's $45 million haul and the 18 million votes she got in 2008. That current landscape is part of Biden's calculus as he mulls challenging Clinton.
+
+For the last week he has been vacationing in South Carolina and reaching out to supporters to gauge interest.
+
+""If he does decide to enter the race, he will add more gravitas to the Democratic field,"" said Jon Cooper, the national finance chairman or Draft Biden 2016. ""He has a strong capable hand and is ready to lead on day one without any learning curve.""
+
+That decades long resume, however, could also be an Achilles heel as polls show that voters are pining for outsiders and fresh faces.
+
+Aside from Biden, the Democratic bench is scarcely populated by alternative power players. Two other Democrats in the race, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, might pose tricky moments for Clinton in Democratic debates. But they're the longest of long shot challengers.
+
+Meanwhile, the next generation of Democratic presidential possibles -- like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand -- have yet to emerge, partly because of the prohibitive presence of Clinton as the heir apparent.
+
+Any late entrants to the race at this stage would run headlong in to the Clinton machine.
+
+The campaign has quietly been building the kind of comprehensive grassroots voter identification structure in early states to swell her delegate count that she lacked in 2008.
+
+And she's consolidated her support among Democratic Party elites -- a barometer of political strength that history suggests is just as important as polling in early states in the summer before nominating votes are cast.
+
+On Friday, Clinton trumpeted the latest significant endorsement, welcoming the support of former Sen. Tom Harkin, a liberal Iowa political icon.
+
+""I have had the privilege of knowing Hillary Clinton for a long time. She and I share many of the same deeply-held beliefs,"" Harkin said, in a statement that may help insulate Clinton from claims she is aloof from the economic woes of many Americans.
+
+As often happens with Clinton, however, over a long political career marked by fierce fights with Republicans and questions about her trustworthiness, good news shares equal billing with unflattering headlines.
+
+It's that trend that has some Democrats worried, and looking with some trepidation towards Clinton's prospects in an eventual general election.
+
+In July, a Quinnipiac University poll of three swing states—Colorado, Iowa, and Virginia—showed Clinton lagging behind possible GOP opponents, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. As she has battled bad headlines about her personal e-mail account, her negative ratings have spiked in those states and her trust numbers have also taken a hit.
+
+A CNN/ORC poll of Democratic voters in Iowa released this week shows that Clinton still beats Sanders overall, yet voters see the Vermont Senator as more trustworthy. And since July, Sanders has attracted cumulative crowds of 100,000 people with his soak-the-rich rhetoric.
+
+""Hillary Clinton has been doing well in Iowa but her people there are rattled by the Bernie Sanders crowds which by Iowa standards are quite large,"" said David Yepsen, who has covered Iowa politics for decades. ""The polls look good for her now but we are six months away and I've seen things change rapidly. The drip, drip, drip, drip, is causing some concern.""",REAL
+2752,The new war on the press: When satire sparks terrorism,"When I think of freedom of the press, what comes to mind is the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Abu Ghraib, NSA surveillance—the tough terrain of investigative reporting.
+
+Not the handiwork of people trying to get a few laughs.
+
+Yet satire, it seems, has suddenly become the new battleground for free expression. And that requires some rethinking for all of us.
+
+I love a good comedic skewering as much as the next person. But satire, fairly or not, has always seemed less “serious” than other forms of journalism, more of an indulgence.
+
+Yet as the massacre at Charlie Hebdo reminds us, cartoonists, satirists and funnymen are often on the front lines of very risky battles. Perhaps because their barbs sting in a personal way that news stories and commentary do not. Perhaps because the comedic overlay gives them license to tackle incendiary subjects from which others shy away.
+
+And here’s the rub: Sometimes what they peddle is truly offensive—maybe to me, maybe to you. And that makes it harder to defend.
+
+Who wants to go to bat for the Piss Christ photo, or the Virgin Mary covered in cow dung, or depictions of Mohammad that obviously make Muslims angry? But we must defend the right to publish, if not the content. Free speech is meaningless if it doesn’t apply to unpopular, even repulsive speech.
+
+If you think about the North Korean-backed hacking of Sony Pictures, it was triggered by a movie whose idea of comedy was a plot to assassinate Kim Jung Un that ends with his head exploding. That, as I said at the time, was an incredibly stupid and needlessly provocative project. Yet I also ripped Sony for caving to threats and deep-sixing the film before bowing to public and Hollywood pressure and making “The Interview” available. In America, you have the right to make a moronic movie.
+
+Nor would I defend the content of such Charlie Hebdo cartoons as one in which rolls of toilet paper were marked “Bible,” “Torah” and “Quran,” with the caption: “In the toilet, all religions.” But the satirical French newspaper has the right to publish outrageously offensive material without being attacked by terrorists.
+
+The issue has surfaced before because of Charlie Hebdo’s poke-in-the-eye editorial approach. The paper’s offices were firebombed in 2011 after it published a cartoon mocking Muhammad. The following year, both the White House spokesman and the French foreign minister criticized the newspaper—but not its right to publish—for another Muhammad cartoon following the Benghazi attack that the administration initially blamed on an anti-Islam film.
+
+Stephane Charbonnier, the paper’s courageous editor and one of the 12 killed in Wednesday’s attack, told ABC in 2012: “We can’t live in a country without freedom of speech. I prefer to die than to live like a rat.”
+
+Chuck Lane made the broader point in his Washington Post column: “It turns out that such political jokesters take big risks, bigger than perhaps even they realize or anticipate — and the repercussions affect us all.
+
+“Yet it is vitally important that the United States and all other Western democracies rally to their unequivocal defense.”
+
+Lane faulted the officials who criticized Charlie Hebdo in 2012 for “mixed messages” that ran the risk of conveying “how dangerous it is to give violent extremists a veto over what your citizens can and cannot say.”
+
+The Washington Post ran of one of Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad cartoons in a gesture of solidarity yesterday. Other news organizations, including Fox News, CNN, the AP and the New York Times, have since made an editorial decision against running the images. Some critics say that’s cowardly; I think it’s a tough call.
+
+I would prefer that they continue aggressive reporting, commentary and, yes, satire if warranted against Islamic terrorists and those who would extinguish free speech at the point of a gun.
+
+In one encouraging sign, Google, Guardian Media and several French publishers have donated money to ensure that Charlie Hebdo will publish next week. That is a message that even terrorists can understand.
+
+Click for more from Media Buzz
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+7655,Apostate Evangelicals Are Poised To Become The Deciding Factor In A Hillary Clinton Election Victory,"Posted on October 28, 2016 by Michael Snyder 
+If you look at the numbers, there is no way that Hillary Clinton could possibly win the election without the support of a substantial percentage of evangelical Christian voters. In fact, if evangelical Christians stuck together they could pretty much elect whoever they want as president. According to the Pew Research Center, 35 percent of all adults in the United States identify themselves as “evangelical” or “born again”, and it has been estimated that there are 94 million evangelical Christian adults in this country. If evangelical Christians acted as a single voting block they could determine the outcome of every single presidential election. Unfortunately, that simply is not going to happen. 
+A survey that was recently conducted by LifeWay Research found that only 45 percent of Christian evangelicals plan to vote for Donald Trump and 31 percent of Christian evangelicals plan to vote for Hillary Clinton. 
+That same survey discovered that moral issues are becoming increasingly unimportant to evangelical voters… Overall, the economy is the top concern for Americans regardless of religious affiliation (30%). National security (17%) and personal character (17%) also are significant issues. Supreme Court nominees (10%), immigration (5%), religious freedom (2%), and abortion (1%) are less important . “For churchgoers and those with evangelical beliefs, their pocketbook and personal safety are paramount,” said McConnell. “Moral issues aren’t a priority for many of them.” 
+I don’t know how in the world abortion could come in at only 1 percent. Even if you add “ Supreme Court nominees ” and abortion together, you still only get a total of 11 percent. 
+This just shows that evangelicals in America have their priorities way out of order. 
+And unfortunately for Donald Trump, he is getting a lot less support from evangelicals than other recent presidential candidates received. According to the New York Times , previous candidates have generally received about 80 percent support from white evangelical voters, but Donald Trump is only getting about 65 to 70 percent support, and his numbers among non-white evangelicals are absolutely dismal. 
+If you are an evangelical Christian and you have reservations about Donald Trump, I can respect that. But there will be other names on the ballot and you do not have to vote for Hillary Clinton. As I have said before, a vote for Hillary Clinton is an act of unmitigated wickedness. 
+Hillary Clinton has made support for abortion one of the central pillars of her long political career. In fact, I don’t know if there is any politician in America that is more associated with abortion than Hillary Clinton. Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, more than 58 million babies have been murdered in the United States, and Hillary Clinton’s hands are drenched with their blood. 
+If you vote for Hillary Clinton, your hands will be drenched with their blood too. 
+Needless to say, I am absolutely horrified that so many prominent evangelical leaders have come out in support of Hillary Clinton during this election season. For example, a group that represents over 6,000 Latino evangelical churches has just announced that they are endorsing Hillary Clinton … 
+An organization representing more than 6,000 Latino evangelical churches in the U.S. is endorsing Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. 
+In a statement Thursday, the group OPEN USA says Clinton has proven her willingness to engage in difficult conversations, listen to contrasting opinions and engage faith leaders. 
+Meanwhile, 75 evangelical leaders recently signed a petition on Change.org that strongly denounces Donald Trump… 
+We, undersigned evangelicals, simply will not tolerate the racial, religious, and gender bigotry that Donald Trump has consistently and deliberately fueled, no matter how else we choose to vote or not to vote. 
+One of the truly alarming trends that we have been seeing this election season is the number of prominent women in the evangelical movement that are openly rejecting Donald Trump and embracing Hillary Clinton. The following is a short excerpt from a recent Washington Post article that examined this phenomenon… 
+When Jen Hatmaker speaks to stadiums full of Christian women, she regales them with stories about her five children and her garden back in Austin, Tex. — and stays away from politics. But recently she took to Facebook and Instagram to blast Donald J. Trump as a “national disgrace,” and remind her legions of followers that there are other names on the ballot in November. 
+And Christianity Today recently published an editorial from one of the top female evangelical leaders in the entire country in which she publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton. According to Christianity Today, Deborah Fikes is “the former Permanent Representative to the United Nations for World Evangelical Alliance, which represents a constituency of 650 million with alliance offices in 129 countries.” Fikes says that she stepped down from some of her leadership positions so that she could openly advocate for Clinton … My recent resignations from evangelical leadership positions to endorse Hillary Clinton speaks volumes of how important I believe it is that she is elected in November. The toxic tone and atmosphere that surrounds Mr. Trump and is fueled among his supporters has done irreparable damage to not only our country and the future of the GOP but also to the public witness of evangelicals in America who are seen as some of his biggest supporters. There is no question in my mind or spirit that with the overwhelming challenges the next American president will face, Hillary Clinton is the most qualified person who has ever run for the Oval Office . On the issues of our national security, economic stability, seeing that healthcare reform continues to move forward, and tackling domestic challenges of poverty, inequality, and racism, we need her to be the person occupying this office. 
+A lot of these women seem to think that abortion shouldn’t be a major issue in this election, but that is like saying that the Holocaust shouldn’t have been a major issue in Nazi Germany. 
+Look, you don’t have to vote for Donald Trump or anyone else to be a good Christian. 
+But if you cast a vote for Hillary Clinton, you are casting a vote for the most evil, wicked and corrupt politician that this nation has possibly ever seen, and you are publicly endorsing the sinful positions that she is proud to stand for. 
+I know that I have been writing about the election a lot lately , but I feel that it is very important that I do so. Most of the media coverage has focused on Donald Trump , but I feel that this election is far more about Hillary Clinton. The things that her and her husband have done have been well documented, and if the American people willingly choose her they will know exactly what they are doing. 
+Unfortunately, not even Christians are standing united against the Clintons. The political divide in the evangelical Christian world has grown so deep that it has even reached Liberty University. The following comes from the Atlantic … 
+That’s why it was such a big deal when, two weeks ago, a group of Liberty students put out a letter explaining why they’re standing against the Republican presidential nominee. Jerry Falwell Jr., who has run the school since his father died in 2007, announced his support for Donald Trump back in January, and he has since spoken on the candidate’s behalf in interviews and at events. “We are Liberty students who are disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history,” the students wrote. “Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him.” 
+Thousands of people signed onto the letter, including, the students said, roughly 2,000 students or alumni with liberty.edu email addresses.Dustin Wahl and Alex Forbes, two of the letter’s authors, were featured on MSNBC and CNN. They said they received supportive emails and tweets from Russell Moore, the head of the political arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Erick Erickson, the conservative radio-show host. 
+And the support for Clinton is particularly strong among young adult evangelicals. When I read the following paragraph on the website of the New York Times , I was absolutely astounded… 
+Kate Shellnutt, 30, the online editor of Christianity Today and editor of the CT Women section, said she had observed that “the millennial generation has a lot less patience for Trump.” Of the 33 influential millennial evangelicals she profiled for a cover story two years ago, she says she can now find only one, Lila Rose, who is pro-Trump, and even she has been publicly critical of him . Several have been using the hashtag #NeverTrump, Ms. Shellnutt said. 
+The frightening thing is that this election might be the last chance for evangelical Christians to shape the political direction of this nation, because the truth is that demographics are rapidly shifting, and this includes the demographics of the evangelical community … 
+As Robert Jones has expertly documented in his recent book The End of White Christian America , the number of older, conservative, white male evangelicals is shrinking each year. Meanwhile, the number of younger evangelicals of all ethnic backgrounds — whose moral and political views extend far beyond positions on gay marriage and abortion — is on the rise. 
+If you follow my work regularly, then you already know that I have very little hope for the future of America. 
+But if Hillary Clinton is elected, there will be exactly zero hope. 
+If evangelical Christians stood united, they could stop her, but at this point it appears that is not going to happen. 
+Courtesy of Michael Snyder Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+7188,BREAKING : Sources Inside the FBI Say Hillary Will Be INDICTED in Early 2017 – TruthFeed,"BREAKING : Sources Inside the FBI Say Hillary Will Be INDICTED in Early 2017 BREAKING : Sources Inside the FBI Say Hillary Will Be INDICTED in Early 2017 Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 29, 2016 On Friday the FBI announced they were reopening the email investigation into Hillary’s mishandling of classified information. In a statement, the FBI said that they discovered “new emails” pertinent to the earlier investigation on “several devices.” Reports indicate that one phone device belongs to Anthony Weiner and the other phone device belongs to his estranged wife Huma Abedin. Sources inside the FBI say there are “SMOKING GUN” BOMBSHELLS on the devices and Hillary will be indicted in January or February of 2017. This woman should not be allowed to run for president. She should be forced to STEP DOWN. Watch the video: Breaking News : HILLARY To Be Indited After The Election In January Or February ! This Is Bigger Than Watergate ! pic.twitter.com/XuunYGcLR1 
+— Richard Weaving (@RichardWeaving) October 29, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+4189,Donald Trump says he doesn’t need a unified GOP. Logic and math suggest otherwise.,"When Donald Trump told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in an interview on Sunday that he didn't think the Republican Party needed to be unified behind his candidacy, it wasn't really clear what he meant.
+
+""Does [the party] have to be unified? I'm very different than everybody else, perhaps, that's ever run for office. I actually don't think so,"" Trump said. ""I think it would be better if it were unified, I think it would be -- there would be something good about it. But I don't think it actually has to be unified in the traditional sense.""
+
+So how will he win? ""I think I'm going to go out and I'm going to get millions of people from the Democrats,"" Trump said. ""I'm going to get Bernie [Sanders] people to vote, because they like me on trade.""
+
+A charitable interpretation is that Trump doesn't think members of the Republican establishment need to align behind him in order for him to be successful. That was certainly true in the primaries, but it's less clear that it's true in the general. Why? For the same reason that the uncharitable interpretation of Trump's comments is so baffling: Trump very much needs Republicans to vote for him in November.
+
+That sounds obvious, of course, but it's worth delving into. Consider, for example the relative unfavorability of Trump and Hillary Clinton within their own parties. Clinton's got the Democratic nomination essentially locked up, but is still battling Bernie Sanders and still maintaining only a small lead over him in national polling. But she is much more positively viewed by members of her own party than is Trump -- and consistently so. Trump's numbers have improved, but they're still pretty abysmal.
+
+This is a large part of the reason that Trump's overall favorability ratings are lower than Clinton's: Republicans look at him a lot more skeptically than Democrats do Clinton. For him to be successful in November, he needs those skeptical Republicans to come out and vote for him anyway.
+
+After all, this happens at a time when partisans have been more willing than ever to vote for the candidate their own party nominated. Even independents -- a group that largely still tends to vote on a partisan basis -- were largely loyal to the party with which they identified in 2008.
+
+If Republicans waver on their choice but Democrats stay true to their party, Trump's in a lot of trouble. (Yes, a chunk of Bernie Sanders supporters say that they won't back Clinton in November, but when Clinton lost the nomination in 2008, the number of defections was much smaller than polling at the end of the primary suggested.)
+
+Donald Trump will end the primary season with more votes from Republicans than any Republican in history. But he's also had the most people vote against him, as the splintered party struggled to reach consensus. The fact that prominent Republicans are reluctant to back Trump is a both a cause and side effect of that split. House Speaker Paul Ryan declining to endorse Trump won't hurt Trump among Trump's existing base of support; they don't like Ryan anyway. But if Ryan argued for Trump's candidacy -- if more moderate/establishment Republicans were to embrace and make the case for his nomination -- it's likely that wavering Republicans might be influenced. Trump needs them to be.
+
+He waves this away by suggesting he'll find some space in the political middle. He returns to this baffling idea that he can lure Bernie Sanders's supporters to his cause -- an effort that will almost certainly fail based on the politics at play and an effort about which Sanders himself has been increasingly vocal.
+
+There has been a repeated suggestion that Trump can lure Democrats to his cause in the way that Ronald Reagan did in 1980. (You can see the dip Reagan caused in Democratic Party loyalty on the first graph above.) But that idea is flawed for several reasons.
+
+First of all, those Reagan Democrats -- mostly working-class white males -- have already migrated to the Republican Party. You can see the trend in data from the General Social Survey; the Reagan Democrats of 1980 are the regular-old Republicans of today. In that sense, Trump is right: His campaign hinges on those voters supporting him.
+
+On top of that, though, white voters are a much smaller part of the electorate than they were in 1980. That year, 88 percent of the electorate was white. In 2012, the figure was 72 percent. In 1988, working-class whites made up half of the electorate, as the Atlantic's Peter Beinart noted in March. This year, they'll be only one-third. Yes, it's possible that Trump will inspire more whites to come to the polls, but there's also some evidence that he's inspiring nonwhites to turn out, too -- to vote against him.
+
+Trump can't count on wooing a large group of Democrats to vote for him in part because most of the Democratic Party is made up of groups that view him very negatively: women, blacks, Hispanics. If he can't convince Democrats, and if Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents maintain their party loyalty, he needs every Republican vote he can get. To do that, he needs help -- the sort of help he didn't get in the primaries, leading to his earning less than 50 percent of the total votes.
+
+It sounds macho to say he doesn't need loyalty, that he'll go it alone, with the party or without it. But a non-unified Republican Party is a Republican Party that endures four more years of a Democratic White House.",REAL
+4555,"At least 20 hostages dead in siege of hotel in Mali, official says","Several gunmen seized a luxury hotel in Mali’s capital on Friday, killing at least 20 people in an attack that raised fresh concerns about security in a country that has battled Islamist insurgents for years.
+
+Even after a multinational campaign to defeat them, militants have proved capable of targeting prominent locations like the city’s Radisson Blu Hotel, where the seven-hour standoff took place.
+
+Security forces swept through the Radisson on Friday afternoon, freeing the last hostages and pursuing the gunmen, who had charged through the hotel yelling “Allahu akbar!” — or “God is great!” As the troops cleared the hotel, they found the floors littered with the bodies of Malians and foreign visitors, including a Belgian government official.
+
+The State Department said a U.S. citizen was among the dead. A department spokesman had reported earlier that no Americans were killed or injured.
+
+An al-Qaeda affiliate based in Africa claimed Friday’s attack. It was the latest in a year of deadly Islamist-led assaults across sub-Saharan Africa, where a patchwork of conflicts has sometimes been overshadowed by Islamic State violence in other parts of the world. From al-Shabab in Somalia to Boko Haram in Nigeria, the continent is host to a profusion of violent extremist groups, with a range of local and transnational goals, seeking to execute large-scale attacks against civilians.
+
+[It’s not just the Islamic State. Other terror groups surge in West Africa.]
+
+In Mali, Friday’s attack underscored how vulnerable the West African country remains, even after French forces and a small number of U.S. troops helped unseat Islamists from their northern stronghold in 2013. Before that campaign, militants appeared to be gaining ground, moving closer to the capital, seizing on the chaos caused by a 2012 military coup. The current government still has only tenuous influence in parts of the country, and the remaining French forces in particular are considered targets.
+
+The gunmen stormed the hotel early Friday, sending some of the 170 guests and staff members fleeing in panic and prompting others to seek hiding places. One witness said the attackers freed some captives who were able to recite verses from the Koran. By late Friday afternoon, Mali’s security minister, Col. Salif Traore, said the remaining hostages were safe.
+
+At least 20 people were killed, Traore said. The Reuters news agency, citing U.N. officials, said at least 27 bodies were seen. Authorities worked through the evening to identify the dead.
+
+Three U.N. staff members in the hotel during the attack were safely evacuated, said Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. U.N. peacekeepers helped secure the perimeter and provided medical aid and forensics assistance, Dujarric said.
+
+The United Nations has envoys in Bamako as part of Mali’s reconciliation efforts — what has become the deadliest peacekeeping mission of the past three years, with 53 U.N. peacekeepers killed since 2013.
+
+The Chinese Foreign Ministry said three Chinese nationals were among the dead and four were rescued.
+
+[How U.S. troops aided at the scene of the hostage standoff]
+
+Meanwhile, security forces tried to pin down the attackers in the heart of Bamako. Officials said that four gunmen were holed up Friday night in a hotel room but that there were no hostages with them.
+
+A group affiliated with al-Qaeda, al-Mourabitoun, said its followers were behind the attack — similar to a smaller assault on a hotel in August that was claimed by the same group. Mali has faced repeated attacks from insurgents linked to al-Qaeda and other factions, but the Islamic State does not have major footholds in the region.
+
+One Senegalese guest, Aissatou Gueye, was in her room when the attackers entered. Like many other guests, she was there to attend a large mining conference. “They were asking people to recite the Koran, and if they do, nothing will happen to them,” she said outside the hotel. Gueye saw one person shot dead before she ran to safety.
+
+About a dozen Americans were rescued from the hotel, including several employees of the U.S. Embassy in Bamako, said State Department spokesman John Kirby.
+
+The American victim was identified by her family as Anita Datar, an international development worker from Takoma Park, Md. The U.S. ambassador to Mali called the family late Friday afternoon to inform them, Datar’s mother said. Datar, the mother of a young son, worked for Palladium, an international development firm with offices in Washington.
+
+[Anita Datar, the only known American killed in Mali, was there to help]
+
+A member of a U.S. Special Operations unit helped to escort guests evacuated from the hotel, the Pentagon said. About 22 U.S. Defense Department personnel were in Bamako when the hotel was attacked.
+
+President Obama, speaking to business leaders at a summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, expressed condolences to the people of Mali. “Mali security forces and our own diplomatic and security agencies rushed in to save lives,” Obama said. “This barbarity only stiffens our resolve to meet this challenge. We will stand with the people of Mali to rid the country of terrorists and strengthen their democracy.”
+
+Authorities drew no direct links to last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris. But Mali — home to the ancient city of Timbuktu — has been at the center of a French-backed effort to drive back Islamist rebels who once controlled large portions of the country.
+
+Security had been reinforced in Bamako — specifically around locations popular with foreigners, including the Radisson — after the Paris attacks, Traore said. He added that the attackers entered the hotel through a side entrance, “which makes us believe that they were familiar with the hotel.”
+
+Foreigners are often targeted in Mali. Yet militants had never seized a target as prominent as the 190-room Radisson Blu, where foreign business people and diplomats are known to stay and dine.
+
+Earlier this month — before the rampage in Paris — the leader of Ansar Dine, one of Mali’s main Islamist groups, released a statement encouraging attacks that would “push away the aggression of the French Crusader assailant” in the former French colony, which stretches from tropical West Africa to desert regions bordering Algeria.
+
+A contingent of French troops is stationed in Mali, and President François Hollande on Thursday had praised the campaign against the Islamist insurgents.
+
+“France is leading this war with its armed forces, its soldiers, its courage,” he said. “It must carry out this war with its allies, its partners giving us all the means available, as we did in Mali, as we are going to continue in Iraq, as we will continue in Syria.”
+
+One of the rescued hostages, popular Guinean singer Sékouba “Bambino” Diabate, told reporters that he hid under his bed and heard two assailants speaking in English as they searched an adjacent room.
+
+“I stayed still, hidden under the bed, not making a noise,” he said. “I heard them say in English: ‘Did you load it? Let’s go.’ ”
+
+Extremist violence has hit Mali repeatedly. In March, attackers reportedly shouting “Allahu akbar” fired on a popular bar in Bamako. Three Malian civilians were killed, along with a Belgian security officer working for the European Union and a French national.
+
+Two months ago, more than a dozen people — including five U.N. contractors — were killed in a 24-hour hostage siege at a hotel in Sevare in central Mali. Responsibility for that attack was claimed by al-Mourabitoun, led by Algerian Mokhtar Belmokhtar.
+
+Belmokhtar, an infamous one-eyed militant, had also orchestrated the bloody seizure of an Algerian gas facility in 2013 in which at least 100 workers were held hostage and dozens were killed. He was targeted in a U.S. airstrike in June in Libya, and Libyan authorities said he was killed. But the Islamist group al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb rejected that claim.
+
+Sieff reported from Nairobi. Carol Morello, Brian Murphy, William Branigin, Sarah Kaplan, Craig Whitlock and Joe Heim in Washington, David Nakamura in Kuala Lumpur and Liu Liu in Beijing contributed to this report.
+
+It’s not just the Islamic State. Other terror groups surge in West Africa.",REAL
+7855,Stabbing Injures Seven People in Newark Home · Guardian Liberty Voice,"According to ABC Eye Witness News, on Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016, in Newark, New Jersey, seven people were stabbed. The stabbing occurred shortly before 4:00 p.m. ET.
+It has been reported some the victims have life-threatening injuries. So far the police have reported there is no clear motive for the stabbing, and there are no suspects in custody.
+Updates on this story will be provided as they come available.
+Another Stabbing Earlier This Year According to ABC Eye Witness News, on July 29, 2016, there was another stabbing. This victim was in critical condition was stabbed by her husband. Which lead to a standoff.
+The 59-year-old victim was stabbed multiple times by the 64-year-old suspect. At the time of the stabbing, their nine-year-old grandson was in the home. He was not injured, and he was able to get help.
+Neighbors came in and pulled the woman onto the grass until paramedics arrived. The suspect sat behind the front door of the home talking to police since about 11:20 a.m., and the standoff ended at about 3:40 p.m. with the man taken into custody.
+During the standoff, the suspect threatened to commit suicide. Residents of the area were told to stay in their homes while officials negotiated with the suspect.
+By Brady Combs
+Edited by Cathy Milne
+Sources:
+ABC EyeWitness News: 7 People Stabbed inside Newark home; police searching for suspect
+ABC EyeWitness News: Woman Stabbed by her husband in a Newark Home, police say
+Image courtesy of ER24 EMS’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License    stabbing",FAKE
+6741,Clinton Staffer Caught Sacrificing Baby to Demon Moloch - Wikileaks,"
+According to a new Wikileaks email leak , a Clinton staffer has been caught “ sacrificing a chicken in the backyard to Moloch “.
+Chicken is a code-word for children, babies among pedophile and satanic ranks.
+Moloch is a Demon to which the ancient Jewish people of the past were caught by Moses while they were sacrificing their own babies when he was on top of Mount Sinai receiving the 10 Commandments from God.
+Moses was so angry and upset that he broke the first set of the 10 Commandments! He condemned and damned everyone. He later went to the mountain again and got a second set of of the 10 Commandments.
+In Leviticus 18:21 God forbid the chosen people to do such a horrible thing:
+Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Moloch, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the LORD.
+God also ordered in Leviticus 20:2 to 20:5 that any follower of Moloch must be put to death:
+Say to the Israelites: ‘Any Israelite or any foreigner residing in Israel who sacrifices any of his children to Moloch is to be put to death. The members of the community are to stone him.
+I myself will set my face against him and will cut him off from his people; for by sacrificing his children to Moloch, he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name.
+If the members of the community close their eyes when that man sacrifices one of his children to Moloch and if they fail to put him to death,
+I myself will set my face against him and his family and will cut them off from their people together with all who follow him in prostituting themselves to Moloch.
+This is NOT a joke people, this is serious SATANIST stuff and either you believe in God or not, it’s your problem, but what matters is that these people DO BELIEVE IN WHAT THEY DO!
+16 years ago, on 15 July 2000 Alex Jones was the first and only to date, to ever infiltrate and secretly videotape the Bohemian Grove . Guess what they were doing there… Mock (or real?!?) sacrifices of children to Demon Moloch.
+",FAKE
+6355,Arkansas Republicans Put The Word “Liar” In Hillary’s Name On Ballot,"Comments 
+The signs that the Republican Party is purposefully doing everything they can to repress the vote and use every trick in the book to somehow sway voters is clear as day. As the Donald Trump campaign is hit with four different lawsuits over their voter suppression campaigns, it’s been discovered that the early voting ballots in Arkansas have a very disturbing “typo” on t hem. 
+Early voting ballots in Lanoke County read “Hilliary Clinton.” 
+Since the Republican Party has been demonizing Hillary Clinton for being “crooked” and a “liar” and a literal demon for years on end, it’s hard to imagine this being an honest “typo.” 
+It’s just another subliminal way that the right-wing is trying to tip the scales in favor of their candidate, who, we need not remind you, is actually an a pathological liar, a serial sexual predator, a thief, and a racist. 
+Watch NBC’s report here:",FAKE
+9842,"ISIS uses an industrial dough kneader to kill 250 children, roasts adults in a bakery oven in Douma, Syria","Email 
+ISIS barbarians used an industrial dough kneader to kill 250 children, and roasted adults in a bakery oven, according to a shocking new report. 
+In an interview with the humanitarian organization Roads of Success, Syrian mom Alice Assaf went into chilling detail about the atrocities the jihadists committed about two years ago in the town of Douma, explaining that some of the youngsters were even decapitated in front of their parents, according to the Express. 
+“We heard that the militants grabbed six strong men working at the bakery and burned them inside the oven. We knew them,” Assaf told Dr. Yvette Isaac, who works for the advocacy group, according to the UK Mirror. 
+“After that, they caught some 250 kids and kneaded them like dough in the bakery dough machine,” Assaf said, according to media reports. “They were put in the dough mixer, they were kneaded. The oldest one of them was four-years-old.” 
+ISIS transported hundreds of girls to the city of Douma, which has been at the center of the Syrian civil war, to be slaughtered. ISIS has been systematically killing non-Muslims, and the majority of its victims at the time were Christian. 
+Assaf said her own son, George, was killed by the radical militants after he refused to switch to a Muslim name. 
+“My son said to me, ‘No, mother, I don’t want to die with an identity not my own. I prefer to die with the name George,'” Assaf said, according to the Christian Post. 
+Assaf added, “I asked my son then to hide, but he refused and said, ‘I don’t want to hide myself. You are the one who taught me to follow what Christ said’ — ‘whoever denies me before man, I will also deny before my father who is in Heaven.'” 
+Dr. Isaac reported the savage slayings to a member of the UK Parliament, Fiona Bruce, who recently recounted the horrifying testimony to her colleagues in open chambers. 
+“She showed us recent film footage of herself talking with mothers–more than one– who had seen their own children crucified,” Bruce said. 
+“She told us of a mother with a two-month-old baby. When [ISIS] knocked at the front door of her house and ordered the entire family out, she pleaded with them to let her collect her child from another room,” Bruce said. 
+“She told us of a mother with a two-month-old baby,” Bruce continued. When [ISIS] knocked at the front door of her house and ordered the entire family out, she pleaded with them to let her collect her child from another room. They told her, ‘No. Go. It is ours now.’”",FAKE
+4863,"Millennials Just Aren't That Into Hillary Clinton, and it Could Cost Her the Election","A number of new polls show Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson doing very well with millennials and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton underperforming with the same demographic that helped President Obama build winning coalitions in 2008 and 2012.
+
+A New York Times/CBS poll shows 26 percent of voters under the age of 29 supporting Johnson and a further 10 percent supporting Green presidential nominee Jill Stein. Similarly, a Quinnipiac poll shows Johnson at 29 percent of young voters, and Stein at 15. In that poll, Clinton barely edges out Johnson among young voters, getting 31 percent. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is at 26 percent among that demographic in the poll. Further, a Global Strategy Group poll of millennials in 11 battleground states found 73 percent of millennials saying that Trump was a racist, and just 38 percent supporting Clinton in a 4-way matchup.
+
+The results have yielded unsurprising hand-wringing from older liberals who feel the vote of millennials belongs to them. Clara Jeffrey, editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, tweeted that she has ""never hated millennials more"" in response to the NYT/CBS poll, which earned refreshing responses from millennials. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, meanwhile, quips that it looked ""like 'liberaltarianism' is a real thing"" and that Donald Trump was ""very glad"" of it.
+
+While Republicans have a few politicians who could be called 'liberaltarian' (two former Republican governors who might be called that are on the Libertarian Party ticket, after all), Trump is not. In a tight race, those votes could be crucial, and Trump has nothing to offer them. Not something to be glad about. The same goes for Democrats, whose nominee has nothing to offer a demographic that has increasingly become more libertarian-friendly.
+
+A Reason-Rupe poll of millennials in 2014 found 66 percent of them believing government was wasteful and inefficient even as many said they planned to vote Democrat in that year and in 2016. The drop off in support for Democrats is unsurprising, given that the rhetoric about government that Democrats deploy does not match the reality on the ground. That reality was bound to catch up with millennials who, even when they are fans of government, give authority the side eye. Many of the responses to Jeffrey's tweets encouraged her sarcastically to keep alienating millennials if she wanted Clinton to win.
+
+The narrative of the older generation of liberals is that Donald Trump is so bad, voters have to hold their nose and vote for Clinton. The option alone of a third party vote is skewered online, mostly by establishment liberals who have increasingly come to represent the poor policy making that has led to a mammoth-sized debt and veritable police state in the U.S. and U.S. warfare state abroad. Donald Trump does not ""scare"" millennials as much as the mess older voters have made of the country. Clinton's courting of neo-conservatives and figures like Henry Kissinger only serves to alienate millennials more. Johnson's refusal to play political games, like powering through a question about Aleppo without knowing what it's in reference to, while it makes him an easy target for the media establishment to mock, likely ingratiates him to millennials who see both Trump and Clinton as products of a corrupt political system their parents' generation has glorified.
+
+Clinton and President Obama's decision to call Trump a break from Republican tradition instead of the inevitable evolution of it, as more dishonest partisans might frame it, has also placed Johnson and the Libertarian Party in a better position. Millennials are used to start-ups. They are early adopters whose behaviors and decisions are helping drive old giants of industry out of business, from Blockbuster to taxicabs. The latest polls suggest they have the potential to disrupt the political industry in this country in the same way they've disrupted so many others. All the fearmongering over Trump, the cries of false equivalency, and the attempts by millennial ""influencers"" like Vox.com to frame the Clinton campaign as something transformative millennials ought to get behind, won't bring millennials to heel in the way major parties were able to in days gone by. Neither will false alarms about ""spoilers"" (spoiler: third parties aren't spoilers, shitty candidates are).
+
+The persistence of never Trump Republicans (even if they don't go for Johnson), combined with Obama and Clinton's refusal (as of yet) to smear the principles of limited government, freedom, and Constitutionalism with Trumpism because of Republicans' history of running on those principles while never acting on them, and the Libertarian party's decision to nominate socially tolerant and fiscally responsible candidates (as many millennials describe themselves) means millennials have the chance to catapult the Libertarian party into major party status, if not through this election cycle alone, almost certainly in cycles to come. Both millennials and Libertarians should expect the smears and attacks to become more vociferous and detached from reality as the old establishment partisan order slowly but surely comes to an end.",REAL
+5360,"Jaish Al-Fatah Leader Admits Receiving Financial, Military Aid from Saudi Arabia","Abdullah Muhammad al-Muhaysini, a senior al Qaeda-linked cleric and the religious leader of Jeish al-Fatah terrorist group, admitted that the militants in Syria have received financial and military aid from Saudi Arabia and certain other Persian Gulf Arab states. 36 Shares
+2 34 0 0
+According to the Syrian dissidents' news website, Enab, Muhaysini has released a video recently in which he appreciated Riyadh and other Arab states for equipping his comrades with missiles.
+The Saudi preacher said that the missiles that they have sent would be used to break the Syrian army and its allies' siege of Aleppo.
+He also thanked Turkey for supporting the terrorists and treating the wounded militants in its hospitals.
+Jaish al-Fatah is a conglomerate of terrorist groups with Al-Nusra (Fatah Al-Sham) Front comprising its main body.
+In relevant remarks in June, a source said that Saudi Arabia has sent new cargoes of weapons and financial aid to the terrorists in Aleppo in Northern Syria to strengthen them against the Syrian army and its allies' fresh attacks.
+MORE... Why do we only hear of the “humanitarian crisis in Aleppo” and not everywhere else in Syria? Is Maintaining Assad the Least Worst Option? The Criminal West’s State Sponsorship of Terrorism Israel wants Syria destroyed as presaged by the Oded Yinon plan ""The Saudi regime has recently sent small arms and new equipment, including 5 drones, to the terrorists in Syria,"" the source said.
+To this end, Riyadh has sent one of its ranking officers to the regions controlled by terrorists in Northern Aleppo to supply them with money and arms to intensify attacks and open new fronts against the Syrian army and popular forces, the source added.
+Also, a prominent Syrian military analyst said earlier this month that the terrorists in Aleppo take orders from outside and don’t dare to leave the city in anticipation of punishment by Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
+""Violation of the ceasefire by the terrorists and their opposition to the evacuation of Aleppo is of no surprise as they are not the ones in charge of the decision-making for remaining or leaving the city, rather they take orders from the regional and international sides for whom they are working,"" Turki Hassan told FNA last Saturday.
+Noting that the main cause of the terrorists' stubborn stay in Aleppo is that leaders of Fatah al-Sham (formerly known as al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham) are afraid of punishment by their Qatari, Saudi and Turkish masters, he said, ""If they move in defiance of their Qatari, Saudi and Turkish lords, they might be killed and their properties be seized.""",FAKE
+3185,Defiant Paul says he can still grow GOP,"Since launching his 2016 presidential campaign, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul has paid particular attention to traditionally left-leaning demographics. Paul was the first White House hopeful to appear on Snapchat, a social app used by millions of Millennials; the first to launch an initiative focused solely on soon-to-be or newly eligible voters, setting up more than 300 ""Students for Rand"" college chapters in just 30 days; and the first to host a fundraiser with leaders in the cannabis industry.
+
+""In the last go around, President Obama won the youth vote 3-to-1,"" Paul said Wednesday during an interview with the Washington Examiner.
+
+He went on, while fidgeting with a stack of sticky notes in the third-floor office of his campaign headquarters. ""I think we sometimes seem to be the stodgy party, with balanced budgets, low taxes and less regulations. But when you talk to young people, they're like: 'I don't have any money.' So taxes and regulatory issues aren't as big a deal for them.""
+
+""The [National Security Agency] overreach and government overreach gives us a unique opportunity to be one of the leaders in opposing that program and actually getting things to go our way,"" Paul said when asked what messages he's using to cultivate support among young Americans.",REAL
+1637,Takeaways from the Republican debate,"(CNN) As the first primaries creep ever closer, candidates are feeling the pressure to rise above the pack and prove their electoral viability.
+
+Each candidate came in with different marks to hit. Jeb Bush needed a game-changing performance. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz wanted to maintain their momentum. And Rand Paul wanted to get into the act.
+
+Rubio was once again the debate's maestro -- hitting all the right notes and not once appearing to bend under pressure.
+
+The Florida senator skillfully weaved his personal biography as the son of immigrant parents as he answered almost every question he fielded.
+
+He also flashed his foreign policy chops and seized the opportunity to set up a contrast between himself and the less mainstream non-interventionist views of his opponent, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
+
+""I know that Rand is a committed isolationist,"" Rubio needled, before offering a deftly handled rebuttal to Paul's questioning of how spending billions on the U.S. military was conservative.
+
+""We can't even have an economy if we're not safe,"" Rubio argued. ""Yes I believe the world -- I don't believe, I know the world is a safer and better place when America is the strongest military power in the world.""
+
+As during most of Rubio's responses -- the audience roared in approval.
+
+While Ben Carson did have to answer one question about the controversy that has swirled around his campaign in the last week, Rubio did not have to field the rolling questions about his finances, notably his use of a Republican Party credit card for personal expenses.
+
+The Texas senator gave another classic Cruz performance on Tuesday night, one that could serve to further his steady rise in the polls -- and the rising chorus of pundits viewing him as the eventual conservative alternative to whichever establishment candidate emerges in a two- or three-person race.
+
+The firebrand conservative slammed critics who dub his hardline position on illegal immigration as ""anti-immigrant,"" calling that ""offensive""; he staked out the middle ground as Rubio and Paul argued for opposing degrees of American intervention in Middle East conflicts; and he played to his base by slamming moderate, establishment Republicans.
+
+""The Democrats are laughing -- because if Republicans join Democrats as the party of amnesty, we will lose,"" Cruz said.
+
+He hit one snag reminiscent of a memorable 2011 debate moment when Rick Perry forgot the name of the third agency he would eliminate. Cruz, naming five federal agencies he would abolish, named just four -- twice naming the Department of Commerce, leaving the Department of Education off of his list.
+
+The retired neurosurgeon is sticking with what works, offering supporters more of the same mild-mannered, reserved demeanor that has rocketed him into a dead heat with Trump.
+
+Carson's most notable moment is one that is sure to please his supporters, who have been devouring his upbraiding of the mainstream media over the course of more than a week of questions about crucial elements of his inspirational biography.
+
+""Thank you for not asking me what I said in the 10th grade,"" Carson said to laughter as Fox Business moderator Neil Cavuto asked him about the impact of the media scrutiny on his campaign.
+
+""We should vet all candidates. I have no problem with being vetted. What I do have a problem with is being lied about and then putting that out there as truth,"" Carson proclaimed. ""People who know me know that I'm an honest person.""
+
+His closing statement was also a memorable break from the feisty tenor of the evening, coming right after Rubio and Cruz trumpeted their campaign websites. Carson, softly showed why he is connecting on the trail.
+
+""In the two hours of this -- of this debate, five people have died from drug-related deaths, $100 million has been added to our national debt, 200 babies have been killed by abortionists, and two veterans have taken their lives out of despair,"" he said. ""This is a narrative that we can change, not we the Democrats, not we the Republicans, but we the people of America, because there is something special about this nation, and we must embrace it and be proud of it and never give it away for the sake of political correctness.""
+
+The former Florida governor improved, but he was still upstaged by the competition.
+
+After his widely panned debate performance last month, Bush got to work. He hired a media coach, got angrier on the campaign trail and attempted to reboot his struggling campaign with a new slogan: Jeb Can Fix It.
+
+The takeaway? Jeb Can (Sort of) Fix It.
+
+Bush forced his way into more speaking time, got his points across more clearly and concisely, and -- perhaps most importantly -- didn't pick a fight he wasn't going to win (against Rubio).
+
+But he also still appeared awkward at times and let up too easily where other candidates would have pressed further, adding to the impression that he lacks the verve to lead his party into the general election. And with several other candidates -- namely Rubio -- soaring above the field with exceptionally strong debate performances, Bush's slightly above-average performance just doesn't rank in the same category.
+
+Bush's two best moments came when he confronted Trump. Bush jumped in as Trump suggested the U.S. should stop being the policeman of the world to say that the billionaire ""is absolutely wrong on this.""
+
+And on Trump's plan to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., Bush said ""it's just not possible and it's not embracing American values"" -- drawing more applause.
+
+As he did in the last debate, Trump once again showed that he can be one man on the stump before a crowd of zealous supporters, and another when he's debating a range of issues before a national audience.
+
+Trump's tone was measured and his message was largely policy-centric. Even when he faced pointed criticism and pushback from his rival candidates -- notably Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina -- Trump didn't get personal. He challenged their contentions and stuck to his message: Yes, the federal government should deport all undocumented immigrants and build a wall, he insisted; No, the U.S. should not be the world's policeman.
+
+And while sticking with the debating style he first debuted at the CNBC debate, Trump even appeared to show some improvement -- delivering longer and more in-depth responses to questions on everything from the economy to foreign policy.
+
+But some of Trump's persona bled out. When Carly Fiorina tried to get a word in, declared: ""Why does she keep interrupting everybody?"" The crowd wasn't happy and booed.
+
+The former Fortune 500 CEO reclaimed her spot as one of the field's most effective and hard-hitting debaters --- a quality that first hoisted her onto the main debate stage after a stand-out performance in the cycle's first primary debate.
+
+Fiorina played to her strengths as a business executive, status as an outsider and displayed her command of the biggest foreign policy issues confronting the U.S.
+
+Her sharp-elbowed strategy produced results as she nabbed her most impressive moment of the night when she jumped into a foreign policy debate between Trump and Bush -- piling onto Bush's critique of the brash front-runner before putting forward her own credentials for the commander-in-chief post.
+
+Skipping from country to country in the Middle East after laying out specific steps she would take to bolster the U.S.'s standing in the face of Russian aggression, Fiorina came away breathless, over time -- but wildly successful.
+
+But there's a big footnote: Her previous strong debate performances didn't yield sustainable results because she failed to capitalize off her gains in the polls. She'll need to have a strategy ready this time.
+
+The Ohio governor didn't miss an opportunity to jostle his opponents and the moderators for more speaking time.
+
+As Trump defended his plan to deport all undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., Kasich looked to get in a word edgewise.
+
+""Maria, can we comment on that? Can we comment on that?"" he asked a moderator in one of the rare occasions in which he actually asked -- and got -- permission to interject.
+
+But it's a strategy that Kasich has applied to previous debates -- both taking on Trump and jumping in at every opportunity -- without earning any real upward movement in the polls following the last debate.
+
+The Kentucky senator with strong libertarian-leanings showed up at the Republican debate Tuesday night -- diving into an impassioned defense of his foreign policy views, challenging the hawkish instincts of the Republican Party and most of his fellow contenders.
+
+Paul hasn't shined through in the previous debates, but a relatively long back and forth with the surging Rubio gave Paul the face time and the speaking time he needed to make his mark.",REAL
+9059,Eamon Dunphy & George Hook Enter 12th Hour Of ‘Who’s More Controversial’ Debate,"0 Add Comment 
+A CHANCE encounter between two of Ireland’s leading provocateurs and opinion-havers, Eamon Dunphy and George Hook, has resulted in a stand off which now enters its 12th hour. 
+Bumping into each other as they both sought to post a letter, presumably of complaint, at their local postbox, Dunphy and Hook found themselves politely disagreeing on who is the more controversial figure. 
+This polite exchange remained reasonable for just 2.46 seconds before both men began trading exaggerated claims and quips, in an effort to both convey they were the proud owners of the Nation’s most contrary opinions. 
+“No. No. No! You merely despise children’s joyful faces when they eat ice-cream. I hate the little shits with every essence of my being. They’re clumsy, careless, they’re a cod, a fraud,” Dunphy barked at Hook after the Newstalk radio host and rugby pundit suggested children were just the worst. 
+In a desperate bid to one up his contrary counterpart, Hook’s eyes frantically searched the street around him for something to give out about. 
+“Cars, too noisy. Roads! Some have potholes. The sky, too bloody high for my liking. Dunphy, I bloody hate that crevasse-faced tosser,” Hook bellowed as he commented on one thing after another, trying to cement his reputation as a controversial champion of Ireland. 
+The pair were then forcibly removed from the street by passers by who couldn’t take much more of their droning, placing them in a room together, which has been rented especially for the broadcasters for the next month. 
+With the stalemate continuing into its 12th hour both men are aware they could secure victory by mentioning how Hitler made the trains run on time, but neither seem ready to share the opinion just yet.",FAKE
+8218,The Real Reason Behind Saakashvili's Resignation,"November 8, 2016 -  Ruslan Ostashko, PolitRussia - translated by J. Arnoldski -  
+
+
+One of the symbols of the “new Ukraine”, the ex-Georgian president, fugitive, and part-time governor of Odessa, Mikhail Saakashvili, has announced his resignation, which came as a shock and to the dismay of Ukrainian citizens, who for some reason had great political hopes for him. I’ll leave aside the discussion of how Saakashvili’s biography, character, and addiction to hard narcotics couldn't possibly leave anything good to be expected from him. What is more interesting to discuss are the motives behind his resignation and explaining whether this is connected to the American elections.  
+Before delving into this, let’s immediately eliminate two entirely untenable theories which nevertheless have a number of supporters on social networks.  
+Untenable theory number one is that Saakashvili has some kind of insider information that the US elections will be won by Hillary Clinton, and that he was warned in advance to secure a good starting position in the new American leadership’s Ukraine strategy. I understand the appeal of this theory, but I can’t agree with it. Saakashvili can hope that Clinton will win, and he can pray for her victory, but he cannot know the results of the US elections or possess any top insider secrets. For those who doubt this, let me remind you of two episodes. 
+The first episode was in 2008, when Saakashvili was 100% sure that America would completely sign up to back him against Russia. Well, how did that 'insider knowledge' work out? 
+The second episode was just recently, in this year, when he spoke of his future triumphant return to Georgia, apparently hoping that the Americans would falsify the results of the Georgian parliamentary elections in favor of his party. The Americans could have done this, but they didn’t. His party lost the elections by a landslide. 
+Thus, the image of Saakashvili as a super insider can be very appealing, but it does not correspond to reality. 
+The second untenable theory is that Saakashvili left for internal Ukrainian reasons or was forced to leave by ‘disgruntled Odessans.” Contemporary Ukraine is a territory full of national injustice. Local, regional, and national authorities couldn’t care less about dissatisfied citizens, whether in Odessa, Kiev, Zaporozhya, and so on. They also don’t care about their approval ratings. Saakashvili was given Odessa to “eat up,” and the people who took this decision to quarter a US mercenary in Ukraine are clearly not the ones sitting in Kiev.  
+Given this, it can be supposed that the version that the former Georgian president, famous for his greed, left his post because of tensions within Ukraine is in the least a strange theory. 
+And now about Saakashvili’s gesture. Apparently, he really needed to officially distance himself from Poroshenko who, from the point of view of many Western experts, has fulfilled almost all of the tasks in Ukraine that he was given. Even better was Saakashvili putting the emphasis on conflict with Poroshenko.  
+The new US president, whoever it will be, will be forced to do something with this situation, and the fact is not too far off that the decision will be made to do some behind-the-scenes spanking. 
+The scenario of backstage spanking, reducing salaries, and rinsing dirty laundry in the media is the best thing that could happen to Poroshenko under any new American administration. 
+Saakashvili is pretending that he has nothing at all to do with what has and is happening in Ukraine. For him, it would be ideal if Washington believed that he has no relation to Poroshenko, doesn’t know Kolomoysky, and has never seen Yatsenyuk, but had instead been somehow dragged into the mess created by the US’ political puppets in Ukraine. 
+Under these circumstances, distancing himself is a good strategy, but Saakashvili has run into an obstacle. He should have distanced himself earlier. Now this trick might not work. 
+The former Georgian president is now demonstrating a kind of behavior which is really familiar in Russia and which is difficult to be misconstrued. What does a regional official who has thieved or failed at an important project do when he learns that a check up is soon coming from Moscow? The pattern of behavior has not changed since the times of the USSR, believe me. This official immediately flies to the capital and tries to, so to say, resolve issues in a small circle of interested associates. Saakashvili and his team have failed in two spheres of work, the Georgian and Ukrainian ones. In Georgia, he lost elections, and in Ukraine he failed to create a success story out of Odessa. The Americans needed such success stories and Saakashvili 100% promised them something of the sort.  
+Now Saakashvili is covering his weak spots and unleashing into the information field the theory that he failed as governor only because of corrupt Kiev and interference by Poroshenko himself and his entourage. 
+Surely, Saakashvili has already written something in this spirit to Washington and is now simply publicly confirming his position and line of defense. If he gains the nerve, then he could try to ask the new US administration (and he has friends among both the Republicans and the Democrats) for a promotion, to let him steer something in Kiev, or participate in a new political project in Ukraine. 
+Considering that the Americans love to arrange political shows in which some political puppets are replaced by other political puppets under cries of fighting against corruption, then this might just work out for him. 
+Saakashvili’s actions are a very bad sign for Poroshenko. Poroshenko has no good way out of the unfolding situation. It may very well be that he has been left with only two paths: one to Rostov and the other to the gallows. 
+Saakashvili’s actions are also a possible sign that the Americans will radically shake up the Ukrainian political elite and bring real freaks and misfits to the forefront. For us, this is more good than bad. Any sudden movements could finish off the government system in Ukraine and lead to the delegitimization of the regime in Kiev, especially if outright Nazis come to power there. 
+
+For us, this collapse of the administrative system and the delegitimization of the government in Ukraine is good, even if Saakashvili earns something out of this.  
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
+                                                   
+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+3646,Will interest rates go up? Five things to expect,"The Federal Reserve is likely to raise the federal funds rate at the conclusion of its two-day meeting on Wednesday.
+
+Raising the banks’ overnight borrowing rate—held near zero since the depths of the financial crisis in 2008—has the potential to push up the cost of mortgages, slow jobs creation and curb stock prices but not always.
+
+Here are five things to expect.
+
+1. Mortgage rates are not likely to rise much
+
+The effects of Fed tightening importantly depends on whether a higher federal funds rate pushes up the 10-year Treasury rate, because rates on mortgages, corporate and municipal bonds generally follow that rate up and down.
+
+When Ben Bernanke raised the federal funds rate in 2004-2006, those rates hardly budged, because the Chinese government was purchasing U.S. bonds at a maddening pace to keep the yuan cheap against the dollar.
+
+Now, both the Chinese and European economies are deeply troubled and their monetary authorities are printing lots of money to push down borrowing costs. Private investors seeking safer and better returns will increase their purchases of U.S. securities limiting any increase in U.S. long rates.
+
+2. Bank fees and car loans will get more expensive
+
+Tighter banking regulations designed to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis have pushed up banks’ costs for providing ordinary retail services.  Higher short-term borrowing rates for  banks will make things even tougher and banks will likely try to further boost fees on checking accounts and other services, and charge higher rates for short-term credit—credit cards, car loans and home improvements.
+
+The good news is banks may start competing more for your money and pay higher rates on 1 to 5-year CDs.
+
+The stronger dollar and lower oil prices are pinching corporate profits and hiring has slowed this year to about 210,000 new jobs a month—less than the 260,000 monthly average in 2014.
+
+Small businesses are a particularly important source of new jobs in an economic recovery but even before the Fed pushes up bank borrowing costs, tighter federal regulations forced large banks to curtail lending to these. Somewhat higher short rates are not likely to have much additional impact on their access to credit.
+
+Finding a job remains toughest for the long-term unemployed whose skills atrophied during the Great Recession and slow recovery, and for whom government benefits—expanded Medicaid and food stamps for healthy men—have often overwhelmed incentives to reskill.
+
+4. Economic growth and inflation will pick up
+
+Household balance sheets are in their best shape since the recovery began and lower gasoline prices give consumers more disposable income. Those factors should overwhelm the consequences of marginally higher short-term interest rates on consumer spending, and economic growth should accelerate to 2.5 to 3 percent in the New Year.
+
+Overall, if Beijing can mount an adequate stimulus program to stabilize its economy, the global economy won’t sink America’s boat and job gains will continue.
+
+Once gasoline prices have bottomed, overall inflation will rise to about 2 percent.
+
+Problems in China and shifts in the broader global economy have rocked equity prices recently. However, the Fed rate increase is widely anticipated and is likely already built into equity prices. The market is more likely to react positively to a rate increase simply because uncertainty about timing has been removed.
+
+The economy has emerged from a tough recession and slow recovery in which the Fed deemed ultra-low interest rates necessary.  However, conditions have much improved and in past decades, stock prices have often moved up even as the Fed raised interest rates.
+
+This remains a good time to be in stocks and if you are an investor on the sidelines, gradually start buying in.
+
+Peter Morici served as Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission from 1993 to 1995. He is an economist and professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and a widely published columnist. He is the five time winner of the MarketWatch best forecaster award. Follow him on Twitter @PMorici1.",REAL
+5338,Election Law Violation Was Hillary’s Idea,"Search Election Law Violation Was Hillary’s Idea Orders to use Donald Duck to foment violence at Trump rallies came straight from the top. October 27, 2016 Matthew Vadum 
+Democrat Hillary Clinton personally authorized illegal dirty tricks operations against Republican Donald Trump’s campaign, according to top Democrats appearing in undercover video. 
+In the third Hillary-related video released by ACORN slayer James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas Action Fund this past Sunday (Oct. 23), Clinton is directly implicated in a scheme to use Donald Duck to mock Trump and troll his supporters at Trump campaign rallies. 
+Among Disney cartoon characters Donald Duck was a natural choice. After all, his name used to appear regularly on voter registration documents when Bill and Hillary Clinton’s favorite community organizing group, the now-defunct ACORN, hired hobos and felons to go on voter-registration drives. 
+Earlier this year Democrats in Donald Duck costumes started appearing at Trump events across America. Costumed individuals would walk around carrying signs. One said, “Trump ducks releasing his tax return.” 
+This cutesy publicity stunt isn’t necessarily the problem, though. The problem is that Hillary Clinton ordered it and apparently broke the law by coordinating with a tax-exempt nonprofit group. 
+Prominent in the video is political organizer Robert Creamer who is very high up in the Democratic Party’s hierarchy. He has reportedly visited the Obama White House 342 times, including 47 meetings with Obama personally. 
+One of the visits took place in Obama’s personal living quarters. 
+“It’s a very big deal that Creamer visited the president’s residence in the White House,” a former senior White House employee told FrontPage in an interview. “White House employees can work there for years and never visit the residence.” 
+Creamer, a practitioner of the agitation arts taught by Marxist community organizing guru Saul Alinsky, is husband tof Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a socialist and advocate of single-payer health care. Creamer is considered by many to be the legislative architect of Obamacare. He also wrote a series of bad checks to cover his salary at a nonprofit and went to prison. Prosecutors wanted to send him up the river for 37 months but he got off with merely five months and 11 months of home confinement from a friendly Democrat judge. 
+Creamer is a founder of the unsavory political consulting firm Democracy Partners . The list of “partners” on the company’s website is a who’s who of elite Democratic Party power players. 
+In addition to Creamer, the partners are: 
+Midwest Academy founder Heather Booth ; website developer Marc Cerabona ; organizer Wyatt Closs ; SEIU veteran Mac D’Alessandro ; Maccabee Group founder Brett C. Di Resta ; CrossCurrents Foundation co-founder Ken Grossinger ; former Media Matters for America online organizer David Grossman ; former SEIU national field director for politics John Hennelly ; strategic communications advisor Marilyn Katz ; organizer Jackie Kendall ; strategist Lupe Lopez ; political consultant Mike Lux ; strategic advisor Josie Mooney ; consultant Patrick Pannett ; organizer Christine Pelosi (her mother is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi); USAction president Khalid Pitts ; former DNC general counsel Joe Sandler ; consultant Linda Saucedo ; fundraiser Renee Schaeffer ; former New Organizing Institute senior fellow Joel Silberman ; and organizer Cheri Whiteman . 
+Listed as “associates” are Lauren Windsor , executive director of American Family Voices, and Aaron Black , who appears in the undercover videos. Black describes himself in the footage as “basically deputy rapid response director for the DNC on the ground at Trump events,” adding “nobody’s supposed to know about me.” 
+(FrontPage published an article yesterday examining Democracy Partners.) 
+For a master practitioner of fascistic tactics, Creamer is amazingly lacking in self-awareness (or just plain dishonest). He wrote a fatuous, ahistorical op-ed in the Huffington Post earlier this year titled “Can Fascism Triumph in America?” 
+“Like other fascist movements, Trump says out loud -- and legitimates -- the kind of hateful, violent language that was previously whispered only in the privacy of people's living rooms.” 
+Bear in mind that quite apart from his mischaracterization of Trump’s public statements, Creamer is shown in the videos masterminding an elaborate criminal conspiracy involving the use of targeted political violence against political opponents. 
+Fomenting and carrying out acts of violence against political opponents was what the fascist Third Reich did, using the Sturmabteiling or S.A., also called brown shirts and storm troopers. Ditto for Mussolini’s Squadristi (black shirts), Mao’s Red Guards, Iran’s Basij , and Haiti’s Tonton Macoute . 
+Creamer explains the Donald Duck action in the third video. 
+“In the end, it was the candidate, Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground,” Creamer says in one of several exchanges. “So, by God, we would get ducks on the ground.” 
+Creamer makes it clear he knows that this coordination between his consulting firm, Democracy Partners, and the campaign was a huge legal landmine when he said: “Don’t repeat that to anybody.” 
+“The whole duck thing? That came about, the reason we moved it from DNC to [Americans United for Change] was to just do a hopscotch, but the actual idea was hatched way back in May,” Creamer associate Scott Foval said, making a pun. 
+“The duck has to be an Americans United for Change entity,” Creamer said. “This had to do only with some problem between [now acting DNC chief] Donna Brazile and ABC, which is owned by Disney, because they were worried about a trademark issue. That’s why. It’s really silly.” 
+We originally launched this duck because Hillary Clinton wants the duck. In any case, so she really wanted this duck figure out there doing stuff, so that was fine. So, we put all these ducks out there and got a lot of coverage. And Trump taxes. And then ABC/Disney went crazy because they thought our original slogan was ‘Donald ducks his taxes, releasing his tax returns.’ 
+Creamer is shown in the video hoping Disney would file a lawsuit against Democrats for using Donald Duck in the campaign, likely because such a thing would generate publicity. 
+“Let them sue us. Please God,” he says, looking to the heavens and clasping his hands together as if in prayer. “I doubt they will because we’re paying to rent or buy the suits, that’s where they get their license fees. We’re not using it for commercial purposes.” 
+The Wall Street Journal reported Aug. 18 that ‘“Donald ducks’ was the creation of the Democratic National Committee.” Then on Sept. 8 the paper reported the DNC “is no longer associated with the duck … Americans United for Change is now managing the duck …” 
+But out of public view the DNC and the Clinton campaign were still controlling the duck operation, breaking federal campaign coordination laws, O’Keefe says in narrating the third video. 
+“We kind of divvy up responsibilities. So sometimes it will be, like, campaign owned,” said Jenna Price, assistant press secretary at the DNC. “So sometimes you will see that they advised something, or they are taking credit for things. So, like, we aren’t taking credit for the duck anymore. That’s like, random ally groups. But it’s still something that we’re involved in.” 
+Brad Woodhouse, president of Americans United for Change, expected the presence of the duck at events would spark violence. “I think this duck is going to get roughed up somewhere.” 
+In one segment, Foval says, “I almost got punched on Monday morning, I mean, I was in a duck costume.” 
+The nation’s campaign coordination laws were enacted after President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, O’Keefe notes. 
+For an activity to violate the law it must meet a three-part test, he explains. 
+First, there must be payment by someone other than the candidate for election-related activity. Second, a campaign has to be materially involved in shaping communications for a third party group. And third, electoral advocacy has to take place close to an election. 
+O’Keefe continues: 
+The payment [prong of the test] is complicated but just the fact that Foval, a paid employee of Americans United for Change, was the duck at some events constitutes payment by AUfC. Conduct, based on their own admission the campaign, Creamer, their agent, and AUfC coordinated the duck activities. And finally content. ‘Donald ducks’ is undeniably political content directed against one candidate for the sole purpose of helping another. 
+The fourth video, released yesterday, isn’t so much an expose of wrongdoing but it does provide ample evidence of Creamer’s ties to the Clinton campaign and to President Obama himself. 
+In a phone call Creamer says “I spend most of my time overseeing the Trump events around the country. I mean, that’s what I do for the Clinton campaign, uh, so that’s interesting as well.” 
+In another scene when an undercover reporter phones saying he needs an immigration lawyer with powerful connections for a wealthy client in Syria, Creamer makes it clear he is happy to help by reaching out to Obama's inner circle. 
+I just need to, I will try and find a couple of good referrals to you and get back to you pretty quick then. Okay? … On the first, well, I’ll just talk, the guy I’m going to talk to first, to see if this is up his alley, the first thing is up his alley. It’s the guy who ran the campaign for President Obama. He has a firm that’s pretty well connected. 
+In another setting, Creamer says: 
+Here’s what I do for the Clinton campaign by the way. I’m a consultant to the Clinton campaign. Wherever Trump or Pence go in the country, we make sure that there are press events in the TV market or whatever … whether they’re big turnouts or little turnouts, whatever, that drive our message wherever the candidate goes to drive his message. So that on any given day they will be between them probably in six places. So our team makes sure there are events in all those six places every day. So it is a lot of events, and we try and help define the other candidate. 
+“Every morning I am on a call at 10:30 that goes over the message being driven by the campaign headquarters,” added Creamer. 
+He continued: 
+I’m in this campaign mainly to deal with what, you know, earned media, with the television, radio. With earned media and social media, not with paid media, not with advertising. There would be a whole different advertising … everybody is driven on the same tracks, though. So then there are a couple, a bunch of people in the Brooklyn office [of the Clinton campaign] that are responsible for possible aspects of communication. Like, we do rapid response and there is a guy there I work with heavily, is the guy that I was just communicating with on that kind of stuff. For instance, we just found, I just sent him a note beforehand when we came here that said, ‘My understanding is there might be another revelation of another woman talking about Trump this afternoon.’ 
+Creamer bragged again about his ties to President Obama. 
+Oh Barack Obama’s was the best campaign in the history of American politics, I mean the second one, I mean the first was good too. I was a consultant to both, the second one, was everything hit on every level and every aspect. 
+Obama is “a pro,” Creamer said. “I’ve known the president since he was a community organizer in Chicago.” 
+I was just at an event with him in Chicago actually, on Friday last. He is just as good as ever. I do a lot of work with the White House on their issues, helping to run issue campaigns that they have been involved in. I mean, for immigration reform for the, the health care bill, trying to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence issues. 
+The second video , released Oct. 18, was a primer on how Democrats get away with massive voter fraud. 
+“It’s a very easy thing for Republicans to say, well they’re bussing people in,” said Scott Foval, then national field director for Americans United for Change. 
+Well you know what? We’ve been bussing people in to deal with you fuckin’ assholes for 50 years and we’re not going to stop now – we’re just going to find a different way to do it. So, I mean I grew up with that idea. They used to bus people out to Iowa. If we needed people out there we’d bus people out to Iowa. 
+In a discussion O’Keefe described as focusing on bringing people from one state to another state to vote illegally, Foval, who also worked as deputy political director at George Soros-funded People for the American Way (PfAW), explains how to get away with voter fraud. 
+Instead of bussing people in, it is better to have them travel in their own personal vehicles, he said. 
+Would they charge each individual of voter fraud? Or are they going to go after the facilitator for conspiracy, which they could prove? It’s one thing if all these people drive up in their personal cars. If there’s a bus involved? That changes the dynamic. 
+“It’s the legality, because you can prove conspiracy if there’s a bus,” he said. “If there are cars it’s much harder to prove … if there’s enough money you have people drive their POVs [personally owned vehicles] or you can have them drive rentals.” 
+Foval says it’s easy to keep the voter fraud operation a secret. “So you use shells. Use shell companies.” 
+Democrats are untouchable, he said. “The question is, whether when you get caught by a reporter, does that matter? Because does it turn into an investigation or not? In this case, this state, the answer is no, because they don’t have any power to do anything.” 
+Foval explained in the first video how pro-Clinton super PACs communicate with each other and how their information finds its way to the DNC, presumably a violation of federal law. 
+“I guaran-damn-tee you that the people who run the super PACs all talk to each other and we and a few other people are the hubs of that communication.” 
+“We’re consultants,” Foval says, “so we’re not the official entity and so those conversations can be had between consultants who are working for different parts.” 
+He adds: 
+The thing that we have to watch is making sure there is a double blind between the actual campaign and the actual DNC and what we’re doing. There’s a double blind there. So they can plausibly deny that they knew anything about it. 
+The Clinton campaign “is fully in it,” veteran left-wing strategist Robert Creamer confirms on hidden camera. “Hillary knows through the chain of command what’s going on.” 
+O’Keefe’s group, Project Veritas Action Fund, filed a formal complaint against the Clinton campaign with the Federal Election Commission last week. 
+The complaint states that Project Veritas: 
+uncovered a criminal conspiracy where, in the words of Scott Foval, ‘The way it works is: The [Hillary for America] campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays The Foval Group, The Foval Group goes and executes … on the ground.’ This has been done in a manner to evade federal election law and violating coordinated expenditures rules. 
+The complaint also accuses Priorities USA Action, Alliance for Retired Americans, Americans United for Change, and the Democratic National Committee of accepting “prohibited and excessive contributions in the form of coordinated expenditures” contrary to federal law and regulations. 
+The first undercover video O’Keefe released sent shock waves through the political community. 
+In that video , released Oct. 17, we learned that the frequent outbursts of violence at Republican candidate Trump’s campaign rallies have been orchestrated and paid for by Clinton’s campaign. 
+The idea was to foment violent at Trump rallies in order to create the false impression that his campaign and supporters were violent crazy people and at the same time provide evidence to support the Left’s predetermined narrative that the billionaire businessman is a dangerous fascist. 
+Such behavior constitutes terrorism, Austin Bay writes at the Observer : 
+Creamer ran what amounts to a domestic U.S. political terror and propaganda operation dedicated to undermining the 2016 U.S. presidential election—“rigging the election,” to use the current term. […] 
+The election rigging scheme he commanded relies on street thuggery. That means physical fear—terror—is a core component of Americans United for Change’s crooked enterprise. Street thuggery is very low-level terrorism, but it is a type of terrorism nonetheless and it is wrong to call it otherwise. Hardboy muscle, bottles and two by fours are street thuggery’s kinetics. Bottles and baseball bats are not Al Qaeda’s high explosives—but they incite fear and when they crack heads they cause casualties. People bleed. Street thuggery as an arm of politics is violent, criminalized politics on an ugly downward slope to much worse, the worse including lynchings and pogroms. If you don’t think street thuggery is terror then consider Kristalnacht. 
+And O’Keefe isn’t finished with the Hillary Clinton campaign yet. 
+“Our lawyers won't let us release all our @HillaryClinton & DNC footage[,]”O'Keefe tweeted Tuesday. “For those demanding full raw [footage], be VERY careful what you wish for.”",FAKE
+3787,Jury selection begins in Colorado theater shooting trial,"CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Gone are the orange hair and the thousand-yard stare. In their place, trimmed hair, a shaggy beard and red-framed glasses.
+
+Sitting upright in court in a dark jacket, blue striped shirt and khaki slacks, James Holmes looking very much like the neuroscience graduate student he used to be, not a man on trial for his life.
+
+But Holmes, now 27, faces 12 murder charges in connection with the summer 2012 massacre at a suburban Denver movie theater's midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises. He could be executed if convicted. Holmes also faces dozens of other charges, including attempted murder. At least 70 were wounded in the massacre.
+
+Jury selection in the case began Tuesday afternoon, and Judge Carlos Samour said an initial pool of 9,000 jurors will be whittled down to 12, plus 12 alternates. The trial may last into October.
+
+Once opening statements get underway, cameras will be allowed in the courtroom. However, they are not allowed during jury selection.
+
+In a lengthy address to prosecutors and Holmes' defense team, Samour said he expects ""passionate and zealous"" courtroom arguments, but reminded both sides and prospective jurors that Holmes is innocent until proven guilty. The jury that will decide Holmes' guilt also will decide whether he should be executed.
+
+""What's most important to me is that justice is done,"" said Samour. ""That's what this whole process is about: Justice.""
+
+Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler wants Holmes put to death for the July 20, 2012, mass shooting in Aurora. He argues that life in prison is insufficient justice for the victims, survivors and their families.
+
+By pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, Holmes admitted he committed the shooting but claims he's legally not responsible for his actions. He's undergone at least two mental-health evaluations at the state mental hospital, but the results have remained secret.
+
+Holmes, then 24, was arrested at the scene by investigators who then discovered his apartment had been booby-trapped with explosives. His lawyers acknowledge Holmes, a former neuroscience doctorate student, was the lone shooter but say he was gripped by a psychotic episode.
+
+Legal analyst Scott Robinson said insanity-plea cases are rare, and it's even more unusual for a jury to find someone not guilty by reason of insanity.
+
+""It's a minuscule percentage ... yet the public perception is that people are getting off on the insanity plea all the time,"" said Robinson. ""It's actually a rare bird.""
+
+In December 2014 — just as jury summons went out — Holmes' parents issued a public statement begging prosecutors to drop the death penalty and give their son a plea deal that would see him locked up and treated.
+
+""We do not know how many victims of the theater shooting would like to see our son killed. But we are aware of people's sentiments,"" they wrote. ""We have read postings on the Internet that have likened him to a monster. He is not a monster. He is a human being gripped by a severe mental illness.""",REAL
+7899,Cyber War — From Trifle to Catastrophe     : Information," Cyber War - From Trifle to Catastrophe By Ernest Partridge
+November 06, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - Hillary Clinton tells us that all seventeen intelligence agencies agree that the Wikileaks hack comes from the Kremlin. Those agencies proclaim this with a rock-solid conviction that I have not heard since Vice President DIck Cheney told us all that ""there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."" Add to that, the rock-solid evidence of Saddam's treachery that Colin Powell presented to the UN Security Council. The mainstream corporate media bought it whole.
+However, as all know today, these were lies. Saddam had no WMDs, and there were no Iraqi chemical weapons ""Winebagos of Death"" vividly described by Colin Powell.
+Now we are told, ""with high confidence,"" that Vladimir Putin's Kremlin has launched a cyber attack to disrupt our presidential election. Never mind that, as MIT expert Theodore Postol has written that there is, ""no technical way that the US intelligence community could know who did the hacking if it was done by sophisticated nation-state actors.""
+The lies that launched the disastrous Iraq war have had lasting consequences to the credibility of the United States Government. The last time that government cried ""wolf,"" there was no wolf. Why should we believe it now?
+So no, I am not convinced. There is good reason not to believe the ""Kremlin hack"" story.
+A crucial distinction is in order: First, there is the actual content of the hacked emails. Second, there are the consequences of the general media assumption and public belief that the emails were a Kremlin plot to disrupt the presidential election.
+As for the content , it was trivial and still worse, not credible. There is nothing remarkable in the disclosed content of the hacked emails. They might, if believed, cause John Podesta some embarrassment. In addition, they might reveal that the Democratic National Committee is controlled by a political elite. But we already know that.
+But why should we believe any of that content? If, as claimed, the leaks came from the Kremlin, there is not, and cannot be, any authentication of the hacked emails unless the original sources (e.g, John Podesta) produce the originals. And why would they? Accordingly, the leakers (whoever they might be) are free to concoct forgeries at will. And of course, it follows that we, the intended audience, are advised to ignore all of them.
+Furthermore, , why would Putin want to use these emails to ""rig"" our election? To tilt the election toward Trump? If that is his motive, it has backfired spectacularly. That alleged ""disclosure"" of the hacking has benefited Clinton far more than Trump. It is one of her favorite talking points, as we discovered in the final debate.
+So we are left with two alternate conclusions: The Russian government likely had no part in the leaking. Or if they did, the leaks will have little or no effect on the election, except to provide Hillary Clinton with a talking point and to embarrass John Podesta.
+In short, the Wikileaks hacks, whatever the source, appear to be a just a prank: A trifle, blown hugely out of proportion by a scandal-hungry media.
+However, even though the content of the hacked emails may be trivial and not credible, the consequences of the accusation of Kremlin connivance could be catastrophic.
+First of all, as we are finding out, the neo-cons and the media are using the hacks to intensify the demonization of Putin and to heat up the renewed Cold War.
+Still worse, as Joe Biden stated recently on Meet the Press , the accusation that Putin is behind the hacks and their release might provoke a cyber retaliation from the United States.
+A Kremlin spokesman has called Biden's threat a a ""virtual American declaration of war on Russia.""
+If, as Biden warns, the United States retaliates, then the Russian response might, unlike the present alleged leaks, be devastating to the US economy.
+Be assured that a ""cyber-war"" entails infinitely more than leaked emails. It might include the shutdown of the internet and emails. Also, the disruption of business and financial communications and utility grids. The world today runs on silicon and microprocessors. Imagine returning home to no electric power, phone service or access to the internet. Add to that, no restocking of the local supermarket or gas stations. And no capability of the government to make prompt repairs. The result: Total economic shutdown.
+We can do this to Russia, and be assured that Russia can do this to us.
+The reality of cyber attacks is no mere speculation, we have seen them at work. The Iranian nuclear weapons program was severely damaged and set back by a CIA implanted computer virus. And this past month, large regions of the United States temporarily lost internet service. The cause remains unknown.
+Has Joe Biden thought through the implications of his threat? Is this the horror that Biden wants to unleash on us and the world in response to an essentially harmless prank? To what purpose? Some kind of capitulation by the Russians? No chance of that.
+A far more likely result would be an escalation from cyber to military combat. And then what?
+Where are the cool-headed grownups, now that we need them?
+Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He has taught Philosophy at the University of California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the website, ""The Online Gadfly"" (www.igc.org/gadfly) and co-edits the progressive website, ""The Crisis Papers"" (www.crisispapers.org). His book in progress, ""Conscience of a Progressive,"" can be seen at www.igc.org/gadfly/progressive/^toc.htm . Send comments to: gadfly@igc.org . Ernest Partridge's blog",FAKE
+2720,Fox News and the Duggars reach a disgusting new low: The twisted persecution complex in last night’s insane interview,"The Duggars delivered a stunning display of deflection, the longest exercise in self-absolution since Gov. Chris Christie’s two-hour pity party when Bridgegate was revealed. The right wing Christian activists and LGBT antagonists found unbelievably creative ways to minimize what son Josh did when he molested four of his sisters, and a baby sitter, in seven separate incidents.
+
+What Josh did “was not rape,” Jim Bob said. “None of [the girls who were molested] were aware of Josh’s wrongdoing,” Michelle added. In fact, “they probably didn’t even understand it was an improper touch.” The improper touching mostly took place “over clothes;” oh, and the few times it was under clothes? “It was like a few seconds.”
+
+And when he molested his babysitter? “It was more just like a fondling, a touch while they were asleep—for most of them. Then there was two other incidents that were when they were awake. And it was just a bad thing.”
+
+“Looking back, we did the best we could under the circumstances,” Jim Bob told Kelly. He and Michelle did what every parent would do: Nothing, really, the first couple of times Josh himself confessed the abuse. Well, not exactly nothing: They prayed, and then they took him to a state trooper, who gave him a stern lecture. Then they got him counseling with an “accredited” agency, but they wouldn’t say what it was.
+
+“As parents, we’re not mandatory reporters,” Jim Bob shared. That’s a reference to laws requiring adults — teachers, coaches, counselors, neighbors — who learn about child sexual abuse to report it to authorities. Good to know the Duggars find solace in the law.
+
+They took other big steps to prevent further abuse: “We don’t let boys babysit,” Michelle explained. “They don’t play hide and seek together, two don’t go off and hide. There are just a lot of things that we’ve put in place.” For anyone who grew up playing with their brothers and boy cousins, as I did, that sounds insane.
+
+Megyn Kelly can tell herself she asked all the tough questions. And she did ask some. But she mostly came off as an ally determined to help the Duggars fight their liberal persecutors. She regularly constructed straw men. Many observers have questioned why the Duggars brought Josh to visit a state trooper who was later sentenced to 56 years for child pornography; no one suggested, as Kelly claimed, that “they chose that guy because they thought he would be sympathetic.” Kelly did ask Michelle Duggar about the robocall suggesting transgender people were child molesters, but Jim Bob stopped her: I think you actually said pedophile in that, and actually a pedophile is an adult that preys on children. Joshua was actually 14 and just turned 15 when he did what he did. And I think that the legal definition is 16 and up for being an adult preying on a child. So he was a child preying on a child. Thanks for clearing that up, Jim Bob. In the home stretch, Kelly let the Duggars tee off against their critics. “I feel like this is more about… there is an agenda and there is people that are purposing to try to bring things out and twisting them to hurt and slander,” Michelle said. Her daughters, she said, “have been victimized more by what happened in what has happened in these last couple weeks than they were 12 years ago.” “It has been an unprecedented attack on our family,” Jim Bob agreed. “And this information was released illegally. And so I’m wondering why all this press is not going after the system for releasing these juvenile records. That is a huge story.” The Duggars then blasted Fox News for suggesting Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown had juvenile records. Kidding! But none of this was the worst. The worst was when Kelly teased her interview with two of Josh’s sisters who were victims. We got to see them cry – and indeed blame the family’s enemies for their suffering.  But we just got a snippet – because Kelly was promoting the show that won’t air until Friday night. Tune in! Personally, I’ll skip it. Breaking my usual rules, I gave Fox an hour of my life I’ll never have back. There are times Kelly behaves like an actual journalist, and questions the toxic narratives her network peddles. This wasn’t one of them.",REAL
+6365,2016 Election Night Live Blog/Open Thread,"Here’s the timing: 
+Most of the US will have to wait for polling stations to close – typically between 19:00 EST (00:00 GMT) and 20:00 EST (01:00 GMT) – for state projections. 
+As for the final result? Stay glued to your phone or TV or set your alarm for 23:00 EST (04:00 GMT). That’s when West Coast polls close and history suggests a winner’s declared. It was bang on the hour in 2008, and 15 minutes later in 2012. 
+Of course, if you go further back in history, 2004 was a nailbiter. I remember very well going to bed after the Kerry campaign said they’d challenge the result based on Ohio, and getting up in the morning to find out they’d caved. And of course election 2000 was what it was. 
+There will be many sites tracking the results as they come in; here’s Politico’s for the presidency (they also have the House and the Senate). It’s impossible to know which one is the best until data actually appears; I prefer maps with results as they come in by county. And speaking of counties… 
+The final RCP averages put Clinton ahead in the national popular vote by 3.3%. However, with Trump ahead in Florida (0.02%), North Carolina (1%), and Clinton only ahead by 0.5% in New Hampshire, it still looks like a horse race, to me. (Of course, I may have become counter-suggestible to the idea that Clinton has it in the bag because almost the entire political class is yammering that she does.) 
+Anyhow, if indeed this is a horse race — and if our famously free press doesn’t simply decide to call it — we’ll be up late waiting for county data in the states that are close (presumably swing states like Florida, North Carolina, and New Hampshire). So here is a table of the counties that various sources regard as key:",FAKE
+2071,Obama's fragile climate legacy,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+6151,Norwegian Government to Deport White Patriot While Nation is Swamped by Tens of Thousands of Non-White Invaders,"Norwegian Government to Deport White Patriot While Nation is Swamped by Tens... Norwegian Government to Deport White Patriot While Nation is Swamped by Tens of Thousands of Non-White Invaders By 0 129 
+Seven policemen searched Norwegian Nordic Resistance Movement member Ronny Bårdsen’s apartment to find the Norwegian-Russian nationalist Yan Petrovskiy (also knnown as Veliki Slavian; pictured). He will be deported from Norway. The police informed Petrovskiy that he has two days to get a flight ticket and five to leave the country. 
+The police wanted to see Petrovskiy’s passport and know if he accepts the decision and leaves Norway voluntarily or if he has to be forced. Petrovskiy answered that according to the advice of his lawyer, Nils Christian Nordhus, he doesn’t keep the passport in his apartment, and he will talk with his lawyer before giving an answer concerning his departure. 
+After this Petrovskiy attempted to call his lawyer while the police were waiting, but because his lawyer didn’t pick it up, the police decided to arrest Petrovskiy and search Bårdsen’s apartment. Petrovskiy has lived in the address for some time and has been registered as a Norwegian resident. 
+The real reason behind the search was to acquire Petrovskiy’s passport, as without it he cannot be deported. Despite the efforts of the police, the passport was not uncovered. 
+The decision about the deportation was made by the Directorate of Immigration (Utlendingsdirektoratet) after the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) sent a letter to the directorate. In the letter PST stated that Petrovskiy was “a threat to national security.” The police — in Norway, Rotherham, or anywhere…",FAKE
+3377,State Dept. accused of stiff-arming intel watchdog over Hillary emails,"Top U.S. intelligence officials are running out of patience with the State Department's reluctance to turn over emails from Hillary Clinton's private email server, which have already been shown to have included top secret communications, Fox News has learned.
+
+The Intelligence Community's Inspector General has requested some 30,000 emails from Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State in order to conduct its own review. Those emails are in possession of the State Department, which has been gradually releasing them to the public.
+
+Clinton has agreed to turn over a similar-sized batch of emails, as well as the highly unusual private server she had installed in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, to the Department of Justice which is conducting a separate investigation.
+
+An intelligence source told Fox News the State Department has pushed back on the government intelligence watchdog's request, and that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is considering intervening. The source said the inspector general wants to check the controls on the redaction process and ensure that the office can get a handle on all of the potentially sensitive information that was contained in the Clinton emails.
+
+The flurry of activity came after Charles McCullough, the inspector general, notified senior members of Congress that two of four retroactively classified emails found on Clinton's server were deemed ""Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information"" — a rating that is the government's highest classifications.
+
+Clinton, the former first lady, senator from New York and top diplomat now running for the Democratic presidential nomination, announced Tuesday that she had told aides to turn over the actual server to the Justice Department, giving in to months of demands that she relinquish the device she used to store her correspondence while secretary of state.
+
+Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said McCullough had reported the new details about the higher classification to Congress on Tuesday.
+
+The State Department disputes McCullough's determination that the emails were classified at the time they were sent. McCullough had previously told Congress that potentially hundreds of classified emails are among the cache that Clinton provided to the State Department.
+
+A State Department spokesman said Wednesday that the agency is still processing the emails Clinton initially turned over and took a veiled swipe at Grassley for disclosing what McCullough had said.
+
+""The emails that have been discussed have not been released to public,"" said Deputy Press Secretary Mark Toner. ""We are working to resolve if it is indeed classified [and] we are taking steps to make sure the information is protected and stored properly.
+
+""These emails were not marked classified when they were sent,"" he added.
+
+A source familiar with the investigation told Fox News late Tuesday that the two emails in question contained operational and geospatial intelligence from the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which produces satellite images.
+
+The FBI is investigating whether classified information was improperly sent via and stored on the so-called ""home-brew"" e-mail server she ran from her home in the New York City suburb after concerns were raised by McCullough. Investigators have said that the probe is not criminal in nature and have denied that Clinton is a target of their inquiries.
+
+Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said she has ""pledged to cooperate with the government's security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them.""
+
+It's not clear if the device will yield any information — Clinton's attorney said in March that no emails from the main personal address she used while secretary of state still ""reside on the server or on back-up systems associated with the server.""
+
+An intelligence source familiar with the matter told Fox News that the campaign's statement of cooperation was overblown, as the FBI had previously taken possession of a thumb drive containing sensitive emails that had been held by Clinton's personal attorney, David Kendall. The Associated Press reported that Kendall gave three thumb drives containing copies of roughly 30,000 work-related emails sent to and from Clinton's personal email address to the FBI after the agency determined he could not remain in possession of the classified information contained in some of the emails.
+
+The AP's report cited a U.S. official briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The State Department previously had said it was comfortable with Kendall keeping the emails at his Washington law office.
+
+Clinton had to this point refused demands from Republican critics to turn over the server to a third party, with Kendall telling the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that ""there is no basis to support the proposed third-party review of the server."" Clinton has also defended her use of the server, saying she used it as a matter of convenience to limit the number of electronic devices she had to carry.
+
+""It's about time,"" House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio said in a statement. ""Secretary Clinton's previous statements that she possessed no classified information were patently untrue. Her mishandling of classified information must be fully investigated.""
+
+""Secretary Clinton said she created this unusual email arrangement with herself for 'convenience.' It may have been convenient for her, but it has been troubling at multiple levels for the rest of the country,"" said Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the chairman of the Benghazi select committee. ""Secretary Clinton's decision to prioritize her own convenience - and desire for control - over the security of our country's intelligence should concern all people of good conscience.""
+
+There is no evidence Clinton used encryption to shield the emails or her personal server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes. Kendall has said that Clinton is ""actively cooperating"" with the FBI inquiry.
+
+In March, Clinton said she exchanged about 60,000 emails in her four years in the Obama administration, about half of which were personal and were discarded. She turned over the other half to the State Department in last December.
+
+The department is reviewing those emails and has begun the process of releasing them to the public.
+
+""As she has said, it is her hope that State and the other agencies involved in the review process will sort out as quickly as possible which emails are appropriate to release to the public, and that the release will be as timely and transparent as possible,"" Merrill said Tuesday.
+
+Earlier this week, Clinton said in a sworn statement submitted to a federal judge that she has turned over to the State Department all emails from the server ""that were or potentially were federal records."" The statement, which carries her signature and was signed under penalty of perjury, echoed months of Clinton's past public statements about the matter.
+
+Fox News' Matt Dean and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+10494,She Drank Carrot Juice Every Day for 8 Months and Got Rid of CANCER!,". She Drank Carrot Juice Every Day for 8 Months and Got Rid of CANCER! Ann Cameron, an author of many children's books, was devastated when she found out that she had ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/she-drank-carrot-juice-every-day-for-8.html Ann Cameron, an author of many children's books, was devastated when she found out that she had colon cancer. In June of 2012, she entered the third phase of her cancer. It was especially terrifying because her husband passed away from lung cancer in 2005 after receiving chemotherapy. She opted not to take the same path. “I was exposed to operation for colon cancer in June 2012, and then I denied chemotherapy healing. I was feeling well, however after six months the cancer was spread to the lungs and entered the fourth phase,"" she said. She found a story about a man diagnosed with skin cancer who effectively cured it by consuming about two and a half kilograms of carrot juice every day. She thought it was worth a try and gave it a whirl. The results? Eight weeks later, her tumors had stopped spreading. Her tumor and lymph glands began to shrink.Four months later, her tissues were back to normal and her tumors were continuing their withdrawal.Eight months later, the registered tomograpy examination indicated the cancer was completely gone.It's something of a mystery why carrots did the trick. They're known to be rich in anticancer properties and contain carotene, which in some has been found to prevent tumors from growing. She wrote about her experiences in a book called Curing Cancer with Carrots .The takeaway? If you find yourself diagnosed with cancer, keep an open mind. What works for one may not work for everyone, but natural cures like this are worth pursuing. Reference: Simpleorganiclife.org Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
+Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
+9713,Polls Tighten: Trump Gains 2.7 Percent In Poll Average In Two Weeks,Comment on this Article Via Your Facebook Account Comment on this Article Via Your Disqus Account Follow Us on Facebook!,FAKE
+7009,MASSACHUSETTS: Designated Terrorist Group CAIR demands synagogue cancel speakers who are pro-Israel anti-Islam,"MASSACHUSETTS: Designated Terrorist Group CAIR demands synagogue cancel speakers who are pro-Israel anti-Islam The speakers include leading counter-jihadists Frank Gaffney of Investigative Project on Terrorism, General Jerry Boykin, and Tom Trento of The United West, all of whom are warriors in the battle to stop the Islamization of America. Somebody needs to tell the CAIR jihadists to mind their own damn business, the truth about CAIR and the death cult posing as a religion is getting out, despite their best efforts to whitewash it.",FAKE
+5037,Poll: Clinton Support Spikes Following Democratic Convention,"Following the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump by 8 points — 50 percent to 42 percent — up from a single-point difference last week, according to the latest NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll.
+
+Clinton's gain also comes after a series of controversial comments made by the Republican nominee this past week regarding the family of a fallen American soldier and Trump's suggestion that Russian hackers should seek out deleted Clinton emails.
+
+The Republican National Convention did not result in a post-convention bounce for Trump.
+
+Clinton also saw a bounce in a four-way general election match-up against Trump, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Clinton now leads Trump by 5 points — 43 percent to 38 percent — in the four-way race. This is a lead-reversal from last week, when Trump was beating the Democratic nominee by 2 points. Support for Johnson (9 points) and Stein (4 points) remained virtually unchanged from last week.
+
+These results are according to the latest from the NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking poll conducted online from July 25 through July 31 among 12,742 adults who say they are registered to vote.
+
+Perhaps a result of a series of well-received speeches from high-profile Democrats, Clinton's gains this week were not only in the horserace numbers. Overall, the number of voters who say they have a strongly favorable impression of the Democratic nominee is up 5 points — from 15 percent to 20 percent — since the question was asked two weeks ago.
+
+Clinton's favorability among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters rose from 74 percent two weeks ago to 80 percent this week. Her unfavorable rating also dropped among Democrats from 24 percent to 19 percent.
+
+President Obama, who spoke at the convention last week, also got an increase in approval this week. His job approval rating is up 3 points — 52 percent approve this week compared to 49 percent last week.
+
+After a contentious primary season, the convention offered Democrats the chance to unite as a party. Overall, most voters who watched or followed the convention did not view the Democratic Party more favorably as a result — 27 percent viewed the Democratic Party more favorably as a result of the convention, but 35 percent viewed the party less favorably, and 37 percent said their opinion of the Democratic Party didn't change.
+
+Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, half said they have a more favorable opinion of the Democratic Party as a result of the convention. Among Independent voters, 42 percent said they view the Democratic Party less favorably and 49 percent said the convention did not change their opinion. These results are similar to the favorability ratings we saw for the Republican Party last week following the GOP convention.
+
+Overall, four in 10 voters said they were more interested in this year's Democratic National Convention compared to previous years. Among Democrats, 58 percent said they were more interested in this year's convention than in prior years. Roughly the same number of Republicans said that about the GOP convention last week. Among Independents, 46 percent said they had about the same level of interest this year as in previous years and 34 percent said they were less interested this year.
+
+A strong Democratic convention combined with Trump's troubles over the past few days surrounding his tweets toward the Khan family and comments about Russia produced a very good bounce for Clinton. The question is whether the bounce is short lived or represents a more permanent shift in the race.
+
+The NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking poll was conducted online July 25 through July 31, 2016 among a national sample of 12,742 adults who say they are registered to vote. Respondents for this non-probability survey were selected from the nearly three million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Results have an error estimate of plus or minus 1.2 percentage points. For full results and methodology, click here.",REAL
+5632,Before It All Began: DML’s Spot-On Prediction of the 2016 Race,"by Dean Daniels / November 7, 2016 / POLITICS / 
+In the summer of 2015 before the current presidential race ignited, and two weeks before Trump announced his candidacy, DML gave a compelling speech during his tour in the state of Massachusetts. In front of an audience at a small town synagogue, the award-winning businessman and conservative commentator laid out the key component that he believed would catapult any presidential candidate above all the others: “putting Americans first.” 
+DML emphasizes during his “Americans first” speech that the number one issue in America is immigration. He explains in crystal clear detail how immigration, both legal and illegal, goes beyond party identification. He says “it’s not a Democrat or Republican issue — it’s an American issue.” 
+Having traveled the country by car exploring the idea of running for president himself, DML got a real sense for what concerned Americans most. Therefore, he knew before the rest of us that the ideal candidate of 2016 would be someone who has the audacity and the courage to tell the American people he or she will commit to the deportation of illegal immigrants. 
+“Remember, it’s not an anti-immigration; it’s an anti-illegal immigration; and it’s about being pro-America.” 
+While putting Americans first would have been DML’s campaign theme had he chosen to run for the highest office in the land, this strategy was instead adopted by none other than Donald J.Trump. This is one major reason why DML has supported Trump since day one. 
+Trump has done more than proven DML correct. Trump has proven how powerful the “ Americans first” ideology is during a day and age when progressive politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are catering to foreign workers and corporate donors at the expense of the American people who are left to rot on the back burner. 
+Watch an excerpt from the speech, and then check out DML’s electoral map and how he sees Trump winning on Tuesday. 
+
+Sign up to get breaking news alerts from Dennis Michael Lynch. Subscribe",FAKE
+4649,Florida Once Again a Focus in 2016 Campaign,"SANFORD, Fla.—The struggle for the White House and the Capitol took center stage this week in one familiar battleground—Florida—as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton swept across the state.
+
+Mr. Trump finished three days of campaigning here Tuesday, touching down in its biggest cities and filling the airwaves with his most expensive advertising buys. At the same time, Mrs. Clinton launched a two-day trip, seeking to capitalize on an...",REAL
+9772,Crimean and Donetsk leaders comment on US elections,"November 10, 2016 - Fort Russ News -  PolitRussia - translated by J. Arnoldski - 
+
+
+Crimean leader Sergey Aksenov welcomed the choice of the American people in the US presidential elections despite what he called “numerous” violations in the electoral process. 
+Aksenov stated: “The American people have made their choice. Our president was clear: the Russian Federation is not interfering in or even making any attempts to influence the will of the American people. In my opinion, the elections were held with numerous violations. If this had happened in Crimea or Russia, then the elections would have been assessed differently by American politicians. They would say that everything was wrong and illegitimate. But the Americans did not allow Russian diplomats near polling stations and prevented the formation of an objective view of what was happening at polling stations and overall how the elections were being held in the US.” 
+Commenting on Trump’s pre-election promises in regards to Russia and the Republic of Crimea, Aksenov said: “Before elections, politicians usually make some statements, and then their program can radically change. Time will tell. I am sure that our president will make sufficient efforts so that Crimea will be recognized throughout the world.” 
+This summer, Trump stated that he would be ready to “look into” the question of recognizing Crimea as Russian territory and lifting the sanctions against Russia if he won the elections. He remarked that Crimeans want to be with Russia and that this should be considered by the international community. These words caused great anxiety in Kiev. 
+
+The leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, was cautious in being optimistic towards Trump’s election as US president. Zakharchenko expressed concern that after Trump moves into the White House, he will become part of the American political system and there is no guarantee that he will be able to resist this system. For the DPR, Trump’s suggested policies could signal a change in attitude towards the Ukrainian crisis. 
+
+
+     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
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+
+       Follow us on Twitter! 
+                               
+
+             Donate! 
+",FAKE
+278,The House’s new conservative politburo,"This column has been updated.
+
+You think John Boehner had a rocky time as speaker of the House? Just wait until you see how his successor fares this fall — if House Republicans can even find a successor.
+
+The same conservatives who badgered Boehner into retirement wasted no time in ousting his hand-picked successor, Kevin McCarthy.
+
+Conservatives had been grumbling about McCarthy as the speaker-apparent almost from the moment Boehner announced his retirement, and by the eve of Thursday's House GOP vote to name a Boehner replacement, the criticism of McCarthy was murderous.
+
+Rep. Tom Massie (Ky.) declared at a luncheon with reporters Wednesday that ""there is absolutely no way that I think you can vote for McCarthy and go back home and tell your constituents you did the best thing for them.""
+
+Rep. Raúl Labrador (Idaho) had questions about whether McCarthy ""is prepared for such a high office.""
+
+And Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.) let it be known that ""outside conservative groups are not comfortable at all with picking Boehner's right-hand man to take the speaker's spot.""
+
+On the eve of Thursday's vote, the conservative Freedom Caucus announced that its few dozen members would vote en bloc against McCarthy. He had enough votes to prevail in the caucus election on Thursday, but unless he could win over the conservative holdouts, he wouldn't prevail in speaker elections that had been set for Oct. 29.
+
+And so, at noon on Thursday, the time the leadership election was to occur, McCarthy withdrew from the race.
+
+McCarthy's surrender is surprising, but nothing changes. It doesn't really matter who the next speaker is, because that person will be leader in title only. Conservatives, far from being placated by Boehner's ouster, are emboldened: They have plans to bend the entire House to their will.
+
+Defaulting on the federal debt? Not a problem. Shutting the government to defund Planned Parenthood? So be it.
+
+These were a couple of the take-aways from Wednesday's installment of ""Conversations with Conservatives,"" a monthly luncheon sponsored by the Heritage Foundation (parent company of the House GOP caucus) and catered by Chick-Fil-A, the fast-food chain owned by religious conservatives. The 10 men on the dais, members of the Freedom Caucus, the Republican Study Committee, the Tea Party Caucus and other conservative factions, might be considered the politburo of the new conservative order in the House.
+
+""The marginalizing of conservatives that's taken place over the last nine months is just not going to be tolerated anymore,"" declared Rep. Andy Harris (Md.).
+
+""We have an opportunity to completely change what's happening,"" announced Labrador.
+
+To seize this ""opportunity,"" they presented the three contenders for the speakership — McCarthy, Jason Chaffetz and Daniel Webster — with a list of demands that would increase the (already deafening) voice of conservatives in the House.
+
+There may only be a few dozen die-hard conservatives in the caucus, but, as Boehner and McCarthy have learned, if they withhold their votes, they deny Republican leaders a majority. Any would-be speaker, therefore, had better do what conservatives want — and that includes likely showdowns over a debt-ceiling increase, an omnibus spending bill, a transportation bill and Export-Import Bank legislation.
+
+Beyond that, the conservatives demand that the speaker never punish them for voting against the caucus; let them amend legislation on the floor at will; never let bills come to the floor without the support of a majority of Republicans; and refuse to take up Senate-brokered compromises.
+
+That would lead to shutdown and default in short order. But this did not seem to be a major concern over lunch. Labrador, mocking GOP leaders' claims that ""we can't shut down the government,"" said he would prefer a leader who would be willing to fight — ""even if we fail.""
+
+Paul Singer of USA Today observed that the conservatives' description of leadership is more like followership. ""You're asking for a speaker,"" he said, who ""follows your lead.""
+
+They did not dispute this notion. Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.) said that ""we want a process-focused speaker,"" while Rep. John Fleming (La.) said the goal is to give ""power to the individual members"" so that the speaker no longer is ""dictating the agenda.""
+
+Then why doesn't one of the conservative hard-liners run for the speakership himself?
+
+Labrador's answer was revealing. ""When you're leading the revolution, you also upset a lot of people,"" he said. ""It's very difficult to make change as we have been trying to make and also build a coalition.""
+
+That's true. It's harder to build a coalition than to tear things apart. And this is why the next speaker — whoever it is — will be no match for emboldened conservatives hell-bent on destruction.
+
+Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
+10312,Dog Waited Faithfully For Over A Month After His Owners Left Him Behind,"There have been horror stories of families leaving behind their pets when they move out, but usually they’re left inside the house where real estate agents can find them. For Boo the dog, he... ",FAKE
+7675,Bizarre! Drone Records Speeding UFO Over Trees,"Bizarre! Drone Records Speeding UFO Over Trees Please scroll down for video 
+POSSIBLE UFO SIGHTING? Man sees 'weirdest thing EVER' while filming fall leaves. 
+A Parkland County, Alberta, Canada resident has spotted what he believes are flying objects, orbs, and discs while operating a drone camera. The unnamed man was filming at Hasse Lake when he noticed this odd objects zooming through his frame while shooting footage of the fall foliage. The video, recorded with a Phantom3P drone, was sent to the MUTUAL UFO Network (MUFON). The man stated that it was ""the weirdest thing"" he has ever recorded. 
+The odd object was not noticed until the drone operator viewed the video at home. He was operating the drone from 500 meters away and did not physically see the weird shapes. The home video shows a collection of white spheres and one darker object that appears as a disc . 
+The object zoomed past the drone, swerved to the left and then vanished. It had to be moving at incredible speeds, as his camera was recording at 60 frames per second. The objects appear as a blur when a frame is paused. The man at first thought they must be birds, but then noticed birds in the frame that do not look anything like the objects. 
+The man, who has experience recording over 100 other drone videos, has never recorded anything like this. MUFON is currently investigating the case. 
+This article (Bizarre! Drone Records Speeding UFO Over Trees) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
+6839,Prepare Yourself For The Higher Energies,"Leave a reply 
+Dylan Harper – Everything and everyone is composed of Energy. This energy allows the Spiritual realm to have contact with you. It is important to take responsibility for your personal vibration, raising it so you may meet with the universal energies and receive communication directly from your Higher self , the Angels and Ascended Masters, and other Light Beings. 
+The higher your personal vibration, the easier it is for the Spiritual realm to make contact with you. The Angels, Ascended Masters and Other Light Beings vibrate at a much higher vibration than Humans. 
+To make contact on a more regular basis, you must raise your personal vibration. This can be done in a number of ways. 
+Meditation is a common way of raising your vibration. You are able to raise your vibration by bringing your attention to your thoughts. The purer the thoughts the higher your vibration. So remove all negative thought patterns and replace them with positive thoughts. 
+Practice of this exercise is all that is needed, then it will become second nature and you will notice other things within your life change as your create a stronger more purer vibration within your energy field. 
+You will only attract vibrations to your energy field that are of the same resonance. 
+Exercise is another way to raise your vibration. Not only does exercise create a healthy body, it creates a healthy mind. When you exercise, your body releases feel good endorphines, when you feel good, you raise your vibration. 
+Find some activity that makes you feel good and go for it. 
+Eat good quality food and drink pure water, what you put into your body will also affect your energy , so treat yourself kindly. 
+Being with friends and those that make us feel Loved and appreciated will also help raise our vibration. Surround yourself with loving friends and family. You can create a spiritual family who will help you and support your vibrational evolution. 
+We have been taught that we need to raise our awareness up toward the Heavens for ascension . It is my belief, that we need to raise our personal vibration to resonate with the vibration of our Higher self. 
+Once we have reached this point of unison, we must then bring our Higher self closer to the Earth. Bringing Heaven to Earth. This will bring a vibration of purity closer to Earth and help her raise her vibration in preparation for the cosmic shift. 
+We all have an important role to play here. We can all start raising our personal vibration so we are able to unite our physical energies with our Higher self’s energies, thus creating Heaven on Earth. 
+In order for this to be successful, We must strenghten our Lower three chakras to help anchor the higher vibrations . 
+Earthly activities are important. Remember to be in the present moment as this helps to strenghten the lower three chakras. 
+Dance, Laugh, pay attention to the mundane activities that tie you to the Earthly experience. This will strenghthen your connection to these chakras. 
+Imagine your Lower three Chakras as the Root system to a very Large tree. 
+The stronger the root system, the stronger the tree. Like the tree, the roots stabilize the tree so it may grow strong and healthy. 
+The root system is equally as large underground as is the tree and its folage above ground. This is a great way to image your chakra system. 
+The Lower three chakras are the roots to your tree, the heart chakra is the midpoint, the joining of the energies, and the upper three chakras are your tree trunk, branches and folage. How strong is the root system to your tree? 
+Give yourself permission to engage in activities to help strengthen your connection to these vital chakras. 
+Here is a little exercise to help anchor your Higher energies into Mother Earth. 
+Sit on the Earth, place your hands firmly on the ground. Now take a moment to breath, connecting with rise and fall of your breath knowing as you breath, you are connecting with the universal breath. 
+Now, have a sense of pulling the energy of the Universe down through your Crown Chakra. Bring this energy down through your brow chakra, then your throat chakra and feel it connect to your Heart chakra. 
+Let this energy rest within your Heart charka for a moment. Now let the energies travel down through your arms and into your hands. Feel this energy build as a warmth or tingling sensation within your hands. 
+Connect with Mother Earth and allow this energy to move through you and deep into Mother Earth. Feel this, see this, allow this exchange of energy from the universe through your hands to Mother Earth. 
+As this energy is allowed to be transfered, say” I bless you and thank you, Our Beloved Mother Earth, in the name of All that is.” 
+When you feel you are finished exchanging energies, bring your awareness back to your breath and allow the universal energies to return to their origin, knowing you can connect again at YOUR divine will. 
+You will feel refreshed and energised as your energy is refined through the universal energy exchange. 
+This exercise can be done on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. If on a monthly basis, I would suggest either on the full moon or the new moon. 
+The more we connect with the universal energies and allow an exchange of energy between earth and the universe, the higher our personal vibration will become. The higher our personal vibration and the more intune with the universe we become, the greater the flow of Love and Harmony to humanity. SF Source Dreamcatcher Reality Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+5709,Life: 7 Incredible Animal Mating Rituals,"7 Incredible Animal Mating Rituals Posted today Email You know the birds and the bees. What about the rest? Here are seven mating rituals that showcase nature in all its complexity and beauty. 
+Orangutans: Orangutans are among a special group of animals with mating rituals based around the lunar cycle, meaning that whenever a full moon is in the sky, male orangutans will climb the tallest tree and try to have sex with the moon, only settling for a female orangutan once they grow tired of stretching their penises outward so they might touch the moon with it. 
+Armadillos: In the “Armadillo’s song,” the male armadillo’s penis makes an annoying high-pitched whirring sound until a female armadillo is so annoyed by it that she silences it by having sex with him. 
+Alligators: During mating season, male alligators stand upright and walk around on their hind legs and place their arms on their hips and sometimes even ride bikes until a female alligator gets horny from watching them. 
+Beavers: The male beaver and female beaver each recite a fun fact about beavers, taking a step closer to one another as they do so. At some point, they get so close that they’re actually mating. 
+Elephants: Before having sex, the female elephant will coat her male partner in sticky, boiling hot Pepsi that only comes out of her trunk when she’s “in the mood.” 
+Iguanas: When it is time for iguanas to mate, the male iguana climbs on top of a female fox and the female iguana climbs on top of a male fox. The two iguanas ride their foxes straight at each other at full speed, and when the foxes collide with each other, the iguanas are flung forward and collide in midair. As they fly through the air, the male iguana impregnates the female iguana, who sprays eggs in all directions as she hurtles haphazardly toward the sky. When the mating ritual is complete, both iguanas hit the ground and die. 
+Bonobos: The male bonobo spends a full year trying to work up the courage to ask for a kiss. If he is rejected or the kiss isn’t that good, he will crawl up a tree and scream at God for giving him such good lips for kissing but no one to share them with.",FAKE
+5130,Why Gingrich could be the ideal running mate for Trump,"Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich are both mavericks, but with complementary skills. And they have a good personal rapport.
+
+Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (l.) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (r) acknowledge the crowd during a campaign rally at the Sharonville Convention Center on July 6, 2016, in Cincinnati.
+
+Vice President Newt Gingrich. It has a certain ring to it, especially if you are Mr. Gingrich. And clearly, the former speaker of the House would love to be Donald Trump’s running mate.
+
+Gingrich has acknowledged that he’s being vetted for the job, and is widely seen as a top prospect. Mr. Trump is expected to announce his choice this week, ahead of the Republican National Convention, which opens July 18.
+
+Would it be a mistake for Trump to put someone as controversial as Gingrich at his side? The rap sheet on Gingrich is a mile long: As speaker in the 1990s, he presided over two unpopular shutdowns of the federal government. In 1995, at a Monitor breakfast, Gingrich showed a lack of discipline when he whined about being seated in the back of Air Force One on a flight to Israel, inspiring the famous “Cry Baby” cartoon.
+
+In 1997, the House reprimanded Gingrich on ethics charges and fined him $300,000. Then GOP colleagues launched an unsuccessful coup to force him out of the speakership. By late 1998, he had resigned from Congress altogether.
+
+Then there’s Gingrich’s messy personal life, including three marriages, just like Trump. As a presidential candidate in 2012, Gingrich won two GOP primaries but he was widely disliked by the general public, and his campaign ran aground.
+
+So why are we arguing that Gingrich might just be the perfect running mate for Trump? Start with the fact that he meets Trump’s résumé requirement: someone with Washington political experience, someone who “could truly be good with respect to dealing with the Senate, dealing with Congress, getting legislation passed,” the billionaire said in May.
+
+But didn’t Gingrich mishandle his time as speaker? In important ways yes, but he also got some things done. He and President Clinton reached a deal that resulted in four straight balanced budgets. They also cut capital gains taxes and reformed welfare. So in Gingrich, Trump would get deep knowledge of how Washington works, and the lessons an older, wiser Gingrich learned from past mistakes.
+
+But wouldn’t putting a controversial running mate next to a controversial presidential nominee make for, well, too much controversy? Maybe. But the public is clamoring for change. Gingrich was all about change when he led the Republican Revolution of 1994 with his 10-point platform, the Contract with America – ushering in a GOP majority in the House for the first time in 40 years. More than 20 years later, Gingrich is still, in a way, an outsider, despite his insider experience.
+
+None of the above, however, gets to why Gingrich might be Trump’s most effective running mate, which is this: He is great at capturing media attention, and could use that to go after Hillary Clinton relentlessly.
+
+“With an untethered attack animal such as former Speaker Gingrich on his ticket, Trump can set down his Twitter account and start behaving presidential,” says John Gizzi, chief political columnist at Newsmax.
+
+Or Trump and Gingrich could double-team Mrs. Clinton, reinforcing the message of “lying crooked Hillary.”
+
+“They can sing from the same hymn book,” says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.
+
+As Trump considers whom to pick – Indiana’s low-key governor and former House member, Mike Pence, is another reported finalist – personal rapport also looms large. Trump is a “relationship guy,” says Mr. O’Connell.
+
+Trump and Gingrich have a bond formed in part at the Trump National Golf Club in northern Virginia, which is near Gingrich’s home. Gingrich and his wife are members, and when Trump was visiting the club, they would socialize.
+
+Last week, the outlines of a potential Trump-Gingrich ticket began to take shape, when the two campaigned together in Cincinnati.
+
+""Newt has been my friend for a long time,” Trump said. “And I'm not saying anything, and I'm not telling even Newt anything, but I can tell you, in one form or another, Newt Gingrich is going to be involved with our government. That I can tell you.""
+
+If he selects Gingrich to be his running mate, Trump added, “nobody’s going to beat him in those debates.”
+
+Ultimately, running mates don’t matter to presidential nominees’ chances - except when they do. Lyndon Johnson helped John F. Kennedy win Texas in 1960. Sarah Palin was a drag on John McCain’s campaign in 2008. With the political novice Trump at the top of the ticket, putting someone at his side with policy and governing experience seems a must.
+
+But beyond that, Trump’s candidacy will rise or fall based on Trump, and nobody else. His larger-than-life persona will not be eclipsed by anyone, even a big personality like Gingrich.",REAL
+6187,"Blame Government, Not Markets for Monopoly","Email 
+When Time-Warner announced it planned to merge with another major communications firm, many feared the new company would exercise near-total monopoly power. These concerns led some to call for government action to block the merger in order to protect both Time-Warner's competitors and consumers. 
+No, I am not talking about Time-Warner’s recent announced plan to merge with AT&T, but the reaction to Time-Warner’s merger with (then) Internet giant AOL in 2000. Far from creating an untouchable leviathan crushing all competitors, the AOL-Time-Warner merger fell apart in under a decade. 
+The failure of AOL-Time-Warner demonstrates that even the biggest companies are vulnerable to competition if there is open entry into the marketplace. AOL-Time-Warner failed because consumers left them for competitors offering lower prices and/or better quality. 
+Corporate mergers and “hostile” takeovers can promote economic efficiency by removing inefficient management and boards of directors. These managers and board members often work together to promote their own interests instead of generating maximum returns for investors by providing consumers with affordable, quality products. Thus, laws making it difficult to launch a ""hostile"" takeover promote inefficient use of resources and harm investors, workers, and consumers. 
+Monopolies and cartels are creations of government, not markets. For example, the reason the media is dominated by a few large companies is that no one can operate a television or radio station unless they obtain federal approval and pay federal licensing fees. Similarly, anyone wishing to operate a cable company must not only comply with federal regulations, they must sign a “franchise” agreement with their local government. Fortunately, the Internet has given Americans greater access to news and ideas shut out by the government-licensed lapdogs of the ""mainstream"" media. This may be why so many politicians are anxious to regulate the web. 
+Government taxes and regulations are effective means of limiting competition in an industry. Large companies can afford the costs of complying with government regulations, costs which cripple their smaller competitors. Big business can also afford to hire lobbyists to ensure that new laws and regulations favor big business. 
+Examples of regulations that benefit large corporations include the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulations that raise costs of developing a new drug, as well as limit consumers ability to learn about natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals. Another example is the Dodd-Frank legislation, which has strengthened large financial intuitions while harming their weaker competitors. 
+Legislation forcing consumers to pay out-of-state sales tax on their online purchases is a classic case of business seeking to use government to harm less politically-powerful competitors. This legislation is being pushed by large brick-and-mortar stores and Internet retailers who are seeking a government-granted advantage over smaller competitors. 
+Many failed mergers and acquisitions result from the distorted signals sent to business and investors by the Federal Reserve’s inflationary monetary policy. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the AOL-Time-Warner fiasco, which was a direct result of the Fed-created dot.com bubble. 
+In a free market , mergers between businesses enable consumers to benefit from new products and reduced prices. Any businesses that charge high prices or offer substandard products will soon face competition from businesses offering consumers lower prices and/or higher quality. Monopolies only exist when government tilts the playing field in favor of well-connected crony capitalists. Therefore those concerned about excessive corporate power should join supporters of the free market in repudiating the regulations, taxes, and subsides that benefit politically-powerful businesses. The most important step is to end the boom-bust business cycle by ending the Federal Reserve . 
+Article reposted with permission from The Ron Paul Institute Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here .",FAKE
+7107,Ten interesting facts about Vladimir Putin,"Ten interesting facts about Vladimir Putin 07.11.2016 1. Childhood dream Since his childhood, Putin has been fond of Soviet films about intelligence officers and spies. He always wanted to work in security agencies. His dream came true in 1975. Having graduated from the law department of the Leningrad State University, the would-be president was assigned to the State Security Committee. 2. Working under cover From 1985 to 1990, Putin had worked in the German Democratic Republic under the guise of the director of the Dresden Friendship House. 3. Family On July 28, 1983, Putin married Lyudmila Putin; the couple had two daughters, Mary (1985) and Ekaterina (1986) Also read: Exclusive hairdresser trims Putin's dogs in lion style 4. Pets Putin has many pets, many of which were gifted to him: four dogs - black labrador Koni, two poodles and Bulgarian Shepherd Dog Buffy, goat Skazka her goatling, and a dwarf horse named Vadik. 5. Judo Print version Font Size Vladimir Putin is a master of sports in judo and sambo. Putin is a champion of Leningrad in judo, he is a winner of the USSR Cup, winner of DSO ""Zalgiris"" and ""Kalev"" championships. In judo, Putin earned championship titles in competitions between universities. During his young years, Putin's judo coach was Anatoly Rakhlin (1938-2013), who then coached the Russian women's national judo team. 6. Writer's Experience In 1999, Putin's first book was published in collaboration with Vasily Shestakov and Alexei Levitsky. The book was devoted to practical judo training and was titled ""Let's Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin.""",FAKE
+7162,11 Stupid Things Vox.com's Matthew Yglesias Has Said | Daily Wire,"11 Stupid Things Vox.com's Matthew Yglesias Has Said By: Aaron Bandler October 26, 2016 
+Matt Yglesias of Vox has always been a gold mine of comedy fodder, given his penchant for saying things that are mind-bogglingly asinine. Apparently Yglesias agrees with this sentiment: Matt Yglesias deleted something like 30,000 tweets yesterday. Clearly a man proud of his history of astute analysis and voxplanations. 
+Fortunately, the Internet is forever and all of the stupid things that Yglesias has said can still be found and mocked mercilessly. 
+Here are 11 things Yglesias has said that are incredibly dumb. 
+1. Yglesias was convinced that people would love Obamacare. That is, until he didn't: . @mattyglesias Obamacare marker - which was solid as of 15 minutes ago - appears to no longer be markering pic.twitter.com/a0EyXImI8g — Omri Ceren (@cerenomri) October 26, 2016 
+His 2013 piece is still available though, and in it he whines about how supposedly ""the media, for non-ideological reasons, is just massively biased toward negativity about this kind of thing."" Yglesias also links to another piece of his in which he claimed that ""when Obamacare becomes the status quo, people will still be happy with the status quo quo and easy to frighten."" 
+In other words, Yglesias felt that the plebs would eventually succumb to his way of thinking. That all fell by the wayside when the Obama administration admitted that premiums were set to increase by an average of 25 percent. 
+2. Yglesias made a racist comment toward former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R). In a 2013 tweet that is now deleted, Yglesias wrote, ""Is Bobby Jindal’s reputation for intelligence anything other than ethnic stereotyping?"" 
+Yglesias doubled down on his nasty comment when he received backlash, tweeting: ""Oh, fun. Conservative twitter is in bogus outrage mode."" 
+Eventually, Yglesias backed down, tweeting: ""For the record, now that I know more about Jindal’s life it’s clear that he’s a very smart man who just says lots of very dumb stuff."" 
+The irony of Yglesias saying this was not lost on Twitter: Good thing you don't say dumb stuff. MT @mattyglesias It’s clear that Jindal’s a very smart man who just says lots of very dumb stuff. — jon gabriel (@exjon) June 18, 2013 
+3. Yglesias once ranted against ""dumb Jewish politicians."" The leftist pundit wrote a ThinkProgress piece in 2009 that was seriously titled ""Dumb Jewish Politicians,"" in which Yglesias highlighted a passage from Jonathan Chait, who wrote in the New Republic that then-Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) had to be stupid for not supporting the public option. 
+""I suspect that Lieberman is the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of a cultural stereotype that Jews are smart and good with numbers,"" Chait wrote. ""Trust me, it’s not true. If Senator Smith from Idaho was angering Democrats by spewing uninformed platitudes, most liberals would deride him as an idiot. With Lieberman, we all suspect it’s part of a plan. I think he just has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t care to learn"" 
+Yglesias agreed: 
+I’ve long held a related theory about Eric Cantor. 
+Anyways, this reminds me that at a meeting this morning I pitched the idea of trying to do health reform in a secret Christmas morning session that only Jewish Senators would attend. There’s a whole bunch — Boxer, Cardin, Feingold, Feinstein, Franken, Kohl, Lautenberg, Levin, Lieberman, Sanders, Schumer, Specter, and Wyden. It’s a very progressive bunch and Lieberman could easily be outvoted 
+4. Yglesias advocated for ending time zones. Seriously. In what was a typical example of Vox being a waste of space, Yglesias wrote a 2014 piece titled ""The case against time zones: They're impractical & outdated."" Yglesias pontificated: 
+Northern Idaho is connected via I-90 to Spokane and Seattle to its west, but not to Boise to its south so the Couer d'Alene area is on Pacific Time rather than Mountain Time. India has broken with the general scheme and adopted a half-hour staggered time zone so as to place the entire country on one time. 
+Yet while these zig-zags and 30-minute zones destroy the pristine geometry of railroad time, they serve a very practical purpose. It is genuinely annoying to schedule meetings, calls, and other arrangements across time zones. The need to constantly specify which time zone you're talking about is a drag. Commuting across time zones would be more annoying still, which is why the suburbs of Chicago that are located in Indiana use Illinois' Central Time rather than Indianapolis' Eastern Time. 
+But the ultimate solution to this problem is not a lot of ad hoc deviations. It's to shift the world to one giant time zone. 
+Ygleasias then called for ""One time to rule them all""–a phrase that prompted J.R.R. Tolkien to weep in his grave–and then wrote this doozy: 
+If the whole world used a single GMT-based time, schedules would still vary. In general most people would sleep when it's dark out and work when it's light out. So at 23:00, most of London would be at home or in bed and most of Los Angeles would be at the office. But of course London's bartenders would probably be at work while some shift workers in LA would be grabbing a nap. The difference from today is that if you were putting together a London-LA conference call at 21:00 there'd be only one possible interpretation of the proposal. A flight that leaves New York at 14:00 and lands in Paris at 20:00 is a six-hour flight, with no need to keep track of time zones. If your appointment is in El Paso at 11:30 you don't need to remember that it's in a different time zone than the rest of Texas. 
+Pejman Yousefzadeh explained just how stupid Yglesias's time zone piece was, writing at Ricochet : ""I grant you that there are times when confusion does take place, but seriously, who cares? Is befuddlement regarding time zones really such a pressing issue that Matthew Yglesias has to take to writing an article demanding that we abolish them? Don’t the people at Vox have anything better to write about?"" 
+Apparently they don't. 
+5. Yglesias doesn't understand Florida's geography very well. Yglesias wrote a short blurb in The Atlantic in 2007, in which he began thinking aloud about the city of Miami. 
+""I'd been interested to know what, if anything, is legally or practically preventing the city from just expanding further and further west if anyone happens to know,"" Yglesias said. 
+People immediately pointed the obvious answer: Miami couldn't do so because there was this thing called a swamp–most of which is The Everglades National Park–causing such development to be difficult to accomplish. 
+""Yes, yes, commenters I know it's a freaking swamp but there's plenty of development on ex-swampland in Florida -- hence all the canals and weird-looking lakes,"" an exasperated Yglesias wrote in an update. 
+Except that the land is not ""ex-swampland,"" it's an actual swamp . Maybe Yglesias shouldn't write a blurb that involves him thinking aloud. 
+6. Yglesias thinks that lying is perfectly fine...if you're a politician. Yglesias found himself getting smacked around on Twitter after he advocated for high-speed rail advocates to provide an ""unrealistically optimistic"" projection about the number of riders that will use the boondoggle program to obtain funding from the government. 
+""For better or for worse, that’s politics,"" Yglesias wrote at ThinkProgress . 
+On Twitter, Yglesias attempted to justify it by writing: ""Fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do, yes."" 
+And yet, Yglesias had the temerity to accuse journalist Eli Lake of being dishonest on Twitter. 
+Yglesias must have realized how badly he put himself in a Catch-22 when he told the Daily Caller to ""go f*** yourself"" when they tried to interview him about the Twitter incident. 
+7. Yglesias once hailed the Department of Veteran Affairs as a healthcare model the country should emulate. The Federalist 's Sean Davis pointed to Yglesias writing in 2009 that the VA was ""producing the highest quality care in the country. Their turnaround points the way toward solving America’s health-care crisis."" Yglesias also tweeted at GOP chairman Reince Priebus in 2013, ""Will @Reince be explaining the evils of socialized medicine to veterans?"" This tweet was also deleted, and for good reason, since the VA has caused 307,000 veteran deaths due to ""systemic"" problems with the agency. 
+8. Yglesias doesn't understand the purpose of the Senate. Yglesias wrote the following for ThinkProgress in 2009, per the Guardian : 
+If you add together the two Republican Senators from Wyoming with the one from Alaska, one from South Dakota, one from New Hampshire, two from Maine, two from Idaho, two from Nebraska, one from Nevada, two from Utah, two from Kansas, two from Mississippi, one from Iowa, two from Oklahoma, two from Kentucky, one from Louisiana, two from South Carolina, and two from Alabama, the 28 of them collectively represent (on a system in which you attribute half the population of a given state to a senator) 11.98 percent of the American population. Meanwhile, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein together represent 11.95 percent of the American population. 
+Now of course Texas is also a big state (though at 7.81 percent of the population it's a lot smaller than California) and there are small states (like Vermont and North Dakota) that have two Democratic Senators. So the point here isn't a narrowly partisan one, though the wacky apportionment of the Senate does have a partisan valence. The point is that this is an unfair and bizarre way to run things. If you consider that the mean state would contain two percent of the population, we have just 34 Senators representing the above-average states even though they collectively contain 69.15 percent of the population. The other 66 Senators represent about 30 percent of the people. If the Iranians were to succeed in overthrowing their theocracy and set about to write a new constitution, nobody in their right mind would recommend this system to them. 
+In three paragraphs of rambling, incoherent nonsense, Yglesias missed the fact that the purpose of having two senators representing each state was so states with smaller populations would be properly represented and not have their interests swallowed up by states with larger populations. 
+9. Yglesias doesn't understand America's financial system. Yglesias showed his ignorance of the issue when he wrote in a 2013 Slate column that there were ""far far far too many banks"" in the country, as there were 6,891 at the time. Yglesias bloviated that all these small banks were somehow dangerous: 
+1. They are poorly managed: You know how the best and brightest of Wall Street royally screw up sometimes? This doesn't get better when you drill down to the less-bright and not-as-good guys. It gets worse. And since small banks finance themselves almost entirely with loans from FDIC-ensured depositors, nobody is watching the store. In effect, the well-managed banks are being taxed to subsidize the poorly managed ones. The dubious decision-making doesn't get as complicated as what you see on Wall Street—it's mostly just classic boom-and-bust pro-cyclical commercial real estate loans—but it creates all the same problems. 2. They can't be regulated: Since these banks are so small, they could be easily driven out of business by high regulatory compliance costs. So since American public policy is perversely committed to preserving them, small banks regularly get various kinds of carve-outs from regulations. And once the carve-outs exist, they create pressure for extension further up the food chain. Other times the compliance issues of small firms become a reason to simply not do tight regulation. 3. They can't compete: If you want the JPMorgan Chases and Bank of Americas of the world to be held to account, you need both regulation and competition. But a bank serving a handful of rural counties or a single midsized city doesn't offer any real competition. Having a large share of America's banking sector tied up in tiny firms only makes it easier for a handful of big boys to monopolize big-time finance. 
+Davis debunked Yglesias's argument, which was devoid of citations and falsely claimed that there haven't been any new banks formed in recent years (there were at least four in 2013.) 
+""Yglesias' arguments are so poorly reasoned and so poorly supported that it leads one to question whether his post was thoughtlessly regurgitated from anti-community bank talking points promoted by the big banks ('You guys, the Wall Street banks that nearly destroyed America aren’t the problem. Small community banks where bankers actually know the borrowers are the real problem. Don’t worry about the facts. Just go with it.'),"" Davis wrote in The Federalist . ""I'm actually at a loss to come up with a more charitable explanation."" 
+10. Yglesias thinks that black conservatives are a recent phenomenon. After reading a review of a Booker T. Washington biography, Yglesias started thinking about ""'black conservative' political tradition,"" prompting him to write in a 2009 ThinkProgress post, ""It's only extremely recently that the idea of an African-American aligning himself, à la Clarence Thomas, with the mainstream conservative movement in America could be remotely possible. But even so, that didn’t mean there was no ideological conflict in black politics or that general rightist sentiments somehow didn’t exist."" 
+This is patently false, as Damon Root explained in Reason : 
+Actually, the great Harlem Renaissance author and journalist George Schuyler—who was known as the “black H.L. Mencken”—published “general rightist sentiments” long before Clarence Thomas came on the scene, including Schuyler’s unambiguously titled 1966 autobiography Black and Conservative. And the celebrated novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston both endorsed conservative Sen. Robert A. Taft in the 1952 presidential election and repeatedly attacked FDR’s New Deal... 
+11. Yglesias expressed joy when Andrew Breitbart died. Following Breitbart's death, Yglesias tweeted : ""Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBrietbart [sic] dead."" 
+This tweet has also been deleted, and for good reason–celebrating the death of someone just because of political differences is worse than stupid, it's ghoulish, vile and reprehensible. And Slate defended Yglesias, stating that he ""is a very passionate journalist and Slate values that passion."" 
+Apparently Slate believes that ""passion"" trumps basic human decency and a reasonable IQ level, and Yglesias certainly does not possess the latter two qualities. ",FAKE
+9725,Hillary’s “Big Tent” is Obama’s “Grand Bargain” on Steroids,"2016 presidential campaign by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
+Barack Obama tried to woo Republicans into a “Grand Bargain” that would have gutted Social Security. Bill Clinton let loose the banks. But Donald Trump’s destruction of the Republican Party will allow Hillary Clinton to “gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle.” The rich are about to get their best deal yet. Hillary’s “Big Tent” is Obama’s “Grand Bargain” on Steroids by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
+“ The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class.” 
+When Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to the Republican Party he provided the unexpected catalyst for completion of the corporate project begun by Bill Clinton, Al Gore and other white Democrats in the 1980s, with the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). To counter relentless attrition of whites to the GOP in their home states, these beleaguered, mostly southern Democrats sought national corporate funding to turn their party decisively to the right. They reckoned, correctly, that a steady stream of corporate capital would allow them to control the new wave of Black voters and politicians that had been mobilized by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns, while strengthening the hand of the South in national Democratic Party calculations. 
+Bill Clinton became the first DLC president in 1992, and moved swiftly and methodically to narrow the ideological differences between the duopoly parties. He completed much of Ronald Reagan’s agenda, claiming it as his own; destroyed welfare “as we knew it”; vastly expanded the mass Black Incarceration regime; pushed NAFTA through Congress over the objections of majorities in his own party; engineered the corporate monopolization of broadcast media; and removed the last safety straps from Wall Street banks. 
+“Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo.” 
+In foreign affairs, Clinton initiated what was to become the doctrine of “humanitarian” military intervention, dismantling and partially occupying the socialist nation of Yugoslavia. In the process, Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo, thus keeping operational the network created by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the previous decade in Afghanistan. In Africa, Clinton conspired with Uganda and exiled Tutsi rebels to overthrow the Hutu majority government in Rwanda, setting off a bloodbath in 1994, followed two years later by an invasion of Congo that has killed more than six million people -- and still counting. 
+Barack Obama was the second DLC president (although he lies about his membership). He, too, moved with unseemly haste to reach a “Grand Bargain” with the GOP -- not of necessity, since he had won a huge electoral mandate with the overwhelming financial backing of Wall Street, but as a matter of ideological principle. In January of 2009, before even taking the oath of office, Obama told the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post that all “entitlements,” including Medicare and Social Security, would be “ on the table ” for cutting in his administration. Obama’s first project, now considered the centerpiece of his legacy, was to resurrect the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s corporate health insurance scheme, adopted by Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996, and made into state law by Republican Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in 2006. Obama’s Affordable Care Act was, literally, written by lobbyists for the insurance and drug industries, and is now collapsing like a poorly constructed house at the end of its mortgage. 
+“For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his ‘Grand Bargain.’” 
+With the Democratic majority in Congress in no mood to tamper with Social Security and Medicare, Obama tried to maneuver the targeted entitlements into a financial crisis trap. He named two dependable reactionaries, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, as co-chairmen of his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, also called the Commission on Deficit Reduction. They dutifully recommended $4 trillion in budget cuts, mostly to social programs, including cuts to Social Security. Although the full commission did not endorse the chairs’ recommendations, and the Congress failed to pass bills modeled on the document, Obama used the Simpson-Bowles formula as a basis for negotiating what he hoped would be a “bipartisan” (GOP plus Obama and a minority of Democrats) massacre of entitlements. For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his “Grand Bargain.” Congressional Black Caucus chairman Emanuel Cleaver, of Kansas City, called the deal a “ Satan’s Sandwich ,” but Obama continued to pursue a political marriage made in hell until the 2012 reelection campaign clock called a halt to the spectacle. 
+“A de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie.” 
+The quest for a Grand Bargain was Barack Obama’s failed attempt to best Bill Clinton in erasing the distinctions between the two major parties – to create a de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie. It was the Republicans who ran away from the altar. And the Democrats did eat much of the Satan’s Sandwich, through sequestration and austerity that ravaged social programs by other means. 
+Why did the Republicans reject the deal? Although both halves of the duopoly ultimately answer to Wall Street, the Republicans, like any other party, have an institutional interest in winning office. It is true that Obama had crafted a deal that any Republican would love, but it was still his deal, and he planned to run for reelection as an historical dealmaker. Probably just as importantly, the Republican Party is the White Man’s party, meaning, white supremacy is its organizing principle, central to its identity among much of the masses. To embrace Obama, no matter how advantageous to their big business patrons, was a hug too far for the GOP. Racism doomed the Grand Bargain – Hallelujah! 
+A New, Bigger Bargain 
+Recently released Wikileaks emails reveal Hillary Clinton speaking to bankers at Morgan Stanley in 2013, a year after the debacle. “The Simpson-Bowles framework and the big elements of it were right,” she said. 
+Thanks to Donald Trump’s demolition of the Republican Party, the conditions have been created for Hillary Clinton, as DLC President #3, to achieve what #1 and #2 could not: gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle. With most of the ruling class and its attendants having vacated the building, the Republican Party has been reduced to Donald Trump and his “deplorables,” as Hillary calls them. Trump’s opposition to corporate trade deals violated the Holy Grail against prohibiting capitalists from moving money and jobs around the world as they see fit, and his reluctance to support regime change as an inherent right of American exceptionalism has frightened and outraged the military industrial complex, the national security establishment, and all sectors dependent on the maintenance of empire. 
+“An inherently unstable arrangement.” 
+Clinton’s Big Tent is not a temporary, election season dwelling. It is how she plans to govern. The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class, while at the same time the party nominally represents most of the folks who are abused and misused by that ruling class. It is an inherently unstable arrangement, and will soon be wracked by splits, as a post-Trump GOP attempts to lure its fat cats back and the darker and poorer constituencies consigned to the latrine area of Hillary’s high class tent break to the Left for air. 
+But in the interim, Clinton will have a unique opportunity to cut grand austerity deals with all the “big elements” of Simpson-Bowles, to renege on her corporate trade promises, and to wage war with great gusto in the name of a “united” country. Ever since the Democratic National Convention it has been clear that the Clintonites are encouraged to consider everyone outside of their grand circle to be suspect, subversive, or depraved. Their inclusive rhetoric is really an invocation of a ruling class consensus, now that Trump has supposedly brought the ruling class together under one banner. In Hillary’s tent, the boardrooms are always in session. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected] .",FAKE
+1896,Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina Announces She's Running For President,"Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, says she will seek the Republican nomination for the 2016 presidential contest.
+
+Fiorina made the announcement on ABC's Good Morning America and later via a simple tweet.
+
+Fiorina joins an already crowded field of Republicans vying for the presidency. On Sunday, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson announced his campaign.
+
+The New York Times reports that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is expected to join the fray on Tuesday.
+
+Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul have all already announced their candidacies. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is still exploring a run.
+
+""A former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Ms. Fiorina is the second woman to make a run for the White House in this election cycle, following Hillary Rodham Clinton's announcement last month. Ms. Fiorina brings strong business acumen and a promise to be a more compassionate version of Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee. And she has suggested that she is the perfect antidote to Mrs. Clinton, who many believe has an easy path to the Democratic nomination. "" 'I think that if Hillary Clinton were to face a female nominee, there are a whole set of things she won't be able to talk about,' Ms. Fiorina said at a breakfast in Washington last month.""
+
+Our friends at It's All Politics have more on Fiorina.",REAL
+8107,RT: Russia Just Tested a Nuclear-Capable Warhead That Can Outsmart US Anti-Missile Systems,"Editor’s Note : Meanwhile, in countries that aren’t being distracted by the biggest bread and circuses election show you’ve ever seen…
+
+Russian strategic missile troops reportedly launched an RS-18 ballistic missile on Tuesday. The launch may have been a test of the advanced hypersonic glider warhead, which would be able to defeat US anti-missile systems.
+The test was conducted at midday from a site near the town of Yasny, Orenburg region, in the southern Urals, and the warhead reached the Kura test range in Kamchatka in Russia’s Far East.
+“The test was a success. The warhead was delivered to Kura field,” the Defense Ministry reported.
+Popular defense blog MilitaryRussia.ru says the launch was meant to test Russia’s hypersonic glider warhead, currently known by its developer designation, ‘object 4202’, or Aeroballistic Hypersonic Warhead.
+A select few countries are currently developing the technology. The US has the HTV-2, a device developed by DARPA that has two partially successful tests under its belt. The Chinese warhead using the same technology is called DF-ZF, with Beijing first confirming a test in 2014. India is also studying hypersonic flight technology, but unlike Russia, the US and China, it is reportedly not developing a strategic missile warhead.
+A hypersonic glider vehicle (HGV) is different from a conventional ballistic missile warhead in that it travels most of the time in the stratosphere rather than in space. It gives an HGV-tipped missile greater range and may give anti-missile systems a shorter window to respond to an attack.
+More importantly, an HGV can maneuver during the approach to a target at high speed, making interception significantly harder, because it makes guiding an interceptor missile towards the attacking vehicle challenging and potentially impossible with current rocket technology.
+Object 4202 is reportedly meant to be used with Russia’s next-gen heavy strategic missile the RS-28 Sarmat. Military experts estimate that the new ICBM, an image of which was first made public this week, may carry up to three HGVs as payload.
+A previous possible test of object 4202 was reported in April. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by RT.com of RT.com . ",FAKE
+5314,Top 10 Pet Care Tips,"Keywords: pet care , pet care tips 
+Having a pet or a companion animal is an amazing thing as the little bundle of joy loves you immensely without asking for much in return. But they do want your little time and attention. Pets are just like kids who need care and support from you, and if they don’t get these things, then they can become victims of infection, malnutrition, and diseases. Therefore, here we have listed some important pet care tips so that you can easily keep your pet happy and healthy. Train your pet 
+Behavioral training is very important for dogs and cats especially when you have children at the house. Proper training can reduce their aggression and help them to accommodate easily in your home environment. If you are not well experienced with pet training, then you can take help of a professional trainer to train them like sitting on command or walking on a leash. Spaying and neutering 
+If you have many pets and you don’t want an increase in their numbers, then you can get them spayed or neutered by a vet. It also benefits your pet as it reduces the chances of your pet getting lost because the tendency to roam around will decrease after spaying and neutering. It also lowers the risk of certain cancers, hernias in male pets and uterine infection in females. Induce natural healing 
+Increasing immunity of your pet is very important, and you can do with a much safer approach. Animal oral nosodes provide a wide range of protection to your pet from various diseases like Corona virus, Lyme disease, West Nile virus. Tick fever etc. and they are very easy to administer as it can be given either by mouth. This natural alternative is safe and has many advantages over the conventional vaccines, many of which are found to be carcinogenic or having side effects. Body cleaning 
+It is important to get your pet habitual to bathing and other cleaning activities like clipping nails, flea or tick examination, etc. from an early age so it doesn’t get surprised when you give it a bath or try to cut its nails. They can even attack you in defense if they are not used to these activities. Keep them active 
+Walking your dog early in the morning is good for him and you as well. It gives you time to bond and keeps both of you fit. Besides that, you must play with your pets regularly to keep them active. You can use a Frisbee or ball to play with your pets or tell them to chase you while you run. These activities benefit both of you mutually. Skincare 
+This is very important especially in the case of pets with a white coat or less pigmentation as they are prone to skin inflammation and skin cancers. Also, check your pet regularly for any external parasite like fleas as it can cause irritated skin, hair loss, hot spots, infection and introduction of other parasites like a tapeworm in your pet. After cleaning and check up, groom your pet by brushing their coat as it helps in reducing hair shedding by them. Watch their diet 
+Children tend to feed their pet anything even their favorite food without knowing that it can be harmful to them, therefore, inform your young ones about the right food for your pet. Food items containing alcohol, coffee, chocolate, poultry bones, salt or unripe fruit can be bad for your pets. You can also ask your vet about other food items which must not be given to your pet. Moreover, you also need to check the weight of your pet regularly as less physical activity and regular feeding can make them obese or overweight. Pet bedding 
+Proper rest is equally necessary for the overall well-being of your pet, and they need a corner for their own for that. You should pick a spot in your house which is warm, clean and quiet to make their bed. Their bedding should be cleaned on a regular basis to prevent any parasites like ticks and fleas. Provide a healthy environment 
+Your pet can understand your mood as it is a living being like you, therefore, try to act happily around them. You must have seen that your cat is scratching the post or toys or your dog becomes restless when you come home. They do these things because they need mental stimulation. Give them toys to play, take them on a walk and play with them to reduce their restlessness and keep their boredom away. Pet identification 
+This prevents your pet from getting lost or taken away by the municipal persons by considering them as stray ones. Make them wear a collar with the address of your house so that it can be returned to you if it gets lost. These days, microchips are used to identify the pet. These microchips are of the size of a rice grain and placed under the skin of the pet within a second. It doesn’t require any battery and sensitive enough to be scanned and tracked easily by a vet or animal control officer. You might also like…",FAKE
+9417,Watch Lab MP claim that “The Government is hurtling towards a chaotic breakfast”,"Next Prev Swipe left/right Watch Lab MP claim that “The Government is hurtling towards a chaotic breakfast” 
+The brexit / breakfast slip strikes again and this time for Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer John McDonnell . ""Hurtling towards a chaotic breakfast"" https://t.co/s451F9ixoP 
+— Sean Clare (@Sean__Clare) October 27, 2016 
+The question is: is this chaotic breakfast going to be hard or soft?",FAKE
+1390,"With rise in polls, Cruz becomes potential Trump target in Tuesday's GOP debate","The once-friendly rivalry between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump is getting edgy as the Texas senator cuts into the business mogul’s lead, setting up a potential showdown in the GOP presidential primary debate Tuesday.
+
+Cruz has largely avoided public attacks on Trump -- likely in part to avoid his withering counter-attacks and also in hopes of gathering Trump supporters should he falter or quit the race.
+
+Trump has mostly left Cruz alone -- at least until recently, when Cruz apparently criticized him at private fundraisers.
+
+The Texan then pulled ahead in Iowa, according to polls released over the past few days.
+
+“He said it behind my back. Somebody taped that conversation,” Trump said about Cruz on “Fox News Sunday.”
+
+“I don't think he's qualified to be president. …  I don't think he's got the right judgment.”
+
+Tuesday's debate, hosted by CNN, will be the fourth of 12 sanctioned GOP White House primary debates and the final one of the year.
+
+It also comes less than 50 days before the Iowa Caucus, the first voting in the 2016 election cycle.
+
+Cruz and Trump will be joined on the main stage in Las Vegas by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
+
+On Sunday, Trump suggested that Cruz’s tactics on Capitol Hill are devoid of the compromising skills needed to run the country.
+
+“He goes in there … like a bit of a maniac,” Trump said.
+
+“You never get things done that way. You can't walk into the Senate and scream and call people liars and not be able to cajole and get along with people. … That's the problem with Ted.”
+
+When the reports surfaced last week of Cruz at New York fundraisers questioning Trump’s judgement, Cruz promptly tweeted: “The Establishment's only hope: Trump & me in a cage match. Sorry to disappoint.”
+
+And within hours of Trump’s attack Sunday, Cruz responded on Twitter by posting a link to the song “Maniac” from the movie “Flashdance” and writing: ""In honor of my friend @realDonaldTrump and good-hearted maniacs everywhere ...""
+
+CNN will also host a debate for the second-tier GOP candidates -- former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former New York Gov. George Pataki.
+
+The network said Paul squeezed into the main debate “by showing viability in Iowa in a Fox News poll released Sunday morning.”
+
+Christie returns to the main stage, largely because of his strong poll numbers in early-voting state New Hampshire.
+
+Carson last month surged in national polls and briefly held second place behind Trump in Iowa. But his campaign has since plummeted roughly 12 percentage points, from 24.8 to 12.6 percent.
+
+Bush is also looking for a comeback, after being considered the presumptive frontrunner early in the election cycle. However, his campaign has failed to catch fire, despite its infrastructure and fundraising prowess.
+
+Rubio has also improved his poll rankings in recent weeks but is competing with Cruz for essentially the same voters, which could bring fireworks to the debate.
+
+Cruz's national poll numbers didn't reach double-digits until early November, according to a RealClearPoltics.com averaging.
+
+But he could indeed win Iowa, considering his support among evangelicals and other social-conservative voters is similar to that of Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who in 2008 and 2012, respectively, won the caucus despite average numbers in national polls.
+
+A Fox News Poll released Sunday showed Cruz edging Trump in Iowa, 28-26 percent among likely caucus-goers. The poll was taken Dec. 7-10 and had a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.
+
+Cruz has a 10-point lead over Cruz according to a new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll, which previously had him trailing Trump in Iowa by 11 percentage points.
+
+And a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows the freshman senator edging closer to Trump nationally, 22-to-27 percent, after trailing by 15 percentage points in October.",REAL
+3458,What If The Supreme Court Had Gone The Other Way On Obamacare?,"What If The Supreme Court Had Gone The Other Way On Obamacare?
+
+This post was updated at 12:15 p.m. ET to reflect the Supreme Court's ruling.
+
+The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that state-based subsidies under the Affordable Care Act are legal. A different decision could have affected the health care of millions of Americans. In King v. Burwell, the court chose to allow the exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare, to many) to continue operating as-is. It could have ended the subsidies in most states allowing many lower-income Americans to afford the insurance offered through those sites.
+
+At issue in the case was a phrase in the law stating that the government will subsidize patients in exchanges ""established by the state."" In King v. Burwell, the question was whether those subsidies should then go to people participating in the exchanges in the 34 states that didn't set up their own — that is, in states where the exchanges are federally run to some degree.
+
+There are two broad paths the Supreme court could have taken here, but within those, there is a lot of room for variation:
+
+Everything stays the way it is — people keep getting their subsidies in all states, regardless of whether the government, the state, or a mix of the two, runs their exchanges.
+
+Obamacare customers in states using federal exchanges would have likely lost their subsidies altogether. That means an estimated 6.4 million people could have lost the tax credits that helped them pay for their insurance through the exchanges.
+
+But there were other potential, more mixed outcomes in which fewer people would have lost their subsidies. Because there were different configurations of federal-state cooperation, residents of some states could have kept their subsidies, while others could have lost them. For example, five states have state-run marketplaces using federal websites — it was possible that the court could have decided either way on those states, as they use federal resources, even while operating their own state marketplaces.
+
+So what could have ended up mattering here was the question of what a state-run exchange is. It was possible the court could have defined that, but it could have also sent it to the administration. And depending on how the administration set the bar on what makes a state-run exchange, this path could have led to still more litigation from Obamacare opponents, challenging how the administration set that definition, explains Linda Blumberg at the Urban Institute.
+
+In the 16 states (plus the District of Columbia) with state-run exchanges, nothing would have changed with this outcome. But the effects in the other 34 states could have gone beyond just more expensive health care. One study from the Urban Institute estimated that 8.2 million more people would have joined the ranks of the uninsured in this case. Not only that, but because so many healthy individuals would have exited the exchanges, premiums would have gone up by an estimated 35 percent for people remaining on the exchanges in the states that lost their subsidies.
+
+Florida, by far, leads the pack in having the most people who were at risk of losing their credits. There, a staggering 1.3 million people could have lost subsidized health insurance, missing out on an average subsidy of $294 per month, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. In Alaska, fewer than 17,000 people could have been affected, but their price tags could have grown in a huge way — by $536 per month on average.
+
+With reporting from Gisele Grayson and Joe Neel.",REAL
+673,Megyn Kelly Rips Into Donald Trump for His Attacks on a Federal Judge,"In their last meeting, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly laughed with her former adversary, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, tossing him a handful of softball questions he could swiftly bat away. But Kelly took a swing right at him on her show Thursday evening, blasting the billionaire for his comments about Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over the civil fraud lawsuits against Trump University, whom Trump has claimed is biased because of his Mexican heritage.
+
+“This is out of line,” Kelly said, raising her voice. The Fox News host had planned to spend the segment talking about House Speaker Paul Ryan endorsing the candidate, but scrapped it when news broke a few hours before her broadcast that Trump told The Wall Street Journal that Curiel, a U.S. District Judge, had an “absolute conflict” presiding over a pair of cases in which plaintiffs accuse Trump University of duping them into paying thousands of dollars to learn Trump’s tricks of the real-estate trade. (According to one former employee of the now-defunct for-profit school, whose testimony was revealed on Tuesday, “Trump University was a fraudulent scheme” that “preyed upon the elderly and uneducated.”) The conflict, according to Trump, derives from the fact that Curiel is “of Mexican heritage” and a member of a Latino lawyers’ association. Curiel grew up in Indiana.
+
+Trump told the Journal that his plan to close off the U.S. border with Mexico and his stated stance against illegal immigration makes the fact that Curiel’s parents are Mexican immigrants relevant. “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” he said.
+
+“The man is not Mexican. His parents are Mexican. He was born in Indiana. He has no conflict of interest,” Kelly deadpanned to the camera. “Now Trump is saying the judge needs to be investigated, someone should look into him, just because he’s ruled against Trump in this case repeatedly . . . That doesn’t make you biased. It doesn’t. Trump continues to attack a sitting federal judge who, by the way, did a lot to fight the drug cartels when he was a prosecutor, based on his ethnicity, suggesting he has an inherent conflict of interest because of his heritage. A Hispanic cannot judge a case against me, that’s what he’s saying.”
+
+This was the fired-up anchor many were hoping to see in Kelly’s first Fox Broadcast special in May, in which she sat down face-to-face with the candidate after a months-long feud that began when Kelly asked him a question about his treatment of women during the first G.O.P. debate in August. For months following the debate, Trump slammed Kelly as a lightweight, suggested the reason for her tough question was that she was menstruating, and encouraged his online supporters to do the same.
+
+Kelly harkened back to the months of harassment from Trump’s followers on Thursday night, subtly empathizing with what Judge Curiel could be about to go through at their hands. “Let me tell you, I guarantee you right now that this judge is getting threats, and vitriol and who knows what else,” she said.
+
+Kelly set the record straight before moving on to broader Trump news: ”There’s no conflict of interest whatsoever based on his ethnicity, just to clear up this man’s reputation, who is a sitting federal judge and has served the country for four years in that capacity.”",REAL
+6438,"Wikileaks May Release Hillary's 33,000 Deleted Emails: Kim Dotcom","
+Internet security expert Kim Dotcom says that Hillary Clinton is in “serious trouble,” with new information set to leak that some speculate could be a Wikileaks release of Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails.
+“There’s unpublished material, yet to come out. Clinton is in serious trouble,” the Megaupload founder tweeted last night.
+Kim Dotcom’s promise is worthy of attention given his long standing relationship with Wikileaks and Julian Assange. During an interview with Bloomberg in May 2015, Dotcom (real name Kim Schmitz) acknowledged, “I love to talk to them”.
+He also predicted that Julian Assange would be Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016 “because he has access to information,” a forecast that very much came true.
+
+There's unpublished material, yet to come out. Clinton is in serious trouble.
+— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) November 1, 2016 
+
+This is not the first time that the entrepreneur’s tweets have prompted speculation to swirl. Schmitz has hinted on a number of occasions that Wikileaks is in possession of Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails.
+Last week, Schmitz tweeted at Wikileaks with a video of himself reacting to “you’ve got mail” audio. Hours before, he also sent out another tweet which stated, “Bleachbit(ch) can’t bleach it,” a reference to the software tool used by Hillary to hide traces of her deleted emails.
+“I know where Hillary Clintons deleted emails are and how to get them legally,” Schmitz tweeted on October 27, adding that they “are all stored in the NSA spy cloud in Utah.”
+I know where Hillary Clintons deleted emails are and how to get them legally @TGowdySC @seanhannity @realDonaldTrump . 100% true. Retweet. pic.twitter.com/eir8r0FJ8M 
+— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 
+
+As far back as December 2014, Schmitz also tweeted that he was “Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016!”
+Radio host Rush Limbaugh picked up on the issue during his radio show on Friday, speculating that Kim Dotcom could have been the hacker that handed Hillary’s deleted emails to Wikileaks.
+“In all of these Podesta emails there’s not a single Hillary Clinton email in the bunch, if you have noticed. It’s Podesta emailing everybody, the DNC, everybody in the Hillary campaign, but there are no Hillary Clinton emails in this Podesta dump,” said Limbaugh.
+“Along comes Kim Dotcom who’s got an axe to grind with the U.S. government, the Obama administration. He knows Assange. So the people — nobody knows — this is all speculation. What’s going on here is that Kim Dotcom has worked with Assange and is really the hacker. It’s not the Russians,” he added.
+Is Kim Dotcom working with Wikileaks to release Hillary’s 33,000 deleted emails right before the election?
+If it’s going to happen, it has to happen this week.
+Source 
+",FAKE
+8579,"Nobel Confusion: Ramos-Horta, Trump and World Disorder","Email 
+History should tell us that writing scolding, even scornful letters, to electorates as part of a conversation for persuasion do not work. They are even less effective when coming from outside that electorate, however well-intentioned. Non-voters should be careful to judge and lecture. 
+Consider the attempt on the part of The Guardian to mount its electoral high horse prior to the 2004 Presidential elections in the United States. The prospect of another four years of George W. Bush was hard to stomach for the editors, hence their disruptive project. Operation Clark County was advertised as an effort to write “to undecided voters in the crucial state of Ohio.” The experiment had more than a degree of condescension, slanted, as it were, to the superior across the pond wisdom. 
+Instead of providing a platform of sobriety, it simply supplied patriotic fuel to US voters to confirm their positions. No one was going to be telling them what to do. Their president was a fool, but was their fool. As one letter went, “We Ohioans are an ornery sort and don’t take meddling well, even if it comes from people we admire and with their sincere goodwill. We are a fairly closed community overall.” Even the New York Times came forth with an unmistakably frank headline: “British Two Cents Draws, in Sum, a Two-Word Reply: Butt Out.” 
+Nobel Prize winner and former president of Timor-Leste, José Ramos-Horta, should be more attuned with that recent history. But instead, he has decided to wade into the US elections with another letter of scorn, another experiment in persuasion. To add weight and magnification to the appeal, he is seeking the signatures of fellow Nobel Prize laureates. The direction of this letter promises to be simple: whatever you do, people of the US, don’t vote for Donald Trump next month. 
+During a brief visit to the northern Australian town of Darwin, Ramos-Horta explained how he and his friends, “Nobel Peace Prize laureates, are extremely concerned with the tone of a presidential candidate Donald Trump in making disparaging remarks about migrants, about Muslims, and refugees.” 
+Ramos-Horta insisted that the rise of such a figure was “extremely worrying for all of us and it does not serve US interests.” Along with his fellow laureates, he was hoping to pen a letter that would “alert American public opinion that the world … cannot afford extremism coming from the White House itself.” 
+Ramos-Horta provides us a fairly typical, if rusted view, of world power. Empires need the wise and clever to lead them, being repositories of responsibility. Lunacy has no place. “The US is an indisputable global power and global powers have to be led with prudence, with enormous wisdom.” 
+What of the brakes of moderation and restraint offered by a critical, at times unreasonable Congress, including other measures so carefully thought through by the Republic’s Founding Fathers? We have seen such brakes bringing the Republic to a screeching halt on occasions, notably during the Obama years. These are polarised times in US politics, and not even the supply of finance to public servants is sacred. 
+This is of little interest to Ramos-Horta, who is convinced that a Trump presidency would have Congress in his deceptively deep pocket to wage war with impunity and engage in a pattern of global mischief making. 
+“Whatever the US president and US congress may decide on some measure of issues internationally can enhance peace, but can provoke instability and world disorder.” Not that the record book on peace, stemming from US foreign policy in recent years, has been particularly enhancing. 
+Having dumped generously on Trump, Ramos-Horta admits a swooning admiration for Hillary Clinton, his preferred White House occupant. If there is a candidate bound to embark on more aggressive stances, be it towards Iran or Russia, few could come close. Her recipe is for greater, not lesser belligerence. Free world boisterousness indeed. 
+Taking leave of his senses, Ramos-Horta suggested that she was “outstanding” and “sensitive to the rest of the world”. With baffling adolescent gullibility, the Nobel Prize laureate saw a Clinton “extremely sensitive to education for poor people, for children”. 
+A sense of balance might have been appropriate at that point: questionable donations from despotic regimes to the same, supposedly helpful foundation open to helping the indigent and illiterate; or security breaches; or compromised arrangements with Wall Street. The world of power is dark, and maze ridden, and at the end of it usually lurks a Clinton apology. 
+A Clinton presidency would hardly be that prudent, nor particularly wise, but that is the Ramos-Horta verdict, his own variant of an external endorsement that is bound to fall on deaf ears in the United States. Any ears who receive the message will be dismissive. From a man whose country suffered an occupation that will, in time, find its way into the books of notable genocides, endorsing such a Clinton can hardly be prudent. But then again, power of the massive sort rarely is.",FAKE
+9836,How Instagram Becomes Backbone for Businesses,"How Instagram Becomes Backbone for Businesses Ad 728×90 – HBS Account – 2149237058061490 http://blogs.naturalnews.com/instagram-becomes-backbone-businesses/ 
+By johnrussell 
+Posted Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 08:30am EDT 
+Keywords: business marketing , content marketing , How Social Media Can Help You to Win New Business , Instagram Instagram is one of the most popular social media applications in the world today.According to statistics ,500 million active users across the globe have instagram accounts. It is an amazing platform for people to connect with their friends,colleagues and acquaintances. The app allows people with similar interests to discover each others profile and connect with them. Instagram developers have made a brilliant job of using the app as a platform for start up business in Asia. Thousands of Instagram accounts are used to promote brands,free on the Google Play Store or Itunes, the app becomes available to a wide range of people from different age groups, nationalities and backgrounds. In Asia, the Instagram app has received massive success over the past few years. In general , Asian enjoy sharing their photos and videos to their Instagram followers. It’s a fun and enjoyable way to share day to day life experiences through pixels on their mobile phones.Since Asians are very hardworking , there are thousands of start up companies who make use of Instagram to boost their sales and profits. The app provides start up companies an avenue to communicate with their followers and engage with them in an efficient way. Asian countries have a multicultural society and the east meets west theme is present in most of them.Asia is an incredibly diverse melting pot of different races and cultures.Because of Asia’s unique identity which resonates so much culture and tradition, a large number of international brands uses it as a regional hub for their businesses.Asian countries are always at the forefront of economic and technological advancements.Countries in Asia are always closely aligned with the most advanced regional and global trends, culture and news. Since social media has become mainstream, it was able to deeply influence and reshape the way Asian’s collaborate, work and consume information. Communications and marketing strategies saw a rapid increase over the past few years because social media.Asian countries are one of the highest global ranking smartphone users in the world. The social media landscape is constantly evolving and Asia is quick to adapt to these changes. Various countries such as Japan ,Singapore ,Malaysia, South Korea , Philippines,Thailand and India have all made use of Instagram as a business platform , especially for startups. On Instagram search, users are free to browse endless amounts of products ,sports , events ,activities and news to keep them up to date with the latest happenings. Over the past few years since social media has become mainstream ,more and more Asian countries have been motivated to startup their companies through apps such as Instagram. They use it to leverage their marketing strategies and boost their sales.Instagram has been a very successful platform for startup companies who strive to increase their online presence.Every startup company’s goal is to one day become famously known fore their quality products and services. One of the best examples of Asian startups on Instagram are fashion accounts. But of course tech startups also had the chance to leverage this social media giant.Millions of people around the world browse Instagram to search for fashion and style inspiration. A startup company called Roposo is the ultimate social network for fashion addicts.Since it was first launched in April 2015, it has already received more than 2 million active followers. The company originated from India. It is a user generated content platform similar to Facebook and Instagram. Raposo’s target market are women and they receive more than 1 posts each month. The developers of Roposo were Inspired from the success of Instagram. They were motivated to create a similar platform which will bring fashion lovers together. This is a great example of how Instagram influences startup companies in Asia. According to recent statistics, Instagram will achieve a higher net mobile display compared to Twitter and Google in 2017. The forecast predicted that the app will receive approximately 3$ billion in revenue by 2017. This is significantly higher than the 595$ million earnings Instagram received in 2015. A new study made by TapInInfluence found that social media marketing influence is eleven times more well received than other types of advertisements such as billboards, banners, and magazines advertorials. As a result, social media accounts who have established massive followings are much coveted by the most successful brands and companies. Social media influencers are conducted by various brands and they are instructed to promote specific products and services in exchange for monetary agreements. According to experts, the world of social media and streaming have greatly influenced companies to pay less attention on television advertisements or print media advertising. Most consumers trust the opinions of the social media influencers they follow which include bloggers, pop stars, celebrities, models etc..As a result, brands and retailers try their best to build good long lasting relationships to increase their brand exposure and gain more profits. Author Bio: JSeager is a Social media fanatic and content creator. . His skills are much sought and he is one of those cool guys who made Instagram Search pretty easy. Follow his blog to know more about his works. Click here for the blog. You might also like…",FAKE
+7085,Top Radio Host Michael Savage: “We’re Being Invaded Right Now”,"Email 
+Not all invasions are hot — not all invaders come with guns and bombs. And Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and other Western leaders are “invading their own countries,” says radio host Michael Savage, using a foreign army introduced under the banner of “immigration,” “illegal migration” and “refugee status.” 
+Writes WND.com , “History isn’t about tolerance or peace or understanding. History is about war. History is about conflict. History is about invasions — and the most consequential invasion in human history is well underway.” WND isn’t talking about just an American problem, a German problem, a Swedish problem, or a French problem, but one that threatens to extinguish all of the greatest civilization ever to grace our planet: Western civilization. And this is effected via what’s euphemistically called “demographic change.” 
+Consider the United States. In 1965, close to 90 percent of Americans were of European descent, were of the Western tradition. That percentage now stands at 62 — and falls further each passing day. What happened? The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 happened. Introduced by Congressman Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.) and aggressively promoted in the Senate by Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), it created a situation in which legal immigration would swell from an average of 250,000 immigrants a year to approximately one million, causing the rate of immigration to exceed the rate of assimilation. Moreover, 85 percent of these new immigrants would come from the Third World, leading to rapid demographic change. Note that this is something Kennedy had promised would not occur . 
+And now, though the United States is teeming with unassimilable foreigners, and citizens must press buttons to conduct business in their native language. Obama has accelerated the process by inviting waves of illegals into our nation and granting “refugee status” gratuitously. As WND tells us, quoting Savage and discussing his new book on the subject, Scorched Earth : “We’re being invaded from the south. We’re being invaded from the north, from the east and from the west. You might say, ‘Well, that’s the way of things,’ and you might get used to it. They’re here, they’re near, they’re everywhere. The question is, why are liberals so quick to embrace this invasion, and why are traditionalists and conservatives like myself so resistant to erasing the borders, language and culture of this great nation?” [said Savage][.] More than 3 million foreigners came to the United States in 2014 and 2015 according to a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies. The foreign-born population in the United States, now standing at 43.3 million people, is at an all-time high. Immigrants now make up almost 14 percent of the population, the highest percentage in 105 years. 
+Of course, liberals aren’t only quick to embrace this invasion, they’ve authored it. Why? 
+Power. 
+Seventy to 90 percent of the Third World and Muslim immigrants in the United States vote for leftists upon being naturalized. This pattern holds throughout the Western world. For instance, in France, where Islamic immigration has become a contentious issue, approximately 90 percent of Muslims voted for socialist president Francois Hollande in 2012. Leftists know this and joyfully import voters. As Andrew Neather, former advisor to ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, confessed in 2009, the massive immigration into the United Kingdom over the previous 15 years was designed by his Labour Party to “rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” 
+But it’s rendering Western civilization “out of date,” a fact that hasn’t escaped hostile foreign entities. As late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi said in 2006 while commenting on the “cold invasion,” “We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe — without swords, without guns, without conquest — will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.” 
+And the “enemy within,” as Savage would put it, celebrates this rending of the West with a demonic hatred of what should be their own culture. Just consider that Swedish multiculturalist social engineer and Social Democrat politician Mona Sahlin actually said in 2001 that ""the Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back."" Of course, if a corresponding sentiment had been expressed by a backwoods tribesman about his own tribe, it would be viewed as most odd; many would call him a traitor. And when a rainforest-dwelling tribe is overwhelmed by outsiders — or when the Tibetans are inundated with ethnic Chinese, which has been happening — anthropologists will condemn it as demographic and cultural genocide. In the West, though, it’s marketed as “multiculturalism.” 
+And we’re told, “Our strength lies in our diversity.” 
+Obama knows precisely what he’s doing, too, says Savage, and is purposely deconstructing our nation. “Obama is invading his own country. He’s destroying it from within, like a worm in an apple,” said the radio host. No doubt. In fact, Obama stated last year that over the long term he was “pretty optimistic” that conservatism would be extinguished “because this country just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks.” 
+Even more damningly, it was alleged in 2015 that there’s a secret Obama administration plot to use the new illegal aliens as “seedlings” that will develop a “country within a country”; these foreigners will “navigate, not assimilate” as they eventually “take over the host,” coming “out of the shadows” and “pushing the citizens into the shadows,” the report informed . 
+In this vein, WND mentions that at issue isn’t just the massive number of im/migrants, but also their nature. The site further points out that this creeping Third Worldism has already turned states such as California into socialist bastions that vote reliably Democrat. For sure. As I wrote in 2010, placing the matter in perspective: If we imported millions of Scandinavians — who have created the most liberal governments on Earth — would we expect them to magically change their ideology upon seeing American terra firma? If not, why would we expect otherwise with south-of-the-border socialists? If they choose Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales types below the Rio Grande, why wouldn’t they above it? Geography doesn’t change ideology. 
+It doesn’t change jihadist zeal, either. Referring to the recent influx of Muslim migrants into the United States — Obama has welcomed more than 13,000 almost exclusively Muslim “Syrian refugees” already this year — Savage mentioned that these individuals cannot actually be vetted and thus are unknown quantities. Moreover, he points out that Obama is preventing border-patrol agents and the police from enforcing immigration law, as the president “invades his own country with a de facto army from other nations,” as the radio legend put it. He characterizes Obama as “dangerous” and as a “psychopath” bent on replacing the population of his own country. 
+Of course, Obama did telegraph his intentions in 2008, promising “fundamental change.” Note that “fundamental” means “ serving as, or being an essential part of, a foundation or basis .” If a man says his wife requires fundamental change, he doesn’t just mean she needs a new hairdo or wardrobe, or even cosmetic surgery. He means that he doesn’t like the very essence of what she is and wants her transformed into a completely different person. 
+As for the Left’s destruction of the West, it will continue unless and until Western voters enforce fundamental change — and divorce leftism, permanently, from their cultures and governments. Photo of Michael Savage: AP Images Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
+Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
+No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language. 
+No product advertisements. 
+Please post comments in English. 
+Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
+4847,Trump Is Wrong About Terrorism and Immigration,"Donald Trump predictably blames ""our extremely open immigration system"" for Saturday's bomb attacks in New Jersey and New York City. His critique overlooks the details of this particular case as well as the general rarity of terrorism by immigrants.
+
+Ahmad Khan Rahami, the 28-year-old man police arrested on Monday in connection with the bombings, is a naturalized U.S. citizen who immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan at the age of 7. He seems to have been radicalized within the last few years, a period when he spent nearly a year in Pakistan and became noticeably more religious and taciturn.
+
+It is hard to imagine how the ""extreme vetting"" Trump advocates for immigrants from ""any nation that has been compromised by terrorism"" could have kept Rahami out of the country. What questions could have been posed to his parents that would have predicted his violent turn two decades later?
+
+Trump faults his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, for supporting the admission of Syrian refugees, who he says pose an unacceptable risk of terrorism. But according to a recent study by Cato Institute immigration policy analyst Alex Nowrasteh, ""the chance of an American being murdered in a terrorist attack caused by a refugee is 1 in 3.64 billion per year.""
+
+Trump has recommended ""a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on""—a plan that his own running mate called ""offensive and unconstitutional."" More recently Trump has said the moratorium should apply to all visitors from countries ""compromised by terrorism,"" a category that arguably includes most of the world.
+
+Some pundits favor a cleaner approach. ""Confronted with the threat of Islamic terrorism,"" Nowrasteh notes, ""well-known conservatives like Larry Kudlow, David Bossie, and Ann Coulter have called for a complete moratorium on immigration.""
+
+A broad moratorium would have the advantage of preventing all terrorist attacks by newly admitted immigrants. But it would also exclude more than 1 million innocent people each year it was in effect, at a huge economic cost. Nowrasteh cites estimates ranging from $35 billion to $229 billion a year.
+
+Nowrasteh reports that tourists accounted for 94 percent of deaths caused by foreign-born terrorists in the United States from 1975 through 2015. Including tourists in the moratorium would raise the annual cost by another $194 billion or so.
+
+Given the rarity of deaths caused by terrorism, Nowrasteh shows, such costs cannot possibly be justified. Based on a value of $15 million per life, he puts ""the combined human, property, business, and economic costs"" of attacks by foreign-born terrorists during the 41-year period covered by his study at $5.3 billion annually, which is ""far less than the minimum estimated yearly benefit of $229.1 billion from immigration and tourism.""
+
+Even that calculation overestimates the potential security benefit of cutting off immigration, since it is dominated by the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an anomalous event that is unlikely to be replicated. The 9/11 attacks (which were perpetrated not by naturalized citizens or by refugees but by visitors with tourist or student visas) account for 99 percent of the 3,024 deaths caused by foreign-born terrorists from 1975 through 2015.
+
+Excluding 9/11, the overwhelming majority of terrorist murders in the United States—more than 90 percent—have been committed by native-born Americans. Except for 2001, the risk of being killed by a foreign-born terrorist has been minuscule and flat for more than four decades.
+
+That risk is extremely low even if you include 9/11: about 1 in 3.6 million per year. You are more than 200 times as likely to die in a traffic accident, 20 times as likely to be killed by falling down stairs, and four times as likely to drown in a bathtub.
+
+Any politician who wants to impose large costs in response to such a tiny risk has a lot of explaining to do.",REAL
+4927,Why Not Vote Third Party? We Asked California Voters.,"In an election year in which the two mainstream candidates are disliked at never-before-seen levels, might there be an opportunity for third party candidates?
+
+Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Darrell Castle of the Constitution Party are seeing more interest in their parties' nominees than ever before, and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson is polling close to double-digits, higher than any other third party candidate since Ross Perot in 1992.
+
+We hit the streets of Los Angeles and the campus of UCLA to ask voters whether they'd consider voting third party this year and to administer the isidewith.com test, an online quiz that shows you which candidate is your ideological match based on your answers to a series of questions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many people's matches weren't consistent with the candidate for whom they planned to vote.
+
+In this solidly blue state, most voters we talked to plan to cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton, with varying levels of enthusiasm. But while a few committed Clinton partisans seemed unlikely to budge, we found that many folks identified as independents, a trend consistent with data that points to fewer and fewer Americans affiliating with the major parties.
+
+And these self-described independents were more willing to at least hear out the third party candidates. In fact, a recent Quinnipiac poll found that 62 percent of Americans want Gary Johnson on the debate stage, despite the fact that the Commission on Presidential Debates sets the polling cutoff at 15 percent.
+
+So what would it take for these independent-minded voters to pull the lever for someone other than Clinton or Trump? Watch the video above to find out.
+
+Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello. Hosted by Monticello. Shot by Weissmueller. Additional graphics by Josh Swain. Music by Audionautix.
+
+Scroll down for downloadable versions. Subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel for daily content like this.",REAL
+5736,"Why any Wife, Mother, Daughter, Sister or Feminist MUST Vote Trump","Why any Wife, Mother, Daughter, Sister or Feminist MUST Vote Trump 03.11.2016 Print version Font Size When I was younger my very dear godmother wanted a small television set for her morning-room. The color scheme of the walls and furniture was sky blue with crème accents. Naturally, she desired one to compliment the palate; unfortunately, this was 1960 and most television sets came in one color - black. As the years progressed I cannot tell you the times I heard how she sought a blue television. Of course every year new models and brighter hues became available until eventually my godmother quite nearly discovered the precise set best suited to her. However, she passed away prior to ever purchasing one. While the implication of my anecdote is obvious - you're likely to die before ever finding perfection - it seems some people in America need a gentle reminder what the dueling implications of their current search for a perfect political candidate holds for them; a fate not the least less serious than death. The foremost Women's Issue of our time is IMMIGRATION and these are the two futures awaiting us. If Clinton wins : Hillary has stated she favors a borderless world without limit and as a result the already porous Southern Border shall remain largely unguarded. To date, there are over 30 million Illegal Mexicans in the United States . They pay no income taxes and no payroll taxes of any kind yet they avail themselves of schools, roads, hospitals and welfare which are paid for by American Citizen tax dollars. If Trump wins : He has emphatically repeated a physical wall will be constructed on the Southern Border, offering job opportunities to tens of thousands of American Citizens and billions of dollars for both the national and local economies. Other employment will be created by maintaining and guarding this structure. American tax dollars will support American children, American veterans and American elderly. If Clinton wins : Illegal Mexicans present in the country with impunity, coupled with illegal driving privileges, illegal subsidies from taxpayers and dozens of other illegal ""freebies"" will not pause there. If Illegal Mexicans can break every other law in America why should sexual harassment, sexual deviancy and sexual assault be any different? Women should expect hundreds of thousands of additional sexual and physical assaults every year by people who have no legitimate excuse to be in the United States. In Mexico it is legal to have sex with children 12 years of age! Although often misconstrued or hidden by fellow-travelers , this is the fact in most of Mexico today. Likewise, ""bride kidnapping"" is not uncommon, as long as the predator-perpetrator ""trades"" something for the female child. And don't think Illegal Mexicans leave this ""culture"" at their border. In recent years have been instances in the United States when Illegal Mexicans have swapped a case of beer or other items as compensation for taking someone's daughter...and then used this ""justification"" in courts for being acquitted of a crime! If Trump wins : The 30 million Illegal Mexicans will dramatically be reduced. Their departure will lessen your daughter's classroom size while increasing resources for her school. You cannot have music, dramatics and sport programs when you double the class-size with non-contributing Illegal Mexicans. In very real terms, unless you are independently wealthy and can afford private instruction, the presence of Illegal Mexican children literally curtails your daughter's opportunities and minimizes her life choices. Moreover, at the same time the 30 million Illegal Mexicans begin to depart another 30 million Illegal Mexicans will never arrive due to strict border security. On average 2 to 3 million Illegal Mexicans are invading America every year. This will immediately cease with a Trump Presidency - to the benefit of your child's education and future employment prospects; not to mention your own quality of life. If Clinton wins : One of the most important things to know , and to remember when you vote, is many allegedly ""hard-working"" Illegals and Refugees (who have genuinely empathetic stories from their experiences) are entirely unable to function in the United States. With no disrespect, not a ""slander"" or a ""slur,"" it is a fact the vast majority are illiterate in the languages of the new homelands AS WELL AS most being illiterate in their own languages! The myth these people ""only want a better life"" or they are ""eager to work"" is revealed by the truth they simply cannot work in an Industrialized Society which already has extremely high unemployment for manual labor . Illegals and Refugees lack the training, lack the skills and most importantly lack the basic ability to learn them. In Germany it is now admitted only 1 in 50 of the Refugees are employable . Thus 49 of 50 will be on Welfare, receiving Free Housing, and collecting Taxpayer Benefits into which they never paid. At least one Syrian Refugee in Germany with 4 ""wives"" and 23 offspring claims $390,000 per year. We all hope for the best for our children, but if your daughter is less than a doctor, lawyer, or other highly educated professional - Illegals and Refugees will directly compete with her in the workplace. And if she cannot find a job there may be no Welfare Benefits for her due to it all being taken by Illegals. If Trump wins : In Germany the past 3 years are approximately 3 million Arab Refugees . Of the 3 million, even the government admits only 60,000 will find permanent employment. This means 2,940,000 uninvited people will be draining Social Security systems from hardworking taxpayers. With Trump a similar situation need never occur in the United States; where Citizens can care for fellow Citizens. If Clinton wins : She has announced in addition to 10,000 totally unvetted Syrian Immigrants, Hillary will increase their number over 500% to nearly 80,000 combined (almost all men of fighting age, with few if any women or children). Though sympathetic, these people have no documents and even the F.B.I. admits it impossible to know who is a terrorist and who a refugee. As example, whether organized terrorists or not in the first six months of this year even the ""approved"" Refugees have committed over 142,000 serious crimes in Germany; many of these being assaults of grotesque sexual nature. If Trump wins : There will be 0 new Syrian Immigrants to America since none can be ascertained non-threatening to the Citizenry. However financial and material aid will be sent to care for impoverished families in places near their homeland which are best suited by culture and religion to maintain them. If Clinton wins : While there are no exact predictors, Europe is a good indicator. In many nations girls and women have been warned not to wear shorts or skirts so as not to "" invite rape ."" Last New Year's Eve over 1,200 German women were assaulted by over 2,000 Middle Eastern Immigrants on one night alone . At a Swedish music festival this summer 5 girls were raped by Middle Eastern Immigrants in one afternoon. Many municipalities have reported ""swimming pool"" sex assaults on children as young as 6 years of age. These are not exceptions or indeed uncommon, but habitual. If Trump wins : Although not all tragedies can be prevented, with care many can be avoided. The best way is pro-active deterrence. If 80,000 Syrians are welcomed by Hillary (in only her first year of office, mind you) and only 5% are rapists that is 4,000 rapes which never need have happened. Worse, as ""Multi-Cultural Jurisprudence"" becomes pervasive in the courts (so to circumvent Immigrant riots like those seen in Paris recently ) we will witness even the worst abusers set loose to commit more crimes. Only last week in Austria , an Iraqi Immigrant who violently raped a 10-year-old in a swimming pool changing area was released by arguing his own ""Sexual Emergency"" and that the parents ""could not prove the rape was unwanted by the child."" This is a fate which awaits our daughters in America. THESE ARE NOT PROVERBIAL ELECTION ""HORROR STORIES"" - THIS IS REALITY IN EUROPE TODAY ! Do I like everything Donald Trump has ever said? Far from being the case!Do I agree with much of what Donald Trump proposes? Absolutely not!Do I trust Donald Trump will fulfill every election promise? Hardly! However since he has premised his campaign on the basis of Defending Against Harmful Immigration it is likely this singular position would be the last pledge he would or even could abandon once in office. Is Donald Trump a cad? Yes. Is Donald Trump a pompous lout? Yes. Is Donald Trump noxious? Yes.Is Donald Trump the ONLY CHOICE FOR WOMEN AND FEMINISTS ? - WITHOUT ONE SINGLE DOUBT ! For those unsettled by recent complaints against him, we cannot judge whether those who have accused Trump of inappropriate acts are telling the truth or not. There are a multitude of legitimate reasons why women wait to come forward with their stories of victimization. That being said, there are also a multitude of reasons why some women come forward only weeks before a national election. Yet even assuming everything alleged of Donald Trump is true, he has at worst used foul language in the past and made some very bad passes with inept physical overtures. NO ONE says he raped them. NO ONE says he ever tried to rape them. NO ONE says he did anything but back off once he was rebuffed. To the contrary, as of this moment there are women of all ages - from girls of 5 to grandmothers of 85 - living in Europe who are verifiable victims of forcible sexual assaults and rapes on a massive scale. These are not ""He said, She said"" or ambiguous private situations; this is an Epidemic Against Women . And it is ENTIRELY self-caused. It happened because Europeans ALLOWED it to happen. Americans CANNOT do the same! There is only ONE ISSUE in this Presidential campaign for Women - Mass Immigration From The Third World, especially of violent men from a hostile Middle East . This can be said with complete certainty because if you are raped and murdered, a real possibility under Hillary Clinton and her European Model of Misogynist Importation, you will not be ALIVE to vote in another election. For all women interested in women, protecting daughters, caring for elders, and with a call to each Authentic Feminist who actually works toward Women's Issues (rather than being Faux Feminists preening for cameras ) there is but one candidate who can and must be supported by all. Donald Trump may provide us many excuses to doubt him, from boorish behavior to partial-birth abortion. Donald Trump may give us a million reasons to loathe him, with his dirty mouth and surly disposition. And it is true Donald Trump may be another man in the Oval Office, causing us to wait just a bit longer for a female to occupy it. Yet Donald Trump is the only candidate acceptable for Women because he alone provides a clear and unambiguous stance on the ONE WOMEN'S ISSUE which counts most- keeping women safe and alive. This is not a television program where one character is fully good and one character is fully evil yet everything somehow works out in the end no matter who wins. If Hillary Clinton is elected, despite her platitudes about Women's Rights , tens of thousands of women will suffer and many of them will die. One candidate makes you feel good about yourself, but puts all women alarmingly at risk. One candidate makes you sick to your stomach, but has female-centric policies which actually protect them. There can be no hesitation that, for our families as well as ourselves , the one who deserves our vote is Donald Trump. Time is short - share this with friends, tell every woman you know ...and get yourself to the voting booth. Guy Somerset",FAKE
+10413,Cannabis Aficionados Develop THC-A Crystalline: The Strongest Hash in The World at 99.99% THC,"posted by Eddie While the sky-high potency may scare some away, Crystalline provides a surprisingly clean, focused, and inspired high. There’s a new kid on the block; her name is Crystalline, and she’s from the Hash Family. Crystalline hash is the latest craze in the hash community, and everyone wants a taste. The demand is so high that THC-A Crystalline is going for $200 a gram in southern California dispensaries . Testing in at an astonishing 99.9% THC, Crystalline is officially the strongest hash on the market. Other concentrates such as ice hash , rosin , and BHO range from 50-80% THC. Macro image of THC Crystalline. Photo courtesy of Allie Beckett. Cannabis concentrates are known for their variety of textures and forms, from shatter to wax to crumble, there’s something for everyone to enjoy. What many extract lovers don’t realize is that these various textures develop from the solvent used to make the concentrate and the methods of purging the solvent out of the final product. However, when THC is reduced to its purest state, it crystallizes, creating crystal ‘rocks’ which look very different than any other marijuana concentrate on the market. Crystalline turns many people off just because of its looks. The internet is filled with scornful reviews of its meth-like appearance, and this criticism is entirely valid. But don’t judge a book by its cover because cannabis crystalline is the purest form of THC and provides sufficient relief for many patients suffering from debilitating and fatal illnesses. And hey, it’s not THC’s fault that it’s a compound with a crystal structure. Guild Extracts, a Southern California extraction company, is the current leader of crystalline production. Their crystallizing process is kept under lock and key, but they claim the ability to make THC-A Crystalline out of any starting material ranging from hydrocarbon extract, CO2 extract, and ice water concentrate. One thing Guild Extracts has made clear is that they are not using a solvent to create this hash, rather, they are extracting pure THC from their starting materials. You may be wondering, what exactly is THC-A Crystalline? Well, before THC is combusted (lit on fire or vaporized) it sits in its raw acidic form, also known as THC-A. THC-A by itself is completely inactive, meaning if it is ingested it will not get you high (but it does have an extraordinary amount of medicinal benefits). When THC-A is activated through heat in a process called decarboxylation, the acidic carbon atom (the “A” in THC-A) is removed leaving behind the psychoactive THC that so many of us know and love. Macro image of THC Crystalline produced by Atom Labs. Photo courtesy of Allie Beckett. Now remember, this pure THC does not contain terpenes (the magical compounds that give cannabis strains their distinctive aroma and flavor profiles while contributing to their therapeutic effects). To make up for the lack of flavor, Guild Extracts has become famous for the “dip n dab,” dipping the crystalline concentrate into terpenes extracted from strains like Goji OG, Tangie, and Sherbert. While the sky-high potency may scare some away, Crystalline provides a surprisingly clean, focused, and inspired high. Plus, health nuts can rest easy knowing that THC-A Crystalline is completely free of any chemical inputs (think butane). source:",FAKE
+5597,BREAKING: Uncovered Huma Email Confirms the Worst… Previous Hacks DID Happen,"A newly released email from 2011 from Hillary aide Huma Abedin reportedly said that her BlackBerry wasn’t working. In response, Justin Cooper — the IT guy who set up Hillary’s private email server — said, “We were attacked again.” Justin Cooper was the Clinton aide who set up the email server.Huma: ""My clinton [black]berry not working""Cooper: ""We were attacked again"" pic.twitter.com/KjQcbocQzz 
+— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) October 28, 2016 
+Given that such an attack probably wouldn’t have been carried out by wolverines with distemper, I’m going to assume that the attack was one carried out by hackers. Advertisement - story continues below 
+Also, one typically doesn’t use the word “again” unless it’s happened before — and in this context, a lot of times before. 
+I am not privy, of course, to the inner workings of Hillary Clinton’s world. In fact, very few people are, considering that Clinton isn’t exactly ruler of the Principality of Transparencyland. However, given her history, I find that it’s usually safe to assume the worst when it comes to her. 
+It’s not that we’ve been lied to yet again. If I got angry every time Hillary Clinton lied to us, my blood pressure could run a hydroelectric power plant. It’s that she lied so cravenly about an issue that affects our national security . 
+And she wants to take this mentality to 1600 Pennsylvania? Give me a break. Advertisement - story continues below",FAKE
+4037,MH370 search: Debris found in Reunion may give clues,"Saint-Denis, Reunion Island (CNN) When investigators get an in-person view of a wing component that likely came from a Boeing 777, they'll be looking for not only a serial number but clues as to why the part broke off the Boeing 777.
+
+One group of independent observers said Thursday that the damage to the component -- a right wing flaperon -- should give authorities a good indication that the piece came off while the plane was still in the air.
+
+The group, led by American Mobile Satellite Corp. co-founder Mike Exner, points to the small amount of damage to the front of the flaperon and the ragged horizontal tear across the back.
+
+The rear damage could have been caused if the airliner had its flaperon down as it went into the ocean, some members of Exner's group wrote in a preliminary assessment after looking at photos and videos of the component.
+
+But the lack of damage to the front makes it more likely the plane was in a high-speed, steep, spiral descent and the part fluttered until it broke off, the group said.
+
+Boeing and Australian officials are confident the debris -- found Wednesday off the coast of a remote island in the west Indian Ocean -- came from a Boeing 777 -- and might be from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a 777 that disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people on board.
+
+Exner's group -- an informal cadre of aviation experts -- said that if the flaperon were still on the wing when the plane hit water, the front would have been damaged by hitting the part of the wing to which it was attached. And the rear damage looks like it was caused by stress rather than being bent and broken off when the plane hit the water.
+
+But an aircraft component specialist who spoke to CNN disagreed.
+
+The lack of damage to the front section ""tells me that the component could still have likely been back in its original position inside the wing itself,"" said Michael Kenney, senior vice president of Universal Asset Management, which provides plane components to airlines.
+
+Boeing investigators are confident that debris found on a remote island in the Indian Ocean comes from a 777 aircraft, according to a source close to the investigation.
+
+""We are highly confident but it still needs confirmation that it is a part from a 777 aircraft,"" he told CNN's ""Erin Burnett OutFront."" ""The only 777 aircraft that we're aware of in the Indian Ocean that could have led to this part floating is MH370. But as I said, we still need to confirm that through closer study.""
+
+People cleaning a beach found the debris Wednesday on Reunion, a French overseas territory in the western Indian Ocean.
+
+The source said Boeing investigators feel confident the piece comes from a 777 because of photos that have been analyzed and a stenciled number that corresponds to a 777 component. A component number is not the same as a part number, which is generally much longer.
+
+Images of the debris also appear to match schematic drawings for the right wing flaperon from a Boeing 777. A flaperon helps the pilot control the aircraft. It is lightweight and has sealed chambers, making it buoyant.
+
+Despite this confidence, no one is saying the part definitely comes from a 777, much less MH370.
+
+Finding the debris is a ""significant development"" in the search for MH370, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said.
+
+New debris, which washed ashore Thursday and appears to resemble remnants of a suitcase, is also part of the investigation, Reunion Island police officials confirmed to CNN.
+
+A preliminary assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies, produced in the wake of the MH370 disaster, suggested it was likely someone in the cockpit deliberately caused the aircraft's movements before the Malaysian airliner disappeared.
+
+Two U.S. officials briefed on the matter told CNN that the assessment, which was not intended for public release, was prepared months ago and was solely based on available satellite and other evidence.
+
+The U.S. intelligence assessment was largely focused on the multiple course changes the aircraft made after it deviated from its scheduled Kuala Lumpur to Beijing route. Analysts determined that, absent any other evidence, it's most likely someone in the cockpit deliberately moved the aircraft to specific waypoints, crossing Indonesian territory and eventually toward the south Indian Ocean.
+
+Malaysian investigators haven't reported finding any evidence that casts suspicion on the pilots.
+
+If it does turn out to be from Flight 370, the development would reassure Australian officials that they are looking for the rest of the plane in the right area, Truss and Dolan said.
+
+""It's credible that debris from MH370 could have reached the Reunion Islands by now,"" Truss said.
+
+Malaysia Airlines is sending a team of investigators to Paris and a second team to Saint-Denis, Reunion, on Friday, an airline official in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, told CNN.
+
+It's unclear how identification will be made.
+
+Normally identification would be aided by a small serial number plate attached to a flaperon, but the part found on the beach appears to be missing the serial number plate, according to photographs.
+
+Other markings may be found on the part, said Kenney, the executive from Universal Asset Management.
+
+Australia is leading the underwater search for the remains of Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean, some 2,300 nautical miles (3,700 kilometers) east of Reunion. But Truss said that French and Malaysian authorities will be responsible for establishing whether the debris found off the island came from the missing jetliner.
+
+Australia has offered its help, he said, including asking marine experts to look at photos of the debris to determine whether barnacles on it are ""consistent with something that was floating in the oceans for 16 months or more.""",REAL
+8231,Bitcoin Soars As China Launches Crackdown On Wealth-Management Products,"  Bitcoin Soars As China Launches Crackdown On Wealth-Management Products Oct 26, 2016 3:36 PM 0 SHARES 
+After trading in a tight range for much of the summer, coiled within a $100 range around the mid-$500s, over the past several weeks bitcoin has once again started to push higher, closely tracking the decline in the Chinese Yuan as shown below. 
+However, the most recent burst in bitcoin activity, which sent it surging by over $20 overnight, has little to do with any moves in the official Chinese currency, which recently rebounded modestly tracking the recent dip in the dollar, and is likely attributable to a long overdue crackdown on China's Wealth-management products, a key component of China’s ""shadow banking"" system. 
+As Bloomberg reported overnight , China’s central bank is finally conducting a trial monitoring of banks’ off-balance-sheet wealth-management products under its macro-prudential assessment system. A question one should ask perhaps is why the $1.9 trillion in asset locked up with WMPs had so far been exempt from regulatory supervision. 
+Just as notable, going forward the WMPs will be included in calculating broad-based credit, something we discussed last week when we showed just how vastly China is undercounting its broadest credit aggregate, Total Social Financing by ignoring shadow debt . Currently, the products aren’t included in the assessment framework, however it’s not clear when or if the People’s Bank of China will add them, Bloomberg added. 
+
+Citigroup estimated that 13 trillion yuan ($1.9 trillion) of the products, which are a key building block in China’s shadow-banking system, could be covered. Other banks' estimates are even bigger. 
+No matter the size, the extra scrutiny will certainly cool growth of the unregulated products, as China tries to rein in financial risks that could tank the economy. Adding the products to the central bank’s calculations could help to emphasize requirements for lenders to limit dangers and maintain sufficient capital. A change would mean regulators would be may be better able to “control the pace of broad-based credit supply,"" Judy Zhang, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Citigroup, said in a note. WMP issuance and yields may shrink as lenders pass on extra costs to investors, she said. 
+As Bank of America explained overnight, in late 2015, PBoC officially introduced its MPA framework, which expanded its focus from loans to credit in a broader sense, covering not only loans but also banks’ bond investments, equity rights and other investments, financial assets bought with re-sale agreement, and deposits with non-deposit-taking financial institutions. The MPA can make it more difficult for banks to adjust on-balance sheet assets to circumvent government’s credit control. The latest move adds banks’ off-balance sheet WMPs, i.e. those without a principal guarantee, to the mix. This, in theory, should make it more difficult for banks to move assets off balance sheet . 
+Chinese households, companies and banks held a record 26.3 trillion yuan of wealth-management products as of June 30 and the China Banking Regulatory Commission has been tightening rules on WMPs since late 2014. Most of the products are non-principal guaranteed, which means they reside off banks’ balance sheets. 
+The implications for th economy can be significant: 
+The cornerstone of PBoC’s MPA is capital adequacy, in-line with Basel III. So it’s possible that in the long term, banks may be required to provide capital for at least some of its off-balance sheet assets, including the WMPs. As of Jun, total balance of bank WMPs reached Rmb26.3tr. Without considering future growth, the additional amount under the MPA would be some Rmb15.5tr, after deducting Rmb6.1tr products with guarantees (already on banks’ balance sheet) and Rmb4.7tr of cash and deposits. This represents about 7% of banks’ on-balance sheet assets as of June (Rmb217tr). More important, we should view the latest development in the broad context of policy tightening over shadow banking activities since early this year (related reports linked in the sidebar). 
+However, the most immediate practical consideration from the increased regulatory supervision of the $1.9 trillion in related product is that these funds, many of which are of highly suspect origins, will seek to shift away from the heightened scrutiny and find alternative venues. Which may explain the latest jump in bitcoin as a modest portion of the funds locked up wealth-management products may have found itself into the digital currency, promptly sending it higher by nearly 5%. Should the crackdown on WMPs persist, it may be just the catalyst to push bitcoin above its recent multi-year highs just why of $800 hit earlier this summer.",FAKE
+2193,How Republicans are targeting Clinton on foreign policy,"Republican groups are moving to the next phase of their plan to take down Hillary Clinton.
+
+After spending much of the year focused on her use of a private email server as secretary of State as a way of raising doubts about her ethics and honesty, outside GOP groups are pivoting to her record as the nation's top diplomat to call into question her leadership abilities.
+
+The focus on national security and foreign policy following the Paris terror attacks and the San Bernardino, Calif, mass shooting has created a natural opening for Clinton to highlight her experience as secretary of State under President Obama. It's also brought a sense of urgency to GOP efforts to turn what's long been considered an asset into a liability, by highlighting what they say was Clinton's role in the president's failed policy approaches — especially in Libya as it becomes a safe haven for Islamic State militants.
+
+America Rising PAC, an outside Republican group, is blasting out missives about Clinton's role in the U.S. intervention in Libya, Iraq, Syria and the release of Guantanamo Bay detainees. Other groups are also expected to spend millions on television ads next year. American Crossroads is combing through digital archives and poll testing for spots that may begin next year, said Crossroads spokesman Ian Prior.
+
+A newly formed super PAC called Future 45 ran its first round of ads in Iowa and New Hampshire using her comments before a special House Benghazi committee that ""I was responsible for quite a bit"" of Obama's foreign policy. ""Her tenure of secretary of State is a vulnerability, not an asset, and it merits serious scrutiny,"" said Dan Conston, a senior adviser to the group, which is planning additional spots.
+
+On Monday, Jeb Bush told an Iowa audience that the Islamic State is taking hold in Libya. ""This is the place that Hillary Clinton, even in the debate in Las Vegas, said was an example of success in foreign policy, of smart power. Really?"" said Bush. ""Libya today is completely chaotic.""
+
+Polls show voters trust Clinton more than any of the Republican candidates, none of whom have similar foreign policy experience,
+
+Yet, much like 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry found himself playing defense on national security issues despite extensive foreign policy credentials, Republicans see an opportunity to tarnish Clinton.
+
+Democrats say Republicans are grasping for a new line of attack because voter interest in her private email server has waned after her testimony before the House special Benghazi committee failed to produce any major revelations about the 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya. Further, Clinton began her campaign with an advantage even greater than Kerry on foreign policy, according to polling, which Democrats say makes it unlikely the strategy can work the way it did in 2004.
+
+""It's classic Karl Rove: Hit your opponent where she's strong,"" said Heather Hurlburt, a former speechwriter to Secretary of State Madeline Albright, referring to President George W. Bush's former chief political strategist. ""They have no choice but to try to tear her down,"" she said.
+
+Republicans acknowledge that this portion of their strategy will be the hardest to execute because it will require significant investments in paid media to make their case.
+
+Yet there is an opening. Beginning with attacks leveled by her Democratic challengers in the most recent debate, Clinton is facing increased scrutiny over Obama's 2011 decision to, along with a large number of nations, intervene in Libya without a plan to fill the void left after the ouster of Moammar Gaddafi.
+
+Obama himself has called the ensuing chaos ""a lesson I had to learn"" about the need to manage new transitions to democracy.
+
+In a Monday interview with CBS's Charlie Rose, Clinton repeated that Gaddafi had ""American blood on his hands"" and ""was a threat to the broader region."" Now the international community needs to join together, as do the armed groups unallied with the Islamic State, to defeat the terrorist network, she said.
+
+Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, says Libya is the biggest trouble spot for Clinton. ""I do think she's got to maybe rethink her argument right now,"" he said. ""I certainly don't think one can evaluate it as a success,"" he said.
+
+Yet Republicans have already spent a significant amount of time on Benghazi, and they are circulating talking points on controversies that may be harder to sell.
+
+For instance: that Clinton also misjudged Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, having referred to him as a ""reformer"" and different from his father. They are also focused on the administration's drawdown of troops in Iraq, which they say left a vacuum for terrorist activity to grow. They say Clinton advocated against leaving a residual force in 2011.
+
+Republicans are also zeroing in on Clinton's decision against labeling Boko Haram, responsible for many more deaths than the Islamic State, a terrorist group — a decision they say allowed terrorist activity to multiply.
+
+Some of the accusations, concerning high-level national security decisions made in the most private of meetings, are difficult to prove, while others aren't meaningful to the public, said Grant Green, a former national security official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
+
+""It's got to be something that the guy out in Omaha can understand,"" he said. Meantime ""It's easy for her to go out and say 'I'm the only one with significant foreign policy experience,'"" said Green.
+
+""As you get further into the general campaign and people start paying closer attention, she can pick these apart one by one, "" said O'Hanlon, a nonpartisan expert. ""On issues of Iraq and Syria, it's pretty clear she's a little more hawkish and she's being vindicated,"" she said.
+
+Derek Chollet, who served on Clinton's policy planning staff from 2009 to 2011, said no one ""takes pride"" in what Libya has become. Yet, inserting U.S. troops after the fact would have overruled the wishes of another sovereign government, he said. ""It's hard to find a compelling path that would have prevented what happened,"" said Chollet, who is now advising the campaign.
+
+On Iraq, he said the U.S. timetable for withdrawal was negotiated by the previous administration, and that former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not grant legal authority for a continuing troop presence. Chollet, who worked closely with Clinton at the time, said she was ""very worried"" about the security of the U.S. embassy and diplomatic facilities absent a U.S. troop presence.
+
+""There was an intense debate through the administration on the slope of the withdrawal. We were constrained by the limits of the strategic framework Bush had signed,"" he said.",REAL
+2830,Ayatollah's decree complicates Iran nuclear talks,The online comment fits closely with his campaign platform.,REAL
+2819,Boehner vows fight to scuttle Iran nuclear deal,"House Speaker John Boehner vowed Wednesday to do ""everything possible"" to stop the newly struck Iran nuclear deal, as Congress formally begins consideration of the hard-fought pact.
+
+""While the president's Iran deal may have been applauded at the United Nations, I think he faces serious skepticism here at home,"" Boehner told reporters at a briefing. ""Let me just assure you that members of Congress will ask much tougher questions this afternoon when we meet with the president's team, because a bad deal threatens the security of the American people.""
+
+The warning comes just days after the U.N. Security Council endorsed the deal, over the objections of many in Congress. Republicans, and some Democrats, had wanted the administration to wait until Congress reviews it before seeking approval from the United Nations.
+
+Congress nevertheless will have its say. Fox News has learned the administration formally sent the deal to Capitol Hill on Sunday -- this starts a 60-day clock for lawmakers to consider it, and then vote to approve or disapprove it or take no action.
+
+The White House has launched an aggressive campaign in recent days, trying to sway wavering Democrats while publicly ripping Republicans for opposing the deal.
+
+In an appearance on ""The Daily Show"" Tuesday, Obama portrayed the controversial deal as the best compromise the government could achieve. In a jab at the George W. Bush administration, he joked that his critics think if only former Vice President Dick Cheney had been on the U.S. negotiating team, ""then everything would be fine.""
+
+But Congress is facing pressure from both sides of the issue. While the White House lobbies for approval, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, a foe of the Iran nuclear, is telling Republicans that Congress must stop the pact.
+
+Dermer met Wednesday morning with some 30 to 40 Republicans -- part of the Conservative Opportunity Society -- at the invitation of Rep. Steve King of Iowa, the group's chairman. Dermer told the group that Congress is the last backstop and no deal is better than a bad deal.
+
+The U.N. action would not take effect for 90 days. Congress technically has limited leverage over the international aspects of the agreement. Still, Obama does not want Congress to kill any part of the deal, and has vowed to veto any such effort.
+
+The agreement itself would roll back sanctions in exchange for limits on Iran's nuclear program, with the ultimate goal of blocking Tehran's pathway to a nuclear weapon for as long as the deal's in place.
+
+Critics argue that Iran could still be well-positioned to pursue a nuclear weapon after a decade, all the while reaping billions in economic benefits. Further, they're concerned the deal gives Iran too much leeway to stall when international inspectors want to visit suspected nuclear sites.
+
+Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., said in a statement Tuesday that they learned from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that two ""side deals"" between Iran and the IAEA will remain secret from Congress and the public.
+
+According to the lawmakers, one agreement covers inspection of the Parchin military complex, and the other concerns potential military aspects of Iran's nuclear program. On the former, they said, Iran would be able to strike a separate arrangement with the IAEA concerning inspections at Parchin.
+
+""In failing to secure the disclosure of these secret side deals, the Obama administration is asking Congress and the American people to trust, but not verify,"" Cotton said in a statement. ""What we cannot do is trust the terror-sponsoring, anti-American, outlaw regime that governs Iran and that has been deceiving the world on its nuclear weapons work for years.""
+
+Fox News' Chad Pergram and Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
+
+",REAL
+8410,The Dark Agenda Behind Globalism And Open Borders,"The Dark Agenda Behind Globalism And Open Borders   
+by Brandon Smith 
+When people unfamiliar with the liberty movement stumble onto the undeniable fact of the “conspiracy” of globalism they tend to look for easy answers to understand what it is and why it exists. Most people today have been conditioned to perceive events from a misinterpreted standpoint of “Occam’s Razor” — they wrongly assume that the simplest explanation is probably the right one. 
+In fact, this is not what Occam’s Razor states. Instead, to summarize, it states that the simplest explanation GIVEN THE EVIDENCE at hand is probably the right explanation. 
+It has been well known and documented for decades that the push for globalism is a deliberate and focused effort on the part of a select “elite;” international financiers, central bankers, political leaders and the numerous members of exclusive think tanks. They often openly admit their goals for total globalization in their own publications, perhaps believing that the uneducated commoners would never read them anyway. Carroll Quigley, mentor to Bill Clinton and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is often quoted with open admissions to the general scheme: 
+“The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.” – Carroll Quigley, Tragedy And Hope 
+The people behind the effort to enforce globalism are tied together by a particular ideology, perhaps even a cult-like religion, in which they envision a world order as described in Plato’s Republic. They believe that they are “chosen” either by fate, destiny or genetics to rule as philosopher kings over the rest of us. They believe that they are the wisest and most capable that humanity has to offer, and that through evolutionary means, they can create chaos and order out of thin air and mold society at will. 
+This mentality is evident in the systems that they build and exploit. For example, central banking in general is nothing more than a mechanism for driving nations into debt, currency devaluation, and ultimately, enslavement through widespread economic extortion. The end game for central banks is, I believe, the triggering of historic financial crisis, which can then be used by the elites as leverage to promote complete global centralization as the only viable solution. 
+This process of destabilizing economies and societies is not directed by the heads of the various central banks. Instead, it is directed by even more central global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements, as outlined in revealing mainstream articles like Ruling The World Of Money published by Harpers Magazine. 
+We also find through the words of globalists that the campaign for a “new world order” is not meant to be voluntary. 
+“… When the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the new world order … and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.” – HG Welles, Fabian Socialist and author of The New World Order 
+“In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than f rom the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.” – Richard Gardner, member of the Trilateral Commission, published in the April, 1974 issue of Foreign Affairs 
+“The New World Order cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the single most significant component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change its perceptions.” – Henry Kissinger, World Action Council, April 19, 1994 
+I could quote globalists all day long, but I think you get the general idea. While some people see globalism as a “natural offshoot” of free markets or the inevitable outcome of economic progress, the reality is that the simplest explanation (given the evidence at hand) is that globalism is an outright war waged against the ideal of sovereign peoples and nations. It is a guerrilla war, or fourth generation warfare, waged by a small group of elites against the rest of us. 
+A significant element of this war concerns the nature of borders. Borders of nations, states and even towns and villages, are not just lines on a map or invisible barriers in the dirt. This is what the elites and the mainstream media would like us to believe. Instead, borders when applied correctly represent principles; or at least, that is supposed to be their function. 
+Human beings are natural community builders; we are constantly seeking out others of like-mind and like-purpose because we understand subconsciously that groups of individuals working together can (often but not always) accomplish more. That said, human beings also have a natural tendency to value individual freedom and the right to voluntary association. We do not like to be forced to associate with people or groups that do not hold similar values. 
+Cultures erect borders because, frankly, people have the right to vet those who wish to join and participate in their endeavors. People also have a right to discriminate against anyone who does not share their core values; or, in other words, we have the right to refuse association with other groups and ideologies that are destructive to our own. 
+Interestingly, globalists and their mouthpieces will argue that by refusing to associate with those who might undermine our values, it is WE who are violating THEIR rights. See how that works? 
+Globalists exploit the word “isolationism” to shame sovereignty champions in the eyes of the public, but there is no shame in isolation when such principles as freedom of speech and expression or the right to self defense are on the line. There is also nothing wrong with isolating a prosperous economic model from unsuccessful economic models. Forcing a decentralized free market economy to adopt feudal administration through central banking and government will eventually destroy that model. Forcing a free market economy into fiscal interdependencey with socialist economies will also most likely undermine that culture. Just as importing millions of people with differing values to feed on a nation after it has had socialism thrust upon it is a recipe for collapse. 
+The point is, some values and social structures are mutually exclusive; no matter how hard you try, certain cultures can never be homogenized with other cultures. You can only eliminate one culture to make room for the other in a border-less world. This is what globalists seek to achieve. It is the greater purpose behind open border policies and globalization – to annihilate ideological competition so that humanity thinks it has no other option but the elitist religion. The ultimate end game of globalists is not to control governments (governments are nothing more than a tool). Rather, their end game is to obtain total psychological influence and eventually consent from the masses. 
+Variety and choice have to be removed from our environment in order for globalism to work, which is a nice way to say that many people will have to die and many principles will have to be erased from the public consciousness. The elites assert that their concept of a single world culture is the pinnacle principle of mankind, and that there is no longer any need for borders because no other principle is superior to theirs. As long as borders as a concept continue to exist there is always the chance of separate and different ideals rising to compete with the globalist philosophy. This is unacceptable to the elites. 
+This has led not so subtle propaganda meme that cultures that value sovereignty over globalism are somehow seething cauldrons of potential evil. Today, with the rising tide of anti-globalist movements, the argument in the mainstream is that “populists” (conservatives) are of a lower and uneducated class and are a dangerous element set to topple the “peace and prosperity” afforded by globalist hands. In other words, we are treated like children scrawling with our finger paints across a finely crafted Mona Lisa. Once again, Carroll Quigley promotes (or predicts) this propaganda decades in advance when he discusses the need for “working within the system” for change instead of fighting against it: 
+“For example, I’ve talked about the lower middle class as the backbone of fascism in the future. I think this may happen. The party members of the Nazi Party in Germany were consistently lower middle class. I think that the right-wing movements in this country are pretty generally in this group.” – Carroll Quigley, from Dissent: Do We Need It? 
+The problem is that these people refuse to confront the fruits of globalization that can be observed so far. Globalists have had free reign over most of the world’s governments for at least a century, if not longer. As a consequence of their influences, we have had two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Great Recession which is still ongoing, too many regional conflicts and genocides to count and the systematic oppression of free agent entrepreneurs, inventors and ideas to the point that we are now suffering from social and financial stagnation. 
+The globalists have long been in power, yet, the existence of borders is blamed for the storm of crises we have endured for the past hundred years? Liberty champions are called “deplorable” populists and fascists while globalists dodge blame like slimy slithering eels? 
+This is the best card the globalists have up their sleeve, and it is the reason why I continue to argue that they plan to allow conservative movements to gain a measure of political power in the next year, only to pull the plug on international fiscal life support and blame us for the resulting tragedy. 
+There is no modicum of evidence to support the notion that globalization, interdependencey and centralization actually work. One need only examine the economic and immigration nightmare present in the EU to understand this. So, the globalists will now argue that the world is actually not centralized ENOUGH. That’s right; they will claim we need more globalization, not less, to solve the world’s ailments. 
+In the meantime, principles of sovereignty have to be historically demonized — the concept of separate cultures built on separate beliefs has to be psychologically equated with evil by future generations. Otherwise, the globalists will never be able to successfully establish a global system without borders. 
+Imagine, for a moment, an era not far away in which the principle of sovereignty is considered so abhorrent, so racist, so violent and poisonous that any individual would be shamed or even punished by the collective for entertaining the notion. Imagine a world in which sovereignty and conservatism are held up to the next generation as the new “original sins;” dangerous ideas that almost brought about the extinction of man. 
+This mental prison is where globalists want to take us. We can break free, but this would require a complete reversal of the way in which we participate in society. Meaning, we need a rebellion of voluntary associations. A push for decentralization instead of globalization. Thousands upon thousands of voluntary groups focusing on localization, self reliance and true production. We must act to build a system that is based on redundancy instead of fragile interdependencey. We need to go back to an age of many borders, not less borders, until every individual is himself free to participate in whatever social group or endeavor he believes is best for him, as well as free to defend against people that seek to sabotage him; a voluntary tribal society devoid of forced associations. 
+Of course, this effort would require unimaginable sacrifice and a fight that would probably last a generation. To suggest otherwise would be a lie. I can’t possibly convince anyone that a potential future based on a hypothetical model is worth that sacrifice. I have no idea whether it is or is not. I can only point out that the globalist dominated world we live in today is clearly doomed. We can argue about what comes next after we have removed our heads from the guillotine. 
+
+
+
+If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here . We greatly appreciate your patronage.",FAKE
+8253,The U.S. National Bird Is Now a Drone,MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft (Lt Col Leslie Pratt/US Air Force),FAKE
+6983,Facebook lets advertisers exclude users by race,"Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers. 
+That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays. 
+The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.” Ads that exclude people based on race, gender and other sensitive factors are prohibited by federal law in housing and employment. 
+[…] 
+When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman , he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”",FAKE
+9423,Interview 1227 – New World Next Week with James Evan Pilato,Enter your email address below to receive updates each time we publish new content. Privacy guaranteed. We never share your info. Follow Us,FAKE
+724,Why Trump is dredging up 1990s attacks against the Clintons,"The presumptive Republican nominee is reintroducing Americans to a panoply of dormant scandals, personal transgressions and partisan controversies that rocked Bill Clinton's White House and first lady Hillary Clinton in two turbulent presidential terms leading up to the end of the 20th Century.
+
+The goal is to link them with a flurry of more recent dramas such as those over Clinton's private email server and Benghazi, to depict her potential presidency as a return to unsavory days of rumor, innuendo and alleged malfeasance that would exhaust and disgust voters -- in effect, making the 2016 election a referendum on the Clintons, and the baggage that has always haunted their successful and resilient political careers.
+
+Case in point: a new Instagram video that pictures Bill Clinton chomping on a cigar and revives claims of wrongdoing against him by several women, which ends with the sound of Hillary Clinton laughing and a slogan: ""Here we go again?""
+
+The billionaire also appears to be taking aim at the already upside-down approval ratings of Hillary Clinton to neutralize rock-bottom perceptions of his own character revealed by polls that threaten his general election appeal, especially with women voters, the majority of whom prefer his likely Democratic rival.
+
+""What he is doing is he is exposing, not just Bill Clinton for what he was and what he had done, but it's the same as it relates to Hillary,"" Michael Cohen, Trump's legal counsel, said on CNN's ""New Day.""
+
+""She attacked Mr. Trump as being a sexist, misogynist, and he is not any of those things,"" Cohen said, portraying Hillary Clinton as an ""enabler"" of her husband's dalliances.
+
+But Trump's personal broadsides against the Clintons are not risk-free. The New York billionaire real estate investor has had a colorful personal life himself, and has been accused by the former secretary of state's allies and in news reports of sexist behavior and a string of unflattering comments about women.
+
+Still, the strategy, from Trump's point of view, has the virtue of forcing Clinton into the painful personal position of recalling her husband's past wrongdoing when she would much prefer to focus on other issues.
+
+She answered with a terse ""No"" when asked by CNN's Chris Cuomo last week whether she ever felt compelled to defend her or her husband's honor against Trump.
+
+""I know that that's exactly what he is fishing for, and you know, I'm not going to be responding.""
+
+Her campaign has dusted off the classic Clinton scandal playbook -- pivoting to focus on Trump's own vulnerabilities and stressing that the American people have more pressing concerns.
+
+""The reason he is doing it, is his own record his coming under scrutiny,"" said Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon on ""New Day"" Monday , as the Clinton camp lit into Trump over past comments that he hoped the real estate market would crash as it would benefit his businesses.
+
+Trump's attacks, aimed at fixing the picture of ""Crooked Hillary"" in the public mind as the general election gears up, recall earlier political branding hit jobs that he pulled against ""low energy"" Jeb Bush and ""little"" Marco Rubio in the GOP race.
+
+He also is showing he is ready to fight fire with a flamethrower. It is significant for instance that his first veiled reference to 1990s sexual allegations against Bill Clinton came after he concluded that the Clinton campaign was playing the ""women card"" was against him.
+
+Trump's attacks recall a tortured political era in which the Clinton White House seemed to stagger from scandal to scandal -- but repeatedly defied predictions of its demise to survive and prosper.
+
+As soon as the new First Couple arrived in Washington from Arkansas, they were beset by rumors of wrongdoing and mini ethics scandals. There was Whitewater, about the First Lady's real estate dealings in Arkansas. Travelgate, about firings of officials in the White House travel office, and Filegate about the alleged misuse of FBI papers.
+
+Early on, the Clinton White House was rocked by the suicide of legal counsel Vince Foster, a close friend of Hillary Clinton, which became the cue for another round of conspiracy theories.
+
+It all culminated in an independent counsel investigation by Ken Starr, which in turn led to the moment when Clinton became only the second President to be impeached by the House of Representatives, in 1998, for lying under oath about an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. He was subsequently acquitted in a trial before the U.S. Senate in February 1999. None of the other 'scandals' produced criminal charges against the Clintons and the Whitewater investigation was eventually wrapped up in 2002.
+
+All of that seemed like ancient history. Bill Clinton Clinton left office with a 66% approval rating, according to CNN/Gallup/USA Today polling, and threw himself into an energetic and philanthropic post presidency and built a personal fortune on the lucrative speech making circuit. Hillary Clinton pursued her own political career in the Senate, as secretary of state and her second presidential campaign.
+
+Even Starr has praised Clinton's redemptive post presidency and in remarks reported by the New York Times on Tuesday bemoaned the ""tragic dimensions"" of the Clinton scandals and investigations of which he was a part.
+
+But Trump is not interested in putting the past to rest. He's dredging it up.
+
+""It's the one thing with her, whether it's Whitewater or whether it's Vince or whether it's Benghazi. It's always a mess with Hillary,"" Trump said in the Post interview.
+
+The most pressing question raised by Trump's personal assault using the ugliest moments of the Clinton presidency is whether it will work.
+
+Tana Goertz, a senior Trump adviser, told CNN's Pamela Brown on Tuesday that there were no fears in the billionaire's camp that raising Bill Clinton's conduct would boost his wife's approval ratings, just as they did back in the 1990s.
+
+""Back then, people felt sorry for Hillary because her husband was unfaithful. They believed she was going to do the right thing for women and empower women, strengthen women and support women and none of that happened,"" Goertz said. ""That might have been a sympathy vote back then, but that will not happen again.""
+
+Throughout their turbulent political careers, the Clintons have shown an ability to court public support by portraying attacks against them as vicious partisan witch hunts and displayed an almost supernatural capacity to weather political crises.
+
+The period of personal anguish, self-reflection and humiliation that Hillary Clinton endured as she questioned whether to save her marriage after the Lewinsky saga meanwhile confounded her enemies as it stirred public empathy for her plight. But she also sparked a public debate over why she had chosen to stay with her husband amid claims by some critics that the marriage was simply a vehicle for her political ambition.
+
+But Hillary Clinton supporter Maria Cardona dismissed the idea that the ghosts of the 1990s will stalk her campaign a two decades later.
+
+""The Bill Clinton issue is already baked in. People know him,"" Cardona said on CNN.
+
+""An attack on her because of what her husband did is going to backfire in an incredibly big way -- she is going to continue to be focused on issues.""",REAL
+7043,Hillary’s High Crimes & Misdemeanors Threaten Constitutional Crisis, ,FAKE
+3658,"3 reasons Americans die sooner than people in other developed nations: guns, drugs, cars","Why are Americans expected to die sooner than their peers in other high-income countries?
+
+A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association takes a look at the question. The results are, well, not too surprising — three of the big drivers for the year analyzed, 2012, were guns, drugs, and cars.
+
+The study looked at these causes of injury deaths, which are the three biggest causes of injury death in the US and altogether account for more than 100,000 early deaths each year in America. It compared how common these deaths are in the US versus other high-income countries — the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, and eight others — with 2012 data from the US National Vital Statistics System and the World Health Organization Mortality Database.
+
+It found that, on average, men and women in the other high-income countries can expect to live about 2.2 years longer than men and women in the US — and guns, drugs, and cars played a prominent role.
+
+Among men, gun deaths explained 21 percent of the gap, drug overdoses 14 percent, and car crashes 13 percent. And among women, gun deaths explained 4 percent, drug overdoses 9 percent, and car crashes 6 percent.
+
+In total, the death rate for guns, drugs, and cars was much, much higher in the US than its developed peers, as this chart shows:
+
+""Although the reasons for the gap in life expectancy at birth between the United States and comparable countries are complex,"" study authors Andrew Fenelon, Li-Hui Chen, and Susan Baker wrote, ""a substantial portion of this gap reflects just three causes of injury.""
+
+So why do Americans die more from these causes? There are cultural factors, but bad policy plays a role too.
+
+With guns, the research shows that America's unusually high levels of gun ownership lead to more gun violence. Other factors, such as socioeconomic issues, contribute to violence, but guns are the one issue that makes America unique relative to other developed countries in comparable socioeconomic circumstances. (To learn more about America's gun problem, read Vox's explainer.)
+
+""A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,"" UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins wrote in a breakthrough analysis in 1999. ""A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.""
+
+Some research also shows tightening existing gun control measures in the US would help: Studies in both Connecticut and Missouri suggested that gun licensing laws in those states helped reduce homicides and suicides.
+
+With drugs, America is now in the middle of a harrowing opioid and heroin epidemic that's killing tens of thousands of people each year. (For an in-depth dive on this topic, read Vox's explainer.)
+
+Academic analyses of the crisis have concluded that the US was too slow to respond to misleading advertising campaigns from opioid producers, in which they claimed that their drugs were safe and effective. Americans have suffered the consequences, getting addicted to and dying from opioid painkillers and heroin as pharmaceutical companies have massively profited.
+
+With cars, by the 1960s European policies began encouraging walking, cycling, and public transportation. The US, meanwhile, continued to encourage sprawl and driving. The result: Americans drive much more than their European peers, and are more likely to die in crashes as a result. (To learn more about US and European transportation policy, read Ralph Buehler's great explainer at the Atlantic's CityLab.)
+
+Even perfect policies might not fix all of these problems — Americans, after all, love their guns, drugs, and cars, and that cultural preference will likely remain strong for some time. But better policies could push the US in the right direction — and save lives.",REAL
+10015,Trump Dedicates D.C. Hotel: 'The Future Lies With The Dreamers'," 
+Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday celebrated the reuse of a landmark that was heading toward being just another old building before he made it a luxury hotel and turned it into a symbol of what he wants to achieve as president.
+Coming off of campaign events in Florida Tuesday and before he jetted off to North Carolina to resume his quest for the White House, Trump was joined by his wife and children at the formal grand opening of the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., built in the city’s historic Old Post Office building.
+“Under budget and ahead of schedule. So important. We don’t hear those words so often, but you will,” said Trump , linking the hotel redevelopment to his promised performance as president. “Today is a metaphor for what we can accomplish for this country.”
+ 
+Related Stories Trump Sets GOP Fundraising Milestone In Small-Donor Contributions Newt Gingrich Defends Donald Trump Against ‘Sexual Predator’ Accusations Donald Trump’s Star On Hollywood Walk Of Fame Vandalized Trump also spoke as a developer, not just as a candidate.
+“My job is to look at undeveloped spaces and imagine what they could be,” he said. “These are spaces that have no hope, no future. But you need imagination and you need the ability to get them done and to unlock their potential, and to unlock the potential of the people working on those spaces and on those projects, and we have so many things we can do for our country.”
+“The United States is great,” he said. “It’s great. Its people are great. There is no task or project too great. There is no dream outside of our reach. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it can’t be done. The future lies with the dreamers, not the cynics and the critics.”
+ 
+The fact that Trump took a few hours for something other than the campaign grated on some who felt the event was an improper distraction.
+
+Republican strategist Steve Schmidt , who helped Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in his 2008 White House race, was among those who said Trump’s priorities were skewed.
+“The walls are collapsing,” Schmidt said, referring to polls showing Trump behind. Trump has discounted those polls as inaccurate and pointed to others that show him leading.
+ 
+Trending Stories Frustrated With Media Bias, Trump Campaign Takes Its Case Directly To Voters With Nightly Show On Facebook Independent Voters Push Trump To The Front In Florida And Ohio RNC Official Takes CNN Host To Task For Claiming There Is No Media Bias “He is not doing any of the normal activities that you’d be doing 13 days out in a presidential race for somebody who’s competitive. You don’t take a time-out to tend to your business interests,” he said.
+Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway suggested that a dose of perspective might be useful.
+“He’s making a pit stop here in Washington and his under-budget, ahead-of-schedule hotel is really remarkable. It shows Americans the tangible accomplishments of Donald Trump. He’s somebody who builds things. He’s somebody who fixes things,” she said Wednesday on NBC’s Today show.
+“And you know, respectfully, Hillary Clinton has time to go to an Adele concert and everybody thinks that’s really cool. Donald Trump stops off to unveil just an incredible, stunning piece of architecture, new hotel, first-class hotel, and everybody’s hair is on fire,” she said.
+Conway dared anyone to find a candidate with a more active schedule than Trump.
+“Hillary Clinton took five days off to prepare for one debate and everybody looked at that as some kind of noble exercise with 23 days to go. Nobody covered that as, where is she? Why doesn’t she campaign much? What is she doing? Where is she hiding?” Conway said. “He’s got the most active campaign schedule of the two candidates by far.”
+What do you think?",FAKE
+5531,Wikileaks Confirming Clinton Was Complicit in the Murder of Ambassador Stevens- The CSS Printed This Allegation Four Years Ago,"
+The late Ambassador Stevens
+Wikileaks is about to confirm the story that The Common Sense Show told 4 years ago in that Ambassador Stevens was set up to die because his stories of gun-running, child trafficking and drug-running on behalf of the CIA in order to promote regime change in Libya using terrorists funded by these illegal activities, were leaking out and it was only a few months until the election. Subsequently, Ambassador Stevens had to be silenced. And Petraeus had to be put in a place where he was not forced to testify before Congress. At the same time, Clinton was broadcasting Stevens whereabouts and she refused to provide the extra protection Stevens was so desperately requesting. Being that Stevens was working for the CIA, then head of the CIA, David Petraeus, would have known about Chris Stevens activities. To protect Obama’s 2012 election, both Stevens and Petraeus had to be gone. People are asking me how I knew all of this four years ago and I say, “I had a source from inside of ARSOF who wanted the real truth to be told. Somebody who knew this nation could not afford to let Clinton ever become President”. This is an excerpt of what I wrote 4 years ago…..  
+……..Nov. 2012
+Who had Ambassador Stevens Killed
+and How the Petraeus Affair Factors In There is the reason for an event and there is the real reason behind the event. Sixty percent of all married men cheat on their spouse. The more money they make and the more power a man possesses, the more opportunity for cheating.
+I have swamp land for sale, in Florida, for anyone to purchase if they are naive enough to believe that David Petraeus, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), resigned solely based upon having an extramarital affair with the biographer-turned-mistress, Colonel Paula Broadwell. How did the affair compromise Petraeus’ position as CIA director? The FBI has concluded that it did not.
+The media has suggested that the affair began in 2006. So, the ignorant American public is supposed to believe that David Patraeus was vetted by the FBI, the Secret Service and the rest of the Obama goon squad and they did not discover the affair until AFTER Ambassador’s Steven’s murder? How convenient is that? This doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the CIA’s and the FBI’s vetting practices now does it? Let me be clear again about this outrageous set of facts. The most powerful and presumably thorough intelligence agency was unable to detect Patraeus’ affair during the vetting process? America, this is what you are being asked to believe!
+It is abundantly clear that the extramarital affair excuse is just one more piece of excrement piled upon a growing mountain of Oba-manure perpetrated by this administration in order to cover up the fact that they had Chris Stevens murdered by the very terrorists that Stevens was running guns to on behalf of the CIA.
+Does Adultery Get One Fired? Let’s examine this event through the lens of common sense. Adultery is indeed a violation of the Military Code of Justice and senior command officers have indeed lost their careers over their sexual indiscretions. However, David Patraeus is no longer a command officer in the military and would not be subject to these prohibitions. And the adultery prohibition is rarely enforced, even in the military, and when it is, it is used as a matter of political expediency in order to get rid of an undesirable.
+As for the political “I did not have sex with the woman, Monica Lewinski,” crowd, adultery is not a career killer. And for the head of a federal agency, or for a cabinet member, unless the affair can be shown to compromise national security, it does not end the careers of unholy partakers of the forbidden fruit while serving in high government office. Petraeus decided to quit, though he was breaking no laws by having an affair, officials said. 
+Janet and David A Tale of Two Tails Rumors persist that the way to get promoted in the Department of Homeland Security is to “provide services” to one’s superiors, especially for Homeland Security Director, Janet Napolitano. So if it is permissible for Janet to be serviced in exchange for a promotion , then why should David be any different when it comes to giving an exclusive to your mistresses’ journalistic desire to become his biographer? Yet Janet is on the verge of being promoted to Attorney General, despite her indiscretions and resulting law suit. Conversely, Patraeus is out of a job. But wait, the believability of this cover story gets worse!
+According to New York Times best-selling author, Aaron Klein, whom I have interviewed on my talk show , Hillary Clinton is a lesbian who surrounded herself with lesbian aides and staffers when she was the First Lady and she continues to do so as the Secretary of State. And as the Mail Online points out, why did it not seem to matter to Hillary that her husband chased anything that wore a skirt? It is because she is a serial lesbian who has had multiple affairs. Who cares?
+Take Attorney General, Eric Holder, his actions, related to the topic of sex, are the most reprehensible of them all. Brandon Darby , previously an FBI informant, is speaking out on the Department of Justice’s hesitancy to assist victims of human trafficking, in particular they are refusing to help children who have been victims of sex crimes. The obvious question is, who is Holder protecting? This inaction on the part of Eric Holder is far more reprehensible, and represents a greater violation of the public trust than do the actions of Hillary Clinton and Janet Napolitano.
+When one considers the fast and furious sexual life-styles of the senior cabinet members of the Obama administration, it is impossible to swallow the fact that Patraeus was sacked because of an affair.
+The Patraeus dismissal based upon an extramarital affair is a cover story, plain and simple.
+The Rats are Jumping Off the Ship I do not care what people do in their private lives behind closed doors. I do not care if Clinton and Napolitano are lesbians. My feelings hold true for the President, the Director of Homeland Security, the Secretary of State or the director of the CIA. However, when a fake cover story is concocted to cover up the murder of an ambassador, as it was with Chris Stevens, then it is everyone’s business.
+Many of the rats of the Obama administration are jumping ship in the aftermath of the murder of Ambassador Stevens and this explains why Patraeus was fired as CIA director. Patraeus is gone for the same reason that Hillary Clinton will soon be gone. Clinton is gone for the same reasons that Eric Holder is contemplating leaving.
+Congressional Hearings Regarding the
+Death of Stevens Begin Soon If Petraeus was subpoenaed before Congress in his role as CIA director, he could not invoke the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. If Hillary Clinton is subpoenaed to testify before Congress, in her role as Secretary of State, she cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. And if members of the Obama administration begin to incriminate themselves for their dirty deeds which resulted in Stevens’ death, then they implicate Obama. 
+This is Obama’s potential Watergate moment. If Clinton reveals before Congress that, as the senior official that oversees diplomatic security, that she denied Stevens’ requests for extra security and that she, Holder, Patraeus and Obama watch drone footage for nearly seven hours as Stevens and his party were murdered and that these senior level Cabinet officials blocked AFRICOM Commander, General Hamm , and the Commander of Carrier Task Force 3, Admiral Gayouette from rescuing the Stevens contingent, and then had both men arrested when the tried to disobey orders and rescue Stevens in violation of these executive orders from Obama administration.
+The gravity of these events are stunning! All of these senior officials, including the President, are implicated as accomplices in Stevens murder. This is criminally negligent homicide. This is first degree murder! And why did Stevens have to be murdered? Stevens was murdered because he was running guns for the CIA to al-Qaeda operatives, first in Libya last year and in Syria this year . (EDITOR’S NOTE: WE KNOW THAT STEVENS WAS ALSO RUNNING KIDS AND DRUGS TO SUPPORT THE CIA IN THEIR EFFORTS TO ARM TERRORISTS IN THE OVERTHROW OF LIBYA.) 
+Dead men tell no tales in this Middle East version of Fast and Furious. This also explains why Patraeus had to be sacked. He was the link between Stevens’ gun running and al-Qaeda since Stevens’ gun running was a CIA operation conducted under the purview of Petraeus. This account is partially confirmed by Council on Foreign Relations member, Dr Steve Pieczenik, as states that Stevens was running guns and missiles into Syria . You remember the missing hand held stinger missiles that went missing in the NATO invasion of Libya last year? Those would be the ones! Can you imagine the public’s further outcry when al-Qaeda operatives begin brining down American commercial airliners with these weapons. Even Biden would not be able to pardon this motley crew!
+How Will the New World Order Spin This? Only a month before the election, I thought Obama’s reign of terror was over. However, in the month before the election, the economic outcome appeared brighter for the first time in years. The housing market showed signs of rebounding. The stock market appeared stronger and the banks were actually talking about loosening credit.
+The George Soros voting machines came into play. The military’s vote was compromised. All the stops were pulled out to extend the heinous tyranny of Obama by the global elite. Why? The very simple and obvious reason is that with Benghazi-Gate, the elite can pull Obama’s strings in any direction they want. If Obama gets out of line, the global elite will topple his presidency and the aforementioned Obamanites will go to prison for a very long time.
+What will the next four years look like in America? Well, under the existing conditions, with Obama’s very freedom riding on the whims of the globalists, the future of America looks bleak as Obama is completely compromised.
+END OF EXCERPT FROM NOVEMBER OF 2012
+ 
+Conclusion When Wikileaks releases their information, and it shows that Stevens was running drugs, guns and children to support the overthrow of Libya, Clinton will come into the foreground. She repeatedly turned down Stevens request for additional protection. PEtraeus was sacked for the bogus reason of having an extramarital affair so he did not have to tell Congress what he knew because he could not hide behind the 5th Amendment.
+If this breaks before the election, Clinton cannot win. She alone set up Stevens by denying protection and transmitting by email Stevens location by email from her private server.
+We know that Stevens was murdered. What happened to Petreaus? After he was fired from the CIA, he went to work for the NWO in Belgrade where serves as the minister of propaganda. He is the chief censorship official in Belgrade. How do I know this? I was interviewed on the Voice of Belgrade radio this past summer and I was told that they had a hard time getting me by the censors and that is when I learned that Petreaus ran State-owned Belgrade media.
+Now we find out that 1,000 emails between Clinton and General Petraeus were not turned over in the original FBI investigation. These emails are going to sink the good ship Hillary. Remember, The Common Sense Show had the information about to be leaked by Wikileaks four years ago. If justice is done, Clinton will soon be doing the perp walk for the murder of Chris Stevens.
+ 
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+ 
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+
+This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.
+",FAKE
+6360,Toxic chemicals found in children’s Halloween makeup – study,"Toxic chemicals found in children’s Halloween makeup – study Toxic chemicals found in children’s Halloween makeup – study By 0 73 
+Halloween is supposed to make your skin crawl, but not like this. A new study finds the scariest part of the holiday may not be the costumes, but makeup for kids. Out of 48 makeup palettes, almost half contained toxic heavy metals. 
+Nearly 20 percent of makeup palettes contain lead and cadmium, according to the newly published study by the Breast Cancer Fund. The study found that some products contained as many as four metals, including arsenic and chromium. 
+Nine of the palettes were found to contain lead, a chemical that is unsafe at any level, for children particularly. Parents may have purchased and applied these products to their children unwittingly, as the makeup doesn’t have to list ingredients on their labels. 
+The BCF may have been among the first to test the palettes, as the FDA does not regulate this particular product. 
+“ The FDA that regulates makeup does not have the power to require pre-market testing ,” Jen Coleman with the Oregon Environmental Council told KGW. 
+The cosmetic safety law enacted 75 years ago does not require testing even for products marketed to children. While the FDA cannot do anything about the problem, they have issued guidelines to avoiding “ a rash, swollen eyelids, or other reaction ” this Halloween. 
+The guidelines make no mention of potential heavy metal poisoning, but they do offer advice like “ Follow all directions carefully ,” and “ Don’t decorate your face with things that aren’t intended for your skin. ” 
+What’s a parent to do in the meantime? Other than use all-natural makeup, the best option is to avoid dark pigments. The BCF study found a correlation between the darkness of the color and the lead content. The darker the color, the more lead it was found to contain. 
+Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
+5481,"After Vets Fight War, Feds Demand Money Back… But Illegals And Refugees Can Keep Their Money","After Vets Fight War, Feds Demand Money Back… But Illegals And Refugees Can Keep Their Money by IWB · October 27, 2016 Tweet 
+Thanks you for your service? No. After promising bonuses & education benefits to military in order to get them to re-enlist for the Afghanistan & Iraq Wars, the Pentagon is now demanding the money back from vets who can’t afford to pay. This is how Obama treats veterans — just like Hillary treats those who protect her in the Secret Service. Can nayone trust their promises? 
+Illegals And Refugees Can Keep Their Money 
+Military Soldiers Made To Pay Bonuses Back But Illegals And Refugees Can Keep There Money",FAKE
+8835,TRUMP TARGETS DEMOCRATIC STATES IN FINAL ASSAULT...,"LA TIMES TUESDAY: FBI Investigators had planned to conduct new email review over several weeks. It now hopes to complete 'preliminary assessment' in coming days, but agency officials have not decided how, or whether, they will disclose results publicly... Developing...",FAKE
+10486,US Moving ISIS Fighters From Iraq To Syria To Topple Assad,"— Jim Jatras (@JimJatras) October 29, 2016 
+Jatras said the US had spent millions of dollars and thousands of man hours to train so-called “moderate militants” in Syria – only for most of them to join al-Qaeda or Islamic State terrorist groups. 
+The former Washington diplomat rejected the idea that there are some “moderate militants” in Syria, declaring that they are all terrorists. 
+“ People who for ideological or religious goals want to attack innocent people and kill them in order to impose some kind of an ideology on them, I think that constitutes terrorism, ” he said. 
+“ And I think trying to overthrow a government of another country to achieve that purpose is terrorism, ” Jatras added. 
+However Jihad Mouracadeh, a political analyst from Beirut, ruled out the accusation that the US and its allies want to redeploy Daesh from Mosul into Raqqah, according to regional reports. Recommended (3 months ago) Assange: Emails Prove Hillary Armed ISIS In Syria To Oust Assad 
+Mouracadeh said the US and NATO are planning to attack the Syrian city; “ says so, it seems to be illogical to redeploy Daesh to a city that is going to be under attack. “ 
+Since March 2011, Syria has been hit by militancy it blames on some Western states and their regional allies. Backed by the Russian air cover, the Syrian military is engaged in an operation to rid the country of Daesh and other terrorist groups. 
+The foreign-backed militancy has left millions of people homeless. According to a UN report more than 400,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict.",FAKE
+10181,It Happened: Personal Notes From A Young Chicago Cubs Fan,"Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo stepped up to the microphone during the World Series rally in Grant Park and choked up, as he spoke about what it meant to be able to be on a team with the 38-year-old catcher David Ross, who was a mentor to him. Rizzo, Ross, and center fielder Dexter Fowler stood shoulder-to-shoulder singing that silly jingle, the one that goes, “Go Cubs Go! Go Cubs Go! Hey, Chicago, whaddya say? Cubs are gonna win today.” It all really hit home for me as a Cubs fan.
+Life is full of things that bring us joy but carry unsavory aspects to them. The Cubs team is owned by Tom Ricketts, a man who donated $1 million to Donald Trump and bears a frightening resemblance to Ted Cruz; so much that one might think Ricketts was his brother. The Cubs also signed Aroldis Chapman, a closer, who served a 30-game suspension this year for domestic abuse. Cubs executives and city officials are responsible for some pretty rapid gentrification in the area of Wrigleyville. With that said, almost all of the Cubs players had fun with each other and never let the pressures of fan-fueled folklore around “curses” defeat them. That made the postseason truly blissful.
+This is where I wrote, Thomas G, my father’s name on the wall. I had to squeeze it in near the brick sidewalk.
+I live about seven blocks from Wrigley Field. I went down there multiple times in the past week. The day after they won, I went down to Wrigley Field to write my father’s name on the stadium wall and join thousands of other Cubs fans in paying tribute to family, who died before they could see the Cubs win a World Series. In the immediate hours after their sweet victory, I took my life into my own hands and went down to the area around Clark and Addison to snap a photo of the stadium sign with “World Series Champions” emblazoned on it.
+On Sunday, right before Game 5, down 3-1 in the series, I stood outside the friendly confines and said to myself—and to my father, even though I don’t really believe in this kind of stuff, this was going to be the game where they turned it all around. That they could still come back. Also, I bought a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times after each game, even the editions with the devastating headlines on Game 3 and Game 4, because it was important to have the full story. I can now put those papers side-by-side and forever see the journey the Chicago Cubs took and relive the heart-wrenching and euphoric moments that took place.
+This seismic sports event—ending the longest championship drought in American sports history—gripped me like so many other Americans. It taught me, once again, the importance of slowing down life and reveling in these kind of experiences. Which I know is easy for me to say. I did not have a boss, who told me I had to work a night shift or else I would be fired. I did not have to worry about what I was going to do to feed my children or prevent my home from being foreclosed. I did not have to be concerned about an array of disadvantages people should not have to confront on a daily basis, but all too often we just go, go, go, and lose sight of those little things that can make us feel a bit more content in life. Or we reject slowing down to appreciate something amazing that magnificently disrupts our routine.
+Additionally, during an election that has smothered and shaken many of us, the perfect antidote was watching this team play baseball. Players like Rizzo let their guard down and made themselves vulnerable in front of us. They were on a world stage, where they perhaps may have thought they needed to maintain a level of toughness or masculinity. Rizzo, on the other hand, as he now famously told Ross during Game 7, was an “emotional wreck,” and he did not seem to be ashamed of making that confession.
+Many of us were “emotional wrecks.” Everyone watching this series felt like “emotional wrecks” at some point. Not everyone watched all moments of the games, unless you happened to be in the select group of people that possibly had tickets to all the games.
+I’ll never forget how Ross told Rizzo it was only going to get worse in the 9th inning. He was right. The Cleveland Indians tied the game in the 8th, acrobatic second baseman Javier Baez had a mishap with a bunt that could have been costly in the 9th, and fans had to bow their heads and hope Chapman would not make a mistake, even though manager Joe Maddon clearly overworked him the past few games.
+Statue outside Wrigley Field of Ernie Banks (Photo by Kevin Gosztola)
+The weather went from great to pouring rain. There was a delay. That delay gave the team a kind of gift, a bit of a halftime to find their composure to go out and win in the 10th inning. (It was suggested during the rally that this may have been a gift from legendary shortstop and first baseman, Ernie Banks, who was “Mr. Cub.” Or, legendary third baseman Ron Santo, who later became a WGN radio broadcaster. )
+So, Rizzo, the “emotional wreck,” stepped up to the microphone during the rally and gave this very real and human tribute to a mentor, “Grandpa” Ross, who played his last game on November 2.
+“Gramps and I sat down a few years ago in an offseason before his last season with Boston. He was a free agent, and we just talked,” Rizzo shared. “We had the same agent. We’re talking, and I say to my agent, man, this is what the Chicago Cubs need. He is exactly what we need to bring everything together. Obviously, a lot of pieces came through with that, but he taught myself personally how to become a real winner. He’s like a brother to me.”
+Fighting back tears, Rizzo continued, “He’s taught me a lot in life—on the field, off the field, how to be a better person. I’m forever grateful for him. He’s going out a champion forever. For the rest of his life, he can say the last game that he played he’s a world champion.”
+That to me is what has made these past moments special. The fact that it took so very long for the team to finally win a baseball championship means all three-to-four generations were brought together. Sons and daughters know their parents longed for this, and many of them have parents, who longed to see what happened. If those parents are still alive, their parents were ecstatic to have lived to see a Cubs World Series.
+Kevin Gosztola
+Families shared stories about their first games, games they remembered, games they want to forget, and games they saw with their fathers or mothers. They shared stories of players they remembered or recalled when they first put on a Cubs baseball hat or wore a jersey with their favorite player’s name on the back. I dug out a photo of me when I was a toddler wearing my Cubs shirt.
+I am 28 years-old. I waited 13 years for this because 2003 was the first postseason, where I really got into watching the Cubs play and experienced what it meant to fail to end the drought when they lost to the Florida Marlins in the National League Championship Series. That is a rather short time span when compared to legions of fans.
+Maddon said, “It’s a players’ game.” Indeed, but for the Cubs, it’s unique. Cubs baseball was essentially a fans’ game, much more so than other ball clubs.
+The last two years of decisions by business executives were made for the fans. The scouts, who went out and found these all-star players, did it for the fans. They recognized there were so many aging Chicago Cubs fans, who kept asking them on the street if they were going to live to see the Cubs win a World Series. Theo Epstein, one of the executives who enabled this team, did not want to have to tell any more fans to take their vitamins when asked if this would be The Year.
+Even with 103 wins in the regular season and the status of number one team in baseball, all too many fans were aware of the record for teams, who came in to the postseason on top and did not make it to the World Series. We also took note of the statistics for comebacks in the World Series when teams were down 3-1. So few ever win not only three games in a row but three games in a row, including two on the road.
+That put tremendous pressure on the Cubs players. They clearly felt it, and we thank them for putting up with millions of “emotional wrecks.”
+As fans process and revel in the fact that it happened (as Maddon would say, how we did not suck), I think about what this means for next year. For the first time, it is possible to watch the Cubs without bringing a legacy of doubt and negativity to games. There are no more goats. There is no more Steve Bartman. There are no more distractions that are not typically part of baseball. Everyone’s favorite punchlines don’t really work anymore. They all are part of the past, and the immediate future is baseball with a team that will have some of the players, who won this championship and who will undoubtedly find ways to dazzle us again as they attempt to repeat as champions in 2017.
+*** 
+For a coda, Chicago Cubs fan Caitlin Swieca pledged a day after Chapman signed with the team in July to donate $10 to a Chicago domestic violence organization every time he got a save. Her campaign managed to raise over $31,000, especially when it took off after she shared it on Twitter.
+Swieca told ESPN she thought during Game 7, “We all compromised what we believed in to root for this guy, and he’s gonna blow it.” Then, it shifted to a celebration. Cubs pitcher Mike Montgomery got his first career save ever, and it was in Game 7 of the World Series. She was happy Chapman did not get the glory and said it couldn’t have been scripted better.
+Oh, and at the parade, some of us fans looked up to see a plane with a banner that read, “Chinese Americans For Trump Go Cubs.” I stood next to a Filipino American family, who had some Chinese heritage in their ancestry. She thought it must be a joke. Then, someone told her it was real. They read something about this group of Chinese Americans. Instantly, she said she was insulted.
+We’re not all Trump fans because Ricketts owns our team. Only a small segment are, and they are the same kind of white men and women disconnected from reality, who you will find in the fandom of just about every American sports team. They would probably support Trump whether Ricketts was a Cubs executive or not.
+Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel were at the rally, but they are both hot garbage. Neither took the stage to speak, and I view that as some kind of small political victory that sweetens the victory over a baseball team with a racist/colonialist sports mascot, which should be replaced immediately. In fact, let’s conjure the Curse of the Racist Mascot and say the Cubs passed it on to them and that’ll prolong their championship drought until they replace Chief Wahoo. Maybe then the Indians will get rid of him.
+The post It Happened: Personal Notes From A Young Chicago Cubs Fan appeared first on Shadowproof .
+",FAKE
+5601,Loony Pseudo-Christian Says That Liberals Are Using Witchcraft To ‘Fog’ Christians’ Heads (VIDEO),"  
+It’s always nice to know that some people aren’t as concerned with the election as they are with the “big picture.” For Lance Wallnau, that constitutes turning America into a Fundamentalist Christian nation. Wallnau is a Seven Mountains Dominionist (so is Ted Cruz) who thinks that there is a vast left-wing conspiracy, even though he says he’s not really a conspiracy buff. There’s some cognitive dissonance for you. 
+Appearing on The Jim Bakker Show on Wednesday, Wallnau opened up his big bag of blarney and laid out his theories about the left-wing’s diabolical plans to destroy conservatives, especially Christian conservatives. Wallnau thinks that the left has a web of progressive organizations like MoveOn.org, Media Matters and Right Wing Watch that controls the media and decides what Americans think and talk about. 
+“They are all independent organizations coordinated by one group of people like us who handle the money. So they’ll show up where there’s race issues—boom, and make them inflammatory. They’ll show up where there’s a campus issue—boom, and make it inflammatory. Then the media machine kicks in, Media Matters, which is run by one of their organizations, and they come in and they get it into the social media channels so it’s in Facebook and everything. And you would think all of America’s ablaze. It’s a handful of funded, executed strategists with entities called 527s that are disciplining America.” 
+Where to start with this stew of projection? No one group handles the money for all the liberal advocacy groups. The idea is absurd. These groups do not plot to turn any single issue into an inflammatory one; that happens organically depending on what life brings us. He’s never heard of the “shit happens” theory, I guess. Media Matters is not a media group unto itself, it exists to keep the actual media honest. Social networks? You think anyone can control those? If so, you really are stupid. And those horrible 527s that are controlling this “disciplining” of America? There are plenty of those on the right, as well. The 527 designation just means it’s a non-profit advocacy group. A quick look at the top fifty 527s in this election cycle shows that all sorts of issues and ideologies are represented. 
+But Wallnau hasn’t emptied his can of crazy yet. Showing an amazing capacity for projection, he explains why Christians are feeling that things are not quite right: 
+“The web literally is coming down on America. And what’s sad is, how many Christians feel this fog on their head at times? Do you feel that? It’s almost like everything’s going wrong. And that fog that’s on Christians is the collective witchcraft that comes over the Body of Christ because there’s spirits being authorized to be released.” 
+He goes on to blame the imaginary left-wing syndicate for authorizing Satan to run things. Authorize? So Satan has to get a rubber stamp of some kind? Is he the one authorizing the release of those spirits? If he is, he must have mountains of paperwork. One wonders when he has time to tempt anyone. 
+Like most pseudo-Christians, Wallnau loves to fall back on the idea that his devil is running things when those things aren’t going his way. That’s toddler-level thinking. What else would you expect, though, from someone who thinks God sent Donald Trump to be their savior? 
+The charge of witchcraft obliges me to repeat things I may have said before but that always bear repeating. Witches do not sit around in groups of 13 trying to figure out ways to ruin the lives of others. We have our own problems and we don’t need or want more stuff to deal with. We are not some cabal intent on turning America into a macrocosm of our own ideology. That’s the Dominionist’s thing. We are quite happy to live out own lives and let others do the same. 
+That said, we do get involved in elections. Just like any other American, we volunteer for our candidates. We phone bank and go door-to-door. We vote and encourage others to do the same. If we are working any witchcraft it is the magic of working together to better the lives of everyone. Jim Bakker and Lance Wallnau ought to try it sometime. 
+Here’s the clip from our conspiracy mates friends at Right Wing Watch 
+Featured Image via Screen Capture Share this Article!",FAKE
+3520,"New ISIS video shows Paris attackers committing prior atrocities, threatening UK","A new video released by the ISIS terror group late Sunday shows nine of the extremists who carried out the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris beheading and shooting captives, as well as training with weapons while plotting the carnage that left 130 dead in the French capital.
+
+The 17-minute video shows the extent of the planning that went into the multiple attacks in Paris, which French authorities have said from the beginning was planned in Syria. The video was provided online by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadi websites.
+
+The video does not contain any footage of the attacks themselves, but is assembled from material shot before the men left for Paris, as well as news and amateur videos. The video did not specify where the nine men were filmed, but it was believed to have been in ISIS-controlled territory in Syria.
+
+The video also contains threats against the United Kingdom, showing images of London landmarks Tower Bridge and St. Paul's Cathedral and claiming extremists are ready to strike ""anytime, anywhere."" At one point, the image of British Prime Minister David Cameron is shown with a crosshair over his face.
+
+A narrator describes the terrorists as ""nine lions of the caliphate who were mobilised from their lairs to make a whole country, France, get down on its knees.""
+
+Seven of the attackers — four from Belgium and three from France — spoke fluent French. The two others — identified by their noms de guerre as Iraqis — spoke in Arabic.
+
+Seven of the militants, including a 20-year-old who was the youngest of the group, were filmed standing behind bound captives, described as ""apostates,"" who were either beheaded or shot.
+
+Among those who can be seen in the video are Bilal Hadfi, who blew himself up outside France's national stadium on that deadly Friday night.
+
+""You destroy our homes and kill our fathers, our brothers, our sisters, our mothers, our children,"" Hadfi says in a message directed at the members of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS.
+
+""Soon on the Champs-Elysées,"" says Samy Amimour, who was raised in a Paris suburb near the French national stadium, as he holds a captive's head aloft.
+
+One militant, Brahim Abdeslam, is seen at a makeshift shooting range. Abdeslam, whose brother Salah fled Paris that night and remains at large, blew himself up at a Paris cafe where he was the only victim. Salah Abdeslam is not seen in the video.
+
+The Nov. 13 attacks targeted a packed concert hall, a restaurant and cafe, and a soccer match at the national stadium.
+
+
+
+Immediately after the attacks, French President Francois Hollande imposed a nationwide state of emergency that is to remain in place until Feb. 26. Hollande has asked for an extension and reiterated that request Monday.
+
+
+
+""No threat will give France pause in what it must do against terrorist. And if I have taken steps to extend the state of emergency, it is because I am aware of the threat and that we will not concede,"" Hollande said in response to the video.
+
+
+
+French Foreign Ministry spokesman Romain Nadal said the government is studying the video but would not comment on its contents.
+
+According to the anti-ISIS activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, Brahim Abdeslam and two other attackers were trained in Raqqa, the extremist group's stronghold and the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate.
+
+In the video, as in other ISIS propaganda trying to drive a wedge between European Muslims and their governments, the men say it is a religious duty to join them. They threaten more attacks in Europe, and the footage closes with one of the militants holding a severed head and footage of Cameron giving a speech — with a text in English warning that whoever stands with the unbelievers ""will be a target for our swords.""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4499,"Obama Looking For Justice Who Will 'Interpret' The Law, Not 'Make' It","Obama Looking For Justice Who Will 'Interpret' The Law, Not 'Make' It
+
+The legal world has a new blogger: former constitutional law professor and current President Barack Obama.
+
+The president took to SCOTUSblog, the leading online chronicle of the Supreme Court, on Wednesday to offer some ""spoiler-free insights"" into what he is seeking in a justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia.
+
+Aside from ""mastery of the law,"" Obama said he wants to choose a nominee who understands ""a judge's job is to interpret the law, not make the law."" But in cases where the law's unclear, the president wrote, he will look for ""the kind of life experience learned outside the classroom and the courtroom; experience that suggests he or she views the law not only as an intellectual exercise, but also grasps the way it affects the daily reality of people's lives in a big, complicated democracy, and in rapidly changing times.""
+
+And, about those times: Senate Republicans signaled this week they will take no action on whomever the White House nominates. All 11 GOP members of the Judiciary Committee signed a letter Tuesday saying they would not give their consent under the Constitution. The lawmakers said they did not intend to even meet with the nominee, let alone hold a public hearing on his or her qualifications.
+
+On Wednesday, President Obama blasted the politics of the Senate, and said the American people would have the chance to judge his nominee — something of a public relations campaign.
+
+""My hope an expectation is that once there is an actual nominee... that those on the judiciary committee recognize that their job is to give this person a hearing, to show the courtesy of meeting with them. They are then free to vote whatever their conscience dictates.""
+
+""I'm going to do my job, I'm going to nominate someone,"" he continued, ""and let the American people decide as to whether that person is qualified.""
+
+That means the court could operate without a full complement of nine members for a year or more, the equivalent of two terms of the Supreme Court. At least one current justice, Samuel Alito, commented on that, telling an audience at Georgetown Law school this week, ""We will deal with it.""
+
+""There's nothing in the Constitution that specifies the size of the Supreme Court,"" Alito said. ""There were times in the history of the court when the court had an even number of justices. They must have been more agreeable in those days.""",REAL
+5231,Penny Nance: Trump vs. Miss Universe -- I can’t get to victim when I think of Alicia Machado,"At Monday’s presidential debate Hillary Clinton’s asserted that Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe, was victimized about her weight by Donald Trump. Her remarks have, perhaps rightfully, given some women pause.  So let’s reflect a moment and add some context to this allegation.  Here’s where I’ve come down.
+
+Like many young girls of my era, I grew up watching the Miss America Pageant.  My friends and I would get together, root for the young woman from our state, or pick another favorite if she didn’t make the top ten.
+
+We held our breath as some of them struggled to answer the interview question and discussed our own answers regarding world peace.  We clapped for the pianist and giggled at the fiery baton twirler.  It was reality TV before reality TV.  And who knew that years later I would be friends with some of those same young women as they went on to have laudable careers in law and broadcasting. The women I know were then, and remain today, smart and gifted women of noble character.
+
+Fast forward to today, and somewhere along the way pageants fell out of favor.  Perhaps it was second wave feminism of the 60s and 70s, or perhaps we just got bored with them.  Regardless, in 2004, the ABC television network dropped the show’s coverage due to record low ratings, but CMT picked it up, and there remains a smaller following.  Most of us were done with Miss America.  However, her more racy sisters, Miss USA and co-owned Miss Universe were, by this time, split off and vying for our attention.
+
+Unlike Miss America, these pageants make no pretense of being anything more than a “beauty” pageant.  They have no talent competition and award no scholarships.
+
+In fact, according to Bustle.com, the entire reason for the split was because Miss America 1951 Yolande Belbeze refused to be photographed for a newspaper wearing a swimsuit.  One of the show’s sponsors, Catalina swimwear, retaliated by creating its own show and, thus, we have Miss USA and Miss Universe.
+
+Of course, there are some smart, talented women who have chosen to participate in the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, but let’s be honest, it’s not why they win.
+
+The women who participate voluntarily don a bikini and walk in front of judges to be, well, judged.
+
+The participants are competing for a job based on their bodies and good looks.
+
+Their worth is based almost solely upon those things and, for one year, they are to represent the company with the asset of conventional beauty.  Not brains, not talent, just beauty.  Quite literally, their bodies are their money makers.
+
+Here’s a little known fact, even the U.S government recognizes this arrangement.  I am told by friends who have modeled that they are able to write off of their taxes anything they do to keep their assets looking good. All the things women spend money on — hair, makeup, gym memberships, and even Botox — is a write off.  Even Uncle Sam gets the joke. Their bodies are their small businesses I suppose.
+
+So here’s the deal. Logically, I can’t get to victim when I think of Alicia Machado.  Name calling is never nice, and — shocker! — Donald Trump isn’t diplomatic in giving criticism.
+
+Here’s the irony.  Regardless of how much Hillary Clinton wants Ms. Machado to be the poster child for misused women, she doesn’t fit the narrative.  Let’s be honest, a woman who voluntarily puts on a bikini and literally asks people to judge her based almost solely on her body can’t be mad when they do.
+
+Ms. Machado was being paid to look perfect, and when she couldn’t -- or wouldn’t -- live up to the standard she had asked to be measured by, she caught criticism.
+
+Maybe she’s also smart and kind.  Who knows? But that was not why she was chosen to serve as Miss Universe for one year.
+
+At this point in my life, I feel conflicted about pageants.  Women I love have done them and will do them.  CWA’s Young Women for America boasts more than one pageant winner.
+
+As logical women, however, we can’t pretend that Alicia Machado was misused.  There are millions of women across this nation who are objectified, abused victims of sexism and misogyny.  Let’s work to protect them, instead of inventing new ones.
+
+Penny Young Nance is president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest women’s public policy organization. She is the author of the forthcoming book ""Feisty and Feminine: A Rallying Cry for Conservative Women"" (Zondervan 2016).",REAL
+7116,US intelligence warns public of pre-election day terror,"US intelligence warns public of pre-election day terror November 04, 2016 The rising sun lights One World Trade as it stands over the Manhattan borough of New York, U.S., November 2, 2016. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson 
+U.S. intelligence officials have warned authorities in New York, Texas, and Virginia about possible attacks by al Qaeda on the day prior to election day. No specific locations were mentioned, but polling station are suspected as targets. U.S. intelligence officials alerted joint terrorism task forces about the possible threat. Senior FBI official: “The FBI, working with our federal, state and local counterparts, shares and assesses intelligence on a daily basis and will continue to work closely with law enforcement and intelligence community partners to identify and disrupt any potential threat to public safety.” Local authorities in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin and Florida said they are not boosting election-related law enforcement personnel or resources above 2012 levels. 
+(ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA) U.S. intelligence officials have warned local authorities in New York, Texas and Virginia about possible attacks by al Qaeda on Monday, a day before the U.S. presidential election, CBS News reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources. 
+No specific locations were mentioned, but U.S. intelligence officials alerted joint terrorism task forces about the possible threat, CBS reported. 
+“The FBI, working with our federal, state and local counterparts, shares and assesses intelligence on a daily basis and will continue to work closely with law enforcement and intelligence community partners to identify and disrupt any potential threat to public safety,” a senior FBI official told CBS. 
+TRUNEWS could not immediately verify the report, and officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.",FAKE
+10517,Carl G. Jung Attitude Types and the Sash of Solitude,"Carl G. Jung Attitude Types and the Sash of Solitude Nov 8, 2016 0 0 
+Jung believed that our orientation to the world was a foundational aspect of our personality. Jung identified was the two opposite ways in which we adapt to, or orient ourselves to, the world. These are Jung’s attitudes of Extraversion and Introversion. Extraversion – Our energy moves toward the outer world of people, places and things; the world outside of us. Introversion – Our energy moves toward the inner world of thoughts and ideas; the world inside of us. Loneliness vs. Solitude 
+As human beings, we are social creatures and, without others around us from birth, we would not even be able to stay alive in this world. Social space plays a crucial role in the development of our personality, as the direction of our development is determined by the expectations of other people and our desire to meet those expectations. That is how we become a part of a collective, social space called society, and society receives its special nature from the culture it represents. 
+The book of our personal history is written in this social space, and our identity is built upon the foundation of our personal history. We are surrounded by other people, and their expectations and requirements are present in our mind when we are alone. Most people do not understand the difference between solitude and being lonely. The solitude is at the same time loneliness for us. 
+The two words, however, mean two different situations. Solitude is the state of the mind, whereas solitude is the state of the Consciousness. 
+In the isolated state of consciousness of Ego-dominated mind we do not like to be alone, when we are alone, we think we are lonely, we find it difficult to tolerate, we try to avoid it. How we do it, depends on our attitude types. Extraversion vs. Introversion 
+Extroverted people focus primarily on social life. When we are alone, we seek friends, go to parties, because we like to share our pleasures and sorrows with others. 
+Introverted people, on the other hand, tolerate loneliness much better, they like to be alone. They turn towards their internal world (thoughts and emotions). They are not alone, though, as other people are present in their mind in the form of their opinions and expectations. When they turn inward, they talk, argue with the opinions of others, and analyze the reactions of others. 
+For an external observer, an introverted person might seem to be alone, but there is usually a whole little group in the head of the person. When an introverted person is alone, they try to find some activity to occupy themselves in order to avoid the unpleasant feelings that come with loneliness. They are capable of watching TV for hours, or use work as an escape route. The Gift of Solitude 
+Why do people so desperately run away from loneliness, from being alone? 
+Because we do not know ourselves, so we do not like being alone. When we are lonely, we must face the fact that our entire personality is pretence, and our whole identity is built upon false foundations. 
+Even if these sentences are not formulated so specifically in our mind when we are on our own, the anxiety and depression overcoming us signify that there is something wrong with us. We feel lonely, so we escape so as to find shelter in the company of others or in our own thoughts from the negative emotions. 
+We feel lonely because we are full of insistence. We insist on our personal identity, our own history, in which the main roles are always played by others. Solitude is a menace to the foundations of our identity. 
+It is true that during our life we are often surrounded by other people, and we live our life as members of the society, but deep inside we remain separate, isolated individuals for the whole of our life. Very deep inside we are born alone, live alone and we die alone. Being alone like that is a state we interpret as solitude. 
+Only the awakening of the Consciousness is capable of putting an end to that sense of solitude rooted in our original isolation. Only when we have experienced that Miracle, do we recognize that loneliness is our natural state, in which the independent, still all-penetrating Presence shines on. 
+Read more articles from Frank M. Wanderer Vote Up Frank M. Wanderer PhD Frank M. Wanderer Ph.D is a professor of psychology, a consciousness researcher and writer. Frank is the author of the books "" The Revolution of Consciousness: De-conditioning the Programmed Mind "", "" Ego - Alertness - Consciousness: The Path to Your Spiritual Home "" and several books on consciousness . With a lifelong interest in the mystery of human existence, Frank’s work is to help others wake up from identification with our personal history and the illusory world of the forms and shapes, and to find our identity in what he calls “the Miracle”, the mystery of the Consciousness. You can also follow his blog HERE",FAKE
+5389,Russian FM Lavrov reminds USA of war crimes in Yugoslavia,"Russian FM Lavrov reminds USA of war crimes in Yugoslavia 31.10.2016 | Source: Pravda.Ru Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reminded the United States of its bombings of Belgrade, Yugoslavia , when the US did not seem to care at all for civilian casualties. Today, the US tries to accuse Russia of war crimes in Syria , Lavrov said in an interview for Rossiya 1 TV channel for a documentary about Russian politician Yevgeny Primakov. ""When a true patriot, an experienced politician, an outstanding statesman, a man with great intuition, with an encyclopedic education - when he learned about the bombings of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by the United States, he did not see any possibility to continue ""business as usual"" with the USA. His plane made a U-turn in midair, and that U-turn meant that Russia could not but defend its truth in cooperation with other powers to achieve equal relations and mutually advantageous arrangements - this is the purpose that Russia has,"" Sergei Lavrov said. ""The aggression against Yugoslavia was, of course, an act of aggression, and it was also the first armed attack on a sovereign state in Europe since 1945. If we talk about it now against the background of what is happening around Syria, our Western partners, especially American and British ones, have already reached the level of public threats in their hysteria, using words such as ""barbaric,"" ""war crimes,"" said Sergey Lavrov.""The aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was fraught with attacks on a huge number of civilian targets, including, among other things, television of Serbia, bridges, on which civilian passenger trains were traveling and a lot more. Thousands were killed, including several hundreds of children, a quarter of a million of refugees, whom no one has ever thought of since then. If Russia, in Primakov's face, would not have reacted the way that he had reacted to such a blatant violation of international law, we wouldn't have probably forgiven that to ourselves for a long time, and our history would have had another very unpleasant page,"" the Russian Foreign Minister said. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru Evgeny Primakov. Story of U-Turn over Athlantic",FAKE
+153,Congress moves closer to preventing a shutdown,"Congress appears to be on the glide path to passing legislation to avert a government shutdown later this week as conservatives eager for a funding fight have now set December as the best time to confront President Obama on spending levels and abortion policies.
+
+A stop-gap spending bill that would fund the government at current levels through Dec. 11 cleared a key procedural hurdle in the Senate Monday on a 77 to 19 vote — and the upper chamber is expected to pass the measure as soon as Tuesday.
+
+If all goes according to the plan hatched by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the House could clear the stop-gap funding bill on Wednesday, averting a shutdown with hours to spare before the Oct. 1 deadline.
+
+The only potential speed bump standing in the way of quick consideration of the bill in the Senate was Sen. Ted Cruz, but Senate leaders took procedural steps to limit the Texas Republican’s options.
+
+Cruz railed against Planned Parenthood and the Iran deal on the Senate floor following the vote Monday, saying he believes the “votes are cooked” in Congress. He said a spending bill without any policy restrictions is “essentially a blank check” to Obama.
+
+“That’s not very clean to me – it actually sounds like a very dirty funding bill,” Cruz said.
+
+He and other conservatives for weeks have been calling on GOP leaders to confront Obama over abortion policies by using the spending bill needed to avert a shutdown this week to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood.
+
+But they are now focusing their attention on December.
+
+This turnabout occurred following House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) announcement on Friday that he will resign at the end of October rather than continue to battle with the most conservative members over how aggressively to confront Obama over issues such as spending, abortion and the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.
+
+Conservatives now view December as the better time to challenge the president because there will be a new House GOP leadership team in place that they will pressure to take a tougher approach.
+
+Republican leaders are moving ahead with a separate strategy for confronting Obama over Planned Parenthood and Obamacare by using the fast-track budget reconciliation process, under which bills can not be filibustered in the Senate. This would allow Republicans to pick a veto fight with the president.
+
+Three House committees on Monday announced plans to begin the process of attempting to repeal parts of the president’s health care law and defund Planned Parenthood through the reconciliation process.
+
+The House Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce and Education and the Workforce Committees will markup bills this week to start the reconciliation process. Once those bills pass the House, the Senate is expected consider them as well.
+
+It is not clear that the reconciliation strategy will satisfy Cruz and other conservatives and cause them to abandon their argument that a government spending bill is the best way to challenge the president.
+
+“This fight certainly isn’t over. We’ve got to remember that this is a short-term funding, a sort of patch, so we’ll likely be back here in December,” the Cruz ally said. “December will be a similar fight. It’s a new bite at the apple.”
+
+Many GOP senators and moderate Republicans in the House are wary of conservatives attempts to force a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood or other differences with Obama. They worry Republicans will be blamed for a shutdown, hurting the part in advance of the 2016 elections.
+
+For instance, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) wrote to Cruz earlier this month asking him to detail his political strategy for defunding Planned Parenthood.
+
+Ayotte wrote that she voted for a bill to redirect funds from Planned Parenthood to other women’s health providers but that legislation didn’t have enough votes pass, let alone enough votes to reverse a veto from Obama. She asked him to explain how he planned to overcome those hurdles.
+
+“During the last government shutdown, I repeatedly asked you what your strategy for success was when we did not have the votes to achieve the goal of defunding Obamacare, but I did not receive an answer,” she wrote. “I am again asking this question and would appreciate you sharing your strategy for success with all of us before any damaging government shutdown becomes imminent.”
+
+Similar tensions could arise again in December if threats of a shutdown fight resurface.",REAL
+2484,"HHS announces small extension for ObamaCare sign-up, bigger delay next year","The Obama administration on Friday offered an extension of the current ObamaCare enrollment period -- though not exactly what Republicans were seeking.
+
+Federal health officials announced Friday afternoon that they'd give people another eight days this year to enroll in an insurance policy and still get covered by Jan. 1. Previously, people had to enroll by Dec. 15 to avoid any break in coverage and have insurance at the start of 2014. The administration, amid lingering problems with the main ObamaCare website, is now pushing that deadline to Dec. 23.
+
+The move comes after the administration announced a more significant delay to the start of next year's ObamaCare enrollment period. That decision was pitched as a way to give consumers and insurance companies more time to study their options, but also conveniently pushes the second round of enrollment past the 2014 midterm elections.
+
+With the administration still offering only modest relief for the current enrollment period, Republicans questioned why the administration was focusing on the second round of enrollment, a year away.
+
+""Another day, another delay, which begs the question, does the president think enrollment will be just as bad next year?"" House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said in a statement. ""It's stunning to see the president so willing to delay next year's open enrollment period rather than focus on the ongoing chaos and uncertainty that is plaguing implementation today.""
+
+White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and a Department of Health and Human Services official confirmed the change to the 2014 sign-up on Friday. That decision does not affect those trying to enroll this year. Rather, it affects those who will sign up late next year for 2015 coverage.
+
+The administration will allow consumers to start signing up on Nov. 15, 2014, as opposed to Oct. 15. Enrollment will last until Jan. 15, 2015, instead of Dec. 7.
+
+An HHS official told Fox News the move will give insurers ""the benefit of more time to evaluate their experiences during the 2014 plan year"" and let them take into account late-filing customers when setting their 2015 rates.
+
+The official added: ""This change is good news for consumers, who will have more time to learn about plans before enrolling and an open enrollment period that's a week longer.""
+
+The administration so far has rebuffed calls to delay or extend the current enrollment period beyond March 31, 2014, even as HHS scrambles to repair the flawed HealthCare.gov site and some states struggle with their own exchanges.
+
+But by pushing off next year's enrollment period, the administration conveniently pushes off the possibility of any ObamaCare hiccups until after the midterm elections. Some of the biggest critics of the current rollout have been Democrats up for reelection next year.
+
+Obama recently tried to address some of their concerns by allowing states and insurance companies to re-offer cancelled insurance policies -- a trend which has become a major headache for the administration. Many states, though, are refusing to make any changes to the way they handle those plans.
+
+HHS argued that the delay next year will give consumers more time to educate themselves about the plans, though it would not affect coverage this year.",REAL
+3166,Trump says he's not worried by opposition to him within GOP,"Donald Trump is shrugging off the refusal of some Republican leaders to endorse him, saying most of the party will back his nomination and new voters will compensate for the rest.
+
+""Look, I'm going to get millions and millions of votes more than the Republicans would have gotten,"" Trump said an interview broadcast Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press.
+
+Trump was addressing questions raised by House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is scheduled to meet with the presumptive presidential nominee on Thursday.
+
+In an interview on ABC's This Week, Trump said he is a ""very different"" kind of candidate, and party unity may not be as big a factor because of new Republicans.
+
+""I think it would be better if it were unified,"" Trump said, adding that ""I don't think it actually has to be unified"" in the more traditional sense.
+
+""It's not called the Conservative Party,"" he told ABC. ""This is called the Republican Party.""
+
+Ryan has said he is not yet ready to endorse Trump because of doubts about his conservatism, while other party members have flatly come out against the nominee-in-waiting. That group includes 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney as well as former 2016 GOP hopefuls Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham. They cited issues ranging from Trump's abrasive language to his comments about women and Hispanics.
+
+Trump lacks the ""temperament or strength of character"" to be president, Bush wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. The former Florida governor added that ""he has not displayed a respect for the Constitution. And, he is not a consistent conservative.""
+
+Bush's brother and father, the two former presidents, have announced they would not attend the July convention that crowns Trump and had no plans to endorse, while Romney has denounced the New York businessman as a ""phony"" and a ""fraud.""
+
+Graham, the South Carolina senator who like Bush lost to Trump in the Republican nomination fight, told CNN: ""Good luck with Paul Ryan trying to find a conservative agenda with this guy.""
+
+In his NBC interview, Trump said Romney is ""ungrateful"" for his support in 2012, and that the former Massachusetts governor ""choked"" on his chance to beat President Obama. Trump said that Bush and Graham are angry that he beat them during the nomination fight, and he noted that both once backed a pledge to support the nominee.
+
+""Now they're breaking,"" Trump said. ""You know, that's a question of honor.”
+
+The presumptive Republican nominee said he was ""blindsided"" by Ryan's reluctance to endorse, saying he thought he had a good relationship with the House speaker.
+
+Ryan told CNN he wants to back the nominee, but ""I'm not there right now.""
+
+Democrats are enjoying all the GOP in-fighting — particularly likely presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who is targeting anti-Trump Republicans for the fall general election.
+
+""Obviously I'm reaching out to Democrats, Republicans, Independents — all voters who want a candidate who is running a campaign based on issues,"" Clinton told CBS' Face the Nation.
+
+Trump, saying he will beat ""Crooked Hillary"" easily in the fall, says most Republicans will wind up backing his candidacy.
+
+""You know, the party's come together,"" Trump told NBC's Meet the Press. ""I have tremendous numbers of endorsements. I'm never going to get Romney's endorsement. He choked. He blew the last election.""",REAL
+1736,Rand Paul's all-too-familiar campaign,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+5766,"Harry Reid BLASTS Comey For Misconduct, Drops Bombshell: FBI Is Sitting On Russian-Trump Info","  
+The decision of FBI Director Comey to go public with a supposed ‘bombshell’ investigation into new Hillary emails was welcomed by Trump as the mainstream media recklessly reported on this total dud of a controversy. It basically dominated the news cycle all day and probably will until we all cast out our vote next Tuesday (or November 28th if you support Trump.) 
+But the politically motivated and reckless actions of Comey have many outraged, including Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid 
+Senator Reid appeared with Clinton today to push back against the “inappropriate,” “unprecedented,” and “puzzling” move by FBI Director James Comey to suddenly go public with new emails. Roughly two months removed from retirement, Reid is waging an all-out war on Comey as he claims a “disturbing double standard” took place in the FBI’s decision to publish this misleading announcement while essentially ignoring Trump. 
+Reid pointed specifically to information the FBI allegedly has that ties Trump to Russia – information Reid says they have intentionally sat on in order to not hurt the candidate’s chances of being elected. 
+He expressed his ire in a blistering letter to Comey. Here’s a key passage: 
+Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be a clear intent to aid one political party over another. I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act, which bars FBI officials from using their official authority to influence an election. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law. 
+And it’s not as though one can accuse Reid of being blindly partisan since he previously defended Comey when Republicans tried to filibuster his nomination and subsequently delay his confirmation. Reid wrote: 
+“I believed you to be a principled public servant.” 
+The actions of Comey were indeed politically motivated as he desperately wished to be loved again by law & order conservatives. But Reid just opened up a whole new can of worms. 
+Featured image via Alex Wong/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
+3335,Hillary Clinton's shrinking email defense,"The report also discloses new details relevant to Clinton's motives and her assertion that the use of a private server was simply a matter of convenience. While criminal charges still remain highly unlikely, the inspector general's report is significant and unquestionably damaging to Clinton's public defense.
+
+Most crucially, the inspector general directly contradicts Clinton's repeated assertions that she complied both with federal law and State Department policies. ""At a minimum,"" the report finds, ""Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.""
+
+The report goes further, noting that while Clinton's subsequent production of 55,000 pages of emails in response to State Department demands partially corrected these violations, the records Clinton turned over were incomplete. Remarkably, the report includes reference to a previously unreleased 2010 email in which Clinton, responding to her deputy chief of staff for operations, Huma Abedin, directly addresses her lack of an official State Department email account and voices a fear of the ""risk of the personal being accessible"" if she had one. In a briefing, State Department officials were unable to confirm the source of this email, but if it was omitted from the records Clinton produced, it again would raise questions about the process she used to distinguish between ""federal records"" and ""personal records"" before destroying the latter.
+
+The inspector general also reveals the comments of State Department records management staff in late 2010 expressly raising concerns that Clinton's private email server ""could contain federal records that needed to be preserved in order to satisfy federal record-keeping requirements."" A senior official rebuffed these concerns, claiming that Clinton's email arrangement ""had been approved by the department legal staff"" -- an assertion the inspector general concluded was untrue -- and directed staff ""never to speak of the secretary's personal email system again.""
+
+Such facts undermine the argument that the significance of maintaining a private server and the negative effects it could have, including on responses to Freedom of Information Act requests or congressional subpoenas, were simply overlooked. Clinton's response to the report is further complicated by the fact that the State Department did not contest the inspector general's findings, concurred with its recommendations, and even acknowledges in its response that ""the department could have done better at preserving emails."" All of this would serve to undermine assertions by Clinton that the inspector general's conclusions are biased or politically motivated. Indeed, thus far Clinton's response has focused on the argument that other secretaries of state also used private email. ""Well there may be reports that come out,"" Clinton commented, ""but nothing has changed. It's the same story. Just like previous secretaries of state I used a personal email, many people did. It was not at all unprecedented."" And, it is true that the inspector general does not spare former Secretary Colin Powell from similar allegations, documenting his use of private email and his admitted failure to preserve those emails. In a nasty campaign, can politicians play nice? (Opinion) Yet this arguably only furthers the perception that the inspector general's review was both balanced and non-biased. And Clinton's response highlights how her defense -- which began with confident assertions that she followed all the rules and broke no laws -- has now been reduced to the argument that ""others did it too"" or that the rules she violated were not significant. Despite the inspector general's report, criminal charges against Clinton remain highly unlikely. While the report provides previously nonpublic information relevant to Clinton's motivations, the available public evidence remains insufficient to illustrate two facts needed for a criminal charge -- that she knew that emails on her private server were classified and that she intentionally mishandled classified information. Who in the world really wants Donald Trump to win? Yet the inspector general's report also highlights the uncertainty that surrounds the precise scope of the current FBI investigation. To the extent the FBI has limited its inquiry to security issues and the possible mishandling of classified information, for example, the inspector general's report finding violations of the federal records laws potentially implicates a different criminal statute. Removing, concealing, or destroying federal records, regardless of whether they are classified, can constitute a federal felony. But again, courts have generally required prosecutors pursuing this charge to prove that defendants knew they were violating the law, for which the evidence against Clinton appears to be lacking. In the end, extracting the truth in the Clinton email controversy in the current polarized political environment remains a nearly impossible task. Some have already begun to seize upon the inspector general's report, mischaracterizing it as clear evidence of a crime. And when the Department of Justice announces that it is not filing criminal charges -- as is both expected and perhaps inevitable -- Clinton will likely argue that it constitutes proof that she did nothing wrong. Based on the publicly available evidence, the reality appears to be nuanced in a way that is satisfying to neither side. Clinton violated the law, but committed no crime.",REAL
+3976,"Dozens dead, including one American, as hostage situation in Mali hotel ends","The deadly hostage situation at a luxury hotel in Mali's capital city ended Friday, with a U.N. report indicating dozens of bodies were littered across multiple floors of the building. One of those killed was an American, according to the State Department.
+
+The siege ""has concluded,"" State Department spokesman John Kirby announced Friday. He said about a dozen Americans were rescued uninjured from the Radisson in Bamako, but a State Department official later said one American had been killed. That person was not immediately identified.
+
+Some of the freed Americans were U.S. embassy personnel, Kirby said.
+
+Some attackers may have remained inside the hotel. A Mali security ministry spokesman told Reuters they ""dug in"" on upper floors of the building.
+
+""They are alone with the Malian special forces who are trying to dislodge them,"" spokesman Amadou Sangho said. Al Qaeda-linked jihadists claimed responsibility for the siege.
+
+A U.N. official told The Associated Press that initial reports from the field indicate 27 people were killed in the attack. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the operation is still ongoing, said 12 bodies were found in the basement and 15 bodies were found on the second floor.
+
+Another U.N. official, Mali mission spokesman Olivier Salgado, said two extremists have been killed and that forces were going from room to room, checking for more casualties.
+
+At least one guest reported the attackers instructed him to recite verses from the Koran before he was allowed to leave the hotel, Malian army commander Modibo Nama Traore told The Associated Press.
+
+At least five U.S. Defense Department personnel were among the Americans freed, according to a senior U.S. defense official, who told Fox News the 22 Defense Department and military personnel in Bamako at the time of the incident ""have all been accounted for.""
+
+Traore said Malian special forces entered the hotel and freed hostages ""floor by floor."" Hours after the attacks began, local TV images showed heavily armed troops in what appeared to be a lobby area. Some U.S. military personnel in Bamako assisted in the rescue efforts, a defense official told Fox News.
+
+Traore said 10 gunmen stormed the hotel Friday morning shouting ""Allahu Akbar,"" or ""God is great,"" in Arabic before firing on the guards. A staffer at the hotel who gave his name as Tamba Diarra said over the phone that the attackers used grenades in the assault.
+
+Al-Mourabitoun, a militant group based in northern Mali, said on Twitter that it was behind the attack, but the claim could not immediately be verified. The group is led by notorious one-eyed jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who gained recognition in 2013 for an attack on an Algerian gas plant that left 40 people dead, including three Americans.
+
+A handful of jihadi groups, some linked to Al Qaeda, seized the northern half of Mali -- a former French colony -- in 2012 and were ousted from cities and towns by a French military intervention.
+
+The Brussels-based Rezidor Hotel group that operates the hotel said the assailants had initially ""locked in"" 140 guests and 30 employees.
+
+The White House said President Obama was briefed about the attack by his national security adviser, Susan Rice. The U.S. Embassy in Mali told citizens to shelter in place amid reports of an ""ongoing active shooter operation.""
+
+In August, the embassy had issued a message warning Americans of a ""heightened security risk to westerners in southern Mali, including the area outside Bamako city.""
+
+The hotel raid Friday unfolded one week after the attacks on Paris that killed 130 people.
+
+One witness, a Guinean singer, told Reuters that he heard the attackers speaking English. ""I heard them say in English ,'Did you load it?', 'Let's go',"" Sékouba Bambino Diabaté told the news agency after he was freed.
+
+French President Francois Hollande said France was ready to help Mali with all means necessary in the wake of the attack and urged French citizens in Mali to make contact with the French Embassy there ""in order that everything is made to offer them protection.""
+
+A top official at the French presidency told The Associated Press that French citizens were in the hotel but could not give more. The official spoke anonymously in line with presidency policy.
+
+In Belgium, Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said there were four Belgians registered at the attacked hotel but it's unclear if they were taken hostage by the gunmen or not.
+
+Five Turkish Airlines personnel were among the freed hostages, Turkey's state-run news agency said.
+
+The website of the official China Daily newspaper also cited an unidentified witness as saying one Chinese citizen had been rescued.
+
+Mali's President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has cut short its trip to Chad where he was attending a meeting of G5 Sahel.
+
+The Mali presidency said on Twitter that Keita will be back to Bamako ""in the next hours.""
+
+Meanwhile, France's national gendarme service says about 50 elite police troops were en route from Paris to Bamako.
+
+A spokesman for the service who was not authorized to be publicly named said they are heading Friday from two different units of special police forces trained for emergency situations.
+
+Even after the French-led military intervention in early 2013 that drove extremists from northern towns and cities in Mali, the northern part of the country remains insecure and militant attacks have extended farther south this year, including the capital. In March, masked gunmen shot up a restaurant in Bamako that is popular with foreigners, killing five people.
+
+About 1,000 French troops remain in the country. The Netherlands also has troops working with the UN mission in Mali. According to the Dutch defense ministry, some 450 Dutch military personnel are taking part in the mission along with four Apache and three Chinook helicopters. Most of the Dutch force is based in Gao, but there are a few officers at the U.N. mission headquarters in Bamako.
+
+Fox News' Greg Palkot, Jennifer Griffin, Lucas Tomlinson, Michelle Macaluso and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4530,Suspect who worked for wealthy DC family arrested for their deaths,"Daron Dylon Wint was arrested Thursday by a fugitive task force and is charged with first-degree murder of a wealthy DC family and their housekeeper.. Wint is expected to appear in DC Superior Court on Friday afternoon.
+
+About a week after the bodies of a wealthy D.C. family and their housekeeper were discovered after a fire in their mansion, an ex-convict who once worked for the businessman and is suspected in the killings has been arrested.
+
+Daron Dylon Wint, 34, was arrested about 11 p.m. Thursday by a fugitive task force and is charged with first-degree murder while armed, D.C. police and the U.S. Marshals Service said. He is expected to appear in D.C. Superior Court on Friday afternoon.
+
+Police have not detailed why Wint — who moved to the U.S. from Guyana in 2000, joined the Marines and later worked as a certified welder before racking up a criminal record — would want to kill 46-year-old Savvas Savopoulos; his 47-year-old wife, Amy; their son, Philip; and housekeeper Veralicia Figueroa. Three of the four victims had been stabbed or bludgeoned before the fire.
+
+Wint showed little emotion when he was captured, Robert Fernandez, commander of the U.S. Marshal Service's Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force told The Associated Press on Friday.
+
+""He was stoic,"" Fernandez said.
+
+Investigators had tracked Wint to the Brooklyn area of New York City, where they barely missed him Wednesday night, Fernandez said.
+
+""We believe he saw himself on the news and just took off,"" Fernandez said. Investigators then tracked Wint to a Howard Johnson Express Inn in College Park, Maryland, on Thursday night, he said.
+
+A team realized Wint was probably in one of two vehicles in the motel parking lot: a car or a moving truck. The vehicles left together and the team followed as they took a U-turn and a strange route — seeming to be lost or trying to shake those who followed, Fernandez said.
+
+Officers eventually got between the two vehicles in northeast Washington and took Wint, three other men and two women into custody, Fernandez said
+
+""We had overwhelming numbers and force,"" Fernandez said. ""They completely submitted immediately.""
+
+Fernandez said he noticed a big wad of cash in the moving truck, but he didn't know how much was there. It was not clear whether that money might have been connected to the Savopoulos family. Fernandez said he did not know whether any weapons were found as the group was taken into custody.
+
+Police said Thursday that they haven't ruled out the possibility that other people were involved in the slayings, but no other suspects have been identified.
+
+Wint had worked for Savopoulos' company, American Iron Works, in the past, police said. Savopoulos was the CEO of American Iron Works, a construction-materials supplier based in Hyattsville, Maryland, that has been involved in major projects in downtown Washington.
+
+The Savopouloses lived in a $4.5 million home in Woodley Park, where mansions are protected by fences and security systems and local and federal law enforcement officers are a constant presence, in part because Vice President Joe Biden's official residence is nearby.
+
+Text messages and voicemails from the Savopouloses to their confused and frightened household staff suggest something was amiss hours before the bodies were found. Their Porsche turned up in suburban Maryland hours after the slayings. It too had been set on fire.
+
+DNA analysis at a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lab linked Wint to the crime, a law enforcement official involved in the investigation told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity for lack of authorization to discuss the investigation publicly.
+
+During the family's final hours, someone called Domino's from their house and ordered pizza. The Washington Post reported that the DNA was found on a pizza crust. At a Domino's about 2 miles away, a worker told the AP that a pizza was delivered from there to the mansion that day.
+
+Wint was convicted of assaulting one girlfriend in Maryland in 2009, and he pleaded guilty the next year to malicious destruction of property after he allegedly threatened to kill a woman and her infant daughter, breaking into her apartment, stealing a television and vandalizing her car.
+
+""I'm going to come over there and kill you, your daughter and friends,"" Wint told that woman, according to the records. ""The defendant advised he was good with a knife and could kill them easily and was not afraid of the police,"" a detective wrote.
+
+Also in 2010, Wint was arrested carrying a 2-foot-long machete and a BB pistol outside the American Iron Works headquarters, but weapons charges were dropped after he pleaded guilty to possessing an open container of alcohol.
+
+Attorney Robin Ficker said Wint didn't seem violent when he defended him in earlier cases.
+
+""My impression of him — I remember him rather well — is that he wouldn't hurt a fly. He's a very nice person,"" Ficker said.
+
+A housekeeper who worked for the Savopoulos family for 20 years, Nelitza Gutierrez, told the AP that she believes the family and Figueroa were held captive for nearly a day before they were killed, citing an unusual voice mail from Savopoulos and a text message sent from the phone of his wife, telling her not to come to the house.
+
+Gutierrez said she and Savopoulos spent May 13 cleaning up a martial arts studio he was opening in northern Virginia before his wife called around 5:30 p.m. She could hear his half of the conversation. He later said his wife told him to come home to watch their son because she was going out, Gutierrez said.
+
+Later that night, sounding flustered, he left Gutierrez a voice mail saying Figueroa would stay with his sick wife overnight, that she shouldn't come the next day, and that Figueroa's phone was dead.
+
+""It doesn't make any sense. How come you don't have another phone — iPhones are all over,"" Gutierrez said. ""He was kind of building stories.""
+
+The next morning, Gutierrez received a text message from Amy Savopoulos that read, in part, ""I am making sure you are not coming today."" She called and texted back and got no response.
+
+The Savopouloses had two teenage daughters who were away at boarding school at the time of the killings. Relatives of the victims have made few public statements and have not returned calls from the AP. Representatives of American Iron Works have repeatedly declined to comment.
+
+Associated Press photographer Alex Brandon in Washington and AP freelancer Meredith Somers in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, contributed to this report.",REAL
+210,House Votes to Upgrade International Religious Freedom Law,"Congress is upgrading the role religious freedom plays in U.S. foreign policy.
+
+On Monday, House lawmakers unanimously approved the Frank Wolf Religious Freedom Act. The bill updates a 1998 law sponsored by the former Virginia congressman.
+
+""Nearly 20 years ago, led by U.S. Congressman Frank R. Wolf, the Congress had the foresight to make advancing the right to religious freedom a high U.S. foreign policy priority,"" Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., the bill's author, said.
+
+""Today religious freedom is still under attack and we must upgrade our programs and methods to meet the challenges of the 21st century,"" he added.
+
+The original law established a framework to investigate religious freedom abuses, name the world's worst violators and suggest courses of action.
+
+The new bill will target radical jihadist groups like Nigeria's Boko Haram and the Islamic State.
+
+""The world is experiencing an unprecedented crisis of international religious freedom,"" Smith said, ""a crisis that continues to create millions of victims, a crisis that undermines liberty, prosperity and peace; a crisis that poses a direct challenge to the U.S. interests in the Middle East, Russia, China and sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.""
+
+The legislation now moves on to the Senate.",REAL
+2561,Cruz's immigration gambit,"During the campaign, Trump had threatened to impose a large tariff to keep the jobs in the United States.",REAL
+453,"U.S. Economy Added A Robust 292,000 Jobs In December","The U.S. economy added 292,000 jobs in December while unemployment held steady at 5 percent, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
+
+The number of new jobs was higher than many economists had anticipated; NPR's John Ydstie says experts had expected about 200,000 new jobs.
+
+In November, the BLS initially said the economy added 211,000 jobs — a ""healthy pace,"" as NPR's Marilyn Geewax put it.
+
+That number has now been revised upward, to 252,000. The job gains for October have also been revised up, from 298,000 to 307,000.
+
+With the revised numbers, the past three months have seen an average of 284,000 new jobs each month. The unemployment rate has held at 5 percent all three months.
+
+Professional and business services, the restaurant industry, health care and construction showed some of the strongest job growth in December, the Bureau says, while mining jobs declined and manufacturing jobs stayed stagnant.
+
+The labor participation rate was little changed in December, and average wages fell by a penny.
+
+Over the year as a whole, average wages rose 2.5 percent, the BLS says — the fastest rise since 2008. But a healthy growth rate for wages would be ""in the 3-4 percent range,"" writes The Wall Street Journal.
+
+All told, employers created 2.65 million new jobs last year — not as strong as 2014's 3.2 million total jobs, but enough to make 2015 the second-best year for U.S. job growth since 1999, The Associated Press reports.
+
+The news comes during a week of turmoil in the international stock markets. Chinese stocks plunged this week, while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial average had their worst-ever start to a year.
+
+Last month, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in the U.S. by 0.25 percentage point, signaling confidence in the American economy. It was the first change in the interest rate since 2008, and the first increase since 2006.",REAL
+9598,7 reasons I'll vote for Trump,"Print 
+Before you applaud me for my integrity or condemn me for selling out, allow me to explain my decision to vote for Donald Trump on Nov. 8. 
+First, I’m writing this because I have been asked incessantly for months how I would be voting, not because I think I’m someone special or that what I do should influence you. 
+Second, I’m not endorsing Donald Trump. In my mind, there’s a world of difference between endorsing a candidate and voting for a candidate. 
+Third, I respect those in the #NeverTrump camp and share many of their concerns, including the possibility of his further vulgarizing and degrading the nation, the possibility of him deepening our ethnic and racial divides, and the possibility of him alienating our allies and unnecessarily provoking our enemies, just to name a few. Among the #NeverTrump voices I respect are columnists like David French and Ben Shapiro, bloggers like Matt Walsh and evangelical leaders like Russell Moore and Beth Moore. 
+Fourth, I take strong exception to evangelicals who have fawned over Trump as if he were some kind of savior figure, supporting him as if he were St. Donald. I also take issue with evangelical leaders who want us to minimize some of Trump’s failings, constantly saying, “Let him who is without sin cast the first one” (see John 8:7). This is not a question of condemning the man but rather a question of making a moral assessment as to his readiness to serve our nation. 
+Fifth, my decision to vote for Trump, barring something earth-shattering between now and Nov. 8, is consistent with my position, which has been: 1) During the GOP primaries, I issued strong warnings against voting for Trump while we had other excellent choices. I did this in writing , on video and on the radio, but always stating that if Trump won the nomination, I would re-evaluate my position. 2) Once Trump became the Republican candidate, I wrote that I was rooting for him to take steps in the right direction and thereby win my vote. 3) I have stated repeatedly that under no circumstances would I vote for Hillary. (For two strong warnings about Hillary, see here and here .) 
+So, what has convinced me that I should now vote for Donald Trump? 
+The culture war is not over! Gain hope, courage and practical advice in Michael Brown’s latest book, “Outlasting the Gay Revolution: Where Homosexual Activism Is Really Going and How to Turn the Tide” 
+First, I believe that he actually is serious about appointing pro-life, pro-Constitution Supreme Court justices. When he said during the last debate that if you’re pro-life, you want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, and when he reiterated at his Gettysburg speech that he will be drawing from his list of 20 potential appointees, he helped me feel more confident that he would not suddenly flip-flop if elected. 
+Second, one reason I endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz was because he took on the political establishment, both Democratic and Republican, to the point of calling it the Washington cartel. Trump is an absolute wrecking ball to the negative parts of the political system (although, unfortunately, he’s been a wrecking ball to some of the good parts of the system), so my vote for him is also a protest vote. 
+Third, I am voting for the Republican platform, not the Republican Party, which means I’m in agreement with the platform while at the same time having very little confidence in the party as a whole. 
+Fourth, while I have always felt that the line, “We’re electing a president, not a pastor,” was overstated and superficial, if we rephrased it to say, “We’re electing a general to train hand-to-hand combat warriors, not a pastor,” it might have more relevance. In other words, we are not looking for Trump to be a moral reformer (even if hedoes appoint righteous judges), and, at this point, he certainly is anything but a moral example (although we pray he will be truly converted and become one). Rather, out of our choices for president, which are stark, we are voting for the one most likely to defeat Hillary and make some good decisions for the nation, not be the savior. And with things so messed up in America, the hand-to-hand combat analogy is closer to home. 
+Fifth, within the first few minutes of the last debate, the massive differences between Hillary and Trump were there for the world to see, she a pro-abortion radical and an extreme supporter of the LGBT agenda and he unashamedly speaking out against late-term abortions and wanting to appoint justices who would defend our essential liberties. Since I have the opportunity to vote, I feel that I should vote for Trump. 
+Sixth, Trump continues to be drawn to conservative Christians, and not just ones who tickle his ears. One of my dear friends has spent hours with Trump and members of his family, and he has told me that in 55 years of ministry, no one has received him as openly and graciously as has Trump. Yet my friend continues to speak the truth to him in the clearest possible terms. While I am not one of those claiming that Trump is a born-again Christian (I see absolutely no evidence of this), the fact that he continues to listen to godly men and open the door to their counsel indicates that something positive could possibly be going on. It also indicates that these godly leaders might be a positive influence on him if he were elected president. 
+Seventh, although I’m quite aware that a president could do great harm or good to the nation, I’m far more concerned with what we as God’s people do with our own lives and witnesses, and for me, the state of the church of America is much more important than the state of the White House. In that context, I echo the words (and warning) of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.” 
+So, in sum: 1) My hope is in God, not Donald Trump, and I do recognize that either Hillary or Trump has the potential to do great harm to America; 2) My urgent call is for us as followers of Jesus to get our own act together so we can be the salt and light of the nation; 3) I will continue to urge all believers not to vote for Hillary Clinton, whose policies will certainly do us great harm; and 4) Ultimately, the most effective way to defeat Hillary is to vote for Trump, while also praying that God will use him for good , not for evil. 
+In the end, if Trump gets elected and fails miserably, I will be grieved but not devastated. If he does well, I will rejoice. 
+Either way, though, my vote is just that: a vote. My greater role is to live a life pleasing to God with the hope of advancing a gospel-based moral and cultural revolution. Receive Michael Brown's commentaries in your email BONUS: By signing up for Michael Brown's alerts, you will also be signed up for news and special offers from WND via email. Name *",FAKE
+9187,Russia and Syria Warn About US Shifting ISIS from Mosul to Battle Assad,"Dispatches from STEPHEN LENDMAN A previous article explained the so-called battle for Mosul is a hoax. It’s about shifting thousands of US-supported ISIS fighters to Syria, along with perhaps letting Turkish forces move in to control evacuated areas. In Moscow, Russian and Syrian foreign ministers expressed concern. Sergey Lavrov said Moscow will “take measures to prevent terrorists moving from Mosul to Syria with their heavy arms, which, of course, will seriously worsen the situation in the Syrian republic.” .. “We think that it is important not to let this happen…We cannot let the terrorist leave Mosul (for) Syria with the aim to re-direct their activity.” .. Syrian Foreign Walid al-Muallem said the US-led “coalition has never fought Daesh. On the contrary, it is destroying the infrastructure of the Syrian economy, and recently destroyed a huge number of bridges on the Euphrates River…They want to move Daesh from Mosul into Raqqa.” .. Assad close political and media advisor Bouthaina Shaaban explained Washington’s dirty scheme, ignored by media scoundrels, saying redeploying ISIS fighters from Mosul to Syria would represent a “huge danger to our sovereignty, to our country.” .. “Russia and Syria are looking at this issue extremely seriously. We’re not going to sit and watch…The way they encircle Mosul shows they would like these terrorists to move into to Syria…They’re navigating terrorism from one place to another, limiting terrorism in one place, directing it to another place. That’s the absolute truth of what is happening in our region.” .. Washington and its rogue allies pay lip service alone to fighting terrorism while actively supporting it. So-called “moderates” aren’t so “moderate,” Shaaban explained. “There are no ’Syrian moderates.’ “ .. They’re cold-blooded cutthroat killers, imperial death squads, serving US imperial interests, actively supported by its coalition partners wanting Assad toppled, Syrian sovereignty destroyed, an Israeli rival eliminated, and Iran isolated ahead of repeating the same scenario against its government. .. Aided by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah fighters, Syria is engaged in the “most challenging issue for humanity in the 21st century,” Shaaban stressed – the struggle to defeat the scourge of US created and supported terrorism, threatening everyone everywhere unless challenged and eliminated. .. America intends stopping at nothing to advance its imperium – its goal, unchallenged dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations – a world unfit and unsafe to live in. Beginning with the Bill and Hillary Clinton co-presidency’s Balkan wars, culminating with the 1999 rape of Yugoslavia, all sovereign independent states have been targeted for regime change – the 9/11 false flag used as pretext to wage phony war on terrorism. .. 
+Syria is in the eye of the storm. Conflicts continue raging in all countries America attacked after that staged incident – effectively declaring war on humanity. Will nuclear war on Russia, China and Iran follow Hillary’s likely ascension to power next year? Her rage for wanting their sovereign governments eliminated risks ending life on earth. PHOTO: US vehicles operating in the Mosul area, purportedly deployed to annihilate ISIS fighters. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS ABOUT THE AUTHOR STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net . His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” ( http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ) Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com . =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. Print this post if you want. Share This:",FAKE
+2410,Here's How Many People In Each State May Not Be Able To Afford Insurance If The Supreme Court Rules Against Obamacare,"The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision in a major new lawsuit against Obamacare this June, and the health coverage for millions hangs in the balance.
+
+This challenge to the Affordable Care Act, called King v. Burwell, came from longtime Obamacare opponents who claim that, because of a key phrase in the law, the federal government may provide tax credit subsidies only in states that operate their own health insurance exchanges. Thirty-four states declined to establish these marketplaces, and instead left that responsibility in the hands of the federal government.
+
+If the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs in this case, it would eliminate health insurance subsidies for 7.5 million low- and moderate-income people in those states, causing most of them to become uninsured when their premiums become unaffordable without financial assistance.
+
+Here's how the numbers break down in each state with a federally operated health insurance exchange. 
+
+ 
+
+ Infographic by Alissa Scheller for The Huffington Post. Jonathan Cohn and Jesse Rifkin contributed reporting.
+
+UPDATE: June 4 -- The numbers displayed on this map are derived from a report that counted health insurance exchange enrollment as of Feb. 22, which the Department of Health and Human Services published on March 10. The department released new data on June 2, detailing enrollment as of March 31. According to the new report, 7.3 million people were covered by plans purchased via the federally operated health insurance exchanges in the 34 states subject to the Supreme Court ruling, and 6.4 million of them received subsidies. The new report includes additional information about each state, but does not update the calculation of average unsubsidized premiums.",REAL
+6699,Hilarious: What “Small Talk” Among Friends Looks Like at The Moment,"Pinterest 
+Robert Gehl reports that Newt Gingrich has accused Fox News’ Megyn Kelly of being “fascinated” by sex, and not caring at all about public policy in a shocking and startling interview. 
+The former Speaker of the House said Kelly showed “bias” for mentioning the groping allegations against Donald Trump. 
+Kelly responded by saying her fascination is not of “sex,” but of who was going to end up in the White House. Kelly has a history with Trump – getting into a shouting match with the Republican candidate over comments he made about women during a primary debate. 
+What set Gingrich off was Kelly’s mention of the leaked “sex boasts” tapes, where Trump is heard to say he grabs women by the genitals. 
+Gingrich attacked, saying the media was obsessed with spending time on the unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, which Trump has denied. “You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy,” he said. 
+“I’m not fascinated by sex, but I’m fascinated about sexual predators,” Kelly said. 
+The bias the media has against Trump – especially focusing on sex – is historic. 
+“This is a scale of bias worthy of Pravda and Izvestia, ” Gingrich said. 
+Take a look at the awesome video:",FAKE
+7627,A Hillary Win Will Be Google’s Win of Everything,"Share This: Dispatches from Eric Zuesse O n November 7th, a Morning Consult and Politico poll of early voters showed Donald Trump to be overwhelmingly viewed by early voters as being the more dangerous of the two major-Party candidates. The mega-corporation Alphabet, formerly known as Google, deserves a lot of the credit for that result, on candidate Hillary Clinton’s behalf — against, first, Bernie Sanders, and, now, Mr. Trump. Eric Schmidt, the billionaire Chairman and top executive of Alphabet Corporation, has been behind the scenes working for her campaign all along, and will be beyond being the most powerful person in the world (which he already was) if she wins. On 1 February 2016, FORTUNE bannered, “Google’s Parent Seizes Apple’s Crown As Most Valuable U.S. Company” , and that understated the reality: it’s been actually the entire world’s most valuable company ever since that time (and not merely the “Most Valuable U.S. Company”). Eric Schmidt: One of the billionaires who control our destiny, for the worse. 
+Schmidt detailed in the recently wikileaked 2014 email to Hillary’s campaign, the means for winning both the nomination and the ultimate victory. It was an email to Hillary Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills, dated 15 April 2014 , and was promptly forwarded by her to John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign manager. Here is just the opening of it, to indicate the types of matters it addressed: 1. Size, Structure and Timing Let’s assume a total budget of about $1.5Billion, with more than 5000 paid employees and million(s) of volunteers. The entire startup ceases operation four days after November 8, 2016. The structure includes a Chairman or Chairwoman who is the external face of the campaign and a President who is the executive in charge of objectives, measurements, systems and building and managing the organization. Every day matters as our end date does not change. An official campaign right after midterm elections and a preparatory team assembled now is best. 2. Location The campaign headquarters will have about a thousand people, mostly young and hardworking and enthusiastic. Its important to have a very large hiring pool (such as Chicago or NYC) from which to choose enthusiastic, smart and low paid permanent employees. DC is a poor choice as its full of distractions and interruptions. Moving the location from DC elsewhere guarantees visitors have taken the time to travel and to help. The key is a large population of talented people who are dying to work for you. Any outer borough of NYC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston are all good examples of a large, blue state city to base in. Employees will relocate to participate in the campaign, and will find low cost temporary housing or live with campaign supporters on a donated basis. This worked well in Chicago and can work elsewhere. The computers will be in the cloud and most likely on Amazon Web services (AWS). All the campaign needs are portable computers, tablets and smart phones along with credit card readers. 3. The pieces of a Campaign a) The Field Its important to have strong field leadership, with autonomy and empowerment. Operations talent needs to build the offices, set up the systems, hire the people, and administer what is about 5000 people. Initial modeling will show heavy hiring in the key battleground states. There is plenty of time to set these functions up and build the human systems. The field is about organizing people, voter contact, and get out the vote programs. .. Then, for example, there’s this: .. Partners like Blue State Digital will do much of the fund raising. A key point is to convert BSD and other partners to pure cloud service offerings to handle the expected crush and load. d) Media (paid), (earned) and (social), and polling New tools should be developed to measure reach and impact of paid, earned and social media. The impact of press coverage should be measurable in reach and impact, and TV effectiveness measured by attention and other surveys. Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme. .. and this: .. In the case where we can’t identify the specific human, we can still have a partial digital voter id, for a person or “probable-person” with attributes that we can identify and use to target. As they respond we can eventually match to a registered voter in the main file. This digital key is eventually matched to a real person. It’s focused on controlling the outcome regardless of the actual merits of the competing candidates; and Schmidt was an ultimate insider in his knowledge of what companies Podesta should select to carry out the various parts of this operation. (Of course, those companies will then be in a privileged position, alongside Alphabet, serving a Clinton Administration.) S chmidt also was proving to Hillary that in his work for her he was entirely objective in her interests, such as by his recommending Amazon, his big cloud-computing competitor, instead of Alphabet’s own cloud-computing service. This is a bipartisan operation, for her, against any and all other candidates. .. Schmidt also was crucially involved in helping in 2011 to plan the coup in Ukraine that Hillary’s State Department was then working on, and which culminated successfully in February 2014 . ( Here’s Hillary’s protégé Victoria Nuland overseeing the operation and selecting on 4 February 2014 who would be leading the country after the coup: “Yats” .) This ‘democratic revolution’ “featured civic self-organization aided by the use of Internet-based social media, neighborhood initiatives, and online news sites” , and this online operation (directed mainly at rallying Ukraine’s anti-Russians, called ‘pro-EU’ people) fits precisely the “tech camps” that started inside the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine on 1 March 2013 , after Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt and Google’s and the U.S. State Department’s Jared Cohen, had deceived wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange into informing them, on 23 June 2011 , how to foment massive public demonstrations online. As planned (and, of course, Assange had no fore-knowledge of any of this), the coup ended in a very bloody ‘false-flag’ operation on 20 February 2014, in which Right Sector paramilitaries who had been trained by the rabidly anti-Russian racist Dmitriy Yarosh , and who were dressed as state-security police, shot down upon the crowd and murdered both regular policemen and the protesters, so that the bloodshed would be blamed on the man Obama was trying to oust, the democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych (who was lots more popular among Ukrainians than any of the subsequent top leaders of Ukraine have been). .. Then these Right Sector mercenaries massacred an untold number of Crimeans who had been peacefully demonstrating there in Kiev against the anti-government (called ‘Maidan’) demonstrators, and who fled back into their eight buses that had taken them there from Crimea, back now to Crimea. Yarosh’s people blocked the buses at the town of Korsun and murdered some and injured others . This terrified the people in Crimea, which had voted 75% for the very person that the Obama Administration had just overthrown. That massacre was a key precipitating-event for the plebiscite that was then held in Crimea on 16 March 2014, at which over 90% of the residents voted for Crimea to rejoin with Russia, of which it had been a part until the Soviet leader in 1954 arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine. .. Right Sector thugs (now in plain clothes) were also behind the subsequent 2 May 2014 massacre of the new regime’s peacefully demonstrating opponents inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa — the event that sparked the breakaway of yet another region of Ukraine: Donbass. .. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama wanted to control Ukraine because it has the longest border with Russia of any European country and would be ideal for placing missiles aimed at Moscow just a five minutes flight-time away. This was part of a plan that was started actually by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush on the night of 24 February 1990 and which both Bill Clinton and Bush’s son advanced, as did Obama and as will Hillary — presumably to the plan’s ultimate conclusion, war against Russia. .. It’s a massive, decades-long, team-effort, on the part of America’s billionaires and their allied billionaires around the world; and, if Clinton wins, then it will be culminated. Eric Schmidt is key to her success in it, and will probably benefit hugely from it, if the conquest can be carried out by non-nuclear means or by ‘bluffing’ (which, of course, is being carefully gamed-out). But, just in case it goes nuclear, the people who are on the inside have already invested in nuclear bunkers for themselves and their friends and their friends’ friends . They are prepared for the worst, but hope for the best (for themselves, at least). About the author =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS",FAKE
+4487,"Quality care for vets more important than wait times, says VA secretary","Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald says wait times aren't the best measure of whether care at VA hospitals is improving. Satisfaction matters more.
+
+“From crisis comes opportunity,” says Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald. “The deeper the crisis, the bigger the changes that can be made.”
+
+Secretary McDonald has had the opportunity to test that theory. A West Point graduate and former chairman and CEO of Procter and Gamble, McDonald was nominated by President Obama to run the VA in wake of a 2014 scandal at its Phoenix hospital. Critics charged that as many as 40 patients died as a result of waiting for treatment in Phoenix and that some VA employees there falsified records on how long patients actually waited.
+
+At a Monitor-hosted breakfast with reporters in the lead up to Memorial Day, the secretary was questioned about why the VA does not publicly report when veterans first ask for an appointment, known as the “create date.” The information can be used to calculate how long vets had to wait for an appointment.
+
+“The days to an appointment is really not what we should be measuring. What we should be measuring is the veteran’s satisfaction,” McDonald said. “What really counts is how does the veteran feel about their encounter with the VA? When you go to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? What is important is, what is your satisfaction with the experience.”
+
+The secretary added, “what I would like to move to actually is that kind of measure. We are in the process of creating that kind of measure, validating that kind of measure.”
+
+The reference to Disney theme parks prompted House Speaker Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin to respond to McDonald’s breakfast comments with a tweet: “This is not make-believe, Mr. Secretary. Veterans have died waiting in those lines.”
+
+Secretary McDonald was also asked about a recent column in Roll Call newspaper, suggesting that Hillary Clinton should consider him as her running mate. Columnist Jonathan Allen argued that McDonald “trumps [Donald] Trump’s business-world experience” and “took on the thankless task of reshaping the broken bureaucracy of the VA….”
+
+McDonald responded, “The way I look at all these things is just as I looked at when the White House contacted me about this job. I went to West Point. My life’s mission has been to help improve the lives of others and if I am asked to serve I certainly will consider it.”
+
+With the Obama administration coming to end in January 2017, McDonald is trying to deliver on what he calls 12 “breakthrough priorities” before the end of this year, including improving the experience veterans have dealing with the VA, increasing access to health care, developing a simplified appeals process, and reducing veterans homelessness.
+
+The secretary cited gains in a variety of areas. In the past 12 months, the VA completed 1.6 million more appointments than in the previous year. Average wait times are now five days for primary care, six days for specialty care, and three days for mental health care, he said.
+
+But McDonald admits that those average wait times are not the experience for vets in all of its facilities. “There are tails at the end of that distribution and some of those tails are what we are trying to deal with.” For example, he said, veterans have been part of the general movement of the population to the South, and the VA needs to build facilities there.
+
+He added that “we know we have an issue getting people in. We know that and we are working hard on it.”
+
+The VA is a massive management challenge.  It runs the largest integrated health care system in the US. It operates 1,200 health care facilities, has 350,000 employees, including 25,000 physicians who serve nine million patients. If it were a business weighed in the Fortune 500 rankings, McDonald said, it would rank sixth.
+
+When asked what issues would confront his successor, McDonald noted that, “one of the things we have committed to here is same-day resolution of a medical issue for any veteran…. It may not solve the issue, but we will get them the help they need that same day. We already do that at about 25 percent of our facilities.”
+
+A second issue his successor will face is the need to “get the appeals backlog down,” McDonald said. There currently are 440,000 appeals of VA benefits decisions pending. “In order to get that backlog down, there is only one thing we can do and that is pass legislation that changes the 80 year-old law that governs appeals,” he said. The law currently allows vets to file unlimited amendments to their claims.",REAL
+4716,Pence: I Don't Understand 'The Basis' of Michelle Obama's Claims,"GOP vice presidential candidate Mike Pence said Friday he has a ""lot of respect"" for First Lady Michelle Obama, but he doesn't understand ""the basis of her claim"" in a her speech Thursday condemning Donald Trump for using what she called sexually predatory language in a conversation caught on a hot-mic in 2005.
+
+""I have a lot of respect for the first lady and the job she has done for the American people over the last seven-and-a-half years,"" the Indiana governor told the ""CBS This Morning"" host Charlie Rose, continuing that he does not believe the language described sexually predatory actions.
+
+""I already spoke about my concerns about the language he used in that 11-year-old video,"" said Pence. ""But what he has made clear is that was talk, regrettable talk on his part. But that there were no actions.""
+
+Further, Trump has ""categorically denied these last unsubstantiated allegations"" that were made this week from at least five women who claimed Trump groped and kissed them against their will in years past.
+
+""Frankly, I think before the day is out the allegations will be questioned,"" said Pence. ""The same reporters who wrote a similar story six months ago for The New York Times have written this story and that story was completely discredited.""
+
+Pence told Fox News' ""Fox & Friends"" the Trump campaign is working to bring out evidence that will disprove the allegations being made about him, and said during an interview with NBC's ""Today"" show that evidence ""is coming in, frankly, a matter of hours.""
+
+He told ""Today"" show hosts Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie that Melania Trump has already contacted People Magazine for a retraction of its story about Trump, but Lauer commented that was different than showing evidence.
+
+""Just say tuned,"" Pence told the ""Today"" show. ""There is more information coming forward. But Donald Trump has made very clear that he's categorically denied these allegations. Yet, he can't be more definitive than that.
+
+""And the difficulty is that at this point in a campaign, it is astonishing to see, with all due respect, the enormous coverage of these really unfounded allegations, unestablished allegations, compared to an avalanche of emails coming out of Hillary Clinton's years as secretary of state.""
+
+Pence said he agrees that allegations such as those being made against Trump ""should always"" be taken ""seriously and respectfully, but in the case of Bill Clinton, he actually admitted to being involved with a 23-year-old intern at the White House named Monica Lewinsky when he was president. Bill Clinton actually paid a settlement of over $800,000 to one of those women [Paula Jones].""
+
+""The remarkable thing, as the media goes chasing after unsubstantiated allegations, coming from a newspaper that six months ago, did a massive similar story that was utterly discredited by the same reporters,"" Pence told Fox News.
+
+""It's remarkable to me they continue to literally ignore the hard evidence that's flowing out of Hillary Clinton's years as secretary of state and the Clinton Foundation, whether it's a speech supporting socialized medicine in Canada, a paid speech supporting open borders in Brazil.""
+
+He said the ""most concerning"" to him was the news that Clinton's aides, while she was secretary of state, were ""directing contracts for the rebuilding of Haiti, after the earthquake, to friends of the Clintons. I mean, this is exactly the kind of pay-to-play politics the American people are tired of. It's going to end when Donald Trump becomes president of the United States.""
+
+Pence told CBS that as the father of two daughters and as a public person, he does take allegations like those facing Trump seriously, but also noted the GOP presidential nominee ""categorically denied"" the claims against him.
+
+Further, the Indiana governor said he urged Trump to apologize, which he has.
+
+He also questioned the timing of the news against Trump, as ""we have hard evidence flowing out of the Clinton Foundation [and] the Clinton years, but the ""unsubstantiated claims are dominating the news.""
+
+Pence said he's spoken with Trump over the allegations being made about him, and he believes the presidential candidate.
+
+""Donald Trump has asserted that all of these recent unsubstantiated allegations are categorically false and I believe him,"" said Pence. ""The Donald Trump as I come to know, and my family has come to know and spent considerable amount of time, is someone who has a long record of not only loving his family and lifting his family up, but employing and promoting women in positions of authority in this company.""
+
+And, Pence told Rose, he gave up a job he loves as governor of Indiana, a state he loves, to join the Trump race ""because I think this country is in a lot of trouble,"" and he thinks it's time to return the issues and move away from the scandals.
+
+The Trump scandals have caused many to question his character, but Pence said he has found Trump's response to be ""extraordinary.""
+
+""He apologized for what he said 11 years ago,"" said Pence. ""He showed humility, he showed heart. He focused that national presidential debate back on the issues that really affect the American people at home and abroad.""
+
+Meanwhile, he pointed out that the ""avalanche"" of emails from Clinton's accounts continue to emerge.
+
+""Clinton was advocating open borders when she was giving a speech in Brazil, advocating socialized medicine when she gave a speech in Canada,"" said Pence. ""The Haitian issue to me is the biggest one . . . The friends of the Clinton's were given preference shall treatment for contracts for the reconstruction of Haiti after an earthquake.""
+
+Also on Friday, Pence commented on Trump's claims that the upcoming election may be rigged, and he agrees that voter fraud has been an issue.
+
+""We are currently involved in a pretty vigorous investigation in the state of Indiana over voter fraud,"" said Pence. ""It is in the interest of everybody on every side of the spectrum to defend the one vote, one principle.
+
+""The way elections are managed at the state level is to become involved as a poll-watcher and poll volunteer and we consistently encourage people to do that.""",REAL
+1003,Ted Cruz: Now the odds-on favorite,"With 16 primaries and caucuses remaining, Donald Trump has to win 70% of the delegates to secure the 1,237 needed to win a first ballot at the Republican convention. Several states are coming up that are more favorable territory for Trump than Cruz, especially New York and Pennsylvania where Trump still has significant leads.
+
+Even so, winning more than two thirds of the remaining delegates is a daunting challenge for him. In the 36 primaries and caucuses leading up to Wisconsin, Trump won only 46% of the delegates. And now he heads down a tough homestretch with Cruz seizing the momentum.
+
+In a year crammed with surprises, no one can say for sure what will unfold in Cleveland, Ohio. But there are two likely outcomes: First, Cruz and Trump have each vowed to vote against a change in the GOP's Rule 40. That's an obscure provision that requires any candidate to win at least eight primaries and caucuses before he or she can be nominated.
+
+Trump and Cruz will be the only two people in Cleveland with that distinction. They should also have enough delegate strength between them to block a rewrite of Rule 40. In other words, potential candidates like John Kasich, Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney won't be eligible even if many delegates think them likely to fare better against Hillary Clinton -- the race could narrow to Trump vs. Cruz.
+
+If Trump then falls short on the first ballot, there will be a donnybrook. But it is now becoming apparent that Cruz is much better prepared to win that fight. Trump has run a campaign long on the outside game of televised rallies but short on the inside game of quietly piling up delegates. New York primary: Get ready for the real show (Opinion) By contrast, Cruz has been superlative playing to the inside. Just look at how craftily he captured delegates away from Trump a few days ago in North Dakota. (The capacity of the Obama team to play the inside game so well helped to propel them past Hillary Clinton in 2008.) In a first ballot, delegates must vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged but thereafter, of course, may vote for someone else. Signs increasingly point to the fact that Republican party regulars pledged to Trump are ready to bolt on a second or third ballot. With Cruz the only other man in the race, that almost certainly means they will drift -- rush? --toward the Texan, and he will take the crown. What the MRI of Donald Trump's soul reveals Wisconsin exit polls gave further evidence, as if any were needed, that Trump's self-destructive behavior in the two weeks leading up to the vote cost him dearly. He reacted so badly to various challenges, especially in his inability to speak clearly about abortion, that one wondered whether he had tired of the game and wanted to go home. Wisconsin voters punished him severely. But Cruz must surely have taken one lesson to heart: that Trump started slipping when the press turned a scorching spotlight on him. Now that the odds have shifted in his favor, the press and others will now vet Cruz much more toughly, too. One of the most interesting questions of the moment is how well he will stand up under that same spotlight. He shouldn't start sniffing for roses yet.",REAL
+5801,Scientists About To Pour $100 Million Into Looking For Aliens Around Weird Star,"Scientists About To Pour $100 Million Into Looking For Aliens Around Weird Star 10/26/2016 
+THE DAILY CALLER 
+Astronomers are about to pour $100 million into investigating a star that may be surrounded by a large structure built by an alien civilization. 
+Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen project of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are turning the program’s $100 million budget into investigating the star’s unique behavior. 
+“Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that has any kind of telescope in any wavelength that can see Tabby’s star has looked at it,” Dr. Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, said in a press statement . “It’s been looked at with Hubble, it’s been looked at with Keck, it’s been looked at in the infrared and radio and high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole range of SETI experiments. Nothing has been found.” 
+Researchers will repeatedly scan the star for eight hours per night over the next two months to examine its extremely unusually dimming behavior. The star randomly dims by as much as 22 percent of its output at extremely irregular intervals. This is consistent with large orbiting masses, much larger than planets, blocking out some of the star’s light when they pass in front of it. All the natural forms of large masses which could cause KIC 8462852’s dimming aren’t consistent with the star’s age . 
+Scientists found the first possible evidence of this extraterrestrial civilization around KIC 8462852 last October , when astronomers with Yale University and other top schools published a study that used NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. 
+So far, astronomers haven’t found a single naturalistic explanation for the star’s exceedingly unusual dimming, which explains the extremely unusual behavior of the star. Astronomers have examined 500 other stars in the vicinity of KIC 8462852, and seen nothing else like it. 
+The dense formations near KIC 8462852 are similar to “Dyson Spheres,” hypothetical, are energy-harvesting “megastuctures” theoretical aliens could hypothetically build by rearranging the solar system. Scientists have pondered the existence of Dyson Spheres since the 1960s, thinking they could be a potential solution to energy problems faced by an extremely old civilization. SETI scientists have long argued humans could detect distant alien civilizations by looking for technological artifacts like Dyson Spheres orbiting other stars. 
+“We spent a long time trying to convince ourselves this wasn’t real. We just weren’t able to,” Ben Montet, a Caltech astronomer who co-authored research on the star, told Gizmodo . “None of the considered phenomena can alone explain the observations.” 
+The best naturalistic explanation favored by astronomers, involves a huge mass of comets erratically orbiting the star and creating enough dust to dim the light, but a January analysis of the star’s history renders that hypothesis implausible, since the unprecedented dimming has continued for over a century. In order to dim for such a long time period, the star would need to have millions of times more dust and comets orbiting it than is the case. 
+Astronomers estimate that the dimming would require roughly 648,000 giant comets of 200 kilometers in diameter, all aligned to pass in front of the star. The chances of such a formation render it essentially impossible, and there is currently no remotely plausible scientific explanation for what is going on with KIC 8462852. 
+Astronomers have previously frequently misjudge abnormal stellar occurrences and, usually, the abnormalities are simply a new phenomenon. 
+A graduate student in astronomy, found an usual pulsing radio signal so predictable it seemed to be a sign of intelligent life in 1967. The astronomers even nicknamed the signal LGM-1, for “little green men,” and believed they had detected a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization , but it turned out to be the first pulsar.",FAKE
+7931,CBS Colorado Investigation Shows People Voting Twice; The Dead Voting,"Pinterest 
+In Colorado, cases of voters casting ballots twice, the dead voting, and other cases of fraud are popping up, lending credence to conservatives’ arguments that the election may be “rigged.” 
+CBS4 found at least a dozen cases where Coloradans have voted twice, and a previous investigation revealed the names of state residents who had been dead for months or years, still voting. 
+In six of the cases, voting records show the exact same person citing twice in the state elections. In the other six, people who were registered in a different state also voted in Colorado. 
+Lincoln Wilson, a registered Republican from Hale, in Northeast Colorado, is accused of voting in both Colorado and Kansas in 2010, 2012 and again in 2014. Wilson told CBS4 he voted in both states, but only “voted on local issues” and “didn’t vote twice for President.” 
+Wilson is one of five Coloradans now charged by the State of Kansas for voting in both states. 
+Randall Killian, an unaffiliated voter, pleaded guilty to voting in Douglas County, Colorado and Kansas in the 2012 presidential election. Ron Weems, a registered Democrat, pleaded guilty to voting in Teller County, Colorado and Kansas in both 2012 and 2014. Both men were fined for their offenses. 
+Kansas has also charged James Criswell, a Republican from Douglas County, and Sharon Farris, a Republican from Denver, with double voting. Their cases have not been resolved yet. 
+Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said his office is “aggressively prosecuting” double voting cases because it’s a crime that “can’t be caught ahead of time.” 
+He says after each election, Colorado and Kansas crosscheck voters to identify double ballots and clean up their databases. But Kobach still believes 10,000 people are registered to vote in both Colorado and Kansas. 
+Combing through voter data, CBS4 found three suspected double voters in Denver, one suspected double voter in Arapahoe County and one suspected double voter in Douglas County. All five cases that CBS4 uncovered have now been referred to prosecutors for possible criminal action. 
+“It’s a relatively small number,” said Williams, “But, it is a problem of any magnitude because we have close elections in Colorado.” 
+But, Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams admits other Coloradans are getting away with it. Combing through voter data, CBS4 found three suspected double voters in Denver, one suspected double voter in Arapahoe County and one suspected double voter in Douglas County. All five cases that CBS4 uncovered have now been referred to prosecutors for possible criminal action.",FAKE
+977,"Sanders, losing in delegates to Clinton, claims 'path to victory'","Bernie Sanders — who is winning delegate contests against Hillary Clinton but not catching up much in terms of actual delegates — insists he has a path to the Democratic presidential nomination, starting with primaries in New York and Pennsylvania.
+
+""We believe that we have the momentum,"" Sanders said Sunday on ABC's This Week. ""We believe that the polling is showing that we're closing the gap.""
+
+The Vermont senator toured a string of Sunday shows a day after beating Clinton by double digits in the Wyoming caucuses — though Clinton will wind up with more convention delegates thanks to ""superdelegates"" who can back any candidate they want.
+
+Speaking on NBC's Meet The Press, Sanders said he has cut Clinton's lead by one-third in recent weeks, won eight of the last nine delegate contests, and is moving up in national polls against both Clinton and potential Republican opponents.
+
+""We're running stronger against Donald Trump and other Republicans than Secretary Clinton,"" Sanders told NBC. ""I think we stand a really good chance to do well in New York State, in Pennsylvania, and as we head into other states.""
+
+The New York primary is April 19, and Clinton holds a double-digit lead there, according to recent polls. Pennsylvania — along with Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Rhode Island —  holds its primary a week later.
+
+The Associated Press reports that, when superdelegates are included, Clinton holds a significant lead over Sanders: 1,756 to 1,068.
+
+Sanders said he believes his campaign can block Clinton from winning the 2,383 delegates needed for nomination at the convention.
+
+""I believe that we have a real path to victory,"" Sanders said on CBS' Face The Nation, ""and that at the end of the day, we're going to win this.""
+
+The former New York senator and secretary of State told CNN's State of The Union on Sunday: ""I intend to have the number of delegates that are required to be nominated.""",REAL
+2572,"Unions fight to preserve Obama’s immigration actions, their members","Two of the country’s most powerful and politically influential labor unions are backing President Obama in the recent court challenge to his 2014 executive action on illegal immigration, saying they support the president’s effort because ""undocumented workers"" need more workplace protection and their participation helps the U.S. economy.
+
+The AFL-CIO and the National Education Association on Monday each filed so-called amicus briefs in a federal appeals court case in which Texas and 26 other states are challenges the president’s 2014 memorandum on illegal immigration.
+
+The memorandum essentially expands work authorization and delayed-deportation programs for illegal immigrants. And it provides similar opportunities for the parents of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.
+
+The AFL-CIO’s 36-page brief essentially argues that Texas lacks the so-called “legal standing” to challenge the memorandum and that the administration didn’t violate procedural requirements in issuing the order.
+
+However, the union also makes very clear its interest in the outcome of the proceedings.
+
+“First, through existing collective bargaining relationships, AFL-CIO affiliates represent many undocumented workers in workplaces throughout the country,” according to the brief by the AFL-CIO, the country’s bigger union collective, with 56 unions representing roughly 12 million workers and retired workers.
+
+Union lawyers argue such workers have substantive protection under labor and employment law but not to a “full range of remedies” when such laws are violated.
+
+Such workers are not entitled to back pay under the National Labor Relations Act and are vulnerable to employer retaliation if they complain about violations, the lawyers argue.
+
+“Secondly, this lack of legal remedies and vulnerability to retaliation creates an incentive for some unscrupulous employers to employ large numbers of undocumented workers at sub-standard wages and working conditions,” they continue in the brief. “Law-abiding employers must compete with these employers, making it more difficult for AFL-CIO affiliate unions to raise wages and improve working conditions.”
+
+Many critics of Obama’s plans to reform federal immigration law without a vote in Congress say he is providing “amnesty” to those who have entered the U.S. illegally. They also say his plans -- backed by Americans companies and labor unions -- take away jobs from U.S. citizens.
+
+""The labor unions, like Democratic politicians, have decided to rely on importing the citizens of other nations to gain power in this one. Of course this cancels out jobs and votes for Americans,"" a GOP congressional aide told FoxNews.com on Saturday.
+
+In 2004, the AFL-CIO spent $5.1 million in lobbying and gave $8.7 million in political-related contributions, with no money going to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets.org.
+
+The entire case, Texas et al v. USA, started in February when a federal judge granted the states a preliminary injunction, which temporarily stops Obama’s 2014 plan from going into effect.
+
+The U.S. government wants the injunction lifted so Obama's actions can proceed but meanwhile has appealed the Texas court ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans, in which the amicus briefs have been filed.
+
+Obama's actions would prevent as many as 5 million people who are in the U.S. illegally from being deported.
+
+The 27 states also argue that the 2014 action is unconstitutional and would force them to invest more in law enforcement, health care and education.
+
+The injunction is intended to stall Obama's actions while the lawsuit progresses through the courts.
+
+Obama's orders to expand a program that protects young immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the U.S. illegally as children was set to take effect Feb. 18. The part that would extend deportation protections to the parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents was slated to begin on May 19.
+
+The 44-page amicus brief from the American Federation of Teachers includes seven other groups including ASPIRA -- the largest national Latino organization in the country.
+
+The document largely makes the case that all children in the U.S. should have access to education for their “psychological, emotional, and physical well-being” and that children in families in which at least one member is an illegal immigrant should not be forced to live apart from their parents.
+
+A coalition of groups including the Service Employees International Union, the second-largest public service union and a big supporter of Democratic political candidates and organizations, filed an amicus brief in the original case.
+
+“The November 20, 2014 executive action on immigration would have beneficial effects on the U.S. economy and U.S. workers,” the brief states in part. “Temporary work authorization for those immigrants who are eligible for deferred action will raise not only their wages, but the wages of all Americans, which will in turn increase government tax revenue and create new jobs.”
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8855,Tony Blair suggests a second referendum to reverse Brexit,"Tony Blair suggests a second referendum to reverse Brexit Tony Blair suggests a second referendum to reverse Brexit By 0 149 
+Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says Britain should keep its “options open” on whether or not to leave the European Union until after Brexit talks with the bloc are completed. 
+During an interview on Friday with BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program, Blair described the EU referendum as “a catastrophe” and said UK voters should be given the option of a second EU referendum. 
+Britain should not withdraw from the EU until it becomes clearer how Brexit would impact UK’s economic, social and cultural future, Blair said. 
+“The bizarre thing about this referendum is that we took a decision but we still don’t know the precise terms,” he said. “There’s got to be some way, either through parliament, or through an election, possibly through another referendum, that people express their view.” 
+The former premier, who was in office from 1997 until 2007, said it should be possible for the public to switch their verdict if it becomes clear the…",FAKE
+7932,"France: Muslim Screams ‘There is Only One Master — Allah’, Punches Teacher in Front of Pupils","France: Muslim Screams ‘There is Only One Master — Allah’, Punches Teacher in Front of Pupils Oct 28, 2016 Previous post 
+This is the France of today and the France of the future, courtesy the suicidal Muslim immigration policies that French authorities (and European authorities in general) continue to pursue, even to the point of national suicide. 
+“Attacker Says ‘There is Only One Master — Allah’, Punches Teacher in Front of Pupils,” by Virginia Hale, Breitbart , October 21, 2016 (thanks to The Religion of Peace ): 
+A primary school teacher was beaten outside his classroom by two young men who called him a racist after seeing the man rebuke a child of non-European origin. 
+The teacher was violently attacked near the entrance of his school while walking back from Marais Stadium, in Argenteuil in Val-d’Oise, with his pupils after a PE class. 
+After Paul Langevin reprimanded one of the children in his class on Monday who was being disruptive and using bad language, two young men jumped out of their car screaming “Don’t you talk to her like that, racist”, at the 50 year old. 
+Mr. Langevin protested: “But I am their master”, using the word maître, which also means ‘primary school teacher’ in French. One of the men replied: “And I am a thug” as the other knocked him to the ground 
+FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
+3007,Iran disputes report of missile test,"Iran's defense minister on Monday denied at least parts of a report in the Iranian media that the military recently test-fired a ballistic missile with pinpoint accuracy at a range of 1,250 miles — a range that would include Israel and several other Middle East nations.
+
+Brigadier General Ali Abdollahi, the Iranian military's deputy chief of staff, told Iran's Tasnim news agency that Iran fired the test missile two weeks ago and that it was accurate to within 25 feet, which he described as zero error.
+
+""We can guide this ballistic missile,"" he told Tasnim. Iran has previously asserted it has such missile capability.
+
+Abdollahi declined to provide further details on the missile or the test. Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan later denied that a missile test of that distance took place. He also told Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are conducting a propaganda campaign to make the world believe Iran's missiles are not for defensive purposes.
+
+Firas Abi-Ali, an analyst for the consulting firm IHS Country Risk, said Iran's government must pursue its missile program to appease hardliners after striking a deal on its nuclear program with the West.
+
+""Given there technical restrictions, the missile program makes a lot of sense for them,"" Abi-Ali told USA TODAY. ""At the end of the day, they are beholden to the hardliners and the IRGC (revolutionary guard). The elected government is not the most powerful actor in Iran.""
+
+Last month, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei stressed the need for boosting Iran’s defense capabilities, saying negotiations without a robust defense could weaken Iran's position and force it to yield to countries posing threats.
+
+Two months ago, Iran test-fired two ballistic missiles, one of them with the phrase ""Israel should be wiped off the Earth"" written on it in Hebrew. Iranian officials say the phrase was added by workers on the ground and was not a decision made by higher-level officials. Iran also conducted a missile test in November.
+
+Iran has rejected claims that missile tests violate the nuclear agreement it reached with the U.S. and other nations or a United Nations resolution on missile testing, describing its missiles as conventional armaments for ""legitimate defense"" and not designed for carrying nuclear warheads.
+
+U.S. State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said the department was aware of the reports. She said that, if a launch was confirmed, the U.S. would take up the issue with the U.N.
+
+The nuclear deal, which took effect in January,  does not directly address missile restrictions. The U.N. Security Council lifted its ban on such testing when the deal was struck, but passed a resolution that ""calls upon Iran not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles ... including launches using such ballistic missile technology.""
+
+The U.S., Britain, France and Germany were among nations decrying the March tests. The Security Council's Panel of Experts on Iran later said in a confidential report, first reported by Reuters, that the March launches did violate the U.N. resolution.
+
+The tests in March involved two types of ballistic missiles during “Might of Velayat” military drills, Tasnim said. (Velayat is Persian for ""governance of the jurist."") The missiles, Qadr-H and Qadr-F, were launched from the East Alborz Mountains, north of Iran, and hit targets on the Makran coast to the southeast along the Pakistan border.",REAL
+5833,Hillary's High Crimes & Misdemeanors,"  
+If Hillary Clinton is elected president on Tuesday, and if what Bret Baier is reporting from FBI sources on Fox News is true, America is headed for a constitutional crisis. 
+Indeed, it would seem imperative that FBI Director James Comey, even if it violates protocol and costs him his job, should state publicly whether what Baier’s FBI sources are telling him is false or true. 
+The people have a right to know — before Tuesday. 
+For, if true, Clinton could face charges in 2017 and impeachment and removal from office in 2018. 
+According to Baier, FBI agents have found new emails, believed to have originated on Clinton’s server, on the computer jointly used by close aide Huma Abedin and her disgraced husband, Anthony Weiner. 
+Abedin’s failure to turn this computer over to the State Department on leaving State appears to be a violation of U.S. law. 
+Moreover, the laptops of close Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, thought destroyed by the FBI, were apparently retained and are “being exploited” by the National Security division. 
+And here is the salient point. His FBI sources told Baier, “with 99 percent” certitude, that Clinton’s Chappaqua server “had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence services…” 
+If this is so, Hillary Clinton as security risk ranks right up there with Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, though they acted out of treasonous ideology and she out of Clintonian hubris. What do these foreign intelligence agencies know about Clinton that the voters do not? 
+The second revelation from Baier is that the Clinton Foundation has been under active investigation by the white-collar crime division of the FBI for a year and is a “very high priority.” 
+Specifically, the FBI is looking into published allegations of “pay-to-play.” This is the charge that the Clinton State Department traded access, influence and policy decisions to foreign regimes and to big donors who gave hundreds of millions to the Clinton Foundation, along with 15 years of six-figure speaking fees for Bill and Hillary. 
+According to Baier’s sources, FBI agents are “actively and aggressively” pursuing this case, have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple persons, and are now being inundated in an “avalanche of new information” from WikiLeaks documents and new emails. 
+The FBI told Baier that they anticipate indictments. 
+Indeed, with the sums involved, and the intimate ties between high officials of Bill’s foundation, and Hillary and her close aides at State, it strains credulity to believe that deals were not discussed and cut. 
+Books have been written alleging and detailing them. 
+Also, not only Fox News but also The Wall Street Journal and other news sources are reporting on what appears a rebellion inside the FBI against strictures on their investigations imposed by higher ups in the Department of Justice of Attorney General Loretta Lynch. 
+Director Comey has come under fire from left and right — first for refusing to recommend the prosecution of Clinton, then for last week’s statement about the discovery of new and “pertinent” emails on the Abedin-Weiner computer — but retains a reputation for integrity. 
+And he knows better than any other high official the answer to a critical question that needs answering before Tuesday: Has Baier been fed exaggerated or false information by FBI agents hostile to Clinton? 
+Or has Baier been told the truth? 
+In the latter case, we are facing a constitutional crisis if Clinton is elected. And the American people surely have a right to know that before they go to the polls on Tuesday. 
+What is predictable ahead? 
+Attorney General Lynch, whether she stays or goes, will be hauled before Congress to explain whether she or top aides impeded the FBI investigations of the Clinton scandals. And witnesses from within her Justice department and FBI will also be called to testify. 
+Moreover, Senate Republicans would block confirmation of any new attorney general who did not first promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the email and pay-to-play scandals, and any pressure from Lynch’s Justice Department on the FBI. 
+Even Democrats would concede that a Department of Justice, staffed by Hillary Clinton appointees, could not credibly be entrusted with investigating alleged high crimes and misdemeanors by former Secretary of State Clinton and confidants like Abedin and Mills. 
+An independent counsel, a special prosecutor, appears inevitable. 
+And such individuals usually mark their success or failure by how many and how high are the indictments and convictions they rack up. 
+However, these processes proceed at a torpid pace. 
+First comes the setting up of the office and the hirings, then the investigations, then the grand jury appearances, then the indictments, then the prosecutions, then the horse-trading for the testimony of the accused and the convicted in return for immunity or leniency. 
+Steadily, it moves up the food chain. And when a head of state is involved, it is a process deeply debilitating to the nation. 
+We have gone through this before, twice. 
+Do we really want to go through it again? 
+Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.” 
+Copyright 2016 Creators.com.",FAKE
+1290,"Bush vows to back GOP nominee, questions Rubio on abortion","Concord, New Hampshire (CNN) Jeb Bush is sharpening his attacks against rival Marco Rubio in the final few days before the New Hampshire primary, raising questions about the Florida senator's position on abortion and characterizing him as an untested, political showman.
+
+In a wide-ranging interview Friday with CNN Special Correspondent Jamie Gangel, the former Florida governor talked about his campaign beyond New Hampshire, but also said he plans to support the Republican nominee -- even if that's Donald Trump.
+
+""I will support the Republican nominee no matter who he or she is,"" Bush said when asked about Trump. ""I've done it my whole entire life. I've signed a pledge to do it. I'll do it.""
+
+Late last year, after Bush began launching an aggressive attack strategy against Trump, the former governor's aides began looking into the possibility of Bush not backing Trump should he become the nominee. Lately, Bush tends to say definitively that Trump won't be the party's pick and avoids answering the hypothetical.
+
+But on Friday, he said he would support the eventual nominee, but stressed he doesn't think Trump would win in the general election.
+
+""I want to win, though. I want the Republican Party's candidate to win. I want a conservative to serve in the White House,"" Bush said. ""I believe I'm best qualified and that's why I'm fighting for this.""
+
+That pledge of party loyalty also extends to Rubio, he said, though Bush and his allies continue to train their fire on the first-term senator, whose third place finish in Iowa ignited a new round of momentum for his campaign.
+
+Since Iowa, where Bush placed sixth, Bush has been traveling across New Hampshire, diligently trying to compare Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz to another first-term senator that ran for president eight years ago: Barack Obama.
+
+Bush said Friday that Rubio is ""charismatic"" but not a ""leader."" His campaign released a TV ad that included footage of former Sen. Rick Santorum, who ended his campaign this week and backed Rubio but failed to name an accomplishment of Rubio's in the Senate.
+
+Asked if Bush's attacks against Rubio will hurt the ""establishment"" lane in the Republican race, as some critics have argued, Bush argued that politics is a contact sport.
+
+""He's attacking me,"" Bush said. ""So does that count, or is this just only a one-way street? Is this the child of privilege that has a free pass, whenever everybody else has to fight for it? This isn't bean bag, you know. This is politics. Every campaign, every candidate will be contrasted and compared. Their records needs to be shown.""
+
+Bush, who considers himself the most pro-life candidate, believes in all three exceptions. Asked if Rubio's position is too extreme, Bush said he ""respects"" it but thinks it won't resonate with large swaths of voters.
+
+""Politically, it's a tough sell to tell a pro-life mother -- had her daughter been raped -- that she would just have to accept that as a sad fact,"" he said. ""This is not an easy decision, but Marco will have to explain that position.""
+
+It's a slight departure from a few months ago when it was reported that the pro-Bush super PAC, Right to Rise USA, was considering plans to attack Rubio on abortion. Asked about it at the time, Bush simply showed signs that he disagreed with the reported strategy.
+
+Mostly, Bush is focused on highlighting what he considers Rubio's lack of leadership skills.
+
+""As a speaker of the (Florida) House, he managed a staff of about 40 people,"" Bush said in the interview Friday. ""That's different than running a, you know, state government, where you had 130,000 people that got reduced by 11%.""
+
+Bush said it wasn't true, but said he was glad he wasn't in a war of words with Christie.
+
+""If he's going after Marco, it means he's not going after me, which warms my heart because I've been on the end of that pole ... by Chris Christie, and he's pretty good at it,"" Bush said.
+
+With just four days until voters head to the polls in New Hampshire, Bush maintained that he's not feeling any ""pressure"" and argued that he's optimistic about his changes.
+
+Bush supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham, however, told the New York Times that if Rubio ""badly"" defeats Bush in New Hampshire, the former governor will be ""toast.""
+
+Bush brushed off the notion. Asked specifically if getting beat ""badly"" looks like Rubio placing first or second and Bush coming in fourth or fifth -- a possible scenario according to some recent polls -- Bush flatly said ""No.""
+
+The candidate pledged to continue on to South Carolina, no matter the results.
+
+""If you want to come visit me from the next week after New Hampshire, I'll be in South Carolina. And the week after that I'll be in Nevada,"" he said. ""We have a national campaign. This is the long haul.""",REAL
+522,House GOP smells victory in budget battle,“I felt it is important to take the opportunity to meet the President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into...,REAL
+9759,Blowback? Journalists whine of victimization as Trump supporters turn on presstitute media,"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC Triggered journalists from across the nation are bemoaning the treatment members of the press are receiving at Trump campaign rallies from the Trump supporters the media routinely misrepresents as ignorant racists, fascist Nazis, or disenchanted working whites. With increasing regularity, these journalist snowflakes are ""reporting"" their victimization at the hands Trump supporters who chant mean things like, ""CNN sucks"" and call them names like ""presstitutes."" For members of the media elite, the occasional taunts and jeers signal a dangerous threat to the free press. During an interview with Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer breathlessly asked Trump's campaign manager to ask Trump to stop calling out the press at his rallies because he is scared ""there could be an ugly incident"" between Trump supporters and the ""hardworking young journalists"" who cover his rallies. A quick review of media stories over the last two weeks reveals more than a dozen articles in major publications with the same ""journalists victimized by Trump supporters at rallies"" narrative. Trump supporters endure long waits, messy parking, and often obstructed view seating to rally for their candidate. The press, on the other hand, is given their own entrance, sectioned off seating, and protection from event security and the Secret Service. After an exhaustive search, this Breitbart reporter could find exactly zero incidences of members of the media being physically attacked or assaulted at Trump rallies. None of this has stopped the misleading characterization of Trump supporters creating a ""menacing"" and ""dangerous"" environment for these special snowflakes. The narrative sprung up briefly in August when NBC 's Katy Tur wrote a long piece in Marie Claire in which she gives her account of her confrontational relationship with Trump and the backlash his ""insults"" on her reporting created with his supporters. Here is a small piece from her ""no-holds-barred"" account: I was six months into covering the Trump campaign for MSNBC and NBC News, and there I was, in the belly of a World War II battleship, in a press pen made out of bicycle racks, surrounded by thousands of whipped-up Trump supporters. ... Trump decided to go further in Mount Pleasant, pointing his finger squarely at me and launching a personal attack as millions of Americans watched at home. ""What a lie it was,"" Trump said, referring to the claim that he had left the stage abruptly. ""What a lie. Katy Tur. What a lie it was. Third. Rate. Reporter. Remember that."" The crowd's boos ricocheted off the iron hull of the USS Yorktown. Just a few days after the Tur piece was published, two other NBC press employees — Frank Thorp and Ali Vitali — tweeted out pictures and videos of Trump supporters showing insufficient deference to the press. It was so very traumatic that it inspired several stories, including this one in Real Clear Politics . On October 13th, the victimhood narrative kicked off in earnest when the ""Committee to Protect Journalists"" issued a statement claiming that Donald Trump is a ""threat to press freedom."" The same day Politico's Ben Schreckinger ran an article titled, ""Trump crowds rain hate on the press"" and CNN 's Jim Acosta claimed to have found a crudely written sign with a swastika and ""media"" written on it. The next day, on October 14th, the narrative of violent Trump supporters scaring the press was being pushed across the media . The Huffington Post 's Ed Mazza wrote a piece titled, ""Frenzied Donald Trump Supporters Are Turning On The Media — And It's Getting Scary."" The Washington Post 's Paul Farhi wrote , ""The press always got booed at Trump rallies. But now the aggression is menacing."" Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine titled his piece, ""Trump's Dangerous Game of 'Beat the Press'."" Tierney Mcafee 's article in People Magazine was titled, ""Press Corps with Trump Now Needs Police Escort as Crowd Shouts 'Whores!'."" Even the Wall St. Journal got in on the action when Reid Epstein wrote, ""Trump Rally-Goers Dismiss His Vulgarities, Offer Their Own for Clinton, News Media."" Just to name a few. The stories have continued until the time of this writing with similar articles in the New York Times , Media Matters , Washington Post (again), AlterNet , and on and on. Every special snowflake reporter with a Twitter account wanted in on the sweet victimhood action. McKay Coppins from Buzzfeed tweeted a seven-second video of someone ""heckling reporters."" Jose DelReal from the Washington Post tweeted that the ""vitriol towards the media"" was as bad as he has ever seen with the ""boos and cursing and middle fingers."" Poor little guy, Eric Boehlert from Media Matters didn't get his own video so he compiled several from other reporters for his own breathless article. Frank Thorp tweeted video of people chanting ""CNN sucks."" The horror! Rosie Gray , another Buzzfeed reporter, found a new angle to keep the narrative going when an attendee used the term Lugenpresse, a German term for ""lying press."" You know who else used the German term Lugenpresse? The Nazi's. As CNN 's Jake Tapper pointed out. CNN 's Jim Acosta wanted everyone to know just how hard it is to do a live shot when people are yelling at you. After weeks of nonstop reporting about the ""menacing"" and ""scary"" treatment of reporters at the hands of Trump supporters, one of the most regular victims, Sopan Deb from CBS, got a nice note from a do-gooding White Knight. At a rally in Naples Florida recently, Trump supporters heckled the press for refusing to stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance. Dustin Stockton is a political reporter for Breitbart News, a community liaison for Gun Owners of America, and a political strategist.",FAKE
+9832,FLASHBACK: American Flags Collapse at the Sight of Hillary Clinton,"0 comments 
+According to The Political Insider , in what may be one of the more appropriate metaphors for how Hillary Clinton has destroyed – and will destroy – American values, video has resurfaced from nearly a decade ago showing American flags collapsing at her feet as she approaches.",FAKE
+7005,Erdogan wants to revive the dream of Ottoman Empire by supporting Saudi Arabia,"Email 
+
+According to Twitter page Jil al HorriyavalTanweer, @jil_ht, the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has claimed in his official twitter account that Turkey is pursuing a revival of Ottoman Empire by deploying military forces to Syria and Iraq, while Saudi Arabia is remaining silent against the disintegration and plundering of the Arab countries by the Erdogan regime, only because of strategic issues and its own hostility toward Bashar Assad.",FAKE
+6300,"Scientists Leak Evidence That Approve Elon Musk's Theory: The Universe Is A ""Computer"" Simulation","Share on Facebook Physicists say they may have evidence that the universe is a computer simulation. How? They made a computer simulation of the universe. And it looks sort of like us. A long-proposed thought experiment, put forward by both philosophers and popular culture, points out that any civilization of sufficient size and intelligence would eventually create a simulation universe if such a thing were possible. A long-proposed thought experiment, put forward by both philosophers and popular culture, points out that any civilization of sufficient size and intelligence would eventually create a simulation universe if such a thing were possible. And since there would therefore be many more simulations (within simulations, within simulations) than real universes, it is therefore more likely than not that our world is artificial. Now a team of researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany led by Silas Beane say they have evidence this may be true. In a paper named ‘ Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation ’, they point out that current simulations of the universe – which do exist, but which are extremely weak and small – naturally put limits on physical laws. Technology Review explains that “the problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time.” What that basically means is that by just being a simulation, the computer would put limits on, for instance, the energy that particles can have within the program. These limits would be experienced by those living within the sim – and as it turns out, something which looks just like these limits do in fact exist. For instance, something known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin, or GZK cut off, is an apparent boundary of the energy that cosmic ray particles can have. This is caused by interaction with cosmic background radiation. But Beane and co’s paper argues that the pattern of this rule mirrors what you might expect from a computer simulation . Naturally, at this point the science becomes pretty tricky to wade through – and we would advise you read the paper itself to try and get the full detail of the idea. But the basic impression is an intriguing one. Like a prisoner in a pitch-black cell, we may never be able to see the ‘walls’ of our prison — but through physics we may be able to reach out and touch them. Watch What Elon Musk Says On This Subject: Related:",FAKE
+4634,Is Huma Abedin Hillary Clinton’s Secret Weapon or Her Next Big Problem?,"Faced with an unending scandal about her use of a private e-mail server when she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton decided last September to “reset” her presidential campaign. As Amy Chozick wrote in the New York Times, the new Hillary would display her “humor” and her “heart,” the qualities that her friends say rarely come across in public appearances. The reset reached its zenith on October 3 when Hillary appeared on Saturday Night Live as “Val,” a bartender to whom Kate McKinnon, as Hillary Clinton, pours her heart out. The six-minute segment ends with “Hillary” and “Val” bonding as they sing “Stand by Me,” the Ben E. King classic. “Hillary” gets so carried away with her manic crooning that she doesn’t realize “Val” has disappeared and been replaced by cast member Cecily Strong, playing a character known as “Huma.” “I was just hanging out with my best friend Val,” Hillary says. Huma tells Hillary there is no one there. “I think you’ve had one too many, Hillary, let’s go,” Huma says. Huma, as anyone who follows politics knows, is 40-year-old Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s “shadow,” as Politico once described her. She began working for Hillary in 1996, when she was a 19-year-old intern fresh from George Washington University assigned to the First Lady’s office. Abedin had wanted to be a journalist like her hero Christiane Amanpour and was hoping to work in the White House press office. “Take a chance,” her mother told her. “Don’t fall in love with Plan A.” Huma took the advice. “Sixteen years later, I wouldn’t change a thing,” she told a dinner audience in 2012, at a Fortune conference. “And I got to meet Christiane Amanpour.” Over the years Huma has served in several positions, with increasingly important-sounding titles. She has been Hillary’s “body woman,” her traveling chief of staff, a senior adviser, and a deputy chief of staff when Hillary was secretary of state. Now, based in Brooklyn, she is the vice-chair of Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign. But whatever the title, the job she performs for Hillary has always been essentially the same: confessor, confidante, and constant companion. It’s safe to say that over the years Abedin and Hillary have spent more time together than either has with her husband. A former adviser to Bill Clinton describes her as “a mini Hillary.” Wherever Hillary goes, Abedin goes. In November 2008, when Hillary flew to Chicago to meet with President-Elect Barack Obama to discuss becoming secretary of state, she took Huma along. During Hillary’s grueling, nearly 11-hour congressional testimony in October about Benghazi, Abedin was there. She has been referred to as a “second daughter” to the Clintons. Others have described Hillary and Huma as like sisters.
+
+Whoever wants to curry favor with Hillary has to go through Abedin, as thousands of recently released e-mails make abundantly clear. For the quotidian matters of the schedule, she speaks for Hillary, and people adept at getting access to Hillary know it. “Everybody fights to be at the center,” the former adviser says, “and Huma controls a lot of that dynamic.” “I’m not sure Hillary could walk out the door without Huma,” Clinton adviser Mandy Grunwald told *Vogue’*s Rebecca Johnson eight years ago. “She’s a little like Radar on *M*A*S*H. If the air-conditioning is too cold, Huma is there with the shawl. She’s always thinking three steps ahead of Hillary.” It’s still true today. Nothing Hillary-related is too big or too small for Abedin’s purview. Take, for example, the secretary of state’s December 2009 struggle to get a faxed document: Abedin: Can you hang up the fax line? They will call again and try fax. Clinton: I thought it was supposed to be off hook to work? Abedin: Yes, but hang up one more time. So they can reestablish the line. Abedin: Just pick up phone and hang it up. And leave it hung up. Clinton: I’ve done it twice now. Still nothing. In January 2013, Abedin was concerned that Clinton might miss an early-morning call from Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India. Abedin discussed the call with Monica Hanley, another Clinton aide. Abedin: Have you been going over her calls with her? So she knows [S]ingh is at 8? Hanley: She was in bed for a nap by the time I heard that she had an 8am call. Will go over with her. Abedin: Very imp[ortant] to do that. She’s often confused. In her new position as vice-chair of Hillary’s campaign, Huma has even taken to being a stand-in for her boss at campaign-related events. In October, she and *Vogue’*s Anna Wintour were off to Paris together for a $1,000-a-person fund-raiser at the home of James Cook, an American businessman. But, for all her proximity to the white-hot center of American politics, Abedin is every bit as unknown to the general public as her boss is world-famous.
+
+Abedin was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, is Pakistani; her late father, Syed Zainul Abedin, was Indian. Both were intellectuals. When Abedin was two years old, the family moved to Jidda, Saudi Arabia, where, with the backing of Abdullah Omar Nasseef, then the president of King Abdulaziz University, her father founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, a think tank, and became the first editor of its Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, which stated its mission as “shedding light” on minority Muslim communities around the world in the hope of “securing the legitimate rights of these communities.” After Syed died, in 1993, his wife succeeded him as director of the institute and editor of the Journal, positions she still holds. She has also been active in the International Islamic Council for Da’wa and Relief, which is now headed by Nasseef and was banned in Israel on account of its ties to the Union of Good, a pro-Hamas fund-raising network, run by Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Google Abdullah Omar Nasseef, the man who set up the Abedins in Jidda, and a host of right-wing screeds pop up. Though he is a high-ranking insider in the Saudi government and sits on the king’s Shura Council, there are claims that Nasseef once had ties to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda—a charge that he has denied through a spokesman—and that he remains a “major” figure in the Muslim Brotherhood. In his early years as the patron of the Abedins’ journal, Nasseef was the secretary-general of the Muslim World League, which Andrew McCarthy, the former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the “Blind Sheik,” Omar Abdel Rahman, in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, claims “has long been the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology.” Google Yusuf al-Qaradawi and you’ll find even more right-wing hysteria. Says McCarthy, who has conducted something of a personal crusade on the question of the Abedin family’s purported connections, “The Union of Good is a designated terrorist organization and Qaradawi is the leading global jurisprudent”—a term McCarthy prefers to “cleric”—“of the Muslim Brotherhood, who has issued fatwas calling for suicide bombings in the Palestinian territories and in Israel and has called for the killings of American soldiers in Iraq.” It turns out the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs is an Abedin family business. Huma was an assistant editor there between 1996 and 2008. Her brother, Hassan, 45, is a book-review editor at the Journal and was a fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, where Nasseef is chairman of the board of trustees. Huma’s sister, Heba, 26, is an assistant editor at the Journal. In June 2012, then congresswoman Michele Bachmann and four conservative congressmen wrote to the State Department warning that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government. The letter specifically cited Abedin: “Huma Abedin has three family members—her late father, her mother and her brother—connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations,” they wrote. But a month later Senator John McCain, no friend of the Clintons, took to the Senate floor to denounce Bachmann’s letter as an “unwarranted and unfounded attack” on Abedin. “I know Huma to be an intelligent, upstanding, hard-working, and loyal servant of our country and our government.” “There are few things that President Obama and John McCain agree on. One is that … Bachmann’s lies about Huma are baseless and bigoted fear-mongering,” says Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill.
+
+The Washington Post once described Abedin as “notoriously private.” That’s a fiction, of course. Like many other political operatives, she appears in the media when it suits her agenda. (Appearing in Vanity Fair is not on it; the Clinton campaign declined to make her available despite repeated requests.) The campaign has put the fear of God into many who might speak about her. One longtime Clinton observer explained that, along with Chelsea, Abedin is “the third rail” of the Clinton political world. “I’m being very candid with you,” this person says. “It’s a situation where everyone’s afraid to comment for fear that they’ll be misquoted, for fear of saying something they may think is laudatory that others may not. You can’t imagine the paranoia…. It’s a paranoia that clearly affects how everyone responds to Huma.” There is a long list of usually chatty Clinton surrogates and supporters who have gone mute on the subject of Huma Abedin. The ones who didn’t get the memo, or choose to ignore it, stick close to the prescribed script. Michael Feldman, the managing director of the Glover Park Group, a communications consulting firm, says that after 20 years Abedin has become part of the “institutional memory” and now occupies “a really important and unique place in an organization.” Bob Barnett, the lawyer who brokered the Clintons’ multi-million-dollar book deals, says Huma is “now one of the key glues that holds Clintonworld together…. She knows everyone and everyone knows her. She knows their strengths. She knows their weaknesses. She knows the roles they’ve played, and that history is priceless to a person in public life.” “Huma is a terrific leader. She’s multifaceted, has a great strategic sense, and she’s a wonderful colleague. She’s an integral part of the team, and her competence is only exceeded by her humility,” says Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
+
+When Anthony Weiner, then in his second term as a congressman from Queens, New York, first saw Abedin around Washington, in 2001, early in Hillary’s Senate term, “I was like, ‘Wow, who is that?’ ” he told *The New York Times Magazine’*s Jonathan Van Meter in 2013 for an in-depth story about their courtship and marriage. At a Democratic Party retreat on Martha’s Vineyard, in August 2001, he asked her out for a drink. She said she had to work, but Hillary promptly gave her the night off and urged the two young folks to go out and have fun. In the event, Abedin, who doesn’t drink alcohol, ordered tea and then retreated to the bathroom. She was slow to return. “She ditched me,” Weiner recalled to Van Meter. They kept running into each other, but Abedin wasn’t interested. She thought he was a brash, ambitious, camera-hogging New Yorker. But opposites began to attract during George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, at which Weiner found himself sitting between Senators Clinton and Obama. “I appreciate you looking out for my boss,” Huma texted him. By 2008 their relationship had become romantic, and they were married on July 10, 2010, with President Clinton presiding. In May 2011, Abedin accompanied Hillary and Obama on a trip to London that included a state dinner at Buckingham Palace. Abedin was invited to the festivities and afterward, in her “spectacular” room at the palace, wrote to Weiner: “I cannot believe what an amazingly blessed life that we live, these incredible experiences we’ve both had.” It was like a fairy tale. A few days later, though, the fairy tale became a nightmare when Weiner called and left a message for his wife, who was in Washington: “My Twitter was hacked.” In fact, despite what he told Abedin and the media, Weiner had mistakenly tweeted a photograph of his erection, meant for a 21-year-old college student in Seattle, to his 45,000 followers. Reporters besieged him. Desperate for privacy, he and his wife, then pregnant, spent the first weekend of June at a friend’s house in the Hamptons. As they were packing up the car to return to New York City, Weiner confessed, “It’s true. It’s me. The picture is me. I sent it.” Abedin was devastated. “It was every emotion that one would imagine: rage and anger and shock,” she told the Times. At a news conference on June 6, Weiner tried to come clean. He admitted he had sent explicit messages to six women during the previous three years, but said he had never actually met any of them. One longtime State Department official says that inside Foggy Bottom some people’s initial reaction was that Abedin might have driven Weiner to sexting because she “was never around. She gave so much to Hillary Clinton, what did she have left for him? It was politically incorrect, but we did wonder.” Abedin turned to Hillary. After all, who better to give advice on a husband’s extramarital escapades? The next day Huma returned to work at the State Department. “My compass was my job,” she said. “It was where I could go and life was normal.” “Huma didn’t really want me to [resign], frankly,” Weiner told Van Meter. “Her frame was: ‘We’ve got to get back to normal somehow.’ ” But between Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s call for his resignation and the fact that the Clintons were now disgusted with him, according to Politico, he believed he had no choice. He resigned the following day, which meant the end of his $174,000 salary, leaving the couple to make do with Abedin’s $155,000 State Department compensation.
+
+After the scandal broke, Clintonworld seemed to go into overdrive to help Huma financially. A key first step was finding the family a new place to live. Soon after he resigned from Congress, Weiner sold his Forest Hills condominium for $430,000. Then Abedin sold her Washington condominium, for $620,000, at a loss of $29,000. Thanks to the generosity of Jack Rosen, a longtime Clinton supporter and New York developer, the couple moved into a sunlit, 12th-floor, 2,120-square-foot, four-bedroom apartment in one of Rosen’s buildings, at 254 Park Avenue South. The monthly rent has been estimated to have been at least $12,000. (In an interview, Rosen says the apartment was made available to the couple in part because of his relationship with the Clintons and they paid a market rental rate.) How Weiner and Abedin could afford the rent had the press wondering, although Weiner had started a consulting firm, Woolf Weiner Associates. The couple reported a combined income of $496,000 for 2012. (While Woolf Weiner remains a corporate entity, last July Weiner joined MWW, a public-relations firm. Two months later he was gone. “I was either not consulted or ignored on every part of this excellent summer adventure,” he tweeted.) The next step was to sign off on Abedin’s 2012 request to become a “special government employee,” or S.G.E., at the State Department. This would allow her to continue to get paid while working from home, in New York City, as a consultant with expertise that no other person could supply on a “myriad of policy, administrative and logistical issues,” according to her application for S.G.E. status. At the same time she could care for her new baby son, Jordan, born on December 21, 2011. She became an S.G.E. in early June 2012 and was paid $62.06 per hour. By then, Abedin was also acting as a consultant to Teneo Holdings, a global strategic-consulting and investment-banking firm co-founded by her old friend Douglas Band, who did the same thing for Bill Clinton that she did for Hillary. For the seven months she worked at Teneo, she was paid $105,000. In addition to the State Department and Teneo jobs, Huma was hired as a consultant to the William J. Clinton Foundation to help plan for Hillary’s “post-State philanthropic activities,” and as a personal employee of Hillary’s. The potential for conflicts cropped up immediately. In April 2012, after her maternity leave and while she was waiting to get her S.G.E. designation, Teneo asked her to intercede on behalf of its client Judith Rodin, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, in obtaining a seat on the President’s Global Development Council. That year, the Rockefeller Foundation paid Teneo $5.7 million for public-relations work. “[Rodin] is expecting us to help her get appointed to this,” reads the subject line of an e-mail between two Teneo officials. “[Senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett’s] team is aware of the request, but has not made a commitment,” another e-mail explains. A few months later Band e-mailed Abedin: “Judy Rodin. Huge [Clinton] foundation/cgi [Clinton Global Initiative] supporter and close pal of wjc [Bill Clinton]. Teneo reps her as well. Can you help?” (There was no reply from Abedin in the e-mail chain, and Rodin did not get the appointment.) In July 2012, Huma, Weiner, and Jordan, then six months old, posed for People magazine in their Park Avenue South apartment, which had been listed for sale at more than $3 million. In the piece Abedin proclaimed, “Anthony has spent every day since [the scandal] trying to be the best dad and husband he can be. I’m proud to be married to him.” Soon thereafter, Weiner announced he was running for mayor. But it turned out he had again sent sexual messages to a woman on social media, starting in July 2012, after the People story appeared. He ended up losing badly in the Democratic primary. For many in Clintonworld, this was the end of their involvement with Anthony Weiner. “The Clintons have put him in exile,” one longtime Clinton insider says. But not Huma. She quickly returned to Hillary’s side. Daniel Halper, online editor at the conservative Weekly Standard and the author of Clinton, Inc., an unflattering portrait of the Clintons, theorizes Huma had little choice after the second sexting fiasco but to stick with Hillary. “She started sort of easing her way out,” he says. “It would have helped if she was the First Lady of New York and would’ve had her own gig going, but, of course, her husband completely fucked her over. But, at that point, there was no way for her to exit gracefully.”
+
+In June 2013, Huma’s various roles caught the attention of Iowa Republican senator Charles Grassley, then the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a June 13 letter to Abedin, he claimed that Teneo had paid her for gathering “political intelligence” on behalf of its clients. (Teneo disputes this assertion.) He noted that, in addition to her $135,000 State Department compensation, she had also been paid “as much as $355,000” for her other consulting. He said he was “concerned” that her S.G.E. status “blurs the line between public and private sector employees.” He asked her to provide him information about her various jobs. In her July 5 response, she denied providing any advice or insights to Teneo clients about the State Department. But these answers did not mollify Grassley. Specifically, he objected to Abedin’s becoming an S.G.E., because he believed she provided no irreplaceable expertise and therefore her designation as one had violated Congress’s intent when it created the program, in 1962. The State Department dismissed his concerns. Her appointment as an S.G.E. “was consistent with employment and ethics rules,” it said. “She was retained for her expert knowledge of policy, administrative, and other matters.” Grassley, now the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, remains unsatisfied and has cited another Abedin-related beef: he claims she had worked 244 days as an S.G.E., far more than the 130 days allowed by the federal S.G.E. law. “If there’s a reason for more than 130 days, then she shouldn’t be an S.G.E.,” he says. “She ought to be a full-time employee.” But, according to someone close to Abedin, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General “miscalculated” the amount of time Huma worked as an S.G.E. and Grassley and his staff are “wrong” about the implications of her working more than 130 days as one. In her interview with the O.I.G,. Abedin recalled receiving verbal approval for the time she spent working. Grassley continues to probe Abedin’s potential conflicts of interest when she was getting four different paychecks at once. “We know she set up dinners for Secretary Clinton and her private-sector employers and e-mailed private-sector employees from government accounts,” he says. During the course of his looking into Abedin’s S.G.E. status, the senator stumbled upon an O.I.G. “criminal” inquiry, commenced in October 2013, about whether Abedin knowingly got paid for hours she did not work while she was on vacation and maternity leave. The heavily redacted report of the inquiry, dated January 2015, is titled “Huma Abedin. Embezzlement.” Essentially, the O.I.G. found that Abedin was paid $33,140.03 (or $20,331.42 after taxes) in a lump sum as a result of her possibly submitting “false or inaccurate time records resulting in pay received for work hours which should have been charged to sick and/or annual leave.” (The Department of Justice declined to prosecute.) The report makes clear that there was confusion about whether she had been authorized to take a maternity leave and whether she should have been paid for a “babymoon”—an August 2011 trip Abedin, then pregnant, and Weiner took to Italy. During that trip, she said in an interview with investigators, “Every day we had calls. We had emails. I was—I feel like I was constantly on conference calls. I have clear memories of walking around and just being on a conference call the whole time as we were walking.” The 161-page report concludes that the State Department wants her to repay $10,674.32, which equates to 62 days of work. As of this writing Abedin has not done so, pending an administrative appeal. In Clintonworld, the reaction to Grassley’s relentless assault on Huma is one of resignation. “It’s understood that if you live in that white-hot center in Clintonland you’ll be the subject of investigations, you’ll be the subject of personal attacks,” explains the longtime Clinton observer. “You expect it to come, and it’s handled. She’s done nothing wrong and has nothing to be apprehensive about. It doesn’t mean she still won’t be attacked.” Another says simply, “Senator Grassley would not be pursuing Huma if she was not a key senior aide to Secretary Clinton.” Grassley says that charge is ridiculous and that he has no plans to give up this fight until he gets more information from Abedin and the State Department. The Judiciary Committee’s lawyers have been trying to schedule a meeting with Abedin’s lawyer, Miguel Rodríguez, but that meeting keeps getting postponed. (Each side says the other is to blame.) “I have to go by my reputation,” Grassley says. “I don’t give up. You know the old saying ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat’?” But Rodríguez says, “Neither the law nor the facts support Senator Grassley’s baseless allegations and extrapolated conclusions. It is disappointing that the senator and his staff continue to focus a politically motivated campaign on Ms. Abedin, who has been known her entire professional life for hard work, integrity, and her sterling reputation. It is people like Ms. Abedin whom we should all want in public service.” Whether it’s palatable for the vice-chairman of Hillary’s presidential campaign to be embroiled in allegations of conflicts of interest, obtaining patronage jobs, or misrepresenting time worked remains to be seen. Asked if at some point Huma becomes a liability to Hillary, the long-term Clinton insider replies, “It’s like anything else. I don’t think so, but you know I don’t have any idea. Hillary is very loyal, but she’s obviously pragmatic.” It’s all gotten more complicated since the simpler days of 2011, when one Saturday morning, just before noon, Huma sent Hillary a copy of an A.P. story about gunmen who tried to assassinate the head of the Libyan Army. Hillary replied about an hour later: “Did you get info from Chelsea about the wall lamps?” Chelsea had sent Huma the link. Huma replied, “They are beautiful, but way out of my price range!” “Did you look at all the ones in the link to the brand?” Hillary asked later that afternoon. “Can you call me at home?” Ed Note: This article has been changed from its original, adding an attribution to the New York Times in the opening paragraph. Related: How Hillary Clinton’s Loyal Confidants Could Cost Her the Election",REAL
+7638,A 70-Year-Old Woman Gave Birth—And What You Should Know About It,"posted by Eddie Each one of us has been told about our ticking biological clock, but those in their 30’s or 40’s who are hoping to have kids, probably think having a baby, is just not possible anymore. Well, it is, but with a few risks. But, after hearing the story about a 70-year-old who gave birth, you now have the perfect comeback to whoever says your lady parts are slowly reaching its best-before date. A 70-year-old woman named, Daljinder Kaur, in India has become the world’s first-mom to give birth to a son, using in-vitro fertilization (IVF). Despite, two failed pregnancies before, the third time was the charm, giving her a boy she named, Arman. What’s more is, it’s been years since Daljinder had her menopause (the end of a woman’s menstrual cycle in life), so theory has it that Daljinder used an egg from a younger donor, although this has not been confirmed. Studies by the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) say that although medicine has endless phenomenon, a woman’s chances of fertility does reduce as they age. This usually occurs by the early-30’s, and plummets faster by their late-30’s. The reason for this is because a woman is born with just one to two million eggs and they are lost gradually with each menstrual cycle, till it finally ends. By the early 50’s, when menopause begins on average, there may be just around a thousand eggs left. But IVF and other assisted reproductive procedures, is usually taken up as a solution to this, especially women who are suffering from infertility and want to improve their chances of getting pregnant. So here’s how IVF works. An egg is taken from a woman and fertilized using a man’s sperm, outside of the body. The embryo is then placed back inside the woman’s womb with the hope that she will get pregnant. The age-limit for allowing IVF and such procedures, in the US is those in their mid-40’s or 50’s. In addition, women in their 40’s are usually impregnated with donor eggs from women in their 20’s and 30’s, to increase their fertility chances. Statistics suggest that women for all ages recorded, who used donor eggs, had a 50% success rate and gave birth. However, a 70-year-old is stretching it a bit, making Daljinder one of the oldest women on the planet to give birth. This is despite the fact that, aged women have a lower blood flow to their uterus, making it close to impossible to conceive and sustain a baby’s life through the pregnancy. It could also take a huge toll on an older woman’s body and put their heart at risk, as it would be unable to handle the blood flow for their own body, let alone a baby. Old-age also comes with its classic creaks from high blood pressure to diabetes and weak bone structures. So, could Daljinder’s case change the face of fertility possibilities as we know it? As a fellow myth-buster, maybe. But the older-mom trend is on a rise, such as, 50-year-old Janet Jackson, who is now pregnant with her first baby as well as Halle Berry who gave birth when she was 47. And hearing from the woman who made history herself, Daljinder’s says she is doing well and feels blessed to hold her own baby. Whoever said motherhood is timeless, has probably found a whole new dimension of meaning to it now. Source:",FAKE
+142,America’s white fragility complex: Why white people get so defensive about their privilege,"Last year, a white male Princeton undergraduate was asked by a classmate to “check his privilege.” Offended by this suggestion, he shot off a 1,300-word essay to the Tory, a right-wing campus newspaper. In it, he wrote about his grandfather who fled the Nazis to Siberia, his grandmother who survived a concentration camp in Germany, about the humble wicker basket business they started in America. He railed against his classmates for “diminishing everything [he’d] accomplished, all the hard work [he’d] done.”
+
+His missive was reprinted by Time. He was interviewed by the New York Times and appeared on Fox News. He became a darling of white conservatives across the country.
+
+What he did not do, at any point, was consider whether being white and male might have given him—if not his ancestors—some advantage in achieving incredible success in America. He did not, in other words, check his privilege.
+
+To Robin DiAngelo, professor of multicutural education at Westfield State University and author of What Does it Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy, Tal Fortgang’s essay—indignant, defensive, beside-the-point, somehow both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing—followed a familiar script. As an anti-racist educator for more than two decades, DiAngelo has heard versions of it recited hundreds of times by white men and women in her workshops.
+
+She’s heard it so many times, in fact, that she came up with a term for it: “white fragility,” which she defined in a 2011 journal article as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation.”
+
+When the Black Lives Matter movement marched in the streets, holding up traffic, disrupting commerce, and refusing to allow “normal life” to resume—insofar as normalcy means a system that permits police and vigilantes to murder black men and women with impunity—white people found themselves in tense conversations online, with friends and in the media about privilege, white supremacy and racism. You could say white fragility was at an all-time high.
+
+I spoke with DiAngelo about how to deal with all the fragile white people, and why it’s worth doing so.
+
+Sam Adler-Bell: How did you come to write about “white fragility”?
+
+Robin DiAngelo: To be honest, I wanted to take it on because it’s a frustrating dynamic that I encounter a lot. I don’t have a lot of patience for it. And I wanted to put a mirror to it.
+
+I do atypical work for a white person, which is that I lead primarily white audiences in discussions on race every day, in workshops all over the country. That has allowed me to observe very predictable patterns. And one of those patterns is this inability to tolerate any kind of challenge to our racial reality. We shut down or lash out or in whatever way possible block any reflection from taking place.
+
+Of course, it functions as means of resistance, but I think it’s also useful to think about it as fragility, as inability to handle the stress of conversations about race and racism
+
+Sometimes it’s strategic, a very intentional push back and rebuttal. But a lot of the time, the person simply cannot function. They regress into an emotional state that prevents anybody from moving forward.
+
+SAB: Carla Murphy recently referenced “white fragility” in an article for Colorlines, and I’ve seen it referenced on Twitter and Facebook a lot lately. It seems like it’s having a moment. Why do you think that is?
+
+RD: I think we get tired of certain terms. What I do used to be called “diversity training,” then “cultural competency” and now, “anti-racism.” These terms are really useful for periods of time, but then they get coopted, and people build all this baggage around them, and you have to come up with new terms or else people won’t engage.
+
+And I think “white privilege” has reached that point. It rocked my world when I first really got it, when I came across Peggy McIntosh. It’s a really powerful start for people. But unfortunately it’s been played so much now that it turns people off.
+
+SAB: What causes white fragility to set in?
+
+RD: For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not “doing.”
+
+In large part, white fragility—the defensiveness, the fear of conflict—is rooted in this good/bad binary. If you call someone out, they think to themselves, “What you just said was that I am a bad person, and that is intolerable to me.” It’s a deep challenge to the core of our identity as good, moral people.
+
+The good/bad binary is also what leads to the very unhelpful phenomenon of un-friending on Facebook.
+
+SAB: Right, because the instinct is to un-friend, to dissociate from those bad white people, so that I’m not implicated in their badness.
+
+RD: When I’m doing a workshop with white people, I’ll often say, “If we don’t work with each other, if we give in to that pull to separate, who have we left to deal with the white person that we’ve given up on and won’t address?
+
+RD: Exactly. And white fragility also comes from a deep sense of entitlement. Think about it like this: from the time I opened my eyes, I have been told that as a white person, I am superior to people of color. There’s never been a space in which I have not been receiving that message. From what hospital I was allowed to be born in, to how my mother was treated by the staff, to who owned the hospital, to who cleaned the rooms and took out the garbage. We are born into a racial hierarchy, and every interaction with media and culture confirms it—our sense that, at a fundamental level, we are superior.
+
+And, the thing is, it feels good. Even though it contradicts our most basic principles and values. So we know it, but we can never admit it. It creates this kind of dangerous internal stew that gets enacted externally in our interactions with people of color, and is crazy-making for people of color. We have set the world up to preserve that internal sense of superiority and also resist challenges to it. All while denying that anything is going on and insisting that race is meaningless to us.
+
+SAB: Something that amazes me is the sophistication of some white people’s defensive maneuvers. I have a black friend who was accused of “online harassment” by a white friend after he called her out in a harsh way. What do you see going on there? RD: First of all, whites often confuse comfort with safety. We say we don’t feel safe, when what we mean is that we don’t feel comfortable. Secondly, no white person looks at a person of color through objective eyes. There’s been a lot of research in this area. Cross-racially, we do not see with objective eyes. Now you add that he’s a black man. It’s not a fluke that she picked the word “harassed.” In doing that, she’s reinforcing a really classic, racist paradigm: White women and black men. White women’s frailty and black men’s aggressiveness and danger. But even if she is feeling that, which she very well may be, we should be suspicious of our feelings in these interactions. There’s no such thing as pure feeling. You have a feeling because you’ve filtered the experience through a particular lens. The feeling is the outcome. It probably feels natural, but of course it’s shaped by what you believe. SAB: There’s also the issue of “tone-policing” here, right? RD: Yes. One of the things I try to work with white people on is letting go of our criteria about how people of color give us feedback. We have to build our stamina to just be humble and bear witness to the pain we’ve caused. In my workshops, one of the things I like to ask white people is, “What are the rules for how people of color should give us feedback about our racism? What are the rules, where did you get them, and whom do they serve?” Usually those questions alone make the point. It’s like if you’re standing on my head and I say, “Get off my head,” and you respond, “Well, you need to tell me nicely.” I’d be like, “No. Fuck you. Get off my fucking head.” In the course of my work, I’ve had many people of color give me feedback in ways that might be perceived as intense or emotional or angry. And on one level, it’s personal—I did do that thing that triggered the response, but at the same time it isn’t onlypersonal. I represent a lifetime of people that have hurt them in the same way that I just did. And, honestly, the fact that they are willing to show me demonstrates, on some level, that they trust me. RD: If people of color went around showing the pain they feel in every moment that they feel it, they could be killed. It is dangerous. They cannot always share their outrage about the injustice of racism. White people can’t tolerate it. And we punish it severely—from job loss, to violence, to murder. For them to take that risk and show us, that is a moment of trust. I say, bring it on, thank you. When I’m doing a workshop, I’ll often ask the people of color in the room, somewhat facetiously, “How often have you given white people feedback about our inevitable and often unconscious racist patterns and had that go well for you?” And they laugh. Because it just doesn’t go well. And so one time I asked, “What would your daily life be like if you could just simply give us feedback, have us receive it graciously, reflect on it and work to change the behavior? What would your life be like?” And this one man of color looked at me and said, “It would be revolutionary.” SAB: I notice as we’ve been talking that you almost always use the word “we” when describing white people’s tendencies. Can you tell me why you do that? RD: Well, for one, I’m white (and you’re white). And even as committed as I am, I’m not outside of anything that I’m talking about here. If I went around saying white people this and white people that, it would be a distancing move. I don’t want to reinforce the idea that there are some whites who are done, and others that still need work. There’s no being finished. Plus, in my work, I’m usually addressing white audiences, and the “we” diminishes defensiveness somewhat. It makes them more comfortable. They see that I’m not just pointing fingers outward. SAB: Do you ever worry about re-centering whiteness? RD: Well, yes. I continually struggle with that reality. By standing up there as an authority on whiteness, I’m necessarily reinforcing my authority as a white person. It goes with the territory. For example, you’re interviewing me now, on whiteness, and people of color have been saying these things for a very long time. On the one hand, I know that in many ways, white people can hear me in a way that they can’t hear people of color. They listen. So by god, I’m going to use my voice to challenge racism. The only alternative I can see is to not speak up and challenge racism. And that is not acceptable to me. SAB: Yes, and racism is something that everyone thinks they’re an authority on. RD: That drives me crazy. I’ll run into someone I haven’t seen in 20 years in the grocery store, and they’ll say, “Hi! What’ve you been doing?” And I say, “I got my Ph.D.” And they say, “Oh wow, what in?” And they’ll go “Oh, well you know. People just need to—” As if they’re going to give me the one-sentence answer to arguably the most challenging social dynamic of our time. Like, hey, why did I knock myself out for 20 years studying, researching, and challenging this within myself and others? I should have just come to you! And the answer is so simple! I’ve never heard that one before! Imagine if I was an astronomer. Everybody has a basic understanding of the sky, but they would not debate an astronomer on astronomy. The arrogance of white people faced with questions of race is unbelievable.",REAL
+8613,"ISIS uses an industrial dough kneader to kill 250 children, roasts adults in a bakery oven in Douma, Syria","Email 
+ISIS barbarians used an industrial dough kneader to kill 250 children, and roasted adults in a bakery oven, according to a shocking new report. 
+In an interview with the humanitarian organization Roads of Success, Syrian mom Alice Assaf went into chilling detail about the atrocities the jihadists committed about two years ago in the town of Douma, explaining that some of the youngsters were even decapitated in front of their parents, according to the Express. 
+“We heard that the militants grabbed six strong men working at the bakery and burned them inside the oven. We knew them,” Assaf told Dr. Yvette Isaac, who works for the advocacy group, according to the UK Mirror. 
+“After that, they caught some 250 kids and kneaded them like dough in the bakery dough machine,” Assaf said, according to media reports. “They were put in the dough mixer, they were kneaded. The oldest one of them was four-years-old.” 
+ISIS transported hundreds of girls to the city of Douma, which has been at the center of the Syrian civil war, to be slaughtered. ISIS has been systematically killing non-Muslims, and the majority of its victims at the time were Christian. 
+Assaf said her own son, George, was killed by the radical militants after he refused to switch to a Muslim name. 
+“My son said to me, ‘No, mother, I don’t want to die with an identity not my own. I prefer to die with the name George,'” Assaf said, according to the Christian Post. 
+Assaf added, “I asked my son then to hide, but he refused and said, ‘I don’t want to hide myself. You are the one who taught me to follow what Christ said’ — ‘whoever denies me before man, I will also deny before my father who is in Heaven.'” 
+Dr. Isaac reported the savage slayings to a member of the UK Parliament, Fiona Bruce, who recently recounted the horrifying testimony to her colleagues in open chambers. 
+“She showed us recent film footage of herself talking with mothers–more than one– who had seen their own children crucified,” Bruce said. 
+“She told us of a mother with a two-month-old baby. When [ISIS] knocked at the front door of her house and ordered the entire family out, she pleaded with them to let her collect her child from another room,” Bruce said. 
+“She told us of a mother with a two-month-old baby,” Bruce continued. When [ISIS] knocked at the front door of her house and ordered the entire family out, she pleaded with them to let her collect her child from another room. They told her, ‘No. Go. It is ours now.’”",FAKE
+9901,Estonia trains partisans for war with Russia,"Estonia trains partisans for war with Russia 01.11.2016 | Source: AP Photo Estonia carries out training for volunteers every week to create people's militia in case occupation army is deployed . According to the New York Times, the country's Defense League conducts events every weekend in the Järva County. Volunteers are taught how to handle assault rifles, put out fire, use horses to transport those injured, distinguish Russian armoured vehicles and hide themselves in the forest from an enemy's army. As one of the participants Vivika Barnabas reported, more than 25,000 people regularly receive such training. It is noted that Estonia 'with a population of 1.3 million people and a standing army of about 6,000, would not stand a chance in a conventional war with Russia'. Margo Klaos, head of the group on nation's defence, which was created by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Government Office, stated that good preparation of population might prevent an attack. The Estonian government also develops programs on preparation of people, local governments and state agencies in case power supply is stopped and there is no connection.   Estonia welcomes US attack aircraft",FAKE
+5168,Karl Rove: Trump's campaign is willing to change. Is the candidate?,"Every Monday, Fox News contributor Karl Rove wraps up the last week in politics and offers an inside look at the week ahead.
+
+Late Breaking News: After this report had been filed, news broke that Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has been fired. Political insiders and journalists alike have reported that Lewandowski and campaign chairman Paul Manafort have been in open warfare over the campaign’s strategy. Lewandowski won most of the battles because he traveled constantly with the candidate and was often the last person The Donald talked to on most every issue.
+
+Lewandowski’s instinct was to “let Trump be Trump.”  But while that might have helped the New York businessman grab 44 percent of the GOP primary vote and become the party’s presumptive nominee, it is not clear this approach would work in the general election.  News reports indicate Trump’s family played a major role in convincing the candidate to dump his manager.
+
+But this change may mean less than expected if the candidate persists in his unorthodox approach.  Winning presidential campaigns are guided by a plan to effectively use the candidate’s time in covering battleground states, targeting persuadable groups of voters with a consistent message that is backed up by solid information and research and delivered in a compelling, deliberate manner.
+
+This requires planning and, having never run for office, Mr. Trump may well believe he doesn’t need a plan or to change his tone or to engage in the basic blocking-and-tackling of persuading and turning out-the-vote.  Instead, he may believe big rallies and frequent TV interviews devoted to the issues of the moment can overcome all.
+
+While it is clear Manafort and the others who make up the winning faction inside Team Trump understand what traditional campaigns need to do, they will not be able to make other needed changes unless the candidate is willing.
+
+The candidates spent last week showcasing divergent strategies to unify their parties. Hillary Clinton continued trying to conciliate Bernie Sanders by reminding he and his supporters of the need to defeat Donald Trump, but the Vermont senator is not willing to suspend his campaign now.
+
+Instead, Sanders seems intent on some sort of confrontation at next month’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. On Tuesday he called for the Democratic Party’s fundamental transformation, and on Thursday he rallied supporters for a platform fight and encouraged them to run for state and local office.
+
+Donald Trump spent his week refusing to conciliate the GOP. On Wednesday he told Republicans upset with his comments about “Mexican Judge” Gonzalo Curiel and opposed to his proposed ban on Muslims entering the country to “Just please be quiet. Don't talk.”
+
+And on “Meet The Press” Sunday, Trump said that while “It would be nice if the Republicans stuck together … I can win one way or the other.” At rallies last week, he also savaged Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush.
+
+Some Republican leaders believe The Donald would be better off ignoring his critics, projecting confidence that the GOP will be united and focusing his energy on Clinton and President Obama. They wonder why he continues to punch down.
+
+Every day Trump spends trashing fellow Republicans is a day the press covers that story, not his attacks on Clinton. Bad advance work can also keep the story alive: Trump held a fundraiser in Arizona at a home built by Senator Barry Goldwater. No one bothered to check what Goldwater’s widow thought of The Donald. She scorched him in interviews.
+
+The two camps have deeply divergent TV strategies, too: NBC News reported Sunday that Clinton and her super PAC allies ARE spending $23.3 million this month in eight battleground states, while Trump and his allies have spent zero (at least one pro-Trump super PAC is running spots on Fox News Channel nationally).
+
+The Clinton campaign ads are running in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. Among them are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ891SoIsdQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiS-WGv8Dps.
+
+The president was heard from, as well: On Tuesday, Obama used the State Floor of the White House for a speech to attack Trump. It’s unusual for any president to use the White House for political speeches, but Obama has demonstrated he doesn’t believe tradition, rules or even the law applies to him.
+
+Democrats counting on Obama to help make the case against Trump believe the president’s 50.4/45.6 percent approval/disapproval rating in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls makes him a big plus for Clinton’s campaign.
+
+Besides counting on those who disapprove of the president to be stronger in their views than those who approve, Republicans believe Obama’s numbers have risen as both party’s primary fights partially obscured him, and that his efforts now to gain the limelight will remind people of what they didn’t like about him and his policies, further fueling voters’ desire for change.
+
+Convention preparations moved forward: Political insiders consider the appointments Friday of Enid Michelson of Utah as Rules Committee chairman for the GOP National Convention and Ron Kaufman of Massachusetts as Rules co-chairman as moves by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus to install leaders loyal to him, rather than to any specific candidate, though the ramifications of this are not yet clear.
+
+Democratic leaders were given the joyful news that veterans of Occupy Wall Street plan to use three campgrounds in southern New Jersey as staging sites for Sanders supporters who will participate in protests in the park across the street from the party’s convention at Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia. The campgrounds are half an hour away and can house thousands.
+
+Looking forward: Clinton promises to step up her attacks on Trump this week with a speech on his business failures, while Trump’s handlers suggest he will lay out more of his economic vision.
+
+Republicans wonder whether Trump will pivot, ignore his Republican critics and focus on Clinton. After all, he has repeatedly criticized Mitt Romney for failing to effectively attack Obama in 2012. Trump’s continued failure to go on the offense himself will raise further concerns and more doubts about his chances in the general election.
+
+Watch also to see if controversy continues bubbling up about Trump’s call on Sunday for profiling Muslims and his suggestion last week that Obama is secretly sympathetic to radical Islam. Even the NRA disavowed Trump’s view that nightclub patrons should be able to carry guns into any club. Let’s see if these Trump comments become bigger items.
+
+But guns are likely to dominate this week’s political coverage: In the aftermath of the Orlando massacre, the Senate takes up four competing measures designed to keep potential terrorists from being able to purchase guns. The most likely to win the largest amount of Senate support is Texas Republican John Cornyn’s bill, but it’s not clear that even he can win the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster by Senate Democrats, some of whom would rather have a political issue than pass legislation.
+
+Karl Rove joined Fox News Channel as a political contributor in February 2008. He also currently serves as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads. His latest book is ""The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters"" (Simon & Schuster, 2015). Follow him on Twitter @KarlRove.",REAL
+10045,With Dire Situation in America for Voters; Homeschool Enrollment Doubles,"The Bible offers up some really good advice as we enter into the final week of the “selection” process. ” Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” (Revelation 18:4)
+Whether it be casting your vote in an utterly broken and corrupt election process, or sending your kids to public school to have USDA stamped on their ass as they are sent down the “drone” assembly line, you provide legitimacy to these systems simply by participating.
+REAL ID is going to end up being a real headache for travelers, and don’t eat beans before getting laser surgery!
+
+Watch on YouTube 
+Sources: 
+Feds Ramp Up REAL ID Bullying Tactics 
+The Clinton Presidency Is Going to Be a Miserable Slog 
+Number of Home-Schooled Students Has Doubled Since 1999, New Data Shows 
+Hospital Patient Seriously Burnt After ‘Farting’ During Cervix Surgery and Causing Laser to Burst Into Flames Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
+We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
+Contributed by The Daily Sheeple of www.TheDailySheeple.com . 
+This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.TheDailySheeple.com. ",FAKE
+9542,Schools All Over America Are Closing On Election Day Due To Fears Of Violence,"in: Politics , Sleuth Journal , Special Interests Will this be the most chaotic election day in modern American history? All across the nation, schools are being closed on election day due to safety fears. Traditionally, schools have been very popular as voting locations because they can accommodate a lot of people, they usually have lots of parking, and everyone in the community knows where they are and can usually get to them fairly easily. But now there is a big movement to remove voting from schools or to shut schools down on election day so that children are not present when voting takes place. According to Fox News , “voting has been removed or classes have been canceled on Election Day at schools in Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere.” Just a couple days ago , I shared with you a survey that found that 51 percent of all Americans are concerned about violence happening on election day, and all of these schools closing is just another sign of how on edge much of the population is as we approach November 8th. Many officials are being very honest about the fact that schools are being shut down on election day because they are afraid of election violence. The following comes from Fox News … Several schools across the nation have decided to close on Election Day over fears of possible violence in the hallways stemming from the fallout from the heated rhetoric that consumed the campaign trail. The fear is the ugliness of the election season could escalate into confrontations and even violence in the school hallways, endangering students. “If anybody can sit there and say they don’t think this is a contentious election, then they aren’t paying much attention,” Ed Tolan, the Falmouth, Maine police chief, said Tuesday. His community has already called off classes on Nov. 8 and an increased police presence will be felt around town. And without a doubt, voting locations are “soft targets” that often have little or no security. We have been blessed to have had such peaceful elections in the past, but we also need to realize that times have changed. I believe that there is wisdom in what Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told reporters … “There is a concern, just like at a concert, sporting event or other public gathering that we didn’t have 15 or 20 years ago,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, co-chairman of the National Association of Secretaries of State election committee. “ What if someone walks in a polling location with a backpack bomb or something? If that happens at a school, then that’s certainly concerning.” All it is going to take is a single incident to change everything. Let us hope that it is not this election day when we see something like that. Another reason why polling locations are under increased scrutiny this election season is because of concerns about election fraud. This is something that Donald Trump has alluded to repeatedly on the campaign trail. For instance, just consider what he told a rally in Pennsylvania … “We don’t want to lose an election because you know what I’m talking about,” Trump told an overwhelmingly white crowd in Manheim, Pa., earlier this month. “Because you know what? That’s a big, big problem, and nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody has the guts to talk about it. So go and watch these polling places .” And of course reports are already pouring in from around the country of big problems with the voting machines. In Illinois this week, one candidate personally experienced a machine switching his votes from Republicans to Democrats… Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats. Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library. “I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.” In addition, if you keep up with my work on The Economic Collapse Blog , then you already know that a number of voters down in Texas have reported that their votes were switched from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . Well, it turns out that those voting machines appear to have a link to the Clinton Foundation … According to OpenSecrets, the company who provided the alleged glitching voting machines is a subsidiary of The McCarthy Group. The McCarthy group is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation – apparently donating 200,000 dollars in 2007 – when it was the largest owner of United States voting machines. Or perhaps the 200,000 dollars went to paying Bill Clinton for speeches? Either way, it doesn’t look good. After everything that we saw in 2012 , I am convinced that there is good reason to be concerned about the integrity of our voting machines. But Democrats don’t like poll observers, because they think that having too many poll observers will intimidate their voters… “It’s un-American, but at the same time we have a long history of doing things like that ,” Ari Berman, author of the 2016 book “ Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America ,” previously told The Christian Science Monitor. “Voting was very, very dangerous. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that we’re at the same place today. I just think the loss of the [official poll observers] is going to be really problematic.” Without a doubt, this has been the craziest election season that we have seen in decades, and I have a feeling that it is about to get even crazier. But will the end result be the election of the most corrupt politician in the history of our country ? If that is the outcome after all that we have been through, it will be exceedingly depressing indeed. Submit your review",FAKE
+2794,Obama says charges he's anti-Semitic are hurtful,"(CNN) President Barack Obama strongly pushed back against claims that he has used anti-Semitic rhetoric in criticizing those opposed to the nuclear deal with Iran.
+
+""There is not a smidgen of evidence for it, other than the fact that there have been times where I've disagreed with a particular Israeli government's position on a particular issue"" Obama said in an interview published Monday with The Forward , a leading Jewish newspaper, adding that such charges are hurtful.
+
+Obama's comments come as the Obama administration is making a full-court press to sell the Iran deal to the American public and prevent Congress from blocking in a September vote the agreement brokered in July between Iran and world power.
+
+Secretary of State John Kerry will deliver a major speech on the deal at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Wednesday as part of that push, CNN has learned. Kerry will use the speech to defend the merits of the agreement and respond to its critics, as Obama has done in several speeches and interviews since the deal was finalized.
+
+Federica Mogherini, foreign policy chief for the European Union, has been representing the Europeans in nuclear talks with Iran.
+
+Federica Mogherini, foreign policy chief for the European Union, has been representing the Europeans in nuclear talks with Iran.
+
+Wendy Sherman has been a key U.S. negotiator in the Iran talks. She is the under secretary of state for political affairs.
+
+Wendy Sherman has been a key U.S. negotiator in the Iran talks. She is the under secretary of state for political affairs.
+
+Kerry, second from left, meets Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, second from right, for talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Monday, March 16. At the far left is U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz. At the far right is Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization.
+
+Kerry, second from left, meets Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, second from right, for talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Monday, March 16. At the far left is U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz. At the far right is Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization.
+
+U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been spearheading negotiations on a possible deal to rein in Iran's nuclear program.
+
+U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been spearheading negotiations on a possible deal to rein in Iran's nuclear program.
+
+After arduous talks that spanned 20 months, negotiators reached a landmark deal aimed at reining in Iran's nuclear program, announced on July 14. From left, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pose for a group picture at the United Nations building in Vienna on July 14.
+
+After arduous talks that spanned 20 months, negotiators reached a landmark deal aimed at reining in Iran's nuclear program, announced on July 14. From left, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pose for a group picture at the United Nations building in Vienna on July 14.
+
+The Obama administration's strongly worded defense of the nuclear deal and its attacks on those opposed to the deal has concerned some prominent members of the American Jewish community, who have worried aloud that the administration's rhetoric could fuel anti-Semitic stereotypes.
+
+At issue are Obama and his top surrogates' claims that opponents of the deal are going to precipitate a war with Iran, and that their opposition has come from a well-funded lobbying campaign -- a campaign rooted in the American Jewish community and other pro-Israel circles.
+
+Some critics of the deal have gone even further in linking Obama's Iran deal to anti-Semitism, as 2016 GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson did while discussing the agreement in light of Iran's threats to Israel.
+
+""Anything is anti-Semitic that is against the survival of a state that is surrounded by enemies and people who want to destroy them,"" he told Fox News in mid-August. ""To sort of ignore that and to act like everything is normal there and these people are paranoid, I think that's anti-Semitic.""
+
+Obama has rejected that premise, and insisted in his interview with The Forward that ""if you care deeply about Israel, then you have an obligation to be honest about what you think, the same way you would with any friend.""
+
+""And we don't do anybody, any friend, a service by just rubber-stamping whatever decisions they make, even if we think that they're damaging in some fashion,"" Obama added.
+
+Beyond the heated rhetoric, critics have recently homed in on elements of the deal that they say do not hold up to the test of scrutiny.
+
+But Kerry, during an interview with CNN in Anchorage, Alaska, ahead of a conference of Arctic nations, pushed back on the notion that the Iranians would be able to self-inspect at Parchin, as Republicans in Congress have alleged.
+
+""We are satisfied that we will be able to have a process which can get us the answers,"" Kerry said. ""If they are not accountable in the way that we expect them to be with appropriate access then they would be in material breach of the agreement and subject to any and all options available to the United States.""
+
+Kerry flew to Anchorage to help deliver President Barack Obama's message on climate change to foreign ministers gathered in Alaska for this week's GLACIER conference.
+
+""We still have time to pull back from the total precipice of absolute catastrophe that threatens life itself on the planet providing that we do the things that the President and others are talking about,"" Kerry said.
+
+The Secretary of State added that global warming skeptics in the Republican Party like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz should travel to Alaska to see the impacts of climate change first hand.
+
+""Ask any Alaskan. I think people in Alaska will tell Donald Trump and tell Ted Cruz it's happening. And all they have to do is come here and open their minds and their eyes and their ears and listen, look. And they will see the impacts of what is happening,"" Kerry said.
+
+Kerry denied the administration is guilty of climate hypocrisy after its recent approval of Shell's application to begin oil and natural gas drilling in the arctic.
+
+He also stated that he will not punt a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to the next administration, but he declined to signal how soon a decision might come.",REAL
+7171,North Korea Threatens ‘Sacred’ Nuclear War Against Israel if this country continue supporting ISIS,"Email 
+North Korea’s Foreign Ministry slammed the “shamelessness of Israel” on Friday, calling the Jewish State a “rogue group” that “poses a nuclear threat” and commits “terrorist attack[s]” against neighboring countries. On Friday the Korean Central News Agency released a statement attributed to North Korea’s Foreign Ministry that responded to comments Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made last week that were critical of the Hermit Kingdom. “This is an unpardonable insult and provocation to the dignity and social system in the DPRK and the choice made by its people,” the statement said of Netanyahu’s comments, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The statement then took issue with Israel’s foreign policy in the Middle East, stating: “Israel not only represents dictatorial forces for aggression that trample down the legitimate right of the Palestinian people and indiscriminately kill them but also is a rogue group that poses a nuclear threat and makes terrorist attack[s] on its neighboring countries with lots of nuclear weapons.” The statement was responding to comments Netanyahu made during a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last week, in which the Israeli leader repeatedly drew parallels between Iran and North Korea. “And, Prime Minister [Abe], we have something else in common,” Netanyahu began. “We are two peace loving democracies that face formidable threats from nearby rogue states.” “Both Iran and North Korea are governed by ruthless and extreme dictatorships, states that seek to bully and intimidate their neighbors, and in our case, to actually eradicate us from the face of the earth.” Noting that “Iran and North Korea have aggressive military nuclear programs,” Netanyahu repeated his plea to not allow Iran to use diplomacy to advance its nuclear program as he alleges North Korea did with the 1994 Agreed Framework. “Iran cannot be allowed to travel the road taken by North Korea.” It’s not the first time that North Korea has slammed Israel or even Netanyahu publicly. After Netanyahu criticized Pyongyang during a trip to Japan last year, the North Korean Foreign Ministry released a similar statement, which called Israel a ""cancer to peace in the Middle East.” It also accused Netanyahu of trying to use North Korea “to divert international criticism of Israel caused by its settlement activity and breakdown in the Middle East peace talks."" Similarly, in last week’s statement, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said, “Everybody knows about the shamelessness of Israel telling lies and making fabrications and pointing accusing fingers to others to justify its criminal acts and evade the censure and condemnation by the international community.” Besides trading public insults, Israel has long been concerned about North Korea’s support for Arab states that are hostile to Israel, as well as Iran. In fact, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War North Korea actually deployed a squadron of MiG-21s to Egypt, which engaged in a firefight with Israeli F-4s. Neither side sustained any damage. More recently, North Korea has been accused of proliferating ballistic missiles and nuclear technology to Syria and Iran. In 2007, Israel destroyed Syria's Al Kibar Nuclear Reactor that was reportedly built by North Korean engineers.",FAKE
+2043,"On Midterm Trail, Hillary Clinton Tests Themes for Possible 2016 Run","ROCHESTER, Mich.—Appearing in liberal Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton told a campaign crowd that corporations have too much clout. In conservative Kentucky, she lauded her husband’s record in office while avoiding any mention of the locally unpopular current White House resident, President Barack Obama.
+
+Mrs. Clinton is back on the campaign trail after a six-year hiatus, aiming to rouse Democratic voters who don’t typically show up for midterm elections. In the course of trying to help her party’s candidates, she is also...",REAL
+9887,"One Week, and Counting: Bottom-Fishing in America","Email 
+Webster: frequenting the bottom. When a right-wing cell (FBI), from its inception, at the heart of government, now appears to the Left of the leading candidate for president (Clinton), one knows that she is fishing on the shoreline of fascism. From a democratic standpoint, it doesn’t get any worse. Even her challenger, matching her stride for stride in vulgarian (pretentious, indecent), gut-authoritarianism, the two the Janus-faced expression of the Class-State, at least does not demonize Putin and Russia, as preparatory, in her case, to still wider confrontation, including China, as dangerously leading up to a catastrophic war, or at first the breakdown of the international order. 
+The FBI, from cops and robbers, to reds and fellow subversives, as television and popular opinion would have it, was a spearhead for McCarthyism and a practical annex of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Those were the days, from Baby-face Nelson to the Rosenbergs, and now, hardly chastened from its turbid (muddy, foul, opaque) past, still the guardian of American innocence, Director Comey makes one correct move to undo the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, and the American political world falls apart. I am not a fan of Comey’s for his initial exoneration of Clinton in her use of a private server at State, but surely, this is an eye-opener, about how far the political spectrum has shifted to the Far Right. 
+Whomever wins the election, America digs itself deeper into the cesspool of hierarchical class-differentiation, wealth-concentration, a pervasive ideological atmosphere of solipsistic hatred at home for human difference, rancid hegemony abroad for any who seek an alternative path to modernization away from the example of US petrifying capitalism. This election reveals that America, like a broken record, is stuck, playing over and over again the themes of domestic repression and foreign counterrevolution, the ideal synthesis for the unilateral assertion of world power. Neither candidate nor major party distances itself from the latter goal. 
+Comey, perhaps against his will and ideological proclivities, achieves standing here, merely, as he should, by doing his duty. The bipartisan consensus maneuvering in place to chastise him reveals the dark reality of a nation so devoted to denial and untruth, possibly to cover over its sins of commission (war crimes, indigenous racism and xenophobia) and omission (failure to act on environmental degradation, an adequate system of health care, a military budget crowding out the general welfare), that it has lost its way and falsified its original promised constitutional existence. America is presently normless, and has been since capitalism inaugurated its take-off stage following the Civil War. And before that, with institutionalized slavery, internal genocidal expansion, and cap-in-hand deference to political ideologues not adverse to compromise with, if not actually representing, vested interests. 
+Scratch America from the democratic column, transposed now to an enlarged banana republic wherein one can expect, from either party and successful candidate, enhanced features of an already ripening Police State. Surveillance, proscription, total exclusion of viable methods, measures, and structural changes pointed toward democratization, America will formally become what it already is: a panicked response to the self-realization of its nihilistic core of moral values and systemic attributes—a nuclear-armed Goliath lacking soul and conscience, and for that reason a menace to world peace and self-renewal at home. No, Comey, by his actions, is not the enemy, but one who for the first time has put on his spectacles and looked around him. There are some things that even an ardent “patriot” cannot stomach. 
+I recall how in the 1960s, e.g., Mississippi Freedom Summer, the FBI would interrogate us, try to sow doubts in the hearts of the demonstrators, act as intimidators pure and simple, combined with its undercover role in breaking up antiwar protests throughout the decade, so I hardly have much hope that things have changed. Yet, my hat is off to Comey, even if only to anger Clinton, force Democrats into self-protective mode, and raise questions about the rotten stinking fish used to fertilize her and the party’s position on war and peace, capitalism (Wall Street’s Miss America), and the Clintons’ own mind-boggling accumulation of personal wealth—all of which is instinctively known by the public, but unable to extricate from the mental prison of submerged guilt for totalitarian ways and practices. 
+We await the election, a studied exercise in un-freedom, where tyranny of false consciousness defines the psychological mental set of America, what Adorno writing sixty-six years ago called authoritarian submission, a framework where the Leadership Principle comes to the foreground if it has not already. Parallels to the incipient stages of Nazism are not an exaggeration, and it is not a loud-mouthed Trump who is necessarily the greatest danger. He is predominantly all-surface. It is Clinton who plumbs the depths of arrogance, ambition, congealed militarism. America, R.I.P. 
+My New York Times Comment to its editorial, “James Comey’s Big Mistake,” 11-1-16, follows: 
+Comey acted honorably. Unlike Hoover, he is here depoliticizing the FBI. The Times has demonstrated such partiality to Clinton, in news selection as well as editorial opinion, that it is hard to take its criticism seriously. Endorsement is one thing, blind-siding the other side quite different. Are not emails a legitimate area of investigation? Does not the public have the right to know, especially in an election? If there is no smoking gun, this will redound to Clinton’s benefit; if there is, yes, it might change minds. But what is wrong with that? 
+Clinton invariably is treated with kid gloves. Even the initial issue, the use of a private server to transact government business, is forgotten. Rather than jump on Comey, why not revisit the whole question–which Comey had originally dismissed–of Clinton’s valuing of transparency, and from there (although it is now late in the game) her whole foreign policy framework and hostility, in particular, to Putin and Russia? 
+To criticize Clinton does not necessarily make one an apologist for Trump. Call the shots with equal endeavor; responsible journalism requires no less.",FAKE
+7475,"Doorway on Moon Found at Bancroft Crater, Google Map, Oct 2016, Photos | Paranormal","(Before It's News)
+Date of discovery: October 26, 2016
+Location of discovery: Bancroft Crater, Earths Moon
+Google Earth Coordinates: 27°54’52.71″N 6°23’23.82″W
+I found this entrance to an underground alien base inside of Bancroft crater. The dark opening measures 70 meters by 50 meters exactly. The outer edges measure 114 meters by 114 meters. I used Google ruler to measure this, so it is their statistics. The base entrance is just outside the shadow of the crater, which means it was placed there deliberately to be in the light and make entering and exiting it with smaller ships much easier. Similar base entrance have been found before. For instance, a very similar entrance was found on Google Mars and was 160 meters across, but with similar design. (Click here to view the Mars entrance) .
+Scott C. Waring
+ Thanks http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ Check out more contributions by Jeffery Pritchett ranging from UFO to Bigfoot to Paranormal to Prophecy",FAKE
+7836,Shock Claim: Nibiru Will Hit In 2017- World Governments Are Prepared,"The head of a leading survivalist group has made several shocking allegations about the United States government building secret, cavernous underground bunkers which are earmarked for use by the global elite in the case of an imminent apocalyptic event.
+
+
+A vast underground bunker under Denver Airport is ready for use by the global elite 
+
+Robert Vicino, head of the survival firm Vivos has claimed that officials from the United States have been building ‘deep underground shelters’ underneath the city of Denver for that past three decades. He claims that sources have deduced that these survival shelters have been a work in progress since 1983. The largest has space for 10,000 people who are members of the global elite. However, the general population has not be considered in these plans. ""They do not have a plan for you and me, but they have a plan for themselves, ” said Vicino.
+
+
+The secretive goings on underneath Denver Airport have often been the source of a great deal of speculation and is suspected to have links with the Illuminati. According to Vicino, it is, in fact, the entrance point of the secret complex which is connected to Washington DC by an underground high-speed train.
+
+Vicino believes that the apocalyptic event the global elite have been for is imminent. ""You have to ask yourself, why did Russia just have a drill for 40 million people?"" he asked. But the answer might not be what people suspect. According to Vicino, the threat will not come from nuclear war but from the arrival of Planet X (also known as Nibiru) which will arrive in September 2017. When Niribu comes close to Earth, it will compromise the integrity of the naturally occurring magnetic shield around the planet, leaving the surface highly vulnerable to showers of debris and toxic radiation rays . 
+
+When questioned why the government had not forewarned the general public about this threat to the world, Vicino replied, ""No government in the world is going to tell you about something life threatening unless they have a solution for you because otherwise, its going to cause a social meltdown.”
+
+
+Vicino recognized that his warning was bound to attract condemnation and ridicule, but he said that he would not be deterred. ""People that think it’s crazy are the ones who have not spent any time doing research. It’s easy to say 'the sky is not blue' if you have never done any research on what color the sky is. If you did not well read and sit there playing with iPhone and watching television, you are probably already a walking zombie, but they should not demean those people who have taken the time to deeply research this stuff, ” he said.
+
+The ""Evidence"" 
+
+Disclose TV SOURCE ",FAKE
+5425,Bill Black: Liberals Didn’t Listen: The Immense Cost of Ignoring Tom Frank’s Warnings,"by Yves Smith 
+By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published at New Economic Perspectives 
+I am writing this article late on election night in my office at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, about a mile from the home in which Tom Frank grew up just over the state line in Kansas. Beginning with his famous book, What’s the Matter with Kansas , first published in 2004, Tom Frank has been warning the Democratic Party of the increasing cost it was paying by abandoning and even attacking the working class, particularly the white working class. Some political scientists tried to savage his work, pointing to Bill Clinton’s electoral success and arguing that the disaffected members of the working class were also less likely to vote. Frank returned to the theme just in time for this election with a new book – Listen, Liberal – that documents in damning, lively narrative the New Democrats’ war on the New Deal, their disdain for organized labor, and their antipathy for what they viewed as retrograde white working class attitudes. 
+Frank kept showing the enormous price the working class were paying as a result of the economic policies of the Republicans and the New Democrats, and the indifference to their plight by the leaders of the New Democrats. Senator Bernie Sanders consciously took up the cause of reducing surging inequality and became a hero to a broad coalition of voters, many of them fiercely opposed to the New Democrats’ embrace of Wall Street cash, policies, and arrogance. Sanders set records for small donor fundraising and generated enormous enthusiasm. Sanders knew he would face the opposition of the New Democrats, but he also found that progressive congressional Democrats would rarely support him publicly in the contest for the Party’s nomination and even union leaders sided overwhelmingly with Secretary Hillary Clinton, the New Democrats’ strongly preferred candidate. 
+Hillary did not simply fail to reach out to the working class voters that the New Democrats had turned their backs on for decades, she infamously attacked them as “deplorables.” This was exactly the group of potential voters that was enraged because it believed, correctly as Tom Frank keeps showing us, that the New Democrats looked down on them and adopted policies that rigged the system against the working class. Hillary’s insult confirmed their most powerful bases for their rage against her. Her insult was an early Christmas present to Trump. Her attempt to walk the insult back was doomed. 
+Hillary Clinton handled things so miserably that she allowed a plutocrat whose career is based on rigging the system against the working class to become the hero of the working class. That is world-class incompetence. Had she followed Tom Frank’s advice she would today be the President-elect. The real cost, however, of her failure will be enormous damage to our democracy, the safety of the world, and the damage that President Trump will do to the working class as he systematically betrays their interests. 
+The first test of whether the Wall Street-wing of the Democratic Party has learned any of the lessons Tom Frank tried to teach them is whether President Obama will continue with his threat to try to have the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) approved by the lame duck session of Congress. Obama, who was elected on the promise that he would stop TPP, should listen to Senators Sanders and Warren and honor his promise to the voters to stop TPP. He must begin the process of the Democrats winning back the support of the working class. 
+The leaders of the democratic-wing of the Democratic Party need to move forward assertively to retake control of their Party. The current head of the DNC has been exposed as part of the effort to prevent Senator Sanders from winning the nomination. She should resign tomorrow. The Clintons should cease acting as Party leaders. 
+A period of enormous corruption and elite fraud is coming soon as the Trump administration brings its signature characteristic – crony capitalism – to bear to control all three branches of government. Trump promises to deregulate Wall Street, appoint top supervisors chosen for their unwillingness to supervise, and appoint judges who will allow CEOs to loot with impunity. Trump promises to outdo even the savage anti-media and anti-whistleblower policies of the Obama administration. The House and Senate committee chairs will intensify their blatantly partisan use of investigations while refusing to conduct real oversight hearings revealing the elite fraud and corruption. 
+The progressive Senate Democrats will have to be innovative and stalwart in these circumstances to find ways to blow the whistle repeatedly on the mounting corruption. Their challenge will be to lead despite having no real institutional power. Democrats should start by doing what they should have done in 2004 – take Tom Frank’s warnings deadly seriously. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
+8900,President-Elect Donald Trump must ensure continued efforts toward a Palestinian state,"  President-Elect Donald Trump must ensure continued efforts toward a Palestinian state   
+WASHINGTON DC – The American Muslims for Palestine , a national education organization advocating for Palestinian human rights, expresses deep concern over President-Elect Trump’s potential plans for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Though it is still unclear what Mr. Trump will do as president, AMP’s concerns stem from comments and promises he made during his campaign. 
+Specifically, AMP asserts the status of Jerusalem has not been resolved and supports Palestinians’ rights to Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. AMP rejects the promises Mr. Trump made to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September to declare Jerusalem as the “undivided capital of Israel.” AMP strongly opposes moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and also is deeply troubled by comments suggesting a Trump administration would forgo the idea of a Palestinian state. 
+If Mr. Trump follows up on his campaign promises, it would be a departure from the position of previous administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, which always understood such actions would undermine U.S credibility and influence throughout the world in general, and in the Middle East in particular. 
+Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett said yesterday the notion of a Palestinian state would not have to be considered under Trump’s administration. “Trump’s victory is an opportunity for Israel to immediately retract the notion of a Palestinian state in the center of the country, which would hurt our security and just cause. … This is the position of the president-elect… The era of a Palestinian state is over,” Bennett was quoted as saying. 
+“At the beginning of his candidacy, Mr. Trump insisted he would be even-handed in his dealings with the Palestinians and Israelis,” said Dr. Osama Abuirshaid, expert analyst and national director of policy for AMP. “We already are in a weakened position in the Middle East because of some current U.S. policies. Mr. Trump’s promises are not in the best interest of the United States.” 
+He added, “If Mr. Trump’s promises were to be implemented, it could hurt our stance throughout the world. They certainly would not have the backing of our global partners and could hurt our national security.” 
+AMP continues to call for an end to Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, including its 10-year siege on the Gaza Strip. 
+“We hope the Trump administration will be open to working to ensure justice for everyone in the Middle East,” Abuirshaid said. “Barring that, we will continue during the next four years to build our base among progressive elements in society, as well with those who work on social justice issues in the interfaith community and communities of color. AMP will continue to advocate for Palestinian human rights by providing accurate information and through contextualizing the Palestinian struggle as one that is just and in accordance with international humanitarian law and international law.” Related Posts:",FAKE
+6849,Defying the Politics of Fear   :," Defying the Politics of Fear By Chris Hedges
+Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday evening at a rally in Philadelphia for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka.
+November 08, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" Truth Dig "" - No social or revolutionary movement succeeds without a core of people who will not betray their vision and their principles. They are the building blocks of social change. They are our only hope for a viable socialism. They are willing to spend their lives as political outcasts. They are willing to endure repression. They will not sell out the oppressed and the poor. They know that you stand with all of the oppressed—people of color in our prisons and marginal communities, the poor, unemployed workers, our LGBT community, undocumented workers, the mentally ill and the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans whom we terrorize and murder—or you stand with none of the oppressed. They know when you fight for the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. They know this is the cost of the moral life, a life that is not abandoned even if means you are destined to spend generations wandering in the wilderness, even if you are destined to fail.
+I was in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania in 1989 during the revolutions, or in the case of Romania an interparty putsch. These revolutions were spontaneous outbursts by an enraged population that had had enough of communist repression, mismanagement and corruption. No one, from the dissidents themselves to the ruling communist parties, anticipated these revolts. They erupted, as all revolutions do, from tinder that had been waiting years for a spark.
+These revolutions were led by a handful of dissidents who until the fall of 1989 were marginal and dismissed by the state as inconsequential until it was too late. The state periodically sent state security to harass them. It often ignored them. I am not even sure you could call these dissidents an opposition. They were profoundly isolated within their own societies. The state media denied them a voice. They had no legal status and were locked out of the political system. They were blacklisted. They struggled to make a living. But when the breaking point in Eastern Europe came, when the ruling communist ideology lost all credibility, there was no question in the minds of the public about whom they could trust. The demonstrators that poured into the streets of East Berlin and Prague were aware of who would sell them out and who would not. They trusted those, such as Václav Havel , who had dedicated their lives to fighting for open society, those who had been willing to be condemned as nonpersons and go to jail for their defiance.
+Our only chance to overthrow corporate power comes from those who will not surrender to it, who will hold fast to the causes of the oppressed no matter what the price, who are willing to be dismissed and reviled by a bankrupt liberal establishment, who have found within themselves the courage to say no, to refuse to cooperate. The most important issue in this election does not revolve around the personal traits of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It revolves around the destructive dynamic of unfettered and unregulated global capitalism, the crimes of imperialism and the security and surveillance apparatus. These forces are where real power lies. Trump and Clinton will do nothing to restrict them.
+It is up to us to resist. We must refuse to be complicit, even in the act of voting, with the fossil fuel industry’s savaging of our ecosystem, endless wars, oppression of the poor, including the one in five children in this country who is hungry, the evisceration of constitutional rights and civil liberties, the cruel and inhumane system of mass incarceration and the state-sponsored execution of unarmed poor people of color in our marginal communities.
+Julien Benda reminds us that we can serve two sets of principles. Privilege and power or justice and truth. The more we make compromises with those who serve privilege and power the more we diminish the capacity for justice and truth. Our strength comes from our steadfastness to justice and truth, a steadfastness that accepts that the corporate forces arrayed against us may crush us, but that the more we make compromises with those whose ends are privilege and power the more we diminish our capacity to effect change.
+Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” writes that the question is not how do you get good people to rule. Popper says this is the wrong question. Most people attracted to power, he writes, have “rarely been above average, either morally or intellectually, and often [have been] below it.” The question is how do we build forces to restrict the despotism of the powerful. There is a moment in Henry Kissinger’s memoirs—do not buy the book—when Nixon and Kissinger are looking out at tens of thousands of anti-war protesters who have surrounded the White House. Nixon had placed empty city buses in front of the White House to keep the protesters back. He worried out loud that the crowd would break through the barricades and get him and Kissinger. And that is exactly where we want people in power to be. This is why, although he was not a liberal, Nixon was our last liberal president. He was scared of movements. And if we cannot make the elites scared of us we will fail.
+The rise of Donald Trump is the product of the disenchantment, despair and anger caused by neoliberalism and the collapse of institutions that once offered a counterweight to the powerful. Trump gives vent to the legitimate rage and betrayal of the white underclass and working poor. His right-wing populism, which will grow in virulence and sophistication under a Clinton presidency, mirrors the right-wing populism rippling across much of Europe including Poland, Hungary, France and Great Britain. If Clinton wins, Trump becomes the dress rehearsal for fascism.
+A bankrupt liberal class, as was true in Yugoslavia when I covered the war and as was true in Weimar Germany, is the great enabler of fascism. Liberals, in the name of the practical, refuse to challenge parties that betray workingmen and –women. They surrender their values for political expediency. Our [failure] to build a counterweight to the Democratic Party after it abandoned the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was our gravest mistake.
+Hillary Clinton embodies the detested neoliberal establishment. She can barely fend off one of the most imbecilic and narcissistic candidates in American history. Matched against a demagogue with brains and political skill, she would lose. If we do not defy the neoliberal order, championed by Clinton and the Democratic Party elites, we ensure the conditions for a terrifying right-wing backlash, one that will use harsh and violent mechanisms to crush the little political space we have left.
+The tactic of strategic voting begs the question “Strategic for whom?” Our money-drenched, heavily managed elections are little more than totalitarian plebiscites to give a veneer of legitimacy to corporate power. As long as we signal that we are not a threat to the established order, as long as we participate in this charade, the neoliberal assault will continue towards its frightening and inevitable conclusion.
+Alexis de Tocqueville correctly saw that when citizens can no longer participate in a meaningful way in political life, political populism is replaced by a cultural populism of sameness, resentment and mindless patriotism and by a form of anti-politics he called “democratic despotism.” The language and rituals of democracy are used to mask a political system based on the unchallenged supremacy of corporate power, one the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.”
+We must build structures of open defiance to the corporate state. It may take as long as a decade for us to effectively confront corporate power. But without a potent counterweight to the neoliberal order we will be steadily disempowered. Every action we take, every word we utter must make it clear that we refuse to participate in our own enslavement and destruction. The rapid disintegration of the ecosystem means resistance cannot be delayed.
+Our success will be determined not by the number of votes we get in this or any other election but by our ability to stand unequivocally with the oppressed. The enemies of freedom throughout history have always charged its defenders with subversion. The enemies of freedom have often convinced large parts of a captive population to parrot back mind-numbing clichés to justify their rule. Resistance to corporate power will require fortitude, an ability to march to the beat of our own drum.
+No revolutionary abandons, no matter what the cost, those he or she defends. We cannot betray those murdered by police in our marginal communities. We cannot betray the courageous dissidents—Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and the great revolutionary Mumia Abu-Jamal . They have not betrayed us. We cannot betray the dissidents in North Dakota who are defying a fossil fuel industry that is orchestrating the sixth great mass extinction , melting the polar ice caps and raising carbon emissions to over 400 parts per million. We cannot betray the 2.3 million men and women locked in cages across this nation for years and decades. We cannot betray the Palestinians. We cannot betray the Iraqis and Afghans whose lives we have destroyed by state terror. If we betray them we betray ourselves.
+We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules. Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state. Our job is to destroy it. “We think we are the doctors,” Alexander Herzen told anarchists of another era. “We are the disease.”
+The state seeks to control us through fear, propaganda, wholesale surveillance and violence. [This] is the only form of social control it has left. The lie of neoliberalism has been exposed. Its credibility has imploded. The moment we cease being afraid, the moment we use our collective strength as I saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 to make the rulers afraid of us, is the moment of the system’s downfall.
+Go into the voting booth on Tuesday. Do not be afraid. Vote with your conscience. Vote Green. If we win 5 percent we win. Five percent becomes the building block for the years ahead. A decade ago Syriza, the ruling party in Greece, was polling 4 percent. And after you vote, join some movement, some protest, some disruption, Black Lives Matter, the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, an anti-fracking demonstration. Courage is contagious. Revolutions begin, as I saw in East Germany, with a few Lutheran clergy holding candles as they marched through the streets of Leipzig in East Germany. It ends with half a million people protesting in East Berlin, the defection of the police and the army to the side of the protesters and the collapse of the Stasi state. But revolutions only happen when a few dissidents decide they will no longer cooperate, when they affirm what we must all affirm, when, as Havel said, they choose to live in truth.
+We may not succeed. So be it. At least those who come after us, and I speak as a father, will say we tried. The corporate forces that have us in their death grip will destroy our lives. They will destroy the lives of my children. They will destroy the lives of your children. They will destroy the ecosystem that makes life possible. We owe it to those who come after us not to be complicit in this evil. We owe it to them to refuse to be good Germans. I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
+Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
+Chris Hedges: The End of the Election Will Not Mean the End of Public Anger Posted on Nov 8, 2016
+In a 30-minute interview with Sophie Shevardnadze at RT, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges discusses who will be the real loser in the 2016 U.S. presidential race.
+Sophie Shevardnadze: Chris Hedges, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author, welcome to the show once again, great to have you back. Hillary was seemingly cruising to victory just after the debates - some polls gave her a 10 point lead - and now there’s virtually nothing separating the candidates. Today, if you had a million bucks who’d you bet it on - Clinton or Trump?
+Chris Hedges: It’s impossible to tell you, because it really will depend on the mood, on the emotions of the voters on election day. That's all these campaigns are about, because they both essentially are neo-liberal candidates who will do nothing to impede imperial expansion and corporate power. The whole campaign has descended to, you know, not surprisingly, to the level of a reality TV show, with presidential debates featuring women who have accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault being brought in by Donald Trump; videos - I'll go back to the primaries - of the size of people's genitals. I mean, it's just appalling, but all of that is emblematic of a political system in deep decay and one that no longer revolves around fundamental issues. We know from the Wikileaks emails, the John Podesta emails that were leaked from Hillary Clinton, that there was a calculated effort on a part of a Clinton campaign to promote these fringe candidates - like Trump, and they particularly wanted Trump, because the difference between Hillary Clinton and a more mainstream Republican candidate, like Jeb Bush, is so marginal. So if you had to ask me, I don't think Trump will win, but I don't rule out the possibility that he will win - we have to look at the Brexit polls in Britain...
+SS: Right.
+CH: ...And same kind of anger is underway here.
+SS: The FBI is extending its investigation into the Clinton email case - after obtaining a warrant to search the laptop of Clinton’s closest aide Huma Abedin. The Clinton campaign says the move is political - is the FBI guilty of swaying the vote, like Hillary suggests?
+CH: To be fair to FBI, they were put in a very difficult position - there are tens of thousands, they say 660,000 emails, we don't really know how many of those, but if the FBI made this discovery and did not make it public, they would be accused, of course, of aiding Clinton campaign. I don't know the motives, but I think we do have to recognise that the FBI, I think, felt correctly, that given the volatility of the campaign and the fact that they had, after the investigation of the Clinton email - she had used a private server - while they certainly felt that it was inappropriate to exonerate her of criminal activity that they felt kind of a responsibility to be transparent.
+SS: Another FBI investigation showed that the bureau didn’t find any evidence that Trump is tied to the Kremlin, like the Clinton campaign implied - has Hillary’s attempt to play the Russian card failed?
+CH: I don't know that it's failed, because the media has been quite obsequious in terms of parroting back this narrative, and one of the frustrations of the Wikileaks email dumps, the John Podesta emails, he is her campaign manager, runs her campaign - is that the contents were often overlooked to essentially ask the question: ""Is Russia trying to influence the elections?"", and as a former investigative reporter for the New York times, this is just not a legitimate question. I spent many-many years, 15 years with the Times, I was elated all sorts of information by all sorts of governments, from the French Intelligence agency to the Israeli Secret Service, the Mossad, to the U.S. government - and these people were not leaking it because they cared about democracy or an open society, they were leaking this information because it was in their interest to do so, and my job, as a reporter, was to determine whether this leaked information was true or untrue - and that's really the only thing the reporter should do with the leaked information on the Podesta emails. But one of the things that as a reporter, as a former investigative reporter, that has disturbed me is that they have - I'm talking about the press, especially about the electronic, commercial corporate press - they have effectively ignored much of what is in the emails to carry up this speculation. Meanwhile, of course, nobody has offered us any evidence that the Trump campaign is linked in any way to Russia or that Russia is responsible for the email dump.
+SS: We’re used to the fact that ordinary Americans don’t really care about foreign policy, but this campaign has focused a lot on foreign issues and Russia in particular. Are candidates trying to unite the nation by creating the image of a foreign threat?
+CH: Yeah. It's very disturbing on many levels, the kind of neo-conservative foreign policy cabal led by Robert Kagan and others that is around Clinton. The very people who gave the disastrous Iraq war, are now proposing policies to bait Russia. You know, it makes absolutely no sense to those of us who spend as many, as I did, two decades abroad as a foreign correspondent, except that it plays well politically into this very stunted, peculiar, neocon vision of the world, and that is that everybody out there only understands one language, and that's force. That's how you see these 15 years now of war, the longest war in U.S. history. It's been an utter disaster, utter failure, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course, Syria, and Libya - and yet, what's the response? More bombs, more bombs, more bombs, which created the problems in the first place.
+SS: Yeah, and do Americans like being scared by a foreign adversary?
+CH: No, I don't think they ""like"" it, but it's a very effective form of control. Fear works, and Americans are hardly the only people to use it. Terrorism, the specter of Russia...whatever it is! Fear is a form of social control, and when you have essentially two political parties that are doing corporate bidding that serves the interests of corporate global elites, at the expense of the citizens - they need fear, they need to manufacture fear, and I think that's what we're seeing.
+SS: Trump has said things along the lines of ‘this election is rigged’ and he’s hinted that he may contend the results, which is kind of like admitting he’ll be defeated. Is this talk backfiring and scaring away voters? Why would people head to the ballots if they think their voice doesn’t count anyway?
+CH: The Trump's base, primarily white lower-working class, which has been dispossessed through de-industrialisation, is going to head to the polls. They are attempting to work within the system. If the race is close and Trump loses, I think, everything we have seen, given the volatility of Trump, suggests that he will charge that the elections were rigged. We certainly have seen evidence now, from in particular the leaked emails, of the rigging of the primaries on the part of the Democratic National Committee, on behalf of the Clintons. It's pretty clear that Nevada Caucus was stolen, they blocked independents from voting in many of the primaries, in many of the states, and independents were Bernie Sanders' primary base. We just saw a few days ago, a day or two ago, that Clinton was actually leaked questions that would be given to her at a staged... I mean, they call them ""Townhalls"", they're totally Potemkin-like reality shows, totally scripted - so, it’s enough to look into the inner workings to suggest that these people, the Clinton machine, the Democratic party do not play fair. So, yeah, I think that that is the danger and the danger becomes then, when enraged Trump supporters believe that the system is rigged, the system is broken, it doesn't function fairly - and that becomes dangerous, because these people will resort to kind of anarchic levels of violence.
+SS: Filmmaker Michael Moore, who you can’t call a Republican-friendly figure exactly, called Trump “a human Molotov cocktail” which desperate poor voters can throw at the system that stole their lives from them. How come a Republican candidate is the candidate of the dispossessed, shouldn’t Hillary be the one taking care of them?
+CH: Yeah. That is the whole idea, that a billionaire developer is somehow the voice of the dispossessed, but he has tapped into this right-wing populism. This is coupled with a kind of xenophobia, kind of exalted nationalism, and a statement - which is true, of course - that the elites have betrayed the ordinary citizenry. So, when Donald Trump goes to Michigan and stands before the executives from car manufacturers, who are moving their plants over the border, courtesy of NAFTA, to Mexico, and says that if you try to make cars in Mexico, I'll put a 35% tariff on it - this is something that no candidate, in either party, has been saying, and there are many-many really struggling... I mean, half of this country now lives in poverty, people who have been waiting a long time for somebody to stand up and defy these corporate executives and CEOs who have destroyed their lives, the lives of their communities, destroyed the lives of their families. So, in that sense, Trump is not a traditional Republican which is why the Republican establishment itself has united with the Democratic establishment to try and destroy the Trump presidency - much as in 1972, the left-wing insurgent candidate George McGovern saw the establishment of the Democratic party unite with the establishment of the Republican party to elect Richard Nixon.
+SS: The election is estimated to have cost 6.6 billion dollars so far -that’s including the House and Senate campaign spending, and is likely to end up being even more pricey than that. That’s the whole budget of Bahrain. Elections in India have four times as many voters and cost one billion less. Is this price tag cutting off any truly independent candidate, like Bernie Sanders?
+CH: You can't compete, unless you can raise that kind of money, unless you can get into debates. Bernie Sanders actually raised significant sums, he didn't do it through corporations, his average campaign contribution was $27 - but yeah, you can't play in this game of political theater, unless you're bankrolled to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. That is the part of the way they lock out third-party candidates, like the Green party candidate Jill Stein.
+SS: The Democratic party managed to fend off an anti-system challenger - Sanders - how come the Republicans couldn’t find anyone who could defeat Trump?
+CH: Because the establishment itself is so deeply hated, so when the Republican establishment finally did - they didn't take him seriously in the beginning, and when they did turn on him, they trotted out the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney to attack him, and people just laughed. It's the Romneys, the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, it's that establishment that people are turning against - which is why Hillary Clinton is having such a difficult time competing against such an imbecilic, undisciplined and impulsive and, frankly, ignorant candidate.
+SS: I'm just wondering - why is the media, even the right-leaning media, which created Trump’s phenomenon - turning on him in this campaign?
+CH: Two reasons. One - he is attacking the trade agreements, which is how the elites make their money, and secondly, he's a public relations disaster for the U.S. I think those are the two reasons. Maybe, the third reason is that they don't know what they're getting with Trump - nobody knows what they're getting with Trump. Trump doesn't know what he's getting with Trump, and they know that Clinton will maintain both the imperial overreach and the design of the corporate state. So, Clinton’s a sure bet and Trump is just too volatile a candidate, and that's why the establishment has turned on him.
+SS: PresidentObama has hit the campaign trail to endorse Hillary Clinton - he’s warning that ‘all the progress will go out the window if we don’t make the right choice’. Do you think everything Obama achieved will really go out the window if Trump gets elected?
+CH: I don't think Obama has achieved very much. His healthcare program which is essentially forcing citizens to buy defective corporate products and we're watching now massive increases, on an average of 22%, and people that have the bronze plan, different levels of plans cannot even afford the kinds of premiums and copayments... - I mean, the whole system is a disaster. His assault on civil liberties has been worse than under Bush, he has expanded imperial wars, in places like Libya, create more failed states. I don't think Obama has much of a legacy. He'll walk out and get rich and will start his own Foundation like the Clintons - there's almost a complete continuity between Bush and Obama.
+SS: A recent CNN ORC poll says Obama’s approval rating is higher than at any time during his presidency - why is he doing so great now that he’s leaving? Is that his Hillary campaigning paying off?
+CH: You know, these people run very skilled public relations operations which revolve not around policy but around creating manufactured personalities, and that has been very difficult for Clinton - and that's why Clinton has the second-highest disapproval rating of any Presidential candidate as far as we know in American history, with the exception, of course, of the person she's competing against - Donald Trump. We have to look at what American politics is - it's really about creating feelings, emotions, getting voters to confuse how they are made to feel with knowledge. It is not about actual policies, and both Michelle Obama who has a very high kind of favourability rating and Barack Obama have been skilled in doing that. It's much more difficult, that's part of the problem, for the Clinton campaign.
+SS: Looking back at the beginning of Obama's presidency, the Nobel committee handed Obama the peace prize in 2009 - not for his accomplishments, but for his intentions. But the promised peace didn’t come to Afghanistan, didn’t come to Iraq, we’re seeing the unravelling of other Middle Eastern states - did Obama’s peace vision not only fail but make things worse?
+CH: Oh yeah, of course, look at Libya, look at Syria, look at Somalia, look at Iraq, look at Afghanistan, look at Pakistan. No, it's a complete catastrophe. I've spent seven years in the Middle East, I was the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times, and what we've done is, I would argue, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, and it's one that Obama aided and abetted. The whole idea of him as a peace candidate is... I mean, I kind of gave up on the Nobel Prize Committee, I have no idea why this was done. As you correctly pointed out, he hadn't even done anything.
+SS: Was it a genuine inability to make things better, were his hands tied?
+CH: No. He was an establishment candidate, he was selected, anointed and promoted by the Democratic Chicago political machine, which is one of the dirtiest in the country, he got more money in 2008 from Wall St. than the Republican candidate who was against him - McCain. No, he's very cynical...bright, talented, unlike George Bush, but deeply cynical candidate. He brought in the old establishment, including the old Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who had been the Secretary of Defence under Bush, he brought in old these figures like Larry Summers and Geithner who are Wall St. marionettes. No, Obama knew very well what he was doing from the very beginning and effectively... Look, he won Advertising Age's top annual award which was ""Marketer of the Year"". His campaign did, because the professionals knew just what he done - he functioned as a brand for the corporate state, a very powerful and a very effective one.
+SS: On the other hand America has restored relations with Cuba and reached a nuclear deal with Iran - both seemed unachievable just a couple of years ago. Do you count those as a Obama's foreign policy successes?
+CH: Yeah, they are foreign policy successes, but we have to understand that the Pentagon had long fought the neocons call for war with Iran, even under the Bush administration they put a stop to it. So, there was no appetite within the American military establishment for war with Iran anyway. So that wasn't really an option, despite Israeli pressure. In terms of Cuba, it just got to the point of absurdity - the boycott of Cuba, and we must also remember that the second generation of Cuban Americans did not have that kind of hatred towards Fidel Castro and towards the Cuban regime, and so it was politically safer for the Democratic party because the new generation, just like the new second and third generation of Jewish Americans don't have that loyalty to Israel - it wasn't as politically volatile a decision.
+SS: Obama made ‘global zero’ a strategic objective - however he failed to get America to ban nuclear tests by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty, while the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to ‘three minutes to midnight’ - that is to a nuclear war. Why did Obama’s promise to ‘reduce the role of nuclear weapons in American foreign policy’ backfire?
+CH: Because the military-industrial establishment is so powerful in the United States that politicians serve its interests. They don't dictate what the interests of that industry is - officialy, it swallows about 53% of our discretionary budget, but that, of course, masks huge other expenditures, including for our nuclear weapon systems, which isn't counted for Veteran's affairs, which is huge for, if you want to count, the security and surveillance state, which is officially hidden, but probably at least a hundred billion dollars... We're starving the rest of society to do that, and you can't fight these wars. Indeed, if you were watching the Bernie Sander's campaign, Sanders did not take on imperial adventurism or the military establishment - because you can't, within the American political system - and Obama, I think, is an example of that.
+SS: Police shootings of unarmed black men have sparked massive protests and the Black lives matter movement - does Obama being the first black president actually mean little for race troubles in the U.S.?
+CH: It means nothing, because you have de-industrialised urban centres, i.e. places that once had factories and jobs, which are now in ruins - you walk through them and it's boarded up factories and pothole streets and crumbling infrastructure, dysfunctional schools, and there are no jobs. So you have created mini police states in these marginal communities, where police can serve, as we see, as Judge, Jury and Executioner - three in one. Americans, almost all poor people of colour, are shot by police in this country every day, and it's a form of social control, along, of course, with mass incarceration. We have 25% of the world's prison population and 4% of the world's population - most of those imprisoned are poor people of colour. So, when you've taken away the possibility for jobs and with it the possibilities for hope, for advancement, for inclusion within both the economic and political system - then you need these very harsh forms of controls in order to keep people, essentially, fenced in. That's why these killings don't stop, it doesn't matter how many protests are carried out, and Obama has quite sadly betrayed, if we go back especially to 2008 and even to 2012, his primary base - African-Americans voted in staggering numbers for Obama, I think, 90% or something. Almost that high, and yet life for African-Americans, I would argue, after 8 years of Obama, is worse than when he took power.
+SS: We've been talking to Chris Hedges, author, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, talking about the ups and downs of 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign, and the end of the Obama era as the Americans are gearing up to choose their next President tomorrow. We'll of course be watching the vote closely. That's it for this edition of SophieCo, I will see you next time.",FAKE
+483,U.S. added 257K jobs in January; unemployment ticks up to 5.7 percent,"The United States kept up its breakneck pace of hiring in January, adding 257,000 jobs as workers received wage increases unseen since the financial crisis, according to government data released Friday morning.
+
+The unemployment rate ticked up by one-tenth of a point, to 5.7 percent, largely because so many people — nearly 1.1 million — entered the workforce, some coming off the sidelines after years of discouragement.
+
+The latest data indicates a fully firing labor market that has become the engine for the American recovery. The United States has added jobs over the last year at its steadiest pace in two decades, and January offered fresh evidence that employers are now willing to raise wages and compete for workers.
+
+“We’re finally getting to that point where a self-sustaining recovery is going on,” said Jeremy Lawson, chief economist at Standard Life Investments, an asset management firm.
+
+The U.S. labor market has expanded quickly enough in the last year that President Obama recently called 2014 a “breakthrough year in America.” And as it turns out, 2014 just got even better. As part of the latest data from the Department of Labor, net jobs growth figures from November and December were significantly revised upward. November’s net jobs gain now stands at a whopping 423,000, up from the previous 353,000, the biggest one-month gain since 2010. The November through January stretch qualifies as the nation’s best three-month stretch of jobs growth in 17 years.
+
+The monthly jobs data can be volatile, particularly in January, when government economists try to calculate seasonally adjusted hiring growth amid the layoffs of holiday workers. U.S. stocks were up and the dollar strengthened Friday morning on the jobs news, which slightly exceeded market expectations.
+
+Perhaps the best sign in the jobs report wasn't the net payroll gain — the figure has topped 200,000 for 11 months in a row — but rather the nascent sign of rising salaries. The average hourly worker saw a 12-cent-per-hour raise in January, the best one-month increase since 2007. Since the Great Recession, real wages have remained stagnant, but this is slowly beginning to change. Over the last year, wages have risen 2.2 percent. Meantime, consumer prices are seeing inflation below 1 percent, largely because cheaper oil has caused gasoline prices to plummet.
+
+""When I look at this report, I see a confident economy,"" Department of Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez said Friday in an interview. ""Companies that are bullish. New job-seekers who are more optimistic. And when you factor low gas prices and wage growth, that adds up to money in people’s pockets, a greater hop in their step.""
+
+The January wage numbers were being closely watched, because wages had taken a slight step backward in December. Real wages are an important indicator for labor market health, as they rise when more workers leave the sideline and companies feel pressure to compete for employees.
+
+Some economists caution about reading too much into one month’s salary data and say only sustained wage growth will help the country fill one of the missing pieces of the recovery.
+
+“Earnings are increasing, but the rates of real wage growth suggest that more must be done to ensure that all families can feel the strengthening recovery in their own lives,” Jason Furman, chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in a statement.
+
+For the Federal Reserve, this report offered perhaps the strongest evidence yet encouraging a short-term rate hike in the middle of this year — even as inflation falls below the central bank’s target.
+
+“The pick-up in average hourly earnings gains was a belated Christmas present,” Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West, said in an e-mail. “It should help the Fed look past a temporary drop in inflation this year and keep their eye on gradually normalizing interest rates.”
+
+In January, jobs growth was broad-based. The health-care and retail sectors were again strong, as they’ve been throughout the recovery. But so, too, were construction (with 39,000 jobs added) and professional and technical services (33,000 jobs added).
+
+For months now, the U.S. economy has looked like the strongest in the developed world. But the recovery here came with a mystery: Some prime-aged workers were sitting on the sideline, unmoved to again begin actively seeking work. That meant they weren’t counted as unemployed. It also left the U.S. economy below its full potential.
+
+January’s data showed at least some evidence that these workers are again looking for work. The labor force participation rate — which tracks the proportion of Americans holding or seeking a job — nudged up from 62.7 to 62.9 percent. That number looks small, but it was caused by a wave of new entrants — some 1.05 million, roughly the population of Rhode Island.
+
+The labor force participation rate is still at its lowest point since the 1970s, but some of that decline is demographic, the result of a retiring wave of baby boomers. The key for the labor force, economists say, is encouraging frustrated middle-aged potential employees to resume their job searches, even if it requires new training or skills.
+
+“There is this drumbeat — we’re seeing more and more jobs in a wide range of different occupations and industries,” said Tara Sinclair, chief economist at Indeed.com, a job search Web site. “Hopefully that will attract these people to get the necessary skills and jobs.”",REAL
+4613,This Is the Least Important Election of Our Lifetimes,"During the 1864 presidential race between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan, The New York Times published an article that contained this sentence: ""We have had many important elections, but never one so important as that now approaching."" Though there may have been some truth in this claim, three years into the Civil War means the Times was probably one election too late.
+
+In any event, every candidate or publication that's made comparable declarations since that time regarding the presidential contest being the ""most important"" election of their ""lifetime"" or their ""generation"" or ""in history"" or ""ever"" is completely full of it.
+
+That goes for Gerald Ford, who in a debate against Jimmy Carter claimed that the 1976 election was ""one of the most vital in the history of America."" As it turns out, that was a contest between an accidental president and a highly ineffectual future president. And it wasn't even the most important election Carter would participate in.
+
+It also goes for Walter Mondale, who in 1984 told a crowd, ""This is the most important election of our lives."" (Ronald Reagan lost a single state to Mondale, and the outcome was never really in doubt.) It goes for John Kerry, who in 2004 said, ""My fellow Americans, this is the most important election of our lifetime."" It goes for Joe Biden and Barack Obama, both of whom claimed that 2008 was ""the most important election in my lifetime."" It goes for Newt Gingrich, who said it in 2012. It goes also for the media that acted as if what they said were true.
+
+It certainly goes for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, neither of whom possess the requisite talent, vision or charisma needed to destroy this country in a mere four years. Yet on Tuesday in Dade City, Florida, Clinton finally stated what many in her party (from the president to students to 96-year-old Roger Angell) have been saying for months: ""I believe this may be the most important election of our lifetimes."" For her, yes. For the rest of us, not so much.
+
+Judging from the histrionic rhetoric we hear daily, most people believe this is the most important election ever. Did you see the meltdown leftist media had after Clinton's ethical tribulations again threatened her chances at the White House? You'd think attacking Clinton were tantamount to attacking the very foundations of ""democracy.""
+
+Partisans always seem to believe that everything that happens to them right now, at this very moment, is the most important thing that has ever happened or will ever happen to humanity.
+
+Yes, government's increasing involvement in the economic and moral lives of citizens has made political stakes high. It's true that 2016 features the two suckiest candidates probably ever. It's also true that our collective vision of the American project has frayed, perhaps beyond repair. With the intense scrutiny of contemporary political coverage, more people are invested in the daily grind of elections, which intensifies the sting of losing. This anger compounds every cycle (although winning brings its own disappointment with its unfulfilled promises).
+
+That's not to say our constitutional republic isn't slowly dying. It probably is. This condition isn't contingent on an election's outcome but on widespread problems with our institutions, politics and voters. Whatever you believe the future of governance should look like, one election is not going make or break it.
+
+In fact, when it comes to policy, it's far more likely that very little will change over the next four years—perhaps even less than changed with the election of Obama, who had two years of one-party rule before Republicans took back Congress. Last year, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a column headlined ""Why 2016 May Be the Most Important Election of Our Lifetime."" Like many other similar pieces, it argues that as our politics become more polarized our elections become correspondingly more significant. But our growing divide might be exactly why 2016 turns out to be one of the least important elections in our lifetime.
+
+If providence (or dumb luck) takes mercy on the Constitution, Washington D.C.'s gridlock—an organic reflection of the nation's disposition—will remain the status quo.
+
+Actually, what am I talking about? That's exactly what the Constitution was built to do in a divided nation. The situation will render the next president weaker than most and somewhat contain his or her authoritarianism and poor judgment.
+
+This kind of frustrating environment is likely to cause more recrimination and, unfortunately, abuses of power that are meant to circumvent the congestion. Still, overall, it's better than partisan unilateralism. The situation will not change until we find competent people to put into the White House or politicians with ideas that have some crossover appeal. That time is not now.
+
+Of course, none of this is to completely diminish the importance of the presidential election. Obviously, voters are making a decision about the future of governance. Judges are at stake. Foreign policy is made. There are consequences. But if the republic can't survive a bad executive, then it's already dead.",REAL
+7182,White House CANCELS all Obama Appearances at Hillary Campaign Events! ! ! | RedFlag News,"
+Superstation95.com 
+Now, we know it's bad! The FBI Director's announcement that the Bureau had found more emails pertinent to its Hillary Clinton private e-mail server investigation, and was re-opening that investigation, sent shockwaves across the political spectrum this afternoon. 
+The fact that the FBI made such an announcement is extraordinary in itself. Generally, the Bureau does NOT publicly reveal that someone is under investigation, never mind someone who is so high-profile, like an active candidate for President! So the revelation that the Hillary investigation is now re-opened is an absolute stunner on many levels. Frankly, all experts agree that it must be something extraordinary they found; something likely criminal. 
+Adding to the drama was that the FBI Director did NOT coordinate the announcement with the White House or with the Department of Justice (DOJ) - which could be an effort by the Bureau to regain its lost reputation for Integrity. Keeping the White house and Justice Department out of the loop means they could not interfere prior to the announcement, and now that the announcement has been made publicly, neither the White House nor the DOJ can prevent the public from knowing something big is taking place. ""DEVASTATING REVELATIONS"" 
+And ""big"" might be an understatement. Late Friday night, the White House very quietly CANCELED all of Barack Obama's scheduled campaign appearances on behalf of Hillary Clinton! The scheduled events, confirmed for months, were all quietly DELETED. See the Before and After images below: 
+Whatever information the FBI has found must be completely devastating for Clinton. So devastating, that President Obama can no longer even be seen as supporting her candidacy! 
+This FBI announcement has ""criminality"" written all over it. 
+Stay tuned. ",FAKE
+8859,"These Products Make Men Grow Breasts, Get Cancers Of The Prostate And Liver","posted by Eddie Owned by Unilever, the Axe brand includes a range of men’s grooming products with many of the ingredients never even tested for safety according to the C.I.R. – Cosmetic Ingredient Review. Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals. Axe products are loaded with endocrine disrupting chemicals. Endocrine disruptorsare exogenous, synthetic chemicals that have hormone-like effects on both humans and wild-life and interfere with the endocrine system by either mimicking or blocking our natural hormones and disrupting their respective body functions. Member scientists of the Endocrine Society issued a report in which they claim: “We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostrate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology.” New studies are also revealing that these harmful chemicals may be causing physical feminization in males. A study published by the International Journal of Andrology found that feminization of boys can now be seen through their play habits. Medical experts are now wondering whether exposure to years of these toxic chemicals is part of the reason so many older men are low on testosterone and experiencing erectile dysfunction. So they take a little blue pill and get exposed to even more chemicals and the cycle continues. Aluminum Zirconium Tetrachlorohydrex Gly Aluminum zirconium tetrachlorohydrex gly is the active ingredient in Axe deodorant products. One or more animal studies show kidney or renal system effects at very low doses, mammalian cells show positive mutation results, animal studies show reproductive effects at moderate doses. Aluminum was first recognized as a human neurotoxin in 1886, before being used as an antiperspirant. A neurotoxin is a substance that causes damage to nerves or nerve tissue. Cocamidopropyl Betaine Cocamidopropyl betaine is a very toxic ingredient which has been linked to cancer in animal tests. The biggest danger of using a product with cocamidopropyl betaine is its potential contamination with nitrosamines . Nitrosamines are created when nitrosating agents are combined with amines. Nitrosamines have been identified as one of the most potent classes of carcinogens, having caused cancer in more than 40 different animal species as well as in humans. PPG-14 Butyl Ether PPG stands for popypropylene glycol, which is made from a completely artificial petroleum product, methyl oxirane. Another name for that is propylene oxide (which is a probable human carcinogen). Propylene oxide is also an irritant and highly flammable. Butyl ethers are in the paraben family, and they are toluene derivatives (toxic petrochemical compounds). Toluene has proven to have a harmful affect on the reproductive system while parabens have been linked to cancer. PEG-8 Distearate According to a report in the International Journal of Toxicology by the Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR) committee, impurities found in various PEG compounds include ethylene oxide; 1,4-dioxane; polycyclic aromatic compounds; and heavy metals such as lead, iron, cobalt, nickel, cadmium, and arsenic. Many of these impurities are linked to cancer. A 1988 Swedish study by Thompson looked at both BHT and BHA. They found that both were toxic and tumour promoting. Both antioxidants were observed to be cytotoxic in a concentration-dependent manner at concentrations ranging from 100 to 750 microM. At equimolar concentrations BHT was more cytotoxic than BHA. source:",FAKE
+2749,O’Reilly denounces Mother Jones story on his war reporting,"Bill O’Reilly responded to a Mother Jones story accusing him of making false claims about his reporting on the Falklands War by calling its author a liar.
+
+The Fox News host told me in an interview that he has always accurately described what happened during that period and that David Corn, Washington bureau chief of the left-wing magazine, “is a liar, a smear merchant, and will do anything he can to injure me and the network. Everybody knows that. Everything I’ve reported about my journalistic career is true.”
+
+Corn, who is also an MSNBC contributor, said last night that he had tried repeatedly, through e-mails and voice mails, to obtain comment from O’Reilly or Fox.
+
+“I’d never speak to him,” O’Reilly said.
+
+The crux of the story involves O’Reilly’s role as a CBS correspondent in the 1982 shooting war between Britain and Argentina over the disputed islands. Referring to the press corps, O’Reilly told me: “Nobody was on the Falklands and I never said I was on the island, ever.”
+
+Corn was a Fox News contributor, from 2001 to 2008, whose contract was not renewed.
+
+The adversarial tone of the story he co-authored is telegraphed in the headline: “Bill O’Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem.”
+
+That clearly accuses O’Reilly of telling lies on par with the false tale that prompted NBC to impose a six-month suspension on Williams, who had to apologize for claiming that he was on a helicopter hit by a rocket-propelled grenade over Iraq in 2003.
+
+And yet the Mother Jones piece appears to turn on semantics, not some specific story that O’Reilly told about being in the Falklands. Among the examples cited:
+
+--In a 2001 book, O’Reilly said: “I've reported on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands.""
+
+--In a Washington panel discussion, O’Reilly said: “I've covered wars, okay? I've been there. The Falklands, Northern Ireland, the Middle East. I've almost been killed three times, okay.”
+
+--In a 2004 column, O’Reilly wrote: “Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands war, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash.""
+
+But that reference—O’Reilly saying he was “in Argentina”--undercuts the thrust of the story, that he claimed to have covered the Falklands combat.
+
+The same phrase, “in Argentina,” also appears in some 2013 comments by O’Reilly cited by Corn:
+
+“I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us. I had to make a decision. And I dragged him off…”
+
+In the interview, O’Reilly described the scene in Buenos Aires in the aftermath of the hostilities in the Falklands: “Thousands took to the streets. Hundreds of troops surrounded the presidential palace. I was in the middle of that. A reporter was shot in the legs. People were throwing rocks, bricks, some had guns.”
+
+So the dispute comes down to O’Reilly’s shorthand use of the Falklands and the term “war zone.”
+
+Corn, who gained public attention when he obtained the Mitt Romney “47 percent” tape during the 2012 campaign, defended his focus on O’Reilly’s language.
+
+“He covered a protest,” Corn said. “It might be a minor point, but the war was over. If Mr. O’Reilly wanted to make that case, he certainly could have. I would have gladly put it in the story. Instead of responding to the substance, he’s out there just calling names.”
+
+But Corn’s own piece largely backs up O’Reilly’s account of the dangerous situation, except for O'Reilly's recollection that there were fatalities:
+
+“Dispatches on the protest filed by reporters from the New York Times, the Miami Herald, and UPI note that thousands did take to the street, setting fires, breaking store windows, and that riot police did battle with protesters who threw rocks and sticks. They say tear gas was deployed; police clubbed people with nightsticks and fired rubber bullets; reporters were assaulted by demonstrators and by police; and a photojournalist was wounded in the legs by gunfire.”
+
+That’s a far cry from a bogus claim of having been shot down in a helicopter, the explicit comparison made by the headline.
+
+O’Reilly said the material he gathered for CBS led Dan Rather’s newscast and he received internal praise for his reporting. He called the Mother Jones story “total bull--.”
+
+“There is not any way anyone on earth could say I said I was on the Falkland Islands,” O’Reilly said.
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+5406,Computer Programmer Admits To Being Paid To Rig Voting Booths,"GUTS: Town Defies Obama, Unanimously Votes Against Refugees 
+When he responded affirmatively, he was asked, “How do you know that to be the case?” 
+“Because in October of 2000 I wrote a prototype for present Congressman Tom Feeney, at the company I work for in Oviedo, Florida, that did just that,” Curtis said. “It would flip the vote 51 – 49 to whoever you wanted it to go to, and whichever race you wanted it to win.” 
+“And would that program that you designed be something that elections officials , that might be on county boards of elections, could detect?” Arnebeck asked.   
+“They’d never see it,” Curtis said. “You would have to view it either in the source code, or you’d have to have a receipt, and then count the hard paper against the actual vote total. Other than that, you won’t see it.” 
+You can watch the video for yourself here: 
+Computer Programmer Testifies Under Oath He Coded Computers to Rig Elections 
+Posted by Anonymous on Thursday, March 17, 2016 
+Given the stakes in this election, and the poll rigging that we’ve already seen, what Curtis said should have a lot of resonance with American voters — especially Trump voters. While the man that Curtis purportedly wrote it for was a Republican, establishment Democrats could clearly do something very similar if given the opportunity.  ",FAKE
+7570,The Resentments Trump Represents,"The Resentments Trump Represents   While the mainstream U.S. media has focused on personal scandals, the presidential race has revealed a deep and sometimes ugly resentment among many Americans who blame the haughty elites for declining living standards, says Andrew Spannaus, 
+By Andrew Spannaus 
+This year’s presidential election has been surprising on many fronts, with the success of a number of outsider candidates and the fact that the most unorthodox of them all, Donald Trump, is within striking distance of victory in the last days of the campaign. 
+As shocking as Trump’s candidacy has been to the national media and political establishment, it has provoked even more astonishment outside of the United States, where people often have a superficial view of the U.S. political and economic situation. This is driven by a reliance on only a few major news outlets that tend to give an elitist view of what happens in the country, ignoring the type of undercurrents that have driven the outsider campaigns this year. Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in Phoenix, Arizona. June 18, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore) 
+In Europe, a common question asked of Americans this year has been: “Has everyone gone crazy?” 
+There is shock that much of the country would be willing to vote for someone as unprepared and offensive as Donald Trump. It is heightened by the fact that the current President is the first African-American to hold the office, confusing people who thought that Barack Obama’s election had put racial considerations on the backburner, but now see the Republican candidate drawing on racist stereotypes to increase enthusiasm among his base. 
+This has led to the common view that white, male America is “fighting back,” and not willing to accept a woman president, after having to suffer the indignity of the first black president for the past eight years. 
+While sexism and racism can’t be ignored, the problem is that just as much of the U.S. media has done for so long, Europeans concentrate mostly on the person of Trump himself, with his countless faults, while almost entirely ignoring the discontent among the population that has made this kind of revolt possible. 
+There is in fact very little recognition of the difficulties of the U.S. middle class over the past 35 years, caused principally by the pro-finance, anti-industrial policies that have contributed to the loss of millions of well-paying jobs across the country. The media touts the low unemployment numbers and the return to economic growth, and thus Europeans don’t understand how the American population could be so upset, and what the source of the anger could be. 
+Yet it doesn’t take much to go beneath the surface and explain the economic anxiety that has driven the realignment of U.S. politics this year. Indeed the stagnation of wages and lack of financial security that much of the American middle- and lower-class suffers from is quite similar to that in Europe; and in Europe the drop in living standards is leading to a continent-wide revolt against the institutions of the European Union.   Europe’s Battle: Nationalists vs. Elites .”] 
+A Left-Right Resistance 
+In Europe as in the U.S., there are right-wing and left-wing manifestations of the protest, combining anger against the bank bailouts, opposition to economic austerity, and fear of immigrants seen as threatening traditions and security. Flag of the European Union. 
+In addition, international “free trade” agreements are the target of significant public and political opposition around the Continent, even more so than in the U.S., where much of the establishment remains committed to the current neoliberal economic policies. 
+Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the self-described “democratic socialist,” and real-estate mogul Donald Trump both target NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, denouncing the pacts as negative for American workers and favorable mostly to multinational corporations. In Europe the target is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the agreement still being negotiated with the U.S. that is seen as negative for smaller companies and traditional markets, and favorable mostly to multinational corporations. 
+The similarities between the protest movements are so strong that failure to recognize them means that someone obviously deserves a prize for misinformation. 
+When it comes to foreign policy, the issues become even more urgent for Europe. While Donald Trump promises to crush ISIS and increase spending on the U.S. military, his position regarding the key strategic question for Europe – relations with Russia – is the opposite of what most people expect. 
+Hillary Clinton’s hawkish stance towards Russia and her stated disgust for Vladimir Putin appear to be perfectly in tune with the reversion towards an adversarial relationship that is currently taking shape after the apparent failure of attempts at greater cooperation through diplomacy made by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry listens to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a meeting room at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, at the outset of a bilateral meeting on July 14, 2016. [State Department Photo] The superficial view is that Clinton will represent continuity with the foreign policy of the Obama administration, but anyone who has been paying attention knows that on numerous important questions, from the nuclear agreement with Iran to relations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, from the establishment of a “no-fly zone” in Syria to intervening more directly in Ukraine, there is significant daylight between the President and his former Secretary of State, and Clinton has barely attempted to hide it.
+Trump, on the other hand, is more in line with the preferred foreign policy of most major European nations, in particular as regards Russia. After years of sanctions and increased military activities closer to Russia’s borders, the leaders of Germany, France and Italy all hope for a reduction of tensions, allowing them to resume economic relations and avoid being caught in the middle of a new East-West conflict. 
+Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has been particularly vocal in opposing the anti-Russia sanctions, including – curiously – immediately after his return from a state dinner at the White House. In fact, it’s not the first time he has been critical of current policy towards Russia right after a meeting in Washington, and as anyone in Italy knows, it’s highly unlikely he would make such statements without tacit approval, or at least acceptance, from the U.S. government, in this case most likely President Obama. 
+If Hillary Clinton wins the election, it will be interesting to see if nations such as Italy will continue to be afforded such leeway. 
+Over the course of the campaign, the recognition of the deeper issues at play in the U.S. election has grown, although such discussion still tends to be overshadowed by superficial coverage of the personal battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and the various scandals of the moment. 
+Europeans would do better to pay close attention to the fundamental questions that have been raised during the campaign, that will have a major impact on the entire Western world in the coming years: the fate of the middle class and the decline of the productive economy, and the decision as to whether to seek cooperation, or conflict, with Russia. 
+Andrew Spannaus is a freelance journalist and strategic analyst based in Milan, Italy. He is the founder of Transatlantico.info, that provides news, analysis and consulting to Italian institutions and businesses. His book on the U.S. elections Perchè vince Trump (Why Trump is Winning) was published in June 2016.",FAKE
+8904,"Wikileaks Bombshell: ‘There is no US election’ (Video, 5.26 mins)","AMERICA VANQUISHED, Part 1: America as an Israeli Colony About 
+This is the website of Lasha Darkmoon, an anglo-American academic with higher degrees in Classics who lives and works in England. You can read more about Darkmoon here . Subscribe to our Newsletter Subscribe to get important new posts and other updates via our occasional newsletter. Meta",FAKE
+5016,"Paul Ryan 1, Donald Trump 0","Donald Trump is a proud man. He rarely admits that he's wrong. He even said, at one point in this campaign, ""A lot of times, when you apologize, they use it as ammunition against [you].""
+
+But Donald Trump effectively apologized twice on Friday -- or at least admitted he was wrong twice. And, arguably, he did it three and even four times.
+
+First, on Friday morning, there was Trump's admission that he mistook video of the release of U.S. hostages held by Iran in Geneva as video of a transfer of $400 million from the United States to Iran. Then, on Friday night, he endorsed House Speaker Paul D. Ryan's (R-Wis.) reelection after declining to do so just three days prior.
+
+Oh, and he also endorsed Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), whom he also conspicuously declined to back earlier this week.
+
+""We will have disagreements, but we will disagree as friends and never stop working together toward victory -- and very importantly, toward real change,"" Trump said of Ryan in Green Bay, Wis.
+
+The endorsement followed plenty of uncertainty. In comments to The Washington Post's Philip Rucker on Tuesday, Trump declined to back Ryan and said nice things about Ryan's primary opponent, Paul Nehlen. The snub was particularly notable since Ryan delayed his own endorsement of Trump. But given that endorsement eventually arrived, Trump's lack of reciprocation was seen as a political faux pas -- or perhaps a signal to Ryan that his continued criticism of Trump's controversial comments wasn't appreciated.
+
+Trump also thumbed his nose at Ayotte, citing her lack of direct support.
+
+“You have a Kelly Ayotte who doesn’t want to talk about Trump, but I'm beating her in the polls by a lot,"" Trump told Rucker. ""You tell me. Are these people that should be representing us, okay? You tell me.”
+
+In the end, though, it looks like a GOP nominee who often says things he might regret had come to regret these comments. Trump trails in the presidential race badly in recent polls -- by as much as 15 points -- and the potential for the GOP establishment to desert him was just not something he could take on.
+
+Ryan has set himself up as the conscience of the GOP. He withheld his endorsement of Trump for a long time before coming around, and he has regularly weighed in when the establishment saw Trump going too far.
+
+But what's most notable here is that Ryan continued his criticism of Trump even after Trump threatened to withhold his endorsement.
+
+""We just came out our convention, and yeah he's had a pretty strange run since the convention,"" Ryan told Jerry Bader of Wisconsin local radio station WTAQ in an interview Thursday. ""You would think you ought to be focusing on Hillary Clinton -- on all of her deficiencies. She is such a weak candidate that one would think we'd be on offense against Hillary Clinton, and it is distressing that that's not what we're talking about these days.""
+
+Ryan reassured that his support wasn't a ""blank check"" and even sent a fundraising email that could be read to warn of a potential landslide Trump loss in November.
+
+If Trump wanted Ryan to kiss the ring and back down, he didn't get it. But despite that, he felt the pressure to back the most significant figure in the GOP establishment. And in doing so, he also bowed to the pressure he faced to endorse two senators who would be very important to GOP efforts to hold onto the Senate.
+
+We're past the point where things like this can be cast as Trump truly changing tack and shifting into general election mode. But clearly, this was one case in which he bowed to the kind of political reality he usually shrugs at.",REAL
+2001,Activists bristle at Clinton fundraising,A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
+9721,Moby Just Destroyed Trump In A Passionate Defense Of Hillary,"Comments 
+Famous techno musician Moby tore into Republican nominee Donald Trump today in an op-ed published in RollingStone magazine, tearing into the racist rabble-rouser with unrepentant fury. “I’m tired of being a mealy-mouthed, NPR-listening lefty who has to respect other people’s opinions” writes Moby. “Trump is an actual sociopath.” 
+Distraught at the unrelenting vitriol being hurled at Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Moby disparages the naivete with which he feels many voters are approaching the election. 
+If you have a 25-year-old who’s a Jill Stein supporter but they were nine when Ralph Nader handed the presidency to George W. Bush, they don’t know better. There are a lot of people who have lived in a relatively benign bubble, like young women who just assume that Roe v. Wade will always be the law of the land. I think that there’s an innocence that is informing a lot of people’s desire not to vote, or to vote for Jill Stein, but it’s because they’ve had eight years of Obama. And I think that that innocence is making some of them naive and delusional. 
+He then goes on to detail just why a Donald Trump presidency is enough of a threat for him to be so undiplomatic in his approach. 
+I think there is something seriously broken inside him where he’s an actual sociopath and on the spectrum pretty close to being a psychopath. He’s done nothing to indicate that he’s even capable of feeling empathy [for anyone] except for himself. 
+[A Trump presidency would be] death by 1,000 Republican cuts. It basically gives the NRA the ability to write gun policy. It gives the coal industry and the oil industry the ability to write energy policy. It’s handing the keys to people who want to advance policy measures that are just — again, I try and be diplomatic, but they’re trying to advance policy measures to protect their corporate interests or protect their personal interests but to the egregious detriment of our country. 
+With Trump, you get a belligerent racist who’s most likely a sociopath [and] definitely a racist and misogynist with no governing experience. And with Hillary, you get an incredibly bright, progressive, strong, experienced legislator. There’s no choice unless you’re ignorant, delusional or racist. 
+He’s absolutely right on that point. While the “death by 1,000 Republican cuts” is the threat posed by any Republican candidate for the Presidency, the figure of Donald Trump is a threat to our Republic as we know it, and there can be only one choice. 
+I’ve given more money to Democrats this cycle than I’ve ever given in an election season. I’ve done phone-banking, tweeted, Facebooked and Instagrammed, probably to my own personal detriment — the detriment of my friendships [and] certainly the detriment of my professional life – but honestly, the results of this election are more important than most. I’d rather lose fans and have a hand in trying to keep Donald Trump out of the White House than trying to protect a career. A career pales in comparison to the health and wellbeing of our country and our planet. 
+What I learned a long time ago is if you’re a public figure and you’re opinionated and outspoken, people will hate you for it — even if they agree with what you’re saying. But it’s really nice: I’ve been doing this for a long time and at this point I just don’t care. What’s someone gonna do — not buy my records? It’s 2016, no one buys records anyway.",FAKE
+258,"The affair allegations that derailed Kevin McCarthy's quest for the speakership, explained","A lot of people I speak to who aren't deeply involved in American politics are a little confused about what, exactly, is up with the House Republicans these days. Why did Kevin McCarthy remove himself from the running for speaker without even having a vote? And if the problem with McCarthy is that he wasn't conservative enough, why are people talking about Paul Ryan — who isn't any more conservative than McCarthy — as possibly being able to step into the breach? What, in other words, is actually going on?
+
+It's awkward for the media because a key element of the story is a wild allegation for which nobody in journalism seems to have any evidence.
+
+But it's clear at this point that the rumors — whether or not they are true — have started to play an important role in big-picture American politics. So here goes. People are saying that McCarthy, who is married, is (or was in the past) having an affair with Renee Ellmers, a married Republican member of Congress from North Carolina.
+
+McCarthy's opponents on the right helped shove him out of the race by threatening to elevate this rumor from Capitol Hill gossip to national news. This explains why he bowed out without insisting on a vote, and it also explains why people think a person with McCarthy-like views might be able to squeak in.
+
+I have no idea, and nobody else seems to either. It's obviously in neither party's interest to admit it if it is true, but it's also not the kind of thing they would easily be able to disprove if it weren't true. But Politico's team of congressional correspondents reports that Ellmers has thanked colleagues for their ""prayers and support,"" and earlier this week her lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to GotNews, the website that originally published the rumors, calling them defamatory.
+
+Nobody thinks the alleged affair is the actual reason McCarthy faced opposition in his quest for the speaker's gavel. Rather, the affair seems to be a tool that his enemies inside the caucus and in the larger movement used against him.
+
+It's a tool that works on two levels:
+
+The affair allegations matter, in other words, because they raise the possibility that the Freedom Caucus doesn't actually have the votes necessary to block an establishment-friendly choice for speaker from obtaining the 218 votes needed to take over. It's possible that the affair allegations were a crucial difference maker — either in driving a few votes away from McCarthy or in driving him from the field even though he had 218 supporters — and that Paul Ryan or some other figure could unite the party without saying or doing anything substantively different from what McCarthy has done.",REAL
+8582,Investment Strategist Forecasts Collapse Timeline: ‘The Last Gasp Will Come In 2018’,"Home » Headlines » Finance News » Investment Strategist Forecasts Collapse Timeline: ‘The Last Gasp Will Come In 2018’ 
+You have about a year to get ready for the next leg of the collapse… 
+
+From Mac Slavo, SHTFPlan : 
+It is no longer a question of whether or not financial markets and the U.S. economy will collapse. That, according to a host of experts, both mainstream and alternative, is a given. 
+The only question now is “when” that moment will come. 
+According to Christine Hughes, chief investment strategist at Otterwood Capital, it will be very soon. Basing her assessment on historically dead-on yield curve analysis, Hughes says in her latest update to clients that we’re looking at a maximum breaking point of 2020, but that some time in the next 12 – 15 months is the more likely scenario, which pegs the next crisis right at the beginning of 2018 . 
+First, the chart, which has been near perfect in its accuracy thus far and shows just how rapidly the yield curve has collapsed in the last 12 months: 
+Hughes explains what it means for you and why you can expect 2018 to be the year of reckoning: 
+As the bond market sees a recession slower growth means lower interest rates and it [the yield curve] collapses. So let’s assume we’re like every other time in history and that happens. Then it moves forward to 2018… 
+So, 2018, according to the yield curve, is pretty much the last gasp we have for this economic cycle. We’re closing in on 2016 now… we basically have a year… maybe a year to 15 months before we have the next crisis on our hands. 
+So if you are levered personally or corporately… if a lot of your assets are in illiquid stuff… the Canadian housing market comes to mind… You might want to think about existing and liquefying yourself. 
+Watch the video report: 
+Wolf Richter of Wolf Street explains why the Treasury Yield Curve is so important: 
+Since early July, the 30-year US Treasury Bond Price Index has plunged 8.3%. It’s now called “the rout” in longer-dated government bonds. One of the specters is rising inflation at a time of ultra-low yields. 
+What has become the number one predictor of a bear market in stocks over the past many decades? The US Treasury yield curve. It drives bank lending – which can strangle the economy. But this time, the risks are much higher, and the potential economic consequences steeper. 
+We know it is only a matter of time at this point. 
+Greg Mannarino of Traders Choice has made similar warnings, noting that the bond markets are signaling a massive crash ahead. And when that crash finally takes place the fall out after the debt bubble bursts, according to Mannarino, could lead to extremely serious consequences: 
+So, when the debt bubble bursts we’re going to get a correction in population. It’s a mathematical certainty. 
+Millions upon millions of people are going to die on a world-wide scale when the debt bubble bursts. And I’m saying when not if… 
+… 
+When resources become more and more scarce we’re going to see countries at war with each other. People will be scrambling… in a worst case scenario… doing everything that they can to survive… to provide for their family and for themselves. 
+There’s no way out of it. 
+Source: Analyst: “Millions Upon Millions of People Are Going to Die on a World-Wide Scale When the Debt Bubble Bursts” 
+If Mannarino and Hughes are right, you have about a year to get ready for the next leg of the collapse . 
+Buy 2017 Gold Pandas and Buy 2017 Silver Panda Coins On Pre-Sale Now! Secure Your 2017 Panda Coins Today at SD Bullion!",FAKE
+4694,Donald Trump is running out of ways to win,"But 25 days before the election, Trump's path to the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the presidency is looking more and more impossible by the day, as states he once said he'd flip from blue to red increasingly slip out of his reach. Meanwhile, reliably red states threaten to turn purple.
+
+Trump's odds of a win were spiraling downward days before the 2005 ""Access Hollywood"" recording that surfaced last week and depicted him bragging about his ability to grope women as a perk of his celebrity. Since then, his support has collapsed -- particularly among women. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed Clinton with a 9-point lead and a new national Fox poll released Thursday night that had Clinton at 45% and Trump at 38% in a four-way race.
+
+In the most stunning development of the week, Trump and Clinton were tied at 26% in ruby-red Utah, with virtually unknown independent candidate Evan McMullin closing in on third place with 22%, according to a survey from Y2 Analytics.
+
+""He's at a point where he's trying to draw an inside straight now by campaigning primarily in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina,"" said veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres. ""He is well behind in Pennsylvania; he appears according to the latest polls to be effectively tied in North Carolina and Ohio; and he's behind in Florida.""
+
+""Donald Trump said he would put new states in play,"" Ayres said, but he noted wryly that he never thought they would be the red states of Utah, Arizona and Georgia. Clinton's campaign has already invested resources in Arizona and is marshaling forces in Georgia as they eye ways to expand the map for down-ballot races. And this is before allegations this week from a growing number of women who have accused him of unwanted sexual advances. Trump has vehemently denied those accusations, and there is no data yet to gauge whether he will suffer further fallout in the polls, but it's another issue that has knocked Trump off-message with time running down before Election Day. ""The map looked strong for Clinton at the start of this race and it's looking even stronger for her toward the end of it,"" Ayres said. ""If a landslide is winning in the Electoral College by more than 100 votes, Clinton is on track to do that now."" Because of Democrats' advantage in the Electoral College, Trump's path to the White House relied not only on keeping all the states that Mitt Romney won in 2012, but also seizing Democratic turf in states like Pennsylvania. Clinton held a 9-point lead in Pennsylvania, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll released Thursday. Most striking was her lead in the Philadelphia suburbs -- the place where many strategists believe this race will be won or lost. A startling 56% of suburban Philadelphia voters said they were supporting Clinton, compared to 28% for Trump. What female voters in Philly suburbs really think Even if Trump were to win the mighty battleground states of North Carolina (where Clinton currently has a 4-point lead), Ohio, Nevada and Florida, he would still fall short of the 270 electoral votes that he needs to win. That means he would have to make up ground in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin -- all states where he is trailing far behind her, according to new polls. Democrats have long been confident about their ability to win Colorado, where both Trump and Clinton visited recently And they are increasingly bullish about their chances in Nevada, another state Clinton hit this week. In another blow to Trump's campaign on Thursday, Republican sources confirmed that Trump was pulling his resources from Virginia, a state that has seen a huge influx in the number of foreign-born citizens and large growth among Asians, who have increasingly tilted toward Democrats in recent years. Because of demographic changes in Arizona and Georgia, those two states appear to be closer this year than in 2012 when Romney won them comfortably. Democrats had already made inroads with the large African-American population in Georgia, and been buoyed by the growing Hispanic population in that state. But Clinton has also shown particular strength this cycle among college-educated white women voters in the suburbs of Atlanta. While campaigning in Colorado this week, Clinton urged her supporters to get their friends out to vote in Utah and Arizona. ""We are competing everywhere, and the polls are tightening because I think Americans want a turnout in as big a number as possible to reject the dark and divisive and hateful campaign that is being run by my opponent."" Many Republican strategists still expect Trump to hold on in Utah and Arizona, even if he loses the race. But Democrats believe they are laying the groundwork for 2020 and beyond. ""In the same way President Obama helped build up registration in the African American community and among millennials, Donald Trump is offering new opportunities for Democrats to make gains,"" said Bill Burton, a former Obama adviser. Burton noted that in California, for example, registration among Latinos has grown exponentially, ""and you're seeing that trend across the country. It's opening doors that wouldn't otherwise be open.... Donald Trump is inspiring a whole new generation of voters to go out and get registered, and get engaged, it's really helping Democrats build up our network.""",REAL
+9925,Stock Markets Collapse In Anticipation Of Trump Win: Dow Jones Futures Down 750 Points,"Panic has set in across the world as anti-establishment candidate Donald Trump looks to be set to take the Presidency of the United States.
+Dow Jones futures are down 754 points as of this writing.
+
+Gold prices are up $47 and silver us up $0.75, like as a result of a panic into safe haven assets:
+
+
+",FAKE
+10157,NYT: Undocumented Student Denounces Free Speech on Immigration Policy,"November 7, 2016, 5:26 pm A+ | a- Oops! Please log in to use this feature. 
+From the New York Times : 
+By Juan Prieto 
+ON CAMPUS NOV. 7, 2016 
+BERKELEY, Calif. — Although the University of California, Berkeley, has some of the best resources in the country for undocumented students like me — in the form of financial and legal aid, for example — it’s been a tense couple of years, magnified by the anti-immigration build-a-wall language of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign. Berkeley’s Undocumented Student Program , which the university established in 2012, works with more than 400 undocumented students and continues to grow as more go public about their immigration status, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves and their families. 
+But by coming out of the shadows, undocumented people open themselves to cruelty and threats. Last year, when I helped organize a campus protest to get the University of California to renew funding for some crucial programs for undocumented students, I was called an illegal leech who should be deported. I shrugged it off: I was proud of marching at Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement started in the 1960s. 
+But looking back, I think I should have made a bigger deal about the maliciousness I witnessed and saw building. A few months later, I received an anonymous email threatening to report my family and me to immigration agents. The threat included details about my actions during the protest — it seemed to be coming from someone who had seen me on campus. I was so disturbed I stopped attending classes, and even when I returned a week later, my anxiety kept me from engaging in class discussions or focusing on my studies. 
+Soon after that, the Undocumented Student Program began to receive anonymous email threats about students, and a fellow undocumented friend — a prominent member of the student government — was told by another student on Facebook: “Thanks for identifying yourself as an illegal … Now get out. I’ll look for you on campus.” All of this information was brought to the administration, but there was no follow-up. 
+I.e., the illegal alien is complaining there was no follow up against the American citizens for reporting the presence of illegal aliens. 
+… This September, after a group of Trump supporters came onto campus to build a mock wall and spew racially charged talk about “illegals,” the undocumented students were told to draft a statement of inclusion as a response, and that perhaps certain departments would send it through their email listservs as a gesture of support. 
+Administrators have said they are determined to earn our trust, but undocumented students on campus don’t want to be placated — we want our administrators to fully stand with us through actions and not just promises. After all, when posters with anti-Semitic language began to crop up around campus in late September, the associate chancellor took swift action by sending an email to all students condemning this language. 
+Some argue that hateful displays of racism or anti-Semitism are different from the actions of those on campus who yell, “Build a wall!” But too often, hate speech toward immigrants in this country is written off as political opinion, and school administrators don’t want to side with one political group or another. However, this political issue happens to be our futures, in the country where we grew up. 
+That’s why it was disheartening when Janet Napolitano, the president of the University of California system — and, it should be noted, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security — wrote, in a Boston Globe op-ed essay , that students must be willing to listen to not just opposing views, but offensive ones, for the sake of free speech. She did not condone hate speech — “that which is designed to personally intimidate or harass” — but wrote that exceptions to free speech should be “narrowly construed.” 
+So many powerful college administrators across the country have made this argument now that I think they have no idea just how offensive speech has gotten, especially during this election. 
+This is not to say that those with conservative opinions should be silenced. 
+Jeb’s opinions on undocumented workers, for example, should not be silenced. 
+But because it is often campus conservatives who complain of the scourge of political correctness, I think it is tempting for college administrators to rally behind conservative students, to see them as the new gadflies, the protectors of free speech. Yet it is comical to think that those of us with lesser rights are somehow infringing on those who have no fear of deportation. 
+Juan Prieto is a senior at the University of California, Berkeley. 
+Now, you might think that there’s something ungracious about an illegal alien denouncing America’s First Amendment. But — don’t you realize? — he’s Undocumented ? That makes him holier than you. Some topics, such as immigration policy, are therefore just too sacred to be discussed anywhere where there are undocumented workers, undocumented students, undocumented welfare recipients, or undocumented criminals, such as the United States. 
+Personally, I’m an undocumented alumnus of Berkeley with an undocumented Ph.D. in physics and an undocumented Nobel Prize. For some reason, though, the King of Sweden wasn’t welcoming of me the last time I walked up on stage with my speech. “Not you again,” the king said. “ Garde !” 
+I blame Trump.",FAKE
+9325,"As Flint Suffers, Nestlé Plans Dramatic Expansion of Water Privatization in Michigan","By Lauren McCauley The state of Michigan has reportedly issued preliminary approval for bottled water behemoth Nestlé to nearly triple the amount of groundwater it will pump, to be bottled and sold... ",FAKE
+1300,Kasich: Bush's campaign is 'freaking out',"""They're getting more and more desperate. They need to relax a little bit. You know, it's just an election, a campaign. It's like they're freaking out. Calm down, Bush people. It's not that serious,"" he told CNN's John Berman and Kate Bolduan Tuesday on CNN's ""At This Hour.""
+
+Kasich, who has staked his hopes a good finish in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, said millions have been spent against him by supporters of his opponents, including Bush.
+
+But the Ohio governor said he is confident that he will do well in the Granite State despite the recent negative ad blitz.
+
+""It's a shame when you see people take the low road to the highest office in the land. But I've decided not to do it,"" he said. ""We feel the momentum. And we'll see what happens. And we'll live with the results. But there will be no regrets in the Kasich campaign for all the work we've put in, the positivity of all of it.""
+
+Kasich said he plans on heading to South Carolina following Tuesday's results. ""We're going to be changing some snowshoes for some flip-flops and we're going to go from fried clams to jambalaya,"" he said.",REAL
+5391,Franklin Graham: The media didn’t understand the ‘God-factor’ in Trump’s win,"X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,",FAKE
+8141,November 11: Daily Contrarian Reads,"November 11: Daily Contrarian Reads   My daily contrarian reads for Friday, November 11th, 2016. You need to login to view this content. 
+David Stockman’s Contra Corner isn’t your typical financial tipsheet. Instead it’s an ongoing dialogue about what’s really happening in the markets… the economy… and governments… so you can understand the world around you and make better decisions for yourself. 
+David believes the world -- certainly the United States -- is at a great inflection point in human history. The massive credit inflation of the last three decades has reached its apogee and is now going to splatter spectacularly. 
+This will have lasting ramifications on how governments tax and regulate you… the type of work you and your family members will have available and what you get paid… the value of your nest egg… and all other areas comprising your quality of life. Login 
+ ",FAKE
+5454,Assange Destroys Hillary Clinton In His Most Provocative Interview Ever [Watch],"Last week, Julian Assange, Editor-In-Chief of WikiLeaks, sat down with John Pilger, Australian journalist and filmmaker, for what is arguably Assange’s most provocative interview ever. During... ",FAKE
+8694,27 Photos That Prove The Earth Is in Serious Danger & It’s Time To Be Worried Now,"We Are Change 
+Often times we are blind to what is happening around us. Just because we cannot see the effects of pollution and over-stripping the Earth of her resources in our own backyards, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a very serious concern. Closing our eyes to these issues is not going to help the problems go away. The world used to be an absolutely beautiful place, but that beauty is slowly being pushed out by the trash of mankind. We are consuming more than what this Earth can handle and pretty soon the Earth will no longer be able to sustain mankind. Here are 27 pictures that will open your eyes to the serious danger that our very existence is in.
+H/T Jill Stein & Unreal-Lists 
+Please remember to subscribe To We Are Change and stay up to date with daily Videos.
+
+Follow WE ARE CHANGE on SOCIAL MEDIA SnapChat: LukeWeAreChange 
+fbook: https://facebook.com/LukeWeAreChange 
+Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange I nstagram: http://instagram.com/lukewearechange Sign up become a patron and Show your support for alternative news for Just 1$ a month you can help Grow We are change We use Bitcoin Too ! 12HdLgeeuA87t2JU8m4tbRo247Yj5u2TVP Join and Up Vote Our STEEMIT The post 27 Photos That Prove The Earth Is in Serious Danger & It’s Time To Be Worried Now appeared first on We Are Change .
+",FAKE
+8053,Putin “Collecting” Former US Allies,"How Putin’s Plan to Collect Former US Allies Could End the American Empire Oct 24, 2016 
+( UR ) As Anti-Media reported Monday, analysis of recent events suggests President Vladimir Putin may have ulterior motives in sending the largest Russian naval fleet since the Cold War steaming toward the Mediterranean Sea. He may, in fact, be initiating the first stages of militarily securing the long-desired Turkish Stream pipeline. 
+As highlighted , positioning the aircraft carrier-led fleet just off the western coast of Syria in the Mediterranean also strategically places it between friendly nations to the north and south — Turkey, with whom the pipeline deal was officially signed last week, and Egypt, with whom Russia is now expanding ties both militarily and economically. 
+But in truth, the agreements being struck around the Mediterranean — while unquestionably important in their own right — are indicative of a much broader, and rather recent, Russian pattern. 
+On the southeast border of Russian ally, Iran, for instance, lies Pakistan. Russia raised eyebrows back in September when it announced that for the first time in modern history Russia and Pakistan would conduct joint military drills — a signal Russia’s influence is spreading across Asia. 
+In October, it was reported additional joint exercises between the two nations had been scheduled for 2017. 
+Pakistan’s neighbor to the east is India. In mid-October, it was announced Russia’s largely state-owned oil company Rosneft, along with other partners, would invest around $12.9 billion in India’s Essar Oil. Additionally, a Russian state investment fund would work with an Indian counterpart to invest $1 billion toward Indian infrastructure. Share:",FAKE
+3050,Point-counterpoint: Is political polarization really such a bad thing? | Commentary,"Americans love to complain about their polarized politics. And why not? It’s the root of congressional stalemates that keep us from dealing with all the important issues of our time, from illegal immigration to bankrupt entitlement programs and government debt — not to mention the waves of hot air that blow over us from cable news talk programs.
+
+But is polarization really such a bad thing?
+
+Political polarization impedes steps necessary to solve mounting national problems. These problems include rising levels of government debt; illegal immigration; spending on entitlement programs; the deterioration of America’s roads, bridges, railways and airports; the impending failure of employee pension systems; and lackluster economic growth, not to mention various pressing international issues.
+
+If the two parties cannot compromise to address these issues, then they will gradually grow to a point of crisis, at which point it may be too late to do very much about them.
+
+Political polarization between the two parties has grown to a point that Americans have not seen since the 1890s, and perhaps not since the 1850s when the nation was in the process of coming apart over the slavery issue.
+
+Scholars have found that Republican voters and officeholders have become much more conservative since the 1970s while Democrats have grown increasingly liberal. From the late 1930s into the 1960s, roughly half the members of the House and Senate were “moderates” as measured by their voting records. The parties had not yet separated into rival ideological camps.
+
+Today less than 10 percent of the members of Congress can be called moderates on a liberal-conservative scale.
+
+By the same process, the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has increased year by year. Students of public opinion have observed a similar pattern among voters: They are now sharply polarized, express strong dislike for the opposing party and its voters, and do not trust the government to enact policies in the public interest.
+
+There was a time in America when parents feared that a son or daughter might marry someone of a different religious faith; today, they tend to worry more that a child might marry someone of a different political faith.
+
+In addition, the various states in the union have moved in opposite political directions, some becoming havens for Democrats and others for Republicans. It would be easy to point to other measures of increased polarization. A polarized and distrustful political system will never yield the compromises needed to address the serious problems the country is now facing.
+
+It is true that President Barack Obama achieved some victories in this polarized environment, but at a high cost to his popularity and the Democratic Party’s standing in Congress. In addition, some of his signal achievements — such as his health care bill and the nuclear treaty with Iran — will be reversed as soon as a Republican president is elected.
+
+It is hard to know exactly what has caused political polarization. To some extent, people “vote with their feet” and gradually separate into different jurisdictions based upon political views and lifestyle preferences. This process is aided by technology that allows citizens to communicate only to those already in agreement.
+
+Over time in any political system the rival “teams” will accumulate grievances against one another to the point where they lose any interest in communicating across party lines. This happened in the 1850s: We know what happened as a consequence of that development. Things are not going to get that bad in America this time around, but they could get plenty bad if and when we have another serious recession or the stock market loses 30 percent or 40 percent of its value. Sadly, it appears that as a nation we are no longer capable of making preparations for such events.
+
+James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He wrote this for InsideSources.com. Reach him at communications@manhattan-institute.org.
+
+Three weeks before Halloween in 2002, the chambers of Congress considered House Joint Resolution 114.
+
+If it passed, that meant then-President George W. Bush would be permitted to “use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines and appropriate” against Iraq.
+
+A total of 296 members of the House of Representatives voted for the resolution; 77 members of the Senate voted yes. That meant 68 percent of the House voted for a U.S. war against Iraq, and 77 percent of the Senate voted likewise.
+
+The vote also meant Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, New York senators, had much in common with Mitch McConnell, a senator from Kentucky, and social conservative Rick Santorum, then a senator from Pennsylvania.
+
+Two liberal Democrats: Clinton and Schumer. Two conservative Republicans: McConnell and Santorum.
+
+However on Oct. 10 and 11, 2002, that foursome all voted the same.
+
+They answered “Aye” in support of Bush’s war to eradicate Saddam Hussein’s supposed stash of “weapons of mass destruction.”
+
+However, suppose that Fearsome Foursome and other rivals didn’t jump into the same bed. Then, perhaps the U.S. wouldn’t have launched a complicated and protracted war that ultimately became a widely unpopular conflict in a foreign land. A Vietnam 2.0, in retrospect.
+
+Perhaps, instead of congressional bipartisanship (i.e. legislative kumbaya), political polarization was needed to prevent the loss of 4,486 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, 2,345 in Afghanistan, with 1 million wounded, all at a cost of potentially $6 trillion.
+
+History has shown us that political polarization can be a positive tool when influencing and assessing the well-being of Americans.
+
+Said Stanford University political science professor David W. Brady: “The U.S. Congress was polarized in the Civil War era and in the New Deal era and it was via polarized voting that got the 13, 14 and 15 amendments passed. ... In the New Deal era, it was polarized voting that passed all of the legislation that makes up the modern welfare state — Social Security, WPA (Works Progress Administration), unemployment compensation. If you believe this was good legislation, then you believe that sometimes polarized voting does good things.”
+
+The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included former slaves recently freed, and the 15th Amendment prohibits federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s “race, color or previous condition of servitude.”
+
+Most of us assuredly support the positive ramifications of Social Security and unemployment compensation legislation. Just ask anyone who is retired and/or unemployed.
+
+Political polarization also is a surefire way to induce passion among the voting ranks. Just examine the fan fervor that follows every step taken by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and Ben Carson. That fervor likely will translate into huge numbers at the primaries and polls come 2016.
+
+We see a clear line of demarcation among our Republican and Democratic and independent presidential candidates, as well as their supporters. No ambiguity. No indifference. No waffling.
+
+But we do see heightened passion and intense debate.
+
+That’s political polarization at its best. Not its worst.
+
+Gregory Clay is a Washington columnist and a former editor for McClatchy-Tribune News Service. He wrote this for InsideSources.com. Follow him on Twitter at @gregory_clay.",REAL
+9377,VIDEO : FBI SOURCES SAY INDICTMENT LIKELY FOR CLINTON – TruthFeed,"VIDEO : FBI SOURCES SAY INDICTMENT LIKELY FOR CLINTON VIDEO : FBI SOURCES SAY INDICTMENT LIKELY FOR CLINTON Videos By TruthFeedNews November 3, 2016 
+BRET BAIER: Here’s the deal: We talked to two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations. One: The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far… Several offices separately have been doing their own investigations. 
+Two: The immunity deal that Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two top aides to Hillary Clinton, got from the Justice Department in which it was beleived that the laptops they had, after a narrow review for classified materials, were going to be destroyed. We have been told that those have not been destroyed — they are at the FBI field office here on Washington and are being exploited. . 
+Three: The Clinton Foundation investigation is so expansive, they have interviewed and re-interviewed many people. They described the evidence they have as ‘a lot of it’ and said there is an ‘avalanche coming in every day.’ WikiLeaks and the new emails. 
+They are “actively and aggressively pursuing this case.” Remember the Foundation case is about accusations of pay-for-play… They are taking the new information and some of them are going back to interview people for the third time. As opposed to what has been written about the Clinton Foundation investigation, it is expansive. 
+The classified e-mail investigation is being run by the National Security division of the FBI. They are currently combing through Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They are having some success — finding what they believe to be new emaisls, not duplicates, that have been transported through Hillary Clinton’s server. 
+Finally, we learned there is a confidence from these sources that her server had been hacked. And that it was a 99% accuracy that it had been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that things had been taken from that… 
+There has been some angst about Attorney General Loretta Lynch — what she has done or not done. She obviously did not impanel, or go to a grand jury at the beginning. They also have a problem, these sources do, with what President Obama said today and back in October of 2015… 
+I pressed again and again on this very issue… The investigations will continue, there is a lot of evidence. And barring some obstruction in some way, they believe they will continue to likely an indictment. 
+Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+8293,"Trump Concedes, Calls Clinton to Congratulate Her","Tuesday, 8 November 2016 Clinton listening to Trump Concede seconds before passing out 
+In a shocking turn of events Donald Trump has conceded the Election and admitted defeat to Hillary Clinton. Nearly 24 hours before the polls will close out west. Trump appeared on CNN at Trump Tower in Bogata, Idaho. 
+""Let's get this right America! I've been faking being a racist,sexist asshole for over a year and a half now. Its time to clear up the misconceptions. i'm really not a Republican,"" said Trump in front of a stunned following with some very nervous Secret Service men watching,""I'm really a Bernie Sanders zealot, but unfortunately he didn't win and so my gambit to ruin the Republican Party has completely failed to achieve its main goal, a Bernie Sanders Presidency. However, Hillary is still a damn site better than Chris Christie, or Jeb Bush, or any of the other bozos who shared the stage during the early debates."" 
+Hillary Clinton could not be reached for comment as she apparently passed out when Trump conceded rather than contesting the election in all 50 states. Bill Clinton spoke on condition of anonymity, ""Hillary is thrilled, though she is drooling a little, the medics haven't quite got her resusitatored yet. I think she is okay though."" Make JinoLeFeeto's  ",FAKE
+7008,UN Failed to Carry Adequate Medical Evacuations in Aleppo - Churkin,"Get short URL 0 29 0 0 The United Nations did not adequately execute evacuations of ill and injured people from Syria’s eastern Aleppo during the humanitarian pause there, Russian Envoy to UN Vitaly Churkin said during the UN Security Council meeting on Wednesday. 
+UNITED NATIONS (Sputnik) — Moreover, Churkin said the UN staff ""didn’t exercise the necessary pressure over the sponsors of illegal military groups in order to make possible cooperation between the armed groups and humanitarian workers."" ""The United Nations didn’t work through properly the operation of medical evacuations of the sick and wounded,"" Churkin stated. ""The work with opposition groups present in city and the local council was left to its own."" ...",FAKE
+989,"Trump's challenges come to the fore, reshaping GOP race","Donald Trump's style puts a ceiling on his political appeal, pundits have long suggested. This week offered new evidence.
+
+How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true
+
+This week, the popular mass e-mail that helps people build their vocabularies – “ A.Word.A.Day” – featured a word that has been used to describe Donald Trump. It’s “clairaudience” and it means “the supposed ability to hear what is inaudible.”
+
+Rolling Stone writer Paul Solotaroff has described the GOP presidential frontrunner as clairaudient – able to see into and hear the hearts of “disaffected underemployed white people” from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and to read their rage back to them “word for word, in ways that no Republican has ever done before.”
+
+But the past two weeks suggest that clairaudience has its limits.
+
+Losing Wisconsin by 13 points is the latest evidence that Trump’s strengths – reading voters and accurately identifying their concerns – are no longer outweighing his shortcomings.
+
+His limitations have long been known. He speaks off the cuff. His policies lack specificity and practicality. His demeanor can be boorish. For months, the connection he has made with his core audience – in some cases, through those very qualities – has limited any damage.
+
+But now, with only two other competitors left in the race and Trump urgently needing 1,237 delegates to avoid a contested convention in which the party will be aligned against him, his clairaudience isn’t enough. So far, he's won fewer than 50 percent of the delegates on offer; to get to 1,237, he'll need to win more than 60 percent of those remaining. In other words, he needs to expand his support.
+
+As a result, the candidate who has broken all the political ""rules"" of how to run for president is at last having to reckon with them.
+
+“He’s kind of like a guy in a barber shop that makes a lot of sense complaining about things. But that doesn’t mean he should be president of the United States,” says GOP consultant Matt Mackowiak, who has not endorsed any candidate.
+
+“This is the challenge going forward: Can he grow as a candidate, and can he grow as a credible nominee?”
+
+No question, the billionaire has identified issues that voters care about, says Republican pollster David Winston, president of The Winston Group.
+
+Along with Mr. Cruz, Trump criticizes lax immigration enforcement and wants to build a big barrier on the southern border.
+
+Along with Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, Trump has railed against international trade deals that have cost Americans well-paying manufacturing jobs.
+
+And he has made a consummate dealmaker’s complaint ­that the US is getting “ripped off” by allies who won’t contribute a fair share to NATO.
+
+“Is Trump identifying dynamics that people care about? Yes,” says Mr. Winston, who does polling for Republicans in Congress. “So you’ve identified the problem. Great. What’s your solution?”
+
+Until this week, Trump has been able to successfully run a primary campaign on such broad policy prescriptions (or none at all) because of his celebrity, his tell-it-like-it-is style, and the fact that there were so many candidates in the race – candidates who mostly fought each other, not him.
+
+“With 17 candidates running, there’s not enough time to force details on tax cuts or whatever your foreign policy is,” says Mackowiak. “Now we’re down to three candidates and there’s more of a requirement for specificity.”
+
+As that dynamic has changed, however, Trump has not grown as a ""credible nominee,"" Mr. Mackowiak argues. He cites the billionaire’s recent interviews on policy positions in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media. He’s laid out positions such as a nuclear-armed Japan and South Korea, possibly leaving NATO, and forcing Mexico to pay for a wall on the border by cutting off money that Mexicans in the US send back home.
+
+Experts have called these positions unworkable or even dangerous. But perhaps more important to voters, they have revealed “how totally out of his depth he is” on almost every major issue, Mackowiak says.
+
+So, can Trump study up and act “more presidential,” as he says his friends and family are urging him to do?
+
+He’s planning soon to roll out more policy speeches (his speech on US-Israeli relations was written by his son-in-law). Recently, one of his foreign policy advisers appeared on the respected PBS Newshour – but his team is made up of unknowns or people who have mixed reputations in foreign policy circles, according to Politico.
+
+“He would need a lot more than a few policy speeches written by somebody else to be a credible candidate for president. He would need an entire personality transplant, and that's not going to happen,” says GOP pollster Whit Ayres, president of North Star Opinion Research. Mr. Ayres was the pollster for Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, who has dropped out of the race.
+
+Trump has said that he will be “very presidential” once he dispenses with his competitors, Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. He’ll be so presidential, he’s telling the media, that they’ll be “bored.”
+
+But in Wisconsin, exit polls show that nearly 40 percent of Republicans said they would not vote for him if he were the nominee. He would need “north of 90 percent in his own party” to win a general election, Ayres points out.
+
+Meanwhile, his controversial style and broad policy pronouncements may have won him a loyal following among primary voters, but his approach so far has also resulted in very high negative ratings among general election voters – unfavorables in the mid- to high-60s.
+
+One of Trump's challenges will be to find some way to drop those “staggering” negatives, explains Winston. “That’s incredibly hard to do.”",REAL
+6713,"Syrian War Report – October 27, 2016: Russian Strikes Destroyed Over 300 Terrorists’ Oil Facilities","Vladimir Putin: The United States continues to sleep with al-Nusra ‹ › South Front Analysis & Intelligence is a public analytical project maintained by an independent team of experts from the four corners of the Earth focusing on international relations issues and crises. They focus on analysis and intelligence of the ongoing crises and the biggest stories from around the world: Ukraine, the war in Middle East, Central Asia issues, protest movements in the Balkans, migration crises, and others. In addition, they provide military operations analysis, the military posture of major world powers, and other important data influencing the growth of tensions between countries and nations. We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by governments and mainstream media. Syrian War Report – October 27, 2016: Russian Strikes Destroyed Over 300 Terrorists’ Oil Facilities By South Front on October 27, 2016 …from SouthFront 
+In northeastern Aleppo, the Syrian army and Liwa al-Quds also continued operations against Jaish al-Fatah militants (mostly members of Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki). The main clashes took place inside the neighborhoods of Bustan Al-Basha and ‘Ard Al-Hamra. Pro-government forces argue that the Syrian military seized the whole ‘Ard Al-Hamra Neighborhood. However, this has not been confirmed. On October 27, the government forces also launched an offensive on the strategic Hanano Youth Housing Complex. Fierce clashes are ongoing there. 
+In southwestern Aleppo, the army and allies have repelled another attempt by militants to retake the Air Defense Battalion Base. 5 militants were killed. Local sources say that Iranian military servicemen were operating in the area along with Syrian troops. 
+The Kurdish YPG launched a series of attacks on the alliance of Turksih-backed militant groups known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the area northwest of Al-Bab. 
+YPG units entered the villages of Til Madîq, Hecinê, Qarami, Jabal Na’i and Mişerefê. Some pro-Kurdish sources argue that some villages have been already taken. 
+The Syrian air strike allegedly killed one of the FSA highest ranking commanders in northern Homs – the Chief of Staff for the Free Syrian Army, Colonel Shouki Ayyoub – on October 26. Ayyoub had played an important role in creation a brand of the FSA. 
+The Syrian Army and the National Defense Forces (NDF) continued to attacks Jaish al-Islam militantsnear the strategic city of Douma in Eastern Ghouta. Fierce clashes took place in the area of al-Reihan and along a road connecting Tal Kurdi and Douma. The army also advanced near near al-Shifouniyeh town. The clashes resulted in killing of 22 militants and destroying of 3 technical vehicles with machine guns. The government forces lost some 8 fighters and a vehicle. 
+Actions of the Russian air grouping in Syria have resulted in a 70% decrease of the oil trafficking by the ISIS terrorist group, Vitaly Naumkin, President of the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) said on October 26. According to the RAS’ information, the Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed over 300 facilities involved in the production and transportation of oil and oil products. 
+Naumikn added that efforts of the Russian military allowed the government forces to liberate 568 settlements, including 150 towns. Some 3700 militants have surrendered to the Syrian government and 847 settlements jointed to the reconciliation process promoted by Moscow. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by South Front on October 27, 2016, With 425 Reads Filed under Military . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments One Response to "" Syrian War Report – October 27, 2016: Russian Strikes Destroyed Over 300 Terrorists’ Oil Facilities "" JohnZ October 27, 2016 at 8:29 am 
+300 facilities destroyed. Looks like Erdogman is going to have to take a loss on this. Too bad he can’t use the IRS profit/loss. Ha, ha. Now one of his mistresses will have to drive that Mercedes for another year and that worthless son of his is going to have to get a real job; one he is more suited for like street cleaning. Things just keep going from bad to worse for the RKM/NWO gangsters. 
+You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
+1743,Inside Bernie Sanders’ unorthodox debate prep,"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
+5574,Is America On The Brink Of Civil War?,"Is America On The Brink Of Civil War? 11/07/2016 
+PJ MEDIA 
+Valerie Jarrett—Barack Obama’s closest consigliere who has lived in the lap of luxury in and out of the White House—is calling for James Comey’s head because the FBI director reopened the matter of Hillary Clinton’s emails only days before the election. 
+As we all know, Comey did this after some 650,000 digital missives, many from Clinton’s server, were discovered on Anthony Weiner’s laptop by the NYPD. 
+Obama, however, is a bit uneasy about Jarrett’s hawkishness toward Comey. 
+“Valerie argued that Comey was interfering deliberately in the election process and had to be stopped,” a source told The New York Post . The same source said Obama, though, is “worried about the consequences of taking such an action – the tsunami of outrage that would come his way, and possibly become a major footnote, or worse, in the history of the presidency.” 
+Ah, those legacy problems, not that the president has much of one outside the comically named Affordable Care Act, which is about as popular as stomach cancer. 
+Nevertheless, he’s right about the tsunami of outrage. In fact it’s an understatement. The bad news is this: As miserable as this endless election season has been, the aftermath is likely to be far worse. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see that putting the American Humpty Dumpty together again is going to be a herculean task. Our country could be permanently fractured in ways few of us would have anticipated even a year ago. Anything is possible now. 
+If Hillary Clinton is elected, the very next day millions of Americans will be watching to see what will happen with the FBI and the Justice Department. Since we can now assume this will be a close election, that would be nearly half the voters in this country, sixty to seventy million people, almost all of whom believe Clinton, the woman a few weeks from inauguration as president, should have been charged with serious crimes and belonged behind bars, not in the White House. 
+Moreover, many have seen the WikiLeaks that reek of collusion between the Clintonistas and officials at the FBI and Justice, not to mention with virtually all the mainstream media outlets that were distrusted to begin with and are now reviled. 
+If that’s not an explosive situation, what is? And we don’t know what Assange et al have in store for us after the election. Just now we learned that the Clinton Foundation accepted—while Her Ladyship was secretary of State and in honor of Bill’s birthday—an unreported one million dollar donation from that paragon of women’s and gay rights, Qatar. This is chump change in the grand Clinton scheme of things, but another reminder of their unending greed and corruption. More importantly, as Tyler Durden points out, this time there should be legal consequences for the foundation—or would be normally in a country governed by the rule of law. 
+Only we’re not anymore. 
+This and a thousand other things put Obama, quite possibly liable himself from the email disclosures, and his attorney general Lynch behind a treacherous eight ball going forward, because they are not dealing with a few thousand disgruntled people, but those many millions. If they were to go ahead with Jarrett’s suggestion, take Comey’s head (i. e. fire him) and replace him with a yet more complaisant successor, who knows what would happen? 
+But if they don’t, and even if they do, the investigation may reveal things so shocking the nation will never be the same. Rumors have been flying that are so extreme that even a ten percent accuracy rate could ignite a firestorm. 
+The problem for all of us is that there is literally nothing Clinton can do to get out of this box, even if, as many predict, Obama pardons her. The corruption is so pervasive there is no way short of an actual military putsch to stop the continuing revelations. And such an action would itself unleash … well, you know the title of this article. 
+Would a Trump victory save us from all this? No one knows. Dennis Prager perhaps put it best. When you have two doors and behind one is a man-eating lion and the other one may or may not have such a lion, which door do you choose? Unless you want to commit suicide, the answer is self-evident.",FAKE
+1257,"Republicans barnstorm Iowa after debate, as underdogs show new life","If there’s one message the Republican presidential candidates not named Donald Trump aimed to get across at the final debate before Iowa’s caucuses, it was this: 50 states still have to vote, and a lot could change when they do.
+
+“We're just starting. The first vote hasn't been counted. Why don't we let the process work?” Jeb Bush said in Des Moines.
+
+The GOP contenders are barnstorming the Hawkeye State Friday on the heels of the Fox News/Google debate, where Trump’s absence put a spotlight on candidates like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio – but also gave the race’s underdogs a chance to engage on the issues, and even capture airtime that eluded them when the front-runner was onstage.
+
+Bush and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, in particular, were getting high marks Friday from analysts. The former Florida governor was seen as having one of his best debate performances of the campaign -- including pointed criticism of his former protégé Rubio -- perhaps benefiting from not having to worry about Trump belittling his every comment. And Paul, after missing the cut in the last debate, returned to the main stage with a firm critique of his rivals’ alleged inconsistencies on immigration, surveillance and more.
+
+In Iowa, those candidates may simply be too far behind in the polls for a strong debate showing to make much difference.
+
+But the night helped show that few candidates are conceding anything to front-runner Trump, or the other two top-polling candidates, Cruz and Rubio.
+
+Asked Friday if he changed any minds at the debate, Bush said, “I hope so.”
+
+New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, too, played the role Thursday of disenchanted Washington outsider, scolding the Florida and Texas senators after an immigration spat and quipping that he needed a Washington “dictionary” to decipher what they were saying.
+
+""This is why you need to send someone outside of Washington to Washington,"" Christie said. ""Stop the Washington bull and let's get things done.""
+
+With Trump out of the picture – boycotting the debate over complaints about Fox News, instead hosting a veterans event nearby – Cruz absorbed much of the criticism from the other GOP candidates.
+
+He and Rubio tangled the most, as Rubio tries to make up ground against Cruz in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
+
+In their most heated exchange, Rubio accused Cruz of falsely describing himself as the most conservative candidate, and changing his position on immigration.
+
+“This is the lie that Ted’s campaign is built on,” the Florida senator said. “Throughout this campaign, you’ve been willing to say and do anything in order to get votes.”
+
+He said Cruz used to talk about bringing immigrants out of the shadows, and, “now, you want to trump Trump on immigration.”
+
+The Texas senator flipped the allegation, saying it is Rubio who vowed to fight against “amnesty” and then reversed course for political expediency.
+
+“I like Marco, he’s very charming, he’s very smooth,” Cruz said, before accusing him of siding with donors in the immigration debate.
+
+Bush later sparred as well with Rubio on immigration. Bush said Rubio sponsored the “gang of eight” bill that allowed for legalization, but “then he cut and run” because it wasn’t popular with conservatives.
+
+The debate marked a particular opportunity for Paul – who did not qualify for the recent Fox Business Network debate but returned to the prime-time stage Thursday after making the cut this time.
+
+""It's great to be back,"" Paul said Thursday.
+
+Paul, despite struggling with low poll numbers, seemed to have plenty of supporters in the audience, as his responses drew applause from the crowd several times. He also took shots at both Cruz and Rubio on their records.
+
+Echoing Cruz' criticism, he said Rubio made a deal with Democrats on immigration and suggested he was weak on border security.
+
+At the same time, Paul suggested Cruz was being disingenuous by claiming he was never for ""amnesty."" He said Cruz has an ""authenticity problem.""
+
+The debate Thursday, with 12.5 million viewers, was the second-highest rated telecast in Fox News’ history.
+
+Also on stage Thursday night were retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
+
+Carson’s standout moment seemed to come at the end of the debate, when he used his closing statement to recite the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.
+
+“Please think of our founding fathers as you listen,” Carson asked. After reading aloud the Preamble -- including its call for a “more perfect union” – he said, “Folks, it’s not too late. Enough said.”
+
+The polls in the Hawkeye State show essentially a two-man race for first between Trump and Cruz in the final stretch. Rubio has been holding steady in third position, while Carson’s numbers have been on a downward course in recent weeks.
+
+After Iowa, the candidates head to New Hampshire, where Trump also leads but several other candidates are jockeying for position behind him.",REAL
+2279,Court Could Force Same-Sex Marriage on Every State - US - CBN News - Christian News 24-7 - CBN.com,"The latest version of Adobe Flash Player is required to watch this video. Please click on the link below to download the latest version. Thanks!
+
+WASHINGTON -- On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court hears Obergefell vs. Hodges, a combination of four cases concerning the matter of same-sex marriage.
+
+The high court is dedicating two-and-a-half-hours to this monumental case, not the usual one hour.
+
+""The only thing before the Supreme Court is will they force all states to have same-sex marriage?"" Regent University law professor Brad Jacob told CBN News.
+
+The stakes couldn't be higher, with the high court possibly determining the very nature of marriage.
+
+CBN News' Paul Strand shows us the sometimes unique sights one sees when thousands of same-sex marriage advocates and traditional marriage advocates fill the Supreme Court Plaza at the same time. Watch below:
+
+Jacob said gays and their allies see marriage as an institution that brings with it certain, exclusive benefits.
+
+""And they look at that and say, 'It's just discrimination to not allow a couple that consist of two men or two women to have that same privilege of having that kind of relationship,'"" Jacob explained.
+
+""The judges who say, 'This is just about admitting everybody to a relationship that already exists,' they're going to say, 'Yes, the states cannot deny that to people just because they're gay,'"" he said.
+
+To hear audio of the arguments on same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court today click here. The case is Obergefell v. Hodges, questions one and two.
+
+ 
+
+Traditional marriage advocates see it as the ages-old sanctioning and blessing of men and women uniting, producing children and giving them a mother and a father.
+
+Ryan Anderson is a leading traditional marriage advocate with the Heritage Foundation said.
+
+""The state's in the marriage business because the union of a man and a woman can produce a child. And a child deserves a mother and a father,"" he said.
+
+""Marriage is not just two people making a commitment to love one another,"" Jacob said as he described the beliefs of traditional marriage advocates.
+
+""It's an institution that's been around for millennia that involves a husband and a wife in a complementary way that can lead to the procreation of children and the core family unit as the building block for all of our society,"" he explained.
+
+On the other hand, Anderson suggested, ""Same-sex marriage sends a signal that mothers and fathers are interchangeable, and therefore mothers and fathers are replaceable.  It'll be very hard to say that fathers are essential if the law has redefined marriage to say fathers are optional.""
+
+Do the People Rule or Judges?
+
+Another huge issue: Should citizens and the states decide this most fundamental matter or federal courts?
+
+""The Supreme Court case is going to determine whether or not citizens or judges get to define what marriage is in the 50 states,"" Anderson explained.
+
+Jacob stated, ""Traditionally, family law including marriage has been state law. It's been primarily something that states controlled in their sovereignty.""
+
+Cathy Ruse, of the Family Research Council, added, ""And the law in this case is clear: states have always had authority to make marriage policy decisions. So the question before the justices is, 'Do we now take that away from states?'""
+
+""So this is a really big constitutional question concerning the powers of the federal government and the state government,"" Jacob explained.
+
+Anderson stated, ""Historically, the citizens and our elected representatives got to make marriage policy. Now we have the chance that nine unelected judges are going to redefine marriage for the entire country.""
+
+But one thing this case is not about is the Supreme Court banning gay marriage.  Even if the court rules it should be left up to the states, it's already legal in 37 of them - in some cases because judges ordered it.
+
+""There's no outcome of this case that would make gay marriage go away,"" Jacob said. And if the justices rule the states should decide on same-sex marriage themselves, he added, ""states will continue to consider it.  Some states will adopt it.  At least for the present, some states won't.""
+
+'Let the Labs of Democracy Do Their Work'
+
+""The Supreme Court shouldn't cut it short,"" Anderson advocated.  ""We should let the discussion continue, let the laboratories of democracy do their work.  We don't need the Supreme Court settling it 'once and for all' for all 50 states.""
+
+That's what the court thought it did with Roe v Wade. But 42 years later, abortion still fiercely divides the nation.
+
+Ruse suggested, ""It will, just like Roe, be a social experiment conducted - really untested, unresearched - on the entire country.  The social implications of this case are so reminiscent of Roe v Wade.""
+
+""The Supreme Court said they were going to solve the abortion issue 42 years ago in Roe v Wade.  There is no issue less settled in American public life than abortion,"" Anderson suggested.
+
+""And every four years at election time, we have a giant culture war over this,"" he continued.  Look at Europe:  Europe has much more commonsense, compromise positions on abortion because they solve it democratically.""
+
+""Our court cut short the democratic process on abortion, and that's why our politics are so polarized. Why would they want to do it again on the marriage issue?"" Anderson asked.
+
+Critics of same-sex marriage warn that legalizing it means that one harmful effect will be on religious liberty, something that's already been seen with government bludgeoning believers at businesses that refuse to back gay marriages.
+
+""As society redefines marriage, it then starts to violate religious liberty rights,"" Anderson explained.
+
+""Christian-run adoption agencies have been shut down because they wanted to find homes for orphans with married moms and dads, and the government said 'that's discrimination,' he continued.
+
+""We've seen bakers, florists and photographers who have no problem serving gay and lesbian customers, who only object to helping to celebrate a same-sex wedding - they've been harassed by the government;  they've been penalized by the government, coerced by the government,"" Anderson said.
+
+Rarely does a country come to a moment like this where the course of a nation, a society, a culture is all hanging on two-and-a-half-hours in a courtroom.",REAL
+10086,BREAKING: WikiLeaks Just Released Full ISIS Donor List With Names,"in: Government , Government Corruption , Obama Exposed , Sleuth Journal , Special Interests , Whistle Blowers Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton are the founders of ISIS. We have proven that through emails and documents leaked from WikiLeaks, but liberal media outlets still refuse to cover it. After all, they are still more focused on what Trump said eleven years ago than what Hillary has actually done. Because of brave patriots like Julian Assange, we have been given more evidence that Hillary Clinton is more connected to ISIS than we originally believed. An email was leaked between Clinton and John Podesta indicating that: “Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region” to accuse Qatar and Saudi Arabia of “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [or ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” Citing the need to “use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets,” said Hillary to Podesta while arguing the current developments in the Middle East were “important to the U.S. for reasons that often differ from country to country.” Odd that Clinton argues Saudi Arabia and Qatar are helping fund ISIS when Hillary’s largest donations come from those two countries. She Is Funded By Nations That Fund ISIS. Coincidence? In another correspondence from 2012, the Director of Foreign Policy at the Clinton Foundation, Amitabh Desai , set up a meeting with Bill Clinton for five minutes in exchange for a $1,000,000 “birthday check.” The email adds that the small but rich nation occupying the Qatar Peninsula would “welcome [the Clinton Foundation’s] suggestions for investments in Haiti — particularly on education and health.” Desai added that while Qatar had already “allocated most of their $20 million … [they were] happy to consider projects we suggest.” We now see two more examples of the Clinton’s acting corrupt and being intertwined with nations that fund ISIS. For those that do not see where the dots connect, let’s simplify how this all worked for Hillary. Hillary, as Secretary of State, would sell terrorist nations large weapons deals only after they gave her a very generous donation to her “foundation.” These weapons, provided by Hillary and her State Department, then filtered down from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Libya, and so on to create, supply, and bolster terrorist groups. That is exactly how ISIS was created. But instead of blowing them up with an air assault, Hillary and Obama decided to leave ISIS alone. Why? Because ISIS being in the Middle East allows the Obama/Clinton machine to make millions in personal profits from these nations in a repetitive cycle of selling weapons. They are choosing personal gain over eliminating a terrorist group. Let that sink in. Why else have they not arrested Hillary for all of these crimes? The FBI would arrest you in a heartbeat if you went to Facebook right now to praise Allah and ISIS. It also speaks volumes as to why they are trying so hard to silence Julian Assange.",FAKE
+2993,"Intel chief ‘absolutely’ forgot about NSA data sweep program, attorney says","The National Security Agency's massive data collection program has prompted lawsuits, internal reviews and a fierce congressional debate over whether to scrap it.
+
+But Director of National Intelligence James Clapper apparently forgot the program even existed during a key hearing two years ago.
+
+Robert Litt, the DNI's general counsel, revealed the major memory lapse during a panel discussion Friday hosted by the Advisory Committee on Transparency. He was offering an explanation as to why, in a now-infamous exchange several months before Ed Snowden-leaked materials surfaced on the NSA program, Clapper told a Senate committee that the government does not ""wittingly"" sweep up information on millions of Americans.
+
+He wasn't lying, Litt said. Rather, ""It was perfectly clear that he had absolutely forgotten the existence of the 215 program.""
+
+The claim may be startling for the lawmakers, civil liberties advocates and transparency groups who have debated the program intensely since it was revealed in a series of media reports in mid-2013.
+
+The 215 program allows the NSA to collect so-called ""metadata"" on phone calls -- including the number called and the date and time of the call -- then stores it in a database that it queries using phone numbers associated with terrorists overseas. Officials say they don't use the information for any other purpose, and that the legal powers that enable the program are essential to the hunt for terrorists. Opponents say the seizure and search of telephone company records violates Americans' expectations of privacy under the Fourth Amendment.
+
+Clapper's early 2013 testimony created a congressional controversy after the Snowden revelations showed the NSA was gathering data on Americans.
+
+At the hearing, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden asked Clapper whether the NSA ""collects any type of data at all"" on millions of Americans.
+
+Clapper told Wyden: ""No sir, it does not."" Asked for clarification, he said ""not wittingly.""
+
+Clapper later apologized, sending a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee admitting his answer was ""clearly erroneous."" He said that he ""simply didn't think"" of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and was thinking of a different provision of a different law.
+
+Litt offered more details on Friday of what happened behind the scenes of that hearing. He said they were only notified the day before that Wyden would ask that question.
+
+""The DNI did not get a chance to review it,"" Litt said. ""He was hit unaware by the question.""
+
+Litt, whose comments were first reported in The Hill, said it was not ""an untruth or a falsehood"" on Clapper's part. ""This was just a mistake on his part. We all make mistakes,"" he said.
+
+He said he realized Clapper forgot after personally telling him he had been wrong. He said Clapper was thinking about a separate program used to sweep up Internet information on foreigners. Litt said he should have corrected the mistake right away.
+
+Litt's explanation comes as the courts and Congress debate the program anew.
+
+A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the bulk collection of Americans' phone records is illegal. The court all but pleaded for Congress to sharpen the boundaries between security and privacy rights.
+
+Meanwhile, lawmakers are weighing the renewal of the USA Patriot Act, including data collection provisions. The House is slated to vote next week on a bill to reauthorize the law while also ending the government's dragnet collection of records.
+
+But Senate leaders, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, have spoken forcefully for a competing measure to reauthorize the law as-is.
+
+Across Congress, the political divisions cut along complex lines. Libertarian-leaning Republicans like Sen. Ted. Cruz and Sen. Rand Paul are aligned with many liberal Democrats, insisting that a secret intelligence agency should not be storing the records of every American phone call. But other Democrats and Republicans say the program is needed now more than ever given the Islamic State group's determination to inspire terrorist attacks on American soil.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+6935,Desperate Trump Supporter Offers Voters Discount On Horse Semen If They Vote Trump,"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
+After a trainwreck campaign, Trump supporters are struggling to find ways to motivate people to vote for their candidate. Trump has alienated nearly every voting bloc in the country, and routinely smears the sort of people who would otherwise be undecided voters. The question for his supporters is how to get people to set aside their hatred for the man and cast their vote for him anyway. For one horse breeder, the answer is semen. 
+In what has been described as “gross,”“totally illegal,” and the most Trumpian thing ever, a Texas Trumper posted on his Facebook page that he would be giving a 50 percent off coupon to all Trump voters good for either one breeding session with his stallions, or frozen semen for the horse owner on the go. 
+The post was flagged by Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall who noted that offering people compensation – even if it’s half off horse semen – for a vote for Trump violates election law. This is totally illegal; also perhaps the most appropriately Trumpian vote buying scheme possible to devise https://t.co/7n0kDam7ZS pic.twitter.com/f11T5dEOmR 
+— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 8, 2016 
+After mockery and disbelief swept the internet, the post was deleted from Facebook. It’s unclear if the post’s creator, Beto Orsi, had a change of heart or merely wanted to avoid the jokes at his expense. From his public profile, it’s clear that he still deeply believes in Donald Trump. And also horses. Here’s his profile background. 
+This election can’t end soon enough. Share this Article!",FAKE
+3839,White House brings lawmakers into Situation Room on Iran,"Washington (CNN) Part of the aggressive outreach to convince Democrats to support the deal with Iran included a briefing Thursday for 15 American Jewish members of the House of Representatives in the Situation Room at the White House. The meeting was the latest in a series of briefings for these members at the White House.
+
+""People felt that the Administration is intent on very seriously addressing the concerns of the Jewish members, which many of them centered around Israel and the security of Israel,"" Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) said after the session.
+
+Schakowsky told reporters she believed there were enough Democrats supporting the deal to help the White House overcome Republican opposition to the agreement.
+
+""I haven't heard anyone say 'oh I learned something that has made it impossible for me now to sustain a presidential veto,'"" Schakowsky said.
+
+Rep. Steve Israel (D-New York) told reporters on Capitol Hill he was still undecided and planned to take the full 60 days allowed for Congress to review the deal to make up his mind on it.
+
+The New York congressman, a member of the Democratic leadership, said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's endorsement of the deal was ""very influential -- there's no question. Leader Pelosi is the most influential member of our caucus.""
+
+On the back-to-back presentations from Vice President Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton to House Democrats, Israel said ""that's a pretty damn good one two punch.""
+
+New York Democratic Rep Jerry Nadler told CNN he remains undecided on the agreement, but he said the meeting with Rhodes helped provide additional information as he reviews the details.
+
+Nadler said one Democrat expressed concerns in the session about the future capability, in roughly 15 years, for Iran to potentially develop a nuclear weapon. Rhodes pointed to restrictions in several areas of deal that would expose any efforts to do this and provide penalties.
+
+Asked about a pledge by the Administration to provide weapons to Israel to address concerns about a military threat from Iran, Schakowsky said there was no detailed briefing on any arms, but ""the assurances were that the United States was definitely prepared to assure the security of Israel and do what was necessary to make that happen.""
+
+One member who requested anonymity told CNN the session was ""very helpful"" in clarifying various questions, including ones about sanctions relief, access by the International Atomic Energy Agency for inspections and why the U.S. ended up supporting an eventual relaxation in the embargo on the ability of Iran to buy conventional weapons and ballistic missiles. The administration officials emphasized there was going to be 24-7 monitoring at known nuclear facilities and the different process for others.
+
+""Some of the concerns that people had were addressed, but there are still lots of questions,"" said the member.
+
+Rhodes, according to Nadler, told the group there would be American officials dispatched to Israel and other Arab allies in the region to discuss what military capabilities they might need after reviewing the deal. Defense Secretary Ash Carter leaves for Israel and other countries in the region this weekend.
+
+Both Schakowsky and Israel told CNN so far their offices have not gotten a large number of calls from Jewish constituents urging them to block the deal.
+
+As part of its aggressive outreach to build support for the Iran deal, several key administration officials earlier this week held a conference call with American Jewish leaders.
+
+Two participants told CNN there were some pointed questions in the call but said was not hostile.
+
+Among the officials on the call were Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro.
+
+Among the areas participants pushed the administration on during the call were whether there were holes in the access for inspections, concerns Iran would use money from sanctions relief for de-stabilizing activities and is Iran really going to be forced to divulge information about its past activities according to one of the participants who is deeply concerned about the agreement. The source said the officials defended the amount of access for inspections and told the leaders Iran will face pressure to use the money from sanctions relief for internal needs.
+
+During the call the administration officials said Israel will not be more in danger and emphasized how Carter will be going there next week and will talk to the government about ways to bolster it.
+
+Several major American Jewish organizations oppose the deal, including the influential American Israeli Public Affairs Committee which said the ""proposed deal with Iran fails to verifiably eliminate every Iranian pathway to a nuclear weapons. On Thursday it posted a petition online urging its members to weigh in: ""Unfortunately, the proposed agreement is fundamentally flawed...Urge your senators and representatives to oppose the agreement.""
+
+The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of American and the Rabbinical Council of America are among a number of groups organizing a rally next week in New York against the deal. ""The inspections regime is insufficient to ensure Iran cannot cheat and surreptitiously develop nuclear weapons, despite President Obama's promise that the deal would be subject to the toughest verification and inspections in the world,"" they said in a statement outlining of their key reasons for coming out against it.
+
+The White House got a more supportive response from the left-leaning J Street group. ""Following our own review of the agreement, we expect to call on Congress to support the deal as the best -- if not only -- means of ensuring that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons.""",REAL
+4227,A close Wisconsin primary could spell future trouble for Clinton,"There was a danger sign for Hillary Clinton in a dank old industrial warehouse here along the Milwaukee River. The cinder-block walls had been painted over with modernist murals bearing the likeness of Bernie Sanders. This was now a campaign field office. And the volunteers, young and old, who manned a phone bank Thursday afternoon vowed never to give up their time — or, for some, even their votes — to Clinton.
+
+Would Teresa VanDoorn, 44, a homemaker who had become a familiar face at the Sanders office, support Clinton if she became the Democratic presidential nominee?
+
+“No,” VanDoorn said. “Voting for Hillary would be approving of the status quo and establishment — and I don’t approve of that. I would write Bernie’s name in. I consider Hillary equal to the GOP candidates, to be frank.”
+
+What about Lily Shea, 19, who has been helping Sanders ahead of Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary? “No, I would write Bernie in — definitely,” she said. “I just don’t trust her. Whenever I hear her talk, I get the feeling there’s something else going on behind the curtains.”
+
+Then there was Patrick Doyle, 55, a Sanders true believer. Asked if he could shift his allegiance to Clinton, Doyle paused to think, then said flatly, “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
+
+Clinton is well on her way to the nomination. But Wisconsin — a fall battleground with a celebrated tradition of progressive activism and political reform — represents a phenomenon that could undermine her in the general election: She has yet to energize some parts of the liberal base or even persuade them to be comfortable with her candidacy.
+
+Whether she prevails in Wisconsin’s primary or, as polls suggest is more likely, Sanders edges her here, Clinton would maintain her sizable delegate lead. To overtake her, Sanders would need blowout wins in many of the states still to vote, including New York, Pennsylvania and California.
+
+General election polling indicates Clinton would easily defeat Republican front-runner Donald Trump in Wisconsin and other swing states. The data also suggests that the majority of Sanders supporters would vote for Clinton.
+
+[Sanders sharpens attacks for a New York showdown with Clinton]
+
+Yet among Sanders’s most fervent backers — the committed liberal activists who would be necessary in any grass-roots effort in a general election and whose votes could be decisive if the race tightens — there is a strong distaste for Clinton. To them, she represents the ­moneyed, special-interest politics they have been fighting against.
+
+Actress Susan Sarandon, a Sanders surrogate, gave voice to this view when she said on MSNBC a few days ago that she would consider sitting out the election if Clinton is the nominee and that a Trump presidency, in the minds of some Sanders fans, might bring about a more immediate “revolution.” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver later distanced the campaign from Sarandon’s comments and said Sanders would support the Democratic nominee.
+
+This hostility has stirred hard feelings in the Clinton orbit. At Clinton’s Milwaukee field office on Thursday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) gave a pep talk to volunteers in which he testified to the former secretary of state’s competence, resiliency, tenacity and grit.
+
+As Booker wrapped up, Winifred Thrall, a 78-year-old Clinton backer, cried out, “Cory! I wish that Susan Sarandon could have heard you.”
+
+In an interview later, Thrall bemoaned that so many Wisconsin progressives are backing a candidate, Sanders, who in her view “has no experience — nothing but calling for a revolution in the streets.”
+
+“It’s so upsetting,” Thrall said. “I have an old friend — we worked on McCarthy and McGovern together, in Appleton, Wisconsin — and I can’t talk to her anymore because of her support of Bernie.”
+
+[For Clinton, a double-barreled fight against Trump and Sanders in N.Y.]
+
+Wisconsin’s primary is important because, in many respects, the state is a microcosm of the Democratic Party nationally and has an unusually engaged electorate.
+
+“We’ve got industrial, urban, rural, small towns, colleges, high tech — it’s all here,” said Democratic former governor Jim Doyle, a Clinton supporter. “Eight years ago, it was a big deal when [Barack] Obama came in and beat Hillary Clinton badly here.”
+
+Tad Devine, Sanders’s chief strategist, said Wisconsin is “a great proxy for a candidate’s strength in the general election. This is a state that Democrats must have.”
+
+The primary is competitive. This week’s Marquette Law School survey, considered the state’s gold standard, had Sanders leading 49 percent to 45 percent. The poll shows that Sanders is leading 57 percent to 37 percent among self-identified independents — part of an alarming national trend for Clinton of being unpopular with unaffiliated voters who can help swing general elections.
+
+“It will be critical for the nominee to be able to win substantially among people who lean Democratic and younger voters, and it does leave the question of whether, absent Bernie Sanders, could Hillary Clinton really rack up large margins,” said Charles Franklin, a professor who oversees the Marquette Law poll.
+
+Joe Zepecki, a Wisconsin-based communications consultant who is not working for either campaign, said independent ­voters pose a big challenge for Clinton. “I don’t think they’re going to waltz right over,” he said.
+
+Sanders has an enthusiastic base in liberal Dane County, home to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and he also has found support in rural farming areas and manufacturing towns. He is trying to tap into the state’s tradition of political reform; one of his ads features a dairy farmer from his home state of Vermont testifying to Sanders’s independence from special interests.
+
+Barbara Lawton, a former lieutenant governor who backed Clinton in 2008 and is supporting Sanders now, said the Wisconsin electorate is “deeply unsettled” — in part because of now-chronic wage stagnation. She said there was a “tone deafness” to Clinton’s campaign, given her ties to Wall Street and support for trade deals, that prevents her candidacy from resonating more with progressive Democrats.
+
+“We’re really looking for someone who you can trust,” Lawton said. “There’s such a longing for the truth.”
+
+Much of Clinton’s support is concentrated in the largest city, Milwaukee, which has a sizable black population, and suburban areas. Booker, the Senate’s only black Democrat, spent Thursday trying to energize Clinton supporters in this city’s neighborhoods.
+
+“What happens in this primary in just a few days is going to affect the trajectory of this campaign. It’s going to affect the spirit of what’s to come,” Booker told a few dozen volunteers at Clinton’s storefront office on Dr. Martin Luther King Drive.
+
+Both candidates have been advertising here and are fanning out across the state this weekend. The Clinton campaign is trying to maximize her performance in targeted congressional districts to ensure that, even if Sanders wins statewide, the two will roughly split Wisconsin’s 86 pledged delegates.
+
+“What we’re seeing this year is so classic: There’s the establishment candidate and the liberal challenger,” Doyle said. “There’s a long history of progressive, liberal candidates making their last stands here.”
+
+Clinton allies rejected any suggestion that a loss to Sanders in Wisconsin would reveal weaknesses that could haunt her in a general election.
+
+“The word ‘weakness’ deters any kind of response from me as it relates to Hillary. There are no weaknesses,” said Martha Love, a longtime African American leader from Milwaukee and a member of the Democratic National Committee. “Our state will fall in line behind the Democratic candidate because the other side — my gosh, my gosh, my gosh, my gosh.”
+
+Matt Flynn, a former state party chairman and a Clinton booster, echoed that view: “If she loses Wisconsin and people are lackluster and aren’t showing any passion about her, does it mean she’ll struggle in the general election? No, because she is running against two of the biggest freaks in the history of American politics: Trump and [Sen. Ted] Cruz.”
+
+At Clinton’s Milwaukee office, volunteers said they were not worried about Sanders backers eventually joining their effort. Some said it may not take any persuasion at all.
+
+Jill Huennekens, 46, a bartender who called Clinton “my hero,” said she has been making phone calls on Clinton’s behalf for months.
+
+“Truthfully, I can’t remember one that’s been Bernie or bust,” she said. “They tell me that they will support Hillary in November, even if they want Bernie in the primary. They say it even without my asking — ‘Don’t worry, she has our support in November.’ ”
+
+Catherine Wolfe, 59, another Clinton volunteer, said the message she tells fellow Democrats is simple: “For those people looking for a ‘revolution,’ all they have to do is vote for a woman, and we’ll have a revolution.”",REAL
+2799,"Afghan officials say Mullah Omar, Taliban leader, may be dead","The reclusive leader of the Taliban hasn't been seen in public for more than a decade. The group is engaged in peace talks with the Afghan government.
+
+Syed Zafar Hashemi, a deputy spokesman for Afghanistan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, speaks during a news conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, July 29, 2015. The Afghan government is investigating reports that Mullah Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban, may be dead, a spokesman for the president's office said on Wednesday.
+
+Mullah Omar of Afghanistan's Taliban regime is shown in this undated photo. Afghan officials are working to confirm reports that the Taliban leader may be dead.
+
+Afghan officials are working to confirm reports that Taliban leader Mullah Omar is dead, just ahead of a new round of peace talks in Pakistan between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
+
+At a last-minute press conference, Zafar Hashemi, a deputy spokesman for the president, said that they were “aware of the reports of the passing of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. We are still in the process of checking those reports,” according to the Associated Press.
+
+The BBC says that ""top sources within the Afghan administration and intelligence agency"" had made the claims. The Taliban haven't yet commented on the reports.
+
+Mullah Omar hasn’t been seen in public for years, and rumors of his death periodically crop up. An Afghan official told The Wall Street Journal that Kabul was informed of his death by Pakistan two years ago. A Pakistani official told AP that this latest report is “'speculation' designed to disrupt peace talks.”
+
+The Taliban reportedly are divided over the talks, with some wanting to continue the insurgency they have been waging since the US came in 2001.
+
+""Whether he is dead or alive is important because he is the collective figure for the Taliban,"" said a Western diplomat with connections to the Taliban leadership. ""If he is dead, it would be much more difficult to get negotiations with the Taliban because there would be no collective figure to rally around and take collective responsibility for entering peace talks.""
+
+The peace talks come as the Taliban are struggling to hold on to their fighters, some of whom are attracted to the high-profile success of the so-called Islamic State. The Taliban have staged a series of “audacious attacks” to try and stave off defections, The Christian Science Monitor reported last month after a suicide attack in Kabul.
+
+With its new activity, the Taliban is out to show restless commanders and fighters, as well as the Afghan people, that it remains a force to be reckoned with. … “ISIS is now seen as the winning horse in the race. It has imposed itself as the most powerful subversive Islamist movement – one that has been tremendously successful at accomplishing what it set out to do – and that is posing a serious challenge to other militant Islamist organizations from the Taliban to Hamas,” says Fawaz Gerges, a professor of contemporary Middle Eastern studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
+
+Last month Mullah Omar supposedly wrote a message backing the peace talks, but because the text posted on the Taliban website did not include any audio or video, it fueled rumors of his death, according to the BBC.
+
+The assumption that he is dead helped drive several Taliban leaders to defect to IS, according to the BBC. And any confirmation of his death could spur more defections, particularly among those opposed to peace talks with the Afghan government.
+
+Mullah Omar came to power after the Taliban emerged as the strongest force in the civil war that followed the pullout of Soviet forces. He later allied with Osama bin Laden, which put the Taliban in the crosshairs of the US after the 9/11 attacks. He has barely been heard from since then and has a $10 million bounty on his head.
+
+The Taliban are not the only organization struggling to prove their continued relevance. The surging power and influence of IS has also sidelined Al Qaeda, which is trying to stem a wave of defections.",REAL
+8350,Even Hillary’s Niece Is Voting Trump,"Leave a reply 
+‘She Wants To Be First Woman President For Selfish Reasons’ – Macy Smit 
+The Daily Sheeple – Hillary Clinton can’t even convince her own family members to vote for her. The only daughter of Bill Clinton’s druggie brother explained to Radar Online that she will be voting for Donald Trump instead of her “selfish” aunt. 
+Macy Smit, a hairstylist from Tampa, Florida said, “I support Donald Trump — 100 percent! I have been a Democrat my entire life, but Trump is what we need right now — somebody who is going to stand up for us. I think at this point Hillary just wants it for the history books — to be the first woman president for selfish reasons.” 
+Macy’s husband Derrick Smit is a meteorologist with the US Air Force and is currently on active duty in Kuwait, where he assists with air operations into and out of Iraq. 
+Macy’s mother, Martha Spivey, agreed with her daughter about Hillary Clinton’s selfish nature. In an interview with Radar, she said, “The Clintons are all talk! Hillary says she’s all about family, but she’s got a niece she’s never met and never acknowledged. The Clintons have never helped us out.” 
+Macy explained in the interview that her estranged father, Roger Clinton, makes a lot of promises that he never keeps. Does this sound familiar? SF Source The Daily Sheeple Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
+515,House GOP Faces Test On Budget Priorities,"WASHINGTON -- House Republicans are hoping they can bring deficit hawks and defense hawks together this week to support a budget -- and avoid an embarrassment if the conference fails to present a unified front on its priorities for the country.
+
+They expect to pull off getting a budget through, thanks to an unusual move to vote on two plans and reluctant promises from some fiscal conservatives to support a budget that would increase spending by adding money for defense.
+
+""It doesn't do any good to be financially responsible if you're dead, so I'm going to vote for it and protect national security,"" Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) told reporters Tuesday after a House GOP conference meeting.
+
+The House is set to vote Wednesday on budgets for the government that would significantly cut domestic spending through measures such as ending Obamacare and slashing welfare programs. Budgets are more a partisan statement of priorities than legislation to appropriate funding, so being unable to cobble together the number of Republicans needed to pass one would be yet another hurdle in a string of difficulties getting the various factions of the conference to agree. At odds are defense hawks, who say the budget must provide more funding for the military, and fiscal conservatives, who consider deficit cuts to be the top priority.
+
+To resolve the problem, the House will hold votes on two bills: the budget that passed through the Budget Committee last week from Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.), which some conservatives said did not provide enough military funding, and one that adds even more funding to the Overseas Contingency Operation fund. Adding defense money through this fund allows the GOP to avoid violating spending caps created in 2011, although some deficit hawks consider it a gimmick.
+
+""It's going to be a very important moment for our conference. ... I think you're going to see a very unified House Republican conference on the floor Wednesday,"" Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said at a press conference.
+
+Some fiscal conservatives may be willing to support the budget, even with additional defense spending that it has offset, because it would bring them closer to a vote to end Obamacare through a process called reconciliation. That would allow Republicans to pass a bill that could actually get to the president, rather than being blocked by Democrats in the Senate.
+
+""I campaigned when I came back here with my heart and soul to get rid of Obamacare, and it's the one shot that we've got to get something on his desk,"" Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) told reporters.
+
+That's not to say everyone is supportive of the bill with extra Overseas Contingency Operations funds. Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) said he is against the version that further boosts military funding, but thinks it will pass because of the overwhelming support from defense hawks.
+
+""If the OCO number ends up on his desk, the president is most likely going to look at it and say, 'Well, that’s great, but where’s my money, where’s my money for the stuff I want and don’t bother me about paying for it, Republicans, because you didn’t pay for the stuff you want so I don’t have to pay for the stuff I want.' And we are to end right back up in this deficit cycle.""
+
+The Senate is moving on the budget this week as well, and faces a similar conflict over whether more defense funding is needed. The Budget Committee voted last week to increase funding for the military, but it could be difficult for the extra funding defense hawks have demanded to get past a procedural hurdle on the Senate floor.",REAL
+8808,Chinese University Sells HIV Testing Kits in Vending Machine,"Chinese University Sells HIV Testing Kits in Vending Machine China has a 43% year-over-year increase of the disease Image Credits: David Pursehouse/Flickr . 
+China has experienced such a growth rate of HIV in the past several years that one university has taken steps to allow students to test themselves: by placing an HIV testing kit in a vending machine next to regular fare like snacks. 
+China has seen a 43% year-over-year increase in infection rates, which likely prompted Southwest Petroleum University in Nanchong City in Sichuan Province to install the test kits . 
+Sichuan Province is one of the top three provinces in China with a disproportionately high rate of HIV/AIDS. Together, with the other two provinces that have high rates of the disease, the three account for over half of the cases of HIV/AIDS in the entire country. 
+80% of new HIV cases occur due to homosexual activity. 
+The kits retail for $4.40 and can be taken as a urine test to determine whether or not students need to seek medical attention. Those who purchase the test will collect their urine and send it to a laboratory, and then access the results online. This can all be done completely anonymously. 
+Similar kits can be purchased online, but they retail for around $45. The cheaper vending machine tests are just as accurate and are partially subsidized by a charity to allow the test to be more accessible. 
+Reports state that the Chinese have limited sex education and very little is discussed about HIV or AIDS. Many students who suspect they may have the disease do not seek medical help because of its link to homosexuality. Those who do have HIV are often thought to be pariahs by their families and friends because of its connection with same-sex encounters. 
+The disease is mostly spreading amongst young homosexual men, but as with anywhere else, women who do not use proper protection are also susceptible to becoming infected. 
+Doctors have stated that most young people who have become infected with HIV/AIDS in China lacked proper education and did not take appropriate precautions for prevention. 
+The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) states that there are currently about half a million people in China living with HIV or AIDS, however this figure may be inaccurate due to underreporting.  ",FAKE
+2249,The GOP’s ludicrous Kim Davis primary: How raging homophobia took the Republican campaign by storm,"I hasten to underscore that I vigorously disagree with Graham on a wide range of issues, especially his interventionist posture on Iraq and the broader Middle East. Although from what I’ve witnessed, especially throughout the Republican nominating process, Graham has comported himself at least as a man of integrity. Not for nothing, but he appears on the surface to be a nice enough guy — at least compared with his GOP colleagues who mostly drive one to violent profanity-strewn outbursts.
+
+This week’s big story is the saga of a Rowan County, KY, clerk Kim Davis, who was jailed indefinitely Thursday by U.S. District Judge David Bunning for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in compliance with an earlier court order. Davis will remain in federal custody until she agrees to issue the appropriate licenses. Last month, meanwhile, a Texas clerk named Katie Lang was hit with a court settlement to the tune of $44,000 in damages and legal fees for refusing to issue a license for a gay couple. But it clearly wasn’t punitive enough to scare Davis who’s clearly acting in contempt of Judge Bunning’s order.
+
+Davis believes that by issuing the licenses she’ll be condemned to Hell. Of course her perceived biblical trespass is ridiculously cherrypicked, as it always is. Homophobes like Davis seem to only zero-in on Leviticus and a few letters written by the apostle Paul. (Regarding the latter, and briefly put, Paul was merely recruiting pagan gentiles to the ascetic Christian lifestyle. Paganism often included sex acts in temple rituals, so naturally converts would have to reject those old forms of worship. Paul, by the way, in Romans, also expressly forbid debating, boasting, deception, being unmerciful and wine-drinking. That’d be a quintuple Hell-worthy condemnation for John Boehner. It’s also worth noting that the terms “homosexuality” and “same-sex marriage” were anachronistic in the ancient world, making it impossible for the Bible to explicitly condemn either.)
+
+Incidentally, it’s come to light that Davis has been divorced three times and married four. So much for the sanctity of marriage. And in the various video clips and photos of Davis, she’s clearly wearing two types of cloth at the same time, which is a direct violation of God’s decree in Leviticus 19:19.
+
+The bottom line here is that Davis works in the public sector and therefore is forbidden by the establishment clause of the First Amendment from imposing her (blindingly contradictory) faith on the public. Naturally, she’s also acting in defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. My cynical side tells me there’s more to Davis’ motives. She’s already been lionized by the bigoted far-right, with at least two GOP presidential candidates rushing to her support, so it’s not unfair to speculate that she’s gripped by the lure of national attention.
+
+To wit: Mike Huckabee personally called Davis to offer his encouragement and, naturally, his prayers. Meanwhile, Rand Paul said that Davis’ actions are indicative of the “American way.” Paul went on to say:
+
+“I think one way to get around the whole idea of what the Supreme Court is forcing on the states is for states just to get out of the business of giving out licenses,” Paul said. “Alabama has already voted to do this, they’re just no longer going to give out licenses. And anybody can make a contract. And then if you want a marriage contract you go to a church. And so I’ve often said we could have gotten around all of this also in the sense that I do believe everybody has a right to a contract.” This is bizarre given how Paul is one of the most vocal supporters of states’ rights — letting the states take control of nearly everything. Then again, he’s such a notorious flip-flopper that he makes Mitt Romney look like a steadfast pillar of unwavering integrity. Speaking of which, let’s return to integrity. A third presidential candidate, Lindsey Graham, also weighed in on the Davis story, but not in the way you’d expect from a conservative Republican. It turns out Graham said exactly what any sane, rational human being might say. “As a public official, comply with the law or resign,” Graham told clerk Kim Davis […] “The rule of law is the rule of law,” Graham said. “We are a rule of law nation. And I appreciate her conviction, and I support traditional marriage, but she’s accepted a job where she has to apply the law to everyone and that’s her choice.” Okay, that was precisely the correct reaction to the story. (Except, of course, the thing about supporting traditional marriage, but nobody’s perfect.) What’s more noteworthy, however, is that Graham said this in total defiance of both his party and his congressional delegation, each of which routinely scrambles over itself to pander as much if not more to anti-gay Americans as it does to racists and sexists. Additionally, Graham had the guts to say it to one of the top-shelf nationally syndicated conservative radio hosts, Hugh Hewitt. The liberal equivalent might’ve been, for example, Elizabeth Warren hypothetically defending the NRA on “Real Time with Bill Maher. No wonder Graham is losing badly in a GOP presidential field populated by goofballs, racists and over-paid comment trolls. While he’s not going to win any popularity polls on the left, there are two things any liberal ought to be able to say about Graham: (1) He obviously possesses at least a modicum of integrity that’s unmatched by the majority of his colleagues; and (2) he appears to be one of the few remaining national politicians who, at least in the here and now, hasn’t sold out to the inchoate screeching and personality politics of the Tea Party and Fox News Channel. And that’s a real accomplishment, given the strong incentives in the other direction. In the blurting culture of Trump-era politics we need more leaders like Graham who are willing to take the rational high-road rather than dutifully falling in line with the fire-eaters, extremists and carnival geeks of his party.",REAL
+7082,IRONY ALERT: First Person Arrested For Voter Fraud Is A Trump Supporter,"IRONY ALERT: First Person Arrested For Voter Fraud Is A Trump Supporter By Andrew Bradford on October 29, 2016 Subscribe 
+Ever since the public opinion polls began showing him behind in the 2016 race for the White House, GOP nominee Donald Trump has alleged that the political system and election is “rigged.” He has even recommended that his supporters show up at polling places to observe what is taking place and assure the election isn’t “stolen” via voter fraud. 
+Which brings us to Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa. Terri Lynn Rote voted early at an election office in her hometown. A few hours later, Rote then went to another polling location and attempted to vote a second time. She was arrested and charged with first-degree election fraud, a Class D felony. 
+The irony is almost too much to stomach, isn’t it? 
+Polk County Auditor Jamie Fitzgerald said it’s the first time in 12 years he can remember ever having to report potential voter fraud to the authorities. 
+What Trump and other Republicans fail to say when they warn of voter fraud on the left is that based on the demographics of the American electorate, there is no need for Democrats to try and commit fraud when it comes to a national election. In fact, it is far more likely that the GOP will have to try to cheat or intimidate voters (with restrictive voter ID provisions and by cutting back the number of polling places or early voting days) in order to remain competitive. 
+It should also be noted that when Trump was winning in the Republican primaries, you never once heard him scream about anyone trying to cheat or rig an election. It was only after his own numbers began to slip and he found himself behind by as much at 14 points to Hillary Clinton that such talk began. 
+So, Donald, what say you about the election being rigged in light of Terri Rote? Donald? Hmm…guess that silence tells us all we need to know. 
+Here’s the Donald alleging that the election is rigged against him: 
+Featured Image Via Des Moines Police Dept. About Andrew Bradford 
+Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect",FAKE
+3013,2016: The year conventional political wisdom was turned upside down,"Shred the political playbook. The 2016 campaign will be remembered as the year in which the conventional wisdom was anything but wise. Most political pundits have been wrong. And almost every assumption about presidential campaigns since the birth of modern politics in 1960, with the first televised debate and widespread use of TV advertising, has been debunked. Our political catechism has been upended. Consider the following:
+
+When the Supreme Court ruled in the 2010 Citizens United case that corporations were people and therefore could spend unlimited amounts of money – without disclosure, in some instances – on political campaigns, Democrats and other critics warned that democracy was now for sale and that the candidate who raised the most money would invariably prevail over less well-funded contenders. Enter Jeb Bush, the Republican Party’s “inevitable” nominee, who raised over $130 million for his campaign and Super Pac even before he formally declared. Eight months later, exit Jeb!, the “low-energy” candidate who, having spent the vast majority of the money he had raised, quit the race, dragging his exclamation point behind him. Donald Trump, by contrast, may be wealthy – just how rich remains in dispute – but he has spent less overall than any other candidate and, because of the nonstop coverage his slurs and antics have received, virtually nothing on TV advertising.
+
+Ted Cruz was supposed to win all the early GOP contests because of his heavy investment in his “ground game.” But, with the exception of Iowa – which he first visited in 2008, only months after being elected a first-term senator from Texas – organization, like money, has meant little this year. Cruz won Iowa thanks to a large evangelical turnout after Trump skipped what turned out to be a critical debate days before the nation’s first caucus, but he has steadily faded ever since. Polls suggest that Trump won in Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina with the most modest of campaign ground organizations because of his powerful slogan of American revitalization; because he is seen as a consummate political outsider, a blunt businessman who says what ordinary people think, a problem-solver and anti-politician; and because of his celebrity status and tempestuous rallies, complete with the by now almost ritualistic ejection of a protester. While Trump has repeatedly flown to primary states in his private jet, he rarely spends a night outside his baronial residence on Fifth Avenue.
+
+Apparently not this year. Almost no establishment politician endorsed Trump during the first two primaries. The only other celebrity politician who rallied to Trump’s side was Sarah Palin, whose rambling, incoherent 45-minute endorsement prior to the Iowa caucus, if anything, may have cost him votes there. Marco Rubio, the candidate who has garnered the most endorsements, has yet to win a primary and is unlikely to do so, despite his growing support from a still reeling Republican “establishment.”
+
+4. You can’t run against the media.
+
+Trump has mocked this political platitude, repeatedly. If anything, one of the bumptious billionaire’s most reliable applause lines is his frequent declaration that the media are “terrible,” “among the most dishonest groups of people” he’s ever met. Apparently his rivals have gotten the message. During the debate in Houston last Thursday, every candidate except John Kasich, who is running a poor fifth except in his home state of Ohio, attacked the press.
+
+Quite the contrary. In 2016, given America’s deep political polarization, no candidate seems able to win without high negatives. The nation’s bitter frustration seems to require candidates to make increasingly stark, even extreme, appeals. The GOP field has no shortage of candidates with high positive ratings, especially Ben Carson and Marco Rubio, neither of whom has carried a single state primary or caucus. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has far higher favorability ratings than Hillary Clinton, who in poll after poll is widely viewed by potential voters of most ages, ethnicities and genders as “untrustworthy” and perhaps even “dishonest.” Yet Clinton got 73.5 percent of the Democratic vote in South Carolina on Saturday.
+
+Many Trump critics continue to assert that he will ultimately stumble, because no candidate can win his party’s nomination or be elected to the nation’s highest office without substantial  political experience. While the 2008 election of a junior senator from Illinois whose resume featured only a brief stint as a community organizer began to challenge that political bromide, the crucial primaries on March 1 and March 15 will be the ultimate referee.
+
+Given the pundits’ predictive record so far, a degree of humility is in order. Trump, once the “unthinkable,” may soon become “inevitable.” For better or worse, the 2016 race is anything but politics as usual.
+
+Judith Miller, a Fox News contributor, is an award-winning writer and author, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The author of several books, her latest is ""The Story: A Reporter's Journey"" (Simon & Schuster, April 7, 2015) now available in paperback. Follow her on Twitter @JMFreeSpeech.
+
+
+
+Douglas E. Schoen has served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton. He has more than 30 years experience as a pollster and political consultant. He is also a Fox News contributor and co-host of ""Fox News Insiders"" Sundays on Fox News Channel at 7 pm ET. He is the author of 13 books. His latest is ""Putin's Master Plan"" (Encounter Books, September 27, 2016). Follow Doug on Twitter @DouglasESchoen.",REAL
+3388,State Department: No record of Clinton signing 'separation' form,"The State Department said Tuesday it has no record of Hillary Clinton signing a key form stating she turned over all official documents upon leaving the department -- a form that was the subject of intense speculation since the issue could determine whether she broke the law.
+
+That document is known as a ""separation"" form, which officials are supposed to sign upon leaving the department. It certifies that the person who signs it has turned over all ""classified or administratively controlled"" materials, as well as all ""unclassified documents and papers"" relating to official government business.
+
+Given that Clinton exclusively used personal email while secretary of state and didn't turn over official records until late last year, a former Justice Department official said last week that if Clinton signed that form, she probably gave a false statement and broke the law.
+
+But on Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters they are ""fairly certain she did not"" sign it.
+
+""We have reviewed Secretary Clinton's official personnel file and administrative files and do not have any record of her signing the OF109 [form],"" Psaki said.
+
+This admission comes after the department for days was unable to answer questions about whether Clinton signed the form.
+
+It also raises questions about whether Clinton, by not signing it, at least violated department policy.
+
+Psaki claimed Clinton did not violate any policy. Further, she said Tuesday that neither of Clinton's two immediate predecessors, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, signed such a statement either.
+
+She also said that different bureaus within the department had different rules relating to such statements that had the effect of making their completion optional by some employees.
+
+Shannen Coffin, a senior lawyer under the George W. Bush administration, first cited the form OF109 in questioning whether Clinton committed a violation by exclusively using personal email as secretary of state, and then not turning over those emails deemed work-related until after leaving the department.
+
+If she indeed signed the document, he told Fox News last week, ""there's no question [she broke the law].""
+
+And if Clinton did not sign that document, he added, ""why not?""
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4655,"Conway touts Trump's 'drain the swamp' message, admits 'we are behind'","""We are behind. She has some advantages,"" Kellyanne Conway said on NBC's ""Meet the Press,"" adding that those advantages include that Clinton ""has a former president, happens to be her husband, campaigning for her; the current president and first lady, vice president -- all much more popular than she can hope to be. And she's seen as the incumbent.""
+
+""He delivers his own speeches. This is his candidacy. He's the guy who's running for the White House, and he has the privilege to say what he wants,"" Conway told CNN's Jake Tapper on ""State of the Union"" Sunday.
+
+""This lifetime ban on lobbying -- if you've worked in the White House, you can't lobby for foreign nations. That's sort of the big, ethical shower we're all going to need to take post-Hillary Clinton State Department,"" she said, touting portions of Trump's speech.
+
+Trump also proposed a series of reforms that include term limits of six years for House and Senate members. That would've meant Trump running mate Mike Pence would've been term-limited out of office halfway through his 12-year tenure representing Indiana. ""He was definitely living in the swamp,"" Conway said of Pence, who led fiscal conservative fights like opposing the bank bailout pushed by his own party's President George W. Bush. ""Mike Pence would agree with Donald Trump on that: When you're there for too long, you need that fresh blood and new perspective,"" Conway said. ""I wish there were more members like Mike Pence. If there were, we wouldn't need to have the conversation."" Conway also attacked Clinton over her family foundation's acceptance of foreign contributions -- but Tapper pointed out that those details are public because the Clinton Foundation has published lists of its donors, while Trump hasn't released his tax returns. Tapper said: ""We have no idea what his ties are and where there might be moneyed interests and conflicts of interest because he won't disclose his tax returns."" Conway responded: ""Here's what we do know: We know that -- as he said yesterday in Gettysburg, Jake -- he used to be an insider. He's somebody who breathed rarefied air right up there with the Clintons and others, given his position, his power and his wealth and his great success as a businessman. And yet, that gives him the credibility and legitimacy to go and fight the system from the outside in. He knows how corrosive and corrupt it is.""",REAL
+9817,President Elect Trump – A New Era of Unpredictability Awaits,"President Elect Trump – A New Era of Unpredictability Awaits President Elect Trump is new title for New York businessman, millionaire and Republican candidate Do... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/president-elect-trump-new-era-of.html President Elect Trump is new title for New York businessman, millionaire and Republican candidate Donald J. Trump, who yesterday on November 8th, 2016 successfully won the US presidential election. Trump managed to defeat favorite Hillary Clinton by a relatively narrow margin. The victory came as a shock to many Americans, regardless of where they reside on the political spectrum. For many in the alternative media, the victory of President Elect Trump comes with a great sense of relief that career criminal Hillary Clinton was not elected (or installed) as so many had expected. Clinton had already showed a propensity to collude, cheat and lie during the Democratic Primaries where she triumphed with dirty tactics over Bernie Sanders.For many others, turned off by Trump’s racism, sexism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and generally flippant comments, the Trump victory is devastating and will challenge them psychologically and emotionally to accept the reality for the results. Hillary Clinton: What Went Wrong? The result is especially surprising given the degree to which Hillary Clinton had ingratiated herself with the upper echelons of the NWO ( New World Order ). From an outside perspective, it seemed Clinton had left no stone unturned in brown-nosing and sucking up to the most powerful people and organizations in the world, including the Rothschilds , Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller CFR ( Council on Foreign Relations ) and many many more. Additionally, given her propensity for criminality and her powerful backers such as George Soros , coupled with the serious problems electronic voting machines possess in being able to be hacked and the vote flipped, many are left wondering how Hillary lost . What went wrong? At this stage in the game of post-election analysis, we can point to a few things. Hillary’s criminal past clearly caught up with her. It is unprecedented in the history of US presidential elections for a leading candidate to be under an on-again, off-again criminal investigation. Clinton simply has so many scandals in her recent and distant past that it’s like trying to stop a ship with 30 holes from sinking; you can’t plug them all. She was also running up against the problem that the Democrats had been in power for 8 years, when recent history shows that power seems to change hands in around that time frame. Clinton represented the establishment, and as the popularity of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump has shown, people are tired of the same. They intuitively know the system is rigged and corrupt, even if they can’t exactly put their fingers on it. Obama, Mr. “Hope and Change”, got in with a slick campaign of promising something different (upon which he didn’t deliver). Trump represented anti-establishment, and whether he truly embodies that or not is an entirely different matter, because it’s all about perception. Does a Trump Victory Show that NWO Powerbrokers Are Less in Control than It Seems? The win of President Elect Trump is truly shocking and monumental event. Many people (including myself) were predicting that it was a foregone conclusion that Clinton would win. For instance, founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange stated before the election that “Trump would not permitted to win”. The MSM ( Mainstream Media ) were clearly favoring Clinton at almost every turn. Whatever you think of Trump, we can at least say the will of the majority of American voters was respected, which is a relief, given how much corruption exists in our society today.The question now is this: is a Trump victory the result the NWO powerbrokers wanted all along, for reasons we are yet to see? Or is it a genuine uprising against these forces? What Does a Trump Presidency Mean for Liberty and Freedom? For me, Trump can be summarized in one word: unpredictable . President Elect Trump truly embodies unpredictability more than any other high-level politician around. One moment he is railing against the 9/11 official story, then he is declaring his love for Israel, then he is bringing up the vaccine-autism connection, then he is suggesting Snowden be killed. Next he is suggesting GMO corn makes you stupid, then he suggesting Muslims be banned from the US, then he is calling global warming a hoax , then he is suggesting the Government be given the power to shut down the internet. Then, after all of that, he makes friendly overtures to Russia while demonizing the hell out of Iran. What does he stand for? Peace or war? Freedom or tyranny?At this stage no one knows, probably not even Trump himself. He has contradicted himself numerous times throughout his campaign, and merely once suggesting a good idea (i.e. looking at who controls the issuance of money instead of letting the international bankers via the Federal Reserve control it) doesn’t mean it will become his policy. Unpredictability is one of Trump’s great qualities, but also one of his most dangerous. A lot will depend on with whom he surrounds himself once becoming President Trump, and what kind of advice they give him. His VP Mike Pence is a standard conservative Republican who will be no doubt far more to the liking of the NWO conspirators, but Trump is also taking advice from retired DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) chief Michael Flynn, the man who came out and highlighted how the US created ISIS in a declassified DIA document .For now, America and the world have around two-and-a-half months to get over the incredible shock of yesterday’s result and psychologically prepare itself for a Trump presidency. Meanwhile, it would be foolish for us to expect that one man can fix all of America’s problems. It will be the job of the independent and alternative media to hold Trump to his promises and his word, and to continue to share ideas of how we can truly create a better, freer and more just society. This necessarily involves questioning the very structures and systems of society, and will never magically improve with just the passing of the baton from one politician to another. By Makia Freeman , Guest writer, HumansAreFree.com  ",FAKE
+7900,Duterte Pulls a 180: China to Build Fake Islands Right Off Philippine Coast,"Duterte Pulls a 180: China to Build Fake Islands Right Off Philippine Coast   Underground Reporter 
+( UR ) Beijing — In a move signaling a point of no return in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s recent pivot to China, it was reported Tuesday the Philippines have granted a state-owned Chinese infrastructure group the right to build artificial islands in the South China Sea — they very practice Duterte’s predecessor had sought to restrict via U.N. intervention. 
+“China Communication Construction Company (CCCC), a State-owned infrastructure group, recently signed a contract with the Philippines’ Mega Harbour Port and Development Inc. to conduct a 208-hectare land reclamation project in Davao’s harbour,” wrote China’s state-run People’s Daily . 
+To be built just off the Philippines’ southern coast by “moving sediment from the seafloor to a reef,” the four islands “will be used for government offices, businesses, residences, ports and industrial land.” 
+The CCCC Dredging chairman stated “the project will elevate cooperation between China and the Philippines’ port construction companies to a new height” and that he “expects the project to become a model for future cooperation between the two nations.” 
+It was barely three months ago that a United Nations arbitration court ruled China’s nearly all-encompassing claim of territorial rights to the South China Sea was invalid. That case had been brought by the administration of Duterte’s predecessor, President Benigno Aquino, because China had begun to construct artificial islands in those waters. 
+Such a drastic shift in policy — and the, admittedly, somewhat puzzling nature of it — was remarked on by Steve Mollman who, writing for Quartz , reported on the new China-Philippines deal on Thursday: 
+“You’d think that rewarding China’s dredging sector would be the last thing the Philippines wants to do. After all, in recent years Chinese dredging ships have been an unwelcome presence in parts of the South China Sea near the Philippines, helping to build islands atop reefs that then became Chinese military bases, complete with runways and ports.” 
+
+South China Sea, with Paracel and Spratly Islands. [Public domain] 
+Indeed, for awhile it appeared the navies of China and the United States — who physically intervened on the side of the Philippines — would succumb to all-out war in the South China Sea. 
+Tensions have since deescalated considerably, however, due in large part to the fact that Duterte, who’s officially announced he intends for his country’s future to unfold within the Chinese sphere of influence, has taken away the one thing the U.S. needed to stick its nose in the affairs of the region — an excuse. 
+“In this venue, your honors, in this venue, I announce my separation from the United States,” Duterte said while speaking at the Great Hall of the People during a historic trip to Beijing last week. 
+In that speech, the Filipino president made his reasoning for the pivot quite clear. “America has lost,” he said flatly. He made equally clear he wants to be a part of what he feels is the winning side: “I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow and maybe I will also go to talk to (Russian President) Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world — China, Philippines and Russia. It’s the only way.” 
+So Duterte is now allowing China to build fake islands in the South China Sea. 
+That statement, in itself, is enough to raise the eyebrows of people following the developments in that region. And with regard to the South China Sea dispute — on the Philippines front, at least — Duterte, in a very real sense, is right. American has lost. Because, after all, it’s awfully hard to convince folks of Chinese aggression when China and the country in question are cooperating voluntarily.",FAKE
+2776,Treasury will begin issuing Iran sanctions waivers under Obama order,"WASHINGTON — President Obama signed an order Sunday directing his administration to begin issuing waivers to Iran nuclear sanctions — but the waivers will only go into effect once Iran meets its obligations under the agreement limiting its nuclear program.
+
+The presidential memorandum marks what's being called ""adoption day"" for the international agreement intended to roll back Iran's nuclear program. The milestone, four administration officials said, is a mere formality, driven more by the calendar than by any action by Iran.
+
+""Today marks an important milestone toward preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and ensuring its nuclear program is exclusively peaceful going forward,"" Obama said in a White House statement released Sunday afternoon.
+
+Obama directed Secretary of State John Kerry to issue the waivers and to ""take all appropriate additional measures to ensure the prompt and effective implementation of the U.S. commitments"" in the agreement.
+
+Sunday marks 90 days since the United Nations Security Council approved the agreement. ""So adoption day is a calendar-driven event and it’s the day at which all the parties begin to take the steps they need to make sure they take to get to implementation day,"" said State Department spokesman John Kirby. ""And we’re not at implementation day; that’s a whole different purpose.""
+
+No date is set for implementation day. Under the agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, implementation will come only when the International Atomic Energy Agency certifies that Iran has lived up to its obligations to reduce its stockpiles of enriched uranium, dismantle two-thirds of its centrifuges, and halt construction of new nuclear facilities.
+
+Western officials have said they expect that to take four to six months. Iran is motivated to act quickly, said one of the four senior administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the State Department.
+
+The agreement, signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, Germany and Iran, requires Obama and the European Union to direct the issuance of waivers on adoption day. Even though they won't go into effect for months, the arrangement allows businesses to know what sanctions are being waived, another senior administration official said.
+
+""These next steps will allow us to reach the objectives we set out to achieve over the course of nearly two years of tough, principled diplomacy and will result in cutting off all four pathways Iran could use to develop enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon,"" Obama said. ""I am confident in the extraordinary benefits to our national security and the peace and security of the world that come with the successful implementation of the (plan of action).""
+
+Most of the sanctions being lifted apply only to non-U.S. citizens and companies doing business with Iran. Most sanctions will still apply to U.S. citizens under separate sanctions imposed on Iran for its support of terrorism and human rights violations. But sales of civilian passenger aircraft and handicrafts — most notably carpets — will be allowed.
+
+The sanctions against Iran are authorized by Congress but implemented via executive order. Obama can waive those executive orders after Democrats in the Senate filibustered a resolution that would have blocked the agreement last month.
+
+But the the adoption day comes amid renewed tensions with Iran over its involvement in Syria's civil war and its Oct. 10 test launch of a ballistic missile — reportedly capably of carrying a nuclear warhead.
+
+But as he has throughout the negotiation, Obama maintained Friday that those issues are separate from the more urgent need to ensure Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon.
+
+""This is something that I made very clear during the debate around the Iran nuclear deal: The Iran nuclear deal solves a specific problem, which is making sure that they don't possess a nuclear weapon,"" he said after meeting with the South Korean president to discuss, among other things, North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
+
+""It does not fully resolve the wide range of issues where we’ve got a big difference. And so we are going to have to continue to put pressure on them through the international community and, where we have bilateral channels, through bilateral channels to indicate to them that there are costs to bad behavior in the region and around the world,"" Obama said.
+
+In Munich on Saturday, a top Iranian military official said Iran was eager to cooperate with the international inspectors and would implement the agreement with ""utmost prudence.""
+
+""It will be the gateway to Iran's taking next steps and will demonstrate the level of sincerity in the settlement of the problems which were created unjustly by others,"" the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, told Iran's state news agency.",REAL
+340,2016 Race Collides With Baltimore Unrest,"With the fires out and much of the glass cleaned up in Baltimore, the ""soul searching"" as President Obama called it, has begun. For those hoping to become the next president of the United States, weighing in presents both an opportunity and a challenge.
+
+Hillary Clinton told an audience in New York Wednesday, the criminal justice system is ""out of balance.""
+
+She called for body cameras for every police department in America and the end of mass incarceration of low-level offenders.
+
+""We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America,"" said Clinton in a keynote speech at the 18th Annual David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum at Columbia University.
+
+""There is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes and an estimated 1.5 million black men are quote 'missing' from their families and communities because of incarceration and premature death.""
+
+The evening before, one-time Baltimore mayor and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley returned to that city and visited with people near where the rioting had taken place. Jason Horowitz of the New York Times was along for the ride:
+
+As mayor, O'Malley subscribed to the ""broken windows"" theory of policing, which was very much in vogue at the time. As Horowitz tells it, O'Malley wasn't universally welcomed to the city he once led, but he also seemed undeterred.
+
+""'Did you see all those boarded-up houses on your way out?' shouted a man who greeted him in front of the Arch Social Club ('Please Pardon Our Dust'), where volunteers made turkey sandwiches, handed out water and watched 'Bonanza.' 'I actually did,' Mr. O'Malley said. 'You plan on doing anything about that?' 'I got elevated to the same rank as you, I'm a citizen now,' Mr. O'Malley said, with a grin that he often wears as a shield. 'You made a lot of promises,' the man shouted. 'And I did the best that I could,' the former mayor said. 'In what community? Not in the black community!' A few seconds later and a couple yards closer to the intersection, a young man named Chris Dickens read to Mr. O'Malley a list of young black men who he said had been victims of police brutality. 'I've heard of them all,' Mr. O'Malley said. 'I think it's tragic and I think we all need to search for a deeper and better understanding. I'm getting crushed with cameras.'""
+
+His not-yet-official campaign team put out a fact sheet outlining his work on matters of policing and criminal justice reform and proudly linked to the Times article as if to imply O'Malley wasn't afraid to mix it up with real people who might not tell him what he wants to hear.
+
+Another potential presidential candidate, Ben Carson, lived in Baltimore for 30 years. He was a world-renowned neurosurgeon who worked at Johns Hopkins University. He wrote on Facebook that he urged ""parents, grandparents and guardians to please take control of your children and do not allow them to be exposed to the dangers of uncontrolled agitators on the streets.""
+
+And Tuesday, he penned an op-ed for Time.
+
+""When rioting and looting occurs in instances like this, I cannot help but think how important it is to get police involved early on in the community so that the first encounter a young person has with a police officer is not a hostile encounter. That is the type of thing that will make a huge difference in this country. The police have to acknowledge any shortcomings, and if there is unfairness, we need to look at it and improve upon that. Objectivity is the real answer. In order to get there, we have to be able to sit down at a table and have an intelligent conversation rather than getting to our respective corners and demonizing each other. We need to create relationships. Relationships are key to resolutions of problems.""
+
+For Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a Libertarian-leaning Republican, the situation in Baltimore presented an opportunity to highlight his bipartisan work on sentencing reform in the Senate. But a call to a conservative talk show host took the topic in a different direction.
+
+""It's depressing. It's sad. It's scary,"" Paul told Laura Ingraham on her show Tuesday.
+
+He joked that he was on a train that went through Baltimore on Monday evening, saying he was glad it didn't stop.
+
+He then turned to the potential causes.
+
+""The breakdown of the family structure. The lack of fathers,"" Paul told Ingraham. ""The lack of sort of a moral code in our society. And this isn't just a racial thing. It goes across racial boundaries. But we do have problems in our country. And you see this and you see that we are close to the tipping point and closer than many think.""
+
+Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday called on the government ""ensure domestic security.""
+
+""Today families are scared,"" Cruz wrote. ""Our government must perform its central functions and purposes: to preserve the peace, protect the people, and serve justice.""
+
+An open question remains how long politicians will continue talking about these issues once the conflict recedes in Baltimore and the cable news cameras pack up and go home. President Obama, Tuesday, said more conflicts between police and the people they are supposed to protect, even more riots, would be inevitable without sustained attention and soul searching.
+
+""If we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could, it's just it would require everybody saying 'this is important, this is significant,'"" Obama said. ""And that we don't just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns.""",REAL
+359,"DoD teams surveying US military sites for potential Gitmo transfers, lawmakers vow fight","The Department of Defense notified lawmakers Friday that teams will visit two military installations in the United States — Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and the Naval Brig in Charleston, S.C. — to conduct “site surveys” looking into transferring a “limited number” of Guantanamo detainees, Pentagon and Capitol Hill sources told Fox News.
+
+The move, coming on the same day Secretary of State John Kerry marked the re-opening of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, has already triggered a backlash on Capitol Hill. But, despite existing congressional restrictions on moving the detainees to U.S. soil, the notice itself suggests officials are wasting no time exploring transfer options for those at the controversial Cuba prison camp.
+
+One Capitol Hill source, reading from the notification, said the first Defense Department survey team was due to visit Fort Leavenworth “starting today [Friday].”
+
+The Naval Brig in Charleston will be visited in the “next several weeks,” said another source, reading from the same notification, which went out Friday morning.
+
+Legally, the administration is still barred from transferring Guantanamo detainees to the United States, according to laws passed by Congress starting in 2010. Building or modifying facilities to house Gitmo inmates is also prohibited in the United States.
+
+“Perhaps DoD does not think this is part of that ‘build or modify’ section,” one source told Fox News, questioning DoD’s funding of the site survey teams visiting the two military installations.
+
+After learning of the survey teams, lawmakers representing Kansas vowed to fight any proposed transfers to their state. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said in a statement that the move ""reflects another egregious overstep by this administration.""
+
+""Congress has consistently stopped Obama by law from moving a single detainee to the U.S.,"" he said. ""Not on my watch will any terrorist be placed in Kansas.""
+
+""Terrorists should not be living down the road from Ft. Leavenworth – home to thousands of Army soldiers and their families, as well as military personnel from across the globe who study at the Intellectual Center of the Army,"" Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., said in a statement.
+
+""This administration’s last-ditch effort to carry out President Obama’s reckless national security decision before he leaves office is disingenuous and flawed.""
+
+Kansas Rep. Lynn Jenkins also fired off a letter to Defense Secretary Ash Carter demanding he abandon any such plans.
+
+""At a time when we face relentless threats from the Islamic State, and have yet to hear a strategy to defeat ISIL, it is absurd to hear that the Department of Defense has personnel on the ground at Fort Leavenworth conducting site surveys to advance the President's proposal that could ultimately result in the transfer of these terrorist to Kansas,"" she said in a statement.
+
+She also said moving detainees stateside would violate federal law. ""It is irresponsible, reckless, and to overstep the law to do so is a dangerous precedent,"" the congresswoman said.
+
+Despite the congressional restrictions, President Obama still wants to fulfill his pledge to shutter the Cuba prison camp. He hasn’t yet provided a plan for achieving this to Congress. A total of 116 detainees remain at Guantanamo, 52 of whom have been approved for transfer.
+
+The Pentagon confirmed to Fox News that DoD personnel will survey the two military sites, “as part of our broader and ongoing effort to identify locations within the United States that can [possibly] facilitate military commissions and can possibly hold detainees currently at Guantanamo Bay.”
+
+Defense Department spokesman Cmdr. Gary Ross said in a statement that security and humane treatment are “primary concerns” but cost is also a factor. He said the costs of providing medical care at Guantanamo, for instance, are rising as the population ages.
+
+He added: “Only those locations that can hold detainees at a maximum security level will be considered. DoD personnel will consider surveying a variety of military and civilian sites to determine their candidacy for holding law of war detainees in a humane and secure manner. There is a broad list of facilities that will be potentially considered. This list is informed by past assessment efforts.""
+
+Whether the administration can reach an agreement with Congress to approve transfers to the U.S. remains to be seen.
+
+The notice sent out Friday -- first reported by Voice of America -- said the teams will look at logistical issues: “The assessment team will meet with facility staff to discuss engineering, force protection, troop housing, security, transportation, information security, contracting and other operational issues.”
+
+“No facilities have been selected,” the notification added.
+
+Lucas Tomlinson is the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News Channel. You can follow him on Twitter: @LucasFoxNews",REAL
+7759,Top Aide to Hillary Clinton Urges the FBI to Disclose what it Knows about Trump's Russia Ties,"23 Shares
+4 18 0 1
+A top aide to Hillary Clinton urged the FBI on Tuesday to disclose what it knows about any ties between Donald Trump and Russia, accusing the agency of unfairly publicizing its inquiry into Clinton's email practices while staying quiet about the Republican presidential candidate.
+The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a preliminary inquiry in recent months into allegations that Trump or his associates might have had questionable dealings with Russian people or businesses, but found no evidence to warrant opening a full investigation, according to sources familiar with the matter. The agency has not publicly discussed the probe.
+A week before Election Day, the Clinton campaign was trying to contain damage from the announcement by FBI Director James Comey on Friday that his agency was looking into newly discovered emails that might relate to Clinton's use of a private server while she was secretary of state.
+Clinton has voiced confidence the FBI will not find anything problematic.
+Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook questioned why the FBI director had not released any information about the agency's Russia inquiries.
+MORE... What will Hillary Clinton do for India? Not Much and Here's Why Clinton's Policies Look Like a Death Sentence for Americans 10 Things to Expect with a Hillary Clinton Presidency Hillary Clinton must be indicted ""If you're in the business of releasing information about investigations on presidential candidates, release everything you have on Donald Trump. Release the information on his connections to the Russians,"" Mook said on CNN.
+The FBI inquiry reviewed allegations that Trump or his associates might have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or engaged in contacts or commerce with people in Russia who are subject to U.S. or international financial sanctions.
+The U.S. government has blamed Russia for cyber attacks on Democratic Party organizations. Democrats criticize Trump for taking what they say is a pro-Russia foreign policy stance.
+Russia's possible role in the campaign again came into focus when online magazine Slate said a group of computer scientists had been alarmed by records showing thousands of apparent connection attempts between an email server operated on behalf of the Trump Organization and computers inside a Russian company, Alfa Bank in Moscow.
+Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said the server, which had been used to send out hotel marketing material, had been dormant for years.
+Prominent U.S. cyber security company FireEye said it had been hired by Alfa Bank to investigate the records and had been granted access to the bank’s systems in Moscow to look for evidence of any relationship with Trump’s company or any signs of hacking or infection. FireEye said so far it had found no emails being sent back and forth or any other link.",FAKE
+2733,"George Stephanopoulos, Brian Williams and the media’s sinking reputation","By failing to disclose his donations to the Clinton Foundation, George Stephanopoulos has damaged his credibility and tarnished his network.
+
+But you know something? He’s got plenty of company.
+
+What an awful couple of years it’s been for the news business, even by our already-tattered standards.
+
+While ABC’s chief anchor has landed himself in a heap of trouble, this comes at a time when NBC’s chief anchor, Brian Williams, is serving a six-month suspension for fabricating an Iraq war tale and possibly embellishing other reporting exploits. And it comes weeks after Rolling Stone had to retract its horrifyingly irresponsible tale of a gang rape at the University of Virginia.
+
+When these episodes erupt, critics carp about how this or that organization has suffered a grievous blow. What’s often missed is that all of us who practice journalism suffer as well, that it reinforces public doubts about whether the business is riddled with bias and conflicts of interest.
+
+This was true back when Janet Cooke committed her fraud at the Washington Post. It was true when Stephen Glass was making up a bunch of articles at the New Republic. It was true when I exposed the serial fabrications of Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Jack Kelley at USA Today. It was true when CBS had to retract Lara Logan’s “60 Minutes” story on Benghazi. And it’s true every time there’s a new instance of plagiarism.
+
+We all make mistakes, myself included, and how you handle those mistakes is crucial. Stephanopoulos didn’t realize he couldn’t be giving money to the family foundation of the guy he used to work for, whose wife is running for president, especially when he was covering the uproar over its tangled finances. But he also misjudged the negative reaction, and his initial statement apologized only for the lack of disclosure. A day later, he realized he had to apologize on camera, and for making the $75,000 donations as well. The former White House official also bowed out of ABC’s Republican presidential debate (although his hand may have been forced by GOP demands to yank the debate from the network).
+
+When Williams was found to have invented the story of being shot at in a helicopter over Iraq, he issued a botched apology and said he’d be taking a few days off. Only later did NBC launch an investigation and remove him from ""Nightly News"" for six months.
+
+Some of this gets caught up in the ideological wars, as liberals would surely include Mother Jones’ account of exaggerated talk about reporting by Bill O’Reilly, who has vehemently denied the allegations and denounced the accusers.
+
+The crux of Stephanopoulos’ problem is that he’s never fully been able to shake his partisan past as a Clinton Democrat—and deepened that wound by giving money to the one charity that should have been off-limits to him.
+
+Of course, the cable networks have hired plenty of political operatives (David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, Jay Carney, Karl Rove), but they’re in the commentary business. And of course some people have made the transition from politics to straight news.
+
+Tim Russert, who worked for Mario Cuomo and Pat Moynihan, did it, but he was an NBC executive before taking over “Meet the Press” and was famously tough on both sides. Tony Snow had been a speechwriter for George H.W. Bush before eventually taking over “Fox News Sunday”—and, of course, leaving to become Bush 43’s press secretary.
+
+As someone who started interviewing Stephanopoulos in 1992, I can say that it takes a long time for a former political adviser to win the audience’s trust as a journalist—and just a short time to lose it. Viewers will have to judge in the future whether George is being as unbiased as possible, but they’ve already rendered their verdict on the mainstream media.
+
+Click for more from Media Buzz
+
+Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
+8757,"Turkey’s Crackdown on Criticism Continues as Journalists, 10K Civil Servants Arrested","By James Holbrooks A day after the administration of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dismissed an additional 10,000 civil employees and shut down another 15 media... ",FAKE
+9218,Government Confirm Compensation For Survivors Of Symphysiotomy Got ‘Lost In The Post’,"0 Add Comment 
+THE GOVERNMENT has put a number of survivors of symphysiotomy minds at ease with their latest explanation for why the State have failed to operate and administer a compensation scheme in a time effective and compassionate manner, WWN can reveal. 
+“Ah, ye can’t trust that Eircode, it’s a load of shite,” confirmed a government spokesman, failing to be drawn on the fact the scheme was set up in such a way as to avoid bringing anyone to account for administering the non-consensual and often unnecessary surgeries to over 1,500 women. 
+“But listen, get onto An Post there and complain, we swear we sent it. This isn’t like all the other times we were just delaying giving women, many of whom are now in their 80s, their compensation for having their pelvises broken against their wishes by a medical professional working for the State,” the spokesman added, full of compassion. 
+Survivors have been relentlessly campaigning since the compensation scheme was first put in place, simply to access the money rightfully owed to them. 
+Keen to remain in the public consciousness in order to force successive governments to honour their commitment and admonish them for so openly working against victims, many of the women have died in recent years without receiving any of the money they are entitled to after those administering the compensation scheme have demanded an unrealistic amount of paperwork. 
+It is thought Ireland’s main opposition party Fianna Fáil would be in an ideal position to make an issue of the scandalous roadblocks and delays put in front of the women, however, the party’s leader Micheál Martin stood over a number of delays when he was minister for health along with his successors in the position Mary Harney, James Reilly and Leo Varadkar. 
+“Honestly, this is a terrible misunderstanding, we’re not trying to limit the State’s liability and just drag this out until all the women have passed away, relying on the public’s apathy to let us go unchallenged, that’s not our style. Argh, it’s that blasted Eircode, we’re telling you,” the spokesman added. 
+If you would like to learn more about why the government continues to ignore these women click HERE .",FAKE
+1542,Muslim debate seizes GOP presidential race,"A debate over Islam -- first sparked by Donald Trump not correcting a town hall questioner who called President Obama a non-American Muslim, and now Ben Carson saying a Muslim should not be president -- has unexpectedly shifted the conversation in the Republican presidential race.
+
+So far, neither candidate at the center of the furor is backing down. Trump has said he had no obligation to correct the man who wrongly called Obama a Muslim. And Carson is doubling down on his remarks from Sunday.
+
+Carson, a Christian and retired neurosurgeon, initially commented on whether a Muslim should be president on NBC's ""Meet the Press.""
+
+""I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,"" Carson said. ""I absolutely would not agree with that.""
+
+He later told The Hill that the next president should be ""sworn in on a stack Bibles, not a Koran."" He explained, ""I do not believe Sharia is consistent with the Constitution of this country.""
+
+Carson's comments were attacked by Democrats, while fellow Republicans gave a more careful answer to the same question. In a primary race that so far has been as unpredictable as it is unruly, the Muslim debate marks the latest sharp turn -- after previous heated debates over illegal immigration and other issues.
+
+Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Sunday, ""It's hard to understand what's so difficult about supporting an American citizen's right to run for president.
+
+""But unsurprisingly, this left Republicans scratching their heads. Of course a Muslim, or any other American citizen, can run for president, end of story.""
+
+In a separate appearance on NBC, fellow 2016 GOP candidate Ohio Gov. John Kasich, was asked whether he would have a problem with a Muslim in the White House.
+
+""The answer is, at the end of the day, you've got to go through the rigors, and people will look at everything. But, for me, the most important thing about being president is you have leadership skills, you know what you're doing and you can help fix this country and raise this country. Those are the qualifications that matter to me.""
+
+Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who taped Sunday an episode of Iowa Press, an Iowa Public Television program, was asked if he agreed with Carson's statements on Muslims being president.
+
+""The Constitution specifies that there shall be no religious test for public office, and I am a constitutionalist,"" Cruz said.
+
+Fellow GOP contender and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio suggested the entire matter is a distraction.
+
+He told ABC News: ""This has nothing to do with the future of our country. These issues have been discussed ad nauseam over the last few years. It's a big waste of time. Barack Obama will not be president in a year and a half. It's time to start talking about the future of America and the people that are at home.""
+
+Carson, a top-tier 2016 candidate and popular among the GOP's evangelical wing, made the statement Sunday after fellow Republican candidate Trump was addressed by a man during a rally Thursday in New Hampshire who said President Obama is a Muslim.
+
+""We have a problem in this country,"" the unidentified man said. ""It's called Muslim. ... You know our current president is one.""
+
+Obama is a Christian. But Trump has declined to address the issue, saying he is not ""morally obligated"" to set straight the record.
+
+Carson also described the Islamic faith as inconsistent with the Constitution. However, he did not specify in what way Islam ran counter to constitutional principles.
+
+Carson said he believes Obama is a Christian and has ""no reason to doubt what he says.""
+
+He also said he would consider voting for a Muslim running for Congress, depending on ""who that Muslim is and what their policies are.""
+
+Carson also made a distinction when it came to electing Muslims to Congress, calling it a ""different story"" from the presidency that ""depends on who that Muslim is and what their policies are, just as it depends on what anybody else says.""
+
+Congress has two Muslim members, Democratic Reps. Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Andre Carson of Indiana.
+
+""If there's somebody who's of any faith, but they say things, and their life has been consistent with things that will elevate this nation and make it possible for everybody to succeed, and bring peace and harmony, then I'm with them,"" Carson said.
+
+The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+4799,Clinton puts Trump on defense at first debate,"(CNN) Hillary Clinton forced Donald Trump onto defense over his temperament, refusal to release his taxes and his past comments about race and women during a fiery debut presidential debate Monday -- a potentially pivotal moment in a tight election campaign.
+
+Clinton, who has seen her dominance of the presidential race fade in the weeks since the Democratic convention, delivered a strong performance in which she demonstrated a command of policy and a sense of humor, smiling through some of Trump's strongest attacks. She delivered the best zinger of the night in response to criticism from Trump for staying off the campaign trail recently.
+
+""I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate,"" she said. ""And yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be President. And that is a good thing.""
+
+Trump came out swinging at the beginning of the debate, and made some effective points on the economy and jobs -- some of the aspects of his outsider presidential campaign that have struck a chord with many Americans. But the debate highlighted Trump's tendency to make false claims as he made inaccurate statements on everything from laws regarding policing, his support for the Iraq War and his contention that Clinton was behind the so-called birther conspiracy.
+
+Appearing in the ""spin room"" after the debate to talk to journalists, Trump said he was happy with his performance.
+
+""It went better than I ever thought,"" he told CNN's Dana Bash.
+
+A CNN/ORC poll of debate watchers released after the event found 62% felt Clinton won compared to 27% for Trump. The poll suggests the debate audience was a bit more Democratic than the public as a whole, about on par with the Democratic tilt in the audience that watched the first debate in 2008 between Obama and John McCain.
+
+One of the most powerful moments of the debate came when the conversation focused on the so-called birther debate following Trump's recent acknowledgment that President Barack Obama was born in the US -- a fact that has been evident for years. With Trump standing just a few feet from her, Clinton blasted him for perpetuating a ""racist lie.""
+
+""He has a long record of engaging in racist behavior,"" Clinton said as Trump shook his head.
+
+Trump hit back, noting Clinton's tough critiques of Obama during their bitter 2008 primary battle.
+
+""You treated him with terrible disrespect and I watch the way you talk now about how lovely everything is ... it doesn't work that way,"" he said. ""When you try to act holier than thou, it really doesn't work.""
+
+As the debate ended, Clinton hammered Trump over his treatment of women.
+
+""This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs,"" Clinton said.
+
+She accused Trump of calling a Latina contestant in a beauty contest ""Miss Piggy"" and a housekeeper because of her ethnicity, seemingly throwing Trump off as he twice asked ""Where did you find this?""
+
+Clinton repeatedly sought to correct Trump's statements -- going so far as referring viewers to fact checks on her website -- as she aimed to portray him as out of touch with the complexities of the American economy.
+
+""I know you live in your own reality,"" she told Trump.
+
+Clinton and Trump opened the debate on a positive note by shaking hands before stationing themselves behind their podiums at Hofstra University on New York's Long Island. Their spouses, former President Bill Clinton and Melania Trump, also greeted each other before taking their seats in the debate hall.
+
+From there, the drama quickly unfolded.
+
+An increasingly angry Trump slammed Clinton for putting her plans to fight ISIS on her website -- and thereby tipping off America's enemy.
+
+""Well, at least I have a plan to fight ISIS,"" Clinton responded, referring to his previous statements that he has a ""secret"" plan to destroy the terrorist group.
+
+Clinton also hit Trump over his refusal to release his tax returns.
+
+""Why won't he release his tax returns?"" Clinton asked.
+
+""Maybe he is not as rich as he says he is,"" she went on. ""Maybe he is not as charitable as he claims to be,"" ""Maybe he doesn't want the American people to know that he has paid nothing in federal taxes.""
+
+Clinton pressed Trump on the issue, saying ""There is something he is hiding.""
+
+Trump replied that he would release his taxes when Clinton made public 33,000 emails that were deleted from her private email server. When Clinton said that Trump had paid no federal income tax in some years, Trump replied ""That makes me smart.""
+
+Clinton also set about Trump's business record, pointing out that he had called himself ""The King of Debt"" and accusing him of ""stiffing"" thousand of contractors who did work for his business.
+
+When the debate turned to racial issues and crime, Clinton said that it was important for police to work together with local communities to restore trust.
+
+Trump accused Clinton of refusing to say the phrase ""law and order"" and bemoaned the state of inner cities. He said that African-Americans and Hispanics were ""living in hell.""
+
+""You walk down the street, you get shot,"" Trump said.
+
+Clinton rebuked Trump for painting ""such a dire picture"" of black communities.
+
+Trump and Clinton are facing off with the campaign at a critical point, as the race is a dead heat just 43 days before Election Day.
+
+The former secretary of state is relying on both states to help pave her way to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.
+
+The rivals spent the day preparing for their big battle.
+
+Clinton participated in mock debates with her tart-tongued former aide Philippe Reines playing Trump. In one practice debate, Reines assumed the character of the unpredictable nominee by praising Clinton for her role as a pioneer for women, campaign sources said.
+
+Reines even wore the kind of signature red tie that Trump favors and adopted his characteristic hand gestures in a bid to fully prepare Clinton for her unpredictable foe.
+
+The Republican nominee has watched videos of Clinton, but his preparation has been less intense than his opponent's, in keeping with his more freewheeling style. He did not hold mock debates, for instance, with someone standing in for Clinton.",REAL
+10289,Thousands of Wild American Bison Appear From No Where At Standing Rock,"Something incredible happened at the front-line of Standing Rock in North Dakota today. The brave men and women, who are protecting water and attempting to stop the Dakota Access pipeline from being built on treaty land, just received assistance from a large herd of wild buffalo that seemed to appear out of nowhere!
+Thousands of people are sacrificing their livelihoods and safety for a much greater cause by being there. Seeing those wild buffalo meant so much because in traditional Native culture the Tatanka Oyate (American Bison) is a sacred symbol. The bison always gave their lives to provide food, shelter, and clothing through the use of their meat and their hides.
+Ceremonies were always conducted to honor their sacrifice and many blessings they provided.
+It’s being reported that Tatanka Oyate were prayed to and called upon for support and by the people at Sioux. While the sweeping arrests, pepper sprays, violence with batons and shots of rubber bullets was happening, a huge eruption of uplifting cheers, excitement and laughter could be heard when the Bison were spotted by the people.
+This was such a spectacular sight to behold. The peaceful path of affirmative non-violent civil disobedience isn’t being adequately responded to by higher level governmental authorizes. The whole world is watching. Sioux tribal leaders are calling on state and federal governments to respect the constitutional rights of water protectors and stop the exploitation of the indigenous communities and the entire planet.
+The bison represents abundance of the Creator’s bounty and respect for all creation knowing that all things are sacred. The bison also represented their spirit and reminded them of how their lives were once lived, free and in harmony with nature.
+It should remain that way
+
+Sources:
+Photo Credit: USuncut.com 
+http://usuncut.com/resistance/thousands-wild-buffalo-appear-nowhere-standing-rock/ 
+http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2016/10/givers-of-courage-thousands-of-wild.html 
+ 
+",FAKE
+9727,Are You Ready for Aftermath of the Election? Will There Be An Election?,"Previous Are You Ready for Aftermath of the Election? Will There Be An Election? 
+I recently interviewed geopolitical and prepping expert, Bob Griswold of Ready Made Resources . We discussed the election and the false flag attacks that could like between the now and preventing the election. 
+Most importantly, Bob the provided the listeners with some very low-cost and effective means of prepping for the coming disasters that are coming our way.",FAKE
+9621,Here Are Six ‘Miracle’ Drugs Big Pharma Now Regrets - Truthdig,"Here Are Six ‘Miracle’ Drugs Big Pharma Now Regrets Posted on Oct 29, 2016 
+By Martha Rosenberg / AlterNet Shutterstock 
+Are you depressed? It may have less to do with your mood than your birth control pills, high blood pressure pills, antibiotics or even anti-hair-loss drug according to new research. New risks have also emerged with popular gastroesophageal reflux disease medicines and even the top-selling painkiller Tylenol. 
+There are two reasons the risks associated with popular drugs seem to trail their aggressive promotion. Certainly, as millions use brand name drugs, dangerous side effects and adverse events are seen that did not emerge in much smaller clinical trials. Who knew? But also, as AlterNet has noted before, dangerous side effects that might be considered major drawbacks to prescribing the drugs often emerge only when drugs have gone “off patent” and all their profit potential is realized. For both reasons, drug safety activists recommend waiting five years before taking a “new” drug—until it is not “new” anymore. 
+Advertisement 
+Here are drugs and drug classes that have raised new concerns. 
+1. Proton Pump Inhibitors 
+One of Pharma’s most successful gambits has been its proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) like Nexium (the “Purple Pill”) and Prilosec that reduce stomach acid. To sell the drugs, Pharma aggressively raised “awareness” of gastroesophageal reflux disease or GERD a rare condition which, over time, can change the lining of the esophagus and lead to cancer. Actually, most PPI users have simple heartburn. Even babies are now given PPIs for “baby reflux” because they spit up 71 times a day—a normal occurrence that has been pathologized. 
+The medical establishment has deplored PPI overuse, pointing out that heartburn can exist without esophageal damage and vice verse and calling PPIs “purple crack.” Now it turns out they are right—acid reducers are addictive. “Once a patient has taken a PPI for longer than a few weeks, acid hypersecretion can occur on discontinuation,” says a recent article in Pharmaceutical Journal. “This causes rebound symptoms, and frequently establishes a vicious cycle of drug reinitiation and long-term continuation.” 
+Adverse effects of long-term PPI use are well documented from the risks of the dread intestinal infection Clostridium difficile (“C Diff”), bone thinning and fractures and vitamin and mineral deficiencies to chronic kidney disease and heart attacks. Now there is a new reported risk: dementia. 
+A study earlier this year in JAMA Neurology of 73,?679 people 75 or older with no dementia and taking PPIs found the patients “had a significantly increased risk of incident dementia compared with the patients not receiving PPI.” Other studies have also found a link. 
+2. Antibiotics 
+AlterNet has frequently written about underreported antibiotic dangers, most recently of the fluoroquinolone class which includes Cipro and Levaquin. Even as the FDA tries to curtail use of antibiotics on the nation’s farms to make animals grow faster (a use which accounts for most U.S. antibiotic sales) drug use on the farm is actually increasing. The FDA’s 2014 Summary Report on Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed for Use in Food Producing Animals reveals that cephalosporin sales increased by 57 percent between 2009 through 2014, sales of antibiotics like clindamycin increased by 150 percent and sales of antibiotics like gentamicin, a dangerous drug class, increased by 36 percent. 
+Antibiotics have a probable role in obesity—why wouldn’t they when they add pounds to livestock? In 1974, Navy recruits were given antibiotics to see if they would gain weight, and after only seven weeks, they did. Similar results were seen in children in Guatemala and in babies . But making people fat or encouraging antibiotic resistant microbes like MRSA are the least of the risks, it turns out. 
+We now know that the bacteria in our gut, the microbiome, which antibiotics compromise as they kill the “bad” bacteria, are responsible for much more than good digestion. Antibiotics also affect the brain and “influence our mood and temperament,” says food expert Michael Pollan. “If you transplant the gut microbiota of relaxed and adventurous mice into the guts of timid and anxious mice they become less stressed and more adventurous.” Antibiotic-affected microbiomes may also be behind asthma and autoimmune diseases, acne and even autism, say published reports. 
+3. Birth Control Pills You know the long list of side effects and warnings at the end of drug ads? Telling you the drug may cause you to bleed to death or have a stroke while you look at images of sunsets and puppies? We have women’s health advocates to thank for the disclosures. Fifty years ago when the Pill first became available, there was no “disclosure.” Women did not know what effects birth control pills would have on their bodies—or even think it was theirright to know—and were supposed to take them anyway.
+By 1970, after The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill by Barbara Seaman was published, Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson held hearings about clear links between the Pill and depression, blood clots and decrease in libido cited nowhere on the label. No women were asked to speak at the hearings, moving Alice Wolfson, a co-founder of the National Women’s Health Network, to say, “It must be admitted that women make superb guinea pigs. They don’t cost anything, they feed themselves, they clean their own cages, pay for their own pills, and remunerate the clinical observer. We will no longer tolerate intimidation by white-coated gods antiseptically directing our lives.” 
+Why were feminists so angry about a drug that let them control their reproduction? Because the Pill caused 50 additional physiological changes besides stopping pregnancy, some of which were and are life-threatening. Women were told by the the male-dominated medical establishment not to worry their pretty heads about what the drugs were doing to their bodies, while men were spared any responsibility or medical risks. 
+Fast-forward to this year, when medical studies again confirmed links between birth control pills and depression. A Danish study of more than a million women found links between birth control pills and depression, especially in young women, and corresponding higher use of antidepressant drugs. 
+Women’s health advocates were finally vindicated. “The risk of depression has been recognized since women were able to get their hands on oral contraceptives,” says Cindy Pearson of the National Women’s Health Network. “It’s been reported by women for 50 years.” 
+A 2013 book called Sweetening the Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control might also be vindicated, writes Lara Prendergast. The book was called “a dishonest anti-Pill treatise” because the author “dared to point out that hormonal contraceptives are ranked by the World Health Organization as a class-one carcinogen alongside tobacco and asbestos,” she writes. 
+4. Propecia 
+Two years ago, AlterNet told readers about Propecia, a popular treatment for male pattern baldness linked to disturbing side effects in men including sexual dysfunction and actual reduction in penis size. At the time, Propecia’s label assured users that sexual side effects “went away in men who stopped taking Propecia”; however, the current label warns about sexual dysfunction like “erectile dysfunction, libido disorders, ejaculation disorders, and orgasm disorders; male infertility and/or poor seminal quality” that continues after discontinuation of treatment. 
+A September study in BMJ found “the risk of erectile dysfunction was not increased for users of finasteride 1mg compared with unexposed men with alopecia [hair loss],” but reports of the disturbing side effects abound in medical j ournals and popular magazines. 
+“Emerging research and a slew of lawsuits suggest that finasteride may be more dangerous than previously believed, with side effects — inability to orgasm, painful erections, chronic depression, insomnia, brain fog, and suicidal thoughts — that can last long after patients stop taking the pill,” wrote Men’s Journal last year. 
+Despite the life-changing side effects, Propecia/finasteride is still aggressively sold with warnings about its use downplayed and hard to find. In fact, “As of Sept. 26, the World Health Organization Program for International Drug Monitoring’s database of adverse drug reactions contained 13,546 finasteride ADRs [adverse drug reactions], including 3,577 sexual function and fertility disorders, 1,526 depressed mood disorders and disturbances, and 67 completed suicides,” writes the Post-Finasteride Syndrome Foundation . 
+5. Tylenol 
+Tylenol may be one of the most widely used pain relieving drugs in the world but new safety concerns continue to emerge. The risk of liver damage with Tylenol (acetaminophen) that can occur from taking even a slightly higher dose than directed moved Tylenol maker, Johnson & Johnson to increase warnings in 2014. Unintentional acetaminophen overdoses cause as many as 26,000 hospitalizations and 458 deaths per year reported the FDA. 
+Soon after the increased warnings, medical journals linked acetaminophen to birth defects in the children of women taking the drug such as poor motor development, behavior problems and language delays. A study in JAMA Pediatrics identified an increased occurrence of ADHD by the age of seven in children whose mothers took acetaminophen. A study in the International Journal of Epidemiology found children more likely to have behavior problems and slow motor development by the age of three if their mothers had taken acetaminophen. Not all medical voices concur. Some said the studies were poorly designed or that fevers , for which the mother presumably took acetaminophen, are responsible for the birth defects. 
+In recent years, acetaminophen has been found to have psychological and mental effects not before described. The pain reliever may “blunt individuals’ reactivity to a range of negative stimuli in addition to physical pain,” says one study. Another study found acetaminophen reduced the psychological pain caused by social rejection. 
+6. Beta Blockers 
+One out of three American has high blood pressure and beta-blockers like atenolol (Tenormin), carvedilol (Coreg), metoprolol, propranolol (Inderal), sotalol (Betapace) and timolol (Timoptic) which treat the condition have been linked to depression for many years. 
+As early as 1967, the British Medical Journal reported that hypertensive patients treated with propranolol for cardiac arrhythmias experienced a rise in the incidence of depression. Still, it has not been known if patients’ depressions were caused by the actual actions of beta blockers (like blocking the effects of epinephrine/adrenaline and slowing heart rate) or mood conditions associated with the diseases for which beta blockers are prescribed such as hypertension and congestive heart failure. 
+Now, the evidence is tipping toward the drugs. An October study in the journal Hypertension found that beta blockers “may have a role in the pathogenesis or course of mood disorders” and increased hospital admissions for mood disorders. A “bidirectional relationship between depression and cardiovascular disease” exists, says the study , “because of the overlapping pathophysiological processes that underlie both conditions.” 
+“There is a lot of data that depression and cardiovascular disease are related ... but current hypertensive practices do not consider depression,” said the study’s lead author Sandosh Padmanabhan. “There could be some people who are predisposed to depression who we should not be giving these drugs.” 
+",FAKE
+9695,"Hillary Clinton, FBI and the Real November Surprise","By wmw_admin on November 6, 2016 Pepe Escobar — Sputnik News Oct 31, 2016 
+“As bad as it is the folks above the President make the decisions. They may have decided on Trump. These things do not happen by accident.” 
+Thus spoke a high-level US business mover and shaker with secure transit in rarified Masters of the Universe-related circles, amidst the utter political chaos provoked by head of the FBI James Comey’s latest bombshell. 
+It’s virtually established by now that US Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Comey not to release his letter to Congress. But Comey did it anyway. If he had not, and a scandal would – inevitably – spring up after the US presidential election, Lynch would be perfectly positioned to deny she knew anything, and Comey would be on the firing line. 
+Lynch is a certified Clinton machine asset. In 1999 then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney’s office. She left in 2002, taking the private practice revolving door. She was back to the Brooklyn office in 2010, urged by Obama. Five years later she became the 83rd US Attorney General, replacing the dodgy Eric Holder. 
+A plausible case has been made that Comey took his fateful decision based on a serious internal revolt at the FBI – led by key people he trust — as well as being egged-on by his wife. 
+Yet one of the key questions that refuse to go away is why the FBI waited until 11 days before the US presidential election to supposedly “find” an email trove on certified sexting pervert Anthony Weiner’s laptop. A Deal With Donald? 
+The business source, although unsympathetic to the Clinton machine, especially in foreign policy, is a realpolitik practitioner, not a conspiracy theorist. He is adamant that, “the FBI reversal could not have happened without orders above the President. If the Masters [of the Universe] have changed their mind, then they will destroy Hillary.” He adds, “they can make a deal with Donald just like anyone else; Donald wins; the Masters win; the people think that their voice has been heard. And then there will be some sort of (controlled) change.” 
+What’s paramount in the whole soap opera is the faith in the US political system — as corrupt as it may be — must endure. That mirrors the faith in the US dollar; if confidence in the US dollar fails, the US as a hegemonic financial power is no more. 
+The source is equally adamant that, “it is almost unprecedented to see a cover-up as extensive as Hillary’s. A secret meeting between Bill Clinton and the Attorney General; the FBI ignoring all evidence and initially clearing Hillary to near rebellion of the whole of the FBI, attested to by Rudolf Giuliani whose reputation as a federal prosecutor is unquestioned; the Clinton “pay for play” foundation. The Masters are troubled that this is getting out of hand.” 
+The record shows that “the Masters do not usually have to go to such lengths to protect their own. They did manage to save Bill Clinton from the Monica Lewinsky perjury and keep him in the presidency. The Masters were not attacked in this case. They even got away with the 1987 cash settlement crash and the theft surrounding the Lehman debacle. In all these cases there were no overarching challenges to their control, as we see now open to the public by Trump. They antagonized and insulted the wrong man.” All Aboard the Huma Train 
+Hillary Clinton is not at the center of Comey’s jaw-dropping October Surprise; it’s actually her right-hand woman and ersatz “daughter” Huma Abedin. This early January essay on Huma Abedin contains plenty of nuggets out and about – some of them positively eyebrow raising. 
+In case Hillary Clinton becomes the next President of the United States (POTUS), Abedin, alternatively known as Princess of Saudi Arabia, will most likely become Hillary’s chief of staff – the power behind running all White House operations. 
+A glimpse of the FBI-Huma Abedin connection is available here. Abedin was granted Top Secret security clearance for the first time in 2009, when Hillary named her deputy chief of staff for operations. Abedin later said she “did not remember” being read into any Special Access Programs (SAPs). It’s crucial to remember that one of Abedin’s emails was huma@clintonemail.com. Crucial translation: she was the only high-level State Dept. aide whose emails were hosted by the notorious Subterranean Clinton Email Server – which she claimed she didn’t know existed until she heard about it in the news. 
+Abedin swore under oath in a lawsuit brought against the State Dept. by Judicial Watch that she had handed over all of her laptops and smart phones that could host emails relevant to the Subterranean Email Server investigation. 
+That may not have been the case. The laptop at the center of Comey’s bombshell was shared by Abedin and her husband Wiener before they split. If Abedin lied, she could face up to five years in jail for perjury. As if the whole illegal email-cum-sexting saga was not sordid enough, the “climax” now seems to have turned into a mixed wrestling match between the former couple, with the big “prize” being the slammer. 
+The FBI has finally obtained a warrant and is now frantically searching no less than 650,000 Abedin emails found on sexting freak Wiener’s laptop; the objective is to exactly determine which ones came from the Subterranean Email Server. 
+As if this was not demeaning enough, the FBI continues to conduct an investigation on the Clinton Foundation. As former Assistant Director of the FBI Tom Fuentes said , “The FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation…the investigation would go forward as a comprehensive unified case and be coordinated, so that investigation is ongoing and Huma Abedin and her role and activities concerning Secretary of State in the nature of the foundation and possible ‘pay to play’, that’s still being looked at now.” 
+Whatever happens until election day, US voters will have to consider the startling fact they may choose a next POTUS that is the subject of a wide-ranging “comprehensive unified” FBI investigation. A Rotten, Rigged System? 
+A former federal public corruption prosecutor volunteers a plausible take on Comey’s action. In a nutshell, FBI agents investigating Weiner’s sexting – and they are a different set of agents investigating Emailgate — saw evidence of State Dept emails on his laptop. Comey knew he needed a search warrant to comb the emails at Wiener’s computer. So he pre-empted the – inevitable – subsequent hype by “sending out a vague…letter to the Hill” that in the end left everyone even more confused. 
+That interpretation though may be only scratching the surface. Deeper and deeper, it seems that Comey’s decision was really precipitated by the senior FBI agents’ insurgence – fed up with the “extreme carelessness” Hillary cover-up. They’ve got to have some surefire material on the Clinton (cash) machine that never saw the light. Comey could have just waited to say something after the election; after all the FBI maintains they had checked all Clinton emails, including deleted ones, not to mention the Podesta emails. So the emails on sexting Wiener’s laptop may be no more than a limited hangout. 
+A much more plausible explanation is that Comey had to do it not only because of the FBI internal revolt (or because he had an urge to upstage WikiLeaks?) He had to do it because the rot goes way beyond the Clinton “pay to play” racket and involves virtually the whole system, from the deep recesses of the Obama administration to the War Party scam, the Department of Justice, the CIA and the FBI itself. 
+What next? Brace for impact; it may well be the ultimate November Surprise.",FAKE
+7437,The Deceptive Nature of Hillary Clinton is Right in Line with Communism,"Posted by David Risselada 
+Much to the surprise of the American electorate, both on the right and left, the FBI is reopening it’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal . Whether this will amount to anything meaningful, or it is simply a distraction is any body’s guess. Many are speculating that this could be the issue which would cause President Obama to cancel the elections . In my recent article “Corrupting One’s Self is the Ultimate Morality in the Pursuit of Utopia,” I discussed the possibility that the blatant corruption is deliberately being thrust in our face to create the necessary attitude for social change. This idea of course, is based on the writings of Alinsky and other “social engineers” skilled in the arts of propaganda and psychological manipulation. Looking at it from this perspective, cancelled elections are a possibility. The truth is, with Hillary Clinton you never know what to expect because she is operating from an “ends justify the means mentality,” and she is willing to do anything to see her dreams of a collectivized America move forward. 
+According to Elizabeth Harrington from the Washington Free Beacon, the Clinton campaign began conducting focus groups to determine which approach Hillary should take concerning her run for the presidency. Hillary is diehard ideologue whose beliefs are right in line with Communists dictators like Stalin and Mao. She believes that ordinary people have no idea how to best conduct their personal business and the state should be involved in every aspect of our lives. The goal of these focus groups was to determine the attitudes of the electorate in order to mold her message and her personality into something they would vote for. Many people would attempt to ridicule and discredit anyone associating Hillary Clinton with communists because she comes across as compassionate and caring, always blaming everything on a vast, right wing conspiracy. 
+This has always been the modus operandi of the communist movement and it explains why so many young people have no idea about the atrocities committed under the regimes of communist rulers. Today’s millennials are well aware of the holocaust and the millions of Jews murdered by Adolph Hitler. They may not however, know that Hitler murdered more than Jews. He started by eliminating the sick and disabled, then he murdered Christians, homosexuals and anyone else essentially, that didn’t go along with his national socialism. The belief is that fascism is an extreme right wing world view. This explains the hostility towards today’s conservative movement. They have been branded as fascists, when in fact, the truth is the exact opposite. On the true political scale, national socialism or fascism is to the right of communism, which represents complete state control, but it is still way left of center. A true, extreme right wing world view would be complete absence of government control over anything. With this being said, and understanding that the horrors of communism have all been forgotten simply because they are no longer being taught, the communists have been very successful in deceiving people because like Hillary Clinton, they pretend to be something they are not. 
+Millions of young people in America, due to left wing indoctrination in our universities , are falling for the communist propaganda under the guise that communism is a more fair, compassionate system of economics. Left wing professors, refusing to acknowledge the failures of communism because they believe the right leader has not come along to implement it the right way, have failed to teach these young minds that the pursuit of total equality has led to the death of 100,000,000 people under communist controlled governments. Communists, believing not in God but in evolution and science, believe that man can be trained into submission and a refusal to accept communist ideals is in fact, a sign of mental deficiency. Therefore, it is justifiable to eliminate them. To understand this read “Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics.” Communists also hide this belief by claiming their pursuit of equality is motivated by a pursuit of social and economic justice when in fact, it is motivated by a pure desire to control every aspect of human being. 
+The Black Book of Communism references the historical debate over the evil natures of both Communism and Nazism. Adolf Hitler, despite his cruelty was open about what his intentions were. He set out to create a perfect race that understood its role was to serve the state and nothing else. This isn’t any different than the goals of communism truthfully, only insofar as communists seek to accomplish this on a global scale, (using the economic class issue as opposed to race) while national socialism focuses on achieving such a goal for the country itself. The communists on the other hand, as mentioned above, pretended to be compassionate about the poor and oppressed when in reality- they use these groups to organize for power while hiding behind the guise of compassion and the struggle to achieve social justice, while in reality-they are systematically imprisoning and murdering all that don’t go along with their agenda. This, according to the Black Book of Communism, makes the communist ideology, if you could really assign degrees of evil, more evil than Nazism because of its deceptive nature. 
+We all know Hillary Clinton is a liar, and she wrote her college thesis on Saul Alinsky but do we know anything else about her? Given the fact that she conducted focus groups to help mold her campaign message it is obvious she is hiding something. Over the past several weeks we have seen references to leaked emails which show she has an obvious disdain for the average American and the common beliefs in liberty that most of us share. She has referred to many of us as “irredeemable deplorables” in an effort to brand us as the uncompassionate ones while pretending to care about the poor and so called oppressed. In fact, this is the whole strategy of the Democrat party because as we all know, they have taken a hard turn left and do not represent the views of most Americans. They will however, pretend to in order to get in office. What are her intentions if she were to assume office? Are the massive dehumanization campaigns where conservatives are labeled as fascists and whites as automatic racists a first step to a repeat of history where millions were slaughtered because they were deemed as undesirable by their own government? Looking at the deceptive nature of Hillary Clinton and the violent nature of the left, it sure seems like a distinct possibility. 
+The number of deaths under communist regimes from the Black Book of Communism Soviet Union- Vladimr Lenin and Joseph Stalin-20 million deaths China-Mao- 65 million deaths Vietnam- Ho Chi Mihn- 1 million deaths North Korea- 2 million deaths Cambodia- Pol Pot- 2 million deaths Eastern Europe- 1 million deaths Latin America- 150,000 deaths Africa- 1.7 million deaths Afghanistan (under soviet control) 1.5 million deaths 
+These are not deaths represented by wartime or revolutions, but by outright murder committed by evil men intent on creating perfect societies based on social justice and equality. I guess the question remains. Is man capable of bringing about a perfect society? 
+Courtesy of Freedom Outpost 
+David Risselada is a freelance writer and researcher. David served in the United States Marine Corps from 1995-1999 and the US Army from 2001-2006. In addition to contributing to FreedomOutpost.com, he writes at Radical Conservative . Follow David on Twitter . 
+Article posted with permission from In Defense of Our Nation Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
+10417,"Obama Furious After Fed-Up ‘Deplorables’ Drop 41,000-Piece Gift On Him","Obama Furious After Fed-Up ‘Deplorables’ Drop 41,000-Piece Gift On Him   Amanda Shea   Pissed off Patriots (left), Barack Obama deplaning Air Force One (right) 
+Barack Obama was at home in the White House when he received a little “gift” from Donald Trump’s fed-up “deplorables,” who interrupted his taxpayer-funded rest and relaxation with 41,000 things he never saw coming. These blunt patriots weren’t messing around, and they sent a clear message to our lame duck president, who didn’t like it at all. 
+The leader of the free world hasn’t done much in his two terms of trying, and he’s not about to start now on his way out of office. He has taken the liberty of awarding himself substantial tee time, only reserving his efforts and energy to promote who he hopes to be his successor, Hillary Clinton. As annoying at it is to watch him do nothing, it’s worse to see him take a side to campaign with one candidate while slandering the other, which Donald Trump’s supporters have noticed and are fed-up over it. 
+There’s a war happening on our own soil, between sharply divided citizens who are sick of seeing democracy destroyed during this election. While Hillary has everyone from the mainstream media to our president in her pantsuit pocket, patriots are expected to just accept it, along with the skewed results — and don’t want to pay a single dime for our president to spit in our faces any longer as he promotes Hillary on our hard-earned tax money. 
+A petition started on StandUnited has received 41,000 signatures from frustrated patriots who are asking Congress to stop paying our president as he plays favorites in campaigning for Hillary. “ We the People demand that Congress withhold President Obama’s salary, pension, travel expenses, etc. for any time he spends actively campaigning for Hillary Clinton between now and the election in November,” the petition on conservative site states. 
+While it’s not unusual for the current president to endorse a candidate on their way out of the White House, “Rarely, however, does that same lame duck President spend weeks or even months prior to the November election actively campaigning for his successor,” the petition laments. 
+Considering Obama’s salary of about $400,000 a year and the cost of Air Force One at $180,000 for every single hour of flight, the amount he’s siphoning from an already strained budget for a candidate that a mass amount of Americans don’t want in office is astronomical and insulting. Congress probably doesn’t even care about the cash or true conservatives and their petition, since the establishment is for keeping things how they want it at the cost of this Republican candidate who could better the country with change we need.",FAKE
+6457,Colin Kaepernick hosts ‘Know Your Rights’ camp for Oakland-area youth,"Print 
+[Ed. – Now teaching the gospel of racial grievance.] 
+San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick hosted a “Know Your Rights” camp for Oakland-area youth Saturday, an event designed to expand his focus on social and racial injustice beyond his national anthem protest. 
+“This is exciting for me because I see a lot of hope, what is to come,” Kaepernick said beforehand, in an interview with The Undefeated’s Marc J. Spears . 
+Kaepernick said the campers, who numbered around 100, would have sessions to learn about situations with police, their rights, holistic health, financial literacy, and understanding both community and self. He said the camp’s aim is to “empower youth, give them resources and tools” to deal with difficult situations. 
+“We want to let them know they have options and people that are behind them to help them,” he said. “And that’s a powerful thing, for someone else to have belief in you.”",FAKE
+7030,Wikileaks Emails Disclose Aliens Linked to Vatican!,"Sound too “strange” to be true? We have proof! Contained in the Pedestal email files that were leaked by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks were hidden a set of emails sent to John Podesta from Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon, evidence that they are getting updates from the Vatican about their awareness of extraterrestrial life, UFO’s.
+
+
+In the video below, the famous author, pastor and speaker, Billy Crone, reveals his dealings with UFO’s and alien life. Additionally, he delves into how October will end with a Satanic BANG and how Hillary is involved.
+
+All that and more in this exclusive report… 
+Locklip SOURCE ",FAKE
+9013,US abstains from UN vote calling for end to Cuban embargo,"US abstains from UN vote calling for end to Cuban embargo Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 21:10 Get short URL U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro gesture after a news conference as part of President Obama's three-day visit to Cuba, in Havana March 21, 2016. © Carlos Barria / Reuters The US government abstained from the UN vote on a resolution calling for an end to the US economic embargo against Cuba, for the first time in 24 years. 
+The 193-member General Assembly adopted the resolution with 191 votes in favor on Wednesday. The only other abstention, besides the US, was Israel. The vote is non-binding but it can have political weight. U.S. decision to abstain in UN vote condemning Cuba embargo is small but meaningful. The cold war is over, Congress must lift embargo pic.twitter.com/lvjq8JlvNE — Charles Rangel (@cbrangel) October 26, 2016 
+Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez described the abstention as a ""positive step for the future of improving relations between the United States and Cuba,"" according to Reuters. In case you missed it: Full speech delivered by #Cuba FM at today's vote against #US blockade #YoVotoVsBloqueo https://t.co/EJnmmyvS8J — José Ramón Cabañas (@JoseRCabanas) October 26, 2016 
+Rodriguez said in September that the embargo cost Cuba $4.6 billion last year, and the full damage over the length of the 50-year embargo was estimated at $125.9 billion. 
+When it was first announced that the US government would abstain from the vote, the entire General Assembly applauded. 
+""Abstaining on this resolution does not mean that the United States agrees with all of the policies and practices of the Cuban government. We do not,"" Samantha Power the US Ambassador to the United Nations told the General Assembly on Tuesday. 
+""We are profoundly concerned by the serious human rights violations that the Cuban government continues to commit with impunity against its own people,"" she said, according to AP. US abstains from UN vote to condemn Cuba embargo for the first time https://t.co/BMLy4VPAYm — The Guardian (@guardian) October 26, 2016 
+The Obama administration began normalizing relations with the Communist-run country in at the end of 2014, easing trade and travel restrictions. On July 20, 2015, diplomatic relations were restored, and embassies in the two countries were reopened. US approves airlines to fly to Cuba https://t.co/46qAzoxt6u pic.twitter.com/GN9lelYGcE — RT America (@RT_America) June 10, 2016 
+Lifting the full embargo will take the support of the Republican-run Congress, which remains critical of the administration’s efforts, arguing it offered too many concessions to Cuba and accepted little in return, especially on human rights and the restoration of expropriated property. ‘Making history’: First US cruise ship in nearly 40 years reaches Cuba (PHOTOS) https://t.co/xqu6jbAgBq pic.twitter.com/K9OE5OMaz4 — RT America (@RT_America) May 2, 2016 
+Obama made the first visit to Havana by a US president in 88 years in March.",FAKE
+9509,West Ham fans laud aerodynamic properties of new pound coin,"Tuesday 1 November 2016 by Formelia Alberthine West Ham fans laud aerodynamic properties of new pound coin 
+West Ham fans have thanked the Royal Mint for its efforts in improving the match-day experience at the London Stadium with the release of a new more aerodynamic pound coin. 
+Many season ticket holders claim its enhanced aerodynamic design, could see its distance and accuracy improve significantly. 
+A Royal Mint spokesperson explained, “There is a reason golf balls aren’t completely flat, these imperfections on the surface actually reward the more skilful throwers. You’re welcome.” 
+After a spate of crowd disturbances at the ground, Hammers fans had complained of a return to the dark days of the early eighties, where only ‘unpredictable’ circular coins could be deployed as missiles at games. 
+West Ham fan Simon Williams congratulated the Royal Mint on the technological advances which have seen multiple ‘stabilising’ edges introduced. 
+He told us, “I’m reasonably confident that with this new coin I could pick out the skull of an opposition player, or supporter for that matter, from way up in the gods. 
+“They’re quite weighty – I had become accustomed to launching 20p’s, but they only leave flesh wounds – these babies could do serious brain damage. 
+“Obviously it’s difficult to inflict brain damage upon Millwall fans, but it will be fun trying! 
+West Ham vice-chair Karen Brady hoped the temptation to start launching whole pounds could see match day takings increase significantly. 
+“Listen, if they want to start targeting the directors’ seats then please, by all means, do so. 
+“In fact, I’d like to see all denominations of our fabled currency ‘go coin’. 
+“If someone could chuck us a £50 we’d happily throw Andy Carroll back at them in retaliation.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
+3825,How the Obama White House runs foreign policy,"When Susan E. Rice took over as President Obama’s national security adviser two years ago, she was struck by how the White House had grown. Since she had last served on the National Security Council, during the Clinton administration, its staff had nearly quadrupled in size, to about 400 people.
+
+Earlier this year Rice embarked on an effort to trim that number, hoping to make the policy­making process more agile. By mid-July, she said in an interview, the staff had been cut by 6 percent.
+
+But it may be too late to change impressions of an NSC bureaucracy whose size has come to symbolize an overbearing and paranoid White House that insists on controlling even the smallest policy details, often at the expense of timely and effective decisions.
+
+In the Defense Department, where mistrust of the White House has persisted since the administration began, Obama is described as resolute and bold when a quick executive action is needed on operations such as hostage rescues and targeted captures and killings.
+
+However, when the president has wanted to move swiftly on some of his most ambitious policy initiatives — the opening to Cuba and the early Iran nuclear negotiations — he has circumvented the usual practice for decision-making and kept a close hold within the White House.
+
+Two senior NSC officials — deputy national security adviser Benjamin J. Rhodes and then-Latin American director Ricardo Zuniga — handled secret talks leading to last December’s announced opening to Cuba. The White House did not inform Secretary of State John F. Kerry until the discussions were well underway, and State Department officials in charge of the region found out only as they neared completion.
+
+The success of those policies — along with a climate deal with China, trade agreements and other legacy-building achievements in recent months — have boosted internal morale and for some, at least, validated the way the administration operates.
+
+But on a host of other important issues, the NSC, designed in Harry Truman’s time to coordinate sometimes-conflicting diplomatic and defense views, is still widely seen as the place where policy becomes immobilized by indecision, plodding through months and sometimes years of repetitive White House meetings.
+
+In addressing challenges where there is internal disagreement or there are no good options — civil war in Syria, Russians in Ukraine and military dictatorship in Egypt, for example — policymaking has been “sclerotic at best, constipated at worse,” a senior Defense Department official said.
+
+“Time seems to be all this process produces. More time, more meetings, more discussions,” the official said.
+
+Others fume that the NSC has taken over things that could and should be handled elsewhere in the government. Former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta, who left the administration in February 2013, has spoken of the “increasing centralization of power at the White House” and a “penchant for control” that in his case included submission of speeches and interview requests for White House approval.
+
+His predecessor at the Defense Department, Robert M. Gates, has said that “micromanagement” by the Obama White House “drove me crazy.”
+
+Many inside Cabinet departments and agencies complain that their expertise and experience is undervalued and that they are subjected to the whims of less knowledgeable NSC staffers. With such a large structure that in some areas duplicates their own departments, senior officials see the NSC as usurping their responsibilities, leaving them feeling unappreciated and frustrated.
+
+“If assistant secretaries, deputy assistants, don’t have a sense of authorship and accountability, they tend to get beaten down,” said a recently departed high-level administration official. “When large agencies — the Defense Department or State or others — don’t feel as much a part of the takeoff, implementation tends to suffer. It’s just human nature.”
+
+Others are less diplomatic. “Any little twerp from the NSC can call a meeting and set the agenda,” a senior State Department official said.
+
+More than a dozen current and former senior officials in national security departments and agencies, and in the White House, discussed the NSC for this article, some of them in several interviews. Most spoke only on the condition of anonymity, whether to criticize or to praise.
+
+Outside the administration, some lawmakers, policy experts and scholars charge that a bloated NSC staff, filled with what they describe as acolytes who distrust the rest of the government and see protecting the president as their primary job, has helped make Obama’s foreign policy ineffective and risk-averse.
+
+“There are problems that call for a real ‘whole of government’ solution,” said David Rothkopf, who has written extensively on the history and structure of the National Security Council and served in the Clinton administration. “I’ve never seen an administration that says it more and does it less.”
+
+Grumbling about how the White House operates is far from unique to the Obama administration, and the NSC staff has grown substantially under virtually every successive president since Jimmy Carter. But the size and intrusiveness of Obama’s NSC has made it a prominent target.
+
+The White House thinks that some administration officials blame the NSC to disguise disorganization and disagreements within their own departments or when decisions don’t go their way.
+
+“I’m not saying there isn’t micromanagement at the NSC. There is,” Rhodes said.
+
+But “sometimes I think the NSC just becomes kind of the boogeyman.”
+
+Never getting to yes or no
+
+“This will likely piss everybody off,” Obama observed at a national security meeting last March, when he decided to end an 18-month long internal argument by releasing weapons shipments to Egypt.
+
+The arms — F-16 aircraft, Abrams tank components and Harpoon missiles — had been on hold since the July 2013 military overthrow of elected president Mohamed Morsi and the installation of Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi as president.
+
+Several months of debate ensued over whether to call the military action a coup — a designation that would have required all military assistance to be withheld. The White House decided to leave its options open.
+
+Some assistance would continue while major military items would be withheld as a message of disapproval. Obama ordered a review of the overall U.S. aid relationship with Egypt, a strategic ally in the Middle East, and said the full partnership would not be restored until Sissi took steps toward a sustainable, nonviolent democracy.
+
+As the review dragged on for months, internal frustration grew.
+
+Kerry and then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel argued that the United States needed Egypt as a reliable, well-armed ally in the region and should restore the weapons aid. Partner nations in the Persian Gulf region — already stung by Obama’s refusal to take military action in Syria — warned that the administration was alienating the Egyptians when it should be working with them.
+
+Others, including departmental officials under both Kerry and Hagel, along with Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and outside human rights advocates, took a different view. They insisted that Obama needed a sign from the Egyptians: some indication they were prepared to stop rounding up political opponents and journalists, release the ones they had thrown in jail, and stop dealing with dissent by killing and execution.
+
+By the time Obama decided in March to lift the ban on the planes and other big-ticket items, no one’s view had changed. Little to nothing had been gained on the human rights front. Sissi’s distrust for the administration had deepened, and Persian Gulf partners thought that the administration had once again let them down.
+
+To many on the inside, Egypt policy has been a prime example of the NSC’s failure to bring together disparate Cabinet views and fashion options for timely presidential decision.
+
+The White House sees different phenomena at work, including the inability of Cabinet secretaries to marshal unity within their own departments, and resentment on the losing side. On both Egypt and Ukraine, where there has been similar reluctance to make final decisions, there has been “a lateral difference between principals” and those beneath them, a senior official said. “Both are sets of issues where decisions have had to go directly to the president and where the decisions haven’t always been popular.”
+
+“We’re working to fix it,” the official said. “It’s everybody’s problem. It frustrates everybody.”
+
+Some remain unsatisfied, however. A senior State Department official recently described White House meetings held four or five days a week on an issue of current concern, with little turnaround time to prepare ordered documents or consider what was discussed the day before. Often, the meetings amount to time-wasting repetition of the same arguments.
+
+In another example, the Justice Department indicated in a high-level meeting last summer that a proposal to hold in indefinite detention older children who crossed the Mexican border without their parents was likely illegal. Yet the same proposal appeared repeatedly on the agenda for discussion by ever-more senior officials, eventually rising to Obama — who pointed out that in addition to being unwise, it was likely illegal, a participant said.
+
+On some issues, meetings at the level of Cabinet deputies — the place where options are supposed to be refined before consideration by department heads and then the president — grew so repetitive last year that deputies stopped coming, sending assistant secretaries and below in their stead.
+
+“It was like ‘Groundhog Day’ . . . with no progress, no refinement,” said one official. “In fairness, these are all tough questions. But eventually, you’ve got to make a choice.”
+
+A former White House official said: “The thing I think is fundamentally wrong with the NSC process is that there’s too much process. There’s too much airing of every agency’s view and recommendations, and not enough adjudicating. . . . Someone’s got to be the decision-maker, who’s just going to say, ‘We’re going to do this’ and ‘We’re not going to do that.’ ”
+
+Crucial delays can be as much about what a policy will look like as about what it actually is. During NSC-led meetings early last year over Ukraine’s list of requested military assistance, “most items were seen as ‘too military,’ ” a senior Defense Department official said. “We were not sure how far Russia was going to go” in helping a separatist takeover, “and whether this would provoke them.”
+
+The Ukrainian military’s urgent need for blankets and packaged meals was easily agreed at the start. The question was how to get them there.
+
+Over multiple NSC meetings, “there was a lot of discussion about optics,” the official said, and whether to send the items by military cargo aircraft or overland.
+
+Eventually, it was decided to ship the supplies by European-licensed trucks, to avoid the provocative sight of U.S. military transport planes on the ground. But a few weeks later, this official flew into Kiev airport for a meeting with Ukrainian officials, only to spot several large, grey C-130 U.S. military transports on the runway. Vice President Biden was visiting, and the planes were there to deliver his communications equipment and sensitive gear.
+
+“Things like that color moods and sour people,” the official said of the lengthy debates. “When you litigate all the small stuff, it makes the big stuff even worse.”
+
+Debates over Ukraine’s request for heavy weapons have now gone on for well more than a year. The White House has not said yes, but it has never said no.
+
+Established in the years following World War II to help the president coordinate and reconcile diplomatic and military perspectives, the National Security Council initially included only the president and the secretaries of state and defense. Since the Truman administration, each chief executive has added, or on rare occasions subtracted, seats at the head table.
+
+A small secretariat eventually developed into a presidential staff led by the national security adviser. Different presidents have put the staff to different uses, but virtually all have increased its size, and the staff itself is now more commonly known as “the NSC.”
+
+Jimmy Carter managed with about 25 NSC staffers and a powerful and outspoken national security adviser in Zbigniew Brzezinski, who often eclipsed Cabinet secretaries. Ronald Reagan went through six national security advisers in eight years, and an “operational” NSC that led to fiascoes such as the Iran-contra scandal.
+
+Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to George H.W. Bush, is often cited as the “gold standard” for how to run an effective and collaborative NSC. Concerned that its staff would overwhelm the departments, he limited it to 50 people.
+
+Its purpose was to integrate views and create a cohesive national security policy, Scowcroft said in an interview, “not to replace departments. . . . That’s always the instinctive thing — well, ‘These guys aren’t doing a good job on something, we’ll just do it ourselves.’ I tried not to do that.”
+
+Under Bill Clinton, the NSC doubled in size to about 100. George W. Bush doubled it again, to 200.
+
+The first indication of how Obama planned to use the NSC came with Presidential Policy Directive 1, issued three weeks after his inauguration. Following the Scowcroft structure, it established a Principals Committee of Cabinet secretaries and top agency officials, chaired by the national security adviser, as the last stop before policy options reached the president.
+
+The Deputies Committee, of No. 2 agency officials, analyzes issues and options before they reach the principals, handles day-to-day crisis management and monitors policy implementation.
+
+A third, lower level of interagency committees generally determines what will rise up to the deputies. In previous administrations, the committees usually were chaired by a lead department or agency — normally the State or Defense departments. Obama’s directive moved them into the White House, chaired by the NSC.
+
+Former officials who participated in Obama’s White House transition and later served in senior administration posts described that decision as a crucial driver toward more centralization. “It was a conscious decision to elevate the NSC’s role by having it chair those committees,” one said.
+
+But it was far from the only reason for growth.
+
+The staff grew by 35 almost immediately, when Obama folded the Homeland Security Council established by his predecessor into the NSC. Slightly more than half of today’s NSC personnel — many of them detailees from other agencies who are not on the White House payroll — are what Rice calls “policy people.” The rest are divided among management and human resources staff and about 100 who supply technology support, including manning the White House Situation Room in shifts, 24 hours a day.
+
+Staffing of traditional NSC “directorates” and “coordinators,” organized by function and geographic regions, ballooned with each new crisis. Surging issues such as cyber- and health security — including Ebola — brought additional staff.
+
+Each subject area produces White House-run meetings, often overlapping sessions called by separate NSC chieftains on security, economic and diplomatic aspects of the same issue. For every meeting, both NSC and agency personnel are tasked with writing issue and option papers than can run to a dozen or more pages.
+
+Rice — who came to the job with unique prior experience at the NSC and the State Department and as a Cabinet member during Obama’s first term — resisted her initial impulse to cut staff until she understood the reasons for the growth. This year, as part of her review, she has folded the separate Bush-era NSC office in charge of Afghanistan-Pakistan affairs back into the South Asia directorate. Implementation of the recently completed Iran nuclear agreement has been based at the State Department, along with the coordinator of the U.S.-led coalition fighting against the Islamic State.
+
+The office that opened at the NSC last year to coordinate the Ebola response among agencies has also been closed, as that crisis has ebbed.
+
+But Rice strongly defended its establishment in the first place. With participation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the State, Defense and Health and Human Services departments; and the U.S. Agency for International Development, she said, the U.S. response “wasn’t working until we sucked it into the White House and the president put his personal muscle behind it.”
+
+Nearly every Thursday morning since the September 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, senior and mid-level officials from at least five government agencies have gathered at the White House to talk about security for U.S. facilities and personnel overseas.
+
+Protecting diplomats and other Americans abroad is a core responsibility of the State Department. Yet the weekly talks are convened by the NSC and led by Lisa Monaco, Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, who guides discussions about where threats are greatest and what kind of protection should be available.
+
+To the White House, this makes perfect sense. Many agencies have personnel based overseas, and many of the resources to protect them reside outside the State Department.
+
+“It used to be that State ran foreign policy,” said a former White House official. “Now, everyone’s got a hand in it. Go around the table, and they’ve all got equities, they’ve all got personnel out in the field, and all that needs to be managed.”
+
+But others drew a direct line from White House management of the issue back to the political embarrassment of the Benghazi attacks, which resulted in the deaths of four U.S. officials. Nearly three years later, a Republican-led congressional committee is still searching for a smoking gun of administration cover-up.
+
+“Benghazi is a good example,” the former official said, “and . . . Ebola. That can’t just be left to CDC and State and others to manage. No. You have to have a czar and a whole team of people. And why is that? Because the politics on this issue have become so much more corrosive and challenging that it’s a natural instinct for the White House to say, ‘We’ve got to have an eye on this. On everything.’ ”
+
+The embassy security meetings have frequently bogged down over minor issues, such as whether to deploy a handful of Special Operations troops or to approve a State Department request for an additional 10 diplomats at an embassy. One official recalled that White House oversight even extended to the overseas deployment of dog handlers and their bomb-sniffing canines.
+
+“The first thing I’m going to do is to stop all this micromanagement from the NSC,” Deputy Secretary Antony J. Blinken joked as he chaired his first senior staff meeting at the State Department in December, after moving there from his White House job as Rice’s deputy.
+
+Blinken, who has gone back and forth among buildings several times, knows better than most that where one sits usually indicates where one stands on the subject.
+
+“When you look at it” from the White House’s perspective, another former official whose career has traveled much the same path said of micromanagement charges, “and you’re just constantly worried about something going wrong, and you’re wearing the shirt for it, you can understand how this happens.”
+
+In January, as internal administration complaints about the NSC escalated, Rice acknowledged the problems but praised the policy outcomes.
+
+“If you look at where we started in 2014, we had no Ukraine and Russia, no Ebola, and no ISIL as the next major counterterrorism” threat, she said in an interview at the time, referring to the Islamic State. “In each of those instances of unforeseen crisis, on top of all the business we were having to do anyway, with some complexity and obviously not always with perfect form, we bent the curve.
+
+“Style points? Sure. Take some off at the margins,” she said. “Substance? Managing an unprecedented array of complex crises and continuing at the same time to pursue the president’s long-term agenda on things that will matter when the music stops, like climate change and Cuba? I feel pretty good.”
+
+But at the same time, she decided she had seen and heard enough to know that her initial reaction to the NSC’s size and structure might have merit. At her direction, aides drew up staffing charts and held focus groups to solicit suggestions for improvement. Senior officials were interviewed; organizational meetings were held.
+
+By June, a statement posted on the White House blog promised a newly “lean, nimble, and policy-oriented” NSC, with “fewer, more focused meetings, less paper to produce and consume, and more communication that yields better policymaking.”
+
+In late July, more than half a year after she began the exercise, Rice said that she was satisfied with the results. “We’re going to keep going” with staff trims, she said. “But we’re going to do it in a thoughtful way. . . . We need to not compromise quality simply for the sake of structure.”
+
+Opinions on the depth of the changes differ. One senior department official agreed last month that there were fewer NSC meetings and less paperwork. Another official, en route to a third White House meeting on a single recent day, hadn’t noticed any change.",REAL
+4515,"ISIS claims responsibility for Garland, Texas, shooting","(CNN) ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack outside a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest in Texas -- and warned of more attacks to come.
+
+In a broadcast on its official radio channel Tuesday, the group said two Al Khilafa soldiers opened fire outside the event in Garland, a Dallas suburb. Al Khilafa is how ISIS refers to its soldiers.
+
+CNN cannot confirm the claim, and ISIS offered no evidence the gunmen were affiliated with the terror organization.
+
+The gunmen, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi , wounded a security guard before police shot and killed them.
+
+Nadir Soofi, left, and Elton Simpson were the two gunmen in the Garland, Texas, shooting.
+
+The ISIS radio announcer also referred to Simpson and Soofi as the terror group's ""brothers."" The announcement ended with this warning:
+
+""We say to the defenders of the cross, the U.S., that future attacks are going to be harsher and worse. The Islamic State soldiers will inflict harm on you with the grace of God. The future is just around the corner.""
+
+While ISIS claimed responsibility two days after the attack, there was no immediate indication that the terror group in Iraq and Syria had contact with Simpson or Soofi, who both lived in Phoenix.
+
+""They may not have had formal contact (with ISIS). They may have had email communication or read communications from ISIS, but I don't think they were directed by ISIS,"" Clemente said.
+
+""I think it's the other way around -- they were kind of applying for membership into ISIS. And so they were doing this act, sent out the tweet in advance because if they know there's a possibility they're not going to make it out of this, then they can't give recognition to what they were trying to do after the fact.""
+
+On Tuesday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest described what happened as ""an attempted terrorist act (that) was foiled."" U.S. authorities, meanwhile, are still looking into what links -- if any -- Sunday's shooters had to international terrorism.
+
+But there are clues that one of the gunmen was an ISIS sympathizer.
+
+Moments before the attack, Simpson posted a tweet with the hashtag #texasattack: ""May Allah accept us as mujahideen.""
+
+The tweet also said he and his fellow attacker had pledged allegiance to ""Amirul Mu'mineen,"" which means ""the leader of the faithful."" CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said that likely refers to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
+
+Earlier, Simpson had asked his followers on Twitter to follow an ISIS propagandist.
+
+After the shooting, the propagandist tweeted: ""Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire.""
+
+Both Twitter accounts have been deactivated.
+
+One U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the shooting was ""certainly more than just inspiration"" by ISIS, but that assessment does not mean the terror group gave the gunmen specific instructions.
+
+A law enforcement official told CNN the attack does not appear to be a clear-cut case of a lone wolf, nor a pure case of someone directed by others to act. Rather, the official said, it appears to be something in between the two extremes.
+
+The attack fits a well-known pattern of ISIS recruitment and incitement: encouraging sympathizers via a sophisticated social media campaign to join the fight in Syria, or, if they cannot, to carry out terror attacks on their own at home, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
+
+In 2011, Simpson was convicted of making a false statement involving international and domestic terrorism. Prosecutors said he told FBI agents he had not discussed traveling to Somalia to engage in ""violent jihad"" -- when, in fact, he had, according to an indictment.
+
+Simpson was sentenced to three years of probation, court records show.
+
+Soofi, on the other hand, was relatively unknown to federal investigators, a law enforcement official told CNN.
+
+Authorities knew of no indication the pair planned to launch Sunday's attack, another law enforcement official said.
+
+Two law enforcement officials say that it's believed Simpson and Soofie drove from Phoenix, Arizona, to Garland, but officials did not specify the exact timeline of when the trip was made.
+
+A separate law enforcement source said the two long guns and four handguns found in their car were bought legally.
+
+The FBI searched the apartment Simpson and Soofie shared and found it to be relatively barren, one of the law enforcement officials said. Authorities retrieved a hard drive, which is being analyzed, the official said.
+
+Investigators are trying to ascertain whether the two gunmen had any associates in Phoenix, or across the United States, who share their ideology. The FBI is scrubbing the deceased attackers' electronics and interviewing friends in a bid to draw possible connections.
+
+The two assailants drove up to the center and started shooting, striking a security guard in the ankle. But Garland police returned fire, killing the gunmen before they were able to enter the building.
+
+Police ""faced death head-on and, with incredible skill and bravery, were able to save a lot of people,"" said Zach Horn, an attorney for the officers.
+
+The shooting stirred memories of other attacks this year in France and Denmark.
+
+In January, gunmen attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine that has a controversial history of depicting Mohammed, and killed 12 people.
+
+In February, a gunman attacked a free speech forum in Copenhagen, Denmark, featuring artist Lars Vilks, who infuriated al Qaeda with his depictions of Mohammed.",REAL
+2747,The “blame the left” crew: What the right’s new Hebdo attack is really about,"It was inevitable that liberals would end up being condemned for the horrific attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hedbo in which 12 people were killed by what appear to have been Muslim extremists. Yes, I know it seems strange on the face of it that anyone would think liberals would be responsible for the actions of ultra-conservative religious fanatics, but this is nothing new. It goes all the way back to the capture of John Walker Lind, the “American Taliban,” when conservative wags such as Ann Coulter declared that he naturally became a member of that violent, conservative religious sect because he was raised in Marin County, California, and was thus a liberal role model:
+
+Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan famously issued this indictment, just five days after 9/11:
+
+It never struck these people as odd that liberals — the coalition that includes feminists, gays and promotes religious pluralism, including atheism — would throw in with conservative fundamentalists, but there it is.
+
+Sullivan later apologized for his remarks. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that Coulter did not.
+
+This idea never really went away, however. It’s as if some people cannot conceptualize the idea that their enemies might not be in cahoots with one another. Even gay-loving atheists and jihadis, which has to be one of the oddest alliances of all time. It took on a slightly different cast when the Danish cartoon controversy erupted back in 2006. At that time, the right was very critical of the left for allegedly failing to throw the blasphemous and insulting cartoons in the jihadists’ faces and show proper regard for Western notions of free speech by telling Muslims everywhere in no uncertain terms what they could do with their prohibition on images of the Prophet Mohammed. William Kristol of the Weekly Standard put it this way:
+
+He was including that liberal squish George W. Bush in his criticism, by the way. His state department had issued a statement condemning the cartoons as being “unacceptable.”
+
+Fast forward to the horrific events of this week in Paris and we’ll see the same refrain. Liberals are once again at least partially responsible for the terrible acts of what appear to be ultra-conservative fanatics because they have failed to properly defend free speech.
+
+Yesterday, Jonathan Chait in New York magazine quoted the Time magazine Paris bureau chief Bruce Crumley in the wake of the earlier firebombing of Charlie Hebdo in 2010, angrily condemning what he called “‘majority sections’ of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant, futile demonstrations that ‘they’ aren’t going to tell ‘us’ what can and can’t be done in free societies?” He was obviously talking about the attitudes and practices of Islamophobes throughout Europe, but did take the magazine to task for its overall offensiveness as well.
+
+Chait sarcastically says, “Crumley carefully noted, terrorism is bad, too. But his primary villain was the satirical magazine that provoked the attacks.” Oddly, later in the piece he quotes Crumley saying that societies cannot give in to the hysterical demands of extremists and that violence and intimidation cannot be condoned, but his point seems to be that beyond that any discussion or disagreement with the substance of the free speech in question is off limits.
+
+He’s not speaking of liberalism in the parochial American sense, obviously, but the criticism hits the same people. He goes on to quote Jay Carney, Obama’s former press secretary, who very mildly pointed out at the time that insulting depictions of the Prophet Mohammed are entirely legal but that publishing them showed questionable judgment and concludes:
+
+The Muslim radical argues that the ban on blasphemy is morally right and should be followed; the Western liberal insists it is morally wrong but should be followed. Theoretical distinctions aside, both positions yield an identical outcome. The right to blaspheme religion is one of the most elemental exercises of political liberalism. One cannot defend the right without defending the practice. So much for that old American trope about freedom of speech: “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” By defending the “practice,” he apparently means we are also obligated to refrain from objecting to what people say as well, which is a very different proposition. This essentially says that in defending freedom of speech you must give up your own right to free speech lest you help the terrorists — which is a bit strange. And it’s a concept over which the great right-wing defenders of American values are going to find themselves in conflict. After all, the shoe was on their religious feet not that long ago: NEW YORK, Sept. 23—He’s particularly outraged, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has said, by a collage of the Virgin Mary dotted with elephant dung. He isn’t impressed by the pickled pig carcasses, either. And he’s taken dead aim at the Brooklyn Museum of Art: It will lose $7 million in city funds, he warns, unless it cancels a “sick” exhibit of British works scheduled to open next week. Rome’s Catholic, Muslim and Jewish leaders have united to condemn pop star Madonna’s decision to stage a mock-crucifixion when she performs in the Italian capital on Sunday a stone’s throw away from Vatican City. The lapsed-Catholic diva’s latest irreverent performance sees her wearing a fake crown of thorns and descending on a suspended, glittery cross as part of her worldwide “Confessions Tour”. Having already been criticised in the United States, Catholics priests from across the Eternal City have gone one further saying the act is blasphemy. Cardinal Ersilio Tonino, speaking with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI said: “This time the limits have really been pushed too far. “This concert is a blashphemous challenge to the faith and a profanation of the cross. She should be excommunicated.” In an unusual show of religious solidarity, Muslim and Jewish leaders added their condemnation of the self-styled Queen of Pop, famous for peppering her concerts and videos with controversial religious and sexual imagery. “I think her idea is in the worst taste and she’d do better to go home,” Mario Scialoja, head of Italy’s Muslim League said. People get upset about things people say and often condemn them for saying it because it’s offensive to them or others. It’s certainly not an exclusively liberal thing unless you think that fundamentalist Islam is liberal or that conservative Catholics like Rudy Giuliani and Pope Benedict are left-wingers. (But it must be noted that in all the situations outlined here, the only person to use the power of the state to try to shut anyone up was Rudy Giuliani.) Arthur Goldhammer wrote a very insightful piece about this latest horror in Al Jazeera. He pointed out that Charlie Hedbo was more than just a satirical magazine. It followed a certain unique French tradition that was “an equal opportunity offender, and it reveled in its freedom to vex, irritate and derange.” It’s doubtful many people would feel it necessary to defend the substance of everything in its pages — how could they without having their heads explode? No, what we must defend is the principle under which they were allowed to say what they said, period. That is inviolable. And that principle also allows people to condemn Islam or Charlie Hedbo  — or both in the very same breath. Once you start policing what people say in the name of free speech you’ve already lost the argument. And yes, under that principle, we must also defend William Donohue’s right to say the cretinous, idiotic things he says. And we can certainly also feel free to condemn him for saying it. In doing so, we are not advocating that he be silenced. We are using our right of free speech to say we think he’s a cretinous idiot and we wish he would stop being one.",REAL
+6516,ADHD NATION: How Big Pharma Created the ADHD Epidemic,"By Kalee Brown
+While I was at university, many of my peers would take Adderall, a drug commonly used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (A.D.H.D.), to help them study or maintain focus while writing an exam. It was somewhat of a social norm and no one seemed to care why because it was so popular; however, I believe it is a clear representation of the social and academic pressures imposed on children to be “successful.”
+It also begs the question: How are so many kids gaining access to Adderall? Author and journalist Alan Schwarz explains that American children are not only severely over-diagnosed with A.D.H.D., but also frighteningly under-educated on the drugs they’re being prescribed, so they end up selling the pills instead of taking them. Well-known for his investigative reporting on how Big Pharma manufactured the “A.D.H.D. Nation” through advertising and doctor bribery, Schwarz recently published his book A.D.H.D. Nation using a term he coined to describe the widespread mishandling and misdiagnosis of the disorder.
+How A.D.H.D. Became An Over-Diagnosed Disorder According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 11% of children between the ages of 4 and 17 have been diagnosed with A.D.H.D. as of 2011. However, if you ask the American Psychiatric Association, they maintain that even though only 5% of American children suffer from the disorder, the diagnosis is actually given to around 15% of American children. This number has been steadily rising , jumping from 7.8% in 2003 to 9.5% in 2007. Schwarz identifies two main themes involved with A.D.H.D. misdiagnosis: the pharmaceutical industry’s role in pushing A.D.H.D. drugs, and doctors failing to identify the root cause of children’s behavioural issues.
+In an interview with Scientific American , Schwarz explains: “Many kids have problems and need help—but those problems in many cases will derive from trauma, anxiety, family discord, poor sleep or diet, bullying at school and more. We must not abandon them. We must help. But we must also be more judicious in how we do that, rather than reflexively giving them a diagnosis of what is generally described as a serious, lifelong brain disorder.”
+Big Pharma’s Role in Widespread A.D.H.D. Misdiagnosis It’s no secret that pharmaceutical companies essentially buy out the medical industry. As with many other diseases and disorders, when it comes to A.D.H.D., pharmaceutical companies have paid doctors and researchers to overstate the dangers of A.D.H.D. and the benefits of taking their drugs and understate the negative side effects. It’s easy for people to believe this misguided information when it’s affiliated with well-known universities like Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Many people don’t even realize that these studies are funded by the very companies that profit from the drugs’ sale because that relationship is hidden in small print ( source ). Even though many of the advertisements Big Pharma has released state that A.D.H.D. medication is “ safer than aspirin ,” these drugs can have significant side effects and are actually considered to be within the same class as morphine and oxycodone due to high risk of abuse and addiction. You can’t just blame all doctors, either; many of them genuinely believe they’re helping these children because of the information they’ve been given in these studies and by Big Pharma.
+Big Pharma creates advertisements for A.D.H.D. drugs that are specifically targeted at parents, describing how these drugs can improve test scores and behaviour at home, among other false claims. One of the most controversial ones was a 2009 ad for Intuniv, Shire’s A.D.H.D. treatment, which included a child in a monster costume taking off his terrifying mask to reveal his calm, smiling self with a text reading, “There’s a great kid in there.” The FDA has stepped in multiple times, sending pharmaceutical companies warning letters or even forcing them to take down their ads because they are false, misleading, and/or exaggerate the effects of their drugs ( source ).
+The following New York Times video was created by Schwarz and Poh Si Teng:
+
+What Is A.D.H.D. and Is It Even Real? If brain scans are performed on people with A.D.H.D., there are clear structural differences; however, the majority of A.D.H.D. diagnoses are confirmed by observation, and often not even by a doctor. Parents or school teachers are typically responsible for observing a child’s actions, and if they fit the “criteria” for A.D.H.D., doctors confirm the diagnosis and hand them a prescription. Instead of getting to the root of these children’s “attention deficit,” they are told they have a medical condition that can only be fixed with medication. This is not only unethical, but also clearly damaging to a child’s self esteem. Many of these kids could simply be uninterested in the subject matter, suffering from some sort of emotional trauma, or even have heightened creativity and energy!
+Many doctors question the legitimacy of A.D.H.D. in general and whether or not it should be classified as a mental disorder. This is largely because the definition of this and similar disorders is usually heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. American psychologist Lisa Cosgrove and others investigated financial ties between the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) panel members and the pharmaceutical industry. Their findings showed that, of the 170 DSM panel members, 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry and 100% of the members of the panels on ‘mood disorders’ and ‘schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders’ had financial ties to drug companies (read our article about it here ).
+Neurologist Richard Saul spent his career examining patients who struggle with short attention spans and difficulty focusing. His extensive experience has led him to believe that A.D.H.D. isn’t actually a disorder, but rather an umbrella of symptoms that shouldn’t be considered a disease. Thus, Saul believes it shouldn’t be listed as a separate disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual. You can read more about his opinion in our article here .
+No matter what your stance on A.D.H.D. is, it is clear that too many children are being diagnosed with it and handed prescriptions without proper medical evaluations. If you or a loved one has just been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., I suggest you do your own research on the subject instead of simply taking drugs for a “mental disorder” that may have been falsely diagnosed.
+Source: Collective Evolution 
+",FAKE
+9636,Donald Trump claims the election will be 'rigged' — and critics have called that preposterous and dangerous,"Email 
+Donald Trump is again riling up his voting base with claims that the November election will be rigged against him. 
+""Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day,"" Trump tweeted Monday morning. ""Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!"" 
+It's a charge that even other Republicans have been quick to refute. Critics have called such talk potentially dangerous and detrimental to trust in the US democratic process. 
+""States, backed by tens of thousands of GOP and DEM volunteers, ensure integrity of electoral process,"" Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who is often sharply critical of Trump, tweeted Sunday. ""Elections are not rigged."" 
+Jon Husted, the secretary of state of Ohio and the top election official in the key battleground state, also said Monday that he could assure Trump the election would not be rigged. 
+Trump's most recent claims coincided with a plunge by him in the polls. Before now, Trump most recently made similar claims when his polls numbers were taking a dive in early August. 
+""And I'm telling you, November 8, we'd better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged,"" the New York billionaire told Fox News host Sean Hannity in August. ""And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it's going to be taken away from us."" 
+Multiple Republicans told Business Insider at the time that Trump's assertion was both ludicrous and dangerous, as Trump would be the first US presidential candidate in modern times, possibly ever, to blame an election loss on voter fraud or a rigged election. 
+Allen Raymond, a former GOP operative who was involved in the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone-jamming scandal, called Trump's continued insistence that the election would be rigged ""detrimental to the Republic."" 
+""The idea that it's rigged, I don't know what he's talking about,"" he said in August. ""I know someone that rigged elections. I mean, you know, the fact of the matter is Hillary Clinton doesn't need to rig this election. Trump's going to win Alabama and that's it. She doesn't have to do anything. It's painful to watch."" 
+Raymond wrote ""How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative"" as a tell-all about the attempt to rig the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election between then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, and Republican US Rep. John E. Sununu. Raymond said that attempted rigging was centered on jamming the phone lines at the New Hampshire Democrats office in Manchester — a task his phone bank was hired to carry out. Sununu went on to win the election by roughly 20,000 votes. Shaheen defeated Sununu in a rematch in 2008. 
+The operative served a brief prison sentence for his involvement.He said any attempts to rig an election would look similar to that — not what Trump's talking about. 
+The Manhattan billionaire told The Washington Post in August that a lack of voter-identification laws would let people ""just keep voting and voting and voting"" and suggested fraud occurred in 2012 against Republican nominee Mitt Romney because there were ""precincts where there were practically nobody voting for the Republican."" 
+""I don't even know what he's talking about,"" Raymond said. ""But this idea that it's 1950 or 1960 and the party bosses are going to roll into Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and are going to rig the ballot box and rig the machines — that's nonsense. An election rigging these days means something totally different than what he's talking about. Now it's stupid stuff like what I did in New Hampshire."" 
+He said the lack of voter-ID laws Trump was trying to use as proof of fraud this fall was also bogus. 
+""These voter-ID laws, what's the intention of that? The clear intention is disenfranchisement,"" he said, echoing a common complaint in liberal circles that voter-ID laws are put in place to prevent minority voting blocks from being able to cast ballots. ""You know, there's a reason we don't have a poll tax anymore. Because it's unconstitutional. 
+""People don't vote 10 times,"" he continued. ""There might be one bad actor every once in a while who tries to vote a couple of times, but he's talking about an institutional effort. It's a total myth."" 
+He said Trump's statements were an attempt to ""basically sideline"" Hillary Clinton's first four years in office. 
+The idea of a rigged election came to the forefront after the Democratic National Committee had its emails hacked and leaked, though both Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Clinton's main opponent in the Democratic primary, had claimed the electoral system was rigged earlier in the primary season. The emails showed that the organization, which was supposed to remain neutral throughout the primary, favored Clinton. 
+Trump said the email leak proved that the primary election was ""rigged"" against Sanders in his early-August interview with Hannity, in addition to such claims he perpetuated along the campaign trail. He used the leak as further evidence that the fall election would be rigged against him as well.",FAKE
+7398,REPORT: Dirty Reporter Blackmails Montel… Help Us Hit Trump or We’ll Print Your Address,"BREAKING: Trump Jumps in FL, Takes 4 Point Lead in OH 
+Williams, who has publicly stated that he was not a Trump supporter, is nevertheless a man of honor and integrity. He doesn’t sell his values to common thugs who use bylines as weapons. 
+According to both Williams and his attorney, Jonathan Franks, Jacob Bernstein from The Times approached Williams, asking for cooperation on a story alleging that people who live in Trump-branded buildings want the Trump name removed in light of the very difficult and contentious 2016 election season. 
+Williams, an independent who lives in a Trump-developed New York building, declined to cooperate.   
+According to Franks, Bernstein replied to a specific request not to print Williams’ address by stating he “would be more likely to extend that courtesy if Montel gave an interview.” 
+Protecting another person’s privacy, especially the privacy of the ballot box, is not a special courtesy. It’s simply common decency. 
+The Washington Examiner took their colleagues at The Times to task for this low-life journalism, noting that Williams identifies as a conservative but is not a registered Republican. He endorsed Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the 2016 GOP primary and has publicly credited Kasich for bringing him back into the conservative fold. 
+Please share this article on Facebook and Twitter to help expose the media’s liberal bias.  ",FAKE
+3717,Police Arrest Suspect In Charleston Church Shooting,"Police in Charleston, S.C., say a man they suspect opened fire and killed nine people during a Wednesday prayer meeting at one of the city's oldest historically black churches has been captured.
+
+Police are calling the attack a hate crime, and they released stills from a security video that authorities say show 21-year-old Dylann Roof entering the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
+
+Roof, police said, sat with the congregation for about an hour before he opened fire at around 9 p.m. ET. He left the church in a black sedan, unleashing an overnight manhunt that involved local and federal law enforcement.
+
+Police apprehended the lone suspect during a traffic stop in Shelby, N.C., an almost four-hour drive from Charleston. Roof waived extradition during a court appearance in Shelby and will be headed back to South Carolina.
+
+Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley said the arrest is a part of the healing process that has just begun.
+
+""In America we don't let people like this get away with this dastardly deed,"" Riley said.
+
+In a statement from the White House, President Obama meditated on the history of the church, which he called a ""sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America.""
+
+He said the Emanuel AME is a church that has seen tragedy in the past. It was burned to the ground because its worshippers wanted to end slavery. It's a place where civil rights leaders spoke and led marches in search for freedom.
+
+Obama said it's a tragedy anytime Americans die in a situation like this, but it's especially heartbreaking when it happens ""at a place where people are seeking peace.""
+
+Obama quoted a eulogy Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at the funeral service for three of the four children who were killed in the 1963 bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham.
+
+In death, King said, those three little girls told America ""that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.""
+
+At an earlier press conference, Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said: ""It is senseless, it is unfathomable, that in today's society somebody would walk into a church, into a prayer meeting, and take lives.""
+
+State Sen. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was also the senior pastor at Emanuel AME Church, was one of the people killed during the attack.
+
+The President Pro Tempore of South Carolina's Senate, Hugh Leatherman, said Pinckney was ""a strong advocate for his constituents, a great pastor and community leader, but most importantly, a cherished and loved husband, father and son.""
+
+He continued: ""The victims were in a Bible study, learning the Word of God, in one of the most beloved institutions in our State whose roots go back to the dark days of slavery. What happened last night is incomprehensible.""
+
+The Charleston County coroner identified the nine victims as Cynthia Hurd, 54; Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41; Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45; Ethel Lance, 70; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Myra Thompson, 59; Susie Jackson, 87; and Depayne Middleton Doctor, 49. All the victims, but Simmons, died at the scene. Simmons died in hospital.
+
+In a short speech at the White House, President Obama said that he was restrained by what he could say about the facts of case, but he was not constrained by emotion.
+
+Obama said that it is tragic anytime Americans die in a situation like this. But it is especially heartbreaking when it happens ""at a place where people are seeking peace.""
+
+He said the Emanuel AME is a church that has seen tragedy in the past. It was burned to the ground because its worshippers wanted to end slavery. It's a place where civil rights leaders spoke and led marches in search for freedom.
+
+""This is a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America,"" Obama said.
+
+Today, he said, marks another attempt against a black church in the United States. And like this church, and others like it, have rebuilt in the past, Mother Emanuel ""will rise again, now.""
+
+Update at 12 p.m. ET. Tip Led To Arrest:
+
+During a news conference, Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said a civilian called police to report suspicious activity.
+
+Police followed up on the tip and quickly figured out that they were dealing with shooting suspect Dylann Roof, who was arrested without incident.
+
+Mullen, who would not comment on whether Roof had any weapons on him, said that Roof was cooperative.
+
+Mullen said that police had yet to determine a motive.
+
+Update at 11:13 a.m. ET. Barbaric Crime:
+
+""Acts like this one have no place in our country and no place in a civilized society,"" she said.
+
+Lynch said that federal authorities are working closely with local authorities to try to apprehend the suspect.
+
+President Obama is expected to make a statement at 11:45 a.m. ET.
+
+Update at 11:10 a.m. ET. Two Previous Arrests:
+
+A search of public records finds that Dylann Roof had two recent court cases against him — one for trespassing, one for drug possession.
+
+Update at 10:33 a.m. ET. Suspect Identified:
+
+The city of Charleston said police have named a suspect: 21-year-old Dylann Roof.
+
+""The vehicle he may be driving is a black Hyundai with vehicle tag LGF330. Anyone with information about his location call 1-800-CALL-FBI,"" the city said in a statement.
+
+The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, tweeted a photograph of the suspect sporting a jacket with what appears to be the flag for ""white-rule Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.""
+
+Another patch on the jacket, the SPLC says, shows a South African apartheid era flag.
+
+Update at 9:35 a.m. ET. A 'Beloved Senator':
+
+The President Pro Tempore of South Carolina Senate, Hugh Leatherman, said Sen. Pinckney was a ""beloved"" public servant.
+
+""Senator Clementa C. Pinckney was a leader in the Senate of South Carolina, a strong advocate for his constituents, a great pastor and community leader, but most importantly, a cherished and loved husband, father and son,"" Leatherman said in a statement. ""The entire Senate of South Carolina extends our love and sympathy to Jennifer, Eliana, Malana, and to the rest of his family.""
+
+Update at 9:05 a.m. ET. State Senator Among Those Killed:
+
+State Sen. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was also the senior pastor at Emanuel AME Church, was one of the people killed during the attack, according to multiple news outlets as well as the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party.
+
+Update at 8:43 a.m. ET. Federal Hate Crime Investigation:
+
+Update at 7:17 a.m. ET. Suspect Sat With Congregation For An Hour:
+
+During a press conference just minutes ago, Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said the suspect sat with the congregation in prayer for about an hour before opening fire.
+
+The suspect ultimately killed 9 people — six females and three males. Three others survived.
+
+Mullen said that law enforcement from all along the East Coast are helping in the investigation and the FBI and the ATF have come in from D.C.
+
+""This tragedy that we're addressing right now is indescribable,"" Mullen said. ""No one in this community will ever forget this night ... and because of the pain and the hurt this individual has caused this community ... the law enforcement officials working on this are committed and we will catch this individual.""
+
+Mullen called on anyone with information about the suspect to call 1-800-Call-FBI, but said that they should not approach the suspect because he is ""very dangerous.""
+
+Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley Jr. said that last night that he and the police chief ""hugged as many"" of the victims' families as they could. He said they saw weeping mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers.
+
+Riley said this attack has ripped a part of the community's fabric forever.
+
+""But we will work to heal them, to love them and support them in that church as long as we live,"" Riley said.
+
+Update at 6:50 a.m. ET. What Happened?
+
+According to The Post and Courier of Charleston, a gunman entered the church on Wednesday evening, as members of the church gathered for a prayer meeting.
+
+The Emanuel AME Church website says that church is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the South. ""Emanuel has one of the largest and oldest black congregations south of Baltimore, Maryland,"" the website says.",REAL
+5205,Donald Trump’s collapse was caused by one big factor: Hillary Clinton,"Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com has laid out four possible outcomes to the race at this point, with all but one featuring a Clinton win:
+
+A Trump win, including cases where he loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College. A narrow Clinton win, wherein she wins the Electoral College, but wins the popular vote by 3 percentage points or less. (Or wins the Electoral College and loses the popular vote.) A Clinton win in the “Obama zone,” wherein she wins the popular vote by 4 to 7 percentage points — the margins by which President Obama won the elections in 2012 and 2008, respectively. Clinton is all but certain to win the Electoral College if she wins the popular vote by this amount. Finally, a Clinton blowout, wherein she wins the popular vote by 8 points or more, which would almost certainly also yield a dominant performance in the Electoral College.
+
+FiveThirtyEight’s model, which averages polls, shows that Clinton has an 85 percent probability of winning and is currently ahead by 6.6 points.
+
+For its part, The New York Times Upshot has a 92 percent probability of a Clinton win and shows see side-by-side comparisons of all the predictions. They all have Clinton with 85 percent or higher. Using its customary metaphor, the Upshot compares the chances of Clinton losing “to the probability that an NFL kicker misses a 29-yard field goal.” That indeed happens (in fact, it happened on Sunday night) so Democrats should not get complacent.
+
+And for down ballot races? Well, there always has been a decent possibility that the Democrats would win the Senate if they retain the White House, simply because this is a cycle when Republicans are defending more seats. Still, that outcome is anything but assured, and some analysts are insisting (without evidence) that this year will feature lots of ticket splitting (that is, people who vote for Clinton but also vote for a Republican incumbent senator, for example).
+
+Still, this cycle is nothing if not unpredictable, so who knows?
+
+Democrats had written off the House from the beginning: GOP gerrymandering all over the country makes it nearly impossible for Democrats to win a majority in the House until another round of redistricting after the 2020 census. Still, the possibility, however remote, is starting to be discussed.
+
+Sam Wang from the Princeton Election Consortium said:
+
+I estimate that Democrats must win the national popular vote by 8% to have any chance at taking control of the House. This large margin is driven by two major factors in equal measure: gerrymandering to pack Democrats into districts, and population patterns which they pack themselves. Therefore the magic number for House Democrats is a Clinton win by 8%. In national polls Clinton is currently ahead by 5% (7 polls starting on October 10th or later), and Obama outperformed his 2012 polls by 3%, so it’s not crazy to imagine. I’d give the House Democrats a 1 in 5 chance of making it over this bar. A long shot . . . but not a crazy long shot.
+
+So what’s happening to make this dramatic shift in October? Clinton had been leading throughout the summer, but on Sept. 26, the day of the first debate, FiveThirtyEight had Donald Trump with a 51 percent chance of winning. The candidates were tied nationally at 45 percent, and the trend was moving in his favor. The obvious answer is that Trump blew it when he made a fool of himself in the aftermath of the first debate with his 3 a.m. tweets about the former Miss Universe. Since then he has been accused by a dozen women of groping and assaulting them against their will. That “Access Hollywood” tape was a shocker. Most observers see the huge and growing gender gap as a result of all that grossness. But something else happened as well. For about a month before that first debate the right-wing media and people in or around the Trump campaign had been spreading spurious rumors that Clinton had brain damage or Parkinson’s disease. This was barely covered in the mainstream media, but everyone in the media pays attention to Matt Drudge, who had been relentless with the story, so they were very much aware of such rumors. When Clinton had her fainting spell at the 9/11 ceremony in New York, the press spent days feigning anger about her failure to keep them properly informed about the details of her doctor’s appointments and diagnosis. (That’s despite campaign professionals saying they would never inform the press of anything like that, mainly because such illnesses are so common on the trail.) Unfortunately for Clinton, the combined effect of the right’s relentless smears about some kind of disqualifying terminal illness and the press fulminating for days over her pneumonia advanced the idea that she lacked the “strength and stamina” required for the job. Coincidentally or otherwise, this was the very charge that Trump had been making for months. By the time of the first debate in late September Clinton had been off the trail for quite a bit, first recovering from her pneumonia and then doing debate prep, with Trump nipping at her heels. When she showed up looking very healthy, sharp and aggressive, it changed the narrative overnight. Indeed, her ability to bait him into misbehavior had her dominating that debate from beginning to end, when she hit him with the Alicia Machado story that had him reeling for days afterward. So it’s true that Trump’s poll numbers have been cratering for a month now, pointing to what may be a catastrophic loss for the Republicans. Much of that happened because of revelations about Trump’s horrifying misogyny and his ongoing inability to behave with any discipline. But it’s a mistake to discount the huge effect of the debates, well beyond Trump’s predictably ridiculous performance. These were the first occasions since the Benghazi hearings for people to see what Clinton is made of, and it reminded them of the characteristics that make her a formidable leader. When she stood there, face-to-face with Trump, it was clear that one of them was a president. And it wasn’t him.",REAL
+6696,FINA suspends Russian swimmer for 8 years over doping — web portal - Russia News Now,"This post was originally published on this site Vitaly Melnikov 
+© Stanislav Krasilnikov/TASS 
+MOSCOW. November 11. /TASS/. The International Swimming Federation (FINA) has banned Russian swimmer Vitaly Melnikov for eight years after a repeat violation of anti-doping rules, the web portal Swimswam reported on Friday. 
+The swimmer who was earlier suspended for two years had his sample taken on March 29, 2016. The sample tested positive. 
+{{item.group_date}} ",FAKE
+7991,BREAKING : Hillary Campaign Manager Deletes his Entire Twitter Timeline – TruthFeed,"BREAKING : Hillary Campaign Manager Deletes his Entire Twitter Timeline BREAKING : Hillary Campaign Manager Deletes his Entire Twitter Timeline Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 28, 2016 
+The Hillary campaign is collapsing. 
+After discovering “new emails” the FBI just announced that they’re reopening the investigation into Hillary’s mishandling of classified information. BREAKING: FBI re-opening Hillary Clinton email investigation #LockHerUp #FridayFeeling 
+— OakTown ☢FBI Re-Do☢ (@hrtablaze) October 28, 2016 
+Now, we’re learning that Hillary’s campaign manager, Robby Mook has deleted his entire Twitter timeline. This story is developing, but obviously, there’s panic – and possibly more cover up inside the Clinton camp. This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
+1303,Why Ted Cruz Has the Most to Lose in New Hampshire,"Ted Cruz took first prize in the Iowa caucuses, but in the days before the New Hampshire primary, not many people are treating the Texas senator like a winner.
+
+Instead, the talk has turned to a clash between Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, the two front-runners in the Granite State, and how one has to lose a bit less than the other in order to claim victory. And whenever Cruz’s name comes up, it tends to be connected to accusations over the “dirty tricks” he allegedly played to win Iowa. Now, with victory in New Hampshire looking increasingly unlikely, Cruz risks looking like a third wheel. Saturday’s Republican debate is a crucial opportunity for him to prevent that fate, but to do so, he just somehow swipe support from either Trump or Rubio.
+
+Cruz goes into the debate with the curse of the Iowa winner looming over him: Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, fellow Christian conservatives who won the caucuses in the past two elections, both ended up losing the nomination. In those elections, the winner in New Hampshire ended up with the Republican nomination. While Trump is currently the front-runner, he also happens to be entirely unpredictable and apparently disinterested in running a coherent ground game. Cruz, on the other hand, has a strong campaign organization in New Hampshire, but is unlikely to win the state thanks to a Rubio surge—that is, unless the polls are misleading, as they were in Iowa.
+
+Winning Iowa at all costs has also put a target on Cruz’s back. In the wake of his victory come accusations from Trump and Ben Carson that the Cruz campaign cheated its way to first place, with Trump calling for the Iowa results to be invalidated and Cruz indicted for voter fraud. When Trump, with an assist from Carson, inevitably turns his wrath on Cruz on Saturday, he will attack the Texan’s integrity and cast him as a political sneak, a description that does tend to befit Cruz’s reputation. The rest of the candidates will likely tear at him, too, given his winner’s status in Iowa. (Luckily for Cruz, few people watch debates on a Saturday night.)
+
+But most important, Cruz now faces two opponents whom he narrowly beat in Iowa, and who are setting themselves up for the showdown he wanted to participate in. The inevitability of his loss in New Hampshire—polls already show him dropping after Rubio’s Iowa performance—has set up the renegade Trump in one corner, and the establishment Rubio in the other. Though Cruz has long trumpeted his own ideological purity, Trump has staked out voters to the far right, while Rubio increasingly fortifies his own position in the center thanks to a bevy of endorsements, leaving Cruz as the man uncertainly, nebulously floating somewhere in between.
+
+For Cruz, his goal on Saturday is not just survival, but to remind the nation that he continues to be relevant as Rubio and Trump suit up for the colossal, intra-party philosophical clash that has loomed over the Republican primary. But barring a moment on the stage where Trump or Rubio utterly, completely collapse, Cruz, the man who won over Iowans with his religious zeal, may find himself, like Huckabee and Santorum before him, a bit player strutting and fretting upon the debate stage, and nothing more.",REAL
+9051,“Nothing Good Can Come of This Election”–and That’s Good,"Posted on November 4, 2016 by Charles Hugh Smith 
+The overwhelming consensus of the punditry across the political spectrum is that “Nothing Good Can Come of This Election”–and that’s a very good thing. The handwringing goes like this: The country is deeply divided by schisms that cannot be bridged, every institution from the two parties to the mainstream media to the Department of Justice has been tarnished by cover-ups, collusion or worse; whomever wins the election will enter the presidency without a mandate, and so on. 
+Why is “nothing good can come of this” good? Because ridding the nation of its political corruption will require hitting bottom. 
+Just as an alcoholic or drug addict is incapable of making any truly positive changes until he/she hits absolute bottom, so it is with our tolerance of a corrupt political system that is poisoning the nation, one injection of corrupt cash, collusion and pay-to-play at a time. 
+If our rotten-to-the-core politics as usual is indeed flying off the cliff to complete destruction, that is an unalloyed good. 
+Just as alcoholics continue down their self-destructive path with the aid of enablers, so too has the corrupt political order expanded with the aid of the Mainstream Media, insiders in the Department of Justice, K Street lobbyists and a veritable army of well-paid lackeys, pundits, academics, apparatchiks and assorted toadies in the organs of governance and in the big-money private sector and philanthro-capitalist dynasties of pay-to-play foundations. 
+The only way anything will truly change in the political order is if every Establishment insider politico loses every election, from the presidency to dogcatcher. Nothing will change until the mere existence of a private foundation like the Clinton Foundation triggers a landslide loss for the politico with ties to such corruption. 
+Nothing will change until the collusion of the mainstream media (supplying the insider candidate with debate questions, etc.) alone causes the colluding candidate to lose by a landslide. 
+Nothing will change until candidates who refuse to accept any donation larger than $100 from anyone or any entity beat the Goldman Sachs/Saudi prince-funded insider candidates by a landslide. 
+Nothing will change until candidates who fund costly negative TV advertising campaigns with millions in pay-to-play “contributions” from Goldman Sachs et al. lose by a landslide. 
+You get the point: we the citizens and voters have to stop being enablers of systemic corruption. We have to stop being bamboozled by insiders with promises of “hope and change” and the usual negative TV blitzes funded by corrupt big money. 
+It’s easy to blame lax campaign laws or the corrupted candidates and their insider toadies, but ultimately we’re responsible for enabling corruption, collusion, pay-for-play and a political and financial Elite that’s above the law. 
+From the point of view of the corrupted, colluding insiders, MSM flunkies, Department of Justice lackeys and well-paid parrot-pundits, nothing good can come from this election because half the voters may actually cast off the shackles of the nation’s corrupt and corrupting political and financial Elites. 
+This mass rejection of the politics as usual of corrupt and corrupting political and financial Elites is the highest possible good –a public good that eludes the hand-wringing corrupt insiders, pundits and toadies who have sucked up fortunes from the trough of putrid systemic corruption.",FAKE
+10200,List of Republicans opposing Trump | OffGuardian,"Charlie Baker , Massachusetts (2015–present)[31] R obert J. Bentley , Alabama (2011–present) (withdrew endorsement)[32] Dennis Daugaard , South Dakota (2011–present) (withdrew endorsement, called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy)[33] Bill Haslam , Tennessee (2011–present)[34] Gary Herbert , Utah (2009–present) (withdrew endorsement)[35] Larry Hogan , Maryland (2015–present)[36][37] Susana Martinez , New Mexico (2011–present); Chair of the Republican Governors Association (2015–present)[38] Brian Sandoval , Nevada (2011–present) (withdrew endorsement)[39] Rick Snyder , Michigan (2011–present)[40] 
+Former Former Massachusetts Governor and 2012 nominee for President Mitt Romney Arne Carlson , Minnesota (1991–99) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] A. Linwood Holton Jr ., Virginia (1970–74); Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs (1974–75) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[41] Jon Huntsman Jr ., Utah (2005–09); United States Ambassador to China (2009–11); United States Ambassador to Singapore (1992–93) (withdrew endorsement)[42] William Milliken , Michigan (1969–83) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[43] Kay A. Orr , Nebraska (1987–91)[44] Tim Pawlenty , Minnesota (2003–11) (withdrew endorsement)[45] Marc Racicot , Montana (1993–01); Chair of the Republican National Committee (2001–03)[46] Mitt Romney , Massachusetts (2003–07), 2012 nominee for President[47] Arnold Schwarzenegger , California (2003–11)[48] William Weld , Massachusetts (1991–97) (2016 Libertarian nominee for Vice President)[49] U.S. Senators Kelly Ayotte , New Hampshire (2011–present) (withdrew intended vote, writing-in Mike Pence)[50] Shelley Moore Capito , West Virginia (2015–present) (withdrew endorsement)[51] Susan Collins , Maine (1997–present)[52] Jeff Flake , Arizona (2013–present) (called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy)[53][54] Cory Gardner , Colorado (2015–present) (withdrew endorsement, called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy, writing-in Mike Pence)[55] Dean Heller , Nevada (2011–present)[56] Mark Kirk , Illinois (2010–present) (withdrew endorsement, writing-in Colin Powell)[37] Mike Lee , Utah (2011–present)[57] John McCain , Arizona (1987–present); 2008 nominee for President (withdrew endorsement)[58] Lisa Murkowski , Alaska (2002–present) (called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy)[59] Rob Portman , Ohio (2010-present) [60] Ben Sasse , Nebraska (2015–present)[20][61] Dan Sullivan , Alaska (2015–present) (withdrew endorsement, called on Trump to withdraw candidacy, writing-in Mike Pence)[62] John Thune , South Dakota (2005–present) (withdrew endorsement, called on Trump to withdraw candidacy)[63] Former Norm Coleman , Minnesota (2003–09)[28][64] David Durenberger , Minnesota (1978–95) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Slade Gorton , Washington (1981–87, 1989–2001) (endorsed Evan McMullin)[65] Gordon J. Humphrey , New Hampshire (1979–90) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[66][67] John Warner , Virginia (1979–2009); United States Secretary of the Navy (1972–74) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[68] U.S. Representatives Justin Amash , Michigan (2011–present)[28] Mike Coffman , Colorado (2009–present)[69] Barbara Comstock , Virginia (2015–present)[70] Carlos Curbelo , Florida (2015–present)[20][71] Rodney Davis , Illinois (2013–present) (withdrew endorsement)[72] Charlie Dent , Pennsylvania (2005–present)[73] Bob Dold , Illinois (2011–13, 2015–present)[28][74] Jeff Fortenberry , Nebraska (2005–present) (withdrew endorsement)[72] Scott Garrett , New Jersey (2003–present) (withdrew endorsement)[72] Kay Granger , Texas (1997–present) (called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy)[75] Richard L. Hanna , New York (2011–present) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[28][76] Cresent Hardy , Nevada (2015–present) (withdrew endorsement)[77] Joe Heck , Nevada (2011–present); 2016 nominee for U.S. Senate (withdrew endorsement)[77] Jaime Herrera Beutler , Washington (2011–present) (writing-in Paul Ryan)[78] Will Hurd , Texas (2015–present)[79] David Jolly , Florida (2014–present)[80] John Katko , New York (2015–present)[81] Adam Kinzinger , Illinois (2011–present)[82] Steve Knight , California (2015–present)[83] Frank LoBiondo , New Jersey (1995–present) (withdrew endorsement, writing-in Mike Pence)[84] Mia Love , Utah (2015–present)[85] Pat Meehan , Pennsylvania (2011–present) (called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy)[84] Erik Paulsen , Minnesota (2009–present) (withdrew endorsement)[86] Reid Ribble , Wisconsin (2011–present)[28] Scott Rigell , Virginia (2011–present) (endorsed Gary Johnson)[20] Martha Roby , Alabama (2011–present) (called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy)[87][88] Tom Rooney , Florida (2009–present) (withdrew endorsement)[72] Ileana Ros-Lehtinen , Florida (1989–present)[28] Mike Simpson , Idaho (1999–present) (withdrew endorsement)[10] Fred Upton , Michigan (1987–present)[89] David Valadao, California (2013–present)[90] Ann Wagner , Missouri (2013–present) (withdrew endorsement)[91] Host of Morning Joe on MSNBC and former U.S. Representative from Florida Joe Scarborough Former Steve Bartlett , Texas (1983–91)[92] Bob Bauman , Maryland (1973–81)[92] Sherwood Boehlert , New York (1993–2007) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[93] Jack Buechner , Missouri (1987–91)[92] Tom Campbell , California (1989–93, 1995–2001) (endorsed Gary Johnson)[94] Bill Clinger , Pennsylvania (1979–97)[92] Tom Coleman , Missouri (1976–93)[92] Geoff Davis , Kentucky (2005–12)[92] Mickey Edwards , Oklahoma (1977–93)[92] Harris Fawell , Illinois (1985–99)[92] Ed Foreman , Texas (1963–65, 1969–71)[92] Amo Houghton , New York (1987–2005)[92] Bob Inglis , South Carolina (1993–99, 2005–11)[28] Jim Kolbe , Arizona (1985–2007) (endorsed Gary Johnson)[95] Steve Kuykendall , California (1999–2001)[92] Jim Leach , Iowa (1977–2007)[92] Pete McCloskey , California (1967–83)[92] Connie Morella , Maryland (1987–2003) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Mike Parker , Mississippi (1989–99); Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works (2001–02)[92] Ron Paul , Texas (1976–77, 1979–85, 1997–2013)[96] Tom Petri , Wisconsin (1979–2015)[92] John Porter , Illinois (1980–2001)[92] Joe Scarborough , Florida (1995–2001); commentator and author[97] Claudine Schneider , Rhode Island (1981–91) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[93] Chris Shays , Connecticut (1987–2009) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Peter Smith , Vermont (1989–11)[92] Mark Souder , Indiana (1995–2010)[98] J.C. Watts , Oklahoma (1995–2003)[20] Edward Weber , Ohio (1981–83)[92] Vin Weber , Minnesota (1983–93)[99] G. William Whitehurst , Virginia (1969–87)[92] Dick Zimmer , New Jersey (1991–97) (endorsed Gary Johnson)[100] Former State Department officials Richard Armitage , Deputy Secretary of State; Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[101] John B. Bellinger III , Legal Adviser of the Department of State; Legal Adviser to the National Security Council[12] Robert Blackwill , United States Ambassador to India; Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Planning (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[12][17] R. Nicholas Burns , Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs; United States Ambassador to NATO; United States Ambassador to Greece (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[102] Eliot A. Cohen , Counselor of the United States Department of State[12][20] Chester Crocker , Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs[22] Jendayi Frazer , Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs[12] James K. Glassman , Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[22] David F. Gordon , Director of Policy Planning[12] Donald Gregg , United States Ambassador to South Korea[19] David A. Gross , U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] John Hillen , Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs[12] Reuben Jeffery III , Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment[12] Robert Joseph , Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs[22] David J. Kramer , Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor[12] Stephen D. Krasner , Director of Policy Planning[22] Frank Lavin , United States Ambassador to Singapore; Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Robert McCallum , United States Ambassador to Australia; Acting United States Deputy Attorney General[12] Richard Miles , United States Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, and Georgia; Acting United States Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan[22] Roger Noriega , Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs[22] John Osborn , Member of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy[22] Kristen Silverberg , Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs[12] William Howard Taft IV , Legal Adviser of the Department of State; United States Ambassador to NATO; United States Deputy Secretary of Defense[12] Shirin R. Tahir-Kheli , Senior Advisor for Women’s Empowerment; Special Assistant to the President for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[12][17] Betty Tamposi , Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[103] Peter Teeley , United States Ambassador to Canada (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Robert Tuttle , United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[104] Philip Zelikow , Counselor of the United States Department of State[12] Former Defense Department officials D on Bacon , Brigadier General, United States Air Force; 2016 nominee for Nebraska’s 2nd district (called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy)[105] Seth Cropsey , Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict & Interdependent Capabilities[22] Michael B. Donley , United States Secretary of the Air Force (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Eric Edelman , Under Secretary of Defense for Policy[12] Doug Feith , Under Secretary of Defense for Policy[106] Robert Hastings , Acting Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs[22] Tim Kane , United States Air Force intelligence officer; Chief Labor Economist, Joint Economic Committee[22] Mary Beth Long , Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs[12] Alberto J. Mora , General Counsel of the Navy (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Gale Pollock , Acting Surgeon General of the United States Army (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Martha Rainville , Major General, United States Air Force; Vermont Adjutant General[22] Michael Rubin , Defense Country Director for Iran and Iraq[22] Kalev Sepp , Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Capabilities[22] Matthew Waxman , Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[10][12] Paul Wolfowitz , United States Deputy Secretary of Defense; President of the World Bank Group (voting for Clinton)[107] Dov Zakheim , Comptroller of the Department of Defense[12] Former National Security officials Ken Adelman , Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[10][22] Mike Baker , covert operations officer, Central Intelligence Agency[22] Tom Donnelly , Director of the Policy Group, House Armed Services Committee[22] Gary Edson , Deputy National Security Advisor[12] Richard Falkenrath , Deputy Homeland Security Advisor[12] Peter Feaver , Senior Director for Strategic Planning[12] Aaron Friedberg , Deputy National Security Advisor to the Vice President[12] Greg Garcia , Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Cyber Security and Telecommunications[22] Michael Green , Senior Director for Asia, National Security Council[12] Paul Haenle , Director for China and Taiwan, National Security Council[12] Michael Hayden , Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006–09)[12] William Inboden , Senior Director for Strategic Planning, National Security Council[12] James Jeffrey , Deputy National Security Advisor[12] James C. Langdon, Jr ., Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board[12] Deborah Loewer , Director of the White House Situation Room (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[108] Evan McMullin , Operations officer, Central Intelligence Agency; Senior Adviser for National Security, House Foreign Affairs Committee (Independent candidate for President)[109][110] P aul D. Miller , Director for Afghanistan, National Security Council[22] Meghan O’Sullivan , Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan[12] Kori Schake , Director of Defense Strategy, National Security Council[12] Gary Schmitt , Executive Director of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board[22] Brent Scowcroft , National Security Advisor (1975–77, 1989–93); Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (2001–05) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] David Shedd , Deputy Director of National Intelligence; Acting Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency[22] Stephen Slick , Senior Director for Intelligence Programs, National Security Council[12] Frances Townsend , Homeland Security Advisor[22] Kenneth Wainstein , Homeland Security Advisor[12] Other former federal government officials Former Chief of Staff to the Vice President and founder of The Weekly Standard Bill Kristol Donald B. Ayer , United States Deputy Attorney General[12] Phillip D. Brady , White House Staff Secretary; White House Cabinet Secretary (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[108] Paul K. Charlton , United States Attorney[111] Linda Chavez , Director of the Office of Public Liaison; 1986 nominee for U.S. Senator from Maryland[28] Jim Cicconi , White House Staff Secretary (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Scott Evertz , Director of the Office of National AIDS Policy (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Tony Fratto , Deputy White House Press Secretary[112] Charles Fried , United States Solicitor General; Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[113] Fred T. Goldberg, Jr. , Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy; Commissioner of Internal Revenue (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[17] Hugh Hewitt , Assistant White House Counsel; conservative radio host (called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy)[114] Theodore Kassinger , United States Deputy Secretary of Commerce[12] Bill Kristol , Chief of Staff to the Vice President (endorsed Evan McMullin)[115] Rosario Marin , Treasurer of the United States (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[116] John McKay , former United States Attorney (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[117] Andrew Natsios , Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development; Chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party[12] Daniel F. Runde , Director of the Global Development Alliance[22] Larry D. Thompson , United States Deputy Attorney General[12] Dan Webb , former United States Attorney (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[118] Peter Wehner , Director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives[10] Lezlee Westine , Director of the Office of Public Liaison (2001–2005) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[99][119] Peter Zeidenberg, Assistant United States Attorney[111] Statewide officials Current Brian Calley , Lieutenant Governor of Michigan (2011–present) (called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy)[120] Spencer Cox , Lieutenant Governor of Utah (2013–present)[121] Kim Guadagno , Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey (2010–present)[122] Former Paul Anderson , Associate Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court (1994–2013) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[123] Greg Bell , Lieutenant Governor of Utah (2009–13) (endorsed Evan McMullin)[124] Bob Brown , Secretary of State of Montana (2001–05) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[125] Betty Montgomery , Attorney General of Ohio (1995–2003), Ohio State Auditor (2003–07)[126] Mark Shurtleff , Attorney General of Utah (2001–13) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[127] Robert Smith , Associate Judge of the New York Court of Appeals (2004–14) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[128] Michael Steele , Lieutenant Governor of Maryland (2003–07) and RNC Chair (2009–11)[129] Diana Taylor , New York Superintendent of Banks (2003–07) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[130] Grant Woods , Attorney General of Arizona (1991–99) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[131] State legislators Current Jack Ciattarelli , New Jersey State Representative (2011–present) (withdrew endorsement)[122] Kurt Daudt , Minnesota State Representative (2011–present), Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives (2015–present) (called on Trump to withdraw his candidacy)[132] David Johnson , Iowa State Senator (2003–present)[37][133] Mark B. Madsen , Utah State Senator (2005–present) (endorsed Gary Johnson)[134] Charisse Millett , Alaska State Representative (2009–present), Majority Leader (2015–present) (withdrew endorsement)[135][136] Ross Spano , Florida State Representative (2012–present)[80] Joe Sweeney , New Hampshire State Representative (2012–present) (withdrew endorsement)[137] Former Lois Sherman Hagarty , Pennsylvania State Representative (1980–92)[138] Brian Lees , Massachusetts State Senator (1989–2007), Minority Leader (1993–2007)[139] Jack McGregor , Pennsylvania State Senator (1963–70) (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[108] Will Weatherford , Florida State Representative (2006–14), Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives (2012–14)[140] Municipal officials Joel Giambra , former Erie County Executive (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[141] Carlos A. Giménez , Mayor of Miami-Dade County (endorsed Hillary Clinton)[142] Danny Jones , Mayor of Charleston, West Virginia (endorsed Gary Johnson)[143][144] Aimee Winder Newton , Member of the Salt Lake County Council (withdrew endorsement)[145] Tomás Regalado , Mayor of Miami[146] OTHER NOTABLE INDIVIDUALS ",FAKE
+10009,Putin: Use of 'mythical' Russian military threat a ‘profitable business',"vladimir putin , Valdai , sochi , RBTH Daily Russian President Vladimir Putin. Source: Kremlin.ru 
+Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that the use of what he described as a ""mythical"" Russian military threat is ""a profitable business."" 
+The Russian leader made this statement on Oct. 27 at a session of the Valdai international discussion club in Sochi. 
+""Fabricated, mythical threats like the so-called Russian military threat are constantly repeated. This is, indeed, a profitable business to seek new budgets in countries and press allies to fit the interests of one superpower, expand NATO and bring the alliance’s infrastructure, combat units and military hardware to our borders,"" said Putin. 
+""The truth is, however, that Russia is not going to attack anyone, that’s ridiculous,"" he continued.",FAKE
+4214,Bernie Sanders says private meeting with Pope Francis is not an endorsement,"ROME —  U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders met privately with Pope Francis on Saturday, the capstone to an unusual detour from the American election.
+
+Sanders said the meeting was for personal reasons and does not constitute an endorsement from the Holy See.
+
+""I am an enormous fan of the pope because I think he has played a transformative role in the world in talking about issues that very rarely get the kind of discussion they deserve,"" Sanders said in an interview aboard his chartered plane. ""Whether it is income and wealth inequality, whether it is what he calls the dispossessed, the young people, the old people, the unemployed people who are on the sidelines of society, whether it is the ideology of greed, whether it is need to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to save the planet, he has been a transformative leader.
+
+""And he is a very beautiful man,"" Sanders continued. ""When you meet him, you see something very, very special in his face. He is a man of peace, and you see that.""
+
+Some of Sanders's advisers, including his wife, Jane, also were at the meeting. He said that there was no discussion of his underdog candidacy or the election. There was no photograph of the brief meeting at the papal residence complex, in keeping with Vatican protocol and also, Sanders said, ""to make clear that there is no endorsement here.""
+
+Francis, on Saturday, made it clear that his meeting with Sanders was not political, saying that those who thought it was should “look for a psychiatrist,” according to Reuters.
+
+The pontiff met Sanders at the Vatican guest house, where the pope lives. “When I came down, I greeted him, I shook his hand and nothing more. This is called good manners and it is not getting involved in politics,” Reuters says the pope told reporters, during an answer to a question aboard the plane returning from the Greek island of Lesbos, where he visited a refugee camp.
+
+[Pope calls for compassion for refugees, takes three families back to Italy]
+
+“If anyone thinks that greeting someone is getting involved in politics, I recommend that he look for a psychiatrist,” he reportedly said while laughing.
+
+Sanders was at the Vatican, participating in a seminar on income inequality and economic justice at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, where he was invited to attend as well as speak. He and other conference invitees spent the night at the Vatican after the conference.
+
+The trip suggests that Sanders is looking ahead to how he would continue and expand the focus on very liberal social justice issues that has defined his candidacy. In a matter of months he moved from gadfly to serious challenger to the longtime Democratic favorite, largely on the strength of a set of ideas more common to liberal university campuses than the political debate stage.
+
+""If elected president I certainly would look forward to working with the pope in trying to create a moral economy, which was the theme of this conference; an economy which challenges the idea that greed has got to be the dominant force in the world's economy,"" Sanders said.
+
+And if he loses?
+
+""Well, the ideas and the efforts remain the same. I'm a United States senator from Vermont. And I'll continue to fight the fights that I've always fought,"" with a larger platform to do so, Sanders said.
+
+The Vatican invitation is symbolic of that platform, he agreed. But Sanders and the pontiff share many goals for social justice and economic restructuring, and Sanders suggested that, and not his candidacy, was the reason for the audience with Francis.
+
+""The speech that I gave yesterday would have been the speech 10 years ago, long before I ever dreamed of running for president,"" he said in an interview with The Washington Post.
+
+Sanders said the trip was ""absolutely"" a worthwhile diversion from campaigning in New York, where he trails front-runner Hillary Clinton by double digits in most polls.
+
+""Look, we have campaigned extraordinarily hard in New York,"" Sanders said. He claimed he has addressed 96,000 people across the state at rallies and other meetings. ""We have worked very hard and when we go back, we're gonna work hard. This was an invitation that I would never have forgiven myself if I had refused.""
+
+Sanders needs a solid showing in New York, which offers more than 200 delegates, to maintain a plausible argument that he can catch up to Clinton. His path to the nomination has grown narrower even as he has defeated Clinton in a string of contests over the past month.
+
+""Uh, we got a shot,"" Sanders said when asked about his prospects for Tuesday's primary vote. ""It's gonna be tough for us, not just because Clinton has won two elections there, but because of the nature of the voting rules.""
+
+New York, which Clinton represented as a senator for eight years, allows only registered Democrats to vote in the Democratic primary, meaning independents are cut out. Sanders has been regularly defeating Clinton among independents. The state also does not allow same-day registration. Sanders said he disagrees with both rules.
+
+""Those are the rules. They don't work for us,"" Sanders said. ""But nonetheless, if there is a large voter turnout, we got a shot to win this.""
+
+Sanders flew to Rome on a large, chartered airliner, largely paid with campaign funds, spokesman Michael Briggs said.
+
+He said he did not know the exact cost of the trip. News organizations flying with Sanders pay for their passage, and the Secret Service also pays a share.
+
+Sanders has taken some criticism earlier in his campaign for using chartered aircraft — a luxury for the privileged class as well as an addition to carbon emissions — while railing against the excesses of the wealthiest top 1 percent of Americans.
+
+Several of Sanders’s advisers, along with his wife, their four children and four of their grandchildren, accompanied him for the overnight visit to Rome. While Jane Sanders attended the conference with her husband and joined him in meeting the pope, the rest of the family spent time sightseeing. The trip also included a stay at a posh hotel.
+
+Sanders was back on the plane Saturday, as he plans to campaign in Brooklyn in the evening.
+
+Stefano Pitrelli in Rome contributed to this report.",REAL
+2316,Alabama Lawmaker: Same-Sex Couples Don’t Deserve Same Financial Benefits As Other Families,"Most conservatives who oppose marriage equality will cite the Bible, “nature,” or polygamy and incest to justify their opposition.
+
+But for one Alabama state senator, a reason to oppose marriage equality is that it would allow same-sex couples to receive the same financial benefits that different-sex couples currently receive.
+
+“You gotta look at the financial aspect of this as well,” State Sen. Del Marsh (R) told radio host Dale Jackson last week. “Let’s face it. If gay marriage is approved, I assume that those types of unions, those people would be entitled to Social Security benefits, insurance. Where does it end?”
+
+Contrary to Marsh’s claim that the financial impact of marriage equality would be devastating, studies have shown that it would be a boon for the economy. Indeed, in 2004 the Congressional Budget Office weighed the potential increased spending on Social Security and other benefits against the increased savings from other programs like Medicare and Medicaid. They found that if all states were to legalize marriage equality, it would boost the federal budget by $10 billion over 10 years. Other reports have found that legalizing marriage equality would improve state budgets as well. The Williams Institute estimates that marriage equality would add $21.7 million to Alabama’s economy over the first three years.
+
+Alabama’s opponents of marriage equality were left scrambling after a judge ruled two weeks ago that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violated both Equality Protection and Due Process protections. The decision is temporarily stayed, pending appeal. It is set to take effect on February 9th.
+
+Marsh was first elected to the Alabama State Senate in 1998. He is currently serving his second term as the President Pro Tempore after being unanimously re-elected by his colleagues.",REAL
+8411,Will the Media Reset After the Election or Are We Stuck With This Tabloid Stuff?,"Written by Peter Van Buren   venerable New York Times ran a story saying Donald Trump lies about the height of his buildings.For no apparent reason, the Times resurrected some information from 1979 saying Trump insisted on counting the basement levels of his signature Trump Tower in the overall count of how many floors the building has. The Times compares this lie to “reports” that Trump adds an inch to his actual body height in his bio materials, and also repeated the gag line that he boasted about how long his penis is (no word on whether it is or is not actually longer than expected.)You have to wade down to paragraph 12 to learn other New York developers use the same count-the-basements levels gimmick to be able to advertise their buildings as taller. There is absolutely no news. The Russians Head over to Slate , which published an “investigative piece” alleging a Trump computer server was secretly communicating with a Russian bank. The story had previously been debunked by the New York Times and The Intercept, but Slate ran it as if they had uncovered the smoking gun proving Trump is under the control of the Russians.At Mother Jones , another article alleged that an anonymous, former intelligence officer provided the FBI with information on a Russian scheme to help Trump win the presidency.“There’s no way to tell whether the FBI has confirmed or debunked any of the allegations contained in the former spy’s memos,” the story said. “But a Russian intelligence attempt to co-opt or cultivate a presidential candidate would mark an even more serious operation than the hacking.”One more example, from Vox , which wrote without even bothering to source it at all “There is basically conclusive evidence that Russia is interfering in the US election, and that this interference has been designed to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. There is strong evidence linking Trump’s foreign policy advisers to Russia, and Trump’s stated policy ideas are extremely favorable to Russian interests.” Journalism Much? I’ve chosen these examples because they are from publications that have in the past enjoyed decent reputations for reporting, and because these stories were run as “news,” not opinion columns, where the standards go right through the floor. Even Mother Jones, which clearly works left-of-center, used to do so with some solid journalism.Not any more.These places (never find fringe publications) are now working with the same standards once reserved for reporting on aliens at Roswell, Elvis sightings and the Illuminati New World Order. It is apparently now within the bounds of mainstream journalism to build a story out of, well, nothing, such as a factoid from 1979, or essentially accuse a presidential candidate of treason based on a single, anonymous source, or claim the Russians have taken over our electoral process based on no sources at all. And Clinton… On the other side, reporting on Clinton by many of these same publications swerves between hagiography and poo-pooing away anything unfavorable. Emails? Who cares! Questions about what her accomplishments as Secretary of State really were? If you ask, you hate women. Pay-for-Play with the Clinton Foundation? Hah, everybody does it, it doesn’t matter. The standard seems to be absent a notarized receipt for a donation matching an arms sale, or a criminal conviction, nothing matters. Next? So be it. The media has fully sh*t the bed this election. That’s where we find ourselves.But what’s next? Will the media reset itself after November 8, or will they run President Trump is Putin’s dog stories for the full term? Will President Clinton be given a pass on, well, everything, for four years, with apologists and explainers on the front page of the Times, never mind in editorials?At what point will the media dig themselves out of this and start real reporting again? Reprinted with permission from WeMeantWell.com . Related",FAKE
+6143,DOJ COMPLAINT: Comey Under Fire Over Partisan Witch Hunt For Hillary (TWEETS/VIDEO),"DOJ COMPLAINT: Comey Under Fire Over Partisan Witch Hunt For Hillary (TWEETS/VIDEO) By Natalie Dailey on October 30, 2016 Subscribe 
+For pretty much this entire election, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has gotten flak for the way she handled her emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. Congressional Republicans grilled her for hours about it, but have found nothing. These same Republicans just keep on complaining anyway. 
+Now, the Director of the FBI, James Comey, wrote a memo saying some newly-found emails may be linked to Hillary Clinton and her private server. 
+The media and the supporters of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump are excited about the possibility of the FBI reopening the investigation. 
+Sorry, guys, it’s not. 
+A Republican Congressman started a Twitter shitstorm over this news: FBI Dir just informed me, ""The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation."" Case reopened 
+— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016 
+Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan (R-Wis), said that Clinton’s security briefings should stop: BREAKING NEWS → The FBI is reopening its investigation into Secretary Hillary Clinton. 
+My full statement ⇩ pic.twitter.com/LHfyg46dWk 
+— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) October 28, 2016 
+At least Hillary Clinton didn’t blab classified information on television. 
+Many news outlets falsely reported that the entire investigation was back on. 
+The Associated Press tweeted: BREAKING: US official: Newly discovered emails related to Clinton investigation did not come from her private server. 
+— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) October 28, 2016 
+The emails were found during the investigation of disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner and his latest sexting scandal involving a 15-year-old girl. 
+The FBI doesn’t know for sure what is in the emails. It is very difficult to read emails when you don’t have a warrant to do so. This puts Comey’s letter to Congress in an even shadier light. All they know is that none of the emails are to or from Clinton herself, and they may only be duplicates of emails the FBI already has in their possession. 
+The Department of Justice has received a complaint from the Democratic Coalition Against Trump accusing FBI Director Comey of violating the Hatch Act . 
+The complaint reads in part: “This is an election year, and we are just 11 days away from the date that the American public votes to choose the next President of the United States, I am writing to ask that an investigation be opened into Director Comey for any potential violations of the Hatch Act. The timing of this announcement, accompanied by the vague facts of the investigation, seems as if Director Comey was making a political move, and not a professional one.” 
+Passed in 1939, the Hatch Act limits political activity of federal employees and certain state and D.C. employees who work with federal funding. It is meant to keep federal agencies from taking sides politically, and prevents employees from getting promotions based on political affiliations.",FAKE
+3262,GOP Senator David Perdue Jokes About Praying for Obama’s Death,"The freshman senator from Georgia quoted scripture at a right-wing Christian confab to say the president's days should be short.
+
+Sen. David Perdue, a freshman senator from Georgia, opened his remarks at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference by encouraging attendees to pray for President Obama. But, he added in a joking tone, they need to pray for him in a very specific way: “We should pray for him like Psalms 109:8 says: Let his days be few, and let another have his office,” the senator said, smiling wryly.
+
+The rest of that passage, which Perdue did not recite, reads, “May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.”
+
+“Let the creditor seize all that he has, and let strangers plunder his labor. Let there be none to extend mercy to him, nor let there be any to favor his fatherless children. Let his posterity be cut off, and in the generation following let their name be blotted out,” it continues.
+
+Perdue’s joke drew immediate criticism. Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, tweeted, “Republican Senator David Perdue is praying for President Obama to die. This is why Trump is the GOP nominee.”
+
+As the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel pointed out, conservatives have long invoked this verse in the yearning for an end to Obama’s days in office. A Christian Science Monitor report from November 16, 2009, detailed the popularity of bumper stickers that read simply, “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8.”
+
+The Road to Majority conference brings together top leaders in the social-conservative world, as well as prominent elected Republicans. Shortly after Perdue’s speech, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and top Trump adviser Sen. Jeff Sessions spoke. Donald Trump will keynote the event later today.
+
+“Senator Perdue said we are called to pray for our country, for our leaders, and for our president. He in no way wishes harm towards our president and everyone in the room understood that. However, we should add the media to our prayer list because they are pushing a narrative to create controversy and that is exactly what the American people are tired of.”",REAL
+9337,"Radio Derb Is On The Air–Leonardo And Brazil’s Miss Bum Bum Pageant, Etc.", ,FAKE
+8737,Assange claims ‘crazed’ Clinton campaign tried to hack WikiLeaks,"Julian Assange has claimed the Hillary Clinton campaign has attacked the servers being used by WikiLeaks. Despite the Ecuadorian embassy shutting down his internet until the US election is over, the website will continue publishing, according to Assange. “Everyday that you publish is a day that you have the initiative in the conflict,” Assange said via telephone at a conference in Argentina on Wednesday.
+The whistleblowing website has been releasing emails from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, on a daily basis since early October.
+Assange claimed the release “whipped up a crazed hornet’s nest atmosphere in the Hillary Clinton campaign” leading them to attack WikiLeaks.
+“ They attacked our servers and attempted hacking attacks and there is an amazing ongoing campaign where state documents were put in the UN and British courts to accuse me of being both a Russian spy and a pedophile,” he added.
+Ecuador’s decision to shut down his internet was described by Assange as a “strategic position” so that its “policy of non-intervention can’t be misinterpreted by actors in the US and even domestically in Ecuador.” 
+He said he was sympathetic with Ecuador, insisting they face the dilemma of having the US interfere with their elections next year if they appear to interfere with the US elections next month.
+Assange, who claimed the embassy will be without internet until the election is over to avoid accusations of interference, said he did not agree with Ecuador’s decision but did understand it. WikiLeaks will not be affected by the decision as they do not publish from Ecuador, he said.
+He did, however, reject the idea that WikiLeaks is interfering with the US election, claiming, “this is not the interference of electoral process, this is the definition of electoral process – for media organizations and, in fact, everyone to publish the truth and their opinion about what is occurring. It cannot be a free and informed election unless people are free to inform.” 
+He also attacked US TV networks, many of whom he accused of being “controlled by Clinton supporters.” 
+The Podesta emails will make no difference to the election result, according to Assange. “I don’t think there’s any chance of Donald Trump winning the election, even with the amazing material we are publishing, because most of the media organizations are strongly aligned with Hillary Clinton,” he said.
+Assange said journalists and people who work in the media are predominantly middle class and view Trump as representing “what in their mind is white trash.” 
+
+
+Source: RT News ",FAKE
+4490,State Department says it can't find emails from Clinton IT specialist,"The State Department told the Republican National Committee that it could not find any emails to or from Hillary Clinton's former IT specialist, who managed her private email server during her tenure as secretary of state before going on to work for the agency, according to a court filing made public Monday.
+
+
+
+The government's revelation in U.S. District Court in Washington came in answer to a lawsuit by the Republican National Committee. The RNC had sued over its public records request for all work-related emails sent to or received by Clinton's former aide, Bryan Pagliano, between 2009 and 2013, the years of Clinton's tenure as America's top diplomat. The lawsuit also pressed for other State Department records from the Clinton era.
+
+The RNC's filing said lawyers for the agency had informed them in discussions that ""the State Department has represented that no responsive records exist"" for any Pagliano emails. Pagliano was hired at the agency after reportedly setting up Clinton's server in 2009, but the lack of any official State Department emails raises the question whether he limited his email traffic using a private account, much like Clinton did during her four years as secretary, or whether his government emails were deleted.
+
+
+
+A State Department official said Monday that the agency possessed emails from Pagliano from the period after Clinton's term had ended, when he continued to work as a technology contractor.
+
+Agency spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau then added Monday evening that some Pagliano emails dating from Clinton's tenure had been recovered from agency officials' files and turned over to other organizations, including Senate investigators.
+
+
+
+""We have previously produced through FOIA and to Congress emails sent and received by Mr. Pagliano during Secretary Clinton's tenure,"" Trudeau said in a public statement. At least one email, which was sent in November 2012 to Clinton from Pagliano -- but possibly from his private email address -- was released as part of 30,000 Clinton emails made public by the agency over the past year.
+
+
+
+A spokesman for the RNC said the organization stood by its description of the discussions with lawyers for the State Department. The group said in its filing that ""the State Department has represented that no responsive records exist.""
+
+
+
+Raj Shah, the RNC spokesman, added, ""It's hard to believe that an IT staffer who set up Hillary Clinton's reckless email server never sent or received a single work-related email in the four years he worked at the State Department."" Clinton's campaign officials declined to comment in response to questions from The Associated Press.
+
+
+
+Trudeau said the State Department is working with Congress and several public records requesters to provide relevant material. She also said agency officials continue to search for ""Mr. Pagliano's emails, which the department may have otherwise retained."" Trudeau also said the department would respond further to the RNC in court.
+
+
+
+State Department officials told Senate investigators last year they could not find a file containing Pagliano's work emails during Clinton's tenure, an assertion first reported by Politico.
+
+
+
+Fox News reported in March that Pagliano has revealed several details about Clinton's personal email system to investigators, including who had access to it– as well as when and what devices were used. An intelligence source close to the case told Fox News that Pagliano has been a ""devastating witness"" to Clinton.
+
+The one email sent by Pagliano that surfaced among Clinton's 30,000 emails was sent to Clinton was a November 2012 birthday greeting. He wished her ""Happy Birthday Madam Secretary. To many more!""
+
+
+
+Pagliano's email address was censored, unlike numerous official State Department addresses that are listed in Clinton's emails -- suggesting he may have sent the message from a private address.
+
+Clinton did not reply directly to Pagliano. Instead, she sent a copy of an email to an aide with the instruction ""Pls respond.""
+
+ 
+
+ The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
+8062,The ‘P’ in PBS Should Stand for ‘Plutocratic’ or ‘Pentagon’,"The ‘P’ in PBS Should Stand for ‘Plutocratic’ or ‘Pentagon’ Posted on Oct 27, 2016 ( WikiMedia ) 
+In a television commercial that the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) ran for years, “PBS NewsHour” host Gwen Ifill declared that she loved her job because it allowed her to “ask not only all of my questions but also and more importantly all of your questions .” This assertion was and remains absurd, just like her network’s regular fundraising claim to be free of corporate sponsors. 
+The claim has long been contradicted by the string of corporate-image commercials (purchased by leading financial, defense, auto, insurance and rail corporations) that appear before the network’s nightly “NewsHour” broadcast—along with a list of corporate-sponsored foundations and superwealthy individuals who pay for the show, along with “regular viewers like you.” 
+Consistent with those commercials and despite its name, the news and commentary one finds on PBS is in rich tune with the narrow capitalist parameters of acceptable coverage and debate that typify the more fully and explicitly for-profit and commercialized corporate media. As progressive journalist David Sirota suggested two years ago , reflecting on recent investigations showing that supermoneyed, right-wing capitalists such as the Koch brothers and Texas billionaire John Arnold had (along with more liberal software mogul Bill Gates) influenced PBS content through multimillion-dollar donations, the “P” in PBS often seems to more properly stand for “Plutocratic,” not “Public.” 
+Advertisement Square, Site wide 
+None of this should be surprising to anyone familiar with the distinctively big-business-dominated history of U.S. broadcast media . Because the United States fails to provide anything like adequate funding for public broadcasting, both PBS and National Public Radio (a regular vehicle for neoliberal business ideology) depend upon foundations, corporations and wealthy individuals to pay for much of their programming. Beneath their standard claims to have no interest in shaping public media content, these private funders have bottom-line agendas, meaning that their contributions come with strings attached—strings that undermine the integrity of the “independent” journalism they bankroll. (For what it’s worth, between 1994 and 2014, the “NewsHour” was primarily owned by the for-profit firm Liberty Media . Liberty Media was run by the conservative and politically active billionaire John Malone, who had a majority stake in MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, the show’s producer.) 
+The Pentagon Broadcasting System? 
+What might seem more surprising, perhaps, is the remarkable extent to which the “P” in PBS often seems to stand for “Pentagon,” or perhaps “Presidential,” when it comes to foreign policy content. Whatever the global issue of the day or week, “NewsHour” anchors and their invited “experts” can be counted on to report and reflect in accord with the doctrinal assumption that Washington always operates with the best of intentions. They almost uniformly treat the U.S. as a great, benevolent and indispensable force for freedom, democracy, security, peace and order in a dangerous world full of evil and deadly actors. 
+The show’s invited commentators are drawn primarily from the nation’s imperial establishment. They are commonly current or retired insiders from within the Pentagon, the White House, the “intelligence community” and/or the nation’s elite network of foreign policy think tanks: the Council on Foreign Relations (the granddaddy of all U.S. ruling-class think tanks ), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Rand Corp. and the Hoover Institution, to name a handful. “NewsHour” anchors and guests generally agree that the United States’ officially designated enemies are malevolent bad guys who need to be contained, controlled and even attacked by the ultimate good guy, Uncle Sam. 
+Not surprisingly, the long and ongoing record of U.S. imperial arrogance and criminality (more on that below) is swept down George Orwell’s memory hole even as new entries are added to the ugly registry. When reported by the “NewsHour,” horrific crimes committed by the U.S. military are always treated as well-intended mistakes. Along with the rest of the mainstream U.S. media, the “NewsHour” “insist[s] that Russia deliberately bombs hospitals, etc., whereas if we do it, it is, of course, an accident .” 
+There’s some room for disagreement between and among the show’s invited experts—including the show’s semi-loopy foreign policy authority, Margaret Warner—about specific U.S. foreign policy tactics, strategies and actions. There’s no space for serious debate about the immorality, lawlessness or imperial nature of that policy. On the rare occasions “NewsHour” anchors seem to challenge guests from the White House or Pentagon on foreign policy matters, it is generally to ask why the U.S. isn’t going harder at the officially certified bad guys. 
+America as Umpire, Not Empire 
+The foreign policy coverage and commentary doesn’t get much better in the documentary division of PBS. A recent documentary (first aired nationally last week) shown by PBS bears the risible title “American Umpire”—an obvious World Series season play on what the filmmakers see as the preposterous notion of an American empire. It is narrated by ex-Marine and former “NewsHour” host and producer Jim Lehrer. Developed by the right-wing Hoover Institution and “targeted for PBS” (the organization’s own revealing phrase), “American Umpire” takes the doctrinal “American exceptionalist,” U.S.-good-and-civilized-rest-of-world-dangerous-and-bad narrative to absurd lengths. 
+It provides extensive “expert” commentary from such former imperial operatives as Madeline Albright (the onetime U.S. secretary of state who led the charge to criminally bomb Serbia and who went on CBS’ “60 Minutes” to say that the death of more than half a million Iraqi children killed by Washington-led “economic sanctions” was “a price worth paying” for the advance of U.S. foreign policy goals), Condoleezza Rice (George W. Bush’s neoconservative national security adviser before and during the arch-criminal U.S. invasion of Iraq), Gen. Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis (an Iraq invasion commander and a former chief of the U.S. Central Command, who two years ago told a San Diego audience that “it’s fun to shoot people”), George Schultz (the Reagan-era secretary of state who called the Sandinista government in Nicaragua “a cancer in our own land mass” that must be “cut out”) and Karl Eikenberry (a retired Army lieutenant general who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan 10 years ago). 
+With further commentary from a handful of mostly conservative academicians—above all the nationalist Texas A&M historian Elizabeth Cobbs ( author of a book on which the documentary is based), “American Umpire” portrays 20th and 21st century U.S. foreign policy as nothing more than a noble effort to selflessly provide welcome and fair rules and discipline on the rest of a childish, dangerous and reckless planet (think “Lord of the Flies”) that lacks the exceptional historical experience bequeathed to U.S. leaders by the nation’s far-seeing Founding Fathers. The only substantive criticism of U.S. foreign policy in “American Umpire” is the complaint, voiced by numerous interview subjects, that America harms itself to the benefit of others (the Europeans above all) by taking upon its shoulders too much of the burden of benevolently policing the planet. We are just too good for our own good. 
+Our Real Task 
+There is not space here to discuss in responsible detail the epic historical deletions and distortions this narrative imposes. The omissions are staggering. They range from the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos resisting U.S. imperial invasion and occupation at the last century’s outset to the restoration of de facto slavery in Haiti and the Dominican Republic after World War I; the unnecessary atom bombing of Hiroshima and, even worse, of Nagasaki (really the first shots of the Cold War ); the toppling of more than 50 governments by U.S. coups and invasions since the end of World War II; the liquidation of perhaps as many as 5 million Southeast Asians in the so-called Vietnam War between 1962 and 1975; the Cold War-era sponsorship of Third World fascism from Chile to South Africa and Indonesia; the attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and numerous CIA-directed terror bombings in socialist Cuba; the near instigation of global thermonuclear war on at least three occasions; the development and sponsorship of Osama bin Laden and other radically arch-reactionary, jihadist Muslim, paramilitary forces to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; the “Highway of Death,” when U.S. warplanes engaged in an aerial traffic jam as they rushed to slaughter tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Iraq in 1991; the coordination and sponsorship of a mass-murderous civil war on peasants, workers and intellectuals (with a death toll well into the many hundreds of thousands) in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s; the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq (responsible for at least 1 million Iraqi deaths); the calamitous U.S. toppling of the Libyan Gadhafi regime; the calamitous destabilization of the Syrian regime; the U.S. funding and encouragement of civil war in central Africa; the enablement and protection of a vicious right-wing coup in Honduras in the spring and summer of 2009; the criminal U.S. global war of terror, replete with rampant “targeted assassinations,” torture, illegal renditions, endless drone war and special-forces killing operations across the Muslim world and other places as well. 
+“American Umpire” hides these horrific transgressions and the imperial calculations behind much of U.S. foreign policy past and present. As numerous key U.S. planning documents reveal over and over, the goal of that policy was to maintain and, if necessary, install governments that “favor[ed] private investment of domestic and foreign capital, production for export, and the right to bring profits out of the country.” Given the United States’ remarkable possession of half the world’s capital after World War II, Washington elites had no doubt that U.S. investors and corporations would profit the most. Internally, the basic, selfish, national and imperial objectives were openly and candidly discussed. As the “liberal” and “dovish” imperialist, top State Department planner and key Cold War architect George F. Kennan explained in Policy Planning Study 23, a critical 1948 document: “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. … In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. … To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming. ... The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.” 
+The necessity of dispensing with “human rights” and other “sentimental” and “unreal objectives” was especially pressing in the “global south.” Washington assigned the vast periphery of the world economic (capitalist) system—Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the energy-rich and thus strategically hypersignificant Middle East—a less than flattering role. It was to “fulfill its major function as a source of raw materials and a market” ( actual State Department language ) for the great industrial (capitalist) nations (excluding “socialist” Russia and its satellites). It was to be exploited both for the benefit of U.S. corporations/investors and for the reconstruction of Europe and Japan as prosperous U.S. trading and investment partners organized on properly capitalist principles that were hostile to the Soviet bloc. 
+“Democracy” was fine as a slogan and benevolent, idealistic-sounding mission statement when it came to marketing this core, underlying, ultra-imperialist U.S. policy at home and abroad. Because most people in the “Third World” had no interest in neocolonial subordination and subscribed to what U.S. intelligence officials considered the heretical “idea that government has direct responsibility for the welfare of its people” (what post-World War II U.S. planners called “communism”), Washington’s real-life commitment to popular governance abroad was strictly qualified, to say the least. “Democracy” was suitable to the U.S. as long as its outcomes comported with the interests of U.S. investors/corporations and related U.S. geopolitical objectives. It had to be abandoned, undermined and/or crushed when it threatened those investors/corporations and the broader imperatives of business rule to any significant degree. As President Richard Nixon’s coldblooded National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger explained in June 1970, three years before the U.S. sponsored a fascist coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected leftist President Salvador Allende, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” 
+The selfish imperial cynicism of U.S. foreign policy continues to this day, into the post-Cold War and post-9/11 era. As leading Dutch political scientists Bastiaann van Apeldoorn and Nana de Graaff write in their important new volume , “American Grand Strategy and Corporate Elite Networks: The Open Door Since the End of the Cold War,” “From the end of the 19th nineteenth century onward, American grand strategy has pursued a liberal expansionism aimed at the creation of a global hegemony premised upon open, “free” markets, to which global capital—and, above all, U.S. transnational capital—has full access. … The global Open Door has continued to define the ends of the American grand strategy throughout the post-Cold War era.” Because—as during and before—the Cold War’s end, Washington’s commitment to “democracy” and “human rights” is conditional and hypocritical: The noble principles are fine insofar as they serve the free-market hegemony of global and especially U.S. transnational capital. They are dispensed with, even as U.S. policymakers trumpet them, when they do not.",FAKE
+8622,Anti-Trump Protesters Are Tools of the Oligarchy     : Information," Anti-Trump Protesters Are Tools of the Oligarchy “Reform always provokes rage on the part of those who profit by the old order.” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order
+By Paul Craig Roberts
+ Who are the anti-Trump protesters besmirching the name of progressives by pretending to be progressives and by refusing to accept the outcome of the presidential election? They look like, and are acting worse than, the “white trash” that they are denouncing.
+I think I know who they are. They are thugs for hire and are paid by the Oligarchy to delegitimize Trump’s presidency in the way that Washington and the German Marshall Fund paid students in Kiev to protest the democratically elected Ukrainian government in order to prepare the way for a coup.
+The organization, change.org, which claims to be a progressive group, but might be a front, along with other progressive groups, for the Oligarchy, is destroying the reputation of all progressives by circulating a petition that directs the electors of the Electoral Collage to annul the election by casting their votes for Hillary. Remember how upset progressives were when Trump said he might not accept the election result if there was evidence that the vote was rigged? Now progressives are doing what they damned Trump for saying he might do under certain conditions.
+The Western presstitutes used the protests in Kiev to delegitimize a democratically elected government and to set it up for a coup. The protest pay was good enough that non-Ukrainians came from nearby countries to participate in the protest in order to collect the money. At the time I posted the amounts paid daily to protesters. Reports came in to me from Eastern and Western Europe from people who were not Ukrainian but were paid to protest as if they were Ukrainians.
+The same thing is going on with the Trump protests. CNN reports that “for many Americans across the country, Donald Trump’s victory is an outcome they simply refuse to accept. Tens of thousands filled the streets in at least 25 US cities overnight.” This is the exact reporting that the Oligarchy desired from its presstitutes and got.
+I hope no one thinks that simultaneous protests in 25 cities were a spontaneous event. How did 25 independent protests manage to come up with the same slogans and the same signs on the same night following the election?
+What is the point of the protests, and what interest is served by them? As the Romans always asked, “who benefits?”
+There is only one answer: The Oligarchy and only the Oligarchy benefits.
+Trump is a threat to the Oligarchy, because he intends to stop the giveaway of American jobs to foreigners. The jobs giveaway, sanctified by the neoliberal junk economists as “free trade,” is one of the main reasons for the 21st century worsening of the US income distribution. Money that was formerly paid in middle class wages and salaries to American manufacturing employees and college graduates has been re-routed to the pockets of the One Percent.
+When US corporations move their production of goods and services sold to Americans offshore to Asian countries, such as China and India, their wage bill falls. The money formerly paid in middle class incomes goes instead into executive bonuses and dividends and capital gains to shareholders. The ladders of upward mobility that had made America the land of opportunity were dismantled for the sole purpose of making a handful of people multi-billionaires.
+Trump is a threat to the Oligarchy, because he intends peaceful relations with Russia. In order to replace the profitable Soviet Threat, the Oligarchy and their neoconservative agents worked overtime to recreate the “Russian Threat” by demonizing Russia.
+Accustomed to many decades of excess profits from the profitable Cold War, the military/security complex was angry when President Reagan brought the Cold War to an end. Before these leaches on American taxpayers could get the Cold War going again, the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of a right-wing coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
+The military/security complex and their zionist neoconservative agents cooked up “the war on terror” to keep the money flowing to the One Percent. But as hard as the presstitute media worked to create fear of “the Muslim threat,” even insouciant Americans knew that the Muslims did not have thousands of ICBMs carrying powerful thermo-nuclear weapons capable of destroying the entirety of the United States in a few minutes. Neither did the Muslims have the Red Army capable of overrunning all of Europe in a couple of days. Indeed, the Muslims haven’t needed an army. Refugees from Washington’s wars enabled by Europeans are overrunning Europe.
+The excuse for the annual trillion dollar ($1,000 billion ) military/security budget was missing. So the Oligarchy created “the New Hitler” in Russia. Hillary was the Oligarchy’s principle agent for heating up the new Cold War.
+Hillary is the tool, enriched by the Oligarchy, whose job as President was to protect and to increase the trillion dollar budget of the military/security complex. With Hillary in the White House, the looting of the American taxpayers in behalf of the wealth of the One Percent could go forward unimpeded. But if Trump resolves “the Russian threat,” the Oligarchy takes an income hit.
+Hillary’s job as President was also to privatize Social Security in order that her Wall Street benefactors can rip off Americans the way that Americans have been ripped off by the insurance companies under Obamacare.
+Those Americans who do not pay attention think, mistakenly, that the FBI cleared Hillary of violating National Security protocols with her email practices. The FBI said that Hillary did violate National Security, but that it was a result of carelessness or ignorance. She got off from indictment, because the FBI concluded that she did not intentionally violate National Security protocols. The investigation of the Clinton Foundation continues.
+In other words, in order to protect Hillary the FBI fell back on the ancient common law rule that “there can be no crime without intent.” (See PCR and Lawrence Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions .)
+One would think that protesters, if they were legitimate, would be celebrating Trump’s victory. He, unlike Hillary, promises to reduce tensions with powerful Russia, and we hope also with China. Unlike Hillary, Trump says he is concerned with the absence of careers for those very people protesting in the streets of 25 cities against him.
+In other words, the protests against the American people for electing Trump as their president are pointless. The protests are happening for one reason only. The Oligarchy intends to delegitimize the Trump Presidency. Once President Trump is delegitimized, it will be easier for the Oligarchy to assassinate him. Unless the Oligarchy can appoint and control Trump’s government, Trump is a prime candidate for assassination.
+The protests against Trump are suspicious for another reason. Unlike Hillary, Obama, and George W. Bush, Donald Trump has not slaughtered and dislocated millions of peoples in seven countries, sending millions of refugees from the Oligarchy’s wars to overrun Europe.
+Trump earned his fortune, and if by hook or crook, not by selling US government influence to foreign agents as Bill and Hillary did.
+So what are the protesters protesting?
+There is no answer except that they are hired to protest. Just as the Maidan protesters in Kiev were hired to protest by US and German financed NGOs.
+The protests in Kiev were equally pointless, because presidential elections were only months away. If Ukrainians really believed that their president was conspiring with Russia to keep Ukraine from becoming a Western puppet state and wished to become a puppet state regardless of the costs, the opportunity to vote the government out was at hand. The only reason for the protests was to orchestrate a coup. The US did succeed in putting their agent in control of the new Ukrainian government as Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador in Kiev confirmed in their telephone conversation that is available on the Internet.
+The Maidan protests were pointless except for making a coup possible. The protests were without any doubt arranged by Washington through Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, a neoconservative brought into the State Department by Hillary Clinton for the purpose of creating conflict with Russia.
+Trump is being protested in order to make him vulnerable in the event he proves to be the threat to the Oligarchy that he is thought to be.
+Trump won the presidency, but the Oligarchy is still in power, which makes any real reforms difficult to achieve. Symbolic reforms can be the product of the contest between President Trump and the oligarchs.
+Karl Marx learned from historical experience, and Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot learned from Karl Marx, that change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington.
+Washington has conspired with traditional elites to remove the elected presidents of Honduras on a number of occasions. Recently, Washington helped elites evict the female presidents of Argentina and Brazil. The presidents of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia are in the crosshairs and are unlikely to survive. Washington is determined to get its hands on Julian Assange. To achieve this Washington intends to overthrow the Ecuadoran government that, in defiance of Washington, gave Julian Assange political asylum.
+Hugo Chavez had the power to exile or to exterminate the Spanish ruling class in Venezuela when the ruling class participated in a CIA coup against Chavez. But before the CIA could kill Chavez, the people and the military forced his release. Instead of punishing the criminals who would have murdered him, Chavez let them go.
+According to Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, this is the classic mistake of the revolutionary. To rely on good will from the overthrown ruling class is the certain road to the defeat of the revolution.
+Latin American has proved itself unable to learn this lesson: Revolutions cannot be conciliatory.
+Trump is a dealmaker. The Oligarchy can permit him the sheen of success in exchange for no real change.
+Trump is not perfect. He might fail on his own. But we should back him on the two most important elements in his program: to reduce tensions between the major nuclear powers, and to halt Washington’s policy of permitting globalism to destroy Americans’ economic prospects.
+If tensions between nuclear powers worsen, we won’t be here to worry about other problems. The combination of the economy hollowed out by globalism and immigration is an economic nightmare. That Trump understands this is reason to support him.
+Note: Some believe that Trump is a ruse conducted by the Oligarchy. However, as Hillary is the bought-and-paid-for representative of the Oligarchy, such an elaborate ruse is unnecessary. It is preferable for the Oligarchy to win on its own platform than to install a president on the opposite platform and then change him around. Another sellout increases the anger of the people. If Hillary had won, the Oligarchy would have had the voters’ mandate for their platform.
+Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order .",FAKE
+4021,"In Ethiopia, Obama seeks progress on peace, security in East Africa","ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia —President Obama convened a meeting with the leaders of several East African nations and the African Union on Monday in an effort to address the worsening situation in South Sudan, even as he met with Ethiopia’s prime minister to discuss how to strengthen human rights and democratic institutions here.
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+With no resolution in sight for the ongoing conflict in South Sudan, Obama brought together top officials from Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan and the A.U. to chart out a strategy in the event that the latest round of peace talks fail.
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+African nations, led by Ethiopia, have been trying to broker a peace in South Sudan through the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional body, and are almost ready to present a possible compromise to the warring parties. The two sides will have until Aug. 17 to respond to the proposal, but administration officials have little expectation that they will accept it.
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+On Monday, Obama praised the regional leaders for showing “extraordinary leadership in trying to address the continuing situation in South Sudan.” The group included Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, African Union Chairperson Dlamini Zuma and Sudan’s minister of foreign affairs, Ibrahim Ghandour.
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+“This gives me and the U.S. delegation an opportunity to learn from them what progress has been made, where there appears to be continued roadblocks and how we can partner with them to make progress,” Obama said. “Our hope is that we can actually bring about the kind of peace that the people of South Sudan so desperately need.”
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+The question of South Sudan — a nation that the United States helped bring into existence in 2011 after years of effort by both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations — has vexed American policymakers for years.
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+In December 2013, South Sudan President Salva Kiir accused Riek Machar, who had served as his vice president, of attempting a coup d’etat. The two had been longtime political rivals from different ethnic groups — Kiir is Dinka, Machar is a Nuer — who had come together to form a government when the country was first created.
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+While tribal differences have helped fuel the conflict, the war has been largely focused on control of the nation’s oil fields, South Sudan’s primary source of revenue.
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+Princeton Lyman, U.S. special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan from 2011 to 2013, noted that when he first took over as envoy, the United States had spent $10 billion on peacekeeping and other assistance for the two nations, “and that was four years ago… This is a big investment,” he added.
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+At this point, more than 2.5 million people are facing food shortages, while roughly 1.5 million are displaced from their homes. An additional 520,000 South Sudanese have fled across the border into neighboring countries, including Ethiopia.
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+The conflict also poses a major economic problem for Kenya, which had major investments in South Sudan before the fighting broke out. The LAPSSET Corridor project was aimed at transporting oil from South Sudan to the Kenyan port of Lamu, and according to E.J. Hogendoorn, deputy program director for Africa at the International Crisis Group, the planned transportation and infrastructure development could have been an “engine of development"" for many parts of East Africa. ""Unfortunately, of course, that’s on hold because of the war,” he said.
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+While Obama spent part of the afternoon addressing a regional conflict in Africa, he devoted the rest of the day to strengthening ties with Ethiopia, whose alliance with the United States dates back more than a century. But the current government has come under sharp criticism for its treatment of political opponents and journalists.
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+Obama is the first sitting U.S. president to visit Ethiopia.
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+In a news conference Monday afternoon, both Obama and Hailemariam said they had a frank discussion about Ethiopia's human rights practices and the need for improvement. Ethiopia is Africa’s number two jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and its ruling party won 100 percent of the seats in May’s parliamentary elections.
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+White House national security adviser Susan Rice, asked last week whether she considered Ethiopia a democracy, replied, with irony: “One hundred percent.”
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+But during the news conference Obama twice referred to the Ethiopian government as “democratically elected.”
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+“I don’t bite my tongue,” Obama said of raising concerns on these issues with Ethiopia. “But I do so from a position of respect.”
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+Hailemariam, for his part, said, “Our commitment to democracy is real, not skin deep.”
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+But he added later that people could not expect sweeping reforms given the fact that military rule ended just a couple of decades ago. “Something has to be understood: This is a fledgling democracy.”
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+The two leaders also discussed their collaboration on counterterrorism, an area in which Ethiopia has been an active leader. The White House announced Monday it will “work with Congress to provide approximately $465 million” this year in new training, equipment and capacity-building aid to its African allies.
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+The administration also said it would provide at least $40 million in assistance this fiscal year to combat violent extremism in East Africa. The money is intended to foster collaboration among security forces, law enforcement, government officials, community leaders and members of civil society, officials said.
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+Obama praised Ethiopia’s work to curb extremist activity but noted that its government had labeled some opposition groups as posing a greater threat than U.S. intelligence would indicate. “Our intelligence indicates while they may oppose the government, they have not tipped into terrorism,” he said.
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+The United States provides more than $600 million in assistance to Ethiopia annually. The vast bulk of that — $490 million — comes from the U.S. Agency for International Development, while the rest is largely security-related. Last fiscal year, nearly $200 million went to health programs, while $163 million went to humanitarian aid.
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+Obama said Ethiopia “has proven itself a global leader” on development and over the past 15 years “has lifted millions of people out of poverty.”
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+“To many people around the world, their image of Ethiopia remains stuck in the past, remembering drought and famine,” he said.
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+The two leaders appeared to have a friendly rapport throughout the news conference. Hailemariam described his country as scoring a series of firsts: Along with being “the cradle of mankind,” he said, “Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee.” That elicited a smile from Obama.
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+Obama said he was impressed by the Ethiopian’s unusual pets. “I had a chance to see the famous lions that live on the grounds,"" he said. ""I’m considering getting some for the White House.” But he conceded that before he did that, “I’ll have to make sure my dogs are safe.”",REAL
+4330,Jeb Bush Is Suddenly Attacking Trump. Here's Why That Matters,"Jeb Bush Is Suddenly Attacking Trump. Here's Why That Matters
+
+Jeb Bush isn't pulling punches anymore when it comes to Donald Trump.
+
+The former Florida governor has delicately danced around the billionaire businessman in the 2016 presidential primary so far. But the gloves came off this week when Bush called out Trump as a closet Democrat. He was trying to stunt Trump's rise while attempting to recover his own political mojo.
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+""What Jeb is desperately trying to do is find his swagger right now,"" GOP strategist Ford O'Connell said. ""The knock against Jeb is that he's low voltage and not willing to fight. The best way to shake those perceptions it to engage against the person who is in the media on a 24/7 loop.""
+
+It's a change from Bush's approach to this point. He hasn't lobbed many direct attacks at Trump other than delicately condemning his criticism of Arizona Sen. John McCain's war service and his attacks against Fox News' Megyn Kelly.
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+Even in this month's first debate, Bush swatted down a story that he had allegedly called Trump a ""buffoon"" and a ""clown,"" saying only that Trump's language had been ""divisive."" Trump called Bush ""a true gentleman.""
+
+The detente ended this week. So far, most of the top-tier candidates have avoided directly attacking Trump, treating him with kid gloves so as not to anger the part of the GOP base to which Trump appeals.
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+In other words, the very voters they need when, they hope, Trump fades.
+
+In split-screen New Hampshire town halls this week, Bush and Trump volleyed attacks on each other. Bush took his most pointed jabs at the current front-runner, underscoring Trump's past history as a Democrat and the liberal positions he used to hold.
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+""Mr. Trump doesn't have a proven conservative record,"" Bush said, according to the Washington Post. ""He was a Democrat longer in the last decade than he was a Republican. He has given more money to Democrats than he's given to Republicans.""
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+Bush went on to attack Trump over his hard-line immigration proposal, arguing it was not just ""vitriolic"" but would have a massive price tag.
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+""Hundreds of billions of dollars of costs to implement his plans is not a conservative plan,"" Bush said. ""This is going to be my pitch: Let's support someone who you don't have to guess where he stands because he's consistent, because he's been governor, he's consistently had the views that he has.""
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+Over the next few days, Bush continued the hits on social media.
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+But Trump, never one to miss a moment to retaliate, didn't pull his punches, either. At his own town hall Wednesday, Trump blasted Bush as an unelectable ""low-energy person.""
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+""You know what's happening to Jeb's crowd just down the street? They're sleeping!"" Trump said to applause.
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+Since then, Trump has also ramped up his attacks against Bush on Twitter.
+
+The move to more hot rhetoric may have tripped Bush up, though. Consider his use of the phrase ""anchor babies."" While immigration reform is something Bush is passionate about — and has even written a book about — he's often criticized within the GOP as too liberal on the issue. Instead, a more combative Bush appeared to use the loaded phrase for the first time.
+
+He was left struggling to defend his use of it. It may have been a signal that the attack-dog crouch he's taking is still one that isn't completely comfortable to Bush, who earlier said he wanted to campaign ""joyfully.""
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+Other candidates have embraced hitting Trump. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul went after him forcefully in the debate, though his punch — that Trump was hedging his bets to support Hillary Clinton if she wins the presidency — didn't appear to land.
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+Other candidates like Ohio Gov. John Kasich demurred. In the earlier GOP debate that night, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and businesswoman Carly Fiorina also jabbed at Trump.
+
+Bush, though, needs to close the floodgates. He's dropped in national polls as Trump has risen. And, in New Hampshire, where Bush once led, Trump and even newcomer Kasich have seen surges.
+
+Cullen, a former New Hampshire GOP chairman, said the change in tone and tactics was a smart move for Bush, one that could help him in the Granite State.
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+""I think it's good politics for Jeb,"" said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman. ""There's 25 percent of the Republicans who are entertained by Donald Trump. But there's 60 percent of the party who say they won't vote for him under any circumstances. Those aren't Jeb Bush's people to begin with. He's trying to appeal to the other 60 percent by being the adult in the room and trying to govern.""
+
+O'Connell agreed. He pointed out that even if this new approach is one that's uncomfortable for Bush, it's necessary.
+
+""In a lot of elections, being the studious one would have worked,"" he said, ""but Trump has flipped the script.""",REAL